a second pot

A second pot
two stops
F- or sign
language or image
word and deed
of trust of doubt
shadows and
reflection
mirrors and
waiting
for a sign
stop and go
traffic of the mind
counting mala
like minutes
like ours
are not hours to give
only borrowed time.

Caffeinated samadhi
midmorning malaise
qu'est-ce que tu fais today?
(rien, rien, rien)
I wait I wait I wait
who will carry it?
"Her Majesty" and Paul
and Peter and Kava
double entendre and
single and rack focus
mixed metaphors and
similes: 'like' 'as'
long as it takes
to write
one good line:

"There's nothing as good as a museum,
a Verdi opera or a stiff-neck poet to hold back progress."
- Charles Bukowski

reudux: list of symptons

(initially diagnosed two years ago)

time.
prose.
apathy.
banality.
headache.
digression.
lack of sleep.
loss of words.
loss of appetite.
thoughts of rain.
poetic anesthesia.
feelings of sadness.
sentence fragments.
frequent meditation.
repetition of mantra.
overuse of repetition.
pushing slightly further.
inability to communicate.
decreased dream intervals.
experimentation with ritual.
decreased sensitivity to time.
syllabic repression of emotion.
increased dependence on form.
recurring thoughts of insomnia.
insomnia thoughts of recurrence.
increased sensitivity to hypnagogia.
circular orientation of thoughtforms.
inability to recognize Oedipal fixation.
withdrawal from friends and love ones.
occasional abortion of midday samadhi.
extended periods of occasional attempts.
obsessive experimentation with nostalgia.
increased consumption of media products.
rapid onset of dramatic temporary solitude.
occasional lapses in obligatory self-reflection.
inexplicable sensitivity to arbitrary past karma.
forced examination of self-defeating tendencies.
fear marked by prominence of existential ideation.
six years spent in lugubrious celebration of this day.

redux: short eulogy for Merce Cunningham

i saw him only

1

time

4

years ago in Miami.
i watched red numbers

counting down

0:20:00

until

0:00:00

nothing

i watched green numbers

counting up to

1:30:00

(applause)

i watched him bow

wheelchaired and prophetic.

on The Road (book rant)

One of the first books I read upon arriving in North Carolina this year was Cormac McCarthy's The Road:

This seemed like an appropriate decision for two reason: 1) my yin and I had just spent a month on the road ourselves; and 2) I found an unmarked, possibly unread copy in the local thrift store for the impossibly reasonable price of 50 cents.

(not this one)

But this is beside the point.

The point is that McCarthy (not this one) had been popping up on my radar time and again over the preceding months, stretching back in one way or another all the way to the Coen brothers' adaptation of No Country For Old Men. But the combination of my graduate studies and thrift-only book purchase policy had kept the writer relegated to the "Wish List" category of my Amazon account, which essentially functions as a shorthand for all the various books and musics that are recommended by friends and colleagues.

This is also beside the point.

And boring.

The point is that The Road held my attention in a way that few novels do, largely because of the way it repeats certain images (the road, the rain, the gray) and layers them atop one another like some sedimentary rock formation:

like these at the Grand Canyon

The difference, however, is that McCarthy's world has no sunsets, ambers or orange; his is a world of monochromatic minimalism, and The Road uses the journey of father and son as a means to exploring the canyons of the mind, the detritus of a world hobbling its way forward after an unspecified Armageddon leaves few good men "to carry the fire."

The tale is deceptively simple, and it's been interesting to gauge others' interpretations. The book jacket, for example, argues that the "father and his son... are sustained by love." My brother, on the other hand, read it as a genre piece, comparing it (unfavorably) to survivalist fantasy and zombie novels. Inexplicably, the front cover quotes the San Francisco Chronicle who apparently called the book a "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness."

(Did all of us read the same book?)

I suppose that's one of the dangers of criticism and review: every work ultimately becomes a reflection of the reader. This truism becomes all the more apparent with a novel like The Road. The plot is brutal and unrelenting, replete with starvation, cannibalism and the ever-looming threat of the child's rape. Such heavy subject matter requires that the reader exercise creative interpretation lest the entire work be lost to closed shutters and self-inflicted nooses.

The bright spots, such as they are, revolve around discovering hidden stores of food whose presence does as much to re-traumatize as it does to sustain. To the father, they represent the pre-Armageddon world, a world his son has never known and will never know. They are reminders that the seeds of destruction were sewn in a time of plenitude, and that the fecund past was ultimately the progenitor of the barren present:

"The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues revolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and it gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all." (28)

The eloquence of the above passage is indicative of the book as a whole, but McCarthy parses out the poetry judiciously. In this way, the novel's structure comes to resemble the stores of foodstuffs, clean water, and medicine they man and his son encounter along the road. The meditations disrupt the narrative progression, and the reader wants to linger in them just a little longer. The words themselves come to function as an oasis, increasing their dramatic impact and providing sustenance to the reader.

The man, however, is tormented by his inner dialogue even more than he is by the decimated landscapes. Language becomes executioner:

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever." (88-89)

The Road also points a finger at language's great conspirator – memory. Language is to word as memory is to image; both fall short of the Truth, and the seeming innocuousness of the latter finally gives rise to the malignancy of the former. For the father, this process is given form by the recollections of his deceased wife:

"Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not." (131)

To me, this is what the novel boils down to: the attempt to reconcile the apparent eternity of word and image with the inescapable fact that we – the containers of these words and images, the owners of language and memory – are doomed to our own mortality. The Road is truly impressive to stage the intersection of these ideas, using the father-son trope to explore the genealogy of signification: the patriarch of language, the orphan of memory.

Finally, there is the ending. Without trudging into the unpleasant world of spoilers, suffice to say that The Road ends only slightly less grimly than it begins. Destination and disillusionment are reached, and – surprise – there is a sliver of silver lining around the cloud of the novel. Although I found this predictability somewhat irksome, it would have been even more unsatisfying if the novel had submitted totally to its dark tendencies.

This seems to be the trouble with tales premised upon the end of the world: there are only two possible endings. Either the reader is left with an uncertain, irrational optimism for the characters after the story's conclusion, or the reader is left with a certain dismalness that forestalls any hopeful resolution. Given these limited options, The Road chooses, poetically, the former:

"He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A little man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt." (261)

some thoughts on Captain America

This weekend is the release of the new Captain America film, the latest such offering from Marvel Comics and the primary focus of my childhood obsession with comic books:

Some years ago I would have certainly been at the cinema tonight, hoping for happy surprise and ready for disappointment. An earlier Captain America movie came out in 1990, long before the superhero craze of the past decade, and it was nearly unwatchable, even to the most rabid of fans like myself.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that when I sold off my comic book collection last summer, the only comics I decided to keep were the Captain America. While some of the Silver Age issues had some value, my motivation was primarily sentimental. From earliest childhood Captain America meant something to me. I would go to the grocery store every week with my grandparents with the understanding that they would buy me one item, up to $1 in value. The weeks when I saw the distinctive and inevitable red, white, and blue covers of Captain America were always my favorite.

I still have no explanation for this proclivity; Batman and Superman were more iconic, and the X-Men were far more popular even before the movie franchise. Furthermore, Captain America was one of the worst-written comics for years and years. He fought absurd villains like the French Batroc:

And crossovers between him and any another major hero only served to highlight how outdated and naive the whole concept was:

case in point

This changed somewhat in the new millennium as writers attempted to make the title edgier, with the biggest shift coming after 9/11. Like few other mainstream comics, Captain America attempted to wrestle with the moral and ethical implications of the War on Terror.

The attack itself had seemed almost comic book-like, both in its frightening novelty and its ghoulish magnitude, and of all characters Captain America was the one best-qualified to work through our nation's trauma. Somehow the problem seemed more complex than simply punching out Osama Bin Laden:

the first issue of Captain America (March 1941)

Looking over the images above (and hundreds more in my own collection),
I now know that my affection for Captain America rests on two things: nostalgia for those trips to the market with my grandparents and the subtle ideological coercion of the image. Neither of these phenomena are as simple as they seem.

The afterglow of childhood often blinds us to the reality of the past, laying the seeds for disillusionment and conflict as we age, and the beauty of the image can seduce into actually believing that the world can be understood through mere appearances. Captain America speaks to both impulses, allowing our society to indulge in the fantasy of a pristine childhood by embodying difficult abstractions like "patriotism" and "democracy" into a single character whose moral compass is certain.

I doubt that I will see the film this, or any other weekend...

repost: Woodstock was like...

Sixteen hour days

and

"dehydration"

after

an impromptu poetry reading.

“Are you in Love?”

said

Charlie Parker’s

drummer’s

ex-wife.

Unknown mad pianists

named after

well-known mad painters

playing

off key perfection.

"Browsing"

Genet

in the bookstore on

the 3rd of July

and

beautiful Chilean women

singing like chickens.

Bee Season (book rant)

Since my yin and I arrived here in North Carolina, it has been either rainy or foggy, or threatening to rain or fog, almost every single day. This weather has cut into our hiking, our plans to shoot my yin's yoga video, and most of all our overall level of drive and ambition. Living in South Florida for the past five years, I've become accustomed to a certain amount of sunshine (300+ days/year or so), and I had forgotten how damp and gloomy the Blue Ridge Mountains can be.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the weather has allowed us time to catch up on our reading, and I just finished:

which my yin picked up at a used bookstore in Eugene six weeks ago. Our respective literary tastes only occasionally coincide, especially given that my taste in books typically ranges from the almost to the totally unreadable, but this was one of those exceptionally happy instances where her appreciation for humor and my snobbery coincided.

This is also beside the point.

The point is that Myla Goldberg's book (her debut, nonetheless) is simultaneously intelligent and easy to read, comical and profound. It details the tale of a Jewish nuclear family – mother, father, daughter, and son – as their youngest child Eliza, a thoroughly lackluster student, proves to be a spelling prodigy in her school's bee.

Over the course of the novel, each of the family members prove to be on a quest for God-realization, though only the father Saul and the son Aaron seem to be doing so self-consciously. Saul is a hazzan (cantor) in his synagogue, a Kabbalahist, and a one-time hippie. His relationship with his kleptomaniac-lawyer wife is best summed up by this clever passage near the start of the novel:

"She sees in Saul the househusband who will enable her parental ambitions without disabling her autonomy. In Miriam, Saul sees the means to a book-lined study and a lifestyle conducive to mystical advancement. They are both absolutely certain these things equal love." (22)

Aaron, on the other hand, suffers through the novel in the shadow of his father, and his actions vacillate between mimicry (as a child) and rebellion (as an adolescent). While the generational tension between them is rote, it works nonetheless, largely due to the parallel between their religious pursuits and the irony that it is these ambitions that ultimately create more distance between them. This was one of my favorite things about the novel because it illustrated how two people – both sincere, both loving, both in search of similar goals – can still find themselves in conflict.

Finally, there is Eliza who, if not quite the novel's protagonist, is certainly the character that drives forward the plot. Her spelling ability is preternatural, extending beyond the powers of mere skill or memorization and into the realm of essence and being:

"Paging through the dictionary is like looking through a microscope. Every word breaks down into parts with unique properties—prefix, suffix, root. Eliza gleans not only the natural laws that govern the letters but their individual behaviors. R, M, and D are strong, unbending and faithful. The sometimes silent B and G and the slippery Kalyani follow strident codes of conduct. Even the redoubtable H, which can make P sound like F and turn ROOM into RHEUM, obeys etymology. Consonants are the camels of language, proudly carrying their lingual loads.

"Vowels, however, are a different species, the fish that flash and glisten in the watery depths. Vowels are elastic and inconstant, fickle and unfaithful. E can sound like I or U. –IBLE and –ABLE are impossible to discern. There is no combination the vowels haven’t tried, exhaustive and incestuous in their couplings. E will as soon pair with A, I, or U, leading the dance or being led. Eliza prefers the vowels’ unpredictability and, of all the vowels, favors Y. Y defies categorization, the only letter than can be two things at one. Before the bee, Eliza had been a consonant, slow and unsurprising. With her bee success, she has entered vowelhood. Eliza begins to look at life in alphabetical terms. School is consonantal in its unchanging schedule. God, full of possibilities, is a vowel. Death: the ultimate consonant." (49-50)

Recognizing the true potential in Eliza's gift, Saul shifts his attention from Aaron to her, and the second half of the book is largely a tale of their developing relationship. Although touching, it was also a little unsettling. I couldn't help but feel sorry for Eliza because in some ways her father is using her. Saul sees in her the ability the lacking himself, the ability to achieve perfect union with an object (dhyana) which opens up the doorway to the deepest reservoirs of spiritual truth.

Implicit in his actions is the conflict between moral concerns (responsibility to one's family) and spiritual ambition (the desire for Enlightenment). Each of the characters wrestles with this in their own way, and in the end it is only Eliza that realizes both goals. The final pages of the novel present an open-ended solution to the dilemma, and in the days since I finished reading it I have only come to appreciate it more and more.

redux: attachment

Part 1

One year ago yesterday I ran into my sister's former lover. He was sitting in the corner of a small coffee shop on King Street (downtown Boone's main thoroughfare) and from the moment I walked in something seemed familiar about him.

"Did you used to live in ____?" he asked.

I recognized the Kentucky in his voice, and somewhere in the back of my mind lights began lighting up one after another: cigarettes, turntables, jealousy and anger.

"Yes," I answered.

photograph of Ryan Adams with coffee

(a short conversation followed

i did not tell him i

once wrote a poem for him)

Looking back now, I wonder about the significance – if any – of our meeting. I do not believe in coincidences; to do so requires that one reject not only the primacy, but even the existence of karma.

Part 2

This afternoon, one year ago, I went to a small storage shed on the north end of the county. Inside were approximately 4000 comic books and my dead grandmother's belongings.

photograph by Stephanie Schneider

(

i remembered

were not there.

some of the things

there

were not remembered.

)

I made what will presumably be my last visit to that same shed two weeks ago. There was a cigar store Indian, a piano, and an oil stain on the floor. Only two of these things belonged to me, and I gave one of them away twice in as many days. The piano now sits in a three bedroom house overlooking a lake.

Part 3

It is neither letting go, nor the thought of letting go. It is the inability to reconstruct a memory that might explain the things I saw; it is the inability to imagine a memory that might make sense of the things I did not.

photograph of a photograph by Patricio Reig

?

?

?

artifact

or

memory

?

?

?

I wrote two-thirds of this one year ago. It is curious to see which of these memories still have emotional resonance and which of them have been relegated to the realm of "things that merely happened"... if such things can even be said to exist at all.

this year's dream and last

reconstructed dream fragments, 15 July 2011

I dreamed last night in the shape of 10,000 rubber bands bound together into a ball, a three-dimensional circle with nothing in its center. There was my best friend from middle school and people I barely knew from high school. All of them wanted to know why I wasn't with them, and I was unable to explain to them that those times – whatever they were – have long since passed.

This dream segues into (or from, perhaps) another dream of more recent acquaintances and friendships – a place and people to which I will return in six weeks time. There is boredom and waiting and uncertainty. All of us would rather be somewhere else, but we cannot leave until the director of the Center (or was it the Director of the center?) returns.

Only upon waking and writing and typing it all down did I begin to see the similarity of this dream, with its themes of waiting, alienation, and loss of identity, to one I had a year ago:

transcribed on 12 July 2010

Dream of Chris Marker's doppelgånger, working as an Anglican priest in Paris. The imposter goes by the name Aaron Marker, and I go to his church, which is packed with university students and hipsters. To pass the time, I speak to the videographer recording the event.

Time passes.

Eventually the imposter arrives. Something is off. He is far too young, perhaps in his late thirties, and as I listen I grow frustrated. The rains come and most of the students and hipsters leave, hoping to avoid the drenching they deserve.

I stay.

Eventually I speak to the imposter, wondering why he was signing autographs during the service. Why would he – the infamously reluctant model, the famously uncompromising photographer – agree to behavior so banal? I tell him that i'm writing my thesis on him, but the imposter looks mystified.

Time lapses.

Eventually I realize the imposter as such, that he is merely part of an act, an elaborate ruse designed by le Marker verité to deflect his fame. Realizing all this, I begin to disrupt the next service by throwing compact discs at the imposter.

Time passes.

I find myself at a university, questioning the path I've taken, wondering how I will support myself. I run into an acquaintance whom I knew seventeen years ago. He now works as a pharmacist, and I wonder if i should go to medical school.

I know it's too late.

Time lapses.

post-scriptum, 14 July 2010

"The Buddha was not interested in some metaphysical existence,
but in his own body and mind, here and now." - Shunryu Suzuki

repost: Quantum Love Story

Three years ago (yesterday) i went with Saylor and a (future) mutual friend to stroll art galleries in north Miami. Along the way, I learned that my (future) mutual friend was a (present) mutual friend of the woman I was trying, with limited success, to date.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the evening's events eventually gave rise to the poem below; and the poem below, in turn, ultimately gave rise to a forthcoming chapbook (currently awaiting Saylor's illustrations).

By way of full disclosure, a less poetic, more immediate version of these events lives here; the author does not pretend to know which assortment of words constitutes greater authenticity.

quantum love story

We watched quarks falling in love with neutrinos,
dancing in and out of existence in the skies over Miami.

Once upon a time we were like

but last night we talked about
love with the lights on:

“There is more than enough time for everything.”

Chasing nostalgia and remembering
the lies we tell ourselves when
we’re young and in love.

A cut-up in my head:

missing my sister in rain-soaked galleries

missing my sister in rain-soaked galleries

missing my sister in rain-soaked galleries

Nothing can be written that compares to dusk from the
abandoned high rises overlooking the Bay of Biscayne;

I knew nothing of knock-breathed Wynwood, lies and doubt.

It’s hard to see, searching for poetry
in lust in truth in love. Words are just
letters; sometimes they have meaning.

(I tried to tell her:)

The whole
universe
lives in
the
center
of a rose.

I bent to kiss it and it was gone, she couldn’t

hear me through the murmuring of her heart.

on Susan Sontag's On Photography (book rant)

[lapse]

I've often wondered about the expression, "Better late than never." While it sounds benign enough on the surface, if one looks a little closer there are certain ideological assumptions embedded within those four little words. Most obviously, it extols a temporal hierarchy (on-time, late, never) that speaks to an underlying linear notion of time, which carries with it both a certain inflexibility and an unshakable, if unspoken, faith in progress.

Secondly, the maxim privileges "doing" over "being" by assigning value to the accomplishment of a task. While the desire to realize one's goals seems common-sensical, it also has a tendency to underestimate the primacy of timing. What if the action in question had a specific time and specific place? The expression"Timing is everything" relays this opposing sentiment and is neatly voice by Robert Jordan and General Golz in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls:


‘To blow the bridge is nothing… You understand?’

‘Yes, I understand.’

‘Absolutely nothing. Merely to blow the bridge is a failure.’

‘Yes, Comrade General.’

‘To blow the bridge at a stated hour based on a time set for the attack is how it should be done. You see that naturally. That is your right and how it should be done’

But this is beside the point.

The point is that it's the second week of July and I have finally finished last year's summer reading list. The list was initially (and largely) compiled in preparation for my master's thesis, but somewhere along the way Susan Sontag's On Photography got left by the wayside. I read it this past week, though, and as the saying goes, "better late than never..."

After all the thousands of pictures taken by my yin and I on our honeymoon, I felt well prepared to read Sontag's book with a critical eye. During our month on the road, I watched the paradoxical ways in which the camera acts upon the individual using it: the 300mm lens bringing one closer to the image while the camera itself puts a physical barrier between the subject and the photographer. I also experienced the desire and subtle expectation for nature to reveal itself to me, for the animals and landscape and sun and moon to pose just long enough to "get a good picture."

Sontag understood all this and more. She writes:

"Photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power." (8)

"To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a 'good' picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune." (12)

In my view the question of power is inseparable from the practice of photography, and there were two times during our honeymoon that I felt this most acutely.

The first time was in San Francisco, mere minutes after our arrival:

I took this picture by setting the camera atop the dinner table, turning on the auto-focus, and hoping for the best. There was something about the woman that I still cannot explain. Her beauty was too much to let pass by, and yet what gave me the right to capture her image without her permission? The photograph was indeed taken and, consciously or unconsciously, I valued my pleasure of her beauty as more important than questions of ownership or consent.

The second time was in Santa Fe:

i
m
age
miss
in
g

This time I chose not to take the picture, not to document the image of Native Americans sitting on the ground across from their white competitors. Both sides selling turquoise and silver; both sides trying to make a living. But only one side with licenses neatly affixed; only one side speaking English as a second language. The relationship between these two groups was, and is, more complex than I can explain; but if I had photographed this image, with the road providing vertical symmetry and a clear division between the groups, something would have been lost. It would have appeared much simpler, much less confusing than the emotion I felt that day.

What are these two impulses? Why did I take one and not the other?

"Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects—unpremeditated slices of the world. Thus, they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real." (69)

The first image, of the woman eating her dinner alone, trades on the prestige of art. There is a tension between her and the painting of the monks above her. While she eats her samosa soup, they hold their begging bowls. While she is dynamic, they are forever frozen. While she embodies the vitality of life and the living presence of the divine, they represent an idealized notion of how one should behave in order to be holy. The photograph captures all these things, and the woman's humanity (which is to say divinity) is enhanced rather than diminished by the image.

The second image, which I did not take, would have traded on the magic of the real. It would have condensed the entire history of the Southwest, the entire history of European-Native interaction into the time it takes to glance at a photo. The complexities of identity and economics and culture would have been collapsed into a single entity, easily consumable, that appeared to be real and unstaged, but actually hollowed out reality by turning it into ready-made clichés and historiographies far from self-evident.

Sontag writes:

"The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, a legacy from the sciences, which is measured not by a notion of value-free truth, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted by nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism." (86)

Again, the first photograph aligns itself with the striving for beautification, while the second would have taken its cue from an idealized, moralistic notion of the "truth." That's why I chose to take one photograph instead of the other, but it was Sontag's book that gave me the words to say so. This is not to say, however, that the impulse I followed was necessarily correct:

"The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery… Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculations, and fantasy." (22-23)

With regard to the first photograph, Sontag would accuse me (or at least my photograph) of both speculation and fantasy. I do not know the woman in the photo, I do not know her history, and I have spoken with her only long enough to discuss the menu at Burma Superstar, the restaurant where the picture was taken. And yet, I presume to Know her spirit, to touch her soul in a way I still struggle to explain.

But perhaps this is the weakness in Sontag's argument: she neglects to fully appreciate the presence of the photographer (by which I mean the Presence of the photographer). This was the case in the first photograph because, no matter how limited, I connected with the woman in the image. I sensed the Peace that dwells within the center of her being, and the image thus becomes an artifact from that encounter, a reminder that defends against the inevitable onset of doubt and forgetfulness.

But in Santa Fe I was not so clear. I was unable to experience the Peace in the situation. Instead, all I saw was the detritus of history, what Walter Benjamin called "one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage."

quote taken from Benjamin's description of Klee's Angelus Nova

Finally, Sontag writes:

"It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art." (15)

This idea, as much as any in her book of essays, highlights the current ambivalence I feel towards the photograph. For as long as I can remember, I have disliked having my picture taken. This, in spite of the existence of seemingly happy images of the past:

author, circa 1980

These early aversions were based primarily on the necessity for posing, the creation of a moment for the sole purpose of memorializing it. Even then, I recognized this as a form a discipline (the frozen, idealized past) as opposed to freedom (the uncertain possibility of the present). Thus, the posed photograph functions as both a form of bodily and emotional coercion, and as I grew older I came to disdain the entire enterprise. For this reason, almost half of my life went largely unphotographed. Those that do exist were either contrived:

self-portrait, 1999

The result of ambush:

1995

Or taken unawares:

2002

Nowadays, though, I've come to an uneasy truce with the photograph. I now recognize that the discipline I once associated with the posed photograph is far more rampant than I realized as a child. Most of us, most of the time, go about posing and performing in one capacity or another. It appears to be part and parcel to being a human being, and I've learned to accept it as one of the primary functions of the mind.

And, while still weary of photography's tendency to promote nostalgia, I've also come to appreciate the ability of words to recontextualize the image, to question and reaffirm, to create doubt and bolster faith, to criticize and promote empathy.

(All these processes are illustrated by the above words and images.)

As Sontag writes:

"Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos." (15)

This understanding is ultimately what changed my relationship to photography a few years ago. In spite of all the questions of power, in spite of the discipline, in spite of the innumerable frailties of the image, the photograph allows us to feel. In a society that seems bent on draining the emotion out of every experience – either through repression, denial, or bottling it to sell back to us in the forms of sports and news and entertainment – we should feel grateful for every practice that helps us to experience the limitless joy, sadness, and confusion that life has to offer.

in praise of Joan Didion (book rant in five parts)

part 1

There is a poem by W.B. Yeats, written after the First World Ward, entitled "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

part 2

There is a mural in San Francisco, painted after the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, that quotes the third and fourth lines of Yeats' poem:

part 3

There is a book written by Joan Didion, published in 1968, whose title essay alludes to the final line of Yeats' poem:

part 4

Six weeks ago I came across a collection of Yeats' poetry while rummaging through a yard sale in Boulder. At the same moment, a copy of Didion's book was lodged somewhere underneath the passenger seat of a black 2003 Jeep Liberty. The co-habitation of literary texts has long been a concern to me; one never knows which author's ideas will be impregnated by those of the other. In the most severe instances, such as those involving Jacques Lacan, one might even be impregnated by the Other.

But this is beside point.

The point is that I finished reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem two days ago, and it is easily one of the most satisfying, and well-timed, literary experiences I've had since I first read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment sometime in the late 1990s. Here's why:

Exhibit A

In the introduction to her book, Didion writes:

"I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece. (I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism, to meet the deadline, but it was also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain." (xv-xvi)

Anyone who has ever performed the role of amateur chemist can appreciate how difficult it is to maintain the delicate balance of ups and downs, and I suppose this tendency is as at least as old as the story of Goldilocks and her quest to find a chair and bed and porridge that's "just right." The current fad of mixing Red Bull and vodka epitomizes this sentiment, and Didion's confession simultaneously highlights both the futility of this effort as well as the logic that underlies it.

Exhibit B

In the book's opening essay, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," Didion writes:

"The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past." (4)

My predilection with memory and forgetting is well-documented, both in this venue and in my academic pursuits. Although expressing a cliché at its core ("Those who forget the past..."), this sentence neatly illustrates why this matters: how can one envision the future without a firm grasp on what happened in the past?

Memory, in spite of its innumerable failures and inevitable fallacies, provides us with our only yardstick against which we can measure our hopes, dreams, and ambitions. This is one of my most persistent critiques of the metaphysical teachings I've encountered over the past five years or so: the notion of enlightenment or freedom or moksha is meaningless unless one maintains a connection to that which is unenlightened. One requires the other for all sense-making, or at least for the ability to communicate it (which would seem to be the only reason to talk about it all).

Exhibit C

Cliché notwithstanding, Didion moves far beyond the realm of dimestore sophism. What struck me most about her essays was their ability to use specific circumstances (oftentimes geography) as means to illustrate much larger historical or cultural conditions:

"Who could fail to read the sermon in the stones of Newport? Who could think that the building of a railroad could guarantee salvation, when there on the lawns of the men who built the railroad nothing is left but the shadows of their migrainous women, and the pony carts waiting for the long-dead children?" (213)

First of all, rarely has there been a turn of phrase so adept as "migranous women" when it comes to demonstrating the Victorian hangover America experienced well into the Twentieth Century. It highlights the intersection of class, gender, and oppression by pointing out the connection between bourgeois discontent and sexual frustration, while simultaneously engaging in a bit of tongue-in-cheek neologism.

More importantly though, the passage illustrates how the physical space of our nation comes to bear the scars of our societal neuroses. I visited these very mansions when I was about 20 years old, and it was a strange sight indeed. Thirty years had passed since Didion first wrote "The Seacoast of Despair," but the same sense of desperation remained. Who were these men of great fortune, who built these great monuments to their wealth, only to leave them empty where the crumbling Dream of America meets the sea?

Exhibit D

Didon's eye is just as well-trained on people as it is on places. This excerpt, taken from the title essay, was written after the author spent some time in San Francisco, in the months of 1967 that would come to be known as "the Summer of Love":

"Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were the children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are the children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb." (122-123)

As far as I can tell, one of the things that makes "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" such a remarkable essay is that it captured the Haight-Ashbury scene at the precise moment when it became apparent that its zenith and nadir might, in fact, be indistinguishable. I do not know if this was the critical interpretation of the piece at the time, but like all Gen-Xers, I grew up with the seemingly irreconcilable knowledge that my parents' generation embodied both the romantically absurd optimism of the Sixties as well as the opportunistically fearful cynicism of the Eighties.

Didion's genius is that she recognizes the Flower Generation not as a cause of progressive cultural change, but rather as a symptom of a larger societal breakdown. At the same time, there is not the slightest twinge of nostalgia in her writing. She does not idealize the past; she sees that the past was already always flawed, that the inequities in the system were structural and therefore beyond remediation. The hippies must therefore be understood not as addressing these inadequacies, but instead as the frayed ends in an unraveling social fabric. This unraveling is what the narrator of Sans soleil calls "the great wound of history."

Exhibit E

I could go on with these examples. I could tell you, for example, how Didion's description of Sacramento in "Notes from a Native Daughter" matched my own experience, mere weeks ago, of California's Central Valley:

"California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension..." (172)

I could also relate the déjà vu I felt while reading "Goodbye to All That," which is Didion's farewell to New York and so closely it matches my own:

"It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends..." (255)

But instead of dwelling on these things, I want to close with a passage from "On Keeping a Notebook":

"Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all these scores. The impulse to write things down is a particularly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself." (132)

I once had professor (the chair of my thesis committee actually) who decried the whole enterprise of blogging as pretentious and "self-absorbed." This edict, uttered more than two years ago, has stayed with me through literally hundreds of posts to this very venue. The title description in the sidebar "Throwing Art Into the Void" is even an attempt to address this criticism, which is as valid as it is disquieting.

For me, the beauty of the blog medium – and by this I mean the thematically dispersed, largely anonymous, largely unread, entirely unmonetized blog medium – is that it allows one to walk along the borders of self-expression (with its concomitant dangers of narcissism and egoism) and self-dissolution (with its concomitant dangers of futility and nihilism). These posts, like sand sculptures, are destined to be washed away by the ocean of information each of us encounters every day. There is no reason to write the things I do, and yet I feel drawn to do so.

This is the "compulsion" of which Didion writes, and her analysis as to the motivations – memorialization and justification – are entirely accurate. If one writes, which is to say if one writes honestly, then one writes because he or she cannot not write. My own experiments with truth (to borrow a phrase from Gandhi) have taught me that the whole idea of a permanent self is little more than an outgrowth of our need to reconstruct the past, our dependence on memory, our utter inability to either remember or forget completely.

Writing is nothing more than a means to this end.

part 5

There is a poem by W.B. Yeats, entitled "Ode to Melancholy," that begins:

No, no! go not to Lethe...

time to get back to work... (kinda)

So the past week (two, really) have been spent readjusting to going to be and waking up in the same place. As any 15-second snippet of Behind the Music will attest, life on the road can be profoundly disorienting. In fact, I think I lost track of precisely what day it was before we even left Boulder.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that all the relatives have been visited, the pantries have been restocked, and the unwanted, unneeded, and/or inherited contents of the storage shed have finally been dispersed to their respective thrift stores, landfills, and new homes. This sundry collection has existed in one form or another since the late 1990's and provided a convenient dumping ground for the items my father might need in the future, the childhood relics my brother had forgotten, and the collectibles whose actual value and sentimental values were sometimes confused in my own imagination.

But this is also beside the point.

The point is that much of the heavy lifting was done last summer, but there still remained a piano, a hot water heater, and a cigar store Indian that my grandfather (the one who died when I was 2) brought home much to the dismay of my grandmother (the one who died when I was 28). Along with these large items there were lawn mowers, plastic shelving, baseball cards, surveying stakes, and a ceramic bust of Chewbacca that my grandmother (the one still living) painted for me as a child:

i
m
age
miss
in
g

But this is even more beside the point.

The point is that I face a crisis of direction. So long as I was concerning myself with moving things from point A to point B, it was easy to maintain a sense of forward momentum, easy to feel that Things Were Getting Done.

How much of our lives are dependent on this illusion? How much of our sense of value is derived not from meaning, but from motion? How often do we close our eyes, wait for the thinking to subside, and then realize that meaning comes before motion?

But this, while not beside the point, is not what I meant to say.

What I meant to say, perhaps, is that for the past six month (or so) this venue has functioned as something of a ready-made. A pleasurable, engaging ready-made – but a ready-made nonetheless. Our honeymoon, and the neat geographic progression from one locale to the next, provided a structure, a form, a mold that could be deployed time and again without too much concern for how it should be shaped.

Now, though, I'm presented with innumerable reminders that it's time to get back to work. I have syllabi to design for classes in the fall, decisions to be made about which PhD programs to apply, and a half-started project that's been kicking around my head for more than two years. Of these things, it is the final one that weighs most heavily on my mind. My graduate studies provided a neat excuse (ready-made one might say) to keep the project on the back burner, and now I'm faced for the first time with nothing more than my own sloth and fear as impediments to the project.

This is exactly the point.

Honeymoon Day 32-?: Crystal Balls and Rearview Mirrors

My yin and I arrived in Boone on a Saturday afternoon. The final five hours of driving felt almost surreal, probably because of my desire to stretch them out until they formed an invisible asymptote, forever separating our journey from its ultimate destination. This yearning could probably be read as a metaphor for the grander, more primitive urge to circumvent or forestall death, but none of these things were on my mind that day.

my day planner, 2010-2011

Instead I was intoxicated by the distinctive redolence of the Appalachian mountains, which still smell like home no matter how long I've been gone. I caught the first whiff when we exited the highway in Elizabethton, a sleepy little town whose character is defined as much by "The Lost State of Franklin" as it is "The Great State of Tennessee."

West of Elizabethton are modestly larger burgs like Johnson City and Kinsport, and to the east lay even less populated municipalities like Hampton and Butler, towns so small that they were sacrificed to the construction of Watauga Dam, which first brought electricity to this area almost seventy years ago.

image appropriated from here

No pictures were taken of any of these places, though, not even of the sign between Trade and Zionville that reads "Welcome to North Carolina." For some reason, going home doesn't entice the eye in the same way as visiting far-away places.

I suppose the root of this can be found in the difference between the familiar and the exotic. Home brings with it a specific feeling, a sense of knowing that cannot be neatly captured by the image. We sense it, we smell it, we hear it in the sound of lawnmowers as much as in the wind.

Whitman Sleep Tonight

There is no sleep so sublime
as Whitman, under a tree
in Brooklyn, I dream
of my grandfather

fresh cut grass,
two cycle engine oil
and nostalgia.
Childhood

spent on the front porch,
chewing on sprigs of birch
pine needles in the fall.
The redolence of spring

mingling autumnal decay

the smell of impotence,
the taste eternal.

The exotic, however, demands attention from the eye. It asks to be seen, it poses, it teases and waits. We find ourselves struggling to tell loved ones what the image fails to communicate. The cliché insists that each picture is worth a thousand words, but the image also demands another thousand in explanation and context. This is what my yin and I discovered when we showed the photographs from our trip to my grandparents and mother.

But, for the time being, this is beside the point.

The point is that my yin and I have decided to extend our honeymoon indefinitely, and if the current estimates hold, it should last until sometime in the year 2089 (78 more years!) Although this estimate of my longevity was provided under some duress, I'm still view it as a reasonably reasonable forecast.

This means that the month we spent on the road is but a tiny fraction of the trips that await us, and if the vital statistics from this adventure are any indication of what lay ahead, then we have much to look forward to:

Honeymoon Vital Statistics

Duration: 32 days
Number of states: 20
Number of National Parks: 13
Total mileage: 9,555
Miles driven by my yin: <.5
Number of photographs: >4,500

What these numbers cannot relate is how much we learned about ourselves and each other over the course of our honeymoon. We encountered bears (without getting eaten), less than ideal accommodations (without getting flea-bitten), and spent more than 200 hours in the car together (without driving each another completely crazy).

even more in love than we were on Day 1

This bodes well...

repost: (happy) birthday, America!

Note: This poem was originally penned in March of 2008 under the influence of boredom, Francis Scott Key, and the patriotism of the previous six and a half years. It is best read while listening to:

"Makes No Difference" by Richard King

I close my eyes and listen...

the vision of a banner

spangled and splattered

smothered and covered

hoisted and dropped

from the rooftop of Waffle House

Stitched together from the scraps of Sicily

and the dregs of Dublin

and the bums of the Balkans

and the crumbs of the Caucuses

and the niggers of the Niger river basin

and the ten thousand bastard Amerasians

from the hundred thousand homeless vets

whose Vietinsemination was such a success.

Can you see that banner?
Can you see that billboard?
The one over the streets of Baghdad:

The one bragging in Bangalore:

The one towering over Tel Aviv:

Can you see?

the dawn’s early light over Bikini Atoll

With sheep lashed to the railings of destroyers,
and GI’s washing their clothes later that day,
eating gyros and laughing at Oppenheimer.

Are you still there?

have I lost you Tet?

What a lovely new year and many more to come,

holidays in the sun

holidays in Cambodia

holidays in Laos.

I have a friend who was there in ‘61:

19 years old

jumping into the jungles

with plenty of advice
and a canteen full of vinegar

for the purpose of douching the wounded.

But who needs all this when we have the Rock?

and the Rock’s red glare

staring down

Stone Cold Steve Austin

Keeping us warm at night,
bringing us in from the cold.

It reminds me of my childhood

and the last icy villain

and his Red Scare.

An actor brought him in from the cold, too:

a real cowboy

But this is a new era,
with a new almond-faced hero

(it’s okay he’s Samoan)

no miscegenation here, boss.

And the planes bursting in mid-air?

not since Lockerby

5 million screaming Scotsmen can’t be wrong.
and 19 dead Arabs can’t be right
and 1 balding municipal servant
who had one good day in September?

He can run for president.

But the flag is still there:

The flag is still there.

The flag is still there.

And what does it say?

Alone at night, naked

and cold.

Shivering from night terrors

and kicking at the covers

holding on with both hands

trying to stretch that blanket a little further

pulling it overhead and trying not to breathe

because Ed Jenner is nowhere around.

And the land?

The land was free;
a manifest destiny quilting bee,
a landscape stitched together

with all those poxy small blankets

three thousand miles
from sea to shining sea.

And our home?

How brave it is, to leave a single tribe in all of Georgia?
No more Apalachee, or Cherokee, or Shawnee.

only a single tribe left in all of Georgia

bought because
it was the cheapest
programming in town.

Who wouldn’t want to own a part of this dream?