Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Monday, September 23, 2013
Sunday, March 17, 2013
For Patti and Robert
[1]
Mosquito-bitten and starving;mid-March daydream of spring
unending. Wistful confidence,
neither regretful nor proud:
the apathy it took to get here.
[2]
I started drinking coffee
for the taste but stayed for
the caffeine. Veins pulsing
like the Ganges, I followed
it until it emptied iteself
one day in September.
[3]
I read it all in one day
racing as if to find some
magical revelation but when I
reached the final pages I found myself
skimming the words – ashamed of being a voyeur
disappointed by my envy – I realized no revelation
my life did not take on new meaning. The
book merely ended and I was one
day older. No closer
– or further –
from the truth
than I had ever been before.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Two Exhibits, One Graph and Chickens Coming Home to Proust
Exhibit #1:
Conclusion #1: This blog is more volatile than the stock market.
Conclusion #2: Invest in tech stocks.
Exhibit #2:
“Thank you. But I think I have everything I need.”
“How about books and videos and the like?”
“I can't think of anything I particularly want.”
“How about Proust’s In Search of Lost Time?” Tamaru asked. “If you’ve never read it this would be a good opportunity to read the whole thing.”
“Have you read it?”
“No, I've never been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can't read the whole of Proust.”
“Do you know anybody who has read the whole thing?”
“I’ve known some people who have spent a long period in jail, but none were the type to be interested in Proust.”
Conclusion #1: Haruki Murakami has a keen sense of conversation.
Conclusion #2: I'm probably never gonna make it all the way through Proust.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Five Things I (re)Learned From Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 Over the Weekend
1. "True, rewriting the past probably had no meaning, Tengo felt. His older girlfriend had been right about that. No matter how passionately or how minutely he might attempt to rewrite the past, the present circumstances in which he found himself would remain generally unchanged. Time had the power to cancel all changes wrought by human artifice, overwriting all new revisions with further revisions, returning the flow to its original course. A few minor facts might be changed, but Tengo would still be Tengo."
2. "Wakeful nights often give people useless thoughts."
3. "Unfortunately, however, sheer talent is not enough. And depending upon how you look at it, possessing an outstanding talent that is not sufficient may be more dangerous than possessing nothing at all."
4. "Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep. Green tea is no match for these things. They might take restful sleep away from you forever."
5. "Tengo closed his eyes again, took a deep breath, found the words he needed and set them in a row. Then he rearranged them to give the image greater clarity and prevision. Finally, he improved the rhythm."
2. "Wakeful nights often give people useless thoughts."
3. "Unfortunately, however, sheer talent is not enough. And depending upon how you look at it, possessing an outstanding talent that is not sufficient may be more dangerous than possessing nothing at all."
4. "Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep. Green tea is no match for these things. They might take restful sleep away from you forever."
5. "Tengo closed his eyes again, took a deep breath, found the words he needed and set them in a row. Then he rearranged them to give the image greater clarity and prevision. Finally, he improved the rhythm."
Sunday, October 30, 2011
random thoughts, Kansas City, 12 years ago tomorrow
Twelve years ago I was on tour in Kansas City, at the halfway point of our journeys through the Midwest. I was in the middle of a catastrophic love affair, and the object of my desire lived in Westchester County, New York. She was a dancer, two years younger than I and a decade wiser. The ramifications of this obsession would not be made manifest for months to come, when i encountered the Dancer's reflection on a Saturday night in Gainesville.
The point is that, in time, I would come to know that those rapturous months with the Dancer, and those torturous years with the Mirror, were in fact part of a single experience, what one might call sukha and dukkha. To date I have never seen a better illustration of the dangers of conflating duality with the Divine, and looking back, I see it as a textbook case of projection and transference – the beatification of the Bronxville beauty on the one hand, and the malificent masochism of the Mirror on the other.
(Everything i saw in them was inside of me;
everything i saw in them was also in the other.
One year ago, I found myself curious about Halloweens past - where I was, what I was doing. I remembered, more or less, who I was for the past several years, but how about further back? I wondered who (I thought) I was a decade ago, but found the documents incoherent, lacking or absent. I stretched back one more year, to 1999, and this is what I discovered:
Day thirteen is a day starts with a call from J______. It woke me up, and I was so happy to hear her voice and her choice. Sometimes I think there’s some psychic (but deeper, more emotional) bond...
Gin at three, a tape, and a boredom thick enough
to grasp. I walk through the bookstore with my hands
clasped together to keep from shoving books off the display.
From where does this urge arise? It's not right to pawn
and merchant and whore these ideas and thoughts
and words under fluorescence and Muzak...
The penguin man cackles
at the table of three – not the
endearing cackle of Bobby, but
the sound of a small-eyed, hook-
nosed gentleman with glasses and
the manner of someone who is not
unhappy, but never laughs without
restraint. That deep hysterical laughter
of the mad, when your eyes water and you
gasp for breaths not for the oxygen, but only
to have another lungful of laughter, to spew into
the night until your sides ache and your bladder pains...
the Kansas
City streets
I miss New
York. I feel
tall enough
to see the
West Coast
burning two
thousand
miles away
and New York
engulfed in its
tungsten flame
one thousand
miles east, as
Hollywood and
Times Square
watch over me...
But this is beside the point.
The point is that, in time, I would come to know that those rapturous months with the Dancer, and those torturous years with the Mirror, were in fact part of a single experience, what one might call sukha and dukkha. To date I have never seen a better illustration of the dangers of conflating duality with the Divine, and looking back, I see it as a textbook case of projection and transference – the beatification of the Bronxville beauty on the one hand, and the malificent masochism of the Mirror on the other.
(Everything i saw in them was inside of me;
everything i saw in them was also in the other.
A man named Peter once told me: 'everything is in everything';
a woman named Lauren once sang: 'everything is everything':)
a woman named Lauren once sang: 'everything is everything':)
They're both right.
One year ago, I found myself curious about Halloweens past - where I was, what I was doing. I remembered, more or less, who I was for the past several years, but how about further back? I wondered who (I thought) I was a decade ago, but found the documents incoherent, lacking or absent. I stretched back one more year, to 1999, and this is what I discovered:
"SIN": 29 September - 7 November 1999
31 October 1999
Day thirteen is a day starts with a call from J______. It woke me up, and I was so happy to hear her voice and her choice. Sometimes I think there’s some psychic (but deeper, more emotional) bond...
I caught myself thinking this morning
and asked myself how the idea got inside:
I would be gone before you arrived. It was
the sound of a heart closing like a wound
– but I keep on picking at the scabs...
and asked myself how the idea got inside:
I would be gone before you arrived. It was
the sound of a heart closing like a wound
– but I keep on picking at the scabs...
Gin at three, a tape, and a boredom thick enough
to grasp. I walk through the bookstore with my hands
clasped together to keep from shoving books off the display.
From where does this urge arise? It's not right to pawn
and merchant and whore these ideas and thoughts
and words under fluorescence and Muzak...
In Kansas City the nights are so quiet that
the table of three next to me becomes
deafening compared to the peaceful
lull of New York’s eight screaming
millions. I’ve read all my books;
and will have to read Kerouac
again, but then why did I buy it...
the table of three next to me becomes
deafening compared to the peaceful
lull of New York’s eight screaming
millions. I’ve read all my books;
and will have to read Kerouac
again, but then why did I buy it...
The penguin man cackles
at the table of three – not the
endearing cackle of Bobby, but
the sound of a small-eyed, hook-
nosed gentleman with glasses and
the manner of someone who is not
unhappy, but never laughs without
restraint. That deep hysterical laughter
of the mad, when your eyes water and you
gasp for breaths not for the oxygen, but only
to have another lungful of laughter, to spew into
the night until your sides ache and your bladder pains...
I finished The Bell Jar tonight, and
it’s fascinating that she turned her
depression, its simplicity, into a
novel. That’s how it is; that feeling
of watching life happen in front of
your eyes, the disbelief that what one
sees is invisible to everyone else. But
what frightened me was the calmness
with which she described it, and I
wonder if she was so removed when it
happened? I have always with me that
sadness, and a desperation to escape
its grasp, like clawing at some invisible
tie around the throat, like the lungs
were some never-stretched tendon,
feeling the pain of movement and
yearning for the freedom of mobility...
it’s fascinating that she turned her
depression, its simplicity, into a
novel. That’s how it is; that feeling
of watching life happen in front of
your eyes, the disbelief that what one
sees is invisible to everyone else. But
what frightened me was the calmness
with which she described it, and I
wonder if she was so removed when it
happened? I have always with me that
sadness, and a desperation to escape
its grasp, like clawing at some invisible
tie around the throat, like the lungs
were some never-stretched tendon,
feeling the pain of movement and
yearning for the freedom of mobility...
I
use
words
fast and
easy and
ambiguous
and so undefined
and unrefined and
unresolved and dissolved
and undeclared and uncleared
and I don’t explain and assume
you just know as I know and never
even have to ask if you know what I mean...
Watching use
words
fast and
easy and
ambiguous
and so undefined
and unrefined and
unresolved and dissolved
and undeclared and uncleared
and I don’t explain and assume
you just know as I know and never
even have to ask if you know what I mean...
the Kansas
City streets
I miss New
York. I feel
tall enough
to see the
West Coast
burning two
thousand
miles away
and New York
engulfed in its
tungsten flame
one thousand
miles east, as
Hollywood and
Times Square
watch over me...
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
redux: weddings, La Cienega and Agra
One year ago I went to a wedding:
The sun rose behind the clouds, moving from hidden to vermillion to amber curtains of light pouring down onto the ocean. The full moon hung in the western sky, almost as if it was waiting to hear the "I do," and it occurred to me that the same moon was just beginning to rise in Agra, where my yin was visiting the Red Fort:
These places are one moon away from each other, one moon that holds the day in perfect harmony with the night. I thought about these things as the preacher gave his sermon. I thought about four years earlier, when I stepped foot on this particular beach for the first time. So much has changed since then, and yet to the sand and the beach and the ocean and the moon it was nothing. It was less than nothing – a blink of the eye, slip of the tongue, a cliché waiting to happen:
I have heard people liken the mind to a monkey:
But these types of statements are an affront to monkeys the world over.
The mind - at least the mind prevalent in this part of the world during this time in history - is better compared to the ruthless precision of Swiss watches. A Rolex-ed tyranny of minutes and minutia, seconds and second-guessing. To live and breathe and swing from trees is the privilege and birthright of humans and monkeys alike. Have you ever heard a child ask:
How about La Cienega, do you think she wonders about time in Nepal?
La Cienega wrote:
in joying india ??
Life is!!!
You no
hmm...thought of you a bunch of times...in Kathmandu hehehe...from months ago! Lost my camera..boohoo
I agree! I actually havent taken many pictures...the crew i was travlling with did! So entering Nepal alone i took on the camera...crossed the border...no more camera!
???
In love! Yes! It is Beautiful! One of the 13 grandmothers lives there...a nepalese shaman! Hope to connect wioth her when she returns to nepal
if you truly desire you WILL make it manifest!!
When do you and [your yin] enter into sacred union
Beautiful!!! You are a most beautiful pair!!! May all the love that is, continue to radiate from each of you!!! and spread out over the whole world!!!! Radiant love!!! Yum! Thank you for the blessing of your presence in my life! Often you come into my heart and my mind and i am lost in love and gratitude!!! Please know this! So much love and gratitude!!!
Conversations like these, scattered and infrequent though they be, is why i call her La Cienega:
And while La Cienega is never beside the point, I should nonetheless return to the wedding...
There were three flower girls, the youngest of whom had a shiner and trailed behind her sisters (or cousins) saying "you dropped some" and pointing to the petals in the sand. It was adorable, the magnificent fragility of life and the imponderable resiliency of children. How sad it is that, as we grow older, each of us has to learn that we can be hurt. Even sadder, however, is that we come to believe that we can be injured in a way that dampers our spirit and being.
The preacher giving the service spoke to these things in his own obtuse way. It was a more traditional service than the one my yin and I would have six months later, but I was able to listen for the truths he spoke rather than becoming lost in the semantics. I was reminded once more that the largest difference between Christian theology and Eastern thought (at least as it's been taught to me) is a matter of which state one calls 'acquired' and which state one calls 'natural.'
In other words, how original is our sin?
Maybe I'll end up becoming a Christian mystic like Dostoevsky and see grand mal visions of the Divine and pen great sweeping novels with unpronounceable characters' names. Maybe I'll write heartfelt accounts of normal people, flawed and anonymous, that come to represent the shifting tides of history as an empire begins to collapse upon itself.
How far apart are 19th century St. Petersburg and 21st century Washington?
The wedding and sunrise were followed by breakfast, and I made small talk with friends and strangers while my mind pondered Dostoevsky. I questioned an acquaintance about her vipassana retreat and asked the server to prepare me a plate without any meat. In spite of this, the ocean breeze smelled like bacon.
After the cake was cut, I wished my friend congratulations. She is one of those special maniacs that does things like build surfboards in her free time and sews dresses for the bridesmaids. I still remember three years ago, when she attempted to set me up with her roommate and fed me a spinach-feta burger with sweet potato fries. The match-making didn't take, though, and that night I walked the beach with Mardou.
The point is that I spoke with my yin after the wedding and gave her a brief recap. She told me about Agra and sent a picture of the Taj Mahal, as seen from the Red Fort:
My favorite, though, was this one of her with a half-Canadian:
The sun rose behind the clouds, moving from hidden to vermillion to amber curtains of light pouring down onto the ocean. The full moon hung in the western sky, almost as if it was waiting to hear the "I do," and it occurred to me that the same moon was just beginning to rise in Agra, where my yin was visiting the Red Fort:
how far apart are these places:
8000 miles? a 20 hour flight? 9½ hours worth of time zone?
8000 miles? a 20 hour flight? 9½ hours worth of time zone?
These places are one moon away from each other, one moon that holds the day in perfect harmony with the night. I thought about these things as the preacher gave his sermon. I thought about four years earlier, when I stepped foot on this particular beach for the first time. So much has changed since then, and yet to the sand and the beach and the ocean and the moon it was nothing. It was less than nothing – a blink of the eye, slip of the tongue, a cliché waiting to happen:
Time is a scam; a beautiful, inexplicably lovely scam.
do these denizens of Agra ever worry about time?
I have heard people liken the mind to a monkey:
"There goes my monkey mind again."
But these types of statements are an affront to monkeys the world over.
The mind - at least the mind prevalent in this part of the world during this time in history - is better compared to the ruthless precision of Swiss watches. A Rolex-ed tyranny of minutes and minutia, seconds and second-guessing. To live and breathe and swing from trees is the privilege and birthright of humans and monkeys alike. Have you ever heard a child ask:
"Do i have enough time to climb this tree?"
How about La Cienega, do you think she wonders about time in Nepal?
No; we were in communication this very morning:
La Cienega wrote:
the author responded:
7:29amin joying india ??
7:29am
that is fantastic!
[my yin] is in Agra right now.
7:30amthat is fantastic!
[my yin] is in Agra right now.
Life is!!!
You no
7:30am
alas, no. school. writing thesis.
saw picture of you and carrots. lovely.
7:30amalas, no. school. writing thesis.
saw picture of you and carrots. lovely.
hmm...thought of you a bunch of times...in Kathmandu hehehe...from months ago! Lost my camera..boohoo
7:30am
we're already planning a future traipse.
we're already planning a future traipse.
cameras are overrated, a poor substitute for the creativity of memory.
7:32am I agree! I actually havent taken many pictures...the crew i was travlling with did! So entering Nepal alone i took on the camera...crossed the border...no more camera!
7:32am
how long are you staying?
7:32am how long are you staying?
???
7:32am
beautiful. have you been to Bhutan?
7:33am beautiful. have you been to Bhutan?
In love! Yes! It is Beautiful! One of the 13 grandmothers lives there...a nepalese shaman! Hope to connect wioth her when she returns to nepal
7:33am
envy. someday someday someday...
7:34am envy. someday someday someday...
if you truly desire you WILL make it manifest!!
7:35am
agreed. envy, like all emotions, is beautiful in its impermanence.
7:35am agreed. envy, like all emotions, is beautiful in its impermanence.
When do you and [your yin] enter into sacred union
7:35am
last Sunday in February.
7:38am last Sunday in February.
Beautiful!!! You are a most beautiful pair!!! May all the love that is, continue to radiate from each of you!!! and spread out over the whole world!!!! Radiant love!!! Yum! Thank you for the blessing of your presence in my life! Often you come into my heart and my mind and i am lost in love and gratitude!!! Please know this! So much love and gratitude!!!
7:39am
always and ever the same.
love, light, and safe travels.
every moment is a gift.
always and ever the same.
love, light, and safe travels.
every moment is a gift.
Conversations like these, scattered and infrequent though they be, is why i call her La Cienega:
And while La Cienega is never beside the point, I should nonetheless return to the wedding...
There were three flower girls, the youngest of whom had a shiner and trailed behind her sisters (or cousins) saying "you dropped some" and pointing to the petals in the sand. It was adorable, the magnificent fragility of life and the imponderable resiliency of children. How sad it is that, as we grow older, each of us has to learn that we can be hurt. Even sadder, however, is that we come to believe that we can be injured in a way that dampers our spirit and being.
The preacher giving the service spoke to these things in his own obtuse way. It was a more traditional service than the one my yin and I would have six months later, but I was able to listen for the truths he spoke rather than becoming lost in the semantics. I was reminded once more that the largest difference between Christian theology and Eastern thought (at least as it's been taught to me) is a matter of which state one calls 'acquired' and which state one calls 'natural.'
In other words, how original is our sin?
a Rose by any other name...
Maybe I'll end up becoming a Christian mystic like Dostoevsky and see grand mal visions of the Divine and pen great sweeping novels with unpronounceable characters' names. Maybe I'll write heartfelt accounts of normal people, flawed and anonymous, that come to represent the shifting tides of history as an empire begins to collapse upon itself.
How far apart are 19th century St. Petersburg and 21st century Washington?
The wedding and sunrise were followed by breakfast, and I made small talk with friends and strangers while my mind pondered Dostoevsky. I questioned an acquaintance about her vipassana retreat and asked the server to prepare me a plate without any meat. In spite of this, the ocean breeze smelled like bacon.
After the cake was cut, I wished my friend congratulations. She is one of those special maniacs that does things like build surfboards in her free time and sews dresses for the bridesmaids. I still remember three years ago, when she attempted to set me up with her roommate and fed me a spinach-feta burger with sweet potato fries. The match-making didn't take, though, and that night I walked the beach with Mardou.
But this is beside the point.
The point is that I spoke with my yin after the wedding and gave her a brief recap. She told me about Agra and sent a picture of the Taj Mahal, as seen from the Red Fort:
more of the Taj to follow...
My favorite, though, was this one of her with a half-Canadian:
"looks like you got laid," i observed.
Alas, getting laid is also beside the point... at least for the time being.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
repost: Godard v. Dostoevsky
This time last year, I turned in the first chapter of my thesis, and to celebrate (and to nurse my ailing, pre-tendonitis wrists and forearms) I decided to take a couple of days of from typing. I wanted to relax and take it easy, to clear my mind of all the convoluted mental acrobatics required to make a the muddled mess of Lacanian thought into a (relatively) straight line of reasoning.
Q: How does a super-genius like myself choose to unwind?
A: French films and Russian novels, of course.
First, le film du jour, Godard's Vivre sa vie, which stars the impossibly comely Anna Karina as the prostitute Nana:
Vivre sa vie has all the wonderful Godard tropes: crime, allusion, tabletop philosophy, episodic construction, and a great jukebox dance scene:
Unfortunately, it also has that other quintessential Godardian trait:
Her lines are delivered emptily (sans la motivation, sans l'effort), and with Karina this is especially disturbing because she and Godard were married during the early and mid-Sixties. One cannot help but feel a certain animosity leaking into the frame from the man directing the camera, an invisible contempt tinged with subtle personal acrimony and the not-so-subtle misogyny of the camera's gaze.
The clearest demonstration of this is the final scene, when Nana is gunned down not by one, but by two pimps who were in the process of trading her. The film ends abruptly, with a long shot of Nana on the ground as her former pimp makes his getaway.
Hoping to lighten my mood, I decided it was the perfect time to start Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Although I read Notes from the Underground a couple of years ago, which had great lines like:
It was Crime and Punishment, however, that instilled my awed, fearful reverence for The Dead Russian. I read it as an undergraduate (also for fun, also without adult supervision) sometime in the late Nineties, and a six-month period of mild insanity followed. In fact, I've never quite been the same since reading of poor Raskolnikov and the murdered pawn broker. Something broke inside of me while reading the novel (I mean this in the best possible way), and I wish I had taken better notes on the experience.
There was simply something different me after the book, something so fundamental as to elude my ability to say it, yet so profound as to inform every thought and action that came after it. The novel had lodged itself into my unconscious mind, and I've been unable (and unwanting) to shake it in the decade that followed.
The same thing happened the first time I heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; maybe it's something about dead Russians:
The point is that I started reading of Mitya, Vanya, and Alyosha last night, and I found myself captivated at the end of the first chapter: "In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we."
I know this is true in my own experience. The gremlins and ghouls and monsters that populate and terrorize this world are acting out of ignorance rather than malice, out of fear rather than evil, out of forgetting rather than remembering.
And so, I humbly submit myself once more to the divine will of the degenerate master, let come what insanity may...
One year later: the thesis was written; the book remains unfinished.
Q: How does a super-genius like myself choose to unwind?
A: French films and Russian novels, of course.
Jean-Luc Godard and Fyodor Dostoevsky, scaled to stature
First, le film du jour, Godard's Vivre sa vie, which stars the impossibly comely Anna Karina as the prostitute Nana:
dig the Voltaire in the background
Vivre sa vie has all the wonderful Godard tropes: crime, allusion, tabletop philosophy, episodic construction, and a great jukebox dance scene:
Unfortunately, it also has that other quintessential Godardian trait:
the vacant woman.
Her lines are delivered emptily (sans la motivation, sans l'effort), and with Karina this is especially disturbing because she and Godard were married during the early and mid-Sixties. One cannot help but feel a certain animosity leaking into the frame from the man directing the camera, an invisible contempt tinged with subtle personal acrimony and the not-so-subtle misogyny of the camera's gaze.
The clearest demonstration of this is the final scene, when Nana is gunned down not by one, but by two pimps who were in the process of trading her. The film ends abruptly, with a long shot of Nana on the ground as her former pimp makes his getaway.
C'est la vie?
Hoping to lighten my mood, I decided it was the perfect time to start Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Although I read Notes from the Underground a couple of years ago, which had great lines like:
"Vice begins with that in which true love finds its consummation."
It was Crime and Punishment, however, that instilled my awed, fearful reverence for The Dead Russian. I read it as an undergraduate (also for fun, also without adult supervision) sometime in the late Nineties, and a six-month period of mild insanity followed. In fact, I've never quite been the same since reading of poor Raskolnikov and the murdered pawn broker. Something broke inside of me while reading the novel (I mean this in the best possible way), and I wish I had taken better notes on the experience.
There was simply something different me after the book, something so fundamental as to elude my ability to say it, yet so profound as to inform every thought and action that came after it. The novel had lodged itself into my unconscious mind, and I've been unable (and unwanting) to shake it in the decade that followed.
The same thing happened the first time I heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; maybe it's something about dead Russians:
The dead Russians are beside the point.
The point is that I started reading of Mitya, Vanya, and Alyosha last night, and I found myself captivated at the end of the first chapter: "In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we."
I know this is true in my own experience. The gremlins and ghouls and monsters that populate and terrorize this world are acting out of ignorance rather than malice, out of fear rather than evil, out of forgetting rather than remembering.
And so, I humbly submit myself once more to the divine will of the degenerate master, let come what insanity may...
[lapse]
One year later: the thesis was written; the book remains unfinished.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
redux: Zazen v. Nancy
This time last year, I read Norweigan Wood and was immediately taken in by its sense of loss. Before even the first page was finished, I found my mind start drifting,
and I could smell the cold German mist of the narrator's world
colliding with the humidity of past life Floridian summers. I felt as if I knew Naoko, but was unable to place precisely how or whom.
Was it Nancy she reminds me of? Those broken cryptic warnings that masqueraded as invitation? Was it her deception or my projection? What difference does it make now, eleven years later? Karmas have been incurred, lives altered, and each of us stumbled into worlds safely removed from the other's.
Was it a trap door?
Those six years stand like a giant pillar in my life, blocking a clear view of what came before and bathing the years since in its shadow. Is it messianic time flowing in two directions? Everything before and after anchored to the memory of what came to pass, of what lay ahead. Sometimes I walk around that pillar and watch the shadows stretch across the ground, but the sun is never moving.
Back then I was also reading Bodhisattva Archetypes, and I thought about the Zen understanding of a sitting meditation. Iin the Zen tradition the point of sitting is not to attain altered or transcendent states of consciousness – it is merely to sit. (A useful understanding since my current schedule requires that most of my sitting practice has been relegated to parking lots in Broward County.)
Another point that stood out was the notion of 'no-self,' which has a certain linguistic resonance with my dormant nihilism. No-self is not a purely negative construction, however, but an understanding that there is no personal existence except as it relates to all other beings.
Coincidentally, perhaps, last year was also the time my own teacher began to describe a 'transcendent individuality' that exists as a way station (or stomping ground) between the identified, limited self and re-immersion into the Godhead. The Zen understanding of 'no-self' seems to overlap with my teacher's 'transcendent individuality,' though I'm not certain either the dead Dogen or the living half-Canadian would care to hear so.
The point is that no-self holds resonance my deepest meditations, which seem less like an expansion of self than the dissolution of self. (Not that the expanded sensations don't exist, it's just that they seem somehow to be more 'me' and less free.) The no-self is also easier to reconcile with my concerns regarding the balance between the material and metaphysical realms. Unlike the yogic concept of the atman, which is ever unaffected, ever outside of relationship, the no-self lends itself more easily to seeing ourselves as constituted historically as well as atemporally, helping to understand one's place in the world for those 23 hours each day that we're not transcending our living rooms and parking lots.
The only problem is that, while my sitting practice resonates with the no-self, the experience that started me on this whole rigmarole four years ago is beyond my comprehension unless it is framed within the notion of some sort of unaffected, unchanging core of existence - the atman, in other words.
(C'est quoi disent les Francais? Mais oui, c'est la vie...)
[return]
Either way, it doesn't really matter. The answer (which is the question) will reveal itself in its own due time. Until then, one continues to sit...
Was it Nancy she reminds me of? Those broken cryptic warnings that masqueraded as invitation? Was it her deception or my projection? What difference does it make now, eleven years later? Karmas have been incurred, lives altered, and each of us stumbled into worlds safely removed from the other's.
Was it a trap door?
Ever watched a rabbit emerge from hat?
Those six years stand like a giant pillar in my life, blocking a clear view of what came before and bathing the years since in its shadow. Is it messianic time flowing in two directions? Everything before and after anchored to the memory of what came to pass, of what lay ahead. Sometimes I walk around that pillar and watch the shadows stretch across the ground, but the sun is never moving.
Back then I was also reading Bodhisattva Archetypes, and I thought about the Zen understanding of a sitting meditation. Iin the Zen tradition the point of sitting is not to attain altered or transcendent states of consciousness – it is merely to sit. (A useful understanding since my current schedule requires that most of my sitting practice has been relegated to parking lots in Broward County.)
Another point that stood out was the notion of 'no-self,' which has a certain linguistic resonance with my dormant nihilism. No-self is not a purely negative construction, however, but an understanding that there is no personal existence except as it relates to all other beings.
Coincidentally, perhaps, last year was also the time my own teacher began to describe a 'transcendent individuality' that exists as a way station (or stomping ground) between the identified, limited self and re-immersion into the Godhead. The Zen understanding of 'no-self' seems to overlap with my teacher's 'transcendent individuality,' though I'm not certain either the dead Dogen or the living half-Canadian would care to hear so.
But this is beside the point.
The point is that no-self holds resonance my deepest meditations, which seem less like an expansion of self than the dissolution of self. (Not that the expanded sensations don't exist, it's just that they seem somehow to be more 'me' and less free.) The no-self is also easier to reconcile with my concerns regarding the balance between the material and metaphysical realms. Unlike the yogic concept of the atman, which is ever unaffected, ever outside of relationship, the no-self lends itself more easily to seeing ourselves as constituted historically as well as atemporally, helping to understand one's place in the world for those 23 hours each day that we're not transcending our living rooms and parking lots.
The only problem is that, while my sitting practice resonates with the no-self, the experience that started me on this whole rigmarole four years ago is beyond my comprehension unless it is framed within the notion of some sort of unaffected, unchanging core of existence - the atman, in other words.
(C'est quoi disent les Francais? Mais oui, c'est la vie...)
[lapse]
A man walks into a store.
The clerk asks, "Atman or no-self?"
The man answers, "One of each please."
The clerk asks, "Atman or no-self?"
The man answers, "One of each please."
[return]
Either way, it doesn't really matter. The answer (which is the question) will reveal itself in its own due time. Until then, one continues to sit...
Monday, August 1, 2011
Tales of Ordinary Madness (book rant)
Last night I finished reading:
For the past week or so the book has provided virtually all of my bedtime stories, offering a kind of perverted, alcoholic lullaby that is only slightly less twisted than the fairy tales most people read their children. Why the story of a young girl (or three little pigs for that matter) being terrorized by a wolf makes for appropriate bedtime fare is beyond me.
It reminds me of a poem I wrote several years ago:
What lupine
machinations
operate
(un/seen)
giving us
safe
clean
well-lit
places in the night?
The point is that I, like most people, was introduced to Charles Bukowski when I was 19 years old. As far as I'm concerned, this is the perfect time for a young person to be introduced to Hank's work because: 1) he or she is still young enough to assume the author's constant references to drunkenness, constipation, and hemorrhoids point towards some underlying profundity; and 2) he or she is not yet old enough to realize that the profundity of said subject matter is self-evident.
Bukowski's other great gift is his ability to write about the truly banal, without pretense or contrivance. Take, for example, this description whose misogyny is surpassed only by its conciseness:
While this description begins predictably, using the insect as shorthand for the woman's disgusting and contemptible nature, the middle portion gives teeth (pun intended) to what would be an otherwise boring characterization. Toothaches and constipation connote specifically human discomfort, pains from which the waitress is forbidden. Finally, and this is his genius, Bukowski makes the leap from the banal to the existential, framing the woman's stupidity as ultimately a matter of her inability to consider death and mortality.
These were the subtleties I missed when I was 19. Back then I could care less for Bukowski. His writing seemed needlessly grotesque and intentionally offensive. But as I've grown older, I've come to understand that his writing is about that very troubling (and very troubling) subject: the grotesquery of aging itself. This, more than anything else, seems to be Bukowski's strongest and most recurrent theme, and I wonder if it was because he was already middle-aged when he "made it."
Most authors seem to achieve Importance, if not Fame, by their late twenties, and I feel certain that these cultural phenomena interfere with what might be called the more "normal" aging process. We live in a society that not only values, but idealizes youth; a society where a distinction must be made between "growing old gracefully" and merely getting older. Bukowski's late-arriving recognition shielded him from this, allowing him to undergo the disappointments that seem part and parcel with the transition into one's thirties.
"I remembered when I was kid, I thought, I’d like to live to see the year 2,000, I thought that would be the magic thing, with my old man beating the hell out of me everyday I wanted to live to be 80 and see the year 2,000; now with everything beating the hell out of me I no longer have that desire." (154)
This passage communicates Bukowski's essential understanding of man's place (yes, always man with Bukowski) in the world: the chasm between the projections of youth and the disillusionment of experience. For him, this process is inevitably one that pulls one closer towards nihilism and emptiness, in spite of the individual's longing for liberation.
Booze, Sex, and Gambling fill this void; they are his trinity as much as the Christians have their Father, Son, and Ghost. A better analogy, though, might be to the Hindu understandings of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. In Bukowski's pantheon, Sex is the Creator, giving birth to desire and inspiring impossible aspirations. Herein lies the source of his misogyny because woman comes to embody this hope that gives rise only to disappointment. Gambling is Vishnu, sustaining him in the time between disappointments, and Alcohol is his Destroyer, obliterating the Sex and Gambling only to give rise to it all again.
Caught in this mêlée, man (yes, always man with Bukowski) is trapped in an inescapable cycle:
"All the people in Los Angeles are doing it: running ass-wild after something that is not there. It is basically a fear of facing one’s self, it is basically a fear of being alone." (190)
In the end, it is this solitude that exists as the sole constant of the universe, existing independently of the booze and the gambling, the heartache and rambling. Bukowski is the Buddha of post-War America, a Siddhartha who realized the first noble truth and went no further. And it would be simple enough to dismiss him as a depressive, an alcoholic, a madman, a coward, and a fraud... if only I had never heard his voice:
For the past week or so the book has provided virtually all of my bedtime stories, offering a kind of perverted, alcoholic lullaby that is only slightly less twisted than the fairy tales most people read their children. Why the story of a young girl (or three little pigs for that matter) being terrorized by a wolf makes for appropriate bedtime fare is beyond me.
It reminds me of a poem I wrote several years ago:
What lupine
machinations
operate
(un/seen)
giving us
safe
clean
well-lit
places in the night?
But this is beside the point.
The point is that I, like most people, was introduced to Charles Bukowski when I was 19 years old. As far as I'm concerned, this is the perfect time for a young person to be introduced to Hank's work because: 1) he or she is still young enough to assume the author's constant references to drunkenness, constipation, and hemorrhoids point towards some underlying profundity; and 2) he or she is not yet old enough to realize that the profundity of said subject matter is self-evident.
Bukowski's other great gift is his ability to write about the truly banal, without pretense or contrivance. Take, for example, this description whose misogyny is surpassed only by its conciseness:
"There was a girl whose ass looked like the bottom of heaven." (88)
There are no drawn-out, flowery descriptions in Tales of Ordinary Madness, and this holds true throughout the dozens of short stories that comprise the book. I do not know if this pattern exists in his longer fiction, but Bukowski's short stories are masterful in their ability to communicate a mood (typically alienation, longing, and/or disappointment) through the sparsest use of words imaginable.
"The waitress was fat and stupid as a roach, unthinking – she’d never had a toothache, she’d never been constipated even, she never thought about death and only a little about life." (96)
Did I mention there is more simile in life than metaphor?
"The waitress was fat and stupid as a roach, unthinking – she’d never had a toothache, she’d never been constipated even, she never thought about death and only a little about life." (96)
While this description begins predictably, using the insect as shorthand for the woman's disgusting and contemptible nature, the middle portion gives teeth (pun intended) to what would be an otherwise boring characterization. Toothaches and constipation connote specifically human discomfort, pains from which the waitress is forbidden. Finally, and this is his genius, Bukowski makes the leap from the banal to the existential, framing the woman's stupidity as ultimately a matter of her inability to consider death and mortality.
These were the subtleties I missed when I was 19. Back then I could care less for Bukowski. His writing seemed needlessly grotesque and intentionally offensive. But as I've grown older, I've come to understand that his writing is about that very troubling (and very troubling) subject: the grotesquery of aging itself. This, more than anything else, seems to be Bukowski's strongest and most recurrent theme, and I wonder if it was because he was already middle-aged when he "made it."
Most authors seem to achieve Importance, if not Fame, by their late twenties, and I feel certain that these cultural phenomena interfere with what might be called the more "normal" aging process. We live in a society that not only values, but idealizes youth; a society where a distinction must be made between "growing old gracefully" and merely getting older. Bukowski's late-arriving recognition shielded him from this, allowing him to undergo the disappointments that seem part and parcel with the transition into one's thirties.
"I remembered when I was kid, I thought, I’d like to live to see the year 2,000, I thought that would be the magic thing, with my old man beating the hell out of me everyday I wanted to live to be 80 and see the year 2,000; now with everything beating the hell out of me I no longer have that desire." (154)
This passage communicates Bukowski's essential understanding of man's place (yes, always man with Bukowski) in the world: the chasm between the projections of youth and the disillusionment of experience. For him, this process is inevitably one that pulls one closer towards nihilism and emptiness, in spite of the individual's longing for liberation.
Booze, Sex, and Gambling fill this void; they are his trinity as much as the Christians have their Father, Son, and Ghost. A better analogy, though, might be to the Hindu understandings of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. In Bukowski's pantheon, Sex is the Creator, giving birth to desire and inspiring impossible aspirations. Herein lies the source of his misogyny because woman comes to embody this hope that gives rise only to disappointment. Gambling is Vishnu, sustaining him in the time between disappointments, and Alcohol is his Destroyer, obliterating the Sex and Gambling only to give rise to it all again.
Caught in this mêlée, man (yes, always man with Bukowski) is trapped in an inescapable cycle:
"All the people in Los Angeles are doing it: running ass-wild after something that is not there. It is basically a fear of facing one’s self, it is basically a fear of being alone." (190)
In the end, it is this solitude that exists as the sole constant of the universe, existing independently of the booze and the gambling, the heartache and rambling. Bukowski is the Buddha of post-War America, a Siddhartha who realized the first noble truth and went no further. And it would be simple enough to dismiss him as a depressive, an alcoholic, a madman, a coward, and a fraud... if only I had never heard his voice:
Saturday, July 23, 2011
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.
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.
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:
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."
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)
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:
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)
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
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
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.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
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...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
