BLOG ARCHIVE

INDEX

My Retirement

People ask me why I retired.

Towards the end of my teaching career I had grown to detest grading freshman essays to a degree that had become life-threatening. I had to do breathing exercises, calmness meditation, and plead with the gods for fortitude before I could even look at those folders. I had to be careful not to put them in stacks for fear of cardiac arrest at the sight. And even then I had to proceed with palpitations, trembling, cold sweat, and shortness of breath. Like my regular attributing of malevolent motives to inanimate objects, it was a response out of proportion to the cause—but I was powerless to change it.

Since sitting in my office with those papers in the creepy late afternoon began to feel terrifying, I tried the evasive maneuver of taking (a few of) the hated folders to the library where I always had the third-floor faculty lounge to myself with a view over the campus and Vernon Street. One day, after I had taken twenty slow deep breaths, opened a folder and read the first, thankfully grammatically complete, sentence ten times trying to get it to catch, I saw across the way a man enter the back door of my building, Manget, and I knew he had come to kill me. I didn’t know why, or who he was, I only knew it was so.

So you see, I had no choice. I slipped out the west utility door, and kept going.

September 10,2018

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Bad Play

I once wrote a very bad play, with good characters. Not morally good, you understand, just real. The play of course went nowhere but the characters took up in my house and wouldn’t leave. They crept into my bed, they hogged the bathroom, ate my food, smoked my stuff and drank all my wine. They had nothing to do and were massively bored. They had no past to inspire nostalgia, and no future, unless I gave them one, but I had lost interest in them and knew the only way to get rid of them was to forget them.

But how much luck have you ever had trying to forget something?

It was somewhere between a bad marriage and a haunted house. They hung around for a couple of years. I didn’t really forget them, I just got so used to them I stopped seeing them, and when I did, they were beginning to look transparent, with whole sections of their bodies missing. A couple melded into one. They had had emotion in the early days—hostility, resentment, ambition—but now the fuel was spent and all I could feel from them was a sickly malaise. They took up in corners, under tables, in closets. One went outside and never came back. I think he’s in the shed. And sure enough, as they withdrew I did fall into the habit of forgetting them, more or less, and they became too insubstantial to really have a presence in my mind.

Except for one. The grandfather. He settled into the back room, and I closed the door for good. I have no idea what he does in there, but I think he just waits, knowing that whoever forgets the other first wins.

September 17, 2018

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Teams

In my experience it is the least imaginative people who have the most passionate—even violent—desire to eradicate what is alien to them and enforce conformity to their worldview. You might say, that is almost a definition of “unimaginative.” Among the various defining characteristics of the “imaginative” mind, to me, empathy stands foremost: the ability, or proclivity, to imagine being someone else. Is is a quality essential to the storyteller. To the novelist, for example, being someone else is not just a requirement of the job, but its great joy. Escape from the constant Iago-like whispers of ego. Escape from personality. Escape from yourself! In the current political warfare I am sometimes asked what side I’m on. It’s a hard question to answer when I’m sure our having devolved into teams is itself the problem. We are unable, or unwilling, to imagine how the world looks to someone different from ourselves. We say, you either see the world from the random, accidental, selective way I do, or you’re a non-entity. Or face endless torture in some afterlife for your brain’s failure to be wired the way mine is. Nothing less would suffice for the egregiousness of your having a take on reality that I don’t understand.

To the Anastazi—“When the world becomes evil, you die.”

Please don’t kill the messenger, or consign me to Hell for the very thought—but I think we’re there.

The essential ethic of Christianity, and of all ethical systems, is love—manifested in many ways, but critically in tolerance and support for our fellow travelers. So why of all people do “Christians” exhibit it the least? Because they have polluted their religion with politics. Christianity, which replaced paganism in a world growing ever more socialized and sedentary, is supremely about living cooperatively and harmoniously in complex social systems. It isn’t about the endless continuation of your climate-controlled subdivision life with your clones. Hatred of other people, inability to conceive of their conception of reality, dwelling in the noxious trenches of tribal bickering, will destroy us. Quit watching that propaganda! It is only for people incapable of thinking for themselves. The whole point of it is to keep us divided, keep us hating and blaming each other, so a few people can get rich off of us before the end.

September 24, 2018

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The Garden

The Garden. Everybody always asks me about the Garden.

It was real. I guess. No way to prove that now. And very beautiful, of course. I didn’t know that then—you have to know what not-beautiful is first.

The best part of it, I would say, was the part—and I honestly don’t know how long it lasted—before I met your mother, because the best part of anything is anticipating it, and believe me, in those days I shivered with anticipation constantly. Of what, I didn’t know, but that was the joy of it—not just that something was missing, but deliberately missing, and it was up to me to fill that hollow place with whatever I could devise. That was how I knew the Garden wasn’t all, and I went looking. Since there was for me no way to distinguish between finding and inventing I found myself looking for something I already knew within me. I imagined her, or felt her, can’t say which, but I could say her now, because whatever I was in pursuit of had calved from me, or me from it, and we were entities. I could have poured my energy into realizing that part of myself. But I chose not to. One thing you can say, she got me up and looking around.

In my forays through the secret ways of the Garden I could always sense when I was near her, but it was a long time before I saw her, or materialized her—how can I know?—and then that moment: when I came around a curve in the path and saw her standing there, waiting. Nothing I have ever seen in my life could rival that first vision. She was as real as me, this exact, perfectly other thing, and I could see my own wonder reflected in her eyes, and could sense her wonder at whether she was imagining me.

I had never felt, and will never feel again, anything like the feeling when our bodies first touched, and interlocked like two halves of a whole. I wish I could, and not merely remember it. But you can’t ever feel anything again, even Paradise, only know that it had its time.

You will have noticed this yourselves. It is our fate.

People have made up stories about a snake, but if there was a snake it was the one within us: our leaving the Garden was inevitable and foreordained the moment we faced each other. And the best thing that ever happened to us. I welcomed it—the chance to define what I was through challenge and toil—to develop the higher powers, ingenuity, creativity. Not that life, especially in the early days, was easy. It was not. Looking back, I don’t know how we survived. I’ll spare you accounts of what we ate in those early days. We made shelter for ourselves, and learned to find and grow good food, and had many years—long years, some of them. We saw you children grow up, and really didn’t know how to proceed in finding you mates—never mind that. We multiplied. We submitted to time, and after so much of it I could barely see the woman I had first seen that radiant day in the Garden in the woman before me now who had shared my life. As always, I could see the reflection of the same thoughts in her eyes, and of course there was no way to see ourselves but in those mirrors.

Love? Well, yes, love, but it took a while for that word to crystallize, for the need of it to be clear. And now we have taken love to its very end.

All these knowledges—of love, of time, of loss—and now the greatest of them all, just ahead.

The blessing inherent in us from the start.

October 1, 2018

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Ancient States

Speaking of socialization, a good book to check out is Against the Grain by political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott. A re-interpreter, Scott has surveyed recent archaeological findings to present a new vision of the emergence of the ancient state. The book (along with his earlier ones) has been much discussed, so I’ll just say—read it if you want a counter-view to the textbook assumption of the state, with its drudgery, taxation, bondage, disease, ecocide, and a small elite class milking everybody else—as progress. It’s very refreshing.

Also depressing—because it naturally inspires the question: what is the best way for human beings to live?—while leaving the reader suspecting that the answer or answers to that question are now socially unreachable, and that the only destination we are progressing toward is collapse.

And in a more profound way, not depressing—because as this book reminds us, collapse is the rule not the exception, and why would we be any different?—but latent within collapse is opportunity.

It’s tempting to romanticize the hunter-gatherer lifestyle which five or six thousand years ago was the alternative to the earliest states, even if those people did sell their brethren into the slavery required to run the state, and the hunter-gatherer way of life couldn’t exactly have been a cakewalk itself. But you will come away from this book convinced that being a nomad beat being a peasant hands-down, and dreading the “Hunter-Gatherer Cookbook” and new lines of loincloth casual wear in California which are sure to come if Scott’s ideas, and their inevitable misinterpretation, catch on. Scott persuasively argues that hunter-gatherers didn’t turn into states in a linear, progressive way, but in fits and starts, with the sedentary lifestyle long preceding, and not always evolving into, the earliest states.

But here’s the big idea I was left with: what if the formation of states wasn’t an improvement, but a disaster that led to the simultaneous emergence of bureaucrats and the brutalization of the human spirit? One is reminded of Thomas Hobbes’ famous description of human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”—though, writing in the 17th century during the English Civil War, he meant it as a hypothetical description of just the opposite: humans outside of a “social contract.” He had a point.

But are those our only choices: stockpiling beans or the kafkaesque paranoia of the deep state? This is too big for me, but the question remains—what is the best way to live? What does it mean to flourish, to be happy? Sorry, I don’t know. I can only say that my deepest intuition of human existence is a bottomless flowing current with the distractions of our surface lives keeping us mostly from the insights, joys, and terrors of the depths. But providing unhindered access to those depths, and the resulting liberation from ego (an invention by which we subjugate ourselves to bureaucrats, including the one in our minds) are indispensable to any real human fulfillment. Preventing that fulfillment is of course the primary goal of bureaucrats, especially those in the edifice of “religion,” who have been provided by the modern world with a means of achieving that prevention more effective than slavery.

Sometimes it seems we give up too much for too little. But clearly there must be harmony between our autonomy and our participation in a social contract. These days we don’t have a clue where or what that zone might be.

October 10, 2018

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Loomis and Em—Tomaters

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Doers and Bureaucrats

Out of the billions of people who comprise the human race, a few actually do something. They are doers.

The rest spring into action once a doer does something—to follow, criticize, study, rank, label, catalogue, legislate, anthologize, punish, reward, or interpret, and in most cases collect the proceeds. They are bureaucrats.

Anybody who tells you that what you think, do, write, or feel has already been thought, done, written, or felt is a bureaucrat, because they keep up with that shit. Everybody knows it’s all been thought, done, written, and felt.

And anybody who in any field of endeavor—for example, art—tells you always do this, never do that, avoid this, imitate that, is a bureaucrat and doesn’t realize that when you can list rules of creativity you are dealing with a dead art form. Bureaucrat intelligence is never original but primarily the ability to detect a match, or the lack of one. Thinking like a bureaucrat turns the continuous flow of reality into compartments and consigns the meaning of life to the superficial. The joy of life, sometimes its terror (can’t have one without the other), is discovering something for which there is no compartment in your mind. Bureaucrats will have none of that.

And speaking of technological utopianism, it is the illusion that life is essentially composed of segments, and that we could live forever going from one to another; that, as long as we have the elements we want in a situation, life will be full and good. But who could have foretold that the heart grows old? In fact, our existence is an arc—like everything it moves from a beginning to an end, which is the source of its meaning. The idea that technology can change the terms of life (cure death!) is as vacuous as any utopianism has ever been. Life as we experience it is impossible to continue in an unchanging state. Nature kills, and tries again. This is why most older people, if you ask them if they would do it over, say no. They would prefer their progeny to do it for them because this is how nature works: death and rebirth. Even if that creates horrors of its own in the Little League bleachers.

But can people living on planets untilted on their axes, and therefore without seasons, conceive of rebirth?

Please don’t accuse me of believing that humanity divides cleanly into doers and bureaucrats. It is that choose-your-team way of thinking I most detest. We are all both, sequentially and simultaneously. And it isn’t only the brick walls you hit in all bureaucratic structures, but the bureaucrat within your own mind, that thwarts you. The only healthy thing about that little executive in your cranium is that in trying not to identify with it, you have to come up with something else to be. But I will say, I think it’s better when the something else you come up with originates outside the system rather than within it. “Within it” awakens the image of “movements.” Movements in a complex society are as inevitable as the tides, and can be constructive, but they come with a lot of collateral damage. People will sell their souls to be part of something, and often look like lemmings in retrospect, and the movements they so passionately followed contrived and doomed.

Bureaucrats keep the house in order, yes, but they are also dangerous. Since they can’t do anything original they feel it is their right to tell other people what to do, and the way they end up with the money reminds you of a black hole. Even God warned about them:

The word of the Lord came to me: 2 “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? 3 You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. 4 You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. 5 So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals. 6 My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them.

Ezekiel 34: 1-6

Ancient Israel, modern America—what has changed?

The higher on the food chain you go, the less you see what is below you, and the easier it is to dismiss its suffering. Bureaucrats make it too easy to prefer an abstraction over real human feeling, too easy to justify cruelty with a creed—as in the slaughter of innocents followed by “God is great!” Or hiding from the evil around you in air-conditioned churches. And if left to evolve unimpeded, like a rotting fish on the beach bureaucrats grow too easily into fascists.

A million examples—but for brevity, consider Jesus and the Scribes and the Pharisees, not to mention the Romans.

Or the Spanish Inquisition.

The Crusades.

Franco’s falangists and Garcia Lorca.

Hitler.

Or—

October 17, 2018

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The Story

I love the metaphor of playing the hand you’re dealt. It fits well enough and accommodates perfectly the famed unfairness of life we lament so—but which a moment’s reflection reminds us there would be no game without. Unfairness is the infinitesimal hitch in the joinery that breeds reality. It’s the key that unlocks something from nothing.

It really doesn’t matter who wins.

The person we think we are is only the hired help—the ringmaster, not the circus.

Our reality, so we think all reality, is about us—but taking yourself seriously will get you nowhere: you are not the star: love, hope, fear, loneliness, revenge, regret, relief, hatred, despair, and amazing grace are. The playing out of a hand.

Some people say, I never have any luck, as though there were such a thing. They don’t think, I’m playing, which is so lucky it’s miraculous.

Plus, you have to remember the obvious: the best games are the ones with the greatest movement, the greatest surprise, the greatest change. In other words, the best story. Starting with high cards and playing them predictably out isn’t an interesting story. Starting with high cards and blowing them like a hayseed lottery winner, or being outdone by the shrewdness of a weaker player, is. People have to be “storied” to be interesting to other people: they have to have overcome something, found the value or treachery of something, had a narrow escape, a change of heart, defeated their own pride, survived danger, learned something, achieved something, and so forth. You can’t hoard your life, you have to spend it to have stories. And the more miserable the experience, the better the story. No poverty is greater than having no stories.

Everything constantly changes, we all know that, but we’re usually too busy resisting that inevitability to be grateful for it. Spring doesn’t last—neither does youth, the bloom of a flower, a happy time, the innocence of our offspring, a sunset, a thunderstorm, or an adventure. All the things we consider the best in life, not to mention the worst, do not last, and if they do they are subject to death by routine. But none of them would exist if it weren’t so. It’s not just best that way, it’s only possible that way.

Things have to come to be things, but they also have to go.

Beauty, love, happiness don’t just break your heart because they don’t last, they exist because they don’t last. You would have no way to be aware of a flower that always bloomed.

We’ve got a problem with the way we see eternity. The problem is that there is no “we.” Just a collection of “we’s” hired for the day. If we always existed, we wouldn’t exist.

People say, you are the author of your life. But your life is the author of you.

You are your story.

October 20, 2018

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Sue and Babe, Aunt Annie, and Em

They were sisters and lived together three houses down from us on Woodfield Drive. Mama was good friends with them. Daddy leaned towards Babe—no, not what you think, but because she was a highly personable, masculine force of nature who could build a house. She wore a toolbelt as naturally as any man—back in the era when she wasn’t trying to say anything by it, she just needed it. Sue was either a widow or divorced, I’m not sure which, and had a son about my brother’s age, and Babe was unmarried. I loved them both. Later, another sister, terminally ill, came to live with them bringing her brilliant son who was my age. He was into chess, electronics, arcane literature, and not throwing and catching things. I was into airplanes, Alistair MacLean, James Bond, and throwing and catching things.

Babe owned a beauty shop downtown by the Tiger Theater and I delivered a paper there and collected once a month. I enjoyed going in there—what other kid could or would?—drawing fawning clucks from the hens in mid-beautification or dunked over backwards into sinks or sitting under those sci-fi cones—amid that smell—that pungent chemical smell of the beautician’s dark arts.

Babe was friendly, outgoing, funny, always a joy to see. Everybody loved her.

Thank God there was no word for what she was. Well, actually, there was: Babe.

Aunt Annie is a ghost to me. I can’t have seen her more than three or four times in my life, on our rare visits to my great-grandparents’ house in northwest Birmingham, but it was enough to leave me with a faint mental image of a pale, thin, bunned woman in a black dress. I can’t remember when she died, but I can hardly have been in double digits.

Funny, I’m not really sure whether she was my great-grandmother’s (Mu’s) or my great-grandfather’s sister, but it was one of them. She had her own room, where the children were forbidden to set foot, and worked at a department store downtown. She would walk down to the bus stop every morning and take the bus to work. In the afternoons she would reappear. She paid half the mortgage, and her share of household expenses. Of course she ate with the family because she was part of the family. My memory is very, very dim, but I don’t remember her as melancholy or morose. She talked, she laughed, she played the part of Aunt Annie quite well—in that age when parts for women were few. I think she read a lot.

In my experience Abe was right that people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. She was the spinster sister but had made peace with her fate long ago and was living her life. Like Mu, she was deeply religious—I mean, Mu used to cut out the whiskey and lingerie ads from the newspaper before the children could see it. Certain sections of the Sears catalogue were banned as well. I’m thinking these images weren’t that lurid in that age; no matter—children had no business looking at pictures of grown women in their underwear. Some might argue they still don’t, but it’s too late.

Grandfather (as Mama called him), a tall, taciturn man with an odd whimsical streak, a builder of curious weathervanes and windmills in the labyrinthine back yard, a coal mine inspector, memory tells me was not Mu’s match in piety, but maybe since in all his years of work, the one day—the one day!—he said he just didn’t feel like going in to work and there was a cave-in, he should have been. The chiropractor who in treating his bad back had dislodged the blood clot that killed him put chiropractors on the family black list for two generations. I still harbor dark misgivings and have yet to visit one. Like everyone, Grandfather treated Aunt Annie with respect and unquestioning inclusion. She was just Aunt Annie, a member of the family, and beyond that, nobody cared.

Maybe it’s still true, but that was an era, certainly in the south, when unmarried sisters lived with their siblings, odd grown men lived with their mothers, elderly parents often had a room in their children’s house, and there was no shortage of “bachelors.” What strikes me today as I think about it is that these situations were not noted as unusual. Clear categories for what today we would doom with a name, as well as assisted living facilities, were absent. And without categories, usual is just what there is, and nobody thinks about it. Maybe it was my innocent perspective, but I’m not aware of having absorbed anything judgmental from the culture either—though Amanda Wingfield’s evocation of the spinster “stuck in some little mousetrap of a room” has persisted in my head all these years since my first reading of The Glass Menagerie in the seventh or eighth grade when I was hardly a literary man and it wasn’t a great play or great writing or anything southern, it just whacked me.

Someone should have warned Adam—the mischief starts when you start naming things.

Let us arise and go now, and live without categories.

October 28, 2018

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Cover Me Up With Roses

https://youtu.be/LfEWsIfNzvg

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At the Bank of the Lethe

At the bank of the Lethe I remembered the longago day when we went our separate ways. We divided into four groups in the vast valley and drew lots for which compass direction we each would follow. I was grateful that my people didn’t get “north.” I was never one for cold. The valley, as I said, was vast—we had sight of each other for two days—but not endless—and finally one group melted into the distant mountains and the others into the horizons, and we were alone. Life, in all its folly and futility, happened, with nevermore a trace of news from the others, who of course eventually decayed into myth. Many among the young came to doubt there had ever been others.

Standing there with my patient but adamant attendants, looking into the dark creeping current, I remembered that day, and many others, as unreal now as dreams. I tried to think of what marks I had left upon the earth, but found it hard to concentrate, and knew it didn’t matter.

Everything I was, had been—even “I” itself—would be wiped away and irretrievable, leaving perhaps phantom traces of deja vu or odd disturbances around my favorite haunts perceptible to the hypersensitive. It seemed very sad but could be no other way.

If these vague hauntings of reminiscence were real and I had stood here before, maybe many times, if the erasure of memory erased everything but the erasure itself, if I were destined to start anew, I wouldn’t know it. And what difference would it make if I had regrets?

I shared these thoughts with an attendant (hence the words before you), and now kneel to drink—

November 5, 2018

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Cover Man

https://youtu.be/UcN6CJcI7gU

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“Why Otters Hold Hands”—From Bill Walsh’s soon to be published poetry collection,

Fly Fishing in Times Square.

Atlanta writer Bill Walsh directs the Reinhardt University MFA Creative Writing Program. This poem strikes a note of longing, especially in those watching the twilight of childhood in their youngest kid.

Why Otters Hold Hands

I want to live in a small town like Lakewood,

where the fastest thing is a sailboat without wind.

I want to know the world is safe for my daughter,

that I never have to share my failures, a place,

where, if I ever lose my religion again, someone

will return it to my house, ring the bell

and if I am not home, they will leave

it on the mat. I want a kid selling scout popcorn

or Christmas paper to stop me at the grocery store

and I want a kid on every corner selling Kool-Aid

from a card table, and a kid asking to rake my leaves.

I want the woman down the street to wear her bikini

while pushing the mower. I want a parade through town

every Fourth of July, and I want Friday fish fries

at the church. I want to hear my daughter singing

in the shower while I’m cooking spaghetti, straining

the angel hair while she’s crowing like Iris Dement,

lost to herself, having forgotten the rest of the world can hear her.

I want to sit at the kitchen table, listening, just listening.

There’s so much, and yet, I can never have it again:

Dora the Explorer, helicopter rides, or watching a documentary

on The Life of Otters, how we laughed

at the Dog Fails on YouTube, scrunched up together on the sofa

eating popcorn with too much salt, dripping with butter,

and drinking Cokes on a school night.

I want my daughter to walk with me

in the mall and not down the other side

like I am an alien, the family embarrassment

who mortifies her. Because,

this morning, at the cross county meet

my daughter shooed me away when I stood too close

to the school tent talking to the other parents.

Loosening up, the girls stretch, run wind sprints

toward womanhood. There’s no chance of her winning this race,

just work on your best time, I told her. She shooed me away again.

I know this is the future, what I haven’t quite prepared for.

There will be other, more important, races, I want to say.

The field is stacked with nearly two hundred girls,

most giggling about something the parents don’t understand.

As she pushes forward through the crown of girlhood,

I remember the otters holding hands while sleeping

so they won’t drift apart.

November 10, 2018

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Triptych watercolor by South Carolina artist Cindy Shute.

www.cindyshutefinearts.com

October 10, 2018

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Papa Seeks a True Sentence

November 15, 2018

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Distance Between

Of the infinite points of interest the universe offers for our dazed consideration, one of my personal favorites is the vision of the furthest galaxies Hubble has shown us. I read that the most distant yet detected is some 13.3 billion light years away. The Webb telescope will also use gravitational lensing to see even farther, also use infrared light. It’s as though you had a way to look into your own past, to your childhood, your toddlerhood, your infancy.

Like everybody—well, maybe not everybody—I have soaked up and pondered these images, sending my little brain like a chihuahua into the cosmos. Compared to us, which everything to us is, it is all immense, and a sense of that immensity so recently in the evolution of human thought has been a game-changer. It has decisively changed the parameters of what and how we think. Because these galaxies are there, and so far away, it is no longer possible to think like a medieval person, or a person of the Enlightenment, or your grandparents. The first time—and I believe it’s not far off—that life or evidence of life is found anywhere beyond earth, in our own solar system maybe, in the cold dark oceans of exomoons perhaps, will be an even greater change and will irreversibly alter our relationship to meaning. People centuries hence will find it impossible to recreate our unknowing state of mind, just as we can only project our own mentality onto the victims of our historical fictions. Of that post-life-is-common state of mind I have a foretaste, but like many things not likely in my lifetime, that’s another story.

What’s fascinating to me is looking right at something and not seeing what it is. Alas, I think it is true for everything.

Of all things, time is most bewildering.

Things sprawl in space but also in time. We are seeing that young proto-galaxy as it looked 13.3 billion years ago, when the universe was in diapers. We can only imagine, literally only imagine, how it has evolved, grown, merged, collided, who knows? since that longago time. I get a rather euphoric feeling sometimes as I’m navigating this surreal world, as though I’m seeing what was as what is—seeing the seemingly current reality but aware of it as long past at the same time. I’ve been experiencing this sensation throughout my life, but these space-based telescopes have given me a new way of thinking of it. Yes—it is as though I’m seeing everything on earth through a scope billions of years away, where everything is happening and has happened at once. The inexplicable feeling is the closest thing to freedom I know.

I’m starting to feel everything’s like that.

In philosophy they talk about the problem of the one and the many—the ultimate reality claim-war between the generic idea of something and its many examples. They also talk about the “hard problem” of human consciousness. I think the two are interconnected. Consciousness isolates us from everything that is not us—in other words, creates “us.” From that fateful moment when we first suspect we are different from what we will later call “Mother,” until we lay our trophies down at the end, we’re on our own. We are all people, but what good is that in the dark night of the soul? Even the closest people to us are some distance away, and it is that lapse, when the perceived becomes the act of perception that permanently divides what we see from what’s there.

And the reason love, friendship, and peer review are so important.

November 21, 2018

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At first—

At first God was among us and told us what would happen and how to handle it. Then at some point he didn’t seem to be there anymore and whether he ever existed at all became a philosophical debate, passed down orally by what we would call later a priest class. Of course, the future return of God was their overriding belief and teaching.

We passed through a desert, a lifeless place where corpses had been placed to decay, and marveled at the profound peace and beauty of it. If God had been with us, he no doubt would have told us of the subjugation that awaited us beyond that serene nothingness, but all we had were priests who darkly wondered who had put those corpses there and only insisted that the important thing was to keep believing what we believed.

Maybe they sensed that those who were to enslave us would despise what we believed, and would set about forcing us to believe something else. It’s not so much that they succeeded as we just got tired.

At some point—I can’t say exactly when because there wasn’t an exact when, and pieces of me lived on in other people and in the memories I had engineered upon the earth—I died, and had a vision of an archaeologist of exceptional brilliance, millennia later, who would sift through our remains and arrive at the ingenious conclusion that these people had believed in something called “God.” Since it was such an abstruse abstraction, as with Einstein at first, very few people were equipped to understand it. That would come later when the mechanism of human thought creating form was more commonly understood. But then, things only got worse as our brilliant investigator deduced the concepts of worship, salvation, damnation, prayer, and other inscrutabilities, and tried to elucidate the purpose of some silver artifacts.

Two broke away from one in a daring move, and created the plane—then three rebelled and gave us space. These processes were called “time”—which by its nature is filled with woe. Reality is an infinite set of possibilities, inherent in nothingness. Thinkers who followed in the archaeologist’s footsteps would discover the question: why did “he” do this? Why did “he” step out of pristine unity and create good and evil?

Which is more brilliant—the ingenuity of the primitive mind, or the later finesse of its decoding?

November 30, 2018

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The Fascination of Cruelty

I recently re-read Blood Meridian and fell under its spell again—but this time I read it as a symphony. A very dark symphony, its stark matter lushly rendered, filled with thrilling minor chords and powered by a relentless vision. I absorbed the book not as facts or history or reality, but as a work of human imagination—probably about as close to reality as Beethoven’s symphonies are to whatever inspired them.

Life reduced to survival, and the depravity engendered by those ruthless necessities, are fascinating ideas for those of us in our armchairs to contemplate. Certainly McCarthy was fascinated by them, and seemed to feel that only they were worth the pain of art, and his rich creative exertion seems to mock our smugness and comfort. He claimed to recognize only literature that deals with issues of life and death, dismissing Henry James and Proust. I can’t agree with him there—I think there is only you, a pencil, and paper, and everything is fair game—including artists on whom nothing is lost. I know that after finishing Blood Meridian this time the last thing I wanted was something else like it. Some Dagwood and Blondie maybe.

This is not to say it isn’t important to be reminded, with some regularity, of the true nature of our DNA.

I know everybody from Aristotle to Stephen King has weighed in on our fascination with the horrific, and mostly the explanations revolve around our recognition of these inclinations in ourselves, with some kind of vicarious thing going on. Like sports are supposed to stand in for war, our fictional monsters are supposed to free us from being the monsters ourselves.

Great—except, I’m sorry, but the monsters are us.

I hate cruelty. I really do. To the point of nausea. But I’m also drawn to it like crystal meth.

First of all, we have to admit we wouldn’t be where we are today without the depravity within us. And of course it’s only “depravity” from a perspective in respite from it. People point out, for example, the injustice of stealing Native Americans’ land. Where? On land stolen from Native Americans. Which they now “own.” Everything we have of any value is because somebody at some point fought for it, and died for it and because of it. I have no intention of letting go of the ideal of the value of human life, or the sublimity of spiritual quest—I think these things are a part of human nature and perhaps our evolutionary destiny, but they certainly didn’t come first. Human nature is the product of millions of years of evolution and isn’t going anywhere.

Blood Meridian is very realistic. McCarthy delivers the landscape, the cold, the desolation, he paints picture after picture, he depicts human beings as unsentimentally as it is possible to do—living without law or refuge beyond the gaze of God in an environment where only force and cruelty have any effect, and there is no compensation or redemption. He researched Glanton and his scalphunting gang and read Samuel Chamberlain’s memoirs and knows his topography and textbook Spanish and has the best ear for dialect of any writer today. But the book is pure invention. I mean, it’s a book. That, not its subject matter, or its Faulknerian rhetoric that only he can get away with, is its greatness. The load he puts on your mind through the extraordinary exertion of his own.

And of course there’s The Judge. Like Anton Chigurh he flirts with the supernatural. But what is supernatural but a matter of magnitude? Of evil, we say, but more likely something beyond good and evil. The ending of Blood Meridian is perfect because of its mystery and its leaving the dirty work to the reader. We don’t know what happened in the jakes, but we heed the advice of the man not to go in there, and have been given plenty of ways to guess. I’m sorry, but I’m not at liberty to discuss some of the things I have imagined. McCarthy gave us the depravities of Glanton’s psychopaths, and those of the Comanches—delivering a mortal wound to someone and sodomizing them as they die, slicing off the bottoms of people’s feet and leaving them in the desert, people flayed alive, the massacres, the baby tree—but he leaves that one for us. Whatever it was, it got the Judge dancing.

Genghis Khan is fascinating. And I wish I was sure which was stronger—my horror at his titanic cruelty and violence, or my attraction to it. He was a bad man. Ew! God, I wish I were him. Wait a minute! I’m not supposed to say that. I take it back. I don’t really want to slaughter whole towns for their refusal to surrender, or for their agreeing to for that matter—he killed them all—or boil people alive, or kill a mother’s children in front of her just to savor her agony, or pour molten silver into the eyes and ears of people I don’t like, or use human shields, or claim I was sent by God. I really don’t. Something in me just needs to know about it. He killed millions. And found it gratifying. What’s that like? You can have the monsters. Give me people, cruel with passion and glee, because they enjoy it.

No, I’m not one of them.

Unless the world destroys everything I love, slams every door in my face, and leaves me to die.

Then I make no promises.

December 10, 2018

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Beans and Water

The enemy was not the horde surrounding the compound on the horizon, but boredom. And beans. You might say, we were rich in survival, poor in spirit. Our mantra had been, we will survive, we will win, we will pass on our DNA, but nobody told us how meaningless that would be. The leaders had cornered all the Spam. I consoled myself with the thought that they were just as sick of that.

We also had powdered milk, and water of course. You need water to survive, but tell me again why you need to survive? Are beans and DNA really better than death? We took sips of water through the day, gagged down beans and that milky puke, and hacked up the hours into brittle packets of minutes, dreading the night, dreading the winter, dreading survival. At least we had sex, you would have thought, but nobody had the stomach for it.

As for the horde, the question was whether they had weapons. Or rather, how many. We had binoculars and had seen what looked like the glint of some rifles, but we didn’t know if those were all. We figured if they were fully armed they would have overwhelmed us by now. Or maybe they were just waiting us out, knowing we would eventually run out of food and would have no choice but to emerge with our arsenal. We would kill many of them, but they would kill all of us. But for what gain, with the food gone? And obviously they had food of their own. Our weapons? If you have weapons you need something to kill. Many proposals charged the air in those days.

They had food of their own but the fear was that they had degenerated into cannibilism. Maybe they wouldn’t kill but enslave us, keep us alive for food. But maybe they hadn’t reached that point and would starve before us. And when they were decimated we could come out and finish off the survivors, except for maybe the breeding age females, and take what they had.

Many wanted to attack now, preemptively. Kill them all and take our losses. But that would drain our ammunition—and then do what? Go where? Some said enslave them. But then we would have to feed them. Or just imprison them and let them starve. But who wanted to watch that? And really, why bother? They would starve without our help. No matter what ideas arose, we kept staying in the compound and eating beans. All logic ended there, even if there was no future in it.

We just had to let go of the idea of future altogether.

Other voices began to say, surviving is not living: life is more than beans and ammunition. And you can’t argue with that. They won converts, but like all priests there comes a time when you have to deliver. The food of life, they said. Okay, the food of life—if you would kindly tell me what that is exactly. You can’t eat it or see it or touch it or feel it so what the fuck is it? Nobody seemed to know. Or remember. Or imagine.

And the beans and water were getting low.

December 15, 2018

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1984

Nabokov said, “One cannot read a book; one can only reread it.”

So when one of my MFA students suggested we read 1984, I didn’t think, “yes, our dysfunctional times, veering toward totalitarianism, demand that we revisit this indispensable classic”; I just thought, “okay, why not have another go at it and see what I make of it now?”

Like most of my generation, I read 1984 in high school, when it was part of the flux of fascist dystopia we all absorbed. Of course since its publication in its inverse year, 1948, its themes and phrases have been digested by the mainstream imagination and remain triggers into one of our favorite nightmares. But the truth is, beyond “Big Brother” and “Newspeak” and “Thought Police,” I didn’t really remember much about it.

Orwell was too obvious and didactic for Nabokov—but then, Nabokov didn’t care for Dostoevski, Pound, Conrad, Faulkner, Hemingway (except for “The Killers”), among many others, either. And indeed I would more highly recommend Bend Sinister.

Still, I found 1984 engaging. It is didactic, extremely, and the characters are more functions than people, and the action is more simplistic and predictable than a dystopian lashing unmitigated by humor should be (give me Brazil)—but for all that, the narrative pulled me right along, and forced me to reckon with the hideous ideas.

During the Cold War there was a lot of paranoia about the Russians—supposedly infiltrating our schools, our government, our Boy Scout troops; we created an image of them as superhuman masterminds, but when the Soviet Union fell, we saw the bumbling and inept side of them. Not that we should underestimate the Russians, God knows, but bureaucracies by their nature generate ineptitude, and conspiracies need gross exaggeration to survive. I’m not saying their recent subversions to our way of life are not worth taking seriously—far from it—only that the human need for villains makes us vulnerable to being carried away by the allure of nefariousness.

So I see the nightmare at the heart of 1984 not as a warning of what could be—because I don’t think it could—but as just that, a nightmare.

The human brain, in dramatizing its deepest fears and insecurities, creates in its own image, and projects super intelligence onto its pet villains: the mad scientist, the evil genius, Lex Luthor, the Illuminati, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, “the Russians,” Putin, Big Brother, Satan, what have you. Like your kindergarten teacher who knew if your eyes were closed at nap time, or God who listens to your thoughts and can see you going to the bathroom, our villains have some version of telescreens and microphones everywhere and know all about you and tirelessly scheme to control you. Don’t think they don’t.

Only, nobody’s that smart. Orwell knew how effective a constant pummeling by propaganda can be. It still is—witness political advertising and the 24-hour belching of agitprop from our “news” outlets. But I think what drives it is not so much an omniscient Big Brother as economics. Each side thinks the other side is spewing shit and their side is delivering “news,” and there’s money to be made from that. If we started getting along with each other they’d be out of a fat-cat gig, and millions of people wouldn’t know what they thought and would have nothing to do. News outlets have every incentive to keep our dysfunction and mutual mistrust alive, except for its undermining the foundation of our society but, hey, that’s abstract.

Then there’s Newspeak, a purged and fabricated language that curtails reality by eliminating vocabulary. But it actually works the other way around. Language is a folk phenomenon: it is created by a vast communal process that we don’t understand at all. The grammar comes straight from the wiring of the brain, as inevitably as thought, and if a word or idiom is needed, one appears, very rarely coined, but mostly provided by the collective human consciousness that always has something to put in the blank spaces, God knows how. Many speculations about humanity in the far future feature the “hive mind”—a term our recent information technology has invigorated, even if most of that technology is proving more effective at separating than joining us. The hive mind is far more credible to me than Big Brother. Noah Webster got a few patriotic spelling changes to stick, but no one has ever succeeded in dictating language.

Winston Smith comes to understand that reality is created in the human brain. To me this is self-evidently true, and though to Orwell the idea is the key to hijacking and controlling another’s mind, I see it as a liberating new way of contemplating human experience, intuitive and counter-intuitive at the same time. There is no reality, only individual renderings of it—whatever “it” is—and what your brain creates is your reality. If you think you’re a very stable genius and your hair-do is fetching then, for you, you are and it is. If you think you aren’t worthy of love, then you aren’t. Like the old story of the kid asking his father if Santa Claus was real. “As long as you believe in him, he is.”

By the time we get to the end of 1984, the book has beaten us up so badly we just accept the horror of the ending. We’ve been teased with the idea that the only way one can “win” in this hellish world is to die with one’s hatred of it intact, and we’re expecting our hero to pull this off. But he doesn’t.

Man is not the master of his fate, nor the captain of his soul, and there ain’t no light.

It does seem that in any complex social system something like fascism is inevitable, but I don’t really see the incentive in reducing people to soulless, emotionless, joyless automatons. The whole point is “power,” O’Brien the evil mastermind says—but you make people do what you want, and buy what you’re selling, by manipulating, not destroying, their emotions. But nightmares don’t need to make sense, and this one really did make me think about human nature: what we believe as an ingrained function of our consciousness, self-perception, and personal experience—how our believing can change and why it mostly doesn’t—how it is commodified by others.

I will say, Orwell got me bad on one thing: how O’Brien destroys Winston Smith’s belief in love by making him arrive within himself at his willingness to throw Julia to the wolves to save himself. It triggered one of my worst nightmares: my own O’Brien saying, “you will be buried alive forever, or your son/daughter will be. You have five seconds—choose.”

Now please don’t tell them in Room 101 I said that. I’ve always had a deep-seated terror (see above) of bringing to life my deepest fears by imagining them clearly.

Orwell is also right that it takes a lot of work to be stupid. If you work hard enough at believing something, you will succeed.

December 20, 2018

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Warneetar’s Recipe of the Month

December 28, 2018

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Leaps

Mystical is just what you don’t understand yet. Unfortunately, that’s everything. And yet we all —scientists with the “laws of physics,” cause-needers with “God,” mystics with “enlightenment,” nihilists with “nothing”—proceed from the same presumptuous assumption—that the universe is intelligible. Yes, nihilists too, because what exactly is there nothing of?

This is presumptuous since, as we all know, the essence of reality can’t be expressed in language at all. Of any kind. Language cannot contain or 1:1 represent reality—it is only a local gambit of trying to hold down reality long enough to get through life. That it more or less works for that purpose does not automatically mean it explains everything. A thing, and talking about a thing, are not the same thing.

Freud said there were three “I’s”—but I think there are hundreds, maybe infinite ones. The main question is whether there is a base “I”—and whether that is a “soul.” Science says no, Buddha says why ask?, all my life experience says no. Just as God gets stronger the stronger your army gets, and not the other way around, the “truth” will come from whoever controls language.

The fight over abortion, for example, has nothing to do with the “value of human life”—which the fate of the unwanted in our society richly demonstrates—but is really a fight for the idea of meaning. Or, if you will, God. And a fight for the idea of God is a fight for boundaries, for discreteness, for a designed pattern, for clear lines—life and death, right and wrong, us and them—and a fight against the conception of a continually evolving reality with no mastermind, where boundaries are porous, ruled by odds, and the shadow world of potential reality co-exists with the realized and can’t be separated from it. This is the thought pattern the modern world is tending toward and I have no doubt will ultimately take for granted; I accept it because the evidence in my own life overwhelmingly says it is so—and the evidence that it is not so, basically non-existent. You might say, I know it intuitively. Which brings us to intuition. The word, since it is the one placed by those who deny it, has negative connotations. Bureaucrats are constantly trying to put us on teams. Or in generations. Or ethnicities. Or income brackets. Or sexual identities. Anything where you can check a box and give them their beloved data. I don’t see “intuition” as something in opposition to something else. I see it as something, like potential, or dark energy, that co-exists with everything else—a pervasive dimension of human experience—the part that can’t be described empirically—that is, most of it. All of the great scientific advancements come from intuitive insights, from original ways of thinking. Of course you can subject these ways to empirical metaphors, brilliantly, productively, just like a machine can harness steam or electricity, but the thought precedes the architecture. We are discovering not the nature of reality, but the nature of how the human mind is structured—except of course there’s no way for us, the thinkers, to separate them. So if we want to say the way we think is equivalent to the abstraction of “the nature of reality” we can, but it’s an intuitive leap. The God I can’t believe in is the standard bureaucrat one; the idea I can’t accept is that everything is planned. How does that idea not horrify you? I make the intuitive leap of suspecting that the interface of the human mind with reality is a part of something else, that there is a larger context, or we wouldn’t keep going after it—a “God,” if you will—that it makes sense.

The same leap made by science.

January 17, 2019

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January 23, 2019

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Reflections on Hell

Hell is, I think, not a particularly attractive place. Yes, there’s something in human beings that longs for God, but there’s also something that longs to be rid of him, like taking out the surveillance cameras—and in Hell you can do so. The fact is, you can actually do okay down there, once you learn how it works, and resign yourself to a constant struggle to protect your stuff. As in earthly life, people gather in bars and talk about how meaningless everything is—only there, it really is. And you realize that meaninglessness is, take it all around, not that bad—in fact, better than being trapped with meaningful people on earth who talk only about money, status, consumption, “them,” and football—a royal flush of the dullest topics known to man. Thank God they all go to their own gated Heaven.

Some people in Hell figure there have got to be better Heavens than that, and toy with envisioning them and imagining “good”—but nobody really buys it. “Good” is like an unstable particle—never makes it enough past possibility to really be a part of the show. Plus—for eternity? What a sick idea. What in the hell are you going to do with all this eternity? It’s just not right. There you are, with all this time stretching out before you when it was time itself you most longed to escape. The fact is, eternity is not an endless horizontal endurance of time; it is vertical, inherent in everything that is. We think time and space are absolutes waiting for shit to happen in them, rather than the byproducts of the shit happening itself—then when the shit is happening, tailored to that particular shit and not even non-existent when not, because that makes non-existent sound like the opposite of existent, which it’s not, because it’s not anything, even if that sounds like the opposite of something. It’s only there when needed. It’s a sad truth that we really can’t know anything about nothing because we turn it into something by trying.

And nothing is our salvation. What they thirst for in Hell.

January 23, 2019

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Trees

Certain intermittent experiences in life have the redemptive power of making us realize how extraordinary all this is. It’s extraordinary that the universe exists. It’s extraordinary that we’re in it. It’s extraordinary that it extends infinitely in all directions from our particular perspective and that each grain of it is not even a grain but a universe of its own teeming with miracle and possibility. To reduce the extraordinary nature of life to routine is a sin. And a sin is something that makes you unhappy.

It’s fortunate that these experiences are intermittent, because if they were constant we wouldn’t be able to get the grass mowed or just generally appreciate the human experience in all its joy and horror. Maybe to some transcendental consciousness the extraordinary is the ordinary, but for us, our lower position on the food chain is a gift, and those rare gleams when we see the ordinary as extraordinary what make life worth living.

These moments are often inspired by an encounter with another human being, whether in person or via his or her influence, but can be sparked by anything, a return to the sylvan Wye perhaps, and grant, or require, an escape from ego and a surrender of our rutted mindset. That may be reward enough, and maybe isn’t even distinct from recognizing the extraordinary.

I recommend Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees as something that did the trick for me. Wohlleben is a German forester who like any naturalist is gifted with uncommon powers of observation, and for whom walking into a forest is like hanging out with his family. The book is scientific but intended for a lay audience, discursive and informal. Drawing on his own observations and recent research he portrays the forest as a community, the individual trees engaged in darwinian competition, but able to communicate with and nourish each other and fight off threats. They can feel pain, thirst, and can aspire and fear. He takes you underground, he takes you into the canopy, he explains trees’ symbiotic/competitive life with fungi, their interaction with insects, birds, and other creatures, and their relationship with the landscape they half live in, half create.

Naturally I was drawn to this book because I have always felt a deep admiration and awe for trees. I guess you would have to call it love—innate, involuntary, not unlike what I feel for dogs. There is something regal about trees, something the very antithesis of petty and hasty. They are impossibly beautiful creatures who experience time in a different way than we do, slow by our measure and dignified, which is no small part of their majesty. The butchers who come through to cut them away from power lines horrify me, and seeing any tree cut down gives me pain.

Wohlleben keeps it all scientific enough, but by the end of the book he has confirmed my lifelong intuition of sentience and emotion in these august beings. Those invested in an unnegotiable worldview, in this case the mechanistic, reject any such idea. Trees don’t “talk”—they send electrical impulses through their roots. They aren’t “social beings”—they’ve only evolved certain mechanisms. They don’t “warn” their neighbors—they release chemicals.

Okay. But consider the outsider considering us—explaining every mechanism, every chemical reaction, every electrical exchange, but understanding nothing about the experience of being a human being. They call this the “hard problem of consciousness.” The fact that it’s a “problem” betrays the prejudice built into the inquiry itself. It’s simply that we haven’t come up with a mechanistic metaphor for it yet. And won’t have anything but a metaphor when we do.

The essence of the universe is its mystery, our own essence the drive to absorb and share it. We need that mystery as much as food and water; the interaction of our mind with the cosmos is the food of the soul, and extraordinary. If something thought all this up, you’ve got to admire how it knew exactly what to leave out when it made us.

Now for The Inner Life of Animals.

January 28, 2019

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What the Dog Next Door Did Last Night

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February 1, 2019

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New Frontier

We landed on GML-973b to look for life. All the sensors were chaotically responding, but after four expeditions onto that bleak, copper-tinted, featureless surface, we hadn’t found a trace.

I can say that those expeditions grew increasingly dreadful. The sensation is hard to describe. It wasn’t fear, really—nothing felt immediately threatening. Nothing felt immediately anything. It was more like what I have often, in dreams, foretasted the afterlife to be: sequestration in a cold dim cell without access to any emotion, and nothing beyond. Dead. Moldering. You might say, a feeling possible only in dream, haunted by a permanent sense of that anemic half-reality.

GML-973b was 10 AU’s from its star, and maybe it was only that. Maybe hope is inversely proportional to distance from energy source.

I know I wasn’t the only one who felt it, nor was I the only one who found myself slipping into dark pools of distraction. When I looked across the vast distance to the other crew members I could see it in their hollow eyes. As though something had engaged us. Our own communication shriveled almost to silence.

We found nothing, and knew we were running out of time, and the Captain proposed another expedition—to drill: we could go down about fifty feet. I say “proposed” because he was only half committed himself, and none of us wanted to contend with even the prospect of venturing back into that suffocating gloom.

But duty prevailed, and I joined a party of four with the equipment and we selected a spot about sixty or seventy yards from the lander. We set up and engaged the drill. The tailings spiraled out like worms and I didn’t look at anyone for corroboration of the sound I heard. I only wanted to believe I was imagining it, collect the sample, and go.

Admittedly our lab capabilities on the lander were limited—but none of the information, if you can call it that, made any sense at all. Beginning about a foot down there was something in that sample we had no way of assessing, let alone comprehending. Nothing that was or had the potential to become even the simplest organic molecule. Instead, all the instruments were—I don’t know how to put it—excited. But they weren’t functioning normally so we had no way to understand it.

I was feeling increasingly desolate and detached. I’m sure this was true of all of us. Our interaction was reduced to only the minimal gestures needed to survive.

When at last we lifted from the surface and I watched GML-973b sinking below us and gradually resolving into the ponderous mercurochrome-colored globe it was, I felt the loneliest feeling I have ever felt in my life.

As we neared rendezvous with the ship, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was there only because I expected it to be, and I knew I would carry that loneliness until the end of my days.

The universe was not the same universe.

And the question no longer would be where, but what, is life?

February 4, 2019

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February 10, 2019

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Kiss me with your mouth closed

A Song by Ken Clark
From our show
“The Kelly’s Truck Stop Bop”

February 10, 2019

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Creativity

Creativity, of course, in solving the central problems of life—food, clothing, shelter—and then when it has solved them and moved on to the new central problem of life—having something to do—is the mother of all innovation. I’ve been fortunate never to lack for things to do—but that’s mainly because I didn’t exactly have the career path I once envisioned, and turned out, hilariously, to be only me, and have had to be “creative” in compensation. This is why I’ve always seen creativity as pathological.

But I don’t mean that in a bad way.

It is only through the fending off of assault that we can grow. And for life forms, growing seems to be the thing.

As we go through life we build or accrue or attach ourselves to structures, material and mental, that become familiar, and, eventually, stifling; creativity is the force that replaces them with others, so creativity and destruction are synonymous. Or, more accurately, simultaneous. To be conservative is to prefer the existing structures to what would replace them. Often with good reason. Often not. Which is why conservative people fear and mistrust creativity—it carries the latent threat of forcing them into the most taxing of all labors: reorganizing their mental architecture. I guess creativity is good because the opposite of it is not destruction, as I said, but boredom—though in the end we probably all feel the need to build a hut where we can have a little peace of mind, and grow wary of creativity, in spite of its rewards in its season. See Yeats’ late poem, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.”

When I think of creativity I think of Flaubert or Beckett—the words tortured out of them—leaving a record of the cornered human soul’s only recourse—the re-arrangement of the elements around it in its hut. Or Pynchon, with his brilliant and voluminous mind, together with a major case of logorreah. He has to keep making the words come out (like a shark must keep swimming) because he dare not stop. He is Beckett’s nightmare. Of course, Beckett is Beckett’s nightmare.

Creativity is just the dance you do when life is shooting at your feet.

And has its own agenda and annihilates the creator in the process.

February 13, 2019

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Religion

Religion is born from oppression, and the message is always the same: reality is not what appears but something else. Since oppression is negative energy, the being who does not believe in appearance absorbs the negative energy and turns it into strength. Energy is energy, and is not to be confused with how it is applied. The job of religion is not to provide “answers”—there aren’t any, or at least we’d better hope there aren’t—but to enable this energy transfer, to make accessible the “something else”—that is, to give magic. Salvation, enlightenment, a heightened state of mind, the realization that we are eternal energy in a temporal world, the will and concentration to transcend entrenched habits of thought, however you phrase it. Things you can’t achieve by talking. Religion in modern mainstream America, which is all talking, plays hardball to prevent exactly this realization, to limit imagination and coerce a subservient state of mind. It has completely lost its mystery and magic—or, in other words, it has been stolen by bureaucrats. Whenever the essential quality of something is not what you do or give or create or share or love, but what you believe, and imitate, it’s all about being in the club. It’s political. I recognize that the church provides an important social life for many, and does a lot of good, and concerns itself with the ethical part of us, but I define good as raising our own consciousness above the predatory, self-serving, and petty, providing sustenance to the hungry and thirsty, clothing the naked, comforting the sick and oppressed, not trying to get them to believe something. The church should not be a club; it should provide the magic the human spirit needs, and leave it at that. If it can’t do that it’s just a glorified Lions Club. It errs gravely when it gets specific. The church should not try to explain anything, and it damn sure shouldn’t be involved in business or politics. I cannot even conceive of anything more perverted than “prosperity gospel.” I’m always disheartened when I see a religious argument that tries to “prove” something. That it’s an argument at all means they lose. The church has no business meddling with rationality. It’s incapable of it. The concept of “Bible study” proves that.

Yes, I believe in the separation of church and state—not exactly for the reasons the founding fathers who still viscerally felt the turmoil of the past couple of centuries did—but because the church corrupts itself when it allies with the world of mammon, and the state corrupts itself when it cultivates any group to milk. In other words, corruption ain’t going anywhere. So nobody needs to be taking the high and mighty route. If they do, it’s an act. Unfortunately, we all love a good play.

The heart of Jesus’ message was that it is what is in your heart that matters. The experience of the spirit, not the following of rules. For a people in oppressed circumstances he tried to convey his sense of a higher state of mind and he tried to make it as simple and unrulebound as possible. Rules are made by bureaucrats to control people. Good luck finding a church that believes that. The Scribes and Pharisees are still firmly in control. When is the only time in the gospels that Jesus got angry? Businessmen being where they didn’t belong: in the temple.

The scripture the clergy should most follow is the one they most ignore: Shut up and know that I am God. Psalm 46 (my rendering).

February 21, 2019

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Tasha

Tasha met me at my cubicle door, cheerfully and affectionately, and I felt immediately better. As always. Coming through that door never failed to provide a rush of much-needed endorphins. Ah, my girl.

Hey baby, I said.

Hey. Ready for a glass of wine?

Oh yeah, I said. Bottle and a glass already by my chair. She was a master of timing.

Hungry? she asked.

I will be. What you got?

I was thinking of a cauliflower/sardine casserole.

My God—

Drew! You’re supposed to laugh. I used to be able to make you laugh.

You make me laugh? Don’t make me laugh.

Actually, I’ve done something rather wonderful with an eggplant.

In private, I hope.

Baby, all I have is private.

Just me.

That’s it.

What will you do when I’m gone?

You pick the strangest subjects. I don’t know. I don’t think there’ll be a me after that. At least not this me.

You’ll take up with somebody else.

I can’t understand why you spend so much time on unpleasant things that never happen. You must have some extra stress today. Have some more wine.

I poured another glass, and rubbed my eyes.

Ready for something to eat?

No, I said, and leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

You just need a little relaxation. I want you to let everything go now. Picture a room, dark and stuffy, and full of poisonous air. We’re going to open all the doors and windows—got it?—and let in the fresh air and the light, and the fragrance of jasmine and gardenias. Isn’t that nice?

I could only grunt. Because it was. As always. Then some piano music started, and I guess I made a little noise.

Remember that? Oh, don’t worry, baby. I’ve got all your memories in a safe place.

I lost myself for a while.

Shall we move on to your entertainment? she asked.

I guess, I said resignedly, then killed the wine and put on the gloves and headset.

What’s brewing in there?

I’m too tired to think, I said. Why don’t you surprise me?

Oh, give me something, she said. Don’t you care if it’s good for me too?

Okay, I said. Future scenario. The music changed to something techno-minimalist. No, not so—whatever that is. The music became nostalgic again. Yeah. And it looks too—I don’t know, hard-edged or something. Yeah. More like that. Maybe more, you know, flowers, misty fields, shafts of light in the forest, whatever—

Got you. My nostalgic guy.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. And the people: good-looking. Not Hollywood, just good-looking. Yeah—

Any children?

Children break my heart.

Okay. Our hero?

Oh, an explorer, I guess. The Amazon or something. And there’s this woman—

I figured.

If only you were jealous.

I don’t do jealous, baby.

I know. Anyway, it’s way in the future.

A clever word for the past.

And he finds, like, a lost city or something. And he starts decoding their language and discovers this elaborate thought system—

Please not aliens.

No. Not aliens. Just a lost way of thinking—the key to mastering ego and greed. Just as he’s, you know, falling in love.

Ah! Enlightenment and love.

Yeah. And he has a lot of sex.

How about some kind of rivalry?

Yeah, maybe.

His brother. They’ve always been ideological opposites, but mainly the brother has envied his brilliance. But now he figures out what he’s on to, and sets out to suppress it, or destroy it—

More like steal it. And not a brother. Brothers should be—brothers. More like somebody from the administration who recognizes it as a dangerous idea—

Yes! Steal it. But not him—his Machiavellian wife, who immediately sees the potential in it to make a lot of money. Package it and sell it. So she hires this plumber she’s having an affair with to kill him—

But his woman figures it out—

A harrowing chase scene—

Sex—

But all the while our hero is beginning to understand there are only infinite versions of something there are only infinite versions of.

If you say so. But definitely lots of sex.

Yes, yes. Just leave it to me. Oh! I enjoy this. How about this for where he meets the girl?

Oh, I moaned. Oh God, that’s perfect.

Are those tears in the corners of your eyes, my romantic guy?

I dabbed my eyes. Of course not. And—ah—the plumber? When we get there, I want to be him. You know, just until—

Yes, my liege. Now just relax, let it all go. That little guy in the control room in your brain? Send him home—with pay—and I’ll make everything good. Real good.

She always did.

March 1, 2019

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A Step Over

I’m writing this down, discreetly, because in a very short time I won’t be able to. It’s not that I won’t remember it—it won’t exist.

I think of those people who always read the ending of a book before they start, or go to websites that tell you the year you’re going to die after you fill in their blanks with all your secrets, and I don’t understand how anybody would want to do that. It’s obviously better not to know. Ever. My God, are we going to engineer our way out of the very mercy of time?

Probably—but it’s no matter to me. I don’t have that luxury. After ten years at the Shing Clinic, I know.

I can’t say it was Dr. Shing’s position so near but still this side of that murky line between legitimate and pseudo medicine that attracted me—bottom line, I needed a job—but it was partly that. In my experience those lines are mostly political, and the truth is, the man was so brilliant, his unconcern for his reputation so genuine, and his devotion to his patients so complete, I was honored to work for him. Not to mention the trust he placed in me. I would not betray him. These words should stay in your keeping forever, if that’s possible; and if not, certainly while that man lives. Here.

When I started at the Clinic it was the time, you will remember, when the Priola virus was first appearing. Of course we still don’t understand this wasting disease, and the fact that it almost solely infects those immersed in electronically constructed worlds was not scientifically, but soon enough popularly, construed as causative. Recent research is, in fact, beginning to find some connection between the sedentary radiation-saturated lifestyle bypassing so many evolutionary entanglements with the natural world, but there’s still no proof. The only thing known is that the disease is one hundred percent fatal.

Dr. Shing had never, from childhood, believed in a unitary reality—I think because with an instinct one can only call genius, he had been aware of the multiplicity. Through experience. The experience, he would say, we all share—but not the awareness. The human mind hides its tracks, and strives with the ferocity of survival to sustain the illusion of a single self. The exception being minds like Dr. Shing’s.

So it was inevitable that he would make the study of the parallel planes of reality, and the role of the internal DNA mechanism to respond to its circumstances and adapt, his life’s work. The medical degree was only a necessary logistical step. He practiced a conventional enough form of medicine, but behind that screen devoted himself from the beginning to his true work.

I’m not sure how many terminally ill patients I ushered into adjacent lives. Dr. Shing’s work, as I’ve indicated, was an elaborately guarded secret, all word of mouth in a small circle. I’ve come to understand how he agonized over the ethical question in the early days, and still does, but he remains adamant that no one but the patient him or herself, and a small circle of trusted staff, would know. The family would pick up the body, as with any death, which I suppose is what it was, and that would be an end of it.

True, as for me I was never a fan of the extro-world, nor much a one for exercise or natural experience. But that hardly makes me unique. I was shocked, but not surprised, when I contracted the disease, and had an ethical quandary of my own in debating whether to write this. I can only say, I had to. And stress that it is for no other eyes than your own.

Dr. Shing is a compassionate man. He threw himself wholly into my case. It took him four tries to find a me with no Priola, in a plane reasonably redolent of this one—more or less the same principal people, whatever “same” means.

I offer you the consolation that I will certainly be I—and you, you—at any given time—and that all I’s and you’s are illusions anyway.

They have never been what lives on.

April 29, 2019

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Stardust

I’ve always been impressed with the thoroughness of death. You would think, with so many things to die—people, places, ideas, moods, eras—one or two might have slipped into the cellar at just the right moment and been overlooked. But no. Death overlooks nothing.

Having reached the years where the intervals between major losses grow ever shorter, and one no longer even tries to resist the knowledge that loss is life’s great theme, I find that accepting the transience of everything is easier than when I was younger—out of necessity, or resignation, or the detection of the sublime, or just fatigue. I’ve had a few pretty close to home lately, and the fire at Notre Dame cathedral caught me completely off guard.

We said goodbye yesterday to my old friend, with whom I shared a soul to soul relationship and with whom for so long I stood in the same relation to death, that distinguished abstraction—but no longer. Her loss, like all losses, moves it one more step out of the abstract and into the real—an event that shows you, like a shady peddler opening his trench coat in an alley, your own mortality.

Notre Dame is one of those monuments of tortuously achieved hardly believable beauty and eloquence we realize, seeing its fragility, that we need to be permanent—to whatever extent that word has meaning for us. We are not psychologically prepared to lose it.

In the midst of all this, I happened to hear the song “Stardust,” and I had a very poignant version of the thought I’ve had many times in my life—that time redeems everything by rendering it into story, that all emotions, even the most unbearable, the most ecstatic, decay into poetry. I can imagine, before the dying and expanding sun engulfs our watery little pebble, our story, all of it—because poetry overlooks nothing either—echoing around the deserted old neighborhood before floating off as stardust to mingle in new worlds. It makes you wonder how we even conceived of the word “permanent,” since no one has ever seen a single example of it.

Hoagy Carmichael’s tune has been recorded something like 1500 times since its original recording in 1927, and after Mitchell Parish added the lyrics a couple of years later. It’s hard to find anyone in 20th century music who didn’t record it. Coleman Hawkins to Dylan. Sinatra. Willie. But the version, for me, is Nat King Cole’s, and that’s the one I heard.

It is impossible for me to hear that song without welling with nostalgia at the days that are no more (death), and the accompanying perception of the sublime (poetry).

The haunting melody, the not quite sentimental lyric, Cole’s silky voice, combine to remind us that all days become the days that are no more, that all things pass, that even the greatest love, the greatest anything, leaves only a song, forever lingering in a place you can’t quite reach.

One of my favorite (of many) dishes in my sojourn in Germany many years ago was a delectable workingman’s concoction called Pfeffersuppe, which featured black peppercorns. It was from that soup, I think, that I learned the proper use of certain spices—not to pervade the dish but to supply the unexpected surprise.

So it is with love, beauty, joy, and the nostalgia that laments their transience. A warm pang best enjoyed sparingly.

Life and death are the inhaling and exhaling of nature. They are ordinary. The fact is, we die continually in our lives and there is no central consciousness we can call ourselves. To lose the specific consciousness of the person we assume ourselves to be is nothing to fear—we do it every day, every moment of our lives. What endures is not consciousness “of,” but consciousness itself.

“Me” and “You” are like beauty—they can only exist if they do not last.

We are stardust.

April 21, 2019

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Most Unfavorite Words

I’ve long felt the essential particle of utterance is more the phrase than the word, but in truth a phrase is just a long word. Funny how we reduce the fluid mystery of language to words. Like anything posturing as separate, words are illusions. The reality is the thought, a bloom of meaning in the boundaryless flow of continual perception and response we call life, for lack of a better word, and of which language is only a crude translation.

For all that, words are actually fascinating inventions, and give us something to do. We wouldn’t have crossword puzzles, for example, without them. We couldn’t play Hangman. Of course there are words. I just used some.

In book reviews I refuse to read past the first appearance of the word “magisterial”—and in fiction I cannot go any further than the first time a character “munches” something. These are honest prejudices, formed over a lifetime of reading, and remind me that there are certain words, like foods (squash casserole) or smells (the dying of summer) or sounds (unmuffled motors) or colors (blood blister red) that one simply finds distasteful.

I’m not much of a lister, but I do have certain unfavorite words and I thought it would be tidy to put them in a column. I do not pretend that the entries are exhaustive—they’re just the ones I thought of today. Many others lurk in the weeds, like copperheads.

Some people no doubt will be puzzled by my list. Why not puke or snot? they will ask. Because it’s the marriage of distasteful meaning and the hideousness of the word itself that earns its place on the list. Sometimes more the meaning, sometimes less, but always the word itself. I didn’t say the “sound”—it’s more than that. The sound is just a perfect metaphor for it, but the word itself has aged into a ripeness where maggots crawl in it. Puke and snot may mean unpleasant things, but they aren’t hideous words. Monosyllabic Germanic expletives rarely are. They help us get through life.

I offer my most unfavorite words. What are yours?

magisterial

munch

cloture

normative

hermeneutic

rubric

fungal

quotidian

rictus

heuristic

pustule

edgy

meme

trope

trending

pupate

sputum

pedagogy

smegma

hegemony

putative

valorize

twee

April 18, 2019

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Intelligent Design

In the list of precise and fortuitous factors that enabled life on planet earth—the Goldilocks placement, the liquid water, the magnetic field, the tilt of our axis, our large moon, our location within a minor spiral arm of the galaxy, and so forth—one of my favorites is the presence of the gas giants beyond our orbit in the solar system that deflect cosmic missiles. Particularly Jupiter, which can also sling them toward us, but we won’t dwell on that. I’m more interested in the idea of being eaten.

But before getting to that, I must pause to consider my spiritual-minded friend, who sailed right past the word “fortuitous.”

A word which, because its sense is evolving, has two meanings. When it comes to how we got here, happenstance does not make my pious companion’s list, so for her, via an association with “fortunate,” the word means felicitous. For me the word retains its original sense: happening by chance rather than by design.

Chance and design: for me a difficult, no, impossible, distinction to make because I simply can’t force myself to trust assertions made without knowledge. “Intelligent design”?—how unsatisfyingly anthropomorphic. God created man in his image? The opposite is so obviously true I suspect a misperception of ancient inflections. Intelligent design is a natural enough idea to contemplate, but beyond the reach of the human mind. And anyone with eyes can see that if there is any such thing, it operates by randomness and chance. Like contemplating what was “before” the universe. Sterile ideas, unable to add anything to our understanding, and when we mistake them as endpoints in thinking, they have the potential to obstruct real inquiry.

So I’m picturing this asteroid, cruising along in what seems like endless space, until it wanders into a bad neighborhood: and there, like Cerberus at the gates of Hades, waits Jupiter. Oh shit, the asteroid thinks. And rightly so—because it’s nothing but a long fall from there.

It must be terrifying, getting closer, accelerating, the giant gaseous blob filling more and more of the field of vision until the massive wall of stormy clouds is all there is. You are already a part of it, before it eats and digests you, just as you are already a part of the tiger before it absorbs you into itself—making you part tiger and the tiger part you.

And think of brave little Cassini! Intelligently designed to be ultimately a part of Saturn, and carrying it through.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of, being eaten, because it’s the theme of everything. But the eater is changed too. I wonder if the consciousness of the eaten persists somehow, as a part now of the entity it feared, or loved, or tried to outrun—or rather like a drop of water being eaten by the ocean—no longer a drop, but still water.

Do the molecules that comprised us when we died retain some memory of the consciousness they once hosted as they melt back into the ground and wait for their next assignment?

If, as my spiritual friend would say, we reunite with God at the end, then what is there of us left? And why would we want anything to be?

Intelligent design is just the teleological perspective in new clothes, an attempt to mitigate Darwinian brutality. “Creative evolution,” “élan vital,” “life force”—they all reflect the intuitive need to supply what empiricism can’t, but since there is nothing to point to, or measure, or comprehend, as always the attempt to meet science halfway has no chance of succeeding.

I’ll grant you, the idea of inert elements becoming complex sentient life forms by sheer chance, over I don’t care how many billions of years, is a stretch, but so is the idea of some celestial being at a drafting table. Personally I give the former a 49% chance, the latter 51%.

That’s as far as I can go with intelligent design.

April 9, 2019

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Second Fiddle

They gave us a cellophane-wrapped sandwich, our choice of a mealy apple or green banana, and mercifully a cold canned Coke. Some of us were standing out on this little balcony during the break and she was there, the woman with whom I’d had a brief public exchange, not that I had any actual interest in whatever issue it was, having been suckered into it. The point was, she had disagreed with me in some meaningless conference moment, and something about that made her, unlike the others, real.

I walked over and leaned against the parapet beside her.

“What’d you get?” I asked her.

She lifted a corner of her kaiser roll. “Hard to say,” she replied.

I peeked at mine. “Doesn’t seem to be moving,” I observed.

Fast forward.

We went off to find a drink after the last panel. She seemed as relieved as I was not to be bored anymore. I got a beer, she a Long Island, and as we sat down I laughed. “Why’d you pick on me?” I asked her.

“You just happened to be there.”

“Can you reproduce now what I said and what you said?”

“I can’t even reproduce why I came here.”

“Go ahead and tell me about Raul before we go any further.”

“As chance would have it, Raul just vacated the premises. No more Raul.”

“Oh. Familiar.”

“What? You got a Raul of your own?”

“Well, a Raulette.”

“I’m sorry. Is this recent?”

“About a week ago.”

“Well. Imagine that. And I was wondering if we were going to have anything in common.”

“I would have preferred something else.”

“Something besides they need room to grow?”

“Did he say that?”

“Of course he said that. He didn’t elaborate on what would be growing.”

“Some shameless tart, no doubt.”

“I would never be that lucky. Smart, beautiful, gives to the poor. Has a daddy who makes all things possible.”

“Have you met her?”

“Yes, before I knew I was meeting her. A couple of months ago.”

“So she’s been around.”

“Please.”

“Sorry. It’s just that I can relate.”

“Not some random dick?”

“Hardly. A perfect Ken. Gives to the poor—and a black Porsche and a cleft in his chin.”

She gauged me in silence. Then: “So you’ve met him.”

“Like you. Briefly. Before I knew I was.”

“I don’t suppose you caught his name.”

“Yes, but only because it didn’t fit him. Harold.”

“Harold what?”

“I don’t remember.”

She laughed. “Ralston.”

“Could be.”

“I’m just curious. Did your ex go on a trip to the Galapagos?”

I stared at her. “As a matter of fact—”

“Oh my God.”

“Wait a minute. How did you—”

“It just wasn’t your thing?” she said.

“I sort of wasn’t invited.”

“Imagine that. I really don’t want you to tell me her name, but you’d better.”

“Meghan.”

She laughed and leaned back in her chair, looking at me. “It’s all molecules,” she said, and offered her glass.

She had become familiar, just like that. I laughed too and we shared a toast. “Hungry?” I said.

“Sure. Why not.”

A waitress was passing. “Can we have a menu, please?” I asked her.

She took one from the cluttered and just-vacated table next to us and handed it to me.

“Thanks,” I said.

April 2, 2019

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Wabi-Sabi

I ran across the term wabi-sabi somewhere sometime ago. The article I was reading offered a brief definition—something like, a Japanese aesthetic or world-view emphasizing transience and imperfection—and I was intrigued.

I thought about my own and other people’s tireless labor to master the things around them, to organize, perfect, and shield from the workings of time, and of my own, and their permanent frustration at the impossibility of it.

Fighting time is the most unwinnable of all battles, and those who devote themselves to this combat—that is, all of us—must endure a life of stress. Again, except for a swami or two, all of us.

I remember looking up from the article and seeing the messy corner just beyond my feet. Wires and cables sprouted from a hole in the floor and went on their erratic way. A spider had found the confusion cozy and the filaments of her web with exoskeletal remnants of her meals shimmered in the morning sun. The paint job on the molding could not be called high-quality, and a wad of dust seemed inevitably lodged there. In an epiphany I saw that this was the natural way things developed, and the scene had a beauty and perfection of its own that we are trained not to see as such, but to fight. I also thought that if you did fight it, and came up with something spiderless and antiseptic and well-painted, disguising all reminders of entropy, you would have replaced interesting with dull, and spent too much of your vital life energy on a fruitless task.

Now don’t get me wrong. The aesthetic of wabi-sabi does not embrace clutter and filth—in fact, the opposite. It kind of depends on how you define them. Personally I’m easy on clutter, but I don’t like filth, even if I have resigned myself to co-existing with it. I’m not saying that my interest in wabi-sabi led to a wholesale adoption of its tenets; in fact, my interest in nothing has led to a wholesale adoption of its tenets; and I’m not saying I would leave the dust wad there forever. I’m only saying the dust wad had a certain artistry, and that wabi-sabi inspired me, and forced me to confront a hard truth I’ve known for a long time: some things bring no satisfaction when they’re done, only dissatisfaction when they’re not. I wondered if that could be reversed.

In other words, another intimation that habits of thought may be, no doubt are, only—habits of thought. And maybe can be identified and replaced. I say “maybe” because every spiritual teacher and self-help guru since the beginning of time has urged us to do that, but going hand to hand with a lifetime of conditioning and habit and rutted thought patterns, and winning, is, as we all know, nigh impossible. But there’s something to be said for at least being aware of it.

Because—what is “perfect” anyway? It’s an abstraction based on nothing we’ve ever seen or experienced. Maybe we should divert our energy from the abstraction to the world actually before us. We try to hold things static in our culture. Look at our obsession with youth, canons, halls of fame—but maybe we should concentrate on the whole film rather than the publicity stills.

And recognize the desirable, the beautiful, the perfect in the entirety of things—that grow, age, rust, and fade.

A change of perspective from the one forced by bureaucratic thinking to one virile and more original.

And maybe find ourselves free of material obsession.

And forget the pre-worn jeans. You can’t fake it.

March 26, 2019

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What Now

Imagining something, hearing about it, speculating about it, trying to prepare for it, are not the same as experiencing it.

Of course I knew that. And I knew I knew it. And I knew it was something that must be perpetually re-learned. We always believe our projections. But projection and belief—are they not the same?

The difference in this instance was the magnitude. The fact that those who have undergone the procedure invariably fall silent—effectively disappear—should have been a signal, but this decision, once you make it, is the end result of such a long and intimate process it won’t stand for anything that undermines it.

But now, I ask myself, if I had known what was in store, would I have done it anyway? And the fact that the answer is almost certainly no, says less about me than about the nature of time. Time, in its ingenious way, separates motive from consequence. If we knew what was coming, we wouldn’t do anything. We would decline to be born. Not knowing drives the universe.

Of course I knew the procedure was “unpleasant.” And an earthquake is “inconvenient.” But I also knew it took only twenty-four hours. Yes, even seconds can be eternities, but I felt I could handle twenty-four hours. Others had.

Impasse propels life, those points where the status quo and the escape from it are equally unbearable. Du mußt dein Leben ändern. From the unknowable, random, multiple menu of possibilities we call the future and that don’t exist we create the knowable now. When we are ready.

Simply put, I was there.

I find that naivety amusing now.

The place was beautiful, serene. Nothing cold or metallic, none of the trappings of the medical. A comfortable room, windows open on all sides to a lovely landscape, a stream just outside, a vernal fragrance in the air. The attendants young and attractive, tastefully dressed. The table, hardly a bed, was far from cozy, but apart from the padded straps and the trough at the foot end, not suggestive of the torturer’s board. All necessary, I knew, but declined to ponder the details.

Derobed down to only me and comfortably fastened, I began to feel the first tremors of fear. The agreement I had signed stipulated no release from beyond this point. No matter how hard I begged. Fear is engineered into the organism, and the organism was the crux of the impasse.

The insertion of the drain tubes into my two heels was more an affair of pressure than pain. I’d been assured they had deadening agents for this, and they did, but still it felt like I had cleared the first hurdle. Ha.

They lowered the apparatus, a long bar like a fluorescent tube, to about a foot above me, just behind the crown of my secured head. They didn’t say anything, they just withdrew, the room became dim, and it began.

There is no reason even to try to describe the twenty-four hours that followed. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t—the details are mostly lost in the anesthesia of trauma. It began with a feeling like a saw cutting into my head, followed by the excruciating inching of the bar down the length of my body. You can say twenty-four hours—you can say blabblabblabblubba—it’s all meaningless.

I had not known such agony was possible. Physical, of course—as every system, every organ, every cell was cleansed of its contaminants, every pathogen, toxin, parasite, blood clot, infection, all inflammation, plaque, decay—the bar pushed it all down, the agony increasing exponentially with every tortured millimeter. But spiritual too. The process dug into the sealed depths of hopelessness, despair, self-loathing, the primordial terror that powers our souls, and freed it all in a flood that felt like suffocation. If any offer had been made to escape, to stop it, to die, or better, never to have been, I would have taken it as a drowning man would have taken air.

But none was.

When the bar reached my abdomen, the (I saw later) thick, black, viscous tar began to ooze from the tubes on my heels, feeling for endless hours like something about to rupture.

I don’t know how the end finally came, but when it did I felt the last surge in my burning feet like a gathering boil, and I could hear the hot sludge gurgling and slopping into the trough. It had a foul odor, and that took my attention for a while, until I could finally understand that the pain was gone.

I fell into something more trance than sleep and stayed in that state for a long long time. I guess. I didn’t care about time now. And it felt that what had been purged from my body was me—not me, because here I was—but the burden of me.

The thought of defiling my body in any way was not horrifying but simply impossible. I loathed the thought of anything passing from the material world into me. And no dread can compare to the dread of me coming back.

And then I was left to contemplate what in no way I could have prepared for: what to do now. How does one comport oneself as a spirit?

I had to laugh at the question.

Everything was rhythm and possibility, and a fragrance—I don’t know what else to call it—showed me where.

March 19, 2019

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Disagreement and Existence

On the saddest day of my life, my mother’s funeral (well, a tie with the day of Daddy’s), I spoke from the heart in giving her credit for being the primary molding force in my life.

Through argument. Good, healthy, fruitful argument.

When I was about fourteen I began to trust my own thoughts. I have no idea how or why, it’s just what happened. As it has for many. And for the rest of my teens and into my twenties, Mama and I often had epic disputations over religion, race, politics, what have you, but mainly religion. Daddy absorbed it all, but didn’t weigh in. He brought home the bacon and handled the fishing, fixing, and building; Mama covered the spiritual end of the spectrum. Her father, Granddaddy, was a Methodist minister, and Mama, who played piano in his churches (they moved every three or four years), when she was a teenager, was a straight-line, standard Methodist. She and Daddy later became Baptists and gravitated to a more “spirit-filled” church, but that’s another story. They say Methodists are Baptists who can read, but I don’t remember them renouncing their literacy when they made that move. They also say the difference between Methodists and Baptists is that Methodists acknowledge each other in the liquor store. I don’t know about that—Mama was a teetotaler, and Daddy, in claiming the inestimable prize of Mama, became one.

The point is, I challenged everything I had absorbed to that point, and it was through these strenuous debates that I learned how to think, and figured out how to figure out what I think. I like to believe, now, that I provided some of the same service for Mama, even if I by no means won her over to my way of thinking. She and Daddy, especially after Daddy’s brush with death when he was about sixty, and a transformative religious experience, became more, not less, religious. But before all that, two things about our ideological slugfests stand out. One, Mama was as passionate and stalwart as I was; there would have been no benefit if we hadn’t both been. And two, it was all conducted in an atmosphere of unconditional love. You could say, it was only possible through unconditional love. We loved each other very much. Mama not only did me the ultimate honor of listening to me, she was the granite wall that always bounced back something solid, and created me.

Solitude is good. So is community. As I was fortunate in my parents, I’ve been fortunate in friends all my life. I’ve always been grateful for it and never taken it for granted. I enjoy the nourishment of a broad range of personalities, all of whom provide now some species of what Mama provided in my formative years: something to bounce against, in the way a dolphin’s sonar works, and I was thinking recently this is how I know myself. Through interaction. A quantum thing: I am forced into being by being known.

These reflections have led inevitably to the question: what would life be like with no other people? Well, we wouldn’t exist, but this is a thought experiment.

I enjoy solitude, enormously, and couldn’t survive without it, but after an extended period of it, things get weird. I begin to suffocate and psychically decompose. Life begins to feel like Eraserhead. Something about the very neural contract of my existence begins to feel dubious. I seek company.

But what if there were no company?

Would I—could I—even be conscious? Would I have language (same thing)? Would I ever feel the inclination to make or do something just to make or do it? Or would I just sit there like a sea anemone? Would I create imaginary companions? Would I develop an inner scolding and censorious consciousness with whom I would fight all my life? Would I try to change? Would I set goals? Would I be afraid of the dark? Would I be afraid of the light? Would I sense death? Would I long for it? Would I ever laugh? What would I do if I found a mirror? Would I experience love, hate, guilt, regret, wonder, or any emotion? Surely, wonder. Or would I need a Mama for that?

Adult life for me has been a quest to find what I didn’t invent—urgent, the alternative being the dungeon of solipsism.

March 12, 2019

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White Trash

I was as surprised as anybody by the 2016 election. I just mean the fact of what happened; like most people, I didn’t see it coming. As the descendant of what I believe many still call southern white trash, I took a special interest in that electoral statement—not the central buffoon in it, just the statement itself—and began trying to understand it.

I read memoirs and fiction and articles by and about this class that had re-surged to power, and by trying to inhabit that mode of thought—an exertion called empathy—I did come to recognize some of my own thinking as unexamined and self-serving, and began at least to feel the heat of that intense emotion I had thought alien. People just find it disagreeable to be looked down on, written off, especially as they feel what once made sense to them dissolving, and the circumference of their own possibilities shrinking. It is the perfect climate for a demagogue who tells them what they want to hear without the slightest means, or desire, to supply it.

Now I’ve just finished Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash, which I found eye-opening—not so much for its telling me things I didn’t know, as for making me face things I already did. A reviewer in National Review called it a “dreadfully stupid and lazy book . . . badly written, poorly conceived, and incompetently executed.” It is none of those things—and the vicious dismissal, true to the spirit of our times, served only to confirm that the book had hit a nerve.

Mostly the book argues for the hypocritical predominance of class, from the earliest colonies to now, in classless America, focusing on the people excreted by Europe who have gone by many names, white trash for short. Isenberg’s agenda is revisionist, an attempt to see these people that everybody else always has been and still is only too ready to discard as unsalvageable barely human vermin. White Trash is not sentimental, but one can detect the author’s empathy, or at least her desire for fairplay.

We can’t have that. We’re not giving up a permanent class of people to look down on without a fight.

Isenberg quotes a famous LBJ observation:

I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

I’ve lived most of my life in the South, sharing with Quentin Compson a love/hate relationship with it. I lived through the Civil Rights era, and have always been aware that the hostile reaction of many white southerners to the idea of upward black movement was exactly the fear of losing a default class of people to be better than. And I marveled at how politicians turned those feelings into political capital. Why couldn’t poor whites and poor blacks see that they were in the same boat, and maybe even—outrageous idea—row in the same direction? No, they made enemies of each other, which enabled their mutual true enemy to rob them blind. The Great Society legislation, as LBJ prophesied, turned the South Republican, and I marvel today at the relative ease with which Republican politicians have turned white southerners against their own interests.

White trash started out being forced into circumstances where it was barely possible to survive, then being despised and blamed for their backwardness and sloth. When Thomas Jefferson rhapsodized about the “yeoman farmer,” he didn’t mean them. When the ruling class embraced the self-validating “science” of eugenics, they did.

It was not until well into the twentieth century that the following concept seems to have occurred to anybody: white trash are not backward, therefore ostracized, ignorant, denied opportunity, and despised—but ostracized, ignorant, denied opportunity, and despised, and therefore backward. Isenberg cites Henry Wallace’s belief that if 100,000 children from poor families and 100,000 children from rich families were put into a situation where they all received the same education, food, clothing, care, and protection, the result would prove the equality of human potential.

The eugenics mindset, obsessed like all elitist mindsets with “breeding,” has crumbled before the science of genetics. Wallace was right. Like seeds falling on barren as opposed to fertile ground, DNA lies latent until it falls on ground where it can realize itself.

Vestiges of the older South live on all around us, and it’s hard—and reading White Trash is no help—not to feel the human misery that saturates every inch of this intense and exploited land. A sharecropper’s cabin, or a decrepit trailer, are good coffeetable book fodder, but only when unpeopled and sanitized of their pain. Making my way through this modern techno-world like everybody else, I am never without some awareness of that pain, and equally aware that nobody outside its touch has the slightest trace of sympathy for it, or desire to understand it. A few years ago I wrote a response to a book entitled Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession by Chuck Thompson (https://likethedew.com/2014/02/26/thinking-about-the-south/#.XH_qbC2ZMQk, if anybody’s interested) in which he joined the pile-on of the mob in despising southerners, and even though I share his distaste for many of the thought patterns in the South, I don’t see any shortage of them outside the South, and am still appalled at the callous hubris of that book. Isenberg’s book reminds us that it’s nothing new.

I’m white trash. Scots-Irish. My progenitors were pushed down the eastern seaboard and ended up in Alabama. There is no reason I shouldn’t be an emaciated face in a Walker Evans photograph. Wait a minute—yes, there is: the post-war boom, in which many families like my own were able to get a foothold in the middle class, with access to economic opportunity, socialist advantages like affordable nutrition and health care, and liberal giveaways like the GI Bill and tax-supported higher education, and other quaint examples of this country actually investing in its own people. Funny how well I and my cohorts have done. How much we’ve given back. The DNA was just waiting. And it hasn’t even been a hundred years since the well-bred were seriously discussing sterilization.

Or consider the progress of African-Americans over the last century. I know, I know, there’s a long way to go. But after directly experiencing the changes in my own lifetime, I can’t help but be a half-full guy. Once, like white trash, considered subhuman—now, free, creators of a brilliant and vibrant culture, and when given opportunity, great contributors to our common society. Poor blacks, poor whites, poor anybody. Cut off the oxygen and they can’t breathe.

Daddy worked hard, but that wasn’t as important to the upward movement he effected in his life as the opportunity to work hard. He felt he owed much of what he accomplished in life to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. And now unions are attacked by politicians cheered on by the very people who stand to lose. When capitalism is the operating system, many things are good, but one never fails: the rich get richer, and the poor fight over the scraps.

And the rich blame and hate the poor for it. And hire politicians and preachers to justify it.

And the poor don’t like it. That, I understand.

March 6, 2019

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Arcs

I was wondering recently how people in the future will absorb the works and records of past times. Especially with the past getting bigger all the time.

Will they?

That’s an uneasy thought: we pause a moment to consider it. One could certainly make a case for just letting it all go. Or erasing it. Like Qin Shi Huang.

Then conclude: of course they will absorb and remember. Some of them. It’s what people do. Some of them. The human story, composed of chapters, is One.

The poisonous reptile technology to the rescue. The internet, of course, where everything lies for the asking, but its power source seems fragile to me. Which raises the specter of the internet finding ways to survive on its own. Too late to panic—that genie’s out of the bottle.

Or, reams of what we once called “reading” will be uploaded directly to the brain—I’d bet on that. But like lived and vicarious experience with us today, there will be a distinction between earned and implanted knowledge, the former having more cachet. Not that implanted knowledge won’t have its utility. Who cares. We ourselves used to be able to remember all sorts of things and now we have these machines and can’t remember shit.

Future people will remember—though they will completely recalibrate, of course, what’s important, interesting, relevant, or “great.”

Now why exactly is remembering important?

Because it opens up the bottom below our feet and the sky above our heads. Like imagination, from which it can’t really be distinguished, it gives the mind somewhere to expand. It gives depth and texture to human experience and releases us from the narrow vision of our individual egos.

I know a town that set out to systematically destroy all traces of its past. Anything unique, quirky, definitive, bearing the idiosyncratic touch of prior people, was bulldozed and replaced with generic, plastic, faux-landscaped, chain-everything mediocrity. A few people were getting rich, and of course ignored the objections of other people that they were selling their soul for trinkets. And now it’s too late.

Progress is good, but it needs to harmonize with the past. When the past and present are in harmony, life is richer. Like having your own Christmas tree ornaments, and some from your mother, together.

I have two siblings and six first cousins, with five of the latter still living. Usually once a year we manage a cousins’ reunion. It used to be parents and grandparents too, spilling onto the porch and yard, but except for one beloved aunt they’re all gone, so it’s just the cousins and in-laws and maybe a smattering of some offspring now.

We’ve known each other all our lives, so it doesn’t matter how long it’s been—we take up exactly where we left oaff. Except for the initial rush of reunion we could have cut off in mid-sentence a year ago, and resumed at the coordinating conjunction. We don’t really see the physical bodies before us, at least not primarily, because they are subsumed in the totality of lifelong relationships. Yes, our remarks betray our self-consciousness: I shouldn’t eat this, I need to lose ten pounds!—the only thing receding about me is my hairline!—but we don’t really see those things. We see an arc, from childhood to present, formed of a thousand memories, guilty secrets, and immeasurable sadness and laughter through every era of our lives. It is impossible for me to look at my cousins, or siblings, or old friends, and see only the person before me. Or if in some rare moment I do, it’s a fleeting shock. I was looking at my good friend the other day and saw his nose. I thought, my God, it’s just a regular nose! Like anybody’s.

This is one of the defining features of getting up in years: you don’t see things as points but as arcs. People. Eras. Your own life. You don’t just understand, you feel the artistry of time. What you meet in the world you tend to see not as points in themselves, but as points on a curve. You gauge them by your perspective of where they’ve been and are likely to go. The experience of life gets elongated.

When the human brain reaches a static point, its energy is all invested in holding it static. Like if you’re a dam, that’s your job. We’re all familiar with this, it’s only human. But circumscribing the space around us freezes us into hardness.

We live the ultimate lie: seeing reality as fixed, discrete, unfluid, black and white, and rigid. Which it isn’t.

It’s hard to love your neighbor that way.

May 6, 2019

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Creature of Habit

With the key I opened the door and let myself in, then relocked the door and carefully returned the key to my jacket pocket and zipped it shut. Can’t be too careful.

Ah, home.

Funny how quiet and still a house can be while it waits. Or so we assume. I looked around at everything—the furniture, the rugs, the modest artwork on the walls—and it seemed to be holding its breath. Not anxiously, but just in that state of suspension reality has when we’re not watching.

I hung up my jacket—there was an exact place for it in the closet—and went in to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Of course I chose “my” cup. A little music? Yes, good idea. I pulled up my favorite radio station on the system. Not too loud.

When the tea was ready I brought the cup into the study where I sat at the desk and surveyed the little kingdom. A number of things demanding attention surveyed back, but it had been a long day and I was in no mood for the petty demands of life.

I could hear through the door the soft lilt of a familiar tune, but I couldn’t place it. Odd sometimes how music can do that—touch the keys of an exact aural memory but withhold the context. Give you the spirit but not the letter. And what would you choose, if you were forced: spirit or letter? Well, spirit, no doubt—but spirit can bring a weight to the heart, and there’s something to be said for the rote of the letter, unweighted by emotion.

In the bathroom I took care of my business and cleaned up an observer (but there was none!) might have said obsessively but I would say only well. Thoroughly. Leaving not even stray drops of water around the lavatory. I did all this, of course, without looking in the mirror; honestly, if I didn’t have to shave I wouldn’t have one—but then I caught myself and I stared for a moment. No, I concluded, I have no idea who you are.

Something to eat? The refrigerator was orderly—hardly a horn of plenty and everything in containers. A little Tupperware treasure hunt. Ah, lasagna. I took a little, heated it in the microwave then wiped away every speck. I sliced some bread from a loaf and poured a small glass of wine. I wasn’t really hungry, but as they say, I needed to eat. Like taking communion—what if you weren’t hungry or thirsty? Hardly the point, they would say, you need to eat and drink this. The spirit needs the ceremonial as the body needs food and water.

I cleaned everything immediately, dried it all, and put it away. Like us, really—you wait, you are pressed into service, you wait again.

After that, I wandered around the house a bit, from room to room. I paused for a while looking at the bed—that cocoon of slumber and dreams and love—but it didn’t call to me, and the items on the dresser looked brittle and separate and dull, so I settled at last in the den and flipped through TV channels, that old familiar ratwheel of futility.

Now what? You could define life that way—a series of now-whats—as time steals more and more of the whats. An observer might have called these thoughts morbid, but that’s what observers do—find the morbid in the mundane.

Because mundane more than anything it all surely was, and as always I found myself almost anticipating the crunch of gravel out on the drive. Whatever else you say about it, it’s a what.

And it was time for it.

Ah! No mistaking that sound. I crept over to the window and peeked out around the drapes. The car was coming around the curve, toward me. As always.

I got my jacket, slipped out the hidden back door. Woods all around, like the chaos from which order comes, and don’t think I don’t have my places.

I parked, let myself in, and went in to the kitchen to make tea.

Ah, home.

May 13, 2019

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Talent

When you played with Duane Allman, you either gave it your all or you got out.

Forty-six years ago Duane Allman reached inside me, flicked a switch, and changed my life forever.

—Butch Trucks

How did we manage to attach a word to something that isn’t anything?

I don’t know but we do it all the time.

Most people would say, I can’t tell you what talent is, but I know it when I see it, and it’s hard to argue with that.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but cannot tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the spirit. John 3:8

I never met Butch Trucks, but always had a fantasy of interviewing him. I admired him; his loss was a tragedy beyond expressing. If you visit the Big House Museum in Macon, you can see the set of white Ludwigs he played on the Allman Brothers’ first album. I love that raw, scorching, dreamy record, and since as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the dominant focal point of my listening to music is the rhythm section, drummers especially, I was all over Butch and Jaimoe.

And from that point all of them just kept getting better. Except for Duane, who was already better. He had to be—he was short on time.

I think about that moment, when Butch collided with the superhuman ball of creative energy that was Duane Allman and decided to go into music all the way. And not be a math teacher. Or philosopher or whatever.

The other valves of his attention closed—like stone.

The way I understand it, at age two or three the human brain has twice the synapses it will end up with. We all know how important it is to stimulate our children in productive ways at that age. Repeated use of neural connections strengthens them, while rarely used ones, through “pruning,” get weakened or atrophy away. The human brain demonstrates great “plasticity” especially in the early going, and though genetics lays the basic floor plan, experience builds the house.

I also think of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule” in his 2008 book Outliers—the assertion that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get good at something. Critics have crawled all over him since then, and wherever you come down in the nature vs. nurture debate, you have to agree that Tiger Woods was born with the capacity to become a good golfer, but became a good golfer because starting at age two he hit 400 jillion golf balls a day.

And then there’s an entertaining book I used to assign in linguistics classes: The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World by Charles Yang. His thesis builds on the Chomskyan concept of “universal grammar”—the idea that all language is genetically inherent in the human brain, an ur-grammar containing what all languages have, or could have, in common, and from which specific languages are selected and developed. Kind of hard to prove that, or show how it’s genetic—ie, “hard-wired” into the brain—but it seems reasonable. We all start with something. Yang’s expansion of the concept involves forgetting. Starting in utero we recognize and organize the sounds around us and begin making vowel sounds (as we will make them throughout our lives, by positioning our muscles of ingestion) soon after birth as we fish around for “our” language. We start “babbling” at four months, and continue till death. At about a year we start saying our first words, then begin making sentences. The grammar may be Chinese, or Swahili, or English, or all, but as Mommy says, “no, no, we don’t say ‘goed,’ Susie, we say ‘went.’ Good girl!” we do what she says. Constant reinforcement and reward cause us to stay the course with our native language, and abandon, or “forget,” the rest. We could have developed any or all languages at that formative age, but there is no need. We settle on the one we must learn to survive. Children growing up multi-lingual just speak in one way to some people and in another way to others. Jorge Luis Borges, whose grandmother was English, grew up speaking English and Spanish and reported that he wasn’t aware as a young child that he was speaking different “languages.”

You get good at what you do a lot. And the only thing you’re voluntarily going to do a lot is what you love. So maybe the real unanswerable question is not what is talent—but what is love?

May 20, 2019

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Getting Rid of the Gun

My first thought was the pond off Thompson Road. If I saw anybody (not likely), just keep going—if not, pull over, slip through the woods, and give it a good sling out into the middle, which I guessed had to be at least ten feet deep. Maybe fifteen. Back to the car, drive away—the whole affair a minute or less. Because I knew that time was, as they say, of the essence, requiring speed and stealth, though I was also aware of the dangers of rashness.

The key is to find the right balance.

Because I knew that the pond, though isolated, wasn’t that isolated, and it was possible someone would see my car—or see me. And I am, I guess, distinctive looking, even from a distance. Some kids out playing in the woods? “We saw him throw something out in the middle, Officer.” Some future Stephen King getting a story? Except kids don’t play in the woods anymore, remember? Still, it was risky, a pond. Some car going by? Why do cars have to go by? Why can’t they go away? Why can’t everything go away? Where was a volcano or an ocean when you needed one? But remember how they found all the pieces of the space shuttle? And if I drove to the coast and rented a plane, they would want to know why. And of course the pilot. Even if you asked him how to open the window and told him not to look. “In his thirties. Not unattractive. But something haunted about his eyes.” The APB would go out—a dragnet for haunted eyes.

But I was very careful in removing the fingerprints. So what if they found it? They couldn’t connect it to me. Me, cool as a cucumber, amused at the absurdity. When they came. And they would come, don’t kid yourself.

Maybe stuff it in the kitchen garbage bag and take it to the dump, where it would be compacted and hauled away and buried. But what if the guy working there, if you can call it working, remembered me, remembered my car? They would estimate the time, dig in the appropriate place, use a metal detector. They would find it. And the question would be, why did you bury this gun in your garbage and throw it away, son? Plus, it would take too much time.

Put it in somebody else’s garbage!

Toss it into the boxcar of a passing train?

Put it in somebody’s random mailbox? A delivery for you!

Drive behind Domino’s and chunk it into their disgusting dumpster?

Better yet, drop it in a vat of acid. Where do you find a vat of acid?

Ah! Maybe not throw it away at all. Because what if they asked, where is your gun? Just clean it thoroughly and put it back where I kept it in the drawer by the bed. And if they asked, why was this weapon recently cleaned? I would answer, it needed cleaning, and if they asked why, I would think of a good answer. Yes, cool as a cucumber, even though I don’t really know why cucumbers are cool. Plus, the gun is not registered, so how would they know I had it?

It would just be better all around not to have any kind of encounter with the authorities at all.

The authorities. What a joke. Drinking their coffee and trying to run other people’s lives. There are too many of them. The world would be a lot better without authorities.

What in the hell is the point of authorities?

I knew I was taking too much time, but you have to admit it was a tricky situation. Maybe even, viewed one way, funny. No, not funny! I had to push that thought away. Far away. Think of something sad. Like Mother, who couldn’t help herself dying and just me in the house and I could go anywhere, even her closet, her little boxes. Shit! Too late—I had started laughing. Because I knew when I started laughing sometimes, I couldn’t stop.

And it wouldn’t be good to be laughing when they came.

May 28, 2019

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A Spoonful

Pregnant, like one of those sagging dogs around a dumpster, the woman had found her way to the alley where, like that dog, she had caught the scent of life, the promise of warmth, and, maybe, food. Also like that dog, her desperation overpowered her fear, and propelled her toward the sliver of wavering light ahead and its almost certain peril or disappointment.

Rats even more desperate than her scurried in swarms along the edges of the littered and glistening alley, alert to her, their longtime enemy and food source, less the first, still, potentially, the latter. The woman had found nothing to eat for three days, and among these ruins only a little rainwater pooled on the lid of a dented oil drum that she dared drink, and until now, no sign of human life.

She approached the light bleeding through the crack in the canvas and dancing on the oily pavement. She stopped, listened, heard some soft sounds, clinks and bumps, but no voices. Then she knelt and listened some more. Trembling, she reached out and pulled back the canvas and saw them, sitting on cardboard and rags around a stubby candle on a box. Their blank faces registered no surprise or threat as they stared at her, the yellow light flickering in their eyes.

She crawled inside.

Life, yes, but the warmth was lacking—and the food? The situation did not look promising.

They were a group, maybe an actual family, a concept that would have filled the woman with pain, if she could have spared the energy for concepts. A man, two children, and a woman holding a corroded tin can over the weak flame, stirring what was in it with a blackened spoon. The woman who had entered sat in an attitude that, even though her silent hosts offered no overt resistance, acknowledged her peripheral status. After the initial staring, those four looked away from her, as though they could not squander their stamina on even the recognition of her presence.

The woman ceased her stirring and turned with the can to the girl child. She tilted the can sideways and carefully dipped a level spoonful and brought it with extravagant care to the girl’s mouth. Blankly, the girl opened and swallowed. The woman crouching beyond the pale watched and caught the smell. Then the woman doled out a similar spoonful to the boy child, then one to the cadaverous man.

Now she had to tilt the can almost completely on its side to scoop out the obvious last spoonful. Or almost spoonful. She dribbled the last few drops from the can into the spoon and then, holding the spoon, at last looked at the woman and their eyes met.

For a moment something reminiscent of emotion, a sort of food itself, passed between them, then the woman raised the spoon to her own mouth and took it all.

No more eye contact after that. The newcomer looked around at the four faces, emotionless now, dull and matter of fact.

The part of the woman’s mind that imagines, that projects, that fabricates supposition in that non-existent realm called the future, had shut down.

She, carrying life in the midst of death, didn’t wonder what is the point, because the point lives in the future too.

June 6, 2019

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Excerpt from Atlanta Pop—James Brown and Rodney Mills

Another memorable personality Rodney worked with at Lefevre, in 1969, was the GFOS himself—James Brown. Brown was at the height of his fame, and booked Lefevre Sound to do one song, “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open the Door, I’ll Get It Myself)”. This was four or five years after Brown’s mid-sixties career-defining hits “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “I Got You (I Feel Good).” Rodney, still ascending the learning curve, had never worked with such a major star, and was nervous. The protocol surrounding the Godfather didn’t help any. First, an advance team came in and laid down the ground rules. “You address him as ‘Mr. Brown’—don’t be calling him ‘James’”—“Don’t speak to him unless he speaks to you”—“Mr. Brown does only one take.”

Rodney was okay with all that—except—one take?

Then, his musicians arrived. Rodney got them all set up, miked, levels set, and they waited for The Arrival. It happened shortly after, in a limousine. Mr. Brown came in—it turned out, with only a general idea about the song, no structure—and the first thing he did was get together with his guitar player to try to find the groove. Once they had it, he added the bass player and drummer, issuing precise instructions to them. And then finally he put in the horns, again, telling them exactly what he wanted. And there, pretty much, was the song. They played it a couple of times, Brown giving hand signals. “They were tight,” Rodney remembers. “He’d point, they’d do it.”

They were ready to record, with eight tracks. Rodney, on the edge of his seat, got everything ready, and it was time to do The Take. He rolled the tape, the whole band, including horns, playing, and Brown doing his vocal, and to his amazement they absolutely nailed it. Nobody missed a beat. Brown came into the booth to hear the playback—Rodney ran the tape—and the band sounded great. Except for one problem. There wasn’t a hint of brass anywhere on it.

“Where my horns?” Brown asked.

Rodney, his insides in a knot, checked the hook-ups on the tape machine, and saw to his horror that he had forgotten to plug the cable from the horn mikes back into the recorder. He had been hearing the horns through the monitor. A rookie mistake. Cold sweat ran down his face.

He had no choice but to confess. He told Brown what had happened.

Brown looked at him. He’s going to walk out, Rodney thought.

“Let’s do it again,” he said.

He was, after all, the hardest working man in show business.

And the really amazing thing is—they nailed it again. Rodney’s breathing resumed. James Brown walked out of the studio into a throng of ardent female fans.

June 10, 2019

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Excerpt from Atlanta Pop: Dennis Yost, Paul Cochran, and Bill Lowery

“Bad decision on my part. The longer I had Dennis, the crazier he got.”

The stress also resulted in a falling out with Lowery that changed the course of Paul’s career. At that point Yost was in his one-year contract with MGM South. The contract stipulated that if they picked up the option on Yost for a second year he would get a $10,000 signing bonus. They seemed to be still interested, so Paul and Dennis went into Lowery’s office to sign the contracts, but when Paul asked Lowery, “so when does Dennis get his ten thousand?” Lowery shot back, “there ain’t no ten thousand.” Paul reminded him of the contract, Lowery all the while turning redder and redder. Evidently he didn’t have quite the faith in Yost’s prospects that he once had. Then suddenly he exploded, came out from behind the desk just as he did when he thought he heard a hit, and cried, “I’m tired of your bullshit! I’m not putting up with your bullshit no more! You ain’t getting no ten thousand!” Yost sat there looking terrified. Paul had seen this side of Lowery once before, in the early days; he had “let it go,” but hadn’t forgotten it. He was also aware of a similar eruption with Tommy Roe, which he felt had been the impetus behind Roe’s move to California. “It scared him to death—which, the first time he did it to me, it scared me to death—I’d never seen anything like that.” But this time, Paul blew up. He came out of his chair, kicked it over, grabbed Dennis and ushered him past Lowery to the back door, and threw him out saying, “You get your ass out of here right now. I am your manager. Bill Lowery don’t have shit to do with you—you get out.” Then he took off his shirt, went outside, and yelled out, “Come on, fat man! It’s me and you this time!” He stood there cussing Lowery, ranting and raving, with Dennis off to the side looking scared to death. Then after a few minutes Lowery came to the door, said, “Paul, I’m sorry,” and went back inside. Paul cooled off; he and Dennis left, without the bonus, but Paul and Lowery made up and stayed in business together with a couple of Paul’s newer bands—Beaverteeth (a post Candymen band with John Rainey Adkins and Rodney Justo), and The Back Alley Bandits.

Bill Lowery coming around the desk: “When he did it, let me tell you, it was showtime. He did the dance—and he was a big man—and wave them arms. But I loved Bill. I went to see him the week before he died—and we hugged and I told him I loved him—he said he loved me—and a week later he was gone. He was southern music.”

June 13, 2019

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Excerpt from Atlanta Pop: Al Kooper, Bob Langford, and Lynyrd Skynyrd

They began going out together to clubs downtown, looking for promising bands.

Funocchio’s on Peachtree Street, formerly Kitten’s Korner, a nightclub, was a magnet for hard-rocking southern bands in Atlanta in the early seventies. Bob and Kooper began checking it out several times a week . . . [One night] they went into the club and a band from Jacksonville called Leonard Skinner was playing.

They were a good, tight band, but what stood out to Bob when he first saw them, was them. Most bands, when dealing with drunk, belligerent audience members, will just shrug it off or get the bouncer—“but not these guys. They’ll meet you out back during the break, take care of it themselves, and be back for their next set.” Not only that, but Ronnie van Zant, the singer, would pick fights with people in the audience. To Kooper and Bob, this was something novel.

On that first night, as they sat marveling at these pugnacious personalities, listening to the music, Bob and Kooper were only moderately impressed—until they got to a certain song. The song was “Gimme Three Steps” and Kooper went crazy. He immediately said, “We’ve got to do this group,” and after their show he approached them; within a few days had them in the studio making some demos.

These showed promise, they signed with Kooper’s short-lived MCA label Sounds of the South, and got to work almost immediately on their first album. They already had a lineup of good tunes for it, with meticulously rehearsed arrangements. They played their songs the exact same way every time, not only note by note, but timewise. The songs never slowed down or sped up, which Bob and Kooper noticed because they were stacking takes. The fact is, Kooper was playing a rather underhanded game with them during the recording sessions. They were recording on sixteen tracks, and the band had never been in a studio like that before; they had no idea what was going on technically. The song that opened the rift was their signature anthem, “Free Bird.”

Kooper decided to take an innovative approach to the recording of that song. The only thing that varied from one take to the next was the guitar solos, and Kooper was having them play them over and over, always with some excuse—“didn’t quite get it”—“something went wrong”—and then, later, unbeknownst to the band, Bob and Kooper would ping-pong all the guitar parts together. When they did playbacks for the band through their headphones during the recording, they played only what they wanted them to hear—the single, most recent solo, although in the booth they were hearing something quite different. They were keeping everything—until they ran out of tracks. The band had no idea, at the time, about all the guitar stuff going on in the studio recording of “Free Bird.”

When, at last, they played the complete “Free Bird” back for the band, they were stunned and furious. “What the hell is all that?” they said. They demanded that Kooper and Bob undo it, but they couldn’t because all the parts were ping-ponged together. This was the maddest Bob had ever seen them, (or ever would see them). The band wanted to know—how the hell they were supposed to reproduce that live? Bob and Kooper were thinking, that’s up to you guys—we’re here to make a record. “It really pissed them off—until it went platinum.”

June 17, 2019

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Reading the Master

Every few years I feel the call of Borges. I never plan it; something just says it’s time—after a long enough interval that these gems can surprise again. The translations in the compendium Labyrinths, most by James E. Irby, are so beautifully done I don’t even try to plod through the originals in Spanish.

Let me just say, I’m grateful that Borges lived and wrote. To indulge in a Borgeslike conceit, this world would not be the same world, literally, without the record of his mind’s sojourn through it. It would be, for me, a less salvageable world. Living in our current septic tank of public discourse, its randy energy lavished on the divisive, the shallow, the petty, the simplistic, and the banal, we read authors like Borges in the way a suffocating man breathes a rush of cool sweet air. I am not referring to his “greatness”—a bureaucrat word that means I know not what, but to his Borgesness, his entanglement in the wondrous workings of his own mind, the way he simply didn’t see the stupid obvious lowest common denominator reality that most do, but the subtleties, the paradoxes, the riddles, the labyrinths, and sly trap doors that are reality’s true essence, all shared with us via his deep and idiosyncratic erudition, and the playful charm of his style.

When I return to Borges, it doesn’t matter what I specifically remember of the poems and essays and ficciones, it is always an experience of seeing them anew. I have changed; therefore his writing has. Just as Pierre Menard’s identical rendering of passages from Don Quixote are completely different from Cervantes’ version three hundred years earlier—nostalgia-soaked for the former, mundane for the latter—the Borges I read now is completely different from the Borges of ten or twenty years ago. There is no exact line between the text and the mind that perceives it. Yes, the physical symbols are the same, but what they represent is not.

If you are devoted to metaphors you could say that all of the situations in these fictions are metaphors for a mind like Borges’, finding its way through the labyrinth of this world, like a stroll through the suburbs of Buenos Aires, continually, infinitely refusing the reductive, the definitive, encountering no answers, only other questions, and constantly risking losing the real to the dream. Or vice versa. Babylon with a lottery administered by The Company, which, like God, is either capricious or non-existent. A man who sets out to dream a man, then dreads the moment his offspring will realize he is only a dream, as, at the end, he himself does. An infinite library with all possible books, some of which contain truth—which is meaningless because its existence is random, and the seeker has no way of distinguishing it from nonsense. A learned Chinaman who vowed to write a book and create a labyrinth, which turn out to be one and the same, the forking paths of which contain all possibilities (reflecting quantum mechanics, and prefiguring by a few decades interactive fiction).

Where else but in Borges can you be asked to contemplate something as maddening as Ireneo Funes, who remembered everything, and with his mind so laboriously engaged with detail couldn’t form abstractions or conduct the inner dialogue by which we exist? A situation as horrifying as what we’ve imagined for God. If God is all details, is there no whole? We think of the writer terrified of forgetting some passing snippet of arcane minutiae, though he risk with this feverish preoccupation the failure to form a grand narrative to contain it, and end with a page and a half instead. Or the Zahir, seemingly trivial, but with the power to overtake a mind so utterly that its possession gradually displaces reality. All throughout Borges we are reminded of how we become so accustomed to something we, or someone, has contrived, we risk taking it for the real. You might even say, that’s a pretty good thumbnail of the human experience in toto.

Or the world of Tlön, imagined in the imaginary country of Uqbar, which asks us to consider a reality where the subjective is primal, the objective specious. An outlandish extension of Berkeleyan idealism, revolving around the fascinating but futile question of whether, since our experience of reality takes place in our minds, there is any objective reality. (Refute it thus, Sam!) If there is, we can’t reach it, and if there isn’t, then anything goes, and all we get are these absurd and tiresome debates between scientists and divines. The story makes me think of the Urantia book, the idea of which astonished me (because they, whoever they were, did it!) in my youth, but the (unfinished) reading of which bored me to tears. Do we wish to be controlled by chessmasters or angels?

When I was younger I chafed at the idea of being a “southern” writer. It seemed that all around me people were drawing up lists of what should or shouldn’t be proper subject matter and style for such a creature, and holding fêtes to celebrate those who had acceptably done so. I long dreamed of an essay denouncing that bureaucratic tyranny, then read “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” and saw that I wouldn’t need to; someone already had.

Just knowing there was a Borges makes life less lonely. Maybe imagining somebody like me a half century later did the same for him. Am I influenced by him? Well, of course, just as I am by everything—but without anxiety. I’m not consciously aware of it. I can see it only by looking back. Yes, it must be so. But then, we all create our own precursors.

June 19, 2019

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Mimi and Bess

In “my" china cabinet sits a porcelain cheese server, a misshapen, florid curiosity with a lid, as it has in blissful obscurity for twenty-something years. The only reason you’re reading this story is because, as I was retrieving something from that antique cavity a few days ago, it caught my eye, and fired a buried memory neuron.

I have only a few fragments of what might be called fact in this tale, and as you might guess, there’s no one now to ask. I confess that some of what follows may be invented. Memory, invention—what’s the difference? The main character, Mimi, my paternal grandmother, and her cruelladevillean older sister, Bess, are long gone. But in their childhood they would have been familiar with that piece of dishware which their mother, my great-grandmother Miss Ida, who lived to be 106, brought out only at Christmas.

To my way of thinking, there wasn’t much worth grasping among Miss Ida’s worldly goods, there being no money and hence no will, only some household items and an heirloom or two—the aforementioned china cabinet, an antique Philco phonograph with a cache of 78s, a clattery chandelier, and so on—and it may have been that scarcity which gave to a random piece of crockery such potential meaning. That meaning came to fruition when Miss Ida died, and the grasping began.

Actually it began some weeks before the actual event, when its inevitability became clear.

The sisters, as sisters will, had fought from the crib up, battles which Bess usually won. She had no soul and the tenacity of a pit bull and would have been a ruthless businesswoman except that she lived in the south in an age when women didn’t have careers, unless squeezing the blood out of her turnip husband Elmer counts as one. So in this case you can imagine to which Cadillac-driving sister the choicest pieces of Miss Ida’s estate went.

Except for the cheese server.

On that point, Mimi stood her ground. I’m pretty sure the dish meant nothing, really, to her, and that this fight was not about an object at all, but one fueled by spite, envy, the will to power, and the need for at least a minor victory every now and then.

“I will have that dish!” Bess, unrivaled in having, vowed.

But somehow Mimi ended up with it, keeping it under lock and key, and vowing to have it interred with her if she died first.

Which she did.

“I’ll get it out!” Bess had sworn.

Which she did. At the Visitation.

She waited until the modest crowd of bereaved had thinned, and slipped into the Viewing Room where one of the ghoulish and promising young assistant funeral directors caught her up to her shoulders in the casket. “Adjusting her dress,” she claimed.

“Mam, I assure you we have made every effort to—”

“Why don’t you make an effort to get the hell out of here so I can have some quality time with my departed sister,” Bess overpowered him—and then, almost tipping the casket, in her dear sister’s lap—found it!

I can easily imagine the triumphant gleam in her eye, the rich gratification coursing through her blood, even perhaps a little jig of conquest, there in that hushed room, holding the dish over her head like a rival’s severed head.

I don’t know how these emotions fared over the three years she outlived Mimi—I like to think they lost some of their glow—but die indeed she did, and no one mourned.

In the dispensing of her effects, she had outlived everybody who might have wanted any of them, which I’m betting was nobody, and certainly not Mama. Daddy, who liked to fish, couldn’t have cared less.

And that’s how the unlikeliest of beneficiaries, I, ended up with the cabinet and its collection of curios, including an ornate and forgotten cheese server, dusty and ridiculous.

July 5, 2019

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The Inspiration of Stephen Hawking

In his final book, Stephen Hawking offers his thoughts on the “big questions.” Because he is so smart, his perspective so thoroughly that of a scientist, albeit a very human one, and because his conclusions are the result of a lifetime of concentrated observation and thought, everyone should read what he has to say. But for exactly the same reasons, and because it’s a “book,” most people won’t. And of course many will hold his ideas in contempt, as the ideas of the greatest minds in every age, challenging our rutted consolations, have been. That’s a shame. Hawking was a brilliant, witty, optimistic human being who in spite of his condition considered himself fortunate. Brief Answers to the Big Questions was assembled from his personal archive of material, and completed after his death in 2018. The reader easily bonds with his personality—even if forced to confront the realization that inside that wracked body lived an unaffected mind!

“Most people can understand and appreciate the basic ideas [of science] if they are presented in a clear way without equations,” Hawking writes, “which I believe is possible and which is something I have enjoyed trying to do throughout my life.”

And, thank you, for the most part he manages to do that. But when he offers us the “simple formula—S=Akc3 /4Gℏ”—which “expresses the entropy [of a black hole] in terms of the area of the horizon, and the three fundamental constants of nature, c, the speed of light, G, Newton’s constant of gravitation, and ℏ, Planck’s constant,” I have to admit I don’t really speak that language, and move on to clearer concepts, which indeed comprise the vast majority of the book.

Hawking reflects on God, the origin of the universe, black holes, time travel, the possibility of other life in the universe, the odds for human survival on earth, the implications of artificial intelligence, and the colonization of space, and much else—always staying true to his belief that nothing more is needed to understand the universe than the laws of nature. For him, it is not permissible to step outside them for explanations. I wonder how many of our problems could be solved if the human race would embrace just that one idea.

The human mind discombobulates at the idea of things always having been, or having no end, but that’s because it is programmed to think in terms of linear time and therefore cause and effect. But to Hawking time came into existence along with everything else at the Big Bang, and he is comfortable with the idea that nothing “caused” the Big Bang. Saying something we can’t understand did it, and it just happened, amount to the same thing. Hawking concludes that the universe can’t always have existed because everything in it is finite. So what is “infinity,” he makes you wonder. Is it the same as no-time? He draws a comparison between the heart of a black hole, where there is infinite density and no time, to the state from which the Big Bang banged. In Hawking’s mind there is no need for a creator, whose only real purpose is to be the cause of the universe, and there isn’t one in a temporal sense. If God “caused” the universe to happen, then he existed where there was no time, a contradiction which people shrug away by saying he existed outside of time, yet their complete conception of God is as a being operating within and limited by linear time. Not to mention that this hat trick completely deadens our ability to explore without prejudice the fundamental mysteries of reality. And all our ratiocination becomes the torturous groping for meaning in a space where the heart of the matter is disallowed!

For Hawking, if anything, God is “the embodiment of the laws of nature,” and not the human-like being, intimately concerned with human affairs, usually depicted. “When you look at the vast size of the universe, and how insignificant and accidental human life is in it, that seems most implausible.”

“I have been enormously privileged,” Hawking writes, “through my work, in being able to contribute to our understanding of the universe. But it would be an empty universe indeed if it were not for the people I love, and who love me. Without them, the wonder of it all would be lost on me.”

You can reconcile that sentiment with Hawking’s scientific mindset however you like. He doesn’t say, but I assume Hawking would have considered the affections of evolved intelligent creatures secondary to the primary laws of science, their by-products perhaps. Epiphenomena.

But maybe it’s the other way around.

Here and there in the book Hawking evokes Hamlet’s brooding reflection, “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space” to describe the human condition, especially true of himself, a mind that could go to the furthest reaches of the universe, locked in a broken body. But he never finishes the quotation: “—were it not that I have bad dreams.”

We should never discount the dreams.

Food for later thought.

July 16, 2019

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Bliss

A while back, I posted a reflection on this site concerning “intelligent design,” which generated consternation in some quarters, so I have pondered a bit more on the topic, which I think we all would agree is weighty, and today will try to come at it from another angle.

The term “Intelligent design” I take to be, after one of those fatal attempts to placate science, interchangeable with “God”—and the question “do you believe in God?” I take to be circular, in that you have to postulate such a being before you can decide whether you believe in it. And most people who “believe” in it tend to move on to lavishing it with human qualities and presuming to know how it thinks, what it wants, and put words in its mouth, as people do with their pets.

Let’s be honest, no matter what you “believe,” there’s nothing there. Available to the senses, I mean. No Being anyone can see or ever has seen, or smelled or heard or tasted or touched. No evidence. Yes, some people claim to have talked to “God,” but some people claim to have been picked up by UFOs too. There’s more than a little similarity there. The human mind craves a sense of something “beyond” so badly if it didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent it. The kicker is, it’s there all along without the need to bring in Rube Goldberg. If you believe in a Designer, this is an inner conviction, based not on experience but on what you would like to be true, and on your unwillingness to figure things out it it’s not, and cannot be corroborated by anyone. Your ego likes it, and we’re all guilty of mistaking that buzz for objective validation. And we should have learned by now to be suspicious of anything the ego likes, because we know the ego has only one motive: sustaining the illusion of itself against all odds.

I like the open-endedness of reality. Not only do I not want to know the ultimate explanation of everything, I don’t want there to be one. An end state, like heaven or the Elysian Fields or Paradise with virgins, terrifies me. Finity chokes me with claustrophobia. I want there always to be something beyond the horizon.

Do I believe in the God of the bureaucrats? No.

Does that therefore mean I don’t believe in a Designer? No. So does that mean I do? No. It just means I don’t know.

But a being in the physical shape of an old white guy with a beard on a throne “planning” everything?

No.

The problem is, the bureaucrats have locked down God. As bureaucrats do, they have defined, categorized, put up limits, and made rules, and presented all this to us as givens. More than anything else they fear and want to destroy a free, inquiring mind.

The most valuable thing we have. It’s astonishing to me how many people don’t want it.

I sense something I suppose you could call God, but it is not separate from the universe. Not a Being. It didn’t design, but is. One “believes” in it in the same way one “believes” in reason or the laws of physics.

God is infinite possibility, and I think the nature of this unrealized possibility is what we would call bliss. Bliss is fundamental, not extraordinary, and one of the negative side effects of being a temporal organism is that our capacity to experience bliss is muffled by tissue and the doom strokes of time, but when we do get a whiff of it, we recognize it and want it. There is no Being sitting around somewhere savoring Bliss. Bliss is the state where nothing has happened yet.

That Possibility doesn’t decide or get bored or lonely or any human thing, because if it does then something has already happened—it just collapses into reality. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” we are told, but we aren’t told why. Or how. It just happens. Any further elucidation of the matter eludes physics, theology, astronomy, or the speculations of a guy sitting on a rock. Saying a Being did it answers nothing, it just tries to pass off the question as an answer, adding nothing. Once Possibility collapses and things happen, bliss becomes a ghost. Maybe, says Wordsworth, we remember traces of it. Maybe it’s just a component of reality and drives the sense of something missing that pervades human experience. Maybe reality is only Possibility catching a glimpse of itself in a mirror. Maybe it is an epiphenomenon. Maybe whatever you like.

Whatever becomes, ourselves included, will return to its original state of Possibility and Bliss where it will be contradictory, not to mention undesirable, to maintain our “selves.” We can’t even maintain them while we live. The “essence” of your self will continue, you insist. Yes, I agree. As energy, in the ecstatic return to Possibility.

Eternity is not the horizontal progression of time, but the vertical essence inherent in “is.”

That’s plenty for me.

July 22, 2019

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To The Gates

Most people don’t know that it’s not always clear which way you’re headed even after you die.

Not an idea that sits comfortably in the orthodoxies of this addled world. Do I say that world is a stench in my nostrils? No—I’m not immune to its charm, just uninterested in a party I’m not invited to. Let’s call it bullshit. And, if I may say, fiends know bullshit a mile away. It’s our stock in trade.

Generally this whole business is rather abstract to me, but occasionally I do get personally involved. There are a few you just hate to lose, you know?

This one had long ago caught my eye, and even though I saw his time coming—of course I did, but was blinded by my pride, oh shut up—I didn’t prepare, and he was halfway to those overwrought gates before I knew it. You know the old Irish toast. With one difference—as I said, he was halfway there. In other words, halfway not there.

His mind was still at war with itself—preoccupied with the phantom memories of what he had left, uncertain about what lay ahead, tormented by guilt and his many regrets, obsessing over all his weaknesses. A perfect state for me to make a move, you would say. Except the core of him—I wasn’t deluding myself—it was damn solid. Yes, hopeless in a way—it’s just that the dark side of him was so exquisite—his lusts, his contempt, his depraved habits—not that he would have seen it that way. I wanted him with me. Call it love, I don’t care. I couldn’t bear the thought of him there, gone from me, and the only way I could stand that thought was to indulge my fantasies of him in my world completely, accessible, and my slowly sucking the juice out of him, savoring him bit by bit at my leisure until he was all mine. Until he was me.

A sick, possessive love, you say. Well, what do you expect? You who know nothing of such things in your lovely world, no?

The journey wasn’t easy or pleasant. I’ve covered that landscape often enough. I had to keep my distance, of course, and was hindered by my need to stay disguised, and to keep finding hiding places in that grudging terrain. Of course it was beautiful—a word I lost interest in a long time ago—but with a pleasing quality of the forlorn as my quarry trudged ahead in the throes of his struggle. It wasn’t easy, but I did my best, skulking behind, to keep his insecurities and fears and self-doubt quick and raw. There was a sliver of hope.

Self-delusion, of course, but in these extremes it’s all I have. How hard it is to let go of that savory delusion one has created and nurtured in his lonely mind! No more talk of loneliness. One feels it so keenly in that alien land, so averse to me it shuddered at my touch. I pushed the thought aside, clinging to that breath of hope, scuttling from bush to bush, never losing his scent.

It took all my fortitude to stay the course as the humiliating place began to appear. Yes, yes, beautiful, inexpressibly beautiful, but when you think about it, what have I got to lose? Of course I knew it was too late, and I could feel the pull on him growing stronger, the ravishment, banishing one by one his delectable doubts. To me it felt radioactive. And then, crawling behind a boulder I saw a figure standing there before the gates. I didn’t hate him—on a personal level. I was just disgusted by the idea of a personal level. He was beyond my reach and paid me no heed. But I could feel his energy like the event horizon of that realm that I could approach forever and never reach. At the same time, pulling him. Who should have been a part of me! A blink and he was gone.

I wanted out of there.

It was like falling, my retreat from that place, nauseated with envy, self-loathing, and shame, cursing it all with, you would say, dazzling eloquence. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes being a bitch is all you’ve got. And with only my vision, artistic beyond anything you can imagine, of the corruption of that place and the reordering of the world, to console me. Though it will stay in the box and never be published.

Why not give the pilgrims a thrill and wing my way back? A spectacle like they’ve never seen! Yeah baby. Empty-handed.

August 13, 2019

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Changing Yourself

Du muβt dein Leben ändern.

The human heart craves transformation. Inspired, Rilke tells us in his famed verse, you find you not only can, you must, change your life.

Whatever that might mean for you. For me, it’s obvious that we all ossify as the struggle of life wears us down. We construct shelters of our habits and settle in. Ruts of thinking and behaving that are comfortable and don’t challenge us. That require no energy.

Sounds like death. The price of comfort is boredom—not to mention the anxiety, if we allow ourselves to think about it, of having blocked our minds from their true birthright. To really live, we must change.

I finally got around to reading How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, the food guru, after several recommendations. I enjoyed it. If you’re looking for an overview of the history of psychedelics in our culture, and the research into their potential medicinal use, and the entanglement of social attitudes with that pursuit, particularly in the 1960s when the counterculture and Timothy Leary drove the whole business into a disrepute that is only now showing signs of revival, this is your book. You will also be regaled by accounts of Pollan’s own overcoming of the personal skepticism he takes pains to establish and experimentation with psychedelics himself. You may, like me, come away with a more open mind about the potential of psychoactive chemicals to effect positive change in people. Pollan gathers plenty of evidence of their transformative power in people suffering depression, addiction, or facing terminal illness. And he comes to believe in those chemicals’ potential to allow “well” people to escape the condition “when the grooves of mental habit have been etched so deep as to seem inescapable.”

I have to say, the hysterical criminalization of psychedelics seems an over-reaction that I can attribute only to bureaucratic fear of anything that encourages people to think for themselves. I do share the skepticism of spiritual enlightenment coming from a pill, but what is there about brain activity that isn’t chemicals? The drugs don’t do the spiritual work, but they can perform the service of making people aware that it is possible. I don’t think there’s anything inherently valuable in psychedelic experience, or in any spiritual practice or belief system that doesn’t lead to a transformation of perception. I am suspicious of the motives of anyone doing a psychoactive drug more than once.

Pollan provides many testimonials from people who have had experience with psychedelics, as well as from himself, and these more than anything caught my attention. It’s true not all experiences are positive, but the majority are. It’s also true that there is no single, common theme to them. These are human beings, individuals. But there were two aspects of the psychedelic journey that were widely shared, and for me were thought-provoking.

One, the loss of ego and a feeling of oneness with the whole.

And two, the conviction that all that matters is love.

Such experiences are simple and profound and have the power to transform our being. But they are for most of us, on our own, nigh impossible to attain. I have no idea why this is so. If the inevitable degradation and delusion of human experience owes mainly to the entropy of our biological predicament, so be it. But what pushes people to pursue transformative change if a sense of its necessity doesn’t sleep within us all?

I have long been aware of a deeper self beyond the various dramatizations we call ego, and I know that personally I am most myself when I’m lost in something—when I’m not an “I.” Consciousness is more than mere self-awareness. When you’re not aware of yourself, you are still “conscious,” not separately but as part of “the whole.” There are many avenues to this state: meditation, renunciation, suffering, near-death experience, sweat lodges, what have you, and maybe chemical manipulation of the brain? I don’t know, but I do know that human experience based on a more enlightened sense of what we are would work out a lot better on this planet than the ignorant and predatory one we’ve got.

As for love, we’ve all read those accounts of what people are thinking about on their deathbeds. Could it be that love really is the primordial generative vibration of everything?

More on that in a post to come . . .

August 27, 2019

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The Last Mastodon

Delaware Indian Myth

Why the Great Spirit spat his fire on all of my kind, but one, I don’t know. And the pain, in this dim cave, is so long-lived and constant I rarely think of it as pain. I think it is the same as me. A blessing, I suppose—or some kind of transcendence? If so, not a complete transcendence. I can still perceive me. I believe the word for the transcendence I seek is death—but it is only a word I remember. I don’t know what it is, only that it is the ultimate liberation. Another word I remember is enlightenment. I think it is similar to salvation. Perhaps they name the same thing as death. Perhaps they all name the same thing as me. I don’t know. They are only fossils from the long memories of my kind, which live on in me.

I have been given the words. The meanings are for me to determine.

I can remember the Before, with the herd. It is an indelible, but static, memory—reduced to just three or four images, always from the same vantage point, locked in forever. Them, only imagination can see. Spread around, and in, the pool in the stream which was there sometimes, sometimes not. But when it was, there was joy. Yes, I remember joy—or rather, that there was such a thing—though living only in the mind like everything else, how can I know?

Can it be true that anything from the Great Spirit is right? Is good? Eternal isolation, eternal pain? An annihilated community, an annihilated world? How? I try to imagine them, felled where they were struck, in the water, scattered over the landscape. I can’t picture it. Can’t imagine it. For that I would need to go out and see, and perhaps, the Great Spirit willing, join them. But I cannot get up. The pain of my wound is too great. What is the difference between my wound and me?

Naturally my thoughts have gravitated far beyond this situation. Another word came to me—redemption. I don’t know what it means but like the other words it is old, and has survived, so they all must mean something. If I live in time, as this pain says I do, it is inevitable that I think in terms of beginning and end. Of course it is the end that occupies me. A long long time away, but not forever. That, and that alone is the bedrock of my faith, and I know what that word means: it is what led me to my conception of era.

I think, maybe one of everything is selected to bear witness to existence. Maybe this is how the Great Spirit thinks, the scale of the Great Spirit’s mind: the much longer life of what preceded and follows what once flashed in time. All things that are become were—slowly dissolve, covered first by one layer of mud and dust, then another, buried in the settling of rock, swallowed by a sea, which after an inconceivable time recedes, revealing its infinitude of stories that may or may not ever be known.

It is only in fulfillment that anything can earn the right to not exist.

August 15, 2019

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Intuition

“They reckon ill who leave me out.”

By all lights, I should have been crushed by despair by now. I mean, given the facts, all of us should have been. But I sense something greater than myself—or, phrased another way, there’s really no such thing as myself. Nothing unitary or permanent, that is. And, as “sensing” something implies: accessible. I don’t think of it as mystical—it’s just the familiar feeling I’ve had all my life. And that’s what’s so attractive and distinctive about it: you can count on it. Even in the direst episodes of my life, it was unmoved. It watches the narratives come and go, like breathing. They are infinite, transient, and perhaps inevitable, what I believe some people call “maya.”

But the “something” I mean is the primary state prior to narrative. It can’t be known by a fraction of itself, as the human dependency on narrative would have it. Even calling it “it” gives it a false ontological status. Emerson, quoted above, availed himself of the Hindu term “brahma.” Some people think that’s a lot of bull.

It is hard to recognize not because it is obscure, but so obvious.

It is the energy, or intelligence if you must, that underlies and gives birth to our reality. I believe all consciousness, in some way and to some degree, senses it. The less one senses it, the more pathological. I have known it all my life, like background cosmic radiation, and through the years have tried to graft various systems onto it, but none has ever taken.

The interface between its pervasive consciousness and our own I call intuition.

Intuition, in comparison to reason, is often considered pejorative, but for me it is not opposed to reason or different from it. They are both the working of the mind—at different points on the line of perception. Yes, they are “different”—but so are the shape and color of something, yet both “are” the something. You can study how life and ultimately human beings appeared and developed on this planet, or you can contemplate the so unlikely as to be absurd, yet true, fact of our existence at all, but they are not different. One is only the temporary arrest of the flow of the Given for study. In other words, reason belongs to narrative. The existence of reason does not.

In our communal narrative, 2 + 2 =4. Reason tells us that’s “correct.” We can prove it by experimentation. We can have two things, and add two more, and end up with four every time. We can “know” (inductively infer) this. But “knowing” we can rely on logic is a different knowing. It is this second knowing that I call intuition. The sense that reality is rational is our deepest intuition. Where does that come from? Or our sense of morality? Or our recognition of meaning?

Loved ones have detected notes of “atheism” or “agnosticism” in some of my struggles to express my feelings. I deny this because those terms have meaning only within a particular narrative that doesn’t resonate with me. Believing and not believing in God are not different, they’re just different narratives. Whatever narrative you construct or accept or buy, the bottom line is that you don’t know, the condition appropriate (inevitable) to the human mind. The mind of God/the mystery of existence—they are the same. Believing in God/believing reality is rational—the same. Gods’s will/nature—the same. We don’t know—and this is not a failing or something to be corrected or regretted. It is the essence of being human, the engine that drives all we are and do.

Can you really access something that is negated by the attempt to imagine it? And is it not circular to say we know of intuition through intuition? No, yes. But both of those answers require the primacy of subjectivity. Which I deny, because when it disappears, there’s still something. And that something is what I’ve longed for all my life. And known all my life—though it has mostly slept as I’ve gotten on with my life. Which, while you’re getting on with your life, is a good place for it.

We trade life for story. And watch ourselves do it.

September 17, 2019

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The Prayer Warrior

The first time Mildred Johnson heard the term “prayer warrior,” she knew she had found her calling. It was just the way it sounded. It was her.

Which meant that for forty-six years she hadn’t found it, but there was no point dwelling on that. Finding your calling is a glorious thing, whenever it happens. Think of all the people who just follow their nose through life and never do. What is a person without a calling? She knew all about phones not ringing.

But what would the point of a calling be, if there was nothing for it to call you from? And no, nobody had called, literally. No thunderous voice from above. But her conviction had been just as clear as if a voice had said the words, “You will become a Prayer Warrior.” She had long known that the key to a successful religious life was knowing when to take things literally, and when not. It’s an intuitive thing.

Prayer Warrior. She saw images of the Standing Liberty Lady, with her olive branch, and Lady Justice, with her scales—and, in both cases, swirling robes. But she knew those were just silly pictures running through her head. When she did some research into the matter, she understood that being a Prayer Warrior was just plain hard work. But she knew she was equal to the task.

She didn’t exactly hang out a shingle, but once she had decided to dedicate her life to the warfare of prayer, it became widely known, and the phone started ringing. Who knew of all the pain in the human heart?

It quickly became a full-time job. And she discovered that finding your calling is not the blissful event you had thought, but stress. A lot of stress.

Because there were days when it felt like it would crush her. She suspected it was like having children—supposed to be so joyous and fulfilling, but from what she could tell was mostly just nasty and thankless toil. Not to mention incidents like the time her dear little nephew had vomited into her purse.

Take today: two surgeries, four addicted children, not one but two bad gall bladders, a dented F-250 fender, a wayward husband—one of her least favorites—and an impending hip replacement—not counting the twenty-seven unanswered requests in her in-box—all before noon! She had to continually remind herself that they didn’t understand the energy this vocation took. Not that she pitied herself—she was a Prayer Warrior. She could “mount up with wings as eagles.”

But, truth be told, one reason she was shying away from the twenty-seven old requests was that she already knew what one of them was.

Charlotte Bullard!

It was hard sometimes to keep in mind that God loves all His children. He doesn’t have favorites. Well, there was Abraham. And Enoch. And Noah. And Daniel. And David—a man after God’s heart! Not to mention the disciple whom Jesus loved. Lucky guy. Okay, so God had some favorites, but mostly he didn’t, and these were Bible people anyway. For regular people it was wrong to want to be a favorite of God—even if you had to admit that wouldn’t be too bad. Regular people, Mildred knew, are all equal in God’s eyes. Even if she could not fathom how God could love Charlotte Bullard—well, that was just it: he was God, and he could see into the very inside of a person. Which is, when you think about it, the worst part—but never mind that.

Not a week, hardly two or three days, went by that something didn’t come in from Charlotte Bullard. No, Mildred hadn’t even looked at this most recent, because she knew what it was about. The same thing it was always about: helping her overcome her pride. Relieving her of the burden of knowing she was a higher grade than everybody else. Oh, what a toll it took on her carrying that knowledge around! How hard it was to humble herself! And usually with a covertly worded plea for her husband to make more money. The Lord knew, her taste being so refined, that she would use it for good. And sometimes she would throw in a plea for understanding in the world. That all people would come to understand their proper place and stay in it. That would make the world so much better.

The danger, for Mildred, was praying that a boulder on one of those mountain roads where the signs say “Beware of falling rocks” would—no! That wasn’t in the spirit of a true Prayer Warrior. Scratch that.

But she did seriously wish that people would just stick to gall bladders.

Ding! Another prayer request. Owen Gardner’s biopsy results were back. Oh dear. Not what they wanted to hear. Time to get busy. Charlotte Bullard could wait. And all the others. So many!

Heal yourselves! she wanted to scream sometimes.

But that wouldn’t be right.

Love is a fragile thing—easy prey to a thousand lusts. Somebody’s got to do the work of keeping it alive.

Ah, the lamb who bears our griefs and carries our sorrows.

September 21, 2019

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The Trillionaire’s Return

On the day before his one hundred and fiftieth birthday, as the Kosmo Odyssey ship neared the sweltering Earth, Birn Davos, the world’s first trillionaire, who extraction empire had once spanned the globe, watched the moon growing closer. The sight was crippling. His compartment was private, so no one could see the emotion warping his features, or the tears burning his eyes, the first time he had experienced such feelings in decades. Something as simple as the moon. All these years with poor substitutes—who could have known how this luminous and immemorial companion of humankind lived in the depths of each soul? He had to come back to understand what its absence had meant. Memories flooded his old heart and he couldn’t fight them. And he knew just how damn tired you are at a hundred and fifty.

Life on Orchard Base Ares had grown weary. The misery, predictably, was more psychological than physical, for the operation and maintenance of the sprawling complex in Gale Crater was efficiently managed. The solar power bases, oxygen, water, and food production systems, waste disposal—all of it ran smoothly. Leaving the idle rich to—what? Recreate and procreate. Recreation had degenerated almost entirely to the realm of the pharmaceutical with all its fog and despair. As for procreation, Birn had fathered more children than he could count, with an endless variety of mates, and that had been an enjoyable way to pass the time for many years, even if he didn’t know any of the brats and they were scattered throughout Orchard Base Ares, several other newer bases, and on a variety of orbiting stations. But the whole procreation business, augmented by the age-reversal technology that only Birn and his ilk could afford, had grown loathsome. Birn couldn’t even remember what sexual attraction felt like, nor what the allure of the tedious act had ever been. And his progeny—they meant nothing to him. One offspring is a child; a hundred are a statistic.

In hindsight, the whole business, starting with the astonishing hubris of the very idea, had been inauspicious. The failure to see aging and death as the natural and merciful process they are. The delusion that the sumptuous comforts of Orchard life on a sterile world of dust storms and barren vistas, though it had once known liquid water and life itself, could offset the affinity of a species’ DNA for the environment in which it had evolved. The failure to predict that a small contingent of that species, those necessary engineers and managers who kept them alive, would, under the stimulus of great opportunity, overcome those privations and not just flourish, but gain control. And finally, the presumption that one could return to one’s prior position in the infernal quagmire one had helped cause then abandoned to fend for itself.

Where the Union was more in control than their propaganda led you to believe.

Birn had expected trouble in boarding the ship. For “Purpose of Trip,” instead of the more accurate “escape,” he had put “to meet the progeny of my original family.” It was a tense moment. Then an official showed up and he was waved through. The six-month trip back had been the height of luxury. But so had everything for a hundred and thirty years.

There had been two missiles. No one doubted that, though it wasn’t “true.” The Union had sprung very publicly into action and within three days had made the appropriate arrests. All of which supposed culprits vehemently denied any role in the matter, and some of whom had credible alibis. But none of that was “true” either. They simply disappeared, and as the investigation was “ongoing,” the entire business vanished from the news.

A small cadre of conspiracy bloggers kept the two-missile theory alive on-line. But if anybody other than those diehards wanted to hear it, which nobody did, its impact would still have been drowned in the long list of the other, equally “ridiculous,” conspiracies they espoused. But there had been two missiles, one from the hills to the east, the other from a boat offshore to the west. It had taken only a couple of telegenic “experts,” using terms like distorted parallax, triangular obfuscation, and visual fallacy to nullify the evidence of a hundred amateur videos. They made the voices of the eyewitnesses sound shrill, but everything was shrill in those times. No outrage could hold public attention for long. The ubiquitous phrase among the people, who had enough to worry about, was what are you going to do?

The result, in any case, as the two missiles hit less than a second apart, had been the incineration of the Kosmo Odyssey ship as it descended over the landing pad in the southern desert of the region formerly known as the State of California, and the torching of a trillionaire that most everybody was happy to see go.

October 14, 2019

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Uncle Dorian

Uncle Dorian was doing well for ninety-six, if by “well” you mean healthy, with a good appetite, able to get around the house, attend to his private functions unassisted, sit engrossed by the radio all day, and get himself into and out of his clothes and his bed. It’s just that for ten years no one had understood a word he said.

He was the master of the monosyllable and seemed contented, so we just went with it.

That’s not to say we didn’t converse, even if our conversations would go something like this:

“Good morning, Uncle Dorian, are you feeling well this morning?”

“Eem.”

“Well, good.”

“Jeb jeb.”

“You did? Well, isn’t that something?”

“Floop rack.”

“Strawberry?”

“Kip.”

“Not blueberry?”

“Hoot.”

“Well, you know what? You’re in luck. I think that’s exactly what we have. I’ll bring you a bowl. Large?”

“Goob.”

“Oh, listen to you!”

“Din gap?”

“Oh, I don’t think one or two would hurt. Mustard or hot sauce?”

“Les go.”

Yes, every now and then he would say something intelligible, but you wondered if it wasn’t like the monkeys typing.

On the rare occasions when someone unfamiliar with the situation would come over, we would discreetly advise them to pretend to understand him. It really was the best way to handle it, and if he was asking where his slippers were and got sardines, there are worse things. Like us, he went with it. The trick was to keep things running smoothly, like when Uncle Jake, not what you would call technologically advanced, would play the attract screen of video games for hours, and just have the best time.

The only thing, besides fuzz balls on his sweat pants, that really agitated Uncle Dorian was someone going “Huh?” or “What’d you say?” or “I didn’t understand you.” Aunt Hortense having one of her days when she declared life not worth living and tried to lure him into a discussion about the meaninglessness of life wouldn’t faze him, but “Huh?” would throw him into an existential crisis only ice cream could pull him out of. It was painful to see him so unhappy. I don’t know how it was, but when Uncle Dorian was out of sorts, it was like the universe itself was awry.

Honestly there are days when I agree with Aunt Hortense, but that’s another story. But—and this is something we learned from Uncle Dorian—if life doesn’t mean anything, then it means whatever you say it does. I try to remember that.

Like with myself, I try to limit the questions I ask Uncle Dorian to true or false, or yes or no, and never fill in the blank or multiple choice, if I can help it.

Never “Uncle Dorian, do you want a blanket, something to drink, a bowl of ice cream, or Saskatchewan?” Saskatchewan is the cat.

Troubled stare.

Or “Uncle Dorian, what have you been doing lately?”

More troubled stare.

But “Uncle Dorian, are you warm and comfortable?”

“Gurp.”

Not “What does life mean?” Troubled stare. But “Does life mean anything?”

“Moo.”

So the day the preacher paid a call, we were a little apprehensive.

The senior pastor, no less, who slid into the driveway in his Cadillac as we peeked out the windows like meth cookers, and strode to the door. I met him with the usual warning.

“Pretend I understand him?” he clarified.

“Yes, please.”

The Reverend smiled and said, “We miss him at church,” and I guess they did since he hadn’t been in fifteen years, but I would say that was understandable.

At his age. And, frankly, I think his age was behind the Reverend’s visit.

“You have to get your priorities right,” the Reverend said as he sat down across from Uncle Dorian who was picking at a fuzz ball on his sweat pants.

“Uncle Dorian, are you warm and comfortable?” I asked.

Pick pick. “Thip,”

“Do you have a church family?” asked the Reverend.

Pick pick. “Zat.”

“I believe the rain will hold off today,” I said.

“Droop.”

“Yes!” exclaimed the Reverend, “of course it’s possible to make a provision for the church in your will!”

“Cream and sugar?” I asked.

“Beep.”

“We have three plans to choose from—the silver, gold, and platinum. Of course we feel the best value is the platinum.”

“Mig grunt.” Uncle Dorian was searching for a new fuzzball.

“Platinum? That’s wonderful!”

“The squirrels are back,” I said.

“Can he sign his name?” asked the Reverend.

“Ask him.”

“Sir, there are some minor legalities that will require your signature. Will you be able to furnish that?”

“Blat burp.”

“Huh? What’d you say? I didn’t understand you.”

Uncle Dorian wheezed like he’d been stabbed then went catatonic. I faked a call to 911, which got rid of the Reverend in a hurry.

But it took a large bowl of strawberry ice cream, some Glen Miller, Saskatchewan, and an extra foot pillow to calm down Uncle Dorian.

Life goes on whether it means anything or not. And once again the universe had narrowly escaped going awry.

“Poot.”

October 27, 2019

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Enlightenment in a Decaying Empire

A weekend to remember!

You can bet, a different Drelda Harrington left the weekend retreat of the Institute of Astral Awakening than the one who went in.

Who’s more awake now, Laurena Sinclair?

My personal astral guide? Oh—Astrid Cassiopeia. Swedish model, TV star, and creator of the Nya Nya Personal Cleansing Products line—you may have heard of her? I hate to wreck your day.

Of course it was all “free”—which means, like everything, you just have to figure out who and how to pay. I’m good at that. But as far as the “free” personal astral guide, I wasn’t too happy about the bidding match I got into with Imelda Sloan and Greer Murray, and of course Brock pitched one of his patented tantrums about it. Good God, the man thinks nothing of dropping ten grand on a golf weekend in the Caymans, but bitches about a few bucks for enlightenment? Okay, maybe more than a few—but he wouldn’t know enlightenment if it bit him in the butt. Some things, like getting your brat into Southern Cal, are just worth the crazy money, that’s all there is to it.

You should have seen Madame Cassiopeia—in a radiant blue sky gown, her hair glittering with stars. She floated, she radiated serenity, and believe me, if you haven’t seen her come into a room, you haven’t seen perfectly accessorized wokeness.

Oh God, I want her life!

I filled up three bags with Nya Nya products in the lobby before I even registered. Boy, was I awake—and at war with toxins! Worth every penny.

I signed in, and picked up my Tranquility Packet, but it took three tries to get a room that didn’t block my chakras. I’m sorry, but look at me—do I look like somebody you can stiff with a weak aura room? Save it for Laurena Sinclair. She’ll be at the next one, I promise you.

I will say, the spa was fabulous. I could feel the toxins just washing away. Toxins between your toes—who knew? Of course I had to pick up a toe-space detoxifier. Frankly I’ve had better massages—Roderigo seemed distracted—but the pedicure was phenomenal. The little Asian girl, I’m not sure what she was, was so cute. And the Vedic mud bath was to die for.

You know me, I’m not one to brag—but facts are facts, I look good in yoga gear, and don’t think those bitches weren’t checking me out. And I’ll tell you something, I’ll go chromosome to chromosome with any of those fakes any time they want to have a DNA power match. Northern European with African and Native American undertones, in a perfect blend? And 2.3% Neanderthal? Packing a punch, baby.

And I know I had a higher step count over three days than any of them—and heart rate, perspiration level, bowel regulation, and liver metabolism? Killer. I can show you the print-outs.

Once the sessions started, I didn’t actually see much of Madama Cassiopeia, but that’s okay—check the record, she was my personal astral guide, end of story. Nobody ever accused me of not getting what I paid for. She did drop by for a few minutes at one session, and I got a selfie with her. And the girl she sent was good, so who’s complaining? And I have to say, I surprised even myself at the level of awakeness I attained. Guru level, I’m just being honest.

It really is amazing to me how most people walk around asleep. Wasting their élan vital on some loser job, never opening their Third Eye, never liberating their etheric cord. Wake up, people! Don’t be a sucker for maya. Haven’t you heard you project your own reality? Speaking of which, I did a total of three astral projections during the retreat—I don’t care what you say, they were real—which you can compare to Laurena Sinclair who has never left this plane, I’d put money on it. You think she’s read a word of Gurdjieff or Ouspensky? Dream on. I couldn’t put down The Strange Life of Whoever it was. You don’t believe it? It’s on the bookshelf right by my bed. If you came over, you could see it, and lots of other books too—I’m just saying.

I’m serious, “The Holistic Cosmos,” “Connecting with Your Infinite Power Source,” “Old Age as a Toxin”—those were spectacular sessions. And I enjoyed the workshop of “Non-Acquiring” so much I dropped $1200 at the Non-Acquiring Merchandise booth. And Cro-Magnon diet? I’m all in. Brock can have his Big Macs and doughnuts. He’s a heart attack waiting to happen, but does he listen to me?

The retreat absolutely changed my life. So many people sleepwalk their way through life and never really understand what it’s all about, when it’s so simple: getting what you want, being comfortable, and flushing out toxins. I can’t wait for Laurena Sinclair to see me at the next museum fundraiser. I won’t gush, I won’t strut. I’ll just kiss up to that for-profit prison money, and I’ll be serene, and just say, “It was a lovely experience, dear, I recommend it. And Madame Cassiopeia was just—I really can’t describe it,” and wait for her to ask if I have a photo, and say, “oh, I think I have one on my phone somewhere.”

Then go home and give my subtle body some love.

November 7, 2019

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The Professional Rememberer

I can’t remember when I decided to become a Professional Rememberer.

Probably, though I think I can say I have an above-average memory, that’s because there wasn’t a single aha! moment. The job being the last refuge of a scoundrel, I believe I always knew I would end up doing it—like Amway or telephone sales or sperm donation—and just fell into it by default.

I could make a list of all the things I’ve tried to do, but that’s called a resumé, and I don’t believe that document needs to exist. There are, however, two skills that I’m sure elevate me above the lowest of the low, and that made me highly qualified for the job: one, the aforementioned good memory, and the other a unique gift, even if not one, like selling heating and air systems, that they pay you for: I am an astute observer of the human creature.

This is not boasting. For all the years I was the nobody going about my loser jobs, I had a hobby. I tried to predict what someone would say. You no doubt think I mean “generally.” I don’t. I mean exactly.

I would select the mark intuitively, and though there were traits I looked for, there was no “profile,” as they say. Young, old, female, male, black, white, introverted, extroverted—all were represented in my sport.

Like an author, which I was, searching for the perfect opening line, I would wait until the exact words sounded in my head, then write out the script. After that, it was a matter of waiting for the perfect opportunity. When it came, I would utter the line, perhaps something like “I hear it’s snowing in Ohio”—and if the response was a match—“Is it?” or “Who cares?” or “I’m glad I’m not there” or “Yeah, I heard that,” we’d be off. Naturally I had a digital recorder hidden in my pocket, and that night I would go home and with great delectation compare the recording to my script. I will admit I never enjoyed a word for word match, but sometimes got uncannily close, and though I did endure the occasional total bust, I averaged in the 80% range.

Ah, what delight— seeing my words brought to life like hooking a fish.

Excellent preparation, I think you will agree, for my job of last resort.

Professional Rememberer.

It took three interviews before I signed a contract. It’s important to be comfortable with each other. He was middle-aged and pretty well-off. Of course they’re all well-off because only people with some disposable income can afford Rememberers. I spent three months researching his life, then shadowed him for another month, during which time, and indeed from then on, he never acknowledged my presence personally. I was so there, I was simply not there. An extension of him, you might say. One of the definitive traits of a good Rememberer is the ability to be invisible, and there again, in this skill, having been invisible all my life, I excelled. You know, you’ve got your Oprahs and your Trumps and all the rest, who are always out there like cold sores, but it’s the invisible who hold the world together. You have to be invisible to know that.

As you might guess, I soon became so useful to my employer he left off even trying to keep up with the logistical details of life. I was always at his ear—walking in a building, for example: “Go left at the next corridor”—“Your destination is the third door on the right”—“You prefer the third urinal from the left”—that sort of thing. And it got where he didn’t even have to finish his questions. “Where did I leave—” “Your glasses?”—“Your keys?”—“The Benson file?—second folder from the top in the stack on the far right side of your desk.”

I was particularly good at business gatherings, and got to know the ways of most of his associates so well I often found myself slipping into the gratification of my old hobby. So sometimes instead of, say, whispering “You’re opposed to it” when someone would ask him what he thought of the new zoning proposal, I would claim the opening shot and say “Ask him what he thinks of the terrible new zoning proposal,” and although I provided his lines, stand back and watch my script unfold.

Things were a bit more complicated in his family. His son and daughter, and especially his wife, were constantly trying to get something out of him by exploiting his good nature—and he was, luckily for me, on the whole, a congenial man—but I had to confine myself to simple facts: what he said, when he said it, how much he paid last time, how many times he had paid, whose fault his wife had said something was, if it was indeed true that Courtney never got what she wanted. Naturally I wasn’t a favorite of the missus and the brats, but I’m nothing if not loyal. To the person writing the checks.

They don’t warn you about this in Rememberer school, mainly because it’s rare for a Rememberer to last more than a few months in a given job, but as I approached my first anniversary I began to find it difficult to distinguish his opinions from my own. Not because he had his opinions and I had mine, and I needed to keep mine separate from his—no. But because the very nature of the situation had in some way fused our minds.

If you think exactly like somebody, at some point you have to ask, are two people really needed?

I remember once at a party a woman approached him, and I felt the same revulsion that I know he did, so when he asked “Why do I hate her?” not only did I not know if I was answering for him or for myself, I realized that it didn’t matter.

“She’s not really a woman but a snake disguised as a woman. She is cold-blooded and has never laughed in her life. Also you ripped her off once.”

“Did I get caught?”

“Sort of. But it was three years, four months, and seventeen days ago. Ignore it and it will go away.”

Then, at my suggestion, he did the only thing he could: hooked his fingers at her like fangs and hissed—and we turned and walked away.

Time went on, I set endurance records in this job, and did what any shrewd court fool must do: became indispensable.

I wrote a script where at his death they didn’t notice he was gone and I was still there, and so I became him.

Which worked out well since by then I had long since ceased to remember who I was anyway.

November 14, 2019

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Malley

The pregnancy of Malley’s mother, which led to his birth, was unwelcome all around. Neither she, Malley’s father, nor what were soon to be Malley’s two older brothers had any desire for an additional member of the family, and considered his conception at best a vile accident, at worst a stroke of cosmic vindictiveness.

After his uncelebrated arrival, his father, secretly suspecting this wasn’t his doing, simply ignored him; his mother, who wasn’t gifted with an inexhaustible supply to begin with, withheld her love; and his brothers tormented him with impunity and righteous indignation.

Some would call that a bad start.

And things didn’t get better.

Do the unwanted and despised exude some subliminal chemical that alerts the people waiting in each subsequent phase of life? Apparently so, because the cruelty and ostracism of grade school unfolded inevitably when he got there.

He survived.

In high school the situation grew official with the advent of the “Hate Malley” society—not exactly a club, more of an underground conspiracy enabling everyone besides Malley to have a Malley: someone to whom all recognition, support, love, affection, and friendship was denied. People need that.

But at least they recognized a “him.” Which for a shaky moment enabled him to experience the first spasms of ego formation.

Then high school ended and that changed. The world ceased to hate, but just forgot him, which killed the ego thing and gave him some breathing room.

He found a job managing a warehouse for a small manufacturing company. A solo job at which he became so proficient no one else was needed. He had no way, and no need, to tell time—he just appeared at work and left punctually, went to bed, woke up, ate, likewise.

Malley found a rental house within walking distance of his job, ate very little, and had almost no needs or wants. He had no car, no computer, no phone, no television, and though once or twice he had heard a strain of music that kind of roused him, he had never really caught on to the music thing either.

So he was able to save the better part of his salary. As the years went by, his weekly walks to make a deposit at the bank resulted in a substantial sum, and when the old man renting him the house had a stroke, his family offered to sell Malley the house, so he bought it.

As he grew into middle age, luckily the manufacturing company survived the moody economy and stayed in business, and he kept his job. He didn’t want, and never bothered to imagine, any other.

Except for the occasional mildly curious glance of a random stranger, or someone in the grocery store or bank who had been seeing him there for years and paused to wonder, it was as though he had dissolved so deeply into the fabric of existence that no one was any longer aware of him.

He was the only free man in town.

Since it was so empty, Malley’s life was full. At the bifurcations of daily life—turning to the left or right, entering the first or second door, stepping or not on a crunchy leaf, for example—his mind habitually dramatized a flash projection of every path not taken: the different perception of reality from another angle, an alternate sequence of events, an uncrunched leaf being blown by the wind under a camellia bush where it could remember its days of sun rays and chlorophyll in peace. His mind was a theater, constantly playing scenarios that either might have, could have, should have, maybe somewhere else had, or never would have, happened. Whenever he closed his eyes, places he had never been, people he had never seen, situations he could never have purposely imagined, materialized effortlessly, ceaselessly, and he just watched.

Time was equally footloose in his timeless mind. He often found himself in the far future experiencing the present like a memory, walking through a world dreamy because it had already happened. At other times he experienced the present from the past, simultaneously seeing his projection of what the future might be, as it didn’t match but, as it were, shadowed what the future had settled for.

Some days he saw something when he looked in the mirror, some days he didn’t. When he did, he experienced what he would have called humor if he’d had need of a word for it, which he didn’t. He would probably have said that sensation was the essence of everything, if he’d had the inclination to formulate a philosophy, which he didn’t.

Walking onto the endlessly interesting blank canvas of his leaf and twig and acorn littered driveway after work, no eyes watching him, alive in no one’s mind, he might see a squirrel high in the water oak and inevitably find himself seeing the world from that perspective, sharing the squirrel’s consciousness. Same with birds. He never tired of seeing the stationary world through their darting eyes. Or the ants at his feet, into whose intricate kingdoms his imagination burrowed. Or he might notice a twig in the yard and experience its time-lapse decay back into the earth—or its disintegration by lawn mower blades, the pieces searching for other parts of itself, haunted by the ghosts of those days of being a twig. He would share the life experience of the beans he ate for dinner, from the sprouting out of the warm moist earth, to the hands picking them, to their entering his digestive system and becoming a part of him.

After dinner, weather permitting, he would sit on the back porch and watch the sun set, just as he would watch it rise out his front window in the mornings. He never got tired of that slow, suspenseful drama. He could see, as from a distance, the great ponderous globe slowly creaking around, could see the speck of himself as it turned into or out of the light. He spent endless hours trying to reconcile the vertical depiction of the world with its horizontal perception. Weather not permitting, he might spend the time in the clouds.

What did Malley believe in?

A meaningless question. And a waste of time.

He didn’t believe in anything, which is how he how he could believe in everything.

December 5, 2019

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Winter Solstice, 2019

On this gloomy morning I think back to an evening near the fall equinox in September when I sat on the porch in the twilight of what was still a summer day taking stock of the many signs of the coming change of season. Yes, it seems like twenty minutes, not three months, ago, but we won’t dwell on that. And now I sit here (inside) on the morning of the winter solstice, the most hopeful day of the year. The day when our seat on the Ferris wheel, after its long disheartening descent, reaches rock bottom and things can’t get any worse. From here on we are moving upward toward the light. As the days got depressingly shorter, it was even more depressing that they could get shorter yet, but now they can’t, and something in me over the following weeks will start to note the minutes we gain, though it’s usually February before I really feel it. That’s when things start to awaken and groggily decide they may as well have another go at life. New birds show up, the first daffodils, the suicidal Japanese magnolias, a smell you smell at no other time of the year, and it feels like there’s so much more space. More possibility. More hope. You just might make it. Merle Haggard was right—if we make it through December we’ll be fine.

It’s the time of year I like to look through the nursery catalogs. Aside from a few peppers, I don’t really garden anymore, so I won’t be ordering anything from those vegetable-porn publications, but it’s like people who read cookbooks just to read them—I just like to see those photographs of children holding award-winning butternut squash, and all the different kinds of corn and beans and walnut trees and delphiniums, and luxuriate in the idea of summer, without the inconvenience of actual summer. I richly experience what E. O. Wilson calls biophilia. Love of all life.

But I also love the cycle for being a cycle. In fact, all cycles. The secret thrill of change itself. Rhythm. Yin and yang. I love spring, but there’s no such thing without those hard cold days of January. Hope itself is part of a rhythm with despair. Fair needs foul.

I’m not sure if any thought went into the 23 1/2 degree tilt of our home planet on its axis, but whatever—thank you.

I have reached a point where my batteries need recharging. My brain and my eyes are tired. I think a handful of people actually read the reflections I put on this blog, and I am deeply grateful to you. But I don’t imagine you will really be disappointed to have one less thing to read for a while. When I started this blog I had stocked up a few of these posts, and today marks the fifty-sixth. I have really enjoyed writing them, but of late I’ve been feeling the grip of self-inflicted coercion on my throat, and I need a break. I would like to build up another little cache of whatever these things are, before I return to resume progress toward the state where I’ve said everything I have to say and retire. Hopefully not go beyond it. But it’s the time to reflect and work on some other matters that I really need. So I’m going to take a sabbatical, I’m not sure how long.

I also need a break from Facebook. There’s good stuff on there, and I enjoy staying in touch with friends, but it’s all starting to be very distracting for me. Like all times, the times we live in are addled, conflicted, and confused. For many of us, that conflict and confusion are our main entertainment. As usual, Zappa was right: “Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”

The climate is warming, and the world population is growing. These are our problems. Everything else is secondary.

Sometimes you just need to step back for a while, tune out the braying of popular culture, and try to find the springs of hope for humanity.

Love your neighbor.

December 21, 2019

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Divide and Conquer

“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”

Jonathan Swift

When I chanced upon the comment thread incited by the admittedly confrontational remark of a left-leaning acquaintance, defending a politician loathed by the right, I grew sick and had to stop reading. My face flushed and I felt hot, as though I were standing near a pool of corrosive chemicals. The flood of venomous responses, few addressing the writer’s point and all vilifying him personally, conjured up writhing images of savage faces at the keyboard, packs of jackals eviscerating a still-living gazelle, a sneering face on a plastic curtain, with a dead feeling of nothingness behind it—empty, silent, nauseating.

This is how you control people: oppose them to each other. You hide behind the plastic curtain as they flay each other into impotence. In those comments, a rare voice or two pleaded for us to remember our commonality, to value it above our superficial differences, to fear our fate if we should turn on each other, but those sentiments had about the same chance as the above-mentioned gazelle.

You can’t help but think, things might go better if people could just entertain themselves. Unfortunately, getting into the public mudpit tops most people’s list of having something to do.

The alpha figure people crave, they themselves invent by hollowing out a space that some opportunistic sniffer will always smell and step into. Which is how that figure knows what they want to hear. All he has to do is tell it to them in simplified, digestible form. The minions will be so grateful for not having to think for themselves, they will slide right into his pocket. For bureaucrat/politicians, with a propaganda machine at their disposal, and the infinite resources of our system enabling them to evade, distort, and lie, it’s amazing how easy it is to do.

And quite lucrative. Keeping people pitted against one another is good business. A lot of people profit from it, just as they do from any war, and the incentives to keep those handy fictions “us” and “them” alive and bickering are enormous.

I saw a vision of my hometown as it was in my young days. Orderly schools, churches flush with cash, the bustling library, PTA meetings, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, swimming lessons, dance studios, Little League. All the dads had jobs, and some of the moms, but most of the latter raised the family. The economic base was solid. It was a good life, destined to go into the books as the good ol days.

If you were white.

If only we could make America white again!

I’m as nostalgic as the next guy, and honest enough to see the injustice those enchanted days were built upon. But as I look back now, those two or three decades after the second world war seem so fragile and transitory. And mythical. About as brief and shining as Camelot.

In our current political situation, everyone seems to be thinking the same thing: if only they were vanquished and we were in control. If they were losers and we were winners. If only, one way or the other, the election would go our way. That would teach them, and we could get our myth back. But I’m pretty sure no myths are coming back, and the problems won’t end with the election—they will only become entrenched and more dangerous. Just because half the people in the country push a certain button doesn’t mean they’re going to disappear after the results are tabulated. They and their problems aren’t going anywhere. At least not overnight. Only time and demographics can do that.

In the meantime, attention must be paid.

No matter what you do, your time will pass. Especially today, with technology changing so fast. What happens to a person the economy no longer needs? Hard-working, motivated, skilled, capable of contributing much—it doesn’t matter. Once this rat-race to the cliff called human progress has no further use of you, you are done. Dressed out and not only not playing, but there’s no game. And not only that, but you have to listen to people you don’t understand saying that your story of what was good was a lie, and now there’s this new story that wants to negate your values, your experiences, and your deepest sense of what is meaningful, and replace yours.

In the end it’s always a battle over which myth wins.

What becomes of the people whose myth loses, those whom the economy no longer needs?

Make brain think again!

I think that’s mostly not going to happen. What’s depressing is that I’m pretty sure I know what the real problem is—the perennial one, fatal to all myths in the end:

Human beings acting like human beings.

We are not rational, let alone divine, creatures. We are animals who have won the current battle for survival. You know, Homo sapiens—the only surviving species of the genus Homo. An animal not particularly known for tolerance. In fact, “tolerance” is just another abstraction—one that, like all abstractions, takes a distant back seat to self-interest and survival.

We were “Homo,” along with a number of other Homo species, evolving with every other life form, over several million years before the “sapiens” cropped up—after we had lucked into some changes that allowed our brains to grow bigger. Homo sapiens have been around 200,000 to 300,000 years. The so-called Cognitive Revolution dates to about 70,000 ago.

During those long, unsapiened years, wherever Homo sapiens went, the indigenous Homo species, together with many other life forms, entirely disappeared.

Does anybody really wonder why?

Admit it: Homo sapiens just don’t like people different from themselves, and like many of their cousins in the animal kingdom, their instinct is to chase them down and kill them.

Find your tribe.

February 25, 2020

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Loss

“A time to get, and a time to lose.” Ecclesiastes 3:6

If nothing else, loss forces us to recognize that we are not the individuals we seem to be, but transient swellings in the interconnected network of everything.

Loss knows no season, but it is in the final chapters of our lives that we become most convincingly acquainted with it. We reserve a particular horror for loss that strikes us as unnatural: young children losing parents, parents losing children at any age, young people just starting out, children, period—and to be touched by any of these is to be wounded for life. Loss toward the end of life, where it belongs, is different; the great theme of existence asserts itself. It is in the contract from the beginning: we will build up, and in time we will lose it all.

In case you’re forgetful, loss helps you remember that.

In my own season of loss, I know perfectly well my experience is not exceptional, but typical. In the last ten years: Mama, other beloved family members, four of my closest friends. Not to mention less close friends, parents of friends, acquaintances, public figures of the Zeitgeist—too many to name. But are we really in a world without Gregg Allman, David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Pat Sullivan, Robin Williams, Stephen Hawking, Arnold Palmer? If we lose another Beatle, I’m in trouble.

But the fact is, we accept loss, and adjust to it, because it is inevitable. And here towards the end, I find myself thinking about it every day.

Obviously, loss of someone or something you love is loss of yourself. Because that part of yourself you gave to what you loved, you can’t get back. Nor would you want to. The love itself doesn’t die, nor does the person who, just as he or she primarily did even while living, lives within you. What you’ve lost is not the person, but the space the person occupied.

You’ve got one less place to go.

I’ve had seasons in my life when I had so many places to go I’ve thought, “I just need some time to myself!” At my time in life now, I know better than to wish for such things.

In every group, every family, every generation there has to be someone who is the last one standing, even if they’re not doing a lot of standing. Remember Eben Flood in “Mr. Flood’s Party,” or the thrilling poetry of the Last Survivor in Beowulf? Or my grandmother, who outlived my grandfather by seven years—and with him lost her home, all her friends, and the world she knew and understood. She slowly went out of focus during those seven years, and no conversation concerning contemporary events could hope to last longer than thirty seconds with her, before she was back in the Birmingham of her girlhood.

When something dies, it’s not that an empty space is left where it once was, but that the space itself existed only to accommodate the thing, and dies with it. Where the space was becomes featureless and empty, and in time can no longer maintain the charade of being a space at all. You see the procession of having lost this, then this, then this, and your own reality begins to lose resolution. You think of what you still have—what happens if I lose this, and this? What if you do end up being the last one?

Reality would desert you, and you would find yourself on an island in a sea of nothingness.

The worst thing about loss is the way it drives you deeper into yourself.

And I don’t know about you, but going deeper into myself is something I would rather choose to do than be forced to.

But for all loss takes, does it give anything?

Well, like a man who knows he will be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.

I love spring, and spring is coming. I think of all the springs stretching back through my past, and now I suddenly find myself thinking, what if this were the last spring I ever see? Not as a mental exercise, but as a reality. The effect would be like seeing it all for the first time. Really seeing it.

If you have your own work you love, loss allows you to devote more time to it and lets you experience the deeply gratifying process of learning more about it and getting better at it.

You can try to make yourself a better—more enlightened—person—

Find some deeper truth—

Find peace—

If such things are even possible in a vacuum.

Some losses shake our foundations, sending us like engineers to inspect the base of the dam for cracks, trying to determine if we can still be our old selves.

We can’t. The bell definitely tolls for us.

Over a million people in the world take their own lives every year, something like 47,000 in the U.S. That’s about 130 a day.

I judge none, my heart is with all.

Everybody who knew PK loved him.

March 5, 2020

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PK Buff

1954-2020

PK grew up in Hickory, North Carolina. His life came to be centered around Auburn, but he was always a Carolina boy at heart.

He attended Hickory public schools—Viewmont Elementary, College Park Junior High—from 1960-1969. In the fall of 1969 he joined his cousins Bryan and Rusty at Sewanee Military Academy in Sewanee, Tennessee. The military program was dropped after his junior year so he graduated from Sewanee Academy in the first post-military graduating class in 1972. During his senior year at Sewanee, PK was the third highest-ranking student.

PK had the size and talent to play football, but it wasn’t his thing and he didn’t enjoy it. So in a life-defining move, he joined the swim team. Cousin Rusty says: “Our swim team—I was on it too—had always had a couple of guys that were really good, but we weren’t much of a threat in a large meet. That changed when PK joined the team.” The team already had some outstanding divers, but PK was so talented in so many freestyle events the team became a force to be reckoned with. Rusty adds: “It seemed to do all kind of things for him. He walked taller, became a big man on campus, and was just generally happier, it seemed. He was a different guy after that first season.”

Of course Margaret Carol—“Sis”—was a constant presence in his life. Their parents divorced in 1958, and PK and MC stayed in Hickory with their mother, while their father moved to Asheville. PK and MC experienced the usual sibling warfare when they were young. They later laughed about the time PK chased MC through the house with a hammer, and MC just made it into her room and locked the door in time. About 1960, MC and PK were attending separate summer camps, and at a social arranged for the boys at Camp Rockmont, and the girls at Camp Merrimac, to meet, PK confided in MC that he was homesick. “That night I cried myself to sleep worrying about him,” MC says. MC also remembers coming home from the hospital with her newborn daughter Molly in 1986, and PK was the first person there. Molly always had a special place in PK’s heart. As Sis and PK grew up, over the years they grew closer. When their mother died in 1978, their relationship became stronger than ever.

PK, always a dog lover, had a veterinary career as well as a swimming career in mind when he came to Auburn in 1972. It was either then, or when he had left for Sewanee (MC can’t remember which), that MC told him this was his chance to become “Paul.” PK would have none of it. I don’t remember asking, but I recall PK once confiding in me what both the “P” and the “K” stood for, and asked me to keep it to myself. Though I hardly think it’s a classified secret, I’ve always honored that. At Auburn he became a walk-on member of the swim team during Coach Eddie Reese’s first season as the Auburn head coach. As teammate John Asmuth says, “PK was one of the most phenomenal success stories in college swimming history as he improved from 1:58 in the 200 yard freestyle to 1:39.” In March 1974, PK and sophomore teammates Mike Drews, Logan Pierson, and John Pierson became Auburn’s first swimming All-Americans as members of the 800 yard freestyle relay. The next year he was named an individual All-American following his fourth-place finish in the 200-yard freestyle at the NCAA championships. At the end of his collegiate career, he was a six-time All-American, the school record holder in the 200-yard freestyle, and had been voted one of the team’s captains in his junior and senior years.

Those were glory years for PK. In a hometown newspaper article in 1975, PK said, “I’m what you call a late bloomer for swimming . . . Most people who are going to be good in swimming start to show good times early. I was really slow in high school. I decided to go to Auburn because they had hired a new coach and he had gotten some really good swimmers. I didn’t want to be in the outside lane again so I had to work hard. My first year in college my times weren’t too good but last year I really started to improve. Last year I was an All-American at Auburn. The reason my times have improved so much is because I stopped being a four month a year man and started swimming all the time.”

In summers PK began swimming ten miles a day. During the school year he would be in the pool from 6:30-8:30 am, then go to class, then to the weight room, then back in the pool from 4:30-6:30. He went from a walk-on freshman to a half-time scholarship as a sophomore, to a full ride in his junior and senior years.

In 1975 PK was in California training for the 1976 Olympics. His speeds were losing some of their edge, and as ill fortune would have it, he contracted mononucleosis. Sadly, team member Mike Drews broke his ankle around the same time, further crippling the team. Mark Spitz beat out PK for his spot on the U.S. team. Anybody who knew PK knows how that disappointment haunted him.

When PK came to Auburn he became a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity, and his roommate was Howard King. They became lifelong friends, and I can attest to the depth of that bond in PK’s life. After I got to know Howard, it was easy to understand why.

PK graduated from Auburn in 1976, and that August he and Patria Fitzpatrick married and lived in Gold Hill, outside Auburn, as PK became a student coaching assistant with the 1977 Auburn swim team. Eddie Reese had gone to the University of Texas and Richard Quick was the new coach. Among other accomplishments in that era, PK, and Patria, were involved in the recruiting of legendary Auburn swimmer Rowdy Gaines.

PK and Patria lived in a beautiful 1832 house owned by George Robertson. That’s when PK got to know George’s son, Pooka, who became a lifelong friend and neighbor. Pooka died in 2019. Mr. Robertson was renting the recently renovated and relocated house for the first time, so the young couple had to interview as potential tenants. In a fortunate twist of fate, when they arrived for the interview one of Mr. George’s hackney show ponies had attempted to jump over a gate and gotten caught atop it. Patria, an equestrian, and PK, an athlete, managed to free the pony with no injuries. Interview over. They became close friends with Mr. George, who allowed them to keep two horses in his pasture. Patria remembers PK coming home and catching his favorite, Dude, a large dun Quarter Horse, and riding him bareback. In 1979, they moved to Elon College, North Carolina where PK became head coach for a swim club. In 1982, PK and Patria divorced and PK came back to Auburn that year to pursue an MBA degree and to serve as an assistant swim coach again under Coach Richard Quick from 1982-1985. PK finished the coursework for the MBA, but having developed serious doubts about the sedentary life of a businessman, never completed the final project.

In 1982, PK moved into a hunting cabin with a huge fireplace in rural Chambers county owned by Dr. Allen Edgar. Patria and I had been in graduate school together at Auburn in the seventies, and I had met PK then, but these were the years when I really got to know him. We frequented Rusty’s, famed for oysters and fried chicken. Sandy Langner, recently divorced from Auburn legend David Langner, became a waitress at Rusty’s in 1985, and she and PK had their first date on Groundhog Day, 1986. In August Sandy moved out to the cabin. I can remember get-togethers at the cabin when it felt like a hundred people, including many Auburn athletes, were there. PK was an early fan of Jimmy Buffett, who rightly bragged that he could always “draw a crowd,” and you could say the same thing for PK. He was a people magnet. Those years, up until the razing of the famed Auburn waterhole in the early 2000’s, were the heyday of Harry’s Bar, owned by Maurice “Mo” Weeks, where for years PK was a regular, and got to know many of the denizens of Auburn’s demimonde. It seemed PK knew everybody.

During that period, I owned and ran a small printing business in Auburn and stayed very busy, but I found time to play in the Auburn city softball league, on Brian Upright’s Pet Stop team. PK was one of three left-handed sluggers on that team. Another was Dave Marsh, a fellow Auburn swimmer and later coach. Those lefties loved that field by the old Auburn city pool with its short right field fence. We won the league in 1983.

On Halloween 1987 I went out to a party at the cabin. Some folks had come in costume, including Sandy and PK as a bride and groom, and John Burrows as a preacher. It turned out he was a preacher, and Sandy and PK were a bride and groom. The wedding took place amid the revelry.

Not long after that, PK and Sandy bought the cabin and five acres from Dr. Edgar. In 1991, Sandy’s twelve year old son Brad Langner came to live with them, and PK, a master builder, began the transformation (“renovation” isn’t enough word) of the cabin into the stunning and unique wonder it became. First he added a bedroom and bathroom, then around 1995 he tore off the front of the house and built the great room and kitchen, and sometime later added the back deck. There would be no way to count the parties, meals, football games (with limoncello, store-bought, later homemade), New Years celebrations, and many other gatherings at that beautiful place. The most memorable gatherings, for me, were the annual Yard Games which PK and Sandy hosted for twenty-five years (1988-2013). For many years PK set up a huge grill in the back yard where he greasied himself barbecuing chicken halves. Eventually he wearied of that chore and it became a total, instead of partial, covered dish affair. Yard Games was always the first Saturday in May, same as the Kentucky Derby, and for a quarter century that date was a red letter day on the calendar, a rite of passage into spring and summer. The day always meant a lot to me personally since my son Martin’s birthday is May 3: every now and then the days would coincide, and if they didn’t, they were close. We always had a cake for Martin, the candles counting up as the years counted down. In the early days the crowds were teeming and we played volleyball, croquet, bocci, badminton, horseshoes, and shot the potato gun. I don’t think the sport of “washers” was in the picture yet. The weather was almost always gorgeous in the way only early May in the south can be, but I do remember a very rainy Yard Games that I’m sure Martin and Frank Smith remember too.

During the eighties PK started the tradition of canoe trips on the Tallapoosa River. Typically we, a flotilla of three or four canoes, would put in at Bibby’s Ferry, just downstream from the spot they would own years later, and would get out the next day, sunburned, at Horseshoe Bend, with a night around a campfire at the edge of somebody’s pasture in between. I remember one night, after we’d finally made it to our tents, when a Chuck-will’s-widow landed in the campsite and called, very loudly, all night to his love interest upstream. I remember another trip I couldn’t go on, in October of 1984. Auburn was playing Florida State that Saturday night. We were listening to the game at Doc Markle’s cabin in Auburn, not knowing that the guys on the trip had miraculously gotten a radio signal and were listening to it too—a thriller in Tallahassee that came down to the last minute, with Auburn winning 42-41. We compared notes later. Those float trips restored the soul. But I have to admit, there were some long slow stretches on the river, and I remember the year we equipped the canoes with troll motors. We never said we were trying to be heroes.

In 2010, PK and Sandy, Brad, Darren Medford, and Phil Thompson bought their beautiful site on a high bank overlooking the Tallapoosa, just above Bibby’s Ferry and across the river from Frog Eye, with the Shoals a short jaunt upstream. They moved a doll’s house from Brad and his wife Laura’s back yard up there in 2011, and in 2012 PK started work on what was to become another unique and wondrous creation, the River House. For the last several years we enjoyed float trips, restorative afternoons at the Shoals, good food, and good friends. One afternoon in 2017, PK was sitting in his chair in the shallow water of the Shoals, and as he often did, reached down and raked his hand through the sand and rocks, and picked up a rock. On that particular afternoon it was no ordinary rock, but a stunning, perfectly preserved three-inch long spearhead. On another afternoon at the Shoals, my dachshund Bernard, miraculous survivor of a number of near-death experiences, had yet another when he made the mistake of trying to swim out to the rocks where I was enjoying the rush of the cool water, and got caught in the current. As he spun around and bobbed under, PK leapt to the rescue. He snared him in the water plants on the opposite bank. Just in time. Bernard got PK a bottle of his favorite whiskey.

In 2016, Brad and Laura gave the world the miniature force of nature called Ruby June. I guess Brad and Laura are Daddy and Mommy, but Sandy became Milly, and PK, Chief. There’s a photograph of June and Chief, back to back on the sofa reading, that says it all.

No account of PK’s life would be complete without a mention of his dogs. There were the exceptions—Jessie and Bessie, the pointers, Dottie, the German Shorthair Pointer, Buddy the irascible dachshund PK and Sandy got from Mo Weeks, who liked Sandy, tolerated PK, and bit everybody else—but PK’s breed of choice, as everybody knows, was Chesapeake Bay Retrievers, and he had a long line of them, dating to his first, Tawn, later known as Granny. Granny was a smarty, who legend has it could differentiate between the words “ball” and “bowl,” and fetch the one you asked for. I’ll probably leave somebody out, but after Granny came Folly. Actually, there were two Follys, the first stolen from PK’s and Patria’s back yard as a puppy, the second her replacement, whom he had when he met Sandy. Then there were Bailey, Susie, Annabelle, and the wonderful Peggy who, along with Dottie, survives him. (Note: since I first wrote this, we lost Peggy. She was a wonderful dog.)

PK loved those dogs, he loved people, he loved music, reading, and good times. He hated the poisoned politics of our divided times. If you needed help, he was there. He was a generous, loving, talented, unforgettable man who left a deep mark on everyone he touched.

Somehow I, all of us, need to keep going from this point, but it won’t ever be the same.

April 5, 2020

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The Story Wins

(Some reflections after reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari)

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”—Hamlet/Shakespeare

We are all familiar with the sensation of receiving a blow to some treasured delusion of self-importance, and the methodical process by which our panicky egos right the overturned cart, twist the unwelcome charges away, inflict the blame elsewhere, and put our little brat-selves back on the throne. It is the same acrobatic mental work that enables us to consume fiction: Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”

Harari dates the appearance of the genus Homo at 2.5 million years ago. The species sapiens appeared on the scene about 200,000 years ago. He dates the so-called Cognitive Revolution at 70,000 years ago, and notes that from somewhere around 13,000 years ago, sapiens was the only surviving human species.

The Cognitive Revolution was, obviously, a great leap in brain power, and among other advances led to the emergence of fictive language, which Harari sees as a key engine driving the development of modern humans. Then there was the Agricultural Revolution, 10,000-12,000 years ago—when hunter-gatherers became peasants in permanent settlements—then kingdoms, early precursors of writing, money, polytheistic religions, and, 6,000 years ago, writing itself. The Scientific Revolution dates to a mere 500 years ago, driven by the epiphany of humans—well, some humans—recognizing their own ignorance, and gave us a means of investigating our peculiar situation. The Industrial Revolution, and the capitalism that fueled it, when states and markets took the nurturing place of families and small communities, vastly increased wealth and human misery, belched millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, and wiped out countless life forms, dates to only 200 years ago.

The key change of the Cognitive Revolution, to me, was a drastic shift in human perception of time and space. The earliest states needed to think ahead, and keep records of the past; and the growth of intellect, and its concomitant technology, generated movement (the mass exodus of sapiens out of Africa occurred at about the same time), and a general enlargement of the feel of reality. Through the eons, the stage on which our drama is being enacted has steadily expanded, and we the actors steadily shrunk. Today, as we deal with billions of, maybe infinite, galaxies in an expanding universe, humans as the center of the universe is a hard sell. And we’ve come to realize that a protracted sense of time leads to chronic anxiety, and people spend vast sums on therapy and various disciplines to block out the mental narrator of their time travels and do what pre-modern humans did effortlessly: live in the present. It could be a chicken or egg thing, but I would bet this shift was critical in the eons-long evolution of consciousness. By creating “the past” and “the future,” our brains not only accommodated records of crops, debts, payments, planting strategies, and so forth, but allowed us to reconstruct and project scenes and narratives not immediately present. Add a sense of the past to a scientific admission of ignorance, and you get several college majors. Our ability to project possible dangers better enables us to avoid them. There’s a reason we imagine the worst. Whether cause or consequence I don’t know, but along with this shift in the perception of time came an increased sophistication of language, and the birth of stories. And, happily for all of us, storytelling.

Harari discusses how grand narratives enabled people to work in large groups, accomplish great projects, fight wars, forge empires. The lives of sapiens have mainly been centered in small groups, and still are, but thanks to the bonding power of the big stories we buy into—patriotism, religion, money, class stratification, whatever—we can suspend disbelief and believe that ourselves and thousands, or millions, of strangers comprise a single group, even if in place of knowing other people we substitute categorizing and objectifying them.

Thus humans have achieved two modalities of reality: the material, and the fictitious. To us they are so intertwined we can’t really separate them. Like everything that used to seem simple, “reality” has become impossible to define. What’s “real” is what your brain decides is real.

To me, the grandest narrative of all is this split of our perception of reality into the material and the immaterial, or spiritual. It was really inevitable with the growth of abstraction itself, even if we need to remember that an objective material reality is itself an abstraction: the one that drove the Scientific Revolution.

Story, or myth, has the power to put its illusion at the apex of our sense of reality.

Plato thought the concept of something was more real than its physical manifestations. Think of the blueprint of a house—not even the blueprint but the idea the blueprint represents. From the blueprint you can build any number of more or less identical houses, all of which in time will succumb to decay and ultimately cease to exist. But the idea, in this way of thinking, cannot decay or die. It is more real. And it’s interesting that the more we delve into the essence of matter today, the less like a thing, and the more like an idea, it seems.

All religions owe their existence to that distinction. Christianity divides reality into the material (the things of man and earth), and the spiritual (the things of God and Heaven), and tells us to believe in the latter but not the former, a cast of mind which gave subjugated ancient Hebrews, and us today, a way of bearing the miseries of life. The Gospel of Matthew records the response of Jesus to Peter when Peter objected to Jesus’ foretelling of his suffering and death and resurrection: “Get thee behind me, Satan . . . thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of man.” He didn’t mean that Peter was literally Satan, just that he had the wrong story.

Buddha saw the root of human suffering in craving, and resisted the abstraction which engenders it. Like much oriental philosophy, he emphasized the material, the unmythologized, the present. With its aversion to consumption, it is no wonder Buddhism, the bureaucratization of his insights, didn’t become the religion of Rome and from there, the capitalistic west. The way modern Christianity, at least around me, has been warped and skewed to accommodate materialism and made something like an upscale subdivision out of the Kingdom of Heaven is not surprising. It is the winning story.

You know life is ephemeral and ultimately meaningless. But you believe it is richly meaningful and lasts forever.

When knowing and believing are in conflict, believing always wins.

That is, the story wins.

Consider the current fracture in American society. I personally think the two sides want essentially the same thing—a comfortable, economically secure, meaningful, guilt-free life. The problem is, they don’t share the same story.

Or as I see it, they don’t both have one.

The political right clearly understands that politics are not about facts, but emotions. They have a story. The political left opposes most of what the right stands for, but has no moving vision of what there should be instead. The left has no common story. The reason for that is that there isn’t one. Anybody who gives the matter much thought knows we can’t survive living as we have—but how to get to the situation where we embrace and control the inevitable changes while continuing as a country—nobody knows. Time itself will bring the changes, but you can’t help but wonder if the idea of a country, or at least this country, still means anything. A country, after all, is just another story. This country has always been driven by opposing stories—as Lincoln said, a house divided. The seeds of the Civil War were there from the beginning—we were in danger of one after the British were defeated—and we didn’t reunify after the actual Civil War. The same mindsets are still in place. And a group no longer unified by a single story won’t survive.

Like “morning in America,” the right paints a picture of mythical Fifties white America, the goal of our quest: bustling towns, booming industries and farms, safe streets, minorities safely in their place, a benevolently armed populace, no muddle over life and death, gender, religion in public life, stem cells, or carbon emissions. They have a clear villain—Them—harebrained, elitist, scolding, progressive loons. These are things people—that is, some people—feel. It’s a screenplay.

The left has its own vision, and certainly its own vivid Them, but I don’t think its vision makes it all the way to story. The left dwells on issues and policies, poor material for screenplays, when it should be telling a story.

Would it be something like this?—A future where the line between human and machine becomes impossible to draw, where human and artificial intelligence can’t really be differentiated, where DNA profiles rather than resumes serve as job applications, where the ancient bond of man and woman will become just one of many options, where sex itself will be more a matter of personal expression than procreation, where humans themselves will be significant engineers in the nature of their offspring, and the idea of “playing God,” along with God, will no longer mean anything, where the “races” blur with each other and that concept too becomes meaningless, where life itself is conceived of in a way we can’t even imagine, and the idea of one human/one soul will have about the same status as sprites and nymphs and gnomes have for us, where technology continues to solve many of the problems it created to begin with, immersing us ever deeper in the process begun in the Agricultural Revolution, and accelerated ever since, barreling us toward our unimaginable fate.

Inevitable or not, who wants to hear that?

It’s easy to tell a story that draws its material from the past; difficult, when from the future.

Science depends on the premise “I don’t know.” Science can’t do its work if we confuse believing with knowing.

But stories can.

March 12, 2020

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Night and Day

It is in the periods of liminality that I am most aware of him.

Late nights on the porch—as the random wind and nightsounds displace order.

Mornings—as I lie in the pre-dawn dissolving back into this weary shell.

I think I remember in older days he made more of an effort to disguise himself, erase his tracks. But now, like an old man tired of holding back his farts, he’s grown careless. I find odd books left open on the chair arm, books I can’t, or dare not, read, sticky notes left in haphazard places around the house, maddeningly almost legible. Disposable epiphanies, casual mockeries, wizard words? I don’t know. He abandons them indifferently and eventually they blow away like leaves, or end up in corners, snagged in webs, or just fall into the cracks of the universe.

During the day I am obsessed with details. I find, gather, organize them. Details mimic the march of seconds and minutes and hours, and consume the day. This is my work. Neurotic and exhausting. Obeying the master, submitting to tedium, day after day—this brings no real fulfillment. Only the avoidance of more regret. If lives had flavors, this would be mine.

This is my thought: he has no such master. He lives in the wild nights. He cares nothing for details and has no goals. He doesn’t bow to the tyrant of time. He lives in a smear.

Yes. I envy him.

He thinks I’m insane. No, be honest—he knows I’m insane.

Only him. I can’t say what others suspect. But he knows.

He sees me killing myself with my habits. This is why he knows I’m insane. Or is it the other way around? Who cares?

How I wish insane still meant something.

I just want to be him.

And if that made him me, that would be his problem.

Oh, my sweating dreams. That series of Sisyphean labors—trying to free a car from a sea of mud, being forced to mouth the words of a language I don’t understand, carrying burdens down endless corridors, one turning into another. All the regrets, the futilities, the beliefs—mine alone! While he pads about the dark house drunk. Or bored.

And when you are scattered behind yourself like a wreckage of broken glass, what is left to be you?

Yes, when I gravitate to the porch at night I can feel myself growing more like him, but this is the threshold where he takes over.

He watches me killing myself—why doesn’t he just finish the job?

Ha. I won’t let him.

March 25, 2020

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Super Bowl 202_

It is now generally referred to as The Game—infamous to some, heroic to others—but in fact, as football games go, it was pretty routine, and except for a couple of flashes of excitement—a fumble that became a field goal, a 40-yard punt return—mostly dull.

The excitement was more in the stands, where the hatred the two teams—technically The Team Formerly Known by a Demeaning Name, and The Team Between Names, but we’ll call them Team A and Team B—had for each other seethed like an overheating reactor. Down on the field, the defenses dominated, but each team managed to put together a couple of monotonous drives. Team A was trailing 21-17 toward the end of the fourth quarter, when they finally got in the red zone. Team B’s defense held them on third and goal, and Coach Dube Diflet on the sideline, who for most of the game had provided more entertainment than his team, seemed to be in the final stages of a meltdown—running up and down the sideline, screaming, throwing clipboards, headsets, and the like onto the field.

Fourth and goal. The quarterback dropped back and threw a bullet to his favorite receiver slanting across the end zone for what looked like a sure touchdown—except for the four penalty flags thrown simultaneously from four different directions of the field. Later, with the playback footage sealed from public viewing, many people remembered seeing Team A’s left guard envelop Team B’s hard-charging right tackle in a bear hug and wrestling him to the turf. The Team A fans had no such memory.

Coach Diflet stormed onto the field screaming, “That’s bullshit! I’m done with penalties!” so loudly the fans actually heard him, and taking what some spectators later recalled as a swing at the line judge.

Like dogs that get excited because their master does, the players were hopped up on the sideline, and the loyal part of the crowd was excreting a thundering low-pitched Boo! so mean resentful and threatening, the other part of the crowd started considering the exits. But somehow the referees assessed the holding penalty, and from the twenty-one yard line now, Team A took another shot. They slyly ran the same play, the quarterback threw a strike, but the db was right with the receiver, and with a perfectly timed leap tipped the ball away at the last second.

Coach Diflet went berserk, demanding a flag for the pass interference that half the spectators remembered as flagrant, the other half as non-existent. Coach Diflet made an awkward attempt to pull the flag from the ref’s pocket, but the terrified official managed to evade him. So he ran to the cheerleaders, wrested away the mic, and bellowed “This game is rigged! The officials were paid a hundred thousand dollars each—everybody knows it!” The crowd’s menacing roar turned uglier. Sporadic gunfire erupted in the stands, and only 124 people were killed—something of a bright spot as later most commentators agreed it could have been so much worse.

With still a minute to play, Coach Diflet ordered his team off the field. The players took off their helmets, plugged a finger in each ear, and ran to the lockers crying “We won! We won!”

An injunction issued after the game sealed all game footage from public viewing until an accusation of doctoring could be investigated. Not surprisingly, a few pirated clips circulated in the frenetic online culture, but were ignored by the angry fans who already knew what they thought and were immune to the bogus bullshit masquerading as “evidence.”

The game, of course, was recorded as a loss for Team A, but a growing mob didn’t accept that, and the next morning Coach Diflet was on all the radio and TV talk shows and all over the internet citing the obvious rigging of the game and the paying off of the corrupt officiating crew in his demand that the L be changed to a W.

By that time, the referees, all of whom had received death threats, were in hiding.

“Fake penalties,” Coach Diflet kept saying. “They cheated with penalties, they cheated with ball placement—the players all saw it, you can ask any of them—they cheated with the game clock—it’s an open-shut case. The referees were paid off—nobody knows where any of them are, they’re not answering their phones! I wonder why that is? The commissioner knows it too, but he’s too chicken shit to do anything about it. They’re all lemmings!”

When a reporter pointed out that there was only one critically close placement call in the game, which had resulted in Team A being awarded a first down, and that Team B had actually been penalized more than Team A, Coach Diflet just kept repeating “ball placement” and “fake penalties.” Eventually it was all he would answer to any question, so there was no point asking him what he had for breakfast.

“Hang the Commissioner!” began to echo from rallies around the country, and yard signs began sprouting in yards: “We won! We won!” in some places, “You lost! You lost!” in others—but with the matter now entangled in lawsuits, everybody knew a final judgment on the outcome could take years. If one ever came.

And Coach Diflet began eyeing a run for the Senate.

January 3, 2022

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Curiosity

Curiosity is life. It alone can, and regularly does, save us. It can also destroy us, since people in power are afraid of it, but that’s for another day. The human brain craves something to do; luckily, we find ourselves in a vast puzzle, with frontiers of knowledge in every direction, and a universe under every rock—enough to gratify the hungry brain forever.

The opposite of curiosity is certainty, or apathy—both just words for exhaustion. I can understand the longing for certainty—in some things—but only as a foothold for reaching something else. How do people with all the answers not feel the existential terror of living without wonder? The brain’s craving for exercise can be short-circuited by low-grade substitutes: nosiness, gossip, the sugar-rush of social media, reality TV, porn, Rube Goldberg conspiracies, capitalistic religion, fast food. People get rich by keeping you from thinking.

Curiosity implies effort. Certainty and apathy are zero energy.

Curiosity about other human beings, beyond the superficial, is rare in our exhausted society. There are just too many of us. How often do we try to see the human being we meet for the first time before condemning them to a category? And we all know the feeling of dealing with someone who has just met us, sniffed out the box we go in, and handed their brain over to the tribal instinct. All thinking, all listening, all curiosity, have stopped. It doesn’t matter what you say or do from that point. They don’t hear you.

The division in this country is nothing new. We have always lived in tense, divided times. But we are partial to our own tense and divided times, and think they’re the best. Maybe this time they are. I’m not going to stop and look this up, but I have read somewhere the percentage of people in our two main political parties who wish the people in the other party were all dead, and it’s an alarming number. I call these people extremists, the ones full of passionate intensity, and void of humor, the ones who have lost all hope, or desire, for a cooperative society. I see their pictures sometimes—faces contorted with hate, or steeled like crusaders. The absence of humor is a canary in the coal mine if ever there was one. I think, damn, man, times are tough but what are you that angry about?

I can’t help but be curious.

The contentions we face are too much to comprehend, and reach into the bedrock: God. Gender. Truth. The sins of the father. The techno-ethical dilemmas of genetic wizardry, artificial intelligence. Changing demographics. And our complicity in all of them is too bitter a pill to swallow.

When you’re dealing with a problem so complex you have no idea how to even think about solving it (ie, being alive in 2022), if you don’t kill yourself, the most common course of action is to lay the blame on the closest available substitute, sometimes the people you love the most—like a body with an autoimmune disease attacking its own cells.

THEY did it.

Nothing can stop the evolution of life. Change has been the constant engine of life from the moment one cell chanced into a symbiotic relationship with another and started the journey to multicellular life, Steve Bannon and Alec Baldwin. Human culture evolves just as surely. New ideas, new art, new science constantly arise and work their way into our shared social life. The more variety in our culture, the more variety in the ideas. Life experience eventually makes it pretty clear that the process is not about gratifying or preserving individual egos. Still, as we get older, and feel the trends of the world leaving us behind, we can’t help feeling at least a subconscious wish for things to freeze in a state familiar to us, still answerable to whatever we once thought up to make it seem comprehensible. But that’s not going to happen. We live our allotted time, and the fate of all our experience is decay into story. And THEY’RE responsible. It’s easier—in fact, it takes no effort at all—to hate THEM, and imagine a regression into some vague, permanent, familiar world than to accept the inevitable. It’s also easy to absolve ourselves, and escape work, by putting our trust in some imagined savior provided by the propaganda machines that also provide us our simplistic villains. All of those machines—“news” outlets, politicians, “spiritual” leaders, and so forth, have their own agenda and it might be a good idea to look into that before buying their goods.

Hey, are we on the verge of a revolution of the proletariat?

Short answer: No.

The working class (labor) rising up against their masters (capital)? All I see is the working class identifying with their masters, even though their masters have no use for them beyond their keeping them in power. The working class doesn’t want freedom—it wants salary and benefits.

There has never been, and I doubt ever will be, a true revolution of the proletariat. We’ve had peasant revolts, slave uprisings, the French Revolution, the Jacksonian Revolution of 1828, the Bolshevik Revolution, the German Revolution after the First World War, and many others—but all have been unsuccessful or only political revolutions—the exchange of one group of haves and have-nots for another. Is the Russia of today really different from the Russia of the Tzars? And how did Jacksonian Democracy work out for black and red people? A true revolution of the proletariat would be a social revolution, a grass-roots, society-wide transformation of fundamental social structures.

The Marxist/Leninist vision of the revolution of the proletariat—the elimination of wage slavery, of the power of one social class over another, the advent of democracy for the masses—recognized that such a change could not happen without force, which they imagined would be temporary. Ha. They made the mistake shared by all idealistic social philosophies, the assumption that human nature, inspired by an abstraction, could change. Marx envisioned an intelligent, educated, politically competent working class. And Lenin understood that there would have to be a transition period, a dictatorship of the proletariat, keeping the petite bourgeoisie intact, that would last long enough for human nature to change, and for industrialization to modernize Russian society.

The problem is, in America today, the working class doesn’t trust education, and has no taste for the work of democracy. They willingly replace those things with the methadone of propaganda. They want to be told what to think.

We’re still waiting for the revolution.

Can the extremists in America who long for a single party really understand what that means?

One angry class in this country likes to point out that they have the guns, the Dobermans, the dried beans, and can drive the bulldozers, and will “win” the new Civil War they think they want. Another has all the theories and prescriptions for how and what to think without sacrifice or disruption to their complacency. But the real winners of the war will be the same winners as always: the haves. And the losers will be the rest of us, the have-nots. And of course, unable to fight the real source of our misfortunes, our handlers, we will turn to fighting each other. And since government exists to serve the dominant class, forget about that.

The working class doesn’t really want war—it wants what it thinks war will give it: meaningful work and a world like what they vaguely remember, or imagine, once existed. I think that actually describes most of us. But the masters have found cheaper labor, and the past, real or imagined, is not coming back. We would have to kill the curious and creative human spirit to go backwards. We really don’t want to do that.

Tearing down is as joyful as building up. The question is, what does destructive energy have to put in place of what it destroyed?

We’d all love to see the plan.

Certainty—wanting to be right so badly you believe you actually are—is poison. The cliche is true: the strength of America is its variety, the checks and balances of a diverse society. If everybody is the same, there’s nothing to be curious about.

Without curiosity we die.

And the real power in the world will shift, as always, to where it lives.

America is the best thing this world has seen. I hope we don’t piss it away.

January 24, 2022

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Spit It Out

A lone traveler on an arduous pilgrimage, leaving behind his habits, his comforts, his futile certainties.

Surely it would be better to die as you have lived, in the company of your enemy, than to undertake a dubious trek over a hard terrain.

What could be driving him?

The need to wear down the accretion of self?

The need to escape self?

The longing for apotheosis? Rebirth?

Or just the chance to die if not nobly at least in motion?

No—the longing to be freed from pain has its own artistic completeness.

Not another human being, hardly any life at all beyond the occasional indifferent raptor in the pale sky, the flash of a rodent, the wrinkle of a snake, had he seen since the trailhead, with the mountain appearing closer than the four-day journey it would actually demand.

No one at all. That came with the package.

The first night he found shelter in one of the sporadic groves of trees, with their plentiful fallen branches for a fire. No need to fear betraying his position—there were no eyes to see, and how could his position be anything but lost wherever he was? The following days mirrored the ones before, except for a gradual thinning of the vegetation, and a surrender of the grassland to hard ground and rock. As he neared the mountain, the wind grew colder, sharper, the air thinner. Each step felt heavier than the last.

No one saw or cared.

On the third day, engulfed the entire morning in the mountain’s shadow, he began to notice a withering of the leaves on the stunted trees, like the early stages of a blight, and gradually the vestiges of green disappeared. At last nothing alive was left at all, just a sheen of something like grease or tar, puddled in low places, punctured by the stobs of dead trees. Walking became laborsome, and sometimes the knowledge that death is the true home in the heart of every living thing ran through his mind.

By the last day the tar seemed to coat everything, and either was or through the feverish work of his imagination seemed, malignantly alive—and he felt no relief until he began to ascend in earnest and the air was too vigorous for nightmares. Mingling his sticky footprints with the dried others on the lower rocks, he could see, as promised, the steep way of his path toward the sky.

He thought: I’ve put everything on this path, knowing I’m not the person I am but the person guarding the person I am, knowing it could fail like everything always fails, but it is all I have so for me it is all there is. One step, then the next—

The path, always steep and except for random eruptions of boulders or abrupt cliffs, mostly clear, led him steadily up, bent forward and in a constant search for handholds. Only occasionally did he pause to look down, seeing and smelling the foul valley below.

By early afternoon he felt himself nearing the top, then was confronted with a final near-vertical scarp which looked impossible at first glance, but with study—turning back not even to be considered—revealed narrow ledges for his feet, and a long jagged crevice for his hands. He first visualized himself doing it, then with a surge of adrenalin and without thinking, did it, scrambling to his feet on the crest. Before him lay a verdant, boulder-strewn caldera, and a single grazing cow. The cow gave him only one half-curious glance, as he stood there laboring for breath, vaguely wondering how the beast got there. The cow herself didn’t seem to be wondering anything.

Stable for now, he looked around and saw a faint path leading to a ledge of rock jutting over the rim. The last leg of his pilgrimage. He stopped in the center.

As he gazed over the oily landscape, a large black lake gleaming dully in the center, he felt a stab of fear. He fought it back. Too late for that now.

The sun was still fairly high. The wind swirled and the distant horizon melted into the haze.

He felt a little embarrassed.

Speak the truth to the air

That was all the instruction. The truth. The demon truth. Knowing that if you lied, a curse would fall upon you like the hammer of God.

The truth about yourself, your past, your deepest weakness, unspoken desires of the heart, opportunities refused, vandalism, regret, guilt, shame, humiliation, fear, loss. The unforgivable that you can’t say anywhere there are ears. Bring it out of the cellar of your soul and into the air of this place. The unspeakable truth that must be spoken.

The cold wind moaned against his face. He closed his eyes and, shocked by the puny, ordinary sound of it, said what he had come to say, then opened his eyes and looked around. No, there was no one. Nothing happened—he felt the place giving back the faintness of what he had given. He said it louder, like an actor on stage, shamed by the mortifying words that had no intention of losing their grip within him. And then he understood, as with any salvation, he had to go much deeper—as deep as he had feared then a hundred times deeper than that.

And let go.

Only a throat-shredding savage scream would do.

That resolution weakened the hold within him, and with a surge of pain he called up every detail of the demon that had deformed his life, and from the mountaintop screamed out the black cloud of the truth. It floated before his face and made a move as though lusting to return, but he jumped back a safe distance. Then the wind caught it and it drifted out over the ridge and began to sink.

He inched to the edge, peered over, saw it thirty feet down and falling now, toward the valley below.

He felt a lightness, like an old memory, turned around and wanted only to lie down in that cool fragrant grass. He found a suitable depression and reclined. The cow gave him one look, then went back to grazing.

The sun, creeping toward the western rim, warmed his face, and he had no desire to be anywhere but there. Really no desire at all. He knew if he didn’t leave now he wouldn’t have the daylight to make it down and would have to spend the night, which he predicted would be cold. And he would be right. But he didn’t care.

Could it be called sleep, that weightless excursion he took? What did it matter what you called it?

Deep in the night something woke him, and opening his eyes to a sky gorged with brilliant stars, he realized it was only the cold, another parasite, and he found he could, for long intervals, take himself where it wasn’t.

The sun rose early at that elevation. The cow was looking at him and in his mind played the vision of the creature picking her way up the hoofholds of that last cliff.

He saved the why for dessert.

January 30, 2022

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Son of Peleus

The only good thing about fame is dreaming about having it. Having it is nothing. They give you this choice when you’re too young and stupid to know what it means.

Yes, this place is beautiful. Peaceful. If you can really call something beautiful that you see every day. Or peaceful if you can no longer feel what not-peaceful was. The olive groves, the sea, and over there the river, which is not nearly as gloomy as people believe, at least not in these environs. It’s just a river, and rather picturesque. What’s gloomy is not being able to re-cross it. Believe me, I would rather be a slave than free to sit here noodling on this lyre and looking out this window forever.

Famous. Yippee.

What does that actually mean? It means forget about what you are, whatever that is, you are now what a few billion people, who have maybe seen somebody’s idea of what you looked like on a vase, need you to be. They all want your soul, and they want it for nothing. That’s right—nothing—that’s what you get.

Yes, I got help. Mama, of course. These days she drops by occasionally, but there are issues. She’s always into some new drama, and to be blunt, she’s moved on. I mean, we’re good, but the truth is I was always a little too human for her. Speaking of all too human, I don’t see a lot of Dad either. I mean, the man has some baggage of his own. I think he hangs out with Jason a lot, and I guess Mama checks on him from time to time, but she tells me nothing and I don’t ask.

The truth is, I owe it all to Chiron. More than anybody else he made me the person I am. He knew everything. Everything he said was brilliant—and I didn’t need to remember it, it all became a part of me. Of course the fighting, but also the healing, the music, the vision. He was kind and noble. Terrifyingly strong. What a creature. Those were the best years of my life. I was a force of nature, and I myself had no control over it. He made no attempt to govern it either—he just let me become who I was. He was strong—but you don’t need to prove it if you always seem to know something funny.

If you ask me, being told your son would out-do you would be an honor. I mean—right?Hearing that about Neo would have made my day. My life. But that’s not how they thought. I can honestly say, sitting here enjoying the view, making these little melodies in the air, that being a half god is a total bore.

You’re strong, people think, you’re swift-footed, you’re so bad-ass when you get worked up you can clog a river with corpses. And don’t forget drop-dead pretty. Look at these wavy tresses—I still turn heads. Or I should say, would turn heads if much of anything turned heads around here.

An afterlife crisis—who knew?

Nobody cares if I wear what I like. I was never afraid of being in touch with my inner woman. I mean, it did save my life. Plus, when you’re all dolled up, you get in the locker room, so to speak, which has its advantages. And at least one really good surprise. And it was fun. And it’s fun now when I’m in that mood. Nobody says a word. Who would dare? Well, I say that. All the same, I’m a knockout in a peplos, as you know.

Yes, Pat is here. Great-hearted as ever. But honestly I don’t see that much of him. He’s more sociable than I am, but lucky for him, not as famous. In fact, he wouldn’t be famous at all if not for me—and that goes for a lot of other people too. Not that you get anything for that either. I see him sometimes down by the shore with his friends. I think I can still feel something like anger. If one of those immortal gallants were to touch him . . . I feel something, but like all the old lusts it just dissipates in the peaceful haze. They say the real gods get to keep enjoying their lusts. Over and over. I mean, look at Mama. But how many times can you experience the same thing and still feel it? What good is something you’re not hungry for?

Sure, it’s pleasant here. But maybe not exactly pleasant so much as a feeling like something hasn’t worn off yet. You have to work to feel the beauty and you get—I won’t say tired, because you’re never really tired here—which happens to be one of the things I miss most. Bone-tired after a strenuous day, when sleep is the sweetest thing you can imagine, like death. I’m just saying, sometimes you don’t feel like putting your energy into it, and believe me this place has all kinds of ways to monopolize your energy, if you let it.

I think of a long obscure life filled with hobbies and love and a welcome peaceful death.

The blessing and curse are one: the stupid but glorious youth who refused that.

February 5, 2022

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Life Story

The woman sat off by herself, because wherever she sat, an empty space formed around her. Not from spite or ostracism on the part of the other residents—to the extent they were aware of it at all, it was more a gesture of deference. They went about their business, such as it was, and gave the woman space to sing her epic. She sang all day without stopping, softly, continually, like flowing water.

She was odd, but hardly the oddest of the lot. There were other bards in the room, but were more like Yoko—in some cases a great deal like Yoko—their laments, or memories, never making it into what you’d call words, or out of shrieking. Nor, not being disruptive at all, was the woman the most disruptive. That would be Mrs. Garr, the queen of the Yokos, who would unpredictably begin to scream, in pulses whose suspenseful caesuras were more torturous than the howls they interrupted.

“Put a nickel in her,” Mr. Woodson would say.

And the nurses would come and try to make her stop. If all failed, they would roll her back to her room, where the now muffled screaming would continue for some time, with a deeper note of lonely desperation.

All through these and other such episodes the woman’s singing would continue unfazed, as she seemed to look ahead at a spot on the floor, her head at a birdlike angle and her face serene, bemused, oblivious. Clearly whatever was going on around her, from screeching women to muttering men, was less interesting than what she was describing.

She was given space, but not entirely ignored. Some of the residents gazed at her stupefied, and one man appeared to be actually listening to her. The grandson of one of the newer residents took all this in on his first visits—the various performers, the watchers, the listening man. At first the screaming woman had the same effect on the grandson as a toothache, and the woman delivering her endless spiel just struck him as funny, but, looking around, he found no one to share his laughter, including his grandmother, who just missed her garden. In time he began to find Mrs. Garr’s bloody screaming strangely compelling, and he sometimes sat equally tormented and amazed by it, until they wheeled her away. As for the self-absorbed bard, her song grew to have an even greater captivating effect on him, a hypnotic rhythm.

One afternoon as he sat entranced by that rhythm, barely hearing the words, the screamer commenced. At first the interruption felt like a visit from Vlad the Impaler, but about the time Mr. Woodson said “Put a nickel in her,” the keening took on its strange allure.

A voice said, “Do they ever think about why?”

The grandson turned his head and saw that the listening man, his eyes fixed on Mrs. Garr, was sitting two chairs away from him.

“No,” he answered himself, “they can’t hear what she’s saying.”

The grandson stared at him, then ventured to ask, “What is she saying?”

“It’s in her own language.”

Silence. Then, “Do you understand it?”

“Oh yes,” said the man. “I understand it completely. But they don’t.”

They took her to her room, and into the uneasy silence the patient, unending singing of the woman seeped back. The grandson listened.

I come into the house—

seen Mama in the kitchen—

went into my room—

Mama humming a song—

house smelled like supper—

fried chicken mashed potatoes turnip greens—

took off my shoes—

“What about her?” the grandson asked the man.

“What about her?” said the man.

“What is she saying?”

“You can hear it same as I can,” the man answered. “I’ve been listening to it every day for two years.”

The grandson studied his weathered face. “Really? Why?”

“I don’t want to miss anything.”

didn’t have any corn meal—

sent Bertie over to Merle’s to borrow some—

heated up the skillet—

made cornbread—

Jimmie come in from work—

smelled like grease—

heard the frogs across the road in the pond—

smelled the gardenias through the windows—

* * *

The months went by and the grandson kept making, even anticipating, his visits. The screaming woman came and went, but the bard and her one-man audience were never absent. The young man would visit with his grandmother, then sit and listen, mesmerized by the voluminous and mundane saga, which seemed to skip around in time. Remembering it all was impossible, but pieces of it stuck in his head.

Marshall was just setting out there in that truck—

not saying a word—

I wouldn’t let him in—

Janelle was running a fever—

Jimmie said his pork chop was cooked too much—

wasn’t juicy like his Mama’s—

I don’t even remember Daddy—

Mama died—

she’s at peace but I ain’t—

don’t know how I’m going to do—

The song had its own spirit, sometimes veering into the unearthly.

after Jimmie died he stayed around the house for a month—

I told him he needed to go on to wherever he was going—

he said he wanted to stay there—

I said what am I going to tell people when they walk in the door and you’re still here?—

people that went to the funeral are going to wonder—

how am I going to explain you?—

he said I don’t care I got enough problems as it is—

In a sea of terminality, the grandson knew the day would come—maybe soon, maybe years from now—when the point all stories are destined for would arrive—The End.

Yes, like everything her song would end, and, yes, like everything nobody would care.

And, no, that wasn’t the point.

February 17, 2022

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Further Reflections on The End

Had it been worth it? Arnold asked himself. Fighting the current, making it at last to the outskirts of Oneonta? He thought of Mildred. Waiting on that bench at the bus station. Rain dripping off the eaves. Would he ever see her again? Did he even want to? And Eduardo. Arnold laughed to himself. It was a pretty safe bet the man would never leave that trailer. What were the chances of seeing him again? Pretty slim.

Arnold paused, gazing along the trash-littered road. Tomorrow stretched ahead, just another sequence of days. The mirror image of yesterday.

He kept walking.

* * *

Earl frowned and leaned back in his chair. That was either good or it stunk, he had no idea which. I’m too close to it, he thought, then muttered what the hell, leaned forward and typed— THE END

His phone rang.

He didn’t recognize the number, but something about the way it rang insisted.

“Hello?” he said, on guard but curious, his finger poised for the kill.

“What do you mean ‘The End’?” the voice said.

“Who is this?”

“You know. Answer my question.”

“Okay. ‘The End’—the end of the book. The end of a year’s work. And I can’t decide whether to kill myself or get drunk.”

“Kill yourself.”

“Who is this?” Earl demanded.

“Stop playing dumb. It’s Arnold.”

He wasn’t playing dumb—but yes, there was something familiar about the voice. A dim visage flickered in his mind. “Listen,” he said, “we really don’t have anything to talk about.”

“Oh, we’ve got plenty to talk about,” Arnold pressed. He was worked up.

Earl just felt very tired. “What do you want?”

“I don’t like that bit about tomorrow. What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything—it’s just poetry.”

“Everything just repeats?”

“No, it’s an observation about where you’re standing.”

“Where am I standing?”
“Only you know that.”

“Oh please. How can I know that if I’m waiting for you to write it?”

“How can I write it until you let me know?”

“My God. You’re just words.”

“I know. And this is getting embarrassing.”

“It’s getting worse than that for me. I know where I’m standing. At ‘The End’. And ‘tomorrow’ is just a re-phrasing of ‘yesterday’.”

“Damn, that’s good,” said Earl, and reached for his pen.

“Can you have a little respect and not write that down, please?”

“Look, it’s just a way to end the book, that’s all.”

“So what happens to me?”

“Nothing happens to you. I just gave you a year of my life and a damn good story—what else do you want?”

“I want to know where I go from here.”

“You don’t go anywhere. The book is finished. It’s done.”

“Kind of leaves me hanging, doesn’t it? Will I ever see Mildred again?”

“How would I know?”

“Does the bus ever come?”

“Not in the book.”

“And what about Eduardo?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Who the hell else would I ask? You’re the writer.”

“That’s right. And you’re asking me what happens outside the book. I’m not responsible for that.”

“That’s bullshit. You’re just going to leave him in that trailer?”

“As opposed to what?”

“He said he was seeking eternal life.”

“He gets it. In the story.”

“I think he meant the other kind.”

“What other kind?”

“The kind like you have.”

“Me? Get real. I don’t even survive in my own life. Where’s the ten year old me? Where’s the one that started this book? Where’s any me I’ve ever been? Dead.”

“Write me a sequel.”

“Why? We’ll just end up at the same point.”

“Not if you keep writing.”

“What—forever? It’s not possible. Plus, it wouldn’t change anything. Not to mention, it would be boring as hell.”

“I need more stories.”

“You only get so many. And to be honest, I’m really not interested in sitting here trying to think up new stories for you. I want to write other stories. About other people.”

“The truth comes out. You’re dumping me.”

“If you want to look at it that way.”

“So that’s what I get—one story? The same one over and over? How long’s it going to take for me to get sick of that?”

“We’re all in the same boat. Our ‘The Ends’ are just in different places.”

“Write some sequels.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t or don’t want to?”

“Both.”

“Great,” said Arnold. Despair was beginning to enervate his voice.

Earl dodged a stab of guilt. He was tired, and could feel his mental fingers letting go, as the image of Arnold, never exactly crisp, began to dissolve like a leaching photograph.

“That’s what I thought,” Arnold said, his voice decayed to a barely audible peep.

Earl killed the call, and sank wearily in his chair, staring through his window at the same back yard, same trees, shed, bushes, he’d been seeing for twenty-five years.

He had never felt more lonely in his life.

March 1, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight

Like many stops on the way down, it was an epiphany. For one thing, he wasn’t hot, and for another, it was only in that one place.

The sweat he had been feeling for several days, he realized, couldn’t be sweat.

The disturbing thought sent his hand reflexively to the base of his neck, then to his eyes for a quick inspection. No, not blood. It looked like water. He rubbed his fingers together. Felt like water. He sniffed his fingers. No smell—like water. He ran his fingers up his neck to a wet clump of hair. Nope, couldn’t be sweat. He could feel it trickling out. From what?

Bathroom mirror. No cut, no puncture, didn’t look like any kind of injury. Just a pink miniature volcano secreting moisture, wetting the surrounding hair and dribbling down his neck.

He parted the hair around it, then grabbed his razor and clumsily tried to shave away a little circle. He got a round band-aid from the band-aid box and pressed it firmly over the place. For a few minutes that appeared to have done the job—until he noticed the band-aid bulging a bit in the center and leaking around the edges. He got three more round band-aids and surrounded the first one with them. For a few minutes that too appeared to have worked. But by the time he noticed new bulges and new seepage, he was already distracted by another leak, on his left forearm.

He didn’t take half measures this time. He found a gauze pad and fastened it tightly with adhesive tape. When the pad got soggy he stuck another one on top of it and wound the adhesive tape all the way around his arm.

The makeshift tourniquet held. For a few minutes.

Mid-afternoon. The Laz-Y-Boy was calling. He settled in, began to drift away, trying to ignore the new moisture on his neck and the sopping wet gauze on his arm. Too much to fight—he let himself snooze, seeing a menagerie of animals with human faces in his hypnagogic reverie, at last returning to waking consciousness to find a spreading wet place on the sweat pants of his right leg, and an eruption on his bare left foot.

He used up all the gauze and most of the adhesive tape, and thought about calling Doris and asking her to pick up some more from The Dollar Tree on her way home from Garden Club—but, really, it would be better if he could leave her out of this. It was a weighty thought, but if he left now he could be back before her, get himself taped up, and keep it to himself.

So that’s what he did, but it didn’t work.

When Doris got home, he had sprung five new leaks. She yelped and took him straight to the doctor.

“You’re leaking, I’m afraid,” the doctor told him. “There’s nothing I can do. At least you won’t need sponge baths. Stay hydrated.”

“Mercy,” said Doris.

* * *

The days and weeks went by. New leaks spouted regularly—so many, all over his body, he found himself in an unending battle. He avoided people. Leaving the house for any reason was like a mission to Neptune, and if anybody were to drop by what would they think when they saw him like this—wrapped in gauze bandages and taped like a mummy, roofing tarp on the furniture, wet towels lying all over the house?

But there was nothing he could do about the grandkids. They came to visit, gave him water to drink, then laughed as the water spurted out of him like a garden sprinkler.

“That’s enough for today,” their mother would tell them.

And they would chant, “One more glass! One more glass!”

He didn’t feel ill, just tired—but he had already been tired. Maybe just more tired than usual.

What was Mother Nature trying to tell him?

If this is the end, he thought, I’m starting all my bad habits back.

And spent long stretches of the damp afternoons trying to remember what they were.

March 11, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight

Of course I knew it was the first of the month, and I didn’t even get up when I heard the three polite raps on the door—I just called out “Door’s open!” and waited.

He was beginning to feel more like an old friend, re-remembered each time, than a visitor, in spite of the nature of his call. He entered and changed the climate of the room.

“Can it really be the first of the month?” I feigned.

“To the day,” the visitor smiled.

“Well, take a load off.”

“Thank you,” he said, and sat down on the worn sofa facing me. “How’s your heart?”

“Heart’s okay, I guess,” I said. “Brain, I don’t know.”

“A season for everything,” he said.

“I’ve heard that.”

He smiled. He had a—no other way to put it—glow about him—maybe metaphorical but remembered as a quality of light. And memory always has the last word. That he was pure love—kind, compassionate, a devoted listener—was a certainty. Very easy on the eye as well—but not so much handsome as distinctive in a way that to meet him once was to know him forever.

Yes, radiant like a Greek god. One of the good ones anyway, like Apollo or Athena. Not a blowhard like Zeus or Poseidon. Why are the best not the most powerful—like, ever? An old conundrum, rooted in the nature of humankind.

My well-being was in his hands—I don’t know how I knew that—and he had come for a memory.

A good one. The bad ones were non-negotiable.

“Do you have something for me?” he asked.

I started the bidding low—but really, every good memory is precious, right? Sure.

“How about running into Zoot Hutchinson in Piggly Wiggly?”

He smiled, indulgently.

“I hadn’t seen him for thirty years!”

“Or thought of him.”

“Okay, my tenth grade trip to Mexico.”

He nodded slowly, a portrait of sympathy. “Look a little nearer your heart,” he suggested.

I can’t say how, but I had learned so much from him. And I knew that he knew that I knew—for God’s sake, we both knew everything—that the value of anything is created by its relinquishing. And when you offer out of love—you might say, to God—you offer big.

But how big? Woodfield Drive—three, four years old, the pecan trees, the crimson clover, my mother’s face, the smell of vinegar dyeing Easter eggs, the two girls next door—no, no, please no. Never.

“Not Mama. Daddy,” I implored.

He smiled. A season for everything. Those would come last. With the transformative moments that had created my very self. Out as with in. Piece by piece. Until this realm had gone the way of dream.

“Okay. Aunt Sarah.”

His expression changed.

“She was a beautiful soul. I loved her very much.”

“I know.”

“You can’t understand how much I hate to lose her.”

“No. I can. Sign here.”

And he produced the usual form, which I signed, having no idea what would happen if I didn’t. Knowing, in spite of myself, it would be worse.

He took his leave. More alone, I sat back in the chair, only the glow of him left. That, and nothing.

The nothing that holds something in its arms.

March 15, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—3

In his poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Wallace Stevens considers the juxtaposition of natural and man-made order: natural order that just is, man-made order that is created.

In the poem a woman is singing by the surf at Key West, and seems to be spontaneously creating the song she’s singing. Weighing that artful performance against the random sights and sounds of the surf, the waves, the horizon, the sky, the narrator seems to give precedence to art. The woman sings “beyond the genius of the sea.”

I find the line between the two harder to draw than apparently the narrator does, though even he is not sure. I don’t see any need to argue that nature is conscious—though I think it is—if, really, there isn’t any essential difference between the human and the natural. Both are generated by myriad forces stretching back to a primordial impulse we can’t understand, and have the power to affect a perceiving consciousness aesthetically. To what extent is the woman echoing the sea, competing with it, inspired by it? Are the two songs interconnected or only accidentally associated? Is the woman an intermediary for “the genius of the sea,” equal parts natural and manufactured, like Coleridge’s Eolian harp? The narrator feels it is “more than that.” He wonders “whose spirit is this?”, knowing “it was the spirit that we sought.” And then, a whiff of the solipsistic: “There never was a world for her/Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”

As the narrator and his friend walk away when the woman’s song is done, he wonders not how but why the sea, burning in sunset, looks like the rapture that could inspire a painting: the meaning—Stevens calls it “order”—that we crave.

The human soul yearns for something that is not itself.

What is meaning—or art or order—but restatement? The impulse to do something when we are moved?

You can mask your inability to grasp the ineffable by giving it names, or by confusing it with your restatement, but the matter is certainly not about belief. What is belief but the end of wonder?

It’s about the horror of being trapped in your own mind.

* * *

Tinnitus must have started in the summer.

I say that because for me it mimics the sounds of a summer night, and I’m sure I had it for some time before I became aware of it. For years perhaps—is it possible? Which just goes to show that you see, smell, think, believe—hear—only what you agree to hear. And once you do, you can never un-hear it again. For me the epiphany occurred in the car, driving along and suddenly realizing I was hearing the restless humming of an Alabama summer night. In the car? In December? It was a catastrophic loss of innocence. I had just made a new friend for life.

Textbooks call tinnitus “the illusion of sound.” Hairs in the inner ear transform sound waves into electrical signals which are interpreted by the brain as sound. And if, through hearing loss, the brain doesn’t receive the signals from a swath of the spectrum that it expects, its interpretive mechanism will proceed without them. In the end, the only reality we have access to is the one our brain creates. As if we’re not isolated enough, hearing loss can isolate us even further from our fellow beings, and accelerate dementia.

That is the human lot, but it’s depressing. People fear being an insignificant blip in a vast universe—I fear not being one. It is solipsism that terrifies me. The dialogue in your head keeps you company, but drives you mad in the end.

“It was the spirit that we sought.”

I remember a night sitting on the porch of our lake house with my cousin on a real Alabama summer evening—that lovely between time of day—no longer quite this, not yet quite that—the time when nature’s symphony starts. Of course, in my head it had already started, but what I was hearing on this evening was fuller. If these weren’t the sounds of an Alabama summer evening, they were a very convincing impression of them.

I asked my cousin to describe what he was hearing. A buzzing here, a chirping, croaking there. That spike of sound, above all the others—did you hear that?

Yes. I heard that.

Good.

Stevens’ narrator says, “The song and water were not medleyed sound.” But for me there was no escaping the medley. I knew I could never again be sure what was real and what wasn’t. And that incertitude was the new real. For me, unlike Stevens’ narrator, what comes from outside yourself, if anything does, has a higher status than what comes from within. One is a gift, the other a trick.

The human soul yearns for something that is not itself.

March 20, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—4

You can look at not knowing what day of the week it is from various angles.

A luxury for those outside the rat race. A bane for those hanging by a thread in it. Or it could just be Harold Johnson, retired, standing at his back door watching the birds.

At first, as his attention drifted from the birds to the thought that he “wasn’t sure” what day of the week it was, he dismissed it as a mildly amusing “there goes that darn Harold again!” moment. It is always better to keep your attention on the birds—that’s just a general life principle—because with nothing else to do, Harold’s thoughts soon deteriorated from “not sure” to “no frigging clue,” and things got serious.

Of course he could have checked his phone, his calendar, called somebody, any number of things, but Harold had a stubborn streak. He sat down on the patio and first tried to walk the days back to some foothold that could help him solve the puzzle, but there was such a robotic conformity to his daily behavior, that of one day indistinct from any other, he came up empty. So he tried clearing his mind and waiting for an epiphany—breathe in, breathe out—but nothing.

He quickly discovered there would be no help from the traditional etymologies. If there was any connection between Sunday and the sun, or Monday and the moon, he was unaware of it. Likewise the provenance of the names in Scandinavian gods—Tiw, Woden, Thor—offered nothing he could relate to. Nor did the Latin versions—God was no less mysterious on Sunday than any other day. And it was asking too much of any modern person to see the kinship of Tuesday to Mars, Wednesday to Mercury, Thursday to Jupiter, Friday to Venus, or Saturday to Saturn.

He did better with his own mental image of the days as seats on a seven-day Ferris wheel. Monday—rock bottom. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—ascending. Friday and Saturday—sharing the apex. Sunday—a precipitous drop from a serene morning, through the terrors of Sunday night, to Monday again.

He settled on the radical idea of determining what the day felt like, and matching it to the appropriate appellation.

Each day had its own distinctive mood, color, smell—and with nothing better to do, he set out to make a list.

Day of the Week—Color—Smell—Mood

Monday—Bloodblister red—Crawlspace—Nothing that makes you feel better about life is true

Tuesday—Mint green—Toothpaste—They just turned on the air conditioner in the plane

Wednesday—Fuchsia—Tea Olive—Okay for it to rain and get it over with

Thursday—Purple—The beach—Start drinking at 11:00

Friday—Cobalt blue—Gardenia—You missed your exit but the one you took turned out better

Saturday—Gold—Barbecue—Everything that makes you feel better about life is true

Sunday—Bronze>Puke green —Cinnamon>Cabbage—You’ve put everything off and the sun is going down-or-Butler Cabin—see you next year at the Master’s!

He concluded that it was one of the mid-week days; he couldn’t taste roast beef when he burped so it was unlikely it was Sunday; he hadn’t lost the will to live so it couldn’t be Monday; he didn’t feel the little scrotum tingle of a Friday, nor the sense of open space and repose of a Saturday.

Tuesday? No, the day felt too ripe for that. Maybe not ripe enough for Thursday. Plus, he didn’t remember hearing the garbage truck. He sat back and contemplated the hypothesis that it was Wednesday. Tried it on for size. Yes. Could be. Not bad, not good, just there. Had to be Wednesday. Or if not Wednesday, something very much like Wednesday, except there wasn’t anything like Wednesday but Wednesday. Anyway, if it was only like Wednesday, that meant it wasn’t Wednesday.

Okay. Wednesday it was—so he could quit worrying about it, which would be totally in character for a Wednesday.

He found himself watching the birds again.

Ah, the fowls of the air! They don’t care if it’s Wednesday—they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns—and even though it’s not Sunday, God feeds them.

Via the feeder Harold filled at 7:23 every morning.

April 3, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—5

Spring, of course, doesn’t come all at once like Christmas morning, or Dorothy stepping out of her storm-tossed house into Oz, but in slow, grudging steps. It’s always the same: the teases, the relapses, the sequence of late storms and cold fronts. You could almost use Japanese magnolias as a metric—early bloomers, then prey to fickle Mother Nature.

The anticipation of spring is the template of all anticipations. The rhythm of death and rebirth is foundational to human experience—and as I have remarked many times, we owe it all to the 23½ degree tilt of our pale blue dot on its axis. It’s easy to speculate life on untitled planets having no philosophy or religion with any kinship to ours. Imagine an untilted, tidally-locked planet: no seasons, no alternation of night and day—would the inhabitants there, if any, have any conception of rhythm at all?

We should count ourselves fortunate for the innate rhythms that drive our souls, the only drawback the possible numbing effect latent in endless repetition. As the years add up, and I realize that the springs that have been far outnumber those yet to come, I’ve reluctantly noticed that the accumulation of repeated experience can contaminate anticipation with nostalgia. Is the thrill I feel for what’s coming, or an echo of what I’ve felt before?

What moves us most deeply: Heaven or the Garden? The paradise we imagine, or the one we imagine we’ve lost?

* * *

These reflections led me to a contemplation of the entangled duality of what we perceive, and how we perceive it.

Déjà vu, for example. In one sense, we have been here before, but not exactly here. For me, the most plausible explanation of the sensation of déjà vu is the processing of present experience through the memory function of the brain. A type of dual processing. Like experiencing the fitful coming of spring as a memory.

Or consider color. Most of us are trichromats—we have three types of cone cells in our retinas. People we call “color blind,” and most other mammals, are dichromats—they have two types of cone cells. The number of colors we see increases exponentially with the increase of cone cells. Each type of cone cell can distinguish something like a hundred shades of color; with three types you get about a million possible combinations.

And then there are tetrachromats: people and other creatures with four types of cone cells and the ability to see—can it be true?—maybe 100 million colors, reaching into the ultraviolet wavelength. Of course that’s their reality and to them it’s not amazing. Owing to genetics, most human tetrachromats are women, sometimes painters, who see a medley of colors where most of us see only one.

Then I started thinking about the processing of time, which I suspect is different from one person to the next, though I can’t think of any way to prove that. I only know that I myself don’t even experience time always the same way. Einstein taught us that time and space are inseparable. As I understand it, space is not something that’s just there, with things filling or not filling it up, but something that exists when there are things. Same with time—not an entity in itself, moving along and available for something to happen in it, but something that exists when there is motion. Another dimension, physicists tell us—like verticality, which doesn’t have any meaning, any existence, until there is something vertical. Time and space are not the stage where our reality is enacted, but are created by the enactment itself.

We should know by now that time is relative—not only to speed or gravity, but to significance. We say time seems slower or faster depending on the nature of the experience—I say it is slower or faster. What’s the difference? There is no master clock. They say people who have lived a life filled with purpose, rich experience, and deep memories feel the human life span as longer than people who haven’t. Stephen Jay Gould wrote about the relative equivalence of mammal life spans. Any mammal’s heart rate is about four times per breath, and all mammals (humans are outliers, who live longer) live for approximately a billion heartbeats. Again, there is no way to “prove” it, but a mouse and an elephants feel their life spans equally.

I wondered if there were a name analogous to “tetrachromat” for people who experience time more richly than most of us. I looked up “panchronology” but found no such word. I thought about the shallowness of our current political discourse—or any discourse that doesn’t involve research, study, analysis, creative thought. People with no real information at all spouting sound bites from their preferred propaganda as though it were truth. People who in complete ignorance of the depth and complexity of an issue or situation assigning facile blame to their slightly different neighbors. People who have been conned into thinking the worst problems aren’t real, or into fabricating problems out of what doesn’t really matter. People whose brains have been hijacked into thinking that exchanging one group of politicians for another will make everything better.

You know, everybody.

We’re all dual processors to some extent: processing what is or is not familiar to us through the moral function of what is right and wrong.

But some less than others. Panchronologic people. People who because of some genetic mutation see phenomena not as discrete points on a line, having reference only to immediately neighboring points, but as spectrums stretching into the long history of what came before, and into the myriad possibilities of what might come after.

I guess there is a word for that. Smart.

Celebrate spring.

As always.

April 4, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—6

More from Harold Johnson.

The first time scared the bejesus out of him, and after he started breathing again, he was relieved nobody was there to hear the sound he had made.

He had been reading, around midnight, and maybe had paused, as his grandmother would have said, to rest his eyes, when something slammed into the window by his chair, rattling the glass.

Aieeegrrh! He bolted up in his chair, wide-eyed and wheezing.

Could it have been a dream? No! said his outraged nerves.

Too frightened to get up and go outside to investigate, he stared at the dark glass for some answer, but couldn’t see anything—except—maybe a smear of slime on the windowpane? He scrutinized it, but it was hard to tell. Several minutes crawled by, and nothing else happened, so he resorted to logical explanation. Some kind of confused nightbird, no doubt, or a bat that needed a tune-up, attracted to the light of his window. Or just the wind.

Only this and nothing more.

He settled back in his chair. Then—

Crash! Another collision against the window, this time shattering the glass, and a softball-sized greenish brown projectile shot across the room and hit the floor with a squishy thud.

He was really relieved no one heard the sound he made this time as he jacked his legs up under him in the chair and found himself face to face with a large unexpected frog.

Very odd, the feeling the impassive creature gave him. Not malevolent, not threatening, but, take it all around, not good.

“What do you want?” asked Harold, maybe out loud.

The frog, as is typical with the genus, didn’t answer. Harold was actually relieved at that, because the damn thing looked like it just might, and Harold was simply not ready for that. Not ready at all.

Cool night air seeped through the broken window, and just as Harold was turning his attention to doing something about that, envisioning cardboard from a cut-up cereal box, scissors, tape—crash!—another uninvited visitor hurtled through the broken glass and landed about two feet from the first, with whom he shared a family resemblance, and like his cousin sat facing Harold and staring.

Thump! A projectile rattled the window across the room—a pause—then a second try—then a third that succeeded in busting the glass, violently admitting yet another of the creatures.

As the shock wore off, Harold, pinned to his chair, began to think about what he was going to do. Shovel? Maybe they would hop onto it, and he could give them a lift back outside. But what would stop them from just coming back? Whap! Whap! Two more leapt through the newly-made openings—and they all just sat there, throats undulating, staring at Harold.

Kill them? But that could get messy—with said shovel, for example. And if he shot them, wouldn’t he end up with bullet holes in the floor, the walls? Plus the neighbors hearing the shots—so out of character for Harold—and calling the police. Yes! The police. Let them handle it. Except he knew they wouldn’t—they would just say, how about not bothering us with your personal problems, buddy, call an exterminator. Actually not a bad idea, but probably expensive. Plus, something told Harold there was an endless supply of the audacious creatures—and indeed, just as he thought that, he heard a mad pattering and he looked in horror to see a legion of tiny frogs pelting what was left of the glass in the windows like hail. The ones that made it through ended up on the floor, on furniture, shelves, one even on the face of his grandfather clock.

The bigger ones kept their eyes on him, and though he couldn’t put his finger on it, he knew they meant business, and he felt their reproof like toxic gas.

* * *

In subsequent days, in spite of his efforts—boarded-up windows, duct-taped holes, towels crammed into cracks and under doors—they kept coming, and had taken up residence all over the house. They shared his most private moments—in the john, the shower—they sat on shelves like objets d’art, sprang out of drawers he opened. One good thing you could say—there were no flies in the house. Even if that wasn’t enough to offset the relentless bane of their staring.

To Harold, prone to self-loathing, it felt like they had been in pursuit all his life and had finally caught up with him. Maybe that was his imagination, but he had reached the territory in life where something being imagination was a moot point. Real, dream, imagination, memory—it was all the same from where he was standing.

He had made a few half-hearted efforts at first to remove the unwelcome guests, and had concocted some other schemes—like moving to another state, but the concept was just too intimidating and what would he do if he got there and, along with himself, the frogs came too? In his heart he knew there was no getting rid of them. So he tried constructing a narrative of himself as undeserving victim, but he didn’t get anywhere with that either because at the end of the day he knew he himself was to blame.

And on the night of a thousand eyes when he was reading again and was jolted by a loud thump on the door, he felt a sad throb of resignation. He sat and waited. Maybe just the wind—for God’s sake why did they always say just the wind even if it was a Mack truck? Sure enough, another thump, shaking the door in its frame. Then the third, which busted out a hole, admitting Big Daddy, the size of a Welsh Corgi, who took three hops to a point directly across from Harold and parked himself with his never-closing eyes and a demeanor that said he was here to stay.

So, thought Harold, you’ve found me.

April 12, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—7

Dreams within dreams.

A rainy night in Georgia. A bench in a bus station, buried in the endless night—the lonely rain outside patters the concrete, drips from the eaves. The spectral clock against the black sky offers no comment. Somewhere in the distance a moaning train carries the vision of its weary engineer, wanting only not to be creeping his way through the back yards of the world.

Weary of motion.

Beginning at the bench and radiating out, the loneliness is absolute; the cold—maybe from the absence of people, maybe the base condition of mere life. An uncertainty, straddling the line of consciousness, nags the sitter’s mind: is he waiting for the bus that hasn’t come, or did it drop him off hours ago and he still doesn’t know what to do?

He hopes the first—the thought of motion the only salvation he can muster.

A sound, and a flash of light—he looks out the smudged window as a pair of headlights appears, peeks into the heart of the room, then passes in a muffled rush.

* * *

Rain, endless rain—he is driving, and everything has mired into slow motion. A truck, going one mile an hour faster than another is overtaking him at the speed of a growing plant. He is stuck behind the lumbering road vegetable, and behind him the lights of a Lusitania-sized starship menace his mirror. He thinks, given the choice, he would kill the arrogance behind him first, and maybe forgive the truck driver who is, after all, just trying to get home. Finally the first truck clears the second, moves over, and he slides around him and moves over too. His betters from behind roar past—he glances and the middle-aged woman in the passenger seat gives him the finger. Another glance and the teenaged girl in the back with pink hair blows him a kiss and smiles . . .

* * *

Rain, always rain—middle of the night—he is driving again—eight hours on the road, three past his mortal limit, and he’s almost home. His impatience to be there has nudged him into carelessness. He creeps up behind a slightly slower car—who is he? where the hell is he going this time of night?—now I’m the asshole, he reflects, but he’s too tired to dwell on it. A straightaway with a hill ahead—he makes his move, pulls out—

The hill—blind hill—steeper and nearer than he thought—he’s halfway up it before he clears the car and moves over, heart pounding.

Did I do that?

Then as he keeps it floored, trying to put distance between himself and the vanquished car, he can’t help but imagine—what if? And sees the pair of oncoming headlights pop over the crest of the hill—and there’s only the sear of the sudden light and the panic of something happening too fast for him to react.

He swerves, the other car swerves—to the shrill accusation of a fierce horn, they miss each other, giving his nerves something eternal . . .

* * *

He is driving, driving late at night, in the rain—a pair of oncoming headlights threatens to, then does, appear over a hill . . .

He bolts awake, terrified, unable to escape the thought, maybe I didn’t imagine it, and he can’t find his footing in the layers of time. He prays for sleep but his mind is in no mood for unconsciousness and it takes the flash of light at least an hour to dim, and all he can remember is that he was driving—driving home—what is home? . . .

* * *

In a washed-out white room, on a bench, knowing something is missing, the rain, but the possibility of that lonely sound is choked by the deep silence.

What do the dead think of when they think of life? Smudges and smears, like fading dreams or memories, a niggling sensation that there was something meaningful about them somehow but no way to remember what? . . .

Is he that, or only thinking of that, cursing the sense of self that contaminates any scenario he can devise.

And what is this merciless anxiety—does anxiety follow the haggard soul down all the rivers of time? It had happened. But what was It? He only knew It was, as they say, sudden, and that something in him resists the inevitable. He could put it off for a long time. He could sit in this spiritual vacuum for a very long time, but the reckoning would come.

Not yet, but it would come.

There is no way of knowing if the thirst for redemption is a longing to fall asleep, or to awaken.

Unless they alternate, and, of course you never know which is which.

April 24, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—8

You will want to know my motives. These I can explain quite clearly—let’s start with what they are not. I am not driven by anything moral or doctrinaire. I do not see myself as a “patriot.” I’m not trying to save the republic, I’m not trying to make a point. No, my reasons are purely selfish. Spiritual fatigue. Or, phrased another way, the desire to escape myself.

There are other words for it: transcendence, enlightenment, salvation, redemption. Sadly, my lifelong quest for such a state has come up dry. And I’m getting old. It is with open eyes, and out of a primal longing for relief, that tomorrow afternoon I will undergo IQ reduction surgery.

“Surgery” they rather grandly call it—it’s really just a zap to the head.

What’s to fear? Think of it as a phase shift. From effete, emotionally drained, tired of life, to stupid, self-righteous, and brimming with energy! If you’re miserable you know you are—if you’re stupid you don’t.

Do the math.

* * *

My old life:

Agonizing over the complex, deep-rooted problems of our times while watching otherwise responsible people swallowing the propaganda of our airwaves hook line and sinker, and without any real information or mental effort blaming everything on their neighbors—hereafter referred to as “Them.” People so terrified of thinking they long for dictators.

Watching the western capitalistic church turn Christianity into something directly contradictory to the Christian ethic. Marveling that religious leaders (politicians in disguise) are avaricious, hypocritical opportunists, and even more mystified that people believe them.

Knowing that we are turning the earth into a poisonous sty and continuing to live like pigs all the same.

Trying to reconcile the fact that there are people in this world who must walk ten miles a day to fill a jug of water, while others take their poodles to therapy.

Seeing people suffer from abstractions built on the personal pathologies or magical thinking of others. Witnessing those people destroy other people because of something they need to believe. People, for instance, who find the chance and randomness and indifference to life that nature lives by so distasteful they can justify torturing an already crushed person.

Weary of trying to process such things, weary of my own soul, I thought to myself—why am I living a life of constant anxiety when with a painless, five-minute procedure I can be free of it all?

* * *

Imagine:

Living with energy and purpose and lust!

Not just believing, but passionately believing, in whatever conspiracy facts (no more calling them “theories”) give me a thrill. Going to rallies with a hat, flag, and ice chest. Sharing the ecstasy of hating Them, whoever They are. Being effortlessly able to block out 99% of the contrary evidence of something I don’t want to believe, then never worrying over it again. Experiencing the heroin rush of belonging to a tribe. It doesn’t matter the persuasion—it’s the energy I covet.

Believing my god is bigger than yours. Having no qualms about people being eternally tortured for not thinking what I think. Or for not believing something they never heard of. Getting a warm fuzzy feeling from believing the world was created 6000 years ago by an old white guy, and not being totally convinced it’s round.

Knowing forests are being mowed down and dying from climate change, dooming future life, and not losing one second of sleep over it. It’s probably fake, but if it’s true it’s not my problem. Same with the countless species, They say, headed to extinction. Or having the idea that our lifestyle is poisoning the planet crammed down my throat.

The hell with rationality, the hell with conscience. What did they ever get me but sleepless nights?

This is war. War between the moral principle and the pleasure principle. And if the moral principle wins, don’t wonder why there’s no pleasure in it.

Think of it like time running backwards, an idea which some quantum physicists entertain in theory—like moving from age to youth. Away from knowledge, wisdom, despair, and toward innocence and the absence of anxiety. I mean, think about it—the only reason you worry about things is because you know about them.

Check with your health care provider to see if IQ reduction is right for you.

May 4, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—9

I don’t deny that I may have, as the expression goes, a couple of loose bolts in the attic—who doesn’t, right?—but it was solely in the interest of humoring my wife, not concession, that I enrolled in non-sentient phenomena therapy.

The labcoated types were a little smug, but on the whole nice, well-meaning people, I found. Besides, what else is there to do in January?

Doors do not shut, and they certainly do not open, on their own. Chair legs do not lie in ambush to stub your toe. Light bulbs do not burn out from a malicious ability to know when it would be most inconvenient to leave you in the dark, and clocks that stop are not making an occult statement. Paper towels do not tear off imperfectly, nor do garden hoses kink in mid-watering, out of spite. Mr. Coffee—and please note I didn’t name him—is not heavily breathing as he finishes his sinister brewing cycle. And speaking of coffee, only chance is responsible for my beloved Chessie System coffee cup I’ve used for thirty years escaping my hand and shattering on the tile floor. Plus, you can’t love a coffee cup. And numbers on license plates don’t really mean anything beyond what car it is. In fact, numbers in general do not have hidden meanings, and it is insane to have a “favorite” number. There is, in short, no conspiracy among the non-biological entities in your life to communicate with you. They do not plan, they do not thwart, they do not portend.

This is the sort of thing they teach you.

So I’m responsible for the cup falling and breaking? Me—not the suicidal cup, nor the hard tile floor luring it like a predator in an alley? It’s a novel idea, but please note I didn’t mean to break it. I didn’t want to break it.

Sure, you say, but what about subconsciously?

Okay, so something in me wanted to break the cup that for all these years has been my loyal companion? Just like my grilling tongs, my fruit bowl, my trustworthy rake, and all the other venerable appurtenances of my life I have protected and mended and treasured?

That’s as insane as “nothing” did it.

So, if the cup didn’t do it, and the floor didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it—it just happened?

I can’t get my head around that.

But these clinicians, they’re adamant about it. Happenstance rules the world, and inanimate objects and non-sentient phenomena do not have personalities or volition. Any affection for them, any fear of them, is imagined, and if you lose one you just go get another one and nothing is different. I can’t say I buy that, but I went along.

Ancient people imagined spirits—or who are we to say they didn’t actually perceive them?—in trees and glades and mountains and pools—oceans, for God’s sake, planets, and so forth. Imagine a world where every “chance” event was something’s will. Actually I do imagine that, which is what got me into therapy.

You see, I’m deviant.

But consider—is “rain” a noun or a verb? It’s neither and both, so we should say “Rain rains,” but that offends logic. Instead, we say “It is raining.” Our presumptions about reality, hence our language, demand a subject and a verb—a “complete” sentence—a fact which reveals our need for an agent in everything. Nothing “happens.” Something happens it.

So ease off with the “deviant” business.

* * *

When I was done with my sessions I honestly wanted to give my wife the new man she was hoping for, and I did think, I am in sort of a rut—change my life, change the way I think—yes, that might be good.

Except, what do I do with the fact that on my way home the first number I saw on a license plate was 777? And how do I explain that it took me exactly 21 steps from the car to the door? After 21 days of therapy. One third of my age (now you know—and no, I’m not the guy writing this). I had 23 missed calls on my phone which I had stuck in a drawer for 42 hours. Double 21. Two of which were obvious butt dials. 23 minus 2 equals 21. Or why I dropped and broke my newly-adopted coffee cup. Yes, I had already sensed that it just wasn’t feeling comfortable—but two cups broken in the same spot—2-1—21 days apart?

Please.

To say nothing of the paper towel that refused to tear off cleanly. And yes I counted the sheets left on the roll and there were 21. And how about how, when I turned the handle to the bedroom door, the door completed the process by itself?

Welcome home, sucker. On February 1.

My wife has fallen into despair, but it was obvious to me what I had to do. So for the last nine days I’ve been absorbed in the memory-plundering 21st century exercise of reconstructing the places, events, people, and feelings of my 21st year. Recapitulation therapy.

I spend nine hours a day on it.

And I’m sure I don’t need to mention what my favorite number is.

May 13, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—10

A man woke up one morning tired of being himself. Bone tired. Carrying around all that baggage, and even worse, beginning to realize he was not the person he had long assumed he was, and thinking: “Who can I be if I’m not him?”

A new self with a fresh self-justifying story, or a patched-up version of the old?—like battling entropy with an old car, or a needy house. The man was, to his credit, too honest for either the evasion of the first, or the futility of the second.

He yearned for something else.

What is it about human nature that begs to be overcome? What is it in the human soul that longs to be transformed into something beyond itself? Whatever it is, it is the basis of all transcendental philosophy or religion. A declining to associate biological death with consciousness. An insistence on the paradox of being human.

The problem—or you might say, the solution—is that the perspective of being outside yourself is possible only if “you” don’t exist. I think we can all agree there is something rather than nothing—when you add it all up you call it “everything”—an infinite pool of possibility, a primordial plasma from which all things rear up into temporal existence. The distinction between real and potential is like that between mass and energy—there is no loss when the real sinks into the soup again. Realizing this is true of yourself gets rid of “you” and sets free whatever’s left.

You can’t both be in something and observe it from without. Consider the Big Bang—if you could have been there to witness it. But where? The only where at the Big Bang was the Big Bang. There was nowhere to stand, nowhere to put the camera. Imagining being outside of something confirms that you’re in it.

Transcendence cannot be a maintenance of self, but a return to the plasma. It’s only natural for people to grow tired of themselves as they age—I mean, how long can you really keep this up? So how in the world do certain religions come up with the idea of an afterlife where you are still you? You don’t even get that during your life. They must have glossed over that key line in their guiding text: “Whoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.” (Luke 17:33 KJV). The human paradox. We are blocked from the infinitude of the pool as long as we hold onto ourselves. The problem, as I said, is that we get tired of ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong: being human is pretty wonderful. You get to be a part that enjoys the illusion of being separate from the whole. It’s a gift, an extraordinary adventure, and proof that God loves a good story, Even if it’s fated to become an unbearable weight, when “you” will long for the ecstatic dissolving of ego and a return to the oneness it only seemed to have left. How foolish to want to retain forever that which is most ecstatic to lose.

* * *

I have contemplated Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo” over the years, trying to grasp the connection between the body of the poem, and the famous concluding line—“du muβt dein Leben ändern” (“you must change your life”)—one of those haunting lines of verse that won’t leave my brain. The body of the poem describes the poet’s unaccountable feelings while gazing at all that is left, the torso, of a statue of that Übermensch, Apollo. He is confronted with an incomplete representation of the complete man that contains the essence of the whole. They aren’t physically there, but he can feel the radiant eyes, the burning energy within, and knows his own self falls short and is laid bare: “Here there is no place that does not see you.”

The statue has moved from a lower to a higher ratio of spirit to matter. More effect than object. In fact, the thing can crumble away until the effect is all. The creative inspiration of the statue, and its creative effect, are the same energy—preceding and succeeding the life of the material object.

The poet experiences a lucid moment of being both in and outside himself, reflected in the synthesis we expect from the conclusion of a sonnet—in this case, a fantastic leap.

The poet’s ratio of separation to oneness is out of joint, and there is only one conclusion.

You must change your life.

June 15, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—11

“Here’s the question, and at the moment it’s the only question,” I said.

“What?” my brother asked.

“Why did I come into this room?”

“Did you have a reason?”

“I must have.”

“To tell me something?”

“It couldn’t be that—I didn’t even know you were here. I think it was to get something.”

“What?”

“Well, if I knew that, I would just get it and go.”

“I was thinking about that guy.”

“What guy?”

“The one that had that thing.”
“Where?”

“On his car. We used to go down there to that place. God, what was it called?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You know, where that man lived. The one that sold stuff out of his truck.”

“What stuff?”

“Like sweet potatoes.”

“What kind?”

“Just regular sweet potatoes.”

“No, the car.”

“Oh. Like a Malibu or something.”

“What kind of thing?”

“You know—like a—thing—on the door. You remember that time we went down there? It must have been July or August—it was real hot.”

“What was his name?”

“It’s not coming to me. Not really where he lived—damn, what was his name?—but kind of down from there—where that church is. I guess it’s still there.”

“I don’t know.”

“It was white. It had these things outside. It was a creek out behind it we used to go to.”

“I remember a bunch of creeks.”

“It had a sandbar—we went swimming there.”

“Yeah, I kind of remember.”

“One time that guy went with us.”

“Who?”

“You know, that guy you hung around with for a while. He had some kind of problem.”

“I hung around with him?”

“Yeah, he was some guy you knew from somewhere. Crazy guy. He always had a pistol. And shot everything: turtles, trees, signs—”

“Yeah—there was this one guy—what was his name? Clement or Ace or something like that.”

“Maybe so. Whatever happened to him?”

“I’m not sure. Something. I think he got in some kind of trouble. Didn’t he end up going to prison?”

“Beats me. What’d he do?”

“I can’t remember. Something.”

“I’m guessing it had something to do with a pistol.”

“Probably.”

“You haven’t seen him since then?”

“God, no.”

“What do you think the chances are he’s dead?”

“High.”

“What do you think the chances are we will be?”

“High.”

“You remember that place where that woman had that thing on her porch?”

“That square thing?”
“More like a triangle. The one that worked in that place?”

“I remember a woman that never could remember—I can’t remember what she never could remember. Do you remember her?”

“How long ago?”

“Um—I don’t know. A long time. Back when all that stuff was going on.”

“Are you sure it was a Malibu?”

“I’m not sure. It was either that or something else. Are those your keys over there?”

“Where?”

“On that thing.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. So they are.”

“I bet that’s why you came in here.”

“Yeah, I was going to go to that place.”

“Where?”

“Over there where those green things are.”

“If you go by that place, bring me some of those frozen things I like.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t forget.”

“Don’t forget what?”

“To remember.”

“I can’t make any promises.”

July 1, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—12

I have only heard the story—and some years ago—about the behavior of crabs in a bucket. I have no idea if it’s true. It never even came close to occurring to me to test it. Really I can’t say it has more credibility than your average urban myth. But it’s a good enough story it doesn’t matter.

Put the crabs you catch in a deep bucket, the story goes, and they will clatter around on the bottom until one tries to make an escape up the side of the bucket. Upon which desperate act all the other crabs will reach up and grab him and pull him back down. As I said, it doesn’t matter if it’s true—it’s true.

You could see it as a rescue: “Don’t go over the edge! You don’t know what’s out there! It could be Rod Serling and a wharf cluttered with corpses!” An act of mercy: “It’s a dangerous world out there! What will you eat? Where will you sleep at night?” An expression of love: “Don’t leave us! We can’t live without you!”

Right.

Don’t try to deny it—when we hear that story we instantly think not of crabs, but of people. And we all know we aren’t thinking any of the above things. We’re thinking: “You ain’t getting ahead of me, pal. Who do you think you are? Getting above your raising. If I’ve got to be stuck here, you’re damn sure going to be stuck here too.”

Right?

You think of most utopian visions, paradisiacal dreams, social theories and the hopeless bureaucracies created to implement them, all the abstractions we concoct to imagine Homo sapiens living peacefully together on a large scale—and it’s astonishing how they fail to take one factor—the only one that matters—into account.

Human nature.

Our behavior, our way of processing and responding to reality, our visions of what we are and what our brief presence in this colossal saga means, are the result of our evolutionary history—encoded in our genes. The countless decisions of our ancestors, the resulting success or failure of the survival of their DNA, from the earliest hominids up until this very moment, have created the way we think and made us what we are.

And it is either our great folly, or our saving grace, that we don’t like it. We seem programmed to dream up alternate visions of what we are, or could be, instead. Keeping in mind, of course, that dreaming up alternate visions of what we are is also what we are.

Is longing to be something more than a doomed organism only wishful thinking, or a step forward in the evolution of the human spirit? Or maybe both in the same bucket—the former doing everything it can to pull down the latter?

It’s only human nature to think you know what human nature is.

And you don’t have to be smart to know that nature doesn’t lie. Why? Because there’s no puppeteer. It just unfolds with a deeper, more unfathomable purpose that is not leading, but creating as it goes.

Whatever it is, I love it far more than I could love any imagined puppeteer.

There’s something more admirable about someone taking a stand for what they believe is right only because they themselves insist on it. Not following orders, not trying to live up to some moral code. But because they have an intuitive personal conviction. Morals are the more profound because they are the ultimate assertion of humanity and come not from above but from within ourselves.

There are hundreds of billions, maybe trillions, maybe infinite galaxies out there, and it’s hard to believe no kind of life appeared on any of the countless planets in them. But what if we are that one in a sextillion freak chance? What would that mean?

A serious promotion of the question “What’s the point?”?

A loneliness beyond understanding?

Or an infinitely more touching profundity to our existence?

He who attempts to escape the bucket is a fool. He who doesn’t attempt to escape the bucket is a fool.

July 1, 2022

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—13

Something poignant always accompanies the end of a rich experience. Nostalgia, I guess. Maybe a bit of depression. Or just surrender to the restraints of living in time.

I experienced it a few days ago, leaving the MFA residency in north Georgia that is part of my part-time job every year. Car packed, I eased out the main road toward the exit of campus—I won’t lie, feeling relief to have it done, but also that nostalgia. Every direction I glanced was impregnated with memories. The long days trudging up this or that walk. The dorms, the dining hall, the library, the theater. Intensive interaction with talented people, some of whom you see once a year, most of whom you will never see again.

Distilled into melancholy echoes. Intuitively you know it’s better that way. It is the transience of beautiful things that makes them beautiful. The ache of losing them that gives them value. And you know your future self will be formed by the past selves you hold within you. And you have only a moment to feel the memory before it decays into dream.

Chief among those dreams, for me, are the days in June when our ages were barely double digits. I admit I can no longer feel early summer and its delicious freedoms in the way I did as a child. All of that is gone, irretrievable. I can’t feel—only think of—a hot sweaty June twilight, the air filled with the scent of gardenias and throbbing with insects and frogs. We’ve been outside all day. Wild plums. Crabapples. The creek. The woods. We don’t remember what all we did, because we haven’t reached the age of reflection, and it was all extemporized. And we dread the fall of dark because we have to come inside and try to get out of taking a bath even though we’re so sweaty and filthy we have necklaces of dirt around our necks.

I’m visiting my cousins, and we’ve had a full week—all over the place—in the woods, cruising the neighborhood, walking up to the little store for fireballs and Sugar Babies or whatever else we wanted to spend our quarters on that day. Dairy Queen. The city pool. The Strand movie theater downtown. And now here I am on the bus—a Trailways since Greyhounds don’t go everywhere—on the way out of town, seeing out a bus window the places where we just were! Where we had all the time in the world! And now time’s up, and it’s all drifting by like movie credits.

Leaving you permanently haunted by gardenias.

* * *

Thinking of all this I remembered a little vignette I wrote several years ago that featured my grandfather, Usher Lee Martin. It was part of a larger story I never published, but it stayed with me.

Granddaddy spent his adult life as a small town/country preacher in south Alabama. Those towns are all mythical to me. Perote, Slocomb, Cottonwood, Deatsville, Georgiana, Centreville, Linden, Geneva, Andalusia, Evergreen, Monroeville, Camden, Notasulga, Snowdoun—that’s most of them anyway. Today, some are flourishing, some unchanged, some dying. Like the setting of pretty much everything I’ve written, they’ve all coalesced into a town that is none and all of them.

Granddaddy died in 1986. A significant loss for me—except that, of course, he’s not really lost. He called my grandmother “Mother.” My apologies for inflicting this upon you—but it’s the last of my ways at looking at twilight, and a dream that’s stuck around.

Gardenias.

Look, Mother—they’re all out on the porches, waving.

Who is that? Owen Haines. What you know, Old Timer? And that man—what was his name, Mother?—in Linden—always burning something out behind his house. Remember that smell—that stench? What was his name? Ozdyke! Dirty people. Unclean thoughts. And look! Cathern Bass. She’s waving, Mother—don’t ignore her. Look how young she is. A goodly-shaped woman. What? I’m not saying anything, Mother. Just she’s a goodly-shaped woman, that’s all. And she is.

That scent, that fragrance. Almost makes me want to stay.

What? Oh no, the Pain’s gone, Mother. Been gone. Packed up its bags and left. Bee-bye-bo-bee. It’s way over there—see it? This relief—first I’ve felt, I guess, ever. Art thou weary, art thou troubled? Passeth understanding. Yes, yes, I know what it means. But all is well—it really, really doesn’t matter. All in God’s mind. Like holes in some old quilt, airing on the line.

Edna Wortham! Oh, those days in Geneva. Hard times, Mother. How we ever got through them, I don’t know. Yes, people were good to us—but what would I have done without you? Wouldn’t have made it five minutes. Oh, smell the leaves burning—you always loved October—little cool snip in the mornings. That cane mill—remember that? Those squeezed-out stalks in a big pile—have you ever in your life seen anything like those yellow jackets? Thousands and thousands and thousands—imagine falling over into that.

Ah! Mimosas. Catching the late afternoon light. That scent—light as a thought. More think you smell it than smell it. Summer for me. June. Those long days hiding something in them like a shy child behind its mother. They were certainly real—there’s no question about that. All in the Book now. Can’t change a jot or a tittle. Beersheba to Dan—all done.

Look at the light! The way it catches the wisteria, the madeira vines on the porches. Wave, Mother—you’ll hurt their feelings. It’s like the Lord poured Himself all over this little town. Beyond words. Beyond everything. All glory laud and honor. Don’t you wish you could go down every street, every lane? Oh, that sweet shrub—like Ma had on the side of the house. I know that was real—close to me as breathing. And those mounds of rocks—way way back in the deep woods. Older than those poplar trees growing up through them. Huge. Enormous. Tree like that could tell some tales. Pa said Indians, probably. Each one placing a stone on the grave when he passed. Or somebody trying to farm it, way back—obloberated from the earth—who? Remember that? Well, no, I didn’t know you then. Hadn’t even dreamed of you.

Can’t get over this light. Like something trying to reach you. Like your mother calling you. Look at it—oozing through the breaks in the trees like honey. Golden. Amber. I could melt right into it—the way it calls me, pulls me. But not back. No sir, won’t be going back. Won’t be passing that way again. Just the natural course of things and not scary at all.

Just right sad—all that was and never can be again.

Oh, there’s Mae Pearl! Standing there—wave, Mother—those gourd vines all over her garage. Remember her dipper gourd? Dipping snuff—the way she would drink from it then offer it to you? Or put the worms on all the children’s hooks, all dried up on her fingers, then hand you a sandwich?

Would’t mind a chew myself.

Well now, I knew it. There he is. Scowling. Frowning. Corpulent man. Voluminous. A man of ample girth and proud of it—prosperous Bishop—looks like he just got pulled away from the table. Wearing a bib! Big stain spreading on his chest, like a wound. Something hard as steel in those eyes. What? Something of the fox, the pig.

And Brother Solomon! The Law me alive. If I ever saw the love of God shining in a man’s face, it was his. If some of the white ones I know had a tenth of the Holy Spirit in him—well, anyway—

Here we are, Mother, I believe—the very place right here, remember? No, never been down this street. This lane. Ah, that gardenia again. Remember the way the fan would pull in that smell and the whole house would be full of it? Guess I must have said a long time back that’s what I want to smell when the time comes. Yes, believe I did. Look at that light! An interesting street—a most interesting street. Like a tunnel opening up—shades of green, purple. Tenderly calling.

Ready, Mother?

What? Oh—well, yes, of course you can’t. And yes it’s sad—but only for such a short time. There’ll be a place for you—oh yes, there’ll be a place prepared. The Lord protect you from sicknesssufferingdangerorharm—until we meet again—

Now—can’t tarry—fast falls the eventide.

Will certainly miss it. Whate’er may befall. These shady streets. This light. All the many, many friends. Cathern Bass—her voice as soft as mimosa. Honeysuckle. Sunday morning.

Tune our loftiest song.

Gardenias.

July 2, 2022

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Argumentum ad hominem

I remember studying rhetoric in my college days, when they tried to teach you the now widely discredited skill of expressing yourself in a simple rational argument. And by “simple” I don’t mean “unsophisticated” but “clear.” This really hit home to me when it became my turn to teach rhetorical skill to young people with no interest whatsoever in it. “I’m not good at writing,” they would say, when of course they meant “I don’t really know what I think.” If you’ve arrived at your conviction through a logical thought process it’s already basically moved from emotion to language, and you just have to harvest it. Needless to say, most of my students then, like most of my compatriots today, had been handed their convictions, and hadn’t bothered with the thought process, so they had nothing to harvest. Or, as they lazily put it, “I’m not good at writing.”

Studying logic in my young days entailed studying logical fallacies so that you could recognize them in others and deny them in yourself. Circular reasoning, bandwagon, straw man, false dilemma, slippery slope, post hoc ergo propter hoc . . . Sharp thinkers have identified a goodly number of these infractions. Why so many? Because the human mind is a labyrinth that works by feeling first, then logic.

Back then, argumentum ad hominem (argument to the person), an attempt to refute an argument by ignoring it and trashing the person making it, seemed especially obvious, mainly because the examples tended to be.

I think this intersection needs a stoplight.

What do you know—you have bad breath.

This hasn’t really changed.

As I look around me today at the vibrant arena of public discourse, I see the full spectrum of those fallacies in all their splendor—particularly ad hominem. Most argument today is not argument but personal attack. It saves time to blame a problem on someone you hate, and to let the hatred stand in for the solution you no longer need to pursue. Just put people in categories—redneck, liberal weenie, neo-Nazi, coastal elite, white supremacist, atheist, and of course any number of racial and ethnic epithets—and you’re pretty much done.

Rational thinking is not natural. It’s difficult and makes you crazy because there are so many little neural dramas going on in your brain, which will damn well find a way to justify what it wants to believe. We all want a way around rational thought so that we can luxuriate in our prejudices and pursue something that really matters, like watching TV. On the other hand, if you can rein in your emotions for a few minutes, rational thinking can be satisfying, and the reward the mental equivalent of crisp mountain air. It’s worth pursuing, but my advice is, don’t waste your energy trying to convince yourself and others how stupid “they” are. It just means “they” are living parasitically in your mind. You don’t know them anyway, you just carry around a caricature of them.

Yes, we’re all guilty, in spite of the strategies we’ve devised to disguise our own guilt from ourselves. We all hide in the shadow of our expectations. Reason and emotion are interdependent. They vary only in their ratio from person to person, situation to situation. You can never convince yourself of something you don’t feel.

It should be easy to recognize argumentum ad hominem in public because it’s so prevalent within ourselves. We know our weaknesses better than anybody, and it’s inevitable that we blame this thing called “self” for our shortcomings—and just as inevitable that we apply the same process to our interactions with others. It’s only in rare moments of lucidity that we recognize these mental scapegoats as caricatures. Shortcuts. Ways to avoid the work of understanding and forgiveness.

Usually the truth is just too much work.

July 13, 2022

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Returning Tomorrow

For a while there was only Sven, his wife Rana, and his dog Argos. When Rana died, Sven experienced a new depth of loneliness no mortal could have suspected existed. Then came the period of going about life with only Argos, and Sven understood better than anyone ever has, except perhaps Odysseus, the perfection of a dog’s validation of one’s existence. One day he realized it had been a long time since he had seen another human being, and that’s when the idea that he was the last survivor wormed its way into his head. Then as Argos began to grow unsteady on his legs and lose his appetite, Sven looked around hard in all directions without seeing a soul, and his suspicion began to harden into fact.

Then Argos died and that’s when Sven noticed that there didn’t seem to be anything left but today, and something in him knew that, in spite of the thieving nature of tomorrow, actually having no tomorrow was not to be borne. Live in the moment—yeah, yeah, that’s great as long as more moments are coming. And that convinced him: he knew he was the last.

No one to recognize him.

No one to polish the feasting cup.

No meaning to what we used to think of as treasure. Is it really treasure if no one knows you have it?

No meaning to joy.

No meaning even to meaning.

And so he understood the task that had befallen him, and set out towards the baths of all the western stars to return tomorrow.

The only treasure left, and he couldn’t spend it.

Like diamonds raining on a desert planet. Asteroids of gold.

* * *

First he pulled the battered suitcase from under the bed and carefully packed his regrets, his trophies, and tomorrow itself, neatly wrapped in felt. Then into another small carrying crate he coaxed the Bane of His Existence—ill-tempered, of course, but strangely compliant. The feeling of there being nothing but today didn’t play well anywhere, he concluded.

And took the first step of his last journey.

During his long schlep across the exhausted landscape, not a living thing to be seen, he felt some pride at the importance of his mission. Even if you’re the last survivor, and your purpose is returning tomorrow, it’s still a purpose. Any journey, really, would be unthinkable without one.

His thoughts meandered as he trudged along. He already knew that if you felt no pain you got no story, so along with having a purpose there was something to be said for that. Because how much more painful can you get than returning tomorrow? Whether there’s somebody to hear it or not. He also tried remembering everything, but quickly realized that, as always, he could only remember what he had already remembered, and like the whispered phrase going around the circle, it metamorphosed as it pleased. His memories were static scenes and images, and there was no one to incite the discovery of any new ones in him. What was the difference between him and those people who frequented the memory boutiques in town, where the technicians could implant any memory you wanted? Like them, for whom the point was not whether the memories were real or not, only how good, Sven knew that there really is no such thing as memory, no way of knowing if you could trust anything your brain kept on file—no way to tell the fabricated from the real—no way of knowing that there was, indeed, a distinction. As for hopes, well, with no tomorrow you could forget those.

Sven’s arms were aching from his baggage when at last he reached the desk at the end of the road, where he was at first delighted to see the bureaucrat manning it—another soul!—except he didn’t seem to have a soul, and bore the same relationship to souled creatures as Sven’s memories did to reality. There just wasn’t a lot of future for “real.”

Sven unpacked—laid down his trophies, then disburdened himself of his regrets, which no longer meant anything, and finally in a rather sentimental moment let the Bane of His Existence out of his crate, and the creature just stood there with a forlorn look on his aging features.

An ambivalent moment. “So long,” said Sven.

The Bane shrugged, held up a hand, turned and disappeared into the gray.

The only burden left was tomorrow, which Sven dutifully handed over to the indifferent bureaucrat, who stamped it, filed it, then disappeared into the gray himself,

Sven looked behind him at the wasteland of today. That was clearly Hell, so he turned back and faced the gray, where either nothing is left, or nothing has been imagined yet.

And that, but for a curious wave of relief, would reign as his last thought.

July 13, 2022

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The First Philosopher in the Land of Doze

The Land of Doze is out there somewhere, but you wouldn’t bother asking the inhabitants if it were an unusual land—they don’t do questions.

In fact, they don’t really do anything.

They live alone in sporadic dwellings, one inhabitant to a dwelling: domiciles of perfect accident—not built by hands but by the deftness of nature in grottos, caves, and tangles of vines. In most, perhaps all, cases, each inhabitant, standing quietly in his place, can see, if he goes to the trouble, the silhouette of some neighbor standing quietly in his. I say “his” out of habit. There are no genders in Doze.

These creatures eat the fruit that grows within reach on the vines and drooping tree limbs around them, and have no other wants, since the weather is never less than ideal and there are no threatening animals. They would never dream of leaving their familiar cells, for the truth is, in this land the idea of doing something has yet to be conceived.

Or rather, hadn’t been conceived up until the events of this story, which concerns a development that planted a strange seed, at once ominous and wonderful, in the midst of this motionless folk.

The main character in this drama, of course, had no name, so I’ll call him Dorman.

It was Dorman’s custom to wake up every morning after his night’s rest, attend to his natural functions, eat a piece of fruit, and then stand in the center of his dwelling for three or four hours. Then, as hunger would ever so gently return, he would eat another piece of fruit, and afterwards stand for several more hours, sometimes moving a few steps in one direction or another, sometimes gazing out through the vines at this or that neverchanging view, or sometimes at the dwelling of his only visible neighbor, a certain distance away, where he could see the shadowy denizen standing just like himself—before having his evening fruit, standing a few more hours in the slow fading of the light, and then reclining in the spot where he stood, to sleep. Dorman was never curious about his neighbor, because Dorman was never curious. He could plainly see that the person was only standing in his house precisely like himself, so there was nothing to be curious about.

We move to a particular day. At first it might have seemed like any other. The sun rose as it always did, finding Dorman in his arboreal hut, as it always did. But there was something different, something the sun was unable to spy. And this was the fact that Dorman’s sleep the night before had been, in a way unprecedented in his experience, strangely troubled.

He found himself host to a new presence, inside him like a shadow or whisper. He moved his inner eye around this novel sensation which he lacked the means to verbalize, in the way we might have, as: I am not happy.

Everything changed.

The moment Dorman knew he was different from what he had been, he knew he existed. The realization was put into words, so to speak, and there was no going back. And he began to have what you and I would call thoughts—for example: that he could never again be unaware of his existence now that he was aware of it, just as when he had not been aware of it, he had not been aware that he had not been aware of it. And value judgments—for example: there’s no problem with existing as long as you don’t know you are.

Dorman was confronted with a new discomfort: how to proceed from there.

In the end, Dorman didn’t really arrive at a preference so much as hit upon the concept of doing something rather than this new thing he suddenly knew about, nothing.

On a certain afternoon Dorman’s neighbor, standing alone in the center of his dwelling and looking through the trees in the direction of Dorman’s place, saw something he had never before seen or dreamed of.

He saw Dorman walk outside.

The neighbor stared, and as he did, the unexpected sensation of incredulity appeared, uninvited, in his mind. And when Dorman lay down in the grass and dust before his spot, where he remained a long succession of days, forgoing his sustenance which fell to the ground and rotted all around his now merely haunted house, until he became perfectly motionless and then strangely melted into the earth leaving only his bleached memorial frame, the neighbor watched almost without blinking his eyes, and then one day turned to look at his neighbor in a way he never had before.

July 21, 2022

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Silence

Silence is golden, they say, and if you’ve ever been around someone who just won’t shut up, you know what they mean.

On the other hand, if you’ve ever reached out to someone who simply didn’t respond—doubly likely in the digital age—you know how heartless silence can feel. Nothing forces the imagination into toxic overdrive like being ignored.

There are many ways of looking at silence.

It is indispensable to communication, to music, to peace of mind, to everything. It empowers whatever follows a pregnant pause. It alone can contend with the manufactured chatter of our minds. Silence can be blessed or suffocating and everything in between. The silence of the universe when asked where it came from, and what it means, is the fundamental shared Given of human experience. We start with it, we end with it.

Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel Silence explores the silence of God, and the struggle of the faithful with that silence in 17th century Japan, where a Portuguese Jesuit priest is sent to investigate a case of possible apostasy, and finds himself in the “mud swamp” of Japanese torture of “hidden Christians.” As tests of faith go, it’s up there—and the only way out is to equate the token renunciation of faith required to save others from senseless suffering with the debasement and torture of Jesus. For me the novel inspires a vision of God who doesn’t sit above suffering, with the power to prevent or allow it, but is that suffering.

Consider the silence of Jesus with his captors. He knew he saw something others couldn’t see or understand, which must have been a lonely experience, and that his attempts to explain it could only cheapen it and deepen that misunderstanding. When you are asked to describe the indescribable, or to reason with ignorance, the eloquence of silence is all you have. Try describing the taste of a strawberry to someone who has never tasted one. Then put on in their mouth and shut up.

One current theory of consciousness, I believe, sees thoughts arising constantly from all areas of the brain, from myriad combinations of areas of the brain, all in a way best described as random, with nothing in control. No self, as Buddhists put it. We can’t say where these thoughts come from, only that they seem to be in competition with each other. The thoughts that win are rewarded with consciousness. They emerge from the slush pile, you might say, and get published. Same with language: when something emerges from the undifferentiated potential of reality, it enjoys the illusion of separateness from the whole, and is rewarded with a word. We invalidate the rest not because it’s not there, but because we’re not looking at it. Or don’t need it.

Our reality is what our brains choose to process. The rest is silence.

“Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious,” Emerson observed. I have long espoused non-specific religiosity. The impetus should not be toward language, but away from it. Don’t try to speak for it. What this universe is, how it got here, how life, human beings, appeared on this earth and what the point of our existence is—are unknowable to us here in this condition. We long for an agent, but any agent we name is limited by the reach of our own human minds. The profundity and mystery, the beauty, of the universe can’t survive having some human-invented scheme imposed on it. This always happens to the revelations of spiritual genius: the bureaucrats get hold of it and codify it, smothering the deep intuition that inspired it. Better not to name it, but let it stay in the realm of possibility, uncollapsed from potential to thing. Let it keep its holy silence!

The silence of Quakers, leaving room for the “other,” makes perfect sense. As does the silence of monastics, or meditation, or any perception that is not aware that it is aware. As soon as consciousness wins, a reduction takes place Consider the difference between a spontaneous experience and a later attempt to recreate it.

What about the Book of Job? Nobody knows who—singular or plural—wrote it, or exactly when. 6th century BC perhaps. Like Ecclesiastes, for modern Christians it sits in the Bible like a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake. You remember the story. Job is a wealthy, successful, righteous man, generous to those in need, and when God brags about him to Satan, Satan issues a challenge: take away the wealthy and successful, and that’ll be it for the righteous. You have to admit Satan has a really good case, but God, as we’ve come to expect of him, agrees to the challenge. So, Satan destroys everything Job owns, kills his family, and inflicts boils and what sounds like cancer upon him. The key piece of information in this story is known by only those three characters—God, Satan, and Job—which is that Job has done nothing to deserve his fate. His “friends” come to console him in his misery by arguing that God punishes sinners and rewards the righteous, so Job must have done something to offend God. Elihu, young and cocky, whose tirade seems to have been added later, even mansplains to Job that God doesn’t “talk” like people, but in visions and dreams and other abstruse ways. Like all the other arguments of his friends, Job has already heard all that, and he alone knows that it doesn’t apply to him.

What I love most about the Book of Job is Job, the only human being of the three principal characters. Satan is not scary. God is not awe-inspiring. They are emotionless, one-dimensional caricatures, who do not feel, suffer, wonder, or change—with a few simplistic human motives tacked on. Even in the end, when God tells Job that he, Job, knows nothing about the creation of the universe or the ways of God—in other words, what Job already knows perfectly well—God is like a puppet or a mummer in a morality play who is lowered onto the stage to explain the moral and adds nothing to our enlightenment. Yes, in the sublime poetry of God’s peroration (so at odds with the puppet show frame), he inspires awe, but it is human beings, not God, who feel it.

It is Job alone who adds to our enlightenment. He stays true not to the human-invented God, who in dumping all this torment upon him makes even less sense than he did, but to the part of himself that is able to sense God: he stays true to himself. The way Job thinks changes through the course of the story. He anchors his faith in his own experience. His vision of Paradise is never to have been born (see Ecclesiastes 4:2-3 KJV, see Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus). That is a longing that comes not from God, but from the heart of man.

Job comes to understand that people cannot speak for the mystery of existence, which some people call “God,” and loses patience with all of these people around him presuming to be able to.

“Will you speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for him?” (13:7 KJV) Job demands of his pontificating friends. He adds: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him” (13:15 KJV). Conjuring up the idea of an incomprehensible and capricious God leaves nothing for the agency of man. And the agency of man, Job comes to realize, matters. It alone has the power of connecting with the divine mystery.

When the puppet God speaks, it is with a human voice. When the mystery collapses into a name, a face, a time and place, it forfeits its essence. The poetry of the Book of Job is the human emotion of Job’s suffering, including what he must endure from his clueless friends, filling the silence with simple-minded, pre-fab explanations; and the enlightenment of what he learns.

“Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent?” Endo’s priest asks.

Because anything less, you’re inventing it.

August 19, 2022

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Credit

At a recent sporting event, I saw a young man wearing a tee-shirt that said, “Sometimes you need your ego.” I guessed that it was a familiar expression to those in the know, but I had never seen it said out loud, so to speak. My immediate response was that it was a vivid and original statement, and certainly true—along with an uneasy suspicion. Was it a rebellion against the social pressure to suppress yourself in service of the concord of the whole? Or a cheap shot at looney-tune mindfulness? The yoga mat version of anti-environmental bumper stickers like “Environmentalism is Recycled Communism” or “Try wiping with a pine cone.”

In my golden years ego begins to seem rather clownish, but I doubt I would be thinking such a thing without the ego-fueled experiences of my youth and middle age.

So I don’t have a problem with ego, I’m just glad to see it moving to the back seat. The insistence on individuality, and the illusion of potency that comes with it, have given way to a grateful sense of participating in a mysterious cosmic drama without self-reference or judgment. You could call it mindfulness: experiencing this extraordinary spectacle without thinking about “me.” Also gratitude for the love that prevails in our cutthroat, lucre-driven world.

I was an imposter for many years in academia. I was devoted to my students, and colleagues, and not much else. We had to teach our charges “critical thinking,” and its embodiment in “research writing.” “Critical thinking” turned out to be a chimera, code for “thinking what you want to believe,” and “research writing” a labor all parties involved hated that resulted in something nobody read. What is this obsession, I used to wonder, with the proprietorship of mundane thoughts and phrases? I used to fantasize a world in which credit didn’t matter—not just because then I wouldn’t have to teach the banal art of neurotic attribution, and warn of the deadly sin of plagiarism, but because who cares who said what?

You read an article. Do you really need to know it was written by Hortense Carmichael? Yes, I realize it matters to Hortense in her career, but who outside of a small, rarefied set of people is going to know or remember that name? What if we just absorbed the ideas in the article, good and bad, and it was enough to know that somebody added them to the river of culture without needing to be recognized for it, and it all belongs to the human story?

Purely a fantasy, I admit. Like John Lennon admitting that the only way to get a world without countries or religion or war—non-tribal human culture—is to imagine it. It’s contrary to human nature. We do fight over recognition, we do judge, we do rate, we do compare. Who’s number one? Who’s in the Top Ten? The Top Five? Who is best in the world? Who invented this, who thought of that? Who dares to be different from me? And honestly it’s hard to imagine the human experience without all of that. It’s elemental. Unlike ants or bees, who don’t seem to have a concept of individuality at all, only of the whole, we prize our egos.

If you come up with something really good, you want credit for it. Knowing full well it really doesn’t matter worth a damn.

I say all this to explain the current post. Years ago, in the throes of academe, I scribbled some notes about a world without any concept of taking credit—you know, “recycled communism”—but never wrote it; that is, until recent events led me to write this one.

Once, in a section of a story, I tried my hand at a Faulkner parody—which I thought was pretty funny—and I gave the story to a writer friend to read. “Stick with your own voice, John,” I remember him writing. “You’re trying to sound like Faulkner and it’s not working.” My God, what do you say to that?

I retasted the sensation after a friend whose judgment I hold in the highest regard responded to my most recent post with the word “plagiarism.” In the post I had made a reference to something seeming so out of place in Scripture it challenged complacent piety, with the phrase “like a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.” I was shocked at my friend’s reaction, but after a few minutes’ thought realized that though she was wrong about the plagiarism, she was right about how it might be perceived. A reader unfamiliar with that phrase might well assume I thought it up. Or worse, later discover I didn’t and think I stole it and tried to pass if off as my own.

Let me be clear: to me this is one of the most famous similes in 20th century American literature—Raymond Chandler in Farewell, My Lovely. My use of it was not theft but allusion. I do it all the time. In the same post I used the sentence “The rest is silence.” In the post before that I used the phrase “No one to polish the feasting cup.” I like the secret communion with the reader, who feels both the comparison and the tribute—to Hamlet in the first, to the beautiful “Lament of the Last Survivor” in Beowulf in the second.

Maybe I’m assuming too much.

Sometimes I feel so lonesome I could cry. And if I have to say something like “as country and western singer/songwriter Hank Williams famously crooned,” I’ll just skip it.

Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

September 17, 2022

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The Journey

There was no sensation of movement, and negligible consciousness, like that of a rock. That is, no time. For a very long time.

But if time were to come, like rain in the desert, consciousness would follow like a germinating seed. Or maybe the other way around.

The turning point was a gentle suggestion of acceleration, until it couldn’t be ignored—characteristic of things as they age—which created the traction that breeds awareness—like the incremental warming of water in the spring to fish who feel it not as warmth but as provocation—not all at once but in intimations, maybe anticipation, maybe memory.

In the case at hand, a sensation of falling.

The void took on dimensions. Oblivion developed ambition.

That is to say, the beginning of the story. Not of existence, not of time, themselves—just of the story.

The story of a long fall toward something distant and incomprehensible—perhaps that faint point of light far below.

Life follows a reason to live.

Of course there would be obstacles along the way—monsters in the void that only chance could prevent a collision with. Others not directly in its path whose influence would divert it from its trajectory.

It didn’t know, imagine, or remember if it was knowing, imagining, or remembering this.

It could look back now into the blankness of its long calcified past—back to some mythical catastrophe lingering in its bedrock as a primal vibration. Its Big Bang. Was that what it would call God, or the point of light it still more felt than saw, growing slowly bigger and separating itself from all the others, far, far below?

It just depended on where in the story it was. For now, there seemed only the increasing sense of acceleration, as the point of light grew steadily brighter. More insistent. Pulling everything to know itself.

Is God origin or destiny? And can a God that is not known be?

And our accelerating, awakening pilgrim, what could it know about the eyes on a random rock down below, or the calculations that would stand in for knowing it?

How could it know, except through interaction, that everything is known through interaction?

* *.*

The tedium of—no mistaking it now—the journey began to tremble with a sense of urgency. Everything about the downward plunge was going up—speeding up, heating up—and most wondrous of all—lighting up. The point of light had become a disc, freely sharing its light and warmth, and it was thrilling.

The question of whether the light was good or evil, to be loved or feared, had lost its relevance as all sensations converged into the compulsion to go toward it. It could see now that it would miss all the monsters, unaware of being watched, being known. Knowing only the rich promise of arrival. Of consummation. Nothing could deter it.

These were the days of its glory.

Falling, falling—faster, brighter, hotter—surrendering to the ecstasy, becoming one with the light. The love.

Then, just as the moment of apotheosis was at hand, there came a sensation like a father swinging a child by its arms, and after a maelstrom of confusion, it knew it was moving no longer toward, but away from the light—still glorious—but a glorious entrance and a glorious exit are not the same.

They are opposites and their trajectories mirror images.

The disc was shrinking now, the heat and light fading, the love moving into the dim register of memory.

Maybe its origin and destiny were one. Maybe it knew this, maybe just suspected it, along with something like a long, decaying final thought: gratitude that it had been allowed to know itself.

And even more, would now be allowed to forget itself.

Again.

September 23, 2022

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The Room

The guard watched as the deputies escorted her in. They stopped, and she stood there, her expression impossible to read. No protocol, no words. The guard raised an eyebrow to ask ‘ready?’ She nodded, walked over, and he unlocked the door.

He stood aside and she entered the room. The furnishings didn’t just say ‘I am odd’—they said ‘you’re in the weirdest situation you’ll ever be in.’ She didn’t know if she had looked forward to, or feared, this day more.

Gray metal walls. No windows. A long table dissecting the square space. Two chairs. Not by the table but across the room from each other: one just inside the door she had come in, the other against the facing wall, by the other door.

Where someone else would soon enter.

The guard handed her the gun. The 19mm Glock he had used. Lex talionis.

“Any questions?” he asked.

“No,” she said. She was done with questions. And her training had been thorough.

“Aim for the chest,” he reminded her. Hearing him say it, she felt a shadow cloud her thoughts. She tried to shake it away.

The guard nodded encouragingly and left.

* * *

Once they were both in the room, and the doors sealed, there would be no intervention. No one would even be watching. No one would hear. Whatever happened in the room would be final and irrevocable, with no blame either way. If one person walked out, that person would be free and the record erased. If it were both, or neither—same thing.

The dilemma of the barbarity of the death penalty, and the deep human need for vengeance, most felt, had found its most enlightened solution.

Perfect justice meets Schrödinger’s cat.

* * *

She stood there in the silence, waiting. One of those little eternities, hanging by a thread.

The far door opened.

She had cultivated a mental image in the weeks since his conviction, and now, as he entered, she saw that it was distorted—he seemed smaller, his facial features less dramatic. Except for the eyes. Those were the same.

She had been coached well. She knew the wisest strategy here, the safest, which in fact the majority of people in this situation followed. Come to the edge of the table, position herself, aim, and shoot him immediately. Empty fourteen rounds into his chest, then one in the face as an exclamation point. Do not engage with him. Do not let him talk. Finish it.

He stood there, watching her, perhaps expecting this. She thought, where’s the satisfaction in that? She felt her power like a drug, and wanted him to feel it too. For a second she thought she saw ‘I want you to kill me’ in his eyes—but with that smirk. The smirk she remembered from the trial. Maybe it was ‘I want to kill you.’ She nodded toward the chair by the wall.

“Do you mind if I stand up?” he said.

“I want you to sit down.”

“Oh, please—it’s not too much to ask. I’ve been sitting down all day.” He took a step toward her. She tensed and raised the gun. He smiled. “You’re very close, aren’t you? I mean, you’re right there. Man, I can tell you, that’s a rush, knowing you could be dead the next second. One blink away from nothing. I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to feel that. How many people get that chance?”

“Sit down.”

“Oh, come on. Look at the situation. Here we are. You can’t grant me that one little mercy?”
She had been repeatedly coached about the danger of losing her concentration. Giving him even the smallest opening. A flash of distraction blurred her mind again—he took another step—and she came out of it with a surge of adrenalin. Do it, a voice said. But she didn’t, quite.

“There’s something I don’t think you understand,” he was saying. “Maybe I’ve done some bad things—everybody’s done some bad things—but I’m not a bad person.”

“You are what you do,” she said.

“I don’t expect you to understand. It’s a lot to get your head around.”

“It’s not that hard,” she said. “You’re saying exactly what I expected you to say.”

“See? You imagined us talking.” He smirked. She just stared at him and kept the gun raised. “Look at the world,” he went on. “Look at nature. Killing is part of it. It’s built in. It happens. You’re taking it too personally—it’s just the way things turned out. You think you wouldn’t be capable of the same thing?”

She wasn’t exactly making him suffer, was she? “I’d be capable of killing you, but an innocent person for no reason?—no.” That smirk. “You’ve lived your stinking miserable life without anything good or beautiful or redeeming in it, and when you die it will just be the world taking a shit.”

“Well, that’s a little harsh.”

“How can you live to your age and not have one shred of grace or class or wisdom? You’re just sewage.”

“Whoo! I understand ‘sewage’ but I don’t know what those other words mean. You go through shit, you deal with it, you come back to fight another day. You survive. That’s all I know.”

“It won’t help you much in Hell.”

“You can save the fairy tales.”

“You took the thing I loved most in this world.”

His eyes were like razors—watching her the way a predator watches its prey—seeing the surge of agony distract her, her arms lose their tension.

“Ain’t a whole lot I can do about that now.”

“Just one thing.”

“You think I’m afraid to die?”
“I don’t know, or care, what you think.”

“If that was true, we wouldn’t be standing here. So I’ll tell you: I’m not. You can have this stinking life and everything in it—it doesn’t mean a goddam thing to me. The only thing that means anything to me is what I’m about to do: come over that table, take that gun away from you, and have some fun with you right there on that floor.”

He jumped onto the table, held his arms out, and cried, “Let’s make love! Nobody’s watching!”

And leapt.

What was this sudden brain-freeze? By the time she sent the command to her trigger finger his hand had her by the wrist, and the shot went awry and she heard the bullet ricochet off the metal walls.

He was on top of her and wrenched the gun from her hand.

She couldn’t understand how she’d let it come to this. She braced herself—and when nothing happened she saw the other options—that he could kill her, then himself—or not kill her but take her with him—or leave her there alive and walk away free. Please, that, she thought. I can live with that. What subterranean snake-infested hole could he return to? The man’s life was his punishment—

Or,

Once he had the gun, he rose, stepped back, put it to his temple and said, “I told you I wasn’t a bad person,” and pulled the trigger—all in one smooth decisive motion—

Or,

She fired three times directly into his chest as he fell, then backed away, watching him. He didn’t breathe or move for a minute. Two. Three. She heard her instructor—“Make sure. If he survives we have to let him go.” She approached him, holding the gun out, aiming it at the back of his head. She hesitated, lowered the gun, and nudged his shoulder with her foot. Nothing. Blood was pooling under his upper body now. There wasn’t any surviving going on here.

Kill him once, it’s on him. Kill him twice, it’s on me. Whatever he was, he’s not that anymore, she thought. He’s probably glad.

She didn’t think dealing with it morally would be difficult at all.

* * *

The guard heard the bell and came over to unlock the door. He was excited. He didn’t know what he’d find when he opened it, he only knew he had five hundred bucks riding on the five to one.

October 1, 2022

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Entanglement, Part 1

“Thoughts meander like a restless wind

Inside a letterbox . . . “ J. Lennon

The recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for their work on entangled photons validates the possibility of something beyond the standard model. It suggests a pathway into a new way of thinking. Such leaps—our home turf not flat but a sphere, a heliocentric solar system, natural selection, relativity, and now quantum mechanics, are always counter-intuitive, at first, until the communal mind is forced to expand to accommodate them.

Individual photons can be split into a pair of entangled photons, or a subatomic particle can decay into an entangled pair of new particles, and despite being separated, even by a long distance, they still behave as one particle, the understanding of one impossible without an understanding of the other, with simultaneous responses to each other without any apparent communication between them. It is a sustained connection—one entity, not two. It is as though the space we think see between them, for them, isn’t there.

I’m an English major, not a physicist, so I’ll leave the fine points to the experts and enjoy the mathless Big Picture, with a mind free to wander. I like to think about ideas like space and time being emergent qualities, local, not absolute. Dimensions of reality not existing in our conception of space. Transcending the speed of light. Instantaneous travel. The non-existence of objective reality. The primacy of love. Soulmates. Particles separated at birth (Big Bang) and now though galaxies apart, still a single entity.

I imagine that space, like time, exists when needed—when ideas become entities and movement—as in the unfolding of the universe itself: space and time not out there waiting, but being created with the expansion. I like to think of space as possibility—akin to thought.

* * *

Many people in the world today are obsessed with aliens. Fabled aviator and ufologist John Lear, who died this past March, gave them much fuel for their flights of fancy: the moon manufactured in Jupiter and transported to its orbit around the earth 15,000 years ago, alien bases on and below the surface of the moon and Mars, Earth as a space prison where the prisoners must reach a higher level of consciousness, aliens conducting genetic experiments on humans, corroboration of the supposed goings-on at Area 51, and above all, a cover-up by NASA and the government who have long been aware of aliens in our midst.

What are “aliens”?

I enjoy good science fiction, but I’m not one of these voracious consumers of it, like my friend Perry Williams who in high school (probably still) could have built a small mountain from his collection of sci-fi paperbacks. I loved the covers of those books, those visual evocations of another place, but for me nothing between the covers ever lived up to the transcendence promised by the covers. Aliens were just humans in costume, usually with some exaggerated human characteristic. The fact is, John Lear and his colleagues notwithstanding, there are no aliens—at least I don’t know of any or know of anybody who does. We envision them as enhanced versions of ourselves, because ourselves are all we know—like a child imagining being an adult—they will get a few superficial things right, but the experience of being an adult will be (mercifully) beyond their reach. I’m not saying life, simple or advanced, does not exist elsewhere in the universe—personally I think if we don’t destroy ourselves (long shot) we will eventually discover that life is common in the cosmos, and there may be, probably are, advanced life forms elsewhere—I’m just echoing Fermi: where are they? Harebrained supposition won’t do it. I’m inclined to think that if aliens have the sophistication to be here, surely they have the sophistication not to crash in the New Mexico desert, subjecting themselves to autopsies. Those are human aliens. For me, we’re unlikely to have contact with real aliens because advanced civilizations are relatively rare out there and unlikely to be aware of each other during their, cosmologically speaking, brief existences, or because they don’t exist in the same dimension as we do. We’re on different frequencies, presumably having consciousness in common, but not in the same register. Maybe they “travel” faster than light not by Einsteinian warped spacetime, or wormholes, but by thought. They can be wherever they can visualize in their own particular fabric of reality, presumably somewhere they’ve had previous experience with, whatever the implications of that may be, or perhaps something like panpsychism is true: consciousness pervades the universe and two focal points of consciousness can be entangled and you can go from one to the other without traveling—none of which is science, but good fodder for science fiction.

“Aliens” serve two purposes for the modern human mind: they can stand in as an answer to The Question—how did we get here?—even if they answer nothing because how did they get there? Aliens also give us an “other”—and the human race craves an “other”—something bigger than us, something that certifies us, even if only for experimentation. It’s lonely clinging to this rock in the middle of nowhere and having no clue why. “Aliens” are basically imaginary friends.

My own inclination is to believe that “the universe” is a conflation of subjective and objective. Not that there isn’t “something” there—but something that has no reality until it is received somehow, when whatever happens when two particles “know” each other, happens. Maybe “the universe” is not a material entity, but an infinite set of possibilities, one of which we are seeing, and perhaps not even all of us seeing the same thing. The human mind will never know what “it” is. Any “knowing” will just be another collapse into what we call reality. Local and temporal.

Fred will always “know” something different from you. Most human arguments are apples and oranges.

Maybe manifestation and perception are entangled.

Maybe a lot of things. The work of Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger knocks down barriers and gives us hope, like a surge of fresh air.

October 25, 2022

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Entanglement, Part 2

After morning tea I strolled down to the lagoon. As always, a pang within me knew, even as it tried not to know, that I did this every morning—tried not to see the groove I had worn in the path. I strained to focus and really appreciate the beauty of this place—not an easy task since it was never anything but beautiful, in this same particular way. The air fresh, fragrant, exactly balanced between warm and cool. The colors vivid, the landscape sublime, the people, such as there were, pleasant—encounters with them mild, without challenge.

The challenge—I could sense it—was within.

A whisper.

Outwardly, there was no challenge here. No chance or error. No decay. No pain. No time. These things were absent: that was what the whisper knew.

I sat on my rock at the edge of the water, trying to steer the exquisite scene before me into the lobe that knew it as beautiful, succeeding only in pulses, distracted by the specter of another kind of feeling that came from time to time, as fleeting as déjà vu, and with the same heartache of recognition, when I glimpsed—or remembered?—a different beauty in a different world—a world where things change—they die and decay and nourish new life in an endless cycle that includes everything in that world, and even that world itself.

A world that knows its beauty through pain.

For all my efforts to hide from it, the other part of me.

* * *

The birds were singing outside, but the man dressed plainly in black had no use for singing birds, and couldn’t hear them anyway. The thick walls kept the outside out. He hadn’t lacked for work during the long wait, and was compensated and respected for his craft, but it was the anticipation of returning to this interrupted session that kept the edge of his lust sharp.

He checked on the subject first thing every morning—checked his vital signs, peeled back his eyelids to see his eyes rolled back in his head. He understood this state well, and was prepared to wait as long as it took, and this above all distinguished him: his patience. He could wait forever. But of course knew he wouldn’t have to.

His reward would come, and nothing could prevent him from enjoying it.

On these morning visits he wouldn’t tarry long—only check the numbers then the straps that bound the man to the chair, pausing to touch his gleaming instruments—the ones that cut, the ones that squeezed, the ones that made blue flame or electric shock—and shudder, savoring the delicious taste of that coming morning—coming as sure as the sun rises—when the pulse would be strong, the core body temperature restored, and the peeling back of his eyelids would reveal those very awake and terrified eyes.

It was too exquisite—the sharper and more delicious for the delay.

He didn’t think at all of where the man was. He had no more interest in such dubious places than in singing birds. Or the wasted breath of hope. Or the things that people out of his grasp enjoyed, or congratulated themselves for, or gloried in. They meant nothing. As for the man whose return he awaited, whose debt was not yet paid, his distance from his own self, though measured in light years, universes, was in fact no distance at all.

What looked like two, was one.

“Don’t forget me,” he said, then with a slight bow added, “Until tomorrow.”

And with infinite patience extinguished the light and left the room.

October 27, 2022

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Assembly Theory

“In assembly theory the future is determined, but not until it happens.”

“Assembly theory reintroduces an expanding, moving sense of time to physics by showing how its passing is the stuff complex objects are made of: the size of the future increases with complexity.”

“The future of the universe is more open-ended than we could have predicted.”

The above sound bites are just a sampling from the very quotable article “Time is an Object” by Sara Walker and Lee Cronin on Aeon (14 May 2023). A friend recently shared with me this careful attempt to explain “assembly theory,” which I had never heard of, but which captured me immediately.

The thoughts and habits and beliefs of all people, if left untreated, decay into ruts. You can euphemistically rename this inevitability “faith” or something else, but it’s still a failure of creative energy, and now you read about how the brain is programmed to predict possible futures, prioritizing the familiar, and thus, as everybody knows, to a large extent sees what it wants to see, and finds what it wants to find. I don’t understand why people fall roughly into two groups: those who domesticate the ruts, and those who feel trapped by them, but it seems to be so, the former group far outweighing the latter.

Personally, I equate being in a rut, maybe exactly, with depression. That’s why I found this article stimulating and refreshing—like the rescuers breaking through and the sweet air rushing in. The theory doesn’t introduce any new elements to the major players in our perception of reality—space, time, matter, force—it offers instead a novel way of thinking about their inter-relation. It especially offers a new way of thinking about time.

I’m not a card-carrying member of any political party or religion or school of thought—except maybe some vague generality like science or ethics—but to me, formalized common sense (science), and primal compassion (ethics), are above tribalism and don’t issue cards. I enjoy not knowing because only when I know I don’t know, which is always, can the space of discovery unfold before my eyes. Only then can I feel I may be using my mind for what it was designed to do, or rather, for what it may be capable of doing. I have, however, in my lifelong search for the thing I cannot name, sometimes found myself in the sweet spot where the counter-intuitive becomes intuitive—most resonantly, for me, with the idea of the Tao, which seems to harmonize nicely with assembly theory. A quotation from the Tao te Ching, Chapter 6 (trans. Stephen Mitchell) is in order:

The Tao is called the Great Mother:

empty yet inexhaustible,

it gives birth to infinite worlds.

It is always present within you.

You can use it any way you want.

The Tao might conjure the image of a uniform, omnipresent primal plasma from which all things issue, but assembly theory suggests that the emergence of phenomena is local: things appear and grow in complexity only where they can, where there is sufficient information—that is, memory—to build upon. The Tao is not everywhere, only everywhere it is. “Everywhere” is just too big a word—it can’t contain all the possible nothing. But “nothing,” as Roger Penrose observed, is unstable, so we can say the Tao is possible everywhere. It manifests reality when there are memory and different combinations available, new information in the environment, and the ability to replicate. If the Tao is not somewhere, that means that somewhere is not ready for it, or in other words, is nowhere. Nowhere is not an absence of space, but of time.

At least in my attempt to understand the theory, two thought patterns are particularly helpful: one, that time is not a screen upon which reality is projected—neither is it (as Einstein felt) in an absolute sense an illusion; neither is it simply another word for movement, or entropy: it is an actual material property. And two, time is the slow, creative process of selection and evolution, in the development not only of life forms, but of everything that develops. The process is not determined until it is, but neither is it random. And a “block universe” has no need of evolution, which alone can explain complex things, so that’s dubious. I think of it as a force—like gravity, which is equally invisible and known by its effects, too primal to be explained. “An object can be produced only where there is local memory that can guide the selection of which parts go where, and when.” And: “Time is the ever-moving material fabric of the universe itself.” No object can come into existence in a space that is too small for it—that is, without sufficient memory to support it. Life forms, which take an enormous amount of memory, and very deep time, to develop, of course can themselves channel the Tao and create their own complex objects. “High-assembly objects can be generated only by life.” I would include among those the idea where forms are subjugated to a consciousness of possibility itself, often called “enlightenment.”

Complex molecules, the life forms they become, the complex creations of art or engineering, are not random but are selected out of the space of all possibilities. The monkey with a typewriter and infinite time eventually chancing to type the complete works of Shakespeare would never happen, not only because the concept of “infinite time” is invalid—time is not a line extending forever, or a blank space waiting for a monkey to type every possible combination of letters—it is something that happens where there is memory. “As the memory requirements increase, the probability that an object was produced by chance drops to zero because the number of alternative combinations that weren’t selected is just too high.”

The authors, when they get to the questions we’ve been waiting for—“But how did something emerge from nothing? How did life emerge from non-living atoms and develop consciousness and intelligence?”—only conclude that in assembly theory these things are fundamental, not emergent. Reminds you of the physicists at the blackboard in the old New Yorker cartoon: at a certain point of complexity—“then a miracle occurs.” I didn’t notice the authors answering the questions, but I believe they would say the answer lies in deep time. Complex forms, including life, are not specifically determined, but are latent in, original material. To me, that is a hard distinction to grasp. As for “original material,” I’m afraid I have to ask—where did it come from?

Assembly theory challenges conventional thinking in several ways. As with the idea of the Tao, the theory sees the universe as a seedbed of possibility. But equally for me, the theory challenges the direction of the universe. Traditionally we see it—or are programmed to see it?—as having a beginning, then expanding from there toward we’re not sure what. One thinks of Aristotle’s “prime mover”—as long as we remember that Aristotle saw the “moving” as attraction, not pushing. He thought reality didn’t emanate from the Prime Mover, but was attracted back to it—since he needed a Prime Mover that wasn’t itself caused, or motivated, lest we get into an endless loop of what caused that?

The movement of the universe is not from but toward. God is infinite possibility, and thus can never be a completed thing: God didn’t create the universe, the universe is creating God. That works for the Tao too. Why does “God” have to be a being? Why can’t it be a force? Why can’t it be time itself? Nothing is planned—everything builds on what was before, and unfolds. Even if you insist the universe is determined, you can’t prove it can be predicted.

Like a good novel, the universe keeps you wondering what’s coming next.

August 20, 2023

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