Is there a plot?
There’s a plot.
No there isn’t.
Yes, there is.
No, there isn’t.
Possessing rationalization and denial in equal measure, confident
in the undertaking, I thought, on the occasion of writing this, that Laurence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake are
two books that the brightest, most talented, inspired and ambitious students of
literature, with few exceptions, eventually regret having read or tried to
read, not because they are too long or incomprehensible (which Finnegan’s
Wake most certainly is), but because they insist in the name of progress
and with all the authority of their authors’ genius on the possibility of
seeing the world and everything in it as a collection of universal product
codes. I could be wrong. And then I thought, This book is no different. The
history of anything is an inventory of memories and desires. And no matter how
you do it (with or without a computer) you almost always end up with words in a
row, that is to say, narrative. This happened. And then that happened. First
there was nothing. Then time and space happened. Then cause and effect
happened. Then language, the names of things. And finally, stories. Every tree
has a root and every tree is a tree, no matter how few or many branches it may
hold. Even if it has been grafted, a seed had to come from somewhere. There is
no way around it, this comic Source Wall. If there were another path I
would take it, if only to see where it leads.
It
’s m
uch ea
sier if so
mewhat boring t
o prefer combinations of
known things to the making up of new thing
s.ings.
where art is concerned.
A novel?
1.
A box, purchased at a yard sale containing a number of items
previously owned by Elihu Tellius, an itinerant theologian influenced by the
work of A.N. Whitehead and Aldous Huxley, husband to the poet and writer Joyan
Bliss.
2.
In the box, an unpublished work titled St. John’s Monkey
Hour by Tellius. several technical papers, an interview with the
artist Miguel Aro, an annotated chess game between Mikhail Tal and Bobby
Fischer, a novelty post card, several collections of short pieces, poetry, a
travel chess set.
. . . From January to May, Joyan disappeared from public
view. She had married one Harry Frederick Cowper who left for no apparent
reason. She later found out he had previously married her cousin who was
serving time in prison for polygamy. In June she resurfaced, and soon after
published her first book of poetry, Va te faire foutre! (i.e., Go
Fuck Yourself!), originally in French, and only much later in English. In
1956 she published her landmark work, Woman In A Box. She later claimed
to have been Joseph Cornell’s lover at the time and the inspiration for his
work, Apollinaris. In 1981 she married Elihu Tellius, thirty years her
junior, and retired to the country where she continued to write in privacy and
relative poverty. Between 1985 and 1991 she wrote Easel and Dead
Ballerinas. Her last book, Auygana, was published posthumously in
1998. Her view of herself as a writer is probably best summed up in the opening
paragraphs of Auygana:
Outsiders sometimes make
the best artists and dissidents, not only because they begin their efforts
estranged from the centers of power in any given group and as a result have an
outsider’s objectivity with regard to prevailing habits and assumptions,
strengths and weaknesses, but also because their brain is wired differently as
a result of their earlier experiences. If they are a mathematician become poet,
they tend to write mathematical poetry (Queneau). If they are a musician become
painter, they tend to compose paintings (Klee). Although art often evolves
mimetically (Mondrian) a lot of it is also the result of conceptual
cross-pollination (Cage). This has been the case for centuries if not thousands
of years. It has certainly been the case with me. I have come to believe,
however, that in the coming century, significance as an artist or intellectual
will be more the result of having the right agent, a brand vision, and a global
media presence than any other factors.
And now, on with the story.
aAbBcCdDEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz
. . .
On a parallel note: It is not that the author feels
particularly cynical or dispossessed. A little loose in the joints maybe. It is
understandable, given the millennium’s shaky start. Nor does the author imagine
any responsibility for or any possibility of changing society through his art.
He has carefully followed the trail of cultural mergers and acquisitions
occurring throughout the middle and end of the last century and has come to the
conclusion that Art is now, for all practical purposes, a wholly owned
subsidiary, not of Politics or Economics as in earlier times, but of
Entertainment. And although art remains his vocation, making a living as a
technologist has become his full time avocation, an avocation in which he has
experienced some success. Compared to most other people in the world, he is
fortunate and knows it. He lives in a country that generates over 21% of the
world’s wealth and contains 4.6% of its population. He lives at a time
(11/08/2003 12:28 GMT) in which 20% of the people in his country believe they
are part of his country’s richest 1% and another 19% believe that they soon
will be. He lives at a time in which suicide accounts for roughly 50% of all
violent deaths worldwide and in which war accounts for approximately 300,000
deaths annually or 3/64,000th of the world’s population, a time in
which a retrovirus with an adaptability and survivability superior to anything
you can imagine (including “Aliens”) accounts for over 3,000,000 deaths
annually, the majority of the world’s “non-violent” deaths, over 90% of them in
underdeveloped countries (to the perpetual shame of the civilized world, a
shame that no amount of years will ever erase). He lives at a time in which
international military conflicts revolve around ethnicity, religion and control
of the world’s resources, especially oil, water, credit and debt. He lives at a
time in which climatologists disagree on the ecological effects of industrial pollution,
but are in almost complete agreement on the fact that the earth is getting
warmer and that, if the warming continues, it may lead in fewer than twenty
years to the devastation of nations and the deaths of millions. He lives at a
time in which a multinational corporatism is the dominant global politic, far
surpassing monarchy, theocracy, democracy, socialism and communism in its
effects, and technology is the primary means by which the nation in which he
lives maintains its temporary global economic, political and military
superiority. He lives at a time in which the most radical stance possible is
one of individual objectivity. As a result, his world, though surreal by any
measure, is filled with opportunity, each day a new day, full of surprises. He
knows that this is how we live now, and that things will probably get to be
even more like this as time goes on, a pastiche of countless meaningful and not
so meaningful statistics in various stages of production and consumption: a
global society of logos, catch phrases and lists. He desires to confine the
majority of his own meaningful acts to the production of art, specifically,
three of its subgenres, visual art, literature and technology. He speculates
that in the early years of the twenty-first century, the majority of art
consumers will turn out to be slightly schizophrenic and if not schizophrenic
at least suffering from one or another mild form of attention deficit disorder.
Given this information, it makes the most sense from a marketing standpoint to
paint and to write in ways that appeal to their sense of self(s) and/or their
attention span. Even though he cannot find Edward
Craven Walker listed in any twentieth-century art history, he believes
the lava lamp represents the apex of twentieth century art. Sometimes, standing
in front of the bathroom mirror, he might even exclaim to himself that he knows
all of these things as well as he knows his own penis. As a result, he
vacillates from day to day in his belief that the world is in general going
uphill or downhill.
He is
writing a book. His book has a protagonist but he’s not sure who it is. His
protagonist may be a woman. But if it turns out that his protagonist is a man,
then his protagonist loves a woman. On a good day, sitting at the toilet soon
after he wakes up, he will say something to himself along the lines of:
She is beautiful when she
sleeps. Everything about her is beautiful. Even when she drools a little on the
pillow, it never smells bad.
Why is that?
On a bad
day, sitting in the same spot, he will say something along the lines of:
She sometimes looks at me
as if to say, “Why won’t you help me? Can’t you see that I am nearly blind,
that the only thing I can see anymore is the dim outline of people,
two-dimensional, dark, jerking and jumping around in their shadow play? Where
once I could see faces, now there are only the silhouettes of hats, hairdos,
noses, lips and chins. Where once I could see the slightest motions of fingers,
toes, mouths and eyes, now there are only wrists, knees and elbows.” I love her. What am I to do?
And then
he recites to himself:
“She entered into the
center of the prison of my body and
spoke: ‘Rise from your deep sleep.’ I wept bitter tears. Afterwards, I asked: ‘Who calls my name, and where is this
hope from, lying as I am in the chains of my prison?’ She answered: ‘I am the
Pronoia of the pure light. Rise, remember, and seek your source, which I
am.’”
He has
picked up the habit, during business meetings, of rewriting the text on his
credit card receipts as Japanese Tanka:
Alamo
Circle
Hotel,
Restaurant and Bar
Rest,
Relax, Enjoy!
$120
Thank
you, and come again soon
Time:
2:32
Elysian
Fields Full Service . . .
Customer’s
Copy
$12.19
I agree
to pay above . . .
Holly’s
Arts & Crafts
1
Sennelier Water
color
Travel Set
5 Arches
90 lb. Cold
Press
Watercolor Paper
The first thing you notice in the box is the postcard. It is
the type of postcard you find in almost any postcard rack in certain southern
states, especially Texas. It is a picture of a cowboy riding a giant jack
rabbit next to a trail of cattle. Normally, at the top of the card written
across the blue southern sky in cursive you would find the words, Cattle
Punching on a Jack Rabbit. That is not the case with this card. Instead of
a sky filled with carefully calligraphed letters, there is a jumble of symbols
of various sorts, cut out and glued firmly to the once blue sky. Some of the
symbols look familiar. Some do not. It is the kind of thing capable of
capturing the mind in a trap from which the only escape is an understanding,
not only of the symbols, but of their relationship to the giant jack rabbit,
the cowboy, the cows, the surrounding mountains and whatever happens to be
written on the other side of the card. Flipping the card over, one finds an
address, and surrounding the address, in a spiral of small, hand printed
letters the text:
Show me anything in this universe that isn’t built with
language and I’ll show you the unspeakable likeness of god. That is not to say
that the unspeakable is better named Unspeakable the Greater or Unspeakable the
Lesser in its relationship to language (or anything else, for that matter),
only that it is unspeakable. Language has been called by some the copestone of
reality. It is much more than that. It is the permeable membrane of the
anagogic. You can draw a line of meaning, not false meaning, but true meaning,
purposeful meaning, from any point in space and time to any other. You can do
this through the use of physics, mathematics and natural language. You can do
this with human emotion, thought, fate, destiny and free will. You can do it
with a pencil or a pen and a plane piece of paper, although in some cases, in
the interest of time, a computer (such as the physical universe) may be
required . . .
Language is the hallucination from which we construct
reality . . .
1. Nf3
Therapy Session
Citing arguments for or against the existence of god is like
picking dinner from a Chinese menu, don’t you think? Despite all the seeming
choices, at some point you have to decide in what combination you want your
meat, fish, poultry and vegetables and whether you want them spicy or mild. You
eventually come to a place where you must decide whether or not you are willing
to make your own little leap of animal faith. You must decide to what degree
your identity is comprised of your genetic predispositions and life’s
experiences. You must decide whether or not you even have an identity. Where
the question of god is concerned, science is no different from any other
religion. Perhaps, when it is all said and done, I am only one of an infinity
of possible combinations of observable events. Each possible combination has its
own belief system, prophets, priests and heretics. Perhaps my identity has no
name. Perhaps my true identity is one and the same with god’s. Even if this is
true, even if I contain within myself everything that I think god is, I remain
an infinitesimal by comparison, a point infinitely small and infinitely dense,
a singularity. In a world where both absolutism and relativism have failed, god
remains a necessity, not as an end state, but as a process. That is the real
heresy. That god is in us and changes even as we do.
That is what he thinks to himself as he sits in a spare,
tastefully decorated room, facing a woman whose head and shoulders are bathed
in a golden yellow light that spills like a waterfall through a south facing,
beveled glass window near the ceiling.
How are you feeling, she asks.
Better.
How are you sleeping?
Better.
He sits quietly. He knows he is expected to continue, but he
doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t know what to say. A minute goes by. He is
suddenly confused about the rules. Are they are waiting each other out, or
aren’t they? Have they reached a point where the first one to speak wins, . . .
or loses? . . . He hates thinking this way? It must be genetic. His hands lie
in his lap, fingertips pressed together. He begins to circle his thumbnails
repeatedly with his forefingers. He also begins barely, almost imperceptibly,
to rock back and forth in his chair. As soon as he realizes he is doing these
things he stops. He concentrates on what it is he is supposed to say.
I remember once, when I was thirteen years old, I got into
an argument with my best friend over something, I don’t remember what, but we
ended up going back and forth like we were two kings in parlay over some newly
discovered continent or trade route. Through the years, that seems to have been
a recurring theme with me.
In what way?
What do you mean, in what way?
What did you and your friend say?
Oh. I don’t know. We could have been reading from a sitcom
script. Something along the lines of . . .
Is true.
Is not.
Is true.
Is not.
One more than that.
No. One more than that.
Too late. I already said one more than that.
It doesn’t work that way.
Yes it does.
No it doesn’t.
I said yes it does.
. . .You know . . . a typical childhood argument.
Preparation for adulthood.
Then what happened?
What usually happens. We kept at it until we were yelling at
each other. As soon as I realized he was about to lose it, I began backing away
from him. He was stronger and faster, but I have a criminal mentality. Once I
was far enough away I said, Have it your own way. But always one more than you,
on everything else, forever! That’s when he came at me. I had enough of a head
start to climb a tree before he could reach me. It was a big tree with rotten
limbs. When he tried to climb after me, I broke off pieces of the limbs and
threw them at him. That kept him on the ground. When he bent down to pick up a
stick and throw it back, I would say, Pick up that stick. When he would move to
pick up a different stick I would say, Pick up that stick instead. When he
finally picked one up I said, Throw it. He didn’t throw it. He didn’t do
anything. He just stood there staring at me. He wanted me to come down, but I
knew he would beat me up if I did. His mom eventually called him home to dinner
and I ran away. That night, before I went to sleep, I said, Always one more
than you, everybody, for everything, forever. It occurred to me that maybe
someone as far back as the Paleolithic era had already beaten me to it, but
then I thought, It seems original enough. Maybe I’m the first.
What happened the next day?
What do you mean?
Between you and your friend?
Nothing. We were fine. We were best friends.
She writes something on her notepad. He wonders what it is.
It could be anything. Maybe a personal reminder to pick up something on the way
home. It’s all part of the puzzle, he thinks. He looks at her for a long time.
She looks back at him. Steadily. Professionally. He observes her body language
and finds it to be neutral, open, entirely appropriate to the situation. He
wonders about his own body language. He is sitting up straight. His legs are
crossed at the ankles. He looks down at his hands resting in his lap. (He is
vain where his hands are concerned.) He stretches out his fingers to check his
cuticles and suddenly, with an unprecedented rush of adrenalin, sees past them
to the large mole hole in the middle of his lap. It is more than a hole. It is
a gaping wide mouth, like the mouth on a blow up doll, shouting in pantomime
for all the world to hear, Your fly is open! Hey, everybody -- his fly is open!
XYZ! XYZ! His anti-memetic conditioning fails him completely and he responds with
Goofus unoriginality, Great! Just fucking great! Thanks a lot! . . . A
cacophony of voices from grade school nuns, high school gym teachers, Air Force
drill sergeants, girlfriends, college classmates and co-workers yells back at
him, Why can’t you ever remember to zip it up? He feels his face getting hot.
His knees start to tremble. That is when he closes his eyes. And then, as he
has done instinctively since he was a child, he systematically calms himself.
First, he takes several slow breaths. Next, he draws a circle in his mind. He
turns it into it a sphere. He colors it blue and makes it shiny, reflective,
like a Christmas tree ornament. He places it in empty space. He makes another
sphere. And another. He makes them different colors. He places them in the
space he has created. He tries to see the reflections of all the other spheres
in the first sphere. He tries to see the reflection of the first sphere in all
the other spheres. He imagines an infinity of reflections. He moves from one
sphere to another, imagines each of them a soul, imagines an infinity of them
standing together in the silence of their singular, shared destiny.
Are you all right?
He opens his eyes. I’m fine.
You seemed for a moment as if you were upset or distracted.
I was just thinking.
About what?
About things that matter. As opposed to things that don’t. I
was trying not to escape into thinking something mattered that didn’t.
And what was that?
He pauses for a moment. Ok. Have you read T. S. Eliot? Of
course you have. Everyone who has read poetry in college has read Prufrock.
But for one thing, it would be a cliché. That one thing is this: with a single
poem, Eliot took modernism straight to postmodernism. Almost every phrase in
that poem is a deliberate reference to something outside itself. Prufrock
is an implicit hypertext that lets you jump out of the poem to some classical
reference and right back in anytime you like. When you get back, you realize
the thing that sent you out turns out to have been a joke or even a pun. The
whole thing is a recursive, self-referential parody of classicism and modernism
both. You read that poem and you realize postmodernism is just another word for
late modernism. Prufrock’s his most famous poem, you know. As far as I’m
concerned, it’s on a par with the first issue of Playboy.
I thought The Waste Land and Four Quartets
were considered his most important works.
She is sharp. She could cut you.
No. Those poems are career filler. I’m personally convinced
he wrote The Waste Land specifically for the purpose of generating
formulaic essays and dissertations as a backup plan to insure his legacy. Prufrock
was something different. It was unique. It was the breakthrough. It was a
twentieth-century how-to manual on love as the frustrated desire of a
middle-aged man for a beautiful young woman in a morally bankrupt society, a
timeless subject. It’s a Protestant’s Lolita, a step and a half away
from pedophilia, that favorite pastime of emperors, senators and aristocracy in
general. After Prufrock, Eliot was more concerned about his reputation
than his work. Sort of like Sartre after he joined the Communist Party. Anyway,
in Prufrock there are two lines that read, In the room the women come
and go/Talking of Michelangelo. We discussed that poem in class and the
professor asked why, with all the repetition in the poem, those two lines were
the only ones repeated back to back and word for word and I told him, Because
they’re the focus of the poem. They’re the farther room. It’s a love poem. He’s
in a brothel. Those lines are why he’s there. The professor told me I was wrong
and that Prufrock was at a cocktail or a dinner party. He insisted that
Eliot would never write a poem about a brothel. I said, Why not? He asked if I
had ever been to Boston. I said, No. He said that people who live in Boston
don’t write poems like that. He said Eliot’s grandfather was Unitarian. I said,
But look at Nietzsche. His whole family was Lutheran. Then he asked if anyone
else thought the same way I did and no one raised their hand. I was
disappointed at the time. I have since learned that in those situations,
excluding teenagers and other revolutionary types, the majority will almost
always side with the person in authority.
Is that what you meant by escape?
No. Not at all. That’s not the escape I was talking about. This
is the escape I was talking about. The conversation we’re having right now.
This escape into thinking that thoughts and words are enough. Thinking that the
world is made entirely of thoughts and words. Just now, I’ve escaped into a
conversation with you about things that may or may not be important, but to do
it I had to leave something behind that was much closer to what I really wanted
to say.
And what was that?
I wanted to say that this is a really one-sided
conversation. I’m the one doing all the talking. I want you to talk to me for a
while. In all the time I’ve been coming here, I can’t remember one real
conversation we’ve ever had. I want to see you reflected in my mind as we talk.
It would be so much easier to talk with you that way. I want us to have a
dialogue.
I thought that this was a dialogue.
Are you telling me that you think
the best possible therapeutic model is for me to do all the talking while you
sit there with only an occasional question to keep me going? Don’t you ever sit
on this side of the desk?
Actually, yes. But that’s my therapy. This is yours.
He sits quietly, his chin in his hand. There is a pen lying
midway between them on her desk. He reaches forward and picks it up.
Look. Like I said, I’ve been coming here for a while and so
far the conversation has been pretty dull. There’s been no real transference in
either direction that I can see. No hostility, or avoidance, or rescue
behaviors.
There has been some avoidance.
Ok. But this is not avoidance. Look. Just do one thing for
me. Call it a favor. Describe this pen to me. That’s all I’m asking. Really.
It’s not about control. It’s more about trust. Just a couple of sentences. I
want to know what it is I’m holding in my hand where you’re concerned. It may
be obvious to you, but it’s not to me.
She looks at the pen and says, It’s a ballpoint pen. It’s my
favorite pen. It was given to me as a gift.
He is relieved. Thanks, he says. That helps quite a bit. I
don’t think that this is really a pen, by the way. The only thing that makes it
a pen is that I’m paying attention to it. I’m looking at the world in front of
me and then all of a sudden I say, Look, there’s a pen. It’s so-and-so high and
so-and-so wide and so-and-so deep. And the next second it’s still there. And a
little while later, it’s still there. From a logical point of view this pen is
periodic, a series of similar events. As long as it retains its periodicity it
remains a thing in itself. Its periodicity is as much a function of the ways in
which I pay attention to it as it is the ways in which it pays attention to
itself and to me. For example, if I give it a closer look I find out it has
parts. And they are periodic, too. And every part has a name. And even if I
don’t know the names, I know they exist. Somebody has named them, sometime,
somewhere. As a result, this thing, this pen, has its place in the world along
with every other thing that someone has decided exists, including all those
things that I call myself -- sensory perception, language, thoughts, emotions,
actions, habits . . . That is what time
is, by the way -- the attention we pay to things. If we did not pay attention
to them in the ways that we do, they would not exist as they do. They would
exist, not as things, but as one and the same with the unity that is the
universe. We create time by paying attention to things. Apart from our paying
attention to them, time does not exist. Of all the things in the universe, time
is the most purely relative. But that’s not what interests me about this pen.
What interests me is what you said. You could have told me things about this
pen that you know we both already know. You could have pretended to tell me
things without saying anything at all. Instead, you chose to tell me things that
I could never have known without your telling me. When you told me that you
like it, you made it important and worth talking about. The fact that it was
lying on your desk was not a random act. And the fact that I’m sitting here
talking with you about it is not a random act.
He puts the pen back on the desk. She relaxes a little.
He had hoped for a more favorable outcome as a result of his
exegesis. He wants to feel calm, but he doesn’t. Again, he clears his mind. He
takes deliberate, slow breaths. He listens to his breathing: soft, a whisper
entering and leaving his body. He feels the line of his lips pressed against
each other. He becomes aware of the tension in his raised shoulders and
deliberately lowers them, relaxes the muscles in his shoulders and back. He
lowers his chin slightly and allows his upper arms to rest against his sides.
His head and torso move slowly, almost imperceptibly, forward and backward with
each breath. He breathes gently, moves gently forward and backward, again and
again.
As if waking from a narcoleptic sleep, he straightens up in
his chair and asks, Did any of that make any sense?
Yes.
Good. He smiles at her. Would you like to see a trick?
What kind of trick?
A writing trick. If you would give me another pen and a
piece of paper I’ll show you.
She takes a piece of paper from her desk drawer and places
it, along with two pens, in front of him.
He leans forward and takes one pen in each hand.
Immediately, he begins writing simultaneously with both hands, beginning at the
outward edge of the paper and moving toward the center. As both hands reach the
center, he reverses direction, moving again to the outward edge of the paper.
He continues this back and forth motion, until he has moved from the top to the
bottom of the page. As soon as he is finished, he lays the pens on the desk and
pushes the paper toward her, so she can read what he has written.
You wrote this upside down.
Yes.
It’s Prufrock.
Yes.
Your handwriting is very small.
So I’ve been told.
That’s quite a trick, she says as she picks up her favorite
pen and writes something on her notepad.
Thanks . . . Look. Don’t take this personally, but sometimes
I don’t really know why I keep coming here.
You choose to come here.
<Silence.>
Anything else? she asks.
Yes.
What is that?
I think maybe my girlfriend is seeing someone.
We can talk about that next time.
She smiles, sits up a little in her chair. Still smiling,
she stands up and walks to the door. He follows her. She is wearing a
close-fitting dress. He starts to look at her body but stops himself. He
imagines that she knows he has had to stop himself from staring at her. He
imagines that she is used to it, that it’s part of the job and that she will
brush it off like a loose hair as soon as he leaves the room.
There is a courtyard in the center of the building, fully
outfitted with benches, hedges, trees, a fountain, and paved walkways. He
always comes here after a session. He sits down in the Saint Augustine grass
with his back against a tree. He can afford to spend an hour here before he
goes back to work. To sit and think, or not think, as he looks around at
whatever there is to see. That is the real reason he continues to come here --
to remember or imagine all or part of whatever there is see. To imagine a face
in the grass or the trees. To engage in one imaginary conversation after
another with one real or imaginary person after another. To say things that
might change things. All his life he has done this, talked to a person in his
mind about a certain thing a dozen times before actually talking to that person
about that certain thing. And then reliving and revising the conversation a
dozen times afterwards,. This is how he has lived his life, talking to one
person, real or imagined, after another, trying to get better at it, trying to
get it right. And even if there really is a person there, which there often is,
talking to them in the same way he would talk to them if he had imagined them
is no different than talking to them as if they are unimagined, because in some
way, they are all imagined, and not only by him. Everything is mediated.
Nothing is not. That is why he talks and has always talked to everyone he has
ever met or imagined as if they are really there, as if they share the same
close correspondences to things outside themselves as he does, as if what he is
saying makes sense and what they are saying makes sense, even though neither of
them may understand it at the time. And for the very same reasons, just as
often, he has these same conversations without practicing or rehearsing them at
all, but just saying whatever comes to mind, in the same way that a
professional basketball player takes the shot, without thinking, knowing he is
more likely to make it if he does not think about making it but simply goes
through the process of making it. Or the master chess player who moves the
chess piece instinctively, having played countless variations of this one game,
having an intuition born of experience that tells him that of all the many
moves that may succeed this move and the seemingly infinite moves that may
succeed the next move and the one after that and the one after that, that this particular
move is the correct move, and he knows it without knowing with any specificity
why it is the correct move, or how the game will turn out, only that he has won
most of the thousands of games he has played by doing this, understanding with
absolute certainty that he has won, several moves before he or anyone else can
prove it. That is how he has lived his life to this point, by thinking and not
thinking, believing all the while that each choice is the correct choice. It is
only recently that this way of being in the world has failed him, has taken on
a separate identity, inexplicable in its inability to easily transform itself
to and from its opposite. He doesn’t believe in chaos without order. Chaos is a
combination of symmetry and randomness, a form of order beyond present
comprehension. Randomness can no more exist without meaning than order can
exist without chaos. Chaos and order are choices that we make, just as thinking
or not thinking are choices that we make, each choice the same choice, the choice
that every person makes each time a choice is made. The choice to see one thing
and not another, to think one thing and not another, to do one thing and not
another. It is impossible to escape purpose or meaning. Purpose is everywhere.
It is equally impossible to escape chaos and randomness. Randomness is
everywhere.
Something in the grass catches his attention and he reaches
down to pick it up, holds it directly in front of his face. At first he thinks
it might be a Lilliputian, someone to talk to, but it turns out to be a twig.
He examines it closely, the sleuth in him hoping to determine by what means it
found its way here, first between the leaves of grass and now between his
fingers. It is small, broken on one end but not the other, with what appears to
be a bud at its tip. It has a bud scar in the middle. Its bark is intact. It is
dried out. He cannot tell in what season it might have fallen. Perhaps a bird
snapped it with its beak or dropped it on its way to its nest. Perhaps the ice
and wind beat, bent and finally broke it. More likely, when it fell it was part
of a larger twig or branch that was eventually hacked to pieces by a lawn
mower, making it small and inconspicuous enough to remain ignored all this
time, to be left to its own devices as long as it didn’t disturb the carefully
constructed atmosphere of the courtyard. But now it has been noticed. And
picked up. And examined. I’m no different than you, he thinks to the twig.
We’re like Hansel and Gretel, either following or leaving behind us little
pieces of ourselves as we wander deep into the moonlit forest. That is our
destiny: to follow things, even the smallest of things, and try to remember in
what order we found them should we find it necessary, for whatever reason, to
backtrack. Perhaps the attentions we pay to things in this world are not only
the result of the comfort we gain from remembering them, but more importantly,
the excitement we gain from discovering that we have remembered anything at
all. In the end, isn’t that the sum of what we are -- the countless particular
attentions we’ve paid to things in a life in which each thing exists only as a
result of the attention it is paid? Isn’t that what ambition is -- the desire
to become, in time, a set of footprints on a path that someone else will
follow, the desire to find a prominent place in the canon of things that
matter, to be remembered as the person that our mind has made us -- a maker and
member of lists? Beginning with the circumstance of birth, place and time, we
choose a named path through the larger world of circumstance, moving from one
point to another, calling each of them by names that someone else has given
them or that we in turn have chosen for them.
Hey!
There is a voice coming from somewhere deep in the wood.
Hey!
In a single instant his soul suddenly and violently
re-entera his body, jerked back after having been stretched like a rubber band
across some interminable distance. With great effort he remembers where he is,
focuses on the person addressing him. Less than two feet away from his nose is
another nose and behind that nose is a face. Sitting cross-legged in front of
him is a young man, twenty something, smiling, thin, dressed in a golf shirt
and slacks, with close cut white hair and perfect teeth. It takes him a few
moments to construct the associations between this image and the knowledge that
he is sitting in the grass in the courtyard of a psychiatric hospital.
What are you doing? the young man asks. Meditating or just
zoning out?
Neither. Staring at this twig.
So, were you on the trail of something?
I suppose.
What kind of trail? A hiking trail, a jogging trail, a happy
trail, or a trail of tears? I’m an expert on all of them, by the way. I can
give you advice if you like. I know things, . . . for example, that you’re an
outpatient.
How do you know that?
Because you’re wearing a suit.
How do you know I’m not a doctor.
No doctor would sit out here under a tree staring at a twig
for five minutes. Besides, you can’t make money sitting under a tree. Not even
Buddha could make money sitting under a tree. Now Ralph Waldo Emerson could
probably make money sitting under a tree, but you’re not him are you?
No . . . So are you a psychiatrist or a patient?
Neither. I’m a psychiatric social worker.
That’s interesting.
No it’s not.
Yeah. Well, I need to get back to work.
What kind of work are you getting back to? . . . Don’t get
mad. I don’t really expect an answer. I am, after all, a professional. You’ve
got your rights. On the other hand, if you’re going to sit under the Bodhi tree
in a place like this, you’ve got to expect questions from the occasional
supplicant.
Is that so?
I don’t know. I guess not.
I’m a computer scientist.
There you go. I knew it. I knew we had something in common.
Although I’m a social worker, I too have an affinity for philosophy. No French
continental deconstructionist philosophy for me, although I must admit, having
read all their stuff, some of it makes sense. Even so, I’ve decided to stick
with good old American analytic philosophy. Mathematics and logic. Physical
science. Don’t worry. I can keep up. Einstein, Turing, von Neumann, Shannon,
Chomsky, Feynman. I’ve read all those guys.
Are you sure you’re not a patient?
I’m your alter ego. I’m the spirit of the twig, an angel
sent to look over you . . . Just kidding. Listen, we’re all patients in one way
or another. It’s problematic, right? So. What exactly do you do?
I work for a computer chip manufacturer. I design software
for programmable chips.
Programmable chips?
Silicon chips that have a generic digital substrate. You
load the circuitry in as software as you need it. That way you use a minimum
number of circuits and a minimum amount of energy in a minimum amount of space.
Wow. That’s cool. What do you do with them?
Use them for different things. Like radio frequency based
identification. You can attach a chip to every unit of production and keep
track of it no matter where it goes.
What do you mean, every unit of production?
Everything. Everything that’s manufactured and everything
that makes, holds or transports anything that’s manufactured. Containers,
pallets, packages, products, individual parts of products. Everything.
What about people? What about plants and animals and
chromosomes and things like that?
Yes. Those too, eventually.
Man, you’re the devil! You’re 666!
No, I’m not.
Yes you are.
No I’m not.
Listen, I know what I’m talking about. First, you’re
renaming all of creation. Then you’re keeping track of it. And then you’re
controlling it. You’re trying to be omniscient and omnipresent and omnipotent
all at the same time. You’re architecting Armageddon. You’re Big Brother’s
right hand man . . . Wow. Here I am sitting across from a guy who’s rolling out
the red carpet for the Antichrist.
No I’m not.
I’m not arguing with you. I believe you. You know, it’s even
more interesting in an ontological sort of way if you don’t believe or know
that you’re doing it. It makes you karmic celebrity material. An instrument of
Fate, so to speak. It puts you at the top of the all time religious myths hit
list, the top ten religious myths of all time. You know, . . . myths. God the
creator. Man as Hero. You know . . . the universal truths. There are more myths
than you can shake a stick at, but some of them are universal. No matter where
you go, there they are. And what you’re doing puts you right at the top.
What are you talking about?
I have to tell you, I live for this stuff, but I can almost
never find anyone willing to listen. You seem like you might. If I just tell
you their names, they won’t seem very awe-inspiring. They need to be part of a
story. They need embellishment.
<Silence.>
Great. . . . Ok. Look. Instead of doing a top forty
countdown, we’ll just start at number one. That way we can stop whenever you
want. . . . Ok. Number one -- creation. Creation boils down to, now you see it,
now you don’t, only in reverse. Something from nothing. Not something from
something smaller. Or from something far away. Or from something that you can’t
see. From nothing. No slight of hand allowed. Once you get the first something,
then it’s a lot easier to rationalize everything that comes after. It’s easier
to imagine Athena popping full-grown out of Zeus’s forehead than to imagine her
popping full-grown out of a scientifically controlled vacuum. After you get
started, things are not so much created as translated or transformed, like
water turning from ice to water to vapor. Or dust turning into Adam. Or matter
into energy. Or energy into matter. Once you get past the initial creation,
everything else is Creation with a little “c.” The Greeks understood this
better than anybody and approached the problem directly. In the beginning was
the Void out of which came Eros and Earth, desire and a place to do it.
Anything else begs the question, If god made everything, who made god? The
Sumerians and the Hindus start with a primeval sea. The Egyptians boil water.
The Chinese and Japanese hatch everything from a great, black egg. The
Babylonians, Hebrews and Sikhs have an all-powerful deity that is responsible
for everything. These days we like-minded individuals have general relativity
and quantum mechanics as our principal authority on the question. For a long
time, everything in science seemed to argue against Creation until the Hot Big
Bang came on the scene. I know you probably know all this already. But did you
know the Big Bang is the leading contender for a Theory of Everything? It
explains everything from about one hundredth of a second after the Big Bang
until now. Everything before that is still waiting on a self-consistent
explanation for quantum gravity, which is just another word for gravity. But
given the Big Bang, the general consensus is that we’re about fourteen billion
years old and that we may actually live in an infinite, open universe. I call
that good news, myself. And there’s a very interesting corollary that goes
along with it. Since all the galaxies appear to be moving away from each other
at an increasing rate of speed, this universe may not be part of a cyclic
process at all, but instead may be a one time only thing, eventually ending in
a cold, vast darkness otherwise know as The Void. What do you know?
Right back where we started. Now that I think about it, maybe it still begs the
question. Is the Big Bang real or simply the current state in some conceptual
chain of cause and effect leading back to the Greeks, their cosmology and their
math? Is our concept of the universe species specific, or could it be arrived
at independently by a group of sentient aliens who never heard of Euclid? We
may never know. And even if you do start with the Void, and by the Void I mean
the real Void, that is, absolutely Nothing, which makes the most
sense to me by the way, where is the cause and effect that gets you from
Nothing to Something? What’s on the other side of Nothing? If there’s nothing
to change it from being Nothing to being Something, how come it’s not still
Nothing? There’s no way around it. Creation is the Big One, the ultimate myth.
If you can accept Creation as a possibility, you can accept anything. I’m going
to keep moving. Here’s another one. Paradise. Paradise is one of my favorites.
I know it like the palm of my hand. In paradise there are no arbitrary
divisions between creator and created, and as true as this is, there is also no
specific requirement for any particular type of uniformity or diversity.
Paradise can be as diverse as you want it to be. Or as boring. When it’s all
said and done, the definition is simple: You in direct communion with all that
is good and perfect. I’m not making this up. I’m being historical, I swear. The
Garden of Eden is an easy example. Everything is perfect. Everything is
beautiful. Adam and Eve are running around naked and don’t even know it. And
although theologians are divided on this, there is a school of thought that
believes that they were having sex all the time. Paradise in this case is like
being a kid in a candy store who’s been living in the candy store for several
hundred years. You can have whatever you want whenever you want it and you can
do whatever you want whenever you want, but you’ve already done everything a
thousand times. Except for one thing. And of course you end up doing that one
thing and all of a sudden there’s hell to pay. But you get another chance --
not here on earth, but in heaven, the other paradise. The paradise that almost
nobody gets to report back from, a situation that results in so much conjecture
that it becomes almost impossible to get any consensus on what it’s like to
live there. You have theories ranging from a White Light into which you want to
disappear forever in an ecstasy of bliss on the one hand, to a place that is
much like earth except that god and the angels live there and you can see them,
and all the houses and streets are made of gold and no one ever gets sick or
hungry or depressed on the other. There is one significant difference between
the two paradises, however. In the earthly paradise you can have or do almost
anything you want and you never have to feel guilty about it. In the heaven
paradise, you’re a lot more respectable. You’re going to live forever and you
don’t mind doing it as a retiree -- cool, calm, collected, at peace and at one
with yourself, not so caught up in things that you easily lose your sense of
perspective. Totally self-actualized . . . One more thing. Paradise should
never be confused with utopia. Utopia is misguided. It assumes paradise can be
created here on earth, usually politically. Human beings are genetically
programmed to form hierarchies and are competitive by nature. The only reason
it worked for a while in The Garden of Eden is because there were only two
people: Adam and Eve. God’s not a person. He’s perfect and incapable of giving
anyone bad advice. On the other hand, the minute the Serpent showed up, who,
although not exactly a person either, is portrayed as a born troublemaker, it
was all over. The only remaining possibilities for any kind of perfect place
are either in a heavenly paradise where everyone is enlightened and god is
completely in control, or in your head if you can reach the point where you
believe that everything is already perfect just the way it is. This is all
pretty pedagogical I know, but if you’re willing to listen, I’m willing to talk
. . . I can tell you’re still listening. I’ll do one more, Rebirth, and then
I’ll stop. . . . Promise. . . .One of
the first things you pick up on when you reach the age of accountability is
that everything living dies. It’s born, it lives and it dies. Then you hear
about the soul, that the soul is eternal, that it came from and returns to god,
that it maintains an existence independent of the body. Or maybe you’re raised
in a way that doesn’t require you to think about what happens after you’re
dead. All you think about is the fact that you’re here right now, and your job
in life is to be as aware of that fact as you possibly can. Or maybe you
believe that you have to be born over and over, gradually progressing toward an
eventual release from life and death. Or you can decide that nothing happens
after you die. You’re just dead and that’s it. A lot of people who believe that
also believe in their chromosomes. Since chromosomes don’t die as long as
you’re able to make a baby, a baby becomes a way to have your genetic self live
on in another person. And although that’s a great thing I think, it
doesn’t change the fact that your body is going to die and decompose. Classic
entropy. When that happens, about two-thirds of the words you normally use to
describe yourself will no longer apply. And as for the rest, once you remove
the memories, whatever there is of you that’s left over bears very little
resemblance to the you standing in front of the mirror in the morning. Or maybe
it does, I don’t know. Nobody can say what happens after you die. Death is a
singularity, just like conception, just like the Big Bang. No one can say for
sure what happened one one-millionth of a second before they got here. And no
one here can say what happens one one-millionth of a second after you realize
you’re not coming back. That’s a strange thing about this particular myth. What
most people don’t realize is that if rebirth or immortality is a myth and not
provable, then the anti-myth is as much of a myth as the myth.
That’s interesting.
Really? You think so?
I’ve really got to go.
But I haven’t even gotten to the Apocalypse.
I’ll come back.
No you won’t.
How do you know that?
Domestic Interlude
At first they plan to go out for dinner. She in her black
silk dress, her eyelids painted blue, her long hair pulled up and fastened with
pins. She is very beautiful. As they are backing out of the garage, she says
she would rather rent a movie and order pizza. They are the best dressed people
at Blockbuster’s. They rent Amelie and Das Boot and call in for a
pizza on the way home. Fifteen minutes into Amelie she falls asleep on
the couch with her head in his lap. He presses the mute button on the TV.
Luckily, the movie is subtitled. After an hour his knees begin to ache. A
little later his legs go to sleep. He tries to keep his body very still, but
eventually he closes his eyes, leans his head back into the cushion and sleeps.
He dreams that she wakes up and lays him in her place and makes him
comfortable. He wakes to find himself sleeping on the couch with his shoes off,
his head on a pillow, his feet covered with a blanket.
Have you ever noticed how in the course of a single moment
you can find your attention as focused on the most arbitrary and
inconsequential things as if they thing were the terrible and awesome, wholly
perfect face of god? It is easy to do when looking at a newborn child, or
death, or some terrible event in nature, or some subtle nuance of motion, light
and sound into which we pour all of the love, or hate or grief of a single
moment. Sometimes the ecstasy of sensation is enough. It is less easy if
something as simple and familiar as a pizza box, or a shoe, or a blank spot on
the floor attempts to capture our attention in the light of its singular gaze,
so that we are forced to see it for what it is and has always been -- the god
Siva dancing on the waters of chaos. That is what is happening now as he stares
at a patch of carpet weave, the toe of a woman’s shoe, the intersection of the
two. There is no breaking sea, or deepening sky, or wind rising and falling,
filling spring trees like lungs with which to manufacture time. There is no
time. There is instead the slow silence that precedes her touch and touching
her -- simpler, better than time.
In the eighth grade he had a crush on his English teacher.
One Friday, after all his schoolmates left the classroom, he walked up to her
and recited La Belle Dame Sans Merci from memory before turning and
leaving the room. When he got home from school, he found out she had called his
mother. The moment his mother brought it up, he became frigid with terror. He
had possessed a raging erection while reciting the poem and didn’t know whether
or not his teacher had noticed and, if she had, whether or not she had told his
mother. His mother didn’t mention anything about an erection, and she didn’t
say anything to his father, so he didn’t get into too much trouble, except for
having to spend one Saturday morning at a school sponsored program on human
sexuality where he watched films about human sexual reproduction, venereal
disease and the dangers of smoking marijuana. Later, his English teacher went
out of her way to make sure he got one of his poems published in the school
yearbook.
He is reading a novel. It’s the first one he has read in
months. The first time he read this book he was nine years old. He was in his
bedroom with the windows open. The early morning sunlight made stripes across
the bed, the floor and the wall and he could hear mockingbirds and smell four
o’clocks. It was a time before he knew the meaning of cynicism. This is a
different time. This time around, he is sitting up in bed with a night light
on. There is a beautiful woman sleeping next to him. The room is rich with
smells. He is happy. You want to hear more details. Why? They are always the
same details. Ok, here is one more detail. Of all the opening paragraphs of all
the stories he has ever read, this is his favorite: ”Call me Ishmael. Some
years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my
purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail
about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of
driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself
growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my
soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses,
and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my
hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle
to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically
knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as
soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical
flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There
is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their
degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the
ocean with me.” -- I cannot write like that and neither can my protagonist. But
he can comment on it: “If I were teaching in a liberal arts college, I would
probably say something to my students along the lines of, What does Ahab
represent if not corporate capitalism and the entrepreneurial spirit at its
worst? And what does the Whale represent if not nature and the international
rule of law? The crew of the Pequod is the middle class, always footing the
bill while at the same time never having any real say in the executive decision
making process. The moral of the story is that it’s not ok to want to make a
lot of money if you have to either enslave everybody or get everybody killed to
do it. I myself am not a violent person, but I am in favor of the Robin Hood
approach to income distribution: The poor should sue multinational corporations
whenever possible. As hard as most of them work, they deserve, if not more, at
least not less of whatever it is that corporate executives end up getting as a
result of their efforts. Heads, wealth and power. Tails, prison sentences. Sometimes
the only real talent that a person with money has is the talent to get his or
her hands on even more money. If I had tenure, I would say something entirely
different, something having to do with the Mind of God, the unity of all life
and the immortality of the soul. Of course, I’m pulling all of this out of my
ass. I have no idea what I would say. None of this has anything to do with Moby
Dick or its opening paragraph. Still, it is a great opening paragraph. There
are other opening paragraphs that are almost as good, but I can’t quote them
here because they’re under copyright and lawyers will immediately threaten me
with demand letters that tell me I have no right to use other people’s ideas
without their permission. These bastards would copyright the letter “A” if they
could. I have friends who are lawyers so I know it’s nothing personal. It’s
part of their role in the “brotherhood,” a not-so-secret society designed to
keep things as fucked up as possible, whether it’s business, art or politics.
There is a lot of money to be made in keeping things fucked up and they’re just
the guys to do it. Along with bankers, politicians, priests, ministers, mullahs
and military types they’re they ultimate mediators. If you think that I’m being
critical of certain types of people, I guess I am. I don’t know why, though.
Some of my best friends are lawyers and much more virtuous than me. They are
exceptional in their talents, enlightened in their thinking and selfless in
their support for the underdog. One of them even went to jail once, rather than
allow the police to enter the home of a client without the proper, duly
authorized documents. Now that I think about it, a few of them are some of the
most wonderful human beings I know. I can think of many categories of people to
which I belong that are not more virtuous than these. Go figure.”
It is around 2 am when he decides to go to the kitchen table
and write.
She sleeps so deeply
her eyes do not move
behind her painted eyelids.
She would rather sleep than dream.
Upon a new bed
the moonlight shines -- light enough
to make a painting
of leaves, grass and winter frost.
On another bed
a woman cries quietly
to lessen the tears
of nearby sleeping children.
A different world
now, than that of clouds and rain.
He titles it, “The Bridges of Madison County meets Ise
Monogatari meets Our Town.”
There is nothing they haven’t done to please themselves and
each other. They’ve put their fingers, toes, tongues, noses, his penis, her
nipples into every orifice and over every inch of skin on each other’s bodies.
He has kissed and nuzzled and licked her from the top of her head to the soles
of her feet more times than he can remember. She has done the same to him. She
has blindfolded him, tied him to the bed and, while consulting a magazine,
dripped melting wax on his chest and stomach, poured crushed ice over his
crotch and ridden him like a cowgirl. He has come up behind her while she was
rinsing vegetables in the kitchen sink, lifted her dress, ripped her panties at
the waist, bent her over the counter, entered her from behind and, holding her
hands flat on the counter in front of her, fucked her as hard as he could,
coming after only a few minutes. She has put her face between his legs in the
parking lot of a restaurant and sucked until he came hard, groaning and heaving
in deep breaths, even as people entering and leaving the restaurant passed next
to the car. He has pushed his hand inside her. She has pushed her hand inside
him. He has rubbed her feet while she lay on the couch and after she was
completely relaxed, put his face and one hand between her legs, doing whatever
he could to please her. They have stood face to face for long periods, kissing
endless small kisses while they slipped their hands down each other’s pants. He
has masturbated in far away hotel rooms fantasizing about her. She has come
naked into the bathroom while he was soaking in a hot bath, sat down between his
legs, leaned back against him as he put his arms around her and lay there with
him, without speaking or moving, until the water turned cold. He has come into
the bathroom while she was soaking in a hot bath, washed her feet, her breasts,
her back and shoulders, shampooed and rinsed her hair, toweled her off and then
brought her a glass of water to drink. Once they are asleep the first thing
they do is to move away from each other on the bed. Then one of them will reach
out to touch the other with a hand or a foot. Gradually, they slide toward each
other as they bend into spoons and nestle together, her arm over his belly if
she is in back, his hand held gently against her breasts by her hand if he is
in back, the one in back breathing in the scent of the other. Does he make her
happy? He sometimes thinks he does. As when she does something to tease him,
unbalance him, put him off a little, laughing at him the whole time, knowing
that this is what women sometimes do to make their lovers crazy, to make them
want them more, to make them love them. On Saturdays they sometimes go to yard
sales. She usually wakes up first. They shower together, drive through a
MacDonald’s for breakfast. She was a good catholic girl, raised to believe that
sex and love were one and the same, that true love was to be had with one
person in a lifetime. She believed this when she was young and continued to
believe it even after her first love left her, continued to believe it even
after she found another who she left for reasons having nothing to do with love
or marriage, continued to believe it from one love to the next, believes it
even now. They find a garage sale filled with items gathered from an attic. She
buys two ruby crystal glasses. He buys a box filled with books, papers, a
novelty postcard and a chess set. She looks in the box and smiles at him, You
are so like yourself. Do you know that?