"Eh, I'm an old man, so don't listen to me anyway.
"We all watch the same television, eat the same things, use the same phrases when we talk, have the same ideas for vacations and most everything else. The ego of a city, the martini, the big wines, sauvignon blanc for the wives... The same conversations, the same laughs, all as if we had invented it ourselves. You get tired serving all that, making it reappear every day, feeding the big egos of DC egos in all their varieties... the amorphous urban and Euro-trash of clubs on Connecticut Avenue... all that sad stuff, Mara, suffering, trying to cure their suffering through more poison...
"Poor shy Hemingway moved to Paris, where they accepted artistes and flaneurs, creative wine bibbers not adding much but by spending in cafes. Perhaps he identified with the waiters as much as anyone else.
"Oh, I'm an old man. Don't listen to me.
"We don't choose to be the strange saints we are, we're just made that way. And I am for the 'holiness' of the individual, someone who gets the human condition, fallen people who can sing about the grit and alienation of a Saturday night.
"What's that line of MacGowan's... 'And the birds were whistling in the trees, where the winds were gently laughing, and I thought about a pair of brown eyes, that waited once for me,' and this is when he's drunk and down on a Saturday night from listening to some old bloke talk about the reality of war, and he remembers the natural part of the world that's even here in this city setting...
"I'd almost rather be that sort of down and out drunk thinking about it all, remembering the metaphors of nature, the things that save us in our fall...
"But people can't be that sensitive, generally, because that calls for someone to be very attuned, and this makes them shy and look weird to the rest. They'd say, 'now, why the hell are you singing about the Old Main Drag, it's not that bad.'
"Well, maybe not shy and weird, just that when you make art you tend to be separated from the ego, the selfish view that you are an entity separate from the world, at battle with it. Most artists and musicians, it doesn't occur to them to go build an oil pipeline. Wood you use carefully and with great respect to build a musical instrument. You--I know it sounds stereotypical but--you become attuned to nature, make scientific observations about life in all its forms, sense the intelligence behind it all.
"So art takes us back to nature and all the things we lose touch with. And so I don't think we'll ever solve all the ecological disasters we're creating. It will take some great change of attitude, child-like, perhaps, organic, acknowledging the soul in all things, the opposite of building military might. Militarize and it takes over the soul, co-opts it with the genies of destruction. Problem is, we all look around and say, 'oh, there are too many bad guys out there; you have to arm yourself...' Kind of a shitty view on human nature.
"Saints, really, these are the only kinds of being who will save us from burning the planet... They at least teach us an environmentally appropriate attitude. It's not just 'go help lepers and poor people,' it's a show of respect to nature, the nature which created the world and all the living things in it. The emphasis on good works is just a part of an ego-free attitude. Not many, I suppose, are ready to take up that attitude because it equates to being defenseless, out of the cycle of the logic of self-preservation, an assumption that we can't trust anyone.
"And that's what art is, anyway, the leap, the trust in something beyond, a willingness and a desire to go for a walk in the woods and feed your subconscious. As often happens when you're cooking; you relax, you begin to combine ingredients, take tradition, discover it yourself like, how nice pesto is, or zucchini with tomato, onion, herbs, olive oil baked with a crusty grain like breadcrumb or quinoa. And, strangely, enough, this is where we get our vitality, our vitamins from, fresh stuff from farmer's markets. Yes, farming is an art, I'm sure.
"Art is tiring. It takes a lot of energy, a willingness to step into something you're not sure about, a willingness to be wrong. Perhaps it can be depressing, like when there is not sudden approval but just the same robotic response of cars on a road driving past you obliviously as you walk along with the radio blaring ego stuff. But who knows, maybe the Universe is reaching out through you somehow, as it were part of the slow grind of the plates moving continents around, you just being on top, going along for the ride, but sensing the movement. I mean, our senses are very subtle as far as their sensitivity...
"It takes a lot of faith. Maybe that's the bottom line. Faith is leading you somewhere, so that eventually by doing you will achieve some confidence in what you're doing.
"Yes, but I'm a folk artist. I don't get paid for what I do, so I work here."
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Friday, May 17, 2013
Too much energy is spent putting writing in boxes, I think anyway.
Writing is a reflection of deeper reality, of that which is everywhere and in everything, and you only need to bite off the piece sufficient unto the day.
...contrary to every book cover, promoting the story of the pages within as if it were a cure for a toothache and bad skin. The cover promises certain standards, approved as a capable handling of a certain form without ambiguity. (Because the book is seen as a product, bringing in money, the system of book reviewing also is a money making proposition, and the two feed off each other, enabling.) "Joe" will travel, there will be tension, the reader's eye will want to follow the conflict, in the end a point will be revealed.
But that's not how life works. Life is shifting sands ever shifting, changing minds, confusion, nature, never still for a moment, always in flux, like being water in a river, something somewhere in this universe we have collectively dreamed up from being living stardust, a bunch of atoms stuck together in physical space.
Religious tales are at least an attempt at 'here is what we are, here is what this is all about,' though necessarily they are primitive and rely on magic tricks often enough, as if they felt a subconscious need to say 'wake up,' like a teacher in a post-lunch classroom on a hot day. There is no real plot to religious stories. Because they are truer to life they provide a gentle resting place for the mind, just as great poetry can do, asking as much as answering, summoning faith, as in Emily Dickinson's "I'm nobody! Who are you?"
These stories are quiet, a Buddha posing, Madonna holding her child, a man spread on a cross revealing his deeper nature and glory, apostles with Jesus on a boat, a saint receiving a vision, like Eustace. They are snapshots, revelations unto themselves, clean and pure, of the kinds of things we remember.
But to make too much out of a plot and the craft behind it objectifies 'the story' as if it were a desirable martini cocktail, a product based on 'what happens to so&so,' as the reader is manipulated into caring... when of course just by our nature caring (unless we are corrupted). We all have power over words, even the purported 'dumbest,' 'the least of these.' We can all take an image and run with it, inhabiting otherness.
A person looking down at a stream, that is enough for a story.
Writers far more clever and industrious than I tell stories, the kind that sell, pages of imaginative detail, entire operas... the accepted form from out of the history of story written down.
But one should also recognize humility, that outer happenstances are of less importance, that a story should not call attention as much to the self, but to The Self we all, more or less, share.
Why pump my image out there, as if it meant more or was better, more beautiful than anyone else's?
We want, in the end, ourselves to be real--the great meditative impulse behind forms of expression.
Manifested, we go out into the world, to realize that we are ever returning. When we tell a story about Job or Jonah or a prophet who speaks in parables about lost sheep and prodigal sons or read about the life of St. Francis we are engaged in the return, the return to being, 'thou art that which is.'
Stories cannot but help do that.
I'm Nobody! Who are you? (260)
by Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
The poem speaks of people's brilliance. Of course, they are. You can explicate truth as a college senior, not that you'll necessarily get a good grade from it or the perfect entree to a job. (Why I believe in and stand by A Hero For Our Time.) But no one recognizes it, or pays you for it, even though your utterance might deserve place in a fine museum.
Time, a function of the Universe, will tell, of course.
25 years spent in humility, I don't know, would that be warranted? I don't know, maybe a token of distractedness just as much. Maybe egotistical in its own way, too much thought put into it, too much nervous energy, when really, you just need to lean back and look up at the stars.
Writing is a reflection of deeper reality, of that which is everywhere and in everything, and you only need to bite off the piece sufficient unto the day.
...contrary to every book cover, promoting the story of the pages within as if it were a cure for a toothache and bad skin. The cover promises certain standards, approved as a capable handling of a certain form without ambiguity. (Because the book is seen as a product, bringing in money, the system of book reviewing also is a money making proposition, and the two feed off each other, enabling.) "Joe" will travel, there will be tension, the reader's eye will want to follow the conflict, in the end a point will be revealed.
But that's not how life works. Life is shifting sands ever shifting, changing minds, confusion, nature, never still for a moment, always in flux, like being water in a river, something somewhere in this universe we have collectively dreamed up from being living stardust, a bunch of atoms stuck together in physical space.
Religious tales are at least an attempt at 'here is what we are, here is what this is all about,' though necessarily they are primitive and rely on magic tricks often enough, as if they felt a subconscious need to say 'wake up,' like a teacher in a post-lunch classroom on a hot day. There is no real plot to religious stories. Because they are truer to life they provide a gentle resting place for the mind, just as great poetry can do, asking as much as answering, summoning faith, as in Emily Dickinson's "I'm nobody! Who are you?"
These stories are quiet, a Buddha posing, Madonna holding her child, a man spread on a cross revealing his deeper nature and glory, apostles with Jesus on a boat, a saint receiving a vision, like Eustace. They are snapshots, revelations unto themselves, clean and pure, of the kinds of things we remember.
But to make too much out of a plot and the craft behind it objectifies 'the story' as if it were a desirable martini cocktail, a product based on 'what happens to so&so,' as the reader is manipulated into caring... when of course just by our nature caring (unless we are corrupted). We all have power over words, even the purported 'dumbest,' 'the least of these.' We can all take an image and run with it, inhabiting otherness.
A person looking down at a stream, that is enough for a story.
Writers far more clever and industrious than I tell stories, the kind that sell, pages of imaginative detail, entire operas... the accepted form from out of the history of story written down.
But one should also recognize humility, that outer happenstances are of less importance, that a story should not call attention as much to the self, but to The Self we all, more or less, share.
Why pump my image out there, as if it meant more or was better, more beautiful than anyone else's?
We want, in the end, ourselves to be real--the great meditative impulse behind forms of expression.
Manifested, we go out into the world, to realize that we are ever returning. When we tell a story about Job or Jonah or a prophet who speaks in parables about lost sheep and prodigal sons or read about the life of St. Francis we are engaged in the return, the return to being, 'thou art that which is.'
Stories cannot but help do that.
I'm Nobody! Who are you? (260)
by Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
The poem speaks of people's brilliance. Of course, they are. You can explicate truth as a college senior, not that you'll necessarily get a good grade from it or the perfect entree to a job. (Why I believe in and stand by A Hero For Our Time.) But no one recognizes it, or pays you for it, even though your utterance might deserve place in a fine museum.
Time, a function of the Universe, will tell, of course.
25 years spent in humility, I don't know, would that be warranted? I don't know, maybe a token of distractedness just as much. Maybe egotistical in its own way, too much thought put into it, too much nervous energy, when really, you just need to lean back and look up at the stars.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
He lay there on his back between the sheets with his arms folded across his chest like a dead knight, hands crossed palm downward, bare, the palm of left resting in the hairs of chest, the right hand on top of the left hand, the four fingers on each hand touching his skin. Then he would turn over on his left side, to the bed's edge and the oxygen, his right hand palm down on the sheet, his left hand propped upward, fingers curled above the open palm barely brushing his lip. He tried sleeping on his stomach, arm under the pillow, as if embracing something forgotten, head turned to the left, jaw deep with the pillow. He would turn on his right side, his right fist against the stubble of his chin, thinker style, left arm draped naturally.
He wrote about things like onion sandwiches and coffee-according-to-Myers and beans heated over a campfire, small textural details, the things of regular life. They were the few things, along with venturing out into the natural world, that helped him in the great unending battle with depression kept-at-bay that one day, one morning he would lose, after a long rich life, up in Idaho. Often what you had to eat was the only thing to look forward to, so you made the best of the egg or whatever it was. A small victory before sinking back. The knowledge of wanting to do something, live somewhere with people he truly liked, but not finding it, nothing but a loneliness that made art private and ill formed.
After the week he didn't want to get up. He got up, took the tea pot out of the fridge for some cold Moroccan Mint tea, then made a little roast beef sandwich on toasted Ezekial English Muffin with a slice of onion, ate it in careful bites, and went back to bed. And he thought, perhaps all the while, of the time he'd had to borrow his father's station wagon to get back to a college homecoming weekend. He went to see her, but when he'd called her that Friday night, not too late, after he'd gotten settled, she'd been very curt with him, and he had even ended up dead-pan laughing, 'ha ha,' into the phone. "Who's this," she had said, very well, and she probably had a point. The next day was sunny and bright, and the down at the football game he'd been talking to an acquaintance when she stepped into view, and his psychology had told him to slide in so that he wouldn't see her standing there with her head up, and then he even turned away and walked behind the stands to the far end of the playing field. She even came down to sit on the grass at the end of the field, but his friends took him back behind a shack where they were smoking, and when he came back he felt stupid and dragged his feet in the cinder track, and when she got up, he didn't look up at her, and she walked past him and away.
He was smart enough to know, had already begun to see it, that steady pushes, didn't have to be anything brilliant, yielded results, and later he understood how perfectly obvious, how appropriate and necessary it had been for her to be mad at him over the initial phone call, and that he shouldn't have taken it as the slight he made it out to be. And there was his dream, the blond sunlight, the fine Fall day at the old football field where they could sit and just have a nice chat, side by side, and he, not anyone else, had fucked it all up. Even later that afternoon, back at his friend's room in the old frat house near the four corners at the top of the hill coming into town he had thrown up. And it quickly became an irrevocable mistake, one he had never intended. Perhaps the beer from the night before after the phone call had left him depressed, so that he saw things negatively.
Then, yes, things, after that had gone badly. He kept remembering it all, and how none of it had been right. And now that he wasn't moving forward and doing anything with his life, now she had a point, or it was as if she had seen something in him. None of it made him feel any better about the whole thing, and whatever possibilities he had then, were slipping quickly away. And it was as if, just as she had once said, 'get a life,' the bad things were coming true, at precisely the wrong time. So, one night, when he called her, after a hard dull day waiting for life to happen working with a landscaper doing tree work on the main residential street in Waterville, a sprinkle of snow on the ground that morning, along with the golden light of morning and the crisp air a sense of not doing anything with his life, of course she said, 'oh, god,' and hung up, and he didn't call back. Yeah, and anyway he never had that confident manner, so gentle, if that is the word, that he was apologetic, as if asking to be hung up on.
He thought of Agnes Von Kurowsky, couldn't forget the beauty of it all, the kiss, and like Chekhov's shy soldier, tied himself into a knot, didn't become a doctor or a scientist, but a traveller who wrote about his own shyness, as to slightly justify it. Life was knocked off course, and he had to change, an adjustment that was somehow in keeping with his inner self, but a complete surprise, like it was for the German soldier getting shot just as he came over the stone wall in one of his stories.
No, kid, don't write about things. That's just giving up, making things worse, probably. Become a naturalist, go out for a walk and find the stream, where the herring are running now over the creekbed. Watch the fish swim upstream in the current, flickering their tail fins. And stay out of the wine. It will just come round and bite you anyway.
It wasn't the past he had fucked up. He had done that right, when you stopped and looked back on it. There had even been some sort of inexplicable virtue, as if coming out of a folk song of an old old sort. It was just the present. That was always the problem. Looking back on it, he didn't even want to make too much of it, and had done his best, truly, to let it all go. But there it was. The meetings that should have been nice had all gone terribly, after the initial time, but in the present, what? like shouting matches unseen and unheard? Why? It occurred to him that there must be something wrong with him, personally, not anyone in his family, who all were great and talented, deep and kind, just himself, inexplicably, confused by time and weather, never in synch.
That depression of Hemingway's he used as a tool, sign of a daily need to pull out the crowbar lever and axis point, to pry, to dig up... The most meaningful things he came up with were the images of himself as an artist at work, some of it direct, some of it indirect, like the portrait of the old fisherman. This consciousness of a narrative voice within, needing to find and tell a story, is always there in him. A man paints a picture of a cat, in doing so revealing his own nature as a painter, in doing so, praying--this is the story of Islands in the Stream. The depression was a tool. It kept him quiet enough to write, not mind the solitude, the work, recognize the need for quiet, and it also helped him see, turn on his inner vision to see the real stuff. Maybe why he did not necessarily avoid depressing things, expose himself to all its forms, brave as he was.
After the Dear Ernest letter, explaining the Italian count and how their own relationship had been a passing youthful fancy, after that there was no contact, no letters between them. They never spoke as old friends over the phone, and she was probably not a subject to bring up with him. He used that part of himself, that time, almost defensively, as a way of protecting something. He accepted his shyness, the strange character of his creative modes, just as Dostoevsky accepted, apparently, his own dislike of electric lights. And she became woven into the background of his early short story collection and at least two novels, if not, in a way, all of them.
All of it seemed to redefine what it was to be an adult, a human, a person. And more and more he found that life was far closer to Emily Dickinson's experience, a redefinition of the self, so that being on his own was normal, a way for him to attend to certain realistic things, making narrative art out of the little bits and pieces of life, a base all people could share in.
The problem in the popular image and understanding of Hemingway is viewing him as a layman, as far as his art goes, when he is of a certain church, a church of understanding reality. He is too immediately constructed out of images of macho outdoorsmen, pompous bullfight aficionado, man of feasts and bars, when he is quieter and more thoughtful than all that.
He wrote about things like onion sandwiches and coffee-according-to-Myers and beans heated over a campfire, small textural details, the things of regular life. They were the few things, along with venturing out into the natural world, that helped him in the great unending battle with depression kept-at-bay that one day, one morning he would lose, after a long rich life, up in Idaho. Often what you had to eat was the only thing to look forward to, so you made the best of the egg or whatever it was. A small victory before sinking back. The knowledge of wanting to do something, live somewhere with people he truly liked, but not finding it, nothing but a loneliness that made art private and ill formed.
After the week he didn't want to get up. He got up, took the tea pot out of the fridge for some cold Moroccan Mint tea, then made a little roast beef sandwich on toasted Ezekial English Muffin with a slice of onion, ate it in careful bites, and went back to bed. And he thought, perhaps all the while, of the time he'd had to borrow his father's station wagon to get back to a college homecoming weekend. He went to see her, but when he'd called her that Friday night, not too late, after he'd gotten settled, she'd been very curt with him, and he had even ended up dead-pan laughing, 'ha ha,' into the phone. "Who's this," she had said, very well, and she probably had a point. The next day was sunny and bright, and the down at the football game he'd been talking to an acquaintance when she stepped into view, and his psychology had told him to slide in so that he wouldn't see her standing there with her head up, and then he even turned away and walked behind the stands to the far end of the playing field. She even came down to sit on the grass at the end of the field, but his friends took him back behind a shack where they were smoking, and when he came back he felt stupid and dragged his feet in the cinder track, and when she got up, he didn't look up at her, and she walked past him and away.
He was smart enough to know, had already begun to see it, that steady pushes, didn't have to be anything brilliant, yielded results, and later he understood how perfectly obvious, how appropriate and necessary it had been for her to be mad at him over the initial phone call, and that he shouldn't have taken it as the slight he made it out to be. And there was his dream, the blond sunlight, the fine Fall day at the old football field where they could sit and just have a nice chat, side by side, and he, not anyone else, had fucked it all up. Even later that afternoon, back at his friend's room in the old frat house near the four corners at the top of the hill coming into town he had thrown up. And it quickly became an irrevocable mistake, one he had never intended. Perhaps the beer from the night before after the phone call had left him depressed, so that he saw things negatively.
Then, yes, things, after that had gone badly. He kept remembering it all, and how none of it had been right. And now that he wasn't moving forward and doing anything with his life, now she had a point, or it was as if she had seen something in him. None of it made him feel any better about the whole thing, and whatever possibilities he had then, were slipping quickly away. And it was as if, just as she had once said, 'get a life,' the bad things were coming true, at precisely the wrong time. So, one night, when he called her, after a hard dull day waiting for life to happen working with a landscaper doing tree work on the main residential street in Waterville, a sprinkle of snow on the ground that morning, along with the golden light of morning and the crisp air a sense of not doing anything with his life, of course she said, 'oh, god,' and hung up, and he didn't call back. Yeah, and anyway he never had that confident manner, so gentle, if that is the word, that he was apologetic, as if asking to be hung up on.
He thought of Agnes Von Kurowsky, couldn't forget the beauty of it all, the kiss, and like Chekhov's shy soldier, tied himself into a knot, didn't become a doctor or a scientist, but a traveller who wrote about his own shyness, as to slightly justify it. Life was knocked off course, and he had to change, an adjustment that was somehow in keeping with his inner self, but a complete surprise, like it was for the German soldier getting shot just as he came over the stone wall in one of his stories.
No, kid, don't write about things. That's just giving up, making things worse, probably. Become a naturalist, go out for a walk and find the stream, where the herring are running now over the creekbed. Watch the fish swim upstream in the current, flickering their tail fins. And stay out of the wine. It will just come round and bite you anyway.
It wasn't the past he had fucked up. He had done that right, when you stopped and looked back on it. There had even been some sort of inexplicable virtue, as if coming out of a folk song of an old old sort. It was just the present. That was always the problem. Looking back on it, he didn't even want to make too much of it, and had done his best, truly, to let it all go. But there it was. The meetings that should have been nice had all gone terribly, after the initial time, but in the present, what? like shouting matches unseen and unheard? Why? It occurred to him that there must be something wrong with him, personally, not anyone in his family, who all were great and talented, deep and kind, just himself, inexplicably, confused by time and weather, never in synch.
That depression of Hemingway's he used as a tool, sign of a daily need to pull out the crowbar lever and axis point, to pry, to dig up... The most meaningful things he came up with were the images of himself as an artist at work, some of it direct, some of it indirect, like the portrait of the old fisherman. This consciousness of a narrative voice within, needing to find and tell a story, is always there in him. A man paints a picture of a cat, in doing so revealing his own nature as a painter, in doing so, praying--this is the story of Islands in the Stream. The depression was a tool. It kept him quiet enough to write, not mind the solitude, the work, recognize the need for quiet, and it also helped him see, turn on his inner vision to see the real stuff. Maybe why he did not necessarily avoid depressing things, expose himself to all its forms, brave as he was.
After the Dear Ernest letter, explaining the Italian count and how their own relationship had been a passing youthful fancy, after that there was no contact, no letters between them. They never spoke as old friends over the phone, and she was probably not a subject to bring up with him. He used that part of himself, that time, almost defensively, as a way of protecting something. He accepted his shyness, the strange character of his creative modes, just as Dostoevsky accepted, apparently, his own dislike of electric lights. And she became woven into the background of his early short story collection and at least two novels, if not, in a way, all of them.
All of it seemed to redefine what it was to be an adult, a human, a person. And more and more he found that life was far closer to Emily Dickinson's experience, a redefinition of the self, so that being on his own was normal, a way for him to attend to certain realistic things, making narrative art out of the little bits and pieces of life, a base all people could share in.
The problem in the popular image and understanding of Hemingway is viewing him as a layman, as far as his art goes, when he is of a certain church, a church of understanding reality. He is too immediately constructed out of images of macho outdoorsmen, pompous bullfight aficionado, man of feasts and bars, when he is quieter and more thoughtful than all that.
Monday, May 13, 2013
A generation perdu... lost. I kept up at my job as a bartender, and inevitably, it seemed, my mind got duller, less confident with intellectual pursuits, caught between loneliness, working odd hours, a lack of conversation going beyond the basic rot about pretty girls, shop talk, the thought of getting a better more appropriate job, wishes for a social life, and even a family life, all of it going nowhere. If you don't keep up at it, reading, writing, you fall into a disheartened spiral, depressed, not wanting to get up out of bed before you had to, stretches of work work work, having less faith in it, burned, wanting to go to grad school, but never making it happen, all the while plodding along. Retirement... forget about it. What hope had we? No easy free ride through grad school, if we had known what we wanted, hadn't felt so down about everything when we left school that reading was a chore when we knew it shouldn't be. Anyway, easy to miss the train. A year goes by, then another, and you're still struggling along paying the rent.
So you sit down, and try to read a book on your own. In doing so, putting off the worries, and only when the bulk of the household chores are done, the necessary groceries without which life isn't possible, the laundry, so to show up to work with a shirt to wear, keep the bathroom clean, the dishes not piled dirty in the sink. And maybe you don't even have time to read, and what comes first is doing what I'm doing now, which is a necessary expression, an attempt to understand what's in the flow of deeper thoughts, thoughts that might give me guidance of some sort.
Showing up at Mother's Day, a lonesome middle aged bachelor, was not a joy. The great dumbing down of everything... I'm pumping out widgets in the form of a special four course menu.
Each year it gets worse, and you get stupider. I once had great lectures about the opening of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, that part about the old carpenter, or about Kerouac, Big Sur, and once on a long car trip back to DC with my mom, as we came closer to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I reeled out my thoughts of how writers suffered and went to work everyday and even did dishonorable things like making their moms work jobs in shoe factories not for a future but because they had to write, to make sense of Eisenhower Era lulled worlds of clean squares, black and white, dedication to economic security, by venturing deeper into what the human mind often enough wonders about.
Long undisciplined lines of prose in need of an editor, but what can you do but try and get the thoughts down as they come. And Kerouac is brave for finding some lasting settings for his narratives, hiking out west, climbing mountains, California, and to do it he had to suffer a lot of uncomfortable spots. Still, he found out of the world just the kinds of places he needed to enter into a scholarly life pondering deeper meanings, from nights with Jazzmen blowing, to the woods outside his sister's house in Rocky Mt., NC, where he is St. Jack of the Dogs, to the Cascades where as a fire watcher he did headstands and pondered Buddha's void. He also struck up camp by the sides of roads where he had to keep hidden to not be arrested, America, no more a place of open communal lands.
Anytime one sits down and writes like this, he feels like Rotarians will come and take him away, that his old Alma Mater, for which he cares deeply, will shake its communal head in disapproval, as if to say, 'what are you trying to do, son; you're not helping anyone; did we waste an education on you?' And for you, personally, the old Alma Mater should have somehow been more help, kinder.
Self-help books will tell you it's all in your head, and I am susceptible to them. They are seductive in their promotion of self-acceptance, their message to 'be positive (for a change, and maybe something good will come of it and you won't make yourself sick, like you're doing now.)' No use being a literary bachelor, they tell me. Get out and get a life. And that I read them sometimes may well mean, I need to reignite the spark of fiction, of reading something, before I get any dumber and numbed down by routine. If they teach hope, then I am for them. We all have spiritual thirst, the need for a quest.
If you do find yourself in the miserable heartbreaking fate of being a confirmed barman, then the only thing you can do, as long as you can, is work in a special place where there is rubbing of elbows and intellectual talk, enough to allow for some semblance of growth, of belonging to community, that you are taken as more than a lackey gopher stuck behind the glass, to others a person who never did anything with his life. A flaneur.
Yes, how did I get where I am, down and out by most people's count, such that I suffer from shame at the thought of reunions. Where will I live when I am old, and with whom, in what kind of a situation? But, alas, America is not the caller of shots anymore, no more healthy pensions, but a cannibalized turn. No GI Bill for my generation, as there was for the generation that made the babies of the boom, my father going to grad school. The legal field seemed cluttered even then to justify the big expense.
But I say to myself a lot, what if I had done something, just tried something, early, when doors were still open. I had not the guts, or the energy, or I was just lazy. One-way ticket to Palookaville, just as my brother had warned me.
There is still the Irish temperament in the genes. Lawless, literary, one side a stickler for Catholic order and morality, the other healthily not fond of being part of someone else's empire, with Celtic charisma and joy for liberated moments of music, talk and drink.
If I'd write a musical about Shane MacGowan, the opening strains might be that old song, traditional, "Kitty." A rebel song, a love song, a calling, a sense of the tragedy imposed by the British Empire, but yes, a calling, a reminder of the human voice, the need for song, sweet, sensitive, coping with the tragic. "In a day, I'll be over the mountains, there'll be time enough left for to cry, so good night and God guard you forever, and write to me, won't you, good bye." He was very good when he had it.
Most of us, I warrant, have to live with that odd sense, that wondering of what to do with our hours here on Earth. Should I exercise, do yoga now, or read a book, or, what? And the great 'what?' is very frustrating, when you see people set up for one thing, doing it, putting up with it, but then slowly having the vacations, the privileges that membership allows (if you play the game 'wisely'), a car, a house, a family of their own. But, most of us, just trying to deal with this quite present, momentary, but permanent and building set-up awkward open space of great potential that exists in the current moment. What to do with it? Who really wants to share that 'feeling at-a-loss of what to do? And yet, most of us can agree, we like to go hiking, get out in nature, maybe pitch a tent, something like that.
I remember Madam Korbonski. The word 'stupid' was in her lexicon, and she said it with a grip of fervor upon it. She once told me, in our late night "coffee" chats, ha ha ha, that she felt stupid if she drank alone. In her high voice, almost at a whiny, with a little chuckle, and a quiet, 'oh my God' as if to admit that she must be a little crazy, she would tell stories, not give a shit what hour the clock said, and discuss quite clearly and well the stupidities and the wisdoms of mankind. The poets and musicians were on the side of the wise. Those enchanted with power were haunted by righteousness, and Homo Sovieticos could be described, to her taste, as 'slaves.' In her presence, a good portion of the times I didn't feel like a complete idiot, but instead, initiated into a larger world of ideas, literature, an awareness of history and, even, useful forms of spirituality. Stupid, that's what a lot of people who'd made their way to power could be. Interestingly enough, she liked folk medicine, and avoided modern doctoring.
Why do human beings like to defy order, and be bad, get up in the middle of the night to do strange things like read and write, things done, really, just for the sensual pleasure of it, of inhabiting a moment, of being free, free to think at least. Let the prose come later, the polish of it I mean, first get the words out. Unless we're read the Riot Act, we like staying up to late, eating at weird hours so as to make the drinking of wine complete and enjoyable, the appetite fulfilled.
The hard thing is keeping the faith in it, in not losing the possibility of the gift of writing, so that you can find an expression of it, as Joyce finds in various forms. Reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man yields its benefits.
So you sit down, and try to read a book on your own. In doing so, putting off the worries, and only when the bulk of the household chores are done, the necessary groceries without which life isn't possible, the laundry, so to show up to work with a shirt to wear, keep the bathroom clean, the dishes not piled dirty in the sink. And maybe you don't even have time to read, and what comes first is doing what I'm doing now, which is a necessary expression, an attempt to understand what's in the flow of deeper thoughts, thoughts that might give me guidance of some sort.
Showing up at Mother's Day, a lonesome middle aged bachelor, was not a joy. The great dumbing down of everything... I'm pumping out widgets in the form of a special four course menu.
Each year it gets worse, and you get stupider. I once had great lectures about the opening of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, that part about the old carpenter, or about Kerouac, Big Sur, and once on a long car trip back to DC with my mom, as we came closer to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I reeled out my thoughts of how writers suffered and went to work everyday and even did dishonorable things like making their moms work jobs in shoe factories not for a future but because they had to write, to make sense of Eisenhower Era lulled worlds of clean squares, black and white, dedication to economic security, by venturing deeper into what the human mind often enough wonders about.
Long undisciplined lines of prose in need of an editor, but what can you do but try and get the thoughts down as they come. And Kerouac is brave for finding some lasting settings for his narratives, hiking out west, climbing mountains, California, and to do it he had to suffer a lot of uncomfortable spots. Still, he found out of the world just the kinds of places he needed to enter into a scholarly life pondering deeper meanings, from nights with Jazzmen blowing, to the woods outside his sister's house in Rocky Mt., NC, where he is St. Jack of the Dogs, to the Cascades where as a fire watcher he did headstands and pondered Buddha's void. He also struck up camp by the sides of roads where he had to keep hidden to not be arrested, America, no more a place of open communal lands.
Anytime one sits down and writes like this, he feels like Rotarians will come and take him away, that his old Alma Mater, for which he cares deeply, will shake its communal head in disapproval, as if to say, 'what are you trying to do, son; you're not helping anyone; did we waste an education on you?' And for you, personally, the old Alma Mater should have somehow been more help, kinder.
Self-help books will tell you it's all in your head, and I am susceptible to them. They are seductive in their promotion of self-acceptance, their message to 'be positive (for a change, and maybe something good will come of it and you won't make yourself sick, like you're doing now.)' No use being a literary bachelor, they tell me. Get out and get a life. And that I read them sometimes may well mean, I need to reignite the spark of fiction, of reading something, before I get any dumber and numbed down by routine. If they teach hope, then I am for them. We all have spiritual thirst, the need for a quest.
If you do find yourself in the miserable heartbreaking fate of being a confirmed barman, then the only thing you can do, as long as you can, is work in a special place where there is rubbing of elbows and intellectual talk, enough to allow for some semblance of growth, of belonging to community, that you are taken as more than a lackey gopher stuck behind the glass, to others a person who never did anything with his life. A flaneur.
Yes, how did I get where I am, down and out by most people's count, such that I suffer from shame at the thought of reunions. Where will I live when I am old, and with whom, in what kind of a situation? But, alas, America is not the caller of shots anymore, no more healthy pensions, but a cannibalized turn. No GI Bill for my generation, as there was for the generation that made the babies of the boom, my father going to grad school. The legal field seemed cluttered even then to justify the big expense.
But I say to myself a lot, what if I had done something, just tried something, early, when doors were still open. I had not the guts, or the energy, or I was just lazy. One-way ticket to Palookaville, just as my brother had warned me.
There is still the Irish temperament in the genes. Lawless, literary, one side a stickler for Catholic order and morality, the other healthily not fond of being part of someone else's empire, with Celtic charisma and joy for liberated moments of music, talk and drink.
If I'd write a musical about Shane MacGowan, the opening strains might be that old song, traditional, "Kitty." A rebel song, a love song, a calling, a sense of the tragedy imposed by the British Empire, but yes, a calling, a reminder of the human voice, the need for song, sweet, sensitive, coping with the tragic. "In a day, I'll be over the mountains, there'll be time enough left for to cry, so good night and God guard you forever, and write to me, won't you, good bye." He was very good when he had it.
Most of us, I warrant, have to live with that odd sense, that wondering of what to do with our hours here on Earth. Should I exercise, do yoga now, or read a book, or, what? And the great 'what?' is very frustrating, when you see people set up for one thing, doing it, putting up with it, but then slowly having the vacations, the privileges that membership allows (if you play the game 'wisely'), a car, a house, a family of their own. But, most of us, just trying to deal with this quite present, momentary, but permanent and building set-up awkward open space of great potential that exists in the current moment. What to do with it? Who really wants to share that 'feeling at-a-loss of what to do? And yet, most of us can agree, we like to go hiking, get out in nature, maybe pitch a tent, something like that.
I remember Madam Korbonski. The word 'stupid' was in her lexicon, and she said it with a grip of fervor upon it. She once told me, in our late night "coffee" chats, ha ha ha, that she felt stupid if she drank alone. In her high voice, almost at a whiny, with a little chuckle, and a quiet, 'oh my God' as if to admit that she must be a little crazy, she would tell stories, not give a shit what hour the clock said, and discuss quite clearly and well the stupidities and the wisdoms of mankind. The poets and musicians were on the side of the wise. Those enchanted with power were haunted by righteousness, and Homo Sovieticos could be described, to her taste, as 'slaves.' In her presence, a good portion of the times I didn't feel like a complete idiot, but instead, initiated into a larger world of ideas, literature, an awareness of history and, even, useful forms of spirituality. Stupid, that's what a lot of people who'd made their way to power could be. Interestingly enough, she liked folk medicine, and avoided modern doctoring.
Why do human beings like to defy order, and be bad, get up in the middle of the night to do strange things like read and write, things done, really, just for the sensual pleasure of it, of inhabiting a moment, of being free, free to think at least. Let the prose come later, the polish of it I mean, first get the words out. Unless we're read the Riot Act, we like staying up to late, eating at weird hours so as to make the drinking of wine complete and enjoyable, the appetite fulfilled.
The hard thing is keeping the faith in it, in not losing the possibility of the gift of writing, so that you can find an expression of it, as Joyce finds in various forms. Reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man yields its benefits.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Definitely, a dreamer... that's what a novelist must be. Able to handle things that don't make sense. Again, respecting the form, the birth of the new...
Some things are called novels, and they are not new at all, but very old, and predictable, and people like them as distraction, and they sell. That is one kind of 'novelist.' Good as far as form, on plot tightness, on solving the crime, the crossword puzzle. Examples abound. But they are not, truly, novels, and might indeed do some disservice to the form. But because such things as these, mysteries, courtroom thrillers, Vincent Flynn/Tom Clancy homeland security/Nelson DeMille society pieces, are taken, popularly, as successes of the novel, a certain view has taken over. To restore a great respect from the true dream-like almost childish efforts, what can you do? Flaubert, Quixote, lines from Yeats--
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
what else can cleanse the mind so that the real vibrations of a novel might come out, as they do in Kerouac's picaresques. Even Hemingway is prone to let the novel down, though he tried to resurrect it, make a long short story technique into something more dreamlike, not his strength. Kundera is the expert, and I honor him, for helping me, an honest blind clown trying to catch a rabbit, understand the form.
Who amongst us could write a novel? Is it possible anymore? This is why I don't mind 5 AM, the chirping of first birds.
Earlier this evening, I dreamt of low income housing for people like myself, an invasive proliferation of rats, my friends the cats I've always had in my family, old Muffler, the tiger tabby big old male, the shoot-outs outside in this poor neighborhood, my own restaurant friends involved in the struggle against rats and thugs. There is a feminine spirit helping me, not remembered now.
No wonder he wrote at night, Dostoevsky,
as if by ignoring humanity he would then have
a better sense of it.
Some things are called novels, and they are not new at all, but very old, and predictable, and people like them as distraction, and they sell. That is one kind of 'novelist.' Good as far as form, on plot tightness, on solving the crime, the crossword puzzle. Examples abound. But they are not, truly, novels, and might indeed do some disservice to the form. But because such things as these, mysteries, courtroom thrillers, Vincent Flynn/Tom Clancy homeland security/Nelson DeMille society pieces, are taken, popularly, as successes of the novel, a certain view has taken over. To restore a great respect from the true dream-like almost childish efforts, what can you do? Flaubert, Quixote, lines from Yeats--
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
what else can cleanse the mind so that the real vibrations of a novel might come out, as they do in Kerouac's picaresques. Even Hemingway is prone to let the novel down, though he tried to resurrect it, make a long short story technique into something more dreamlike, not his strength. Kundera is the expert, and I honor him, for helping me, an honest blind clown trying to catch a rabbit, understand the form.
Who amongst us could write a novel? Is it possible anymore? This is why I don't mind 5 AM, the chirping of first birds.
Earlier this evening, I dreamt of low income housing for people like myself, an invasive proliferation of rats, my friends the cats I've always had in my family, old Muffler, the tiger tabby big old male, the shoot-outs outside in this poor neighborhood, my own restaurant friends involved in the struggle against rats and thugs. There is a feminine spirit helping me, not remembered now.
No wonder he wrote at night, Dostoevsky,
as if by ignoring humanity he would then have
a better sense of it.
Friday, May 10, 2013
There are, perhaps, varieties of mental health, we could say. What's healthy for one may be a bit different than what is for healthy for another.
That great moment in Twain, I think of. Huck and Jim, separated in the great fog in the river's channels at nightfall, and miraculously finding each other the next day. Huck plays a little trick, telling his friend it all must have been a dream, though he's given away by the litter of twigs and river detritus on his raft. Jim: There I was, most heartbroke, thinking I'd lost Huck, and then I find him... and all you can think of is playing a trick on old Jim.
Varieties: the poetic underachiever, the organized overachiever... one finds health in poetry and long attempts at prose, the other in the advances in neurochemistry, but each seeking an understanding of where kindness and sympathy, decency, empathy and all that stuff comes from and constitutes...
The first day off of the week, I just sleep. I may get up and blog some, but I wouldn't call that serious, more just an exercise, an attempt to get the guts back in track. Blogging is not that serious, just sort of lazy writing, writing for the sake of getting back in the stream of things, of first acknowledging the benefits of psychological health that come by it. And maybe sleep and prolonged napping are a part of that regeneration of wordy thoughts, poking out of the semi-sorry compost heap of the workweek. Sleep on the couch while all the demons parade, of how you've not done enough in life to make for any kind of lasting security or professional existence counted on, all the neuroses of the world and people you know poking at you, such that the next day you wake in such a sorry and desperate state that you have no choice but to write, like you too were caught in the foggy Mississippi night, lost, and only through struggle of words could hope to get back to dry land.
The one who is poetic is ever accused of being disorganized, time spend usefully being financial reward for all we seem to know. And yet, why apply the standards of the overachievers upon him? He's not done anything wrong, except not be as happy and therefore as self-confident as he should be given his talents and the opportunities presented him in life, no? It would seem racist, in a way, the overachiever shutting the door on him and his poetry.
Who knows why we inflict harm upon other beings. Perhaps we're just doing so unconsciously, without thinking about it, without being in the other's persons shoes and feeling their wants and needs and the terms of how to approach them politely. Distracted tom-foolery, probably does as much damage as anything, done without as much thought, without malicious intent, but enough to cause offenses.
It hurts to write, it does. It's work. It rises up above you, all you should do, and you can of course only take off a little piece of it to work on, and it's enough to put you back on the couch helpless discouraged and depressed enough to take another nap even as the world outside is filled up with golden sunshine, but you remember, 'this is what it's like,' so you head on.
Why is there pain in life? Does it represent a kind of molting, changing out of an old skin in order to grow, that wings might come out and finally lift one up with all the built-up strength within, so that one would rise and look back with partially-hidden indigence at how ignored he was, forgotten.
Unfinished thought.
And heading off on an errand to the pharmacy, it occurs to me that you have to embrace a kind of insanity, low grade, harmless, maybe just "less sane than you'd otherwise be if you were taking a practical approach to life," if you are going to write. And think of it, the first lines of poetry I read in college, with Benjamin DeMott, were the words of John Clare, who himself was bound for an institution. It's a foray into nature, an expedition to catalog the variety of life, the peace of the natural world, an acceptance of wildness within, the creature life of the subconscious. For most the tune of a city is the great show of sanity, the advice taken from fashion magazines of how to look, what to wear, how to talk, how to act, what to buy, and if you're not a part of that, a slippery slope to homelessness. So, you'd have to be careful if you're going to set out to explore the workings of the mind, as they are natural, following their own rules, their own vitality and vigor. These things too, one must obey, even if they aren't practical at all.
That great moment in Twain, I think of. Huck and Jim, separated in the great fog in the river's channels at nightfall, and miraculously finding each other the next day. Huck plays a little trick, telling his friend it all must have been a dream, though he's given away by the litter of twigs and river detritus on his raft. Jim: There I was, most heartbroke, thinking I'd lost Huck, and then I find him... and all you can think of is playing a trick on old Jim.
Varieties: the poetic underachiever, the organized overachiever... one finds health in poetry and long attempts at prose, the other in the advances in neurochemistry, but each seeking an understanding of where kindness and sympathy, decency, empathy and all that stuff comes from and constitutes...
The first day off of the week, I just sleep. I may get up and blog some, but I wouldn't call that serious, more just an exercise, an attempt to get the guts back in track. Blogging is not that serious, just sort of lazy writing, writing for the sake of getting back in the stream of things, of first acknowledging the benefits of psychological health that come by it. And maybe sleep and prolonged napping are a part of that regeneration of wordy thoughts, poking out of the semi-sorry compost heap of the workweek. Sleep on the couch while all the demons parade, of how you've not done enough in life to make for any kind of lasting security or professional existence counted on, all the neuroses of the world and people you know poking at you, such that the next day you wake in such a sorry and desperate state that you have no choice but to write, like you too were caught in the foggy Mississippi night, lost, and only through struggle of words could hope to get back to dry land.
The one who is poetic is ever accused of being disorganized, time spend usefully being financial reward for all we seem to know. And yet, why apply the standards of the overachievers upon him? He's not done anything wrong, except not be as happy and therefore as self-confident as he should be given his talents and the opportunities presented him in life, no? It would seem racist, in a way, the overachiever shutting the door on him and his poetry.
Who knows why we inflict harm upon other beings. Perhaps we're just doing so unconsciously, without thinking about it, without being in the other's persons shoes and feeling their wants and needs and the terms of how to approach them politely. Distracted tom-foolery, probably does as much damage as anything, done without as much thought, without malicious intent, but enough to cause offenses.
It hurts to write, it does. It's work. It rises up above you, all you should do, and you can of course only take off a little piece of it to work on, and it's enough to put you back on the couch helpless discouraged and depressed enough to take another nap even as the world outside is filled up with golden sunshine, but you remember, 'this is what it's like,' so you head on.
Why is there pain in life? Does it represent a kind of molting, changing out of an old skin in order to grow, that wings might come out and finally lift one up with all the built-up strength within, so that one would rise and look back with partially-hidden indigence at how ignored he was, forgotten.
Unfinished thought.
And heading off on an errand to the pharmacy, it occurs to me that you have to embrace a kind of insanity, low grade, harmless, maybe just "less sane than you'd otherwise be if you were taking a practical approach to life," if you are going to write. And think of it, the first lines of poetry I read in college, with Benjamin DeMott, were the words of John Clare, who himself was bound for an institution. It's a foray into nature, an expedition to catalog the variety of life, the peace of the natural world, an acceptance of wildness within, the creature life of the subconscious. For most the tune of a city is the great show of sanity, the advice taken from fashion magazines of how to look, what to wear, how to talk, how to act, what to buy, and if you're not a part of that, a slippery slope to homelessness. So, you'd have to be careful if you're going to set out to explore the workings of the mind, as they are natural, following their own rules, their own vitality and vigor. These things too, one must obey, even if they aren't practical at all.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Dostoevsky on HLN
I am reminded of the trial scenes of The Brothers Karamazov as I search to write something, begin a new novel perhaps, with the events of the Jodi Arias trial fresh in memory. I watched, saw the grim accusatory faces seated in rows as the sex-tape was played, followed a skeleton gist of the trial that I had avoided, saw photos, watched the archived coverage to sample the general flavor, and then I turned away, not without some of it sticking to the curls of the intricate brain. (Today I will light some incense.)
As I say, I had that sensation, Mitya at the trial. Strange courtroom proceedings, foreign customs, the same righteous serious-about-the-law solemnity, strutting lawyers claiming to know everything, a path to truth. You're reading The Brothers Karamazov, trying to follow along, and really, besides the Alyosha and the old Father Zossima spiritual stuff, not a whole lot of it makes sense to you, as if it were indeed The classic wandering Russian novel, a wall of verbage full of femme fatals, incomprehensible, hard to predict, hard to figure, 'why is this here?' with its relationships and plot turns. And I think you even know, as you read, that Dimitri is being railroaded, but doesn't even care, being too involved with a certain kind of woman. The whole thing, almost hallucinatory, or at the least, baffling, murky, and there's even this other brother, Ivan, the skeptic, who in his own feverish hallucinations dreams up the whole Grand Inquisitor thing, which is itself, haphazardly, as if the landing of a UFO in the midst of novel's plot (serialized, to keep the public interest up, with murder, lurid women, foolish people, humanity misbehaving over money and what-not) one of the greatest observations a novelist has ever made about moral 'realities and pieties,' i.e., it's all bullshit, as only a Russian can understand bullshit, except of course the essential Jesus himself, which one is able to grasp well enough.
CNN, a panel of mock jurors, is interviewed, freshly post the verdict, and a woman is saying, "I want her to fry, fry like that chicken I ate for dinner." Really? (Was she, too, constrained to follow the script that itself had become a runaway train constantly wrecking its way down the tracks in slow motion bit-by-bit horror?)
And it might even seem, if you were to be somewhat honest with yourself--'honesty,' hah!--that this one woman on the stand was herself a character worthy of putting into a Russian novel, or even left one with the impression that she was in fact several, almost countless numbers, of characters. (Her drastically changing appearance cooperated.) One does not want to really admit nor share too much of his own guesses, having spent so little time following the whole thing--even that sounds coy now--but it could seem that there was a foolish girl who had fallen in with a guy who seemed okay and upright, a Mormon, even, infallible, but who was the perfect utterly shallow make-a-sex-tape (extremely painful to listen to in all its stupidity) kind of a guy, who knew not love, nor spiritual love, but merely puerile porno as a relationship, to which poor girl was all too accommodating, or simply forced, hoping for a relationship with a successful guy. Living in a porn culture, one is not being completely self-righteous in observing that, given the quick selfish pleasure video-game fix allowed by the digital age, that has made sex into, just that, a video game with a scorecard. And here's this poor uncentered young woman completely adrift in it, reaching out to the vain picture of modern love, finding it empty, hair-coloring, the guy, the perfect inspirational business salesman, able to be shallow enough to talk the stupid banal talk, from what it would seem, with a perfect backstory. A disease few, it would seem, are immune to as they conform to the flow of information that bestows status.
Who knows what happened. I got out of it before forming much of an opinion, beyond that of finding the whole thing a perfect representation of modern times, the lack of morality, and the willingness to turn a blind eye to the words of Jesus himself before the sinful woman and her accusers, now a sort of inapplicable joke almost, 'judge not, lest ye be judged.' Because we're going to judge, we must judge. And it is, after all, the law, and you can't go around murdering people, of course. Justice must play all stories out and attempt to get at the truth, and you can't be cynical about it and say it's all Kafkaesque. (It is, unfortunately, easier to be negative, critical and accusatory when we try to make clinical sense out of stories, as if there can be no good intentions, or at least ones that don't pave the road to hell.)
If I remember, the condition of Ivan, best financially-situated of the brothers, worsens, and he, with little ceremony, dies. Dimitri, the eldest, the passionate one, innocent of murder, is found guilty and sent off to hard labor, the bright side being that he will be spiritually-aided (and hopefully made okay) by the quiet hero of the novel, youngest brother and monk, Alyosha. And all the while, it is this queer idiot sort of handy man of the wicked cruel old man with the money and father of all three, Smerdyakov-- a certain suggestive onomotopoeia to the name-- and one should have been been suspicious about the novelist when he throws in a chapter strangely entitled, "Smerdyakov, with a guitar." (To which our minds have to stop, take pause, and wonder, why this pointless actionless moment, but Dostoevsky so clever and so great a dreamer of a novelist, with such great faith in the form, such that that faith is astounding and beautiful, that we can't initially see this, suddenly, as a possible suspect and plot denouement ...) Smerdyakov himself has gotten the fever of consumption, and probably would be hardly coherent anyway, but he admits, it was he, with the blunt instrument, bloody and recovered from the crime scene, who did it, even to protect everyone, including Dimitri, ironically. Is it Alyosha who hears his confession? I forget. It is all post-trial, and there's nothing anyone can do about it anyway, as we all begin to drift away, not quite knowing yet, again having no clue, how this all might end, much like life itself. (This another hint of Dostoevsky's musical genius.)
As a measure of satisfaction, the great moment at the end, that is a reaffirmation of the Christian spirit that itself almost suffered hallucination and imprisonment under some venemous creep of an Archbishop Inquisitor, Christ told that he is meaningless and should simply go away and not mess with the perfect system humanity has figured out quite on its own, thank you very much, Alyosha and the schoolboys, coming to the deathbed of the boy they have previously tormented, now peace made, (through, of all things, a stray dog.) The little boy then dies, and we're left outside the churchyard after the burial (the poor father sobbing, sobbing), and Alyosha, a pure person, from back in that time we didn't need to think cynical thoughts all the time, gently marshals the boys, his 'little chickens' together, and the boys go, right at the end of, what?, eight hundred and forty pages, "Hurrah for Karamazov." And after all that, after how many pages of strangeness, facts, legality, characters, it's actually quite touching, as if you yourself was just about to be released from prison for a crime you didn't commit, touching indeed. That's what you're left with, this little 'hurrah,' and it means all the world. And it is as if we are all learners, like children again, and we are here at the moment where, from previous lifetimes and understandings, we have already mature knowledge and wisdom, but yet we are learning something new and fresh, reaching that fine point we knew we were somehow always reaching for. We have, despite all, learned something new and fresh. (Do we become more adult, or more open, childlike learners--one study question.)
But of course, real life is stranger than fiction, and hard to make sense of.
Maybe novelists aren't so bad after all.
And, as a postscript, after all this great lack of faith in prose and imagination that such a trial and cultural phenomenon represents, unable to extract a larger lesson from the puerility of behavior, unable to find a sensitivity, such that no one stood up for any sensitivity, any sympathy, any Mother Theresa feeling for the lepers, the sick, the dying sensualists, just a blind glassy screen on the television to watch it all, a willingness to hype, it seems plain. Of course, who wants to understand, who really cares, about such people? Television reveals no wish but to judge, a pundit poking up at every place to deliver an opinion. The pleasure of skewering, as if one were, himself, perfect, moral, beyond reproach, immune to what all floats in our blood. As was noted on Bill Moyers, all the public seems able to do, as in Boston, is to cheer "USA, USA," patriotism, pride in the police state, every criminal caught now a Bin Laden brought to justice. Legalese, we are caught in legalese.
As I say, I had that sensation, Mitya at the trial. Strange courtroom proceedings, foreign customs, the same righteous serious-about-the-law solemnity, strutting lawyers claiming to know everything, a path to truth. You're reading The Brothers Karamazov, trying to follow along, and really, besides the Alyosha and the old Father Zossima spiritual stuff, not a whole lot of it makes sense to you, as if it were indeed The classic wandering Russian novel, a wall of verbage full of femme fatals, incomprehensible, hard to predict, hard to figure, 'why is this here?' with its relationships and plot turns. And I think you even know, as you read, that Dimitri is being railroaded, but doesn't even care, being too involved with a certain kind of woman. The whole thing, almost hallucinatory, or at the least, baffling, murky, and there's even this other brother, Ivan, the skeptic, who in his own feverish hallucinations dreams up the whole Grand Inquisitor thing, which is itself, haphazardly, as if the landing of a UFO in the midst of novel's plot (serialized, to keep the public interest up, with murder, lurid women, foolish people, humanity misbehaving over money and what-not) one of the greatest observations a novelist has ever made about moral 'realities and pieties,' i.e., it's all bullshit, as only a Russian can understand bullshit, except of course the essential Jesus himself, which one is able to grasp well enough.
CNN, a panel of mock jurors, is interviewed, freshly post the verdict, and a woman is saying, "I want her to fry, fry like that chicken I ate for dinner." Really? (Was she, too, constrained to follow the script that itself had become a runaway train constantly wrecking its way down the tracks in slow motion bit-by-bit horror?)
And it might even seem, if you were to be somewhat honest with yourself--'honesty,' hah!--that this one woman on the stand was herself a character worthy of putting into a Russian novel, or even left one with the impression that she was in fact several, almost countless numbers, of characters. (Her drastically changing appearance cooperated.) One does not want to really admit nor share too much of his own guesses, having spent so little time following the whole thing--even that sounds coy now--but it could seem that there was a foolish girl who had fallen in with a guy who seemed okay and upright, a Mormon, even, infallible, but who was the perfect utterly shallow make-a-sex-tape (extremely painful to listen to in all its stupidity) kind of a guy, who knew not love, nor spiritual love, but merely puerile porno as a relationship, to which poor girl was all too accommodating, or simply forced, hoping for a relationship with a successful guy. Living in a porn culture, one is not being completely self-righteous in observing that, given the quick selfish pleasure video-game fix allowed by the digital age, that has made sex into, just that, a video game with a scorecard. And here's this poor uncentered young woman completely adrift in it, reaching out to the vain picture of modern love, finding it empty, hair-coloring, the guy, the perfect inspirational business salesman, able to be shallow enough to talk the stupid banal talk, from what it would seem, with a perfect backstory. A disease few, it would seem, are immune to as they conform to the flow of information that bestows status.
Who knows what happened. I got out of it before forming much of an opinion, beyond that of finding the whole thing a perfect representation of modern times, the lack of morality, and the willingness to turn a blind eye to the words of Jesus himself before the sinful woman and her accusers, now a sort of inapplicable joke almost, 'judge not, lest ye be judged.' Because we're going to judge, we must judge. And it is, after all, the law, and you can't go around murdering people, of course. Justice must play all stories out and attempt to get at the truth, and you can't be cynical about it and say it's all Kafkaesque. (It is, unfortunately, easier to be negative, critical and accusatory when we try to make clinical sense out of stories, as if there can be no good intentions, or at least ones that don't pave the road to hell.)
If I remember, the condition of Ivan, best financially-situated of the brothers, worsens, and he, with little ceremony, dies. Dimitri, the eldest, the passionate one, innocent of murder, is found guilty and sent off to hard labor, the bright side being that he will be spiritually-aided (and hopefully made okay) by the quiet hero of the novel, youngest brother and monk, Alyosha. And all the while, it is this queer idiot sort of handy man of the wicked cruel old man with the money and father of all three, Smerdyakov-- a certain suggestive onomotopoeia to the name-- and one should have been been suspicious about the novelist when he throws in a chapter strangely entitled, "Smerdyakov, with a guitar." (To which our minds have to stop, take pause, and wonder, why this pointless actionless moment, but Dostoevsky so clever and so great a dreamer of a novelist, with such great faith in the form, such that that faith is astounding and beautiful, that we can't initially see this, suddenly, as a possible suspect and plot denouement ...) Smerdyakov himself has gotten the fever of consumption, and probably would be hardly coherent anyway, but he admits, it was he, with the blunt instrument, bloody and recovered from the crime scene, who did it, even to protect everyone, including Dimitri, ironically. Is it Alyosha who hears his confession? I forget. It is all post-trial, and there's nothing anyone can do about it anyway, as we all begin to drift away, not quite knowing yet, again having no clue, how this all might end, much like life itself. (This another hint of Dostoevsky's musical genius.)
As a measure of satisfaction, the great moment at the end, that is a reaffirmation of the Christian spirit that itself almost suffered hallucination and imprisonment under some venemous creep of an Archbishop Inquisitor, Christ told that he is meaningless and should simply go away and not mess with the perfect system humanity has figured out quite on its own, thank you very much, Alyosha and the schoolboys, coming to the deathbed of the boy they have previously tormented, now peace made, (through, of all things, a stray dog.) The little boy then dies, and we're left outside the churchyard after the burial (the poor father sobbing, sobbing), and Alyosha, a pure person, from back in that time we didn't need to think cynical thoughts all the time, gently marshals the boys, his 'little chickens' together, and the boys go, right at the end of, what?, eight hundred and forty pages, "Hurrah for Karamazov." And after all that, after how many pages of strangeness, facts, legality, characters, it's actually quite touching, as if you yourself was just about to be released from prison for a crime you didn't commit, touching indeed. That's what you're left with, this little 'hurrah,' and it means all the world. And it is as if we are all learners, like children again, and we are here at the moment where, from previous lifetimes and understandings, we have already mature knowledge and wisdom, but yet we are learning something new and fresh, reaching that fine point we knew we were somehow always reaching for. We have, despite all, learned something new and fresh. (Do we become more adult, or more open, childlike learners--one study question.)
But of course, real life is stranger than fiction, and hard to make sense of.
Maybe novelists aren't so bad after all.
And, as a postscript, after all this great lack of faith in prose and imagination that such a trial and cultural phenomenon represents, unable to extract a larger lesson from the puerility of behavior, unable to find a sensitivity, such that no one stood up for any sensitivity, any sympathy, any Mother Theresa feeling for the lepers, the sick, the dying sensualists, just a blind glassy screen on the television to watch it all, a willingness to hype, it seems plain. Of course, who wants to understand, who really cares, about such people? Television reveals no wish but to judge, a pundit poking up at every place to deliver an opinion. The pleasure of skewering, as if one were, himself, perfect, moral, beyond reproach, immune to what all floats in our blood. As was noted on Bill Moyers, all the public seems able to do, as in Boston, is to cheer "USA, USA," patriotism, pride in the police state, every criminal caught now a Bin Laden brought to justice. Legalese, we are caught in legalese.
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