I may regret this later. Usually this kind of thing I do. I mean, I feel a moment of clarity, which feels tons like the Holy Ghost and other good stuff and I get carried away on that feeling and then, maybe early the next morning when I am filled with nausea looking ahead at a long day of fruitless and overfamiliar labor and it's raining and there's a new letter from Dooshbag's attorney and I am filled with murderous rage and capitalism is most deifinitely in retrograde, etc., I feel shame at yesterday's exuberance and youthful hope. But maybe not this time.
The idea: I basically crib the basic premise of Absalom, Absalom!. Not the structure, just the skeletal story, in which a stranger shows up in a remote place, finagles this huge land deal, and disrupts a small town, and his son meets his secret past and etc. I rearrange the Faulkner telling to something far more linear, first things first. Then I pretty much plug in my peeps. I am way too overcome with lethargy and ennui to say more than this right now, so I hope it's clear what I mean. There is a murder. there is blind fate, there is lust and greed, and the whole thing I basically rearrange as modern Sophocles. Someone must die.
Huh. Not so appealing once I write it out.
Maybe I won't do that.
Feck.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Saturday, October 8, 2011
To Be Read in a Thick Japanese Accent
I tried to please my wife. But I could not turn straw into gold. I brought water every day from the stream. I heated it at the fire and filled her tub, and she bathed. But the water would grow cold and she was displeased.
One day she made a robot husband with fingers of aluminum and ruby eyes that saw everything at once. This robot did not drive me from the house but I was so ashamed that I betook myself to the barn and dwelt there weeping several days, lamenting my estate. It was clear that I was not so good a husband as the robot. He brought water that did not grow cold. He did not need her to be warm or vulnerable. He could lift her and carry her so that her feet were not soiled until quickly she forgot that our house was a farm house surrounded by dirt.
I studied the robot and learned how to be a robot husband. Hundreds of times I heated the water not with fire but with electricity and with the sun so that it did not grow cold. I watched the robot husband run round and round the house so that my wife could be alone but not feel afraid and I learned to walk round and round the house without growing tired. Finally I cut out my heart and installed a tiny cabinet there where I placed crackers salted only on one side and also batteries with the rays of the sun. I learned to be a robot husband, and when I came back from the barn I had so much power. I explained to the robot that I had learned all that he did to be a good robot husband. He laughed. But I showed him how I made hot water that would not grow cold and how I could walk around the house and many other things. Still he laughed.
But I showed him that I could also be a human husband. I could listen and although nothing seemed to happen my listening would make my wife grow stronger. I did not know what to make for dinner but if I looked through the cupboards an idea came to me that might have nothing to do with what was in the cupboards but seemed to have arrived on its own. The robot grew angry. He took the cupboard apart and searched the kitchen for the idea of food but he found only particle board and laminate. And then I made this dinner for the robot and he said that he understood.
The robot flew up into the sky, farther and farther until he was only a shrinking dot hanging still among the drifting clouds. I went back inside and in the kitchen I saw my wife admiring a puzzle that had been put together by her robot husband. It was a puzzle that was all one color, and it was perfectly assembled.
One day she made a robot husband with fingers of aluminum and ruby eyes that saw everything at once. This robot did not drive me from the house but I was so ashamed that I betook myself to the barn and dwelt there weeping several days, lamenting my estate. It was clear that I was not so good a husband as the robot. He brought water that did not grow cold. He did not need her to be warm or vulnerable. He could lift her and carry her so that her feet were not soiled until quickly she forgot that our house was a farm house surrounded by dirt.
I studied the robot and learned how to be a robot husband. Hundreds of times I heated the water not with fire but with electricity and with the sun so that it did not grow cold. I watched the robot husband run round and round the house so that my wife could be alone but not feel afraid and I learned to walk round and round the house without growing tired. Finally I cut out my heart and installed a tiny cabinet there where I placed crackers salted only on one side and also batteries with the rays of the sun. I learned to be a robot husband, and when I came back from the barn I had so much power. I explained to the robot that I had learned all that he did to be a good robot husband. He laughed. But I showed him how I made hot water that would not grow cold and how I could walk around the house and many other things. Still he laughed.
But I showed him that I could also be a human husband. I could listen and although nothing seemed to happen my listening would make my wife grow stronger. I did not know what to make for dinner but if I looked through the cupboards an idea came to me that might have nothing to do with what was in the cupboards but seemed to have arrived on its own. The robot grew angry. He took the cupboard apart and searched the kitchen for the idea of food but he found only particle board and laminate. And then I made this dinner for the robot and he said that he understood.
The robot flew up into the sky, farther and farther until he was only a shrinking dot hanging still among the drifting clouds. I went back inside and in the kitchen I saw my wife admiring a puzzle that had been put together by her robot husband. It was a puzzle that was all one color, and it was perfectly assembled.
Friday, October 7, 2011
And He's All, Like
At length, I got to take Geoffrey Hill's seminar on Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is an obscure topic even in the Religion and Literature program of a major university with a seminary program and a Department of Religion and people running around growing their hair out to be poets and playwrights and mystics and indigents. There were nine of us, including Professor Hill, and we met in his large, scholarly edition-lined office, strewn with miscellaneous volumes of the OED and the bones of saints and so forth.
Hill's persona as a teacher is wonderful: he was funny, modest, hospitable, at great pains to be kind to us, well aware that we were intimidated and eager to impress. One of his great gifts, I think, is an ability to draw down the powers upon his own person with great magisterial acts of erudition, eloquence, and immolating scruple--and then to stagger aside with Vaudvillean nimbleness so that the bolt redounds back upon The Tradition or The Obscure Almighty or strikes a wall, leaving clown-shaped hole.
We were starting one session and Hill was laboring to find the particular page of the particular Hopkins poem we had prepared. Which wasn't easy because he had read the pages clean out of the shitty OUP edition of Hopkins we were working with. And I'm realizing that this is a story about making a fool of oneself and being let off the hook.
So he's looking through these rubberbanded-together pages for the poem and we're all preparing our stuff until the whole thing goes on just past the point of endurance, which for me is never very far. And so I ask, "Have you been reading that book in the bath?" Stupid. Stupid. A half-hopeful fuck. He looked up at me through his eyebrows and said in his best prophetic growl, "NO, Mr. WULF." Then glaring at his scattering pages, "I ONLY read MISTery novels in the BAHTH." Two beats. "And the MOD-uhns." So great.
This was such a gift to me. Both because to me what is truly funny has either a note of kenotic condescension or elective folly. And this was both.
The last time I saw Geoffrey Hill was when I dropped in on him at his house in Boston--again vastly inappropriate and misjudged and near-desperate--to give him a volume of theological essays to which Eliot had contributed an essay on revelation and which he had inscribed to some local priest. Even as I found it in some long-closed dusty bookstore far north on Massachusetts Avenue, I knew it wasn't for the likes of me. And Professor Hill invited me in, and he asked me how my daughter was, and I asked about his youngest daughter. We talked for a few minutes about what it's like to raise children knowing that depression is likely to be among the things they inherit from you. He looked so much older than he had just a few years before. I was leaving Boston and knew that I would likely never see him again. I had no words for the kindness I owed him. More than that, for the sense that I was somehow in his lineage, or could be.
We made it back to the door. I said, "Thank you, Professor Hill. I may not see you again."
He smiled and said, with something that was not irony but more like faith in the presence of enormous and fearlessly-reckoned odds, "We'll see each other again. If not here." And I left.
And that was it. That is the tone that he can summon on a broad range of topics until it becomes an article of faith that seems very close about his every line. Maybe that's something of what a poet is.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Yummy Fall Polenta That I Am Love
1 cup polenta (not instant, bc that's some bullshit)
4-5 cups chicken broth
a couple or three shallots
like a thing or half a thing of prosciutto of indifferent quality
red pepper flakes until it rocks
sage and rosemary
Cook up the prosciutto and red pepper/sage/rosemary in some olive oil until the pig is crispy. Be generous with the sage and rosemary. And with the prosciutto. Dump into the polenta while it finishes thickening. Mix in some Parmesan while it cools. Spread on a pan and let it seize up all yummy, a la V.
Eat with steak and sturdy IPA while watching the moon turn blood red and the stars fall from the sky.
I am fully in love with polenta (spellcheck offers 'tadpole') right now, and if I had a pony I'd eat it on my damn pony. All as I can say.
4-5 cups chicken broth
a couple or three shallots
like a thing or half a thing of prosciutto of indifferent quality
red pepper flakes until it rocks
sage and rosemary
Cook up the prosciutto and red pepper/sage/rosemary in some olive oil until the pig is crispy. Be generous with the sage and rosemary. And with the prosciutto. Dump into the polenta while it finishes thickening. Mix in some Parmesan while it cools. Spread on a pan and let it seize up all yummy, a la V.
Eat with steak and sturdy IPA while watching the moon turn blood red and the stars fall from the sky.
I am fully in love with polenta (spellcheck offers 'tadpole') right now, and if I had a pony I'd eat it on my damn pony. All as I can say.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Monday, September 26, 2011
V., Salt Lake City, Utah, September 26, 2012, 4:30 AM
I am half-lucid, should be asleep. I am as usual thinking about my impending disasters: unpaid taxes, legal disputes with the ex, a daughter who didn't come home this weekend and I don't know where she is, etc., and as I lie here thinking these near-fatal thoughts of shit about which I can do nothing but which is of course endlessly compelling, each impending disaster takes on a cinematic [though somewhat fragmentary and kaleidoscopic] image, a sort of visual theme. For example: my back-taxes take the form of, or my thoughts of it are accompanied by, an image of an immense groaning black-iron dirigible, its trusswork backlit by coalfire, its riveted ironplate siding leaking black smoke, venting enough heat that the entire skyfilling sun-eclipsing monstrous mass is coming down. It is lowering above me and is too vast to outrun.
And the legal nonsense with [or against] my ex: she and her pitbull attorney have hybridized, or sort of violently combined into one malformed carbuncular asexual sort of butch matriarch wearing the battle fatigues of the U.S. Marines. He/she/it is standing above me with a wet towel. I am in something like a dentist's chair, totally immobilized. He/she/it asks me, in a tone of hostile contempt, a series of demented questions, like this one: Can you prove, with documentation, that these groceries [it holds up a receipt] benefited the marital children? and as soon as I try to answer, or to express my outrage, this monstrous virago slaps the dripping towel over my mouth and nose and I lurch from the brink of sleep gasping and adrenal.
So go my nights. My days are somewhat less dramatic and sometimes less lucid. I think that my planning brain has been routed. Too much stress. Too many demands on my time made by people with needs I can't begin to meet. I can't get myself to sit down and rationally and systematically plan my life these days. I have so much happening and the stakes are so high and my needs are so continually unmet, and my life here in Salt Lake City Utah is so muted and pointless that it takes an act of will to even list what I need to attend to, and for six months now I have not got beyond a simple list. I just deal, more or less, with whatever current crisis.
All of which is dreary and, dream-imagery aside, so colorless and typical of the human condition as to be unworthy of note. Which is why I want to tell you a story:
And the legal nonsense with [or against] my ex: she and her pitbull attorney have hybridized, or sort of violently combined into one malformed carbuncular asexual sort of butch matriarch wearing the battle fatigues of the U.S. Marines. He/she/it is standing above me with a wet towel. I am in something like a dentist's chair, totally immobilized. He/she/it asks me, in a tone of hostile contempt, a series of demented questions, like this one: Can you prove, with documentation, that these groceries [it holds up a receipt] benefited the marital children? and as soon as I try to answer, or to express my outrage, this monstrous virago slaps the dripping towel over my mouth and nose and I lurch from the brink of sleep gasping and adrenal.
So go my nights. My days are somewhat less dramatic and sometimes less lucid. I think that my planning brain has been routed. Too much stress. Too many demands on my time made by people with needs I can't begin to meet. I can't get myself to sit down and rationally and systematically plan my life these days. I have so much happening and the stakes are so high and my needs are so continually unmet, and my life here in Salt Lake City Utah is so muted and pointless that it takes an act of will to even list what I need to attend to, and for six months now I have not got beyond a simple list. I just deal, more or less, with whatever current crisis.
All of which is dreary and, dream-imagery aside, so colorless and typical of the human condition as to be unworthy of note. Which is why I want to tell you a story:
Thursday, September 22, 2011
The Kolob Tabernacle Gets Under His Skin
By prophet seer and revelatory fiat it was built at the crossroads, not at the corner of one quadrant as ever since cardo and decumanus first had it so but at the geometric centerpoint at the very intersection of the centerlines of the two roads in the perfect as-drawn crosshaired bullseye of what would have been a roundabout had more urbane planners had their way but which evolved in fact to become a rough rutted swerve of trafficked bare hardpan and later a merely expedient sweep of asphalt in the midst of which the Tabernacle now stood autonomous, alone and to appearance arbitrary so that what began as fiat ended up as apparent mistake, the certainty of the prophet seer and revelator coming finally to light as hamfistedness, the way what is white and bloated and fishbitten finally slips its chains and surfaces to indict. He thought: this is a likeness of our discomfort with the social order: that the Tabernacle, meeting place for the propagation of edicts, the leveling of censure, the knitting of the congregation, the buttressing of values and family and general cohesion, should so whelm the townplan that all roads must needs finally go their near-heedless way around it lest it govern overmuch the hurried passage of the people who no matter their allegiances must get where they are going. And that in delaying them every day by looming there omnipresent, unaware of its architectural solecism, a shadowing reminder of their oaths and contracts, it so chafe and irk that they tire of the order it was placed there to keep and become wild. Thus the rough expedient looping of the blacktop where the prophet had designed a neat-compassed circle did for him, for this modern man this century later, symbolize the accommodations people, individuals all, make to live with each other else the social contract so irk and chafe that at some personal culmination one of the overregulated citizens mix fertilizer with diesel and bring down the Tabernacle. In this vast country at least it is in no one's nature to be so overseen, stared-down on and disapproved of, by this kind of unblinking panoptic presence of distant authority. It loomed there and he imagined it circled with a wind-rippled God-sustained red banner declaring Non Annuit Coeptis. One may love the church and resent its nagging.
Then one moonless night in the deadwinter the man ran off the expedient asphalt, well into his fifth of Jameson's, and came up in the ditch in the deep snow, tires frictionless, and the headlights bore an upangled wedge of light through the snowfall directly at the facade of the Tabernacle. For a long few minutes as he reeled behind the wheel it glowed alone and faceless in all the night and as the man noted how its fine old stone was now nearly hidden in the aluminum and vinyl of the expedient costeffective tithebought recent remodel and the whiskey sidled up his esophagus in unctuous laminar flow then he became convinced of his night's work. He offed the headlights, lurched the two blocks home, and returned with paint and roller. In the near-complete dark he overturned a trashcan, chinned the gutter over the new storefront entry, made the roof, and considered his canvas: an uninterrupted upper wall of squared blocks of red sandstone maybe forty feet across and taller than he could reach. He marked the very axial center of the wall, the spot bisected by the cardo of Kolob Town, and drafted in white oil housepaint a vast eyewhite, almond, symmetrical, and stylized. Then an arm-compassed iris of barnred, then a pupil in stoveblack, which he drew purposely smallish because he imagined it would seem to squint its contempt. He stood back, woozy in the cold, disordered by the gusting of the snow. The eye was plain even in this moonless solstice, fairly done, clear and simple, iconic. He threw the paint buckets down into the snow and jumped after. He worried briefly about the footprints in the snow between his truck and the road. He left the paint to freeze, fetched a shovel from the bed and began to dig and sometime later, with the whiskey wearing off, he drove home.
Then one moonless night in the deadwinter the man ran off the expedient asphalt, well into his fifth of Jameson's, and came up in the ditch in the deep snow, tires frictionless, and the headlights bore an upangled wedge of light through the snowfall directly at the facade of the Tabernacle. For a long few minutes as he reeled behind the wheel it glowed alone and faceless in all the night and as the man noted how its fine old stone was now nearly hidden in the aluminum and vinyl of the expedient costeffective tithebought recent remodel and the whiskey sidled up his esophagus in unctuous laminar flow then he became convinced of his night's work. He offed the headlights, lurched the two blocks home, and returned with paint and roller. In the near-complete dark he overturned a trashcan, chinned the gutter over the new storefront entry, made the roof, and considered his canvas: an uninterrupted upper wall of squared blocks of red sandstone maybe forty feet across and taller than he could reach. He marked the very axial center of the wall, the spot bisected by the cardo of Kolob Town, and drafted in white oil housepaint a vast eyewhite, almond, symmetrical, and stylized. Then an arm-compassed iris of barnred, then a pupil in stoveblack, which he drew purposely smallish because he imagined it would seem to squint its contempt. He stood back, woozy in the cold, disordered by the gusting of the snow. The eye was plain even in this moonless solstice, fairly done, clear and simple, iconic. He threw the paint buckets down into the snow and jumped after. He worried briefly about the footprints in the snow between his truck and the road. He left the paint to freeze, fetched a shovel from the bed and began to dig and sometime later, with the whiskey wearing off, he drove home.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Tomasz, Grand Arch Ranch, Pierce County, Utah, Summer 2010
There's not much to say. I grew up in Wisconsin. My parents came from Poland. My dad is a dairyman, and I thought I would be. He wanted me to get an Ag degree so I could help with the dairy expansion, now up to two thousand head. I went to Purdue, and then I got interested in beef and came out here on a study exchange when I was working on a research grant for dryland grazing. My dad still wants me back in Wisconsin, but I am having a good time here learning to cowboy and enjoying no early mornings and hardly any mosquitoes. I think I will sign up for a year and stay. It's going to be hard on my folks, but they have help and I just can't see dairying my whole life, which these days is 6 days of paperwork and one day of wading through the muck every week. Here I'm on horseback pretty often, and running the tractor a bit and keeping fences, and this is mostly eight-hour days, probably the easiest work I'm going to find around bovines, I guess.
When I first came out here I had been reading Aldo Leopold in college, required for a land conservation class. He is not a hero to many Midwestern commercial operators, to say the least. But then I went and saw his place and got very excited about his trips in the west. I had never been out of the Midwest. When I saw this exchange spot open up I just set aside my nervousness and jumped on it. If they'd of known that I didn't ride I bet they would of past me up. One word of advice I have is do not show up day one on a Utah ranch saying you came because of reading a conservationist hero and that you can't ride. Good thing they were looking for help giving shots, because that I can do. I do love working the lots and culling the animals. I gave up my wellies and John Deere hat, and now I'm in ropers and a straw wide-brim that I bet my buddies back home would laugh at, but it's the right gear for here. So, like I said, I'm staying on for another year. After the drive I am going to work hard on my riding. My foreman has a big quarterhorse just my size, and I do spend some time nights thinking I might buy that horse and settle here. Everyone is real decent and I can't think of a bad word to say about any of this except I feel bad my parents will not like this new life I'm working on.
When I first came out here I had been reading Aldo Leopold in college, required for a land conservation class. He is not a hero to many Midwestern commercial operators, to say the least. But then I went and saw his place and got very excited about his trips in the west. I had never been out of the Midwest. When I saw this exchange spot open up I just set aside my nervousness and jumped on it. If they'd of known that I didn't ride I bet they would of past me up. One word of advice I have is do not show up day one on a Utah ranch saying you came because of reading a conservationist hero and that you can't ride. Good thing they were looking for help giving shots, because that I can do. I do love working the lots and culling the animals. I gave up my wellies and John Deere hat, and now I'm in ropers and a straw wide-brim that I bet my buddies back home would laugh at, but it's the right gear for here. So, like I said, I'm staying on for another year. After the drive I am going to work hard on my riding. My foreman has a big quarterhorse just my size, and I do spend some time nights thinking I might buy that horse and settle here. Everyone is real decent and I can't think of a bad word to say about any of this except I feel bad my parents will not like this new life I'm working on.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
I Will Try to Tell It Straight, Katie Donelly, Kolob, Utah, Summer 2010
I have tried everything, I mean for my age. I had no idea in high school. Maybe be an art teacher? I was good at drawing. Then I graduated and I got a job in the art store in Flagstaff, thinking that would be a chance, but all they had me do was stock shelves. All my coworkers there had been to art school and most were older, and when a teacher --they had classes upstairs?-- when a teacher came down and needed help teaching or setting up for a class or whatever they always went to the art students, which I wasn't and I felt I would never be. I mean, even after just one summer working there it was pretty clear I would never save money to go to school and maybe I didn't plan well for art school anyway. My grades were not good. Maybe in other towns I wouldn't have even graduated, but in Flagstaff they just want you through your four years and out the door. So I felt pretty stuck, but I did work there a whole year. They never had me do anything but inventory, not even work the register.
Then Blaise, who I knew from sangha, asked me if I wanted to work at Daisey's, the college bar by NAU? And I had to think about it because of my vows to never drink. I mean, I have the most Irish family and I wanted to be the one to not drink, to not do that instead of everything else. So I hesitated to take the job, but then I did because of the tips and the night hours. This was good and bad. Not all good, but not all bad either. I started out doing inventory, which I knew how to do by then of course, but they promised when the students came back at the end of the summer I would work tables, which is what happened. I would get their orders and take them to the bar and then take the full tray back to my table and hand the drinks around. This you're supposed to do all flirty? because that's how you get tips from the college boys, by making them feel you're their one special bargirl! Just for them. I had to get some sort of embarrassing coaching from my boss and the other girls, on what to wear, how to talk, how to avoid the trouble boys, stuff like that. Even how to move for them! It was embarrassing, but it was also nice to get advice from the older girls, who it really felt like were looking out for me. They called me little sister and always had nice things to say and when Daisy's was full and loud and it was the end of the evening so the boys were rowdy they would encourage me with sly winks and tell me how much they envied my ass and liked my jeans and stuff like that. I really liked that job. Every day I looked forward to it. I mean, sometimes it was hard? Like, there was this one boy for a while he was tipping me so much I started getting nervous and then he grabbed me a couple of times, but then he apologized, actually really nice like a gentleman. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it but he started coming every night and sitting in my area, and you don't move out of your area because of the regulars? So: he started chatting me up and I was having my premonitions about this and getting worried, like when I left to walk home I kept thinking he'd be there and I was freaked out. Then one day Bobby Seau, our sort of doorman and bouncer, who is, like, a bear? I mean, he is like six feet tall and so thick I could not reach around him and he looks fat but he is all hard as wood. Anyway, he saw this college boy grab my wrist one night and I did get a little upset, and he was just suddenly there looking at the kid and he says pretty polite but strong let go of her and go home. And the kid starts to say something but Bobby Seau just shakes his enormous head and the kid takes the tab and leaves, no tip. Things like that could stress me out but mostly I loved that job and the people who worked there.
After I think two years? Blaise left to open the restaurant here in Kolob. I really missed her. She was really the person who made Daisey's work. She ran the place and everyone loved and respected her. Plus, I had rented a room from her for a year, so we had gotten close outside of work and she was a good friend. One day she called me from Kolob and offered me a job here. She said it would be a pay cut, but that she would love to have me here and that she had a trailer I could stay in, stuff like that. I had finally bought a car with what I'd saved from Daisey's, so I hesitated a while not sure that I could make payments with lower income, but here I am. Some of being here is like Daisey's, but really not much. I'm serving food, and there isn't much drinking here, mostly just wine with dinner, so that suits me. I have to dress a little fancier, but that's not too expensive. I already love my coworkers. There's a girl I knew a little in Flag, and some of the kitchen workers are my age and they're nice. This is a pretty good buddhist community, too, so I don't have to explain my dzi bead and my vows and stuff.
There aren't many men my age in town. Actually not many men at all! One thing I was really sad about in Flag was I kept meeting really good guys but then nothing. We would go out like two or three times and nothing. I was pretty down on myself, romance-wise. I learned how to flirt working in the bar, and I got to where I could predict a man's response to what I was wearing and how I acted and moved. But then after we'd gone out a couple of times they just stopped calling and lost interest, which made me feel pretty sad, or like I just didn't have what they wanted. I went through that whole pathetic girl thing? Where you keep checking your breath and re-doing your hair and asking the other waitresses if your ass looks fat, stuff like that. When Blaise asked me here I thought it might get worse, romance-wise, with so few men and most of them Mormon, which, I used to be Mormon, but not really because of all the drinking in my family, but I know it doesn't help the romance, so I hesitated on account of so few men-prospects. When I first got here I was okay being celibate for a while. I went into retreat for four weeks when I left Daisey's before I came here. I went to New Mexico and meditated and received teachings for those four weeks, and when I got to Kolob I kept that focus for a while, but really I was lonely. I went down to Blaise's, she had fires in her yard some nights, and I was really happy to have all these new girlfriends, but I did get lonely. One thing I did was start reading again which I hadn't since my dad made me when I was a kid. And I read not crap but real books, like Huck Finn and even Moby Dick and stuff to pass the day before my shift in the evening, and I kept the trailer extremely clean! There is one boy in the kitchen who came by for a while and I'm pretty sure he liked me, but he is so awkward and boring I just didn't see that going anywhere.
But I really love this job, too. They money is pretty good, especially with the trailer so cheap and nothing here to buy! And I am working through the guidebook of all the trails in this area and I really think this country is beautiful. And so I think I will be here for a while and I hope it just keeps working out.
Then Blaise, who I knew from sangha, asked me if I wanted to work at Daisey's, the college bar by NAU? And I had to think about it because of my vows to never drink. I mean, I have the most Irish family and I wanted to be the one to not drink, to not do that instead of everything else. So I hesitated to take the job, but then I did because of the tips and the night hours. This was good and bad. Not all good, but not all bad either. I started out doing inventory, which I knew how to do by then of course, but they promised when the students came back at the end of the summer I would work tables, which is what happened. I would get their orders and take them to the bar and then take the full tray back to my table and hand the drinks around. This you're supposed to do all flirty? because that's how you get tips from the college boys, by making them feel you're their one special bargirl! Just for them. I had to get some sort of embarrassing coaching from my boss and the other girls, on what to wear, how to talk, how to avoid the trouble boys, stuff like that. Even how to move for them! It was embarrassing, but it was also nice to get advice from the older girls, who it really felt like were looking out for me. They called me little sister and always had nice things to say and when Daisy's was full and loud and it was the end of the evening so the boys were rowdy they would encourage me with sly winks and tell me how much they envied my ass and liked my jeans and stuff like that. I really liked that job. Every day I looked forward to it. I mean, sometimes it was hard? Like, there was this one boy for a while he was tipping me so much I started getting nervous and then he grabbed me a couple of times, but then he apologized, actually really nice like a gentleman. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it but he started coming every night and sitting in my area, and you don't move out of your area because of the regulars? So: he started chatting me up and I was having my premonitions about this and getting worried, like when I left to walk home I kept thinking he'd be there and I was freaked out. Then one day Bobby Seau, our sort of doorman and bouncer, who is, like, a bear? I mean, he is like six feet tall and so thick I could not reach around him and he looks fat but he is all hard as wood. Anyway, he saw this college boy grab my wrist one night and I did get a little upset, and he was just suddenly there looking at the kid and he says pretty polite but strong let go of her and go home. And the kid starts to say something but Bobby Seau just shakes his enormous head and the kid takes the tab and leaves, no tip. Things like that could stress me out but mostly I loved that job and the people who worked there.
After I think two years? Blaise left to open the restaurant here in Kolob. I really missed her. She was really the person who made Daisey's work. She ran the place and everyone loved and respected her. Plus, I had rented a room from her for a year, so we had gotten close outside of work and she was a good friend. One day she called me from Kolob and offered me a job here. She said it would be a pay cut, but that she would love to have me here and that she had a trailer I could stay in, stuff like that. I had finally bought a car with what I'd saved from Daisey's, so I hesitated a while not sure that I could make payments with lower income, but here I am. Some of being here is like Daisey's, but really not much. I'm serving food, and there isn't much drinking here, mostly just wine with dinner, so that suits me. I have to dress a little fancier, but that's not too expensive. I already love my coworkers. There's a girl I knew a little in Flag, and some of the kitchen workers are my age and they're nice. This is a pretty good buddhist community, too, so I don't have to explain my dzi bead and my vows and stuff.
There aren't many men my age in town. Actually not many men at all! One thing I was really sad about in Flag was I kept meeting really good guys but then nothing. We would go out like two or three times and nothing. I was pretty down on myself, romance-wise. I learned how to flirt working in the bar, and I got to where I could predict a man's response to what I was wearing and how I acted and moved. But then after we'd gone out a couple of times they just stopped calling and lost interest, which made me feel pretty sad, or like I just didn't have what they wanted. I went through that whole pathetic girl thing? Where you keep checking your breath and re-doing your hair and asking the other waitresses if your ass looks fat, stuff like that. When Blaise asked me here I thought it might get worse, romance-wise, with so few men and most of them Mormon, which, I used to be Mormon, but not really because of all the drinking in my family, but I know it doesn't help the romance, so I hesitated on account of so few men-prospects. When I first got here I was okay being celibate for a while. I went into retreat for four weeks when I left Daisey's before I came here. I went to New Mexico and meditated and received teachings for those four weeks, and when I got to Kolob I kept that focus for a while, but really I was lonely. I went down to Blaise's, she had fires in her yard some nights, and I was really happy to have all these new girlfriends, but I did get lonely. One thing I did was start reading again which I hadn't since my dad made me when I was a kid. And I read not crap but real books, like Huck Finn and even Moby Dick and stuff to pass the day before my shift in the evening, and I kept the trailer extremely clean! There is one boy in the kitchen who came by for a while and I'm pretty sure he liked me, but he is so awkward and boring I just didn't see that going anywhere.
But I really love this job, too. They money is pretty good, especially with the trailer so cheap and nothing here to buy! And I am working through the guidebook of all the trails in this area and I really think this country is beautiful. And so I think I will be here for a while and I hope it just keeps working out.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
They Came Like a Ragged Circus
They came like a ragged caravan, clowns and grotesques and desparate ones too long-gone to think on their goal, as well as pregnant girls and beaten women and fugitives from state and church and family, but over years, spread so thin upon that scant mountain two-track that only their gradual pooling in the town told of their dripping arrival, as though at a drain at the bottom of the world. One came while the outer country burned, that long hot summer before they put men on the moon, the summer of love and of riots, while he was young, jerking against the stakes every sun-baked rut the cattle truck rattled and bucked, his backback and mandolin case lashed into a steer-shat corner with baling wire. Some weeks later the first couple, starved-looking and sunburned, retching, it seemed, some fell language and heaving like luggage an enormous, black, bawling infant, the first of its color the ranchers had ever seen, arrived by Volkswagen, also a first. Through the Nixon years they came, one lurching displacement after another, exhausted, alone, despirited, mostly secretive and afraid. Some looked for houses. Some slept in caves. A few built remote cabins in the woods, and these still dot the area, but most were so poor-built and exposed to weather they no longer serve as shelter. Most camped around the town.
For a few years a strange transaction seemed to change the place: young men, all Mormons, left the ranches and took their shooting skills to Viet Nam, while a shadow-town of long-haired and talkative, strange and effete men of the same age came and lived and worked and bartered, and the old order seemed to come apart, an unravelling at first, and then a rending, because the old people saw the new people as a mockery of their sons' service overseas, as a challenge to the order of their church and families, as parasites and freeloaders of a kind never welcome on a frontier.
For a few years a strange transaction seemed to change the place: young men, all Mormons, left the ranches and took their shooting skills to Viet Nam, while a shadow-town of long-haired and talkative, strange and effete men of the same age came and lived and worked and bartered, and the old order seemed to come apart, an unravelling at first, and then a rending, because the old people saw the new people as a mockery of their sons' service overseas, as a challenge to the order of their church and families, as parasites and freeloaders of a kind never welcome on a frontier.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Simon Doolittle, Boston, Massachusetts, winter 2011.
In response to your e-mail of November 6, please receive the following with my apologies for my dilatory response:
1. Regarding Fox's whereabouts this last summer, I know almost nothing. I saw him a few times in Kolob and once in Grand Arch in April and May, and spoke briefly with him. As I recollect, the topic of our conversations was purely quotidian, treating mainly of greetings and idle smalltalk. We were cordial. Of course, as you have doubtless surmised, the rumors concerning his activities in and out of the bedrooms [and sleeping bags] of Kolob's female population had been circulating and rising in temperature for some time at that point, and I was of the impression that he was making himself scarce, lest one of the affected men make good on a promise to secure his demise by gunshot, or, in one case, by crossbow-bolt and strangulation. I neither asked him where he'd been, nor received from him any indication that he was living elsewhere, but please understand that he is a cagey fellow, private and elusive, and, furthermore, I am not one of his very few confidants. After May I do not recall having seen him at all.
2. To speculate, as you requested, on who might share Fox's confidence, I shall require anonymity. It appears to me that Fox, despite his many heterosexual assignations and his remarkable facility in flirtation [an example I have attempted to emulate, thus far without notable success], does not confide in women. Indeed, to my lamentably inexperienced eye, his conquests, though involving every rumored physical intimacy, do not include personal revelation of any kind. He is often described as maddeningly unknowable. However, I have seen him many times in apparent profound conversation with Lauro, that other one-monickered man of mystery often spied in and around Kolob. It would behoove you to engage Lauro in your project to discover the one true Fox. With your guarantee of anonymity, might I also be so indelicate as to suggest that Lauro's "wife" "Eve" may have, shall we say, deep knowledge of Fox's comings and goings, though I suspect that to suggest so to Lauro himself would be to invite a rage of jealousy that you might presume to be endemic and stereotypical to the Latin masculine temperament, but multiplied. Having had the dubious distinction of witnessing Lauro's reaction when he learned that the ____________ County Sheriffs had shot his dog, I can vouchsafe that eliciting his ire would be folly indeed.
3. And, finally, addressing your questions concerning my social position in the veritably arachnid interweavings of Kolob slander and hearsay: I arrived to warm reception, but discovered too soon that the extreme deference I show the estimable work of Mr. Roget was nearly bereft of social benefit among the primitive-skills and wilderness-survival cliques I voyaged to Kolob to study in the first place. A Doctor of Philosophy candidate in Semiotics might suppose that a facility with the more recondite and Latinate philology might stand him well is his attempts to ingratiate himself with the young, nubile, Medusa-maned groupies of the Survival School, but said candidate has misjudged female alacrity so often in his almost monastic tenure as a gynophile that he is no longer in the least surprised that his polysyllabic inclinations have functioned most efficaciously as prophylactics.
Yours,
Simon Doolittle
Northeastern University
Boston
1. Regarding Fox's whereabouts this last summer, I know almost nothing. I saw him a few times in Kolob and once in Grand Arch in April and May, and spoke briefly with him. As I recollect, the topic of our conversations was purely quotidian, treating mainly of greetings and idle smalltalk. We were cordial. Of course, as you have doubtless surmised, the rumors concerning his activities in and out of the bedrooms [and sleeping bags] of Kolob's female population had been circulating and rising in temperature for some time at that point, and I was of the impression that he was making himself scarce, lest one of the affected men make good on a promise to secure his demise by gunshot, or, in one case, by crossbow-bolt and strangulation. I neither asked him where he'd been, nor received from him any indication that he was living elsewhere, but please understand that he is a cagey fellow, private and elusive, and, furthermore, I am not one of his very few confidants. After May I do not recall having seen him at all.
2. To speculate, as you requested, on who might share Fox's confidence, I shall require anonymity. It appears to me that Fox, despite his many heterosexual assignations and his remarkable facility in flirtation [an example I have attempted to emulate, thus far without notable success], does not confide in women. Indeed, to my lamentably inexperienced eye, his conquests, though involving every rumored physical intimacy, do not include personal revelation of any kind. He is often described as maddeningly unknowable. However, I have seen him many times in apparent profound conversation with Lauro, that other one-monickered man of mystery often spied in and around Kolob. It would behoove you to engage Lauro in your project to discover the one true Fox. With your guarantee of anonymity, might I also be so indelicate as to suggest that Lauro's "wife" "Eve" may have, shall we say, deep knowledge of Fox's comings and goings, though I suspect that to suggest so to Lauro himself would be to invite a rage of jealousy that you might presume to be endemic and stereotypical to the Latin masculine temperament, but multiplied. Having had the dubious distinction of witnessing Lauro's reaction when he learned that the ____________ County Sheriffs had shot his dog, I can vouchsafe that eliciting his ire would be folly indeed.
3. And, finally, addressing your questions concerning my social position in the veritably arachnid interweavings of Kolob slander and hearsay: I arrived to warm reception, but discovered too soon that the extreme deference I show the estimable work of Mr. Roget was nearly bereft of social benefit among the primitive-skills and wilderness-survival cliques I voyaged to Kolob to study in the first place. A Doctor of Philosophy candidate in Semiotics might suppose that a facility with the more recondite and Latinate philology might stand him well is his attempts to ingratiate himself with the young, nubile, Medusa-maned groupies of the Survival School, but said candidate has misjudged female alacrity so often in his almost monastic tenure as a gynophile that he is no longer in the least surprised that his polysyllabic inclinations have functioned most efficaciously as prophylactics.
Yours,
Simon Doolittle
Northeastern University
Boston
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Fox, Tucson, Arizona, Summer 2011
I had been going through this crazy shit for like three years, ever since I went to the Barranca the first time after my father died, that time on the train out of Sinaloa. I was back in the States, in Tucson, mostly hanging around the U of A doing this and that for coffee money, for food trades, sleeping sometimes in the parks, sometimes just behind bushes on campus, off and on crashing at friends' apartments. For a while I was house-sitting for some frends' parents, but that was way out of town and I had no car, etc. So this crazy shit I started mentioning: I just could not stay still for very long. I mean in one place. I would find a place to sleep, quiet, private, shaded, clean, no fucking drunk fratboys nearby to piss on me which did happen once, and I would be there max three days. Day one: settle in. Day two: feel good about my 'house'. Day three: get fidgety and all insomniac. Day four? Somewhere else. I just could not spend four nights in even the most honey sleeping spot. One thing about my particular version of homelessness is I chose it and I do it like an art. I am clean and neat and I do not turn into a bum. Of course, I am always open to a new lady-friend, and long hair and no belongings and my crazy-ass scars are hard enough for most of them to take already, and if I added filth and stink and yellow teeth to the mix I would never get any again. So I showered every day, almost, and brushed my teeth after every meal, and kept my clothes as clean as an all-outdoors life allows. So pretty soon after I got to Tucson I fell into this pattern of always moving, at least every three days. It felt like my sanity depended on it. My life started to revolve around my second night in a honey sleeping spot, after the first night of settling in and before the third night when I got fidgety. By fidgety I do not mean that I was slightly off or irritated, or that I was just distracted or bored and drumming my fingers. I would wake up middle of my third night, start tossing and turning, start having panicky thoughts, the kind that cycle over and over and play out in the worst scenarios of death and murder and humiliation and frustration and dread and immobility and my heart would start pounding and I'd sweat and then maybe punch the ground and yell Fuck! and pack my shit and untie the anti-theft lanyard that connected my backpack to my wrist, and start walking. Usually I'd just head to the Butterfly, which opened at 6:00, and wait. Sometimes I'd just go over to the cactus garden on the U of A mall, but campus cops were always around within minutes. Sorry, I've got rambling habits now. Back to my crazy shit: one girl I knew from high school, who I will call Dolores because of how that is totally not an apt name for her of the sunny and affable disposition, was rooming right behind the business school and had a honey old house that needed a new roof. So I made a deal with the roommate's daddy, the landlord, name of Lloyd, to roof the place in exchange for free rent in a tiny old outbuilding behind at the back of the courtyard. People trust me, and he was happy to have materials delivered and lend me the tools. And I was happy to have a room just a couple blocks from the Butterfly and a short walk from the concert halls and the library, so I moved in, built a Mexican cot, and dove into work. I tore off the old shingles myself in one day, in like sixteen hours, which is fucking heroic, and I was determined to impress the landlord and maybe Dolores, et al. Day two the shingles show up and I am flashing and nailing as soon as the girls go to school and I do not let up except for brief breaks that day or the next despite Tucson heat, maybe 110 degrees, much more on the roof. Trouble is night three: damned if I don't wake up, have the terrors and sweats, and end up sleeping the rest of the night behind a mesquite in the alley. I finished the roof faster than the landlord thought possible, and I do dead-straight work. It was perfect and Landlloyd, as I had started calling him, said so, very happy. Right away he has me staining some beams and refinishing the front door, etc. etc. etc. I was his new maintenance guy for his rentals, and I had a free room. He even gave me an iPod which I loaded in the library. All good, except I was still homeless because I couldn't sleep anywhere more than three nights. One night I was getting all fidgety behind a bus stop on Mountain when fucking cops pulled up and told me to move on, then the fuckers followed me with the spotlight on my back for blocks and I was fucking steamed. Sun was breaking, that time of early morning when your heart gets light and you breathe deeper and you feel all vigorous? So I get this sudden urge to run and I cinch up my pack and tighten my sandals and then I run, and I am perhaps the fastest white boy you will ever see. Of course the cops immediately sped up and when they pulled alongside me and as the loudspeaker started to squawk I go over a fence like nothing and and the fat fuck donut-assed cop cannot get over behind me. I was like four backyards away before I heard him slam back into the car and they peeled out and around to the side of the block I was hurdling fences behind so I just ran back and right back over the same fence and across Mountain and over another fence into the middle of the next block, etc. then spent an hour under some oleanders reading Amulet again and happier than I'd been in some months, which was saying a lot, seeing how my life was nearly perfect, or, I should say, frictionless except for the goddamned fidgets every third night. Like I was saying, I was employed, liked my boss, had a honey room and a good angle on Dolores, but I was unable to, not allowed to, sleep in my room.
So most of my friends tend to be hippies because I like affable people and I like to smoke and not many people will let you crash on their floor and drink their Coronas except hippies. One downside is their weird gullibility or lack of critical power or whatever it is that leads them to believe all sorts of crazy flaccid shit. Dolores' particular hippie thing was a half-assed mash-up of shamanism and tarot. Both predictable enough, but sort of a weird combo, i.m.o. So one day I was in the house patching some plaster and Dolores is meandering around in her underpants with her wild mane of blondish hair all over the place and her nipples quite visibly refusing to be shy, and I was starting to chat her up a bit, pretending to be totally cool but actually in a state of hard-to-hide sexual excitement. She offered me a hit, which I of course accepted, sitting bent forward over my plaster tools and my excitement, wondering if today was my lucky day, when open pops the front door and it's this middle-aged like old witch wearing predictable silver and turquoise and some kind of Nepali or Guatemalan smock and with a big velvet bag and an aura of Nag Champa and flowers. I get to see Dolores' quite excellent ass flex half out of her underpants as she tip-toed to hug the witch, but then it was just me and the witch and my boner as Dolores disappeared to get dressed or something.
I'm Ruth.
Hi. I'm Fox.
Good to meet you, Fox.
Good to meet you.
Etc.
The kind of exchange that makes me all crazy while it lasts and that I avoid so assiduously that going to parties or whatever can be a pinche nightmare.
Anyway, within a few minutes I found myself sitting out in the courtyard, still shirtless, which means scars exposed, across from Ruth, who spread tarot cards across the table. She closed her eyes [she had turquoise eyeshadow] and murmured something fluently in some language I don't know, and then lit incense and then then smiled at me. I was slightly high, so I didn't feel totally irritated, but this is the kind of banal mumbo-jumbo I can't abide. Makes me want to jump up and run for the hills. Then Dolores mushed into the same chair with me, now in a skirt, alas, and I took another hit and settled back for the reading, trying to remember not to smirk.
Ruth flipped a few cards, moved them around , etc. My mind couldn't follow it at all, like a magic trick. At some length, during which I was entirely focused on the slippery film of sweat forming between my leg and Dolores', Ruth spoke:
Your father is dead. Dolores told me, don't think the cards had that. She smiled, winningly, really. He was an artist, a musician. When he was young he was the best in his school, then in the clubs, a kind of hero, really. He loved Django and was crazy for the old folk tunes out of Appalachia.
How much of this did Dolores even know? I wondered. Ruth continued:
When you were born he took a day job to pay the bills and played clubs on weekends but he stopped improving. He did his job, which was boring, and he was involved in the family, in raising you, which is rare. Or precious! She smiled at me again. She had a very kind smile. Your father did what most men do: he spent years doing what he thought was his duty, and neglected the great gift that the Universe gave him.
I winced at this, I hope unnoticed.
And then he died young, with regret and some bitterness. You knew this but couldn't name it. When you were young. And the cards and my vision of you as your father's son suggest, quite clearly, or, rather, insist that your wandering and your inability to settle are the unsettled energy of your dead father who lives in you.
She paused, eyes down, her hands ancient on the table's edge. I just sat, breathing in shallow gasps and, goddamn it, I started crying, like some soft dumb fuck, or, to be honest, like I missed my dad, which I certainly did. So Dolores puts her hand on my leg, and her short-bitten nails are painted like ladybug carapaces, and Ruth says:
You you will have to keep wandering and making do out of doors until your father's ghost is satisfied. She shrugged and did a surprisingly girlish sort of wince, as though embarrassed by her gift, or the personal nature of what she's said.
We sat for a minute in the incense smoke, and then Ruth stacked her cards that I'm not sure she even really consulted, and she left and I got a beer and stood in the sun by the orange tree and while I was there Dolores came up behind me and put her brown arms around me and her wild hair was like a hundred gnats on my back and then we went inside to her room, an incredible mess of a room that smelled of dirty clothes and rosewater and patchouli soap, and gradually, as though suspended in warm saltwater, we helped each other out of our clothes and fucked each other into a stupor abetted by the grass and beer and heat but more stupid and free of thought that those things alone could ever accomplish and again the next night, and on the third I got fidgety and packed my stuff and left a long sweet note and I walked to campus to see if I could settle in one of my sleeping spots from the previous summer.
So most of my friends tend to be hippies because I like affable people and I like to smoke and not many people will let you crash on their floor and drink their Coronas except hippies. One downside is their weird gullibility or lack of critical power or whatever it is that leads them to believe all sorts of crazy flaccid shit. Dolores' particular hippie thing was a half-assed mash-up of shamanism and tarot. Both predictable enough, but sort of a weird combo, i.m.o. So one day I was in the house patching some plaster and Dolores is meandering around in her underpants with her wild mane of blondish hair all over the place and her nipples quite visibly refusing to be shy, and I was starting to chat her up a bit, pretending to be totally cool but actually in a state of hard-to-hide sexual excitement. She offered me a hit, which I of course accepted, sitting bent forward over my plaster tools and my excitement, wondering if today was my lucky day, when open pops the front door and it's this middle-aged like old witch wearing predictable silver and turquoise and some kind of Nepali or Guatemalan smock and with a big velvet bag and an aura of Nag Champa and flowers. I get to see Dolores' quite excellent ass flex half out of her underpants as she tip-toed to hug the witch, but then it was just me and the witch and my boner as Dolores disappeared to get dressed or something.
I'm Ruth.
Hi. I'm Fox.
Good to meet you, Fox.
Good to meet you.
Etc.
The kind of exchange that makes me all crazy while it lasts and that I avoid so assiduously that going to parties or whatever can be a pinche nightmare.
Anyway, within a few minutes I found myself sitting out in the courtyard, still shirtless, which means scars exposed, across from Ruth, who spread tarot cards across the table. She closed her eyes [she had turquoise eyeshadow] and murmured something fluently in some language I don't know, and then lit incense and then then smiled at me. I was slightly high, so I didn't feel totally irritated, but this is the kind of banal mumbo-jumbo I can't abide. Makes me want to jump up and run for the hills. Then Dolores mushed into the same chair with me, now in a skirt, alas, and I took another hit and settled back for the reading, trying to remember not to smirk.
Ruth flipped a few cards, moved them around , etc. My mind couldn't follow it at all, like a magic trick. At some length, during which I was entirely focused on the slippery film of sweat forming between my leg and Dolores', Ruth spoke:
Your father is dead. Dolores told me, don't think the cards had that. She smiled, winningly, really. He was an artist, a musician. When he was young he was the best in his school, then in the clubs, a kind of hero, really. He loved Django and was crazy for the old folk tunes out of Appalachia.
How much of this did Dolores even know? I wondered. Ruth continued:
When you were born he took a day job to pay the bills and played clubs on weekends but he stopped improving. He did his job, which was boring, and he was involved in the family, in raising you, which is rare. Or precious! She smiled at me again. She had a very kind smile. Your father did what most men do: he spent years doing what he thought was his duty, and neglected the great gift that the Universe gave him.
I winced at this, I hope unnoticed.
And then he died young, with regret and some bitterness. You knew this but couldn't name it. When you were young. And the cards and my vision of you as your father's son suggest, quite clearly, or, rather, insist that your wandering and your inability to settle are the unsettled energy of your dead father who lives in you.
She paused, eyes down, her hands ancient on the table's edge. I just sat, breathing in shallow gasps and, goddamn it, I started crying, like some soft dumb fuck, or, to be honest, like I missed my dad, which I certainly did. So Dolores puts her hand on my leg, and her short-bitten nails are painted like ladybug carapaces, and Ruth says:
You you will have to keep wandering and making do out of doors until your father's ghost is satisfied. She shrugged and did a surprisingly girlish sort of wince, as though embarrassed by her gift, or the personal nature of what she's said.
We sat for a minute in the incense smoke, and then Ruth stacked her cards that I'm not sure she even really consulted, and she left and I got a beer and stood in the sun by the orange tree and while I was there Dolores came up behind me and put her brown arms around me and her wild hair was like a hundred gnats on my back and then we went inside to her room, an incredible mess of a room that smelled of dirty clothes and rosewater and patchouli soap, and gradually, as though suspended in warm saltwater, we helped each other out of our clothes and fucked each other into a stupor abetted by the grass and beer and heat but more stupid and free of thought that those things alone could ever accomplish and again the next night, and on the third I got fidgety and packed my stuff and left a long sweet note and I walked to campus to see if I could settle in one of my sleeping spots from the previous summer.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Some Stuff about Bush2.0, Hill, Dylan, Rimbaud and Ashbery and Resisting Ideology
But, although the Dylan stuff is okay, there may be more wit in this dinner table exchange:
Me: I think I've finally understood this beer.
Hilde: What's it about?
This essay is an attempt to explain the usefulness of poetry to one particular student. The objections and distaste that the essay begins with are a version of his. In the course of writing it, I’ve imagined him as older and more sophisticated, and imagined that he shares some of my own history with books, music and politics. Other than that, I’m imagining Jack’s best explanations of his visceral distaste for what he sees as poetry’s excess, self-indulgence and willful idiosyncrasy.
Thomas Mann says that, “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” This might argue that anyone attempting to understand the world and speak clearly about it would do well to stay as far away from writers as possible. And yet I find that my perplexities about works of literature help me with my perplexities about the world, and that my evolving perplexities about the world make certain works of literature different and bigger each time I reread them. Somehow perceiving and reading well, writing and living well, are all interconnected.
Most educated people I’ve talked to about poetry say that it makes them anxious, that it seems needlessly roundabout, that it is difficult to understand, that it makes people feel dumb. In a way this response is peculiar because these same people see things all the time that they don’t understand, of course—they even enjoy seeing new, strange things. Most of us enjoy being at the ocean or in the mountains, in part because the scale of those things scrambles the mind’s ability to understand size and location: certain kinds of disorientation open onto wonder. Maybe it’s harder to have a similar response to language because it’s the product of human artifice and not natural process? We’re too used to being snookered by language to be awed by it?
Most of us can stand in front of an abstract painting and not feel dumb. Maybe this is because when someone gives you directions back to the highway they don’t do it in stylized geometric blobs, they do it in words. If you don’t understand words, you risk missing important information, looking like an idiot, failing at essential tasks. Perhaps this is related to the impatience some people feel with modern art: language is not just important because it conveys necessary information, it also carries social significance. We scan each others’ language all the time for some sense of basic congruence with our own. Certain words and ways of using them mark people as either in or out: ‘Orioles’, ‘organic’, ‘outside the box’. When two people of good will don’t understand each other, it’s perplexing. It’s natural to assume that if someone from your own culture is using language really differently than you, something is wrong with one of you. And yet as important as it to detect malicious obfuscation or pretentious charlatanism or confused thinking, you come willy-nilly upon moments when words are inadequate or tired or incomprehensible, and you must either find new words or give up.
Poetry often puts you in the situation of recognizing the words but not being sure what is meant by them. So do lots of other situations in which language is necessary to understanding another person. One difference between the semantic disorientation of reading poetry and the equivalent experience when talking to your parents is that the poet is often exquisitely aware of the disorientation. The English poet Geoffrey Hill talks about the difficulty of poetry and of people in an interview with The Paris Review from Spring 2000:
INTERVIEWER: What comes up often in reviews of your work is the idea of an overly intellectual bent; in recent reviews of The Triumph of Love, often the word difficult comes up. People mention that it’s worth going through or it isn’t worth going through.
HILL: Like a Victorian wedding night, yes. Let’s take difficulty first. We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification.
It is important to admit that not all writing is good, and that it is possible to be hoodwinked into devoting great effort to untangling what turns out not to be difficult honesty but sloppy obfuscation. It is also important to admit that writing truly can be difficult because, like some of Geoffrey Hill’s work, it assumes a wide range of knowledge or experience. Mostly, though, this is not the reason that some things are difficult to read. Most notoriously difficult writers—Hill, Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery, one could go on indefinitely—require little in the way of footnoting. In fact footnotes can be a misleading way of reassuring a student that lack of understanding is really lack of erudition. Most writers are difficult because they are presenting the world in a different way. The more workable approach is not eliminate difficulties with glosses; the trick is to accept difficult phrases at face value and to continue watching closely for evidence of the poem’s character and perspectives. As if a poem were a country in which one had just landed or a new kind of animal: new but itself, behaving according to the laws of its own nature, different but organized according to an internal consistency demonstrated by its every gesture, however bafflingly remote from the behavior of one’s own countrymen or faithful dog.
For Hill, language admits simplification only at great cost. Not only, as he points out, do people often object when treated as if they were simpler than they are, but simplification of human nature is a tool of subjugation: “tyranny requires simplification.” The mass manipulation of people—the sale of a ‘final solution’, or ‘happiness’, or ‘duty’— requires that much of what is difficult and various in human nature be left out or somehow ruled out of bounds. As a Mormon, I was often told that human suffering was a consequence of sin. This explanation takes attention away from the particulars of suffering—because of mental illness, say, or economic exploitation—and refocuses it on the message: the Gospel. And although difficult art may have deserved the reputation of focusing disproportionately on what is unpleasant in human experience, advertising and bad movies leave out much of what is actually pleasurable. Art that flatters our public assumptions can depict ‘triumphs of the human spirit’ and ‘affirm life’ (I’m not quoting anything in particular here but a quick Google search for ‘movie, triumph of the human spirit’ will bear me out) but they can have nothing to say about the subtle ordinary pleasures of good food, parenting, learning, rest.
There are practical reasons to regard writers and other artists and technicians who find themselves in great perplexity about some aspect of the world as useful guides. Assumptions about the world, even accurate and useful ones, can keep us from seeing the world as it is. One of the roles of art is to present something in the world to us in such a way that we experience it not as we expect to but as we would from a particular existential and sensory perspective. I remember being surprised when first seeing Gauguin’s “Two Tahitian Women” at the National Gallery that the shadows were not just ‘dark’. I was irritated at first that Gauguin would strain reality in that way in order to get an effect. His shadows were various greens and blues, yellow-browns and—in one patch in the lower left where colors from a shaft of sunlight bleed into the adjacent darkness—nearly red. But this irritation was also a grudge that I carried around for a while, and the grudge was also a question. It finally made me look differently at the shadows under the magnolia in my front yard and discover that they had color and that the color was different depending on time of day and year, and depending what was growing in the yard. And then of course I realized that what I saw had a lot to do with my own degree of openness to what was there to be seen. It began to make sense to suppose that things were different colors for me depending my own thoughts and moods. I finally asked my eldest daughter whether shadows had color. She said, ‘duh’. It’s not that I’d never thought of it: I had thought of ‘shadow’ as a near synonym for ‘darkness’. I’d never seen shadow.
The consequences of being blinded by words multiply painfully when dealing with other people. During my two years in Taiwan as a Mormon missionary, I was constantly unable to understand Chinese people because of my own assumption that we meant the same thing by some word or phrase. Mostly I wasn’t aware of this, and thought it was a difference of opinion or degree of attention to the topic under discussion. I was trying to convince Chinese people of the ‘truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ’, as I would have put it at that time. The problem, among others, was that I wasn’t aware that there weren’t exact equivalents for any of those essential words. The Chinese word I was taught to use for “truth,” for instance, would have been more accurately translated as ‘sincerity.’ An essential aspect of the word I had in mind connoted ‘accuracy to the underlying structures of reality’. But the claim that I was being understood to make was about the sincerity and social honesty of Christians—which was never at issue for most of the people I spoke with. Most Chinese people I talked simply pointed out that Christianity was an aspect of my culture, and so of course I was quite sincere in my belief. What did this have to do with them, though? I wanted to say that I had had truck with a deeper level of reality. What didn’t occur to me until much later was that my sense that it was possible to be accurate about reality on a deeper level is in fact a scientific one—or at least a product of the Western Enlightenment assumptions about a reality that reveals simpler and more general causes as one gets closer to the heart of it. The Chinese as moderns of course also share this assumption about the physical world. I really don’t think most Chinese extend it to the social world. Instead, they maintain a distance between ‘sincerity’ and ‘truth’. In retrospect this seems wise.
But this failure to agree on the definition or implications of a word can cause just as much mischief between members of the same culture. My memory of the first week after 9/11 is that people were still much more sad and shocked than they were angry. People smiled sadly at each other, and were much more likely to let others merge in front of them in traffic. Clearly there was cause for anger, but it was still unclear against whom one might direct ones anger. Anger has a way of dispersing unless there is an object against which it can be directed. Few people can be angry at a hurricane. Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people and wounded 450 more when he bombed government buildings in Oklahoma City in 1995, aroused more shock and pity than anger. His violence seemed without rational cause, unconnected to anything substantially human. His trial and execution seemed somehow not to the point, not satisfying; it answered none of the questions inspired by the event of his violence. The collective response in the first week after September 11, 2001 was very similar: helplessness, grief, shock. Not anger.
In the weeks after September 11, 2001, a number of words, ‘freedom’ and ‘terror’ among them, turned the inchoate feelings of our shared grief into anger. I believe that it is possible to pinpoint the moment this happened. Whereas the nationalistic edge of ‘freedom’ had been, to my ear anyway, a subtle undertone when used by certain speakers, within a few weeks of 9/11 ‘freedom’ very clearly denoted resistance to the violence and hatred of a faction of militant Muslims who were plotting to kill us. The assumption underlying this particular definition of ‘freedom’ was that the plotters of the crimes of 9/11 were motivated by their fanatical commitment to Islam, and that this commitment caused an unreasoning hatred of Americans. The corollary to this logic was that what came to be routinely called the Twin Towers were attacked not because they were a major New York landmark, nor because many of the elite of the world financial industry worked in them, but because they contained Americans-who-defend-freedom.
On September 20th, President George W. Bush gave a speech in which ‘freedom’ and ‘terror’ were defined very clearly and used to rally American resolve. Bush argued that we were attacked out of hatred and because of our freedom—in fact the attackers were ‘enemies of freedom’:
They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other… These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.
One assertion here is that Americans are hated not for what they believe or do but for their freedoms. In fact it is not merely the occupants of the World Trade Center who were attacked: they were attacked in order to attack their freedoms. And the freedoms that elicit terrorist hatred do not amount to the mere liberty to do as we please, they are something particularly American. The plural here, ‘freedoms’, makes freedom not primarily an existential condition but a series of political prerogatives granted by legislation, specifically the First Amendment. The tendency of Bush’s rhetoric is to identify ‘freedom’ with the particular laws and political structures of the United States. He goes on to argue that the ultimate aim of attacking our freedoms is to end our ‘way of life’. This image is at once stark and vague. Americans certainly do have a way of life, (and in many respects it is one that I believe in) but the idea that the attacks on the World Trade Center could be that ideologically specific is a bold claim.
Having connected the attacks to ‘freedom’, Bush goes on to suggest the proper political response at home.
Americans are asking: What is expected of us? I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat. I ask you to uphold the values of America, and remember why so many have come here. We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith. I ask you to continue to support the victims of this tragedy with your contributions. Those who want to give can go to a central source of information, libertyunites.org, to find the names of groups providing direct help in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Here Bush very quickly establishes the connection between the desire for affection and comfort, between the desire to ‘hug your children’, and the ‘resolute’ posture necessary to ‘fight for our principles’. The web domain, ‘libertyunites.org’ is a nice summation of this part of his argument. One might reasonably suppose that liberty to hold various opinions would divide opinion. Despite the contention earlier in the speech that one of our freedoms is the right to disagree with each other, liberty, properly understood, obligates one to oppose those who would destroy the way of life that sustains freedom. This logic that certain curtailments of practical freedom were a necessary means of protecting freedom as a way of life quickly took legislative form in the provisions of the Patriot Act.
I now find myself unable to agree with my family about what freedom is. Not that we don’t both feel free a kind of freedom when we get in our cars or go to the polls. But because ‘freedom’ has become a kind of jargon that brings a great many other assumptions along with it. From my perspective its use has been corrupted; from theirs it has become obligatory. To me it has been co-opted by a particular ideology; to them I seem cowardly or blind in my dereliction of clear patriotic duty. It doesn’t seem possible at this point to have a conversation about 9/11 that isn’t dominated by the language and logic of Bush’s speech.
But there are examples in the history of American politics of people eluding just this sort of language. One of the most often repeated stories about 20th rock music is about the outrage inspired by Bob Dylan’s first electric tour in 1965. Dylan had been widely accepted as a kind of folk prophet visiting justice on the powerful on behalf of the disenfranchised. It mattered very much that Dylan was not a rock musician—that he played an acoustic guitar alone on stage, that he cut his hair short in back in scruffy emulation of Woody Guthrie and wore blue jeans and plaid flannel, that he worked in largely in the shared images, stories and verse forms of the ‘folk music’ that had come to be associated with American socialism by a large and influential minority of the American academy. In contrast, rock music was associated with matching showbiz uniforms, with slick travelling showcases, with the aggressively promoted hit machine that was already well established by the late 50’s, and with an urban world that was opposed to the pastoral innocence and self-determination of the rural worker. This image remained important, even as Greenwich Village, and not some bucolic outpost, collected and produced politicized folk singers.
During his ’65 tour, audiences listened in rapt silence to the mostly familiar songs that Dylan played during his first, acoustic, set. When the rock band joined him for the second set, and Dylan began to play his new material, they grew restive. Many booed and jeered; some left. And then people lined up in the next city to reenact the same scene, even after they read the reviews from the last city. One scene in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary of the tour, “Don’t Look Back,” shows a young Englishman in the packed Royal Prince Albert Hall concert yelling above the jostling and chatter before one song: “Judas!” Dylan, who has turned around to discuss the next song with his band, walks back to the microphone in skinny jeans and shades. “I don’t believe you,” he says in a slow nasal snarl: “You’re a liar.”
The episode sticks, with me anyway, because the anger about Dylan’s ‘going electric’ has precisely to do with truth and fidelity. Rock music and electric instruments seemed to betoken a political renunciation, as well as a stylistic shift. And as Dylan began to seek for possibilities beyond the folk songbook and the ideological orthodoxy that claimed it, his songs and his personae changed rapidly and dramatically. A song like “The Times They Are A-Changin” (1963-64), despite moving rapidly between scenes and straining at the limits of words, still seemed like folk music—in part because the strain on words seems to lean so heavily on the cadences, parallelisms and eschatological urgency of the Hebrew Bible, as well as notions of ultimate justice. This is still a voice that gets its authority from its belief in social justice:
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
The warning not to ‘stand in the doorway’ or ‘block up the hall’ has resonances of New Testament apocalyptic parables like the story of the foolish virgins who go to meet their bridegrooms without oil for their lamps, and upon returning from having fetched oil find that they are locked out and have missed the nuptial night. One convention of the biblical parable and the folk song, though, is the explanation at the end. Jesus ends this one, “Keep awake, then, for ye know neither the day nor the hour.” (Matthew 25:13). In “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, although it’s not clear exactly how the times will change, it’s clear that the warning not to “stand in the doorway” is part of a single vision of the future that the entire song is concerned with.
By the time Dylan writes “Mr. Tambourine Man” there is no longer this sense that metaphor is unified by a single concern or that vision is the vision of social justice. Vision seems to have reverted to the wild:
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
There is still a sense of seeking contact with another power in the song, but it’s certainly not Yahweh coming in power and glory to judge the quick and the dead. Instead there are suggestions that the power being courted has to do with something more like drug visions or half-sleeping hallucinations. And the impediments to realizing this vision aren’t the guardians of an outworn power structure—not senators and parents and others who don’t heed warnings of the apocalypse. Instead the speaker is trying to free consciousness from some aspect of itself or its language. Why would it help to have “all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves”? Maybe because it’s hard to see visions in the middle of a difficult and mundane world that is expert at forming you to its own purposes. Elsewhere in the same song: “My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet/ I have no one to meet/And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.” The street walked by numbed millions is no place to dream dreams.
But so, to return to the questions at the beginning of this essay in a different form, why are dreams worthwhile? How are they useful—especially given that they seem to disrupt language? In the case of the Hebrew prophets, and of the folk troubadours who borrow aspects of their voice, the answer has to do with another sense of ‘dreams’—the one that Martin Luther King means when he says, “I have a dream.” The prophets are trying to reach beyond the voice of political power to a divine source that will reorder the political world. But the dreaming of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” is not that. Instead the source of power is somehow obscured by the habits and damages of a corrupt world but is nevertheless internal—waiting only to be worked through or scraped away. And beginning in 1964 we see Dylan working towards a set of practices for doing this work. He sings in “My Back Pages” (1964):
Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Here the source of power is associated with youth. But it isn’t a naïve youth. It’s something that can be returned to—or perhaps can only be achieved by first moving through disillusionment. The use of ‘ideas’ here is new. The whole way of speaking in this poem resists ideas. Instead it encourages a moment-by-moment multiplying of images, feelings, possibilities—each layer of which makes it more difficult to say what is and isn’t real or possible in this world. ‘Ideas’ here aren’t synopses of arguments; they aren’t necessarily even coherent. Instead they are a means of going beyond the confining habits and assumptions of a corrupt world. And the style that Dylan is inventing here is a technique for getting out of deadended conversations.
The context of “My Back Pages” still seems to have to do with social justice but now the voice mistrusts the critiques of political structures as much as it mistrusts the structures themselves:
A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
In each verse, someone proposes a definition or diagnosis that is unequivocal, and in each verse the refrain undermines faith in ideas with faith in this particular kind of youth. The inability of the professor to ‘fool’ (to play? to joke?) somehow makes him unable to get at the truth. The earnest preaching of the speaker and the clarity of his definitions are also not solutions but problems. What are we supposed to do, then, if our best attempts to think and speak clearly are counterproductive? What else is there?
At a press conference in Los Angeles in the middle of the 1965 tour, Dylan was asked for the umpteenth time the reasons for his popularity, and finally erupted in frustration. The incident is famous in part, again, because Pennebaker caught it on film, and part of what makes it absorbing cinema is the contrast between the slow, innocent presumption of the TIME magazine reporter who asks the question and the aggressive, hyper-aware young writer who answers it. To the reporter, Dylan is a story because his popularity with young people makes him a kind of clue to a mysterious or outrageous youth culture. From his professional perspective, his question makes perfect sense. From Dylan’s perspective, the agenda of his songs and the agenda of TIME magazine cannot even occupy the same conversation.
Dylan: You know the audience that subscribes to TIME Magazine, the audience of people that want to know what’s happening in the world week by week: the people that work during the day and can read it. It’s small, alright, and it’s concise and there’s pictures in it, you know? It’s a certain class of people: it’s a class of people that take the magazine seriously. I mean, sure, I can read it, you know—I read it. I get it on the airplanes but I don’t take it seriously. If I want to find out anything, I’m not gonna read TIME magazine, I’m not gonna read Newsweek, I’m not gonna read any of these magazines— I mean, ‘cause they just got too much to lose by printing the truth. You know that.
TIME: What kind of truths are they leaving out ?
Dylan: Well anything, even on a worldwide basis, they’d just go off the stands in a day if they printed really the truth.
TM: What is really the truth?
Dylan: Really the truth is just a plain picture. A plain picture of, of, let’s say a tramp vomiting man into the sewer you know? And then and uh, next door to the picture you know, is Mr. Rockafeller or you know, Mr. C.W. Jones on a subway going to work, uh you know, any kind of picture. Just make some collage of pictures. Which they don’t do. There’s no ideas in TIME Magazine, there’s just these facts, which too are serious, even the article on which your doing the way it’s gonna come out, but you see It can’t be a good article because the guy that’s writing the article is sitting at a desk in New York, and he’s not even going out of his office, he’s just gonna get these 15 reporters and there gonna send him a quota.
The scene is arresting. Dylan is either making a devastating point or being cruel to a defenseless innocent. The Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, looking back at “Don’t Look Back” in 1998, writes, “What a jerk Bob Dylan was in 1965. What an immature, self-important, inflated, cruel, shallow little creature, lacking in empathy and contemptuous of anyone who was not himself or his lackey. Did we actually once take this twirp as our folk god?” Ebert then hastily decrescendos by describing this frenzy of pen-stabs as one of the ‘observations’ that he jotted down while rewatching the movie. These are not ‘observations’. But why is the scene so absorbingly awful? Or, to put in another way, why do Ebert and others get so exercised about it? Isn’t it that Dylan’s condescension and frustration implicates him (and me, certainly), too? And for that matter, Dylan is himself a child of the middle class, a one-time dilatory college student. Hardly an outsider by origins.
The reporter seems, is, so innocent: just doing the journalist’s job of just asking. Dylan points out, though—and it seems this is a difficult point—that the very format of TIME is antithetical to truth as he, Dylan, is thinking about it. TIME is designed to appeal to people from a particular class who value particular things and who read it in a particular context. The problems as Dylan sees them are precisely with this set of constructs: the middle class and the ubiquitous, nearly invisible structures that keep us in the middle. The question he’s being asked ad nauseum during these several weeks of the ’65 tour is a series of variations on ‘why have you changed?’, ‘why have you become so difficult?’, ‘what are you talking about?’ But the context in which the question is being posed makes the answer incomprehensible because the answer for Dylan is that what he wants to say is being muffled by TIME Magazine’s form of address, this context for which answers are packaged as entertainment for commutes and coffee breaks. And at this moment in ’65, Dylan is searching for a set of practices that take him beyond the terrible vulnerability he feels at the center of TIME Magazine’s professional fascination and hostility. He sits slumped on a sofa a few scenes later and says in reference to the travel and the questions and the booing: “I’m going to have to get me a new Dylan.” And the reporter is baffled and tired, too. At one point in the exchange he looks back tentatively at Dylan: “Do you care what you say?” Dylan returns, “How can I answer that if you got the nerve to ask me?” Impasse.
Dylan is quite serious about the alternative he proposes to the highly genre-specific TIME version of truth-as-news. A quick glance at a song like “Desolation Row” (1956) reveals something very much like the collage he describes to TIME: “A plain picture of, of, let’s say a tramp vomiting man into the sewer you know? And then and uh, next door to the picture you know, is Mr. Rockafeller or you know, Mr. C.W. Jones on a subway going to work.” The strategy here is to avoid the selective version of the world that you get when you decide what you’re looking for, rather than trying to just look. Just catalog, he says, don’t interpret, don’t filter anything out. It’s quite scientific, really, and yet hard to understand—maybe because in order to write this way you need to suspend the devices that normally order writing, like narrative and argument. This strategy comes out Dylan’s discomfort with orthodoxies, left and right—out of his sense that he was being pushed from both sides.
Specifically, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the strategies of montage and visionary catalogue that he used from the mid- to the late-60’s come in part from his reading of the 19th century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Dylan describes in his memoir, Chronicles, how he was handed a letter of Rimbaud by his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo:
Someplace along the line, Suze had also introduced me to the poetry of French Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud. That was a big deal, too. I came across one of his letter called “Je est un autre,” which translates into “I is someone else.” When I read those words the bell went off. It made perfect sense. (Chronicles, p. 288)
Dylan doesn’t much trouble himself to explain what the phrase meant to him but it has a long and important history in 20th C thinking about poetry and the self. The letter he’s referring to was written by Rimbaud, then an aspiring 17 year-old poet, to a teacher of his, Georges Izambard. The passage reads,
I wish to be a poet, and I am working to make myself into a seer: you will not understand at all, and I would not nearly know how to explain it to you. It's a question of coming to the unknown through the disordering [or ‘dissoluteness’] of all the senses. The suffering is enormous, but one must be strong, be born a poet, and I have come to terms with my destiny as a poet. It's not at all my fault. It's wrong to say "I think"; one ought to say "I am being thought" - Forgive the play on words - I is another. Too bad for the wood which finds itself a violin, and brush off the oblivious, who quibble over things they know nothing about!
What Rimbaud means by ‘seer’ has little to with visions, let alone hallucination. In fact, earlier in the letter he chides his teacher for writing ‘subjective poetry [that] will always be terribly insipid.’ So what’s wrong with subjectivity? And isn’t subjectivity just a fact?—the product of looking in one direction and not another, if nothing else?—whether we like it or not? Rimbaud would agree with this objection, and in fact the random and hallucinatory qualities of Rimbaud’s later verse seem to celebrate a kind of subjectivity of perspective, the happenstance version of the world assembled by a single observer. But Rimbaud aims to write ‘objective poetry’, by which I think he means something very much like what Dylan means by ‘the truth is just a plain picture.’ Each of us will have a different collage to assemble but nevertheless we either succeed to assemble an accurate picture of what we’ve seen or we fail. The suggestion, then, is that objectivity isn’t easy. It required not only accurate observation but also a ‘derangement of the senses.’
A truer version of the objective world must begin with ‘derangement’ because the self is not so static or so inevitable and we are accustomed to think. Rimbaud says that it would be more accurate to regard the self as the product of habitual thoughts and words: “It's wrong to say ‘I think’; one ought to say ‘I am being thought’ –Forgive the play on words – I is another.” What one experiences as ‘I’, in other words, does not think a world; instead, thoughts create the experience of an ‘I’. And a corollary of this idea about the self that has huge importance in 20th C poetics is the sense that the self is malleable. If I am not only the creature of God or of my genetics, but am also in part the product of thoughts, then I can change myself by changing my thoughts. In part this seems merely common-sensical. But Rimbaud means something more radical—and part of what he means is that this thinking of the self can have not only different sources (values, beliefs, classic texts, etc.) but a different way of ordering the senses. Rimbaud’s later work tends towards frequent and rapid shifts in setting, scale, social context and tone. The poems are ordered less by character, plot and theme, more by sensory stimuli: he writes what he sees. Again, though, this is not just a matter of faithful secretarial work. The way that I was being thought kept me from seeing shadows as having color. What else is the I currently being thought unable to see? And what to do about it?
The discipline that Rimbaud entered into did indeed involve both dissolution and derangement. As part of his poetic aspirations, he cultivated not only unedited experiences of the senses but also scandal and violence both to himself to the canons of taste, manners and virtue. He was convinced that the desire for social belonging occludes vision of the objective world. So he rebels both inwardly and outwardly. He says near the opening of A Season in Hell, ‘One night, I sat Beauty on my knee.—And I found her bitter.—And I hurt her.’ It would be hard to conceive of a more distasteful blackguarding of beauty, and most of the poem continues in delightfully lurid and inventive ways to shit-spatter everything lovely and dignified. And yet later in the sequence, in a poem called ‘Hunger’, he makes his goals plain:
O happiness, o reason: I finally chased the blue from the sky, this blue that’s really black; and I lived, a gold spark, forged from natural light. Full of joy, I expressed myself as ridiculously and strangely as possible.
Rediscovered!
What? –Eternity.
Sea and sun
As one.
My eternal soul,
Heed your vow
Despite empty night
And fiery day.
Break
From earthly approval,
And common urges!
And soar, accordingly…
Although the visionary scope is cosmic and the moral alternatives are stark, this begins to seem more like ‘keep an open mind.’ But no one teaches you how to keep an open mind; they mostly just scold you when you seem to have closed it. You often get the sense that ‘keep an open mind’ is something people say because they haven’t yet closed it in the particular way they would like. Rimbaud’s letters and verse document his process of opening his mind in the pursuit of beauty and a vision of eternity—that is, in pursuit of clarity and peace despite finitude, deadlines and death. This is very practical stuff, actually. Elsewhere in Rimbaud’s mature poetry (all written before the age of 21) we find the same pattern: assaults on logical and social convention that open onto beautifully clear scenes, plain pictures that invite the reader to see the world clearly.
Plain pictures are hard won.
Rimbaud’s life and language may seem willfully weird, easy to dismiss, but he’s in good company in the history of literature and art—and, I would wager, in the history of science and mathematics, too. Rimbaud is self-consciously following in the pattern of Baudelaire. Both sought out poverty, bad reputation and hallucination in the interest of clarity. In the English tradition, so much of poetry flows from William Blake, who gets his particular version of literal-world-through-derangement-of-the-senses through Jacob Boehme and Emmanuel Swedenborg. He breaks with both philosophically but he becomes a poet through their visionary methods. Blake says in a letter, attempting to clarify for the hundredth time that what he means by ‘vision’ is not supernatural transcendence of the mundane but something much closer to a radical openness to the senses: “I see through the eyes, not with them.” He is constantly warning us that, because of our socialization and in the interest of practical expedition, the mind doesn’t necessarily attend to something just because it falls into the frame of the senses. We see things all the time that don’t make their way into our thinking. In fact, the visual field is full of tiny gaps caused by damage to the eye. The mind creates the useful illusion of an unbroken visual world. It is useful to remind ourselves, even to learn techniques of unknowing, that the “world” is not the moment-by-moment image created by the senses; the ‘world’ is the product of all of our assumptions. Our assumptions can be wrong.
I hope that with this set of aims and practices in mind, more people would be able to approach poems that are at first alien and threatening and find instead a companionable temporary derangement of the senses—an incitement to attempt new kinds of accuracy, honesty, openness to the pleasures of the senses. Poetry does not necessarily make us accurate or happy or moral, but it does offer a discipline of looking closely, with fresh eyes. It makes us capable of more outlandish misapprehensions and unexpected clarities. It can teach us to assume that each iteration of a familiar thing will be different, and make us question the accuracy of familiar words by sending us back to our senses. Much of skill in problem-solving, as well as much of pleasure in being alive, lies in an openness to the senses, and through them the world.
With this attitude towards poetry, I have found that I can pick up a poem by a poet who intimidated and annoyed me for years—bored me, too—and the poem repays my attention handsomely. John Ashbery’s much-anthologized “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” will do nicely. Ashbery, by the way, has just published a translation of Rimbaud’s last poems, Illuminations. Be forewarned that my aim here is not to explain the poem, but only to enjoy it a bit.
You can’t say it that way any more.
Bothered about beauty you have to
Come out into the open, into a clearing,
And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
Of you, you who have so many lovers,
People who look up to you and are willing
To do things for you, but you think
It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . .
So much for self-analysis. Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting:
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?
There are a lot of other things of the same quality
As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must
Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,
Dull-sounding ones. She approached me
About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was
Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.
Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head
Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.
There are a hundred places to begin, partly because the poem offers so little in the way of an obvious centering character, plot or theme. The title, from Horace: ‘as is painting, so is poetry’: it’s odd that ‘you can’t say it that way anymore’ because Ashbery’s poems are often very like paintings: they place a number of things on a canvass at a level of detail and animation and intention that the reader begins to perceive stories. Ashbery’s poems are visual, painterly—in their composition and their logic. But ‘you can’t say it that way in anymore’: the poem begins in discouragement and ends having travelled some distance to renew discouragement and find it useful. Ashbery begins with discouragement, and then he goes on to say a great deal, ending with ‘so that understanding/ May begin, and in doing so be undone’. Imagine how different it would have been if he’d said, ‘all understandings are superseded and are therefore useless’ or ‘the attempt to understand is a fool’s game’. Is it the same thing? I don’t think so. In part because the poem takes the desire to say as a fact: ‘the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate/Something between breaths’. And the poem assumes that the speaker knows that speaking is the beginning of relinquishment. We speak not despite but because of this:
if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.
Do my questions seem to have more to do with me than with the poem? I think that no matter what questions I pose, if I return to the words of the poem again and again I’ll be changed by it. That is, what I want to do is not to regard the poem as having a paraphrasible message, although it may well. What I really need is not always advice but a new environment for my senses—some experience of my expectations being (mostly pleasantly) challenges and reordered. Again, whether or not I’m convinced that a mind can be ‘almost empty’ or that two heads can be locked together or any other usage or contention of the poem—whether or not I am satisfied that I know what the poem argues—I can say something about what a poem is doing. And I know this because I’ve tested it with my own questions, allowed it to disorder my senses a little.
So I allow Ashbery the role of reposing my questions to me, rather than burdening him with the task of coming up with answers. It is ultimately myself as reader whom I burden. Isn’t that the reason we end up feeling dumb?: we feel obliged to ask a poem for answers that we mostly don’t want? We want not only—maybe not even mostly—to understand the world. We want to be alive in it.
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