Less Is Less

Live Through This

I'm teaching Moby-Dick starting tomorrow. Psyched. As usual I've got a whole weird body full of a year of rereading and reading about. And brooding, writing, and dreaming about. And no lesson plan. But it'll be fine, it'll be good.
I'm listening to Hole's Celebrity Skin over and over right now. It's super awesome.
Found an old bottle of Guerlain L'Heure Bleue for real cheap and it's great stuff.
Favorite pasta sauce at present: lots of ground fennel and dried rosemary, plenty of red and black pepper, and a scandal of garlicky garlic. It's the culinary equivalent of being beaten half to death on a California hillside and it makes me happy. Beer: Dale's Pale Ale. Bad coffee lately; I feel cursed. I need a Swiss press as my French one is too fickle and grudge-dogged. Grudge-dogged.
Crazy Heart kicked my ass. I called my Dad late at night driving alone and at velocity out of a parking garage afterwards. Reception near impossible on all counts.
Reading also Adam Zagajewski and again with Colette. It started when it snowed several feet and I was housebound and the velocity of American letters made staying put impossible. Zagajewski says, "Love sets us free; time kills us." Oh, I hope so.
I keep thinking of the big sketch book you made. It's a perfect object.
I have no reason not to be happy; I am not happy.

Conversation in a Busy Day

-Hello?
-Is Margaret there?
-I'm sorry, who's calling?
-This is Liz.
-Liz?
-Uh-huh.
-Ummmmm... she hasn't been here in like three years? Can I ask what this is about?
-This is Liz.
-Yes.
-...
-...
-So. Can I talk with Margaret? This is Liz.
-Liz.
-Yes.
-...
-...
-So, she hasn't lived here in like three years? And this is my cell phone?
-Right.
-I have to say I'm baffled by this conversation.
-Right.
-Goodbye, Liz.
-Right. Right.
[click]
[Silence]

We Aren't French

Even though there are no Americans willing to write anything like The Psychoanalysis of Fire, we can understand that shit in translation.

More Possible Tarot Cards

The Bibliomancer
The Totally Awesome Boots
The Trained Bear
The Slaughter House
Native Earth
Last Chance for Gas
What is Unprovable
The Abandoned Well
Rabbi Leonard Nimoy
The Ad Man
The Personal Best
The Non-Apology
A Familiar Snowflake
Fatigue
The Indelible Yen
The Man with a Theory
The False Memory
The Stutterer
The Distance Swimmer
Competence
Love as an Adjective
Lady Lazarus
The Map of Sand
Awakened by Touch
Smile Lines
Rye Whiskey
The Personal Shopper
The Mount of Olives
Who Would Notice?
The Doormat
Gotcher Nose
The Toe Ring
The Hep Cat
He Was Always Kind to Me
The Three-Legged Mutt
The Smell of Spring
The Ugly Poet
The Bullet Lodged Near the Heart
The Trivial Mistake
Say It!
Those Bastards
It Would Probably Be a Good Idea
The Charlatan
Calloused Hands
Ease

Song about Making Flags, the Chorus of Which Is Partly Lifted from a Fragment in Moby-Dick

I wanted to make me a flag from the first row of wagons,
to make me a flag from the line of a keel.
I cut Jefferson stars and started to hang them
in the dark of a night I thought we'd never fill.

So good night and farewell, ye sweet Tennessee ladies,
good night and farewell, ye sweet ladies of Maine.
We must do what we want while we can
so when morning comes down
we can do what we must once again.

But I made me a flag from the streaked cheeks of children,
I made me a flag from the welts off a slave,
I made stars from the eyes of the dead and the nights
of the men that killed them made thread black as the grave.

So good night and farewell...

Pour me a drink of the distance and silence
you find at first light on American roads.
Sit with me a while, 'cause this love and this violence
I cannot understand them and they're all I know.

My grandfather he made a flag out of Westward,
my father he made him a flag out of Stone,
and I don't have a flag, but I would leave my daughters
stars and stripes broad and bright enough to make a home.

So goodnight and farewell, ye sweet Tennessee ladies,
good night and farewell, ye sweet ladies of Maine.
We must do what we want while we can
so when morning comes down
we can do what we must once again.

All This Travelling

My father-in-law has a colleague of many years named Kai Woehler, a German immigrant who came to the States in the early 60's and began to teach physics for the U.S. Navy in Monterey, California. He had been one of the last students of Heisenberg, and fallen heir to Heisenberg's dream of a unified field theory--which if I get it, is at once an understanding of the most fundamental particles (movements?) of Being and something like the meaning of Being. Something that you could point to and in some sense say, that's the gist of it, right there. Woehler is also a traveler to remote, dangerous places--through the Taklamakan Desert along the Silk Road, to Svalbard, to the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. The impulse to find the basic particle of Being--he himself capitalizes It--and the impulse to travel to places that are nearly unreachable and that mark the end of something, that cannot be gone beyond, seem related somehow. So, busy life. And he has lunch with my father-in-law, whom I adore, on the third Thursday of the month, I think it is.

Now presumably, if you saw the smallest possible particle it wouldn't look like much. The point, in fact, is to edge as near as possible to nothing, to approach the instant of Becoming. And maybe you would see how the finger print of Being is scrimshawed, how the iris and the vocal chords are tuned to the particular pitch of something unrepeatable. But there is a logical problem, or at least a sticking point, with looking for meaning in matter. Even the most fundamental stuff is just stuff, even if it is the stuff we're made of. There is a question for me of whether it's the answer or the question that we worship at the shrine of philosophy or science. I think I know the answer but I don't like it. I think maybe, looking at the fundamental particle or movement, what you would see, if you were a cosmologist and a searcher, would be as much as anything the road approaching this particle. The effort and tedium and longing, the dead ends at which beloved friends and revered elders had gotten stuck, the luck of arriving alive.

Lunch may hold as much transcendental meaning as anything else. Kai Woehler and my father-in-law were once discussing the moment of death. They were trying to imagine the fear and pain of death, and considering whether the moment of death were somehow the best seat in the House of Being or just the Edge of the Dumpster. And Kai said confidently that he would take his chances with the pain and disappointment, that he wanted no anaesthetics. That in some sense this was the great adventure and he wanted to arrive at the much anticipated destination with a clear head. I like this. Of course, again, it's just death. Not logically any more the source of religious meaning that my first cup of coffee this morning. And yet I suspect that somehow the end of my first cup of coffee, the firstness of the cup itself even, has to do with death. That death is the end towards which all Being and all consciousness of Being moves. And likewise, I can't help believing--even as I lose belief in nearly everything else--that the basic patterns of Being are the basic patterns of consciousness: planning and doing, waiting and missing, longing and relinquishment.

I need to think about death again. Not this time as the end of personality and personal accomplishments, of being seen and loved. Or, okay, maybe a bit. But more than that, I need to know whether I can believe that death is good. Walt Whitman, after seeing plenty of it in the Civil War hospitals of Washington D.C., summoned his clearest voice and called to it, sang to it:

Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love—But praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.
Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee—I glorify thee above all;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

It is easy in dark, exhausted moods to--theoretically--welcome ones own death. It costs no more than the welcoming of other ultimates--Love or God or even Independent Wealth. Ones own death, or the thought of it anyway, wipes the board clean. Unless one has the bigness of heart to imagine leaving other people behind, leaving behind a world that continues to need and break. But the occasion of this hymn to death was the disastrous, faith-shaking loss of Lincoln, two years into an endless war that was killing not only brothers but belief. For Whitman, Lincoln was "the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands," as he says at the close of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," his consideration of Lincoln's death and of his body's long recessional by train across the country back to the earth of Illinois.

So I'm wondering whether death is good, and I don't even know how to ask yet. But I'm thinking that in all sorts of ways that I'm only starting to see, mine is an American life. That is, I'm deeply situated in this land and this history, this particular love and violence. And so in some way mine will be an American death. And even the great American hymn of death, Whitman's great discursive twilit talk of death-longing, is a road story--a movie in which it feels like something worthwhile or real happens because of the sheer fact of movement towards a destination. Or is it just movement through the swamps and plains of the land? Or even awareness of the land spreading out around you? And if you're a Westerner then you have to add to catalog of the land deserts, forests and mountains, and the ever-present fact of distance, and the Pacific beyond them all. Clearly the land is itself a story. I get to be in it until I die and then, even, I suppose, all my tendencies will carry on in the land. It's after 4AM now, and I'm ending this not because I've gotten anywhere but just because I'm grateful to be tired. I'm going to practice believing that death is good.