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What matters is the poetry
***
[A portion of ongoing novel]
Without our poetry, we cannot be. Not as human beings. Perhaps as cogs. The machine can feed us with tubes and shower us with hoses, and pair us off on the internet as it sees fit, to breed more flesh to pull the plow. The machine does not know about poetry. It knows some rhyme. A ditty, stolen from some loose lip, perhaps. But the soul, or the sight and sound of beauty and mind is not within its grasp. It knows only what is useful. But just as the machine cannot judge beauty beyond the formula of kitsch, the machine does not know poetry.
It is interesting to me that Wikipedia, a product of the machine, defines ‘kitsch’ as “a term applied to art and design that is perceived as naive imitation, overly eccentric, gratuitous, or of banal taste.” It does not appreciate paintings of dogs who play poker. But it does appreciate splatter paintings and colorful geometry, and other forms of accidental art easily manufactured. It enthusiastically extols the sterile replications of the post-modern. But the machine does not have a sense of humor.
Poor Mrs. Benson, laboring over the clot of sex-driven minds in my senior high school poetry class, each with their own thoughts focused on the bell, could not have known that her efforts were not wholly in vain. She taught her poetry class with all the serious vigor that she could find in the face of so much apathy. I barely passed. But I had been infected, as if brushed by the mythical small-pox blanket, non-the-less. I may be a questionable or dubious poet myself, but I was reading Byron, on my own, within two years. And I thank her dearly.
Without poetry, I might not be here today, but enclosed instead in a glass and gypsum cubicle, ticking off the boxes until five.
Despite your resistance, you cannot hate the woman who had you read Don Juan and make it make sense that an indefatigable lover could have cuckolded his best friend—or consider that it might only have been the whim of Mary Shelly—too young to truly love, who was the brightest monster of all, and seduced a club-footed poet trying to make more of life than just the beauty of some Italian coast—or did she want a child so badly from her faithless husband. Ideas that might even make your hormones think. The machine would not know. But such adult thoughts, when I was only seventeen, have not been forgotten.
Dear Mrs. Benson. She must be long passed us now. But I do hope she knew what she had done.
Shadow recognition
[another glimpse of ‘What Matters’]
Harry usually visits when he is concerned about something. He never comes out from his lair for the sheer pleasure of the sunshine. He doesn’t own a hat, and the halls at MIT are endless so I think he probably just takes to them for exercise. He swims at the pool there as if it is a punishment for his sins. A kid in a cold shower. A scourging. I know things are going really well when I don’t see him for months. But, just recently, he has been out to the Cape almost weekly. Even in the snow.
He shows up one Spring morning fairly early. His car is a twenty-year-old Plymouth fury. They don’t make those anymore and parts are getting harder to find so it rattles. He repairs it himself and borrows bits from one place to fix another. I know it’s him by the rattles. About six in the morning, he knows I know it’s him so he sits there in his car at least ten minutes until I get my pants on, take care of business and open the door. Jim is sitting quietly in the passenger seat, as usual.
I figure he must have been up at least since four in order to have gotten here. But he tells me he never went to sleep.
I say hi and Jim gets out and follows us in. Jim won’t move unless spoken to and I’ve forgotten that before and accidentally left him sitting in the car for hours. And Harry can be oblivious, even though he talks to Jim almost continuously.
“What’s the problem?”
“They’ve been all over me for the last week.”
“They? The FBI?”
“Right. Well, there is one woman who couldn’t melt butter in her mouth and wears a small rose pin in her lapel that I’m positive is some kind of sign of authority to her underlings—she might be CIA, or NSA, or something. She’s been sitting at the back of my classes. She says she is just ‘auditing’ as if that’s an excuse. But she’s always keeping an eye on Jim…I played with her. I told her if she wasn’t a registered student she needed security clearance to be in the class. She just smiled…Cold.”
I told Harry I had to take my morning walk. Harry doesn’t walk much. He’s pretty lean only because he doesn’t eat all that much either. He does take vitamins and eats fruit. He grabbed one of my apples as we went through and I made him take off his shoes on the deck. The shoes are leather and won’t survive a walk in wet sand.
Jim says, “I’ll wait here if that’s okay.” I nodded at that and he smiles. It is such a genuine looking smile that I have to smile back.
With his feet bare and pink, Harry walks like he’s on broken glass until he reaches the sand.
“This sand is fucking cold.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
This patter is like a vaudeville routine with no punch line. He always tells me the sand is cold unless it’s hot. But this morning, before the sun has reached it, the sand is very cold.
His next words will be, ‘Slow down.’
And I say, “It’s colder if you stand still.”
A low fog sits over the Bay and catches rainbows in its trim. The tide is low and the bluff is casting wonderful shapes in the shadows before us. Harry stops and studies these for a moment.
“There is something there that I haven’t figured out. There is a language to shadows. I think there is a lot more there to be found.”
I don’t know how his mind works. I understand that less and less as time goes by. But I say what I can.
“They’re beautiful.”
“That’s exactly part of it.”
I give that a shot. “Beauty is an analog appreciation.”
He says, “Yes! That’s right!”
I have heard all this before, but I don’t really have a clue about what I am saying.
He says, “My feet are getting colder from appreciation of all this beauty.”
We walked about three miles. Getting around the thickly strewn shells and spoils of seagulls above the tideline added a bit. It’s mating season so they are mostly on the upper shore making new friends but the seagulls were thick in the air above us as well, I think because we had disturbed the privacy of their rites and rituals. Harry didn’t notice any of that. He doesn’t particularly like animals so that may be a way of dealing with it.
He tells me, “On Tuesday the lady with the rose pin had a wide-eyed look on her stone stolid face. I’d been talking to a bunch of undergraduates in the basic robotics class. I was telling them what they have heard me say in one way or another at least a dozen times since day one—that everything they were learning here was going to be obsolete before they can use it. Everything. But they can at least learn ‘how’ to work with it as the world changes. The scientific method will always be the same. No matter how stupid the so-called scientists become. Science is made to be broken. And then I say again what I have told them again and again, that the brain is not digital. If they want to understand anything, they have to overcome the digital barrier that we have put up around us to represent knowledge. The digital can only look ‘like’ something—it cannot ‘be’ something.”
There was actual emotion in his voice that carried in the cool sea air. But then again, he was carefully stepping around sea gull poop at the time.
I told him, “You can wash that off at the spigot on the side of the house.
He ignores me. “And the lady with the rose pin got up, right then, and left the class.”
“Do you think it was because she understood what you were trying to say.”
“No. As you’ve said, the government is congenitally stupid. I think the matter is that she interpreted what I said in some way that fit her narrative. God knows what that was. She understood what she wanted to understand.”
“That’s sound’s right. But what do you think that was, exactly?”
He shakes his head, “The thing of it is, because Jim is primarily digital—all his moving parts, I mean, they can’t grasp all that. They know what he can do physically and they’re ahead of me there. Jim can’t do somersaults. He doesn’t run very fast. That’s the sort of stuff the military wants…But Jim doesn’t want to. And that’s what bothers them. He has a will of his own. He can’t jump over a candle stick if they ask him to but he’ll recite the nursery rhyme back at them. It blows their minds! They can’t figure out how he makes the connections. They think it’s some instruction or code, which it is in a way of thinking, but they can’t read it because that’s not digital. They think it’s in his software, but they can’t figure out where…and I’m afraid they’re going to kidnap him. Like the golden goose. They’ll destroy him trying to find out. They’re watching me and recording me all the time to figure out how I communicate with him.”
“They can’t accept the idea that it’s just words?”
“No. Their idea of words are just digital bits. And visual object recognition is just another bunch of 1s and 0s, not the actual substance of the shapes. There is no concept of beauty in their digestion, just the nutritional value.”
“Have you used that analogy in class?”
“Yes…They have no idea of shadow…You know I need a name for it. Maybe, I should call it ‘shadow recognition.’
“What you are doing is a kind of chiaroscuro, isn’t it? Bringing light out of darkness. That’s a sort of shadow recognition.”
Harry gives me a look of faux astonishment.
“You were listening the last time I was here! Very good!”
“I still don’t understand it.”
“That’s okay…Do you think they’ll kidnap him?”
“It’s the government. They are congenitally stupid. So, yes.”
He takes a breath. Now I am going to find out why he showed up at 6 in the morning
“Can I leave him here?”
I had that figured.
“For a while. Sure.”
“Good.”
By that time, we were back at the deck. Jim appears to have heard something, or knew already what Harry was going to ask for.
Right off, Jim says, “At least I don’t snore.”
Out in the bradberries
the future that was and might be again
[a short story about everyday life on Mars]
The bradberries were ripe again. Twice a year is more than enough, don’t you think? But if I let them rot on the vine, they’ll bring the fruit flies and those buggers will infiltrate the house and because Milei never saw a piece of fruit she could pass without buying a few, they’ll infest the kitchen again and then she’ll complain to me for letting it happen and we’ll have to spend the next month with the smell of sweet vinegar in the air from the traps. It’s a real problem. Even the kids complain. And in the end, it’s another good reason not to let a woman think you are better than you are. They expect too much.
It’s all about the consequences, you know.
I was still in the army when I met her. I could have used some sound advice from an elder right then. Not that I would have listened. Just a precaution. She’s too beautiful to be resisted. But an enlisted man is also too easily swayed. Deprivations hollow the mind. On a dark night in a pod during a storm you overthink some things and totally ignore others.
I met her while on leave from Titan station. There’d already been twelve months of resisting right there. I was working with a sergeant named Palmer who was working off a felony charge and she was bound and determined to enjoy every minute of it. But I resisted, as I said. And then I came home and head over to the hardware store on my own dime to pick up some ‘C’ brackets which the Army never gives you enough of, and there she is, wearing her older brother’s work clothes to get her planting done after a fertilizer spill—all overalls and pony tail. I didn’t have a chance in hell.
First off, she is ordering the parts to fix her own fertilizing rig. Something about all those edgy words in a woman’s mouth that make you think new thoughts. But she smiles. Then she tells me that I have a spot on my uniform. Very rude, I’m thinking. But she’s put one of those price tags from a regulator on my back when we were waiting in line. I couldn’t see it and I had to take my jacket off. At least the clerk gets a laugh.
She just smiles again and says, “Actually, I thought you’d be worth more.”
So, I tell her, “The army will take just about anything these days. You should give it a shot. Better than fixing fertilizer regulators.”
And she says, “You ain’t smelled liquid Paragreen Fertilizer first thing in the morning, or you wouldn’t say that.”
Then a guy who looks like he could lift a pod all by himself leans in the door and calls her away. That was her brother, but I didn’t know that at the time.
A year after that I’m back home again waiting for my decommission. This little black-haired girl in overalls has been in my head the whole time. So, I go looking for her. No plan. She may be married to a fellow that lifts up pods for sport. But I knew her name then because her brother had called to her. It’s a popular name, but there are not that many working farms on that side of Elon. Maybe half a dozen, and I went to every single one. But the Milei I was looking for wasn’t there.
So, I go back to the hardware store. Of course, you would tell me, that I should have done that thing first. But I’m not that smart. And the clerk who helped us isn’t there anymore, anyway. But, after a lot of hemming and hawing, the new clerk says, “Does she have black hair and pony tails?” Affirmative. “That would be Milei Adams. She’s from out in the Boon Docks—over by the ridges. But she seems to come in here every chance she gets. Seems like something is always broken.”
So, I am out of there to the Docks, straight away, as soon as I can borrow my Dad’s car.
Now, here is the joke.
Milei came in that hardware store again the same day that I am out scouting for her in the ridges. There are farms buried down in every one of those furrows. and it’s a three hour drive just to get to one. But now, the clerk has told her that a soldier has been in asking for her. And she says, ‘Son of a gun. Took him long enough!”
Glen, the clerk, told me that himself, later on.
Well, she passes me on the road back home after my first couple of inquiries came up empty. But I had a lead, then, so I am whistling. There is a ‘Milei’ out in dock three. But now I’m running out of day light too, so I’m heading back to try another day. And then this car passes me going too fast, and on the screen I can see it raise a crop of dust and stop to turn around behind me. So, I stop too. Right there. There was no room to pull over. Just the sun-pink cut in the crust at either side. It’s that time of day and there is traffic. And she comes up just behind and stops. I’m still fumbling with the closure on my suit and she is already out and standing there at my door. Somebody honked. She smiles. And then she says, ‘“Follow me.”
And I’m not even hooked into my system yet, but I say ‘okay,’ anyway.
Now, that’s consequences for you.
What matters
about novel truth
***
The common ground
As always, the first matter is where to begin.
This is a story of what I believe to be an extraordinary friendship. It is told not as an egotistical boost of myself. In many ways, I am an incidental part of the narrative. Harry is the hero, but his sense of privacy makes my attempt at interpretation unwanted. So, by necessity, given that what I know about him is only what I have learned through our friendship, I have told too much about myself.
If Harry were to tell this tale, which he never would do, he would say it is really about Doris, or myself, or even Jim. This is not false modesty. He is that modest. As a true scientist, he sees himself within a continuity of history that begins with recorded time. I have trouble remembering what I ate for breakfast.
Perhaps I should begin with the fact that we are actually the product of several hundred thousand years of that history. More, if you like. At least that, I think Harry would say. But we don’t have to go back that far to get the picture. Most of that is unrecorded in any case, and no catalog of events lately begun—of births and deaths, or of accomplishments, of battles won and lost, or of things said, will make up anything like a complete account, or a fair record. But this is a brief record of just one friendship. No battles. No murders. But a great deal of mystery in it that compels me.
If I do have a contribution to speak of, I think it is this. By convincing Harry to see himself as part of a larger narrative, I have given him some religion. Before that, he was easily depressed by ‘the lack of value’ as he would too often say. If he could find no purpose in a thing, he could not do it. He would not even try. And given his belief in facts and logic, any religion or philosophy of meaning eluded him. He lived his life in pursuit of making things work. Ontology was to be avoided because categorization of the unknown was impossible. But I would say that he is more an engineer than a scientist. Knowledge for its own sake was irrational to him. There must be a purpose. And though I was not present, I think that idea brought him to the brink of suicide. Thankfully, Doris was around at the time. Woman are a muse even more than amusing.
Now, that is the sort of statement my daughter would object to. Loudly. She denies her own attitudes toward men even while passing judgement. She would object, I think, most loudly on her mother’s behalf. She has always defended her mother—and there has always been much to defend. But Harry is rather straightforward about such things. His love for Doris is a mystery to him and he simply clocks that up to the greater unknown that occupies most of the space in the universe. Very smart. Very rational.
I am of the mind that to make it up is as close as we will get. And whatever that accumulation of questionable data might be, even that, will always be disputed. Someone will think greater emphasis ought to be placed on this or the other thing, and some particular person or persons ought to be shown more respect. Probably true, if judged by God, but we are only men, and what we do is naturally flawed. Naturally. And this narrative may be the best that I can do on short order—as a part of a single human lifetime. Anyway, this is what I have done.
I imagined a robot.
It was an easy thing for me to do, really. Just words. This is the record of that, and a narrative of the matters that made it possible, and what happened because of it. But the story is personal. I won’t tell you everything, even if you wanted to know. Not likely; even though we now live in an impersonal world—every detail of our lives is known, or gathered—I will not tell you all that I know, but only what I think is important. And besides, whatever it is, there is an algorithm for that. But by some combination of common sense (which I will credit to my mother) and insight (for which I will give my father his due), I am not much on the great digital record myself. By some design. I will take credit for that. But how might that matter?
I have written a few books. More words there. Those attempts usually sketched the inner shores of life. Their purpose, I believed, was to make something of the stuff that usually goes unrecorded, as a small illumination of the dark matter that they say fills our universe. But then, this story is not about that at all. Or not very much of it. But it is about a robot as well.
Perhaps it should begin with my father, that deeply flawed man who spawned me. To say he was flawed, as all men are, is not a tautology. He worked at it. But he deserves credit for my being—for more than just the genes I wear, but for the way I wear them. I did not imagine my robot in a vacuum, you know (not even the vacuum of space), but in a garret.
Since that time, I have managed to live most of my own life away, the way I pleased, in a spending spree of hours and days, right here, on the quiet side of that great weathered arm of terminal moraine known as Cape Cod, where at twilight the thin sea on the low tidal flats of the Bay can reflect yet another world out of a hammered copper sky. An alternate world. The kind of thing you may have read about in science fiction.
I have walked most of the length of that outer arm, out of ‘season’ and often against the bluster of mother nature, at the edge of a nattering maw of ocean that was never the same one twice—as Heraclitus warned us about rivers—and I have stood where Henry Thoreau and his buddy Ellery Channing once stood. More than once.
I can only imagine what Thoreau once heard in the spoken Greek of that ocean roar, as from the mouth of the great preacher, Poluphloisboios Thalassa, when he wrote, “The attention of those who frequent the camp-meetings at Eastham is said to be divided between the preaching of the Methodists and the preaching of the billows on the back-side of the Cape, for they all stream over here in the course of their stay. I trust that in this case the loudest voice carries it. With what effect may we suppose the ocean to say, ‘My hearers!’ to the multitude on the bank! On that side some John N. Maffit; on this, the Reverend Poluphloisboios Thalassa…” More of that later, but I took that drama for real when I first read it.
Many know of the ancient sea-goddess Thalassa, who ‘mingled’ with Pontos to make the sea and all the fish, and a few might even know the archaic word for ‘roar’ that is polyphloisbic. But who, today, outside of North Carolina, might know that John Newland Maffitt Sr. was a Dublin-born Methodist preacher who gained national recognition as a charismatic orator with dramatic preaching style and filled the pews up and down the Eastern seaboard, or that his son was a Confederate navy Lieutenant and blockade runner known as ‘Prince of the Privateers,’ much less that there is a serendip of romance that you might find there in Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor by William Benjamin Gould. But those are the sorts of detail you can get when reading close by the woodstove on a day that feels uninhabitable.
On calmer days, I have walked the edges of that ocean-blast crater of sea grass and quiet water that is the remains of where Henry Beston spent a year and more in his small house on an outermost crest of sand, at the far side of this curled arm that raised by a continent in challenge to the great ocean—an arm raised like the fighter Beston was, showing off his intellectual muscle in a dual of wits with the very same mother nature I have met, wanting, I think, more to civilize the bluster in his mind perhaps after his service as an ambulance driver in the Great War, in the same way as he lived later in the quiet of a salt-water farm in Maine, without electricity or the intrusion of the modern, so that he might recover his humanity.
‘Without intrusion of the modern,’ I repeat, for moral justification.
Beston’s opening words in The Outermost House were, “East and ahead of the coast of North America, some thirty miles and more from the inner shores of Massachusetts, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. For twenty miles this last and outer earth faces the ever-hostile ocean in the form of a great eroded cliff of earth and clay, the undulations and levels of whose rim now stand a hundred, now a hundred and fifty feet above the tides. Worn by the breakers and the rains, disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold. Many earths compose it, and many gravels and sands stratified and intermingled. It has many colours: old ivory here, peat here, and here old ivory darkened and enriched with rust. At twilight, its rim lifted to the splendour in the west, the face of the wall becomes a substance of shadow and dark descending to the eternal unquiet of the sea; at dawn the sun rising out of ocean gilds it with a level silence of light which thins and rises and vanishes into day.”
Ho! And here I am merely sandwiched on this safer side, in a shack between two larger and fancier summer houses. Here, where that world that Thoreau and Beston once knew has now been so greatly subdivided and civilized by potable water in pipes, and by parking; where there is no hike necessary to find a neighbor, or the sound of another voice—except in winter…So, to gain that quiet they knew, at least seasonally, I have ordained myself to the religion of the year-rounder. If need be, given the weather, I might escape inland at night, when the traffic is not so bad, and visit the crumbling civilization of the forefathers. If only for the books, mind you. I cannot keep books for long here, in this sea air, unless they might be better off swollen like the legs of old men. Bestsellers in pulpy paperback grow as mushrooms do in the moisture of this place. Abandoned by forgetful visitors, I have too often lugged those off the beaches to a dumpster!
There I go, in another misdirection.
But the more important matter here, in this narrative, is that the human mind is not digital.
Nor is my appreciation of the fact.
What? Yes, that. About my robot, then.
Jim was a mechanical beast, as all robots are. I had imagined him that way before I knew there was another. His mind was only magic to me. A few words toyed up against the scientific efforts of life-times spent trying to understand the trick. He was supposedly powered by a battery. I had no idea of the kind of battery that might be.
He was first conjured in handwritten pieces without continuity, when I was yet a child in my nest. But ‘Jim’ was the name I gave him from the very first. I have no memory of why. My composition books are fat with the handwritten notes—nothing technical, of course. I always abjured the technical. But all of the early stories centered on his being mistaken for human.
Later, as he became a friend, I could depend on Jim to help deal with the problems I faced, or at least offer comfort. I gave him greater powers drawn from whatever bit of philosophy I was reading, which he re-quoted to me regularly, as computers do. Heraclitus and Thoreau were common sources. I continued to avoid the technical as unimportant, and then even as counterproductive. Jim was a philosopher, when that art was still of the natural kind.
No matter. The science was changing too quickly, in any case, and any tit-bit I might use from the news would soon be outdated. Better to avoid that altogether. By the time I was in college, it had become irrelevant anyway. Most of the best science fiction I was reading was based on ‘science’ that was ridiculous, such as human space travel to other galaxies, far, far away, or flying saucers, and worst of all, time travel! But it was the ideas that mattered, not the pseudo scientific gimmicks. ‘Star Trek’ travel I called it. The laws of physics that were being rewritten in Hollywood for the convenience of plot development were irrelevant to me.
I was far more interested in what people would do if confronted with some of the more obvious realities of the future. Especially the ones we had not yet solved in the past, such as slavery, or most especially, human beings who willingly gave up their freedoms for safety and false security, in a world with atomic power and governments that, by their actions (as opposed to rhetoric), obviously hated human beings and all of their dirty little habits in the first place. That too seemed to be changing quickly, but at least we had what we knew of history for the example. Didn’t we?
But then, too, I only wanted to avoid the sort of arguments I had heard in Dirkin Lounge, where the nerds of MITALS met and fussed over the number of morons that might fit in a red telephone box—Doctor Who aside.
I could see, in that current age, the greatest danger was already the replacement of thinking by computers and formula and the reduction of the scope of human life itself by machines. Obviously, today, the latest efforts to interact with the mind digitally are only done because they (someone) might better manage it thus. But obviously, such efforts do not actually define the human mind! Nor can they. They actually define the inadequacies of the perpetrators better, and the shortcomings of the numbers, in and of themselves. As numbers always do. Reduce the value of a thing to a number—cash—and then redetermine its value from that. This is only the rude magic of the street side hustler. Not reality. A shell game.
What civilization truly proves is a human value that is undetermined by numbers, in which beauty rules, and cathedrals rise, and cottages stand amidst the powers of the earth, only to fall and to rise once more, where music may be heard and played, and poetry sung, and love is made and remade, and babies cry and laugh again.
The common ground of humanity might be heard in the singing of the wind off a frowning brow of sand or found in a few words spoken aloud into a night of fog—the close echo reminding us of our own presence, alone. The digital cannot begin to define what is human, nor can the human being violated by a chip define the rape. The numbers simply don’t add up.
What is my true purpose here then? To make some of that understandable? Perhaps. But all of that is why my friendship with Harry matters. It was the common ground between us.
In a breath of stars
(from Whatever it takes: a novel in the form of a journal)
- In a breath of stars
Supreme tactician, Geoffrey Donne, having successfully maneuvered Maya out the door for a little privacy, gazing from the field behind the barn tonight, with the sole light from the back door of the house shaded by the great bulk of Neal Wright’s genius. The noise of the stars is bright—needles of light on the black slate of a chalkboard; stars too thick to the eye to count. But still, just as Neal Wright would have seen them. And taught them to his children. And as all the heroes of human history would have known them, minus a super nova or two. I say that thought out-loud to Maya. Even in that dark I can see her roll her eyes.
Brightly, I say, “Right there is the continuity—the conversation,” pointing out at that tapestry of light and dark “The sight itself is not an answer to anything. It is just a part of an ancient conversation, like the weather, between them and us, through time. A sort of animated cave painting. An ancient script. This is where we are on our map. We are human beings and this is what we see.”
She is practical, as mothers are. She says, “Stars are difficult to paint. Not just because of size. They have no true shape. They change before the eye.”
I say, “Van Gogh did it,…but he cheated. He made them big so they would stand still.”
And she shakes her head, “That’s only bending the truth. That’s not a lie. The same as saying stars are ‘noisy-bright.’”
I admit, “That’s right.”
It seems to me now that the clash between man and machine is only natural. Inevitable. “Mankind created the machine to do his work. Improve his life. In the machine there is a bit of himself, and for that he always suffers some small loss of his humanity as a consequence. Perhaps only a missing finger, or a toe. But usually more. That’s the double-edged sword of all of that creation. Nature does not reckon with the mind of man, because it is in us. Nature made man—call it God if you wish—and now, it must deal with the mind of all that creation. All of that’s a part of the conversation too. All of that is the internal conflict. An eternal conflict perhaps, if we survive.
I say, “Just words. Our tools. Words are machines too. Our rhetorical hammer and chisel. Neal knew that.”
Maya has moved away a little, out of the small light from the house, further into the shadow of stars.
She says, “He was hiding words in his wall. Why was that?”
My thought was, “The words betrayed him.”
Maya is frowning. I can hear the frown in her voice, “When they took his children away?”
But that was not something that could be understood by me. Not in mere words.
“He saw it as a punishment of God. This was his Eden.” I change the direction of that and say, “Imagine, just one small interruption in that conversation between mankind and nature, one small flare of anger or careless outburst—just the arm and fist of a solar flare and we are all gone.”
The Biblical fall of man from the perfection of the Garden of Eden was the consequence of a quest for knowledge. Lots of it. And it continues. We are still falling. Me, most of all, I think.
As if reading my mind, she says, “No. You have already fallen. Past tense.”
I think she is smiling now.
I say, “He knew that Eden was not machine-made. But if Eden was perfect, why did man want more? Why did he want more? He might have been guilty about that. God would have known that the quest for knowledge is at the heart of man. At his core. Because God would have made us that way.”
Maya says, “That would just be the sex. Don’t blame me. Guys are always blaming women. I’ve only done what nature made me do.”
I object. “No. I hope not. Love seems like so much more than sex…Were you compelled?”
She nods, purposely, so I can see it.“Yes. By nature. You gave me no choice.”
Very confusing.
The suffering of man is a consequence of nature’s imperfection as much as his own—It’s all the same. If that life can be called imperfect when set out on the cold and dark slate of physics, it is the physics that is wrong. The stone has no opportunity to be perfect, or want to be. It is, for all intents and purposes, forever, what it is. There is no story there. No narrative. The story of mankind is in us. In our mistakes. And that is the slate we are writing on, now. We are still falling. That is what stories are all about. We are in Eden even now, and we are still falling.
E = mc2. Mass and energy are the same physical beings and might be exchanged, one for the other. Like bodily fluids. I can see how that might apply. Even at the speed of light. But why not slow down. There is gravity to consider. And love.
That man is not a match to nature, nor an opponent—he is of nature itself, that’s not the problem. It is the physics of all the universe that’s outside of nature—and nature’s God—that is, all living things—that’s beyond the physics of it. I figure, Einstein would have balked. He must have known. But the physics of the universe exists. Period. It is only nature that is perishable. That is the true conflict. And the words to describe that—there is the story. That we ‘shall not perish from the earth.’ Lincoln had that right. Has this not been discussed before?
I say, “The machine is only mankind’s attempt to manage physics. Is that the evil? But by that same turn, the machine might manage mankind. There is the evil. Just the way words do. We invent the words to help us communicate, but then the words determine what we say and how we say it. The natural clash between man and machine are the opposite edges of the same sword—the natural clash between nature—the will to live—and the inanimate physics of an entire universe. But we cannot be an opponent to physics. It’s not a fair fight.”
She is ahead of me on this, “The mind of nature might be in the creation of mankind as an agent in the ongoing clash between all life and physics…I suppose it’s our task is to deal with that.”
I wasn’t feeling smart enough for this. “Then, I must be a secret agent,”
She says, “But I think it’s even simpler than all that”
She is probably right, again. I am suddenly reeling with the possibilities of being an agent of nature in a cold universe, and feeling very blasphemous.
“Just the same as machines and words were created by mankind to deal with physics and all the reality we can perceive, Nature has created man as an agent to deal with some larger reality—something that is in the breath of stars—and the noise of the stars is in all that breathing…Much the same as it is in a kiss.”
But where’s the poetry in that!
[a chapter from ‘Whaterever It Takes’
I asked Maya about a series of words, printed in green, at the edge of a painting on her desk: ‘Lowering, Towering, Flowering.’ Printed in formal Roman letters, as if chiseled there in stone, they reminded me of those renaissance paintings of naked zaftig women and muscular men trimmed with a few words such as ‘Obedience to God,’ laid out on the periphery to keep the religious authorities at bay.
Maya told me that this was a reminder to her—she often became engrossed in some subject within the frame and forgot her original purpose. She painted them over when she had finished. “I think I started that habit when I was quite young. I got the idea from Mom.”
I had often seen odd words at the edge of Julia’s manuscripts and never asked about them. I pursued it with Maya. “Why those words?”.
“They rhyme. They stick together in the mind that way. It was her rule to look for the poetry in things. Not that it should necessarily be a good poem or a bad one, but to see how things connected to one another, so that they could be taken one by one and not overwhelm me. She used that same rule for all kinds of things. I remember one verse, one of my favorites, that she made up on the spot when we complained too loudly about missing the beach.”
She recited it then, with a little dramatic flare:
“It was a graysome day
With rain too bored to fall;
Fettered in fog amidst the trees,
And on windows, blistered small.
The road was dark with wet,
No puddles shone at all,
And in the grass were diamonds
Where sun collected small
Spiders stepped out carefully
Squirrels stayed home to bawl
And when the worms
came out to breathe
The robins bit them small.
“When we were young, this became our motto. Elena would say, whenever she was frustrated by something she could not control, ‘But where’s the poetry in that!’ She even said it once when we all had the flu and Mom was sick and vomited on the floor and it made a good mess but it made us all laugh anyway because it was her and not us. Except for Mom, of course. Mom didn’t think it was very funny at the time. But we still say it today. When things don’t go right. When the mundane becomes petty. ’Where’s the poetry in that!’”
The thing of it is, that Julia likes to talk.
One evening, she just said it, out of the blue, after I had been hammering a little bit on her narrative about Donovan. In her usual way with some double entendre clearly present.
“But where’s the poetry in that? He is not a stupid man. Uneducated, simple in his wants, but very perceptive and bright. He has, so far at least, relied too much on his native abilities and not enough on what he had learned … But I can’t give him any ideas. He has to have the ideas on his own. And he happens to live around a lot of people who exist on the received wisdom of the Bible without ever giving it a deeper thought. Being bright in such a world is difficult. It can get you killed! Received wisdom is tough on those who do not believe. And you know that he does not. He has seen the sham of it. This is not real Christianity that he faces. This is dogma.”
She did not explain what she knew I already understood, but much of it was in the fabric of the book and I was not about to argue with her sense of a man that she knew far better than I ever could.
I was about to go when she said, “You know, it would be far easier if he could be caught up in the Industrial Revolution. He would fight that. He would be a Luddite! He would see immediately how that—the machine monsters in the factories—how they would be stealing his humanity as much as plowing the fields for Rolf ever did. And he has no problems with the intrusion of logic. Logic was never a part of his upbringing. His narrative is his own. He has the Bible, and John Donne, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare. He understands the narrative.”
I could hear then that she was onto a jag. Her words came faster.
“Logic can be a wonderful tool—much like its cousin, math. A kind of shorthand. But there’s no poetry in it. All the subtlety, nuance and color of language, reduced to numbers. A kind of communication, but only of a very limited nature. Good for counting the herd, or the beans. Einstein said that logic might get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere…Storytelling is the making of analogies. Cause and effect…The slaves to logic would even have it be a philosophy. The slaves of logic want it to define morality, when it can do no such thing. Logic cannot define truth or beauty, though it might help us in our mortal re-creation of it…They frequently confuse logic and reason. But I think that may be intentional. Reason is by analogy. Logic is addition and subtraction. Those who think otherwise—and they are the majority today, to be sure, because it is the easier path for thinking that is laid down in the public schools by teachers who don’t want the bother of analogies—to much time taken—inefficient—Those are the sorts of people that you must live with now, and the ones my daughters must live with, and my grandchildren. The mind that evolved over the millennia within our brains was the result of analogy, not math. A brain reduced to math is a poor machine at best. Better to have beads on a string. Logic might lead us, through reasoning, to find a right or a wrong, but an axe is not a moral code. And the ones who believe it is, have no sense of humor about it. They sense the danger. One joke they play is to say they don’t accept ‘analogy.’ They arbitrarily reject analogy as false reasoning because it is not precisely and always the same—as if their precious logic has any physical appearance in real life, or in the lives of the ten thousand generations that came before. And then, they always offer their basic theorem: if ‘a’ equals ‘b’ and ‘c’ equals ‘b’ then ‘a’ equals ‘c’, which, not coincidently, is an analogy, crude as it is. But truth and beauty, beauty and truth, they can not be reached by the false deductions of addition and subtraction. Sherlock Holmes will forever be looking for his cocaine in that particular hay stack.”
“You are mixing your metaphors. He might be looking for a needle if he was taking heroin.”
“I am tired.”
“Good night.”
On this day
On this day in 2026,
Sox are sold in sizes six to 12;
That is, one size fits all,
From six to twelve, inclusively.
In times to come this will be
Something to smile at,
proof of our primitive ways.
At a convenient price point
We now wear sizes six to twelve;
Walk, accustomed to discomfort;
And pretend we are free.
We talk. We vote, don’t we?
This too will bring a smile
In those times to come.
In cars shaped like rocket ships,
We drive to where the road takes us,
At speeds that give us time enough
To watch TV at the other end.
For hours. All of us. Even those
who say they read—their lives
Flattened on small black screens.
The smile will become a laugh.
It will be so much better then.
Plugged in. No need of screens.
Sizes six to twelve will be unnecessary.
When we are driven. No sox. No sex.
One body suit. No need to walk.
The body bag will be enough.
Information changes you
Information changes you. This is a profound fact, assumed by all of us, but given short shrift, though it’s well worth the time to study.
Each of us learn to deal with our small portion of the universe in practical ways. This is determined primarily by our physiology. Some of us learn to extend the range of our awareness by artificial means, most often by improving on one or more of our senses, say, with a pair of glasses. Some of us go beyond that, creating machines that enhance our ability to deal with our world. A car, for instance.
Some of us have a natural capacity to understand certain information better than others. The math impaired tend to avoid the sciences. The tone deaf do not hear what people with perfect pitch do. There are people with a form of synesthesia that allows them to see colors when they hear certain sounds. And the differences among us are uncountable because our senses may be combined in infinite and myriad ways. But by the time we have grown to adulthood, we naturally comprehend all of this, have generally come to terms with it, and begin to act in ways that allow for it. If we have vertigo, we don’t climb to heights. And yet, we are still each human, in the broader sense.
Information changes you. You are not the same as the person who did not know this. It is the key moment at the beginning of the Hebrew bible. As the story goes, the garden of Eden was lost in just that way. Once you are aware of your nakedness, you cannot unsee it. All knowledge is like that. All the rest of the Bible, and thence human history, follows suit. But not by wearing a suit.
What is information? It is the perception of our senses translated into language in order to understand it and thus may be communicated to others. Information becomes language through consistency of use. If you scream in pain the same way as you scream with pleasure, you have a failure to communicate.
We have created numbers to help comprehend some of that. But we know that numbers do not account for most information; only a very small part of it. And the numbers themselves are artificial. That is what allows us to play with them. Like money in the money supply—worthless unless attached to a particular consistent factor—that may itself be another artificial construct. Even so, that information changes us. It may even make us rich or poor.
If we deny the value of money, for instance, then we must create another currency to barter with. If you are an artist who has created something you value and it has taken you a week to make, you cannot then trade it for three days’ supply of food. You will die. If you, as an artist, insist on writing books nobody reads, you will have to find another means of paying for the costs of living. Selling books, for instance.
If you have learned how to shape wood, you might be a carpenter and build houses or you might be a sculptor and make totem poles. If there is no demand for your totem poles, you might have to use your talent to make bookshelves in order to eat. But a talent is a form of information. It is information which has been translated through your senses into an ability, and then used to make something useful out of the small portion of the universe you live in.
Most people learn more than one talent in order to provide for themselves and their families. The less talent they achieve, the narrower range of jobs they can do and often, the less money they make to provide for themselves and their families. This is not rocket science.
Information changes you—or not. People who act the same before they know something significant as they did after, might have other deficiencies. If your spouse treats you the same after learning you are having an affair, as before, there may be something else going on there. Information can be useless. Most of what you see on afternoon television, for instance. If you spend time watching that, you will have less useful information for the time spent than by doing something useful…There may be a consequence to acquiring useless information after all. So, indirectly, the information changes you.
Brilliant thinkers like Iain McGilchrist have studied the mind and made its function more explicable, but they cannot make us think. Dorothy Parker had that pegged just right while leading a horticulture. We cannot easily unsee what we know. We can forget but they won’t be bygones. Information changes us. The very act of forgetting changes us again.
In most circumstances, knowing is better than not knowing, but there is such a thing as knowing too much. J.R.R. Tolkien surviving his time at Somme would be an example of that. But he then translated that information into something else in order to comprehend the incomprehensible. Making the most of such information can be a key to understanding it better. Understanding the complexity might be achieved through a form of Zen, or, in Tolkien’s case, redirected through a narrative that makes some sense of great horror. But much of the literature of mankind is, to some degree, a means of interpreting what we have learned. Even the humor.
Information changes us. A child is born. Our child. And just as the child’s perceptions are first interpreting a new world, we are discovering the child. And through them we are rediscovering ourselves. And we are changed yet again.
Dumb, data dumb, data dumb
data dumb
There are many kinds of dumb. The ideologically dumb who cannot see their own stupidity through the gauze of a particular ism, is common. Marxism is the easiest example of that, but there are many others in our modern age. There are the religious dumb who have adopted a true belief and cannot break loose for fear of losing themselves to doubt or worse, losing friends. The simplest kind of dumb are the self-serving sort who steal or lie or kill for their own immediate advantage without seeing the consequence. Then there are the really very, very, dumb who combine a few different kinds of dumb together for the inevitable result, and then blame others.
Intelligence is usually not a factor. There are as many high I.Q. dumb as there are the naturally impaired. In fact, most lower I.Q. individuals have learned to guard against dumb-think after earlier experience taught them the basic facts of life, and being commonsensical, they stick to what makes them happy. They might then be misled more easily than others, but their understanding of the mistake is more straight-forward.
Lately, we have turned up a new sort of dumb—temporarily new—one that has grown exponentially in our vapid, technologically dependent, culture. We now have recent generations of bright minds made dumb by the memorization of data—something a cheap computer can do better. That is like counting the grains of sand on the beach. With the coming of AI, this will be the first cohort to be marginalized. And, importantly, because they have never been taught to think for themselves or to find worth for other reasons than the mathematical, statistical, or the pre-ordained, they will be the most angry with the world that then reduces them to beggars, and they will most easily be directed by nefarious minds to war, or riot, or worse.
When convenience becomes the standard of value, or efficiency, or speed, rather than beauty, or quality, or purpose, then the inevitable result is a data driven culture. This will serve the purpose of malign minds for a time, but then they will find the numbers themselves inconvenient. Such populations are not as productive, are costly to maintain, and besides, the robotics age has arrived. A war, or a plague will be just what the doctor ordered.
Because most schools, public or private, have failed to teach values of any kind, other than the reductive insanity of woke, in order to keep students in line and their parents cowered, and because critical thinking has long been out of fashion, a significant portion of the population is already essentially helpless, while also being demanding. This new welfare society is a kind of faux aristocracy, a royalty of privilege bestowed on them by technology they cannot make or create or fix themselves but will always demand ever more from. Think of an enormous version of a little shop of horrors with the echo of ‘feed me, feed me’ from every corner as it grows. And it will have no better end.
“If a man will not work, he shall not eat,” is the Biblical aphorism most recently translated into shortened form as ‘them that works, eats.’ Such a simplistic philosophy does not sit well with minds of the western liberal welfare society that we have today. And it will not stand. They will not be re-educated, or they cannot be re-educated. Mike Rowe is terrific, but he cannot save them all,
The singularity you have heard so much about, ‘A hypothetical future point in time when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and then be able to self-replicate and improve itself autonomously,’ dependent on compliance, of course, has already been achieved. And failed. Even as the minions of this outcome are busy trying to find the necessary energy, their numbers are diminishing. Love does not fit in the box. It cannot be programmed. There is no algorithm for it. Just chemical lust. And lust does not produce children, except by mistake. Importantly, it does not produce children who can think for themselves.
A Wikipedia definition: “In mathematics, a singularity is a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined, or a point where the mathematical object ceases to be ‘well-behaved’ in some particular way, such as by lacking differentiability or analyticity.” I think it is easier to simply think of it as unique.
In practice, it is uniquely undefinable. And thus, useless for any practical purpose other than to write dystopian novels. The eschaton has already been immanentized. Our utopia is here. If it doesn’t look like much, that is only because it is so much less than you had before. The feces underfoot are merely the illusion of our misconceptions.
Knowledge is not manufactured. What was not known before becomes knowledge. It is empirical. Knowledge is discovered. But it was always there to begin with. There really are no voids in the universe, just what we have not yet discovered. And, despite the effort of the best of minds to pretend otherwise, AI has no means of discovery. Data is knowledge, if you like, but then so is a grain of sand. Data is numbers. Knowing the number of grains of sand on the beach does not make you wise. Finding a way to turn silica into chips is smart—not dumb. AI is dumb. Using the chips to store knowledge in useful ways, that might be wise. But the AI will not imagine that until told to do it by a better man.
In the beginning
It has become increasingly difficult to talk to people in recent years. This is partly due to subject, such as politics, and partly due to several other matters. Because basic communication is the start of things, the beginning, I figured it might be good to address some of those matters. Granted, most potential readers will not read this for the same reason that essential communications have broken down, but it is at least a foundation—a beginning.
The first matter is the language. I speak a form of America English which, because of the spread of popular culture, is fairly compatible with most other English speakers, and I generally obey the rules of grammar and spelling presented in the primary dictionaries available to the student of the language. I have been known to abuse those rules, but this is generally the case.
Though it seems simplistic, this single matter is also the start of a great deal of mischief.
If, for instance, in a court of law, your jury, or even one member of that jury, speaks Spanish, and you speak English, you are screwed. That goes doubly for judges. An interpreter is not adequate for translating what you have to say. Language is contextual. Your demeanor is a part of your testimony. Interpreters function, but they interpret. That is part of the definition. Ipso facto. And this is why the founders of English common law demanded a jury of your peers. Equals. A yeoman was to be tried by other yeoman. etc.
This one fact then also became a key breakdown of the class society. Getting a bunch of equals together was a chore if finding twelve equals was hampered by class distinctions. It also prompted some other ideas of modern democracy, and voting rights, and a great deal more. It’s all very complicated, especially by a legal profession dependent for its livelihood on complicating matters, but it is all connected in subtle ways as well as the obvious. The point is, a common language is key. And as English common law spread so widely under the aegis of British Empire, the ideas inherent in that were exposed to various peoples throughout the world and the concept of equality under the law and all the ramifications of that spread with it.
If you are young and inexperienced and sitting in a classroom with all this dry fact in front of you, or is being postulated by a professor who has said the words one time too many to countless classrooms before you, it might seem fairly worthless, but when you are arrested for a legal transgression, or must sit on a jury in judgement of some other poor bloke, it might all make sense. Language is very important. Multilingual societies are always riven by it.
The introduction of other languages into the American social system is a burden that stretches beyond a few moments lost in a quickie-mart trying to figure out the cost of a pack of gum with a clerk behind the register who speaks too fast to interpret. Besides the obvious problem, there is a social one. We are a society driven to the use of credit cards not just for the convenience of payment, but to avoid interaction with other human beings who do not speak our language. This cost is real. It is difficult to garner enough empathy to be civil when the register breaks down. As they do. And when you read that the clerk has been robbed, and shot, it is more difficult to conjure the sympathy for another human being necessary to feel the outrage that might make you reconsider your position on one political issue or another. It is all connected. It is all very complicated.
In the beginning, there was language. And the language of love made more people you had to understand.
In the second place, why would you want to understand them? What can they do for you, anyway? Fix your sink, perhaps, or your computer, or your marriage. You cannot even go out to the woods these days without bumping into someone. Communication helps. Good communication helps a lot.
My postulate here is that it has become increasingly difficult to speak with other people. Another reason for this is that subtle but obvious one: why bother. If society proscribes your role, then all you need to do is follow the directions. Right? Well, obviously, that is not working as well as it used to, back when everyone was trying to match their lives to the ads in Life magazine. Most people alive in American today never read a copy of Life magazine—not when it was a weekly display of American life and not a monthly directive to what should be done.
Now, I am a libertarian by nature and believe that form of government governs best that governs least, but perhaps you are a marxist and adhere to a hair shirt philosophy that regulates human action to a rigid set of dos and don’ts. The Pilgrims were very much of that mind. And the Shakers. That’s part of the American deal too. But the American society has survived for more than two hundred and fifty years on an open system that has worked its kinks out by communication.
For example: a “prohibition on the quartering of militia in private homes in either war or peacetime without consent of the homes’ owners.” Not a restriction on government that most people have ever thought about. It is assumed. But when communication stopped before, we killed each other. That appears to have been the only solution to disagreements such as slavery. Now, most marxists seem to have issues with communication. I have heard them express the reductio ad absurdum: why bother?
Because most of our individual rights are assumed, most of us are used to it by now. And even if that number were reduced to, say, thirty percent, such as it was at the time of the Revolution, it would still be understood. And a government that attempted to significantly reduce those rights would be in for a bloody bother. This is not an objective. It must be avoided at almost all cost. But it is a fact. And effective communication is the only solution for that bother.
In is important to realize that the Constitution that governs us is a list of prohibitions on government. It is not a set of directions for the citizen, other than to keep him aware of the lines that government should not cross. And there is the communication issue again. The schooling of the average American citizen is so poor that they cannot clearly state more than a few of those prohibitions. Most usually, that understanding is reduced to one: freedom of speech. And now that one has been encroached upon by government to place limits on the citizen in the guise of ‘hate speech,’ the definition of which is in the hands of government.
Now, it is fairly said that freedom of speech is the most important of all the amendments. The particular amendment in danger includes freedom of the press, and of religion, freedom to assemble and freedom to petition the government. That is why it is the first of the amendments. All the other provisions for governance that are contained in the constitution were, in the eyes of the founders, insufficient to make that one principle clear. They wanted that to be plain.
My worry that it has become increasingly difficult to speak with other people is based on everyday experience. It is not an estimate, or a guess. A key factor in our national social profile is that we are not speaking to one another openly any longer. And this is a danger to our wellbeing.
I am not concerned with the morons who are instigated to riot by various marxists organizations. In most cases, their ignorance is their own punishment via the small lives they live. The others will be dealt with by the law that is on the books. I am very much concerned with the general public that is afraid to communicate over the Thanksgiving table for fear of being uncomfortable, and makes fun of the uncle or grandparent that does. I am very much concerned about the school system teaching woke ideology and parents remaining silent to avoid confrontation in front of the children—who are actually learning a lesson about their parents. I am very much concerned about soldiers who do not know what they may be fighting and dying for. I am very much concerned about a loss of civility that comes from a lack of individual communication.
Let’s talk.
Delusional
[An excerpt from the novel ‘Whatever it takes’]
And this is an average day.
The smell of cooking is thick in the house when I arrive. I finally realize that this might be the normal. She starts cooking by four. It makes thinking about anything but food almost impossible. But I must. She only eats two meals a day, and by five, I’m in some sort of psycho-physical collapse. On this particular day, it was fried chicken. I would have said before that I liked fried chicken. It’s just fine. Only, I had never had the sort of fried chicken that she makes. It will be difficult to eat fried chicken anywhere else ever again.
I start work right away. This is mostly just retyping on my laptop the words on the sheets that she has typed out earlier that day, as well as parts she has written before I came—while she is right there cooking in the kitchen and answering any of my questions or simply talking to me extempore. The book is entitled, ‘The Plow and Stars.’ It’s over 1000 handwritten pages, now. She does not know how many words that is, but she tells me from previous experience that will amount to about 300 pages when typed. I guess out loud that it will be under ninety thousand. She frowns at me. This is obviously far too much calculation to her taste.
“I have never thought about that. The number of words. Ned was always concerned about that because it might make the book more expensive than the ‘unwritten’ budget all the editors knew was hanging over their heads. But he stood up for me a couple of times. I never had to cut a word. Though, he did tell me once when I came in ‘under budget’ that he had made the case then, to allow for that when I went too long.”
Her answers are ready, and I think she has a need to talk to someone after working in her own head for at least eight hours, especially since her daughters flew the coop—so to speak. Perhaps that’s really my role here. To listen. The exhaust fan is on, and a little loud at first, so she’s talking over that when she speaks, and I get to hear a voice I haven’t heard before. Her usual voice is restrained. Deliberate. Feminine, but controlled in the way that mothers do with children. Though that could be a little irritating if she keeps it up for too long. I don’t mind it when she gets emotional. You can hear that in her work as well. But it seems she hasn’t mastered the art of talking loudly. It sounds as if she is angry. I wonder if that is also from living alone. And does she talk to herself that way?
I asked, “Do you talk to yourself out loud when you write.”
It caught her by surprise. “Of course.”
I got the funny look.
“I only asked because I do that too.”
A couple of dozen pages in, with Julia still standing at the stove, I asked, “Are you intending for Clare to be cynical.”
It was just a thought I had while retyping the words, at that particular moment. Heroines who are cynical are far less appealing. I know, from what she has told me before, that ‘Clare,’ who is to be the protagonist here, is a tough cookie—a woman who has survived the worst.
Julia says, “I think that’s probably her lack of faith. She wants to have faith but can’t find it. Her losses have been too great. I don’t go into all that because it just makes for pathos. I don’t want that reaction. The cynicism keeps her in the right key.”
This cynicism was not all that obvious. I had thought it was just an undertone that had crept in inadvertently. I should accept now that there is nothing inadvertent in Julia’s writing. At least I should have guessed. But by then, I was already fully distracted by the smell of buttermilk and lard. By asking the question, I was actually trying to concentrate.
She says, “Clare lives in what the author William Manchester called, ‘A world lit only by fire.’ It’s worth always remembering that, and I have the hardest time with it myself, because it’s so easy to assume the modern practical prejudices we have because of the comforts of our own lives. For her—the scene you’re working on is just her getting out of bed. Really, just that. It’s the best moment of her day. At least she’s had sleep. The coziness of the bed was perfect—as perfect as she knows. Her dreams are fading, and the gauze of that, hides the glare of hunger, and the pain of her damaged foot which has not yet healed, and the cold. Especially the cold. She will build a peat fire. That is a very unsatisfying heat. Uneven. Small. Her clothes and body smell of the work she did the day before, and the day before that. Later, she’ll eat a coarse hard brown bread that she made several days before. Because of the rain, that’s already getting moldy. But at least the water will be fresh. The rain from the roof has filled the mossy pots, and the sound of the falling of that obscures much else. It’s a small din of sound that hides the morning dark outside, and that allows her to hold her eyes closed and keep a brief grasp on her dream. She will not eat until she’s worked for several hours at her loom…She has no idea if she can sell the fabric. That’s a worry that intrudes on her mind. That’s not a given. The English authorities have forbidden the sale of fabric unless a tax is paid. She has no money for the tax. She is pregnant, so she is feeling queasy in any case. Her mind is just trying to engage her hopes in the dark … How does she do that? How does she keep her hope before her and not slip into the darker maw of dejection. Well, for her, it’s a cynicism that makes fun of everything that confronts her. She laughs at her state. At herself. It is an Irish humor, built upon centuries of abuse. Not out-loud, where it will draw attention, but spoken to herself. She has an internal life that is as real as her dreams. She can hold on to that. She can keep her hopes alive by standing on that ground…And she’s bright, remember. Not smart, because she has never had any general schooling, but she is bright. Very bright. She reads Latin. This is some of what she picked up from her mother as well as the nun at the church—That poor nun at the beginning of the story…You’ve already seen that, but you must see her in that context. Being bright is not a permanent state. It is a shine that must be polished. Her internal dialog does that.”
I was chastened. But she was not finished.
Julia says “You see, mankind is, by nature, delusional. How could we get up in the morning and face the day if we were not? Do you think the beauty of a sunrise is sufficient to ignore your arthritis; the delicate design of a snowflake sufficient to ignore the cold? Then you are delusional. The pain of living would be overwhelming if you could not blind yourself to your own demise. Your body may be riven by pain, but you give yourself to love. Those you love are torn from you by disease and pestilence, and you nurse another. We are really wonderfully made, we human beings. We can believe in our gods no matter how they betray us. Our own stink should be sufficient to drive us away from each other, but instead we embrace. We watch ourselves grow old and pretend there is grace to it. We are delusional. I thank God for that defense. Other animals, so trapped by instinct or ignorance, must bear their own slaughter, with brief panic, seemingly unaware of their future as they ruminate. We are given the gift of delusions to endure, and the powers of imagination to distract ourselves. We make up sports to manufacture our own entertainment. We celebrate our kings and write plays to give them honor and renown. We write novels to give color to the mundane. We defend our kidnappers with our own lives and sacrifice our children to the wars of our captors. We murder other human beings and blind ourselves to the inevitable consequence. Thank God we are delusional, else we would stay in bed.”
It was an inverse of philosophy—the meaning of life turned inside out.
Later, she said, “Thinner fabric can be more difficult to handle, more fragile, more liable to tear. A mere tissue of integrity. But gossamer is beautiful to the eye. The beauty of silk, like the woman she imagines herself to be, is magnified by its modest strength—but if it has been rent, it is lost. Old silk can often be beautiful for the character of its flaws I suppose. But the flaws are real, and it is still more delicate.”
She actually said this aloud, to me. Then she suddenly looked away in a look of despair, or perhaps a little shame. “Oh, bosh! Such metaphors are too thin.”
Julia had been explaining her use of a word to me, ‘gossamer,’ in the description of a mysterious gift Clare receives. I had foolishly questioned its use in context.
And still later, “Once, I thought I would be a poet. It was a fever. A sickness. Perhaps the last vestige of my childhood—that I would simply identify the truth with words. Can you conjure such a thing? How did I come to be possessed by the idea that I knew the truth at all, I can’t say. I haven’t the discipline to be a poet. But it was that idea that made me want to be a writer, and I turned to prose instead. and it determined my whole life. It was such a wonderful mistake! My delusion!”
With this, a deeper hunger had come upon me, personally.
About five-thirty she interrupted her wanderings around the room and the house and set the table. She’d found a sturdy chair in one of the bedrooms upstairs and brought that down. We sat across from each other, beneath the side window, but the table is small, maybe three feet around, so we were close. Close enough for me to be a little uncomfortable. She had made biscuits and gravy and buttered carrots. I had died by then and gone to heaven.
She said, “It’s all very difficult to imagine. We are so spoiled. So soft…The chicken is fresh. I picked it up yesterday from my neighbor, Frank. He raises chickens and sells them to the Johnson’s Farm Market over in Nottingham. Organic. You can see them out there in his yard right now. They sound like happy chickens. You must feel sorry for them, though. They’re living their best lives and then, whop! — I can’t eat my own chickens. Only the eggs. But I trade those to Frank for his chicken, and he does the bloody work. I let mine grow old. I become very attached to them and the idea of killing them is impossible. That’s how soft I am. Clare would have simply gone ‘whop,’ or just sold the critter. She wouldn’t have eaten it…She would have saved the money. She had her hope.”
I was relatively speechless with the delight of all this. And because the biscuits and gravy were as good as the chicken.
Julia said, “I don’t mean to spoil the story for you, if you’re following it, but Clare is sleeping with the Lord’s son to get the money for her passage. Her cynicism is warranted. And if I were in her position, I would be cynical too, and bitter, and just as likely immobile. I would never have gotten out of that hovel. I’m writing about someone better than me. I always do…Writing is my moment in bed, in the early morning, holding onto my dream.”
What could I say to that? All I came up with was, “How did the human race survive? … Seriously. How did it happen?”
She shrugs at that. “The dreams. It was the delusions. Those who dreamed the best, survived.”
Trying to make a formula out of the magic, I stupidly said, “So, it’s a sort of natural selection. Over the eons, the smartest ones more often make it.”
She shook her head at me. “No, I’m not so sure. Depends on what you think smart is. The kind of ‘smart’ that most people think of is Einstein. But Einstein is an aberration. A luxury product of our society, you might say. The society that made him possible is the result of dreams. A million dreams.”
“And a little math?”
“No. If you do the math, you just stay at home and guard your turf. The risk of dreams is too great. What makes us human is not math. A crow can do a little math. What makes us human is our dreams. I don’t know what crows dream of, but the ones I see are still pestering the garbage cans.”
Now sick with age
Now sick with age,
That disease for which
There is no cure,
No care but carelessness,
Nor time enough.
Now sick with age
And left with remembering—
That salve of memory,
Being my only respite—
Forgetting is the greatest fear.
Now sick with age,
The greater fear is not death
But to be forgotten even by myself;
And to be left alive
Without a past.
Now sick with age,
Infirm, and weakened by it;
The pain in my body and head
Is simply the way it will be
until I am dead.
Now sick with age
Easy rhyme cannot hide
The truth of when I died;
When even the small importance
of what I said was no longer heard.
Now sick with age
The little that I’ve been
Is lost right before me;
What I cared for most,
Stolen, before my eyes.
And now sick with age
I ask, did I do well?
Did I deserve the chance I had?
Or did I lose the chance
To make it worth remembering?
Whale piss
[A chapter of the current project, a novel called ‘What Matters’]
I awoke with the lifejacket pushed up beneath my chin by the water—adrift in the ocean, in the midst of a puddle of whale piss, so it wasn’t water at all, or not much of that. The water beyond me, a ragged patchwork of flat sky light and dark water—dark water, not black or gray, ran to a thick smudge of horizon. Only that smudge could be seen in every direction across the rise and fall of gentle swells. No land. No other boat. The sky was pale and colorless as well. I knew I was floating in whale piss because I had been there before.
Now, I am one of those writers that works in metaphor more than analogy. This predicament had all the markers. Simply judged, my life was then a lot of whale piss.
The lifejacket was the one my father kept stowed beneath the short forward deck on our old boat. Mostly kept there so that he could keep his feet up on something when he was steering. It was mildewy and faded and strangely soiled so that what was left of the orange color remained only where the ties were sewn to the fabric. I recognized it immediately as a familiar of my childhood.
I imagined myself as seen from below, from the dark, a fracture in the bright surface light like a windshield ruined by a stone. Analogy, of course. My white legs scissoring the water, flashing like a lore to any predator. Another analogy.
I had read somewhere of a shipwrecked sailor lost at sea who had found himself in a puddle of whale piss amidst an empty ocean and reckoned that it had been deposited there purposely by some protective creature to keep the sharks away. True or not, he had previously been on a whaling ship and it seemed to me that whales might not think so kindly of him.
My life was a puddle of whale piss. When had I been in such whale piss before?
It wasn’t really a ‘when.’ It was where I had always been. Befuddled by life itself.
My father, being a child of Illinois, had never had a boat before in his life when he had uncovered the old lacquered mahogany ‘skiff’ in the great room of our house after moving there. I was not born yet so, I was not a witness to this, but he had many miss adventures learning how to deal with it. My real fascination with it had always been the motor, which seemed alive to me when it ran, and growled as I believed a dinosaur might, and was encased by a sinewy enclosure, not smooth on the surface like modern engines, but ribbed by its parts the way a body builder might be. It wasn’t a large engine but required constant attention, and the very difficulties it posed to my father were some part of the affection he had for it. But having the boat out with the family nested there at all sides was an event, and the several times that we were stranded by sudden bad weather only enlarged that event and the mythos attached.
The boat was made by Hacker-Craft, which evidently made it special, and he was always getting offers for it when we pulled up at a dock to get gas, even with us right there inside. They always called it a ‘runabout.’ My father called it a skiff. Evidently, what made it unique was that it did not have much of a deck area. It was an open design intended to ferry passengers back and forth to larger boats. That is as much as I remember about it. In 1963 my father ran it up on some rocks and it forever after sat on its rusting trailer at the side of the house, covered with a green canvas tarp, and was used from then on as a hiding place. That was when I became most familiar with the old life-jacket.
But it was during a previous mishap, when the boat was swamped while my father attempted to reach a safe harbor during a summer storm, and all of its occupants were turned out into the foam near a jetty, that the experience of floating in the ocean with a lifejacket on had likely been impressed on my soul. I was never alone then. We held hands as we rode the waves and my mother told Irish stories her mother had told her, and a dory came from the harbor and fished us all out in short order.
I had first had the whale-piss dream when I went off to college. And again shortly after that, before I left from that place for good. The metaphor seemed as right to me then as it did years later when I was changing wet diapers in the middle of the night. The dream had no beginning and no end. It was always the middle. But that fact seemed the key to understanding the dream.
My effort to live according to my principles, was likely less pure. I had never been able to fully attach my thoreauvian ideals to the everyday process of living. Old Henry did not seem to care quite as much about sex, for instance. Or women in general. And I am not sure if he ever changed a diaper, but I know that he avoided spending time with children. My too brief years around Bridgett could have been multiplied ten-fold, as far as I was concerned. Of course, that would have been at the expense of Doris.
I was engaged on what I believed to be a great project—not exactly a civil war, or a revolution, but something. The idea was that I should write for an audience that might appreciate what I was saying without a need for concocted plots and made-up tribulations. I asked myself what would a person do if they were in such and such a situation. The person of the characters should be interesting by nature. The situation should be unusual. But there were no murders, and because I had never been on a battlefield, there were no wars. The situations were all of the kind that a normal human being might have. And the themes were always grand: variations on utopia, or the collapse of civilization due to ignorance and neglect being the most common. There were murders and wars, but they occurred off-stage. The importance was in how the characters dealt with this hardship. The human matter.
Unbidden, a reviewer had called my second book, ‘whale piss,’ for dealing with the utopia theme without reaching a conclusion. I actually wrote him back to explain that the urine analysis was that this condition was actually caused by a lot of human beings pissing on someone all at the same time for not obeying the ‘rules.’ I have no idea if he had somehow been blessed with a similar dream as myself. I can only hope so.
What is remembered
What is remembered better is often just the wish;
not what was done,
much less what was wanted to be done.
What actually happened was mundane,
but informs much of what I did thereafter.
For instance, in 1969;
to get from Brattleboro, Vermont,
to San Diego, California—
with the two hundred dollars that I had,
required a thumb, and a rucksack.
I slept the length of the New York Turnpike
in the passenger seat of a Volkswagen bus.
I couldn’t have been good company.
Did I wash pots in a kitchen that smelt of fish,
in Cleveland or Cincinnati?
I recall the fish but I have failed
the remainder of that memory
as much as the memory has failed me, I think.
But this was my brave summer:
graduated but yet undrafted;
my adventure when other boys
were already dying in rice paddies.
I mopped the floor of a laundromat
for five dollars in Albany, New York,
when I went in to wash my clothes,
but they had had a flood.
It was raining that hard.
If I’d put my thumb out in the rain, then,
I think my cloths would have been washed for free.
But the rain stopped soon thereafter, before the sun
finally stopped my thumb, and I fainted.
The joke, I wasn’t drinking enough water,
someone in St. Louis said—a doctor, I think.
So, I bought a better hat,
with the money I had in my pocket
And worked then in an air-conditioned
warehouse that was heaven so long as it lasted;
at least until the truck was empty—
maybe two trucks. Or three.
Myself and a fellow named Eugene
who told better jokes, but I never saw again.
It was still hotter when I left,
but at least I had a hat.
I am told—was told after that,
that I went to the wrong Kansas City.
There were no jobs in the one I went to.
The leather in my shoe was losing its soul.
So, I removed the the hundred dollar bill there
and bought a pair of sneakers,
along with a dozen blisters for free.
I don’t remember diddly-squat
of the days thereafter
and I’m not too sure of the squat.
But to be fair, it’s only been about 21,000 days
since I was twenty-one.
Denver is a vague recollection
of sun, dust, and a pink-stone rail station
full of echoes without people,
where I slept on the floor below a bench,
and the train came a day after.
San Francisco was as cold as
Mark Twain warned it would be,
that one day in July,
when I wandered hills for warmth
and bought a book of poems
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
from a fellow who looked like Ferlinghetti
but I was too shy to ask.
My remembered life
is checkered by forgetfulness—
purposeful perhaps, subconsciously.
Shot with blanks of white between
the dark of forgotten events,
and some recalled for no discernible reason.
Hitching rides is like that too,
each one unique at the time,
but then lost as anchorless oddities
of face and smell and voice,
becoming the dark water beneath
a louder sky of unsure purpose,
and misbegotten possibilities.
What was I thinking?
What did I do?
The Oakland bus was cramped
and stank of my own sweat
as much as anyone else’s.
I remember that—at least,
a memory that is inescapable even now.
Near LA, I got out early at a stop,
simply because I could see the ocean,
(anxious perhaps to escape my olfactory)
and I danced first on hot grainy sand,
while toeing candy wrappers and cigarette butts,
and plunged into water colder there
than I could imagine liquid water could ever be.
Perhaps I should have noticed first
that I was swimming alone.
I hitched a ride from that beach to LA.
in a trough of traffic that left much time to talk,
but I cannot remember now what was said.
LA was treeless streets and lots and hot sun,
and walking distances without a measure of familiarity.
I know that I never got to Hollywood.
Tired then, I got on a bus again;
watched shirtless fellows do drills
in the sun at Camp Pendleton,
while the bus waited there awhile;
and reached San Diego at last
in a dark filled night with small lights,
and no more place to it than an ocean,
and waited there for my rescue.
About this re-revolt of the philistines
We have made of ourselves a great orphanage, and all of us little Olivers, asking for more. We learn our morals from coffin makers and Fagins and only expect the worst of our fellow man.
That is the summation of the situation our situation is in. Popular culture has overwhelmed us. We are suffocating like a toy poodle in Margaret Dumont’s lap. Someone once said, if it wasn’t for popular culture we’d have no culture at all. This might be the meme for our current state of affairs. This is us. We have abandoned all else…mostly.
There is a revolt going on. If it were gauged for size and weight it would be quickly squelched, but it is there, and not just in one place, or attached to one political cell or cohort. I cannot judge its power any more than its numbers. But I certainly hope that it’s big, or else we are lost. It is the culture that supports our civilization, not just Elon Musk. And the Machine will not be patient with our necessary faults. That is, those faults we must live with or else we die. The faults that make life worth living. Without them we have no virtues.
I think I will blame Dickens first.
Dickens wrote characters, not people. This was worse in his early work, and bettered as he grew older and learned from his fellow writers, but it was a fault he never lost entirely, succumbing to the tropes of the stage in his time, and making characters into props and devices. This, and his sense of plot, made him very popular. But it was ruinous for literature in general. Because it was an easy tool, other writers copied him. The newly reading audiences presented with the cheap product off the steam presses, succumbed to the quick entertainment on the page. Teachers loved it because the plot points and characters could be conveniently used on tests. The more difficult writing of a Hugo or Balzac, or Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy, could be safely left in translation.
But Dickens cannot (even if you could) be dismissed as worthless. His plots are often terrific, and his perceptions about society very intelligent. Dickens saw early on that the reduction of the human spirit to a cog on a wheel in the industrial age, so visually captured by Charles Chaplin in Modern Times, was already felt by the working public in the mid 19th Century when most people were still farmers. But just as Dickens characters often lacked the complexity of flesh and blood, our literary judgments are too often reduced to simplicities. And this then is abetted by the sheer quantity of the printed product using modern industry. What should you read?
The Dickens character became a staple of Hollywood. It was so much easier to deal with a Fagin in under two hours running time. And the visual cues of Hollywood became advertisement for the books in the ever-larger supermarket of printed paper. But ‘popular culture’ as we understand it today, may have begun with the glazing of Charles Dickens. The torrent of imitators—a torrent is a lot, all at once, and seemingly unstoppable—resulted in a transformation of literature; and as literature was then the primary vessel of culture in general, it changed everything. The Victorian age, good and bad, was born.
And this then became the cue for ambiguity. An educated elite wanted to separate themselves from the ‘reading public.’ Sophistication required avoiding the obvious. Hiding true meaning in obscurity, so that it might survive. Some societies craved this ambiguity more than others, the Swedish and the French come to mind. Slogging through Proust felt like punishment to one adolescent and I have never been able to return to find out if I missed anything while trying to pass the test. But there again, the easier dismissal, this time for lack of plot development or defined characters, makes me the poorer. I am sure that the author did not labor that hard and consistently with nothing to say.
American fiction was plagued with Fagins. Whole genres such as mystery and science fiction grew up around them—easy to package as well as to read. In the case of mystery, noir offered the ‘sophisticated’ angle on what were essentially the same stories again and again. In England, whole villages were murdered, or so it seemed, by characters driven with the motivation of cheap mechanical toys.
Raymond Chandler and others tried to redeem the mystery genre with human complexity. Science fiction finally lost its pulp origins to writers like Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison who kept asking questions. And Hollywood realized that the questions—why more than how, and what more than who, might be used as hooks to get the public back in the seats. Reel life could transpire in ninety minutes if framed well. But I am afraid they will need an invasion of body snatchers to keep the theaters open now.
The problem is that the whole enterprise of fiction cannot be contained on one boat, even a bigger one. and reducing reading habits to genres is as counterproductive as making every character a Fagin or an Oliver.
But there is an even worse aspect to consider. What of an audience willing to spend time, for instance, reading bodice busters? The sexual motor driving romances is symptomatic of an unhealthy pornography and worth some consideration, is it not? But it is not the pornography by itself that is the matter, but the context. The standard of masculinity there alone is a psychological and social disaster.
Fifty years ago it was westerns. Bookkeepers in Queens were reading formula Westerns like candy. What aspect of that was healthy? If even one of them got in their over-priced cars and drove to Montana to work on a ranch for $30 a week plus room and board, that would have been worth it. But they stayed home and lived on the paperback page. I love westerns—as a setting, not a genre. Frederick Manfred, Elmer Kelton, and Cormac McCarthy cannot be judged in the same way as Louis L’Amour, Max Brand and Zane Grey. Meanwhile the American public happily sat on the living room couch and watched cardboard characters in gun fights that defied Western history.
The problem is—there are many problems. The motivation of the corporate publishing is bread and circuses. The Alfred and Blanch Knopf’s of the publishing world are long gone and replaced by bean counters and college business majors who look at flow charts for personal guidance. Hollywood has been absorbed by multinational corporations with no sense of human identity, making the Jack Warners and Louis B. Mayers of yesterday look like aesthetic geniuses—which they were in a perverse way.
I have not even begun a critique of music, primarily because I can’t read the stuff—but I listen. What I hear, outside of some film scoring, doesn’t inspire. Architecture is slowly overcoming the brutalism of the mid-twentieth century, but mostly by imitating the past, which is not a positive. Art, as in painting and sculpture, is trying yet to survive the bludgeon of photography, but the Wyeth family cannot carry the weight of that revolt alone and the few who persist in the old ways are much ignored by an audience numbed by what passes for realism. At least the range of drama between David Mamet and Horton Foote seem to have drawn audiences to human complexities worth considering, beyond the new racial and gender stereotypes.
But film and video appear to carry the greatest possibility for breaking the fall, even while AI and digitalization seem to have mesmerized, the technology is offering creative minds a chance to do things that were impossible beneath the deadweight of corporate and union bound Hollywood. The script writing of Taylor Sheridan offers the hope of complex characters doing interesting things outside of the cubicle, but one (me) longs for a little more humor. Where is our Preston Sturges? Our Ben Hecht? We don’t have to judge by box office now. Hasn’t that freed us or has it left us talking to an audience of one.
And none of this is curable by sudden revelation in our digital world. The bots are on it! Every hint of success will be copied ad infinitum and any taint of failure will be scrubbed before it can infect. How will we know if we succeed? In our short term on earth, we will not. But we can succumb, as a species, or we can revolt.
Grandma versus the Machine
Grandmothers are like books. They take up time and space, and they smell. They are even dusty. The wisdom of the ages is that simple and direct. This is the source of knowledge we human beings survived upon for hundreds of thousands of years before what we call ‘modern civilization’ descended upon our lives. But, everything is so much better now.
Actually, what really makes things better, are machines. The rest is questionable. And the invention of machines did not require Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler or Mao. Forget about all those wars. All that it required was a natural spirit of inquiry left free to inquire. Curiosity. But, of course, that caused a lot of mischief too.
Some have grandmothers who kept them in the house to avoid accidents, and bullies, and germs. But those grandmothers had very few great grandkids (side benefit: population reduction). Others of us had a grandmother who told us to get home before dark as she closed the door behind. And we did because her cooking was that good, if nothing else.
What Grandma said was always the truth. If facts disagreed, it was likely the facts that were wrong. We disobeyed at our own peril. Grandma (mine at least) did not have a degree in physics, but she knew about the laws of motion. Her sense of gravity was impeccable. Her degree was in common sense. Now we can just do TicToc.
My grandmother was not a saint, but she had a fair anger and a sure sense of right and wrong. When she was mistaken, it was usually because she was forced to decide before she was ready—before she could know all the facts. But then, importantly, she usually reserved judgement rather than make a wrong one.
Grandpa was not blessed with her reserve, but he was handy. And lucky. At least he married Grandma when he had the chance. But what does this all have to do with the machine? The matter is that now, much of our lives are dictated by the machine. We disobey the machine at our own peril. And several generations have come along who hardly know their grandmothers. And this, I believe, is now the problem with everything.
Such a broad brush of a statement will find little support among those who never really knew their grandmothers. This is not just a pity—it is a tragedy, for them and thence for all of mankind. And of course there are some grandfathers, or aunts or uncles, who filled in when the need arose, but grandfathers too often died in wars or were maimed by their work, and it was the grandmothers who carried the load—who passed on the wisdom of the ages (not a problem now, with fewer aunts and uncles to pick up the slack).
And too, it is the grandmothers who have always suffered most from the poor decisions of husbands and sons who failed to listen and learn. It was also their sons who died in war, or who came home deaf and blind and legless. It was often their homes that were destroyed—just collateral damage you understand. But there are not a lot of grandmothers in history who conquered other nations. Aggressive behavior is predominately a male characteristic. That is the nature of the species.
Now, there are not a lot of grandmothers in training these days. Not enough, anyway. So much better to just have a dog. Or a cat. You have college bills to pay, after all. How will you know anything if you don’t go to college? You can’t afford children. So much better to commute to an office, work in a nice clean cubicle, and sip coffee from a plastic mug. So much more fulfilling. Men do it!
The machine was made by men—for their benefit and convenience. Sure, there are some women who were inventive. (You’ll think of one if you have a moment), but the infernal device was usually made to suit the male mind for efficiency, or multiply and expand upon male strength, and this always became a numbers game. And who wants to be stuck in the kitchen anyway? It is not that canned ravioli tastes better, but that it is cheaper and easier to make. Forget the arts of cooking. It’s in the can!
Funny thing, how young adults who cannot really afford it, will go out to eat at a restaurant rather than open a package—or can—at home. Hilarious. But the machine is great! Really! Charlie Chaplin had it all wrong! We have more leisure time now—we can watch Star Wars—again. And with AI, the machines that entertain us will be even better. We have CGI. We can skip the theatre and stay at home and hook up—not with a friend but to a marvelous device. There will be so much less angst. Very cozy.
With AI, we don’t even have to drive our own cars anymore. Fewer accidents, you know. Within a generation, most people will not even know how to drive, anyway. Much safer. We can already work from home these days, with virtual meetings, and avoid the germs. Of course, AI takes the fun out of sports betting, but maybe we can even things out a bit. There is a video game for that, isn’t there? And money—hell, that’s just a blip on the screen. The worry over April 15th every year is eliminated. The ‘money’ never even really left the treasury’s pocket.
In a few years all our food will be chosen for us by the AI at the market. (It knows what you like), and then it delivers! That’s another savings on gas, and congestion. Much healthier too. The machine can help you avoid too many sweets. AI can even choose our clothes. It’s already making them anyway. You’ll never be out of fashion again! AI can do it all. Of course it can! Think about it. What can it not do? You’ll have more time to do all the things you always wanted to. With permission.
Grandma is superfluous! No unpleasant funerals to go to. We now have AI. And anyway, because we will all live in apartment cells, we won’t have grandma’s house to go to anymore. Sunday traffic will be so much better. Yeah.
On Christmas Eve I think of Santa Claus
Not some disembodied shade of a fellow, or a bloodless saint, but the guy in the ads on the back of my copies of National Geographic and The Saturday Evening Post when I was a kid—a hearty old elf, with a great white beard, suited in red with white trim, capable of stopping to enjoy a bottle of Coca Cola on his rounds and taking a moment in front of the fire to consider the pleasures of life. That was Santa Claus. All others were impostors, perhaps well-intentioned, but missing the point.
The artist, Haddon Sundblom, took his inspiration, I am told, from Clement Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which I had certainly read by then, and heard read, and knew from television depictions, all of which would have been black and white. But my Santa was not black and white. He was a full-blooded character.
I did not just believe in him. Or, at least, I don’t remember trying to believe in him. He was a natural part of my imagined world, which was as real to me as what else I knew. Arguments about the reality of Santa Claus bemused me. They were disputing the existence of someone else. Something else. And when asked if I believed in that, I knew I could safely say, no. I could not imagine such a thing as that: a spirit who circled the globe behind ‘eight tiny reindeer.’ No…But Santa. Santa was quite real to me and did not require belief.
The importance of this is in what I chose to write about, then and later.
But I never wrote about Santa Claus. This is the thought I have now on Christmas Eve, and I wonder why … And I think because, though he fit well within my known universe, he was real, and what I wrote about was not. And I knew that, too. I did not write about my parents, for instance. I think I tried, more than once, and found it uncomfortable. I had to lie in order to make them more than stick figures. The reason I wrote, from early on, was to find the truth in things.
The contradiction here is a figment of a larger misunderstanding. Somewhere in that faded past, I had already determined that I did not understand my parents, or, for that matter, most of the adult world. They were given to lies and pretense, and I did not understand why. I did not yet have any idea why they lied, and I could not imagine a purpose other than deception.
But Santa was real. He had good will toward all mankind, and his gift, which did not require a sleigh or reindeer, or even a bottle of Coke, was to spread that good will. Why was that so difficult to understand? Especially on the birthday of Christ.
‘Do you believe in God?’ was the refrain. The context. How could there be a Santa if there was no God? And I had no answer for that. Nothing glib. Mostly, I think, because God had been delivered to me on a silver platter. I was raised a Catholic. I could not imagine a God who required worship, and suffering, and agony, and death. My limited intelligence made no sense of that. But a jolly old elf dressed in red pajamas whose beard would have been out of fashion even in the wilderness, that made sense. He was a man of good will. It seemed like an appropriate thing. We needed more of that and less of the suffering and agony. Death may be necessary, along with taxes, if only to make way for new comers, and to give the foolish something to worry about. But Haddon Sundblom had captured another idea for me at an early age. And Santa did not require worship. Not even the milk and cookies.
I heard a joke retold by a friend one day and realized that this whole conundrum was somehow captured within it.
A fellow dies after a long life and finds himself before St. Peter at the pearly gates of heaven. St. Peter smiles at his arrival.
“Is this where I belong?” the fellow asks, in disbelief. “I’ve made so many mistakes. I have done so much that was wrong.”
“Yes. But you tried your best. You knew when you had failed, and you tried to do better. You did well with what you had…Now, follow me.”
And St. Peter leads him through the gates and up a leafy forest path.
“This is so beautiful! I have always loved the woods.”
“Yes. Hiking was your passion.” says St. Peter.
And along a splendid ridge of pine above a lake.
“Is this for me, too?”
“Oh, yes,” says St. Peter.
But further along, among the rocks below them, they see the writhing of naked bodies, screaming and crying in a dark pit of despair .
“But what is that?”
“Oh, that. Don’t worry. That’s just the Catholics. They wouldn’t have it any other way.”
About the Revolution
At the time this is written there is a television series being broadcast, spawned by the upcoming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. This essay does not directly concern that, or the historical aspects of those events, as relevant as they are. This essay addresses the practical necessity of an American Revolution, today, and continuing into the foreseeable future. Though it concerns our immediate lives, it will have little interest to most who might read it, for it lacks much in the way of bread and circuses, and can thus be ignored. There are rents and mortgages to cover. Taxes to pay. Food to buy. Illnesses and infirmities to attend. Importantly, there are laws to obey, or avoid. There is not enough time for anything else. A little entertainment would be welcome, but an essay on revolution is not wanted. Besides, it might be disturbing. Better to watch a good football game, or some baseball, depending on the season.
For most of the world, the very idea of revolution is a luxury. That is, the consideration of such an idea is outside the realm of practical application, and though needed, is debatable. And there is no time to debate. There are rents to cover, taxes to pay, etc. That’s the way the world works… until it doesn’t.
In its usual herky-jerky way, that is the way the world usually works. But, now it doesn’t, so ’Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” Bette Davis had that right, and much else.
‘Criminal,’ we are told, is relating to, or involving, a crime. A crime, of course, is something against the law. The ‘law’ is a custom or practice of prescribed conduct that may be enforced by a controlling authority. That is roughly what Merriam Webster says and it’s good enough for this conversation. Thus, we are all criminals because we are all breaking laws, everyday, as a matter of practical procedure, in order to live. Much of that is common sense. The necessity of keeping things going, despite the law. Well, “The law is an ass,” as Mr. Bumble said when it was suggested that the law presumed that his wife acted under his direction.
Our problem here is not a matter of misunderstanding, or “failure to communicate” as Strother Martin once said. Not wanting to spend needless and boring paragraphs defining words readily understood by most potential readers, it is always easier to resort of a common meme, such as found in the movies (even Oliver Twist has been made into a movie, several times) to elucidate.
We break the laws because there are too many of them. That is not an accident. The idea is that it gives the authorities leverage to have their way with us. We are thus screwed. And not coincidentally, that was what motivated our ancestors to cross the Atlantic on stinking ships—to get away from laws. The attempt to enforce those laws, across a difficult sea, was then the reason for the first American Revolution and the founding of ‘The Republic.’ But as I have said in an essay some years ago, the Republic is dead. All attempts to revive it are wasted due to the self-interest of people who have no real concept of the original. And the concept of ‘liberty’ inherent in that Republic will not be found in a television series made by someone who has no reason to report what goes against his own sense of self-interest.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a nation in possession of a good fortune and in danger of losing it, must be in want of a revolution.” Or so it might have been said if Jane Austen had cared to look beyond the troubled waters that surrounded her. England never produced a constitution of her presumed liberties. The prevailing interests saw to that. But our Founding Fathers (all white males we are often informed by those who think with the color of their skin) realized that a constitution was necessary to establish the Republic they were inventing. It was still a novel idea at the time.
Most importantly, by encoding the principles of governance, the constitution gave guidance to the newly established authority meant to rule a fledgling nation.
But the great failure of the document turned out not to be in enshrining mistakes, such as slavery, or the reduced status of women—those wrongs could and would be addressed in time—but in offering a means of corruption through the establishment of laws that bound the citizen to the needs of the government instead of binding the government to the needs of the citizen.
Famously, this constitution did say, plainly, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” as a means of restraining the powers of government, not the citizen, but then buried that caution in an architecture of law that was unrestrained in that age of the baroque. The ornamentation was more than a matter of a fig leaf. And like a fig tree, the stolon of prohibition upon the citizenry propagated madly.
That flaw has flourished while the natural right of the citizen to live his life unmolested by other citizens or government has since been cloaked like ugly genitalia in a church.
So, here we are then, all lawed up with no place to go.
[more, shortly]
Again reborn again
In old age we are reborn again,
Our faults shadowed in the veins beneath our skin
The bones of us that shout within and poke without
Are not the same as those that we had trusted in
To hold our weight at the thinnest edge of things
When muscle tied them all together.
That muscle too has gone away,
or loosened there within,
And the flesh we once wore with pride, or not,
Has gone to skin,
And that mottle we wear now,
But for the scars we earned, is not us,
And does not mirror what we were,
Or thought we were.
Before we were born again;
When what we once wanted to be
Before we became what we have been
Was what we were,
And suddenly we were new again,
Just as we were once remade from babes to children
And from children became our youth
And from youth became young men;
That young man was not the youth that he had been
Nor the child he barely knew
And that child was not the babe.
That youth may have been a better self,
The unsure courage there within
Still to be tested against the man to come,
Who may have failed and failed again,
Until that young man at last became us
Or what we thought we knew to be us,
Before we became the man we were,
And will never be again,
No matter the wanting,
Not buried yet, but withered,
Until we are born again
To dust and memory.