TFTD

If I exorcise my devils,

Well, my angels may leave too.

When they leave

 They're so hard to find.

— Tom Waits, "Please Call Me, Baby"

TFTD

What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning, when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.

— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

The Joys of Student Writing: Exhibit E

"I just wanted to send this email informing you that i will not be in class tonight because i got scheduled for work and i tried calling to see if some one can take my shit, but no one can take it."

MVP

My sister, Mckenzie, has been named the 4A High School Volleyball MVP of the State of Utah.

I concede that her achievement represents an advance for the family over my own Most-Improved Award at the St. Mary's College Basketball Camp when I was in third grade.

"Shame on you! . . . You can go!"

Amen.



Update 11/20: I awoke this morning still reeling from this video—and its implications for the country.

On occasion certain images present themselves that clarify where the moral authority in a particular debate lies. With that idea in mind, I resolved to write a longer note, arguing that this video gives us that kind of imagery and adding some thoughts on how the police are dressed, their casually sadistic attitude (recognizable to anyone who's interacted with contemporary American police officers), and the students' spontaneous—and wholly successful—search for the language with which to respond to authoritarian cruelty.

But before doing my own writing I read this note from James Fallows at the Atlantic. Which makes all of my points.

This video makes it clear that our choice is simple: either we acknowledge where the moral authority self-evidently lies in this debate and proceed with the changes the occupiers demand, or we permit the United States to continue on its path toward a fascist plutocracy.

I find myself braced by the dignity and moral sophistication of these students. The Occupy Movement will triumph. It is our time's Civil Rights Movement. From what I see in this video, I'm now convinced that this country will not return to the moral desolation, the systemic injustice, the gleeful selfishness that has defined America during my generation. Change has come to America.

TFTD

I cause trouble, therefore I have a soul.

— Amélie Nothomb, Hygiene and the Assassin

Bloom Springs

In this week's Sunday Times, the inimitable Harold Bloom says in one article—"Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?"—what I've been trying to say with two years of blogging.

Disgrace, by the Seattle Police Department

Photo: JOSHUA TRUJILLO / SEATTLEPI.COM

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee

Disgrace rushes – then meanders; finally, like its broken anti-hero, it anti-climaxes. The reader's task is to either resist or embrace its slow collapse. Resist it and you side with the world's optimistic innocents (secular liberals). Embrace it and you side with its despairing realists (everyone else). Regardless, the same fate—obsolescence, ugliness, disgrace—awaits.

Because for this South African novelist the modern State, which is good for little but moralizing and obfuscation, will see to it that you're denied life's fundamental pleasures. It will deny you beauty. It will deny you privacy. It will deny you the intellectual and physical capacity to construct for yourself an ethical life.

And History, which is the State's official narrative and is most succinctly embodied by your neighbors, is a rapist.

Decency—rare in Coetzee's world—manifests itself as brokenness. If you haven't been broken, you're a monster. If you have been broken, you devote your life to the welfare of animals.

In the protagonist's anti-climax we arrive at Coetzee's primary theme: disgrace, in the age of brutalism, is actually grace, and might be a road to redemption.

TFTD

Each of us is so ashamed of his own helplessness and ignorance that he considers it appropriate to communicate only what he thinks others will understand.

— Czeslaw Milosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay

Occupy Oakland

Protesters rush to help Iraq War-veteran Scott Olsen, who's just had his head fractured by a projectile fired by Oakland police while exercising his First Amendment rights to free speech and to peaceably assemble.

If what you see at :40 doesn't piss you off, I don't know why you're reading this blog.

Home Alone

Nothing of the eager laziness that defines the way they live at home. Here, they are visitors. I'm their host. I rally them to comfort. "Take off your shoes! You're home here, too." They don't bother to pretend they believe me. In their eyes: How can we be home here, if you're not?

~

I'm reading again. Four, five books a week, as if I'd returned to college.

I'm uncluttered; my mind's not only sad; I remember my dreams (literally); most days it's the little conveniences I miss, like a mitt for handling hot pans.

And again I'm sleeping on the floor, as I did when I was teaching at San Diego State; also as Amy and I did just after our wedding. I sleep well on the floor, although on account of the single-pane windows my throat aches mildly every morning.

~

What matters I keep to myself. You think I'm going to write about what matters—that I have the courage for that? Here, I evade. I digress.

~

I live around the corner from Belmont's library. I write there now, mostly, surrounded by books. Two days ago I was hurtling through a scene in my novel and a woman with Downs Syndrome sat across from me, despite the unoccupied tables around us. She leafed quickly through a fat US history book. After she'd turned through every page, she went to the shelves and picked out a new book. And again sat across from me and read, after her fashion. She breathed loudly; I could smell her breath.

For nearly an hour she flipped pages, while I attempted fiction. Sometimes she would look at me, as if hoping that I'd speak.

I wondered that I didn't gather my things and move to a different table. But I'm not that kind of man. My inability to move—or, to see it another way: my decision to stay—explains all that's wrong and all that's right with my life.

~

Not many birds. Mostly crows.

A crow's intelligence scales nicely with our own. I find that everything crows do, as I watch them, makes sense.

This morning as I pumped gas I watched one of them pecking at something in the middle of the street. Nonchalantly it walked out of the way of an oncoming car, declining to fly.

~

The night's are extraordinarily silent. More silent, somehow, than the night's in Half Moon Bay. Certainly I'm more silent—as if I were traveling through a foreign land, ignorant of its language and, as a consequence, unwilling to speak.

~

Two bedrooms. Nothing—not even love—is as expensive as optimism.

~

Tonight I won't see them in their Halloween costumes. But tomorrow night, after their grandparents have left for Michigan, they will, I hope, come for a visit. I'll make spaghetti; we'll sit on the carpet and watch a movie. They won't spend the night—they never do. Home—life—is elsewhere. They wonder about me. They ask themselves, looking at me, at my apartment: Is this what it means to be a man? Is this how a man lives?

Yes. I don't know.

Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee

INTERVIEWER
And men? What do you think interests them?

HOUELLEBECQ
Little asses. I like Coetzee. He says things brutally, too. 

— The Paris Review

I first encountered Coetzee about a decade ago, when I read Disgrace. From that experience I can tell you that Houellebecq's right: Coetzee says things brutally. More than brutally: crushingly. I wasn't prepared for his brutality—rarely in my life have I been as outraged by a book as I was by Disgrace. Indignantly I finished it, as if to prove to the author that no matter what he did, I wouldn't let him make me quit.

I'm reading Disgrace again now, having loved Summertime. This time through I'm not outraged but filled with dread, as if by reading it I were listening to my smartest, cruelest self warn me from the future, of my future.

Among the tragedies of aging: slowly coming to realize that one is capable of anything.

But about Summertime: I've had the good fortune, over the last year, as I've negotiated the long-foreseen dissolution of my life, to encounter a series of books that have all arrived, I've thought, exactly when I've needed them. The pattern began last October with The Unquiet Grave. It continues with Summertime, Coetzee's evocation of the years, during his mid-30s, when he finally became a writer. The novel takes the form of some notebook fragments and the memories of five people—four of them are women—who passed, at that time, through his life (or this fictional reconstruction of his life). The novel's conceit is ingenious: Coetzee has died, and a biographer is traversing the globe interviewing those who knew him.

True to form, Coetzee gives a brutal portrait of himself—or of his alter-ego, we'll say, if we're particular—as a reclusive, damaged man, a failure as a lover, an emotional and intellectual mediocrity.

The novel's triumph is that it replaces the portrait of the artist as young hero with a portrait of the artist as human being. In Coetzee's case we have a human being who makes art of his mediocrity. From his example we can infer that to be an artist, all you have to do is refuse to lie.

Good luck with that, Treanor.

Libertarians of the World, Unite!

Some of my most interesting friends have been—are—libertarians. Yet many of them belong to fiercely regulated communities—often a religious community. In my life, for example, most of the libertarians I know are Mormon.

And from what I can tell they see no conflict between their distrust of democratic government and their trust in the intensely authoritarian, aggressively communal religions that govern their ethical and social lives.

And maybe there is no conflict.

Regardless, this apparent paradox leads me to believe that no one is a libertarian vis-à-vis the community by which they define themselves. Our primary communities will always feature robust regulation, a hierarchical structure built to maintain the rule of law, and a fierce repudiation of individualism. For just about all of us, our fealty to the community by which we define ourselves precedes our fealty to ourselves—including those of us who call ourselves libertarian.

So it could be that the difference between conservatives and liberals in this country is not political but social: for conservatives (and for libertarians in particular) a community other than the nation is their primary community; for liberals, the nation is their primary community.

This difference explains the radically different attitude toward government that distinguishes conservatives from liberals in this country.

Conservatives experience the nation as oppressive—as another community attempting to displace their primary community. They seek to avoid that displacement by weakening the nation to the point that it no longer represents a threat to the roles played in their lives by their primary community.

Liberals, on the other hand, experience the nation as their primary community and want to strengthen it to the point that it can do what a conservative's primary community already does: function as a viable social world that provides for the safety, health, and stability that all human beings need to flourish.

TFTD

How much sadness there is in life. Still, it won't do to become depressed, one should turn to other things, and the right thing is work, but there are times when one can only find peace of mind in the realization: I, too, shall not be spared by unhappiness.

— Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to Theo, 15 September 1883

The Joys of Student Writing, Exhibit D

Q: What government agency is responsible for regulating the food industry?

A: Fast food restaurants.

TFTD

It's not the consumer's job to know what they want.

— Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, RIP

He'll be best remembered not for technological innovation but for an intense aesthetic sensibility. That sensibility shaped world commerce and product design for a generation. Jobs—who was, from what I hear, often unbearable to work with—gave us a lesson worth remembering: to draw a distinction between form and function is to court mediocrity and irrelevance—no matter what you do with your life.

In this delightful speech, he tells us to never forget that death awaits us all. Now his death has arrived. Having lived defiantly in its shadow, he'll likely—imagine—never be forgotten.

TFTD

      Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

— Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill"

The Virtues of Embarrassment

People forget that I want to disappoint. — Gabriel Orozco

I experience writing as a dance with embarrassment. Language lets me humiliate myself systematically; it lets me become the champion of my own stupidity. Through both prose and poetry—especially through poetry—I insist upon my narrowness; I drag my indignation and self-importance into the light so as to destroy it and rescue myself from the boredom of being right.

Day after day I read what I've written—which at the moment of its creation echoed "GENIUS!"—and I marvel at my theatrical cluelessness, at my ambition, my naive glee. My god, I think: the vanity! And—as if to repudiate the increasing evidence of my own pointlessness—I begin again.

So this blog serves best as a record of my stupidity. It's a record of my embarrassing search for what Richard Buckner calls the "gone ghosts that only suckers make." The Bewildered Eye is the archive of a sucker. I'm grateful for it not least because its avalanche of failures proves that I'm still alive, that I'm still willing to risk catastrophe, and, most plainly, that I still enjoy the fruits of my past embarrassments: a broken heart, a yearning for wildness, and an abiding hope that eventually, despite all, love and beauty will win the day.

Salter on Hemingway

This blog began as—and always will be—an homage to the artistry of James Salter. He's just published an admiring essay on Ernest Hemingway, which takes the form of a book review regarding a new Hemingway biography called Hemingway's Boat, by Paul Hendrickson.

Find Salter's essay, "The Finest Life You Ever Saw," here.

Is Consuming Sugar More Dangerous Than Smoking?

I've wondered at Michelle Obama's decision to focus on diet and childhood obesity as the First Lady. But after absorbing the information I've linked below, I've come to the conclusion that no single message will have a more salutary effect on the future of American life than the call to change its catastrophically unhealthy diet.

Why catastrophically unhealthy? Because sucrose—cane sugar—and fructose (especially in the form of high fructose corn syrup) might be killing more people every year than cigarette-smoking. And sugar, in whatever form, starts killing us at a much earlier age.

From the soapbox: "Is Sugar Toxic?"

And (if you have 90 minutes):



The message is simple: Sucrose and fructose are poisonous. Eliminate them, as much as you can, from your diet. Over time they're as likely to kill you as smoking. Before killing you, they'll do what they're doing to much of the country: lead to obesity, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

TFTD

Decadence was brought about by doing work too easily and being too lazy to do it well, by a surfeit of fine art and a love of the bizarre.

— Voltaire, The Princess of Babylon

Train Brain

Train north to the city. High school girl talking loudly to the boy next to her about becoming a meteorologist. Her skin translucent, her eyes green, her nose fierce ridges of cartilage.

He's in love with her. He leans into her clumsily, whitely. His white innocence is boring—a luxury.

She—her voice—trembles with frustration. He's too far behind her. Trying to talk to him she's just-about shouting.

But love has crippled him—made him stupid. He keeps leaning into her, unable to speak, to do anything interesting. He's using his soft, new body to defend himself against her intelligence. He thinks that looming over her is clever.

In Burlingame they de-board.

I'm reading Summertime, by Coetzee.

A woman in the seat across the aisle further complicates my journey by shouting into her phone.

Looking up from my book I marvel at the complexity of her ugliness. She hides the dissolution of her face with large whiteframed sunglasses. Even her voice is ugly. But she doesn't give a shit; she has urgent business—she's needed; through her phone she proves to anyone who might mistake her for her body (me) that she's not a body—a doomed, desolated body—but a voice articulating the vast, irrepressible ongoingness of the planet.

I'm not needed. I'm a curiosity—even to myself. I want this version of myself to die.

The good news is: I'm succeeding in killing him.

A night in the Mission will help.

TFTD

Poems are not made out of poetry.

-- E.M. Cioran, "Beyond the Novel"

The Joys of Student Writing: Exhibit C

"Society is full of ignorance and steroid types."

Reflections on Kid A [Chicken]

Ensoulment

Not just ideas but certain people ensoul the world, when we encounter them.

They summon us from certainty to wonder.

Ensoulment is what we mean by love.

Kid A Chicken

According to this website, chickens are being slaughtered around the world at the rate of about 1000/sec. This evening, the boys and I ate two of them.

Eric's recipe for Kid A Chicken

• Put on Kid A.
• Preheat your George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine™ to medium.
• Use organic, free range chicken breasts.
• Pepper with Jamaica Me Crazy Seasoned Pepper™.
• Salt with Jamaica Me Crazy Seasoned Sea Salt™.
• Lightly powder with Spice Islands Gourmet Blend Curry Powder™ sprinkled from a teaspoon. Rub the powder into the breasts with the back of the spoon.
• Baptize with Rose's Sweetened Lime Juice™.
• Christen with extra virgin olive oil.

Cook for ~10 minutes. Midway through grilling, lift the grill's lid and sprinkle the breasts with additional drops of olive oil. Permit the chicken to cook for ~four minutes with the lid raised. Close the lid for the final minute of grilling.

Serve hot. Explain to the children—or to whoever happens to be your captive audience—that the meat will be slightly tougher than they're used to because the chickens didn't live their entire lives inside a cage, in the dark, but were permitted to walk the earth, after their fashion, like Jules Winnfield after he returned the briefcase to Marcellus Wallace. (Children appreciate hyperbole, not least because they're rarely fooled by  it.)

At some point, turn the conversation to art. Using Kid A as Exhibit A, explain to them that over the course of their lifetimes, they'll discover that most great works of art are initially befuddling. Eventually, however, those same works will strike them as inevitable. Indeed (they'll exchange smiles when you use the word "indeed") the transition from befuddling to inevitable is the means by which we recognize a great work of art.

Don't neglect to be grateful for their gratitude, for their company, for the chicken, for the searching generosity of artists everywhere, and for Labor Day, which at some level makes all of this possible.

TFTD

The world of literature: a sort of Club Med cunningly disguised as a swamp, a desert, a working-class suburb, or a novel-as-mirror reflecting itself.

— Roberto Bolaño, "The Myths of Cthulhu"

I Do My Part

With the boys I wandered Borders' carcass in Palo Alto this afternoon. Most of the bookshelves were bare, although, curiously, the Romance section appeared to be over-stacked; the Crime section, too. Philosophy was gutted. There were no children's books left. I couldn't find Poetry.

At 70% off I bought:

• Hygiene and the Assassin, by Amélie Nothomb
• The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds
• One More Story: Thirteen Stories in the Time-Honored Mode, by Ingo Schulze
• Mourning Diary, by Roland Barthes 
• The Insufferable Guacho, by Roberto Bolaño
• Remainder, by Tom McCarthy

Reviews forthcoming, perhaps, weeks, months, years from now.

TFTD

Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

— Staretz Silouan

Half Moon Bay

1

The lethargic fog. Gulls on the streetlamps. The low hills, spotted by eucalyptus; the sweet air. Somewhere: my sons.

2

Ten, fifteen couples, here and there, making love, in damp rooms, sad blankets kicked to the floor.

3

Raccoons sleep in the drain pipes. From a wet power line a hawk contemplates the crushed fields. Abruptly, a boy, maybe Mexican, crosses the highway, running. The hawk's head flicks.

4

The slow, bored, cold tourists. The town is uglier than they'd expected. Realer.

5

The girls all have long hair. As if I've returned to Chile.

6

Behind me, a little boy presses his face against the Peet's Coffee window. I turn to him and he smiles, showing his gums, his tiny teeth.

7

All the bars. I remember my contentment at being a local; joyously I over-tipped. My friends always greeted me with what I took to be genuine warmth. At the end of the night I'd drive home drunk, cautiously.

8

The nights warmer than the days. The low drone of the foghorn echoing around Pillar Point and down the coastline's long crescent.

9

On Highway 1: a lone siren. Its mournful fading. Another siren soon filling the silence.

10

We stood under the front yard's only tree, weeping. The bougainvillea raged pinkly.

11

The orange haze of the nurseries' lights dulling, dimming the stars.

12

Autumn. The sunlight, fields of pumpkins, hay mazes, crows. The shortening days' glitter.

13

I am despised.

14

One afternoon I happened upon a pig browsing my neighborhood. Brown, hairy—it dismissed my presence as I'd dismiss a small dog. After a while it wandered into the hills. A couple of county sheriffs followed its tracks and shot it. Sitting at my desk—this was a couple of years ago, when I still lived there—I heard their rifles crack. Some Mexicans brought its carcass out of the trees and heaved it into the back of their truck.

15

The ocean rattles the sand. Plovers scuttle along the foam, pecking the water for crabs.

16

Main Street's long, clean sidewalks, its small shops, all but the restaurants—and perhaps even the restaurants—selling nostalgia. I'm too poor for them, thank god.

17

Fishing boats sway in the harbor; the fishermen, high on meth, their beards oxidized by salt, drink toward sleep. Their wet eyes shine bluely.

18

Two very young Mexican girls wait with babies for a break in the traffic. They hold onto strollers hanging with groceries.

19

Dead salmon silver the pier's oil-stained wood. Chinese couples from San Francisco, the men holding fat wallets, projecting an air of profound dissatisfaction with all but themselves, wait by the scales. In the distance: a fishing boat's generator. On the other side of the jetty, looking like seals, the surfers drift, talking.

20

The yellow house, its blue bookshelf, its books, its orange kitchen, its woman, its boys.  The morning's busyness; the backyard's redwood fence wet with dew.  Shoots of new calla lilies show along the edge of the patio.  Soon there will be hundreds of them, waist-high, opening their white faces to the winter sun.

21

The grass is still thin where Maggie, now dead for nearly a year, had circled it, searching for field mice.

22

Day after day I visit home.

Memoirs of a Coward

The empathetic introspection of the novel has given way to the auto-erotic exhibitionism of the memoir.

I suppose it's a sign of the times. History has defeated poetry; the novel—like love—has lost its war with the pornography of facts; we stand without songs in Plato's Republic.

Fair enough: to the project of gutting the western imagination I add my own vanity project, written in 1999—it's been lightly revised over the years—and now self-published at Smashwords.

It's also available through Amazon. Buying it through Smashwords, however, lets you access the book in a wide variety of formats, including those used by the Kindle, the iPad, the Nook, the Kobo, and just about any home computer.

Cost: $2.99 + 2-3 hours of your time.

Blood on the Polycarbonate

I've nearly finished putting my entire CD collection on the computer, in preparation for the iCloud storm.

A curious experience, going through my music: dozens of the discs I don't remember buying; dozens of others mark the various strategies I've used to both reinvent and recover myself—which is a long way of saying that they mark the highlights of my life. The sight of some of them made my heart ache: old Springsteen, Van Morrison and Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Radiohead, and Billie Holliday. Tom Waits. Dusty Springfield and Sparklehorse. A few others. To be honest, remembering the names now makes me tired and somehow desperately glad I'm alive.

The two individual songwriters of my generation who have meant the most to me over the last fifteen years are probably Richard Buckner and Elliott Smith. My love for their art—this is now clear—will be permanent, maybe because they're both from the West Coast; maybe because their songs are, for the most part, really fucking sad—hopefully, exquisitely sad; certainly because they're men; finally, because I'm drawn toward the way that their music is diffident yet audaciously beautiful.

Smith's music now rises from the grave, which intensifies its sadness—and my gratitude. He left us something, after all: he honored his unsurpassed gift for melody for more than a decade; his songwriting was incredibly generous; and then he put a knife in his chest. And none of that adds up, yet it does, and there's nothing to be done about it but be grateful that when he made music he never, as far as I can tell, lied.

Buckner's new album, Our Blood, came out a couple of weeks ago, on my birthday. Belatedly I gave it to myself. I saw recently, on some website that I can't be bothered to find again, that he's spent the last few years in upstate New York holding up signs for some construction company. During off hours, he made Our Blood, another fantastic album.

In an essay on Nicanor Parra, Roberto Bolaño says, "First requirement of a masterpiece: to pass unnoticed." Relatively speaking, Buckner's work has met that requirement. Were it not for Good Will Hunting, it's likely that Smith's would have, too; and even with "Miss Misery," Smith was never famous, really: I saw him with a couple of hundred people in Salt Lake City at the height of his popularity.

Anyway, talk of fame is beside the point. Richard Buckner and Elliott Smith consolidate how life feels to me—really feels, without adornment—into that three-minute marvel called the American popular song.

Here's Buckner doing one of my favorite songs: "Once." As of today—try not to marvel at this—the video of his performance has received 449 viewings.

TFTD

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

— Henry David Thoreau

Ad Honorem (2)

          From you I learned to be a believer.
          Right now I'm sitting in a mall café surrounded by concrete walls lit blandly by the skylights above my head —
          — An old woman who has lost her hair walking past with a grocery bag suspended from her arm —
          — A young lady with intelligent eyes selling mattresses on the mall walkway to my left —
          — Two men in their fifties speaking English over a flattened stack of architectural drawings.
          We're all easy targets. I prefer everything to anything’s demise. The consequences of extinction are astonishing. Who knows what I don’t know we need?
          A young man talks on the mall’s public telephone. His girlfriend pushes on the mattress three steps from him and looks at him and smiles privately and raises her eyebrows. He laughs into the phone and stops talking to kiss her openly on the mouth.
          Coal-eyed little girl drops her balloon down the stairs, and calls out, pointing while she looks over her shoulder, —¡Mami, globo!
          Always behind us that undiminished continent upon which we've constructed the nation of our lives, motherhood.
          Thank you, too, for that choice. I think it worked out much better than not. All of us —me, especially— must allow that your marriage to my mother was not a failure. It is finished yet continuous. You did beautifully! You succeeded; now you succeed anew.
          That is your achievement: your mistakes aren’t so special; but your triumphs, your successes, have been, are.

Reviews in Brief

Cowboys vs. Aliens

"Why so serious?" —The Joker

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Q: "Are we the apes, or are we the humans?"

A: "Right now we're the humans. But hopefully we'll become the apes."

Born Again

The primary task of creative literature is to rejuvenate our problems. —Witold Gombrowicz

Because we're as old as our problems. And the secret to life isn't found in solving its problems—they're too numerous, too befuddling—but in keeping them new.

So the history of literature is a history of  revisions. Poems, novels: modified advances upon the unsolved mysteries of love and desire, of violence and community and selfhood, of predation and surrender, of language, beauty, humor, and the silence of God.

Each fresh advance rejuvenates the spirit—the mind, the self, whatever—as the comings and goings of each plant and each animal rejuvenate nature.

The Little Conqueror

It must mean something, this capacity to continue to feel life as I've felt it since adolescence.

Certain sensations abide, uncontaminated by nostalgia, exhaustion, or wisdom. By way of their persistence, I continue to recognize myself; I cohere.

Memory, when it's not entirely an act of the imagination—when, in other words, it's at least a little bit accurate—requires no effort and gives meaning to the sensation of my continuity.

Without effort I remember my roommates playing Nevermind over and over, day after day, at BYU: I remember the sensation of walking into my apartment, into a song, and sitting with my cheap lunch at our kitchen table and listening.

So this new song feels like college:



Which is another way of saying that it feels like me, right now, continuing.

The intransigence of hope might be one of the more important lessons that I took from college. Other people learn about it elsewhere; a lot of people have learned about it from rock 'n' roll.

TFTD

He dreaded the idea of being shot down alone . . . without a girl to scream out his name.

— Badlands

Checkmate 2: The Sequel

On December 7, 2010, I wrote a short post called "Checkmate," celebrating Obama's tactical victory over Republicans following the end-or-extend-the-Bush-Tax-Cuts debate. (Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer made the same point three days later.) My post ended with the (optimistic) prediction that most of Obama's supporters would eventually realize what he had done, and, as a consequence, he would be re-elected in 2012.

Now Washington has just played another, far more serious game of chicken, and the conventional wisdom seems to be that Obama caved in. (Today's column by Paul Krugman succinctly articulates that view.)

But, once again, that view is wrong. Of course liberals will spend some time—maybe too much time—wringing their hands about Obama's "weak leadership," but in truth Obama has extracted a momentous victory from Republicans: he has begun the process of dismantling the military-industrial complex.

That dismantling is long overdue. The military-industrial complex represents the most serious single threat to the health of the republic—far more serious than low tax rates on the rich or painful (and counter-productive) cuts to social services.

A neighbor of mine—by which I mean that he also lives in Sunnyvale—summarizes my point in his comment to Krugman's column:

Obama's negotiations have gotten: 

1. The extension of unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 99 weeks.
2. A 2% cut in payroll taxes to stimulate the economy.
3. Extension of the Bush tax cut for those who make less than $250K.
4. Passage of the START treaty with Russia.
5. No government shutdown, and no government default.
6. $900 billion in defense spending reductions. 

In return, the Republicans got an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy that will expire in two years, and about $200 billion a year in discretionary spending cuts [beginning, for the most part, in 2013].  

The Republicans would never have agreed to items 1 to 6 except possibly the payroll tax cut. Obama has mitigated the disaster not caused them. And the Republicans have sustained devastating political damage for modest fiscal gains.

I'm delighted that Congress has just agreed to massive cuts to defense. Of course I don't like the collateral costs. (Republican commentator David Frum nicely summarizes the dangers of contemporary Republican thinking.) But Obama hasn't merely acquiesced to the Tea Party. He's extracted meaningful, long-term changes to the fundamental structure of American life. In time, I hope we'll see this weekend as the beginning of the end of the American Empire—not because we almost stopped paying our bills, but because we finally stopped giving the Pentagon a blank check.

Update: an article in today's New York Times extends this point.

Update: The push-back begins.

Menlo Park

I was leaf struck
by sunlight. I remember
the sensation of my greenness—
making greenness of the regaling breeze.
It wasn't a mistake to see myself
as indistinguishable from rain.

I often rained.
That hasn't changed.

And the ducks and drakes, skittering across
the mirroring pond, destined:

I was drake and pond; I was sunlight
on silver water. I was homelessness;
I was a dove cooing in the library's eaves;
a dove's rustling was my heart,
in the shadow of the eaves.

I was the hawk's avarice, defeated
by my opalescence, my cowardice.
But on certain afternoons I was rain
greening a leaf, a breeze carrying
the dove's low cooing. I was

Memory and disbelief, and delight greened
The cemetery stones in Menlo Park.

TFTD

The future will be better tomorrow.

— Dan Quayle

Ad Honorem (1)

For my dad's 60th birthday, I wrote a small chapbook, of sorts, and sent it to him from Costa Rica.  As he nears 70, I'm going to re-post some of its content, in his honor:

Of course, there is the struggle for existence in everything, and there is no other principle, everybody knows that, but still . . .

You live there, in Dostoevsky’s “but still . . .” In his ellipsis.

Around us the much discussed horror. The heavens’ silence & the mediocrity of its prophets. The dollar-lost. The harvests, in short, season after season, of grief. Nature strange with beauty. Rather like an eccentric philanthropist distributing riches as if intent upon a taunting inscrutability.

To live successfully requires a measure of violence. You hit a man in the face when you thought he’d endangered your child.

But still . . .

Along the top of our backyard wall a short gleaming coil of razor wire. Through the wire a tree covered with bright orange blossoms. Slowly the tree is losing its leaves; in a week or two I will write: Only the blossoms remain.

We know the score, right —to live!— but still . . .

Digressions on the Path to Bewilderment

We're silent to the degree that we're in despair. So I've been pretty silent about politics lately—maybe not just about politics—watching Obama follow the Tea Party into the abyss of "government austerity."

In short, it's become clear that Obama represents the concerns of Goldman Sachs at least as emphatically as George Bush did; and at some level he's more dangerous because he enjoys the camouflage of the Democratic Party.

That travesty aside: Ultimately, I'm trying to decide if I'm a Platonist.

Is it true that someone must be the boss? Must society design itself around that principle?

If it is true—and needless to say that's the current position of both Democrats and Republicans—then I suppose I prefer the tyranny of the welfare state to the tyranny of Goldman Sachs. At least the welfare state serves more than 1% of the population. I'll take the elitist Barack Obama and his ethics of compassion to the elitist Ayn Rand and her virtue of selfishness.

All of this is another way of asking: Can no one rule?

The call for small government pre-supposes that if we limit government's power, liberty fills the void. Plato says otherwise: Goldman Sachs will fill the void, or some other multinational corporation, or—prout Ayn Rand—John Galt, triumphant.

I do know that a fundamental problem with the ethics of compassion—perhaps its fatal flaw—is that people resent help. They'll take it, but they won't appreciate it, ever. To their credit.

Anyway, here are a couple of things worth reading, both of which can be held responsible, to some degree, for my current bewilderment:

• "Why I Am Not a Conservative," by the hero of the tea partiers—and more famously the author of The Road to Serfdom—Friedrich von Hayek.

• "The Euthanasia of Industry," by Michael Hudson, the author of Super-Imperialism and "The New Road to Serfdom: An Illustrated Guide to the Coming Real Estate Collapse," an article published in Harper's in 2006 that correctly predicted the 2008 recession.

John Wooden Refutes Ayn Rand

"The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team."

The Starbucks Girl Gave Me My Tea with a Smile

The next morning he was discovered dead in his bed, and the coroner's verdict was — "Death by the visitation of God."
                    — Edgar Allen Poe, "The Imp of the Perverse"

Which might explain what Freud meant when he said that we all want to die. God is Love, after all—a forest naiad tending the fountain of youth. Dying for love retains its lyrical dignity, even in this least lyrical of epochs. So put that on a Starbucks t-shirt: Love is death by the visitation of God. She can wear it with her Dickies and Converse. "'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished."

Or God is the Law, his most successful uniform no longer the priest's frock but the cop's carapace of polyethylene and polyester. A .357 Magnum has replaced the scythe, which replaced the Olympian lightning bolt; the boom is different—smaller, less theatrical—but the outcome no less dire.

Always around love and the law one senses the scent of the divine. But we don't need a scent to know when God has paid a visit. The corpses are proof enough.

TFTD

There's no sense in a man picking out the worst name he can find for everything.

— Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

Churn

The word churn was made

for the sea. If words can be said
to be made. I suppose by a churning
of their own they coalesce; soon, life

becomes unthinkable without
where they lead.

What I mean to say is
I have never felt so summoned. Distantly,

Mavericks, where men come
for fame, has been transformed
into banks of foam

blowing across pools of stone.

TFTD

No one asks Balzac to be Stendhal. All anyone asks of Balzac is that he be God.

— Roberto Bolaño, "Notes on Jaime Bayly"

"Slow Learner"

A couple of weeks ago, while cleaning out my desk drawer, I found a stack of old Zip disks. I recalled seeing a dusty Zip Drive in a drawer at my office, so I grabbed them. This afternoon I went through those disks for the first time in over a decade.

Among them, a disk labelled Eric's Files. On Eric's Files, a folder called "Old Writings." In "Old Writings," a subfolder called "Old Work." Within "Old Work," a subfolder called "Slow Learner"—a title I no doubt stole from Pynchon. Within "Slow Learner": six stories I don't remember writing.

So we got a torrential rainstorm today—something that at this time of year in the South Bay simply does not happen—and I spent the afternoon reading stories that I wrote over a decade ago yet absolutely do not remember.

In addition to the "Slow Learner" stories, I've found at least eight year's worth of writing that I thought gone forever, including basically all the fiction and every essay I wrote as both an undergraduate and a graduate student.

My vertigo was exacerbated by a folder of old photographs on the same disk, among them, a picture with Lincoln when he was seven years old:

For grins, here's the first story in that "Slow Learner" subfolder, written, I'm guessing, some time in the early '90s:

Fall

          Rhoda fell down the exit stairs. You need to be more religious, he said.
          You’re the man who tries to help, she said. I’ve seen your type.
    His name was Story. He waved at a car that thought to stop.
    She said, When I was nine I fell off the monkey bars—
    And I was the one who made fun.
    I was dropped on my head as an infant.
    He held out his hand. My guess is you’re almost finished.
    She took his hand and stood up with a flourish. She said, When I was fourteen a man kicked me in the face with steel-toed boots.
    This stopped his wit.
    She rubbed her palm against her pants. When he reached down, she said, it was to take off my shirt.

    What’s that noise? Story asked. He took the poker from the fire and with it above his head he roared at the open room.
    Rhoda opened her eyes. Got any hot bread?
    I have a learning disorder, he said. Sleep sneaks in—
    I really have a headache.
    A splitting headache, he said.
    She waved finger. My headaches don’t split.
    I do, he said.
    She looked at the fire. After a while she said, Let me think for a second.

    When she called he was on the couch. He said, The moss grows greener—
    I know, she said. I’m sorry. The bear on her floor showed teeth.
    He said, I have a horse, you’re stuck, your shoes have holes—
    The last guy I asked for a glass of water collapsed like a corpse on the porch. You lifted me up, Story. She tapped the phone with her finger. I keep telling myself, That fellow lifted me up. 

    Rhoda was with Deirdre at the bar. He’s from Brazil, she said. She pointed at a waiter. 

    There was broken popcorn on the crushed-felt floor.
    The waiter came up and Deirdre’s eyes glazed over. After he left Deirdre said, They wear those hats and those frocks the colors of kid’s cereal.
    A girl danced under two blue lights.
    Rhoda nodded and Deirdre handed her another cigarette. Rhoda said, Is the grass always greener?
    Do I look like an expert? Deirdre pointed at the talent. Ask her.
    That’s what he told me, Rhoda said. He said ‘moss,’ though. And he said he has a horse.
    There’s a caption.
    He said lots of things, but that about the horse was what caught me. I thought, That’s a great line for after sex.

    Rhoda read the sign. Recycled Cans Only.
    I want to go to Europe, too, Story said. Hear some Frenchy say, ‘You are an ugly American.’ Or whatever they say over there.
    Se la vie, Rhoda said. Or, ‘Americans are very fat. Don’t you worry about your health?’ Or, ‘Psychoanthropomanic reoccurrence stemming from a history of sublimated violence.’
    Story said, That’s not French. That’s TV.
    Rhoda looked passed him. You were the best drunk ever, Story. You didn’t have drunk-type endurance.
    He nodded and tossed his book in bar. Everyday I watch the news, he said. ‘When the lights went out he pulled a gun.’ ‘Enflamed hearts, broken minds.’
    I lost my last newspaper, Rhoda said.
    To live life that way. Put down the weapons—
    The fear—
    He traced the fall of her palm.
    Oh, love, love, she said. I can’t stop reading that sign.

Common Sense Gets the Death Penalty

Setting aside the morally intolerable possibility of the State executing an innocent citizen, here is yet another reason to object to the death penalty: it costs way too freakin' much.

Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then, according to a comprehensive analysis of the death penalty's costs.

Choke on that, California.

America's most important contribution to the history of moral philosophy is pragmatism. I suspect I'm not alone in yearning for its return to American political life.

Sam Hearts Pink Pop

The English 1B Book Club, Summer 2011

This summer's theme: "Crime: What, How, Why?"

We'll focus on noir. Our books:

The Gold-Bug and Other Tales, by Edgar Allan Poe
Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett
Dirty Snow, by Georges Simenon
Fatale, by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Buried Child, by Sam Shepard
Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño

Poetry by Sylvia Plath.

Some movies, likely including The Asphalt Jungle (its final scenes, at least, and the Marilyn Monroe scenes), Badlands, and L.A.Confidential.

Also, I'm going to give the students the option of playing L.A. Noire and writing about the game as an artistic experience vis-à-vis our readings. I haven't played it but hope to, despite the fact that it's been years since I've picked up a game controller in earnest.

TFTD

There are no old women.

— Vincent Van Gogh

The End of the World

As a boy, summer Sundays, I lived on apricots, plucking them from my grandmother's backyard tree. I remember their skin's light down and their unpredictable little squirts of sweet juice—so tender they'd fall apart sometimes in my hand—and spitting the seeds casually into the weeds. I would eat them over the course of a day by the fistful.

So this morning I gave my son Zachary his first apricot—incomprehensible but true.

At least I think it was an apricot. It was advertised as an apricot. It was hairless, a dull yellow, and as firm as an unripe peach.

He took a bite, chewed for a moment, looked up at me and said: "It tastes like an apple."

The Possibility of an Island, by Michel Houellebecq

I bought this book when it came out but failed to make it beyond page 50. I had no desire to read the diary of the protagonist's 24th clone.

But after reading Public Enemies and teaching Platform this winter—after, in short, imagining myself to be an expert on Houellebecq—I picked it up again and this time read it in short order, rapt.

At the center of the novel is Houellebecq's alter-ego: a famous comic, Daniel, who has arrived at middle-age, lost his interest in the people around him, and set about surviving on sex and alcohol. As in Platform, mere survival is interrupted by the arrival of a young woman, Esther, who restores him to life. But his young love is promptly taken from him—but not by Islamic terrorists, as in Platform, but by the vapid pleasures of Western Civ. (drugs, casual sex, dreams of celebrity).

By linking capitalist hedonism with religious fundamentalism in this way—arguing that they're essentially two sides of the same coin (standing, both of them, in the way of love)—The Possibility of an Island clarifies the source of Houellebecq's hatred for contemporary life:

To increase desires to an unbearable level while making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.

I admit that I find ridiculous statements like these exciting. So I found the book exciting. Schizophrenic moral outrage drives the narrative: on the one hand, the book is nostalgically conservative, yearning for a time when love meant something, when people had souls; on the other hand, it delights in modern libertinism, in the availability of beautiful girls who bounce into one's bed now and then to casually rescue one from despair. The kids are unleashed, and, my god, isn't it lovely?

But Houellebecq's aware of his schizophrenia: the schizophrenia is the point. He spends some time narrating the rise of a minor California cult that will, we learn, eventually conquer the world. At times it seems pretty clear that his heart's not in all the tedious storytelling. He's at his best—in some respects he's our most interesting working writer—when he's outraged, sparing no one, including himself:

If you attack the world with sufficient violence, it ends up spitting its filthy lucre back at you; but never, never will it give back joy.

The Tree of Life

Cyril Connolly's masterpiece, The Unquiet Grave, opens with bracing audacity:

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

I don't know if Terrence Malick has read The Unquiet Grave, but I say with confidence that Malick thinks the same of filmmaking: if you're not out to make a masterpiece, why bother?

And he's made at least two masterpieces: Badlands, which is as good as just about anything, and The Thin Red Line, which finished in a dead heat with Pulp Fiction and Kieślowski's Three Colors Trilogy ("Blue," "White," "Red") as my favorite films of the '90s.

Now comes The Tree of Life. It shames any film I've seen in the theater since The Bad Lieutenant. Malick beautifully evokes the beauty and terror of childhood as we experience it in memory. In the process, he takes on life's most excruciating question: How does one come to grips with the death of a child?

The film is an homage to brotherly love, to the beauty of boys, to the imprecisions of parenting, to the failures—mostly private—of adult life; and to the formal possibilities of cinema, our era's preeminent art-form.

I'm happy to report that Malick is either tired of plot or—perhaps more admirably—distrustful of it. Instead, he trusts images—which is another way of saying he trusts his audience.

And I trust him. That's not something I can say of many contemporary artists. He has the courage to risk feeling. Odd, isn't it, how rare that's become?

God-talk

I have the impression—the product of ashes—
That I speak with the voice of God.
A consequence, too, of a lot of God-talk
When I was a kid—listening to my father,

For instance, pray in Spanish:
The tongue's mallet transformed into kisses.

God in Spanish is made of Ss—
The serpent in the tree, summoning us
To suffering. Awaited

The sequoia, the sea otter,
The succulent oyster. Cunnilingus.
Buenos Aires and Concepción.
Salt Lake City. Menlo Park.
A morning dove glimmered in late April dew.
I withdrew my hand and she flew.

To my left, the Monterey cypresses
Scatter the wind. The foghorn continues
Its cloud-muffled blaring. I can no longer
Distinguish myself from the suffocating
Eucalyptus, the yellow-eyed starling,
The paused cow. In El Granada,
The Tree of Life, it turns out, is a weed.

Now to the pain of love
I add the shame of ending it.

The Me Party Platform

All that I've achieved, I've achieved alone—including my ability to write these lines. To tax my achievements is theft.

"Women's health" is a euphemism for slaughtering children.

Good government programs should be referred to as "my _________," as in: "Don't touch my Medicare!" or "Hands off my Social Security!" Everything else is welfare, destroys the moral backbone of the nation, and should be eliminated. If I can't call it mine, it shouldn't exist.

When in doubt, incarcerate.

If we must choose between privatizing schools and privatizing prisons, do both.

"The arts" is a euphemism for what gays do to each other.

Sex should only happen between a married man and woman or between an adult citizen and the flag.

Any drug that I don't use, or that I haven't used since college, or that wasn't produced by a multinational corporation, should be illegal.

Spare no expense when invading other countries. A truly great country invades another country regularly—at least once per president. As with men in general, a strong president invades; a weak president withdraws.

I am a well-regulated militia.

If you don't understand any of this, you're in a tax-induced coma. The best antidote for that coma is a corporate news channel. News agencies owned by billionaires reliably speak truth to power.

Jesus is the founding member of the Me Party.

The Conquered Reader

During my early youth there were the books I tried, over and over, with no success, to read: Being and Nothingness (odd that Sartre comes first to mind), Atlas Shrugged, and Brave New World; anything by George Eliot; The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden; Great Expectations; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; anything by Herman Wouk; Watership Down; the James Herriot books; Your Erroneous Zones; Born Free; Carlos Castaneda; The Day of the Jackal and The Eagle Has Landed; I'm OK—You're OK; The Silmarillion; For Whom the Bell Tolls.

As if to honor that failure I have yet to read any of them. (Contemplating another run at Being and Nothingness makes me shudder. I must have started that book fifteen times.)

Most were my dad's books, left lying around, after he, too, in all likelihood, had set them aside.

Now it's the case that I fail to finish most books. After a few pages, I think: Yeah, I get the idea. Awash in stories, after all these years, the thought of reading now makes me tired.

Yet I still haven't found something better to do.

Reno, Continued

X-Men

Magneto is right to wear a brain-cap. If some guy—a professor, in particular—is rolling around (literally) controlling our brains, I can assure you: brain-caps would be as ubiquitous as baseball hats at a NASCAR race.

Really, the politics of X-Men is a complete clusterfuck, but the film plays nicely into the present American fantasies that 1) our hopes for survival reside in superheroes; and 2) that we tolerate difference.

So:


AN OPEN LETTER TO THE AMERICAN FILM-GOER

June 9, 2011

Dear American film-goer:

There are no superheroes.

Difference terrifies. Terror is the source of its appeal.

Sincerely,

Eric Treanor

Beyond that: thank you, Michael Fassbender, for bringing gravitas to being correct.

Matthew Vaughn: Prostitutes sell a feel-good message. Please get back to making satire like Kick-Ass, which was the iciest indictment of contemporary American dream-life since American Beauty. I’ve said something along these lines before: the truth is usually cruel.

Sometimes

We paint the red door.

Mother won't shut up.

The starling banishes the hawk.

The heart declines to blush.

God is not insufficient.

Night outlasts the gardenia.

New Orleans explains it.

Winning is sad.

A lone oak neutralizes the landscape.

The offered flower is not a metaphor.

I miss the dove.

"Which reality?"

Scattered pearls from Enrique Vila-Matas in this short interview regarding his book Never Any End to Paris, which has just been reprinted by New Directions.

TFTD

A Wounded Crow

I'm a boy in Chalmers, Indiana, in my neighbor's tree-house, looking across cornfields at an approaching storm. As I watching, a phalanx of black clouds begins to turn upon itself. The rain, no longer falling, circulates. A tearing sky howls.

Abruptly, the horizon disappears behind a rising wall of earth. With a roar, storm is consuming the world.

~

The Greek gods didn't reflect the Law but the world's wildness. Nature, to the Greek eye, literally embodied the Divine; to be divine was, fundamentally, to be wild.

In response to the mystery of wildness, Greek art invented tragedy and comedy, which turned wildness into an aesthetic principle. Through the alchemy of poetry, wildness became fate—which is to say: it became beautiful.

Surrounded, then, by beautiful gods, humanity occupied a place within the world that was, for many centuries, both dignified and jocular.

~

Over time, however, nature's gods disappeared, driven away—humiliated—by the One God of the Book. Nature no longer embodied divinity but was subject to it. Man (who invents and then mimics his saviors) was not longer natural—no longer wild—but master of nature and servant of God. The purpose of life was not to live beautifully but to live obediently, productively: to save oneself, in other words, from wildness.

The world's transition from a pantheon of wild gods to a single, law-giving God made possible the triumph of metaphysics and the emergence of civilized life, with its hopefulness, its (relative) tranquility, its quests for meaning, its devotion to abstractions. Of course all these ambitions, before the infinite silence of the stars, are absurd: the universe does not hope, or quest, or sprout seeds of goodness. The only invention that could disguise the absurdity of ideas was an even greater absurdity: the omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful Father of monotheism. God justifies the absurdity of hope (for example) by rendering all existence absurd. God's absurdity displaced Zeus's wildness and made possible the majesty of history.

~

To use the word "absurd"—to call, for instance, the God of the Bible "absurd"—seems like a provocation. But I mean it as a tribute. Absurdity is, after all, the only conceivable response to wildness. Faced with nature's intractable, incontrovertible, non-negotiable wildness, we build the Great Wall of the Absurd, which is every bit as intractable, incontrovertible, and non-negotiable. By this means we survive. Thanks, for instance, to the absurdity of a crucified God, we acquire the immortality that the Greeks once acquired through song.

In this regard, absurdity is compassionate. Absurdity repudiates the amoral, raging, mute cruelty of the natural world with the moral, communicative, attentive compassion of God.

~

Death, not wildness, made God necessary. Death is neither absurd nor wild; it has no value; it abides beyond language, beyond sense. Against its awesome valuelessness both wildness and absurdity come into relief. Death proves that existence is real.

Death is to life what the zero is to mathematics. By standing outside of mathematics, the zero makes mathematics possible. Death does the same for life.

~

If you appreciate justice, equality, hope, compassion, pity, order, the idea of evil—in short, if you are a meta-physician—then you are a disciple of the absurd. Absurdity is humanity's great triumph, its highest invention.

But it's human, all too human, and despite its momentous consolations, absurdity does not attract us. We find it repellent. We appreciate its significance; we depend upon its stability to counter the world's ongoing wildness; but fundamentally we do not desire it. We desire wildness.

Thoreau understood the essence of desire when he wrote, "In literature, it is only the wild that attracts us."

What's true of literature is true of everything. Only wildness attracts, ever.

Thoreau is properly understood as the father of modern environmentalism; "Walking" is the modern era's first yearning for the wild gods' return to the world.

~

The God of the Book has never truly been worshiped. Monotheism requires violent coercion because it demands that we desire the undesirable, that we worship the absurd. An executed God asks us to sacrifice what we most love—wildness—in order to live forever.

As we approach death—real, valueless death—this sacrifice appears to make sense. In this regard, monotheism is the revenge of death upon life.

~

Now, after 2000 years, we are crushed by the Law. We're tired of monotheism's coercions. We're tired of the tamed world's ugliness. We miss the gods—with Thoreau, we yearn for their wildness. We want god-embodying nature back.

Kafka saw this yearning before anyone else: Absurdity, once our Great Wall, has become our prison. Absurdity's immortality is no longer worth its cost; immortality without wildness isn't salvation but murder.

~

Yesterday, driving along Homestead Ave in Sunnyvale, I saw a wounded crow bouncing its way across the road. It could no longer fly. Two cars passed over it without killing it. Flailing its wings, it hopped up onto the sidewalk and into the grass. Quickly it disappeared into some bushes under a tree.

Again, Thoreau: "In Wildness is the preservation of the world."

The best way to summon the gods back to the world is to love what embodies them. A worshipful attitude toward our planet must be, upon pain of extinction, the essence of our religious lives.

Yes, absurdity rescued us from the banality of death. But we now must rescue ourselves from our rescuer, replacing the good with the beautiful, the law with a song.

TFTD

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

— Albert Camus

Reno

I'm off to Reno this weekend with the boys, for Sam's AAU basketball tournament. Be hard to name something I'd rather do—the way that kid moves—despite the catastrophe of traffic we'll face leaving the Bay Area.

I mentioned the trip to my creative writing class yesterday. I said, "Doesn't the idea of Reno make you want to write?"

Bruce knows something about writing, and he gave us our final story, before we said goodbye.

TFTD

I feel sorry for you, monsieur, that you are so easily happy.

— Charles Baudelaire

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

Over this longest-of-all weekends, I re-read the novel that changed my life back in high school—the novel that made me want to be a writer. And I stand by my younger judgment: it's a perfect book.

All great books get better with each re-reading. More than ever I was enthralled by the novel's form, the rhythm of its prose, its imagery and its courage. Effortlessly—yet ruthlessly—Heart of Darkness addresses life's fundamental questions. Proceeding through it, I often stopped and thought, I can't believe how good this is. It's as good as anything; it's one of the great works in world literature.

And because it belongs to my youth (I seem to have forgotten nothing from my youth; I felt that I remembered every line) it afforded me the chance to contrast that younger reader with who—with what—I've become. Conrad's framing, telling the story in retrospect, invites and then steadily intensifies this kind of self-interrogation.

Kurtz was right. The horror.

After reading it I watched the Billboard Music Awards, when I wasn't walking in circles, rubbing my face. Listen: I like popular culture as much as the next guy. But the sanest response to the Black Eyed Peas is: You can't be serious.

Conrad is serious. He knows that if you're going to risk adulthood—and not content yourself with BEP—you've got to make your journey up the river. What you find there will be serious. Kurtz's last words are serious. The measure of a man is not what he finds at the end of his river—we all find the same thing—but how we respond to what we find.

Marlow finds, among many things, that it's ok to be haunted by the truth.

Vietnam Orphanage Eagle Service Project

I met Brent Omdahl when I was ten years old, in Clayton, CA. My family moved into the house across the street, and he was my partner-in-crime until eighth grade, when his family moved to Germany. We reunited in college, and we've tried, with meager success, to stay in touch since.

I knew that Brent had been living in Vietnam for a while. He and his family now live in Georgia, and he recently sent me a note telling me that his son Ashton is returning to Hanoi to help an orphanage there.

I invite you to visit Ashton's website and consider helping him with a contribution. It's hard to imagine a worthier cause.

Shawn Mahaffey, Rest in Peace

Coming across Nevada we ran into a blizzard. We decided to stop in Elko—really the weather gave us no choice—and I turned the U-Haul toward a cheap-looking hotel. But I forgot I was driving a truck and slammed the roof of the U-Haul into the overhang at the hotel entrance. The truck shook violently; we could hear the truck's roof dragging along the base of the overhang. "Keep going!" Shawn shouted. Soon we pulled clear. When I parked—anyone who knew Shawn will know that I'm not exaggerating—he literally fell out of the truck, he was laughing so hard.

We walked to the overhang and looked up. There were streaks of freshly gouged paint along its underside.

More laughter, through the lobby doors—I let Shawn lead the way; I knew his smile would help.

The Chinese lady at the reception desk said, "Don't do that again!"

Again Shawn was in stitches. But his laughter was softening her. "Whole building shake," she said—speaking more gently.

His smile, his laughter—I don't use this word lightly: Irresistible. By the time she gave us our room key even she was laughing.

And he had his saying for the rest of the trip, in a perfect Chinese accent: "Don't do that again!"

~

Shawn was on the trip with me because he knew that a brother-in-law needed help. That was all he needed to know. That's how Shawn was, to a greater degree than anyone I've ever met.

Why is it that the most selfless people we meet are often the most haunted?

Shawn was an alcoholic and died from complications arising from his alcoholism. Those of us who knew him now ask ourselves if we could have done more. I could have; the cold luxury of hindsight makes that cruelly clear.

But we often fail each other, just as we fail ourselves—the point now, as Shawn's brother said in his funeral yesterday, is to "choose to remember." Shawn makes remembering easy, having been, in a manner that was both a blessing and a curse, unforgettable.

Rest in peace, Shawn. We miss you terribly.