Graceland

I should go back to my old Missionary's Journal to look up his name: I'm pretty sure it was Paul—not Pablo but actually Paul, the only child of two people who were old enough, I thought then, to be his grandparents. He played the guitar all the time, usually alone in his room, he said; but on Christmas Day 1986, which my companion and I spent with him and his family, he sat at the dining room table after a late lunch and played for us and sang.

After he was done, we went outside and lit off bottle rockets. He and my companion and I were basically kids, remember, so it should come as no surprise that we thought it was great to place the stems of the bottle rockets in a pile of wet sand and aim them at passing cars. The Argentinian bottle rockets seemed to me stronger than any I'd used in California, but that impression might of been a by-product of my general delight at setting off fireworks for Christmas.

That night, before leaving, having, in my bag, nothing else of use, I gave Paul my copy—a cassette tape—of Paul Simon's Graceland. I wasn't supposed to have it (The Missionary Handbook authorized nothing but classical music or anything by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir) but I thought it was a sensational album and believed he'd like it.

I wasn't wrong. A couple of months later he told me that he'd listened to it so much that he'd broken the tape. To prove it, he brought out his guitar and sang "Graceland," the title track, which we both agreed was as good as any song by the Beatles, even though neither he nor I were parents, of course, and I was not yet divorced, so the truth of the song must have seemed to us as distant (yet indisputable) as the the truth of Jesus' love had felt, when we'd read of it together before lighting the bottle rockets, in a short passage from the Gospel of John.

In Praise of Love, by Alain Badiou

People in love put their trust in difference rather than being suspicious of it. — Alain Badiou

When I read a contemporary meditation on love—fictional, poetic, philosophical—I often can't shake the impression that I'm reading a paraphrase of The Double Flame, by Octavio Paz, which I was lucky enough to read when it first came out 20 years ago and which immediately became for me a sacred text.

Badiou's little book is no exception.

In the first place, Badiou defines love as Paz did: it's exclusive; it's transgressive; it's a power struggle; it's a journey from fate to freedom; it requires the concept of the soul.

Secondly, he sees the same threats to love that Paz saw (or foresaw): in libertinism; in the disintegration of taboos; in self-obsession; in an excess of (mostly economic) freedom; and in the demise of the concept of the soul. These historical processes are largely a product of materialistic capitalism, which has obliterated love's earlier enemies—tribalism; the Church; feudalism; sexual puritanism; 20th-century political totalitarianism—and now constitutes the greatest threat to love in the West.

Also like Paz, Badiou beautifully describes love as an encounter with—and celebration of—otherness. That encounter makes possible an aesthetic and political transformation that is difficult, exhilarating, and redemptive—which is why love has been (and should be, once again) the central value in our public and private lives.

For anyone seeking a primer on love's peculiar nature and a meditation on its place in the modern world, this little book enjoys a couple of advantages over The Double Flame's vast erudition: Badiou's book is very short, and its format (as an interview with a journalist from Le Monde) makes for straightforward reading.

So In Praise of Love might have the ugliest cover in the history of publishing, but it elegantly re-articulates the principal insights of The Double Flame, which is reason enough for me to remember it as one of my books of the year.

Provo

Once, when I was very young — likely 23 — I went to a Mormon dance at a municipal park in Provo, Utah, and there watched a girl dance with a sensuality I hadn’t seen before and have not seen since, not in the flamenco bars of Madrid or Cádiz or in the strip clubs of North Beach — not even, it occurs to me, at the senior proms I have chaperoned for my two sons, where the girls were as playful and beautiful as they will ever be but, I suspect, too burdened by the extravagance of their dresses and by their awareness of themselves as spectacles to release themselves to sensuality, which a poet must once have called, perhaps redundantly, the “perilous sublime."

Uncharacteristically, after suffering for a couple of hours at the sight of her dancing, which made me ache and possibly broke my heart in some kind of permanent fashion, I managed to ask her if she would go with me for an ice cream sundae. She agreed. I remember nothing about our date, however, except that at one point she commented on how I enunciated the word really. “You have a funny way of saying it,” she said. “I do?” I asked. “The way you say the e,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it that way."

I never saw her again.

The Blogging Years, Volume II

A new blog, under a new name, begins.

Below I have archived The Bewildered Eye, which is no longer available as an independent blog but might be of casual interest. It spans November 2009 to March 2014. I don't anticipate tinkering with it anymore but no doubt will; today, at least, I think of it as Volume I of my life as a blogger, which I intend to continue, despite the impassioned advice of some very good friends.

So welcome to The Foggy Eye, which sounds to my ear like the name of a good coastside bar. I hope it offers similar pleasures.