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.

Basketball, Physics, and the Pursuit of Beauty

Last night, the Half Moon Bay boys' basketball team lost its Northern California Championship semifinal playoff game, ending its season and effectively drawing to a close the basketball careers of most of its senior players.

Among those seniors: my second child, my heart's joy, Zach. Like his teammates, Zach was devastated after the loss, weeping openly and turning to his teammates and his parents for solace. Disbelief—one of grief's commonest manifestations—had reconfigured his face. His career could not be over! Yet it was.

When I got home from the game, I turned to the Internet for distraction. At some point I came across the following video, which, according to the The Atlantic, had gone viral over the last couple of days. It captures the moment when a physicist, Andrei Linde, learns that his life work on the origin of the universe has been finally proved correct:

One can imagine the long hours, the setbacks, the obstacles and discouraging days—years—that brought Linde to his moment of triumph. We don't see the daunting work in this clip but its reward. Only from his face—reconfigured, too, by disbelief—and from his wife's slumped joy can we infer those years of struggle.

But aside from their joy and relief, what most struck me about the video was a comment by Linde himself: "I always live with this feeling. What if I am tricked? What if I believe in this just because it is beautiful?"

It's good, I thought, to be reminded that scientists, too, are guided by beauty. The beauty of Linde's idea reassured him, over 30 long years, that he was not wrong.

Which returns me to Zach and last night's loss. Basketball has given those boys—they are now young men—a realm in which to do something beautiful. They have been a joy to watch; their pursuit of beauty—what their coaches would likely call excellence—has been relentless; and as spectators to their passion, our joy has increased as their skill improved, as their play became more beautiful.

Last night, the game over, the season done, we mourned what they—and we—mistook as defeat. After the game some of the boys probably wondered, as Linde did, if those long hours had been worth it—if beauty had tricked them. The season, after all—a season of their lives—had come to an end.

But watching Linde and imagining his journey, it occurred to me that in both science and athletics, properly understood, there are no defeats. Yesterday's failure prepares both the scientist and the athlete for future success.

So, yes, the season is over—but its lesson remains: guided by beauty, working hard to be excellent, we are fully alive; living beautifully, we bring those around us to life. We touch the world with our grace, our truth.

Last night, Zach, I did not mourn because you'd lost a basketball game. I mourned because I will never see you play with your team again. You guys—all of you, together—were beautiful. I will miss that beauty.

But I take comfort in the knowledge that you have learned, like Andrei Linde, to trust what you find beautiful. You were not wrong to see beauty in basketball and to pursue that beauty with passion and love. Now, a marvelous season behind you, go forward, my son, living as you played: gracefully, fiercely, with your whole heart. If you do that, more hard-earned triumphs await.

TFTD

Yo creo que un escritor qué merezca este nombre debe hacer todo lo que esté a su alcance para favorecer una 'mutación' del lector, luchar contra la pasividad del asimilador de novelas y cuentos, contra esa tendencia a preferir productos premasticados. La renovación formal de la novela — para emplear sus términos — debe apuntar a la creación de un lector tan activo y batallador como el novelista mismo, de un lector que le haga frente cuando sea necesario, que colabore en la tarea de estar cada vez más tremendamente vivo y descontento y maravillado y de cara al sol.

— Julio Cortazar, “El escarabajo de oro”

TFTD

Like a monk, sentencing himself to ascesis, tormented by erotic visions, I would take shelter in rhythm and the order of syntax, because I was afraid of my chaos.

— Czeslaw Milosz, Road-side Dog

The Infatuations, by Javier Marías

As with A Heart So White, The Infatuations is essentially a novel-length meditation on a single line from Macbeth—in this case: "She should have died hereafter," the opening line from Macbeth's famous "sound and fury" soliloquy.

And, as in A Heart So White, Marías continues to be too stylized for my taste—by which I mean: too repetitive; by which I mean: I grow weary listening to the same rhetorical mode, page after page, regardless of who's speaking, in which a word is offered to describe (let's say) an action, but that word is then immediately modified or revised or refined by the speaker—often the narrator—as if language at the moment of its utterance always fails or blunders or disappoints, and that failure can only be addressed or mitigated or contained by more words, relentlessly, or unrelentingly, and hopelessly, or despairingly, until the final page.

There's something to that, of course, epistemologically speaking. A verb is not its action.

Still, it's disconcerting to encounter a writer with so little confidence in language.

Or, better said, it's perturbing to always, only listen to characters for whom life's greatest drama is not what we can communicate but that we can't, and who experience that drama, both epistemologically and ontologically, in exactly the same way.

In other words: Javier Marías has made a career of repudiating Shakespeare's confidence in language, which is total, absolute, and—for good reason—besotted.

Put another way: Marías has made a career of writing about Shakespeare by enacting Hamlet's indecision, at the level of the sentence, over and over, for thousands of pages, in which language is not a creator of truth—of the creator of a truth—but its futile pursuit.

Perhaps Marías is trying to understand how all of us, Shakespeare's children, lost what should have been our best inheritance: the poet's confidence—and joy—in the vitality, primacy, and utility of words.

Or he's reminding us that it's all we have and not what we believe it to be, Shakespeare notwithstanding.

Anyway, The Infatuations might be the best book of 2013—it's brilliant, brimming with passages that you'll want to read to your lover—but I had more fun reading Glitz, which constructed more than one kind of consciousness.

TFTD

Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

— William Faulkner, "The Art of Fiction No. 12"

Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee

In Coetzee one discovers that humility—an awareness of one's insignificance—liberates an artist far more than confidence. Coetzee writes as if it doesn't matter what he says: he is not, he seems to think, that important. So he tells the truth.

He also writes as if he doesn't entirely trust the novel as an art form. Which is interesting for someone commonly—and rightly—regarded as the greatest living English-language novelist.

Allegorist. Fablist. Novelist. Whatever. Writer: Waiting for the Barbarians is my lifetime's best dystopian novel.

Like Kafka and Beckett, Coetzee produces stories that glow with an aura of myth or scripture. He doesn't have Beckett's lyrical gifts or Kafka's knack for a single, acute metaphor. But he's more formally rigorous—at least as a novelist—than either of them: a bit more the Protestant, perhaps: less mystical, more lawful, neater, a better citizen, a more conscientious craftsman.

Coming myself from similar stock, I mean that as a compliment. I appreciate his attentiveness. There's nothing vainglorious or self-indulgent about his art. Unlike Kafka and Beckett, he chooses communication over innovation; and I find no writer of his generation, with the possible exception of his compatriot Nadine Gordimer, as profoundly ethical, as morally engaged. Like his narrator in Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee is our era's John the Baptist, a voice in the wilderness, describing not just the form but the content of our advancing doom.

As with Kafka, as with Beckett, we ignore him at our peril.

Bring Your Legs with You, by Darrell Spencer

America, in other words, is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.
— Dave Hickey, Air Guitar

Which might explain why Bring Your Legs with You, written by (full disclosure) a long-ago professor of mine, seems like the most American novel I've read since reading The Friends of Eddie Coyle, three years ago.

Some backstory: While escorting me through BYU's undergraduate English program, Darrell consistently argued for the value of provincial, hardboiled American fiction. He didn't want Tuscany or Paris; he wanted—as our common mentor, François Camoin once said said—a 7-eleven in Nebraska. Maybe impulsively (maybe not), Darrell declared Ray the greatest American novel of the last 25 years. You want American Lit.? Then read Hammett. Read Chandler. Read Wise Blood. Read early Carver. If you'd like, take a shot at Lot 49. And read Ray. You've got to read Ray.

And, as often as possible, go to Las Vegas.

So I'm with Hickey: I suspect that Bring Your Legs with You is a fantastic lens through which to view modern American life—with its scammers, its dreamers, its lovers, its killers—because it's a Las Vegas novel: provincial, hardboiled, desert-hot, sexy, tough-guy lyrical, and suspicious of hope (optimism just about always being a sign of deluded thinking).

Through a series of interconnected stories, we follow the possible-comeback of Tommy Rooke, one-time heavyweight contender, and his band of all-American merry-making schemers. Most of the stories are self-contained masterpieces; a couple of them felt like they served primarily to keep the narrative rolling. Regardless, they all reflect Spencer's extraordinary ear for the music of modern American English.

I haven't seen Darrell in many years. But I suppose an author's best company should be his books. Regardless, Bring your Legs with You is wonderful company. Ten years have passed since its publication—which is fine. After all, Roberto Bolaño, who knew a thing or two about literature, once said that the first requirement of a masterpiece is that it pass unnoticed. At least it's out there. And, like Spencer's toughs, it's ready when you are.

Speak, Assassin: In Defense of "Her"

"Her" is fantastic. Much of its dramatic power hinges on an exquisite scene that comes about 2/3s of the way through the film, when Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, has lunch with Catherine, played by Rooney Mara, to hand over their divorce papers, for her to sign.

In a review called "Love Objects," Elaine Blair, writing for the New York Review of Books, attacks the scene for idealizing and objectifying Catherine.

But her critique misreads the scene, in my view. I posted the following comment to the review:

I took this scene to be shot in cinema's version of free indirect indirect style: we aren't seeing Catherine as the world sees her but as Theodore sees her. Jonze's reliance on free indirect style, which he uses, I think, with extraordinary delicacy, applies to every moment that Catherine is on screen. 

Throughout the film, Theodore embodies our tendency to idealize the past—particularly a past love. His professional life, his constant reminiscing, and, most poignantly, his relationship with Catherine all reflect this tendency. So it should come as no surprise that when Theodore actually comes face-to-face with his past, in the present, Jonze makes clear to us what he is seeing: not the present but the past; the idealized object of his desire, flawless, eternally young—his Beatrice. 

The fact that Theodore can only see Catherine as a desired object, that he has lost the capacity to experience her as a desiring subject, is not a flaw in the film but its triumph: we contemplate together love's greatest loss, in which the beloved is now but a memory, and as a memory no longer herself—an object, not a subject, forever.

Old Art, New World

Religion

At my age, no idea but "God is my neighbor" is of any use.

Now, the world on fire, God and I must strive together to save it, this Kingdom of Heaven: our home.

All That Is, by James Salter

It's not easy to get into the swing of a piece of deep mysticism when you just set out with a story. — D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

Lawrence nails every novelist's first problem—the problem, really, of the novel: "You just set out with a story."

A great novel (by this means we recognize its greatness) transcends the embarrassment of its own gossip. We listen to it as we listen to a lover: entranced. Thinking, Luminous.

Story's importance diminishes to the degree that our love for the novel's voice—it's entrancing song, if you will—increases.

As with love, we look back on a great novel both humbled and further attuned to our connectedness to others. We find ourselves reminded that we always have been everyone.

We find ourselves. Re-minded.

James Salter has written two great novels: A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years. Both novels—still—open my chest and remove my battered heart and show it to me and say, "You see? No different. The universe. Listen."

To which I reply, without embarrassment: "Yes." 

All That Is, Salter's newest novel, is not a great novel. At the level of the sentence, it's better written than just about anything being published by an American novelist these days. For that reason alone I recommend it wholeheartedly. But unlike Salter's masterpieces, it does not exceed its story. And—but for a few scenes, which are, in a manner unique to Salter, luminous—that's all it is.

Fair Warning

I'm going to bring the Eye out of retirement—or, more accurately, out of its grave—shinier, happier—

Fair Weather

Three years ago, almost to the day, I started The Bewildered Eye. But recently three people I love and trust have suggested that the energy I'm directing here might be better directed toward other, more urgent work.

And in truth my heart's not in it anymore. I've grown tired of this voice—of its possibilities; I no longer require the man who made it. All literary voices are inventions: The Bewildered Eye's invented voice is mercifully obsolete.

Obama's re-election now nailed the Eye's coffin closed.

Over the coming months I'll revisit what I've made here, and I'll probably refine some of the posts a bit, and I might create some kind of "Selected Works" label for the writing I continue to approve of. But I won't add to it; I consider it complete—finished—

But for this: Thank you for listening.

Update: I haven't done much refining, but the "Selected Works" label is now in place.

Yes, Please

A note to friends & family who are California voters:

A couple of weeks ago my dean at Chabot College informed me that my classes are on the chopping block if Prop. 30 doesn't pass. The district will be eliminating classes for over 2000 students, which means it will be eliminating the teachers who teach them. In all likelihood, I will be one of those teachers.

A week ago, Lincoln applied to Cal-Poly. But if Prop. 30 doesn't pass, the CA State schools will cut the number of incoming freshmen that they'll be accepting by 20,000 students—which might include him.

No, I don't want to pay an extra quarter of a percent in sales taxes for four years. But the long-term cost to the state—and to my family—will be far higher if we allow six billion dollars in cuts to education THIS YEAR ALONE.

We can debate how we got here until we're blue in the face. But the public education system in our state is in crisis. I urge you to help save it. Please join me in voting YES on Prop. 30.

TFTD

Only people with some strength of character can be truly gentle: usually, what seems like gentleness is mere weakness, which readily turns to bitterness.

—La Rochefoucauld

On Bitterness

An aqueduct runs through the trees behind the house. A few years ago, county workers landscaped the aqueduct's banks, and it's now re-populated, at long last, by ducks and drakes. During these hot October nights I keep the bedroom window open to hear their chatter. Listening to them, they become extensions of my own yearning—or I become an extension of theirs.

I'm used to sleeping near water. The house in Costa Rica, where I discovered unhappiness, also had a waterway behind it, bordered along its edges by trash and towering Poro trees heavy with orange blossoms. In the evening, the sky above the creek's trees swarmed with bats. Sometimes I'd sit in our little backyard drinking a beer, watching the bats feed. The backyard was surrounded by high fences topped with razor wire and the upturned edges of broken bottles. In the middle of the yard there was a small concrete manhole cover. It permitted access to the home's drainage system, which carried sink water to the creek.

For many months we had no trouble with the drains. But one evening, after hours of torrential rain, water from the creek surged up through the pipes and lifted the manhole cover off its setting. Within minutes the backyard was submerged. Floodwaters came across the patio. I put towels against the back door, but they proved useless: the creek, roaring through the trees behind the house, was now pouring through the kitchen. Soon the house was flooded. The boys occupied the kitchen counter, where they could watch the flood without, I hoped, being injured. I opened the front door and attempted to direct the water from the back door to the front door. If I could get it out the door, I thought, it would roll down the driveway, into the street.

After a while the rain stopped, and soon the flooding stopped, and by nightfall I'd swept most of the water, which stunk of sewage, out of the house. The two older boys helped clean the mud off the floors.

The bases of my bookshelves, which were made of cheap particle board, had absorbed water, and over time they rotted. But I'd managed to save the music speakers and the throw rugs. So we still had music when we wanted it, and a place to dance. But music and dancing was rare during those months; we'd had our share of it during the early years of our marriage, in Utah. Maybe the Costa Rican tropics—torrential sunlight, torrential rain—overwhelmed us, to such a degree that we became unrecognizable to ourselves, and, as a consequence, to each other.

~

This summer, one of my dearest friends, who lives in Boise, let me tell him about a more recent flood. He's been through a few of his own; after a long weekend he gave me a broad-chested hug and said, "Be patient, Eric. Most of all, with yourself."

Maybe I'll manage to take his advice. Tonight, the October breeze is unseasonably warm, and I've got the window open. The ducks have resumed their noisy yearning. Soon, November rain will bring new floods. The ducks and drakes are counting on it. So am I.