What Kind of Country Elects Donald Trump?

A country that has transformed its primary and secondary schools into dreary exercises in standardized test-taking.

A country that has transformed its colleges and universities from schools of rhetoric, science, and the arts into job training centers that leave new trainees with no guarantee of employment and often with crushing debt.

A country whose most recognizable heroic role models come from comic books written for newly pubescent males.

A country that eats, as its primary diet, addictive fake food, and, as a consequence, has tens of millions of citizens who are chronically ill.

A country that regularly advertises and airs human cage-fighting on its major television channels, during primetime family programming.

A country that enjoys, as its definitive leisure-time entertainment, a grandiose art-form that regularly propagandizes fascist values—the glories of violence and militarism; the sexiness of centralized corporate-nationalist power; the moral goodness of physical beauty—and that regularly stylizes, to its delight, images of its own apocalypse.

A country that has re-labelled decency, civility, and kindness as "political correctness."

A country that has been erotically dulled by the newly ubiquitous presence of joyless, loveless pornography.

A country that claims as its favorite sport a brain-destroying gladiatorial battle, run by a multi-billion dollar corporation, in massive arenas, between drug-enhanced, heavily-armored, faceless members of its poverty class.

A country that no longer turns to professional journalists for news and information but relies upon a single corporation's personalized "newsfeed," which has been specifically designed to reinforce the particular beliefs of each reader.

A country that refuses to see a commonly-organized, commonly-shared defense against illness and accident as a social good.

A country that uses science to create vast wealth, extraordinary luxury, and unprecedentedly long lifespans, while openly and unapologetically dismissing the most important scientific discovery in its history: that its lifestyle is rapidly destroying the global ecosystem.

A country that represents 4.4% of the world's population yet incarcerates 22% of its prisoners—and that, as a matter of legal practice, regularly executes some of those prisoners.

A country in which its college-aged population spends, on average, eight hours a day looking at a cellphone screen.

And, lastly, ironically, a country that rejects, for the only political office beholden to the general population, the actual vote of the general population, and relies instead upon a Constitutional gimmick put in place at its founding to secure the support of those citizens at the time who practiced human slavery.

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.

In Defense of Everyone

When I was very young—five, six years old—my family lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, and a couple times a year we'd visit our cousins in Alabama. My uncle Forrest worked in Huntsville as an aeronautical engineer for Boeing.

Among my cousins, I was most in awe of Tim—a tall, slim, handsome boy, a few years older than me, who struck me, in a manner typical of middle sons, as warmer than his cool brother Dave and cooler than his warm brother Todd. I followed him around a lot during our visits, trying to learn how to be a boy. In memory, he's forever the handsomest of the Treanor boys, and, despite his meek name, the most admirable, combining a Treanor's congenital interest in the life of the mind with an athlete's physical ease.

It's been at least twenty years, I'm guessing, since Tim and I have seen one another. But a minor family crisis this summer involving Chik-Fil-A, my mother, and my gay brother Nathan sent me to Tim's Facebook page, where I learned something of his life today. He now lives in North Carolina, where he works as a chiropractor. The Western diet, as with tens of millions of other Americans, has softened his slim handsomeness. And—now to my purpose—he's become a staunch, activist Republican.

I took some time perusing his posts, which I could read despite the fact that we've never become Facebook friends. Many of them were about me: a progressivist liberal who, for the most part, votes Democrat. Yet they weren't describing a person I recognized.

Nor did they describe a president I recognized: a "communist," who wants to "destroy the family, destroy private property, destroy religion, destroy the nation." For a while I considered attempting to disprove his claims—but I quickly realized that I'm about as unlikely to change his views as he is to change mine, and there wasn't much summer left, and only an idiot begins an un-winnable war. Especially against family.

But Tim's Facebook page has stayed with me. And alongside its catalog of crimes and misdemeanors I've considered the way some of my liberal friends talk about Republicans: as anti-intellectual, racist, xenophobic, gay-hating, Bible-thumping, patriarchal, anti-science reactionaries working to drag us back into a 19th century, Gilded Age dystopia, where unregulated corporate magnates collaborate to steal the nation's wealth, overheat the planet, and destroy the middle class, all in the name of some Darwinian, Ayn Rand-ish individualism that replaces community with the Law of the Jungle and tolerance with the Law of God. And don't bother asking whose God.

Something is wrong with these pictures. Most people I know, Democrat or Republican, are, speaking generally, equally decent: equally compassionate, equally patriotic, equally smart, equally happy, equally devoted to the future of America and equally devoted to the safety of their families and their neighbors. Republicans, in my experience, do tend to be a bit more insular and frightened of otherness, particularly if it comes packaged in poverty. Democrats, on the other hand, do tend to be a bit more starry-eyed, a bit too indifferent to tradition, and a bit suspicious of wealth, particularly if it comes packaged in a suit and tie.

Which brings me, like most of my experiences these days, to James Baldwin:

What you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I'm not describing you when I talk about you; I'm describing me.

So I turn this wisdom upon myself. Many of the most astonishing people in my life—including my own mother, who walks on water—are dedicated Republicans. Like many Democrats, they genuinely worry that America—which is inevitably their idea of America—is losing its way. They fear for their future and for the future of their children; with good reason they look back on the 20th century and proclaim that the single greatest threat to freedom is the tyranny of the State.

In fact, this fear is as old as the country. DH Lawrence saw it with an artist's acuity when he wrote of American immigrants:

They came largely to get away—that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

[. . . ]

In America this frictional opposition has been the vital factor. It has given the Yankee his kick. Only the continual influx of more servile Europeans has provided America with an obedient labouring class. The true obedience never outlasting the first generation.

According to Lawrence, that refrain—"henceforth be masterless"—captures something essential in the American temperament; and I think he's right. Yes, Lawrence has plenty to say about the self-delusion that accompanies our cries for masterlessness in American life. It's the same self-delusion that liberals point out when they note the hypocrisy of Tea Partiers who simultaneously call for government to get out of their lives and, in the next breath, threaten any politician who wants to cut Medicare. It's the same self-delusion that conservatives point out when they note that Occupiers are organizing against corporate power by using iPads. There is always, says Lawrence, a master.

For many Democrats these days, Mitt Romney embodies, down to his toenails, their idea of a freeedom-destroying master: a monied corporatist, archetypically white, who has enriched himself by financial sleights-of-hand, exporting jobs, and tax evasion. He's not an embodiment of American ingenuity but an amoral crony-capitalist whose trickle-down economics and commitment to deregulation will only accelerate the collapse of the middle class. Never mind his well-documented philanthropy, his dedication to his family and his faith, his years of unsalaried public service. Talk to a Democrat and he'll make it clear: "Mitt Romney isn't the solution. He's the problem."

And for Republicans, Obama perfectly embodies the freedom-destroying master they fear: of uncertain—possibly foreign—provenance; a foreign-educated, multi-racial, multi-religious "community organizer" who rose to fame not through merit and hard work but on the wings of Marxist utopian conspirators and a healthy dose of liberal guilt. Never mind that coming out of college he took his Harvard degree to Chicago's South Side, or his own commitment to faith and family, or, as president, four years of historically low taxes, robust militarism in the country's defense, and, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a level of frugality while in office unmatched by any president since Eisenhower. Ask Tim: Obama isn't the solution. He's the problem.

Contrast these views with how each party sees its own candidate: for Republicans, Romney isn't a usurping master but a fellow traveler who will help them build a road to their idea of the American Dream. Ditto for Democrats: Obama isn't a usurping master but a fellow traveler who will help them build a road to their idea of the American Dream.

In other words, American Republicans and American Democrats—Tim and I—are two sides of the same coin. Our distraught response to each other's politics, our habits of impugning each other's motives and attacking each other's common sense, simply reflects back to us what we most fear: a master-tyrant, who has tracked us from the nightmares of the past, even to here, where we thought we'd finally be free.

No Thank You, Please

If one learns theology before learning to become a man, one will never become a man. —Ludvig Holberg

I still remember vividly the afternoon I told my Mormon bishop that I wanted my name removed from the records of the LDS Church. Utah sunlight, coming through a large window to my left, lit up his office; portraits of Mormon leaders and Jesus and Book of Mormon heroes decorated the walls of his office; photographs of his family cornered his desk. During an earlier meeting he'd told me with enthusiasm of the happiness he and his wife experienced singing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He had mementos on the shelves behind him of their travels.

He received my news with sadness. He tried to get me to explain my decision, but I refused to do that, and he soon gave up. With grim professionalism he told me how to proceed; he also told me what I'd lose, which amounted to everything: the assurance of life at God's side in heaven, with my family, forever.

While he talked I thought mainly about him. I couldn't help but see him as a projection of myself 30 years from then: soft-spoken and wise, silver in every respect, kind, and harmless, and maybe, I thought, vaguely angry. He seemed to abide, like many religious leaders, in a kind of patriarchal self-assurance that I found both enviable and scary. What he no doubt meant as compassion I experienced as condescension. He seemed sexless—or nearly so: too sexless, anyway, for me to trust. His assiduously combed hair and clean-shaven cheeks both saddened and frightened me; but adult innocence, or an adult's ambition to appear innocent, is always sad and is often frightening.

After a while he reassured me of God's love for me and sent me on my way.

I have never, not for one day, regretted my decision to abandon Mormonism—not because the church is evil or its theology incoherent but because from adolescence I'd used religion to avoid becoming an adult. Yes, I can provide a mildly sophisticated repudiation of Mormonism on philosophical or rational grounds. But the truth is simpler: I left the church because I was tired of childhood. I yearned for messy complexity, for the bewildered authenticity—the earned blue happiness—of adulthood.

~

Watching Mitt Romney reminds me of that bright April day, because Mitt Romney strikes me as a version of myself, had I allowed my life to unfold differently. I see him as many things, some of them good, but mostly I see him as miserable. He carries his misery in his body: his smile is miserable; his laugh is miserable; even his notorious hair is miserable. He's embittered by innocence, by obedience; he's crushed by the myths of superiority and chosenness that have been pounded into his head since he was a toddler and which, in some gleaming corner of his consciousness, he knows to be false.

That knowledge haunts his life; his vast ambition, including his quest for the presidency, is little more than a tireless battle against his misery.

And it's not just his misery: it's the misery of anyone who has only been obedient. Romney was told to be good, and hardworking, and conscientious, and self-reliant, and god-fearing, and tolerant, and compassionate, and obedient, and honorable; and he's been all of those things. But to have been only those things—to have never known disobedience, and rebellion, and secrecy, and drunkenness, and dancing and swearing and fucking—precludes the possibility of growing up. And a man who never grows up is a miserable man.

In Romney's cruel unhappiness I see the future I could have had, if I'd been obedient to my destiny. Of course I would have been less wealthy than Romney, and less handsome, and less ambitious and less renowned. But I would have been similarly miserable. And, like Romney, I would have asked the people around me to collaborate in my misery by pretending that it was happiness and worth emulating.

Romney now seeks my collaboration by asking me to vote for him. Instead, I'll vote for the adult, with his blue happiness, his easy smile, his hard-won, complicated calm. I'll vote, in other words, for the man I wanted to become, long ago, when I took a last look at the dreams of my father, and told them goodbye.

Aurora

A couple of weeks ago I went for the first time in my life to Buffalo Wild Wings. The building was cavernous, dimly lit; huge projection screens hung from its high roof; plasma TVs—themselves enormous—surrounded the room. Here and there a neon sign gleamed. The restaurant was full. Couples, who had been seated to face each other, gazed up at their respective TVs; children, too, with their families, turned in their seats to watch while they ate; everyone—but for the smallest children, who were either locked in high-chairs or running about—gazed upwards, as if at flickering angels. Beneath their upturned faces their hands worked on plates of orange chicken.

The plasma TVs glowed with sporting events: soccer; baseball—our beautiful game; poker; an old NFL game; golf; hockey; even sailing. But the four projection screens, which dominated the room as a movie screen dominates a theater, were all broadcasting the same event: an MMA fight. Two men, their heads shaved, wearing nothing but shorts, circled each other. The mat beneath them was smeared with their blood.

I'd been invited to the restaurant by a friend. And for a few minutes I tried to stay. But I found it impossible to ignore the MMA fight, and without an available table it was easy for me to suggest that we leave. "Anyway," I said, "I can't watch this." Actually, I could do nothing but watch it. The scene was primal, riveting.

I remember when MMA fighting was an underground subculture, mysterious, barbaric, vaguely shameful. Occasionally I saw advertisements for it on late-night TV. The DVDs promised warehouse settings, high cages, poor production values. The fights, always between two white men, apparently had but one rule: win. The midwestern American high school fight had found its expression in commerce.

Now MMA has gone mainstream—more than mainstream: it's dinner table entertainment. You see it, too, in upscale SF bars on Saturday nights, and in posh lounges in Los Altos and Burlingame. It's even advertised during Giants games on TV: an inning ends and abruptly we're confronted with the sight of a man being knocked unconscious by a kick to the head. He falls to the mat, his eyes gone white, for our entertainment.

~

A couple of quarters ago I taught Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño. I found discussing it difficult. Bolaño's books—being, at every level, new—defend themselves against understanding. But we concluded (in a very small nutshell) that Bolaño was announcing the triumph of fascism by way of the arts. Fascism might have been defeated militarily, the book seems to say, but it has triumphed culturally, which is a vaster, more fundamental victory. The principles of fascism—purification through violence, corporate militarism, the glorification of the body, "survival of the fittest," nationalism as patriotism, a disdain for the life of the mind—dominate contemporary Western culture. The West—America—defeated Hitler, only to become, in many respects, his most ardent spokesman.

Leaving Buffalo Wild Wings (which no doubt survives—this isn't a peripheral point—on the low-cost ruthlessness of industrialized chicken farms), it was easy to imagine Bolaño's wry smile. You didn't believe me, did you? Compassion, community—a civilized dinner? Those ideas belong to another age. Welcome to the global triumph of fascism.

~

I have yet to see The Dark Knight Rises. Lincoln and Zachary saw it on Thursday night in Daly City, about an hour after—unbeknownst to all of us—a young man in Aurora, Colorado, walked into a packed movie theater and opened fire, killing twelve people and injuring dozens more. In the world of Distant Star—in our world—the slaughter in Aurora was essentially performance art. Yes, James Holmes, a PhD student in neuroscience, is a moral outrage. But—as the forthcoming media circus will confirm—we find his story riveting, and eminently American. According to the New York Times, many people in the audience thought what was happening was part of the show.

As much as we like to declaim against it, violence is our national pastime. We eat to violence; we pay for violence; we export violence; we applaud violence. America loves violence. If we didn't, we'd fucking change.

Notes for the Defense

In class today I gave an impassioned speech about literature—maybe for myself more than for my students, who regarded me as I spoke with impassive curiosity, if at all.

I said (I'm summarizing): These stories are songs written to make life, with its inexplicable suffering, something more than a desert of pain. (I was happy to hear myself carried away.)

We were discussing "The Shawl," by Cynthia Ozick. At the end of my speech I had the sense to ask one of the students to read the story's final paragraph. I've made the mistake of reading it to a class before. It's disconcerting for students to watch their professor weep. And these students, most of them, don't deserve to see that, anyway. I've been dumbfounded this quarter—I've told them this—by their indifference. But, like me, they reflect their Age. I'm angry; they're indifferent; one or two of them seem to care about something other than money or grades—one or two of them are extraordinary, luminous with intelligence; the rest strike me as bored, and I strike them (correctly) as angry, and we blame our boredom and anger on each other and will forget about each other as soon as we can.

Still, walking into class this morning I was in an exuberant mood: after all, we were discussing "The Shawl" and, after a class break, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Reading García Márquez returns me to my youth, to literature as joy, to the pleasure of story: my first love. It's the love to which I've been most faithful, I suppose. It turned out that most of the class hadn't read the book—the luminous had read it—but I didn't care. Chronicle will be there for them tomorrow; it will be there when they're ready for it, when they realize that life is not about money or grades or the approval of their parents and that the same fate awaits them that befalls Magda and Santiago: certain death.

"So," I told them, "I suggest that you attend to this singing, and, more broadly, to the blessed habit we have—these artists have—of making songs of our suffering."

~

Nina Simone echoes through Coupa Cafe.

~

The Euro 2012 soccer tournament is in full swing right now, and like García Márquez soccer returns me to my youth—to the moment in my youth when I woke up: namely, to Eric in Argentina. There he is, in his white shirt and his conservative tie, with his boyish blonde cluelessness, watching Maradona highlights on a restaurant's flickering TV in little, provincial Azul. And, a year later, there he is—it's a June night in General Belgrano—swaddled against the cold in his uncle's down-filled sleeping bag, opening for the first time El amor en los tiempos del cólera.

Soccer and the novel: two inventions that honor life as suffering, punctuated by moments of beauty and joy.

~

There's a woman sitting at a table across from me who desperately needs a cigarette. She doesn't know she needs a cigarette—like most non-smokers—but by the velocity of her speaking it's clear she does.

The young man sitting with her hasn't touched his bagel. His slim arms, dark and almost hairless, he has folded across his chest. We both are trying to defend ourselves against her onslaught.

~

"It seems," Nina says, "that I'm never tired loving you."

I hadn't realized this about her: she sings like Elvis.

~

In a week my life will return to a now-all-too-familiar rootlessness. I blame no one but myself—in fact I don't even blame myself—but I'm aware this afternoon of a new exhaustion in my legs, my eyes, my heart. Perhaps it's this exhaustion that has me nostalgic for my youth—for Argentina and G.G.M.'s literature of joy, for soccer and its elegant, futile virility. Whatever the case, my life continues to be undeniably beautiful, but also saturated with sadness and tinged with new despair at a certain unrelenting maliciousness from over the hill that I cannot—and will no longer attempt to—surmount.

Eric in Belmont approaches his terminus. I cheer him up by reminding him of the girls in their summer dresses, and dinner tonight with Nathan and his new love, and the almond eyes that illuminate his dreams, and The Character of Rain (our next book), and the mystery of what tomorrow holds, be it sacred or profane.

The Estranged

So, yes, I've returned to Camus.

Years ago his example summoned me to the artist's life. I opted instead for traditional joys, which were real enough; but traditional suffering always comes with traditional joys, and in the end one must choose between living and dying. It's easy to mistake death for life—easy enough that, at some point, just about all of us do it. For many people it's the mistake that defines their lives. For a long time it defined mine.

What I loved most about Camus when I first read him was that despite his elegant, extraordinarily lucid prose, I couldn't understand him. Reading The Stranger, I thought, This is a little, simple book. It's taught in high school. Why can't I understand it?

François Camion, one of my life's many brilliant teachers, released me from that particular anxiety when he pointed out offhandedly that to understand and to love are, at some level, opposites. Ideas like that come from somewhere: I never asked François if that idea came from Camus. It certainly could have.

In any case, my inability to understand Camus became an enduring source of pleasure, and—more to the point—it served as a thrilling artistic model. Be clear, I thought, yet  mysterious. Write sparely yet mythically. Do not articulate the trivial despairs of domesticity. Be in the world—he repudiated the commandments of my youth—and of it.

Of course we're attracted to our opposites, and in many respects Camus is my opposite: African-born; a sensualist, a success with women; hard-working; brave; stylish; free of religious dogma; French-Mediterranean (in a nutshell); a smoker (somehow, that's important); prolific. A romantic figure who managed to be above romance. A man at home in the world, in his time.

But we must recognize something of ourselves in those we love, too, and I had the audacity to think of him as a kindred spirit. In the 1958 Preface that opens Lyrical and Critical Essays, I recognized myself time and again:

I was placed halfway between poverty and the sun. Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything. . . . The lovely warmth that reigned over my childhood freed me from all resentment. I lived on almost nothing, but also in a kind of rapture.

After some soul-searching . . . I can testify that among my many weaknesses I have never discovered the most widespread failing, envy, the true cancer of societies and doctrines.

I don't know how to own things.

I have never been able to succumb to what is called "home life" (so often the very opposite of an inner life); "bourgeois" happiness bores and terrifies me.

I don't envy anyone anything, which is my right, but I am not always mindful of the wants of others and this robs me of imagination, that is to say, kindness. 

I don't think I ever found delight in re-reading a finished page.

Differences and similarities of this order—this intensity—mark most love affairs. The good thing about falling in love with an author is that he's easily returned to. If he's changed, it's because we are. Noting those changes can be both a relief and a heartbreak.

I finished re-reading The Fall last night and with relief still found it incomprehensible. Which probably means that it's the mirror Jean-Baptiste (and, by extension, Camus) meant for it to be.

Art, life, love—the words are synonyms—are all incomprehensible. With Camus as my model, I am, I hope, also incomprehensible—not least to myself. Certainly I hope I'm incomprehensible to those who love me or have loved me. If they have ceased to love me, it's probably because they have decided that they comprehend me.

Camus warns against that decision. While humanity is inclined to interpret incomprehensibility as a mark of evil, of guilt, his work reminds us that it's often a kind of beauty, and worth treasuring.

At least I think that's what he says.

Notes on Houellebecq

My face is dying. More slowly than the rest of me—but dying, indisputably.

And no matter what strategies I devise to pretend otherwise (and to distract the world from its pitiless collapse), plainly: my face is me. From its angular meatiness I can no longer expunge the traces of grief, failure, fleeting joy, and the wounds of love and solitude.

~

In the bible of contemporary literature, Michel Houellebecq is Ecclesiastes.

He reminds us that all is vanity, that life is fleeting and inconsequential, that pleasure is rare and never surrenders what it promises. In response to art's diligent attention to human striving, Houellebecq writes, for example: "They don't really amount to much, anyway, human relationships."

Absurd claims like this one possess: 1) the legitimacy of grammar, and 2) a perspective from which they're true. Set against the backdrop of the universe—13 billion years and 300 billion galaxies—it's not unreasonable to conclude that life is brief and meaningless, that we're scattered dust; our love affairs, betrayals, and suicides are sighs lost in the wind of time.

But frankly, that perspective doesn't amount to much, itself. It's an inhuman (by which I mean irrelevant) perspective. From the perspective of a human being—Houellebecq knows this—human relationships in fact amount to everything.

By proclaiming life's banality, Houellebecq's art—like Ecclesiastes—has the peculiar capacity to remind us that what we mean to each other is a protean invention, subject to accident, folly, and the evanescence of ideas. Life's inventedness is what makes it unconquerable. We feel the distance between his cynicism and our optimism, his indifference and our devotedness, and that distance is poignant. Really no word better summarizes the effect of Houellebecq's writing: poignancy.

~

The fruit tree outside my window has nearly lost its blossoms. Fallen petals rot on the concrete.

For about two weeks that tree kept me alive, after a fashion. I wouldn't have died—but it required that I lived. In its presence I had no alternative.

Its late-spring greenness has now rendered it more or less invisible.

~

Twice in my life I've seen a dog get hit by a car. The first time, I was six; I was walking to a friend's house in Knoxville, Tennessee, and being followed by our family beagle, Joshua. I kept shouting at Joshua to go home, and he'd lower his head and pretend to go, only to resume following me when I continued walking. After a while I started throwing rocks at him to get him to go home. To escape my rocks he ran into the street, where he was hit—clipped—by an on-rushing car. I took him home—his back leg had been broken—and my dad took him to the vet. I never told my parents that I had caused his injury.

The second time, I was in my late-20s. I was on a bike ride with my brother and his wife's family, and their family dog—I've forgotten its name—was running along with us. We weren't yet far from their home when he dashed in front of a truck. The truck's driver saw him and slammed on his brakes; the dog—a small dog—got caught against one of the truck's front tires, and the tire briefly pushed the dog along the asphalt before mercifully running over it. The dog wasn't immediately killed; but its fur was ripped from its back, exposing most of its ribcage. The dog dragged itself under a car and snarled at anyone that approached. It seemed to be embarrassed by its dying. It declined to look at us. Slowly a pool of blood formed around its paws. After a while it put its head down, and its eyes dimmed and turned off.

~

Embarrassment is the sign of a soul. Anyone incapable of embarrassment is incapable of love.

Michel Houellebecq produces embarrassed art. His novels are embarrassed by their attentiveness, by their stories—by the fact of their existence. Their existence refutes their ostensible nihilism. Houellebecq loves the world, people—the whole mess. If he didn't, he would shut up.

~

Unlike Roberto Bolaño, Houellebecq is romantic about his post-romantic pose. His use of the semi-colon—it's the linchpin of his prose—gives him away. His semi-colon is stylish, and style is always romantic.

~

Houellebecq's male characters, by the end of his novels, always arrive at a cavalier indifference to sex. They're like men for whom peeing has become optional.

~

In Bolaño and Houellebecq, 21st century literature begins where 20th century literature began: with naturalism. Their prose is more clinical, less melodramatic than Norris or Dreiser, but like those writers they are advancing an aesthetic of brutalism; they see anti-heroism as heroism; they see triumph in failure.

~

We are both the map and the territory.

Is Nothing Sacred?

Americans understand that to a Muslim the Koran is sacred. What Americans don't understand is that to a Muslim a Koran is sacred.

The West has spent 2500 years desacralizing the world. What matters to the West is not a thing but the idea it represents.

For sentimental reasons a Christian might be upset by someone burning a Bible. But ultimately what matters to a Christian is not a Bible but its ideas. Copies of the Bible come and go. We use them as coasters for a cold can of beer in a Motel 6.

An individual Bible isn't sacred because, to the West, nothing material is sacred. Plato argued that to imagine the material world as sacred is folly—an exercise in futility. Material objects turn to dust. They burn. They cease to be. Better—far wiser—to value ideas, which are not subject to the vagaries of time and circumstance. A soldier with a match cannot destroy the thought in your head.

The history of Western culture can be summarized as the triumph of that idea.

We don't like to see people burn a flag, but we value the idea of freedom of speech more than we value a flag. Anyway, the flag is not America. America is what I think it is. As a material object in the world, there is nothing really, organically sacred about the cloth of a flag.

To a Muslim the physical world continues to be divided between the sacred and the profane. A Koran—every single Koran—is a sacred object. It is a divine manifestation. To burn it and throw it in a pile of trash is to treat God himself as trash. A Koran is important for its ideas, but it's equally important as a sacred object in the world, a persisting physical embodiment of the voice of God.

It's basically impossible for a modern Westerner to think of objects this way. There are no sacred places, no sacred objects. Our churches are tourist destinations. "Antique Roadshow" determines the real value of our family heirlooms. A girl's body sells soda pop.

And an Afghan Muslim can't think as as we do. The world is filled with sacred objects, sacred places. The family Koran, carefully wrapped in the finest silks, is a physical manifestation of God in the home. It is sacred; it pulses with the divine. A mosque isn't a tourist destination but the physical presence of heaven on earth. (A Mormon, with his restricted temples, his blessed undergarments, knows something about this kind of thinking.) A girl's body, like the Greek nymphs that preceded Plato's insurrection, is too sacred for a man to look upon without both the girl and the man being destroyed.

The West won't re-sanctify the world—at least not any time soon. Capitalism surpasses all previous revolutions in its indifference to the sacred. Love alone—including the body of the beloved—retains some hint of holiness. With the death of love we will complete Plato's assault upon the gods. Eros, it appears, will be the last of them to fall. And fall he will.

The Muslim world has taken another path. A Muslim treasures matter. A woman's hair. A book. An old pillar in the heart of dusty Mecca.

Today, contemplating the violence in Afghanistan, it's difficult to imagine our paths converging.

More than that: I'm not sure we want them to. After all, it's nice to know, if only for the purposes of nostalgia, that someone, somewhere, still thinks that something is sacred.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Welcome to Brutalism

It was one of those tossed-off comments that made François Camoin such a great teacher: "The next phase of the novel is going to be post-Romanticism, if you want to give it a name."

We'd been talking in class about postmodernism, its relation to Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman, to earlier modernism—all of that. But we, the young writers, didn't want to know where we'd been (modernism) or where we were (postmodernism); we wanted to know where we were going. We wanted to take the novel to its destiny.

That was thirteen years ago, and we now know that François was right. Welcome to the post-Romantic era. Welcome to the Age of Brutalism.

~

It's one of the ironies of history that Romanticism arose from Voltaire, the scientific method, and the Industrial Revolution.

Voltaire incinerated Enlightenment optimism and, in Candide, left us one of literature's great portraits of the meaninglessness of life.

Science materialized the planet and our bodies in a manner unknown to the West since the pre-Socratic era.

And the Industrial Revolution introduced into our aesthetic lives the metaphor of the machine. (We know from history that we become our metaphors.)

No one foresaw the dangerous implications of these revolutions as dramatically as Sade, who carried them to their logical conclusion: life is nothing; systematically steal from it what pleasure you can, by any means necessary.

Sade constituted a kind of endgame for the novel at the end of the eighteenth century (despite being a supremely tedious writer). He created, for other artists, a genuine dilemma: How does one respond to the logical case for sodomizing children for fun?

It was necessary, in other words, to imagine a way out of Philosophy in the Bedroom. That way, cleared first by the Germans, came to be called Romanticism.

But—to paraphrase John Barth—Romanticism is exhausted. We once again stand with Voltaire in the ruins of Lisbon. To that horror we add Oppenheimer in the ashes of Hiroshima and Robert Downey Jr. in his Ironman suit.

To put it another way: we're back in Sade's bedroom.

~

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 inaugurates a new era in literary art. I'm calling that era the Age of Brutalism.

Unlike modernist and postmodernist novels, which are, in essence, romantic, 2666 doesn't deny the reality of Sade's bedroom. (Exhibit A: Bolaño's novel within his novel: 'The Part About the Crimes.") But it's Sade's bedroom seen without Romanticism's delusions. We see Sade through the clarity of mourning, and with sad relief.

What gives Brutalism its pathos—what makes Brutalism art—is its awareness that all our songs (they still echo across the canyons of memory), all our political exercises, all our romantic odes to love and the human spirit failed to save those sodomized little girls. Sade still stands over them with a shrug. And it's his shrug—the sense of its inevitability, exacerbated by the philosophical failures of the last 200 years—that sends us back to language.

Brutalism is the representation and the contemplation of the Sadean shrug. That shrug, according to Bolaño, is "the secret of the world." Literature must rise to its challenge.

Brutalism recognizes that the rhetoric and the philosophical content of Romanticism have failed to rid of the world of Sade's shrug. Romanticism—after the Holocaust, after Cuidad Juarez—is an evasion. Religion? Ni hablar. Science? Sade is nothing if not a scientist.

Confronted by Romanticism's failure, Brutalism takes a new path—I'm not just thinking of Bolaño but also of Michel Houellebecq—employing the rhetoric of Sade against itself. Brutalist art is characterized by its emphasis on explicit sex and extreme violence, Voltairian cynicism, scientific and academic discourse, misogyny disguised as adoration, satire, and a cold delight in insult, which it constructs as a mode of honesty.

Brutalism's ambition seems to be, at least in part, to undermine Sade by appropriating his discourse. To defuse the bomb by blowing it up.

It's an open question if this will work. The great risk, of course, is that one becomes what one hopes to destroy. Another problem is that we're no longer sure what we're rescuing. The idea of love? Human dignity? Promethean hope?

Regardless, there's something in Bolaño, and perhaps even in Houellebecq, that's not in Sade, yet not Romantic. For all their brutalism, there's something other than a shrug at the sight of a sodomized child; and there's something other than a Blue Flower.

That new thing might be our future. It might be what fills the void left by the end of the soul.

The Storm of Life

August in Indiana—we're on Hwy 43, heading north from Lafayette, through cornfields, toward Chalmers. I'm eight years old and I've just been baptized. My hair is wet on the collar of my white Sunday shirt.

In the back seat I'm thinking, I'm completely pure.

That night, as on most nights, I fight with my brother. As soon as I surface from the mild hysteria of our brawling, I realize, That was my first sin!

And I  rush to my bedroom and kneel next to my bed. Speaking aloud, my arms folded across my chest, my eyes closed, I tell God, "Please forgive me for fighting with Jared."

I end the prayer and stand up. But I don't feel quite the same.

Really, since that day, I've never felt quite the same.

~

But I've always—even now—yearned to. I've yearned for the same all-encompassing whiteness of that August afternoon: the white jumpsuit I wore; Dad in white, in the water, waiting, and taking my hand, and receiving me into his arms; and then announcing the baptismal oath above me; and my brother and sisters kneeling beside the font, watching; and Mom, so proud, her tears—a young woman, not yet thirty—as she looked with joy at her son, at me.

Under I went. The water received me, closed over me. I clutched my dad's arms and he drew me up into air. And I could feel my purity: I was—for the first and last time—indisputably pure. In other words, at that instant, for that moment, I was, I thought, what I'm supposed to be.

~

The thing that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is, really, in sum, their innocence. . . . I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives.

— James Baldwin, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy"

If I remember correctly, I was actually baptized on my eighth birthday: August 2, 1975. I share that birthday with James Baldwin, who was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924. There are additional similarities: we are both first sons of large families; we both grew up in intensely religious homes; we both had—have, in my case—bewilderingly powerful fathers; we both decided as adolescents that we wanted to be writers; and not long after we'd entered adulthood we wandered from the faiths of our families.

I care about all of this because no single author has shocked me with insight as consistently as Baldwin. Very rarely, in all my years of reading, has a sentence changed my life—changed, I mean to say, my orientation toward my own behavior. Baldwin's sentences have done that not once but many times.

So during the past few months I've gone back to him the manner that my dad might turn to his Bible. By dumb luck I came across what Baldwin has to say about white America's attachment to innocence.

~

I tell her: But this! And you, this!

The children have fled to their bedrooms.

No! she says, this! And not this! That!

I understand myself. We always understand ourselves.

The door, the sky, the ocean air.

Later, alone, in exile, I write: Don't forget this.

I'm in pursuit of my innocence. Again I'm that boy—lustrously blond, wearing his embarrassing glasses, his teeth misshapen by years of sucking his thumb—running to his bedroom to retrieve what belongs to him, what he's been promised. 

~

A man who was once my prophet, Brigham Young, claimed that Africans are descendants of the murderer Cain: “Cain slew his brother . . . and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin."

Thirty years ago, I found that idea reasonable. After all, I read The Book of Mormon before I was seven, in preparation for my baptism, and, time and again, it had linked righteousness—by which it meant innocence—to fair skin. To be dark was—is—a de facto sign of guilt in God's eyes.

I see now that in this regard Mormonism is merely American. This country has always connected, at the level of essence, skin color and soul.

But Baldwin didn't need a prophet or a book to tell him he was guilty. He had the policeman's stare, the boss's disdain, the banker's fear, the librarian's condescension, and his father's relentless bitterness. Guilt, James Baldwin knew, was his birthright. No one tells us more poignantly how this myth of inherent guilt is black America's curse.

White America's curse is its opposite: the myth of our congenital innocence.

~

I can't remember a time in my life when I haven't spent a tremendous amount of energy maintaining—for myself, most of all—the myth of my innocence. Eric the Good; Eric the Well-intentioned; Eric, Guardian of Star-crossed Memories and What-Should-Have-Been, But for This World. Eric the Misunderstood.

Over the years, I've had no better proof of my innocence than my failures.

I've built my life upon this poetic contradiction, simply because it's allowed me to imagine that, fundamentally, I don't fail. The world fails. Other people fail. And my faultless heart is stymied by their practical, coldhearted cynicism.

Or: confronted by the reality of their pain, my contrition, forgiveness, cleansing, and justification occur with the arrival of my first tear. To weep is my moment of truth—proof of my return to innocence.

~

Now, maybe too late, I see that what Baldwin calls the "dream" of my innocence is destroying me. I'm breaking myself to pieces against it. There's no forgiveness, no cleansing, no renewal; there's the storm of life. The rain, the wind, the nostalgic shafts of sunlight—everything comes and goes, unceasingly. Nothing is ever—can ever be—undone.

~

I'm not the only white American to wonder why black Americans often seem so free. Lawlessly free, really—so lawless that their freedom seems to reinforce our belief in their guilt.

It hadn't occurred to me until reading Baldwin that they're free because they don't care about being innocent. By declaring them innately guilty, we freed them from the burden of devoting their lives to a myth of purity. Their freedom from innocence is what we mean—what they mean, too—when we say, They don't give a fuck.

Of course it's true that a good many of them—perhaps a majority of them, including Baldwin's father—destroy themselves raging against the myth of their guilt. Baldwin spent his adult life warning against the bitter futility of that fight. It's futile, of course, because it's a fight with a lie.

But the African-Americans who have succeeded in rejecting the myth of black guilt have given this country it's richest glimpse, up to now, of real freedom. Mournful freedom, yes—freedom in the key of the blues. But real freedom. I shiver to think of this country without it.

~

Which brings me, as always, back to myself.

Looking at my own life, and listening to Baldwin talk about his, has led me, over the past few weeks, to this conclusion: the myth of white innocence and the myth of black guilt are equally lethal. They end in delusion, in cruelty, in bitter despair.

I'm neither innocent nor guilty; I'm a man soaked—baptized—and windblown by the storm of life. I have no reason to repent because I've never been innocent. There's no holiness I can hope to return to. There's no guilt that I need to purge.

Through the maelstrom, I can hear singing. It's the free singing of people who don't believe in their innocence, don't care about guilt. It's the free singing of people who understand love.

~

Freeze that wet-haired boy in the back of his father's car. Sit next to him, put your arm around his shoulders, and tell him: "Kid, it's like this."

He'll listen. He's curious and he has, like every eight year old, an honest heart. And he knows about storms. He sees them coming all the time across the fields of high corn. Sometimes he receives them with laughter, arms up, soaked to the skin.

"This Is This"

At Sam's basketball practice last night, standing next to the bleachers and doing all I could to avoid being drawn into a conversation with another parent, I read, "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science."

And finally I was freed of my soapbox.

The article makes it clear—as if I needed proof—that human beings don't care about facts.

Instead, we care about values.

It's what we value, not what we know, that constitutes our identity. Our values shape our ideas of community, our purpose in life, our search for the admiration of those we love, our physical safety, the means by which we exercise power in the world.

Around our values we construct whatever system of "knowledge" we need to assure their survival. The legitimacy of that system isn't a consequence of how factual it is but of how effectively it reinforces what we hold dear.

In the Age of Science, it's likely religion that gives us the best example of the conflict between values and facts.

Most people of faith sense, however vaguely, that if they were to spend ten minutes objectively researching the history of their religion, they'd run up against facts that they can't reconcile with their values. So, instead of doing the research, they devote a lifetime—yes, a lifetime!—to a system of knowledge that can be eviscerated by ten minutes of scientific or historical research.

But they don't shun the research because they're afraid of the facts. They shun the research because they don't care about facts. Really, they don't—bottom line—believe in facts. They believe in what they value; they believe in safeguarding, by any means necessary, the structure, immanently fragile, of their identity.

Their identity is real. It's not a fact: it's alive.

So it doesn't matter if this or that prophet was, speaking factually, a philandering scam-artist. What matters are friends, family, community, connectedness, personal charisma, prestige, one's personae. The "fact" that the prophet wasn't a philandering scam-artist makes all of that possible.

In the end, you know, calling him a philandering scam-artist won't help anyone through the valley of the shadow of death.

So back to my comment on the soapbox.

I've just spent a few days revising my blog. Rereading it, I was struck, more than anything, by its futility. It's changed no one's mind, and never will. People—this is a scientific fact—don't really listen, unless they need to, unless they already believe what you're saying.

Better that I share how much I like eating a tangerine while I'm sitting in the sun, it's thin skin peeled and stacked in a little pile next to my chair, ready for ants.

The breeze comes and goes according to a wilderness of facts that I can't begin to understand. The air smells of traffic.

And I'm thinking of how much I've lost, and of the facts I've needed to explain those losses, if only to myself.

A mallard pair, duck and drake, fly over head, their long necks extended, symbols of grace. They drop into the aqueduct behind my uncle's house.

Passing clouds intermittently dull the sun's brilliance.

The planet is warming. That's a fact. The church is not true. That's a fact. Our nation's wealth is consolidating into the hands of a tiny minority. That's a fact. It's a beautiful morning; this tangerine is delicious; and I wait in brutal, exquisite solitude. All facts. Which of them matters to you?