Weight of September; High School; (Dis)locations
Early Fall Dispatch
Greetings:
The fall begins. (Read as much into that as you wish!) On the quotidian side, too much going on, not all of it bad which means some of it is, too much noise, too many irritations, some real worries, none of which I feel the need to detail here. I mention such things only to suggest the weight, along with our dystopian news, pushing down on my (the nation’s?) spirit and so my writing. But we got a puppy, the children are visiting, one will find some strength. For this outing, I’m trying to concentrate, focus, with a little poetry even. “Please don’t tell anybody, I don’t do this very often.”
And I’ve included a whole book chapter, from a rather experimental book, so this Signal is quite long. “Just give it away,” as the song says. But even if it is free, who as time to read, you ask? Part of the point, I guess.
* * *
Somewhat to my surprise, I flew back for my 40th high school reunion, maybe my first reunion for any school. It was surreal, bittersweet, generous, wonderful.
We toured the school, a strange combination of the remembered, the not remembered, and a nagging in-between. Some things seemed smaller, some bigger. Forty years is significant in the life of a pine tree, too. People recalling different things, “I remember when we ______,” or “this room was _____” which one may not be able to confirm or deny. The neighborhood itself was different, denser, small post war houses replaced by grander residences, or university buildings. Conversation was largely reduced to clichés about the way it was, or at least what we now remember – such a troubling word, this present consciousness of a past [truth] – about the way it was.
Many of you must know what else we talked about: the rediscovery of old friends, some once very close. Talk about people we wanted to see who couldn’t, or at any rate didn’t, make it. Cliques faded, and occasional struggles to recall who that person could have been, then. But hey, the light isn’t good and my eyes . . . (Nametags save lives!) Pride over children, some grandchildren. The variabilities and vicissitudes of aging, unevenly distributed but borne by all. The loss of parents, and worries over their care. Classmates gone and sometimes one had not heard, which was sad and unsettling at the same time, confusing. People do die, I’ve read, and why did I assume I would know, somehow? An unexpected and welcome dearth of talk about material success, but fascination with physical locations, hence the text below.
Forty years of more or less adult life later, I see how bizarre, marvelous, sometimes painful, maybe downright crazy a project the American public high school is: an effort to distill an identity from a combustible mash-up of sex, sports, recreational substances, the occasional book, class, race, while bodies are physically growing, and in a roughly meritocratic political economy – all thrown together for about 8 hours a day, more with “extra” curricular activities, in a bureaucratic setting where tardiness matters. One might make comparisons to schooling in other countries, or perhaps the military, but I don’t think there is anything much like high school’s combination of breadth, intensity, transformation and consequence. Maybe I’ll write about that sometime.
As I’ve said before, one of the best things about aging, even better than compound interest, is that generosity becomes easier. “To understand all is to forgive all,” something in that direction. Again, the re-meeting was sweet. I hope you have a similar opportunity.
* * *
The Weight of September
Sometime during the 15th century,
a painter cleaned his brushes
and went to the cathedral square
for September sun and new wine.
Business was good.
More Madonnas ordered.
Vulgar old soldiers
never tired of St. Sebastian.
You’d think they’d seen
enough violated flesh.
The girl would have her dowry.
She so wanted grandchildren.
Maybe he did, too.
The boy was already situated.
Couldn’t paint but
a born courtier.
Probably for the best.
But none of that
answered the question:
could he yet show
the love
the pain
the faith
so that one would
see?
* * *
From Smith Lake, an unpublished book of uncertain form about . . . well, I let you worry about that. At least it is about what makes a place significant, at least significant enough to be identifiable, which is not a given. With examples.
Chapter Three: (Dis)location
I have probably been misleading any reader of this text by suggesting a quest for the grail, or a dream quest, at least some search for meaning only attainable after travail. None of which is entirely wrong, but the immediate reasons for driving to northwestern Alabama were more prosaic: positively, I felt obliged to see family in the South, and negatively, I could not stand driving I-70 East from Lawrence.
Many people cannot stand I-70 West. Because Kansans so frequently vacation in Colorado, some call it simply "the drive." Just west of Topeka, the land opens up to vast expanses, little upon nothing as far as the eye can see, which is a long way. Tiny hamlets and the occasional town are separated by miles and miles of highway. What is hard to fathom is that this is the so-called "Main Street" of Kansas, with towns like beads, well not many beads, on a string. Evidently, very few people live or work on Main Street, and they have left little behind, the Cathedral on the Plains off to the south being a notable exception. A billboard advertises Prairie Village, allegedly Nebraska's #1 attraction, a paltry detour of 167 miles (each way) to the north. Has anybody ever done this? To the south, almost nothing, and to the north, even less. But I love the high plains, the deceptive almost flatness of it all, and I imagine the Comanche and the Sioux riding their vast distances. I have sought buffalo – pedantic to insist on "bison” – and they can be very hard to see. On the plains, you think you see everything, but there is much you miss. Words to live by.
As I said, however, what has come to give me real trouble is I-70 East, which I have had to drive many times. For years if not quite every year, I have taught at Buffalo in the fall, so in late August I often have needed to ferry a car from Lawrence to Western New York. In December I would bring the car back, driving unreasonably fast and long and mostly avoiding snow to get it over with, roughly sixteen hours at speed watching for slicks, my stomach churning if I have to switch from coffee to Mountain Dew. But at least that's an adventure, with family and holidays and skiing if I make it safely.
The drive at the beginning of the semester, to Buffalo, is harder, as fond as I still am of East Aurora. Packing for the semester, I always get a later than intended start. Mapquest gives the distance from my house in Lawrence to Pat's farm, Morningside, in East Aurora as 1,022 miles, but without turning around for gas, lodging, accidental exits and detours for construction at the end of summer. In practice, I've usually ended up just shy of 1,100 miles. This is not the radio play 1,100 miles: Kansas City, with its bad roads and byzantine interchanges, often under buildings; the endless stretch of Missouri, littered with billboards, many about abortion; wealth but also abandonment, clutter; and St. Louis a mess, too. I usually bypass the city around to the north and if I'm lucky barely glimpse Saarinen's Arch, downriver and downtown, which is admittedly sublime if you get out of the car. At this point, I've traversed a bit of Kansas and one whole state, Missouri.
One of my themes here is appreciation, but I have to confess to having trouble with “Miz -UHR -ah” as they say there but nowhere else. I first heard of the place from my childhood friend Jeff, whose father must have been a professor at Columbia before moving to Atlanta, and from whom I learned “30.06.” When I drive across the state, I’m usually in a bad mood, leaving family to work, or returning in the winter, exhausted and pressed for time. But there is always something. Drivers are reckless and rude (a common prejudice among Kansans), winter storms coat the highway with ice, trucks jackknife. Giant piles of slash burn; trucks burn; dumpsters burn. I-70 East has assumed a Dantean character in my mind. And when the zombies come, I fully expect them to arise in the hinterland somewhere to the south of I-70 and move on unsuspecting travelers like me.
Finally crossing from Missouri into southern Illinois, legendarily tough East St. Louis gives way to more farmland but little rural beauty, just megafarms and some trees. Illinois and Indiana both claim Lincoln and also for other reasons are hard to distinguish. The giant cross in Effingham. Major highway crossing. When the NYT wants to talk about the plight of truckers, they send some fine young journalist to hang out here. Your intrepid journalist, reporting from the field in Effingham. Hammer down. Drive, drive, and drive some more, and then finally reach Indianapolis. Halfway.
I force myself to make it at least as far as Indianapolis. Famous for car races, though I've never been. Huge football stadium, old style in that new fashion, right on the interstate if you cut through town. FedEx or maybe UPS owns the airport, also on the highway. Chateau Thomas, no doubt named after our eldest, surprisingly good wine made right here by the highway. California juice, of course a bit overpriced. You can stay at this exit, too, even eat at Cracker Barrel (at least I think so), White Castle, and any number of sports bars (quite sure of this last). But there are few things to see, and this from someone who loves nothing, the big empty of the plains and its sheltering sky.
No doubt I should get off the road, explore, learn something, find something to appreciate. These are places, too, and must have some history, some particularity. Moreover, I have friends sort of on the way, but visiting requires sometimes substantial detours. Miles to go before I sleep or even happy hour, and I feel the pressure so I press on, making the experience all the more unpleasant. Rushing slows time. Once, while taking eldest son to Oberlin for a summer program, I traveled a little slower. On that same trip I took our youngest to the really fine zoo in Columbus. For a while the child’s favorite restaurant was a fish grill place with fire pits in a fancy suburban multiuse development, also right by the highway, where we proved a theorem he had worked out in the back seat. But over and over, at the beginning and end of the semester, there is no time, somehow, the desire to be elsewhere is too much, and the places I traverse look worse than they should, through little fault of their own.
One year, with Amy and the kids already back in school, and a few extra days in my schedule, I thought why not go see my family in Atlanta, avoiding the dreaded I-70 east? That route could bring me by Smith Lake, and hadn't I always meant to go back? From Atlanta I could head up the spine of the Blue Ridge, dropping down to Tennessee. See Aunt Jane and Cousin Tom and his family. Then through West Virginia as due north as possible, hacking through the Alleghanies with Pittsburg off to the left somewhere. I would arrive at Morningside, Pat's place in East Aurora, in the late afternoon on Sunday before Labor Day, with beautiful light coming down on the farmland.
East Aurora is in the North, hard by the Canadian border that you can see from a big hill, and more northerly because of the elevation. The few hundred feet above Lake Erie matter. There would be flowers, and strangely almost springtime air, everything still vibrant green after most of the country's plants had grown tired from their summertime exertions. Cocktails and something on the grill. Surely, I could prepare for the semester on Monday? [As if I would, with just a few more hours of effort, finally be prepared to talk about political economy at the present juncture.] That was my plan.
* * *
This journey if not this story begins in Lawrence, Kansas, an oddly meaning-full town. It's now best known as the home of the University of Kansas (chartered in 1864) and where the inventor of basketball, James A. Naismith, last coached and died. None of which really matters to me or probably to you, except that such things make places. My presence in Lawrence seems somewhat random to me, but I suppose lots of folks are used to being washed up here or there, by corporate reassignment, military posting, or what have you. Come to think of it, my presence pretty much anywhere has come to seem somewhat random. Perhaps one can travel too much. Be that as it may, unappreciated by the administration in the school that still pays me well, Amy got a much better job offer in Topeka, and we moved the family, and indeed became relatively affluent. Lawrence is exceedingly pleasant, a great place to raise kids, and Kansas is the Monaco of the United States.
Speaking of Lawrence and wives, but not pleasantly at all: Lawrence is also where William S. Boroughs went sometime after writing Naked Lunch and other books that made him a figure of some notoriety, and also after shooting his wife whose name I forget in Mexico in what may or may not have been an accident, whatever "accident" might mean in the context of WSB's drug use. The (endlessly contested, look it up) story goes that the couple was acting out the William Tell scene, the wife placing an apple (?) on her head, the husband shooting. In the Swiss version, the father hits the apple, misses his son, and thereupon kills the tyrant who thought up the spectacle for his own sport. In the counterculture American version, the spectacle appears to have been its own reward. (French intellectuals nod sagely at this point.) The husband misses (?) and shoots his wife in the head and stands trial for murder in Mexico. A friend corrects: he shot his wife in the US and fled to Mexico and was eventually allowed to come back (extradited?). Something like that. Anyway, eventually Boroughs is back in the US and lives out his days in the funky university town of Lawrence, drinking at a downtown watering hole called the Bourgeois Pig, which still stands. In fine weather, one may sit outside and watch the town go by.
From this remove, when questions of life and law have faded, this brutal tale raises questions about legibility, not just about what went down among a bunch of drug addled folks proud to be in the avant garde (how quaint!), or what they might have been thinking (who cares, except fans?) but of Borough's work. When we moved the family to Lawrence it seemed like a good idea to read Naked Lunch and maybe something else by way of educating myself about the local history and culture. I could not read the book, not because I was prudish but because to my jaded eye the once "revolutionary" aspects of the book -- a lot of sex, presented as liberation -- seemed erotically and aesthetically primitive, politically idiotic, and worst of all, tendentious. (Last time I banged an Indian, pardon me, native America, teenage prostitute, I mean underage sex worker, at a truck stop outside the rez, that's what I thought, liberation. Just kidding.) I'm being harsh, perhaps too harsh. Aesthetic primitivism can be wonderful, though I'd have to do a much more careful reading to make that claim in this case. And a great deal of modern politics, at least at the level of individual consciousness and legal demand, is about gender and identity, which have something to do with what used to more simply be thought of as sex, and which now appears to require a great deal of attention (indeed cheerleading) that I won't provide here. Of course, the sexual revolution was liberating, that's what it means to understand freedom in terms of capital, as inflight magazines and more interestingly, Houllebecq's Submission remind me. I see no secular alternative, although secularism is often thin, and that may be a good thing. But I digress.
It is possible that I am being ungrateful to Boroughs. Perhaps my own fondness for hallucinatory images owes something, albeit indirectly, to his work. But maybe my source is magical realism, or poetry, or just hallucination, like the recurring vision of walking out of law school and turning right and taking a different Mass Ave. north, north, away from this and all the way to the Kingdom, firs and white snow, drinking beer in the cold night, comrades and good women and little else. Clear and cold and hard. I do not know. Be such things as they may, I presume a case could be made for Naked Lunch, and to be fair I should try again but that is unlikely. Things change in time, and readings change, too. I worry about that. If Naked Lunch can move from revolutionary cry to apology for the hedonism on which late capitalism depends to a period piece that would be in simply bad taste if published today . . . how then are we to use texts to freeze time and achieve a modicum of immortality?
Lawrence sits on the banks of the broad and muddy Kansas River or "Kaw," which flows roughly eastward to join the Missouri at Kansas City, whence Lewis and Clark set out. "Kaw" is derived from Kansa (various spellings), the People of the South Wind, from which the state also gets its name. Before moving here, I had never before lived anyplace with a wind out of the south, except as the van of a storm, and it still disturbs me when the south wind blows. The Kaw, a relative of the Osage people, were much admired by the whites, who thought them handsome, generous and brave. Never numerous, the Kaw were based along the river, upstream from Lawrence around what is now Topeka, past the point of transition where the mixed forest bottomlands and prairie (from the French for meadow) gave way to the treeless expanse of the great plains, a transition that can still be seen on I-70, farther west than it used to be. Traditionally, the Kaw farmed and journeyed out into what is now western Kansas to hunt the plentiful buffalo. They were often at war with the plains tribes, but retained close relations with their river bottom kin, the Osage.
After the coming of the white man, the history of the tribe is fairly typical, sad in familiar ways albeit not especially brutal as such stories go. The Kaw were pushed about Kansas, and eventually were removed to Oklahoma. For a while it looked like the tribe would disappear altogether, but its fortunes have revived somewhat in recent years. Tribal government has been reestablished, and language classes are now offered. The Kaw own the Rock and Brews Casino, in Braman, on I-35 just south of the Kansas line. But neither full blooded Kaw nor native speakers remain. I sometimes think of the Kaw when I'm sitting on the deck at night, listening to the forest and the spooky warm wind blows.
This forest, here, is new. The Europeans started cutting trees as soon as they landed on the Atlantic beach, and they kept cutting trees as they moved westward. When a true frontiersman could hear the sound of a neighbor's ax, the land was too settled and it was time to move on, or so it was said. But what if there are no trees? On the vast grasslands of the middle of the continent, drought, fire, the buffalo and the wind conspired to keep trees from growing, except in protected places. It is disorienting, placeless, and the wind blows. My wife and I found a minimalist beauty, away from the clutter, but our son, reared in the secondary growth of Western New York, positively hated the swelling grassland, where there was no way to locate oneself.
There is a border country between the dense forest and the treeless plains, areas where young trees might survive in places where the soil is a bit deeper, or there is water, maybe only if the weather is good for a stretch. Once established the trees are better able to withstand drought and fire and grazing animals. But the wind still twists them. And so, heading west, for miles upon miles one finds a patchwork of prairie and forest, the trees generally scrubby and struggling to survive, until conditions become too brutal and only the grasses can live. Confronted with the grasslands, the Europeans began planting trees, watering them and protecting them from fire and animals. They thus moved the borderlands westward. Farther west, where forests are impossible and the dry farms extend for hundreds and even thousands of acres, trees are planted around homesteads and laboriously tended. These islands of trees, or oases to flip the image, are visible for miles across the high plains, comfort against the wind. And so now when I am home in Lawrence I watch the sun set through the tangled woods at the edge of the great Eastern forest that now reaches from the Atlantic to here and a little beyond, almost to the middle of the continent, listening to the coo of doves and the cries of cardinals and birds I cannot name by sound. And I realize that much of my life is a forest.
Lawrence is named after Amos Adams Lawrence, a Massachusetts industrialist and abolitionist who financed the establishment of the town along the river, by a waterfall that could be used to generate power in fine New England fashion. The New Englanders raised the head of water with a dam and provided mechanical power carried through a system of belts to the town's workshops. Long since the dam was converted to generating electricity. The power plant was upgraded just a few years ago, in fact, and is owned by friends of ours. It has been in their family for generations.
Lawrence financed the town's founding (he himself never visited) so that its inhabitants could vote against slavery for Kansas. Recall that under the Missouri Compromise, territories could vote to become slave-holding or free states. Hence "Free State," which is seen everywhere and is the name of a fine microbrewery with a brewpub in an old building on “Massachusetts Street,” which would be called “Main Street” in any other classic 19th century downtown. Long before it was mobbed by disturbingly shiny college students, however, Lawrence was a "settlement" in the Israeli sense of a self-conscious means to a certain form of dominion, and a rejection of another form of political economy.
The Missouri Compromise, a masterpiece of politics, was flawed by the uncomfortable fact that those who have fled or died cannot vote. In a perversely logical effort to reduce the numbers of opposing voters, partisans and opponents of slavery began terrorizing and killing one another, in the era aptly known as Bleeding Kansas, sometimes thought of as the true start of the Civil War. John Brown lived and fought near here, before heading back East to get himself and his sons killed at the federal armory at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. The mascot of the University of Kansas, "Jayhawk" is neither a real bird (for some reason I had thought it was a small accipiter, like a Cooper’s hawk, that hunted jays) nor entirely innocent. "Jayhawking" was Kansas slang for raids into slaveholding Missouri, and until a recent outbreak of historical consciousness the annual football game between the universities of Kansas and Missouri was called the Border War. Well after the Civil War had begun in organized earnest, a Missouri partisan named Quantrill raided Lawrence with the stated goal of leaving no man or boy alive, and no house standing, and almost succeeded.
As I said, Lawrence has always been a meaningful place, not just Boroughs but abolition and damn Yankees and "Jayhawks," the theft of horses and massacres and retaliations and signal fires over the hills before the telegraph line, all of which has somehow if bizarrely been converted into sports and suburban comfort for which intellectuals like me are insufficiently grateful. As well as a mecca of college basketball, Lawrence has come to see itself as the SciFi capital of the world, a center for fantasy games, and the like. Such history does not matter much in the grand scheme of things. This is not Paris or London or even St. Louis. But such stories make places.
My own presence in Lawrence, however, seems rather random, even to me. I live there, at least much of the time, not because schools and houses are good and by coastal standards very affordable, nor even because Kansas is the Monaco of the US, but more importantly and as I mentioned Amy is a law professor in nearby Topeka, the state capitol. Lucky for me and as I've suggested, Lawrence is exceedingly pleasant in a college town suburban kind of way, sporty, green and well supplied with restaurants and beautiful young people. A real estate agent told me that Lawrence had been voted the second least stressful place to live. (As I reread it, this last sentence is an epistemological fireworks display.) And yet over against this sense of randomness and disconnection, a competing sense of odd connections emerges.
Lawrence story: we are trying to buy a used bookshelf in a furniture/housewares boutique built into an old warehouse near the spur tracks on the other side of the river under the hulking grain elevator, in a working man's neighborhood that is slowly being rebuilt as a haven for architectural experiments. KU has an architecture school, and some of the houses are really interesting. The Prairie School meets Frank Gehry with odd doses of Bauhaus, mid-century modern and remnants of old farmhouse, Victorian, bungalow, trailer and hippie. If you head south, with the tracks to your left and the levee (built after the big flood in the fifties that damaged both Kansas City (where the Kaw meets the Missouri) and St. Louis (where the Missouri meets the Mississippi)) to your right, you drive among these architectural efforts, until you get to an agricultural products plant and one of the strip clubs, and then basically farms until maybe Tulsa.
As I browse the boutique it becomes clear that the store is also a meeting place for spiritualists, as that word was used in the late 19th and early 20th century, holding séances and lectures by mediums and so forth. I know all this from the schedule, with fees, on the chalkboard. As I'm taking that in, I note that the only book on one of the shelves we didn't buy (too tall) is a volume from an expensive and beautifully photographed series about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Dianetics.
I happen to know that L. Ron Hubbard took his name from another American character, Elbert Hubbard. One of the first advertising executives in the world, working for the Larkin Soap Company in Buffalo New York, Elbert Hubbard moved to the beautiful horsey village of East Aurora and founded the "Roycroft" (the name is made up, sort of like "kings craft," no?) movement. Artisans at the Roycroft produced arts and crafts, notably furniture, architecture, and books and other texts set in distinctive Roycroft type. The Roycroft was a seminal expression of what would come to be the broader Arts and Crafts movement, a late 19th and early 20th century response to industrialization. The movement had a campus which is still there, now anchored by a boutique hotel.
For many years our family lived around the corner, in a handsome old Victorian. When the family grew, I helped build an addition, a master suite high above the garden, well integrated into the old structure. I'm still proud of that labor, and pride in good labor indeed was one of the points of the Roycroft movement. Elbert Hubbard influenced Frank Lloyd Wright, in town on commissions from Larkin executives. In turn, Wright not only adopted much of Hubbard's style, he married Hubbard's beloved niece. Meanwhile, Hubbard wrote a best-selling pamphlet sold worldwide, had many affairs, and he and his long suffering wife died in the sinking of The Lusitania. In front of the old East Aurora high school, on Main Street, a statue of Hubbard stands across from one of Michelangelo. Both geniuses.
In my misspent youth I knew of L. Ron Hubbard and his movement (religion? cult?) Dianetics only because of a little movie, beloved by my circle, called Repo Man. The film follows a young soul who enters the strange world of car repossession, falls into sex if not love, and then the aliens come and take him away. The plot was hardly the point and the characters only a little more important. Repo Man was about America, a rather wacky portrayal of just how weird life in America was, and surely still is. And at odd moments, somebody in the movie would refer to Dianetics or to Hubbard as if such things were common knowledge.
Years later but years ago, as a young lawyer, I wrote poetry and occasionally gave readings in Washington, D.C. This was a surprisingly easy thing to do in the 1990s. Venues were plenty and standards were not very high. At a small reading where I was very well received, one of the other poets, a middle aged woman, said supportively to the group that I had "the gift." She then read a poem dedicated to, or perhaps about, L. Ron Hubbard, or maybe his work. I began wondering, who goes to these things?
Back in the boutique, as my wife wandered onward in search of the right shelf, I looked down at the book in my hands. It was about . . . L. Ron Hubbard's poetry. Evidently Hubbard had written a considerable amount of poetry over the years, especially in the 1930s, mostly while doing other things. Flipping through, I read:
Most of my poetry
Is free verse
The freer the better.
We bought a beat-up old shelf for the "kids" (two at Harvard) to paint and then use to store board games. When we are together, we play a lot of games. [I confess to the pride. I struck “already” in deference to our youngest, still in high school. No pressure. Right.] [Lest he read and feel slighted: the math whiz went to Stanford.]
I left the boutique feeling uncanny, having come upon something less than causal, less than really meaningful, much less than a songline or what might be a songline if I had a tribe. But still something, a tracing or a genealogy or a dewy spider web in our society's mornings, magical yet real or maybe vice-a-versa. Perhaps this is only a garden version of Umberto Eco's hanging rope, given meaning by my soon enough to be dead weight.
We have at least that much, but I think there is more. Maybe what I'm looking for, and often finding, is connective tissue. And maybe that's one of the lessons of Smith Lake, to be learned anyplace that people live together and in the world. Places have their own special beings and connections, and for that at least should be appreciated. "Right here, right now," as Fatboy Slim has it.
Appreciating this turns out to be very difficult to do in our culture. We are obsessed with things not as they happen to be in themselves, but as they happen to stand relative to other things. Accountancy has moved from a convenience to a disease of the soul. Not the Alps, but Davos. Consider our obsessions with rankings, from schools to restaurants to wine to vacations to cars to mountains to -- we seem unable to enjoy unless our experience is validated by its alleged superiority over the experiences of others. Or, more negatively, we are acutely conscious of the inferiority of most of our experiences. We are impoverished by envy, or more generally, by comparisons. So it becomes difficult to say that Smith Lake is not the most beautiful lake in the world, but it is Smith Lake. And Lawrence is Lawrence. And you, dear one, are you. Regardless of how many (real?) followers you may have.
Am I complaining about anything more than the so common human desire for prestige, the problems of vanity and envy and so forth recognized since Solomon's time? I think so. Advertising campaigns in airports and on planes often unsurprisingly turn on destinations. Airlines, hotels, and even global banks often display a succession of "iconic" images such as the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, New York's skyline, and maybe an Irish pub or Belize or something. I have been all these places; are you impressed? But in another sense, I have not been any of the places depicted on the jetway walls. Professionally produced posters used to sell something hardly represent the planet. Actual places cannot be as well framed and usually are not as well-lit as posters, which do not represent a physical world so much as constitute a social world that one should have visited, a compendium of desires, a pretension at sophistication. It is the difference between a woman, a model (now that is an interesting word), and an image of the model in an in-flight magazine. We long for the simulacrum. (Sometimes I think of this as Hegel's revenge; maybe I'll write about that someday.)
I recently read a fine essay on drinking in the old city of Brno, in Moravia. It is the kind of story I love: a man wanders from one almost indescribably cool bar to the next, and meets people who are warm, friendly. All is right with the world. But the essay is in the New York Times, which is de rigueur in my cohort and I read it because I'm obedient. So now we realize how cool it is to go barhopping in Brno, especially because one of the bartenders is ranked #1 in the world. What could this possibly mean? Related story: I'm in Stockholm, late evening before an early morning flight, bar closing but they still feed me. We start talking beer then aquavit, and it turns out that they are making cocktails driven by aquavit, which I think is really cool, and the bartender is just back from competing in Ibiza, epicenter of global coolhunting . . . He made me a spectacular drink and then left me in the very capable hands of his protégé. On his way out, he came back ‘round to tell me “I'm Nils, by the way.” Great guy. It has to be said that I mean that un-ironically. He was a great bartender, and I hope still is.
Globalization speaks the language of money, of commensurability -- is it any wonder we are obsessed by comparisons? There is always better wine, a cuter dog, etc. Or to be more cutting, a more beautiful bedmate, smarter children, a more desirable address. Or to be more precise, an idea of an as yet to be achieved (not bought yet) image. And since the purpose of the image is to arouse desire and conversely, remind us of our own impoverishment, we are always confronted with an allegedly better possibility. In response, I believe the point of living well today is to resist comparison to the image and say this, now. Not all, or even the best possible (whatever that might mean) dogs, women, children, houses, but this dog, woman, child, house is to be appreciated, maybe even loved. Welcome to Smith Lake. Right here. Right now.
Maybe because of this confrontation with the world from which I demand perhaps too much particular meaning the Swedes tell me that my project reminds them of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, a series of six autobiographical books that have roiled the suspiciously calm waters of Scandinavian intellectual life and even made a splash in literary circles in the US. I have not read the books, despite the claims of great cultural importance. Maybe I should, but life -- and more on not reading later. For many people, the staged version, necessarily a radical abridgement, "'seems to be a convenient way not to have to read the books,' said Åsa, a woman in her early 30s. 'Everybody seems to have a quite strong view of this book, so you feel you have to read it, but the sheer volume is intimidating.'”
I gather that Knausgaard describes, in painfully precise and minute and sometimes infuriatingly (to the Swedes) self-absorbed detail, one man's effort to get through his day and generally make sense of his life that seems to need no such justification, with its good marriage, fine children, and now artistic acclaim. Which is not to say that life is without difficulty. Sex is an issue, as is death. (I've heard these things somewhere before.) Knausgaard feels strongly about such things, especially as they pertain to him, so he copiously articulates his hopes, fears, efforts, failings, and many dislikes. In short, he struggles to hold things together. (I get that too.)
I do not know how Knausgaard's Min Kip should be related to Hitler's Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"). The provocation is a bit annoying, precious, and if I were older it probably would be offensive. I am not convinced it is worth reading the books to find out how trying to get the kids to school or even coping with impotence relates to trying to take over a nation and exterminate entire peoples. But I do have time to guess: in slyly comparing himself to Hitler, perhaps Knausgaard is only insisting on the perfection of his egotism? And if so, perhaps this self-obsession renders him capable of depicting a man who happens to be himself with unprecedented precision, attempting the textual equivalent of a late Rembrandt self-portrait? While this is bad manners, might not a great portrait of a man, and in particular the psychological difficulties of actually living in the "perfect" modern societies of Scandinavia, emerge? I'm sure many critics seem to think something like that. Can we say that Knausgaard is not as good an everyman as anyone else? Maybe insane egotism is the price to be paid for total honesty? Good not to be a blood relative? [There are other things to say here, about Norway’s relationship to the Nazis, but let’s move on.]
Be such things as they may, I doubt precision or "honesty" is all that sensible a goal for literature. Narratives are necessary to make sense out of life, indeed for our minds to function. But texts are not life, and converting life into text, as I'm doing here, should never be considered a "real" activity. "This is not a pipe"; no string of words more than hints at a bird in the air.
We are often confused and our worlds are quite foggy. This is human. Our lack of clarity about what things mean is sometimes, as in youth, innocent, and sometimes, as in love, even noble. From this perspective, writing a book called My Struggle seems like something only a young man would begin. We all have struggles, of course, but "I" am not so discrete an entity. We cannot quite remember (all) that we are, and much that we are cannot properly be understood, whether as a memory or anything else, much less conveyed. In the same vein, our relationships to our fellows and to the world are as often not struggles, but relationships of wonder, gratitude, or bemusement or something else altogether. And on good days, many of our struggles arise from love, when "I" am not the point.
* * *
In the years of this writing, I read more about and from Knausgaard. Although I still have not invested in My Struggle, I did read a dazzling yet unpretentious essay, on trying (and I believe failing) to come to grips with Anselm Kiefer (and we are back to the Nazis). I cannot remember reading a more sophisticated essay. I also read an interview in which Knausgaard moves cleanly from the Sermon on the Mount to Kierkegaard to Heidegger to talk about how we are to be in the world, all of which is beautiful and I believe true, but then he goes on to say that's what he's trying to do, feels obliged to do (can't help doing), and so he must try to express the meaning of this, to "fasten his gaze" on things in the world. He wants to write what I would call the sense of pregnancy, and there is something ineffably, inescapably, religious about both the effort and the world in which it is made, even in the absence of an articulated faith. His is a religion in spite of itself, and I'll forgive a lot for that, whatever our other disagreements may be, especially about how to write and who gets hurt.
* * *
Another moist spring night
rather late
after the writing
last beer on the deck
frogs
and owls in droves
noisy suggestions of shadows
you can smell the smoke
from burning the range.
* * *
Safe travels, and savor what you can.
-- David A. Westbrook
It was lovely to lay eyes on you again. Stay healthy & happy my beloved friend.