I am a fat idiot

I have become fat and dull, pleasure loving, lazy. I wallow about the house in sun and rain, peek timidly outside sometimes, worried. The cows wake me in the morning, and the carpenter bees make a racket all afternoon. When sometimes I amble by the mirror I am disgusted. More often I steel myself against an accidental peek, and march crablike across my room looking askance so the mirror will not show me.

My mind is no better. One hopes for the redemption of a strong mind in a weak body, the compensation that somehow brings the whole up to the general mark, but this is nowhere to be found. After the sort of denial that only I can manage, I have acceded to the force of evidence. My mind retains nothing. Where once it could be viewed as amusing to leave one’s shoes planted unfindable on an upstairs shelf, or one’s keys in a kitchen cabinet and therefore lost, and thereby delaying arrival at work, this kind of event has ceased to entertain. Where once the forgetting of names and conversations could be excused with a chuckle, it is now the siren of emergency response that follows it.

Certainly not the first rude question

It is of course rude to ask what goes into our standard picture of domestic felicity. But there is a standard picture of domestic felicity. Some rules govern those ingredients as the picture appears much the same everywhere. I have before me a straightforward example, a couple sitting at a breakfast table by a wall that is entirely window, lit gray-ly from what looks like an overcast morning outside their—possibly hillside house. Beneath the table a young boy is playing upon a carpet patterned in vaguely Mugghal or east indian designs, whorled and angled in aqua, turquoise and lime green. The room is predictably roomlike, square, spare, measured, at the wall opposite the window a neo-60s sideboard with straight hewn legs, rounded corners and recessed drawer handles, on top cascading ferns from spherical wooden vases. It is morning. The couple, whose features and coloring possibly move the setting to a place of diverse population, smile at one another, she looking attentively at him while holding a coffee cup. She: silky brown hair, cherub-soft, striped slacks, her bare foot coquetting with the floor. He: slender, lightly bearded, thotughtful, expressing an idea. She is looking at him while his gaze goes just over her shoulder and out to the gray hillscape behind her, where his thoughts combinate together. There is also of course a cute dog, down there with the boy. There is not in this scene, or in any portrait of domestic felicity I have known: dirty ash trays, stacks of dishes, shelves full of books set aside to finish later, bales of magazines deposited randomly about the premises, piles of clean clothing by the drier, piles of dirty clothing by the washer, a light dust of soot along the sills, clumps of dog hair on the carpet, an array of coffee mugs ornamenting surfaces, cobwebs, dustwebs, window smears, and crumb clusters. The people are attractive, the room is attractive.

Pain

Tell you it’s real nice boppin along with no pain and feeling that you’ve never had a bad day in your life and never will have. Then suddenly you have pain. By pain I mean not the kind that animates the sensory nerves and sends a jangling along the pathways to register as fire in the brain. The pain I speak of has no fire, no jangling. It is the stunned silence after a bomb blast, the clear-cutting of perception which the migraine would otherwise occupy, the wide absence of tiny understandings. It is mortal pain without the histrionics, agony without writhing. It is dumb, it is dumpf.

The Fighting Shy Rules of Stuff

1. The acquisition of stuff must be monitored with vigilance, and whenever possible avoided.
2. It is perfectly acceptable, and better than acceptable, to diminish your load of stuff periodically. 
3. You usually don’t need to buy something to solve a problem. This statement is necessary as thoughts of buying are almost a reflexive reaction to any new problem faced in daily life, whether a rusty chain (buy some oil) or a fresh new anxiety (pay a therapist).
4. The urge to buy can usually be satisfied through circumvention, through making the thing wanted, for example, or renovating an old one, or borrowing one, or finding a lay alternative, rather than by buying new. The desire for a particular experience is often construed in the imagination as a desire to buy, probably because buying a thing, for so long associated with enjoyment of the thing by preceding it, has come to be imagined as the enjoyment itself.
5. Yet, with very few exceptions, the enjoyment of new acquisition soon wears off, and the soul returns to the humdrum quotidian.
6. The price of an object seldom includes—as it should when making the purchase decision--the cost of storing the item for years, the commensurate loss of living space, the psychological toll of schlepping it around, the embarrassment of seeing it sit idle, the worry of finding a big enough place to hold it, and others that should be obvious to the reader.
7. The accumulation of many possessions diminishes the appreciation of few. One faces a choice: Many and worse or fewer and better.
8. Love of less can be cultivated, is nobler in spirit, and cheaper.
9. In modern life, very few tools—very few tools—are truly necessary to perform the tasks of daily living. What tools are not possessed can often be improvised.
10. A borrowed item is a more efficient item, as because it is used by more users it is more often used.
11. A truly needed and not-to-be-borrowed item can be purchased with others and shared in a group.
12. The concept of private property is not considerably diminished by the loss of exclusivity. That is to say, you don’t lose possession of something because others get to use it. It is no less your possession simply because you have lost the exclusive use of it.

Conclusion: The theory of private property is a powerful, a civilized, and a not-to-mention necessary idea. But it can be taken too far.

Living Dangerously

I sometimes see my life as romantic. But then I remember where I live.

The “house” that I have rented for many years—an interesting structure—one of those bland fronts of a South Philly house that often shield peculiar and sometimes rich lives from the glare of public knowledge. Long ago my little place probably housed sailors or dockyard workers or longshoremen. Just a few blocks away are the great piers that once serviced ocean-going freighters, the street that was once a seething waterfront thoroughfare.

Photographs from the mid-19^th century show this street a maelstrom of activity: the dusty avenue thick with horses and wagons, and thousands of carts bearing the freight of the tall ships whose masts tower above the piers in the background. It was a close, active street, the kind of street where the primary commerce of the international American trade once took place—among men and small-scale vehicles, not cranes and mechanics and diesel trucks. (I miss it, can you tell?)  Now, of course, Delaware Avenue is no such thing, but a six-lane boulevard of stoplights and road rage, connecting the Sprawl Mart with the Home Repo and the Super Stash. It’s a strip mall stuck in the only place the city could put it, the only stretch of open retail-ready land within 10 miles.

But the houses around here remain largely what they were. I’m pleased to live in a place where a house can reach 150 years of age, and more, and still serve as a house, without making any great fuss about it. I live amid scores and scores of these houses, and not even a block of suburban-style mini-houses—vinyl siding, garages—can destroy the ambience.

However, I’ve known I must leave this place--the lust has indeed wandered—and have wondered what circumstance would permit me a graceful exit from this residence of six years. Last week I found it: The first floor wall, long bowed outward into the alley, has in fact collapsed. I didn’t realize this at first. My landlord spent the night here last week and we couldn’t figure out why the furnace, which had run all night, had apparently failed to heat the house by morning. Then we looked in the alley. A big brick wall really does make quite a pile. We had only a piece of sheetrock between us and the great outdoors.

This new development with the house takes its place alongside other, older quirks of the structure. For example, the hole in the bathroom floor that looks down into the kitchen.

Following the walll discovery came frantic calls to contractors, several of whom came to give estimates. And they confirmed what I’ve always told the owner about this place: Fixed up, it’ll sell at a huge profit. I think he believes it now, and plans to sell. Which means I need to find a new place to live.

Which is all right. I’ve decided, at least for now, that my only safety is despair of safety. I seem to be happy only when in flight. So once again into the wild blue yonder. So far the remaining two floors have not tumbled. Just give me another two days.

Gone

Yesterday I got up at 7, loaded the car with all kindsa bicycles, dropped off keys, drank coffee, took medicine, and was outta the parking lot before the first person showed up for work. The Geo purred like a kitten. I covered 500 miles and got a subsantial part of the way there, listening to Bill Bryson the whole way.

Now two days away from the job, two solid days hoofin it east, more than 1000 miles from the breezy grit of Los Angeles. I’m in the big sweeping prairieland of New Mexico and the Texas panhandle, where the scene goes white with dust whipped in the westerly sirocco.

Glad to be gone, in fact. How can I say it sucked because they were unfun, those people. One colleague in particular, I desperately wanted to know as a friend. I tried repeatedly to open some friendly connection with him. And every time I felt I was feeding his not-so-secret belief that I was an imbecile. He looked at friendly gestures as weakness. I tried until I despaired, and felt I no longer needed to play the earnest suitor.

Random notes from the road

October 14, 2014

Got started from Tulsa this morning and drove a humane 300 miles East to St. Robert,  Mo, where now. Traveled the path of old 66, locally now a superhighway called the Will Rogers Memorial Highway. A center span of this highway is a toll road—possibly because it enters the Kickapoo nation territory—but near Tulsa in the west and Springfield in the east, passage is free.

Signboards, many of which lay mangled after the recent winds, advertise things like “Visit the Catholic Superstore!” and “When you die you will meet God,” appealing to some audience you also might meet when you are dead, and identify. For God only knows who it is now. There is great admonishment around here to repent and be ready, a nice accompanying message to the harangue of death I was listening to while driving. Bryson, of course. Whose base narrative line I am coming to believe is a random Google search. Put it like this: The thread upon which he hangs his prose looks more and more like a desultory sequence of diverted interests, of the sort you naturally fall into when you aimlessly look stuff up on the Internet.

Certainly it’s the sort of trap I fall into when on the Internet, where last night I started by looking up pictures of the clothing worn by Otzi the Iceman, and proceeded thence by incomprehensible steps to an account of Charlotte Bronte’s life, followed by pictures of Charlotte Bronte, followed by the writing of Charlotte Bronte, followed by exhaustion.

This search cascade did yield the interesting photographs I sought of Otzi the Iceman and his marvelous equippage. The tools and clothing found with him—indeed, the food in his stomach and the once-glowing ember in a birch bark cannister—spoke much about his life, his sustanance, his background, his mode of survival. And it occurred to me to wonder how much he and I, both sole practitioners of our own highly personal and self-invented technic, might have in common. Specifically I wondered if his impulse to fashion a coat out of animal skins or a backpack out of reeds or a carrying pouch out of birch bark, was somehow similar to my desire for the cash-independent resourcefulness of my do-it-yourself camp stove and my self-powered travel and my permanent auto-repairs with seine twine.

Otzi lived in a time before economy. Sometimes I wish I did too.  

Notes from the end of an era

When I think how little anyone worried about the death of books, the death of bookstores, the death of so much else of the commerce of culture—music, movies, newspapers, the live singing and playing of music—I am moved to nostalgia even for that very ignorance. How could we have known that in a short time, in so very short a time, the markers among which we arranged our adult lives, the markers we were just coming to grasp, would be gone. And not in any slow disintegration and seeping loss of market share, but in a fantastic great implosion of beloved institutions. How could have known we were the last of a great tradition that would die tomorrow?

It takes an effort now, as Bill Bryson would say, even to remember the relation we had with words, with writers, before the Internet made it possible for anyone with an internet connection to be seen by the world. One so much enjoyed curling up with a newspaper on the train, or a book on the airplane. One correlated one’s travel with the speed of reading, to see if a good paper could last the whole train ride, or vice versa. One enjoyed knowing the great author was out there, somewhere, at his rustic house in Vermont, and might be reached by  correspondance through his publisher, and might actually respond. One aspired to be that distant presence, in all its vagueness and mystery. It was a smaller world but a more enchanting one. Typing, reading by lamplight, by candlelight, writing in cursive, penmanship, the connoisseurship of inks and pens, all now gone the way of the dial telephone, and with them a way of understanding and interpreting the world, and more than that a way of expression.

And this from a man who would never have claimed to be happy in those years. In fact he has never been happier than now, in these later times, these post-internet times. He will not therefore credit this great magic of the age with his improvement. And yet he will also not claim it kept him down. He will only say—I will only say  (this third person gets tedious)--that to the extent I could be helped by the rapid retrieval of information, the Internet has helped me. It has made my mind commensurate with the greatest in the land, as far as plain information is concerned. It has given me instant answers to difficult questions, of which I have many. And if those answers fail to satisfy my curiousity, I am consoled at least in knowing they are the best available. It has made me less worried about the strange questions I wish to ask. For even before I finish typing the question in the search space, my exact question appears at my cursor in anticipation.

So I'm really not that grateful to be here

Pardon me if I don’t see God’s great charity in skipping my death in order to ordain a new destiny for me as a staggering neuralgic. This hunger for gratitude around me, this discomfort with any other response but humble endurance and thankfulness for the fulness of his benevolence because I lived–-what is it but a salve to the horror of death? People want to see this. It helps them believe that serious illness is really all for the best. Is it magnanimous to see mercy in this condition? Is it the dog’s still-wagging tail after a beating? Is it even sane to feel grateful?

No, I am not grateful. I lived a life of constant physical challenge, both to better my health as a child and to foster a vigorous old age. I was cheated of both. I am not grateful for being here and I am not happy. God’s real gift would have been to take me when I fell. I do not live each day as it comes and I do not live in the fullness of his bountiful plan. I live in rage. I will not be happy until the vigor I enjoyed as a 55-year-old returns to me, or He, in his divine justice, finds more amusement elsewhere and lets me go. 

I do thank him for taking an already vivid sense of tragedy, an instinct for sarcasm, and developing it, elongating it, elevating it to a level of truly cosmic pretensions. Laughter is laughter, however biting.

Simple Gifts

Tis a gift to be crippled, tis a gift to be still

Tis a gift to sit right through the fire drill.

I crept down this morning and I sat on the stoop,

And I waited all day for some help to poop.

Sit then, you’re weaker than it seems,

My little prank will engulf all your dreams,

And I’ll hold you still when you want to flee,
For I am the Lord of the Joke you see.

I used to think Atlantic City would make a fine study for an artist. Now I just hope everyone forgets about the place. Woe to those writers trapped there by work or untreatable fascination, who by continued unregulated exposure have convinced themselves of its realism and essentialness, the endless panoply of human drama, the raw mix and rough-hewn shape of the sublime, etc., when indeed it is nothing such. A setting like a character must be inherently likeable or at least have some inner agent reaching towards its redemption. But there is nothing redemptive about Atlantic City. Even the gulls there are surly.

How gratifying to be able to prohibit someone, for their protection, from doing something they may enjoy.

His real being became gradually subsumed within a prankish contrivance of his own design, and thereafter it was nearly impossible to know what he really thought. He became more and more fond of not answering questions, or answering them with a sentiment opposite his real one--trusting at first, I suppose, that his hearer would apprehend the nature of this prank, and share the joke, but soon enough forswearing even that faith, and trusting himself more and more to answering with falsehood, or distortion, or some bombastic claim all irrespective of truth or the way things stood in the common perception. As he became a more daring liar, his need for props and supports and safety nets withdrew, until he became quite happy to launch off into an open environment of prevarication without the least fear for his safety.

Addled with Adler

I spent most of the day yesterday wandering around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, not accomplishing much, loitering along the waterfront, studying for long minutes the bowsprit of the USS Constellation, and the gammoning iron and other rigging of Pride of Baltimore II. I was happy to be confirmed in this non-productiveness by a new understanding of the word “leisure,” given to me by Mortimer Adler in a recorded lecture he gave some years ago on how to speak and how to listen. Leisure is a verb, Adler said, used as we use words like “work” or “play”--I work, I play, I leisure--and it denotes those activities of the mind whose end is the growth of sprit, intellect, and imagination.

I must say though that in other ways I begin to question some of Adler’s assertions and assumptions, those very premises upon which he based so much of his theory of the Great Books education, and the importance of reading. I question them the more so now as I come to see how strongly those ideas have swayed my own education, coming to me all unbeknownst through the intermediary of another great University of Chicago stalwart, Richard Mitchell.

For example, I swallow with the greatest difficulty the notion that conversation, as Adler asserts, admits of only two important ends: to persuade, and to inform. Conversation rightly considered, says he, is useful only when it is being used to influence—he himself prefers the word “sell”—and when it is being used to inform, to instruct, to confer information. And it is for these ends only that we should remain courteous, alert and respectful in conversation, for conversation does nothing more important.

No doubt there are delights in conversation, benefits of conversation, understanding produced by conversation, that go well beyond the twin objectives of selling and informing. Adler’s abomination of cocktail chatter I think betrays a blindness in this regard: He fails to see or will not affirm conversation’s value as a social lubricant, a protocol of introduction and developing intimacy. Those who would be friends, who would know each other’s minds, anticipate each other’s needs and support each other’s deficiencies, must begin that relationship with a conversation. Surely I don’t need to hammer this point home when so many others have done that work already—Eric Bern, Deborah Tannen, Carol Gilligan, by god, even John Gray and his Venus and Mars, to name a few. Conversation establishes social status, and then often tries to erase those differences it has revealed. Conversation situates participants in the social environment.

Furthermore, we might conclude conversation to be a very dull and mechanical thing if we grant it nothing more than the power of rehearsing ideas already present in the minds of the participants, as Adler seems to want to do, and not recognizing in it that enlivening energy that can illuminate, elucidate, magnify and sometimes transform those very ideas. Conversation breeds insight, surely, as much for the speaker as for the hearer, if not more. Where two conversationalists speak and listen to each other with care, and stick stubbornly to topic, insight abounds like very flowers, and thinking and conceptualization bear afterwards the salubrious marks of refinement and polish for having been brought into such contact with the thoughts of another, whether in agreement or not.

Therefore I take it as self-evident that the best objectives of conversation may very well be these: Not persuasion or teaching, but the fostering or insight, friendship, and might I also say the fine example of beautiful, elegant, eloquent speech.

Some good psychoactive drugs would come in handy right now, which I would push straight into my ear so they'd be closer to my brain. Ear suppositories. Isn't suppository also a kind of verb? I could swear I've read about suppository verbs. YES! I know! The verbs shove, stick and ram are all suppository verbs.

Waste the gift or waste the life?

What did it all mean?

Goddamn nothin.

What will it all have meant?

I didn't believe in it, you see. None of that fulfilling stuff, supposed to be fulfilling stuff. Thought it was a ruse and a detour and still do. Some day the wisdom may descend upon me like a herald of glory. But no, all a ruse.

You had wished to dedicate yourself and work with heart.

But it all comes to nothing, no? You are not your body, are not you mind, are not your dreams, are not your talents, are not your love, are not your breath, are not are not are not. You are not your heart.

You hold this position for spite only.

Of course. That is as close as I get to the belief in god! If there is no god, who am I trying to spite?

So much overtook them now, so many channels of looking and hearing, the young people filming themselves, good god, always more young people, always younger people, and younger people, all of them growing and aging as they themselves were doing, but bringing with them the accoutrements of a technical mastery unseen before in history, that sped up their lives even as they pined to slow down, the video blog and the self-produced music, all of these younger ones so much happier with the new technics than they; and, yes, all of them self-aware, not a whit less intelligent but more so, more intelligent and beautiful and serene, more cunning and ambitious and active. It made them pine for an age they could almost believe they had experienced in fact, when beauty was felt as a soft breeze upon the body. But the wisest of them believed that that salad age, that dew-touched morning and mystic dawn had less real youth to it than present yearning, less remembered greatness than current ambition. It was their unassuaged lust turned backward, made to wear a period costume. And the very wisest looked upon the new wonders with the greatest skepticism.

They find it not so much in the object of focus but the habit of focus, the direction focus finds itself maddeningly, compulsively pointed, its choice of objects, the lighting in which it sees them, the perspective and proportion they assume relative to other objects nearby. The man presumed to see best at night sees mostly night.