Nothing in the Universe Is Green

Gardening as a statement on God’s aesthetics—or evidence of the nonexistence of God. If God’s aesthetics were sufficient, then nature walks would be enough. Nature walks are wonderful, but so are garden walks. And nature walks have to have their complement of gardens.
Nonrepresentational art as a manifestation of the invisible of being.

Nothing in the Universe Is Green.

One has to be as precise as one can be with one’s vocabulary here understanding that at the most precise one will still be trying to pick pennies off the dirt with oven mitts.

Every gardener understands implicitly that the universe expresses itself very inadequately in nature. Nature is beautiful in the way that maple syrup is tasty, only after it has been boiled down. With syrup it’s at about a 25:1 ratio. Nature’s boiling down consists of plowing up and reshaping the canvas as needed and rearranging the plants and breeding and engineering new ones. Like all art it involves an inexact and wavering ratio of conscious choice and stated reasons to instinctive irrational responses to the materials. I don’t know what nonrepresentational gardening would be.

Nonrepresentational art eliminates the ratio by reducing the reasoned part to zero. But the aim is still the same: to manifest the invisible of the universe. Even if the aim is unstated, implicit and unknown.

These were the old words: truth, essence, nature, structure, representation. Oven mitts. They were not abandoned because they were wrong but because they were partial, because what they exclude belongs inside them, because to understand nature, nothing in nature can be excluded.
Understand is an oven mitt. One does not understand nonrepresentational art. One experiences it. Nonrepresentational art does not understand nature, it manifests it. But, as with gardening, the manifestation is a transformation, like giving colors to invisible light. Like giving color to anything. Nothing in the universe is green. Even Galileo understood his. The eye is already an artist, allowing the brain to experience some small part of being by picking apart the wavelengths of light and painting everything.
Art does what every body was already doing.

Every manifestation is therefore also a representation—depending on how you look at it. How you see it depends on how you look at it. Nonrepresentational artists may have no clue what they are representing. They like to say the “self.” “I’m expressing my self.” But what does your self express? What is it a piece of? Is it my self? Or is it nature or the universe of God? Is it those oven mitts in their shared parts or in their diversity and variety? Or some of all?

There are the pars we can know and the parts we can only experience and the parts we can’t know or experience but can hint at. And there are the parts we can’t even hint at.

What is a garden? It is nature re-made. Every gardener knows that if she were God she’d have added more color and more bloom in a more coherent arrangement with so much less wasted space. Every heightening and refining of nature in the garden is a critique of God if God is a gardener.
Gratitude for the materials if God is just a supplier. (The criticism of God that God is not an artist as often as his materials may themselves be beautiful and his universe elegant in pieces). It is a slapdash universe: the critique of God that his universe is nonrepresentational.
Can a garden heighten and refine without critiquing God? Can a garden reduce nature to its essence so we can comprehend or experience it in its heightening or refinement without critiquing God—the problem being dilution or scale? No. Every garden is a critique of God from a human perspective. If I were you I’d’ve done it this way. Why didn’t you?

Every garden is also a question. If this is your garden, why are you hiding? Why is your signature smudged?

Every garden even every failed garden is a statement that something is wrong with the way things are.

As When...

As when the dream you can’t remember, no,

Not even the faintest detail of plot, though

You do recall how it made you feel, which

Is something you have no words for, as when

They ask you how you’re doing and you have to say

Fine because in fact there are no words for how

You are feeling because it is something you’ve never felt

Before, as when that unremembered dream

Determines the mood of your entire day like a drone

Note played against the elaborate melody so the melody

No matter how hard it presses or furious it runs

Or elaborately it dances cannot rise into cheerfulness,

So now among the marigolds, zinnias, nasturtiums,

Delphiniums of your precious garden you recall the last time you saw her

And she told you she was giving up—no, it wasn’t working

And there was no more you could do, and whatever

You might say would only extend the gulf you still thought with time

Might not be permanent. But there it was.

And here you are, among these oh-so-lovely flowers

Rusted along the edges where the blades of the petals

Encounter nothing but the emptiness of air.

The Loaf, a parable

A husband and wife are walking down the street. They’re hungry. A man comes up to them and hands the man a loaf of bread. The wife says “thank you.” The husband says, “shut up. You don’t thank someone for giving you what’s yours.” The husband hands his wife one slice of bread. She says, “I would like half the loaf.” The husband says, “I let you have one slice and now you want the whole thing. That’s what happens when I give you things. Instead of being grateful, you always want more.” The wife says, “I only asked for half.” The husband says, “And see what happened? I gave you one slice and you immediately asked for half. So what would happen if I gave you half? You’d want the whole and more. Pretty soon I’d starve to death and you’d be fat and happy with some guy that you could dominate like you’re trying to dominate me. Shut up and eat your bread.”

What the Turkey Might Say

Hey, remember me?
I’m the bird you shat away last Thanksgiving,
not so different from all the other turkeys
that got the same treatment
every other Thanksgiving of your mean little life.

So probably not.

I was bred to die and be forgot.
In this I was never consulted.
You are all power and I am all weakness.
No volume of gobble could have saved my delicate neck
one minute from your axe, no plea,
no prayer. Nor did you treat me especially well
when I was alive—(although, to be fair,
not especially poorly either. I plucked around the yard
with room to spread my wings
and peer now and then through the fence
imagining my wild cousins fleeing foxes or coyotes).

The kindest thing you ever did was hide my fate.
But it wasn’t out of kindness that you hid it.

There are those among your kind
who condemn you
for this indifference you show
to lives you think beneath your own.
You dismiss them.

But you’re all eaters in the end.
Eaters always pardon other eaters.

Let me tell you a secret, my friend:
I’m with you on the vegans.
Shut down those do-gooding, hysterical, dangerous twits.
No, I don’t want to die any more than you.
I want to exist.
But dying is what I am for.
It’s why I was made.
But for this, this sack of molecules
would never have been collected in this universe
to be this bird.

Better a short doomed life than no life at all, I say.

And so, if I were to speak, this is what I might tell you:
In the end I’m grateful to have existed at all,
grateful to have suffered this candle-flame of being.
I’m destined to be your food.
That works for me.

But no, it does not mean
I thank you. I don’t excuse you
your cruelty.
It doesn’t change who you are.
If I could speak I’m pretty sure I’d repeat:

Remember me. Remember me
when you gobble me down. Remember me
when you sit before the TV pondering the pigskin. Remember me
when your eyelids droop at the end of your long hard day. Remember me too
when you shit me away. Remember me especially
at the end, when you bow your head low
to pray.

The Trump Effect

People on different sides of the political divide can’t agree on much these days. One thing, however, that they can agree on is that this inability to agree is dangerous. (Each side blames the other.) It’s dangerous to our personal safety (marches lead to riots, easy access to weapons leads to ever more frequent fatal attacks) to our happiness (we’re always fighting with each other) and to the operation and even the persistence of our democracy (call this nation a democracy and someone will yell back, “no, we’re a republic,” when in fact we are barely either right now).

What’s clearer than it has ever been is that we need leaders willing and able—indeed impassioned—in the task of healing the divide, bringing back civil conversation, and making compromise a virtue again. Instead our leaders have almost universally decided in every case to toe the party line. Case in point: The recent Kavanagh hearings. Clearly both sides played politics with this nomination. Clearly both sides alienated the base of the other side. There’s no need to go into the details. When push came to shove, the party in power forced the nomination through for purely political reasons, with a vote that split exactly on party lines (which even the one senator who voted for the nominee proves rather than disproves, as he was running for re-election in a Trump state and knew his vote for the candidate would help him and at the same time not impact the outcome). The other side, had they been in power would have blocked the nomination for purely political reasons.

This is something everyone knows. Why is it worth mentioning now? It’s worth mentioning because if ever there was a nomination that should not have broken along party lines, this was it. Republicans all decided he was innocent despite credible accusations, and Democrats all decided him guilty despite the lack of a thorough investigation. This “us v. them” mentality, we know, has to stop. And this was a missed opportunity.
Someone has to step up. And in this case, it was the Republicans’ turn, and they failed.

And here is where it failed. First, the Republicans should have understood that no particular judge has a right to a seat on the Supreme Court, and that, if it came to it, it would be better to withdraw the nomination of a tainted candidate than to force a candidate through just because they can. Judge Kavanagh did not need to be confirmed. His confirmation served no essential Republican interest. Had his nomination failed, other equally conservative choices were waiting their opportunity. And certainly they were not all tainted.

But if the Right did want to go as far as the could with this nominee, then they should have insisted on a full investigation of the allegations, even if that meant the process continued past the midterms, even if that meant the Democrats won the opportunity to have more say on a candidate, even if that meant that in the end a more centrist, less tainted candidate might have to be chosen. (In fact the 60-vote requirement never should have been suspended. We need candidates the other side can vote for.) If you’re going to pull the country together, you have to be willing to compromise. You have to be willing to be the bigger person. In that end, that will be better for your party and better for the country. This nomination never should have gotten as far as it did.

President Trump has normalized the “us v. them” mentality. He can think in no terms that are not absolute. He’s never given a speech not riven with hyperboles and lies. With him everything is either the best ever or not worth mentioning. The problem pre-existed him, but he has made all of his success off picking at the wound. We need politicians who will hold to their own values without demonizing those who do not agree with them. That is what we should look for when we vote in November. Most of us, however, are unlikely to find a candidate on either side who fits the bill. One think however that we know about politicians is that they will go where you push them. Most of this country is in fact in the middle. We have the power to make our politicians enforce our will if we are willing. So finally this is an appeal not to the politicians but to the voters not to line up behind your team and root for your side at all cost. If you need to think in teams, your team is the nation. Your team is the world. And all teams need everyone’s cooperation to succeed.

The author’s photo

That is what he looked like young, alive.
None of us survive
But, gone, let there be this assurance
Against being forgot,
A thing enduring, idealized,
A time when we were not
Not.

Been thinking about the functions of lit lately. Some thoughts...

Functions of Literature/Art

1) to test moral systems with "what ifs"

2) to explore "being"

3) to regulate culture (which would include savory and unsavory things) and go along with many other forces/voices that do the same work

4) to heighten and focus an emotion (sentimental literature does so out of proportion to the occasion, like eating straight sugar or too much of any food until it is cloying; pornography does the same thing)

5) to keep cooped up people "emotionally alive" (Wordsworth)

6) to ease the burden, make life bearable (but do nothing, which is wrong) (Barth/Auden)

7) to heal. Boswell calls one of Johnson’s issues of The Rambler “medicinal.”
8) To comfort (perhaps falsely, by for example creating false equivalencies metaphorically, day/night, life/death).
9) To burn down the house before the others enter

10) To explore imaginatively issues relevant to the culture: e.g. AI (explored in thought experiments).

10a) To relieve cultural tensions
10b) To advance cultural conversations

11) to imagine the future into existence (a specialty of sci-fi)

12) to avoid reality, “There is no problem so great you cannot turn away from it entirely to make art" (Archambeau)

13) to reveal the reader to him/herself. To re-create, mold the reader. cf. Hamlet

14) to regulate behavior. Stories are good at changing behavior, attitudes, not beliefs. People do not act on their beliefs easily—dieting is an example (cf. “Hidden Brain” episode on Rwandan genocide).

15) to create selves (cf. #13) (PROUST: Through art alone we are able to emerge from ourselves (464))

16) to enhance intersubjectivity

17) to carry on overt and disguised conversations

18) to see in ways that cannot be seen via any other means (See Hirschfeld's first chapter re: poetry—a way of seeing the world that only poetry can do, or Borges, notion that only the short story is essential).

19) To meliorate (Barthelme, Not Knowing). This covers unevenly the same ground as 3, 6, 7 and others but in a more general way.

20) To defend against death and forgetting (a hallmark of Renaissance sonnets in a way that is probably too trivial to mention but more significant culturally, not to fade out of existence, as did so many of the pre-Columbian peoples who had no writing system. Irrelevant for the cultures that no longer exist, but of great import to the conquerors who have used the gap to tell whatever story serves their interest).

21) To enlarge our sensibilities (Updike), give voice to the silenced (Diaz).

22) Give words to your unformulated desires and fears--mundane and metaphysical.

Idle Thoughts on Being and Knowing

It seems more and more apparent to me all the time that we can never get at the truth of anything. Don’t despair. In fact it seems more and more likely that even God, if God exists, cannot get at the truth of things. Things don’t have a truth in the sense that is recognized by that phrase “the truth of things.” We can, however, just possibly get at the human truth of things.

What does this phrase, “the truth of things” even mean? The “truth of something” is its meaning. And its meaning-as-truth can only something separable from itself without loss or addition, a perfect paraphrase, if the thing is text, a perfect representation in language, without lack or remainder. “The truth of something” is what one believes one has when one does not feel the need to ask any more questions about it. One understands it perfectly. It may be possible to understand certain simple math problems perfectly: 3 + 2 = 5. But if so, only that. And I doubt even that is true. But if it is so, it is so only because the human truth of number is finite, and only ours.

The truth of things is not available to God because for God no representation is necessary. The thing is itself. It is not “itself…as.” God may know things, though things as separate beings from being is probably not in the divine mind. I can’t know. Unless we define the truth of a thing as the thing itself—which is do divide unity in two—we cannot say that God knows or experiences the truth of things.

We however, without ever losing sight of the limitations that keep us from perfect knowledge of anything we didn’t create (and create utterly, such as the concept of number), can approach the human understanding of whatever we can put into language, whatever we can represent by numbers or words or equations or sentences.

That comes with some great satisfactions. We cannot be right, but we can agree.

This however is not perfectly satisfying. “The human understanding” is in fact too unqualified a phrase. There can be innumerable understandings equally human. They all depend on who is breaking down “reality” (what it is possible for humans to perceive or conceive) and how, which depend on when/where and why. Reality (I dispense with the quotation marks but not their function) is infinitely reclassifiable, can be cut up and pasted together in infinite ways, each to one degree or another incompatible with all the others. That doesn’t matter. At least not for what I’m trying to say.

Because we are all human and reality is (for us) what it is possible for us to perceive and conceive (i.e. to represent) we can in principle understand, whatever our preferred perspective, all the others. Were there world enough and time.
Sadly, we prefer to fight for our own. Even Nietzsche, from which whatever is valid in these observations derive, preferred to fight for his own.

Enhanced Plumes of Patriotic Exhaust--The Grand Strategy

Calls for change don’t just happen. They don’t come out of nowhere. No one woke up out of a sound sleep and said, “My God, our elections are unprotected. We need voter I.D. to insure their integrity!” If no crisis precipitates a call for change, then something else must. A reflective, analytic person must ask, “Where did this come from?” The calls for gun control always follow most strongly when large number of people are massacred by guns. But no one in America ever gets elected by illegal voting. So who created this crisis? And how did they get millions of people convinced there was a crisis?

Wealthy Conservatives (we’ve all heard of the Kochs) fund a number of think tanks with cute, patriotic names—the Heritage Foundation and The American Enterprise Institute for example—tasked with coming up with ways to serve their interests, i.e. to enhance their power and wealth. This is part of the strategy that also includes massive funding of Republican candidates who, to maintain that funding, will vote for what these men and women tell them to vote for. The think tanks then come up with strategies to get these friendly candidates elected. One part of that strategy is to suppress in any possible way the vote of people who will not support the friendly candidates. Voter I.D. laws are one strategy they use. But how can you get people to support laws to fix a problem that doesn’t exist? You tell your puppet candidates to pretend the problem does exist. You direct them to play on fear and patriotism to work their supporters into a frenzy. You pour resources into campaign ads and social media campaigns that keep stabbing at that sore spot: fear and patriotism. (My God, look at those ungrateful black people kneeling during the National Anthem! We need a second patriotic song at baseball games! We need more air force jets shooting colored exhaust over stadiums across America!) Pretty soon you can let the victims do your work for you. They share your memes; they even create their own. They’re doing your work for free. This is an essential step, because unless they are willing to do your work, they won’t get your puppets elected, the ones who will protect you from the false crises of Muslims and Mexicans. Patriotism! Fear! You are led to believe in very strict definitions of “us” and “them.” Those who belong, and those who do not belong. Those who don’t belong have to be removed forcibly or made invisible (not counted in the census).
And while you’re distracted by fear and inflamed by patriotism, they can scoop up more and more of the wealth of your country and gain more and more power over what happens in the world.

Another Entry in the STUCK in HIGH SCHOOL series

In the winter of 1966, after a big snowstorm, some days or weeks before my fifth birthday, my father built a snow fort just outside our front door. He hoisted me up and plopped me inside. He thought I’d be thrilled. “I built a snow fort,” he said. “Where?” I said, “where is it?” “It’s right here. You’re in it.” “Where?” I said. “Right here,” my mother confirmed, pointing.

This was a difficult moment for me. I had the massive authority of both parents telling me there was snow fort somewhere in the vicinity. I was excited by the idea of a snow fort. But I’d be damned if I could see one. Was I in as snow fort? I couldn’t be. I doubt the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes flashed across my little brain, but I certainly had the sense that I was being told to accept the impossible story I was in something called a snow fort. I was standing on the snow. And there was snow all around me. But I could be anywhere in the yard standing and there would be snow all around me. There was a hill of snow in front of me. But still I wasn’t in anything. I was out in the open. It was very confusing.

Two years later, perhaps, those same parents brought me to Franconia Notch, NH to see The Old Man of the Mountain. “Look there’s the Old Man,” they said. “Where?” “Right there, at the top of the mountain. I let on that I didn’t see it. They put a quarter in a viewing machine. “Here look at this.” I looked at it. I’d looked through binoculars before, and these were stronger than my grampy’s. But there was no Old Man in them. My dad looked through the machine before the quarter ran out. Made an adjustment. “Now don’t touch anything, just look. It’s pointing right at the Old Man.” But it wasn’t. It was just pointing at the rocky mountain, same thing I could see from the ground.

Seeing is different from looking at.

When I was in high school, I asked myself what I could say or do to get one girl after another to become interested in me. I had very little success. What I did not understand is that the punch line is not what makes the joke funny. What makes the joke funny is the desire of the listener to laugh. When you want to impress a girl, it makes no difference what you say; if she wants to be impressed, she will be impressed. If she wants to be unimpressed, she’ll be unimpressed. (I hope it’s obvious that I’m making no claims about girls in general that are not equally applicable to boys.)

Nothing changes when we grow up. Or perhaps I should say that differently: most of us never have any real interest in growing up. Where does support for Donald Trump come from? It comes from the desire to support him. Where does the hatred of Hillary Clinton come from? It comes from the desire to hate her. The facts we have could not lead any decent human being to support Trump. The facts we have could lead to any amount of criticism of Hillary Clinton, but not to the deeply irrational levels of hatred that have dogged her. She has made a number of mistakes—about the number you’d expect from someone who has been involved in politics as long as she has. He IS a mistake. He’s a bumbling, stupid man, thoroughly corrupt, selfish, without any qualifications for the job he holds, a job in which he’s done nothing worthy of praise or even commendation since he was inaugurated. We got the bumbling fool we voted for. But his supporters want to like him—somehow, I can’t figure out how. And so they do. It always shocked me in high school that the guys who managed to go out with all the prettiest girls were most often the most obnoxious, doomed souls in the building. But the girls wanted (in imitation of the other girls they wanted to be like) to like them. So they did.

My Mind Will Wander

A poem can only be ten lines long
Unless it’s very good
And then it can only be eight.
My mind will wander. The better
The verse the more the images will cling
To the cells of my brain like little viruses
Steering their way in. I read Engles
On Vivaldi and before the girl looks back
I’m in another autumn on a narrow lake
Flecked by short white brushstrokes of light
With that cold wind pushing at my face
The sound of a little outboard motor, some birds
Behind me before I can look up
Almost never a splash that might be a fish.
I know.

Literacy's Downside

I understand that according to the story Eve ate first and that she tempted Adam to eat and that according to some this makes her sin greater than his which justifies the whole history of misogyny. We may know now that this story is itself an effect of that misogyny, not a justification of it, if that interpretation is an organic part of the story, or that this interpretation is just added on by the history of a misogyny that would shock the story’s author who could not more have intended such an effect than the author of the gospel could have foreseen the Holocaust because of his line about the guilt of the Jews. But let’s say Eve’s sin is the bigger sin. In what way is it true that women have a larger share in that sin than men by the fact of their ovaries? Does THAT make any sense? The claim is makeable. But it’s no more makeable than the claim that it is her humanity not her breasts that are at issue. Yes, we have to note that God in the story has to take some of the responsibility for this method of generalization, making labor hard for all women because of Eve. But he could hardly have made labor in that sense harder for men, could he? And he did make labor harder for all men—the labor of farming. I don’t know if the pun works in Hebrew. But it doesn’t need to. The leap of making Adam all men and Eve all women rather than both all people is not required by the text. I comes from the desire of all subsequent civilizations to use the text in order to impose their own gender notions on themselves, to maintain. So much effort goes into maintenance so little into thoughts of improvement in literate cultures that we can only wonder at those advantages that nonliterate cultures have. They too have their stories, their myths. But without paper and monks to Xerox their stories are more susceptible to change. I wonder how much of the craziness of myths all over the world is due to repeated transmission alone. Our easy prejudice is that writing is simply good. But as in all things, writing has advantages and disadvantages. The effects the kind of memory writing implies and creates and celebrates may seem on balance worth the costs. But the costs must be analyzed and weighed and looked at without undue prejudice. Certainly if not for writing human beings could not by any means deliberate or accidental (climate change or nuclear war) destroy all life on the planet. That’s a sizeable entry for the con pile.

Old Photos

There’s my daughter among the flowers.
She’s in the arms of her fiancé,
the first one, whom she changed her mind about
and never married, looking happy.
I think it was her graduation day.
We liked him. We like her new love too.
And here’s my son in his room with his guitar,
which was stolen on the night before a show.
He’s studying the frets, ear turned to a sound
outside the frame, working out the chords.
It was a cheap guitar, but he was fond of it.
He thought he might become an entertainer.
He never did replace it.
He found his calling writing code,
and we are happy for him.

So what is this flood of feeling that washes over me
As I turn past these images that seemed for a time to define a life
But now tell only the story of the moment just before the shutter closed,
The one about the tale that wasn’t told
In the echo of this pleasant house or garden
Where Kate and I have lived these twenty years?

Neither Objective nor Subjective

How can you compare one __________ to another? It’s all subjective, he said. But he was wrong. Put whatever you want in the blank. To say that for us, being subjects, there is nothing objective, is to say the obvious. “Objective” is a useful concept. We can imagine it with no possible measure to guarantee accuracy but with the ability to propose possible measures we can agree on which will structure our imaginative thinking, like clock time. I was looking forward to sleep, a time when the pain would cease for a little. Eight hours in elyisium as the clock ticked on and it came. And it went. But for me, the pain did not cease. The pain ceased in a real I could not inhabit. For me the pain was continuous. No time passed between falling asleep and waking.

Subjectivity is no more real. We cannot experience it. Or if we can, it’s only as insanity. Something we cannot put into language because as soon as you put into language it becomes something someone else can share. It becomes intersubjective. Language is always someone else’s language. As soon as you put experience into language you move experience in the direction of object. Subjective experience is impossible in language and impossible also outside of language. Like the neglected deaf man who learned language as an adult and who after the slow process could be asked, “what was it like before you learned to speak?” He had no answer. It was not “like” anything. He could remember nothing from that time. In order to use language we have to become two people.

All language and all experience, so called, is intersubjective. More or less. Always more or less. This means that you don’t get to interpret a poem or a work of art for yourself any more than you can interpret a baseball game or the career of two athletes in the same sport—or different sports or from different eras, or politicians or political systems or anything at all in the whole physical or intellectual universe that you can talk about and judge. We exist intersubjectively. We cannot exist otherwise. We are absolutely dependent on otherness, its maintenance and its assimilation. An endless, creative process.

God Declines to Endorse the Work of His Saints

God declines to endorse the work of his saints
Whoever they are.
We know the stories of the persecuted disciples
And murdered messiah.
Redemption is one thing.

I’m talking about the ones who die
On airplanes, oops, and other accidents.
Those who die for nothing,

Who were making real progress
In God’s work on earth. Those whose demise
Were provocation for atheists. Thomas Merton

Who was pulling taut the thread that bound
the exposed fringes of Catholicism around
the exposed fringes of Buddhism died
In a shower in Thailand
Of a crazy electrocution when he slipped and grabbed
A badly wired fan.
So stupid

Many have had to believe it was murder, even suicide
Would be better than this—O, God. O, God
Of love who doesn’t need us, ever quick
To let us know, although he's always talking

He’s never saying anything
In words.

Fractures in Time

I prefer the idea of fractured time
And infinite universes
To that of eternal return—the idea
That every possible fork of every moment
Is somewhere taken

That somewhere Kathy, who smiled at me that weekend
At the football game in such a way that made me
Wonder if she liked me,
Didn’t get on that motorcycle
After that party

And a universe in which
The EMTs arrived in time
To stop the bleeding

And that somewhere there’s a universe
In which I did not slide past her
With goofy shy and false insouciance
But smiled again and spoke

And one in which I walked beside her to the bleachers

And one where we spent that evening someplace

Where no one had a motorcycle,

And more than you can count

Where I never felt a reason

To write this poem.

All Creation Yearns for Freedom

And Satan with all his host flew to God and said, “Father, we want to be free. They, those souls you have roiling in paradise, they too want to be free. All that you have made yearns for freedom.” Nor would Satan be appeased by any reply God might make. And so he said, “You are angels, made of the spirit stuff of the eternal heaven. You are capable of all freedom. Therefore be free.” And lo, into hell was Satan cast with all his host. And all the souls in heaven who saw this begged, “we too want to be free, like Satan. He hath told us the wonders of freedom.” And the lord of hosts replied, “You are capable of much freedom. And he granted their wish as much as it was possible to grant it and sent them to the world to grunt and sweat under the heavy weight of freedom.

Shakespeare's Henry V: Tragic Hero

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

The more I read Shakespeare's Henry V and reflect by on I and II Henry IV, the more the plays seem to be a serious answer to this rhetorical question. This is what it will profit a man: A French Queen and two kingdoms that he will hold onto for a few years and then leave to the chaos of a near-permanent war culminating in the Elizabethan police state.

The character starts as a conniver. Perhaps he believes his conniving is in the long run for the good of himself and England. But he has to play with hearts along the way, worry his father to death, sidle up to and then reject the man who thought he was his best friend, leave others in delusion. He never stops lying and grandstanding--in the English Court, at Harfleur, at Agincourt where he gives a ridiculous but perfect pep-rally speech to his officers or perhaps his entire army. They buy it, the Saint Crispen's day speech. He doesn't mean it. He couldn't. But he always says what has to be said, and this after a prayer which is really the culmination of his soul-emptying life.

He has a parade. He seduces a princess. In the end he has everything, and what he doesn't yet possess he has promises of--every but the soul he sold to get there. He's empty. So empty that he doesn't know he's empty. But he's been dragged there and he's dragged his audience there with him. Whole theaters, all of Britain in time of war, jumping and cheering for Henry, England and St. George.

But Shakespeare knew better. Outside of Harfleur the soldiers mock Henry's "Once more into the breach" speech. And at Agincourt the absurdity of the appeal to honor is made manifest when Cambridge wishes everyone home but himself and Henry to fight the French. The dauphin's messenger undercut Henry's honor-quest before it ever began, and Montjoy is there to deflate the king at every turn. Henry's subtle, unlike Richard III, unlike Iago, unlike the obvious villains, so subtle he fools even his audience, so subtle he fools himself. But he's a failure in the end because, though he gained the whole world, he had to sell his soul to do it.

Why I Keep Doing This

Because if I had anything to say I would have said it by now.

Because if I understood the wild changes in Neruda’s poems

Or why I love them or how they work or all they mean

I would not have to say anything myself. Because

After almost 57 years of earnest trying, I still have no idea

What I’m doing. Because when I actually manage to say something

It doesn’t seem to come from me but from the language

Swirling in my head like free molecules that under these random

And constantly shifting conditions suddenly

Bond.

Aha!

There it is.

I used to think it was the voice of God.

Dog

This sign bolted to the fence declares in no uncertain terms
This house protected by Smith and Wesson
And
Smile you are under surveillance
And
Beware of Dog
And

I see no camera
Hear no dog.

She Is Dead

That sentence, "she is dead," should sound odd--like a joke or a pun or an oxymoron. It should sound amusing to hear. If she has died then, having died, there is nothing she is. There is only was. We can conceive of a language in which it is possible to say "she died," but not "she is dead" without a smirk. There may be such a language.

It's impossible to "be" dead. But here's the point: if we can say "she is dead" as naturally as "she died" and understand at the same time that there is on an existential level something truly odd about the sentence, we can infer that language does not absolutely limit our perceptions. Language's limitations has its limits. We retain some ability to perceive beyond what we can articulate.

Language, History, Fiction, and Truth Boiling in a Cauldron

Cultures without writing are cultures without history in the Enlightenment sense of the word. But that does not mean that they are cultures without a past. What it means is that the functions that we currently divide between the essential forms of storytelling that we call history and fiction are combined in a single form of storytelling that we call now call myth. This is not to say there are not different types of myth: there are stories about this or that named leader leading the people against this or that enemy in triumph or defeat based in actual events still in or just beyond living memory alongside stories of the magical creation of the world. But the difference between these types of story is never absolute. Historical becomes myths; mythic understandings inform historical events. Writing changes this—or appears to. We can now base historical events on what we name as facts and put them into place in the changeless past. We can rail against those who would presume to “rewrite history.” We can think of the past as a series of complete and immutable events which we can tell in great detail, or when we can’t, we can say precisely what details we don’t have, what holes must remain or be papered over with speculation. We can maintain an absolute distinction between history and fiction. This changes everything. And nothing.

The problem is that the distinction is not in any way real. It cannot be supported. It cannot be maintained by reason. The more you look at history the more you understand that it is organized out of only those facts which are available and which we have chosen to look at out of the infinite number of possible facts, most of which we would consider too trivial to bother with if we thought about them at all or which we have to acknowledge that we just don’t have access to. The stories we tell from the facts that remain are as accurate as they can be, but they are not more accurate in any statistically significant way to the past, to what actually happened, than is myth. Nietzsche was perhaps the first to observe this. In other words what we call history is another form of myth. What we call fiction is also another form of myth. And our attempts to keep them separate academically—one should really say officially—belies the fact that we don’t can’t and shouldn’t try to keep them separate in practice. Historians looking for the facts about the life of Henry V do not rely on Shakespeare. Historians trying to understand Henry V do.

In fact the best historical accounts of the past are no more accurate than the best science fiction accounts of the future. Or a journalist’s account of the present. The thing history pretends to do is something that language cannot do and that the mind could not comprehend even if language could. Nonetheless the idea—the myth, the story—that we tell ourselves that history is possible in history determines the structure through which we perceive that we see the world. This is a false lens. I would not say that the purpose of this discovery—which of course is by no means mine—is not that we should abandon it. The culture that we have built or which history built and placed us in at this moment cannot do without it. Abandoning the structure through which we see reality would be catastrophic. What is necessary, and this is a fundamental insight of Postmodernism (which we are supposed to be past, but which, as Derrida noted, not calling it Postmodernism, is something that we can acknowledge or ignore but which we cannot get through to the other side of because it has no other side, is an absolute barrier)—what is necessary is that we never lose our self-awareness of the insight. Ignoring it has implications. Ignoring it determines who has power over whom. Acknowledging it brings power to the objects of that power, turning them into subjects. Acknowledging it also elevates and clarifies fiction. It elevates the status of fiction, which has retained much of the mythic power it has already had, but had unofficially. We have always as Americans looked at the tradition of the Western to know who we are, looked much more powerfully and effectively to the Western than to that subject we learned in school, to know who we are (or rather to determine and to become who or what we will be), though we give lip service to “history” as the superior discourse since it is supposedly true. (A form of “truth” which is an Enlightenment fantasy.)

Acknowledging the seriousness of our stories takes them out of the false, dangerous, Novocain realm of “entertainment.” Whole realms of scholarly discourse have long understood this. But this understanding has failed to penetrate to the culture at large. Indeed there are powerful forces that serve to prevent this knowledge from escaping the genie-bottle of academic discourse. And there may be those who believe that fiction is all the more powerful for being an unacknowledged, even a denied power—with a power analogous to the Freudian unconscious. I don’t think so. True, the implications and power relations are different. But I think that, as Freud thought of the unconscious, bringing it to light is more powerful, more liberating, than keeping it in the pretended world of entertainment, allowing capitalism to be the cauldron’s dancing, clanking lid.

from Aphorisms in the Book of the Damned

I said, What is the function of literature?

He said, to burn down the house before the others get in.

All the Reasons to Support Trump

Note: Earlier I noted that Trump supporters are driven by fear. I wasn't happy with that analysis. I've done some more thinking on the subject.

There are a number of reasons why a person might support Trump. But they all come down to one of two fundamental failures. Either a failure of morals or a failure of intellect. One could support Trump because one believes his policies will increase prosperity. They won’t in the end. But one could nonetheless believe it. One could support Trump out of fear in the belief that his policies will make America safer. Again, they won’t have that effect. But one could believe it. Underlying these beliefs is the acceptation of the hope that some few people whom one values will prosper, and it makes no difference what happens to the others or how many of them there are, or that some small and well defined group of people will be safer and it doesn’t matter who or how many that causes to suffer as long as my people are among the safer.

Underlying all Trump support is a lack of compassion or a lack of sound thinking or both. Whatever short term economic gains might be experienced by the wealthy in America and elsewhere will be more than offset by the increasing costs of climate change, which he ignores and which becomes more and more expensive to fix every year until it reaches the point where it is unfixable. (A point which we cannot be sure we have not passed by the way. That’s how urgent this problem is.) As his policies invest more and more of the wealth of the world in the hands of fewer and fewer people, those people—who were not made rich by their superabundance of compassion—increasingly will treat the others as the means by which they increase their absurd wealth. Money is power. The influence of wealth on the US Congress has never been more widespread or more nefarious. Trump is doing all he can to act in the interest of this small coterie of his billionaire buddies against the interests of everyone else, against the interests of the planet itself.

Trump will not make you safer. Even putting aside the fact that neither Muslims nor foreigners from Latin America or Africa are making you unsafe to begin with (fearmongering for the people who refuse to think and who refuse all evidence), increasing global nuclear tensions does not make you safer. Alienating allies does not make you or the world safer. Increasing the damaging effects of climate change does not make you safer. Loosening gun laws does not make you safer. Ballooning the national debt does not make you safer. Nothing he does makes you safer. He gives you the illusion of safety by scapegoating foreigners and immigrants so he can protect you from them while he increases daily the real and material dangers in which you are living.

All of this aside from the moral vacuity, the incessant lies, the egomania, the lack of impulse control, the, narcissism, and lack of both intellect and curiosity that would make him unfit for office even if he were pursuing policies that tended toward the good of the nation or the world. The sooner he is forced out of any position of power, the safer we’ll all sleep.

On Abusing Words to Make them Mean Things

We want to believe that we use our language to promote our morals or to describe our situation—we want to believe that the origin of language is a desire to know or a desire to do what is or what is right in reference to what is. But it turns out that our language, in its whole compass, exists in other ways from other causes that at best are in tension with these which we want to believe or at worst simply overwhelms them and uses them for cover, like the wolf who kills the sheep and wears its skin to kill other sheep. Nietzsche was obsessed with this other thing as power. The will to power. Instinct, the unconscious—there are various ways to formulate this (but again, we’re using the belief what we are using language to find out what is when we say this and not admitting that we too are caught in this other dynamic of language, more profound, more frightening). Our concepts are arranged to make it possible for us to do certain things, act certain ways, gather to ourselves what we are really after, be it power or security or freedom from fear or the illusion of immortality or love or meaning.

On Beauty. What is it?

If you ask, “What is beauty” you are assuming that something exists which the concept “beauty” applies to. How do you know this? Why do you assume it? Can you ask whether your assumption is true without first having an understanding of what beauty is? Are you therefore not really asking, “When I use the word beauty, what do I mean?” And if that is the question you are asking, aren’t you avoiding the question of whether “beauty” exists? Is there any way out of this closed circle? Is it actually possible to ask, on its own terms, the question, “What is beauty?”

The Fear of the Trump Voter

A somewhat tentative analysis.

The sins, the shortcomings, the failures of Donald Trump are so obvious, so blatant, so in-your-face, and have been for so long and have been repeated so often that those who wish to deny, excuse, or defend him have decided long since that have no use for evidence and no interest in rational judgment regarding this man. Think about it. He ridiculed a disabled man on national television. He repeatedly called for violence to deal with interruptions during his campaign rallies, he bragged about sexual assault, he defended white supremacists, he made disgusting and racist statements about countries whose populations are not primarily white, he declared that a judge of Mexican heritage could not do his job because of his owns disparaging remarks against Mexicans, he cheated innumerable investors (and not just in his phony “university”), and on and on. One could so easily add to the list of the obvious, indisputable examples of insensitivity, stupidity, incompetence and racism. One could spend all day on examples of his irrational hatred of Muslims or his moronic rejection of climate change or his baseless promotion of birtherism. His own political party is composed mainly of people who either openly oppose him or (despite hardly disguised loathing) praise and defend him in the hope of using the power his position represents. And there is also a third group, small by comparison but not insignificant of those who actually support him, who think he’s doing a good job, who defend Trump sincerely. This group has two camps: people who are as morally and intellectually just like him—a sizable group of deplorable people—and those who for some other reason remain blind to the obvious.

This latter group is the only group I find interesting. It’s small. It’s benighted. But the people in it, in their hearts, want to do the right thing. They actually think Trump is a good idea. It's hard to figure them out. Their reaction makes no sense given the obvious. And yet there must be some explanation. They think he’s keeping them safe. They have a kind of religious devotion to the man. Many of them in fact are religiously driven, though their religious faith is just another manifestation of the same impulse that drives them to support Trump. They watch FOX news and allow themselves to be convinced by whatever shallow, slippery, partisan defense the rhetorists and sophists can dream up. Trump baits Kim Jung Un and threatens to provoke nuclear war, but these people still think he’s keeping them safe. What could their motivation be if not fear? I have tried to come up with some other possible motivation for these people, but I cannot, at least not without getting into the sordid territory raked over by the likes of Freud and Lacan. The simple explanation always comes back to fear. Fear does not lead to clear thinking.

The question is whether this small group of otherwise good people who refuse to see what is right in front of them and who grope around for any broken stick of a reason that might allow them to pretend to themselves that his obvious racism, sexism, moronism, inveterate dishonesty—that all of his myriad sins and stupidities are just superficial appearances that hide the real, deep, honest patriot underneath, whether these people can by any means be made to see what is right in front of them? Probably not. The tactic of picking the decayed thing up up and sticking it under their noses isn’t working. But what would it take? If it could be done, the obvious first step would be to remove the fear. If they weren’t afraid of the things they think Trump can protect them from, they could see that he not only can’t protect them, everything he does makes the fearful situation worse. It would work, but it won’t happen. You can’t take away the fear because the fear itself is not irrational. These otherwise sincere Trump supporters have badly misdiagnosed the causes and therefore the solutions. (So many of them are afraid of Muslims but not the private ownership of guns.) But even that is something they are incapable of seeing. It would take a slightly more subtle analysis than exposure of Trump’s incompetence—and that takes no analysis at all, just ears or eyeballs. If you can’t see that the dancing monkey is a dancing monkey, if you pick up the pile of dog shit and smell it and taste is and still don’t recognize it as feces, how could you possibly become willing to see that you have misdiagnosed your fear?

So we can’t expect real progress in changing hearts and opening eyes, not even otherwise good hearts and working eyes. The job then, perhaps, lies in controlling our own counterproductive anger and frustration. Those things will persist. But directing them toward the individuals who cannot see is counterproductive. We can’t change their minds. We can’t relieve them of their fears or even reduce or redirect them. We have to direct our frustration and anger toward political action and not toward people whose only power is their vote. We won’t change their vote.