Confessions of a Writer

I once heard David Sedaris say

                No one should presume to call himself a writer.

That’s a title others have to give you.

                No one’s ever called me a writer.

I mean no one with the authority to make the call.

Fuck it. I write. I’m a writer.

It’s not a question of whether I’m good at it.

                I’ve also heard many times from many writers

This: be honest.

They always say it as though that’s all good writing is.

Just root out the truth of what you see

                Or think or feel—and word it. The rest is learnable

Technique. Fuck that too.

Let’s be honest. No one knows what combination

Of native verbal talent and learning

And luck and observational and emotional skill

Goes into making someone a writer.

                Or some writer “successful.”

You read this stuff and it sounds just like

                Famous X is having a beer-soaked conversation

With the mirror. And losing it.

                But he’s successful.

Or this other one saying shit so convoluted you swear

                He himself could not have understood it.

And then there’s the dubious philosophy or

                The jingling noises of consonants wracking

Vowels. I don’t get it.

                That’s my first confession.

My second is that I’ve never read Dante

                Though I’ve always meant to.

Or Finnegan’s Wake, which I doubt would repay

                The effort, though I hate the inescapable

Economic metaphor. I doubt my emotions

                Validate anything. And I don’t believe

The intellect is up to the task of figuring out

                The universe. And saying that questions

Are more important than answers

                Is just like Edward Taylor praising God

For murdering his children. And if there were no God

                And all values were contestable

And if life were a game

                Whose stakes are actual death,

And worthless misery, and joy that is only joy

                Because it is blind—well then

That would mean the world would be

                Pretty much like it is.

A world in which Donald Trump

                Could be president.

May We Have Good Weather Tomorrow

You can pray for good weather tomorrow, but

Tomorrow’s weather is already set.

The weatherman may be wrong to say it will rain, but

Whether or not it will rain has already been set

By the pressure in the air and the moisture and

That butterfly that so fiercely beat its wings in Columbia

Last February when the open beak of a sparrow appeared out of nowhere.

The only question that remains, the one on which our salvation

Depends, is whether the weather can be changed

By any means at all at any point between now

And the end. Go ahead and pray.

No Tomorrow

Politicians, pundits, priests, professors and other cheerleaders tell us, daily, they “remain optimistic.” Usually this is follows a review of the most dismal statistics—statistics about deaths, wars, political divisions, melting ice caps, rising seas of racism, sexism, homophobia, sealed borders, water shortages, shrinking forests. The forests of the earth cut down for farms to grow the food so an exploding population can feed itself, shrinking the lungs to make more room for the stomach so Mother Earth can glut herself until she cannot breathe. But they “remain optimistic.”

I don’t. In fact I’m pretty depressed about the state of the earth and the chances the human inhabitants will wise up before it’s too late. If I wasn’t before—before the feeble-minded, hate-filled, fear-mongering Tangerine Tornado prevaricated itself into the oval office—I would be now. But I already was. I’m just more angry about it now. This just amplifies it.

Tragedy is the state of sad affairs that should not have to have happened, that should have been avoidable but weren’t. Everything you needed to solve the problem was there. But you could not have known it. The state we are in is truly and technically tragic, though the tragedy is still playing out.

For the earth to survive we need well-meaning people to work very hard, to be willing to sacrifice short term gains for long-term viability. The recent election makes it abundantly clear: we aren’t going to do that.

The threat of global warming is so great that it will take a worldwide effort never quite paralleled in history, the closest parallels being global war. But global war was a response to a much more palpable threat. Global warming still seems abstract. Sure the storms are getting bigger and stronger and more frequent. But there have always been storms, and mendacious people are still able to convince people who don’t want to be scared that this or that global conspiracy is lying to them to bring in a new world order. A stupid old story we gobble up like candy.

The truth is, I don’t think we’ll figure it out in time. In fact, there’s a better than even chance it’s already too late. Not just at the rate we’re crowding the skies of Mother Earth with sun-sucking carbon, but because of what we’ve already done. The process accelerates. There may well already be enough poison in the sky to kill the patient and the people walk around debating or ignoring or fighting over the riches archeologists from some distant star may someday stumble on, figure out, and laugh about. The poison has been ingested and we like Hamlet still babbling when no medicine in the world can do us good babble on the stage but just enough life left to proclaim that we are dead.

There is not half an hour of life. The treacherous instrument is in our hands, unbated and envenomed. The foul practice hath turned itself upon ourselves and here we lie, never to rise again. Our Mother’s poisoned.

I do not remain optimistic. On a planet on which out of ignorance, spite, prejudice, and just plain bone-headedness something like Trump can happen, how could we possibly imagine that the inhabitants have the brains or initiative that are required to fix its problems in time? One day soon these people drop the pretense and fall on their knees and say, “Lord, help us, we have sinned against the Earth.” By then the alarm will have been screaming for hours, while they talked all the louder to drown it out. And as they, “Oh, yeah, I know what the screaming is,” they fall asleep forever.

Well, then, why bother? If you don’t have faith in humanity, and you don’t think we have time, and you can’t expect God to intervene—his track record for saving people from their own stupidity is no cause for hope—why even write this pessimistic piece to bring the dying legions down?

Why, indeed?

Because of course I may be wrong. Because I’m just one person staring from one awkward vantage at a huge and complex problem. Because I acknowledge—eyes open—that this problem is more than any one brain can analyze to certainty, certainly too big for me.  

Pessimism is not an excuse for giving up. It’s a stronger argument to press on than its cousin proclaiming glass half-full. Because under the banner of a well-informed pessimism you see how hard you’d have to fight. Because you have no alternative.

A pessimist is someone driven by a wall of fire to the edge of a cliff. He’s facing a divide he’s almost sure he cannot leap across. If he tries he’ll probably die. But if he doesn’t, he’ll certainly die. He doesn’t give himself the lie that he can make it. He sees it for what it is. And he jumps like there’s no tomorrow.  

Passing through the Membrane

When nice stopped meaning precise

or when mean was transformed from low to unkind

when still traded always for up till now

and sophisticated skied into a compliment

we can never quite know. One day

he said “I love you still” and she wondered what she’d done.

But to be safe, she didn’t say.

They broke up the next day.

Years later he told his second wife

that she was kind of sophisticated,

but nice,

if you know what I mean.

A neat tart, she thought,

of some oxymoronic sort

and said so. So he lost

his second wife as well

for being mean.

Presence

“Everything becomes and recurs eternally.” Nietzsche

“An utterance is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing outside it that is given and final. It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable.” Bakhtin

The high whine in my left ear cannot drown

the higher fainter whine in my right.  

I’m growing old. Falling apart as everything does,

little by little, until

the whole structure crumbles. Nonetheless

I can still hear the steady click of the clock like a heartbeat

over the whine. And the alternate rhythm of music still

easily draws me away. Sometimes

I think the best attitude to take to death is

to ignore it. Don’t accept it.

Don’t bother to fear it. Just don’t

pay it any heed. Preparation

is just another form of denial,

another agent of that fell sergeant. And yet,

the moment I sat down and urged

the goddess presence to visit me

like a holy ghost and write whatever comes

I heard the whine in my ear against the music of my life

and thought of death. 

Late Night Thoughts on This Horrendous Election

No one has ever tried harder to throw an election than Trump did. Barely a day went by when he didn’t say or do or fail to do something which should have disqualified him in the eyes of every American. There’s no need to catalog these gross lapses of basic decency, the stuff we teach to the smallest children who act out even in private. And yet he won. And it’s not because Hillary was such a bad candidate that people felt they had to vote for Trump. Some felt that way, of course. But I still have to maintain that those who said, “I loathe Trump like any decent person but I have to vote for him because Hillary is so evil” can’t be many. The statement itself is so irrational, so contrary to all the evidence, that I however large the number of people who believed this, it cannot account for Trump’s obscene victory.

But something has to. A lot of people right now, two days after the election, are pulling their hair out to understand. Some, like Michael Moore, gave us a scenario long before the election that accounts pretty convincingly for what happened—at least one of his five points does (the one about the Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin strategy). But Moore himself was not convinced when he wrote it that Trump was going to win (the week after he penned a way to stop Trump; he also voted for Hillary, which would have been a waste of time if he knew Trump would win). His essay was more of an “if Trump wins, this is how it will happen,” though for marketing purposes (presumably) it’s circulated as “Five Reasons Why Trump Will Win in November.” Moreover, the whole five reasons taken together don’t explain how Americans, some of them by no means stupid in other ways, could cast a vote for this unpredictable, valueless, inexperienced, unqualified, hateful and mendacious clown.

I thought better of Americans generally. I still believe not enough of them are stupid enough for their sheer stupidity to have been what propelled them to do something so stupid. Even very intelligent people do stupid things sometimes. Einstein probably failed to grab his umbrella when it threatened rain. (At least it would not surprise me to hear that he did.)

So you still have to figure out how so many not-stupid people could be so stupid. I don’t like any of the reasons I’m hearing, all the exit poll data, the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary, the complacency of people who didn’t vote because all the polls said she’d win—so what was the point? None of that puts it over the top as far as I can see. The phenomenon was so big and the act of voting so counterintuitive and counterproductive that something else had to be at play.

Something neither logical analysis nor research can uncover. The unaccounted element in Trump’s (stupid—have I said “stupid” enough yet?) victory was the same force that propelled the sales and hysteria of Harry Potter books and Beany Babies. Donald Trump rode the wave of a mindless, hysterical, mimetic fad, the kind that sweeps through every society with pretty predictable regularity, the kind that leaves people with Rubbermaid bins of worthless stuffed animals they bought in a frenzy convinced they were setting themselves up for future riches on the resale market.

I should make it clear I have nothing against Harry Potter books or Beanie Babies. The animals are cute, well made, fun to play with. The books are competently written, fantasy-mysteries fun to read, full of safe themes of love and loyalty and friendship that only the most paranoid fundamentalist could have a problem with. But the toys are not a hundred times better than the other cute stuffed animals that were offered for sale during the frenzy, and the books are not a hundred times better than a lot of other books published for the same audience in the same period. Indeed their greatness did not get noticed by all those publishers to whom they were first offered because it was never their greatness that sold them. Unpredictably, and with a large element of randomness thrown in, they caught the wave when the culture was ready for another bit of collective madness.

The species is wired for this, and the global communications and marketing networks amplify the phenomenon in ways unforeseeable for those things emerged. And as in all such cases, whether confined to a single household or town or spread out throughout the world, the individuals so caught up are convinced that their frenzy is not a frenzy, that they are acting on their own volition and that they “just really like Harry Potter,” or Beanie Babies or any number of other fads you can think up on your own.

The phenomenon if you are interested is well analyzed in the work of Rene Girard in such texts as The Scapegoat and Things Hidden since the Creation of the World and many other books.

So this is my conclusion: Trump is a fad.

I almost typed “fraud” but he’s not so much a fraud. He makes almost no attempt to hide his con. The one insightful thing he said in his 18 month campaign was that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any supporters. (It wasn’t of course his own insight; he was quoting or plagiarizing, but it was still insightful.) In fact he marveled as he said it. He couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make sense (even to him, who has a very low threshold for sense). But he was right. And that’s the best evidence I can submit for the claim. Fads are not reasonable. Fads catch reasonable people up in irrational acts.

Fads are things that leave you months later, when they have finally passed, a lot lighter in the wallet, trying to figure out what to do with dozens or Rubbermaid buckets full of regret.

How Can a Nation Be Great

A reflection on the Dakota
pipeline standoff.


How can a nation

 

founded on liberty

 

and justice

 

and genocide

 

and slavery

 

ever be great

 

if it does not learn how

 

to reconcile

 

its actions

 

with its principles?

How to Talk to a Trump Voter

Don't.

Just don't.

You can't talk an alcoholic into becoming sober. He has to figure it out for himself. He has to have so destroyed his life that sobriety is all he has left. It's literally tragic that you can see it coming and know there's nothing you can do about it. If from a distance you see a man walking backwards over a cliff there's nothing you can do to save him. The cliff is too far way. Your voice won't carry. You know what's coming. You can time it. But you can't do anything about it.


Trump voters are like that. Backing over a cliff, drinking themselves stupid on his mendacity: a mendacity that is impossible to expose because it has never been hidden. His lies are so numerous, so obvious, and so dangerous that, though he does everything short of starting his speeches with "by the way, don't believe a word I'm about to say, staring with my next sentence," he can't get his followers to hear him. It would be comical in a movie. In life it's frightening and sad.


They'll learn. Or they won't.  There's nothing you can do. I saw a Trump ad that ended, "All she's interested in is money, and power, and herself." The main problem with the claim is that NO ONE could possibly believe that sentence applies to Hillary and not (infinitely more aptly) to Trump. But no one is laughing. He's stripping himself naked in public daily and pointing his finger at his opponent and saying, "Look at that shameless woman without any clothes."


If you talked to them, they'd ask you for facts. But they don't recognize facts. They visit Breitbart, and Fox News and all of your Right Wing bullshit sites and then ask you for facts. Keep your facts. Facts mean nothing to these people. A fact to a Trump voter is an empty glass. What's the point? You can't get drunk off that.

Energy and Interpretation

Heat is the part of light that we see with our skin.

Light is the part of heat that we feel with our eyes.

When we feel with our eyes we call it seeing.

When we see with our skin we call it feeling.

Ontological Despair

ity. How it is is is used
so indiscriminately
of rocks and seasons and God
I cannot say. But that it is is clear
to anyone with ears.

Blow the Trump-et.

If the success of Donald Trump to this point reveals a fundamental weakness in the theoretical underpinnings of democracy, the actual election of the man would reveal the sad fact that this form of government has, contrary to the rhetoric of its advocates, nothing on those forms it opposes. It is often said that we are a young nation. That’s true. But young as we are, we’re old enough to know better—if this form of government is a way to train people who know better, who make good choices, who vote according to their actual interests. It’s also true that many who are going to vote for Trump are sensible enough not to like him or believe him, that they would rather not “have to” vote for him. In fact the majority are apparently not voting for the demagogue so much as voting against his opponent, variously criticized as corrupt or greedy. But it does not take a keen political observer to see that there’s nothing Hilary Clinton has been suspected of that Trump has not amply shown himself guilty of—greed, lying, skirting the law, manipulating the system, seeking wealth and personal power against all other interests. He is the possessor of a mendacity so patent and profound that any number of people have wondered whether his candidacy has not been from the start a conscious joke which he himself has fallen victim to, whether he really wants to be president, whether he’s been trying from day one to throw the election. I myself go further and wonder if he even knows what he wants or ever has or has ever been capable of it. His story changes from day to day. He has such a flippant attitude toward facts that he may not be able to tell truthfully whether he was serious or not when he descended the escalator like a god deigning to appear before his people—like an ironic quotation of showman Hitler descending from the skies in The Triumph of the Will. And when it comes to undermining our democracy, it’s clear that Trump has been doing that in small ways his whole life--by manipulating the legal system that was set up to ensure justice and fairness, by buying his way out of serving in the military, by manipulating tax laws or bribing his way out of lawsuits; if he becomes president he won’t be able to stop himself from undermining our country in a much bigger way. His very ignorance (revealed in big or small ways almost every time he opens his mouth)—this ignorance of the particulars of the Constitution and of the job he thinks he’s seeking guarantee as much. Our democratic system is built on the idea that the common person is better able to assess his/her needs than are the wealthy and powerful elites, that “common sense” leads common people to recognize and support their own interests. This is why ordinary people, whatever their education, are allowed to vote. Trump’s present attainments and apparently viable prospects call this foundational idea into question.

All hope is not, however, yet lost. Perhaps we will yet prove that American Democracy is in some meaningful way exceptional. Although China may now use Trump as evidence that there’s nothing special in our form of government, the strength of the system, if it does retain strength and has any pretentions to bragging rights on the world stage, can yet be revealed—by an overwhelming defeat of Trumpery.

Spring and Fall to an Old Man

April stopped by with its cool sunshine
that feels warm only by contrast.

We imagined ourselves
seeking clovers in the grass
by the pile of unburned logs.

Before we knew it

was here it wasn’t, the hyacinths,

green sticks,

shriveled brown tips,
wrinkled bits of color,
like wads of chewed gum,

and the daffodils' blooms 
dull yellow paper
dried and drooping,
lying on rocks
like the heads of the condemned.

We should have checked the calendar

before we bolted out the door.

Why Won't They Vote for Hilary?

I’ve been watching the “I could never vote for Hilary” people with great interest, trying to figure out the basis for this stance, which on the surface is just plain bizarre when not voting for Hilary amounts to a de facto voting for an unstable, clownish, megalomaniac.

This is what I have observed: there are primarily two groups of people who won’t vote for Hilary: the Bernie-or-Bust people and the Nostalgic-for-Reagan people. I am not sure the same analysis can be applied equally to both groups. The Bernie-or-Bust people are the smaller group, so I am not primarily concerned with them.

The vast majority of the anti-Hilary people are in the other group. But their own affection for Reagan makes it very difficult to take their hatred of Hilary seriously. Reagan, among his many sins, sold weapons to our enemies in order to fund an illegal war in Central America. Either of those acts is far worse than anything Hilary has ever been accused of doing or ever would do. (I mean of course “seriously accused,” since there are those who have accused her of being in league with Satan.) And in fact the vast majority of the reasons these people give for hating Hilary are demonstrably specious—essentially made up (the whole Benghazi “scandal” for example, for which there is literally no basis in fact).

Now I don’t want to excuse Hilary. She has done some stupid and even perhaps reckless things—but nothing that any thoughtful observer could use to suggest either that she is either unqualified for the presidency or, more importantly, that she is not an infinitely better choice than the befuddled sociopath who is her opponent, even if all the stories were true.

In other words, the hatred for Hilary, the “I could never pull the lever beside her name” talk in fact has little if any relationship to any honest evaluation of Hilary as a potential president. That does not mean that those who come to this conclusion don’t believe they come to it honestly. But it does mean that in fact they do not.  

So what is really behind this hatred of Hilary? Some will say it is a conscious or unconscious bias against the fact that she is a woman. There may be something to that, but I don’t think it accounts for much. I don’t think that that alone explains the vitriol or resentment. In fact we see this same vitriol in every election and on both sides. Sure, there is misogyny against Hilary as there is racism against Obama, but in fact at this level all candidates are hated beyond any reason by a large swath of voters who don’t vote for them.

Trump is the exception of course. He’s hated with good reason by both sides. So perhaps to understand the hatred of Hilary it will be useful to understand the acceptance of Trump. An acceptance of Trump has to be to some extent pathological, since there can be no reasonable justification for it. In fact he’s the reverse of the same impulse that produces the hatred of Hilary.

I don’t think this pathology is limited to those who accept Trump or hate Hilary. In fact it is pervasive (if not necessarily universal) on both sides.

I have entertained the idea that the problem is the rhetoric that is used to get these people elected, which is full of the trumped up hatred of the other with exaggerated language and absurd conclusions. Until Trump came along, this language, as most of us knew, was primarily “just politics.” We knew enough not to take it seriously. If to win an election the Democrat said of the Republican “He’s not qualified to be president,” we winked. We dialed it down without thinking. So that now when we actually do have a candidate who is not only not qualified but comically unqualified we out of habit dial that observation down as though it were the typical political hyperbole. The “cry wolf” syndrome. That may have something to do with how it is an otherwise reasonable person could bring herself to vote for Trump, but it doesn’t explain the hatred of Hilary.

I think that what does explain not just this bizarre behavior but the bizarre language and behavior surrounding every American election is simple ego-maintenance. The voters think they are thinking, think they are thinking for themselves, think they are thinking their own thoughts. But thoughts are not driving either votes for the sociopath or the refusal to vote for the qualified candidate. Rather the voter who won’t vote for Hilary even in this unprecedented situation are simply finding it impossible to see herself as someone who can belong to the group of people who vote for Hilary. In her mind she is part of a tribe, and this is a tribe of people who hate Hilary. These Hilary haters are like sports fans. Sports fans can get violent in their preference for their team or their hatred of the Yankees. Any thoughtful person knows that there is no rational basis for the preference of any sports team over any other. It’s a matter of autonomic loyalty, pure and simple. Still there are fans of the Red Sox who would not root for the Yankees for any amount of reward. And there are members of the American electorate who could not vote for the obviously qualified candidate even when not voting for her is a threat to the stability of the republic itself.

In fact that is, essentially, the American electorate.

This is a fact of what we have gotten used to calling “human nature.” I doubt there’s any way out of it, though individuals might learn at times to put it aside (they will be few and they’ll have to do something that feels like tearing off a piece of their identity to do it). I do still believe that individuals can come to recognize, at times, the irrationality of their prejudices and can successfully fight to overcome them and grow from the act. But it’s getting harder to maintain that optimism. And without that optimism, it becomes very difficult to hold on to the theoretical basis for this 18^th-century formation of democracy.

The Smell of Cigarette Smoke in an Empty Room

To promise the poet atonement is
To promise more than you know….
It is a kind of suicide
The bliss of the bleeding throat—
A kind of assassination or…

 Why am I here

right now
In this room?
I don’t even know what I came to the kitchen to get—
It wasn’t a knife or a glass of anything.
Was it the question I find unsought
between the dirty dishes and compost?
If I can’t remember what I was after, why
can I remember that there was a quest
and I was on it?

Proper Respect

Trump voters ask me to respect their choice. I can’t. It’s not a respectable choice. This is a democracy. I respect their right to make that choice. If you want to vote for him, I will not lock your door or chain you to the bed or hide your car keys. In a country where Republicans are disenfranchising their opposition wherever they can by pushing “voter I.D. laws,” I will respect your right to make up your mind and cast your vote. Nor would I support any trickery that would try to prevent you. But I cannot respect your choice.

Donald Trump is a demagogue. Mike Pence criticized President Obama for calling him this. He said that name calling has no place in our democracy. (Someone ought to introduce Mike Pence to his running mate.) But it is not name calling to call Donald Trump a Demagogue. “Crooked Hillary” is name calling, “Lying Ted,” “Lazy Jeb.” These are examples of name calling. If I called Donald Trump the bloated host of the hirsute, Day-Glo alien attached to his scalp, that would be name calling. “Demagogue” is a descriptive term—wholly accurate: “a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.” It is a negative term because it labels a negative thing, like “murderer” and “rapist.”

Donald Trump is a demagogue. And that’s about the nicest thing I could say about him. To choose to vote for him is a mistake. It may be one made out of a sincere and heart-felt desire to make America Great. But it won’t do that. You don’t make a shirt clean or a country great by dragging it through the mud.

What Is the Number?

There are many ways to kill yourself.
But if they didn’t have guns, many people who would wouldn’t.
They wouldn’t try or they wouldn’t succeed. They’d get help.
The moment of panic would pass.
Many would be alive today.

 Guns don’t kill people, people do. Yes.
But they do it so much more easily with guns.
So much more efficiently
So much more successfully.
Just aim at head or heart and pull.
It’s no wonder it’s the tool of choice.
 
You may think it protects you.
And maybe it does.
Maybe there will be a time when you personally for your own preservation will find yourself lucky
     you have a gun.
It’s not likely. Chances are better it will kill you
Or it will kill your spouse or one of your children
Or one of your neighbors or friends.
This is well attested, but no one can be sure.

Keep it, if you think it’s worth the risk.
Life is a gamble.
But please
To honor those who will die
Ask yourself this:
Where is your price point?
How many souls is your comfort worth?
On the off chance that sometime in the uncertain future you will be among the very few this thing
   has rescued, how many other lives equal yours?

 

Fixing the Door

For many months

if you did not open the screen door just right,

pulling up on the handle to keep the wheel that would no longer turn above the track and holding the tension

until it was all the way open or all the way closed,

the whole thing would crash on the deck.

Every fifth time, it crashed anyway.

You’d curse.

Everyone cursed that fucking door.

 

Today, you took the door deliberately off its track.

You opened the package with the two metal wheels (which you’d bought months ago),

and, drilling one hole and putting in one screw,

you fixed it.

 

It was as easy as you knew it would be,

which is why you took so long to do it. All day

the family has been going in and out of that door to sun,

to visit the garden,

to cool themselves in the pool.

The door works perfectly.

No one has noticed.

First Contact Speech

My friends—I call you friends, though I do not know you, though I understand that many of you wish bad things for me and my people, though if I knew each of you as a person, some I would laugh with and share a bowl and some I would greet through gritted teeth, I call you friends. –I call you friends as a sign of my good will, not because we are friends but because I hope your people and my people can live in peace. I call you friends to make us friends. If your tongue has a better word, I do not know it.

                My friends, you say you bring me God. God is already here. You know this already. You tell us God is everywhere. God is here. You say that this is true. You therefore bring us knowledge of God, God who is everywhere, God who has always been here. We thank you. We will hear your knowledge of God. And we will give you our knowledge of God. We will exchange our knowledge with your knowledge like fire of two colors, like a flame doubles when divided.

                My friends, you say your knowledge of God is true knowledge and our knowledge of God is not-true knowledge. You wish to take our knowledge which is coal away from us and give us yours which is gold. It may be our knowledge is coal and yours is gold. Gold is a useless ornament on a cold night. It is rare, hard to find, requires much labor to become a bauble that burns falsely in flashes. It gives light only when light is not needed, when the sun burns. Its light has no heat, and this is good, because when it burns no heat is needed. Coal is everywhere. It is easy to find. It gives heat to all, requiring no skill or wealth. I am glad our knowledge is coal. Perhaps you come from a place where there is no coal. I am glad your knowledge is gold. When we do not freeze, when we are well fed and watered and well pleased with our lives, we may admire this gold and ask of it what ornament it may add to our wisdom.

                We have received already one lump of gold. And it is this: you call God God. This is gold. We call God many names. This is coal. But God has no name. God is beyond naming. This is an ornament to our knowledge.

Before I will receive any more of your gold, please take from me an equal weight of coal in even exchange for this gold.

My friends, you call God "he" and "him." Your eyes see the world as "he" and "him" and "she" and "her." In all persons and all animals and all plants, you see the two of your tongue and so your tongue does not permit a one or a many that is a one or a many but for being a not-two. You must be patient. This is hard to say in the words of your tongue. You see the outside of things. And on this outside you see person as high and all other things as low. We do not see this. If person is the highest of all things, then you say God is a person, forgetting that this saying is a picture. When you see persons, you see man and not-man and you say that man is higher. We do not see this. You forget that this saying is a picture that says more of what you do not know than what you do know. So you say God is a man-person. You look around and you see the world in numbers. You say I am not my wife. You say I am not my children. I am not my people. I am not the earth, the stars, the sky. You say the rivers do not flow through me on their way to the sky. We do not see this. You say God is one. You say God is one-male-person. This is not gold. This is not coal. This is that which is not. This is a stone lifted to smash a bone then tossed aside forever. This is a stone when it is not a stone. What I give you is coal.

You must be patient, my friends. If your tongue has better words to say this, I do not know them. I do not believe it does. This is hard to say in your tongue.

               

Fencing as You Go

To some degree your words are defined by your use of them, defined, that is, as you use them. Your interlocutors have then to navigate what you say by reference to their knowledge of the language and their intuition of the present situation. (This is not fully recognized in any research I have read on the subject, but it seems to be implicit in the work of Austin.) Wittgenstein informs us that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Yes, but that means that the words' meanings are being made every time they are used. Add to this the imperfect presence of any speaker’s meaning to himself at the point of the utterance and you see the inherent and practical imprecision of every saying. And this is only the beginning of the complications, but it is as far as I will go at the moment. The deeper we investigate the complexities of the utterance, the worse it gets for what we like to call “communication.” Language affords all sorts of tricks that allow us to think we’re being rational when we are actually saying nothing at all—and to congratulate ourselves on our cleverness.

How to Read Anything (C.S. Lewis, Jillian Keenan and Company)

On the one hand you have comments such as this: “For there can be no serious doubt that Milton meant just what Addison said: neither more, nor less, nor other than that. If you can’t be interested in that, you can’t be interested in Paradise Lost” (C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 71).


On the other hand, you have comments like this: “We all have our own versions, and those interpretations are as valid as anyone’s…. Characters are like clouds: we all see different animals hidden in them” (Jillian Keenan, Sex with Shakespeare, 21).


Either there's only one correct way to read a text--or anything goes.


Lewis’ version of reading, which allows only two possibilities, the correct interpretation and error, is at odds with the history of interpretation and with language itself. All texts actually get multiple interpretations, remain sites of agony for various meanings among contentious factions and, far from settling into singleness from the concerted efforts of equally perspicacious, equally well educated readers, endlessly accrue and multiply meanings. And language itself, as shown by everyone from Saussure to Derrida, simply cannot ever be so absolutely nailed down.


But is Keenan’s view any better? Lewis would have called her informal reading method wishy washy (or something equally disparaging). It’s nonrigorous, nonserious. It puts the expert and the amateur on the same plain--a way of thinking that is currently having disastrous effects in the sciences where ignorant American politicians feel authorized to pronounce on matters they know less about than school children. It’s a complacent way of thinking, an unapologetic attempt to abuse (in Keenan's case) Shakespeare’s texts into mirrors for herself the working out of her private quirks or neuroses. It may be useful for her to do this and entertaining for us to watch her do this, in a kind of voyeuristic way, but in the end, if it tells us anything about Shakespeare it will be by chance.

Clearly, in my view, neither Lewis nor Keenan is right. He But the middle ground one might reach is hardly less problematic. Lewis is disingenuous or naïve when he claims that his singular view of the text covers all the intended (let alone the unintended) implications of Paradise Lost. He severely oversimplifies the text, cutting it off from innumerable rich and challenging readings that can and have proven productive—from Blake to Fish. The idea that the text to be seen properly has to be seen only via the ways that his own vision of Christianity matches (as he sees it) Milton’s own shows an unsupportable confidence in his own ability to align his 20^th century consciousness with that of 17^th century Milton, perhaps again a naivete, perhaps a Miltonic hubris—also ironic in an essay that centrally valorizes differences over samenesses and condemns the “enduring human heart,” as a valid critical focus. At the same time Keenan allows too little resistance in the text. True, she’s actually struggling with it. But she’s struggling against what the text seems to be in order to force it to reflect her own needs for the text. She's clever, and worth reading. And her book will teach you something about Shakespeare and about reading. But even her metaphor reveals the problem. While it may be true that not all people see the same shape in a cloud, it’s not true that we all see different shapes in them. When a cloud looks like a dog a lot of people are going to see the dog. And if you don’t see the dog, I can show it to you.

I don’t think either Lewis or Keenan is doing anything wrong. What’s wrong is proclaiming that what they are doing is true or right, that it conforms to the facts of a text. For Lewis, the only way to be interested in Milton’s poem is to be interested in the view of Christianity reflected in that poem—whether or not Lewis is correct in his characterization of what the Christianity is is beside the point. For Keenan, because we are all different all interpretations are equally valid. She’s as monolithic in her insistence on the irretrievable openness of the text as he is in insisting on its closedness.  What in fact is Keenan herself actually doing if not inviting us to see the shape of her cloud?

Here's a better way of thinking about texts.


As I tell my own students endlessly, if you want to read a text yourself and interpret it to yourself, you can do anything you want to it or with it. You can let it work our thoughts in any direction you want them to go. You can make it your mirror or your judge. (At least you can try; there's no assurance the text will cooperate.) You can skip words you don’t know or chapters you don’t like and lose yourself in our own head without permission from the text or the literature police because there are no literature police. If you want to think “The Road Not Taken” is telling you that you should strike out on your own and always travel the less worn path, you can make the poem give you that good advice—you can use the poem to tell you what you already wanted to know. It might work. It’s a kind of masturbatory thrill. But you can masturbate to whatever turns you on. However, if you want to read a text in a community—and literature has always assumed a community of readers—then you will have to negotiate the treacherous terrain of other souls or other subjectivities. You will also have to negotiate at some point with the text itself as though it were one of those subjectivities in your reading group. Once you’ve had your fill of masturbation, you will have to cooperate with the needs and desires of your lovers.

How do you do this? Since the text can only go so far in offering to you the means to decipher it, and although all texts at all times exert the threat of pressure against your reading, more and more texts more current than Milton or Shakespeare withdraw as much as possible from offering those means, you have to set up for (or with) your community what counts.


In other words, you make up the rules, and then you play the game.


What are we in particular after when we read this text now? The mind of Milton may not be attainable. But it can still be the guiding principle for the reading of a text. It can be what you want to achieve and you can tirelessly seek it via whatever means you imagine would be most likely to yield it. And you can justify the quest, if you choose or if you need to or if you are recruiting more archeologists to your dig. But not on the grounds that it is the only valid thing to do with a text. Or you can utterly give up on figuring out either what the author was trying to say or what the text actually says (which again, are only ever attainable up to a point—everything gets blurry again when you focus past the optimal). But you oughtn't make this choice either in monolithic despair over the possibility of the text’s meaningful resistance to your queries or in vague (and equally monolithic) assurance that your ignorance is good as any expert's expertise.


Equally monolithic. As I was writing the previous paragraphs, I was toying with the idea that if the theory advocated by Keenan (as opposed to her actual practice) is masturbation, then Lewis’ is a form of abuse. But in fact, since all metaphors break down when pressed too hard, both methods are equally abusive in so far as they say “no” to any practice outside their own.