Liberation from Self-Imposed Literary Bondage

No, this is not about the Marquis De Sade. Although I did once glance into one of his more famous works, which, intriguingly, was sitting on the “psychology” shelf in my grandmother’s house (she’s a bit of a radical, that particular grandma), only to be treated to a lurid scene involving becowled monks standing in a circle, leering at a nude, kidnapped young woman. I also saw that Geoffrey Rush film about the good Marquis, “Quills,” which was exaggerated and stupid (you can quote me on that).

This post is about a different kind of bondage: the kind where I suddenly decide things like “I will read the entire 1001 Arabian Nights, and I may not read anything else until I have finished” and in the instant of thinking it, silently but fully commit myself to the project. The original of the 1001 Arabian nights, as translated (floridly, with occasional spasms of horrifying verse) by E. Powys Mathers into English from a French edition by Dr. J.C Mardrus, runs to approximately 2400 pages, in four editions that I purchased impulsively (though I do not entirely regret it) last Summer from Amazon.

In August or September, after reading a bunch of Borges’ essays (Borges is a big fan of the 1001 Nights—the essays speak of them often and fondly), I shackled myself semi-consciously to the project of reading EVERY LAST ONE. It is November now. I made it through around 900 pages (372 Nights). I read about Djinns (genies) and Ifrits (like a genie) and princes and princesses and lamb shanks stuffed with dates and pistachios. I read about old men bewitched by young men as “beautiful as a new moon,” and about mysterious cities in the desert, made out of various metals. Underground passageways, a snake queen, lovers separated, disguised and reunited. Wondrous islands in the middle of the ocean, veritable Paradises with fruits and animals unknown to man.

Some of the stories are great, some are awful—most of them are interesting in one way or another. The sheer number of them is staggering: it’s all plot and scenery (not much in the way of character development, but like Lou Reed says, ‘those was different times.’). A lot of it is frankly pornographic. A penis is called a ‘Zabb.’ Women’s breasts are always like pomegranates or moons. Desirable women have difficulty standing up, due to the weight of their buttocks, which leave deep and lasting impressions in the cushions they have been sitting on. There’s a surprisingly (to me, at least) casual attitude towards homosexuality. The Nights seems to consider homosexual sex (male and female) as a kind of rare delicacy—like monkey brains—slightly distasteful but strangely compelling.

The Tales are full of crazy and memorable images, such as a spider on a mountaintop conversing with the Wind, and the culinarily-inclined will find themselves haunted (maybe forever) by delicately perfumed rice-creams and succulent fowl.

But I think it is not a good idea to commit to reading them ALL in a row. By doing so, one turns what could and should be a rare pleasure into a source of all-pervasive dread.
Oh God, one sighs. Not Another F#&*in’ Ifrit. If This Trapdoor Leads to an Underground Chamber Filled With Jewels I Am Totally Going to Throw Up.

After much psychic torment and moral wrangling, I decided: “fuck it!” I’ve moved on, and I’m pleased as punch about it. I’m reading “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”—a sort of Dickensian Harry Potter for grownups. I LOVE IT! At this point, honestly, I think I would happily devour the instruction manual for my Toyota, is how starved I have been for something, anything, other than the 1001 Arabian Nights.

A Very Weird and Strangely Moving Dream

In my dreams last night I was walking around a mall in a wealthy suburb of New York (Scarsdale, I think) and I ran into a guy I haven’t seen in years—once a close friend of mine, but a person so remote and oddly autonomous in his thinking that “friend” isn’t really the right word. “Influence” might be more accurate. In the mall of my dream, I ran into him, walking around a men’s clothing department. I was deeply moved by the shock of recognition: this person has always had an inexplicably profound effect on me. I can only compare it to the charismatic pull of a David Koresh (or perhaps a less sinister, but similarly magnetic personality).

We sat down on a bench and I asked him how he was. He told me that he was living in France (entirely possible for this guy) and that he had joined an anti-American terrorist organization (also not beyond the limits of imagination, for said friend). He had done some illegal things with this group, for which he was being pursued. He began crying as he told me this, and I was moved to a profound, piercing kind of pity. I saw this friend as a deeply troubled, perhaps mentally disturbed person who had always needed help and had instead received only baffled admiration from his so-called “friends,” like me.

Joy

I was talking the other day with D and E (no this is not some sort of cute little alphabetical allegory) about this goddamn soul-crushing American fear of wasted time—the relentless drive to be productive at every moment of the day. Not to oversleep. Not to take a vacation that is longer than ten days, lest your life fall apart completely in your absence. I have heard my nearest and dearest griping/gloating about how France is finally having to face Reality and question its two-month Summer holidays, now that it is economically plugged into the European Union. I have heard same respond to news of joyful, non-job-related happenings with a sour “It must be great not to have responsibilities.”

Over the past few years I have made my money as a teacher, first of middle school, now of community college. In the faculty lounges of these institutions (as I guess is typical of any lounge in any government facility) I have listened to the complaints and the tirades of those whose spirits have been crushed by too many unpleasant responsibilities and a general lack of joy, to the point where any manifestation of joy seems suspect to them, to the point where even the desire to experience joy seems childish and unrealistic. Their words, their faces, I can say without the slightest fear of disingenuousness, have been knives in my heart. Always are. They drive me to madness and despair. Madness because I want to grab them by the collars and scream: THEN GET OUT OF HERE! Change your job! Change your life! Divorce your husband! Dismantle whatever it is you’ve imprisoned yourself inside of and MOVE ON? What have you got to lose? The alternative is seeping out your miserable, small, complaining, disgruntled existence for another, say, forty years until you die.

Or, um, is it NOT THAT SIMPLE? Anyway, that’s the madness.

Despair because their words are acid, poison. If you don’t exorcise the stuff by spitting back in their faces (which I tend not to do, being basically a nice, polite boy), it threatens to worm its way into you. To make you think that this disease of smallness and discontent and enslavement to unwanted “responsibilities” at the expense of joy is somehow inexorable, universal.

By far, the most attractive response to all of this, theoretically speaking, is “fuck it.” Maybe practically speaking, too. At any rate, my oversensitivity to this tendency a lot of people seem to have to be poisonous, suppurating sacs of bitterness has led me to keep most people at a distance. This is probably, no, certainly overcompensation, in that, paradoxically, good, healthy contact with others is one of the things in life that can be most joy-bringing and life-sustaining. Trapping yourself with nobody but yourself, unless you have a particularly positive and autonomously content Self (which I don’t), can lead to long periods of decided un-joy.

What I’m questioning here is what seems to me to be an unspoken agreement between a lot of people that Responsibility = Unhappiness and Happiness = Irresponsibility. Some kind of artificial distinction between those activities and modes of thought which are appropriate to grownups (i.e. Seriousness, Responsibility, Sobriety (spiritual and literal)) and those which are not (i.e. Playfulness, Joy). This duality, which seems to me to be all-but-all-pervasive in the adult (and possibly, particularly American) world has (as I guess is abundantly clear at this point) been a source of great distress to me for as long as I can remember. I struggle with it both outside and inside of myself. But whatever the outcome of my struggle at any given moment, or in the long run, I swear this: that I am the Enemy of Joylessness, of Unromantic living. Of the celebration and fetishization of Responsibility at the expense of happiness and personal freedom.

More About New York

The other day I was walking down the street, thinking to myself “what am I doing here in New York?” A long time ago, when I was 18, I came here to visit NYU with my father. Walking around Greenwich Village, I thought: Yes. This is it. I belong here. It was something incredibly dumb like the store Trash on Vaudeville—a glam-rock boutique on St. Mark’s Place that sells stuff like sparkly green Doc Martens—that made me fall in love with the city. That was IT. I was moving here and staying here forever. As they say, hideously, bafflingly, in the Bible, my heart was circumcised on the subject.

Like just about every New Yorker (and I guess I have earned the right, now that I no longer care much about it, to call myself a New Yorker), I have a love/hate relationship with the city.

I Hate:

• Traffic, all the time, everywhere.
• Loud idiots yelling outside my window.
• Car alarms.
• Standing in a subway car that is so crowded that I can’t turn the pages of a book, and being asked to step further into the car.
• Rats. Man I hate rats.
• Park Slope Moms and their murderous baby-carriages and their relentless, age-inappropriate chatter to their little Tristans and Charlottes about upcoming “play-dates” (whatever in God’s name those may be).
• No trees, no sky, no grass without rats on it.
• Clusters of horrible teenagers saying horrible things right next to me on the subway.
• Ambulances, fire trucks, police cars.
• Freakish and spontaneous happenings.
• The idea of raising kids here.
• Burglary, mugging, murder.
• Corny New York Kitsch, like those awful Robert DeNiro American Express ads.

I Love:

• Constant access to art: theatre, music and paintings. Not so big on dance or opera, though.
• Delicious, amazing Japanese fusion cuisine. Restaurants of every conceivable variety and caliber.
• Freakish and spontaneous happenings.
• Opportunity. Everywhere.
• The pulsing, tremulous energy of the city.
• The skyline of Manhattan from the BQE at night.
• The fact that everybody I could ever possibly know will at least come here to visit sometime.
• That New York is just always completely fucking COOL.
• Crazy cultural, ethnic and religious juxtapositions of the sort that happen every semester in every community college class I teach here.
• Subways, when they’re not too full.
• Dog Runs (spaces in public parks for dogs to run around. I don’t have a dog, but sometimes I sneak into them anyway, just to watch the dogs.)
• The random bits of historical flotsam scattered around everywhere.
• Timely access to obscure and great films.

So it seems that there are exactly the same number of things I love (thirteen), as there are things I hate about New York. I don’t know--my folks live in Suburban Maryland, and I don’t think they’re any less neurotic or frustrated than I am, in spite of the ostensible preponderance of stressors here. And as Chekhov, Ibsen and Bergman have amply demonstrated, it is entirely possible to drive yourself to suicide in a pastoral setting, beneath a cloudless, azure sky.

But this place is addictive, and arguably all addictions are unhealthy, in that they enslave you. If I were to move out of New York at this point, I would probably have to live with the eternal sense that something cool was happening and I was totally missing it. At least here, if something cool is happening, I have the option of being there. Even if I rarely am there, at least I could have been if I had wanted to. In fact, I am almost never there—but by virtue of the fact that I live here, it’s still mine, anyway. It’s all very pathological, really.

Long Time No Blog

So I am going to pull the dubious move of blogging about not blogging, on the assumption that it is preferable to not blogging at all. I have not, in fact, disappeared off of the face of the Earth. Blogs are funny things, in that they feel old and stale if not regularly updated. That’s funny because not every blog is based on current events. Mine, for example, is based on whatever the hell I feel like writing about at the moment. I started it solely for the purpose of having a place to do that, publicly. I told myself that I would write on it when, and only when I felt like it, regardless of the reading public (should there be one). Yet, for the past few months, the BLOG has been lurking somewhere in my lower brain, heaving and seething and humidly accusing me of slackerdom for not updating it more regularly.

When you think about it, a blog like mine is no more in danger of staleness than is a collection of essays sitting on a shelf. These anecdotes and thoughts and memoirs aren’t time-bound. So shut up, BLOG! I am not beholden to ye. Over the Summer, I had an embarrassment of free time, so I blogged a lot. It’s Fall now, and with Fall come Obligations and Agendas. I am obliged to make money by teaching people to read and write, and my big, overarching agenda these days is to get paid to write, which has necessitated my writing, editing and hustling stuff other than this blog.

Also, enough with this word “blog.” It doesn’t really fit what I’m doing here—I’m not “logging” anything. And the neologism is a little misleading, in that it makes the “blog” seem like a completely new medium, when in fact it is nothing more than a public forum for publishing whatever you want to. It’s wide open. It doesn’t need to be daily, necessarily, or political, or hip, or targeted at a niche market. It’s words, images, video on a page. It logs chronologically because it’s designed that way—actually that’s the problem. If the software automatically organized writings by subject, length, text color and other categories, and did not prioritize them by recentness, there would be no reason to feel guilty for not updating the thing constantly.

Ah. There. I have expiated the guilt, reopened the floodgates of consciousness and creativity—feng shui-d the shit into a workable chi-circulation system. Things are flowing again. Phew.

I Used to Think Faulkner Was a Monster

When I was a kid, we used to go to my maternal grandmother’s house for Christmas and Easter. I had one Christian and (still have) one Jewish grandma, so we divided up the holidays. Somehow Thanksgiving became a Jewish holiday, but that’s another story. Anyway, my sister and I always stayed in a room that used to belong to two of my aunts when they were kids. At the head of each bed is a kind of long alcove-shelf in the wall, lined with books from when the aunts were in high school and college. The most prominent book on my shelf, because of the design of the spine (“Design of the Spine” sounds like a terrible mystery novel doesn’t it?) was a paperback Faulkner anthology. It was pea green, with FAULKNER written in what looked like salmon-colored streaks of blood. In fact the font was almost identical to that of Helter Skelter, the book about the Manson Family that grandma had in the den.

As a kid, I assumed that FAULKNER was a monster, like FRANKENSTEIN(‘s monster) or DRACULA. Sometimes, before going to sleep, I had to turn the FAULKNER book around backwards, so the scary name faced the wall.

Ironically, I fanatically love Faulkner now. He’s definitely not warm and cuddly, but he won’t come after you with an axe, either.

The Bipolar Logic of Gym Music, or: Young/Sexy/Rich/Virile/Cool vs. Not

So I’m exercising in my local gym on this “elliptical trainer” thing that is better for your knees than running but will kill you if you get off it too fast, and thinking about the music they’ve got playing in there. I’m not sure what to call it, exactly—it’s pretty much the same music all the time: a kind of hard-driving pop-techno which is basically a very fast beat with phrases like “Got to keep it movin’!” or “Do it to me, baby!” looped over and over and over again on top of it. Sometimes there is a keyboard/midi/synth playing a very frenetic lead that sounds like the noise a cat might make if you put it in a particle accelerator. The overall effect of this music is, I think, supposed to be motivational: it’s supposed to motivate you to dance, exercise, or fornicate very fast and for a very long time. It is the aural equivalent of that P.E. coach everybody had in Seventh grade whose motivational technique consisted of verbally abusing and insulting you until you either got motivated or gave up sports forever.

Some people like that, I guess. Some people need that, maybe. Disregarding for a moment the very relevant question of why I do not simply bring an iPod to the gym and shut up already, let me state for the record that I am not one of those people. To me, that music presents a very bossy dilemma: Either a) Submit entirely to its relentless rhythms, and become the badass exercising machine that it wants you to be or b) Be the loser who can’t keep up. Winner or Loser? What do you want to be? Pretty compelling logic, even if you’re paying attention, because it hits way, way below the belt. It preys on precisely the same kinds of profound insecurities I thought we all left gratefully behind us at middle school graduation: the desperate fear of not being cool enough, where ‘cool’ = fast, strong, hot, cute, interesting, smart (depending on where you went to middle school), wealthy, aware of really obscure shit (depending on what crowd you hung out with)…you get the picture. The music forces you to choose between fictional opposites, within a duality that it (the music) creates. After all, say I amp my workout up to the amphetamine-grade intensity that the song demands, and in so doing completely burn myself out in ten minutes, while the guy next to me who is listening to, say, the Cowboy Junkies on headphones, is exercising at a cardiovascularly healthy, but more leisurely pace. And say this guy keeps going for another 40 minutes after I collapse, beet-red, in a stupor in the corner? Do I win?

There is a very strong parallel here to the way a lot of advertising works. The most hit-you-over-the-head-obvious example of what I’m getting at would be the typical Viagra ad, which, in magazines, tends to show a robust-looking, toothy, middle-aged guy with a full head of steel-grey, “distinguished” hair being hugged from behind by an anachronistically youthful, middle-aged woman, who is visibly satisfied in every way with the guy, thanks in no small part to Viagra. Now I am not a middle-aged man, and I have not suffered the devastating effects of prostate-removal or any of the other potency-threatening ravages that can come to men in their middle years, but I can imagine that those ads haunt the psyches of a lot of otherwise reasonable guys 50 and older. The message is basically: “Are you SURE your woman is satisfied with your performance? Because if you are, hey man, more power to ya…but if there’s even the teensy weensiest little shred of doubt lurking somewhere in the deepest recesses of your imagination, don’t you think you OWE it to her to give us a call?”

Now I am not in any way impugning Viagra, which in spite of its reputedly prohibitive price tag has undoubtedly given a new lease on (sex) life to many, many (upper-middle class) men with legitimate medical issues. Nor am I questioning Pfizer’s right to make a buck (or ten bucks a pill, or whatever) and therefore their right to advertise. What I am very harshly criticizing is the ubiquity of messages coming at us all the time (from tv, radio, magazines, billboards…) that frame everything in these zero-sum terms, where either you do exactly as they say or you are a total loser. I think this can’t be good for us, hearing these kinds of messages all the time, everywhere, even if we were all (which we aren’t, all) so jaded and meta-aware that they couldn’t catch us in their little binary webs. Not that being jaded and meta-aware, which is pretty much the only form of self-defense against these constant threats and demands, is necessarily such a good thing, either.

“Work it, baby!”
“Work it! Work it!”

“Work it, baby!”
“Work it! Work it!”

No. I will not work it. Or maybe I will, but not because you tell me to. Maybe I’m just not good with authority. Or maybe it’s just those damn synthesizers. The guy next to me is singing along, in a robust falsetto: “Wooooork eeeeeet!” “Woooooork eeeeeet!” I glance over at him and he really is working it—he’s completely magenta and he’s punching at the air and sweating into his eyes and grinning. He is enthusiastically on board with whatever this music wants him to do. If the music told him to jump off a roof, this guy would be like: “how high?” I kind of envy him.

Meanwhile, I’m doing everything in my power to stay in my own invisible, tenuous rhythmic bubble, but the song is omnipresent, omnipotent, all-devouring—my only refuge is the television in front of me, which is showing a computer-generated graphic of a man’s newly revivified hair follicle: we see how “Super Boost” seeps into the shriveled pore, causing it to put forth a thick, black hair.

I close my eyes. I take deep breaths, counting backwards from ten. In this city, I think, you really need an iPod. Then I think: Shit! now the music’s making me buy an iPod! Then I think: don’t think like that. Then the song ends, and for like ten full seconds, I don’t think anything at all.

What's Lit* to Me? (Letter to My College Students)

Note: This is something I wrote for an English 201 class at BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College), hence the "In this class" talk. I reprint it here because I think it doesn't do a bad job of answering the title's question.



Why do I love to read fiction? Why do I want my children (someday) and my students (now) to love to read fiction?

Since long before there was written language, people have been making up stories. Some of the earliest ones were made up to explain the world—to make sense of it. Some of them, I suspect, were just made up to pass the time—as entertainment. Either way, writing and reading (or listening to) fiction seems to be something human beings have loved to do for tens of thousands of years. Why?

Inventing and listening to fiction is a lot like dreaming. When we dream, our unconscious mind takes images and memories and rearranges them in different shapes. Our mind, freed from the facts and responsibilities of daily life, wanders, swinging like a trapeze artist from image to image—we are flying, in a sense, on ideas. This is why dreams can be so exhilarating and so terrifying—because the reassuring net of reality isn’t under you: you don’t know where you’re going.

Fiction, like dreams, gives us the feeling of uncertainty: we allow the author (if we’re reading) or our imagination (if we’re writing) to carry us from idea to idea, image to image, without being sure of where we’re headed. We like this feeling of uncertainty: sometimes it fills us with hope, sometimes with terror, but we love it because it is freedom. It releases us, temporarily, from everything we think we know about ourselves and the world. It frees our minds to think in new ways, to change, to grow—it shakes us loose from the dusty comfort of our everyday lives.

For me, good literature is any piece of made-up writing (poem, play, book, short story) that gives me this sense of release. I believe that the feeling good literature provides is a basic human need, and that experiencing this feeling often makes us more complex, thoughtful, aware and alive than we are without it.

Some fiction is written in a simple, straightforward style that can affect almost anyone immediately, without any special study or effort. Some, because it was written a long time ago, or because the writer is using words or techniques that are not immediately familiar, takes a little unpacking before you can connect with it. If the writing is good enough, that work is well worth doing.

In this class, we’ll read both kinds of fiction—the kind you have to work at, and the kind that comes naturally. In any case, our goal will always be the same: to connect, to understand, to dig down to the point where the writing can really work its magic on us.

To paraphrase what someone once said to me in a Tarot card reading about my life: “It won’t always be easy, but it will never be boring.” I think, if you commit sincerely to the work of this class, you’ll find that to be very, very true.

*where literature is defined as stories, novels, poems, and plays

Lit Notes: About 200 Pages Into House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

This novel was recommended to me by a friend whose literary taste is impeccable (cannot be pecked at). Unfortunately, although I find the premise of the book extremely interesting and original, the overall experience of reading it has been far more irritating than enjoyable or illuminating, for reasons that will become clear below.

Note: This review’s credibility is seriously undermined by the fact that I don’t want to bother hunting down quotations from the book to support my various allegations. It also doesn't help that I haven't yet finished the book. But there it is.


What I Like About House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

1) It’s ambitious as hell: a meta-meta narrative of a fictional documentary about a house that is not so much haunted as alive and totally alien and horrifying in nature.

2) It’s a (more) intelligent horror novel—a genre that doesn’t get enough attention from ‘serious’ writers (yes, I know it’s a slippery term. That’s why it’s in quotation marks).

3) The concept of the house is really original and uncanny.

4) The ways Johnny Truant, the second narrator, relates to/comments upon/digresses from the ‘manuscript’ that forms the body of the novel.

5) The layout* (a clever trope that almost immediately becomes a major stumbling block to enjoying the novel)

6) The letters from the crazy mom, in the appendix. Her voice is completely distinct from that of the other narrators, and extremely convincing, as are her tricky paranoid/delusional spirals and occasional moments of clarity.



What I Dislike About House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

1) The author’s iffy grip on the English language (i.e. his tendency to change tense in the middle of a sentence, his failure to use commas half the time they are needed, his just flat-out wrong use of certain words…) is really annoying and distracting throughout. The fact that the main narrator, Zampano, is a fictional character doesn’t really excuse it, either, although it is a clever way for the author to distance himself from the text’s flaws. Johnny Truant, the second narrator, is of course supposed to be not-so-well-educated. The trouble is that Danielewski’s awkward control of the language is consistent in both narrators, making it pretty clear that the problem is his, not theirs.

2) The pages and pages of, for example, the names of buildings, which, while they (very obviously) make the point that Zampano is not all that stable/reliable of a narrator are ultimately just irritating and useless, not to mention a huge waste of paper.

3) The visual device of altering the layout in crazy ways (i.e. the “see through” boxes of footnotes, with the text on one side of the page and its mirror-image on the other) which I guess is supposed to put us in mind of the strange geometry of Navidson’s house, but which, again, is really just distracting and disruptive to the flow of the novel.

4) The excuse for all this, given by Johnny Truant in a footnote early in the book, that he has decided not to edit Zampano’s text, believing that the layout itself, the digressions, and the material Zampano crossed out is all potentially necessary and important.

5) The random bits of grad-student level theory (Hegel, Derrida, DeSaussure) strewn throughout the book, that succeed only in giving the reader the impression that Danielewski has spent some time in grad school, and no, the fictional narrator doesn’t get him out of that one, either.

6) The gratuitous and totally boring accounts of Johnny Truant’s sex life.

7) The fact that, by the middle of the book, the footnotes become so constant, and so intentionally disorganized (even the numbers are out of order) that any reader without a photographic memory starts getting lost and has to keep going back and rereading. The point here, obviously, is that you, the reader, are getting lost and turned around by the text just as Navidson and the explorers of the house get confused by the house itself. The trouble is that, instead of thinking “Wow, this narrative is branching and proliferating in just the same mindfucking way that the rooms in the Navidson house do!” , the reader just feels completely disconnected from the book and wonders why he is being asked to deal with this shit.

8) Danielewski’s tendency to explode at random into pseudo-poetic/metaphysical abstractions that are eerily reminiscent of my high school’s literary magazine.

9) The fact that basically everything about the book that makes it “serious literature” is ill-executed and off-balance. The whole thing could (and should) have been reduced to a very effective, 30 page short story: just Zampano’s description of The Navidson Record, minus all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit.

P.S. On the book jacket, Bret Easton Ellis envisions “Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Danielewski’s feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter, awe.” Ellis’ qualifications for making such a statement notwithstanding-- Pynchon?! David Foster Wallace?!? I really really really really really think not.

Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!

I have a sort of meaningful relationship with my cat. There. I’ve said it. Now there are many people in this world who, completely without hesitation or irony, will, in public, speak in baby language to their pets, let them lick their faces, and/or talk at great length about the intricacies of the pet’s diet, medical conditions, amusing or incorrigible behaviors, and generally give everybody the impression that they do nothing whatsoever but interact with and think about this animal all the time. When I see/hear somebody doing this I feel a curious mixture of sadness and creepiness, as if I am eavesdropping on something very personal and weird and not altogether healthy—like if a grownup woman were telling you encyclopedically about her My Little Pony collection: all the colors and smells, how long and silky their hair is, and what each one likes and doesn’t like to eat.

And yet, I love my cat. And I have a deep conviction that she is unusually perspicacious among cats: sensitive and clever and wise. And I am inclined to believe that there exists between us some kind of meaningful person/cat bond that is not just food or warmth-related.

Now don’t get me wrong--I’m not saying that my cat and I have conversations, or that I feel that she is telepathic or anything. But I have a bond with this cat—a bond that is somewhat at odds with my intellectual skepticism about the whole pet/human relationship thing.

I have a friend, an anthropologist by undergrad training, who, before he himself acquired a dog at his wife’s behest would look scornfully at pets (mine or anybody’s) whenever he saw one and mutter “familiars.” I haven’t read any anthropological theories of “familiars,” but I took his scorn to mean that he sees the whole thing as a kind of sad, pretend relationship in which the human makes himself feel important by having this little creature that follows him around everywhere, fawning and doting on him.

Objectively speaking, I kind of feel this way too. Dogs, in particular, often disgust me with their obsequiousness—the very quality that makes a lot of people love them. Not all dogs are totally obsequious, of course—partly it depends on the breed and partly on how they are raised, I guess. For example, I used to know an incredibly bright, proud and almost noble Husky that was completely devoted to its owner and yet at the same time totally independent, to the point of disappearing for days at a time, then returning home with a kind of dissipated grin on its face, obviously having really lived. That dog was cool. On the other hand, I know a Golden Retriever that, from the moment you enter the house where it lives, is all over you—licking you, jumping up on you, and knocking you over with its immense, motor-impaired bulk—its entire hindquarters wagging independently of its torso, so that they slam into you repeatedly with incredible force. That dog is very annoying and represents everything that is hateful (to me) about the pet/owner relationship.

The problem, of course, is that cats and dogs don’t talk. They just behave. Ok—actually they kind of talk, too, with the meowing and the barking and the growling and the purring and whatnot, but let’s agree that their vocabularies are very limited. A radically empiricist perspective (that of certain deeply scientifically oriented members of my family, say) would argue that although the cat seems happy when it’s purring, I can’t really know whether what the cat feels bears any relation to what I think of as happiness, or whether the cat can be aware in any metacognitive way that it is happy (I’m not sure where neurology stands on this at the moment—I’m afraid I don’t even know whether cats have frontal lobes…), and if not, whether that makes any difference at all with respect to whether I should be sitting there petting the cat or not (as I write this, my cat has just crossed the length of the apartment to leap up on my lap and started kneading my leg and purring). This empiricist family member might also point out that the only reason the cat wants to sit with me is because a) it’s cold and I’m warm b) I feed it or c) by licking me, it can obtain salt. This might, in turn, make me feel very sad and alienated from the cat with which I had been communing so peacefully just a moment before, but the logic of it is vexing and not easy to refute.

For those adults who have totally unproblematic, giddily childlike relationships with their pets, for example the many hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Korean (and maybe Chinese, but I don’t know, so I won’t say) women who keep those tiny little, well-coiffed terriers (and let’s leave aside, for the moment, the fact that, in Korea at least, many of these same pet-loving women have their dogs’ voice boxes surgically removed or altered so that they can’t bark and disturb the neighbors in those insane beehive-like apartment buildings they live in) and carry them everywhere, these things, I guess, aren’t even a question. These pet owners, I suppose, simply trust to instinct: they love their pet, their pet shows all the signs of loving them, and that’s that. I kind of envy the simplicity of that perspective, but then again it can lead to carrying said pet around everywhere in a shopping bag, spending ridiculous amounts of money on keeping it silky and beribboned, and (maybe) alienating all reasonable human beings by being at all times in deep communion with something that may or may not even think.

Still, as I look to my left and see my cat sitting faithfully on the arm of my armchair, I must admit I am touched—in part because, although she (the cat) is also close to D--, she is most often to be found sitting or sleeping immediately next to me. The same is true of D—‘s cat. I think to myself (in moments of weakness): here is this creature that I have rescued from a brutal and probably brief life of scavenging in trashcans, and it (the creature) knows that I’m the one who did this and appreciates it deeply and basically thinks of me as its parent/provider/main dude and damn that’s kind of sweet. Then, literally in the next moment, I think: good lord man, come off it. It’s a cat. It knows you so it comes near you. It knew you first, and you pet it and give it food and don’t kick it, so it comes near you. Please spare us with the appreciation and whatnot.

So I’m not sure whether I have succeeded in explaining the deep complexities of this issue, or merely in revealing myself as a guy, like Hamlet, whose purer emotions and instincts are horribly alloyed with thought. “Think less!” my acting teacher was always telling me in college. “You think too much!” certain scientific empiricists in my family were always telling me.

It is possible to overthink things, or to think about them wrong, or at the wrong time—like, for example, while walking on a tightrope, you should not think: “What if a big wind comes and blows me off of here? Or what if the rope breaks? What am I doing up here anyway, like an idiot, five hundred feet above the ground on a wire? Is there something wrong with me? If I were a nutritionist, like my mom wanted me to be, I’d be sitting in a comfortable, air-conditioned office right now, in almost no danger of dying a horrible, painful death…”

When you listen to those people on National Geographic talking about their relationship with a lion or an ocelot or a hippopotamus, they are absolutely sincere and unmuddied about the fact that there is a relationship there. They understand and can articulate exactly what you shouldn’t do around the ocelot and what you are communicating to it with your body language and when it is happy and when it is cross and so forth. They seem happy to see the ocelot each morning and it seems happy to see them. It is also, true, I believe I have heard, that a lot of these animal trainers and breeders are not so good at communicating with people, which is why they go into animal-related fields. Maybe the higher-order communication (both verbal and non-verbal) of human beings, if you’re any good at it, trips up your ability to engage in or at least to accept conceptually the relationship you have with your pet.

Anyway, I love my cat, and at the same time I view her from a certain skeptical distance, as a being whose agendas and motivations are obscure and inscrutable to me. Which, is, come to think of it, kind of the way I deal with most people, too.

Diamond Chef

Diamond Chef appeared in my kitchen one evening last Spring. He was (is) essentially two-dimensional. His body is a black diamond, such as one might see on a playing card, about two feet in height and one in width. His head is that of a stereotypical chef, with a moustache and a brioche-shaped, puffy, white hat. He floats, bobbing slightly in the air, and does not speak.

Within seconds after his appearance, there appeared, just as mysteriously, on my kitchen table, a complete pot-roast dinner. What was especially bizarre was the fact that just that afternoon I had been daydreaming of pot roast. Diamond Chef smiled, knowingly, it seemed, as this thought occurred to me. I blinked my eyes (or did I?) and he was gone.

The pot roast was delicious. Perfect. The onions and carrots were perfectly caramelized, and the fat of the beef was crispy. In addition, there was a rich flavor to the jus at the bottom of the pan, as if sherry and shallots had been sautéed in it.

I waited in vain throughout the Spring for Diamond Chef’s return, sometimes checking the kitchen fifteen times in a single day. Why had he come, I wondered. Had I done something to drive him off? Then one day, as Summer was fast approaching, in the food section of our county newspaper, I read a curious item. Apparently five other households had been visited by a similar apparition: A floating diamond with a human head. In each case, the apparition had remained only ten or twelve minutes, leaving behind a fully cooked dinner ideally suited to the tastes of the homeowner and his family. I determined to look up these families one by one, to hear their stories firsthand.

The news item included a small photograph of a house I recognized from the long, constitutional walks I regularly take in my neighborhood, with no particular destination in mind. It was not far—maybe ten minutes on foot—so I set out immediately to speak with the owner.

When I arrived, the television was on so loud that you could hear it clearly through the door. It was playing “Fear Factor,” a show I don’t watch but whose music is distinctive. I knocked loudly, certain that the occupant would not be able to hear over the television. Then I went to the window and looked in. The television watcher, a woman of approximately four hundred pounds in a shapeless floral nightgown, saw me and screamed. I smiled harmlessly.

Dubiously and with great effort, she raised her great bulk from the armchair and shuffled to the door. She opened it as far as the chain would allow. I spoke quickly: “I am here about the Diamond Chef. I have seen him too.” Her eyes widened and she unlatched the chain.

It turned out that her name was Mabel. She lived alone and, consequently, had been terrified when, the Thursday evening before, she had entered her kitchen to find an enormous bucket of fried chicken steaming on the counter. She had been even more shocked when, a moment later, she noticed what she described as: “some kind of big honking insect” floating in front of her, with the head of a man and a black, diamond-shaped body (It was with some difficulty that I was able to coax this full description out of her. For a long time she insisted on describing Diamond Chef as an insect, merely adding such unhelpful adjectives as “flat” and “hairy” in response to my interrogations.)

According to Mabel, she woke up twenty minutes later on the kitchen floor with a nasty knock on the head. During the brief period of her unconsciousness she had had what she described as a “vision” of Diamond Chef’s origins. She saw a planet, far from Earth, on which many creatures almost identical to Diamond Chef lived, floating inside glass bubbles. The planet (as best as I could glean, given Mabel’s somewhat limited powers of description) was entirely barren except for a magnificent glass city in its center with towers stretching up to the sky: the City of the Diamond Chefs. Suddenly there was a great commotion—the Diamond Chefs were abuzz like a giant hive of bees. The agitation seemed to be focused around one of the creatures, whose bubble was glowing a pale orange and giving off a high-pitched hum. This bubble and its occupant suddenly shot at tremendous velocity straight up into the air and out of the planet’s atmosphere.

Mabel understood that inside this bubble was the same creature that had appeared to her in the kitchen, and that it had come to Earth on a mission of goodwill. Furthermore, she understood that it could not and would not appear in any country upon whose soil a war was currently being fought, for it was peace-loving by nature and found all forms of aggression abhorrent.

Upon awaking from this vision, and after steadying her nerves somewhat, Mabel sat down at the kitchen table and consumed the entire bucket of fried chicken. It was, as she put it: “The god-damned best thing I ever tasted.”

So let us array the facts before us, as on a chessboard, so as to see if some pattern will emerge:

• Diamond Chef appears in the kitchens of people in this county.

• He cannot (or will not) speak.

• He prepares (or makes manifest) a delicious meal, then disappears.

• He appears to intuit individual food preferences without asking.

• His body is a black diamond, his head that of a stereotypical chef.

• He is benevolent.

• He hates war.

• On his own planet, he lives inside a bubble, but here he does not.

• He is not fully subject to the laws of gravity.

• His hat is white and puffy.

Although I cannot as yet discover the full meaning of this web of interconnected facts, the outlines of a pattern do dimly, tantalizingly begin to emerge. I know, nonetheless, that we may never fully understand why Diamond Chef has come to us at this time, still less who or what he is. That he loves mankind, I have not the slightest doubt. That he is of a superior intelligence to our own I am also certain.

Even as I write this, the subtle flavor of that pot roast haunts me. I will seek out the others he has visited. I will gather up their stories. I will seek to penetrate to the most esoteric layers of this mystery, even if in the very process of doing so I am transformed into something hideous and unrecognizable and must thereafter divorce myself from the society of men.

In all Sincerity,

Roger Brostworthy, Montgomery County Maryland
8/20/06

Showing Off

I haven’t written anything here for the past few weeks for a number of reasons, which include technical (computer) issues in Turkey, the fact that I’ve been reading more than I’ve been writing, and, perhaps most importantly, the working out of thoughts about why it is I’m writing this blog in the first place—that is, what I want it to be and what I don’t want it to be and whether I want it to be at all.

One thing you realize once you start “publishing” your thoughts on a regular basis without much editing is how half-baked most of them are, how slippery, how not-quite-what-you-meant. Disregarding factual mistakes (like the historical inaccuracy a friend pointed out in my referring to Wagner as a “Nazi”), your casual impressions of things come echoing back to you laden with attitudes and assumptions and just plain stupidity that you really hadn’t been aware you possessed—and make you wonder whether, instead of commenting blithely on everything, you hadn’t better just shut up and pay attention to somebody or something besides yourself for awhile.

What is this blog supposed to be? First of all, my intention in starting it was to share thoughts and some creative work with Everybody: to throw things out into the world to be seen, commented upon, criticized and/or enjoyed by other people.
One part of that (which is probably present to some extent in anybody who produces just about anything for public consumption, but especially in those who produce non-utilitarian, subjective things like books, music, paintings...) is the same exact impulse that prompts a kid in the swimming pool to yell: “look, mommy!” and then dive under the water. You want to be noticed and appreciated.

Another part of it is the desire to connect—that is, not only to be praised, but to enter into meaningful dialogue with people who can relate to what you’re doing but who are themselves doing and thinking things that inspire—in the original meaning of giving new spirit or life to—you. This is not entirely selfish: the pleasure of connecting with other people (creatively, intellectually, emotionally), which is the best of what we call friendship, comes not from somehow consuming another person’s spirit, but, in a sense, from the shared experience of a third spirit in the interplay of the two personalities (yours and your friend’s).

So the blog is also a kind of reaching out, in a way that is not possible in any other form, for a kind of contact that is almost impossible to establish under the normal circumstances of daily living—where you interact with people mainly on a functional basis (giving things to and getting things from them).

This reaching out implies a kind of vulnerability—that is, if it is to be meaningful at all, it must be generous, in the sense of putting something at risk. What is at risk is some piece of inner consciousness that is hidden when you walk down the street or ride the subway; you have to expose something that matters to you, and run the risk of getting negative, even hostile responses.

“Exposure” doesn’t mean “confession” here—confession, as I understand it, is a way of offering and withdrawing at the same time—that is, anticipating and outdoing any possible criticism in advance. The idea of confession includes the sense that what is being expressed is a thing that should never have existed in the first place—a fact that the confessor (the one who confesses, not the confidant) acknowledges in the form of expression—the words drip with guilt, embarrassment, remorse.

So the reaching out I want to do here is not about vulnerability for its own sake. It is about the benefits that can arise from a specific kind of vulnerability—that are worth the risk of whatever injury you might be exposing yourself to. You just put the thing out there and let its chain of unintended consequences unfold.

But obviously, you are not a disinterested party—like a parent with a child, you want the world to receive the things you put into it well. You want them to be accepted and loved more than they are rejected. It would be stupid to deny this. You are not—cannot be indifferent to the response. Otherwise, it would be enough to write in your diary and burn it all on your deathbed.

I think that the second impulse I described—the impulse toward dialogue and “friendship,” is the more satisfying and sustaining of the two. A single experience of mutual “recognition” and understanding is worth thousands of anonymous words of praise.

In fact, generalized praise without any sense of connection, it seems to me, would be a kind of Hell—like being walled up forever inside a beautiful, impregnable fortress. It would have the ironic effect of making you feel infinitely more isolated than you were when you first reached out. Generalized praise is a different kind of not-understanding, worse than being ignored because, on its own, it transforms the unique, complex, dreaming self you’ve exposed to the world into a repetitive, homogeneous, meaningless affirmation: “You are great! Everything you do is great!” No matter what you produce, the response is the same. Why bother to produce at all?

The “look at me, mommy!” impulse is basic, primitive—it appears in early childhood, when communication is in a nascent form—when you are practicing the idea of communication: I do something, the other person responds. In this situation, all that matters is whether the response happens, and whether it is positive or negative.

But somehow, the need for this kind of attention doesn’t completely vanish when the second, more complex kind of communication arises: what I’m calling “dialogue.” Let’s put it this way: If I write a book and it receives a positive, meaningful response from ten people—people with whom I can “connect” in the way described above—and is completely ignored forever by the rest of the world, that, somehow, doesn’t seem good enough.

Why not? Well—even if generalized praise is not sufficient in itself, it does, perhaps, serve a primitive need that the self has to be validated in the eyes of the world, so that the billions of people-you-don’t-know seem more positively disposed toward you than indifferent or hostile. That is, it palliates the generalized anxiety of being one insignificant person in an ocean of people. Maybe this is another way of saying “it makes you feel important.”

Is the need to “feel important” important? Should it be freely encouraged, encouraged skeptically, or despised? After all, history seems to be full of people who, convinced of their own importance, or seeking to have it confirmed, did and said and continue to do all kinds of ridiculous things. Again, the danger, it seems to me, is that the beneficiary of the world’s generalized approval can become an isolated curator of his or her own legend—jealously defending it like the mythological King of the Wood, who takes his power in the first place by slaying the previous king, and thereafter must prowl around in circles, waiting for his inevitable destroyer.

In this sense, it is a fine line between (if there is one at all) the drive to seek generalized approval and the will to power. For what is power but a solidified form of approval? Power is protection from whatever disagrees with you—it is the ability to exercise your will regardless of those who disapprove of your actions. The acquisition of power, once power has been established as the primary goal, is an insatiable drive, because anything short of absolute power leaves you potentially vulnerable to some more powerful and hostile force.

It is with good reason, then, that people feel ambivalent about the need for generalized approval: in its most potent form, it becomes an addiction, transforming the addict (as all addictions do) into a kind of slave, operating within extremely narrow and rigid boundaries—losing completely the sense of “play” that is present in the kind of “dialogue” I wrote about earlier: Dialogue and communication tending toward “life,” in the sense of new possibilities—change—hope, and generalized approval tending more towards “death” in the sense of the single-minded pursuit of one small, unchanging thing, forever.

So what I’m asking, then, is whether it is possible and necessary for these two drives—the desire for “connection” and the desire for generalized approval, to coexist peacefully—to find some kind of balance that is positive and sustainable and life-giving. I’m asking this because I think some measure of both of these needs is what’s driving me to write anything at all—in this blog or outside of it.

A friend once told me that he didn’t want to publish anything until after he turned 30, because until that time he would be motivated more by the desire to “be a writer” than by the desire to write. I’m suggesting here that both desires are present, each to a greater or lesser extent, in anybody who produces anything, and that it is only the autistic savant and maybe, possibly, the very rare mad genius who produces for no other reason than to produce.

But the fact that the “generalized approval” drive can end up, in its extreme forms, producing very ugly results, does not necessarily make it Evil. Is the child who yells “look at me, mommy!” evil? We may be embarrassed to admit that we, as sensible, sensitive, complicated adults are motivated (among other things) by the need for approval. We may respond with disgust to signs of this need in others—as something base in their nature. It makes us uncomfortable because it is selfish, because it is childish, and because we fear where it might lead. But we are motivated and driven by precisely this kind of thing—hunger, sexual desire, the need for approval. All of these drives can take ugly and destructive forms, but who would deny that we must live in some kind of harmony with them—neither denying them categorically nor obeying them blindly?

Which leaves me with the thought that there is no way of completely escaping the “look at me, mommy!” impulse, and that we should find some way of accepting it and living with it amicably—satisfying it without becoming its slave. Think about the sexual impulse: it is possible to be enslaved by it in two ways—either by trying desperately to deny it, as something “wrong” and “dirty,” or by transforming your whole existence into a desperate attempt not to be sexually repressed—either way, you’re all about sex, which is a pretty limited place to be.

Where, then, does the “connection” drive fit in—the need, not to be blindly approved of, but to respond and be responded to—to stimulate and be stimulated by interaction with others? It definitely arises at a later stage of development than the “look at me!” need, but that doesn’t necessarily make it less basic. What is special (and therfore less problematic) about “interaction” is that it distributes attention between both people: you are paying attention to the other person and being paid attention to by them. The focus is not entirely on you.

This releases you (and the other person) from the responsibility/guilt of being on stage, of being expected to perform/blamed if you fail to. Not you, not the other person, but some third force—“inspiration” for want of a better word—does the performing. It is on this third thing that your mutual attention is focused. In other words, you and the other person are able to enjoy the benefits of production without its entanglements because you are both making the thing and not making the thing at the same time. The “third force” is the paradoxical fusion of self-pride and outward-directed-focus into a single thing. You are proud of “it.”

All of this gets very tangly and metaphysical: in art, there are two ways of looking at this: Collaboration and the literary or artistic “circle” (or individual, creative friendship).

Collaboration: theatre, or film, for example, are collaborative arts in which people come together to produce something that belongs at once to each of them and to none of them. Often it is difficult to tell whether the success of a particular scene is the work of the director, the writer, the actors, or all of them together.

In the utopian ideal of theatre and film production, the team pours its collective energy into The Production, which takes on a life of its own, surprising and unexpected to its creators.

In reality, of course, it almost never works like this: usually a few personalities dominate the production, struggle with one another over creative input and credit, work independently of (and sometimes against) one another, and everybody ends up at least a little bit disappointed with the final product: it feels like a compromise—a debased alloy.

So let’s simplify the equation and think about creative partnerships, like the great music-writing teams: Gilbert and Sullivan, Lerner and Lowe, Rogers and Hammerstein, Lennon and McCartney, etc. Now I freely admit that I know next to nothing about how any of those teams actually wrote music together, but I think it’s safe to say that, working in collaboration, they produced something greater than the sum of its parts—something remarkable because of the way its elements interact: the music and the lyrics, for example, or the vocal melody and the guitar part. These relationships are unique in that they de-emphasize the contributions of the individuals to the final product and focus the artists’ attention instead upon the interaction of their separate contributions—a tricky way of freeing themselves to create.

A different, but equally illustrative example would be the idea of literary or artistic “circles”—a silly concept in the way it comes down to us, since, in reality, these “circles” were probably quite fluid and amorphous—with people coming and going, new people constantly being included and excluded, etc.—but we can accept that there have been artists who, through personal contact with other artists and the sharing of their work, have been stimulated in their own writing or painting or whatever to try things that they would not otherwise have tried—and to sustain projects that might otherwise have been dropped.

In this kind of situation, there is not a direct collaboration, but somehow the dialogue is productive—precisely, again, because it allows the producer to step, however temporarily, outside of his/her own boundaries and, by seeing things through different eyes, by focusing outward, to extend them. Because, in the end, we are never fully free of our own boundaries—the best we can hope to do is to stretch them, which happens whenever we are able to forget about them entirely for a while and focus on something outside of ourselves.

Which, interestingly, brings me back to where this post started---the feeling I sometimes (often?) have that it’s time to shut up and listen. An ironic place to end up after five pages of writing.

For the past couple of weeks, while I haven’t been writing in this blog, I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Also, writing other kinds of things—children’s stories/poems and a longer, semi-fictional thing that I love but that isn’t yet quite fictional enough for comfort. Also, some people have been commenting on my posts (many thanks, Eric, Liza, Becca…), which is a step in the right direction, because being a blog crying out in the wilderness “Repent! Repent!” is not what I’m into at all.

I also want to expand the content here—so that it’s not all this non-fictional, essay-type writing…but I’m a little reluctant, for (ugh) intellectual property reasons, to put stories and poetry up here before they’re copyrighted/published elsewhere. That is probably an incredibly arrogant/paranoid concern, since it assumes that my readership is/will be so vast that it includes literary pirates who comb blogs looking for material to steal. Aaarrgh!—avast ye Literary Pirates!! If you see stories and poems up here soon, you’ll know I’ve decided these concerns were stupid.

Compare/Contrast

It has been a while since I wrote about Turkey. A few weeks ago a friend of mine here made the point that my written observations have tended to focus on the sorts of oddities that stand out to the foreign eye: the strange, the sensational, the disturbing. I have been thinking about that and wanting to find a way to penetrate beyond satirizing Turkey’s technological inferiority or innocence in relation to the United States. This is not to say that I withdraw my earlier comments or consider them misguided or wrong, but rather that they represent first impressions—surface impressions that don’t paint a complete picture of the reality of modern Turkey, even in the eyes of an foreign observer.

During the time when my family was visiting, I noticed that many of the same kinds of oddities caught their attention: the poor condition of roads and sidewalks. The lack of bright yellow lines warning you not to trip over obstructions. The taxi drivers going at incredible speeds and seeming only narrowly to avoid destroying other taxis or running over pedestrians. Roosters crowing at sunrise, dogs barking all night long, the Muezzin caterwauling the call to prayer five times a day in scales alien to Western ears. In particular my grandmother (an intelligent, well traveled, and for the most part a very open-minded person) seemed to be unable to understand why “breakfast” in Turkey does not include scrambled eggs, toast, bacon and sausage, but instead consists of small plates of tomatoes, cheese, olives and borek (a kind of savory pastry with cheese). “In America,” she would say, incredulously, each morning, “there would be toast, maybe eggs, orange juice and coffee. That would be what we call breakfast.”

Workmen suspended in high places with dubious safety equipment. A guy welding or power-sanding metal without goggles. A guy on top of a glass awning, cleaning it, his full weight pressing down on the curved glass plate. A helmetless woman on a scooter with her two helmetless infants. Street dogs. Street cats. And so on.

These are the things that catch the attention of an alert American observer. I’ve started to realize, however, and to think about the fact that my initial default reaction to these differences was a kind of bemused, supercilious superiority. No shame in that—it is what it is. But I’ve been thinking about it. About how to get beneath it.

Last night we were taking a sick friend to the hospital. Nothing deadly—but a painful kidney infection requiring antibiotics. The taxi driver, catching wind of the situation, became an ambulance driver: honking at everybody to get out of the way, running red lights, driving at incredible speeds, often in the oncoming lane, sometimes scaring the shit out of us but obviously with the intention of getting the patient to the hospital as quickly as possible.

Not only can I not imagine a taxi driver doing such a thing spontaneously in New York—even if one tried to, the police would immediately intervene to restore civil order—which is most likely why he wouldn’t risk it in the first place. Am I glad that taxi drivers are not careening insanely down the streets of New York? Yes. Am I sad that what happened last night could never happen in New York? Yes. Very sad. On the way back from the hospital, my friends were discussing the possibility of getting dinner out at that late hour. The taxi driver (a different one) recommended and took us to a 24 hour sandwich place. Again—I just can’t see it happening in New York. Another taxi driver, last week, gave my family a spontaneous, deeply informative (and free) historical tour of Istanbul on the way to the Hagia Sophia.

There are fruit and vegetable trucks all over Istanbul. They drive around and a guy yells through a megaphone: Tomatoes! Beans! Onions! Corn! The loud, affectless announcement sounds like an air raid warning to me: “GET INTO YOUR HOUSES! DO NOT COME OUTSIDE! THE ENEMY IS APPROACHING!” People come out and buy the produce, which is local, fresh and delicious. And incredibly cheap. And it comes to you! There is always one of these trucks coming around, wherever you are.

People, when you approach them, are friendly here. There is an assumption of common humanity that simply does not exist in modern, multi-fragmented-mosaic America. You are not an “other” here: you are “brother,” “sister,” “uncle,” “aunt.” You are not “who the hell are you?” You are not “whatchoo want?” You are not “I don’t owe you shit.” People are humane to each other. They have time for each other. I’m not saying it’s a utopia. I’m not saying there aren’t horrible, godforsaken sons-of-bitches here because undoubtedly there are—but what I’m saying holds true overall.

Partly, I think, this is because Turkey holds onto a concept of Turkishness, in spite of its ethnically and religiously diverse population. This has been called into question by the Kurdish separatist movement: in the far East of Turkey, the Kurds, one of Turkey’s many ethnically distinct minorities (possibly the poorest) has been agitating for recognition as a separate entity for the past decade or so. The Turkish government, fearing a loss of Turkish national unity, and of land and resources should the Kurds found a separate nation, and of total fragmentation should other ethnic minorities follow the Kurdish lead, has responded quite harshly at times, destroying villages and civilian lives in an effort to break the back of the movement. So Turkish unity does not come without its cost.

But in a sense, this idea of Turkishness that unites many of the ethnic and religious groups that comprise this nation into a people who can call each other “brother,” “sister,” and so on, is reminiscent of the old American “Melting Pot” idea which has vanished with the late Twentieth/Early 21st Century’s emphasis upon ethnic and individual difference, on “roots,” on being a “mosaic” or a “tossed salad” rather than a homogeneous, Europeanized mass.

Where the thinking goes from here is into a trite “with every gain there is a loss and with every loss there is a gain” kind of formula. For example: much of the heightened public awareness and concern about safety in America is the result of 1) a judicial system in which people can efficiently file and win lawsuits and 2) a federal government that is responsive to the demands of special interest groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Neither of these things exists in Turkey, thus life here is both freer and potentially more dangerous than life in America. IN TURKEY--Plus: Freedom. Minus: Danger. IN AMERICA--Plus: Safety. Minus: Rules and Regulations.

Boring, Sidney, Boring.

The two countries don’t really match up, and to hold them side by side is to diminish both. Still, I can’t stop thinking, since I came here—partly because of the obvious cultural contrasts and partly because of the reading I’ve been doing—about how fucking uptight the America is in which I have lived most of my adult life. “Conservatives” of various stripes on one side ready to jump at any impropriety or deviation from whatever their particular branch of Conservatism’s definition of Normality happens to be. “Liberals” on the other side with their knives aimed at the throats of anybody who says anything that doesn’t sound ultra-tolerant and pluralistic and multi-whateverthefuck.

I’m starting to sense, to understand, to become increasingly outraged by the kinds of rhetorical and ideological fetters I and my countrymen and women have chosen to flail about in for the past twenty or thirty years—the rhetoric (both “Liberal” and “Conservative”) that has taken the place of thought and dialogue for so much of my parents’ and my generation.

And because the rhetorical formulas that have particularly tended to restrain and define me are the “Liberal” ones I have osmotically absorbed from friends and colleagues and movies and songs—orthodoxies that fit under the umbrella of what my father’s generation calls “P.C.,” the lion’s share of my contempt I reserve for them. Because they masquerade, insidiously, as righteousness, when, in fact, they are merely another form of automatic thinking: of letting platitudes substitute for independent thought.

What I’m trying to do, gradually, awkwardly, is to recognize and disentangle myself from as many assumptions as possible, particularly those that disguise themselves as well-meaning and humanitarian, so as to be better able to see things as they are—and to think about, question and say what I want without fear of being labeled one way or another. It’s not the labeling I want to eradicate—someone will always be there to label you the moment you open your mouth--it’s the fear.

So let me take aim at one constraint I find particularly vexing and characteristically Present-Day-American: the near-total eclipse, in “correct” pedagogical and social thinking, of notions of collective humanity by notions of difference. File this under “When we gain X, we lose Y,” with the subtitle: “Does it always have to go this way?”

Let’s face it: There is a lot of hypocrisy and stupidity in our modern American celebrations of individual and cultural identity. For one thing, there has been a devastating simultaneous rejection of a sense of common humanity—of the fact that wisdom and knowledge are not isolated cultural products, relevant only to particular ethnic or cultural groups. That the history of ideas and aesthetics is not simply and solely the history of the domination and oppression of certain groups’ ideologies and values by others. There is an assumption that one must make a choice between completely ignoring the differences between individuals and groups and seeing absolutely everything as a function of those differences.

Shakespeare is:

1) A writer who used the English language (and, when necessary, re-created it) with greater fluidity, range, and subtlety than just about anybody else, ever. Who presented a vast range of human behaviors, motivations and emotions that arguably cover most of human experience, regardless of social and historical circumstance. A hugely popular entertainer whose plays were beloved, in his time, by all strata of English society, from the Queen to the peasantry.

2) a White, Male, European playwright steeped in the hierarchical class-based worldview of his time. Who speaks in an antiquated, pretentious language that is inaccessible to the common man.

And I am as sad and righteously angry that many, maybe most people in my generation will only ever know definition #2 of Shakespeare, as others have, quite rightly, felt about the fact that brilliant Latino, African American, Female, Asian and other voices have been left out of various Western curricula for so long.

Should we not listen to Wagner because his music was later appropriated by Nazis (thanks to Liza for the historical correction on this one...)? Do we have nothing to learn from reading Freud because his ideas are “old fashioned?” When, during the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution in China, the rioting masses lopped off the heads and destroyed the cultural products (books, art, architecture) of the “Bourgeoisie” in the name of progress, did China, France and the world gain more than we lost?

We should read and listen to EVERYTHING, shouldn’t we? We should be brave enough to do that, I think, without fear of being corrupted by something that contradicts what we already believe.

All of this has very little to do with Turkey. Turkey has its own problems—very different ones—to deal with at the moment. And I have enough of a task in sorting out America and my place in it without trying to take Turkey on as well. Perhaps the best I can do is to collect a few impressions and try to share them with you without diminishing them by easy comparison.

In the bedroom in Istanbul in which I am writing this, light is flooding in through faintly yellow, white and pink colored curtains. Outside there is the noise of grey doves cooing in the walnut tree and children playing (this is an idyllic moment—often these same children are knocking each other down and crying). My brother-in-law and his girlfriend are lying on the livingroom couch, him with back pain, her with the kidney infection, but both recovering slowly, slowly. Next to me on the bed is a little, handmade white dress with red and black flies crocheted on the front of it: a present for the child, to be delivered next Monday, of one of my oldest friends. In the next room there is the sound of a creaking spring (not what you’re thinking). Haven’t heard the rooster in a few days. Is he gone? Dead? The crows aren’t around either: their huge, solidly constructed nest sits empty in the top of the walnut tree. I’m thinking that this time is the best time possible—free as I am to read and write and think whatever I want, to divide up the time or let it pass however I choose. I refuse to see this as privilege—as a vacation from the Real World. This IS the real world. This is as real as it gets.

Scary Dreams

For the past few weeks I’ve been carrying this computer around with me, but have used it only once, to play Aphex Twin for a former bar DJ, now working at a hotel in Cappadocia.

My folks and my grandmother left Turkey this morning at 6am. Last night I dreamt that I was robbing a bank with several of my good friends. We were working for an evil organization run by Robert Englund, the guy who used to play Freddy Kreuger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but he was not aware of this heist we were pulling. We hauled an enormous amount of cash out of this bank in two black garbage bags. I locked the bank door from the inside, we made everybody get into the vault, and I chose two of the fifteen or so hangers-on who had followed our gang into the bank to empty out the drawers and the safe.

I realized, in the middle of the robbery, that none of us was wearing a mask and that there were videocameras everywhere. I understood that, even if we were not caught in the act, I would have to go into permanent hiding, or flee to another country to avoid prison. We made off with the cash and stashed it somewhere. Later, we would divide it among us. I was wondering how much each share would amount to. I was wondering whether it would sustain me during my years in hiding, and whether I should flee to a country with a weak economy so that the money would last longer.

Sometimes I have these kinds of dreams—in which I do something irrevocable—punishable by many years or life in prison. The feeling is claustrophobic and terrible: an immense pressure on the solar plexus. This thing you have done, nothing can undo it. There is blood on your hands. You have fucked up forever. You deserve even worse than the punishment you will inevitably receive.

Heavy stuff. Some deep, subterranean accumulation of guilt?—hundreds of thousands of grains of little meaningless guilts for things like some girl you once broke up with badly or somebody you never called back who you promised you would? Flotsam and jetsam accrued and compacted and petrified into a big, ugly, menacing heap that casts shadows across the dreaming mind, pinning it like a butterfly just when it should be at its least constrained...

But this stealing dream was different from other nightmares I’ve had, ones in which I have brutally murdered somebody either in self-defense or just inadvertently, without realizing what I was doing. In the stealing dream, there was still a hope of escape: we were not caught immediately. It would be several days before the police got onto our trail. In the meantime I could change my appearance or leave the country. Something would be lost, but I would also, probably, have the money and my freedom. I would forever, in my own mind, be branded a criminal, but my only punishment would come from my conscience, and I could live with that, couldn’t I?

After all, though robbing a bank was an ignoble thing to do, wasn’t it essentially a victimless crime? The State would absorb the costs. On the other hand, I would have to cut myself off from everyone I had ever known—from friends and family—and that physical separation would be another kind of punishment. Exile.

That’s the thing about both the murder and the robbery dreams: the irrevocability. The feeling that a door has closed--that YOU have closed a door--that can never be opened again. That what you were before, you are no longer and can never be again. And that the change is immediately visible to everybody: that you are marked.

What is the fear that precipitates this kind of dream? Is it fear rather than guilt? Perhaps murder and robbery just represent boundaries you have set for yourself: ways of living and thinking that you won’t allow yourself to do because they would threaten the existence you have built and are afraid to lose. Perhaps the transgressing self in the dream is, in fact, free—-crossing naturally and carelessly over artificial boundaries: the horror in the dream is not the transgression itself—it’s the backlash of the consciousness, beginning to understand the meaning and the consequences of the transgression. Trying and failing to reconcile the new self with the old self, when in fact, they are the just same self in different locations, as demarcated on a map that has no meaning to the self it locates.

Like when you’re standing at the Four Corner states, in all four states at once, saying: “I’m in four states at once” and how that means something and nothing at the same time.

What I’m thinking is that the Big Scary Thing in the dream may not be trustworthy, and that it might not be altogether necessary or wise to submit to its intimidating power. What is interesting is that the Ego, in these dreams, if you look at them this way, is characteristically unconstrained, childlike, and unconcerned, and that the Superego kicks in with its big, parental “NO!” only after the damage has been done, failing to protect you, serving only to punish you. It’s the uselessness of this that strikes me as interesting and untrustworthy—whose authority I’m inclined to reject as unedifying and essentially antagonistic.

Maybe these dreams are my sleeping self doing battle with my own, self-imposed limitations—testing the waters. The backlash is tremendous—suffocating—terrifying, but after all, survivable because it’s only a dream. If, as they say, dreams reflect the preoccupations of the subconscious self—the tensions that arise from its constant process of becoming (and unbecoming), then I’m rooting for the Ego: go on—disappear to Iceland. Dye your hair. Cover your entire body and face with tattoos. Be Something Else. If this requires an amputation, so be it. Cut the hook loose and your arm along with it. Ignore the Big Scary Voice and it either vanishes or becomes a ridiculous irrelevancy. An anachronism. Nothing.

AAAAAAAAAAAA

The silent A screams across the page. He sets up columns of jagged teeth. He waves them menacingly at the sky:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

And all that is heard is the sound of the wind, whistling between them. The A quivers, shakes with rage. He will rend the very fabric of the air! Upon his spikes the falling birds will be impaled!

The As are a mountain range. The snow settles upon them. They are background, scenery. Silent, majestic, fixed in place:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Somebody climbs them and claims them for his country. The As are familiar from postcards. Place your cheek upon one: It is cool and hard. You can feel its substance extending below you for miles, its roots ending somewhere deep in the Earth, dangling playfully into her molten heart.

The A is far far away from you. It knows you not. Sunk deep into some directionless dream, it revolves.

The As are being worn away. The wind and the snow are eating away at them, smoothing them out. It’s a kind of relief, being worn down in this way. We look forward to the time when this place will be flat again, when nothing but fine sand blowing around will disturb the total emptiness.

Eregli (pron. “Eh-ray-lee”):

We are staying at the Summer apartment of D’s childhood, in Eregli, on a bay of the Marmara sea, about an hour and a half from Istanbul. D—grew up in Izmit, a small city not far from here, which was close to the epicenter of the huge earthquake that killed tens of thousands of Turkish people maybe ten years ago. In Eregli, during that earthquake, only one building collapsed, taking with it the lives of one of D's friends from high school, the friend’s husband, and his entire immediate family. They were sitting on the balcony, eating, at the time.

Eregli, when D- was a child, was a remote and primitive fishing village. The only Summer residence was the apartment building we’re staying in, which was built as a collective project by her father and a group of his close friends and family. An architect relative designed the building, whose balconies all face west, so you can see the sunset from every apartment. The balconies are adjoining, and have rolling screens for privacy. When these are lifted, which they usually are, you can see and talk to all of the neighbors in either direction, which creates an effect something like watching television while looking into an infinitely reflecting set of mirrors. I have become friends with Iris, a four year old girl who lives two apartments over. From her open balcony-wall, when we are on our respective balconies at the same time, she displays all of her posessions one by one: a mirror, a toy pony, two seashells and a coloring book, for me and D- to admire.

Last night there was a village wedding, or circumcision party (we’re not sure which) at a restaurant across the street which is basically a wooden tent (like a big sukkah, for the Judeophiles out there) with a kitchen and fluorescent light-rods hung in the trees. We sat on a neighbor’s balcony with maybe ten people who have known D- since she was born (some of her parent’s generation, some contemporaries, and some of their children), listening to the gypsy music and Turkish folk songs coming from the restaurant. Somebody set off fireworks—big, impressive ones—on the beach and everyone came running, thinking it was gunfire.

A neighbor said that every time the villagers have one of these celebrations, there is a fight. People get drunk, and, inevitably, late in the evening, there is a dispute that ends in violence. Last night’s iteration was a little disappointing: around 11 pm some guy yelled something, and was thrown out of the party. He did a kind of face-saving stagger/strut down the road beneath out balcony, muttering to himself.

Here I am “the American.” People are very kind to me, and burst into peals of joyful laughter whenever I say anything in Turkish. Two nights ago, on our way to Eregli, we ate at the Summer house of the architect relative, Ghengis (“Cengiz” in Turkish. “Atila,” as in “Attila the Hun,” is also a common Turkish name…). His four year old grandson, who had a plastic lightsaber and Spiderman pyjamas, was scared of me because he thought I was Peter Parker, and because I'm foreign. While we ate dinner, he hid inside the house, burying his face in the couch. After dinner, I chased him around saying “The American is Coming!” in Turkish, in a Zombie voice, and we became great friends. He told me, with D- translating, the entire plot of “The Lion King III,” which I did not even know existed.

Eregli is an amazing place. Everybody knows everybody. The young kids, the teens, and the adults are all living their separate realities in full view of one another—the kids running around in packs, shouting, swimming, kicking balls around—the teens drinking, smoking, or just huddling around sullenly in groups of three or four on the beach. The adults sitting on balconies or in the backyards, talking, laughing, and drinking either alcohol or tea.

Last night, D- and I went to sit on a bench by the water, on an unlit stretch of beach. Under two trees behind us sat two groups of villagers at two tables, one for men and one for women (the women all wearing colorful headscarves, as they do), drinking raki (a grape and anise liquor—very much like Greek Ouzo). The men started singing a folk song with a lot of vibrato, one of them doing the stringed instrumental part with his voice, because they didn’t have any instruments. The song, D- told me, is sung by a man to a dark-haired woman who has rejected him, and basically says: “I have built bridges and fountains. Don’t think you’re so special.” And we, the audience, understand why the woman has rejected him.

Ours is no longer the only building on the block. The street is now lined with vacation apartments, delis, restaurants and “tea gardens” (outdoor tea places). The town still feels isolated, peaceful, and primitive, though—you see at least as many headscarf-wearing village women in the streets as you do Istanbul vacationers, and an American in Eregli is still an almost freakish oddity: A couple of teenagers in a tea garden asked me yesterday, incredulously, “why did you come here?”

This situation here is almost inconceivable to me, as an American and the product of a not-very-social suburban family——three generations of people, some of whom have known each other for thirty years, coming to the same place every Summer, watching each other and their children and their children’s children growing up. It is exactly like a huge, extended family. D- has not been here for eight years, yet she fell immediately back into the rhythm of the Eregli lifestyle, running from apartment to apartment to talk to people and to their relatives on the telephone, sitting outside with the “aunts” (the generic term of affection for any woman at least 20 years older than you. If she’s around your age, you call her “sister.”) talking about flowers and what everybody has been doing lately.

A guy just drove by selling peaches. Yesterday a guy drove by selling bleach. I couldn’t understand that. There are delis here—why do you need a mobile bleach salesman? My mother-in-law bought some bleach from him, which was a 20 minute process involving chatting and laughing with the guy so he would give her a better price. In Turkey, you must develop a personal relationship with the salesperson, or you get imperfect products at an unreasonable price. I have been told, by Turkish people, that trying to take advantage of others through trickery is a part of Turkish culture—that salespeople and customers alike delight in gaining the upper hand through small acts of deceit. Caveat Emptor.

A car just pulled up outside with a two year old boy at the wheel, steering, on his father’s lap. D- and some of the ladies are swimming. I think I might join them. So let me end with a story that my father-in-law told me last night—a kind of Turkish Zen koan about Nasrattin Hoja, a wise figure of legend who lived around 500 years ago.

Nasrattin Hoja was walking along the street when he saw two men fighting. He stepped in and pulled them apart. “What are you doing?” said one of the men. “You don’t know what this man has done! He has stolen my cow and insulted my mother!” “You are right,” said Nasrattin Hoja. “Wait just a minute!” said the other man—“You haven’t heard my side of the story! This man is a liar!” “You are right,” said Nasrattin Hoja. A third man, who had been standing nearby, witnessing these events, spoke up: “Nasrattin Hoja,” he said, “It is not possible that this man and that man can both be right!” Nasrattin Hoja considered this. “You are right, too,” he said.

Memoir—Summer “Exchanges” to Finland and France As An Impressionable Youth

Because I’m living right now in a kind of “insider’s” Turkey, I’ve been thinking a lot about two Summer experiences I had when I was an early teen—total immersions in foreign environments. When you’re living outside of your native country, you do a lot of thinking about yourself and how much of it is a product of your native environment—you make a lot of comparisons between where you come from and where you are, trying to figure out the differences, and probably also making a lot of mistakes—identifying as “cultural” tendencies that are specific to the individuals with whom you have contact. In any case, it is an experience of disorientation that sometimes, especially if you don’t know the language well, feels like being a child again, listening to and observing everything for clues as to what is really going on.

In the Summers after ninth and tenth grade I was sent on “exchange” to Finland and France, through a program that connected families with prospective young visitors from other countries. In reality, there was no “exchange”—a family just took you in for the Summer. Nor was there any special structure to the program—whatever the family did, you did.

In Finland I stayed in Helsinki with a family that claimed to be the second richest in the country. The father, who was originally Swedish, proudly drove me around his two underground parking garages (beneath downtown shopping malls). These were the only underground parking lots in Helsinki at the time, and brought him great wealth, with which he and his wife would travel around Europe, shopping.

For most of that Summer, they were abroad, shopping, leaving me and Sebastian, their son, in the care of two ancient grandparents who lived in the basement apartment with their equally ancient, mop-like dog. I believe that these were Sebastian’s father’s father and mother’s mother, who, having been widowed by their respective mates, had hit upon the convenient solution of becoming a couple themselves.

The house was a five-story, rectangular, wood-faced structure like an apartment building (which it may originally have been). Sebastian (or “Seba,” as he was called) and I lived on the top floor and almost never saw the grandparents. Occasionally the grandmother would come up in the elevator to check on us, calling out “Se-e-b-a-a!” “Se-e-b-a-a!” while I hid in my bedroom, for fear of having to talk to her in my very limited French (she spoke Finnish and French, but not English). We saw her maybe three times the whole Summer.

Seba and I were, I guess, around 14 years old. He was more experienced than I was in the ways of bad kid-ness, probably because kids in Helsinki, from the age of around 10, begin spending their evenings and weekends gathering in large, asphalt youth-parks, with maybe 100 other youths aged 10-18, drinking and skateboarding around.
All of Seba’s friends were from the projects of Helsinki, and in addition to drinking and skateboarding while listening to the Beastie Boys, they liked to break into these octagonal kiosks that are all over the city and steal candy and money.

The first three things I was ok with: I drank a lot of Carlsberg and Elephant beer that Summer, created elaborate grip-tape designs (spider web with spider for myself, and Marijuana leaf with Playboy Bunny for Seba, at his request) for two skateboards that Seba and I would use to skate all over Helsinki, listened to the Beastie Boys on somebody’s boom box that had been painted pink, and whose speakers had stolen VW symbols affixed to them, and enjoyed Seba’s father’s sauna, swimming pool, projection tv and vast collection of VHS films to the fullest.

I drew the line, however (for some reason), at breaking into kiosks, which was done by climbing on top of them and opening the roof-panel. On those occasions when Seba and friends would decide to knock over a kiosk, I would politely excuse myself and walk home. I can’t clearly recall my thoughts at the time, but I think I knew it was “wrong” and was scared of ending up in a Finnish jail and being bailed out (or being unable to be bailed out) by my furious parents.

One evening, early in the Summer, Seba and I were in the youth park with a bottle of Gin. I had never tasted Gin before, but this did not daunt me from drinking half a bottle while sitting on a bench, talking to random Finnish teens about America. When a third of the bottle was empty, I announced to all the girls who were present that in America, all girls want to sleep with me, and suggested that they might like to do the same. When half of the bottle was gone, I vomited, rolled off the bench, and lay there, where I remained until Seba and a group of his friends grew tired of the youth park and carried me home. Somebody gave me a bath and put me to bed.

The next morning I awoke to find Seba leaning over my bed, grinning and holding out a cup, which I took and drained. The contents, it turned out, had been 120 proof rum from South America, which Seba claimed would instantly cure my hangover, which I guess it did. I then walked out into the hallway, where many Finnish youths were sleeping or slowly waking up, Seba’s parents being in France or somewhere. They all leered knowingly at me and I knew, although I could not remember anything, that I must have made a complete idiot of myself.

It is a testament to my good sense that I did not drink myself into oblivion ever again that Summer, and to the good sense of my stomach that I couldn’t touch Gin for maybe a decade after that night.

Seba’s family (like all Finnish, middle and upper-middle class families) had a Summer house about an hour’s drive north of Helsinki (I forget the name of the town). We went there once or twice during the Summer when his parents were back in town and stayed for a couple of days each time. I remember the place as a woodland Paradise, where Seba’s grandma made the best sausages and bread I have ever tasted. These we ate hot out of the oven with a delicious, sweet-hot Finnish mustard from a tube (which I have often thought of but have never seen since that Summer).

About thirty feet from the house there was a wooden sauna and a lake. The men and the women of the household would use the sauna in shifts, for modesty’s sake, stripping naked and turning beet red as somebody poured water onto the burning coals and the little wooden house was filled with steam and the spicy smell of seasoned wood (from the fire below the coals). When you had become as red as you could endure being, you would run, naked, out of the sauna-house and jump into the cold lake. Every nerve in your body would then experience a kind of screaming momentary epiphany, leaving you energized, calm and focused. Then you would repeat the process all over again.

Seba’s family also had a motorboat on that lake, and they put me in a wetsuit and taught me to waterski. I picked up the basics after four or five attempts, and was happily upright and skiing around the lake for the rest of that day.
There was also a girl there—a cousin of the family, I think, with whom I would lie in the sun on a rock and hold hands. She did not speak English and I didn’t know any Finnish. Seba made a lot of fun of me for this mini-relationship, because he thought the girl was ugly.

There were other things too—side trips to Denmark (with the family) and to Leningrad (with the exchange organization), but what I remember most vividly is being a kid on my own, with Seba, skating around, drinking, eating pancakes, and living as free as any kid could wish to be from the (perhaps not unwisely) oppressive rules and requirements of grown-ups. All told, I survived pretty well without any supervision, and learned some things about my own resilience and limits that I couldn’t have learned at home.

Simultaneously, though I was only dimly aware of the fact, my sister was in the early stages of diagnosis of a cancer that would almost kill her that Fall, and would leave her with a prosthetic knee-joint. In retrospect, I think this was my parents’ main motivation for sending me away.

France, the following Summer, was a completely different experience. My host family, who lived in Paris, were a couple in their mid-sixties. The man was retired from the World Bank, skeletally thin, possessed of a long, wispy beard, and very serious about Astrology, which he practiced with elaborate, detailed charts and maps, casting the futures not only of friends and relatives, but of whole nations and Humanity itself. For most of the Summer he sat in a chair, smoking unfiltered Gaulois cigarettes, reading his way through the Complete Works of Freud in eight or ten volumes. He said almost nothing to me the whole Summer, aside from offering once to read my future, which I refused because it (and he) scared me.

That Summer, for me, was mostly about reading. I spent a lot of time alone, reading Big Books and feeling deep, vague stirrings of meaningfulness. I “read” Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness (from which I understood and felt only a dark and primitive sense of ancient, scary impulses), Nietzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (from which I understood nothing at all), and The Lord of the Rings (the book I understood best and enjoyed most that Summer). I also watched (in French) the movie “Le Grand Bleu” (“The Big Blue”) about an air-tankless competitive diver with an almost mystical relationship with the sea, which, along with Lord of the Rings inspired me to write sprawling, pompous metaphysical poems which I would send to my then-girlfriend, who had moved to Kentucky that Summer for good.

My host mother was more talkative and physically energetic than her husband, and she would involve me in all kinds of physical activities, especially when we were staying in their family’s ancient “chateau” in the South of France. We spent most of the Summer in that house, which was built in the 1600’s and was really more like a one-story monastery than what I think of as a chateau. The walls were made of cool, smooth, white stone and bore old wooden crosses. All around the place was the vineyard country of Savoie, where Vins de Table are produced—miles and miles in every direction of rolling hills covered with rows of grapevines, with the occasional white house in the middle of them. Nearby, on one side, were the French Alps, separating France and Italy. Every Friday a farmer would come to the house in a wagon, bringing a big wheel of cheese (usually “Tomme De Savoie”—a semi-soft, musty, delicious cow’s milk cheese), fresh bread and eggs, and a cherry tart.

The rest of the time, the couple (and I) ate 1) wheat bread spread with vegetable lard and sprinkled with flaked yeast and 2) brown rice. That was pretty much it. As a result of this diet, and the fact that the mother was always making me hike and bike to the point of nervous collapse, I was always in a state of semi-starvation, and would frequently sneak into the kitchen at night (in between chapters of Lord of the Rings) to steal delicious savory biscuits—crumbly, salty, buttery boxed crackers with burnt edges. I stole so many of these that, on my departure at the end of the Summer, the mother gave me two boxes to take home with me.

The physical component of the Summer involved mainly hiking and biking. My host mother was in incredible shape, and would ride or hike for long distances, very fast, without the slightest sign of fatigue. I, on the other hand, was a pathetic, soft, non-athletic kid who began each excursion panting and sweating, and ended up almost always in tears, saying (in French) “it’s too much!” “take me home!” “I’m dying!” The French cast a cold ear on such complaints, basically ignoring them altogether.

One time, on the way back from a biking trip, I either rode ahead or fell behind and got lost. I ended up in a tiny wine-country village, and went into a restaurant to ask for help. I told the owner the names of my host parents, he found them in the phone book, and they came to rescue me.

The main difference between the French Summer and the Finnish one was that, in France, I was living the solitary, alienated existence of a little Hamlet or Young Werther, very conscious of my own identity as a young intellectual/mystic, penetrating the realms of the inner consciousness, and the mysteries of Philosophy and the Ocean. My daytime identity, by contrast, was that of the solitary, alienated Pathetic Wimp, being dragged, whimpering, all over the countryside. In both cases, I had no companions of my own age, and could not really relate in any way to my host parents, who were old and very weird people.

In Finland, on the other hand, my life was outward-directed. I was constantly interacting with other people, people my own age, and doing exactly whatever I wanted to do. Actually, I had a great time in both places. France was strange but exciting: I was opening up to a kind of isolated, personal, intellectual life that was new and mysterious to me. I felt misunderstood, and I kind of liked it, because I was coming to a new kind of understanding of myself as distinct from (and ultimately, inaccessible to) other people. In Finland, self and identity were not really at issue, because I was constantly involved in some kind of social activity. There was no separation between myself and other people because from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep (and sleep was rare that Summer, with only two or three hours of darkness per night) I was part of a Group (almost a gang, come to think of it, what with all the theft).

The structure of this piece feels like it is pressuring me into deriving some kind of cutesy lesson from all of this. My fault—I have a tendency to fall into these kinds of fascistic narrative structures that leave me, at the end, rebelling against the corner I’ve painted myself into: “Finland and France: Two Contrasting Lessons in Extroverted and Introverted Living.”

No lessons, please. At the end of the Finland trip, Seba’s parents took us to Tivoli Gardens in Denmark, which is a kind of outdoor park with lots of stores, flowers and ferris wheels. Many of the stores there sell handmade pipes and tobacco. I bought a little pipe on a keychain and some tobacco to smoke in it. As I was packing to go home, it suddenly hit me that, in America, I would not be able to wander around with my friends, smoking this pipe. That, in fact, if I brought the pipe home, I would be in Big Trouble. With deep regret, I buried it at the bottom of a drawer in the room I was staying in, underneath a pile of old, unused, miscellaneous things. It’s probably still there.