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
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
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.
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.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
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.
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.
Sunday, August 20, 2006
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
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
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
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.
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.
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.
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.
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