A Case for Sun Worship

Posted on March 14, 2019

Strictly speaking, moonlight doesn’t exist. It is not a luminous thing, the moon. Neither is Saturn, or Earth, or Mars. Absent the sun, and stars, the universe is a lightless theatre of immense objects swirling round each other without a sound. Imagine that.

A cat can look at the king, but no one can look at the sun without damage. Reverently or not, we must deflect our faces.

It gives life, causes the sap to rise, makes plants and makes factories of them, dyes the flesh, scorches who comes too close, ignores the distant, grants everything to them that orbit prudently.

The palm of light pressed to the eyelid summons the sleeper from sleep. Life clasps to light; bends to it. Light is the first code.

The thing about God is, O.K., but where? More and more the supposed invisible resembles the next discovery of Science: what you thought were angels was “spooky action at a distance.” The God that submerges into everything is nowhere, is quarks, muons, while the sun you generally can’t avoid. What we thought were miracles was photosynthesis.

Would life have existed without light? According to science writer Michael Gross, no, it would not. “There may be other kinds of life in the Universe, but the only kind that we know about owes its existence to the energy of the Sun, and its family tree was shaped by the invention of photosynthesis more than by any other event. As a result, today’s inhabitants of our planet tend to rely on light for energy, information, and guidance in space/time. No wonder ancient cultures acknowledged its importance by worshipping the Sun as a life-giving, god-like being. Had this small yellow star acquired less fuel and failed to light up, all life-forms that we know of would be non-existent.”

If the God-construct is based on something other than proto-alphas, it must be the sun: inscrutable, all-powerful, essentially immortal, life-giving, capable of wiping us out at any time. Consider the long reach of the solar flare. Consider how it motors our weather.

Isn’t it strange, that we take it for granted? Isn’t it bizarre what a difference a few degrees’ distance makes? How the quality of light slides, protean, full of character? We make hats and lotion, tint our windows, flip down our visors.

“Misadjustment of biological rhythm or light intake can therefore make us ill and depressive without us even realising that light is the underlying problem. Recent discoveries suggest that this response to light and dark may be independent of the eyes. In one controversial experiment, it was triggered by illuminating the backside of a person’s legs.”

It does not seem crazy to me that the change happens independent of sight, because the sun gives warmth!

I can tell you, if you talk to your college-educated liberal friends about this, you get some funny looks. It is not that the sun isn’t great. Everyone agrees: the sun is terrific. But need it be an object of worship? It’s the idea of worship that folks get tangled in. Which makes sense to me. I’ve been giving religious worship the slip my whole life. And I don’t want to fall here into the quicksand of discussing the subject in general.

But I don’t think it’s any lamer an oversimplification than any of the other you-are-what-you-blank formulations to suggest that you are what you revere. Revering something manifest and inhuman needn’t be all that insane. You don’t have to ask it for a Christmas pony or anything; you don’t even have to speak to it. It might be as simple as taking a tiny portion of your day’s allotment of sun-given energy from the transient teeming buzz of the now and applying it instead to just thinking about the unwinking source.

And when it does, finally, wink, and give out? in that Mayan-calendar future none of us will see? Well, hail Satan, it may just cave into a black hole.

The Commerce Between Us

Posted on July 23, 2018

This morning I met a 3-year-old and her little brother in the dentist’s office waiting room. In no time at all I went from perfect stranger to trusted confidant. I said “Hello” and the girl said “I’m Rapunzel.”

She had a slightly spooky way about her: her eyes swam constantly around eye contact with me, rolling in her cute rolling head, and she spent a healthy portion of our little talk slowly spinning. The story she told would’ve been pretty hard to follow anyway. It involved a being named (alternately) Tinkle or Twinkle, and something about bedtime and the night, and she said “wintuhs” a lot. Her little brother didn’t seem to know what to make of it either—or of me. He sat in a tiger chair everybody else wanted to sit in, glanced at me coyly, walked around a little table a few times, then flashed me a look at the card he was holding with a picture of a green animal-like blob on it.

“What’s that?” I asked. He was really proud of it, but this question vexed him.

“Osaur,” he finally managed.

“Dinosaur,” his mom corrected happily. She’d been sitting opposite me filling out health forms, grateful I think for the assist. (“Do you have kids?” she’d asked earlier, smiling and nodding expectantly. My shake of the head aborted whatever exchange would’ve followed a positive response, like it always does… “Nephews and a niece,” I said, immediately second-guessing my honesty. For, reader, I confess: I want sometimes to spy into that moment, to feel the juice of that umbilical tether.

A nice man in a puffy Mets jacket recently sat down at the bar of my coffee shop and had a bagel with lox. Recent transplant from the Island. I said to him, “So, the Mets,” and he took on a philosophical air: “Whata you gonna do.” Instant cultural commerce between strangers. [Let us carve the new wood, said the young poet to the old poet, Let there be commerce between us.] No one sportsy is unfamiliar with this sensation. I imagine something similar links the victims of the white patriarchy in moments of white patriarchal egregiousness: pulses of empathy throbbed across the synaptic gulfs between people otherwise unknown to each other, instants of engagement—as fleeting as a Facebook scroll’s—in which a person is a picture worth a thousand words, never mind the authorship.

But I get away from myself. My point is: she asks, I lie, say “Just had our first” or “Two of the little devils” or whatever, what nutso parental emotion rays would she’ve beamed back my way? I imagine it’s a cross between the connection people make with strangers witnessing something wild together—the uncorked-ecstatic Can you believe this shit? you might get at shows or ballgames [which really do lead people to high-five perfect strangers], but sleepier—and that between veterans of wars, who need merely confirm that another had been there to achieve a grim transcendent understanding language could only have approximated.

I imagine it’s like that, ’cause that’s all I can do. The childless do not spark conversations across waiting rooms devoid of children by saying, “Hey, you childless?”)

At some point I said to the mom, “It’s like they’re talking in their sleep,” and she did the puppet-with-her-hand-that-jabbers-and-jabbers-and-jabbers. But the more I thought about it, the more apt an analogy it became.

Not for all intents and purposes, but for a lot of them, childhood is a dream. Think about it! The dreamstate of being a kid, the dreamy babbling. Remembering your childhood: the inability to vividly recall, the pieces that float up into your waking adult days, tripped by some random adjacency… The faces we recall might have the wrong names and vice versa. And consider how dreamlike a child’s days must be! “A nice stranger struck up a conversation with us in a room where grownups wait. My sister spun and talked to him about Twinkle and wintuhs. I showed him my dinosaur and then attacked a sofa at a running start. Plowed into it headfirst. Why not? My chair was a tiger.”

Dreaming then can be understood as a dip back into childhood, where we are always surrounded by strangers yet somehow at the same time safe under a veil of normalcy. (Except for moments of cold panic, of course, which in our dreams we are as like as not to experience for bizarre reasons. Similarly, kids are lousy threat assessors, charmed by fire and completely losing their shit if made to look at a piece of fruit, say.)

A dream is the mind playing when the body is at its most helpless: a nightly state of childhood. My sister spun, I ran growling into a sofa, mom all the while filling out paperwork FOREVER….

I read this to A. and she says “It makes you think, are we looking for chaos?” “When?” I ask. “When we dream,” she says, “I mean when was the last time you had a boring dream? I go to bed all the time thinking: Geez, can I just go grocery shopping or something? Instead of being—I don’t know—raped by an alligator? But no.”

Even kids as kids aren’t very good at remembering things. Their brains are plastic, and sieves, and a gigantic impossibly alien world is pouring through them at all times. Where did I put that toy I was playing with eleven seconds ago? Where is the thing that I am looking at right now—right this second—this thing that I am literally describing right this second and looking at and not seeing? Where is it?

“It’s right there, dude.”

“Oh.”

Maybe childhood invents dreaming, and that’s why we’re often so silly, oblivious and incapable in our dreams.

My first memory of a dream is waking up from a nightmare of a lion chasing me. I walked into my parents’ room and woke up my mom. She told me to go back to sleep and tell the lion to leave me alone. It worked! Maybe I remember it because it was the first time adult behavior influenced my dream. The boy in the dream had agency and fortitude. He’d learned from his elders. Maybe this was part of the waking-up process—which is analogous to getting older. Eventually we awaken even in our dreams.

(Awaken… What a word. Lord of mind. Light of days. “To spring into being, arise, originate…”

Believing it an effective form of self-hypnosis, etching words into the grapefruit of my brains, “saying” them in my head, I pray most nights. Mostly I pray for good dreams: entertaining, charming, frivolous, bright, funny, quirky, so on. Indie movies Greg Kinnear would star in. I pray for A.’s, too, since she’s for as long as I’ve known her been more or less terrorized by dreams at least a couple times a week. It works for me pretty well. Better at any rate than does praying for random pots of money or a miraculously single chin.)

As kids, the only domain we’re ever truly masters of is that of our dreams. If our eyes are open, someone else is in charge; if closed: free as the wind! For argument’s sake, consider Merlin, who as everybody knows was born in the extremity of his old age and then walked backwards through time. Informed already by a lifetime’s worth of vocabulary, experience and knowledge, Merlin would’ve cultivated a unique dreamlife actually impossible for the nonfictional person to imagine. But let’s give it a shot:

They’d be pretty much like real life, if flavored with a certain tang of senescence. Maybe random pains and forgetfulness would replace falling and unplanned nudity as dominant themes. Instead of flying, just getting around OK on your feet. But the idea of “dream logic” as a thing contrary to waking logic wouldn’t exist for Merlin. Forged in the set schema of an established mind, his dreams wouldn’t add much spice to his life. They’d be like watching a sequel of his day every night, instead of tuning in to a broadcast from a parallel but goofy universe. Merlin, we can be assured, dreamt of grocery shopping.

Which all suggests that as children we’re constructing a kind of time machine we’ll then inflict on our adult selves for the rest of their lives. As if to say:

You, you who just laid awake absorbed for some precious minutes of your life churning through your ever-updated itinerary of fears, you who’ve ranged so widely beyond your early limits that you like to think you’re only a distant relative of that helpless little guy who didn’t know shit from Shinola—yeah, when you sleep? That’s my house.

The Gym

Posted on January 22, 2018

A typical moment at the end of a session at the new Gold’s down the street: I’m grody with sweat, pale with exertion, whiskers beaded, mostly avoiding my reflection in the mirror a foot away while holding heel to butt in my usual stretching routine. Behind me, to my left, a young barefoot gentleman with nice bulbed arms cuffs his thighs in turn, slapping them like he’s picking on them, like a mafioso screwing with his younger brother; the other guy, to my right, is arched over a large blue nipple, strenuously doing push-ups on his fists.

∴

I’m on the treadmill, three and a half miles painted onto a yard of sweat-anointed rubber track when a maybe 65-year-old-woman, fatless and frizzy-haired, trots backwards into my field of vision, jazz-handsing. She comes to a stop at the wall, then tilts into it and pushes off without honestly–I mean really, she wasn’t even far away from it. This was a lean-in from kissing distance. Now she picks up the little medicine ball and kind of push-throws it down against the wall. I’m obsessed with her weird workout. Arielle must see her.

∴

I mount the treadmill, hit “Quick Start”, log on the wi-fi, and my phone burps: Arielle saying: Niiiiiiice ass!

∴

I like the mobocracy of the gym, the flowing anarchic kind of silly mess of it, of all these bodies. Everyone out to better themselves, no one in charge, though there is probably a hierarchy of fitness. Were power to be wielded, it wouldn’t be the schlubby wielding it, regardless of what they parked outside. It would be the guy with the milk chocolate skin and the trim mohawk and the tiny camo shirts tucked among the furrows of his enormous scalloped muscles. Muscles like entire cats curled into his body. This guy, my friend overheard someone tell him: “Man, you keep workin’ out, you’re gonna look goofy!”

∴

All the time I find myself being like: How is this co-ed? How cool is that? It seems very bold or adult or reckless of us. But everything has its limits. A. tells me of awkwardness in the stretching room. A guy next to her, in his activity, making frankly very undisguised sex grunts. We treadmill next to each other once while in front of us a very self-satisfied yogaist yogas her butt off, swanning and craning and flexing. After, A. is like: “How ’bout that yoga lady?”

∴

Sometimes you want to draw people’s attention to the Sign of Rules, particularly the one that says No Grunting. A svelte salt-and-pepper-haired man with his back to the wall walks his hands backwards down it til he’s a bridge on the floor, each time at the same steps emitting these deep animal moans.

∴

I ask Dan at work–Dan who just opened a Crossfit thing–Is it true you’re not supposed to stretch before exercising? He says Yeah, don’t do static stretching, like this, and he shows me pinning the heel to the butt, but dynamic stretching is good. What’s dynamic stretching? And he shows me cantering across the floor like a new horse. So I just stretch after.

∴

At first I was like: Where did all these jocks come from? Who knew? It was a revelation to discover that PE really took for so many people. Guy with Cat-Sized Muscles, now he and those like him I think just clearly dedicate their entire lives to their bodies, but they’re the exception. Everybody else you get the feeling have regular jobs and relationships and just happen to somehow know all these bizarre workout techniques. How do all these people know all these bizarre techniques?

Then again, my Florida brother-in-law, Chris, who owns a fitness studio, says he can’t go to the gym anymore because everyone’s doing it wrong. It’s good for his business actually, ’cause they’re all going to end up needing physical therapy, which he does, but he doesn’t see it that way ’cause he’s a good guy. I resist telling Dan about the thing I read about millennials in their third decades on Earth high-intensity-training themselves into replacement hips.

∴

People squatting under broad black weights, breathing through their teeth. People dangling from monkey bars, throwing themselves around, behaving improbably. Once I became confused watching a woman fold her upper torso down over a thing, holding a weight, and then straightening again. How can we move like that? Without using our arms or legs? How do we move?

∴

Meatheads in their little shirts, sheened in sweat. Rangy fellas with thousand yard stares. Guys crowded with tatts. Big boys with football shoulders and thick calves. A bronzed Adonis with a man bun, lordly upon the stair stepper, writing–I imagine–poetry in his pocket-sized leather journal.

∴

In the early days I watched this maybe 65-year-old-man with tattooed legs run six miles at 6.0 speed. He then taught me (by showing, not telling) that wet wipes exist you can clean up after yourself with, which I would’ve figured out myself I think had I spent a little more time at the Sign of Rules. There’s an older woman who walks pretty slowly, a hardback book opened on the display. An our-ageish lady who’s there a lot will bring a magazine from time to time, but mostly we’re plugged in. Arielle listens to special playlists of workout music, I to the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson. Some tune in I’m sure to the ubiquitous horror show of Fox News or CNN or the lesser hell of sports talk. That running man didn’t bring shit with him, though, and he’d staked the single best ‘mill from which to avoid television. This is my preferred ‘mill now.

∴

Arielle tells me that one day in the stretching room there were just too many dudes. It was all dudes and her, and when one more came in she just had to get out of there. That week we’d watched the Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which the gang of mean teens get hypnotized by hyenas and eat their principal, and she said it just felt like hyenas gathering around her. She said too that one time in the sauna these two Americans (my adjective) were giggling confessionally about beans and farting. In the sauna!

∴

I go a lot. I go enough that I develop little pockets of short patience and uncharitable thought. So many people spend so much time doing basically nothing! They idle around complex machines! They stand, idling! They stretch and stretch and move without conviction from one thing to the next! They wander in a desultory fashion! For this you pay $40 a month?

∴

One man you would think works there, so often is he around, carousing with the real employees, but never seeming to exercise. We talk about him, A. and I, at night. I imitate his strange gait–left side less mobile or fluid than right. I’ve seen him so much, seen him just slowly walking so much that on the first try my imitation is fairly spot-on. It’s not uncanny, like the recent Kermit the Frog singing “Just one more sleep til Christmas” I unleashed from the passenger’s seat with Arielle driving, but pretty damn good. The next day I see him among the weights. He’s doing a little supervised thing with a trainer involving just his right or left side. Later, upon my treadmill, I mark that he makes a slow but complete circuit around the interior of the gym, stopping to chat up the employees at the front, before returning to the weights. In a flash it occurs to me that he could be rehabbing something. He was in a traffic accident or got knifed or used to be fat and suffer strokes. I feel bad. If that: Good on you, brother. Keep it up. You’re an inspiration to us all. But if not that: Fuck you, weirdo! Get a life!

Takeaways from the 2016 election for our leaders of tomorrow

Posted on November 9, 2016

It’s OK to insult everyone, lie 90% of the time, have no serious ideas, show an utter disregard for our institutions, and scorn the idea of preparing for stuff. Conservative voters are cool with all that.

It’s OK to make shit up about why you can’t release your tax returns. Conservative voters will buy it. And even a lot of them who know you’re lying will find a way to ignore it.

It’s OK to change just about every position you’ve ever publicly held in order to pander to evangelicals. Had a couple of front-page divorces and affairs? Can’t pronounce “II” correctly? On the record saying that women will let you grab them by the pussy if you’re famous? No problem. Conservative voters will let you off the hook.

Ascribe climate change to a Chinese hoax. Why not? Conservative voters don’t care about climate change anyway.

Don’t start small and work your way up in public service. Much preferable to the conservative voter is a background in casino bankruptcy and reality television. Because guess what? Running for office is easy! All you have to do is tell conservative voters that you’ll single-handedly resurrect entire irretrievable industries. They love that stuff. Also: see if you can wipe your ass with our founding documents while threatening to institute religious tests for refugees. Conservative voters will cheer you.

Go ahead and get endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan while you’re at it.

And remember: a campaign is not about ideas; it’s an opportunity to throw a temper tantrum. Conservative voters love a good temper tantrum.

To future Senate leaders and congresspeople: It’s OK to piss on the constitution for transparent political gain. It might work! And, either way, conservative voters don’t mind.

Also, whenever you have a sense of who you might run against four years down the road, it’s advisable to finance non-stop character assassination and witch hunts against that person with taxpayer dollars. Conservative voters won’t hold it against you.

Too, you should do everything in your power to make sure that the government basically doesn’t work. Don’t pass laws. Don’t confirm appointees. Hell, shut it down! Then run against it for being dysfunctional! Conservative voters eat that stuff up.

And if you ever think about becoming director of the FBI, it’s fine if you want to mess around a little bit with elections. Again: it might work! Anything for a W, right?

Calling People Stupid

Posted on July 8, 2016

In a recent New York Times editorial, a creative writing professor who drove five hours to attend the Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, hypothesized that the Trump phenomenon is fueled by the collective desire of his fans for their own safe space.

(Leave it to an academic to link arguably the 21st century’s most and least progressive social movements: on one side, the paper-skinned, trigger-warned darlings of the institutional left, carving out free-speech-free zones on the quad and screaming down their liberal centrist elders, and on the other the yahoos hawking TRUMP THAT BITCH-branded merchandise to each other in the rustiest patches of the Rust Belt. But isn’t this precisely the sort of intellectual exercise Trump dismisses?)

His point was that the movement might actually have very little to do with the man himself. In Greensboro, he heard unchallenged vulgarities hurled at all the demographics you’d expect, witnessed people proudly unfurling their resentments, and saw sizable chunks of the audience tire of the ranting figure at the pulpit and leave in the middle. He scarcely heard the candidate’s name at all. In this light, the Trump show is primarily an excuse for adults to behave poorly in public. Looking at it like that doesn’t much tax the imagination.

With his tweeted outbursts (“Bad!” “Sad!”), surreal denunciations, lies of breathtaking audacity and sulking refusal to talk to mean girls, the Trump show has been less a campaign than a massively public temper tantrum. And it is easily the most colossally embarrassing thing that’s happened to America in my lifetime. I mean, it wins that race running away, and I paid attention to the Swift Boating of John Kerry and the Bush re-election. I paid attention for the Monicagate merry-go-round of hypocrisy, when the House Republicans, in a farcical round, couldn’t find a leader free of the taint of adultery, until finally settling on a “safe choice” who just happened to be a child-abuser and future embezzler. It’s so embarrassing that it’s more embarrassing than David Cameron’s recent oopsy you may have heard about.

I’m a native Texan and I watched Rick Perry run for president. My adopted state just passed HB2. Sarah Palin is. But the only thing I can ever conceive of being more embarrassing than Candidate Trump is President-Elect Trump.

We’re experiencing a moment in which America is essentially river dancing across the world stage while shitting itself.

One is never far removed from the aggrieved right when one is from Texas. Some of the earliest and most influential adults in my life were three Texan brothers, owners of an Austin coffee shop chain, who employed me for three-plus years from the age of fifteen. Two of them were political, one—Scott—extremely so, and it was a rare shift that didn’t entail being forced to listen to a cynical diatribe directed at the Clintons, at the loony left, at hippy environmentalists driving foul old cars.

Remember when the president was touring an African nation, all but engulfed in a human sea of outstretched arms, and someone fell and was getting trampled, and he, florid-faced and yelling, tried to disentangle the masses? Scott misinterpreted his reaction as one of racist panic and took unconcealed delight in the spectacle of the world’s most prominent democrat unhinged by terror at the presence and nearness of so many blacks. I was positive that it was deliberate, this misinterpretation, and I felt nauseous with hatred. The president was trying to save someone’s life—a black person’s life, as a matter of fact—and this asshole, through some horrible mean smallness of the heart, was alchemizing it into proof for all his horrible mean smallness.

In my Southern Baptist education I was taught that it’s an unforgivable sin to attribute God’s work to the devil.

(Though that’s evidence of smallness in me, too, that snarky sentence right there. An atheist dem browbeating a religious conservative with scripture is an act of cruelty for its own sake. It’s a way of saying, I’m so much better than you that look, I can whip you on your own terms—terms I don’t even pretend to accept. I’m stereotyping, to boot: Scott was no Christian.)

It’s a paradox that the governing philosophy founded on an aspirational ethos (that traditional structures be not atrophied and individual agency not stunted by the hand of government) is the one today most inclined to see the worst in people. For years Republicans have won the votes of people they’ve thrown under the bus by framing scapegoats for the violence. The welfare queens threw you under the bus. The inner city threw you under the bus. The Mexican rapists who took your jobs threw you under the bus. The non-believers, the worthless college students and the liberal media threw you under the bus. (Yes, somehow it is the fault of the liberal media.) Also the gays did it. Big government did it. “Activist” judges did it. The national debt that we’ve so diligently watered when it was our turn to hold the can (but never mind that) did it. The bleeding-heart-soft-on-crime democrats did it. Darwin did it. Actual science did it. And now, while you’re not paying attention, we’re going to slash food stamps while repealing the estate tax, so that Sam Walton’s great-great-great-great-great grandson never has to work a day in his life. Vote Republican!

Finally it’s Trump—Trump, the tasteless outsider, Trump, the reader of the National Enquirer—who has the grapes to call the kettle black: It’s our leaders, folks. They’re stupid.

Now we’ve come to the part of the blogpost where I once again reference an early Louis C.K. bit:

There’s an early Louis C.K. bit about how stupid is the one thing you can’t get away with. People respect the crazy man and shower praise on the disabled, but if you’re stupid, people hate you: “What are you, stupid? Shut up, you stupid shit!”

There has always been this sneering element among the luminaries of the far right—particularly of the AM radio set, which has none-too-gradually infiltrated the ecosystems of the heretofore not batshit insane. Though generally an exemplar of the field, Rush Limbaugh’s aborted foray into SportsCenter was not representative: Sean Hannity made the transition from the low bandwidth to the big screen; Glenn Beck’s blessing is courted by mainstream Republicans; and the guy who invites guests to come and be yelled at to shut up in front of a national audience, Bill O’Reilly, adopted his entire persona from the spectrum. The sneer is, to me anyway, as emblematic of the right as the frothy latte is of the left. It denotes a way of being in the world that is adversarial, dominating, incurious and intolerant. In a word: illiberal. In Trump, the sneer has reached its apotheosis.

Remember that Ainsley Hayes episode of West Wing where she takes Josh to task for not liking the people who oppose him on gun control? It isn’t that he doesn’t like the guns, is her point: it’s that he doesn’t like the people. And since we’re all Americans here and all in this together, we need to at least, and always, like each other.

Maybe this is what Obama was thinking of when he referred to the show as a “liberal fantasy.”

I want to like the people on the other side, but I often don’t think this is possible. Besides the litany of policy conflicts, there are vast, yawning aesthetic differences to overcome. I just don’t feel like mustering the energy to try and bridge gaps with someone wearing a pin that says KFC HILLARY SPECIAL: 2 FAT THIGHS, 2 SMALL BREASTS, LEFT WING. (Yes, that exists. I’m sorry.)

We should at least like some of the same things, though. We should at least appreciate, in common, a few of the tenets that make us Americans. For instance: religious freedom. For instance: the right to due process. For instance: a tradition of transparency in electoral politics. For instance: a respect for those who’ve served their country. For instance: the importance of a free and watchdog press.

But the people who gather in the toxic safe space around the Donald to vent their spleens against everyone guilty of throwing them under the bus don’t care about those things. Not really. Not with their feet. When they cheer their candidate’s proposal to impose religious tests on immigrants, when they embrace his enthusiasm for torture and his disdain for the Miranda rights, when they forgive the Braggart of Braggarts’ hilarious refusal to release his tax returns, when they permit him to castigate prisoners of war for having been dumb enough to get caught, and when they remain indifferent as he punishes each institution that has the temerity to truthfully report his actions, they as much as sing out their contempt for American values.

If they’re citizens of anything, it’s television.

The thing about stupidity is that it’s irreversible. Ignorance you can stamp out. This is one of the things my office-neighbor, Mr Mashburn, is always reminding me of. “On your way to stamp out ignorance?” he’ll ask me when I’m going to class. “You know it,” I’ll say. And in class, day after day, quarter after quarter, waves of ignorance break against the bulwark of education. Mr Mashburn’s been doing it for a whole career. He’s about to retire. In fact, he might have just attended his final graduation ceremony. It was an odd one.

The honor guard came out with the flag and their rifles and their funny cadence, and right after we sang “America the Beautiful” they departed in their funny, halting way. Said Mashburn in his sonorous southern barritone, sotto voce on the stage, “That might be a bit premature.” Which was accurate, because next we were lead in the Pledge of Allegiance: a whole auditorium of people with their hands on their hearts, staring at the faculty with their hands on their hearts, pledging allegiance to a flag that wasn’t there—or, pledging allegiance to each other.

When you call someone stupid, you dehumanize them. You say: there’s no rescuing you, you aren’t even worth the effort. It isn’t a coincidence that the same campaign that says “Don’t let the back door hit you on the way out” to people threatening emigration in the event of a Trump victory has laid its foundation on calling people stupid.

They say that contempt is the one emotion a marriage can’t survive. In this analogy, the flag is the ring we all wear to signify our marriage to each other.

I want to stomp and cry and call them stupid, too. But if I did, I’d be helping to drag the flag from the room. And my concern is that, once it’s gone, we won’t get it back.

Tagged: Donald Trump, Ignorance, Right Wing Radio

Nonverbal

Posted on May 4, 2016

WNYC’s On the Media is a great show. One of the things that makes it so is its peerless audio editing. A story from one of its (since deceased) staff members spoke to this aspect: how surprised he was, upon experiencing the process, that Bob Garfield did not in fact always have precisely the word right to hand, but sometimes went searching for it, like the rest of us, behind the wandering torch of a prolonged uhhhhhhhhh; or that each of Brooke Gladstone’s interviewees did not instantly reply to her stunningly composed questions in clean, perspicacious paragraphs. Rather, as with any other magic show, work was being done! Lots of it!

We’re driving home from out of town Sunday, listening to the latest episode, and Gladstone’s interviewing a journalist about the bus that went missing in Mexico when this man says um-hmm in a perfectly natural way that nevertheless knocks me out of the narrative orbit. You don’t normally hear um-hmms in On the Media. Normally they dandruff the cutting room floor, is my guess, victims of the producers’ yen for musically uncluttered dialogue. This one, though, was crafty: it’d been threaded inexcisably between Gladstone’s words. A freight-car-hopping um-hmm. A tumor you can’t cut out. An itsy bitsy little morsel of information. But what is it, exactly: um-hmm? Is it even grammatical?

Arielle and I puzzle over this for a few miles. Clearly, um-hmm is “yes.” Suddenly there is so much to think about. The next day, waiting at the deli for sliced turkey, I scribble down a second list next to my grocery list: categories of speech that can be expressed vocally without using words. It gets more interesting after yes and no.

Let me think about that, for instance, can take many forms. The straight-up, considered hmm belongs here, of course—perhaps the Model T of the hummed nonverbal set—but so to does the aforementioned full-throated uhhhhhhhhh. I am shocked could come across in numerous ways, though the one that first occurred to me deliside was the old-fashioned rapid-intake-of-breath (hhe?). That feels good might take the prize for broadest category, comprising the oofs of sitting in chairs alongside the hummed exhalations of getting your feet rubbed and sex’s gamut of breaths and moans.

A little looking revealed the term backchannel: defined by google as “a sound or gesture made to give continuity to a conversation by a person who is listening to another.” According to my researches, the most common backchannels in American English are: yeah, uh-huh, hm, right, and OK. Clearly, the scope of my investigation is larger (a bloodcurdling scream conveys meaning but does not provide continuity to any but the weirdest conversation), but what a swell place to start. Scroll to the bottom of the page referenced above and you will find links to a slightly ticcy Englishman lecturing on “clicking and tutting”, a very brief audio-visual representation of “Huh” being a universal word, and actually pretty fascinating schematics of backchannels in recorded and diagrammed action.

One might intimate that hurts with a sharp inhale through the teeth or with a noise way back in the throat. Speaking in his final White House Correspondents’ Dinner over the weekend, President Obama joked that the media had covered Trump’s campaign with restraint and judiciousness. He commenced then with a trifecta of back-throat notes connoting moral judgement (doubled by the customarily wagging head) followed by a fourth note a full five seconds later! (This drama unfolds from time marks 22:24 – 22:30 in the above, if you’d like to see for yourself.) The fourth note is not so much a reiteration of the judgment as an avowal of baffled helplessness: a Tevya moment.

That hurts or that feels bad encompasses a vast range of nonverbal responses. We can say it with a twitch, a flinch, a look, a coloring. We can say it with a mood, or by retaliating. By pleading and crying, shaking our fist, shaking all over. We can say it by vowing revenge or retreating into silence.

When something tastes good, there’s a noise for that. It’s different from when something tastes refreshing. The former is typically another back-of-the-throat noise, while the latter is a cold, happy exhalation, ala the Busch beer commercials of old. The former might start high, dive low, go high twice more and finish low (a ditty of enjoyment that must have come from somewhere, ’cause everything did, and was it a commercial, probably? Some grandma in hair-curlers, licking a spoon clean and shaking her hips? Did I just create that image?) but the latter is always true. (My touchstone for that was refreshing is Danny Glover’s character in Silverado, integrating a saloon by having his first sip of whisky in ten days.) (Which is strange, when you think about it, because no matter your take on whisky, it is many things, but it is seldom refreshing.) (O.K., I can’t find the scene I’m talking about on youtube, but if you watched the one I linked to, trust me, after John Cleese is done straightening everything out, Glover walks over to the bar, knocks back the shot and emits this awesome, lip-smacking exhale of satiation.)

Like animals—like animals—we laugh. But we giggle, too: hummed melodious giggles, spurred by tickles and pokes (Pillsbury Doughboy, anyone?). We inflect the hmm of thoughtfulness and it becomes skepticism. Like animals—animals—we growl.

10.

I must warn you, once you start noticing backchannels, they are wonderful and distracting. Arielle and I are having some beers in our library, making recordings of these noises, incapable either of omitting backchannels or ignoring them. I tell her I learned that people wait about 700 milliseconds after hearing a low note of about 100 milliseconds to voice one. I pause fractionally and she fills the gap with an um-hmm—completely on autopilot. I discover a bias toward right in my own speech. The proffered backchannel says: I am listening to you and you’re not insane. It says that rhythm is essential to dialogue.

11.

Representations of which often leave much to be desired. I remember that one of the nasty things people would do when George W. Bush was President was reproduce verbatim his speech to emphasize its clumsiness. Of course he was a bad speaker, but a verbatim transcript of anyone’s language is invariably the written equivalent of the first HD cameras making luminous and unignorable the caked-on makeup and cratering pores of TV personalities. For the most part, it’s a miracle that any of us are ever understood. We speak in dizzied ill grammar. We’re experts at filling-in each other’s lacunae. We slosh about in a rain of fragments and change case and tense at the drop of a hat. It’s a mess. Or it isn’t. It’s an inimitable solo. Your voice is a singular instrument, and when you play it, I weave in my rights, my uh-huhs, to say I hear you, you make sense, because conversationalists duet better.

12.

You can make how about that? with an uptilted hum, like a jaunty fedora: the audible equivalent of a cocked eyebrow. You can do I don’t get it, I’m exhausted and, maybe my favorite, I didn’t mean to do that. We compared notes and decided Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine, was right when he noted that women say “Oops” and men say “Oop.” Louis C.K. nailed it, too, riffing on those moments when you say nothing at all. You enter an occupied elevator, go to press a button and realize it’s already been activated. What noise do you make? And what the hell does that mean?

13.

An occupied elevator is a weird sort of audience, isn’t it? It’s either no stage or all stage. And that stuff matters! Only the most self-centered person in the world would let fly the backchannels as a student in a classroom during a lecture, but as soon as the professor is responding to a particular question, that questioner often feels swept up by a tide of um-hmms and yeahs. A little reaction is O.K., though, at a poetry recital, and encouraged during a certain kind of church service. We’re informed by the rules of wherever we are.

14.

Masters of prose dialogue are praised for their ears, their uncanny knack for translating the spoken word into print. Elmore Leonard’s got shelves full of these accolades. So does Richard Price. An audacious actor might salt her silences with backchannels, but they’re only ever given the scantest role in books, which substitute tag lines. I remember a sequence of dialogue in Don Delillo’s Endzone: two college football players in earnest, worldly discussion in their dorm room. Delillo’s not much for the tag line—preferring to make his readers pay closer attention—but he deploys a whip-sharp “he said” after a short sentence and it stood out. At the time I’d thought he did it for the rhythm, and I still do. But now I know it was also a stand-in for um-hmm.

15.

Arielle recalls that one of her favored tactics is to isolate me in my speech: to let me go on and on in silence. She’ll stare at me, unblinking, with a slightly suspicious look, as if she is a five-year-old girl and I am a benign stranger. I will keep talking, becoming amused, feeling odd. She will deprive me of yeah, and O.K. until I am crutchless, unsupported, a guy talking-slash-dragging himself across the parched mesa of her silence. It’s funny because it’s true.

Tagged: backchannels, Louis C.K., nonverbal communication, On the Media

A Case for HRC

Posted on March 21, 2016

Hillary Clinton is not typecast for the role. Her figure doesn’t suggest power. Her voice belongs in the overlit, underairconditioned rooms of county party headquarters, not rising across a stadium of the devout, rinsing away their hopelessness. You can see her leading a shaggy, too-old group of volunteers in the Pledge. It is harder to imagine her establishing doctrines that radiate out across the globe from 1600 Pennsylvania, a commander of fleets and astronauts.

She’s got all her husband’s political baggage and none of his political skill, remarked a poster to an internet forum.

The Senate conservative’s favorite Democrat, said Senate conservatives, according to an article in Harper’s.

Neither a progressive, nor a liberal, until Bernie decided to run, wrote John MacArthur, that magazine’s publisher.

So what’s a gun-allergic, bible-abjuring, tax-amiable lefty like myself thinking? Why am I not feeling the Bern?

OK, one reason is because, the nearer we come to the end of his historic presidency, the more I like Barry, and she’s the most like him of anyone running.

He’s by no means been the black Messiah progressives hoped for, but let’s be honest: the root of that disappointment should rightly be assigned to progressives them(our)selves, who in 2008 succumbed en masse to a fever dream, googly-eyed with romance, heedless to the clues (they weren’t concealed) that Obama fancied himself an intellectually honest pragmatist first, a liberal partisan not at all. (This should have been obvious even from his national coming-out party: the “audacity of hope” speech at Kerry’s convention.)

(It’s a sad shitty tragic thing that his administration had to exist in the same swamp with Mitch McConnell and his yahoo caucus; think of what could’ve been accomplished over the last eight years for our country [and our world] had the Republican Party not been…itself. Anyway, the new insanity is upon us, and it’s worse and different than it’s been in our lifetime. The inevitable eruption of the GOP is making Mister President look better every day.)

“I miss Barack Obama,” wrote conservative columnist David Brooks a little while ago, suffering a bit of nostalgia-for-the-present (saudade [sow-DAH-chey], is how I just learned the Portugese refer to this condition).

He has such a knack for taking the heat out of things, a SXSW attendee said of the President, who’d addressed a group there about justice and iPhones.

The only grown-up in the room–that’s how they’ll write it up in history.

I’m not sure it’s possible that he could’ve done more to bridge the gulf between his administration and its opposition, but it does seem that he exhausted his tool bag fairly quickly. In the theatre, actors playing characters who are trying to get something from someone else are exhorted to change their tactics: if reason isn’t working, try flattery. If flattery doesn’t do the trick, try sweet. Try hot. Whatever it takes. But the dynamic between the Prez and his opponents (Obama: Be reasonable. Congressional Republicans: Won’t!) has been remarkably consistent from the beginning. Say that’s his greatest political shortcoming: a lack of creativity in terms of combating the cynical intransigence of his self-proclaimed enemies. This is not I think a problem he shares with Hillary.

I’d rather be caught trying, the Secretary of State told her staff.

That was in the lead-up to the Libyan intervention, which, OK, not the best example, but the point remains: she’s an inveterate tryer. She believes in it. She is, in this way, nearly the photo-negative of the fraying Republican monolith that works (well…) in the Capitol Building. Where our current president is a thoughtful and finicky cat, repelled by squalor, Hillary is (oh dear) a hound at peace with muddy scrums if muddy scrums are called for.

I like that she isn’t an ideologue. I like most everything Bernie has to say and I think, unfortunately, that he’s right: the only way he can deliver on his promises is if he surfs in on a tremendous and revolutionary wave. Very recent history shows us that waves of such a scale are not unheard of (Obama ’08), it’s their tendency to dissipate upon impact that’s terminal.

(He tried to tell us that, too–Obama did–first in his acceptance speech when he originally won the party’s nomination [It’s about you, he said] and again in his second inaugural [when he answered the right’s ceaseless anti-government bromides with a long overdue paean to citizenship].)

No. The campaign to move the dial left needs to be wider and deeper than what Bernie can offer. It needs to happen in every state at the grassroots level, gradually (imagine the America that went frothing mad over the Affordable Care Act reacting to President Sanders’s first hundred days to-do list); it needs to be organized around quantifiable goals (overturning right-to-work laws, for instance; reversing the [very recent] legal notion that the 2nd amendment grants an individual’s absolute right to own firearms); and it needs to be financed beyond the lifespan of one charismatic curmudgeon’s Quixotic run for office. Bernie is a great conversation starter (he’s certainly preferable to the one the Republican underbelly belched up), but he’s not the guy to bring it home. No one person is.

HRC may not be up to the task of putting out the fire in Washington, but she might over time do quite a bit to curtail its spread. A president who doesn’t come into office saddled with grandiose hopes, who is more concerned with substance than with optics, who’d rather be caught trying, might be the best thing we can expect right now. A president who began her political career with a listening tour, for crying out loud, sounds awfully refreshing.

I keep thinking about Elder Bush: a pragmatic technocrat intolerant of partisan silliness who looks better and better all the time. He didn’t have “the vision thing” in a moment when “the vision thing” was ascendant. (He also didn’t have much of the personality thing.) But that crap can be misleading. To use a metaphor he would appreciate, lots of baseball players get promoted on the basis of an individual tool (usually power) even while, on the daily, they vastly underperform their less glamorous colleagues. When Elder Bush assumed the Oval, its previous occupant had been an undisputed master of vision–someone capable, when he wasn’t napping, of hitting immense rhetorical home runs. He got drummed out by a personality equally as large. And that’s pretty much where we’ve been stuck for a long time. (Although it might be worth noting that the current president described his foreign policy as a singles hitter.)

This is weak tea so far as political endorsements go, I know, but we would do well to temper our enthusiasm when it comes to our leaders. The yen for a single fixer who can come in and solve all our problems is childish, and it opens the door to the Trumps of the world. Plus, it’s undemocratic.

Of course, that yen is encouraged by those who would lead us. Which is another reason I like Hillary. She isn’t selling herself like that. She’s selling herself as a team player…someone who will lay down a sacrifice bunt, steal a bag, go the other way to advance the runner. (It’s Spring, so I’m kind of basebally right now.) Perhaps what the country could benefit from the most at present is someone who takes the job more seriously than she takes herself. Looking at the field of available candidates, there’s no question to me who that is.

She fights, she loses sometimes, she comes back, she wins. She tries, she adapts, she tries again, she keeps her eye on the ball. She knows she won’t please everyone, she knows she’s not a natural politico, she knows it isn’t going to be easy.

Could we maybe give that a try?

Loon Lake: A Meditation on Death and Tom Clancy

Posted on July 22, 2015

Well, now E.L. Doctorow is dead.

There’s a lot I don’t know about Doctorow. For instance, I am only just today, now that he’s dead, learning that he was, politically, a great lefty.

My dad gave me a book of his years ago called Loon Lake. I read some but not all of this book before putting it down. I’ve moved it approximately one million times. Early on it’d be taken from a bookshelf that was being moved too, filed with its colleagues into a cardboard box, lugged, then slipped back in among its colleagues onto the same bookshelf, now in some unfamiliar room. Eventually the bookshelves were replaced; the book kept moving.

In grad school I was struck when a professor referred to a book as a “technology”. It’s really an incredible piece of technology when you think about it, she said. We clashed a lot, this professor and I, although I ended up having nothing but affection for her. Affection can creep up on you like that, co-opting what’s mean in you.

But it’s true: they really are amazing pieces of technology. A book is a middle finger to Impermanence. Loon Lake had lives in the minds of probably hundreds of thousands of people, and even though its author is dead it will continue to. The ship doesn’t sink with the captain.

I don’t really have what you’d call a relationship with Loon Lake. I remember that there’s passengers on a train all heading in the same direction for different reasons, and that my dad had highlighted a monologue in which a grown-up was advising a youngster on the importance of determining what level of moral compromise he’d be willing to accept in life, and staying there, and not exceeding that level. I think.

This embarrasses me a little, even though it probably shouldn’t, but my first favorite author was Tom Clancy. I borrowed a copy of Patriot Games from my mom and read it when I was probably 12 or 13. Clancy didn’t used to be such a hack; there were very thoughtful explorations in that book, which had a lot to do with the Irish Republican Army, about terrorism. A lot of these passages were underlined in the book–passages concerning when it could be arguably permissable for a person to act if the state wouldn’t or couldn’t—and I remember being genuinely afraid that my sweet Baptist mother was hatching a terroristic scheme. Because you’re stupid when you’re a kid!

Then I realized the book originally belonged to her friend Beverly, and I felt a tremendous relief, because obviously Beverly was the terrorist, and my mom was safe.

I did the flashlight-under-the-blanket-thing with Larry Bond’s Cauldron, a global military techno thriller about a war in South Africa. I was way into tanks and shit, bombers. I had my own favorite Air Force jet. It wasn’t even an especially fast or powerful one—I just thought it looked cool. I watched a History Channel show narrated by George C. Scott (of course) called “Brute Force” and got really excited by the prospect of cruise missiles that delivered a payload of multiple independently-targeted heat-seeking bombs. I wrote long imitative fictions about the U.S. going to the brink of war with North Korea. I remember having a Secretary of Defense tell the President the line “You can’t spell nuclear without unclear” and thinking I was a chubby genius.

These young versions of you are ineradicable. I cannot erase the chubby genius with a hard-on for Jane’s Defence Weekly. Even in a Faulkner seminar in college, even unthreading The Sound and the Fury around a whisky-wet table with hot, smart friends, all of whom have lit cigarettes and divergent opinions, he haunts me. You’re more Benjy than Quentin, he says. You’d rather be reading 1960s baseball fiction—admit it. But why should I resent him? Why shouldn’t I just be grateful for having had a gateway passion and be done with it?

Because good lefties should start off reading Tolkien? I don’t know. Because I feel like a fake. Because now the chubby genius wants to be seen reading Pynchon. Because during one my blacker moods as an undergraduate it seemed that the study of literature trained readers how to appreciate what they didn’t love and dismiss what they did. Because if Loon Lake had been more like The Cardinal of the Kremlin and less like Loon Lake I probably finish it.

More and more these days I bump into the necessity of forgiving myself for being who I am. What a pain in the ass it is, always running yourself down and then picking yourself up. “You are a piece of shit, Walsh.” “Hey, go easy on him! He’s only human!” “Why didn’t you finish that fucking book?” “Calm down! Can’t you see he’s trying to sleep?”

It’s like you have to flog that flimsy genrelove out of you with Seriousness. Why can’t I can’t get affection to co-opt all that meanness?

Mostly what gnaws at me is the suspicion that my slavish commitment to Sloth is undermining my talent, consigning me to historical irrelevance and ruining Arielle’s life.

Speaking of ostentatious Pynchonianism: it is well known among The Bucktooth’d One’s fans that he writes with a Post-It note affixed to his monitor reading ESCHEW SLOTH. “And Sloth,” he wrote in an essay on the subject for the NYT, “being continual evasion, just kept piling up like a budget deficit, while the dimensions of the inevitable payback grew ever less merciful.”

I’ve been writing the same novel now for oh about three years. It’s great and I love it and when I can’t sleep at night I think about what’s happening in it, what’s happened in it, and what’s going to happen in it. It’s about 120- or 130-pages long, which is really bupkus for three years’ work. You have to put some pretty serious effort into just absolutely farting around in order to duck 300 pages after 1000 days.

I have a relationship with this inactivity. It evolves. Sometimes it’s the bane of my existence and other times it’s actually admirable, like in a tranquil, Zen sort of way. Finishing things is overrated, I think. It really is about the journey. Oh, but, by the way, you’re going to be 40 in the blink of an eye, so maybe you better get scrivening there, pal.

Melville knew. What were those 400 pages in the middle of Moby Dick but a prolonged deferral of narrative obligation? “Dear Reader,” he might as well have written after approximately the fiftieth page, “thank you very much for buying my book. I know I’ve set up quite the gripping tale here, what with the maniac captain’s relentless pursuit of the demonic beast and all, but the thing is, I’m really just flat terrified of finishing this mother, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to spend around 400 pages on the subject of whales in general. Then at the end I’ll sink the ship and we can all just get on with our fucking lives. Deal? Deal.”

My sister told me once about how Zadie Smith confessed to spending loads of time on the first halves of her books before rushing through to the end, and she said this explained Zadie Smith books for her.

The chunk of my book that’s written has been polished to an extraordinary gleam. I stroll through it regularly, rubbing sentences, holding paragraphs up to the light. The other half swims mostly intact and alive but unfished in my imagination. At night I visit it in its aquarium, admiring its beauty, doing next to nothing to dredge it out splattering and sputtering onto the page. What isn’t written yet is perfect. Then you have to go and pin it down: a naturalist killing a butterfly. But I digress.

Friend of mine had a t-shirt in Junior High: “Top 10 Reasons to Procrastinate: #1:”

Well, anyway. This has been a delightful couple hours at the office. You cannot see in here all the breaks, the living ellipses: the twenty minutes reading Nearer My Couch to Thee; the episodic sessions surfing Astros chat forums; the occasional outbreaks of honest work done. This meditation is lousy with punched holes. It is interlarded with air. Like the soul, writes T.P. in Mason & Dixon, bread is mostly air.

Maybe that’s just another example of That Which is Below resembling That Which is Above: looking at me, the stranger cannot see the chubby genius thrillingly turning the pages of military potboilers; or the son putting down the book his father gave him to read and letting the memory of it vanish into the fog bank; or the thirtysomething donning a nightly mental hair shirt. We are each an index of what we can’t forget, and each alone in the remembering.

This year, as soon as I’ve finished THE THOMAS PYNCHON BOOK I’M CURRENTLY READING, I’ll pick up Loon Lake.

Thanks, mom, Thanks, dad. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, E.L.

—D.W.

The disordered room

Posted on April 8, 2015

I woke up this morning thinking about a poem one of Arielle’s friends read at our wedding: a Mary Oliver poem, “#13”, the last one in her excellent collection, West Wind. After a concise introduction (It is midnight, or almost), a long breath of wind rushes into the poet’s room, touching everything, upheaving her manuscripts, entering even the pockets of the clothes hanging in her closet and wobbling the lampshade before getting inhaled back toward the ocean and a sky rife with stars. The wind’s winding, almost punctuationless sentence concludes by placing the poet on the scene, sitting at her desk, smiling: I pick up a pencil, I put it down, I pick it up again. / I am thinking of you. / I am always thinking of you.

Originally I thought the wind was a metaphor for love: the singular disordering ungrammatical event of love. In its reckless, breathless sweep the alphabet is lost. Then, quickly, after frisking every interior surface of its object, it goes out the way it came in.

We were English majors! We were drunkards! Drunk with poetry, drunk with love, and quite often drunk with whisky. We were smart enough to get the most out of not knowing how to handle this new, ferocious, hilarious way of life. Our wedding program began with the epigram Robert Hass wrote for his 1979 collection, Praise:

We asked the captain what course

of action he proposed to take toward

a beast so large, terrifying, and

unpredictable. He hesitated to

answer, and then said judiciously:

“I think I shall praise it.”

Our previous lives were smashed by the Interloper. No sense resisting it. A moment ago our futures had contained infinite possibilities, now they just contained each other, and that was that. Only a fool would try and squash capital l Love down to something manageable. That’s why the poet smiling in her wind-tumbled room makes sense: she knows that this particular tyrannical visitor is to be welcomed—greedily. (Earlier, in probably the book’s most famous poem, “#2”, she instructs a young reader: There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied.)

This morning, though, yet a little flighty with dream logic, I thought: it’s not Love, it’s Time, Love’s interloping cousin.

Time, which, though always happening, tends only to occur to us in gusts. Time, which, in its ceaseless pouring, shuffles the indices of our minds, crawls through our bookshelves, intermixes our chapters. Time, which, while invisible, adjusts the light we see ourselves in.

In one thought I thought: Isn’t it funny: am I only now, seven years later, thinking about this? and No, no—I’ve always thought this, haven’t I?

I have been preoccupied lately with the idea of “the past”. In a recent very vivid and internally logical dream I assembled a minor philosophy of life revolving around the concept of memory: it is chiefly what separates us from our cats, say, who can be livid with you one second and five minutes later purring and supplicant. Memory of the past is what makes us smarter than we were in the past. By definition, we improve at life every day because we have a greater reservoir of past to draw on. There’s an inverse relationship between the length of our future and its immediate quality.

Then I’ve been thinking: actually the past is stupid, as in intransigent, like a mule. It’s stupid because you can’t do anything about it. It just fucking sits there being what it is. It doesn’t even have respect for you enough to cackle or taunt or sneer. You’re irrelevant to the past, yea tho’ thou plow and sow It, tho’ It be meat and milk to thee.

But, truth is, the past’s a malleable, liquidy thing, perforated with lacunae. We’ve each of us got darkened wings in our libraries, entire card catalogues locked and keyless.

I was recently reminded of an incident in grade school: a food fight that led to my and a classmate’s week-long internment in separate little rooms: In School Suspension. Was this before or after she and I shared our first French kiss? Don’t know. Don’t remember. I’m not even sure I honestly remember the food fight, or the ISS. I may have populated the recounting with a troupe of old feelings trained in the School of Trouble and convinced myself I remembered. Like moths feel made of other moths, memories sometimes are Lego constructions of other memories.

Could it be this was the first time I was in serious trouble? Could be, sure. Maybe someone else has access to this particular cache. I do not.

We are just flat stuck in these rooms. It’s always nearly midnight in them, and the moment you find time to sit and write something sensical, great big snapping bolts of time come in and blow everything around. Did you always feel this way, or is it just occurring to you now? Can you even tell the difference?

It’s helpful to have big ass epic moments standing out back there amid all the fog to, if nothing else, show how far you’ve come.

At our ceremony, Julia’s voice caught somewhere between the poem’s last two sentences. You don’t realize how much heavy “#13” is packing until the end. Mary Oliver is a tall woman, but she hides behind that wind and then socks your nose in the last stanza.

Her voice caught, which of course meant both Arielle and I got misty, locked eyes.

The wind, time, whatever, it was just distraction; just some noise while I thought about you. Not even the sifting ocean of the past can bury that.

—D.W.

And now, reproduced for you, in its entirety and without permission, the poem:

West Wind #13

It is midnight, or almost.

Out in the world the wind stretches

bundles back into itself like a hundred

bolts of lace then stretches again

flows itself over the windowsill and into the room

it scatters the papers from the desk

it is in love with disorganization

now the manuscript is on the floor, and reshuffled

now the chapters have married each other

now the alphabet is lost

now the white curtains are tossing wing on wing

now the body of the wind snaps

it sniffs the closet it touches into the pockets of the coats

it touches the shells upon the shelves

it touches the tops of the books

it slides along the walls

now the light lamp wavers

as the body of the wind swings over the light

outside a million stars are burning

now the ocean calls to the wind

now the wind, like water slips under the sash

into the yard the garden the long black sky

in my room after such disturbance I sit, smiling.

I pick up a pencil, I put it down, I pick it up again.

I am thinking of you.

I am always thinking of you.

—Mary Oliver

Tagged: Mary Oliver, the Past, Wedding

“It is all right to hold a conversation, but you should let go of it now and then.”

Posted on March 4, 2015

Couple years ago I was washing the dishes and listening to All Things Considered when I made a minor discovery about growing up. It was triggered, this discovery, by the transition music between stories. Some anonymous NPR sound tech had excerpted an instrumental passage from an M.C. 900 Foot Jesus song, of all things. If you’ve never heard of M.C. 900 Foot Jesus, you’re not alone. That boat you’re in contains nearly the entire human race. All I can tell you about him is that for a minute in the nineties he was probably America’s most famous white Texan rapper. (In a similar vein, I believe I am the most famous Devin Abraham Sorrell Walsh born on April 17th, 1980, ever.) Around the same time, I’d heard P.J. Harvey sampled on Marketplace. My peeps were growing up.

The kids I played four-square with were employed in public radio now, smuggling their culture into the larger American conversation vis a vis transition music. Siegel finishes talking and, boom: it’s 1997 again. It seemed possible that soon enough the whole country would sound different: just as our parents grew up in a world that sounded like Perry Como, Johnny Mathis and Bing Crosby and engineered it into one that sounded like the Beatles, the Supremes and Led Zeppelin, we would grow up in a country that sounded like the Beatles, the Supremes and Led Zeppelin and engineer it into one that sounded like Outkast, Radiohead and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.*

I remember getting pretty cheesed when it was reported that W.’s speechwriters coded allusions into his formal statements only the devout among his listeners could identify as biblical; the rest of us just whistling obliviously on as the chief executive secured camouflaged grappling hooks to the wall between church and state. (Actually not obliviously whistling, just pissed about something else.) But there’s something cool about it, too: a sneaky, sophisticated method of communicating different things to different audiences though reading from just one script; a way to say shibboleth without the enemy even hearing.

Anyway, that’s what the M.C. 900 Foot Jesus person was doing, too. Even though I was wrist-deep in suds in an Asheville kitchen, and he or she was punching buttons in a radio control booth in D.C., we were in communication. The tech was saying: Our turn.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because, even though musically the U.S. is still pretty firmly under the Boomer moon, the conversation I’m hearing more and more on the news and in social media does in fact seem to revolve around issues of emotional and intellectual development germane to the 30-something. People be talking about how they finally don’t care what other people think of them. People be talking about learning to be different without judgment, to respect difference, listen, stand up for themselves, admit their shortcomings, stop lying.

Meanwhile, the news is dripping with vaccines and saddled with college debt—issues my parents must be relieved they don’t need to worry about too much.

But this is always happening. In another thirty years the national dialogue I’m taking part in will resemble what my folks’ sounds like now (albeit with more flooding and less retirement security). People in their early 20s will be scheming their future greatness while preoccupied with sex. Middle schoolers will have their own Beavis & Butthead to mimic into exhaustion. Kids will rove into their back yards with whatever species of superhero action figure you have to have, and will pour their liquid minds into the console game they’ll ironically-unironically claim still to love a couple decades later. The conversations stay the same, the proper nouns change, the speakers cycle through.

The illusion is reinforced by the fact that I’m just not Facebook friends with many 60-year-olds or 8th graders.

I’m more capable of having better, more substantive conversations than I used to be. This stems in large part from figuring out how to better suppress my ego—that obnoxious little lunatic that lives between my belly and my crotch. If you come at a conversation from a position of wanting to inquire, rather than wanting to teach or show-off; if you’re uncowed by the prospect of being judged; if you insist on taking everyone seriously and you demand candor from yourself—all operations the little lunatic quakes against—you improve the quality of your conversation.

Arielle and I recently had lunch with a former real estate client who is suffering from a pretty bad break-up. Conversation-wise, heartbreak’s got a lot of juice. It can get you fairly heavily divulging to near-strangers. (If I were an evil genius professional interrogator, I would inflict heartbreak on all my subjects and then get them at their lowest.) Anyway, our pal had a lot to say, and I was struck by how rare an occasion it is: to be the audience for a genuine emotional outpour. This got me thinking about conversations in general; hence the blog post, the title of which is a quotation by the deceased Ogden Nashy American poet Richard Armour. How often have you had a conversation you let go into? If you’re like me, you can count them on both hands.

I remember one at a sleepover at a friend’s house when I was probably 12, another with my best friend during high school, a bunch with young women I’ve loved, a series with a pair of buddies in my early 20s… Age tends to be a common denominator, another is that I mostly don’t recall what we discussed, only how. At the heart of each was a mutual disarmament. That Jean-Luc Picard knew his stuff: if you want to make friends, try not raising your shields. Suddenly the world is busy with dimensions you couldn’t articulate before; rich with texture you couldn’t feel before; you’re not alone—or you’re still alone, possibly even aloner, but so is your friend, so is everyone.

I’m not sure if it’s sad that I remember so few or if I should be grateful to remember so many.

My nephew and I were watching Transformers: Rescuebots over the weekend.

(This must be one of the dearest privileges of parenthood: having a supple-minded little kid you can talk to. When else—and with whom but family—do we routinely engage in candid personal cross-generational dialogue?)

We got to talking about ghosts, ’cause of the episode, and one thing led to another, and I was defining “sexy” for him and discussing holograms and time travel and he asked me: “Is the future real?”

Judging from my own experience, he won’t remember that conversation for long. But I will. I mean, are you kidding? Is the future real? That just freaking wins.

–D.W.

*Full body chills moment: the afternoon after writing this, and after spending an inordinate amount of time mulling over which bands should constitute this final triumvirate, having settled first upon and having never once budged from Outkast, what do I hear as the first segue tune on the news? The opening piano riff of “Caroline”. Raise your hand if you’re over 35 and you know what I’m talking about. Raise your hand if you’re under.

Tagged: conversation, Outkast, Perry Como

NeverNesters

lefty politics, Asheville real estate, and what to expect when you're not