May 2008 Archives

Ten minutes on May 8, 2008

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Hemingway, Farewell to Arms, 1929


I got home last night late from teaching, and read about 100 pages of a crime novel called Echo Park by Michael Connelly. I’m not entirely sure why I picked this book up, other than the fact that I am a blank reader, where blank is one of the following adjectives: compulsive, wildly eclectic, standards-free, omnivorous, impulsive. This book was sitting on the table next to my bed, where it landed when Margann finished it, and it boasts the kind of cover I usually avoid: big broad bands of color with the font of the “no funny stuff straight shooting prose” style of detective fiction and some genres of horror. The photo is actually cool/creepy: a park at night with the blue of a big halogen streetlight turning everything – picnic tables, grass, trees – into a potential crime scene. If a murder hasn’t been committed here, the photo says, just wait.

So I read about Harry (original name Hieronymous) Bosch, the apparently well known and well loved street smart tough damaged etc etc detective of the Connelly industry. And Los Angeles in this novel certainly has a canvas full of devils and devilish acts. A young woman, Marie Gesto, disappeared back in 1993 and Harry couldn’t crack the case; now apparently the killer has been caught, but all is not as it seems, and the plot careens like a car chase from hypothesis to hypothesis, mistakes to corrections to brilliant induction. We are, it seems, hard wired for stories, and we stay till the end; I enjoyed the ride, but at 2:30 in the morning, facing a busy day, I wondered whether seeing things resolved was worth the sleep deprivation hangover I risked.

From Hemingway to Chandler, we want to believe that there are some strong men out there who are competent, who have a code of ethics separate from the cynical ones of politicians, the lazy ones of the wealthy, and the corrupt ones of the criminal. We want to believe that though they make mistakes, act rashly, lose the girl, get beat up, follow dead end trails, in the end, their native intelligence and something – a drive for justice, taking injustice and violence and victimization personally – wins the day. Sort of. Often many of the bad guys get away, big fish go unpunished (unhooked?), and the general landscape looks just as it did before Harry solved the Gesto case, saved a girl from a serial killer, and uncovered the bad cop inside who was getting his friends killed.

When I read stories like these, I often think of the question I ask my students when we consider gender and literature. For this culture, for this time, for this class: what was the Good Man? What was the Bad Man? And according to what texts? In detective novels, the Good Man is very rarely a leader, very very rarely someone in government. Perhaps never. Instead, goodness must be wrung from unpromising situations, must be fed internally in the face of thousands of forces and pressures to do the wrong thing, the easy thing, the thing that, multiplied, leads to the overall evil of the culture.

One nice touch to this novel, and to a raft of contemporary texts (The Sopranos, for example) is the addition of the female therapist or psychologist who elicits the character’s inner doubts and confusions and narratives, and who provides a kind of literary analysis of this kind of masculinity. In Echo Park, the ex girl friend is an FBI operative who is aware of and sympathetic to the world the main character in habits – police work, detective work, the maddening and conflicted network of political actors and groups surrounding the simple acts of catching bad guys. She profiles the suspect with Harry, helps him see motivations and where the official story seems off base, but she also profiles Harry himself (from her point of view as a potential partner/lover, and as a fellow professional, and as a woman). And Harry comes up, not as a macho jerk or a bad man, but as someone whose masculine virtues in a corrupt world make him a bad choice for a partner, husband, intimate. She gets him, and that means she doesn’t get to get him; he gets this, and that means he doesn’t get her, and he doesn’t benefit personally from ‘getting’ himself.

I finished the book and felt myself merged with Harry – I am a very Keatsian, negative capability type of reader, who tends to merge with characters and inhabit them and so feel what it is to be me being them, as it were, and them as a version of myself. Much as I feel reading the best Hemingway stories – the Nick stories, or The Sun Also Rises, or “Snows of Kilimanjaro, whose main character’s name is Harry – I sense that I am being called to a certain Ideal version of masculinity, one that has some necessary but unpleasant downsides. There is never a moment of merging with the group, any group. It is a permanent outsider feeling, where one meets occasionally members of one’s tribe, other men who Know and who have suffered the effects of acting on principles even at the expense of self interest. It is a lovely/lonely feeling, sacrifice and intelligence and honor in the best senses of those words, though as Hemingway understood, these words need to be rediscovered in the context of a banal and greedy and corrupt and unjust society.

In Hemingway’s words in Farewell to Arms:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

This is Hemingway on how the war – World War l – destroyed his generation’s ability to say the words honor and sacrifice and so on in the old public ways. These words had been used to destroy hundreds of thousands of men, many very young, very brutally. But still the desire for this kind of man to find again those things – honor, sacrifice – leads them to reinvent the words in light of their own experience. That is what Harry Bosch, and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and many of the Hemingway protagonists do. In Farewell to Arms, Catherine says to Frederic, “What you tell me about in the nights. That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.” And she is right; all the abstractions are to be distrusted, are the sources of great evil and deception in the world, unless we make them personal.

And yet part of this making personal, ironically, is deciding which narratives you will accept, put on, keep. And many of these come not from experiences but from books, films, songs.

In the other novel I just finished, When Gravity Fails, George Effinger has our late 22nd Century hero join the multitudes of people who are wired for softwares, moddies and daddies, personality modifications (moddies) and data complexes (daddies) like the instant ability to speak Turkish or fly a helicopter. (Other examples of this kind of imagined future can be found in William Gibson’s novels, especially Neuromancer and its sequels, and in The Matrix). So one of the characters, trying to solve a crime, buys software that turns him into Nero Wolfe, the famous fictional detective in Rex Stout’s long series of crime novels.  Another character daily pops in a software agent that makes him a kind of stereotypic tough guy, with the sneer, the clipped speech, the streetwise comebacks.

I didn’t have a jack in my neck. I just sat there, thinking of Effinger, and holding Echo Park in my hand, feeling the virtual reality of this model of masculinity flood over me, merging with my ‘actual’ personality. Tomorrow, I thought, I will go back to being my self, which is…who? A projection, a fictional unity, an apparent character made up certainly of experiences, social molding as a male, but also of compelling stories of the Good Man and the Bad Man, calling to me, hailing me.

In science fiction, and in daily life, technology makes the invisible visible. Effinger’s moddies are simply artefacts that show us how invisible things – internalized narratives, the traces of song lyrics, memories of photos – shape us, allow us to shape our selves, and to shape our selves differently.

Which moddie would you pop in? When? To feel which complex of emotions, abilities? Which one, which ones, are the good man, the good men? For whom?

I’m reaching behind my neck and popping out this personality module…there. And now – let’s see – which one of these makes sense for the next couple hours?

Got it. Mmmm. Ok. Here we go…

Ten minutes on May 4, 2008

bucolic
1523, from L. bucolicus, from Gk. boukolikos "rustic," from boukolos "herdsman," from bous "cow" + -kolos "tending," related to L. colere "to till (the ground), cultivate, dwell, inhabit" (the root of colony).

Yesterday – Saturday – Margann, my brother Peter, our neighbors Dirk and Mark, and a butt load of other people ran and swam and biked in the vicinity of San Antonio Lake, in the Wildflower set of triathlon races. That meant that on Friday Margann loaded up the Highlander (“there canne be oonly ONE Highlaundah!” You must say this with Sean Connery’s accent) with bikes and gear and camping stuff and off she went; I traded my little Honda hybrid for a mini-van, feeling the shift somewhat like moving from a corsair to a galleon. Then I took five kids and a goaltimate kid down to Seaside.

Friday was one of those days they talk about in Pacific Grove. After dropping kids, I had a couple hours to kill, so I went to Peter’s place a block from Lover’s Point in PG. In the, oh, ten miles? between Seaside and PG, the weather turned Arctic, gray, just the kind of weather for being John Steinbeck writing about East of Eden, particularly the tragic parts. I fell asleep to the sound of wind howling just outside my bungalow, and then drove back to Bailey’s school for a half hour game of goaltie with the kids. It was almost bitter out, but the kids barely seemed to notice, some wearing only the short sleeved white uniform shirt. In about two minutes it became clear that Bailey was the best player on the field, and all the offense ran through him. I was in no way proud of him – well ok, maybe a lot, watching him slice and dice and catch hard throws.

I thought about playing some disc golf, but the wind suggested otherwise, so I drove around Marina looking for a decent café, found one, and ate epic amounts of food and drank espresso and read George Effinger. I thus spend a lovely couple hours near the end of the 22nd Century, in the 'Budayeen', “the entertainment / criminal quarter of an unnamed Middle-Eastern city, probably somewhere in the Levant.” Everyone is wired, people pop moddies (personality modification software) and daddies (information specific software like the kind in William Gibson’s novels).

As I read, I couldn’t help noticing that the very nicely appointed café was very very new, and so still rough around the edges design- and service-wise. For example, the deli case is the size of a small submarine in the U.S. Navy, possible a nuclear one; it holds very wonderful food, but when you try to order over it, the person taking your order can’t hear you (due to the buzz of lighting and various other humming bots back there) or really see you (all were women about the same height as the case, give or take a couple inches). So each order, or attempted order, was an experiment in talking at cross purposes, paraphrases of orders gone horribly wrong, and persistent mutual frustration, all thoughtfully designed into the system.

I imagined these same people “chipped in” with moddies and daddies,chipped in to things that made them better at being deli counter people, or offered them a massively parallel reality as they did the boring work of getting other people food. I imagined them going home and chipping into different identities to match the desires of their sex partner or play out this or that fantasy or curiosity. I thought about the fluidity of happiness, and then drank more yuppie-style birch beer and chowed the rest of my tri tip. Made to perfection. Perhaps some day we’ll fool the taste buds – hell we do it all the time now, Micky D’s and all of them, they live off that section of New Jersey specializing in the industrial production of tastes. But there is something powerfully reassuring about bread this good, a sandwich this well made, fresh tomatoes and just hot enough jalapenos, secret sauce and all the rest. As the restaurant clunked along – a bottle broke in the drink case, more people came in and mimed their way into lunches – I alternated between North Africa many years into the future, praise Allah, and the out of time bucolic feeling of warmth on any cold day in history, hot food, comfort, safety.


So this leads me to bucolic. There is a whole literary history to the notion of the bucolic, to literature of the bucolic, country life. Virgil wrote The Bucolics. Here is a bit of the background from Wikipedia:

Imitating the Greek Bucolica ("on care of cattle", so named from the poetry's rustic subjects) by Theocritus, Virgil created a Roman version partly by offering a dramatic and mythic interpretation of revolutionary change at Rome in the turbulent period between roughly 44 and 38 BC. Virgil introduced political clamor largely absent from Theocritus' poems, called idylls ("little scenes" or "vignettes"), even though erotic turbulence disturbs the "idyllic" landscapes of Theocritus.

Virgil's book contains ten pieces, each called not an idyll but an eclogue ("draft" or "selection" or "reckoning"), populated by and large with herdsmen imagined conversing and making songs in largely rural settings, whether suffering or embracing revolutionary change or happy or unhappy love. Performed with great success on the Roman stage, they feature a mix of visionary politics and eroticism that made Virgil a celebrity, legendary in his own lifetime.

The pastoral, the bucolic, the idyll and its adjective form the idyllic…nature as filtered in the 3rd Century BC and after, with cows taking care of themselves, thank you very much, and shepherds taking advantage of all the down time to chase first attractive country girls, and then attractive boys. I think Wilde said “Simplicity is the last refuge of the complex,’ and I think he had Theocritus and then Virgil in mind. And the boys, I imagine.

What I want to mention here is this idea that kept popping into my head as I imagined Margann and company swimming Lake San Antonio, biking, running, surrounded by the landscape of rural California. That is: if you are paying any attention to what is happening politically, economically, around the globe, you ought to be either scandalized or horrified or both. The constant knowledge that this whole shebang of late Oil culture might collapse with horrendous results is hard to carry; even when you don’t want to be Atlas, the world as your knowledge constructs it, imagines it in the future, invariably jumps up and lands its massive ass on your shoulders, and there you are with pollutions of all kind and extinctions and global toasting and social collapse of first failed states and then the states mainly responsible for their failures…I’m telling you, it is not fun to pick your damn head out of the sand and look at what is happening, even with one eye shut.

And so we turn to things that are, in their way, a version of the bucolic. I play disc, disc golf and goaltimate, and both are played in beautiful rural type settings, the huge expanse of green grass that we call Lower East Field, the woods of De la Veaga where you wander around with your merry men like the forest of Arden in the Shakespeare play.

Or we buy wild modern technology-driven clothing and bikes and such, and push our bodies against and with the landscape, until exhaustion and exhilaration merge and produce an animal pleasure and solidity.

This is why these plays were so popular to the Romans of Virgil’s time, caught up in revolutionary political changes, as we are. We imagine the state of affairs where our work – thinking of eros, of the good life, chasing discs and bikes and each other around circuits of natural beauty – is directly related to tending, not cows, but our bodies and minds. Cultivating, not broccoli, or that alone, but patterns of being and doing in the world that become culture, living and growing culture.

I remember finding the bucolic at Stanford in 1976. I was high up in Green Library, in my grad student carrel, with books on rhetoric, Bacon, the essay as a form, the “Senecan amble” of a particular form of Latin that was taken up by the English writers several worlds after the Romans. The lead-lined window, old with triangular bits of cloudy glass, opened just enough to see the glorious day in a sliver, and let the incense of new cut grass and hot fall day in. It did not open far enough to jump out of. I thought of this as I tried to stay interested in my academic career. But gradually I simply stared out the window, and into my tiny sliver of sight a couple wandered, four floors below. Cruelly, they began to lay out a picnic: the checked tablecloth, the food, the whole wonderful cliché. Then they lay on the blanket, passing food and then kissing and rolling around slightly, in the unconscious way of undergraduates and wild animals.

I wanted to not be in this carrel. This discipline, and this disciplined, working body. I didn’t want to think of the past alone, or even the future. I wanted the present to present me with delight, I wanted all my reading and thinking to be channeled into a way of living, one that felt like enough, come what may in the rest of the wide wide world.

That sense of wanting the present to be enough, to be full, to be one in which the body (however thinking, however urban, however modern or anxious or cynical or what have you) is tended to, and finds ways to tend to the own care and feeding of this body, this mind, this spirit. Be here now; beer here now; the bucolic extends its generous arms to include both of these meanings.

It is so so easy to have the present produce anxiety, loss of focus and meaning. The future – the futures that come unbidden like hellhounds from the fear segments of the nightly news or the blandishments of scientists telling us about the snow pack, the soil, the gyre of trash and plastic in the ocean the size of Texas.

But if we are to rewrite the future, I think we need to spend some time in the bucolic. We need to know, deep in our bones and the bones of our ideas, that there are lives worth living, that beckon to us, promising not eternal joy but mortal joy.

I taught Marlowe last year, and he wrote in Elizabethan England:

Come live with me and be my Love,
    And we will all the pleasures prove

His poem is a pastoral, but what I want to notice is this word prove. It means that we can achieve Love, and embody all the pleasures – eros, but also clothing and wine and dance and all. And it means that in our love, we will prove – that is, test – all the pleasures. Which will stand this testing, the proving ground of experience?  

Margann came home flushed with happiness, thirteen minutes better than last year, having trained, raced, and then driven to the utterly bucolic A-frame of her friend Morgan, deep in the national forest between Hunter Liggett and Big Sur. They rode mountain bikes up into the wilderness off of forest roads, climbed to a huge swimming hole, gasped as the bodies hit the ice cold water. I felt the aura of it all on her; I took some of it up to East Field, where the Mexican soccer game emitted peals of laughter and groans, and our own goaltie game unfolded across a perfectly green grass field, edged with golden and brown grass, overlooking the giant bowl of Monterey Bay. All these smart people with professions and careers, or on their way to same, running in complex chaos-theory patterns, constantly testing the immediate decisions of mind and body, constantly informed as to success or failure, proving these pleasures that make life not contingent on tomorrow, but enough, enough.