Plots and Stories

Time returns me to the blog. It is there that I begin to work out ideas that have their origin in my day and that compose the substance of my dreams. 

At the end of Canto IV of Dante’s Inferno I find these lines spoken by Virgil. He is at the moment in Limbo and there sees the great spirits of the past who, born before the Christ have not been baptized and cannot therefore enter Paradise: the Trojans, the Greeks and fabled figures of early Rome; then Virgil sees the philosophers, scientists, mathematicians and doctors, and the Moorish scholar, Averroës But Virgil bemoans that he “cannot enumerate them all fully;/my long theme so drives me on that many times/my words fall short of the facts.” That is, Virgil must abandon the telling of the facts so that he can narrate his story. The story exceeds the facts. In Daniel Kehlmann’s novel, Measuring the World, Alexander von Humboldt says “a renowned traveler was only renowned if he left good stories behind.” Though Humboldt believed that by his physical measurements the “cosmos would be understood, all difficulties pertaining to man’s beginnings, such as fear, war and exploitation, would sink into the past,” but he seems to be also aware that the measurements must be a source of the story in which the measurements are embedded. Outside of a story the measurements lack meaning. Isn’t this about what Virgil complains,that there are too many facts and he must continue the story. In Kehlmann’s novel Carl Gauss avers, that “the world could be calculated after a fashion, but that was a long way from understanding it.” The measurements were the facts that required a story to mean anything. And then the measurements fade into the story.

Maybe the measurements were simply the plot. In George Gissing’s New Grub Street, the novelist Edwin Reardon suffering from a version of writer’s block and trying desperately to produce something that he can sell for publishing complains that he must now “put aside his intellectual work and begin again once more the search for a ‘plot.’” That is, he would rather have a story and not a plot, the latter an ordered narrative of events that might drive forward what will become the story. Story explores the motives and consequences of the actions narrated by the plot. Yes, Joyce’s Ulysses plots the movement of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin, but the story wonders about their character and the motives for their journeying and the thoughts and emotions that arise in their movements and charted meetings along the way. The story arises out of and includes the plot. The narrator of Orley Farm says the “I will not attempt to report the words that passed between [Lady Orme and Lady Mason] for the next half-hour, for they concerned a matter which I may not dare to handle too closely in such pages as these . . .” This narrator acknowledges that the plot might be in the words but that the story exists in the silence. And in Kehlman’s novel, Carl Gauss, when asked what science was responded “If such a man didn’t give up before he reached an understanding, that, perhaps was science.” Science was the story. I recall a statement by Neils Bohr, a physicist whose work helped develop the atomic bomb: “Science was the result of experiments and not reality.” The story arose out of the plot. 

I think I have spent a good part of my life in stories, both those that I have read and those that I have been told. I have narrated not a few stories myself; I am constantly in the process of storying my life. It is the only way I can know my life. I do act in the world throughout my days, measure it as it were, but those actions lack meaning outside of the story I can narrate about them. I sit writing since 6:30 am and paused only to go to the bathroom, but what and why I am writing, where does it all come from is the story. In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Newspaper, whose nickname is Paper, narrates the news to the community that cannot (or will not) read. But her listeners insist that she make the news be a story. Rusty, one of her listeners, says to Paper, “C’mon Paper . . . story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” Why should she do so, Paper asks, and Rusty answers, “’Cause if you tell it any other way, it’ll sound like a lie.” Unless there is a story all that would exist would be the facts, and the facts are empty and meaningless outside the context from which they were first embedded and from which they are drawn. We demand context for sense, and the narration of that context provides the story. The Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town says, “In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,” and though the play displays the facts, that is not the story that the play depicts: it is the lives that Emily comes to understand that are imperfect without the story. Emily says, “They don’t understand much, do they? . . . That’s all human beings are!—Just blind people.” To see only the facts is to miss life. Thus, we narrate, and “story it up . . . put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” The story narrates our life. The narrator of José Saramajo’s novel, Blindness, says, “All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.”  Nevertheless, we tell a story so that we might know what happened, and until we narrate the story, we don’t know what happened.

So, too, is that the idea in Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake. Patchett’s Emily narrates to her adult daughters the story of her summer affair with the television and movie star, Peter Duke, a passionate affair that had ended when Duke had taken up with the actor who had replaced Emily in the play and in life when Emily’s Achilles heel became torn. In modern parlance, Duke ghosted Emily: he stopped all communication with her. Hearing this story, Emily’s daughter, Maisie, responds with anger, but Emily says, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” She is narrating that story to her daughters. At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all felt like and even what it all might have meant. But, of course, it is only a story. In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store “somebody’s up late and talking” at the livery stable. They are telling a story. All we ever have is the story. We define ourselves by the stories we tell. We know others from the stories they tell. Fatty, in McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, had learned that the Nate Timblin he has come to known now was not the same Nate Timblin who had served time in prison. “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all: we are stories, and our storied lives are the stuff of our dreams.  

Thoreau complains in his journal that he prefers the company of wood nymphs or wood gods because the men “did not inspire me. One or another abused our ears with many words and a few thoughts which were not theirs.” Conversation here was all plot and there was no story. Perhaps we search the world not as did Demosthenes carrying a lantern in search for an honest person but as writers with their metaphorical pens looking for the story.

 

 

On Time in Time

In the essay “Walking” Thoreau writes, “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” I have been wondering how Thoreau knew that it was four hours a day or more that he had been out walking. Did Thoreau wear a watch? Was there a clock in his cabin at Walden Pond? Sometimes he walked with a friend: did he then possess something to measure the time? I ask this because increasingly and annoyingly. Too often I complain about time’s controls on me; by time’s pronouncements and imperatives that are delivered and sealed on the multiple devices that ironically I seem incapable of leaving unwound or uncharged, and that I yet carry about and that unfailingly measure my life in minutes and miles.

I realize that I have allowed myself to be controlled by my devices and the announcements it sends to me of its measures and critiques of my life activities. For example, I allow my smart phone to announce the time of day, and to even note what day and month it is; The phone can inform me how many hours and minutes I have slept, can awaken me at the hour I have set for waking, and put me to sleep when at the hour I set. I think that my smart phone can now measure the quality of my sleep, as if I wouldn’t be aware of that character myself! On the phone I can use the timer function to set time-limits to my naps and to correctly time my coffee preparations. The phone measures my daily steps and keeps a record how today’s walk compares to that of yesterday’s amble, to that of last month’s walking, and to even those of the previous year, and then it has the audacity to chastise me if I have not walked as much today as I did yesterday or last month or last year! The phone announces how many calories I have expended for the day, month and year, and offers me a measure of my physical effort, of what it refers to as my METS(?). The only METS of which I am familiar or about which I even care is the baseball team for which I was a fanatical fan until they won the World Series in 1969. The phone tells me how many minutes I have stood (60 minutes), how many minutes I have exercised (74 minutes), and offers an assessment of my cardio fitness, though I don’t know to what the latter refers! I have refused the phone access to my heart rate and blood pressure though I possess a blood pressure machine that also counts the beats of my heart. There is even more recorded and stored on the smart phone but I have reached the end of my patience, technological expertise and ciuriosity. Nonetheless, when I return from my every walk I religiously check the steps report because the goal I have been cautioned is 10,000 steps and 45 minutes a day, and rule-bound that I seem to be I attempt daily to achieve that mark. And now I possess an Apple Watch because I was tricked into thinking that it was free but really I am paying for the line, though what line is meant I am not certain though I believe I have certainly crossed it. A very kind flight attendant showed my what else my Apple Watch can do but I soon lost interest. And while I depend on the devices to govern my enjoyment and measures of time, my mentor Thoreau had looked to the rooster as his measure of time. “Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought.” Thoreau urges me to live in the present which is apparently all that concerns the cock in his crowing. I seem obsessed with Time and I seem to be focused on something quite apart from the present.

            Thoreau comments that we do not ride the railroad, but that it rides upon us. It is time to which he refers. The appearance of the railroad made an immediate awareness of and obedience to time essential. Trains ran on schedules and if you wanted to ride on one you had better be in the car when the train was leaving the station. Thus, one needed a watch or a well-wound clock. No cock crowing would serve. Factory work contributed to the tyranny of time as did punch cards that recorded the times for entry to and exits from the factory floor. I seem to be governed by my anxieties that causes time to be with me late and soon. I have consider that a mountain top retreat (but not Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain where everything is controlled by a strict time schedule) or a desert escape might be a means of releasing me from the imprisonment I feel regarding time, but I am afraid of being away from the grounding time’s offers and the distractions that all of my devices grant me. Thoreau writes, “It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.” Alas, I do not think I am such a free man. As for the rooster: “Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed.” As for me, I check the news too often. 

Walking, and before that running, has served me as lucky charms: every day that I walked or ran I believed I would not die. At 78 years old I am still walking and still alive, so I think this incantatory practice to be thus far effective. But now the walking seems to count only if I approach the step goal. I often manage to come close and even at times reach ten thousand steps and even more, but the walk is not free. I pay with some peace and some distance from time’s term. Thoreau writes, “I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for . . .” Thoreau, too, understands his walk as charm, but I observe how that his walk is also committed to time: he might achieve his freedom in a walk but it must be accomplished within a specific time. I find that I like to walk early and grow rust in the afternoons. 

There is a natural order to the measurement of time: the stages of the moon, the motion of the earth about the sun that defines a year, though the results of this movement vary according to geography. For example, New York experiences four regular seasons, but Costa Rica seems to enjoy only two: the rainy season and the non-rainy season. Minnesota in my experience has four irregular seasons: a long winter, a day of Spring, several months each of Summer and Fall. The tides are regular but it has been only since the invention of the time piece that this movement can be given a specificity in time.

I think à la Kant, that time is not something we enter or use but something we create though not in the sense as in “I can make time for that . . .” That suggests an already existing schedule into which a new activity can be made to fit. Time already exists in this formulation. To allow time to be defined outside of us restricts me to the prison world of the devices. I grow rusty and lose the present. I am always somewhere else and in another time. Simon and Garfunkel sing, “time, time, time, see what’s become of me,” Sandy Denny sings, “Who knows where the time goes?” Dylan sings, “time passes slowly up here in the mountains.” I am cautioned that “Time waits for no one!” In these thoughts time is external to me and we enter into it: time precedes me. But to ignore time is not to make it disappear as if it was something external to us. Rather, to ignore time is to live in the present: Thoreau writes of the cock’s crow: “He has not fallen astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is, is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time.” That is, to be ever in the present and therefore, unconcerned with time.

 

 

 

 

On The Shoemaker and the Elves

For reasons not immediately relevant here, I having been thinking abut the Grimm’s tale “The Shoemaker and the Elves” though I don’t recall where I first learned it. In that story a poor shoemaker laid out the leather for a pair of shoes that he intends to work on in the morning. These were his last pieces of leather and he is so poor that he will not have the means to buy any more leather to make shoes. But when he awoke the next morning and after having eaten his meagre breakfast, he moved to his worktable to begin sewing what seemed to be his final pair of shoes, but to his amazement the shoemaker found that the shoes had already been beautifully finished. He put the shoes in the window of his shop, and soon a wealthy man came into the shop, saw the newly fashioned shoes and thinking them beautiful, and offered for them more money than the shoemaker would ever have thought to charge. With the money he had received the shoemaker purchased leather for another pair of shoes. During the day he cut the leather and laid the leather pieces out on the table expecting to begin work in the morning, but when he awoke in the morning, and having eaten his meagre breakfast prepared by his wife, he moved quickly to his worktable only to again discover a pair of shoes beautifully made. He again placed the shoes in the window and another wealthy man saw them in the window and was so enamored of the pair that, he offered far more money for than them. than the shoemaker would normally have charged for them.

The shoemaker’s reputation grew. Each night he would cut the leather out at night and then retire to bed, and early the next morning when he was about to set to work he found that the shoes had been already made. For a number of nights this continued: the shoemaker would cut the leather for the sewing in the morning, but over night the shoes were beautifully prepared. The shoemaker did not wonder how these shoes were prepared; he only knew that they were beautifully constructed and that he would be offered more money for each pair than he would have have charged for his own work.. But one evening after the man had been cutting out the leather for more shoes, he said to his wife before going to bed, "What do you think if we were to stay up to-night to see who it is that lends us this helping hand?" After dark and at bedtime, the wife lit a candle, and then they hid themselves in a corner of the room behind some clothes which were hanging up there to dry and they watched. At midnight, two handsome little naked men came, sat down at the shoemaker's table, took all the leathers which the shoemaker had cut out for next day’s shoes, and began to stitch, and sew, and hammer so skillfully and so quickly with their little fingers that the shoemaker could not turn away his eyes in amazement. The elves did not stop until all was done, and when they were finished they stood the completed shoes on the table and ran quickly out of the door. For several nights the shoemaker and his wife spied on the elves at work and the next day put the shoes in the window where they were quickly sold. The shoemaker and his wife were no longer poor. One day the shoemaker’s wife said that she thought that it would be kind of her to make clothes for the naked elves and for him to make for them tiny boots. Her husband agreed, and so one night she laid out what they had prepared and before they began work the elves donned the apparel, then prepared the shoes and danced happily out of the workshop fully adorned. And then they never returned. But the man’s shoes had now become so popular that he had more customers than he ever before, and he and his wife became rich.

So what would I say the elves were doing there in the shoemaker’s studio while he and his wife were asleep. How did they find their way into the workshop? And why? I don’t believe that the elves sought to teach the shoemaker his craft, he was asleep while they worked. And besides, he had been making shoes for years. Perhaps the shoemaker might have seen in the quality of the elves’ work techniques the shoemaker could employ to enhance his product’s excellence. Maybe the shoemaker had studied the exceptional quality in the construction sewn into the shoes by the elves and he marveled at a technique with which he was not already familiar but certainly which he could adopt in his practice. I did wonder what the shoemaker imagine was occurring in his workshop every night while he and his wife slept? He was certainly aware that somehow his leather was being crafted into fine shoes ready for sale. Why did he wait so long to find out what occurred in his workshop while he slept that left beautiful crafter shoes. Finally, one day he suggested to his wife that perhaps they hide themselves to see what was happening in the workshop while they slept. And so that night the two lit a candle and hid behind a curtain and waited. They were soon surprised to discover two naked elves dance in and set to work making shoes from the leather the shoemaking had cut and left out on the table. His wife suggested that they make clothes and shoes for the elves who had been so helpful to them, and the man agreed that this would be a wonderful act. Maybe the elves meant in their work to teach the couple the importance of generosity and kindness because once the man and woman made the elves shoes and clothes they never returned.

Now, after the elves had left the shoemaker continued to make and sell shoes. But I wondered why the rich men hadn’t entered his establishment before, paying a greater sum for the shoes than he asked. Was the shoemaker undervaluing his work or was his work not excellent? I wondered how had he and his wife survived prior to the arrival of the elves? Why did the elves need to teach him kindness and generosity. And then I pondered, why him, why did the elves appear to this shoemaker at this time? There must have been other poor shoemakers who might have benefitted from the work of the elves. 

Now, to answer these questions would be the work of midrash, the Jewish scholarly practice of asking questions in the text’s openings and then telling stories with pop and scoop to answer those questions., Out of those stories principles of ethics and manners come to be derived. Midrash is fun. And I suspect there is no end to the answers to the questions a work of art might inspire. Midrash is how stories occur: answering question from the gaps.

 

 

 

Howdy Doody

When I was a child (how many reminiscences start with that phrase!) when someone did something that angered me, I would face my opponent, scrunch up my reddened visage and scream, “You’re a doody-head.” And then I would take back my ball and go home. Now, I don’t think that this indictment referred to the television puppet Howdy Doody, whose show was hosted by Buffalo Bob alongside with Clarabelle, the clown and the eponymous wooden character. I did watch the show with childlike avidity and delight, and even recall begging my parents to enroll me in the seated audience gallery filled with children of my age group, but alas, my enjoyment was to continue seated on the floor before the black and white Philco television set in the family living room. Nor did the barb doody-head refer to the cheerful greeting, howdy doody! employed by my nana, Rose, who exclaimed as I walked through the door into her apartment, “Well, Howdy doody!” as she ushered me into her kitchen and sat me down with a piece of her home-made cake and a glass of milk.. No, my use of the taunt, doody-head, referred to the occasion of my enemy’s head become human excrement. As I got older the insult transformed into the phrase, “You’ve got your head up your ass!”

I recalled this connection with regard to the more recent childish retort rising from the potty mouth of Trump, though certainly not at all an isolated incident in the public discourse of this man. He has been too long at the fair. A Federal judge had ruled against the administration’s actions of deporting Venezuelans against court orders. Trump replied, “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before should be IMPEACHED.” Trump continued, describing Judge James Boasberg as a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama.” In essence and in his frustration Trump was calling Judge James Boasberg a doody-head! And this seems to be Trump’s sole strategy when he experiences any opposition to his plans. The Red Queen would call out, “Off with their heads,” but even Trump cannot (so far) organize the execution of his perceived enemies, though he has thus far fired a large contingent of government workers. But who knows what he intends as we head into the reign of this wannabe autocrat . . . But to my mind, Trump’s rage mirrored that of a six-year-old child who had been frustratingly resisted by somebody. You’re a doody-head, he screamed. Except he is 78 years old and the President of a nation founded on the premise of division of powers in the branches of a democratic government!
            Enough. I’ve wasted a good hour of my time thinking about Trump. I’ve got to step out of the muck and engage in something lovely.

Lotus Eaters

   

  I think frequently here about the lotus eaters. We have been living for the past four weeks in lotus land—Puntarenas Province, Costa Rica. We stayed here last year for seven weeks and the year prior for seven weeks in Guanacaste Province. We traveled a bit about the country, at least on the country’s Pacific coast: walked the rain forest in Monteverde and the coffee and chocolate plantations there; there we hiked a mountainous trail at El Tigre where we suffered serious fatigue and where one of us almost collapsed. She was transported to a safe place via zip line bicycle! The other one was left to complete the walk alone and walking the last 350 meters sludging through the mud and brambles feared suffering a heart attack and hoped that in that event he might be found. To celebrate our survival we dined that evening in a restaurant in the trees and enjoyed a very lovely meal. We have visited Manuel Antonio National Park, spent a few days in the city of La Fortuna and stayed there in a hotel whose window overlooked the Arenal Volcano. In the late 1960s the Arenal erupted and destroyed the town of La Fortuna, but the volcano has been quiescent in the years since and the city has been reconstructed; we spent a day on the beach at Tortuga Island; we hiked the park surrounding Rincon de la Viejo and in the area experienced a volcanic mud bath and natural hot springs. We drove All Terrain Vehicles all three years, and we have stayed in the capital city of San Jose and toured the Pos Volcano.

We have not been completely sedentary; indeed, it almost could appear that we have been very active, but actually for the majority of the time during our weeks-long stays, we lie about amid the lotus blossoms. Twice a day we walk to the beach carrying our beach chairs and water bottles and sit comfortably in the sun and sand for 90-120 minutes. I have slobbered my face and body with SPF-50 sun screen, though I never am not worried about skin cancer, a result of a careless and vain youth on the beaches of Long Island and some bad genes: my legs are splotched with what the dermatologist refers to as ‘wisdom spots’ but which know as blemishes. Sometimes we head into the ocean, she for play and me for a cooling, and then we return to the chairs where we sit until we gather the energy to retread our steps and return to the casa where we will we shower and have a(nother) lie down. We read and write, enjoy a quiet cocktail hour, dine in or out and retire early for the evening. And then on the next day we push repeat. And regardless of our forays out, we remain for the most part sedentary, and it seems to me that with every new day our lethargies increase. 

                I have been thinking about the lotus eaters. In Homer’s The Odyssey Ulysses and his men go ashore on the island and having eaten of the lotus plants they become languid and lose their desire to raise themselves from their lethargic comfort and continue their voyage home. Homer writes that Ulysses’s men went ashore “and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them.” They would go no more to roaming. 

Alfred Lloyd Tennyson addresses the same topic in his poem, “The Lotos-Eaters.” In Tennyson’s work Ulysses’s crew having arrived at the island of the lotus blossoms the sailors want to abandon their world-weariness and live forever eating of the blossoms. They say, 

Death is the end of life; ah, why 

Should life all labour be? 

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, 

And in a little while our lips are dumb. 

Let us alone. What is it that will last? 

All things are taken from us, and become 

Portions and parcels of the dreadful past. 

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have 

To war with evil? Is there any peace 

In ever climbing up the climbing wave? 

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave 

In silence; ripen, fall and cease: 

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

Weary of war and strife, with the constant effort that a life of responsibility demands, of inevitable pain and loss only to be doomed to die, the sailors beg to be left alone. Three times in the stanza they make this demand: they would go no more to roaming. In these times I appreciate their wish to withdraw from the difficulties life means.

The presence of the lotus eaters appears continuously in literature. Chapter 5 of James Joyce’s Ulysses addresses Homer’s episode of the Lotus Eaters as Leopold Bloom wanders seemingly aimlessly about Dublin before attending to Digby’s funeral. Bloom is to keep away from his home where his wife Molly will be meeting for a sexual tryst with her manager, Boylan. Joyce refers to this episode as “The Lotus Eaters." In the chapter Bloom's daylong journey through Dublin begins with thoughts concerning drugs and other strategies for avoiding reality. 

            In another literary reference, in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain an implicit reference is made to the lotus eaters by Ludovico Settembrini, the Italian humanist intellectual, a patient/client of the sanitorium being treated along with other sufferers for tuberculosis. Settembrini says, “Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death, with which it may well belong—allied to the grave and its unsavory anatomy.” He argues that music, too, lulls the listener and leads to torpidity. Settembrini is arguing that analysis can act as the flower of the lotus plant: a narcotic that depletes one of the desire to act. There are critics of postmodernism who might agree with Settembrini. And it was Bertoldt Brecht who argued that catharsis as the result of experiencing theatrical tragedy also serves as a lotus flower draining the desire to act as the emotionally drained audience exits the play. Brecht believed that theater should inspire committed action.

            However, in his poem “Ulysses” Tennyson has offered an alternative to the lethargy of the sailors who eat of the lotus blossoms. Ulysses exhorts his comrades, 

Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

This is the opposite of quietism, of torpidity, of lotus eating. Ulysses’ invitation is to action, to risk, to discovery, and to exploration. There would be no time for indolence, says Ulysses. We must go a-roaming. 

I think the urge to eat of the lotus blossom and forget all cares and responsibility is ever-present. Life is hard here out of the garden. In Costa Rica it is so simple to lay about, to do little, to eat of the lotus blossom. To amble to the beach and then amble home, not to rest from a weariness of doing but to continue to do nothing. Like Ulysses, I have not the strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, if ever I had that strength and the inclination to lie-about is strong and alluring. But I have much sympathy with Ulysses’ call to action, an acceptance that we are what we are, creatures with will and longings to move out and explore and even to suffer. Yes, life might be hard and death our end, but though weakened with toil and age we still possess the strengths to struggle, to explore and discover new worlds. Lying amongst the lotus blossoms there is no energy to set sail still, and it takes a great exercise of will to put away the lotus blossoms and to set sail again. 

But sometimes I just don't have the will.

 

Rings of Saturn

There are motives and methods for attempting to get away from the world, but in fact, do so is ultimately an impossible task. I accept that wherever I go I am always in the world and am subject more and less to its slings and arrows. Perhaps it is truer to say that there is no getting away from the world until one recognizes the world that I am always of and in. That recognition entails acknowledging and understanding the myths by which I have lived in the world. But even more, I have always said that wherever I go, well, there I am, and I carry with me all of my neuroses, peccadilloes and, even amazedly, gather together some of my somewhat positive and appealing character traits. All that being said, nevertheless there is motive for removing myself from as much of the external inputs as I can tolerate—to get away from the world, that is— and by doing so leave time and energy to focus on those stimuli and events that derive from within, recognizing that the presence of the unconscious colors all the remembering, itself always a problematic and imprecise process, and that any control over memory is only partially illusory. I always respect what dreams may come . . . And anyway, the act of remembering is inevitably partial and imperfect and influenced by the present. There is, then, no way to get away from the world and rediscover the self. James Baldwin has written of his own expatriate experience, “I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed home.” Getting away from the world to find the self is a fruitless endeavor.

Nevertheless, there remain motives for reducing contact with the world even as there are various methods by which such withdrawal can be made. By the world I refer to the ever presence of words, events and personages of which I am made conscious, some of which I love and some that are anathema to me. Marx has said that men and women make their own histories but not in conditions of their own choosing. One motive for getting away from the world was to eliminate as much noise as is possible so that the choices I would make were somewhat but never completely free of some uninvited and unwelcome influence. But as I have said there is always the influences of the unconscious to acknowledge and accept.

We have traveled to Costa Rica to get away from the harsh mid-west winter of Minnesota. In my aging I have grown intolerant of the cold wind and snow. Once these meteorological events did not trouble me: I would run with pleasure in the early morning dark, sub-zero weather only sparely bundled in expensive running gear. Or maybe it is that I have in my life preferred the sun and heat to the cold—I have always eschewed air conditioning—though regrettably now my skin shows the long-term results of my sun worship. The dermatologist kindly refers to these marks as wisdom spots but I know them as blemishes and ugly. Occasional basal skin cancers have been excised from my surfaces, and I am forever anxious of suffering more serious cancerous eruptions. I maintain my annual appointments to the skin doctors. But now on the quiet, sun-drenched and sizzling beach I sit in my chair slobbered over with sunscreen lotions and sprays, and am not troubled by invasive external noises, though occasionally a boom box blares and disturbs my rest. But then, I just move my chair a bit to the north or south and the quiet returns. My breaths echo the crashing of the waves; the yoga instructors reminded me to breathe, and the ocean rhythms return me to my breaths. In this environment the external world can with some effort be kept at bay though I appreciate the paradox that considerable energy and funds has been spent in order to achieve some seclusive peace.

The political situation in this moment is so dire that not to know about it seems to me an absolute motive to leave the world and any news regarding it. The reports today seem to me too ominous, and though I am not personally threatened by events, at least, not yet, I am concerned about the children . . . Paul Siebel sang, “We can teach them nothing, nothing, but survival in a desert bare . . .” Politicians are making the world a desert bare. In my life, the news had always arrived via print copy, computer and phone. At the time of the election, I had stopped paper delivery of the New York Times and relegated its reportage to a location buried in the my stuff bookmark on the computer. I can choose not to go there. I also can choose not to go to the websites for CNN and Politico which I have also buried in the my stuff folder. At the election I had substituted Wired rather than the New York Times as my home page. Most of the articles in the formerare beyond my pay grade and even my interests, and I do not care to devote the energies to learn how to read them. The photos are nice, and I suppose bit coin and cryptocurrency and other neologisms might be important awarenesses, but not for me, I think. My cash-in-pocket, credit cards, and investments are sufficient. I am amused sometimes at the newer technological products Wired recommends, most of which I will not purchase and don’t even understand their purpose, but all of which entice me to live a better life. Away then from the immediacy of the news I have been partially successful at avoiding the fetid political atmosphere, though, alas, I still awaken each morning and feel soiled by even a minimal awareness of the appalling attempts by the present government to destroy a democracy as it has been known for more than 250 years. 

But James Baldwin notwithstanding, perhaps the motive for retreat is not an escape that I seek at all: it is a recovery—a re-focusing—of my internal operations that in the absence of the ever-present stimuli of the external can be better seen and heard. Away from the devices by which the world becomes instantly available, I can listen for my own callings and then make assessments and adjustments. I have put away the phone but I’m writing on the computer. On any of my devices a simple click of the fingers on the keyboard attaches me to the world with which I am trying to minimize contact. It is that easy to re-enter the world. On these devices any question I might have can be effortlessly addressed with just a few clicks and alarmingly soon I have fallen into a rabbit hole and have even forgotten where I had started when I picked up the smart phone or clicked some Googled search. Sometimes I realize that after some time down there in the hole I grow alarmed that I haven’t even found an answer to my original question. The whole motive of escaping the world was to avoid the rabbit hole in the first place and not to follow it down, though my partner who has not had the same desire to leave the world, occasionally offers me news of the headlines that often sadden me. Not her, but them. I have been asking her to refrain doing so, but perhaps it gives her comfort to share the horror. And who am I to deny her that relief. Townes Van Zandt sings, “Maybe she just has to sing for the sake of the song/And who do I think I am to decide that she’s wrong.” I am weary of being chastised by my phone. It tells me that today I am not walking as much as I did yesterday, and that this year I am walking less than I did last year. I know that I can turn off the recording of my activity, but I also like to listen to music that tends to relax me when I walk; then the recording of my steps and calorie expenditure continues as does the judgement. Even my electric toothbrush castigates me if I do not spend the required two minutes caring for my teeth. When I place it back down it displays a frowned face. My writing on the computer keeps me above ground with some effort, but I could too easily become distracted or frustrated in the writing and follow these disturbances down into the rabbit hole. I have to learn to tolerate frustration again and eschew instant gratification.

It is of course possible not to turn on the computer or the phone and return to the manual toothbrush . . . but actually that radical isolation that would result does not appeal to me. I can’t completely abandon the phone because some actual people do call me on it. For example, my daughters, my brother and sister and a few dear friends. And occasionally news of a tragedy back home occurs—a death or illness that requires my attention. Though it strikes me . . . that the wanting to know the details of life and death that surround me a part of an attachment to the world that I have not successfully abandoned. Somehow, it suggests that I want to continue the attachment. When I used to look at the print copy of the New York Times I first turned to the Obituary pages as a way to measure the remaining size of my world, and now even when I have partially buried the Times on the computer, I still do want to know who in the world has left it because this awareness helps me know the world in which I continue to live, announces how with the deaths of those with whom I have grown up the world tends to shrink a bit. I continue to monitor the deaths so that I know the lifes. I know that if I do not track these events in the immediate present, I will catch up later with them when I return to the world in which I daily live, but the apparent distance I experience days and miles away offers me comfort and keeps me in the moment unmindful of the changes. Here, in Costa Rica, I don’t carefully track who has live and who has died. Maybe it is that a motive for getting away from that diurnal world and its obituaries has been an unconscious now made conscious attempt to get away from death. 

As this page and others like it show, I like to write, and it is on the computer that I make that effort. And again I recognize that the clicks away from the current page too easily can lead me back into the world from which I have wanted to minimize contact. There along with the current news that I am trying to avoid I can discover announcements about opening new movies, new streaming shows, new products from Amazon shopping (mostly), Skellig Store (occasionally), even eBay (rarely). I have taken to this latter site for less expensive rimless eyeglass frames, a style I have been wearing for upwards of thirty years. In my inbox seemingly hourly there appear dozens of requests by the Democrats pleading for monies, but these urgent requests return me to motive #1 and my wish to lose the politics and find myself again. As if the politics isn’t one of the myths by which I have lived. The assault on the senses from the computer that comes from the world creates tensions and they seem to me now inevitable. Wherever I go, there I am.

Sometimes I realize that it requires an expenditure of some considerable energy not to go on the various devices and lines and to resist the call of the world. Too often I feel myself drawn to attend to notice of the events as if to a magnet; such attention serves as a means of grounding myself, suggesting that I need news of the world in order to situate myself in it. W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn explores just how close one can get to tragedy without being destroyed by it. Saturn’s rings are situated just far enough away from the planet’s gravitational pull to keep from being drawn down onto its surface and smashed to bits. I think I require the connection to the world to maintain the necessary distance from it to avoid being smashed to bits by its gravitational pull.

It begins to appear to me that motives for turning away the world already contain the methods for doing so, though it appears also that a complete escape seems unlikely or even sought. And it takes an honest effort to understand the necessary distance to maintain from the world which must always be held in view.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Catch-22 in 2025

For at least the past twelve years or so I have been enjoying coffee and a crossword puzzle from the Minnesota Star-Tribune every Saturday morning with a friend. In the beginning we met at a local coffee house following the abandonment by my previous coffee klatch—my daughters—who had gone off to college and other locations. During the pandemic when I would not leave the house, Ruven bravely met me at chez moi where in the beginning I made the coffee (always a very excellent brew, saying so myself) and he brought the bagels. During those early mornings I began to recognize that there was no substitute for a New York bagel and over time I sadly declined the fare he would carry over. Ruven then arrived only with the Arts section of the newspaper that contained the Universal crossword puzzle. He carried a pen (!) clipped onto the newspaper and brought his good cheer. We would talk politics and coffee, share some personal stories from the past and the present, rail at the Republicans and the Trump government and talk about books. One Saturday during a light moment in our conversation a reference was made to Major Major Major Major, a character in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, and Ruven commented that Catch-22 was a funny, funny book. I nodded my head in agreement. Now, I had not read the book in years and I picked it off my bookshelf and began to rea and as I read I chuckled aloud. More than once I even guffawed.

And as I was reading in my comfy chair this past evening during the first week of Trump’s presidency, it struck me with not a little alarm that the present seemed to be an auspicious time to be rereading Heller’s novel because the personages and events in the novel seemed too similar to what passes today for government. Catch-22 takes place for the most part on the island of Pianosa, situated in the Mediterranean Sea eight miles south of Elba, where the 256^th Bomber Squadron is stationed. The novel follows the lives (and deaths) of the American service men in World War II who in the fulfillment of their duties are constantly endangered while dropping bombs on the enemy who in turn fire back at the planes and destroying the bombers and killing its crew; the novel narrates the hierarchy of officers who callously order the enlisted men about, and the self-serving staff, like Milo Minderbinder, who use the squadron for their own egregiously self-interested aims and purposes. Milo Mnderbinder for one contracts with the Germans to bomb his own base to fulfill a contract that makes Milo a handsome profit. Colonel Cathcart, who is responsible for increasing the number of missions his men have to fly, considers that “the war was crawling with group commanders who were merely doing their duty, and it required just some sort of dramatic gesture like making his group fly more combat missions than any other bomber group to spotlight his unique qualities of leadership.” One thing that didn’t concern Cathcart was the danger he put his squadron in by continuing to increase the number of missions they had to fly! Rather, Cathcart was concerned with his status and the possibility of his promotion. 

Well, this is not the time or place to analyze this wonderful and frightening novel, except to say that during my reading I grew alarmed at how our current reality under Trump looked too much like the events and personages of the novel. Marx had said “Hegel remarks somewhere that all faces and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”  Trump’s appearance as President for the second time on the world stage appeared to me as farce, dangerous as it seems. That is, what transpires in his administration as responsible governance can only be understood as farcical and incompetent and cannot be understood as anything approaching honest and effective government. His leadership is organized by motives of revenge and greed, and like Heller’s Colonel Cathcart, his leadership is relevant to him only as it increases his wealth and satisfies his illimitably greedy egotism, energies for revenge and grasp at power. Trump’s inauguration (his coronation, as it is turning out) and his brash accusations and lies; his unashamed display of his abysmal ignorance; his appointments of incompetents and unethical candidates for cabinet positions who are charged to enact his will and support his unlimited narcissism and greed and his desire for retribution; his self-aggrandizing harangues all appear to repeat the absurdities of the events and personages in Catch-22. For example, Trump’s acts on the first day of his reign was 1) to pardon the 1600 violent insurrectionists of January 6, 2020 and return these racist, misogynist nazis to the street even as Trump decries the illusory lawlessness rampant in the nation perpetrated by illegal immigrants (whom he refers to as animals and vermin) and by what he terms the left-wing crazies (whom he terms wackos); 2) to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate treaty amid the continuing crisis of global warming and his absurd promise to increase the use of fossil fuel and to drill, baby, drill; 3) to withdraw the United States from the United Nations World Health Organization who Trump has claimed mishandled the corona virus epidemic. This from the man who had suggested that the corona virus pandemic was basically not serious and could be managed easily with quack and dangerous treatments! This from a man who had been treated preferentially and expensively when he early on contracted the disease. Trump’s first actions speak to the dangerous threat to the democracy of the nation. The absurdity and incompetence of the present government seems to me too frightenedly like the events and personages in the novel. On every page of Catch-22 the danger posed by those incompetent, oblivious and self-aggrandizing administrators to the lives of the men they dominate is prominent. So is our nation endangered by Trump and his band of incompetent, billionaire sycophants.

            I am aware that everything any administration does in governing the United States can be wrong, but during the Biden presidency I awoke every day without a sense of fear and dread. Those calmer days are over, and I awaken each morning with a sickly sense of being fouled and threatened. As Yossarian heads out at novel’s end away from the war he admits to being frightened, and Major Danby says, “That’s good. It proves you’re still alive. It won’t be fun.” I’m frightened and alive, but  I know it won’t be fun.