“We did what we could but it was not enough because I found you here. All of you are not just names on the wall, you are alive. Your blood’s on my hands, your screams in my ears, your eyes in my soul. I told you you’d be alright but I lied. Please forgive me. I see your face in my son. I can’t bear the thought. You told me about your wife, your kids, your girl, your mother. Then you died. I should have done more. Your pain is ours. Please, God. I’ll never forget your faces. I can’t, you’re still alive.”
President Obama is right: of Major Hasan we should not “jump to conclusions.” But there is one thing we can know for certain: the horrors of war are not cabined to those who fight in them.
The centrality of war is the intentional killing of human beings: the healer is charged with preserving life, to “abstain from doing harm.” When these worlds collide, when a healer is tasked with applying the healing arts to those deliberately damaged by war, then, as one nurse learned, “you can never be ordinary again.”
The note quoted above, left by another nurse at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, speaks to that. Beyond the “furthur” are more such voices. Many more.
We too must suffer all the suffering around us. What each of us possesses is not a body but a process of growth, and it conducts us through every pain, in this form or in that. Just as the child unfolds through all the stages of life to old age and death (and every stage seems unattainable to the previous one, whether in fear or longing) so we unfold (not less deeply bound to humanity than to ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. In this process there is no place for justice, but no place either for dread of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.
You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that displaying crucifixes in Italian public schools violates religious and educational freedoms. It has ordered the Italian government to pay a $7390 fine to an Italian mother, Soile Lautsi, who has struggled for eight years to compel her children’s schools in northern Italy to remove crucifixes from the classrooms.
The Court rejected the government’s disingenuous argument that the crucifix is not a religious totem at all, but instead “a national symbol of culture, history, identity, tolerance, and”—get this—”secularism.”
Sanely, the Court concluded that secular, state-run schools, where attendance is compulsory, must “observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education,” and that crucifix-clogged classrooms “could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion.”
Crucifixes have been compulsory in Italian classrooms since the enactment in the 1920s of two laws under the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, a personage aided and enabled by the Catholic Church, which for millennia has been the premier peddler of crucifixes.
Lautsi’s husband, Massimo Albertin, said the family was satisfied with the court’s ruling. “We believe the ruling is a positive signal from Europe to Italy, which seems to increasingly lose its secularism,” he said from their home in Albano Terme. “The crucifix creates discrimination.”
I was interested in learning more about how young and troubled children perceive things and before filming started I showed some paintings to the children. The results were very revealing and mysterious. I remember one, an Italian renaissance painting which had in the background an entire city with castles and harbours and hundreds of people weaseling around unloading ships, all sorts of things going on. I would project a slide of the picture for maybe ten seconds and then turn it off and ask the children, “What have you seen?” And four or five of them in one voice shouted, “A horse! A horse!” “Where on earth is the horse?” I said to myself. So I put the slide back on and searched. “Down there!” they all shouted. And yes, in the corner of the picture was a single horse and a single horseman with a lance. It makes me think to this very day.
His weariness with things was frightening; it smacked of obliteration, a wall of anger and fatigue that felt as though it might sweep him into nothingness. Worst of all was loneliness.
There were times when he was capable of rejoicing in himself as a singularity—a man without a story, secure from tribal delusion, able to see the many levels. But at other times he felt that he might give anything to be able to explain himself. To call himself Jew or Greek, Gentile or otherwise, the citizen of no mean city. But he had no recourse except to call himself an American and hence the slave of possibility. He was not always up for the necessary degree of self-invention, unprepared, occasionally, to assemble himself.
And sometimes the entire field of folk seemed alien and hostile, driven by rages he could not comprehend, drunk on hopes he could not imagine. So he could make his way only through questioning, forever inquiring of wild-eyed obsessives the nature of their dreams, their assessment of themselves and their enemies, listening agreeably while they poured scorn on his ignorance and explained the all too obvious. When he wrote, it was for some reader like himself, a bastard, party to no covenants, promised nothing except the certainty of silence overhead, darkness around. Sometimes he had to face the simple fact that he had nothing and no one and try to remember when that had seemed a source of strength and perverse pride. Sometimes it came back for him.
Yesterday it was crisp all day. Never really warmed up. Mr. Sun, just not pumping it out the way he used to. Yesterday, well, “he tried to do his best,” as Neil Young once put it, “but he could not.”
The kitten, an April child who has lived all his young life in the lambent blush of sultry California summer, huddled yesterday, befuddled and bewildered. “Not likely to get any better, not any time soon,” I told him. “This is called ‘cold.’” Attempting to burrow into my feet, he makes it clear that he doesn’t like it. “And ‘cold’ is why,” say I, squatting before the wood stove, “we have this thing called ‘fire.’” And lit the match.
Yep, Mr. Sun is in trouble, up here in the Northern Hemisphere. He’s on the long slide, heading down towards the Solstice, at which time he’ll flicker out . . . to fire up anew. Northern peoples for millennia honored the passing of the sun, and his rebirth, each year at the Winter Solstice—which is why the children of Saul, when they elected to make of Jesus a Christ, decided he had been born on Christmas Day. Even though, best evidence suggests, he was really born a Pisces.
Anyway. That’s all a couple months down the road still. I wanted to post today Van Morrison’s “Country Fair,” from Veedon Fleece, the song that most says to me: undeniable arrival of autumn. But Morrison is a crusty poopstain about allowing his stuff on the tubes: as soon as somebody puts something up, his people descend to growl that it be taken down. Morrison is an ornery cuss by nature; his view of people frolicking with his songs across the tubes is also no doubt colored by the fact that, after 50 years in the music business, he’s a near-pauper, gleefully fleeced by slimeballing “managers” who serially “managed” to pocket all of his money.
So I’m left instead with “Requiem Again,” from The Durutti Column. Pretty autumn-like. Candles a good idea, too. Burning for Mr. Sun, to help him make it through.
With life tough enough to figure, you’d think people would leave off trying to suss out what happens after it, too. But they don’t. Some science types claim that’s actually what differentiates humans from other animals, brooding on the afterlife, but they’re probably wrong about that, as ravens attend funerals, and elephants weep for their dead.
In a certain sense it’s understandable, this obsession with events after the expiration of breath, since life is so short, and death is so long. Matt Groening, in a Love Is Hell strip, once put things in perspective for one of his rabbits, who was considering adultery, confronting him with a line across the entire page that represented time. The line was labeled “time you are dead.” Near the very beginning of the line lay a tiny dot: “time you are alive.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has decided that traditional indicators of a nation’s economic progress are insufficient, misleading, even dangerous. Thus, he has announced, France will begin factoring into analyses of its economic vitality such intangibles as “happiness” and “well being.”
Sarkozy believes that reliance on gross domestic product—GDP—as the main measure of economic prosperity contributed to the recent global financial crisis. He is urging other nations to join France in measuring less materialistic indicators of progress.
The French President said the current crisis does not just give the international community the freedom to imagine another economic model, but it obliges the world to do so. “We do not have the choice,” he said.
“Open the second shutter, so that more light can come in.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, last words
The United States Supreme Court will decide in October whether to hear the Obama administration’s ill-advised plea that it not be required to comply with a court order mandating the release of photographs documenting torture and abuse inflicted on prisoners in the War on Terra.
The Justice Department had initially declined to pursue the BushCo-era appeal, with presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs publicly describing the case as “unwinnable.” However, after intense lobbying from military officials and BushCo holdovers, Obama in May declared “that releasing these photos would inflame anti-American opinion and allow our enemies to paint U.S. troops with a broad, damning and inaccurate brush, thereby endangering them in theaters of war.”
Replied Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, the plaintiff in the case: “It’s an awful idea to give violent extremists veto power over the Freedom of Information Act.”
As the linked New York Times report points out, the case turns on one of the very principles behind the establishing of this nation, memorably expressed by William O. Douglas in his dissent in Environmental Protection Agency v. Mink (1973) 410 US 73: “The generation that made the nation thought secrecy in government one of the instruments of Old World tyranny and committed itself to the principle that a democracy cannot function unless the people are permitted to know what their government is up to.”
Maurice Maeterlinck was an interesting person. A Belgian born in 1862 into a wealthy French family, he initially snored into law, before waking to write first Symbolist, and then fairy-dust plays, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911.
By that time Maeterlinck had pretty much abandoned the theater, having become intensely interested in ants and bees, and inscribing several eccentric works about each.
In the end, he wandered off onto his own peculiar path of mysticism, peridocially producing, until the end of his life in 1949, volumes with titles like Wisdom and Destiny, The Buried Temple, Our Eternity, The Great Secret, and The Life of Space.
In this last, Maeterlinck included the essay “The Isolation of Man.” It seems to have been intended as an argument against the existence of extraterrestrial life. But to me it reads as one of the most poignant refutations extant of the notion that some deity once planted, and today watches over, those of us suffering here on terra nullius.
It was Labor Day, and I was slogging through the supermarket, in search of cold remedies, because the season is changing, and Someone has decided to afflict the humans of this household with Bugs. I was drudging, no credit to sentience, just plodding through the day, “putting one foot to front of de other,” as Cecil the bartender describes it in Robert Stone’s A Flag For Sunrise.
They have photographed a molecule, and it is a honeycomb.
This pleases me on many levels. Not least because in spiritual systems, a living being is considered a spirit incarnated in matter. Molecules are where matter begins to assemble; it is well and right, then, that material assembly should commence with the sort of compartments where honey, the spirit, may enter, and be stored.
As Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat wrote, in choosing to begin her definitive Histoire naturelle et morale de la mourriture with honey:
The Hebrew for bee is dbure, from the root dbr, meaning “word,” indicating the bee’s mission to reveal the Divine Word, the Truth. Honey, miraculously made by the bees, signifies truth because it needs no treatment to transform it after it has been collected. It does not deteriorate, and until the discovery of sugar there was no substitute. What but the bee can actually create honey by settling on the centres of God’s own flowers? Or the gods’ own flowers: it came to the same thing.
Then there is the tale of the two santeria orishas, Oggun and Oshun. It was with honey that the latter brought the former into the world.
Oggun can be very sad. Once, he was so angry at the way of people, their crimes and lies, that he went into the deep woods, so deep no one could find him, and he was so silent no one could talk to him or could coax him out. Finally, Oshun went after him and walked through the woods and walked through the woods until she came to a clearing by a stream. She could feel Oggun carefully watching from behind the trees. She didn’t make the mistake of calling out to him. She began to dance slowly with her arms out like this. Oshun has her own dance, very sexual. When she felt that he was curious and moving closer she still didn’t call his name. She danced a little faster, a little slower, and when he came out of hiding she danced until he was close enough to her to dip her fingers into a gourd of honey hanging from her waist and she smeared the honey on his lips. He had never tasted anything so sweet in his life. She danced and filled her hand with honey and put more honey in his mouth and more honey while she tied him to her with a rope of yellow silk and led him back into the world.
And once lacriolla anacaona returned with him to the world? Today, maybe, as honey is the music of the bee and the flower, they sound together in lamusica cubana . . . .
In the coming days and weeks, we will be subjected to indelicate recountings of the life of Edward Kennedy that will linger over his flaws as a man. We know what to expect from the wingnuts—Sean Hannity announced months ago that when Kennedy died, he would refuse to mourn him as “a great American”—but such a reference also appears even now, as I type this, in the front-page slug on the New York Times website: “a disciplined liberal lawmaker with a sometimes-stormy personal life.”
Last month, in a Black Kos diary, people were envying the Kossack Robinswing because she had met Miles Davis—a man also know for his “sometimes-stormy personal life.” Robinswing had a very wise reply:
“Meeting him for real,” she said, “happens with his music.”
And so it is with Senator Kennedy. The real Ted Kennedy was in his music. Which, as William O. Douglas once expressed it, was all about using his considerable powers to try to help “the miserable, the sick, the suspect, the unpopular, the offbeat.” He was a rich man’s son who considered lost and suffering people his “base.” And through a personal life riven, as all human lives must be riven, by missteps and failures, in his public life, for those people, his music never stopped.
Jerry Garcia always maintained that he and his band performed poorly at Woodstock because they were distracted by “the presence of invisible time travelers from the future who had come back to see it. You could sense the significance of the event as it was happening.”
Makes sense to me. It always seemed strange that the concert was almost instantly regarded as so epochal. Why would that be? There was a hell of a lot of other stuff going on at the time. The answer, I guess, is because people from the future had already decided it was.
Perhaps because Garcia and his Grateful Dead bandmates may have been, to use a favorite Garcia word from those days, “hipper” to the presence of those invisible time travelers, the Dead were more afflicted with pixie dust than other Woodstock musicians.
It was pitch-dark when they hit the stage, and a howling wind was blowing down the hillside, actually threatening to move the huge stage backwards in the mud.
The stage was sinking, and the equipment was starting to roll toward the edge. The sound system went off, the lights went off, and radio signals from the Air Force were coming out of my amp. It was not an atmosphere conducive to good music.
Lesh wasn’t the only one afflicted by strange noise:
Random CB radio signals kept erupting out of the PA while the band played, and “people behind the amplifiers kept yelling, ‘The stage is collapsing! The stage is collapsing!’” Garcia said.
“Actually, I had a wonderful time. The guitarists were not. Because of electrical problems, they were getting shocks from their strings and all,” he said. “Aversion therapy like that, no one needs.”
Throughout the Dead’s set, Garcia observed blue balls of electricity bouncing around the stage; these would occasionally either strike, or emanate from, his guitar. Garcia thought these balls the product of some electrical problem.
Uh-huh. Not wise, Jerry, to tattle on the time-travelers. ; )
In honor of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, I’m putting up Joe Cocker’s Woodstock version of “With A Little Help From My Friends.” Not because it’s a great version of a song that Cocker made great. But because it could be regarded as evidence of Garcia’s time-travelers theory. Cocker was always an odd duck in those days, but on this day he waddled through the looking glass. This is a man who surely seems to be seeing, feeling, receiving, reflecting somebody from somewhere.
i got to get my friends together
cause all we gotta do is love now
i’m gonna take em home with me now
you got to get hold of your friends now
you got to get hold of your friends and love
everybody knows the way
everybody knows the way now
The civility that is meant to be the foundation of civilization has become an antiquated thing of the past. Our new culture is not so much postmodern as postcivilized, and this cultural shift involves not a step forward but an electronic meltdown of civilization in which barbarism and savagery boil up to the surface once again. As James Joyce prophesied in Finnegans Wake: “Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil.”
At each stage in the cultural evolution of humanity, a new medium of communication comes forth, and the medium then effects a shift to a new form of polity. We begin with the origins of language in the African savanna, and we end up with the disintegration of literature on the Internet.
With the rise of the new postwar forms of electronic communication, philosophy and reasoned discourse could no longer hold together in the supersaturated solution of the global media. Democracy was replaced by mediocracy; citizen was replaced by media subject. Vast electronic latifundia took control of sports, entertainment, politics, journalism, and education; in fact, all forms of culture simply became variants of the entertainment industry. In the hands of a few giants of industry, new mergers created new global streams of techno-swill in which the believing subject was fed like cattle in feedlots.
The citizen who is “morphing” into the loyal subject of the media demands participation in the pageantry. He or she too wishes to become a celebrity and go on television. People will do anything or say anything to go on afternoon talk shows. Good taste and decorum are expressions of the vanished civilization. Television becomes, in fact, a new kind of human sacrifice. Rather than an Aztec ripping out of the heart from a living body and a tumbling of the bloody corpse down the pyramid steps before an awe-inspired multitude, we have a new form of evisceration in which the heart of the individual’s life is ripped out. Each spectator of the pageantry of the media tries to become his or her own spectacle. Fast-fame takeouts litter the information superhighway strips of the new electronic America. The media acolytes seek to attack the White House to gain attention, verbally expose themselves sexually on afternoon talk shows, or form a congregation around their personal obsessions.
If talk show hosts and radio commentators gain attention and become rich only to the degree that they are intellectually pornographic, why shouldn’t the average subject of the mediocracy aspire to his or her own fabrications of cultural history: that the holocaust never happened, that NASA never went to the moon and that the moon landing was all done in a television studio, that the Rockefellers are planning to set off a thermonuclear war and shift their headquarters from New York to Crestone, Colorado.
The representational government of the traditional literate nation-state undergoes an electronic meltdown in which archaic forms surface in new formations. Reasoned discourse in parliaments and senates is replaced by celebrity management for the new masses of the electronic mediocracy. As politics and sports create the Superbowl of the permanent presidential campaign, civilized discourse is displaced to the academy, but as reason is now powerless to counter either the economy of late capitalism or electronic media’s power to swamp literacy, “discourse” becomes an object of academic analysis, and violence becomes the virtual mode of discourse. As McLuhan said, “the sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in the new and invisible environment.” The new and invisible environment is the shift from natural selection through the vehicle of the human animal body by cultural intrusion. In suburban culture, with rifles and family values, we have the ghost dance of the rednecks. In urban postmodern culture, however, the body is the sloughed-off environment, so it is being painted, sculpted, pierced, lifted, and tucked. Since sex is no longer the agency of natural selection, sexual words become the punctuation marks in the new discourse of violence. “Fuck” and “bitch” are not tropes in the traditional sense of poetic discourse; they are cries in a sociobiological agon and part of the male display of conflict.
For the epoch of biological evolution, the human body had its own forms of signaling when to start and when to stop violent conflict. But because of what McLuhan termed “the media extensions of man,” the evolutionary system of inhibition expressed in the body and its forms of body language is short-circuited. Consider the fact that if we bump into someone around the corner, we back off and courteously excuse ourselves. But if someone cuts in front of us on the highway in an automobile, we shout out our obscenities in a steel-encased rage. We lose the system of check and balances expressed in the physical body with its biological systems for dealing with and containing aggression. Consider again how people on talk radio will become enraged over the day’s news, or how people who live in the cyberspace of electronic bulletin boards will “go up in flames.” There are no bodies in these modes of communication, so as we shift to out-of-body forms of projection into cyberspace networks, it is not surprising that the astral plane takes us over as we become possessed by those noetic parasites that older cultures liked to call demons.
—Coming Into Being, William Irwin Thompson
When you go to psychic school, you will receive instruction in “mockups.” Visualizing something you would like, it is said, helps to tease it out from that ether where everything is possible, nudge it into the realm of “reality.” Conversely, allowing one’s mind to become an Eeyore-like gallery of “bad pictures” can act like a magnet, attracting negativity.
Is this stuff “true”? Who knows? Joseph Kern says: “Deciding what is true and what isn’t now seems to me a lack of modesty.”
I go with you, jefe.
It is certainly true that Important People have believed such things to be true. What John Lennon was getting at when he said “war is over if you want it.” John Wesley, founder of the Methodist variant of Christianity, counseled his acolytes: “Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith.” People struggling in Alcoholics Anonymous, and in its various offshoots, are instructed: “Act as if ye have faith, and faith shall be given to you.” No doubt because boatloads of creative artists have run aground on the shoals of addiction, this gentle admonition has slowly seeped into the popular culture, where it is now generally believed to be moored in scripture. David Mamet, for instance, in his script for The Verdict, allows his bibulous barrister Frank Galvin to present it as an article of the Roman Catholic faith. And so, today, many people are convinced it originally emanated from The Most High himself. And, in the circularity of such things, perhaps it did. ; )
There was nothing at the edge of the river
But dry grass and cotton candy.
“Alias,” I said to him. “Alias,
Somebody there makes us want to drink the river
Somebody wants to thirst us.”
“Kid,” he said. “No river
Wants to trap men. There ain’t no malice in it. Try
To understand.”
We stood there by that little river and Alias took off his shirt
and I took off my shirt
I was never real. Alias was never real.
Or that big cotton tree or the ground.
Or the little river.
—Jack Spicer, “Billy The Kid,” The Collected Books of Jack Spicer
I used to think dreams were magic. A portal into someplace special. I read all the Jung, all the dream books. I kept journals. Traced the trails of my unconscious, looking for Meanings and Grails.
I now think that’s all a load of bollocks, to be frank. Dreams are but a nocturnal processing system, of information received while the corporeal container is up and about. In any remembered dream I can easily find analogues to events or emotions experienced in an earlier waking state. Or nudges towards things I should, as KGO’s Ray Taliaferro puts it, “be thinking about, talking about, or doing something about.”
Maybe I’ve just soured on dreams because they don’t give me anything anymore. Maybe the problem is, as Joseph Kern says in Red, “it’s been years since I dreamt something nice.” Well, not quite that bad. But close.
Some guy on the radio said Vitamin B6 stimulates vivid dreaming. I’m trying that. Nothing to report.
When I was in the jug, the guy in the next cell would each morning wake the block by cheerily chiming: “Wake up and do your time.”
The idea being that to sleep through the day was to cheat: to properly serve one’s sentence one had to be up and about. Doing something, anything, even if there was clearly no point to it, seeing as how as you were locked away in a cage.
More than twenty years on, age and ennui having transformed life itself into something of a sentence, I often come to consciousness with the same thought: “Wake up and do your time.”
The fact that there don’t seem to be any bars about when I today awake doesn’t really mean anything. In a long-abandoned novel, I pulled from the ether a character confined in a mental institution who proposed that part of the reason he was so confined was because he had discovered that the only really true free place on the planet is the Bohemian Grove. All else is prison. The fact that the prison is much larger than the free space, he pointed out, did not make it any less a prison.
Anyway. These days, to encourage me to wake up and do my time, I sometimes summon music. In recent months, I’ve taken to slouching into Tuesdays, as that day is referenced within it, behind a 1994 number from something called The Freddy Jones Band, “In a Daydream.”
You can find the thing below. The video is uninteresting and even a little frightening: those are some pretty pasty white boys. But the song itself does have that lift.
The Moody Blues’ “Tuesday Afternoon,” like “In a Daydream,” involves upbeat messages received from nature and pleasant misty mental states. Why Tuesdays would have such an effect on musicians I have no idea: the day is, after all, named after and ruled by the war god Mars, not a fellow normally associated with tree-hugging, cloud-luluing, and happily loving life.
“Tuesday Afternoon” was always a more melancholy song than “In A Daydream,” and today I find I get no lift from it whatsoever. This is no doubt at least partially the result of repeated exposure. Scoop Nisker used to caution that both experiences and memories are akin to cassette tapes: every time you play them, a wee bit rubs away. Play them over and over and over again, and eventually they’ll become so degraded they’ll barely sound at all. It was to combat this effect that Nisker would journey to Asia every year, there to enter for a month or so some Buddhist monastery, where he could “rest the tapes.”
An excellent example of how, in music, one can kill the one they love by obsessive repeated rewinding and replaying of the tape is San Francisco ChronicleJon Carroll’s experience with Paul Simon’s Graceland. For months and then years after the thing was released, Carroll waxed rhapsodic about it, over and over and over again. He couldn’t play it enough; couldn’t praise it enough; eventually, he sounded like Philip K. Dick genuflecting before Beethoven’s Ninth. Until, one day, to his shock, he discovered that he got nothing from Graceland at all. The thrill was gone. He’d completely degraded the tape.
And now the tubes tell me that there on the TV “Tuesday Afternoon” is currently being used to push Visa. Oh well.
It was shortly after I was subjected to the horror of Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” enlisted to sell dishwashing detergent that I retired my television.
“When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent enquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about: whereupon, so it is said—and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be—he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.”
Please forgive me. I see your face in my son. I can’t bear the thought. You told me about your wife, your kids, your girl, your mother. Then you died. I should have done more. Your pain is ours. Please, God. I’ll never forget your faces. I can’t, you’re still alive.”
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