never, ever say the words "palpable difference" together. on one condition: if the difference is such that, when object A is held next to object B, the air between them constricts in electromagnetic existential peristalsis, a current of invisible, living water forms in the middle of the current and the two become one palpitating heart, then it makes perfect sense.
debating today with a friend today over whether it is good or bad to leave a light on after walking out of a room. he said that it was depressing to always come home to a dark room, enough to qualify hours- maybe even days!- of wasted energy. I argued that doing that would be admitting defeat, bowing to the infinite ghosts of loneliness, grief and dreaming. is that the emotional strength of youth these days? fickle enough that a gesture so dismissively wasteful and wastefully dismissive as leaving a light on after leaving a room will completely reassure us, allow us to stay in that room for eighteen hours every day.
it reminds me of a German CD of domestic noises. one track was ironing. another was eggs frying. another was an invisible wife getting out of bed, brushing her teeth, showering, combing her hair, dressing and going out the door, maybe with the light still on.
and the common myth about the lonesome, aging truck driver, or cowboy, or divorced cop, who, when faced with endless lines of asphalt and the quiet, unintrusive hum of the CB or crickets or radio, will write stories in his head about having somebody to come home to, having somebody waiting for him, having anybody at all. maybe being had in return.
at the same time a sheet of paper is infinitely thin, there are galaxies of nanometers trapped in orbit inside its width. what I'd like to find is human kindness which isn't a matter of scale, which doesn't turn pale in the face of planets or solid extrasolar masses.
the difference is such that, when I hear these stories or see these people walking with both hands in their pockets and their shoulders hunched against the cold that nobody else will make warm, I hesitate at the light switch as I'm leaving my dorm. there is a space as wide as a light switch between being in love in this world and being only a man.
-
my last class on thursdays ends at seven thirty, and on a normal day I don't get home until eight. it used to be I'd walk back with the sunset and close my door at the onset of dark. now it's setting earlier on in the evening, and I'm faced with a problem. when I leave at five thirty, do I keep the light on, just so I can feel like the phantom of the woman I love is waiting inside as I walk back at night? delude the solitude away?
the other option, shutting the lights, maybe that's more terrible than conscious self-deception. either way you admit something: either you pretend you're on your own, or you don't. if it's honesty, if it's self-respect, it doesn't matter; it also doesn't matter if you try keeping the lights on for a while, right at the onset of autumn, when the sun first starts getting lazy, and you walk in with the remotest song in your head of HER being behind the door, and when you open it, and she evaporates, even though she was only a ghost, maybe the first time all the air goes out of your room is enough.
the difference is palpable. it's the distance between the point and the pointlessness, between thinking that life without love is lifeless, and thinking that love is a meaningless dream the wakeful have.
whatever defines the space between the two has no bearing on how big it really is. myself, I believe it's as big as your heart.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
chapter four: newspaper-entities
it is impolite to listen to your ipod in public. why? because if you do, you're passively making the presumption that the reality your ears are entrenched in is more important than the one drowning everybody else. "ooh, ooh, look at me, thinking I'd be lost and trapped if I weren't constantly on the outside, oooh."
have you ever been found yourself in a room where everybody's distracted? they'll be on cell phones, reading, listening to music, or staring off into the corners, visibly hateful of the fact that, well, shit, here I find myself. what are they ignoring? is it an active state of ignorance? is it anything personal?
because, hell, why wouldn't it be personal? when two strangers are forced to confront each other's existence, it's custom to give the smallest possible acknowledgement, maybe a nod, or a pursing of the lips which is not really a smile, or a furrowing of the eyebrows which is not meant to be a frown, but just as well. what is more personal than the denial of these basic considerations? when I show up early for a class, and the only available place to sit down is next to a guy reading a newspaper, and my taking of this seat forces him to fold his newspaper into a smaller entity than the one which once it embodied, would it not be polite for him to push over a bit, maybe to reassure me that he would've gotten out of my way even if he hadn't had a newspaper to fold, or, let's be generous, if I wasn't there at all? is it that unreasonable to assume that, when I accept my position as a stranger in relation to all those around me, I want the mantle to fit comfortably and come off easily, I want the shrinkage to be as unnoticeable as possible, I would like at least a small semblance of myself to remain after I've shaved off all the important stuff and focused on what can get me out of a class of four hundred ninety people the same as I was when I went in?
I sit next to people who don't fold their newspapers, who don't look at me and then look beyond me like they hadn't at all, who don't rearrange their silverware and napkins and glasses at dinner because, who knows, bad table manners might offend me; I walk behind smokers who don't blow smoke straight up, towards their noses and eyes, because I might have an allergy or something; I read newspapers with pages out of order, because they have been read before by people who care enough not to pollute, but not enough to fix the page order. when a stranger insults another stranger, it's between those two and every stranger there's ever been, at the same time. is there any insult more potent, more crippling than that?
have you ever been found yourself in a room where everybody's distracted? they'll be on cell phones, reading, listening to music, or staring off into the corners, visibly hateful of the fact that, well, shit, here I find myself. what are they ignoring? is it an active state of ignorance? is it anything personal?
because, hell, why wouldn't it be personal? when two strangers are forced to confront each other's existence, it's custom to give the smallest possible acknowledgement, maybe a nod, or a pursing of the lips which is not really a smile, or a furrowing of the eyebrows which is not meant to be a frown, but just as well. what is more personal than the denial of these basic considerations? when I show up early for a class, and the only available place to sit down is next to a guy reading a newspaper, and my taking of this seat forces him to fold his newspaper into a smaller entity than the one which once it embodied, would it not be polite for him to push over a bit, maybe to reassure me that he would've gotten out of my way even if he hadn't had a newspaper to fold, or, let's be generous, if I wasn't there at all? is it that unreasonable to assume that, when I accept my position as a stranger in relation to all those around me, I want the mantle to fit comfortably and come off easily, I want the shrinkage to be as unnoticeable as possible, I would like at least a small semblance of myself to remain after I've shaved off all the important stuff and focused on what can get me out of a class of four hundred ninety people the same as I was when I went in?
I sit next to people who don't fold their newspapers, who don't look at me and then look beyond me like they hadn't at all, who don't rearrange their silverware and napkins and glasses at dinner because, who knows, bad table manners might offend me; I walk behind smokers who don't blow smoke straight up, towards their noses and eyes, because I might have an allergy or something; I read newspapers with pages out of order, because they have been read before by people who care enough not to pollute, but not enough to fix the page order. when a stranger insults another stranger, it's between those two and every stranger there's ever been, at the same time. is there any insult more potent, more crippling than that?
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
chapter three: stars and squares
decency can be taken away in the name of decency. this I learned from the steve wilkos show.
ignore the fact that it's verbal abuse as art form. it's impossible to go too far in insulting the guests, because there's always something legitimately wrong with them. they're deadbeat dads, wife-beaters, some of them murderers, rapists and thieves whose on-air comments are tantamount to confessions. because they're despicable, because they've all done despicable things, it's okay to treat them as "the other": warped, depraved objects which need to be hammered back into the shape of a respectable human being. this must be done, and by any means necessary.
so, okay, hypothetically, let's make that sacrifice on the altar of common sense in the name of... I don't know, the betterment of society? assume the host's insulting, demeaning, self-aggrandizing treatment of these criminal clowns is cruelly, terribly doing them good. assume what wilkos wants, deep down, is to stop people's suffering.
here we encounter two basic problems.
1) is it only the victim's suffering he wants to stop? is he so caught up in slandering and debasing his guests that he can't imagine that, maybe, in some strange, warped imitation of the black and white world he inhabits, something in the perpetrator's life triggered his repulsive behavior? not something that would excuse their actions, but something that would explain them.
wilkos requires no explanation.
the wilkos credo boils down to this: if a man sins, he becomes a sinner, no longer a man. that's a fine way to look at the world, if you don't need to look for a long time. there's no room for complexity. a thief is a thief, and that is all. until people cast out their foulest, most vile trait, they are that trait. nothing else is relevant or pertinent to a discussion of who they are.
again, assume his goal is to stop these people from hurting other people. if that were so, wouldn't he treat them like human beings? let's say it's a wife-beater he's shouting at, a guy who gets frustrated easily, a guy with violent tendencies. after wilkos is done debasing and insulting him, is he more or less likely to go home and beat the shit out of his wife and kids? he treats people like animals while expecting them to walk off the set and act like men. it doesn't work like that. it just isn't like that.
2) if he really wants to stop suffering and ease pain, why is he exploiting it with a daytime talk show? okay, so he thinks the only effective way to stop the pain is to shout the transgressors into pudding, the verbal equivalent of hooking a pair of jumper cables to their balls and letting them have it until the scum has safely exited their systems. okay. if he were that concerned with a clean sweep, a total purge of all that is sick and vile in our society, why in the name of Jesus Christ would he air the dirty-laundry part on national television?
ignore the obvious decaying of the lowest common denominator of american culture. take for granted the fact that defamation and slander is now entertainment, justified because it's being done against people who've done bad things. I'm sorry to ask, but pretend, for a moment, that we're not better than that.
here's the point: when wilkos airs these interventions, people get humiliated. publicly. they become infamous to a portion of the world large enough to pass for what is, to them, personally, the whole wide world and all its people and all of eternity, forever and ever. wilkos characterizes them as only a sinner, only a sin stitched inside a decaying husk of flesh, worth less than the mortal shells housing the vacuous space where their souls might have existed, once upon a time. the only hope he gives them is to be like him: responsible, manly, unstable. are they likely to go to bed with that in mind, looking forward to a better tomorrow? what does it help to call them worthless and unhuman, except him and his show?
maybe wilkos is ignoring buddhism, maybe he's considered that explanation, that suffering is inevitable, unavoidable, and that anything other than understanding and perseverence will only deepen the pain inside the human heart; maybe he's considered that and ignored it for the sake of his show. it would be premature to say he understands it.
it's a bit of christ dilemma, too. there's the vengeful christ, who wants to take the ax to the tree of sin. there's also the loving christ, who says the only way to treat a person, any person, righteous or wicked or any stripe inbetween, is with love, endless, selfless, unflinching love. how do you reconcile these two, the rage and the compassion? how do you turn the rotten into the pure?
oh, there is a path. and that, according to jesus, is jesus. the only way a sinner can enter heaven is through his body. only if they confess their sins, only if they pluck out every adulterous eye, burn all the chaff on their mortal bodies, do what he, personally, has declared as "the right thing to do." only if sinners take up the ax and chop at themselves in a manner jesus has deemed acceptable will they be worthy of a seat next to him at the end of everything. they have to change, and until then, the rest of us, the perfect ones, those that don't beat our wives and take care of our kids and don't cheat or steal or abuse, all we can do is be repulsed by them, hold out hopes that they'll make the only logical decision, slaughter their entire ego and embrace and imitate his.
wilkos had a man on his show one time, named joe. joe beat his girlfriends up. according to wilkos, here is what joe should've said when he came on:
"I want to apologize to those women, and you know what, Steve? I want you to show me how to be a man, and a father, and how to take care of those kids, that I brought into the world. And with your help, Steve, I can be a man just like you."
the man who offers his way as the only way to lead a good life is either a messiah or a fraud. steve wilkos is not a messiah.
ignore the fact that it's verbal abuse as art form. it's impossible to go too far in insulting the guests, because there's always something legitimately wrong with them. they're deadbeat dads, wife-beaters, some of them murderers, rapists and thieves whose on-air comments are tantamount to confessions. because they're despicable, because they've all done despicable things, it's okay to treat them as "the other": warped, depraved objects which need to be hammered back into the shape of a respectable human being. this must be done, and by any means necessary.
so, okay, hypothetically, let's make that sacrifice on the altar of common sense in the name of... I don't know, the betterment of society? assume the host's insulting, demeaning, self-aggrandizing treatment of these criminal clowns is cruelly, terribly doing them good. assume what wilkos wants, deep down, is to stop people's suffering.
here we encounter two basic problems.
1) is it only the victim's suffering he wants to stop? is he so caught up in slandering and debasing his guests that he can't imagine that, maybe, in some strange, warped imitation of the black and white world he inhabits, something in the perpetrator's life triggered his repulsive behavior? not something that would excuse their actions, but something that would explain them.
wilkos requires no explanation.
the wilkos credo boils down to this: if a man sins, he becomes a sinner, no longer a man. that's a fine way to look at the world, if you don't need to look for a long time. there's no room for complexity. a thief is a thief, and that is all. until people cast out their foulest, most vile trait, they are that trait. nothing else is relevant or pertinent to a discussion of who they are.
again, assume his goal is to stop these people from hurting other people. if that were so, wouldn't he treat them like human beings? let's say it's a wife-beater he's shouting at, a guy who gets frustrated easily, a guy with violent tendencies. after wilkos is done debasing and insulting him, is he more or less likely to go home and beat the shit out of his wife and kids? he treats people like animals while expecting them to walk off the set and act like men. it doesn't work like that. it just isn't like that.
2) if he really wants to stop suffering and ease pain, why is he exploiting it with a daytime talk show? okay, so he thinks the only effective way to stop the pain is to shout the transgressors into pudding, the verbal equivalent of hooking a pair of jumper cables to their balls and letting them have it until the scum has safely exited their systems. okay. if he were that concerned with a clean sweep, a total purge of all that is sick and vile in our society, why in the name of Jesus Christ would he air the dirty-laundry part on national television?
ignore the obvious decaying of the lowest common denominator of american culture. take for granted the fact that defamation and slander is now entertainment, justified because it's being done against people who've done bad things. I'm sorry to ask, but pretend, for a moment, that we're not better than that.
here's the point: when wilkos airs these interventions, people get humiliated. publicly. they become infamous to a portion of the world large enough to pass for what is, to them, personally, the whole wide world and all its people and all of eternity, forever and ever. wilkos characterizes them as only a sinner, only a sin stitched inside a decaying husk of flesh, worth less than the mortal shells housing the vacuous space where their souls might have existed, once upon a time. the only hope he gives them is to be like him: responsible, manly, unstable. are they likely to go to bed with that in mind, looking forward to a better tomorrow? what does it help to call them worthless and unhuman, except him and his show?
maybe wilkos is ignoring buddhism, maybe he's considered that explanation, that suffering is inevitable, unavoidable, and that anything other than understanding and perseverence will only deepen the pain inside the human heart; maybe he's considered that and ignored it for the sake of his show. it would be premature to say he understands it.
it's a bit of christ dilemma, too. there's the vengeful christ, who wants to take the ax to the tree of sin. there's also the loving christ, who says the only way to treat a person, any person, righteous or wicked or any stripe inbetween, is with love, endless, selfless, unflinching love. how do you reconcile these two, the rage and the compassion? how do you turn the rotten into the pure?
oh, there is a path. and that, according to jesus, is jesus. the only way a sinner can enter heaven is through his body. only if they confess their sins, only if they pluck out every adulterous eye, burn all the chaff on their mortal bodies, do what he, personally, has declared as "the right thing to do." only if sinners take up the ax and chop at themselves in a manner jesus has deemed acceptable will they be worthy of a seat next to him at the end of everything. they have to change, and until then, the rest of us, the perfect ones, those that don't beat our wives and take care of our kids and don't cheat or steal or abuse, all we can do is be repulsed by them, hold out hopes that they'll make the only logical decision, slaughter their entire ego and embrace and imitate his.
wilkos had a man on his show one time, named joe. joe beat his girlfriends up. according to wilkos, here is what joe should've said when he came on:
"I want to apologize to those women, and you know what, Steve? I want you to show me how to be a man, and a father, and how to take care of those kids, that I brought into the world. And with your help, Steve, I can be a man just like you."
the man who offers his way as the only way to lead a good life is either a messiah or a fraud. steve wilkos is not a messiah.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
chapter two: pet sematary
it is nice to not dig a grave for somebody else's dog.
I guarantee you, it'll cheer you up, wherever you are. I recommend finding somebody with a dog that just died- the dog, not the person- and digging a grave for that dog- not person. then try convincing the guy to put his dog in it.
am I going to believe that you- just some guy with a shovel- dug that grave, specifically for my dog, who you had no manner of finding out was dead? maybe you're just some hack dog-grave-digger, who excavates a small plot of land every weekend and cons an innocent former dog owner to put his beloved pet inside. suppose the grave doesn't fit exactly- suppose you're such a hack that allows the barest of gaps of air to interrupt my dog's body from touching the earth you bury him in, suppose there's the tiniest flaw in your emotional capacities and syntactical detail as gravedigger, suppose you misjudge the labrador of envy for the golden retriever of pride, how do I correct such a flaw in representation? what do I do, dig him back up? pretend there wasn't a story to begin with?
we carve out a piece of earth with the blunt tools the english language provides. then we con our readers into giving up their emotions to us, so we can bury them in the graves we've just made, then call them "Dog" for as long as the letters can stay there, frozen on the face of the tomb.
I guarantee you, it'll cheer you up, wherever you are. I recommend finding somebody with a dog that just died- the dog, not the person- and digging a grave for that dog- not person. then try convincing the guy to put his dog in it.
am I going to believe that you- just some guy with a shovel- dug that grave, specifically for my dog, who you had no manner of finding out was dead? maybe you're just some hack dog-grave-digger, who excavates a small plot of land every weekend and cons an innocent former dog owner to put his beloved pet inside. suppose the grave doesn't fit exactly- suppose you're such a hack that allows the barest of gaps of air to interrupt my dog's body from touching the earth you bury him in, suppose there's the tiniest flaw in your emotional capacities and syntactical detail as gravedigger, suppose you misjudge the labrador of envy for the golden retriever of pride, how do I correct such a flaw in representation? what do I do, dig him back up? pretend there wasn't a story to begin with?
we carve out a piece of earth with the blunt tools the english language provides. then we con our readers into giving up their emotions to us, so we can bury them in the graves we've just made, then call them "Dog" for as long as the letters can stay there, frozen on the face of the tomb.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
chapter one: squares
"humanity" is a pitfall good writers fall into, and better ones avoid. it's when you confuse the point, which is not to say something important, or even want to. it's not to be content with just saying whatever fits the story. it's not a pragmatic solution to feeling guilty about writing more stories than term papers.
"humanity" is what good writers pretend to serve when they run out of good ideas and start sticking together stories which are indistinguishable close up. I'm not bowing down to the literatti dogma of conflict, climax and resolution! I serve a higher truth!
that is bullshit. that is futile. that's vain more than anything else: assume a reader is already a human being. what more do you need to tell him? assume he's been alive for at least five minutes. what more could you tell him that he needs to know?
the shame of it is that it's possible to be satisfied with writing about "humanity." it's a large enough generalization to fit whatever bullshit you want to call a story. you could spend a lot of time trying to defy all the rules for writing a story- do without a setting, characters, plot, dialogue, conflict, even- without feeling a speck of guilt over what you've created.
does it invite self-reference? yes. does it invite shallowness? yes. does it do anything? no. but look how broad and sweeping my declarations are! look how species-affirming it is! doesn't it make you feel good to be a person? so decent and fuzzy and brave?
here's what I'd like to do: I'd like to beat the shit out of myself with words. without pause, without considering how best to do it or how effective it would be if I arched my arm a different way or closed my fist over poetry instead of gloving it in prose. is that so much to ask? I'd like my art to reduce me to tatters of tenderized bone, blood and meat. is that too much to expect from a college experience?
"humanity" is what good writers pretend to serve when they run out of good ideas and start sticking together stories which are indistinguishable close up. I'm not bowing down to the literatti dogma of conflict, climax and resolution! I serve a higher truth!
that is bullshit. that is futile. that's vain more than anything else: assume a reader is already a human being. what more do you need to tell him? assume he's been alive for at least five minutes. what more could you tell him that he needs to know?
the shame of it is that it's possible to be satisfied with writing about "humanity." it's a large enough generalization to fit whatever bullshit you want to call a story. you could spend a lot of time trying to defy all the rules for writing a story- do without a setting, characters, plot, dialogue, conflict, even- without feeling a speck of guilt over what you've created.
does it invite self-reference? yes. does it invite shallowness? yes. does it do anything? no. but look how broad and sweeping my declarations are! look how species-affirming it is! doesn't it make you feel good to be a person? so decent and fuzzy and brave?
here's what I'd like to do: I'd like to beat the shit out of myself with words. without pause, without considering how best to do it or how effective it would be if I arched my arm a different way or closed my fist over poetry instead of gloving it in prose. is that so much to ask? I'd like my art to reduce me to tatters of tenderized bone, blood and meat. is that too much to expect from a college experience?
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