Being Me!

Did I write about this? In principle, that's a simple thing to discover. I could do a computer aided search (what computers are good for), though I might miss the number of times I've written about it personally to someone, or prior to its electronic inscription. Does it even matter? Am I afraid of boring you (terrified, apparently)?

It seems odd that I might have missed it in the prior diatribe that I compulsively resurrect as the crucial narrative of my life, but I just can't remember, and haven't the time to read and find out. I do know that it happened, and did even recently receive, anonymously through the mail via my parents who didn't know what to do with it, an actual video of the events surrounding the occurrence. So I have documentary evidence, though that itself, PoPo, must change the occurrence I remember.

The event I have in mind was a drowning, and its striking aftermath, the iconic flash of my entire life, precisely as lived. Different from a dream. Different from fantasy. Precisely not a narrative, because the entire thing was present all at once in crystal clarity. And then gone, as if with my death, but more precisely with my surfacing.

I'd started down a challenging rapids up North, along the French River in Ontario. My older brother was in the bow, and I, the heavier of the pair and oddly the better helmsman, was at the stern. The canoe was pathetically inadequate, a low freeboard shell of oilcanning flimsy fiberglass. These canoes made no sense for rental, and less for voyaging, but they were what was available. They must have been meant for casual resort vacationers to paddle around in, and not for the sort of Canadian canoe-culture we'd all grown to be such a part of. Odd.

The steep and deep rapids ended in a whirlpool, not so evident on the surface. Our canoe had frustratingly filled along the plunge; a better canoe would not have. We piloted well enough. I remember sensing the canoe sink below as I was treading water at the bottom of the run; I exercised the absurd caution to give it a slight tug, meant to induce its drift back toward the surface since I wasn't even sure these playthings had any proper positive buoyancy. I wasn't sure it would ever surface once completely submerged. It was a momentary lapse in logical thinking, but in body sense it worked at the time.

In the event, my slight tug was exercised in the reverse direction; when I lifted my head for air there was no surface to be found. Only a slight tug was necessary to propel my own negative buoyancy (I have famously dense bones) downward. I hadn't caught a breath. I hadn't intended to swim underwater, a skill I actually did excel at, especially with regard to duration.

I know I have rehearsed this story a thousand times, and a few of those even in writing. For sure, that should make this time incrementally more instructive, right? Though inevitably less true. At the conclusion of this episode, my brother was making a panicked face, and his lifesaving training preventing him from approach to my choking self. I'd been down for what must have seemed an interminable interval. He pushed a paddle toward me.

During the interval, I'd lost track of up or down - I had no sense of which way to kick, and my feet were encumbered in the kicking by sneakers, worn against the rocks in case of capsize. I'd exhausted my brain's ability to inhibit any sucking in. I gave up. And in that interval between my drowning and the evident after-the-fact sucking in of a better mixture of air than the bubbly one I'd assumed, my entire life to that moment was before me, in all detail, and with duration infinitely expanded. I know I had no sense that I was at any surface. I was gone.

And so I now wonder at two connected things; connected by my confusion about them. The sense that I am confused in each case by the very same thing.

I am confused that anyone can harbor an illusion that the self could be suspended, on ice as it were, or even in hibernation during long space voyages. The brain is properly dialogic and dialectic and requires for mind's persistence that its inner activity is constant and, most importantly, continuous. This much is entirely clear to me. Stop the action, and the thing itself is gone. The ideation of the self, which is the emergent as-if phenomenon of a narrative which becomes the self. There can be no interval between past and future, in precisely the sense that Zeno's paradox must be solved and re-solved by the reductive overlapping of any final is-ness of the interval. My then and future self, of necessity, overlap, and a break is conceptually impossible.

So, there is, clearly, a slowing down beyond recovery of the quickness of self's substrate. A final bounding surface. And so here is my more important confusion: I cannot conceive my own shortfall in courage. Why do I persist in a life hardly lived? Why do I labor as a galley slave without apparent bonds. Why do I fear gesture toward "creativity," when all that could be lost or gained is my already and ever present conviction that I am a fool?

I often wonder if the experience of death has formed my chains or the very prospect of liberation. Am I more tentative? Why not, like the iconic cancer survivor or heart-attack awakener, an enriched and enriching sense of life properly lived?

I feel bound by love. I feel bounded. My protest, familiarly, has been to smoke and drink and more recently and soberly to disregard, dogmatically, any attention paid to earnest impositions of caution in the form of calorie counting and statin ingestion. These I find more deadly to my soul than the oh-so-unfortunate demise I evidently court. I mourn in anticipation for those left behind, but my protest most properly is against my very own self for not daring to live. I refuse to perpetuate this drudgery.

At best, my writing hints, like Michelangelo's slaves, at a form that would be emergent. But mine is the naive version, where, perhaps at best, proportions and angles have not been entirely ruined, since intuition has held back from too many hits of the chisel; so unlike those apocalyptic masterworks, whose perfection is their very precise incompletion. There is no doubt there that a genius is at work. And here a fool.

But even the very rocks for Michelangelo had already suggested the form within, and so the very first hit of chisel by me could only ruin the outcome; pulverize the substrate. I drink therefore I am. It is my only precise choice. The intervals melt together.

The thing that would terrorize me the most, for certain, would be the very prospect of immortality (I hardly fear its actuality, which is plainly absurd). Then faced with death always and only being a choice. Then faced with all sensational boundaries being always and only self described. Then faced with the Groundhog Day recurrent attempt to craft my heart; that thing at the center of me me me no matter how many times I did come back to it the very possibility to come back over and over and over again could only ensure its pulverization complete. (Isn't this the way we all do live?)

The other day I was quite certain that unaccustomed heartburn was my end. I hesitated to call out, so prospectively embarrassed was I at the vision of ambulance and lights at the Diocesan offices. I literally could not imagine living down the event (already inscribed in the annals of the HR office is my recent remove from sanity, when I requested police escort away from my death-like midnight den, in anticipation of expectant arrivals for which I was unprepared - did I tell that story yet? It can be made very very funny.).

I think it was the shot of adrenalin at the shade in prospect which made the heartburn so seeming terminal. I rehearsed my death and was glad I did not announce it. The embarrassment of being wrong remains far too great an inhibition, and so in life's narration, this remains heart-burn only, with adrenalin chaser, and far from the dilation of that beating interval beyond its proper limit. There were no flashbacks, nor would there be on the gurney. Nor ever, perhaps, again, except for these compulsive tellings.

Gobama! The End of Personal History

It's taken me a while. I don't have anything profound to say, but whatever I do have to say certainly has evolved over the past few days - not because of events on the political stage so much as because of events on the home front.

I did weep to watch all those seemingly ecstatic souls in the Chicago park, and then to witness the actual event - well, via the magic of television. I'd pulled back from my own involvement in the campaign, perhaps after Obama became such a consummate politician and I was no longer sure if he was that real deal. But then it hit me that the entire world was watching with wonder as we apparently triumphed over what has been called so often our original sin.

Granted, this particular black man seems no threat to white women, and he can't even dance. His wife and kids fill the Kennedy role, just as well as he does, right down to all the ways in which they are attractive to the rest of us. For me, there was only mild lingering regret that it had to be a black man before a woman, but that simply forces an examination of how willing I am to let my own ideology be swayed by the happenstance of events.


I'm making rationalizations about how, on the world stage, getting a woman into that position matters less than getting a black man there. I come up with SAT-style analogies Hillary:woman::Barack:black man. And made as if history somehow rehearses what ought to be rather than what is. As if history is inevitably right, simply because we only get one. Not very flattering to either of them.

But then the flattery would have to be in the terms of what we're striving to move beyond. So, Hillary's not feminine enough? Not beautiful enough? And Barack not enough of a stud muffin? How intensely politically (!!) incorrect!

I even find myself swept along in new found belief in "democracy" as an actual resolver of power rather than a ritual construct to sanction the real power as it deploys itself; as in democratic capitalism, or whatever bogus pairing the Bushies indulged in, where democracy is the empty ceremony on the face of what the Europeans have taken to calling savage capitalism.

America the uncultivated.

Still, I can move well beyond how short Obama falls from my preferred ideologies, since I remain convinced that at this particular moment what truly matters is the ability to stir belief, and to do so on a global level. I just can't imagine Ralph Nader pulling that off. The massive juggernaut of the global economy has to be guided carefully, and with nuanced sensitivity for inertias of various sorts, in various directions. That requires willingness on the part of masses of people, which in turn requires belief.

Beyond the marvel at this miracle candidate at this miracle moment in history, are some less comfortable features of Obama the man. As was Bill Clinton, this is a man without a father, and also without, to a certain very real extent, a family history. Just because this is reciprocal to W., doesn't put them in any different category. After all, Bush reinvented himself almost in opposition to his family history, in ways to caricature - certainly for the Europeans - everything crass about Americans - not the Bush family legacy. Bushes don't tend toward born again. And their drinking moves ceremoniously from secret society hazings toward mastery of a tonic to enhance rather than compromise control. An abstemious born-again is almost by very definition a failure in that bloodline.

So the question remains whether this is the only kind of American president possible anymore. Whether a man who is not fundamentally a loner could ever sustain the colossal transference which the pageant of democracy, so called, burdens him with. And if Obama is as intelligent and genuine as he seems, then is he perforce the last president? Who else among us could survive and remain poised at that particular pressure point? Who could remain believable?

I am pleased most with the careful way in which he is reconstructing the role, in particular so that it can be filled by someone else. He is sober in his avoidance of any semblance of rock star persona. He has studied the mistakes of both Clinton and Bush.

In the person of the president, someone real has to make wise and ethical judgements, based on human understanding, which means experience, empathy, as well as some literacy. But that person has to exist in seemingly impossible relation to a role, which has to be acted very much as if one were a real human being, knowing all the while that anything real (a blow job, or the wrong kind of vanity, say) will entirely destroy the illusion to the detriment, certainly not of the person, but of the person in the role.

The most astonishing illusion rehearsed by the American pageant of democracy is that the person in the role wants and wanted it. How strange a taboo there is against admitting the obvious, that being president represents such self-sacrifice that only those without family embeddedness could possibly pursue it. Which surely explains Obama's stumble for not answering Couric's impertinent question about why presidents sexually stray so often. He might have highlighted the importance of what nuclear privacy, succor and repose remains to him with Michelle. But that would be to tell a lie just too impossibly big, and so now that I think about it I'll have to forgive him that one - as I have long since forgiven Spitzer his succumbing to a diabolically brilliant sting (operation).

So, and here is the reason for my delayed response, we have a president who is very much forced to become, as it were for the public good, a person outside the narrative of his own life. If he truly wanted the job - the power, since it would be absurd to want the responsibility - that would make sociopathy a job requirement. In this now matured television age, he must act toward his once-loved ones in a manner whose conformity to near absolute standards belies any possibility that those behaviors could ever be genuine. To have a self under those circumstances would be an absurd expectation.

The self must be put aside and held in suspension for at least the duration of the term(s) in office, unless, like W. there's nothing to suspend, in which case extended restorative vacations become possible, since you were never in the first place actually doing the nation's work, only being, kinglike, the nation-synecdoche.

The changeover is mind wrenching. Or is it?

We have in Obama someone singlularly capable of filling the role, of making the right and good judgements; whose contrast to W. could not be more extreme along almost every vector. And yet we have also, because of that capacity for judgement, the liklihood that there will be far less wrenching exercises of arbitrary authority. Now when exercise of authority might be precisely what is most needed.

Sure, there will be plenty of yeoman labor, reinstating controls on the financial markets, reconstructing environmental and industrial and labor protections. Putting back together a sound polity, in better harmony with the rest of the world. Dismantling imperial ambitions. But if the Bush presidency represented the sort of audacity only possible when accompanied by ignorance - a kind of appalling incapacity for good judgement in favor of fundamentalist absolutes - economic, moral and behavioral - how can we expect Obama to channel the better desires and ambitions of ordinary people up against the raw power of capital, whose bitch W. so transparently was.

Obama cannot be our bitch, since we the people hardly know what we want (there is never any ambiguity about what capital "wants"). At best, we the people want wise leadership, to be enacted in our name if not with our very close control. We will demand a new definition of better, if we will be forced to let go of consumerism and techological comforts and excitements as a way to move in that direction (better). Better will have to be in a more human direction. Better will have to prefer the neighbors to the television. Better will have to break down some mythology about individualism.

So, here I am enacting the end of personal history. My life is a novel, of which I am more the reader than the author. The patterns surprise me, always after the fact. But there can be no question that I am now in a self-conscious stance to my own life which makes personal commitment no longer possible.

And now I would be critic and author both? An impossible combination. The author must discover all the ways his characters might behave, and then write the one possible history out of which a character becomes known. The critic would prevent any and all forward motion. But the reader retains some distance. It is my consciousness which escapes toward open skys, drifting apart and beyond this meaningless sound and fury, which is yet my own.

It is indeed a new day. A good day. A day when life becomes possible again. Projection returns home. As with Mother Theresa's stance toward God (radical doubt apparently), Obama has clearly already decided that - and this is both how and why he accepted the burden - that his faith in democracy is unconditional. And that should enable an honest brokering on our behalf, with the vectors forcing compromise more fully exposed. It is after all a different kind of gaming of the system which overpowers by organization and fundraising rather than studied manipulations of fear and prejudice. This was a competition between things and their seeming.

Hurrah!

The Soul's Residence

Here are three apparently unrelated happenstances in my life today (now weeks ago!), the relation of which is my attempt to tie them together (by definition, it would seem). They coincide in me, and therefore tying them together has at least as much justification as any other self-definition, even if their interrelation doesn't seem to have any more significance than that coincidence.


If I can find something by which actually to tie them together, then I might even have demonstrated a way toward the self beyond my self; the process of writing as it relates to the self - specifically the generation of the self - and I might even touch upon something broader, relating to that elusive and impossible linguistic trick and travesty, truth in the abstract. The self, I think, represents more an achievement, or rather an aspiration, than a given, and its trueing is a process toward what can easily be mistaken for an essence, since only death can represent its accomplishment.

First is the event of my daughter's Mock Trial competition, at which she is a widely touted champ. This competition rehearses the very formal and formalized ways in which truth in the particular is arrived at in our society (and doesn't the need for such formality itself mock the very notion of truth in the abstract?). I walked into the event this afternoon, not incidentally, with her teammate who is a first generation American, and whose parents are Indian. My occasion to learn this was a text-messaging barrage with my absent-from-the-event other daughter, who freely addresses me as "loser" and worse, which I suspected, rightly as he replied, would not go over so well with this particular teammate's father. Hold that thought.

Next is an email from my sister, relating how she did send to my other sister, without compromising copy to myself, a reportedly straightforward bit of truthtelling, which we are both (my unimplicated sister and myself) convinced my implicated sister needs to allow to penetrate her own Fundamentalist-ly impervious soul. I had previously opined as to the futility of such truthtelling, having in mind the ways in which those bent on defending, say, Sarah Palin as promising commander-in-chief are apparently unbowed by the reasonable power of any mitigating observations or arguments.

Finally, an unbidden email from my former girlfriend, mother of my own aborted child, leaking some pride at the upcoming musical performance of her own daughter, of an age somewhere between my own two, I believe. This I received as a very pleasant surprise, and even wrote, or rather thumbed, a no doubt very strangely packed response from my phone, letting her know, among other things, of the sad and more recently bewildering events which have befallen my youngest sister because of her, so-called, sociopath husband, again so-called. My former girlfriend had been quite close to that sister. They felt some affinity. And now her daughter shares the violin with my sister. I could not help but be struck.

Among these events intervened several automobile passages past the mournful and apparently Catholic protesters in front of the gynecological clinic, which must be one of very few remaining abortion providers in the city (I'm sure there are plenty which don't cater to the under resourced, and which therefore are less handy to the protest). Also, the revelation that my younger daughter had escaped the out-of-control escalation at a post-Halloween party, just before the police arrived to mortify those - among them many of my daughter's friends - who hadn't beat a hasty enough retreat.


As is typical for me, I wondered at my own absence of anger or judgement. Just the facts, sweetie. I was wondering how justified was her boyfriend's anger at her for her apparent abandonment of him, more than I was wondering about any betrayal of me, though still for the purpose of gauging "character." The jury is out, though my own championing of my daughter, whatever her shortcomings of character, intelligence, argumentation, behavior, and so forth, has long long since been decided (unconditionally in her favor, should you doubt).

I am also proud to the point of choking up when in the presence of my older daughter doing her Mock Trial argumentations. I am not so much the perfect Machiavellian fan, finding only fault in the opposition, whose efforts I also do credit. I just think my daughter's the greatest, and the pride comes as it were unbidden, and quite beyond my control.

So now my brother-in-law, and this will be absolutely no surprise to those who read the world on the basis of some literacy, has all along exemplified that very sort of strong fatherhood whose passing I mildly mourn, at least in the sense that it would have both grounded my pride and conditioned my (in the event lacking) righteous anger at my various daughters for their straying beyond the pale of acceptable behavior, almost regardless of who was doing the accepting. (this even despite my own implication for having made the straying itself stray so far from invoking any inward fear on their part for the traipsing).

Now there also was a kind of fourth event (I've always been mystified at how one can enumerate, prior to the utterance, the precise number of points one is about to elaborate, as though they were elaborated ahead of time, in the mind. In this case now, I think I was really being arbitrary when I said "three", since as soon as I said it, the number of potential candidates fairly started marching across my memory for the day.) But this fourth does almost rise to election as an event, and not just a part of the background noise, like the abortion protesters, or my younger daughter's reveleations.

My good friend, with whom I have enjoyed many a reckless night and day emailed me a celebration of Hunter S. Thompson, written by Johnny Depp, by the sending of which I was implicitly being compared to this great man (not Depp!). Apart from the mournful fact that I have never given any evidence of life lived quite large, I did also recognize, with plenty of regret, that to the extent that I ever did come close, I have fallen that far away from anything of the sort. I am now entirely cowed, and devoted to paying bills. My passions are very effetively drowned in liquor, broadly meant; that selfsame category of stimulant which in company excites rather than quenches same.


These days, about the only thing which qualifies me for affinity with Thompson, notwithstanding that drinking alone would never qualify as life lived large, is the fact that I chafe acutely at my abstention for the purpose of corralling these thoughts together. My work, most days, is done by the time I even think of writing, and being done, I desire only release and oblivion. And even this day, it seemed I was working to ferry the girls and their various teammates around the town, and to guide relatives and friends to the right Part, and so on and so forth. But I remain clear of thought.


Well, you be the judge.



So, I don't understand why I remain so shy of myself. It pains me actually, and on occasion I really strain to catch a glimpse of how I might appear from the outside (don't we all?), as today when I realized that my daughter's former high school teacher, to whom I look very much up, but who certainly now appears much younger than me, and to whom I could claim actual seniority of academic credentials, might regard me as something other than the fuck up I regard myself. I think I once learned that she might have aspired to teach in the school I once headed. I thought of this as she conditioned her encouragement of my thoughts for my daughters' college choices by the limitations of their high school's reach; the one at which this teacher still teaches.


Was this a reprimand for my older daughter's reaching? (she was rebuffed by various Ivys, despite an astounding set of credentials which hoist her well beyond the school-limited transcript, by standardized proof not just of her potential, but of her actual achievement). A reminder not to commit the same sin twice? I wonder what it might feel like actually to be looked up to, by potential drinking buddies especially, as Hunter S. Thompson was by Johnny Depp.


I guess you have to start with some inward esteem, and that is the thing so hard to achieve. I feel incredibly fortunate for the peer-based pairings I have enjoyed, never wanting to ratchet them outward to something larger than is my actual life. But even when my life has expanded, I never did realize any sense of my own deserving, and I've always thought that this subjective lack defined and continues to define my aloneness, if not lonliness (that last remains only aspirational). A spiraling inward and downward which was my epigraphic photo and only remembrance in my proper class's yearbook from college.


Well, so my sister wondered if there was such a thing as too much conscience, as she agonized about what to say and how. She finally sent her sharp words entirely on her own, without so much as checking in with me, and even declining to let me know just what she did say.


And I think rather more in the direction of this reticence I feel, which is directed back at me, and not as something good to have. This is surely not any overabundance of conscience, and I project the selfsame lack upon my sister. In my case, it is something more toward the direction of, if not my sociopathic brother-in-law, then my God-beholden younger sister who has virtually abandoned her own now thrice unwanted and unrespected daughter.


She herself, this daughter, is coming to terms with what it means NOT to have been aborted, and therefore never quite affirmatively wanted. My brother-in-law's example of the very thing I lack, does not by his absense of conscience somehow confer to me its presence. I know that I am more like my implicated sister in her betrayal of her daughter, when I feel no outrage toward my own daughter's behavior, than I am like a good father who offers structure, support and guidance. I know that this is something reciprocal, and joined for that, to my own father's spirit-killing ownership of his children's behaviors as that thing from which I had to escape, although less so than my mother's spirit-killing ownership of my soul (control freak/naricissist - must be a common-enough pairing).



So, I do applaud my unimplicated sister for her liberation from me, to the extent that I am proxy for our father, but even more so to the extent that she finds me articulate, sensitive and wise in matters of intellectual and emotional understanding. I am rather proud that I didn't want even to know, much less to second guess, what she said and why. I simply trusted that it was hers to say, and felt glad that she'd risen up to say it as and on her own. I also felt no small amount relieved.

* * *

I dipped my big toe in, starting with Violence, and liked it and felt I even could read it. Then I dove right in, making perhaps a page a day, with The Parallax View (I'm going to attempt, assiduously, to avoid trying to find the characters to put those silly marks over the z's in the guy's name, so the links will have to do).

Now, what I want to say is that this guy manages to say, almost precisely, the very thing I'm trying to say here (here?), or rather to work out how to write here, so that I can eventually write it somewhere more appropriate, or just give it up as a crazed quest. The trouble is that here is a credible scholar saying the very same thing, but the trouble is that he's way less readable than I ever hope to be (!!!).

I came across this brilliant writing, allegedly from Chomsky, just by accident while reading about Zizek (there, I did it without the proper marks) in the handy Wikipedia. Chomsky beautifully trashes PoMo in all the lovely ways, pointing out its hermetic existence within the academy, and its utter disconnect from any useful efforts to better our lot. Principally, he distinguishes that sort of scholarship from any other by the fact not only that he can't understand it himself, but that he can't find any self-professed experts to lead him to any better understanding than the one he can arrive at himself, which is that it's all gibberish and not to be understood.

So, it's a fine thing for me to claim that yup, I'm trying to say exactly what Zizek says, only I'm trying to say it in a much simpler way, without all the philosophical jargon, and, perhaps therefore, with more powerful results. I'm trying for the much simpler scientific method. But how disgustingly cheeky of me to claim affinity to someone so far my better, especially when I'm only a tiny way into the impenetrable book!

The Chomsky article then reminded me of a brilliant little pamphlet recording a famous dialog between Chomsky and Foucault, the one in English, the other in French, which I came across quite by accident in the local indie bookstore and thought so brilliant I recommended it to someone, who, rather predictably, couldn't find any interest there.

So, what is one to do? You think you have this understanding, this way to construe things, which is so important that all sorts of people need to come to terms with it, and you can't make it interesting enough for one single other soul even to get a start with it. I guess people need a hook in. I don't think very many people are reading this Zizek book, though I could be wrong, since it's plenty commented on, and the book has nice production values. I mean, it's frickin' brilliant and all, and I guess he built up his cred in the field, and so forth.

But back to Chomsky for a moment, who, I think, dismisses the PoMo folks in the very same way I would dismiss the religious fundies, or the people who will defend Palin regardless of what an idiot she manifests herself to be. It's like they get convinced by some internal narrative which trumps all and any attempts to penetrate it.

I myself know a certain attraction to PoMo writings - to that kind of social criticism - which gets caught up in word play and a kind of argument which is just as hermetic as the academy-bound society which are its sole practitioners.



So there! In these words, the soul resides? By these words, my soul's residence is constructed? Is it sad to say that I think perhaps so? These words as analog for that heart construction that is and has been my every behavior, to make me, quite simply, recognizeable to those who would love me. And if I do make the mistake of not sternly enough structuring my own daughters' lives, at least I do so up against the impossibility anymore, post modernly, of knowing God directly as those very very evil practitioners claim to do. My love strives for liberation.



. . . but for the transgression of posting this, which at best should remain as notes for future labored elaboration to the point of readability. But isn't that what guarantees my safety (and yours?)

Simple Twists of Fate

. . . or why is it that the offices of J. Edgar Hoover, HUAC and the Roman Inquisition seem to follow such similar patterns. There is some power structure, and some relation to that power structure which gets understood as orthodoxy. And then there are some very clever practitioners at some distance who, largely because of their cleverness, excite the paranoid suspicion of the orthodox, who move ruthlessly to destroy the clever ones.

As usual, I know nothing or very little of the history of these things, but perhaps enough - as with physics, say - to offer a kind of explanation or ordering of my own. The pattern is familiar enough in my own life's experience, so that it seems to matter little whether I am projecting my own observations large, or the larger observations onto my own teapot domain. We all know - in my case it was the new high school principal, in yours it might be Cheney, say - the pattern of small-mindedness upsetting literacy.

What I really want to understand is how things meant by language change and evolve, and how those changes can represent such real and actual threats to power structures. And why it is that there always seem to be shameful sexual practices behind the paranoid prosecutions, and that these sexual practices always get projected outward onto the persecuted.

Maybe these are minor subtexts which have been and deserve to be discounted by history and historians, but the occasion for these musings on my part now is my reading of a minor history of the order of priests which founded the school I once headed. The priests involved with that school lived in orbit around the school's founder and his vaguely libertine, but certainly intellectual, apostasy, vis-a-vis the orders more central obedient membership. I seem to recall that spies were periodically sent.

I looked only askance at such things, not really wanting to know very much about the politics of the school's history, and only wanting to evaluate the stories, pro and con, about the school's still then living founder as I formed my own opinion: at the least he shared my canniness about candid self-exposure and we hit it off very well. I enjoyed drinking, which combined well with his apparent obsession with it, as evidenced by the empty bottles left for his/my secretary to remove each morning right next to his feminine high-heeled pumps. I think he was a rather short man.

More recently, I have become aware that many other things apparent only at the periphery of my vision were likely more toward the scandalous truth lately revealed by the Church more generally. It may even be that I should be proud of the affirmative act of closing the school, more than or at least as much as I feel responsibility for my failure to keep it open. If I was only directly aware of those things within my purview, that is because it was properly a survival technique in the face of extreme fiscal duress, all under my charge. And I operated without benefit of any understanding of the wider economic climate in which I was trying to preserve an already virtually defunct institution.

Youth does contain unmeasured boldness, and had I then the broader sense I now suffer, I surely would never have accepted the responsibilities offered me.

The school was premised on the idea that a certain very small subset of the student population was capable to learn at a rate and level of sophistication which made their attendance at common schools problematic, if not outright abusive. These children were denoted "gifted", which was not a politically impossible premise on which to found a school during the days leading up to Sputnik's launch. That denotation also provided cover for the otherwise unsavory thoughts and practices of the school's freethinking founder. Perhaps there was even a beatnik mood to indulge freethinking, and provide its very own precincts, safe from the susceptibilities of the more common children, nuns, priests and other mentors.

Over its brief history, the school never could decide its identity along the continuum from Great Books essentialism to Summerhill progressivism, but we did consider ourselves freethinkers all, and peculiarly licensed to lure, entice, cajole, discipline and even encourage our charges to enter the heady space of the open mind. I think at the end we held out the enlightenment promise of liberation both secular and divine from the cloddish weight of ignorance.

The particular instrument for entrance was the IQ test, administered without conflict of interest, or at least without inward conflict of conscience, by the school's founder himself, which it actually took me some time after taking over the school to understand or even really know about. I'm very slow that way!

Now for a while, the IQ test basked in the same kind of pristine sanctity as other sorts of measuring tools; the slide rule, the microscope and such. It was meant to provide a way to identify those children, presented to us perhaps by ego-boundary challenged parents, or best by parents who wondered if their child's reaction to schooling more typically administered might be an indication of the system's, rather than the child's, inadequacies. It was meant to cut through other proxies for intelligence including gender, teacher-toadiness, wealth and good looks, for some examples, to discover the secret unschooled quality of mind which would guarantee entrance to our fine and liberal institution.

Of course, in practice many dolts and pretty children were admitted too, and the school's collection of teachers included the dread indoctrinators alongside the most gifted openers of minds. There would always be a tension between the Aristotelean pronouncers of essential and quintessential truths and the proto-post-modernists who could and would believe most anything short of true religion and other superstitions. And because we were bound by our mission to admit any measurably qualified students regardless of their ability to pay, the school was systemically bankrupt. This in the lead-up financial meltdowns of the 80's when I, foolish dolt, thought I could make sense of things - such youthful folly dwarfs what I attempt here.

So anyhow, it warms somehow the more perverse parts of my shrunken heart to find that this order of Priests may congenitally, as it were from the beginning, be prone to sloppy practices and by them to excuse sordid undertakings in the guise of bringing enlightenment to the unwashed. The order may attempt to excuse itself as being embedded in a Church during its darkest days of Inquisition and power over Galilean Truth, somehow finding it's shortcomings inevitable within a culture it had to sneak around in as the only way toward flourish. Hell, I had the very same excuses ready to hand, although I'm pretty sure I drew my lines more clearly than had many of my institutional forbears.

Back in this sordid past of the Church, in ways now known to be congruent with its more recent past, it was always more imperative (!!) to protect the institution than its charges. So sins of priests were construed as peccadilloes. Reassignments were made. The innocents (the molested children) were not considered spiritually far enough along to suffer either guilt or harm, since in any case they were not considered morally capable of culpability. The grave risk of harm was to the soul of the priest, and by him to the body politic of the greater Church.

I think it accurate that tortures and eventual murders administered by the broader Inquisition were always justified as in defense of the soul which had been betrayed by its fleshy owner and his benighted mind. The screams and howls, in other words, emanated from that part which needed destroying, and never from the essential soul in dire need of salvation. So, just as the needs of the flesh are denied existence by the simple expedient of being ignored among priests, the failings of the flesh are also denied existence by that same expedient - act as well as innocent participants.

How telling that the inheritor of authority for this very self-same Inquisition (with whom I so recently confessed falling in love, alack!) is now our Pope. How interesting that abortion, which rescues so many and so much is now the main - at least in the arena of politics - preoccupation of a Church so bent on locating the soul and defending it.

This is what I want to reconcile. Well, perhaps you can already tell that there will be no reconcilliation, any more than there can be with any of life's paradoxes and antinomies. So, to be honest, I think this is what I want to expose and terminate. Paradoxes, ironies, and antinomies need to be embraced and celebrated, I declare, because it is the actual scintillating opposition between and among impossible otherness which is the very ground of this thing called life, which it is my (and your) mission to preserve.

But it is surely ironic that the same church which discarded, and likely still does, the souls of innocents as needing no protection when fouled by the very fathers pledged to nurture and protect them now wants to protect those radically unformed souls in utero, when so evidently their best protection would be to torture the flesh right off them before they even quicken. And how ironic that it is the very sin of their creation (because otherwise these fetuses would be wanted) which forces these souls' owners to face a life of likely torture.

Well, I guess now that I come to think about it, perhaps the Church is being entirely consistent!

I was surprised to learn (I said I'm slow) that among Galileo's sins was the notion of atomic (versus smooth and continuous) structure to matter, and that such secondary qualities as color might inhere more in the knower than the known. These are matters also of teasing out the soul from its substrate, and I guess the Church finds itself without choice given its prior commitment to incarnation, transubstantiation and the rest.

So, my particular blasphemy (will I be ordered to appear?) is to call this the moment in history where the Church's body needs to be tortured from its endangered soul, since it is clear to me at least that the Jesus we can know would not condone its (the Church's) self-defense against the interests of those children it has harmed.

Which means, I think, that recent exposures do more than harm the Church's balance sheet. Come to think of it, the same thing is happening with the J. Edgar Hoover legacies. These homophobic, sexophobic containers of inner filth are actually facing their final come-uppance, now that the soul is found not so much in us as about us.

This is the story of Galileo's atoms too. These turn out not to have any perceptible existence without at the same time releasing something of their secondary qualities. The soul in utero, in other words, is no more possible than earthly containment of immortality.

So, there can be no irony in torture. But positions black and white must always be ironic. The Church has become an ironic institution, at odds certainly with itself, if not with its very history and origins, which are sordid indeed. The cool thing is that we all do contain the seeds of our own undoings, typically at the very moment of our certainties.

Now, I shall have to bone up on the meaning of irony! Back to reading that very telling tale . . .

Laying it on - Chapter 8 from 1983

They were staying in a delicious old boarding house, all rustic and wooden. It might have been a journey to the past, but for their modern activity. On the second night, there was a great party around a campfire. Howie liked everyone very much and seemed to have been accepted. He was a good diver, and always eager. In those cold waters balkiness and problems are bound to arise, and he hadn't caused any. He'd proven his maturity.

They were drinking wildly around the fire. Hardened divers all, and full of lust and jokes and free talk. Howie had carried with him the absolute taboo against drinking which had been found, rationally, in opposition to the friv­olity of his peers to whom he always wanted to remain other. They cajoled him, they taunted him; they threatened him with his youth. He had admitted that he'd never drunk anything before, but he hadn't revealed his age. It was apparent that he liked them, and they weren't about to oust him or make him feel bad, but Fred was incredulous.

"I can't believe I've got a diving buddy who doesn't drink or smoke. Man, that just isn't done."

Howie was all smiles as he watched the swilling in that tonic which so effectively dissolves all social barriers. He wanted to be a part, but he was stilted and distant. Vulgar­ity was choked before it could be uttered. His mind thought feverishly for jokes that might include him, but they all fell flat in his mind. If only he could relinquish control -- relax and enter. But booze was frivolous and disgusting --it killed and ruined people. He knew the statistics for drunk-driving and could fairly preach on this topic about which he had no intimate knowledge.

A tough Canadian came over all full of his drink and vulgar accent. He bore the scars of a brawler, and it was clear that his earnest friendliness must be courted. He allowed his hatred of Yanks to be softened by the machismo of diving. And some of the divers had been born in Canada. Ah, but who of you are real men. I'll show you what a real Canadian man can do. Give me an axe.

"Alright, try chopping that log there."

The burliest of the divers gave a mighty and practised swing which left hardly a mark on the massive oak.

"On, no, that ain't the way now."

The Canadian weaved over to the block and took a gentle swing which hardly slowed as the axe-head neatly parted the log with just a whisper of a crack. Laughter all around. Howie was awed. To find with no thickness (the blade) the space in that which is joined only on the surface. The belief in two pieces behind the appearance of wholeness. The impossible solidity of the log so easily rendered a fiction.

He performed the feat over and over again. He must have been buoyed by the success of his display. The combination of the diver's prowess at what was remote to him and his own proof of capability must have warmed him to the group. He became genuinely friendly. There was no more contest. He taught them all how to give the head of the axe a twisting momentum so that when the blade enters the wood, the sharp jerk of the axe's twist will pry the log apart. There were scattered successes, but all were impressed by the knowledge.

He couldn't have imparted all he knew, but he made the honest attempt. He was a woodchopper, and it would have been impossible to convey a technique that in the end was no technique. But he'd figured something out that could be told. If they were to forget him, it would be of no use.
They had to look deeper than the technique to find his sec­rets, but most forgot and would forget the technique too when it didn't seem to work. Or if it did work, they'd have forgotten him anyway. The words that don't convey, and yet manage to make the teller extraneous -- mortal in comparison to their immortality.

Howie, at least, had gotten a fuller message. Somehow in the course of the merriment it had become alright to drink. With wild abandon and determination mixed, he took a few sips from a wine bottle. It wasn't a message from the woodchopper or a response to the repeated coaxing that start­ed him. It was something simple falling away. Something --some words -- had been made too much of and they were being sloughed off. Who? the teacher of our hearts.

Throughout the evening, he consumed perhaps a bottle of beer and a glass of wine. He could barely walk. His smiles were goofier and he had less to say -- less chance of partak­ing in any way than he had had before. Everyone was drawing farther away. This was an initiation. It was not yet given to him to partake of the other world. He was reeling from its otherness. Stupefied by the unaccustomed lethargy of his sense. The world was spinning and it was with some difficulty that he climbed into the van beside Fred. He marveled that Fred could actually drive. He marveled aloud in his garbled drunken voice. And Fred marveled, "I can't believe I've got the only buddy in the world who's never taken a drink." He'd watched Fred drink many times more than he had consumed, and marveled.

Later, when he had gotten really nauseously drunk for the first time, on quantities prodigious even for the veter­an, he marveled at his exquisite control as he roared home through the night. A hammering clinching physical control. He had never taken curves so perfectly, never been so perceptive of the slightest wink of activity on the side of the road -- never been so sure of his control -- nor so driven by a physical urge to hammer the pedal. To roar, to scream --to reach out. If the car could have gone faster, he would have driven it. The wheel must have pinched somewhat beneath his iron grip.

On the morning after his initiation, the world was disjointed. He kept telling Fred, in a somewhat less drunken voice, that he still felt drunk. The world still spun. Oh, he could act his natural self, but it was an act. He doubted anyone could notice, but it disturbed him, and he mourned the lost clear world. An irrevocable affront had been made to the clarity of his brain. When for years after he would have this disjointed feeling -- this confusion, where the world seemed at a remove, and he a ghost of himself -- or an actor -- he would mourn the lost self of his youth which had beheld the world so clearly. Which had never felt lost.

Part of that old clear world, he owed to science; he was quick at picking up the principles of biology, physics and chemistry. He was good at math. The gremlins of his sparkling youth were being replaced gradually by the smooth connections of science. He had faith in the future --in his future -- and it largely rested on his faith in his rational skills. Perhaps that faith was broken when the world still reeled after the apparent physical cause for the reeling --the drink -- had long since worn off. Or perhaps his faith was broken by his own fear that he had damaged his brain with the liquor. It didn't seem to be the lack of faith which caused the reeling, in any case. But the reeling which caused his lack of faith. Either the world had gone awry or he had. In either case, the future would leave gaps. He had begun a growing desperation for something to replace his lost faith.

When they took the dive that day, he was anxious to prove to himself that he could still function -- that the connections he had forged so carefully were still there. As a child, he would complete the sum of two-plus-two in his head to prove to himself that he wasn't crazy -- or dreaming -- and now he wanted to prove the same thing. He felt in a fog as they readied the gear for what was to be a deep and dangerous dive. Nothing was any more difficult. No memory is deficient. He just felt detached -- it wasn't quite real.

Only a few of the best and boldest divers were going to go down to one-hundred and fifty feet where there was an old wooden wreck reported to have belonged to an early trader or explorer. The water was frigid. As they got deeper in the green fresh water, all light was blocked out. Their wet suits had been squeezed into a tiny fraction of their former thickness and the cold penetrated easily. He knew the dang­ers and the time-tables; how deep they could go and for how long. There was a great need for control. The world was being closed out with utter completeness, leaving only the cold, their metallic breathing, and the unreal moonlit out­lines of the other divers. If you forgot for an instant where you were and why -- if you lost control -- you would be lost.

Someone panicked and wanted to go up. She was the girlfriend of the leader and brought along for that reason rather than for her experience. She was calmed. Fred and Howie looked into each other's sober faces. They were at ease. They only felt the enclosing claustrophobia as a possi­bility. It was real, but it was beyond them. A torch was played on a plaque commemorating the old ship. Divers had been there before. Howie looked at his depth gage. They were there.

To test the limits. To find out where -- exactly -- the hint of possibility becomes actuality. The summer before, alone, in the deeper darker water of a small Canadian lake he had fled for the depths. Where there might have been mon­sters. Nessie. He was alone with his scoutmaster, who was also a diver. While the other readied the boat, Howie went under again. Just for a minute. To see. To test. Alone.

Fifty feet. He'd been that deep before. But he was alone. There were no other eyes. There was nothing. It was getting darker. Colder. Eighty feet. The hint becomes a pounding. This is crazy. How much air do I have? I haven't checked the timetables. But I know the limits by heart. Can't stay long or he'll be worried. I would have to decom­press slowly on the way up and he'd think I had drowned. But he would see my bubbles. One hundred feet. I don't have a pressure gauge. How do I know I will have enough time to decompress? We've been in the water for an hour. He got cold. But I don't get cold, and I breath slowly. I'm calm and I can stay under through three buddies who must surface shivering, and out of breath -- their air tanks exhausted. I control my breathing. Conscious -- totally conscious, but relaxed.

Then there sparked a sharp disjuncture. A demon appeared. From where? From his head. From his experience that knew the limits. From his aloneness. Common sense? But suddenly his comfort turned to panic. He shivered in terror and cried out through the bubbles of his mouthpiece. Something darker than the depths had appeared to him. It impelled him to the surface with just enough control left in Howie's head from the other side of panic, that he managed not to bolt too quickly. Still he spent the rest of the day worriedly waiting for the bends to come on. How would he explain? It would cause such a ruckus. It would ruin every­thing. They'd have to send a helicopter. Who would pay? How could he explain. He would be a fool, and condemned --guilty -- before the only valid tribunal.

No, he couldn't face that. They'd all want him to feel guilty -- selfish. He had done something stupid. He didn't want that. He'd rather be the martyr. He would go off alone if he felt the bends coming on. He couldn't face the humil­iation of being cured. And most of all he couldn't face explaining what he was really up to. That he couldn't tell. It would have been more painful than the bends to try with words to convince anyone that he wasn't a fool. And there was no lie he could think of that would explain his act. More painful still to lie, because he'd be inventing all the while a reason that he would believe himself eventually. He would be made a fool along the way toward trying to convince everyone he wasn't. No, far better to crawl off. It would be painful for people, but easier to understand. They would simply think he'd drowned.

The way back more painful than the way out. Howie often had dreams of falling down under cold crystalline water. Out of breath. He'd just keep falling. Sinking. Being sucked under. He couldn't breath, and would wake from the night­mares out of breath.

Howie had been wondering what it would be like to dive to one hundred fifty feet. It isn't just the closing out of the world. The air you breathe becomes narcotic at that depth. Nitrogen has the same effect on physical and mental reactions that some drugs do. You feel stoned. Too far beneath the surface -- beyond the boundary -- and the connections are frayed. A metaphor of the world -- not literary, but there in experience.

Howie didn't feel anything strange. When they got back to the surface, there was the swapping of experiences. How great it felt to be stoned, and he hadn't felt it at all. Perhaps it had been the attempt to keep off claustrophobia and the cold. Perhaps it had been the real need for control, and the training which forged a strong connection. Perhaps it had been something else -- a physical immunity or a simple misnaming of experience. Narcosis is fickle. It's never the same from day to day, nor does it effect two people the same way. He knew that Fred had plenty of cause to worry from his performance the night before. But Howie had kept his head.

Years later, he was to experience narcosis. In the Bahamas, where the boat is still visible from one hundred and eighty-five feet below the surface. Where the cold is mild and the colors softened to phosphorescent glows instead of pitch darkness. Where you soar down an underwater cliff with the freedom of a bird and only with cold sobriety keep your­self from the temptation to continue falling into the invit­ing blackness that lies deeper, deeper. He made this dive four days in a row. It eradicated the privilege of making any other dives for the day, since too much gas had been stored in his blood under pressure, and he would risk getting bent. But the beauty and the odd sensation of the narcotic depths kept calling him back. He would get stoned.

He wasn't out of control. Once he reminded the dive-master that the time limit had been exhausted when he had forgotten. You must take care of how much gas your blood absorbs and leave time to allow it to escape during the slow ascent. The margins are slim. The air-supply doesn't last long at depth, and once below, a plunge for the surface is deadly. Acclimation, once acquired, can be relieved only with the same care that it was gotten. Exits are as slow as entrances, though the impulse to bolt for the familiar can be great. Or to bolt away.

There was a girl who panicked at one hundred and eighty five feet; Howie's buddy. The air comes thick in the regu­lator and with difficulty. You have to kick hard to compen­sate for the lost buoyancy of the compressed wetsuit, and to keep from falling the deadly extra fathom. It's easy to panic, and he saw it in her eyes. He was stoned, but in control. He had to chase after her in a dangerous burst of energy in order to grab her fin and hold her down. Calm is everything. Excitement can lead to panic when the regulator limits your ability to catch your breath. He looked at her and calmed her before they started the slower more reasoned ascent. Communication is limited under-water. There can be no words. But the simple and direct communication was effec­tive. It was all that was possible.

When the long drive home was nearing its end, and Fred was desperately on the brink of sleep, he offered to take Howie straight to his house. Howie was glad that Fred would see the house of which he was moderately proud. It was a nice house, and gave him some legitimacy. It might draw respect for his position. He hoped that Fred would stay to lunch. He would demonstrate his friendship by welcoming Fred openly into the position -- the status; the world he knew was other to Fred -- of his house. He wanted Fred to know that he respected him more than those others he'd excluded. That they could share their differences. He hoped they could bridge the difference in age and status and experience.

But his pride must have blinded him. As soon as they arrived, he was ashamed. He was ashamed of the prosperity of his house, because it announced the gulf. He knew that he must forever appear young and spoiled to this man who had earned his abilities and his intelligence. He was sorely disappointed that no amount of persuasion could get Fred to stay for lunch. Fred must have felt uncomfortable. Howie knew he was famished -- and that he didn't have much money. But, if he was uncomfortable, he didn't show it. With the unerring canniness of the initiate, he tendered the coin that is sure to be most highly prized in the suburbs.

"I can sure tell you, Mrs. Hahn.' I've never dove with anyone better than Howie. He really knows his stuff. A lot of people can't tell the difference between a good and bad diver, but I've never felt more comfortable. A good buddy is important in diving."

And with that he paid his debt and established his seniority and was off, forever. He had drawn the bounds of their friendship very clearly, and Howie, though secretly, was deeply hurt.




"You know Howie, you do seem out of control. You do veer and make false starts. It's hard to follow."

Can't you be patient. This is new to me. New Territory. I haven't been here before. I haven't written.

"Perhaps you should practice -- get some training. Study. Read. Anything before you just spill your guts out."

This is my life. It isn't ordered or neat or straight­forward. I want it to have meaning, but I also want it to remain alive.

"Your idealism isn't quite cute. You don't kill something by training it. You nourish something that otherwise might never grow. You're just spattering your brains out. It may do more harm than good."

But I have studied, and I have read, and I have lived. And I've talked. That's all this is. There's no training for those things except the rudiments. You learn it by doing it.

"But you shoot so high!"

You mean I have to earn my birthright? You mean that I have no right to presume that I have anything to say until I've assimilated all that has already been said? No. I'm through with guilt. I'm through trying to find a reason that could justify my presumption about myself. I'm through trying to pay back the world for the accident of my birth and my position.

"Looks to me like you're trying desperately to pay it back."

Damn you! Why can't I be whole -- just one. Yes, in a way I am. But I'm not going to feel guilty that I am who I am through no right. It was an accident. I just happened to be born who and where I was, and to be led or to have lead myself where I've been. I can't sort all that out. But I'm going to make that accident -- my life -- mean something.
That's a responsibility.

"Your life seems to have meant something in the past without your intervention. Why now?"

Because I'm lonely.

"Whose fault is that?"

I won't feel guilty, damn it. I won't. I just haven't become acclimated.

"You're getting carried away again."

All Praise the Great Web - Bail Me Out Scotty

Not the creatures who spun it, but the very matrix itself, which backgrounds any systems of operation (does OS rhyme with OZ), and provides - such a relief - this medium which entails no anxiety of sales or positioning or even preserving of paper and its order. I even hear there is a certain indelibility, to counter the obvious fact that I or anyone who hacks my password, can simply remove from the ether any trace of this messy drivel.

(I would have to remain the prime suspect, since it is so excruciatingly embarrassing to put myself, thinly veiled, so OUT THERE)

But who knows what "out there" really is, or for that matter "in here"? I think I am a bundle of language and relationship snippets which strives for the abstract quality of authenticity, and towards which I can measure progress by ingathering of commodity gratifications to my every desire. These too are abstracted from any hands that might once have touched them. And still there is that other handy (!!!) if elusive affirmation of purest authenticity - fame.

Where my very name becomes a brand, single word at best, and there remains quite literally no space for personal relations. What a strange thing to hope for! I know I am not alone in my disappointment that when Katie Couric (do I write about her too much?) asked him "why do so many presidents cheat on their wives?", Obama could only think to comment that he truly can't understand it since he has a hard time even picking his nose, so public has his life become (he must secretly want a white woman, don't you think?). I don't know why he missed the script so evidently embedded in the question, whereby he was supposed to highlight the importance therefore of his private life and his great good fortune in having been endowed so liberally with such a wonderful family.

And they truly are! And he's not threatening that way, which is only commented on in code, methinks. How truly bizarre that McCain is and has been such a threat to women, and remains able to speak without apparent irony of honor!! This man is noways honorable, nor ever has been, and even his suffering pales, surely in comparison, to the routine black - let's call it just for fun - lifestyle. I think these old white guys still suffer slave fetishism, bitches.

Enough!

And why they both failed to point out that presidential strayings actually seem rather fewer than those of, say, evangelical preachers. At least McCain knows he has no standing to pounce on Obama's omissions. But, as usual, I digress.

So, this medium - the web - pushes back just precisely the same as paper. It's not quite physical though, and perhaps therefore I don't have to risk the creative pit of silly assumptions about ideas leading to their artful expression. I should think it pushes back rather better than paper even, just simply because it is so immediately "out there", and there's even the nifty facility for near synchronous interaction with you, gentle reader (although to be sure, I'll probably drop dead of shock the first time I see a reader response, so be really really gentle, since you don't want that on your hands).

(So, is this like chainsaw sculpting at the fair?)

The only thing I haven't the patience (though I certainly have the skill) to figure out is how, efficiently, to intersperse American words with symbols like the one for infinity, underlines to indicate published titles, and alternate languages, really just for the purpose of showing off (it's an American guy thing).

So, I'm left with keyboard strokes, which is good since my "hand" is very difficult to read even by me, who is truly capable of losing my own sense. And simple straightforward words (laugh track) not adulterated by visual "style" or bookbinders art (betrayal there). These, then, are commodity words, available freely according to whatever physical bale you (I almost said "gentle reader" but that is becoming an old-age tik, almost as insufferable as McCain's "my friend" in place of the more natural "ummm") prefer to scoop them out in . ('out of,' more properly, or 'out into,' say. Not as in buckets or rescue, but more at misery, which is, apart from commodity naked women, the truly great thing about having internet on your phone while reading - the lookup function)

Oy!

I gather (reap) that there was (propositionally) this society (only in the abstract), which did truly grieve its loss not, to be clear (as mud) of commodity-fetish aspirations, whose accomplishment was so frantically desired that such extravagant debt was entered into (backing is perverse) that a mere spike in the global oil market (picture pins in balloons now) could bring this house of cards tumbling down (to really muddy up - read mix - the metaphors). It was not the loss of the commodities themselves, or their easy reach, or even the hope of someday bringing them to within reach. It was the loss of that kind of aspiration, for abstract free agency, which has been so tragically dashed.

What I mean is that we apparently grieve our necessary return to such unmediated (I'm talking hands-off now) pleasures as swimming in quarries, climbing trees, hitchhiking rides with strangers, taking food to neighbors houses to share, on foot I hardly need add, riding bicycles, playing hide and seek, baking mud on our bodies in the sun before and to enhance the joy of diving in, peeling off clothes in bowers, say, and making love mutually not to gratify the senses so much as, dare we say it, the hearts - as though this return was somehow a loss!!!????

What gets lost is commodity space littered with "product" (shit) which is now the stuff with which we smear our bodies, and litter our homes, and fill our stomachs, and even marry, always hoping and apparently even praying to replace with better and improved models and brand names.

In my will will be instructions to liquidate for maximum lucre the goods and paper and then to distribute said load among loved ones so that I may live eternally on in their abstracted love??? Not! There do remain one or two silly items which contain as much of me at least as a lock of hair or fingernail shavings. Burn them, please, but don't liquidate them. Well, that's a joke, since they have no value these cast-off second-hand products (I think I'll have to admit some honor in hanging on to this old, now drying out and nearly dessicated body, shell, cocoon, boat of mine, when for achievement of the sheerest pleasure in sailing, it would have been so much cheaper and better sanctioned to go plastic!). The body bloats and paradoxically shrivels, without inviting sadness for pleasures past but truly had!

This is all no great loss, people! This is the disappearance of vacuity into vacuum, or like that stoned Yellow Submarine tuba player, who sucks himself up the horn (bell). There wasn't anything there in the first place, duh.

And how incredibly silly of me to think that between the spaces of product advertisement, pitched to hormone-crazed perpetual adolescents willing to subject themselves to all sorts of voluntary immolation (sun baking again), even to the point of branding their very bodies (not a great big fan of piercings and tatoos, can you tell?) for sale or barter, there could be some actually to read and to tell the difference among what has heart and what is merest simulacrum of that bodily pleasure which pervades authentic human life.

I need to get out more! (but so do you! and without all the gear).

Today, I shall get a tatoo, by the way, to enter that punky funky rockandrolly earsplitting grungy mind-numb sexual moshpit rebellion which remains tamed, thanks God, by drug war chastity because otherwise it would morph into something very much like terrorism, donchaknow you betcha!

Well, NOT! But I'd really like to. Haven't the nerve or the jingle. I like my authenticity straight!

So, this did NOT go where I thought it would, which might be, precisely, the very sharp point. I wanted to say something about authentic media, and sensual culture, and rhythmic life in abundance which is now, finally, so available once again. But I got distracted by meltdown.

I know you'll indulge me.

Chapter 7, from 1983

He arrived at school full of determination to be back on his course. He'd chosen science earlier because that had been the language which promised to eradicate all the demons. It had a favorable track record in his experience. And that summer had ended with a foray to a cottage in Canada to correct the deficiencies of his freshman year. He had chosen Yale over more prestigious technical schools, because some stirrings had begun that there was other than science. He wanted to be where it was available. But he'd ended his freshman year in a ruin of exposure to philosophy, music, psychology, art, and literature, and was determined now to make amends.

He'd loaded his tiny motorcycle with all the physics books he could lay his hands on and made off for Canada where there was a cottage, beloved of his youth. He was detained at the border where some officious girl, about his own age, seemed not to believe that he had no ulterior intent. Boundaries are always guarded by those jealous of free passage. He asked her affably -- out of curiosity -- why they had chosen to detain him. "It's not your right to enter Canada." He was not entitled to an answer. It seems that personal contact is denied border guards.

What made her suspicious? He was the most innocent of travelers, wanting only to return to what had belonged to him since before he could remember. His memories where shaped by Canada, and now they were to be cut off. This metaphor compels me. Isn't there always reason and good sense behind all buffers at crossings? He was a natural candidate for suspicion. No obvious means. A motorcycle loaded only with books on a ridiculously unlikely topic. He'd just bought a carton of Pall-Mall cigarettes at the duty-free shop. What better candidate for insanity?... Excuse me; "suspicion of ulterior motive?" She had to stop him. He was just curious.

He got to the cottage, and tried to make a home for two weeks. During those two weeks, he was indeed reinvigorated in his desire to study science. He'd finally unraveled the brick wall at the end of infinity. For the first time in his life, he'd encountered relativity theory, and the language of science was brimming with wild promise. Infinity returns to the origin. My God, it was exciting. He was dizzy and chosen. He made himself sick with unaccustomed heavy smoking. He swam wildly in the clear water of his youth. But he shuttered the excitement at nights within the cozy cabin.

Here was a real answer. It had been found in 1905 and nobody had told him -- so he'd better keep quiet, because probably his excitement was ridiculous. The "world" had known for some time, and no-one seemed excited. He was by now quite suspicious of his every excitement -- as though all it revealed was his ignorance. It was a pattern long since made obvious. Whatever truth he was chosen to receive, in the privacy of his thoughts, he would immediately find revealed in whatever book came to hand afterward. He hadn't been chosen at all. He was simply slow to learn.

Yet the books came to hand with astounding coincidence. He wanted to cry out, "Hey, that's exactly what I was just thinking. I know that already. I must think just like so-and-so" who had written the book. But he kept quiet because the experience had grown so familiar that he knew he must read every book written before declaring his originality. His premature excitement would only be ridiculous.

But these books were new. There was nothing familiar except the old question that they answered. It reinforced his muteness even more, because it showed him where he couldn't venture untutored, and brought a new conviction to return to the sciences. His excitement was bridled by the habitual fear, and he wanted to know where this would lead. So convinced was he of the need for originality, and of his own lack, that it wasn't for a long time that he would learn that all original statements are rehearsals of the most ancient --and thus the most original. To invent something is to discover something, and vice-versa, though language hadn't broken down for him in that way yet.

He was suspicious of his excitement for another reason. He had been excited many times before, and there seemed to be a causal relationship, about which he was more and more certain, between the excitement and a swift depression that would inexplicably ensue. It was getting more difficult each time to find new excitement. It seemed forever impossible to make any excitement, or even aliveness or contentment, last for more than an instant, while the depression would go on and on.

So he would cling -- to his love, to his discoveries, to this new physical world which was so unlike the world that common people inhabited that he was able to cling to his conviction that they all must be zombies. Common people --the everyday people of his world -- the ones he knew and cared about, and the ones he didn't know; they all inhabited a world which he now had proof was a false one. They were trying to drag him into that world with all the common-sense advice and example whose purpose was to convince him to settle down -- and not get so excited. But now he had proof. My God, you all act as though you know. But you couldn't know because you never even hinted at this. You live in a world which has been denied by your own high priests of science. Why doesn't their proof change you as I would have it change me?

But the common people were the only people he had ever really liked in that simple way that he was familiar with. The people who never gave advice and were unsure of their example. "They" whom he hated were the pretenders, the hypocrites, the people in charge and in control, or who would be. He wanted desperately to be liked in that simple fashion, and was, on occasion, though simplicity for him was usually a pretense.

Howie remembered that when he was twelve or so, he had been possessed by one of his self-transcendent passions. He was beginning to scan the newspaper want ads for scuba diving equipment. He had some money from a paper-route and yard jobs -- not enough to seriously believe that he could enter the monied world of sport, but he kept hoping that he would find a bargain. The passion leaked out in some mystical fashion, and his father surprised him one day after work. It was a very wise thing to do. His father also had been nipped by the impractical desire to swim under-water, but he knew that it wasn't something one should do on blind desire alone. Howie was oblivious. He knew he wanted to scuba-dive, and that if he could just get the equipment he'd be able to. His father had heard that there would be a course in the local high school, and proposed that they take it together. Howie was thrilled.

They passed the course in the friendly competition of the two best swimmers and best students of the physics and physiology of pressure that were necessary to complete the course. They swam effortlessly when others floundered, and were at home under the water more so than above. It was a dream come true for Howie. Finally, he was able to accept the gentle repose of the ever-peaceful womb-space of water without the urgent cry of his body for breath always to haunt his return. Even in the spittle-ridden water of the chlorinated swimming pool, it was a heavenly feeling.

They equaled one another's score on the written exam which was several percentage points above the rest. There was a brief panic when it came time to fill out the forms for certification. Yes, even this limited transcendence is regulated. It seems that Howie couldn't have taught himself to dive even if he had the equipment. But it was a sensible regulation. There are many dangers involved in diving, and those selling equipment wanted to be sure they were not selling barbiturates to a potential suicide. It wasn't a government regulation. The people involved needed to ensure the safety of the sport simply to ensure its continued free practice. There was no injustice.

But consider the injustice Howie felt when the instructor lowered his eyes and quietly cursed his condolences. You had to be fourteen to be certified. Gosh, they'd all thought he was eighteen or so. How could he be just thirteen? How. I don't believe it. Well, it was all a big joke, and it wouldn't matter in the end. They would send in his application later and in the meantime the instructor ran his own shop. Thank God for rules whose letter can be ignored.

Howie clearly fell within the bounds of the rule's spirit. He had been well trained for the water. No-one would know the difference.

And so he was free to dive, except that he didn't have a car or a boat or any money. The discomfort caused by this impossible prison -- knowledge without means -- must have been so palpable that his father had to swallow his own rule about self-reliance by erosive bits. Howie had enough money for some equipment and his father helped. Then there was to be a weekend trip to the underwater paradise of Tobermory, Ontario. It seemed a paradise to him after the murky polluted water of Lake Erie where the world became pitch black and claustrophobic below twenty-five feet or so.

He was sixteen by that time and had gotten his driver's license. O, the agony of waiting for that birthday. The backing in and out of the driveway. The indulgent driving down dirt roads. He was a natural driver with all the instincts that need not be taught but which await only permission to be enacted. He had built go-carts and flown miniature motorcycles over jumps. He had internalized all the various laws of motion and propulsion whose exploitation by the automobile -- that subject of all American boy's dreams -- was being cruelly kept from him by the irrelevance of his age. The great leveler of differences which ignored his special qualification by counting only the years that he walked on the earth, was again caging him with his desires.

It was necessary to have a "buddy" to go on the dive trip, so as to observe one of the basic safety principles of the sport. He was alone in his interests -- he had no companion of his own age -- so he called someone whose name had been given by the shop that had organized the trip. Howie never seemed to be close to people his own age. There were some friends he'd grown up with, but he had since moved to a different town. Now he was able to like only those younger than him -- he was great with kids -- or those older. He was suspicious of people his own age. They would demand the simple respect that he be like them and that was his greatest fear. There had to be reasons that they were all frivolous or dull or bad or too good and he found them all without trouble. Then, too, he didn't want anyone so close to him as to be able to know his own vacancy. In truth it was a simple thing. He was afraid he wouldn't be liked -- or that he couldn't like someone he'd allowed to get close to him. So he kept a distance.

His father dropped him off at his "buddy's" house on the way to work. It was in downtown Buffalo in a working class section, and Howie was mildly afraid that he'd gone in over his head. He wouldn't know how to communicate with this person. He would be the object of scorn and hatred and even the violence that a youth from the suburbs fears in the city. He knew he was to be far younger than anyone else along on the trip, and that had already made him defensive. He wanted to get along and was afraid he wouldn't know how to act.

But Howie and Fred liked each other simply and immediately. They both shared the same excitement about diving and instantly fell into the familiar banter of shoptalk. Fred was about twenty-five, and they were going to travel in his van. Howie was impressed with the work Fred had done to put this ancient relic in terrific running condition. When he learned that he'd rebuilt the engine himself, Howie began to be filled with admiration. It was fueled. Fred seemed to like talking with Howie -- perhaps he was drawn by something there that impressed him. The obvious intelligence of his speech and manner that bespoke privilege. They were each entrapped in their circumstance and needed to prove to the world that they didn't belong there. Howie was trapped in the banality of suburbia with all the petty school concerns from which he'd dissociated himself. Fred was trapped in a world of no money and no priviledge. He told Howie of how he remembered the start of his interest in diving. He was a child in the bathtub with his older brother. He knew from some innate ability to see how things worked that he could breath through the drain in the bathtub if he covered it with his mouth underwater and opened it. He and his brother would compete to see who could hold his breath the longest, and he had terrified his brother with this drain pipe snorkel.

Howie was entranced. Silly to say, but it was the beginning of another revelation for him. Here was this man who'd come out of a tiny and shabby frame house and who spoke with a heavy city impropriety and who exhibited more intelligence --and romance -- than all the best and brightest people from his own background. Here was true intelligence and ability --and, as usual, it was buried by circumstance.

"My brother got the best of me. He told me that I'd catch typhoid from the drain. I was terrified for weeks."

Beaten by peers afraid to be bested. Hammered back from the elation of discovery by those who have invented all the best reasons for remaining where they are. I am better because I know enough not to try something stupid. But why do we have to be better? Why do we have to invent reasons for satisfying ourselves that it's better not to be better? Brothers have to compete, though, because they share the sunlight which makes them grow. Parents are partial to the clever kid, and he'd get all the privileges which must be denied to the other. All attempts at fairness are seen through by children who always know what love is.

Howie was so enamored that when they drove through the black section and Fred pulled out a switchblade and laid it on the dash, he wasn't shocked.

"If one of those fucking jungle-bunnies tries to jump me, he's got something comin'."

In the moment of revelation, the world was upside down, and this seemed the proper response. Howie made it fit with his own disgust at racism -- the denial for ever of privilege to a people, because ultimately we are jealous of God's love. He felt that here at least was an honest response.

Fred wasn't cowering in his fear. He wasn't calling names from behind the walls of some suburban fortress. He called a spade a spade and dealt with the reality as he knew it. This wasn't racism -- it was the only alive response to a fear that for Fred was too real to sublimate with words. And Howie felt secure with the knife there on the dashboard. He wondered if he could ever use it, but he admired the forthrightness and courage of Fred who, he was certain, could.

You don't knife a black man who's mugging you -- you pity him. He has a right to knife you and beat you, for his anger is real. But what do you do with the fear that creeps into your guts? Howie was not competent to enter the city. Abstractions are fine when you aren't threatened by actuality. They work well on paper and in talk, but how do you put them into practice? How do you unwind the circumstances of your skin in a world that has determined to entrap you there?

Fred grew tired on the long drive, and Howie was anxious to prove that he, too, was a real person and not some intelligent wimp.

"Would you like me to drive?"

"Well, it's a pretty tricky van. I feel like I'm the only one who could drive it. It has a lot of little quirks."

Howie was dying to drive. He'd only just gotten his license, and had still not enough opportunity to test the exhilaration. He wanted to prove what a good driver he knew himself to be.

Fred got more tired. "Can you drive a standard?"

Howie flashed with the pride of his contempt for automatic transmission. It was an axiom borrowed from his father that anyone who couldn't drive a standard shouldn't be driving. If they didn't understand at least that much of the workings of a car, then they shouldn't be on the road. They wouldn't be in control.

"I've never driven anything else."

So Howie got behind the wheel. He carried a mixture of nervousness and confidence. Fred was indulgent when he started up in third.

"The shifter's a little tricky, I always do that myself."

It still felt funny. The accelerator seemed sticky and heavy. The clutch was erratic. When he got moving, the whole van seemed loose. He wanted to blame the old van, but Fred had driven remarkably well. There'd been that feeling of confidence and control that Howie recognized immediately in a good driver. The way curves were taken. The smoothness of gear changes and braking. The van had seemed really tight and at home on the road. Now it weaved and jerked. The wheel seemed loose. It automatically over-corrected. I'm not in control.

But Howie always claimed he was doing fine. It was a terrible struggle to keep the external appearance from betraying the internal actuality. God, I can hardly keep this thing on the road -- it veers all over. Howie was slightly panicked. An odd disjunction pervaded to even the way the landscape appeared. Things seemed less than real. He couldn't get back a feeling of being there. He couldn't capture his accustomed sense of awareness of the position of the cars around him. Who was going to pass; where was the road going. He didn't anticipate the curves properly. It was a dazed feeling, and Fred wasn't getting any rest.

Howie had driven all sorts of cars by then -- at every opportunity he could get. Once, while on a boy-scout trip, the scoutmaster needed someone to pull the trailer away from a boat as it was being launched. He was fourteen and had only driven his father's car in and out of the driveway. It required tricky clutchwork. He was confident that of the boys he was the one to do it, and he performed beautifully. With the thrill of triumph, he and a friend had taken off on a furtive spree along the back roads. The scoutmaster had hurried off in the boat -- it was getting late, and he had left instructions about parking the car. Howie couldn't have driven the car if he hadn't earned the implicit trust of the scoutmaster. But there was the friend and there was the road. The infraction would go unnoticed.

Yet some realms are forever forbidden because they belong too closely to another personality. Such must have been the case with Fred's van. By now, Howie could probably drive it well enough; but then, he was pretending -- and couldn't cross the boundary of personality which made this vehicle so different from any other.

Cars are mechanical things. They can be mastered whatever their quirks. Ah, but to pretend mastery can lead to disaster. And to attempt mastery when the thing must remain forever other only serves to shut tightly the doors of entrance. A humility is required. But Howie had to be bold, or he'd never learn. He had to fake it. He believed he could master the van and fought vainly to prove it. And where is the boundary between belief and actuality? Is it just there, in the test, or can the belief alone sometimes create the actuality which would never have appeared without it. And belief in mastery is not the same as belief in things behind appearances. Yet they both require demonstration. Is pride holding the latch? And what is the relationship between pride and boldness?