In Bounds

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A wind from the south

Has blown it up clear,

Torn the bluest expanse

From which ‘morrows appear.

Only nearer the earth

And dominion of night

Are the sad workers working

Thru to black morning light.

All their ligaments twitching

And brows knitted tight,

To the heirs of good fortune—

A good-God-awful plight.

But their laughter is long

And grins ear to ear,

For when oil stocks plummet

Not a thing shall they fear.

Home to veal and foie gras

And the proles to warm beer,

Sleep and labor for Christmas—

Is there always next year?

Yes and ‘ever for scions

And collars starched white,

On shoulders enslaved

How unclouded the sight.

Psychobabble Rabble

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The following is a first-hand account of self-induced psychosis composed “in real time” one evening in June 2018 with some post-production—minor edits and the occasional addendum—for clarification and improved readability.

Vertigo. Bah roo hoo! I’ve donned a purple jester hat. Or someone has. The scene feels vague, temporary, like a dream. I laugh and laugh and laugh. Laughter turns about my chandelier and evaporates, unrequited. Then I’m speaking wif an accent. The Queen’s English, then with a lisp. Who are you? I want to know. Sombreros suddenly. Electricity. People snap like guitar strings into place. Curlicues with every exhalation weaving and undoing. Imminent madness. A chorus of voices blathering ad infinitum. Changing, shifting. Faces, too. The ocean. Floor to ceiling to the asteroid belt. A drifting abyss of faces. Savage longing. An immense crimson door, waxen and impossibly ornate. So incredibly strange. The possibility of events now, but I’m in my pajamas. My God, the things I could do if only I had on pants! Ricocheting percussion. Burrap brap brap. Unheard of sounds. A volley of metallic snowballs, breaking up into innumerable oblivions. Harmonies, woven like rope. I want to congratulate the singers. Thank them. I see twins. Very good, thank you. How can anything be captured? I mean, written down? All senses having collapsed into a field, like a soup, it cannot. Yes! No. No, I’m talking the living phenomenology of sensory soup. Recorded, like this, it is dead. I am a madman. I am a bad man. Dead man. The tyranny of the ever-changing absurd theater of clownery. I keep thinking, “Just fall asleep.” Courage! 

The light speaks. How? I want to know. There are no wrong answers. Frequencies, vibration. The company of a woman. Could I be saved? Movement, sound, none of it makes much sense. This is a spilling. The internal neon tumbleweed landscape of a mind, perhaps mine. I’m only trying to explain to you. In the absence of sound and/or thought, fools rush in. And they won’t shut up. Clowns everywhere, riding invisible geometries like carts on rails into a maze of mines. True silence is simply an issue of resolution. And architecture, how crude or fine the ornament. Below the talking is, I hope, peace. Like, physically below language. Another plane. The twaddle is only superficial, crust. I run my hand through my hair. They won’t shut up. Nothing makes sense. Clarity is slippery, belongs to someone else. “Just go to sleep.” What have I become?

Incredibly strange. I repeat it over and over like a mantra that becomes visible and unspools like sausage links. The picture frame is peopled, a crumpled shirt shows a face. My own feels massaged by invisible hands. One minute a smile, the next furrowed in confusion. At one point I feel my legs oscillate, though I’m still, contained in a sleeping bag. They wave and hum, become pure vibration and heat. I’m overrun with little babbling elves, goblins smirking and conversing with me. They want to stunt me, to keep me as a child. Their hands are working me over. I feel I’m in a crib. “Away with anything that holds me back,” I say, and reach for the cross around my neck as if for a rescue raft. As if for a binky. I try to conjure Christ, to summon him to my predicament. But my thoughts have been hijacked. Clicks and pops echo, become visual streaks, code-like. I’m whirring in the machine, chez moi. This cannot possibly be my bedroom. And yet. And yet each time I raise my head there it is: my closet door, woofing in a silent undertow. 

“You want to play?” I ask the voices. Indeed they do. And yet they seem intent on instructing also. Do this, do that. Later, I remark, “Your strange little games.” Who am I talking to? I feel I’m to be their audience, the recipient of the night’s entertainment. It is a play starring creatures of the subconscious with infinite acts, the stage the cluttered skull of a schizophrenic, his mania manifested as furniture. “Bah roo hoo!” They cheer. I laugh aloud (didn’t I?) and can’t fathom what it means. Another instruction: “Had I thanked everyone enough?” It seems I have not. Gratitude, again. Squiggles. Wiggles. Emanations. Cowboy barroom flashes. Desert heat lightning in ripples when I wave my arms. Jades, violets, sky blues. It’s free jazz, blown by the invisible mouths of flowers. I feel as if I’ve gone insane. Mind as mother, reproducing. Separations beget totality, immersion. I’m wading through sonic weather, soaked in it. Who are you? Pieces to pick up. A world to reconstruct from things misremembered, forgotten songs, lost feelings found in dark recesses. Breaths as gentle as a blink becoming musics unfathomable, impossible. I’ve gone over the threshold. And the whole time, the clock of the heart, set against the fevered pace of the no-man’s-land I’ve traversed tonight and seeded with “sacred love.” 

What was spoken to me that I did not hear? Could not translate? Would not swallow? Who do I believe I’ve become? Who did I turn away? I’m insane. I say “I,” but there are two of us. One is gently arranged on a queen bed, tossing, turning, chuckling maniacally into an indifferent darkness; the other seems to hover a few inches above, mediating and communicating with the anti-matter that has invaded the room. Which one am I? Ah-ha. Sleep, I think, at last. But it’s paper-thin. I awake with “In Remembrance of Me” pirouetting through my headphones. I’ve turned sideways but my consciousness has remained righted, lighter than bones, submerged and slotted into a confined space. Like a lost birthday balloon it seems to be groping for the highest gable. Guaraldi’s piano is above me, the rustling of the parishioners in Grace Cathedral, impeccably defined to these new ears, below. 

Synesthetic terror. Shapes morph into sound. Scccruuuunch. A pop can is crushed into a rainbow. It’s inexplicable. The supremacy of physical existence, of the body, is illusory. A panopticon of Lilliputian synaptic apocalypses has been erected, against my will and by an anonymous architect. It is a costume of light that I wear like a crown of thorns. The King of Nobody. Or Blake’s Nobodaddy. It is a threshold of immense ambiguity, hesitating between utter transformation and the bric-a-brac of the still-life that is my bedroom. Panic lingers at the edges of my vision, pushing streaks of white hot light into view like an overdeveloped film. The choreography of an unremarkable Wednesday falls apart, the wheels have come off and yet there is a patterned order that begins to reveal itself. “Beneath the wool, a pattern.”

At any rate, forgive me. “It cannot,” as Terence McKenna discovered, “be Englished.”

Image: Seliger, Charles. Don Quixote. 1944.

The Grifter

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His high forehead and sunken black marbles for eyes give the rest of him, which isn’t much, the illusion of gravitas. 

He slinks and contorts like water as if to ceaselessly dazzle a mirror unseen but to him. Passing women lift their chins, droop their eyelids and spy him through a squint. There is something about him, both magnetic and repulsive, that pierces them. Something taboo. Perhaps something false.

The grifter slouches into a kind of practiced repose and periodically scavenges his lady’s plate for stray beans and clumps of sticky rice that tumble from her burrito. She puts three fat fingers to her lips, an attempt at modesty, and chews and chews. The rouge on her cheeks, clownishly thick, cracks and a wet flap of tortilla falls into her lap. He looks at it, at her, then at me, and sinks even lower, thumbing the cleft on his chin that lends him an unearned perspicacity.  

His pomaded mop, Vantablack in the dim light of the joint, is coiffed with the utmost care, over and back in a flamboyant sweep; he pats it like you would a hot electric range. But his shirt is too big—there’s a gap between neck and collar, which is yellowed with sweat and tired. It is second-hand, one of two on loan from a former employer, who, on an nth-generation facsimile, in the box labeled “Reason for termination,” recorded without emotion, “repeated indiscretions and tardiness.” His gal licks her plate, blows him a kiss and splits. 

He turns, motherless again, and stands transfixed before a high-definition aerial shot of some sprawling Asian megalopolis, the camera slowly descending into a blinking cacophony of black glass and steel plunging out of fog. It cuts, retreats, and the loop repeats. He watches it again and returns, smirking with adolescent mirth. An eyebrow asks, You gonna drink this? He wants to be surrounded by beauty. Forbidden beauty. At home, on his nightstand, is a single book: “How to Achieve Multiple Orgasms.”

At closing time, desperate for a piece of ass, he’ll charm you into playing “banker,” and craftily withdraw funds for one last round. And you’ll oblige, desperate for a piece yourself. The lights go up. His shoes are untied and he reeks of a cheap chemical spray. In the foyer he strikes a kind of decadent pose, simultaneously priggish and artless (elbow out, thumb through a belt loop, foot turned out like a gangly ballerina), and leans into a window. Not to see, but be seen—his reflection, primped to taste, complies. 

For his face is the ticket, to bed or bar and all the people in between. People going places.

Image: Leiter, Saul. The Kiss. 1952.

Seeing This and That

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“Albania is beautiful, unhappy, and for all its current topicality, boring.” How many journalists have the gall to begin a story like this? One, long deceased, I’d wager.

His name was Joseph Roth. Born on the bleeding edge of the Habsburg’s Austro-Hungarian empire, in what is now Ukraine, he spent much of his working life in Germany observing and remarking upon the milieu of decadence and decay and, ultimately, madness between world wars. Roth composed a formidable body of fiction, but he also introduced to the English-speaking world the feuilleton, the slight piece of entertainment, gossip or criticism that he wrote by the boatload for Der Neue Tag, Prager Tagblatt, Frankfurter Zeitung, Neue Berliner Zeitung and other papers of the day. The term now has the unfortunate connotation of “soap opera,” in France particularly, but for Roth the feuilleton, dozens of which are collected and translated by Michael Hofmann in The Hotel Years, was the sine qua non of journalistic soothsaying.

Relying on senses alone—“interviews,” said Roth, “are an alibi for a journalist’s lack of ideas”—his little stories, two or three pages long at most, are a joy to read, each the equivalent of a well portioned dessert. This is literature, if not sheer poetry, in comparison to the antiseptic, matter-of-fact filler that pads the modern newspaper. He tells of churchgoers “smelling of jasmine, sex and starch”; of the fraternity man, a “slogan on two legs,” whose humdrum existence “resembles the underworld stirrings of incompletely deceased ghosts”; of a hapless stage clown whose show betrays his “fight against life, the brutal unremitting struggle against the resistance of everything in the world, the wickedness and unfittedness of things, the grotesque illogic of ordinary circumstance.” The stranger, the commoner, the invisible—Roth, with an uncommon sympathy, noticed the people swept aside by impersonal forces, by time and history, by the swastika. He noticed the profane absurdity of life, vanishing ways of being (“Will you ever be greeted like that again?”), cities “made of stacks of city, of bundles of towns” with “each street a gaping mouth.”

It’s dizzying. The scope and depth of his observations. And refreshing, to know that, in our age of insouciant narcissism, there once lived men—a man, at least—more interested in the lives of their neighbors. Roth, a Jew who owned virtually nothing and lived in hotels, was, in a sense—and despite a fatal alcoholism, an exemplary witness of Christ’s admonition to “become passers-by.” And a paragon of the responsible journalist. “What can I do,” he asked in the pages of Kölnische Zeitung, “apart from writing about individuals I meet by chance, setting down what greets my eyes and ears, and selecting from them as I see fit?”

Image: Meidner, Ludwig. Die Brennende Stadt. 1913.

Book of the City of Dreams (Excerpt II)

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At the intersection there are two police vehicles pulled aside bumper to bumper. Before them is heap of blue aluminum and glass on rubber wheels, its nose collapsed into an old face. Moments ago it was a car. The driver has vanished. I roll down my window—it’s unusually warm—and stare at the officers as I pass, but their heads are bowed into screens and they don’t look up. Heads shaven and radiant they could be brothers. I drive to work, park and forget the carnage entirely.

The following morning. A cheap veneer of ice and snow—the earliest in a century—has transformed the neighborhood. Schools are closed and the traffic is light, cautious. It’s quiet but for the crunch of tires and an earthmover, hidden from view, tolling its little warning. 

And then I remember. The shimmer of shattered windshield. The bored gravity of the twin sheriffs. The siren-less banality of the scene. The forgetting. The destruction, largely anonymous, unseen, forgotten. A man or woman, boy or girl, is somewhere in agony, maimed or dead. Disturbed certainly. A sibling or two, a mother, a friend, a lover knows. The intersection, the stage, is unchanged but for its disguise of snow. I pass through it on my way to work.

Later that day. I read “the ruts became deeper,” a sentence of no great import in Madame Bovary, and images of a dream, gossamer-thin like a Lina Bo Bardi drawing, suddenly return with a pleasant potency. I’m in my car, idling behind others at a red light. To my left is a steep slope, a khaki swath of dry grass crowned with asphalt. Another road. The camera pans to the light, still red, and back to the grass. A man in a derelict gray hatchback is scything down it, hell for leather, with cartoonish whimsy. The dream invites me to trace his tracks—up, to the road—and, once he has passed, I accept. The going is difficult. Perhaps because I’m no longer in the car—I am the car.

On television linemen are restoring the electricity. Classes will resume tomorrow. The weatherman explains what happened. Nothing else, it seems, did.  Smashed sedans and broken bodies go unremarked upon. The cops are in bed with their wives. Rome is in bed with Belial. I warm a bowl of spinach soup in the microwave and scroll through stock photos of Pitigliano. A city without a future in a country of caryatids without arms. A city without cars. I’d love to visit, but I’m a menial and I have no money.

That night. I’m lost in a maze of narrow streets. In a dream. And there she is, post-workout, still wearing gym shorts. Aphrodite, waxen, shorter than I’d imagined. Her limbs are the necks of swans. She hoists a charger of frosted doughnuts and, overwhelmed, wonders, “What am I going to do? I ordered drinks and a pork chop, too.” Revelers encircle her, ogling the spread, taking pictures of it, posing with it. But we cannot eat the treasure. We are in search of a party elsewhere, and go looking, but it isn’t there. It isn’t anywhere. I stoop to pick up a coin. Even in my dreams I am poor.

And haunted by food. Cheeses and tarts, plantains and pie, cakes, fishes, buttered toast. They steam and drip, swirl and become melodies. Chords in the song of the thin man. The dirge of dirges, carried by a plaintive cello on a bed of heavy cream. The fast is his vote, the feast his cudgel. Every candied lick the sting of a mortal wound because it is submission to the world and its sovereign, death. Sweet death. How queer she appears as a tangle of string beans. Give us red meat! If only to say, “Ah, yes, there she is.” But I am still besotted with sleep and the long hour between meals when death can only come to the edge of the wood. No further. She must squint through binoculars and drool. So the thin man eats without opening his mouth. The fat man she has seated and served.

I put a full bladder of warm piss into the toilet bowl. My heart leaps from hibernation, confused, revving in high gear. It is but three a.m. and I am a congeries of stupid thoughts, grocery lists and impossible dream images. The man, for instance, without a face, whom I suspect is only the lowly moderator of an online forum. “Thoughtspace,” he says when I ask of his handle. I turn to the flashing leaderboard in search of his moniker but see only versions of it. Chimeras. Thoughtfake, Thoughttheorem, Timespace. “Are we in the game now?” I wonder, turning back, but he has vanished. Another faceless, hooded thug in a velvet track suit approaches and, in passing, stealthily reaches into my jacket, reaches—preposterously—inside me. Violates me with only a tickle. And yet I’ve been—somehow—rearranged. The mongrel! Beast! I am incensed. I seem to float forward on thoughts of revenge and, looking down, find I’m cradling a rod of gleaming, warm steel. I’ve born a rifle.

But I’m no man of violence. You have forced my hand. Pitting father against son, teacher against pupil, stranger against stranger. It is only self-defense. I once aspired to sing, then to write. Now I must fight. You trick and accuse and deride and lie. You divide. You dress up death in the clothes of truth and lie. You populate my dreams with freaks and puzzles and lie. But I’m no man of violence. I’m barely a man. Childless, passive, a pauper. I only wanted to write. But you bore me a gun. 

Next morning. Snow melting. Crows cawing. Cars crawling. Babies bawling. Everything here is endowed with the myth of my childhood. I can open the same cupboards, the same books. Peer through the same windows into the suppers of the same people. The very people whose painted cheeks haunted me on Halloweens. Here I can be all eye. 

The patient dawn behind the blinds putting prison bars of light across the dresser-cum-bookshelf [I’m coming for you and your Ethics next, Aristotle! And you, Ms. Ditlevsen, don’t budge!]. Ma, ageless in her nubby flannel pajamas, hunched before her jumble. Squirrels twitterpated by the harvest and growing plump on their bounty. Pops in his chair with the obits. The fogged glass into the foyer. The headlights searching the furniture. TV news—always TV news. Turn it up! Turn it down, please. Why is it so quiet? Why is it so loud, dear? I can’t hear it! Can you hear it? The opening salvo. Shall we go for a stroll?

Someone has lost a calendar. The wind has decked it with faux cobwebs and folded it around a signpost. It is March. We have traveled back in time. And in a heavy feminine hand, in the square marked “8,” someone has written, “leave everything.” It is a Friday. Did she? What is it about Fridays that inspire such utter hopelessness? Leave my job, no. Leave Michael. No. Everything. I picture a young woman, her stomach in knots, head dizzy with unanswerable questions. Car pointed east. Wipers going furiously. An American baptism at 75 miles per hour. Everything will be new. She’s too young to know that it is a lie.

Spring is always that way, teasing. It is Palm Sunday, years ago. An uncharacteristically clear evening. People are out walking, birds are singing and courting in the brush. I’m light as air. A young family charges past me, dad pushing a stroller and mom corralling a trio of smiling, fleet-footed tykes. They are racing each other down the boulevard. Laughter ricochets off of yellow brick houses—huge, billowing laughter, really, in the absence of cars. I remember laughter. The good has triumphed, has overcome the world, if only for some seconds. If only for eternity.

Alas, I must turn away from it. And immediately I enter a dream. Leafless arms of stately elms ripple over me and I trip down a corridor of gentle light. Golden light! At its end, some blocks ahead, a door in the trees reveals the sunset, suddenly a point of intense concentration. Through the keyhole, someplace else. A New Jerusalem. Unearthed memories slide on top of one another like mille-feuille, fold into each other, jostle the senses, become almost physical. Christ, too, is walking beneath wrought iron into the City of Many Names, alone, with knowledge of his fate. I see a light breeze sweeping through Golgatha, whipping up little eddies of dust in anticipation. Cue the centurions. His coming resurrection is my own hoped-for conversion, a crocus emerging from frozen ground in the night of life into the heaving bosom of innocence. A clean break from winter. Is it too much to ask? It snowed late into April of that year. And I remain un-bloomed.

Enough poetry. I, too, was once a child. Perhaps I still am—in spirit—as the artist should be. The adult is the crucible of corruption, corruption being the supplication of transience, the denial of truth for lies. This street, for instance, is a lie, a run-on sentence composed for a vile machine. The kitten crushed into soupy leather by a two ton something. Andrew lost in the fog and found on the hood of an Expedition. It is a lie if our hands beget power and speed before tenderness. The lie of lust. It is not our way, to murder. But there are screens to return to and spouses to see through and it’s been such a long day. Accelerate. 

Or turn here and become small again. Become slow again. Try, again, to really notice. Repetitions, pathways, throughways, pipeways, the ciphers of ordinary time. I’m talking about the big mess of life in a patch of weeds and dead leaves and inside the skull. The play of light on vinyl siding. Semantic drift, the immutable—and beautiful—ignorance of youth, the sensation of clothes, vagabonds. Intelligence is an intense noticing. And distraction, its correlative, a kind of retardation. Distraction, destruction. They are sister lovers. No mere hausfraus, they are—beware—seductresses of universal infamy swaddled in exotic patterns and lounging like cats on the ledges and toppled blocks of travertine ruins. Dance about them, delight in their perfumes, but do not meet eyes. Who does anyhow anymore?

Evening. If Canetti is right that “All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams,” who can be their savior? What of crimes compartmentalized and paved over? God, come with me, the guiltiest man alive. Last night a woman, perhaps a former employer, is confronting me with video evidence of some wrongdoing I’ve committed. I see my face on the screen, warped, embalmed. My arms, swathed in a mushroom heather cardigan, wave wildly. “But I’ve done nothing wrong,” I think to myself. There must be some kind of mistake. “I’m so disappointed in you,” says the woman. Lies! The word staggers the dream, but it holds. Lies! I stand accused, naked but for my innocence. Yet she is intransigent, cannot see it. The truth. I’m strong-armed into a purple robe. Hot dust chokes my nostrils. The sensation of falling. And then I wake up.

Book of the City of Dreams (Excerpt I)

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It was only a dream. Only a dream. Her face churning in rhythmic clicks to the tick tock of an unseen remote control–swish swish–in essence, channel surfing her. Or was it a great transparent hand of sinewy glass massaging her jowls like putty? Pain into bliss into fright and awe—“a hundred fantastic and terrible and obscene forms”—and back again. There is a delay between us. An unbridgeable distance of inches. She submits, mouthing unknowables (the image is “out of sync”). Her black mane spilling suspended over a blacker void as if submerged in a pool at night. Her smile. Eyes eating me alive. How it seemed a performance, some kind of macabre dance. Click click click. Watching it (did she know I was there?) I felt a pang of truth, wordless and visible, indescribable but undeniable. Illiterate truth (isn’t it always?). I don’t know who she was, this woman talking without speaking. I don’t know what it meant, what it means. When I awoke my hands were mitts, numb, dumb, someone else’s. It was only a dream.

Make Hell While the Sun Shines

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What is it about control, about the habit of organizing others according to one’s wishes, of remaking them into one’s own image? It exists in the playground bully, the pernicious smothering of an overzealous mother, in the micromanaging office supervisor and, most troublingly, in the machinations of national governments. Like our seemingly fathomless appetite for sex and sweets, the impulse to manipulate another person has proven indestructible, and, if I may, I’d like to riff a minute on this baffling–and disturbing–human tendency.

Like Chet Baker, “I’m old fashioned / that’s how I want to be.” But there we part ways–I don’t believe “this year’s fancies are passing fancies.” The intellectual kind, at least. If they fade in the popular imagination, let’s chalk it up to something of a reculer pour mieux sauter. Like Lavoisier’s law of matter, I think ideas are neither created nor destroyed, even the particularly heinous ones.

So, just as the (supposed) dismantling of Daesh (IS, ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) in Syria has only paused Salafi dreams of a caliphate in the Middle East and Europe, the death of Josef Stalin on March 5, 1953 did not halt the march of communism (nor make for particularly profound cinematic grist, unless you’re partial to four letter words). 

It metastasized in the hearts and minds of the Czech people. Milan Kundera, iconoclast and favorite son, wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being that they were “convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise.” Not until the nonviolent “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 did they realize their blunder.

In Hungary, too, the Marxist dream of universal brotherhood found bonhomie with Soviet barbed wire and boots for much of the twentieth century, until 1990, when the soldiers finally boarded–in a stroke of tragic irony–thousands of railway cars bound for the heart of an empire in disarray. But it was a communism not so much of blackouts and breadlines but of private restaurants and–imagine it–used car lots. They called it gulyáskommunizmus, or goulash communism–a mix, like the savory dish, of ideologies. 

Inspired by the “Polish thaw,” a loosened leash allowed for some movement of capital and consumer goods, even some dissent. But it was still a society monitored by secret police, a society where entrepreneurs erected their dreams in a clandestine side-show. Young Americans like to speak these days of their “oppression,” quaffing a small-batch IPA at brunch. Party hard-liners in Hungary permitted a single state-owned brewery, “and the beer was terrible,” notes a historian in The New York Times in 1983. 

These countries did shed the yoke of communism, and one prays the beer has improved in due course, but the idea persists. As Rousseau observed, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The temptation to manage in toto, to curb if necessary, is terribly seductive to those who resent–and fear–the autonomy of others. For political systems of control–like those of the Soviet bloc yesterday and Xi Jinping’s China today–are fundamentally systems of fear–of achievement, of distinction, of possibility and, basically, of nature. 

And these systems are extrusions of the people who build them. I know a man who cannot sit in peace at a quiet restaurant because he chooses, instead of making conversation with his table mates, to hone in on those transpiring around him. If the voices are too loud or vile for his liking, and because he cannot in good conscience interrupt them to say so, his temper simmers until it boils over and he exits in a huff. He despises the “spontaneous eruptions of joy” at a neighborhood ballpark, the evening lawnmowers and barking crows that trespass on his cone of silence.

To this man, and to bureaucrats of his ilk in positions of power, the unpredictable, liquid dance of life is a fount of anxiety and animus. It must be composed, tamed, willed into submission. And with force if it resists. His comfort, his illusion of protection, is sacrosanct. Hence, the exterior world–everything beyond his jurisdiction–is suspect. It is, ultimately, a canvas not for creation but criticism. 

It is self-preservation–an existential fear of bodily death, really–in its ugliest manifestation, the embryonic spirit of malice and violence. Is it any wonder the most authoritarian societies are the most explicitly brutal? Fear rationalizes the objectification of the stranger, even of the friend, so that she can be coerced and corralled. Even her death is seen in the abstract. What matters is the continuation of the self. Homo homini lupus–“man is a wolf to man.”

Accordingly, this spirit, albeit a (to-date) diluted strain of the kind that ravaged so much of twentieth century Europe, has found sanctuary today in the peoples of the West, the very architects of its progenitor’s demise. They call it socialism. Perhaps out of guilt, spiritual lethargy or sheer stupidity it has been embraced, particularly by impressionable youth, with an almost messianic fervor. Why? It is a Weltanschauung that–in the wake of a retreating church–appears to offer identity, meaning (“Women have better sex under socialism,” claims author Kristen R. Ghodsee) and eventually–after the revolution, of course–security.

Its detractors shrug with the air of a drunken (and fat) Jack Kerouac in conversation–on a 1968 episode of Firing Line–with academic Lewis Yablonsky and Ed Sanders of the Fugs before an amused William F. Buckley. When Yablonsky raises the subject of hippie endearment to psychedelic drugs we see a scowling Kerouac give an emphatic “thumbs down” as Sanders–a mile-wide smile creeping across his face–jerks his enthusiastically upwards. 

“I believe in order, tenderness and piety,” slurs a visibly defeated Kerouac, lamenting ideals given short shrift by the unwelcome inheritors of his beatific vision–the hippies–who instead espouse a “misanthropic”–Buckley’s word–regime of disorder, callousness and profanity. Half a century on their children and grandchildren are the evangelists of socialism, a doctrine more virile than ever, operating under the guise of anti-fascism, moral rectitude and a cloak of shibboleths (“Good night white pride,“ “Resist!” “Destroy the patriarchy!”).

This is the metaphysical sputum of philosopher Michel Foucault’s infatuation with perversion–what his biographer, James Miller, termed “the creative potential of disorder”–that has legitimized violence and moved a protégé, author Édouard Louis, to declare, “There is no truth without anger” and “it would be indecent these days for writers to talk of anything else but violence.” 

See? With a flick of the wrist–voilà–up is down, down is up. This is the modus operandi of the control freak–to limit, to critique, to cultivate the politics of j’accuse–and his grand strategy, socialism. It is nothing less than a contemporary incarnation of the fallout from original sin, what Paul Krause in The Imaginative Conservative describes as “the lust to dominate what would produce our happiness through an inversion of the natural order of right and wrong.”

Like the communist scourge before it socialism is predicated on this ineradicable lie. Ineradicable because it is the defining characteristic of human nature: our fallenness. Our malignancy. Cut it out of the lungs and it takes in the breast tissue. Snuff it out in Prague and it reemerges in Tangiers. Bury it there and it surfaces in Birmingham. In Portland. In Concepción. Ever in flux–hiding and seeking–like the sands of Namibia.

Look no further than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party of the United Kingdom for evidence of its noxious presence. Just this past week, at a party conference, the “center-left” group voted (ironically) to abolish private schools–redistribute their investments and endowments to the state–if given the keys to govern in the next general election. Instead of acting as an agent of growth the socialist, remember, aims to displease. She demands submission. Wherever inequality leads (i.e. wherever liberty nourishes the kaleidoscopic display of life) the socialist follows. Wherever humanity thrives the socialist is there to bridle it and to shush it. 

Because the desire to rule is a distortion of the gift of life. It is a cardinal feature of this world. From time immemorial subjugation has been–and remains–the way of the control freak. When the methods of the iron fist–i.e. those of Hitler’s Third Reich, Stalin’s Red Terror, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, etc.–meet resistance in men of conscience, they’re simply morphed into a less obvious but more duplicitous design. Tyranny, in other words–say, those of the business professional–, has merely been “rebranded” or–in those of the psychologist–“feminized” pari passu with modern sensibilities. 

Alexis De Tocqueville, in the 1830s, recognized the phenomenon as a kind of perpetually wagging forefinger that “does not tyrannize” but “compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies” with a “network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” Its fruit is a “new kind of servitude” wherein, “the will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided.” But instead of the merciful Lamb of God it is the administrative state that shepherds him from cradle to grave.

Any parent of a precocious child, or Silicon Valley success guru, will warn against this. Individuals learn through failure–there must be room for mistakes, or, rather, the possibility of making a mistake. This is a crucial qualitative distinction. For on the larger scale of governing, where F.A. Hayek treads, “it is more important to […] release the creative energy of individuals than to devise further machinery for ‘guiding’ and ‘directing’ them–to create conditions favorable to progress rather than to ‘plan progress.’” It was true in 1945, when much of Western civilization had been reduced to a smoldering ruin, and it is true still, today, on the brink of ever new catastrophes.

We are stubborn, broken creatures. We fill our sad hearts with too much cake and too much gin. But we mustn’t be told we cannot. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” says William Blake in his Proverbs of Hell, and later, “for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.” 

The control freak, however, knows and acts accordingly. If humanity is to ever escape the ceaseless cycle of violence, perhaps, as Carl Jung suggests, society must trade containment for caritas. Indeed, “Where love stops,” he wisely observes, “power begins, and violence and terror.”

Photo: Foucault, Michel. Date and photographer unknown.

Knock Knock. Who’s There?

Connor DinnisonLeave a comment

Shortly after seven in the evening a plume of boiling pink stuff cut a cleft into the firmament. Sheared it in two. And I was there to see it. I’m talking about a sunset, employing a bit of purple prose because it was that magnificent. The way it paused the day, hanging there, pouring out in ripples like a spilled electric smoothie; how could it be? I thanked God. 

And beneath it (and Him), in the dark, cars are pulling into driveways, neighbors are cooking and laughing, a dog is barking. My stomach is full of food. It is a Tuesday. Judith Hearne, in the Brian Moore novel on my nightstand, is forever off “to the last [bus] stop, the lonely room, the lonely night.” 

I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to express about this sunset, or how, when I began typing tonight. But it was remarkable; that I knew. It merited a recording, if only a reminder that it happened, that an ordinary moment was penetrated by a scene so captivating it warranted my explicit attention. Vox audita perit litera scripta manet, as the Romans would say. “The heard voice perishes, but the written letter remains.”

More than its obvious beauty I was struck by the sunset’s unexpectedness. Like locking eyes with a smiling stranger, it was the kind of event that obliterates time and, subsequently, the petty doubts and errant wants that animate so many of our waking hours. Mine, at least. Achtung! “Pay attention,” it seemed to command, but with fantastic hues and billowing forms instead of words. Imagine that–a sky made of words. Nature as a sloganeering word processor. Shudder to think of that kind of mouth; it would never shut-up. 

Much to the chagrin of physicists (and despots), the cosmos are mute, and rightly so. What wonder spelled out, literally, for ease of interpretation and clarity would ever stoke the imagination or turn the heart of some “lonely watcher on the hills”? Take three giants of such visionary inspiration: Ulysses, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and the Panasonic NN-ST776SQPQ Inverter Microwave Oven operation manual. Do you see what I mean? There must be some sensual incoherence, some inherent ambivalence, in a work for it to assert any kind of dominion over the psyche. 

Take, say, a sunset. 

Or a prayer. It’s no coincidence, the devout tell us, the most effective and humble way to God’s presence is through the mantra, or in the case of Christianity the repetition–aloud or silent–of the short “Jesus prayer” (“Lord Jesus, have mercy on me”). Forget “Lord, thank you for the promotion and for yesterday’s victory in the ball game and forgive me for my impatience at the gas pump and” ad nauseam. Forget prayer as billboard and prayer as epistolary solitaire. The point is to lose yourself, to, paradoxically, silence yourself. To shut-up and focus.

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” observed the French philosopher Simone Weil. Distraction, then, is what? Anxiety? Indifference? Our age is rife with it. Nothing sinister per se, but it demonstrates a kind of prideful bondage to helplessness. And yet we live in an Age of Perceived Certainty. In our abilities, in our superiorities, in ourselves. Perhaps we’d benefit from a dose of humility, the kind dispensed via sunset, to recall our true place on the cosmic ladder. To see anew our limitations and, in essence, our humanity. For, “Impossibility,” Weil argued, “is the door of the supernatural. We can only knock at it. Someone else opens it.” 

Is this not the formula for adventure? The word descends from the Latin advenire, to arrive, which implies a leaving and, of course, a risk. Flight. It requires an Other and an encounter. It asks for submission. It is the beginning of faith.

Modernity, on the other hand, increasingly resembles the end of adventure, the proverbial Panasonic instruction manual. Safety is paramount. Perhaps that is why I am so enamored with Tuesday’s sunset. Because it was such a surprise, pregnant with possibility, the unknown and the strange. Modernity demands conformity and eschews risk for the sake of economy and, alas, at the expense of life, of bewilderment and majesty. Of adventure. My sunset is its triumph, the redemption of the baroque, the frilly and weird, over the banal. It’s Mario Irarrázabal’s Mano del Desierto reaching through the sand, the flower on the tarmac. Glorious is the word that comes to mind.

I think it’s Christ, too, overcoming the world.

Photo: Escalier, Marcos. Desert’s Hand. Flickr.

What Comes After

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It is sobering–and often plain awful–to be reminded, every so often, of just how precarious our circumstances really are in the steadily turning cogs of machinery we call “civilization.” I’m looking at photographer Joel Meyerowitz’s behemoth monograph, Aftermath, documenting the cleanup of rubble in “the forbidden city,” site of the fallen World Trade Center towers post-9/11.

The local library has set it out for display, buried, oddly, in a stack of home renovation books. My God. How quickly we shed the veneer of custom and class in terror and uncertainty. In one photo, notes (“I still have hope!” or “We love you Paul”) and tags (“Moondog,” “Buffalo P.D.” and “USA!”) are scribbled and smudged on the dusty exterior of a Japanese restaurant, stacked, as in Lascaux, as high as the human hand can reach. In another, a despondent, “Where’s Frank?” casts a haunting pall over an apartment lobby. One minute it was errands and phone calls, coffee and bagels with old friends, cuff links and Brooks Brothers; the next, utter confusion and panic, blood and hot dust, men and women leaping from windows.

A fireman involved in the cleanup operation, many months after that bluebird September day, says Meyerowitz, was christened “The Raven” because of his uncanny knack for retrieving bones from the debris. Human bones. What has become of him? “The Raven,” I mean. The bones, we know, belong to the dead and are easily categorized. It’s the flesh–life–that bewilders. It must be accounted for. It must go on. And these kinds of things are not supposed to happen, aren’t, God forbid, “part of the plan.” 

What of Frank? I picture him middle-aged, mustachioed and balding, quick to smile and courteous to his fellow tenants–the kind of guy who’d greet a stranger, too, with a “mornin'” or a “how-are-ya, champ?” I picture him caked in soot, his sleeves rolled up above his elbows, in the lobby of the north tower guiding shellshocked office workers out of stairwells. I picture him consulting with policemen, doing his part, a wet rag over his mouth. He doesn’t know what’s happened, but he knows it was fate that placed him there that morning. “Where’s Frank?” I don’t want to, but I imagine he never left.

Photo: Meyerowitz, Joel. Fireman Rescue Crew. 2001. Aftermath. Phaidon Press, 2006. Print.