Here is a square picture filled with four square pictures: the top left is a piece of wood; the top right is a bird’s-eye view of... On second thought, I’ll explain this image in the postscript.
Dear diary,
On Saturday afternoon, I was listening to my boss deliver a lecture. He was telling me about his garage door, which suffered a breakdown earlier in the week. He showed me a brochure for the new door that he ordered to replace the one that is currently off its rails. The most attractive feature of this new door, according to my boss, is that it has four large windows along its right side, which he plans to cover with semi-transparent frosty stickers; to allow the outside light in, while obscuring the view to passersby. This made me think: Everyone wants to reside in brightness and clarity and yet remain unseen, like Jove in Heaven. So the sun itself has the best life of all, for it’s the most brilliant sight in our neck of the woods, but no one can look directly at it without burning their eyes out. So it can behold without being beheld.
And when my boss ended his speech, I tried to incite a conversation by offering a remark of my own. So I said: Tomorrow (which is now today, as I write: Sunday, September the Tertius or 3rd) airs the final episode of the new Twin Peaks. But my boss could not have cared less about this fact. He replied, “Oh. That’s too bad.” And I said, No I only mentioned it to note how fast the time went, for it seemed like only a week ago that the series began, and it’s eighteen hours total, and now it’s ending – I’m not sad about it: I actually dislike most of it; only three hours so far were sublime (3, 4, & 8) – but it pleases me to watch it whether it’s good or not, because I’m fascinated by the development of artists, especially those who are sui generis, avant-garde. Think of George Lucas: he made the very first Star Wars film in 1977 when he was young; and it was not easy to push his vision through to completion: that movie was a total surprise, wholly unexpected by either critics or the public; it was beyond daring; so the executives and behind-the-scenes moneyfolk etc. harbored the gravest doubts about its worth, and many people who should’ve been allies were roadblocks to the wily young Lucas. Then, XX years later, after Star Wars had enjoyed a full generation of ultra-success, Lucas, now far aged, was able to revisit his oddball film that has grown into a franchise...
Why strain to articulate the details? Everyone knows the story: Lucas’s second coming was embarrassingly tedious compared to that initial advent.
Compare his original TV pilot for the series, and the other shows and film that he wrote and directed, to what David Lynch is doing with Twin Peaks: The Return. I like to note the similarities and differences in the successes and failures of the young and old Lynch versus the same from the young and old Lucas. Here, again, we have the much younger Lynch struggling with blockhead networks and achieving an offbeat, surrealist soap opera to vie with Lucas’s space opera. Note how they're both attracted to demotic material, so-called vulgar genres. Now Lynch also, all these years later, approaches his own ancient universe with full directorial control, creative carte blanche (if not limitless financing – Lucas admittedly has a leg up there). I find more genuine greatness in the 2017 Twin Peaks than in the 1999-2005 “prequel trilogy” of Star Wars, BUT both series are similarly pervaded by an uninspired quality that I associate with the comfortable, self-satisfied artist. There’s no reason that advanced age itself must produce tame art – the examples of extremely old people who have brought forth masterworks are too numerous to mention – yet a certain level of success, of popularity, seems to have the effect on mature minds of rendering them artistically impotent. I might channel William Blake to put this another way: You start out as John Milton’s Satan, an amazing creative upstart; then artistic triumph lulls you to deteriorate into John Milton’s God. Perhaps repose is the enemy. Maybe the worst thing that can happen to an experimental poet is to be granted salvation, supposing that concept means “acceptance by the multitudes during one’s lifetime.”
But I’d rather be loved by people and produce bad art, than to be hated by people and produce good art. Because good and bad don’t exist without an overseer to cast judgments; and I desire a life that is free from slavemasters. So what I’m saying is that there’s only the masses and their affection: there is, in truth, no judgment; so never mind punk bloggers who rate your latest work as shoddier than your youthful breakthroughs.
Corporations are people, and people are countries. So countries are indistinguishable from the corporations that own them, and they also follow the aging cycle of humankind. Which is to say: They, too, grow up to become their parents...
Isn’t it funny? You have Britain in the latter half of the 18th century bearing colonies and then losing control of thirteen of them. Then a couple hundred years later those colonies have expanded into a nation of more than fifty states, plus several territories that are other-than-states, and countless military bases infesting the globe. What if a smattering of U.S. military bases wanted to exit their empire, the way that those first thirteen colonies broke from Britain?
Therefore shall a child leave its parent. (Genesis 2:24)
What would this group of new patriots call themselves? I’m sure it would be an unpronounceable acronym, because that’s the current fad among the short-sighted. And do you need fresh land to start a new country? Because some members of the audience have suggested that the PRU100IPME (pronounced: Patriotic Rebel United Fivescore Independent Private Military Establishments) colonize Mars. But here’s the thing with Mars: it doesn’t have a paradise to overthrow. New empires require a beautiful landscape to uglify, and an existing harmony of gods and gardeners to slaughter (or enslave); otherwise, what’s the point of tyranny? If you’re going to try to make matters fair for everyone, you might as well just assassinate yourself now. For only death is truly democratic. But careful thinkers will notice that my hypothetical country-launch contains one flaw – this was by design; I wanted to test the strength of the audience’s fussiness – it is this: You don’t need to stumble upon another physical continent to reestablish Hell, because now we have the Internet. Any advantage that the original British colonies enjoyed from existing in proximity can now be achieved via online interactions: you no longer have to walk to your neighbor’s shack in the woods and ask to borrow a meat pie for your troops; you just order it electronically. And the same goes for spying on the enemy, acquiring nuclear arsenal, and even bankrolling the warfare itself. The only thing lacking is a trustworthy curator for all the art that the infant nation will produce. And you also need a lower class of disposable souls to do all the work: behind every god-serving despot there’s a trillion humble servants.
*
[Everything above is an addition: I wrote it after being ashamed of my original entry, which consisted of all that follows. I want this public-private journal to crack open my psyche, so I prohibit myself from deleting anything; but I allow myself to bury the stuff that seems frumpy to me, by writing way overmuch.]
TL;DR
Today I’m worried that I’m no good, that I have nothing to say anymore. I only record this feeling so that I can look back on it and laugh someday – that’s what I hope will happen. Yestreen, I made the mistake of following through on an impulse to check out the social networking profile page of a person who was unknown to me and whose status update another half-known person had micro-blogged. Are these tech-terms intelligible still, O ye creatures that crawled from the toxic, post-human swamp: “profile page,” “status update,” “micro-blogged”? I just mean that a stranger came to my attention by a stroke of god, and I let my curiosity get the better of me: I opened the scroll of that person’s publications, and I quickly learned that he or she is a lawyer who lives in my small town, and this person is clever and prolific and intelligent. And this lawyer owns his or her own firm, which specializes in legal protection for immigrants; so he or she is constantly providing TRUE AID to those in need: helping them acquire citizenship; protecting them from the empire’s official xenophobic terror-squads; etc. All this impressed me; on the flip-side, all this depressed me: because I can’t help but find myself lacking when compared to an actual hero. I will call the soul in question “Capt” because that name is omni-gendered as an angel:
Capt owns a lucrative business; I have always worked for miserly bosses. Capt lives and breathes philanthropy; I just blink piteously at news stories. Capt reclines by the cool stream in the pleasure dome; I am the infidel whom the fire vaults over.
Worst of all, I spend the next morning posing for my journal with crocodile tears. No more of this. Let me change the subject.
But I have nothing to speak of. So I will talk about the books that I’m reading, because I always like when other people do that.
It’s weird how things work out. On the same day, we finished reading three of the five books in our green-park stack, which is the stack that we keep in a backpack to read aloud at parks: Ahmed Ali’s English translation of Alcoran; Samuel Butler’s novel The Way of All Flesh; and James Merrill’s poetry collection The Inner Room. When I asked my sweetheart what we should replace Alcoran with, right away she said The Gnostic Scriptures (we love and so keep returning to the collection translated and edited by Bentley Layton). Then I decided that we’d fill the void left by The Way of All Flesh with another novel: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I’ve read his Notes from Underground many times, and also Crime and Punishment, which was the very first classic I ever set eyes on – my mother found a paperback on sale for a dime at a garage sale and purchased the book for me when I was a teenager (which reminds me, I still owe my mom ten cents plus interest) – but I’m ashamed to admit that, for no good reason, I’m unfamiliar with the rest of Dostoevsky. But I’m eager as usual to remedy my ignorance. Then I forgot to replace the Merrill book, I mean I forgot to remove it from the stack when we rode our bikes to the park on Wednesday, so we decided to continue with the next title in his collection (A Scattering of Salts) instead of doing as I intended and starting a volume of Geoffrey Hill’s works. You see, we own the complete poems of Merrill and Hill and Elizabeth Bishop, and our habit is to go from one to the next, to rotate between the three, volume by volume, for the sake of variety. There’s no grand reason that we fixed on these three poets – I love them all and many more as well – chance whim and fancy landed us this way.
And as I mentioned in my previous secret missive, I finished Gore Vidal’s Empire; and it worked out that the next book in the series was already waiting for me at the library; it’s called Hollywood: A novel of America in the 1920s. Here’s a good, self-explanatory passage, which takes place prior to World War I – the eloquence of Vidal’s Woodrow Wilson, 28th U.S. prez, who explains earlier in the passage that he was only a youth when the Civil War ended:
“My family suffered very little. But what we saw around us, the bitterness of the losers in the war and the brutality of the winners . . . well, none of this was lost on me. I am not,” a wintry close-lipped smile divided for an instant the rude stone face, “an enthusiast of war like Colonel Roosevelt, whose mentality is that of a child of six and whose imagination must be nonexistent. You see, I can imagine what this war will do to us. I pray I’m wrong. But I am deathly afraid that once you lead this people—and I know them well—into war, they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. Because to fight to win, you must be brutal and ruthless, and that spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life. You—Congress—will be infected by it, too, and the police, and the average citizen. The whole lot. Then we shall win. But what shall we win? How do we help the South . . . I mean the Central Powers to return from a war-time to a peace-time basis? How do we help ourselves? We shall have become what we are fighting. We shall be trying to reconstruct a peace-time civilization with war-time standards. That’s not possible, and since everyone will be involved, there’ll be no bystanders with sufficient power to make a just peace. That’s what I had wanted us to be. Too proud to fight in the mud, but ready to stand by, ready to mediate, ready to . . .” the voice stopped.
Is Wilson wrong? Have we not become what we were fighting? The populace was as inherently pacifistic then as it is now; it took massive efforts of propaganda to rile people up to war’s requisite fever pitch. I wish that we would learn from this reality, and stay stubbornly skeptical about all news of conflict and everything we’re told – especially the stuff that is repeated oftenest, loudest, and that seems the most obviously valid due solely to mass consensus. Not that we all need to become conspiracy theorists; just that we should remain wary about information that fuels our aggression, that makes us crave revenge on our fellow earthlings.
I am getting heated, speaking about this. Must cool down. Think of modern changes towards the positive...
At least rowdy saloons are not the average town’s cultural center nowadays. And it’s less common for one’s husband to bring home a bevy of prostitutes and perform orgies in front of you and your weeping children.
But all citizens still carry firearms, that’s true. And everybody wants to be a sherrif, so we’re all short-fused: quick to draw and bangbang trigger-happy. Plus we all lock our doors. Why? Do we think that our neighbor’s wife is going to try to haul off our old clunky, nineteen-watt stereo speakers? Let her have them. And the only other thing our house has is books. I already listed the titles above – they’re all that type of prissy litter. I mean: literature. So, perusing whatever you stole from off my shelves will be significantly different than watching American football. But admittedly it would be worth your while to break inside and borrow my Wrong Cops DVD, because that film’s hard to find. Unless it’s still on Netflix.
But am I patriotic because today I wore a RED shirt, homemade with the name of my old rap group ironed on it, with BLUE jeans and clean WHITE shoes? No: you are not therefore patriotic, Bryan; simply displaying the colors of the flag will never ingratiate you with the zealot-purist. In order to qualify, you must also possess a red white and blue motorcar; whereas look at your mode of transportation: it does not even require gasoline; it is a gray bike with a hot pink chain-lock, and the beverage bottle is green.
What could possibly compel anyone to face the might of American airpower? It was something I often wondered as I followed the invasion in the news. Back then, every day seemed to bring reports of dozens or hundreds of Taliban mowed down, only to have more of them sprout anew days later. They had the faceless quality of old Hollywood henchmen, always willing to sacrifice themselves in a mindless drive to satisfy some devious master. That certainly didn’t sound like anyone I’d ever met, and it was one of the things I found most interesting about the Taliban.
That’s from near the beginning of another new book I’m suffering through—I don’t say “suffering” because it’s badly written, in fact it’s very well-written, but because it’s hard to hear about the hellish chaos of post-9/11 Afghanistan—it’s called No Good Men Among the Living, subtitled: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal.
I can’t follow the goings-on, in books like this last-mentioned which relay the deathmatch. Unlike certain forms of violent new televised wrestling, there’s no cage to contain the action: it’s sheer confusion. Trucks are driving one way; people are in makeshift prisons; gunfire comes from who-knows-where; “when the smoke cleared, all he could see was a burning lump of metal”; this desperate faction over here is dying to kill that forlorn regime over there; nobody trusts anyone; former allies are now enemies and vice versa; foreign soldiers at checkpoints blah blah blah...
Suddenly everything exploded: windows burst, slabs of the ceiling came crashing down, and Karzai was thrown to the ground. When he looked up, he saw smoke and blood and groaning, soot-covered men.
The Americans had called in an air strike—on themselves. Although threat of a Taliban counterattack had been minimal, American bombing had continued (largely on orders of Amerine’s superior, who had flown in to join the mission). In the process, an errant 2,000-pound satellite-guided bomb struck their own encampment.
When I admit that I don’t understand this stuff, I fear that it sounds like I’m joking: it’s so obvious to state, it feels comically naive. For who does understand this stuff? Is there some elite group out there that knows what’s going on and has a plan, some group that not only perceives this inhuman catastrophe but desires it? It appears to me as though all who’re actually participating in the fighting, whether on the ground or up in the air, simply trust their higher power – whether military, clerical, supernatural – they assume that such an entity exists and that its interests match their own. But combatants from all sides end up returning to civility and getting maltreated. They find out, only after it’s too late, that there’s no “duty,” no “honor.” I don’t know how they keep finding people willing to fight.
The threat of poverty combined with foul education...
P.S.
(About the image)
This entry begins with a square picture filled with square pictures: the top left is a piece of wood; the top right is a bird’s-eye view of 33 golf tees (the age of Christ when he died) arranged in the shape of a flesh-hued cross; the bottom left is a piece of wood with 33 empty tombs whose inhabitants have risen up into the outer darkness (see the top-right square); and the black circle filled with black circles at the bottom-right corner is a rubber drink coaster for your Virgin Mary, which is the name of a non-alcoholic beverage: it’s basically a Bloody Mary minus the vodka. So blood equals alcohol, and therefore vodka is life. As Nosferatu the Vampyre saith in Leviticus:
For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and you shall offer it to me upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls. (17:11)
No comments:
Post a Comment