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Born 5:14 pm, January 20, 2008, Room 24 on the twelfth floor of the Roosevelt Hospital in NYC, of which staff was so lackadaisical, under-managed and incompetent that not only my wife, but several others did not receive the requested epidural administration for pain relief. Thank God my wife is a soldier; I’m so proud of her. I thought maybe the thing to do for this post is to quote some lines of classy poetry, so maybe I was going to go with Larkin (”they fuck you up, your mum and dad”), but instead, these closing lines from “Midnight” from Spencer Reece in the hopes of a good life ahead for my daughter, Ella (happy birthday, darling) -

The rest of this panorama is immense, dark, impenetrable, unstructured.
But if you look closely in the left-hand corner,
I can just be distinguished from the blue blue brilliance of all this land,
a tiny figure, no bigger than a grass blade, a shadow hugged by shadows,
heading home after a long walk nowhere,
encircled by a halo of rocks, trees, crops, rivers, clouds -
by every blessed thing conspiring together to save my life.

No baby yet. So today, I would like to talk about the Devil. If The Book of Job is any indication, it would seem all too likely that if Satan or the Anti-Christ were to walk the earth today among us, he or she would be a suave PR/marketing guru of devastating and ruthless acumen, leaving the throngs of his followers craving and craving. That is not the only reason why I think Steve Jobs of Apple Computers is the devil; when asked if Apple would design a e-Reader like the Amazon Kindle, Jobs replied -

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore… The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

Sweet. What a dick. Before we scoff at his reductive comment, though, I’m sure most of us would admit that we had such a thought cross our minds. I live in NYC right now and such a comment seems just patently false to me. But I used to work in an independent book store in Los Angeles as a Buyer, and analyzing weekly/monthly sales, I’d often think about the same thing - that people were reading less and less. (Although I hate to be elitist, I’m not talking about books like Eat Right For Your Blood Type.) Even in NYC, I’ve talked to a few editors at publishing houses who lamented about the same thing, especially about the decline in readership & sales of literary fiction. Depressing, for sure, but at the same time, I don’t think there’s any cause for alarm. Literature will stick around.

On a more cheerful note, here’s a memo that the National League of Baseball sent to its players in late 1890’s. In an attempt to redress the use of profanity by the players on the field, the memo makes a conscientious but colorful effort to define exactly what sort of language that the League is concerned about -

That such a brutal language as “You cock-sucking son of a bitch!” “You prick-eating bastard!” “You cunt-lapping dog!” “Kiss my ass you son of a bitch!” “A dog must have fucked your mother when she made you!” “I fucked your mother, your sister, your wife!” “I’ll make you suck my ass!” “You cock-sucker!” and many other revolting terms are used by a limited number of players, and are promiscuously used upon the ball field is vouched for by the almost unanimous assertion of those invited to speak… whether it be the language quoted above, or some other indecent and infamous invention of depravity, the League is pledged to remove it from the ball field…

Thankfully, History has sided with the profane.

My wife is delivering our second child this week (a daughter). So please excuse me as I can’t post as much as I’d like to. It’ll get more hectic with family flying in from California. And school’s starting again in a week! I will cardiac arrest right after all this is over. For some reason, I’m very nervous, although I’ve been through this process before. I’m freaking out, also, because I chose not to go to a refresher Lamaze class at the hospital, because I fell asleep my first time there. But I think I forgot most of the techniques, and we’ll have to resort to impromptu breathing patterns during labor. It is very likely that at my wife’s side, I’ll look like a third-base coach sending complex and frantic signals to a confused base runner. My wife, on the other hand, exudes a Siddhartan calm. Just an amazing woman.

Two nights ago, I took her out on a date. A last-chance respite, you know, before our incarceration. We went to the Radu Lupu recital at the Carnegie Hall. One of my favorite discs is Radu Lupu’s Late Brahms; when I die, I want to lose my final consciousness listening to his Opus 118 A-major intermezzo. Or Weird Al Yankovic, maybe, who knows.

Anyway, the first half of Lupu’s recital was devoted to Schubert’s D. 850 Sonata, and the second half, to the first book of Debussy’s Preludes. The hall was packed. Amazing, considering that there was no war-horse virtuoso piece nor an especially intriguing program. But I suspect all of them were there, just like me, to hear the sheer beauty of sound that Lupu can produce out of the piano. I don’t know of any other pianist who is capable of producing that kind of tone from the instrument. Maybe Krystian Zimerman or Murray Perahia.

Schubert’s D. 850 Sonata is called “Gasteiner” because it was composed in 1825, during Schubert’s visit to the spa town of Gastein. He would die in three years. His last symphony, the “Great” symphony in C-major, is also based on the sketches he made in Gastein in 1825. So the sonata, too, has a Beethovenian grandeur. I don’t know if Lupu was over-pedaling or if the Carnegie Hall’s acoustics were suspect, but the first movement came off a bit hazy. But the Con moto slow movement was perhaps the finest I’ve heard, either live or on record. And it was beyond my understanding how Lupu could make the mysterious hush of the ppp which ends the sonata linger in the hall’s air.

The Preludes were even finer. Became a suite of damn-near miraculous luminous sound in Lupu’s hands. As an encore, he played something from the second book of Debussy’s Preludes (I can’t remember the title, because Lupu didn’t announce his encores). Then for the second encore, he played the C sharp-minor from Schubert’s Moments Musicaux. In virtually all the renditions I’ve heard, the pianists invariably try to accentuate and over-emphasize the piece’s connection to Bach. But Lupu downplayed such a connection, and just… played. It sang as I’ve never heard it sing.

It should be obvious to you by now that this post isn’t much of an objective music review, because it was impossible for me not to love the moment. During the slow movement of the Schubert, I was holding my wife’s hand, my forearm nudged against her side. The entire hall was silent, straining to listen to the quiet music of Schubert, then I felt my baby squirm and move, grazing against my arm. I looked at my wife in wonder. I was so happy. She’s listening to this, I thought, the way the notes hang in the air before their decay.

(Image: by Shaun Tan)

I don’t know if some of you are planning on reading Coetzee’s Diary of A Bad Year, which received - for the most part - excellent reviews so far. I haven’t finished the book yet, but I must say, some of the discursive patches of writing on politics are pretty derivative and disengaged from Coetzee’s usually lively fictional imagination. The author’s disquisition on State and Power, especially, reads like a limp distillation of the Frankfurt School ideas. I believe that there’s definitely a place for essayistic, political writing in fiction, if done well. One prime example that I know of is Alexander Kluge’s The Devil’s Blind Spot. Even when dealing with topics such as the 9/11, Iraq and Guantanamo, Kluge’s mischievous and elliptical fictional frame of mind shapes such issues beyond the simplistic, binarious notions formed by the media images, the headlines. The book is structurally a series of quick feuilletons, and in progressing through the short pieces, one simply moves along with the author’s pace of thought in a state of constant surprise; a perfect read. In one particularly disquieting chapter near the end of the book, Kluge uses Kant’s retort - “A well-intended lie is an act of omnipotence” - as a prism through which to contemplate the various political occurrences of such lies in history (The French Revolution, The Stalinist purge during the 1937 Moscow trials, the CIA interrogation of Al-Qaeda operatives, etc.). Then, immediately following the chapter is the author’s whimsical musing on Fourier’s mathematical calculation of the transmigration of souls -

The human soul, says Fourier, must assume 810 different forms before it concludes its planetary circuit and can return to earth. Of these existences in the cosmos 720 years are happy, 45 favorable, and 45 unfavorable or unhappy. After the end of our world the chosen souls will travel to the sun! Only those with complete courses are chosen. Before souls spend 80,000 years on our planet, they must have inhabited all other planets and worlds. The human race will have enjoyed boreal light for 70,000 years.

Kluge then trains his gaze on Benjamin, who contemplated Fourier’s notion of transmigration of souls in The Arcades Project, its hopeless utopia. All too naturally, the reader’s sense of desperation about the atrocities of human history grafts onto Benjamin’s - especially after having read Kluge’s preceding chapter about “lies” in history. And the twin emotions of despair and glee which attend Benjamin’s description of Fourier’s hopeless utopia seem the same attendant feelings which visit the reader, and Kluge’s fiction becomes, effortlessly and simultaneously in the seamless instant of unnameable sadness, also a palimpsest of historical disillusionment -

Fourier also says that… humanity will acquire the capacity to live like fish in the water and to fly like birds in the air, and that, by then, humans will have reached a height of seven feet and have a life span of at least 144 years. Everyone, at that point, will be able to transform himself into an amphibian; the individual will have the power of opening or closing at will the valves connecting the chambers of the heart and so - without the blood having to pass through the lungs - bring it directly to the heart… Nature will evolve in such fashion, he maintains, that a time will come when orange trees blossom in Siberia, and the most dangerous animals will be replaced by their opposites. ANTI-LIONS and ANTI-WHALES… New stars will emerge to take the place of the moon, which, by then, will already have begun to rot.

(Image: by Ji Lee)

I’m re-reading Cortazar’s Hopscotch. As you know, you can read the book in a linear fashion, up until Chapter 56, or alternately, in a “hopscotch” fashion, jumping around according to the dictates of the author given in the Table of Instructions. This time around, I’ve chosen to disregard the Table of Instructions, foraging through the book according to my whim, to see what might happen. I’ll write more about the results later, but I must say, some parts of Hopscotch make better sense to me, now that I’m in NYC and have been on the L train to Brooklyn on numerous occasions (I’d insert a smiley face emoticon here, only if I knew how to) -

… and it occurred to me like a sort of mental belch that this whole A B C of my life was a painful bit of stupidity, because it was based solely on a dialectical pattern, on the choice of what could be called nonconduct rather than conduct, on faddish indecency instead of social decency.

I’m sure most of us are guilty of this “faddish indecency” at certain points of our lives. But in this post, I’m going to deviate from Cortazar’s connotation here to appropriate the phrase, “faddish indecency,” to describe a kind of writing that I don’t have much of a tolerance for. Specifically speaking, it’s the kind of writing pertaining to rendering moments of violence through fiction (for that matter, let’s also include rendering sex in fiction as well). The faddish indecency, in such cases, occurs when such moments are overly aestheticized.

A couple of years ago, in the summer ‘06 issue of Zoetrope’s All-Story, there was a good short story written by David Means, called “Nebraska.” From the beginning, I was engrossed by it. The prose was beautifully immaculate, each word impeccably considered. The story wasn’t one of those enervated pieces about the tortured inner lives of people, either; it had a real, strong plot, concerning a heist that a set of characters were to pull off.

The characters in “Nebraska” are faddishly indecent, in the original Cortazarian sense, deliberately living in defiance of social decency, but with a cool sense of style. Before the planned heist, one of the protagonists bleaches her hair and feels like Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, and her cohorts strive for a certain élan as well, going for the Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway vibe, circa Bonnie & Clyde. I have no problem with this; it’s entirely natural for these characters to fashion their identities, referring back to their cultural icons. But I have a problem with how the actual heist is rendered, the violent crux of its action. Means’ prose goes into a cinematic slow-mo -

… all frozen there for a moment in the fear and agony until there is the flash of muzzle fire and then - in what seems to be a modulated time/space, not slow motion but rather something else, a kind of compact glimmering shimmer of movement - the fat man falls to the side, collapsing under the weight of his torso as his knees give, falling to the ground and then bowing down, prayerfully, his dark oil-slicked hair glinting in the light and his scalp bright red with sweat until another bullet hits and the top of his skull flowers with bone and spray; then the other man falls too, his lean slim body folding over sidelong and leathery; his own bones balsawood frail and delicate so that he appears to come down to the earth with a sliding motion, like a leaf blown by the wind, crumpling over himself.

I understand that this may be Means’ prose homage to the hail-of-bullets ending of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Even still: is it me, or is this too pretty or too precious Would such a moment of terrible violence really boil down to a “compact glimmering shimmer of movement” Would the falling man’s bones really occur to anyone to be “balsawood frail” as he crumples in death Perhaps it’s only a matter of subjective opinion, but I found the action of the violence too thickly smeared with aestheticized glaze, too prettified and stylized to be convincing as any real moment. So I found this passage to be an instance of “faddish indecency.”

I don’t know why such writing bothers me more than any other kind, but I figure I’d need an analyst to figure it out rather than a literary critic. But on an aesthetic level, I feel that the closer you get to depicting the limits of death, the more difficult it gets in rendering the truth in that given moment. Rather than dressing it up with beautiful shrouds, I feel that the writer should strip death of decorousness. It doesn’t mean that every writer should write about violence and death in a stark, Cormac McCarthy-esque cant. In his essay “That To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne writes that it is the dreadful trappings and faces with which people surround scenes of death that are more frightening than death itself -

Children fear even their friends when they see them masked, and so do we ours. We must strip the mask from things as well as from persons; when it is off, we shall find beneath only that same death which a valet or a mere chambermaid passed through not long ago…

Montaigne’s stoical prescription on dealing with death seems as good an advice on writing about death as any: to strip the masks from things to discover in the moment of death - by the process of attrition - any and all truth available, lurking beneath the masks.

Wow. Did I really use the word “Geist” in my last post I’m such an asshole. I swear it won’t happen again.

But speaking of Geist (he he), I’m thinking about the Chinese idealist philosopher Wang Yangming (1472-1529), sitting in front of a bamboo tree for a week with his friend. He was an innatist Confucian philosopher who believed that because of the human capacity for memory, one can comprehend every essence of multivalent physical objects in the universe, by examining and understanding - through anamnesis - each essence of every thing, one by one, gradually. (Or - so to speak - rung by rung, up the Plato’s ladder).

Anyways, Wang and his friend sat in front of a bamboo tree. They didn’t eat or sleep, trying to explore the complete essence of the tree (Pass the pipe, Wang!). The friend passed out after three days, the wuss that he is, and Wang fell ill after one week. But he concluded that in the end, he continued to exist in his state, just as the tree had all along, on its own accord, existed in the universe.

According to Wang’s formulation, it is not the world that molds the mind, but the mind which gives rise to the world, through reason. First of all: the word “mind” is problematic here, as the word should mean “heart” or “consciousness” as well; just as it is with the German word Geist, the Chinese word escapes a straightforward English translation. It is common in the western world to use the word “mind” with Wang’s philosophy, but in the eastern world, the translation of the word tends toward “heart” rather than “mind”; to me, it makes more sense to use “heart,” albeit in a loose sense. Especially since the word “mind” comes with a heavy Cartesian baggage in the western philosophy. Just know that we’re talking about heart-mind-consciousness. So in rephrasing, Wang said that since “heart” is reason itself, there is nothing in the universe outside one’s “heart,” no reason outside “heart.”

One day, as Wang and his pupils were walking alongside a cliff, one of his pupils pointed toward a flower tree growing in the dark crevice of the cliff. He asked Wang: “If indeed there exists nothing outside one’s heart, then how related is that solitary flower in the cliff to my heart, seeing as it lives and falls quietly, unbeknownst to me” Wang replied: “Before you noticed that flower, both your heart and that flower were silent, but in the moment you noticed the flower, the flower’s color became clear, and is that not letting you know that it lies not outside your heart?”

Wang’s response is almost a paraphrase of George Berkeley’s dictum, Esse is Percipi. Or what about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? But screw all those comparisons: Wang’s response to his pupil precisely mirrors the fox’s lesson to the Little Prince in St. Exupéry’s book, doesn’t it? The fox teaches the Little Prince to “tame” him, and through that taming, the fox says he shall hear every day, in the Prince’s approach, “the sound of a step that will be different from all others.” After he learns to “tame” the fox, and gets to “know” the fox, the Little Prince realizes that the roses on earth cannot compare to the rose he loves back in Asteroid B-162. When the Prince goes back to bid farewell to the fox, the fox tells him that he has a very simple secret to tell him -

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Happy new year, everyone.

(Top Image: by David Chelsea)

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