Mitchell R. McInnis's Blog: Wanderer's Notebook

Confession of a Former Gun Editor: The NRA is the Problem

I was born and raised in Montana, in a law enforcement and military family. Few things feel as comfortable or homelike to me as a gun. Certainly a pen. As Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney wrote, “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” Precisely.

Now, I know I’m unusual in that sentiment, especially in the liberal circles which I often travel. Snug and gun are two words many of my friends would never tuck together unless engaging in half-drunk wordplay.

This kinship to guns has served me well, however, especially in my early days as a young writer in New York City. After several notable reporters and editors advised me newspapers were a sinking ship, and that I was probably too smart to be a reporter (whatever that means), I applied for several magazine editor jobs. My choices boiled down to gun magazines or sailing magazines, an easy choice for a Montana guy with the rent due.

My editor at the magazines was the legendary Harry Kane. Former Green Beret and Tunnel Rat in Vietnam, Harry was likewise fluent in Herodotus, Von Clausewitz and Proust, not to mention all other things literary. His father had been an Army general who’d early in his career sunk a Nazi submarine off the coast of North Carolina. Harry was born and grew up on Fort Bragg, but his father was born in Brooklyn. He always claimed his daddy would’ve been governor of North Carolina if he hadn’t been a Yankee. His quotient and quantum of original thoughts were virtuoso. And our well-groomed stock of freelancers were former special forces, former Secret Service, and retired law enforcement officers with more stories and insights than a lifetime of fledgling artists’ parties.

My days were spent with folks who likewise grew up with guns and the sporting life. They were patriots in the truest sense of the term, and they believed unequivocally in self-defense. And we all agreed on one thing, idiots should not be armed. These folks were mostly down-to-earth, and they reminded me of home, which was a long way away.

My evenings were often spent with friends who hadn’t grown up with guns. They were from cities and from small towns all over the country and Europe, and the lot of them understood guns to be a sign that something horrible was about to happen. Guns equal crime and/or war, and they were against both. And how. I couldn’t agree more. What’s more, as a Montanan living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan, I found my own instincts changing. Whereas I’d grown up completely comfortable at the sight of guns, I went through my days hoping to never see guns unless they were on cops’ hips. I came to an acute understanding of both sides, and both sides remain dear to me still.

Then there’s the NRA. I somewhat timidly asked Harry Kane what he thought of the NRA, and since it would be an insult to a Green Beret to say he spoke like a sailor, I’ll just say his response can’t be repeated here. To my surprise and relief, he was not an NRA supporter, and most certainly not a fan of Wayne Lapierre. Like every soldier who’s been sent across the globe to take care of a bureaucrat’s dirty work, Kane had a bullshit-detector second to none. And every time the NRA came up, its alarm sounded.

Believe it or not, it was a time before school shootings were a regular cultural event. This was pre-Columbine, and just before this current generation of young people came to wear the sad yet descriptive moniker “the school shootings generation.” It was also the start of the stark Us versus Them polarization in American politics that has left all of us grumbling and dumb in frustration. The U.S. Senate was still a place where deals were made, and more importantly, legislation was passed under the auspices of Democrat senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Dianne Feinstein, as well as Republican senators Olympia Snowe and Bob Dole.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this was anything but a golden age. As I enter my middle 40s, I look back on the time and think, “Really? Is that supposed to be when things were better?” I refuse to believe that. But when it comes to the gun industry, it was the end of a simpler time for gun owners and a time of hyper-politicization by the NRA.

For those unfamiliar with guns and the gun industry, I want to draw a stark contrast between gun manufacturers and the NRA. When most conscientious non-gun owners think about annual events like the Shot Show, the industry’s largest tradeshow, they think of Charlton Heston holding a rifle above his head, shouting, “FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS!!!...” That’s not the gun industry, that’s the NRA. But it’s not the NRA’s rank and file members so much as the kooky, snake-oil tactics of Wayne Lapierre and mouthpieces like Dana Loesch. For nearly 30 years, NRA CEO Lapierre has led the dubious charge for the NRA like some unmedicated, unhinged Quixote storming at hallucinated gun-thieving ogres.

I sketch Lapierre and Loesch as caricatures here because they are two. And there’s a lot more resentment of their tactics within the gun industry than most people think. Under Lapierre’s leadership, the NRA attempted to bankrupt legendary gun maker Smith & Wesson when it bravely and conscientiously moved toward safety reforms. Avi Selk of the Washington Post has written a chilling account of this internecine carnage, and it is available online.

Another New York writer friend, Harold Crooks—an accomplished journalist and filmmaker—was part of the team that studied and interrogated pernicious organizational behavior in the award-winning documentary The Corporation. Crooks has spent his career delving into malicious organizational and corporate practices, from our bellicose intervention in Central American politics to the usurious practices of the waste management industry. Harold’s an old friend and mentor, and I often think of his cogent assessments whenever grappling with righteous anger. Like Kane, Crooks has a state-of-the-art bullshit detector.

The Corporation's hypothesis is relatively simple. The 14th Amendment granted corporations status as individuals under the law. Since said designation has led to licentious behavior, why not apply that other codicil of representative democracy, each right presupposes an obligation. Under this lens, the film scrutinized corporate behavior and granted that behavior a psychological category. Based on this rubric, the corporation was categorized a psychopath because it consistently exhibited the symptoms: callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, the reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), incapacity to experience guilt, and failure to conform to social norms and respect the law.

Let’s apply this logic to the NRA’s long-time assertion: guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And if there is one consistent line of rhetoric in the NRA’s arsenal, it is that background checks are essential to preventing the wrong individuals from acquiring guns. As Dana Loesch said on behalf of the NRA in a recent CNN town hall in Florida: "This madman passed a background check. How was he able to pass a background check? He was able to pass a background check because we have a system that's flawed."

In short, the NRA is the problem. This once patriotic, paternalistic gathering of greatest generation fathers, uncles and their sons has become a parody of itself. In the 19 years since Columbine, the strident lobbying and advocacy of the NRA looks more like Big Tobacco than the fatherly gathering it once was. If you want more evidence and a microcosm of this moral decay, research the career of John R. Lott Jr., the once respected academic at the University of Chicago, now a defrocked and demoralized gun evangelist trying to convince folks that snake oil also works as gun oil.

As Lapierre has famously said, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The problem is, there’s a troubling dearth of good guys out there. In the NRA and elsewhere.

Speaking of good guys, my marquis Harry Kane story comes from May 1999 following the Columbine shooting. The NRA, despite protests, had decided to hold its annual convention in Denver, only a short drive from where the shooting had taken place in Littleton, CO. Anti-NRA sentiments were high, and those sentiments were memorably stoked by its then-president, Charlton Heston, who offered glib remarks like, “We’re not peddling heroin.” These remarks were made prior to the aforementioned Planet-of-the-Apes-like spectacle destined to live in cable news clip files for eternity.

I’d been an editor since I was a teenager and getting in trouble for what had been published was a relished part of my repertoire by 1999. What was different was my own unwitting role in promoting one of the rifles used in the Columbine shooting—the Hi-Point Model 995 carbine rifle—of which I’d recently penned a new product review for front-of-the-book in a couple of our magazines. Anyone who’s ever worked in magazines knows that new products sections are the kind of stuff you write in your sleep, rewriting company press releases, trying to add a bit of flair.

But, it just so happened that the article I’d sleep-written had been on stands in time for the shooters to have read the same en route to purchasing the rifles used to murder their classmates. My crisis of conscience was earnest, but it was also quickly interrupted by another editor who reminded me that correlation is not causation, and 28,000 model 995s had been made and sold in 1998 alone. To think my little article had caused anything was the over-workings of a narcissistic twentysomething’s brain.

I never admitted my misguided though earnest pangs to Harry. The man had survived Vietnam and a subsequent career in special ops with his head and heart mostly intact, to say my concerns were quaint by comparison would be generous. But Harry did notice that I’d taped the NRA’s personal invitation to the Denver convention above my desk in constant eyeshot to ensure a reckoning with the same.

“What about the convention? You gonna go?” he asked. “Nope," I replied. “I was raised with guns, but I’ve never been a fan of the NRA. My father used to say, ‘millions of armed Americans don’t really need lobbyists for back-up.’ He was a homicide detective.” Harry nodded and told me he was letting the NRA know via phone that he wouldn’t be in attendance as well as his low opinion of their choice to continue with the convention.

The rest of our conversation was frank and not to be repeated. I don’t have his permission to repeat it, and therefore I will not. But I did walk away from that conversation with a different perspective on the NRA, and on Wayne Lapierre, and in the 19 years since, that opinion has done nothing but galvanize. It’s summed up by something else my father used to say, “If you wouldn’t take candy from them, you sure as hell shouldn’t trust ‘em with a gun.” It’s a gut check.

It’s a variation on the drunken uncle theory. We all have that uncle. The one who invariably has a few too many and starts airing grievances along with racist and otherwise troubling comments. We send the kids into the other room, keep him away from dangerous objects, and his dutiful wife eventually escorts him out the door in a series of low-tone scolds and curses.

When all these characteristics get distilled, what kind of a portrait emerges? It doesn’t quite add up to a psychopath or madman, but it is a sketch of a very worrisome and potentially dangerous individual. One who certainly displays callous disregard for the feelings of other people, a reckless disregard for the safety of others, incapacity to experience guilt, and failure to conform to social norms.

Would this person pass a background check? If so, is this a sign of a flawed system, as Dana Loesch asserted? Would you take candy from this person? Precisely.

-MRM

A Brief History of Apocalypticism: A Love Story

Malaise was the word applied to but never uttered in Jimmy Carter’s 1979 die-casting speech known by the same name. It was July 15, just after Independence Day, and Carter was trying to muster the much sullied American spirit. The “crisis of confidence” he described culminated in this statement: “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

Confidence was the word put in the place of faith, because it was meant to be a secular speech. Any speech writer will tell you, it was a poorly constructed but eloquent speech. Those listening were lost by the time he got to the statement I’ve quoted here. Carter failed to use his bully pulpit to inspire Americans, to remind of our secular and unifying and sometimes terrifying faith that we are a chosen people.

Terrifying because almost 40 years later, Americans are seeing the other side of that animating democratic mandate in the hands of a megalomaniacal lunatic currently known as president.

And in these dark times as in many dark times before, we glimpse the seamy underbelly of faith, superstition. Carter correctly named the future as the Zion of Americans’ faith, and when that future comes into question, as it has of late, some morbid and bizarre superstitions gain currency.

For instance, drop the search string “Steve Bannon apocalypse” into Google and get ready for some dark entertainment. Bannon is an adherent of a school of apocalypticism espoused by so-called generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe. Strauss and Howe argue that American history—and world history insofar as Anglo-American history is a braid of the same—operate in four-stage cycles (a.k.a. saecula) moving from various degrees of crisis to renewal, culminating in apocalypse. According to their theory, we entered a major crisis on September 18, 2008 when the world economy tanked as a result of widespread mortgage and mortgage-based derivatives fraud. This cycle of crisis will end in human extinction somewhere around 2026, according to Bannon and his fellow adherents.

“OK,” you say, another kooky apocalyptic theory. We’ve seen more than our fair share in recent history, whether it was Y2K or the Mayan calendar or the more recent face-off between our orange orangutan of a president and his maniacal counterpart in North Korea. And let’s not forget the armageddon-seeking Branch Davidians (Seventh Day Adventists), whose cultish, communal existence culminated in the charismatic leadership and micro-apocalypse of David Koresh that spawned reprisals and domestic terrorism in Waco’s name.
So what, right?

Well, here’s what. It’s worth remembering that riding the seamy underbelly like bumpkin barnacles are evangelicals who believe that massive war and the consecration of the Jewish state (Israel) presage apocalypse and the return of Jesus Christ. Now, I am not a conspiracy theorist, believing wholeheartedly that people are too self-interested and unintelligent to pull-off large-scale conspiracies, but this is a cabal of numbskulls if ever there was one. This literal revelation is nothing new in American politics, unfortunately, and it festers at the heart of evangelicals’ and therefore conservatives’ fervent support of Israel’s biblical claims over the process of peace. A sanctified Israel equals the ultimate Christmas, the return of Jesus himself.

Such real-life horror stories always put me in mind of a bedtime story originally told by William S. Burroughs’ pal, Brion Gysin: Some trillions of years ago, a sloppy, dirty giant flicked grease from his fingers. One of those gobs of grease is our universe on its way to the floor… SPLAT!

In his usual, inimitable manner, Burroughs would precede the re-telling of Gysin’s tale with the charming ditty: “Death needs time like a junkie needs junk… Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, for our pook-sweet sake… You stupid, greedy, vulgar American death-sucker.”

If ever there’s been another species so ironic in its will to live, I would gladly pay to hear the tale. While we dominate and desiccate our home planet in the name of human progress, we are wickedly busy at plotting our own demise. Whether natural, alien or good old conspiratorial, our urge toward apocalypticism could be harnessed as an oh-so potent alternative fuel source.

But it’s not just Americans who have a zest for apocalypticism. It’s human, all too human to feel such urges. Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that the human mechanism is built for suffering, and along with it, epic endurance. Think of it: the greatest of human pleasures are relatively brief, while pain can go on and on and on. Hume argued that this alone shows the vast human predisposition toward pain over pleasure.

Could apocalypticism be the adult form of a child’s cry for its parents, a cry to assuage the discomfort of hunger or soiled diaper? Perhaps this is too Freudian a la The Future of an Illusion, but still worth considering. Rather than parents, in this case, it’s the cosmos, and the soiled diaper is, well, earth.

Looking for a root cause in mythology, we can look to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and his recounting of the tale of King Midas:

King Midas, as the story goes, was hunting the woods in search of Silenus, king of satyrs. The legend was that if you captured Silenus, guardian of secrets and master riddler, you could ask him anything and he would be compelled to answer. After much searching, Midas captured Silenus and said, “Now, Silenus, you must tell me… What is the best fate of Man?” Silenus giggled madly in reply, “Oh, great king, you do not want to know the answer!” Midas grew more insistent, “Yes, Silenus, I do. You are compelled to tell me the answer!” Silenus persisted in his giggling, wringing his hands, “Oh, no, great king, trust me… you DO NOT want to know!” Midas grew angry, “Silenus, I COMMAND you to tell me! What is the best fate of Man?!” Silenus straightened his face, saying, “As you wish, great king… the second best fate of Man is to die young… the best fate is NEVER TO HAVE EXISTED AT ALL!” At this, Midas relinquished his hold on Silenus, and the satyr king disappeared into the woods, cackling madly as he galloped away.

This legend correctly diagnoses the thanatotic urges (which could just as easily be described, in more poetic terms, as duende) woven into our roots as humans. In this case, those urges are masked under the name of fate.

Whatever the reasons for our duplicitous romance with death, say scientists, there’s no need to add “cease & desist apocalyptic longings” to your list of new year’s resolutions. It’s actually a hard-wired hunger, especially among those who’ve experienced trauma. While it does open the door to self-fulfilling prophecy a la the Branch Davidians and Jonestown it also provides comfort to the traumatized by way of predicting an end to their pain and suffering. As University of Minnesota neuroscientist Shmuel Lissek says, "The initial response to any hint of alarm is fear. This is the architecture with which we’re built." It’s the function of the amygdala, the brain’s fear center, hijacking a fearful individual’s thoughts with a better-safe-than-sorry anticipation that prevents higher brain functions from interrupting the war room conversation. This amygdalic hijack is also the state that individuals suffering from extreme anxiety experience day to day. So, while it is comforting in a primal way, the urges it comforts are powerful, irrational and painful.

And thus we circle back to the Steve Bannon types, who do not suffer and are not suffering except at the hands of their own insufferable personalities and cro-magnon drives. To imbibe of apocalyptic thought and to go so far as to disseminate such rhetoric makes one a cultish oaf unable to acquire power by any means other than appealing to our basest nature. Bannon’s type is so well established in history, it’s archetypal. In literature, it is the character of Gail Wynand from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Wynand is the ultimate schlockmeister, a lord of yellow journalism. A fearmonger. Like Bannon.

And yet, this comparison will seem flawed to some, as Ayn Rand’s archetypes celebrate the independent man, the strong man, the talented man of vision. Aye, there’s the rub. Shrewdness is not talent, nor is ruthlessness. Like a lack of finesse, these are the characteristics of resentful oafs slouching toward the District of Columbia stoking petty resentments and base prejudice along the way.

But the museum of time retains whole wings for men like Bannon, and the future men and women of vision will spend bemused Saturdays in these museums of the past, remembering with a chill, our choices could have been different.

-MRM

The Myth of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Vaginal Agitprop vs. Alluvial Evolution

During recent travels, I was fortunate enough to spend a few days in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Maybe it’s the potter in me, but the terra cotta hues of the New Mexico desert, as well as its previous, paleontological status as ocean floor, keeps me hyperaware of its ancient mud-like memory. It’s surprisingly old for an American township, too, having been established in 1608. Those four centuries are and are not evident in the town’s consciousness, but their solemnity certainly is present in its full name: La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís, a.k.a. the Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi. (This is why Catholics are no longer invited to be on the chamber of commerce’s naming committee.)

It’s a highly concentrated town of creatives, able to brag about its many galleries without having to stoop to living in geriatric Scottsdale. Two of its museums—SITE Santa Fe and the O’Keeffe Museum—are world-class. SITE is a postmodern masterpiece of a museum, and the O’Keeffe turned out to be more illuminating than expected.

I visited with a dear friend—herself an art historian and museum curator—so we approach any such visit as a chance to challenge established thoughts, knowing that only constantly challenged theories hold rainwater.

O’Keeffe’s paintings have become a kind of thought experiment in which viewers debate competing superpositions: flowers or vaginas? But to go on and say this thought experiment was Schrodinger cat-like would be fatuous, so I’ll leave it at the question of competing superpositions.

I crack jokes out of my own discomfort as well as sense of absurdity in the human instinct to reduce a great woman’s abstract masterpieces to a rumor of refined graffiti’d genitalia. The absurd state of culture reflected this adolescent prurience back in unflattering detail. But it is also reassuring, reminding that Georgia O’Keeffe’s work is a master class—a master class in painting as well as maturity. And ours is a culture that tends toward double-tittering at the suggestion of such subjects taken seriously. Double because of the nature of the subject matter, and because the word “tittering” itself will spark giggling.

As this visit occurred recently, our examination of the sacred feminine seemed all the more prescient, given the tidal shift in our culture’s chosen ignorance toward sexual harassment claims. All this to say our trip felt even more like a pilgrimage than it otherwise might have, and it honored our intent with insights.

Grateful for release from the surge of now in the news, relishing the ancient terra cotta time of Santa Fe, we wandered the downtown plaza, carefully evocative of its pueblo history cum Santa Fe style. The plaza integrates Native American traditions with commerce, offering Native vendors space to sell artisan jewelry and baubles along the Palace of Governors, which is the oldest continually inhabited public building in the United States, in service since 1610.

Overall, the plaza’s feel is unique in the American West, given that Native American, Spanish and bougie white folks mingle influence and presence in the space with a naturalistic sensibility. Starbucks is tucked around the corner and out of sight, and the gallery culture is very rich indeed. Art commerce is good business, with multi-million-dollar Native American pottery collections from San Ildefonso and Kewa (formerly Santo Domingo) pueblos on display and for sale. As a potter, it’s glorious just to see such alchemy of the mud to gold variety for such world-class work.

Just off the plaza is the O’Keeffe Museum. It’s a surprisingly unassuming structure. Given O’Keeffe’s legacy as the “Mother of American Modernism,” I was surprised at how little pomp surrounds the museum itself. The collection—as of this article—is a sampling of her paintings spanning her long career from art school to her death in 1986 (at the age of 98).

O’Keeffe’s flowers greet viewers immediately. I walked past them to survey the collection, knowing my perceptions of her work had been formed almost exclusively by two-dimensional photographs. I’ve studied painting for over 25 years, most avidly as an art lover but also as an artist, and am confident in my ability to decipher the grammar of any painter’s brushstrokes if given sufficient time in front of their canvases.

This, of course, is the joyful paradox of learning art history mostly from books and slides: at least half of the experience is absent. It’s like eating fine cuisine with a head cold, your sense of smell absent. There’s a lot of hypothesizing and outright guessing involved until all your senses are engaged. It’s a joyful paradox because art is both the study of the sublime and sublimation. In the case of O’Keeffe’s paintings, the wait was worth it, and fortunately not what I was expecting.

Spending time with her various paintings, I became aware of the subtle play of space, distance and time in her shadow play. So subtle that it doesn’t show up in photographs. This inflection occurs in various ways in her various canvases, and it communicates various states of seeking and finding, but always constant is exploration. Her brushwork grammar is not one of specific rules, unlike painters like Van Gogh or more obviously, Seurat. For her, rendering was rarely a stylistic certitude. Most often, her canvases feel like the many cross-country journeys she made in her Model-A Ford—faithful toward destination. Faithful that her senses and experience would blend via intuition, leading to a destination.

This is rather awe inspiring. Think of it. Taking an old car like a Model-A, sturdy as they were, and setting out across the deserts of the Southwest, alone. Knowing that New York was somewhere “off in that direction” and that you would get there eventually, able to surmount obstacles and fix flat tires, somehow keep the old car from overheating in punishing sun so hot it gives lizards pause. And then doing it again and again and again, undaunted. Such adventuresome spirit conjures thoughts of Amelia Earhart.

Channeling this awareness of O’Keeffe’s exploratory, almost improvisational grammar and sense of adventure into a renewed gaze, we can address her exquisite flower paintings anew. Almost all her paintings are strikingly two-dimensional, which is to say she accentuated her and her contemporaries’ self-awareness of painting as a two-dimensional medium (partly in deference to the multi-dimensional capabilities of photography).

This is striking given the flower paintings’ sensual reputation. Striking because it calls the question on any sensual intent. If you’ve spent any time around paintings with sensual intent, you feel it when you stand in front of them. If you’ve spent time in front of Courbet’s “The Source” at the Met or Manet’s “Olympia” at Musee D’Orsay, you understand the intent of which I speak. But it isn’t specifically representational. It’s the same sensation a perceptive observer gets from standing in front of a Rothko. It’s enough to make you blush and have to fight grinning. It’s why Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa” (a sculpture not a painting, but the vibe is the same) has held visitors rapt and half-guilty for centuries.

But there’s an essential distinction between sensual and symbolic content. Sensual content is the stuff of eroticism, symbolic content is the stuff of abstraction and by extension, pictographs.

In case you were wondering, this is the part that requires maturity.

So, in the question of vagina or not vagina, I’m going to tack like Chris Rock when he is asked whether or not there is ever a situation wherein white folks may use the N-word. 'Not really.' Take the Indian (in Asia) symbol of the lingam-yoni. It is a highly visible symbol, on display in many public spaces. More than just on view, the lingam-yoni are a site of public interaction. Hindus pour oil and put leaves on the statuary symbols to keep them “cool,” as they are a symbol of creative heat. The lingam-yoni’s antecedents are a penis and vagina, one inside the other. The energy created is called tapis, and it is the power source of ithyphallic yogis of yore.

The yoni itself is a symbol of the sacred feminine. The source of life. And as we know from biology, the power of creation is a female superpower, not a male one. Therefore, the symbol itself can cause some discomfort among patriarchal phallocentric Christians, Muslims and even Buddhists. In a world where men hold power, it’s a symbol of defiance and even revolution. But it is likewise a symbol of nonviolence, of creation rather than destruction.

And if you’re standing in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the yoni is everywhere. The town itself is former ocean floor, and therefore an alluvial landscape. A valley, a sacred “v.” You get the picture. Just as O’Keeffe painted the oh-so phallic skyscrapers of Manhattan in their symbolic form, why wouldn’t she translate the landscape she called home for most of her adult life?

Here again, this is why presence, conversation and dialogue are so essential to art. When we stand in front of these wonderful paintings, the yonic symbolism is one level of awareness, but the realization of kaleidoscopic time, alluvial evolution, mother earth and the sacred feminine are where we arrive once we master, elevate and evolve the mechanics of our Model-A perspective.

-MRM

Notes from the Borderlands: Rider’s Song

I live in the borderlands. A space between America and Mexico. America because the name is an ideal, not a geographical distinction. And Mexico because it is concrete. Concrete like a sewer pipe. Nothing ideal, nothing unstained. Now, I’m not talking about Mexicans, I’m talking about Mexico. Mexicans, somehow, are the opposite of Mexico, somehow stainless. Not exactly, but you catch my intent; this is anything but a dog whistle.

To feel, see and experience the boundaries of this netherland, wander El Paso’s southernmost, long-established barrio, Chihuahuita (aka Little Chihuahua). Walking south from San Jacinto and Pioneer plazas, a type of antiquated theatricality takes hold as you wander from one filmic ideation to another. The former feels simultaneously old world Spain, yet somehow Texan, though nothing like Houston or Dallas. It's the romantic old Spain you can still hear in the literal translation of an unabbreviated, casual introduction, “Mucho gusto en conocerte. Miguel a su servicio.” “Equalmente. Pilar a servirte.” (“Much pleasure in knowing you. Miguel at your command.” “Equally. Pilar to serve you.” Et cetera.) Filmic in its fusion of these, side by side, in a disorienting daydream.

Such antiquated formality smacks of Don Quixote’s Spain, but it also echoes characters of Chicano writers like Jose Antonio Villareal and Amado Muro. Muro’s description of a bullfighter from “Sunday in Little Chihuahua” personifies this duality: “Luis Castro fights with the gaiety and the abandon of the gypsies who dance nude amid flowering lemon trees in Sevilla’s joyous San Bernardo quarter, where the great torero Pepe Luis Vazquez was born.”

Continuing south on El Paso Street past a variety of clothing shops, tattoo parlors and pawn shops, the vibe changes to bordertown. By the time you reach the Burger King—which the gringos playfully call ‘el reyes de los burgers’ to play on Latin Kings and the fact that only Mexicans frequent the burger joint—it feels like you’ve left the lower 48. If you’re feeling playful, echoes of Dean Moriarty hit your head: “Victor, you got gurls? Where? A donde?” he cried in Spanish. “Dig that, Sal, I’m speaking Spanish!”

But the playfulness evaporates in the dust and exhaust clotted air. The last seven blocks to the murderous barrios of Juarez are not a formality, even though they seem more Mexican than Texan. If you’ve spent any time in Juarez, you’ll never take the phrase “law and order” lightly again. It’s so bad—to complete the movie metaphor—that movies aimed at capturing its awfulness fail, flat-out, seem too shellacked, too orderly, too framed to capture the literal bleeding of this meat plant known as Ciudad Juarez. And the urge of anything living, whether on two or four legs, is to escape.

Strangely, though, wandering north again past ‘el reyes de los burgers’ you find yourself back within the mecca of hobos known as El Paso.

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I arrive in El Paso via good ol’ Greyhound. We traveled through the night, through thunderstorms that synched up perfectly with the electric hurdy-gurdy of Dan Auerbach’s guitar in my headphones.

This was a relatively short bus ride for me—only two days—and the custom remains true: there is no such thing as real sleep on a bus.

My mind wanders to the little poem I always think about at times like these, Lorca’s “Rider’s Song.” There are so many tiny variations in the translations of this clarifying poem, the variations themselves become part of the rider’s refrain. I open my notebook and click on the tiny reading light overhead to write out my favorite, slightly tweaked translation from memory:

Rider’s Song
Cordoba.
Distant and lonely.

Black pony, full moon,
olives in my saddlebag.
Though I know all the roads
I shall never reach Cordoba.

By the plain, by the wind,
black pony, red moon.
Death looks at me
from the towers of Cordoba.

O how long the road is!
O my brave pony!
O death waits for me,
this side of Cordoba.

Cordoba.
Distant and lonely.

The poem is reassuring, and “olives in my saddlebag” cinches the translation to universal cowboy. But the half-dream of the darkened bus cruising toward El Paso—forest of lightening the only illumination of horizon—is anything but reassuring. It brings to mind residents and visitors to El Paso during the Mexican revolution, of them paying money to stand atop the taller buildings to watch the macabre battles raging on the other side of the Rio Grande. Somehow, this dynamic has also concretized in the two towns’ history. El Paso is the front-row seat to the shit-show that is Juarez and Mexico.

And yet, El Paso remains true to its name. It is a pass between mountain ranges, a corridor for travelers. I remember picking up my father’s dog-eared copies of Louis L’Amour and encountering references to El Paso. Later, wanting to know more about my father—who was very much a wanderer who settled down when he found the right town and the right woman—I read about L’Amour’s adventures in New Mexico and Texas, riding the trains and living the life of a hobo. Back when hobo meant free from poverty and place and not simply ‘bum.’

We arrive in the bus station in the pale blue of pre-dawn. The bus station is just off El Paso Street. A little ways to the left is the El Paso Museum of Art (EPMA), a walk the other direction leads to the border. At 4am, nothing’s open.

Out of habit, I wander and take notes, offering cigarettes to more interesting and peaceful looking homeless guys, in exchange for conversation. Several of them wander back and forth across the border, sleeping on the El Paso side, then hustling tourists on both sides during the day. I think of the times I’ve been homeless, waiting out the night, not in transit, stuck. I think of learning the wisdom of Maya Angelou’s elegant insight the hard way (because there ain’t no easy way to learn it):

“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.”

-MRM

Jumping the Albino Alligator

(Or, How I Learned to Embrace Boomers’ Mortality & Appease One Last Chorus of Vietnam Nigglers)

In general, it’s rude to wish someone’s death. Some would say it’s bad karma, which is to say, given the notion ‘thoughts are things,’ it’s not sound to send such malice into the air, fearing it might boomerang.

Amnesty, naturally, is granted to anyone crossing a New York intersection when a cab driver arbitrarily jolts into the crosswalk, ejaculating something antic like, “I hope your mother dies, leprosy-ridden, in sexual servitude to a despotic regime!” And, of course, there are always Nazis; it’s always acceptable to wish a violent, horrible demise on Nazis.

The other exception, I’ve recently learned, is when one wishes a gentle, peaceful death for an old person who is already past ripe. This, essentially, is a proactive variation on the perennial ‘rest in peace.’

I’ve recently derived this bit of wisdom during a review of argumentum ad absurdum surrounding Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary. Eighteen hours more talk about a war we knew was lost in 1966… 1968 at the latest. And one of this documentary’s saving graces is its highlight of this very point. But do we really need another round of discussion on Vietnam?

Nope. Granted, Burns did attend Hampshire College from 1971 to 1975, and like so many of his generation, archiving their version of the Vietnam era is their life’s work. But Burns’ is neither as crazy nor as entertaining as Oliver Stone. Whereas Stone is the crazy grandfather toeing senility, Burns is the retired non-denominational pastor of a granddad who always speaks in parables but never mentions God.

Before abandoning the documentary—much like a middle-aged grandson getting up for a fresh cocktail while granddad again recites tales of his years ‘in the Orient’—I recapped the coterie of arguments for and against the war, chuckling how the argument had grown so tired (more than a decade ago) that the edgy POV had become ‘Vietnam was a necessary war’ in the name of winning the Cold War. On the other side, the usual suspects had long-since given over to silence on the point that the anti-war movement accomplished little more than electing Richard Nixon and prolonging the war. Oh, and yeah, it actually did inspire some of the best American music around, not to mention one-of-a-kind writers like Hunter S. Thompson. But there was a lingering silence surrounding the fact that LBJ, despised by the anti-war movement, was primarily responsible for the only monumental gains during the period, civil rights.

Add to this a compelling, revisionist assertion from no less than Christopher Hitchens:
"The option of accepting a unified and Communist Vietnam, which would have evolved toward some form of market liberalism even faster than China has since done, always existed. It was not until President Kennedy decided to make a stand there, in revenge for the reverses he had suffered in Cuba and Berlin, that quagmire became inevitable."

The documentary itself, like most of Burns’ work, is a careful, methodical, PBS-earnest survey of all top-of-mind sources. However, it starts to feel less like historical digest and more like the myopic meanderings of an old man unaware that the history since has vastly overshadowed the events he can’t stop recounting. His compunction to include all sides becomes the most mealy mouthed of relativism. And while the growing pains of a fledgling superpower on the world stage still obsess the self-obsessed Boomers, the rest of us have not only moved on, we feel an urgency to try and understand the four decades since Vietnam, as their ramifications are still playing out. This ongoing obsession with Vietnam, by now, is plainly and nakedly self-obsession. It’s naked narcissism. And the Boomers should damn well know by now something those flower-power films decreed frame by frame: please leave your clothes on.

This obsession with Vietnam smacks of Michael Chabon’s character, Professor Grady Tripp. Aging, vain, unable to write and increasingly irrelevant, his hopeless attempts at his second novel have digressed into a 1000-plus page volume consumed by minutiae, including but not limited to genealogies of its main characters’ horses. It’s sad, narcissistic, especially in light of contemporary woes.

Consider the displacement of Syrians alone. According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 4.8 million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, while 6.6 million are displaced within Syria. Approximately 1 million of these have requested asylum in Europe. And this is only one of the fronts on which American policy has circled back serpentine upon itself. And what could be a more complex matrix of blame than the current threat of pseudo-Islamic terrorism?

To make a jump-cut to another fictional caricature—since we’re talking film—Walter Sobchak. Everything in Walter’s world threads through the eye of Vietnam. Even when he loses it in a diner, or at the bowling alley, it is somehow related to Vietnam. And for the sympathetic viewer, a sympathetic malediction is hatched. Walter’s way of coping with his experiences in Vietnam and re-entry to peacenik Los Angeles is by reminding all present of the grunt’s day to day eyeful. “I’m finishing my coffee.”

Two decades hence, we can imagine Walter as an elderly dude. And we can only imagine that the much-less physically formidable Sobchak increasingly emotes pathos as his complaints about Vietnam become less and less relevant, yet somehow increasingly plaintive. While his arguments become less sympathetic, his presence becomes the increasing face of pathos. He can’t get beyond his memories of Vietnam, but the world is decades past. And it’s difficult not to empathize with this long-since soldier whose valorous days have long-since expired. So like the dutiful grandson—cocktail in hand—we sit and listen to the long, prolonged dirge of pre-death, our host still seeking approval before the shuffle off.

But, in all seriousness, why have we indulged this endless rehashing of Vietnam for so long? Because, on one hand, and rightfully so, we think of Vietnam veterans as dupes who were further disrespected upon returning home. While indulging this sentiment, on the other hand, we must reject sentimentalism. Both the sentimentalism that indicts Vietnam vets and the sentimentalism that exonerates them as dupes. As James Baldwin described in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel”:

"Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty."

Threading the generational realities back through the honorific tone and sympathetic ear as grandpa recites his greatest hits… is tiresome. Nonsense is nonsense, and yet we sentimentally listen to its grating textures, somehow apologetic for the same. Apologetic, somehow, for our own revulsion at the insipidity of this oh-so American vanity, this sentimental back-slapping to which we’re prone.

Another satirical yet bitingly honest way of getting at this is through the culmination of Don Draper’s character in Mad Men. Faced with his own shallowness and unlikability, the tear-jerking yet opportunistic metaphor of an unwanted item of food that never gets picked, is dropped into Draper’s lap at a California retreat. In an uncharacteristically earnest moment, Don gets up from his chair and hugs the man, as they cry in unison. All the clichés of group therapy and hippie-era ‘I’m Ok, you’re Ok’ sentimentalism are present. And the handsome yet lost and utterly inauthentic Don Draper is faced with his turning point. What comes next?

Sitting atop a dramatic promontory on the northern California coast—blue sky and Pacific as backdrop—Draper chants “Om” with his fellow retreaters. New beginnings, new insights, the sheer tenacity of this character culminate in a thin smile on his face as we fade and cut to the most classic of Coca-Cola commercials, the multicultural harmonies of “I’d like to buy the world a Coke… and keep it company… it’s the real thing…” Once again, Don has turned a potentially personal breakthrough into a breakthrough commercial refrain, forsaking substance for a sappy, sentimentalist jingle that promises to make consumerist Uncle Toms of us all.

Because we are such a young country, a particularly impactful generation can leave a legacy that seems more like an archetype. This is heightened by the value we place on individuals, especially charismatic, dramatic and compelling individuals. In the twentieth century, the mantle was split between the so-called greatest generation and their children, the baby boomers. Boomers fought a failed revolution against Vietnam, then joined the ranks of devoted capitalists, having spent the majority of their mercurial energies trying to strike a movie-poster-like-pose in the mirror. As Hunter S. Thompson said of their so-called revolution in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971):

"So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”

Watching Burns’ documentary, listening to yet another account of the war in Vietnam, I’m reminded of the psychotropic visions spouted from Dr. Gonzo and his attorney, of their hallucinatory musings that, like the best philosophical musings of a stoner, sound poetic and profound for a second or two, but their spell dissipates quickly into meaningless relativism and unsound philosophy. At worst, it’s the slavish narcissism of Don Draper, and at best it’s the crackpot poetry of Werner Herzog wondering if albino alligators in a zoo in France will somehow jump from their tanks and end up commenting on and remaking ancient cave paintings in nearby Chauvet. Amusing lunacy.

But, like dutiful grandchildren, we refill their cocktails knowing the end of the evening is nigh and a cab is on its way.

-MRM

Anselm Kiefer’s Asylum for Malignant Memories

In St. Augustine’s Confessions, the priest visits the Manichees, an ancient non-Christian religion devoted to the notion that our world is comprised of good and bad particles. Atomic level good and evil. Some of these particles, according to their doctrine, we can control through digestion. For instance, if one eats an apple and expels a belch from that apple, good particles are liberated into the air. In this way, a human agent is able to maximize the quantum of good atoms by merely eating an apple and belching.

It’s no more fanciful than devils and angels, surely, though its symbology is inverted, at least when it comes to apples. It’s also an elegant and playful variation on human agency. With equal playfulness, I’ve wondered over the years whether or not the mathematically inclined Manichees found themselves calculating the number of apples per bad deed. A lie equals three apples, while minor theft equals eight. One imagines the California-sized orchards required to offset the lot of human misdeeds, not to mention collective evils like war.

I thought of the Manichees this week while revisiting the stupefying artistry of Anselm Kiefer’s Barjac. No mere canvas or installation, Barjac is a renaissance town in southern France. Kiefer’s town. Kiefer’s Barjac is its own commune amidst the series of communes known collectively as Barjac. He bought a roughly 200-acre plot and commenced years ago, creating this art township with only the help of his assistants. Visitors are rare and only upon invitation.

Punctuating the landscape around Kiefer’s studio are a series of rickety towers reminiscent of medieval Italy, but likewise allusive to a Dr. Seuss trip. A series of outbuildings and seeming chapels occupy this artscape. Having grown up in Montana, the landscape reminds me of the old state asylum in Warm Springs, a self-contained city-state devoted in equal parts to treating and separating the mentally ill from the population at large. While Kiefer’s artistic muses have been described as demonic by some, his city-state is more of an asylum of memory, or a laboratory for the artistic treatment of malignant memories.

As wickedly unique as this landscape is, it is not Kiefer’s first Siamese-like twinning of studio and gallery space. In the 1980s, he purchased a brick factory in Buchen, Germany, former site of the extermination camp Buchenwald. In the course of creating monumental canvases and installations, he amassed all manner of leftovers, all of which remain in the transformed factory. Burnt books from a school fire line the wall on one floor, while a small hill of straw in near-adobe state mixed with dirt, sand paint and wreckage occupy yet another room on another floor.

Sitting silent and untouched are the factory’s brick ovens, suggestive of sinister happenings nearby, and evocative of questions like: What must these brickmakers have been thinking as the smoke from their kiln-baked clay mingled with the curiously acrid smoke from the camp? As the stench from the camp settled over the town? And how many examples of exactly this type of chosen blindness can we indicate in other towns, times and places outside of Germany?

Returning to Barjac, we see the wreckage and rubble of war carefully curated, bathed in light and seemingly, curiously, growing huge, gray ash-stuffed sunflowers like mushroom caps from scat. In this hothouse of memory, it’s difficult not to think of Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra:”

“Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray / shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on / top of a pile of ancient sawdust— / [....] dead baby carriages, black / treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem / of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, / nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the / razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past— / and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, / crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog / and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— / corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like / a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon- / to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays / obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire / spiderweb, / leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures / from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen / out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, / Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O / my soul, I loved you then!”

In Kiefer’s compositions of saturated sunflowers and war debris, the sunflowers arc from the debris, an upcropping both random and orchestrated, in mid-transformation. And indeed, this transformation is intentional by Kiefer, as he’s carefully situated the debris—in this case, two wrecked plane fuselages atop piles of near-demolished concrete with rebar dangling mid-air like legs. He has set these here to grow, to transform, to sublimate into a new form. He gives hint to his task while walking its acreage, commenting how he used to have nightmares, “but not anymore.”

Has Kiefer, like that fictional, mathematical Manichee derived an equation for the transformation of the darkest of dark human deeds? An equation for the sublime? Wouldn’t this be alchemy? Not that nonsense of turning lead to gold, but the sludge of human evil to mulch that is rained upon, decomposing and recomposing as mud receptive to gentler seeds blown in from elsewhere, manifesting first as the sooty protuberance of a dying sunflower but eventually as the ecstatic and exuberant sunflower of Van Gogh’s visions. That vision is generations away, perhaps, or it may be as close as Barjac. Perhaps.

Here’s a Barjac tour to whet your appetite for such transformations: Kiefers Barjac

-MRM

The Last of the Aristocratic Essayists, Louis Menand IV

I am of the atavistic few who still loves magazines. Glossy paper between the fingers magazines. I got my start as an editor in New York in trade magazines, and it was a wonderful education in how publications succeed and fail. All of the best magazines have one thing in common: good essays.

I’m in the process of writing a book of essays, and have published them in various venues for three decades now (I started publishing them at 15), so I recently took a couple months to consider what I love most about them. And, because the essay remains undoubtedly relevant, not to mention pivotal to constructive discourse, I considered numerous rubrics by which to evaluate my own passion for this storied form.

The essay was popularized as a literary form by Michel de Montaigne (aka Lord Montaigne). Montaigne’s aristocratic tone and sensibility, not to mention his erudite wit, spawned a genre and generations of devotees, each of whom accepts the rather bourgeois challenge to take up the pen and pit his or her wit against those who have come before on a given topic. In that way, it is the perfect task of a landed lord, sitting idly upon his estate, to address the world at large from his oh-so entitled titularity.

However, while its roots are unassailably aristocratic, this form has become wildly democratic, especially in the hands of writers from Voltaire to James Baldwin. And while creative nonfiction remains a strange yet amusing adulteration of Montaigne’s original form, it is undoubtedly a genre of its own, as so many MFA programs have found it a lucrative lure for students and publishers alike. But this family of forms, despite its dysfunction, is still a loose confederation of lineages laudable and not so. At its base, the essay is a question, like a conversation, is a question of time, and therefore length (a.k.a. space).

Returning to the magazine, I find myself catching up on whatever subscriptions form piles in various waiting rooms. Waiting rooms are one of the last bastions of enforced quiet time outside of childhood, and something that smart-phone users have bastardized like so many other things. Regardless, magazines on all sorts of topics, wait for perusal, offering various lengths and depths of essay. While scanning the choices, I’m often reminded of the line from the Big Chill, when Jeff Goldblum’s character says the measure of any article he’s written for People magazine is how successfully it can be completed during the length of the average crap. And, as like begets like, People magazine remains among the popular magazine choices.

Of a different lineage though similarly self-inflated flatulent waft is The New Yorker. Amidst its sub-par poetry by supposedly famous poets (even poets need a payday) and the endless prattle of Knickerbockers’ descendants, are a few quality essays and often stories. Louis Menand is among this faux-elite publication’s best of frequent contributors, and he is one of the last of long essayists in periodicals who doesn’t leave readers hopelessly dyspeptic. Menand only rarely makes readers wonder what he’s making per word (e.g. “At a buck a word, this essay is looking better and better...for him.”), and even less seldom that there are Roman numerals after his name.

The proof, as they say (not sure who they are), is in the pudding. In this case, it was Menand’s excellent long essay, “He’s Back” about Karl Marx scholarship, revisited (later published online as “Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today” & still available at publication of this article). In its final form, this essay is 17 printed pages. Menand is a scholar, and this essay is borderline scholarly length, which certainly makes its publication a rarity outside of JSTOR’s antecedents. Its anecdotal form declares it to be journalism—in the tradition of that glorious old gray dog, the Wall Street Journal—but its roaming, careful consideration is latter-day Montaigne in its philosophical temperament and digest.

As someone who came of age, intellectually, in the schools of Chicago socialism, I differ with Menand’s somewhat aloof sense that financial inequality has always been a part of industrialized economies and we have yet to invent a political system capable of correcting those inequalities, as his after-dinner over brandy tone is too cursory for my tastes. However, Menand’s final paragraph does put one in mind of the nearly defunct, but at one time war-tested sensibilities of the noblesse oblige:

"This is probably not true of tribal societies, and it does not seem to have been true of the earliest known democratic state, Periclean Athens (at least, for the citizens). But inequality has been with us for a long time. Industrial capitalism didn’t reverse it in the nineteenth century, and finance capitalism is not reversing it in the twenty-first. The only thing that can reverse it is political action aimed at changing systems that seem to many people to be simply the way things have to be. We invented our social arrangements; we can alter them when they are working against us. There are no gods out there to strike us dead if we do."

In this measured indictment of current socially contracted institutions, Menand is reminiscent of Jacques Louis David’s portrait of Monsieur Lavoisier, good-hearted aristocrat applying reason to seemingly intractable injustice.

Having tipped my hand as an old-school Chicago socialist, I must also admit my indictment of American Marxists as quaint sentimentalists and good-hearted artists politically naïve to the point of being apologists for Soviet-era totalitarianism. Modern socialism in no more menacing than the likes of Canada, while possessing the savoir faire of Paris. And unlike the Marxists who envisioned a great proletarian uprising, the next revolution will more likely resemble the good-hearted though philosophically muddled and sadly inert gatherings of Occupy, uniting folks of all economic strata under the ilke of desperation for justice. So, here’s to Mr. Menand and the long-form essay, reminding us of this vaunted form’s distinguishing and most distinguished characteristic, conscience.

- MRM

Let's Start with the Last & Begin with the End

Like you, I suspect, I spend much of my time reading. And, like any good craft hound, I find myself assigning homework tasks aimed, yes, at craft… but also just to satisfy random curiosity. This week, the randomness came from a novelist friend who wanted to discuss favorite story and novel endings. Particularly, the why of the same.

Now, I’m not talking about the collection of favorite last lines stored up for some dinner party that never comes, I’m talking about the last bit that distinguishes a novel’s world from our own, writer from reader, and that oh-so important soluble lens we take back into our everyday lives.

After hunting through my own shelves and sifting the online compendium of best last-lines, I circled back to three haunting endings from Cormac McCarthy, and then a sentimental yet cruel duo from Evelyn Waugh and Edgar Allan Poe.

After considering the usual suspects: Wuthering Heights, Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Ulysses, et all, I fell away from such pseudo-intellectual parlor tricks, as they bore me. Instead, I sat and thought about the endings that left me sleepless, agitated and wanting to write myself to the other side. I shy away from calling these endings inspirational, as they aren’t that kind of inspirational. In fact, they’re more like a shot of whiskey amidst trauma, bracing and somehow sobering, yet still the stuff of restless sleep and certainly fever dreams.

The first of the three McCarthy endings is No Country for Old Men. This ending was realized both on the page and in film, but both versions remind us the mind of the reader/viewer is the most potent element of any haunting.

Sometime narrator Sheriff Ed Tom Bell leaves the reader and the viewer (in the film played by Tommy Lee Jones) with the same two dreams of his dead father. The first is a simple one, of meeting his father in town and receiving some money from him that Bell somehow lost, he thinks, but admits he doesn’t remember “all that well.” The second is equally simple, yet elegant, and not at all easily forgotten:

“[….] It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”

As this ending is as easily found as a click and tap on Netflix—and because it’s all the narrated, bedeviled hunting and history leading up to it that makes it so powerful—I’ll discuss it here verbatim without worries of so-called spoilers.

Again, it’s worth noting that filmmakers as accomplished and imaginative as the Coen brothers decided to let this brief narrative suffice, unmitigated by enactment of its images, as the stark ending for their adaptation of the novel. And this from the brothers who brought you “Barton Fink” and its hellfire induced ending and battle cry, “I’ll show you the life of the mind! I WILL SHOW you the life of the mind!” McCarthy’s spare prose captures the ending in eight sentences. Deftly separating story-maker from story-digester, this brief passage does all the craft work necessary while leaving him or her to stare the syllables down as well as their bedeviled speaker.

Next is McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Normally, I don’t shy away from hearing or telling the endings of novels, but in this case I will only hint. Because Blood Meridian is an utterly unique experience, and one that will test even the most seasoned of novel hounds, I will say only this, “He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.” Anyone who’s done the work of digesting this glorious nightmare-inspiring novel will shudder at mere mention of the judge’s dance.

Last among McCarthy’s endings, though it is first on my list of all endings, is Suttree. Despite the very deserved praise of the Border Trilogy, Suttree remains McCarthy’s masterpiece. After all, it is the bridge between his earlier and later novels, and he devoted 20 years to its careful crafting. In an age of too many gimmick and genre endings, Suttree refreshes our sense of the epic in a fusion that is Faulkner-, Steinbeck- and Homer-esque, yet all the trickster shaman that is McCarthy. This ending is worthy of conversations, as is this novel, but those conversations are hard-won as it is hard to find readers passionate and devoted enough to sit with this magnificent book, sad as that is. However, for those of you who have read it, I again will leave you with only one clue as nod and knowing wink: “waterbearer.”

Finally, as this column is intended to be repast rather than nightcap, I offer a somewhat curious duo for your consideration: Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Edgar Allan Poe’s Cask of Amontillado. Wallace Stevens wrote that death is the mother of beauty. In itself, this observation and its author will sufficiently agitate, inspire an intelligent reader into hours of page tending of the ink-stained variety. With that in mind, this last bit is dessert-to-go.

Waugh and Poe both offer us a keen look into the revenge ending, though of differing violence. Poe leaves the drunken yet slowly sobering receiver of violent revenge to his revelations, brick by brick, to ponder that great motto of the Order of the Thistle: “Nemo me impune lacessit” (No man attacks me unpunished.). This ultimate revenge ending is given twist by Waugh in his Handful, as Mr. Todd’s host recounts a similarly haunting tale to his sobering guest. A tale of visitors who came while Todd slept. He is on the hunt for his missing watch, and his helpful host imparts how he gifted the watch to the visitors (aka search & rescue party) who had arrived while Todd slept the narcotic sleep induced by the host’s mickey:

“I gave it as a memento to the men who came looking for you. They were most grateful and they enjoyed the small cross I erected to commemorate your arrival… Tonight, now that you’re feeling better, we should resume the Dickens…”

Like Sartre’s twisting dagger of a last line in No Exit “Hell is other people,” Waugh reminds us of a fate worse than death. Having to read Dickens aloud. Endlessly. And yet, upon learning of Mr. Todd’s fate, it’s virtually impossible to suppress laughter. As Oscar Wilde observed, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” And that, bound in a nutshell of infinite space strangely shaped like a filbert, is the difference between pity and terror.

And with that, friends, return to work. Much ink to be spilled. Dessert awaits those who finish the night’s work well.

- MRM

A Wander Back

I’m an obsessive note taker. When sorting out difficult projects, my desk is a multi-tiered, sliding blackboard-esque tool for writing multiple narratives and lists at once. I meditate in ink and notebooks are my mantra.

There’s nothing unusual in the practice. I’m grateful to have cribbed the habit from painter friends and potters and James Dickey. Potters especially are expert in production, its flow and optimal conditions. No such thing as ‘clay block’ in the pottery studio. There’s always clay to be pugged.

Sifting my desk’s layers of notes and folders, I found the bottom of the stack, and got to work. A few olives bobbed to the top of the jar. Romantic, writerly quotes of sweet miseries endlessly chased. From Paul Auster’s classic, Hand to Mouth:

"Just on principle, it felt wrong to me
for a writer to hide out in a university,
to surround himself with too many
like-minded people, to get too
comfortable. The risk was complacency,
and once that happens to a writer, he's as
good as lost.

I'm not going to defend the choices I
made. If they weren't practical, the truth
was that I didn't want to be practical.
What I wanted were new experiences.
I wanted to go out into the world and
test myself, to move from this to that,
to explore as much as I could. As long
as I kept my eyes open, I figured that
whatever happened to me would be
useful, would teach me things I had
never known before. If this sounds
like a rather old-fashioned approach,
perhaps it was. Young writer bids
farewell to family and friends and
sets out for points unknown to
discover what he's made of."

Auster is the master crooner of writerly ballads sung to fellow scribblers. Whether it’s the literal furniture his character builds from books in Moon Palace or the urbane intellectual mood and tone of novels like Leviathan (dedicated to Don DeLillo), Country of Last Things and New York Trilogy. Mythology of the writing life is made sexy in his pages. So much so that his books were hard to find on Manhattan and Brooklyn bookshelves because other hand-to-mouth young writers frequently stole them like street bibles.

Auster’s wandering ethos is post-Whitman, which is to say it comes after the democratic vistas sung so vigorously by Whitman, along with his latter-day saints Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Kerouac is iconic for his capture of the energies and rhythms of his time and travels in the sound of his work. And despite whatever pretentious nonsense dismisses Kerouac, his challenge of form, his raw talent and daunting output prove him among the finest of American writers.

It’s especially good to have such inspirations through most of pugging’s equivalent: admin. As I like to joke, ‘I need to get a better looking secretary.’ Sifting papers and documents, and think in terms of projects or collections whenever possible. There’s nothing wrong with efficiency, and you should always have a couple spaces, notebooks, etc. for pure fun. Random scribblings, marginalia, quotes, the odd line drawing of a clown laughing back at you from the pages, ensuring your ongoing humility. To this cause, Charles Reznikoff wrote a wonderful writer’s prayer, "Te Deum":

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day’s work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

These two passages from Auster and Reznikoff are perfect bookends for any writer dedicated to the craft. In a coupling of high romance and bricktender’s strong back, a writer’s wellspring is born. And always, always, there is the work that goes into becoming fluent with one’s craft. All the books read, the manuscripts written, the manuscripts burned or balled up and thrown into a corner, all the doubt, insecurity and negative inside voices you learn to sidestep in order be bold on the page.

Freedom on the page is essential to passing the dark weather. And as a writer, there’s plenty of dark weather. The freedom to play, dig, construct, tear down and spill ink are all essential freedoms. In this way, the blank page goes from a place of potential terror to a place of unending wonder and empowerment. And glorious labor.

But like a bricktender apprenticing to one day become an architect, one must learn to love the labor, the red of the clay, the voice of each brick becoming harmonious in each wall and lintel.

- MRM