Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "musings"
Dealing with the Mortality of my Parents:
I’ve held off on writing this down, even in a blog that no one reads, for a simple reason. I just don’t like thinking about the idea of my parents dying. I have no children of my own, and I’ve alienated myself from my sister-in-law badly enough that I never get to see my brother’s son, my nephew. I have a small circle of friends in my life, small enough that I’ll include my dog and my therapist in the official count in order not to look too pathetic.
The point is that I don’t want my parents to die, and yet I know they must. Both of my parents are, in their own way, responsible for this path I’ve charted through life as a writer, which, come to think of it, may be a good enough reason to wish ill on both of them. My mother is an Irish-Protestant girl from the Deep South, who took advantage of the initiatives offered by the Great Society to get a first-class education and escape the cotton mills that claimed the lives and lungs of her mother and father. My own dad is the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in New York’s Lower East Side before migrating to Memphis, Tennessee. There his father worked as an accountant. My father became a Freudian psychiatrist.
My mother is something like sixty-nine or seventy years old. She still smokes, takes a pharmacopeia of pills, and is constantly at the prestigious Mayo Clinic for a battery of tests and results whose specifics she has never really let me in on. I talk with her daily on the phone, mostly about poetry and literature, and sometimes about life in general.
My father, on the other hand, gave up cigarettes some time ago, got on an exercise regimen, and worries daily and vociferously about his own death. His wife is a decade older than him (roughly eighty years old) and he likes to joke that he robbed the cradle instead of the grave. More seriously, he’s confessed that after she dies he’d like to move into the property my brother and I cohabit, which is his and for which I pay rent.
“I’m realistic,” he said, of his girlfriend, “and I know she could die any day.”
My reply was maybe harsh, but we don’t bullshit each other too much. “So, could you.”
He shook his head. “I’m going to live forever.” He meant it, in spite of the fact that he is a medical doctor who is seventy, who has diabetes and had two open heart surgeries. More recently he had a “minor” surgery at which I was present, because I had to drive him home from the hospital.
It is strange to sit in a room with one’s father while a young woman explains the pain he is going to feel as she inserts a catheter into his penis. Ageing is very serious business, dying even moreso. Both processes are unavoidable, unless you talk to the science fiction writer, Ben Bova, who argues that all we have to do is essentially rewrite our “death dates” as they’re programmed (as such) in our telomeres, in order to extend life perhaps indefinitely. That said, not even the wildest speculation is really up to the challenge of describing what catheterizing a five-hundred-year-old penis might look like.
What explains my mother’s equipoise regarding the cold fact of her own death, and my father’s reluctance to come to grips with the truth of mortality? Some of it can be put down to the residual traces of their own religious weltanschauungs. Neither my mother or father were especially religious or observant (they wouldn’t have married if they were) but Christianity puts a much greater premium on the quality and reality of the afterlife than Judaism, which, aside from some obscure and Kabbalistic minor pronouncements, seems to think that when you die you’re kosher worm food.
Both of my parents are Baby Boomers, which means that regardless of what their avowed religion is, they believe in a host of ideas and pieties whose credibility is presently under heavy strain. Their generation, more than any that came before or after, thought that the human condition, especially as regards race and poverty, could be solved, and that the only thing barring the solution was bad people. I don’t think either one of them really believes this anymore.
Still, if the fires don’t burn, perhaps the embers smolder, at least in some figurative respects.
The other day I was listening to The Doors’ song Five to One. As with most of their output, if you think too much about Jim Morrison or what “the Lizard King” thought of himself, it can all become a bit insufferable. Morrison, as Roger Ebert said in his review of Oliver Stone’s film about the band, is a bit of a drag and also a second-rate poet.
No group from the sixties could have ever credibly led a revolution, but their revolutionary posturing did make for some great pop music. View The Doors that way ---and remember that contrary to the pronouncements of the airheaded photojournalist in the movie that Jim Morrison wasn’t The Doors, at least not without Robby Krieger’s flamenco-inspired guitar playing and Ray Manzarek’s otherworldly powers on the keyboard- and the music can be enjoyable.
Still the lyrics can be pretty stupid. “The old get old and the young get stronger.” This isn’t quite true. The old are already old, and they merely get older and die. The young get stronger for a while, then they also get old, and older, and then die.
I think my mother and father’s generation forgot this.
An old Greek saying has it that a healthy society is one in which the young plant trees in whose shadow they will never stand. The Boomers seemed to take the opposite tact, and behaved like cultural lumberjacks, going through the woods and hacking down sturdy redwoods from the past and making solipsistic pronouncements about their own genius rather than having the decency to even shout “Timber!” to warn their children of what was going to come down on their heads as a result of their own folly.
One day upon leaving the hospital with my father (on a previous visit, maybe for an epidural) I was holding him as he stumbled dizzily through the corridor, helping to guide him to the elevator.
I didn’t want to needle him too badly, but I had to ask, “How could you guys say something like ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty-five? You knew you’d eventually get older, right?’”
“No,” he responded as we wandered to the elevator. “No, we didn’t.”
I’m thirty-six now, and sometimes and in some ways feel like both of my parents are younger than me. I just wish there was a way for me to give them some of the years from my own life to add to theirs, as a proverb from another land has it. Maybe Japan.
The point is that I don’t want my parents to die, and yet I know they must. Both of my parents are, in their own way, responsible for this path I’ve charted through life as a writer, which, come to think of it, may be a good enough reason to wish ill on both of them. My mother is an Irish-Protestant girl from the Deep South, who took advantage of the initiatives offered by the Great Society to get a first-class education and escape the cotton mills that claimed the lives and lungs of her mother and father. My own dad is the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in New York’s Lower East Side before migrating to Memphis, Tennessee. There his father worked as an accountant. My father became a Freudian psychiatrist.
My mother is something like sixty-nine or seventy years old. She still smokes, takes a pharmacopeia of pills, and is constantly at the prestigious Mayo Clinic for a battery of tests and results whose specifics she has never really let me in on. I talk with her daily on the phone, mostly about poetry and literature, and sometimes about life in general.
My father, on the other hand, gave up cigarettes some time ago, got on an exercise regimen, and worries daily and vociferously about his own death. His wife is a decade older than him (roughly eighty years old) and he likes to joke that he robbed the cradle instead of the grave. More seriously, he’s confessed that after she dies he’d like to move into the property my brother and I cohabit, which is his and for which I pay rent.
“I’m realistic,” he said, of his girlfriend, “and I know she could die any day.”
My reply was maybe harsh, but we don’t bullshit each other too much. “So, could you.”
He shook his head. “I’m going to live forever.” He meant it, in spite of the fact that he is a medical doctor who is seventy, who has diabetes and had two open heart surgeries. More recently he had a “minor” surgery at which I was present, because I had to drive him home from the hospital.
It is strange to sit in a room with one’s father while a young woman explains the pain he is going to feel as she inserts a catheter into his penis. Ageing is very serious business, dying even moreso. Both processes are unavoidable, unless you talk to the science fiction writer, Ben Bova, who argues that all we have to do is essentially rewrite our “death dates” as they’re programmed (as such) in our telomeres, in order to extend life perhaps indefinitely. That said, not even the wildest speculation is really up to the challenge of describing what catheterizing a five-hundred-year-old penis might look like.
What explains my mother’s equipoise regarding the cold fact of her own death, and my father’s reluctance to come to grips with the truth of mortality? Some of it can be put down to the residual traces of their own religious weltanschauungs. Neither my mother or father were especially religious or observant (they wouldn’t have married if they were) but Christianity puts a much greater premium on the quality and reality of the afterlife than Judaism, which, aside from some obscure and Kabbalistic minor pronouncements, seems to think that when you die you’re kosher worm food.
Both of my parents are Baby Boomers, which means that regardless of what their avowed religion is, they believe in a host of ideas and pieties whose credibility is presently under heavy strain. Their generation, more than any that came before or after, thought that the human condition, especially as regards race and poverty, could be solved, and that the only thing barring the solution was bad people. I don’t think either one of them really believes this anymore.
Still, if the fires don’t burn, perhaps the embers smolder, at least in some figurative respects.
The other day I was listening to The Doors’ song Five to One. As with most of their output, if you think too much about Jim Morrison or what “the Lizard King” thought of himself, it can all become a bit insufferable. Morrison, as Roger Ebert said in his review of Oliver Stone’s film about the band, is a bit of a drag and also a second-rate poet.
No group from the sixties could have ever credibly led a revolution, but their revolutionary posturing did make for some great pop music. View The Doors that way ---and remember that contrary to the pronouncements of the airheaded photojournalist in the movie that Jim Morrison wasn’t The Doors, at least not without Robby Krieger’s flamenco-inspired guitar playing and Ray Manzarek’s otherworldly powers on the keyboard- and the music can be enjoyable.
Still the lyrics can be pretty stupid. “The old get old and the young get stronger.” This isn’t quite true. The old are already old, and they merely get older and die. The young get stronger for a while, then they also get old, and older, and then die.
I think my mother and father’s generation forgot this.
An old Greek saying has it that a healthy society is one in which the young plant trees in whose shadow they will never stand. The Boomers seemed to take the opposite tact, and behaved like cultural lumberjacks, going through the woods and hacking down sturdy redwoods from the past and making solipsistic pronouncements about their own genius rather than having the decency to even shout “Timber!” to warn their children of what was going to come down on their heads as a result of their own folly.
One day upon leaving the hospital with my father (on a previous visit, maybe for an epidural) I was holding him as he stumbled dizzily through the corridor, helping to guide him to the elevator.
I didn’t want to needle him too badly, but I had to ask, “How could you guys say something like ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty-five? You knew you’d eventually get older, right?’”
“No,” he responded as we wandered to the elevator. “No, we didn’t.”
I’m thirty-six now, and sometimes and in some ways feel like both of my parents are younger than me. I just wish there was a way for me to give them some of the years from my own life to add to theirs, as a proverb from another land has it. Maybe Japan.
What Stephen King is better at than Everyone Else
I was going to say that unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few decades, you know the general arc of author Stephen King’s career, along with his critical reception, and how both have altered. But the truth is that King is famous enough that even if you’ve been living under a rock, providing you have keen hearing and wi-fi rays can penetrate rock (and maybe they can’t, I don’t know) chances are good you know who Stephen King is, what he does, and how others feel about him.
I’m too young to remember when the guy first burst onto the scene (I was born in the early 80s), but my age also means that I was pretty much in the eye of the storm, King-wise, when for good and for ill, the guy made his deepest penetration of pop culture. One could even be illiterate and know who King was, thanks to both the magic of the glass teat and the silver screen. In one of my earlier books I wrote about an encounter between two boys in first grade who talk about Stephen King, concluding that he is an evil old man who lives in a castle, and when a movie is sufficiently scary, say about a malevolent clown who pulls kids into the sewer, or about vampire children who scrape at your bedroom window during the night with their claws, said work was screened for King, and, if he thought it sufficiently horrifying, King nodded his head and said, “It looks scary enough, put my name on it.” Or words to that effect.
For the literate-but-pleasure-reading-public, Stephen King was no master stylist, but was without peer as a storyteller. He was someone who knew how to hook you and keep you on the line, for several hundred pages, and the ubiquity of his paperbacks at newsstands in airport terminals no doubt eased the travels of insomniacs taking transcontinental flights in the 1980s, who were worried about junk bond barons raiding their pensions or Libyans with shoulder-mounted cannons trying to beat the high score set by whoever shot down Pan-Am Flight 103.
For the middle to highbrow, Stephen King was initially perceived as a hack, someone who had taken a lifetime of pulp detritus like E.C. comics and crumpled typewriter pages discarded in Rod Serling’s wastebasket and somehow managed to get a platoon of ghostwriting monkeys to shape this grist into a number of very-well selling mass market paperbacks.
The problem with calling King a hack, though, is that a hack is someone who doesn’t do it from the heart, someone who churns it out as if they were on the clock and does it just to get paid. Stephen King is prolific as hell, but if he were doing it solely for the money he would have stopped a long time ago.
Eventually the gatekeepers (I imagine them sitting around a wood-paneled Manhattan boardroom, a group of horse-faced Boston Brahmans in black turtlenecks, tan sports blazers, and oxblood loafers) had to concede that Fine, King wasn’t a hack, and he wasn’t even trash, but his writing trashy. Thus provided one was to treat the indulgence of reading his work as a guilty pleasure, like a tabloid hidden inside the folds of a paper of record during the daily commute, then even the Good People could read King all in good fun.
This attitude may or may not still be prevalent among the Good People. I remember encountering it a couple times as an undergrad, with one especially insufferable professor (insufferable for other reasons) sniffing haughtily and snorting before saying, “Stephen King is …okay.”
This kind of stalemated “Okay,” drawn like an unwanted concession by a wrestling opponent who’d been pinned but was too proud to tap out, eventually morphed into respect, or at least a more grudging acknowledgment of King’s staying power and maybe even his (gasp) literary merits (relatively speaking, of course, old chap). This was due to the simple fact, already touched upon, that the guy kept writing through the initial critical indifference, the later drubbing, and finally the acceptance.
It didn’t hurt that Stephen King, when in nonfiction mode, demonstrated more than an autodidact’s knowledge of not only horror fiction, but of great literature and the mechanics of writing. Danse Macabre is one of the few texts analyzing pop culture that might cause an undergrad (and even a professor) to work up a light topcoat of sweat if they were to grapple with all of the theories and history elucidated in the book, which takes the reader on a tour from Continental Romanticism all the way to schlock b-pictures dealing with the horrors of the atomic age. Touching very briefly now on On Writing, let’s just say there’s a good chance that the book is likely to supplant Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style as the go-to text for people who want to learn how to be writers. Sure, if said wannabe writer is in a reputable MFA program, they’ll hide the book on the dorm room bookshelf, sans cover, but they’ll still learn more from that twenty dollar hardback than they will going fifty-thousand dollars in debt to have some tweed-jacketed Updike lookalike make them parse The Yellow Wallpaper or The Story of an Hour closer than a monkey examining its offspring’s head for lice.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read anything by King, but during my formative years as a young man and a young writer I read quite a bit of him. I was already well-enough alienated from society in a literal sense at that point already to not worry about what was or wasn’t salonfähig as the Germans say, so I didn’t care whose imprimatur King did or didn’t have. I read ‘Salem’s Lot with the same set of eyes I used to read Remembrance of Things Past (unless some sinister eye-merchant, like the one in ETA Hoffman’s Der Sandmann, swapped out my peepers in my sleep one night while I was dozing).
What I may or may not have noticed about King, though, besides the obvious, is that he was (and probably remains) a writer of unparalleled stamina.
This is something King himself addressed at some point in his writing, I think in relation to his novel Carrie. He talked about how short the novel was in its initial typewritten draft, and that he had to pad the thing out with these interleaved committee meetings on telekinesis (sort of like a Kefauver Inquiry, but into paranormal phenomena rather than mafia meddling with boxing).
King pointed out, with an uncharacteristic scoff in his voice (apparently he can look down his nose just as much as some éminence grise tending goal at The Paris Review), that one can sense when writers who are attempting their first novels struggle to cross the finish line, to write something of fifty or sixty thousand words. King himself said that when he went back and read something from his Carrie period, he recognized his voice, his style, and mannerisms, but the work read as if he had been suffering from a very bad head cold or had been under the grip of the flu while composing it.
Since Carrie, though, I don’t think King has struggled over the finish line even once. Or if he has, he hasn’t betrayed that to the reader.
For just as writing is a form of telepathy between writer and reader (as King points out in On Writing), some things can be communicated by the less-than-expert telepath against his or her will during transmission. They can betray, reveal, broadcast their weaknesses much as a poker player or boxer can. They can also bluff.
Many times reading novels by writers of varying ability (some of them very good), I have sensed them fatiguing, sagging psychically. It seems that when King hits this potential wall of fatigue which every creative person encounters, no matter how inspired or well-trained their muse, he steps up his work-rate, to borrow a phrase from boxing (and we’ll stick with boxing and ditch poker, since I know something about the former and nil about the latter). He not only refuses to buckle to the inclination to slow down, but seems to find himself spurred on to new heights by it. Just as some animals and some fighters are more dangerous when they’re wounded, King seems to find his deepest well of inspiration at the point where most other people pack it in for the day.
He is not just prolific in terms of cranking out books, one after another, but is a marvel of perpetual motion even within the pages of a single book, or story. Whatever planted this seed that’s borne an inexhaustible forest of fruits over the decades, (admittedly of varying quality, even according to his hardcore fans)- whether it was poverty, abandonment by his father who’d made his own halfhearted attempts at being a writer, or if it was just inspiration he was born with- King has been punching away at his unconquerable foe now for more than four decades. Addiction, alcohol, criticism, aging, and speeding vehicles have not slowed him down. The blandishments of fame and success have not robbed him of his vital essence, the succubus has not sapped his “precious bodily fluid,” to borrow a phrase from Base Commander Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove.
He’s the literary equivalent of Henry “Hammering Hank” Armstrong (sometimes also billed as “Homicide Hank”), dubbed the “perpetual motion machine,” a boxer who reportedly walked to and from work a cumulative twenty miles each day…to drive spikes while on the clock. And then spent his nights in smoky Masonic temples, Moose lodges, and VFW halls battling it out for fifteen rounds with no air-conditioning under hot lights in front of sometimes-hostile crowds.
Stephen King is a rich and famous writer who does not need a panegyric composed by me deep down here in the trenches of a little-frequented blog, anymore than Muhammad Ali needed the praise of a kid in some grimy PAL gym getting his hands wrapped as he prepped to get paid a couple hundred bucks to have his brains beaten in before a room half-filled with folding chairs.
But if you think he hasn’t earned than $400 million, you’re buggin worse than Phife Dog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhcmz...
I’m too young to remember when the guy first burst onto the scene (I was born in the early 80s), but my age also means that I was pretty much in the eye of the storm, King-wise, when for good and for ill, the guy made his deepest penetration of pop culture. One could even be illiterate and know who King was, thanks to both the magic of the glass teat and the silver screen. In one of my earlier books I wrote about an encounter between two boys in first grade who talk about Stephen King, concluding that he is an evil old man who lives in a castle, and when a movie is sufficiently scary, say about a malevolent clown who pulls kids into the sewer, or about vampire children who scrape at your bedroom window during the night with their claws, said work was screened for King, and, if he thought it sufficiently horrifying, King nodded his head and said, “It looks scary enough, put my name on it.” Or words to that effect.
For the literate-but-pleasure-reading-public, Stephen King was no master stylist, but was without peer as a storyteller. He was someone who knew how to hook you and keep you on the line, for several hundred pages, and the ubiquity of his paperbacks at newsstands in airport terminals no doubt eased the travels of insomniacs taking transcontinental flights in the 1980s, who were worried about junk bond barons raiding their pensions or Libyans with shoulder-mounted cannons trying to beat the high score set by whoever shot down Pan-Am Flight 103.
For the middle to highbrow, Stephen King was initially perceived as a hack, someone who had taken a lifetime of pulp detritus like E.C. comics and crumpled typewriter pages discarded in Rod Serling’s wastebasket and somehow managed to get a platoon of ghostwriting monkeys to shape this grist into a number of very-well selling mass market paperbacks.
The problem with calling King a hack, though, is that a hack is someone who doesn’t do it from the heart, someone who churns it out as if they were on the clock and does it just to get paid. Stephen King is prolific as hell, but if he were doing it solely for the money he would have stopped a long time ago.
Eventually the gatekeepers (I imagine them sitting around a wood-paneled Manhattan boardroom, a group of horse-faced Boston Brahmans in black turtlenecks, tan sports blazers, and oxblood loafers) had to concede that Fine, King wasn’t a hack, and he wasn’t even trash, but his writing trashy. Thus provided one was to treat the indulgence of reading his work as a guilty pleasure, like a tabloid hidden inside the folds of a paper of record during the daily commute, then even the Good People could read King all in good fun.
This attitude may or may not still be prevalent among the Good People. I remember encountering it a couple times as an undergrad, with one especially insufferable professor (insufferable for other reasons) sniffing haughtily and snorting before saying, “Stephen King is …okay.”
This kind of stalemated “Okay,” drawn like an unwanted concession by a wrestling opponent who’d been pinned but was too proud to tap out, eventually morphed into respect, or at least a more grudging acknowledgment of King’s staying power and maybe even his (gasp) literary merits (relatively speaking, of course, old chap). This was due to the simple fact, already touched upon, that the guy kept writing through the initial critical indifference, the later drubbing, and finally the acceptance.
It didn’t hurt that Stephen King, when in nonfiction mode, demonstrated more than an autodidact’s knowledge of not only horror fiction, but of great literature and the mechanics of writing. Danse Macabre is one of the few texts analyzing pop culture that might cause an undergrad (and even a professor) to work up a light topcoat of sweat if they were to grapple with all of the theories and history elucidated in the book, which takes the reader on a tour from Continental Romanticism all the way to schlock b-pictures dealing with the horrors of the atomic age. Touching very briefly now on On Writing, let’s just say there’s a good chance that the book is likely to supplant Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style as the go-to text for people who want to learn how to be writers. Sure, if said wannabe writer is in a reputable MFA program, they’ll hide the book on the dorm room bookshelf, sans cover, but they’ll still learn more from that twenty dollar hardback than they will going fifty-thousand dollars in debt to have some tweed-jacketed Updike lookalike make them parse The Yellow Wallpaper or The Story of an Hour closer than a monkey examining its offspring’s head for lice.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read anything by King, but during my formative years as a young man and a young writer I read quite a bit of him. I was already well-enough alienated from society in a literal sense at that point already to not worry about what was or wasn’t salonfähig as the Germans say, so I didn’t care whose imprimatur King did or didn’t have. I read ‘Salem’s Lot with the same set of eyes I used to read Remembrance of Things Past (unless some sinister eye-merchant, like the one in ETA Hoffman’s Der Sandmann, swapped out my peepers in my sleep one night while I was dozing).
What I may or may not have noticed about King, though, besides the obvious, is that he was (and probably remains) a writer of unparalleled stamina.
This is something King himself addressed at some point in his writing, I think in relation to his novel Carrie. He talked about how short the novel was in its initial typewritten draft, and that he had to pad the thing out with these interleaved committee meetings on telekinesis (sort of like a Kefauver Inquiry, but into paranormal phenomena rather than mafia meddling with boxing).
King pointed out, with an uncharacteristic scoff in his voice (apparently he can look down his nose just as much as some éminence grise tending goal at The Paris Review), that one can sense when writers who are attempting their first novels struggle to cross the finish line, to write something of fifty or sixty thousand words. King himself said that when he went back and read something from his Carrie period, he recognized his voice, his style, and mannerisms, but the work read as if he had been suffering from a very bad head cold or had been under the grip of the flu while composing it.
Since Carrie, though, I don’t think King has struggled over the finish line even once. Or if he has, he hasn’t betrayed that to the reader.
For just as writing is a form of telepathy between writer and reader (as King points out in On Writing), some things can be communicated by the less-than-expert telepath against his or her will during transmission. They can betray, reveal, broadcast their weaknesses much as a poker player or boxer can. They can also bluff.
Many times reading novels by writers of varying ability (some of them very good), I have sensed them fatiguing, sagging psychically. It seems that when King hits this potential wall of fatigue which every creative person encounters, no matter how inspired or well-trained their muse, he steps up his work-rate, to borrow a phrase from boxing (and we’ll stick with boxing and ditch poker, since I know something about the former and nil about the latter). He not only refuses to buckle to the inclination to slow down, but seems to find himself spurred on to new heights by it. Just as some animals and some fighters are more dangerous when they’re wounded, King seems to find his deepest well of inspiration at the point where most other people pack it in for the day.
He is not just prolific in terms of cranking out books, one after another, but is a marvel of perpetual motion even within the pages of a single book, or story. Whatever planted this seed that’s borne an inexhaustible forest of fruits over the decades, (admittedly of varying quality, even according to his hardcore fans)- whether it was poverty, abandonment by his father who’d made his own halfhearted attempts at being a writer, or if it was just inspiration he was born with- King has been punching away at his unconquerable foe now for more than four decades. Addiction, alcohol, criticism, aging, and speeding vehicles have not slowed him down. The blandishments of fame and success have not robbed him of his vital essence, the succubus has not sapped his “precious bodily fluid,” to borrow a phrase from Base Commander Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove.
He’s the literary equivalent of Henry “Hammering Hank” Armstrong (sometimes also billed as “Homicide Hank”), dubbed the “perpetual motion machine,” a boxer who reportedly walked to and from work a cumulative twenty miles each day…to drive spikes while on the clock. And then spent his nights in smoky Masonic temples, Moose lodges, and VFW halls battling it out for fifteen rounds with no air-conditioning under hot lights in front of sometimes-hostile crowds.
Stephen King is a rich and famous writer who does not need a panegyric composed by me deep down here in the trenches of a little-frequented blog, anymore than Muhammad Ali needed the praise of a kid in some grimy PAL gym getting his hands wrapped as he prepped to get paid a couple hundred bucks to have his brains beaten in before a room half-filled with folding chairs.
But if you think he hasn’t earned than $400 million, you’re buggin worse than Phife Dog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhcmz...
The Internet Is a Sand Mandala
The internet is many things: a source for information, both reliable and unreliable, a method of trolling and irritating people, a porn machine, a way to order shower curtains at a clearance price and have them arrive the next day. But right now, more than anything else, I’m thinking of it as a kind of sand mandala. For those who don’t know what that is, this definition from the unimpeachable source Wikipedia should more than suffice for this blog’s purposes:
“Sand mandala (Tibetan: དཀྱིལ་འཁོར།, Wylie: dkyil 'khor; Chinese: 沙坛城; pinyin: Shā Tánchéng) is a Tibetan Buddhist tradition involving the creation and destruction of mandalas made from coloured sand. A sand mandala is ritualistically dismantled once it has been completed and its accompanying ceremonies and viewing are finished to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life.”
That still doesn’t quite give you the picture, though, so go ahead and supplement that definition with a quick look on Google Images, if you care that much. Or screw it, I’ll include an image of a mandala at the top of this blog post.
The point is that a sand mandala is an intricately constructed circular piece of art, involving all sorts of ornamentation, arabesques, scrimshawing, esoteric and symbolic detail. And yet it’s created not to last—like most artworks—but to exist for a very short ephemeral moment of time before being wiped away by the monk’s sandal or effaced by his rock garden rake.
Why destroy your creation like that? I think (as alluded to in the Wikipedia quote) that the point is to underline the impermanence of all things, to affirm that creation is its own reward. To make something and then to cherish that creation is to become attached to the things of the world, to the material plane. That natural and free energy which caused you to inhabit the moment fully and thus create is undermined once that moment is encased, solidified in hardened strata rather than blowing in sand.
What does this have to do with the internet? Maybe nothing, but earlier today I went to the website www.paragraphline.com, deciding to take a trip down Memory Lane. Many years ago, you see, I wrote some stories and articles for them, a couple of which I like very much. That’s unusual for me, to like my writing, to not wince on it when I reread it, for my flaws and cloying need for approval not to jump out at me, as if lit in constantly strobing neon. And yet, rather than seeing the website (as I had the last few times I came back there), I got this message instead:
“Paragraph Line Books is (was?) a publisher of absurdist and weird literature. For various reasons (mostly apathy) we're currently on a break. Maybe when the whole publishing thing makes more sense, we'll be back.
“Some of our various published books are still on Amazon. We've pulled down everything we published here, because WordPress is impossible to maintain long-term. Sorry.
“We are obviously not open for submissions. If you have any other inquiries, we're not that hard to find.
“-JK 2/13/22”
It hurt a little to read that, firstly because I had fond memories of working with the people at Paragraph Line. But secondly, because all that work I’d done was gone from the website. Sure, I could find it again on the Wayback Machine, as everything on the internet gets archived and lives as long as the internet lives in cached form.
But that got me thinking about what happens when the internet goes. I mean, say, for instance that those who’ve gamed out the current round of brinkmanship between Russia and the West are right and we do get a nuclear exchange. Large swaths of civilization will disappear, and with it, lots of electrical infrastructure and surely many Cloud servers, right?
Then even the memories of those stories—along with the memories that I have of working with the other writers in that collective—will be effaced from the universe. And all those writers and readers of the work (myself included) will eventually die. We’ll be reduced first to worm food and then to a finer dust to be reassimilated into the loam and hummus. Perhaps portions of us will live on when we maybe soak into the roots of trees bordering the cemeteries where we’re interred.
Even if some aliens were to arrive on the scarified wastes of what was once our planet, and were to reboot the net, they probably wouldn’t be able to interpret the weird sigils of our ancient orthography. And even if they did enjoy it, we could get no enjoyment from their enjoyment of our works. “Immortality,” as a famous man once observed, “is the stupid invention of the living.” Edgar Allen Poe was a miserable, tortured soul who lived only for a short time. I doubt his soul (if such a thing exists) gets any solace from seeing his likeness hung on posters on the walls behind steam-shrouded baristas in coffee shops.
It's a bummer, this impermanence, this understanding of the temporal factor of everything. No matter how hard we cling to the things of this world they will slip through our fingers, and the flesh of those same fingers will rot, and the skeletal flanges beneath that will also turn to dust. We can create bibliographies of our own works, bind the works in vellum or strong Morocco, and place those same tomes in lead-lined cases. But somehow time and oxygen and verdigris and fruiting mycelia and the heat death of our Sun will all eventually make it all not matter.
But while there’s much to grieve in that, it’s also liberating as hell. If everything—from ancient hieroglyphics to the phonemes carved on the Rosetta Stone— is ultimately impermanent, and no record can last into eternity, then everything is written on sand. The difference between amphorae inscribed with cuneiform logograms attesting a ruler’s greatness don’t have much more chance of survival than an ignored banner ad for Carnival Cruises currently flashing on the screen of an old lady who doesn’t have her adblocker enabled.
And that means that the only reason to create anything is to achieve the buzz that comes in the moment of creation, since that moment, once passed, is obliterated. It’s only yours as long as it lasts.
There’s a reason the pianist Fats Domino—when his fingers were strutting up and down the keys and he was smiling and sweating—would scream, “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!” There is no high like the moment, yet it’s elusive and short-lived, and the memory of its greatness only mocks it rather than truly preserving it. So enjoy it while it lasts. Or better yet, don’t enjoy it, as that requires too much cognizance of it. Just let it carry you as far and as long as it can, and when the tailwind ceases and drops you back to the ground, have the decency to keep walking.
There are of course writers who don’t think that way. Richard Price—whom I admired a lot when I was young—used to say that he looked at writing like building a house, and that his favorite part was the sense of accomplishment he had when he was done. Some critic asserted that Ernest Hemingway woke up early, around 7 a.m., and tried to get all of his writing done before noon because after that he got drunk. Creation was an obstacle, an obligation, standing between him and the bottle or the bonefish tackle waiting in the speedboat, or both.
That’s in direct contrast to someone like Charles Bukowski, who—in an interview with Sean Penn—likened writing to the smoking of a cigarette. The act of sitting before the typewriter was the drawing of smoke into the lungs, the satisfaction of imbibing tobacco, the stirring of the synapses being fed what they craved. The ashes flicked into the tray, however—the detritus, the afterbirth—was the book or the short story. The work was not a house, a piece of craftsmanship; it was an afterthought to an experience whose buzz the reader could only experience vicariously. A kind of contact high passed from writer to reader.
It’s of course possible that those who build houses get a buzz while building, and that those who smoke cigarettes gain some sort of strange solace—maybe even an odd sense of accomplishment—from staring at the pile of accumulated ashes in the tray. The Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun used to say that he wrote for the same reason a man lying in bed late at night might listen to the drip-drip of the bathroom faucet. It was just something to do. Not very romantic, but still essential in its way.
But the impermanence, the fleetingness—which bummed me out so much earlier today—is somehow giving me a small measure of joy in writing this right now. And that minor buzz is worth more than any shelfful of accolades.
Artists who have achieved great things are many times forced to live in their own shadows. I guess that’s why I’m grateful that when I go back and look at most of my writing, I wince. It means I can get up tomorrow and try again. Imagine peaking in your twenties. What the hell do you do with all those remaining years? Pickle your liver, let undergrads fawn over you? Salinger was right to retreat to his hermitage and to maintain radio silence. The only other option—the one taken by Harper Lee (or her estate taking advantage of her)—was to kill the legend by trying to reconstruct the already swirled-away image of the beautiful mandala.
Still, I miss those guys I worked with at the Paragraph Line micro-press. They published many of my shorter stories and essays, not to mention a couple of my early books. And I was much more undaunted, younger, and less cynical in those days.
But I must not be totally at the end of my tether, as I’m still here, still typing, and trying. The writer John Sheppard (also at Paragraph Line, also apparently retired, and from whom I’m sadly estranged) was fond of quoting a little something by the late, great Southern gothic Flannery O’Connor. But as it’s been awhile, I’ll just paraphrase: There is no such thing as a hopeless work of art. The act of creation in itself implies some hope, or the attempt wouldn’t have even been made.
The creation of even the bleakest novel—even Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night—requires some kind of faith, or at least effort.
Then again, there’s nothing more abject and hopeless than a suicide note, and that also requires some effort, so maybe I’m talking out of my ass. But that’s what blogs are for.
The “JK” in the internet message is Jon Konrath, by the way. He’s a good writer, with a keen sense of humor, but the last I checked he had given up on the game just like John, and was working writing copy for some advertising firm.
Wherever the hell they are now, I wish them well, and thank them for giving me a chance all those years ago.
But it hardly matters. These words are written on pixels perhaps soon to be erased by nuclear warheads. And when Jon and John and I are in the ground, perhaps the worms munching on me and them will all meet up for some slithering quorum. Then I’ll be able to thank my old friends, in person (or at least as some kind of panpsychic vestige of what was once a man but is now locked inside the segments of a slithering worm’s body.)
And on that upbeat note I’ll put this entry to bed.
“Sand mandala (Tibetan: དཀྱིལ་འཁོར།, Wylie: dkyil 'khor; Chinese: 沙坛城; pinyin: Shā Tánchéng) is a Tibetan Buddhist tradition involving the creation and destruction of mandalas made from coloured sand. A sand mandala is ritualistically dismantled once it has been completed and its accompanying ceremonies and viewing are finished to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life.”
That still doesn’t quite give you the picture, though, so go ahead and supplement that definition with a quick look on Google Images, if you care that much. Or screw it, I’ll include an image of a mandala at the top of this blog post.
The point is that a sand mandala is an intricately constructed circular piece of art, involving all sorts of ornamentation, arabesques, scrimshawing, esoteric and symbolic detail. And yet it’s created not to last—like most artworks—but to exist for a very short ephemeral moment of time before being wiped away by the monk’s sandal or effaced by his rock garden rake.
Why destroy your creation like that? I think (as alluded to in the Wikipedia quote) that the point is to underline the impermanence of all things, to affirm that creation is its own reward. To make something and then to cherish that creation is to become attached to the things of the world, to the material plane. That natural and free energy which caused you to inhabit the moment fully and thus create is undermined once that moment is encased, solidified in hardened strata rather than blowing in sand.
What does this have to do with the internet? Maybe nothing, but earlier today I went to the website www.paragraphline.com, deciding to take a trip down Memory Lane. Many years ago, you see, I wrote some stories and articles for them, a couple of which I like very much. That’s unusual for me, to like my writing, to not wince on it when I reread it, for my flaws and cloying need for approval not to jump out at me, as if lit in constantly strobing neon. And yet, rather than seeing the website (as I had the last few times I came back there), I got this message instead:
“Paragraph Line Books is (was?) a publisher of absurdist and weird literature. For various reasons (mostly apathy) we're currently on a break. Maybe when the whole publishing thing makes more sense, we'll be back.
“Some of our various published books are still on Amazon. We've pulled down everything we published here, because WordPress is impossible to maintain long-term. Sorry.
“We are obviously not open for submissions. If you have any other inquiries, we're not that hard to find.
“-JK 2/13/22”
It hurt a little to read that, firstly because I had fond memories of working with the people at Paragraph Line. But secondly, because all that work I’d done was gone from the website. Sure, I could find it again on the Wayback Machine, as everything on the internet gets archived and lives as long as the internet lives in cached form.
But that got me thinking about what happens when the internet goes. I mean, say, for instance that those who’ve gamed out the current round of brinkmanship between Russia and the West are right and we do get a nuclear exchange. Large swaths of civilization will disappear, and with it, lots of electrical infrastructure and surely many Cloud servers, right?
Then even the memories of those stories—along with the memories that I have of working with the other writers in that collective—will be effaced from the universe. And all those writers and readers of the work (myself included) will eventually die. We’ll be reduced first to worm food and then to a finer dust to be reassimilated into the loam and hummus. Perhaps portions of us will live on when we maybe soak into the roots of trees bordering the cemeteries where we’re interred.
Even if some aliens were to arrive on the scarified wastes of what was once our planet, and were to reboot the net, they probably wouldn’t be able to interpret the weird sigils of our ancient orthography. And even if they did enjoy it, we could get no enjoyment from their enjoyment of our works. “Immortality,” as a famous man once observed, “is the stupid invention of the living.” Edgar Allen Poe was a miserable, tortured soul who lived only for a short time. I doubt his soul (if such a thing exists) gets any solace from seeing his likeness hung on posters on the walls behind steam-shrouded baristas in coffee shops.
It's a bummer, this impermanence, this understanding of the temporal factor of everything. No matter how hard we cling to the things of this world they will slip through our fingers, and the flesh of those same fingers will rot, and the skeletal flanges beneath that will also turn to dust. We can create bibliographies of our own works, bind the works in vellum or strong Morocco, and place those same tomes in lead-lined cases. But somehow time and oxygen and verdigris and fruiting mycelia and the heat death of our Sun will all eventually make it all not matter.
But while there’s much to grieve in that, it’s also liberating as hell. If everything—from ancient hieroglyphics to the phonemes carved on the Rosetta Stone— is ultimately impermanent, and no record can last into eternity, then everything is written on sand. The difference between amphorae inscribed with cuneiform logograms attesting a ruler’s greatness don’t have much more chance of survival than an ignored banner ad for Carnival Cruises currently flashing on the screen of an old lady who doesn’t have her adblocker enabled.
And that means that the only reason to create anything is to achieve the buzz that comes in the moment of creation, since that moment, once passed, is obliterated. It’s only yours as long as it lasts.
There’s a reason the pianist Fats Domino—when his fingers were strutting up and down the keys and he was smiling and sweating—would scream, “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!” There is no high like the moment, yet it’s elusive and short-lived, and the memory of its greatness only mocks it rather than truly preserving it. So enjoy it while it lasts. Or better yet, don’t enjoy it, as that requires too much cognizance of it. Just let it carry you as far and as long as it can, and when the tailwind ceases and drops you back to the ground, have the decency to keep walking.
There are of course writers who don’t think that way. Richard Price—whom I admired a lot when I was young—used to say that he looked at writing like building a house, and that his favorite part was the sense of accomplishment he had when he was done. Some critic asserted that Ernest Hemingway woke up early, around 7 a.m., and tried to get all of his writing done before noon because after that he got drunk. Creation was an obstacle, an obligation, standing between him and the bottle or the bonefish tackle waiting in the speedboat, or both.
That’s in direct contrast to someone like Charles Bukowski, who—in an interview with Sean Penn—likened writing to the smoking of a cigarette. The act of sitting before the typewriter was the drawing of smoke into the lungs, the satisfaction of imbibing tobacco, the stirring of the synapses being fed what they craved. The ashes flicked into the tray, however—the detritus, the afterbirth—was the book or the short story. The work was not a house, a piece of craftsmanship; it was an afterthought to an experience whose buzz the reader could only experience vicariously. A kind of contact high passed from writer to reader.
It’s of course possible that those who build houses get a buzz while building, and that those who smoke cigarettes gain some sort of strange solace—maybe even an odd sense of accomplishment—from staring at the pile of accumulated ashes in the tray. The Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun used to say that he wrote for the same reason a man lying in bed late at night might listen to the drip-drip of the bathroom faucet. It was just something to do. Not very romantic, but still essential in its way.
But the impermanence, the fleetingness—which bummed me out so much earlier today—is somehow giving me a small measure of joy in writing this right now. And that minor buzz is worth more than any shelfful of accolades.
Artists who have achieved great things are many times forced to live in their own shadows. I guess that’s why I’m grateful that when I go back and look at most of my writing, I wince. It means I can get up tomorrow and try again. Imagine peaking in your twenties. What the hell do you do with all those remaining years? Pickle your liver, let undergrads fawn over you? Salinger was right to retreat to his hermitage and to maintain radio silence. The only other option—the one taken by Harper Lee (or her estate taking advantage of her)—was to kill the legend by trying to reconstruct the already swirled-away image of the beautiful mandala.
Still, I miss those guys I worked with at the Paragraph Line micro-press. They published many of my shorter stories and essays, not to mention a couple of my early books. And I was much more undaunted, younger, and less cynical in those days.
But I must not be totally at the end of my tether, as I’m still here, still typing, and trying. The writer John Sheppard (also at Paragraph Line, also apparently retired, and from whom I’m sadly estranged) was fond of quoting a little something by the late, great Southern gothic Flannery O’Connor. But as it’s been awhile, I’ll just paraphrase: There is no such thing as a hopeless work of art. The act of creation in itself implies some hope, or the attempt wouldn’t have even been made.
The creation of even the bleakest novel—even Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night—requires some kind of faith, or at least effort.
Then again, there’s nothing more abject and hopeless than a suicide note, and that also requires some effort, so maybe I’m talking out of my ass. But that’s what blogs are for.
The “JK” in the internet message is Jon Konrath, by the way. He’s a good writer, with a keen sense of humor, but the last I checked he had given up on the game just like John, and was working writing copy for some advertising firm.
Wherever the hell they are now, I wish them well, and thank them for giving me a chance all those years ago.
But it hardly matters. These words are written on pixels perhaps soon to be erased by nuclear warheads. And when Jon and John and I are in the ground, perhaps the worms munching on me and them will all meet up for some slithering quorum. Then I’ll be able to thank my old friends, in person (or at least as some kind of panpsychic vestige of what was once a man but is now locked inside the segments of a slithering worm’s body.)
And on that upbeat note I’ll put this entry to bed.
Brains in Vats, Necks in Nooses: Musings at Owl Creek.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek, is a great short story, with a hell of a lot of staying power. Author Kurt Vonnegut considered it the best American short story ever written, and declared anyone who hadn’t read it a twerp. It has so penetrated our culture that even if you haven’t read it, or necessarily even heard of it, you know it. Songs, TV shows, comic books, and even a film or two have been inspired by the story.
Here's the CliffsNotes version of Ambrose Bierce’s masterpiece: A southern soldier-turned-guerilla named Peyton Farquhar is having the hangman’s noose slipped around his neck by a detail of Yankee soldiers. Farquhar, much like the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart, is distracted by a loud noise. This noise, however, isn’t the beating of a heart, symbolizing a guilt-ridden conscience. This is the ticking of his watch’s hands, amplified now that he knows time is running out.
While preparing to be executed, Farquhar flashes back to an earlier time where he and his lovely wife are sitting on the steps of his plantation house. Then a Reb in butternut grey shows up, spoiling the peace of their afternoon idyll. He gives Farquhar the news that the Yankees are closing in on this stretch of countryside, which spoils the rest of the afternoon.
Anyone who’s ever read of “Sherman’s March,” knows that Northern reprisals against the secessionist South could get pretty brutal. Naturally Farquhar is eager to thwart the Yanks, even if the War is almost over, the Surrender at Appomattox a fait accompli.
The soldier tells him that the Union Army is currently working on repairing Owl Creek Bridge, which is an essentially strategic chokepoint for both armies. He plants the thought in Farquhar’s head (where, to be fair, it may have already had some purchase) that he should sabotage the bridge-building effort.
Farquhar takes him up on the offer, only to discover that the “Reb” was in fact a false-flagging Yankee spy gone undercover. The spy captures him and takes him to his command, where he is summarily judged for attempted sabotage and condemned to hang.
Farquhar flashes forward back to the present, where he is now being thrown over the side of the bridge. Only instead of his neck breaking, the frayed hemp of the noose snaps, and he escapes into the running river.
The soldiers on the banks take shots at him, and just as they are about to adjust their fire correctly—let loose with grapeshot and Minié ball—Farquhar makes land. He runs through the woods and passes through beautiful countryside. Much like William Wharton’s alter-ego in the World War II novel, A Midnight Clear, he’s noticing how beautiful the world is just when he’s about to leave it. It’s this vividness, heightening of the Farquhar’s senses by Bierce, that takes this thing from the naturalistic to the Proustian. Although we’re not bombarded with sensory details, the feel and smell and sights of a forest in bloom are strong enough to taste and touch.
Farquhar comes into a clearing, heading back in direction of his house, and his beautiful wife. He has almost reached her when his neck snaps.
It turns out that his entire escape from the Union hanging squad was a brief flight of fancy of which death quickly disabused him.
It’s powerful and effective stuff, even now. The idea of a “trick ending,” hadn’t been overplayed at that point, and even if it had, it’s Bierce’s deceptive naturalism that sells it all. Much like the Yankee spy, he skillfully deploys sleight-of-hand, misdirecting us so that we don’t see the trap springing beneath our feet. We’re given, in the factual and succinct language of a newsman, the whole metaphysical heft of the human condition, our limitless imagination and very limited bodies.
What gives the story its power, aside from its perfect construction, the fine attention to detail, the seemingly effortless manipulation of the reader’s attention and sympathies? What makes it still relevant, while so many other stories—great as they may be—no longer hit so hard?
Plenty of people have their own theories. Here’s mine:
The story’s “false narrative continuity”—thinking one thing’s happening when something else is—resonates very much in this world where most people’s pleasures are virtual. Whether it’s videogaming with a synthetic community online or bingeing Netflix with a pint of Chunky Monkey and a handful of edibles, there’s a sense of evasion, escape. But also a looming knowledge of some final reckoning, not just of death, which is inevitable, but of reckoning with all the time we squandered struggling not to think.
“Sooner or later,” Robert Louis Stevenson said, “we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.” Americans are good with banquets—or at least buffets—we’re less good with consequences.
Understand, I’m not knocking anyone’s past-time, and Lord knows I’m better at ducking reality then most. Hell, almost everything ultimately boils down to a diversion or an evasion, even religious ritual and quests for peak experience. Climb a mountain, meditate in an ashram, Netflix and chill...It all ends the same way, and we’ll find out what that end is when we get there. Unless, in fact, the end is truly the void, in which case it won’t matter whether we climbed mountains, prayed, or popped CBD gummies while laughing at cartoons.
And due to the old “Brains in a Vat,” problem, there’s also no way to objectively be sure what any of us is really doing right now. I could very well be hooked up to a machine, thinking I’m writing these words, while you’re hooked up to a machine and think you’re reading them. Meanwhile whoever actually runs those machines is laughing at us both and probably drawing dicks on our foreheads.
That’s another way that Owl Creek acts as a frontrunner for modern, or even postmodern thinking. It questions consciousness in a way that neither Kant nor Descartes even had. Doctor of Philosophy Gilbert Harman didn’t even get there til the middle of the twentieth century, when he postulated the aforementioned “Brains in a Vat” experiment. Werner Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht brought the problem to the arthouse audience, while the Wachowskis mainstreamed it with The Matrix. As usual, Plato (with his Cave) got there firstest with the mostest, as the old boxing trainers like to say.
Getting back to the story, I wonder: was Farquhar’s flight into fantasy a small mercy, something—like the release of adrenaline or cortisol—his body did to make death easier?
In the very effective Alfred Hitchcock Presents adaptation of the work, Farquhar seems not only happy, but in absolute bliss while bathed in the warmth of his delusion. The sun-dappled countryside evokes childhood memories, not the Gothic south but the simpler hillbilly eclogue of The Andy Griffith Show: walking through woods with trees draped in lush thickets of Spanish moss; hearing the Robeson-esque baritone of “Old Ben,” the faithful slave; Farquhar running up to the porch of his old antebellum colonial mansion where his wife is waiting for him in her white bridal lace. Sure, it’s only a fraction of a second and still ends with his neck getting broken, but the delusion’s a bit like the spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down.
In that episode’s conclusion, we only see Farquar’s dangling feet, not his face. Still, I’d like to imagine that much like Sam Lowry in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, he’s grinning ear to ear, unaware and forever trapped in bliss.
It could be. If one’s state of mind at death determines where their soul goes when they transmigrate, then Farquar is definitely off to a happy hereafter. Something like Disney’s Songs of the South before first Reconstruction, then Civil Rights, and finally twenty-first century iconoclasm put the permanent kibosh on the romance of the “Lost Cause.”
***
There’s another interpretation of Incident at Owl Creek, one that occurred to me earlier watching Carnival of Souls, a horror movie obviously influenced or even inspired, by Bierce’s story.
Thumbnailing it here for you (I can’t CliffsNotes it, as it was never a book or short story), it’s about three girls whose car goes off a bridge. Two of the girls drown, while the third, Mary, lives. Or at least she thinks she does.
She seems oddly distant from all the people she meets after surviving her accident, her standoffishness and anxiety verging on something more unsettling. Like an old elephant, it’s as if she wants to wander off to die alone, out of sight, with as much dignity as she can muster.
And yet at the film’s conclusion we realize she’s been dead the whole time, drowned with her other two hapless friends.
It’s how I felt after my year in Iraq, as if I hadn’t really lived, and that it’s only a matter of time until I realize it. I hate to keep talking about it, but it’s hard, since I still keep thinking about it.
There was one moment when I volunteered (dumb, dumb, dumb!) for convoy detail, and realized I was probably going to die. The anxiety kept growing in me, as well as the guilt at what I was doing to my mother, who’d already been through this shit with her brother who went to Vietnam. It also hurt when I thought about my younger brother, and what effect my death or maiming might have on him.
Finally, to deal with the agony of not knowing whether or not I was going to die, I told myself that I already had died, that I was already dead. And the pain and anxiety abated, replaced with a kind of spiritual apathy that I confused at the time with peace of mind. “He who makes a beast of himself,” Samuel Johnson once observed, “gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Replace “beast” with “ghost” and you have some idea of the spiritual damage I did to myself in the long-run by making things easier for myself, in Iraq, in the short run.
But it was only after I got home that I realized what I had done to myself by willing my mind into accepting death so totally.
And now I feel like someday soon I’m going to realize that all these years were just a trick of time dilation, the moment before my death.
It’s only a matter of time. Perhaps writing the next sentence, I’ll blink once and find these naked hands gloved and gripping my squad automatic weapon. In the confusion of segueing from dream to reality I’ll fail to jump down from my turret and my neck will be broken when our Humvee rolls over. The last sixteen years will have been a false memory, something my sensorium conjured to make that final moment where the neck breaks less painful, less real. Death, like Vonnegut’s Tralfalmadorians, likes to play games with the subjects trapped in his zoo.
It’s not a pleasant thought, but it’s one I can’t escape, and one I’m sure that Ambrose Bierce—who witnessed several hangings in the War—probably knew a thing or two about.
Here's the CliffsNotes version of Ambrose Bierce’s masterpiece: A southern soldier-turned-guerilla named Peyton Farquhar is having the hangman’s noose slipped around his neck by a detail of Yankee soldiers. Farquhar, much like the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart, is distracted by a loud noise. This noise, however, isn’t the beating of a heart, symbolizing a guilt-ridden conscience. This is the ticking of his watch’s hands, amplified now that he knows time is running out.
While preparing to be executed, Farquhar flashes back to an earlier time where he and his lovely wife are sitting on the steps of his plantation house. Then a Reb in butternut grey shows up, spoiling the peace of their afternoon idyll. He gives Farquhar the news that the Yankees are closing in on this stretch of countryside, which spoils the rest of the afternoon.
Anyone who’s ever read of “Sherman’s March,” knows that Northern reprisals against the secessionist South could get pretty brutal. Naturally Farquhar is eager to thwart the Yanks, even if the War is almost over, the Surrender at Appomattox a fait accompli.
The soldier tells him that the Union Army is currently working on repairing Owl Creek Bridge, which is an essentially strategic chokepoint for both armies. He plants the thought in Farquhar’s head (where, to be fair, it may have already had some purchase) that he should sabotage the bridge-building effort.
Farquhar takes him up on the offer, only to discover that the “Reb” was in fact a false-flagging Yankee spy gone undercover. The spy captures him and takes him to his command, where he is summarily judged for attempted sabotage and condemned to hang.
Farquhar flashes forward back to the present, where he is now being thrown over the side of the bridge. Only instead of his neck breaking, the frayed hemp of the noose snaps, and he escapes into the running river.
The soldiers on the banks take shots at him, and just as they are about to adjust their fire correctly—let loose with grapeshot and Minié ball—Farquhar makes land. He runs through the woods and passes through beautiful countryside. Much like William Wharton’s alter-ego in the World War II novel, A Midnight Clear, he’s noticing how beautiful the world is just when he’s about to leave it. It’s this vividness, heightening of the Farquhar’s senses by Bierce, that takes this thing from the naturalistic to the Proustian. Although we’re not bombarded with sensory details, the feel and smell and sights of a forest in bloom are strong enough to taste and touch.
Farquhar comes into a clearing, heading back in direction of his house, and his beautiful wife. He has almost reached her when his neck snaps.
It turns out that his entire escape from the Union hanging squad was a brief flight of fancy of which death quickly disabused him.
It’s powerful and effective stuff, even now. The idea of a “trick ending,” hadn’t been overplayed at that point, and even if it had, it’s Bierce’s deceptive naturalism that sells it all. Much like the Yankee spy, he skillfully deploys sleight-of-hand, misdirecting us so that we don’t see the trap springing beneath our feet. We’re given, in the factual and succinct language of a newsman, the whole metaphysical heft of the human condition, our limitless imagination and very limited bodies.
What gives the story its power, aside from its perfect construction, the fine attention to detail, the seemingly effortless manipulation of the reader’s attention and sympathies? What makes it still relevant, while so many other stories—great as they may be—no longer hit so hard?
Plenty of people have their own theories. Here’s mine:
The story’s “false narrative continuity”—thinking one thing’s happening when something else is—resonates very much in this world where most people’s pleasures are virtual. Whether it’s videogaming with a synthetic community online or bingeing Netflix with a pint of Chunky Monkey and a handful of edibles, there’s a sense of evasion, escape. But also a looming knowledge of some final reckoning, not just of death, which is inevitable, but of reckoning with all the time we squandered struggling not to think.
“Sooner or later,” Robert Louis Stevenson said, “we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.” Americans are good with banquets—or at least buffets—we’re less good with consequences.
Understand, I’m not knocking anyone’s past-time, and Lord knows I’m better at ducking reality then most. Hell, almost everything ultimately boils down to a diversion or an evasion, even religious ritual and quests for peak experience. Climb a mountain, meditate in an ashram, Netflix and chill...It all ends the same way, and we’ll find out what that end is when we get there. Unless, in fact, the end is truly the void, in which case it won’t matter whether we climbed mountains, prayed, or popped CBD gummies while laughing at cartoons.
And due to the old “Brains in a Vat,” problem, there’s also no way to objectively be sure what any of us is really doing right now. I could very well be hooked up to a machine, thinking I’m writing these words, while you’re hooked up to a machine and think you’re reading them. Meanwhile whoever actually runs those machines is laughing at us both and probably drawing dicks on our foreheads.
That’s another way that Owl Creek acts as a frontrunner for modern, or even postmodern thinking. It questions consciousness in a way that neither Kant nor Descartes even had. Doctor of Philosophy Gilbert Harman didn’t even get there til the middle of the twentieth century, when he postulated the aforementioned “Brains in a Vat” experiment. Werner Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht brought the problem to the arthouse audience, while the Wachowskis mainstreamed it with The Matrix. As usual, Plato (with his Cave) got there firstest with the mostest, as the old boxing trainers like to say.
Getting back to the story, I wonder: was Farquhar’s flight into fantasy a small mercy, something—like the release of adrenaline or cortisol—his body did to make death easier?
In the very effective Alfred Hitchcock Presents adaptation of the work, Farquhar seems not only happy, but in absolute bliss while bathed in the warmth of his delusion. The sun-dappled countryside evokes childhood memories, not the Gothic south but the simpler hillbilly eclogue of The Andy Griffith Show: walking through woods with trees draped in lush thickets of Spanish moss; hearing the Robeson-esque baritone of “Old Ben,” the faithful slave; Farquhar running up to the porch of his old antebellum colonial mansion where his wife is waiting for him in her white bridal lace. Sure, it’s only a fraction of a second and still ends with his neck getting broken, but the delusion’s a bit like the spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down.
In that episode’s conclusion, we only see Farquar’s dangling feet, not his face. Still, I’d like to imagine that much like Sam Lowry in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, he’s grinning ear to ear, unaware and forever trapped in bliss.
It could be. If one’s state of mind at death determines where their soul goes when they transmigrate, then Farquar is definitely off to a happy hereafter. Something like Disney’s Songs of the South before first Reconstruction, then Civil Rights, and finally twenty-first century iconoclasm put the permanent kibosh on the romance of the “Lost Cause.”
***
There’s another interpretation of Incident at Owl Creek, one that occurred to me earlier watching Carnival of Souls, a horror movie obviously influenced or even inspired, by Bierce’s story.
Thumbnailing it here for you (I can’t CliffsNotes it, as it was never a book or short story), it’s about three girls whose car goes off a bridge. Two of the girls drown, while the third, Mary, lives. Or at least she thinks she does.
She seems oddly distant from all the people she meets after surviving her accident, her standoffishness and anxiety verging on something more unsettling. Like an old elephant, it’s as if she wants to wander off to die alone, out of sight, with as much dignity as she can muster.
And yet at the film’s conclusion we realize she’s been dead the whole time, drowned with her other two hapless friends.
It’s how I felt after my year in Iraq, as if I hadn’t really lived, and that it’s only a matter of time until I realize it. I hate to keep talking about it, but it’s hard, since I still keep thinking about it.
There was one moment when I volunteered (dumb, dumb, dumb!) for convoy detail, and realized I was probably going to die. The anxiety kept growing in me, as well as the guilt at what I was doing to my mother, who’d already been through this shit with her brother who went to Vietnam. It also hurt when I thought about my younger brother, and what effect my death or maiming might have on him.
Finally, to deal with the agony of not knowing whether or not I was going to die, I told myself that I already had died, that I was already dead. And the pain and anxiety abated, replaced with a kind of spiritual apathy that I confused at the time with peace of mind. “He who makes a beast of himself,” Samuel Johnson once observed, “gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Replace “beast” with “ghost” and you have some idea of the spiritual damage I did to myself in the long-run by making things easier for myself, in Iraq, in the short run.
But it was only after I got home that I realized what I had done to myself by willing my mind into accepting death so totally.
And now I feel like someday soon I’m going to realize that all these years were just a trick of time dilation, the moment before my death.
It’s only a matter of time. Perhaps writing the next sentence, I’ll blink once and find these naked hands gloved and gripping my squad automatic weapon. In the confusion of segueing from dream to reality I’ll fail to jump down from my turret and my neck will be broken when our Humvee rolls over. The last sixteen years will have been a false memory, something my sensorium conjured to make that final moment where the neck breaks less painful, less real. Death, like Vonnegut’s Tralfalmadorians, likes to play games with the subjects trapped in his zoo.
It’s not a pleasant thought, but it’s one I can’t escape, and one I’m sure that Ambrose Bierce—who witnessed several hangings in the War—probably knew a thing or two about.
Is Writing a Form of Acting?
There’s an anecdote about Robert E. Howard, the author of a million sword and sorcery tales featuring his creations like Kull, Solomon Kane, and, most famously Conan the Cimmerian. Supposedly, while writing his tales, he would often get quite caught up in the composition. So caught up in fact that he would do things like tying a blanket around his neck to mimic a cape, and begin acting out his scenes. He would shout and swashbuckle and parry imaginary blows while delivering his own ripostes.
There’s no way to know for sure whether Howard actually engaged in such antics, but it hardly matters for the purposes of this little blog entry. I’m simply remembering it in relation to a question I’ve been posing to myself, off and on, for the last few weeks, or maybe months. And since I have you here, I’ll pose it to you, now, too:
Is writing acting? I mean, does it involve a form of theatrical conceit similar to acting? Must the writer adopt the mantle of the various characters they write about, must they *play* these characters? I’m not too conscious of my mannerisms while writing, but I will occasionally catch myself mumbling a character’s lines, even making gestures. When, say, a character strikes another character, I might find myself clenching my fist and delivering a phantom blow in the air. I never get caught up enough in the act to accidentally hit my computer monitor, but the enacting of some scene does sometimes happen, in a small way.
Anyone who’s written has also no doubt experienced the feeling of being skin-close to the characters they’ve created. They’ve also probably experienced a feeling of seeing a character at a frustrating remove. Maybe they’ve even been repulsed by a character they’ve created, and, if they were quite unlucky, this character happened to be the protagonist. What kind of masochist would deliberately spend time with someone they despise for the months, or sometimes years, it requires to write a book? The answer might be that one did not know their character would prove to be so repulsive when they first created them. Assuming our creations take on a life of their own and start refusing orders from the conscious creator—a state desired by most writers—this could easily happen.
This sense of revulsion at one’s creations is not exclusive to writers, by the way. Al Pacino claimed to have despised the coldhearted Michael Corleone, whom he played over the course of three films spanning several decades. Ditto Christian Bale, who played the irredeemable Patrick Bateman in the film version of the novel “American Psycho.” His agent, in fact, warned him that the role would prove to be career suicide, but Bale went ahead with it anyway...
I’ve already read Uta Hagen’s “Respect for Acting,” and will probably work my way through the rest of the classics in the genre before the sun sets on 2025. There were a couple of very interesting tidbits I managed to extract from her book. The first was that if one simply performs an action, it will usually lack verity. One must perform the action with a goal in mind in order to animate the action. An action, then, is not a goal, but the movement from desire to the obtainment of that desire, or at least the attempt to obtain the desired object or state. This rule obtains even if one merely has to walk across a room. Walk across the room because the script says to, and the act of walking will be bloodless. Walk because you want something—even if it’s just the OJ from the fridge—and suddenly the act becomes something else.
How does this apply to writing? For me, the answer is simple enough. Replace Hagen’s “goal” with “story” and you have a similar principle. Any action done simply to be done—or any description given, any exposition frontloaded for that reason—will lack gravity; the reader, no matter how ill-tuned to story mechanics, will somehow inherently sense it. Make the action, description, the seemingly offhand tidbit somehow one with the overall thrust of the story and you have something else. You have unity, symmetry, beauty, or at the very least motion that appears to be leading somewhere. This rule probably holds even for the most meandering of genres: the picaresque. A man fighting windmills is ridiculous. A man fighting windmills who doesn’t see the ridiculousness inherent in his act is poetry.
The other gem mined from Madame Hagen’s book regarded research. Certain “method” actors like Robert De Niro or Daniel Day-Lewis are by turns lauded and lambasted for their over-the-top immersive research. De Niro became a cab driver for a time to help immerse himself in the volatile mind of Travis Bickle; Day-Lewis, in preparing to play a paralyzed man, reportedly broke a rib while sitting rictus-stiff in a wheelchair for too long.
My own suffering for my “art” (I must use sneer quotes, as I have a hard time regarding myself as an artist) never involved much more than reading books. That said, I have strained my eyes and my attention span to their very limits reading sometimes incredibly boring texts.
But, to paraphrase Ms. Hagen, a month’s agony is worth a moment’s verisimilitude. I’ve found, in fact, that reading a five-hundred page book to learn the exact right single word sometimes makes it all worth it. This word could be something as simple as the slang name for some trade used only among insiders; it could be a certain breed of dog, or even a description of that dog’s coat. Even if that appropriated word only appears once in my story, it somehow acts like an incantation to enliven everything around it. A sort of “Open Sesame” to which I only gain access after many hours of patient and seemingly fruitless labor.
Of course, for the layman, the sine qua non of good acting is the ability to make oneself cry, maybe even on-cue. Have I ever cried writing, or made myself cry? I’ve come close once or twice, but it’s not something I’m proud of, though a lot of writers apparently are.
Right behind self-induced tears on the list of impressive feats performed by actors is massive changes in physical appearance, either extreme weight gain or extreme weight loss. I’d hazard that if one were to poll one-thousand professional writers, there would be a lot more gainers than losers. And that very little of that gain would have been in the service of their craft, or trying to get inside a portly character’s head by gaining a gut. I suppose in the loosest sense, every writer whose sedentary lifestyle has caused them to gain weight has suffered for their art. Notice I didn’t put the scare quotes around *art* there, if only because some scribblers can actually refer to themselves as artists without gagging.
Putting aside writing as acting when assuming the mantle of a character, the very act of creating fiction itself might involve some theatrical conceit.
There’s a creative nonfiction writer I know who talks about the obstacle he encounters every time he tries to write fiction. “I simply cannot say this or that action happened, unless it has happened.” He feels like a liar when he does. If he got a DUI, he can write, “I got a DUI.” He can even write that “Bill got a DUI,” provided Bill is just serving as his alter-ego for the piece in question. But he cannot write “Bill got his PhD,” unless he (the author) acquired one himself. Much less could he write, “Bill got abducted by UFOs” or “Bill was a private detective.”
For those of us more inclined to fiction, Bill is one boring SOB. That’s okay, though, because from Bill’s perspective we are all quite full of shit.
Maybe that is the one overarching link between the actor and writer, the place where they sit in perfect apposition. Both are liars, relying on deception to achieve their goals. Granted, it’s a deception desired by the audience, and welcomed by them when done well, but it’s also distrusted by that same crowd.
When I put it this way, both acting and writing sound a lot more like prostitution than artistry.
Maybe that, then, is the way in which writing is very much like acting, if not quite being a form of acting itself. Practitioners in both fields tend to feel some ambivalence about themselves, both about the quality of their own performance, and more generally what they do. A sense of, if not shame, then at least a feeling that it’s probably meet and proper for them to leave through the backdoor after entertaining the assembled guests.
Maybe that’s better than the front door, though, as one can just easily slip in as out through the backdoor. Willie Dixon seemed to think so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I17sI...
There’s no way to know for sure whether Howard actually engaged in such antics, but it hardly matters for the purposes of this little blog entry. I’m simply remembering it in relation to a question I’ve been posing to myself, off and on, for the last few weeks, or maybe months. And since I have you here, I’ll pose it to you, now, too:
Is writing acting? I mean, does it involve a form of theatrical conceit similar to acting? Must the writer adopt the mantle of the various characters they write about, must they *play* these characters? I’m not too conscious of my mannerisms while writing, but I will occasionally catch myself mumbling a character’s lines, even making gestures. When, say, a character strikes another character, I might find myself clenching my fist and delivering a phantom blow in the air. I never get caught up enough in the act to accidentally hit my computer monitor, but the enacting of some scene does sometimes happen, in a small way.
Anyone who’s written has also no doubt experienced the feeling of being skin-close to the characters they’ve created. They’ve also probably experienced a feeling of seeing a character at a frustrating remove. Maybe they’ve even been repulsed by a character they’ve created, and, if they were quite unlucky, this character happened to be the protagonist. What kind of masochist would deliberately spend time with someone they despise for the months, or sometimes years, it requires to write a book? The answer might be that one did not know their character would prove to be so repulsive when they first created them. Assuming our creations take on a life of their own and start refusing orders from the conscious creator—a state desired by most writers—this could easily happen.
This sense of revulsion at one’s creations is not exclusive to writers, by the way. Al Pacino claimed to have despised the coldhearted Michael Corleone, whom he played over the course of three films spanning several decades. Ditto Christian Bale, who played the irredeemable Patrick Bateman in the film version of the novel “American Psycho.” His agent, in fact, warned him that the role would prove to be career suicide, but Bale went ahead with it anyway...
I’ve already read Uta Hagen’s “Respect for Acting,” and will probably work my way through the rest of the classics in the genre before the sun sets on 2025. There were a couple of very interesting tidbits I managed to extract from her book. The first was that if one simply performs an action, it will usually lack verity. One must perform the action with a goal in mind in order to animate the action. An action, then, is not a goal, but the movement from desire to the obtainment of that desire, or at least the attempt to obtain the desired object or state. This rule obtains even if one merely has to walk across a room. Walk across the room because the script says to, and the act of walking will be bloodless. Walk because you want something—even if it’s just the OJ from the fridge—and suddenly the act becomes something else.
How does this apply to writing? For me, the answer is simple enough. Replace Hagen’s “goal” with “story” and you have a similar principle. Any action done simply to be done—or any description given, any exposition frontloaded for that reason—will lack gravity; the reader, no matter how ill-tuned to story mechanics, will somehow inherently sense it. Make the action, description, the seemingly offhand tidbit somehow one with the overall thrust of the story and you have something else. You have unity, symmetry, beauty, or at the very least motion that appears to be leading somewhere. This rule probably holds even for the most meandering of genres: the picaresque. A man fighting windmills is ridiculous. A man fighting windmills who doesn’t see the ridiculousness inherent in his act is poetry.
The other gem mined from Madame Hagen’s book regarded research. Certain “method” actors like Robert De Niro or Daniel Day-Lewis are by turns lauded and lambasted for their over-the-top immersive research. De Niro became a cab driver for a time to help immerse himself in the volatile mind of Travis Bickle; Day-Lewis, in preparing to play a paralyzed man, reportedly broke a rib while sitting rictus-stiff in a wheelchair for too long.
My own suffering for my “art” (I must use sneer quotes, as I have a hard time regarding myself as an artist) never involved much more than reading books. That said, I have strained my eyes and my attention span to their very limits reading sometimes incredibly boring texts.
But, to paraphrase Ms. Hagen, a month’s agony is worth a moment’s verisimilitude. I’ve found, in fact, that reading a five-hundred page book to learn the exact right single word sometimes makes it all worth it. This word could be something as simple as the slang name for some trade used only among insiders; it could be a certain breed of dog, or even a description of that dog’s coat. Even if that appropriated word only appears once in my story, it somehow acts like an incantation to enliven everything around it. A sort of “Open Sesame” to which I only gain access after many hours of patient and seemingly fruitless labor.
Of course, for the layman, the sine qua non of good acting is the ability to make oneself cry, maybe even on-cue. Have I ever cried writing, or made myself cry? I’ve come close once or twice, but it’s not something I’m proud of, though a lot of writers apparently are.
Right behind self-induced tears on the list of impressive feats performed by actors is massive changes in physical appearance, either extreme weight gain or extreme weight loss. I’d hazard that if one were to poll one-thousand professional writers, there would be a lot more gainers than losers. And that very little of that gain would have been in the service of their craft, or trying to get inside a portly character’s head by gaining a gut. I suppose in the loosest sense, every writer whose sedentary lifestyle has caused them to gain weight has suffered for their art. Notice I didn’t put the scare quotes around *art* there, if only because some scribblers can actually refer to themselves as artists without gagging.
Putting aside writing as acting when assuming the mantle of a character, the very act of creating fiction itself might involve some theatrical conceit.
There’s a creative nonfiction writer I know who talks about the obstacle he encounters every time he tries to write fiction. “I simply cannot say this or that action happened, unless it has happened.” He feels like a liar when he does. If he got a DUI, he can write, “I got a DUI.” He can even write that “Bill got a DUI,” provided Bill is just serving as his alter-ego for the piece in question. But he cannot write “Bill got his PhD,” unless he (the author) acquired one himself. Much less could he write, “Bill got abducted by UFOs” or “Bill was a private detective.”
For those of us more inclined to fiction, Bill is one boring SOB. That’s okay, though, because from Bill’s perspective we are all quite full of shit.
Maybe that is the one overarching link between the actor and writer, the place where they sit in perfect apposition. Both are liars, relying on deception to achieve their goals. Granted, it’s a deception desired by the audience, and welcomed by them when done well, but it’s also distrusted by that same crowd.
When I put it this way, both acting and writing sound a lot more like prostitution than artistry.
Maybe that, then, is the way in which writing is very much like acting, if not quite being a form of acting itself. Practitioners in both fields tend to feel some ambivalence about themselves, both about the quality of their own performance, and more generally what they do. A sense of, if not shame, then at least a feeling that it’s probably meet and proper for them to leave through the backdoor after entertaining the assembled guests.
Maybe that’s better than the front door, though, as one can just easily slip in as out through the backdoor. Willie Dixon seemed to think so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I17sI...
