While Waiting for Lunch to Arrive

The retractor emptied its cartridge onto the floor, sucking it down and out of sight. We were left pinioned to the walls like insects, afraid to step across the empty space toward the open door. We could see that the driveway was still there, and the lawn. Maybe it was the sunlight slicing across the field of vision that made us afraid. I’d read that, if you ever found yourself at the bottom of a deep well, you could look up at the sky in broad daylight and see the stars. Looking horizontally across that void I could see all the way to the edge of the world, as if the trees and buildings weren’t even there, as if the curvature of the world could bend my line of sight.

Slowly — I presume my progress was slow, since every increment of intervening space stands out now in my memory as clearly as separate universes linked together only by my passage between them — and with an equanimity that surprised me I edged my way along the wall. I passed the now-empty space where the plant pots had been stored, next to the potting soil and the dessicated earthworms I had collected from sidewalks after the rain. The tools still hung from their pegs: I hoped that, once I could reach them, I would know what to do with them.

Cantilevered along the edge of the opening, the hydraulics twitched and sweated — I knew it wanted to activate itself, pulling the door down along its track, consigning us to darkness and the vertical plunge. Maybe if I jammed a rake into the mechanism? Pulling it from its holster, I grasped the rake in the wrong hand and so of course it fell. I waited for it to hit bottom, and so I waited for an eternity; then I began inching along again.

When at last I turned the corner I glanced back toward my companion. I observed that she had not moved at all, still positioned midway between the spare tires and the half-empty paint cans. Despite the positional stability, however, the distance had increased enormously. I remained silent, knowing that if I called out to her she would be consigned to another eternity of waiting before my voice reached her.

I grasped the…

***

Lunch is here; I can stop now.

Agents Provocateurs in the Pumpkin Patch

UPDATE: K said that the Bachmann supporters were particularly irked for having paid good money for good seats in the barn, only to have the headliner not show up. Of course they blamed the students. K said that the students got a brief glimpse of the candidate at a distance, accompanied by her posse of PR people, walking down the trail leading to the baby goat pen. The only reason they knew it was her? They cheered, and she waved.

The “PumpkinGate” non-event was picked up by the New York Times:

GRINNELL, Iowa — Representative Michele Bachmann is committed to crisscrossing Iowa to personally impress as many voters as possible, but it is a good bet she won’t be returning to this college town any time soon.

Some 50 students from Grinnell College showed up at Carroll’s Pumpkin Patch on Tuesday evening, where Mrs. Bachmann had scheduled a fund-raising event on behalf of a conservative Christian group, the Family Leader. Soon after, police officers arrived and threw a cordon sanitaire around the students while Mrs. Bachmann toured the baby goat corral and pumpkin-washing station.

A few students, who had been alerted to the visit by an e-mail from the campus Democrats, unfurled signs protesting Mrs. Bachmann’s opposition to gay rights (“Pumpkins are the Gayest”). But there was no chanting and no heckling. Most students said they had come to hear her speak and to ask a question or two.

“Grinnell’s known for being a very liberal and politically active campus, but we’re very peaceful,’’ said one student, Jillian Johnson. “We weren’t going to throw anything. We just wanted her to talk to us.”

**********

Our daughter K and some of her pals attended a scheduled Bachmann rally yesterday, apparently forcing the candidate not to appear at her own event. From the Des Moines Register:

Grinnell, Ia. – Michele Bachmann’s appearance at a fundraiser on a pumpkin farm here this evening was delayed and then curtailed after several dozen Grinnell College students showed up.

Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman, was to speak at an ostensibly open event in the hayloft of a barn at Carroll’s Pumpkin Farm during a fundraiser for the Iowa Family Leader, an advocacy group for socially conservative issues.

But the event’s 5:30 start time came and went with no sign of the candidate after the event space filled up with college students, some carrying signs. Bachmann ended up not appearing until about 6:40 – after a truck from the Poweshiek County Sheriff and two police cars arrived on the scene and officers cordoned off part of the farm with police tape.

Rather than speaking publicly from the barn – which was festooned with Bachmann campaign posters and clearly arranged for her to speak – Bachmann met with Family Leader donors privately in a house on the property and then took a short walking tour with farm owners Danny Carroll – a former state lawmaker – and his wife.

The students, meanwhile, stood behind the cordon waving signs supporting gay marriage and playing on misstatements the candidate has made. They clapped rhythmically and yelled questions and entreaties in Bachmann’s general direction.

Grinnell College students wait for Michele Bachmann (The Register/Jason Noble)

Taking questions from the press, Bachmann said the event was private, and that she did not intend make comments to an audience that wasn’t part of the fundraiser.

“This was never intended to be a big public event,” she said. “This was always intended to be a private fundraiser.”

When pressed on why she didn’t engage with the students, Bachmann deflected the question.

Freedom by Franzen, 2010

He hugged her and lightly rubbed her, cursing her constantly, cursing the position she’d put him in. For a long time she didn’t get any warmer, kept falling asleep and barely waking up, but finally something clicked on inside her, and she began to shiver and clutch him. He kept rubbing and hugging, and then, all at once, her eyes were wide open and she was looking into him.

Her eyes weren’t blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they’d ever said or done, every pain they’d inflicted, every joy they’d share, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind.

“It’s me,” she said. “Just me.”

 

Toll Road Nation

One word: privatization.

Interest rates are at historic lows, while corporate profits are at historic highs. Both parties want to restrict government income by capping borrowing while lowering taxes. This forces government to sell off those publicly-owned assets that it can no longer maintain. Highways are one of the most valuable assets owned by governments.

So picture this: The government outsources road building and repair. It guarantees loans to private industry, plus gives them big tax incentives/deductions for rebuilding America’s infrastructure. Industry then owns all or part of the roads they build and/or maintain. Industry turns the American road system into a set of interlinked toll roads. Outfit each vehicle with a GPS, which functions as a remote monitoring system for calculating tolls. The private highway companies send you a bill at the end of the month, just like for phones, electricity, etc. It’s another potential source of huge profits for private industry, built on an infrastructure paid for by taxpayers. Citizens who benefited from government investment in the road system are turned into paying customers. I don’t think this is far-fetched at all. Obama already floated the idea a couple of months ago as a way to pay for “investing in America’s infrastructure.”

[I wrote this earlier today as a comment on Erdman’s post about financing the American roads, but I thought I’d suck it back into Ktismatics as a speculative post in its own right.]

The Bluest Eye by Morrison, 1970

All his life he had a fondness for things — not the acquisition of wealth or beautiful objects, but a genuine love of worn objects: a coffee pot that had been his mother’s, a welcome mat from the door of a rooming house he had once lived in, a quilt from a Salvation Army store counter. It was as though his disdain of human contact had converted itself into a craving for things humans had touched. The residue of the human spirit smeared on inanimate objects was all he could withstand of humanity. To contemplate, for example, evidence of human footsteps on the mat — absorb the smell of the quilt and wallow in the sweet certainty that many bodies had sweated, slept, dreamed, made love, been ill, and even died under it. Wherever he went, he took along his things and was always searching for others. This thirst for worn things let to casual but habitual examinations of trash barrels in alleys and wastebaskets in public places. . . .

All in all, his personality was an arabesque: intricate, symmetrical, balanced, and tightly constructed — except for one flaw. The careful design was marred occasionally by rare but keen sexual cravings.

He could have been an active homosexual but lacked the courage. Bestiality did not occur to him, and sodomy was out of the question, for he did not experience sustained erections and could not endure the thought of somebody else’s. And besides, the one thing that disgusted him more than entering and caressing a woman was caressing and being caressed by a man. In any case, his cravings, although intense, never relished physical contact. He abhorred flesh on flesh. Body odor, breath odor, overwhelmed him. The sight of dried matter in the corner of the eye, decayed or missing teeth, ear wax, blackheads, moles, blisters, skin crusts — all the natural excretions and protections the body was capable of — disquieted him. His attention therefore gradually settled on those humans whose bodies were least offensive — children. And since he was too diffident to confront homosexuality, and since little boys were insulting, scary, and stubborn, he further limited his interests to little girls. They were usually manageable and frequently seductive. His sexuality was anything but lewd; his patronage of little girls smacked of innocence and was associated in his mind with cleanliness. He was what one might call a very clean old man.

Suicide by Levé, 2008

In the metro, in Paris, you entered a train car and sat down on a folding seat. Three stations later, a homeless man came to sit next you. He smelled of cheese, urine, and shit. Hirsute, he turned toward you, sniffed several times, and said: “Hmmm, it smells flowery in here.” You had put on a fragrance in the morning before going out. For once, a homeless man made you laugh. Normally such people made you uncomfortable. You didn’t feel threatened, they’d never caused you any harm, but you were afraid of ending up like them. Nothing justified this fear, however. You were not alone, poor, alcoholic, abandoned. You had a family, a wife, friends, a house. You did not lack money. But homeless people were like ghosts foretelling one of your possible ends. You didn’t identify with happy people, and in your excessiveness you projected onto those who had failed in everything, or succeeded in nothing. The homeless embodied the final stage in a decline your life could have tended toward. You did not take them for victims, but for authors of their own lives. As scandalous as it seems, you used to think that some homeless people had chosen to live that way. This is what disturbed you the most: that you could, one day, choose to fail. Not to let yourself go, which would only have been a form of passivity, but to want to descend, to become a ruin of yourself. Memories of other homeless people came to mind. You couldn’t prevent yourself, when you saw some, from stopping to watch them from a distance. They owned nothing, lived from day to day without domicile, without possessions, without friends. Their destitution fascinated you. You used to imagine living like them, abandoning what had been given to you and what you had acquired. You would detach yourself from things, from people, and from time. You would situate yourself in a perpetual present. You would renounce organizing your future. You would let yourself be guided by the randomness of encounters and events, indifferent to one choice over another. When, seated in the metro, you were imagining to yourself what it would be like to live in his shoes, your neighbor stood up, staggering, and left to join a group of drunk homeless people on the next metro platform. One of them was slumped on the ground, asleep with his mouth open, belly up, one shoe undone. He resembled a corpse. This was perhaps what you feared: to become inert in a body that still breathes, drinks, and feeds itself. To commit suicide in slow motion.

 

Station Zero

He walks down to Station Zero like a dead Jesus dragging his cross back down Golgotha. There are no scars to be seen, no gashes to be probed. He is well fed, well conditioned, reasonably well dressed; he carries himself well for a dead man. But he knows the score, and it is Zero.

There is a bay, and then there are mountains; in between is the city. Long ago the city began pushing itself up the mountainside, and the narrow shop-lined street bears signs of its struggle. Finally it stopped being a street altogether and turned into a stone stairway. Bud kept going until even the squat old houses gave up the climb. Higher still he saw a shallow niche carved into the solid rock; a green steel trash barrel occupied the protected space where a statue or relic had once stood. From there the stairway steepened and veered to the right, its ascent blocked from view by the bushes and craggy trees that had managed to find a foothold. Bud took one more step up and scuffed his shoe. Fuck it, he thought: I’m going back.

Bud stepped into a bakery. He pointed to an apricot-filled pastry in the display case, then waited with embarrassed helplessness as the small woman behind the counter sorted brusquely through the coins he held out in the palm of his hand for her inspection. He asked her where he could find a coffee, and she pointed down the street and around the next corner. Toting his pastry in its paper sack, he took the turn and saw the sign above the door: a stylized cross-sectional drawing of a nautilus shell inscribed with one word – Rik’s.

*  *  *

In March I arrived at a tentative ending to a novel. Since then I added a sentence to it here and there, but overall that ending still looks good to me. A week ago I came up with what seems like a pretty good opening paragraph on the next installment for this ongoing project, tentatively named The Stations. I let that paragraph sit for a couple of days, added a couple of thousand words to it, let it sit again, scrapped it altogether, gave it a shake and a twist for another go. So here, for your inspection, are the first three paragraphs of something new.

The beginning is the hardest part. Why, among the countless possible beginnings of countless possible texts, should I settle on this one? If things go well, then after some juddering and some catatonia the beginning accrues additional mass and generates a momentum of its own. It doesn’t always work, and so my hard drive is spattered with false starts. We’ll see if this one goes anywhere.

Langue and Parole

Would anyone like to hear about either: (a) my thoughts on Embassytown, the latest novel by China Miéville; or (b) my calling the cops to report a car that didn’t give me, the pedestrian, right of way in an intersection?

Okay fine:

(a) The story is pretty good, based on some high-level linguistic theories. Still — and this won’t mean anything to anyone who hasn’t read the book — I don’t believe that “Language” really works. If the Ariekei use words to refer to things, then I don’t know how they aren’t using a symbolic, signifying means of communicating and thinking. Also, if Language can be understood by the Ariekei only as a direct channel to the speaker and not as a mere sequence of sounds, then how is it that they can understand tape recordings of Language? I mean, I appreciate that Miéville is trying to break out of structuralism and the Lacanian Real into a theory of language based on the joint referentiality of speaker and hearer pointing at the world together. And, presumably because we humans can only speak referentially and symbolically, it’s not possible for us truly to grasp this other way of talking. But I tend to agree with Spanish Dancer when, after he has learned to speak like humans, he tells his fellow Ariekei that “You have never spoken.”

(b) I returned Embassytown to the library on my afternoon run. Getting close to home, running south down Toedtli Street, I approached the intersection with Grinnell Avenue. This corner has caused me troubles before: cars heading west on Grinnell typically drive through that intersection without stopping or slowing for bicycles, walkers, or runners like me. And it happened again this time: I could see the car coming, he could see me coming; I reached the street before he did; he did not slow down, and I had to stop in order to keep from being hit. I watched the car intently as it whizzed by. I shouted out the 6-digit license number as I read it off the back plate. A lady standing in the driveway at a house on the corner whooped as I shouted: she had seen the near-miss and was clearly on my side.

When I got home I called the police; the dispatcher took my number and asked if an officer could return my call. About twenty minutes later Officer Trujillo called. I explained what had happened; he reiterated that in a residential area it’s the car’s responsibility to stop for pedestrians even when the intersection isn’t officially marked off as a crosswalk. He asked if there had been any sort of confrontation between me and the driver; I said no, other than my shouting out the license number. He asked if I wanted to press charges, or if I would be satisfied if the driver was given a verbal warning; I said that a warning would be fine. He said that he had already looked up the name and phone number of the vehicle’s owner, and wanted to know if I’d like him to call me back after he’d issued the warning; I said no, that I would rely on his handling the situation. I thanked Officer Trujillo and hung up the phone.

B.S. in Eccentricity

Stephen slipped off his shoes. “Yoohoo! Anybody home?”

“Upstairs.” Lynne had started painting again, and she had outfitted one of the spare bedrooms as a studio.

“Where’s Avery?” Stephen asked, and Lynne pointed out the window. Two yards over, across the cul-de-sac, a girl was laughing as she chased a friend and her dog between the still-spindly trees sprinkled through the new subdivision. In the distance a line of jagged foothills angled toward the right, like giant dominoes falling. Beyond, the high peaks showed white. The house backed into a section of the greenbelt that surrounded the town, affording great views all around: location, location, location. They had bought this executive home when they were on a roll financially and professionally. Now that Stephen had jumped the track they really couldn’t afford the mortgage payments any longer. Stephen had the sense that they needed some tangible alternative dream to keep them from feeling that their best days were already behind them. The Salon had seemed to offer that alternative, but now he wasn’t so sure.

Stephen looked at the table under the window: on her sketchpad Lynne had watercolored a variety of abstract shapes, overlaid with precisely engineered black lines, probably executed in ink. “I’ve been trying to make a copy of this Kandinsky,” she said, pointing to a postcard-sized reproduction taped to the wall.

He inspected both versions carefully, point by point. Lynne’s variant, much larger, deviated only slightly from the postcard. She began applying a dark purple smudge of paint to her rendering of the masterwork.

“I’m not sure which one I like better,” Stephen said, though truth be told he didn’t really know what to look for. “Listen, suppose I have a client who believes things that are sort of nutty. Surely I don’t need to go along with everything the client believes?”

Concentrating, she extended the purple shape out and down. “You mean that young guy with hemophilia? Can you give him your opinion without sounding like you think he’s a little off center?”

“I guess not. Still, it seems dishonest not to, or at least disingenuous.”

Lynne put her brush down. “See this painting? Kandinsky had synaesthesia. When he saw colors he heard music. Literally. He painted like he was playing a keyboard, like he was playing his audience. He believed that each brushstroke would set off sympathetic harmonies in people’s souls. Kind of odd, but also kind of true. Before Kandinsky there was another Russian, a composer, Scriabin. Scriabin believed that if he played a certain chord, and if at that precise moment a certain pattern of colors was displayed, then — right then — the world would come to an end.”

Maybe Scriabin was right, Stephen thought: maybe some day somebody will hit the right combination. Maybe Scriabin already did it a century ago, and since then we’ve been living in some other world. “So,” he asked asked his wife, “would you have told Scriabin and Kandinsky you thought they were nuts?”

“I’d have told them I admire their work very much. Besides, only Scriabin was really nutty. Kandinsky was just eccentric.”

Stephen looked again at the Kandinsky postcard. A work of exuberant precision, the picture looked to him like a mapmaker’s rendition of a dreamscape. The fragments of geometry incorporated into the work: were they engineered segments of an intricate scaffolding being erected around the fantasy in order to contain it? Or was something uncontrollable smashing through the gridwork, breaking it to bits? “One more thing,” he said to Lynne. “If you’d had the chance, would you have encouraged Kandinsky to pursue his eccentricity to the limit, even if it took him all the way into madness? All for the sake of genius, for the sake of art, for the end of the world?”

“I wouldn’t have had to,” Lynne replied as she picked up her brush. “Kandinsky had Scriabin. I’m not sure who Scriabin had – maybe Rasputin.”

*   *   *

If the characters in this novel are at least partly autobiographical, then tomorrow Stephen and Lynne will be driving halfway across the country to take their daughter Avery to college. Time’s arrow and all that. Avery’s friend still lives in that cul-de-sac, as do the dog and all the other neighbors who don’t make an appearance in the story. While there are some visitors to this blog who teach college, and others who go to college or grad school, and still others who still think about their college days with some frequency, I’m guessing that not many of you are parents of college kids. Maybe even that will happen to you some day.

The Wrestler by Aronofsky, 2008

Cassidy the stripper stands up and straddles Randy the Ram, gazing soulfully at the scar.
CASSIDY: “He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that
brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we were healed.”

RANDY: What’s that?

CASSIDY: It’s from “Passion of the Christ”. You never seen it?

Randy shrugs no.

CASSIDY: Dude, you gotta. It’s amazing. It’s, like, so inspiring. They throw everything at Him. Whips,
arrows, rocks… Just beat the living fuck out of Him for the whole two hours. And He just takes it.

RANDY : Huh. I’ll have to check it out.

CASSIDY (lightly tracing a finger along Randy’s bicep scar): The sacrificial Ram…

Post Post

The US Postal Service lost $8.5 billion in 2010 and $20 billion over the past 4 years. The news articles report that losses have been mounting primarily because mail volume has dropped 20 percent. The USPS has already laid off 100 thousand workers and they propose to axe another 120 thousand. They also propose to withdraw the entire remaining workforce from Federal government health and retirement plans.

What percent of all pieces of mail are sent by businesses? I couldn’t find the statistics, but at least 95 percent of the mail that shows up in my box is either an ad or a bill. So here’s a service run by the Federal government largely for the benefit of private industry. UPS and FedEx, the two biggest private-sector delivery companies, are both making profits. Is it because they’re so much more businesslike, so much more efficient, so austere? I’d say it’s pretty austere to lay off almost a quarter million workers. Or is the Postal Service losing money because it’s underpricing its services? Instead of charging its corporate customers the full cost of its services, the Post Office is shifting costs to the taxpayers.

It may well be that physical mail is becoming obsolete, and consequently that some significant percentage of postal workers really ought to be doing something else for a living. I’m also not persuaded that I want the government to run a delivery service on behalf of corporate interests. But having the Postal Service cut benefits for its workers in order to keep its corporate customers from footing the full bill for services received? I don’t think so. How about this: run it like a business and raise the rates.

Soon the Postmaster General will deliver his proposal to the Postal Workers’ Union for accepting draconian cuts in benefits, including reduced pensions for already-retired workers. What should the Union do with this proposal? I asked Elvis when I saw him at the Denver Greyhound station the other day. Here’s what Elvis had to say:

Taking the Dog

Yesterday Anne and I drove a guy down to the Greyhound bus station in Denver. Our passenger was a cordial and responsive conversationalist who thankfully didn’t feel the common urge to fill silences with talk. He did start humming to himself as we approached downtown, probably signaling his increased anxiety as we approached our destination. This guy, who is homeless, is heading back to his home town of New York City for the first time in ten years. He had all his stuff with him — a pack, a sleeping roll — but I think he expects he’ll come back West sooner or later. He’s going back to visit his aging mother — possibly, he believes, for the last time — and his younger brother, whom he had not spoken to in at least five years before Anne arranged a phone call last week. He gave himself a haircut in preparation for his return home, though the raggedness of the job unfortunately gives him the wild look of the untreated schizophrenic, which is one of the things this guy also happens to be. It’s going to be a long ride: a day and a half with two or three transfers. But Greyhound is cheaper than a plane, and you don’t need to show personal identification to “take the dog,” which is a good thing if you don’t happen to have any ID.

Instead of parking in the lot and paying the $4 fee, I drove around the block a few times while Anne helped her friend pick up his ticket and get oriented. On my first lap my attention was drawn to a guy standing at the corner of 20th and Curtis, evidently waiting for someone. Shortish and paunchy, he was decked out in full Elvis regalia: red-and-black bell-bottomed polyester pantsuit, pointed black boots, high bouffant hairdo, black plastic sunglasses. I watched as several pedestrians passed him by without giving him an obvious second glance. When the light changed and I made my left turn I rolled my window halfway down. “Lookin’ sharp!” I yelled out to the Elvis impersonator as I passed by. In my rearview mirror I saw him executing a long, full-bodied theatrical fist-pump. I suppose even the King himself, before the private jets and the limos, had to take the dog from gig to gig and wait for somebody to pick him up at the downtown station. When I came back around on my second lap Elvis was gone.