Not Such a Waste After All?

Here’s another old Ktismatics post that seems to be generating a disproportionate number of hits. Unlike yesterday’s heterotopic swarm, this post has been garnering 2 or 3 visits a day for the past couple of weeks. Before that I don’t recall much action, though maybe the momentum, such as it is, was building beneath the threshold of my awareness.

So what is it about this particular post that has caught people’s fancy? Does a search on Lacan and Miller and tragedy lead them to Ktismatics? Has a sense of workplace tragedy, heretofore latent, begun emerging into consciousness? Whatever the cause and despite my empirical agnosticism, I’m experiencing a renewed sense of transcendent convergence. My recent posts about Wallace Stevens and blogwriting have got me thinking more explicitly again about why we work and for whom. Here’s the last bit of the post for those who don’t want to click through:

It’s tragic when you try to accomplish something you hope will last, and fail. In a world where nothing lasts tragedy is rendered futile. What do you call it when you purposely set out to accomplish something futile, and succeed?

Heterotopic Swarm

Here I’ve been talking about luring people to Ktismatics via distribution of printed copies in a roving brochure stand, and what happens? Late last night I got 25 hits to this old post. Apparently somebody with a LiveJournal account put up this quote from my post:

I am attracted to… the non-site, the place of exile, the rupture in the time-space continuum, the outpost of the preposterous, the portal that punctuates the world like a black hole, the gateway to alternate realities.

The entire quote was written as a link to my post, and apparently this person has a host of curious readers. Who is this mysterious visitor, and what trail led him or her to Ktismatics? And the other 24: are they my doppelgängers, suddenly appearing out of nowhere because yesterday I wrote them into existence? Or are they reality travelers seeking asylum in some heterotopia buried deep in the blogosphere? Perhaps in due time something like truth will be revealed…

An Audience of Doppelgängers

If while walking along I happened to notice a somewhat ungainly 3-legged wooden display stand surmounted by a photo of an ominous 3-wheeled motorized vehicle, I would slow down to take a closer look. Cursorily examining the printed matter on display I would probably think it seemed interesting enough to take a copy. I would probably read the whole thing. I would probably think that the writer’s psychological practice sounded interesting. I would probably check out the blog. I would probably become at least an occasional reader of the blog in the future.

Why do I write blog posts? Partly because the topics interest me, partly because writing helps me clarify my thoughts, partly because I like crafting the prose. So why do I put it out there for other people to read? Partly because I think others will share my interest in the topic, partly because I think others might derive value or pleasure from what I’ve had to say, partly because I would enjoy engaging in online discussions about the topic with others.

So do I write these posts for myself, or for the others? I’d say that I write for the readers. If I wrote strictly for myself the prose would be less precise, the material less well organized — which is how I write in my personal notebooks. Does that mean I write for a particular audience — for the regular readers and commenters, for the somewhat wider audience who visit occasionally but who rarely if ever comment, or for all those who have never read my blog? When I first started the blog, before I had any readers, I consciously set out to woo an audience. I had just finished writing a nonfiction book, and I wrote blog posts that I hoped would attract people who might be interested in reading my book. But that phase of Ktismatics ended at least six months ago.

Now when I write something I presume that everyone is potentially interested in it. But I don’t consciously adapt what I have to say either to attract or to offend any particular sort of reader. I’ve also come to realize that, for whatever reason, not everyone cares about what I write or likes the way I write about it.

I can picture myself wandering haphazardly through the blogosphere and happening to come upon Ktismatics. I imagine that I don’t remember having written the blog, or that it was written by my exact double. Would I like reading Ktistmatics? I believe that I would. Now I imagine a complementary scenario: I write Ktismatics and launch it into a world populated by uncounted replicates of me. I suspect this is the audience I’m writing for: a version of myself who is entirely unknown to me.

A few posts ago I quoted the poet Wallace Stevens as saying that he wrote for the elite. I suppose I do too: an elite whose archetypal figure is myself. While I imagine a potential audience that includes everyone in the world, I’m actually writing for no one – a fantasized projection of myself that doesn’t exist. It’s a kind of schizoid move of self-alienation, separating myself-as-writer from myself-as-reader.

For whom do you write?

“Life” Imitates “Art”

(With my new practice and marketing plan under scrutiny, I thought readers might be amused by an excerpt from Part 2, Chapter 2 of The Stations, my first unpublished novel.)

Sometimes people ask me how I decided to open the Salon Postisme. I tell them I didn’t. The Salon was already there; all I had to do was step through the door.

I was exploring without curiosity the edges of downtown when a sign caught my eye. Black print on a four-by-six white index card, stuck with yellowed tape to the wall, the sign certainly wasn’t designed to grab the attention of the passing window-shopper. It read:

THE SALON POSTISME
Portals, Intervals, Alternate Realities
Henry Adamowicz, Proprietor
“Get Different”
WALK-INS WELCOME
(ring bell for service)

A short corridor and a long stairway were all that could be seen through the glass door. With nothing to do and less to hope for, I rang. A few seconds later a buzzer sounded. I tried the door: locked. I rang again. A man shambled down the stairs: tall and heavy-set but not paunchy, wiry steel-gray hair combed straight back – I figured he was probably older than he looked. He was carrying a large cardboard box, which he balanced under one arm in order to open the door for me.

“Sorry, I guess they still haven’t fixed the buzzer. Please come in.”

“You know, it looks like you’ve got your hands full. I didn’t really have any business to transact or whatever. I was just curious about the sign. I’ll stop by another time.”

He pushed the door open wider and beckoned me in. “No, no, please. Come up. Anyway, after today it’s too late.”

I followed him up one flight to a small office. The decor consisted of a faded maroon couch, a couple of gray lounge chairs, a small oak table that apparently served as a desk, some bookcases, an old silver floor lamp with faux marble base – garage sale material, but clean. Scattered throughout the room were boxes half-filled with books, file folders, papers and miscellaneous junk, all of it making the place feel even smaller than it was. The man gestured for me to sit in one of the chairs.

“I was just about to make myself a coffee,” he said enthusiastically. “Will you have one? I’m out of milk, so it’ll have to be a straight espresso. I’ve got some sugar here someplace.” He fumbled through one of the boxes.

“That’s okay. Really, I was just passing by. Maybe you’ve got a brochure or something.”

“No brochures. You think it would be a good idea? Sorry: I’m Hank Adamowicz, but people call me Prop.”

“Stephen Hanley. You’re leaving?”

He nodded. “Headed for Lisbon next Tuesday. You’ve arrived on my last day at the office.”

“Oh. Well I guess there’s no real point then.”

“No, I wouldn’t say that. Actually, today might be a perfect day. It would be a shame for the Salon to close up just because I’m not here. Work down here on the Mall, do you?”

Without portfolio, anticipating the freedom of conversing with somebody I would never see again, I decided to linger awhile with Prop Adamowicz. Three hours and three espressos later, the Salon Postisme was under new management. Rent for the office was paid up through the end of the year, and Prop insisted on leaving the furniture (“Can’t very well take this crap with me to Portugal, can I?”)….

“And the Proprietor of the Salon is what: some sort of high priest?”

“More like an usher.”

I had begun to feel slightly giddy. This conversation was surely happening; it was even coherent in a way. Still, was it possible that anyone other than I would ever have buzzed that buzzer, walked up those steps and into this office, talked with this frankly bizarre man for more than five minutes? I needed some reality testing.

“How do you advertise your services?”

“No advertising. No discount coupons.”

“You mean people just sort of show up at the door?”

“You did.”

Now it was my turn to walk around the office. “About how many people would you say stop in over the course of a month?”

Prop sighed with obvious disappointment. “So you want the financial statements, business plan, that sort of thing? Starting to feel this might be too risky a proposition, are you?”

“I just want to get… I mean, seriously, how many people actually come here because they want to enter into some sort of new interval?”

“No one,” Prop said, but he didn’t sound discouraged. He visibly relaxed again. “You’re right: intervality is the thing that grabs me, but it might be trivial to everybody else. Still, it’s been my experience that nurturing your own obsession keeps you from feeling too helpful. Once you start thinking of yourself as a helper, you’re lost. You think you’re being selfless, but you’re really looking for admiration. You start trying to please people in order to get it. Pretty soon you’re working harder and harder but getting less and less done. A bit of advice: resist being a healer, Stephen.”

I started experiencing a feeling I’d known before but couldn’t name. Relief combined with anxiety. “Then why do people come here?”

“For the same reason you did: curiosity. Probably there’s some sort of vague dissatisfaction, usually latent but sometimes overt. Also, a sense of intrigue, like maybe they’re the first person who ever actually rang my doorbell. And hope – hope for a world in which a place like the Salon could actually exist. In most people’s experience hope eventually ends in disappointment, so they hide behind skeptical amusement, like tourists in some sort of new age theme park. Two, three, four people come in together, chat for a few minutes. A week later one comes back. That sort of thing.”

“So what brings that one person back?”

“It depends. By the way, I can usually tell which one is most likely to return. It’s the one who happened to see the sign under my doorbell, had perhaps seen it weeks before. Sometimes I guess wrong.”

Writers’ Chamber of Commerce?

In my last post I described my ambivalence about setting up my new brochure stand, stocked with copies of recent posts from Ktismatics, luring the unsuspecting passer-by to my blog and possibly to my psychology practice. Carrying the stand around makes me self-conscious, and I’m worried about whether the local merchants will want it stationed in front of their shops. But mostly I’m afraid that no one will want to read what I write.

A few posts ago I quoted Wallace Stevens as saying that he wrote for an elite audience, that in effect his writing was a performance staged not to a chamber of commerce but to a gallery of one’s own, if there are enough of one’s own to fill a gallery. Stevens might have been drawing the stereotypic distinction between the Babbitts and the aesthetes, but Stevens himself was a successful businessman as well as an acclaimed poet. I think instead he’s saying that he isn’t addressing himself to the marketplace of poets.

In every field of endeavor practitioners tend to converge on a particular way of doing their work, a bidirectional movement in which the expertise and judgment of the workers plays against the evolving tastes of the customers. If one is philosophically inclined one might describe this convergence as a dialectic or the continual unfolding of a zeitgeist. A more pragmatic or cynical observer might call it a compromise, or even a sell-out.

When I first started writing fiction my spirits were buoyed by my romantic image of the artist, hermetically sequestered against time and tide, pulling forth from the void the tangible manifestation of a unique vision. But it turns out that writing too is a business, and the writers are at the bottom looking up.

There’s a whole industry of writers’ conferences, where would-be published authors gather to hear from agents and publishers and commercially successful writers about trends in the industry. What kinds of books are selling, how do the successful writers develop characters and plots in ways that attract the book-reading public, using the active voice and avoiding adverbs to keep the reader’s attention, and so on. Writers attend these conferences partly to learn, but mostly to network – a chamber of commerce for writers.

Of course you’d like to get a famous author to take a shine to your work, give you personal advice, introduce you to her agent, write a glowing recommendation on the back cover of your first book. But you’ll settle for meeting writers who are a little more successful than you are, writers represented by agents, writers with book deals in the works. More realistically, maybe you’ll strike up acquaintance with fellow wannabes, embedding yourself in your assigned spot at the bottom of the hierarchy. Maybe you’ll start reading one another’s work; better, maybe somebody in your network will take a step up the ladder and throw you a lifeline – a letter of introduction to his agent, for example. But probably not: once he’s got an agent he doesn’t want to tempt fate by recommending some other writer whose work his agent might not like. Besides, now he’s moved into a more select circle.

(To be continued.)

Brochure Stand

For several years now I’ve imagined a reality that’s just slightly different from the socially constructed reality in which we’re ordinarily immersed. Scattered throughout this alternate reality are individuals who trace eccentric and distant orbits. What distinguishes them isn’t their individuality but the trajectories they follow: they see something else and are drawn to it. Each one sees something different from the rest, which isolates the travelers not just from the non-travelers but from one another as well. Because no courses have been charted to these unexplored territories, the solitary voyager makes many wrong turns along the way. In pursuing this haphazard course into dark and unpopulated sectors the voyager struggles against the constant pull of gravity, the persistent temptation to turn back. Occasionally the voyager detects a signal, weak and intermittent: someone else is out here, another explorer. The conversation may be distorted by spatial and temporal distance, but the message is communicated: though I see something other than what you see, I do see something.

This metaphor of space travel isn’t quite right, because it takes this alternate reality too far away from ordinary reality. Better: the voyagers traverse the earth on their quests and pilgrimages. They may encounter one another without realizing it, because it’s difficult to distinguish the voyagers from the natives and the tourists. I imagine a place where the reality traveler can find fellowship on the road, someplace like Rick’s Cafe Americain in Casablanca, precariously placed in no-man’s land, a heterotopia within a heterotopia. But even if it’s closed down by the authorities the cafe might rematerialize next month in Brazzaville or some other obscure outpost.

When I was twenty I passed through Casablanca. Like other Moroccan cities it is really two cities: the old exotic medina and the modern French sector. Casablanca isn’t an obscure outpost: it’s the most Western of all Moroccan cities. The new town dominates the old; international business overwhelms the local trade, though some young street kid did offer to sell me some time alone with his sister for a good price. And Casablanca isn’t even in the desert; it’s on the Mediterranean.

The week before taking the trip that took me to Morocco I made myself a tent out of a big sheet of plastic. I was going to travel light and cheap, so I thought a tent might keep me dry and save me money. I’m not very mechanically adept, so the tent wasn’t pretty; it also turned out to be heavier than I expected. Still, building the thing gave me a sense of control over the uncertain fate that lay ahead. My first night abroad it rained. Having hitchhiked a short way from the Lisbon airport, I found myself pitching my plastic tent in a deserted gravel pit in a persistent drizzle. It worked; I kept dry overnight. The next morning it was still raining a little. The tent was still wet of course and gritty, and it had taken some damage from use. I left my homemade tent in the gravel pit and headed back to the road.

Just about three years ago I mailed off my first novel about this alternate reality. I sent it to a New York agent, an old friend of a Lebanese expatriate I had gotten to know in France. Anne took a photo of me as I handed the big mailing envelope across the counter to the postal employee. The main character and the narrator in this novel is a guy kind of like Rick. Earlier, before the story begins, this character happened upon a small upstairs office marked only by a three-by-five card taped beneath the door buzzer. This office served as a kind of Rick’s Cafe tucked into a side street of a fairly ordinary American town that seems a lot like Boulder. The original Rick in this story was just getting ready to leave for Lisbon; the narrator, for no apparent reason other than a lack of alternatives, decides to become the new Rick and to take proprietorship of the “cafe.” By the time the story in the novel unfolds the narrator has become disillusioned with the cafe, which has expanded to multiple outposts globally. Now he sits and drinks coffees and beers at someone else’s local cafe, waiting without much hope for something different to happen.

Yesterday I got my brochure stand ready to go. I printed off precisely twenty-seven copies of my two most recent blog posts, printing a brief description of my psychology practice at the bottom of the page. My idea was to place the brochure stand at various places around town for an hour or two at a time. Most passers-by would ignore the stand; a few, attracted by its strangeness, would stop and take a brochure. Some might go see the blog, a few might even call, but most would probably read the brochure and forget about it. But then, maybe some day a few months from now, they’d see the odd stand again, pick up another brochure, maybe tell a friend. Gradually a clientele would build itself.

So I put the stand and the brochures in the car and went off to do some errands. My first stop was the liquor store (out of beer), then the grocery. So I decided to leave the brochure stand on the sidewalk near the liquor store while I did the grocery shopping, then come back and pick it up maybe an hour later. So I’m walking toward the liquor store carrying my brochure stand through the parking lot and the gloom begins to descend. Nobody is going to want this thing standing in front of their store. I feel like an idiot carrying this thing around. After a couple minutes I find a place on the corner. I put the brochures in the receptacle and set the stand on the sidewalk. Immediately a mild breeze from behind bends the sheaf of brochures forward at the top, curling them over so that the print cannot be seen at all. I try to straighten the brochures, make them stay upright — nothing works. Two young guys stand next to a car in the lot watching me indifferently. I left the stand where it was, brochures bent forward, and went to the grocery. When I came back an hour later I picked up the stand and the brochures, put them back in the car, and drove home. I didn’t even bother counting the brochures: I knew that not one of the twenty-seven would be missing.

Sitemeter informs me that, while I’ve been writing this post in the American predawn hours, Ktismatics has had two visitors: one from Tehran, the other from some unidentified place in China. And now I’m having a deja vu experience: didn’t I write this before, at the end of some prior post, about a visitor from Tehran and another from China?

Not the Exceptional Monster

A friend asked Wallace Stevens, then an old man, if he had any regrets about pursuing a full-time career in business instead of concentrating on his poetry. In response Stevens said this:

If Beethoven could look back on what he had accomplished and say that it was a collection of crumbs compared to what he had hoped to accomplish, where should I ever find a figure of speech adequate to size up the little that I have done compared to that which I had once hoped to do. Of course, I have had a happy and well-kept life. But I have not even begun to touch the spheres within spheres that might have been possible if, instead of devoting the principal amount of my time to making a living, I had devoted it to thought and poetry. Certainly it is as true as it ever was that whatever means most to one should receive all of one’s time and that has not been true in my case. But, then, if I had been more determined about it, I might now be looking back not with a mere sense of regret but at some actual devastation. To be cheerful about it, I am now in the happy position of being able to say that I don’t know what would have happened if I had had more time. This is very much better than to have had all the time in the world and have found oneself inadequate.

And yet, if Stevens was so unsure of his adequacy as a poet, why did he keep his day job even after he caught his artistic stride, even after the laurel wreath encircled his head? Did he prize his executive pay and privilege that much, or (almost inconceivably) was it the job itself that held him? The daily routine of commutes and files and phone calls that let the decades slip quietly by, the easy and self-limiting camaraderie of the big corporation counterbalancing a very private life, the grinding away at a tangible problem until a concrete solution makes itself known…

Red robin, stop your preludes, practicing
Mere repetitions. These things at least comprise
An occupation, an exercise, a work,

A thing final in itself and, therefore, good;
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round

And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good,
The way wine comes to table in a wood.

And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf
Above the table spins its constant spin,
So that we look at it with pleasure, look

At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

– from “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” 1947, by Wallace Stevens

Constructing a Possible Poet

The other day I wrote about Wallace Stevens’ day job as a surety claims attorney, a job he kept until his death despite rising acclaim, a Pulitzer Prize, and a professorial offer from Harvard. For Stevens poetry was an avocation, the work of an amateur in the French sense of the term. Why did he do it, and for whom?

In 1940, when Stevens was 61 years old and at the height of his artistry, he extolled the nobility of poetry in an essay entitled “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” In a truly vital poetry the imagination must harness itself to reality, Stevens asserts, but it must also resist the “pressure” of reality. That poetic nobility had sunk to diminished and degenerate levels Stevens attributed to increased pressure and decreased imaginative resistance.

I might be expected to speak of the social, that is to say sociological or political, obligation of the poet. He has none… I do not think that a poet owes any more as a social obligation than he owes as a moral obligation, and if there is anything concerning poetry about which people agree it is that the role of the poet is not to be found in morals… The truth is that the social obligation so closely urged is a phase of the pressure of reality which a poet is bound to resist or evade today. Dante in Purgatory and Paradise was still the voice of the Middle Ages but not through fulfilling any social obligation.

Hitler had invaded Poland; the European conflict had begun, while America retained its tenuous isolation. Current events might prove a source of inspiration, but imagination cannot be commanded or moved by duty. It can operate freely only in an imaginative space that is released from the pressure of reality. The poetic process is psychologically an escapist process, Stevens acknowledges without apology. If your imagination draws you to war as a subject, by all means follow its lead. The poet is born not made, says Stevens: that which inspires him is also part of him.

If a possible poet is left facing life without any categorical exactions upon him, what then? What is his function? Certainly it is not to lead people out of the confusion in which they find themselves. Nor is it, I think, to comfort them while they follow their leaders to and fro. I think that his function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short, is to help people live their lives.

I’m surprised. Here’s Stevens, not just a possible poet but an actual one, his country poised on the brink of entering a world war, sitting in his corner office in a Hartford office building taking care of surety claims, writing about how the poet’s function is to help people live their lives? Did he believe that being a claims man was an even higher calling?

Time and time again it has been said that he may not address himself to an elite. I think he may. There is not a poet whom we prize living today that does not address himself to an elite. The poet will continue to do this: to address himself to an elite even in a classless society, unless, perhaps, this exposes him to imprisonment or exile. In that event he is likely not to address himself to anyone at all. He may, like Shostakovich, content himself with pretence. He will, nevertheless, still be addressing himself to an elite, for all poets address themselves to someone and it is of the essence of that instinct, and it seems to amount to an instinct, that it should be to an elite, not to a drab but to a woman with the hair of a pythoness, not to a chamber of commerce but to a gallery of one’s own, if there are enough of one’s own to fill a gallery.

Often enough I’ve heard artists claim that they paint only for themselves, that they write because they must yield to an inner urge toward self-expression, that to make a film for an audience is to corrupt the freedom of artistry. Stevens the amateur will have no part of it. He doesn’t just want to write; he wants to be read. Why the elite? Because they are the harshest critics? I don’t think so. If for Stevens imagination is the noblest instinct, then only the noblest of mere mortals can allow their imaginations to be released without being held down by the strong hand of reality. Stevens wrote for the elite of the imagination.

And that elite, if it responds, not out of complaisance, but because the poet has quickened it, because he has educed from it that for which it was searching in itself and in the life around it and which it had not yet quite found, will thereafter do for the poet what he cannot do for himself, that is to say, receive his poetry.

On Keeping Your Day Job

Money is a kind of poetry.

– Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was a surety claims attorney for the Hartford Insurance Company. I don’t know if he made enough selling his poems to quit the business, but as I understand it he didn’t want to.

A surety bond guarantees that a construction company will complete the work it’s being paid for, according to specifications and on time. What can go wrong? Plenty. The contractor might not have the know-how to tackle a really complex job. Maybe they’ve never done such a big project before. Maybe they’re overextended – too much work spread across too many job sites and not enough foremen to keep things on track. Maybe they underbid the job and just can’t afford to complete the project. Maybe they’ve gotten distracted by some other problem on some other job, and they lose focus on the jobs they could do in their sleep. So many ways for things to go wrong. If the contractor can’t get the job done, then it’s up to the surety company to find somebody else who can. That’s not so bad – there are plenty of other companies out there willing to do the job. The problem is paying for it.

When a contractor runs into problems on the job, he thinks he’s going to be able to fix them eventually. Usually it takes money to fix problems. So the contractor keeps submitting progress reports and invoices, keeps cashing checks, keeps spending money, and still the problem doesn’t fix itself. Instead it gets worse, and it spreads. Pretty soon the contractor is borrowing money from his other jobs to try to fix the bad one, and after awhile he can’t pay his workers and subcontractors and suppliers. He gets past due letters: 30 days past due, 60 days, 90. Pretty soon somebody slaps a lien on the job, and that’s when the owner – the guy who hired the contractor, the guy who pays the contractor – first gets the clue. Something is going terribly wrong here.

That’s when they call the surety company. Maybe the bond underwriter already knows that things are going badly for his client. Usually there’s at least some prior indication that things are a little shaky, but the contractor can always come up with an explanation. And you’re inclined to believe him. You’ve been doing business with the contractor for years, collected tens of thousands of dollars in premiums from him, sat down across the table from him, walked through his yard, kicked the tires on his trucks, joked around with his office manager. You like the guy. Besides, if you pull the plug, stop writing bonds, what’s the contractor going to do? He needs new work to pay for cleaning up the problems on the old jobs. But sometimes you can feel it; you know you’re just throwing good money after bad. Finally the whole house of cards falls down around the contractor’s head. Then comes the sickening moment when the underwriter, the guy who has stuck his neck way out for this contractor, hands over his file to the claims attorney. And then you know you’ve just cost your company a few million bucks.

Stevens said that holding down a regular job was good for him, good for his writing. It’s hard to imagine. Here’s a guy who’s just spent all day wrangling over past-due bills and selling off contractors’ houses to pay off the creditors. Then he closes his files, walks to the train station, buys himself a drink in a plastic cup, hops the train, sits down and writes a poem on the commute home? I read somewhere how Stevens would be at the office, right in the middle of dictating a letter, when he’d just stop, pull out a pad of paper, and write a few lines of poetry. They say he kept his poetry in the lower left drawer of his desk, separate from his claims work. Still, how separate could they have been?

One of Stevens’ poems starts like this: “I placed a jar in Tennessee.” He might have said “jar,” but maybe he was thinking about a building, some surety claim, some half-built eyesore that Stevens found a way to get finished. Was he proud to see that building sitting on top of that Tennessee hill, turning the surrounding wilderness into a kind of landscaping? Or did he wish he could have demolished the thing? Maybe Stevens just decided to make a settlement with the owner, and they left a half-finished empty shell of a building up there on the Tennessee hill, “tall and of a port of air.”

Every once in awhile you get the sense that some of the papers from the right desk drawer found their way to the left drawer. “The earth is not a building but a body,” Stevens wrote. His job was to make sure that buildings got built on the body of the earth. “There is no difference between god and his temple,” he wrote. “A claim man finds it difficult sometimes to distinguish himself from the papers he handles,” he wrote in a 1938 article for Eastern Underwriter.

“Money is a kind of poetry” – I wonder what he meant by that? They say he wrote his poems on little slips of paper that he’d stash in the lower left desk drawer. When he was finished with a poem he’d hand the little papers to his secretary and she’d type them up for him. Maybe when he’d open that drawer at the office, those little slips of paper would remind him of money, like a wad of dollar bills stashed in there. But then wouldn’t he have said it the other way around – poetry is a kind of money?

“Money is a kind of poetry.” Was he just another greedy bastard, and that’s why he kept his claims job, so at the end of the day he could go home, pour himself a glass of claret, and admire the fine paintings on his walls? He made poems, and he made money – same thing, just little pieces of paper, two sides of the same coin. Then again, maybe he was looking at money like a bond claims man, a poetic one. The flows of money, the meaning of money, the reality made up of an accumulation of abstract things, like a poem that’s really not just a string of words.

The Song of the Road

From Fellini’s La Strada (The Road), 1954, music by Nino Rota:

We aren’t there the first time Gelsomina hears the song. It was on the day it rained, the day Zampano couldn’t do his strong-man act, that they heard it, she and Zampano. She had performed some sort of incantation before their feeble campfire: “It will rain the day after tomorrow,” she announced when she was finished, but he didn’t pay any attention. He probably didn’t pay attention to the song either. Only later does she ask Zampano if he remembers the song. She hums the melody; the hard lines etched in his face do not soften.

She hears a different song when, overtaxed by his unremitting cruelty, Gelsomina leaves Zampano. Squatting on her haunches at the side of the road, uncertain of her next step, she hears them before seeing them: uniformed, marching in the grass next to the road, the three musicians play. Enchanted, Gelsomina rises and follows. In the town the tune is the same but now it’s slow, minor-keyed, mournful. The parade is bigger now: nuns, altar boys, girls dressed in white, a priest. Men carry a large crucifix and a shrine to the Madonna and Child. The throng jostles Gelsomina past a butcher shop, where a pig carcass hangs head-down from a hook in the window. That night there’s another show in town: the Fool, wings glued to his back, walks high above the square, his tightrope suspended between the top of the church and the roof of the building across the street. When the show is over Gelsomina remains in the square, alone but for the two drunks who harry her. She hears the church bell chime once and expectantly she looks to the sky. But her hope turns to despair as she hears the motorcycle engine approaching: it’s Zampano. He slaps her twice, drags her into the back of his 3-wheeled van, and drives her away.

When she awakens she finds herself surrounded by circus people pitching their tents on the outskirts of Rome. A violin sings in the distance: it’s the first song, the song she heard the day it rained. She follows the music and there sits the Fool, child-sized violin in hand, a smoldering cigarette wedged under one of the tuning pegs. The Fool teaches Gelsomina to play the trumpet. “Everything in this world is useful for something,” he tells her. “Even you have a purpose.” Jealous of his talents and infuriated by his taunting, Zampano nearly kills the Fool. He asks Gelsomina to leave the circus with him, but she decides to stay with Zampano: “If I don’t stay with him, who will stay?”

Cut loose by the circus and on their own again, Zampano and Gelsomina accept an offer to spend the night at a thousand-year-old convent. “She plays the drum,” Zampano tells one of the nuns, but Gelsomina brings out the trumpet instead. It’s the song she heard in the rain, the song the Fool played on his violin. Zampano snatches the axe from one of the other nuns and begins savagely chopping firewood…

I skip to the last time we hear the song. Another traveling circus, this one at the seaside. After the trapeze artist’s performance Zampano does his act, the man with lungs of steel breaking the chain around his chest for the ten thousandth time. This time there is no girl to play the dramatic drumroll and pass the hat. Zampano walks through town: amid the chatter of children he hears a beautiful voice humming a familiar song. Zampano calls through the barbed-wire fence to the young woman: How do you know that song? It must have been four or five years ago, she begins. That night Zampano, drunk and violent, gets thrown out of a bar. “You’re all big men in a crowd. I don’t need anybody. Just me alone. Just me alone.” He staggers to the beach in the darkness…

Alternative Occupation

Despite some uneven improvements, the analysts concluded that the level of overall violence is high, Iraq’s sectarian groups remain unreconciled, and al-Qaida in Iraq is still able to conduct highly visible attacks… The intelligence report warns against scaling back the mission of U.S. forces, an argument the Bush administration could use to support a continuation of its current troop surge. Analysts found that changing the U.S. military’s mission from its current focus — countering insurgents and stabilizing the country — in favor of supporting Iraqi forces and stopping terrorists would hurt the security gains of the last six months.

The American military presence in Iraq currently stands at 162,000 — the highest level since the beginning of the war. The population of Iraq is about 28 million; that means there’s 1 American soldier for every 167 Iraqis. The U.S. Government Accounting Office estimates that we’ve spent half a trillion dollars on the war so far. That’s $18,000 for every Iraqi man, woman and child, or $3 million for every American soldier stationed in Iraq.

I can imagine an alternative history in which a victorious Iraqi army occupies America. Deployment is proportional to ours presently in Iraq: the US population is about 300 million, so that means there would be about 1.8 million Iraqi soldiers on American soil. Sounds like a lot, but the sheer numbers aren’t really that shock-and-awesome. The cumulative manpower of all the American police forces is just about 1 million. Doubling the police force might be noticeable, but life probably wouldn’t change much for most of us.

I live in Boulder Colorado, population 100 thousand — there would be about 600 occupying forces here in town. Suppose the troops were here to prevent American insurgent strikes against the Iraq-friendly government and to reduce violence between rival intra-American political factions. Their assignment isn’t an easy one, since nearly everybody in Boulder wants the troops to leave, and more than half of us believe that it’s justifiable to kill the soldiers. Consequently, maybe 90 percent of violent attacks are directed not at fellow Boulderites but at the occupying Iraqi army. Not surprisingly, the troops don’t patrol neighborhoods in squad cars looking for hot spots; instead they stay holed up in their heavily fortified headquarters. They’re afraid to talk to the locals for fear of being ambushed. When they do venture into the town, they drive in convoys of heavily armored vehicles that never stop or slow down. When they do stop you’d be advised not to stick around to find out why.

Now suppose some ethnic strife flared up in your neighborhood. Would you call the Iraqi army, invite them to come and have a look around? Not likely. They wouldn’t investigate; they’d knock down doors and intimidate everyone. Besides, since everybody hates the occupiers, what would be the consequences if you called the Iraqis into your neighborhood? Retaliation would be almost certain. Consequently the Iraqi army typically finds itself responding to false leads and anonymous calls motivated by personal revenge. Ordinary internecine strife remains untouched by the armed foreign presence.

At some point the occupying army might get the hint. We’re not wanted, we’re every faction’s enemy, we’re not doing any good here. These Americans seem to be on the verge of chaos, but they’ll just have to work things out among ourselves.

After Life

On After Life, a 1998 film by Kore-Eda…

The premise is straightforward. When you die, you’re sent to a residential institution where you undergo a one-week orientation and transition program. Your task during the first half of the week is to settle on a single memory that was particularly meaningful to you during your lifetime. During the second half of the week the staff recreates the scene of this memory as accurately as they can, given the surprisingly limited resources available to them. Finally, on the last day, you watch the filmed reenactment of your memory. As you watch you are transported into the memory, where you will spend eternity. The self-referential interpretation is clear: film itself is a portal to alternate realities.

But there’s also this: I live my life haunted by my own ghost, who lives in my memory. My spectral double keeps haunting me with the past, turning the present into an eternal return of prior events, places, relationships, experiences. Traumatic events might intrude, but my main defense against them is to relive, over and over, the happy events of my life. Maybe the times I danced for my brother. Or the day I sat with my fiancee on a park bench. Or being cradled on my mother’s lap as a small child. Or soaring through the clouds on a solo flight. The memories chosen by the newly-deceased all shared an archaic narcissism, a sense of instantaneous yet timeless plenitude, a direct connection with the Real that underlies all differentiation between self, other and the world. Remembered moments like these are so primal, so perfect, so self-obliterating that they may have happened only in our imaginations.

I might be alert to the ways in which I re-enact the destructive and painful patterns I developed at a younger age, but I’m less aware of how I’m held captive by the shining moments. Entranced by their glow I might escape the spell in which the darker events of the past would ensnare me. But the luminant memories also cast long shadows that obscure the dimmer existential charms of quotidian life. By keeping past glories in front of me all the time, like a movie reel that loops eternally, I stop living life in real time. Because nothing can equal the sublime moments from my (real or imagined) past, I vaguely discern that my ghostly mnemic double is the one who truly lives, and that the present is but a pale afterglow of a meaningful but mythic past.

In the film there are some who cannot choose a memory. These aren’t the ones who led terrible lives: for them to lock into one good memory is to forget all the rest. Rather it’s those who in looking back on their lives see a flat and featureless plain: they cannot choose because there’s nothing worth remembering.

Then there are those who will not choose. Why lock into a memory that’s barely real any more? Why not relive a dream? Why not create a fictional scene and live that? Or why not just live inside this heterotopic way station poised between a mythic past and a mythic eternity? Why not live this haunted and precarious life week after week? Maybe join the staff, help others remember, recreate their stories, allow their memories to trigger your own without getting locked into them. Enjoy tenuous fellowship with those few others who manage to keep company with specters while resisting the persistent lure to join their number.

I Want Something, I Want Something

In Man’s Search for Meaning (1959), Victor Frankl wrote about the “existential vacuum,” the personal meaninglessness that increasingly characterizes life in contemporary Western society. Says Frankl:

A statistical survey recently revealed that among my European students, 25 percent showed a more-or-less marked degree of existential vacuum. Among my American students it was not 25 but 60 percent. The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind is doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.

So how have things changed over the last half century? Here are some excerpts from this 2001 article by John Schumaker, an American living in New Zealand:

In 1970, a largescale survey of US university students showed that 80 per cent of them had as a goal ‘the development of a meaningful philosophy of life’. By 1989, the percentage had fallen to 41 per cent. During the same period, the number of those aiming to be very well off financially increased from 39 per cent to 75 per cent

The percentage of total economic activity that is generated in America from personal spending has reached 70 per cent, far more than any other nation. In a spending showdown, no-one is faster or more deadly than Americans. We spend hugely more on ourselves than our closest rival. Private spending is between 50 per cent and 90 per cent greater than in all major European countries.

American-style radical consumerism has succeeded to the point that social analysts now speak of things like ‘consumer trance’ and ‘ecological dissociation’. Take the fascination with sport utility vehicles (SWs). Who would have thought in these delicate environmental times that the public could be sold a popular mode of transport that consumes one-third more fuel and creates 75 per cent more pollution than ordinary cars? And who would have guessed that the average fuel efficiency of US cars in the year 2001 would be less than in the hog-car days of the 1950s and 1960s? Environmentalists have calculated that the SW fad has caused Americans to waste 70 billion gallons of gasoline in the past 10 years – an immense price for an outdoorsy image.

Eighty-five percent of Americans indicated in a recent poll that a ‘six-figure’ income would be required to service their yearned-for lifestyle. Yet, nearly 30 percent of those actually earning six-figures reported that their ‘basic needs’ were not being met.

Escalating materialism may be the single largest contributor to Western society’s tenfold increase in major depression over the past half-century. It certainly features in the worrying rash of ‘consumption disorders’ such as compulsive shopping, consumer vertigo and kleptomania. Hyper-materialism also features prominently in the emerging plague of existential disorders’ such as chronic boredom, ennui, jadedness, purposelessness, meaninglessness and alienation. Surveys of therapists reveal that 40 per cent of Americans seeking psychotherapy today suffer from these and other complaints, often referred to as all-pervasive ‘psychic deadness’. Once materialism becomes the epicenter of one’s life it can be hard to feel any more alive than the lifeless objects that litter the consumer world. In a recent study of US university students, 81 per cent of them reported feeling in an ‘existential vacuum’.

The Doctor Will See You Now: Case Study 1

The other day I put up a page on the blog describing MY PSYCHOLOGY PRACTICE, an edited and shortened version of an earlier post. (The link to this page appears at the top of the blog, just under the “Ktismatics” banner.) Soon Parodycenter put up a comment. “dear Dr Doyle,” it begins: “I read your advertisement with great interest. I have a big problem…” The comment then outlines the nature of the problem. “Can you help me?” the comment concludes. I must confess to a certain degree of ambivalence upon reading this comment, as evidenced by my two responses. In light of Parodycenter’s subsequent reply I think perhaps the right course of action is to engage in a public psychoanalysis of his problem.

Background. Parodycenter is a blog name for Dejan, the creator and writer of the blog Cultural Parody Center. I first became aware of this blog in April, when Dejan wrote a post extolling the virtues of Ktismatics. Since then I have been a regular reader and occasional commenter at the Parody Center. Less consistently I read some of the other blogs on the Parody Center’s blogroll, affording me the opportunity to read Dejan’s comments elsewhere. And of course he contributes his observations here at Ktismatics as well.

While Dejan seems well-versed and expresses strong opinions on a wide array of subjects, he seems repeatedly drawn to a few. Jacques Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Film, especially David Lynch’s Inland Empire (thumbs up) and Zack Snyder’s 300 (thumbs down). Sex, especially in its more transgressive manifestations. Serbia and the former Yugoslavia (tragic). Slavoj Zizek (contemptible). Perhaps most notable has been Dejan’s frequent discussions with Le Colonel Chabert — on his own blog, on the Colonel’s blog, seemingly on any blog where Chabert makes a comment. These protracted exchanges almost invariably turn caustic and end in Chabert’s refusal to continue.

The Initial Conversation, as transferred from the “My Psychology Practice” comments (comment feature now disabled on that page):

So, let’s get started with the analysis, shall we? I’ll pose a few preliminary observations based on the analysand’s original description of his problem, then wait for him to respond. If anyone else would like to interject as we proceed, please feel free to do so.

* * * *

Hello Dejan, please sit down. Is it alright if I call you Dejan? Comfortable?

On the page describing My Psychology Practice I listed an email address for curious parties to contact me. Yet you posed your problem as a comment on the blog, thus exposing your problem to public scrutiny…

On your comment you logged in as Parodycenter, your blogging persona with a link to your blog, yet you signed the comment personally as Dejan…

In your comment you refer to me as Doctor Doyle…

You say you “can’t stop” offending people, and then in the next sentence you say you “enjoy” it…

You say you enjoy hurting the sensibilities of “just about ANYONE” on the internet, yet I’m the only one you mention by name…