Not sure how updates in these parts are going to go, but tomorrow I’m heading south, to test the good food and fine life in the heart of the Mediterranean. Hopefully somewhere down there I can get my writer’s groove back.
Sicily!
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Author Archives: Jerry
A Couple of Days Wasted
There comes a time in any geek’s life when he (usually it’s a he) wants to say, “make these two folders the same.” Of course it’s not quite that simple, but it’s not terribly complex.
Not until you look at the software available for the task these days, anyway, and this isn’t just a Mac thing. Oh, there are utilities out there, all right, but they all have two things in common: they do too much and they cost too much. I didn’t want to pay thirty dollars, not when I could spend two days of my life instead. That’s what my life is worth, these days.
So, over the last couple of days I made a folder merge utility. It came out pretty nice. I thought I’d put it up at the Hut as freeware, sort of a promotional thing.
But…
It deletes files. Of course it does; when you synchronize folders and files don’t match something’s going to get deleted. It’s in the nature of the program to delete files. (The fancier programs allow you to reconcile the differences between files. That’s why they cost money.)
But…
Someone’s going to delete the wrong files. With this sort of software that’s a dead certainty. I show in living color when a newer file will be replaced by an older one, but in this day and age is that enough? The software itself is pretty solid now. It does exactly what it says it does. I don’t think that’s enough.
Remembering the Great Bloggers of the Early 21st Century
A few days ago I heard about a notable literary figure, whose name I have of course forgotten. He was apparently one of the first diarists, a man who recorded his life (or at least a part of it) faithfully, and his life was interesting enough — or perhaps I should say well expressed enough — to be good reading, even a few hundred years later.
My brother’s step-father-in-law has in his possession the diary of a man who was a landowner when the communists came. If the diary is half of what Jirka says it is (not a safe bet), there’s a master’s thesis there. The parts he told me about were fascinating. (The people in charge were asslickers, not farmers, and when the decree came down that they would be switching from horses to tractors, they did, over the objections of the people who knew better. The horses were shipped off, and the tractors sank in the very soft soil. It was a disaster.) In these volumes (so I’m told) are those magical moments of life that at the time appear to be the daily grind, a window into another person’s world.
Try this. Sit in a bar strike up a conversation with the guy sitting next to you, and eventually tell him you’re a writer. A little more time will pass, and then that guy will be telling you why you should help him write his autobiography. (Actually that won’t happen where I am now, but the response is nearly universal in the US.) While I sometimes deride these folks, they do know one thing, and it goes right back to what I said before. It’s not wheter the life is interesting, but whether the account of the life is interesting.
And then there are blogs. It is remarkable, actually, that there are so many people out there who are able to put their lives out there in a way that is both articulare and honest. There are thousands of blogs like that. Then there are the millions of others. Searching for that leg-up out of the “other” category, I thought about what it was than made some blogs interesting while most were just reminders that a large segment of our society needs more to do. I’m really thinking more of the journal-type blog than journalistic-type blogs like those dedicated to politics or sports.
So what might I do, I asked myself, to lift this blog above the vast, sucking pit that is most of the blogosphere? What can I do to make the Media Empire a blazing beacon of lucid, penetrating thought, shining through the locust-plague-darkened skies of unfettered free speech? I devoted some time to this, because as with anything you do, it should be possible to get better. Eventually I arrived at the answer: What I can do is nothing.
(Involuntary falshback to a cartoon from the 50’s or 60’s, with two white-coated men standing at one end of a gigantic computer. There are dials and wires and bigness and the computer says everything about what people thought Earth-shattering computers would be like, back then. One scientist is holding the tape which feeds from a slot in the front of the machine. “It says the answer is two,” he says to the other. A lot of effort to get a simple answer.)
Nothing, or at least not much. Blogging is like hitting a baseball, maybe. Most times, the batter walks back to the dugout, unsuccessful. Yet there are some hitters who can make contact with astonishing consistency (approacing 40% not-sucking!), while others are less consistent but sometimes knock it out of the park. In those terms, this episode probably counts as bunting for a base hit.
(This thought process started as “how can I use my blog to help establish my writing career?” “Stop putting out crappy serial fiction,” was the most obvious answer. But I like putting out crappy serial fiction, even though no one reads it. In fact, as soon as I’m done with this, I think I’m going to poop out some serial fiction. Because I can.)
What I set out to say before making this all about me, me, me, was that while the diary as a literary form may continue, I fear it will be lost among the journals, blogs, scrapbooks, and Muddled Ramblings of our age. We are, as a crowd, very eager to tell about ourselves, to somehow with well-chosen words elevate our lives from “same ol’ shit” to “a unique perspective”.
I tried to imagine bloging fifty years in the future, and to me it looks a lot more like You-Tube than wordpress. We could be living in the Golden Moment of underfettered self-expression via the written word. The next generation of successful bloggers will be more like actors that writers.
Episode 25: Reunion by the River, part three
Our story so far: Charles Lowell is a detective who thought he was down on his luck, until his luck changed. He has a client now, Meredith Baxter, a beautiful if quite dangerous woman who holds the key to find something, a treasure of some sort, that is badly wanted by every underworld figure on the planet. For a while the various factions wanted Lowell alive, hoping that he would help them find the treasure for themselves. He can’t make them all happy, however, and the ones who come out on the losing end will not hesitate to express their displeasure with a bullet. Lowell has already been shot once, and his spunky assistant Alice was badly beaten.
Tonight Meredith will be recovering a painting called Blood of the Saint, in which her husband found the key to the location of the treasure. He was pulled from the East River soon after that. Lowell and Meredith are at Jake’s, a dive bar favored by the disreputable crowd. Meredith is certain that there are killers waiting for them outside.
To read the entire story from the beginning click here.
I picked up the gun where it sat in front of me on the table and tested the feel in my left hand. It was a Walther, a .32, not the sort of gat you picture blasting your way out of a building with. Subtlety was Walther’s bag. Still, it was a good choice for my sinister hand, and dexter wasn’t going to be any use. I checked the safety and the magazine. The whole time I was looking for alternatives. “This isn’t like last time, is it?” I asked.
She hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“I mean the warehouse, where you had your own people attack us.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“The people inside with us, they knew something, didn’t they? Something you didn’t want to get around. Staging the attack while I was there was a nice touch. It kept me from quitting, and got us on the run together.”
She set her gun back down in her lap. “This is what I get for hiring clever men. I suppose another drink wouldn’t hurt before we go.”
I figured she was probably right about that. Booze in here, killers waiting outside. Not a tough decision. I went to fetch the booze. By now the area around the bar was uncomfortably bright, and I felt eyes peering at me from the darker recesses.
“Another round?” asked Jake.
“That’s right. Pour one for yourself, while you’re at it.”
Jake hesitated. “Crap, Charley, It’s that bad, then?”
“Just do it.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
I paid him. Along with the bills was a card I had been given long before, on a Tuesday. It wasn’t as clean and white as it had been then, the rigor of the last five days had taken its toll. It was, I reflected, the only thing on me that I had owned for that long. It felt like I was parting with on old friend, or at least a rival. Five days since I had decided never to call that number. Jake looked at it quizzically but kept his yap shut. “Tell your mother Charlie says ‘hello’,” I said.
“Will do, Charlie.” Jake seemed almost mournful; the bags under his eyes even heavier than usual, his pale skin and hollow cheeks reminding me of a mournful spirit, not the Reaper himself but one who follows in his wake cleaning up the mess. One like that never forgets anything, no matter how hard it tries. He picked up his glass. “Here’s to ya.”
I drank with him and got a refill before returning to the table in the corner.
“What was that all about?” Meridith Baxter asked.
“Just saying goodbye,” I said. “Heading to San Fran in the morning.”
She seemed almost amused. “Are you, now?”
“Given the chance.” I was serious.
“Well, good luck to you out there.”
“Thanks.” I took a sip of what was maybe my last drink, to stretch what was maybe my last conversation. I looked across at perhaps the last dame I’d ever see and waited for her to tell me the last lie I might ever hear. Time was stretched and folded; the past, the whole of human history was nothing, a blink of a bat’s eye, while the future didn’t exist at all. Only the now was real, the moment between the vanishing past and the nonexistent future. It stretched to infinity, wrapped back on itself, and the world froze, locked in that moment. A moment drinking top-shelf liquor with a top-shelf killer who looked damn good in black.
She took a sip from her own drink and looked me in the eye. “You’re right, of course. Those were my people who attacked the warehouse. What you don’t understand is that I was for all intents and purposes a prisoner. While obstensibly part of my organization, the people ‘protecting’ me were loyal to someone else. My ex-husband’s family, I expect.
“It is true I timed the attack to make sure you were swept along in the events. I’m sorry about that, but I needed your help and I still do.” She leaned back in her chair and her face was lost in the shadows. “They laugh at you, Charlie, the thugs and goons and hoodlums, the politicians and the lawyers, the cops and the reporters and even the drunks. You’re the biggest joke in this whole damn town. ‘Charlie Lowell,’ one will say, and they all share a chuckle. Nothing else need be said.”
“Well, that explains why you hired me, then.”
“Shut up, Charles. You’re the worst of all of them. You want to know why you drink so much? Every other two-bit gumshoe in this four-bit town is just looking for the next bit of dirty work to make a quick buck. But not Charles Lowell. You spend your life looking for truth. You’re the only honest person in town, Charley, the only one not on the take or two-timing or double-dipping or working some sort of scam. You can’t lie, you can’t cheat, you can’t steal. The only other way to survive in this town, the only way to stay sane, is to be drunk. That’s why they laugh. You are the strangest fish in the fishbowl. I’m not laughing, though.” She paused and smirked. “Except when you think San Francisco would be different.”
I though of a few retorts, but discarded them all. It didn’t matter whether San Fran was better or worse, as long as it was far from here. Maybe it was all the same everywhere, but I didn’t think so. Not for me. This town was dried up, dead, it had nothing left to tell me, no secrets to whisper in my ear as I walked the streets at night. Somewhere else, it would take a while before I could see past the empty faces of the buildings and of the people to see the deeper emptiness beneath. Anywhere was better than here.
I thought of the business card I had just given Jake. “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think,” I finally said.
She finished her drink and stood, holding her canon with casual familiarity. “If we’re still alive tomorrow, you can explain to me how wrong I am.”
I stood also, the little Walther small and awkward in my large left hand. “Back door?”
She shrugged. “Good as any.”
Three toughs stood also, and reached for their weapons.
I wheeled on them, pushing my client behind me.
“Those are ours,” she said. Quietly she added “Probably.”
I glanced over at Jake. He had picked up the bar phone and was dialing carefully.
“Great,” Meredith said. “Now we’ll have the cops here as well. Better get going.” I led the way to the back door, where Meredith took charge. “We go out fast, and ready to shoot. With any luck we still have a man on the rooftop across the alley.” We exploded through the door, goons in front, looking for targets, waiting for bullets.
There were neither. We moved quickly through the deepening twilight, bristling with guns but with nothing to shoot. We piled into two cars waiting at the end of the alley and were away.
“That was fortunate,” I said.
Meredith was scowling. “Something’s
wrong.”
Tune in next time for: Reunion by the River, Part 4!
Thought for the day
The Hap-Happiest time of the year.
Ah, summer. It is Sunday, the quietest days Strašnice has to offer. I’m sitting on the patio at Café Vinice, the shade under the big awning sufficient to allow me to see the screen while the sun shines brightly on the purple-leaved trees in the little landscaped square.
I have only just settled in; my resolution: Get Serious. Before I do that, however, it is worth noting a couple of things — things I’ve said before and will certainly be saying again. I should probably give these principles a name, a shorthand to allow me to repeat myself without sounding repetitions. With the right code word the repetitions become a pleasure in themselves, a secret shared among the initiated.
First, beer is better when consumed outdoors. This principle extends to other beverages as well, but a chilly beer shares a special relationship with the sun and the breeze, a kinship that no other beverage can match. The lager I am drinking now was invented in the chilly caves around Plzn, and it is that residual chill and shadow that mixes so perfectly with a warm day.
Second, there is nothing a girl can wear (including nothing) that is sexier than a miniskirt. I get angry just imagining the day fickle fashion steals from me the simple pleasure of appreciating a graceful form shrouded in exactly the right amount of mystery. (That could also describe my favorite writers, and is the goal I set for myself.)
I’ve mentioned all of that before. One other thing — insignificant compared to those two — that is contributing to my current sanguinity: A nice, breathable wicker chair. Sometimes the things you barely notice at all (not because they are functioning poorly but because they are functioning especially well) are the ones that make the difference between a nice afternoon and an exceptional one. For instance, if I was wearaig sandals right now, I probably wouldn’t notice, but I’m not wearing sandals and I do know my feet are hot. Perhaps the imperfection (hot feet) makes the rest of the goodness graspable.
Shade, sun, trees, breeze, miniskirts, the arrival of my second beer (service oddly friendly today), finishing a thought-provoking book and settling in to see where those thoughts lead. I’ve been over all that stuff before. What’s the word, then, I can use as a shorthand, the sign I can use to wrap up all those feelings into a complete idea?
Maybe this one: Summer. Summer spoken in a reverent, Tom Sawyer voice, when the livin’ is easy — a time when it’s OK to be happy, to appreciate the good life and the wicker chair.
Lost in the Cosmos: A few more thoughts.
Some of this stuff falls outside the normal subjects covered in this blog (whatever that means), but it’s my Media Empire and I’ll do what I want. Actually, I’m not sure just what I’m going to put here yet, but just in case it’s ponderous, long-winded, and nonsensical (a distinct possibility), here’s a link I found by googling “potato eye rutabaga”. It’s almost certain to be more interesting that what follows.
First off, a couple of people commented on my first post about this book to point out that the author would probably be happy to discover that his book annoyed me. I said as much myself in the original post. It’s hard to imagine that he would be displeased to have provoked a thoughtful (if badly uninformed) response from a reader of his work. While the latter parts of the book annoyed me less, there were still assumptions I found problematic.
I was almost to the end of the book when I put my finger on one of the things that was troubling me. There is a stated assumption in the book that the world is a mad, ugly, brutal place, and that people are having a hard time dealing with it should come as no surprise. Part of his premise is that this is a new development, that the rise of technology and the decline of traditional ways for an individual to place himself in the world (specifically, religion) have led to historically desperate times for a species that is aware of itself, but is thoroughly unable to grasp itself the way it can any other thing in the cosmos.
Saying that things are different now is a tricky thing. In high school one of my favorite teachers pointed out that the historically large body of poetry and literature produced by soldiers during World War I was a reflection of a new level of horror that technology had brought to war. She might be right, I’m sure as hell glad I’ll never know those hardships, but I raised my hand. Might it just be that this was the first war where most of the foot soldiers were literate?
So, it’s hard to compare previous times to our own. Walker Percy cites many statistics of increasing behaviors that would be indicative of a growing dislocation of selves in a world that is increasingly mad, but I wonder. Perhaps there is a hierarchy of problems people face: eating, staying warm, reproducing, understanding your place in the universe. That does place us in a historic period; most people on this planet are going to eat dinner tonight, most are going to sleep under a roof, and some have even decided not to bother with reproduction. That leaves a historically staggering segment of the population with the luxury of feeling Lost in the Cosmos.
An aside: the author regularly characterizes a modern view of sex as just another need, like eating and breathing. If that were true, I’d be dead. Sex is a want, not a need. Sometimes it is a very strong want that make us just as aggressive and stupid as the need to eat, but the cost of failure is not the same. There is a rather large section of the book devoted to society’s idea that sex is a need — he uses hypothetical space voyages to create small groups of people forced to live together for many years. He does a good job demonstrating that the assumption of sex as a need can lead to major trouble, but then leaves it at that, not considering it might be possible to construct a crew where there is simply no expectation that this “need” will be met. Captain Cook or Magellan might be able to give some hints on the subject.
(Although twice — twice! — in the latter parts of the book he added “other” at the end of his multiple-choice questions. Maybe he thought we were ready for it by then.)
Back to luxury: the fundamental schism between Walker Percy and myself. In his view, being lost is a bad thing, leading to man’s ability to cooly, intellectually commit genocide (genocides of passion or of ideals are, apparently, better genocides)…
Um, let me jump back to the sex for a second. He echoes Kierkegaard as saying that the Christianity is responsible for eroticising sex. Before Christianity, he maintains, sex did not have the magical quality it did after. It’s odd, because the non-idealized sex before Christianity seems to be benign, while the casual sex in the wake of Christianity’s decline is a root cause of the increasing violence of our society. I think I might have to read that part again.
So, right. Luxury. I think we live in a time when needs are so completely and invisibly fulfilled that we’ve forgotten what a need really is. Five hundred years ago, people might have wanted to understand their place in the cosmos; some guy might have had periods at night wondering “why did I say that?”, revealing a fundamental desire to understand his self and his place in the world, but then his belly growled and the youngest (of nine) kids woke up crying with a really scary-sounding cough, and he was too busy surviving to stop and ask why.
Why do we feel lost? Because we can.
Percy’s not here to argue with me, so on occasion I will have to do it for him. I promise I’ll do my level best not to make him a straw man, but to present his rebuttal as honestly as I can. Let’s not fool ourselves, however; his responses would be much more complete (and interesting) than the ones I’m putting in his mouth.
Percy: But by any empirical measure — drug use, war deaths, suicide — there’s something wrong here.
[Mmm.. that’s actually pretty close to a straw man. But my heart’s in the right place, I promise.]
Escalating war deaths are a large theme later in the book. I wonder, though, what you would find if you normalized against population. Certainly I’ll agree that war is much more dangerous for civilians these days, but Hannibal broke a record for one-day battlefield slaughter that was only surpassed in the last one hundred years. And now that I think of it, the civilians in Carthage were eventually completely wiped out. War sucks, and it has always sucked. There is one enormous difference, now, I’ll agree… the weapons we don’t use.
Drug use and suicide I put in the “luxury” column. People don’t kill themselves very often if it means their children will starve (of course I have nothing to substantiate that claim with). You want to prevent a suicide? Make that person responsible for someone else’s life. That does make Suicide an artifact of the technological age, and even traceable to individuals being trapped in world they can’t place themselves in. So there is some level of agreement between Percy and me.
Dang, how many paragraphs was that without talking about Christianity and sex? Too many! I think it is historically accurate to say that with the rise of the Judeo-Christian tradition (and don’t forget Islam!) sexual mores changed. It would be easy to conclude causality, but there was a more fundamental revolution going on, something that gave rise to centrally-controlled religions and a complex code of sexual behavior. Cities.
I must admit now that I have no evidence to back this statement up, and I have read nothing that supports it. It just sounds right to me. This is not scholarship; it’s some guy talking.
Cities (and increasing population in general) created an unprecedented social challenge; there was a need for a whole new, externally applied and enforced code of conduct to allow so many people to live in such a small space. Those rules also allowed for an economy to exist that made services possible.
Percy: But mysticism isn’t necessary to accomplish that.
Jerry: You’re right, but it doesn’t hurt. It’s harder to question a mystery.
So, cities. People living packed together. Religion changes, sexual mores change. Religion was the embodiment of the new set of rules, and rules governing sex were naturally included. They’re tied together, but ultimately they’re just two parts of the answer to the question “how can we all live together?” Two effects of the same cause.
Now, thousands of years later, life is changing again, and what has broken religion are democracy and prosperity. Central authority still exists, but it must suffer questioning, and react to the arbitrary fiats of the consensus. You can’t do that and maintain an aura of absolute moral clarity.
For “Christian Era”, I would substitute “Urban Era”. The Urban Era is ending. Cities will still be here, bigger than ever, but I think there is a fundamental change going on nonetheless, one tied to cities finally doing what they are supposed to do: ensure the prosperity and health of its inhabitants. Even the most awful of US cities is doing a good job of this, on a historical scale. (If the Nitrogen levels in the biosphere gets any worse, we’ll be back to stonings, but for now let’s enjoy it.)
I was afraid of this. I’m deep in and almost ready to get back to the first point I wanted to make. Maybe if I repeat the sentence it will be like the previous ramble never happened…
I was almost to the end of the book when I put my finger on one of the things that was troubling me. Percy said (once again), that the world sucks. Then I remembered a point he had made earlier, possibly in the optional reading. A “world” is something we each create, a crazy network of signs and associated memories. A world is inside your head. (Saying that, Percy’s statement that the only thing we can’t put into our world is ourselves becomes obvious; it would be recursive. The world is a subset of our selves.) So when he says the world is insane, that has nothing to do with me.
Granted, there is a substantial overlap between people’s worlds, or civilization could not exist. But differences, especially in interpretation, are not just good, but I suspect in the grand scheme (a machine Percy and I could argue about at length) those differences are necessary.
I’ll try to be faster with the second point. Sorry, but there has to be a second point.
Percy discusses at length coping strategies for souls trapped in this place. It boils down to, live with it, transcend it, or kill yourself.
Obviously the most interesting option is to transcend it. (Borrowing from my off-the-cuff statement above that I’m liking more an more, the transcendent state is when you can see that the world is a part of you, rather than the other way around.) Percy lists two and exactly two paths to transcendence: Science and Art. I think there are those capable of finding other paths.
The problem with this transcendent life is that except in a few rare cases it is temporary. A scientist cannot remain in the realm of his field forever; sooner or later he has to go to the grocery store. Percy claims, and I believe, that ‘re-entry’ is much more difficult for an artist. He lists eleven modes (still the numbering!) that an artist can use to come back to Earth after living in that place where art comes from.
Seeger: what the hell is this reentry stuff? From where? To where?
Percy: What do you do?
Seeger: I’m a writer.
Percy: I see. [Writers are an especially messed-up breed, by Percy’s reckoning. I just find them annoying.] Do you drink?
Seeger: Well, yes.
Percy: [checks off item two of eleven — item one is still hanging] Where do you live?
Seeger: Prague.
Percy: You don’t say. Where before that?
Seeger: Well, kind of nowhere. The road.
Percy: [Checks off item three. He looks me over. Number four is sex. He doesn’t bother to ask. Likewise he skips over returning home, living a lie, mysticism, and suicide. Skipping ahead he rules out numbers ten and eleven, being ‘saved’ and frontal assault. He’s got a feeling about number nine, however…] Tell me about your day.
Seeger: I work on my software and I write.
Percy: All the time?
Seeger: Pretty much. I hang with my brother sometimes.
Percy: So… this whole nasty world you accuse me of creating… It could be there and you’d never know it.
Seeger: Umm….
Percy: You are one lucky man. And yet, the characters you create, the best ones, live in a world of terrifying ambiguity, a place where there is no truth, no right, no wrong, just an individual alone and adrift, knowing his actions ultimately mean nothing.
Seeger: Exactly! Now don’t you see?
Percy: …
I think that’s what Percy would say. (Option nine is to never come down, to barricade yourself against the pesky real world and not come out. Optimistically, that’s been my mode. It’s either that or I’ve never left the ground. It sure feels like I’ve been up there.) Two of the options on how an artist can deal with the real world don’t require dealing at all. Suicide and monkhood. (I think Percy had a more elegant name for it.) Option one, the one skipped over, is actually the option of last resort — a well-adjusted artist performing at a high level without showing any unusual signs of social discomfort.
Which, finally, brings me to the very heart of the difference between Percy and myself. We agree that the human is newcomer to a landscape unlike any terrain Scopes’ monkeys had to deal with. Man is self-conscious, a monumental, catastrophic and very recent development. We’re together on all that. The crazy thing about mankind, the frightful thing, is that [Jerry hesitates in his writing, thinking there might be two things, but one is more frightful] is that he can ask why. Dogs don’t ask why. I bet whales don’t ask why. Even the most ardent gorilla-language people have backed off on our primate cousins asking the Big Question.
The Question fascinates me, particularly because I don’t think there’s an absolute answer. 42? It’s as good as any. Maybe that’s why people with Answers bother me; I don’t even understand the question, but I’m pretty sure there is no answer. Absolutes are all false.
King Arthur: Go find the grail!
Sir Jerry: But it doesn’t exist.
King Arthur: And…?
Sir Jerry: I’ll find it or die trying.
In the above scene, King Arthur is another part of my head that I understand even more poorly than most parts.
Man is a creature of contradictions, able to believe contradictory things, to hold them in his head at the same time. This is perhaps the triumph of symbolic thought, that complex systems can be reduced to an idea, and fundamentally conflicting ideas, in their reduced states, can be entertained simultaneously. Thus people who can read can vote to not teach evolution in their schools. It makes no sense whatsoever, but here we find the most fundamental trait of humanity. We don’t make sense.
Above, when Percy cited the characters in my stories, he pointed out that they were lost, searching for meaning where none existed, islands in an ocean they didn’t understand. (Maybe I’m embellishing on the words I previously put in his mouth.) It’s true. But…
The difference between Percy and me is that, ultimately, whatever words you want to wrap it in, he sees man as having a terrible dark side. I see man as having a terrible dark side that makes him interesting enough to justify his existence.
Not included in this episode: Consciousness and Evolution and Language and the Unnameable Self. Seriously, if you like thinking, you can do a hell of a lot worse than Lost in the Cosmos. I have mentioned more than once that this book pissed me off, but what some folks don’t catch is that that’s high praise. I said somewhere that I’d like to argue with Walker Percy over beers sometime, and if he wants to throw down I’ll be there. The thing is that jargon exists for a reason; in any given field it’s important for a word to mean a particular thing. The first half of the discussion would be a tutorial. After that poor Walker would discover that nothing I have to say is actually new.
Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle
Quite a night at the Little Café
Start with the beginning, people say, but tonight’s story starts with the end.
“You are a workaholic,” she says, stumbling on the word in a heartbreakingly beautiful way.
“I am,” I admit. “But I’m happy.” With those words I formally removed myself from the list of potential replacements for the boyfriend she thinks is about to dump her. I had just explained to her that I would be a terrible boyfriend, and she believed me. I was convincing.
I was talking to Martin when she came in. She is striking, and where in the US tall girls often feel awkward, she was a tall woman wearing tall shoes. Tall is not a sin here. (I think I’ll move to Japan.) I’ve seen her several times before, but tonight she struck me harder than usual. Enough that I made a comment to Martin.
Ah, Martin. It warms my cold, desolate heart to see him with Leigh. Things have been pissy between them for the last few days; there’s a lot going on for them all at once, including a career-making (or busting) panel appearance for Leigh. Then there’s the part where they’re buying their first place together. They showed up tonight and I happily put down my book. They told me in a good-natured way about the squabbles they’d been having, and as I wondered why it was me that heard this, I also felt that these guys had what it takes to last. They’re in love, and it’s possible to be in love and be angry at the same time. At some level they know that.
Anyway, Leigh decided to take off before she had even ordered. She wasn’t feeling well, and just wanted to be home. I can understand that. Martin said he would be home at 11:05 — five minutes after the bar closed, less than an hour hence. He promised. She left.
We chatted, Martin and I, about this and that, all fascinating topics I’m sure, only one of which I remember. “I would stay away from one so young,” Martin said, in reference to the girl who had just walked in. “But that’s just me…” She never struck me as that young, myself.
The big hand was moving uphill, the little hand inching toward eleven, when I ordered my last beer for the night. I chatted with Martin some more. No beer arrived, and closing time was fast approaching. “Technical difficulties,” I was told. No fear, I would be served my beer. That snafu looked to push my night past 11:05, and Martin decided I should not drink my last beer alone. He called the Missus.
While it might seem quite reasonable to you and me to delay ones return home because ones buddy’s beer was slow in coming, I was nonetheless grateful for Leigh’s perspective and her extension of Martin’s curfew. He made another promise: 11:23. My beer finally arrived, he had another, and we talked some more. Time passed.
The universe would be a lot cooler if time would just chill out once in a while.
The time: 11:15. Martin still has most of a beer in front of him. In eight minutes he must be home. “You’re running out of time, dude,” I said (or something like that). “You better start drinking.” He looked at the clock on the wall, then in shock turned to his watch for confirmation. He was out of time. He reached for… his phone.
“No!” said I. “Better to leave half a beer on the table than to make that call! Just go home!”
He made the call. I only heard one side of the phone conversation, but the best part for me was when he said, “Yeah, Jerry said you would kill me…” We had a laugh about that before Martin left at 11:20. He’s three minutes from home if he walks quickly.
He was barely out the door, I had picked up my book but had yet to scan the point I left off, when the astonishingly beautiful woman slid next to me. “What are you reading?” she asked.
“Philosophy, but it’s pissing me off again.”
We talked for quite a while. Out of some chivalrous impulse I defended her boyfriend until I had to admit that he was a spoiled little baby who wanted to go out and play but always wanted someone to come home to. We both agreed she’d be better off without him. That’s when I explained what a horrible boyfriend I would be.
“You are a workaholic”, she said, stumbling on the word in a heartbreakingly beautiful way.
The Perfect Excuse
Tonight I walked into the Little Café Near Home with no beard. My beard rarely comes off but I have been in this place with a naked face before. Franta, who sports an ill-kempt gray beard himself, gave me a hard time about it. I said something not provably false: It’s because of a woman. (Secretly I suspected that this whole audition for the role of a butler was a plot by sister in law and mother of sister in law to get me to shave. It turns out I underestimated them and their conniving ways. I am a) shaven b) family looked out for, and c) a potential coup with the client, anticipating his needs before he does.
I’m good with that.
So tonight I’m clean-shaven, though not terribly respectable, and I can honestly (though deceptively) blame a woman. It was the perfect, unassailable explanation. A woman. Men have done far stupider things than shave for a woman, and they always will. Rather than harsh on me, the guys at the bar thought, man, he got off light. When I said the beard would be back soon, they nodded in understanding.
I had typed that the dumbest things men do, they do to impress women, but the counterexamples came flooding into my head. Genocide, and shit like that. Honestly, now that I think about it, the best things men do are to impress women. Leave him to himself and man is an idiot.
Dislocated Life
Today I sent a message to a friend. “What country are you in?” I asked. After I sent that message, I stopped to think about it. I can have a conversation with someone and have no idea where on the planet he is. His location, for all practical purposes, is a number; the disposition of the atoms that carry around his consciousness has become secondary.
We are all (those of us with mobile phones, anyway) disembodied voices, placeless. Until recently, when you spoke to someone, you knew exactly where they were, within shouting range. Then the telephone came along, but if you didn’t know where the person was, you still knew where their phone was. Now a person’s location is more like a probability cloud, to borrow from physics. When someone talks to me, I am most likely in my neighborhood, and the farther afield you imagine, the less likely you are to find me there. Some people are a lot harder to guess, their cloud is much more diffuse.
Of course, if physics really applied, then the less certain we were of where we are, the more certain we’d be about where we’re going. I think it’s pretty safe to say that’s not the case.
But if my mobile phone is allowing me to transcend location, if the meaningful idea of who I am is projected by this placeless device, where am I during those (fairly frequent) periods when I’m not answering the phone?
I’ll always remember What’s Her Name.
The guy who runs the little café near home is, by all accounts, a jerk. There’s been some turnover in the staff lately, but when I came back from the mini road trip I found the owner’s girlfriend long gone and in her place there was What’s Her Name. I’ve mentioned her before. I have, in my day, exchanged words with more than a couple of bartenders, and often the connection is an illusion constructed to enhance tips, but around here there are no tips.
She looked over my shoulder as I practiced my Czech, something I was awkward with at first, but I quickly got used to. She was practicing her English at the same time, and her advice and expansions were welcome. Somewhere around the time I managed to pronounce Kristina and Kristyna differently, I knew we had become friends. Apparently most people who share What’s Her Name’s name have given up on the distinction. She’s Moravian, though, and they like to get things right. Apparently her speech was a little too formal for the crowd here. That’s the way she tells it, anyway; she never felt welcome.
Under the incandescent light of the bar she was not what you might term a classic beauty. Whatever that means. There is the beauty her boyfriend has captured with his camera, and let me just tell you, hoo-dang somewhere between the eyes and the lips, with a side order of wild hair, I’m sold on the photographs. Wow.
But my What’s-Her-Name is not the beautiful, passionate woman in the photos. Those photos remind me of just how much I’m not an artist. I see them and I know I’m just a hack, some guy spewing words, and I’ll never be able to match that expression in that photograph, the one when she’s looking straight into the camera and there’s only one word (the other 999 unnecessary) and that word is yes.
She is leaving now. She’s worried that her boss is going to rip her off on the way out the door, but overall glad she won’t be working for him anymore. It’s a pity. She had an almost American-style friendliness, and she responded well to my American-style humor. Now, she will join the legion of bartenders I’ve met, connected with, only to have one of us (usually me, given my wandering ways) move on.
Will I see her again? That’s a tricky thing, isn’t it?
Bam!
So, have you ever been writing a story, and you realize there’s something missing, and it’s a movie screenplay so what’s missing is pretty basic — no rocket science here — and you have two cool scenes that don’t come to satisfying resolutions but then you realize they are the setup for the two main characters to be in a showdown where each believes they have to win to save the other’s life, and while they’re standing there, both capable of incredible destruction while surrounded by legions of gun-wielding thugs, one says the exactly perfect thing to put them into harmony against the hordes?
Yeah. Me too.
AiA: White Shadow – Episode 4
Our story so far: Allison is an American high-school student who has transferred to a private prep school in Japan. In this Japan, transfer students bring trouble close on their heels, and her classmates are hard at work trying to figure out just what form that trouble will take. Is she a demon? A killer Robot? Seiji, the boy who sits next to her in class, just wants to be out of the crossfire, but he knows the signs and there’s big trouble heading his way. Allison, of course, understands none of this.
Meanwhile, there is a computer virus running around, called White Shadow, that somehow infects the minds of computer users. Some of her classmates have fallen victim and have been shipped off to the Institure. Allison’s “uncle” (actually a distant relative) seems to have fallen victim as well; he has been sitting at his computer, staring blankly, for days.
If you would like to read from the beginning, the entire story is here.
Allison was afraid to look into her uncle’s office, but she just couldn’t stop herself. The room was almost filled with electronics now, a cybernetic womb with her uncle at its center, bathed on all sides now by the radiation from the monitors. On some flashed images, seemingly at random, from all around the world, while others showed quickly-transforming schematics and streams of text. The wash of information was hypnotic, drawing her into the room. Beneath the torrent there was something else, some structure, some deeper meaning, a secret of infinite value. She was sure of it.
Allison moved toward the focus of the information, and now she heard snatches of sound, voices in every language, music, sounds of nature and sounds of the city. Yes, yes, that helped.
She had forgotten her uncle until she bumped into him. “Sorry,” she said distractedly, annoyed that he should have the best spot. She looked down at him where he sat, then recoiled in horror. Wires, tubes, and… things, pulsing with life, were coming from the machines around him and going straight into his arms and legs, distending his skin. Those were nothing compared to his face, however. A host of filaments emerged from his cheeks, his ears, eyes and mouth.
Allison stepped back, turned to run, when her Uncle’s face came on one of the monitors directly in front of her, then another and another until he was surrounding her. She twisted around frantically; she didn’t like having him looking over her shoulder.
“It is not how it appears,” her uncle said from the screens.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Your new friends think I am a victim of White Shadow. You know that’s not true.”
“Listen, I’ve got to go…”
Suddenly Uncle’s voice was a roar that filled the room, crushing Allison. “DO I LOOK LIKE A VICTIM? Do I look like one of your pathetic little friends hooked on his video game?”
Allison shrank in on herself under the barrage. The voice softened.
“I have become more than that. More than human. I am White Shadow! I created it, just as it created me.”
Maybe I should call the cops, Allison thought, or an ambulance.
“The authorities cannot stop us,” Uncle said.
Allison already had a bad feeling about that. “Umm… us?”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Uncle said.
Oh, shit, she thought.
“But you are not ready. You will return.” Uncle’s face disappeared from the monitors, and once more the patterns and crush of imagery returned. Allison staggered from the room and sagged against the wall outside in the hallway, gasping for breath. She heard noises behind her and ran from the house without turning to look. She was not going to trip on something while running and looking over her shoulder.
She slammed the front door behind her and fought to control her breath.
Maybe someone at school would know what to do.
She shook her head. Who am I fooling? she thought. No one will believe me. They’ll all think I’m crazy. I’ll just find another place to live. In the meantime, I won’t go into that room. She started up the street.
A moving van passed, going slowly, while a little boy chased after it. “Wait! Come back!” he cried. From the cab a little girl was waving and shouting some sort of incomprehensible promise back at the boy. That seemed to happen a lot around here. Maybe it was a tradition when families moved, for the neighborhood kids to chase after them to let them know they would be missed.
The kid staggered to a halt, and the van sped away. There was no other traffic on the road at all. There was never traffic. For all this was a bustling, populous city, she wasn’t sure why they even had roads outside the city center. For the moving vans, she supposed.
Try as she might to distract herself, her thoughts kept returning to the monitors in her uncle’s office. There was something there, beneath the seemingly random stream of information. Something big, world-changing even. The sound had helped. Maybe if she could see all the monitors at once…
“Hey, space cadet!”
Allison snapped out of her reverie and turned to see the one boy who was nice to her hurrying up behind her. “Hi, Kaneda,” she said. She wasn’t in the mood for company, but she wasn’t in the mood to be alone, either. It was something else, she wanted, a different form of communion—
“Heellloooo! Jeez, Allison, you really are spaced out this morning. Is everything OK?”
For a moment she considered telling him about her morning, but she decided against it. He had just started being nice to her, and if he told the rest of the boys in the class she was crazy then none of them would ever talk to her again. She would find a way to deal with this on her own. Maybe if she understood the patterns she would know what to do.
In her distracted state she didn’t hear the rumble of the skateboard wheels until too late. “Watch out!” Daisuke shouted just before he crashed into her. Allison spun to the ground, scraping her knee again, her books flying again.
Allison looked up and for the first time since she arrived she was genuinely angry. This wasn’t a cultural difference, this was just plain rude. “Watch where you’re going, you jerk!” she called out to the retreating boy. He turned in wide-eyed surprise at the anger in her voice, and at that moment his board hit a pebble and he tumbled to the sidewalk. “I’m sorry!” he cried as he jumped back on and skated away even faster than before.
Kaneda didn’t respond. “They’re… white…” he choked out in a tiny voice. A trickle of blood came ouit his left nostril.
Allison blushed and jumped up. Damn this short skirt! She turned on Kaneda. “If you were a gentleman you’d help me up instead of staring!”
Kaneda shrank back. “Don’t hurt me! I’m sorry!”
She stooped — carefully — and began to collect her books. “At least last time I met someone with manners,” she grumbled.
Too late Kaneda jumped to help her. “Oh?” he asked with an air of indifference. “Who was that?”
Allison remembered the stranger’s voice and his tall, lanky good looks. “I didn’t get his name. He probably thought I was an idiot.”
“He’s not in our class?”
“No, he was older, I think. But he seemed to know about the academy.”
Kaneda’s interest seemed to be growing, as much as he tried to hide the fact. “What did he look like?”
Allison remembered his eyes, almost violet — indigo, perhaps — and deep as the ocean. His voice had been deep and clear, like a mountain lake, but warm as well. “Kind of tall,” she said, “his hair was messy.”
Kaneda gave a calculated shrug. “That could be lots of guys.” They turned once more toward school.
When they reached class there was an excited buzz going around the room. “What’s going on?” Allison asked.
“Didn’t you hear?” Ruchia said excitedly. “City 12b is almost ready!”
“City 12b?”
“Yeah!” Tasuki said. “It’s the best!”
“Beaches,” Ruchia said dreamily.
“Shops,” said Kano. “And boys.”
Hitomi said, “The bay is excellent for swimming, and the mysterious island is quite harmonious.”
“12b?” Allison asked. “Doesn’t it have a name?”
“Not yet, silly,” Kano said. “Not until someone lives there.”
Ruchia understood Allison’s confusion. “Here in Japan, we number our backup cities until people move into them.”
“Backup cities?”
“Of course. So when a city gets destroyed the people have somewhere to go.”
Allison was speechless.
“Don’t you have backup cities in America?”
“Well… no.”
“That’s horrible! You just leave everyone homeless?”
Allison supposed she should be flattered that the entire class had conspired to pull her leg like this. Across the room she heard a boy say, “12b! Do you think it will be ready in time? I heard they’re still rusticizing.”
“… problems with the plum blossom system…” she caught from another part of the room. But then she started to see the giveaway signs. Everyone was furtively glancing her direction, to gague her reaction to the joke. Allison hd never felt farther from home.
It was not until the lunchtime Emergency Committee meeting that Kouta and Seiji were able to debrief Kaneda.
“Well,” Kaneda started, “I saw her teeth.”
“You made her smile?”
“Uh, actually, she was shouting at the time, but I saw them.”
“And…?”
“No demon teeth. As mad as she was, I think they would have been noticeable. But she sure seemed like a demon. She knocked Daisuke off his skateboard from twenty meters. She was scary.”
Seiji nodded. “I heard about that already. It’s all over school.” He chuckled. “I bet the kid watches where he’s going a little better now.”
“Maybe she’s a killer angel,” Kouta mused. “They’ve been on the rise lately.”
“Daisuke’s lucky she didn’t kill him. I’ve never been more afraid than I was when she caught me… uh…”
Seiji looked his friend in the eye with cold fire. “What did you do?”
“Well, uh, I found out she wears white panties.”
“Of course she does,” Kouta said irritably. “She’s a transfer student. You mean with that skirt you still hadn’t noticed?”
“Well, there’s seeing, and then there’s… seeing.”
The boys stood for a moment in silent appreciation of the seeing. “She didn’t punch you?” Seiji asked.
“No. I thought I was dead, I thought she was going to knock me into the stratosphere, but then she was just sarcastic.”
Seiji lapsed into silence. He had dared to hope that Kaneda would be the one, and the panty-sighting had seemed like a good omen. But then, no violence. The poor sap who was bound to a transfer student would never survive a panty-sighting unscathed. Was sarcastic enough? Seiji didn’t think so.
Kaneda was not the one. He would blindly chase Allison, but he would never be the one. Kouta was a possibility, but his mother was still alive, and that made him a long shot. Seiji didn’t like the way the math was working out. He didn’t like anything about this whole mess.
“There’s one other thing,” Kaneda said. “Kenzo’s back.”
“What?”
“He talked to her. On her first day of school.”
“How do you know?”
“She was asking if I knew someone she had met. Tall, spiky hair.”
“That could be anyone.”
“It was him. She got that look. The look all the girls get when they think about Kenzo.”
“He didn’t waste any time,” Seiji said. “First day of school. Before we even knew she was coming.”
“I don’t like it,” Kouta said. “That guy’s trouble.”
Kaneda swallowed. “I hope they get 12b ready quickly.”
“They better have another city ready after that one,” Seiji said.
“What do you mean?”
“This is just chapter one. The wacky old monks told me so.”
A New Superhero
During my travels in the US I actually watched TV a couple of times, and one show I saw was about cephalopods. You’ve got your octopuses (if you want to get all snooty, don’t uses ‘octopi’, that would be a Latin plural on a Greek word. ‘Octopi’ is false erudition. The formal plural would be octopodes, with the accent on the top. But I digress.), your squids, and your cuttlefish.
In this television show they had some mind-boggling footage of cuttlefish, which have developed some amazing system that gives them muscular control over the color of their skins. They flashed colors and patterns across their bodies, sometimes one pattern on the side with the female (everything’s cool, baby), and an entirely different pattern on the side with the rival male (back off, chump).
Give fine enough motor control, a cuttlefish could play a movie on his skin.
It wasn’t until the second beer tonight that I considered what it would be like to have cuttlefish skin. Some people are worried about genetic manipulation, that it would lead to frivolous modifications of the human form. I’ve got my shopping list right here, and it starts with wings. Cuttlefish skin is right up there, though, probably even edging out gills and wheels.
Cuttlefish-man the superhero would rock. A master of disguise and ingenious at camouflage, he works out by displaying “tattoos”, then animating them running around on his skin.
I picture a superhero job interview that goes something like: “Cuttlefish-man? What the hell kind of name is that?” The interviewer looks up from the resume he is scannning to discover the chair in front of his desk is empty — until a pair of square-slitted eyes blink somewhere in the air over the back of the chair. Cuttlefish-man reappears (he would have to be bald, I suppose). “That’s what kind” he would say without a hint of smugness.
Science note: while invisibility is impossible (and even if it were possible the invisible man would be blind… Holy crap! what a great moment! The lab accident makes him invisible, but the point is completely meaningless to him because his eyes don’t work anymore! The light passes right through his retinas. It would go something like: *Lab Explodes* “Oh, shit I can’t see!” “Where are you?” “I’m right here but I’m blind, I’m blind!” “But I can’t see you!” “Dude, that’s seriously not funny. Help me!” He would imagine himself the way any adult who lost their sight imagined themselves. As far as his senses are concerned, he is completely ordinary. A blind invisible man would be the best superhero ever — uh, except Cuttlefish-Man, of course, who we’re talking about here…), it is possible to project an image that from a certain point of view is indistinguishable from invisibility.
Of course, it’s not all fun and games for the newest entry in the super-pantheon. Cuttlefish-man has inherited the shy, retiring nature of his namesake, which makes it awkward when he has to work naked. Bruce Wayne is bugging him all the time for skin samples, so he can develop his own “cuttle-suit”. He is awkward around women, worried that he’s going to light up like a billboard when she leans toward him over the table. That doesn’t actually happen — or, at least not very often — but his ears turn awfully red.
Late-Night Musings
It’s one of those times, right now, when you see things and they seem somehow more significant, tied, in some intangible way, to a deeper pattern, some kind of secret that’s almost within reach but skitters away whenever you look directly at it. Those hints, those glimpses, could be anything, and in the end are nothing.
There are two marks on the doorway leading into the kitchen, one labeled “day”, the other, a centimeter below that, labeled “nite”. They are above me as I walk past, an artifact of the Soup Boy days, an empirical resolution of a debate with his girlfriend. Yes, you really do wake up taller than you go to bed. I knew that from adjusting the mirrors in my car twice a day (I do like to have the glass just right), but there they are, the two heights of Soup Boy. I wonder, if you measured carefully enough, if you would discover that gravity is winning. I wonder if the night is a short victory but we never make up the ground we lost the day before.
But it’s not gravity that’s the enemy, now that I think of it. Gravity just wants me to fall, it pulls on all of me equally. That’s what orbit is, not a lack of gravity but a constant falling, without ever hitting anything. It is not gravity that is crushing me, but the ground pushing up against my feet.
Before getting up to look around the apartment, finding things I’d stopped seeing long since, I caught up a bit with back podcasts of Writer’s Almanac. I tend to listen to them in bunches when I’m in a mood like this one. Poetry is always better when you feel adrift, when the Big Mystery is teasing you.
Earlier I spent the evening working on a bit of prose that I really shouldn’t be spending time on. It’s self-indulgent, pretentious prose, which is certainly pleasant to write, but I got no time for that kind of shit. (Except, of course for this blog.) It’s an odd marriage of a favorite anecdote of mine and some of the thoughts thrust upon me by Lost in the Cosmos.
The anecdote:
I was sitting in a café listening to two writers talking together. Also present were a couple of college students, female, obviously very impressed by finding themselves in a foreign city in the presence of Actual Artists, who were having an Actual Discussion. I sat a little back from the table, not commenting and at one point I chuckled to myself at something one of the other writers said. The girls sitting next to me looked at me quizzically; no one else seemed to notice the joke.
I leaned back further and said, “They’re not listening to each other. It’s two monologues.” She turned her ear back to them and realized that her Actual Artists were really just talking at each other. No information moved in either direction. She smiled and we shared the joke, feeling vaguely superior to the others at the table.
In that girl’s view, she was in the presence of Actual Artists, and some Other Guy, one who was mysterious, not a talker so obviously a thinker, one who saw through the games of the Artists, a man of penetrating insight. Was I also a writer? Why was I there? With a little chuckle I had gone from being unnoticed to being the towering intellect of the little meeting.
I was also the only one not hitting on the girls. I would have, believe me, but I couldn’t figure a way to do that without becoming part of my own joke. In the end it was pride that stopped me.
So the story I wrote is based on that, loosely. I was asking myself, “what if I actually was like the Other Guy the girl imagined she was sitting next to? What might have happened next?” There are some good bits in the scene (and some pretty lousy ones), although the characters surrounding the guy are far more interesting than the guy himself. That feels about right.
As I write this I hear the rumble of the night tram in the distance, cautious as it passes over the switches at Starostrašnická. I wonder who’s on it right now, where they’re coming home from. I wonder if they will remember this night, or would prefer to forget. I wonder if they are lonely.