HEADNOTE

“Journal of the Third Wolf” is a letter to my descendants about my interior life (and my life as an “Ear Witness,” to use Elias Canetti’s wonderful term) which anyone at all is welcome to read. What new readers do is their own business, but my advice is to start where it starts — with the first, or “oldest,” entry. The journal reads from top to bottom, like words on the page, not from bottom to top like a proper blog. The date at the top, September 22, means nothing; it’s just when I started. And a note to frequent readers: I revise the entries from time to time, putting new stuff in old places; thus there will probably be entries you haven’t seen in places you’ve already slogged through — especially audio clips and photos. I apologize for the likely inconvenience, but I can’t figure out any other way to do what I want to do here.

JOURNAL ENTRIES

I remind myself of the indolent sultan who loved to awaken from a long reverie only for the sheer joy of sinking blissfully into another one — or of actually going to sleep.

Why I Started this Journal. Two main reasons. The first is the same as Montaigne’s for starting to write his little essays in the late sixteenth century — to let my descendants know what their antecedent was like on the inside. (Montaigne also had his portrait painted for them, as in his day absolutely everything about a person vanished when that person died — except for his existence in the memories of those who would soon die themselves. Thankfully, we have throwaway cameras today and all too many images of all our boring relatives—including all those my descendants have of me. But they have nothing from inside.) When my mother died, she left nothing — just a few newsy letters to her relatives in Tennessee and twenty or thirty Kodak snapshots taken over a fifty-year period. Ditto for my father. But right after his funeral, his sister Margie gave me a little metal box which had once been used for fishing tackle. Inside it were his “personal effects.” These included his wire-rimmed spectacles (bifocal), his carefully scrubbed Saran-wrapped dentures, a wad of (to me) meaningless business papers, and snippings of all the polemical letters-to-the-editor he’d published in the Louisville Courier-Journal over his long lifetime (most of which I’d read previously). Now, when I teach Montaigne, which I do all the time, I take that box in and start things off by showing it to my seminar. “Montaigne left a lot more,” I tell them. “I wish my father had. I wish my mother had. Tell your parents to start writing to you about the life inside themselves. And remember to write to your own kids, if you have them, while you’re still alive.”

The second reason has to do with my one special talent or special state of grace. I have always possessed it, or lived within it. I am particularly blessed by what I just call Hearing Things. Nothing “mystical,” nothing about “channeling,” nothing “supernatural.” Nothing like any of that. I just hear things in my daily rounds, usually speech, of a sort that no one else seems to hear—or to remember. Some are said just to anyone within earshot. Some are said just to me (or “for my benefit”). Many of these things are just plain hilarious, and they always have been. Most are somehow ironic. Some are filthy. I tell family and friends (and even students) what I heard and they say, “God, I could go for a YEAR and not hear anything that great!” So it seems to be something pretty much unique to me (although it could certainly not be literally unique to me), as I have never heard anyone else speak of it—of its centrality through the years of their lives. Its centrality through the years of my own life is the primary evidence I possess that there could be some basis for believing in a personally experienced religion.

So in “Journal of the Third Wolf” I am going to pass on to you some of the Hearing Things stuff from my life past and present. Why, here’s an example just fresh from today! I am standing in the checkout line at the Food Lion. It is a long line (one of three or four), it is moving at a snail’s pace (they all are), it is 90-plus degrees outside, and the air conditioning is out. All of a sudden a very shrill siren alarm goes off by the Exit Doors. A loud recorded bass voice shouts: “Stop where you are! Return your merchandise to the checkout counter immediately! You have not paid for your merchandise!” All eyes turn to the Exit Doors, where two frightened-looking women with a gaggle of screaming children are standing with their filled carts, eyes looking wildly around. Then a loud REAL voice, the voice of one of the checkout women (who turns out to be the Store Manager), shouts: “JUST GO ON OUT THROUGH THE DOORS! DON’ PAY NO ‘TENTION TO THAT THING! WE AIN’T HAD THE TRAININ’ FOR IT!” So the women pass on through the doors, and somebody turns off the recorded voice and the siren alarm, and the Store Manager yells to everybody within earshot, “HOW THEY ’SPECT US TO CATCH US NO SHOPLIFTERS IF WE AIN’T HAD THE TECHNICAL TRAINING FOR IT?” Whereupon one of the other checkout woman nods dramatically and shouts, “Yolanda, you can by GOD say THAT again!”

My poor students wring their hands and tell me they worry endlessly about being “unproductive.” I tell them they should stop worrying. I tell them that productivity is one of the primary “evil virtues.” Junk in every direction, as far as the eye can see. Most of it ugly, useless, or both. “Look ABOUT you!” I tell them. “Shit EVERYWHERE!” Almost all of them immediately agree, although appearing shocked at the thought. They say they wonder why they never thought of that before. I wonder why with them. But the answer must be that they have never looked about themselves.

My students also say they they feel guilty when they “lose their optimism” — even for a day — when something bad happens to them or they hear about something bad happening to somebody else somewhere. I tell them that optimism is a very new idea in our culture — that it was introduced into intellectual parlance by Leibniz, then popularized by Voltaire in the novel Candide. An eighteenth century idea, in other words — no older. (And one that Voltaire himself hated — or thought hilarious.) Before that time all thoughtful people thought of an optimistic attitude as INSANITY. Which of course it is. Again, I tell my students: “Look ABOUT you!” And they say, “Yes, but we’re SUPPOSED to be optimists.” And I say, “Ever wonder why?”

People under thirty (unless they are untypically “experienced” in the Jimi Hendrix sense) tend to devalue the claims of experienced people who hold up their experience as a foundation from which to claim authoritative knowledge in disputed questions about what “life is really like.” The kid thinks the experienced person is cynical, and the cynical person things the kid is naive — same as it ever was. The only way to convince unbelieving people that experience is invaluable is to point to specific examples while in a discussion group of at least three or four. My favorite example is the inextricable connection between New Age-ism and grifterism. It is an inevitable coming-together, because New Agers really don’t believe other people exist — that the only world that matters is inside their heads, and thus that “I am the only thing that is really real.” If you are the only thing that is really real, then anything you do is good only to the extent that it benefits you. Which is why every New Age person I’ve ever known has been a con artist to the bone. If you are in a group of three or four, and if anyone other than you in that group is over thirty, and if you make the claim I have just made, all the experienced people will agree and all the inexperienced will not.

The inexperienced are, in other words, marks.

Experience will fix this. Nothing else can.

My students ask me what use logic is — what use things like syllogisms are in the real world. I ask them how many believe in God. About two-thirds raise their hands. I ask them how many believe there is only one God. The same hands, usually. So then I ask those students how many believe that this one God hears prayer. Same hands. I draw a circle on the blackboard and put a big “G” inside it. I draw twenty or other little circles around the big one. “These represent about a billion people,” I say. Two of the little circles I label “Bush” and “bin Ladn.” “Here is a syllogism that I think is worth something in the real world,” I tell them. “See if you can bust it.” The syllogism is: If there is a God, and if there is only one, and if that God hears prayer, then George W. Bush and Osama bin Ladn are actually being heard by the same God when they pray.” They are shocked. They try to bust it. They cannot. They agree, most of them, that it is very useful indeed.

Some people, when discussing (say) their problems, are forever saying things like: “Well, that’s an important part of the equation,” or “That’s just part of the equation,” or “That’s certainly a part of the equation that can’t be left out.” Why is it that there is never any equation whatsoever in their previous discourse to which they can possibly be referring? And, this being so, what in God’s name do they think they are talking about when they use it?

I was so happy the day I figured out the essence of true “primary” narcissism — of my own and of all others. It is the passion to possess the elusive person in order to have the luxury of rejecting him or her.

For all true narcissists, platinum is everything they want but cannot possess — value. Shit is everything they have successfully managed, by hook or by crook, to possess.

Not having ANY desire for a cigarette, or for a shot of heroin, twenty years after twenty years of addiction, is a narcissist’s paradise. “It wants me, and it wants me bad. But I don’t need it. I scorn it. It is excrement. I piss upon it from a great height.”

Simple pop narcissism is that of the hunchback who looks in the mirror and says “On me it looks good.”

My theory is that the memory “materials” (they aren’t really material, but just play along) of jokes, dreams, and fictional stories are some sort of flimsier, finer, more gossamer-like, more perishable stuff than the memory materials of real life. Which is why we can’t remember them, no matter how much we vow to try to do so. (Unless they contain a graphic image which either horrifies us or so stimulates us to erotic response that we are brought to orgasm — or both at once.) When Shakespeare said that WE are “such stuff as dreams are made on,” he knew what he was talking about: we will be forgotten not just shortly after we die, but as soon as we age to the point in our mortal lives that we cease being marketable.

I think the three key ingredients of good teaching are: 1.) First, do no harm (as with the apocryphal Item One of the Hippocratic Oath); 2.) Know a lot about what you teach and be passionately interested in it; 3.) Be someone who has had the good fortune of having personally experienced endless years of horrible teaching (preferably including parenting) yourself — so you know so easily what is missing and hence needed so badly by one student or a roomful of students. Each of the three is necessary but not sufficient. But all three, taken together, are sufficient.

More Pedagogical Bullshit. This takes off from a question about “identity” from an interview with me this past spring on the NPR/Smithsonian/Story Corps Deal:

Life Down South: I walk along the street in the summer sun and pass three obviously prosperous middle-aged lawyers in their seersucker suits drinking cokes on a trial break. One of them points to his forehead: “See that little brown scar? That there’s where the bullet went in. I didn’t feel nothin’. Doctors say their ain’t nothin’ in my brain. So naw, I ain’t worried.”

“They are right, of course. And fuck them!” What Gustav Flaubert wrote in his journal as he sat at his desk in his black and pink silk dressing gown, ten minutes after having arisen at 4:00 p.m. and having his first cigar of the day, upon looking out his study window and seeing three happy petit-bourgeois families out behind their houses in their gardens, babbling children everywhere.

My first talent to show up was for drawing and painting. I was thought to be a prodigy — but, as I now know, I was not. When I was ten or eleven, I actually won one of those “Draw Me” correspondence courses — from something called Art Instruction, Inc., in Chicago. (The instructional materials were surprisingly terrific, but the correspondence instructors themselves were execrable.) I didn’t finish. But I did go on to major in painting in college. I didn’t really enjoy drawing and painting by then — something about moving from doing it on the floor on my stomach to doing it at an easel standing up. By the time I graduated, I was totally bored with it. I had three reasons. First, I felt imprisoned in the normal rectangle, but no matter how one might try to avoid rectangle after rectangle by doing round or triangular or trapezoidal pictures, the result was always this dopey exercise in self-consciousness — in too-obviously seeming to “want to be different.” Second, I hated the smell and downright gloppy mess of painting (although I was ashamed of saying so at the time, for fear of seeming either unmanly or unwomanly or otherwise sterile or artificial in my abhorrence of “natural”-seeming things). Third, I couldn’t stand the way the thing never moved after you painted it. It just sat there staring back at you (or at whomever) for all eternity — or, until like Albert Ryder’s, it wore out because you’d used the cheapest possible materials.

When I was 22 and on my first teaching gig at Wisconsin State University, I saw an ad soliciting entries for a big regional painting show in Little Rock. The chief juror would be a woman named Katherine Kuh, a very big deal at the time, who wrote for The Saturday Review of Literature. I had never entered a show before. I knew I was going to Little Rock for Christmas with my wife’s family, so I painted a huge picture of a Pierrot-like matador looking all post-coitally depressed (like Truman Capote in his first book-jacket photos for Other Voices, Other Rooms) after having sunk the coup de grace sword into the (now-dead) bull. It was fashionably cartoonish for its time and on the whole pretty good. (It is now lost, although photos exist. Cormac McCarthy: “Three moves is as good as a housefire.”) When we drove down to Little Rock in the du rigueuer Volkswagen Beetle, we took it with us in the back seat, its huge canvas all rolled up and ready to be re-framed. But it turned out that I actually had to re-frame it on the premises of the gallery itself, as there was nothing big enough to carry it there in otherwise, and so this I did, hammering and nailing away for hours to the amusement of the museum guards and passers-by. I took it in, signed an entry form, and left. A month or so later, I got word back up in Wisconsin that I’d won the show. Good! I thought. Now I can quit this shit a winner. And so I did. I have never painted again, except to make birthday presents for friends who asked for paintings by me. How brilliant I was in those days!

But I cannot claim that I have not harbored the sucker’s dumb wish to leave artefacts behind — even monuments, probably. Most of my doodles through school were of rock formatiions, lovely renderings in red and green ballpoint on lined notebook paper, many of which I still have. My friends laughed about them. “You’re so transparent,” they said — especially the girlfriends — and I was. I have not left any. I doubt that I will. I am forever Getting Sentimenal Over Me about it.

And the dream is still there. To wit, here’s the actual vivid dream I had on the couch while napping away one afternoon last week forty years after doing all those doodles of rock formations: I am a statue standing amongst other statues in front of a giant stone building — a state capitol or giant library or something of the sort, something with (of course!) pillars and all that. We statues are covered in green sediment, bird droppings, and dirt turning into mud. It is a cold, gray day. It is raining. The other statues are bitching about how we should be cleaned up — restored to our pristine glory and dignity. “No,” I say. “All that is totally irrelevant. What’s important is that we’re HERE! They’ll probably clean us off someday. If so, so what? If NOT, so what? I’m just happy to be a statue here at all — and so should you be!” Upon awakening, I realized that it was just more transparent wishful thinking: just to be a statue, a monument, no matter how begrimed. It is not in the cards.

I wanted to go to college. My father did not want me to go. He was an old-time man of the hills, and he believed that men should only go to college to become doctors or lawyers. Women should go to become teachers. Nobody should go for any other reason. That was what he knew of college. We finally reached a deal: he would pay for college if I would be an agriculture major (as I had been in high school), and he could then justify the expense by reasoning that when I inherited the family farm I’d do a better job than I would do otherwise. I wanted to go to college so much that I agreed to the deal. So off I went — on the train, as one did in those days.

I hated farms and I hated agriculture, but I loved college — even with all the agriculture courses. I kept noticing all these people who fascinated me. They wore berets and cravats and sandals, and they drank “Chianti wine” (as we called it in Kentucky, cf. “Paris, France”). They smoked French cigarettes, meditated (reportedly) in front of black candles, and actually had sex (reportedly), as opposed to all the ersatz sex other students did in those days just a year or two before the pill. They were the artists — students and faculty. I had been thought to have a talent for painting (see above), and at that point, as a freshman, I still wanted to paint. Or, rather, that was what I told myself the afternoon I walked into the dean’s office and signed a paper changing majors from agriculture to art. What I really wanted, of course, was to drink Chianti wine, smoke French cigarettes, meditate in front of black candles, and have real sex all the time with long-haired women so sophisticated that they apprently knew how to have it without getting pregnant — and who would existentially peel off their black leotards to have it with me. I figured that my father, who never insisted upon anything so crass as inspecting my grades, would never know. And he never did.

The day after my freshman year ended, I went back to the farm to spend the summer — again on the train. My father asked me if I’d like to “take a walk down to the river” (the Rolling Fork). I knew this meant he wanted to have a father-to-son talk. And so we walked down there — about half a mile through the woods. I had been born terribly late in any father’s life for those days — he had been fifty-four — and so he was now seventy-three. He chain-smoked cigarettes hand-rolled from Prince Albert tobacco and rolling papers. (He’d held a life-long disdain for “hard-rolls.”) As we stood and looked at the river, he said, “Well, I want you to tell me how a year at the university has changed you. Start anywhere you like, but just tell me the important things.” Well. In those days, especially with art students the world over, the big buzzword was “alienation,” and I did indeed feel very alienated. So I started telling him about my alienation. After about ten minutes of stuttering around about it, I finally said, “I guess you could just say that I feel alienated from my religion, my country, my values, my whole culture, the whole world I grew up in.” There ensued a long silence. It made me more nervous than anything he could have actually said in response. Finally, he took his first deep draw off his newly rolled Prince Albert cigarette and exhaled for about twenty seconds, as he always did. And then he said: “Yeah, I think you are alienated, Francis [my first name — more on which later]. I think you always have been. I think you’re alienated from what you’ve always been alienated from: hard work and decent people.” He had hit the nail on the head.

To my astonishment, he hit it on the head quite often. Like the day he asked my Uncle Wayne if he was going to support Eisenhower or Stevenson. Uncle Wayne said, “Well, I’m still sittin’ on the fence there, Smoke” (my dad’s lifelong nickname). To which my dad replied, “That’s a smart thing to do if all you’re lookin’ for’s a sore ass.”

My father was a fan of nothing. He had no interests or enthusiasms — none that I could find, anyway. So my mother and I were truly shocked when he told us, sometime in the late 1950s, that he had become a Ricky Nelson fan. (We had listened to “Ozzie and Harriet” on the radio, and then we’d graduated to their TV show, and it was on that show that Ozzie pushed Ricky forward as an Elvis-imitating rock star — a push to which Ricky, who loved the music, was certainly not averse.) My father loved Ricky’s first two or three hits, especially “Travelling Man.” He asked me if I’d buy the 45 rpm record for him. I did. He played it over and over. He wanted more. I got them for him. He had always felt that Ricky Nelson was, in the Mozart sense, “beloved of God.” “That boy’s touched a humpback’s hump,” he’d say. But this was of course one of the times when he was wrong — when he’d definitely missed the nail.

When James Dean cracked up in his sports car and died, Ricky Nelson was devastated. James Dean, much more than Elvis, was his hero. So he bought the smashed-up sports car and had it perfectly restored. And he began proudly driving it around LA. At a party attended by both him and Alec Guinness, the latter told Ricky he knew he’d bought Dean’s car and restored it. He asked if he could see it sometime. “Sure, Mr. Guinness,” said Ricky. “It’s parked right outside.” As soon as Guinness set eyes on the beautiful vehicle, he was hit by a wave of fright and nausea. He glowered. “Ricky,” he said, “you would have no reason to know this, but I am something of a psychic and I’m very reliable — particularly when it comes to disasters ensuing. You must not drive that car. It is cursed.” Ricky laughed it off. Guinness insisted he was serious. They parted ways. Shortly afterward, Ricky cracked up in the car and was nearly killed. He was hospitalized for weeks and on crutches for months. Many, many years later, he was talking to Jerry Lee Lewis, another idol. He knew Jerry Lee’s battered-up touring airplane was for sale. He asked to buy it. “Ricky, you’d better not. God knows how much long this motherfucker’s got to go.” But Ricky insisted. And on New Year’s Eve around twenty-five years ago, as everybody knows, he, his whole band, and part of his family crashed in it and died. (Were they on coke, as some journalists claimed? Probably. Was that fact relevant? Probably not. They were always on coke.) It took the firefighters 36 hours to put out the fire, so intensely did it blaze on. I was glad that my father, who was wedded to the primitive hill-country Irish faith that some people, Ricky Nelson among them, were particularly beloved of God and the angels, had not lived to hear this news.

Jerry Lee Lewis is still rocking, still surviving everything. Jackson Pollock died just as James Dean and Albert Camus had died: at the wheel, pedal to the metal. When I was 22, all these people were heroes to me. I did not do what Dean and Camus did, but I did do what Pollock and Jerry Lee did: I painted abstract expressionist pictures and I played abstract expressionist rock and roll piano in a band. My friends the abstract expressionists hated rock and roll, and they particularly hated the barbarian Jerry Lee. The redneck rockers hated abstract expressionism because (obviously) it wasn’t Real Art. But I had seen Jerry Lee and Jackson Pollock perform, and I had seen them do it up close. (Pollock, admittedly, I had seen only via the now-famous documentary films in which you watch him paint from beneath a giant pane of glass — his “canvas” in these films. Jerry Lee I had seen from over his right shoulder.) I was convinced that, whatever the two of them were doing, they were doing the SAME THING. I still think so. Everybody talked about the “physicality” of drip painting back then — not for nothing was it called “action painting” — whereas the physical basis of rock and roll, even if you discount the sexual part of that basis (which you should not), was and is obvious. If you watch Pollock and Jerry Lee with an eye to being them, you can hardly fail to see the similarity: both are making mad “controlled sweeps” with their arms and hands. I think this might be easier to see if somehow monocolored three-dimensional visual tracings could be made of their respective arm movements for as little as 60 seconds each. (The resulting “pictures” would necessarily resemble Pollock’s paintings to some extent.) They are carefully (but not in a conscious sense) making the aesthete’s “unified fields” out of their repetitive sweeps, adding a little extra here and a little extra there—soucons— to break up the regularity of what they are doing and making. They are simply doing the same thing over and over in the air with their arms, without thought, and doing it with more than enough rhythmical force to make the proverbial “strong statement” — in spades — which is the only condition for big-time success in the modern arts which is both necessary and sufficient. The streams of paint flowing from Pollock’s brushes and wooden sticks are like the fingers of Jerry Lee Lewis, and the tip of the colored stream that hits the canvas is like one of the tips of his fingers as it hits the keyboard: exquisitely fine tuning, but (thankfully) damned little of it. Long ago I concluded that it is not necessary to be either anti-intellectual or stupid to do what they do — which is getting the mind out of it and letting the body take over. But I also concluded that it may be necessary that one not have learned how to “really play” or “really paint” in order to be a true virtuoso genius at such painting and playing. (In saying this, I am aware that Pollock was schooled under Thomas Hart Benton et alia, and that Lewis learned by listening to the black masters in the churches and clubs in rural Louisiana. But I don’t think this fact constituted, in either case, formal education in the two respective arts.) Am I making an implicit argument for either anti-intellectualism or the advantages of not having a formal education (in the arts or anything else)? No. All I’m saying is that doing what Pollock and Lewis did physically — at the level of genius they reached — is incompatible with being an intellectual in words or a formally trained artist.

What is my favorite book? Darwin’s Of the Origin of Species (which I see, correctly, as incorporating the slightly later, albeit separately published, Descent of Man). It should be everybody’s favorite book.

The people who put John Scopes on trial in rural Dayton, Tennessee, back in the ’twenties included some of my close relatives on my mother’s side. In the mid-’eighties their descendants were at it again in that same county. I went to a family reunion down there then — my first real trip back to the South after fifteen years in Seattle. We were smoking cigars and laughing and drinking hard cider and cussing (mildly) there in the church park, at least the men and the younger women were, prior grabbing our paper plates and falling to a big picnic lunch. I liked these people — especially after all the washed-out, humorless, creepy Scandinavians in the Pacific Northwest. I was having myself a real good time. So, having dropped my usual guarded sensitivity-training bullshit, so professionally cultivated for dealing with my puritanical Seattle socialist and New Age friends, I said in my customarily witty and charming and ironical down-home way, “Well, if I can believe that Communist Dan Rather, you folks down here believe that Charles Darwin is the Devil.” Oh, reader, the crashing silence! The fearsomely well-mannered nonchalance of the kinfolks as they drifted away in twos and threes, effortlessly appearing not to be drifting away so much as to be casually moving away toward something that they’d suddenly thought needed seeing to! I toyed with the thought of running after them and saying, “Hey, hey, wait a minute, I’m a Christian too!” (Which was and is true.) Thankfully, I caught myself in time, blessed by the Lord with the sudden epiphanal knowledge that the only true and honest and proper response to let rise up within me, albeit unspoken, was: Fuck them. I love them.

My Tennessee kinfolk (whom I DO love) believe that every word of the King James Bible is the literal truth. (How horrified they would be to learn that King James himself, who commissioned it, was both a devout Christian and a publicly raving queer. And that he saw no conflict between the two states — and the two behaviors.) Hundreds of millions of people in the United States, Mexico, and South America agree with them — this despite the fact that one cannot interpret it literally because, to take the most troublesome example, the text of Genesis is in stark conflict with itself when taken literally. In one place, for example, humans are put here before flora, whereas in another, the flora come first; in another place, the man and the woman are put here simultaneously, while shortly afterward we read that the man was put here first. But I tell my students that I see no conflict between the Bible and Darwin — and that they should not, either, no matter what they believe about either. For if Jesus taught in parables to those who were not prepared to understand the literal truth of a thing (as he tells his disciples he did all the time), then from whom did he learn to do this? From whom did he learn to teach? And if his father taught him to teach, as is certainly the case if anyone did, then we must assume that his father taught in parables as well. I tell my students that the problem is that we have yet to interpret Genesis (and all the other world creation stories) correctly as parable. How would we do this with any hope of being right? We would try to read it (and them) in the light of, and by the lovely light cast by, Charles Darwin.

One of my favorite words to use with students in talking about Darwin is funny. In truth, when you look at it from the angle I’ll unhesitatingly label correct, evolution by natural selection is about as hilarious as things get. I think it may well be the root of all humor, the core of all hilarity. For example, I heard a report on NPR the other day about elephants in Africa. Turns out that significant numbers of individuals from normally tusked elephant species are suddenly being born without tusks. This phenomenon puzzled the experts for about an hour, and then they realized, and announced to the press, that it is evolution’s way of saving the species (which is all evolution cares about). Their chief predators are men with elephant guns trying to shoot them for their ivory. So . . . VOILA! Oh, how I love this stuff! One can only imagine the countless scenes to be replayed over and over in the wild in when a young tusked elephant runs into an unknown (to him or her) young tuskless elephant: “Haw, haw, haw! Holy God, do YOU look stupid!” Second elephant blushes in embarrassment. BANG! “Oh, excuse me,” sighs first elephant in expiration. “I have been shot for my tusks and must die now. Such is the eternal way with us elephants.” Hardly.

The whole evolution by natural selection deal is really just one big Roadrunner cartoon. The Roadrunner is the individual species — e.g., my individual species of elephant. Wylie P. Coyote is everything that preys upon it (including, metaphorically, territory hostile to its survival). Enter Wylie stage left, double-barreled Roadrunner shotgun in hand, and then: Beep.-Beep! WHANG!!!!!! (In the real world, of course, the Roadrunner bites it more often than not, and Wylie gets to win. For life seldom actually imitates art—contra all the sophisticates who’ve tried to out-sophisticate Oscar Wilde by reversing his maxim.) The artists aren’t smart enough, or knowledgeable enough, to make it so. As Daniel C. Dennett (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) keeps insisting: Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is smarter than you are.

Thus much for cartoon (or other metaphorical) versions. The great entomologist Edward O. Wilson (Sociobiology, Consilience) very recently said it best: “[Darwin’s theory] states simply that if a population of organisms contains multiple hereditary variants in some trait (say, red versus blue eyes in a bird population), and if one of these variants succeeds in contributing more offspring to the next generation than the other variants, the overall composition of the population changes, and evolution has occurred.” (Source: http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/110518.html Courtesy of Tom Maddox.)

Darwin’s Friend T.H. Huxley on the Theory of Evolution: “How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that!”

I don’t exactly believe this, but it’s an idea I have a soft spot in my head for: that some conceivable evolutionary survival value of the emergence of prayer-based religion centered upon a supposedly loving God who hears the prayer and does whatever he wants with it may be the first step by a species toward the survival enhancement of its individual members, as opposed to species survival enhancement itself. All I have to go on is lifelong experience at observing the percentages. This experience has inevitably supplied me with a million dull stories — exempla — which I count (stupidly, in all likelihood) as “anecdotal evidence.” I spare you these.

Darwin was a Church of England guy but not a devout believer. Mrs. Darwin was. Darwin lay on his sofa for years with Mrs. Darwin knitting nearby, and every time he looked at her he had — in the Huckleberry Finn sense of “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” when he makes his crucial decision involving saving his slave friend Jim — pangs of conscience regarding publishing the stuff which was becoming the ORIGIN. He also fretted constantly about the terrible effects (emotional, ethical, and so forth) that his theory might have on individual people and upon society. Finally, he just figured out, and said, that no one ever need tell a lie for God — even a “lie by omission.” This was one of the great moments in world history. Not just because it allowed the Origin (and its sequel, The Descent of Man) to see daylight, but also because it was an initial intellectual freeing from a very dumb idea of (whether He or She or It exists or not) God. It let the conscience (which is very real and hard-wired in, no matter what you call it) see daylight. After much darkness. In fact, Renaissance, Schmenaissance: I think the real Renaissance began on the several crucial days of his life in which Darwin Saw Through.

For twenty-five years I have held the scandalous idea (my own, may God help me, which I have never before seen anywhere in print) that the real origin of speech lies in its ability to permit lying — which itself permitted, for the first time, INTRASPECIES deception. The other kind of deception, the INTERspecies kind, is the basis of all animal life: I’ll deceive you so you won’t eat me; you’ll deceive me into thinking you’re something that hasn’t the slightest interest in eating me; I’ll deceive the weird little guy next door so he won’t know that I have an all-consuming, if you will, interest in eating him; he’ll meanwhile try to deceive me into thinking he’s not something I could possibly want to eat. As Bruce Chatwin speculates in his masterpiece The Songlines, there arguably came a time in human evolution when our species felt reasonably safe from the species which preyed upon it. All the ravening monsters were dead. We had either killed them off because we were so much smarter, or they had gone extinct, or they had moved on. At that point we started seeing other humans as prey and predator — and acting that way. My own idea, which I got right after reading Richard Dawkins’ first two books (The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype), was that speech emerged at that point in order to enable a much finer grade of intraspefic lying than had theretofore been possible without it. I still believe in this theory very strongly.

At Oxford, in 1978, just after reading his The Selfish Gene, I found myself having a drink with Dawkins in the outside beer garden of the ancient Turf Tavern (where Shakespeare himself doubtless drank as well, although the garden wall there is actually the oldest standing thing in Oxford, may trivialists take due note). We had met through a mutual acquaintance, Nancy Taylor, my colleague at The Evergreen State College in Washington state. Dawkins was young and tough then — 38, I think — and was somewhat bitter about how his “selfish gene” theory had made him seem the evil Thomas Hobbes of his day. (It is now of course the central paradigm of evolutionary biology — and rightfully so, as it is really only Darwin in really down-to-earth words which push the theory of evolution to the wall. And then through it. I dared to float my idea about lying as the origin of speech to him, briefly arguing that it was only a logical extension of Darwin’s, and his, ideas. I guessed, before doing so, that he might, in his brusque Oxbridge way, start blurting out “Oh, no, no, no, no . . . .” Or that he might go “Hmmmmmmmm . . . well, that’s rather interesting” in politely dismissive fashion. Or that he might — joy of joys — shout “Eureka! You have have found it.” So he surprised me a good bit when he merely raised one eyebrow somewhat avuncularly (although he was younger than I by a couple of years) and looked at me with a mildly sardonic grin, as if I had just offered up the most obvious thought in the history of the world and said “Well, what ELSE could have caused it?” I said, “Well, it will certainly be news to the linguistics people.” (I thought of myself as something of a linguist as I’d done a brief few months of postdoctoral work with Chomsky at MIT.) “Ah,” said Dawkins. “The linguistics people.”

The Varieties of Mystical Experience I: the Automobile Graveyard: I have actually had several “mystical experiences” (so-called, and for lack of a better term), none likely to meet anybody’s strict definition. But here is one that may qualify — one of my first. I was riding in a car with four or five other guys. I was twenty-three and on my first full-time college teaching gig. I detested it. Despite the fact that we were driving in a Virginia twilght, I could not stop thinking about how ugly all the man-made stuff was, here right outside Norfolk, one of this country’s hell-holes. I looked up at the stars, now just becoming visible. I looked back down. We were passing a junk yard on one side of the highway and an automobile graveyard on the other. To escape the view, I looked back up at the stars — so pure, so crystalline, so lovely to my young and alienated eyes. And suddenly I realized: Good Christ, if an automobile graveyard could be on THIS star, then an automobile graveyard (or something far worse in every conceivable way, and of course in every INconceivable way) could well be on one or more of THOSE stars out there!. And doubtless is! Why not? I suddenly stopped detesting the world. I have not detested it since.

The Varieties of Mystical Experience II: Suspected Supply-Side Prober Busted in Amarillo

The Varieties of Mystical Experience III: The Prober Probed: A good many years later I did indeed find myself on the other end of the probe. Or something. It had been a long day during a long week during a long summer. I was Home Alone — and had been for a week or more — in my brown house on Eld Inlet just outside Olympia, Washington, where I was teaching at Evergreen College. I was temporarily leading the life of a recluse — by choice. No teaching, no nothing. Just reading and meditating and trying to lose a few pounds. I decided to take a long afternoon nap. I did. During this nap, I had (what may or may not have been) a vivid dream. Aliens had come into the bedroom. Friendly aliens. Light blue. “Don’t worry,” one said. “This is just a routine procedure. You will not be harmed.” “Fine,” I said. “Go to it.” For in my dream (or whatever it was), I was glad to see the aliens (in whom I did not believe, and in whom i still don’t) finally show up at my house. So they gently and cheerfully probed away, using the long needles you’ve heard so much about to “extract” various things from my head and upper body. I felt no pain. My only emotion was just one of, you know, “I am glad to help you aliens in any way I can.” Finally, one of them said, “We’re nearly done here, and so we’ll be going soon.” “What were you looking for?” I asked. “And did you find it?” I don’t remember the answer in words, but the message was that they thought I knew some deep secret about human language (i.e., speech) and that they wanted to know that secret. I do remember one of them saying in words “We know you studied with Chomsky and we think he may know things, but you know what he knows plus what you know.” (This I did not exactly believe myself, since I disagreed with Chomsky about many things and doubted that I knew much of anything at all — except the stuff about lying which is mentioned elsewhere in this journal.) Anyhow, they zoomed off. Out through the roof, it seemed. And I woke up. At the same time I heard the sound of a nearby explosion and the whole house shook violently. I leapt up. And that’s where the trouble began — for me, a skeptic. I had gone to bed fully clothed, just for an afternoon nap, but I woke up stark naked. (I had never before slept naked in my life, and I never have again. I don’t like sleeping naked.) More wondrously, however, my shoes, socks, shirt, cutoffs, and underwear were all lying in the four corners of the room, as if thrown there carelessly, randomly, and in haste. I ran into the living room. The whole place was a minor wreck. Books on the floor, lamps turned over and broken, smashed cups and dishes on the floor. I ran to the telephone to call my dear friend and colleage Richard Jones (yes, yes, coincidentally and ironically the famous DREAM psychologist Richard M. Jones) and ask what the hell had happened. I suspected that Seattle, sixty miles north, had been nuked. “How about that EARTHQUAKE?” laughed Richard, as usual about one-fourth into a quart of Dewar’s at 7:00 p.m. “Our house is a wreck. Fortunately, my back is out again and I can’t help Susie clean it up. Thank God for Scotch.” Earthquake. Ah . . . .

I got dressed and went out to the car to drive into Olympia for supplies. Earthquake supplies. OTC abduction remedies. Scotch. Whatever. But as I drove up the long gravel driveway from my house to Sunset Beach Drive I was alert enough, fortunately, to spot a huge fissure now bisecting the driveway, a fissure at least three feet wide. An earthquake fissure. What to do? Well, I did what any farm boy would do in such circumstances. I went back to the house, found a flashlight and four or five old planks, and took them back up the driveway and threw them across the fissure. Bridge Over the Fissure Kwai. “That’ll work for a day or so,” I thought. Four years later, they were still there. Just as stuff like that is still always and forever still there on the farm. Until some new person buys the property, notices the plank bridge for the first time, and says “My God, Margaret, look at this. We DROVE across this coming in here. It’s a wonder we all ain’t dead.” indeed.

And this is the place to mention that “bridge” is my favorite word. My favorite word of all words. I loved it the first time I heard it (or remember hearing it), at about age four, and I still love it today. I love it every time I hear it. I shall never stop loving it. Bridge, bridge, bridge. Ah . . . .

A snowflake magnified so powerfully that I could see every single one of its microsections — all in one view. It was perhaps the loveliest image I had ever seen. It was in a dream. And in that dream I looked at the snowflake for about two minutes, and I thought, “I shall never stop looking at this.” Slowly, it began to unfold, to deconstruct, to metamorphose, changing slowly but with seemingly inevitable logic into . . . a bridge! The most beautiful of all possible bridges, too. Each of the tiny ice-lines of which it was made changed into a shiny steel-line which was part of, and indispensable to, the bridge. The bridge was the same color as the snowflake, a pale blue-white which I still see more clearly in memory than I see most other things either in memory or in front of me.

People’s Perceptions of Me: Life Down South. I walk out my front door a few days ago on a hot sunny day. I am wearing a dark-blue Hawaiian shirt. When I get to the gate, I stop before opening it because a woman is just about to cross my path on the sidewalk just beyond it. I sweetly decide to let her pass, rather than swinging the gate outward (the only way it goes), thus momentarily blocking her way. She lumbers past. Our eyes do not meet. She is elderly (at least as old as I am). She weighs (conservative estimate) 350 pounds. She is wearing a bright purple jump suit. She is wearing hair-curlers. She is carrying about five plastic bags of foood from the local grocery. She is also carrying a boom box which is playing hip-hop at top volume. I cross the sidewalk and get ready to step into my 1979 Cadillac DeVille, parked at the curb. When she gets about twenty feet down the way past me, she turns off the boom box and says, seemingly to herself but in actuality of course to me, “Now THERE’s one crazy-looking motherfucker THERE!”

Bill Clinton, whom I detested for many years but began to appreciate, perhaps even to adore, after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, so gracefully did he and his family bear it, and so horrible were the press and the impeachment subcommmittee in the right-wing House, repeatedly parroted a proverbial supposed truth which is in no way borne out in my own experience. He said, “Hard problems yield to hard and sustained effort.” Nothing could be further from my own lived truth. For me, hard problems may have “yielded” to such hard and sustained in the sense that they somehow got finally resolved. But they were never resolved in any really successful, or even meaningfully satisfying, way. In my experience, hard problems only yield to grace itself — to luck, serendipity, or whatever you might choose to call it — in any way that really matters to me or to anyone else. Hard work might get the job done, but that’s all. If you really care about the job, so what if it does?

People’s Perceptions of Me: What A Life-Long Befuddlement! People have told me so many things about how they have perceived me over the years, one of whom was the woman in purple. None of it makes any sense, either in terms of how I perceive myself or in terms of what other people were saying to me at the same time about their own perceptions of me. And also in terms of any “objective” standard — or so I believe. For example, the eccentric and irascible Oxford historian and poet A.L. Rowse shouted to me in the Christ Church Common Room on two or three occasions, in his deafening (for he was growing deaf) singsong Cornish voice, “Well! You look exactly like an American CIA man to me!,” adding immediately that he could therefore could never quite trust me. Here is a photo of me from that same month (accompanied by my faithful personal florist):

Perhaps it IS all “Roshomon”: and perhaps you have looked yourself, and have said with the redoubtable Rowse: “Yup. Fucker’s just flat CIA all the way.”

Today, at almost the moment I am writing on August 20, 2005, Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes are being shot out of a giant cannon at his memorial service at Owl Farm near Woody Creek, Colorado, in dutiful accordance with his longstanding expressed wishes. There are many things I could say about Hunter, and in some of these journal entries I will. (I was, for example, his junior high school compadre in Louisville.) For now, I just want to talk about Fun. Hunter didn’t invent it, but I think he actually pushed it as a philosophy and actual way of life further than anyone else ever did in the world. This is important. It is a new idea, “Fun.” It is not the same as the literary “pleasure” or “hedonism” or “Epicureanism.” But neither is it necessarily a philistinish or juvenile idea. It is its own pursuit, leading to its own farther shore: the Shore of Fun. Hunter was the first person on earth who both turned it into a philosophy of the good life AND into a daily practice OF the good life. Into “praxis.” And onward into Art with a capital “A” — the Art of Fun. Although Hunter has had, and will have, many disciples in this art (and I’m not talking about all his febrile stylistic imitators in writing), he will have few, and perhaps no, successful ones. The Art of Fun is too difficult — and, unlike most arts, which only talk idly of danger (Picasso: “What I do on canvas is actually dangerous to the extreme, actually the greatest of risks” — Oh, what pretentious bullshit!) — it is very, very dangerous. It requires the greatest of virtuosos. Thus far, only one.

The Global Village. Forty years ago Marshall Mcluhan announced that we were living in one. He based this pronouncement mainly upon the establishment (and growing power) of television. He was right. Sort of. But for all his supposed prophetic powers, he had no idea what it would feel like to live in that village in the twenty-first century. It isn’t just that he didn’t know about living within the context of the internet and of 200-plus cable television channels. Primarily, it is that he had no idea how much the experience of living in the global village would bring about the end of all “exoticism” — the romanticization of faraway places with strange-sounding names. Forty years ago, we in monolingual North America had very romantic ideas about — well, BAGDAD! Not to mention Cairo, Chartres, Pakistan, Tibet, even . . . God help us, London. Now we don’t. Most of those places have become as de-exoticized, deromanticized, for us as Omaha — maybe moreso with a good many of them. We no longer fantasize about going there. In fact, you couldn’t pay us to go there (unless you paid us CNN’s major correspondant salaries). For we Americans living in island-mentality America, even those of us who’ve traveled a bit, the global village phenomenon in its reality has certainly made us more conscious of the world around us — more aware of its nearness, more aware of the interconnectedness of us all. But has it made us less ethnocentric? I don’t think so. I think it has made us more ethnocentric. We have now seen and heard a lot of the rest of the village. And we don’t much like it.

I was the first person of my acquaintance to become interested in computers and to actually buy one (an Apple desktop, in 1978). I then became the first person of my acquaintance to lose interest in them totally (in about 1980). Since that time, I have grudgingly used them, grateful for word processing and, increasingly, for the internet. (Word processing was a greater leap forwardfrom the mighty IBM Selectric than the IBM Selectric itself had been from the pencil. “Sure, I type on the damned things,” said the late Gene Siskel. “But that hardly seems to merit all the hype.”) But the reason I grew to be not only uninterested in them but to ABHOR them is that their existence did more to bring down the quality of human discourse among bright and witty people than anything else in my experience. In fact, computer talk amongst intellectuals dumbed down discourse to a frightening and depressing extent after the first year or so of the Reagan administration (fittingly enough, of course). And speaking of presidents: in the fall of 1972, during the first of my twenty-five years in Seattle, I saw a wonderful piece of graffiti in the men’s room of the old Brasserie Pittsbourg in Pioneer Square: “Nixon! He has done for the American Presidency precisely what pantyhose did for fingerfucking!” The direct analogy is what computer talk did for the quality of American discourse. Ah, but I digress. The point is that now, in 2005, I feel differently about computers (though not about Nixon, the American Presidency, and pantyhose). The first reason I am interested in them again is that have become much simpler to use, thus relegating almost all the endless chat about “computer problems” (to the exclusion of all other topics) to the proverbial dustbin of history. Second, they are vastly more useful and incredibly faster — and more fun — in terms of what they can do.

So I am interested in them once again—twenty-seven years after I first bought one, and twenty-five years after I quit giving a damn about them.

Here’s one specific reason why. I am writing this on a new Apple laptop computer. It came with a program called iChat (Apple’s chat program). I had used chat programs before, including iChat, and had found them mainly a bother, because of all the little noises emanating from my computer all the time, indicating only that somebody, somewhere, wanted to interrupt me by writing me little squibs about something really dumb. So I was chatting last week with a woman from California about a gift I wanted to send someone. She wrote a note asking, “Why don’t we just TALK?” “Talk?” I asked. “How?” “See that little green telephone icon next to your name and mine on the iChat board?” “Yes,” I said. “Click it,” she said, “and talk in the general direction of that little tiny hole to the right of your screen.” I did. Immediately we were talking away. TALKING FOR FREE! She said: “For a hundred dollars you can get a little camera that mounts on your screen like the one I have here. With that, we can see each other in real time as we talk.” “Just as free?” I asked. “Just as free, yes.” Later that night, I did the same thing with a pal in Paris for three hours. He had the technology on his own new Apple laptop but didn’t even know he had it — didn’t know what the “little hole” was. Now he does. We are now finally living in the future.

So I run into my goddaughter (for lack of a better term, for the relationship is a boringly complex one) in the Mudhouse coffeeshop in Charlottesville. She is sitting at a table with five of her peers. They are having a mini-reunion four years after graduating from Wesleyan. They are Apple girls, so I announced to them the same news I just told you about how I’d just learned about “talking for free.” They looked at one another and sort of rolled their eyes. The goddaughter said, “Where ya been, Leo?” Then the girl next to her said, “Hmmmmmmmm, I guess I know a FEW people who still use cell phones.” I am stunned. (She had said it in the same way she might have said, “Hmmmmmmmmmm, I guess I know a FEW people who still use the abacus.”) They all nod. They are totally blase. “Oh thank God,” I said. “I got to skip the cell phone altogether.” Second girl to me: “You really didn’t miss dick.”

Yup. Living in the future. At last.

1 September 2005

Not really. We have all just re-learned that we are still stuck in that part of the past which is hideous and barbaric beyond the power of any words to describe — and reminded, too, that we are stuck in it forever. The blithe social theorist who ten years ago proclaimed an “end to history” — cunning, carnal history as humans have lived it — spoke before 9/11 and before today.

“I Come No More To Make You Laugh” That is the first line of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, spoken by an actor who comes on stage alone as a character called “Prologue.” This character was probably played by Shakespeare himself, famous throughout London at that time as the senior playwright genius of his time. He apparently planned to retire immediately from writing — to quit not only the effort to “make us laugh,” but also to quit all writing. The ensuing play is a sober, elevated chronicle about his beloved country in its recent past. I think of that line now as I sit here writing during the New Orleans disaster. A disaster which is not so much an act of God as it is an act of man: a failure on the part of the people in charge to prepare (particularly in their neglect of the decaying levee); a failure on the part of the federal and state government to respond to the suffering of hundreds of thousands, a racist failure, a classist failure. There is absolutely nothing to say — nothing that isn’t rhetorical bullshit, inexcusably offensive cant, one more example of the horror that so often springs “self-expressively” from (what we mistake for) good intentions. One of the writers I admire most, Leon Wieselthier, an editor at The New Republic, long ago said that anybody’s attempt to produce any kind of self-expressive rhetoric at all in response to the Holocaust — laments, bromides, pontifications, disgustingly airy promises of “never again, “ whatever — is not just inappropriate in the extreme, but amounts to, and is, profanation itself. For what happened there, and what did not happen but should have happened, is beyond words. He is right. His words apply here. Not equally, certainly. But they apply. Shakespeare changed his mind, and with the help of his young collaborator John Fletcher wrote a bit more before finally throwing it in. And so will I. But right now the “thoughts that lie too deep for tears” certainly lie too deep for words. Even words about anything else. Right now, there is not, nor should there be, anything else for any of us.

4 September 2005

My dear old friend Tom Maddox, deeply disturbed about Katrina and the lack of response on the part of those in positions of responsibility (and/or other power to do something), emails from California. After a page or two of speculation about how so many could have been so neglectful in the face of so much human and (animal) suffering, Tom begins to wonder if he has not felt his way to one central cause: the deep-seated ideology forever alive in the hearts of right-wing conservatives (starting, in modern history, with Herbert Hoover during the Depression), which holds that any federal response to anything within our national borders is a moral error. A sin only to be “corrected” when the political heat gets turned way up — at which point the right-wing convervative rationalizes his way into believing that it’s okay to sin in order to avoid suffering a loss of power or credibility, a loss which might result in diminished party coffers and lost elections. I wrote Tom back to say I thought he was absolutely right to think of the “too much gummint” thing, wondering at the same time why I had not thought of it myself — had not REMEMBERED to think of it. It is because I forgot that they keep on acting in such tragically stingy fashion upon what they so deeply and powerfully believe in their extremist Ayn Randian heartfelt idiocy, all results to the contrary when real crunches come. And so we let the heat get turned off — over seventy years after everybody vowed they would never forget, would never let the heat go down again: 1932, the year the people threw Hoover out.

Kevin Sullivan of the Washington Post’s Foreign Service today reports something nearly unbelievable — and something we in America would never know about at all if we relied solely on the domestic electronic media for our news: the Bush Administration, in its indifference and arrogance, and again in support of its Randian ideology, has turned down all offers of foreign aid for New Orleans from over fifty other nations, including some of the poorest. South Africa, Cuba, Venezuela, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, China, El Salvador, Bosnia, Kosovo, Belarus, even Sri Lanka — all have offered millions upon millions of dollars to the suffering poor of New Orleans. Fidel Castro offered to send eleven hundred doctors, each carrying emergency medical supplies amounting to tons of relief aid. Upon being turned down by the American government, some of the heads of these nations, in order to get around that government, just threw up their hands and made their donations directly to the American Red Cross. Meanwhile, the conservative cable pundits in America fleetingly (and sneeringly) dismiss these offers of aid as being motivated by PR concerns, one-upmanship, and the desire to make American democracy appear hypocritical in the eyes of the world. Yeah, of course they are — to some extent — and so what? And your point, in agreeing with Bush that we should turn down the aid for the suffering thousands in New Orleans, is what, exactly?

I had at first thought that the already-famous words of Sheriff Bell (in Cormac McCarthy’s new novel No Country for Old Men) might apply to what is happening in New Orleans: “This ain’t America.” Perhaps especially to the act of giving the National Guard, MPs, and metropolitan police the command to shoot looters on sight in order to “protect property” and “restore order,” when in obvious fact most of the poor bastards doing the looting were just trying to get food and bottled water in order to save themselves and their families. The Sheriff Bells may say all they want that “this ain’t America,” but of course it precisely is. Right underneath all the bullshit. And always has been. So are most, perhaps all, other places. I agree with the estimable Anthony Holden in yesterday’s London Daily Mail: “Rarely has such lurid evidence of the darker side of the American dream been so brutally exposed.”

6 September 2005: Encouraging News at Last! At the moment this idiot Chertoff (new Bushoid Head of Homeland Security) orders “everyone out of New Orleans,” the first bar re-opens in the French Quarter (Jack’s). Internet video footage shows happy drinkers inside socializing by candlelight— the usual Big Easy wackos doing Tarot readings, talking tattoos, and wishing Fats Domino were President. Chertoff— who on NPR dismissed as “mere rumor” three days after the Convention Center was opened the news that the place was a chaotic disaster area with absolutely nobody, anywhere, in charge. Least of all, it now turns out, the head of FEMA, Brown, Bush’s cattle-baron Texas crony appointee, who is also talking about “all these unsubstantiated rumors.” Meanwhile, another rumor had been sweeping through the thousands of suffering people wandering around inside the Convention Center: that they’d coralled them all in there so they could firebomb the place and finally “get rid of all the niggers in this town.” The rumor Chertoff and Brown dismissed was true, the rumor the flood victims heard was not true; but the point is that one cannot understand how Chertoff and Brown could have been, at that late point in the action, so ignorant of the realities inside that he would announce them as unlikely rumor, whereas one can easily understand how the folks inside the Covention Center could so easily have believed the one they heard—not just because of what had happened to them in less than half a week, but also (and more crucially) because of what had happened to them for their entire lives. EASILY have believed it? Of course. Because on that same day thousands of the fleeing poor were turned back at gunpoint—and gunfire!— by mostly white cops as they tried to escape New Orleans via a bridge called the Crescent City Connectiion to the affluent higher-ground suburb on the other side—a suburb which itself had been evacuated because of Katrina’s winds, and which had charged its police force to protect its empy homes and shops from the “thousands of fleeing criminal looters” who would soon be pouring across the bridge into their town. [11 September Update: this last horror was acknowledged today on CBS by the suburb’s police chief—who defended the decision and added the reassuring note that if he discovered any of his cops to’ve fired theirr guns during the bridge turn-back, they would most certainly face the possiblity of disciplinary action.]

7 September 2005: A friend and I get the idea, since nobody in power is doing anything, of renting a semi, announcing that we’d park it in a convenient location for the weekend (Lowe’s parking lot, actually, which is adjacent to several big markets and drugstores), filling it up with what knowledgeable people say is needed, and then driving it to Franklin, LA, which is apparently a distribution point for New Orleans relief. At the last minute, after we have actually arranged to rent the semi, we learn that somebody else here has had the very same idea (even down to the Lowe’s parking lot) and has just set up. I go to the nearby Kroger’s and buy five hundred bucks worth of stuff (not much, but all I’ve got in my checking account) and take it over to the truck, which, thankfully, is filling up fast in this truly charitable town. My friend and I decide to register as volunteers (now being recruited) with the Red Cross and drive on down to see if they can use a couple of old guys for anything. Leaving soon.

7 September 2005: I hate to admit it, but I guess if I myself were still sitting at the bar in Jack’s (as I know I would be!), I would have to hang it up and leave today. The risks from bacteria (expected) and from lead (unexpected and unexplained) in the floodwater seem just too great.

7 September 2005: The frighteningly cynical and self-serving assertions by the Republican leadership (especially Speaker of the House Denny Hastert) that New Orleans should not be rebuilt once all the people get out (or are gotten out) are apparently too outrageous even for some of the lunatics (“the craziest right-wing motherfuckers we could find and hire — Jon Stewart) at Fox News. Everybody knows that New Orleans is, for Hastert & Co., a constantly lacerating thorn in the side: It is a heavily Democratic city, and it regularly tips conservative Louisiana into the Blue column. How attractive it must seem to them to turn it Red simply by eliminating an entire troublesome city! You say you doubt that even Hastert and Delay and Rove could be THAT Machiavellian, THAT cynical? Oh, innocent reader!

8 September 2005: My brilliant, loving, sweet, witty, intellectual, artistic, beautiful daughter’s birthday. The temporarily super-responsible, super-adult, and hence grossly overscheduled, overextended, soccer mom. The culture she lives in like a fish in water, the culture of overscheduled, overextended, soccer moms, is beyond me. Totally beyond my comprehension, no matter my widely reputed powers of empathy (powers falsely ascribed, obviously). I observe this culture as the proverbial anthropologist from Mars would observe it, seeking for understand it. I will never understand it. But that doesn’t matter. I understand her. I understood her before she entered this culture and became “immersed” in it, I understand her now, and I will always understand her. Of all the people I know, or have ever known, she is the one who most fits T.S. Eliot’s line about the “still point in time”: the one who, at any and times and places in her life, is always most exactly like herself! And this is all the more wonderful because it — she — is a most wonderful self!

9 September 2005

Bob Bennetta and I learn that we can’t go to New Orleans with the Red Cross. They demand — and where’s the persuasive logic in this? — a minimum one-month commitment. We’d do it anyway, except that he has contractual commitments here (gigging jazz pianist and school music teacher), and I can’t get away from teaching at the University for that long. We shall find something else — probably opening up our homes to evacuees, quite a few of whom, it turns out, are bound for Our Town.

Somewhat cheered up by hearing James Joyce’s Definition of an Irish Queer: a guy who prefers women to whiskey.

The brilliant composer and diarist Ned Rorem, whom I admire, in Ben Jonson’s words, “this side idolatry,” and who is openly gay and openly alcoholic (dry for over twenty-five years), reports that he is not amused by Joyce’s definition — that, though not offended personally, he can’t find the “ha-ha” in it. I have reluctantly decided that Rorem’s main Achilles heel is his lifelong (and perhaps congenital) insensitivity to other people’s humor. His fifty-plus years of diary and journal entries prove that he is, as it were, tone-deaf to it. An odd characteristic to find in such an ironist. But not unique, amongst ironists, to Rorem.

Think of the world without certain sui generis things in it: asparagus, the yo-yo, cold and perfectly ripe watermelon, oysters, the martini, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (read it—warily), Hunter S. Thompson, Jerry Lee Lewis, and . . . Ned Rorem. (You will have your own list.) How much poorer we would be without even one of these things which, in Doctor Samuel Johnson’s words, “put one in mind of nothing else.” It frightens me to think of a world—one in which I had to live, anyway—without even one of them. To think of a world without any of them, without any such people and things, is just to be flat-out scared to death.

One such singular entity for me was my old friend and mentor Morse Peckham—author of such brilliant books in social and critical theory as Man’s Rage for Chaos, Beyond the Tragic Vision, Explanation and Power, and The Romantic Virtuoso. In my “Introduction” to this last book (published posthumously by Wesleyan UP), I tried to say exactly what was so special about Morse, and of course I failed, as one always does when trying to articulate what was so special about anything at all. Two of his most brilliant ideas (both indispensably useful to me over the years) did not ever manage, to my knowledge, to find a place anywhere in his writings, and so I give them here as, to the best of my remembrance, he spoke them:

1. Unconscious and Conscious. “People say to me that they don’t really believe in the idea of the Unconscious — whether in Freud’s formulation or in anyone’s. I cannot find a formulation of it that exactly satisfies me, either, but I do believe in it. In the end, one simply has to. What I DON’T believe in any longer is the Conscious—in Consciousness itself. The older I get, the more untenable it seems. At this point in my life, I would be more ashamed and embarrassed to admit belief in Consciousness than to admit I believed in the Tooth Fairy.”
2. Unity (and Holism and Oneness and Monism and Fusion and so on). “I am amused and disheartened by the yearning for Unity with a capital “U”—a yearning which immediately gets turned into an assertion by those possessing the passionate yearning within their breasts. ‘Everything is Unified,’ they will tell you. Then they’ll make one of four assertions about Unity: (a.) that although it may not be evident on the MERE SURFACE of the world, beneath that surface, or behind it or something, everything is really Unified after all—for those with the discernment to see it; (b.) that although it may not be evident TODAY, things were once Unified, probably in some sort of Golden Age (e.g., Eden), but have fallen into chaos because of people’s failures or sins, and that this Unity can be recovered by our species if it works hard enough, because it is still ‘really there’; (c.) that although it may not be evident TODAY, we are inexorably moving TOWARD a final Unity — in some sort of Apocalypse, perhaps, or in Marx’s Workers’ Paradise—and so of course that Unity exists today, too, albeit in embryo; (d.) that although it may not be evident HERE, things are really Unified in other places where the people themselves have become Unified—Tibetan monks and stuff. But I think the truth about Unity boils down to an axiom I made up long ago: ALL PERCEPTUAL FIELDS WILL BE UNIFIED FOR ME IN DIRECT CORRELATION TO THE LOOSENESS OF MY CRITERIA, AND ALL PERCEPTUAL FIELDS WILL BE DISUNIFIED FOR ME IN DIRECT CORRELATION TO THE RIGOROUSNESS OF MY CRITERIA. Thus, for example, those with a strong need for Unity, such as those among the terminally ill who believe that their discovery of Unity Within and Without will heal them, will easily ‘find’ it and begin asserting it, probably as some sort of mantra. And those with no such need for Unity during their lives, such as the healthy Bertrand Russell even at the age of 99, may easily be cheerful, contented believers in Disunity, Atomism, and even Chaos all the way. Not having the need for Unity, they don’t Yearn for Unity enough to assert Unity’s existence, either to others or to themselves. ’Screw Unity,’ they say. As I do myself. It is the best-disguised of man-made prisons, inside of which humans can never, ever have a new idea.”

In Dreams We Kiss Ourselves Goodbye. Another person who reminded me of no one else was Richard M. Jones. He was both the greatest teacher I ever knew and the greatest theorist of education. (Odd as it may sound, it is nearly impossible to find a great teacher who is also a great theorist of teaching. And it IS impossible in my experience—Richard aside—to find a great theorist of education, indeed ANY theorist of educatiion, who is a great teacher.) Richard’s specialty was the psychology of dreams. His sub-specialty was the application of dream psychology to teaching. He invented the Dream Reflection Seminar. He wrote books with titles like The New Psychology of Dreaming and The Dream Poet. He had lots of good ideas but probably only one truly great one. And it was the truly great one that, tragically, never made it into print. It was the idea that dreams, in actuality, are IMPERSONAL. They are impersonal because it is not the Constructed Self who dreams them. In fact, the Constructed Self, being a fiction, can ipso facto not dream at all. How could it? It is, after all, only a bit more than T.S. Eliot’s face constructed every morning “to meet the faces that we meet.” It is our art work, our personality. We think of it as “me,” but it is not. It is simply the best public me that I could make—including myself among my public, of course. The dream is dreamt by the child inside, albeit with the grownup’s memories—the child who was there before “I” started constructing my “self.” (This is obviously not in agreement with Fritz Perls’ popular theory, which some readers may know, that “everything in my dream is in reality a part of me.” Nor is it in agreement with Jung. But Richard thought, and I agree, that it is not in any real conflict with anything in Freud’s own theory of dreams. Not that any of that matters, or ever did! ) So Richard was puzzled as to why so many of his clients, students, and patients would often sigh to him, “Oh, dreams! I hate them. My dreams have nothing to do with my SELF. I wish they did, but they just don’t.” So Richard titled his last book, never finished or published, In Dreams We Kiss Ourselves Goodbye. It exists in a manuscript of about two hundred pages. The first few pages, in which he does at least get the idea out clearly, is brilliant. It starts going downhill pretty soon and, after a while, dissolves into gibberish. Richard had tried to write it while battling Alzeimers—a fact of which he had no idea. It is all too clever to write that Richard kissed himself goodbye while writing In Dreams We Kiss Ourselves Goodbye. But it is the literal truth: Richard did. He had a laugh like no one else’s, ever. It was a supercilious, avuncular, maddening, risque chuckle. It was “Heh Heh,” but there was a pause, a beat between the “Heh”’s. So it was “Heh . . . . . . . . Heh.” Almost everyone hated it. I loved it. You cannot imagine how much I miss it now.

As I was lying on the couch today, deep in Bachelardian reverie, acting out my cosmically ordained role as the Sultan of the Supine (so yclept by Alex Scarbrough), something became clear to me for the first time ever. It is why I have always thought of hard-core homosexuals (male and female) and hard-core atheists as inextricably linked together by a sort of one-dimensionality—without ever knowing why, indeed without ever even WONDERING why, I did so. Today, it came to me as I was daydreaming about Ned Rorem while looking at a squirrel just outside the window. Serious homosexuals and serious atheists seem one-dimensional because they evince the passionate yearning for sameness rather than the Other. They seem immune to any yearning for the Other, and that lack of yearning strikes me as itself a lack. An emptiness that “people like me” fill simply by the constant yearning for the Other, whether that yearning be consummated or not—ever. It is the yearning with which the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch filled himself up—the forty-year yearning for a woman named Laura whom he had only seen once in passing, a woman who seemed to him to embody the Divine Idea, who seemed to him to embody his (orthodox, Roman Catholic) God. (The great irony with Petrarch today is that he is generally regarded as the Father of Humanism, itself generally regarded as “secular,” although very little of it is, or ever has been “secular”—all the American Jerry Falwells and George W. Bushes to the contrary.) I bring Petrarch in here only because, let’s face it, could any idea, could any practice, seem dumber than his today? He is the prime example of just how dumb the whole idea of a constant yearning for the Other is. And yet it is only those people whose centers are PRECISELY that constant yearning who seem three-dimensional to me. Those who do not yearn for the Other, who have no interest in it, do not.

Re-reading the paragraph I have just written: It is silly, but is it only silly? My educated brain tells me it’s about the silliest thing I have ever written (or thought). Yet something within which seems about as deep as Shakespeare’s “certain fathoms in the earth” tells me there is something important about what I feel—in addition to its being just silly as all hell. I do need to stress, not just to you but also to myself, that a feeling is all it is. It is not an argument or an assertion. It is not even a belief—whatever that is. In other words, I feel it strongly, but I don’t believe it at all.

This feeling is exactly analogous to (or is the same thing as) the feeling reported by seemingly half the people I ran into thirty-plus years ago: “I just don’t trust anybody that doesn’t smoke or drink.” They mean that they don’t trust anybody who doesn’t feel the Yearning strongly enough to act upon it. Or to have felt it strongly enough to have acted upon it in the past, despite whatever wagon they may be clinging to now—and who admit it to you freely: “This is my state.” (Admittedly, I met most of these people in Southern bars.) So: Do I “believe” people are better or more trustworthy who experience a yearning for the Other in the form of smoke and/or drink? No. Do I “believe” people are better or more trustworthy who experience a yearning for the Other in the forms of heterosexual consummation or of meeting God on the road like Jack Kerouac or Saint Paul? No. In fact, I “believe” the precise opposite. And as for what I do with those beliefs, I know myself to be (and others know me to be) a rights-centered libertarian, in particular a supporter of gay rights and religious freedom rights in these times. Still: this feeling of different “dimensionalities,” with respect to yearning, stays strong in me.

Hearing Things: The second reason I am doing this online journal (for the first reason, see the second paragraph from the top) has to do with my one special talent—or special state of grace. I have always possessed it, or lived within it. I take myself to be particularly blessed by what I just call Hearing Things. Nothing “mystical,” nothing about “channeling,” nothing “supernatural.” Nothing like any of that. I just hear things in my daily rounds, usually speech, of a sort that no one else seems to hear—or to remember. Some I hear people say just to anyone within earshot. Some I hear people say just to me (or “for my benefit”). Many of these things are just plain hilarious, and they always have been. Most are somehow ironic. Some are filthy. I tell family and friends (and even students) what I heard and they say, “God, I could go for a YEAR and not hear anything that great!” So it seems to be something pretty much unique to me (although it could certainly not be literally unique to me), as I have never heard anyone else speak of it—of its centrality through the years of their lives. But: its centrality through the years of my own life is the primary evidence I possess that there might be some basis for believing in a personally experienced religion.

Hearing Things: Life Down South. As I get set to race across Water Street to the daily gym torture today, I see three sweating guys in ball caps standing by a parked black Hummer with all the doors open. They are vacating a suite of offices downtown. One guy is waving his arms at the other two. As I dart across in front of oncoming traffic I hear him shout: “It was the irony that got us, boys. I mean, who ever dreamt that a prosperous dot-com could get its ass thrown into bankruptcy by a fucking hardware problem?”

Hearing Things: Life Down South. I am standing in the checkout line at the Food Lion supermarket. It is a long line (one of three or four), it is moving at a snail’s pace, it is 90 degrees outside, and the air conditioning isn’t working. All of a sudden a very shrill siren alarm goes off by the Exit Doors. A loud recorded bass voice shouts: “Stop where you are! Return your merchandise to the checkout counter immediately! You have not paid for your merchandise!” All eyes turn to the Exit Doors, where two frightened-looking women with a gaggle of screaming children are standing with their filled carts, eyes looking wildly around. Then a loud REAL voice, the voice of one of the checkout women (who turns out to be the Store Manager), shouts: “JUST GO ON OUT THROUGH THE DOORS! DON’ PAY NO ‘TENTION TO THAT THING! WE AIN’T HAD THE TRAININ’ FOR IT!” So the women pass on through the doors, and somebody turns off the recorded voice and the siren alarm, and the Store Manager yells to everybody within earshot, “HOW THEY ’SPECT US TO CATCH US NO SHOPLIFTERS IF WE AIN’T HAD THE TECHNICAL TRAINING FOR IT?” Whereupon one of the other checkout women nods in dramatic agreement and shouts, “Yolanda, you can by God say that again!”

Yellow. I have severe problems with Yellow. (All who know me know this. So to readers who know me well, this will all seem [and be] redundant.) On the one hand, Yellow is actually my favorite color. When I was a little boy, Yellow had to compete with fire-engine red for my affections. But Yellow is the one I married. I give myself great credit for having married Yellow, for in doing so I have lovingly, forgivingly, and most charitably overlooked Yellow’s great flaw. Which of course is that it’s the color of some of the most vomitously disgusting food ever invented by a colorblind God: Eggs, (and egg nog, and egg custard), bananas, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, butter, honey (so acrid and downright abrasive beneath its surface sweetness), and on and on literally ad nauseam. But, in order to be more clear, I must be more specific: bright yellow food is mostly okay (lemons, summer squash, corn). It is the yellow veering down to orange things that are the most consistently and unrelentingly disgusting. But these yellow-veering-to-orange things also have to be sort of sickeningly sweet (albeit sometimes bitter beneath) in order to really and truly pass the projectile-vomit test. (The one exception is bananas, which are bright yellow but also sickeningly sweet, in addition to possessing at their very centers the most horrible of all flavors . . . banana!)

Eggs. Again, when I was a little boy, I would sit at the breakfast table with my parents and we would be eating soft-boiled eggs (always with toast and bacon, which are themselves admittedly damned tasty). I hated these things, these soft-boiled eggs. My mother said, quite sensibly, “Well, Frank, maybe Francis would just like them some other way.” So she tried frying them, scrambling them, poaching them, and even hard-boiling them. No difference. All disgusting. Finally, one day (which I remember very well, even though I was only five and just starting kindergarten), I had the brilliant idea of asking my parents, “What ARE these things?” They told me. At which point (as they later told the story to the delighted kinfolk), I did about a twenty-second take (unintentional, artless) and then looked at them incredulously and said, “And we’re actually EATING these?” I believed at that moment, and I believe even more strongly now, that this is one of the most barbaric practices I have ever heard about: the eating of eggs. William S. Burroughs, whom I discovered in my late teens and cherish until this day (see photo above), put my thoughts and feelings about this unexaminedly sickening human practice into just the right words when he would say in his sepulchral Missouri voice with his dismissive sneer: “Egg-sucking mammals!” So eggs are just the worst of all—chicken embryos, yellow-veering-to-orange, and hideously sweet just underneath. Think upon it, reader. Let your true feelings emerge. Unlike all the billions of chickens who will never be, let them peck their way through your socially constructed egg-eating shell and stride forward, living, into the light.

Can I hear you out there grumbling and whining in the egg-sucking mammalian darkness inside which which, imprisoned, you live? I can. “Oh, Leo, if only you knew how much I love to eat eggs! Only a horrible person like you could not love to eat them too! If only you knew how much they MEAN to me! If only I could get you to APPRECIATE them!” Ditto for the simian screams and shrieks of you branch-to-branch-swinging bananaphile monkeys, forever lost in your blind monkey banana lust. Fucking nasty unevolved benighted babyfood eaters all of you!

Francis. I was Francis until I was nineteen. Then I became Leo. It happened (predictably, for a southern boy) like this. I was pledging a fraternity as a freshman in college and, after eight weeks, we finally got to Hell Night. This is the night when all the so-called brutal hazing you’ve heard so much about used to take place—and hopefully still does. Anyhow, by about 5:00 a.m. on a dark Sunday morning in November, after being forced to eat live goldfish out of the public fountain downtown, after enduring the whack of the Ancient Ceremonial Paddle (which inflicted no real pain), and after being force-marched fifteen miles blindfolded back into town along some kind of obscure dirt road, we were all reassembled by the Pledgemaster, Kenneth Hightower (who later became an Army General), and then taken, boy by boy, through the Ancient Induction Ceremony. When it was my turn to be inducted, Pledgemaster Hightower said I could only be inducted into the fraternity on one condition: “We can’t have no fucking Francises in this fraternity, so you’ll have to agree to be Leo [my middle name] from this point on in your life. Deal or no deal, Pledge?” “Deal,” I said. I’d always hated Francis. I’d always loved Leo. And now I had an excuse for my mother for changing it—my dear mother who loved the name Francis and had only middle-named me Leo out of the dutiful need to honor this one certain “other man” in her life.

This was Dr. Leo Bloch, her physician in Louisville. (Mine, too, until, we left Louisville.) I was my mother’s first and only child, born to her when she was past forty. Everything about this pregnancy, from the effort to get pregnant through the birth itself, was one enormous physical (and probably emotional) difficulty for her. When I was finally born and pronounced a well baby,, she named me Francis (my father’s real, formal name). But two days later, after she thought about things, she added Leo to my name to honor Dr. Bloch, for both my mother and father would forever say to me afterward (after I was of a certain age), “If it hadn’t been for Dr. Bloch, I don’t think you’d be here now, Francis.” I always loved the name Leo. And I loved it all the more when I found out, as an adult, something even my parents didn’t know about Dr. Bloch: he had been a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany who got out right before his family’s train left. When I graduated from college, my mother said, “You must send Dr. Bloch an invitation.” Dr. Bloch was by then in his nineties, but I did. And I subsequently received a very nice gift from him in the mail: a set of monogrammed handkerchiefs, pink on ivory—“FLD”— with a note saying that he was sure “Frances” had grown up to be a “wonderful young woman.”

1 October 2005: I have now been doing this online journal for about six weeks, and in that little patch of time it has received nearly six hundred “hits” from nearly six hundred different readers. (My “counter” is set so as not to count revisiting readers; it will give me the greater number if I ask for it, but I have not done so to date.) This seems an excellent tiime and place to set down some of these readers’ in-person and email responses—and also to invite you to respond as well (email address provided in “Profile” sidebar above). To wit:

1. LG and I are having dinner yesterday. Even before the drinks arrive, she indicts me as a liar because . . . “You know full well that your favorite color is not Yellow! Your favorite color is Pink!” I flush with embarrassment—not because I have lied (although I have, albeit unconsciously) I, but because I have been so thoughtlessly cavalier and inconstant with respect to my passionately beloved Pink. (What would Petrarch think?) I am just as embarrassed about the cause of my sin, the tritest cause of all in love stories both true and fictive: the “out of sight, out of mind” factor. You just never SEE True Pink anymore. The paradigm of True Pink is the so-finely-woven cotten Hathaway shirts from the 1950s. It is not merely “Shocking Pink,” although it is certainly that. It is a Pink so strong and pure that it seems to be of one essence with the cotton. Together, they seem one wondrous thing. A thing at once strong, delicate, bright, soft, almost shiny in the best of senses, a thing perfect to both the sight and the touch. You don’t see it anymore. What you see in its place is pinkish cheap coarse-weave Oxford cloth (so-called from the beginning to give a touch of phoney button-down class to the cheap and tawdry). Today, anything even resembling True Pink survives only in such weird manifestations as peppermint ice cream, those tiny Valentine’s candy hearts with the red writing on them, and the “pink center” of medium rare steak. My own heart leaps up when I behold, on occasions all too rare, one of those things going into other people’s mouths.
2. On Hearing Things. My beloved former student BR writes from Chicago: “I read your journal regularly. Some sections make me wonder ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’ Some stuff I respond to in my own notes because it reminds me of something I have noticed about myself. This morning I read the stuff about ‘hearing things.’ That I really get. I don’t know if I would have ever thought about it like that, but I hear things. For quite a long time I was kind of upset that I couldn’t do anything with it. This talent had no value. Being privy to some sort of ridiculousness never materialized into anything bigger than a story that might elicit a chuckle. My guilt over this resembles the guilt you described students as having about not being productive. That has changed. Now, I enjoy these moments quite a bit more. Some I tell my wife or pals about, and sometimes I write them down and email them to people who might also chuckle, and sometimes I just shake my head.” As for the head shaking, me too! I thank you for your friendship and readership, Brian.
3. On Hearing Things. Linguistics professor JML writes from Ann Arbor: “As for your singular talent, as you mention it in the blog, I was irresistibly reminded of [Elias] Canetti’s ‘Earwitness,’ which I copy for your delectation if you’re unfamiliar with it: ‘[The Earwitness] forgets nothing. . . . He does nothing else, he says it very precisely, some people wish they had held their tongues. All those modern gadgets are superfluous: his ear is better and more faithful than any gadget, nothing is erased, nothing is blocked, no matter how bad it is, lies, curses, four-letter words, all kinds of indecencies, invectives from remote and little-known languages, he accurately registers even things he does not understand . . . . When it comes to this useful gift, which he alone has, he would take no heed of wife, child, or brother. Whatever he has heard, he has heard, and even the Good Lord is helpless to change it. . . . He looks people in the eye, the things they say in these circumstances seem quite unimportant to them and do not suffice to spell their doom. He is a friendly person, everyone trusts him, everyone likes to have a drink with him, harmless phrases are exchanged. At such times, people have no inkling that they are speaking with the executioner himself.”

   Canetti is absolutely right, and I thank JML for putting me in touch with the only writing on this topic I have ever read—or ever even heard anybody mention. But memory is indeed selective, and what Canetti’s Earwitness remembers from what he hears people say is rather the opposite of what I remember. For the great Canetti, the Earwitness remembers pieces of speech which convict his ownknowing speakers from their own mouths, and the Earwitness is thus in Canetti’s sense their “executioner.” (“This is a great example of the Biblical “You yourself have said it!”) For me, though, the pieces of speech I remember are ones that manifest, and prove, what is (for lack of a better and less semantically loaded word) the speakers’ very divinity. Or so I believe.

4. Under the Covers with Sara! Oh My! Old pal and former teaching colleague SH writes from Olympia: “I only wish I could take the thing to bed—lie on my side under my lamp and fall asleep reading it. Funny, I often scream at my writing students: just because it happens to you, doesn’t mean it’s interesting. Well, here I have an answer to that: a model for how to make an interior life into a piece of work—not exposure but contemplation, discursive wandering punctuated by surprise, insight, admonition, and so forth. The writing has what I like to call shape, tone, elegance. Lions, tigers, bears. Oh, my!” Because SH is one of the greatest writing teachers on earth, I was nearly reduced to tears of gratitude upon her words.
5. First, Second, and Third Wolves. KL, sans doubt the sweetest of all former students, writes from Seattle: “Why ‘Third Wolf’?” Ah, Kerry my darling, I was just waiting for somebody to write and ask. The First Wolf is my great hero Laura Cereta (1469-1499), a brilliant humanist whose snarling, luminous words survive only in her letters and journals. She was discounted, even ignored, by the other brilliant humanists of her day solely because she was a woman and thus “could not be taken seriously.” She famously refers to herself as a wolf in an acidic letter to one of these eminent philosophers, who she (correctly) feels has condescendingly praised her as someone he both fears (as a predator upon him) and yet tries to hunt down and kill (as his prey). The Second Wolf is William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), whom I believe to be one of the two or three great writers of English-language narrative prose (including his letters and journals) in the second half of the twentieth century. As a boy, kept a secret little book on ruled yellow notebook paper which he called “Journal of a Wolf.” So I call this “The Journal of the Third Wolf.” But this is also the place to acknowledge the obvious: there has been, and will be, a virtual infinitude of journal-keeping wolves.

   Here is the only known image of Laura Cereta:

   And here is one amongst millions of images of William S. Burroughs—but my own favorite, and a rarity:

6. Is the Third Wolf Really a Christian? KL (who has known him for 25 years) also writes: “I’m also a bit confused, having read perhaps too quickly and befuddledly at this late hour, about your beliefs. You say you ARE a Christian? As in, Christ is the son of God and Christianity is the one true religion? And there is some sort of an afterlife? I am interested to hear more, as I have recently been trying to bring together the fact of my mostly atheist beliefs and strictly atheist upbringing (“I thank God I was raised an atheist!”) with the fact that I definitely do believe in something, although it doesn’t involve any kind of an afterlife or a conception of God that has a ‘master plan’ for all humanity and individual lives.”

   Alas, Kerry, I just wrote those words too quickly and thoughtlessly. Too BADLY, I am ashamed to say to a former writing student who writes as beautifully and clearly as you do. I thank you for calling my attention to it. No, I don’t believe that Christ was the literal son of God. No, I don’t believe that Christianity is the one true religion. No, I don’t believe in the Christian afterlife, or for that matter in any, and I don’t believe in Heaven as an existent locatable “place.” And (to anticipate other obvious questions): no, I don’t believe in the virgin birth or in the resurrection of Jesus. (I acknowledge the slight chance that some or all of these things are literally true, but no, I don’t believe in the truth of any of them.) So I am not a Christian in the sense that any good Christian could possibly accept. But I call myself a Christian anyway because the words of Jesus, as set down in the four gospels, are the words by another person with which I am most fully in agreement. All I pay attention to in the Bible are the four gospels, and all I pay attention to in them are the quoted words of Jesus, and, of these words, the ones I pay MOST attention to are the ones scholars think are actually his. (I pay no attention whatsoever, for example, to Paul. Nice guy, but . . . .) William F. Buckley once famously said that if he found out that Jesus was not literally the son of God and literally resurrected, he would “immediately turn Jew.” But if Jesus is the teacher in whom you most believe (he is for Buckley), why go so far? Why can’t you be a Christian in the same way you can be a Confucian? Why can’t you just say, This is the guy who got it right and said it best when it comes to the conduct of life? One difficulty, admittedly, is that of trying to make Jesus into a coherent person with a cohrent teaching, for he seems much different in, say, Matthew, than he does in, say, John. I try! I think it is worth it to try. But, as I also believe in a God of some sort — a God who (whether he, she, it, or all of them together) is much like the “Father” spoken of by Jesus—, then the enormous difficulty lies in relating Jesus to that “Father.” For if Jesus is not God’s literal “son,” how can Jesus’ words be taken as a reliable characterization of God? The only answer I have is the usual inadequate one: Jesus was “inspired” by God—literally having the true words about God BLOWN INTO HIM. Of course, this answer in itself blows. It begs the all-important questions, How?, and, Why should anyone believe THAT?” I don’t know. My own experience, which is all I have, indicates strongly that (a.) there is a God, (b.) he, she, it, whatever, is well-enough understood as “good” and “loving” (leaving it at that), and (c.) this God hears prayer—and then does whatever he, she, it, or whatever wants to with it, knowing full well that the Rolling Stones got it right: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you might just find, you get what you need.” Sometimes, if rarely, what you want IS what you need. In my own experience, which is all I have, I have found out years later that, when I prayed for what I dearly wanted, and when that dear want was also what I needed, I got it—and that when I did not need it, I did not get it, no matter how desperately I wanted it. For we don’t know what we need until . . . . later.

   I also have trouble with Jesus because he seems to be (like Jehovah/Yahweh) so devoid of humor—so irascible, perverse, and contrarian at every chance in his recorded dialogues with people (or seemingly so). Such a snippy, cheeky smart-aleck in those dialogues (or seemingly so). But this is also one of the things that amazes me about him: in all my experience, although I have known many such young men, I have never known one who professed, and who practiced in his recorded actions, anything approaching Jesus’ teachings of love and forgiveness. Whether he was literally “divine” or not, and whether he literally worked miracles or not, if he was anything like the Jesus portrayed in the four gospels, he was certainly a person like none of the thousands I’ve ever known. For me, this is one of the most important facts about Jesus—and one I’ve never seen remarked upon anywhere.

7. KL Weighs in on Unity. “On the whole unity/chaos topic: I don’t think there is any ‘unity,’ and I do think there is ‘chaos,’ but there is also indisputably pattern (if not design) and quite complex function in living things that really is hard to understand in terms of pure chemical science. I do believe there is an interconnectedness of things—not UNITY of things, since life is indeed random and chaotic, and since lives are in competition, and evolutionarily jostle and smother and prey upon one another. But even so, there is interconnectedness.”

   I agree—almost. I’m just not so convinced that “interconnectedness” equals “pattern.” Consider the Internet. It is all “interconnected” by these miraculous things called “links.” But the fact that it IS all connected by links does not not necessarily mean (to me) that those links, taken in their totality, form a “pattern”—unless one wants to assert simply that any bunch of connectons/links existent within anything anyone perceives as a “whole system” (like the Internet or even a framed painting) is ipso facto a “pattern.” If we PERCEIVE something as a whole system and/or as a pattern, we will of course be convinced that it IS. But is it? I doubt it. It is comforting to believe (as Peckham says, above), that it is so. But I see no reason to believe it, other than my emotional desire to be comforted and consoled and reassured. This is what Peckham is talking about when he says that we will perceive unity and pattern in perceptual fields to the extent that we have the emotional NEED to do so—and that, at those psychological moments when we completely lack that need, when we feel very healthy and strong, we will indulge ourselves in the good wholesome evil fun of seeing no unity or pattern whatsoever in anything we think about or look at.

[By the way, I apologize to one and all for the excessive use of all-caps words for emphasis in this journal. They should all be italicizations, but the embarrassing fact is that stupid Leo can’t get the italics function to work. As soon as he figures it out, he will tediously and obsessively convert every all-cap word to an italicized word.]

Life Down South/Hearing Things. I am down at the tiny B & R Market on the corner of my street around 10:00 p.m. last night buying canned coffee and cashew nuts. The sweet lady behind the counter (who has been there for years, and who, because of her motherly sympathetic ear and crinkly smiling eyes would make an excellent bartender) is listening to the musings of a sad-looking customer whom she obviously knows. The man takes a drag off his Newport and says: “We all got to give Bobby Joe time. He’ll put the bottle down. The old boy’s trouble is that he’s only forty-five years old and just ain’t got used to this fuckin’ death shit yet.”

HYPOSTATIZATION. And Now for a Few Words (and Paragraphs) About One of Life’s Greatest Words, HYPOSTATIZATION. (The verb, which is really more important, is HYPOSTATIZE.)

Yup. HYPOSTATIZATION. Like you (probably), I hate nine-dollar words that are also nubulous (and maybe even totally meaningless) abstractions. But I love it when I find a word, no matter how big or little, that nails something humans REALLY DO—especially when it’s something that no other word really nails. HYPOSTATIZATION is such a word. (The word REIFICATION is sometimes used in ways that come close, but its usage has been fuzzed up by Marxian theorists [such as Georg Lukacs] to such an extent that if you use it to mean HYPOSTATIZATION, most educated people won’t understand what you’re getting at.) HYPOSTATIZATION is breathtaking in its implications. Consider the following other words (all nouns) that name things we are taught to believe are actually inside of us somewhere: IMAGINATION, REASON, the UNDERSTANDING, and MIND itself. (Sometimes these HYPOSTATIZATIONS are broken down hierarchically. For example, the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote “Kubla Khan,” claimed that there was both a PRIMARY IMAGINATION and a SECONDARY IMAGINATION. And sometimes HYPOSTATIZATIONS are given “add-ons.” For example, Coleridge, along with the German philosophers he followed, also argued that there was a special kind of IMAGINATION inside of you called the FANCY—one of the few that has actually sort of died out over the years, although some readers will have heard of it. ) These particular HYPOSTATIZATIONS are some of our supposed human “faculties” (a term invented by eighteenth-century philosophers and psychologists). We are taught that they are “real,” and we are taught to develop them, and we are taught to worry when they seem not to be working right. Maybe your grandmother, when she thought you’d done something both stupid and wrong, shouted at you: “Have you lost your FACULTIES?”

Anyway, HYPOSTATIZATION is what we do when we turn a human ability (including the ability to feel or sense stuff) into an actual entity (albeit a nonphysical or noncorporeal entity) that supposedly resides inside of you. Of course, this “turning into” is almost totally done for us by the cultures into which we are born. We “receive” it. So, as social theorists would say, these supposed entities are “social constructions.”

Thus, the fact that we have the ability to think logically, to think “reasonably,” has led us to believe that we have an entity called REASON inside of us. (We think of such a “faculty” as residing inside our heads, but it is of course possible, since faculties are non-corporeal, non-physical, that they have their homes in our little fingers.) Why is this important? Well, just to name one little thing, it was the supposed absence of the faculty of REASON in women—an absence claimed by men, of course—that made it illegal for women to vote in America and most of Europe until the twentieth century!

But that’s just the beginning. There’s a lot more to HYPOSTATIZATION than just your supposed “faculties.” Consider all the following words: CONSCIENCE; SOUL; EGO, ID, SUPEREGO (all three from Freud); the UNCONSCIOUS (Freud again), along with its pals SUBCONSCIOUS and PRECONSCIOUS; and ARCHETYPE (from Plato, Jung, Northrop Frye and others). The psychologist Wilhelm Reich HYPOSTATIZED when he decided that certain kinds of “good human energy” live in things inside us called ORGONES. (He invented the ORGONE Box, a big wooden box, insulated with lead, in which people sat for long stretches, and still sit today, accumulating that good old ORGONE energy. (My hero William Burroughs owned one and spent many hours in it. So did Allen Ginsberg. So did the brilliant British educator A.S. Neill, who wrote SUMMERHILL. So did thousands of other Reichians. And, lest you think Reich was ONLY a crackpot, consider that he is still regarded as one of the most important psychologists of both sexuality and the “Fascist Impulse” in the twentieth century.) Marshall McLuhan, the major media theorist of the twentieth century, came up with a HYPOSTATIZATION he called the SENSORIUM—a “thing” inside you that directs the traffic between the five (at least) senses. My teacher (for all too short a time) Noam Chomsky invented a HYPOSTATIZATION he called the SENTENCE GENERATOR—the “thing” that creates the “infiinite number of sentences” he thinks you are able to speak.

Another of my favorite writers, the eighteenth-century aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (horribly neglected outside his native Germany), worried quite a bit about HYPOSTATIZATION. He worried about it even though he didn’t know the word (or any German equivalent), and even though he did not foresee how much HYPOSTATIZATION would explode in social theory by the end of the nineteenth century. He likened it to the trick of the classical Greek dramatists called the DEUX EX MACHINA. (When they couldn’t solve a complicated mess they had created, the playwrights sometimes had a god come down out of the sky at the end of the play