When Negativity Don't Pull You Through

I don’t understand the taboo against complaining. Do all cultures have this sour disposition toward people who insist on telling the truth? Of lifting the veil? What was it Shelley said, “lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there.” Things like: Pilates on a spacecraft, as it hurtles toward earth in flames. Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess. The truculence of poets. Ruskin weeping in a men’s room. Who wants to see that? What everyone wants, apparently, is quiet. And who can blame them? Nobody wants to find themselves in Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. We just want a crackling fire and a huge willingness to gaze into the eyes of a penny and say I love you. It whispers of all sorts of impulse and indication that all those sexy pencils we bring to a sheet of paper just to repeat our grievances over and over and erase them in a fit of shame might be a bit too melodramatic to suit our purposes. Complaining must have an edge, or it’s just a wet sponge. People aren’t always great listeners. The mind wanders. A good complaint can coax a swarm of happy minds out of their fake contentment. Illusions are intoxicating. The truth is an old rag soaked in gasoline.

Art alone, by being useless, can be used to patch an existential tire. And since most people consider complaining to be useless and annoying let me show you how consciousness tosses about like grain in the wind. The grain isn’t complaining because there’s nothing to complain about. It’s grain. At least, I think it’s reasonable to assume that that’s what goes on in the domain of grain. Grain being grain. Wind being wind. Nature accomplishing its tasks in unhurried calm. Complaining is different. Complaining sensationalizes the ideal. Its agitations are squalls. Small craft warnings. Inundations of nihilistic bile. The sharp burn of brandy, exquisite as a catharsis.

All grain does is sensationalize eating. It grows it waves in the wind it turns into bread. Complaining comes from pain. This is why it’s immodest, and irritating, and holy, and annoying. But it should be respected. It shouldn’t be shunned like it’s a sin rippling through the puritan community.

Cowboys, according to the John Wayne Hollywood model, hate complainers. They just look you in the eye and spit at the ground and ignore you. Hamlet would not have made a good cowboy. George Carlin was a spectacular cowboy. And so was Bill Hicks. But there was also a lot of Hamlet in them. People given to solitude, but craving a stage. People seething with preternatural insight. O cursed spite, why was I born to set it right.

Wild Bill was a bit like that, and so was Samuel Clemens, whose complaints were dressed in humor, and buffalo robes and stage coach stations. People hardened by blizzards. And disease. And death. Is it any wonder a cowboy would look at you silly if you complained the service at the Rawhide Saloon was slow and the waitresses were rude? He’d pull out his six-shooter and put a few holes in the ceiling. And laugh like a maniac. Because he survived the civil war. And you’re a jerk and a cheat at cards. Cowboys may not complain. But there’s hurt and devilry in their eyes when they can see the fraudulent nature of things, and feel backed against a wall.

Hamlet was a supremely gifted complainer. My complaints are blunt instruments compared to his samurai pith and wit.

People don’t like complainers because it spoils the meticulously constructed world of denial they live in. Their own personal Disneyland.

If you’re into complaint porn like me, I recommend reading the reviews online. Reviews for plumbers. Reviews for electricians. Reviews for rabis and priests. Reviews for shamans and birthday clowns. Reviews for swimming pools and window installation companies. Reviews for Hamlet and Portnoy’s Complaint. Bill Burr at Madison Square Garden.

Complaints, especially the big complaints, the existential complaints, that whole what’s the point of rolling a boulder to the top of a hill if it’s going to go rolling back down again? Deserve a theatre of their own. And they often do at the comedy clubs. And those little bits in King Lear, when Lear is raging against the heavens in a vicious storm of treachery and abandonment. And the fool and mad Tom seek shelter in whatever hovel they can find. And Gloucester appears with a light and invites them into the castle. Where things get even worse. And hard looks suffer inflammations of harsh unforgiving speech. Grievances so hard they create armies and death.

Complaining isn’t a frivolous endeavor. Complaining will earn you complaints. It’s blasphemous. It’s a clear effrontery to the author of our existence. Who made everything perfect. Which it most definitely is not. Maybe for some creatures. But not us delicate humans. Not with our sensitive unfurred, unscaled skin. Our tiny little teeth and our tiny little eyes and our wingless shoulders and the complications of our fingers and the oppositions of our thumbs. Our big dumb brains inventing telescopes and microscopes but too stupid to take care of a planet.

Astronauts never seem to complain. Maybe its due to the weightlessness. I would definitely complain less if I could float. And good healthcare. And a stable economy. And people who loved me. Who would complain in those circumstances? Larry David no doubt. Because there will always be people who don’t know to park. Or look you in the eye and tell you the truth.

It takes stamina to listen to someone’s complaint. There has to be some appetite for negativity, or such assurance in the world you’ve constructed that its foundational assumptions can withstand a small tremor of grumbling.

Some people are drawn to the negative. These people are called nihilists, and they enjoy hard rock and Beckett, gestures without a purpose and minerals shaped like a Missouri breakfast. They’re surprisingly nimble and active participants in the game of life, once you get them motivated, and hand them some money, and a bag of cocaine.

I wrote a novel of complaining once. And those poor generous souls who were willing to subject themselves to my abuses of the English language, complained about the complaining. I think I may have taken it a notch to high. Too much trouble in the treble. And not nearly enough bass.

It’s hard trying to maintain a balanced view of things in life, just enough reward to justify the punishment. It’s good to remind yourself of the things you’re grateful for. But we all live in a state of acute precarity these days and we’re all trying to keep our dinghies from turning over. The waves are high and their menace is real. Does someone’s complaining help our situation? I believe it does. Maybe a chain reaction of vigorous healthy complaining across the nation of an exhausted people finally fed up with the imbecility of their government will spread a broad, liberating light across the darkness of the prairie all the way to Vegas to the Gulf of the Farallones and Kerouac’s old Golden Gate and brighten the sad dim lights of San Francisco.   

The Universe In The Creak Of A Bedspring

Science doesn’t think. Said Heidegger. Science is rigorously empirical. It observes. It measures. It quantifies. It obscures Being with abstract numerical properties. Science is reductive, thought is rampant. Technology is fundamentally blind. Creativity sees the invisible beyond the visible. Science exalts objectivity. Poetry evinces Erfahrung, the feeling of coming into existence.

Science eschews the alchemy of metaphor for the accuracy of the caliper.

The mind (to paraphrase William James) sees in the universe an alluring enigma whose key is hidden in the form of a word or a name.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Science sees the mind as a kind of computer, an organ, an electrochemical Wurlitzer. A symbol-manipulation device, a network of neurons, or a probabilistic inference engine.

According to Heidegger (and, not unironically, the AI overview on Google) “technology significantly affects the mind by shaping our perception of the world, causing us to view everything as raw material for manipulation and control, essentially ‘enframing’ our understanding and limiting our ability to experience the world authentically; he argues that modern technology, with its focus on calculation and efficiency, can restrict our thinking to a purely instrumental way of viewing the world, potentially reducing our capacity for deeper contemplation and connection with nature and other beings.”

I’m sympathetic to these thoughts. I find them cogent and alert. I also find them romantically naïve.

Technology has helped make existence endurable. Not just endurable, fun. It’s exhilarating to feel the thrust and roar of the turbojets aboard a passenger jet lift from the ground and watch below as the city and its exasperating complications shrink into inconsequential miniatures. Take that initial downward dive on a roller coaster. Listen to Susan Tedeschi play an electric guitar.

Technology has given us refrigerators, vaccines, electric lights and heating, halls for symphonies, stadiums for sports, telescopes, microscopes, spectroscopes and colonoscopies, calculus and codeine, welding, windmills and well-being, vineyards and violins, antennas and aqueducts and antibiotics, careful experimentation and observation, Robert Boyle’s indomitable matter of fact.

Technology has also destroyed what I most love. What I devoted to my life to. Writing. Literature. Poetry. Computer technology has had a powerfully corrosive effect on literary and critical thinking. It has also been a critical component of warheads and ballistic missiles.

Not to mention the 2,000 lb. bombs being dropped daily on the citizens of Gaza. Men, women, and children. Babies.

Or the fire bombs dropped on Dresden in February, 1945.

Or the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Or the daily release of 32,000 gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan for the next thirty years.

Science doesn’t think. It blunders. It destroys. It brutalizes nature. It distances us from ourselves. It produces sidewalk zombies forever scrolling for little squirts of dopamine. It enables war and ecological disasters. Lethal viruses escape from its labs. Children die in lithium mines.

So I get it. I lean toward Heidegger. Everything but the Nazi affiliation.  

It’s a curious exercise to mix poetry and science. Lucretius did a fine job of it in De Rerum Natura. This testifies to the ultimate failure of categories to support a coherent argument. Because poetry and science – mathematics especially – have far more in common than they do irresolvable differences. Things blur. Life is lived in blends of plum and soft Tara gray.

Equations are poetry. There are equations that evince a marvelous aesthetic. And there are equations that reveal unexpected relationships between things, which is precisely what poetry does. Poetry is an arena of equation making.

For example, the Standard Model Lagrangian. It’s not much to look at. At first glance, it looks like an indecipherable mess. But it’s beautiful. Beautiful in its complexities and mathematical éclat. It describes the fundamental interactions of elementary particles within the Standard Model of particle physics, and does so with clarity and sparkle and a keenly displayed perceptibility of highly elusive abstractions. How is this different from a poem? The equation is customarily written as a sum of terms representing the kinetic energy of the particles, their interactions with the gauge bosons (a bosonic elementary particle that acts as the force carrier for elementary fermions) and the Higgs field interactions, which is responsible for converting energy to horses, frogs, and motorcycles. It’s a poem. It does what poetry does. It creates. It enchants. It accelerates particle beams smashes congruent chains and sprinkles the world with God particles.

I’m not trying to make converts here. I do tend to get evangelistic on matters of poetry and the verbal arts, but a lot of the time I’m trying hard to make sense of the many incongruities and contradictions that inhabit my brain. The wrongly assumed antagonism between science and art being one of them.

If there were an equation for that, it would look like this, what I call the Pierre Reverdy equation: “The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison, but only of the bringing together of two more or less distant realities. The more the relations of the two realities brought together are distant and fitting, the stronger the image – the more emotive power and poetic reality it will have.”

The ocean in a drop of water.

The universe in the creak of a bedspring.

Squiggles Splashes Blobs

The abstract fascinates me. I can’t say why. Maybe it’s because it’s abstract. The attraction is in the realm of the abstract and is therefore indefinable. Intangible. Impalpable. Incorporeal. Like a mist on a swamp. Like the song of a siren echoing in a Norwegian fjord. The abstract morphs immediately into fable. Into wizards and gyroscopes. As soon as I start thinking about the abstract, I start fetching images for it, so that it becomes apparent and manageable. Which destroys it. It becomes a representation of something entirely different. It becomes a utility rather than an entity. The abstract has the fluid ellipsis of Platonic sublimation. Images aren’t repelled by the abstract, they’re attracted to the abstract. It’s just that in the realm of the abstract, they cease to be recognized as objects in the realm of the human. Human perception is navigable when things are specific. When things are no longer specific, no longer tied to a narrative, they become abstract. Geometric. Squares, circles, rhombohedrons. Squiggles, splashes, blobs.

I like to drift to the north of myself and float above the tundra in an igloo. This is precisely how I feel about abstraction. The energy is clear and brilliant like the stars, but if it gets too warm your house melts.

When I view a work of abstract art, I’m confused as to how to take in. Because I want to take it in. I’ve been drawn to certain paintings – many paintings in fact – by forces I don’t understand. An incomprehensible magnetism draws me to a representation that is a non-representation, a representation unrepresenting itself. The reality, its essence of being, is in shape and color. That’s it. Shape. And color. Altitude spread over a mountain like chowder. The eloquence of a green arm holding a black sun. The creak of floorboards. Sensations peeled back to reveal the juice of value. Predicaments of existential trace. I let myself go to this twist of reality to find a pulse of fervor in a streak of scarlet, and linger before the canvas dissolving on its spin. Each splatter, each blot, each smudge, each splurge a palpable echo of the void between our ribs.

Reality is just an artifice, writes Mallarmé, good for anchoring the average intellect among the mirages of a fact. One must sift experience for the charms of procrastination. Facts are simply the centipedes of certitude, a swarm of anatomies creating a mirage in the shimmering advance of the text, the rapid clatter of little slender ideas, each charged with its own special brand of facticity. Something is true because it has precipitous effects on people. It makes them happen to themselves, like jalapeños or dandruff. The idea that reality is one and many and in a state of perpetual flux comes to us from Heraclitus, who, it is said, may have brought about his own death by speaking in a confused manner to the doctors treating him. He had also covered himself in cow dung. What we apprehend is, in the end, mostly random. Reality is just an artifice.

The irony at the core of abstract painting is its seeming avoidance of reality, stripping itself of any narrative, a picnic in the woods, a winter sunrise in the country, lily pads in a still pond. It gives us reality: line, shape, color, texture, mass, volume, paint.

There has never been enough said about Pollock’s draftsmanship. That amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate that simplest of elements, the line – to change, to reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrassment of riches in the mass by drawing alone. Said Frank O’Hara.

You can’t look at abstract art without thinking: why am I here? How did I get talked into this? And why didn’t I wear my suspenders? This belt is useless. My pants keep falling down. My hair looks like shit today too. Like this painting. Is this truly what art looks like up close? Oh, stop being such a philistine. I was drawn here. I don’t get it. But I’m drawn to it. It’s visceral. Proprioceptive. Now there’s a word. Words have the funniest habit of popping into your mind for no reason. Like they’re some kind of elfin spermatozoa. The seeds of the impalpable. This painting isn’t a turnstile. You can’t enter it and pass through it to a subway that takes you to a specific destination. It’s all surface and fact and immediacy and sod. Take that painting by Wyeth. The one everybody understands. The woman sitting in the grass looking at a house in the distance, at the top of the slope. There’s a story there. Maybe a murder. Maybe she lost the use of her legs and she’s hoping someone in the house will come to her rescue. Maybe she’s lost. But what am I doing here? I’m looking at this painting and thinking about another painting. The abstract is insistent in a very weird way. It’s really not insisting on being looked at all. It seems fine just hanging on a wall. Even though it was created on some guy’s floor while the maniac danced around it in an exultation of paint. Color. Movement. That’s what I’m seeing. The residue of that guy’s exaltation. Which makes it insistent. That’s what I’m sensing. It’s that visceral sensation of some guy’s wild energy.

Pollock is the Nureyev of Action Painting. A Greenwich Village shaman of the 1950s. When I was a kid playing “Beautiful Dreamer” on a flute and collecting eggs from the henhouse on a North Dakota farm and feeling their warmth and that beautiful ovalness that feels so good in your hand, right down to the bone and marrow and gladness of having a hand, this supple organ for feeling and holding things. With its bouquet of fingers, and silly importance of the thumb.

The heavy impasto of Shimmering Substance says it all: It’s a universe of color a tether untethered an éclat of internal lightning. A pleonasm steeped in naked transparency. Thoughts in pursuit of a stick. Pragmatism is just a subtle crack in the argument. There are better ways to feel the resonances of the dead. Our own kindnesses invite us to open our breath to the reality of ourselves. Or the hang of things. The scrotum is a domain of great decorum. Here are some ways to think about thinking: and by that I mean the activities of the mind, which are interacting with something it doesn’t recognize, but that flashes on and off in the Kansas night. I find paint uplifting. Sensuous. Libidinous. Pleasantly gooey. I could throw adjectives at it all day and it wouldn’t bring anything into easy understanding. The effrontery of it. That sound it makes when you stir it in a big can. One need only accept the sparkle of propagation to enjoy this moment.

We hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters. There isn’t much to go on. Other than your nerves. I wish I better understood the decorum of legs. The way they move with such easy, natural rhythm could solve anybody’s argument. I do like Kline. And Kandinsky and Gerhard Richter. Prose is thought poetry is a gun in the glove box. These branches carry lovely blossoms. These branches of words, which are buds on the tongue of something magnificent, and wide open and denim. Ever open a bottle of something carbonated that overflowed and got your fingers sticky? We’re surrounded on all fronts by the impish sparkle of the arbitrary. Fruits, consequences, facts. Cesarean cookies dusted with penicillin. The science of masses, molecules and the ether. The oddness of standing naked in a stationary store looking for a stuffed monkey. Teary-eyed farewell bugs. Hot sonata ice. You don’t even know what I’m talking about. I don’t either. This always happens when I get around something abstract. The cod are visible below the waves. And the thunder reminds me of Ganesha. Whatever happened to Cameron Diaz?

Cy Twombly's marks inflate with the crackle of abstraction in the surrounding space. Rothko’s volumes are as lush as the light will allow. Is space the ultimate abstraction? Just space? Infinite quantities of space. Which isn’t a quantity. Or is it? Is space a quantity? Yes, it is, as it is a fundamental dimension that can be measured and is considered to be a vital framework for describing the physical world, similar to time and mass; meaning you can quantify the amount of space occupied by a walrus or a concertina through measurements like length, width, and height. Space isn’t empty. Space is full of particles, radiation and energy, which, according to William Blake, is eternal delight. You might also consider a trip to Thailand, or Bhutan, where penises are painted everywhere, in honor of Drukpa Kunley, a 15^th century Buddhist teacher. And if that doesn’t pan out you can always go fishing. Or visit a local face. Aren’t eyebrows wonderful?

Mathematics is fiercely abstract. That’s because numbers are elegant. It’s paradoxes bloom into beautiful theories. Einstein called math the poetry of logical ideas. But look at Einstein’s desk. Does anything look logical there? I suppose it does in some cockeyed way I’d never understand. Not without a spoon, a fork, and a pile of pancakes. A piece of chalk. And a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Socked by physics into a stupor of infinite volume. Or something like it. A truncated acute hyperbolic solid cut by a plane, like Gabriel’s Horn, which has finite space, but infinite surface area. I wonder what it sounds like. Conversations with strangers. Oysters slurped from the shell. Or maybe Miles Davis’s muted trumpet in So What. And that’s it. That attitude lurking in the abstract. I’m here. I exist. I have Being. But no bone. I exist in the mind. So what. 

Dumb Dark And Gray

Is there a recipe for chimera? They say the meat of the chimera is tender as hope and sweetened with the juice of illusion. It must first be pounded with a giant desperation, marinated in bitter rumination, then baked in a paragraph preheated with unobtainable desires. Later, after the table is set with great expectations, hungry emotions, & cutlery warm as tears, it’s time to serve the chimera. Some say it tastes like glory, others that it savors of desperate measures and fetishized asparagus. I followed a chimera to California one day. I tried to sneak up on it and surprise it, but as I approached, a giant reality pounced & ate it. Life is empty without at least one illusion. The illusion, for example, that life has meaning. Meaning is another tasty meat. It's best eaten raw, but if you put it in a poem, or a self-help book, which is its own special type of chimera, season it with prepositions and saleswomen. Make it convincing. Give it magnetism and crusades. Talk about it. Let people know where you’re coming from. Avalon. El Dorado. Cockaigne.

Glastonbury, near Pilton, where the Glastonbury Festival has featured T. Rex, Radiohead, Adele, Beyoncé and The Rolling Stones, was once known as the Isle of Avalon, where King Arthur was taken after the Battle of Camlann, in which his son Mordred stabbed him in the head with his sword. Keith Richards was but a young man when this happened. I can hear his chimera purring behind a Grammatico amp. Can’t You Hear Me Knocking. I Heard It Through The Grapevine begins in the key of betrayal. We all come to discover the treachery of snow on a sidewalk, the barely visible, potentially lethal sheet of crystal known as black ice. I don't know if there's a parable here, or one on the way, but high inflationary dollars do have a certain flair, the wizardry of illusion. The boldness of drawing wealth from a future that may or may not exist haunts the corner of North Euphoria & West Ecstasy. Sausages are sold here, and pretzels and popcorn.

Wassily Kandinsky turned to abstraction to bring reality to paint. People had begun mistaking pictures for paint, paint for pictures. Kandinsky incandesced into color. Geometric and biomorphic forms, curious entities with strong suggestions of intracellular life but without the domesticating definitions of easy identifiability. The mind is provoked into celestial organicism. Bold colors in a realm of endless metamorphosis. Luminous walls across a blue river. Radiant yellows, robust greens, squiggles of black sinuous as music. What feels like a flicker of red is an immersion in the abstract, the canvas strumming a herd of deities. It’s an aesthetic of heat, a fire in the logic of blue. The flutter of rebellion in a splodge of atomic tangerine. Or just plain heat.

Is there a fool in the dictionary? Yes, there is: one who is deficient in judgment, sense, or understanding. One who acts unwisely in a given occasion: I was a fool to subscribe to The Elegant Gaffe. Formerly, a member of a royal or noble household who entertained the court with jests and mimicry. The act of being foolish, such as making inversions invite the irrational into a whorl of living temperature. The ability, if not the compulsion, to turn the world upside down. To scoff at money, then do everything you can to get it. Devote yourself to a library of world literature as the world grows increasingly illiterate. And expect to get paid for it. Celebrate the use of lazy tongs at a word salad bar on a late-night poetry show called Dumb Dark and Gray. Make demands. Don’t let the academic system degrade it into being a mere specialization. Wear a funny hat. Put everything beyond the reach of logic. You’re there. Now honk your horn.

 

 

Time For You To Leave Now William Blake

I think it’s finally here, that feeling of irrelevance that’s been seeping into the darker corners of my denial for at least a decade. My relation to the world has altered. The pier is empty. The ship has sailed. Captain Ahab isn’t hunting for a white whale in a world of towering, oceanic prose. He’s obsessively doomscrolling a mobile phone next to a closed bookstore which is now a Starbucks. The good news is that I’m old. Being old is surprisingly salutary; it feels appropriate, like old boots on a wet day in December. There’s a side to obsolescence not unlike adolescence. Irrelevance is to old age what an Amish horse and buggy is to a Tesla sedan with all-wheel drive. It’s based. It’s genuine. It’s contrary, it’s refractory, and agreeably anachronistic. When defiance of the norms leads to social and cultural irrelevance, old age is the salt that enhances its flavor.

I’m not alone. Language itself has become irrelevant. More and more people can’t read. They may be functionally literate, but reading for subtleties of meaning, for nuance, for evocative insinuations or glorious insights into the realm of human consciousness counts for very little. Don’t believe me? Go listen to a podcast. Go on TikTok. Listen to an influencer. But before doing so, remove any guns or potent pharmaceuticals from your office or home. Why else have things such as ‘misinformation’ or ‘hate speech’ or ‘fake news’ become such a threat that liberals – once the bastion of free speech – are now calling for censorship? Language has become a wild beast, a bull bristling with banderillas and blood running down the sides in a bullfight ring.

People of a given age who rage over these issues are generally called curmudgeons – a favorite word among gaslighters – and reminded of their irrelevance. We’re in a new world now. Post a protest about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and – if you happen to be a resident of England – you may have your house raided, as did author and anti-Zionist Asa Winstanely, who argued the salient but unpopular point that it’s wrong to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, and that the conflation of these terms is used by the state to stifle dissent. This contradicts my statements about the irrelevance of language; apparently, there remain situations in which the written word still unsettles some people with a bit too much relevance. I may be confronting an important paradox here: language continues to have relevance depending on context, the intolerance and infantile hypersensitivity of a heavily propagandized public, and the power of billionaires who own and control the social media platforms to censor speech contrary to the official narrative.

Thankfully, I’m not a journalist, but a harmless poet, composing verbal amusement parks with the relevance of a funhouse in a weapons manufacturing plant.

It’s not like I wasn’t warned. In 1994, the prestigious publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux brought out The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts. The trajectory of Birkerts’ life was quite similar to mine: enamored of the enchantments of the written word, he spent his early adult years living in very humble circumstances while dedicating himself to the pursuits of a nascent author, supporting himself with jobs clerking in bookstores. And also like me, and being of a similar age, he has had to witness the slow, painful erosion of a literary culture thousands of years old. Various literary cultures, I might add. The apocalypse of the printed word has been global. “There is no question,” Birkerts writes, “but the transition from the culture of the book to the culture of electronic communication will radically alter the ways in which we use language on every societal level.”

The complexity and distinctiveness of spoken and written expression, which are deeply bound to traditions of print literacy, will gradually be replaced by a more telegraphic sort of “plainspeak.” Syntactic masonry is already a dying art. Neil Postman and others have already suggested what losses have been incurred by the advent of telegraphy and television – how the complex discourse patterns of the nineteenth century were flattened by the requirements of communication over distances. That tendency runs riot as the layers of mediation thicken. Simple linguistic prefab is now the norm, while ambiguity, paradox, irony, subtlety, and wit are fast disappearing. In their place, the simple “vision thing” and myriad other “things.” Verbal intelligence, which has long been viewed as suspect as the act of reading, will come to seem positively conspiratorial. The greater part of any articulate person’s energy will be deployed in dumbing-down her discourse…Fewer and fewer people will be able to contend with the so-called masterworks of literature or ideas. Joyce, Woolf, Soyinka, not to mention the masters who preceded them, will go unread, and the civilizing energies of their prose will circulate aimlessly between closed covers.

This was written 30 years ago. Fast forward to 2024, and the detritus of the plague are visible everywhere, at least to the like-minded bibliophiles who have retreated into the sanctity of their libraries.

I’ve noticed that some authors, such as former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges, who wrote his own plea to the preservation of print media accompanied with all the dire consequences its demise would have on society, in a book published in 2009 titled Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, now writes a column on Substack which is accompanied by a podcast, The Chris Hedges Report Podcast, covering US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society. Were it not linked with a podcast, for which his accompanying text is essentially a transcript, I’m guessing his audience would not be as large. Which is a shame, because Hedges is a beautiful writer; the lucidity and gracefulness of his sentences were a special joy despite their oftentimes disturbing contents.

Another writer, an Australian woman named Caitlin Johnstone, also began accompanying her columns with a video in which the text is read by her co-writer, Tom Foley. Anticipating, I’m sure, the aversion people now have to the arduous task of reading. Read, for example, her recent article “The West Only Has Pretend Heroes Like Spider-Man And SpongeBob.” Here is an excerpt: “There are no real heroes with popular support in the western empire, because everything that’s truly heroic gets stomped down here, and everything that gets amplified to popularity is either vapid distraction or directly facilitates the interests of the evil empire.”

I envy people who have the finances and patience to set up a microphone and what else technology needed to put out a podcast. They’re hugely popular, an indication, perhaps, of a return to an oral culture not that dissimilar from our distant ancestors munching down hard on mastodon meat while listening to one of their clan members deliver the narrative of killing the tusked, hairy monster with their spears and unflinching courage. Joe Rogan – a hugely popular podcaster and UFC color commentator – not to mention a massively built man highly skilled in the martial arts – would dovetail into that role perfectly. His interviews can go as long as three hours without becoming tedious. He is an absorbed listener and adept conversationalist. Nevertheless, art, aesthetics, philosophy and/or literature rarely, if ever, come under discussion.

At age 77, it is somewhat befitting that a man in my predicament would try to find some meaningful traction despite the haunting fact of my irrelevance. The once highly popular blog provided a convenient substitute for the disappearance of print media, particularly in that it bypassed the accustomed gatekeepers and editors and gave one the freedom to write whatever and however you wanted, has been on the wane. There are now platforms such as Medium and Substack which appear to have captured the blog audience. All these mediums, however, are read on a computer screen, oftentimes a small mobile phone screen. Not an ideal situation.

Another victim of our electronic age is letters. I used to love writing letters. Still do. Provided I can occasionally find someone to participate in the exchange of verbal flurries and details pertaining to one’s personal life. There is no reason an email cannot carry that burden, but most people evince a stubborn reluctance to let their language spread its wings there. Don’t know why. It’s so frigging easy. Could it be the ever-haunting specter of surveillance? The letter sealed in an envelope was a private, sacrosanct world. Compare, for example, the warmth and verbal panache of Keats’ letters to the abrupt bullets of a typical email and you will witness an erosion of an art akin to the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, or the ice sheets of Greenland.

I’m often amazed to attend literary events. They’ve begun having a distinct Fahrenheit 451 vibe about them, people still devoted to the literary arts and doing what they can to preserve them. But the high and noble ambition of making a living by writing the Great American Novel, of producing an On The Road or The Handmaid’s Tale or Catcher in the Rye or Slaughter-House Five, seems as antiquated and obsolete as a prospector leading a mule burdened with camping equipment into the Nevada desert in search of gold.

Why should it bother me? I’m retired – not so much from a literary career but from the menial shit jobs I worked to make a living (what a remarkably odd and stupid phrase that is, make a living) which were the bane of my existence. I hated every job I ever had. But who doesn’t. It’s rare to find someone who makes money doing what they love to do. I have nothing but a huge bonfire of envy for that person, and a spark of admiration flying up into the dark cold night.

I watched a video recently about the 15 signs of intelligence, one of which was change, the eager embrace of the new rather than the stubborn reluctance to adapt. I couldn’t disagree more. Which, I guess, makes me a really stupid person. But most of the changes I’ve witnessed since the beginning of the 2000s have been unmitigated disasters. All the sidewalk zombies I see every day gazing mindlessly at a handheld device testify to an obliteration of intellect akin to the bubonic plague. Or the dreary tedium of people checking their own groceries without even a murmur of aggrieved humiliation at being put to work by the very store to whom they're giving their money is another sad spectacle of fallen humanity. Fuck change. If you can’t step in the same river twice, and the water is too polluted for swimming, go for a walk instead. But watch out for the nincompoops doing 60 mph down the sidewalk on a monowheel.

There is, I must admit, a euphoric side to irrelevance. It means being detached. Unchained. Not necessarily unengaged, not apathetic, not aloof, but off to the side, viewing the pageantry of human absurdity from the margins, like one of God’s spies, a neutral observer enlightened by dissociation and the wisdom of mortality, a bit like one of the angels in Wings of Desire. The knowledge that you’re temporary, ephemeral as a dragonfly when it comes down to it, is weirdly exhilarating. At least in the abstract, where nothing weighs nothing, and all the data banks nestled in row upon row upon row of floor-standing server racks count for nothing in the stillness of a crystal. Sunyata, the Hindu term for ultimate truth or reality, flashes semantically over a field of obsidian in the veined wings of a dragonfly. Irrelevance is an amulet beaded with words.

It gives me a peaceful feeling whenever I revisit in my mind’s eye that image of Johnny Depp in Dead Man lying still in a canoe, mortally wounded, as he drifts into the ocean. It all began by applying for a job as an accountant in the western frontier and morphing – mostly by one crazy happenstance after another - into a surprisingly lethal gunfighter. He has a memorable encounter with a frontier Iggy Pop, and an infamous bounty hunter and murderous cannibal named Cole Wilson played by Lance Henriksen. Most of these events occur while under the tutelage of a member of the Cayuga Tribe named Nobody, archly played by Gary Farmer, who – under the impression that Depp is English poet William Blake – befriends the accountant-cum-gunfighter as he penetrates deeper into the American west, feeding him quotes of Blakean wisdom until his final and fatal gunfight. Nobody leans over the carefully prepared canoe to tell Depp “Time for you to leave now William Blake, time for you to go back to where you came from.” “You mean Cleveland,” the dying Depp mutters. “Back to the place where all the spirits come from,” answers Nobody, “and where all the spirits return. This world will no longer concern you.” Nobody gives the canoe a shove and Depp floats outward toward the gray horizon to that place of ultimate irrelevance, of free-floating creative energy where particles pop in and out of existence in a sparkle of divine fluctuation. “The authors,” said William Blake, “are in eternity.”