Stoner

Mornings now, the first thing I do is turn on the heat. By the time I sit down and take my first sip of coffee, the room is deliciously warm. Is it a stretch to call a flavor serious? No, I truly believe there’s something inherently solemn about coffee. Tea gets perky from percolation. But coffee gets serious when it diffuses throughout a black powder of ground beans and drips through a filter into a porcelain pot. It’s as if it were thought itself penetrating and diffusing throughout a substance, meditating on it, saturating it, then dripping its infusion into the pot. This why coffee is hot and rectifying and serious. It makes me feel corrected. Specific. Palpable. An unequivocal being newly arrived from the nebulous oblivion of sleep.

Consciousness seeps in slowly. Coffee helps with that process, because it’s something to react to, immediately, and conveniently. Habit makes it easy. I could do it in my sleep. This works out well, since I’m half awake. Same with the cat. She wants attention. Affection. Which I give freely, and pleasurably. She lies down, fully extending her body and lying on her back, exposing the white warm fur of her belly. There’s an ease to this that allows consciousness to enter the skull without crashing into too much furniture. Whatever clutter a dream, or series of dreams, have left behind. Dreams are messy. Disorganized. The spoor of something beyond the material world trying to communicate with you in a language of labyrinths and tapioca helicopters.

1:30 p.m. We go for a run on upper Queen Anne. There aren’t that many crows out today. After numerous conflicts with the neighbors, we stopped feeding them. But the crows still remember us and get excited when they see us. Most of all, they still expect peanuts. It’s a bit sad, and more than a little aggravating. Today there’s only been a couple here and there.

We stop by the library. R picks up The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing and I drop off Stoner, by John Williams.

Stoner was an odd book. Not at all what I thought it was going to be. All I knew was that a few days ago on Facebook a lot of people were raving about it. Naturally, I was intrigued. The book is titled Stoner. How could that not be intriguing? When I saw it had been published in 1965, I grew even more intrigued. I’d never heard of it. I was a senior in high school in 1965. I graduated that summer. That was a time when quite a few celebrities were writers. Kerouac, especially. But also Malcolm X, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut and Ken Kesey. Sylvia Plath and John Updike. Betty Friedan and Harper Lee. Truman Capote was a frequent guest on late night talk shows. And spent some time wth the Rolling Stones. Which appears not to have gone all that well. But not as disastrous for Capote as Answered Prayers. Lots of writers were engaged with, and influential of, mainstream society in the 60s. Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America turned him into a rock star. It was thanks to Bob Dylan I discovered writers like Gertude Stein and Arthur Rimbaud and movements like Dada and Surrealism. So it struck me as odd I’d never heard of an extremely popular book published in 1965 called Stoner.

As I said, Stoner wasn’t at all what I thought it would be. It had nothing to do with drugs. Stoner was the surname of the main character. The story begins in the early 20^th century. The tone, as well as the architecture of the narrative, is stark and dreary. A courthouse, not a Grand Palais.  Stoner’s parents are tough, enduring, hard-working people maintaining a small farm in Missouri. They’re laconic, in the extreme. They seem locked in their bodies, holding tightly to whatever helps keep them sane, and most importantly, alive. Their son, William Stoner, attends college and so leaves home for the first time. He worries if his parents will be ok without his help. He’s that kind of son: dutiful and loving. His intention at college is to earn a degree in agriculture, so that he can help his parents run the farm more profitably. But he falls in love. Not with a woman, but an idea: literature.

I wasn’t gripped by the story. Not at first. What kept me going was the phrasing, the beautifully crafted sentences. They were a pleasure to read, soothing and reassuring. The book’s dependable, comfortable rhythm pulled me along in a kind of trance, a stillness like the surface of a puddle on a windless day, reflecting an elm or the gnarly entanglements of an American sycamore.

After Stoner confesses his change of major to literature to his parents (you can feel their deep disappointment, their dreams collapsing, but they abide by their son’s decision with a respectful acquiescence), I was expecting fireworks. He’s a young guy in college. Heterosexual, bisexual, or gay, I was ready for some action. None came. The five years Stoner attends college he makes two male friends, neither of whom seem to have much interest in libidinal distractions. Or even sports, which is really unusual. I kind of liked this. I felt comfortable with this guy and his two friends and their monastic demeanor, their quiet asceticism. The student as monk. Or anchorite. Frivolity kept to a minimum. Sly jokes and witticisms were the order of the day; the occasional Animal House bacchanals and heroic quantities of booze I remember from my college days are strangely absent.  So are the maniacal outbursts of sports events. These are people who dress formerly for their classes. Who have a strangely mature outlook for people so young, a wry understanding of life. Who immerse themselves in books. Any book. Any day of the week. Any hour of the day. And reemerge from its chrysalis in a blaze of wonder. Gazes glazed with reflection, with the ineffable gleam of elsewhere in their enraptured faces.

Stoner rents an attic with an older couple who also provide food in exchange for his doing a few chores on the property. Stoner complies easily. He’s a nose to the grindstone kind of guy. Stoic as a hunger artist. Ascetic as a Hindu sannyasi.

What I was really waiting for was Stoner’s passion for literature. I was anticipating dithyrambic raptures, a long, beautiful unfolding of nuances and flowers of verbal fire, roses plucked from the air and placed in a Qingbai porcelain vase, panegyrics for Melville and Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson and Whitman. Inebriations of air. Raptures of language. A slow dance with syntax. But none came. I read, instead, that Stoner has no instinct of introspection. Say what? How can that be? How can anyone have a love of literature with no flair nor inclination for introspection? Literature is introspection. What the hell kind of book is this? Were it not for the soothing musicality of its sentences – and an obsessive drive to complete any book I begin - I doubt I would’ve continued.

The story plods along like a mournful adagio. Events have an almost mechanical inevitability to them. Until, subtly, quietly, slyly, they don’t. Things start to get real. And a little surreal. Stoner meets a woman at a faculty party, Edith Bostwick, the daughter of a banker, and falls in love. Edith, on the other hand, seems a little dismissive and indifferent. Theres nothing spontaneous about her. Nothing done on impulse, or out of a burst of emotion. She seems gloomy and uninterested in anything. She may as well be a mannequin in a department store window. When Stoner asks for her hand in marriage, she consents. This perplexed me. I felt sure she was going to turn the guy down. Nevertheless, it’s weird, this consent. It’s given grudgingly, with a certain contrecœur, as the French put it. Its sober neutrality is markedly bare of emotion. It’s like a nod to a legal agreement. There’s no description of what she’s feeling, no clue as to her mood, or designs, or plans, or the remotest enthusiasm. She doesn’t seem to be feeling anything.

The marriage, of course, is a total failure. A loveless marriage in a modest apartment on a professor’s dismal salary. As things evolve, the one constant is Edith’s resentment toward William. The best they achieve is an amiable indifference toward one another. And even manage, out of that fog, to produce a daughter, who is named Grace, and who becomes an alcoholic in her adulthood.

Three-quarters of my way in to this strange novel I began to respect Stoner. Or Bill, as he was sometimes called. The events in Bill’s life, the weight of mediocrity and easy compromise measured against his deep respect for excellence and legacy, was beginning to reflect an evident toxicity in American culture and education I hadn’t been expecting, even though the book had been leading up to it all along. Its observations were being so quietly and gently dispensed that its disquieting insights entered the bloodstream like a timed pharmaceutical. The core revelation at the heart of this book is extremely pertinent. It had to do with quality, with high aesthetic value and intellectual integrity, and the nearly impossible stance – the heavy sacrifice - required to maintain a body of high aesthetic worth, especially when corruption begins to quietly infiltrate and erode an institution, or an entire culture.

“Art from the west becomes more and more a shriek of torment recording pain,” writes Doris Lessing in her introduction to The Golden Notebook. “Pain is becoming our deepest reality.”

Stoner enters into a conflict with Hollis Lomax, the chair of the English Department and a former friend of long time standing. The conflict stems from Stoner’s refusal, as a committee member, to pass an incompetent graduate student named Charles Walker, who is also Lomax’s mentor and gains sympathy from a physical disability. Lomax seethes with resentment over this and punishes Stoner’s adamant refusal by giving Stoner a grueling teaching schedule and hindering his career progression. Stoner takes this within stride, handling these inconveniences and insulting status with quiet dignity and stoicism; he remains a popular teacher, which further fuels Lomax’s animus. Nor does Stoner receive any support from his colleagues. It’s a situation that reminds me of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, or movies like High Noon and Serpico, conflicts in which the protagonist addresses a morally challenging situation with singular courage and commitment to principle, and earning nothing but derision and discouragement from the community.

This conflict hit home for reasons that should be obvious. We live in a time of overwhelming corruption. Governments, so steeped in venality and cowardice they’re unable to serve the public, a situation in the U.S. that has manifested in the public spectacle of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and the well-documented work of Whitney Webb revealing the stupefying amount of blackmail in U.S. politics in her book One Nation Under Blackmail.

I see it in academia, too. Works of poetry and fiction that are manifest mediocrities – at best – that are not only published but touted as being works of supreme innovation and quality. It’s all about schmoozing now, performance and personality over true merit and quality. Those with high positions in academia are also given a supreme advantage in institutional backing, invitations to appear on panels and symposiums and lectures which gives them high visibility and a consequent ascendency to receiving prestigious literary awards. Those in the margins must lapse into obscurity while pompous academicians “humbly” accept prestigious and rich rewards.

Social critic Curtis White wrote a book about the spread of mediocrity titled The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, as far back as 2003, in which he writes “my intention in this book is to explore this poverty, our poverty, through the media, academia, and politics, the three areas of public life that provide the vehicles for the great antagonists of the imagination: entertainment, orthodoxy, and ideology. But I also want to think, more positively, about the present condition of our religious and civic spirit, as well as about something that I will call the sublime, that which beckons us beyond the suffocating if familiar activities of entertainment, academic orthodoxy, and ideology. The sublime is that indistinct but essential thing that Stevens called the ‘necessary angel.’ It has something very simple if curiously distant to say to us. It wants to tell us that change is real and the world can be other than it is.”

America and Europe – the so-called western world - has been so fully corporatized, so fully bent to the toxic prerogatives of corporate greed and technofeudalism, however manifestly destructive and dystopic its continuing enslavement of world cultures, and destruction of nature and fragile ecosystems, that the younger generations now have no frame of reference outside the wake of the capitalist juggernaut. And now, with the advent of AI, no one even knows what’s real anymore. One wonders, at this point, what is even left. The last time I stepped into one of Seattle’s biggest bookstores, what few books were on display were dwarfed by a gift shop tchotchke mentality, T-shirts and coffee mugs. Nobody reads anymore. Even celebrated authors have a peculiar, aw shucks, me too, I’ve lost my ability to focus on things, as if none of this really mattered.

Nor does it help that the U.S. now has a ridiculously high rate of illiteracy, a problem no one seems to give a shit about, despite all the numerous books and podcasts and essays identifying the problem – which is pretty obvious to begin with – that attention spans have been decimated by the new cybertechnology, and especially smartphones, which have become a supplementary appendage. This deterioration in focus and learning even has a name now: brain rot.

I’m not big on solutions. Things often have a way of evolving in surprising ways. And often, the so-called solutions have more to do with profit than healing. But the world could sure use one. I’d go so far as to say the solutions are as obvious as they are easy: put your smartphone down and open a book. Start a conversation. Rent a kayak and put yourself in a large body of water, feeling the waves, and rocking in the sway of your own emotions, the undulating and boundless expanse of reverie in a universe of endless fascination.

 

How To Hang A Thing In Speech

Islands fascinate me. They are isolated worlds - not in the scientific sense, but the wildly nonspecific sense - from the rest of the planet. The rest of the planet is, of course, teeming with human beings, and the occasional misfit grumbling in his rags the same question over and over to a thousand wrong answers. Life is different on islands. The problems are less monumental. The sky solves everything. Awakens a carpenter's grammar and builds a glass vocabulary. For housing humanity. Everyone has their own preferences, ideas, and sense of time. So they become islands. Talking to strangers. Every argument in favor of hair dyes is a statement tinged with a million desires, and not a little anxiety. And every blow is worth at least one antenna. A shaky vision and a gothic redemption. Ibiza at night is a crazy place. Not so much Grimsey. Which is stark, and desolate, and surrounded by humpback whales. It’s Gothic. Mythic. And cold. It’s a place for philosophers. Old woman gazing at the gloom of thunder in a cube of Icelandic spar.

I sense, get the feel of the cage, with this work, this frigate ahead of me. With which I will make volleys of what is funny and strange. I will fold my life into a bomb and explode it in somebody’s porridge. Or mind. Not because the mind is a form of porridge, but because it has language at its disposal, and subjectivity. The mind cooked by English is a polyglot porridge. The recipe is apparent in every jaw. Every beard and spice rack. Caraway. Nutmeg. Thyme. Glass slides depicting arrays of stained protozoans. Which is crazy in a way. Bacteria are why the men around here wear ties. That, and a paycheck. The way water eats a continent shore by shore is precisely how everything human gets shattered by inconvenient realties. Pavement, rainy nights in San Francisco, ancient coins unearthed on the property of a former rock star, the subjunctive case clenched in the hand of an ugly preposition. It’s always good to have a graceful look above the neck, no matter what lumpy old bag you have in your hand. To those who don’t know you, you will appear suspicious, and silly. And to those who do know you, you will appear lost in mystical absorption. No matter. Subjectivity is prodigal, and fits in a single pronoun. Like an island.

I like a long thin faucet that curves upward in a kitchen sink. Arches. And lets the water down in a long thin column. And is mute in its dream of service like an elephant. Whose trunk sprays water over its head. And views the world with two sad eyes. It's an odd thing to sweep a floor while listening to Eric Satie. There’s a simplicity in the action that parallels the simplicity of the music. Which isn’t simple at all. The notes are sprinkled into the world like pearls from a broken necklace. It's a strange syncopation that awakens the nerves to the things they carry around. Emotions big as planetariums. James Dean with a grievance and a knife. It explains it. What we fight about. Let’s face it, a real antagonism at root. That old chestnut: what are we here for? Everybody knows the world’s gone wrong. But they keep getting up, starting the car, scraping frost from the window, and heading to work, whatever meaning happens to be sleeping in those syllables, they’re awake now, your eyes are mingled in these words, as are mine, looking for you.

Don’t be shy. You know who you are. Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim once said all things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison. Ok, gotcha. So what’s your poison? I’m a fiend for marshmallows. Cannabis gummies. And Ritz crackers.

TV is a poison. I grew up with it. I love TV. I have a great respect for propaganda, even though I know it’s toxic. It’s a guilty pleasure. A very, very guilty pleasure. Propaganda is the sweet syrup of confirmation bias that bloats the ego, appeases a troubled conscience with a wonderfully plausible alibi, and kills societies, rots them from inside out. How many cop shows show so-called conspiracy theorists as QAnon wackos with a maniacal hatred of rules, hair-trigger tempers, huge gun collections, garages full of survival gear, deep delusional passions, sooner or later caught up in the inevitable terrorist plot, à la Ted Kazinsky, and brought down by well-meaning detectives doing their heroic, self-sacrificing best to prevent us all from descending into the chaos of a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape. A good fiction has the capacity to charm. To make you believe in its virtues. However distorted. However delusional. The gaslighting is sweet.

He can't stand any image of himself, he suffers from being named. He believes that the perfection of a human relationship lies in this absence of image: abolishing adjectives between oneself, between one and the other; a relationship that uses adjectives is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death.

Wrote Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

Raw, simple being. Undefined. Unconfined. Naked. Is this what is meant by absence of image? Because I’ve just used four adjectives to define the undefinable. And gotten nowhere. The first thing to come to mind are descriptions of near-death experiences, in which being, no longer contained by a body, diffuses into a boundless, nebulous energy of pure consciousness. Pure love. A pure ego-less state of pure energy. So that throwing a net of adjectives over it is like trying to capture a solar eclipse with a shoebox. You’ll capture none of the silence, this visit from the sublime, moon shadows rolling through prairie grass, and hole of night in the sky.

The central drive of everything is insemination. Pollinators and poets.

Propagation begins with a cerebral whirlwind. Inspiration. Something must inspire its creation. Mountains, forests, cranberries. We went hiking, inflated and cleaned. And this happened. A steady pulse haunted the totem. The faces looked ready to say something. We are the colors of contingency. Stop thinking! Just ask yourself if the work has allowed you to walk outside of yourself into an unknown world. It’s not a matter of being right or wrong. It’s about movement, emotion, holistic correspondence, and wild speculation. Conjecture is the way to the possible. The beehives that mouth their seeming chaos among the houses of genre. The biology of pink waddles around in brown. There are fires in black unleashed by alluring hues of gray. We’ll have things to do when green turns blue. But prose? You need space for that. Freer, more open language, and sudden curious sensations. The feeling that, after dying, the soul diffuses with a universal consciousness. There is, for example, tangible evidence that syllables discharge lightning and thunder, and will sometimes attain the status of a bold perfume, depending on the circumstances, and the magnitude of the impulse that keeps popping up in all these bubbles, smiling at the spectral autonomy that allowed these raptures, and how to hang a thing in speech.

 

The New Antipathy

The new antipathy was a clean hypothesis. It was an operation propelled by participle. It had nothing to do with broccoli. This was about luminosity. The tumble of photons about a sewing kit. It had the flavor of anger seasoned with a little disrespect. I could feel the heft of its implications in every word. Imagine two detectives backing away from a radioactive predicate. They move cautiously, so as not to disturb the circumstance of its combustion, this spondee of pickled helium. Poetry is the cesium of capitalism. We’ve known that all along. And yet the old paddle wheelers continued going up and down the rivers. And a pesky little particle intractable to grammatical analysis exploded into an eyeball. A pretty one, with an iris the color of exoneration. Each time I feel swelling in my ankles I know that I'm about to try and explain something that I don't fully understand myself. I don’t even know what it is yet. Whether it’s a substance, a proverb, or a feeling new to this form, a radical new manifestation of beauty as light as gravity and violent as a thermostat. Truth is, I just don’t understand anything anymore. Not even jock itch. My line of work never required an office. But it did require beams of light intermingling with one another like words in a tugboat. I had to do something, or the whole virtue of the thing, the principle, you might even call it an appliance, a dishwasher or iron, would evaporate in wire. This wouldn’t be the first time my intentions became overly ambitious and spread its lather leeward, in the direction of Steamboat Springs. Hesitations can hesitate for so long they become sensations, semaphores on a flightdeck. If you’re going to land, land now. It’s time our feet felt something other than mountains. I’ve been swinging back and forth on a trapeze all day, looking down at all that sawdust, all those rash decisions and warm embraces wrestled to the ground like escalators. I want to get down and walk the ground again, like a real narrative, with eggnog skulls and long secluded strolls along the coast of a thrashing indecision.

What I’d like right now is a bubbly metamorphosis. I feel ready for something. Not sure what. Something with wings. Something slithery and supple and preposterous. My hammer glows amidst the many mental calls to my gut. Much of life is like that. Shoegaze. Kabuki. A guitar can alter one's sense of being. You can stand on a stage in front of a million people and still feel upside down. Employment is the monotony that usurps our expansion. Experience is the barracuda that echoes our scope. Aching is the stir that institutes our reach. Instinct is the syntax that spangles our luxuries. Then there’s the really naïve hope that a postage stamp can carry the weight of my mind to a wet sweater in Lowell. Like the old days. When Emily Dickinson rode a Harley up and own the streets of Amherst. Now we have bandwidth. Minds tethered to security issues. I remember owning a baseball glove once, but that’s as far as I got to understanding Jung, and the vital importance of third base. Until I solve the problem of how to get the energy of a man – me – into narrative, this will have lost its relevance, and I’ll sit here as usual, taking in the Stones, reminiscing, scribbling, stirring some form of soup, entwining a frayed mythology, thinking hard about the future, the one I left behind in 1976, on the freeway to California.

Don't let yourself be carried away by superficial reactions to a dark thought. Explore it as you would an underworld. There are things there that can fulfil or kill a grammar with a single mushroom. The key property is movement. The convergence of hands on a sticky substance. A kneecap embodies the fulcrum of ingenuity among the strippers. It’s all so meridional. I think of Napolean strolling the shores of Saint Helena. Euclid drawing shapes on scrolls of papyrus. Morning in the throat of a paradox. Words born from a luminous consciousness. Tumbling down the spine of a paragraph. Stumbling around in a slippery metaphor. This glitter of drug nebula in my balcony headlights is entirely salsa. Winter is the perfect time for rides in competitive forklifts. I heat by generating incidents as toward happens. The warp finger is insoluble below the fullness of your antifreeze. Think of it as an ear eating a toccata sandwich. A conquest by sudden crease of the sugar pronouns. I dwell in the yell of a reach to think it. I have fenced off the personality house for everyone's safety. The time of nutmeg is here. There are signs in the men’s room. Life is preoccupation with itself. Get used to habits. Make use of them. Lift what you value into a Technicolor future. Pedal to the metal. Merge with oncoming traffic.

Now, here’s the kick. I write this stuff for no particular reason. I spill my brains without incident not because it makes me happy but because I’m against the restraints of seclusion. I can feel myself drifting out to sea a little more each day. The horizon is dripping with thought. Clouds veined with lightning. Things are beginning to seesaw. I like dealing with these things straight on, like Dostoyevski. Meditating on the universe with the look of bad intent is bound to create a disturbance. It makes people nervous. The Zoo was one of the bars that lets you know the instant you walk in nobody here is interested in your aspirations. All they want is your utter indifference. The guts are a poor source of moss. Nobody fondles their shield. They clench it. I am more fucked with the devious than the genial. The genial are everywhere they know is there because it’s there not because it’s whispered into the ear like a secret. We have no secrets. Secrets age in old age. They become strains of old melody. And die in the drafts at the airport.