False starts 2

Notes for a short novel, opening scenes

    Usilla (an Indian-India name), 18 and a photographer, familiar handle,Silla
    A whitewashed sign on a whitewashed clapboard one-story building on main street, Ursula Sheridan Photography
    She periodically exhibits her work here, but there is no picture of her
    She hosts a periodic competition
    From the B and B window across the street, a puma sits in a tree behind the gallery
    Its color is that of the countryside around this No. CA town.
    Silla's father owns a hardware business that the narrator has come to investigate for possible purchase.

These "facts" are the starting point, rather than mapping out the whole thing as in novel-/story-writing exercises before now.

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You have filled some gaps in my half-knowledge of what you have been doing, and been up to, since high school. Thanks. I was curious and still am. But I see from this distance (in time and space), and because of it, that we can never really know or need to know each other's histories. This is not to subtract anything for the affection I have for you, our time together, and the care-full thoughts I have had about you over the years, and now. Nor does it subtract from the importance of our separate paths both chosen and fateful. What we have done with our lives is what we have done, and experienced, for good or ill. And now is now.

High school was an arguably important four years of our lives, and we have had the fortune, I think good, to have been granted more than that, for we are still here. But a blip in time it was, part of a set of formative experiences which has been built upon and forgotten as the case might be. In short, there is nothing left but memories, and the gap of intervening years from then till now just that, a gap for which there can be no adequate accounting. Nor should we feel compelled to fill it in, but it is nice/interesting to know what happened in pieces. How did you turn out? How was life for you?

In lieu of this accounting, did any or all of it really matter? and what we are about now? is there salvation in our deeds and daily lives?

In mine, I am not sure. But I will go through some of this to let you see what is now. Perhaps you will be able to connect that with that which you knew about me so long ago that it was and shall remain yesterday.

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I miss Western landscapes. Oh, the distances and the colors, to be drunk with them any time of day or eve. But I have never described them, what I saw and felt as I stood or sat and stared into the distance. The words including the technical ones escape me, or I don't even possess them. But Edward Abbey and others did. Zane Gray did. Here is a short vista of a desert Southwest in //Tales of Lonely Trails//.

My gaze then seemed impelled and held by things afar, a vast yellow and purple corrugated world of distance, apparently now on a level with my eyes. I was drawn by the beauty and grandeur of that scene; and then I was transfixed, almost by fear, by the realization that I dared to venture down into this wild and up-flung fastness. I kept looking afar, sweeping the three-quarter circle of horizon till my judgment of distance was confounded and my sense of proportion dwarfed one moment and magnified the next.

With this and other descriptions, this once popular American author can still take you there and bring you to the edge of a panorama and present it to you so that you are there too. (Why is it that sometimes you see a comma before //too//? I never liked it.)

Not all are interested in word pictures of landscapes, but in the absence of being there, these are as good as photos and paintings for me because they are vivid pictures in the mind, colorful imagined places I can visit again and again without a boarding card or pack mule. Anytime. Such mental places have been as real to me as being present at a specific time and place and looking at the reality before me.

Sometimes when I close my eyes and relax, places I have never been come into view. What makes them so real is vividness. Where do these come from? Are they beaming to me from some remote location?

Sometimes I close my eyes and action starts and a kind of scene unfolds in a disturbing sequence, or a lost loved one appears. Then a sudden jolt, a reflex, immediately opens my eyes to stop the spirits and demons that would appear and injure me. Conjured or chosen images are powerful; they are as physical presence. I choose sometimes not to look or to go there, chasing the pictures away.

Of course, there can be most pleasing realities and the people and actions, well, would that they continue to seduce me before the breakfast bell rings and I have to get up. These are so not mundane compared to that woman I was with in my memory, or that raft down that river and that icy water from the runoff freshening the moments recalled after the fact that day or later.

Once in a while a photo or painting will move me, even a moment in time that I capture by stopping and looking or watching something. Here are two examples followed by what happened next. What was real about these things? What I saw in my mind and what I felt and thought. Nothing else. But you must judge, as the storytellers say.

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I was given this today via an email: " . . . with the West drawing lines 'also' in Africa or like the 38th parallel. Do you know how that happened?"

Thanks for the stimulus to go checking my understandings of things historical. I am still no historian, and not yet convinced that the study/discipline is worth much in the absence of an infrastructure (e.g., education, a reason-driven body politic, etc.) to support and check its "facts" and its thoroughly researched and considered lessons.

My personal inadequacies aside, this meandering article ("A Point of View: Democracy and Islamic Law") does ask an interesting question to which it does not indicate an answer, yet. Must wait to sell this newspaper so that I can buy the next tomorrow?) Could have gone straight to the question, but I will wait patiently while the winded have their way of getting at the answer, or should I say, a response.

The question then: "What way of defining ourselves reconciles democratic elections with real opposition and individual rights?"

I will venture a guess. We (should) define ourselves as a reasonable and feeling (caring) people who accept rules and laws we take a hand in formulating, and then we play by same. As in any play, while you (a majority) win today, I have a chance to convince in an orderly and peaceful way such that the outcomes next time lean more towards the better possibilities I visualize. Without burning the house down, I can really, really oppose what is going on without denying your right to what it is you enjoy while having it your way.

Our way is best, but sometimes (always?) we have to see and value our differences to make any progress. And the game is all about progress, making everything better for as many as possible. I am an idealist: Would that all enjoy everything more and better, not just goodies for the few. And if a significant few at the top, or the bottom, show a society's deep inequities in access to the means of having a say and a meal (I would include health in the list), then something needs to be done. For the reasonable and feeling people that we are or can be, we will see that inequalities make for a broken or fractured and incomplete way of being.

The alternative is to be "led" by a benevolent philosopher-dictator, whereby we can go about our lives and not bother about messy stuff like political systems (democracy versus what?), opposition (because your god does not look like mine?), individual rights (you ain't got any anymore, so what are you talking about?). These affairs of state are just the claptrap of a few disgruntled souls who have had too much school, or alcohol, or material things, the real opiates of the masses in the West.

Of course, the implication of the article, or so it seems to me, is that there must be things on which to base governing and the governed, and a democratic model is preferred. Religion is one, values as I have indicated, a person, like a dictator, pure utilitarianism--things for the good of each and all needs to be done regardless of persuasions or personalities. [I am not quite sure what I was trying to say here.] I guess that is the secular swaysion of sorts. What else? Oh, anarchy, but who really wants that? Has it proved itself at any level of implementation?

Those societies that want to be ruled by whatever, let 'em be so ruled.

I guess I got off on a tangent. Back to the thesis, or should I say the reason for the writing that I found meandering.

The question he asks is, if anything, the thesis, or raison d'etre. The rest is a reading of histories for our benefit, to place us all on the same page, I guess. But the real point is his question which he puts off answering. The suggestion is, and it is provocative, that we are doing democracy wrong in some way in the West. Well, natch, not real news. And we have lost our way more than I like, etc. So I will await his answer or analysis. And keep my tangents to myself till the second part of his article appears.

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Interruptions in life therefore thought. Oh for a sustained idea to carry me from the first to the last word.

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Topics to develop in a short series on teaching and learning.

    Best way to learn [done]
    Typical course agenda
    Common framework
    Take some medicine
    Applying what you learn
    Which English (to speak/learn)
    Skills--general, objectives specific rwsl [reading, writing, etc.]
    Word order demystified
    Common errors

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During that year I regularly went to the public library and sat in the area for foreign periodicals. I spent a couple of hours perusing at least one each in French, German and English. I am not sure I learned much more from the French and German ones, but it was fun to try to decode what passed quickly on the turning pages. Captions of pictures and headlines were what I focused on most. Now and then I would venture into the articles and test my understanding. I had my computer handy and looked up the word or phrase till it became too distracting, too slow to get the story and continuity. And then I would write or research a topic on my computer until it was time to go, signaled by fatigue or hunger, with a quick look at the new exhibit on the top floor before I exited the building. Fatigue was the worst, because that was when I would have to pack up and shlep home the four long blocks. By time of my arrival I was usually awake again. It was better if hunger drove me out of the swinging doors and onto the street. A kebap place or fast vegetarian restaurant was nearby. There was always the Chinese place or a Czech pub with a lunch special. I was spoiled because the food was affordable and it filled me up. Returning to the library was often the goal yet seldom realized. Then the shlep home was mandatory. A hot lunch any time of year begat a drowsiness inescapable, and the lure of drifting off into a drugged sleep under the duvet on a cold winter afternoon heaven on earth.

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It may not apply, but it seems like it should. Oh, by the way, when I referred to the principle behind Snowden's whistleblowing, I was not talking about his principles but a principle we have often cited in our more idealistic moments. I will put it in my own words.

It is justifiable to blow the whistle on something illegal, or grossly out of line with collective values, supposed allegiance or contractual obligations notwithstanding. In short, there are higher laws to obey if the law of the day or practice is deemed immoral. But do so at your peril.

Nuremberg Trials Principle IV, Superior Orders can be paraphrased: "It is not an acceptable excuse to say 'I was just following my superior's orders".

The wikipedia article goes on to say that

 Nuremberg Principle IV is legally supported by the jurisprudence found in certain articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which deal indirectly with conscientious objection. It is also supported by the principles found in paragraph 171 of the Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status which was issued by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Those principles deal with the conditions under which conscientious objectors can apply for refugee status in another country if they face persecution in their own country for refusing to participate in an illegal war.

Lots of stuff here of interest. Did Snowden's action stem from what is going on in an illegal war? one
that has not been legally declared? Was his status as an outsourced arm of the defense establishment put him in the role of subordinate to superior as seen under Principle IV? And wouldn't his exoneration or lessened offense be so deemed under this rubric versus that of the Espionage Act? If a spy tells the world what it in essence already knows, is he really revealing secrets? Etc.

So, my question remains, but not for you personally, just the general you. However, if there is humor here or a clever workaround, I would be interested in hearing about it, or reading it. This is a complex issue for which we do not need to raise a hand and be counted. Just an interesting exercise, especially if asked a leading question in conversation. For my part, I think the principles that inform the answers to whether or not one agrees with what he did most interesting. But you, the personal you, would expect that of me by now.

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To see a World in a Grain of Sand when taken alone from Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" is ambiguous, even in light of the assertion by presumably a number [of readers] that "The poem contains a series of paradoxes which speak of innocence juxtaposed with evil and corruption." What can it mean? I deem that because of some particular, one of the infrequent openings into the light and enlightenment is for some life changing--that is one reading. Another is that more than it, the thing itself, we can see more than the detail, the particular. Any one thing can open consciousness to boundless reverie and realizations.

    . . . Heaven in a Wild Flower,/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.
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At the present moment, we are experiencing the rise of new digital pleasures and distractions, the expansion of a mostly visual culture that races far ahead of the imagination, the ubiquity of social networks that redefine the pure solitude once required for reading a demanding book. And in this time of rapid changes in the workplace, life's great mysteries seem more economic than existential. A digital environment also stresses quantitative thinking, and perhaps that helps explain why the most exciting cultural advances are now in science and medicine.

It is hardly a surprise that in this atmosphere, college students choose to major in fields that are most relevant to the life around them. What a blessing that is on literature. Slipping out from behind ivied prison doors, where they have been forced to labor as evaluative "texts," the great thoughts and feelings made permanent by art can resume their rightful place as a unique phase of ordinary experience.

http://online.wsj.com/
THE SATURDAY ESSAY
July 12, 2013
Who Ruined the Humanities?
By LEE SIEGEL

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Further to the world in a grain of sand, Wovoka

Black Coyote, one of the Arapaho delegates and also a police officer, the same incident came up, but with a very different sequel. Black Coyote told how they had seated themselves on the ground in front of Wovoka, as described by Tall Bull, and went on to tell how the messiah had waved his feathers over his hat, and then, when he withdrew his hand, Black Coyote looked into the hat and there "saw the whole world."

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Hard and soft. Sounds like porn! Well, here is a bit of porn, then.

Psychology has both hard and soft aspects. If we get some rats and implant some electrodes, we can consistently trigger the same behaviors. And this has been demonstrated with humans. Hard.

Soft. There are at the very least four personality types or temperaments. Fuzzy lines exist between each, but consistently enough, people demonstrate preference for one over the others (e.g., Myers-Briggs and Keirsey Temperament Sorter). The reliability is such that soft instruments that inventory these things in us can be used to increase self awareness and assess the match between one's "personality" and choice of work. In other words, practical applications. Soft science that works.

Literature has both hard and soft. Hard would include concordances, meta analyses, etc. An interesting relatively recent example involved the works of Agatha Christie. As her signs of aging increased, her works deteriorated in range of vocabulary, coherence of plot, etc. Only after her death were these parallel phenomena identified and tracked. The tracking began and ended with analyses of her books.

Soft, but hugely reliable. Ten people read Hamlet. Five are experts in lit analysis and criticism. Five are not. All ten reject the claim that the play is about road rage or the fact that a bridge would fall someday in Washington state.

Points being that in both hard and soft sciences, evidence is gathered and weighed. Conclusions/predictions made. We understand the world better, until further testing or the addition of new knowledge and we have to revise. "Truth-enough-to-proceed" points along the way to comprehending our worlds.

Other than pressing your button again, I still find truth a good word.

Fact: Did you brush your teeth this morning?
Answer, if you are not joshing as usual, will be true whether you did or not. A little truth.

Probability: Does brushing your teeth decrease the likelihood of dental problems later in life? Ask any dentist; you will get the very same answer every time. A useful bit of advice, a truth we can use.

Explanation: Will brushing your teeth with coke (as in cola) damage tooth enamel? Your chemistry guy will tell you that this is 99 percent true. Good enough truth.

Cultural insight: Mao and no doubt other Chinese of his generation drank and swilled lots of tea to "take care of" their teeth, based in part on the justification that tigers don't brush theirs! We know this--it is true and a fact. And (fact, probability, explanation) Mao's teeth and gums were rotten! As was a lot of his political philosophy.

Which brings me to the truths of politics or sociology or systems like the environment. We might call these soft science insights, Reasonable Interpretations Subject to Further Verification. Good enough truth for now. How about: "George W. and the constellation of characters he surrounded himself with ignored what we knew and what we didn't. The object was Iraq invasion and retribution for a war his daddy 'lost'." Argue this one, but it is a defensible position; some might find it so persuasive as to use this insight to base a campaign against the Bush-like idiots of the world.

And now for the non-scientific, hard or soft. I can't claim all these examples of science and truths we can, to a large degree, rely on without considering a negative example.

>>"In every fach there are critics and people who "study" (musicologists). For me both musicologists and critics have one thing in common — they have no musical talent so they have to talk and write about."

No, no. Wait, not necessarily. Some people like to talk and write about. Others like to sing or make music, etc. Some of each category are good. Others not. And some probably do both pretty well, or not. And the claim of causality is flawed. Because one cannot sing or make music does not lead to talking and writing about. I know a guy who wanted to be a flamenco guitarist. He was terrible. Now he is a doctor, not a writer or critic.

I sense you have a deep suspicion--no, you have actually voiced it--a deep negative regard for those who study. Or maybe it is just the silly ones you have met or read. And your stated preference is "I'm just not into [scholarly stuff] except in some political sense since that can affect lives." So be it. I accept that.

For me, and this is all about me in case you were wondering, I think all of these things affect lives. Psychology, literature . . . basket-weaving. The "Rite of Spring "caused a riot in Paris, I think. Music even affects lives. And studying all of these things and how they do what they do is/are fascinating.

TO BE CONTINUED

False starts (fragments, really)

I have this file called ".drafts". It gets longer and longer and I can't seem to complete the separate bits fast enough that I have collected there, and thereby reduce the overall size. Today ".drafts" is over 52,000 words. There is another problem. Some of the bits will never hold enough interest for me to complete into something, and I am getting a little bored of seeing some of the same paragraphs lying around. What to do but clear this workspace by throwing some stuff out and slightly polishing what's left, and then put it out somewhere so that I can start fresh, leaving these false starts, because that is what they are, behind me. The following is the product of this clearing process.

BEGINNING

I told my Israeli friend to take off his coat of culture instead of buttoning it up as apparently he was doing to insulate him from worlds he had known--six years of international travel and residence abroad before returning to the Promised Land to settle down. He was silent after my advice, and to this day he becomes more and more enmeshed in "his culture," a mixture of national-ethnicism and religion.

As for me and my own experiences living outside my own nation-culture for more than 20 years now, in four different (Western) countries, I think my realizing my own advice an unreachable objective. In fact, because it is so subjective, this national-cultural thing (I call it culture, a particular constellation of ways of living), analysis and stepping outside to an objective(?) posture is impossible. However, there are those who seem to demonstrate such wide-ranging comfort and competence in different places and situations that the product of uncovering or shedding the protective and parochial layers can be glimpsed if not found. What to call this evolved human?

Labels for those who live outside their own geographic borders or ethnic constraints are less than helpful. Refugee, transnational, expatriate, stateless . . . they are all so specific as to ignore the category I admire and am trying to describe. I am talking about the person who chooses to live abroad, who has a command of two or more languages not including the mother tongue, who is comfortable in homogenous and mixed company, who has moved beyond comparing every place and person and peculiarity to where s/he must anchor all perspectives and therefore perceptions--where s/he grew up, or the country called home.

Having lived and traveled as I have, my own prejudices have developed as to what it should mean to transcend one's own. One's own, I refer not to the psychological, vocational, or socio-historical development or profile. If one is an egoist or social justice advocate, teacher or aid worker, business person or pauper, these are not in themselves definitive of transcending that which may be said about a group or class of people when we use the shorthand terms or descriptions that are stereotypes. The transcending-culture individual does not refer to new acquaintances or situations as having the flavors often associated with these people and not those, or some specified others. S/he ignores it or just observes, letting the people and events be themselves for what they uniquely are. Of course, it might be easy in some cases to make a case for their fit with what one already knows or has experienced, but that is not what the object of interaction or observation entails. It is the discovery of the uniquely who-what and having that inform what is going on now and, if tentatively, future encounters.

This is all quite abstract. A concrete example from both the what is and what it is not camps should suffice to clarify.

X, a US citizen, lived and worked in Germany for most of his adult life. He is now retired in Spain, because of the more favorable climate and cost of living. He is "European" in that he speaks German and English, collects social security from his "adopted" country, Germany, and retirement from work in Germany and long ago in the US. He has health coverage in Germany and the US. He must travel to either country to make good these benefits. He has a home address in the US and legal residence in Germany. His status in Spain is, well, snowbird on a year-round basis, except when he visits his property in the US to check on it, yearly. He watches US TV channels via satellite, follows baseball and American football, reads the US and international (not strictly European) news in English from US publications, and occasionally surveys the German headlines for what might be happening that would affect him and his status and benefits as a German resident and retiree. He reads English books from the local libraries, mostly US history and foreign policy, and socializes with English speakers, most often US or UK expats. His speech, when talking with Europeans of any stripe, is peppered with baseball idioms and those typical of American English--"It ain't rocket science." His references to culture and history and politics are American, in large part stemming from when he was younger and first came to the continent. Thus dated. He does not go to "foreign" films dubbed in English or with English subtitles (somewhat rare in European cinemas), and he takes in the local music scene represented at the bar known to be a foreigner's hangout. His education stopped with his formal studies many years ago, and does not read or study more current views and knowledge in some of his interest areas, which I am afraid I don't know beyond sports and the latest faux pas's of the US government and some of its less attractive and admirable citizens.

I could go on, but this gives enough of a snapshot to imagine the converse of this profile. Do that, that is imagine someone who does not look and feel like X.

Next consider the following partial list of quirks and qualities.

• adaptable
• at home in the world
• civilized
• comfortable
• confident
• conversant
• cosmopolitan
• flexible
• multi-linguistic
• non-judgmental
• polished, a cosmopolite
• sophisticated (not elitist)
• stateless (not displaced)
• tellurian
• uniquely individuated
• world citizen
• worldly
• . . . free from local, provincial, or national ideas, prejudices, or attachments

Perhaps I misspoke. There are not many quirks here. Qualities, yes. And you can imagine some descriptors yourself for the kind of person I am referring to. Quirks are reserved for those of a more limited view and capacity.

Matthew Arnold in his essay "Culture and Anarchy" said that culture is curiosity and a striving for perfection. The idea of his culture is cultured: the cultured person who knows and aspires to do and be good per God's will. Culture for Arnold is not a way of life as I have represented the term, or Culture per se, that being those artifacts of the arts and humanities that have stood the test of time and that those who know or know a little about them can enrich their speech and awareness by direct reference or allusion. For Arnold, Culture would be those things that gifted members of society contribute to those of us who would be cultured.

Arnold's treatise is less about the cosmopolite I have tried to sketch above than about a slightly out-of-fashion hero or heroine, today's Renaissance person or perhaps broadly educated and talented academic cum sportsperson/celebrity--a kind of renaissance person?

But Arnold's analysis of becoming cultured, or more widely and deeply adept, has insights which I find useful and insightful even today. Here he is on the subject of what might prevent moderns from becoming more than they would be without further development along the lines of the cosmopolite, a term I now utilize, if provisionally, as shorthand for the person worldly competent.

Indeed nearly all the characters of perfection, as culture teaches us to fix them, meet in this country with some powerful tendency which thwarts them and sets them at defiance. The idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us. The idea of perfection as a general expansion of the human family is at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual's personality, our maxim of "every man for himself." The idea of perfection as an harmonious expansion of human nature is at variance with our want of flexibility, with our inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a thing, with our intense [16] energetic absorption in the particular pursuit we happen to be following. So culture has a rough task to achieve in this country, and its preachers have, and are likely long to have, a hard time of it. . . . ("Culture and Anarchy" by Matthew Arnold in EPUB format available from http://www.gutenberg.org)

I guess, although I am not an example of the cultured man or cosmopolite as I would conceive of him or her, I have a hard time of it. A life in teaching and consulting and mentoring and guiding . . . what was all that for? Whom did I touch? and did I have the curiosity and achieve the perfection needed to become that ideal I now see so little of among the expats and nationals I meet in different countries? Is the cosmopolite the product of a process or just of situation and circumstance mixed with a being who can get along and contribute in any encounter anywhere?

One of the characteristics of the cosmopolite as I have encountered and observed is that s/he is well read. And becoming cultured, if that is what may be required would include reading. But: ". . . The Great American Novel—-always capitalized, like the United States of America itself—-has to be a book that contains and explains the whole country, that makes sense of a place that remains, after 230-odd years, a mystery to itself." (This from a recent article by Adam Kirsch in the //Harvard Review// on the American novel and lit crit.) This is a sentence that confounds me. I am interested in the part about "a mystery to itself."

Is it the novel that is a mystery to itself or the country? I take it syntactically that it is the country. But a novel about a country that is a mystery to itself is a novel that is a mystery to itself? Okay, that doesn't necessarily follow, but still at least this novel is incomplete in some sense. If your subject (individual, group, country) has no complete awareness/understanding, then other than stating that view, the writing, the novel, reflects that partial //selfie// view. It has to point that out or describe it in some limited way to draw  that conclusion. (Oh that word. You know which one. Grates. The first and last time I will use it.) And stating that fact, that the country hasn't completed its homework on knowing itself, would seem to imply that the writer understands more than the country or the great book does; therefore, s/he is more omniscient (is that possible?) than the GAN or its author? Thus we have little use for the cultural icon we have revered?

I am confounded, although I have read novels that I could not get a complete handle on yet still found great, at least better/more challenging--i.e. richer--than the pulp variety. If all this comes down to this, that a novel is a mystery to itself, then perhaps it is not worth bothering with? I don't know.

However, I have addressed this matter elsewhere, and I take the liberty to repeat the salient stuff here. Unpublished paper "'Better' Stereotypes: A Model for Getting Beyond (Useless) Surfaces."

[illustration]

To see and understand a culture one must move below the surface of things from one's own perspective to the inside as seen and understood from the position of the other. Experience of and in a culture can aid this movement to the inside. Cultural informants, broadly defined, can help interpret things observed, and not observed except by the him or her, such that useful insights are confirmed or uncovered for the observer. Penetration into the culture is a function of the depth of information and insights the observer has access to. What may sometimes be tacit and difficult to articulate can be loosened from its embeddedness by more careful observation and persistent inquiry. Some of the most useful but most difficult roots of behavior lie at the core, in strata of bedrock as it were, not readily available even to the most astute observers and insiders. What is needed is more information and knowledge, or perhaps dramatic events, to shake loose the unconscious and inarticulate ground. With these, and perhaps in crisis times, what a person or a people characteristically does can be more easily seen, and why they do it may be more easily understood.

So there may always be stuff that is a mystery to us. Not being able to make all transparent need not be an indictment against the GAN or anything or anyone else. To shed the coat of culture may not be entirely possible. My apologies to my Israeli friend. But unbuttoning it and tying it round one's waist may be indeed possible as evidenced by the cosmopolite I have been trying to characterize and have met from time to time.

The room fills with an elephant. Religion.

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What was it about this novel, Fowles' //The Magus//, on the BBC's list of the 100 books of the twentieth century to be read, that brought me back and back again to it for a number of years? I am reading it again after a twenty-year hiatus, and I realize now but do not recall ever re-reading it for this reason: that it is a portrait of myself, give or take some details, at the same age as it was written. The Greek references and allusions were familiar. I had a classical education from secondary right through college and graduate school. I taught English. I worked in a private school abroad in a culture I could hardly penetrate. The passages in French I could read, having had many years of school French based on reading and translation. I had a young man's dark night of the soul and began coming out of it after my few short years abroad. I had an affair with a woman I thought I loved but left because I had to. I contracted a sexual disease for which I had to be treated. I deceived myself and others about who I was. I contemplated suicide but backed down because I chose to live a shallow life. I flirted with existentialism as a field of study and way of life. I felt profoundly alone and sought to free myself from obligations. I wrote poetry and aspired to become an artist. And there is more but assured the point has been made. I identify with Urfe unreservedly.

My memory serves me thus: I read and re-read the book because of the mysteries. They were, I thought, masterful and sensual and beyond my experience but would that that could have happened to me, including meeting a man and women so much more interesting and complex and advanced than I. Then the revised edition came out, and I just completed reading that; I am left wondering what it was I read before, what I experienced, what drew me back and back again to the first edition. The revised version will draw me back in to cycles of re-reading?

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New year's resolutions--this time round. For the last several years I have been able to accomplish what I set out to do beginning on the first of the year. Memorable among these has been not so much the elimination of the F-word from my audible repertoire but the most judicious and appropriate use of it. No longer does it just pop out unawares. I am aware of when and how I choose to use it. Much better, especially for the company I sometimes find myself in. Then last year was to reduce or eliminate reading the daily news. I have weaned myself of this time-wasting habit. Much going on in the world is still the same, I am told. The ills of the world are not solved by knowing about what the media wants me to focus on. So there.

This year there are two resolutions. Write everyday from morn till at least 2 PM, and administer what I must after that.

Let me address the latter. I live in a country not my own, but still this applies to wherever I have ever lived. Demands on your time to just keep things going and legal and taken care of require huge amounts, gobs of Time. And now that I am older and more mature, it takes huge amounts of energy better spent on more important stuff. If I go out shopping and to the post office to pay a bill, I get home and don't want to do much else than have lunch and a nap. Then the day and impeti have gone. Got to light the late afternoon fire, walk the dog, do the dishes, answer an email or two . . . you see, day gone, all because I was administering and not being the person who enjoys some special things I know that I do supremely. Best to put all that first and if and as necessary, take care of the administrivia. Think of it. Administering your life. Endless trivia. Get a blood test. Take it to the doctor to see if you need your medications adjusted. Fill the prescriptions. Go to the tax office to see if I owe taxes on the house. I don't. Not yet. The tax office doesn't know. Come back four days before the deadline in two weeks. We might be able to tell you then. (I live in Italy. Enough said.) Whew. What a waste. And who cares if I have all my official papers in order? Has someone ever come round and asked me to show the various obscure bits before I get tossed out of Europe? No.

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You don't fool me with that innocent outfit and expression, although you would behold me. You cannot relieve by me the burning desire which consumes you now from inside. Besides, you are too young, too different, too vapid, too . . . too. . . . It has nothing to do with me.

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Thought experiment: If we allowed everyone from 5 years of age up to own a gun, what would happen?

•  A small, mostly passive proportion of the populace would object vocally and then retreat to mumbling and solitary protests in private and out of sight.
•  A large proportion of the populace would embrace the freedom and call it a right not a privilege.
•  A large proportion of these would acquire guns.
•  The guns and munitions industries would institute a holiday where everyone was encouraged to shoot their guns off to the air above in unison at noon and gather later for a barbeque and gun games. Among these there would be 21-gun salutes, wild random shooting with cries of yippee, and some tears at wounds and casualties perpetrated by the careless and untrained.
•  Annually we would witness more mass shootings but eventually accept them as the cost of freedom. No more tears need be shed. Shit happens.
•  A small proportion of crazies would do crazy things like hold people hostage, snipe at passersby, kill someone because of a verbal disagreement or unjust job termination, etc.
•  A very small proportion of experienced gun owners would see religion and give up their arms and campaign for the repeal of the freedom, without success.
•  Criminals would continue to use guns to get what they wanted, but increase their arsenals to newer technologies to accomplish the same end. To stay competitive, you know.
•  Non-gun owners would be marginalized and deemed impolitically correct or worse. They would become a new discriminated-against group with appropriate epithets to describe them.
•  Foreign visitors to the country would decrease.
•  TV shows and documentaries and infodocu re-enactments would increase showing us more and more violent scenes to savor before bedtime.
•  Since 5 year olds would be entitled to a gun, they would find new products to badger their parents about--pink or blue pint-sized rifles and pistols made of plastic that shoot real bullets, one at a time, just for safety.
• Laws would be enacted to prevent carrying firearms into designated places such as the men's room at the local movie theater, the garage of a friend, the desert . . . places where the likelihood of accident or perpetration would be less or more . . .

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This writing is not for you, being the flippant that you say you are. Just a moment. A flippant, that's a noun? as in I am a flippant? I think you are coining a new usage, although. . . . There is an alleged use of flippant as a noun on the fan and lyrics interpretation pages for the alternative L. A. metal band, Tool. We have this snippet of their song lyrics for 10,000 Days (Wings pt. 2): "Ignorant flippants in the congregation/ Gather around spewing sympathy,/ Spare me." The question is not settled, I allege, for the various sites that transcribe or copy lyrics, the word in question may be siblings or fibbers, or?

So back to the point. You are a flippant, one who makes flip comments. Does that mean you are also a flipper? Perhaps one of these usages will become the word of the year!

Aw, let's not pursue this fluff  further. So, back to the point.

The Bible as fiction. This is an amusing story at least from the point of view of a pastor's recent claim, or should I more politely say limited world (Google news story about this; not worth referencing here.) Turns out that the Bible can be read in different ways--as history, for example--thereby creating all manner of fools and adepts. As "lead pastor at the nondenominational Discovery Church in Simi Valley," I assume he is credentialed somehow and qualified/enlightened enough to be amazed and forgiving, as he admits. He will still shop at Costco. I like that. Spending money as one's good deed. As if shopping or shopping wherever mattered. Now that's amusing.

See, we are such fluff as dreams are made of--from our foundations to our everyday civic, artistic and intellectual assets. Now this is tragedy or comedy, depending upon how your day is going, which I hope is well.

As for the store's apologizing for "misclassifying" the holy book, we are a people ever vigilant to root out honest errors and poor judgement in the use of "our" language, while at the same time committing misdeeds and sins against those not like us who we think threaten us in some as-yet-to-be-proved ways.

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I have packed the poem (the one from an earlier post about Dave and a chair) with what we both (Dave and I) like. Humor (amusement) and ideas.

The poem pits performance against reclining. The reader is left with a choice, if not amusement. That choice is the great idea. Which is to be preferred? Alternatively, one can wonder the significance of the Dave of the chair fame. Who would this be who prefers not to act or do? A nihilist, lazy person, someone tired of life's demands? And does any of it matter?

Sometimes the question is more important than an answer, for without questions, where would we be? . . . in the recliner smiling or snoozing.

TO BE CONTINUED