tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-324834412024-03-07T03:49:05.620-06:00Sometimes when we thinkHere, I reproduce some of my favorite passages from my own reading for others to enjoy. Of course, these will be interspersed with the occasional story, observation or frustration I wish to voice. It's a narcissistic medium, after all.Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.comBlogger91125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-72142960746716148052015-07-28T01:52:00.000-05:002015-07-28T01:52:13.362-05:00The real face appears<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
The Blind Owl<br />
by Sadegh Hedayat<br />
(1957)<br />
<br />
Life as it proceeds reveals, coolly an dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that every one possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendants. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realize one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears.Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-1648431781849377752015-07-28T01:32:00.001-05:002015-07-28T01:33:13.476-05:00I'll tell you what happened up there<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
<div>
Trout Fishing in America</div>
<div>
by Richard Brautigan</div>
<div>
(1967)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I was sitting on a stool in the bookstore one afternoon reading a book that was in the shape of a chalice. The book had clear pages like gin, and the first page in the book read: </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<i>Billy the Kid born November 23, 1859 in New York City</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The owner of the bookstore came up to me, and put his arm on my shoulder and said, "Would you like to get laid?" His voice was very kind. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"No," I said.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"You're wrong," he said, and then without saying anything else, he went out in front of the bookstore, and stopped a pair of total strangers, a man and a woman. He talked to them for a few moments. I couldn't hear what he was saying. He pointed at me in the bookstore. The woman nodded her head and then the man nodded his head.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
They came into the bookstore.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I was embarrassed. I could not leave the bookstore because they were entering by the only door, so I decided to go upstairs and go to the toilet. I got up abruptly and walked to the back of the bookstore and went upstairs to the bathroom, and they followed after me.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I could hear them on the stairs.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I waited for a long time in the bathroom and they waited an equally long time in the other room. They never spoke. When I came out of the bathroom, the woman was lying naked on the couch, and the man was sitting in a chair with his hat on his lap. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Don't worry about him," the girl said. "These things make no difference to him. He's rich. He has 3,859 Rolls Royces." The girl was very pretty and her body was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over the rocks of bone and hidden nerves. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Come to me," she said. "And come inside me for we are Aquarius and I love you."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I looked a the man sitting in the chair. He was not smiling and he did not look sad.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I took off my shoes and all my clothes. The man did not say a word.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The girl's body moved ever so slightly from side to side.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There was nothing else I could do for my body was like birds sitting on a telephone wire strung out down the world, clouds tossing the wires carefully.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I laid the girl.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It was like the eternal 59th second when it becomes a minute and then looks kind of sheepish.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Good," the girl said, and kissed me on the face.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The man sat there without speaking or moving or sending out any emotion into the room. I guess he <u>was</u> rich and owned 3,859 Rolls Royces.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Afterwards the girl got dressed and she and the man left. They walked down the stairs and on their way out, I heard him say his first words.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Would you like to go to Ernie's for dinner?"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"I don't know," the girl said. "It's a little early to think about dinner."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Then I heard the door close and they were gone. I got dressed and went downstairs. The flesh about my body fell soft and relaxed like an experiment in functional background music.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The owner of the bookstore was sitting at his desk behind the counter. "I'll tell you what happened up there," he said, in a beautiful anti-three-legged-crow voice, in an anti-dandelion side of the mountain voice.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"What?" I said.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"You found in the Spanish Civil War. You were a young Communist from Cleveland, Ohio. She was a painter. A New York Jew who was sightseeing in the Spanish Civil War as if it were the Mardi Gras in New Orleans being acted out by Greek statues.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"She was drawing a picture of the dead anarchist when you met her. She asked you to stand beside the anarchist and act as if you had killed him. You slapped her across the face and said something that would be embarrassing for me to repeat.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"You both fell very much in love.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Once while you were at the front she read <u>Anatomy of Melancholy</u> and did 349 drawings of a lemon.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Your love for each other was mostly spiritual. Neither one of you performed like millionaires in bed.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"When Barcelona fell, you and she flew to England, and then took a ship back to New York. Your love for each other remained in Spain. It was only a war love. You loved only yourselves, loving each other in Spain during the war. On the Atlantic you were different toward each other and became every day more and more like people lost from each other.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Every wave on the Atlantic was like a dead seagull dragging its driftwood artillery from horizon to horizon. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"When the ship bumped up against America, you departed without saying anything and never saw each other again. The last I heard of you, you were still living in Philadelphia."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"That's what you think happened up there?" I said.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Partly," he said. "Yes, that's part of it."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
He took out his pipe and filled it with tobacco and lit it.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Do you want me to tell you what else happened up there?" he said.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Go ahead."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"You crossed the border into Mexico," he said. "You rode your horse into a small town. The people knew who you were and they were afraid of you. They knew you had killed many men with that gun you wore at your side. The town itself was so small that it didn't have a priest. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"When the rurales saw you, they left the town. Tough as they were, they did not want to have anything to do with you. The rurales left.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"You became the most powerful man in the town.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"You were seduced by a thirteen-year-old girl, and you and she lived together in an adobe hut, and practically all you did was make love.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"She was slender and had long dark hair. You made love standing, sitting, lying on the dirt floor with pigs and chickens around you. The walls, the floor and even the roof of the hut were coated with your sperm and her come.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"You slept on the floor at night and used your sperm for a pillow and her come for a blanket.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"The people in the town were so afraid of you that they could do nothing.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"After a while she started going around town without any clothes on, and the people of the town said that it was not a good thing, and when you started going around without any clothes, and when both of you began making love on the back of your horse in the middle of the zocalo, the people of the town became so afraid that they abandoned the town. It's been abandoned ever since. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"People won't live there.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Neither of you lived to be twenty-one. It was not necessary.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"See, I do know what happened upstairs," he said. He smiled at me kindly. His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I thought about what happened upstairs.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"You know what I say is the truth," he said. "For you saw it with your own eyes and traveled it with your own body. Finish the book you were reading before you were interrupted. I'm glad you got laid."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Once resumed, the pages of the book began to speed up and turn faster and faster until they were spinning like wheels in the sea.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-52040274098218406812014-08-19T12:06:00.003-05:002014-08-19T12:13:55.450-05:00The two of me"Borges and I"<br />
by Jorge Luis Borges<br />
(as published in "Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings" in 1964)<br />
<br />
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. <br />
<br />
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.<br />
<br />
I do not know which of us has written this page.<br />
<br />
<br />Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-22122892191034856942014-04-03T20:26:00.000-05:002014-06-25T14:16:30.716-05:00The world is everything that is the case<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
<div>
Wittgenstein's Mistress</div>
<div>
by David Markson</div>
<div>
(1988)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There are no painting materials in this house.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Actually there was one canvas on a wall, when I came. Directly above and to the side of where this typewriter is, in fact.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
A painting of this very house, although it took me some days to recognize that.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Not because it was not a satisfactory representation, but because I had not happened to look at the house from that perspective, as yet.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I had already removed the painting into another room by the time I did so.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Still, I believed it was a painting of this house.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
After I had concluded that it was, or that it appeared to be, I did not go back into the room to verify my conclusion</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
(...)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There are no paintings in the closed rooms. Or at least not in the three closed rooms that are downstairs.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Though I have just replaced the painting of the house.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
(...)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Which I now cannot be positive is a painting of this house, or of a house that is simply very much like this house.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
(...)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now the painting does appear to be of this house.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As a matter of fact there also appears to be somebody at the very window, upstairs, from which I watch the sunset.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I had not noticed her at all, before this.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If it is a she. The brushwork is fairly abstract, at that point, so that there is little more than a hint of anybody, really.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Still, it is interesting to speculate suddenly about just who might be lurking at my bedroom window while I am typing down here right below.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Well, and on the wall just above and to the side of me, at the same time.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
All of this being merely in a manner of speaking, of course.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Although I have just also closed my eyes, and so could additionally say that for the moment the person was not only both upstairs and on the wall, but in my head, as well.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Were I to walk outside to where I can see the window, and do the same thing all over again, the arrangement could become much more complicated than that.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
For that matter I have only now noticed something else in the painting.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The door that I generally use, coming and going from the front deck, is open.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Not two minutes ago, I happen to have closed that same door.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Obviously no action of my own, such as that, changes anything in the painting.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Nonetheless I have again just closed my eyes, trying to see if I could imagine the painting with the door to the deck closed. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I was not able to close the door to the deck in the version of the painting in my head.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Had I any pigments, I could paint it closed on the painting itself, should this begin to trouble me seriously.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There are no painting materials in this house.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Unquestionably there would have had to be all sorts of such materials here at one time, however.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Well, with the exception of those that she carried to the dunes, where else would the painter have deposited them?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now I have made the painter a she, also. Doubtless because of my continued sense of it being a she at the window.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But in either case one may still assume that there must be additional painting materials inside the house in the painting, even if one cannot see any of them in the painting itself.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As a matter of fact it is no less possible that there are additional people inside the house as well, above and beyond the woman at my window.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Then again, very likely the others could be at the beach, since it is late on a summer afternoon in the canvas, although no later than four o'clock.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So that next one is forced to wonder why the woman at the window did not go to the beach herself, for that matter.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Although on second thought I have decided that the woman may well be a child.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So that perhaps she had been made to remain at home as a punishment, after having misbehaved. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Or perhaps she was even ill.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Possibly there is nobody at the window in the canvas.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
(...)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Although I have now made a categorical decision that the painting is not a painting of this house.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Assuredly, it is a painting of the other house, farther down the beach, which burned.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
To tell the truth I cannot call that other house to mind at all, any longer.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Although perhaps that house and this house were identical. Or quite similar, at any rate.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Houses along the beach are often that way, being constructed by people with basically similar tastes.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Though as a matter of fact I cannot be absolutely certain that the painting is on the wall beside me any longer itself, since I am no longer looking at it.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Quite possibly I put it back into the room with the atlas and the life of Brahms. I have a distinct suspicion that it had entered my mind to do that.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The painting is on the wall.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And at least we have verified that it was not the life of Brahms that I set fire to the pages from also, out on the beach.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Unless as I have suggested somebody in this house had owned two lives of Brahms, both printed on cheap paper and both ruined by dampness.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Or two people had owned them, which is perhaps more likely.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Perhaps two people who were not particularly friendly with each other, in fact. Though both of whom were interested in Brahms.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Perhaps one of those was the painter. Well, and the other the person in the window, why not?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Perhaps the painter, being a landscape painter, did not wish to paint the other person at all, actually. But perhaps the other person insisted upon looking out of the window while the painter was at work.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Very possibly this could have been what made them angry with each other to begin with.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If the painter had closed her eyes, or had simply refused to look, would the other person have still been at the window?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
One might as well ask if the house itself would have been there.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And why have I troubled to close my own eyes again? </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I am still feeling the typewriter, naturally. And hearing the keys.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Also I can feel the seat of this chair, through my undergarments.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Doing this out at the dunes, the painter would have felt the breeze. And a sense of the sunshine.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Well, and she would have heard the surf. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Yesterday, when I was hearing Kirsten Flagstad singing<i> The Alto Rhapsody</i>, what exactly was I hearing?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Winters, when the snow covers everything, leaving only that strange calligraphy of the spines of the trees, it is a little like closing one's eyes.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Certainly reality is altered.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
One morning you awaken, and all color has ceased to exist. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Everything that one is able to see, then, is like that nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of plaster and glue.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I have said that.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Still, it is almost as if one might paint the entire world, and in any manner one wished.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Letting one's brushing become abstract at a window, or not. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
(...)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There is nobody at the window in the painting of the house, by the way.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I have now concluded that what I believed to be a person is a shadow.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If it is not a shadow, it is perhaps a curtain.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As a matter of fact it could actually be nothing more than an attempt to imply depths, within the room.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Although in a manner of speaking all that is really in the window is burnt sienna pigment. And some yellow ochre.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In fact there is now window either, in that same manner of speaking, but only shape.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So that any few speculations I have made about the person at the window would therefore now appear to be rendered meaningless, obviously.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Unless of course I subsequently become convinced that there is somebody at the window all over again.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I have put that badly.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
What I intended to say was that I may possibly become newly convinced that there is somebody at the window, hardly that somebody who had been at the window has gone away but might come back.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In either case it remains a fact that no altered perception of my own, such as this one, changes anything in the painting.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So that perhaps my earlier speculations remain valid after all.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I have very little idea what I mean by that.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
One can scarcely speculate about a person when there is no person to speculate about.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Yet there is no way of denying that one did make such speculations.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Two days ago, when I was hearing Kathleen Ferrier, what exactly was I hearing?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Yesterday, when I was speculating about a person at the window in the painting, what exactly was I speculating about?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I have just put the painting back into the room with the atlas and the life of Brahms. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As a matter of fact I have now also had another night's sleep.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I mention that, this time, only because in a manner of speaking one could now say that it has this quickly become the day after tomorrow.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Certain questions would still continue to appear unanswerable, however.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Such as, for instance, if I have concluded that there is nothing in the painting except for shapes, am I also concluding that there is nothing on these pages except letters of the alphabet?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If one understood only the Greek alphabet, what would be on these pages?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-62540947850220733662013-12-02T00:03:00.000-06:002013-12-02T00:03:54.584-06:00Masks<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
The End of the Road<br />
by John Barth<br />
(1958)<br />
<br />
"In life," he said, "there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. <i>Hamlet</i> could be told from Polonius's point of view and called <i>The Tragedy of Polonius</i>, <i>Lord Chamberlain of Denmark</i>. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you're an usher in a wedding. From the groom's viewpoint he's the major character; the other's play support parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bride and groom both are minor figures. What you've done is choose to <i>play the part</i> of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to <i>pretend to be</i> less important than you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character, condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense fiction isn't a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life. <br />
<br />
"Now, not only are we the heroes of our own life stories--we're the ones who conceive of the story, and give other people the essences of minor characters. But since no man's life story as a rule is ever one story with a coherent plot, we're always reconceiving just the sort of hero we are, and consequently just the sort of minor roles that other people are supposed to play. This is generally true. If any man displays almost the same character day in and day out, all day long, it's either because he has no imagination, like an actor who can play only one role, or because he has an imagination so comprehensive that he sees each particular situation of his life as an episode in some grand over-all plot, and can so distort the situations that the same type of hero can deal with them all. But this is most unusual. <br />
<br />
"This kind of role-assigning is myth-making, and when it's done consciously or unconsciously for the purpose of aggrandizing or protecting your ego--and it's probably done for this purpose all the time--it becomes Mythotherapy. Here's the point: an immobility such as you experienced that time in Penn Station is possible only to a person who for some reason or other has ceased to participate in Mythotherapy. At that time on the bench you were neither a major nor a minor character: you were no character at all. It's because this happened once that it's necessary for me to explain to you something that comes quite naturally to everyone else. It's like teaching a paralytic how to walk again. <br />
<br />
"Now many crises in people's lives occur because the hero role that they've assumed for one situation or set of situations no longer applies to some new situation that comes up, or--the same thing in effect--because they haven't the imagination to distort the new situation to fit their old role. This happens to parents, for instance, when their children grow older, and to the lovers when one of them begins to dislike the other. If the new situation is too overpowering to ignore, and they can't find a mask to meet it with, they may become schizophrenic--a last-resort mask--or simply shattered. All questions of integrity involve this consideration, because a man's integrity consists in being faithful to the script he has written for himself.<br />
<br />
"I've said you're too unstable to play any one part all the time--you're also too unimaginative--so for you these crises had better be met by changing scripts as often as necessary. This should come naturally to you; the important thing for you is to realize what your'e doing so you won't get caught without a script, or with the wrong script in a given situation. You did quite well, for example, for a beginner, to walk in here so confidently and almost arrogantly a while ago, and assign me the role of a quack. But you must be able to change masks at once if by some means or other I'm able to make the one you walked in with untenable. Perhaps--I'm just suggesting an offhand possibility--you could change to thinking of me as The Sagacious Old Mentor, a kind of Machiavellian Nestor, say, and yourself as The Ingenuous But Promising Young Protege, a young Alexander, who someday will put all these teachings into practice and far outshine the master. Do you get the idea? Or--this is repugnant, but it could be used as a last resort--The Silently Indignant Young Man, who tolerates the ravings of a Senile Crank but who will leave this house unsullied by them. I call this repugnant because if you ever used it you'd cut yourself off from much that you haven't learned yet.<br />
<br />
"It's extremely important that you learn to assume these masks wholeheartedly. Don't think there's anything behind them: <i>ego</i> means <i>I</i>, and <i>I</i> means <i>ego</i>, and the ego by definition is a mask. Where there's no ego--this is you on the bench--there's no <i>I</i>. If you sometimes have the feeling that your mask is <i>insincere</i>--impossible word!--it's only because one of your masks is incompatible with another. You mustn't put on two at a time. There's a source of conflict, and conflict between masks, like absence of masks, is a source of immobility. The more sharply you can dramatize your situation, and define your own role and everybody else's role, the safer you'll be. It doesn't matter in Mythotherapy for paralytics whether your role is major or minor, as long as it's clearly conceived, but in the nature of things it'll normally always be major. Now say something."<br />
<br />
I could not.<br />
<br />
"Say something!" the Doctor ordered. "Move! Take a role!"Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-12441791224568013552013-11-26T06:34:00.001-06:002013-11-26T06:36:23.816-06:00The discovery of fear, of animality, of intimacy<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
The Floating Opera<br />
by John Barth<br />
(1956)<br />
<br />
Well, this isn't a book about war experiences, though I could write a good long book about them, and it wouldn't resemble any war book you've ever read, either. Except for a single incident--and I mean to tell you about it at once--my Army career was largely without influence on the rest of my life. This one incident, during the battle in the Argonne Forest, I find significant in two ways, at least: it in some manner cured the tendency described above [the narrator's disinterest in "doing correctly the small things that constitute the glorious whole"], and it provided me with the second of two unforgettable demonstrations of my own animality.<br />
<br />
The Argonne fighting was well under way before my outfit was sent in to replace a rifle company that had been destroyed. It was my first and only battle. I was, of course, inadequate fighting material--what intelligent boy isn't?--but I was no more afraid as the lorries drove us to the front than were any of my fellows, and I've never been cowardly, to my knowledge, in matters of physical violence. It was a late afternoon when we arrived, and the Germans were laying down an incredible barrage on our positions. We hustled out of the lorries onto the ground, and it was much as I imagine jumping from an airplane would be: relative calm, and then bang! horrible confusion. We were all paralyzed. None of us remembered anything, not anything that we'd been told. Frightful! Horrifying! The air, I swear, was simply split with artillery. The ground--you couldn't stand on it, no matter how loudly your officers shouted. We all simply fell down: fortunately for us, I guess, I suppose most of you, if you are men of this century, have experienced the like, or worse. <br />
<br />
I've no idea what we did. Indeed, I've often wondered, if there were many soldiers like me, how the Allies won the war. God knows how much the government had spent on my training, hurried as it was, and then I--all of us--simply collapsed. No cowardice, no fear (not yet); we were simply robbed of muscle by the noise.<br />
<br />
Just before dark, I remember, I found myself belly-down on a sort of ridge. All around were splintered tree stumps, three feet high. I had no idea what I was doing there. The sun was almost down, and there was a great deal of smoke in the air. A number of uniformed figures seemed to be attending to some business of theirs in a hollow below me. The barrage, I think, had ceased, or else I was totally deaf.<br />
<br />
"Why," I said to myself, rather drunkenly, "those men are German soldiers. That is the enemy."<br />
<br />
I could scarcely believe it. For heaven's sake! German soldiers! It occurred to me that I was supposed to kill them. I didn't even look around to see if the rest of the United States Army was with me; I simply fired my rifle any number of times at the men working in the hollow. None of them dropped dead, or even seemed to notice their danger. It seemed to me they should have counterattacked, or taken cover, or something. No, sir. I remember very carefully reloading and firing, reloading and firing, reloading and firing. It was a hell of an easy war, but how in the world did you go about killing the enemy soldiers? And where was everyone else? <br />
<br />
The next thing that happened (for scenes changed in the battle as in dreams) happened in the dark. Suddenly it had been nighttime for a while. This time it was I who was in a hollow, on all fours in a shell hole half full of muddy water. I still had my rifle, but it was empty, and if I owned any more ammunition I didn't remember how to put it in the rifle. I was just there, on hands and knees, my head hanging down, staring at the water. Everything was quiet again; only a few flares made a hissing noise as they drifted down through the air. And now there came real fear, quickly but not suddenly, a purely physical sensation. It swept over me in shuddering waves from my thighs and buttocks to my shoulders and jaws and back again, one shock after another, exactly as though rolls of flesh were undulating. There was no cowardice involved; in fact, my mind wasn't engaged at all--either I was thinking of something else or, more probably, I was just stupefied. Cowardice involves choice, but fear is independent of choice. When the waves reached my hips and thighs I opened my sphincters; when they crossed my stomach and chest I retched and gasped; when they struck my face my jaw hung slack, my saliva ran, my eyes watered. Then back they'd go again, and then return. I've no way of knowing how long this lasted: perhaps only a minute. But it was the purest and strongest emotion I've ever experienced. I could actually, for a part of the time it lasted, regard myself objectively: a shocked, drooling animal in a mudhole. It is one thing to agree intellectually to the proposition that man is a species of animal; quite another to realize, thoroughly and for good, your personal animality, to the extent that you are actually never able to oppose the words <i>man</i> and <i>animal</i>, even in casual speech; never able to regard your fellow creatures except as more or less intelligent, more or less healthy, more or less dangerous, more or less adequate <i>fauna</i>; never able to regard their accomplishments except as the tricks of more or less well-trained beasts. In my case this has been true since that night, and no one--not my father, nor Jane, nor myself--have I been able even for a moment to regard differently. <br />
<br />
The other part of the incident followed immediately. Both armies returned from wherever they'd been hiding, and I was aware for the first time that a battle was really in progress. A great deal of machine-gun fire rattled across the hollow from both sides; men in ones and twos and threes stalked or crawled or ran all around, occasionally peering into my shell hold; the flares blazed more frequently, and there was much shooting, shouting, screaming, and cursing. This must have lasted for hours. With a part of my mind I was perfectly willing to join in the fighting, though I was confused; if someone had shouted orders at me, I'm certain I'd have obeyed them. But I was left entirely alone, and alone my body couldn't move. The waves of fear were gone, but they'd left me exhausted, still in the same position.<br />
<br />
Finally the artillery opened up again, apparently laying their fire exactly in the hollow, where the hand-to-hand fighting was in progress. Perhaps both sides had resolved to clean up that untidy squabble with high-explosive shells and begin again. Most of the explosions seemed to be within a few hundred feet of my hole, and the fear returned. There was no question in my mind but that I'd be killed; what I feared was the knowledge that my dying could very well be protracted and painful, and that it must be suffered alone. The only thing I was able to wish for was someone to keep me company while I went through with it. <br />
<br />
Sentimental? It certainly is, and I've thought so ever since. But that's what the feeling was, and it was tremendously strong, and I'd not be honest if I didn't speak of it. It was such a strong feeling that when from nowhere a man jumped into the mudhole beside me, I fell on him instantly and embraced him as hard as I could. Very sensibly he assumed I was attacking him, and with some cry of alarm he wrenched away. I fell on him again, before he could raise his rifle, but he managed, in our tussling, to run the point of his bayonet into the calf of my left leg, not very deeply. I shouted in his ear that I didn't want to fight with him; that I loved him; and at the same time--since I was larger and apparently stronger than he--I got behind him and pinioned his arms and legs. He struggled for a long time, and in German, so that I knew him to be an enemy soldier. How could I make everything clear to him? Even if I were able to talk to him and explain my intentions, he would certainly think me either a coward or a lunatic, and kill me anyway. He had to understand everything at once. <br />
<br />
Of course, I could have killed him, and I'm sure he understood that fact; he was helpless. What I did, finally, was work my rifle over to me with one hand, after rolling my companion onto his stomach in the muddy water, and then put the point of <i>my </i>bayonet on the back of his neck, until it just barely broke the skin and drew a drop of blood. My friend went weak--collapsed, in fact--and what he cried in German I took to be either a surrender, a plea for mercy, or both. Not wanting to leave any doubts about the matter, I held him there for several minutes more, perhaps even pressing a trifle harder on the bayonet, until he broke down, lost control of all his bodily functions, as I had done earlier, and wept. He had, I believe, the same fear; certainly he was a shocked animal. <br />
<br />
Where was the rest of the U.S. Army? Reader, I'ver <i>never </i>learned where the armies spent their time in this battle!<br />
<br />
Now read this paragraph with an open mind; I can't warn you too often not to make the quickest, easiest judgments of me, if you're interested in being accurate. The next thing I did was lay aside my rifle, bayonet and all, lie in the mud beside this animal whom I'd reduced to paralysis, and embrace him as fiercely as any man ever embraced his mistress. I covered his dirty stubbled face with kisses: his staring eyes, his shuddering neck. Incredibly, now that I look back on it, he responded in kind! The fear left him, as it had left me, and for an hour, I'm sure, we clung to each other.<br />
<br />
If the notion of homosexuality enters your head, you're normal, I think. If you judge either the German sergeant or myself to have been homosexual, you're stupid.<br />
<br />
After our embrace, the trembling of both of us subsided, and we released each other. There was a complete and, to my knowledge, unique understanding between us. I, in fact, was something like normal for the first time since stepping out of the lorry. I was aware, now, with all my senses. A great many shells were whistling overhead, but none were bursting very near us, and the hand-to-hand fighting had apparently moved elsewhere. <br />
<br />
The German and I sat on opposite sides of the shell hole, perhaps five feet apart, smiling at each other in complete understanding. Occasionally we attempted to communicate by gestures, but for the most part communication was unnecessary. I had dry cigarettes; he had none. He had rations; I had none. Neither had ammunition. Both had bandages and iodine. Both had bayonets. We shared the cigarettes and rations; I bandaged the wound on his neck, and he the wound in my left. He indicated the seat of his trousers and held his nose. I indicated the seat of my trousers and did likewise. We both laughed until we cried, and fell into each other's arms again--though only for an instant this time: our fear had gone, and normal embarrassment had taken its place. We regarded each other warmly. Perhaps we slept.<br />
<br />
Never in my life have I enjoyed such intense intimacy, such clear communication with a fellow human being, male or female, as I enjoyed with that German sergeant. He was a little grizzled, unlovely fellow, considerably older than I; doubtless a professional soldier. I saw him more clearly as the day dawned. While he slept I felt as jealous and protective--I think <i>exactly</i> as jealous and protective--as a lion over her cub. If any American, even m y father, had jumped into the shell hole at that moment, I'd have killed him unhesitatingly before he could kill my friend. What validity could the artifices of family and nation claim beside a bond like ours? I asked myself. What difference did it make that we would go our separate ways, never having learned even the other's name, he to kill other Americans, I perhaps to kill other Germans? He and I had made a private armistice. What difference (I asked myself) did he make even if we were to meet each other again, face to face, in the numberless chances of war, and without a smile of recognition, go at each other with bayonets? For the space of some hours we had been one man, had understood each other beyond friendship, beyond love, as a wise man understands himself. <br />
<br />
Let me end the story. My rhetorical questions, as you may have anticipated, raised after a while the germ of a doubt in my mind. To be sure, I understood perfectly how <i>I </i>felt about our relationship. But then, I had instigated it. My companion had indeed responded, but from beneath the pointed end of my bayonet, his face down in the mud. Again, he'd not turned on me, though he'd had many opportunities to do so since our tacit truce; but, as I remarked, he looked like an old professional soldier, and I, remember, was only eighteen. How could I be certain that our incredible sympathy did not actually exist only in my imagination, and that he was not all the while smiling to himself, taking me for a lunatic or a homosexual crank, bidding his time, resting, smoking, sleeping--until he was good and ready to kill me? Only a hardened professional could sleep so soundly and contentedly in a mudhole during a battle. There was even a trace of a smile on his lips. Was it not something of a sneer?<br />
<br />
In the growing light everything seemed less nightmarish. Doubtless the fighting had moved considerably away from our position. Was I in German territory, or was he in Allied territory? He was indeed an unlovely fellow. Common-looking, and tough. No intelligence in his face. Heaven knows he looked incapable of conceiving or appreciating any such <i>rapport</i> as I'd envisioned. Hadn't he speared my leg? Of course, I'd jumped on him first...<br />
<br />
I grew increasingly nervous, and peered out of my hold. Not a living soul was visible, though a number of bodies lay in various positions and degrees of completeness on the ground, in the barbed wire, on the shattered stumps, in other holes. The air was full of smoke and dust and atmospheric haze, and it was a bit chilly. My leg hurt. I sat back in the hole and stared nervously at the German sergeant, waiting for some sign of his awakening. I even took up my rifle (and moved his away), just to be safe. I was getting jumpier all the time, and began to worry that the fear might return. <br />
<br />
Finally I decided to sneak quietly out of the hole and make my way to the Americans, if I could find them, leaving the German asleep. A perfect solution! I rose to my feet, holding my rifle and not taking my eyes from the German soldier's face. At once he opened his eyes, and although his head didn't move, a look of terrible alarm flashed across his face. In an instant I lunged at him and struck him in the chest with my bayonet. The blow stunned him, and my weight on the rifle held him pinned, but the blade lodged in his breastbone and refused to enter. <br />
<br />
<i>My God! </i>I thought frantically. <i>Can't I kill him? </i>He grasped the muzzle of my rifle in both hands, trying to force it away from him, but I had better leverage from my standing position. We strained silently for a second. My eyes were on the bayonet; his, I fear, on my face. At last the point slipped up off the bone, from our combined straining--our last correspondence!--and with a tiny horrible puncturing sound, slid into and through his neck, and he began to die. I dropped the rifle--no force on earth could have made me withdraw it--and fled, trembling, across the shattered hollow. By merest luck, the first soldiers I encountered were American, and the battle was over for me. <br />
<br />
That's my war story. I told it--apropos of what? Oh yes, it cured me. In fact, it cured me of several things. I seldom daydream any more, even for an instant. I never expect very much from myself or my fellow animals. I almost never characterize people in a word or a phrase, and rarely pass judgment on them at all. I no longer look for the esteem or approbation of my acquaintances. I do things more slowly, more systematically, and more thoroughly. To be sure, I don't call that one incident, traumatic as it proved to be, the single cause of all these alterations in me; in fact, I don't see where some of them follow at all. But when I think of the alterations, I immediately think of the incident (specifically, I confess, of that infinitesimal puncturing noise), and the fact seems significant to me, though I'll allow the possibility of the whole thing's being a case of <i>post hoc, ergo propter hoc</i>, as the logicians say. I don't really care. Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-33405848558146263052013-07-22T23:09:00.000-05:002013-07-22T23:11:11.661-05:00Despair<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
<div>
The Myth of Sisyphus</div>
<div>
by Albert Camus</div>
<div>
(1955)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd. I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis, negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my light. But there is no reply here to my intent, and this stirring lyricism cannot hide the paradox from me. One must therefore turn away. Kierkegaard may shout in warning, "If man had no eternal consciousness, if, at the bottom of everything, there were merely a wild, seething force producing everything, both large and trifling, in the storm of dark passions, if the bottomless void that nothing can fill underlay all things, what would life be but despair?" This cry is not likely to stop the absurd man. Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious question, "What would life be?" one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard's reply: "despair." Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage. </div>
Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-15260087321561893002013-05-14T16:26:00.000-05:002013-07-16T12:02:53.368-05:00The Road Runner<div>
<i>...an excerpt from...</i></div>
<div>
The Broom of the System</div>
<div>
by David Foster Wallace</div>
<div>
(1987)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Has it occurred to you that 'The Road Runner' is what might aptly be termed an existential program? That it comments not uninterestingly on the very attitudes that would be implicit in a person's feeling 'upset' over a catastrophic fire in his home? I see you are puzzled," Fieldbinder said, nothing Dr. J___ frantically scratching his head, a plume of dandruff shooting up into the air of the office only to resettle on the obscene bald spot in the middle of the doctor's skull-shaped head. <br />
<br /></div>
<div>
Fieldbinder smiled and continued, "I invite you to realize that this program does nothing other than present us with a protagonist, a coyote, functioning within a system interestingly characterized as a malevolent Nature, a protagonist who endlessly, tirelessly, disastrously pursues a thing, a telos--the bird in the title role--a thing and goal far, far less valuable than the effort and resources the protagonist puts into its pursuit." Fieldbinder grinned wryly. "The thing pursued--a skinny meatless bird--is far less valuable than the energy and attention and economic resources expended by the coyote on the process of pursuit. Just as an attachment radiating from the Self outward is worth far less than the price the establishment of such an attachment inevitably exacts." </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Dr. J___ inflated an anatomically correct doll and began to fondle it as it stared blankly. Fieldbinder smiled patiently.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"A question, doctor," he said. "Why doesn't the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapults and radioactive road runner pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?" He smiled coolly. "Why doesn't the coyote simply go eat Chinese food?" Fieldbinder's face assumed a cool, bland, wry expression as he attended to his impeccable slacks. </div>
Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-91542248869315970342013-04-26T10:45:00.000-05:002013-04-26T10:46:35.987-05:00On youth<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
Pornografia<br />
by Witold Gombrowicz<br />
(1960)<br />
<br />
At first glance he was perfectly ordinary, serene and friendly, obedient and even eager. Torn between the child and the grown man (and this made him both innocently naive and pitilessly experienced) he was neither the one nor the other, but he was a third term, he was youth, violent and uncontrolled, surrendering him to cruelty, restraint and obedience, and condemning him to slavery and humiliation. He was inferior because he was young. Imperfect because he was young. Sensual because he was young. Carnal because he was young. Destructive because he was young. And, in his very youthfulness, he was despicable. The oddest thing of all was that his smile, the most elegant thing about him, was the very mechanism that dragged him into humiliation, because this child could not defend himself, disarmed as he was by his constant desire to laugh. <br />
<br />
<i>This excerpt is from the version translated from a French translation (not from the original Polish) by Alastair Hamilton. Though it reads well, there has since been an English translation made directly from the original Polish by Danuta Borchardt, who did fantastic work translating <a href="http://lukedanger.blogspot.com/2010/04/our-element-is-unending-immaturity.html" target="_blank">Ferdydurke</a>. </i>Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-41126377532917963282013-04-18T03:44:00.000-05:002013-04-20T02:37:18.275-05:00Survival of the species while you wonder if life has a purpose<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
Agape Agape<br />
by William Gaddis<br />
(2002)<br />
<br />
How could, all going backward braced myself against that heap like a pillar of salt whole thing yes, the unswerving punctuality of chance, clock without the clockmaker perfectly simple in word and deed says Plato, God wouldn't lie or change because he's perfect so it's God God God, virtue and beauty and no mad or senseless person can be God's friend no, make yourselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake says Tolstoy, nothing senseless about that is there? Strive for absolute chastity for the good of the neighborhood whole purpose of life to be part of God's kingdom only way to get there's absolute chastity, husband and wife live like brother and sister nothing mad about that is there? Dress up like a muzhik float around the house look like Noah's Ark whole performance out of the greatest fiction ever created, take God out of the equation you've got nothing left not even love no, had that somewhere if I had that letter Wagner wrote to Rockel where love's lost sight of because everything we do, think, take and give is in fear of the end, the greatest most desperate fiction of the afterlife ever created yes, the denial of death, what this whole mad escapade's all about, isn't it Levochka? Good God how you fight it! Your man Pozdnyshev in The Kreutzer Sonata wallowing in the slime of debauchery he tells us, keeps stripping away the fictions right down to what it's really all about and then he can't face it, not just love no, only you, the choice of one man or woman over all the others says the lady on the train won't have it will you, Pozdnyshev. Supposed to be something noble and ideal but it's just something sordid that brings us down to the level of pigs. Natural? a natural human activity? No no no, eating's natural, something you enjoy but this is unnatural and loathsome, honeymoon's shameful and tedious, nothing sacred for us about marriage nothing to it but copulation, couple of months you've learned to hate the sight of each other ready to poison her or shoot yourself good God man, when you felt the blade go into her didn't what it's really all about stare you in the face? Some nonsense there about mankind following some ideal that's the fiction isn't it? What Plato's poets and honeyed muse are all about, you strip it clean stop short and run because you really know don't you, not like pigs and rabbits reproducing themselves as fast as they can but you hold it at arm's length, even say animals seem to know their offspring mean survival of the species while you wonder if life has a purpose and that's it isn't it! That you're being used, used, used, that you're being used by nature simply to perpetuate the family line, the social tribe, the white race, the species just like your pigs and rabbits and that's what you resent, what you hate, what you go through hell for and she knew it too didn't she? Knew what her body was for, like animals know yes and she knew you thought you owned her body, why you're terrified by a woman bearing down on you in a ballgown because you know those bare arms and shoulders, you know those breasts aren't just playthings she's offering to you posing as an instrument of pleasure but bigger the better there's gallons, there's the promise of gallons of survival of the species like a yes, like a huge brood mare. Pleasure yes, yes it's beautifully done jealousy and the whole un, unreasonable the whole madness...<br />
<br />
<i>Note: The novel's name is properly accented <span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19.1875px;">Agapē Agape</span>, but I was having difficulty inserting the accent. </i>Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-69820413234602225212013-01-10T18:13:00.000-06:002013-01-10T18:13:20.509-06:00Safety in numbers<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
White Noise<br />
by Don DeLillo<br />
(1985)<br />
<br />
I tell my students they're already too old to figure importantly in the making of society. Minute by minute they're beginning to diverge from each other. 'Even as we sit here,' I tell them, 'you are spinning out from the core, becoming less recognizable as a group, less targetable by advertisers and mass-producers of culture. Kids are a true universal. But you're well beyond that, already beginning to drift, to feel estranged from the products you consume. Who are they designed for? What is your place in the marketing scheme? Once you're out of school, it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity.' Then I tap my pencil on the table to indicate time passing ominously.Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-50610923251753860582012-12-15T18:25:00.000-06:002012-12-15T18:25:14.053-06:00To sleep, perchance to dream<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
At Swim-Two-Birds<br />
by Flann O'Brien<br />
(1951)<br />
<br />
What is wrong with Cryan and most people, said Byrne, is that they do not spend sufficient time in bed. When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.<br />
<br />
I agree, I said.<br />
<br />
We must invert our conception of repose and activity, he continued. We should not sleep to recover the energy expended when awake but rather wake occasionally to defecate the unwanted energy that sleep engenders. This might be done quickly--a five-mile race at full tilt around the town and then back to bed and the kingdom of the shadows.Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-22256111160769810232012-12-15T17:55:00.002-06:002012-12-15T18:32:57.039-06:00Giving Nature her ransom<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
Rabbit, Run<br />
by John Updike<br />
(1960)<br />
<br />
He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-14808563879233346952012-12-15T17:32:00.001-06:002012-12-15T22:13:49.836-06:00Creating the character<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
<div>
The Guiltless</div>
<div>
by Hermann Broch</div>
<div>
(1917)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
On the assumption that ideas reflecting the universality of the median may prove universally fruitful, let the hero be localized in the middle class of a medium-sized provincial town, perhaps the former capital of one of the lesser German principalities--time 1913--, in the person of a high school teacher. It may further be assumed that if this man taught mathematics and physics he had been brought to this occupation by a small talent for exact disciplines; he had no doubt applied himself to his studies with laudable devotion, reddened ears, and a certain joyful trepidation, though it must be owned that he neither contemplated the higher principles nor aspired to the higher tasks of the discipline in question, but firmly believed that from the standpoint both of career and of intellectual achievement his teacher's certificate was the highest goal to which he could attain. For a character constructed of middling qualities does not waste much thought about the spuriousness of things and of knowledge; they merely strike him as weird; he knows only operational problems, problems of classification and combination, never those of existence, and regardless of whether forms of life or algebraic formulas are involved, the one thing that really matters to him is that they should "come out even"; for him mathematics consists of "assignments" to be done by him or his students, and he looks upon his daily schedule and his financial worries as assignments of precisely the same order: even the so-called enjoyment of life is to him an assignment, a state of affairs prescribed partly by tradition and partly by his colleagues. Wholly determined by the things of a flat outside world in which petty-bourgeois house furnishings and Maxwell's Law are scattered about as harmonious equals, a man of this stamp works in the laboratory and in school, gives private lessons, rides in the streetcar, drinks beer on occasional evenings, goes to the brothel afterward, goes to the doctor's, and sits at his mother's table at vacation time; black-rimmed fingernails grace his hands, reddish-blond hair his head, of disgust he knows little, but linoleum strikes him as a suitable floor covering.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Can such a minimum of personality, such a non-self, be made into an object of human interest? Might one not just as well develop the history of some dead thing, of a shovel, for instance?</div>
Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-21952604097596036872012-12-15T16:38:00.000-06:002013-04-26T12:46:31.380-05:00Returning to Zeno's Conscience<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
Zeno's Conscience<br />
by Italo Svevo<br />
(1923)<br />
<br />
<i>I had previously posted <a href="http://lukedanger.blogspot.com/2009/07/on-compassion-or-lack-thereof.html" target="_blank">an excerpt</a> from Zeno's Conscience. This can be seen as a continuation of it. Impressive is its prescience, published in 1923, to describe both the dawning of the nuclear age and the rise of fascism. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
The doctor, when he has received this last part of my manuscript, should then give it all back to me. I would rewrite it with real clarity, for how could I understand my life before knowing this last period of it? Perhaps I lived all those years only to prepare myself for this!<br />
<br />
Naturally I am not ingenuous, and I forgive the doctor for seeing life itself as a manifestation of sickness. Life does resemble sickness a bit, as it proceeds by crises and lyses, and has daily improvements and setbacks. Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn't tolerate therapies. It would be like stopping the holes that we have in our bodies, believing them wounds. We would die of strangulation the moment we were treated. <br />
<br />
Present-day life is polluted at the roots. Man has put himself in the place of trees and animals and has polluted the air, has blocked free space. Worse can happen. The sad and active animal could discover other forces and press them into his service. There is a threat of this kind in the air. It will be followed by a great gain...in the number of humans. Every square meter will be occupied by a man. Who will cure us of the lack of air and of space? Merely thinking of it, I am suffocated!<br />
<br />
But it isn't this, not only this.<br />
<br />
Any effort to give us health is vain. It can belong only to the animal who knows a sole progress, that of his own organism. When the swallow realized that for her no other life was possible except migration, she strengthened the muscle that moved her wings, and it then became the most substantial part of her organism. The mole buried herself, and her whole body adapted to her need. The horse grew and transformed his hoof. We don't know the process of some animals, but it must have occurred and it will never have undermined their health. <br />
<br />
But bespectacled man, on the contrary, invents devices outside of his body, and if health and nobility existed in the inventor, they are almost always lacking in the user. Devices are bought, sold, and stolen, and man becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker. His first devices seemed extensions of his arm and couldn't be effective without its strength; but, by now, the device no longer has any relation to the limb. And it is the device that creates sickness, abandoning the law that was, on all earth, the creator. The law of the strongest vanished, and we lost healthful selection. We would need much more than psychoanalysis. Under the law established by the possessor of the greatest number of devices, sickness and the sick will flourish. <br />
<br />
Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness. Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-84165831789680185222012-08-17T12:27:00.000-05:002012-12-15T17:33:33.986-06:00Crave<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
Crave<br />
by Sarah Kane<br />
(1998)<br />
<br />
C She is currently having some kind of nervous breakdown and wishes she'd been born black, male and more attractive.<br />
<br />
B I give myself.<br />
<br />
C Or just more attractive.<br />
<br />
B I give my heart. <br />
<br />
C Or just different.<br />
<br />
M But that's not really giving.<br />
<br />
C Just someone fucking else.<br />
<br />
A Fragile and choking.<br />
<br />
C She ceases to continue with the day to day farce of getting through the next few hours in an attempt to ward off the fact that she doesn't know how to get through the next forty years.<br />
<br />
A I love you still,<br />
<br />
B Against my will.<br />
<br />
C She's talking about herself in the third person because the idea of being who she is, of acknowledging that she is herself, is more than her pride can take.<br />
<br />
B With a fucking vengeance. <br />
<br />
C She's sick to the fucking gills of herself and wishes wishes wishes that something would happen to make life begin. <br />
<br />
A I'm a much nicer person since I had an affair.<br />
<br />
C You can only kill yourself if you're not already dead. <br />
<br />
M Guilt does that. <br />
<br />
A Because now I know that betrayal means nothing.Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-15594125251570607172012-08-17T12:10:00.001-05:002012-08-17T12:10:48.180-05:00To be forgotten...an excerpt from...<br />
The Rings of Saturn<br />
by W.G. Sebald<br />
(1995)<br />
<br />
Much as in this continuous process of consuming and being consumed, nothing endures, in Thomas Browne's view. On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. For the history of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark. Knowledge of that descent into the dark, for Browne, is inseparable from his belief in the day of resurrection, when, as in a theatre, the last revolutions are ended and the actors appear once more on stage, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece. As a doctor, who saw disease growing and raging in bodies, he understood mortality better than the flowering of life. To him it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-91927388087981395012012-01-10T22:50:00.001-06:002014-09-04T12:11:28.535-05:00A thumbnail sketch<i>…an excerpt from…</i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span">You Bright and Risen Angels<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span">By William Vollmann<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span">(1987)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span">About three weeks ago my fiancee, with whom I
had been living for almost three years, decided that she did not love me
anymore. This put her in an unenviable strategic position, for I remained
stubbornly oblivious to this fact despite her best efforts at delicate
suggestion, so at last, no longer able to stomach my endearments (she had
always been my Bee; and I had been her Beetle), losing interest in the tedious
details of my life (which, like a robin redbreast, I had been all too eager to
feed her in our nest, as if she were still my baby bird who was content to eat
what I might bring her), and unable to desire me sexually (it had gotten to the
point where I had to beg her each Saturday morning for about forty-five minutes
until finally she would hitch up her nightgown and spread her legs and close
her eyes and lie there motionless), there was nothing for her to do but unveil
her pure hard will in a session of evil mercy killing; for it was all too clear
that I had no minimum level of self-respect below which I would not debase
myself to keep her. So, one night
after she had bought my birthday present, she steeled to shoot her own
dog. It would be unnecessary, she
knew, to disregard my tears and nasty groveling entreaties in order to compel
me to see that no matter how good I might be henceforth my case was hopeless,
that I simply could not have her anymore.
I am told that when a girl gets her ears pierced the poor dumb flesh
tries to grow back where it is not wanted; and sometimes she must push needles
through the spot several times over the next few days in order to kill it for
good, because it will try until it is dead to heal the wound. So it was here. I had to be dealt with in one great
firm stroke, without unnecessary cruelty, but the knife had to go in and it had
to be twisted just as firmly in the wound, because the flesh would not
understand. I remember once when I
was working on a ranch my friend Eric was showing me how to kill a pig. We were smoking all our pigs for
sausage. The previous three had
been dispatched; the last had hidden itself behind a pile of straw in its
hutch, for pigs are very intelligent animals. As we exposed it and dragged it outside and onto the
bloodstained sand, it began to scream.
We flung it down on its back and Eric bayoneted it through the
heart. It screamed and screamed. The dark pig-blood spurted. Eric and I held the dying animal
down. Eric removed the bayonet so
that the blood could run freely, and with exquisite gentleness he worked the
trembling pig’s back legs, forward and back, forward and back, to pump all the
blood out. The pig lay there sweating and shaking and pissing and rolling its
eyes. Eric stroked its head to
calm it, just as he might have done with a dairy cow that had been spooked by
something. “All right now,” he
said gently but inflexibly into the pig’s ear. “You just lie there and bleed.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span">This, then, was the hard ceremony of
cauterization which my fiancée had to conduct. No doubt she consulted with our mutual friends to find the
best way of doing it, just like her best friend Milly had studied all the sex
manuals and anatomy charts for weeks before she finally parted with her
maidenhead, back when we were all in college; for all this day there was an
eerie silence in our (now Bee’s) apartment, the friends evidently warned by Bee
to leave the path clear for the operation. Now, as I returned home from work, like a rapist strapped to
a table, wheeled along to his castration, her heart failed her for a moment;
and when I got into bed beside her she told me that we would stop being lovers
for the time being, and would sleep in separate rooms, but we could still live
together and see if we could be friends.
This was somewhat akin to piercing the earlobe once and letting nature
takes its course, healing if it might; or to stabbing through almost to the
pig’s heart but not quite penetrating it; then sewing the animal up with catgut
stitches and debating whether or not to give it antibiotics; or to cutting of
only one of the rapist’s testicles.
–I told her that as we had already stopped cooking together or eating
together or seeing each other for more than about ten minutes a day I couldn’t
se that this would do anything but lower our mutual expectations another notch.
–“Well,” asked my Bee, “what’s your alternative?” –The Beetle clicked and
fluttered its elytra in nervous grief and burrowed deep beneath the bedclothes,
“We could spend more time together,” it hazarded; “we could, Bee, we could’ and
we could each give up something else to make time and do more things together,”
but Bee buzzed angrily at it and said, “The more things we do together the
worse we get along. There is a third alternative,” and now already she was
recovering from her vacillation and raising her stinger and having the Beetle
roll over and bare its black glossy insect-tummy to her, and brushing alcohol
on its thorax where she would carry out sentence and sting; and the Beetle, understanding
that is pleas had made an unpleasant impression, lay still and thought back on
all the crimes it had committed, such as crawling up into her hive and drinking
honey from her combs when she was busy and had worked so hard to make it for
herself; and the Beetle said, knowing the answer very well, “What alternative?”
and the Bee buzzed like a saw and said, “<i>You </i></span><span class="apple-style-span">know what I mean,” but Beetle said, “No I don’t,” because Beetle
did not want to admit that it knew the answer; so Bee hummed and buzzed and
said, “We could end this completely,” in a very determined voice; and Beetle
said, “Oh,” in a very small voice because it was the first time that Bee had
ever said that, and it went to hide at the foot of the bed again, but bee flew
up and hovered over it like the Angel of Death and said, “Well, would you
rather accept my alternative or break up?”; and the Beetle thought about it and
decided what was a little more degradation if that meant that it could keep its
Bee; and very rapidly it rubbed its elytra together and said, “I don’t like
your alternative, but I want to stay with you and I’ll accept any compromise…”
– but looking up into the darkness with its bug-eyes the Beetle could sense
that the Bee had no intention of compromise in any form, so it added quickly,
“But if that’s what you want I’ll do it because I’ll do anything you want me to
do; I love you;” but then the bee settled on the Beetle nonetheless and grasped
the proper spot and stung it deeply and slowly and thoroughly, and said, “I
don’t think I love you anymore.” That was the first time that she had ever said
<i>that</i></span><span class="apple-style-span">.
– “Oh,” said Beetle (the last thing it ever said). – “I’ve never broken up with anyone
before,” Bee hummed, “and I don’t know if I’m doing this right – you can hate
me if you want – but I don’t want to live with you anymore.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span">The cool sting-venom spread a bottomless
numbness as the Beetle turned up its stiffening legs and died, for now I could
never be her Beetle again, and I was left with a dry cerebral exhaustion (which
I hope that God feels every time that an insect dies). In the meantime the sad little corpse
twitched and struggled for another interval, just as a crocodile can bite for
up to an hour after death; for there were still a few biomechanical standby
command centers functioning trying to make the Beetle survive the massive shock
trauma and nervous failure (though Bee, I must say, had stung firmly and well,
advised both by her instincts and the example of other bees, and remained with
her stinger inside the Beetle for some moments to make sure that she had done
the job, just as a trapper will rock on his heels upon a coyote’s throat for a
quarter-hour after the animal’s eyes have bulged out and its tongue has turned
blue and it has gone limp; just as, according to the dictates of quaint
American marriage manuals, a husband trying to impregnate his wife will leave
his limp penis inside her for quite a while so as not to make it any harder for
his sperm to swim up through their mutal slime; reason dictates that long after
a fleshly process has been accomplished to apparent satisfaction it is best to
practice overkill.) And in fact
Beetle made thrashing movements for some days, so much did it love its Bee and
so little did it want to die. When
Bee was out in the subsequent days I missed her as if <i>she</i></span><span class="apple-style-span">, not Beetle, were dead, for my Bee would never come back to me
now; and when she entered the apartment at night my mouth dried up so that I
was unable to say a word to her, and my heart pounded with fear of her, a sort
of <i>sharp green </i></span><span class="apple-style-span">fear – I had to <i>look </i></span><span class="apple-style-span">at her and hear her in the other room and know that she was
conscious of me as a problem solved in all but disposal; and now she shut the
door to her room (we exchanged few further words after that night) and began to
study her Polish. She was a very
young girl; she was not yet nineteen.
I had known that someday she would send me away from her. It was so terrible being in the
apartment when she was in the bedroom. – She was very short and stout and
walked with a slight limp. There
was a metal plate in her ankle; she had broken the bone years ago and had
always been too busy to have her plate extracted. I could recognize her step in the evenings as she came down
the hall to our number. I would
usually be curled on my side on the floor, sobbing picturesquely into the
rug. When I heard her I would run
silently to my chair in the corner of the living room, almost mad with misery
and terror. The key turned in the
lock. I stared down at my toes,
grinding my teeth and holding my breath.
I would not have her looking at me full on; I was sideways to the
doorway. I would not expose my
back to her, either; I could best take her presence in the side, the shoulders,
the neck. She came in quickly, face turned away from me, and marched into the
bedroom. The door closed behind
her. I heard her sighing and
grumbling as she took off her little daypack, got out her books and set to
work. She would be in there until
five or six the next morning; then she’d go out, off to her classes and friends,
and be gone all day. The mattress
where I now slept was against the wall right by the door. When she went out, she stepped over my
face. – I never dared to ask quite why it was that she didn’t love me anymore:
Had I been mean to her? Did I
smell bad? – Sometimes I could not bear it and stuck my head in the oven and
turned on the gas, but here I was a bungler just like poor Electric Emily, and
all that happened was that I got a terrible headache and felt dizzy and had to
go to the bathroom to vomit.*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span">But this still lay in the future, for now the
problem was to get through the night in the double bed (which Bee and I had
bought on Haight Street) with Beetle’s smooth rounded body still rocking side
to side with faint comical motions like a scientific balance finally coming to
equilibrium, and locking its legs in its death-agony all through me; and with
Bee lying beside me tense and uncomfortable yet proud, I think, of what she had
done. This American girl must have
seen (as she waited out the hour of midnight) the night-noon horizons of future
frontiers, the sun burning down on the salt licks and desert barrens, her
cooking-pot over her shoulder and behind her a dead stranger at the water hole;
time to push on while she could (but actually this trope is ill-suited to her
because she hated to walk anywhere; we had fights about this; she was plump and
sedentary like a sweet caterpillar, but there was this ruthlessness in her
still; she was also going to get rid of her snakes when they got too big. Perhaps I think of her as a bold
pioneer making tracks away from me not only because she, like myself, was a
citizen of our great Republic, but also because before I went to Afghanistan in
1982 she had taken me to see <i>Lawrence of Arabia</i></span><span class="apple-style-span"> and held my hand; and it was great, it was keen, it was really
marv; especially the part where Lawrence had to go back in the desert sun to
rescue one of the Arabs in the caravan that was going to storm Aqaba. – “Aqaba,
Aqaba!” cried Lawrence madly; in his own memoirs he does not mention whether he
did anything of the kind, but all accounts agree that he had to stop worrying
about Aqaba for a minute because a man had fallen off a camel in the night and
Lawrence was going to turn around and save him even though they said it was impossible
because the sun would kill him and must have already killed the other guy
anyhow (that was why they rode by night); and now the sun began to rise and
shrivel things up as if it were the Emperor of the blue globes, and the sand
started smoking, but Lawrence rode into the sunrise just the same, and the
Arabs were furious with him because he would die and thereby louse up the Aqaba
campaign, that son of Iblis, but he didn’t die then; that was the remarkable
thing; he rode back through the white-hot dunes and found the man crawling
along in the sand, already close to dead, and lifted him up onto his camel and
hauled him back to camp.
– “Wawrence!” cried the two servant-boys who waited for him on the hill
at camp, hoping while the other Arabs slept brutishly, needing the stimulus of
a white man to lead them on to victory against the Turk. – Yes, here came old
Lawrence, a real man was he; they all gave him water and celebrated madly. Later Lawrence had to shoot he same
fellow he rescued, for the sake of harmony. – Only the shooting part is described in his memoirs; the
desert rescue is, I think, a contrivance, much like our own notion of rescuing
our Iranian hostages some years ago, though we failed miserably there, by God;
but the point of all this is that Bee was off to Aqaba! Or maybe she was reading proudly along,
moving from “A” to “A” in the great desert of knowledge; now she and her
caravan of books were already as far west as Provo, Utah, pursued by beetles
and snakes and Gila monsters, but onward, onward she went with her retinue; and
now she was in Bishop, California; now the wagon train came down through the
palms of Sacramento, closer to the fine new smell, the smell of the Pacific, of
an undergraduate degree, a teaching assistantship; yes, here was Aqaba all
right; those bloody stupid Turks had set their guns facing the sea because they
didn’t have the imagination to realize that somebody had the <i>guts</i></span><span class="apple-style-span"> to do it the hard way, crossing the desert dunes to fall on them
from behind, as I would have if it would have done any good; oh, I would have
kissed her ass a million times; anything, anything.) – She could not sleep that
night; I could not sleep. Although
it was impossible to see her in the darkness I could sense the rigidity of her
body next to me, and when she shifted her position slightly or coughed then I
knew that she was still awake and was lying listening to <i>my </i></span><span class="apple-style-span">movements, until finally I could not stand it and asked her to
please sleep on the mattress in the other room. She would not go at first, I don’t know why—did she feel
regretful about the necessity of getting up now and leaving me? Was she
satisfied where she was?—but after another hour had passed and we were still
both lying there hearing each other breathe she took her blankets out wordlessly
and did not come back. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span">The next day was Saturday and I woke early,
feeling under the weather. She was
dialing her friends, informing them in a low buzz that all was well; “I did it;
Beetle and I broke up last night.
Now we just have to work out the”—she gave the following words a droll
emphasis—“gory details.” — The little corpse spasmed, gorily. It had been Aqaba’s last defender. And Lawrence went wading in the sea,
inhaling the cool spray of freedom. –Over my cereal she presented me with an
itemized bill for rent and food and her share of certain common possessions,
which I could not read for tears and agreed to every term of for the sake of
harmony. All the time I knew that
her friends had done it, that her friends had tricked my Bee…This was the only
explanation. – An hour later Milly
and Arthur came by, and Milly, who had always despised me, was extremely polite
and spoke to me more than she had in months and asked how I had slept and
looked me full in the face with great satisfaction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span">When they left, Bee stepped outside with them
and they talked out of my hearing for perhaps forty-six minutes according to my
watch, then she came back and told me that Arthur wanted to have a little chat
with me that evening, and got her keys and fluttered away with other friends to
spread the new; and as soon as the door was closed I stuck my fist in my mouth
so that no one would hear and screamed and screamed with my mouth open like a
grub’s; then it was time to gash myself half-heartedly with Bee’s steak knives
a few times and maybe hit my head with a lightweight hammer just for the hell
of it, then back to the gas oven to be saved, then off to the broom closet for
a mop to clean up my vomit. Now
here came Bee again, ignoring a smell of gas when was so clearly a textbook
example of the Call for Help, rushing instead to the phone to dial: --“Oh,
Diana told you? –Great; yes, Milly knows, she had a lot of good advise
beforehand and was very very supportive; oh, I feel fine, thank you, very
relieved it went so well; no, that’s very nice of you to say but I’m sure I
must have been horrible to him too at times; why, that’s so <i>funny</i></span><span class="apple-style-span">; Arlova promised last week to help me with that; that’s really
neat; no, I’m just reading; really, I do feel fine; it was <i>much </i></span><span class="apple-style-span">easier than I thought and when you told me…” – Here she sunk the
receiver into her neck and chest and bent her head and whispered something into
it and cocked her head and listened for a minute and laughed. – “Oh, no, I made it really clear, and
now all we have to settle is”—giggle—“the gory details” – I kept abreast of the
politics of the situation as best I could, learning from indirect reports that
Milly blamed me entirely for forcing Bee to initiate the break-up (Milly was a
meta-feminist at Stanford), and Arlova had always thought I exerted a weird and
repressive influence on Bee’s entire environment, that Diana felt that it was
important to hold my assets until I paid what I owed of the rent; and that
Pavel and Richard were fighting over who could ask Bee out first. Arthur contented himself with saying
that he was disappointed in me for letting this happen, and Seth got me
drunk. Meanwhile the dead Beetle
was rapidly being effaced from Bee’s life and Crystalline Hive, for I was now
moving out my effects, the piles of boxes shrinking day by day, I feeling a
certain emotional squeeze because the slower I went the longer I would be in
proximity to her, which was unbearable since even when she was out I was in
constant fear that she might come back and I would have to <i>say </i></span><span class="apple-style-span">something to her or look at her or answer a question; but he
faster I went the more irrevocably I cooperated in my own liquidation. In the end I chose the latter option,
because Beetle had always been obedient to its Bee in scheduling matters and it
seemed that she wanted me out, so I wrote a note saying I’d do anything, <i>anything</i></span><span class="apple-style-span"> if she’d take me back (but couldn’t bear to read any response so
instructed her never to answer), moved my last suitcase out, returned the
apartment keys, mailed her a check for everything I owed her plus ten dollars
to go to movies on, and settled into a resignation which I did not dare to
examine too closely.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span">Of course at night I dreamed that I made amends
for whatever it was I had done wrong, and came to her on my knees, and she
hugged me and let me come back to her, and I woke up exhausted but happy, not
knowing where I was (for I was now living with Seth and Arthur), and then I
looked around me and realized that it was “only” a dream, just as when I was a
child I used to dream of finding treasure or being given presents, and would
wake up in the morning convinced that I could still feel something in my hand
but it was melting fast like fairy ice and by the time I opened my hand there
was never anything there. Or I
would dream that Bee let me fuck her one last time to say good riddance, and
she spread her legs wide for me but I could feel her revulsion, and I mounted
her and entered her deeply and panted and snorted like a bull mounting a piece
of rawhide stretched on a frame, which the insemination agent has rubbed
against the backside of a cow in heat—and how we laugh to see him going at it
and ejaculating on a damned <i>sawhorse </i></span><span class="apple-style-span">for Christ’s sake, so we can use his semen just like we use the
rest of him; and she lay there under me holding her breath as we did it, stiff
with disgust, and when I was almost through she closed her legs tightly to trap
me and called for all her friends and they came rushing out of the closet and
seized me and pulled me off and threw me on my back and spread my legs and
shoved Bee’s nightgown up against my nose and mouth so that I could feel the
cotton soft against my face and smell the honey-sell of my Bee and be soothed
and pacified and tricked like an animal, and Bee held one of my ankles and
Milly stepped up with a razor and put her hand on the inside of my thigh and
traced the place with her forefinger and Richard nodded and Milly cut my
femoral artery while they held me firmly against the spongy mattress, and Bee
said, “He’s bleeding now; you can let go of him,” and they all got up and stood
round me to see if another cut would be needed, and while they waited Milly
worked up a big gob and spat in my face…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-style-span">* Carbon monoxide injures through tissue
hypoxia. Hemoglobin’s affinity for
it is 218 times greater than that for oxygen, so it must really love it, just
like Beetle loved its Bee. Blood
levels of less than 10% carboxyhemoglobin produce few symptoms. As we move up the evolutionary scale to
10-30, headaches, nausea and mild dysfunctions of the central nervous system
appear (for you are just beginning to damage yourself now), decreasing visual
acuity and impaired cognitive beeping and clicking being among the most common
indications. More advanced
psychotics prefer to aim for 30-40, which yields a harvest of severe headaches,
dyspnea on exertion, dizziness, <i>real </i></span><span class="apple-style-span">nausea, not this kid stuff, vomiting, dim vision and, if you
achieve your goal, ataxia and possible collapse. The professional proceeds to levels in excess of 50, which
state induces tachypnea, convulsions, coma and death through profound shock and
respiratory and cardiac failure.
– While we’re on the subject of suicide, I should mention that in our
great Republic males commit that deed three times as often as females, but call
suicide prevention centers only a third as frequently. – As this book goes to press, I find
myself anxious to keep it up to date, so I must add a relevant fact from one of
the Cyanide Society’s publications, only recently available to the lay reader:
namely, that gas ovens throughout this nation have been reformatted to make
lethality a more distant possibility.
There is some new additive in the gas which restores corpses to life. This explains why chickens and
hamburgers broiled in the gas oven always taste good; they are brought back to
themselves, as it were, and then killed fresh, backed alive; but I am losing
the moral, which is that nothing will stop a real man; so if necessary stick
your head in the oven and turn on the gas and light the pilot. It will feel much like a high
fever. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-26807465981527466892011-12-16T22:14:00.001-06:002011-12-16T22:16:13.003-06:00How Doctors Diehttp://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die/read/nexus/<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
<strong style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">by Ken Murray</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
To see how patients play a role, imagine a scenario in which someone has lost consciousness and been admitted to an emergency room. As is so often the case, no one has made a plan for this situation, and shocked and scared family members find themselves caught up in a maze of choices. They’re overwhelmed. When doctors ask if they want “everything” done, they answer yes. Then the nightmare begins. Sometimes, a family really means “do everything,” but often they just mean “do everything that’s reasonable.” The problem is that they may not know what’s reasonable, nor, in their confusion and sorrow, will they ask about it or hear what a physician may be telling them. For their part, doctors told to do “everything” will do it, whether it is reasonable or not.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
The above scenario is a common one. Feeding into the problem are unrealistic expectations of what doctors can accomplish. Many people think of CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor. I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one, a healthy man who’d had no heart troubles (for those who want specifics, he had a “tension pneumothorax”), walked out of the hospital. If a patient suffers from severe illness, old age, or a terminal disease, the odds of a good outcome from CPR are infinitesimal, while the odds of suffering are overwhelming. Poor knowledge and misguided expectations lead to a lot of bad decisions.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
But of course it’s not just patients making these things happen. Doctors play an enabling role, too. The trouble is that even doctors who hate to administer futile care must find a way to address the wishes of patients and families. Imagine, once again, the emergency room with those grieving, possibly hysterical, family members. They do not know the doctor. Establishing trust and confidence under such circumstances is a very delicate thing. People are prepared to think the doctor is acting out of base motives, trying to save time, or money, or effort, especially if the doctor is advising against further treatment.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
Some doctors are stronger communicators than others, and some doctors are more adamant, but the pressures they all face are similar. When I faced circumstances involving end-of-life choices, I adopted the approach of laying out only the options that I thought were reasonable (as I would in any situation) as early in the process as possible. When patients or families brought up unreasonable choices, I would discuss the issue in layman’s terms that portrayed the downsides clearly. If patients or families still insisted on treatments I considered pointless or harmful, I would offer to transfer their care to another doctor or hospital.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
Should I have been more forceful at times? I know that some of those transfers still haunt me. One of the patients of whom I was most fond was an attorney from a famous political family. She had severe diabetes and terrible circulation, and, at one point, she developed a painful sore on her foot. Knowing the hazards of hospitals, I did everything I could to keep her from resorting to surgery. Still, she sought out outside experts with whom I had no relationship. Not knowing as much about her as I did, they decided to perform bypass surgery on her chronically clogged blood vessels in both legs. This didn’t restore her circulation, and the surgical wounds wouldn’t heal. Her feet became gangrenous, and she endured bilateral leg amputations. Two weeks later, in the famous medical center in which all this had occurred, she died.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litigation and do whatever they’re asked, with little feedback, to avoid getting in trouble.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
Even when the right preparations have been made, the system can still swallow people up. One of my patients was a man named Jack, a 78-year-old who had been ill for years and undergone about 15 major surgical procedures. He explained to me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to be placed on life support machines again. One Saturday, however, Jack suffered a massive stroke and got admitted to the emergency room unconscious, without his wife. Doctors did everything possible to resuscitate him and put him on life support in the ICU. This was Jack’s worst nightmare. When I arrived at the hospital and took over Jack’s care, I spoke to his wife and to hospital staff, bringing in my office notes with his care preferences. Then I turned off the life support machines and sat with him. He died two hours later.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
Even with all his wishes documented, Jack hadn’t died as he’d hoped. The system had intervened. One of the nurses, I later found out, even reported my unplugging of Jack to the authorities as a possible homicide. Nothing came of it, of course; Jack’s wishes had been spelled out explicitly, and he’d left the paperwork to prove it. But the prospect of a police investigation is terrifying for any physician. I could far more easily have left Jack on life support against his stated wishes, prolonging his life, and his suffering, a few more weeks. I would even have made a little more money, and Medicare would have ended up with an additional $500,000 bill. It’s no wonder many doctors err on the side of overtreatment.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
But doctors still don’t over-treat themselves. They see the consequences of this constantly. Almost anyone can find a way to die in peace at home, and pain can be managed better than ever. Hospice care, which focuses on providing terminally ill patients with comfort and dignity rather than on futile cures, provides most people with much better final days. Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures. I was struck to hear on the radio recently that the famous reporter Tom Wicker had “died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family.” Such stories are, thankfully, increasingly common.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
Several years ago, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight—or torch) had a seizure that turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. I arranged for him to see various specialists, and we learned that with aggressive treatment of his condition, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months. Ultimately, Torch decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
We spent the next eight months doing a bunch of things that he enjoyed, having fun together like we hadn’t had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time. We’d hang out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He even gained a bit of weight, eating his favorite foods rather than hospital foods. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited. One day, he didn’t wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
Torch was no doctor, but he knew he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Don’t most of us? If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity. As for me, my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like my fellow doctors.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left;">
<em style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><strong style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Ken Murray</strong>, MD, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC.</em></div>Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-76395128102120271532011-10-25T23:39:00.000-05:002013-04-15T08:22:09.033-05:00Taking ownership of one's societyIn light of the popular protests arising across the Arab world and now the US...<br />
<br />
<i> ...an excerpt from...</i><br />
Ulysses<br />
by James Joyce<br />
(1922)<br />
<br />
--You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint Patrice called Ireland for short.<br />
--I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.<br />
--But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-5353617903230337332011-08-17T18:02:00.004-05:002011-08-17T18:13:08.170-05:00Nausea, revisitedI <a href="http://lukedanger.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-way.html">previously posted</a> an excerpt from Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Recently, I came across this nice (and very accessible) commentary on the novel:
<br />
<br /><iframe width="425" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mZSkPNoMpqo?fs=1" frameborder="0" allowFullScreen=""></iframe>Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-19868307147192335282011-08-09T14:14:00.006-05:002011-08-17T18:44:02.147-05:00Moving beyond religion-based morality<span style="font-style:italic;">Reprinted from the opinion piece published in the USA Today on 8/1/2011 by Jerry A Coyne, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago</span>
<br />
<br />One cold Chicago day last February, I watched a Federal Express delivery man carry an armful of boxes to his truck. In the middle of the icy street, he slipped, scattering the boxes and exposing himself to traffic. Without thinking, I ran into the street, stopped cars, hoisted the man up and helped him recover his load. Pondering this afterward, I realized that my tiny act of altruism had been completely instinctive; there was no time for calculation.
<br />
<br />We see the instinctive nature of moral acts and judgments in many ways: in the automatic repugnance we feel when someone such as Bernie Madoff bilks the gullible and trusting, in our disapproval of the person who steals food from the office refrigerator, in our admiration for someone who risks his life to save a drowning child. And although some morality comes from reason and persuasion — we must learn, for example, to share our toys — much of it seems intuitive and inborn.
<br />
<br />Many Americans, including Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian, see instinctive morality as both a gift from God and strong evidence for His existence.
<br />
<br />As a biologist, I see belief in God-given morality as American's biggest impediment to accepting the fact of evolution. "Evolution," many argue, "could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality. For if we were merely evolved beasts, we would act like beasts. Surely our good behavior, and the moral sentiments that promote it, reflect impulses that God instilled in our soul."
<br />
<br />So while morality supposedly comes from God, immorality is laid at the door of Charles Darwin, who has been blamed for everything from Nazism to the shootings in Columbine.
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Why it couldn't be God</span>
<br />
<br />But though both moral and immoral behaviors can be promoted by religions, morality itself — either in individual behavior or social codes — simply cannot come from the will or commands of a God. This has been recognized by philosophers since the time of Plato.
<br />
<br />Religious people can appreciate this by considering Plato's question: Do actions become moral simply because they're dictated by God, or are they dictated by God because they are moral? It doesn't take much thought to see that the right answer is the second one. Why? Because if God commanded us to do something obviously immoral, such as kill our children or steal, it wouldn't automatically become OK. Of course, you can argue that God would never sanction something like that because he's a completely moral being, but then you're still using some idea of morality that is independent of God. Either way, it's clear that even for the faithful, God cannot be the source of morality but at best a transmitter of some human-generated morality.
<br />
<br />This isn't just philosophical rumination, because God — at least the God of Christians and Jews — repeatedly sanctioned or ordered immoral acts in the Old Testament. These include slavery (Leviticus 25:44-46), genocide (Deuteronomy 7:1-2; 20:16-18), the slaying of adulterers and homosexuals, and the stoning of non-virgin brides (Leviticus 20:10, 20:13, Deuteronomy 22:20-21).
<br />
<br />Was God being moral when, after some children made fun of the prophet Elisha's bald head, he made bears rip 42 of them to pieces (2 Kings 2:23-24)? Even in the New Testament, Jesus preaches principles of questionable morality, barring heaven to the wealthy (Matthew 19:24), approving the beating of slaves (Luke 12:47-48), and damning sinners to the torments of hell (Mark 9:47-48). Similar sentiments appear in the Quran.
<br />
<br />Now, few of us see genocide or stoning as moral, so Christians and Jews pass over those parts of the Bible with judicious silence. But that's just the point. There is something else — some other source of morality — that supersedes biblical commands. When religious people pick and choose their morality from Scripture, they clearly do so based on extrareligious notions of what's moral.
<br />
<br />Further, the idea that morality is divinely inspired doesn't jibe with the fact that religiously based ethics have changed profoundly over time. Slavery was once defended by churches on scriptural grounds; now it's seen as grossly immoral. Mormons barred blacks from the priesthood, also on religious grounds, until church leaders had a convenient "revelation" to the contrary in 1978. Catholics once had a list of books considered immoral to read; they did away with that in 1966. Did these adjustments occur because God changed His mind? No, they came from secular improvements in morality that forced religion to clean up its act.
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Where, then?</span>
<br />
<br />So where does morality come from, if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing — even notions of fairness. This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is built partly on the genes of our ancestors.
<br />
<br />And the conditions under which humans evolved are precisely those that would favor the evolution of moral codes: small social groups of big-brained animals. When individuals in a group can get to know, recognize and remember each other, this gives an advantage to genes that make you behave nicely towards others in the group, reward those who cooperate and punish those who cheat. That's how natural selection can build morality. Secular reason adds another layer atop these evolved behaviors, helping us extend our moral sentiments far beyond our small group of friends and relatives — even to animals.
<br />
<br />Should we be afraid that a morality based on our genes and our brains is somehow inferior to one handed down from above? Not at all. In fact, it's far better, because secular morality has a flexibility and responsiveness to social change that no God-given morality could ever have. Secular morality is what pushes religion to improve its own dogma on issues such as slavery and the treatment of women. Secular morality is what prevents ethically irrelevant matters — what we eat, read or wear, when we work, or whom we have sex with — from being grouped with matters of genuine moral concern, like rape and child abuse. And really, isn't it better to be moral because you've worked out for yourself — in conjunction with your group — the right thing to do, rather than because you want to propitiate a god or avoid punishment in the hereafter?
<br />
<br />Nor should we worry that a society based on secular morality will degenerate into lawlessness. That experiment has already been done — in countries such as Sweden and Denmark that are largely filled with non-believers and atheists. I can vouch from experience that secular European nations are full of well-behaved and well-meaning citizens, not criminals and sociopaths running amok. In fact, you can make a good case that those countries, with their liberal social views and extensive aid for the sick, old and disadvantaged, are even more moral than America.
<br />
<br />Clearly, you can be good without God.
<br />Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-51523116925149071752011-06-16T23:03:00.003-05:002011-06-16T23:08:10.157-05:00Selfish or selfless?...an excerpt from...<br />The Fountainhead, Book 4<br />by Ayn Rand<br />(1943)<br /><br />I've looked at him--at what's left of him--and it's helped me to understand. He's paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that he's been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness--in other people's eyes. Fame, admiration, envy--all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn't want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn't want to build, but to be admired as a builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There's your actual selflessness. It's his ego he's betrayed and given up. But everybody calls him selfish.<br /><br />(For all the criticism of Ayn Rand, whether literary or philosophical, I continue to enjoy this quote.)Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-10444936226261048392011-05-31T01:10:00.005-05:002013-04-24T00:10:40.860-05:00On the culture of killing<i>...an excerpt from...</i><br />
The Plague<br />
by Albert Camus<br />
(1947)<br />
<br />
'I've tried to dwell on my start in life, since for me it really was the start of...everything. I came to grips with poverty when I was eighteen, after an easy life till then. I tried all sorts of jobs, and I didn't do too badly. But my real interest in life was the death penalty; I wanted to square accounts with that poor blind "owl" on the dock. So I became an agitator as they say. I didn't want to be pestiferous, that's all. To my mind, the social order round me was based on the death-sentence, and by fighting the established order I'd be fighting against murder. That was my view, others had told me so, and I still think that this belief of mine was substantially true. I joined forces with a group of people I then liked, and indeed have never ceased to lie. I spent many years in close co-operation with them, and there's not a country in Europe in whose struggles I haven't played a part. But that's another story. <br />
<br />
'Needless to say, I knew that we, too, on occasion, passed sentences of death. But I was told that these few deaths were inevitable for the building up of a new world in which murder would cease to be. That also was true up to a point—and maybe I'm not capable of standing fast where that order of truths is concerned. Whatever the explanation, I hesitated. But then I remembered that miserable "owl" on the dock, and it enabled me to keep on. Until the day when I was present at an execution—it was in Hungary—and exactly the same dazed horror that I'd experienced as a youngster made everything reel before my eyes. <br />
<br />
'Have you ever seen a man shot by firing-squad? No, of course not; the spectators are hand-picked and it's like a private party, you need an invitation. The result is that you've gleaned your ideas about it from books and pictures. A post, a blindfolded man, some soldiers in the offing. But the real thing isn't a bit like that. Do you know that the firing-squad stands only a yard and a half from the condemned man? Do you know that if the victim took two steps forward his chest would touch the rifles? Do you know that, at this short range, the soldiers concentrate their big bullets into a hole into which you could thrust your fist? No, you didn't know all that; those are things that are never spoken of. For the plague-stricken their peace of mind is more important than a human life. Decent folks must be allowed to sleep easy o' nights, mustn't they? Really it would be shockingly bad taste to linger on such details, that's common knowledge. But personally I've never been able to sleep well since then. The bad taste remained in my mouth and I've kept lingering on the details, brooding over them. <br />
<br />
'And thus I came to understand that I, anyhow, had had plague through all those long years in which, paradoxically enough, I'd believed with all my soul that I was fighting it. I learned that I had had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people; that I'd even brought about their deaths by approving of acts and principles which would only end that way. Others did not seem embarrassed by such thoughts, or anyhow never voiced them of their own accord. But I was different; what I'd come to know stuck in my gorge. I was with them and yet I was alone. When I spoke of these matters they told me not to be so squeamish; I should remember what great issues were at stake. And they advanced arguments, often quite impressive ones, to make me swallow what none the less I couldn't bring myself to stomach. I replied that the most eminent of the plague-stricken, the men who wear red robes, also have excellent arguments to justify what they do, and once I admitted the arguments of necessity and <span style="font-style: italic;">force majeure</span> put forward by the less eminent, I couldn't reject those of the eminent. To which they retorted that the surest way of playing the game of the red robes was to leave to them the monopoly of the death penalty. My reply to this was that, if you gave in once, there was no reason for not continuing to give in. It seems to be that history has borne me out; today there's a sort of competition who will kill the most. They're all mad-crazy over murder and they couldn't stop killing men even if they wanted to.<br />
<br />
‘In any case, my concern was not with arguments. It was with the poor “owl”; with that foul procedure whereby dirty mouths stinking of plague told a fettered man that he was going to die, and scientifically arranged things so that he should die, after nights and nights of mental torture while he waited to be murdered in cold blood. My concern was with that hole, big as a fist, in a man’s chest. And I told myself that meanwhile, so far anyhow as I was concerned, nothing in the world would induce me to accept any argument that justified such butcheries. Yes, I chose to be blindly obstinate, pending the day when I could see my way more clearly. <br />
<br />
‘I’m still of the same mind. For many years I’ve been ashamed, mortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn. As time went on I merely learned that even those who were better than the rest could not keep themselves nowadays from killing or letting others kill, because such is the logic by which they live; and that we can’t stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody. Yes, I’ve been ashamed ever since; I have realized that we all have the plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the mortal enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that’s the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. This, and only this, can bring relief to men and, if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good. So that is why I resolved to have no truck with anything which, directly or indirectly, for good reasons or for bad, brings death to anyone, or justified others’ putting him to death. <br />
<br />
‘That, too, is why this epidemic has taught me nothing new, except that I must fight it at your side. I know positively—yes, Rieux, I can say I know the world inside out, as you may see—that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is the product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearing business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearing to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free, except death. <br />
<br />
‘Pending that release, I know I have no place in the world of today; once I’d definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end. I leave it to others to “make history.” I know, too, that I’m not qualified to pass judgment on those others. There’s something lacking in my mental make-up, and its lack prevents me from being a rational murderer. So it’s a deficiency, not a superiority. But, as things are, I’m willing to be as I am; I’ve learnt modesty. All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s simple, but I know it’s true. You see, I’d heard such quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people’s heads enough to make them approve of murder; and I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language. So I resolved always to speak—and to act—quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track. That’s why I say there are pestilences and there are victims, no more than that. If, by making that statement, I, too, become a carrier of the plague-germ, at least I don’t do it willfully. I try, in short, to be an innocent murderer. You see, I’ve no great ambitions. <br />
<br />
‘I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That’s why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim’s side—so as to reduce the damage done. Amongst them I can at least try to discovery how one attains to the third category; in other words, to peace. ‘<br />
<br />
Tarrou was swinging his leg, tapping the terrace lightly with his heal, as he concluded. After a short silence the doctor [Rieux] raised himself a little in his chair and asked if Tarrou had an idea of the path to follow for attaining peace.<br />
<br />
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘The path of sympathy.’<br />
<br />
Two ambulances were clanging in the distance. The dispersed shouts they had been hearing off and on drew together on the outskirts of the town, near the stony hill, and presently there was a sound like a gun-shot. Then silence fell again. Rieux counted two flashes of the revolving light. The breeze freshened and a gust coming from the sea filled the air for a moment with the smell of brine. And at the same time they clearly heard the low sound of waves lapping the foot of the cliffs. <br />
<br />
‘It comes to this,’ Tarrou said almost casually, ‘what interests me is learning how to become a saint.’<br />
<br />
‘But you don’t believe in God.’<br />
<br />
‘Exactly. Can one be a saint without God? –that’s the problem, in fact the only problem, I’m up against today.’<br />
<br />
A sudden blaze sprang up above the place the shouts had come from and, stemming the wind-stream, a rumour of many voices came to their ears. The blaze died down almost at once, leaving behind it only a dull red glow. Then in a break of the wind they distinctly heard some strident yells and the discharge of a gun, followed by the roar of an angry crowd. Tarrou stood up and listened, but nothing more could be heard. <br />
<br />
'Another skirmish at the gates, I suppose.'<br />
<br />
'Well, it's over now,' Rieux said. <br />
<br />
Tarrou said in a low voice that it was never over, and there would be more victims, because that was in the order of things.<br />
<br />
'Perhaps,' the doctor answered. 'But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is—being a man.’<br />
<br />
‘Yes, we’re both after the same thing, but I’m less ambitious.’<br />
<br />
Rieux supposed Tarrou was jesting and turned to him with a smile. But, faintly lit by the dim radiance falling from the sky, the face he saw was sad and earnest. There was another gust of wind and Rieux felt it warm on his skin. Tarrou gave himself a little shake. <br />
<br />
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘what we now should do for friendship’s sake?’<br />
<br />
‘Anything you like, Tarrou.’<br />
<br />
‘Go for a swim. It’s one of these harmless pleasures that even a saint-to-be can indulge in, don’t you agree?’ Rieux smiled again, and Tarrou continued: ‘Really it’s too damn silly living only in and for the plague. Of course a man should fight for the victims, but, if he ceases caring for anything outside that, what’s the use of his fighting?’Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32483441.post-19783670762583357282011-05-24T22:40:00.006-05:002011-05-25T15:35:15.930-05:00It made my dayAfter giving my name (Luke) to the Asian barista who took my order in a cafe recently, I received this:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcfrBtZh943OWEVR6mqW9il74ZfNnpxHbxc1i6kQqQ6MKM8r5IHzMZjshnchL9cUfqSQuizlPgb5yT4PHKT9393hmVDsh0q6blvNlZBG3VQj-naDUv2e9VRnmaCOxo9V89b-xieQ/s1600/Ruke.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 239px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcfrBtZh943OWEVR6mqW9il74ZfNnpxHbxc1i6kQqQ6MKM8r5IHzMZjshnchL9cUfqSQuizlPgb5yT4PHKT9393hmVDsh0q6blvNlZBG3VQj-naDUv2e9VRnmaCOxo9V89b-xieQ/s320/Ruke.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5610493688581686354" /></a><br /><br />It was possibly the greatest moment of my life. A classic stereotype made manifest in an entirely new context. I wouldn't have expected that it would somehow show itself in written form, but, there you have it. It reminded me of when I was traveling on a train in China and heard someone singing "Sweet Home Arabama" (which actually happened, and was also hilarious).Lukehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05281207062851911272noreply@blogger.com0