Shannon has left me.

No, wait. That’s not right. It’s I who’s left her, and I did it a while ago, too.

I sit in a drab apartment on the third floor of a complex off vaci Utca (VAHtsy OOtsa) in Budapest. There is fabric on the walls–scored beige, thick and hard as amphibian skin–and two putty-colored easy chairs, straight out of Super 8, and a coffee table of black-lacquered particle board, and a glass-doored hutch against the wall, also black-lacquered particle board. The tone is set by the single sad decorative effort: two shelves of empty liquor gift-tins, carefully arranged in the hutch: Dewar’s, Johnny Walker Red, Beefeater, Absolut.

Budapest in 2001–surely it’s a different place now, fast as Eastern Europe is these days, fast as it was in those days–is a city so sexy its longtime residents have relegated their constant hard-ons to the drear of daily life. The women are blonde; they have enormous breasts; they wear thongs; and over their thongs they wear filmy tights or tiny skirts. The men are powerful specimens, tall and muscled and preternaturally confident. These men could crush me in the crook of their arm. They are the Dutch, they are the Danish, but unburdened by the weary sophistication–political, social, sexual–of Western Europe. They all must be unbearably good in bed.

And they have discovered the candied bliss of the American shopping mall. Sixty feet away from my front door, just across vaci Utca, is a pristine five-tier retail mecca, replete with indoor vegetation, multi-screen cinemas (a captain’s easy chair for every paying customer), and countless stores selling whorish outfits for pennies, for spare change, forints. Each shopgirl is a dream of womanly abundance. There are fantastic asses everywhere you look. And the eyes–they seem to invite. (Is it my imagination? Almost certainly it is. I am terribly lonely here.) There’s a TGI Friday’s on the north end, first floor. It is my favorite restaurant.

What I mean to say: Budapest is the perfect place to watch the end of the world.

And Shannon has left me.

What destruction we cannot wreak by our own hand, we wreak passively. In the case of love: a thousand miscast glances, the contemptuous homemaking demands of a tyrant (well-suited for a ’50s housewife in high heels), and a precisely limited sexual plan, designed for my pleasure, designed for my pleasure.

We are in Venice, the living, gasping, brackish museum, in a fabulous apartment, in a fabulous palazzo, terra-cotta roofs in every direction. But for me, I am occupied by flirting with the bar girl. Shannon is at my side, doing the International Herald Trib crossword. The bar girl has sensual lips, that priceless Italian insolence, and is pleased to fuel my fantasies. Meanwhile, Shannon ignores it as best she can. There is grocery shopping to be done, and she’s always on the look-out for a provocative blouse to interest me, and she is deeply in love with Venice. She thinks she loves me, too, but in truth I am only a conduit, a way to get her in. And for me, Shannon is a way, was a way, to get me out. Out of Bennington, Vermont, out of the Bush-addled United States, out of a life that bored me. And here we sit, in this Venetian bar, where the bar girl has just walked by and brushed her hand against my shoulder. That insolence, those sensual lips. I’d like to do terrible things to her.

Venice is a small town for expat Americans. When Shannon has taken all she can take, when my contempt, my wandering eyes, my fury at her insufficiency, at my insufficiency, peak, I must find a new place in which to decay. Budapest, Buda-Pest, city on the Danube, where the buildings proudly bear the bullet holes of 1956, where the women, the girls, twitch their bethonged asses like seasoned pros. Budapest is the place to be, baby.

I am inside my apartment, inside my hard beige walls, because my eyes, my fantasies, are bigger than my courage. I’d like to be a player, but let’s get real. I’m too sensitive, too diffident, too weak, to make the necessary moves. At 3 pm, I turn on CNN and watch massive death in real-time. I see the second plane. I see the desperate, brave suicides. I see the towers fall.

What destruction we cannot wreak by our own hand, we wreak passively.

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, unrelated to the other languages of Central Europe, and as one of the small number of modern European languages which do not belong to the Indo-European language family it has always been of great interest to linguists. It is spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighboring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar. [–Wikipedia]

Halál. Death.

I do not speak Hungarian. I cannot pronounce Hungarian. For days I wander the mall, the streets, staring at the newspaper photographs of fire and death, halál, captioned and headlined in a language of stacked consonants and inscrutable syllables. I speak to no one.

Two weeks later I move to a new apartment, farther south, away from the mall, the TGI Friday’s, the fulsome bodies of the girls of my sad little dreams. In my new home I do not get CNN, but Fox News. I develop a disturbing relationship with Bill O’Reilly.

The previous occupant of my apartment, the son of my landlord, has left a cardboard box of videotapes, which I sort through in a pathetic attempt to avoid the writing that is, supposedly, my mission. But they are all in magyar, all useless, all but one. It is unlabeled, black, anonymous. It is unmitigated hardcore pornography. It is an Italian import. There is no sensuality here, no insolence, only fucking. Only death.

Thank you, I say. Thank you, whoever you are. This is everything. This is enough.

Five years seems like such a long time ago. Among other things, both my parents were still alive. (Neither is now.) I was not yet married. I had never heard of blogs. I had never been to Finland (a regular destination for me in recent years because of my friend Marko). I had never been harassed by agents of the Department of Homeland Security. There was no Department of Homeland Security. And there was no Patriot Act, the most dangerous, destructive (of civil liberties) and retrogressive piece of legislation in memory, which now holds over every head in this country (specially Muslim and Arab ones) the dark threat of indefinite detention at Guantanamo, without charge or due process.

The thing I remember most clearly about the day of the attacks is speaking to my mother in Karachi at some point. It wasn’t a particularly substantive exchange, but it was nice to hear her voice, and a relief, I imagine, for her to hear mine. For days afterwards one went around as if in a dream. Nothing felt real. The atmosphere in New York City took a long time to return to anything like normal, and during that period one’s emotions remained unpredictable and turbulent. September 11th itself was, of course, the worst. By afternoon of that bright autumn day, my uptown apartment had become a makeshift refugee camp for a number of friends who lived near the World Trade Center, and who could no longer go home. At some point on that day, we all went out en masse to try and get a late lunch, only to find an eerie silence on Broadway. All traffic had been stopped in Manhattan. For some odd reason, the few people present were whispering to each other, if speaking at all. After a while, armored personnel carriers with uniformed soldiers began slowly rolling down the streets, while F-14 Tomcats circled overhead. People in civilian dress carrying submachine guns quietly appeared on the street corners. (Later, I learned they were FBI agents.) It was not clear then if there would be further attacks. One felt like one was in a war zone, and I was reminded of my recurring childhood nightmares after Pakistan’s 1971 war with India. Every little while, someone in our group would suddenly break into tears.

That night, we slept fitfully, gripped by the confusion of sadness, fear, anger. The next day, I managed to collect myself enough to send an email to friends and family expressing some of what I felt. I reproduce that message here:

Hello,

As time elapses, I am more clearly able to identify and articulate what it is that has been making me so sad about this attack. It is this: some cities do not belong to any particular country but are treasures for all people; cosmopolitan and international by nature, they are the repositories of our shared world culture and artistic production, testaments to what is common and binding among diverse peoples, and sources of creative energy. They come to stand for our notions of community and brotherhood. New York has been by far the most magnificent of these world treasures, and it still is today. Here, on every block you will meet people from forty different countries. Here you can speak Urdu with the cab drivers, and Korean at the grocery store. Here, bhangra rhythms and classical sitar mix with calypso and Finnish ambient chants. Here is where mosques and synagogues are separated by no green-lines. Here is where Rodney King’s wish has mostly come true: we do get along. This city is the least provincial; no nationalism flourishes here. It is the most potent fountainhead of intellectual and artistic endeavor. What this mindless attack has done is desecrate and damage the ideals of international community that this city not only symbolizes, but instantiates as fact and lovely example. And it is this desecration which is so devastatingly heart-breaking.

I recall two things: one, the pleasure and awe with which my mother took in the incomparably stunning view from the 110th floor observation deck of the World Trade Center on a visit from Pakistan in 1974. And two, her reading in Urdu, the words of welcome inscribed in the lobby of that building in over one hundred languages, to all people of the world. Alas, no one shall ever do either again.

Abbas

On that day, the only thing that I was, was a New Yorker. A New Yorker who loved his wounded city more than ever. And one whose only allegiance was to the sentimental cosmopolitan ideal that this city somehow still manages to embody even today. Probably because many people were still in shock and unable to say anything, this email was forwarded along and eventually ended up being one of those things that went around the internet in ever-wider circles. I received hundreds of appreciative emails in reply and my two little paragraphs were translated into various languages and published in newspapers. They were even read aloud by European political leaders at emergency meetings and hastily assembled conferences. People started asking me my opinion on what had happened, and along with all the other bewildering sentiments, I started feeling inflated.

A little over a week later, I found out that one of my close friends, Ehtesham U. Raja, who had so far been unaccounted for, had actually died in the World Trade Center. He had been attending a business meeting that fateful morning in Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the WTC. Again, while trying to recover from this blow, I received many messages of sympathy. And I liked it. And then I felt disgusted for feeling self-important through my friend’s death. It was at that time, while sitting one afternoon in our living room with my wife Margit, in the midst of this confusing tempest of fast-changing emotions, that I sarcastically spewed out (for catharsis) what could in a very generous mood be considered a prose poem. I readily admit that I am no poet, and perhaps there is a bit of what Vladimir Nabokov once rightly described as (something like) “the passing around of specimens of one’s sputum for inspection” about my making public for the first time now what I had written that day, but in the spirit of telling what this horrific event did to us New Yorkers, I adduce it here. Please be gentle in judging me:

How We Became Important

At first we were thrilled,

the way one is thrilled by thrillers.

It was a real-life action movie, and then it got better.

This was no small entertainment–no Amtrak derailment,

no mere collision of jumbo jets over Tenerife.

It was something bigger,

and it was right on our doorstep, just outside our window.

It was real.

ABC News went off the air and, being engineers,

we realized the thin hypodermic,

a transmitting antenna, was destroyed.

We felt clever, in the know.

We changed channels.

We called family members

in anxious, incredulous excitement,

but we couldn’t get through.

Well, yes. That made sense.

This was big.

And then we saw thousands perish in an instant.

In a brown cloud.

Live on television.

And we wept. (Later we would brag about this weeping.)

We inventoried important landmarks nearby,

wondering if we would be next,

but we knew it was fantasy,

a wish for the adrenaline rush of fire and heat,

a wish to be closer, still closer.

Of course, no one thought us important enough to kill,

but it was thrilling to make believe.

We climbed to the roof and watched the rolls of smoke and dust.

We identified F-14s by their double vertical rudders,

the overall silhouette of the Tomcat.

We spoke like admirals about carrier battle groups.

We ate lunch, marveling at the unfolding of History.

We lowered the pitch of our voices, became grave,

newly aware of our central role.

We made pronouncements about death and infamy.

We were lucky enough to be Muslims

(and from Pakistan, too),

and while others worried for our safety,

we knew that no harm would come to us.

All the same, we had become victims–

that most desirable status, that gift of our time.

Now we had sympathy, the ear of the world

for whatever we might like to spew:

hymns and elegies

professing love of this land;

our shock and sorrow, and our attempts to transcend them;

pious lectures about people and nations

outside America’s soft, imaginary borders.

We defended Muslims to Christians and America to Muslims.

We were virtuous, pleading restraint but never peace,

and we became terribly sophisticated in our politics.

We ate well and slept badly.

We dreamed of burning airplanes.

Soon enough our attentions turned to Eros.

Women liked our newfound moist-eyed sensitivity.

You see, we didn’t know if there would be a tomorrow,

and in any case we were too important now

to read fiction or write philosophy.

There was no time for the old things.

This was big.

And then, with our egos already swollen,

we discovered that a close friend had died with all the others.

A man eating a breakfast with a view.

A close friend, gone.

We couldn’t believe our good luck!

Not everyone could claim such moment.

Not everyone would receive messages of condolence.

We had only lived on the periphery of meaning before,

but now, when the landlady called to collect back-rent,

we would ask if everyone she knew was OK,

and hope, hope that she would return the favor.

Rent.

How trivial compared to the loss of our friend.

Yes, there was grief.

But how quickly our losses were recompensed

by feelings of centrality, consequence.

Overnight, we became astute and worldly thinkers,

with courageous and steadfast hearts.

We were potent lovers and sensitive friends.

We were sages and saints,

and wise.

We really thought we had become important.

New York, uniquely, inspires proprietary feelings in people who don’t even live here.  All over the world, I’ve noticed, people like to think of their cities in relation to New York.  Bostonians speak of the Boston-New York axis, Washingtonians of the Washington-New York corridor.  Los Angelenos and Chicagoans too.  The English consume a diet of newspaper stories claiming that “Swinging” London in “Cool” Britannia has finally surpassed New York in any of a number of areas: art, music, architecture.  (There’s no corresponding competitive discourse in New York media – I guess we don’t suffer from comparative anxieties.)  Even in my hometown of Buffalo, where New York City is often regarded as the great sinkhole of state monies, we took a secret pride in being co-members of the Empire State with N.Y.C.  These perceived affiliations and competitions are a way for other cities to append themselves to New York, to partake of its cultural gravitational field.  Paris is French, Tokyo is Japanese, but New York, to many, is a heterotopia floating off the coast of the United States. 

Manhattan’s grid, and New York’s prolific displays of maps of itself and its subways, streets, and configurations, make it an easy city in which to feel at home.  People produce cognitive maps here very quickly, feel comfortable navigating its terrain almost immediately.  This quality of ease, which is so different, for instance, to the impenetrable ball of yarn that is the map of London, is perhaps the origin of the pervasive sense of belonging experienced by New York visitors and residents alike.  No labyrinthine local knowledges prevent the first-timer from getting from Fifty-Third and Sixth to Twenty-Sixth and Tenth.  Perhaps that famous expression of fealty, “we are all New Yorkers now” should have been, “we are all New Yorkers already.”

I may belong to a minority in remembering the World Trade Center as a poetic structure, but the reasons I do have much to do with how it expressed these signature qualities of New York City.   Visually, the buildings gave the sense of a vertical grid, elongated just as Manhattan is elongated, with an avenue of sky running in between.  Unexpected views of them would often crop up, maybe when turning south from Houston Street onto Sullivan, or standing on the corner of Lafayette and Spring, or while driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike.  Emerging from the Brat Pack-era hangout The Odeon, way downtown, their almost ominous presence suddenly loomed over you.  A perfect visual metaphor, they towered over neighboring skyscrapers the way New York towers over its neighboring cities.  Dark masses illuminated by a bright grid, they signified New York.

I often think about how important it was that there were two of them.  One skyscraper, like the Empire State Building or the Woolworth, somehow remains a building, its mass of steel and concrete impossible to forget.  The twoness of the Twin Towers brought into being relations with the air, dramatized space.  The few places where one tower completely occluded the other (such as the pier leading to the Holland tunnel exhaust, off Spring and West Streets) were uncanny viewing points.  The one visible tower despotically oppressed, rather than symbolized, the city.  One tower was a fascist; two towers invoked psychology, doubleness, complexity.  And because the footprints of the buildings occupied two diagonally opposed squares, they almost always presented themselves to the eye as perspectival, one slightly higher than the other.  The aura of their unevenness brilliantly leavened their austere shapes.  They hovered.

As you approached the plaza, you always noted with pleasure the little arches near the bottoms of the aluminum facade.  These merest bends subtly recalled and paid homage to the Deco architectural landmarks of the city.  They conjured the relation of the Chrysler and the Empire State to the grid itself, represented as the endless lines that clad the trade center’s sides.  The optical illusions those shimmering lines made were almost arrogant: excessive on a building that already inspired vertigo.  For a time, the cavernous lobbies contained a satellite airline terminal.  The sight of those ticket counters was oddly right in buildings that, like airports, constituted entire worlds unto themselves, with the frisson of rocket ships or space stations.  The towers’ otherworldliness made them the unlikely site of a Wednesday evening club night at Windows on the World, frequented by Kate Moss and the rest of the New York glitter circuit of the mid-Nineties.  You’d wander around with a drink and then suddenly come to the windows, through which the shockingly faraway streets below gave a pleasing shock. 

For me, the World Trade Center was part of the given world.  It was finished the year before I was born.  I could never quite comprehend accounts of the debates about Yamasaki’s design choices, about the wisdom of his aluminum minimalism.  To me, they were already there.  They were a late articulation of modernism, in a romantic and slightly whimsical version.  And modernism was a credo whose modernity seemed unquestionable, if you take my meaning.  The good things about New York City for me were (and are) related to its embrace of what it means to be modern, to be in the present tense.  From my family’s decision to immigrate to the United States to my mother’s Audrey Hepburn haircut, my life has been dominated by instantiations of modernism, by dynamic faith in making things new. 

From the time of my first visit to New York, when we visited the WTC and I finally tasted my first long dreamed-of escargot, it never crossed my mind that the towers, along with plenty of other institutions of the postwar period, would prove impermanent.  How could what represented the present become past?  But like other seemingly permanent features of life, One World Trade Center and Two World Trade Center now appear as stupendous legends that lasted for a short twenty-five years.  The gashes that appeared in the buildings, as I stared at them from Chambers and Church Streets, never looked anything other than fixable – it never occurred to me not to assume the towers were invulnerable until they fell.  Even the great, floating sheets of metal tearing away and drifting down from above, or the people I saw leap to their deaths, didn’t convince me that the buildings themselves might not make it.  Surely the emergent chaos those gashes represented could never defeat the entire order.  But it did.

On September 14th, 2001, I flew back to Buffalo on one of the first planes to take off from JFK.  The night before, Abbas, Margit and I had spontaneously sung “New York, New York” at the top of our lungs with a bar full of strangers.  There were about six people on board the Airbus, and I was seated in the first row.  I was heading to a high-school friend’s wedding.  I broke into tears at the sight of the smoldering wreck of downtown, where I still needed to pass a military checkpoint to return to my apartment.  I remember clenching my fists and somberly determining that no passenger would cross the threshold separating me from the captain, on pain of death.  As the flight progressed, it occurred to me that everyone else on the plane was extremely afraid of me. 

It is the world as it existed when I happened upon it that turns out to be the fleeting one.  I’ll be simply part of a shrinking group of people who remember New York with the World Trade Center. 

My other Dispatches.

Justin E. H. Smith

What could be more self-indulgent than to recount where one was on September 11? As if other people were not somewhere. As if being anywhere at all on the planet automatically made one a survivor. I survived September 11, as it happens, in an internet café in Berlin packed with smirking German hipsters, who could not wait to go find more hipsters, at a rave or at a squat, with whom to wax ironical about the day’s events and to recount with a smirk where they were when it happened, a whole six hours later. My grandmother survived Auschwitz: disguised since birth as a Swedish Protestant, she rode it out teaching elementary school in Minnesota. But she had the decency to stay pursed-lipped after the war. We on the other hand must carry on about where we were, what we felt and thought, as though that mattered. I am no exception.

The first thought I had when asked to write something for the fifth anniversary of September 11 was: Jesus. I must be really old. I was old then, and it’s been five years. I should probably start wrapping things up right about now. I don’t even have a will, let alone a legacy. I can’t seem to bring myself to think about such things. I just love life too much. I do not want to die.

I knew of course that what I was expected to produce was hard-nosed political analysis –I’ve managed to do it for Counterpunch— and here I was carrying on as though it was all about me. I would like to be a sharp political analyst, I truly would: on the one hand, the chickens of American imperialism came home to roost, but on the other hand taking innocent lives is never acceptable, etc.

Some topics just stifle all that analytical acumen and cause me to regress into infantile self-absorption, unable to write about anything other than myself. My hope is that I will get away with this by lacquering it up with essayistic style, and claiming membership in a venerable tradition. Montaigne got away with it, some will respond, only because in the 16th century the self was a new and exciting discovery. Today it is old news. And yet, today, I carry on.

A long time ago, in that phase of life when infantile self-absorption was not only tolerated but celebrated by fawning adults, I lived in a white-trash exurb of a mediocre Western city. There were cars on jacks and mean-ass dogs on chains in front yards, people hung sheets in their windows instead of curtains, and there were no structures over two stories high. I imagined that cities consisted in rows of buildings as high as the World Trade Center, stretching out beyond the horizon in all directions, with tubular, glass bridges connecting them all at their very tops, for those who preferred not to use jet-packs.

But then I was taken on family vacations to the supposedly shining cities of the American West, and I saw empty lots between buildings, with broken glass glistening amongst the weeds, and plastic six-pack holders, and weeds pushing up even between the cracks in the sidewalks. No, Sacramento would not cut it, not even Los Angeles, and not even that supposedly exceptional Western city, San Francisco. I resolved by the age of eight or so to move to New York, where I would spend the rest of my life 110 floors above the earth, never again to descend to that terrestrial sphere where the dirt and the plants and animals, and the feral human rejects drifting across the great wide West, were condemned to live out their days.

On the day we moved out of my childhood home in the white-trash exurb, into a condo in a lower-middle-class suburb, I scrawled the lyrics to Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Halber Mensch” on the inside of a bedroom closet, with a magic marker, and added a hammer-and-sickle and an anarchist ‘A’ for good measure. It was 1987, and I was 15.

I arrived in New York in 1994 and left, unwillingly, in 2000. I went to the top of the World Trade Center only once, with Klaus, visiting from Berlin. He wanted to see Gary Kasparov playing against Deep Blue. 1997, that must have been. My sole visit to the 110th floor I had once hoped to inhabit was to witness a showdown between man and machine, a popular pastime among the curious ever since the Mechanical Turk made its debut in 1769.

On September 9, 2001, I set out from my miserable little college-town amidst the cornfields of southern Ohio, whither the great Metropolis had cast me once I finished my Ph.D. at Columbia. I drove to Chicago to fly to Berlin, via Paris, for a conference devoted to the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. On the way I passed right under Sears Tower. It looked shabby and old, and I remember thinking: that thing’s going to have to come down sooner or later. Structures like that can’t just go on forever. Is there anyone, I wonder, who will be able to see to its demolition?

I arrived on the tenth and installed myself in Pamela’s Kreuzberg apartment. She introduced me to her new boyfriend, and at every opportunity I suggested to her that she could not be serious. We had a punctilious drink in a nearby bar, the three of us, and she announced that I would have to make my way back and let myself in. The two of them had plans.

The next day I decided to skip most of the afternoon sessions at the conference in order to read the New York Times at an internet café near the Zoogarten Bahnhof. When I arrived, there was a widescreen TV in the café showing scenes of smoke and carnage. My first thought was: nothing to worry about. That must be somewhere really far away and irrelevant. Somewhere really fucked up, where this kind of thing is normal. Then I saw the NYPD vehicles. The hipsters who ran the place were watching and making jokes to one another. In the news report I heard the verb einstürzen. I was more surprised by that word than by the images it accompanied. That was among the first German words I ever learned, having been a card-carrying hipster myself and having throughout the eighties sought out the hardest-core German industrial music available in the California exurbs. It means ‘to collapse’, and is used in connection with buildings and other large structures. Einstürzende Neubauten had presented themselves as anarchists and nihilists, back in the eighties, but certainly not as fascists (and ‘Islamofascists’ were not even on the radar), who would have liked to have seen it all collapse.

I rushed back to the Leibniz crowd at the Technical University a few blocks away. Best of all possible worlds my ass, I thought. I had always found Voltaire an obnoxious wiseacre, all-too easily taking jabs at Leibniz’s Theodicy without having really made any effort to understand it. When Leibniz said this was the best of all possible worlds, he didn’t mean that it was great or anything, he meant that it was the maximal set of compossible individuals, some of which must, being different from one another, by definition also be worse than others. Hence evil. I felt in an instant that I had just had my own Lisbon Earthquake, and could no longer fault Voltaire for his pessimism. But still, the Leibnizians were my people, and I, like everyone else at that moment, needed some company.

On the program for that afternoon was a meeting of all the various national Leibniz societies, of which there are more than you would think: Chinese, Japanese, Israeli, Argentine, Spanish, American (but not, I probably don’t need to mention, Iranian, Afghan, or Libyan). The representative of the Chinese Leibniz Society was up first: he droned on for at least an hour about his group’s growing membership in a monotone ideally suited to some Central Committee report on crop yields in Xinjiang. Then the American representative got up and calmly said that, because our minds were all, no doubt, elsewhere, he would be brief with his news. Next came the Israeli. He wasted no time in telling all of us a thing or two about terrorism. One would not think that a business meeting of national Leibniz societies could turn into an occasion for a fiery political speech, about freedom and its enemies, about the importance of defending civilization against those who would like to see it all collapse, etc. But our Israeli colleague managed to tie it all together. He said that Leibniz would agree with the opinions he expressed, and that it would be a fine gesture to issue a press release to the Berlin media affirming our disapproval, as Leibnizians, of flying planes into buildings. Two days later, in Der Tagesspiegel and the Berliner Morgenpost, there it was: in German, English, and French, a press release denouncing, in the spirit of Leibniz, terrorism. Leibniz, I note in passing, is rightly credited with being an early visionary of a united Europe. He thought the religious wars of the early 17th century could best be avoided if the Catholics and the Protestants were to team up and invade Egypt together.

That night I went out to a bar with Pamela and her new boyfriend. I bought an evening tabloid from a vendor: ‘Zehntausende Tote’ read the headline. There were pictures of bodies falling from the tops of the Towers, pictures we don’t see much anymore. Pamela showed us pictures of her own from a recent birthday party she threw for herself at Windows on the World. I got drunk on whiskey. We talked, naturally, about New York. Her boyfriend had never even been there. He couldn’t relate. I imagined that under the circumstances she might just send him home so that the two of us could give each other a bit of succor.

When I was 13 or so I taught myself to stage bicycle accidents. I would ride to sorority row at the local university and, with great athletic force and balletic precision, would crash my bike on the front lawns of the houses with the Greek letters where the girls were congregated on the front porches. They would rush down to see to my well-being. They didn’t know me, but their collective solicitude had the effect of something like love.

But no, Pamela sent me back to her place, and went back to his with him. No matter. I had the mass media to keep me company: two TV’s, a radio, and the internet. I turned them all on at once. Local German news channels on TV, the BBC on the radio, and the New York Times online. ‘U.S. Attacked,’ read the headline. On the BBC I remember hearing interviews with passengers whose plane en route to the US had been rerouted to Halifax. An elderly British woman said something like: “Well I suppose we’ve got a free visit to Nova Scotia, haven’t we? It’s a lovely city, my niece tells me. I shall have to pay a visit to the aquarium.” Next they asked an American man what he was feeling. “They’re gonna fuckin’ pay,” he replied. “We’ve just gotta go over there and fuckin’ nuke ‘em.” Most of the opinions I’ve heard expressed since then amount to variations on these two themes.

I had to spend a few extra days in Paris waiting for trans-Atlantic flights to resume. There were US embassy officials at Charles de Gaulle, wearing badges around their necks, expressing what passes for official compassion to Americans trying to get home, but calling us “sir” and “ma’am” far too much to seem sincere. On my first day in Paris, after some hours of futile jockeying at the airport, I took the RER into town to find Anna in her attic studio off the Boulevard Hausmann. She was American, and I hoped she’d be good company. As it turns out, she was in New York attempting to get her French work visa renewed, and would later regale me with tales of great inconvenience. So I did not find any company, but I did see the flowers and banners along the length of the Seine, announcing “Nous sommes tous des américains.” I saw these with my own eyes, though I know it’s hard to believe. By the 16th or so, flights had returned to their normal schedule and those of us who had been stranded were being squeezed in for departures. I left Paris on the 17th. There was a false and forced sense of good cheer on the plane. I sat next to a man with a Tunisian passport, and we were exceedingly nice to each other. On descent into Chicago, the pilot pointed out to us that those on the left side of the plane could catch a spectacular glimpse of the Sears Tower.

I am terrified of flying, and have been since long before the events. My terror is existential and not statistical, and no amount of data as to the relative safety of flying will make any difference. It just feels wrong. It is something we should not be doing. Never do I feel more alone in the universe, more abandoned, than when I am in a plane, and it is that much more awful when we hit a little patch of rough air. This of course is the point at which self-absorption begins to border on insult to the memory of the dead. What the passengers felt on September 11, skimming just above the Hudson at 600 miles per hour towards God knows what, could only have been infinitely worse: the ultimate abandonment, the ultimate absence of love.

Which brings us back to Montaigne and the controversial art of carrying on about oneself. Some philosophers say that the self is a relatively recent invention, and that back in the good old authentic days real people had no need for it. I don’t understand this claim. It seems to me any fanatical cave-bear worshipping hunter-gatherer, no matter how un-modern, is still going to be able to think: too bad the mammoths trampled my brother. Then again, at least they didn’t get me.

It seems to me that those who demonstrated five years ago how ready they were to die and to kill would have liked to return to that imagined primordial era when the self did not matter, but only something somehow higher. It seems to me also for that very reason that our massive response in the form of self-absorbed chatter about where we were, and how the events inconvenienced us, might be more profound than it lets on. It is a response to a well-known pronouncement from a cave in Tora Bora. It says: no, I love life more than you love death. Go ahead and hate your life, but I do not want to die. I am a self-absorbed coward, who gets sick with fear in the faintest of turbulence, and I believe in nothing bigger or higher than my own little bubble of a world. I believe that all deaths are meaningless and regrettable, and especially mine. Death leads to nothing on the other end, and the good for each of us consists in avoiding it. The good of the world, in turn, is best seen to by maximizing the number of people who have no hope for reward in the afterlife, and who value bodily and structural integrity, boringly, over the splattering of guts, including their own, in the name of transcendent principles.

Blixa Bargeld, the idea man behind Einstürzende Neubauten, is in his forties now, and has put on quite a bit of weight. Even back in the early nineties, the anarchist feminists I used to know out on Warschauer Strasse, Silke and Heike and Ines, considered Blixa a bloated bourgeois sell-out. They preferred Donna Haraway, and music informed by the ethos of the Cyborg Manifesto. (It’s too bad I had not yet met Haraway back then, and could not tell them that the cyborg professor’s main preoccupations are in fact dogs and baseball.) They imagined themselves ‘posthuman’. One of them, who had been a high-school exchange student in Kansas some years earlier, enjoyed recounting to the delight of all how fat and stupid (how merely human) Kansans are. They squatted unclaimed flats in the former East Berlin, knitted their own socks, and posted a chore board on the fridge so that everyone could sign up to do their part. Daunted by the work expected of me, I stayed for two nights and then checked into a Best Western.

The girls imagined a radically different world, not one where all the Best Westerns would collapse, but at least where the guests would all be non-paying, and would provide their own maid service. They wanted to bring down the system, and then use its buildings. They disdained the boyish need to blow things up. Bargeld, for his part, never blew anything up –the thing about collapsing new buildings was just a symbol, you see– but instead went into theater. He now cites Bertolt Brecht, who hoped to see rivers of blood spilled for the creation of a better world, and who wrote the lyrics for a Kurt Weill song later transformed into a McDonald’s commercial (“It’s Mac Tonight,” sung by a styrofoam crescent moon wearing Ray-Bans and a tux and seated at a grand piano), as his model and inspiration.

**

[Justin E. H. Smith will be going on book leave for the next few months. An extensive archive of his writing can be found at www.jehsmith.com]

Given all the remarkable occurrences of the last five years, it may seem trivial to dwell on the emergence of fiction about September 11. Why not dwell instead on reality, which is so much more outlandish, tragic, and compelling these days, and whose catastrophes seem to have accelerated recently, so that ordinary life has begun to seem like a thing that is lived between bombings, wars, hurricanes, tsunamis, and other disasters? Fiction, admittedly, cannot bask long in politics (it dries out, it withers), and our era is intensely, blindingly, inescapably, and at times all-embracingly political. A novel cannot convey with any resonance the contemporary irony of an open racist like Patrick Buchanan finding a soapbox at antiwar.com, or, conversely, explain how good liberal intellectuals, through opening some sort of Pandora’s Box of nationalistic pseudo-patriotism, came to wring their hands over whether sleep deprivation is torture. Anyone who’s read The Gulag Archipelago or who is familiar with ‘sleep deprivation psychosis’ knows that answer is not complicated or morally ambiguous.

This stuff, you couldn’t make up. And, although the “September 11 truth movement” (which dominates the first page in a “9/11 truth” Google search) is, strictly speaking, a collective work of epic fiction, fiction writers could not have invented it or predicted its strange hypnotic power over people who should be able to recognize when an idea with the intellectual credibility of the Heaven’s Gate cult is presented by charlatans – and on progressive radio stations, no less. A punk band from the eighties called The Dead Milkmen put it best, and their maxim still applies: It’s a fucked up world.

Almost more than September 11 fiction itself, I am fascinated by the hostile reaction it often gets. There is a ritualistic aspect to the trashing of September 11 fiction, as if it were a ceremonial humiliation that our great minds have to be put through for attempting the impossible, a sort of midlife career change or imaginative retooling for writers suddenly made to feel that their worldview is obsolescent. Admittedly, some of the stuff published so far on the subject has not been very good. But there is another dimension to the case, which is that the wry people at cocktail parties tell us that none of it can be any good, which may be a sign that these writers are on to something. (These same wry people tell us that web logs are worthless enterprises.)

Why does a thoughtful critic like James Wood see the text of John Updike’s Terrorist through a blood-red gauze of derision and fury? Is it really the worst thing Updike ever wrote? Why did the New York Press take extraordinary measures to assassinate the character of Jonathan Safran Foer for writing the seemingly heartfelt Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? And what about Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, and Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, probably the most laughed-at novel from a major literary figure published in recent memory? Why is it that the usually melty ambiguous anodyne reviewer, normally prone to disguising his or her actual opinions of books in bland, sales-wrecking polite prose, discovers a voice of Hearstean bombastic rage when September 11th, terrorism, or the current political climate is the subject of a new novel? Is it because these books are unusually bad (some of them are)? Or is something else going on? And why has film – in the form of United 93 and Paradise Now – done better so far?

Part of the problem is the subject matter itself. Despite the recent and intriguing effort of Martin Amis, a stylish and witty writer with formidable intellectual powers, I still do not believe that Muhammad Atta can be rendered into interesting material for fiction. The simple reason is that Atta was not an interesting man; he was a man who once recoiled from the talking animals of the Disney film The Jungle Book with the commentary, “Chaos, chaos.” There is a basic confusion here about the nature of the events of September 11, which in themselves were unspeakably horrific and of monumental historical importance, with no fictionalization needed to make them more unspeakable, horrific, or important.

Those novels that take other current events as their starting point, like the day of global antiwar protests depicted by McEwan, or the hypothetical plot to cashier Bush relished in detail by Baker’s characters, have an even more difficult hill to climb in literary history because their real-life resonances are so time-bound. But this is the risk of all topical fiction – but Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls were once pretty topical, too.

A short note about what I think is the best attempt so far to scale this Everest of grief by an American writer, Deborah Eisenberg’s extraordinary short story collection Twilight of the Superheroes, which came out from FSG earlier this year. The title story is the only piece of fiction I have ever read about September 11 that gives me a sharp shock of recognition in the guts, the heart, and the brain. It is one of those works in which the author has written down what everyone is secretly thinking.

She got certain things that no one had gotten, or got them down, anyway – although her story is marred at points by over-dwelling in vaguely acceptable liberal explanations of the “root causes” of terrorism that, personally, have always struck me as nonsense. She wisely does not set her story inside the Towers, instead taking various tangent lines through time, moving the film quickly backward and forward so that the narrative never dwells for long on the event itself, the singularity, the black hole of meaning in Lower Manhattan. Instead, she depicts a group of listless young people who’ve subletted a luxury apartment overlooking the World Trade Center, and takes you into their lives before, during, and after the attacks. Good fiction shows time passing, human change, in ways that other art cannot.

Consider just one remarkable passage, one of many in the story:

One kept waiting – as if a morning would arrive from before that day to take them all along a different track. One kept waiting for that shattering day to unhappen, so that the real – the intended – future, the one that had been implied by the past, could unfold. Hour after hour, month after month after month, waiting for that day to not have happened. But it had happened. And now it was always going to have happened.

That is the world we inhabit, described with an simple, elegant, fearless, and heartbreaking clarity. Fiction still has new things to tell us, things our Secretary of Defense and national philosopher Donald Rumsfeld would call ‘unknown unknowns’: things we don’t know we don’t know. I would like to imagine that in twenty years Rumsfeld will cut a rather ignominious figure. It is politically although not logically impossible that he could go to jail under U.S. law for grave violations of the Geneva Conventions barring the torture of prisoners; perhaps it is more likely that he will end his days like Kissinger, with foreign travel a sometimes delicate matter. At any rate, I hope he will be a man diminished, and not enlarged, by history. I also hope Deborah Eisenberg will be even better known than she is now, especially to sympathetic readers who want to understand what happened to us along the way from September 11 to whatever future future we haven’t yet figured out how to keep from happening or, ultimately, having happened.

Some of my most significant relationships—to people, places, and projects—are matters of a delicate violence. I’d not venture such a dramatic statement had I not been desperately looking to get out of the heat one afternoon two weeks ago and ducked into a small museum with a rich exhibition of photographs temporarily on view. The air conditioning was just barely strong enough to fight the sweltering heat outside, and the works by Henri Cartier-Bresson on exhibit inside were more than strong enough to fight any fatigue caused by the languid late-summer day. The photographs were on loan from the artist’s eponymous foundation in Paris to the Museum of Rome at Palazzo Braschi, and were divided into two sections—an homage to Rome and portraits. Refreshingly, there were almost no didactic walls or labels filled with irksome curatorial elucidation whatsoever, and most texts were direct quotes of the photographer. Somehow I kept reading what he said not only in light of photography, but also as it applies to life and its related arts.

Entering the show, the viewer—who is naturally set to judge what is about to be seen—is brought into a relationship with the photographer as he speaks of what “our” eye must do, and how it must do it: “Our eye must continually measure and judge. We change the perspective with a slight bend of the knee, and we create coincidences of lines with a simple movement of the head by a fraction of a millimeter, but this can only be done at the speed of a reflex, without trying to make Art.” Is he talking about a photographer’s eye, or that of a draughtsman (he first worked in drawing and painting), surveyor, designer, architect, or stylist? Perhaps he doesn’t intend this on a strictly visual level at all; I succumbed to my usual problem of reading these citations in the most open way possible, where it even seemed he was talking of how readers must measure and judge the words they read, how a turn of the head while crossing the street can create coincidental encounters, and how chance changes in perspective can create new friends of old enemies and vice versa.

The sheer delight he found in his work is palpable in some of the smile-inducing photographs, but also in some of the more serious scenes and portraits—a weighty yet duly appreciative delight. The physical body inevitably factors into the metaphysical outcome: “To photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge to detect a fleeting reality; at this point the captured image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.” What I find curious is that in many of the photographs the subjects also seem to be holding their breath. A girl running across a square is suspended in mid-step, between sunlight and shadow, ground and sky, yet she’s so convincingly caught that one could expect to see her just like that, but perhaps in color, upon exiting the museum. For days after the show I found that the words physical, intellectual, and joy unwittingly worked their way into my usual daily descriptive lists of events, sights, ideas, desires, and other experiences. I hardly ever have occasion to use those words, never mind all in the same context.

The photographs of Rome were primarily taken in the fifties. On one of his visits to the postwar city his guide was none other than Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the vivid impressions he took of the expanding Roman periphery and bizarre encounters between the new suburbia and surrounding empty fields carry reverberations of their collaboration. Oddly, the day I visited I was wearing a blouse with unclassifiable sleeves somewhere between short-sleeved and sleeveless, which had inspired a fashion-conscious friend to suggest I change, saying that such a weak cut had no business dressing anything but weak arms, and I was unprepared to support my choice by citing some current celebrity or trend touting that particular look. Then I saw that in the first room was a photograph of three women grouped in the foreground of an otherwise bleak field on the city outskirts; one was smoking, one was talking and gesticulating, and the third listened attentively, wearing a blouse of the very same cut. This was a complete coincidence that nevertheless made me feel part of a moment captured over fifty years ago, and I wonder if his oft-referenced Artless Art isn’t precisely that—creating relationships and connecting people, stillnesses, silences, and motions across differences in space, time, and character. One of three young schoolboys shown taking shelter from the rain under his books and waiting for a scooter to pass by and clear their path could’ve been a friend of mine who lived in that neighborhood until the surrounding fields were completely swallowed up by construction.

In 1943 Cartier-Bresson portrayed Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and Bonnard. All are included here, along with portraits of Beckett, Barthes, Huppert, Roualt, and others. Many of these images have become the most iconic portrait of their sitter, and the lesser-known ones are full of welcome surprises; Roualt looked remarkably meek, almost cowering under a dark crosslike form, in comparison to his very visceral paintings and prints. A New York Times article published earlier this year talks about some of the portraits as they appeared in a Paris exhibition, and the author chooses to read the photographs for what they might say about the “power relationship” between famous sitter and (sometimes more, sometimes less) famous photographer. The fact that the Parisian show was subtitled with a phrase of Cartier-Bresson’s that speaks of “the inner silence of a consenting victim” certainly supports such a view, and complicates the relationships that third parties—at a safe remove from the scene of the crime—can only speculate about.

What other artist, alive and well at the age of thirty-nine, has had the privilege of working on his own posthumous solo show in a prestigious museum? In 1947, when it was widely thought he’d been killed in the war, he actually worked on a “posthumous” exhibit of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in the same year co-founded Magnum. He came to the United States several times, and created a series he later published under the title L’Amérique furtivement, or America in Passing, though “in passing” somehow fails to render the senses of stealth, thievery, and furtiveness inherent in the original. Often his comments about photography and his own creative process can seem obvious, but they are clearly heeded only by the few, no matter how many fields they really apply to: “In order to give meaning to the world one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.”

What does any of this have to do with violence or delicacy? My favorite quote from the exhibition covers it all, and at the same time raises more questions: “More than anything else I feel a great joy in realizing the portraits. That is the most difficult thing because it involves a duel without rules, a delicate violence.” This is just too exquisite. In this translation I’ve favored the term realizing, rather than the more American creating, as it also loosely reflects the fact that in taking/making/creating a true portrait one comes to realizations about the subject (and by extension perhaps one’s self) as well. The duel without rules is the relationship between sitter and photographer, passive and active, the one who provides and the one who takes. But this is so dramatic, he must be exaggerating; I wonder if any other relationship/duel has rules any more concrete than the ones he claims don’t exist in the portrait-based duel? Surely any sort of relationship is governed by laws and limits, perhaps only unwritten, but enforced by fights, estrangements, and reconciliations? And what of delicate violence? I read this as the silent but inexorable crawl of suburban sprawl across rapidly shrinking countryside caught in these photographs. It is also evident in the ambiguous glances from faces we think are familiar from screen, canvas, and page but about which we really know nothing. A portraitist necessarily violates the subject’s privacy in stealing that moment, that look, that expression—but can only do so in a delicate fashion, or else risk ruining the fragile relationship. Some of Cartier-Bresson’s subjects were close friends, some were short-term collaborators, and others he never even met, lawlessly snapping their likeness as they ran past. Although his mention of a duel without rules is seductively poetic, and I agree with him about the duel, I must insist that some rule or logic does govern it. Our adherence to it or disregard of it is another matter altogether.

This exhibition is up from May 31 to October 30 at the Museo di Roma/Palazzo Braschi in Rome. All the images here are taken from his book covers; cheap internet substitutions for his photographs just won’t cut it, so you’ll have to go find the real thing.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be found here.

1. Brief Narrative on the Purpose and History of Wisher and Wish

Whether it is possible to isolate one’s essence even from one’s own species will, I suppose, determine the approval of this proposal. More often than I’d like to admit I’ve rested my forehead on a cool spot of my desk, and with the appearance of having nodded off or keeled over, daydreamed at length of being bird or beast, often a tree, sometimes a fish, never a bug.  One reason I’ve deemed this fantasy fantastical, along with some practical concerns, is that I feel my bones, my skin, my very lashes and the bloody hangnail on my thumb and the burp I belched at dinner to have as much to do with who I am as the dream I had last night, or day, and the way I treat my sister.  I love bodies, drown in them, watch them, hear them shriek and scrape.  How could I be a bee, and still be me; they use their legs so differently.  But having just learned of your existence, after having been up until this point highly skeptical of  Genies, I’m inclined to risk rejection upon the slim chance that the premise of my petty desire should ring true.  So here goes: I’d like to have dinner with my cats.

Dinner not as per usual – me with my sad soup bowl balanced on my knees, learning via TLC how to decorate Stacy from Wisconsin’s dorm room, they crouched over sweet pea and venison diet, served up on a paper plate.  No, this is a grand affair, several courses, pre-dinner drinks, dessert and nightcap, excellent music and cloth napkins.  And it’s not just the two cats living in my apartment currently, it’s several I have known and know.  And Genie, this is where you come in – they’re people, not cats, and they’re the cats as they would be as people.

I’m supposed to convey a compelling purpose, an argument as to why you should grant this wish, and I’m positive that requirement exists to deter wishes such as mine.  Why not wish on a grander scale, give peace a chance or the nation health care or even myself a better landlord?  It strikes me though that (and please do take this in the best way possible) a Genie may not always carry the same spirit as the wisher.  I figure that I could probably do more wide scale damage than good even with the greatest intention, so here I’ll stay personal and girly, contained within 6 hours, with only the added stipulation that I be allowed to photograph the event, and the living cats restored to their original form once dinner’s done.

2. Key Players and Their Affiliates

Kitty, for starters, has got to be there, and in fact I’d like her to be hostess.  The dinner’s at her apartment and I’m guessing that’s some floor-through sprawling apartment in San Francisco full of lovely odd junk furniture and beautiful broken appliances that haven’t worked for years.  We call her the Elizabeth Taylor of Cats, she really is beautiful, and has the most shocking little fierce voice which she uses only to swear when in discomfort or dismay.  Her suitors, Copper and Monkeyface, won’t be formal guests but will probably call a few times during dinner to make sure they can’t help with anything.  Copper stares in the windows at Kitty all day long and once broke into the house and shat under the bed and somehow wormed out of his collar and left it there.  Monkeyface just stares with sexy force, nose to the window.  Yes, Kitty should host, she’ll swan around calmly and make one on one chat with each guest tenderly, remembering odd anecdotes, but stay out of the larger conversation.

Andy (“Pope”) and Cougar (“Jim”) are the next guests, no-brainers, they’re the ones in my house right now.  Andy, god, now he’s a conversation piece and will be quite the party guest.  He’s got a remarkably large head and is a bit overweight, coat black all over and a tail with a strangely wide base, so that he looks a bit like an armadillo.  When S. picked him out at the in-store shelter at Petco, he looked me straight in the eye and knocked over his food dish.  Perhaps he’ll spill the wine, and make some excellent jokes unwittingly, and show up with a bad shave and a sloppy kiss for me.  Cougar is lithe and gray, fluid in the shoulders and neck like a dancer.  He’s got a few concerns which I’m eager to hear aired; he stares with such a worried gaze.  We should make sure there’s plenty of cheese on hand because he loves it.

Then Midnight, she’s a wild-card.  I met her and fed her when I was a child; left out bowls of milk in the yard.  No collar on her.  I wanted to keep her bad.

I neglected to mention pertinent recent events in the prior section, thinking you might overlook the omission, but realize now I’ve got to appeal to your sensitive side should I have a chance of gazing into my dear sweet Morris’s eyes again.  He’ll probably show up early to the party, perfectly carve the meat, then disappear until everyone else arrives.  Wildly handsome and also scruffy, dirty teeth and rips in his suit. Fiddle will be happy to see him again; Morris practically raised him.  Fiddle’s clumsy, needy, separated from his mother too soon.  He’ll make a bad pass at Kitty without realizing what he’s done, dance a little too close. 

And finally Snuttie, to even out the men and women.  She’s a little crackers and getting on in age, and as a cat has to have her face pushed down into food to know it’s there and pisses on anything on the ground.  I’ll be glad to see her, no matter the production.

3. Statement reflecting your wish’s greatest weakness or weaknesses, both programmatically and structurally.

Would they know themselves to have been cats?  What would they perceive their relationship to me to be?  Could I ask them questions about their feline experience?  Would they have human histories, families, hopes?  How much do they know about current events and what movies are playing?   Do their human bodies reflect some physical characteristics they also carried as cats? Would you identify the correct cats?  Who will cook dinner and clean up?

But the biggest weakness I stated up top, Genie (points for being forthright?).  Could they translate? 

My contact information is attached and most every weeknight I could attend the dinner (7:30 would be perfect).  Please do let me know the date and time as soon as possible.

Being a fan of Andre Agassi is difficult – there’s too much competition.  He is the most sentimentally revered figure in the history of professional tennis, which can make appreciating him feel like a form of conformity.  For this reason, with the start of the U.S. Open, Agassi’s declared last tournament, many tennis enthusiasts prefer to moan about the press banquet of schmaltz being spread out before us.  But, as with music fans who denounce overly popular musicians to demonstrate their independence, those who allow NBC’s endless ‘inspirational’ montages to dictate their feelings are merely indulging in juvenile contrarianism.  Having trouble admiring what is too popular is a common youthful problem, but not the one I face here.  Quite the opposite: with nostalgic tributes to Agassi thicker on the ground than confetti, many composed by people who have actually met the man, what can I add?

Maybe I can start by critiquing some of the broad brushstrokes used to paint the man’s narrative arc.  Today’s New York Times contains an illustration of Agassi bisected into two halves: on the left, his youthful bleach-blond maned incarnation; on the right, his current “wizened veteran” visage.  As a visual metaphor it sums up the common conception of Agassi’s career: after a wasted youth spent caring too much about image, Agassi dropped to number 141 in the rankings, then was reborn having learned important life lessons and returned to number one.  Simple, but mostly wrong.  In truth, Agassi’s career has been about comebacks from the very beginning.

Agassi was blessed with ball-striking talent so clean and remarkable that at age four he rallied with Jimmy Connors for a crowd at Caesar’s Palace in his hometown of Las Vegas.  Growing up, he was seen in no uncertain terms as a prodigy who would go on to dominate tennis.  And he duly burned up the men’s tour as a teenager, and in 1990 he reached the finals of two Grand Slam tournaments as a heavy favorite.  He lost both (although we later came to realize that losing to a then-unknown Pete Sampras wasn’t as inexplicable as it then seemed), then reached the French Open final in 1991 again as the favorite, and lost again.  What happened? 

Agassi’s early years were marked by a desire and an ability to hit the ball harder off both forehand and backhand sides than was generally considered wise.  He possessed, however, a freakish consistency in his ability to strike the ball early (making ‘hit it on the rise’ into a shibboleth of the era) and accurately.  First chance he got, he simply blasted you off the court.  Agassi was able to maintain the “flow state” — those ineffable, perfect stretches — much more of the time than others, with less practice and less preparation.  He had a sort of genius.

Yet his talent came with a price.  The unconscious ability to unload on the ball was prone, as all such talents are, to disappear during moments of tension.  This happened to him quite often early in his career; when faced with matches he was favored in, and thus pressured by, he often lost them.  It was as if the punishment for how easily the strokes came to him was a lack of strategies to win (you can see this today with Marat Safin).  The midsection of his career then, was marked by fallow periods followed by amazing victories out of nowhere.  He won the 1992 Wimbledon after playing indifferently for months, with little practice, on his worst surface.  Again he disappeared, only to resurface with a poor ranking and become the only player to win the U.S. Open without a seeding in 1994. 

At this stage, Agassi employed the crafty former veteran, Brad Gilbert, whose professional success despite a near vacuum of talent was the precise reversal of Agassi’s underachievement.  Together, Gilbert and Agassi were able to concoct strategies of point construction that could overcome Agassi’s early reliance on irruptions of brilliance.  Specifically, the new plan was to become fitter than any man on tour, and to punish opponents by jerking them from side to side, purposely not making the killing stroke until a plain positional adavantage was achieved.  This plan wore opponents out, induced unforced errors (which are the easiest way to win points), and, most importantly, freed Agassi from reliance on the “flow state.”   He began to dominate, beating Sampras at the Australian Open to begin 1995, and in doing so generated a hybrid offensive-defensive model for success followed to this day.

Agassi went on to dominate 1995 until the U.S. Open final against Pete Sampras, which he entered having won 27 straight matches.  Sampras, however, had never needed to play the defensive tactics Agassi had developed, because Sampras possessed a serve that is probably the single most devastating weapon in tennis history.  (The shorter Agassi, by contrast, has never had the psychological luxury of a great serve.)  In addition, Sampras never showed vulnerability on big stages the way Agassi did.  He mercilessly served Agassi off the court that day, sending him into a tailspin from which Agassi took two years to recover.

Now, the rivalry between Sampras and Agassi was extremely close.  Every time they met in Grand Slams on a slower surface (Roland Garros, Australia), Agassi won.  Of their sixteen tournament finals, Agassi won seven, Pete nine.  Unfortunately, everytime they met in the two faster Slams, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, Sampras won.  These are the most prestigious tournaments in tennis.  After 1995, Agassi was faced with the realization that all his childhood genius combined with all his adulthood grinding was still not good enough to defeat Sampras at the events most important to him.  There was also the nagging sense that he cared too much in the big moments to be a true killer.

Don’t shut down on a player.  Agassi lost some interest, then made the mother of all comebacks, from 141 in 1998 to winning the French Open in 1999.  This gave him the historic full collection of Grand Slams on three surfaces, an achievement Sampras couldn’t match (nor Federer, as yet).  And thus began a run of dominance at an age that defied belief, and a consistency he had never before showed.  Agassi was ranked number one as recently as June 2003, and just last year, of course, played Federer pretty darn tough in the U.S. Open final, at age 35.

I have spent some time recounting the many comebacks of Agassi’s career, to give some of the flavor of his tenure in tennis.  Rather than a dominant number one, he has always seemed to be an ephemeral victor, an paradoxical combination of all-time legend with underdog.  He has revived his passion for the intense physical work of playing professional tennis after disappointments of many kinds.  Uniquely among top players, who rise to the top, are displaced, and then fade away, Agassi was able to scale the heights repeatedly, never becoming fatally disengaged by heartbreaking losses.  This was partly because of his amazing native facility for pugilistic hitting, much more due to his tenacious desire to play.

Like tennis’ Gatsby, Agassi was an extremely sensitive arriviste; of Armenian-Iranian origins, Agassi’s father had boxed for Iran before moving to Las Vegas to pursue Amercian social mobility.  His drilling of Agassi as a toddler may have programmed Agassi’s later perfection in muscle memory.  Agassi’s astonishingly bad, Merry Go Round fashion sense as a youngster was a sign of his contempt for those who would attempt to exclude him because of his lack of gentility.  Likewise his denunciations of Wimbledon’s dress code and anything else that seemed insufficiently egalitarian to the teenage Agassi. 

After such an assault on a perceived establishment, Agassi’s transformation into the offical Elder Statesman of tennis sometimes surprises.  But the intelligence he always showed has remained constant.  He has an uncanny ability to remember crucial details, and he is probably the most accurate tennis analyst alive.  (Here’s Agassi after playing Federer; here after playing Nadal.)  He is compassionate towards others as only a career underdog could be: he is by far the world’s most philanthropic athlete.  His career has demonstrated that redemption does not come from winning, but from working and giving (as New Agey as that, and Agassi, often sounds).  This last, by the way, is what I believe Agassi means when he says he owes a debt to tennis, that tennis has taught him lessons.

Caring more deeply about his sport and its intersection with the actual world than maybe any other player, Agassi showed that sensitivity can be an asset instead of a liability for athletes, who are more commonly compared to warriors and assassins.  This has had far-reaching effects on sport.  No longer do we think that true champions must be repressive drones or angry jerks.  If Federer is Sampras’ technical heir, he is Agassi’s emotional heir: he wins without negativity.  Federer, Andy Roddick, and others have also followed the lead Agassi set by forming their own foundations (Agassi’s runs a public school in a deprived section of Las Vegas).  The more impassive Sampras won more, and the more talented Federer will win more, but Agassi’s care has won him the love of the world.  The most important thing I’ve learned from watching him is how to defeat winning and losing.

The rest of Dispatches.

Maybe it is OK to be a Nazi if you also happened to write at least one really amazing book. Granted, Mister Grass has written a lot of crap in the last few decades. I was recently trying to read My Century when a fit of boredom so immobilized me I had to watch several episodes of The Entourage on a friend’s TiVo just to get back the use of my limbs. But The Tin Drum is a great book of the twentieth century. It is so good that you can’t debate it. It’s just good. It’s great. A person who has written a book like The Tin Drum has provided a service for humanity. They have managed to grasp and convey something deep and profound and important about the real experiences of a generation. A novel that operates on that level is performing at the very highest echelon of what a novel can do and be. The Tin Drum is one of the novels that actually did the work of putting the European mind and soul back together again after its utter collapse in the traumas of the first half of the twentieth century. John Berger put it this way in his impassioned defense of Grass in last week’s Guardian:

… [H]is life as a storyteller was devoted to grasping, narrating and explaining, with extensive fellow-feeling, the contradictions, cruelties, abysmal losses, wisdom, ignorance, cowardice and grace of people (person by person) under extreme historical stress. Very few other writers of our time have such a wide knowledge of articulate and inarticulate experience. Grass never shut his eyes. He became a writer of honour.

The Tin Drum, in that sense, changed the world, at least a little bit (and for the better). The person who wrote The Tin Drum has therefore become a special person to us.

Günter Grass is also a terrible blow hard and sometimes barely tolerable jerk who has shown a calculated and self-serving side in many of his actions, most egregiously in rather conveniently waiting to receive his Nobel Prize before mentioning anything about all that SS stuff. Christopher Hitchens, not one to mince words, has summed up the situation thusly:

Grass’ many defenders have not asked themselves the question that needs to be posed, which is: Has he at last decided to appeal to the new German readership that is, so to say, a bit fed up with hearing about how dreadful the Nazis were? If this admittedly rather cynical suggestion has any merit, then at least his recent boring writings and operatic confessions would, in combination, make perfect sense. But they would also make absolute nonsense of his previous career as a literary policeman and a patroller of the line of taboo. “Let those who want to judge, pass judgment,” Grass said last week in a typically sententious utterance. Very well, then, mein lieber Herr. The first judgment is that you kept quiet about your past until you could win the Nobel Prize for literature. The second judgment is that you are not as important to German or to literary history as you think you are. The third judgment is that you will be remembered neither as a war criminal nor as an anti-Nazi hero, but more as a bit of a bloody fool.

There is no question that Hitchens is essentially correct in this tirade. Grass can and should be condemned for all of it. And here there is something lacking in Berger’s otherwise thoughtful essay. Berger is right that Grass proved himself, in his work, to be a writer of honor. But he’s also proved himself to be a complete ass. It took Hitchens to put his finger on that one messy little detail: Grass is a piece of shit.

But he is also great, overwhelmingly, wonderfully great. That’s how good his book is. And that is the one thing Hitchens is wrong about. Grass’s importance to German literature and, indeed, to world literature can’t be underestimated. That’s what happens when you write a truly great novel. Perhaps it’s not right, but there you have it. There are lots of weasely little worms who served with the SS when they were too young or ignorant to realize what they were doing and they’ll never be forgiven for it. Nor should they be. Let them rot. But they didn’t write any great novels. When you do something great, the rules change. That is the nature of our moral world, the human moral world in which things don’t work out very clean and nice. They get complicated and they do so quickly. Berger gives a nod to that fact in his essay but he makes it too easy on himself and thus too easy on Grass as well. Hitchens is no friend to easiness but he has to fudge the issue as well in order to achieve the finality of his moral judgments. In the end, Hitchens has to belittle Grass’s writing in order to get away cleanly with his judgments. The one time Hitchens mentions The Tin Drum, he does so with a telling reverence that shows how much he is brushing the question of Grass’s achievement under the rug. He writes, “For all this, one was never able to suppress the slight feeling that the author of The Tin Drum was something of a bigmouth and a fraud, and also something of a hypocrite.” Well, fair enough. But that’s the point. He is still the author of The Tin Drum and nothing is going to change that. It has to enter into our thinking about the man and what he is to us, what he means to us.

The brilliant philosopher Bernard Williams once coined the term Moral Luck. With it, he meant to pound a little contingency into the universalist and absolute moral philosophies of the Kantians and Utilitarians. We are not judged, Williams meant to say, in the pure realm of our actions and intentions, but within the decidedly contingent realm of the outcomes of those actions and intentions. What happens matters. The way things turn out, which is effectively impossible to foretell, has a lot to do with how we judge and understand the initial behavior. Williams was famously fond of his Gauguin example. It was, by any standard, a rather reprehensible set of actions that led Gauguin to abandon his wife and child and take off to Tahiti where he could behave scandalously with very young girls. It was a shitty thing to do. But, Gauguin also managed to accomplish something else. He painted brilliant paintings there. He painted paintings that were a revelation, that blew painting open and revealed new worlds of possibility to the art of his time. That is an accomplishment that cannot be ignored in the attempt to take account of Gauguin’s awful behavior to the people who needed him most. We judge Gauguin differently in the light of his accomplishment. That isn’t even to say that we let him off the hook, but that we simply cannot see his actions as unrelated to his accomplishments when those accomplishments are so meaningful to the world we all share.

And that is where Günter Grass currently resides. He’s in Gauguin territory. And any attempt to reduce him either to being a complete fraud on the one hand or a martyr/saint on the other is going to look like bad moral philosophy. Maybe we simply have to say that he’s a piece of shit who got away with it. Worse things happen in the world than that. But I’m glad he wrote The Tin Drum and I have no question that the world in which The Tin Drum was written is better than the world in which it wasn’t.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.

— Jane Austen, in a letter dated March 13, 1816

There’s been a great deal of heated discussion in the blogosphere this past week about that infamous Forbes column by Michael Noer. You know the one. It’s where he urges his male readers to marry any woman, pretty or ugly, so long as she’s not an example of that unnatural, emasculating, horrific hellbeast — the dreaded Career Woman. Because dude, that is just a recipe for divorce, according to Noer’s generic “social scientists.” Not because the fragile male ego can’t take the competition, but because such marriages run a higher risk of failure due to the woman‘s dissatisfaction with a mate who might not be able to keep pace with her fast-track professional goals and achievements.

It took mere nanoseconds for every feminist blogger (male and female) on the Internet to be up in arms over Noer’s crassly sexist scribblings; even Jack Shafer at Slate felt compelled to weigh in on the issue. Among the many other objections raised, Noer’s definition of a “Career Woman” is not the stereotypical senior partner in a law firm or corporate CEO bringing down six figures (or more), but any female with a college degree who works 35 hours a week and makes more than $30,000 a year. The accompanying readership outcry prompted the Powers That Be at Forbes to post a rebuttal by Elizabeth Corcoran, which now appears side-by-side with Noer’s original screed.

I wonder whether Noer would have considered the English novelist Jane Austen to be one of those unmarriageable “career women” he so clearly despises. She certainly didn’t fit his simplistic strict criteria: she lived quietly, had no formal education, and came from modest means. While technically her “career” was writing, she earned very little from her literary endeavors — rarely more than 100 pounds per year — and spent much of her life dependent on financial assistance from her brothers. Yet in her own quiet way, she was quite the rabble-rousing feminist revolutionary, particularly when it came to her ideological views on matters of marriage.

Jane Austen was born December 16, 1775, in Hampshire, England, the seventh child of eight born to the local rector, George Austen, and his wife. Her father was a gentleman, with a respectable income supplemented by private tutoring, but the costs of maintaining such a large household meant that Jane and her older sister, Cassandra, didn’t have much in the way of dowries. Nor was there much opportunity for formal education, apart from a year-long stint at a nearby boarding school. But she learned to draw and play the pianoforte, and she was an avid reader, with full access to her father’s considerable library. She also loved to write, penning humorous parodies of Shakespeare’s plays and the more fashionable novels of her day for her family’s amusement at the age of 12. By 20 she had turned her attention to writing novels.

It’s quite telling that Austen’s heroines were rarely girly-girls, by Regency standards, where the only socially acceptable status for women was marriage — otherwise they were “doomed” to be spinster dependents, teachers, governesses, or lowly servants. Catherine in Northanger Abbey prefers cricket and baseball to more feminine forms of play, and loves “rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.” But none of Austen’s protagonists are as modern as Elizabeth Bennett, the spirited heroine of Pride and Prejudice. She is pretty and charming enough to turn heads, but with no dowry, her marital prospects are slim. Nonetheless, she still refuses two proposals of marriage: one from her cousin, Mr. Collins, and one from Mr. Darcy (whom, as we all know, she eventually accepts — but only because she loves him). Either one of them would have been acceptable matches in Regency England — indeed, Darcy was quite the catch — but Elizabeth heeds her father’s warnings not to tie herself to a life partner she can’t love and respect.

That was a downright radical notion in Austen’s day: women simply didn’t have the luxury of marrying for love. Compare Elizabeth’s choices and attitude with that of her far more pragmatic friend, Charlotte Lucas, who marries the odious Mr. Collins simply because she has no better prospects, being both plain and poor — and, at 27, verging on desperation to avoid abject spinsterhood. Charlotte personifies the plight of the low-brow Regency gentlewoman, for whom marriage “was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.”

As Austen wrote, so she lived. She, too, had limited marital prospects because of her small dowry, despite being described in contemporary accounts as very pretty, lively, witty, even flirtatious — the kind of fun-loving, whip-smart girl-next-door many men would dearly love to meet and marry. Unable, for financial reasons, to marry the young man she truly cared for at age 20, she resisted attempts to set her up with a local reverend in Cambridge the following year. In 1802, then in her late 20s, she briefly succumbed to temptation and accepted a marriage proposal from one Harris Bigg-Wither, a man six years her junior, quite prosperous, but “big and awkward.” She repented the next day and rescinded her acceptance, choosing to live out her life as a spinster rather than marry for anything other than love — even if it meant sacrificing financial stability. In the end, Austen had the courage of her convictions. Noer would have just hated her, I suspect. She, in turn, would have found him quite ridiculous, no doubt making him the target of her razor-sharp wit.

One might be tempted to dismiss this past week’s hullabaloo as the proverbial tempest in a teapot were Noer a lone voice crying in the wilderness. My inner cynic insists that Forbes and Noer were deliberately antagonistic in order to generate just the sort of red-hot free publicity the article has since received. Even if my inner cynic is wrong, who really cares about the opinions of a clearly insecure man who lacks the stones to consider a potential wife his equal? Not me. The whole “Battle of the Sexes” debate seems so, well, 1970s. But there seems to be a disturbing broader trend at play: an abject terror that our society is changing as a result of the progress made over the last 30 years in terms of women’s rights, the roles they play, and the ever-widening array of choices they can make. And we all know how people fear change — even when it’s arguably for the better.

Consider a few examples from The New York Times, which has been running an alarmist series of articles on “the new gender divide.” For instance, on July 9 , Tamar Lewin reported on how women college students were leaving men in the dust, in terms of their commitment to achieving academic success — perhaps because most women don’t (yet) view education as an entitlement, having been denied the privilege for centuries. This should be a positive development, but apparently, it is evidence for a pending “crisis for boys,” despite the fact that, as Lewin writes, “[M]en still dominate the math-science axis, earn more money, and wield more power than women.” One gets the sense that Lewin was reluctant to jump on the “crisis” bandwagon, since she goes on to prominently quote the skeptical education analyst Sara Mead: “The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys.”

Further riffing on the “men are victims” motif, the August 6 installment of the Times‘ gender divide series detailed the growing number of men between 40 and 44, with less than four years of college, who are still (gasp!) single, in part because women have become economically independent. Again, this ought to be a positive thing. In fact, it’s a bit difficult to take such concerns seriously. Personally, I’m still waiting for the TIME cover story declaring that men over 40 have a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married; maybe then I’ll start to worry — in between chortles of delight at having the matrimonial tables turned at long last. But part of me bristles at the unspoken implication that the reason such men aren’t married isn’t due to choice, but because all those uppity, status-seeking, money-grubbing, over-educated females think they’re too good for the hard-working regular guy. That’s insulting to both men and women.

Yea verily, I exaggerate for comic effect, but even more unsettling is a nagging sense that there might be a wee bit of truth to that exaggeration. Lewin’s article quotes a young female college student as saying she would be reluctant to marry a man without a college degree: “I want to be able to have that intellectual conversation.” Eventually this young woman will learn that a college degree, even from an Ivy League school, is not necessarily evidence of intelligence — just look at our current president. Ironically, the over-40 single men featured in the August 9 Times article were described as healthy, youthful and happy despite their unmarried state, although they still desired female companionship. It is no longer a “truth universally acknowledged” that a young man of good fortune must, by definition, be in want of a wife. Ditto for young women of good fortune.

And let’s not forget last October’s pathetic “pity me” whine-fest by Times columnist Maureen Dowd, intended to help launch her new book, provocatively titled Are Men Necessary? (Check out Katie Roiphe’s witty, Austen-worthy smack-down of Dowd in Slate entitled, “Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?“) In essence, Dowd complains that men don’t want lively, spirited women who are their intellectual equals because they find them too threatening; instead, they want pliable women in positions of servitude: maids, for instance, or secretaries. At the same time, however, Dowd finds very few men she herself would deem acceptable based on her stringent, “I must marry up” criteria. Can you say “double standard”? Granted, it’s hard to marry “up” when you’re, well, Maureen Dowd. But why does someone as well-placed as Maureen Dowd even need to marry “up”? Why dismiss otherwise handsome, decent men as prospective husbands out of hand just because they’re a little lower on the socio-economic ladder? (What would Mr. Darcy do? Easy — he married Elizabeth anyway, despite her lower socio-economic status, because he loved her and could afford to choose with his heart.)

Jane Austen would never have been so crass. She knew marriage should be first and foremost based on mutual love and respect, and that a union of true equals has nothing to do with their respective socio-economic status. She suffered the loss of her youthful suitor, an Irishman named Thomas Lefroy, because “society” — in the form of their respective families — didn’t deem him economically worthy. (He had the last laugh: he later became chief justice of Ireland, and told his nephew of his “boyish love” for Jane Austen.) Another young man who fell in love with her, and whom she might have loved in return, and married, died tragically before he could propose. (A similar fate befell Austen’s older sister, Cassandra, who was engaged for several years to a young man who died before they could marry.)

Marriage for women is no longer about economic survival, as it was in Austen’s day. Women have never had more freedom of choice, more options for what they want from life. And yet, it seems that the issue of marriage is becoming more about the social pressure to conform to the cultural stereotype than it is about finding the right loving partner. Anyone who doesn’t fit the traditional mold is viewed with extreme suspicion. The message to young women today is clear: Beware, because nobody will want to marry you if you’re too smart, too successful, too selective about your choice of man, because men like Noer can’t handle the competition. And that would be terrible! You’ll be an old maid! With a hundred cats! People will snicker behind your back and secretly pity you!

Thirty years into the women’s movement, and we still labor under the false assumption that marriage is the only acceptable state for a woman — or a man, for that matter.  Even Dowd has fallen into this trap. She’s beautiful, powerful, successful, and attracts equally successful, well-heeled men as paramours, even if she hasn’t married any of them. She clearly has a pretty high opinion of herself. And yet somehow even Dowd has bought into the notion that all her impressive accomplishments are negated by the fact that she’s “still single.”

Compare Dowd’s attitude to that of Austen, who found humor in her “old maid” status at 37, and even relished certain advantages when chaperoning young ladies at dances, “for I am put on the Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like.” She indulged in flowers and concert tickets, and delighted in being an aunt to her many nieces and nephews. And while her novels brought her only modest recognition and financial rewards, they did bring great personal satisfaction. When she died — probably of Addison’s disease — at 41, she was buried at Winchester Cathedral. Perhaps the only thing that would have piqued her ire was that her tombstone made no mention of her literary accomplishments, merely alluded to “the extraordinary endowments of her mind.”

Somehow I doubt Dowd’s eventual obituary in the Times will follow its respectful summation of her life’s work with the somber observation, “Alas, she never married.” That’s because we don’t live in Austen’s Victorian England, with its restrictive social mores and limited opportunities for women. There’s still progress to be made on the road to true gender equality, but I believe our society has changed for the better. Women marry not because we need to, but because we choose to do so, and can also choose when to do so. We don’t have to be like Charlotte Lucas and accept the first halfway decent guy (or, in poor Charlotte’s case, the first pompous insufferable jackass) who comes along. We can afford to hold out for the kind of man we can truly love. And in the long run, that can only be a good thing for both genders. Unlike Dowd, I have faith in the male of the species. I suspect most men, given the choice, would opt to marry a woman who truly loved them, rather than one who wed them out of necessity or raw, status-seeking greed. I consider Noer and his ilk to be the aberration, not the norm.

Austen’s Emma is a strong-willed young woman, perhaps just a wee bit spoiled, with enough confidence and economic independence to be able to view marriage as an option, not a necessity. She meets her friend Harriet’s horror at the prospect of being an “old maid” with good-humored disdain: “A single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable.” Indeed, Emma laments, “To be so bent on marriage — to pursue a man merely for the sake of a situation — is a sort of thing that shocks me.” Emma’s sentiments echo those of her postmodern kindred spirit, the feminist blogger Bitch PhD:

“If you define non-career women as all the ‘undereducated’ who work part-time and make less than $30K, it becomes painfully obvious why female careerists are more likely to divorce than non-careerists: They can better afford to get out of an unhappy marriage than their sisters. That may be bad news for all the schmoes getting dumped, but it’s great news for the gals. So, go ahead, young ladies. Get your degree. Even go to grad school. Gun for that corner office if you want to, and get the guy. If you divorce, make sure to stick him with the shared subscription to Forbes.”

[UPDATE:  I take responsibility for an inadvertent mis-attribution: the quote above was written not by BitchPhD, but by Shafer in his Slate article, who in turn linked to her. So Shafer is Emma’s kindred feminist spirit, and Jane’s spirit throws him a genteel high five for his eloquence.]

Somewhere, Jane Austen is demurely pumping her tiny, lace-gloved fist in the air with a big smile on her pixie-ish face, declaring in dulcet well-bred Regency tones, “You go, girls!” My inner hopeless romantic would like to think her lost first love, Tom Lefroy, who everyone said wasn’t good “husband material,” is laughing by her side.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette muses on science and culture at her own blog, Cocktail Party Physics.

I have spent a lot of time in libraries.

Some of it was joyous. The library in our town when I was growing up provided the books that transported me into mythic worlds where I found my heroes among ancient Greeks, baseball starts, and even of the occasional great politician. Fastballers, spear throwers, and great rhetoricians – these were my summer companions. I once tried to read Arthur Schlesinger’s first book on FDR. I could barely carry the book home on my bicycle. But even as I ran out of summer time and returned the book unfinished, I still remember that amazing mix of fixers that surrounded the master himself, from clever lawyers, campaigning social reformers, and ward bosses — all seeking to change an America gone really wrong. As a Chicago boy, raised behind the lace curtain by a family of New Deal Democrats and a states rights Republican father, I often wondered what would have happened to life around me if Mayor Daley had been Jim Farley instead. It would be a better world, I told myself. When John Kennedy and his motorcade passed our house, and my sister and I festooned the attic with his pictures and bumper stickers, much to the dismay of my father and to the secret pleasure of my mother, I figured a better world was coming again.

The solace of the small town library did not last. The fantasies of childhood were replaced by the imperatives of young adulthood. Other atheneums, university libraries, became my haunts. I feared and despised them for some 20 years. Northwestern’s Deering Library, named for the tractor family, became my enemy. Like all Chicagoans who claim first dibs on near-native Frank Lloyd Wright and keep his quotes as closely as they do the poetry of Carl Sandburg, I would remember his acid description of Deering, a Romanesque part church, part castle, that it looked like a pregnant pig on its back.

Its mastery for me proved impossible. Too many books. An unforgiving card catalog. Dim-lit reading rooms, suffocating stacks. Like those great early cathedrals, natural light was anathema. The scant windows were colored. Light was to have shown presumably from within. Outside was the prairie; inside the seat of learning. The little light of mine couldn’t shine.

I later left the Midwest for the East Coast, but the university libraries there were fortresses of learning no less than Deering had been. Even newer libraries built on modernist designs, all glass curtain walls and open plan spaces on the first floors, turned into cloisters up above where all the books were. I hated them too.

But I see now that it was more than architecture that bedeviled me. My relationship to libraries and books had changed. Thanks to my scholarly pursuits, I had become something of a reluctant intellectual minotaur. The man in me had taken on the mind of an industrialist, piling through books in great heaps, pulling out citations, sources, and reading excerpts at an appalling speed. Did you ever wonder why we love Google? No doubt because it perfects our pursuit of industrial knowledge. It is utterly and ruthlessly efficient. It is like a cleaver that cuts through and strips away the meandering intellectual contexts in which knowledge is found. It gives us the meat of the matter, as one used to say in demanding a synthesis from a wistful student or an absent-minded colleague.

The beast in me was weak. The memory of the good mother that the small town library of my past had invoked prevented me from turning Deering or any other learning castles into objects of conquest. I did not feel strong enough to devour or to subordinate them to my will. Moreover, they became a kind of Kryptonite in my intellectual life. The more time I spent in them, and thus with them, the weaker I felt. Thus, I became a guerrilla user. I would strike quickly, practically upending the portion of the stacks that was my target, grabbing up the books, and fleeing the library after a few life-draining hours. But oh, the fines.

Things changed a bit with the arrival of the university library as pastel airport lounge style. Postmodernist architects, by letting in light and by using colors that I think of as variations on United Airlines O’Hare Terminal robin’s egg blue, calmed me. I still attacked the periodicals room in a frenzy, but I did develop little habits of browsing the new books section, even sitting down, and reading a bit without constant breathlessness and palpitations.

This summer, I spent time in a small town library — Salisbury, Connecticut’s Scoville Library. It says it is America’s first free public library, founded in 1803. The present building was constructed in the late 1880s owing to the benefice of a local iron master named Scoville. It has 33,000 books, the New York Times, The Financial Times, the local newspapers, Harper’s, the Atlantic, but not the New York Review of Books. If the late Norman Cousins were still publishing The Saturday Review, you would doubtless still find it there. Though not a Carnegie library (he financed 3,000 public libraries throughout the nation around the turn of the century), it is like them: a spirited architectural gem, loaded down with the eclectic touches of a time when a lot of Furness and Richardson went a long way.

I find comfort in its finitude. History is just four stands each with six bookshelves: could there be any more than a thousand books? Anthropology and sociology practically disappear, a perverse pleasure for me, the anthropologist.

This is where I re-discovered Hitler. Far and away, he and his Third Reich lead the history collection, a fact I have noted at other town libraries near me in Boston. I had had some good exposure to the genre over the years. In my time as an undergraduate, Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny was a standby in poli sci courses otherwise devoted to mindnumbing abstract theories of modernization and nation-building, a kind of functionalist fun house of American triumphalism produced by the self-satisfied political scientist cold warriors. Bullock was grudgingly assigned as the sugar that made the veiled ideology of American superiority go down more easily. Hitler like Stalin was an anti-American, all that was the evil that we were not. He like Stalin was an object lesson in what could happen mostly elsewhere, save the McCarthy era, if we did not remain vigilant and spread democracy worldwide.

About Hitler, The Holocaust, Night and Fog, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and yes, Mel Brooks became my teachers in addition to Bullock over the years. I had book-marked the new three-volume histories of Hitler and of the Third Reich, but hadn’t gotten to either of them.

At the Scoville Library this summer, I picked up William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), a book I had known of since high school but had never read. I gleaned my first impression of Shirer in the sixties on a late night talk show out of Chicago run by Irv Kupcinet, a former sports and gossip columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, who was also a kind of weekend, Midwestern version of David Suskind. Shirer, as I remember was a solid, big-headed man with facial hair and a pipe. During this time, Hans Morgenthau was on Kup’s show a lot. Shirer, an intelligent, intrepid journalist who had reported first-hand the rise the rise of Nazism and the onset of World War II, had become a respected historian. He held his own with all of the south side U. of Chicago lions that Kup entertained on those late Saturday nights.

Now, in high summer with a lake at my feet, or my feet in the lake, was my chance. A small town library had availed me of another myth, this time a meditation with facts on the rise and fall of Hitler, recited by highly competent and morally attuned Homer. And I descended into the hell of the Hitlerism and the Third Reich.

Shirer’s Hitler is not banal. Her Eichmann, the Holocaust general manager, may have been, but the difference between him as puppet and Hitler as fairly jumps off of each riveting page. Shirer’s Hitler is evil incarnate, a white-hot poker stuck in the eye of German society, blinding the German Cyclops as it devoured its victims. He was a devil, a Beelzebub, who caused the death of scores of millions of people, and who finished his life practically desperate to kill some more.

Hitler was also was possessed of a charisma that guided his evil genius. It was said of Alexander that he could lead his troops anywhere and beyond human endurance. But when his troops felt his gift had become a betrayal of their bond, their unconditional love became hate. If he had crossed the Indus once more, they would have killed him.

Hitler was possessed of the same charisma: he commanded, and others submitted and became his followers. It was subordination fueled by attraction, awe, fear, and a kind of blinding love. Today, part of what seems an almost unending age of cynicism, his followers’ confessions of love seem naively, even absurdly carnal. Listen to what Goebbels wrote in 1926. I quote with major elisions for emphasis:

My heart is beating so wildly it is about to burst. I enter the hall. Roaring welcome… And then I speak for two and a half hours…People roar and shout. At the end Hitler embraces me. I feel happy…Hitler is always at my side…

Adolph Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple.

We…bow to him…with the manly, unbroken pride of the ancient Norsemen who stand upright before their Germanic feudal lord. We feel that he is greater than all of us, greater than you and I. He is the instrument of the Divine Will that shapes history with fresh, creative genius.” (Shirer, 128-129)

He is the Fuehrer – the leader. “From millions of men … one man must step forward,” Shirer quotes Hitler as writing in Mein Kampf, “who with apodictic force will form granite principles form the wavering idea-world of the broad masses and take up the struggle for their sole correctness, until from the shifting waves of a free thought-world there will arise a brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will. (Shirer, 109-110)

Hitler had a volcanic temperament. He had fits – not those you would describe your Aunt Ellen of having, but those worthy of psychiatric evaluation. His rages remind one of those attributed to charismatic figures of the past. When in fits of rage, Alexander and Charlemagne would command their soldiers to slaughter every man, woman and child in sight. Only orgies of blood and violence could calm them. Achilles’ rage on the death of Patroclus remains the greatest and most lasting of archetypes to this kind of psychotic break that charismatic figures are prone to, and are by their subalterns often permitted.

But Hitler’s rages were also instrumental. He would use them to bully and intimidate foreign leaders, succeeding in gaining ground for the Reich while giving a knowing wink to his lieutenants. The rages inflicted on his followers achieved more complicated effects. Like a great, mad magician, he turned outsiders into enemies, and enemies into sub-humans, vermin and lice on the German body that had to be exterminated. Vacillators and prevaricators became murderers. People jumped over moral boundaries and executed the slaughter of the Slavs and the Holocaust.

Thanks to the Scoville Library, I found Shirer this summer, and discovered Hitler again. I suffered the sickening fascination of evil. I achieved a greater appreciation of the powers of emotion to overturn reason.

I re-disovered Hitler, however, enwrapped in the comfort of a small-town lending library, a little outpost of reason like the one that succored me in my early life. Thanks to Shirer’s remarkable book, I have learned that though we live in a world of madness, emotion, and unreason, we are led by those possessed mostly of ignorance and hubris, and not of total evil. Call out your analogies for the American empire, Afghanistan, and Iraq: Athens and the Peloponnesian War, 16^th Century Spain, the Western Europe of the Two Wars, the Soviet Union of the successors of Stalin. Fair enough. But Hitler? Well, not yet.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD‘s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

The whole history of art is really a prolonged commentary on human nature. Here, in a world that has managed to send a human-made object out of our solar system but which yet witnesses thousands of deaths every day from starvation and war, Wagner’s art work surely stands for the mightiness of the human endeavour, whatever our beliefs about why or how we got here. As Wagner was intensely human, there are traces of all his humanity in his work. Perfection is an ideal that can be embodied in art, hardly ever lived out as an ethical ideal.

Orpheus is ascending: And maybe we are learning to look at the face of Wagner with not only our love but with compassion too, the same compassion Wagner expressed so nobly in his music. The world must be an alien place for those who can only criticise what has been brought by civilisation to their back door. How strange it is that Wagner should have achieved something so gigantic in one lifetime. We do no honour to Wagner by turning those achievements into a cult and praise, as in a Nuremberg war rally, the outer garments, the actual detritus of biography and performing tradition left behind after the life has been consigned to history. A real love of Wagner means putting aside all the biographical apparatus and listening to the music he composed and the words his characters sing. What we do with that intensity and exaltation is our own affair, but I should say that the experience is a civilising one.

In some of Lucian Freud’s later paintings the artist has concentrated on painting the figures of Sue Tilley and Leigh Bowery. They are subjects who have amplitude; they impose their bodies on the visual landscape with a voluptuous certainty; they have a physicality that reaches out beyond the canvas; the details of their skin and hair are painted in loving detail. These paintings of Freud are in total contrast to the anorexic smugness that passes itself off as beautiful in contemporary culture. Wagner’s works are somewhat like these paintings. All of life has been put into them. Beyond the rational, yet not irrational, the music of Wagner provokes with its prodding at the fabric of life, the fabric Wagner found so difficult to wear himself. Past debt, fatigue, depression, nervous exhaustion, irritability and duplicity, Wagner dragged into existence his music dramas with their panoramic transformative power. We cannot always be worthy of rising to the level that Wagner demands, and sometimes those demands, as in the Prologue and Act One of Götterdämmerung on a hot August afternoon, are fearsome.

Orpheus had been given a gift by the gods. Wagner often wanted to hand his gift back; even after his world success he fantasised about luxuriating on the Nile and wished the whole Bayreuth enterprise would go to the devil. Christina Rossetti asked in a poem, ‘Does the road wind up-hill all the way?’ and answered, ‘Yes, to the very end.’ Wagner’s life was lived along a road that wound up-hill to the very end. The extraordinary fecundity of Wagner’s imaginative world is still leading audiences, critics and historians uphill.

I said at the outset that Wagner’s predestined end was the classical imperium we reserve for only a handful of mighty creative spirits. He is still removed from that imperium, but the distance is narrowing. Much still needs to be written about and thought over, and that will only be possible once we have cast to one side our present cultural confusion.

In Theodore Zeldin’s book, An Intimate History Of Humanity, Vintage, 1994, the author states that, with all of our historical understanding and insatiable curiosity, the real age of discovery has hardly begun. Let us try to discover the real Wagner, the Wagner still in advance of a century of new departures, artistic revolutions and experimentation. Wagner saw quite clearly that art was not a throw of the dice across a white abyss of symbolic chance, to use the language of Mallarmé, but a profoundly expressive medium that could embody the complexity of existence. It may seem outrageous to claim that we have not yet discovered Wagner. What with the outpouring of critical works written and a performing tradition that is ‘rich and strange’, perhaps it might be objected that we understand Wagner only too well. I would argue that we are now only just preparing ourselves intellectually and emotionally to confront the reach of the Wagnerian enterprise. The old pro and contra arguments are not sophisticated enough to bring into focus the contradictions and ambiguities that the Wagner music drama presents us with.

Critics who write on Wagner spend a great deal of time wringing their hands at the wailing wall of their own supposed moral superiority. I don’t suppose any of them ever got round to nearly starving or being exiled from their own country, though I imagine one or two of them might have had bad first marriages. It is the individual members of the great unwashed general public who are properly grateful for culture, not the critical fraternity, and who often see beyond the tiresome theoretical monologues to the passion and beauty of the art. It is one of the singular failures of most art criticism, though it is of particular significance in Wagner’s case, that it cannot accommodate itself to the following observation made by Arthur Schnitzler in Casanova’s Return To Venice: ‘had he not leamt a thousand times that in the souls of all persons who are truly alive, discrepant elements, nay apparently hostile elements, may coexist in perfect harmony?’

From the very tooth and claw of nature Wagner drew down onto the stage uncanny representations of fire, water and birdsong, moonlight, rainbow and wind. From his own knowledge of human frailty he gave us Marke’s grieving and Brangaene’s incomprehension, Alberich’s lust for power and Wotan’s abnegation of that very same power, Loge’s ironic detachment and Parsifal’s spiritual commitment, Kurwenal’s steadfastness and Ortrud’s treachery. From within a reservoir of sympathetic intellectual interest he fashioned the epic-poetical, political-aesthetic, republican-mediaeval art work of the future. There is revolutionary fervour in the music dramas, just as there is resignation, passionate abandonment to divine fate and existential aloneness. In other words, there is life, not an image of life, but the thing itself in all its ambiguity and complexity. How perplexing it is that an artist captured it all with such intensity and verisimilitude. And how remarkable it is that it should have been possible when circumstance so often conspires to defeat what is worthwhile in this world. The Wagnerian music drama continues to thrive because, for one thing, it is all-inclusive. The young sailor at the beginning of Tristan und Isolde is winged with the same yearning humanity as its protagonists; the apprentices who request silence at the beginning of the song contest in Meistersinger know they are asking for the quiet needed for all to properly participate in a festival of poetry and song. Wagner does not compartmentalise his characters either. Nothing could betray a greater misunderstanding of Wagnerian dramaturgy than a comment such as this in the notes for the CDs of the Met’s 1942 Tannhäuser: ‘Wolfram is so goody-goody. No wonder . . .  nobility has died out . . . he’s too pure to procreate’. Such vulgar reductionism cannot begin to comprehend Wagner’s theatrical world which, whilst seldom achieving equanimity, sees into the heart of the human experience, and in doing so, attempts to reconcile all of its fragmented splendour. Now, one must take account of someone like Marc Weiner who proposes that Wagner’s works are riddled with anti-Semitic intention. There can be no question of the shameful prevarications still practised by those who would like to rewrite history after their own unjust deserts. Art worthy of the name will always withstand critical scrutiny; it has nothing to fear from it. But intellectual justice has to be exercised on behalf of art too. Trying to contain Wagner in an ideological straightjacket simply doesn’t work. The music dramas are too big and too many depth charges are set off in the course of the Wagner experience for there ever to be much plain sailing. Simplifying the biographical facts of the matter doesn’t help our understanding of Wagner either. Just as Cosima’s haughty obsequiousness can make us feel queasy, so can her service to the composer fill us with amazement at its dedicated far-sightedness. If the lamentable intellectual shenanigans Glasenapp got up to have challenged contemporary Wagner scholarship to rebalance the scholarly equation, so too must we come to a clear-sighted estimation of what really was achieved by Wagner and what is now being achieved by the inheritance of Wagnerism.

Are our ideals capable of being fulfilled by us, here, now, practically. Or are our lives exercises in hypocrisy, and all our humanitarianism a charade to cover over the traces of an adamantine egotism. Is not the example of Wagner a compelling witness for the defence of Western culture, which latterly can be seen to have not been up to scratch. Why is it that the world of Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall and AIDS can appear to fit the Wagnerian music drama so aptly whereas our own art can seem so indifferent, unconcerned and mediocre by comparison. Well, I would argue that Wagner was open to the enormity of our existence and that he lived out the polar and tropical entirety of the mysterium that got put into its elliptical orbit as the third rock from the sun. If there is an underlying racist or sexist agenda in the works themselves, it must be of the kind that is transformed in the very effort of the life lived and the art created. Beauty and truth to be realities must have dipped their purity into the muck of life, the ‘foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ as Yeats has it in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’. Wagner certainly knew that bone shop in all of its complexities—its disappointments, hatreds and failures. Transcendence and redemption were freely optioned by a volatile sensibility at the epicentre of the Romantic agony.

I am all too aware of the unsatisfactory nature of this commentary on Wagner, just as I am aware that its contents could easily be dismissed as a rhetorical trope by one of our latter-day linguistic exegetes. What matters now is our commitment to art; that we have learned from it, been taught to feel and think in new ways by it. If we look on the Wagnerian endeavour as entertainment we have entirely missed the point; Wagner would have had nothing but contempt for us. It is not a matter of entering the theatre with bowed heads and an air of hysterical solemnity, as with the old guard at Bayreuth, but of an active and intelligent engagement with one of the most fertile and challenging artistic oeuvres that Western civilisation has given us. If that means rejecting the art work of the future or reducing it to the level of our own present straightened circumstances, so be it. It is often the function of great art to wait beyond decades and even centuries of neglect for its torso to emerge before newly-cleansed and awakened eyes.

On the last night of his life Cosima hears Richard talking ‘volubly and loudly’, as always.’ “Once in 5000 years it succeeds!” “I was talking about Undine, the being who longed for a soul.” He goes to the piano, plays the mournful theme “Rheingold, Rheingold”, continues with “False and base all those who dwell up above.” “Extraordinary that I saw this so clearly at the time!”—And as he is lying in bed, he says, “I feel loving towards them, these subservient creatures of the deep, with all their yearning.” ‘ [Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, February 11th, 1883] What a profound leave-taking of life with its clear presentiment of death these final comments are. And how truthful to his whole artistic endeavour is this final adieu. It was extraordinary that Wagner felt and composed as he did; no artist does themself a favour by indulging in false modesty. His final comment is one that expresses love; on the eve of his death Wagner foresees the ocean of life ready to take him, Licht-Alberich/Schwarz-Alberich, down to the depths on the immense wave of feeling he expressed in his music so profoundly. And as he prepares to descend, before a final historical ascent, he sheds his mortality, becoming, like Undine, a spirit of infinite yearning and patience.

In ‘The Critic as Artist’ Oscar Wilde writes in his amusing way, ‘A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal’. Well, perhaps never in the whole history of art was an artist more sincere than Wagner. Maybe it is that sincerity we find so unsettling. We now live in a culture that will pay millions of dollars for a baseball and that espouses the celebrity interview as a via media of significance. In contrast, we have Wagner to show us, in his life and work, what the upper limit for significance can be in this world. The great achievement of democracy gives us a personal freedom to fulfil our humanity to the best of our capacity. Wagner shows both the glories and limitations of this enigmatic human enterprise. His work also stands defiantly as a challenge to all that is unachieved or too-easily achieved in art and culture. Once in five thousand years it succeeds? No, certainly not. But it did succeed gigantically, once. Against all the odds, the poetic ideal became a reality. Wagner ascended the terrain we have yet to traverse, step-by-painful step, and he is waiting for us now.

                                                                        *

The following poem was written in 1997. Ernest Newman, the Wagner scholar and music critic, mistakenly believed that Wagner had composed a string quartet while staying near Lake Starnberg, the lake in which Ludwig II subsequently drowned. My suggestion is that we can complete the ‘quartet’ begun by Ludwig, Nietzsche and Wagner through our involvement in, and commitment to, the creative act.

       Starnberg Quartet
      Ludwig, Nietzsche, Wagner

Here a gold symposium
Was summoned by a swan:
A king unsure of kingship, but who found
In art the solace we would give it now
If we believed in it as he had done;
A thinker near truth’s wound,
Bitter in rejecting what he loved,
A mind at the end of its strength,
Yet leaving Attic tracings
Of philosophic joy;
And a composer, worthy of our need,
Moving beyond failure
To ideals not betrayed.

It ended with drowning and madness,
An argument over sex.
Laughing death now names the fourth
Making the markings of this score—
That is you and I.
Matching what we have
With what they had to give,
Our reach might equal theirs.

We were never so foolish
To think redemption could come
From music heard in the dark
Or use ambiguous logic
To challenge our modern redoubt,
And we know if a god came to earth
Its name would sound like Mandela,
Not Wotan with his strife.

If we reject a part
Of what they were or said
And would never wish to become,
Then too we honour their greatness—
From highest bliss to the social debt,
Manoeuvring to find
All the human allows.

A mountain stands before us
Beneath a radiant Muse
And we would climb it still,
If we could give our best
And serve art as we know we should.
We wait now near their limit
For courage to reshape
The image of our magnitude
In work that’s undismayed.

Written 1997 Published 2001

Justin E. H. Smith

[An extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing can be found at www.jehsmith.com]

I would probably not consider myself in any position to hold forth on God, were talk of this sort not all the rage in Hollywood, and were I not such a slave to trickle-down fashion. But I remain an ordinary mortal, and would do well to proceed cautiously. I should perhaps begin by defining my terms.

It seems to me that God is nothing other than the inflation to infinity of our experience of paternal authority. I was never all that impressed with paternal authority. I preferred maternal solicitude, which inflated to infinity gives us not God but, well, infinite longing for more maternal solicitude. Our access to this begins decreasing around the time we stop breastfeeding, and when it is reduced to a mere residue at puberty we begin to look for alternative sources of it. For the most part, we look in vain, but the absence of what we long for does not cause us to supernaturalize the elusive object of our longing(save for a few neo-pagans who have made the category mistake of suggesting that God may be a woman).

I’ve digressed, you say, but my point is precisely that I have not. God is not a universally necessary a priori concept, and it is not the case that for logical or metaphysical reasons beyond dispute there simply “has to be something,” as the self-described “non-religious but very spiritual” types like to say. It is not the case that everyone everywhere possesses the concept, and it is not the case that we ourselves cannot dispense with it. Rather, supernatural entities are an abstraction from our natural and emotional ties to humans and other animals, and these are largely determined by our culture’s values.

We may individually value the women in our lives, but this is something we are expected to keep to ourselves, and when it comes to candidacy for that infinitely high public office of divinity, only a patriarch will do. In many cultures, the supernatural does not extend beyond dead ancestors, conceptualized as ghosts. Members of these cultures will agree that “there has to be something,” but this something is not an omnipotent omniscient creator. It’s just grandpa. Our culture, however, has a habit of infinitizing what it values, of projecting our human attachment to fathers and kings into infinity.

I am no more ready to argue, on metaphysical or logical grounds, against the existence of God than I am ready to argue against the existence of the ghosts of ancestors that some Mongolian peasant holds dear. It is simply not my business. Any serious engagement with the problem of God will be not metaphysical but anthropological. Engaged in this way, the question is not whether God –the concept of which is taken for granted– exists or does not exist, but rather why it is that a society conceptualizes the ultimate grounds of its own existence in one way rather than another.

What we learn when we put the question in this way is quite a bit about the place of fathers and kings and big inflated things in our culture, but very little about the place of, or the logical need for, an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator in the universe. To remain content with learning this much may seem an all-too humble scope of interest, but it is not clear that it constitutes a true change of subject. For talk of God, as Durkheim rightly discerned, is really just talk of society. Society is God, as the great sociologist put it, and to this extent, at least, I can confirm that he exists.

In certain times and places, such as second-century Alexandria or nineteenth-century Denmark, philosophers have taken an interest in the concept of God, and attempted to defend it by stripping away the naive anthropomorphisms that the vulgar habitually attach to it. God, they argue, cannot be a man, let alone a man with a long white beard; God cannot really have a face, let alone a backside, even if the masses were pleased to hear that on Mt. Sinai Moses caught a glimpse of the latter; God cannot really have any human traits at all. Indeed, God cannot even be described in human language.

The problem, though, is that when these rigorous demands are pushed as far as they can go, and one by one all the features projected from human experience are stripped away, we find that not all that much is left, and the apophatic path leads us to something that looks troublingly like atheism. God is an old man on a throne or he is, quite literally, nothing. For this reason, tiresome academic debates such as that between Bertrand Russell the “atheist” and Father Copleston the “theist,” the one denying that there is some entity x such that x equals God, and the other denying the denial –which for some reason undergraduates always want to reenact, though much less eloquently, in my introductory philosophy classes– really don’t get to the heart of the matter. (I suppose I should not be hard on the youngsters. They’re still learning. But grown men should know better.)

To opt for agnosticism is no solution: it is to accept the terms of the debate as laid out by the dithering old dons of a century ago, but to lack the conviction to side with either of them. Agnosticism says that there is something it would be nice to know, but that due to our limited grasp of things we are unable to know it. Agnosticism is failed theism, and I want to say that there is nothing to theism but the projection of what we already value from our mundane experience. It is either this or the empty space left by negative theology, which is hardly worthy of worship either. And it is for this reason that the truly pious disposition can only be atheism: not as the denial of the existence of some entity, à la Russell –as though the problem of God were of a pair with the problem of Bigfoot–, but as a cultivated recognition of the humanness of our projections, and of the cosmic irrelevance of what one’s own culture would like to imagine divine. If I may put this point slightly more paradoxically: it seems to me that the true path to illumination, the one sole hope for arriving at an unio mystica with the ultimate source of our being, is to insist unto death on the exclusive truth of the materialist party line.

Consider in this connection the expression of the religious sentiment in art. Pier Paolo Pasolini, before he was murdered by an underage hustler he had unashamedly picked up in some back alley of Rome, managed to make one of the most beautiful pieces of religious art of the 20th century: his film rendition of The Gospel According to St. Matthew. The best religious art of the last 100 years was created by a homosexual communist.

Perhaps the worst religious art (using that term generously) of the same period was created by an aggressive and empty-souled goon with outsized daddy issues who, when on break from belching hatred, remains unable to shut up about his personal relationship with the divine. Rent his Passion of the Christ together with Pasolini’s masterpiece sometime, and watch them back to back. Then ask yourself whose side you want to be on come Judgment Day.

It’s easy to reduce our political leaders to the sum of their policies, to regard them as no more complex than the glib pronouncements of op/ed contributors. It’s much more difficult to acknowledge the totality of their humanity, to regard them as family men and women, as enthusiasts and hobbyists, individuals of many interests and varying depths. The Bush Administration in particular is susceptible to this reductive tendency. The attacks of September 11th shattered America’s image of itself as invulnerable superpower, and the Bush Administration, in responding to the new challenges of asymmetric warfare with non-state terrorist entities, exposes itself to caricature on a daily basis. But dangerous times require bold new policies, and the men and women that formulate and implement those policies make easy targets for late-night talk-show hosts and comedy-prone pundits. What follows is a small attempt to correct the one-dimensional views so much in fashion these days. Of course, it is only a beginning, and a superficial one at that. Readers will be at fault to imagine that the depths of the four individuals briefly discussed below are so easily plumbed. 

Much has been made of Condoleezza Rice’s musical talents. She is a gifted pianist who, at one time, planned to make a career of music. Today, as Secretary of State, she has less time to devote to her first passion, but still she maintains her skills, regularly meeting with four lawyer friends in her home in downtown Washington, D.C., to practice and perform chamber music. A recent profile in the New York Times Magazine quoted her response to a frequently asked question, namely, does playing music relax her? “It’s not exactly relaxing if you are struggling to play Brahms,” she answered. “But it is transporting.” Commenting on their choice of music, Robert Battey, a former professor of cello at the University of Missouri and current member of the group, said, “We generally like to start off with a nice finger-buster for the secretary.” But for true relaxation, Ms. Rice depends on an altogether different hobby, though one that is no less demanding of precision. For more than a decade, she has exercised her nimble fingers and her nimbler mind with Origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper-folding. Throughout her apartment in the tony Watergate complex, nestled between the family photographs, advanced degrees and other mementoes of a life of academic and inside-the-Beltway achievement, are samples of her meticulous work: a prancing Pegasus, a foil-backed crane, even a remarkably detailed rendering of an F-14 Tomcat fighter jet. Recently, Ms. Rice has expanded her repertoire to include Kirigami, a branch of the art that allows cuts to be made in the paper in order to create symmetrical objects, such as snowflakes and pentagrams. As with her music, the secretary is not reluctant to share her paper-folding talents. Upon Margaret Beckett’s appointment to the position of Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Foreign Secretary) for Britain in May, 2006, Ms. Rice presented her with a stunning orchid blossom. She has made similar gifts for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, King Abdullah II of Jordan, and the Bush family, upon the college graduation of daughter Jenna.

Richard Bruce Cheney, 46th Vice President of the United States, is often characterized as a vicious political in-fighter and soulless pragmatist. He is a leader of the neocon movement currently in power in Washington, and has been at the center of America’s conservative elite since the mid-seventies, when he became the youngest chief of staff in U.S. history, serving in President Gerald Ford’s administration, along with his political fellow traveler Donald Rumsfeld (see below). He is thought to be the driving force behind an effort to expand executive power to an unprecedented degree, exemplified by the Bush administration’s regular use of signing statements to selectively ignore constitutional and legislative restraints, its fight for warrantless wiretapping, and its skirting of international standards of humanitarian treatment of war prisoners. An intensely private man, little is known about his family life with wife Lynne, and still less about his recreational preferences (except the hunting of oxygen-deprived quail). But to the residents and shopkeepers of Mackinac Island, Michigan, there’s no mystery to this Vice President. Mr. Cheney is just another “fudgie,” one of the thousands of fudge enthusiasts who descend on the tiny island each summer to sample its famous candy. According to classmates at the University of Wyoming, Mr. Cheney regularly spurned frat parties and college mixers in favor of concocting new fudge recipes in his dormitory’s kitchen, and endeared himself to his fellow students for his generosity with the product of his efforts. He has made several pilgrimages to Baltimore, Maryland, and Poughkeepsie, New York, both of which lay claim to the title Birthplace of Fudge, and he boasts senior membership in the North American Fudge Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preparation and enjoyment of what has been called “America’s favorite sinful snack.” But Mr. Cheney’s affinity for sweets extends beyond the world of fudge, to include peanut brittle, taffy and even some varieties of hard candy. He is widely believed to reward political allies and business associates with small “sampler” gift boxes of homemade sweets, anonymously delivered, each one bearing the mischievous inscription “Love, DLC.”

Curiously, Origami is not the only secret Bush administration talent with roots in the early Edo period (1603-1867) of Japan. John R. Bolton, current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, is a practitioner of the Japanese tea ceremony, and a devoted student of sadō or chadō, literally “the way of tea.” Mr. Bolton, known for his gruff demeanor and blunt criticism, makes for a highly unlikely ambassador, and is infamous for remarking that the U.N. would be no different if ten of the Secretariat building’s 38 stories were lopped off. In addition, he is known for his leadership position among the neoconservatives who encouraged the invasion of Iraq, and for his part in the manipulation of intelligence relating to Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium for the creation of a nuclear weapon. With these facts in mind, it’s all the more remarkable that he should devote himself to the delicate complexities of the tea ceremony, which requires substantial knowledge of calligraphy, ceramics, flower arrangement and incense. A friend of Mr. Bolton, speaking on condition of anonymity, was quick to point out that his personality is widely misunderstood. “He values simplicity and refinement above all,” this friend said, “and he’s got a very eastern notion of beauty. Very formal, very restrained.” Mr. Bolton and the members of his tea circle gather at least once a month to engage in the ceremony, usually at his residence in New York. The Ambassador wears kimono and hakama, which is the most traditional of prescribed wardrobes, and prepares the tea room with tatami, a calligraphic scroll, and a simple arrangement of seasonal flowers. Whenever possible, a facilitator or teacher is invited to participate, and provides instruction on various aspects of the ceremony, including the hanging scroll, tatami placement, and the elaborate service motions required of the skilled practitioner.

There is a bit more obvious justice to Donald Rumsfeld’s secret talent. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is widely known for his oracular speaking style, unique vocal cadence and undeniable charisma. Indeed, in the early days of the Iraq War, he managed to charm many in the press corps and the public with his witty pronouncements on the status of the conflict, notwithstanding the grim subject matter. So it is perhaps not a surprise to learn that Mr. Rumsfeld is a widely respected Laurel (a title of achievement in the Arts & Sciences) in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), Middle Kingdom (comprising Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and parts of several other states). The SCA is familiar to many for its presence on American college campuses, and is best described as a Medieval and Renaissance-themed arts revival organization. Members of the SCA gather for festivals and demonstrations in full costume, and participate in combat tournaments, arts exhibits, classes, workshops, dancing and feasts. Mr. Rumsfeld, whose SCA persona is Wilhelm von Steublen, is renowned in the Bardic Arts, specifically poetry and storytelling. He excels in creating ribald, historically appropriate ballads, set to Gregorian Chant tunes and performed during regional and national festivals. He is also noted for his “fyrewalking” at nighttime events, in which a performer moves from campsite to campsite offering entertainment, in exchange for food, drink and other, bawdier refreshments. The secretary is unusual within the SCA for joining as a full-fledged, dues paying member at the late age of 44, in 1976, during his first tenure as Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford. But it wasn’t long before he was fully invested in the organization: Honored with the title of Laurel in 1980, he quickly became the Middle Kindom’s principal authority on the Bardic Arts (including poetry, storytelling and early music), and has received numerous awards and honorary titles since then. In 1992, he was selected to sit on the SCA’s Board of Directors, and continues to serve in that position to this day.

On the seventh day She said, “Let there be light.” But nothing stirred: not a blade of grass, not a leaf. Then on the eighth day She said, “Let there be Caffeine.” And the whole world came into being; life found a purpose: the trees trembled, the fish floated, the birds buzzed, the women went shopping and the men went to war.

Well, all men except Mr. Cafenos, a toothpaste salesman who believed he was born to achieve more than sell lies about the whitening magic of his toothpaste. Always searching for a break from the white lies, he had an intuition: if packaged properly, caffeine could trumpet the wake up call for the sleepwalkers of the world. He brewed the business plan in his mind. “It is all in the packaging” he uttered the cliché and claimed it as his original thought. He set out to unravel the science and art of his product and he found the following information.

Caffeine – a white bitter powder when dried – is chemically a xanthine alkaloid. Two other xanthines (theophylline and theobromine:’theos’) live as a close family with caffeine in coffee, tea, cacao beans, mate, cola nuts and guarana.

The quantity of these three related compounds varies in different plants. Caffeine concentration is up to 4% in tea leaves and coffee but tea has more of the other two ‘theos’, which explains its occasional stronger kick. The ‘theos’ relax the smooth muscles of the breathing tubes (bronchi) while caffeine stimulates the heart and jolts the brain.

Cola nuts have lower caffeine content while cocoa contains eight times more theophylline than caffeine. Guarana soda is popular in Brazil and it wakes up the brain minus the coffee jitters. It is likely that guarana and mate deliver their unusual punches with some other compound besides caffeine.

A 7 oz cup of coffee has the following caffeine (mg):

Drip 115-175
Brewed 80-135
Instant 65-100
Tea 30-70
Espresso 100mg/2oz

Coffee is safe in moderation and it takes 50-200 cups to kill a man. Theobromine is not as assertive as its two other cousins except for chocolate devouring dogs – in excess it is a ruthless poison and a pound can kill the dog.

For the chemical sleuths the alias of caffeine is: 3,7-dihydro- 1,3,7-trimethyl- 1H-purine- 2,6-dione.

With all these discoveries Mr. Cafenos began his caffeine enterprise. The unwanted effects of caffeine that he had learned, he kept to himself – like a well groomed salesman.

He built a bohemian coffee shop and his Sumatra Mandheling-Lintong drip coffee, extracted by clean soft water at precisely 95 degrees Celsius, was an instant hit. His obsessive quality controls demanded freshly roasted ground beans from the finest crops of the world. And he insisted on cleaning the equipment after each brew, for clean equipment is as important as the bean quality to yield the right flavor. Oil and resins stick to the pot and spoil the taste.

With the stirring success of his first venture he expanded and soon his shops were proliferating faster than the dandelions in your backyard.

He brewed exotic beans of the world. His varietals/staights included Brazil Bourbons, Celebes Kalossi, Colombia Excelso, Colombia Supremo, Costa Rica Tarrazu, Ethiopian Harrar-Moka, Guatemala Antigua, Indian Mysore, Jamaican Blue Mtn/Wallensford Estate, Java Estate Kuyumas, Kenya AA, Kona Extra Prime, Mexico Pluma Altura, Mocha Mattari (Yemen), New Guinea, Panama Organic and Tanzania Peaberry.

His blends and dark roasts were Colombia Supremo Dark, Espresso Roast, French Roast, Vienna Roast and Mocha-Java.

Mr. Cafenos appeared on every billboard, magazine, prime time TV, football game, radio, newspaper and the Internet.

His caffeine laced the products on every grocery shelf; he got the drug into you either through his brew or his grocery adulteration.

Mr. Cafenos’s caffeine empire ruled. But every thing must change and so did his luck.

A lonely chemist from his R&D department – who like every other ‘lonely’ had excess spare time – invented a technique to remove the buzz from the coffee. But no one cared, which added depression to his loneliness. So the lonely, unwanted, depressed chemist published his invention in a scientific journal, describing the bad effects of coffee on health, hence, the importance of decaffeinating. He, in his scientific honesty and business naiveté, mentioned the bad effects that Mr. Cafenos had assiduously suppressed.

He wrote,” Caffeine causes thinning of the bones (osteoporosis), decreases the motility of the sperms, increases irritability and may harm the pregnant mother. Caffeine is habit forming and sudden cessation causes withdrawal symptoms.”

His candor cost him his job like many other scientists before him. And an unemployed scientist is a disabled parasite; he needs the crutch of a laboratory to feed his stomach.

The lonely, unwanted, depressed and now jobless chemist had only one asset: he knew the process of decaffeinating. The asset was valuable for a detractor of Mr. Cafenos, who offered business partnership to the chemist and thus was born the ‘decaf coffee’.

They borrowed all the leaves from Mr. Cafenos’s business plan and countered his every concoction with a decaf version. Decaf, they declared, was pure, non toxic and virtuous and they were surprised by the number of gullible neurotics who paid for their decaf. And as their luck would have it, the neurotics multiplied as fast as their products.

We all know, capitalists accommodate competition only if it can’t be killed. Mr. Cafenos tried both and failed; his profits plummeted. To make matters worse, his wife discovered a new emotion unknown to her so far: her love for him matched his balance sheet. She decided – like a faithful wife – to announce her declining love for him. But she did not get a chance.

He had disappeared without a trail or trace.

Decafs got into action and declared him dead due to caffeine poisoning; it suited them. The wife accepted widowhood with alacrity; it suited her. The prime time TV cashed high ratings on his death; it suited them.

The happy widow promptly proceeded to annex the caffeine empire and then a strange thing happened.

After twenty-three days, Mr. Cafenos reappeared in a purple robe and a brown cap – oh, never mind the color mismatch.

The marketing genius, Mr. Cafenos, called a prime time press conference and declared in front of the ogling cameras that he had meditated on the roof of his ninety-five storeys high rise building for twenty-three days and he had a revelation.

He had known from history of religion that there are higher chances of communion with God, if you climb on a higher ground or something; in his case he chose a city sky scrapper. Yes, the God had spoken to him and She had said “Let there be caffeine.”

He demonized all the decafs as blasphemous, heretic pagans who will be roasted like coffee beans in the life after.

But that did not solve his immediate problem here on earth: cash flow at the coffee shop. So taking the help of his new found religion, he announced “The Caffeine Manifesto.”/p>

He made it simple and articulate, but you should be kind enough to overlook the intellectual dishonesty. (Why shouldn’t you; you have done it before.)

The new religion said:

• Caffeine is God’s gift.
• Caffeine energizes and thus increases economic productivity.
• Productivity is the source of all profit.

He proceeded to sermonize from the pulpit of the press conference, the corollaries derived from the new axioms: “The Decafs are parasites on the economic system; they thrive on the profits created by the sweat and toll of the “caffeinated” worker; Down with the pop gulping, wine sipping, beer guzzling, cognac sniffing decafs; All the caffeinated workers of word unite!”

When a reporter asked, “Why the purple robe and the brown cap?” He replied, “It is all in the packaging!”

This all infuriated the decafs and thus started the protest phase of the caffeine war.

They mounted pressure with all persuasive techniques created by mankind: media saturating advertisements after midnight, rallies on bridges and beaches; civil disobedience in all wrestling arenas; bikini competition in all grocery stores; car washes in snow storms.

The reincarnated Mr. Cafenos retaliated by renaming his coffee shops as ‘Temples of Caffeine’. His newly converted clergy delivered vitriolic sermons at the temples on Thursdays. His followers wore purple wristbands and coffee-bean-shaped brown caps.

And both camps checked their profit and loss statements every quarter. And it seemed the decafs camp was having more fun in life and also winning at the cash register.

When Mrs. Cafenos discovered no turnaround and mounting losses, she reactivated her plan A. She eloped with a decaf, filed for divorce and demanded half the assets of Mr. Cafenos before the balance sheet got redder.

This infuriated desperate Mr. Cafenos and in his next Thursday sermon he announced his next plan. He demanded a new nation carved out of the old one and called it “CaffeiNation” The productive, hard working caffeinated workers will be free from the tyranny of the decafs. He promised a nation based on the new religion and caffeine.

Right after the sermon a faithful follower, inebriated on the new religion and propelled by extra-strong-no-cream-double-colombia-excellso in his blood marched briskly to Mrs.Cafenos’s lover’s house and burned it down. Next morning the fire fighters found two charred bodies but none was of Mrs. Cafenos or her lover.

The decafs called it the death of innocent civilians and appealed to the Human Rights activists, who at that time were in a conference in Bahamas discussing “water as a female right.” They replied by email, “We do not involve with gang violence unless one of the gangs is the Government. We will investigate the situation when we return. Please ensure press coverage.”

Both sides declared this a vindication of their stand and the Decafs proceeded to retaliate by burning down a Temple Of Caffeine.

Thus started the second phase of the caffeine war – the violent phase.

History reminds us repeatedly that love does not beget love in spite of all the gurus, but violence attracts violence unfailingly and urgently, which the masses seem to enjoy more compared to this love-thing. So the bystanders in the caffeine war promptly chose and joined their preferred violent gang. The decision was easy as it was made by the limbic system of the brain and not by the cortex. And biology tells us, when limbic system plays, rational cortex is a dumb spectator.

Thus started the next phase of caffeine war – the limbic system war that is the most brutal, bloody, destructive, unrelenting and unstoppable. The rescue from this vortex is possible only by an external force, as suggested by one of Newton’s laws.

Mr. Cafenos understood this all and as he witnessed relentless charring of his temples, he appealed to The United Notion and demanded its intervention to secede and form an independent “CaffeiNation.”

One member of The United Notion said, “Independence is not the same as freedom.”

The second said,” Violence over caffeine is stupid.”

The third said,” We should not even discuss this ridiculous appeal.”

The other Notional members agreed not to discuss it except the wise president of The United Notion. He said,” We will discuss this serious issue in the assembly without delay. Those who consider this matter stupid and ridiculous apparently haven’t tuned into the CNN world news lately.”

Eqbal Ahmad was a shining example of what a true internationalist should be. Eqbal was at home in the history of all the world’s great civilizations. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of states past and present, and he knew that states had a rightful role to play. But he also knew that states existed to serve people, not the other way around, and he had little to do with governments, except as a thorn in their side. To friends, colleagues, and students, however, he gave unstintingly of himself and his time, his example and his memory will inspire many to carry on his work.
                                        —Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations

By complete coincidence, a few weeks ago, just after I had been thinking about writing a few words about Eqbal Ahmad, and had called his daughter Dohra (a friend) to speak about him, I received an email from Columbia University Press offering me a review copy of The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (edited by Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani; Foreword by Noam Chomsky). The book arrived two days ago by mail. Even though Eqbal died in 1999 at a relatively youngish age (he was 66), his political analyses are so sharp and prescient, and perhaps even more important and relevant today, that I decided immediately to introduce him to those 3QD readers who may not know of him, and also to recommend getting the book.

Like his close friend Edward Said (whose book Culture and Imperialism is dedicated to Eqbal, and who followed him to a too-early grave at about the same age a few years later), Eqbal was one of that rare breed of academics: those who bring their intellectual insights into the public sphere and directly engage a much wider world than the professoriate. While Eqbal’s activities and achievements were immensely wide-ranging (teaching, academic writing, political activism, journalism), possibly the most impressive thing about him was his uncannily precise feel for politics, and his ability to dispel the clutter of argument around political issues with a plainspoken insight of lucidity and obvious truth. As Noam Chomsky points out in his foreword:

… Ahmad was able to identify currents of modern history that few perceived. To mention only one distressingly timely illustration, he recognized at once that Washington and its allies were creating a terrorist monster when they exploited Afghan resistance to Soviet invasion by organizing and training Islamic fundamentalist extremists for their own cynical purposes. He warned that these initiatives were reviving a form of violent jihadism that had disappeared from the Muslim world centuries earlier and were also helping to implant similar forces in Pakistan under the brutal Zia-ul-Haq dictatorship, with a devastating impact on Pakistani society, Afghanistan, and beyond.

Indeed Eqbal pointed out that, as he welcomed them to the white house in 1985, President Ronald Reagan actually called the Afghan Mujahideen (the future Taliban) “the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers.” At the time, they were battling the Evil Empire, so no degree of hyperbole in their praise could be considered excessive. These “moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers” are now, of course, terrorists. Speaking of which, in one essay, Eqbal brilliantly unpacks the term “terrorism.” As Carolee Bengelsdorf and Margaret Cerrulo explain in their introduction:

“Terrorism” in [Eqbal’s] analysis is a floating signifier attached at will to our enemies to evoke moral revulsion. The vagueness and inconsistency of its definition, he insists, is key to its political usefulness. Official discussion will eschew, indeed disallow, any search for causes or motives, to the point where former secretary of state George Schultz, asked about the causes of Palestinian terrorism, insisted “there is no connection with any cause. Period.”

Or consider Eqbal’s foresight in these few sentences (written in 1993) on the Oslo Accord:

Trouble awaits for the accord. Hamas will continue to question its legitimacy and may be joined by other nationalist elements. Attacks on Israeli occupation forces and other acts of resistance shall occur, giving Israel ample arguments against Palestinian statehood. It may stall even on extending limited autonomy to the West Bank. After all, its cooperation is premised on the PLO’s ability to maintain order, especially in Gaza. No one should be surprised if Yasser Arafat ends up as the Pasha of Gaza…

Eqbal was also able to correctly forecast (in 1988) that the birth of Jihad International would coincide with a disastrous rise in tensions between the Sunni and the Shia, with proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran taking place on various battlegrounds, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, and as we can now clearly see, Iraq.

                                ————————- *** ————————–

Born in the village of Ikri in the Bihar province of India in either 1933 or 1934 (record-keeping of births was not a priority in the subcontinent until recently so that even I have no birth certificate), Eqbal witnessed the murder of his father one night when only a few years old, who died while trying to protect Eqbal from the blows of his assassins. It was a land dispute.

His grandfather was a wealthy man who had established the Khudabaksh Library in Patna where to this day it remains one of the finest collections of medieval Persian manuscripts. When he was about 14, Eqbal migrated to Pakistan upon its creation with his older brothers. (In 1996, the BBC produced a documentary about this difficult trek in a refugee caravan from India to Pakistan as part of a 5-part series entitled “Stories My Country Told Me.” The others profiled were Edward Said, E.J. Hobsbawm, Desmond Tutu and Maxine Hong Kingston.)

After graduating in economics from the Foreman Christian College in Lahore, Eqbal served briefly as an officer in the Pakistan Army before leaving for Occidental College in California as a Rotary Fellow in 1957, and soon transferred to study political science and middle eastern history at Princeton, where he eventually obtained his doctorate in 1967. While he was conducting thesis research on trade unions, Eqbal lived in North Africa from 1960 to 1964, and became a student and active supporter of the Algerian Revolution. It is not clear if he ever met Franz Fanon, but Fanon certainly knew of Eqbal and they shared a mutual respect. [Photo shows Eqbal at Princeton.]

I recently saw the brilliant Gillo Pontecorvo film The Battle of Algiers (rent it!) and was surprised to learn that Eqbal was a consultant on the film. He helped research the script and was present during the filming. Selected Writings contains an edited transcript of a fascinating lecture Eqbal gave to undergraduates at Hampshire College about the making of the movie. Even though it is a short thing (7 pages), it is a paradigmatic illustration of how packed with strategic insight even the most informal of Eqbal’s writing could be, and I’d like to dwell on it here for a bit. One of the key lessons that Eqbal took away from Algeria was that before revolutionary movements are ready to fight a state entity, they must take away its moral legitimacy by outperforming it at its main task: administration. Here’s Eqbal:

… to be successful, the revolutionary movement must outadminister the enemy before it starts to outfight it. The Battle of Algiers gives you that insight from both sides, Algerian and French. The film closely follows the actual battle, but the emphasis is not on violence; it is on organization…

…Ali is shown leading an angry mob, calling for blood in response to the [French] bombing. In a critical early moment in the film, he goes to see the resistance commander, Colonel Mohammed Jafar, and has an argument with Jafar saying, “We must strike back.” Jafar answers, “No, Ali, not yet; we are not ready. We must first organize the Casbah before we engage in violence. We must clean up the numbers racket, the gambling racket, the prostitution; we must institute discipline; we must offer services to people…”

… A second critical moment in the film is the marriage scene, presided over by an FLN [resistance] militant. It signifies that French rule is over inside the Casbah, that the revolution has outadministered the French. Colonial law stipulated that marriages must be registered with the French government… [but] The French have been cut out of the process…

This, no doubt, has already reminded you of the recent successes of a certain organization today which has taken these lessons to heart and has made itself the sole provider of public services in southern Lebanon. Yes, of course: Hizbullah. Also, interestingly enough, the Pentagon screened The Battle of Algiers for the heads of its Special (counterinsurgency) Forces in August 2003. Another of Eqbal’s points in this lecture is that a revolutionary movement must allow the larger population to appear neutral in the conflict until close to the end, and that the call for a general strike by the resistance leadership was an early mistake in the Algerian Revolution:

… In order to protect people, revolutionaries must maintain the fiction of popular neutrality. The incumbent power (whether colonial or local) has the compulsion to say, “The people are behind us; the revolutionaries, the guerrillas, are merely terrorizing them. We are protecting the people,” as indeed the French said. That rhetoric reduces their ability to attack the whole population. Therefore good revolutionary tactics always create an environment in which the people are overtly neutral, while covertly larger and larger numbers of them support the revolution by various means. In Algeria, therefore, you didn’t do anything to expose the entire people to attack by the other side. No decent revolutionary movement would call a general strike in a situation of warfare until almost the end, when it was winning, and it just need the last push.

This was not the case in Algeria… When the FLN declares the general strike, [French commander] Colonel Mathieu is very happy and says, “Now we can lick them. They have made their first bad move.” Why? Because they are announcing themselves to be on the side of the revolution. He can plan his operation: arrest everyone who is on strike and torture the bloody lot. Interrogate them. Some of them will turn out to be activists, some of them will turn out to be neutrals. But now he has a large pool from which he can get information… Seventy-seven thousand people in a period of just about twelve days were tortured, badly, in the city of Algiers… Six of the French who carried out the operation were eventually censured for torture.

The third point that Eqbal makes is that because of this mistake, the FLN was decimated in Algiers and its leadership had to move to weaker positions in Tunis. This insecurity caused them to raise a conventional army there (the Armee de Liberation Nationale, or ALN), complete with tanks, and even a small air force. When independence finally came in 1962, the ALN under Colonel Houari Boumedienne, which was not a revolutionary force, turned on the FLN leaders. By 1960 everyone knew the Algerian people were going to win; there was no need for the conventional army. Eqbal’s disappointment is palpable here:

Without that conventional army, the revolution would have been at least partially successful. It has not been even partially successful. It only succeeded in getting rid of France; it failed at building a democratic, revolutionary society.

In the mid-to-late 60s, Eqbal taught at various American Universities and became “one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of American policies in Vietnam and Cambodia.” In November of 1970, after reports to congress by J. Edgar Hoover, Eqbal was indicted along with the antiwar priest Daniel Berrigan and six other catholics on charges of conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger in an attempt to end the war in Vietnam. The group came to be known as the Harrisburg 8. [Photo shows a press conference for the Kissinger trial. Eqbal is seated at extreme left.] One measure of Eqbal’s unwavering integrity and unerring moral compass is that in April of 1971, during his trial on these trumped up conspiracy charges, he took note of the worsening situation in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and the Pakistani army’s shameful atrocities there. At a time when hardly any other Pakistani raised a voice in protest, and under all that personal stress, Eqbal took the time to write a “Letter to a Pakistani Diplomat” which is included in Selected Writings. After laying out a seven-point argument for why the Pakistani government’s actions would only end in disastrous secession (which, of course, they did within the year), he writes:

I know that I shall be condemned for my position. For someone who is facing a serious trial in America, it is not easy to confront one’s own government. Yet it is not possible for me to oppose American crimes in Southeast Asia or Indian occupation of Kashmir while accepting the crimes that my government is committing against the people of East Pakistan. Although I mourn the death of Biharis by Bengali vigilantes and condemn the irresponsibilities of the Awami League, I am not willing to equate their actions with that of the government and the criminal acts of an organized, professional army.

After their deliberations, the jury declared a mistrial in the Harrisburg 8 case in April of 1972. For the next decade, Eqbal continued writing while a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., also serving as the first director of its European affiliate, the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. He also held various visiting professorships during this time, and further consolidated his reputation as an intellectual’s intellectual. (“I’ve spent much of my adult life, it seems, reading and learning from Eqbal Ahmad.” —Seymour M. Hersh) From 1982 Eqbal was a professor of political science at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts until his retirement in 1997. But from 1992 onwards, he had started dividing his time between Amherst and Islamabad. Eqbal Ahmad died on May 11, 1999.

                               ————————- *** ————————–

Starting in the early 90s, Eqbal’s dream was to start a new secular university of the highest academic caliber in Pakistan, which he wanted to name Khaldunia after the famous fourteenth century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun. I only met Eqbal Ahmad once: after the screening of the BBC documentary about his migration to Pakistan (which I have mentioned above) at Columbia University. Akeel Bilgrami introduced me to him and we all went to dinner together. (I’m quite sure Robin Varghese was also present.) There, I asked him how the Khaldunia project was going, and he replied that he would tell me but first I must commit to teaching there for two years. Of course, I immediately and happily did, but alas, Khaldunia never came to be. The corrupt Pakistani bureaucracy put hurdles in Eqbal’s path at every step and finally even rescinded the land grant they had given him years earlier. Still, Eqbal kept trying, and during these years also became a columnist for Karachi’s largest English daily, Dawn. He wrote his last column on April 25th, 1999, and died two weeks later. Eqbal really was one the most widely beloved and respected men I can think of. Edward Said spoke at his memorial service, ending thus:

Bantering, ironic, sporty, unpedantic, gracious, immaculate in dress and expression, faultlessly kind, an unpretentious connoisseur of food and wine, Eqbal’s themes in the end were always liberation and injustice, or how to achieve the first without reproducing more of the second. He saw himself perceptively as a man of the eighteenth century, modern because of enlightenment and breadth of outlook, not because of technological or quasi-scientific “progress”. Somehow he managed unostentatiously to preserve his native Muslim tradition without succumbing either to the frozen exclusivism or to the jealousy that has often gone with it. Humanity and genuine secularism in this blood-drenched old century of ours had no finer champion. His innumerable friends grieve inconsolably.

You may read the rest of Said’s speech here, and other tributes can be seen here. Over the years, Robin, who knew Eqbal Ahmad intimately and worked with him for a while, has frequently entertained and edified me with anecdotes of Eqbal. Rather than try to recall these and give a second-hand account, I urge Robin to set down some of his personal reminiscences of Eqbal himself here at 3QD in the near future. But for now I give the last word to Arundhati Roy who speaks for many in saying: “Ahmad is a brilliant man with brilliant insights. My only complaint about him is that he is not here now, when we need him the most.”

[All photos of Eqbal Ahmad are taken from this website and were provided by Emily Roysdon of Hampshire College.]

My other Monday Musings can be seen here.

I went the Museum of Modern Art the other day with the intention of seeing the new Dada exhibition. I never made it in, however, because I found myself preoccupied with the Douglas Gordon videos on display in the room next door. Now let me say at the outset that video art has never been my thing. I’ve usually found that artists working in video try too hard to de-familiarize a medium cognitively associated with the pleasures of television. Video makes my brain expect TV and thus more than anything else to expect narrative. The response by video-artists is often to freeze out all notions of story telling—or what we might naively call action—and put in their place one or another kind of tableau. Video art would appear to become art, in other words, when it sheds its association with what we ordinarily find within the box.

So I was happily surprised to find so much in the Gordon exhibit, and to find in particular that Gordon’s videos worked precisely by making me rethink (at least for a moment) the ways in which we view television or film. This is not to say that Gordon’s works are a version of television or film, or what some might deride as mere entertainment; it is rather to say that Gordon remains much closer to the forms to which the medium of video inevitably alludes. His point is not to detach video from entertainment but rather to try to comment upon the way in which visual entertainment works.

Perhaps the most well known of his works is 24 Hour Psycho, in which he slows down Hitchock’s film to the speed at which it would take a day to watch the whole thing, and projects it front and back on a single, large panel. Do the math and that turns out to be roughly two frames per second, just enough for the human eye to perceive each as it gives way to the next. The result is that the motion of the motion picture is not so much slowed down as thrown into a kind of controlled herky-jerky. The illusion of reproducing human perception is taken apart, as what we see is not fluid movement—what we at least think we see in real life—but rather a series of connected stills and the gap between them, as if we’ve learned for the first time that light really does come in particles after all. The effect is uncanny: one can almost feel the brain attempt to stitch together the stills into the motion we expect from films and the events we remember to be the story of Psycho. But this requires, first, that we, as it were, melt the one still into the next (and the next), and, second, that we situate them in relation to a whole that we will never see. When I got there Janet Leigh was putting her stolen bundle into her bag and preparing to go on the lam. An hour or so later, she had been pulled over by a policeman. Anthony Perkins, the shower, etc. were still nowhere to be seen. Now of course we remember Perkins and the shower when we see the film denatured into a daylong version of itself. Our memory assists in the effort of putting the one still in a fluid relation to the next, which is I suspect something that happens at a preconscious level when we watch film at its ordinary speed.

A similar sort of thing happens with Gordon’s genuinely disorienting piece Left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right, which splits Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool into two panels with alternating frames projected on each side, one the reverse of the other. One frame flashes on the right, followed by black leader, and the next frame, flipped in reverse, flashes on the left, followed by black leader, and so on. The visual result is a double and mirrored image and a pulsing strobe that fills the entire room. The effort to compress the two into one—to flip the movie right side out—and make something like a cohesive fit is daunting. More so, however, is the aural effect. 24 Hour Psycho is blessedly silent (one shudders to think what speech and score slowed down to that duration would sound like). But Left is right keeps the soundtrack attached to its flipped over and alternating frames. What emerges is not quite human speech, but something that has all the cadence and rhythms of it appearing to come out of the mouths of the images broken up and split on the screen. The piece thus reveals an interesting difference between the way we process visual and aural stimulus. At some level of preconscious activity, we convert sequential stills into the perception of motion. We can even do this when the motion is revealed to be one still after the next or, with greater effort in Left is right, when the images strobe and mirror each other. We cannot do the same with speech, which, as the philosophers would say, is compositionally structured. Break speech down by inserting syncopated pauses and mumblings and it will sound like speech but communicate nothing at all.

Space keeps me from saying much about Between Darkness and Light, a riff on William Blake that projects The Exorcist and The Song of Bernadette (a 1943 movie about a woman claiming to see the Virgin Mary) on top of each other. One quick thing to notice is the sheer dominance black and white has when placed on top of color. We see through the blush of the one to the more saturated tones of the other. And of course the ironic juxtapositions of two films reversed in spiritual content yet similar in iconography and form.

Discussed:

Timothy Leary: A Biography, by Robert Greenfield. 2006
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson. 1971
A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick. 1977
A Scanner Darkly, (Movie) by Richard Linklater. 2006
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, by Lawrence Sutin. 1986

Time has been quite cruel to Timothy Leary’s best known prescription: that the mass indulgence of hallucinogens would result in a liberating transformation of American society. The “mystic vision” behind this bad notion actually belonged to the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, but Leary was seen as the “perfect person for the job” of advancing the alchemist’s agenda — initially through the dosing of famous artists, poets, intellectuals and musicians. Whatever value may lie in consciousness alteration among society’s vanguard, the more wide-spread the experiment became, the more terrible its public costs, the more Leary seemed to deny that it had all gone horribly wrong. The crimes of the Manson family should have been a sickening wake-up call, and if there is a flicker of vitality still left in the original proposition that some intrinsic and transcendent wisdom lies in the imbibing of psychedelics, the news that right-wing harpy Ann Coulter (a shrew so shrill even conservatives have tired of her) remains a wistful Deadhead might prove sobering.

Robert Greenfield’s 600+ page biography of Leary reveals a charismatic and talented Irish huckster who anti-heroically refused to sober up. Though he initially approached psychedelics with scientific skepticism and hopes for psychiatric use, the mystic vision imparted by Ginsberg took deep hold and propelled him from F. Scott Fitzgerald wanna-be to Acid King to pseudo-Revolutionary fugitive, before winding up as a Hollywood Squares style B-list celebrity with a penchant for fringe science. One of the oddest kinks in this declension, a turning point in Greenfield’s biography, is when Leary, behind bars and looking at rotting the rest of his life in prison, named names in the drug movement he had built. To show the depths of his penitence he penned articles for the conservative flagship The National Review, in which he lambasted the druggie music and wayward morals of his friend John Lennon (and Bob Dylan) while also attempting to lure his devoted ex-wife into arrest. Bummer.

Why did Leary flip and fink? Perhaps there was some residual effect from the stupendous amounts of all the acid, brain damage that lent a certain plasticity to his character, or maybe it was an addiction to a more common and insidious drug: fame. Leary behind bars was forgotten as the world moved on, a fate too grating to endure for an egomaniac, especially if all that was to be sacrificed were past principles and allies. Ratting out his friends, associates and lawyers would both place him back in the public eye and speed his release, and it seemed to have worked okay. Credit the man with dancing fast enough to avoid his “karma”.

A noteworthy side effect of this episode is the way Leary’s fall from grace came to symbolize the death of the sixties for so many. When a grand vision with utopian promise grabs a sizable chunk of culture then sputters out into betrayal and self-parody, it remains with the burned romantics, writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Philip K. Dick, to best chronicle the aftermath. Both men were masters of writing a certain style of drug addled jive, prose that crackled with wild energy and potential violence while teetering between complete paranoia and high comedy. Thompson, in his best known book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas captures both the triumph of the counter-culture in full bloom and its quick collapse:

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning . . .

And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

The human cost of that “broke and rolled back” was vicious in lives, health, and hope. Even as early as 1971, Thompson bemoaned the “fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip”:

He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a though to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. . . What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force – is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

It was among the terror of those “grim meat hook realities” that Philip K. Dick (PKD) often lived and wrote, combining, in his later novels, the sweaty dregs of the drug culture with the All-American horror of H. P. Lovecraft. In his A Scanner Darkly, the protagonist, Bob Arctor, covertly works as a narcotics agent in a bleakly futuristic Orange County California. Coupled with an array of high-tech surveillance gear, Arctor’s growing intake of the schizophrenia-inducing drug “Substance D” is driving him to narc on himself. Arctor is a burned out divorcée living with other thirty-something bachelor freaks in a drug den of a suburban house, a setting inspired by PKD’s own shattered home in Marin County of the early seventies. PKD, according to biographer Lawrence Sutin, was near broke and addicted to amphetamines. He suffered from bouts of agoraphobia and kept an open house policy for teenage hippies and dealers. During roughly the same time, an exiled Tim Leary was enjoying the life of a coked-up ski bum in Switzerland, haunting through force of celebrity and charm, the chalets of dubious aristocrats in a dance of mutual scams.

In A Scanner Darkly, one of the more psychotic characters, in order to burn the luckless protagonist Arctor, impersonates him on the phone and signs off with “Tune in, turn on and good-bye,” a stunt seemingly calculated to call down the wrath of the straights. Leary’s most famous phrase, of course, was “Tune in, turn on and drop out” and the last clause was already a tacit admission that the initial flush of psychedelic potential had failed to radically transform America . . . that the drug culture should simply “drop out” and either go into internal exile or live parasitically off of the straights. Funny how touchy straight society got on that score.

Leary was a fan of PKD’s sci-fi, and through a bit of druggie synchronicity, the guru manqué has a connection to the current movie version of A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater. Leary’s archivist through-out the sixties was Michael Horowitz, the father of the Hollywood actress Winona Ryder, who co-stars as in A Scanner Darkly. (Ryder regarded Leary as her godfather and has written a foreword to one of Leary’s latest biographies.) Horowitz, as archivist and friend, was put in a terrible bind when Leary started collaborating with the Feds in prison. He agonized over whether to surrender Leary’s files as Leary requested and was dismayed by the personal pressure to turn over incriminating letters. The New York Times reported that with the archives seized, the FBI hoped “they would be able to solve every drug case of the 1960s”. While the high aspirations and naiveté of the Feds were comical, the resulting paranoia among the drug culture was very real. The flood of undercover agents that hit the streets at the end of the Nixon administration, and the tactic of dealers to turn in the competition, were part of the reason that narcs were an obsession of both Thompson and PKD. The idea that the necessary intimacy of drug use could be contaminated by the subterfuge of a cop was the ultimate buzz-kill, the recession of that “high and beautiful wave,” and Leary’s betrayal helped to show how hollow the whole show was to begin with.

Called in front of a grand jury in 1975, Winona’s Dad refused to testify, befuddling the prosecuting attorney by maintaining that archivists possesses the same privileged confidentiality that is bestowed upon priests, spouses and attorneys. A clever tact, he escaped without indictment, and decades later, his daughter, in a PKD derived movie, would play a narc that plots to drive another narc insane in an elaborate plot to bust a drug manufacturer. That schizoid mirroring and fear/fascination with undercover cops was not just a literary trope for PKD. According to Sutin, in February of 1973, despite his still occasional use of cannibinoids, Dick wrote to the Justice Department offering up A Scanner Darkly as part of the fight against drugs.  Throughout the seventies he corresponded with the FBI to let them know that despite the appreciation of his novels by left-wing and even French literary critics, he, PKD, was a patriot.

Of all the many films that have been based on PKD’s works, Linklater’s is the closest in spirit and tone to such schizoid deliberations. The book, despite its thin veneer of sci-fi, was an obvious cri de coeur emanating from the sixties hangover. Stripped of its proper temporal context, Linklater’s film recalibrates much of Philip Dick’s horror and anguish as comedy, substituting gritty poverty and the bitterly-earned paranoia of the early seventies for nineties style slacker wit. In Southern California of the early seventies, it was possible that a bunch of edgy hippies and drug dealers might actually know someone, or have connections to, radical terrorist groups like the Weather Underground.  Similar connections between psychedelic slackers and today’s radical terrorism are hard to imagine, and the film characters efforts to make them stretch into silliness.

Imagining the future through science fiction was a shared fixation of Leary and Dick, one with flippant optimism and the other with tendentious horror. Their idiosyncratic approaches as futurists provided downright, well . . . . trippy codas to their lives. Leary briefly flirted with the idea of cheating death and getting a glimpse of tomorrow. Intrigued by cryogenic preservation, Leary, on his deathbed, talked of having a sketchy cryonic corporation sever and freeze his head for future re-animation. Owing to a lack of trust with said corporation, Leary backed out and passed away in front of cameras and surrounded by friends. Dick, who popularized the existential dilemmas of androids, died in 1982 but recently served as a model for a highly-detailed robotic head, a showcase for the work of Hanson Robotics Inc, complete with an “artificial-intelligence-driven personality”. The construct was designed to simulate a conversation with the dead author, but alas, David Hanson, the builder, misplaced the head on an airplane in December of last year and it has yet to reappear. Given such material, one’s tempted to ponder the bizarreness of it all, perhaps even by drifting into one of PKD’s parallel realms, a dark future in which the frosty noggin of Timothy Leary and the android cephalos of PKD bullshit each other on the nature of reality.

The palm at the end of the mind
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze décor…

—Wallace Stevens, Of Mere Being

These are the lines that keep repeating themselves in my mind as I sit in the church, the dull buzz of insects outside rearticulated by the dull buzz of the humans within, all of us repeating prayers and hymns and poems as though they are zen koans or Heraclitean fragments. We are in shock: that would explain it. The mind shuts down like a freezing thing here, even in July’s heat; in the landscape of despair memory goes numb and occluded monuments rise up to limn the horizon of one’s thinking. You end up grasping, half-blind and with stiff fingers, at words. And what are words? Puffs of air, aspirated, spent, already-too-late, guttural gestures. Words do not exist.

We are at a funeral. For a boy. Six months earlier I had been building a fort in winter with this boy, shoveling blocks of wet snow into the shape of a wall, then spiking it, Transylvania-like, with pine cones and fir boughs. I had watched him inhale the resiny tang of the boughs before he laid them into the snow and thought to myself, “I remember that. I remember smelling winter as a boy.” And now, in July, I am sitting in a church muttering poetry, remembering my memories of this boy and celebrating his death.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

Churches tend to be dead things, all hard, marble surfaces, shellacked canvases, dingy clothes and stale water. That’s why they burn incense: to cover up the smell of death. And then there is the absurd, vertical orientation they force upon you. All this standing up, raising your voices to heaven, getting down on your knees, standing up again, bowing your head… God doesn’t live in the steeple or the sky. But we do anything in a church to avoid looking along the horizontal axis, to avoid looking at one another, because that would mean looking the thing in the face.

“Something terrible has happened,” we would have to admit. “It cannot be contained; we cannot contain it. It creeps in upon us and it creeps beyond us.” So we look up, we sit down, we lift up our hearts and pray. But if you look along the horizontal axis in a church, if you eschew the vertical to which you are beckoned, you begin to perceive the shimmering aura of alienation in which every human being is enveloped. In church, each of us is alone.

Which of course is one of the reasons for going to church in the first place—to transcend alienation (rather than puncture it), to remind ourselves that we are brothers and sisters in the eyes of God, that we are together in this, not separate, and that God is with us. We are not alone. But God is mute, and we in this church cannot speak. We can only pray.

I am so angry, I have to pee. So does my sister. Thankfully, I follow her out down the aisle.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

There were two hundred people in the church; there are fifty more in its entranceway and another two hundred outside. Most of them seem to have their mouths open. They are panting, weeping. The sky looks incredibly stupid above their heads. It is an oily, dull sky, thick with stupidity. It must be cruel as well, because it is raining heat down upon them. It is torrid outside. Everyone is suffering. My sister and I relieve ourselves, go back in and sit down. More prayers. Still no answer. That’s when I notice the canopy of green in one of the side doors. The boy’s father stands up and delivers a eulogy. It is one of the most stunningly courageous acts I have ever seen a human perform. He does not break. He speaks of a “brotherhood of pain,” how people used to derive their identities from suffering. Then he implores us not to join them. “Andrew had a good life,” he says, “Please. Leave your pain behind you. Leave it here.”

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Through a side door there is a green canopy that I have been studying for some time now. It is a riotous growth of vines and leaves that smothers everything beyond. It emanates coolness. It glows. I feel like sitting there for fifty years and letting it grow over everything, the whole church and me too, smother everything, lend us a bit of shade from the idiotic, hysterical sky with all its light and heat and scuttering clouds. I would like to feel that green canopy envelope me, then start growing inside me. Death.

There’s a thick strand in philosophy’s braid that curls around death. I am not a philosopher, nor a poet—though some of my best friends are. (Wallace Stevens was both, it seems.) But I know that studying philosophy can make your life better, in no small way because it can help you deal with death, calmly and with equanimity. I’ve been puzzled by this poem since the first time I read it. Perhaps it is a measure of callousness on my part, but sitting in that church I found myself realizing not that philosophy illuminates death, but that death illuminates poetry:

The palm at the end of the mind
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze décor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

The rain falls ever harder, and noon is as grey as six in the morning. I’m in a tiny mill town in the Salzkammergut region of Austria, and it’s rained consistently for the past eleven days. Although the geographic distances aren’t much, this Austria is culturally quite far from the Vienna of Zweig, Hundertwasser, Jelinek et al., and even farther from the Mozart delirium (chocolates, operas, and 250th birthdays) now taking place in Salzburg. I’ve come here for a congress of papermakers, and suppose Steyrermühl was chosen more for the historical presence of paper along the Traun River than for the industrial paper mill that now seems to be the sole life of the town.

I’ll be giving a brief presentation about watermarks—those oft-misunderstood marks most visible when paper is backlit. Over the past few months, as I considered what I might bring to this show-and-tell, I got sidetracked.

Getting over History

On my way north from Italy I traveled through Trentino-Alto Adige, or Südtirol, and stopped in Bozen and Meran. When I mentioned this to an Italian friend from a bit farther south, he was repulsed, asking why I would want to go someplace where everyone’s a Nazi. This was said in jest, of course, but not completely. I said such an opinion would be like saying all Italians are Fascists, to which he replied “no, that’s very different, you see, because we had partisans fighting the Fascists, but none of the people stood up against what was going on in Germany and Austria.” Our little disagreement aside, when I was considering how to introduce watermarks, I figured my first stop should be Google; after all, fewer and fewer people still think of going to a printed, bound, multi-volume encyclopedia. So, I googled “watermarks,” and the first link, followed by many others in the top ten, was the website of a documentary that debuted last year about a Viennese Jewish female swimming team, the women’s forced flights to several other continents in the nineteen-thirties, and their recent reunion. That’s one more strike against my bicker-backup. I’m either naïve, or would just really like to think that people and nations can eventually get over their histories.

A Do-it-Yourself Digital Future

Several more of the top ten links for “watermarks” sent me to sites for creating my very own digital watermark to protect documents and impart my otherwise generic, Wonderbread copy-paper printouts with a distinguished air. The truth is that real watermarks, as they were born several hundred years ago, are an endangered species, while their imitators are proliferating right and left. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, or trying to change the inevitable course of things; I just mean that it’s really refreshing when I meet someone who has even a vague idea of these symbols’ rich past.

I’m enchanted by these signs. The subtle white-on-white mark, transparently traced out by minute differences in thickness, can be missed if one isn’t paying attention. There are catalogues upon catalogues of the most common signs used—grapes, coats of arms, hands, initials, anchors, fool’s caps—and, like runes or linear A, their origins and meanings remain largely mysterious. They have political implications as well: one of the more common watermarks in European handmade papers is the Pro Patria (any Vaterland remarks, anyone?) mark, usually a sword- or staff-wielding sovereign enclosed by a fence or within a walled city-state. Imitation, quality control, and copyright issues had come up in paper long before the industrial revolution and information-age; the Baselstab, or Basel crozier, was first used by papermakers in Basel, as it is the city symbol. Because they also made what was widely known as the best (and most expensive) paper, this mark was copied all around Europe, allowing the lesser papermakers in many countries to tell their clients it was a high quality imported paper, and therefore charge them significantly more.

Then there are the kitschy chiaroscuro watermarks with heads of state and other prominent figures—oversized, more pompous relatives of the tiny ones found in paper currency. The practicality of the line watermark, usually used as a maker’s mark or mill’s signature, is more humble, and more easily written over, than the flashy, cameo-like portrait chiaroscuro sort.

I suppose it’s the sheer understatement of most watermarks that so attracts me. As directing trends produce more and more thirty-second television spots with hundreds of images flashed for mere milliseconds, and Photoshop allows anyone to crank up the contrast to create oceans of saccharine, Technicolor images of a brighter, better world, watermarks are a humble, slow, quiet presence. The signs are there, and are easily overlooked.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be found here.