Wee review

This is going to be short, with nothing significant in it, so I figure that I might as well make sure that the illustration is worth looking at. For those who wonder about my process, it's creating the images that takes most time. Getting links to various sites takes time, too, and coming up with the ideas and the writing is nearly no time at all, but the illustrating takes an eternity, and I'm often not very happy with the results in any case.

T is pleasant, sure, to see one’s name in print;
A book ’s a book, although there ’s nothing in ’t. -- Byron

First, a book, and then a movie. That's the way of things, after all. All books turn into movies when once they're watered with sufficient money and vanity. The main page article at Wikistupidia today was Battlefield Earth -- a film designed and executed as a war against humanity. Had it possessed any force, it would have qualified as a form of assault. It, you see, was a book. I don't know why it had been a book, except that it required delusions on the part of fewer people to appear that way.

The book I have to review as a word of warning, but slight warning, is Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I bought it on my last paycheck exsanguination, and I did so on the advice of the reviewers at

1. The New York Times
2. The New York Review of Books
3. Times Literary Supplement (link not available).

I did so, and now I have to demur from all of those established, celebrated, and wise reviewers.

One hates to show one's own vainglory, but this one does hope that you readers mine are clicking on the links, as I have made an effort to have them be entertaining and even metaphorical. If you have, then you already have a sinking feeling in the pits of your stomaches or stomae, because you have seen the author's photograph at the Simon Armitage site. It's the kind of thing that can cause fits. As a man of limited beauty, myself, I do not begrudge the Poet his half-face Mesmer portraits, nor his grimace of portent.

I got the book on Friday, and today is Monday, and it is done. What I found interesting about myself during reading was that I spent far less time reading the translation than I did reading the Pearl Poet. I couldn't keep my eyes on the right hand side of the page. I was magnetically drawn over to the noble verse itself. Part of this is because I have read the poem in Middle English before, so the language isn't that much of a barrier to me. However, when I was not drawn to the left, I was often as not catapulted there by the translation.

Oh, there are stinkers. Stinkers are inevitable in any translation. I have to pick on the poor poet some time (although I suppose he is not so poor now that his book is selling like mad, and I think of how Aurelian Townshend died "a poor pocky poet" who would write a century of sonnets for a few pence), so I'll stick in my thumb and pull out something dumb.

Around 2116, we get this:

He's lurked about too long
engaged in grief and gore.
His hits are swift and strong --
he'll fell you to the floor.

Well, "he'll fell you to the floor" kind of sounds dumb. It's not Anglo-Saxon litotes. It fails to undercut enough to catch the spirit of "that was a good king," but it's following on a description of chopping and maiming and clobbering and mincing people. It's the kind of thing that makes you rub your eyes, do a double take, and fly to the left page to see what the Pearl Poet wrote. Was our glaring contemporary being fair?

He has wonyd here ful yore,
On bent much baret bende.
Ayayn his dyntes sore
Ye may not yow defende

is what our unknown poet wrote. Don't ask me to translate it, please. You can pretty much do that yourself. You don't need my efforts.

Oh, alright!

He has lived here for years,/ On doing much grief and gore bent./ Against his sore blows/ You may not yourself defend.

Simon Armitage has decided to go the "fluid" route and avoid the stiffness of previous poets (dunces including W. S. Merwin and Tolkien, we gather) who tried to maintain cognates where possible. Being knocked down just seems a little less fluid and a little more watery. I don't consider it quite the same in force as being defenseless. Never mind, though. Perhaps Mr. Armitage's squire is telling Gawain that Bersilak is a black belt in Aikido or Tai Chi.

What bugs me, though, and the reason I am dissatisfied and constantly jumping to the left, is not a particular weak spot here or there. I commend Mr. Armitage generally on his translation. If his goal was liveliness and a translation into contemporary poetry, he did a fine enough job. What scarred my mind as I tried to read the translation was not any given word choice, but the fact that the alliteration is whatever happens to fit the form and sense for contemporary British English. The Pearl Poet was not a fool, I think we can all agree, nor a shoddy craftsman. Double negatives were still in his language, but they were not at all necessary. The general subject-verb-object monotony of Modern English was dominant for him, too. However, he varies. He chooses which consonants to alliterate, decides when to repeat words, knows when a double negative will be amplification.

There is a muscularity to his preferred consonants. He likes p's and t's when men are being mainly, and he likes l's and m's when ladies are lounging (and lying). The effect is to make the throat work, to make the sound embattled, to create importance with repetition. With Armitage, you can easily miss that there is any alliteration present, but with the Pearl Poet, there is no way you can forget it. His linguistic effects are not pyrotechnic, but they are expert. Form and sense are perfectly married. They're so perfectly married that we sit back and stare, slack jawed, at how one human could have gotten every word right over the course of thousands of lines.

Listen to the original lines, above. Listen to how the 'you not defend you' acts as a sign of absolute doom, how impossible the situation is as the page presents it. "Knock you down" is not merely an accidental bit of bathos, it's a sign that fluidity has come at the cost of appreciation.

---

Oh, the movie?

Well, I'm watching "The Holiday." Critics were dismayed that it did not do well at the box office last year. One made a bitter comment about how the public had decided, instead, to go see some fart and vomit comedy instead.

Well, I don't know about the latter very much. After all, I watched pieces of "Jackass" on Comedy Central last night and laughed until tears came to my eyes, but I did so with my finger on the "flip back" button on the remote so that I would not see at all any of the bits that offended me. However, I will say that "The Holiday" is about letter perfect as romantic comedies go.

I don't generally like romantic comedies, as my own romantic life is more farce than comedy, and I do not find that the happy ending ever comes. After all, any ending is necessarily not happy, when it comes to romance, and freezing the action at the moment of marriage and claiming that all of time has been soaked in bliss, that the future is only an unending line of joys, can no longer fool me. However, for clever dialog, true characterization, and innovative situation, I have to say that "The Holiday" gets very high marks. Oh, and beautiful people who would never be without suitors have to go through much suffering to find suitable suits. Other than that, it's pretty good.

Sorry to have taken so much of your time today.

What's Brown and Sticky?

Supposedly, the "funniest joke in Britain" was the title to this entry (with the answer being "a stick") one year. It didn't seem very funny to me, but the results have gotten better lately.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist. -- Jean Jacques Rousseau

Our friends in the neurosciences have done much. Their new machines allow them to look at brains in distress, brains at rest, and even brains conjoined in congress. They have looked at the mind of contemplative monks and nuns, they say, although they have really only seen the brain, and they have looked at the mad and bad alike. They have long known that tumors explain religious mania.

In fact, there is a sort of belief lurking in a lot of science that extraordinary spirituality must have a physical analog, at best, or an aberrant physiology to explain it, at worst. Such theories may explain Benedict Joseph Labre, but they may not, too. The few cases of documented religious visionaries who were "cured" by electro-shock therapy or surgery is just another sneaking insult woven into the discussion of religious experience. It's ok. We religious are accustomed to being suspect.

However, it seems to me that this very insult, this very flail used against religion, is a confirmation of it. If there is a part of the brain that says, "This is the voice of the divine," then doesn't that mean that the experience of the supernatural is natural? In other words, if every brain has a receptor for religious experience, doesn't that prove, for once and all, that religious experience is part of the very condition of having a human brain? Doesn't it make the people who deny any possibility of such expression or experience ... well... weird? Doesn't it make them as unnatural as a person who refuses to eat carbohydrates or protein?

Still, I don't mean to offer a lashing to those who are aspiritual. They have my peace and best wishes. I have always hoped that they would stop trying to beat me with this stick, but it's not a big deal if people want to think that my brain is disordered. It probably is.

However, here is the thing that occurred to me today, the thing that has me puzzled. If there are tumors, microadenomas, and brain injuries that can result in people having delusional experiences of the divine, then is it possible that there are similar things that can prevent people from hearing the legitimate religious stimulus? If so, why are we not studying this?

I would advocate only one thing: we change our definition of the human from a creature who apprehends and experiences only natural stimulus to a creature whose normal and healthy operation involves the real or experiential apprehension and experience of the supernatural. In other words, if we look at a person who says that he has never felt that there is anything grander or greater than the natural world and say that this is aberrant, rather than looking at the person who sees "heaven in a grain of sand" and saying that that is a malady, would we not be likely to seek out the conditions that stifle such experience? I do not say that my version of religious intuition or experience is normal, but, when I look through history and mankind from China to Peru, I see people experiencing something.

Perhaps we can turn this stick to a lever. Perhaps we can even prise open our framing metaphors for life.

What I've been doing

I owe my many readers some word of explanation about why I have been absent from these frames for so long. Part of it has been due to lassitude and inconsiderateness, for I have decided that I want my fans to anticipate and thereby enjoy the next post all the more, but part of it has been due to my overloaded extracurricular activities.

You see, I was called upon, by those whom I may not name, to infiltrate and stop a gun-running circuit operating on I-95. This involved spending considerable time drinking absinthe and mescal at The Li'l Rebel roadhouse and tavern while I gained the confidence of the one known as Big Coot. Despite his moniker, Big Coot was not, in fact, my goal, for he was a small man in a large organization of perhaps six. However, with the Big Coot in my pocket, I might be able to gain access to Gemany (pronounced "Gemini"), a two-toned blond with a checkerboard tattoo on the sole of her left foot and dagger ear rings, who was purportedly the leader and chief liaison to the higher ups.

It was as a consequence of a bottle of mescal and a discussion of low pressure weather systems and the movement of air that I found myself in a knife fight with Tim "Leadhead" Jimson, whom I called "Weed," behind the Li'l Rebel Friday night. The local police arrested all of us together, after sending several bystanders to the hospital for unrelated wounds that were discovered during processing.

This led to my needing to rely upon Juan Abigados, the noted loanshark of Blufton, South Carolina, who is deeply connected to the Paris underworld. There was no question of making the "big" with him, but the bail money sent ripples through the Parisian gangland, where my personal asset manager has been worried about my long position in Asian currency markets. He is convinced that the Chinese Communist Party is about to unpeg the Yuan and thereby allow exchange rates to lower in order to increase national market positions in manufacturing. Well, it's hardly worth mentioning how dangerous this would be to my Parisian contacts! If the Yuan falls, the Malay and Chinese gangs will be desperate for liquidity and will dump merchandise, devaluing all assets in the Parisian black economy. That, in turn, will ruin Juan Abigados, and that will make him sell information about my true identity. We can't have that.

Obviously, I had to do something drastic.

Therefore, I contacted Lady Elizabeth Cantrip, my London paramour, and I had her begin a desperate course of action. She organized a "protest" of Chinese human rights policies as the Olympic torch passed through London. This was an ruse, and my only fear was that my former colleagues in MI-5 would see through it too quickly. It was important for my agents to actually seize the torch briefly so that they could implant a small microchip with an RFID device that I had to hastily design and program over the Internet the night before.

Now, when the torch finally reaches Beijing, the Chinese finance minister will read the chip and be sure to keep the exchange rate high, thus keeping my monetary futures secure and preventing the gang warfare in Paris that would otherwise break out.

So far, all of my plans are working out, but I'm still concerned about Gemany and why she refused to go out with me.

--

So, that's it.

Well, either that or I've been sick and depressed. You can take your pick of which you believe to be more likely.

Corrupt, Entitled Overlords of American Myth

Ok, that does it! I have had absolutely enough. Some feckless ass was on the television my mother was watching this morning, Holy Saturday by the way, explaining how to raise YOUR CHILD to be a millionaire. His website is a monument to himself, with copyright notices aplenty. He was on this television show with a youngster, and the youngster looked like a parody of Gordon Gecko (the video isn't there, yet; you should thank me).

I am FED UP with the idea of the imperial rich man.

I am sick unto death of the myth of the CEO.
Look, it's not that I necessarily hate the rich. I don't hate politicians, and I don't hate rich people. Some friends of mine are extremely rich (really extremely), and some are in politics, but there is a huge difference between a person who is rich and a person who sets out to be rich, just as there is a big difference between public service and power. However, in America, we have this desire to be ruled. It's nasty and shameful, and we don't like to admit it, but we have an inbred hatred of anarchy.

I thought, when I read it, that Carlyle was just being provocative, or perhaps he was falling victim to the same malicious, poltergeist zeitgeist that moved Matthew Arnold to do his thing. Both of these authors, and many more beside, said that we loves us some powerful men, that we needs us someone to give us orders. They seem proto-crypto-fascist to us, and loads of folks hate Carlyle, in particular, for what he said. Don't get me wrong, the zeitgeist can explain them, but it can't explain them away.

In the United States, we have always followed our own accidental way. We have put a bounty on public intellectuals. They are not allowed. Seriously: we don't allow them. We allow journalists, but not intellectuals. As soon as it looks like one is about to arise, we point out that she or he is a communist, a feminist, a Black nationalist, crazy, or something else so that we can black list and black ball them and keep them off center stage. We relegate them to "think tanks," at best, and then those release corporate reports. The result is that our policies emerge by accident. Our practices far supersede our theories. We also have this wonderful practice of talking up freedom and liberty already assured and democracy by definition and never investigating what they mean. Instead, we are more addicted to tradition than a Dickensian beadle or a Waugh headmaster.

Why do we avoid socialized medicine? Because our private system is the system we formed in the mists of time. Why do we have gerrymandering? Because this is the system we worked out ages ago. Why do we have the electoral college? Because the founding fathers (great men, all) decided on it in their wisdom.

"Money well timed, and properly applied, will do anything." John Gay, The Beggar's Opera, II xii

Well, I've worked at Wikipedia for four years now. I've written some 250+ articles on the site. I admit this to my shame, I'm sure, but it is a truth I must confess. I was drawn to it for two reasons. The first was that there is a lack of opportunity for those of us who are generalists to write. The professional journals do nothing but "applied Lacanian insights into the underclass (re)presentations of the (m)other in the post-colonial narratives of Mrs. Gaskell" or the similar. The second reason was that it promised to have a flat hierarchy and to test the idea that the crowd, each contributing, was, in aggregate, well intentioned and knowledgeable. People who knew nothing would concede to those who knew, and people who wanted a quick giggle would give ground to people who helped them with information.

However, Wikipedia has a CEO-founder. James Wales (Jimbo, Jimmy, etc.) made money in business and then donated some to found Wikipedia. The project succeeded, and I suppose everyone out there knows to what degree it has succeeded. What is curious, and what has always been curious, is that, from the day the thing started to this, people have predicted that it would collapse under its own weight, and, from the first day to this, James Wales has been a sort of voice of authority or CEO for Wikipedia.

The US loves CEO's. George W. Bush promised to be the "first CEO president" of the United States, and I would argue that he has, indeed, been exactly that. In what way has he failed to be one?

The CEO is an ubermensch. He walks into a meeting, where competing underlings shout out their reports, and, in a dash, a trice, a flash, he uses his superior will to decide between them. He is "the deciderer." The CEO does not read all those reports. They would sully the instinct. They would pollute the will. They would tether the judgment. They would drag the CEO's impulses into the paralysis of consideration and contemplation, and, worst of all, fear. The attitudes of the employees do not matter (see Cheney's response to 70% of the American people thinking the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea: "So?"). You see, the CEO is fearless, and therefore attuned to "instinct" and will.

George W. Bush has boasted of not reading newspapers, not reading reports from his Cabinet, not reading much at all (when he isn't boasting that he reads deep stuff, even if it hasn't been released yet), because he needs to remain the one to decide, not to deliberate. He sees his function as the Magic 8 Ball of government -- when all things are indeterminate, just ask, and he'll pick one for you.

Of course, most corporate CEO's have one task: the profitability of the stock. Notably, this is not "viability of the company," "earnings of workers," "quality of goods and services," but only "profitability to shareholders." Now, "profit" can be generated a lot of ways. One is to sell the company. Another is to increase markets. Another is to decrease costs. Since all other companies are trying the same things, "selling the company" and "decreasing costs" are a hell of a lot easier than "increasing markets." Now, interestingly, "costs" include cleaning up the environment, health plans, safety measures, work environment, and workers. What's more, if you fire 2 of 3 workers, threaten the third, and hire temporaries without benefits to make up the slack, you have increased profit, even though it actually costs more to do that because the costs are on a different part of the balance sheet. The CEO who figured this out got rich.

This is our hero?

This is our leader?

Well, Wikipedia, as a corporate entity of users, has worked consistently to establish hierarchies. The people who volunteer there find the idea that no one is in charge intolerable. They really hate it, and each thinks that, since no one is in charge (except Jimbo), he or she should be in charge. When Wikipedia died, it did not do so because it got too large, but rather because it got too small. Power developed, and people selected themselves for it. They wanted, desperately, passionately, to know where they stood in the ranks. They wanted to know who was above them and who below, and they wanted to know what it meant. It was important for each and every one of them, and therefore all of them had a seriously vested interest in making sure that there was a single point of power above them all, a CEO.

How can you be in charge of a project with no hierarchy, unless you can assure all the rest that there is a single commander and that this commander favors you? If Jimbo were not the CEO of Wikipedia, then none of the others could claim to have rights.

Remember my definition of the CEO's job, above. The CEO is to be the deciderer. The CEO is to be the tie-breaker, the leader, the one who is unburdened with ethical or moral considerations that might lead to fear. The CEO is to be, in other words, an ego unburdened by superego.

Google "CEO scandal" some time. The list is long. Some throw parties for themselves with ice sculptures that urinate vodka. Some get hookers. Some get hookers and vodka. Some spy. Some start wars across the planet without thinking about it. This is to be expected: the CEO is impulse, not judgment. The CEO is "profit" (i.e. "gimme") and not work. So, when Jimbo Wales turned out to be screwing Wikipedia to screw "the Canadian Anne Coulter," it was no surprise. After all, the man listed Ayn Rand as his favorite author.

So, do you want to make your child a CEO? Do you want to make "millionaire" the goal? That's easy: teach the child that its impulses are perfect and give it arbitrary obstacles. Make sure that it remains selfish, inconsiderate, unthinking, and gluttonous. You can do it, America: you worship them, so you can make your children the gods they already think themselves.

Nothing Ain't Worth Nothing If It's Free

"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." -- Joseph Conrad

I only have one photo for today, so I'll make up for that with many quotations, both appropriate and delightful. Indeed, an allusion in the title should be noted by the keen eyed observer. That the world created by capital trading has only one god, and that being capital, is not news. Capital sets its own rules, its own code of morality, and I can recall T. S. Eliot's lines in Choruses from The Rock that we are in a new world, where people claim to worship nothing at all. Capital is on the pediment and on the mount of our institutions of mind. A publicly traded corporation that misses a chance to increase profits may be sued by its share holders, for example, and so one that passes up a chance to save money and pollute in order to be wise and clean up is acting against capital. In ethics, we have "wrong," and in religion we have "evil," but in capital, we have "waste" and "unprofitable." Since a corporation is a person (click, if you don't believe me), it is a person operating in a separate set of behavioral norms.

I really, really want to rant and rave about the CEO, and I keep promising myself that I will, just as soon as my bile is distilled and my thoughts are sharpened, but I must keep away from that theme for now to talk about something much more timely.

Bertolt Brecht had a lot to say about people who knew the prices of things, but not what they do. It's an interesting problem: the prevalence of price over substance. We have it many places, today. For example, we have had a spate of government as bargain hunting, where this policy or that was debated, not in terms of its public good, but in terms of its price in money. It used to be the Republican by-word, in fact, that the government that costs least governs best.

After the photo, a very strange connection.

"What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told expressly, that they neither marry nor are given in marriage." -- Jonathan Swift

Well, at the beginning of last week, one of my favorite public figures fell. Elliot Spitzer's name came up in the investigation of an online escort service. Do I need to link to the story? If so, which would be even nearly impartial? The New York Times broke the story, so one can read about it there. By now, every American with a television set, most with a radio, and some residents of other nations, knows that Governor Spitzer appears to have employed a "high cost prostitute." Every comment, every analysis, every report made a point of the fact that "Kristen," Governor Spitzer's liaison, was expensive. She was very expensive.

I have been puzzled by this. Yes, journalists are, in general, stupid. They repeat themselves in preference to thinking. They rephrase the rip-n'-read from the AP 90% of the time. Television producers like to show women's stockings (as that's the best way to say "whore" without words: show an extended leg with stockings being put on). After the first day, the news critters went crawling about to get pictures of "Kristen," as they were interested in making her famous, and they began going through their Rolodexes of prostitutes to put on camera (and they did not seem to have trouble finding these phone numbers). Apparently, one investigative journalist has discovered that Kristen the prostitute lies on MySpace.

So here's what's bugging me: is it better or worse that Mr. Spitzer spent $4,000 on his prostitute instead of some lower sum?

"Most men are in a coma when they are at rest and mad when they act." -- Epicurus

Think about it: Hugh Grant pulled his Porsche over and got an act performed on him for 1% of what the governor spent. Like "Kristen," "Divine Brown" got some celebrity (I won't link, as it's obscene, but she made a pornographic film, and it was, if you can believe it, poorly reviewed even by that industry's standards). The fact that she could barely speak coherent English, barely sustain the male lewd gaze for more than a few seconds, and the fact that she had all of the strength of character of a street walker meant that her fame (like all fame, Aurelius said) was fleeting. Josh Levin did a very amusing piece on the service of Kristen's service and how it was "less a whore house than a whore home," so one supposes there is value added. Was Hugh Grant better than Elliot Spitzer for being frugal, or was Spitzer better for having a prestige brand?

Why is everyone interested in the cost of all things? Are female viewers and listeners thinking, "How can anyone pay that much for that?" and male viewers and listeners thinking, "That must be awesome to get something worth that much?" In fact, there is a mystique about the "high priced call girl." Such creatures are supposed by the public to be the nude models of men's magazines, starlets, and other refined and impossible prey/entrepreneurs who are calculating the cost of access very precisely and driving up the market value by scarcity.

Do we say, "Well, at least the governor gave in to a really excellent temptation," or do we say, "His crimes are worse, because he spent that kind of money on something he could have gotten anywhere?" Do we condemn Hugh Grant more, or do we excuse him more ("He must be really psychologically ill to do that")? Why the focus on the price, and not the thing?

National Public Radio alone tried, and only for a single story, to answer "why do men risk everything and go to a prostitute." Unfortunately, they got an expert on street exchange who could speak only of the Hugh Grant price range customers, and he reassured the listeners that "only 1 in 5 or 1 in 6" men have employed what Terry Pratchett termed "a lady of negotiable affections." 20-30% of men? I think I know quite a few men, and I am absolutely sure that none has ever told me of ever using a prostitute. Either some men are pretty habitual or the professor's statistics rely on some obscure and insane formula.

What's interesting to me about this obsession with the cost is that it doesn't seem to come up when the gay public figures have prostitutes. When "Jeff Gannon," White House friend, turned out to be a gay prostitute, no one mentioned whether he was a cheap or expensive whore. When Barney Frank turned out to have been paying a prostitute, we didn't really get the cost per hour. When the New Jersey governor turned up the same way, the price was not quoted. Of course most of the scandals have been about free gay sex or coerced gay sex. Foley was trying to coerce it from underage boys in Congress. George Michael and Larry Craig were looking for free gay sex from police.

So, the career of Governor Spitzer is over because he spent a great deal of money for Kristen, while Hugh Grant goes on. The incontinent Craig remains in office. Do not ask the public what prostitution means: all that they have learned is the price.

Addendum: In response to comments, which said that I had ended without the usual Cato-like denunciation, let me add this observation.

The constant reference to price is, in fact, the reiteration of the crime of prostitution, over and over again. Every time some news drone mentions how much is spent for what, that person is branding the woman a prostitute and branding the customer a John. Furthermore, every reference to price, and especially every repetition of the price, commits, once more, the actual crime in prostitution: it reduces a person to an organ and an organ to a monetary value and that exchange to rights of possession and use. It is reducing sex to a commodity and a person to a single anatomical feature, demanding particularized gestures and ceremonies of one person, and offering up power for money. Of course that's the bottom line crime capitalism has within it, as everyone from Swift to Jean Luc Godard has made clear: it is symbolic cannibalism. To continue to fixate on the price is to continue to buy a woman's sex.

Miscellany 1: Stars and Nuts

Why do the heathens rage?

"The horror of getting up is unparalleled, and I am filled with amazement every morning when I find that I have done it." -- Lytton Strachey

My first question is about the morning star. If you're up before dawn, and it's easy to be up before dawn these days, as the clocks have changed, but the sun hasn't, then you've seen, there in the East, a bright point. That's Venus. It's a "wandering star," because it seems to wiggle in the sky, unlike the "fixed stars."

The Babylonians and the Greeks saw the planet as the very essence of the feminine. The former called it Ishtar, and the latter called it Aphrodite. Why they associated the morning with women is beyond me, as both also associated the Moon, for pretty doggone obvious reasons, with women (because both are unapproachable, of course). In Latin, it was called Lucifer, the light bringer, and in the Masai, it's known as the "orphan boy."

Why is Venus important? It's important because it is above the horizon just before dawn, of course, and because it's easily seen in the early evening before disappearing. That makes it somewhat mysterious, but it also makes it important.

I don't care.

I do care about the Fallen Angel's association, because it suggests, like the Masai, that its position as not-night and not-day is an ejection. If you had to figure out why this very bright star was there some of the time and seemed to be away from the night proper and away from the day, you could either conclude that it was the Sun's harbinger or that it was suffering some sort of punishment. Thus, the fallen angel thing works.

What bothers me enough to write, though, is a really awful explanation of the importance of Venus I got from edumucational filims back when I were a laddie. You see (or I saw) shaggy cavemen in hairy clothes grunting in a cavern opening, and a Voice of Authority (a Metatron simulacrum) saying, "Primitive man lived in fear of the darkness, and this is why the morning star was so important to him. It assured him that day would return, and this is why tribes worshiped the morning star, which we know is actually the planet Venus."

Similarly, the explanation for the Fenris Wolf and such is that solar eclipses frightened the stupid clods and made them afraid that the light would never return again, and therefore they had to come up with the wolf, although in some places and people the Sun is the evil one.

Now tell me, reader, when you have noticed a solar eclipse, how worried did you get? Did you have weeks of worry and uncontrollably sweaty palms? Did your crops wilt, and did you fear that they would? When night has fallen, have you worried, even once, that it would never end? Now, I know that there are experiences that can make you think that the night will never end, but that's different. Indeed, Myles na gCopaleen said that he knew a man who was caught at a poetry reading who ripped his own face off as the only course commensurate with honor. However, have you noticed any animals, even the ones that are most susceptible to getting gobbled up, exhibiting any signs of fear over the possibility of eternal night? Well, I haven't.

As I looked up at Venus this morning, I noticed that my dog was peeing on the grass and sniffing where the neighbor Dachshund had peed, that she was intrigued by his medical conditions and concerned that he might be making an incursion into her property. To prevent this hegemony was her greatest concern. She didn't notice Venus and couldn't be persuaded to care. The invasion of the Dachshunds is much more relevant, she tells me. Why on earth would our ancestors be dumber than dogs, dumber than birds, dumber than deer, and dumber than cows? Why would they build civilization on inferential logic, only to forget every evening?

You know why early civilizations cared about Venus? It's because our circadian rhythms are 23.5 hr, and the day is 24 hr. In other words, left to our own devices, we wake up a bit earlier than we should, or we go to bed a bit later than we should. Before electric lights, guess which one was more common? So, there you are, donning your shaggy coat and wondering why no one has invented haircuts, and you need to go out to do some violence: when do you start out? You want to get to the place before the enemy (whether it's a Woolly Mastodon or the Persian Army), and so you pay careful attention to the light bringer. This is not because you're in the mood for love, but because you need to get going before dawn to be there at dawn. Far from grunting, autistic, amnesiac subanimals, the earlier civilizations were strategists who knew how to steal a march.Topic 2: Stars

The other thing pressing on my mind lately is how irate people get when high profile actors and singers and actresses and spokespeople endorse a political cause or other. They get furious. They declare curses upon whole cities, industries, and denounce all previous films and songs because the composers or actors in them disagree. (Warning: many of those links are to extremely nasty sites.) It's quite something.

I was thinking about this as I considered telling a student who is interested in sad music about Joy Division's "Atmosphere," (link is to YouTube video) which is one of the saddest things around (although "The Eternal" (nicest of the sites, there) is probably even more elegiac). I was thinking that this student is very determinedly conservative, and I realized that I could tell her that Ian Curtis was actually very much a conservative, too. I then thought about how I found his politics surprising, dubious, etc., and I realized that, in my own way, I was falling into the trap.

It wasn't the first time.

I'm a Jonathan Swift specialist, which means that I am also an Alexander Pope specialist. I recently gave a paper where I discussed how miserably Pope failed in the job of theodicy in The Essay on Man and how the cheerful, tug-your-forelock view that seems to be espoused in the poem is not Pope's, that Pope's view is actually just a big melange. The problem is that these guys were conservatives, and I'm not. Now, with Swift, it's easier. Swift was more of an anti-change person than a conservative. He didn't want to go back to anything. He just thought that all the people coming along with ideas to improve the world were venal, stupid, and arrogant, and he was right. In fact, he would be somewhat liberal today, as the people he fought as liberals are now the conservatives. Pope, though, was much more of a power magnet. He liked to be on the winning side, and he liked order, and he wished that order liked him more.

My temptation was to remake them, to save them from their limited perspective, to either make them secretly like me or to make excuses. However, in the end, I had to remember that what Swift and Pope and Fielding stood for lost. What Aphra Behn wanted was wrong. I had to get over it.

I think, when people get all upset about their radio stars or screen players having a view, it's because they confuse enjoying the art with endorsing the artist. That singer's song sounded just like your life, so she simply must be like you. When she isn't, you get mad at her managers, or you get mad that she was only pretending to be like you. She isn't "really from Texas," or isn't "really country," and Clooney must be "trying something," and Susan Sarandon must be "on a secret mission," just as Jane Fonda was a "secret agent." It's the fact that the person isn't like you, and yet you identified with him or her, that makes for the hatred.

It doesn't help that, when we read a novel, we have to project ourselves as readers into the text. We have to identify and assume an illusionistic mantle. With films and television, the illusion is cast at us: This is You, and it takes only a child's amount (or a caveman's grunt's worth) of imagination to make the connection. When you hear a song like "Atmosphere," where your own feelings of desolation match entirely the singer's, it becomes inevitable that you identify. When you do all that, when you become the artist and assume the artist as you, to find out that the artist is actually Not Like You can be traumatic.

There isn't much to do, when all is said and done, except hope.

We can hope that all of those throwing DVD's and CD's into bonfires get out of their childish inability to dissociate themselves from the experience of art, although such dissociation diminishes the pleasure. We can hope for the rise of a less totalizing artistic experience than the film. We can hope for a diminution of the star system in music so that fools don't get a chance. It's a vain hope, though. Congregations fall when their pastors turn out to be diddling themselves or the church secretary, and fans have a crisis when the star turns out to be Bruce Willis or George Clooney, and that's how things stand. The message is the message still, and the art is still as pure and true and as much You as it was before. Even in an age so overdosed on irony that no one knows what they mean, primitive identification is the normative value.

Demons and the Devil (Way Down in the Hole)

"Yes, I don't think that Obama or whatever his name is is ready for the White House, him and his wife. They don't act like they've got that many smarts to me. But anyway, if it was me and they was putting me in there it would scare me to death. I know I ain't that smart so I don't think they are neither." -- Unidentified voter, Georgia, Feb. 5, 2008

I have grown weary of the first person singular, and I thought I might avoid having it be the first word of this blog entry, or at least some blog entry some time. I guess today isn't my day. Despite the fact that solipsism is the one thing that plagues our society most, the attempt to deny one's own place in opinion or judgment is another. We have two alternating problems. The one is a world without empathy because it is a world where everything outside of the self is a flattened image of "not me," and, on the other, people who, when they have a desire, will squirm about verbally and blame their own impulses on inevitability, expedience, or the needs of others. I would prefer to talk about this, in one of my tried and true "neither/nor" essays, at some later point, though. Perhaps my next will deal with it under the topic of "Going to the movies." For now, I want to address something else. I want to address keeping the devil way down in the hole, as Tom Waits says we should.

A week or more ago, I saw "Into the Wild," directed by Sean Penn and concerning Chris McCandless. I went to the local art house (the town my great-great-great-great grandfather helped settle has just gotten one). The movie, for those who can't follow a link or who do not yet know, concerns a young man who graduated with honors from Emory University and then, out of a sense of great resentment toward his parents and the machine of materialism and expectations, gave away his trust fund, tore up his identification, and set off walking. He eventually went to Alaska, where he died of malnutrition, although not because of any amateurishness on his part. As I sat in the theater, a voice over came on to give some background to the man. I knew little about the movie ahead of time except its plot outline, and I didn't know the name of the hero. However, the name began to bother me. As the voice over man said that he had gone to Emory and graduated in 1989, it gnawed at me more. I realized that there was a very, very strong chance that I had met him.

Without going into the "famous dead people I have known" routine, it's enough to say that I had a red shirt senior year at Emory, and I had to take a Poetry class (Poetry 205) in my fifth year. I was already an experienced English Major at that point and a competent writer of close readings, and so the other students in the class, who were all Freshmen, gathered around me for help on writing papers. I really think I met the youngster then.

He was possessed of a devil, and, had I known him well, I would have done exactly what all the others did, including himself, and mistaken it for a demon.

There is a great deal of folderol about "daemons," since that Golden Compass movie, but it merely adds to the babble surrounding the demon. You see, it's good to have a demon. A demon is the minor aggravation that produces a pearl, it is the generative unhappiness. If you have demons, you have things that rob you of contentment, but not of joy. With a demon, you never quite settle. You think you're fat, and your friends tell you you are not, but they know nothing compared to the internal censor. You feel friendless, despite all the people calling you their friend, and so you continue to glad hand strangers and buy books on influencing others. You cannot quite get over seeing your parents naked, or dead, or fight, and so you write poem after poem about social malaise and the menace of mayonnaise culture. Mysterious images coalesce like sunbeams in your subconsciousness and strike common objects with holy light, and all thanks to your demon. In time, you can even come to give your demon a name. Like a stranger wielding a goad, you call it everything from Io's flies to Unresolved Identity Fixation or Inferiority Complex.

People with demons are easy to spot. Not only do they keep beating away at creative expression, but they show unearthly interest in themselves. It's common to laugh at people like this, if they are not young. However, they are not interested in the complexity of themselves because of egotism, but because of unhappiness. They are restless, most of all. If they are graphically or physically or verbally inclined, they will, either as a hobby or annoyingly public party trick, create art. If they are jabbed by duller demons, they may buy endless and repetitive books on working It out. There is a great deal of money spent that way, so people with demons are common as people with noses.

Devils are another matter. Devils are the ones who not only inflict the impulse on their victims but also suggest a really destructive object. Chris McCandless hated his parents, even though they did not appear to be too dramatically unlike other assortments of hypocrites, compromisers, and achievers (but who says that the other assortments shouldn't be as possessed and miserable?), and he felt that pain from top to bottom, as tens of thousands of other young people have. However, he also had a notion of how to fix things. He would go on the Romantic American trip of self-reliance and self-discovery and find his own identity in his own way, and without any compromises. That's what a devil does.

If I knew him, he was not the only possessed person I knew. I knew another who was working as a prostitute. She was attending Georgia Tech, and she was graduating, and she was working as a particular sort of prostitute. She had been inspired by Genesis P. Orridge and his girlfriend and their stage shows that included self-mutilation and on-stage bodily functions. At least she and her boyfriend seemed to be entranced by that, but she was also being paid to be the victim of scatalogical and violent sex fantasies. I had no idea about that. Do you suppose that this was a demon? When a person's "art" goes to the stage where she is being tied up by drugged up rock stars and slashed or urinated upon, is that the slight irritation of an unresolved issue or an unbalanced equation in the mind, or is that, just perhaps, a little bit more?
She, however, did what she did, and none of us knew, and now she is doing fine. McCandless, of course, is dead. Another I knew. She was one of the prettiest, happiest, most wonderful young women I knew. She was fantastic, and I wished with all my might that she would date me at some point. Sending such wishes is as well as sending fishes, of course. Many demons persuade us to date the least appropriate person, but she dated the most wretched. She did not seek out the married or unavailable, or gay, as so many women I have known have done, but only those who would be certain to abuse her affections. I lost touch with her for years and ran into her again only after a suicide attempt and a complete psychotic break as a result to sexual abuse from a step-father that had been going on all the time that I had known her.

Devils are perverse. They hold out the worst things and make them seem inevitable. They sit at the center and draw us to them. They propel us toward their own ends. Sometimes, as with my friend, they are clear wounds that suppurate and multiply, the wounds at the center of the psyche that try to spread out to claim the whole mind. Sometimes, like my artist friend, they take their own paths to satisfy the consumption of the person in odure and death. Sometimes, as in McCandless, they demand purity that can only come in a shortened life. Whatever they do, though, they consume.

I will leave my attentive reader to guess the connections between these unfortunate people and the voter I begin with, but I will tie up the bow with a recurrent reference to myself.

I have a bit of the demon of self-destruction, but it is only a demon. I cannot keep it in the hole, but I can keep a foot outside of the open mouth of the grave. I regard it as rather common to say, with Beckett's Murphy, that the good old days are when you wished you were dead. It's only surprising and worrisome, to me, when a new method comes to mind or a new form of self-destruction appears in the rear view mirror as a fait d'accompli.

The Last Homely Homey's Homely Home

When I was fifteen, I read the Jr Tolkien trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, and I loved it. In fact, I would say that those three books cast an exceptionally long shadow over my imagination and my education. From them, I learned much. In the first book, there is a chapter entitled, "The Last Homely Home," and it seemed like a stupid title for a chapter. Given the high or low seriousness of the books as I read them, what was a wordplay title doing there? Later on, in the second book, I learned two cool words, and I'm not alone in learning these words from The Two Towers: "flotsam and jetsam." At fifteen, I didn't really get the fact that the author meant those to be different words with different connotations, that he was contrasting the things that float away and the things that are thrown overboard, but I still learned two new words. The next year, when I was sixteen, I learned another new word, "homeboy" and "homey." This was 1978, and the person who taught me the words was a Caucasian of my age who came from a bit of South Carolina.


I re-read those books as an over-educated adult -- last year or the year before -- before I begin to forget all the things I learned in school. I was struck by the homoeroticism in them, like everyone who doesn't fall under their spell is, and I was struck by the political theory enunciated in them (it's scary, folks), and I was also "getting" a lot of the Anglo-Saxon professorisms in the books. Many things in the books are because of standard features in Germanic story telling, or things that seem like standard features when we don't have much that survives from these Germanic tales.

The word "homey" goes way back. It goes back before you heard it in a song, and it goes back before that. It goes back at least to the 1940's. I don't have a problem with the word, in fact. Unlike other slang, it steps into a hole in English and fills a need. Remember that any time we find a "first usage," the word already has to have some currency, if there is any depth to the term at all. Unless the first usage is, "and by this I mean..." the person who uses it first is assuming that people already know what it means. Of course, with some words the meaning is so obvious that you can forge ahead without usage, but I doubt that such would be the case in those first jazz songs in the 1940's. These are songs, after all, so they probably aren't trying to build a new set of words. The point is that other languages have their pisano, and English has nothing but "countryman," and that -- let's face it -- is so diluted and nebulous that it doesn't give any sense of friendliness at all, and friendliness is the point of "homeboy" and "homegirl" and "homey."

In Tolkein, the "last homely home" is this standard feature. It's assumed to be, anyway. If you were heading out into the waste land or the wild wood or the deep forest -- all terms that mean little to us -- you would have to look forward to a long trip where anything might happen, and so the person who lived at the last possible place before the waste would be a person who would be expected to entertain, supply, and love up on travelers. We do have a modern corollary to "last homely home." It's "last rest stop for next 80 miles" on the highway. Suppose you were about to take the highway through Death Valley or through Idaho. You would have a serious need to restock, resupply, relieve, and replenish yourself before you headed out. There is a vague sense of dread when we see these highway signs. You have to ask yourself serious questions.

So, the person who actually lived there had to be ready. People would be coming out of the wild needing practically everything, and people would be going into it having forgotten almost anything. There were loads of social codes, too, about what happened to people who refused aid to travelers. This is the infamous "hospitality code" that goes into Greek literature as well as Germanic. Basically, it's just a theme that everyone needs if they're going to make it in a world with bad maps and slow travel. The thing about "homely," though, is not wordplay as much as curmudgeonly point-making (like in "flotsam and jetsam"), because Tolkien was pointing right at the fact that a "homely" person is a "homebody" and a "girl you leave at home." In other words, a homely person is a person you don't parade.

Is it good to be homely? If so, I'm up to my waist in heaven already. Tolkien was fighting a rear guard action and lamenting the changes that had long ago occurred.

How do we handle hospitality now? With the hospitality industry, of course. If you are coming up to the scary highway sign, you don't pull into the first driveway. You pull into the "service station." If you are weary and need rest, you go to a hotel. There, you pay the host a set fee for specific services (or a not-so-set fee, if you look at your bill in the morning (I'll bet you thought opening that mini-fridge door was just curiosity) (you might have thought that flipping by the porno movie was innocent)). The rest station provided by the state is better, perhaps, if you consider only $1.25 for a Snickers bar better than $1.95 for a Coca-Cola, but don't look for a bed, climate control, or ... what's that other thing?

The other ball I have in the air in this essay is the "homely" thing, so I'd best come back to it. There is no question that, by Tolkien's time, "homely" was an insult. It did begin innocently enough. There were girls who went on the promenade, and there were girls left at home. (See the agony of being left at home in "Cinderella?" That's not the source of pain in Ashputtel.) It is the sin of vanity (from pride) to want to go stomping around to be looked at by other women (and the cute men), but it is the sin of being unwanted to be told to stay at home. The moral conflicts with the psychological and biological. Cities created the "homely" by creating miniature environments for display. While Robert Burns is talking about girls on display at church, and George Eliot is talking about the non-vain girls being vain on their way to church, and Fielding is talking about the church promenade as a place for woman-on-woman fighting, the urban setting makes the park, and the park makes the promenade. In the US, we have the mall promenade (and it's even done in a circle), or we have "cruising" on "the strip." Either way, it is ceremonial display, and the homely person is not invited.

Today? Today, though, we're all on display. There are no homely people. There are no homely homes, and there are no homely people in them. The city and the town's restrictions have been lifted. Hooray! We can all promenade! We can all stroll and achieve that great goal of being looked at. With the advent of MyFace.com and blogs, it's possible for anyone, male or female, to do a little photo matting or manipulation, or even to do none of that, and safely display just about anything. Before long, someone might even look. It's not, however, the looking that matters. It's the showing. (This looks like a kindred spirit. It just goes to show that I'm more of a cliche than I thought, but so is everyone else.)

What, though, is missing? Why am I fighting a rearguard action, myself? What is it that preoccupies those of us, "between two worlds, the one dying, the other overpoweringly preborn?" I have my own elegy, here, because there is every bit as much lost between the promenade and MyFace.com as there is between the code of hospitality and the hospitality industry. Something is gained. Of that we have proof and no doubt. However, there is no person in place. Just as the hotel porter now is compelled by productive code rather than ethical code, so the gawker is compelled by an interior and non-social impulse. The person who looks is looking privately, and the object of the gaze never gets the benefit or penalty of the display. The person who displays does so privately, and she or he never gets the interaction and negotiation that is part of the prom.

Puppies learn from their litters how hard to bite when at play. Adopt a puppy too soon, and the dog will bite too hard or not learn how to play. There is a reason beyond reproduction that we don't want to be homely: it is a social and cultural education. Similarly, there is a reason we want the last homely home to welcome travelers, and why we punish with the Erinyes those who demand payment for doing what is their duty. The human interaction, unforced and yet impelled (and I could do "impulsion and compulsion" as a chapter title), is necessary and not merely a luxury tax.

Lofi

Despite feeling like the bottom of a dredged channel, I'm going to attempt to write in praise of vagrant metaphors, shiftless paradoxes, and approximations. The title of this post is most emphatically not related to my subject, although it might be a pretentious fourth cousin by marriage.

'See how without confusion it is

all that it is, and how flawless

its grace is. Running or walking, the way

is the same. Be still. Be still.

“He moves your bones, and the way is clear.”' -- Wendell Berry, "Grace."

Come on in, we've got the truth surrounded, the phenomenologists suggest from the other room. You cannot hold it in your hand, and your hands are hardly true, themselves, but they are the boxes around which you contain the hands you imagine you have. You have precision only in your own imagination, and there is any other precision only in the out-there somewhere. The real is up on the shelf that you can't quite reach.

Oh, no. No fear: I'm not going to get into all that rot. Tulips have streaks, and you can like them or not. It's none of my business how solid you think things are. It's enough for me to start with a scary word like "phenomenology" and a scary jangle like the previous. I don't want to spend any time doing that particular treadmill dance.

No, it's enough for me to say that I, the Geogre, have had little rest in the concept that all my concepts and percepts match, that there is an ideal that I can know, and that there is a real that I can know without a category or concept. I'm plentifully puzzled by Wittgenstein, and I do not know if the blue house is blue, really. I do not know what I would do, if I met a man who was blue, too, because words might fail me, and then I'd really make a lot of noise.

I have to give credit for these thoughts to Jimi Hendrix. I got one of his CD's on sale a couple of days ago, and I finally put it in the car CD player today. It's hard for me to be in a receptive state for exciting music when I'm in my car or at home or at work, so it can be a while. Mainly I just listen to Wimpy Hill music and wait for Garrison Killer to come on the radio, when I know it's time to take my Geritol to help with my iron-poor blood. (Hey, it beats listening to Hawaiian nose flute music on subscription satellite.)

So, I was listening to "Purple Haze" and "Wind Calls Mary" (and Mary never returns the calls), and I noticed that both songs have incredible amounts of hiss on them. In fact, they're both absolutely awash with "bad" recording technology. Compact Discs are digital things, and they are absolutely faithful, and that means that they reproduce everything from the master tapes, and that means that the noise you hear on a Hendrix CD is the noise that was on the tape, and not the noise produced by a piece of your sock that went rogue and landed in front of your record needle.

I hate the fact that this hiss was present and that it was so precise. The CD meant that I could hear things that I had otherwise not made out. For example, at the end of "Purple Haze," there is someone-not-Hendrix saying "Purple haze! Purple haze! Purple haze!" Whoever he was, he sounds ridiculous, retarded, and revolting. I preferred having a hiss there, a hiss of imprecision, not the hiss of precision. It's better to have the ambiguity as a part of the process than as part of a clean, mechanical injection.

Ever heard "Wild Thing?" It's great, right? The band involved, the Troggs, were too drunk to speak, just drunk enough to fight, and too stupid to compose, and yet this great song comes out of a five and ten cent studio. Great guitar sound, isn't it? Listen on a CD, and you can tell where that guitar sound comes from: it comes from the snare drum rattle. The drums weren't isolated, so the "fuzz" is actually bleed through. Weren't you happier not knowing that?

You know the beginning of Sergio Leone's masterpiece, "A Fistful of Dollars?" There is a great theme song by Ennio Morricone. Whoowahai! Whoowahai! Great!

I heard it on a CD, and, unfortunately, I could make out the male voices. They are, I am sorry to say, saying, "We can fight! We can fight."

I will avoid, at all costs, hearing the flying monkey guard song from The Wizard of Oz. I do not want to know that it's not "Oh-ee-oh, Oh-eeeeee-oh."

You know, I think I'm happier, now, in my older age, in having not even a small, vague, squishy clue about truth. Or rather, I am happy because I have a vague clue, but no proof. I have an approximation of a truth, and that seems a great deal better to me than one that has been inked in.

The healthiest dogs are mutts. The most beautiful people are generally mixed "race." Heterogeneous is most often strong. At the same time, knowing only somewhat, having the operative misprision, the effort that results in nearly there, is immensely comforting to me. I can live in a room whose color may be blue. If I need to get up to the very top shelf to get to the real, I can jump. Otherwise, I prefer to know that I don't have a handle on things.

Ask not for whom the dinner bell tolls

"To me, nature is... I dunno, spiders and bugs, and big fish eating little fish. And plants eating plants and animals eating.... It's like an enormous restaurant." -- Woody Allen, "Love and Death."

The sad fact is that, as Bertolt Brecht wrote, "Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts." The other morning, I went out very early with my dog, and it was extremely quiet, as it is out here in the pre-industrial world, and I could hear lowing from a distant slaughterhouse. Today, I went off to Wal*Mart, and in the parking lot was a pickup truck pulling a trailer with a couple of beef cows in it, and they, too, were lowing periodically, probably about the rain and cold.

It is fashionable to worry about the unfree cows, to try to liberate them, to imbue them with rights and intelligence, but it's also true that beef is as we have made it. I was once out toting a shotgun. I would call it "hunting," but nothing I do with a gun can be called "hunting." I hunt the way that Prednisent Bush philosophizes. Anyway, we city boys were out walking through a vast field, and there were some moo-cows coming along the fence line, and we were between them and the fence, and a very bad time it was. The herd stared and stamped and walked and leaned and pushed and pushed, and we were back to the fence about to get crushed. The one farm raised member of the "hunting" party came along, looked at us with disgust, and shouted, "How! Hyow!" at the cattle. The assembled cattle looked... well, cowed... and walked off.

Cattle are stupid. We made them stupid. We bred them for idiocy. We bred them to be docile. We succeeded. Your modern farm cow is as close to a protein refrigerator on hooves as we can make it, and we can make it very, very like a refrigerator on hooves indeed.

At the same time, it's impossible to get away from the fact that life and nature is not merely a restaurant. It is the back room of a restaurant. It is the walk-in freezer of the restaurant, and we murder to survive.

Don't you dare think you can escape this by munching veggies, either. Oh, no you don't. You can make yourself 80 lbs. underweight, with body odor that can make the air congeal, with teeth as flat as a Kansas shadow at noon, but you're still killing. You're not just killing the plants, either. You're prying the ovaries off plants and popping them in your yapper, you think. The fact is, you're also using animals. You're using them in the production, in the fertilizing, in the transportation, and often in the cooking. Now, of course, you can go for the serious ahimsa thing, where you don't "eat anything that casts a shadow." You can gather only yogurt, sea kelp, and the excrescence of various molds, and, if you can keep from cheating and not go bankrupt, you can wag your finger at the rest of us and revel in your superiority.

However, the economical way of eating, the efficient way of eating, and, for whatever it's worth, the natural way of eating is meat and fish and poultry and any small squeaky thing we can strangle.

That leads me to a couple of very old fashioned points.

First, we have to remember that Peter was told, in a vision, to kill and eat (Acts 10:13). Despite our own desire to cause no injury, to not survive by death, to not manufacture our bodies out of the bodies of other living things (with or without faces), it is an inescapable fact. It is, like the origin of evil, simply not something we can argue. No matter how paradoxical it seems, eating living things is how the system works.

The Talmud says, "It is beyond our power to explain either the prosperity of the wicked or the afflictions of the righteous," or so I'm told. It is just one of those things.

However, because every animal has a life, every one has a personality of its own, because each has emotions, or enough of a simulacra of humanity to make us believe it is a person, we have a responsibility. My second point is that gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason. The capricious taking of life is the only crime worse than taking life. Killing a hog to eat one strip of bacon is a sin. On the farm, it would be immediately palpable, this crime. Not only would the killing take work, it would be intimate.

Because we now get the supermarket, the restaurant, the drive-through window, because the cow has become the patty, we have a higher moral calling to waste nothing. We are trapped in a sin, because we don't know what has been wasted already, and we are conscious of this sin in a general disquiet that leads us to believe that there is no freedom except in soy plaster disguised as a burger, stir fry of chutes and legumes, and industrially processed bacterial cultures. We feel the pain, the guilt, and the crime of living in a sinful system, where we are gluttons whether we throw the food out the window or clean our plates. We stare and wonder, is it waste to eat more than we need, or is it waste to leave any on the plastic tray?

I cannot endorse the option of the communalists. I wish them well, but I haven't the ability to go live on a closed estate where we can raise our own food.

I can, however, be irritated at Christmas dinner, when my brother was asked to say the "blessing" and repeated the quick pace mantra he heard from my father, who used to blurt out a modulated string of syllables. At the very least, when you sit down to eat, you can thank God for the life of the animal that was sacrificed for your food, you can ask blessings on all who toiled on the food from the field to the table, and you can be conscious that sacrifice is part of life.

Reasoning with the Earth

I'm on a roll here, with at least four hilarious posts in a row. I'd like to continue that level of hilarity by talking about puberty, cancer, and death. Get your weight lifting belt out, because you'll need it from all the laughter.

"Naturam expella furca licet, usque recurret." -- Horace, Ars Poetica

I noticed this morning that I've developed arthritis in my right hip. My poor dog is eleven years old, and she, too, has arthritis in her right hip, so the two of us match in that regard. However, I can give her expensive pills that have her frisking about like a puppy, while all the NSAID's are contraindicated for me, of course. Why are they contraindicated? Because I have a mechanical heart valve. Why do I have one of those? Because I had heart surgery in 1998 to follow up on surgery from 1969. Why did I have surgery in 1969? Because I am my family's genetic sin eater or my mother's litter's runt.

Now, when I was seven years old and having open heart surgery, and very risky heart surgery (and once upon a time that would have been a tautology (very funny link, there), but now the modifier is necessary), I was told frequently that I was being "brave." I thought not. I thought I was merely being manly -- which meant, of course, being stoic. I was uncomplaining. I've since made up for it by a stream of whining that could make a corpse run away, but, at the time, I was a 'brave little Geogre.' I assume that the three week coma was brave, too, but, at any rate, I then wanted to prove my manhood -- despite the fact that I would not possess manhood for four more years or so.

Later on, there were more things to do, more surgeries, more indignities (presuming one has dignity to be negated, and I've always found dignity to be a bit of a burden), and I decided, after becoming a man, that the events would hurt as much if one complains or not, but that complaining might mean getting medicated, so I might as well make a pest of myself. That was my attitude for a cholecystectomy (I think I was one of the datapoints for that article), and I actually had a fairly good time flirting with the nurses and getting zapped with morphine during that operation, but I soon reversed my attitude. You see, there's nothing brave about it, but there's nothing cowardly, either.

Forget your Susan Sontag books and just think about how we use volitional language when we speak of disease. The point to disease is that it's involuntary. You cannot be brave or fearful or happy or sad in regard to the disease. The disease just happens. It's biology. You can't have it because of moral failing or foolishness, and you can't have it for virtue or strength. After all, there are virtuous people dying young and villains living to great age, smokers and drinkers like Winston Churchill and bystanders who die of mesothelioma who never went near a cigarette.

The body is morally neutral. You can kick nature out with a pitchfork, Horace says, but she'll seep back in. You can argue all you want with biology. You can tell it that it shouldn't do that. You can put up a law. You can tell it to do something else, instead. The body will obey, to a point, and then it will go back to being what it is.

Think about teenagers. Their bodies are illegal. Literally, a teenager's physical body is a violation of the law. A youngster told me that, in high school, his school had put on a production of Quills. I gasped. No, I said in shock, you simply couldn't have! That play has nudity in it, and high school students can't be naked. In fact, no one under 18 may ever be naked, even if attempting to be nude. A 17 year old who drops his pants at the beach is not only violating the usual laws against public disturbances, but any tourist who captures the scene out of the corner of the frame is guilty of pornography. A minute past midnight on his 18th birthday, and he can take a picture of his naughty bits with his telephone and send them to all his friends.

In the case of girls, it's much worse, because a girl does not desire to become a loaded weapon. She does not choose to be taboo. She does not choose to be the object of covetousness. Like the paradoxical wretchedness surrounding virginity, this is potent so long as it is undesired, and yet those are the years that a girl will most learn how to see herself. It is when the gaze of the law and society is most telling her that her body is an offense. She can't opt-out, either. It just happens.

The final act for most of us, at least on earth, is death. I have thought a great deal about how it is frightening precisely the way that disease is. The most common reaction would be, "I'm not ready."

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter if you prepare for death or do not, if you are at peace or turmoil, if you are 85 or 15, if you are calm or frantic. No qualifications are necessary for dying well or poorly, and no skill is involved. Just as with achieving puberty or arthritis, you will face the thing because it is neutral. It is not good, not bad, and not sentient enough to be indifferent.

There is no good I can imagine for these matters. I believe in the afterlife. It is part of my creed. However, death looms for all, believer and unbeliever, but we are all born with a death sentence. We are all born with a sentence upon us to mature, age, and die, and the only good I can see from pondering these matters is relieving ourselves of judgment.

If you are reading this and are young, remember that you are not as different as the glare of society tells you you are. If you are middle aged, just realize that the diseases and maladies you suffer with are just normal, and you couldn't have prevented them and yet been yourself. If you are thinking of death, don't rail at its injustice. Anything that happens to all of us, the good and bad alike, cannot be anything but neutral. You cannot win the argument against biology, and you cannot reason with the earth.