Rage and Loneliness

Finally, wrath. Western literature begins with it, in a full on drop-kick that knocks us into the dust.

Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achileos…

Perseus’s (the website, not the hero) online Greek dictionary understands that first word as “wrath, lasting anger”; but though Achilles' emotion is unchanging, like everything the Greeks called divine, our understanding of it will always rely on that most mortal of all pursuits: translation. In English, the versions reach deep into literary prehistory, like rungs on a ladder. Alexander Pope’s, for example, kicks off with:

“Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess sing!”

To me, this couplet is like a particularly difficult yoga pose, or the opening sequence of a Hollywood action movie: contorted, obscurely balanced and – to an unsympathetic observer, at least – completely ridiculous. Much syntactic madness is inflicted in the name of rhyme; but despite our modern touchiness at this type of deformation, the Iliad’s central problem is still there, poised like a teacup on the tip of a sword. Wrath is sung, exclamation point – not sung of, or sung about, but SUNG! The lack of preposition suggests invocation rather than paraphrase: an act that, like Christmas Mass or a particularly vigorous touch football game, aspires to become what it describes. In other words sing this wrath, goddess, and in singing make us feel it. Kindle our hearts.

In the history of literature as it's known to us, then, wrath is a brushing of invisible dirt off our very real shoulders: the opening stutter-step with which we indicated (and indicate) our boredom, as a species, with walking, and a desire to elevate our body into a higher and more deeply useful sphere. As with all dances, however, the steps change over the years. Watch the just-departed 20th century sing its way out of the Homeric gates:

“Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’s son Achilleus,
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold on the Achaians.” (Lattimore, 1951)

“Anger be your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus’s anger doomed and ruinous…” (Fitzgerald, 1974)

“Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses...” (Fagels, 1990)


As the years pass, composure slips from the original poem's shoulders like the silk bathrobe of a heavyweight fighter, revealing lines so muscled that they begin to seem more brutal than classical. The brilliant contemporary poet Christopher Logue completes this transformation with a version of the Iliad whose wrath is truly placed on our tongue and swallowed. Here’s his description of Patroclus’s thrown spear skewering Akafact:

“As Akafact fell back, back arched,
God blew the javelin straight; and thus
Mid-air, the cold bronze apex sank
Between his teeth and tongue, parted his brain,
Pressed on, and stapled him against the upturned hull.
His dead jaw gaped. His soul
Crawled off his tongue and vanished into sunlight.” (Logue, War Music, p. 153)

Given how soaked through these lines are with pleasure, it should be no surprise that the wrath they incarnate is pleasurable to us. Reading Logue’s Homer is unsettling and enlightening over and over again exactly because of how much pleasure it not just takes but makes us feel in its violence. Like Kill Bill vol. 1 (in my opinion our second greatest contemporary translation of the Iliad next to Logue’s), it illustrates how hypocritical it is for us to say, with Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, that “It’s no real pleasure in life.” Actually, one of the problems of art is exactly that: no matter how rigorously we try to portray sin as terrible, monotonous, and limiting, our very portrayals are, by virtue of their being works of art, sculpted, powerful, and suffused with meaning. Admit it: you kind of sort of love the Misfit. And you love Achilles, or rather Brad Pitt, despite the fact that the work he exists in portrays him as the Slave (and therefore, we rush to conclude, the Master) of his passion.

I’m belaboring this point, which probably seems antithetical to my larger, pan-blogular argument about the fundamental sterility of sin, because I think it frames one of the biggest temptations I face as an artist: namely, to mistake the romantic creations of the books I read for their much less romantic creators. I call this The Stephen Daedalus Syndrome, after Joyce’s “autobiographical” hero from the Portrait and Ulysses. Sharp as a tack, “doomed and ruinous” as any Greek hero, he drags his roiling creativity through the Dublin of both books. For a good ten years, I was deeply in love with him, partly because of how much like me he seemed to be, and partly because of how much better than me he always was. But a while ago, I came to a realization: Stephen Deadalus did not write Ulysses. He couldn’t have, in the same way that Paul Morel couldn’t write Sons and Lovers: not because they lacked ability, but because there was something deeply adolescent in them, meaning something that, for all its promise, clung to its potential in order to avoid risking failure, which is after all the price of any communicative creativity.

As a young, failing, frustrated and frustrating writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of led life will allow me a writing one. I also spend a lot of barely-wrested time staring at my computer screen, wondering why nothing's happening. One of the things I’ve come to dislike about these posts is how much they seem to put me on the side of the normal and normative in fiction, as if I were trying to be a sort of James Woods lite. But as much as I love Woods, along with the rest of the great British belle-lettrist tradition that stretches from Coleridge and Hazlitt to Ricks, Bayley, Pritchett, et al, it would be facetious and dishonest of me to claim membership in their tribe - not to mention the rhetorical self-confidence conferred by that membership. Anglicans protest only to form new communities; but the American tradition is an archipelago of antinomians that curls like a nautilus towards greater and greater loneliness. Our brains breed islands, as Bishop’s Crusoe puts it. And if those islands found cities in the future, we should remember to be conservative with our conservatism – for the unmannered now may seem thoroughly normal in the future, even sophisticated. Think Stein, that disciple of Henry James, or Picasso’s portrait, which he admitted did not look like her. “But it will,” he said.


Still, the new and different is not always the prophetic, and it is every writer’s job to decide how much of his tradition he can abandon, and how much of himself he can indulge. Not every passion deserves to be fed – or rather, within every passion there is a bet being made (if not in the sufferer, then at least on him), that the voice being heard is God’s. If it’s not God’s, we’d better believe it is – either way, we’d better be skilled and persuasive enough to convince others that it is. Because the loneliness of an artist who cannot believe in his or her own art is a deep one, and no amount of readers or rewards will be able to change that.

The French philosopher/Alsatian Simone Weil, who died when she was 34 from tuberculosis and self-enforced starvation, kept a copy of the Iliad by her bed. “A Poem of Force” she called it – though to her, the rage of the book’s characters was something that the book itself ended up condemning, through relentless accumulation. In this way, it was less a thriller and more a war movie, like Saving Private Ryan or Plattoon – or better yet, an Apocalypse. There may be people who encounter works like this and find themselves thrilled to the point of imitation, but Weil wasn’t one of them; on the contrary, her Iliad, unlike Logue's, denounces the pre-Christian world of might makes right with a vehemence that is absolutely unwavering. You want man in nature? You want to follow your passions without any conscious or cultural checks? Well then, here you go. Breathe deep. That faint metallic scent you smell is your own helplessness in the face of the Gods.

For me, sin is real because loneliness and isolation are real, and the self-devouring is everywhere. It’s also real because writing is life and life is writing, the one an allegory for the other. If we take this connection seriously, I think, we bring ourselves closer to an understanding of what it means to be both creative and happy in the world. We also get a sense of how difficult it is, not just to understand ourselves, but to pour out the rich little glass of our personality in a way that enriches both it and the larger community. Despite the romantic image of the writer holed up in his tower that has been foisted on us for at least a century, I understand writing as a fundamentally social act. It is work, not Mozartian work that flows from our fingertips like snot from a runny nose, but achieved work, half gift, half labor, whose deep desire, like ours, is to be shared.

Why I Keep Talking about this Shit

What’s going on here? Why bother talking about something as abstract and anachronistic as sin? Why open myself up so obviously to charges of spiritual dilettantism (from people who are more serious about religion than myself), and cranky irrelevance (from people who are less so)?

It’s hard to ignore questions like this, as I sit here at six o’clock in the morning, staring out at the Northern New England darkness, wondering how much there is left to say about “wrath”, “greed”, and the whole abstract mechanism in general. I mean, even if we grant that there are certain types of human behavior that God doesn’t like (an idea that must remain securely rhetorical for some people), how can we seriously believe that a list of seven words, translated and misappropriated from Greek and Latin traditions, can be anything more than the barest of placeholders for these types of behavior? And how can we pretend that any thought about them is something more than an exercise: a way to make ourselves seem more serious than we are, by harvesting the philosophically-intriguing categories of a religion without really taking seriously the whole heaven-harps-halos mythology that makes those categories so significant to the vast majority of the people who use them?

If I was raised with any sort of religion at all, it was the WASPy Protestantism that encourages me to cherry-pick spiritual truths so long as I accept the radiant basement-dwelling of a home-made spiritual world. In this way, I don’t think I’m that much different from the rest of America. Talking about things like what happens after we die, or what it means to be a good person, my voice inevitably lowers, and my shoulders hunch. I begin to feel like I’m walking through a hushed pine grove, or maybe hidden beneath a pile of cushions. I remember an old Teddy Ruxpin adventure when the gang is shrunk down to the size of chess pieces and then left to wander around the underside and interior of their apartment sofa. The landscape is lunar – full of galloping bugs and pennies the size of wagon-wheels – but still, at the same time, deeply intimate. Strange as it may be, it’s still their sofa: an object that they’ve lived with their entire lives. Which is kind of how I feel when I start talking about these things.


Does it sound ridiculous to say that I get that same intimate/strange feeling when I talk about certain aspects of writing? Probably – but there’s no way around it: at this point in my life, writing is the most undivided form attention that I practice. It’s the way I access the world: the door that leads most reliably to the inner chamber. Other processes (I am tempted to say all other processes) may allegorize it – sex, for example, or chopping wood or restocking hospital supply closets – and therefore give me helpful ways to think about what I’m doing, the same way that studying a painting can help us understand something about the symphony we’re writing. But when it comes down to brass tacks, writing is what I’m interested in. Or not writing, so much as making, in all these fields (and here, I think I’m going to pull a Tolstoy and say, simply, and in full confidence, that you know what I mean).

When I think about sin, then, it is as a writer who believes that the problems of writing are the problems of life, and that, if we stay open-minded and attentive enough, an observation of our left hands will always help us understand what our right ones are doing. The Old Testament contains two things, stories and laws; but what the New Testament reminds us is that both of these are tools for understanding and manipulating that strange border in each of us where our behavior in the outside world shapes, and is shaped by, who we are inside ourselves. Religion as primitive cognitive behavioral therapy? To my mind, there’s nothing even remotely primitive about it. On the contrary, what we’re talking about here is a highly-sophisticated piece of spiritual technology, which furthermore is continually evolving and being updated by its users, generation after generation. Like all living languages – like the natural world itself – it is open source, in the truest sense of those words.

But even admitting this, the question remains: what does it help us do? Well (to begin with, since even my leviathan-sized ego has to admit that its attempts to plumb the depths here are cursory and limited), like any book, the Bible can be seen as a sort of virtual reality, which allows us to imaginatively experience certain difficult situations in a very refined form. In refining these situations, I would argue, it also poses, or at least invites us to understand them. Osip Mandelstam linked this with the domesticating culture of the ancient Greeks (Hellenes):

“Anyone who feels himself a Hellene must be on his guard now as two thousand years ago. You can’t Hellenize the world once and for all the way you can repaint a house. The Christian world is an organism, a living body. The tissues of our world are renewed by death. We have to struggle with the barbarism of a new life, because there, in the new life which is in full bloom, death is unvanquished! While death exists in the world, Hellenism will be, because Christianity Hellenizes death…” (Pushkin and Scriabin, Selected Essays, p. 127)


In other words, Christianity takes the most terrifying and difficult thing in the universe – namely, death – and makes it just another part of our emotional living room. The Bible – ostensibly the most victorious book ever written – is full of failure. If you don’t believe me, read for yourself: you will be amazed, I promise, by the sad epilogues of almost every one of the Biblical heroes, from Moses to Noah to David, to Christ himself. They live in God – and then again, taking the writer’s point of view, it is impossible for me not to see this as translating into something like “they live in a creative spirit, their inner and outer worlds line up in a way that makes it possible for them to create”. But that window of creation, like a square of sunlight in an overcast afternoon, only lasts so long. The question, then, is what to do, not with our blessed moments (since in those moments, we don’t need to ask any questions: we just write), but between them, when they have gone away. How to live without God, or good writing, or happiness, or work.

Or, how to make these things come back. With this turn, I think, we move from the desert of the Old Testament, with its disasters and exoduses and late-night angel wrasslings, and into the New Testament’s hemmed, though flourishing garden. Sin in the OT is a matter of disobeying laws: eating pork is a “sin”. But Christ as I understand him both refines and, more importantly, relocates the spiritual battle: now, in addition to our behavior outside, there will be our behavior inside. Sin is “soul error”, to use Montaigne’s phrase: a disalignment, or malformation, which alienates us from our own creative instinct (Hmmm....). Gripped by greed, for example, we are not empowered but consumed. We quite literally “miss the point” of what we are doing, not to mention life in general: we pursue things that do not make us happy and husband traits or habits that are self-defeating. And the result is that death takes over, in a way that is frustrating instead of fructifying.

If I’ve spent far too much of everyone’s time here thinking about all this, it’s because I find it immensely applicable to any creative work, but particularly to writing, which is after all what we spend all day doing or trying to do. Greed, for example, is what I see in the way I load some of my paragraphs with imagery. I’m like a kid in a candy store: I legitimately love comparing the material of life, finding resemblances, how this looks like that. In and of itself, this is, I think one of my greatest strengths as a writer. But when I indulge it too much, the page begins to sag. My reader’s attention gets lost; my own attention gets lost even, or stopped, like water attempting to make its way through a clogged pipe. The piece as a whole fails, because a larger proportion has been sacrificed for miniature workmanship. So what was started, ostensibly, as an act of communication turns its back, not only on its audience, but also on the very thing that it is trying to communicate. Insert your own indulgence here.


(not that there’s anything wrong, in and of itself, with working Joyce-like all day on a sentence. But the result has to be something that fits in with a larger pattern.)

I’ll stop here, for today. For your own indulgence with all this hooplah, attentive or not, I can only offer my thanks and sincere belief that what I’m talking about here is worth looking into. Life is a constant creation; the Bible is a record of creation; writing is our own creating, our profession and vocation. There’s nothing holy about it. At least, there’s nothing any holier about it than there is about picking your nose, or getting stuck in traffic or going skating. Books help us transform the world into something useful. In a very real and tangible way, they allow us to join in the fun.

I Want You

Working as a hospital orderly teaches you, among other things, that the human body is a temple lodged precariously between currents of quicksand and wind. Two disasters can happen to this temple: 1) a total movement, or 2) a total solidity.

Think of total movement as life-overload, in which the flow state that we lust after is courted to the point that it begins sleeping on our couch and using our credit cards. One of the most visionary moments in the recent disaster epic/Woody Harrison vehicle 2012 was when a tiny passenger jet took off to find the normally uncluttered Las Vegas air transformed into a maze of fire and falling buildings. This, my friends, is your body melting down. In my job, it means a patient can’t stop shitting, bleeding, throwing up, etc. If uncorrected, it leads to a disintegration that is simultaneously both larger and smaller: smaller in that cells burst and organs liquefy, larger in that the body itself expires. As any cholera sufferer will tell you, diarrhea can kill. Easily. All it takes is for your body to get so excited that it either forgets how, or loses the ability, to stop.

Solidity, on the other hand, is the body stopping too much, from fear or misunderstanding or even anger. It starts with a clench and runs to irritation. Alain (Emile De Chartier, secret philosophical godfather to both Sartre and Simone Weil) gives us a simple and helpful example:

“If you rub your eye when you have a gnat in it, or a bit of dust, it will bother you for two or three hours; just keep your two hands still and look at the end of your nose; soon the flow of tears will relieve your discomfort.” (On Happiness, p. 28)

Often, medicine will help us induce this composure; but a failure to do so will lead (again, in my rather messy professional experience) to constipation, nausea, fester and boil. At the hospital where I work, patients – no matter how serious their conditions – are strongly encouraged to exercise three times a day. For many, this means simply sitting in a chair for a half hour. Others do laps, their IVs trailing behind them like thin and worried butlers. But no matter how bad what they have is, the goal is the same: to get them moving again.


Any philosophy, religion or literature that ignores the body is doomed to wither into the prized pet of a decrepit coterie; that Christianity (along with all the other world religions) has not should clue us in to the rootedness of its wisdom – despite all popular and institutional prejudice. Read the Song of Songs, or Genesis, or even the Gospel of Luke again: desire is so pervasive in these books that we forget to look for it. Read Leviticus, in which an ungiving mesh of rituals and laws is laid over Israel like a lace tablecloth over a pool of blood. Then think of those stories in which this pattern is rent. You won’t have to think long: there are very, very many of them.

A study of any one sin reveals the similarity of all sins; but when it comes to physical desire, lust is where we start. What is it? In America today I see us talking about desire in one of two ways: either it is a) a poisonous bad thing to be avoided at all costs, or b) a life-giving, truth-affirming force that has the potential to break through your staid bourgeois comforts and let life in, man. But isn’t choosing between these two options like choosing between dysentery and paralysis? If we actually read the Bible, on the other hand, we find a world that is neither one nor the other: a world in which desire is like air or food, a necessary component of human life, desirous and terrible at the same time but then hey, what isn’t? Adam lusts after Eve, David lusts after Bathsheba, Christ lusts after Mary Magdalene, Judas lusts after Christ (er…I mean, Sam/Gollum lusts after Frodo!). Saying this, however, is a far cry from admitting that “anything goes”; if anything, what we begin to see is how the book of books can be understood as a study on how to avoid the comic/tragic exaggeration of desire, which I think we can safely call “lust”.

Maybe not safely – though I do maintain that the balance, no matter how precarious, is what we all really want, and that a sincere succumbing to desire or fear is more a misunderstanding of how we can achieve that balance, than a rejection of it. Lust, like pride, or envy, is an attempt to transcend – a willful and childish disregarding of proportion. It differs from desire in the same way that Anne Carson’s Socratic eros differs from the bad reading of her Lysian dilettante. Please excuse the parentheticals: despite Carson’s plainwater prose this shit is VERY difficult (for me at least), even after you’ve read the whole book:

“In Sokrates’ view, a true logos [a true written argument or work] has this in common with a real love affair, that it must be lived out in time. It is not the same backwards as forwards, it cannot be entered at any point, or frozen at its acme, or dismissed when fascination falters. A reader, like a bad lover, may feel he can zoom into his text at any point and pluck the fruit of its wisdom. A writer, like Lysias [villain and fool of the Phaedrus, the dialogue under discussion], may feel he can rearrange the limbs of the fiction on which he dotes with no regard for its life as an organism in time. So readers and writers dabble in the glamor of grammata without submitting themselves to wholesale erotic takeover or the change of self entailed in it. Like Odysseus bound to the mast of his ship, a reader may titillate himself with the siren song of knowledge and sail past intact. It is a kind of voyeurism, as we see when we watch Phaedrus [Robin to Sokrates’ Batman, at least here] seduced by the written word of Lysias. In Plato’s view, the Lysian text is as philosophic pornography when compared with the erotic logos of Sokrates.” (Eros the Bittersweet, p. 165)


This quote is a diamond: turn it in your hand and watch as thought fractures into new alignments. On this particular circuit, I am struck above all else by how Carson, while writing a book about erotic love, can make me feel that true eros (that is, for the purposes of our argument, true desire, rather than simple lust) must be committed, even when “fascination falters”. To me, this brings the very Greek-Greek eros much closer to the Christian-Greek agape, which is the word that appears in the gospels. The relevance of this swerve is as important for writers as it is for doctors. Life lusts after death in the same way that a page of any book, anywhere, longs to be blank again. The created object (body or book) is a temple perched between currents: like a sewer grate, it would cave in if too solid, be swept away if too flimsy. So all structures aspire to the harplike stringing between heaven and earth

How hard is it to remember this? Or, even better, how easy is it to forget this? Anyone who has found themselves compromised by lust will tell you how easy, and if you don't believe them, that's fine: just beware that the history of the human race is full of recorded examples of men and women who thought they were bodiless, pure wills. The mind can chose not to recognize consequence, if necessary; but the body is where consequence writes itself. Just look at a lifelong smoker. In artistic terms, this consequence is not something to be avoided: if anything, I think what Carson and the Bible both suggest (as much as an encyclopedia and a lake can suggest anything) is that it is precisely when we accept the consequences of our desire that we move out of the creationless desert of lust and into the creative kingdom of desire and satisfaction. The sin, then, is not in wishing to overstep boundaries (or even in overstepping boundaries), but in the way that we try to tell ourselves that everything is ok, everything is the same. We can do whatever we want. We can't do whatever we want, in life or art. But then, things would be stupefyingly boring and completely meaningless if we could.

The Green Room

I was made for jealousy. My brother, born two and a half years later, seemed perfect in every respect: he was happy, cute, blonde, and, most importantly, athletic, with the musculature and coordination of a superchimp. Meanwhile, I could barely walk across the room without tripping over my ankles. Gravity is how the universe expresses its love; but to the uncoordinated this love seems embarrassing, even compromising. We want to be free. And no matter what element we chose, my brother always seemed about 15% freer than I was.

The literature of envy is rich, probably because writers and artists, existing as they do in a world of limited attention, are so naturally competitive. Even Goethe, who sat on German writing like an elephant on a chandelier, said: “The root evil: everyone would like to be what he could be, and would like the rest to be nothing, indeed, not to be.” In other words, no matter how much our sense of our own excellence inflates, it will never be able to detach itself from the surrounding social ground and float free. The gigantic little brother of the world will always be there to remind you how assailable your success is, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Other national genii – that is, other artists who we now understand to be, not just greats, but actual founders, firsts – have been similarly preoccupied with the jealousy theme. In Alexander Pushkin’s mini-drama “Mozart and Salieri” (adapted into a play and, eventually, Milos Forman’s Pushkinian film “Amadeus”), Salieri lays out his reasons for murdering Mozart with a metaphysical tenacity reminiscent of the best Dostoyevskian criminal. “People say that there’s no justice on earth. Well there isn’t any in heaven either.” His complaint against Mozart, then, is that he manages to embody an injustice that somehow manages to feel both cosmic and personal. Life is not fair: more specifically, my life is not fair. Mozart’s self-assured reply to this is genial, even bland: “Genius never commits a crime.” So, by murdering Mozart, Salieri unwittingly proves his own mediocrity (in the play, though not in the movie, where he’s wheeled away cackling and triumphant: a Satan who has managed, finally, to correct God).


Salieri’s monologue is a room: a room that we all inhabit occasionally and sometimes get comfortable in, to the point that, even if we were shown a way out, we wouldn’t take it. I remember for example what it was like to “celebrate” my eighteenth birthday by going to the drive-in with my parents. There, in the back seat of our forest-green minivan, I stared up at the ceiling as the felt of the floor-mats pricked my neck. I had never felt more miserable in my entire life – and the reason I had never felt more miserable was that each laugh or shout that I heard outside my window seemed like it had been conceived, crafted, and carefully launched in a single-minded attempt convince me of my own worthlessness. I felt alone, in other words; but in one of envy’s great paradoxes, I also felt like the still center of a closed and airless circle that had been created and was now being maintained by every single person in the world other than myself. Had someone whispered in my ear, at that moment, that there was no justice in either earth or heaven, I would have known what they meant. Jealousy, like all the sins, makes the world feel completely personal. That it is not may point the way to that door, and inspire us with the desire to walk through it.

What is the opposite of envy? Humility doesn’t exactly get it: when I try to be humble about the people I envy, I usually just end up denigrating them through some more-inclusive means (“Well, in a hundred years we’ll both be dead! Take that!”). But perhaps the sense of proportion that humility depends on can be useful; for if being humble means abandoning the float-above-the-world mentality for one that accepts the deeply-rooted interdependency of life (and art), then can’t we point humility, like a sort of emotional firehose, at our own personal Mozarts? Rene Girard, a true genius of jealousy, said that envy’s biggest mistake is the way that it turns the envied into a sort of god: a creature, in other words, not like me. Whereas the truth is that even Mozart was human and therefore imperfect, sinning, and yes, even jealous. (the letters, journals and biographies of the Great Dead (now there was a band) are instructive reading on this: who was ever as jealous as a pantheon-level writer?)

It may seem paradoxical to suggest that admitting jealousy is a way to get over it; but when it comes to the city of the creative mind (meaning, every mind), paradoxes are like traffic circles: confusing, but essential. For those of us who want to make things, envy can be a useful kick in the ass; unfortunately, it can just as often be the kick that keeps kicking, and if I can’t sit down then how am I going to write? Christianity has been accused of infecting us all with teleology, meaning a view of things in which there is one best end point and a million other subservient steps leading up to it. This may be true. But isn’t there also a way to read the Bible as a longer, more detailed version of Robinson Crusoe – that is, as a vast meditation on making? God creates, and then each subsequent hero in the long line of heroes creates as well, or tries to; meanwhile, what we hold in our hands is a record of their successes and failures: a list of tried inventions. The challenge is to see it as more zoo than museum and more vibrant ecosystem than zoo. Like all great books, it wants to be used.


Harold Bloom would probably disagree, but for me, the teleological pyramid picture of writing is unhelpful - even paralyzing. The thought that out of all of us (all the thousands of us), only one will get to stand on the top wrung doesn't make me want to jump higher: it makes me want to crawl into my bed and die. Is this hesitancy to join the huge, envy-soaked agon of literary supremacy itself proof that I will never be a great or even good writer? To be completely honest, I don't know. But I DO know that, if I want to be any kind of writer at all, I simply cannot afford to think this way. Inherent in this is another paradox, and maybe a lie too: the tree, one of many, has to somehow find a way to subtract the chatter of its forest and create a sphere of sunlight and silence around it, in order to grow. Mozart, who was a man before he was a genius, knew how to do this. Salieri did not.

How To Be Lazy

The secret theme of all creations – from the Bible to a Quentin Tarantino epic, to a level of Super Mario Brothers – is creation. How do we make things? More importantly, how do we go on making things? The persistence of these questions should be obvious to anyone who has ever hung out with artists; but the most fascinating part of it, to me at least, is how integral laziness is to the productivity that obsesses all of us, no matter how many “good” hours we manage to pack in a given day.

I get bored easily. As a childhood animal lover, my Book of Books was a binderfull of celluloid sheaths that my father brought home from work one day. The volume’s empty pages had a pleasant kerosiney smell and glossy texture, like over-tanned balloon-hides. I filled them, one by one, with the Ranger Rick magazines that I’d been collecting since I’d been old enough to demand a subscription. The issues came every four months or so, along with a tape of Northern Exposure episodes and various cooking utensils, in the bubble-wrapped care packages that my grandmother sent us from Somers, New York. I poured over them giddily before placing them, one at a time, in my binder. And from that point on I was always reading them. I brought them to school and to restaurants, where I would store the bulging compendium beneath my chair as I suffered through the meal itself, and then bring it out as soon as there was a lull.


Later, while visiting my great aunt in Maine , I remember realizing suddenly that one possible way to survive the interminable booklessness of family reunions was by imagining that I was a character in a video game, and that each detail of my surroundings (whatever level or “board” I was on/in) was therefore a challenge and opportunity for Mega Man-like personal enhancement. The world was transformed, from a flat surface to a veritable advent calendar of significance. As such, it was inherently interesting: not just a place for books, but a book itself, as readable to me as it had been for Edwards, or Emerson, or that original Mario in the depths of Bowser’s castle, Henry David Thoreau.

Henry James, whose writing stands in relation to those original side-scrollers with a revelatory vagueness of Mystian proportions, told us, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” In saying this, he is looking backwards to the listmaking Benjamin Franklin and forwards to the paranoid fantasies of Thomas Pynchon, who, in The Crying of Lot 49, described how truly horrible it would be to be trapped in a video game. Or a web for that matter, whose crystalline filaments are after all a metaphor of mobility only for the unmoving spider.

The internet makes Crusoes of us all – but the point here is not that Crusoe is lonely, but that his loneliness is sublimated, to an industry that sees the world as a gigantic tool, something like the cliché about the Native American and his buffalo, every part was useful. The French anthropologist/landscape artist Claude Levi-Strauss makes a similar point about the “primitive” cultures of Brazil when he points out that their language (which named every plant and animal with a precision that makes Linnaeus look like a kindergartner), like their habit of tattooing every inch of available skin, was really a very developed version of what our own culture does now with an indulgent and self-congratulatory hightechitude reminiscent of, say, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The naked world must be covered against emptiness, the same way that the naked head must be covered against rain. This does not necessarily mean that you have to invent a machine for shooting clouds out of the sky.


Nights, of course, were significantly more dangerous. They left me: alright, they had to, I know - but they still left me. And though I had my books – had more of them, actually, now that I’d been sent to a school where books really were the only things that would talk to me – I found my brain and heart spinning like wheels in mud. In any examination of the malformations called “sins”, proportion begins to crop up as an antidote; but where was I going to find proportion? I was an expatriate by birth and uprooted, used to gorging myself. “Candy, anger, sleep,” I whispered, or should have. It probably would have helped to know that someone else knew what I was going through. Of the three, the last is what bothered me when I visited my family in Cairo, in their new home, their first home without me. Jet-lagged, I read through the night or wandered around the apartment trying not to trip over my sister’s new cat. One day I woke up (from a nap? Or was it the middle of the night again?) to see the sky outside churning like a cement mixer. The khamsin, or sirocco, which I watched cake a donkey standing inexplicably beneath my window with a slow layer of lard-colored dirt. The donkey didn’t move.

Of course it didn't: it didn't see any way out, didn't see any way to see a way out. Sloth, like gluttony, produces a nausea that is both spiritual (not totally sure what that word means, but hopefully you do) and physical. It is the result, rather than a preventative, of industry: not work, but rather the effort that apes the procedures of creativity without ever really managing to hit, through exploration and bravery, on any real root. It smacks of diligence, or duty; of the obeyed letter rather than the animating spirit. In my experience as a writer, there is a point in every day when we know what we should be doing. Sometimes that “should” is simply sitting down at the desk, and we don’t, because we feel like we need to research more, or write a blog entry, or read another chapter… But more often, I think, the should happens within the writing. Not knowing what we have to do isn’t depressing, so long as we have faith that whatever we’re doing will eventually reveal that; what’s depressing is when we know what we have to do, secretly, but keep deciding not to do it. We hold back by telling ourselves we’ve gone forward. Isaac Babel (another devotee of patience) put it in a way that no amount of exposition can exhaust: “One’s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.” Sloth is what you feel when you’re turning the key so much, and so fast, that the gears are stripped.

The secret insight of Christian theology (and others probably: I'm only trying to say what I know) is the deep sterility of sin: the way it knocks us out of the very world that it promises to open. The question, then, is how we get back in – and not once, but again and again, since by the time we realize the value of what we’ve lost, it will probably be gone forever, at least in that form. In Pynchon's seemingly-closed riddle of a universe, the underground postal service is called WASTE. Henry James would be appalled. But ignoring this reality provokes, I think, a disappointment with life that leads us to a watching-TV-for-9-straight-hours despondency. It is one of our culture's best kept secrets that it cultivates this state at the same time that it pretends to relieve it, by eliminating waste. But there is no eliminating waste, at least for us. For God - or whatever you want to put in that place - maybe. But then the next question to ask is, is God the most bored being in the universe, or the most interested?

Gluttony

I grew up an expatriate in the third world, meaning that early on I grew gluttonous in a way that I still have trouble with. Let me explain.

The only place to get Snickers bars in Lusaka, we thought, was at the commissary, a building that I never saw, but which I imagined as a sort of cross between a military bunker and Candyland, except that instead of passing through it visitors were content simply to browse the shelves - forever, if possible. In order to do this you had to be American, meaning you had to work for the American embassy. Families, like my own, who were employed by less reliable organizations were forced to shop at the local Zambian supermarkets, where the controlled chaos of the African food industry made every visit a harrowing adventure. Aisles shifted and items appeared, or disappeared with a dreamlike suddenness that would have taken a full-fledged Joseph to comprehend. Boxes of South African breakfast cereal stood like soldiers at attention, or better yet, like men impersonating soldiers and trying not to laugh as my brother and I inspected them. Their cardboard (the reverse sides of which we could see, since many of the box-tops were torn open) was unbleached and their mascots harried beneath sagging speech-bubbles. “Tommy the Tiger says: ‘You will enjoy my flavored cornmeal!’” Except that, next to his radiantly chesty American original – a stencil of which I had made in one of my notebooks the previous summer and now kept under my pillow, along with two issues of Gamepro and a MacDonalds placemat – Tommy looked haggard and even a little guilty-looking.

America, like heaven, was somewhere else. Still, there were windfalls. In the middle of the melee my mother clung to our cart-handle like a dowser clutching her dowsing rod. She held her head high, her flared nostrils sifting through the layers of spoilt milk, okra, and split-open rice bags until they caught on something interesting. Sometimes this was nothing we could use. A bottle of curry-sauce stamped with letters that looked like tiny pictures of different types of noodles. A shoebox sized container of pickled shark meat. Or the tiny chewable ginger ties that were delicious, sure, but which, because of their packaging, smell, and general grit, my brother and I rejected immediately as Not American, meaning Not the Real Thing.

Given this general atmosphere of difficulty, you would think that stumbling onto a box of Snickers bars would have caused my family immense joy; but if anything, I remember feeling only terror. Afterwards, in our boiling Volvo (its inside smelled like a gigantic sponge, at least during the rainy season), we poured over our carton like priests before an oracle, examining each little detail. Where had it come from? What did it mean? And did the fact that splendor had entered our lives mean the favor of the gods, or their curse? Either way, we all felt the presence of something bigger there, lying under our hands with ominous generosity, like a case of candles that we had bought and then discovered was full of dynamite…

The literary thing to say here would be that my un-American childhood created a vacuum of expectation that the real America could never satisfy; but the truth is that my childhood expatriation wasn’t un-American: it was hyper-American. So, after fifteen years of living on the continent that presumptuously assumes its name, America has never disappointed me, because I haven’t found it. I eat and eat and eat and it sucks, because despite all the resources at my disposal, I can’t find the flavor I’m looking for. I spend hours on the internet trying to find out what was in the Mezoe orange juice (battery acid, grapefruit rinds, and didn’t it always seem to suggest just a bit of salt?) that I habitually poured out on the concrete at the American Embassy School of Lusaka, because it lacked the nectar-like sweetness of my classmates’ Juicy Juice.

This Christmas, my dad the unreconstructed expatriate (Dakaar, for now at least) very generously gave me his old MacBook. His undeleted iTunes library includes a bunch of Eagles songs, which is funny because, like that great and admirable homebody the Dude, I loathe the Eagles more than fruit flies and freezing rain combined. “Take It Easy”, “Get Over It”, “Learn To Be Still” – but then isn’t this the point? The West coast’s gluttony for stillness and relaxation is the three-ton Buddha we place on our scale in the hope that it will counterbalance a deep and inborn anxiety. But that’s narcosis, not absorption. As a deeply anxious person myself, I know that the worst thing anyone can say is “Don’t worry.” Why not, I want to scream back? And where does your sense of calm get you but further immured, further removed, further stuck, in other words, in the hell that is disconnection and detachment?

(and alright, I can’t believe I’m going to do this, but the Eagles even showed us what that place looks like, right? It’s the Hotel California, a legitimately brilliant marriage of form and content that is far more hellish than even a above-average high-school term paper can reveal. Listen to it again: it will ruin for you, in order, 1) Don Henley, 2) guitar solos, 3) classic rock radio stations. This is not a song about California: it’s a song about art, or the failure of ambition in art, or what happens when you succumb to the gluttony of satisfactions that some concierge has handed you, but which you yourself take no pleasure from)

To rush into the third act here (since, let’s be honest, an Eagles reference should sound like a death knoll, for anything, anywhere): the good thing about gluttony is that it feels like a search, whereas the bad thing about gluttony is the way that it promises an end to searching and so focuses us on the goal, rather than on the process itself. Like each of the seven deadly sins, it is deeply idealistic and therefore unforgiving, meaning that it justifies itself by saying that everything we can actually see and experience is not It, not Worth It, not the Real Thing. By doing this, it robs us of our enjoyment and so alienates us from the very food that we need to survive. It allows us to accept our fear of being human, which condition, with all its pain, can be our sustenance.

Gluttunous writing is not hard to find - although it's important, I think, that we distinguish it from writing that is legitimately hungry and therefore overflows through pleasure, rather than disgust. Stephen King and James Clavell are only two examples of writers who write as if the only purpose of opening a book were to finish it, as the only purpose of opening an XXL bag of Dorritos is to be able, half an hour later, to scrunch that same bag up and throw it in the trash. I don’t say this Puritanically, or because I dislike Dorritos (I pretty much worship them, which is why I can pretend to know what I'm talking about). I loved and love both King and Clavell, among others (Timothy Zahn, anyone?), and in many ways owe my love of reading to the complete immersion that their worlds offered me when I was a kid. But I know I have to be careful. I remember what those Snickers bars tasted like when we finally opened them, and what they led to, which was not even more desire, but the despair of knowing that I would never be able to eat enough. The suspicion that we had been duped again, and that these were not the actual Snickers bars I'd heard so much about, but some strange simulacrum, a box of fakes.

I want to live. More importantly, I want to want to live here. I grow impatient, these days, with things that suggest I should want to live somewhere else. Or language that suggests, by its use or misuse, that language is not important. Books of gluttony exhaust, but books of appetite – I’m thinking here of books like 2666, or The Castle, or Moby Dick – both satisfy and provoke, by some strange and beautiful paradox. At the heart, for all their searching, I think they embrace what they are, no matter how limited that is. Kafka said that patience wasn’t just a virtue, but the virtue: not a humiliated waiting, but its own kind of fulfillment. Osip Mandelstam: “To speak is to be forever on the road”. We are all on the road. And, being on the road, our only recourse is to speak, and in doing so transform the alien corn into Keats’s “alien corn”, which is both haunting and gorgeous. The Real Thing, which I like because it shows something I suspected even then: that art is what makes us real, brings us closer, rather than the other way around.

So speak.

Manners

Growing up, at the same time that it was always my mother and my father, it was also always my mother or my father.

There was nothing Greek about this; it happened at the dinner table and then in my head, as I thought about the one place where the two of them seemed most divided. For while my mother orchestrated meals with the ritual care of a batter about to step up to the plate, my father had haste. He ate like a vacuum cleaner and then started picking things off our plates with the graceful, self-delighted lunges of a velociraptor stumbling upon a field of gerbils. Sensing a soft spot in the usually clear hierarchy of our life, I followed his example – mostly because (unbelievably enough) I actually ate more quickly than he did, at least if the dish in question was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or cereal.

It wasn’t, for the most part, which meant that I had to find a way to get rid of it. Over the years, I refined my technique like an apprentice burglar. Like all great artists, I indulged in flourishes, but only when I felt like they were subordinated to an over all design. My tools were few but effective: a large napkin (preferably made out of a resilient material like cotton or polyester), a glass of milk (to mask the taste of those bits I had to eat in order to make the trick believable), and, if necessary, a pair of very, very deep-pocketed sweatpants (which, unfortunately, I wore a lot of in those days). When caught, I took a quick second to gauge the situation and then pleaded misunderstanding or repentance, depending on the parent.

According to my mom, I had no manners. But the truth was that even then, I was simply confused and, confusingly, perhaps even a little excited by the places in my life where it was not really clear what type of behavior would be normal and what would not. To say that Americans are particularly stupid on this topic misses the point, since it is exactly our lack of manners that makes us the most mannered people in the universe. Live in New York New York, or Portland Maine, and you’ll see this equally: life in these places is a texture of densely woven gestures that exist in and of themselves but at the same time mark the gesturer as a member as surely as a lantern sticking out of said member’s skull would mark him/her/it as a fish known as the deep sea angler, which survives, like a poet in Hollywood, by adopting the manners of something that its prey’s usual environment (water) finds alluring (light).

Another way of putting this is to admit that you’re always either on the inside or the outside of any group - and then looking back, I think that if there was one vulnerability that my mother had and my father didn’t, it was this fear of being on the outside. She didn’t want to be shunned, revealed as an outsider, and because of this she decided that it was much safer and better not to put oneself in harm’s way. America, the same country that had left her this bursting, heartfelt, debilitating idealism, had given her a perfect way to deal with it. Be an outsider. Be unique. Be the single member of a country whose boundaries only you can make out, and then inhabit other memberships with the sort of barely-perceptible disdain that insinuates just how impressive your jacket lining would be, if they could only swim fast enough to see it.

The great southern puppeteer/Bible saleswoman Flannery O’Conner followed Henry James (himself a lifelong expatriate) by parsing fiction’s flow into arterial Mystery and veinous Manners. But aren’t manners – that is, the huge mechanism of what we, as a group and individually, find usual – the greatest mystery of all? A Tolstoyan experiment: right now I am sitting on my couch writing a blog entry as my sister’s dog throws up in his dog bed. Sounds reasonable enough – but then turn the situation just a bit towards the “cowlike gaze” and we see, aha, the mystery of furniture! A lump of shaped and molded softness serving no discernable purpose! A tiny animal that has been bred, over centuries, not for its adaptive capabilities, but for sheer and utter uselessness! It’s all so ridiculous; but at the same time, the heart of the mystery here is the way that, sitting here, doing this ridiculous thing (blogging!) in this ridiculous environment (“Vermont”!) on this ridiculous object (a sofa-bed!) find absolutely none of it ridiculous. In fact, the truth is just the opposite: it is all normal. And it is all normal for me because somewhere in my brain and body lurks the idea that it is all normal for everybody else.

Manners are not the enemy: manners are the door, the jug that invites the water in the way a tree invites birds, or a house people. And there is no other way. Turn from the spirit if you want to, but every break will be partial and every move from that point on an attempt to move to some higher communion, perhaps possible, perhaps not – perhaps only lonely, since the other citizens of your imaginary republic do not yet exist. Milton’s Satan says “Which way I fly is hell/ Myself am hell”, and though it might be interesting for a second to see this as the first artist in Western biblical translation, I think that saying this misses the more massive point of Satan’s fundamental sterility. Adam and Eve broke the rules, and we have a sense that this crack in the world is somehow fundamentally related to our subsequent creativity. But they also repented – that is, they made peace, asked forgiveness, tried to re-enter the family. Satan broke everything, repented nothing, and so ended up creating nothing, except the brokenness.