Out to Sea: An Appreciation

I have been thinking about old habits, of those I think I have outgrown, but having been reminded of them I become filled with a nostalgia for their grip, a longing, if for nothing else, for the known past. Like a hermit crab, if it could miss the snugness of its old shell. That nostalgia may be important. It may be the only place where I can find a sense of departure, a measure for psychological growth, but it's rife with peril because it can easily induce vertigo. It wouldn't be so hard to collapse back.

A teacher of mine once asked the class to tell him what the expression a painted ship upon a painted ocean indicated. There were answers, none of which he deemed right. Motion! I answered, picturing Bob Ross dabbing some spray around a ship's bow with a fan brush (look at that water: bold, churnin', carryin' on). My teacher shook his head at our collective stupidity, looking directly at me. Stillness, he said. A painted ship on a painted ocean is Coleridge's symbol for stillness.  It was there in the poem if I had bothered to read it.

Back then I used to read differently.  There was a long time when I sounded out the words in my head and placed each word next to each other and slowly, slowly assembled meaning and should meaning not come forth, I would stop and flip through the dictionary or refer to the shelf loaded with the leather bound volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. Building meaning sometimes took an hour or more and by then I would need to start the assignment over again to try to get the full sense of what I was reading.

A vestige of that style of reading carried with me all the way through college.  It wasn't until I read Gravity's Rainbow that that habit broke out of necessity. It was the Spring of my graduating year. I had technically graduated that winter, but I had stayed on since I had found a job in the media department at my school.  I fixed broken 4 x 5 cameras. I serviced the color printer in the photo dome. I rented equipment to students with valid IDs. I helped shoot a video textbook that a visiting professor was making on avant guard art starring Rikrit Tiravanija, among others. I lived in a house with four other kids and the parents of a kid we knew through a friend. The parents were the landlords and weren't supposed to be living in the house, but had decided at the last moment to renovate their house and split the first floor with me. They had a microphone and an amp and would sing either the Eric Burden version of House of the Rising Sun or Ween's Piss Up a Rope with one of the other four kids I lived with (the kid I found from time to time shitting in my bathroom because she had run out of toilet paper on her floor of the house). But it was Spring in Ohio. The thaw had become a general budding and there was music, better music, escaping the windows of the conservatory I walked past to get to work.

I had the Penguin Modern Classics edition of GR with the V2 schematics on the cover. I keep to this day a kind of running list of books that people recommend to me or that are referenced within books I have already read and adored. This auxiliary list exerts a significant pressure, compulsive and consumptive. For my entire college life, I just wanted to be able to choose the books I could read.  It's probably what drew me to creating my own major and can be credited with the many C's that litter my transcript.  There was a thirst that I could not get a handle on.  I asked first to understand then to know, if that makes sense, outside of the arrogance of a freshly minted twenty-one year old. There were things that seemed so elemental that were completely left out of the college curriculum. I didn't have the patience for the iterative steps. I wanted the big picture. The biggest picture. I was very much attuned to the idea that the world was knowable and would have gladly carried an x-ray machine on my back from block to block if it meant I could see everything-- the danger, the opportunity that each day wore underneath its ordinary clothes.  

There was also no small amount of social pressure to say that I finished it, GR, that book held up as the paragon of postmodern complexity. It had been recommended by a friend of mine who dabbled in postmodern lit for fun, who had the book pressed upon him while studying at Oxford. I had mishandled that friendship. I picked a moment after he had broken his leg playing soccer to let him know that I needed some space.  As a result, that friend and I had been in less frequent contact than we had been the previous year when I had bought the book, which means the spine had been staring at me for at least a year and that I had, as I did in those days, re-read the first few pages at least a dozen times to get the rhythm. I wasn't fully aware yet of the distance I had put between myself and this friend. Even now I am aware only of the possibility of our return to full friendship as it stands, fifteen years out, that the time of our mutual affection is now something subterranean and that some force would be needed to bring it back to the light of reality. So it may have been still within the acts of friendship, competition and lingering resentment that I decided to read Gravity's Rainbow, at last.  I was also in love and the intercession of that fundamental feeling may have been the solvent that suspended everything that year.

Time is a game only children play well.   

I miss in part the freedom of that arrogance, its prod. There is something almost holy about the arrogance of the young. It is simultaneously our most animalistic feature and the feature that separates us the most from nature. A superiority built upon the most spurious credentials, the achievements of youth taken as an end unto themselves, the eighty yard runs,  the gleaming report cards, the mere fact of youth with all of its heliocentricity. Yet I feel a great many problems that would seem otherwise unsolvable were only initially addressed due to its presence, that secret sentence shouted with every thought, I am better than this! Of course it only worked in those cases where the thought was grounded in some actual ability and I'm sure Malcolm Gladwell has some good stats about how the people who solve insurmountable problems in their youths were actually never young, but suffered some kind of Benjamin Button like disorder where they intellectually aged in reverse so applied themselves in their youths and caroused in their 60's. To get older, is to learn how to doubt yourself with style, but also to learn that confidence and arrogance are miles apart. Maybe neither truly matter past appearances.    

A good deal of my early intellectual arrogance (who's to say it's over) was the result of that class, the one where the teacher asked us the meaning of Coleridge's simile.  He taught us to think, or so he said, woke us from our intellectual stupors.  He got me to read, to begin reading and to begin questioning what I read, for which I'm eternally grateful, but he also set up a self-critical paradigm, a kind of zero point in my learning based on the humiliation of ignorance. Okay not to ding him too much, because he wasn't the only teacher who taught by spectacular humiliation, I went to an all boys Catholic school after all and sometimes the only way to cut through the green fog of indifference was to break a kid down. He was just the one who raised it to an art form. It's still there to this day, a kid made of all of the mistakes I've ever made, swollen with them, the little fuckhead, my inner Mr. Bungle.  This kid is so essential to my thinking, is so full of my own partial understandings, prejudices and old ignorances that when I find his shape outside of me, say in the shape of someone else who maybe shares a misunderstanding of which I have long since disabused myself, my first instinct is to make fun of the person. In a way it's a mark of comfort and friendship, a mark of sameness, a reflex of pier to pier connoisseurship, the kind that's used to sniff out insider knowledge, like the deepest cut on Chubby Checker's discography (a doggone space baby), but it's also polarizing, limiting-- well, dick-ish, right? But to think about that kid, the little fuckhead, is almost bathetic. It's impossible to rehabilitate Mr. Bungle, to normalize relations with him. He must remain a whipping boy. Mustn't he?  I read over this summer Watching the Body Burn by Thomas Glynn. Glynn's world is defined by the illogic of youth and through the portrait of his father he shows effectively how the long trace of that illogic grows well into adulthood, whether its partially suppressed by alcoholism or expressed outright in unchecked bigotry. In Glynn's world, Mr Bungle is the operator.  (See here for an interview Thomas Glynn conducted with Frank Zappa).         

So too, the odd ease with which the effects of love can be extended to those completely outside its sway, an infection local only to the sufferers of that condition, since it's bred from the senses and the misapprehensions which live solely in their brains. In my case, I could sense only the slack I was due as a person in love, that it was my right to withdraw, to be tied up and preoccupied and that everything else could hang until the day I was able to return to their priority, like a Rip Van Winkle certain both of his nap and that things would all remain the same. 

I actually hurled the book, sitting on my bed alone in my room, chucked it so it flew, the many unread pages fluttering as a kind of warning and startled my toilet paper rustling roommate so bad she let out a scream when the spine went kunk against the bathroom door. I let it stay where it landed, facedown against the baseboard for what I thought would be forever. I had run into the Kenosha Kid sequence and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the fuck he was saying.  Forever turned out to be a day. When I picked it back up and carried on, I decided to take in as much as I could. Full comprehension may not necessarily be the key to making it through the book and I wanted to say I had finished it.  GR was on my auxiliary list.  The fact that it was put there by my friend with the broken leg, the one with whom I had mismanaged my side of the friendship, it made it seem like reading it through would connect us again, that it would go into some column of material we could touch on should the friendship return in full.  At the same time, completing it would mean I was independent of him, that the debt I owed him of reading a book he had recommended was there-by fulfilled and that in reading it I was his equal and so wouldn't need him. If all of this existed, it formed a layer around the book jacket and snuck into the bracket holes/ censor marks that broke each section of the book.

But when I made it through, I was fully under the book's spell. I hadn't resurfaced by the time the last page was turned. It actually wasn't until a few weeks had past that I found that the novel started to unpack itself.  Scenes would bubble up and I'd gasp at what I missed the first time through.  Questions would arise about plot points, historical details and luckily at this point, the internet was a thing, so I went online and found a treasure trove of resources, not the least being Tim Ware's indexes at the old Hyperarts page (now turned to http://thomaspynchon.com/). What I found was a great match for the drive, an answering voice for that drive to understand everything (and that this need doesn't necessarily obey linearity) and a model slightly outside of the Mr. Bungle model for learning.  The book gave you everything and you had the freedom to find yourself within it.       




Considering it now, the notion of a painted ship on a painted ocean makes me kind of nauseous. I think of a sudden stillness brought on as the ship tilts into a painted wave, Bob Ross replaced with Albert Pinkham Ryder, caught as I sometimes am when the subway stops on a banked portion of the track. Caught, standing on my toes like Gidget on her surfboard, the surf itself a rear-projection, so incapable of moving anything or settling completely. It's a bit like the stasis that comes from too much navel gazing, the desire to act but the inability to do so either because of a lack of self-confidence or fear of repetition.   But its not self-consciousness alone that breeds stasis, it's self-consciousness with a refusal to own your thoughts, to accept them as your own and so valuable that tends to shut things down.  

I was lucky to get an afternoon a couple weeks back to catch Inherent Vice on the big screen, the 35 mm print on a real projector with scratches and bubbles and cigarette burns and shit.  I was trying to recall the book, but this happens to me sometimes.  Books melt away if I don't think about them regularly or talk to someone about them.  So I was probably as prepared as Doc Sportello for the fun. Now, a little ways after the pic-- enjoyable for its willingness to go there, to be dense and funny and unreal but never quite as fluid rhythmic or funny as the book--I recall a whole subplot involving a country that broke off the edge of California and dropped into the ocean that didn't make it into the film, Lemuria, and its parallel with the lost ideals of the 60's.  That lost country laying somewhere below the surface waiting to be rediscovered.   

David Bowie Golden Years
Boredoms Seadrum
Mr. Bungle Sweet Charity

Everything Crash (IPoS,tHL Part 6)

Tadanori Yokoo

In the previous posts, I have taken up a lot of time to talk about a number of works that have been celebrated fairly widely within the world of letters.  In part, I wanted to acknowledge that within our culture, the currency of exchange is generally trafficked around attention.  That is, certain works are spoken about more than others because they serve as functional vehicles for the most number of ideas, or as caches for meaning.  This is only one need for writing or art.  On the other side resides those works that measure personal feelings, sentiments or ideas, that always appear as under-appreciated treasures. Often, the preciousness of the text is in direct proportion to its relative obscurity. In some cases, the level of idiosyncrasy assures that while a reader may identify with the work, love it, empathize with it, they may lack the language to describe it or a means to pull it into their everyday thinking.  Mark Costello's Murphy Stories is one of those books for me.  Christine Schutt's Nightwork is another. In both of these cases, I felt the writing dissolve some essential structure in my thinking that then made me a better reader and lifted a psychological burden I didn't know I'd been carrying.  I could add a few more (The Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine, Motorman, Firework, Stories in the Worst Way) but I mostly want to stop to acknowledge that though I've taken pains to pace out my thinking here, I am still missing some points and I'll make an effort to pull this out a little further, but that in casting off with this idea I really wanted to get a handle on the means by which Proust makes himself understood and consider the reasons for that form of expression, its value and its short-comings in contrast to other styles as well as to a number of writers I find valuable to find a balance to the means of self-expression and ultimately what is made public within any given form of writing.

Through the pain, I always tell the truth

In this light, I was thinking about Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, and considering the text as an inquiry into meaning that withholds meaning and simply presents the actions of character in their search. As a Vietnam novel and one that deals with the intelligence community leading up to and following the conflict, we already have the cultural implication of a meaningless war, an implication that isn't spelled out in the novel, but instead exists as the fundamental question within, but also the idea of hidden meaning and the variety of truths people seek.  The novel unlocks for me around the early use of the word infestation-- the only four syllable word spent in a sea of single or double syllable words within the early portion of the book and used to describe the state of a tree in a jungle with ants-- then following the assassin Fest and the change in meaning that association ascribes to his name and actions within the book we get to the prime contrast of intelligence, agents of meaning and meaningless death. Not as overt as Harry Mathews, who includes actual cryptograms within the text of Tlooth, but along those lines-- the question of the ways in which people conceal and reveal political truths contrasts to the larger search for meaning and the ways in which we interrogate nature to fulfill our needs.     

Mark Lombardi Global Networks

Everything Crash

Despite all of the energy put into a system, there is always a point of diminishing returns, a point where the system becomes supersaturated and cannot continue to perform the function of its design.  Within the natural world, the system breaks down and transforms through decay into its reduced, constituent parts, nutrient and toxic.  It's written into the second law of thermodynamics.  

Consider what came out of the second world war.

Proust and Pynchon, separated by Puig and Puzo on my shelf, separated by two world wars, separated by an ocean, separated by titanic differences in form, style, and thought. Considering Proust as one removed from Parisian society, sitting in his cork lined room limning the evanescent stuff of memory and its extensions then considering Pynchon, removed as well from the old monied New England and Mid-Atlantic society, self-exiled and wandering, I assume, through bars and back rooms and scenes intellectual or non, it may be worthwhile to consider the type of reclusiveness an author adheres to.

Pynchon has cultivated a charismatic absence. Gaddis's reclusiveness, because of the tone of his writing, the anger, came off with a kind of disdain born of superiority (a Jonathan Edwards type severity and distrust of people).  Nevertheless Gaddis has his followers too and for many Gaddis's and Pynchon's concerns are so close that some assumed they were the same person. I'm assuming someone put this forward before, but I always thought that Pynchon could have been the name Gaddis and Ralph Ellison put on the work that came out of Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute (the institute does pre-date V. by two years).  Come to think of it, Ellison too went into reclusion after The Invisible Man. 

In the absent author, I've found surrogates for other absences within my own life, but  I think of Thomas Pynchon as a kind of reverse Batman. His name appears in lights and he disappears to allow the citizens of Gotham to learn krav maga and assemble the clues left behind in the Riddler's latest puzzle, only the tools he leaves us are our own paranoia, our foibles, our follies and a deep mistrust of authority. Gravity's Rainbow is about the collapse of Europe after WWII and what rose up from its remains. In Search of Lost Time is an attempt to reconstruct in part the society that stood before the first World War.  The two works stand as book ends for the first half of the twentieth century: one looking backwards and the other looking forward (I had read online a while back a letter Dow Mossman had written about GR stating that it goes into the past to talk about the future-- thought that was a good way of putting it, but can't find the link to save my life now).  

Going back through his work, Pynchon presents himself as a kind of paradox.  His books avoid a build to hierarchical meaning, instead setting his balance so that all elements can carry equal weight, a novel in suspension and novels that would appear to highlight the means of control and relinquish the more obvious elements of authorial control.  Indirection, discourse and expansion as the methods of understanding the world. The variety of epistemologies that he uses as lenses (organic chemistry, horticultural, behavioral psychology, parapsychology, film theory, electrical engineering, rocket science, etc) underpins the basic idea that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently Faustian, but also the only means of alleviating the human condition of unknowing, ignorance, subjection and subjugation. While there's always a sense of the absurd, Pynchon is more interesting for his ability to maintain a concept of the tragic, that notion of the innocence lost in the path toward total knowledge (Gnossos and Mathemesis for the Gnostics out there).  To consider Tyrone Slothrop, swabbed by Q-Tip as an infant to build the response that would turn him into the V-2 divining rod he becomes as an adult, that he was sold into said swabbing by his father, so that Tyrone could be eventually the pawn within the questing of industrial, governmental, clandestine and military plots gets at the level and degree with which Gravity's Rainbow points at the embedded corruption, but despite still retains the character's humanity (ironically, the swab in this case).      

Pynchon adapts the Joycean strategy of reference, inference and invocation to attempt a text that addresses a pluralistic readership.  If there should be any one reader who comprehends the whole of Gravity's Rainbow  without additional research, that reader may feel  a bit like Maxwell's demon. The book is there to prompt us out of specialized roles, to sort through the elements of the story to come away with their own sense of understanding, or the reader can simply allow the work to flow, to take it for its ride. Joshua Cohen's review of Bleeding Edge in Harper's captures the effect of Pynchon's influence: people come together to solve the mystery. That this type of collective pursuit of meaning is in a way the best antidote to a corporate system that propagates single, easily replicable solutions may be the unintended extension of Pynchon's charisma.  It reminds me in ways of the work of early Christians, or of Talmudic scholars-- readers can inhabit and question the text in pre-political communities and come away with their own pet theories.

To think of Pynchon's work within the question of publicity, it seems that in his pursuits he has created a matrix of books that would allow for the maximal expression of latent meaning, but that those connections are left for the readers to discern.  The ways in which Pynchon plays with the explicit is always tempered with a healthy dose of the unknown.