Sunday, July 10, 2011

Fear

This town has its mouth around an exhaust pipe. A billion cubic inches of poisonous gas to fill every last alveolus in its cancerous lung; the urban tumour grows and pulsates and glows and flickers; acidic, insidious and toxic virus spread. I don't live in this city: I am outside it, I am above it. I am of greater things than asphalt and alcohol, I am of higher places than crossroads and gutters. I am not storm drains or telegraph poles. I am not made of bricks and mortar nor of glass and steel. I am flesh and blood and spirit and soul and the city is rotting from the inside out and I'm taking it with me.

Sidewalks slick with decaying rainfall reflecting geriatric streetlamps and zoetroping traffic headlights flashing spectral rhythms over block after block after block after block after block animating stills of movement taken from snapshots in old newspapers all brown and grey of men in hats and horseless carriages and Cadillacs and Toyotas and women in shorts and haltertops and policemen and criminals and human roadkill asphalt jelly spread over their cartoon gridiron pavement home. Exulted triumph in demise. I am discord and disarray. I don't live in this city: I pick it apart piece by piece.

Great castiron battleships sail between rooftops threatening salvo fire from guns as big as a man in batteries taller than the tallest tower to shatter glass and lay waste, razed, reduced to piles of cinderblocks in crossroads. Fear. Far away fear. I don't live in this city: I approach over the ocean: storms and ships fighting in the harbour and on the river and in the ports and spilling on the streets. Thunder. Grumbling first. Growling. Growing. Groaning. Grating grinding great sheets of metal crash collide crackling flowing disintegrating crumbling grumbling growling mumbling humming one last rumble gone. Fear far away fear crouched catlike over the ocean. I do not live in this city: I come at it sideward.

I'm not here. Not really. I don't live in this city. Call me a ghost if you want, I won't mind. Call me a spectre, a dream, a spirit, anything. Just don't say that I'm really here, because I'm not. Everybody knows me, but everybody knows that I don't exist. I am not tangible nor am I corporeal, nor visible in any real sense. I'm a feeling. An intuition. I'm that little hand that pulls your stomach down into your crotch. I'm not here, not really, but you can feel me. I don't live in this city, I stalk through it. I'll find you. Hide away in your sunny days and your happy children, but I will find you. You can't hide from your fear after you've given it a name.

Name a street. Any street. Name it after your great patriots, your great artists, your great liberators and your great oppressors. Name it after your great rivers, your great lakes, your great oceans or mountains or forests. Name it after your saints or your gods or your devils and sinners. Name it after your love. Name it after your loss. Name it after your conquest and your defeat. Name it after nothing. Make something up. What do I care? Streets don't need names. Streets have names for convenience and for ego. Wouldn't you like a street named after you? Who wouldn't? Or a square maybe? An avenue or a boulevard? Streets don't need names. Streets are named after nothings and nobodies. What's the difference what a street is called when there's nobody on it? Empty things don't need names.

Empty glasses rolling on empty tables and empty chairs upturned in empty rooms. Empty houses in empty suburbs and empty echoes in empty theatres. Empty books on empty shelves and empty records in empty players. Empty apartments and empty hotel rooms and empty taxicabs abandoned on empty corners with their doors open swaying in the breeze like empty flags. Empty shops with empty registers and empty bars with empty bottles. Empty rivers and empty bridges and empty ports with empty ships. Empty promises and empty platitudes and empty meetings and empty goodbyes. Empty coffee cups and empty pastry cases, empty refrigerators and empty cupboards. Empty hellos. Empty I love yous. Empty words. Empty of all meaning. Empty nameless, empty saturation. Empty city. Empty hearts full of fear. I don't live in this city: I empty it.

The city has its lips around that pipe and it's gulping down carbon monoxide like white milk from the teat. Everything crumbling and falling and buildings coming down slowly at first then so fast you can't keep up. There is death everywhere. Death and fear and beauty hidden within. Somewhere deep inside there is something beautiful and shining: under the city there is light within decay. I don't live here, but I come when it's bright and resplendent and I bring cannon and battleship and I bring storm and I bring chaos and I regret nothing.

Snowdrifts and skylarks glittering. Peace and beauty and the absence of fear. I walk around and see things so nice here sometimes, so good to take in. It breaks from the grey. If the sun catches a building in the right way, or the snow piles up on the riverbank, then it seems like I forget myself for a moment. I close my eyes and feel the city move around me and let the wind carry my fear away. That's no good. I need fear. I'm nothing without it. I need to remind myself to stay dispassionate and disinterested but sometimes the sunlight and the snowfall take over and I'm overwhelmed by light and warmth and love and wonderful things human beings are capable of when they forget that I'm here and I almost smile. But then it only takes one. One small slipup by one small single self and I close my eyes and I feel the city move around me and I let the wind carry my fear down every street and infect every heart with the cancerous virus of despair. I don't live here, but I'm always asked back.

I don't live in this city. I just walk around it, on its slimy pavements and through its skeletal alleyways. I don't live in this city but I can smell it rising from the cobblestones. I don't live in this city but I can feel it breaking wavecrest rooftops over my head. I don't live in this city: I inhabit it. I have become its streets and its buildings, its pipes and its sewers, its arteries and its senses. I have become every pair of feet on concrete and every pair of nostrils sucking down exhaust fumes. I've become every heart breaking and every conversation flowing and every couple fucking. I am every apartment and townhouse, every parking lot and office block, every bar and every whorehouse and every junkie scrounging for change. I am flesh and blood and spirit and soul and I am the fear that rises from the street on dark nights when it rains. I am the fear that men carry in their hearts. I am human, all too human.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Surface Detail


It was an April morning, barely seven o'clock, when I woke to an orange blaze shining through my curtains and lighting the room brighter than the dawn sunlight. Firing in the back of my eyes, it shunted all sleep aside and I shook awake and into a sitting position in one smooth move. I panicked a little, thinking (irrationally in a drunken sleephaze) that a war had started, or maybe the cops had the place surrounded and were shining a helicopter spotlight through my window. Then my brain woke and I realized that I'd done nothing illegal. That's when panic subsided to curiosity, then curiosity slowly gave way to dread as I oozed myself out of my blankets and drew back the curtains to look out the window. A sheet of orange pain sledgehammered its way through my eyes and stabbed the back of my head with dazzling light. The world outside was a great orange blur. I stumbled over last night's teeshirt, stained with ketchup and animal fat and slowly dissolving in the fumes of what seemed like pure ethanol, stumbled to my nightstand and grabbed my glasses. One lens was broken. Maybe I'd fallen on my face last night, but my face didn't feel bruised. My glasses did nothing to clear up the orange world. The apartment buildings across the courtyard shimmered like a mirage or a halfremembered dream: impossible to pick out details but the shape was discernible with a little effort. Nothing seemed to move except the air itself; the very space between things breathed and writhed and twisted and warped, but relatively speaking all was still. I thought it must have been a dream, one of those crazy halfawake hallucinations brought on by a particularly bad hangover. I had no frame of reference for what I was seeing. No precedent. My mind tried to make sense of it in tiny chunks—desert and mirage analogies springing up unbidden—but I couldn’t fit any of it together. This was no dream, the pain of stubbing my toe on the bedframe assured me. Something had happened during the night; something had gone wrong at sunrise. Something had happened to make the world look like this, like looking through that wobbly tinted glass old people sometimes have in their front doors. I couldn’t take it all in at once. The building opposite mine; the vacant lot down the street; the old church spire I can see from my pillow when I sleep with the window open and whose copper plating glints green in the moonlight: all the landmarks of my bedroom window had changed into shimmering sunsetcoloured grotesque spectres of a cityscape. I went through the usual routine: pinching myself, rubbing my eyes, shaking my head (I had to stop that quickly: my splitting headache exploded at the slightest movement), still the world was washed orange. I really started to panic then. I decided to go to the kitchen to get some aspirin for my head, and maybe all this would clear up after some drugs, but the kitchen too was glowing, the false-hued sunlight pouring in through the small window over the sink. Needles of orange glinted on the faucets and I was afraid to touch them to pour a glass of water so I slumped cottonmouthed on the couch and turned on the TV to see if there was anything on the news. Nothing but static. I can see now the fuzz on the screen being tinted the same orange, but that may be misremembered. My apartment was cool; I looked to the airconditioner but it was off. I thought it should be hotter than this if the world outside was on fire. A thin slice of orange flame speared through the gap in the livingroom curtains, translucent motes of dust dancing suspended, momentarily illuminated in a snapshot before moving on. It was beautiful in its own way. I couldn’t look at it without feeling like throwing up. I went back into my bedroom—now the same orange as the outside world, as if the strange glow had slowly seeped in while I was out—to get dressed. As I was pulling on an old pair of jeans (torn at the knee from a combination of regular wear and a small motorcycle accident several years back) I noticed that it was quiet. Too quiet, as they say. Normally, even at this early hour, there would be traffic on the street below, garbagetrucks lumbering about, sirens screaming toward some emergency or other, but this morning there was nothing. I could suddenly hear my heart beating in my chest and my blood roiling around in my ears as if I had seashells ducttaped to the sides of my head. Not even the sound of a breeze whipping across the powerlines over the courtyard trickled in from outside. I stood and threw open my window, but it was the same as if I hadn’t. No change in temperature, no quick rise in volume of the city’s soundtrack, nothing. It was like I’d opened a kitchen cupboard (my orange kitchen rushed back into my mind and I shuddered involuntarily). For no particular reason, I began to sing. Quietly at first, then louder and louder until I was almost shouting the chorus to Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. I hadn’t woken with a song in my head that day (which I then realized was unusual; most mornings I’ll wake up singing some awful pop song or other that I didn’t even know I knew the words to) but here came Kate Bush crashing into my mind. The absurdity of what I was doing struck me and I began to laugh as I was singing, the words coming out distorted by giggles like the world outside was distorted by the orange whatever-it-was. I fell on my bed, out of breath but still humming the tune. I laced up my sneakers as quickly as I could, given that my hands had stopped working on account of last night’s chronic alcohol abuse, and decided that I had to go outside. I was terrified by the thought, but figured that I’d only degenerate into paranoia if I stayed inside. I had to go out and see what was happening, maybe find someone to talk to about it, hopefully find someone who could explain it. I stumbled into the kitchen again (thinking that I had to first conquer my fear of my own kitchen if I was to conquer my fear of the orange world outside) and swallowed two aspirins. My keys lay on the coffeetable. I picked them up and stuffed them into my pocket. I was halfway out my apartment door when I felt that my cellphone wasn’t in my left pocket, where it always is. I returned to the livingroom and there it was on the coffeetable, almost where my keys were. I picked it up to turn it on but it didn’t respond. Must be out of battery. I stole a quick glance at the sheet of orange haze cascading through the gap in the curtains, swallowed hard, and left.

Every great adventure begins with boredom. That’s why you always see Sherlock Holmes plucking his violin and mainlining cocaine before Watson bursts in with a case. Our hero is destined for greater things than getting desperately high and twirling his thumbs around one another. Me, the only reason I leave my apartment these days is to get more cheap vodka from the hole-in-the-wall liquorstore across the street. Sometimes I drink wine, but usually only when I’m hungry. Ennui, that’s what it is. Only the French would have a word for it. Boredom and despair and nihilism all rolled into one. My life is desolate but I don’t think I’m on the verge of any great adventure. My life isn’t a detective story: it’s my life. Nothing has to happen in life. Life doesn’t have a plot, it’s just chaos. There’s life and there’s death and there’s nothing in between. Cause and effect are meaningless; corollary and corroboration, correlation and causation, cast and crew, certainty and circumstance, choice and destiny: these are things scientists and pulp novelists use to explain what goes on in their worlds. My world doesn’t have things like these. My world has entropy and decay and inertia and these things will go on until the heat-death of my apartment, my stinking stickyfloored apartment that I have no reason to ever clean. People’s houses only get cleaned when they have something better to put off and I’ve never got anything else to do so the Coke stains on the couch fade into different colors like an old atlas; the ashtrays spill over with papery roll-up butts and old fingernail clippings torn off with yellowing teeth; the dishes pile up at the sink, forming an orderly line around the block outside a methadone clinic; the empty vodka bottles roll around inside my plastic recycling bucket in that way that bodies find a convenient tessellation in a mass grave. All the inanimate things in my life seem like they’re lying around waiting to die while I’m lying around waiting for something to happen to me, waiting for someone to come along and say I recognize the genius inside you that nobody’s given you the chance yet to show, waiting to find out what exactly it is I can do, what sort of contribution I can actually make to society besides those fragmented thoughts I record by calling my own answering machine and do nothing with. I’m waiting for direction and purpose, for something to rein me in and focus me so that I can really shine, something to force me to consider what’s below the surface of my useless existence, something to make me more than a cockroach, more than a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, but somebody’s said that already so I can’t use that one. I need to be human again, to have a job to get up for in the morning, to buy coffee and records and go out for dinner, to eat something more than hamburgers made of rat intestines and bits of spiders topped with cheese slices that have the nutritional value of a floppy credit card, to go deeper down than I can see, to stop scratching at the door and kick that fucker down and live, to go beyond what I can see out my window, to find some detail in the world that isn’t blurred by a methylated haze. From a life lived through other people’s words this seems like it could happen, but I’m kidding myself. I tell myself, every now and then, that life isn’t like a movie where I could be thrown into an extravagant set of circumstances by the end of the first act. Life’s more like a Bruce Springsteen song, where everything’s just shit all the time and you can either make the best of it by singing about it in huge stadiums or you can disappear lost in memory like a Vietnam vet or a knocked-up Midwestern girl, only remembered when you die in a few terse words by a preacher spoken in a quiet mortuary in which only the first row of seats is occupied. I can’t live without doing something, but I can’t do anything without living. Please explain to me the mystery of this unbroken circle. Explain to me how to get into this human existence thing that I can’t make head nor tail of. I can’t see an entry point, only the circumference of the circle, the surface of the sphere, watching it go round and round perfectly fine without me. I don’t know how this happened. I had such extraordinary plans. I was going to be the best at… whatever it was that I was going to do. No, I do know how this started. When you have a brush with death you’re supposed to take stock of your life and live every day like it’s your last, right? You’re given a new lease on the world and everything seems bright and shiny and you watch the most beautiful sunrise of your life. Bullshit. I was in a bar a few years back—a real dive where the whiskey’s got dead flies in it and the wood seems to have curdled into existence and they try to be classy by putting out small candles in tumblers but the place just gets filled with that smell of recently-burnt-out candles because they don’t replace them every few hours, the sort of place where the middle-of-the-road country-rock gets louder as the sun gets lower—sitting and just stewing in my own selfhatred—because you can’t talk to bartenders any more: that’s just a thing that happens in movies—sitting and stewing when this old man sidled up next to me, struggling to get his atrophied legs around the stool, spittle permanently lodged in the dimple between his quivering lip and upturned chin, a chin that looked like it had never stopped growing, like a plant moving heliotropically up toward the sun. He sat there, didn’t say a word, and the barman brought him a shallow glass of rippling amber and he just sniffed it and sat in silence. He looked at me briefly with eyes that seemed to have a mind of their own; caught in his strabismic crossfire, I had to mentally bisect the angle between his eyes to figure he was looking at me. I raised my glass to him and he nodded slowly and stared into his own. I looked away eventually. On my other side sat a young guy, barely eighteen I’d guess, steeped in artificial pheromones as if he was trying to convince everyone that his glands naturally produced like formaldehyde to preserve his youth forever. He was one of those guys who thinks that everyone in a bar is a kindred spirit, like you can talk to the guy next to you and it’ll cost less than a shrink, and he started telling me about his life and how he’d broken up with his girlfriend and how his car wouldn’t start that morning and his watch had stopped and when he went to the store they didn’t have his brand of cigarettes and how life’s little injustices pile up on you until you’re consumed with impotent rage that you can’t vent properly without looking like a complete psycho. Life's little injustices? What about its big ones? What about the huge fuckoff glaring injustices that kick you when you're down? What about those schoolyard-bully injustices that you can't do anything about because if you tell someone it'll just get worse? What about those injustices that are so fucking big you can't even see to the end of them? Don't give me life's little injustices, okay? I've got enough of the big ones. So I left. I staggered out into the orange arclit street and clambered onto my motorcycle and drove around for a while thinking about how everyone else has got it easy. Maybe I wasn’t concentrating, maybe I was more drunk than I thought, but I didn’t see the cat crossing the street in front of me and mashed it into the tarmac like old pizza into carpet and I listed and skidded along, tearing a hole into the knee of my jeans and shredding the skin underneath and I lay there for a while with my bike on top of me breathing heavily and looking down at the river which seemed like it was flowing backwards, but it was only a trick, the wind pushing the waves back upriver while the rest of the water underneath flowed down to the sea as usual. The streets were empty: nobody saw me fall. I stood up and limped to the nearest station. I didn’t trust my bike so I left it in the middle of the street. I got on the train going uptown, my chest still heaving itself into my throat. At the next station an old lady got on. She could barely make it over the gap between the train and the platform that those prerecorded announcements keep reminding you to mind. She sat in the square two-and-two seat across the aisle from me. Muttering eschatological nonsense through her underbite, she shamelessly slipped off her moccasins and slid them under the seat, resting her arachnodactylic sportsocks on the opposite seat, flaking off little crusts of grime and age onto the orange plastic. When you get that old only comfort matters, I guess. She looked at me sideways, like daring me to say something, and I looked out the window beside me to watch the black tunnel’s sporadic lights rush by like fireflies with a pressing appointment, trying to ignore the blood pooling in my basketball shoes which I wear even though I’ve never played basketball in my life; they’re just damn comfortable. I chanced a sideward glance at the old lady and she was in the middle of rolling a cigarette from a pouch of Drum, which she wobbled between her mismatched lips and after three strikes coerced a flame out of the twodimensional match from one of those matchbooks you get at newsstands that are no good for anything except sliding under unbalanced tables to steady them. She dropped the match to the floor of the carriage, letting it burn itself out or else burn the whole train down. Another prerecorded announcement blasted through the car—we were the only two there—saying Thank you for not smoking on…. She ignored it, enjoying her cigarette. I said nothing. Who am I to deny an old lady her simple pleasures? If I ever get to be that old I’ll probably smoke on the subway too. But I’ll probably die before I’m forty unless I can find some way out. I’ll leave a bloated corpse on the city streets and the cops will put up that yellow tape and make me into a chalk outline and I’ll end up just another toetag in the morgue, not even worth the autopsy. Death by misadventure, that’s the official line. That’s what they say when you just fall down dead drunk on the sidewalk because you have nothing else to live for, but they don’t know that. Death by misadventure. Death by fucking ennui. So yeah I’ve looked death in the face and I learned nothing except that when I’m old I can take off my moccasins on the subway. I crashed my motorcycle and I nearly threw up on the subway and I looked death in the face and it just made me worse, kept me indoors forever not leaving except for more vodka and cigarettes. I’ve cheated death and it didn’t make me enjoy life. Life by misadventure, death by ennui. Life inside my safe shoebox apartment with my safe empty glass bottles and my safe overflowing ashtrays and my safe Cokestain maps. Life that means nothing and death that makes no difference to anybody. Life of smoking on trains and straining to focus my walleyed gaze on whatever it is that I’m drinking. Death by life’s little injustices. Death by pheromones and formaldehyde. Death by misadventure.

The world outside my apartment was sodium orange, the sky buzzing like a giant arclight had replaced the sun. The river was still: a ten-mile-long sheet of glass made of raw sewage and the frames of old shoppingcarts glowing that red of a TV standby light. Nothing had detail, nothing was discernible unless you were right next to it. The only thing that I could see clearly was that I was alone. The streets were still and quiet; not even the wind made a sound. I walked a block or two without seeing so much as a roach. The sidewalk was clean and dry, all the old gum and newspapers and candy wrappers evaporated in the night. I shouted out a Hello or two, but my voice didn’t echo and went unanswered. I’d never seen the city so quiet. It was that old cliché, you know: The Last Man on Earth. Hundreds of movies can't really prepare you for the sheer loneliness of knowing—somehow knowing even though there are no bodies and no stench of putrefaction, you just know—that you're the only person left alive. Not loneliness, really, though; you can get used to loneliness, I've gotten used to loneliness, to being ignored, to being like a pebble on a riverbed getting knocked around and worn down while the great volumes of water rush past completely oblivious and unaffected by a little circle of stone. Not loneliness, no, but aloneness. A sharp and distinct mixture of emotion and knowledge, both knowing and feeling that you are completely on your own, and having to settle yourself into the fact that there's definitely nothing you can do about it. You can't just go and find somebody to talk to outside if it gets too much: there's nobody left. No matter how far into a bottle of vodka I dove I was always aware, if even only subconsciously, that all I really had to do was just talk to somebody outside and I'd be a real person again but here there was nobody else, even outside I was alone; if I can't fit into the world then I become the world, the world inside my apartment and the orange world-on-fire out here. Stillness. Stillness and aloneness and solitude. I used to call my apartment my Fortress of Solitude, as though it were a mansion of crystals in the frozen North and I the Man of Steel, Last Son of a Dying World, humanity's only hope for salvation from itself, taking my power from the light of the yellow sun. But I'm not Superman. I'm not really anything like Superman, though I guess Superman felt kind of isolated sometimes too, but at least he had something to do: he knew why he was here. I had no Metropolis to save except this burnt orange one sprawling out around me, and that wasn't worth saving because who would I be saving it for? There was nobody anymore to live there and the whole damned empty waffleiron of streets and parks and teetering highrises meant nothing to me really: it was just someplace I lived. Everybody has to make a home someplace, and mine happened to be there. The place was unfamiliar to me, like all the other people who lived here. The city was a stranger in a bar who gaped at me crosseyed and who I only ever knew by looking at. I never really got into the heart of this place; I knew it by touch like a blind man feeling his way around his own home. The river is the heart of the city. I’ve never known the river. I can see it from my apartment, but I’ve never watched it rise and fall, never been familiar with the movements of the tide. I only use it to navigate, uptown downtown, north and south. It’s a compass, a tool, not a living breathing entity keeping the whole town alive. It’s a map and a road and an artery and a grave. I took my cellphone out of my pocket. It didn't work and besides now there was nobody left alive to call me, not that anybody had ever called me before now; come to think of it I don't even know why I had a cellphone, just because it seemed like I should I suppose. I tossed it into the river. It skipped twice like a flat stone and went under, leaving a tripartite waveform radiating out across the glowing surface like I'd dropped a rock into molten iron. I watched it until the waves had spread farther than I could see and the surface had settled down again back to red glass. I had to go looking for an answer to this question, a reason for what had happened. I couldn’t look at the sky: it was a dome of light, the whole firmament lit up brighter than the sun, casting no shadows, as if the atmosphere itself was on fire. I’d find no answers up there. I kept on walking downriver until I reached the docks and the ocean. I could only stand there with bricks in my shoes and sawdust in my throat trying to connect up enough thought to work out what I was looking at. A couple miles out, near the edge of the world, the sun had fallen into the sea. Huge plumes of steam hung around it painted onto the canvas of light in the sky, nothing moving or making any sound. The gargantuan globe that provided life to the world now turning slowly to an iron ball in the cooling North Atlantic. This wasn’t the answer I wanted. Everything will die. Death by cold and the absence of life. Life is a melody that plays over the rhythm of the universe if it has something to keep time. No more sunrise or sunset, no more noons or overcast mornings or slantshadowed summer evenings where the smell of cut grass fills the air. The sun was dead. I sat down on the pier and slipped off my shoes, kicking them into the water, watching the sun darken and quench and eventually slip below the surface of the ocean. There was my answer, falling slowly into a salty grave. There was my question, fading away to perpetual night. Looking for answers isn’t the right thing to do. I should’ve gone looking for more questions. Looking for answers only makes you miserable when you find them, but looking for more questions means you always have something to move toward. I know I’m telling this story like some crazy exegesis of how I live in this world, but it’s all true. When I was younger, I used to try to engineer epiphanies by walking around and finding places that looked interesting, by going to bars and trying to meet people who could teach me something, wandering in that misguided way that people who have never had a major revelation go seeking them out, poking around in the dumpsters and dives of society to make myself feel better without ever thinking about how I could change. Epiphany will never come from inside, it’ll only show itself when you stop looking. Real selfknowledge is like those purple UV lights in nightclub toilets that you can’t ever focus directly on, but if you stop looking at them you’ll see that they show up all the flaws in the stitching of your clothes, all the otherwise invisible dandruff that’s fallen on your shoulders. It’s something no amount of clever similes can possibly describe. It’s something really only a catastrophe can show you. You go looking for big sweeping changes but what you really need is to see all the tiny little things that are wrong with you. Move closer to the big picture and focus on life’s little imperfections. Put off those generalizations. Explore the small stuff, examine the detail. Life by adventure. That night when the sun was a million-mile cannonball on the seabed and no light would ever touch these streets again I felt my way back barefoot to my apartment and cleaned it from top to bottom. I brought the empty bottles to the dumpster, poured the overflowing ashtrays into the trash, scrubbed the Coke stains out of the sofa, mopped the mysterious sticky patches off the floor. I slept on fresh linen in a bed that didn’t smell like it could strip the paint off the walls. I woke the next morning with that Kate Bush song still rattling around in my ears. I’d slept with the window open and my curtains billowed tenderly. I got up and pulled them apart, shoving my head outside to taste the newborn morning. The sun was rising stately, a yellow thumbnail disc climbing through the white areolae of rippled clouds: the most beautiful sunrise I’d ever seen. Traffic hummed, the city stank, and a soft breeze blew discarded trash along the streets. 

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Before There Stood Gods Upon Olympus

The Forgotten Realm of Lord Dunsany



"Before there stood gods upon Olympus, or ever Allah was Allah, had wrought and rested Mana-Yood-Sushai."



When you think of fantasy writers, who do you think of? J.R.R. Tolkien? Terry Pratchett? Robert Jordan? Chances are, an Irish name wouldn’t even enter your head. But Ireland has as much of a connection to fantasy literature as the United Kingdom or America do. Just as Tolkien drew on Norse mythology for The Lord of the Rings, and Pratchett draws on elements of Hindu mythology for Discworld, so too has old Irish mythology left its impact on the fantasy world, perhaps no more so than in the hands of Lord Dunsany, one of Ireland’s most prolific and influential writers. Dunsany had a large hand in creating the fantasy genre with his seminal short stories, first collected in The Gods of Pegana, and in his novels including The King of Elflands Daughter, The Charwoman’s Shadow and his wildly popular Joseph Jorkens series.
    In London in 1878, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett was born the heir to one of the oldest Irish peerages. Having grown up in Kent and attending Eton and Sandhurst, Plunkett inherited the Dunsany title from his father at the age of twenty-one. After a brief spell in the military, he returned to his ancestral home of Dunsany Castle in County Meath, near the historically and mythologically significant site of Tara.
    In 1903, he met the youngest daughter of the Earl of Jersey, Lady Beatrice Child Villiers, and they married the following year. They maintained an active social life--travelling between their homes in Meath and London, and Dunsany’s childhood home in Kent--and became friendly with many of the day’s most prominent literary figures, including Percy French, George “AE” Russell, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats, who made Dunsany the unprecedented offer of selecting and editing one of Dunsany’s works in 1912.
    As a result of his moving in these literary circles, Dunsany became involved with the Irish Literary Revival, to which he was seen as a major contributor. His fantasy works drew heavily on old Celtic mythology. His first collection of stories, The Gods of Pegana, published in 1905, concerned his pantheon of invented gods, such as Mana-Yood-Sushai and Skari the Drummer and is considered a major influence on later writers like Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft and Ursula K. Le Guin. His 1924 novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, is one of the earliest works of fantasy fiction in the world. Published before the genre was even named, it contains many of the tropes and conventions of fantasy used even to this day.
    One of his best loved characters was Joseph Jorkens, an eccentric middle-aged raconteur who would regale members of his gentleman’s club with exotic and fantastical tales of his supposed travels around the world for the price of a drink. Jorkens’ popularity comes down to the fact that most people who read Dunsany’s work could relate to him. He was one of those characters about whom one could say “I know a fellow like that,” a chancer always looking for a free drink, a man who could sing for his supper.
    Dunsany himself could certainly sing for his supper. He was a consistently prolific writer, having published 18 collections of stories and 14 novels, alongside many plays and poetry collections, in the space of 30 years. In 1919 he made his first tour of America and exploded onto the literary scene over there, helping to create the fantasy genre on the other side of the Atlantic. His Revival comrades assisted him greatly in making a name for himself (notably Yeats and Lady Gregory, whose collections of Irish myths and legends were a source of inspiration to Dunsany) but once his stories were being read, his fame grew exponentially.
   Besides being a giant of the burgeoning fantasy genre, Dunsany was also instrumental in kicking off the Irish theatre. He was one of the largest donors to the new Abbey Theatre, and wrote a great many plays during his lifetime, collaborating with Padraic Colum and having his works staged regularly at the Abbey. Many of his theatrical works were also staged in the West End and on Broadway. Alongside his forays into live theatre, Dunsany wrote radio plays for the BBC, records of which survive to this day, though unfortunately none of the original recordings are in existence.
    He was regarded as a pioneer and an innovator by his peers because of his inventive use of language (incorporating Irish speech patterns and wildly original metaphors and turns of phrase into his works) and as familiar and comfortable by his public on account of his popular and escapist style. Dunsany could be called the Stephen King of his age, but even this grossly understates his influence and popularity.
     In all his fantastical writings, he never abandoned his Irish roots. On the contrary, his work was grounded quite firmly in Irish history and culture. Besides using Celtic mythology as his starting point, he used the Irish vernacular and mode of speech often in his works. These close ties to his homeland and its zeitgeist contributed majorly to his popularity. It could be argued that Dunsany did for the fantasy genre what Joyce did for postmodernism: both were progenitors of their respective genres and both did it in the peculiarly Irish style, never neglecting the common Irishman as a reader even when their works dealt with their loftiest intellectual ideas.
    Dunsany’s work is as fresh today as it was a hundred years ago, still channelling something primal from within the human—and indeed the Irish—experience. To this day, Dunsany continues to influence writers and artists, with fantasy authors David Eddings and Neil Gaiman, and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, paying tribute to Dunsany in their works.
    It is a pity that Dunsany is not as widely read and loved as he once was, and that his work is to some extent lost to the public, being read mainly by the more esoteric fantasy fans and writers. His influence, however, is not lost and remains powerful—perhaps more than ever—and to some extent, in one form or another, he is still being read today, by anyone who picks up a fantasy novel.

Normal Service Has Resumed


In what we call our civilization (from the Latin civilis meaning 'city-state'; in essence a congregation of large numbers of people living together in a localized, selfgoverned conurbation independent of other similar global enclaves, therefore the word as we now use it—etymological evolution notwithstanding—is something of a misnomer since with 'civilization' we in fact refer to the totality of all political entities whose citizens live relatively—and often remarkably, but let’s chalk that down to the universality of human nature—similar lives, culturally and technologically, and whose territorial concerns are generally broken into increasingly smaller administrative demesnes and overseen by increasingly smaller fractal forms of local government; in essence a holistic term for the conglomeration of post-colonial city- and nation-states, a sort of latinate synecdoche; basically, what’s known as The Western World, though it could be more accurately described as The World of the USA’s Exported Synthesis of European Culture and Homegrown Entertainment Which Other Nations Seem to Like Because of the Previously Chalked-Down-To Universality of Human Nature) schadenfreude reigns. We are lustful creatures: violent and sexual animals, but now (and for thousands of years past) able to control, regulate and disseminate these base hormonal urges into entertainment as an outlet for our evolutionary-holdover instinctual survivalist behavior patterns. I hate to fill up on tired old analogues, but Roman gladiatorial combat is still the perfect example to illustrate the human thirst for spectacular bloodshed. We repackage sadism as amusement, death as entertainment. We always have, and we always will.

In that age-old dichotomy between the so-called 'low arts' (i.e. mainstream culture; instant-gratification escapism) and 'high arts' (philosophical fiction; reflections of the human condition) there is one element, one undercurrent that runs through everything human culture produces: pain. Everything we do, everything we write or stage or play deals with negative emotions and detrimental circumstances, and more often than not are concerned with overcoming these. We are fascinated by pain and by loss and by grief and despair and death. Even those works—both high and low—which purport to be happy or uplifting are usually descriptive of the aftermath of the banishment of negative emotion or the surmounting of apparently-insurmountable obstacles. We can only be happy after we have suffered.
    What are almost unanimously described as the best works of art are those which can bridge this cultural divide and speak to something deep within the human psyche while still superficially entertaining and amusing; those works which can be enjoyed on an emotional and intellectual level. Something an opera-snob won’t turn his nose up at and a popcorn-muncher won’t dismiss as wank. I can think of very few examples from any sphere of culture, which goes to show how damn hard it is to pull something like this off. Shakespeare comes to mind. He wrote his plays pretty much for the money, to appeal to a broad audience and to fill as many houses as he could; it just so happened that he was also a literary genius who could get right into the soul. Nowadays, of course and perhaps unfortunately, Shakespeare is considered high-culture and somewhat elitist, not to be understood by the Great Unwashed. He still resonates down into low-culture, though. Ever see The Lion King? That’s pretty much Hamlet. Thor? Partially King Lear. West Side Story? Almost entirely Romeo & Juliet.
    I can’t stop here, though, without mentioning Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet adaptation. I reckon that was the most faithful modern adaptation of any of Shakespeare’s works, for the simple fact that it got it. Luhrmann’s movie was basically what Shakespeare’s play was, way back when. A spectacle. Big and bold and entertaining and meant to be enjoyed rather than studied. A lot of people get so caught up in what something means that they often forget to just go along for the ride. Not that analysis and critical theories aren’t important to a text, they can add a lot of insight and increase enjoyment by increasing understanding, but sometimes they can override the text, and then the interpretation of art becomes more important than the art itself, and that’s definitely a bad thing. That’s why so many people groan at the mention of Shakespeare, because it conjures up images of stuffy old professors made of tweed pipecleaners telling you what you should think about The Merchant of Venice. (Protip: it’s about revenge. That’s all you need to know. About most of Shakepeare’s plays, actually.)
    So but I’ve digressed here. I was saying that Shakespeare had been elevated from low-cultural to high-cultural status, then started to trickle back down again into popcornland. That’s probably because the people who make the really great low culture are almost always familiar with and inspired by high culture. The only problem with taking your cue from Shakespeare is that it’s not his plots that made him brilliant (he stole most of them anyway); it was his characters. You see, in good literature, great things happen. In great literature, it doesn’t matter much what happens: what matters is who it happens to. The reason that Great Literature is in fact great literature is empathy. Empathy and sadism. We want to see characters suffer, really suffer, and then come through at the end. We like seeing our heroes beaten and tortured and broken down, only to rebuild stronger and smarter and finally triumph. Because of empathy. And sadism. We like knowing that other people—fictional though they may be—have bigger problems than we (the audience, that is) do, and more than that we love knowing that they can get their shit together and come out kicking ass, because if this one guy that somebody made up can do it, then maybe I can too. And it’s hard—really fucking hard—to write proper great characters. Macbeth would have been useless if Lady Macbeth wasn’t such a psycho, and Macduff wasn’t so stubborn. It would’ve been some bland pseudohistorical medieval-Scottish powerstruggle rather than the psychological thriller it is. Because people can’t empathize with things that happen, people can only empathize with other people. And adorable talking animals.

So empathy is at the core of art, but what’s at the core of spectacle? That’s where the sadism really kicks in. We love to see our heroes triumph, but moreso we love seeing our villains fall. But what if we’re indifferent? What if the people we’re watching aren’t characters, but are real people? Worse, what if they’re celebrities? It seems (according to a study published in Scientific American) that gossip is an important part of being human. It’s a callback to our days of living in tribes, when it was to the benefit of everyone to know everyone else’s business because that way the tribe could function more efficiently as a unit, as one consciousness. As we started congregating in larger and larger groups and as cities became the new tribes, so personal concern for one’s neighbours evolved into the more anonymous Gossip. We feel like we need to know the minute details of a complete stranger’s life for the good of the tribe, only the tribe doesn’t exist anymore so we don’t really know why we’re compelled to pry and this manifests itself in morbid curiosity. Just like we’re fascinated by death because we don’t really understand it, so are we fascinated by this nosey impulse because we don’t know why it’s so important to us to know what underwear Paris Hilton has on.
    From the beginnings of the city-state in ancient Babylon and Sumer, through its perfection in Greece and Rome, then its resurgence during the Renaissance and on to its evolution into the nation-state in modern times, people have become more and more anonymous to one another, because so many live in such a small area. Once you surpass Dunbar’s number, concern becomes curiosity and further, curiosity becomes obsession. What once was familiar is now impersonal, and the more people who live in one place, the more difficult it is to get oneself noticed. Hence, fame—as a phenomenon—has exploded, and certain people become public figures—celebrities if you will (from the Latin celebritas meaning 'fame', so that’s pretty straightforward)—as a result of their achievements, but now achievement seems to be a minor criterion for fame, with even the fifteen minutes decaying into fifteen seconds, with culture getting faster and fame’s half-life getting disproportionately shorter. People are now famous for being famous, because people love being talked about and people love to talk. I won’t do anything so gauche as use an Oscar Wilde quote, but you know the one I mean. Because of the impersonal nature of celebrity gossip, sadism has taken over from empathy. Famous people (perhaps because of envy, perhaps simply because of our violent, jealous nature) are not the heroes of our stories, but the villains. Like the Roman gladiators, who fought to the death for the amusement of the crowd, modern celebrities now simply live for the amusement of the crowd. And instead of pitting gladiators against one another in the coliseum, we pit our celebrities against one another in a much more dangerous venue: reality television.
    We claim to be an enlightened people, we Westerners, with a strong moral compass. Certain things are Wrong. Killing is Wrong. Gladiatorial combat seems barbaric to us, because Killing Is Wrong. What used to be bloodshed and death is now the controlled spectacle of Reality Television. Jersey Shore, The Hills, Big Brother: all this stems from that bizarre pleasure we get from watching things going wrong for people. Whereas back then, 'going wrong' meant serious injury or death, now it means losing your job, breaking up with your boyfriend, not having the right shoes, not being able to lose 50 pounds in a week. We have convinced ourselves that we’ve evolved intellectually since Roman times, simply for the fact that we don’t kill indiscriminately anymore (let’s not go there, though); murder is illegal and all that, and yet all we have done is diluted the Roman Spectacle and in so doing denied our baser instincts, which are inherently a part of us. The Romans understood and embraced the human animal, accepted their instincts. They could live with the darker aspects of humanity. Maybe then they were more enlightened than we are. 'Gnothi sauton', the Greeks said. Know thyself. The Romans certainly knew themselves. They had no illusions or pretensions about the fact that people are murderous and violent, and no matter how many vague analogues or simulacra we modern civilizations produce for our bloodlust, it’s still there and always will be, however we dress it up.

That universality of human nature I talked about? That’s what makes this possible. That’s why Big Brother has been franchised to no less than thirteen different countries. That’s why Perez Hilton is in the top 500 most trafficked sites on the web (which may not seem like much, but keep in mind there are over 182 million sites in existence). That’s why no matter where you go, people will talk. No matter where you are, people will talk and people will want to watch each other go down in flames, and the further removed from someone you are, the more enjoyment you get from it. So maybe 'civilization' isn’t so much of a misnomer after all. Maybe it’s the perfect word for what we are, only instead of referring to our political structure it refers to our cultural cohesion. The human race is one global city-state of gossip. People talk about breaking down borders, about the Global Village, about Utopia. Well, Utopia’s here. Not in any one place, not physically or geographically, but culturally. Our civilization is a conglomeration of post-colonial city- and nation-states, but spectacle? Chalk that down to the universality of human nature.