[JULY 2020.]
In the Yogachara reading group I’m attending on Zoom, a list is passed around of the fifty-one factors of the mind. “It’s a bad English translation,” says the vice-abbot. The factors are divided into categories—virtuous, neutral, afflictions, secondary afflictions—and at the very end come four “Uncategorized Factors (non-karmic).” These are: drowsiness, regret, discovery, scrutiny.
With regard to that momentous point—M. Paul’s fate—in case any one in future should request to be enlightened thereon—they may be told that it was designed that every reader should settle the catastrophe for himself, according to the quality of his disposition, the tender or remorseless impulse of his nature—Drowning and Matrimony are the fearful alternatives. The merciful—like Miss Mulock, Mr Williams, Lady Harriet St Clair and Mr Alexander Frazer—will of course choose the former and milder doom—drown him to put him out of pain. The cruel-hearted will on the contrary pitilessly impale him on the second horn of the dilemma—marrying him without ruth or compunction to that—person—that—that—individual— “Lucy Snowe.”
—Charlotte Brontë toying with her publisher, 26 March 1853
Next to the church, along the woody eminence from which you can watch fireworks, five or six pines stand tall, half covered in ivy. A pair of hawks live here. They have red shoulders and tails both, and seem to be different sizes at different times, so we’ve been unsure about species, but lately we think they must be Buteo jamaicensis. Their wings from below have that black-rimmed white look, and they’re just such tough customers. They keen like the possessed; when crows mob them, a half dozen at a time, they shrug it off. “Just another day being a hawk on Twitter,” we say. There was a nest where hungry hawklets seemed likely, but it was far out of view, and being still doubtful on telling one hawk from another we’re not sure if any fledged this year.
For my hungry progeny I make a burrito. The beans are gin and the rice is vermouth; you need both, but there’s no mistaking which one gets top billing. Yet it’s the rice that takes longer to cook. So this tends to be one of the dozen small still spots in my day: it bubbles, I putter, it bubbles, I putter.
Under the hawks we garden, or try to garden. It’s tough interpretive work, sorting out the plants that want to be hot and dry from those that are simply putting up with it. But the work never stops, which must be the definition of a garden as opposed to a monument. A garden could only become a monument by chance: that is, if someone happened to notice it after it was dead.
Our city blew up last night, same as all the other cities, I’m told. The parking lot of the disused church next door gives a good vantage over our local sweep of the flats; an hour before sunset scattered rockets were already going up, but with real dark it became continuous, like an ocean striking shore and cresting everywhere in bright spray, from Point Pinole down to the Bay Bridge and Oakland container yards.
R., high on gunpowder, ran in circles in the dark, wearing the orange kimono that I bought her secondhand in Kyoto. She was bummed because the city had canceled the usual park festival where she gets painted with henna every year. So far this is her America.
“Technically,” she said, “the Fourth of July is also a holiday for peace, because isn’t it the end of a war?”
No, no, we said, it was the start of a war.
“Oh.” We watched the explosions a while longer. 花火 (flower-fire). Fuegos artificiales.
Cable from Elsewhere
The highway cutting up into the mountains of Fukui Prefecture brought no spring flowers, but the season’s weather was still with us, blotched clouds scudding low and fast, and gray rain starting up and halting over patches of open field. The slopes, covered in close-packed, shaggy, slender conifers, were held back at the most precipitous points by retaining walls draped as square lattices against the earth’s contours, like huge concrete nets.
Hence that typical sequence of the nineteenth-century novel, where the protagonist, more or less willingly, betrays his closest friends (and if this is not so for Stendhal’s heroes, it is only because they do not have any friends).
—Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture
I finished a trek through Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and some associated criticism right around the time that, by coincidence, Ray posted some Bildung of his own; and because I’m the sort of mockingbird who makes every song about himself, all that potential and actualization, all those schemes and misfires, encounters at crossroads, deferred recognitions and disguised influences have summed up to leave me with a weird, achy nostalgia for, let’s say, right around 2005.
Why then? The world can’t have been much better off. I certainly had far less leverage on it. I had no presentiment of the vocational dumb luck that would end up buying me a box seat in the American theatre of cruelty; nor had I figured out how to write novels, and if I had it to do over again, making different mistakes, it would have been easy to miss that mark as well.
And yet. I was enjoying school the only way I ever enjoyed institutions, by keeping one foot on the outside, and where that other foot was planted was the 2005 internet, and without that decade’s internet there would have been nothing at all. I had hit one sort of bottom a couple of years before; now I was waking up, learning to think, constantly discovering new islands, and always in such good company.
Then, bit by bit, came the darkening. And that feeling of doors closing, halls standing empty, FOR RENT signs going up in well-loved windows must be what anyone feels at the end of youth; but it can’t be only an artifact of who I was then, because I know so many people who did the same things around the same time—chose career paths just as dull as mine, gave themselves to the very same normative family structure—and yet did not drop off the internet, in fact came alive on the new internet as never before. I’ve tried to follow, many times, but every single sally into “social” media has taken the same quick trajectory into shame and silence. The mask doesn’t work; it fits the wrong parts of the face too well. Even around here, in recent years, I’ve become a very occasional guest in my own home.
That’s Stendhal for you, arrived just in time for the end of the party. Young Julien, born too late to fight for Napoleon, is old Stendhal (about 25 years older than his protagonist), who did fight for Napoleon but still feels life has passed him by. The presiding spirits who assign Wilhelm Meister his worldly place can do nothing for Julien. But if Julien goes to the scaffold, at least he stays young, that’s some rhetoric….
To go back to 2005. To try more doors, find a passage you missed the first time. The absurdly imagined Noah’s Ark scene that follows, bringing everyone after you.
If I could write novels, I wouldn't write on the internet either.
Your implicit ranking of genres is flattering enough that I’m now properly embarrassed to have vaunted what I’ve brought to print. But that aside, what then is up with all those novelists who do write on the internet, and are good and fluent at it? J. has told me more than once that just dropping it might be preferable to all the agonizing; but I never did make a clean break, and I’m not the only one. Isn’t there some vitamin still here with no other dietary source, that we can’t synthesize on our own?
