Author: admin

Hey, Les.

Long time no scribble. Pardonnez moi, svp. Many changes in my life over the past few months.

I’ve found a new cave. It’s near the water, not too high up, high ceilings (can you say “cathedral”?). Northern exposure, and in a bit of a valley, so there’s not too much direct sun. But that’s jake with me.

I was reading Paul Auster again. I know, I know. But the title—Man in the Dark—spoke to me. I won’t labor the narrative details, but it’s about a man divided between two worlds, two ways of life. One was prompted by recollections of violence, a race riot, about which the narrator says the following:

That was my war. Not a real war, perhaps, but once you witness violence on that scale, it isn’t difficult to imagine something worse, and once your mind is capable of doing that, you understand that the worst possibilities of the imagination are the country you live in. Just think if, and chances are it will happen.

The country we live in is comprised of the worst possibilities of our imagination. Now, that’s a thought to either keep us hunkered down in our dark spaces, or make us confront the darkness to dispel it while denying the abyss, the Mariana Trench of our imaginations. Which way do we go?

Yrs,

OG (forgot how to sign my name, it’s been so long)

Hey, Les.

That Roman cave reminds me of my dreams, which of late have teemed with illicit and debased liaisons. I’m drawn to those eroded human figures on the columns, caryatid and telamon, degraded shadows of their full-bodied selves. Barely capable of breath, let alone any other engagement. Doomed to become less and less, Les.

Cheerily yrs,

A tip o’ the biscuit to ya, Les.

Hey, Les.

I heard a new song on the radio this morning. It had special resonance for me; I was just about to sit down and apply for last week’s unemployment compensation. The song by Rufus Wainwright is called “Going to a Town”; the lyrics go like this:

I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down
I’m going to a place that has already been disgraced
I’m gonna see some folks who have already been let down
I’m so tired of America

I’m gonna make it up for all of The Sunday Times
I’m gonna make it up for all of the nursery rhymes
They never really seem to want to tell the truth
I’m so tired of you, America

Making my own way home, ain’t gonna be alone
I’ve got a life to lead, America
I’ve got a life to lead

Tell me, do you really think you go to hell for having loved?
Tell me, enough of thinking everything that you’ve done is good
I really need to know, after soaking the body of Jesus Christ in blood
I’m so tired of America

I really need to know
I may just never see you again, or might as well
You took advantage of a world that loved you well
I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down
I’m so tired of you, America

Making my own way home, ain’t gonna be alone
I’ve got a life to lead, America
I’ve got a life to lead
I got a soul to feed
I got a dream to heed
And that’s all I need

Making my own way home, ain’t gonna be alone
I’m going to a town
That has already been burnt down.

I have to say, by word and wan voice Rufus nailed me this morning. My applications were online, for three different positions at Wells Fargo banks; I was imagining myself a teller, a personal banker, and even an agricultural controversial claims analyst. Anything to get me out of the cave, you know. But so bloodless—no meeting with an interviewer, no soul to the exchange, which felt like filling out a marketing survey.

Am I tired of America? Yes and no. I’ve been riding the wave of economic stimulus and unemployment assistance through the duration of the jobless recovery, so I’m grateful to the America that supports its displaced members. But I’m pissed to be one of the members of a society that gives rise to arrogant megalomaniacs like Madoff and Petters, pissed to have been found guilty of my own ambitions, pissed to have been found wanting in the midst of entrepreneurial capitalism run amok. Tired of feeling at war with my world, tired of my country using war as a means of public relations. Tired of feeling alone (sorry, Rufus, that arrow missed its mark).

You?

Yrs,

Hey, Les.

For your global itinerary:

• Les Hautes Roches, Rochecorbon (“From $252 for a double.”)
• Alexander’s Boutique Hotel of Oia, Santorini (“180-degree views of the Aegean Sea.”)
• The Laleh Kandovan, International Rocky Hotel, Kandovan (“Rooms once hid residents from invading Mongols.”)
• The Caves, Negril (“All-inclusive rates start at $798 for double rooms during high season.”)
• Cuevas Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Guadix (“Once sheltered those fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Now they house half the town’s population.”)
• Kelebek Hotel, Göreme (“Views of—and rooms carved out of—the rock formations known as ‘fairy chimneys’.”)

What are self-respecting, miserly, monadic troglodytes like you and I supposed to do when word like this from Afar* starts getting out?

Somehow, though, I think the panoramic views place isn’t doing the cave thing quite right. Caves that “make you feel like you’ve taken a vow of chicness”? No, thanks.

Yrs,

* “Sleep Like a Rock in a Cave.” Afar 2, no. 1 (March/April 2010), p. 47. Thanks a lot, Amy Cortese. You can keep the Italian place for yourself.

Hey, Les.

You up on your Transcendentalism? This is from Emerson, and I found it moving, today:

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.

I feel like so many are caught in the bind of admiring, and seeking to emulate, what someone else has created. Seeing success, and thinking it takes only a set of procedures to accomplish it. A sequence, set and named, more than a bravely, unwittingly followed interior agenda, something moving you forward that can hardly be identified, quantified, or labeled.

What do we learn from teachers, except to ignore their lessons? Or, rather, to ignore the model they set, for it worked for them in the unique circumstances of a life’s evolution and is unlikely to yield similar results if tried in another context.

Oh, where have I been today, to be thinking these thoughts…mucking about in the hills of suburbia, where so many lives seem to emulate each other.

Yrs,

Hey, Les.

Do you know about Scott Roeder? Kind of a distant cousin of ours whose will got absorbed into the campaign against abortion. His trial is going on now. I heard that he was a “little bit more” on the fringe than most of the Bible-thumping right-to-lifers, and when I heard that LBM clue I had to look into his qualifications a little bit more. Did you know that he made his own license plates, because he considered himself a sovereign state unto himself? And when he got pulled over because of them, police found materials for a bomb in his car.

This was a decade before he assassinated Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, May 31, 2009. Point blank execution, in the back of his head. In the lobby of Tiller’s church.

Which one was the savior? (Devin Friedman attempts an answer in the new GQ, of all places.)

As Alan “Silky Slim” Reed says, people respect violence.

Yrs,

p.s. The jury didn’t have much trouble separating act from implication. It only took them 37 minutes to arrive at the guilty verdict. Now, I’m just a bit worried about the notion that his defense was crafted to set a precedent for judging other comparable acts of violence. Read this excerpt from the Iowa Independent:

The ruling does not come as a surprise, since Roeder openly admitted he shot and killed Tiller in the hopes of arguing the necessity defense, which would claim that he did so to prevent the doctor from performing abortions. Roeder’s defense was crafted for him by Des Moines anti-abortion activist Dave Leach.

Leach’s hope was that the Roeder trial could set a precedent, whether victorious or not, that could then be applied to other acts of civil disobedience against abortion.

“The very existence of legal abortion, and even the existence of this discussion [of the necessity defense], as well as any hope the prosecutor has of convicting Scott, relies upon their success in keeping the slaughter of millions of human beings ‘irrelevant,’” Leach said before the trial’s conclusion. “Political correctness requires that we not care about their shed blood.”

Scary.

Full story by Jason Hancock, 1/29/10.

Hey, Les.

Someone just sent me this link, about a discussion out west between a photographer and a woman who lost both her legs when she was one, but managed to grow up to be gorgeous and athletic and totally awesome anyway. I was moved, and inspired–almost wish I could have heard them talk. Even the pictures of the photographer seem appealing.

Am I just going soft around the edges, or what?

Yrs,

Hey, Les. Check this out.

While his companions (the apostles Peter, James, and John) sleep in a garden, a troubled man (Christ, contemplating his imminent crucifixion) is consoled by an angel. Aert, who was a devoted student of Rembrandt, rendered the central figures with sympathy and focus, yet his view from within the woods, behind the insensible, indistinct mound of sleeping men, maintains distance. Was that skepticism? Modesty? Reverence? A man’s trials are his own, yet they need not be borne alone, and they are often witnessed and remarked on from afar. And yes, many of us late-night seekers long for an angel of deliverance.

There’s a feeling of a cave here, too, or at least a cove. So many of our LBMs suffer in silence. Did Aert depict their utopia?

I like the fact that he did Jesus in such a non-fussy way. Just another burdened fella trying to sort it all out.

Yrs,

Find out more about the city of maples.

No, that’s not me, lying still, though the stone is ominous and the link to Neruda in my last post self-evident.