14: MN Blue
15: Two Rivers
Last, next.
State Fair time soon. Moving on to the Blue Ribbon (#14) even though I’m only 2/3 through the Two Rivers (#13).
(Feb 2021: This is the beginning of my tracking Field Notes as I used them. I originally entered these into Day One. Full series here.)
Field NotesI’ve been curious why, when people here on the coast say they are travelling to Portland, that they are going “up to Portland.”
Because I am over-educated and under-employed, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this curious figure of speech. On a map, Portland is very clearly southeast of Clatsop County. Like it or not, speakers of English speak of north as up, and south down. So why not say “down to Portland”? Also, when approaching Portland from over the coastal range, you are descending a long slope. This too draws on a different but related notion of down.
Having read way far more Mircea Eliade than was strictly good for me, I couldn’t help but recall Eliade’s observation that many ancient societies regarded their holiests sites as being closer to heaven than profane places, even when they were not situated on literal peaks. The temple mount in Jerusalem, Mt Zion, Baghdad, etc etc. Eden was in the east, which is why for the bulk of history, east was up, and maps were often drawn with the east at the top. We still pay homage to this old custom when we speak of orienting ourselves, and orientation. Orient = east.
So, do residents of Clatsop County look upon Portland as their cultural capital? (After all, even today, Britons regularly speak of going up to London, even though almost the entire country is north of London.)
No. (Or, if they do, that’s not why they say up.) The answer is much simpler, and the geography of my home region kept me from seeing it.
People on the coast say up because, living at the mouth of the Columbia, Portland is upriver from them. The Columbia is the only American river worth mentioning that empties into the Pacific (indeed, it is one of only a handful of rivers in the world that empties into the Pacific). The shipping trade that passes in and out keeps this town alive. I knew how important the Columbia is to this region, and it’s not surprising that the major geographical and political features of a region will affect how people speak of their local environments… So why didn’t I think of that?
Well, I grew up on the Mississippi. Downriver is south — down. Upriver is north — up. And my hometown of Minneapolis turned its back on the river that birthed it years ago: the city’s skyline now looks out over the lakes, away from the river.
Also, a continent, seen simplistically, is a domed rock that slopes down to the sea. But this would not have been a useful metaphor for someone like me, living so far from any ocean.
The place that made us, even if we no longer live there, even if it no longer exists, will continue to shape our worldview, and influence which metaphors we live by, as we struggle every day to understand our surroundings.
If we grow up in a region where all rivers flow south, then we may come to think of that local feature as a universal law, and we will be blind to very real rivers that do not conform to this “law.” A benign mistake, surely. But if we equate up with good and up with north, we will necessarily and unconsciously equate good with north. This is why syllogisms can sometimes be more trouble than they’re worth.
And it reminds us always to ask ourselves why we think what we think, and in what ways our models of the world both bring order to and distort our apprehension of the very world we hope to understand.
This dark morning, the rain lashes my front windows and Monstrance is on for at least the fourth time in the last twenty-four hours.
The Internet and all the channels on Blogovision are overrun with Vonnegut tributes and redundant notifications, so I will add my voice to the cacophony only to point toward this, by Lance Mannion. And to say, Exactly so: ruined. My life was ruined when I was about thirteen, when my eighth grade English teacher assigned Cat’s Cradle. Game over. I wanted to be a writer.
More than that, though, I wanted to stay awake and pay attention. There was something about Cat’s Cradle that made me realize I was constantly in danger of missing the big picture. It was the first of many books, and he was the first of many writers, to leave me with that sick yet elated feeling. Ursula K Le Guin, Douglas Adams, Ray Bradbury, Annie Dillard, Pynchon. It’s like the old joke about the difference between a virgin and a lightbulb: you can unscrew a lightbulb. You can’t unread stuff like that.
But you can fall back asleep. If I may be so bold as to suggest that art has a message (a claim I would not want to be asked to defend), that message is perhaps: Pay attention! Stay awake! They’re out there, waiting for you to fall asleep, and then they’re going to take over everything else! Keep your lamps trimmed and burning!
And for Vonnegut, like all satirists, the best defense is a good offense. Good artists shock, great artists startle. After all, we can grow numb to shocks, and fall back asleep. What we need are good and frequent startlings. Wake up.
readings OTDFor quite a few reasons (which I won’t bore you with), 2006 was the worst year of my life, and it ended badly. I am heartily glad it’s over, even if a “year” is an arbitrary demarcation. All that was bad about 2006 fell within the human universe, and such demarcations, tho arbitrary, are also within the human universe. I am therefore confident that the latter will have a real effect upon the former.
I am thankful for the good things that happened during the calendar year of 2006, even tho I could count them on one maimed hand. I am taking seriously the notion of the “new year’s resolution,” never having done so before, and one of my resolutions is to step to the side of polarities. Black-and-white, for example, is a polarity; but to introduce “shades of grey” simply defines a new polarity of “black/white” v. “greys.” Instead, I resolve to look for a meaningful third space.
Also, I simply have a thing against the number six, and I’m glad to see it go.
metaIn an attempt to slow down in my reading of ATD, I have been trying to distract myself in some way. But why should I want to try to slow down at all? Well, it is entirely possible that I was not in my right mind when I made the decision, but just before the blessed holiday season, I came to the conclusion that I needed to slow down on my reading of that vast tome because, well… Because as I approached the eponymously named Part 4, I felt as if I were engaged in a car chase from some hit action show in the 1970s, in which the laws of physics are ignored with blithe condescension. I was catching air over gentle rises in the street; bullets fired from extremely close range either glanced harmlessly off the bumper or missed altogether. It was like a syndicated rerun flying dream without the commercial breaks; it was awesome.
But once I actually hit Part 4, the car began to disintegrate entirely. The hubcaps zinged off onto the sidewalk; the trunk popped open and ejected its contents all over the road; the glove compartment gaped open suddenly, spitting countless scraps of paper out into the cab to flutter about, while the outdated maps flapped open to paste themselves to the windshield; the doors flew off; the tires shredded themselves on nothing, and tire rims began scraping and throwing sparks in dangerous directions…
It was perhaps time to slow down.
I have since been distracting my magpie mind with any number of dazzling distractions, chief among them Bleak House, which I had not read before. In fact, apart from Great Expectations in school maybe twenty-three years ago, I had never read any Dickens before. I’ve been really impressed. All I’ve read by the way of prose for the last eighteen months has been Proust and Pynchon, with some interludes for The Ginger Man and the White Whale. And I have in fact been a relative stranger to fiction for many years. My relish for Dickens may be nothing much more than of the “Is this a regular cracker or is this a Ritz?“ variety. Ne’ertheless, I am relishing it all the same.
Other shiny things? A small Penguin sampler of John Ruskin, another fella I’d read not one word of before, but he’s been taking the top of my head right off. The book itself is slim and ridiculously overpriced, and you’ve probably seen them near the checkout of your local indie bookstore (the megaplexes tend to bury them deep in some counterintuitive section, like self-help or cooking; how these tumorous megastores stay in business boggles my poor naïve mind…) The erstwhile typographer in me was slain at the sight of them and has shown great restraint in not succumbing to their sirensong more than twice.
Also, I have a stack of Dostoevsky standing by for later in the year (some, like Crumbs-n-Puns & The Bros Kay, will be rereads after several decades; others, like the Idiot, for the first time). David Copperfield, Tom Jones, and The Red and the Black. Oh, and a collection of Guy Davenport’s writings (So far, I group him in the same polymathic camp as Louis Zukofsky and Paul Metcalf). I’ve also been hearing a compelling buzz abt Richard Powers, so I picked up his first book, the one about the farmers; also McCarthy’s Suttree. I have this habit of reading the first page of a book in the store; if it stays with me for a few days, it goes on my list (it’s a very long list). Suttree has been on that list for a while.
readings PynchonHere’s a thought I just had. To collate and then read all of Pynchon’s works chronologically.
It would go something like this:
[Note, 5 July 2020: I have inserted Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, neither of which had been published when I first wrote this post.]
PynchonI highly recommend this review. It is spoilerish, if that’s a concern as you read through Against The Day yourself. This is exactly how it feels to trawl and drift through the book:
readings PynchonThere is no narrator quite like Pynchon. The other evening I was up late with this book and it hit me, there in the deep quiet after everyone had gone to bed, that he’s really most like an all-night DJ, spinning his favorites, talking about them, riffing on this and that and not really caring too hard who’s listening. But like the best of those DJs, sometimes what comes out is so beautiful that your heart just jumps right into your throat.
We have been Netflixing Monty Python’s Flying Circus over the last few weeks, and it has been a fascinating experience to come into contact once again with something so formative for me. Apropos of my earlier comments about the two forms of comedy, I have been paying special attention to the things I am laughing at. It tends to be one of these: satire, slapstick, absurdism, music, or archeology.
By archeology, I mean rediscovering the source of some verbal signature or other that I had long since internalized. (“So that’s where I got it!”)
By music I mean when the previous three elements (“satire, slapstick, absurdism”) are harmonized. A perfect example of this is a moment in the Killer Joke sketch, when there is newsreel footage of Chamberlain holding up a piece of paper; the voice-over is talking about how this new Killer Joke is the culmination of “Europe’s pre-war joke.” Peace in our time, indeed. What a joke.
The moment passes quickly in the Killer Joke sketch, and it’s one that lesser comedians would have set as the cornerstone for the whole sketch. But if you’re composing a polyphonic work, no single voice can be principal for long. The “pre-war joke” is a deft harmony between satire and absurdism, helping to balance these with the slapstick of, say, the German soldiers laughing to death and falling out of the trees.
Well, it is finished. After a 12-hour marathon yesterday, I completed the last volume of Á la recherche du temp perdu. I’m still a bit dazzled at the moment, not to mention more than a little exhausted. It may be some time before I can post anything resembling a debrief or final essay. For the moment, I will say that it was extremely rewarding, and that it is a profound work on every level — in its exquisite details, its discursive meanderings, its macrocosmic themes and ideas — which has changed, permanently, how I engage the world and myself.
Now, what’s next. Do you have to ask?
readings Proust