Surrender to Destiny

The trip to Florida was good, calm. We saw dolphins. We watched the Oscars. We developed an unhealthy taste for Sudoku. We returned and hit the ground running. The last two weeks have been an achronic blur. What month is this?

We also finally admitted the obvious, and bought the DVD set of Wonderfalls. Last weekend, a good friend came over to help my wife with the dance piece she’ll be showing next month, and we listened to a lot of Beatles. She stayed over and on Sunday, the three of us watched the entire Wonderfalls series.

Since then, I’ve gone back and watched the five or six episodes that also have commentary. I’ve got it bad.

Girl needs a boy. Girl needs a donut. Take a picture. Save the lovebirds. Lick the lightswitch. Save him from her. Bring her back. See a penny, pick it up. Get to the church on time. Ask the monkey. Shoelace untied: staple it. Show him who’s special. Let him go. Comfort her.

Have a Pancake

For most of December, we had a trio of DVDs from Netflix in the house, holding up our queue. The complete Wonderfalls, a TV show that was cancelled for no reason whatsoever. It resided in a shadowland between Gilmore Girls and West Wing on the one hand, and vintage supernatural shows such as Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie on the other. It also learned valuable lessons from Raising Arizona and Sliding Doors. It was witty, surreal, funny, sappy, deep, flaky, dazzling.

A cynical and world-weary 24 year-old woman named Jaye, with a philosophy degree from Brown, has returned to her native Niagara NY, and now lives in a trailer park and works at a souvenir shop near the Falls. One day, inanimate objects begin talking to her, exhorting her with cryptic requests to do things (“Ask about his wedding ring” “Get her words out”) or to not do things (“Don’t give her money back”). She quickly learns to comply, because the objects nag her mercilessly until she does, or smugly rub her nose in it when she doesn’t (“told you not to give her money back”).

Her family is quirky, and seemingly nothing like her; they’re all driven and successful, she’s stalled and under-employed. Also, all their names rhyme: Darren, Karen, Aaron, Sharon. As the episodes progress (there were thirteen in the season; only four ever aired before the show was axed by the typically imaginative and perceptive TV execs), the animals grow more, well, animated; the storylines weave into richer patterns; the characters and relationships deepen.

I found the show very moving, and I easily identified with this girl who is — by her own admission and in accord with her family’s perceptions — a black sheep wracked by the contradictory motives of apathy and compassion.

Most importantly, of course, is that the brilliant theme song was composed and performed by one of my greatest artistic heroes, Andy Partridge.

Watch the show and you’ll soon enough start imagining what the cow creamer might say to you and how it might change your life.

The Midterm

I finished The Guermantes Way a few days ago, after roughly ten weeks of reading. In Search of Lost Time is divided into seven parts, but because Parts 5 and 6 are fairly short, they are bound together. So in reaching the end of Volume 3, I think of myself as half way through. It is appropriate, therefore, that I take a moment and reflect on the book so far.

The Guermantes Way focused on a series of social encounters over the course of two years or so. The narrator has left behind his childish crush on Gilberte, and his adolescent obsession with Albertine, and now finds himself mesmerized by the Duchesse de Guermantes. He stalks her for many months, and in a double attempt to forget her and ingratiate himself with her family in the hope of being invited into her salon, he visits for several weeks one of his very good friends, Robert Saint-Loup, who is a nephew of the Duchesse.

His ardor for the Duchesse finally cools over the course of the next half year, and only then does he finally get invited to one of her parties. He is approached by the eccentric M. de Charlus, another Guermantes. He is an aloof, pompous, and, frankly, creepy old man. The narrator does not keep an appointment with Charlus because he learns that his grandmother has had a stroke. She dies early in the second part, or about halfway through the volume, but we do not hear much about it. Instead, we see how others react, or don’t react. The Duc de Guermantes stops by during the grandmother’s final hours and is left waiting in the hall because the rest of the family is rushing about, calling for servants to bring boiling water, or fresh towels, or more medications. The Duc, oblivious of the crisis, and perplexed that there could possibly be anything more important than a visit from a Guermantes, is extremely offended and goes away with the impression that the narrator’s mother is a distant and antisocial woman who does not know how to run a good house.

In all, the portraits of high society are deeply unflattering; vain and childish fools hide behind grandiose titles. The Proustian habit, established in the first two volumes, of delving into long, discursive reflections and descriptions of peoples’ innermost motivations is often abandoned in Guermantes, in favor of straightforward narrative. It is less introspective and more purely driven by narrative than the previous volumes. Many characters’ personalities are laid bare through simple descriptions of their actions and words.

So it was a shock yesterday and today to find that Volume 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, returns to the simultaneously microscopic and macrocosmic reflections on human nature. This volume marks the beginning of what Proust called the “great inversion.” Our perception of many characters, beginning with M. de Charlus, are altered utterly through a series of revelations regarding their hidden motives and relationships.

If the principal themes of Swann’s Way were that of childhood and memory (and the introduction of later themes, such as senseless obsessive love), and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower was that of adolescent puppy love, and The Guermantes Way was the glittering and worthless surfaces of high society, then Sodom and Gomorrah is that of homosexual love. It also begins the reprise of unthinking obsession, first stated relatively mildly in the backstory of Swann, the social-climbing Jew who is passing for a gentile, and Odette, the erstwhile prostitute and courtesan who is clawing her way into society. This time, it is the narrator who finds himself increasingly obsessed and jealous of Albertine, and not Albertine as she is, but Albertine as he imagines her to be, just as Swann has little notion of Odette’s past, and no inclination to find out.

The overall experience of reading Proust is a wrenching one. He is unsparing in his critiques and insights into human behavior; his portrayal of teen love was, for example, pitch-perfect and embarrassingly accurate. I find myself recasting my own life upon reflection. I also find myself recalling events in my own life that had otherwise fallen into oblivion. He describes the sensation of lying awake at night as a child, watching the faint lights seep in through the windows, or around the edges of the door, and I remember my own insomniac anxiety: the gold and glass chandelier over the stairs, the tan carpet, the distant adult voices downstairs.

Reading Guermantes has been, like the previous volumes, a great comfort, but unlike them, a mild torture. Proust’s acuity in portraying the quotidian nature of hypocrisy is devastating. Every relationship in this volume is in one way or another unhealthy, doomed, loveless, mercenary. The Duc, for example, is an incorrigible philanderer, cycling rapidly through gold-digging courtesans, who, when inevitably they are cast off, become confidantes and “ladies-in-waiting” to the spurned Duchesse. The Duc is kind to the Duchesse only when he has discarded a mistress or when he’s beginning to woo a new one. But they are a formidable social team, bound together by deep habit and ancient obligation, and so they entertain together. He serves as the Duchesse’s impresario; her wit is bitter and funny, and he sets up the marks for her to strike down with her sharp tongue.

Another theme relates to the utter divorce between loyalty and reason. The events in the book take place during the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Whether you thought Dreyfus innocent or guilty had almost nothing to do with the facts of the case, which were few and largely indisputable, and had almost everything to do with your social standing, your political sympathies, and, of course, whether you were Jewish or not, and Anti-semitic or not. Just as Swann finds himself blindly obsessed with Odette, despite knowing full well that the tart is a sly, self-serving, faithless whore, and not even remotely his type, so did royalists and conservatives unthinkingly condemn Dreyfus against all reason, and supporters of Dreyfus instinctively dismiss anti-Dreyfusards as worthless and mindless wastes of skin, regardless of their other virtues. It was to French society what the debate over abortion has been for the US in the last several decades.

This is what is so wrenching about Proust: the silly, the callow, the perverted, the vain, the noble, the naïve… they all are me, they all are us.

I may go to a book (poems or prose or fiction) to read new evocations or descriptions of what I already know, believe, feel; or I may go in order to discover new perspectives, previously unkown or unfamiliar ways of thinking, feeling, belief.

But if I am too eager for the one and encounter the other, I probably won’t like the work — it’ll have nothing to do with the quality of the writing or the value of the thinking, the depths of feeling and everything to do with my own expectations, needs, tastes of the moment. I may dismiss the work utterly simply because we are mismatched just then: twenty-four hours earlier or later, and it might have become a seminal and life-changing work.

“This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole.”

The news of John Spencer’s death makes me very sad.

Ever since Bartlet walked out of the Oval, having signed over his presidential powers to the Speaker of the House, I have hardly watched the show because, to quote Josh, “they forgot to bring the funny.”

But for a few years there, that show was deeply important to me, out of all proportion for a television show. It was important to me the way the Daodejing is important to me, or Gravity’s Rainbow. And the role of Leo McGarry was pivotal to its importance. Leo was the basso continuo.

May his memory be a blessing.

In the last week or so, I advanced to Volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time. So far, we have returned to the youthful narrator’s perspective, and we are hearing about his naïve love for Swann’s daughter, Gilberte. We are also gaining more insights into Swann’s obsessive and disastrous affair with Odette, and we understand a little better how they came to be married, despite Swann having arrived at the sobering realization, at the end of Swann in Love, that Odette really just isn’t his type.

And Proust continues to do a very strange thing with the point of view; he regularly slides from his own first-person account of things to an omniscient narrator privy to everyone’s internal motivations and back again. He somehow manages to do this fluidly, without the slightest jolt to the narrative; we simply shift from, say, a dinner party at which the narrator is present, to deep background regarding events from years before the narrator would even have been born.

I experience no jolt because, I think, of the absolute trust he inspires. He could tell me about anything, however dull or otherwise not to my taste, and I’d happily listen for as long as he wished to speak, because he has proven beyond doubt that he can make insightful and profound use of anything at all, including wallpaper, furniture, mediocre Romantic sonatas — and of course madeleines dipped in herbal tea.

By a curious coincidence, my wife spotted a Proust reference in an unlikely spot. As a ramp up to the imminent theatrical release of its sequel, some cable channel has been repeatedly airing an action flick called The Transporter. At one point, a character bakes some madeleines, prompting a revery from the French police chief on the nature of memory and observation, noting that Proust, being a “details man,” would have made a great detective; he adds that in fact it had been his reading of Proust as a youth that inspired him to become an investigator.

She had just told me of this scene when we turned on the TV — and there was the movie, moments away from the very scene in question. And in a typically Proustian way, I experienced the scene twice — but the first one seemed more real, because it had been Ana’s story, and the actual film itself, upon which her version was based, seemed like a mere enactment.

(The silly Python song faded weeks ago, thankfully — except when my wife asks me, “And in the second book: what did Proust write about, write about?”)

Mere pages away from the end of Swann’s Way — so close in fact that I don’t know if I should even haul it to work or not; I could finish it on the ride in this morning, and I hate lugging dead books with me. Volume 2 is somewhat larger, so I sure as heck don’t want to drag them both. Ah, the quandaries of a reader.

But more about the book itself:

It is breathtaking. He slows time down for you to draw out, over many pages, the refractions of a single moment. The narrator sees, for example, a girl through the hedge, falls instantly in love, and we then read about how the mind so often latches onto some framing detail, the colors of the leaves and flowers in the hedge, the flash of a beach ball, the sound of some distant wind high in the trees, as the crucial mnemonic detail that will forever stand in for the luminous flashing moment of first love. The mind can only grasp that first moment by approaching as it were obliquely, by way of some indirect and innocuous aspect.

The novel within a novel, Swann in Love, which I just finished, is a study of sexual jealousy, agonizing and embarrassing in its brutal and lacerating accuracy. A trainwreck in dreamlike slow motion. And Odette isn’t even his type.

I have at long last taken the Proust plunge. I began the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation about six years ago, but stalled out. I tried picking it up again this spring, and faltered once again. Then, on a whim a month or so ago, I poked around online trying to tease out what had always struck me as its bewildering history of translations in English. I found that there are essentially only two. The first is the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation. Moncrieff died before finishing, so Kilmartin rounded out Time Regained. Later, D.J. Enright worked his way through M/K, revising it considerably.

And the only other English translation, it turns out, is the one instigated by Penguin a few years ago, where each of the seven volumes has been assigned a different translator. Lydia Davis takes on Swann’s Way, and it is this volume that I bought, and am surging through on the train each day. I cannot speak yet to any qualitative difference between this and the M/K, since I’d rather not get distracted (and, frankly, I don’t remember much from my previous two incomplete passes), but suffice it to say, I have found myself completely enthralled, which is not how I would have described my previous attempts. Thankfully, I ride to the terminus of each of my commuter lines (at least on the way home), so I have not missed my stops.

One unpleasant side effect has been that I’ve been incessantly singing and humming, “Proust in his first book, wrote about, wrote about”… This will, I hope, pass once I move beyond the first book.

I think people follow sensational news stories that escalate into media frenzies at least in part to try to figure out why the stories have been whipped up into frenzies at all. We wait for some news outlet to supply us with something genuinely revelatory, the newsworthy fact that will justify all the live feeds and up-to-the-minute rumor-mongering, correspondents in parkas before the hotel, the impounded car.

Do we hear anything during these updates that sheds profound light on the human condition, or exposes some deep flaw in law enforcement, government, morality, ethics? Anything that makes us strive for something better, improve our relations to each other or ourselves? News that stays news? No. Instead, we get tawdry and callow soap operas, embarrassments of voyeurism. Nothing we haven’t seen or heard a thousand times before. Aerial shots of a white bronco passing slowly underneath the overpasses of LA. Posters of the pretty girl on telephone poles, her body later found in a trash bag at the base of the canyon.

To whom — besides the stubbornly naïve — is the news ever in any way surprising? Are there still hermits and anchorites so insulated that they are startled to learn that powerful boys of privilege will think themselves above the law? Every generation has its Raskolnikov, probably every family does. Who is still alarmed and surprised by human behavior? Are we not all human here? Don’t we all have vile thoughts that we struggle with? Do we not all find ourselves humiliated at one moment and smugly triumphant at another? I am all sorts, and so are you. The only surprise for me comes when I do not identify with something glorious or grotesque, and it is a rare surprise indeed. My mind is capable of imagining all sorts of horrors. I commit none of them, but I do not underestimate other members of my species to take that step. Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow.

There is indeed an appeal for a poetry in which the author is “a connoisseur of yourself” because the vast undifferentiated mass of humanity drifts through life, somnolent, watching Fox news, always surprised, baffled, alarmed, terrified. Every moment. And the calluses build up over their raw, tender parts. Their carapace of fear prevents them from sensing almost everything that comes at them, and indeed pretty much everything within themselves. Mute and distant shocks, like a submarine striking a manatee. Those few among us who can say with Socrates, “I know nothing,” startle and amaze the rest of us. You have robbed me. God, I am naked. What shall I do?

So a poetry that offers such otherwise banal insights into the same self we have entombed within ourselves, like Paul D’s little tin box — this poetry can sell, and can actually seep into the groundwater of these polluted little ghetto-selves that would otherwise watch with rheumy eyes the clock ticking down to their unremarkable deaths. These are facile shocks, but useful to the anesthetized masses to simulate wakefulness.

But we want from poetry something truly startling, and not merely predictably shocking, not the shocks we can get used to; we can masticate with our rotted gums almost any pap dished out to us. Shock is easy, and mass-producible. We can commodify horrors.

We want from poetry something gently revolutionary, something sincerely strange and unfamiliar. Instead, we get the pretty girls, the fleeing black men, the millionaire sons blasting their sleeping parents with shotguns. We find a strange comfort in these images, we can sing along to the refrains. We can excitedly recite the verses with one another. We can forge a community from such familiar elements. Is that really what we want?

We are pattern seekers and meaning makers: we cannot escape form. Even a depiction of chaos will be, in some fundamental way, formal. Indeed, chaos is simply the unfiltered and the uncategorized. As soon as I call this bit “this,” and that bit “that,” I have performed an act of creation. We cannot choose to be formal; we can only choose how heavily we lean into it. Seeking patterns and making forms is simply our minds in the work of comprehension. Cognition is a winnowing, a series of choices that constrain. But constraints do not limit us, they free us. We sit down to write a poem: where to start, and where to go from there? Instead of all the cosmos, an endless wordhoard to intimidate and overwhelm us, we merely need something that rhymes with “now”, or three more syllables, or only six words.

I have been attracted to the Hay(na)ku form recently because the constraint (three lines of six words: 1-2-3 or 3-2-1) sits so lightly on the composition process. I may have half-formed ideas, or notes, or single words lying around, and no other place to put them. Thinking of five more words to go with these fugitives, or reworking a phrase to bring it down to the count, is a playful and surprisingly friendly way of working. It’s almost like not working at all. And yet, like all miniaturist forms, it is challenging in a way that long, discursive works are not. As Pascal quipped, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.”