Travelogue 986 – May 24

The Bebop Shaman

This spring has been a disappointment. Temperatures have been slow to rise, and it’s rained nearly every day this month. It’s been a further test for everyone who has waited for COVID restrictions to be eased. We have the opportunity to sit on cold and wet terraces and be served our coffee or beers, but we still can’t sit inside. And the wait continues for the freedoms that come with vaccination. I’ve had one shot now, which puts me into a kind of limbo. I can still get sick, and I still can’t travel. Further, like a well-aimed blow when I’m down, the shot made me ill.

I travelled as far as the neighbouring town of Schiedam on an errand a few days ago. I stood on the Metro platform in the central train station of Schiedam, looking longingly down the many train tracks. By and large, I haven’t suffered terribly from the claustrophobia that I know has afflicted many during the long COVID lockdowns, but this spring, I admit to some restlessness.

We go out. We do our best to fight these doldrums while staying safe. On our three-day weekend (for Pentecost), the family went out. We took the girls to the playground, wiping down toys for them, huddling under trees when the showers came. We took them for ice cream, huddling on damp benches outside the shop, shivering but defiant.

Any sort of travel would be a relief, even to a nearby town. Why does the psyche crave movement? Is it simply a hankering for variety, or is it something more profound?

Wanderlust is a quality often associated with my compatriots, especially Americans of the twentieth century. With “On the Road”, Kerouac took his place as author of post-war wanderlust. His friend Neal Cassady set the tone with his famous letter of 1950, and, as a character in the novel, Dean Moriarty, he took his place as shaman for the new movement, a cult of renewed Manifest Destiny. In this edition of the cult, Americans weren’t claiming land but Experience. The new man was a philosopher of action, all thought expressed in deeds, and individuality a kind of magic, best expressed in dance and music. Following Cassady the shaman, the Beats saw that action was libido released and that wisdom was instinct posing as Zen. There were a lot of words, but it was personality that counted. It was a literary movement that was impatient with words. It was literature that longed to be jazz.

It’s a different age. I wander what Ginsberg would have made of QAnon? I wonder what Cassady would have done with social media? I wonder what Kerouac and Watts would have thought of anime and Pokemon?

Travelogue 985 – May 14 

Aesthetics and Language

I’m in the process of editing a piece of writing. I’m under a deadline because I have an appointment to show someone what I’ve done. It would be better if I waited. Our household is living under a cloud because of the passing of my wife’s mother.

The proximity of death has a way of stripping meaning and beauty away from living things. In this state, looking at a piece of writing is like looking through skin to the bones. Beauty evaporates and one is left with a jumble of phrases, a patchwork of words hung sloppily upon the pretence of frame. Language is just an arrangement of pieces. Without aesthetics, they fit together rather arbitrarily.

I suppose every writer struggles with this dual sight. In a worst-case scenario, the writer can’t control the switch between levels. Suddenly, the lens of aesthetics falls, and language is stripped of order and beauty. If the writer can’t regain the original perspective, then the work dies on the vine.

I’m thinking of Kerouac and Cassady again. When Kerouac received the infamous “Joan Anderson Letter” from Cassady, he was ripe for some bulletin about aesthetics. According to Kerouac, what he had found in that letter was a beautiful fusion between personality and style. Cassady’s writing was completely authentic, completely him. Reportedly, he returned to his work-in-progress, “On the Road” with new vision and new ambition. This is when he resolved to re-write the whole manuscript in one marathon session, typing onto one continuous roll of paper.

It was something more than style. The Beats were always in search of something religious, or at least ecstatic, in art. What Cassady had achieved was something like capturing the greater being that lived beyond the mundane, (the soul, the psyche?) inside the act of expression, merging being and expression of being. The Beats suspected, as many have in history, that madness and divinity, or perhaps madness and truth, were close cousins. This is a position common among mystics. Despite their pretensions, the Beats themselves fell far short of being real mystics, but they might have stood as weaker representations of the Renaissance- or Romantic-era identification of artist as seer or mystic.

The simple formula falls apart immediately. Whatever you may think of “On the Road”, it is apparent that Kerouac’s writing is of a different calibre than its inspiration, Cassady’s letter. It still required a writer to write. Kerouac marshalled the fragments of language into an often eloquent lyricism.

Travelogue 984 – May 8

Grief Again

COVID has left this kind of scar, this kind of legacy. It’s ugly and corrosive. It breaks the spirit. What the virus doesn’t destroy itself, it inspires humanity to destroy. It wasn’t enough to suffer the anxiety and grief of runaway pandemic, but we had to fight among ourselves over childish pseudo-ideologies. Trump’s bleach moment will probably go down as the low bar of human response to crisis in our time, primarily because it’s funny. But I believe more insidious and more emblematic is Tucker Carlson’s recent rant against masks, during which he called on his viewers to call Child Protective Services if they saw children wearing masks. That clip probably won’t survive. It’s not as satisfying as watching Trump make an ass of himself. Carlson is repulsive (even as he calls wearing a mask ‘repulsive’,) whining miserably and staring at the camera like the stunted man-child he is. But his performance is a snapshot of our worst selves.

Was anything like this sort of posturing ever necessary? How advanced is this species, after all? No doubt history will emphasize the (eventual) response and the (very compromised) successes more than the suffering. But we must remember what Nature wrought and how we made it worse.

COVID has taken my wife’s mother. Every day we live with the loss. We were not able to go to the funeral. The government in Ethiopia pushes for same-day funerals. We had no time to travel. The family in Ethiopia never got to see her during her final days at the hospital. This story is all too characteristic of the times and this disease.

Every day we live with the loss. Perhaps that’s the most salient experience of grief, the relentlessness of it, day after day, waking up to the realization of loss over and over. I’ve written about grief extensively in my book, “Careful So”. I don’t want to write about it now. My wife’s grief and her family’s grief come before mine. I have to respect it with silence.

Travelogue 983 – May 6

Shocks

Deaths come like earthquakes. First came news of Bruce’s passing, and it shook the room, knocking things off the shelves and leaving a bit of a mess. But then came a more serious shock a few days ago, when COVID took my mother-in-law. That shook to the foundation, even as I was still tidying up after the last quake, breaking things and leaving cracks in the floor.

Repairs and re-thinks are necessary now. What happened was unsettling – in the way that death raises questions about life, life in general and the life of the deceased. There’s something unjust about the timing, and it rarely leaves a neat close to the human story. Illness, in particular, never seems fair. In the case of my mother-in-law, there were so many variables in the course of that disease, and so little information. I think this is a common feeling in the wake of COVID.

Sometimes the quake requires deep renovations. Sometimes it’s excessively painful to know that this is what Nature has wrought. It’s one thing to know that all things must pass; it’s another thing to come to terms with the cruel randomness of how they pass. It seems unkind.

Our girls don’t understand what’s happened yet. They partake of Nature. They are random themselves, random in their blessings and random in their trials.

Little Ren, my youngest, has reached a peak of cuteness at her age. It’s so lovely, and it aches because stages pass so quickly. That’s not how I should think, I know. I should enjoy the moment.

“It’s night!” she told me, taking my hand and guiding me to the window to point out at the darkness. She was concerned. Menna and I had been out on a desperate errand to a dentist in Amsterdam, while a baby-sitter watched the girls. I’m facing years of serious work on my mouth, and I wanted a second opinion. We got home from Amsterdam late, and Little Ren wanted us to understand that we that we had been too late. She took my hand and brought me to the window. “It’s night!”

Travelogue 982 – May 2

A New Sure Doom

Being young is finding something to care about, many things to care about, and to care about them with power and with whimsy. Not just with devotion, but with abandon and with irony, because youth has an abundance of energy.

My small group of associates cared about art and politics, and that’s no surprise. Those have been the concerns of youth since Orwell? since Byron? since Rousseau? Our politics were fairly shallow, though it was a serious time, being America’s first experience with neo-con rule. We preferred literature. And for critical few years we were enamoured of the Beats.

People roll their eyes at the Beats now, and there’s a lot to roll eyes about. We laughed at them then, even as we loved them. Their virtue was their exuberance, their well of youthfulness, which overrode the abundant rhetoric about suffering. They talked about troubles the way young people do, with heartbreak and wailing that is delivered with such vigour that it’s ultimately unconvincing.

I’ve been breezing through the famous “Joan Anderson Letter” by Neal Cassady, credited by Ginsberg and Kerouac as a primary inspiration for Beat prose and recently re-discovered in someone’s attic. “I wake to more horrors than Céline,” he writes, “not a vain statement for now I’ve passed thru just repetitious shudderings and nightmare twitches. I have discovered new sure doom ….” This was the rhetorical position of the Beats, an embrace of trouble, a conviction that they were more powerful than their pain. It was a language of salvation, the language of a generation rescued from annihilation. Remember that Ginsberg, Kerouac and Cassady met only two or three years after the German surrender and Hiroshima.

Here we were, picking up the novels and poetry decades later. It should be noted that we were closer to the time of the Beats then than we are to our own youth now. We actually met Ginsberg himself in the East Village, when he performed Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience”. It was all still alive. 

We read “On the Road” and we realized we had Dean Moriarty in our midst. That was our friend Bruce, fresh from Texas and hungry for life.

 Travelogue 981 – April 27

 Another Day for the King

It’s King’s Day again. The king’s birthday is one of those holidays that stand in the calendar as uneasy amalgams. There a real king who has a real birthday, but the day is a celebration of Dutchness and a lot of other things that have nothing to do with royalty. It’s history for the living, irreverence and tradition, carpe (holi)diem with a nod to the dignity of preceding generations. It’s a frustrating assignment for journalists every year. What can you say? You print photos of people having fun beside photos of the king humbly smiling and waving. You leave it at that.

These silly paradoxes are what trip up nationalists every time. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene’s short-lived Anglo-Saxon caucus in Washington, D.C.! It was patently ridiculous and offensive. Greene wouldn’t be able to pick an Anglo-Saxon out of a medieval line-up if her life depended on it. And I’m quite sure she couldn’t find ten words to describe the history of that maligned group. Does she realize they were the losers in the battle for primacy in England almost a thousand years ago?

People like Greene go out of their way to perform these intellectual pratfalls for us. But in fact, they are just providing us with catharsis for our own sense of awkwardness. We don’t like to admit how foolish we all are made by living in the present as products of time. Our histories make fools of us, our natural, national and personal histories. Loveable, hapless, God’s-children kind of fools.

The passing of my friend Bruce reminds me how difficult it is to assimilate all one’s life into one coherent identity, or even one coherent narrative. It’s like the personality of the present is living with personalities from the past in one big house. The house is spacious enough that our hero can pass whole weeks without encountering housemates. The hero becomes quite secure with his or her identity. But the day comes when the past and present cross paths in the hallway. If we’re honest, it’s a bit shocking every time. The act of recognizing oneself is rarely an encounter with the beloved, but an encounter with the Stranger. One can love the Stranger, as Jesus was at pains to say. But love for the Stranger isn’t achieved by misnaming the Stranger or by outfitting the Stranger in familiar garb or attractive masks.

As I talk about Bruce, I’ll talk about ideas I entertained back then. I’ll talk about places we knew, and how I knew them then. I confess it will be impossible to recapture the precise quality of my thought and feelings, and so I will freely mix them with current impressions. That is the uneasy marriage of ‘personalities’ arranged by Time.

Travelogue 980 – April 24

Spring’s Power

Little Ren has developed a taste for the outdoors. In principle, I approve, but whoever is tasked with taking her out must be rested, alert, and warmed up. Little Ren likes to run and run. Once out the door, she sets off and the excursion becomes a chase.

She leads me to the park at the end of the canal behind our building, next to Spart Stadium. It’s a big park, with lots of playground toys and lots of room to run. It has a fence around it, which I find a blessing. I get to retreat to one of the benches and sit while she cycles madly through her round of games and amusements.

Not that I don’t join in, once I catch my breath. I enjoy pushing her on the swing or helping her climb. But it seems as though her favourite pastimes are the messy ones, digging in the sandpit, or rooting around in the grass to find odd bits of Nature’s discards.

So rest on the side-lines I do. I recharge. I take in the first pleasant signs of spring. Trees are in the early stages of budding, sending up red shoots and ethereal clouds of green. It’s that delicate period when nature seems to be considering whether spring will take hold. The skies are big; the air is crisp. The trees, with their new growth, seem small. The tender new leaves might be a tentative query.

And, yet, below appearances, life is insistent. It’s unstoppable. It’s the weed that cracks the concrete. Life is the need to live, ravening and implacable.

This reminds me that I wanted to talk about Bruce. We were friends not even a full decade, though it seemed much longer. So much happened. We were young, and events were dramatic. Relationships were like drugs.

I wouldn’t say I was the Kerouac of our little group, but he was the Neal Cassady, the wild man, satyr and shaman. He was bigger than life, always laughing, and in perpetual motion. Everything he said was revelation or pure bathos. We followed him, and we recovered from him, and then we sought him out again. And then, suddenly, it was all over. He had crossed lines that couldn’t be forgiven, his antics gone too far. His friends turned away, grew up. The truth is, we had all crossed lines. His crimes were simply the most evident. I never really held a grudge, even though I had had to close the door. His life force was unrefined and unrestrained. He partook of that unstoppable power of spring.

Travelogue 979 – April 22

False Spring

Spring skies don’t always bring spring temperatures. The sun has been reclaiming its skies, rising early and then climbing high, putting the clouds to flight. But in the morning, we still need our coats and scarves. This can be a frustrating time of year.

My workplace has made the mysterious decision to station us squarely in harm’s way, just as case numbers are rising. To be fair, they are just following the Dutch government’s advice and model, as they open restaurant terraces while taking their own sweet time with the vaccination rollout. It would be hard to find reason in the move. Expediency and obstinacy, yes; sensitive and thoughtful leadership, I don’t think so.

Someone close to us is struggling with COVID right now, so I may be a little humourless on this topic. This person is not in the Netherlands. She is in Ethiopia, where the healthcare system tries the best it can without the resources Dutch institutions have. They fall short when they would rather succeed. Here in Europe, it feels at times like we fall short just to be contrary. 

Last week an old friend died. I don’t believe it was from COVID, though I can’t be sure. I had lost touch with him, and the news of his passing reached me in a circuitous fashion. We haven’t been close in many years, but I was nonetheless saddened by the news.

I’d like to write about my friend. I’d like to write about the many things he taught me. And I’d like to write about the galaxy of thoughts and feelings sparked by the event of his passing. It’s really impossible. Capturing honestly and accurately even one moment in writing is impossible. Writing requires structure that betrays the substance of being. I found this while writing the memoir about my first years in Ethiopia. I could buff the experience into a smooth narrative, which would be falsehood, or I could throw a mental net and capture fragments and impressions, commit them to the page somehow, and create a different type of falsehood. Memoir is a well-intentioned lie. A writer of memoir can only try, with every effort, to fashion a closer resemblance to truth. 

It puts me in mind of Michelangelo, with no justification at all. He famously (apocryphally?) saw the statue inside the stone. When the statue is finished, it seems to live. His style is based on ancient Roman sculpture, and those Roman busts are indeed impressive. I’ve noticed lately on youtube efforts to animate those busts, so that we might get an idea of what the Caesars looked like. It really doesn’t work. It makes you realize the beautiful bust is not the person.

Travelogue 978 – April 5 

The Firm

I interrupt my meditations again with an important bulletin. I have now seen the original pilot for “Suits”, a TV show that aired between 2011 and 2019. That means I’m qualified to report on the British royal family. “Suits” is the show that, of course, made Meghan Markle famous before her marriage to Prince Harry. In the pilot, she plays a sassy paralegal working at the high-powered law firm.

The series is a legal drama, and the show is not sparing with the tropes we love about this genre. The lawyers are cold-blooded and ruthless. They will do anything to win. They indulge in excess and luxury. Everything around them is beautiful. The male lawyers are womanizers in embarrassing style, meaning their behaviours are portrayed as cute and funny. They can’t help themselves; their physical attractiveness is a kind of imperative.

The practice of law is also portrayed in the usual film shorthand, time lapse drudgery and two-minute clips of a partner being a badass in a negotiation, and dramatic breaking points in interrogations. Who wouldn’t be mesmerized by the glamour of the law office? A lot of rhetoric is dedicated to the virtues of hard work and smarts, but the medium of television defies any real portrait. The screen allows for boredom but no pain, disaffection but no despair. It loves conflict, but can’t abide the long days when, hour after hour, you wonder how you will continue. It fails to depict mediocrity, even when it manages to be mediocrity in itself. Existentialist struggles don’t exist in law firms or on Wall Street.

Turning my newfound insights to an analysis of the royal family in England, it’s clear that the new Duchess was uniquely suited to join ‘The Firm’. She’s smarter and more attractive than the rest of us. She can be a badass in a negotiation. She rarely suffers from ennui or existential angst. If either intrudes on daily experience, she can be sure that a scene change is coming quickly. There will be none of these dreary depressions that beset royals of the twentieth century.

Piers Morgan has carried on with his crusade against Markle. It’s an odd obsession. “She’s just one of many whiny, privileged, hypocritical celebrities who now cynically exploit victimhood to suppress free speech,” he writes. Well, okay, it’s fun to call out spoiled celebrities, but isn’t he one of them? Does he get to do that? He calls out her “woke world view” and her service to cancel culture. Sure, the politically correct try our patience at times, but do they do that any more than the politically incorrect? Does being annoying make someone’s viewpoint wrong? Is it possible we’re annoyed because the politically correct are, in fact, correct? And again: does someone attacking another person so vehemently get to decry cancel culture? It appears that self-awareness remains the rarest quality in political discourse.

Travelogue 977 – April 2

Torches at the Capitol

Baby Jos sees air molecules now. One beautiful morning, walking to school, Baby announced that she could see the molecules in the air. “They’re going everywhere,” she said. Her mama and I were suitably impressed. “You don’t see them?” she asked. I didn’t mind admitting that I couldn’t. I see a lot less than I used to, but even at its best, my sight was never up to spotting individual molecules.

After remarking a number of times on her new discovery, she asked why she couldn’t see the molecules as easily where the sun was making its slow appearance in the east. I said I couldn’t be sure, but maybe it had something to do with the sun’s strong light. She agreed. She warned me I shouldn’t look at the sun. Further, she said I shouldn’t try to reach out to touch the sun. I might hurt myself.

In short, I’m see Scaevola everywhere these days, now that I’ve begin the all-important discussion of that ancient Roman legend, the discussion that will reveal all sorts of truths and near-truths and passive truths and unconscious truths.

I see Scaevola in the old rock music videos I’ve been watching in between more sober activities. I do this to reminisce, and I love the memories. But I can’t help being amused sometimes at the earnest abandon those singers brought to the mic. They had no self-consciousness and very little sense of irony. It takes belief. You can see it in their eyes. Once the music starts, they are absolutely immersed and swimming in the experience. All for the show.

I see Scaevola in Trump-(and-post-Trump)-era headlines in the U.S., like “Car Rams into Barrier at the Capitol”. Or the January 6 assault itself, where hundreds of dum-dums led by the QAnon shaman in buffalo horns stormed the Capitol building. Like Icarus challenging the sun, … but lacking the wits, the charm, the joie de vivre, the innocence, or the pathos; lacking, basically, any quality that might have excited sympathetic response from any corner. The January 6 assault has little to recommend it as a mythical event, other its flirtation with fire.

One watches spectacles like these and wonders whether these people were sober.

Travelogue 976 – March 28

Crying Children

There’s a relentlessness to the Republican cant. They are incontinent, powerless over their message, powerless over their garrulousness. Their cant has the relentlessness of psychological need. When Baby is very tired, she seizes on some grievance and she cries and cries. She stomps a foot and demands attention. “You aren’t listening to me!” she shouts. This is what the Republican cant sounds like. Part of growing up should be a process of becoming self-aware of what one sounds like.

Apologies to my readers who were waiting for answers to the Scaevolan mysteries that have intrigued us for millennia; I’m needing to think out loud about this upsetting situation in American politics.

I’ve never been a fan of the Republican Party, but the times force us to re-evaluate what we thought was bad before. Reagan and the Bushes do not deserve to be considered as good leaders by almost any objective measure. And yet, we are forced by the extremity of the Republican moral collapse to display them as models of behaviour. It’s extraordinary!

I don’t find it impossible to believe, for instance, that there were moments when G.W. consulted his conscience. Those times may not have been frequent. He may have overruled his conscience, or had it overruled. But I can believe there was some foundation of humanity there. How is it we have become so desperate that that seems a gold standard?

Tucker Carlson agreed with a guest on his show yesterday that the Republican Party would be forced to resort to a fascist candidate "within 10 to 20 years". Oh, really? And why is that? Because “… we’re going to be all treated like criminals, and all subject to every single law, while antifa, Black Lives Matter guys go free and Hunter Biden goes free ….” These are the thoughts that take the place of policy in America’s second party. It’s extraordinary!

What do you advise the child who complains that no one likes him? You advise that child to re-assess his way of relating to the other kids. The Republican cries of injustice are the cries of a bully who’s been ostracized. There are real reasons the other kids don’t like him! What the Republicans are saying when they cry foul is that they want the right to say and stand for offensive things without consequence. “My racist feelings are sincere. They represent deep values for me!” they cry. “You aren’t listening to me!”

So the governor of Georgia signs a law restricting voting rights while locked in a room with six other white dudes, sitting at a desk placed underneath a painting of a plantation that profited from slave labour. A black state legislator knocks on the door of the chamber and is hauled away by police. How does a politician become so blind to optics? By living in a bubble of grievance. “In my heart I’m a good person. If I’m a racist, it’s a good-guy racism.” He stomps his foot and cries that we’re not listening. It’s embarrassing.

The purpose of the political theatre that Republicans claim to abhor is to show us what’s inside a politician’s heart. The rest of us can’t see into your heart. Telling us, in ripe tones of indignation, that you’re a good guy doesn’t cut it.

I’ve never been a fan of the Republican Party, but I do believe there is a place for a viable conservative party. I may never vote with them, but they form a function in political debate. The trouble is the Republican Party is no longer a viable conservative party. There is no constructive policy debate in the Republican Party. There is only grievance, and the grievance of people who have earned their exile. At this point, the Republican Party has to convince the nation and the world that they are not fascists. You don’t get to cry that people call you fascists when you act like fascists. Do the work! Find something positive to contribute to the nation!

Travelogue 975 – March 22

The Word for Suffering

Television is finally a force for good. There’s a show called ‘Number Blocks’ that has inspired Baby Jos with a passion for numbers and maths. She watches the show at every opportunity. The numbers have personalities and voices and colours, and Baby knows them all. When the TV is not on, she draws Number Blocks. She playacts with numbers.

More than knowing what colour the character Number Eight is, she has internalized the math. It’s astonishing. She knows that eight is made of four twos and two fours. She knows that five and three makes eight. Two and six, too. She became absolutely besotted with the idea of big numbers like a thousand and a million. She knows how to write a thousand. She knows it’s ten hundreds. She understand the rudiments of squares. I’m blown away, both by her acumen and her passion.

Youth is a succession of passions. This we know. Watching the unfoldment of those passions is mesmerizing. It’s one of the great joys of being a parent. It’s also something of a mystery. Do we ever understand human passions? We nod at them with wisdom, acknowledging them as a fact of life; we empathize, because we know what passion feels like; but do we understand another person’s passions? Why numbers? Why now? I don’t know. I love it, but I don’t understand it.

Returning to my last topic, the myth of the Passion of Scaevola, I find myself wondering why parents told their children this story. It may seem self-evident: to inspire patriotism. But what emotion did parents expect to rouse? Pride, horror, or aspiration? Each has its purpose, but they might be contradictory purposes. Most obviously, the child was meant to be proud to be a Roman. The child identifies as the same species as Scaevola, an exceptional race of people.

Identification goes further, though, especially for the child. The child imagines him- or herself in Scaevola’s shoes. What feeling ensues? Hopefully a horror at the thought of thrusting his or her hand into the fire. Eventually, the horror may turn into fascination. It was an act of passion, after all, something attractive to the human imagination. The word passion, by the way, derives from a Latin word for suffering. Thence, Christ’s Passion. Strange that it has come to mean desire! The child conceives a passion for the Passion of Scaevola. The child suffers what Scaevola suffers? The child desires what Scaevola suffered? The child desires to be a hero, or the child desires simply to suffer? Have the two become the same, by virtue of the framing of the story? What did the Romans praise when they praised Scaevola, the cold abstraction of patriotism or the fiery sacrificial impulse? What would the child absorb?

I haven’t really provided any answers, have I? Do I get another try?

Travelogue 974 – March 15

Talking Assassins on the Ides

It’s the Ides of March. Last year, I was being initiated into the new world of COVID lockdown. A year later, I’m still working at home. Bars and cafes are still shut. I’ve had exactly one beer so far this year, and, somehow, even though I’m eating at home and never drinking alcohol, I’m still in worse shape than ever. I’m gaining weight. I don’t run anymore, lacking the motivation of races. My eyes are fried from constant computer use. My psyche is in no better shape, though more spare than my flabby exterior, starved as it is by lockdown, haggard, lean, and spooked. I can’t remember the last time I was outside the city limits. I can’t remember the last time I watched a movie in the theatre. Was there ever an Ides of March more fateful? Well, maybe one.

I’ve been listening to a podcast about the history of Rome. The podcast starts at the beginning, of course, and, being a well-behaved auditor, I’m starting there, too. It’s funny how Roman history starts in legend. Even the modern historian of Rome recounts the legends, admitting they’re legends, but having no alternative but the sketchiest archaeology. The legends, says the historian, may serve as a kind of code, betraying some truth behind their colourful dramas. The strange thing is how legend and truth are melded somewhere in the fifth century or so before Christ. For a century or two of Roman history, according to the histories written during the late Republic and later, legendary figures lived side by side with historical ones.

Prominent in Rome’s early history, legendary or otherwise, are the Etruscans, Rome’s powerful northern neighbours. It can safely be assumed that much of early Roman history was played out in the shadow of that civilization. One legend we inherit has its roots in a conflict with the Etruscans, the legend of Gaius Mucius Scaevola. This soldier was sent to assassinate King Porsenna of Clusium, who was attacking the city. Scaevola was captured and brought before the king. The soldier brashly told the king there would be many more assassins, and, when threatened with death by fire, the young man held his left hand in the fire without so much as a whimper, to prove the terrible resolve of his people. Porsenna let him go and promptly retreated, intimidated by the boy’s fervour. Legend or truth, you may be wondering. One clue might be that the soldier’s name, Scaevola, means left-handed in old Latin. What are the odds?

Is this patriotism or extreme predation? Is this passion or psychosis? All the answers in my next blog.

Travelogue 973 – March 10

Bad Art: “Moxie”

It’s embarrassing when your side makes bad art. Liberals and lefties have had it good in recent decades. The greats among the arts have primarily been fellow liberals. It must have been frustrating for loyal right-wingers with any aesthetic taste. What if they didn’t like country music? All that was left was Adam Sandler, reality TV and Expendables. Readers had propaganda, all inspired by the grande dame Ayn Rand. It’s tempting to think that the laws of physics don’t allow right-wing perspectives and good art to inhabit the same space. But it wasn’t so long ago that conservatives were the great patrons, and in some cases, the great artists. Look at T.S. Eliot. Look at what happened to his friend, Ezra Pound, weird convert to fascism and fan of Mussolini.

We watched the film “Moxie” on Netflix the other night, and it left me fearful that our golden age was passing. I realized how delicate the balance was between art made by lefties and leftie propaganda. It was a horrible movie, and not for any lack of talent on set. It was horrible because the filmmakers gave in to excess and demonstrated they were fine with propaganda. I couldn’t disagree with any of the political principles driving the film. But I was left utterly dejected by the mallet taken to the subject matter, and to the heads and shoulders of the audience. My God, it was tiring. Absolutely nothing could be left to the imagination. There was nothing that could be left to chance. There was nothing that could be ambiguous. The bad boy (played by the son of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as it happens) could be left with not a shred of humanity. The good boy was painted with similar subtlety, a caricature of the attentive and selfless lover, who virtually evaporated into the mists whenever female eyes were not upon him. The girls and women (other than a good-hearted but misguided school principal) were all versions of cartoon superheroes. Each had her superpower and each had her cross to bear, but, gosh, when they united, there was no force, terrestrial or otherwise, that could withstand them. And never could they (or we) waver. Miserable.

Defenders of the film could say, “Reverse the casting, male for female, and what you’ve just said could apply to dozens, maybe hundreds, of movies made in recent decades. (See Expendables.)” That may be true, but you don’t defend bad art by referencing other bad art. It only makes it worse that they should have known better. It’s too late in the game to claim “Moxie” was satire.

The type in performance and narrative is coming back (as discussed in my last entry) and there is no better place for the type than in a propaganda piece. The heroes and villains play out our personal morality plays, not to remind us that we are fallible, but to remind us how mighty we are in our righteousness.

We know in our hearts we are the heroes, and we know we will vanquish. The pleasure of the drama is indulging in furious indignation at the villains and in the glory of seeing them smitten. We know that Thanos will be smitten in the final Avengers movie, but that’s a wholly different sensation to anticipating the glorious smiting of an arrogant son of a Republican governor. Rah, rah! Send in the cheerleaders.

Travelogue 972 – March 9

Heroes and Types

Forgive me if I return to Chesterton. I have another insight from his writings about Dickens. It has some tangential relevance to my current meditations on historical fiction. He tells us that the difference between characters of ancient fiction versus modern literature is the difference between types (divine because unchanging) and individuals (changing and mortal). Chesterton claims that Dickens was the last to create divine characters in the modern era. “Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist,” he writes. What makes types appealing is their timelessness. They are ‘divine’ in the sense that they don’t age. Even when their stories demonstrate narrative arc, their essences are unchanging. Pickwick is Pickwick from start to finish of Dickens’s novel.

Discussing pre-modern literature, Chesterton makes reference to “the comic literature”, and my mind automatically reads it as “comic books”. It’s a telling substitution. Forgetting for one instant when Chesterton was writing, I make him a spokesman for a question of my own. Isn’t our century’s fixation on super-hero narratives odd? Isn’t there something medieval or ancient about this falling back into morality tales populated with heroes and types? Characterization has become fairly shallow and formulaic, even in the films that don’t feature heroes and villains in costume. Audiences must be informed which characters they’re dealing with within seconds, identities communicated through signals like costume, gesture and speech patterns. This is a theatre of masques.

When this principle is applied to historical fiction, then what do we get? Is that where Regency romances come from and time travel novels? This is history written for the thrill of interacting vicariously with types. Heroes are types almost by definition. Our historical heroes have become types that live eternally in the imagination. We want to see them alive in imagery. Alexander the Great enters the field of battle. We want to see how he walks, hear what he sounds like, know who his lovers are. It’s like brain candy; it’s simple gratification.

There’s this voyeuristic element to all historical fiction. What matters is whether the gratification is the first purpose of the book or whether there is a story to be told. I mentioned that I had been reading “Circe”. Here’s a book that definitely trades on the thrill element; we get to see the Greek gods walk the earth again! (Did anyone see them the first time?) But there is more going on. The first level of deeper engagement is the ‘what if?’ What would the memoir (in the modern sense) of a goddess sound like? I think Miller was very successful with this challenge. It’s beautifully and thoughtfully written, and the heroine does change and grow. I won’t reveal Miller’s ending, but I will say that it’s made nearly inescapable by the choice to rescue the character from type.

One aspect to the novel seems less successful. Is Miller using Circe’s ‘life’ to teach us about women’s struggles? If so, I don’t find it very convincing. She’s in good company there, since scholars and writers have for millennia been interpreting mythology and projecting pedagogical narratives on tops of the stories of Greek gods and goddesses, despite the very evident chaos that characterizes the world of the Olympians. Miller’s tell is the typing of male characters in juxtaposition to the individualization of the heroine. Circe’s complexity stands in almost humorous contrast to Telemachus’s stasis as the man who listens and also is darn handy. But, there you go: no goddess is perfect.

Travelogue 971 – February 25

The Joy of Exercise

Very slowly, the temperatures have been dropping, though they’re still unseasonably high. We have had almost two weeks of beautiful weather, something very noteworthy in the Netherlands. It has been the perfect opportunity for me to start exercising again, and yet I haven’t. I have shown great resourcefulness in avoiding the necessary. I have discovered and invented any number of excuses to put off my responsibility to be healthy. Fortunately, I have a better angel in Menna, who has been stubborn about insisting that I start running again. Yesterday, finally, I started. In the same way that I needed excuses to avoid exercise, I also needed one to start running. It seems there is little I can do in life simply because I should. My excuse was, as it was for Ted Cruz, my kids. Baby Jos needs more practice on her bicycle, so I suited up for running, and I took her out on the bike paths. That was a workout! What I hadn’t thought out was that, once she was pedalling, there was very little I could do to control the pace. Neither could I indulge in my suffering. I had to smile and encourage. There was no room for huffing and puffing, swearing or weeping, like I might reasonably have been expected to do. And that was my first run in months. The good news is, Baby Jos is becoming quite proficient on her little two-wheeler. Even better, she was having a good time. She was absolutely delighted to be out on her bike again, and so excited to be testing herself on the bike paths. She wore a huge grin the entire time, easy and genuine, as a stark contrast to her father’s expression of real distress, masquerading as supportive-daddy face. I’m forced to assert, though, that there is nothing like sharing your child’s joy, no matter the personal duress. The part of me that hovered high above the sweating and suffering physical self was sincerely happy.

Travelogue 970 – February 21

Fanciful

Baby asks me wonderful questions. Riding home on the train, as we watched the fields spin by, as we watched sunlight glint off the canals, Baby asked, “Why does the sun like us?” One week after our snowy trip to Baby’s violin lesson, we’re making the same trip in temperatures nearing 60˚F. It’s uncanny.

“Why does the sun like us?” It’s such a lovely question, and I was delighted. It doesn’t matter what I answered, because fanciful and beautiful questions deserve fanciful and beautiful answers. Any response beginning with, “Actually,” would never have made it past my lips. I think I said something about the sun loving all it surveys, or something about how the sun gives life to everything. Baby’s mom is a Christian, so I figure I have some room for playful paganism.

I was reminded of the god Helios, whom I’ve always revered in my agnostical, not-quite-serious, pantheistic manner. Helios is also a character in the novel I’m reading now, “Circe” by Madeline Miller. The book is a fanciful book about the Greek goddess and sorceress, Circe. The goddess tells her own story, and it’s a fun read. Okay, it’s not historical fiction, but it does feel like a fit with my theme of historical fiction in recent months, just because it complements so neatly my unceasing fascination with ancient Greek and Roman history.

If I were to analyse the voice given to this ahistorical figure, Circe, I would say it has authority and it’s seductive. The narrative demonstrates dramatic arc, discovery and personal development, opportunities for assertion and for redemption. I have few objections to the language attributed to someone speaking to me across several thousand years, other than my usual regret combined with gratitude for the overlay of modern psychological concept. The regret is that’s it’s anachronistic; the gratitude is that it makes characters relatable.

If anything, I wish for tougher choices. Of course we want the hero to be the sorceress. Of course, we want her to redeem the path of witchcraft with her humanity and her self-possession. I could have wished for a story, say, from inside Athena’s light and wisdom and dull righteousness. The choices all seem too easy. But I certainly can’t complain about the adept story-telling and refined language.

I’ve been thinking about these deities and the complex mythologies they populate. Helios is the sun, but he has a form and a life beyond being the fiery disc in the sky. In that sense, he is not the disc itself, but somehow the personality of the sun in the sky and, in some senses, the supervisor of the operational side of being sun. It’s a sort of feudalism. Helios is Duke of Sunshine.

Philosophers of the classical ages felt compelled to explain and interpret their inherited mythology. It strikes me as the obvious first step that Plato would have offered the idea of forms defining and animating the things of this world, kind of like the way gods and goddesses did, but without the personality, pranks and sexual escapades. Real philosophers will wince at this reductionist thought, but it does follow, doesn’t it? My child sees Helios in the sky. She’ll later abstract it into an idea, a placeholder in the mind, before science ‘solves’ her problem: why does the sun like us?

Travelogue 969 – February 14

Our Time on the Ice

It’s been a festive week. Last weekend it snowed, and temperatures dipped below freezing. They fell, and they stayed below freezing all week. The canals froze. The sun came out. And slowly we saw people venturing out onto the ice. By yesterday, skaters were out everywhere, turning elegant circles on the ice. Baby and I had a chance to watch them in a number of locations. We travelled to a nearby village for Baby’s violin lesson. Since the lockdown has closed the school, we receive video lessons and, once in a while, we travel to the teacher’s house. All along the way, from the tram and from the train, we saw cheerful people on the canals. In the small town of Pijnacker, we walked by families enjoying the day together outside. Many of them had gathered on the ice. Dads were pulling sleds with toddlers. Moms on ice skates were holding young ones with skates. Older kids were pushing each other on the ice. Baby and I went out on the canal together. It was her first time on the ice, and she couldn’t have been more excited. We slid around on the ice, and Baby demanded I teach her how to ice skate immediately. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. We have no skates!” This snowfall caught us woefully unprepared. We had no shovel to clear the walkway. We had no sled. We had no ice skates. The media is telling us we haven’t seen these conditions in ten years. Certainly not since we’ve been here. There have been a few snowstorms, one or two that were big ones, but no snow that stuck. The girls have enjoyed themselves, despite our lack of preparation, making snowballs until their hands hurt so much they cried. They gathered ice and called it treasure. They made snow angels. They even got to see an igloo. Mysteriously, they had clamoured to build one. I don’t know where that idea came from. And then, amazingly, we discovered that a downstairs neighbour had made one, packing snow into a shallow recycling bin to make bricks! Today is Valentine’s Day, and, in a kind of bow to the divine Eros, the freeze has broken. There was no evident change in the skies. The wind was constant. The sun shone in the same way it had the day before. And yet, by noon, the temperatures had broken through freezing. We took a walk by our canal, and there were already long cracks in the ice. We were sad to see our winter-in-winter already passing.

Travelogue 968 – February 6

Voice for a Time?

If we consider “Blood Meridian” as historical fiction, even tentatively, then maybe we have a basis for analysing the voice, the way we did for Vidal’s “Julian”. “Blood Meridian” is not a first-person narrative, of course, and so the strategies of the two books must diverge. Vidal had to make a decision about what Julian himself should sound like, and he opted for accessibility. It’s fair to say that McCarthy had something very different in mind. We are just about as far from McCarthy’s characters’ states of mind as we could imagine. The third person narrative distances us. The lack of a single clear protagonist distances us. The stratospheric perspective taken by the narrator distances us. And what is the voice of that narration? When I ‘listen’, I hear a few different strains interwoven.

Much has been said about McCarthy’s ‘Faulknerian’ style. I’m not convinced. His style reminds me more of the beat writers than of Faulkner. There is that (dark) lyricism stretched to breaking point. There is that sense of something big forever imminent, a sense never quite fulfilled except by the thrill of imminence. There is that playful, if sometimes strained, use of vocabulary. My experience of Faulkner has been one of sinking deeply into convoluted sentences and tidal emotion. Faulkner was sleeping pills and whiskey, whereas the beats were amphetamines. McCarthy might fall in the middle, nearer to tequila on a hangover. There just isn’t the emotional depth or radical constructions of the language. Long sentences don’t make Faulkner.

McCarthy reaches occasionally for nineteenth-century cadences, sometimes with a Coen-Brothers-like exaggeration, employing the wooden and stodgy formality that cinema has taught us is Civil-War-era language. It’s a concession of sorts to the exigencies of historical fiction. But the beat liberties clearly take precedence, making for only a fleeting period feel. Take as example these excerpts from the beginning to Chapter XI: “The shoeless mules slaloming through the dry grass and pine needles.” “… and they crossed a high saddle at sunset where wild doves were rocketing down the wind …” It’s expressive language, but language that can’t decide when or where it was written.

All in all, I’d say “Blood Meridian” is about “Blood Meridian”. It has a terrible beauty of its own, but I’m not sure it aspires to speaking either for or about its chosen time period. A few singularly savage images are offered as symbols of the pillaging of the continent. In that sense, it’s a didactic piece. Beyond that, it’s simply fanciful language for a cold-blooded story.

Travelogue 967 – February 3
Taking Scalps

Who are, after all, the characters of this novel? I would say the primary one is Nature. Dizzying amounts of language are devoted to the deserts and the treacherous skies. That does not mean that Nature can be allowed to be a sympathetic character. No character can be in a book like this. The book is set in wartime, and so each force and every character is painted in adversarial light, pitted not only against each other, but against the reader. The war is not one given a name in history books. It’s the continual assault on humanity and Nature that is the mundane history of North America after the Europeans invade.

There is ‘the kid’, whose unreliable presence provides the main thread through the book. The kid doesn’t speak much. He’s destitute without knowing it. He moves from one degrading experience to the next. He proves himself capable of unthinking acts of violence. He proves himself capable of survival. He survives without a conscious reason to, as far as the reader knows, and a cynic would firmly state that that sets him apart among humans in no way at all. I might answer, no, this is not a metaphysics. It’s fiction, and still a portrait rather than a medical treatise. Few people accept so blandly that they have no reason to live. But all right: point of view is a choice.

The kid runs into some bad company. There doesn’t seem to be many other options in the world he inhabits. He falls in with a troop of bounty hunters, led by the foul Glanton and the supernatural Judge Holden. This troop rides around northern Mexico taking scalps and causing mayhem in any town that allows them in. There’s little to like about them, but there’s no one else to root for in this landscape. The Apaches are bizarrely vicious. The Mexicans are passive and venal. One might root for the landscape itself, which is always lovingly described, but it, too, seems guided by malevolence.

It should be stated that Glanton and Holden are based on historical figures. This novel, as creepy as it is, as set as it is on portraying reality as unreal, or at least unnatural, qualifies as historical fiction. The historical figures are only points of departure in characterization, but the outline of the narrative cleaves more or less faithfully to what remains of a historical record. Maybe it qualifies as historical fiction mostly as a kind of meta-narrative about the rape of the Americas.