Larry L. Dill's
New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
March, 2006
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More excerpts from Larry L. Dill's Intimate Journals
February 2, 2006, Waynesville, North Carolina. 9:am. Cold. Grey.
“Why don’t you write something people can read?”
---James Joyce’s wife, Nora
In “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” Azar Nafisi is concerned quite naturally with the moral lessons of literature. She faults the philistines of the Islamic Revolution for not understanding the complexity of morality in the human condition. What you see is not always what you get.
The Islamic extremists who sponsored (and continued to sponsor) the war on the west have a point. But like the Elizabethan Protestants’ heavy handed treatment of Catholics, and their lingering anti-Semitism, in general, their intolerance of the other, the Islamic fundamentalists ruin everything.
The fire is good and right this morning.
February 4, 2006, 9:30 am. A moment of sun, then grey.
These lines from “Reading Lolita in Tehran”:
It was one of those cold, gray early-December mornings when the overcast sky and the chill in the air seems to promise snow. I had asked Bijan to light a fire before leaving for work, and it sparkled now with a soothing warmth. Cozy—a word too common for Yassi’s usage—would be the right term for how we felt.
The conventional life has always seemed like an obligation. But even without being conventional you could be known, or known about, so as to be available in the event of an emergency. I’ve always been fascinated by the occasions when because of some national or world crisis, a retired senator or diplomat has come out of retirement to serve his country. But retirement is not the same as unconventional. In fact retirement is the official finale of the conventional life.
I was thinking about how hard it was to escape convention. Actually, I was thinking about how I could still be called out of my unconventional life to fill some important role, perhaps in my family. No one living conventionally has time to be the supernumerary. There is a Shakespere line somewhere about playing a small part (or is it Eliot?). The dictionary offers two distinct meanings for supernumerary: “someone to swell a crowd,” as it were; and someone extra to step into an important role if necessary. But one risks merely being water in a faucet that is never turned on. Yet to be there for that moment when needed has a mystical quality. In a sense, if the moment of need never comes, then you never existed.
I did not feel “cozy,” but I nursed the supernumerary vision like a delicate fire that could go out at any moment. That moment when the air hangs suspended between the rainstorm and the first flakes of snow.
When you keep a diary honestly, you have a tendency to want to write down clever new thoughts that come to you. But you also want to try to give provenance to those pieces of memory and resolution (vision?) that live in your head like pieces of furniture that have been there for a very long time.
The cat sits outside the picture window looking in as you look out. She sits sometimes inside looking out as we do; but sometimes she just sits outside looking in.
February 5, Sunday, Rabbit Rock, 7:30 am. Snow on the ground. 20 degrees. Fire in the stove. I got up once, Deborah twice, to stoke it up through the night.
Sometimes, like this morning, the wind at Rabbit Rock makes a distant sound as if it were passing high overhead like an airplane. Still further in the distance a faint whistle of the wind in the cell tower on top of Sugar Top.
I’ve gotten up and made coffee as it becomes light. After getting up and stoking the fire, Deborah has gone back to bed. She sleeps in her loft in cold weather. I’m in my loft now where it is warmer than down below and where in the full length glass window of the eastern eave of the cabin the light is best for writing.
I have become completely committed now to writing, the way I once was to building this cabin. I made a few stops in building the cabin, for example, when I helped Deborah care for her dying grandfather, both of us supernumeraries then. I interrupt my writing now for the work of subsistence. Insuring a source of firewood here and at Rockledge and at the house in Waynesville. Other handyman duties. And for relations with my children and their mother.
From the window now a light snow is visible. Only a dusting really and flakes drifting on the air. Woodpeckers large and small at work in the tall trees. Otherwise still. It is around 20 degrees. I’m curled up in my sleeping bag writing, drinking coffee, looking out the window at my new cabin. On weekends when Deborah is at Rabbit Rock, I stay here in the big house with her. Only one fire needed that way. And long conversations by the fire in the evenings.
I’ll go to Washington, DC next month to meet Camen. We’ll all go to Paris in April. Then I’ll go to New Mexico in June to camp out in the high desert and in the Gila Wilderness. Camen and Veneet’s wedding will be in October in Princeton. And then a blank slate. I’ll write wherever I go. From wherever I go to someone in the clouds.
I feel like Treadwell, “The Grizzly Man.” A righteous fool. A character in Quixote, self-dramatizing life by living on the edge of convention, looking for a way out of the maze of my own mind.
Downstairs again for more coffee. The sunlight streams over the horizon and shines into the cabin all the way to the back wall. I put more wood on the fire and decide to build a another fire in the cast iron cook stove. Something we rarely do. Deborah still sleeps in her loft. The dog is still curled up in his bed. I go outside to get kindling and stove wood from under the cabin. The ground is frozen and the snow crackles under my boots. It is 8:30 now and back in my loft the heat of the cook stove warming up directly beneath me warms my loft as well. The bare black stove pipe travels through the center of the loft floor and out through the roof. You can back up to it like it was itself a stove. The cook stove has a very small fire box and must be attended more often than the main stove and the wood that fits it must be smaller and shorter than regular fire wood. It takes an hour or two to get the cold cast iron completely hot but it creates a pleasant warmth in the kitchen area and makes me hungry to think about the biscuits I will cook in it in a little while.
February 6, Waynesville, 8:30 am. Cold.
I built this fire place in Deborah’s house myself from a prefabricated firebox that I surrounded by walls and bookshelves and a grey tile hearth. A television, DVD and VCR player, and a component stereo system take up half the shelving space. The other shelves are filled with my record player and old record albums, and some of Deborah’s books and photographs. The books are a mix of her own—books on printmaking, pottery, calligraphy, painting and poetry. Books by Yeats, Freud and Jung. Books on literacy, photography and Irish legend. And books that belonged to her grandparents in whose house she now lives—Bibles mostly but also an unabridged Webster’s dictionary and her grandfather’s mail-order machinist school handbooks.
I get up earlier than I used to since I quit drinking. At the first stirrings of wakefulness I can usually tell whether Deborah has left for work or is still getting ready. I am usually in some sort of dialog with a dream which is in the process of becoming a conscious pattern of thought. At this point I am still in my room behind a closed door. At some point I realize that I am no longer dreaming but am awake and being annoyed in one way or another by thoughts of my own inadequacy, my foolishness or guilt or the hopelessness of my life or life itself or of somebody I have known or some plan I have. These thoughts aid me in waking up the same way your mother used to aid you in waking up by continuing to come into your room and shake you or otherwise cajole you until at some point staying in bed actually becomes harder than getting up.
This morning I have gotten up, looked out the window to see if Deborah’s car is still in the driveway, looked at the clock in my room, opened my door and followed the smell of coffee into the kitchen. I speak to Deborah who is having breakfast at the dining room table and looking out at the grey morning with her cat and her dog in attendance like servants waiting for the next command. There never is a command of course. She speaks to them as she would beloved children whose lives are so filled with self-control that no instructions are necessary.
Neither Deborah nor I are morning people. We have often talked until 3 or 4 in the morning, whether or not we have had a good night’s sleep, we say little. She watches the birds outside on the feeder and finishes her breakfast. I pour myself a cup of coffee and build a fire of last night’s still glowing embers, newspaper, locust bark and large slabs of firewood I have cut and brought to town from Rabbit Rock to stack on the front porch.
With the fire burning brightly I look for the book I am currently reading and the notebook I am currently writing in and sit down in one of Deborah’s grandmother’s floral wing back chairs, to read or to write or both and to gaze still half asleep into the new fire.
As Deborah readies herself to leave for work, peering into the refrigerator for just the right leftover to take to work for lunch, I begin to come alive and stand in front of the glass storm door looking out at the way some neighbors have neatly bagged their garbage while others appear to have been satisfied merely to get it out on the street in any condition conceivable. I joke about this as Deborah bags up the vegetarian chili and rice I made at Rabbit Rock on Saturday night. She is dressed to the nines as usual and is gone.
I pour my second cup of coffee and the dog and I watch as she drives off. He goes back to bed and I return to my arm chair by the fire to pretend for a while longer to be Montaigne, the retired French nobleman, inventing the essay. I will soon enough begin a day that will include unloading the firewood still out in the car that I cut this weekend at R.R. , stacking it on the front porch, driving back out to R.R. to pick up a bag of dog food that was inadvertently left behind, unsecured from the everpresent mice, and to work on handyman projects that have begun to pile up around the Waynesville house: a running toilet, a slow drain in the kitchen sink, a mysterious intermittent leak under the refrigerator, or is it the water heater.
But for now I am Michel de Montaigne, retired French nobleman, inventing the essay.
February 8
I saw John Cage read poetry at St Marks Church in New York around 1990. He had on denim dungarees and a denim chore coat. He looked like my grandfather used to look just after he came in from milking the cows. Though famous for decades as an avant-garde musician and composer, he was currently a distinguished professor of poetry at Harvard. Allen Ginsberg was sitting in the front row looking even more like a homeless man than Cage. Ginsberg was teaching at Brooklyn College and would soon sell his papers to them for over a million dollars and buy his mother an apartment there in Manhattan.
Anyway, Cage read a poem that was a treatment of a passage written by Henry David Thoreau. He had concocted a mathematical formula to select the words to go into the poem. I have forgotten what the passage was and I have forgotten the formula, but it was something like the first five words of every fifth line in the passage. As he read, of course, the reading made no sense. But as he went on and on, some ineffable emotional sense did emerge. My initial feeling that I was listening to gibberish gave way to a certain rhythm and cadence. Certain words and certain phrases, certain thoughts and ideas, kept cropping back up.
I remember how my Iranian friend used to turn out the lights at parties and then with a single candle or a flashlight shining upwards into his face, he would recite passages from Shakespeare’s plays… in Persian, or was it Farsi. I can’t remember the plays. Only that from the way the lines were delivered they seem to be monologues from the tragedies. None of us knew our Shakespeare well enough to know without a hint which play or which part of the play or even which character he was reciting. But we were enthralled.
I was enthralled too with Cage. Perhaps because it was Cage. Or perhaps because it was Thoreau. In the New Yorker interview I referred to in the January, 06, NHJ, it is revealed that Ashbery was influenced by Cage. And in that interview Ashbery is asked by a member of the audience in a lecture he gave, the following:
“There are some of us who are fiction writers and so I feel bad about the elementary nature of my question. I understand fiction, the way you can get absorbed in a book and get lost in a character, but I was wondering if you could help me to read poetry, because I find it very hard to get into and I was wondering if you might help me out.”
Ashbery was momentarily stumped.
“Well, first of all, you really don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he told her gently. The students laughed. “As Marianne Moore says, I too dislike it; There are other things more important than all this fiddle. But if you’re liking it enough to pick it up and go ahead, maybe one thing would be to forget yourself while you’re reading it and not think that in order to appreciate it you have to have read a book about it. That’s the way I read. And if you’re not liking it put it aside, which I also do.”
I’ve been reading “Reading Lolita in Tehran” against a backdrop of contemporary events in which the Muslim world is awash in a sea of righteous indignation over some irreverent cartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper last fall. Everybody with a passing acquaintance with international affairs in our time knows that this indignation is about much more than cartoons. Left wing political writers say it is about western colonialism and imperialism. Religious writers say it is about the desecration of religious symbols—something understandable to followers of any religion anywhere in the world.
Meanwhile, the President of Iran is defiant in the face of calls by the west to cease and desist in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons. What relevance does poetry--particularly poetry whose meaning you do not even understand—have in such a world as we live in now?
Nasiri, in “Reading Lolita,” suggests that reading fiction—great fiction—can illuminate the dimensions of moral choice which we humans face. But poetry? Where does the poetry of Cage and Ashbery stand in this moral universe?
I have always resisted the idea that art stands above, or, at the very least, outside politics and social morality. But even allowing for such belief is a moral act, is it not? I know some would say no. There are other things in life beyond morality. And humans of all moral persuasions go there and live there all the time. It is a universe borne of innocence. And though after the fall described in the Genesis story of the garden of Eden and after the literal events in our own lives that lead to a loss of innocence, we forever long to return there. This is the ultimate source of both religion and art, and this is the source of well made modern poetry.
And then this from “Reading Lolita in Tehran.”
It is said that the personal is political. That is not true of course. At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing. The realm of imagination is a bridge between them, constantly refashioning one in terms of the other.
Plato’s philosopher-king knew this and so did the blind censor [mentioned earlier in the book, one of the chief censors of books, film and theater in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution was, ironically, actually blind], so it was perhaps not surprising that the Islamic Republic’s first task had been to blur the lives and boundaries between the personal and the political, thereby destroying both.
February 9. Snow, 20 degrees.
For some people travel is a vague notion as alien as, say, homosexuality is to a heterosexual. I have a good fire this morning. Snow is gently falling. I’m warm and comfortable. I have books to read, television, the internet. Yet I’m restless for the open road. I have trips planned to Washington, DC, Paris, New Mexico and New York all within the coming year. And yet I feel restless for the open road. Right now.
My father only made two trips outside the state of Texas in his life and these were trips required by his job. I’m thinking of another favorite movie now, “Tonto and Me,” starring Art Carney as a retiree who travels with his cat across the country on a bus to see his son in California. Carney has many adventures along the way including a night with a young hippy girl. Am I looking for a night with a young girl? I don’t think so. The disadvantages of one night stands far out weigh the advantages.
The snow is falling heavily now in the bright light. Heavily but silently as falling snow does. Its beauty belies its dangers as so many beautiful things do. One wonders how the mind could be so deceived. Inside the house here the most beautiful thing is the fire in the fireplace. Beautiful and fraught with danger.
Reading on in “Reading Lolita in Tehran,”page 323:
She said, “I’m going away.” She said she was twenty-seven now and didn’t know what it meant to live. She had always thought that life in jail would be the hardest, but it hadn’t been. She brushed a few strands of hair from her face. She said, There, in jail, I like the rest of them thought we would be killed and that would be the end, or we would live, we would live and get out, and begin all over. She said, There, in jail, we dreamed of just being outside, free, but when I came out I discovered that I missed the sense of solidarity we had in jail, the sense of purpose, the way we tried to share memories and food. She said, More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to movies. I am twenty-seven. I don’t know what it means to love. I don’t want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is. You’d call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess, she said, smiling.
And then this from page 338:
I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts, and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared?
We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings. To me it seemed as if we had not really existed, or only half existed, because we could not imaginatively realize ourselves and communicate to the world, because we had used works of imagination to serve as handmaidens to some political ploy.
February 11. 8 am. Snowing. 32 degrees.
Those dreams and emails and telephone calls, all from someone who is somewhere else.
Y is there at some pathetic flea market, socializing as is her way with the raspy-voiced veterans and the crude old women. Dropping the “N” word as proudly as her grandmother did. I’m there with the black girl, her eyes showing the shock. Someone is trying to move an old woodstove around so that it can be displayed for sale and used at the same time. Watching, I want to get out of there. But inside the dream I’m like a prisoner in a camp. Escaping would involve enormous courage, something I’ve never had much of. Had I found the door, I would have just run out and left the black girl there. Are suicide bombers courageous? Do they dream of Paradise as it is said or the peacefulness of mere oblivion? How could we ever know?
The fire crackles this morning with its early start and brings me back to this world. This world? Yes. One of the parallel universes I think I've known. I wear a heavy wool overcoat to keep the heating bill down. My father did, too, and his father. I come from a long line of cold men with shivering hearts.
Y and I had a discussion once about the lynchings and whether or not our ancestors could ever have been involved. I said I thought they could have been. She said, “Not my family.” I wasn’t so sure. I wonder about the sudden breakdown of law and order in my peaceful world. The real one? Or the parallel one? I don’t know. Sometimes I can’t tell them apart.
“you’re so full of shit! My daughter’s gay friend said to me at dinner one night. You’ve been lying to us all this time,” I thought to myself,, "and now you’re the only one who knows the truth?”
And I remember trying to impress the pretty young blonde who worked for me at the New York Public Library. “I’ve been studying Wallace Stevens’ poetry for 30 years, ever since college,” I said. When her father came by to pick her up for lunch, she dug her rebellious claws into my heart, Lolita style. “Dad, she said, “Mr. Dill is a Wallace Stevens scholar,” she said to him with what I’m certain was a sarcastic wink.
I still think about that remark 20 years later and about Y and the “N” word. Defying my sensibilities, both of them, for their own freedom? Or to counter my pedantry? To shock me? Or to turn away my predatory Humbert heart?
Even the cat looks for someway out. “Behind these books, perhaps,” she sniffs, “maybe a secret door?"
* * *
Dear Dr. Nafisi,
I have just finished your book, “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” I am following it with Edward Said’s “Orientalism.” The two books seem to compliment each other. It is the time of the cartoon controversy and the disclosure of Iranian nuclear ambitions, and the scandal over warrantless searches here in the US.
I will not take up your time except to say how clear the window was into your world. I eagerly await your next book. It is hard to pick out a favorite passage in this one (like having to choose one of your children over another one). But I know you like your students to do more than nod their heads and say, “That was good.” So I will point out this one of many I have copied into my journals.
It is said that the personal is political. That is not true, of course. At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing. The realm of imagination is a bridge between, constantly refashioning one in terms of the other. Plato’s philosopher-king knew this and so did the blind censor, so it was perhaps not surprising that the Islamic Republic’s first task had been to blur the lines and boundaries between the personal and the political, thereby destroying both.
And I loved your “Magician” and the titillating way you teased your readers with the idea that while he may well have been “real,” he may also have been a wise fictional element of your own psyche.
Your students and your readers have been very lucky to have you.
Best wishes,
Larry L. Dill
February 14, 2006. 8 am, 30 degrees, sunny.
I sit half asleep in a wingback arm chair by the fire while Deborah gets ready for work. It is Valentine’s Day. I have a dull headache from dull dreams too boring even to recount. I am in the middle of the biennial rearrangement of my bedroom and study and all in there is in disarray. I have boxed up two-thirds of the remainder of my books to take to my new cabin at Rabbit Rock. What I have chosen to leave behind on a new bookshelf in my room here in town is an odd assortment of about 200 books. Most of my books on literacy, for example, seem, oddly enough, to want to stay in town. Several books by E.O. Wilson, several by Chomsky. My “coffee table” books, “Complete Paintings by Da Vinci,” “The Rivers of Texas,” “Atlas of the New Europe,” “The History of the Tango,” etc. The complete and/or collected poems of Wallace Stevens, Pushkin, James Merrell, Auden, Whitman, Browning. Several novels by Philip Roth, some still unread.
It occurs to me that I seem to have an inordinate (or as my parents would have said, “unhealthy”) interest in works by gay men and Jews. It is a Philip Roth moment. Or a Woody Allen moment. For a moment I’m Albert Brooks. For years I wanted to be a sort of Texas Philip Roth—himself a more intellectually introspective version of Allen or Brooks.
James Merrell sits on my shelf with a box cutter slashed dust cover from Amazon dot com, intimidating me with the same refinement of emotional objectivity that an actual gay man might do if he were sitting here with me beside this fire.
I have kept behind here in my room in town an as yet unread copy of Dave Eggers “Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” On the copyright page Eggers has humorously added personal anecdotes about himself including a continuum scale illustrating that he is mostly straight but partially gay. One of the underlying themes of the movie Broke Back Mountain is that sexual orientation is not so much a continuum as it is the sometimes open, sometimes hidden threads in the rich tapestry of one’s life.
I wonder about Montaigne and Edward Said, the only two writers I am trying to read systematically these days—one as background for a trip to France, the other as background for an understanding of the Muslim world that has become an important part of the life of every American like a kind of latent homosexuality.
Deborah prepares to leave for work, dressed stylishly in black slacks and turtleneck sweater, around her neck a necklace of pale blue iridescent stones she found at a street fair in New York. I didn’t remember it at first.
Oh, yes, Bob was there. I couldn’t afford to buy it for her but I loaned her a hundred dollars til she could find an ATM. She and Bob and I were like Three Men in a Boat. Faithfully teamed up but each one on a journey of passionate solitude.
Now she delicately wraps for herself one of the giant dark chocolate covered strawberries she has made for me as a Valentine gift. I am lucky to have her. Our lives have become intertwined like the patterns in a Persian rug. A rug we use. And walk on and muse about. It warms the floor under both of us. Merrell has it though not as a Persian rug but an intricate puzzle. In the poem “Lost in Translation” (unrelated to the recent Bill Murray movie of the same name) he writes,
Out of the blue, as promised, of a New York
Puzzle-rental shop the puzzle comes—
A superior one, containing a thousand hand sawn,
Sandal-scented pieces. Many take
Shapes known already—the craftsman’s repertoire
Nice in its limitation—from other puzzles:
Witch on broomstick, ostrich, hourglass,
Even (surely not just in retrospect)
An inchling, innocently branching palm.
These can be put aside, made stories of
While Mademoiselle spreads out the rest face-up,
Herself excited as a child; or questioned
Like incoherent faces in a crowd,
Each with its scrap of highly colored
Evidence the Law must piece together.
Sky-blue ostrich? Likely story.
Mauve of the witch’s cloak white, severed fingers
Pluck? Detain her. The plot thickens
As all at once two pieces interlock.
For all my love of words, and for all my words of love, I don’t know how to tell you how much you mean to me. I think, I read, I write. Sometimes I fix things for you that are broken or build things that need to be built. That’s all there is to me. Walking the dog in the park today I think to myself that writing the truth compassionately
“is a whole ‘nuther story.” The dog cons me this way and that, chews up a chicken bone before I can take it from him. The Mexican boys play like grownups amongst themselves, kicking their basketballs in a game of soccer. The crow sings, the cold wind blows, and the sun shines on the concrete picnic table and on the stretched out dog and on me. The snow lingers on the mountainside, the way I cling to this life, this pathetic fallacy, like a blind man clinging to an invisible muse.
February 15.
In time and space the empty mind wishes to participate like a child on the sidelines while other children play. Though the mind is bright and filled with imaginings the gap between the self and the social is a physical gap unbridgeable for want of knowledge. Team spirit, or belief, is a substitute for knowledge and can sometimes propel the outsider in without the requisite knowledge. And the importance of community is born.
* * *
So it might be said that poetry grew up along side religion and serving a somewhat different but sometimes overlapping function.
In classical Greece and Rome geographers, historians, public figures like Caesar, orators and poets added to the fund of taxonomic lore separating races, regions, nations and minds from each other; much of that was self-serving, and existed to prove that Romans and Greeks were superior to other kinds of people…
Consider how the orient, and in particular the near orient became known in the west as its great complementary opposite since antiquity. There were the Bible and the rise of Christianity, there were travelers like Marco Polo who charted the trade routes and patterned a regulated system of commercial exchange, and after him, Lodovico di Varthema and Pietro della Valle; there were fabulists like Mandeville; there were redoubtable conquering Eastern movements, principally Islam, of course; there were the militant pilgrims, chiefly the crusaders. Altogether an internally structured archive is built up from the literature that belongs to these experiences. Out of this comes a restricted number of typical encapsulations: the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation. These are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West. What gives the immense number of encounters some unity, however, is the vacillation I was speaking about earlier. Something patently foreign and distant acquires, for one reason or another a status more rather than less familiar. One tends to stop judging things either as completely novel or as completely well known; a new median category that allows one to see new things, things seen for the first time as versions of a previously known thing. In essence such a category is not so much a way of receiving new information as it is a method of controlling what seems to be a threat to some established view of things. If the mind must suddenly deal with what it takes to be a radically new form of life—as Islam appeared to Europe in the early Middle Ages—the response on the whole is conservative and defensive. Islam is judged to be a fraudulent new version of some previous experience, in this case Christianity. The threat is muted, familiar values impose themselves, and in the end the mind reduces the pressure upon it by accommodating things to itself as either “original” or “repetitious.” Islam thereafter is “handled”: its novelty and its suggestiveness are brought under control so that relatively nuanced discriminations are now made that would have been impossible had the raw novelty of Islam been left unattended. The Orient at large, therefore, vacillates between the West’s contempt for what is familiar and its shivers of delight in—or fear of—novelty.
--Said, “Orientalism," pp 57-59
February 16. Rabbit Rock, 2:30 pm, 55 degree. Clear blue skies. Sun streaming through the window onto this page.
I’ve come up here to spend just one night. Have brought a lot of books up here to outfit my cabin. Eerie wind blowing in around the unweatherized windows. A crow calls in the distance. Otherwise quiet.
I still have a small leak in the roof around the stove pipe. I need to fix that this afternoon while the temperature is warm enough for the roof sealant to flow. Must do that within the hour. Then go up and clean out the spring. Montaigne, Ashbery, Edward Said all await my attention.
I keep thinking of Said’s reference to Levi-Strauss’s “science of the concrete.” I don’t have the science of my necessary practical functions here at Rabbit Rock. Science here means myth. Like Wallace Stevens I don’t have a myth—at least not one that serves as science. The spring is just a spring. The water is just a necessary part of my survival if I’m going to live on the side of this mountain. It is bland, un-poetic truth. Science now is mere knowing. Not knowing without value, but knowing without comforting illusions. “Concrete Science” really is concrete now.
What Said is referring to in quoting Levi-Strauss is the primitive mind’s mystification of the other, beginning with the inanimate objects in one’s own environment, like trees and blades of grass all the way out to other tribes and other worlds and their relationship to one’s own concrete spirituality. One’s own pre-scientific science.
* * *
Settled in my loft to read at 10 pm. I’m using a small propane lantern which makes a mild hissing sound. The box heater down below rumbles like a car engine. So I am at somewhat of a disadvantage to hear sounds outside. I always feel a little nervous when I’m alone at RR without the dog to alert me of anyone coming near. Slowly the sound of the wind picks up as it blows up through the gap and is enough for me to begin to imagine that I hear something. Maybe a car out there somewhere on the road coming to the cabin.
As I peer out the window through my own reflection it looks as if there is a light, like a flashlight, way up on the side of Little Rocky Face on the other side of the road, across the gap maybe a quarter mile away. The light does not belong there. There are no houses up there. Not even any roads. Earlier I heard a hunting dog howling in that area but now I hear nothing.
The flashlight appears to be descending the mountain, itself about a quarter mile high. I begin to get a little nervous. If it is the guy who lives on the other side of the mountain and frequently runs his dogs on the mountain, he could have lost a dog and be out looking for it and that would be nothing for me to worry about. But I’ve never seen anybody in the area where I see the flashlight now. He is at least a half mile off his own property now and on land owned by the family down below. They never run dogs and it is extremely unlikely that any member of that clan would be up on the side of that mountain (especially at this time of night).
The flashlight keeps descending in my direction and still no sound of a dog or the man calling a dog. I’m beginning to imagine all sorts of things. A fugitive from the law for example. My cabin with its propane lantern and two kerosene lanterns is lit up like a Christmas tree on the side of this bare winter landscape. It could not be someone lost or in trouble or he would be crying out. It is a very powerful flashlight and you can see that whoever is carrying it is having some difficulty coming down the steep rocky face of the mountainside. Still he makes steady progress and stays on a path that seems to be guided by the light of my cabin. I decide to turn out my lights and see what happens. Very soon he will have come all the way down to the road that winds up through the gap and separates the mountain I’m on from the one he is on. If he is someone else—not a neighbor—then who else? Once he gets down to the road he might follow it up toward the gap and turn off onto the road that dead ends at my cabin.
I go down stairs for a better view and stand in the open doorway and watch the flashlight as it is panned back and forth as the man searches for the best way down the mountain. I get cold and close the door and go back up stairs where it is warm and sit on my cot in the dark and look out the upstairs window. When I first spotted the light, I was looking up toward the top of the mountain. Now the light is way down below me. He has reached the road. Then I see the red tail lights of a truck. The wind is blowing strongly crossways between us and I still can’t hear any sound. Then I can see the headlights shining on the trees and the truck makes its way down the mountain road away from me.
I am much relieved and relight the lamps. I am out here alone in these Appalachian woods armed with nothing but a cell phone and a hunting knife. The nearest house is a mile away. Hunters, good men and not so good, travel through these woods with and without permission, with and without dogs but always armed with a gun. It is an unsettling feeling. It is wild country. There are bears and coyotes up here and we’ve even seen one mountain lion.
All is well now I think. But my science of the concrete has given way to its primitive xenophobia. I listen to the wind and it brings both myth and mystery. On the edge of the wilderness, like the edge of sleep the mind writes its own stories.
February 17, 9 am. Sunshine surrounded by sinister black clouds. 45 degrees.
I look out the window in the direction of my midnight hiker. Among the bare trees and leave mold I see the largest skunk I’ve ever seen at Rabbit Rock. He is traveling on an angular path 50 yards away up past the cabin in a south to north direction with all deliberate speed. He is solid black but for a white band around his neck. His tail is bushy and longer than the rest of him.
I sit in the rocker by the fire. The black clouds have overtaken the sun now. A storm is brewing. Snow predicted tonight.
I presume that the mystery flashlight last night was wielded by a man. We presume a lot of things. We make assumptions, sometimes based on reasonable analysis. We call that science. Sometimes we make them based on myth. What Said is proposing in “Orientalism” is that a European science of the Orient is based not on a rational analysis of historical fact but on a foundation of mythological “otherness” that reaches all the way back to the dawn of history. The difference between formula fiction and what we might simply call art is the ability of the writer to break up the genre in such a way that predictability is challenged both at the level of scientific reason but at the level of mythological tradition. The Oedipus complex comes to mind as does rain falling from a sunlit sky (what we call the Devil beating his wife).
But art in its efforts to deconstruct reality by turning the tide against its presumed inevitability creates new and chaotic myths that then become part of the collective wisdom of the community, Levi-Strauss’s “concrete science” of illusion and false consciousness. Is this not why Plato banned poets from the Republic?
But not so fast. If the deconstructive nature of art is pattern breaking is it adding more illusion or taking it away? The man with the flashlight last night could have been a woman and if it had been a woman there might have been in my mind a wholly different set of imagined explanations.
Is the scene in Brokeback Mountain where the two cowboys huddling together in their tent for warmth suddenly break into sexual intercourse a reality ripped up into myth or is it “concrete science?” that is to say, is the belief that there are no gay cowboys ripped apart and reconfigured as truth? In that sense the movie is polemical but it may also be seen as hard science (no pun intended).
A flashlight coming down off the side of Little Rocky Face could have been a woman. The Westminster Whippet lost in New York as I write could have had a thousand women with flashlights looking for it last night. And it could have been a woman on the side of that mountain and my fears would have been allayed. Even if it was a man he could as likely have been benign as he could have been evil. What am I talking about? Most likely it was a man and most likely he was benign. But I’m still thinking about the possibility of danger. I am still slipping back and forth between my imagination and hard facts.
But as Einstein pointed out and as I’ve been trying to illuminate here, the world is not divided between imagination and truth. Sometimes it takes an unfettered imagination to uncover the truth. That is why Einstein said “imagination is more important than knowledge.”
February 18. Saturday. Waynesville. 7 am. Rain. Faint light in the window.
I awoke at 6 terrified by my precarious financial situation. I began reading “Orientalism” and came to a passage where there is a reference to Dante’s Inferno and the eighth of the nine descending circles of Hell in which the founder of Islam, Mohammed, is found, his body split open and his intrails hanging down between his legs. The eighth circle is the place for “schismatics and sowers of discord.
I find on my bookshelf here two art books, one by Gustave Dore and the other by William Blake, both of which illustrate Dante’s Inferno. Both sets of drawings were done in the 19th century, Blake in England, Dore in France. The Divine Comedy itself was written in Italy four centuries earlier.
The Canto in question is number 28 in which Dante and Virgil encounter Mohammed in his horrible condition. The Blake book edited by Milton Klonsky (including Klonsky’s own translations of Dante’s work) has Mohammed say to Dante,
Now see how I split myself apart! See how Mohammed is mangled! Before me weeping, goes Ali [Mohammed’s son-in-law], his face cleft from chin to forelock; and all the others whom thou seeist here were during their lifetime sowers of scandal and schism, and therefore are they thus cloven.
Edward Said’s comments on Dante’s Oriental vision include the following from page 69 of “Orientalism:
The discriminations and refinements of Dante’s poetic grasp of Islam are an instance of the schematic, almost cosmological inevitability with which Islam and its designated representatives are creatures of Western geographical, historical, and above all, moral apprehension. Empirical data about the Orient or about any of its parts count for very little; what matters and is decisive is what I have been calling the Oriental vision by no means confined to the professional scholar, but rather common possession of all who have thought about the Orient in the West. Dante’s powers as a poet intensify, make more rather than less representative, these powers on the Orient. Mohammed, Saladin, Averroes and Aricenna are fixed in a visionary cosmology—fixed, laid out, boxed in, imprisoned, without much regard for anything except their “function” and the patterns they realize on the stage on which they appear.
I could for the education of my readers when I publish these journals on the internet, display either or both of the Dore and Blake plates. But these are the times that try men’s souls. This week a million dollar bounty has been offered by a Muslim cleric for the murder of the Danish cartoonist who published a drawing of Mohammed with a turban in the shape of a bomb. Though the number of hits on my web page is extremely low, could it be googled by someone in the Muslim world intent on finding all the web pages in the world in which images of Mohammed are posted and hunting down and killing them?
The irony of the whole Danish cartoon debacle was that a cartoon contest was mounted ostensibly to determine the level of self-censorship among Western artists on topics concerning the Muslim world. Now, like Salmon Rushdie had to do for years, many if not all the cartoonists involved in the Danish affair have had to go into hiding.
Meanwhile, an Iranian newspaper has called a contest for cartoons of the holocaust. And in response to that a 27 year old publisher in Israel has called forth a contest in his magazine of Holocaust cartoons and jokes by Jewish artists only in an effort to illustrate that no one is better at laughing at anti-Semitism than Jews themselves.
Suffice it here for me to bear out Edward Said’s withering criticism of Western stereotyping of Muslims (“Orientalism” was first published in 1978) with Klonsky’s commentary on Dante’s infamous depiction of Mohammed in Hell.
It was popularly believed in Dante’s time that Mahomet (ca 570-632) had once been a Christian convert, even rising to become a cardinal and a candidate for the papacy, but then defected to found his own rival religion. The great dispute over the succession to the caliphate centering about Mohomet’s son-in-law, Ali, who reigned from 656 until his assassination in 661, resulted in a lasting schism in the Moslem faith. Mohomet is shown at the left [plate 59], some of his ropy intestines draped over his shoulder and some dangling from his groin, as he pulls open his chest to reveal his entrails to Dante and Virgil. Beside him stands Ali, his pace split precisely down the middle.
--- Klonsky, Blake’s Dante, page 150
To me the image of Mahomet that Blake portrays, stocky with long hair and a long flowing beard, looks much the same as Blake’s identical drawings of Job and of God himself in his illustrations of the book of Job which I found on my shelf this morning as well.
I could here, I suppose (if my scanner wasn’t broken), present one of several of Blake’s plates illustrating the Book of Job in which God and Job appear. My favorite is plate 13 in which “the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.”
In Michael Marqusee’s introduction to my Paddington edition of Blake’s Job he says of plate 13,
Here Blake has dared to represent the unrepresentable, and with considerable success. The engraved line has never been more vigorous than it is in enacting the whirlwind of plate 13. It has the freedom of a pencil drawing while preserving the resolute certainty of the burin [a steel tool used to engrave metal plates]. For Blake there is nothing that cannot be understood by imagination, and therefore nothing beyond the scope of art.
February 19, 2006. Sunday. 8 am. 22 degrees. Snow on the ground. The whole town of Waynesville, quiet.
In a review in the New York Times of a new book on the biological origins of religion by Daniel Dennett, the reviewer is merciless in his denial of Dennett’s proposal, ranting on and on with the rather unconvincing argument that Dennett is not (as even he admits) stating that the origins of religion are now proven fact but the mere speculations of a wishful atheist. Ironically it’s the same argument used by proponents of intelligent design to challenge the theory of evolution or what they call Darwinism. It is an unexpected charge from a New York Times reviewer and is filled with a peevish nit-picking at Dennett’s logic. The review was so irrational and vituperative itt made me want to go right out and buy the book
Never before in my lifetime has it seemed more important to me to understand the relationship between art, science and religion. Edward Said’s book, “Orientalism makes clear that belief systems are rooted in human biology, whether they be strictly bound up in formal religious doctrine, the literary and graphic visions of artists or the subliminal biases of scientists and historians. The Danish cartoon controversy is simply not being discussed in the mainstream media beyond discussion of its political implications for international relations.
Some commentators are beginning to observe (in light of the extraordinary response to the cartoons in the Islamic world) that religion is sometimes used to further a political agenda—one of the understatements of the century.
The way European Jews were treated in the Holocaust and in its aftermath the establishment of the state of Israel is the single most important matrix of events in the 20th century and it so far threatens to dominate the 21st century as well.
This matrix has not gained the full attention of human history until after the fall of the Soviet Union and the death of Mao in China. But now, unhampered by an overt dialectic between capitalism and socialism, religion has become the chief conceit in the contemporary quest for understanding the human condition.
February 21. Grey winter. 8 am
One day a toothache, the next day intellectual anxiety. Blake said, “a tear is an intellectual thing.” Well, it is when the tear is caused by something other than physical pain.
The idea of physical pain versus mental pain is sloppy thinking these days because the mind as a configuration of thoughts more or less running all the time like a huge bureaucracy is really as physical as a tooth.
I feel isolated because I can’t find a community to belong to. Not much is said of a hermit’s alienation. My own is itself a huge bureaucracy of Kafkaesque proportions. When I was in high school I was in so many organizations that I was called to the principle’s office to be told to cut back. And even the principle had no idea how many organizations I was involved in outside of school. Over my adult years I have sought community in friendships, marriages, and work environments and all sorts of organizations. Mostly to no avail. I have taken up residence inside the exiled kingdom of books and ideas—ideas that have other acolytes besides myself to be sure—but in some sense, like the vows of silence taken by some believers, individuals turn inward to worship the idea in its purest abstraction, untainted by the interpretations or the heresies of others.
Just as I mentioned it at the beginning that mind and body are both part of the same physical universe, so emotion and intellect are both part of the same physical brain. And so intellectual isolation can be a source of emotional pain and emotional pain a source of intellectual confusion.
This talk of religion I wanted to put behind me because for me it seems like putting Santa Claus behind me. But it doesn’t work that way. If you expect to find community. Looking for a group to belong to whose members have in common that they don’t believe in God is like looking for a group to belong to whose members have in common that they only like rock and roll. The conversation will soon go flat.
I’ve grown weary of trying to discuss religion with believers. Somewhere in my trunk is a humorous essay I wrote for the Christian Century (which was rejected) called, “Some of my best friends are Christians.” Evidently they didn’t find it humorous.
* * *
The morning moves on and I can’t get to the point I want to make. Am I trying to make a point? Something about religion. Something about sadness and isolation. Something about community.
The study of religion is now being brought into the realm of biology. No longer is there a mere war of wits between religion and evolution. Believers have now taken the offensive by erecting a parallel universe outside the theory of evolution called Intelligent Design. Biologists (some anyway) are beginning to study religion as sociobiology. The politics of the debate between intelligent design and evolution has overshadowed, still overshadows the study of religion as myth and psychological illusion, ultimately a more devastating theory than evolution itself because it seeks not merely to dismiss the Bible as a rational explanation for creation (there could be another one, more in line with evolution that still proposes God as a prime mover), this sociobiological approach to religion would at somepoint relegate the still active belief systems of Judiaism, Christianity, Islam, etc., to the same dust heap of history that the religions relegated the ancient paganisms of the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Celts and the American Indians.
How do contemporary religions stay so vibrant if not through political power? And whereas the Cold War between the ideologies of communism and capitalism appeared to have been mostly devoid of religious overtones, American demogogues were never afraid to charge that Soviet atheism was just another religion.
Now, in a book review of Daniel Dennett’s book on the history and evolution of religion, “Breaking the Spell,” a New York Times reviewer charges that Dennett’s “so called rational approach” to religion is itself just another irrational belief system parading around as science. “Scientism” the reviewer calls it. In fact every idea that this reviewer doesn’t like gets the suffix “ism.”
February 22, 2006 9 am. Mild 42 degrees. Humid and damp outside.
I’m feeling sorry for myself. I have a generalized, dull pain on the left side of my mouth. Yesterday I bit down on some food and broke off the side of one of my upper back teeth. I’m going to have to go to a dentist which is going to be a very big deal for me. I haven’t been to a dentist in more that thirty years. I’ve been through three marriages, one of them twice and two other long term relationships and several short ones since the last time I went to a dentist. I’ve lost both parents and all four grandparents since the last time I went to a dentist. I’m already on medication for high blood pressure and I have a cholesterol level that I may find out next week is still high enough that I’m going to have to go on cholesterol medicine and before they will grant me my piddling Social Security check, the Social Security Administration wants me to rake over all those marriages and get the exact dates of those marriages and the exact dates of the divorces and even the Social Security numbers of the ex-wives (if I can get them). Twelve years ago, when I turned 50, all those marriages were already history and I had the insane idea to celebrate my 50th year by bringing all those ex-wives together. I never did it. But I thought about it. That was crazy enough.
Anyway, I’ve been in and out of the Army and written a book about it and gone to three graduate schools and built 3 log cabins and worked in the New York Public Library and helped to raise 3 children and lost track of and then found and then lost track of again those wives and lost track of so many friends and lost forever so many relatives—all this has happened since the last time I went to a dentist. Four months ago I chipped off the inside of an upper canine. I never felt any pain so I didn’t do anything about it except try to remember to eat carefully so as not to break off any more…on and on and on…some more stuff here…and now this latest and I have started to eat as carefully as I imagine a man with no teeth would and today I’m feeling this dull pain. So I could need 3 or 4 teeth pulled or filled with gold or plastic or something or worse. Maybe I could loose all of them. I can’t conceive of life with false teeth.
So I got up this morning feeling sorry for myself and took 2 Ibupropen and pulled a children’s book off the shelf by Shel Silverstein that I bought because the title is Lafcadio the Lion Who Shot Back. I own several children’s books which I have bought serendipitously though I have no one to give them to but myself. I bought this one because ever since I discovered the writer Lafcadio Hearne years ago, I decided that if I ever used a pen name it would be Lafcadio something or other. I just like the way it sounded and I liked the way it sounded with Hearne. Sort of the way a lot of American Indians have a Spanish sounding name and then also an English or Irish or Germanic sounding name.
Anyway, I have had this children’s book for years and never read it. I just kept it on the shelf for a time when I thought I might want to read it. That came this morning as I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself and drinking a cup of coffee and waiting for the Ibu to kick in, and wondering how I was going to deal with these dental issues. I started first to pick up a children’s book I bought in Santa Fe years ago as well. It’s called Annie and the Old One. I had read this one before. It is about a little Navaho girl learning about death from her grandmother. It is so thin it might disappear if I keep it upright among the grown up books like the Dictionary of Marxist Thought and the Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen and the Golden Bough and The Human Stain and the Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe. So it lies prominantly on the top of a stack of coffee table books, Berggasse 19 (Freud’s house in Vienna), The Illustrated Poetry of Rumi, The Tango, The Paintings of Da Vinci, The Harper Atlas of World history. But I couldn’t pick Annie and the Old One up this morning. I was too sad.
I decided instead that it was time to read Lafcadio the Lion who shot Back. It was perched there next to Faulkner’s early poetic effort, “Vision in Spring,” and my old college Shakespeare and Leaves of Grass and The Dying Animal. I pulled Lafcadio down and read it and looked at Silverstein’s wonderful line drawings of Lafcadio in his various guises and on his various adventures. It was pretty long book as children’s books go but I finished it in about 15 minutes, including looking at the pictures. One of the reasons I like children’s books is because you can read them in one short sitting and they can sometimes generate as much thought as a book that might take days or even weeks to read.
The message I got out of Lafcadio The Lion Who Shot Back was that you never know what is going to happen next in life. The story is about innocence and experience, about travel and adventure and even about coming home to find that you can’t go home again. I wandered around the house after reading the book, thought about building a fire, pulled down a book called New Mexico’s Wilderness Areas from Deborah’s bookshelf, went back to put Lafcadio away and have a look now at the Faulkner book next to it and maybe while I was gathering books to look at, I was ready now to look at Annie and the Old One again, and while I was at it, look up the word wistful in the dictionary which I thought might be the word for what I was feeling right then (and it was).
I sat down again and opened the Faulkner book at a random page and read this passage.
Once more soft starred evening falls
Upon these empty walls;
Once more the world sinks into darkness, he said,
Watching calm gusts of stars swept overhead
Like candle flames across a coffin blown—
And leaves a flare of light to whisper ancient stones.
Restless branches gestured in the dark
Above him; roof peaks, narrow, black and stark
Like sharpened foreheads, streamed with star-bright hair.
Someday he, too, must die.
Then I opened up Annie and the Old One to these lines.
“My granddaughter,” she said, “You have tried to hold back time. This cannot be done.” The desert stretched yellow and brown away to the edge of the morning sky.
Lafcadio the Lion who had learned to shoot a gun ends like this.
“I guess I don’t belong in the hunter’s world and I guess I don’t belong in the lion’s world. I guess I just don’t belong anywhere,” he said.
And with that he shook his head and he put down his gun and he walked away over the hill, away from the hunters and away from the lions.
And he walked and soon from far away he could hear the sound of the hunters shooting the lions and he could hear the sound of the lions eating up the hunters.
And he didn’t really know where he was going, but he did know he was going somewhere, because you really have to go somewhere, don’t you?
And he didn’t really know what was going to happen to him, but he did know that something was going to happen, because something always does, doesn’t it?
And the sun was just beginning to go down behind the hill and it was getting a little chilly in the jungle and a warm rain was beginning to fall and Lafcadio the Great walked down into the valley alone.
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