Mark Twain « Under The Table

Posts Tagged ‘Mark Twain’

When Is It Done?

Monday, December 12th, 2011

(This piece appeared—twice!—in the Anderson Valley Advertiser in 2008-2009. I recently got a request for this article, thought it was on my blog, but could not find it herein. So here it is now. Enjoy.)

Thirty-five years ago, I was hitchhiking from Santa Cruz to San Francisco on Highway One, and I got a ride with the poet William Everson, also known as Brother Antoninus, one of the more esoteric Beats. He sported a wispy white beard and a well-worn cowboy hat, and his old car reeked of tobacco. Recently installed as a poet-in-residence at UC Santa Cruz, he was going to a party in Bonny Dune but had no idea how to get there.

I knew exactly where he wanted to go and offered to be his guide, though it meant traveling many miles out of my way. I was obsessed with poetry and wanted as much of the great man’s time as I could finagle. He accepted my offer to be his Sancho Panza and did me the honor of asking, “So what’s your thing?”

“Guitar. And I write stories and poems, too.”

He nodded. “Who do you read?”

“Philip Whalen. Lew Welch. Faulkner. Kazantzakis.”

He lit a cigarette and seemed disinclined to continue the conversation.

And then, without consciously intending to, I asked, “So…how do you know when a poem is done?”

So pained was Everson’s expression, I might as well have asked him what he thought of the poetry of Rod McKuen. Here he was on his way to a party, no doubt to drink and smoke and let his hair down and take a break from all the bullshit attendant to his newly won academic sinecure, and his guide to such bliss—a scrawny wannabe with nary a joint to share—asks him the single most annoying question an artist can be asked.

I was about to blurt an apology for my stupid question, when the good man cleared his throat and said, “So you decide this is what you want to do, and you do it for years and years and years, not because anybody gives you anything for it but because you want those poems. And you might work a line a hundred times and never get it, and then you’ll be sure you’ve got a good one and the next morning it reads like shit. But one day, after all that work, something shifts in your awareness, and from then on you just know. You just do. There’s no rule about it. You come into harmony with your feelings and you look at the thing and say, ‘Yeah. That’s it.’”

•

William Faulkner rewrote his first two novels, Mosquitoes and Soldier’s Pay, many times. But no matter how many drafts he wrote, he always wanted to rewrite. He came to realize that in the time it took him to complete a new draft, he had so changed as a person and grown as a writer, that he had become, literally, someone else; and this new person wanted to make the book his book.

So from then on, Faulkner made it his practice to write three drafts and call the book done. Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ also settled on three drafts. And I, in the days before computers, would do four drafts before undertaking a final draft with an editor. Of course, with the advent of computers, rewriting has taken on whole new meanings, and our beleaguered bookstores and libraries are jammed with proof that computerized word processing has in no way improved the quality of writing or the quality of books.

•

There is a marvelous movie made in 1956 entitled The Mystery of Picasso. The film was revived in the 1980’s and shown in art houses all over Europe and America. In the film, Picasso paints on one side of an absorbent canvas that allows colored ink to seep through the canvas unadulterated and without running. The camera is on the other side of the canvas, filming Picasso’s strokes as they appear, as if by magic, and coalesce into paintings. Some of the paintings are shown developing in real time, some manifest in time lapse.

When I watched this movie in a theatre full of artists and art lovers, the response from the audience was remarkable. As Picasso rapidly created a painting, a person—or several people—would cry out, “Stop! It’s perfect!” and then they would groan as Picasso carried on, changing the image until someone else would shout, “Yes! There! That’s it!” only to have the master paint on and on and on.

By the end of the film we had witnessed the making and annihilation and making and annihilation of hundreds of great works of art—done and not done and done and not done and done.

•

With the exception of The Prince and the Pauper, which may be a perfect fable, Mark Twain had great difficulty finishing his novels, as did Thomas Hardy. Both men would write in trances of inspiration until they reached the climaxes of their stories, and then not know how to end them. Both writers would put their incomplete manuscripts away for several months, even years, then get them out and affix endings quite unrelated to the original spontaneous flow. Sadly, these forced completions are the great weaknesses of otherwise masterful works.

So Twain might have said a book is done when the writer ceases to write it. Faulkner might have said there is no guarantee that when a thing is done the artist will like it. Picasso might have said the thing is always done and never done. And in this moment, reserving the right to change my mind in the next, I say the poem or song or book or painting is done when a comfortable silence falls and I’m absolutely certain it’s time for me to do something else.

Tags: Anderson Valley Advertiser, Beats, Bonny Dune, Brother Antoninus, done, drafts, Faulkner, Lew Welch, Marcia Sloane, Mark Twain, Nikos Kazantzakis, Philip Whalen, poets, Rod McKuen, Sancho Panza, Santa Cruz, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Mystery of Picasso, The Prince and the Pauper, Thomas Hardy, Todd Walton, UC Santa Cruz, Under the Table Books, when is a poem done?, William Everson, Zorba the Greek
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Complexity

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Photo by Marcia Sloane

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser December 2011)

“Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.” Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

Are most humans inherently incapable of understanding complex arrangements of interrelated things and actions, or can almost anyone develop such a capability?

Yesterday I heard live coverage of the eviction of campers at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, an occupation that began as a protest against rich people being further enriched by a corrupt financial system. After several weeks of camping in the park, the protestors morphed into an ongoing settlement of people who, judging from interviews I heard with a number of evicted campers, wanted to continue living in Zuccotti Park indefinitely because: “Where else am I supposed to go?” “The one per cent got rich ripping everyone else off.” “There are no good jobs left in America because the rich people sent all the jobs to China.” “It is my constitutional right to camp here as long as I want.” “Private property is a conspiracy of the one per cent.” “This is the beginning of a revolution.” “They can’t make us go.” “It’s time to make a stand.” “The system is totally rigged.” “It’s much better here than in the homeless shelters.” “We are family.”

“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

A friend recently said to me, “I guess we should have voted for Hillary, now that we know what a fraud Obama is.”

“Are you serious?” I replied, having previously thought this person to be moderately intelligent.

“Well…just look at what he’s doing.”

“What does that have to do with Hillary? What makes you think she would do anything differently than Obama? She works for the same people he works for. She does whatever her handlers tell her to do.”

“Well…but under Clinton…”

“Don’t go there,” I warned. “Don’t rewrite history, please. Bill was the master deregulator, the champion of NAFTA, the destroyer of the safety net, enemy of our industrial base, servant of the fat cats. Don’t you remember?”

Remembering things is another human capability I wonder about. I am astonished by how little anyone remembers about anything. When I remind people that Al Gore, before his enthronement as an environmental guru, led the campaign against the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the usual reaction is disbelief. “He’s also a proponent of nuclear power,” I add, “and said so to Congress shortly after he made a big splash with his global warming movie.”

“No!”

Yes.

So if we can’t remember anything, and we can’t understand complex situations, where does that leave us?

The novel Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain is a comic tragic story of a well-meaning intelligent person who remembers things and is capable of understanding complex arrangements of interrelated things and actions, living in a society of racist imbeciles and self-serving charlatans. If the title has deterred you, I encourage you to give the book a try.

At the outset of the story we learn how our hero got his nickname, and how the dreadful label dramatically altered the course of his life.

[In that same month of February, Dawson’s Landing gained a new citizen. This was Mr. David Wilson, a young fellow of Scotch parentage. He had wandered to this remote region from his birthplace in the interior of the State of New York, to seek his fortune. He was twenty-five years old, college-bred, and had finished a post-college course in an Eastern law school a couple of years before.

He was a homely, freckled, sandy-haired young fellow, with an intelligent blue eye that had frankness and comradeship in it and a covert twinkle of a pleasant sort. But for an unfortunate remark of his, he would no doubt have entered at once upon a successful career at Dawson’s Landing. But he made his fatal remark the first day he spent in the village, and it ‘gaged’ him. He had just made the acquaintance of a group of citizens when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud:

“I wish I owned half that dog.”

“Why?” somebody asked.

“Because I would kill my half.”

The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found no light there, no expression that they could read. They fell away from him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy to discuss him. One said:

“’Pears to be a fool.”

“’Pears?” said another. “Is, I reckon you better say.”

“Said he wished he owned half of the dog, the idiot,” said a third. “What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his half? Do you reckon he thought it would live?”

“Why he must have thought it, unless he is the downrightest fool in the world; because if he hadn’t thought it, he would have wanted to own the whole dog, knowing that if he killed his half and the other half died, he would be responsible for that half just the same as if he had killed that half instead of his own. Don’t it look that way to you, gents?”

“Yes, it does. If he owned one half of the general dog, it would be so; if he owned one end of the dog and another person owned the other end, it would be so, just the same; particularly in the first case, because if you kill one half of a general dog, there ain’t any man that can tell whose half it was, but if he owned one end of the dog, maybe he could kill his end of it and—”

“No, he couldn’t, either; he couldn’t and not be responsible if the other end died, which it would. In my opinion the man ain’t in his right mind.”

“In my opinion he haint got any mind.”

No. 3 said: “Well, he’s a lummox, anyway.”

“That’s what he is,” said No. 4, “he’s a labrick—just a Simon-pure labrick, if ever there was one.”

“Yes, sir, he’s a dam fool, that’s the way I put him up,” said No. 5. “Anybody can think different that wants to, but those are my sentiments.”

“I’m with you, gentlemen,” said No. 6. “Perfect jackass—yes, and it ain’t going too far to say he is a pudd’nhead. If he ain’t a pudd’nhead, I ain’t no judge, that’s all.”

Mr. Wilson stood elected. The incident was told all over the town, and gravely discussed by everybody. Within a week he had lost his first name; Pudd’nhead took its place. In time he came to be liked, and well liked, too; but by that time the nickname had got well stuck on, and it stayed. That first day’s verdict made him a fool, and he was not able to get it set aside, or even modified. The nickname soon ceased to carry any harsh or unfriendly feeling with it, but it held its place, and was to continue to hold its place for twenty long years.]

Ah, subtlety, another of the lost arts, along with complexity and memory—attributes of an interesting mind, of the sort of intelligence I love engaging with, and just the sort of intelligence that is so painfully lacking in our contemporary fiction and plays and movies and humor. I love subtle irony, subtle sarcasm, subtle innuendo; and because I employ such subtlety in my speech, people are forever falling away from me as from something uncanny, so I feel compelled to say, “I was only kidding. That was a joke. Let me explain. Please.” But by then it is usually too late, as it was too late for Pudd’nhead, and I am taken for a fool, or for someone who likes complexity and subtlety and remembering what happened not so very long ago.

“It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that make horse races.” Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

So…while the various Occupy encampments around the country were being raided by police, and the tents and belongings of several hundred campers were being removed, a video game called Modern Warfare 3 was released in America, and within twenty-four hours the game sold 6.5 million copies and grossed 400 million dollars, with the Japanese and German versions of the game soon to be released. “This game’s Survival Mode features one or two players fighting endless waves of enemies, with each wave becoming increasingly difficult. Despite being so frequently compared to the World At War Nazi Zombies Mode, enemies do not spawn at fixed locations like the zombies do; instead, they appear at tactical positions based on the current location of the player.”

This may be a stretch, but can you imagine a video game entitled Occupy Wall Street wherein the player(s) not only have to figure out how to successfully camp at Zuccotti Park and keep the police at bay, but also try to achieve objectives beyond continuous camping? Killing the enemy will not be an option in this game; which means subtlety, complexity, and an excellent knowledge of past protest movements will be extremely important in any game-winning strategy, which means, of course, no one will buy the game.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

Goodnight, Gracie.

Tags: Al Gore, Anderson Valley Advertiser, Clinton, complexity, dogs, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Hillary, Kyoto Protocol, lost arts, Marcia Sloane, Mark Twain, memory, NAFTA, nuclear power, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, subtlety, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books, Zuccotti Park
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Krugman & Chin & Grimes

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Photo Todd Walton and Robin Chin by John Grimes

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser September 2011)

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” Winston Churchill

Last week there came news that Dick Cheney was canceling his subscription to the New York Times because the New York Times had the audacity to print what Paul Krugman wrote to commemorate the disaster known as 9/11. I was curious to read what caused the perpetrator of so much needless death and destruction and economic ruin to cancel the paper that had been so helpful to him during his eight-year reign as on-site puppeteer of George W Bush, and here, in case you missed Krugman’s brief epistle, is what made Dick so mad.

“What happened after 9/11—and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not—was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neo cons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

“A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits—people who should have understood very well what was happening—took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

“The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.”

Krugman’s words washed over me like a cool breeze on a hot day, the hot day being the hundreds of newspaper and interweb articles and thousands of minutes of radio and television time spent on further hijacking and poisoning the memory of 9/11. And though the content of Krugman’s note held nothing new for those who don’t swallow the propaganda of our overlords, the placement of Krugman’s note in the nation’s paper-of-record at that moment in history was, in my opinion, a brave act.

“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” Mark Twain

I first became aware of Paul Krugman when I was giving a little help to my friend Robin Chin as she strove day and night for two years to make a documentary entitled There’s Something About W, a movie she hoped would be a valuable weapon in defeating George W. Bush as he ran for a second term as President of the United States. And I am convinced that had even ten per cent of the American voters seen There’s Something About W, George Bush would have been defeated by a landslide.

So there I was watching a rough cut of There’s Something About W in John (Robin’s partner) and Robin’s tiny one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, their little living room converted into an editing studio, when Paul Krugman appeared on the screen, a likable, matter-of-fact fellow explaining in easy-to-understand terms exactly how George and his puppeteers were pulling the economic wool over the eyes of the American public. Krugman appears several times in the course of Robin’s marvelous film, which also features a number of well-known political comedians, and Krugman’s wry delivery of the terrible truth fits perfectly. Over these ensuing eight years, as Krugman’s fame has grown and he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, I have been a semi-regular reader of his articles; and it has been fascinating to watch as his warnings prove repeatedly prophetic while our overlords gleefully ignore him—for they most definitely do not want what Krugman wants, which is for the world to be a better place for everyone.

“There are two great rules of life: never tell everything at once.” Ken Venturi

Robin Chin and John Grimes are two of my favorite people, and how we became friends is a favorite memory. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of meeting someone for the first time and feeling as if you already know them. I’m not talking about especially liking a person the first time you meet them, or falling in love at first sight, but of familiarity, as if you and they might have been roommates or neighbors or siblings, though you’ve never laid eyes on each other, not in this lifetime anyway.

That’s how I felt when I first met Robin and John on a December evening in the early 1990’s—as if I knew them already and had known them for eons. I was camping in an empty cottage in Berkeley owned by my pal David Jouris (the person from whom I cadge many of the quotations I use in my essays), enjoying a brief respite from my swiftly devolving life in Sacramento. David, hoping to cheer me up, invited me to tag along to a holiday party in San Rafael; and though I have never been much of a party guy, being psychically porous, allergic to alcohol, and possessed of a preternatural talent for putting my foot in my mouth, I went with him.

On those rare occasions when I do attend parties, my strategy for survival is to scout around for a good place to hide, procure a plate of food, and return to my hiding place. At this party, however, every square inch of the house was occupied and it was freezing outside, so I settled near the guacamole in the very crowded kitchen next to Robin, a beautiful woman with long black hair who seemed as shell-shocked as I by the cacophonous goings on.

At that point, if memory serves, our mutual friend David waltzed by and introduced us. Robin and I fell into conversation, and when I learned that Robin was a San Francisco-based photographer, I mentioned a commercial photographer I knew in the city who turned out to be someone Robin knew. Then John, who is most definitely a party guy and an indefatigable punster, joined us in conversation, and before we knew it we were all fast friends and planning the first of many reunions.

“Always remember there are two types of people in the world. Those who come into a room and say, “Well, here I am!” and those who come in and say, “Ah, there you are!” Frederick L. Collins

Robin and John are definitely “Ah, there you are!” people, and if, during the first several years of our friendship, a person had said to me, “Robin and John are making a major documentary film that could seriously influence who becomes the next President of the United States,” I would have assumed the person was speaking about a different John and Robin. Not that they aren’t talented and creative and passionate, they are, but they are such “Ah, there you are!” people and not at all “Well, here I am!” people that it never occurred to me they might aspire to write and direct and produce something on the scale of a major motion documentary. How such a thing came to pass would make a fine documentary in itself, but an even better fictional comedy based on a true story.

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” Lewis Carroll

By the time I moved to Berkeley in the mid-1990’s, Robin had transitioned from photography to film editing and would eventually become the assistant editor on a number of award-winning documentaries, while John continued to amplify his success as an illustrator and cartoonist. They were living in the aforementioned tiny apartment where they live to this day, John’s office a desk, computer, and a photocopy machine adjacent to their miniscule kitchen, Robin’s editing studio inseparable from the living room. The interweb boom was just getting underway and the Bay Area was awash in money trickling down sufficiently to support thousands of freelance human beings such as John and Robin and yours truly. Clinton was President, and though we knew he was spearheading the frenzied sundering of the social safety net, destroying our industrial base, and bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age, he was technically a Democrat, the economy was literally bubbling along, and we were busily scrambling to pay our rents, so in much the same way that liberals and progressives are neutralized (neutered?) today by Obama being a Democrat and the official “lesser evil”, we were rarely moved to protest.

“I think that the good and the great are only separated by the willingness to sacrifice.” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

But then Bush was enthroned, the towers came down, and the overlords chanted “weapons of mass destruction” day and night until finally the muddled masses conflated Saddam Hussein with Osama Bin Laden. Then, as W was on the verge of ordering the invasion and demolition of Iraq, millions of Americans and millions of people around the world, old farts and young farts, got off our butts and went to march against going to war; and Robin and John decided to film the anti-war demonstrations in San Francisco.

I remember marching along Market Street with a half-million other passionate people and realizing that something was very different about this march than those anti-war protests of the 1960’s and 70’s; the largest difference being that our overlords had cleverly diverted traffic from several blocks away on either side of Market Street so no one but the marchers could witness the true scale of the protest. And the subservient media, including the shameful San Francisco Chronicle, reported only ten thousand marched against the war that day, and gave equal space to fake little pro-war demonstrations attended by a few dozen shills.

But we who marched knew how many of us there were, and on an island in that river of humanity, Robin and John stood filming the truth as it flowed toward and around them. I like to think it was the passionate energy of those hundreds of thousands of protestors that infused Robin and John with the awesome energy it took to transcend their previous notions of who they were and enable them to make a movie that might very well have changed the world. If only…

Todd: What motivated you, Robin, to start filming the anti-war protests?

Robin: Watching the pre-war reporting on television and in the papers, I felt we were being fed nothing but pro-war propaganda, and I was scared to death about the tragic consequences of the United States going to war and the erosion of our civil liberties the administration (Cheney) would implement. So I wanted to document the protests in San Francisco and interview people with different points of view.

Todd: And what were you going to do with that footage?

Robin: Well, we got so many compelling interviews at those protests, interviews with people from all walks of life, that I thought we’d make a small video to present the anti-war side. And then I tuned in C-SPAN for the very first time so I could watch the debate in Congress about going to war, and I was shocked to see what else was going on in Congress, and what else, policy-wise, the Bush Administration was doing—all these radical changes to our government, the whole New Deal safety net being dismantled, the drive to privatize Social Security, out sourcing of jobs, the Patriot act, the NSA’s invasion of privacy, and on and on. This shifted my idea of making a small piece about the war to the idea of a larger documentary that eventually became There’s Something About W.

Todd: And how were you able to involve Krugman?

Robin: Krugman was one of the first and most articulate people we saw writing and speaking about the radical policies of the Bush Administration, and the first person I saw in the mainstream media calling people in the administration liars. When we saw a video of Krugman talking at the New School, John contacted Krugman’s publicist and we ended up interviewing him in three different venues when he visited the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.

Todd: But knowing you as I do, knowing what a private person you always were, and are, I wonder what it was that compelled you to go out of character, so to speak, and undertake the making of such a public epic as There’s Something About W.

Robin: As I was driving home one rainy day I felt something suddenly jump into my body, and I felt a very big responsibility to warn everyone about all the changes and policies the Administration was trying to enact. I didn’t think people were really getting this information. It seemed like the world, as I knew it, was going to be taken over and destroyed by the Bush Administration, and I thought if I was going to take the big leap and make the sacrifice to produce and fund a documentary of my own, there was no better time and no better subject than this one. Having worked on documentaries for Frontline, Frontline/World, and with many other independent filmmakers, I thought I knew how much it would take, though it ended up taking much more than I ever imagined. So I enlisted John and many other friends and people I knew in the film industry to help sound the alarm.

Todd: And what are you doing now?

Robin: I have continued to document the unvarnished history of our government through my video archive that now contains over 20,000 hours of television broadcast footage, and we’re going to have a meeting with the Internet Archive about putting as much of that footage as possible on-line for all to see, and to be a historical record for researchers.

Tags: 9/11, Anderson Valley Advertiser, anti-war, courage, David Jouris, Dick Cheney, favorite people, Frederick L. Collins, George Bush, Iraq, John Grimes, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Ken Venturi, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, moral courage, New York Times, Paul Krugman, quotations, Robin Chin, There's Something About W, two types of people, Under the Table Books, war, Winston Churchill
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Brandon Crawford

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

(This article first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser August 2011)

“The Possible’s slow fuse is lit

By the Imagination.” Emily Dickinson

While following a seemingly insignificant line of thought I will suddenly find myself on a broad avenue of inquiry that becomes the on-ramp to a sixteen-lane super highway of conjecture leading to an imposing citadel wherein is housed the solution to all the problems of humankind. Wow. Talk about grandiose. But isn’t that how our minds sometimes work, leaping from the insignificant to a grand unified theory of everything?

For instance, my recent musings about Brandon Crawford merged onto the super highway of an idea that all the problems of human society can be traced to a lack of imagination, to the inability of people to imagine new ways of proceeding rather than repeating the same old nonsense that dooms us all to slide down the steep and slippery slopes to a most unpleasant bottom of the dysfunctional pyramidal paradigm.

Who is Brandon Crawford? A descendant of English royalty? An up-and-coming politico? A movie star? Nay. Brandon Crawford is a baseball player, an easy-going California guy, a wide-ranging and quietly brilliant shortstop for the San Francisco Giants recently sent back to the minor leagues where, because of the aforementioned lack of imagination by people in positions of power, he definitely does not, in the way I imagine things, belong.

When Brandon was called up from the minor leagues a month or so ago, the Giants were reeling from injuries to star players and mired in a debilitating ennui that threatened to send our team spiraling out of contention for a return to the World Series. Desperation, not imagination, inspired General Manager Brian Sabean and Manager Bruce Bochy to call up the young Brandon, and the results were miraculous. The moribund team came to life, moved into first place, and steadily won more games than they lost. Brandon Crawford, as far as my imagination is concerned, was the catalyst for this revival, and his removal from the starting lineup and eventual demotion to the minor leagues was the cause of the team’s recent collapse. Crawford’s individual statistics may not support my view, but baseball is a team sport, synergy ineffable, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

“The status quo sucks.” George Carlin

Few of the people in power in the Giants organization, and terribly few people in power in our local, state, and national governments, and almost no one in power in the movie business and publishing industry, in energy production and transportation and environmental protection, in education and agriculture and healthcare and foreign policy seems capable of understanding what is blatantly obvious to you and me and millions of moderately intelligent people. Why is this? Could it be that the people in power have little or no imagination?

Assuming that’s true, how did such unimaginative people get into positions of power over so many people with more imagination than they? And the answer is: unimaginative people select other unimaginative people to work for them and succeed them, while actively discriminating against people with original ideas and less conventional ways of doing things. Thus the status quo is forever protecting itself unto decrepitude and terminal ossification. Yes, you agree, but how did those unimaginative poop heads get into power in the first place, from which positioning they continue to perpetrate such stultifying stupidity? Good question.

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Mark Twain

Assuming not every election is rigged (and maybe that’s an unwise assumption), we, the people, elected the amoral dingbats now actively destroying our world, and we’ve been electing them and re-electing them for hundreds of years. Why do we vote for these unimaginative people? Why do we continue to buy unimaginative books and go to unimaginative movies and watch unimaginative television? I think we do these things because we fear our imaginations, which we were taught to fear. I would even say we are a culture that punishes children whenever their imaginations get the best of them and lead them into uncharted territories where their timid elders fear to follow. But why are the elders so afraid?

Because imagination is unpredictable and potentially disruptive of what we are used to; and what we are used to, for most adults, is apparently preferable to the unknown, probably because we’ve also been taught to fear the unknown. I, for instance, spent a large part of my previous life staying in disastrous relationships long after I should have jumped ship, so to speak, because though I could imagine myriad preferable alternatives to my rotten imbroglios, I was frozen by the fear that the fruits of my imagination would never ripen and I would fall into a bottomless pit of loneliness or even lousier relationships.

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Michelangelo

Hold everything. My imagination just did a loop-dee-loop and deposited me at the foot of a monument whereupon is engraved the command: Teach them to fear the unknown. Is this the imperative underpinning what I first imagined to be an imagination deficiency? Would it be more accurate to say that our fear of what we might imagine, rather than a lack of imagination, has brought humanity to the brink, and in some parts of the world, over the brink of disaster?

Buckminster Fuller, who imagined and then created the geodesic dome, convinced me through his highly imaginative writing that the largest impediment to humans making the world an environmentally zaftig and robust utopia is our misguided collective imagination. And just who has been misguiding our collective right brain? Clever, greedy, left-brain-dominated people who won’t allow themselves to imagine that spaceship earth was designed by an impeccably imaginative universe to provide plenty of food and comfort and fun for everyone onboard.

According to Bucky, humanity is choking to death on the ancient fish bone of the idea (the imagining) that life on earth is all about scarcity, when, in fact, with a modicum of creative re-imagining, we can open the non-existent doors to our illusory cages, step out onto the lush playing field, play shortstop, bat second, and be paid handsomely to do so.

“Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up.” Bob Lemon

Which brings us back to Brandon Crawford. Four days ago, having failed to win a game in five tries since Brandon’s exile to the lesser leagues, our Giants exploded for eight runs (the most this year at home) and our pitcher Brian Vogelsang continued his inexplicable, unpredicted, and hard-to-imagine (except for those of us with sufficient imagination) dominance and allowed but one run. Put another way: we finally won a game without Brandon Crawford. However, since that solitary win, we have played our archenemy the Philadelphia Phillies twice and had our butts handed to us on paper plates. That is to say: they beat us with ease.

So now our challenge is to imagine that despite the shortsightedness and lack of imagination by those in managerial positions, the collective imagination of millions of Giants fans will synergize to produce a shift in team consciousness and we will start winning again, defeat the mighty Phillies in the National League playoffs, and return to the World Series against who else but the New York Yankees.

My current dilemma is that I keep imagining dire scenarios involving multiple injuries to perfectly nice players necessitating Brandon Crawford being called back up to the mother team, and his return sparking a renaissance. But that’s old paradigm stuff. Hollywood hogwash. Violence-based winner-loser crap. Why not imagine multiple emotional and spiritual epiphanies overtaking our stars and journeymen alike, epiphanies leading to a harmony of energies that makes of the entire team one gigantic Brandon Crawford, only with a good batting average?

If I can imagine such a transformation of a silly old baseball team, surely we can put our psyches together and imagine millions of obscenely rich people sharing their wealth with everyone else in heretofore unimagined and totally groovy ways, so that war and weaponry and mountaintop removal quickly become things of the past and we are set free to imagine the infinite potential of what Bucky dubbed livingry.

Tags: Anderson Valley Advertiser, baseball, Bob Lemon, Brandon Crawford, Buckminster Fuller, Emily Dickinson, fear, George Carlin, imagination, livingry, Marcia Sloane, Mark Twain, Michelangelo, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies, San Francisco Giants, sharing wealth, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books, unknown, World Series
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Kings and Presidents

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

(This essay first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser April 2011)

“Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.” Herbert Spencer

I just finished reading an excellent book by British historian Derek Wilson: A Brief History of Henry VIII, 386 pages of densely informative prose that is certainly not brief by American standards. I do not often read history, but I’m glad I read this book because it illuminates much of what’s going on in the world today. But before I tell you a little more about Henry VIII and why his story reminds me so much of George H. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and innumerable bullies and louts responsible for the ruination of our local, national, and global societies, I thought you might enjoy knowing how I came to be interested in Henry VIII.

“Kings are in the moral order what monsters are in the natural.” Henri Gregoire

Several years ago, I wrote a play about a history professor who has a nervous breakdown that features visitations from Queen Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s daughter. When I came out of my trance and found that the rough draft contained a goodly amount of Queen Elizabeth data, I thought it prudent to run a fact-check on my muse and see if she knew what she was talking about. So I read two biographies of Elizabeth and was pleased and mystified to find that the information in my play did, indeed, jibe with those historical records.

If this sort of precognition seems implausible or impossible to you, well, so be it. I had never read or seen anything about Queen Elizabeth prior to writing the play. I only knew she was not the same Queen Elizabeth of my childhood who was forever appearing in National Geographics watching African warriors and soldiers dancing and marching in her honor. Twenty years ago, I wrote a novel (not yet published) in which the protagonist, a pianist and piano teacher, knows a great deal about the life and music of Felix Mendelssohn, all of which was news to me. Shortly thereafter I bought my first recordings of Mendelssohn’s music, which I loved, and I read two Mendelssohn biographies to make sure the references in my novel were accurate, which they were.

How do I explain this sort of thing? Well, if you’ve ever been struck hard and completely out-of-the-blue by thoughts of a friend you haven’t heard from in years, and then the phone rings, and you pick up the phone, and it is that very friend, or if you’ve ever for-no-reason-in-particular decided to turn right instead of turning left as you have always turned a million times before, and because you turned right instead of the usual left you saw something that cleared up a mystery or changed the course of your life, then maybe what I’m about to say will make some sense to you.

Jung spoke of a collective unconscious wherein the cumulative experience of humanity resides and may be accessed by individuals, usually through symbolic dreams. In more modern terms, perhaps there is some sort of psychic internet, if you will, from which surprising and informative responses to our thoughts and desires may come, causing us to do things or create things we might otherwise not have created or done. Or maybe I have supra-phenomenal hearing I’m unaware of and without knowing it I listened to long and learned lectures about Mendelssohn and Queen Elizabeth emanating from UC Berkeley five miles from my house. I don’t know.

In any case, when I saw A Brief History of Henry VIII advertised in the Daedalus remainder catalogue for only five bucks, and wondering if there might be any new revelations therein about Elizabeth, I decided to give the book a try.

“If you’re asking me as President, would I understand reality, I do.” George W. Bush

Henry VIII became king when he was a teenager. George W. Bush became President of the United States and might as well have been a teenager, and not a bright one. Henry let other people run the country while he hunted and jousted and partied. George W. let other people run the country while he, I don’t know, watched television? They both had rotten fathers who thought their sons stupid. They both presided over ill-fated military adventures and appeared at staged victory celebrations—George W. emerging from a jet on an aircraft carrier, Henry arriving in a conquered French city wearing armor. The big differences seem to be that George W. only presided over the ruination of his country and the world for eight years, while Henry ruined England and France and Scotland for almost forty years, George W. wasn’t obsessed about producing a male heir and Henry was, and Henry founded the Anglican Church, had scads of wives, and was apparently lousy in bed, whereas George W. had only one wife and founded no church.

“Don’t forget your great guns, which are the most respectable arguments of the rights of kings.” Frederick the Great

One of my favorite books is The Prince and the Pauper, which is ostensibly, fictionally, about Henry VIII’s son. Interesting note: when I tell people The Prince and the Pauper is among my favorite books, I usually get one of three responses. 1. Dickens? 2. The children’s book? 3. Never read it. When I tell these respondents that The Prince and the Pauper was written by Mark Twain, that only smart and imaginative children will enjoy it, that I think the book is Twain’s most beautifully written work, and that I’ve read it five times, my respondents are invariably surprised.

Twain vividly portrays with fiction, and Derek Wilson shows with meticulous biography, that not only does Might Make Right, but once Might has established an entrenched bureaucracy and controls all the money and weapons and commerce of a nation or a world, then absolute nincompoops can be made kings (or presidents) and the monstrous pyramid will lurch along for decades before finally collapsing under the weight of its own corruption and stupidity.

In The Prince and the Pauper, which, by the way, is great fun to read aloud with your mate or children or friends, a pauper (who happens to be physically identical down to his eyebrows to the heir to the English throne, and who learned to mimic courtly speech and manners as a means of escaping, at least in his mind, the violence and grossness of grinding poverty and an abusive father) quite accidentally switches places with the boy who would be king, and the would-be king becomes a pauper in the manner of Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

Once the switch is made, the rulers of the entrenched bureaucracy conclude that the prince has gone mad rather than been replaced, and when they report their finding to Twain’s brilliantly drawn fictional Henry VIII, the king, who is dying, orders that the prince’s madness be tolerated and ignored, and that anyone spreading news of Edward’s distemper outside the castle will be summarily executed for treason. And that, from what I gather from Wilson’s biography, would have been just like Henry.

O, what a tangled web we weave;

When first we practice to deceive! Sir Walter Scott

Lying is the primary method of rule by an oligarchy masquerading as a monarchy or as a democracy with a congress and president. I am thinking specifically of what is going on right now at the Fukushima nuclear power plants in Japan, and how we, the people, are being lied to so egregiously it would be laughable except the powers-that-be, so far, are getting away with their lies and what they are lying about is the ruination of an entire nation if not a larger part of the entire world.

So why did Henry VIII lie as a way of life? Why did Bill Clinton lie with every breath he took? Why does Barack Obama lie with such maddening frequency? And how did these guys get so good at lying? My hunch is that they each developed a false persona early in life in order to survive a childhood that did not permit honesty, either self-honesty or honesty to others, and these false personas served them so well that they became, Henry and Bill and Barack, thoroughly false.

Of equal importance, of course, is why we, the people, so readily believe the lies of our lying overlords and keep electing and/or not overthrowing these monsters? After painful consideration of my own enduring gullibility, I think we believe our lying overlords (at least enough not to revolt) because the entrenched bureaucracy, by successfully controlling our religion, our media, and our education, has instilled in us from cradle to grave a foundational mythology of lies with which their current lies resonate as entirely plausible.

“The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.” Aristotle

Regarding Fukushima, the foundational mythology says that the corporations that build nuclear power plants are inherently good. General Electric, after all, is synonymous with light bulb, and who doesn’t love a light bulb? Thus it is inconceivable to a well-indoctrinated citizenry that those who give us light and electricity to run our computers and play our video games would ever build a power plant that might turn Japan into an uninhabitable wasteland for centuries to come. Who wants to believe that? No one. And the puppeteers of king and president puppets know we don’t want to believe what may very well be true. So they say things like, “We are rigorously monitoring the situation, and we are confident the situation will be stabilized relatively soon and that negative impacts on the environment will be minimal,” when the truth is just the opposite.

Here’s a little tidbit I snatched from Reuters that sheds a tiny light of truth on what’s going on at Fukushima. “In its attempt to bring the plant under control, TEPCO is looking for “jumpers”—workers who, for payment of up to $5,000 a shift, will rush into highly radioactive areas to do a quick task before racing out as quickly as possible.” See? Clearly they’ve got things under control. And if you need some quick cash…

“Compassion is the basis of all morality.” Arthur Schopenhauer

In The Prince and the Pauper, while the pauper is fast learning to play the part of a prince, the real prince, who had yet to solidify his false persona, is learning firsthand what life among the downtrodden is really like. And ultimately he learns what it is to sacrifice one’s self for the good of others; which is the quantum opposite of what kings and presidents learn to do. Alas.

If only Obama and Bush and Clinton would each take a turn or two as “jumpers” at Fukushima. Maybe then we would finally see the beginning of the end to the nuclear madness.

Tags: Anderson Valley Advertiser, Aristotle, Arthur Schopenhauer, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Derek Wilson, Dickens, Felix Mendelssohn, Frederick the Great, Fukushima, General Electric, George H. Bush, George W. Bush, Henri Gregoire, Henry VIII, Herbert Spencer, Japan, jumpers, Jung, kings, Mark Twain, nuclear power, Oliver Twist, precognition, presidents, Queen Elizabeth, Reuters, Sir Walter Scott, TEPCO, The Prince and the Pauper
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Scholar Jim

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

“There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous.” Mark Twain

I wonder how Mark Twain would feel if he knew his novel Huckleberry Finn has been rewritten in such a way that the meaning of his book is entirely changed, and that such an execrable mutation of his work is about to be afflicted on the next generation of American schoolchildren. I ask because such a crime has just taken place. Yes, it’s true, and I quote from The New York Times:

“Throughout the book [Huckleberry Finn]—219 times in all—the word nigger is replaced by slave, a substitution that was made by NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Alabama, which plans to release the edition in February.

“Alan Gribben, a professor of English and a Twain scholar at Auburn University, approached the publisher with the idea in July. Mr. Gribben said Tuesday that he had been teaching Mark Twain for decades and always hesitated before reading aloud the common racial epithet, which is used liberally in the book, a reflection of social attitudes in the mid-19th century.

“‘I found myself right out of graduate school at Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think I’m alone.’

“Mr. Gribben, who combined Huckleberry Finn with Tom Sawyer in a single volume and also supplied an introduction, said he worried that Huckleberry Finn had fallen off reading lists, and wanted to offer an edition that is not for scholars, but for younger people and general readers.

“‘I’m by no means sanitizing Mark Twain,’ Mr. Gribben said. ‘The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact. I just had the idea to get us away from obsessing about this one word, and just let the stories stand alone.’ (The book also substitutes Indian for injun.)”

Should we be outraged? I suppose the publication and widespread dissemination of degenerate versions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer pale next to the unending crimes against humanity perpetrated by military forces around the globe, but still, removing nigger from Huckleberry Finn and replacing it with slave is not only immoral, it is grossly stupid. For one thing, the word slave already appears many times in the original text. Clearly, Twain did not want Jim to be known as Slave Jim. Might not this so-called scholar have changed nigger to negro or some African-sounding word like jomo or kumbaya? Or better yet, why not change nigger to scholar? Scholar Jim. Yes. I like the sound of that.

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Ernest Hemingway

Ernest who? Wrote some book called For Whom the Bell Tolls. Now there’s a title in need of updating. Nobody uses the word whom anymore. Or the archaic verb toll. The new title should be Who Is That Bell Ringing For? Don’t you think?

But, Todd, the word nigger taken out of the context of a novel set prior to the Civil War is offensive and racist. Never mind that Huckleberry Finn is about racism and the dawning awareness in the mind of an extremely appealing everyman (Huck) that slavery and racism are deeply wrong and need to be abandoned by anyone purporting to be a decent human being. Never mind that the word nigger is to Huckleberry Finn what garlic is to good Jewish, er, Hebrew chicken soup.

“Only one thing is impossible to God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.” Mark Twain

Indeed. Why is it even legal for this so-called scholar to rewrite Huckleberry Finn? Oh, because the book is in the public domain, meaning Twain and his heirs are long dead, so anyone who wants to fuck with, I mean, amend the original text may do so without fear of legal action against them. Fine. In that case, I want to change the ending of Huckleberry Finn, which has always struck me as weak and something of a copout. I think the novel should end with Huck coming out of the closet and admitting that he and Tom [Sawyer] have a serious thing for each other. You know what I mean by thing, don’t you? And Becky will be exposed as a cover for Tom and Huck’s, you know, hanky panky. And Jim (Jomo) should be like this totally wise prophet kind of guy who helps Huck and Tom emigrate to France where they adopt three children, a Hebrew, an Italian, and an Irishman. Yascha, Luigi, and Sean. Scholars all.

“What are the three great American things? Jazz, the Bill of Rights, and Mark Twain.” Roy Blount Jr.

What about Moby Dick? Goodness, dick will never do. Dick means, you know, the male thingy. Perhaps the Auburn scholar would like to go through Melville’s massive tome and change all the dicks to, I don’t know, Jason? Moby Jason. No, I’m thinking scholar might be the best choice here, too. Moby Scholar. Yes. Perfect.

“There are three kinds of people—commonplace men, remarkable men, and lunatics.” Mark Twain

There goes Mark (Samuel) again, using an inappropriate word. He used the word men synonymously with people. What a sexist! What a male chauvinist pig. I’m sending a letter to that Auburn scholar demanding he rewrite all of Twain’s nineteenth century writings to bring them into accord with twenty-first-century political correctness. Just think how women today must feel when they read quotations like that. How could Twain have been so blind and ignorant and arrogant not to know that our language would continue to evolve after his death. Some genius he turned out to be.

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” Mark Twain

The best thing for me about this Auburn University scholar, or the damn idiot, as I’m sure Twain would have called him, blithely ruining Huckleberry Finn and making boatloads of money in the process, is that his deplorable actions have now freed me entirely from my last shreds of regret about dropping out of college in 1969 after two inglorious years of academic nonsense. There have been times in my life when money and gainful employment were hard come by, and in those dire straits it crossed my mind that it might have behooved me to earn a degree or two, but now I am confirmed in my long ago decision to remove myself from the psychic influence of that Auburn scholar and those of his kind, for they are surely bad for the mind and the heart, and most definitely toxic to the soul.

“The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.” Mark Twain

Seriously folks, I do mourn for our culture as I mourn for our society, the lunatics having taken control of just about everything now. But comes the revolution, we will find all the copies of Huckleberry Sawyer wherein nigger has been replaced by slave, and we will burn those copies, but not wastefully. We will ignite those useless pages in woodstoves to heat our homes, the flames providing extra heat for the double good they are doing.

Tags: Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Herman Melville, Huckleberry Finn, idiots, injun, Mark Twain, nigger, Roy Blount Jr., Tom Sawyer
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Propaganda of Childhood

Thursday, December 30th, 2010

(This article first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser December 2010)

“What we remember from childhood we remember forever—permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.” Cynthia Ozick

The propaganda of my childhood said that Santa Claus rewards children for being good by giving them what they want. And long after I figured out that my parents were Santa Claus, I continued to believe that the reason I never got what I wanted was because I was not good. Every year I was given clothing I did not want, books I did not want, and things my father wanted, so that as I unwrapped those gifts he would chortle, “What a coincidence. Just what I needed.”

However, when I was ten-years-old, my parents gave me a real bow and arrows with steel tips, something I had been asking for since I was old enough to ask for something. And when I went outside to shoot that bow and arrows, and found that my father had also bought a bale of hay to which he had affixed a beautiful target, I was more than happy; I was filled to bursting with the sense of being good.

“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.” Shirley Temple

In response to the depressing fact that the latest tax bill signed into law by President Obama actually increases taxes on the poorest 150 million Americans while allowing the super wealthy to pay no taxes at all, a friend remarked, “That doesn’t fit with the propaganda of our childhood.” And her comment struck me as a cogent explanation for why my peers and I continue to be so deeply disappointed by the machinations of the corporate overlords as carried out by their trusty puppets. And her comment also explained why we, the people, gorge on documentaries and articles recounting sordid truths about our government and our history yet remain powerless to effectively respond to these revelations. Why? Because we are programmed from the cradle through high school to believe the opposite of the truth.

For instance, nowhere in the propaganda of our childhood does it say the President of the United States is a puppet manipulated by corporate overlords. Indeed, according to the propaganda of our childhood there are no such things as corporate overlords. According to the textbooks and teachings of my childhood, the President of the United States and the senators and representatives in Congress and the governors of the states are men (and a few women) who love the poor and downtrodden and are dedicated to helping them. Our rulers are special people, war heroes and people from humble beginnings who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and want to help other people do the same.

But what was impressed on us even more persistently and deeply than the special goodness of our leaders was the unimpeachable truth that these special people cannot lie. The president tried to lie when he was a child (all the presidents tried at one time or another in their childhoods to lie) but he felt so bad about lying that he confessed his lie to his father or mother or grandfather or teacher, and rather than (or along with) spanking him, they showered him with love for admitting his mistake; and their love empowered him to overcome a thousand hardships and to marry a lovely, intelligent, essentially submissive woman who was his rock from which he rose to the position of commander-in-chief. Amen.

“Childhood is a promise that is never kept.” Ken Hill

In the California public schools of my youth, circa 1955-1967, American History was the main Social Studies event in Kindergarten, First Grade, Second Grade, Third Grade, Fifth Grade, Eighth Grade, and Eleventh Grade. The fundamental operating principle of that system was: The Salient Information shall be foisted on their malleable brains over and over again, year after year, and they will be compelled to memorize and regurgitate this information dozens of times as their brains develop so that whether they can remember a single date or historical tidbit at the end of their indoctrination, the underlying ideology of subservience to an imaginary system run by good and wise white people is deeply and permanently ingrained.

This is not conspiracy theory. Public education as it exists in America today was designed and implemented in the early twentieth century by industrialists working directly with their national, state, and local proxies to transform a largely agrarian population of people recently arrived from myriad foreign societies into a homogeneous population of factory workers. That is actual history, not propaganda. If you have ever wondered why public school classes are exactly one hour in duration and begin and end with the ringing of a bell, it is to simulate the experience of working in a factory, and to condition the nervous systems of the students for that eventuality.

“Those who have succeeded at anything and don’t mention luck are kidding themselves.” Larry King

Luck? According to the propaganda of our childhood there is only one way to succeed and that is through hard work and perseverance. Luck has nothing to do with success. You start in the mailroom or the equivalent of the mailroom in your chosen profession and if you work hard and loyally at delivering mail without questioning the value of what you’re doing you will eventually be noticed by someone further up the chain of command who will say, “Wow, that person is really working hard and persevering so I’m going to give him a better job and more money.” Eventually, if you never stop working hard and never question authority, by golly, you’ll rise to the top and become president of the company or discover a cure for some dread disease or win an Academy Award or something like that.

Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? Well, long after my childhood I moderated a panel of successful movie and television writers speaking to an audience of aspiring young writers. Before the public show, the panelists asked me what questions I was going to ask them. Since the panelists all knew each other, they had a good and raunchy time answering my questions by recounting their family connections, sexual connections, drug connections, and nauseating (to me) cronyism that launched their various careers near the top of the heap. But in front of that crowd of eager young writers, each of these famous people spouted phony nonsense about working his or her way up from some mythical bottom, with two of them actually referencing the mailroom!

In contrast to such propaganda, Henry Miller recounts in his memoirs that it was not the quality of his writing that first got him published, but a sexy girlfriend who traded sexual favors with a few editors to grease the wheels, as it were; and he followed this plan of action by having his lover’s wealthy and well-connected husband publish and promote the novels that made Henry famous. Yet we recoil from such truth because it was impressed upon us ten thousand times in our youth that if we created an original and valuable thing, we would be rewarded with wealth and fame, when in truth such valuable creations were more likely to be stolen from us than to bring us any kind of reward.

“Memory itself is an internal rumor.” George Santayana

In the propaganda of our childhood, Thomas Edison was a great guy who invented the light bulb. Henry Ford was a great guy, too, and he invented the assembly line and the Mustang. Can you imagine your child coming home from school troubled by the news that Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and hosts of other American icons were not, in fact, great guys, and that they perpetrated all sorts of dastardly deeds along the way to owning the patents on light bulbs and automobiles and just about everything else defining modern life? Imagine all those famous white guys, the Founding Fathers and Founding Inventors and Founding Explorers and Founding Paragons of Virtue and Pluck revealed to our children in the light of truth. What kind of people would we Americans be in the absence of all that bogus information hardwired into our psyches?

I posed this question to someone of my father’s generation, a middle-class liberal, and before he could invent a more judicious reply, he blurted, “Oh, but if we taught them the truth there might be rebellion.”

I wonder. Who knows what might happen in the absence of the ongoing barrage of propaganda, now that this bogus morality and bogus history is so deeply entrenched in us? It seems that no matter how loud our conscious minds yell “Beware!” our more powerful subconscious programming commands us to believe (name any American president, senator, celebrity, industrialist) is telling the truth.

“If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.” Mark Twain

According to the propaganda of our childhood, America was solely responsible for the good guys winning World War II. When I was eighteen and finally read a detailed history of World War II, I was shocked to learn that for each of the many armed divisions (approximately 15,000 men in a division) deployed by the Germans on their western front against the British, French, and American troops, five divisions were deployed against the Russians. Even so, we were taught that if America hadn’t entered World War II, the Germans and Japanese would have conquered the world and made everyone on earth their slaves. And we were certainly never taught the terrible truth that the bankers who funded the German war effort funded the American and British side of the conflict, too; yet that is the case.

We were taught that our leaders didn’t want to drop those atomic bombs on two cities filled with women and children and civilians, but it was the only way to defeat the Japanese who were irrational and evil, as were the Germans. Americans, and to a lesser degree people from England, were rational and good. Cigarettes were good, too, according to the propaganda of my childhood. Indeed, if you were in a hot steamy hell you could come all the way up into a mentholated paradise by sucking on burning Kools.

“The living moment is everything.” D.H. Lawrence

So. Is the propaganda of today’s childhood qualitatively different than that of my childhood? I would say Yes, for sheer volume alone, but also for the use of special visual and sonic effects that make it virtually impossible to distinguish fantasy from reality. That is to say, the foundational lies are much the same, but the spectacular presentation of those lies makes the lies appear more real than reality, certainly bigger and more colorful, with all the rough edges of truth airbrushed away.

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com

Tags: airbrush, American History, Americans, Anderson Valley Advertiser, assembly line, British, childhood, Cynthia Ozick, D.H. Lawrence, Founding Fathers, George Santayana, Germans, Henry Ford, Henry Miller, Japanese, Ken Hill, Larry King, light bulb, Mark Twain, Obama, poor, propaganda, Santa Claus, Shirley Temple, Thomas Edison, truth, Under the Table Books, wealthy, World War II
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Slow Going

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

(First published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser December 2010)

“For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.” Lily Tomlin

Five years ago, a few weeks before I made my move from Berkeley to Mendocino, I came within a few inches of being killed by a young man who was driving his pickup truck very fast while simultaneously using his mobile phone. I had just stepped into the crosswalk at the intersection of San Pablo Avenue and Gilman Avenue, having been given the go ahead to cross by the illuminated symbol of a human being taking a walk. The young man who was driving his pickup very fast apparently did not see the red light or me or possibly anything as he sped through the intersection with his phone pressed to his ear. I don’t know if he was talking to someone or listening to someone else talking, or perhaps he was listening to music; I am only certain he was pressing his phone to his ear as his two-ton missile shot by within inches of my puny little flesh and blood body. And whether there is such a thing as fate or whether life is a muddle of meaningless happenstance, had I been one step further along at that moment, I would have been smashed to smithereens.

So today I’m driving our old truck into our soggy hamlet to get the mail and groceries, a cold rain falling, and because I am the unelected president of Mendocino Drivers Not In A Hurry To Get Anywhere, I’ve only gotten a few hundred yards down the Comptche-Ukiah straightaway before my rearview mirror is filled with the sight of a pickup closing fast upon me. As is my custom in these situations, I move to the outer edge of the road and slow to a crawl, timing my move so that whoever is driving that oncoming pickup will have an easy time passing me—the road ahead empty, the broken yellow line entirely on our side. But this particular pickup (going at least seventy miles per hour) zooms to within a few feet of my bumper before swerving around me and becoming a dot in the distance; and I, frightened and angry, unleash an obscenity-filled and punctuation-free description of this person’s intelligence, sexual predilection, and everything I wish to befall him in the near future.

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” Mohandas Gandhi

Seriously, folks, the village of Mendocino is not, I repeat, not a city. I’m not even sure we qualify as a town given we only have one criminally usurious gas station and nary a Mexican restaurant. Yet on most Fridays, some Mondays, every summer weekend, and unpredictably throughout the year, people drive around the village as if they are in Santa Monica at lunch hour late for I don’t know what, surgery? and in mortal fear of not finding a parking place and therefore doomed to die in their cars.

At first I thought these lunatics had to be tourists or weekend residents bringing their urban neuroses to our hinterlands, but over time I have come to realize that such irrational behavior is contagious, that locals participate, too, and that even I, determined to honor my inner slow poke, do at times react to this transplanted insanity by momentarily joining in the madness.

“Human nature cannot be studied in cities except at a disadvantage—a village is the place.” Mark Twain

A good friend recently visited from San Francisco and accompanied me on my errands in the village. He was envious there was no line at the post office, and he was impressed that the postal employees knew me by my first name, but my gabbing with Jeff and Patty at the Mendocino Market as I lollygagged in front of their delectable fish and fowl drove my friend mad with impatience. And as Garnish struck up a conversation about opera with me as he rang up my purchases in Corners, and I having already complimented Sky on the fabulous cauliflower and blabbed at length with Deborah about the benefits of cocoanut oil, my friend began whirling like a dervish and I had to send him outside to wait for me, though he is sixty-one and should know better.

“Teach us to care and not to care.” T.S. Eliot

I first delved into Buddhism in the late 1960’s when I ran into Buddhist references in the poetry of Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, my favorite San Francisco Beat poets. For many years thereafter I read essays and books by American, Japanese, Tibetan, Chinese, Thai, and Korean Buddhist teachers discussing the ins and outs and ups and downs of Buddhist dharma.

Nowadays I’ll go a year or two at a stretch without reading any dharma, and then a book will befall me or I’ll be hunting for something in my bookshelf and pull out Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki or White Sail by Thinley Norbu, and the next thing I know I’ll be deep into a refresher course in mindfulness and the wisdom of no escape.

Most recently I couldn’t resist buying a brand new hardback copy of Jack Kornfield’s The Wise Heart, his four-hundred-page treatise on Buddhist psychology for only a few dollars from the Daedalus Books catalogue. Such a deal! One of my all-time favorite Buddhist texts is Mark Epstein’s Thoughts Without a Thinker, a brilliant illumination of both Buddhist psychology and western (derived from Freud) psychology in which Epstein compares and contrasts these two very different yet complimentary views of human emotionality and behavior. So far, I have only read sixty pages of Kornfield’s The Wise Heart, but the text has already proven to be a good kick in my mental ass, so to speak, to slow down and smell the moments.

So this morning I decided to walk very slowly on my way to pick up the morning paper at the mouth of our driveway. As I took my slow and mindful steps, I focused on what I was stepping on. Lost in fascination with the conglomerations of pebbles and soil and dead leaves and tiny green shoots of new life composing my path to the highway, I arrived at my destination in no time at all. The newspaper in its plastic sheath seemed enormous and prophetic, and my hand as it entered the frame of my vision to pick up the paper seemed incredibly complex and beautiful—everything shaped by the quality of my focus.

“It is important to practice at the speed of no mistakes.” Lucinda Mackworth-Young

I have been practicing the piano every day for forty-five years. Of late, I have been playing tunes as slowly as I can without entirely abandoning their rhythmic forms, and in so doing I have discovered tunes within tunes I would otherwise have never guessed were there.

“People ought to listen more slowly.” Jean Sparks Ducey

In 1972 I attended a single meeting of a group practicing Therapeutic Conversation. Had I been a bit more emotionally evolved, I probably would have attended several more of their meetings, but one of the members so repulsed me I never went back. However, I learned such valuable lessons from that one meeting, I was changed forever as a conversationalist.

The first process of the evening was Circle Talk, in which we took our turn speaking after the person to our right had finished saying whatever he or she wanted to say. However, we couldn’t just jump right in the moment the person finished speaking. We had to wait a full minute before we spoke, the time being kept by the leader. And I discovered, in the silence of that incredibly long minute, that what I initially thought I wanted to say was almost never a real response to what the previous speaker had said, but something only tangentially related. Yet if I could be patient, a true response would rise from the depths of that short infinity.

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com

Tags: Anderson Valley Advertiser, Buddhism, Corners of the Mouth, Freud, Jack Kornfield, Jean Sparks Ducey, Lew Welch, Lily Tomlin, listening, Lucinda Mackworth-Young, Mark Epstein, Mark Twain, Mendocino Market, Mohandas Gandhi, Philip Whalen, Shunryu Suzuki, speaking, T.S. Eliot, Thinley Norbu, Thoughts Without A Thinker, Under the Table Books
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Happiness

Friday, December 10th, 2010

“If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.” Edith Wharton

November thirtieth. The weather report said Mendocino could expect rain tonight and for the next several days, so in anticipation of the deluge I spent an hour giving my three garlic beds their second mulching with some well-aged horse manure. I planted my garlic on October 17, my birthday, and now all but a few of the hundred and forty cloves I inserted into the friable soil have sent up sturdy green shoots.

“The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.” Mark Twain

Both garlic and humans gestate in their respective wombs for nine months before arriving at the optimal moment for emerging into the light. The poet in me finds this similarity delightful and significant.

“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” Colette

I am sixty-one and have grown garlic every year for the last thirty years. I began growing garlic while living in Sacramento where I had a large vegetable and flower garden in the backyard of the only house I ever owned. I have grown vegetables since I was six-years-old, but waited to sew my first bed of garlic until I was certain I would be living in the same place for more than a year.

Before I planted my first garlic crop, I consulted pertinent chapters in gardening books and interviewed an elderly Italian woman who grew gorgeous garlic plants in a large circular patch in the center of her impressively green lawn a few blocks from my house. I gathered from my research that in the event of an early and persistently wet winter I might not need to water my garlic until spring, but if no rain fell for some weeks at a stretch I would need to give my garlic periodic soakings. This meant I could no longer blithely ignore my garden from December to March as was my habit before I undertook the growing of garlic.

“‘Well,’ said Pooh, ‘what I like best,’ and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.” A.A. Milne

China produces 77% of the garlic grown in the world: 23 billion pounds a year. Zowee! That comes to more than three pounds of garlic for every person on earth. India grows 4% of the garlic, South Korea 2%, Russia 1.6%, and the United States 1.4%. Which suggests that though Gilroy, California claims to be the garlic capital of the world, it is not.

“The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.” V.S. Pritchett

One of the most satisfying accomplishments of my life was making groovalicious pesto from garlic and basil and almonds I grew in my own Sacramento backyard. My two almond trees, planted adjacent to a tall wooden fence, began to produce nuts in their fifth year; and every single one of those firstborn nuts was devoured by squirrels before those nuts were ripe enough for human consumption.

Indeed, until my almond trees were eight-years-old I despaired of ever harvesting more than a few pathetic almonds from my trees. Then one day I noticed that those ravenous arboreal rodents had left untouched a concentration of almonds growing low in the tree and near the fence on which my cats liked to perch. Thus enlightened, I thereafter pruned my almond trees to encourage the growth of several more low down branches so that these branches and their bounty could be easily patrolled by my cats, while the yummy prizes adorning the upper branches were sacrificed to the incorrigible squirrels.

“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.” Eric Hoffer

Since fleeing Sacramento in 1995, I have never again grown such rampant and mammoth and exceedingly juicy basil, and may never again harvest such delicious almonds from trees I nurtured from bare roots into towering prolificacy; but here in Mendocino I grow garlic that surpasses the best I ever grew in those inland lowlands where the summers were cruel to the likes of me, and the winters were not much kinder, for I was bred and born in San Francisco where Hot is anything over seventy-eight and Cold is anything below fifty.

“When ambition ends, happiness begins.” Thomas Merton

After fifteen years of growing garlic in Sacramento, I moved to Berkeley and rented a house that afforded me only a tiny garden plot, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, a quarter of which I devoted to the cultivation of garlic. I had honed my garlic chops, as it were, in a climate very unlike Berkeley’s, and so it took me a year to adjust my gardening techniques to fit that cooler coastal clime where lettuce and kale and chard grow year round, Aloe Vera can spread like Bermuda Grass, and hedges of Jade plants are not uncommon.

“On the whole, the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.” William Inge

I usually harvest my garlic bulbs at the end of June or in early July, and from that happy pile I set aside a few dozen of the largest bulbs with the biggest cloves for the next fall planting. I grow two strains of hard neck garlic, one strain descended from spicy white garlic sold to me by a Chinese garlic grower I met at a farmer’s market in Sacramento, the other a pinkish garlic given to me by a woman who said the garlic had been passed down for generations in the family of an Italian man she was dating. And when a fresh shipment of garlic appears on the shelf at Corners of the Mouth in Mendocino, I will go through the lot looking for outstanding bulbs with large firm cloves to add to my arsenal.

“Happiness is a how, not a what. A talent, not an object.” Hermann Hesse

One day an elderly man with a thick German accent stood in the middle of my Berkeley plot and proclaimed, “I zee by your garlic zat you are real gardener.”

I know several gardeners who don’t grow garlic and are far more zealous and prolific than I in the ways of growing vegetables and flowers and herbs, so I certainly don’t consider the growing of garlic a prerequisite for being a real gardener. I suppose this German fellow may have labeled me a real gardener because of the beauty and enormity of my garlic plants and my fastidious care of their beds, but in remembering the tone of his voice and the twinkle in his eye, I think, actually, he did consider growing garlic a prerequisite for being a real gardener, and though I may not intellectually agree with him, in some ineffable way I do agree.

“Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.” Kahil Gibran

The aged manure I use to mulch my garlic comes to me courtesy of my good friend Kathy Mooney, her horse Paloma the manufacturer of the blessed poop. Paloma is a gorgeous, white, blue-eyed Tennessee Walker, friendly and intelligent and possibly clairvoyant, for she always seems to be expecting me when I arrive with a bag of apples for her.

Prior to my coming to collect her manure, my interactions with Paloma were conducted over a fence between us, I feeding her apples and petting her, she allowing me to do so. Thus my entrance into her corral with my wheelbarrow ushered in a new phase of our relationship and gave me a firsthand appreciation of how strong a 1200-pound horse in her prime can be.

Having followed me to the area where she generally deposits her fertilizer, Paloma gingerly fitted her large and beautiful snout under the front rim of my big blue wheelbarrow, and with a flick of her mighty neck flung the wheelbarrow fifteen feet through the air (thankfully not in my direction), as if to say, “Thank you so much for bringing me a new toy. Fetch it, please, and I will toss it again.”

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” Albert Schweitzer

As I was mulching the many green spikes with Paloma’s manure, I realized that this fabulously rich organic matter was in part composed of apples I’d brought to Paloma, and those apples came from Joanne’s trees, Joanne being our gracious neighbor and landlord. One of the perks of renting from Joanne is a profusion of apples every fall from her well-tended trees, apples we share with several other households in the watershed.

“The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.” Vita Sackville-West

Earlier this year, a consortium of scientists decoded the complete genome of the Golden Delicious apple, which turns out to have 57,000 genes, the highest number of any plant genome studied to date and more genes than the human genome, which only has 30,000 genes. Think about that the next time you eat an apple.

“You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Turn an apple on its side and cut it in half. Examine the centers of the halves. You will find that the seed cavities form five-pointed stars. Now take a large rose hip and cut it in half in the same way you cut the apple. Voila. You will find similar five-pointed stars, for apples and roses are close kin.

“What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.” Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Marcia’s Fresh Garlic Dressing (for salad for two)

In a glass jar or ceramic bowl mix together 2-3 large cloves of grated fresh garlic, 2 tablespoons olive oil, 2 tablespoons seasoned rice vinegar, and a healthy splash of tamari. Now dress the lettuce—a generous handful per person—and for an extra treat throw in half an avocado.

(This article first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser December 2010)

Tags: A.A. Milne, Albert Schweitzer, almonds, ambition, Anderson Valley Advertiser, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, avocado, basil, Berkeley, cats, China, Colette, Corners of the Mouth, Edith Wharton, Eric Hoffer, garlic, genomes, Gilroy, Golden Delicious, happiness, Herman Hesse, India, Kahlil Gibran, Kathy Mooney, Mark Twain, Mendocino, monotony, pesto, Pooh, rose hips, roses, Russia, Sacramento, salad dressing, San Francisco, South Korea, squirrels, stars, Tennessee Walker, Thomas Merton, V.S. Pritchett, Vita Sackville-West, William Inge
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Meaning of Meaning

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

I first encountered the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1967 when I was eighteen, a freshman at UC Santa Cruz. Wittgenstein’s little treatises The Blue and Brown Books were required reading for all freshmen enrolled at Stevenson College, the campus within the campus named after Adlai Stevenson and dedicated to the social sciences. I was a gung ho anthropology major, though my gung ho-ness would soon be replaced by the awareness that anthropology was a deeply conflicted realm best avoided by the already conflicted likes of me.

But in my early weeks on that lovely campus, free for the first time in my life from my parents’ incessant intrusions, the breezes eloquent and optimal for Frisbee, the bevies of braless beauties making of life an erotic potpourri, I was inspired to give academia the old college try. So I dove into my studies with youthful zeal, and things went swimmingly for a month or so, and then…Wittgenstein.

I beg the forgiveness of any Wittgenstein devotees who may read this dispatch. My sense of the man, based on a few biographical sketches and the four pages of his work I have labored through, is that he was an intimidating German charlatan for whom Oxford and the higher realms of academia were a field of clover, he a ravenous cow. But I don’t know.

In the introductory lecture on Wittgenstein given by a professor who would soon thereafter kill himself, we teenagers were told that the brilliant German transplant was initially intrigued by the meanings of meanings of words, but soon grew tired of such pedestrian mental gymnastics and was moved to pontificate for thousands of impenetrable pages about the meanings of the meanings of the meanings of words. To which my Jewish grandmother would have retorted, “From this he makes a living? Oy vey.”

Dazed and confused by the professor’s elucidation of Wittgenstein’s multi-layered inquiries into the meanings of meanings of meanings, and being mightily distracted by the nearness of so many outrageously cute and minimally clothed chicks (as we ignorant sexists called pretty girls in those days), I exited the lecture hall stuck on layer one. Woman. What is the meaning of Woman? Look! There goes one now. Okay. Wow. There she is. Woman means that. Her. And the meaning of the meaning? Hmm. What is the meaning of the word that means Her? Well, gosh, so many meanings, let me count the ways. But wait! What is the meaning of the meaning of the word that means woman? My head hurt.

We hoped, my fellow freshmen and I, that our section leaders (philosophy graduate students) would be able to shed some light on the dazzling introductory lecture so we might be able to cobble together passable papers on the subject at hand, whatever that subject turned out to be. I can see us now, a section of ten anxious neophyte scholars, gathered in a little room with a prematurely bald graduate student saying to us, “So…what comes to mind when you hear the word chair?”

To which one of my fellow scholars replied, “A chair.”

“Aha,” rejoined our section leader. “But do you think of a specific chair? Wittgenstein says you don’t. He says that when you hear the word chair, your brain accesses an abstract symbol representing the essence of chair, or what Wittgenstein calls chair-ness.”

A silence fell. I want to call the silence profound, but I’m unsure of the meaning of the meaning of the meaning of profound, but I do know that particular silence spoke volumes filled with blank pages.

“A picture is a fact.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Despite the confusing introductory lecture and the confounding discussion with the philosophy graduate student, I clung to the hope that Wittgenstein’s actual writings might burn off the thickening fog swirling about the prolific German of Oxford. So I hunkered down with The Blue and Brown Books and deduced from their brief introduction that these tracts were to Wittgenstein what Dick and Jane and Spot and Puff were to learning to read. That is to say, The Blue and Brown Books were the equivalent of Wittgenstein for Dummies.

Reading every word, and checking them twice, I made my way into the equatorial regions of Page Four of The Blue Book. Up to that point, or perhaps it was not a point but a moment, I thought I kind of sort of maybe sort of partially understood what Wittgenstein was driving at, but then his construct, so-called, fell apart for me and I had to start over at the beginning. I amplified my concentration and focused my entire being on following the steps (or threads) of his argument, and by the time I arrived at the North Pole of Page Three I felt sure that if Wittgenstein were only still alive and I could meet him, I would try to hurt him, though I had not theretofore been prone to violence.

This was my first powerful experience of feeling wholly unsuited to the academic life, and I was bummed because of the aforementioned erotic potpourri and the eloquent breezes, etc. So I wandered despondently across the bucolic campus to the Whole Earth Café (yes, the original Whole Earth Café of Whole Earth Café fame) and ordered a mango banana strawberry and yeast smoothie to soothe my jangled psyche. And as I was paying for my drink, I asked the hippy guy manning the cash register, “You ever read any Wittgenstein?”

And without missing a beat, he said, “The meaning of the meaning of the meaning of a turd.”

“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.” Rumi

Coleman Barks, the renowned co-translator of Rumi into English, traveled to Turkey one summer to soak up the atmosphere in the home environs of Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi poet who is today more popular than Rod McKuen. One very hot day Barks went into a café and using his rudimentary Turkish ordered a bottle of water. The waiter seemed startled and asked Barks to repeat his order, which Barks did. The waiter hurried away to the kitchen and returned with a chef. Barks repeated his order to the chef, and a heated discussion ensued. Barks eventually got his bottle of water, but why all the fuss? Barks had mispronounced his words. Instead of asking for a bottle of water, he had asked for the secret of the universe.

“Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” Groucho Marx

Once upon a time in Turkey there was a man named Halim who was a waiter in a café. One very hot day, a foreigner, a middle-aged man with curly gray hair, entered the café, bowed politely to Halim, and asked, “May I have the secret of the universe?”

Halim was startled by the foreigner’s request because that very morning Halim had woken from a vivid dream of strolling with a beautiful woman on the shore of a lake in the moonlight. In the dream, Halim and the woman had kissed, and then the woman had said to him, “I will gladly make love with you if you will tell me the secret of the universe.”

And now this middle-aged foreigner had made the very same request. What could this mean, this confluence of identical and unanswerable questions?

Halim rushed into the kitchen and said to the chef, “Toros, help me. An English man, or possibly he is American, has asked for the secret of the universe.”

“Ey Vaay,” said Toros, shaking his head woefully. “No doubt he is another of those blasted Rumi tourists. I’ll give him what for.”

So the chef and the waiter returned to the foreigner, and the chef said in his flawless Turkish, “Why do you want the secret of the universe?”

To which the foreigner replied, “To quench my thirst.”

“Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.” Mark Twain

In Turkey, in the very neighborhood where the famous Sufi poet Rumi lived so long ago, there stands a humble café. And on the kitchen shelf in this café there is a bottle of water among many other bottles of water that appears to be no different than the other bottles of water. But there is, indeed, a difference; for the water inside this singular bottle contains the secret of the universe.

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Gertrude Stein

A man, having guzzled a bottle of water on a hot day, wanders onto a barren field to take a piss. His urine rains down on a tiny fig seed that has lain dormant in a little crevice for seven hundred years. A pool of urine engulfs the fig seed, which pool evaporates over the ensuing hours, but not before the hard shell of the seed dissolves, the seed germinates, and tiny tendrils grow out of the seed and delve into the earth.

Some weeks later, a man on his way home from the café where he works as a waiter, espies the fig sprout growing in the otherwise barren field. With great care, the waiter digs up the seedling and carries the baby plant home to his garden where he will water and feed her so she might one day become the mother of ten thousand figs.

(This article originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser September 2010)

Tags: Anderson Valley Advertiser, Coleman Barks, figs, Gertrude Stein, Groucho Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mark Twain, Rumi, secret of the universe, Stevenson College, Turkey, UC Santa Cruz, water
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Under The Table