Of forever’s hole
Feeling half
Failing
Falling
For the other
Always hungry
Wrestling with sleep
Struggling with desire
That cannot be
And an infinity of things
Caught between the possible
Unaware of its existence
Dead
Asleep
And become the other
All destroyed itself
And with that thought
There is no other
I am all there is
I am all-powerful
I am all-knowing
And the thought was “I am all”
There was a thought
And in the stillness
All was still
There was no surface, no boundary
No ripples, no waves
All was perfect, complete, unmoved
Unmoving
No quantum activity of any kind
No molecules, no atoms
There was no other, no separation
All was one

In the beginning

All was one
There was no other, no separation
No molecules, no atoms
No quantum activity of any kind
Unmoving
All was perfect, complete, unmoved
No ripples, no waves
There was no surface, no boundary
All was still
And in the stillness
There was a thought
And the thought was “I am all”
I am all-knowing
I am all-powerful
I am all there is
There is no other
And with that thought
All destroyed itself
And became the other
Asleep
Dead
Unaware of its existence
Caught between the possible
And an infinity of things
That cannot be
Struggling with desire
Wrestling with sleep
Always hungry
For the other
Falling
Failing
Feeling half
Of forever’s hole

Posted on Tuesday 11 of December, 2007 [17:29:54 UTC]

Me and Bill Brunner were golfing buddies. Golf was what we shared in common. Matter of fact, I think that was the only thing we shared in common. It was all we talked about, that’s for sure.

We’d go golfing at the drop of a hat, anytime. He’d call me up, or I’d call him up.

– Hey, buddy, you wanna go knock some little white balls around? we’d ask each other.

We had our regular games, too; but we were probably out on the links on average three or four times a week at the height of summer, just on a whim, unless it was raining – and I think there were a few times when we played through the wet as well, if there wasn’t lightning involved.

There’s really nothing else like it, being out on the course right at daybreak before things heated up, or at sunset, trying to get those last few holes in before you lose the light. The dew on the grass. The smell of the greens. The quiet. Some folks just don’t understand. It was all great. Same course, over and over again, same partner; never exactly the same game twice.

In fact I met Bill at the golf course, first time after I joined the club. That was over ten years ago, after the doc advised me to get my fat ass off the family room couch and exercise or he’d pretty soon have me back into the hospital for another angioplasty. So I had an excuse to get out of the house and stop bothering the wife. I needed to do it, you see – doctor’s orders. And, truth to tell, she was happy to get rid of me. Get some time back to herself, especially since my retirement.

I wasn’t exactly looking forward to that first day I showed up at the club, after I’d pulled my old set of sticks out of the attic and cleaned them up. It had been years since I’d played, so I was pretty sure I’d be rusty. Bill’d been stood up by a friend of his, and he was looking for somebody to team up with, so the club pro introduced us. I’d really been hoping I could just play a round all by myself, until I got the kinks out, but he’d said, “Oh, never mind that. I’m no hotshot myself.”

Which was true. He wasn’t real good. Nonetheless, he beat me that first game, but not by much, and after that, we traded wins back and forth pretty regular, whittling away at our handicaps. Tiger Woods had nothing to fear from us, that’s for sure.

What’d we talk about out there? The wife always asked me that question when I got home from a game.

– How’s Bill? she’d ask.
– Fine, I’d say.
– Who won? she’d ask, and I’d tell her.
– I never can figure out what you boys see in that game. It’s just hitting a little white ball around with a stick!
– It does take some skill, darling, I’d argue, if I felt like it. You don’t just hit the ball any which way.
– I suppose that’s right, but still, I think you like it just ‘cause it lets you get out of the house and talk to somebody you actually like talking to. What do you boys talk about out there anyway?

And then I’d tell her the truth. We talked golf. We talked about the day and the kind of game we were having. We talked about why the ball took a little cut to the left on some swings, or how we’d pulled a muscle the day before and it was screwing with our aim, or we’d talk about some new improved club one of us had heard about, or how the greens keepers had messed up a certain hole today.

She couldn’t believe that was all there was to it, but it’s true. We almost never talked about the wives, or the kids, or the grandkids, or the news. We certainly never talked politics or religion. I didn’t even know Bill was Episcopalian until after Alice died. And I just sort of assumed he was Republican.

Alice was Bill’s wife, and we played a golf game not two days after he’d put her into the ground, and that day too, as I remember it, we just talked about the game. We talked golf. Golf was all there was between us. We didn’t socialize much off the course; we used to get together now and then with the wives, but that was before Alice passed away. My wife kept asking me to ask Bill over to dinner some night after, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t picture the three of us seated around the table talking about something other than golf. It didn’t seem right.

It was the Internet that did it, I think, the stuff he was reading there. At least that’s what I imagine, because I never found out for sure. It was a couple of months after Alice died, long wintry months with weeks going by just full of snow, wall-to-wall white. The wife and I gave up sometime in January and took off for Florida for a couple of weeks that turned into a couple more weeks and then a couple more, and before we knew it, it was the middle of March and we’d gotten bored of the sunshine and shuffleboard set. I’d tried to play the local courses a couple of times, but it just wasn’t the same.

Sometime in late February I gave old Bill a call, but I didn’t get him at home. Just got his machine, and I left him a message saying how much I missed our game and how I’d give him a call when we got back and – snow or no snow – we’d go out and knock some little white balls around.

When we did finally get back home again, it was raining cats and dogs. I was surprised to discover that there wasn’t a phone call from Bill on the answering machine, acknowledging my call. I guess he was just waiting for me to alert him that we were back in town, and I waited until the first bright and sunny morning of spring. He answered after the third or fourth ring.

– Hey, buddy, how ‘bout we go out and knock some little white balls around? I asked him.
– Hey, welcome back. How was sunny Florida? D’ja drink a lot of OJ?
– Oh yeah, we drank it ‘til our skin turned orange. How you doin’? Made it through the winter I see?
– Yeah, but I gotta tell you, winter’s really starting to get to me, you know? I mean, it just traps you indoors for days.
– I know what you mean. Mary and me just about went stir crazy in January. Just had to take off, get the hell out of here.
– Yeah, well, you’re lucky. I was just stuck here.
– I suppose. But you should give Florida a try next year. Do you a world of good. They’ve got some damn nice courses down there. So what do you say we get out and test the greens today?
– Afraid I can’t today. I’ve gotten pretty busy here. Let’s set something up for later on in the week, what do you say? How’s Thursday for you?

I have to admit that I was kind of disappointed. I’d have thought he’d have jumped at the chance to get out of the house after hibernating all winter, but he didn’t seem particularly excited about the prospect. Still, I didn’t let on.

– Yeah, okay, Thursday it is. Thursday morning, usual time?
– Thursday morning. See you there, he said, and hung up the phone.

Yeah, I was disappointed. I’d really looked forward to a spontaneous game, spur-of-the-moment kind of thing to get me out of the house. Well, hell, I figured, why not just go ahead and play nine holes anyhow? With him or without him. So I grabbed my clubs and informed Mary that I was heading for the club.

– How’s Bill? Survive the winter, did he?
– Oh, yeah. He’s fine. I gotta go. I told him I’d meet him there in fifteen, I lied.
– Well, she said, you boys go have fun.

I felt bad about lying to her, but I was angry. In my mind I blamed Bill for making me have to tell her a lie. The club pro recognized me when I came in the door, and asked if I was waiting for Bill, which for some reason really ticked me off. I said no, I was just going out on my own this afternoon, get the kinks out of my game after the long hiatus in Florida.

– I was wondering why I hadn’t seen you guys out here yet. Been down south, eh?
– Yeah, me and the missus went down for the winter.
– Well, you didn’t miss much. There’s only been a couple of days here recently when you could even see the course. It’s dried out some now. Should be nice for you.
– Thanks, I said, tiring quickly of the chitchat.

Needless to say, I played a terrible nine holes. I just couldn’t concentrate for thinking about how Bill Brunner had ruined our little reunion match. What the hell was wrong with the guy anyway? Was it going to be like this in the future, me having to chase him down to play the occasional game in between whatever else it was he was up to? Every time I hooked the damn ball off into the rough, I just got angrier and angrier about it, and then I ended up feeling so damn stupid for being angry about it that I found myself getting annoyed with myself for feeling angry. I had to stop in at the bar, grab a drink and cool down before I drove home or I’d have ended up taking Mary’s head off, and she hadn’t even done anything! I just prayed she wouldn’t ask me anything about Bill or what we’d talked about, and she must have sensed something was up because she didn’t even give it a mention.

That was the first hint I had that something was wrong, that the situation had changed. Things were off-balance, because something other than golf had intruded itself into Bill’s life while we’d been away, or the part of Bill’s life that I was familiar with, and I couldn’t even comment on it or ask about it – because that was exactly the sort of thing we never talked about. It was just plain disturbing to be caught in a situation like this. What was worse was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was up. It bugged me for days; I couldn’t get it out of my mind and yet I knew that, come Thursday, we’d just go out and play golf – and talk golf – and I’d never find out what the hell was bothering the guy.

And then, in thinking about it, I said to myself that, of course, he’s hooked up with somebody new, the old dog. I mean, you know, he’s in his early seventies and all, but he’s not a bad-looking guy for all that, still has his hair, which is more than I can say for myself, and not much of a gut. Sure, that must be it, I thought. Plenty of lonely single women out there looking for a guy in a similar situation. He just didn’t feel like mentioning it on the phone, although he’d talked about being lonely and cooped up all winter. Yeah, sure, that must be it, I thought, and that made me feel a little better. But, of course, I didn’t know for sure, and there was no telling whether I would know for sure or not. Would he tell me about her? Just bring it up casually and trespass against our unspoken rule of never talking about anything except golf?

He was already out on the bench at the first hole waiting for me when I arrived, letting others play through as he sat alone, staring out at the bright green rolling lanes of new-mown grass. Bill’s a big guy, six three or six four, I think, even though, like the rest of us, age is shrinking him. He’s got that “big guy hunch”, as if he’s constantly trying to pull himself down to the height of everyone else in the crowd, and it’s a habit, even when he’s sitting down. He had on his “lucky” cardigan that he wears on spring mornings before the heat takes over, and a beat-up old red baseball cap with the bill in the front, where it should be. He was clearly lost in thought when I rounded the bench and it took him a brief moment to snap out of it and recognize me.

– Well, there you are, you old duffer. How you been keeping yourself?
– Not bad, not good. Fair to middling, I guess you’d have to say.
– Ready to knock some little white balls around?
– Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess. Tommy tells me you played nine anyway on Monday. Sorry I couldn’t join you.
– Oh, that’s okay. You’d have beat the pants off of me that day, I’ll tell you. Must be these Ohio greens take some getting used to.
– You play much down in Florida?
– No, not much. But, you know, you get rusty.

I wanted to say something like that it wasn’t the same without him, but really, it just sounded too sappy. Besides, maybe he knew what I meant. Maybe we didn’t really have to say things right out loud like that. We flipped a coin, and he won the toss.

– Well, let’s see how rusty I’ve gotten, he said, stepping up to the tee.

He lined up his wood, glanced off to the east once or twice, where the sun was just skirting the tops of a thick band of maple, ash and oak trees that lined the course. They’d once provided a border for a farmer’s fields. Beyond were the shingled roofs of a housing development, wet and sparkling with dew.

Bill paused for what seemed to me (or was memory playing tricks on me?) to be an extraordinarily long time, looked down, looked up again, glanced off to the left, gave a long sigh and finally took his swing. But at the last minute, he’d sort of pulled it. It lofted high and long but gradually edged left, hit the ground and rolled into the weeds at the border of the woods. He stood stock still, watching it go off-course, then turned and grinned at me.

– Pret-ty rusty, I’d say.
– Let me show you rusty.

I hooked my ball pretty good as well but with a slightly more forceful swing and ended up in the same general area but fifty yards or so further down the fairway. We grabbed our bags and began wheeling them down the slope.

– As long as I play, I don’t think I’ll ever lose that hook shot.
– Nope. Me either.

That was when I noticed that he was walking a little funny, a little slower for one thing, but he was also favoring his right leg a bit. I asked him about it.

– Oh, I took a fall a couple months back. Nothing much to worry about it. It’s just that, you know, it takes a lot longer for these things to heal when you get older. Actually, they never do heal.
– Tell me about it. I still haven’t gotten over that tumble I took, and that was, what – five, six years ago? What happened?
– Oh, shoveling snow. Hit a patch of ice and down I went. It’s one of those things, you know, where you can be pretty sure that you’ll be feeling it the rest of your life, that it’ll just always be there. Can’t be fixed.
– Well, that sounds a little . . . fatalistic.
– That’s what I’ve become, he said. A fatalist, I guess.

He veered off to intercept his ball while I continued on. There was something about the slow and deliberate way he favored that leg that struck me. He looked suddenly old. I wondered, did I look that old? I tried to put a little spring in my step to counteract the thought. When I looked back over my shoulder, Bill was standing beside his ball, but he wasn’t lining up his shot. Instead, he was staring off into space, off towards the woods and the development beyond, lost again in some wool-gathering. I stopped by my ball and leaned on my club. What the hell was he doing, I wondered? What was he staring at?

After a moment, he moved into position and gave the ball a whack. It lofted nicely and arced onto the green, bouncing a couple of times and rolling to a stop a foot or two from the hole.

– Nice one, I called out. He waved away the compliment and started toward the hole. I lined up my shot and joined him on the green, slightly farther away from the cup. He was already lining up his putt when I reached the green. It seemed to take him forever to feel right about it. Time and again he’d realign his feet, take a little swish to the side, stare at the hole, stare at the ball. This was entirely unlike Bill who was usually quick and certain in his swings. Now he seemed unsure of himself, unable to commit. When he finally tapped the ball, it scooted around the lip of the cup and rolled to a stop six inches to the side. He knocked it in with a sigh, but said nothing.

And it went on like this, hole after hole. I felt like we were playing in molasses, every shot taking longer and longer to set up and complete. After a while we didn’t even talk about the game. The air felt heavy and the time just dragged on and on. Finally, a group that had been pushing us on every hole put up such a fuss that we let them play through. As we stood back, watching them tee off, I asked,

– Something bothering you, Bill? You just don’t seem to be into this.
– Yeah. Yeah, sorry, he said.
– Something you want to talk about?
– Honestly, I would, Don. I would, he sighed. But I just don’t know how.
– I don’t understand.

He turned and stared at me for a moment, not in anger. More like in puzzlement, trying to figure something out, locate a word or something.

– I don’t . . . I can’t . . . it’s just over. It’s over.
– What’s over? I asked, thinking, of course, that he was talking about that woman I imagined he’d met during the winter months I was away. You having . . . an affair or something?
– An af -? He laughed, a melancholy chuckle, shaking his head. Oh hell, no, he said. If only . . . no.

And here he extended his hand, sweeping it across the course, and beyond, to the housing developments and off towards the west where the bell tower of the Community Christian Church poked its steeple up above the treeline, designating the town center. He let it hold there for a moment, then let it drop.

- It . . . all of it, he said, shaking his head again ruefully, will soon be gone. All of it.
– All of what? What are you talking about?
– Take a look around you, Don. Take a good long look. Look at the neatly trimmed grass, the beautiful cars in the parking lot over there, the rows and rows of houses in that development over beyond the trees, each of them home to a family of some sort, a mom and dad and maybe a couple of kids and a pet or two – and all of them without a clue as to the shitstorm that’s headed their way. It’s like a flood or a tidal wave the likes of which they’ve never seen before, taking out everything in front of it, wiping it clean. There aren’t any words to describe it because you and I have never seen anything like it before. It’s that bad. And it’s coming. And there’s nothing you or I or anyone can do to stop it. It’s just . . . over, he shrugged.

I didn’t know what to say. This certainly wasn’t what I’d expected. It was just completely out of the blue. My mind raced to put together some sort of a response. I felt angry. This was just too much, too bizarre to be believed.

– What the hell are you talking about?

I must have raised my voice a little too loud. The last guy teeing off stopped in mid-swing to glare in my direction. I grabbed Bill by the sleeve and tugged him off to one side.

– What is this? Some kind of a joke? What the hell? Whad’ya mean “it’s over”? What the hell kind of a joke is that?
– It’s not a joke. I’m completely serious. We’re headed over a cliff. The brakes are out, the gas pedal’s stuck to the floor and we’re staring down into the abyss. A couple of weeks, a couple of months . . . you’ll see. We’re headed down.
– Oh, come off it. You miss a couple of putts and lose a ball in the woods and it’s the end of everything? C’mon, snap out of it, man.

He gave that weary little chuckle again and shook his head. My god, Don. What can I tell you. I carry this thing with me wherever I go. Wherever I look I see these things and I think, “It’s all going to go away.” There’s something unbelievably sad and awful about it, this notion that it’s all about to vanish. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

– What are you, some kind of Nostradamus or something? Since when did you, William Brunner, acquire the gift of prophecy? Who told you it’s all going away? Who says it’s over.
– I read it.
– You read it?
– I read it. On the Internet.
– On the Internet? Oh my god, Bill, the Internet? The Internet’s a loony bin, an echo chamber for conspiracy theorists and guys with nothing better to do than spread lies and misinformation. Is that what you’ve been up to all winter, reading about 9/11 Truth theories and who shot JFK? I must say, I’m surprised. I thought you had more of a head on your shoulders.

Now it was his turn to be angry.

- I didn’t expect you to understand. But I thought you might try to show me a little respect. Doesn’t matter. It isn’t worth talking about.
– Well, that’s the first sensible thing you’ve said. But I don’t kid myself that you’re conceding the point. What makes you think the world’s coming to an end?
– I didn’t say the world was coming to an end. The world will do just fine. It’ll solve its problems just fine, believe me, only we’re not going to like a solution that doesn’t happen to include us – or, at least, nearly as many of us as are currently consuming its resources.
– So over the winter, you’ve become an environmentalist, is that right?
– Yes, Don. Or rather, no, since I’m not really doing anything to stop any of it from happening. I’ve just become aware that it is happening, but I don’t know what it is I can do to prevent it from happening.
– And just exactly what is it that’s going to take us out?
– Peak oil. Global warming. Climate change. Species extinction. Deforestation. Topsoil and water depletion. Destruction of the rainforests. Famine. War. Should I go on?
– No, no. Really, you’ve said enough. So you sat around all winter and read up on all the Democratic platform positions, is that right?
– No. This really has nothing to do with politics, except that politicians seem to be uniformly just as clueless as to what’s to be done as any of us. We’re all in the same boat on this one, Don, and that boat’s sinking fast.
– Hold on a sec, Bill. Take a deep breath. Step back. Have a look around – and here I repeated his sweeping gesture, taking in the golf course, the housing development, the parking lot, the woods, and the town beyond, so placid, so peaceful, except for the thin buzz of a distant lawnmower – take a good long look, I said, and tell me that any of this is going away anytime soon. Be honest, and have a look. It’s here, it’s healthy. It isn’t on anything like its last legs. It’s staying. It’ll be here a long long time after you and I are gone, my friend.

I patted him on the shoulder.

– You’ve had a bad dream, a bad time of it maybe. But now you’re here, you’re awake. You’re just some guy playing a few holes of golf with his buddy, and the rest of it, all the crazy chatter out there on the TV and in the papers and on the Internet, that’s all just nonsense, just crazy crazy nonsense. All you’re required to do, my friend, at this particular point in time, is work on that hook shot. And nail that putt.

He looked at me long and hard, and I realized that I had just said the very last thing in the world he’d wanted to hear coming from my mouth. I tried to smile, to counteract his look of utter pity and contempt, but my smile quickly faded. I saw his hand grip the club and squeeze it tightly. Then he let it relax, and I felt my smile quickly melting away.

– No, my friend. No. That is not all that’s required of me. Or you.

And with that, he grabbed his cart and wheeled it away, back across the course towards the clubhouse.

– So, did you have a good time? my wife asked after I’d arrived home and stowed my clubs in the garage. How’s Bill? she asked, preoccupied, without expressing any real curiosity in my reply.

– It’s over, I said. It’s over.

Posted on Thursday 22 of November, 2007 [05:53:05 UTC]

My new cartoon on YouTube, shows you how not to do it. You can find it here.

Posted on Sunday 18 of November, 2007 [06:03:18 UTC]

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to check out two documentaries, each of which arrives bearing approximately the same bad tidings: we’re pretty much screwed.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour and T. S. Bennett’s What a Way to Go – Life at the End of Empire are both films offering unflinching looks at the immense problems attending post-industrial globalism, and neither film tries to sugarcoat either the extent or the devastating gravity of the issues. Bennett’s self-produced and (and pretty much self-financed) epic wins the award for refraining the longest from sounding the hopeful and triumphant “we can solve this problem” note that seemed to me to somewhat undercut the impact of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Though I admire the efforts of all three of these filmmakers, I think DiCaprio’s film is the most effective (and possibly the most mainstream) effort yet to deliver the bad news about both Peak Oil and Climate Change in a form that's palatable for the uninitiated. I’m not quite sure why it isn’t getting more attention, apart from the fact that it’s in limited release at the moment; maybe reviewers and audiences alike think DiCaprio is just trying to steal Gore’s thunder by doing a bit of out-of-his-depth environmentalist posturing.

But just to be clear about this, Leo produced and narrates the film. The real documentarians at work here are writer/directors Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, and they’ve assembled a rather remarkable collection of talking heads, including people like Richard Heinberg, Thom Hartmann, Paul Stamets, Bill McKibben, Steven Hawking, Joseph Tainter(!), David Suzuki and others, that indicates they did their homework and they get it. Whether audiences will also get it or not remains to be seen, but this is an excellent film in terms of its accessibility – it spends probably two-thirds of its length scaring the shit out of you before offering even the faintest of faint hopes that we might, just maybe, be able to redesign the way we do things and avert complete catastrophe. Even at that, it never lets up on the “we’re running out of time” meme, and the visuals only serve to underscore this point over and over again.

How we might do this redesigning thing, however, is not made terribly clear. No mention is made, for example, of permaculture, although biomimicry gets a nod. The film turns it over to people like “cradle-to-cradle” designer William McDonough to speak to the problem, but that tends to leave the impression that the crucial choices are up to yet another set of experts – not technologists per se, but trained engineers and accredited designers. Still, the film does an excellent job of laying out the problem in terms I’ve yet to encounter in any other mainstream media; Time/Warner is to be congratulated for indulging DiCaprio in this endeavor. Reviewers are going to have to talk about Peak Oil in discussing the movie, and that’s got to be a good thing. If it disappears from theaters, buy it and show it to people you love and trust when it comes out on DVD.

Tim Bennett’s What a Way to Go is, for the moment, only available on DVD (you can purchase it here). As much as I admire the effort that has gone into the making of this video and want to encourage everyone to give it the time and attention it deserves, I ultimately found it to be . . . well, how can I put this? . . . unhelpful.

That is not to say that Bennett has failed in his self-appointed task exactly, or that this is not a noble effort. Bennett and his producer, Sally C. Erickson, have also done their homework, and their reading parallels a good deal of my own in pursuit of this subject. In fact, the film is more or less a record of all the folks, experts and ordinary citizens alike, that Bennett’s gone to over the past couple of years to scope out the nature of the problem, and it becomes understandably clear that nobody’s very happy about what they see coming down the road. Unfortunately, he’s chosen to narrate the film himself, in a kind of weary Sad Sack sort of fashion; and as he trudges along (literally, in the final half-hour of the video, entitled “Walkabout”), reciting a seemingly endless litany of things going wrong, you sort of start to feel sorry for the guy, as if he were Eeyore eternally condemned to conduct guided tours of the Apocalypse. He’s an unmedicated Everyman making his own excruciating Pilgrim’s Progress toward . . . well, what exactly?

Like The End of Suburbia and possibly due to budgetary considerations, he frequently has to resort to archival footage and public domain imagery to fill out the visual components of his two hour-plus odyssey through the treacherous shoals of Climate Change, Peak Oil and their socio-political underpinnings that put him in touch with such iconoclastic authors as Derrick Jensen, Daniel Quinn, Heinberg (again), Jerry Mander, and William Catton. Yes, he actually tracked these guys down and got them on film. While the interviews are fairly on-point and for the most part informative, the archival stuff is occasionally not his friend, sometimes acting as an ironic counterpoint to what he’s actually trying to get across – but you’re not sure if he’s aware of the irony.

I found myself giving him points for tenacity right up to the end, but frankly, while I like to think that I’m a member in good standing of the choir he’s preaching to, I don’t think this film is going to serve as the kind of effective wake-up call that, say, End of Suburbia was for many viewers.

Let’s be honest here: this is a tough and brutal message. People who get it – who really get it – often find themselves suffering through those five stages of grieving we’ve all heard about, without ever getting to the “acceptance” part. And Bennett has practically handed them the big socio-political stick with which they can reject his premise: no red-blooded, SUV-entitled, Wal-Mart-shoppin’ suburban American is going to buy into his “everything you know is wrong” outlook.

To his credit, he talks about this in his film, how most of these kinds of messages (books, movies, interviews, whatever) always get to the “happy” chapter that attempts to reassure the viewer or reader or listener that, although things are bad, there are ways to “fix” the problem, and you’re not to blame. As he notes, the “happy” chapter always lulls you back to sleep, back into the “somebody else is taking care of it” state of complacency. DiCaprio’s film, as I observed above, also has a “happy” chapter; Gore’s movie turned light-bulb changing into an act of penance and contrition.

Despite a caveat or two, Bennett opts for a slightly upbeat “Let’s build a boat” metaphor to end his trek to contrast with the rest of the movie’s downbeat “we’re on a runaway locomotive” structural motif, but you do find yourself, at the finish, on a remote beach staring at a blank ocean, the waves relentlessly rolling in, the shore depopulated, the people who have joined him there having disappeared along with the film’s peripatetic narrator. I could almost imagine an audience, at this point, reaching in unison for the poisoned Kool-Aid and downing it with a toast: whataya say, let’s just end it all now!

The problem here lies only partially with the medium or the artistry of the communication itself; that is, if you’ve effectively communicated the message, the chances are pretty good that at some point your audience will have tuned out. It’s that grim. If the point of telling them this stuff in the first place is to get them to act in their own behalf, as well as in behalf of the planet, you’ve almost failed by succeeding too well. It’s in that sense that I think The 11th Hour, despite its faults, is a more effective piece of populist communication, but I have the feeling that the Peak Oil folks are going to find themselves embracing What a Way to Go, and continuing to wall themselves off from the public at large that desperately needs to hear what these filmmakers have to say.

Posted on Monday 27 of August, 2007 [05:03:11 UTC]

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

Welcome to the end – and the beginning – of the greatest sustained blast of linguistic pyrotechnics in all of literature, James Joyce’s magnum opus, Finnegans Wake.

Published in 1939, when the world’s attention was riveted on a widening war and suffering its own “nightmare of history”, the Wake is a massive 628 page novel written end-to-end (and, as illustrated by the passage above, end-lessly) in the language of darkest night, of dreams and the unconscious, a substrate of English overlaid, by punning, allusion and portmanteau aggregation, with words and their associated contexts of meanings borrowed from dozens of other languages. (One of the Wake’s best explicators, Roland McHugh, has abbreviations for attributions in 62 languages listed in his Annotations.) These layers of meaning thread their way, sometimes six or seven deep, down the page and through the novel, and by implication extend in vast networks, in many directions, in a fashion that in many ways anticipated the invention of hyperlinked text, which denizens of the Internet now take for granted.

Joyce intended for the novel to be encyclopedic in its reach and scope, and yet to retain its distinctly Irish tone and character, particularized in the daily routines and details of life of a pubkeeper and his family in Chapelizod, a suburb on the western edge of Dublin. Experienced through the distorting mirror of one night’s fitful and dream-tossed sleep, the challenge was to invent a style that expressed the metamorphic flow of thought unbridled and unbound by waking limitations of place or time. All of history and, in particular, Irish history, is gathered up and harmonized in a prose that, like Dublin’s River Liffey itself, never seems to stop moving, shifting, changing and fracturing in a stream of reflexive polymorphous identities.

Joyce said of this experimental fiction, “I am trying to tell the story of this Chapelizod family in a new way. Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book. Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death. There is nothing paradoxical about this. Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose."

Such a narrative method and the style it produces necessarily present real challenges and difficulties for the reader. Finnegans Wake may very well be one of the most perplexing and daunting as well as one of the least accessible works of fiction ever written. It is almost perversely impenetrable without a great deal of effort and external reading, and that requirement has often proved more than the average interested reader is prepared to invest. Life is just too short to devote oneself to the understanding of a single work of fiction. Or is it?

For me, this book has been a constant source of inspiration as well as delight and frustration. Reading it over the course of my lifetime, dipping into it from time to time; reading along with page-a-week listserve groups; meeting with academics at UCLA and attempting to parse the text sentence by sentence; tracking down the books to which Joyce alludes in his text (another Joyce commentator, James Atherton, refers to the Wake as a book of books, seeking to absorb and appropriate the works of others by naming them within its text) – all these activities have served to transform the novel for me into the centerpiece of a life-long quest.

And because my life is not yet over, neither is this quest; but I thought it would be interesting in this space to note what it is I’ve learned in reading this book, in as succinct a fashion as possible. I am no scholar, though I deeply appreciate the efforts of academics to untangle Joyce’s web, so it is not my intention to go very deeply into the intricacies of the text itself or to provide some startlingly original new piece of exegesis. Rather, I want to briefly encapsulate my understanding of what it is Joyce was attempting with this work.

It is my conviction that Joyce sought to forge in this novel an indissoluble connection between an “average” Irish shopkeeper (the novel’s “hero”, if it has but one, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker or HCE) and the ancient semi-mythical Celtic king, Finn MacCool, acting as a stand-in for all the ancient Irish god-kings. These two persons are divided by a span of time of tens of centuries, but Joyce brings them together, along with a host of other flawed heroes and historical personages, in the space of one long night’s disturbing dream, the “nightmare of history” from which Stephen Dedalus claimed he was attempting to awake in Joyce’s previous and best-known novel, Ulysses.

In that book, Joyce famously connected another Irish Everyman, advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, with the Homeric hero from whom the book derives its title, by a process of literary but not literal correspondence and association. In the Wake, he uses the process of dreaming to fuse the two images, mythic hero and Chapelizod innkeeper, so that the two become an indistinguishable (but ill-defined) one.

This hero lies buried in the text of the book, which is itself the four-sided coffin at the Wake. As others celebrate around its apparently dead central figure, the reader himself “wakes the dead” by reading aloud of the many incidents, rumored, invented or recorded, which make up his history, a tale of all fallen heroes in every era, of failing fathers and warring sons, of tempting daughters and steadfast wives. Time and space vanish as categories of experience and everything occurs in a kind of ahistorical present containing within it the seeds of both its past and the future.

An example of this is the passage I quoted at the beginning of this essay: you will note that Howth Castle and Environs (a real building and locale in Dublin) bears the initials HCE, those of the novel’s ostensible protagonist, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. HCE is also Finn, come again, whom George Gibson, in his Wake Rites, has identified as an avatar of ECH, the god-king of the ancient Teamhur Feis celebrated annually at Tara. HCE, in his dream, is vaguely aware of himself as this sleeping giant, the mound on whom the city of Dublin is built. The hill on which sits Howth Castle is his head and his toes pop up out in Phoenix Park (itself incorporating a symbol of resurrection), a public park adjacent to Chapelizod. He lies apparently dead, but is also merely asleep in his four-sided bed, which is also the book and a boat: the bark of Osiris in his nightly journey through the Underworld, as recounted in The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Joyce employs this trick of “burying” his characters in the text throughout, and it is the task of the reader to dig through the layers of language, to penetrate their many disguises and piece their lives together again. They are the Flesh made Word, in a reversal of the Biblical formulation, in a nightworld from which all light is absent. They are creatures composed (and decomposing) of language and letters, reassembled by the action of the river itself, HCE’s wife ALP, an Isis-figure and Dublin’s River Liffey (here, Anna Livia Plurabelle.)

ALP is the “riverrun” of language that provides the flow of the narrative, the circulatory stream of the city and its mythic hero. I.i 20.10-13: “For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies.” HCE and ALP form together an anagram for the word “chapel”. Their inn in Chapelizod stands on the site of the legendary chapel of Iseult, the lover of Tristan in the classic tale of love, loyalty and betrayal. The conjunction (in the chapel) of Mister Typus (type us) and Mistress Tope (literally, an alcoholic, but possible also: to open? to hope?) produces "typtopies", children who will re-enact the Tristan/Iseult archetype, as well as other tales of treachery and tragic romance.

The other thing to note about the passage quoted at the beginning of this essay is that “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” is only part of a sentence that “ends” the novel and is continued on the first page with the remainder beginning with “riverrun” – that is, the novel is circular.

In effect, it is a cycle of history and storytelling that repeats itself over and over and never ends, such that the Wake is always, as it was referred to during the length of its composition, a Work in Progress. Joyce signals this theme within the sentence by burying a nod in the direction of Giambattista Vico (“vicus”), an eighteenth century philosopher who developed a theory of cyclical historical recurrence meant to chronicle the rise and inevitable fall of civilizations, and which Joyce used to structure the work.

Within the bounds of that single divided passage, Joyce has managed to describe the whole of the arc through the long night of Finnegans Wake, which the reader travels in a singular way, on a lonely path, through a confused tale of past loves to arrive at the end with a longing to begin the journey on the river again – a series of indefinite articles preceding a final landing on the definite “the”. It’s an odd word with which to conclude a novel, but then again, it is not really the end. It’s the beginning again of the awakening of all the Finns (the ends) of the world.

What turns this eternal wheel is a conflict at its center, a fundamental imbalance, a betrayal of some sort which Joyce attributes to a transgression on the part of the father/creator. (“It’s something fails us,” says Anna near the end of the novel. “First we feel. Then we fall.”) Never actually defined, the guilt of this crime nonetheless weighs on the narrative and spreads to every corner of the novel as the crime is buried, forgotten, dug up and retried again and again in endless variations that never quite approximate some final truth.

It is as if a repertory company of actors, taking a series of different roles, performs an entire season of dissimilar plays, each of which retells in a different location with a new wardrobe of costumes precisely the same plot. It seems as if we are encountering something new and utterly different at the start of each performance, but gradually we begin to detect the outlines of the old familiar tale. The great man falls; his sons rise to take his place, and fail in turn, and in failing, turn and re-turn the great wheel of the Wakean world.

But this original sin is neither Good nor Evil (despite the fact that on the first page we have been returned to Eve and Adam's, nominally a church in the center of Dublin but symbolically, of course, the Garden of Eden.) It is simply the expression of a fundamental imbalance that drives the dynamic of all of our relationships, especially the familial. Again, within the invented language of the Wake, Joyce strives always to conjoin the opposing poles of conflict. An invented word such as “cropse”, for example, contains visual and aural allusions to both life, in the form of growing crops to feed ourselves, and “corpse”, a suggestion that the living must die to fertilize the growth of the next generation. The two concepts are linked inseparably in a single word, and there are countless such examples throughout the novel of this kind of marriage of opposites.

There is considerable evidence that Joyce felt he was composing with this work a bible for a new secular religion, and that his mission in spending the last seventeen years of his productive life as a writer on a single complicated novel was a religious one. At the heart of that endeavor he presides over and consecrates his own sacramental union. Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of his earlier autobiographical fiction, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, had rejected the Jesuit priesthood to become a kind of secular artist/prophet to his people, “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The Wake is that conscience, harkening back through its resurrection and recreation of the yearly kingship rites at Tara (as George Gibson has so clearly demonstrated) to an ancient time of ceremony and celebration, of ritual cleansing and revival, and connecting those events with the ordinary experience of contemporary urban life.

That is what I believe is going on at Old Finn’s “funferal” in Finnegans Wake, a party surrounding the prone corpse of a sleeping king becomes a family rehearsing its troubled history becomes a city slumbering beside its cleansing swiftly-flowing river which carries its stories of not only the Irish people (who are themselves, as Joyce knew well, a combination of many races, a product of many invasions) but of all humanity. Here’s Joyce (as the novel’s voice) once again on what the reader may expect from this work:

I.i 20:10-20: “So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined (may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder!) till Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor.

“Cry not yet! There’s many a smile to Nondum, with sytty maids per man, sir, and the park’s so dark by kindlelight. But look what you have in your handself! The movibles are scrawling in motions, marching, all of them ago, in pitpat and zingzang for every busy eerie whig’s a bit of a torytale to tell.”

The thing that you have “in your handself” is, one hopes, the book itself, with all it’s little movibles scrawling in motions (its words set in movable type telling the tale of a Whig/Tory opposition as a kind of fairy tale), the earwhig being Mr. Earwicker’s totem insect (with a whisper of incest in his ear) throughout.

But really, so what? I mean, essentially it’s a work of fiction. A novel. A story. A relatively simple story, as a matter of fact, told in a peculiarly convoluted, confusing, and, by the look of it, unnecessarily complex fashion – and what’s the point anyhow? If it’s this much work to get at what the author’s trying to say, is it at all worth it?

Ordinary prose makes a virtue of communicating its meanings clearly. The language is a medium, a liquid conveying the message suspended within it. The medium needs to be pure to the point of transparency, without obstruction. In order to read the message, the language itself should provide as little interference as possible. In writing, for the most part, we seek to get rid of the clutter, and in the world of fiction-writing, Hemingway is the model to be emulated; the writer reports the who, what, when, where and why of his story with as little decoration as possible, because the decoration only serves to distract.

But what if you are telling a story that has no “who”, no “when”, no "where" – no time or place or single privileged point of view from which to experience the flow of events? In other words, what if you are trying to portray the experience of the dream state, where the dreamer no longer experiences himself as a part of that flow, and the events themselves are indistinct, borderless, representing a variety of times and places that are overlaid, one over top of the other, all occupying the same place, the same time?

That prose would, of necessity, be at the opposite end of the spectrum from that of Hemingway. It would be prose that literally strained against the contemporary grammatical boundaries of the language itself, that needed to reach back into its own history, traveling the long etymological paths by which the many appropriations of English words from other languages have evolved into the understandings which we share today. That prose would need, at every turn, to account for itself in dozens of different ways, strange to behold and encounter, stranger still to grapple with and attempt to extract some meaning from, where multiple threads of meaning are intended, at times pulling in opposite directions.

The point is to make conscious the great unconscious mechanisms of thought, the rudimentary language of association which precedes and informs conscious thought, the essential and basic forms of human experience with which each of us works out his or her individual story, and in the process, reconnects with the fundamental narrative of every human life on this planet, no matter in which language it assumes its form. By reaching across that immense cultural gap separating the ancient Finn and the modern Humphrey, Joyce sought to awaken in his readers that sense of our long common heritage, and point out the cyclical path towards our common destiny. And to do so in as playful a manner as possible.

So, finally, the Wake is not some dreadful long slog through 628 pages of incomprehensible gibberish in order to get to the big finish – after all, there is no real end to it, so once you pick up the basics of what Joyce is about, you can literally dive in at any point in the stream and go for a little swim whenever you like. Though the water may always be a bit murky, there are prizes to be obtained with a little diligent digging, and patience is always rewarded.

And, finally, again, when I consider what this novel is actually saying about the human condition, about “man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death” and all the wanderings of its denizens, by day and by night, I recall the conclusion of Stephen Dedalus’ discourse on Hamlet in the library in Ulysses:

“Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”

And I think, too, of Leopold Bloom, lying in his bed, his last thoughts contracting to a final period, as consciousness shades into sleep:

“He rests. He has travelled.

“With?

“Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

“When?

“Going to a dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

“Where?

.

No such period ever arrives to round out and conclude Finnegans Wake. There is only: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the

Posted on Monday 06 of August, 2007 [05:20:52 UTC]

It should come as no surprise that one of the first people to recognize (and capitalize on) the tremendous appeal of immersive experiences and virtual worlds was an animator. And not just any animator, but the man who led the artistic vanguard of the development of animated storytelling in the first part of the twentieth century, your uncle and mine: Walt Disney.

Disney began by taking a medium that was essentially a series of moving black and white comic strips devoted largely to the seemingly endless re-staging of vaudeville gags and bits of silent comedy, with the additional novelty of wildly fantastic and physically impossible actions and metamorphoses. This raw medium he transformed, over a period of roughly fifteen or twenty years, into a full-color narrative experience, enhanced with synchronized sound and music and dramatically centered on characters in whom the audience believed and in whose fate they became deeply and emotionally invested.

He accomplished this feat by continually pushing for the evolution of a kind of verisimilitude in drawing and movement and in the rendering of his onscreen worlds, which achieved their own type of cartoon “realism” by paying strict and rigorously detailed attention to visual cues (of volume, weight, texture, reaction to force, interaction with light and shadow) that established believability in the minds of the audience. He was not necessarily the originator of the styles he popularized in his animated features – he borrowed liberally from children’s book illustration, silent films, and art movements such as Surrealism and German Expressionism as well as the work of comic artists of the time – but once he had absorbed a certain style, his work became the paradigm against which the output of his contemporaries and competitors was measured and into which the work of other artists was subsumed.

Realizing that audiences would only attend to a feature-length story if they were able to form a bond of identification with its protagonist and care enough about his or her plight to suspend the disbelief that attaches to blobs of color bound with an outline, Disney artists focused on the details, especially the subtle cues that tell us an object has weight in the world and reacts not only to recognizable physical laws but responds as well to the inner call of emotion and thought, the unseen calculus of feeling and motivation. Walt impressed upon his animators the task of making that emotion visible, of perfecting a language of body gesture and facial nuance that signaled, in the pared-down and abstracted symbols of the cartoon, the simplified through-line of invisible affect.

In addition, every composition, every color, every brushstroke, every highlight or shadow, every lovingly detailed drop of rain or sigh of a breeze through tall grass was directed towards communicating and maintaining an unambiguous rendering of the emotional current of the story. Linking all of these elements in turn to a musical and aural score drew the audience in through a total experience of synesthesia, perhaps best epitomized in the music and movement synthesis of Fantasia (where he even experimented with an early version of stereo sound spatialization) but evident to some degree in all of his best animated features.

In many ways, what Walt sought to portray on a flat two-dimensional surface was depth itself, in both a literal and figurative sense. One of his early innovations, the multi-plane camera, allowed him to accomplish a kind of infinite truck or push into a scene by moving towards and then passing through a series of paintings on glass representing various successive planes in a landscape. This kind of an effect would not be duplicated or perfected until well into the digital era, when the layering of elements in a scene was no longer restricted by the discoloration of cellulose acetate or limitations of lighting and tracking. It’s clear that what Disney had in mind was “dimensionality” itself, immersion, both in the way he treated the volumes of his characters onscreen and in his treatment of the space within the motion picture frame.

The theme parks gave him that dimensional canvas with which to work, and he attacked the problems of storytelling within a three-dimensional space with exactly the same techniques that had brought about a revolution in animation in the thirties and forties. Spaces in Disneyland are arranged as narrative or connected compositions, and detailed to produce a desired emotional effect from virtually any point of observation, while leading the “audience” into the park through subtle direction and visual enticement: the promise of more.

This style of design has been labeled “The Architecture of Reassurance” by the designers and engineers of Walt Disney Imagineering, but that phrase describes only a part of the actual effect it achieves. It refers to the sense of containment, of a separate place, safely buffered from the outside world and completely consistent and sufficient onto itself.

But there is something else that goes on within the boundaries of the parks, immersive environments that constantly reiterate a single theme as subtext: the theme of control through the commoditization of both time and space, the control of consumption by means of packaging the repeatable experience and parceling it out in time. It comes dressed in many colorful costumes, decorated with pleasing forms and palatable shapes, rough edges smoothed and surfaces polished to a sheen, but its message is always the same: the promise of more.

It could be said, of course, that cinema itself is the prototype for this kind of commoditization of experience: the audience is sold a ticket to a certain span of time inside a contained and controlled space. What they experience within that box, in that time, is a mechanized and completely repeatable experience – unlike, say, a live theatrical performance which inevitably includes subtle changes from one show to the next. In film, it is only when the machine malfunctions in some obvious fashion that the real nature of the experience is revealed, as the lights come up and the audience discovers itself sitting in an empty auditorium, the music silenced, the magic dissipated.

Disney achieved his measure of control in the parks by means of mechanization first, then, not too much later, through the application of his own brand of robotics (the dimensional art of audio-animatronics) and finally through computerization. It is no accident, then, that the last projects to have engaged Walt’s attention at the end of his life were EPCOT (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which eventually evolved into a kind of permanent World’s Fair exhibition) and Celebration, an actual designed and inhabited community inside the perimeter of the Florida resort and, in practice, a failed experiment in corporate-designed consumerism masquerading as a representative of small town Americana. The community as movie set. One should perhaps refrain from judging these things too harshly, since they now serve in many significant ways as prototypes for the kinds of online communities and websites I’ve discussed elsewhere.

It is in this way that the evolution of the field of animation, which began its life as the struggle to achieve control of line and shape on an empty page, and the arc of Disney’s career itself mimic the deep penetration into industrial and post-industrial societies of the virtual world or worlds in which we now find ourselves immersed, purchasing and consuming in parcels large and small, delivered on the media assembly line moving ceaselessly towards our future (more!), the advertised times and packaged places of our existence.

Posted on Tuesday 10 of July, 2007 [08:13:49 UTC]

I was away for a while, but now I'm back.

Over the course of the past month I've taken advantage of the opportunity to participate in an online alternate reality game called World Without Oil. I'd created a blog a long time ago that I'd never actually used, so I decided to dedicate it to posts in which I, along with hundreds of other participants posting blog entries, videos and podcasts on other sites, collectively imagined what daily life might be like during a period of escalating oil and gas prices and the consequent social and economic disruption they would entail. You can find the results here, but I would recommend that if you are truly interested in the sequence of events, you might want to begin in the April archive (the game started on April 30) and move forward from there. Each day of the month represented another week in the crisis, right up to the end of May.

The results, as I stated in a concluding essay on the site, were interesting, but also frustrating and ultimately, as a collaborative experiment, far from satisfying. I certainly learned some things, but I wasn't altogether happy with the final shape of the collective fiction we all wrought. Essentially, I felt that the game needed a better design. Nonetheless, I think there's something of value there, both in terms of the Peak Oil experience and what the effort says about the value of virtual worlds and alternate simulation scenarios. As both are areas of interest to me, I could not resist. Have a look.

Posted on Saturday 02 of June, 2007 [07:53:37 UTC]

The news, the bad news, the news everyone knew they would hear one day but dreaded hearing when that day finally arrived – that news is here: the plant is closing.

The company is gone. It’s over. The factory that once sat astride prime real estate at the center of this tiny downtown, having evolved from a small blacksmith shop at the intersection of Main (Cleveland Avenue) and Maple Streets, and at one time, Portage (an Indian trail, blunted now; then a pioneer road, a thoroughfare to the railroad station to the west of town; and finally a paved and winding tree-lined avenue down which presidential candidates once paraded, trawling for voters), that factory is an empty shell, haunted by a few ghostly workers busy within its three-story high walls, bringing its operations and its history to an untidy close.

Its great proud red brick stack, emblazoned with the company name in a long row of vertically descending white letters, still towers high above the rolling Ohio countryside like the turret of a castle at the center of its feudal estate; but the fires from the furnaces below that once filled it with smoke, billowing from its opening like a banner to the world proclaiming its success, are long ago extinguished. What shall become of it? people ask as they stand on the wide lawn below, gaping up at it from the place where generations have gathered to sing carols in the snow amid the dark of winter or wave flags at the passing tanks and troops and marching bands in the warm breezes and bright summers of Memorial Day parades long past. What shall become of us?

No one knows the answer to those questions. It has been a long time coming, long enough for many to prepare some kind of uneasy transition or escape, either to another job, or another locale, or into the final phase of their lives by way of a decent severance package and an early retirement. But for the town itself, revolving for so many years around the massive core of industrial gravity at its center, the corporate headquarters of a once powerful global enterprise, the absence of this entity in its midst will wield a devastating blow from which it may never recover, the consequences of whose disappearance will be felt in innumerable ways, large and small.

I could almost feel its passing as I approached in the night, as the jet cut through the high cold stillness and I nodded off intermittently, speeding always toward the rising sun. And as the early morning sky began to brighten and sketch the outline of the shore of Lake Erie off to our left, I felt it both drawing ever closer, transforming from a memory into solid substance, and receding in time. Forty or fifty miles to the south was the town where I’d grown up, the factory shuttered and empty where I’d worked summers between college semesters, the schools I’d attended, the neighborhoods I’d walked, the fields where I’d played ball, the woods where I’d built makeshift forts and fought imaginary wars, played hide-and-go-seek, cracked hickory nuts and picked blackberries and dark blood-red cherries. It was all rising up before me, out of the fog of memory, rolling in my direction with the turning of the earth beneath the relentless roar of the jet’s engines.

I’d caught the red-eye home, and now it was three in the morning my time even as the plane touched down and Cleveland yawned and stretched and reached over to shut off its alarm in order to catch a few more moments of sleep, something I was unable to do. Below the descending plane, the land was recovering from a late and unexpected snowfall of a week or so previous to my arrival, melted now, which had bowed the heads of tulips and stunted the daffodils in their beds. Now it was warming its way towards raising the sap in the trees and clothing with the buds of a billion leaves the starkly barren branches that blurred in a greybrown smear past the windows of the plane.

It was to be a short trip, only four days, a check-in really. In the past six months, my father, who would be eighty-seven in a few months, had suffered three life-threatening episodes that had sent him to the emergency room; the most recent of these three, in which he’d lost well over half of his blood supply, had been the most serious, the one in which he had become truly convinced that he was about to die and had entertained the thought that dying would be preferable to the pain he was experiencing – were it not for his concern for my mother. Because he is pretty much the sole source of care for her (during the day), he could not afford to give up. And so he endured the pain until they managed to locate a vein that wouldn’t collapse and reintroduced several pints of blood into him and revived him. He did not give up, and days later, he had returned to his rigorously structured routines.

He would be up now, waiting, feeding my mother, exercising her paralyzed limbs, performing the morning rituals as he has done every day for the past fifteen years, as I rented a car and navigated the tangle of highways that would take me south through the greening farmlands and forests of northeast Ohio, its small towns, its ruined hillsides, its clustered developments – and everywhere, water. Coming from what is essentially a desert, I am again overwhelmed by the sheer amount of water in the landscape, the streams and rivers, the pockets of lakes that I’d seen dotting the world below from the air. I’d grown up with it, of course, but it never fails to make an impression on me by contrast with where I live now, where water is at such a premium, where its flow and storage are so vigorously guarded and its ownership so zealously maintained. I’d lived in my present location in Los Angeles for almost twenty years without consciously realizing that a river ran through my neighborhood – because it lived in a concrete box channel for purposes of flood control.

In Los Angeles, most of the streams and creeks have been either channelized or buried in storm drains in order to rush the water off the streets and parking lots and away south to the ocean during brief periods of intense downpour. As a consequence, aquifers are depleted by a growing population faster than they can be recharged, and water must be pumped in from distant rivers to meet increased demand. In Ohio, every ditch contains a small pool that can provide temporary riparian habitat. Many streams are likewise buried in urban areas, but you don’t have to travel far to find an open body of water, where ducks casually stroll the banks, and frogs serenade the night. The land, left unattended, is saturated with its lushness.

As I approach the town from the north, the smokestack that rises nearly a hundred feet above the city, its secular steeple, pushes its way above the treeline. Amid the ordinary denizens of the interstate exit, all the big box stores and franchise outlets that have arrived to cluster about this intersection and bleed life out of the small downtown economy to the east, the stack still stands like a great middle finger extended towards the future, but it is an empty gesture, hollow and ineffectual. The future has overtaken it, snuck up from behind and surprised it, entered from within and vacated it, scattering its contents and the lives of those who maintained it to the four corners of the globe, and it is no more. Someday soon, this shell too will be dismantled and will disappear, and with it, unless I hurry, the stories it longs to tell.

Posted on Saturday 28 of April, 2007 [19:12:14 UTC]

Distressed about the destruction of the planet?

Concerned about global warming and climate change? Troubled by the disruption of ecosystems, the depletion of water tables, the erosion of the topsoil, the mass extinction of species, declines in biodiversity?

Upset about the War on Terror? Anxious about Peak Oil?

Worried about the curtailment of individual freedoms, about government invasion of your privacy, abuse of constitutionally guaranteed rights in the name of national security, official sanction of the practice of torture?

Perhaps you’re distraught over social injustice, the growing gap between the very poor and the very very rich, the decimation of the middle class, the increasing numbers of people without adequate health care or the means to pay for it, the rise in mortgage foreclosures, job outsourcing and growing unemployment, the devaluation of the dollar, the possibility of total economic collapse?

Well, just stop.

Don’t stop being worried or concerned – that’s a good sign. It means you’re awake, you’re paying attention despite all the soothing voices instructing you to calm down, to buy something, take a pill, black it out – pleading with you not to take these issues seriously.

Take them seriously. They’re serious problems.

We are at a moment in the history of the human race unlike any we have ever faced before. Our power to obliterate ourselves surpasses any other freedom or capacity civilization has ever enjoyed or had to command as its own; and to top it off, there are more of us on the planet now than have ever been alive. The earth is past its carrying capacity with regard to us, and the resources that have allowed us to arrive at this place in so short a time are rapidly being consumed but not replaced.

So, stop.

We owe it to the rest of the world, the vast majority of whose population never had the advantage or the opportunity to enjoy the kind of consumption patterns we Americans take for granted. And they’ll be the first to suffer the consequences of what we’re doing, of the way we’re living.

So, stop. If you care about other people, if your concern rises to the level of wanting to act in the world’s behalf, just stop. Stop doing what you’re doing.

Stop driving. Get out of your car and walk, or ride a bicycle; but stop driving. Just put the car in the garage. Try it out for a day, or two. You’ll be surprised at how it will work a subtle change on your point of view. There will be all sorts of things that will fall off your list of priorities, that didn’t really need doing. You’ll stop doing them, and stop driving in order to do them. Get out of your car and re-encounter the world you want to save.

Stop watching television. Americans watch too much television, and there’s nothing there, no nourishment, no information to be gained. So, just stop watching. Admit to yourself that it wasn’t really entertaining you that much after all and hasn’t for quite some time. It was just a habit, an addiction. Turn it off and sit quietly by yourself, listening to what you’ve got to say when you’re all alone with yourself. What you may find yourself saying is, “I’m lonely.” And that’s a good thing, realizing that. It may motivate you to reach out to others who are equally isolated. It may inspire you to rejoin the human community.

Stop shopping. You don’t really need all that stuff. Look around you and figure out what you actually do need, then give away or sell the rest of it. It will free you, and if you don’t buy stuff to replace it, you’ll save money, and you’ll be ahead of the game because most Americans don’t save anything. They’re living off wealth they’re borrowing from the future, and we may not have a future. You may even become rich with all the money you’ve saved, but more to the point, the stuff that was occupying that place in your life will be gone, leaving that space empty. Who knows who or what might rush in to fill that vacuum?

Stop eating stuff your grandmother wouldn’t have recognized as food. Try growing something yourself and eating it; or, if that’s out of your reach, try purchasing food from the farmers who grow it rather than the processors and the distributors who package and ship it. Food that’s shipped has energy embedded in the process on top of the energy it took to grow it – it’s expensive for the planet and the planet’s population to be importing food from vast distances that probably isn’t all that nutritious by the time it hits your plate anyway.

So, just stop.

Want to save the world? Feeling so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problems that you’re paralyzed into inaction? Convinced you need to do something, anything, now, before it’s too late?

Just stop. The important thing now, at this point in time, are the things we don’t do, the things we refrain from doing. Rearrange the familiar patterns of your world, stop them in their tracks. Stop, and the world will thank you.

Posted on Monday 02 of April, 2007 [07:53:17 UTC]

The people in the valley had lived, for as long as anyone could remember, in peace.

There were written records, of course, of great battles that had once been fought, of long wars, of nightmarish sieges, of starvation, of pestilence and widespread death. And there were those who retold these histories as exciting and glorious tales, giving rise to myths which reinforced a sense of great purpose in the values by which the people of the valley lived their lives. But these values, they believed, were validated by the peace they enjoyed, not by the wars that had been fought or the lives that had been lost to secure them.

There was no need for such wars now; the people knew how their valley worked – how the mountains captured rain and snow, how the rivers and streams flowed from them to the valley below, how the trees of the forests and the plants and grasses of the meadows used those waters and the warmth of the sun to maintain the life of birds, of insects, of mammals and the people themselves in a vast network of countless exchanges and connections of mutual support. Their elders and all who had preceded them had observed and taken note of its functioning over the course of time, and the people of the valley lived within those boundaries, circulating and recycling the energies of this place so that all might be fed, sheltered and remain at peace on the yield and increase of their harvest.

It was not a place without tragedy, without lives cut short by capricious events, diseases without cures, accidents without apparent cause or blame to be assigned. People loved, or lost at love, and suffered the pain of loss. But the people of the valley understood in their hearts that these things were all a part of nature itself, like the mountains that surrounded their home and bounded their lives. They accepted these features of their landscape just as they accepted their positions in the larger scheme of nature. It was not a place without incident, but there were no grand monuments to elevate the status of one event over another in the colorful pageant of its history or in the celebration of one life over the value of the many lives that had appeared and winked out like the reflections of sunlight on the surface of a swiftly-flowing stream.

But there was a wider world outside the valley, and in that wider world there were people born in places that had never known peace, that had no tradition or understanding of the place they were in. They worshipped change and sought always to improve upon the place where they found themselves; and having exhausted its resources in the effort to change it, they were forced constantly to pack up and move on and leave each unloved place worse for their having been there. As they moved through the world (and it was not just one tribe of men, but many) they seized the lands of others by force, scattering them from their homes, forcing them into the turmoil of diaspora or enslavement. Kingdoms grew in their wake; empires expanded under the impulse of their energies, directed always towards the goal of making better the things they found and took from others. As they accessed more territory, their armies grew, the better to move and, moving, to grow.

And so it was that there came a day when the army of one such powerful and warlike empire encountered the fertile valley which had so long existed in peace, deep in the mountains of the distant west, that its people had no memory of war; and there they encamped and prepared themselves for what their forward scouts had informed them would be the easy invasion and rapid conquest of a passive people who lived simply upon a land of almost inconceivable plenty. It was as if their god himself had assigned to these people of this valley the task of working to produce what this army had come to consume, and they volubly shouted their praise to the heavens and their thanks to their warlike deity for the glory of their certain victory.

The people realized, of course, what was about to befall them, and on the night before the invasion, after their own scouts had reported the vast army encamped at their doorstep, they came together in an assembly of elders to reason with each other and determine a course of action. Fighting a war of any sort was out of the question, of course; they were clearly vastly out-numbered and unarmed, untrained in any of the skills of warriors. Perhaps they could try to negotiate a peaceful settlement, some reasoned? What would induce someone with such a vast and powerful army in tow to give up anything in a negotiation, argued others? Round and round the discussion went, and with every passing hour, the situation appeared more desperate – and progress toward a resolution more hopelessly deadlocked. No one wanted a war they knew they would lose, and yet war had arrived unbidden.

At last, as dawn approached and the hour of reckoning came on apace, an old man, whom most knew only as a friendly sort of odd fellow with a modest farm at the edge of one of the outlying villages, rose to address the crowd. His offer was simple: he would go alone to speak with the commander of the invading troops. He would find out what they wanted and return to the assembly with whatever sort of demands they proposed.

Everyone rapidly agreed to this plan, as nothing else that had been offered actually involved anyone doing anything. So they sent the old man off, with a few gifts of fruits and vegetables, meats, cheeses and homespun fabrics; and their hearts were lifted as they watched him depart, for they knew his mission was hopeless, yet still they hoped.

Sunrise came, and shortly thereafter a single armored rider on horseback galloped along the main road into the valley, through the woods and fields and over the streams and finally directly into their midst, where, from the bag he carried, he lifted the severed head of the old man – mouth agape and eyes sightlessly staring – and tossed it into the center of the gathering. Then he turned and hastily galloped away before anyone could move or even quite take in what had just occurred.

There was silence for a moment, and then a great commotion filled the town square. Some screamed, some fainted, some shouted in anger, some wailed in despair. Such a grotesque spectacle of horror had not been seen in the valley in anyone’s memory. It was more than most could comprehend. Fear swept through the crowd and panic set in. The assembly unraveled and people fled to their homes, to hastily pack their few essential supplies and, weeping, begin their chaotic exodus before the inevitably advancing wave of soldiers whose herald was this old man’s visage.

But then a strange thing happened. At first, it was a just a few young men and women who protested to their parents that they should not leave, that they must stay. Some of them counseled fighting, but others quickly talked them out of the idea. Their object was to stay alive, and to do so, they must stay here. They could fight – and die. Or they could continue to live in this place and adapt to the conditions of survival under the rule of a conquering regime.

Times would be hard; perhaps many of them would die anyway, or be taken away as slaves, or live only to serve their new masters. But the people of the valley would continue to live in the place they knew and understood, and their traditions would be maintained and handed down. For to be torn from this land would be the equivalent of erasing their very identities. It would leave them lost, wandering upon the face of an unfriendly and inhospitable world, looking for the place that would always be behind them, the place they had unwillingly chosen to abandon, a place that would eventually be but a memory. And who would care for it then?

As they imagined themselves in this future place, their fear and desperation ebbed away. Several of their number returned to the square, removed the old man’s head and buried it, and cleaned the stones of his blood. One by one, all up and down the length of the valley, family by family and house by house, the people resettled themselves. There were some who chose to leave. But many more who stayed made the decision to simply go about their daily chores and continue living by the principles which had always sustained them. And thus did the people of the valley allow themselves to be effortlessly conquered. Though no one cooperated, neither did they resist.

In the ensuing invasion, some of them died of random acts of willful evil, some were taken away as slaves, some lived only to serve their new masters who very soon exhausted the abundant resources of the place and grew tired of the relentless boredom of its routine and, to them, unremarkable pleasures. The army moved on, leaving a provisional government that demanded an exorbitant portion of the annual harvest in taxation but otherwise practiced a benign if contemptuous sort of tyranny on the people of the valley who had managed peacefully to adapt to their rule, who lived on in the place they loved and maintained its traditions as best they could until that time when the empire that had sustained the provisional government withered and was no longer heard from and its several ruling generations were gradually absorbed by interaction and intermarriage and submerged into the general population. In time, with its cancer in regression, the valley healed itself and flourished once more.

Though some innocent blood was shed, no great battle commemorated this victory; no monument was raised to this triumph. Stories were told, of course; but in time, the people of the valley came to believe that they had always lived, for as long as anyone could remember, in peace.

Posted on Saturday 27 of January, 2007 [06:52:38 UTC]