CLINGING TO FAILED IDEAS

the united states suffers from institutionalized ignorance and it is endemic. as a nation they cling to a capitalist-centered world view, a winner-take-all ethic and a profoundly unempathetic attitude toward other people, not only of the world but within their own country. like other unevolved nations they still rely on first-past-the-post elections, a two-party system which cannot represent the views of many of its diverse citizens, and control of government at every level by moneyed interests. 

this regrettable situation will be exacerbated by the newly elected government and those who still seek to present optimistic scenarios or caution against despair are guilty of wilful blindness. it will be bad. it will hurt americans and it will hurt us all. and by withholding its undeniable power to assist in solving the existential threats both to itself and the planet, the united states will be materially responsible for its collapse, if it should indeed come to that.

though i hear ringing in my ears, 'be careful what you wish for,' i do think it is past time for a world governing body to wrest control of world-scale issues from the hands of regional interests.

OSTRICHES

what is it about canadian politicians that they so resemble ostriches, who put their heads in the sand when threatened with a difficult situation? the sand these politicians are burying their heads in is the tar sands and they are not going to come out of it looking clean and spiffy. 

the only practical solution to canada's contribution in opposing the encroaching devastation of climate change (and the tar sands are the biggest single canadian contributor to our terrible, sasquatch-sized footprint) is the complete cessation of alberta's mining of these tar sands.

so why are we spending treasure to increase the destructive flow of bitumen from this terrible foreign-controlled site that we will someday soon have to start trying to distance ourselves from? this is not about jobs, pipelines don't add significant jobs for the size of the capital investment, this is unneeded and unwanted infrastructure that is running against the stream of not only history but also science, and it is purely based on the inability of a privileged segment of the population to admit that their privilege is based on the destruction of our future, all our futures, their own included. getting off the tar sands will require a lot of new green energy infrastructure, which really is much more labor-intense and will result in many more good, technical as well as construction jobs, than any pipeline proposal.

the oligarchs do not speak for us, the great majority of humans, nor for the other life of earth. this is the sickest short-sided stupidity at precisely the moment in the history of the exploitation of earth by modern humans when better ways are actually finally clear to us. we know what path we have to take. why do we let shortsighted, selfish and callous sociopaths continue to dominate the large-scale efforts of man? if they keep on, you will soon be saying goodbye and good riddance to capitalism in all its forms, the good with the bad. times are going to quickly overtake us. while we fiddle with corrupt political and capital systems, trimming the edges and trying to make them look like something they are not and never have been, the planet burns.

THIS NADINE GORDIMER

this nadine gordimer knows what a novel is. knows what structure is. knows what meaning to chase down, to capture, knows the shape of the trap that will snare it.

one reads The Pickup thinking it like a Y; two people from different places brought accidentally together, who go on living as one complicated strand made of two, the stem of the Y. but it is not a Y. it is an X. and the author has known it and known where it goes and what she is after nailing to the earth, to the page, and she does nail it, artfully, carefully, letting out just enough at every turn, to cause that wonderful novelistic thing —— the inevitable surprise.

you think you know, even for quite a time, until coming up from underneath there is emerging another knowing, the right one this time, to surprise you. this woman born of, emerging from, a cold materialistic world of privilege, which values privilege over justice, who seeks the enveloping warmth of family. this man born of family, emerging from a stifling, formal, inflexible set of meanings and imperatives that yet better values human warmth and care, though in poverty, who seeks the expanding potential of success unbridled, of privilege, security, worldliness, even wealth — everything he sees embodied in her. everything that she wishes to abandon in favor of the family he seeks to abandon — how can it be anything but a perfect X?

first with her friends at the L A café and then with his relatives in africa, she has sought the enclosing warmth of a family she has never known. he has sought a kind of privilege he has heard of but never known. they have been forced by the author to confront one another, and to confront the ideas they each represent. how inevitable. how perfect.

like life in a crystal glass, we get to see it clearly, in the clarity of the novelist's singular unswerving vision.

if life were as visible as this we would never need novels.

WRITING LIKE NADINE

i'm not self-protective; have no wish to be. because i'm not afraid.

oh, i think The Pickup is a grand choice. spending time with nadine is lovely. as i read i wonder what you are thinking, what you are really thinking; what you will say to me about it and what you really feel, and if they will be exactly the same thing. if that is even possible.

just curious. just wondering if you are afraid, and if so, of what?

(writing like nadine.)

ROSS LOCKRIDGE/ALBERT CAMUS

i think camus and lockridge were living in very different places with both a different recent history and a different long history. as a young man camus was influenced by the dadaist movement, nihilism and the theater of the absurd after the devastation of world war one, with its utter failure both of the social order and of its intellectual and moral structures, and lockridge, who was living isolated from most of its effects in middle america (an america which had always been and remained quite self-referential), was not. (america lost some men in 1916-18 but it was considered europe's problem and it was europe that was laid waste.) the literary and intellectual influence in america was still rooted in the transcendentalism of the nineteenth century, in emerson, thoreau and especially whitman. lockridge himself seems to have been an extremely confident unstoppable force of nature, with whitman as his model and, though more conventional than whitman, accepted most of the permissions that whitman had conferred upon himself.

in terms of personality lockridge was unashamedly grandiose and considered himself the appropriate archetype of the great american drama. camus was a skeptical intellectual who did not believe in heroes at all, at least in the beginning. that changed  somewhat with The Plague, when he began to believe it made a difference what people did and did abandon the nihilism of his earlier work in favor of what has been termed by others, existentialism. but his approach to ideas and human behavior remained skeptical and critical.

if camus had been an american writer he might have been ignored but in france with its (sometimes problematic) intellectual tradition, his singular, original work found immediate favor with the intelligentsia which mediated french culture, unlike america where commercial interests and positivism dominated cultural expression from the beginning. 

though whitman had been an outsider most of his life, by its end he was revered somewhat in america (more in europe). lockridge seems to have wanted to be both as famous as whitman but in addition, to be successful in commercial terms as well.

so, though contemporary, these are very different men in terms of life experience and personality. camus grew up dirt poor in algiers and achieved surprising results early on because he was singled out in school as very bright and given access to privilege he never would have been granted by his humble birth, either in algeria or france. lockridge had no such deficits to overcome, early on or later in his brief life. he was kept out of the second war by health concerns and continued uninterrupted by its effects on the country in his singular literary ambition.

when it comes to Raintree County and The Plague, the differences in personality, in focus, philosophy (if lockridge can be said to have had any coherent philosophy) are stark. camus' work is philosophical, intellectual, abstract, cool and skeptical. lockridge's work is hot, emotional, unquestioning, accepting and much more stereotypical. he describes characters grandly, visually, as though the look and speech of them told all, but there are elements of stereotype, albeit very colorful stereotypes. camus' characters are unique, their identities are in their depth not on their skin, and they represent philosophical ideas and conflicting world views; one is hard pressed to find stereotypical types in the piece. 

though they are both good examples of their literary type, born of the same time, of the same western world and world view, these two works could not be more different in their purpose, construction, meaning, or as an experience for the reader. they both seem to me to contain much, and much that rewards the reader. in particular, lockridge and his opus i find slightly easier to admire for at least the scope of his ambition, than i did as a young man — camus i have always admired.

PURPOSE — A STRANGE WORD

why would nature want to convert grass into goat? 
what purpose is there in that? 
what purpose is there in me asking? 

i tell you, purpose has nothing to do with any of it. 
there is no nature with a purpose
there is no plan

there is just everything.

ONE OF THEM, YES

they wanting to see themselves as others see them
or, 
more
wanting others to see them as they see themselves.
yes that one 
that last one 
will be the 
sadder
one.

SOMETHING

we have the same issue with the conception of cosmos that we have conceiving life; they are both structured in time, they have a history, and the human mind is incapable of really understanding nothingness and timelessness, though we have invented zero. we cannot truthfully understand nonexistence at any scale. the meaning of our own death may be only too clear to us, as may be the various imagined ends of our universe, but to imagine no life and no cosmos at all — nothing at all — we have no language for that. nothingness is only relative, death is only relative. language is something and nothing cannot be contained in something. we are left with absence, another comparative. lack implies something missing. something is something the human mind cannot escape.

CAPITALISM UNDEMONIZED

capitalism could be saved. it's important not to demonize this method of production because of excesses of greed and hubris and sociopathic behavior, especially in the financial and energy sectors. the real freedom it brought to enterprise has been valuable and it has proved to be a more successful way of organizing production of material goods and services than the centrally planned economic model, which in comparison allowed even more corruption among the powerful.

the problem is that it bears watching, and regulating, when excesses emerge. the role of production and its ownership vs. state control of enterprise that has emerged in europe, especially since the second world war, and has come to be accepted there, is a better indicator of the way to salvage the good and eliminate the bad in so-called democracies around the world than the british and especially the american model. the key is to remove corporate influence from government and prevent it weaseling its way back in. the most important control needed to save the idea and ideals of democracy is to get money and influence, especially but not only corporate money, out of politics altogether and make elected representatives represent another constituency — the citizens of the state. at its core value, so-called capitalist democracy gives power to money, social democracy gives it to people. for this, the people need to be educated into thoughtful citizenhood.

and then — long live the people.

TIME'S ARROW

chaos (implied order) > cosmos > chaos (dispersal)

where one ends (or fades away) is not the same as where one begins. time does have an arrow, but this does not imply that a clock is not always starting somewhere in the physical universe(s).

REASON

our deepest motivations are not reasonable. reason is merely a tool we employ to accomplish what is innately needed. 

BRIDGE

a human is a bridge. by the things he can't let go and the things he adopts, he links the past to the future. 

MURDERERS

i live in a world full of murderers: murderous governments, murderous armed forces, murderous law enforcement agencies, murderous religious fanatics, murderous gangs of criminals, murderous youth gangs, murderous individuals, murderous psychotics, even murderous workplaces, highways, bars, nightclubs. 

sometimes i wonder if there is something wrong with me, that it offends me so. 

behind each murderer is an investor who profits from the crime. there is some general agreement among most public societies that the taking of a life is wrong. what about profiting from murder? about the killing business? about the accretion of wealth and power through supporting murder? is there general agreement about that? or is it considered just another economic activity, a legitimate countable positive addition to the GDP?

sometimes i wonder if there is something wrong with me, that this also offends me so, that people, individual people, allow themselves to profit in this way.

REAL AND NOT REAL

whether a book is fiction or nonfiction is not interesting. what is useful to know is whether the book attempts to get at something real — YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN; CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY; A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN; THE PLAGUE; THE PICKUP — or whether it is not real — HARRY POTTER; STAR WARS; ALL THE LIGHT YOU CANNOT SEE, and many many others. that is what should be categorized and clearly labeled for the reading public, not because real is inherently better — many people gain much from fantasy and other suspensions of reality, much more than i do — but because it is a more useful distinction to make in identifying a work for a potential reader. it is the underlying, original intention of the author from which every aspect and experience of the book in the mind of the reader will derive.