Vanishing Cities

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated – Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.

At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.

The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out – “anything that flies on anything that moves” – a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.

See the rest of the article here: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/9963-focus-hegemony-and-its-dilemmas-part-1

I was surprised at how caustic and downright hostile Henry David was toward the pyramids (and the pharaohs). Here’s what he has to say in WALDEN: “As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”

For once, I can’t agree with him though the pyramids may be the greatest monuments in history to the wealth gap.

Plato’s Gospel
by Vincent Czyz

“I become holy by initiation. The Lord [Jesus] reveals the Mysteries. He marks the worshipper with His seal …” —Clement of Alexandria, from The Protreptikos (Exhortation to the Greeks), ca 190 AD.

Here in America, Darwin is on the ropes again. After winning round after round since the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in 1925, he’s facing thoroughly revived opponents—adversaries who are taking fewer standing eight-counts and getting in a few licks of their own. In 2005, for example, 11 parents in Dover, PA who resented having their children taught Creationism (repackaged as “intelligent design”), brought suit against the school board in what has been touted as a second Monkey Trial. Dr. Ken Miller, a professor at Brown University and the author of the biology book that agreed with evolution—the book that the parents wanted their children to use—stated on the witness stand that he believes God created the universe. Considering that Dr. Miller was a witness for the plaintiffs, it’s a small miracle they won.

A survey conducted in 2006 by political scientist Jon D. Miller of Michigan State University showed that only 14 percent of American adults consider evolution “definitely true” while roughly a third believe it to be “absolutely false.” Out of a sampler of 34 countries, only Turkey was less accepting of Darwin’s theories, while in nations such as Denmark, Sweden, and France, better than 80 percent of the adults questioned sided with Darwin. Perhaps more disquieting is the fact that 20 years ago about seven percent of U.S. adults were uncertain about evolution; that number has since tripled.

The uniquely American aspect to this resurgence of religious fundamentalism is reiterated by a chart showing the relationship of wealth to religious belief republished in the June 2, 2010 opinion section of by the New York Times (“Why Is America Religious?”), which demonstrates that the “the wealthier a country is, the less important religion is to that country. The one exception: The United States.” As USA Today pointed out (June 3, 2004), the “religion gap” is the “leading edge of the ‘culture war’ that has polarized American politics, reshaped the coalitions that make up the Democratic and Republican parties and influenced the appeals their presidential candidates are making.”

A somewhat medieval mentality, it seems, still holds significant sway in the world’s most powerful nation. If ‘medieval’ seems too close to hyperbole, recall Pat Robertson’s remark about Haiti and its “pact with the Devil” in the wake of the earthquake that hit the island. If you’re inclined to dismiss Robertson as a marginal political player, consider Ronald Reagan, who openly wondered whether Armageddon—in the form of a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union—was going to occur on his watch. Or take the Bush White House, which in 2003 had to deny claims trumpeted by a BBC television program that Bush bragged to Palestine’s President Abbas, “God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did …” When it comes to credibility, Abbas and the BBC are probably safer bets. We are dealing after all with a man who, in his nationally televised debate with John Kerry, said, “I pray over my decisions,” including the one to invade Iraq. Reagan and Bush (a millennialist more by implication than admission) are not alone. According to the 2008 documentary “Waiting for Armageddon,” 20 million Americans believe we are now living in the End Times. Among these End Timers is Sarah Palin, the Republican front-runner for 2010.

And let’s not forget the Left Behind series, 16 volumes of pulp fiction about the Rapture authored by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. The books have sold some 70 million copies; at one time roughly one in eight Americans was reading them. “Scholars reconstructing the popular history of the first years of the 21st century … will have to grapple with the phenomenon of Left Behind,” writes David Gates in the May 24, 2004 issue of Newsweek. It should come as no surprise that, as Gates reports, “many critics of the series see a resonance between its apocalyptic scenario and the born-again President Bush’s apocalyptic rhetoric and confrontational Mideast policies.”

It was in this atmosphere of religious recidivism that I began writing The Christ Mosaic, a novel based on the suspicion among a number of religion scholars that the Christ of the Gospels is not a historical figure. I don’t remotely propose to prove that in the space of this essay; rather, I’d like to present what I hope is persuasive evidence that the Gospels are quite clearly a species of fiction—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Moreover, the author of Mark, at least, never intended his work to be understood by educated readers as literally true.

There are plenty of enigmatic passages in the Bible, but three in particular lend themselves to unraveling ulterior motives written into the Scriptures: Why is a blind man healed outside of Jericho named after one of Plato’s most famous dialogues? Why does Jesus send a multitude of demons into a herd of 2,000 pigs? And why are the first words of another blind man healed by Jesus, “I see men like trees, walking”? If these questions are answered objectively and plausibly, it becomes clear that Mark is both more and less than a faithful recording of events as they happened.

Any attempt to answer these questions, however, brings us to our first obstacle, and it’s nearly insurmountable: We in the 21st century really can’t imagine the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean) of the first century AD. The vast majority of us today don’t speak Aramaic (the supposed language of Jesus) or ancient Hebrew; we haven’t read the Gospels in the Koine Greek in which they were written. Moreover, most of us have no concept whatsoever of the religious milieu in which the Gospel writers lived, and even scholars can reconstruct it only vaguely for us. In short we’ve lost the calibrations on our compass.

So before getting to our questions, we need an impression of the ancient Levant’s spiritual mindset … a brief biography of the Greco-Egyptian God Serapis is a good place to start. After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, Alexander’s generals divided up his empire; Ptolemy got Egypt and took Alexandria as his capital. Faced with ruling an Egyptian population and a large number of transplanted Greeks, Ptolemy needed a way to unite his subjects. Settling on worship as the most effective way to get everyone pulling in the same direction, Ptolemy created a composite god: Serapis. Serapis was the husband of the Egyptian goddess Isis, just as the Egyptian god Osiris had been. And Serapis’s animal was the divine bull, Apis—as was Osiris’s. (The name Serapis is a fusion of Osiris-Apis.) Whenever Serapis was depicted, however, the likeness was of a bearded, curly-haired Greek. Like Zeus, Serapis was the ruler of the gods, and like Dionysos, he was a fertility god.

Ptolemy’s god was created purely out of political expediency (although as we will see, the religion Serapis presided over was not). Today, except in the case of a very small, fringe cult, this would be unthinkable—you just don’t go around mixing and matching gods. In the first-century Levant and in centuries previous, however, it was not only acceptable, it was routine. The Mystery religions, of which the cult of Serapis was one, were classic examples of this sort of syncretism. In Asia Minor the Greek goddess Artemis was grafted onto the cult of the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele and stood at the center of the Ephesian Mysteries. The Pythagorean Mysteries took the Mysteries of Osiris and replaced the Egyptian god with a Greek one—Dionysos, who evolved into Dionysos Zagreus, the divine figure worshipped in numerous Mystery cults. His dual name reflected that fact he was also a composite of two gods, but the minor figure of Zagreus (who is slain and resurrected) was almost completely assimilated by the more prominent god.

This syncretism worked on a local level as well; a city-state often chose a god who already had a strong following to head up their Mysteries. The Eleusian Mysteries near Athens, for example, venerated Demeter and her daughter Kore (also known as Persephone, who was the mother of Zagreus). Using a familiar god as the front man—or woman—was a simple but effective way of gaining converts to an alien religion or to a newly created one. (We can see a vestige of this practice in car interiors: the plastic Jesus sometimes glued to the dash often has blond hair, fair skin, and blue eyes, which, had Jesus lived, is hardly likely.)

Ptolemy’s strategy worked brilliantly. Serapis became enormously popular, and the cult spread well beyond Egypt; the Serapeum in Alexandria, destroyed by fanatical Christians in 385 AD, is thought to have been one of the finest edifices of the ancient world.

It’s interesting to note that when Christianity first took hold in Egypt, early church members venerated Serapis and Jesus equally.[1] Once again, we need to bear in mind that syncretism was the way of the ancient world, and practices unimaginable today were common enough when Christianity was in its infancy.

So far the Mysteries have merely been mentioned, but we really can’t begin to understand the ancient Levant without at least a basic understanding of these Cults. Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, dug up the oldest of Christianity’s roots—the worship of a god who dies only to be resurrected—and followed it to its elemental source: the cyclical death and rebirth of plant life. It is as simple as it is ingenious: the turning of the seasons. Drawing upon examples from hundreds of cultures and peoples as divergent as African huntsmen and German peasants, Native Americans and Welsh farmers, Frazer proved fairly conclusively that a broad range of religions all reflected the death of the Earth in fall and winter and its rebirth in spring.

The Mysteries are the clearest embodiment of this truth. The high priest was the hierophant (“one who reveals sacred things”). “Secrecy,” according to Walter Burkert in Greek Religion, “was radical” and an essential element.[2] An initiate into the cults was called a mystes. The root, tied to the Greek verb myein, means to close or to shut. It’s often conjectured this is because initiates had to keep their mouths closed about the ceremonies, but they hadn’t participated in the central ceremonies yet. Perhaps a more likely explanation for “shut” to be at the root of mystes is that before a mystes become an epopt (a witness), their eyes were closed—spiritually speaking. Because of the secrecy clause, a great deal of information about the exact nature and practices of the Mysteries has been lost, but Burkert identifies an agrarian aspect as among the most important. Not surprisingly, Demeter (goddess of grain) and Dionysus (god of wine and fertility) were two of the most important Mystery deities.

Another key element, Burkert notes, “is the aspect of myth: mysteries are accompanied by tales—some of which may be secret hieroi logoi—mostly telling of suffering gods.” Joseph Campbell agrees: “[T]he principle of divine life is symbolized as a divine individual (Dumuzi-Adonis-Attis-Dionysos-Christ) …”[3] Life, in the form of the god, will suffer, die, and be reborn.

We also know that the initiation rites, purification ceremonies, and processions culminated in a final drama, the purpose of which was to bring the initiate face to face with God. Aristotle, drily detached as ever, puts it this way, “It is not necessary for the initiated to learn anything, but to receive impressions and to be put in a certain frame of mind.” Plato was well acquainted with the Mysteries but, respecting their vow of silence, made comparisons to them rather than writing about them directly: “[W]e philosophers followed in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; and then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed …”[4] Here, raising philosophy to the status of a divine experience, he likens it to initiation into the Mysteries.

Christianity’s connection to the Mysteries, honestly, is no longer much of a mystery. Campbell, for example, citing the work of Jane Harrison, doesn’t even bother to argue the issue—it’s too obvious. He points out that “numerous elements” included in the heritage of “the mysteries of Demeter and the Orphics … were passed on to Christianity—most obviously in the myths and rites of the Virgin and the Mass.”[5] (You may have noticed that Campbell included Christ in his list of Mysteries deities cited above).

The great Roman orator Cicero, who died in 43 BC, actually criticized Mystery celebrants for taking their rites too literally: “Is anybody so mad,” he wrote, “as to believe that the food he eats is actually a god?”[6] I mention Cicero not to detract from belief in the Eucharist, but to point out that well before Christ was born, a nearly identical rite had already been firmly established. The fact is, Cicero was no enemy of the Mysteries; far from it. But he believed in a symbolic interpretation of the rites, not a literal one. In De Legibus, (II, xiv, 36), he has nothing but praise for the Greek Mysteries, saying that through them “We have gained the understanding not only to live happily but also to die with better hope.”

To continue reading, go to http://logosjournal.com/2011/summer_czyz/

Famed Polished director Krzysztof Kieslowski once claimed that the job of a filmmaker is to transport his or her audience to a world: it doesn’t matter if that world is emotional or intellectual. The same can probably be said of any fictional endeavor. Unfortunately, it is probably in her role as demiurge that Nicolette de Csipkay most emphatically fails. Her debut collection, ‘Black Umbrella Stories,’ is written in a faux naïve style that is simply too flimsy to support the reader’s belief and has neither emotional nor intellectual impact. Moreover, there is nothing to compensate—no alluring characters, no compelling plots, no humor.
The child-like voice of the narration, which is fairly uniform throughout the collection, gives the stories a fairytale feel to them: “Wanda was a little girl who lived with her parents in a sunny house beside seas of rustling corn. Wanda liked to read stories and play in the fields with her dog, Corky, catching bugs and crickets and mice. One day when Wanda had just caught a grasshopper another little girl came up behind her and said ‘boo,’ making Wanda jump and allowing the grasshopper to escape from her hands.”
Odd, often inexplicable things happen (in “Cat Lady” a woman gives birth to an abundance of kittens; an old woman in “A Visit to Portugal” occupies herself at night with a collection of dead beetles and insists her young boarder come up and admire them as well); surroundings are afforded little description—if they are described at all—making the space in which events happen as bare as a minimalist stage; and dialogue is simplistic, at times bordering on mindless.
It is not surprising then that when Evelyn’s husband, Bill, is killed on the second day of a ski trip in “Evelyn and Bill”, there is not so much as an emotional twitch in the reader. There is not much of an emotional response in Evelyn, either, who is, in fact, looking forward to spending a little time alone since she has been racked with anxiety over when Bill will finally catch her hand scoring another touchdown in her erogenous zone—where it has been wandering with alarming frequency. Clearly, this emotional flat-line is a conscious choice the author has made and would be fine if, say, the stories were humorous. While many of the situations De Csipkay sets up seem bound to induce a chuckle or at least a smile, in fact, there is something about them that is mildly disturbing. In “Cat Lady”, for example, it turns out that the man of the house is clandestinely burying many of the kittens. “It’s no use kid,” he says to the young girl who is the story’s protagonist, “She just has too damn many of them.”
To make matters worse, the writing is often deliberately banal. “Once a month Adele looks into her closet and decides what she wants to throw away. One month it is three sets of pink leotards, one striped silk blouse and two pairs of trousers—one a grey [sic] wool, the other a burgundy corduroy. One month it is underwear, because she is tired of bras and panties and, even, socks.” It can also be pretty close to inane: “I conclude it is difficult to understand the true nature of boredom if one is consistently bored, even if for inconsistent reasons. It is in my interest to be interested, as this is what I am predisposed towards being in being bored. And yet, if boredom is complementary, then, in fact, I am interested by nature and must, naturally, continue to live in boredom which will make an objective understanding of boredom impossible.”
So we have these sort of grown-up fairytales, scantily clad in see-through prose, in which little girls tend to be the heroines and there is at least the hint, beneath the tales’ placid facades, of the sinister. Nothing, however, is brought off with any particular flare or artfulness, none of the narratives is very clever and as readers we come away empty-handed. The problem, it seems to me, is that while De Csipkay has appropriated the fairytale mode, she has not has not adapted them to an adult’s palate. It could be argued that she has added the Gothic dimension for her older audience, but one look at a genuine fairytale reminds us that a typical situation involves children who are in danger of being devoured by a hungry giant or an evil witch.
Although ‘Black Umbrella Stories’ is De Csipkay’s first book, she is already being touted as a standard-bearer for “post-feminist fiction.” I cannot help comparing her efforts to “The Glass Coffin”, a tale contained within A.S. Byatt’s novel ‘Possession.’ Using the most hackneyed elements of the fairytale—a poor but honest tailor, a dark forest, a lone cottage, a magical key made of glass, to name a few—Byatt nonetheless, through meticulously wrought prose, manages to charm us into forgiving her the borrowed tropes.
Angela Carter, whose style is more lyrical, fresher and more original than Byatt’s, succeeds—even when she is not writing fairytales—in bestowing that magical feel on her short stories. “Black Venus”, for example, begins, “Sad, so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the inconsolable season. In America, they call it ‘the Fall’ … as if the fatal drama of the primal fruit-theft must recur … with cyclic regularity, at the same time of every year that schoolboys set out to rob orchards …”
The single paragraph from which this comes is, for me, richer and more evocative than one of de Csipkay’s entire narratives. If ‘Black Umbrella Stories’ represents the new wave in women’s fiction, give me the glorious girls of the old school any day.

Note: Originally published in 2003 on the arts pages of WBUR’s website under the direction of Bill Marx

This is from the most popular Amazon review of the book: “It’s pretty hard not to be impressed with this thing, with its amazing scholarship and spectacular writing. […] [S]o much so that you almost feel you have to genuflect before it every time you pick it up.” I don’t remotely agree.

While ‘Possession’ is certainly impressive in some respects, it is clearly deficient in others. Let me start with the glaring insult to Americans. The ridiculously obvious villain in this book is Mortimer Cropper. Take a look at his name. ‘Mort’ is death (mortician, mortuary) and ‘crop’ as a verb means to cut; in short he’s the Grim Reaper. In the first scene in which Cropper appears, Byatt demonstrates how little use she has for subtlety: he is wearing a “Black silk dressing gown,” over “Black silk pyjamas,” “mole-Black slippers,” and he “pushed down on a switch on his Black box.” (Capital “Bs” mine.) He had “American hips, ready for … the faraway ghost of a gunbelt.” (American hips? There’s her minor, separate, pot-shot at American gun laws.) Morty drinks Black coffee, and in case you are a dense American reader and still don’t get it, “His car was a long black Mercedes … a swift funereal car.” So there’s Cropper, death driving a hearse. [pp 104-109]

That’s not the insult. The insult is that Cropper, backed by tons of American money, is busy buying up all the “relics” of fictitious Victorian poet Randolph Ash as though the material items that belonged to Ash were more important than the poetry he wrote. This is Byatt’s way of saying Americans are not very bright (Cropper is a scholar don’t forget) and easily mistake the image for the thing itself, are so dazzled by gold foil wrapping they forget to analyze the contents of the box. It’s a clumsy perpetuation of a stereotype—one that Kazuo Ishiguro brilliantly and subtly annihilated in THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. Byatt’s hero, lowly Roland Mitchell, says at least twice how he’s not interested in Ash’s personal belongings, just in what Ash wrote. One just wants to reach into the book and pat him on the head. (And, yes, he’s associated with the color white—just like any good guy.)

To be sure, Cropper’s Scottish counterpart, James Blackadder (a double-sided name I’ll let you ponder for yourselves) doesn’t come off particularly favorably, but he’s the under-funded underdog against the rich American who doesn’t even know how to properly value the poetry to which he’s dedicated a lifetime of study. And while both men have subsumed their identities under Ash’s, have devoted their lives to someone else’s work rather than producing original work of their own, Cropper is clearly the more reprehensible of the two: “Maud decided she intuited …” notice the clunkiness of the phrase by the way … does Maud really need to decide to intuit? How about: Maud intuited “something terrible about Cropper’s imagination …. He had a peculiarly vicious version of reverse hagiography” [note the cheap repetition of the letter V]: “the desire to cut his subject down to size.” Precisely what ‘crop’ means, of course.

Do I want to “genuflect” in front of this text? Hardly. While Byatt does an admirable job with recreating Victorian letters and Victorian poems—really first rate—the actual story suffers. There are so many poems, so many letters the narrative never gains much momentum. Every time you think the story is going to go somewhere, she throws a 10-page poem at you or 20 pages of letters. They bog the story down interminably.

Another pitfall: Byatt seems to think that it would be clever if the modern characters recreated the situation of the characters they are researching. Unfortunately, about 1000 authors before her have also thought this would be clever. Maud is Christabel Lamotte; Roland is Ash; Roland’s girlfriend Val stands in for Mrs. Ash while Leonora doubles as Christabel’s girlfriend (and there’s an incident in which Roland peeps through the keyhole of a bathroom door to see if Maud is in there, recreating the most famous scene from Lamotte’s most famous poem. Maud is wearing a dragon kimono, meant to conjure up the reptilian Melusina of the poem). This doubling might have worked if it actually *meant* something, if it contributed something conceptually to the novel, but, other than helping out with the title. it seems nothing more than an affinity for symmetry—however artificial.

You also get tired of being pummeled with green in association with Maud: When we first encounter her “green and white length,” in which the modifying phrase should be hyphenated, she’s wearing “a long pine-green tunic over a pine-green skirt” and “long shining green shoes.” [p. 44] On top of this there are green scarves, green headdresses, green dresses, green pillows, green sheets, a green blanket, and her green car. There is such a thing as overdoing it: “[T]he bathroom was a chill Green grassy place, glittering with cleanness, huge dark Green stoppered jars on water-Green thick glass shelves, a floor tiled in glass tiles …” [capital Gs mine]. Tiled in tiles? She couldn’t come up with “covered in glass tiles” or something similar? Oh, and “Green-trellised towels” in case you don’t get that she’s the Queen of Green. (p. 63) She’s the green of spring, she’s Demeter or the Earth Mother, she’s life while Mortimer Cropper is death. The reader is similarly pounded with green words when Lamotte is described: “the pale sap-green of vegetable life, “green shadows in green tresses of young hay,” “her eyes were green, glass-green, malachite green, the cloudy green of seawater …” [p. 302] If it weren’t so overdone, it might be worthwhile.

As for the “spectacular writing,” it’s all reserved for the Victorian recreations. There’s nothing particularly impressive about the sentences that convey the contemporary story; there’s a lot to be desired in fact. Here’s an example: “A very small woman appeared …. She wore a large apron covered with purple and grey florets, over a skinny black jumper. She had a small hard, brown-skinned face under white hair drawn into a bun.” A very unimaginative piling up of simple adjectives: colors, small (twice!), large, and that’s about it. The writing is workmanlike, competent, but hardly better.

Or “The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust, a dust composed of smoke and fog particles accumulated before the Clean Air Acts.” [p. 5] Do we really need this repetition of dust? We certainly don’t need the comma after “duster,” which is just mispunctuation. Don’t we call black dust “composed of smoke particles” soot? (And fog is not composed of anything solid; it’s water vapor.) This is just unnecessary hyperbole and repetition.

In spite of the fact that Byatt throws Freud and Lacan into the novel, in spite of the fact that it’s set in academia, giving her the freedom to wallop us with an interesting theory or two, Byatt gives us little more than a few tired lines discounting penis envy. All these professors and textual critics and not a single interesting idea that I could find in this novel. It is mainly an exercise in contrivance—albeit expertly executed contrivance.

So Byatt has done well forging a believable pair of poets from the 19th century but failed to give us realistic counterparts. She excels at imitation but, like her villains, has nothing original to convey.

Limitless.

Most of us have heard the premise or seen the movie. A drug allows a writer—pretty clever to begin with but no genius—to access every shadowy neuro-corner, every forgotten niche of his mind, to put every brain synapse under voluntary control so that, as he phrases it, “A tablet a day and what I could do with my day was limitless.”

Apparently not.

He goes on to give some impressive examples of a fully focused mind … “I learned to play the piano in three days. Math became useful … and fun.” (As a way of raking in money in casinos.) “Even half-listening to any language I became fluent.” In a matter of days he finishes writing the novel that, for months, he’d only been able to talk about enthusiastically.

But then he has a little epiphany: “Suddenly I began to form an idea. I knew exactly what I needed to do. It wasn’t writing. It wasn’t books. It was much bigger than that.”

It’s money. He figures out how to play the stock market. We had an inkling this was where the moving was going when it turned out his only use for math—the discipline that made moonshots and the pyramids possible—was playing craps or roulette.

Stockpile money … that’s the way to use a nearly limitless mind? Really? Yes, that’s it. Eddy (our writer) leaves books behind and enters the world of big finance.

Big deal. (Pun intended). Eddy could have helped Stephen Hawking figure out information paradox. I don’t claim to understand it all that well, but here it is summed up by the guyz & galz at Wikipedia:

The black hole information paradox results from combining quantum mechanics and general relativity. It suggests that physical information could disappear in a black hole, allowing many physical states to evolve into the same state. This is a contentious subject since it violates a commonly assumed tenet of science—that complete information about a physical system at one point in time should determine its state at any other time. Quantum mechanics says that complete information about a system is encoded in its wave function and is NEVER lost.

Too abstract? Not practical enough? Stock market more interesting?

Maybe Eddy could cure a disease. Nah, not violent enough. (We can already eliminate cancer right now if we want to, but the cure doesn’t come in capsule form: it’s called a clean environment—all of it, thoroughly purged of the foul brew of toxins it’s been exposed to; but that’s boring, too).

Invent something better than tv? Impossible!

Well, how about Eddy gets interested in radio astronomy, all those indecipherable squiggles and waves and bizarre charts of radio waves coming from parts of the universe known and unknown? Wouldn’t it be fun if in this quagmire of electromagnetic patterns Eddy discovered something intelligible? Maybe figures out the Sun is actually a form of consciousness—as Rupert Sheldrake believes—giving new meaning to the age-old equation between light and knowledge (Prometheus, fire, all that)? Maybe discovers aliens use stars as relay stations for messages—including of course our Sun. Or … let’s leave the Sun out of it. Deciphers alien communications among the star chatter and cosmic hiss. And figures out how to communicate with the aliens—which is all they’ve been waiting for, a sign from us, and the movie climaxes with a flood of light and a tentacle grasping an outstretched hand (Eddy’s of course.)

Not cool enough? Not violent enough? Too original? Probably all of the above.

How about Eddy pulls off cold fusion? Ends the whole oil game! With
Big Oil and all its minions out to stop him!

The possibilities were just about limitless, but what a paucity of ideas Hollywood evinces with this movie, and what a lack of imagination Americans show paying money to see it. (I didn’t spend a nickel to be bored by it.)

If there’s anything about it that was interesting it might be that, INADVERTENTLY, the filmmakers may have captured a changing of the guard. At the end of the movie, Eddy Morra (he wants morra this and morra that), played by Brad Cooper, is confronted by Robert Deniro’s Carl van Loon (a little loony for power & money), but Cooper is “50 moves ahead” of Carl who has to slink off in his shiny back limo. Maybe Deniro’s hit his twilight and Cooper—though I’m not a fan—is about to eclipse the older star.

Oh, and–back to the movie–for some reason it doesn’t occur to Carl that, now that he has bought the lab that makes the drug, he too can start popping it. And since he was 50 moves ahead of Eddy BEFORE Eddy became a pill-popping addict, he ought to be able to bury Eddy in a month or two. But then the good guy doesn’t win.

Imaginationless.

A crowd had gathered, enough people to fill the bazaar—a few hundred onlookers at least.
The young newlyweds were unrepentant. “We love each other no matter what happens.”
Of course they knew what would happen.
A man with a face as craggy as the landscape, his graying beard as brittle as the sparse vegetation that sprouted in the sun-punished land surrounding the village, pronounced judgment on them in the name of the hastily convened religious court.
The women in the crowd were sent back to their homes by shouting men. Other men stooped to heft stones. Juliette’s brother was among them.
Back to back, the couple remained defiant. Wrapped in a black burqa Juliette held her head up as though silently insisting she was not afraid.
When the bazaar had been cleared of women, a turbaned farmer with a huge fist hurled the first rock. It thudded against Juliette’s chest, well below its mark.
The pain became a spreading numbness above her right breast. A second stone cracked the bone forming the bridge of her nose. With a cry she bent at the waist and covered her face. She barely felt the stones that smashed against her body, but one that crushed her ear dropped her to her knees.
Her brother was pleased to see he’d felled the woman who’d brought shame on his family.
Romeo would have shielded her with his body, but he was reeling from a stone that had opened up a gash in his temple. The world spinning madly out of control, he lost his footing. The rock that shattered his front teeth dropped him. His father congratulated himself on his aim; there would be no more impudent words from his son’s mouth.
The men of the village moved closer now as they pelted the young couple with chunks of the harsh landscape that had been collected beforehand.
There were smiles as the men looked over their handiwork: both of the sinners were lying on their faces though Romeo’s leg was still moving, it looked more like a twitch than a sign of life. Hardly a yard away, a Taliban commander slung a rock that split open the crown of Romeo’s head.
A hail of stones continued to bounce off the bodies as the men had not exhausted their supply, and they wanted to be sure the sentence had been carried out.
The villagers went back to their homes but left the bodies lying where they had fallen.
So ends Shakespeare’s Khayyam and Siddiqa.
Admittedly, I’ve gotten my wires crossed, twisted things around a bit. So let me set the record straight. Shakespeare never wrote play like this—not exactly.
Khayyam was an Afghan—let’s imagine him as handsome to make his death all the more tragic—who fell in love with Siddiqa; she was 19 to his 25. Unfortunately, Siddiqa was already promised by her family to one of Khayyam’s relatives. Khayyam could not persuade her parents that he and Siddiqa shared a love that superseded any arrangements they had made for her betrothal.
Her parents denied the couple permission to marry.
The fled to eastern Afghanistan, where they were married.
Both families pleaded for their return to their own village. They promised to welcome them back and formally recognize the marriage. Khayyam and Siddiqa were overjoyed to have their parents’ approval.
But when they returned to Mullah Quli, the Taliban were waiting. Clerics from nearby villages were gathered to decide the fate of the couple according to Sharia law. Roughly 200 villagers took part in the stoning. And among the executioners—Hollywood will love this—were Khayyam’s father and brother as well as Siddiqa’s brother and assorted other relatives.
Shakespeare didn’t write it, but Hollywood should assign a team of writers. The plot’s already finished. All they need to do is change the names to something more western—it’s hard to imagine Julia Roberts as Siddiqa or Johnny Depp as Khayyam. Oh, and leave out the part about Khayyam being already married with a couple of kids. That flies in Muslim countries, where men can have up to four wives, but doesn’t play well to the Disney crowd. Get Ron Howard to direct. I mean, he had no trouble cutting John Nash’s first wife and child out of “A Beautiful Mind,” not to mention that stuff about Nash’s homosexuality—he’s a natural for “Star-Crossed in Kunduz.” No, too foreign-sounding. “Under Star-Crossed Skies.” Yeah, that has a ring to it. Based on a true story! That always brings in more people.
The story was on the front page of the New York Times, but from what I can see, it went virtually unnoticed. There were a few blogs on the Internet, but astonishingly enough, hardly any comments. When I posted it on my Facebook account, of my 300 plus contacts, only two bothered to comment.
If this had happened in the West—England or France—I can’t imagine this story would not have generated an international outcry.

I recently came across a blog post that was a gusher of praise for a poet whom I also admire. The praise, however, I found objectionable. The author was trying to defend the poet’s simple language:

“We’re humans, we see the world, we feel the world, and isn’t that enough.”[?] (He forgot the question mark.)

Well, no, it’s not. If that were enough we wouldn’t need poets–or art for that matter. We’d just need not to be blind, really, although we’d still have four other major senses through which to “see” the world.

“What’s with all the worry, and the drama, and the artifice.[?] (Another missed question mark.)

After all, who wants drama in their drama? Or artifice in their art?

“Kenne is doing really hard work here. He is dismissing centuries of aesthetic mumbo jumbo, of fancy dancing, of showmanship, of selling his wares as a poet.”

Actually, dismissing centuries of more complex writing is really, really easy work. And Native Americans have not abandoned fancydancing. Nor have they given up on their simpler ones. I have no idea why the blogger feels, like so many critics, it necessary to brandish one against the other. I’m infinitely grateful neither Hemingway nor W.C. Williams ventured to write PARADISE LOST (what a great comedy skit that would make, though only academicians & students would laugh). I’m just as grateful Milton never tried to write THE OLD MAN & THE SEA. (Another great opportunity for humor.) There’s no enmity here; critics have made that up. And there’s no reason not to appreciate Shelley or Keats or Eliot or any other good poet who has worked in a complex mode. It’s literally a negative way–and I would say, a cheap way–of praising simplicity. Which does fine on it’s own.

I’m a fan of Kenne. But calling anything more complex than a simple declarative statement “aesthetic mumbo jumbo” exhibits a closed mind and a unusual poverty of perspective.

Although I used a wonderful quote from Pascal’s PENSEES for my collection of short stories (Adrift in a Vanishing City), I never actually read his PENSEES. I have now read the first 250 or so pages. Previously, I’d seen only a few fragments quoted by other authors (most notably William Barrett in IRRATIONAL MAN, which I read last year). In fact, before reading Barrett, I think I read two or three *sentences* of Pascal, including the one I used for as an epigraph for “Zee Gee and the Blue Jean Baby Queen.” I certainly NEVER saw this:

“We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips away, and flees eternally before us. Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state. We burn with desire to find a firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity …”

I was struck by its similarity to an exchange (in ADRIFT) from a story called “The Northwest Passage” (Pap has a slight lisp):

Pap never … unless at the end there, maybe he came on the [Northwest] passage, which is what took him by the hand along the spirit trail.

It ain’t sho easy, the streets, sometimes they move.

“Pap—?”

I mean don’t you remember ’em bein just a scant different from what yer seein now, ain’t they moved?
“Well Pap who’da thought …? I’m glad you left Farley’s, nothing for you there anyway, you know.”
Some kinda … Farleyz izh shome kinda—but that ain’t the point, the point’s the streets, they’re still runnin east-west or north-south or bending around southeast and whatall, but just maybe they’ve shifted over a bit. This scrag a land we think’s sittin shtill so we can shtand on it, the continents are all afloat adrift awash in the world’s oceans, the earth itself’s ashkew on its axish, headin off with the entire sholar system in its own direction—what’s heavy enough, anchored enough, dug in deep enough not t’be?
“Well I … Farley’s, I guess,” The Duke said, thinking he might’ve understood.
Everythin you know, or jusht think you know, it’s all heaped up, sittin on the waters they used t’think surrounded all the land there is, the earth disk-shaped back then, surrounded by the Great Outer Sea of Boundless Extent. Nothin stays put, memories ain’t where you left em. ‘Less you take the time to arrange ’em, line em up with yer own personal astrolabe so every time you see scorpio rising—her sign—you remember Blue Jean and everythin she is to you.

I’m sure this not cryptamnesia … because I know I never read this bit of Pascal before. If I had, I would have printed it out and framed it.

While Pascal talks about “floating in a medium of vast extent,” Pap says everything’s sitting on the Great Outer Sea of Boundless Extent (this is an actual name I found during my research … taken from the days when cartographers thought one could sail off the edge of the world).

Nothing stands still, Pascal says, Nothin stays put, Pap reiterates. It’s almost eerie.

I find this happens with some regularity when I write and I think it lends credence to a comment Paul West made about the act of writing–it’s more like “trance,” he said.