All Tomorrow’s Parties

There’s a cockroach in my kitchen. We surprise each other in the mornings. By the time I get my slipper, he has maybe one, two moments to live. But he’s faster than me by a millisecond. Just that much and he runs under the cabinet. Gregor, I think, your time will come. Because it will. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day, one day my little friend, the party will be over.

I’m a rather clean person and I prefer a neat and tidy house. But I live by a stream in the tropics. That means the insect life is ubiquitous. So around me, insect death must also be. This is disturbing, of course, because I’d like to be a good Zen Buddhist. I’d like to harm none. And I’m not so arrogant that I can’t imagine myself in Gregor’s position. Wasn’t that Kafka’s point?

We have to be careful when we metamorphose human beings into something else. It’s an old, dark form of magic and, like all sorcery, comes with certain consequences. I think of Circe turning Odysseus’ crew into pigs:

She opened her gleaming doors at once and stepped forth,
inviting them all in, and in they went, all innocence.
Only Eurylochus stayed behind – he sensed a trap…
She ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs,
then she mixed them a potion – cheese, barley
and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine –
but into the brew she stirred her wicked drugs
to wipe from their memories any thought of home.
Once they’d drained the bowls she filled, suddenly
she struck with her wand, drove them into her pigsties,
all of them bristling into swine – with grunts,
snouts – even their bodies, yes, and only
the men’s minds stayed steadfast as before.
So off they went to their pens, sobbing, squealing
as Circe flung them acorns, cornel nuts and mast,
common fodder for hogs that root and roll in mud.

(Odyssey, Book 10, lines 253-268)

She’s a sorceress, certainly, and in some readings an immortal goddess. But in Greek myth, even the gods are subject to the peregrinations of consequence and fate. For example, in later retellings, Circe herself falls in love with Odysseus, a love which, in this story as in life, seems more like a double-bladed sword than a sorcerous wand. Unrequited love is maybe one of the most poisonous, wrenching potions we can drink. And yet I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t voluntarily drink it—only the odd Eurylochus, waiting in the front yard, unwilling to enter, the voice of bitter fear that says, I’d rather feel nothing than go through that.

At first, we think Eurylochus is wise. But he isn’t. Perhaps his voice still echoes in language of post-millennial generations that seem to have given up on romance. But they probably haven’t, at least not as a broad demographic. This despite endless overheated magazine articles about kids not moving out and not developing the social skills of their parents. Say it with me: the kids are alright. Human psychobiology being what it is, they may just be waiting for the right potion in the right bowl, offered by the right sorceress in the right economic circumstances. Circe’s out there, kids. She’s on an island, not on Tinder. And she’s cute. Your destiny might lie more in the realm of sus domesticus than homo sapiens, but I believe in you.

Still, what love could be less requited than one that transforms a human into an animal? Were Odysseus’ men really pigs at heart? Was Circe really that powerful? In Madeline Miller’s retelling, the crewmen of Circe are swine from the start, in essence if not in form. It’s a bad trope that has been part of a long misandrist literary tradition, going back at least as far as John Chrysostom’s homilies on the book of Matthew: “[T]hese men are swine; even as when the pearl is trampled under foot, it is not so trampled, because it is really contemptible, but because it fell among swine.”

The tradition finds its apotheosis in Victorian phobias about men’s sexual needs and the simple binary that takes physicality as the natural province of the devil—the absolute scullery level of Christian morality. But it’s still around and we’ve seen genocidal war propaganda dehumanize people by means of this same metamorphosis. It’s undeniably black magic when political rhetoric transforms a human being into a farm animal or a cockroach to be swatted. Love becomes hate. Man becomes beast. Or worse.

Thankfully, unlike Madeline Miller, Homer leaves the romantic aspect ambiguous. But what do we do? In the transformations of our lives, in every segment of every day, what potions do we drink? What is our human proportionality, our inner ratio of person to creature, especially when love’s “wicked drugs” get involved? And how do we apply this calculus to others?

Literature and popular culture keep asking. William Gibson, creator of the cyberpunk genre, made it about cybernetic implants and the identity dissolution that seems to accompany an overly online existence. But he’s posing the same old questions about human emotion versus human intention. In All Tomorrow’s Parties, he wrote: “[Laney] had always taken it for granted that he possessed some stable core of continuous selfhood, but now he suspected that this might be another of those illusions the node [data] had enabled him to outgrow.” As the character’s humanity gave way to the ethereal grip of digitality, he became less than human. Laney’s desires had outstripped his willingness to acknowledge his own humanity. He’d forgotten himself.

A decade earlier, Mike Pondsmith, in the Cyberpunk roleplaying game, took inspiration from Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer, and created a game rule for it: “When a character installs too much cyberware, they lose ‘Humanity’ points. Drop too low and they succumb to cyberpsychosis—a dissociative state where they become violent, detached from human empathy, and essentially a mindless killing machine.” A clear example of man into beast in a world where machines are fetishistically becoming the object of all desires.

*The replicant owl in Blade Runner. Expensive? Very. And perhaps a late-stage iteration of Uncle Bob. But we like the artificial owl better.*

The implications are inherently Shakespearean. Lear says to Kent, “Come not between the dragon and his wrath” (1.1.124), a transmogrification meant to justify Lear’s uncontrollable rage. In order to act inhumane towards Cordelia, he has to become something inhuman. And so Shakespeare poses one of his perennial questions: where do we locate our humanity? How savage do we want to be to each other by means of such transformations in the service of emotions we don’t fully appreciate or understand? Or, in High Pondsmithian: how many humanity points do we actually have left? How much of myself can I replace before I’m no longer me? And how does that make me feel?

Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” is also deliberately ambiguous on this point, even if it’s central to the story. Did Gregor Samsa become a giant cockroach because of who he essentially was (like Madeline Miller’s men being always-already pigs) or because the importunities of life had slowly replaced his parts, altering his nature, detaching his human empathy until he reached the scullery level of cockroach-psychosis? Of course, Lear was a dangerous king. So naturally, he transformed into a dragon. Gregor Samsa was a lowly clerk, a technician, so naturally . . . Now I hunt Gregor in my kitchen. Though, to someone else, I think I must be Gregor Samsa.

But this was about unrequited love and the inner convolutions that cause us to behave in ways other than human. How much of Circe’s Pramnian wine can I drink before I become an animal? How much emotion can I endure before I forget myself? When do I reach the point at which I say, “I’d rather feel nothing than go through that”? I think most people reach that point sooner than they expect. Maybe the post-Millennials are right.

We think Eurylochus can’t be wise. At least, we don’t want him to be. We look in the mirror and say, “I believe in you.” We affirm the power of love. We like the taste of sorcerous barley wine and ask for seconds. But we don’t know how much we’ve already changed. We don’t anticipate the degree to which our “continuous selfhood” has already been displaced—not through a wraith-like transformation into a digital persona or through a royal draconic invocation, but through the very sad, very human experience of self-forgetting. Because if an immortal goddess can fall in love, she can suffer heartbreak. And if she can, so can we.

Now we wonder about new taxonomies. We ask, “What rough beast am I becoming? Who was I yesterday? And will I forget this pain in some timeless animal life to come? Do I want to forget?” There’s a man standing in the front yard with a bitter look on his face. He seems to know something. I wonder what it is.

Disappearing Act

Like many college kids, I was in a hurry to get my piece of paper. By my last quarter at UC Irvine, I was taking 18 credits, working multiple jobs, and feeling the accelerated decrepitude that comes standard with silly 20-something social timing. I had to hurry up and “start my life.” I don’t blame myself for feeling that way, but it’s funny to remember.

I’m not looking back through time and saying, as a depressed, middle-aged relative once said to me, “After high school, the best times of your life are over.” High school sucked. And college more or less also sucked. But maybe the suction toward the end of my undergraduate years—of intense work, full course loads, worry, and frustration—was a bit less. And maybe in that margin, I brought a lot on myself voluntarily, like taking art classes I didn’t need to graduate.

In a moment of prescience, I thought, after this quarter, I’m never going to have time to take an art class. This is it. I petitioned for the right to take credits past the maximum and got turned down. So I showed up at Dr. Ladaner’s drawing and painting classroom on the first day and said, “They won’t let me take your class for credit. Can I just pretend I’m a student?” He gave me a long look, smiled, and nodded at an empty seat. Ladaner was great.

This is what he taught me. You have to air your work out. You have to let go. You have to be messy. You have to give yourself permission to draw and not erase because the line you draw is the line you draw. You have to accept it. And yourself. It’s the only way to get better.

I still can’t draw. But I took that lesson, which often came wrapped in some pretty harsh language, to heart. It has helped me in everything I’ve written. You have to be willing to make a mess of things. Neatness in the creative process (or really in any process) is, all too often, an expression of counterproductive fear. Ladaner didn’t get upset when we created something that didn’t work. He got upset at pretentiousness and stage fright.

You have to get over yourself, like the nude models we drew around midterms. A few were vampire-exhibitionists, sucking up the attention. But most were highly developed individuals who’d integrated being an artist’s model into their own process. They knew: you have to be willing to let people see you. It’s not about sucking up attention. It’s about exchange. And it’s about knowing how to get out of your own way.

We went outside to draw the cars in the parking lot. Ladaner didn’t tell us anything beyond that. His style: “We’re gonna go out and draw some cars today.” Someone asked, “How should we do it? What should we use?” He smiled and said, “Let’s go.”

So we went. We drew some cars. He did, too. I snuck up behind him and looked. He was using a piece of charcoal, making a wobbly kind of grid. I thought, this doesn’t look like that Toyota over there. It looks like an oversized waffle that dropped down a chimney. But then I realized he wasn’t drawing the cars. He was drawing the negative space between them, the light on the windshields, the shadows of the tires.

He noticed me and said to take a step back, unfocus, squint a little. I did and it all came together. I was impressed. On the way back to the classroom, he tossed it in the trash. That made me feel even more impressed. And I got it. Ladaner always did the assignments he gave us, but he didn’t dwell on his vastly superior technical ability. He was just hanging out, hanging loose, participating. He said, “Draw every day,” because that’s what he did. But he didn’t get hung up on it. He was more like a drummer doing his rudiments.

Years later, I was a writing instructor at a different university and had the privilege of teaching beginning fiction writing to his very quiet, buttoned-down, organized daughter in order to help her fulfill a gen ed requirement. On the first day, when I saw her name, I asked whether there was any relation (this university was in a different state). She said her father was a professor of art at UCI.

After regaining the power of speech, I said to tell him hi from me, that I once sat in on one of his fantastic drawing and painting workshops. She just gave me a look. I don’t think she ever said anything of the sort to him and I didn’t bring it up again. By the 15th week, she had a solid B in my class, only because she missed two assignments. I treated her like everyone else. She was a good student but largely uninterested in creative writing. Still, part of me really wanted to tell her that a lot of what I’d come to believe about the writing process and about life began with her father’s concepts.

Don’t be afraid to draw a wobbly line or write a wobbly sentence. Maybe you can fix it in the mix. When the time comes, maybe you won’t even want to. And maybe, if you’re really into it, you won’t think about yourself at all. That’s when I know I’m doing it right, when I disappear.

I try to have multiple projects going at once. I try not to get too self-conscious or fixated on whether I’m writing well, even though I sometimes can’t help it. A writing teacher of mine put it like this: “A writer can be shy and afraid of anything in life except writing.” So I try to be brave and let the project move through me instead of getting in the way.

In The Creative Act, Rick Rubin points out that we have to approach it with everything that we are: “We begin with everything: everything seen, everything done, everything thought, everything felt, everything imagined, everything forgotten, and everything that rests unspoken and unthought within us.” But it’s better if we’re not conscious of this inner substance. We don’t think, now I’m going to write a sad scene. We write a scene. And if the scene is sad, it’s sad.

Genre fiction writers call this “pantsing” (writing by the seat of one’s pants). They often despise it because the publishing industry does its best to make them deeply anxious about whether their work is marketable. But it’s a lot like making love. You can’t make love if you’re afraid of letting go. You can’t make art if you’re afraid of letting go. You can’t make friends, either. And you definitely can’t make love to artistic friends.

I remind myself: you have to confront uncertainty. You have to allow yourself to get lost, step off the path, forget the editorial style sheet, fall off the outline. You have to disappear.

Actors understand this. Francis Ford Coppola described Gene Hackman’s performance in The Conversation as “the first time I saw Gene truly lose himself. He wasn’t performing; he was unraveling.” Hackman was so immersed in the role, he was able to go off script in a way that squared perfectly with the character. Many of the best scenes in that movie were more like channeling than acting. Then again, at the deepest level, is there really much difference?

Blue Nights

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.

— the opening to Blue Nights by Joan Didion

καπνός μαντεία

That’s the thing with bucket lists. They end. If you’d asked me ten years ago whether I had one, I’d have said I thought they were stupid. I’d have called them products of an increasingly enshitified media-internet convergence, self-help waffle, and that one bad movie. The bucket list concept has always seemed like life-coach hype. But I did have one. I didn’t write it down or post it or engrave it on a thin sheet of marble to hang over my desk, but it was there, implicit, a coil of smoke always turning in my field of vision, a divination only I could read. And it said one thing: hurry up.

So I did. I wanted to publish a book of stories. I published two with a third complete manuscript still out there, tumbling through the maybe-someday abyss. I wanted to learn martial arts. I studied multiple styles. I wanted to teach university writing and wound up teaching it for over two decades, travel the world and live abroad for substantial periods (at least 13 countries to date), and get a PhD (2010, English). For these things, I feel only gratitude—mostly to myself for having had the courage to attempt them, but none of it was accomplished in a vacuum. What did the millennials say twenty years ago? Something, something, the friends we made along the way? I made a few.

But I’m Generation X, where the “X” evokes the old cartoon “wingding eyes,” which are supposed to indicate being “dead or asleep without dreaming. Comical depictions of corpses or ghosts will have their tongues sticking out as well as this. Sometimes, both eyes will combine into a single, longways X. May also be a feature in depictions of clowns.” Sounds about right for Gen-X. Dead. Asleep without dreaming. Corpses, ghosts, clowns. I’m all that, depending on which day of the week you encounter me. Come over on a Sunday afternoon and you get a trifecta. But one of them always has to be “clown.” And the friends I made along the way turned out just the same. Now they’re mostly ghosts.

In classical antiquity, sorcerers would burn sacrifices to gods and spirits of the dead, then practice capnomancy with the smoke, reading it like divine script. Καπνός (kapnos) means “smoke” and μαντεία (manteia) means “seeing,” as in divination or second sight. The bucket list I had was capnomantic in that sense. I was my own burning sacrifice, my own smoke, my own divine message from myself to myself. And the smoke always said time was short. So I needed to do what I needed to do. And it worked out, more or less. It wasn’t much of a list, unless I thought about it for a while and scared myself. But the bucket part ran deep.

And now? Now I peer into my bucket like a child afraid to dive in. Because it seems like I’ve come around, made a perfect circle to where I began. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote, “I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.” A brighter flame for more powerful μαντεία, of course, but in the end it’s all the same. The smoke blows away. After mountains, more mountains. And if you don’t die a hero, you live to carry other people’s ashes, too. So many. A million metric tons of ashes, the remains of the dead that are now your responsibility, their memories, their ghosts. Quite a burden to carry up a mountain trail.

The rim of the bucket makes a perfect circle. Wobbling on the edge, I try to grip with my toes. The mountains are watching. Smoke twists above my head like a thin snake. You ask me what the gods and spirits said in its coils. And I tell you to be patient. Just wait a little longer. I’m still burning.

On Loneliness

I finished a short story draft this morning before dawn. I don’t know if I’m going to post it here, but I’m definitely sending it to magazines once I edit it. That’s what it’s like to be a writer. You sit alone at a desk in the early morning or late into the night, making a world from the stuff in your head. You never know if you’re good. You never know if the responses you get (if any) are accurate or truthful. You’re completely alone in every way that matters. And, when you aren’t, you still are. Amateurs say “writing community” and the real artists give a little side-eye. Sure, sure, the writing community. That’s great. Now excuse me, I, uh, gotta be somewhere.

When you’re finished and the draft is as good as it’s going to get, you put it into the Submittable churn or email it to a magazine editor. If you’re a big deal or trying to pretend that you are, you send it to an agent or a manager, the beneficent industry parasites who are supposed to make everything easier but who can’t until you make it easier for yourself and don’t need them. Most of them don’t understand anything about sitting at the table in the dark.

And then your story, which is weirdly no longer connected to you, does its own thing out in the wild, cycling through the picayune innards of small-press publishing—the ugly Rube Goldberg literary digestion machine, glimpsed imperfectly at a distance and kind of stupid, mean, and silly all at at once. But by then you don’t care. You’re already on to another project.

A professor of mine once said, without early childhood loneliness, there’d be no one majoring in English. But I say, without lifelong loneliness, there’d be no one writing short stories or poems at 4:00 AM at the kitchen table. Or maybe I’ve got it backwards. Maybe without the stories, there wouldn’t be a cold, empty house. There wouldn’t be darkness and the need to imagine you are somewhere else. There wouldn’t be regret and the bitter absence of everyday joys that others take for granted. Because this is what you get, what everyone gets. This is the price for being able to make art.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic. Some days, I think so. On the worst days, not. Like when Vincent Hanna asks Neil McCauley in the legendary diner scene in Heat, “So you never wanted a regular type life, huh?”And Neil answers, “What the fuck is that? Barbecues and ball games?” And all Vincent can say, because it’s true, is “Yeah.”

Somebody asks me why I’ve been a wanderer all my life. Someone asks me what it is I actually do. And I have a variety of thought-stopping answers prepared. Because I don’t understand barbecues and ball games. I don’t understand normal life and day jobs, even though I’ve nearly always had one in which I wear a convincing man suit, function more or less effectively, and run a reasonable simulation of humanity.

A big part of the price is alienation, is becoming a weirdo, but that might be a chicken-egg thing. Would you have accepted this lifestyle if you weren’t already weird? When I was a kid, I spent most of my time alone, even when I was at school, especially when I was at school, making up stories. In college, the same. In law school, the same. In graduate school, the same. In fact, stories were what yanked me out of law school and full-on into the world of creative writing. Was I writing the stories or were the stories writing me?

James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” And that also seems true. But then I think, would I be reading so much if I hadn’t already walked away from the barbecues and ball games? Shit, man, I didn’t even go in the stadium. I didn’t even get through the parking lot. A weird goth bus full of theater kids got me and I wound up smoking weed on a rooftop, asking is this where it’s at? And concluding, no, this isn’t. This is just another ball game. Where it’s at was back home in my room in my imagination. And now it’s at the kitchen table five days a week a few hours before I have to go interact with the general population.

Loneliness does strange and awful things. When we can’t share who we are or what we do in a meaningful way, something starts to rot and twist. And it never untwists. It just keeps twisting and rotting and twisting. You look at yourself one morning, at the shadows in your face, and ask, is this what I am? A creature of the night? You think, I’d rather be a night-blooming flower than a cockroach. But it’s all of a piece.

You’re a member of the class of beings that takes meaning in absence, in solitude, in the unnatural silence of the world asleep. But you’re not asleep. In fact, it’s the only time you’re fully awake. And so one comes to understand, to see oneself, in the figure of the moth, the vampire, the possum, the spider, the blossom at the end of a branch nodding in the wind, all the carnivora that wait for nightfall while the wide world pounds by overhead. The moon is their sun. And yours.

As I sit at my desk, like I did this morning and the morning before that and the morning before that, building artificial realities out of words, I often wonder what it’s like to lead a regular type life. “No such thing,” someone said to me recently, but he doesn’t know. He’s a weirdo, too.

I got up last week and the words wouldn’t come. So I went for a run and wound up walking through the neighborhood, hearing wind chimes, looking at yellow rectangles of distant windows. I watched black water twist under a bridge and felt the first drops of morning rain. No one was awake. No one looked out at the shape of a man standing still on a bridge in the dark, listening.

A Story About the Body

by Robert Hass

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept them from the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.

Midnight Thoughts: Crimes, Mistakes, and the Spaces Between Us

1. Which side of the glass?

I once went to a prison in California with a public defender named Neil to meet with one of his clients, a murderer. Neil was about 55 years old and I was 21 or 22, his legal assistant. This was mid-1990s and, for me, a summer job. Neil was also one of the wisest people I’d ever met or ever would meet. And one of his greatest professional achievements was keeping this man off death row.

The client was a former physician and his crime hadn’t been sensational enough to merit more than a blip on the news, but he was going to be in prison for life (instead of executed, thanks to Neil). This was way before the federal court order against capital punishment in the state. Back then, people like this only had people like Neil. And we may think, as I did at the time, too bad. He did the crime. He should pay. But I don’t think like that anymore.

We talked with the client for about 30 minutes. I remember him being articulate and personable, if a little twitchy. He wanted to know how his ex-wife was doing (because she, understandably, never visited him in prison). He didn’t want to talk about his case (though Neil insisted) or prison life (though Neil insisted). He wanted to show us his pen-and-ink drawings, which actually looked good. None of them were violent or about prison. All were from his memory of a life before, a life he couldn’t manage, a self he couldn’t control. They were simple scenes, a young man sitting on a bench, a horse, a balloon caught in power lines, a fountain in the park.

When we left, I remember feeling a bit sad. Neil wanted to know what I thought of the guy and I said as much. I said something like it’s strange how one person commits a crime and another doesn’t, how one person winds up in a cell for life and another lives free to age 90. And Neil said that was exactly right. It is strange. And there isn’t an answer to that question or a reason why.

I remember him saying, “Anyone can do anything at any time” and “The only thing that puts him on that side of the glass and us on this side is he did the thing and got caught.” But lots of people do the thing and don’t get caught. And lots of people get caught but never did the thing at all. And that’s why Neil was a public defender. The legal system, according to Neil, is inherently asymmetrical and perverse. I think the term he used is, “really fucked up.”

We all know this, even those who do their best to maintain the system. The law is made up of words, good policy intentions, and best possible premises. We like to imagine it’s a divine mandate, but it isn’t. Words can change. Intentions can change. Premises can shift. So we need to think about what right and wrong really mean, about mistakes and imperfections, about unrecoverable errors and the people who commit them.

We need to remember that the killer was once a child who liked comic books and wonder what brought him from that to being the worst sort of criminal. We need to mourn the victim and try as best we can to redress the harm; though, we know some crimes cannot be redressed. And we need to levy pressure on the system to make it work right so that there can be something approximating justice.

Neil always said, “There isn’t much difference between him and us.” I had a hard time accepting that. But having lived a lot and having seen a lot of different people in my life, I’m beginning to think that we are all equal in the end. As the saying goes, at the end of the game, the pawn and the king go in the same box. When I think back to that, now I hear Neil saying, because he is us, even though I don’t think he actually ever said those exact words.

2. Useful Fictions

There’s no way to tell whether the things we do, feel, or become arise from internal or external causes. Ultimately, there probably isn’t much separation between anything. It’s almost trite to quote Yeats’ “Among Schoolchildren,” but he seems insightful when he writes, “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

We can’t. Dancer and dance must always be one. And the circumstances of the dancer-dance. And the time it happened. And the cultural and historical moment and everything else. Nothing is separate. Everything emerges as part of everything else and recedes back into that all-encompassing whole. As some schools of Buddhism term it: “interdependent co-arising.” Dancer-dance, criminal-crime, dancer-crime, criminal-dance, dancing you, dancing me, one side of the glass or the other. We have to wonder about best possible premises and words and good intentions because, in the end, we cannot tell where one thing begins and another ends.

To have social order, there must be social accountability; however, in an absolute sense, nothing is truly personal. The mistakes we make are imminently human. And our achievements come about as much from an accident of time, space, and disposition as they do from intentional, willed action. Sure, we like to own our achievements and hide our mistakes. But in the end: the pine box.

3. Mention Me When They Ask You What Happened

If we become what we do, what we do must also circumscribe, interpenetrate, and inform us before and after we do it. That’s a convoluted way of saying there is no beginning, no end to who we are. Therefore, drawing distinctions between dancer and dance, between actor and action, seems like we’re creating a useful fiction—a way of seeing that helps us focus on one thing or another at the expense of the whole.

In this light, asking for forgiveness does no good. What happened took place because of us, because of everything within and around us, because of what came before us and what shall come after, and because of what is always emerging and passing away beyond our awareness but still within phenomenon of our lives.

Who can tell the dancer from the dance? Not me. Whatever happened is now an indestructible figment of all life everywhere and for all time. The error, the mistake exists. It is a fact of life. And you can’t make it un-exist no matter how much you wish you could. Forgiveness is pointless. Penance is a waste. Retribution must be, too. Where does that leave justice? Maybe it’s just another useful fiction, another way of keeping everyone as calm as possible while the minutes and days tick by.

Of course, we regret our mistakes when hindsight seems to make everything clear, but even that is a perspective trapped in space and time. If clarity depends on where we’re standing, it’s not true clarity, is it? Regret seems like that, a coin glimpsed at the bottom of a pail of muddy water. Do you see the truth? Are you sure? What’s down there, really? And why are you feeling this way about it?

We feel a certain way now because of what we think happened then. We can’t simply feel things in themselves; we never emote in a vacuum. Our errors, misapprehensions, insights, and revelations depend on context. Like folk healers who believed in the Doctrine of Signatures—essentially that divinity “wrote” the true name of a thing in its essence, shaping it according to its properties—we must believe that the world around us and the things moving through it mean something. Maybe we believe this just to stay sane in an insane world.

As Frankl might say, life asks us what the meaning of it is. And it’s our responsibility to come up with the answer. Whether our answer is mistaken or not is beside the point. How could we ever truly make a mistake if our perception of the world emerges from our experience, which is mostly out of our control? Like the Zen master who celebrated his long prison sentence because it was just like the monastery and provided time and space for him to practice, all we can do is bear witness to the moments of our lives and accept that even the act of bearing witness depends on who we are, where we are, how we are.

In this light, we might find that our thoughts are thinking us; our words are speaking us; our actions are doing us as much as we are doing them. And so we may find it far better to offer forgiveness than ask for it. With this insight, in order to pass judgment on anyone, we would have to acknowledge that there really is no separation between us and them.

If you understand the other, you understand yourself. If you understand yourself, you understand everything, which is another way of saying, judge someone and you judge yourself along with them. We are every criminal and every victim. We are the leaf that falls from the tree and the blade of grass on which it lands. As Luc Sante writes at the end of the “Unknown Soldier,” which is a prose poem about this idea: “Think of me when you run out of money. Remember me when you fall on the sidewalk. Mention me when they ask you what happened. I am everywhere under your feet.”

A Reason for the Screaming

“Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved; in this love, you are like a knife with which I explore myself.”

― Letters to Milena, Kafka

My favorite people are the broken ones, the messy ones, those who speak before they think, who seem to breathe in experience and breathe out emotion, who make glaring mistakes, who embarrass themselves and still manage to be kind. I especially love those who have the presence of mind to be otherwise, but who affirmatively choose a way of being that accentuates their flaws and uncertainties, because they seem to have discovered other, more valuable things on which to spend their energy. Such people are beautiful and far too rare. They also seem to suffer more than most people, as they explore themselves, not with a flashlight, but with a scalpel.

I don’t mean to imply online performative awkwardness, which is a deliberate style (almost a form of marketing) that ultimately comes across as studied, cynical, and inauthentic. I’m not talking about anything created in a book publicist’s brainstorming session or by an agency trying to associate social justice with light beer. Nor am I talking about those who suffer from the sort of social anxiety, shyness, or autism that painfully prevents them from experiencing a full range of human experience.

Rather, I mean to point out the sort of person who calls herself “Ursula the Bear Shaman” and stands up among scientists at an ecological conference to give George Monbiot a stern talking to (as actually happened); the eccentric professor who’s willing to be laughed at by his students in order to induce suspension of disbelief and thereby dramatize his subject matter; the daughter of a poet friend who can’t speak to men without first criticizing them up front (bizarre and off-putting but actually very amusing when you come to expect it); or an amateur stand up comedian I know, who isn’t funny but who keeps trying. I’d never discourage him because it’s the trying that interests me, not the flat jokes. It’s the decision to try, the choice one makes to discard certain social mores, that I find compelling.

We shake our heads. Such people are trying—trying our patience. We want to say, “Boundaries are good. Boundaries are important. Close your mouth. Open your eyes and ears. Learn what’s appropriate. And please do not stand on that part of the carpet. You’re messing it up.” But I think that’s shortsighted. People are generally lovely, creative, and endearing. But, like flowers, they need the right conditions to demonstrate this. Deep breath. Sometimes, you can smell them at a distance, for better or worse.

Even when they’re being petty, resentful, cruel, egotistical, or otherwise ugly, there can be an aesthetic to it, a shape to their behavior that causes you to say (or maybe just to think), “Yes, you are a repugnant, perhaps loutish, perhaps unnecessarily hysterical, perhaps wrongly jealous, perhaps hypocritical, perhaps exhausting individual, but you’re doing it so well. Bravo!” And, of course, when they (and we) get tired of playing those roles, we can play others. The script is endless. The cast is as big as the world. At some point, we think everyone will choose to play the holy fool. It’s a favorite role of mine.

Certainly there are creeps and degenerates, those whose brokenness has rendered them toxic or harmful. We don’t want them hurting people because they lack self control. We don’t want their tiresome problems always within our field of vision unless we’re being paid by the social panopticon to supervise them in some way. As a friend once said about a strict Zen temple that seemed packed with angry obsessive-compulsives deeply concerned that their arm hairs and the fibers on their trousers all pointed the same way, “Some people just need a prison cell to feel right.” If one is not provided for them, maybe they’ll create one by virtue of their actions or in their existing groups. That’s not the sort I’m talking about, either.

My favorite people aren’t trying to consume or enslave others. They’re not abusers or parasites. It’s hard to love a parasite, which is one of the fundamental messages of the traditional vampire myth. The vampire might look young and beautiful, but it’s actually a corpse that wants to drink your blood to perpetuate its wretched antisocial existence. And so, like all folk myths, it presents the audience with a cautionary choice: go for the pretty, superficial thing that will undo you or accept the harsh truth.

Sadly, harsh-truth-accepting can also become reified into a self-defeating, self-righteous personal style, where we don latex Oliver Cromwell masks and get off on shutting down the theaters. If we can’t have our own fun, maybe we can ruin everyone else’s as a kind of anti-fun and that will be almost as satisfying as the genuine article, like drinking someone’s blood just to keep shambling along to the next victim. Accepting reality (or a reality) is a good thing, but performing the Person Who Faces Hard Truths is back to selling light beer for equity and inclusion while auditioning for The Witch.

I’m trying to describe the sort of person who has dispensed with many, if not most, social filters, but who has done so in a conscious way. This makes me think of the Egyptian deity, Set, who was the god of foreigners and some say an ancient symbol for the conscious mind. Being conscious is more than just being deliberate. In a Viktor Frankl will-to-meaning sense, it’s accepting the deep existential responsibility of investing life with depth and purpose. In Man’s Search for Meaning (one of my favorite books), Frankl provides what might be the most useful (if existentialist) definitions of consciousness ever formulated:

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

That’s more than mere deliberation. That’s a one-pointed engagement with experience. It’s the heart of mindfulness. It’s “be here now” taken to an inevitable, ontological extreme. It’s a rejection of social vampirism and an acceptance of a type of transpersonal imperative focused on the individual. When I see this image of Horus and Set advising Ramesses III, I see the tension of social appropriateness versus individual consciousness, like the superego versus the id, resonant in the mind.

On the left, Horus, the ultimate pharaoh, the embodiment of the State (the state of affairs) and its collective moral, social, even municipal will. And on the right, Set, whose therianthropic form has never been conclusively defined because consciousness is protean and ultimately beyond type.

Here, one thinks Ramesses III must be faced with the core Frankl-ian problem: “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” There’s what the group (the State, the state of affairs in one’s life) dictates. Then there’s what the individual’s conscious mind has deemed important.

In this essay, I’m celebrating those who lean a little away from Horus and a little more towards Set, a little away from what they think they should be thinking and doing and a little more towards meaning. So even if, as the Smashing Pumpkins sang in 1997, “The world is a vampire/ sent to drain,” transforming us into angry rats in cages, let’s be quality angry rats.

I was going to send Andrew Marvell’s brilliant “To His Coy Mistress,” another favorite, to a literary friend of mine today because I have no doubt this person—being the good sort I’m talking about here—would read it and appreciate it. Instead, I’ll excerpt the last few lines for everyone who reads this essay—because it applies to all of us leaning away from the Horus of propriety towards the Set of conscious meaning, saying, doing, and appreciating what matters most instead of what merely passes.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Allow Yourself to be Hurt

For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession he will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophecy. Therefore, because it’s not by mastery that they make poems or say many lovely things about their subjects (as you do about Homer)—but because it’s by a divine gift—each poet is able to compose beautifully only that for which the Muse has aroused him. . . .

That’s why God takes their intellect away from them when he uses them as his servants, as he does prophets and godly diviners, so that we who hear should know that they are not the ones who speak those verses that are of such high value, for their intellect is not in them: the god himself is the one who speaks, and he gives voice through them to us.

Ion, Plato

I’ve taught fiction writing at multiple universities since 1998. And, if I taught it now, I would seem prescient to a group of beginning writing students. I’ve heard their complaints, witnessed their anxieties, seen their mistakes, and helped them through these things hundreds of times. It can seem like ESP.

Just as a karate instructor can predict what you’ll do in sparring (because the human body can only move a set number of ways), I can usually predict what my students will do in their first stories. There are only so many dramatic moves and so many ways to convey those moves in a kumite of eight pages.

I say: “Write a five-to-eight-page story from a single point of view in a human or human-like protagonist, who struggles and changes before the end.” Sometimes, I add, “Alternately, write the story so that he, she, or it misses the last chance to change and, in the process, reveals something, which is, believe it or not, tantamount to another mode of change.” I tell them all dramatic perspectives flow into each other and that all voices and moods are ultimately one voice and mood. I tell them that singularity is what they’re here to discover.

These ideas don’t completely make sense. They don’t need to. They only need to sit in the class notes, radioactive, nagging, hopefully prodding the students into exploring for themselves because I believe that’s the only way to learn. There are no canned answers. We might talk about principles and realizations, which is what I do when I teach, but the paths to those principles and realizations must be idiosyncratic. In art, especially in the art of writing, there is only that aforesaid singularity. There are only individual discoveries. There’s only going out of your mind.

In the first workshop critique meeting, some students won’t show. Others will come ready for a fight. Others, will drag themselves in, ready to weep. A few will arrive looking for validation. I’ll say nothing and let the workshop do most of the critiquing, which will inevitably frustrate everyone.

Where’s the teaching? What are we paying you for? They’ll come to me after class and may be too polite to ask those exact questions, but they’ll want to know if their story was successful (which usually means marketable, because marketing is all they know at that point). They’ll want to know if they’ve “got it.”

“I don’t know,” I’ll say. “Have you got it? Where is it? Where’s it hiding? Your back pocket? Let me check. It’s not in mine . . . “

Davis is an asshole, I’ll read on their faces. Just give me the answer. Give me the formula, the template, the winning structure, the marketable, unobjectionable subject matter that will make people love and accept me as a creative person.

I’ll ask them what their creative project is. What emotional experience are they trying to create inside the limits I already proposed? Because good short fiction is prose that moves you in some way, on some level, within certain constraints. Moving the reader means moving yourself. Moving yourself means attaining the inspiration that Plato talks about in Ion. It means feeling those emotions. It means getting your criticizing mind out of the way. But I don’t say, “Plato” or “Ion” because they haven’t read it and generally wouldn’t if I recommended it.

To the complete beginners, I say, “Try this exercise and tell me what you discover.” To the ones a little more advanced, I talk about losing one’s mind. But I don’t say it like that. I always have to make sure to speak in language they can understand and accept. I recommend that they read according to their interests. I stress the library. I don’t say, “Make yourself vulnerable. You gain nothing by playing it safe except more of the same.” I don’t say, “The secret of powerful fiction writing is that the fiction writer must change.”

Most beginning fiction writers can’t tell me what their creative project is, which is the problem at the root of all their other complaints, anxieties, false starts, and mistakes. I learned this in a workshop run by Amy Bloom, who said I needed to write enough to know what I was writing about. If I didn’t have a sense of that emotion, my reader wouldn’t, either. She was a great teacher. Many of the things she said in the critiques of my writing helped me develop a writing and teaching style, which is mine, not hers, which is the point. There is no winning formula. There is only you, the page, and that thing coming through you.

So how do my students typically discover this—I mean, the brave ones who stick around? The cowards rest on the Davis is an asshole realization and put their paperwork in before the semester drop date, which is also very good. Maybe they go add a course in leisure studies or social ecology. May they be happy and multiply. This isn’t for them.

The ones who want to know give themselves permission to experience this pain. They allow themselves to be hurt, to become vulnerable, to suffer such that the emotion has its way with them. That’s their project. Good actors do this. Writers do this. Other artists can work this way, too, but we mostly imagine actors and writers, people wrapped up in a dramatic process. Because this is drama, the essence of it. This is not intellectual scholarship. This is becoming possessed.

Allow yourself to be hurt. Drop all your boundaries, shields, rationalizations, barriers, and evasions. Drop your training, conformity, and desire for approval. Drop your fucking achievements. Drop what you think should be. Make yourself vulnerable if you want to feel something. Then you become powerful in proportion to that. It’s one of the core paradoxes of art—the more blood you offer on the Muse’s altar, the more she returns to you. The greatest artists offer nearly all of themselves. The easier and more pleasant you try to make it, the more numb you’ll feel, the more you’ll start to think about marketability, the worse writer you’ll become, the more frustrated, rigid, and bewrayed by what you’ve given and the choices you’ve made.

The ones who find this truth on their own always want to talk with me about it, usually towards the end of a semester. They come with a certain look on their faces—I found this true thing, but it’s been hard, and I’m a little shaky. And I tell them yes, that’s it. Then I ask them what their project is and they can answer. I used to talk with them about it over drinks, which seemed to make it a little easier.

In the best creative writing class I ever taught (Western Michigan University, 2009), one of the most gifted students I’ve ever had explained the whole thing spontaneously to me in her own language, because she found it on her own. Then she said, “It seems to me that this vulnerability applies to other parts of life, too.”

“Interesting observation,” I said.

Love

I’ve got a lot on my mind these days. New concerns. New friends. The world ticking down like a schizophrenic clock to redemption and armageddon, grief and mania all at once. The possibility of love. The verity of hate. Truth and consequences, the “or” taken out of everything.

I watched Charlie Kirk’s murder over and over. I watched Iryna Zarutska’s murder over and over. An ex-Marine said, “If you’re taking public transit, just don’t sit down.” I repeated this to a co-worker and he nodded at the wisdom of it. But you can acknowledge wisdom and affirm that you’re never, in any minute of all the days between this moment and the cessation of your pulse, going to practice it.

My co-worker will sit because he’s tired at the end of the day; there’s no parking downtown; and, like all of us, he often takes the bus. I like him very much and I hope he never has to regret sitting in front of an insane man with a folding knife. I would have hoped that for Iryna Zarutska, too. I’d hope that for anyone.

My drama is far less compelling, thankfully. Last night I had a sore throat and sinus cold. Every time I lay down in bed, I felt like I was suffocating. I finally said, “Fine. There’s reading I can be doing. There’s tea I can be drinking. There’s the novel draft like digging a tunnel through the center of the earth with a spoon. There’s morning Zazen. There’s the sun coming up while I sit and wonder about the ratio of cups of coffee to workday hours.” And as I said, so it came to pass.

Neem Karoli Baba (aka, “Maharaji”), Ram Dass’ guru is famous for saying, “Love everyone and always tell the truth.” As much as I’ve enjoyed reading Ram Dass’ books and listening to his lectures, I’ve mostly been a student of the “Paying back is a virtue” school of ethical compensation with a little “It’s impossible to love everyone and you shouldn’t try” thrown in for flavor. But lately, I’ve been rethinking this.

Given the high weirdness and unpleasantness of the news, I’ve begun to think that one either loves everyone or no one. There’s no halfsies possible, since there is no objective basis for who we choose to love. We’re actually not in fine control of that—no “or,” no meaningful choice there, either. We love who we love. We like who we like. And our greatest deepest loves, like our greatest deepest hatreds, must always be ever-unfolding mysteries. But is there a way to love more, to reach the ideal such that, at least for now, we’re a bit less hypocritical in our preferences?

Sometimes, the hardest person to love is ourselves, since the enigma of the self is the deepest puzzle of all. Like a tide pool, it has layers that stretch down into our being. Like a bottomless pit, it can be terrifying. And yet we have to go exploring down there. At some point, we have to look in the mirror and say, “I love you” or “I hate you” and stick to that. We can’t say, “I love you now, but I’ll hate you later” because, as Maharaji says, we also have to tell the truth.

In Polishing the Mirror, Ram Dass writes about being angry:

I said to [Maharaji], “Well, you told me to tell the truth, and the truth is I don’t love everyone.” He leaned close to me—like nose to nose and eye to eye—and very fiercely he said, “Love everyone and tell the truth.”

I started to say, “But …” and at that point the whole rest of that sentence became self-evident to me. He was saying, “When you finish being who you think you are, this is who you will be.” I was thinking I was somebody who couldn’t love everyone and tell the truth. He was saying, “Well, when you give that one up, I am still here, and the game is very simple. Love everyone and tell the truth.” . . . I saw that the only reason I got angry was because I was holding on to how I thought it was supposed to be.

I am not as wise as Ram Dass. I can say I don’t believe I’m somebody who can love everyone. But the only non-hypocritical alternative—to hate everyone—is perhaps even more impossible for me. Maybe I haven’t traveled down into the layers of my inner tide pool far enough. Maybe admitting this is the only way to at least tell the truth as I understand it right now.

Lately, I have been hanging out with a group of librarians, some of the kindest, sweetest well-meaning people I’ve known in a long time. They’re setting a powerful example for me. But, around them, I often feel like a Russian in the synagogue, like my inner darkness could never make it possible for me to be like that and still express my truth.

This morning, I practiced Zazen at sunrise. I quietly chanted the Heart Sutra, which I have not done in a long time, for Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk, not because of who they were or who they weren’t, but because a Zen master once said to me, “Maybe, in another life, I am you and you are me.”

It’s entirely possible. Maybe, when I finish being who I think I am, I’ll be able to say whether I believe that or not. Who will I be then? Maybe I will be Iryna Zarutska or Charlie Kirk or you.