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.

Words and the Reunification of Words

College. I won an award from the German Department: “Most Improved Student of German,” oder Der Deutschlerner mit den Größten Fortschritten. Or something like that. It was an award for good character and endurance rather than achievement, a participation trophy given to students like me.

Students like me: generally those whose families didn’t have villas in Bavaria. My family had a villa in east San Diego on Cherokee Avenue and we had German Shepherds, but it wasn’t the same. Maybe I couldn’t afford to go on any of the sponsored international trips. Maybe I couldn’t manage to learn the language in any functional sense. But I had a pulse and was willing to sign up, course after course. Hence, “Most Improved Student of German.”

The German Department at UC Irvine needed students to keep taking German. So the Department sought to develop a novel pedagogical strategy: encouragement. Deployed effectively, it was intended to keep those of us at the bottom of every class ranking (the German Department wanted to be encouraging, but it would not give up its internal student ranking system) from becoming too hopeless and depressed.

But I soon understood that if your father was a diplomat and you spent your summers in Berlin, you wouldn’t need such help. Sandra von Hayden’s father, for example, really was a diplomat. She liked to ask me what in the world I thought I was doing in German. She sat next to me, quarter after quarter, from German I up through Post-WWII Literature B, asking versions of that question, until I realized that her constant rudeness was a mode of flirtation. Unfortunately or fortunately, the realization came too late. I mostly pretended she didn’t exist. But later I’d ask myself, “What in the world do you think you’re doing here?”

There was the aristocratic Belgian kid, Benji, who knew Jerry Garcia and a bunch of other celebrities and politicians, sad black-dress-wearing Lena, and cheerful Day-Glo anime lunchbox Cindy Chang, who was quite possibly the only German student worse than me. I recall some Swiss kid, living in Huntington Beach, who was trying to be a surfer dude for a year, and a gorgeous Italian exchange student who seemed to already know ten languages and was now studying Russian and German at the same time. I also have a vague memory of an older Canadian guy, who kept asking people to call him “Grumpy Bear” (Mürrischer Bär); though, the reason for that is lost to time.

The teacher, Herr Steiner, called me “Herr Davis” because of my constant comical seriousness and constant comical mistakes. He called Cindy, “Immer-spät Cindy” because of her constant comical lateness. Together, Cindy Chang and I were the two comical North Americans studying German in North America. I don’t remember the other students. When I think about those years, many things are blurry because I was trying to write a science fiction novel and I believed that required industrial-sized bales of marijuana and a comparable amount of alcohol.

Still, I got As in nearly all of my classes, including the ones in German. I studied hard during the week. On the weekends, I worked on my novel about a scientist who develops a process for communicating with an alien intelligence inherent in metals and then applies it to the iron in human blood. He becomes a kind of prescient vampire, someone who knows things that should not be known. I never finished the first draft, but I worked on it for a long time. On certain blurry evenings, I allowed myself to think it was brilliant.

But back to Bavaria. Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Munich. Shopping in Bonn. Hiking in the Black Forest. Concerts in gowns and tuxedos with Vati und Mutti. Such things were closed to me and, now that I think back on it, I’m pretty sure that was good. I wouldn’t be the questionable character that I am today if I’d been that respectable at age 19.

I should have taken Spanish and eventually I did. But I felt obsessed with German. And I am constitutionally incapable of stopping once I develop an obsession. The world gave me subtle hints—sometimes not-so-subtle hints—that I should quit while I was behind. But I am stubborn and prone to saying, “No, fuck that. I’ll do what I want,” even if I have to say it in a language I don’t fully understand.

Lean days. I didn’t own a computer. The UCI humanities library still had a glass room full of typewriters and one could see students in there, applying correction tape to their term papers every November. I had an IBM Selectric that my pot friend, Kyle, stole for me out of a car, and a Brother word processor with a LED screen half as big as your phone. I couldn’t afford the ink cartridges for the Brother. More often than not, it was the Selectric, which overheated every two hours. So that was my weekend work method: write for two hours, smoke, read, write for two more hours.

But the German Department award came with two interesting prizes. One was Wörter und die Wiedervereinigung der Wörter, a book of poems by Hans-Jost Frey, and $500. I should have bought a better Selectric at a yard sale and saved the rest of the money, but I believe I’ve established the sort of decisions I was making at that point in my life. Instead, I went to Sears because they were having a sale on used Packard Bell computers.

Little did I know that Packard Bells are historically regarded as some of the worst computers ever made. I didn’t know a thing about computers. I just thought, this is what I need to finish the novel. And, of course, once I completed my novel, everything would change. I had big dreams. All it would take was a little more perseverance, a little more fuck that.

I also didn’t know that the cleared-out area next to the garden section where they had the used computers on display was staffed by two guys getting paid on commission. I hadn’t yet explored the world of retail sales and had no idea what brutal exigencies of fate could cause a 30-year-old man named Ted to have to work in Sears, next to a wall of lawnmowers, selling the worst computers ever made.

He had supernaturally bad dandruff. I’ll never forget it. At first, I thought it was a white speckled design on the shoulders of his blazer. This was, after all, 1993, and you could still see styles like that from the the 80s.

Ted said, “Hey dude,” and we shook hands in front of a shelf of assembled Packard Bell systems. They were being offered as packages: computer, printer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and I think some kind of plastic desktop organizer for pens and paperclips. $400 for each bundle.

We stood in the green garden show area, breathing the fertilizer from one aisle over, and nodded in mutual appreciation. This was it. I was going to be one of those people who owned a computer. I was a serious man now. I felt like I was one step away from having a cream business card with WRITER embossed on it.

Ted rattled off a number of technical details and I nodded like I understood. In fact, I’d expected nothing less. It had a modem inside it, you see, so you didn’t have to buy that idiotic phone receiver cradle that everybody knew about because we’d seen pictures of them in magazines. No, this was a Packard Bell. And that meant you could use this program called “Mosaic” to get on this other thing called the “Internet,” where everything was free. And, Ted grinned, you could see titties. So many titties. “Am I right?”

I felt over-stimulated. I grinned back and said, “Right!” not really understanding what he meant. I knew generally about titties but had no idea about the internet or how the two might work together. I was a babe in the woods, a foal in the meadow, a kitten of the universe taking his very first steps onto the windowsill of consequence. Titties, you say? Internal modem? Why this is precisely the reason I came to patronize your fine establishment, my good sir.

Ted and I had obviously become the best of friends, which is why, in the process of ringing me up, he felt he needed to mention that the system clock didn’t “work perfect” and there was “something up” with the floppy drive. But, really, I’d chosen the best model there. Really. I was gonna love it. He knew I would.

When I got to the parking lot, where Kyle was waiting in my ancient Chevy Blazer, I realized I was an idiot. He stepped out, coughed 100 times, waved smoke out of the car, and squinted. “You just bought that with the money?” he said to the giant cardboard box that had once held an orange ceramic planter. He said it as if “that” were something incomprehensible and yet horribly depressing. And in that moment, I realized he was right. It was both of those things. I turned on my heel and went back to the garden center.

Ted wasn’t as happy to see me when I walked back in. When I told him I wanted to return it, he looked even less happy.

“You can’t do this to me,” he said.

“I want to return it.”

“You can’t return it. It’s used.”

“I’ve got the receipt you just gave me. It says I can return it within 30 days.”

“No, you can’t. That’s not right.”

At that moment, Ted’s colleague, a very thin man with hard eyes, who looked like he should have been manning the desk of a motel with hourly rates, shot Ted a glance and said, “Yes, actually, he can.”

Ted looked at him and seemed like he was about to cry. Then he looked back at me from behind the sales counter and said, “My mother’s in the hospital. I need this.”

And I said something like, “Why don’t you buy her a Packard Bell?” At which point, he gave me a look like he wanted to stab me with one of the garden section’s hedge clippers and processed my return.

I dropped Kyle off and gave him $20 for coming with me to Sears—because unless he was stealing something for you out of the goodness of his heart, Kyle never did anything for free—and went home feeling twitchy and strange. I’d never had that much money at one time in my life and I felt like I’d almost given it away to a pathological liar with dandruff.

On Monday, I was back in Deutschstunde, watching Sandra von Hayden field strip and meticulously clean the inside of her mechanical pencil with a Q-tip. She noticed me watching and mouthed, “What the fuck?” I gave her an empty stare and turned back to the documentary Herr Steiner was showing on the development of the Saxon dialect. Unfortunately, the documentary was in Saxon and even the Italian exchange student was having a rough go of it.

Immer-spät Cindy was, unsurprisingly, spät. When she sat down on the other side of me, she whispered, “What’d I miss, huh?” and Sandra glared at her.

“They’re speaking Saxon,” I said.

“What in the hell is that?”

I’d noticed that Cindy had recently started to wear fewer florescent items and pepper her language with profanity, which vaguely saddened me.

“It’s a dialect.”

“Herr Davis?” said Herr Steiner.

And I whispered, “Sorry.”

That night or maybe the night after, I would attempt to read some poems from Hans-Jost Frey’s book about words and how they get reunified and how this was like the reunification of Germany. I’d succeed enough to understand how far I still had to go. I still had the Selectric. I planned to buy 10 Brother ink cartridges. Maybe that weekend, I’d give Kyle a $20 to keep me company on a trip to a print shop where I could get some business cards made. Cream. Embossed.

What if?

My fellow fiction writers, I’m not asking you to accept this, just to entertain it: what if you engaged in less self-promotion and diverted a little more energy to the substance of your writing?

What if you read more of what you love and also made sure to read some poetry? What if you stepped out from behind your shield of irony, self-consciousness, sarcasm, and cute internet lingo? What if you did something sensuous or dangerous, preferably outside your living space? What if you stopped numbing yourself and voluntarily felt some pain—perhaps only to see how far you could go?

You would slow down. You would be less monetized and your momentary publicity would decrease. Yes, the rat race of cynical, always-online, self-promoting content regurgitation would pass by for a time.

You probably wouldn’t die. You might live.