solstice notes

Solstice thoughts:

The longest night of the year. On this day the pagan imagery speaks more strongly to me than any other time of the year, save Halloween. On both of these evenings one can sense how thin the veil is between worlds. I think some of the greatest art has been created when the veil is thin.

Tonight I could crack open my skull and not feel it.

Stolen from Coil: Moon's milk spills from my unquiet skull and forms a white rainbow. One of my favorite sentences ever...

We know that what we see with our eyes is but one level of what really exists. Will we, I wonder, eventually evolve to where we can see multiple levels at once? How might we interpret such stimuli? I confess I find it odd that we put so much effort into creating unreal experiences and so little towards seeing what is around us. If we could see waves of energy! I'm not the target audience for virtual reality, I guess.

A friend posted this conversation on Facebook tonight:
Friend to her two-year old: "Oh, I just love you so much. As much as all the universes and solar systems that have ever existed forever."
Two-year old: "And the Kuiper belt."
Friend: "Yes, and the Kuiper belt."

I got away from burning candles for a number of years but they've come back strong since we moved to this house. And now I notice the children burning them. This makes me happy to see. It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. It is better to light a candle than wake up with a raging hangover.

I've never been able to meditate. But sometimes I can be still and hear the hum. The universe sings a steady lullaby, electrical and full of colors we've not yet seen. But sometimes we dream them. When we wake up our head hurts. And then we get coffee and go about our little lives.

Sometimes I knock this meat wagon we call a body, but it is pretty amazing what it can do. Sometimes all I want is skin-to-skin touch. A universe within a universe.

I never thought Arthur C. Clarke was a particularly good writer, but as a mind he was fascinating. And he is responsible for one of the most truthful statements I've ever read: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Magic is intent. Magic is storytelling. If we ever meet a true alien race, and if we could somehow communicate with it, storytelling is what would bridge the gap. I believe this. But then, I'm kind of naive and stupid. Except when I'm cynical and stupid.

Even atheists are touched by ghosts.

I want to say: moon, moon, moon. I want to shout: Moon! Moon! Moon! I want so sing: moon moon moon. I want to whisper moon--moon--moon.

There is so much beauty.

Books read in 2014

Goodreads says I read 38 books this year. That's kind of sad, especially since several of them I didn't actually finish (but Goodreads can't figure that out.) I thought I read more, somehow. Of course, this doesn't count the books I re-read, of which there are always a few each year. In any case, here is the list, followed by a few random thoughts. 

Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer
Authority, by by Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer
Revival, by Stephen King
After the People Lights Have Gone Off, by Stephen Graham Jones
Call Me Burroughs: A Life, by Barry Miles
Unseaming, by Mike Allen
The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 6, edited by Ellen Datlow
The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 4, edited by Ellen Datlow
Fearful Symmetries, edited by Ellen Datlow
The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz
Origin: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith
Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle that Defined a Generation, by Blake J. Harris
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King
The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett
Thirst for Love, by Yukio Mishima (did not finish)
Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler
Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher
Lean on Pete, by Wily Vlautin
Afraid, by Jack Kilborn (did not finish)
The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin Kiernan
Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain, by Charles R. Cross
The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero
Ask the Dust, by John Fante (did not finish)
The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith
Atonement, by Ian McEwan (did not finish)
Blue of Noon, by Georges Bataille
Hitchcock and Bradbury Fistfight in Heaven (McSweeney's)
Out, by Natsuo Kirino
To Live is to Die: The Life and Death of Metallica's Cliff Burton, by Joel McIver
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, by Laird Barron
Today I Wrote Nothing, by Daniil Kharms
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
The Summer of Black Widows, by Sherman Alexie
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami

Ok, so...Revival was one of the pretty good late-period SK books, Mr. Mercedes one of the meh (though I still enjoyed it enough)...Patricia Highsmith is a frighteningly cold writer. Like deep space ice. No warm blood flows...Caitlin Kiernan deserves so much more recognition than she gets. The Drowning Girl is one of her best...Natsuo Kirino's Out was a recommendation from my sister-in-law, I loved it though the ending stumbled. But the rest was brilliant...Speaking of stumbling endings, the first half of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch was among the best things I read this year, but the second half went from ok to boring and then it just went straight downhill at a frightening pace. If she ever figures out how to finish a story, she'll be one of the very best writers of the era. I'll keep trying. there's so much promise there... 

I'm thankful Ellen Datlow does what she does. There's a sameness creeping into too many of her anthologies and sometimes I think she's just burnt out, but she always pulls in enough good stories to be worth reading...I can't decide which book impressed me more: Mike Carey's Unseaming or Stephen Graham Jones' After the People Lights Have Gone Off. Both are outstanding and an excellent starting point for anyone looking for the best contemporary horror...Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy is the only thing I've read in the last six, seven years that made me say "This. This is exactly what I want to read. I wish I had written this." An absolutely astounding achievement, and the yardstick to which the whole fantastical field will be measured against for years, even as it transcends that very field...

Do they teach classics in school anymore? What defines a classic? Because everyone should read Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, but I suspect it is a largely forgotten book. It's haunted me since I read it, and anyone interested in understanding the torn-apart psyche of the 20th century would do well to read it. Where are the writers with the courage to write such stories now?...War is a demonstration of the failure of human evolution, and that we lost a talented mind like Daniil Kharms says the worst about us a species. He understood the absurdity of his era, even as that absurdity cost him his life. What would he think of this era? You could say the same for Bruno Schultz. To think of what these two writers could have produced...

I've said it many times and I'll never stop saying it: Haruki Murakami is a treasure. He just amazes me. We are all kids in a sandbox next to him...I miss Carl Sagan something fierce, but I am thankful Neil DeGrasse Tyson is out there doing his best. His writing is still not as approachable as Sagan, but he's getting there...I wonder what I would have thought of Neuromancer if I'd read it back when it came out, as I meant to. I'm glad I finally did, but it's hard to suspend the last 30 years of history while reading it. A bit too late...

So, about those books I didn't finish: Atonement sucked, it was as boring as watching paint dry, maybe worse. Paint drying at least has a point. I find it hard to believe this is the same guy who wrote The Cement Garden, which is a fantastic book...I would have been impressed with John Fante's Ask the Dust when I was 15. At 40, not so much...Thirst for Love is actually brilliant, I just couldn't sync with it as I had just finished Darkness at Noon and couldn't shake that book. I'll try it again one day...Afraid is the kind of paint-by-numbers book that just does nothing for me anymore...

Nonfiction: The Disaster Artist was fantastic if you've seen The Room, and if you haven't, you've missed the most brilliant bad movie ever made. I got obsessed with the movie and the book was a wonderful compliment. Seriously, you just have to see it...I did a post on Call Me Burroughs last month, great biography...Console Wars was an entertaining story but the framing of it, mostly from the point of view of Sega of America's president during that time, was a problem. Context was missing, and as such it felt one-sided. Still, there I had  a twinge of nostalgia, even though I wasn't gaming much in that era...I very much liked Charles Cross's Kurt Cobain biography, Heavier than Heaven, but thought that this year's Here We Are Now was reaching and thin. A couple of interesting chapters, but it also proves that it's pretty damn hard to say anything new about Kurt...To Live is to Die, on the other hand, shines a light on the number one rock tragedy (in my eyes, anyway) ever, which would be the death of Cliff Burton in a bus crash in 1986. Not only did Cliff play a major role in shaping Metallica's sound, teaching the rest of the band music theory and exposing them to different influences, he was arguably the best bass player of the era and a musician of immense talent. Orion? That's his, man, and it's maybe the greatest Metallica track ever. To Live is to Die is an entertaining read of a life that was cut too short not from lame rock star excess, but pure bad luck. Heaven owes us, man, heaven fucking owes us. 

On to 2015! Well, after I *finally* finish The Dark Tower series. Halfway through Volume 7!

shaking through

We constantly try to put everything into a narrative. We think we know the way the story goes, and if we don't, then we will damn well frame it so it makes "sense." So it serves the function of a communication tool, be the audience few or many. We do it to make order out of chaos. To categorize and file away for future reference.

I wish we'd stop trying to do this all of the time.

Maybe it's just human nature to do so. But I think our evolution is running a lot faster than our narrative. It can't keep up. Just like our technological capabilities have outpaced our ethical constructs, our ability to discuss the rapid changes in our species over the last 150 years or so outstrips the need to turn everything into a narrative. Narrative has its place, but it cannot bear the full weight of such a discussion without masking part of it.

Somehow the above came out of thinking about my father's shaking hands this evening. Not shaking as in a greeting, shaking as he can no longer keep control of them all the time. Sometimes they shake, they tremble. Last weekend I watched my father, who has worked with his hands his entire life, who has built so many things with those hands, struggle to screw the top on a lamp. I tried to do it for him but he would not let me. Perhaps it was pride, perhaps embarrassment, but I saw it as determination, the same determination he's had his whole life. He sees a job through to the end.

"My hands sometimes shake now," he said. And then made a joke about operating tablesaws and growing old.

So tonight I was turning this incident over in my head, trying to turn it into some kind of comment on mortality and the cycle of life and how weakness can be strength and god knows what else. And then it hit me, like a bottle breaking over my head in some imagined bar fight: I was trying to force a narrative on it. If I could do that, it would be safe. I would be safe. The incident could be dissected and examined and theories proposed.

Fuck that. It's not that simple. My father's hands are shaking and that means one of the foundations of my life is shaking. It's dangerous because every moment is dangerous. My father could live many years yet, or not. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Seeing his hands shake unleashed a lot of emotions in me. They are not all processed. Perhaps some of them never will be. To process suggests an end date. A time when something is done. Filed away. Organized. Dead. Safely fit in a narrative.

I like beginnings, middles and ends in my fiction. Human life does not fit into this pattern so neatly. We can't say we have an end date or a start date when we don't even know what death is. We understand more than we once did...and even that little bit is enough to tear down human constructs that have provided the framework of our world for most of our existence. We live in the resulting chaos. And we understand very little still. What happens when we learn more, understand more? I am excited to bear witness, to think, to wrestle with it all. It will not fit into a narrative.

My wife--my beautiful, lovely wife--sent me this quote today: ""You're a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made from stardust, what do you have to be scared of?" I can't get it out of my head. Funny, truthful, wonderful. This entire post was an attempt to say just that. Sometimes I feel fear, but I'm not scared.

Our bones are filled with stars. May we be wise enough to allow our intellect to follow.

when i close my eyes the lights of the world go out

When I close my eyes the lights of the world go out.

My most unrelenting fear is of drowning. Tonight I read about an airplane disaster. A plane crashed into the ocean. Later they found a few bodies. Many they never found. How many of those people had a fear of flying but never thought about drowning? Reading it, I found myself hoping that they were killed in the crash itself, that death was quick and painless.

To die slowly in the ocean, utterly alone, would be the worst of deaths. There was a movie made a few years back called Open Water that dealt with this. Supposedly based on a true story (really, the connections were tenuous...yes I researched it; I am obsessive in my own way) the story concerned a couple who went out with a scuba diving group. The group was not well run, the crew failed to take an accurate head count, and as a result the boat later left without the couple, no one aware they were ever there in the first place. The film follows the couple as they come to grips with what has happened and their inevitable demise. It is a minimalist film, as befits such a terrifying idea. There is almost no soundtrack, just the sound of water, of the vast ocean.

How cold they must have been. How very, very cold.

My reaction to this movie was visceral. I still find it hard to write about. I don't know how to swim. I'm uneasy around the water. And yet I love the ocean...love it and fear it. I am utterly in awe of its power. The ocean doesn't care about you. The ocean can make you disappear without even trying. Your life does not scale to the ocean. The ocean is always at the end of the world.

I can feel my bones humming. Rolling waves of my blood. Warmth. I am not cold, I am not chilled, I can walk and the solid earth is beneath my feet.

In the dark early morning hours I roll over and drape a hand across my wife. Her body is warm. My body is warm. Together we make warmth, the blankets covering us. I say a prayer into her skin. We are alive and together. We will not escape death. But for this moment, we are alive together, she asleep and I awake. These moments are known only to us. This is our secret history, the history of lovers. This is the other side of the unknowable Cosmos.

The cold ocean waits out there. The end of the world waits out there. Let it wait, wait, wait.

lava lamps and st. anger

Maybe your altar needs a lava lamp. Maybe you never thought of it as an altar, only as your own space, and you resent any encroachment into that space. You hate lava lamps, after all. They represent the hipster condescending attitude towards prior generations, the too-cute "weren't they just so groovy, man," the revisionist tendency to take any cultural shift and package it up as just more disposable crap to sell (see also: the entirety of the 1980s.)

But it's more: lava lamps in their original context were annoying, something for stoned heads to stare at and go "Ooooohhh!" Presumably while listening to Pink Floyd. The idea that drug taking could be a legitimate spiritual inquiry is lost in the molten wax. Thinking about life from a different angle simply becomes another novelty. "Dude, pass me the Cheetos. Netflix is streaming Up in Smoke."

So you don't need a lava lamp in your life, nor do you need it on your altar that is not an altar. Except maybe you do. Is this meta enough yet? Meta--the Internet Age version of too clever by half. What you say when you think you are above your audience. Everyone nod seriously. Mmm-hmm. And let's not forget irony! It's good for your blood. It also makes it easy to prevent any meaningful exchange from taking place. Those are messy.

You are grumpy tonight, sir. I think you do need a lava lamp on your altar. It fits because it doesn't fit. You are listening to St. Anger right now, perhaps the most reviled album of the last fifteen years before people stopped caring about music altogether unless new U2 albums were appearing unwanted on their phones. (You really like that U2 album, too.) St. Anger is part of your altar, sure, just like everything Metallica has ever done is part of why you are alive. In your very DNA. But if someone were to build a Metallica altar, it would almost certainly stop after the first four albums, maybe the first five. It sure as hell wouldn't have St. Anger on it. But you like St. Anger for the same reason everyone else hates it: it's raw, honest, self-indulgent, and a complete and utter mess. It has the worst drum sound ever recorded. The lyrics are often cringe-worthy from a band that once wrote beautifully structured epics intelligently exploring a variety of topics. To go from that to rehab speak! But you dig it anyway. Maybe it doesn't hold a candle to the other records. It still, at certain times, speaks loudly to you. Loudly with a ping (god that fucking non-existent snare sound!)

A flawed altar needs a lava lamp like a tourniquet needs a chainsaw. Or a wisdom tooth needs a jackhammer. If you were more clever...oh hell, if you were more clever you wouldn't write unfocused ramblings about lava lamps and St. Anger. The altar that is not an altar needs a lava lamp that is most certainly a lava lamp. 

a saturday afternoon ramble about the beats

Recently I finished reading the comprehensive William Burroughs biography by Barry Miles, simply entitled "Burroughs: A Life." And what a life it was. The book is a worthy companion to the earlier biography of Burroughs by Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw, written in the early 90s when Burroughs was still alive. I would recommend both to anyone interested in this most American of writers (even though he wrote most of his material abroad, his voice to me has always been uniquely American, no matter how outlandish the literary technique he is using on any given work.)

I know the story of Burroughs and the Beats well; the Beats were very influential on me in my youth. But I rarely read them these days, and, after glancing back through some formerly influential works while reading the Burroughs bio, I find that of the big three (Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg) only Burroughs' work still resonates on any level. The rest feels locked into the era and the myth of that era. The best of Burrough's work, though, has never lost its power. In any case, it's a Saturday afternoon and I feel like rambling. So here we go. (Note: this has not been edited for length or clarity and is a first draft. Very Beat of me!)

sylvia

Sylvia Plath would have been 82 today. One of the three defining writers of my life (Stephen King and Raymond Carver being the other two), I long ago ran out of words to say about her work, her life and what it has meant and continues to mean to me. Instead, as I have done before and almost certainly will do again, I will share my favorite poem of hers:

The Moon and the Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

ostia (coiled)

Snow.

I watch the snow. I have never seen it snow. There are bones underground and monuments atop them. You can hear the bones humming in the afternoon beneath the austere sky. I don't know where the snow comes from. There are thousands of words for snow. I will never learn all, or even most, of them.

I have never seen it snow. I watch the snow. A warm body lies atop the bed. Boxes of photos lie beneath. You can hear the photos rustle during the night. The ceiling light does not work and the bulb in the lamp is almost burnt out. Snow is white. I will never learn all, or even most, of the colors.

An earth mover made of bones digs a hole and the four horsemen of the apocalypse ride out.

I will not have to worry about riding the carousel at the carnival as neither of these things exist. I use the bones to dig. They hum and are not brittle. They like to be put to use.

The first act of death is getting in an automobile.

Austin Spare hides under a pile of corpses. He can hear the bones humming.

The snow looks like cherry blossoms. I do not know if all snow looks like this. Snow eradicates the world. I use the bones to scrape away roots. I kneel, and my body breaks. It does not belong to me. Nothing belongs to me. Not even the bones. My bones.

Together the bones and I hum.



--10/16/14 and 10/23/14

a notebook and a pen

There is comfort in having a notebook and a pen nearby. My handwriting, never great, has badly deteriorated through lack of use. But I still pick up the notebook and pen on occasion. The computer has never once offered comfort. I don't believe it capable, honestly. The notebook and pen have been my lifelong friends and companions.

I've kept every notebook I've ever done any creative writing in, as well as my handwritten journals. What value could they ever possibly have to anyone? None, except to me. Not for inspiration, but as proof. Proof to myself that I actually lived. I had some thoughts and tried to express some things. The notebooks are by and large not flattering--the writing is mostly awful and most were composed during some rough years when I was young. When I read through one of the notebooks a couple of months back, I cringed at the arrogance in some (but, to be fair, certainly not all) the writings. Such insecurity in my life and only on the page was there any confidence. Clearly I overcompensated. Only the young and stupid believe themselves to be some kind of visionary. Only the young and stupid care about being some kind of visionary. 

I largely stopped writing by hand in the mid-90s. Within a year or two I essentially stopped writing altogether (minus the occasional journal entry.) For close to a decade, I did little writing, having convinced it was pointless as I have little talent. When I started back up again in the mid-aughts (having missed the joyous feeling of creativity, the occasional catharsis, and deciding that since no one saw my work anyway it didn't matter if I had no talent) I composed almost exclusively on a computer. This has its advantages--I can type much faster than I can write by hand--but it lacks the intimacy, the companionship of writing by hand.

I find writing by hand ideal for prose and poetry, but I've never been able to compose stories very well with the pen. The pen simply slows me down too much, and that is not good for the volume of words a story requires, especially in the first draft. For poetry and prose, which are largely more contemplative and slow to the page, it is perfect. 

Lord my handwriting is bad now. Yet it doesn't matter. That is the great thing about the notebook and the pen--they do not judge. They warm to your touch, even when the harshest words are laid down, the loudest cries of despair. They comfort you and let you vent, support you when you struggle to say something meaningful, even when you are only composing a conversation with yourself. It is a blessing to have such good friends, ones who do not care if you go away for awhile. They will always welcome you back. 

Note: yes, this was composed by pen in notebook. Putting it here on the blog makes it much more legible.

the ones that got away

Some of the stories don't work out. Let me clarify: a lot of the stories don't work out. Maybe they got one draft. Maybe they got one page. Maybe they got one line. Well, ok, I've never abandoned a story after one line. If the line was that good, it was repurposed somewhere. (I've never written a line that good.)

I'm thinking tonight about some of the stories that didn't make it. There was the one about the moon rides. I always think about that one this time of year. Just couldn't make it work, it's too bad. A fast start that devolved into mush no matter what angle I took. Then there was the one about the guy who was busy masturbating when he heard a crash and, after awkwardly getting his pants back on, discovered a cat in his kitchen he'd never seen before. As if that wasn't bad enough, the cat kept accusing him (in a human voice) of making a mess. 

About a year ago there was the one about the light bulbs. It was revealing itself to be a post-apocalyptic story, but there are few things more tired than the post-apocalyptic story these days, and I wasn't bringing anything fresh to it. So I abandoned it. I did dig this part, though:

“Block 12, from Lancaster to Warren, is contaminated.” His face, puffy and red, would be considered cherubic if we lived in a different world.

“You’re sure,” I say. This is not good.

 

“Five reports in the last two hours. The block has already been closed off.” 

“Christ, how did it get there? That block was sealed off six months ago.”  I can’t believe this.  We honestly thought we had the situation under control. I’d say we were even adjusting to living in this world. If the threat had not been eradicated, it was at least reasonably under control. But three days ago there was an outbreak in block 37, and now this today. My stomach churned, and I was glad I had not eaten any breakfast. 

We’d gotten complacent, in the face of something we didn’t understand.
  
“Have the executed the Koch brothers yet?”  I ask as my laptop wakes up. 

I mean, not great prose, but we all dream of a world free of the Koch brothers, no? I have no shame about these stillborn tales, but I am kind of bummed about some of them not making it. Sometimes, though, it just ain't working and you have to move on.