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.