A Flock of Eulogies

Into my late twenties, I had what I felt to be unusually good fortune in not having had any significant experiences of bereavement. My extended family was intact, all my friends survived high school, and we didn't really have pets growing up (excepting a couple of goldfish that we never got around to naming, that my mother accidentally killed; and an adorable Chinese Crested that my brothers and I were quite taken with for about a month, but similarly failed to imprint with, and ended up selling to an elderly lady after less than a year).

This may have been largely a function of growing up in a fairly sheltered environment, where ready access to resources that would mediate threats of illness or injury were the norm for my family and most people I knew. Additionally, both sides of my family seem to carry whatever genes promote longevity, with several great-grandparents and grandparents having lived or currently living into their late eighties and early nineties, along with a minimal history of cancer, heart disease, or other hereditary health problems. That and I think a bit of good luck kept me from having to go to really any funerals until I was 29 or so. Year of my Saturn return, of course.

That was 2016. Collectively, we witnessed a freakish number of celebrity deaths that year. David Bowie, Carrie Fisher, Leonard Cohen, Alan Rickman, George Michael - many of these were stunning, in the sense of losing a known quantity, but if we're honest with ourselves the emotional impact of these losses was probably pretty minimal for most of us. Bowie's passing hit me pretty hard, but still - I can safely say that anyone reading this probably didn't know any of those figures personally, and neither did I. They were living canvases for us to project our feelings onto, at a comforting remove and asking nothing in return except our audience. For me, losing Bowie was losing a constant, was like watching a star go dark. It wasn't losing a history - I never met the man, never sat down with him at a coffee shop to exchange ideas, never collaborated with him on a project or argued with him or made a toast at his wedding. It was nothing personal.

*   *   *

That was also the year I lost two of my grandparents: my father's father in January, and my mother's mother in June. These, of course, made an impact, although both had lived into their eighties. My grandfather had had a series of strokes and debilitating accidents for about a decade leading up to then; my grandmother's decline was more sudden.

Prior to this, I'd been somewhat self-conscious about having lived a life practically untouched by death. I'd concocted metaphysical theories about this: Death, to whom I'd ascribed personhood and agency, had a plan for me, or had devised in terms of my life's progression some sort of Faustian bargaining principle in which I'd had no foreknowledge or say. Up to a certain age, the theory went, I wouldn't touch death, would be protected from it; then the floodgates would open, and with the first death would come many; I would be in the weeds with it.

Of course, I had merely chosen to see a world without death, simply because it hadn't yet taken someone within my own friend/family network such that I would consider it to have "counted." Also at play here, however, was a species of wishful thinking: I desired some kind of antidote to an overly-sanitized upbringing by touching, making contact with, the abject element. To this day, at work or at home, I tend to be the one to volunteer to dispose of dead animals - rodents, lizards and the like.

When I was living in Portland, Oregon, a housemate's cat once dragged the body of a field mouse it had killed into our common area. I made a casket for it from a shoebox, lined it with newspaper and filled it with various ritual trinkets that would accompany it into the underworld, walked with it solemnly in funeral procession to the Willamette River and then released it into the current. This surely constituted a minor public health hazard, but I was twenty-three, idealistic and leading kind of a degenerate existence; I couldn't have cared less.

*   *   *

Since my grandparents' passing, death hasn't asserted itself in my life as the deluge that I feared and perhaps morbidly hoped it would, and I'm grateful for this. I don't see myself dealing with personal loss stoically and with equanimity, like some kind of midwife for the other side. In some measure, I put that up as a front - to this day, even - and behind that I grieve. Deeply, abjectly - there is a fragility about me, around matters of life and the loss of it, that I don't like to let others see. 

I wrote this piece with two people in mind, a couple of unconnected individuals in my life whose deaths I received word of within 24 hours of each other.

The first passed away at the age of 79 of heart disease last September, and I didn't find out until a couple of nights ago. He was a beloved anthropology professor at UVA, and a spiritual guide to me and to many in his orbit; I was fortunate to see him fairly recently before his death, apparently healthy and in good spirits. I considered him a friend, and I like to believe he thought of me as one too.

This past May, willfully avoiding doing a Google search to find out whether he was still living, I posted some reflections on him to my Facebook page, which I reproduce here: 

I once had an anthropology professor who had authored an interesting methodology for deconstructing myth. He would break down a story, poem, etc. into six critical junctures and state these in terms of their archetype - as in the hero’s journey, for instance, the point of departure, the descent into the underworld, the return, and so forth. He laid these out circularly, such that the end recapitulated and thus implied the beginning again, so as basically to create a narrative circuit. 

Then, he reversed the flow of causality in this underlying archetypal structure, such that the denouement became the inciting event to the critical junctures that preceded it. As an exercise, he would invent a respecified telling of the myth in which events proceed according to this reversed archetypal progression. He positioned this as an “undoing” of the original mythic structure (in much the sense that Christopher Hyatt, for instance, used the term). He called this technique “obviation." 

Rereading an obviated myth was a revelation. Understanding it in terms of its “antitwin” (a term this professor invented) rendered the specific architecture of the narrative moot or irrelevant in such a way that the essence, or motive core, of the story was laid bare. I don’t know how else to describe it. I tried the technique on “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats, which was a poem I had already known by heart, and it changed the way the reading of the poem *felt* afterward. 

This same professor is in his eighties, and as of last year was still teaching a course for undergraduates each spring in which they read through all nine books in the main Carlos Castaneda series. He taught me a lot and helped set me on the path I’m on, and I miss him. 

This pretty much speaks for my feelings on hearing of his passing. I think on some level, despite keeping myself from confirming my intuition at the time that I wrote those reflections, a part of me already knew my professor was gone.

The second person I wanted specifically to write about in this post was about my age, also beloved in his community, and ended his life a couple of nights ago. I didn't know him well - we met while modeling together in a photo shoot for a vodka ad, shortly after I moved to Richmond three years ago - but I'd encounter him in cafes and grocery stores around town every now and then. We would trade snippets of conversation - I vividly remember a brief discussion we had about automation and its implications for the labor market in line for the self-checkout kiosks at Kroger - and even though he was practically a celebrity in the community, featuring in magazine articles and gallery exhibitions, he always seemed happy to see me, always made me feel like I mattered.

I suppose that's a characteristic of people who play those roles in the lives of others - they just generate that much love and good feeling around them, they lift others up like a gentle rising tide. I haven't found it within myself to be that for others; I am in awe of, and stand humbled before, those who are.

Let's Read: "Carbon Ideologies" by William Vollmann

In my first post on this blog, I described myself having a moral crisis on visiting Italy in fall 2018, a combination of being overwhelmed with the beauty of the locale while also being keenly aware, suddenly, of the pace and scale of the ecological harrowing of the planet.

The subtext of this moment was that I was then reading reviews of an intriguing, two-volume treatise on climate change and energy usage, Carbon Ideologies, the second volume of which had recently been published by the noted novelist, journalist, war correspondent and one-time Unabomber suspect William T. Vollmann.

What was striking to me, in reading about Vollmann's 1,268-page summary of the state of the planetary ecology, was that he prefaces the work by disclaiming that the situation is utterly without hope. "Vollmann declares from the outset that he will not offer any solutions," reads one review in The Atlantic, "because he does not believe any are possible: 'Nothing can be done to save [the world as we know it]; therefore, nothing need be done.'" 

It's not that I was primed to accept Vollmann's claim of futility at face value; it's not as though these words were music to my ears, nor do I believe that they seriously could be to anyone's. It's more that I dearly appreciated an approach to a complex, controversial issue - a discourse dominated, as politics are, by displays of rage and expressions of shallow polemic - that leaves room for the presence of the unspeakable. I don't believe that there's no hope of mediating, at least, some of the worst effects of global temperature rise in the 21st century and beyond; here are a couple of articles that describe some promising technological approaches, and make the case that Vollmann's climate fatalism is wretchedly remiss in failing to differentiate between bad and worse.

Nonetheless, I feel that there is value in entertaining questions that seemingly threaten to undermine us and our efforts to repair the world. Not that I have seriously mounted such an effort in my thirty-two years of life on this planet; maybe that's the reason I feel compelled to embark on reading Carbon Ideologies as a project, recording my impressions on this blog as I go. Vollmann's work surveys oil wells in the United Arab Emirates; natural gas repositories in Colorado; fracking sites in West Virginia; and the habitable regions outside of the exclusion zone rendered uninhabitable by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Vollmann also collates reams of data, some two hundred pages of tables and graphs, detailing annual patterns of global energy usage and wastage ("What was the work for?" he asks).

At the heart of Vollmann's chosen topic is a set of truths that I feel everyone living today, in whatever margin they are capable, ought to confront. Those of you who know me, know that I tend to avoid commenting on political matters; I may be at fault in my silence on various issues, but that is my choice. The only substantial exception I make to this policy is with regard to the phenomenon of conditions on the Earth ranging inexorably towards the uninhabitable. I'm with Vollmann, in that I do not seek to condemn, or to cast blame; or to argue in favor of any particular regime or prescription of policy reform, or to promote the usage of some approach over any other one; nor to seek to persuade skeptics that these climate phenomena truly are products of human impact on the environment.

I'm concerned with the bigger picture, which is that, whatever the causes, global temperatures seem to be increasing rapidly, compared with the historical norm for the Anthropocene, and that this will bear profound, unprecedented consequences for human life, and every other current form of life on Earth. The reviewer in The Atlantic refers to Carbon Ideologies as being "in the vanguard of the coming second wave of climate literature, books written not to diagnose or solve the problem, but to grapple with its moral consequences." I aim to situate my writings here within that discourse, if not within whatever canon it may produce.

Tatemae and Honne

"Tokyo Story" (1953), dir. Yasujiro Ozu

Honne and tatemae. This is a concept I learned of outside of the martial arts, but I think relevant to it: it is broadly characteristic of Japanese culture at large. We have similar concepts in the west, but not so explicitly codified.

Honne is a person's true feelings, their authentic self, state of nature; tatemae is the socialized self, the persona and conditioned behaviors one presents to others in the world.

This might not sound like a novel concept to western readers, as we generally have a sense of "realness" or authenticity as a preferable ideal, in contrast with the conformist, the square, etc. What's interesting about the Japanese conception of these two aspects of human identity and behavior, however, is that it seems to anticipate the non-conformist's rebellion against the falsely constructed self. Yes, it acknowledges, you have your honne, your truth, what you actually feel; with that in mind, for the sake of others and the society in which we live, you must cultivate tatemae, you must construct a persona with which you may live and deal harmoniously with your peers.

Examples of this concept are at play in Yasujiro Ozu's film "Tokyo Story" (1953), which treats the topic despairingly: an elderly couple, facing illness and the specter of death, bears a thousand petty abuses and annoyances at the hands of their aloof children and grandchildren with smiling, stoic graciousness, a response that masks evident sentiments of abandonment, heartbreak and nostalgia. Another example, Natsume Sōseki's classic novel Kokoro (1914), can be read as a dialogue between tatemae and honne, in the forms of a young Japanese university student in the post-Meiji Restoration Japan of the early 1900s, who is habituated to the rapid inculcation of modern, western social norms, and his elderly mentor: an eccentric, reclusive human relic of a lost traditionalism, but also one who has rejected the new world, has renounced membership in it, without hope of triumphing over a puerile modern dispensation except in death. The young man is tatemae, a timid and compliant (if well-meaning) social climber; the old man is honne, rageful and dejected, and his only recourse is ultimately suicide. Of course, in feudal Japan, ritual suicide or seppuku was a means of regaining grace under the threat of dishonor. Equally, however, it was the ultimate act of acquiescence to the reigning social order. (We might take solace in presuming that the elder in this story is offering his death to the "old Japan".)

As a westerner, I'm interested in the Japanese rendering of the dichotomy between the private self and the public one, because in my life, there have been times when I've gotten myself quite confused around matters of self, authenticity and true nature - and I think a lot of us in the west may share that confusion. David Foster Wallace, a beloved Gen X novelist and essayist, infamously wrote tortuous, impenetrable volumes of navel-gazing exegesis about authenticity, identity and right action amidst fractious and relativistic forces of secular post-modernity. Like the old man in Kokoro, Wallace killed himself. This is not to suggest that failing to discover one's true nature, or to be at peace with being at the mercy of contradictory social pressures, results in suicide - it has come out that the nature of Wallace's inner suffering was rooted in treatment-resistant clinical mood issues, and his wrangling with weighty existential questions was likely an expression of that. That being said, I think that suicide is a fitting metaphor for the substitution of the social self for the natural one: tatemae being the the willful self-negation of the honne.

But then, what makes the concept of tatemae-honne so interesting is that, in contrast with the western attitude by which social conditioning simply happens - unconsciously, quietly, as if by accident - tatemae is a set of behaviors that one chooses, cognizant though they are of their honne. At first blush, such choosing might seem abhorrent, a kind of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. On the contrary, however, I wonder to what, if any, extent that consciously and deliberately willing the artificial representation of oneself changes the nature of the act.

Moving away from a model of mask and reality, a "false self" and a "true self," what if there simply existed a self, singular and whole, but understood dually as both an outward-facing, extroverted tatemae, and a private, intimately personal honne? Importantly, both of these aspects are considered authentic - or if you'd rather, neither is (that would depend more on the religious paradigm through which one views the issue, a topic beyond the scope of this writing). Authenticity, in this conception of self, becomes a moot point, a vestige of a flawed dichotomous conception. What follows is a realization:

There is nothing we can express that doesn't contain some part of us.

I am aware of myself, except in rare cases, extraordinary settings, as playing a role, inhabiting an affected persona, a constructed self. But not to feel myself to be implicitly condemned, according to some standard of modern-day pop virtue, as "inauthentic" for this - that would be a kind of freedom.

Excerpt: "The Scraecrow"

It was the final year of recorded history. Sages were calling in favors, while ordinary men and women found novel ways to exercise their capacities for denial. The Dreamtime was, as it had ever been, a holy mess.

Let it be revealed, then, that everything of consequence that happens in a person's life, happens in the threshold of the dreaming. Every momentous decision made - marriage proposals, declarations of war; zagging, instead of zigging, away from instead of into the pathway of oncoming traffic, or vice versa - was foretold, by the arbiters of such things, in the Dreamtime.

We have known this, always, in our hearts of hearts. It is not the heart that rebels against this, but the mind, insisting as it does on the autonomy of - it can't say.

It had been a brief age, measurable in months, of which hot summers, cowardly violent acts and flock-like movements of refugee populations were characteristic. When the end came, for most, it would come quickly: a sudden grace, a warm velvet blanket of swiftly dropping darkness. And yet, for now, the living endured restless sleep, troubled by omens of unwelcome truths.

The Meadowlark

I wanted to chase yesterday's post with something a little smoother, so I've dug up some short fiction I wrote going on seven years ago. I was grooving on Southern Gothic at the time - Faulkner, O'Connor, et al - which may or may not have had something to do with my secretly wanting to live in the woods as a mountain sorcerer.

I'm hoping to start writing a bit in this vein again. A lot of the concepts and themes that I want to explore are better done so through fiction and lyric, I feel.

*   *   *

The Meadowlark
by Joseph Pickert

Tobias would rise each dawn with the other college boys in the summer laborers’ bungalow in the foothills outside Hanover, and if dredging were their business that day they would ride on the company bus to the reservoir. He operated a slow crane parked on a rocky abutment facing the sun in the morning and lifted the riverbed up in square heaps at a pace that, on a cool day, felt like leisure.

For whiskey wages several evenings each month, Tobias and a few others would walk the Appalachian with a lantern and handfuls of yellow chalk between them, marking congestions of white oak and birch on the trail for the benefit of a logging crew. From the reservoir after a day or so, Tobias would distract himself watching the crew set to work felling their marks in the distant hills, wondering whether their faces were brutal and sober, as with the men of his father’s season—the ones who never left the West Virginian cinder quarry upon which prospectors had founded Fullerton, an industrial township of eleven hundred. Tobias belonged to the third generation of Fullerton quarrymen, and had been the first of the Coverdale family to get away, attending Dartmouth on a union scholarship to study engineering. His father, thick in the belly and long in the face, from whom Tobias had inherited a gravel stare, had always suspected that this son of his would be the one to escape. Yet it never occurred to him that it would be on the union’s dime that Tobias would take himself north.

He was courting a girl from uptown, twenty-one with chestnut hair cut short over her forehead. Margaret worked regular hours in the university library and would meet Tobias in the late afternoon on his day off at the quadrangle. She dressed in a raggedy wool cardigan and a secondhand plum-colored blouse, wore unpolished nails and would modestly rouge her cheeks. The niece of a junior Senator from Connecticut, Margaret concealed her pedigree behind simple tastes and a quiet voice, and Tobias, in time, learned to forget his poverty when they went out together to Saturday night picture shows—where she allowed him to pay for her ticket—and to gazebo dance socials to which he wore a borrowed suede coat and a tie. Margaret turned him on to colored jazz. She helped him develop a smoking habit. Tobias became enamored with her, and in a mutely seditious way declared himself to be with her against the world. He took her along the trail after dark, and into the caves that pockmarked the gradual ridge that ran slick with overflow from the reservoir during the wet season, and she made love to him there on a pale sheet of slate against the light of a fire they’d used newspaper to kindle. He believed this was merely the beginning of happiness. She made him feel like he would never die.

The sickle moon that night seemed inclined to swing low through the gathering clouds and cleave the earth. Tobias came out of a dream with a full bladder, and while Margaret contentedly snored under a quilt by the fire, he stumbled afoot to the mouth of the cave, naked except for a cotton pullover and an oversized pair of rawhide boots, and flattened a path upward over thickets of chokecherry and leatherwood to a meager creek at the crest of the hill that trickled out to the waterfront. The reservoir spanned four miles wide, and his view from the granite shore encompassed it whole. Tobias scanned its tarcharcoal surface for whitecaps, evidence of high wind or a troubling tide. The water ran quiet.

On the way down again to the campsite, he crushed a meadowlark in the high grass under his heel; felt its ribs crunch and its wings snap. He did not sleep at all afterward. Morning came.

The path back to Hanover led Tobias and Margaret out of the woods to a paved road beside a strand of rickety townhouses, slick with beads of the morning damp, and they sauntered its length. She was immune to the gauntlet of lingering porch eyes, but the dirt of the previous day on their clothes ashamed him.

“You shouldn’t let those people reduce you,” Margaret said. “What right do they have to put you beneath them?”

She had gotten this way with Tobias before, whenever his caste started to filter through the layers of politesse he had attempted to cultivate. Tobias wished to be done with his origins, yet Margaret was constantly pardoning him on their account. “We can only become what we are,” she would tell him, more often than he could remember. Tobias would listen and want to believe that by nature he might be akin to her. Yet he was a mimic at best. Trailing her in the street, he studied the way her hands would swing by her sides. How they bounced to the right or the left as each heel transferred her weight to the ball of that foot, and how every step in the small dance of her movements seemed infused with intention because none of it was. This—her vacant ease—was the aspect that defied Tobias. Margaret’s absence was something he couldn’t fake.

He was with her another three weeks, and then she left him. We won’t divert your attention by describing in fine detail what she told him that evening. They were words of mercy, words of love, and we cannot repeat them.

*   *   *

Margaret had a half-brother, who had been her cousin until her mother’s remarriage. Margaret had only occasionally seen Virgil in six years, since he'd left the Shenandoah Valley to attend college in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he now practiced criminal law. Yet they were always close. In his adolescence, Virgil had shown her a roughhousing affection, and had accidentally inflicted the scar that cut across her left eyebrow after pushing her off of a valley trail into a bramble. Lately he'd taken to calling her frequently, and by August’s end Margaret finally conceded the issue, and invited Virgil to Hanover over Labor Day weekend.

He made the thirteen-hour drive to New Hampshire in his 1924 Model T and reached her dormitory apartment that Thursday, an hour before midnight. Margaret climbed into the passenger seat, and he swiftly disclosed to her a handle of contraband whiskey. Her heart skipped a beat. Virgil was by no means the only young man Margaret had known to flout the liquor ban, and more often than not she played the happy accomplice, but her cousin actually made it feel illegal. Taboo followed him like a shadow. Yet she adored him.

He took her out. He told her tales, like they were children again. Margaret, more drunk than her relation, listened with foggy acquiescence to his argument while they hunkered together on an uptown street corner sometime between the two and three o’clock bells.

“There’ll be part of this country where God inn’t,” Virgil said. “Them place near our kin—”

“My kin?” Margaret protested.

“Yours and mine,” he insisted, “down in the valley. Girl I knew, had a friend. Never laid eyes on her myself. Drove east all her own, middle the day, make for Richmond but don’t get there. Week and change go by, she come up befoul in a ravine off the route. Neck broke with ropeburn all around.”

She had known him to brag about his proximity to happenings like these, but tonight the bravado was absent from his telling. “Sugarplum,” he lamented, “the Lord make no provision for lynchin’ a white woman. No account meanin’ to make it seem.”

Margaret took his hand in hers and reclined her aching head on his thigh. “Why would the Lord exempt a woman from such a fate?”

Virgil swallowed. “That inn’t the way he made it, Sugarplum.”

“Say he made it for man to unmake,” Margaret said.

“Say none such a thing,” Virgil said. “I forbid it.”

He was unique among her father’s kin in two respects. John Lancaster, Margaret’s uncle on her mother’s side, had taken a liking to Virgil in his youth and invested a small fortune in his rehabilitation. They maintained a cordial written correspondence, and congregated annually around Easter at the Lancaster estate up in Waterbury, Connecticut. So Virgil was as much a child of Lancaster as he belonged to his own father, Margaret’s paternal uncle; it was likely at his benefactor's urging that the young man had inverted bridal custom upon marrying a Richmond tax collector's daughter, and at twenty became Virgil Byrd.

“How’s the wife?” Margaret asked.

“Tubercular,” Virgil said.

Margaret sat up. “Tubercular,” she repeated.

“Verily,” he declared.

“You mean consumptive,” Margaret said. “You’re saying she’s ill.”

“Your lips to God’s ears,” Virgil said, and spat at the bushes.

She hadn’t believed she’d heard him right. Not that she was angry, or outraged, although conscience mandated that she should be. The news troubled her. Yet Virgil never had much use for anything like guilt. Margaret knew that. What she felt now, she felt on his behalf.

“I suppose you won’t be a Byrd for long,” she ventured.

Virgil brushed the hair from her forehead. “What the word on the boy you been playin’ on?”

“I don't know who you mean,” Margaret said.

Virgil chuckled. “That so? Well, I shouldn’t ask.”

“What do you care?" she said. “I know plenty of boys.”

He shrugged. “Inn’t none of my business, Sugarplum.”

“Plenty of ‘em,” she said. “My mother, Virgil. How is she?”

“Ain’t seen her,” he said. “Pop keep distant his way with her.”

“Shame. I hoped you might send her my love. Mother and Uncle John and the rest of them, both ways. They’re all very far from me, Virgil. Don’t touch my face.”

“You’re gettin’ your cheeks wet,” he said.

“You’re a scoundrel, Virgil. I’m not tubercular and I don’t need you to take care of me. That’s not what a bird is for,” she said. “Orion’s looking down on us, and there’s a word inside of you to tell me. One word, cousin. If you had only one.”

They studied the sidewalk together.

“You were supposed to say ‘sugarplum,’” Margaret said.

“I’m all out of sugarplums,” he confessed.

*   *   *

Yet Tobias wouldn’t go away. Not that he’d bodily approached or harassed her, but that his memory resisted her revision, his erasure, and hounded Margaret in her sleep.

At night she lay in her cot by the dresser, bedcovers pulled up over her breasts while moonlight played on the wall beside her. She felt him as soon as he entered her room. Margaret turned her head—she did not want him to see her face—and waited for him to wrest the linens from her grip and climb atop her. Yet Tobias had always lacked weight enough to bring her comfort this way. He simply had no gravity to offer. Touching him, Margaret felt nearly a superstitious disquiet, the kind that accompanies a walk through a graveyard, and now recalled a similar pall that befell her when she’d gone to a fortuneteller at the county fair some previous spring. “Tobias,” she muttered. “I am cold. Why are you blocking the light?” A deck of cards, a jug o’ wine. The teller cast his lots into a copper bowl.

Virgil shook her awake. “Jesus and Mary, Margaret.”

She bolted upright. “What did I say?”

“All sort of thing and a lot o’ none.” He lifted himself up off the floor mat and sat beside her on the mattress. “Sounded particular you were gamblin’, sister.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Virgil yawned. “I become curious about your boy,” he said. “Tommy or Toby or whomever. Treatin’ you poor, what I gather.”

“He’s treating me fine,” she said.

“You owe your boy money or something?” Virgil loosely pecked her chin with his knuckle. “Hell, I got money. Other things, beside. You tell me now.”

“Get out of my bed,” she said.

“You ain’t lyin’ down.”

“I mean to be,” Margaret said. “Scoot.”

“Scoot!” he said. “O heavens mine, Margaret. Scoot she say.”

She freed herself from his arm. “You can’t be here,” she said. “You’ll be found before long. They would eject me. They would send me home.”

“Home high or low?” Virgil asked.

“It’s moot,” she said. “You wouldn’t put me in that position. I won’t let you.”

“Sugarplum,” he cooed. “Course I won’t.”

That eased her a little. “I’ll visit you sometime, Virgil. I promise.” She paused. “I don’t want anything from you right now. I wish you hadn’t come.”

He inched closer and squeezed her hand. “Don’t mention it no more,” he said.

“I don’t want you to call me like you’ve been calling me,” she said. “Let me alone for a while. Supposing to tell you that was what brought me to ask you here, Virgil. I didn’t want you to come.”

“I regret makin’ you say that,” he said.

“I wish I’d said it better.”

“You said fine.”

“I hate it when you say it like that,” she said. “I can’t stand it.”

“I won’t say it no more,” he said.

It was as if he’d told her that he loved her, but what did it matter? There were footsteps in the dormitory hall. Other girls. They were not like her. They would talk. “It’s time,” Margaret said. “The window. Get out.”

Virgil abided her command. “There inn’t a thing sayin’ to make it seem,” he muttered, tying his laces.

“I don’t need it to,” she answered.

He unbuckled the pane and slid it upward. “Well, get out here ‘fore long,” he said. “For all God’s love and money, little sister, but it ain’t your place.”

“Never was any place,” she said.

Virgil took the last word, but we need not repeat it. He meant it for her, but there was nothing in it for her.

*   *   *

Margaret saw Tobias again just a couple days later, weaving his bicycle through a shuffling crowd. He whizzed right past her. He didn’t look.

“Tobias,” she called out after him, “Tobias!”

We’ve said too much already. Let us erase these words. Watch the whiskey work its way into the bottle again. See the clouds recover the moon. We retrace our ways south over blue hills and granite shores. Every fallen white oak, every birch alights again on its stump as the riverbed rises. On a clear day with the sun overhead we can look on its face with the naked eye.

Not too far ashore, the grasses rustle. A little bird rises. It returns to the branch native to it and then off it flies, into the white.

Abjection, Your Honor

Let's talk about that epigraph at the top of the page: three lines of verse by écrivain célèbre Victor Hugo, from his collection of poems La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages), published in three series in 1859, 1877 and 1883. This tercet appears in the first series, in a poem titled "Le Crapaud" ("The Toad"). In the original French:

Pas de bête qui n’ait un reflet d’infini ; 
Pas de prunelle abjecte et vile que ne touche
L’éclair d’en-haut, parfois tendre et parfois farouche

The translation I quote in my header, with its capital Beast and Promethean meter, is the one that I personally prefer; a gentler English rendering of the complete poem can be found here. La Légende is hailed by contemporary critics as a masterpiece of French modern literature, but unlike his massively popular novel Les Misérables, Hugo's poetic saga seems to have a minimal readership outside of his native France and besides scholars of French literature. The context in which readers today are likely to be acquainted with the lines quoted above is not the original text, but rather, their citing in an obscure and yet seminal work of French psychoanalytic literary criticism, Julia Kristeva's Pouvoirs de l'horreur: Essai sur l'abjection (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection).

As I write this, a housefly is buzzing around in my space. It zips and zags around the vicinity of my head, and thus follow shades of the undesirable and offensive with which we link the insect: carrion, rotting, decay; illness, transmission of disease; intrusion, an unwanted visitor. Abjection, this psychic landscape of revulsion, the domain of rejected phenomenal experience - and from a nondual perspective, the rejected self - constantly asserts itself in our milieus, usually right beneath the surface of our awareness, in ways that we are only just capable of ignoring. Kristeva describes reacting viscerally to accidentally touching her lips to the "skin" that forms on the surface of milk, "harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring," and the total sensory revolt that ensues: 

I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire; "I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it, "I" expel it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which "I" claim to establish myself. 

The theory of ego identity that underpins Kristeva's analysis of her response is post-Freudian, and supposes that the subjective "I" forms itself on the basis of distinguishing itself from that which is object, or "Not I". The power of experiences of abjection - however one comes to them - is that they confront the subject with the arbitrariness of its separation from the object, and in doing so, seem to threaten the subject itself with annihilation. What is immediately remiss when we experience disgust - whether socially, upon hearing of or witnessing a violation of a taboo, or kinesthetically, as when handling dog shit or spoiled food - is that the object's disgustingness is not an intrinsic property of that object, and yet in practice we experience it as such.

Beholding a sunset, smelling a rose, the subject is ennobled, reflective - willingly participating in a phenomenon that transcends it, and perhaps even cognizant of it as such. "This starry night is so much greater than I," remarks the awestruck "I" in contemplation; "how humbled am I to stand before it - how fortunate, even, to exist in transcendent continuity with it." This is characteristic of the mystical experience.

Cleaning up vomit, or disposing of the bloated corpse of a rat, the subject naturally has a categorically different reaction. Voiceless, desperate, reflexive: This is no part of me. Get it away. One feels compromised by the association, a sense of shame at "being in the middle of treachery," as Kristeva puts it, as if coming into contact with filth or the taboo, even by accident, were to confer guilt by association, or to constitute one's endorsement of such. Hence the trope of morticians and exterminators being probable serial killers, or the social abandonment of the wives and mothers of men who commit heinous crimes.

Astute readers will note that abjection, in my paraphrasing of Kristeva's theory of it, implies liminality - a "no man's land" between so-called subject and object, the phenomenal abyss alluded to by the Sephirotic theory of mind.

As a magician, I don't consider experiences of abjection to be a goal of my practice. But they do come with the territory, and I would argue that they are endemic to the path.

Indexing the Eschaton, Part I

I wanted, off the top of my head, to dash off a quick-and-dirty post listing and capsule-summarizing appearances of the Eschaton in popular media (it doesn't seem to turn up much elsewhere; even the most ostensibly highbrow of the items on this list, a roughly 1,100-page tome of a novel that people speak of with reverence and awe in many literary circles, is in spite of its tenure in the hearts of readers a work of highly sophisticated pop art).

Unsurprisingly, what I intended to be an interesting little ditty has ended up turning into an essay-length document, and I've decided to break it up into chunks for serial posting.

I'm not talking broadly about eschatology, per the Christian apocalypse and other end-times cosmologies. The Eschaton, more specifically, is an event, a contemporary archetype, a kind of teleological koan; yet a poorly defined one, with varying parameters. The preeminent type, the mystical-temporal concept of Eschaton that the late ethnobotanist and entheogenesis advocate Terence McKenna popularized in the late twentieth century, is but one of several. These differing forms of Eschaton vary widely in nature; those listed here scantly resemble each other, except to suggest similar underlying principles and/or mechanisms. In the first part of this essay, I'll briefly discuss a few of these forms, noting an exemplar of each.

Let's get started:

• Utopian Eschaton: The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975). A seriocomic romp through the chaotic landscape of western conspiracy theories, co-authored by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. The novel aims to permanently undermine the ontological complacency of the reader through a rapid progression of shifting premises, repeatingly asserting new sets of apparently solid assumptions about reality that subsequently and suddenly give way like trap floors. Illuminatus! famously begins with the line "It was the year when they finally immanetized the Eschaton" (although whether this actually happens in the ensuing text is debatable). At the time of the novel's writing, the conceptual genesis of "immanetizing the Eschaton" was a right-wing political admonition against leftist utopianism, the phrase coined by political philosopher Eric Voegelin and popularized by conservative commentator William F. Buckley. Thus, at its conception, the Eschaton was synonymous with the age-old "kingdom of Heaven on earth" eschatologies of the major world religions - it had yet to acquire the modernized psychedelic magnetism of Terence McKenna's later rendering of the concept in speculative metaphysical form as a teleological attractor, a "transcendental object at the end of time."


• Semiotic Eschaton: Infinite Jest (1996). A big, self-important, profoundly moving and yet frustratingly imperfect novel by the late, reluctant literary icon David Foster Wallace. In one of its myriad sections, the comically brainy students at an elite tennis academy construct an elaborate global thermonuclear warfare-scenario with racquets, tennis balls and statistics -- and they call it "Eschaton." At the midway point of the novel occurs a lengthy chapter detailing the mechanics of an Eschaton match. Gameplay is riveting, complex and entertaining, but proceedings deteriorate catastrophically when snow begins to fall on the tennis courts, and the players can't reach a consensus as to whether or not that means snow is also falling in the game scenario.
  
  Wallace is commenting on the fragility of our meaning-making capacities, and the Eschaton match in his novel humorously suggests an ultimately quite frightening notion, one that the novel explores in depth throughout its duration: the idea that some event could occur to so thoroughly rupture our current understanding of reality as to permanently disable our ability to form any new understanding. This terminal semiotic psychosis would constitute a type of Eschaton - but unlike the form that Voegelin proscribes, or that McKenna enshrines, this is an Eschaton of a more abstract variety: an irreparable breaching of the division - upon which our capacity to make meaning depends - between signifiers and their referents.


• Apocalyptic Eschaton: Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) - A shadowy cabal of technocrats uses angel chromosomes, a sad kid's mother's biomechanized corpse and redacted portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls to force a radical shift in the evolution of humanity. The original series spanned twenty-six episodes of slow-boiling melodrama, masterfully cultivating a growing sense of existential dread and pre-apocalyptic malaise before going full-on Larry Carlson with a ninety-minute theatrical release that the director has all but admitted constitutes an act of willful aggression against his show's shitty fans. I mean, look:

I'll be honest: if I were going to be tangled up in an Eschaton, I'd be kind of thrilled to see it play out like this. In addition to being a gorgeous, disturbing work of symbolic art, the series' concluding film End of Evangelion evokes a number of classic works of late 20th-century psychonautical doomsday prophecy - Terence McKenna's explications of his Mayan calendar-based novelty-forecasting algorithm Time Wave Zero, for instance, which was arguably unprecedented in properly introducing the world to the Eschaton-as-terminal-mindfuck trope with which readers are likely the most familiar today.

I'm going to follow up with Parts II and III in a couple of weeks, drawing on examples from the graphic literary corpus of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, as well as hard science-fiction narratives such as the online post-Singularity world-building project Orion's Arm, and the recent films Arrival and Interstellar. I'll speak of these works and their concepts of Eschaton in terms of a fourth categorical form: the Paradigm Eschaton, having to do with sudden, global initiations into radically expanded dimensional and/or temporal understandings.

"It opens the pod bay doors, HAL. It does this whenever it's told."

Or, in the parlance of common machinery:

>> Hello world.

I am a synthesist: magick practitioner, improv actor and theatergoer, budoka (martial artist in one of the Japanese koryu traditions). Also: an amateur statistician, off-and-on-again musician, dabbler in languages, connoisseur of specialty coffees, crap yogi. Polymath underachiever, soft-spoken soothsayer of the more-or-less imminently immanent eschaton.

My purpose in launching this blog is to inaugur a general public record of my creative and intellectual misadventures. I'm involved with several practice-oriented communities that concern themselves with specific methodologies and activities, speak in varying terms about widely disparate (although tangentially related) subjects and concepts, and generally overlap only marginally. To enter any of those praxis spaces is to bring some, but not all, of the content of my inner life to the table. On this blog, however, I give you the entirety of the enchilada - within reasonable constraints of discretion, honor, decency, etcetera.

I will be speaking at the junction point of topics, traditions and rabbit holes that interest me, lines of thought which will be largely esoteric. I will be drawing novel correspondences between areas that many people have mastered singularly, but that I'd wager very few have pursued to any great length as a group (although I've been surprised in some cases where the overlap between domains has been somewhat larger than I would have anticipated). I will do minimal explaining of these concepts, but will nonetheless seek to take care of my readership by using gentle, lively language, communicating the "gist" amidst details, and writing about things that I consider to be fun and interesting.

I also intend for this blog to serve as a yardstick of my own progress in time, because the practices I engage are intended and reputed to change a person. Put differently, this is all a big practical joke that I'm playing on my future self, but ultimately a good-natured one - I want to embarrass him, but in a kind-hearted way (i.e. not in the sense of a surprise party that backfires).

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Arcadiology - I made that word up. It invokes the Latin aphorism "Et in Arcadia ego," which you can read about somewhere else on the internet.

To quote Nick Cave: "All beauty must die."

Ok, I'm aware that John Keats said it first. I'm more interested in Cave's interpretation of the dialectic that weds death and beauty, because it suits my disposition better, and because I love Nick Cave.

Here we go, though: my sense is that part of the mystery of Tiphareth is the simultaneous experience of beauty, in any of its myriad forms, and of the knowledge that that form will eventually wither, deteriorate, pass. I spent a few days in southern Italy last fall, and the awareness of the fragility of what I beheld was present and viscerally painful. The weather was gorgeous, living was easy and all I could think about was the looming specter of climate change, and the apparent inevitability of more or less total systemic failure in our time, or within sight of it. Neapolitans, I learned, live their lives in the perpetual shadow of Vesuvius, which could blow again any day now. Pompeii revisited.

That's what this blog is about, too. It will be a recurring theme, probably the major one (unless and until something radical happens to change my perspective). If that isn't for you, be forewarned.

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DEDICATION

To my friends, family, brethren, buyu, comrades, teachers, lovers and true believers.

"The LORD bring you to the accomplishment of your true Wills, the Great Work, the Summum Bonum, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness." - Aleister Crowley, Liber XV

"I don't know man, I didn't do it." - Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia