From Wall Street Journal to my wall . . .

I am pretty happy about this.  Thanks to Edel Rodriguez for parting with it.

Adultery, or Lake Michigan

I was reading an interview in the Paris Review with John McPhee today.  At some point while he was speaking about the topics in which he is interested, primarily sports and the environment, the first line of the essay below popped in to my head.  I couldn't shake it, so I started writing.

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The lake has the temper of a mistress.  Warm and beckoning one moment, harsh and vindictive the next.  Like a lady, she is often misunderstood and underestimated in both mood and resolve.  Her character, often dormant beneath a mercurial surface, reveals its full dimension and aspect in impetuous moments, regardless of day and season.  Often dismissed as pliable and impotent, just as often taken for granted, it is only after years that we see the lake has shaped the landscape and boundaries around it, rather than being shaped by them.  Like glacial rocks rooted steadfast in a riverbed beneath a swiftly tilting current, it’s only after ages we understand that the water is the sculptor of destiny, not the eroding stones.  If given enough time on an endless continuum, motion always subjugates the inert and the dormant.

Geologically, thermodynamically, environmentally and practically she is the body which has compelled the surrounding world towards her gravity.  Spiritually, intellectually and emotionally, however, Lake Michigan is much more important.

The Great Lakes all have their shades; Superior is a dreamscape, Huron is caught between worlds, Erie becomes her industrial history; Ontario, a snow-maker tipping over Niagra’s edge.  Lake Michigan -- from trough to crest, rocky crags of its West to uninterrupted dunes of its Eastern shore . . . Southern sulfur to Northern lights -- lives a kaleidoscopic existence.  In her artistic and cultural reaches she houses the same myriad of counterpoints, linking Hiawatha to Hemingway and Green Bay to Chicago.  The lake exists outside the grasp of those who would seek to define and claim her.  Elusive while being omnipresent.

On a middle-summer day drifting with a meandering current 15 miles offshore near the Illinois-Wisconsin border, the lake’s azure reflection gives life to a fading skyline shrinking southward into haze.  Warm Midwest waters beckon for a swim under that sundrenched sky.   Cool air rising from the calm surface holds shoreline clouds at bay in a manner which makes me feel haloed by good fortune.

On an August day in 2006 -- 35 miles offshore between Michigan City and Chicago -- a storm rolling off land near Kenosha veers sharply southeast emboldened by that same cool, sentinel air and plows across the water speeding hundred-mile-an-hour winds ahead of it, and the resultant surge of cresting waves.  The marine radio blares for all vessels to seek safe harbor.  Firefly lightning charges distant air off the starboard beam in a manner which makes me feel exposed to a measureless danger and depth. 

It’s the sublime coalescence of horizon and heart.  It’s the directionless fear of some infinite thing.

Donald Rumsfeld and the new (oxy)morons

I just watched the two-part Jon Stewart interview with Donald Rumsfeld from last week and was both fascinated and revolted by a couple of phrases he used in relation to the decision to go to war in Iraq.

They are as follows . . .

• 'Always never' -- as in: " . . .intelligence is always never perfect."

• 'Parade of Horribles" -- as in: a worst case scenario list submitted for consideration to the National Security Council prior to green-lighting the invasion. A couple of items posited as possible, but unlikely in this list were, 1) The war could last 6-8 years; 2) There will be no weapons of mass destruction.

Given that both these "unlikely" Horribles came to pass, I did a little research as to what else may have made the list. That information can be found in an excerpt from Douglas Feith's book on NPR.

Everything on that list occured. Everything.

Now two trite thoughts occur to me . . . "Parade of Horribles" would be a terrific band name, and "Always Never" would be a great title for a novel of bleak irony.

Unfortunately those ideas are followed by a gravitational third thought . . . How I would feel if I had been directly impacted by the loss of life which became the toxic product of these words? If my son or daughter was one of the Horribles-cum-reality?

It takes your breath away. It's fucking gross.

Philosophy?

I went on a dramatic wiki-walk yesterday which took me from J.M. Coetzee to Ford Maddox Ford to Samuel Beckett to Albert Camus by way of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought.

I have always maintained that an education in English Literature is comprised of equal parts History and Philosophy. I also find that as my tastes shift in what I read, my preferences also drift to writers and writings which render portraits of those wrestling with important questions.

Existentialism? Metaphysics? Lately these words are getting mistakenly tied up into new-age mysticism? Aren't they are the trees from which all branches of meaning are derived?

Where are we?
What is it like?
Why are we here?
What is important?
How should we spend our time?

Not to play 'tag-you're-it' with philosophical buzzwords, but I wholly reject nihilistic thought in that I believe in "importance" -- not in the strict ontological sense -- in the sense that how we choose to spend our time is most likely the key to achieving proprioception (one of my favorite new words of the year!) in the worldly and infinite sense; which goes well beyond mere self-awareness. It is more than just how we are perceived, but it is understanding infinitely evolving relationship to everything . . . literally everything . . . outside the lens of self.

Given that we have a relationship to everything, then how we choose to spend our time is important -- as each decision shifts the balance of that relationship in a way that sets it on a new course. This is the unquantifiable algorithm of space and time.

I read The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen recently, and inside of being an incredible book, memoir and journey, it introduced me to Buddhist philosophy. The interesting thing about Buddhist thought is it's centered, perhaps obsessed, with finding and accepting your relationship to everything. But I think it rejects the idea of Importance (capital "I") in that the goal is to achieve a neutral state to space/time and become one with the world. Symbiosis with the crackling matter of existence.

However, outside of a monk living on a rock shelf in the Himalaya, this is - literally - an impossible pursuit. Buddhist thought and practice has an arcane and unique ability to enhance our proprioception, but maintaining that state of awareness and neutrality is not practical or possible.

We are all going to make decisions. Those decisions deploy misshapen rock ripples against unseen targets and change the course of Everything. If this is the case, shouldn't these missives be something which we consciously choose to unleash based on a value system which is defensible?

So, I suppose my question is not, What is Important?, but more, How do we decide what is Important?, and even more specifically, How do we decide how to spend our time and determine what is Important through the lens of that infinite algorithm and not through the keyhole of self?

I think Camus rejected Importance; I think Beckett suggests these questions can only be answered in a vacuum; and I think Coetzee embraces the idea of it . . . but also deals with the flip-side, which is Consequence. With a capital "C."

Is this all just Ethics? I don't know but I don't think so. The notion of Importance is not about the binary question of 'right' and 'wrong', but the decisions that live within those paradigms.

Edel Rodriguez and David Foster Wallace

An illustration commissioned for a Wall Street Journal adaptation of David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon College commencement address which was later published as a book under the title, This is Water.

Artist: Edel Martinez

More info can be found here.