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.

Wiki-walking

Wiki-walking: my term for the countless hours lost hyperlinking your way through Wikipedia when, initially, the intent was to read only one entry . It is completely possible someone else has coined this term.

Here is a good wiki-walk I took this morning:

Moby Dick-->greatest novels (Western Canon)-->Great Books of the Western World-->The Great Converstion-->Moby Dick-->Romanticism-->Transcendentalist-->Romanticsm-->The Sorrows of Young Werther-->Sturm und Drang-->Prometheus (unfinished Goethe poem)--Prometheus-->Prometheus Society-->Mensa International . . . terminated.

I learned that Sturm und Drang loosely translates to Storm and Stress . . . which I kind of think would be a cool band name, or a blog name. So would Mental Furniture. Odd band names would be a good topic for another post.

All of this started because I was reading The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell, which so far is exceedingly average and overwrought with commas (which I am particularly sensitive to because I struggle with this same prediliction, and I kind of hate it) . . . but in one scene he compares his pursuit of a pig to Ahab's pursuit of the whale. I got to thinking about Moby Dick and zoned out for half a page before looking it up.

Could the tools and systems of information and convenience have such a warping effect on our minds so as to cause something like ADD, or does it just seem that way? The links vying for my attention on that site are little data-sirens. I do this a lot.

Itinerant's Law #33

Itinerant's Law #33: You are likely to be the only "expert" in the airport's Expert Traveler security line.

Provenance: Any airport where they give a person the ability to
qualify themselves as an expert in anything.

Example: The "expert" in front of me had to go through the metal
detector 3 separate times to remove from his pockets, in order: a lighter (TSA alert?), 4 individual serving Advil packets, and finally about $2.73 in loose change.

Itinerant's Law #41

Itinerant's Law #41: The shorter the flight, the greater your
frustration with airport inefficiencies.

Provenance: Flights between St. Louis and Chicago

Basis: Arrival time at airport before flight: 2 hours; seat assignment
due to flight being oversold: middle; t-shirt on the guy sitting next
to you: "Northwestern Football Bench Press Champion 2008; time spent at baggage claim due to overhead space being full: 40 minutes; actual flight time: 47 minutes. Temper: red-line and rising.

Itinerant = business traveler

From Dictionary.com:

i·tin·er·ant /aɪˈtɪnərənt, ɪˈtɪn-/ Show Spelle[ahy-tin-er-uh nt]
–adjective

1. traveling from place to place, esp. on a circuit, as a minister, judge, or sales representative; itinerating; journeying.

Inventing Color

My daughter is 8 months old this week. I was speaking with a friend of mine at lunch a while back, and he asked me how it was going, you know, being a dad. What it was like. I replied it requires the most rigorous self-discipline I am capable of to not talk about her all the time . . . to not regurgitate the explicit details of every micro-milestone she achieves. It is actually, physically, hard to do. I have to completely be conscious that a request to see a recent photo of her is really a request to see at most 2-3 pictures. Not the 53 I immediately want to display. Also, to constantly remind myself that her small coos and long naps are only interesting to maybe 5 people in the entire world . . . and that is if I include the grandparents.

As a single guy, then later as a proud four-year member of the DINK ("Dual Income, No Kids" for the uninitiated) club once married, I was constantly annoyed by one of the tics common to all new parents--the frequency with which they would assert some variation of the following: "You just won't understand what I mean until you're a father." And this disqualifier would almost always follow a lengthy story or description of how great and fulfilling it was to be a parent, which would then be immediately deconstructed by the qualification that I am incapable of understanding what was just described. Then why did I just listen? There must be several hours of my life I could recover if not forced to endure these self-described incomprehensible anecdotes.

In fatherhood, however, I've found the immense compulsion; the need to share these types of stories is almost uncontainable. So I suppose I understand now. I have still vowed not to do it. I try very hard not to indulge that urge.

So it was that I was sitting there with my buddy at lunch, and he began to press me on this topic which defies description, as he has no kids-- and the truth is, there are just things you can't comprehend except through experience. Like going 200 miles per hour in a car. Sky diving. Getting hit in the balls by something traveling at great speed . . . the English language fails us here. It has no capacity to accurately capture and convey these things.

I looked at my friend and said, here is what it's like: try to invent a new color.

I asked him to conceptualize a brand new spectrum on the rainbow, using nothing from our known palette to construct it. Invent a color. It's impossible.

This is what it's like to be a father. To look at your little girl and having the very sight of her tap a previously undiscovered internal reservoir of emotion, only to instantly realize that this emotion is unlike any other you have ever felt. Language . . . and even imagination fail that request. It is instant folly.

Pal, I said . . . defeated . . . you just won't understand what I mean until you're a dad.

Thoughts from a traffic-mired taxi

When you need to go to the bathroom and there isn't one in sight...no
matter how long you've 'held' it...no matter how many miles you've
traveled under the mounting pressure...when you come within range of the target, the last 20 feet are the most excruciating.

The human ass can detect proximity. In all of history, never has a more accurate homing beacon been devised than the rectum.

The Flu, Tolkien, College, Suicide, etc.

When I was in 7th grade I stayed home sick from school. My parents didn't have the most extensive reading collection, but one book that was on the shelf, a book my aunt had given me for Christmas some years before was The Hobbit. Being stranded in a suburban home with an itchy brain and an ill body . . . with nothing on pre-cable daytime television but soaps and "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" . . . led me to pull the Tolkien story down. It changed my life. Literally every direction I have moved since can in some way be traced to that serendipitous flu.

A couple years later, I was at church with my folks for a Thanksgiving service and browsing the bookstore when I came across The Fellowship of the Ring. I hadn't heard of any sequel to his first and most famous book-- but recognizing the author's name, I bought it with allowance money and devoured it and the subsequent members of it's trilogy.

Because of Tolkien I chose-- much to my father's disapproval-- to study English Literature in college. Also, being a collegiate football player made this choice . . . somewhat strange. Having landed at Illinois State University, football faded away and even to me a Lit education at a second rate school at the end of the postmodern bubble . . . in its final death belch . . . seemed less than aspirational. However, it did afford me lottery-ticket level exposure to a young writer and professor named David Foster Wallace.

When my wife asks me now why I was, and am, so fascinated by him--particularly because our lives have almost nothing in common and he chose to hang himself in 2008--I tell her being there, at that point in both of our personal histories (1), was like being able to reach out and touch lightning without getting burned.

If David Wallace-- who the day he died would likely not have remembered my name-- could have received a small jar filled up with some cosmic substance capturing all of the anonymous impact he had on my life and all of the personal importance, fulfillment, gratification, and potency that knowledge could have carried with it . . . if there was an ice cream scoop for the brain that could remove that compartment of reverance/gratefulness/respect in me and surgically juxtapose it with whatever his final reality was, he never would have died the way he did. That knowledge would be a cure for anything. Even depression. He didn't know me, and I miss him.

The rest is details. I want to say or do something, someday, both worthy and reflective of his impact.
___________

(1) - It was the school year of 1995/96. He was already a legend in the small universe of the English department, and was on the cusp of publishing the cruise ship article in Harper's which served as a shot-across-the-bow to the world for the super-stardom which would accompany the arrival of Infinite Jest. I was in my final year, and had just enough education and exposure to such things that I understood the rare air I breathed. (I obviously understand the triteness of a footnote here. I'm sorry.)