"Pops"

All my life I've wanted to look older. Now it seems I have at last succeeded. Twice in the past week, the children who nowadays sell tickets to museums and movies have asked me if I wanted the senior citizen discount. And last night, as my companion and I were walking home from a movie ("Russian Ark," since you ask), some stranger called out, "That's right, Pops. Take care of the lady."

I don't mind the years -- experience is a growing treasure. I do though want to retard the other effects of aging, the ones that could keep me from further interesting experiences. Coloring my beard is obviously not sufficient. So I rely on two techniques: physical exercise, to keep the machinery going, and fiction. To have the most exciting experiences imaginable, all I have to do is imagine them. And while I'm doing it, it doesn't really matter what I look like to people on the outside.

But I think maybe I will try again to color my beard. No point in provoking the ignorant young whippersnappers.

Cataclysms of Consciousness

Daniel del Solar has forwarded a letter from self-described "Podunk university English teacher" Luciana Bohne, who complains that a junior said to her, without embarrassment, "I don't read." Prof. Bohne warns that "Without minds or hearts, [such students] are instrumentalized to buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened senses--official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations."

Prof. Bohne, what you are experiencing is a mere ripple of the Third Cataclysm of Consciousness -- the third major degradation of thinking and imagination since humans first started flaking stones for tools. We are entering what will be remembered (if anybody still remembers how to remember) as the Post-literate Age.

The First Cataclysm began around 1000 B.C. with the invention of writing -- at first, thought to be no more than a handy way for the king's minions to keep track of who owed taxes and where the grain was stored. The terrible effects of this invention have been exhaustively explored by Julian Jaynes (1977), The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company. They included the loss of memory (people relied on marks on clay tablets instead of their own memories of the songs of their people) and, far more disturbing, the loss of the voice of God.

The practice of reading, Jaynes argued, creates neural connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, so that auditory right-brain impressions are no longer independent of left-brain analysis. In Homer, whose songs were elaborated in an oral culture long before literacy was introduced, the heroes literally [sic] hear the voices of their gods; later Greeks, infected by literacy, no longer could. I'm not doing Jaynes' brilliant book justice, but that's the main idea. For more, see his many fans' website.

Beyond Jaynes, we can see that the First Cataclysm is still continuing. Whenever literacy is introduced into a previously oral culture, the young lose their awe of the ancient traditions and their respect for their elders, and they also lose -- even when they try very hard -- the ability to improvise long heroic songs fluently. Well, Walter Ong can tell you a lot more about that problem. Cf. Ong, Walter J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York, Routledge.

The Second Cataclysm is also still going on. This was the popularization of printing, which had its most immediate deleterious effects in Europe. Benedict Anderson makes a convincing case that the proliferation of cheaply printed books, pamphlets, sermons and so on in the vernacular languages spelled the end of Latin as a universal language among the tiny, international learned elite, and gave a huge boost to nationalist sentiment. From there it's been downhill all the way to Slobodan Milosevic and the unfortunate Zoran Djindjic, not to mention Israelis and Palestinians, or Timorese and Indonesians, or any of countless other bloody conflicts. Cf. Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities. London, Verso.

Of course, in the wake of each cataclysm, new generations were born not knowing the value of a single universal language, or the even greater glories of oral culture. And there grew a class of people who actually enjoyed reading and thought they were superior because they knew how to do it. Even today, there are little groups of people trying to return to oral cultures, and larger societies struggling to preserve the ancient languages -- Sanskrit, old Greek, classical Latin, Icelandic.

And no doubt there will be many like us, the old timers, who cling to our print-literacy culture even after it has fallen completely into disuse. The new generations will have no trouble communicating with one another without reading print, but still, we Old Timers fear that they will be missing something. And we will be right.

Just as you and I have lost forever the voices of our gods and the enchantment of bowing a one-stringed fiddle and improvising heroic verses for days on end. So, the loss is inevitable. All we can do, like the bards of oral societies and the chanting monks of early literacy, is to cling to our traditions as long as we can.

Inventing, and destroying, the wheel

Speaking of consequences, as the Bush Administration and its "coalition of the willing" (Spain, Britain and the ever-powerful Bulgaria) prepare to bomb massively the cradle of civilization, do they have any idea what they will be obliterating? It all started there -- the wheel, writing, cities, empires, right there in Mesopotamia ("Between-the-Rivers," i.e., the Tigris & Euphrates that frame Baghdad). It's like killing your own mother, except worse: like killing your own mother while you're still attached at the umbilical cord. Oh, well. This is probably just sentimental nonsense. We can probably level Baghdad and obliterate every sign of our ancient heritage without feeling any loss. Except, that strange twinge, a twitch in a phantom limb. So they gave us the beginning of civilization. Fine. We've got it, we've ballooned it into a massive world-wide system, and learned to use it to destroy far more effectively than those ancient charioteers with the braided beards. And we don't need them any more. Funny, though. I think I just heard somebody say that same thing about us.

Too easy to change the world

The assassination of Zoran Djindjic confirms (it seems to me) the statement I've put up (to the left of this column) describing the premise of this weblog. Nineteen guys with boxcutters, one guy with a sniperscope, a pack of zealots who stole an election and now control the US Armed Forces, can change the world. Nobody is bothering to think about the consequences.

[The statement referred to, since removed, said something like: "The revolutionaries have only changed the world. The point, however, is to understand it." See Marx and Engels, The German Ideology.]

Readings

Woolf, Virginia (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

A mistresspiece of internal monologue. The reader gets to eavesdrop on the conversations that Clarissa Dalloway and her acquaintances imagine but dare not or know not how to speak. This is a subtler and wittier X-ray than Orwell's of the anxieties of the lower middle, middle middle and upper middle classes, groping for a new normality after the trauma of the Great European War. Septimus Warren Smith, the war hero driven mad by that war, and his obtuse but self-assured doctors symbolize a whole eddy of misunderstandings, while Clarissa submerges her doubts by organizing a party where the guests make no gesture without calculating the impression they might create on others. I thank the makers of the movie "The Hours" for getting me to engage in this delicious read.

More fiction commentary, including a recent note on Stephen Crane, is available here.

Apology and amends

My apologies. Since you have been good enough to drop by now and then, I should at least be offering something interesting to read, and I've been neglecting to do so lately. My excuse: writing time has been focused on the Latin American architecture book, and on querying agents to place my novel. I expect to report developments on one or both of these soon.

Meanwhile, I have little to say on the impending war on Iraq beyond what you have already heard. I am sure that you and I are in agreement; the whole world seems to agree, except those who are in the Bush Administration or are in some sense in its pay. Perhaps in the very long run, Bush's reckless destruction of America's economic and diplomatic preeminence will be a good thing for the world -- but what a waste of an opportunity to do good!

Stress

The other day my co-conspirator went to an introductory tai-chi class and brought back a plastic card for testing stress. You press your thumb against a black, heat-sensitive rectangle, and if you're relaxed it will turn from green (pretty stressed) to red (getting better) all the way to blue (aah, relaxed). Mine stayed black. My brain and body had clenched so tight I hadn't until then even realized I was tense.

None of the exercises suggested on the card -- fist-clenching and releasing, then slow breathing, mostly -- had any effect. Finally I decided to stop everything and plug myself into the stereo with these terrific Bose earphones (guilt about their high price had contributed to my stress, but I reasoned that they were lots cheaper than therapy). It took maybe an hour and a half of Rampall playing flute concerts, followed by Mozart string quartets, until I was able to turn my card-print blue.

Why so stressed? Tom Ridge's Homeland Insecurity alerts certainly hadn't helped. Premonitions of what Bush's bombing was going to do to neighborhoods full of people in Iraq made it worse. But then there was my particular, personal situation: I've been really, really anxious -- more than I wanted to admit -- about my career. And some of what I was doing about it was just making me more anxious. Specifically, I'd concocted this plan to generate four or five freelance article queries every week -- while working against a May deadline to produce half of a contracted book and trying to sell my novel. That was crazy. If any of you have ever tried to write three or four completely unrelated works simultaneously, you'll know how crazy it was. And it was helping to drive me batty.

So, once I'd turned my card blue and my brain had unlocked, I decided to drop the high-intensity freelance query project. Maybe a couple of queries, for projects to do after the May deadline -- one is already out, for a column (weekly?) that I want to call "Mistaken Identities," on my usual themes of encounters and misunderstandings between people of different cultures. It's a rich vein. I've proposed it to Salon.com. If they don't take it, or if they don't survive, I may still do something with it. But not now.

Last night my anxieties about getting an agent to place my novel were greatly alleviated by a roundtable presentation by Robin Davis Miller at the Authors Guild. It was helpful to see that my anxieties regarding the author-agent relationship are almost universal among writers -- but that they don't need to be. Ms. Miller made it seem more like a rational, manageable process. I'll report more as I go along. So far, I think I've been doing the right things -- investigating what sort of agent I want & sending out sensible, targeted queries.

The other great anxiety is from work on the book, Latin American Architecture and Urbanism. But that's a good sort of anxiety, the thrill of a challenge. Writing is something I know how to do and enjoy. It was that damned four-query-a-week plan that was messing me up by keeping me away from the book.

The final cause of anxiety is the perennial: income. The depression brought to us by the G.O.P. (Greed, Oil and Privilege) has wiped out the discretionary funds of the nonprofit & education agencies that had been my clients. That was why I came up with the desperate freelance query scheme. But we'll just have to ride things out, on our rapidly diminishing reserves, in hopes that in addition to the money coming when we turn in half the book manuscript, (a) somebody buys my novel, or (b) one of my other probes pays off, or (c) my co-conspirator & co-author's other major project (a beautiful little apartment complex she's designing for a spot on the Costa del Sol) begins to pay out, or (d) it starts raining gold -- softly, so as not to injure anybody.

Samizdat II

And from the same (1986) file, a better effort:

SONNET 2

Susana looks at me with quiet eyes
then takes my words and reads them with a frown;
will she find worth in that which I despise?
Without a word she puts the papers down.
I watch and wonder what it is she's seen
and take her silence as the worst critique
of all I've written as she sits serene
and I, atremble, am afraid to speak.

I would not trust her judgment or my own
if everything I wrote won her applause,
but still that doesn't mean that I condone
her frank delineation of its flaws.
So naturally she's still. What could she say?
Since really all I want to hear's "Hurray!"

What are "Samizdat Publications"?

Just me and my word processor, trying to write as truthfully and forcefully as I (we) can, without regard for marketability. If you like it, if you hate it, if you'd like to see future samizdat productions, if you'd like to contribute something for reproduction and mailing, or if you have any other comments or writings of your own you'd like to share, please write to:

Geoffrey Fox
14 E. 4th Street, Apt. 812
New York, NY 10012

Samizdat

In 1986, before browsers and bloggers, it was a lot harder to distribute one's own works. I don't think I ever really tried with this sonnet, which I just rediscovered in an old computer file.

SONNET 1

For my Susana first I write this verse,
and hope that she will think it finely wrought.
To please her I'd commit a dithyramb or worse
but it's no use -- she quickly sees my thought.
For she knows things of me that I don't see
and hears from me the things I have not said,
but which are there, unwhispered though they be,
deep-recessed and hidden in my head.

And though I wrap myself all tightly furled
in garments richly woven of self-praise,
to prance before my mirror and the world,
yet I stand free and naked to her gaze.
I cannot lie to her, although I try;
she answers to my meaning, not the lie.

Copyright 1986 Geoffrey Fox,14 E.4th St.,#812,New York NY 10012

Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner

This stirring legend of the Inuit had been passed down generation to generation for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, but was in danger of disappearing as younger people forgot the traditions and became more used to watching television than to hearing their elders' songs. A team of filmmakers from Igloolik then used the new technology as an ally rather than a foe, to produce this version of Atanarjuat, reproducing the spiritual and material culture of their ancestors. This was not only a great communal experience for the Inuit; it's also a wonderful, unique opportunity for all of us to imagine what life was like for our ancestors, all our ancestors, toward the end of the last great Ice Age. I loved it also because it brought to life the scenes of shamanism (among Turkic and Mongolian communities of Siberia) that I had researched for my novel of the Ottomans, A Gift for the Sultan.

Igloolik is a community of 1200 people located on a small island in the north Baffin region of the Canadian Arctic with archeological evidence of 4000 years of continuous habitation. Throughout these millennia, with no written language, untold numbers of nomadic Inuit renewed their culture and traditional knowledge for every generation entirely through storytelling. (From the Atanarjuat website)