« July 2005 | Main | September 2005 »
August 27, 2005
Frere Fractious Transcends Himself
Maybe he was just so lost in his thoughts that he hadn’t noticed the TV was smoking and blinking and coughing over there in the corner of his cell, I mean his well furnished three-room suite at the northwest corner of the monastery. But once he did notice that the TV was on, he swivelled around in his chair and rolled himself toward it, and as he was rolling he once again experienced that feeling that God had just snuck out of the room, and was therefore not watching him.
Or, you’d have to say this was a deduction, that God had absconded, from the fact that when and only when he was watching television could he say he was truly alone--he noticed this many times, because all day and night there was always a birds-eye view of him, his consciousness just wouldn’t let him alone. And though he never would think that this watching consciousness was God, it seemed like it might be, when it was gone. God is like that, he thought, always a little offended, a little put off. But, presto, when he was alone with the television, it was just him and it. It was a refuge, and Frere Fractious was, to tell the truth, theoretically relieved. Soon, he would be scared, but initially the TV was a real soporific.
The monastery definitely should offer residential and vocational aid, to persons who had attempted permanent flight from deceptive and evil medical treatments. Foreseeing that those who come to it, the monastery, will be, as it were, permanent. They will get jobs on the outside, they may even go to bars and be as convivial as they can, be lost for days at music festivals, or fall asleep in movie theaters where great scenes in history are for the first time being shown; but essentially they live at the monastery, one great proof of which is that it is the place they always return to. The way other people always return to a certain place in their thoughts.
“I am always thinking about this stuff,” the Frere fractiously noted. Alone in his arena, with the blue glow, the night without end, the frightening end of thought.
“Does anyone have a tape recorder?” Randy DeSoto was overheard to mutter. Of course tape recorders were from the old days, they were from a technology that had come and gone, and, as Randy, but more emphatically his friend Teddy Brewster had said, once a technology comes and goes before it is even understood, that’s an untraversable break with the past. Yeah, they were living in a different universe now. It seemed like the only thing remaining from the old days was, in fact, this game of Scrabble. Everything else, even Maud at the kitchen stove, was pretty well totally transformed, and one had to wonder if the essence of it was still there, given that the appearance was so altered to the very bones. For example . . . Ah, examples just multiply, in this novel.
But, in his last book, Theodosious wrote, and he wrote it well. “Mark my words.”
Mark my words! I can say that I am aware of a reality, yes I can, in its actual happening, around me and to me so that I am never just an observer but I must participate and influence this reality. Do I shout! Do I not shout? I can say, that this is happening! But of history, like crumbling books, and even memory, damn it, of these I cannot say in this same sense anything of them--of all that can be called past, that it has this happening quality. The past is deprived of the very essence of the reality of what is actually happening, what is always happening . . . Like, outside, August, that is the free month, moon over Pinnacle Hill . . .
Of couse, Theodosious hardly ever got out. Scuffles down the sidewalk now and then, hastens back to his office, at the northeast corner of the house . . . He is like some god-damned fictional character, except that he so perfectly not. He is just like any of us, I have to think. Standing back from these excellent, hysterical remarks, we have to ask: Why is this difference important? Um. It is important because life has meaning? Maybe? And meaning cannot be established without a story, that links what is happening with what has already happened? And (go slowly now, since you have the time), in order to tell this story I have to contemplate upon the . . . possibility of what has already been. Lord in heaven! For it is not carrying the essence of the actually happening reality around me. Or, go ahead, God!, just live in the shrinkable future.
Too simple for words! There are many aides and remedies for these confounding piled up arguments and situations. August moons, many clues, you are so alert you just can’t keep life from being profound.
“This is my understanding, and I must keep this in the tone of a personal description,” said Teddy Brewster, who is the most inflamable of the ones here at our kitchen table.
“August is the free month!” declares Frere Fractious, practising to be a monk. “I have got it, I am truly thinking now . . .” he whispered, barely audible-- I mean, not even God could have heard it, over the mind-transfusing television. But there he was. And he had alot of supplies. He had a back room, where the future was already installed.
Posted by mortimer at 05:20 AM | Comments (12956)
August 20, 2005
The Supreme Blooming of Private Thoughts (The Source of Television!)
People are in the situation where their own thoughts have no interaction with the world. They are condemned to think in private. And proceed nevertheless. Their actual thoughts have no effect, do not produce any results, but are of a realm sometimes visited, just to check it’s status, which is by now with little or no emotion. This is clear and they have come to notice this, and now simply slump in their chairs for lack of any mission whatsoever, or sit up in their chairs with invisible irony. Let me say this again and a slightly different way; there is an unbridgeable gulf between the world in which they move around, and the invisible remote world of their thoughts. In fact, that latter world is increasingly only a rumor, or a secret. There is nothing that they are involved in which requires reference to their thoughts. They are watching television, all the time.
`Let me put this yet another way, since it is one of the main themes here, upon which I shall be harping ,” Teddy Brewster said to his charming and charmed companion, Lorrie Blushing.
“What’s another main theme?” Lorrie said, not so much as if she required him to tell her, but as if she knew what another main theme was herself and wanted him to play at guessing it. But she knew he would just keep talking, and probably add another theme! For really this theme, other people’s thoughts and how they can’t do anything with them, is not for them. They were a few of the real people, for now.
“What’s really funny,” he said, “is to listen to these marketing guys, talk about each other. They always say, “So and so could sell water to a lake.” While right across the room, someone is telling someone else the same thing about them. Did I tell you the Xerox story? About how the guy who invented photocopying didn’t really want to have invented it, so he sold it, and that was the future of privacy.” He was stunned, for the thesis was too much for him . . .
“You never tell me anything,” Lorrie, said, blushing at the blatant untruth of this, as blatant untruths always conjure up their opposite, which, indeed, was that he told her rather more than everything. He told her so much, she was sure he was trying to make her swoon . . .
The question had emerged, amidst a storm of controversial circumstances in everybody’s lives, whilst we were hardly able to negotiate a day in advance, though smiling, ambling, obfuscating, displaying our last ditch personalities, whether thoughts had any effect, or were just reservations, reserved for some sad apocalypse. I knew the truth, though I had such reverse power --its display was past spectacle now, and into free wheeling judgements. So I decided to write the book that was just there all along--the easy to read text, plugged in . . .
“First you learn to drive, then you drive, then you forget how to drive because, after all, driving wasn’t at all what was imagined, whilst in the time you learnt it.” Frere Fractious, when he was lying on his narrow cot, with nothing to steady his thoughts but the cradle of a paper moon, the lone remnant of the night hugging him, would always lapse into something like an arcane line of verse.
"Then the driver of the car, forgets the weather outside.
In bad talk, no one has traceable lives.” THE MODERN EPOCH (Edward WIlliams)
The dogged reflection on the idea that, after all, you can pass your life driving and it will be only that, just driving, and the memory of what images you had while learning to drive, that it would lead to other worlds, that it would lead to, I don’t know, California or something!, instead of just back to the garage, or alternate side of the street parking for the rest of your days, these reflections are the very ones that undermine your actual ability to drive; so that one day you find you have forgotten something very simple, like . . . And driving then becomes twice as complicated, you have to keep reminding yourself how to do it, which is very different than learning it was. And eventually you forget something very essential, like . . .
“One can only take out one’s wallet so many times, before one’s arm gets worn out from never getting a full explanation as to what this repeating action is supposed to prove. What I mean is, they say you never forgot how to ride a bicycle, once you have learned it, but this I dispute, “ Randy DeSoto was saying, and to no one in particular unless is was Maud over at the kitchen stove, who was the only one in the room not playing Scrabble. Randy himself was not thinking about the Scrabble board, of course, since it wasn’t his turn yet and probably wouldn’t be for God knows how long.
“There still is the Kentucky Derby,” Paige Witmore said, mockingly. “And the ice cream man still comes down the street, ringing his annoying bell, though the kids don’t get it,.” she added, and with all ten fingers put down all seven letters to spell the word “Dominoes”, off Randy’s “often.”
An yet, back in his cell, Frere Fractious considered how to handle the problem of reverse anachronisms. Getting nowhere with that, he decided to put together a few more manuscripts packets, of the poem "The Modern Epoch", using the specially lightweight cardboard binders he had just picked up from the stationary store. The procedure, to kill people’s thoughts, was to convince people that something which was purely thought-wise was actually purely physical, and then offer them a pill which claimed to be the exact physical solution, but which only worked because they believed it would. This was the formula that the most humorous monk was formulating for himself, tonight, whilst doing whatever else he appeared to be doing. He could restate it . . . It’s only too familiar. But! Hell, before that operation was complete, and it did seem like this might become laborious, right along with the other three or four cell-keeping things he was in the middle of, for some reason the television just popped on. Sound and all.
And if there is one thought we have all had, it is that the television is a segue, into privacy supreme.
Posted by mortimer at 02:53 AM | Comments (3391)
August 09, 2005
The Most Sexy Conversation You Can Have
“Obviously, everything has already happened. Except the specific adventure of how, in your case, any old knowledge of this is being obtained.”
“Obviously, life is a big secret being revealed to you in pieces, and in such a fashion that you keep losing some of the pieces. For lack of knowing what the puzzle looks like on the outside of the box. “
“ What if, after this life, you are FURTHER away from the truth than you are now? Ever think of that?”
“The problem, as I see it, is the difficulty of handing off, so to speak, existence from personal consciousness to humanity. It’s like, who is taking care of reality, while the other one is in the shop?”
“My primary example, those days, of how the world was changing in the direction merely of our hopes and fears, and not, say, in the direction of any inevitability, was the cellphone. Yes, I see you understand me.”
“I cannot help trying to establish the apparently right order of events historically. And everytime such a story is glimpsed, it is as if I see it in a mirror. And then the mirror is pivoted, quickly, with a turn of the wrist, and the history thrown into retrospect.”
“ So it is not fully correct to say, glibly, that history happens forward but is understood backwards. I think it is understood forwards, and then happens backwards upon the point of that understanding. What is hard to grasp is the exact involvement of the mind considering this. What I experience is the creation of history, not the comprehension of it; the feeling is like the feeling of something that is beginning to make sense.”
“This is the sexiest conversation of all conversations.”
“I mean after this experience, the idea that history happens in a forward motion, as by itself, is kind of left in the dust as a useless premise and couldn’t be demonstrated and was concealing an ulterior motive: that of preventing the experience of seeing life actually happen. How about this guy! He refers to his intellectual cogitation as experience.”
“Says Sally Undertone.”
“What can be said to go on without a witness? Lots of things! You say. But the fact is they don’t really happen until they are discovered to have happened.”
“In any meaningful sense,” she demurred. “Or do you mean in any sense?”
“The latter,” I said. “One way to introduce a couple of my themes in my book, and fiery distinctions together, shooting off those themes, would be to describe the baseball game on television. As on television, you see.”
“I see,” she said. “This does work better in a conversational mode.”
“Seriousness is sexier, yes, in a conversational mode. In fact, what could be sexier, than seriousness?”
She says, “that is what I meant.”
“And the side pans they take of the movie stars in the stands. These famous movie stars don’t look so great, but really they don’t have much else to do; being a movie star leaves you with alot of extra time and not much practice how to fill it.”
“That’s funny!” she said.
He gulped at all the unedited material there, but looked at her for help. She slid over the table a little helping of conchitas. “Good,” he said, “I’ll remember my life, time for that. But when they show the other people, the real people so to speak, they are way more glamourous, and actually having fun at the game. Why? Because they lead fuller lives, and this is just a scene. Like me, too, I am just catching this on the television while I do other things.”
“Are you going to write this book, or just explain how you could do it,” Sally purred in an undertone that was all inviting. She knew the answer to this, particularly since he had told her only and countless times that he wrote the book mostly only for her.
“The book is the explanation of the book,” I said. That did it.
Posted by mortimer at 02:37 AM | Comments (2209)
August 04, 2005
The Very Short Legend of the Enigmatic Past
“When I worked for the railroad,“ the real Steve Eckhardt was saying, “they were very big on seniority.” Steve says this to his one-week partner Montesso, who dragged himself out of bed this morning at seven to get to this job, pounding out aluminium soffit and handing them up the ladder. It is not clear when Steve himself worked for the railroad, he is just telling legends.
“They were so rigorous on seniority,” he says, “there was one guy working there still, who was older than the railroad itself. He was a teenager, when the railroad first came through; and he has been working for it his whole life; so he is older than the railroad itself.”
This is hard to fathom. But Steve makes the conclusion. “That makes him one hundred and sixty eight.”
Slow down! He’s a wiry, tireless, perennially balding guy, never gets bored through several incarnations, never talks much either, which is too bad because he must have a hell of a stock of stories. Probably not though; he probably forgets thing as soon as they happen; that’s why he likes working on the railroad. That’s what the railroad represents, maybe! The blank future. Pretty soon, if he doesn’t hurry up and die, he is going to outlive the railroad, and then where will he be?
Well, we don’t know. I swear, the smartest people don’t even get a chance to finish their thoughts. Steve is coming down the ladder, and Montesso is already in the truck, drinking beer. It’s a problem of time, really, trying to figure out when these epochs started and how quickly they are ending. I know the gutters are done, the aluminum soffit, the soffit, is on--that’s the word I learned. It is when the thunderstorms roll in, that you can take stock of reality, really.
In the kindly lecturing tone, breaking the silence at dinner, I deign to get back to our previous discussion. Speaking again to the fourth reader. We have to see that the system is devised precisely in response to the situation which it ignores and, to us, conspicuously doesn’t include in its description of the world. Evolution, preening itself on its consciousness, leaves out consciousness as a factor or even as an event, in the evolutionary story it tells. I’ll go by that. Some say God is just a solution to an intolerable situation. But they think they have finished the job by removing God; when that still leaves the intolerable situation. Laugh that one off too.
“Why in my day, everybody read the newspaper,” she says, “now, I don’t know where people are getting their information.” This must be just remembered, from one of the really old people. Whom we are not. We are reflective beings, lightening fast in a world of inconclusive thinking . . .
Now, investigation techniques have rendered all previous procedures problematic. There is no case now that cannot be thrown into doubt, because of the new ways there are to look into every aspect of everything, and as a result there are no decisions being made. Or if there are, they are immediately challenged and maybe reversed; though even that is fantastic. Over half the cases in the very courts are challenges to cases in the recent past, so you can see that if this trend continues it is certain some cases will never reach the courts at all.
Plus! In the government itself it happens that anytime a situation is brought into a hearing, it never comes out of the hearing. This is because there are now so many techniques for getting at what actually happened, that it takes forever to explore what actually happened, which is the thing in dispute. Also, some of the techniques are in dispute, or capable of being manipulated, so every conclusion is challenged, and since the prevelant feeling is that the whole thing is a game, it just breaks down along party lines. Damn!
Plus, more than half of what seem to be events are staged events, staged by the very party they seem to be hurting, for the purpose of showing that that party will withstand scandal, weather any storm, come clean and do its own housecleaning, etc. etc.
Plus, every instance of plugging into the new technology involves a setting up procedure and a constant vigilance to the working of the system such that most of the time is spent preparing for the actual benefit. Over half the time is spent making sure the system is ready for the occasion. When you talk to people about what they are doing they mostly tell you about their preparations, or things going wrong, things getting back to normal. Yap, yap. But there is no normal, the cue was missed for the making of life meaningful, among the people whose identity was not established in this onrushing new reality.
“So you see, Mrs Soffit, the old days when you could just read the newspaper at breakfast with your cereal, and consider yourself informed, are rather now as far away as . . . stagecoaches,” I said. And that is before anything ever happened, as far as I can reason it. It is an airtight enigma, sealed up, and here come those promising clouds, threatening rain again over this city street in Rochester, New York.
Posted by mortimer at 02:34 AM | Comments (1240)