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December 30, 2005
Photo Heyday at Marketplace Mall
Here is a photo that doesn’t have any reference. It is like a record of a pathetic seasonal fireworks, in a shopping mall somewhere in Upstate New York. But it must be a fantasy, to kill fantasy altogether; and besides, who would go there, and take a picture? It must be an example of that new school called Photo-Nihilism, that I heard about and ever since have been looking for examples of, and am now cursed with. But this is a scene that is upon analysis not possible. If you look closely and think about it, you will have to agree: this is nowhere.
Like a photograph of mist, or better yet, a ghost. Which is not possible; even though there are undoubtably ghosts, you can’t just go and photograph them. Why? Because photography is a species of technology, and technology is nature--rearranged and sometimes refined. And sometimes splattered all over the walls. But nature is all we have around here, in various forms and available for purchase. You can’t buy something that is not to be found in the world. Obviously. And buying is what we do around here.
But! And here we go, kids. Photo-Nihilsm perhaps captures the occult! The unseen. The aliens, and their invisible ships! Previously photography was used for verifying the actual. This new genre documents the unreal, and in order to get these pictures all you have to do is go to the Mega Mall. And spin on your heels. It’s easy, and fun, while you are doing it. And when you get home, after downsizing those Christmas presents, you are strangely lighter. And you have to wonder: Did Alexander Graham Bell really think he could talk on his new thingumajig (telephone) to his dead grandmother? Were the Egyptians, when you come right down it, correct about the afterlife? Is it even remotely possible that this is the only reality and we just happen to live in it? I mean I know we have organized things pretty well, but stuff leaks through. Glittering dust from the painted blue skylights, made of something you don’t want to inhale. People and manikins walking to and fro. Trying to get out of the picture. It's amazing how well they behave. You would think they might just start throwing things; I know I would, if I wasn’t so damn confused, and actually afraid for my life. With all these pillars that aren't even glued to the floor. With all these slippery floors.
Posted by mortimer at 04:27 PM | Comments (4558)
December 23, 2005
Aunt Caroline's Christmas Cookies
It took years for anyone to realize what was so miraculous about Aunt Caroline’s Christmas cookies. If you asked her--if you said, “what is it about these cookies, Aunt Caroline?”, all you got was a quiet “pretty much sugar, butter, and flour,” for an answer, and that seemed to conceal, rather than reveal, her secret. They were very fragile, these cookies, so lightweight you could hardly tell you were holding them. The children liked to carry them around the house and leave them balanced on the arms of sofas and experimentally on edges of tables. So that these cookies were indeed more like a sacrament, than a dessert, and one felt like taking a vow before eating one, and then nibbling very slowly. The last thing you would do--was eat them like cookies, that is rapidly and unthinkingly. Taking them out of the round tin boxes all her brothers and sisters would seem to pay them a tribute; removing the first layer, and coming to the wax paper, they would not even crumble that, but fold it neatly and put it aside as if the slightest violence were an irreverence to the simple and great occasion she had made Christmas, in, once again, bringing these perfect confections . . .
Now it should be understood that Aunt Caroline was not in any other way known for exceptional cooking; this was her one product, for which she had a mysterious talent, and there were many years when her cookies stood as a lackluster entry among a tableful of fantastic desserts made by others in the family. But one by one, over the years, these ruder, you might say more modern and flamboyant participants became shamed by comparison. In the same way as her cookies were savored and eaten slowly throughout the day (and sometimes even saved until they were stale), the continuous expectation of these cookies, at Christmas, over the years, became for us a savoring thought--of something very genuine and good that would occur during the holiday. It took time for her Christmas cookies to utterly triumph, amidst a crowd of that was not short of proud and egotistical individuals. But Caroline's cookies lasted not only in the occasion, but in the memory, gaining in meaning. . .
They triumphed precisely because there was something about them that was of the essence of time. They were long-lasting to begin with. They put you in a reverie about Christmas, that connected over the years, making the holiday deeper by repetition. Of course! This made it seem that the cookies were getting better, for certainly the occasion was--but the cookies themselves were not getting better in any simple sense of Caroline having improved them. It was obvious they were exactly the same as before. It was just that we were becoming more grateful for the opportunity of tasting these special cookies once again, as if we had missed them the first time and successively missed them again and again. She kept making the original cookies. They were cookies that as if by a miracle kept coming back in their first glory, each time more certainly, each time unaccusingly, forgivingly, and each time more clearly we could focus on the scenes she had traced with the point of a knife and suffused with palest coloring. Showing us in her humble tableaus a few aspects of the scenery of the historical Christmas.
Whatever was communicated took on that quality of happening for the first time, even though its whole content was of something well known, indisputable and familiar. By that route of thought, dwelling on how it could be that something familiar would appeal again to us as something brand new, or that some whole complex of Christmas stories and truths should arise in the mind through the simple action of a small contemplation--it was there that the miraculous nature of the cookies began to dawn on the assembled people. Through these cookies Christmas had found a way to re-enter as if through our thoughts, personally. These cookies disproved that degenerate voice which had corrupted so many other rituals, and earnest feelings. Cynical voices had turned Christmas into a lament, as if two thousand years had disproven it! When of all things it got stronger with time, for simplicity is triumph--the present is nothing but a sketchy scene in which someone is holding the lid of a round tin box, and, putting gently aside the wax paper, is about to gaze as if unknowingly at a selection of fragile cookies. Reality is paper thin. But the past, that is where great mysteries have already happened.
We could never live there. We are caught in THIS dilemma of a world. Where a modest, yet miraculous idea must be defended in a clashing of pretensions; where the first Christmas is found, like a baby, amidst the nearly fatal confusion of the second; where hope is released by a reenactment. And even this truth, that ours is the second Christmas, can not be borne but silently, as it comes with no instructions . . . We simply take a cookie from the tray, and stand looking out the window at the snowfall upon the quiet scene beyond the living room windows.
Posted by mortimer at 08:43 PM | Comments (1320)
December 15, 2005
Glories of the Waiting Room
After one has sustained any kind of physical injury, or has survived the throes of any sickness, he may have a hard time differentiating the effects still lingering from it, and certain aspects of the way he always used to feel anyway. He almost certainly will be haunted by a sense of repitition. Didn’t he always have a reflex tendency to protect his left side, say, when . . . walking into incoming traffic, or sliding through a crowded aisle? Wasn’t he always in a kind of daze, and sometimes had to just sit down because of sheer mental confusion, tracable perhaps to his . . . inherent brilliance? Was he even human, the way most people are, to begin with? But only learning it, by picking up hints and signals grabbed from observation? Previously he didn’t think of himself as having to cover this up, but it was part of his fallible person--his very personality; not a sign of fast moving mortality! Hadn’t he always flown from severe anxiety to great elation in an unforeeable instant? Didn’t he change like the weather, faster than the weather? Didn’t he secretly believe he actually was the cause of the weather, half the time? Wasn’t he always unsteady on his feet, and on the other hand light on his feet? And, most significant of all, wasn’t he a doubt-ridden soul from the day he was born! So there, one is always adjusting and shifting between assessing what has happened, and getting ready for another gloriously, half deserved fall from grace.
But then, after this established balancing act, a new factor creeps into his consideration: the factor of age! This makes a sneaky assault on his consciousness, as if to suggest he may be altogether, by force of time itself, eventually . . . unredeemable. Just when he thought he had fully recovered from the last catastrophe, which succesfully he had redefined as no catastrophe at all, he was hit with the fear that too much time had been lost, just in the recovery period. Or rather, that just since time had passed at all, a new and later condition and whatever its brand-new effects might be, was newly upon him. So now he had to consider whether there were not maybe THREE possible sources for any of his specific doubts and actual symptoms. Either they, this still numberable flock, were reoccuring as something that had always had happened in life, or they were reoccurring as echoes and lingering effects of the catastrophe that had befallen him midway in his life, OR they were new signs of the beginning onslaught of age on him. Interesting. Troubling. A further education for his body and mind altogether.
Then again, are there not are pure benefits to age; like being more constitutionally prepared, from experience and a new mental flexibility, to deal with nettling, or rather inspiring, situations such as this. This being in the Waiting Room. Inspiring? Why yes, because this is the wellspring of imagination. If you exhaustively review all possible scenarios, it's a glorious scrapheap-- of what never happens to you. This he has learned. When deep down he believes he can address, or cure, or suffer anything. Give yourself some lattitude, man, he says to himself. It’s a dramatic thing, being alone with your fate. It’s just a split second before he hears those fatal words, which he has heard before, “the doctor will see you now,” that he achieves a state of total preparedness. After what he has been through, you can pretty much look at it like it's the doctor who has the problem now . . .
Posted by mortimer at 02:02 AM | Comments (2390)
December 07, 2005
THE AFTERLIFE HOTEL (continued)
“So the fatuous famous actor when he is interviewed on Charlie Rose always tells what acting part it was, to be sure, that was the Big Break, cuz when the RaRa Reviewer praised him like he did in The New York Times, well that led to the Phone Call, and then the offers started rolling in. It’s the way it happens.”
“It’s the way it happens, when it happens.”
“Now he is the enviable position of being able to pick the parts he wants to play.”
”Oh sure he is.”
“Even people in life can’t do that!”
“The call doesn’t come for everyone, just because they put in ten years working as a waiter or a call-girl. I mean a waitress or a doorman.”
“I have this terrible ringing sense of an . . . equilibrium.”
“Secretly though, he is undermined by the grawing reality that he doesn’t really like any of the parts. None of them give him the chance to be—himself!”
“Balance. You mean you have this sense of balance?”
“Fish. Fish I think-- think everything else is in a fishtank. When they nose up to the side of the fishtank, see, they think: my, my, what is going on out there?”
“Actually, fish can’t look straight ahead. And they probably therefore and for other reasons can’t think rationally. Which, come to think of it, might not be the only way to think.”
“They thought I was just being funny, but it was more than that. And when they got the feeling it was more than that, they thought it wasn’t funny anymore. Like I had tricked them!”
“With me it was the other way around. I was trying to be profound, and it was lucky I was at least funny.”
"The opposite of the truth has a great career."
“Ah so, we still have alot of work to do. To right the wrong, and reset up the spinning top.”
“Why is that? That we have, suddenly, so much work to do. Didn’t we keep up, or what?”
“At least we are relieved of the question of the public, the responsibility of the historical record, the pyrotechnics of publishing and promotion, and other ugly earthly duties!”
“It is the nature of life to compound itself, and get further and further behind in the main mission, it seems.”
“Still, though, one swift revelation and we might be out of here.”
“First, though, we have to figure out where we are.”
“Do we have to figure out where we are, first, to . . .”
“Getting out of here is equivalent to figuring out where we are.”
“Because . . .”
“If we knew where we were, we would be there! It’s not knowing where we are, that makes us wonder where we are.”
“Don’t everybody speak at once.”
“So how is this any different from being alive was? Well, I can answer that for myself. It is different because now it is the main topic. And there are only a few of us here, perhaps a few more coming in. A few more waiting on it. In the mood of a farewell.”
--- 5 ---
“Okay folks. If this is the afterlife, there is no need to conform to former assumed requirements of making things interesting to an essentially disinterested human audience.”
“You can say that again! We certainly were naive to think everybody was interested in life.”
“Meanwhile over to the Tavern of Historical Personages—we find many former agitators. Staying up all night, though it isn’t night for that only happens on earth, as they strive to rig up a morning landscape —like a memory of life. Ah, life—what was it?”
“Ah, life—what was it. Not really a question, if you put it that way.”
“For awhile I thought I would know what it was before it ended, and then I thought at least for certain I would know afterwards. Who would have thought that, looking back I still don’t know what it was!”
“And over at this table, three famed literary giants, who are little guys, from the 1840’s. That would be Edgar Allen Poe, Soren Kierkegaard, and Thomas DeQuincey. Never met in life, I hear.”
“Meeting now for the first time. Though they were all in a soldiers’ row on someone’s bookshelf.”
“And what’s the name of the woman running the Wild West brothel? Where the gunslinger finds brief solace before the final shoot-out in the morning . . .”
“Kitty. Always, Kitty.”
“I have the feeling I’ve been here before.”
“There was a ferment, the oldest, the most remarkable of all, that was known to be an organic being—beer yeast. That’s Louie! Frock-coated Louie. Treat him to a frosty mug!“
“I can’t believe I don’t have to worry about my car anymore.”
“I’m going back.”
“You get this far and you want to go back?
“I can’t even think without music playing.”
“I can’t believe I am aware of the fact that three checks are going to bounce. Like I could do something about it now!”
“Why did we always have to hear the President’s reaction to everything.”
“Especially when we knew exactly what it is going to be.”
“I always like the parts about the President. The President is a real comic character; we just roll him out and put a microphone in front of him, and he gives the stupid emotion everytime.”
“That is because is he is so thoroughly deluded that he is President.”
“A real President would be able to divorce himself from the fact, I agree.”
“Not the main topic, kids."
--- 6 ---
“This might be a good time to take the stage with my “Six Good People” monologue. Where is the stage? And what have they done with the audience?”
“Most pertinent now are issues and situations that arise and are unresolved between one person and another.”
“Like what?”
“I can’t think of anything at the moment.”
“Most pertinent now are . . . persons? What? What? How?”
“If it wasn’t resolved, look out for now it will be! My crashing consciousness will have justice."
“Go for it. People could never just admit they gave that topic or issue no thought. They have to infernally pretend that they have given everything ample thought, and give an opinion. Which requires ignoring what they just heard, from me, which, it they admitted it, proves they never . . .”
“The reason she, or he, doesn’t readily agree with you is that would expose the fact she, or he, has never given the subject any thought. He, or she, verily has to pretend to have thought about it, and when confronted with conclusions, the very conclusions thought would of course have to reach, she, or he—-the whole lot of them! has to dispute them, to, as I said, preserve the—”
“I get it!”
“Does he or she know he is right?”
“If he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, in panic of being exposed she, or he, must risk flatly denying.“
“This becomes more important than anything else. Not the topic, but the topic of how they treated the topic! God!”
“What was the subject?”
“Tell us the subject, before that horrible vagueness begins, like some invisible poison pumped into the air through the radiators, floor vents, ceiing fans—”
“How to create characters in a play. Charlie Rose asks Tom Stoppard, you see, HOW he writes his plays. He says, what to you do, Tom, think of the character and then give them the lines?”
“Tom says, no Charlie, that is precisely wrong. What I do Charlie, is think up the dialogue and once that gets going I know something about the character—by what he is already saying. Get it!”
“Topic 1: Thomas Jefferson did sire children from the slave Sally Hemmings. DNA tests have finally proved it, such tests not being in existence back when . . . Two: Daniel Wegman’s master thesis in college was titled: “The Future of Retail Food Marketing. Today he is getting an award from the National Grocers Association or some god-damned group like that for, guess what? innovation! And three: the body of George Mallory at the top of Mt. Everest has been found and if the camera is found it might be determined whether he got to the top first. Frozen film on route to lab at Kodak.”
“These are your three themes?”
“In descending order of apparent relevence to earthly existience such as it was once known. Ah yes. With superior ramifications.”
“Examples involving complicated retroactiveness.”
“These are the three themes?”
“It will be the ramifications, that will transcend the initial theme, but we don’t know the ramifications until we bury ourselves in the themes. And with such faith we shall persevere.”
“With all the time in the world.”
Posted by mortimer at 01:48 AM | Comments (3618)