Hell HAS frozen over!
“I would have made a good pope.” – Richard M. Nixon, 1974
BON MOT DU TEMPS. Memory decays unless reinforced. It has a half-life because the molecules that store it – AMPA receptors and mRNAs – have a half-life. The Apollo Eleven flag was purchased from Sears and did not survive the ignition gases of the liftoff. The tyrant Demylus once spat into a delicate fish dish, so desperate was he to have it all to himself. What is the virtual commensurate of a frontal lobe?
All things coexist, all events and points are united, every state of being is side by side and follows one upon the other. Swallows at the window, fluttering waves of twisting and turning black lines, a seething mass of like-minded animal power.
Diogenes was often seen wandering the streets of Athens, buck naked or nearabouts, and always carrying with him a lantern brightly lit, even in the broadest daylight. When asked what the hell he was doing, he replied, “I am looking for a human being.” In his 1965 performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, Joseph Beuys sat in a gallery window, his face covered in honey and gold powder, whispering explanations of the drawings on the walls to the dead hare cradled in his arms. When asked what the hell he was doing, he replied, “I don’t like explaining things to human beings.”
O to give up writing! Just lifting that exclamation point into place exhausted me. So tired, can’t seem to sleep more than two hours at a time, the loops waking me up, then an hour spent writing them down, clearing them out, hosing them out of my head like the organs and blood of a gutted fish. My brain feels like a kicked-in anthill, images swarming between my ears, climbing over each other to get out. I feel myself slipping away, turning red and black, growing long wings, getting ready to lift into the sky.
During the first half of my blind grandfather’s last stay with us, which happened to coincide with a particularly difficult period of my life, I was forced to take sedatives, which caused me to suffer from the most terrible dreams imaginable. In one of these, more a waking than a sleeping dream – hallucination is perhaps a more accurate term – I was walking along a rocky foreshore at low tide, perhaps on Salt Spring Island, perhaps in Brittany. Seashells crunched beneath my boots, and the water roiled fiercely offshore, as if in a great storm. The sky, however, was clear blue, and the air was calm. I was walking with someone, but could not turn my head to see who it was. Looking down, I saw that the embedded mussels I was trampling beneath my boots were still alive but dying, oozing out of their crushed shells. I stopped walking and knelt to get a closer look. To my shock, the slithering creatures were not oozing but consciously abandoning their broken shells and crawling across the rocks, moving together in the same direction and quickly, faster than they should have been able to. I looked over to where they seemed to be headed and was horrified to see, at their terminus, my walking companion, a single, oozing invertebrate, with the proportions and shape of a human being.
I always liked Joseph Beuys’s idea for the Berlin Wall. Don’t tear it down. Raise it higher. Improve its proportions.
“How much?” we asked.
“Five centimetres.”
I remember now. Remember, this too will pass. As Nixon put it, “Animals do not admire each other.” Remember the last time they had us here? Remember the last time we failed, and what followed? That passed, and this too will pass. Once, during that last episode – the perfect word, makes it sound like the soap opera it was – while we were scrambling to contain the “crisis,” we spent a night at your apartment thrashing things out, just the two of us, drinking scotch and trying to find solutions to problems we could only partially identify. We covered a lot of the old ground quickly, dispensing with the usual nonsense (“I’m a kept cat,” you told me. “But I choose my own litter box.”), sidestepping the dull-headed obstacles and moving in on the nut of the newer issues with determined purposefulness. There was no treacle; there was nothing tentative, no half-measures, no waffling, no whinging, no second-guessing. We had things to communicate and we took the time to listen to each other. We argued about many things, but tried hard to find common ground. Within the first hour, however, we were cartoon drunk, slurring our words and squinting at each other like porno Popeyes. My kidneys weren’t working; they weren’t as bad as they are now, but they ached terribly, and my guts churned and burned, and I had to make over a dozen trips to the toilet. As far as I could tell, you took no notice. By this late stage, you were incapable of registering any event external to those firing inside your skull. Want, want, want! Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice! It wasn’t so much that you were caught up in yourself; it wasn’t ego. You were reeling. You were defenceless. I wanted to help, I really did. That’s why I was there. I know you know that. And I honestly thought I could do some good. But I was useless; I realise that now. As Nixon said, you can’t depend on the man who made the mess to clean it up. I was in a worse state than you. It was a rotten time, and I was no good to anybody. I still thought I could be some mentor or herald under different, less reactive circumstances, which I see now was laughable. I wasn’t even a voice in the wilderness. I was a fart in the desert. I didn’t know answers from a can of paint.
Regretting the disappearance of the past is like busting the dead for loitering. “Even the dead will not be safe if the enemy wins. And this enemy does not stop winning.” But the past is not enemy territory. It is not a no man’s land. It is not a place, it is ambrosia, it is the food of the gods, best served piping hot, in layers, like lasagne, with ground meat, cheese, basil, tomato sauce and béchamel.
Does that make sense? I have been thinking about how my blind grandfather would rub a fingernail over the edge of a coin to determine its denomination. The ribbed trim of dimes and quarters, the smooth edge of pennies, the denticled sides of a nickel. Bank clerks arranged the bills in his wallet. Twenties, tens, fives, twos, ones. The temptation must have been great to steal his money. When he bought things, he would finger through the bills, you could see him calculating, remembering, then he would pull out a five or a ten, hold it hesitatingly, then offer it up. How often did he make mistakes? How often did the shopkeepers say, No, sir, that’s a ten, reach into his wallet and pull out another and say, Here, that’s a five. Or give him the wrong change, all ones instead of fives.
A few times a week, he would ask me to count his bills and reorganise his wallet. I don’t know if I ever took any for myself. I don’t know if I stole from him. I don’t know because I don’t remember.
Only in fetters is liberty. Without its banks, can a river be? Everyone is an artist, Beuys said. And an asshole. Plato was once holding forth on his theory of ideas and, pointing to a bowl on a table, said that there are many bowls and tables in the world, but there is only one idea of a bowl, and one idea of a table, and this “bowlness” and “tableness” precede the existence of all particular bowls and tables.
Diogenes scratched his nuts and snorted. “I see the bowl on the table, but I can’t see any fucking ‘bowlness’ or ‘tableness.’”
Plato smiled. “That’s because you have eyes to see the bowl and the table, but,” tapping his head with his forefinger, “to see ‘bowlness’ and ‘tableness’ requires a level of intelligence you lack.”
Diogenes looked at him for a while. Then he got up and walked to the table. He picked up a cup and peered inside. “Is it empty?” he asked.
Plato nodded.
“Where is the ‘emptiness’ that precedes this empty cup?” asked Diogenes.
Plato paused, seeking a clever answer.
Diogenes leaned over and tapped Plato’s skull with his knuckle. “I think you will find all the emptiness you need right fucking here.”
“I won’t shake hands with anybody from San Francisco,” said Nixon on one of the tapes. And then a rant about All in the Family. “Archie is sitting here with his hippie son-in-law,” says Nixon, “married to the screwball daughter, who apparently goes both ways.” And you hear Ehrlichman brown-nose grunt in agreement. “The point that I make is that, goddamn it, I do not think that you glorify on public television homosexuality. You don’t glorify it, John, anymore than you glorify, uh, whores. I don’t want to see this country go that way. You know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates.”
THUS roll I, never taking ease,
My tub, like Saint Diogenes,
Now serious am, now seek to please;
Now love and hate in turn one sees;
The motives now are those, now these;
Now nothings, now realities.
Thus roll I, never taking ease,
My tub, like Saint Diogenes. – Goethe, 1815Alexander the Great once travelled on elephant-back for a whole week for the sole purpose of an audience with Diogenes. When he finally found him, sitting naked in the dirt by the side of the road, he dismounted and asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him.
Diogenes looked at him and said, “You can get the fuck out of my light.”
A wealthy man once led Diogenes into his palace and warned him not to spit on the floors, whereupon Diogenes cleared his throat and spat in the man’s mouth.
“Sorry,” he said, “but it was the filthiest-looking receptacle I could find.”
“In the old days, when many men had many wives, a certain man had two – one as old as he, the other young and firm and beautiful – and he worshipped both with equal passion and tenderness. But then the young one bore him a daughter he loved even more than his two wives. This great love made him also perhaps fonder of the daughter’s mother, to the great raging chagrin of his older wife, who set upon a devious plan, pretending to be gravely ill, not able to eat, though she did gulp down fistfuls of food when backs were turned. Finally, after weeks of ruse, seemingly on the point of death, she declared that only one thing could cure her. She must eat the heart of her stepdaughter.”
“What is the point of this?” you asked, right about here. I told you to shut up and listen. You closed your eyes and started snoring, faking at first, but real soon enough.
“On hearing his old wife’s wicked demand, the poor man’s face fell. He was heartbroken; he knew not what to do. He loved his wife almost as much as he loved his little daughter. “You can have other daughters,” said his wife. “And sons, too. But you can never have another wife you would love as much as me.” The poor man gave in to her wickedness and commanded two of his woodsmen to slay his daughter and bring back her heart. The men took her to the dark woods, but, being merciful men, they took pity on her and slew instead a dog. They snuck the child back to her mother and told her what had happened. Frightened, the mother fled with the child into the dark woods. The dog’s heart was brought to the evil stepmother, who was filled with joy. “Just seeing it has healed me,” she declared. “I require nothing more.” And she greedily gulped it down. For many months, the old couple lived together in relative peace. The old man was sad, but his wife worked hard to make him forget his terrible loss. But at last, one of the servants told the old man what had happened, and he grew cold and distant. She, seeing this, longed for a more loving and livelier husband. One day, while the old man was out in the dark woods hunting wild boar, a handsome young man, beautifully dressed from head to toe in shimmering black, came to the house and flattered the old woman. She flirted with him and showed him her breasts. He kissed her. “Leave with me,” he whispered, and they fled together into the birch trees and came to a beautiful house with gold mats, where they lay down together and made passionate love till the break of day, when, exhausted, they fell fast asleep in each other’s arms. But when the old woman woke in the morning it was not a house at all, but a pile of leaves and branches in the midst of the dark woods; and her new man had been transformed into a carrion-crow, and her own body, too, had been turned into a carrion-crow’s, and she was eating dung. At that moment, she knew she would eat nothing but dung for the rest of her life.”
I sit carefully, avoiding excess, in my quiet corner of the world, surrounded by friends and family, impeccably fulfilling my civic obligations, satisfied with the duties and functions assigned and at one with the world because, through some misfiring squirt in a small lobe at the front of the brain, I am convinced that, like poor Lycas, I am in the theatre, forever viewing staged entertainments. The finest comedies and tragedies in the world.
I have uncontrollable visions. They do not fragment, they do not shatter. They withstand analysis.
Montaigne wrote of Thrasyllus, son of Pythodorus, who believed that every boat that sailed into the port of Piraeus carried stores for him and him alone. His brother had him cured — “caused him to be restored to his better understanding” — but Thrasyllus was infinitely happier before, when the sight of a new ship brought fresh, unsullied joy.
In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
“What happened to the old man?” you asked.
“What do you mean?”
“In the Aino story.”
“He was told in a dream to take back his younger wife and his child, and the three lived happily together ever after.”
“And that’s supposed to tell us something useful?”
“Yes.”
Even if the lunar flag assembly had survived the blast of rocket exhaust during takeoff, it would have disintegrated by now.
At nesting time, male swans, the world’s largest waterfowl, with wing spans of up to eight feet, can be lethal. A blow from a male tundra swan’s wing can break a grown man’s femur.
I once saw a miniature poodle savagely beaten and pulled into the swimming pool of the Twilight 4-Star Motel in Thunderhill, Manitoba, by an aggressive tundra swan. The dog would have drowned if someone hadn’t clubbed the bird over the head with the pool-cleaning net.
“The mind of him from whom the limb is taken by the swiftness of the blow feels no pain.”
I was a slow developer. I did not utter an intelligible word until I was four. From then on, I spoke in complete and complicated phrases, though barely audible, my voice a wet, lisping, upwind whisper, “like bath water swirling down a drain,” my father used to say.
I still have this trait, I do not know where it comes from. I start strong, great gusts of wind in my sails, then the words drift and the voice trails off to a quiet gurgle before disappearing altogether.
An old question presents itself: What was I born for? This always sets me off. What was I born for? What is anybody born for?
I write this to learn it, to memorise it. I want to hear it echoed as from some mountaintop afar away in the West. I speak it out loud, I give it new cadences, I even sing its different parts, but none of it sticks, not a single word. It has no meat. It has no béchamel. No depth. No resonance. Is it too genteel? Am I another dumb extra? Grist for the mill? A passenger, that’s what you once called me. A chair warmer. A schmuck taking up a seat on the bus of life.
“Not even a passenger. You haven’t even got on the bus. You don’t even know where the stop is.”
The DLPFC, just behind the forehead, is the last area in the brain to develop. Proteins and phospholipids mix to create myelin, a thick, whitish insulating sheath that forms around nerve fibres. Myelin helps increase the speed at which the impulses inside are fired down the line. We learned about this in a roundabout manner. Alcohol relaxes the dolorific crispations of the membranes. The main effects of trauma to this region, according to the DSK, are “flat affect, social withdrawal and ineffectiveness, impairment of goal-related behaviours, inattentiveness, poor motivation, and poor insight.” IQ levels drop. Problem-solving skills disappear. The process begins thus (I’ll have more concrete examples later). Make an error, a red-coloured “BLUE”, a red-coloured club or spade, a black-coloured ace of hearts, and a quick squirt of blood splashes against the anterior cingulate cortex, the ACC, a collar of tissue in the brain. Similar events occur when things go missing: phantom pain in a severed limb or a pulled tooth.
The more closely you look at something, the more distantly it looks back. The same is true of words.
On July 5th of the year 1989, the day before his wife’s sixty-eighth birthday, President Reagan, barely a half year out of the Oval Office, lost his nerve – and control of the horse that he was riding – and was thrown headfirst into a rock. The accident occurred during an unofficial buffalo hunt on a private ranch in Mexico. The Secret Service told reporters that the President had only sustained “bruises and minor abrasions” and had not (god forbid!) “fallen”: “the animal, a seventeen-hand Arabian gray – a gift from José Lopez Portilla – slipped on loose stones while negotiating a sidestepping descent down a very steep incline.” Spooked, it bucked “repeatedly and wildly,” eventually unsaddling the experienced rider.
“My own private rodeo,” joked the President, whose cowboy films included Santa Fe Trail, The Last Outpost, Cowboy from Brooklyn, Angel from Texas, Tennessee Partner, and Cattle Queen of Montana. He and Nancy were flown by military helicopter to an army hospital across the border in Arizona. “The President is in excellent condition,” said the attending doctor. Five hours later, he was released. He and Nancy flew back to the birthday party. A week later, doctors in Los Angeles discovered a subdural hematoma between his dura mater, which adheres to the skull, and his arachnoid mater, which envelops the brain.
Reagan’s injury (and its cause) is strikingly similar to that which Eadward Muybridge suffered in central Texas in 1860. Muybridge remembered nothing of the accident. “A fellow passenger told me after leaving that station we had travelled for probably half an hour – we were just then entering the Texas Cross-Timbers. The mustangs ran away. The driver was unable to control them. Just as we were getting to the Timbers, I remarked that the best plan would be for us to get out of the back of the stage, because I saw that an accident would occur. He told me that I took out my knife to cut the canvas back of the stage when it ran against a rock or a stump, and threw me out against my head.” His first memory following the event was lying in bed at Fort Smith, Arkansas, about 150 miles from the scene of the accident.
“There was a small wound on the top of my head,” he told the court.
His hair turned from black to grey in four days.
The Mexican ranch where Reagan’s accident occurred belonged to Bill Wilson, the first-ever US Ambassador to the Holy See. I bring this up here because the College of Cardinals is convening this week to elect the next Bishop of Rome.
“So?” you ask.
“Fears of Rome run deep,” I answer, touching my forefinger to my nose. You raised your hand to your mouth and tittered behind it. Why? Why do you do this when you laugh?
In 1867, the US Congress, influenced by rumours that the Vatican had played a “significant and primary” role in the Lincoln assassination, severed diplomatic ties with the Papal States. Presbyterian Reagan, not Catholic Jack or Quaker Nixon, reversed this in 1983, and Bob Wilson was its face, voice, eyes, and ears.
The following year, Wilson used equipment donated by the Knights of Columbus to replace the outdated Hallicrafter instruments at HV1CN. The only station that transmits from inside the Vatican walls, HV1CN, first aired in 1957. In 1965, Bill Halligan, the founder of Hallicrafters, donated a new station to replace HV1CN’s old army surplus equipment. In 1966, he sold his company to Northrop. Fierce Japanese competition soon forced Northrop to drop domestic non-military electronics production; in 1970, it sold the company, but kept the Hallicrafters plant in Rolling Meadows, just outside of Chicago, retooling it and changing its name to Northrop Corporation’s Defense Systems Division. In 1985, Wilson met with Mu’ammer Qaddafi in Tripoli a few days after the Rome and Vienna airport attacks. When this was discovered by the press the following year, Wilson resigned.
Four years later, on September 8th, 1989, neurosurgeons at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, drilled “at least one hole” (according to the NYT) into the right side of Reagan’s skull, inserted a catheter, and sucked out a second hematoma.
The little wiggle and the bang. This is what we called it. The little wiggle and the bang.
According to most DX clusters, ham stations in the Vatican are among the most desirable contacts worldwide.
Animals “witness” the death of their own kind and know to fear it, and they are able to transmit that fear to others, but only immediately and physically – instinctually, with their muscles, not their minds. This, I am sure, you have seen. The defensive crouch, the speeding heart, the flood of blood.
Swallows at the window in mad flight, rats frozen to the spot, dogs, cowering, heads and paws turned to the sky, committed to submission. You see this especially – in massive numbers, entire populations – during earthquakes. Epinephrine and norepinephrine and cortisol. But to truly bear witness and show by your existence that something is true is an exclusively human calling.
Promise me that you will fix this claptrap. I can’t help but flash on the image of two monkeys picking lice off each other’s scalp and popping them into their mouths. “Only the man in pain can tell you what hurts,” said Nixon. Let’s leave it at that. You and I will survive. It’s not a problem of not having enough information but too much. Throw away the extraneous details and focus on the structure, on the surface equation.
It is a question of equilibrium, and of infinitely complicated behaviour. A deterministic chaos.
Remember, there are no atheists in foxholes. Which, you ask, or should be asking, means what, exactly?
https://music.apple.com/ca/album/a-town-called-hell/1472085774?i=1472085775