Nice watch

Nice watch, dude. I don’t wear one, although they have come roaring back into style. I have two that stay in a drawer. My wrists have grown fat as the rest of me has, and I don’t fit into them any more. Well, I suppose I could wear the one with the leather band, but I don’t.

It was somebody from early in the last century, like Nietzsche or maybe Thomas Mann, or Sartre - somebody - who said that Humanity’s only real superpower is reading. That struck me as maybe a bit of self-serving aggrandizement, but also true. We chiefly - or maybe exclusively - encounter our ancestors through books. And our minds can be thoroughly transformed - not only our minds, but our outlooks, our attitudes, and certainly our perceptions - when encountering a genius from a previous time. I know I’m preaching to the choir here. 

So it was with dismay and disappointment that I found out that Workman Press did not publish a 2019 Page-a-Day calendar with a new book every day. It sucks. I did start to realize, though, in true insert-the-rationalization-that-fits fashion, that in the last couple of years, fewer and fewer books appealed to me, and that I hadn’t got that much use out of them. 

So for 2019, I got a calendar with a new Zen thought each day, and I have really been enjoying it. An early-year sampling of favorites: from E.M. Forster: “Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.” From someone named Joanna Macy: “To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe - to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it - is a wonder beyond words.” From the Upanishads: “The spirit down here in man and the spirit up there in the sun, in reality are only one spirit, and there is no other one.” And I’ll finish up with my all-time fave, John Keats: “I will clamber through the Clouds and exist.” 

In August of 2017, much of the U.S. witnessed a total solar eclipse. I was working at a construction and engineering firm in Boulder (Colorado had about a 91% totality) and we went out into our small parking lot to take a gander at it. Some thoughtful person had brought in eyewear, like 3D glasses for the theater, only they were certified to protect your eyes as you looked up at the phenomenon. Scattered in the lot next door to ours were some young people - undergrads at the U. of Colorado most likely - because there was a pot dispensary there. 

We’re watching and remarking and gawking, and I took off my lenses and walked them over to a shy-looking young guy, who may or may not have been high. If he was, then he was very low-key about it. I handed him the protective gear and said, You probably want to see this. He appreciated it big time and I told him to be careful. He almost didn’t do it, but I gently encouraged him and when he brought the eyegear to his eyes and looked up, he looked up for a long time. It was almost like having a contact high.

A few days ago I watched the Avengers Infinity War, because I like the franchise … well, it just seemed like so much filler to me. It’s so obviously set up for a sequel - it boils down to the latest in the exploitative, we’re-just-going-to-make-noisy-frenetic-shit-you’ll-buy-it-anyway genre. That’s what they should call the superhero genre. Religion used to be the opiate of the masses. Now it’s cinema. A religion of its own.

My reading progresses glacially. Beside me here is “Everything Under” by Daisy Johnson. It’s debut fiction that was nominated for the Booker last year! I love an amazing bit of debut fiction. I’m only on page 38, and so far the tension builds between a neglectful mother who is hated by her grown daughter as the mother slides into dementia. 

My other book at the moment is a reader of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian linguist and philosopher who published from the 1920s to 1950s. He talks about what he calls Heteroglossia, the multitude of languages and meanings in fiction, but also in everyday speech. Won’t get soporific about it, but he says that authoritarian regimes (which figure prominently in stuff written in Soviet Russia) try to suppress the multiplicity of languages, and attempt to keep all utterance in standard, normative language. He calls this a centripetal force. The countervailing centrifugal force is the more natural and stronger force, pushing meaning and language outward to encounter more and more meaning. It dovetails nicely with a book I recently finished, called “Sweet Lamb of Heaven,” by Lydia Millet (2016). In that book, a woman’s estranged husband severely limits what she can say, and even think, as he runs for election to a seat in the Alaska state legislature. It’s uncanny, actually.

Well, right there, I’m going to peter out and go to bed. Been a long day.