Subconscious Political Cave Art

"Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,--Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,--nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,--her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,--that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,--not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,--rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common." - Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

There is an extraordinary moment in Werner Herzog's documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams when the camera pans over a number of drawings of ancient buffalo all layered over one another and Herzog, in that marvelous Teuton drawl, tells us that the artists who painted these near-identical images lived over a span of thousands of years. Of course, none of them knew that. They had no carbon dating systems. They had no concept of art history. The last participant in the graffiti oneupsmanship that Herzog documents had no idea that he was marring the record of his ancestors and changing the perception that later generations would have about the cave. What the ancient men and women who left those records on those stalactites lacked is known to us modern motherfuckers as the anxiety of influence. Obviously anyone who drew atop the previous buffalo felt that he was adding something to the depictions, but with no other permanent records, that anonymous artist was oblivious to the fact that thousands of years and untold development had occurred between the first charcoal buffalo and the last.

Memory, records, truth and time are humanity's great survival tools, and the reason that people have become so good at staying alive and remaking the planet in our image is the continued refining of these skills. They can also be terrible burdens, curses against individuals and bludgeons against society.

Here are two examples of what I mean, one personal and the other societal.

Personal: How much of my self am I aware of, and how much of the self of which I am aware am I able to control, and how much of my self is simply a reaction to stimulus? I am aware of my tendency towards self-righteousness and aware of my good humor. I am aware of my historic attraction to well-read women about my height and weight or perhaps a bit larger who have long, curly, walnut-colored hair, athletic bearing and a whiff of sadness. One would imagine that all this awareness would have allowed me to develop, over time, a touch of humility and a sense of gravitas and an appreciation for happy, straight-haired blondes who enjoy bad television and move carelessly about the world. The presumption that the memory of negative reactions to my wrathful condemnations of those who think differently about the world than I or my clowning or my disastrous relations with the opposite gender would allow for an evolution in my personality is based on an understanding of the role that time plays in the evolution of a species that it cannot play for an individual. Human bodies experience linear time much more acutely than does the human mind. We grow. We age. We break bones and bear scars. All the while our mind works on unifying the current moment with all those it has taken in before, which it does, needfully, based upon those same prior experiences. Like the fractal image in the caption, the picture grows larger and more complex, but does not deviate from the founding shape or equation.

It's worth mentioning here that I do not believe in fate and I do believe that people can change and change for the better. But I believe that those changes are of degree rather than kind and that they occur after repeating the pattern time and again - that life is not shaped in a Modest Mouse-like "lifelong walk to the same exact spot" but is akin to a spiral, with a person finding herself on the same vector, but with the ability to look back, in memory, and see how the behavior pattern played out previously and tinker with the course to hopefully affect an improved outcome. I also believe that the forces that set us on those spirals are largely outside of our control. Am I innately sarcastic and self-sufficient, or are those reactions that I then cultivated because I valued sarcasm's ability to deflect disappointment and self-sufficiency's capacity to create a remove between myself and the unreliable mass of humanity? Where is the chicken and where is the egg? For that matter, if the chicken (my conscious self) is getting more experience and growing larger, does the egg (my unconscious/subconscious/personality/soul) grow correspondingly huge alongside it? I had one of my usual end of the world-type dreams recently, and I recognized I was dreaming when I looked back on the white smoke wafting from the city out on to the river in which I was swimming and realized that it was nearly identical to the cover of The New Yorker on the 10th Anniversary. New symbol for an old fear, perhaps, but it was comforting in a way to see a familiar emotion in a different guise. Like falling in love again and you know it's real because it feels as fresh and raw as it did the first time, but with huge sublimated fear in place of love.

Here is the societal example, which I promise will be simple and less vague: What does the Constitution of the United States mean and/or represent? If you consult the memories of the men involved in its debate, drafting and adoption, it means wildly different things. It was a codification of the union that the Declaration of Independence created. It was a betrayal of the spirit of independence through the codification of that union. If you consult the record, that is, the thing itself, you can find it to be equally perplexing and self-contradictory. Within one hundred years of its ratification, the Constitution had proved so maddeningly elusive in its definitions of the rights and responsibilities of the various governments it created or enshrined that the country tore itself apart for four years to resolve those ambiguities. How about the truth of the Constitution? We know from the preamble that it is intended to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity." Justice for whom? Justice by what standard? What is the proper weight between domestic tranquility (which would seem to provide a framework against divisive politics) and the blessings of liberty (which include the right to cacophonous disagreement)? Is the general welfare the general welfare of the country as measured in GDP or the general welfare of the country as measured in class mobility? How many of the Constitution's goals are provided by the Constitution itself and how many are supplied by the workings of other institutions that exist because we have respect for the rule of law? Finally, crucially, there is our perception of time as it relates to the Constitution. Could this document have been produced by different men in a different place in a different time? How reverent should we be of the Founders' accomplishment, and can that reverence include revision? Can we be aware of how special and important the cave drawing is and still have the chutzpah required to add our art atop it in good conscience?

Economies of Scale

"I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water." - William James

For most of my adult life, I've worked in restaurants. There are two strategies restaurateurs employ in order to turn a profit. 1) Reliance on high volume/popularity. 2) Systematic yet disguised price gouging. Strategy #1 is best exemplified by your local diner. They don't have loss-leaders, they don't price competitively and their chief concern is getting you in and out as quickly as possible. They probably only make a few cents of profit on every transaction, so their business strategy is to conduct as many transactions as possible. Strategy #2 is best exemplified by your local mid-market chain restaurant (think Applebee's/Outback, etc.), where you get a steak for perhaps a dollar or two less than you would at a joint with one outlet rather than several hundred. The quality of the food is in all likelihood lower but more consistent than any independent place, and this is because the chains are making purchase arrangements with large-scale distributors who supply them with product at a much lower price than any independent can negotiate. But because the price is set by the surrounding market, the chain is able to charge a price comparable to the independent and pocket the difference as profit. Think of it this way: were I to charge $18 for a steak, you would wonder about the quality of the beef, because you are used to paying more for your meat; so I charge $24 to meet your expectations, despite the fact that I only needed to charge $18 to make a profit. The reason I am able to charge $18 and still make a profit is that not only my restaurant but my whole chain buys in bulk and gets substantial price breaks from the slaughterhouses contracted to supply all that red meat.

Americans are used to the benefits of large economies of scale. Our goods were less expensive than the rest of the world even before we started contracting our labor to other countries because our market was both enormous and integrated. Every town had a Macy's, every Macy's had the same lines of clothes, and because of the scale of these operations, Americans were able to have better shoes at lower prices than other, smaller countries. Moreover, because nearly all Americans speak English at least passably and the national infrastructure is continuous and functional, there is less of a risk of disagreement in cultural taste and less time lost moving goods around.

Slowly, finally, the citizens of the United States have begun to grasp the limitations of these large-scale enterprises. When Robert Rudin and Larry Summers conceived the expansion of individual banks' scope of operations, the intent was a reduction in borrowing costs that would allow for reduced risk and a corresponding increase in the supply of loans for Americans with limited capital. By granting Citibank access to insurance and investment equity, the Clinton administration hoped to make the bank less reliant on the repayment of each loan, less reliant on the interest paid on the loans being repaid, less reliant on the down payment to secure a loan and therefore more willing to lend to the lower and lower-middle classes, who could then secure property that would allow them a higher standard of living. What no one in either the Clinton or Bush II administrations ever seemed to consider was a problem in one of the enormous, multi-sector banks that rose out of the repeal of Glass-Steagall and other banking regulations. When the bankers fucked up, the consequences were no longer limited to their depositors or even just other banks with which they did business, but spread out in to all the large-scale economies to which they had been allowed access. Insurance, investment banking, commercial and residential real estate, municipal bonds, retirement and pension funds all suffered.

Here's another (hypothetical) example: imagine what would happen if Wal-Mart went out of business. Wal-Mart's enormous economies of scale have allowed it to demand lower prices from its suppliers and undercut its competitors' price for all goods sold. Wal-Mart now dominates the markets for electronics, clothes, groceries, gardening, home improvement and even books in much of the United States. More than a few towns and small cities are beholden to Wal-Mart for access to many of the necessities of life, as the superstore has used its capacity to increase profit by lowering price to put all local competitors (who do not have Wal-Mart's leverage over manufacturers) out of business. Were Wal-Mart to falter, millions of people would suddenly be without basic daily needs, including, of course, employment. When a small business fails, that sucks for the community in which it is located and the handful, or even hundreds, of employees. When a steel mill shutters, that sucks for a whole town. When a national enterprise goes under, the repercussions are so severe that the impact generally outweighs any positive benefits that the scale of the operation was able to impart. The economic boom that came about with the easy credit terms offered by the balloon banks won't be remembered half so well as the simultaneous collapse of several national economies when those balloons burst.

William James' quote above continues with a screed against national enterprise, whether the results are good or ill. He believed that lasting triumphs were small, limited to individuals. Certainly he felt that other individuals could sway one of their fellows, and would have been somewhere between skeptical and amused by Randian notions of individual primacy. He was the sort of person who listened when his friends spoke, thought about what they had said, and either rebutted or agreed based on his experience and the dictates of his conscience.

Kel's brother Kramer has been down documenting the Occupy Wall Street movement, which got me thinking about the root cause of those protests and on to the whole economies of scale thoughtline, but I chose my favorite photo from Kramer's collection 'Til Human Voices Wake Us. The photographs are of swimmers at New York City beaches, men and women borne by mammoth amalgamations of salt and water that break, as in the photo above, into billions of constituent parts. Most of the time the person rides the mass back to shore, but every now and again the tidal force is overwhelming, and that very last line of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" really resonates.

Softness in Literary Fiction

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.” ― Ernest Hemingway


Dumping on people is not really my thing. I have my tastes, and they align with some folks' and diverge from others'. There is a growing tendency in literary fiction to not judge one's characters too harshly that has led to soft, inexact language that may not rely as heavily on ten-dollar words as Faulkner once did but makes up for simplified vocabulary with fanciful description and endless sentences that are invariably described as 'discursive' by reviewers.


Pictured at right is Joshua Ferris. My use of his photograph is completely arbitrary. He could just as easily be Jonathan Safran Foer or Colum McCann or Gary Shteyngart or any author whose books are full of people who 'make love' rather than engaging in anything so quotidian or dirty as sex, intercourse, fucking; who 'desperately seek' love or salvation and never are manipulative or callow except when attempting 'soul transference' with some other person whose 'desire' happens to align with their own.


On the last page of McCann's Let the Great World Spin, the author explains that the title comes from a line in Tennyson, and that Tennyson in turn was inspired by an Arabic verse that translates into a lovely description that could very easily be read as somehow evocative of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Since Let the Great World Spin is framed around Phillipe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, it's very easy to see where McCann is going with all this intertextual classicism. There's a soothing element to the whole book, an effort to make sentences into balms that a reader might use to ease the pain of existence. There's a character who reminisces about her home in Missouri and later dies the moment she reaches the riverbank to which she so longed to return. The hookers in the book are good-humored and articulate about their anger against God. A coked-out trust funder is able to find redemption in the arms of a man who most of the other characters consider a bit of an asshole. People in this world do things like find one another.


Big words and complex ideas are fine in fiction, not that I want to side against Hemingway in any fight. Hemingway wrote books before flickering images robbed simple words of their power. Suddenly all simplicity did was say in a page what a filmed image could tell you in a second. Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen both pack their books with ruminations on science and art and consumerism and neurology and biology and the difference between, say 'run-on' as a hyphenated construction of four letters and that construction's capacity to describe this sentence, and, better, to evoke it.


Most of this is predicated on my view of the world. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner builds these fantastic characters who keep fucking up their lives because they are haunted by memory and ruled by emotion. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway builds admittedly rather shallow characters whose lives are fucked by external circumstance and seek moments of grace through their present actions. I prefer Hemingway and that preference is tied up more than a little in my belief that action trumps emotion.


To put this in a more direct way - the characters in the books of these soft-handed MFA holders are constantly feeling a course through life and then reflecting on how the course they muddled on to has given rise to other, equally interesting feelings, while the characters in, say George Saunders' writing are acting (or not acting, but in a weak-willed rather than reflective manner) and these actions (or inactions) arose from considerations like economics and loyalty and tribalism rather than some need to 're-capture the wild narrative of my life.'


For the record, none of the quotes come from the writings of the authors I am criticizing, though I feel they easily could have. Also, Ferris' sweater in the picture is ridiculous.

Springsteen

"Now those memories come back to haunt me/They haunt me like a curse/Is a dream a lie if it don't come true/Or is it something worse?" - Bruce Springsteen, "The River"

One of my earliest musical memories is of hearing "Badlands" one night in the bar with my dad. There's not a lot of specificity to the memory, but I can hear the charging piano line and the bluesy bottoming out of the guitar and see his mustache very clearly. Is there anyone my age who hears a Bruce Springsteen song and doesn't think of their father?

Now I'm not going to get all mopey and Tony Soprano-reminiscing-about-the-glory-of-Johnny-Boy hagiographying about either my dad or Bruce. Go read Joe Posnanski's blog entry on the song "The Promise" if you want that flavor today. Nor am I going to give you a cynical post-modern reading on the photo above, pointing out how the Darkness on the Edge of Town back cover photo uses familiar symbols (the faded wallpaper, the V-neck undershirt, the door that Springsteen's slouch says he's about to use to go out for a ride and never come back) to convey blue-collar existential dread to an audience whose lives Bruce's stopped resembling around his 21st birthday. Chuck Klosterman covers that somewhere in Sex, Lies and Cocoa Puffs, I think. No, what I want to talk about really quickly here is how Springsteen has tricked a huge fan base into listening to the most depressing shit ever to tumble out of a jukebox.

Dylan is an adept at setting sad songs to upbeat tempos as a method of disguising the content. If the title didn't give the game away, I'd bet many people could be fooled by the pace of the song and the lightness in Bob's voice into thinking that "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" is a love song. In Dylan, it's a bit of a game, though, one of the dozens of obfuscations and roadblocks that he throws in front of his audience to force them to engage with the content rather than just shout along. For Springsteen, the despondent lyrics and anthemic music are interconnected. I read once that the message of Bruce Springsteen is that Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. I think a more accurate read is that Nothing Will Save You But It's Okay To Try And Find Something Anyway.

Born to Run made the anthem a safe form for rock and roll. I don't think that's hyperbolic. As massive as Pink Floyd songs are, you don't really sing along to them. The biggest Zeppelin songs are more like dance tracks or jam sessions than verse-chorus form songs. The Who probably came the closest to what I would define as an anthem, but as much as I love them, there's something impersonal about The Who. Springsteen always seems like he's reaching back past all the big rock acts that preceded him and channeling Frank Sinatra, Roy Orbison, even Ray Charles, guys who sang what sounded like very personal stories that were also very relatable. Everything about their voices made you think that they'd lived those songs.

Let's take "Backstreets." This is about as huge a song as any in Springsteen's setlist, with big, yelling choruses and a backing piano that sounds possessed by the ghost of Jelly Roll Morton on barbituates. My reading of the lyrics is that Bruce watched Midnight Cowboy and decided to write an uplifting song about Rizzo and Joe but not gloss over their lives at all. There's absolutely no redemption at all in the lyric, as near the end the narrator cries out to his long-lost friend/lover/partner, "Remember all the movies, Terry/We'd go see/Trying to learn to walk like the heroes/We thought we had to be/Well after all this time/To find we're just like all the rest/Stranded in the park/And forced to confess/To hiding on the backstreets." I don't care how Romantic a view you might have on the ability of pain to bring out the sweetness in life, that's just fucking bleak. And I'm not cherry picking. "Badlands" is about an auto mechanic who wants to "find one face that ain't looking through me." "Hungry Heart" is about a guy who abandons his wife and kids. "Born in the U.S.A." is about a Vietnam vet betrayed by his country. AND THOSE ARE THE FUCKING HITS!

Nebraska was the first album on which Bruce dropped the artifice of rock and roll and gave us the lyrics unadorned. Jason once described it as "the album on the stereo when you walk into the garage and find the body." It's not an easy listen and the songs on it don't often make it into the live shows, which I think is rather unfortunate. There's nothing in the lyrics of a song like, say, "Atlantic City" that makes it any less uplifting than a song like "Glory Days." If anything, "Atlantic City" is less cynical. Why not slap a few power chords and a Max Weinberg back beat on that bitch and get Chris Christie to bellow along to it at the next concert he attends?

My suspicion is that, by 1982, Springsteen was coming to grips with what he'd unleashed upon the world. Boston, Journey, Billy Joel, Night Ranger, Bon Jovi, eventually even Guns N Roses would succumb and blast out something larger than a power ballad - an Anthem, laden with screeching guitars, breathless vocalizing and stultifying drums, like a many-winged early airplane trying to take off from under its own weight. And so Bruce gave us Nebraska, the distillate of his worldview. It's easily my favorite of his records. I've been told that shows how sad my tastes lean. I think most people are too busy shouting along to the chorus to pay attention to the verse, and that Nebraska takes away that crutch. I also think it's his most strangely uplifting album. You endure nine tracks of acoustic guitar, harmonica, wailing and shit and then you get "Reason to Believe," which is equally awful (quick summation: dead dogs, dead babies, dead love) but saved by a bounce in the harmonica and the vocal that is otherwise missing from the album. It's not an anthem, and it's barely even a jaunty-tempoed-sad-song, but it stands out because of the context and teaches the listener how to properly hear a Bruce Springsteen song - enjoy everything that's there, be it a single moment of grace in a river of shit or the enormous promise of dawn on the open road, because this is the life you've got and "it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive."

Charlie Kelly, Totemic Objects and Me

"Stop the hardwood floor's lopsided grin/Leave the dirt and dead flowers in a brown coffee tin/Let your hand melt a hole in the frost/Peer out under a sky that looks just like a shirt I lost." - The Weakerthans, "Leash"

There was a very sweet moment in the recent episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Sweetness and Sunny seldom align, so it was noteworthy. Resident whipping boy Charlie ends up spending a night on the beach with The Waitress. The Waitress had taken a bunch of Ecstasy before she encountered Charlie and therefore has no recollection of what transpired, so Charlie attempts to jog her memory by showing her first the dead sand crab that they dug up while they were exploring the wonders of marine life. The Waitress doesn't remember anything, and instead heaves the dead animal away, as any sensible person would. So Charlie breaks out the cool jade-like object that The Waitress gave to him during her drug-induced euphoria. She correctly identifies Charlie's precious jewel as the bottom of a broken beer bottle and storms off in a huff.

My question here - is it weird that I relate to Charlie's attachment to what could only very generously be described as emotional junk?

Impulsive collecting of trinkets and the assignation of emotional content to them is not usually considered healthy behavior. Serial killers like to keep hair or bits of clothing from their victims, after all. Still, a certain level of sentimentality isn't harmful. And so I wore the pair of jeans that Kim bought me until I literally couldn't walk in them because the knee was so badly blown out that half my shin would protrude through the hole. At my next job, I exclusively used the silver mini-tray that all my friends at Dos Caminos had inscribed with their wine keys on my last night there, until I left it in a cab a year later. I kept a single brown argyle sock that I wore mismatched because it was the survivor of a pair that Tara gave me for my birthday. For years I wore a bandanna that I found at the bottom of a lake. That, too, was left in a cab. In a box next to the envelope with my undergraduate diploma that I never opened is a child's watch with Pinkie and the Brain on the face and a busted band that hasn't ticked in a decade. Sometimes I think of getting a safe deposit box just for that.

Why do we bestow such memorial power on stupid shit? Every item that I've wanted to retain and eventually lost or misplaced or replaced or finally thrown out didn't take the emotions or the memories that I associated with it. The impermanent world that our brain struggles to comprehend as it flashes past us doesn't suddenly become fixed within some shiny bauble or faded stitch of cloth.

Charlie is actually kind of a great role model for someone who wants to be rid of the power that totems can hold. He lives in a perpetual present that makes complete sense to him and is defined by simple parameters: Gang=good; Waitress=love; Food=necessary. Of course, serial killers also live in perpetual presents that make complete sense to them and are defined by simple parameters.

Looks like a future of hoarding for me!