The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

first post, from April 9, 2007

come and go and start and stop recur and are re-referenced as we walk stand crawl slide across and over, up and through the Twisty Whirly Earth.

First you write sentences, then you write paragraphs, then you write chapters, and then you write books. A whale swims through the ocean for seventy years, then suns on beaches and passes away. Whale to beached bones, all while godeyes sneeze shut.

The stories of our journeys are the bones of that journey, and may be the only bones we leave when we too stop our wanderings.

Four years ago,  I met someone and we played around for two weeks, jumping and dodging, me not knowing what to do, she not knowing what the next move would be. Ultimately, my nervousness got the best of me, and that Chapter was left unrealized. The Narrative had failed, and I felt like I had lost the plot.

Other things were happening, too.

My uncle and grandfather were both dead, killed in the space of six months by their respective diseases.

Their deaths, and this false start with a girl, the girl who could have been my first, combined to destroy the illusion of self that I had carefully constructed for the world’s consumption over the previous preceding 11 years of my waking life.

Mohammed, that dark-skinned desert prophet, said that in order to live we must die, die while still living. That is what happened to me. I realized the possibility of such a death, a suicide I could effect while at the same continue my walkings on the Earth (walks whose cessation I’ll miss most when I go to my terrifying and thought-nullifying grave.)

So that’s what I did. I became a walking ghost, going through the motions. It was a dark and terrifying time that seemed to last forever. Looking back, time runs together

But then, slowly, surprisingly, I began to be saved.

I took pills, and they worked. I made new friends, I ventured into a new city and let my mind grapple with new ideas, ideas my previous self had discarded and disregarded.

I was still a failure, still weakened from my ordeal, but I was beginning to stretch my limbs.

I returned to the house of my father, and sat there for six months, wondering what would become of me.

An old friend called my father one day and offered me a job. I took it with pleasure, a lying smile on my face. One day he asked me what I wanted to be. “A novelist,” I said. “You want to write a novel?” he said. “Just read the Da Vinci Code and knock it off.” Not that kind of novelist, Boss.

The work was easy. Simple. They didn’t have enough for me to do. I discovered the pleasures of this new technology that would enable me to talk to women who I sort of knew without the risk of rejection. I messaged at work, and made a plan to go to New York and see about a girl.

I went to New York but did not have said girl’s number (a failure of technology, I think) and went back empty handed.

There was another girl I had recently met, a beautiful girl with dark hair. While I had talked to her at that bar, more excited and alive then I had been in recent memory, I resolved that the next time I saw her, I would ask her out.

I did not see her again for close to seven weeks, across a Thanksgiving, a Christmas, a conference in Orlando, a concert in Atlantic City.

When I met her again, I was speechless the entire night. In the back of my head, I watched myself sabotage my chances, fearing rejection.

The next day, I had my friends fix us up.

The rest was a chapter of its own.

And now she’s gone, and sometimes, it’s like she was never here to begin with, or maybe because I invented a self that could be with her, that self is now gone, and I am back where I started, a partial ghost.

This afternoon, the girl from way back when, the one with the false start, called me on the phone. She said she had come to Philadelphia on a whim, and she wanted to see me.

We went to get coffee, and then we walked through the park. I smoked a cigarette, and a homeless man came to bum one and then proceeded to talk to us for the rest of our time there. He told us he was the only leprechan in America. He asked us our birthdays and read us our signs. He was the same sign as me, a Cancer.

I told him I had always thought Cancer was the worst sign. He disagreed, but told us how if you accept something from a Cancer, and it goes poorly, or something like that, the Cancer will then hurt you, mentally or emotionally. It’s funny – it’s true. It’s what I had done to this girl, all those years ago, when it had ended badly.

I regretted that so much. She wouldn’t talk to me, and I began to realize that I would never see her again, that she was out of my life forever. The whole think stank of a kind of death.

I went on with life, knowing what loss was, knowing what regret was.

And now my girl is in South America, at the ends of the Earth, and I may never see that one again, and I know loss, and I know regret.

Since then, I’ve been waiting. Waiting for the narrative to continue. Waiting for “Six Months Later” to flash across the title card.

I guess life has a way of surprising everyone, even me.

And that’s how a chapter ends. That’s how a book gets written. That’s how a life gets lived.

The greatest opportunity – gift, maybe – that we get in this Crazy World with its Crazy Rules is the Inevitability of Change. Contained in that law of nature is all the joy and all the sadness in the entire world.

It’s more than enough for anyone, including me.

1981 A.R. Ammons J.R. Brodsky James Alan McPherson Leslie Marmon Silko Derek Walcott Robert Penn Warren Cormac McCarthy Richard Critchfield 1982 William Gaddis Ved Mehta 1983 William Kennedy Brad Leithauser John Sayles Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan 1984 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Charles Simic Bill Irwin Galway Kinnell 85 John Ashbery 86 Daryl Hine Jay Wright 87 Walter Abish Douglas Crase Richard Kenney Tina Rosenberg Mark Strand May Swenson 88 Andre Dubus Thomas Pynchon 89 Allen Grossman Jay Cantor Keith Hefner Richard Powers 90 Guy Davenport Jorie Graham Patricia Hampl John Hollander Susan Sontag 91 Alice Fulton Guillermo Gomez-Pena David Hammons Lewis Hyde Eleanor Wilner 92 Amy Clampitt Irving Feldman Robert Hall Norman Manea Paule Marshall Michael Massing Joanna Scott 93 Stanley Crouch Ernest Gaines Thom Gunn Jim Powell John Wideman 94 Donella Meadows Adrienne Rich 95 Octavia Butler Sandra Cisneros Virginia Hamilton Sandy Close 96 Rebecca Goldstein Richard Howard John Jesurun Thylias Moss Anna Deavere Smith 97 Luis Alfaro Lee Breuer Han Ong Susan Stewart David Foster Wallace 98 Linda Bierds Edward Hirsch Charles R. Johnson Charles Lewis Ishmael Reed Mary Zimmerman 99 Campbell McGrath Naomi Wallace 0 Anne Carson Ben Katchor Lucia M. Perillo 1 Andrea Barrett Susan Lori-Parks 2002 Katherine Boo Karen Hesse Jack Miles Colson Whitehead 2003 Lydia Davis Angela Johnson 2004 Aleksander Hermon Edward P. Jones C.D. Wright 2005 Jonathan Lethem 2006 Atul Gawande David Macaulay Sarah Ruhl George Saunders 2007 Stuart Dybek Lynn Nottage Peter Cole 2008 Alex Ross 2009 Edwidge Danticat Deborah Eisenberg Heather McHugh

http://www.rsf.org/ennemis.html

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Completed on March 12, 2010, something palindromic about that date, a 3, two 2’s, two 1’s, two 0’s, not in that order, begun sometime in late December 2009 or early January (this time around, like many books this one began with a failed attempt to scale the mountain) (Mt. Dilaudid?);

The weaving of narrative of characters. Loved the AA stuff, Don Gately, the overwhelming weight of substance.

A novel of television and distraction and the moral and intellectual degeneration of America. Written in 1996. Funny as those of Hal’s generation (or older, I am actually closer to Gately’s age, or possibly Orin, making Hal and Mario younger peers of my younger brother) did bounce back, after the decay/decadence of the mid-90s to make at least something of this lost nameless decade.

Wallace was right about that — the science-fictional decade of 2000-2009 was, due to a change in convention, unable to be named, leaving us in a strange limbo nameless time. Like a child who went around until he was ten unnamed. You — him — me — it is weird that we name things. Nevertheless, we do. What shall this decade be called? My vote is the ‘Tens.

Several different drugs. The greatest drug of all – DMZ? Is that a real one? Let’s look — no, wikipedia hints that it is fictional. Analogue to DMT, the Heaven/Transcendence/Drug?

When did I first hear about DMT? I was in RG’s apartment, it was my junior year of college at the University of Penn’s Woods, it was near the beginning of the year I think, but possibly later — I think it was near the beginning, while I was still doing the EL dance, and one of the boys from that other group of friends those girls were associating with at the time — (funny and great the meeting of new people where you are introduced to someone else’s circle of friends, a whole other universe  of beings out there, conversing, their own dramas, not yours, the lovely attraction of it all, finally, new stories) — one of the boys — and you know, this may have been closer to winter, it may have been sans slash post EL, just RG, and JG, and a third, what’shername, but anyway, long way around, the mark of the chronically dull is that they can never get to the point, they are always digressing, they cannot separate the essential from the incidental, anyway, third time now, one of these boys tells us of the hallucinogenic drug called DMT — a drug, he tells us, that is naturally synthesized in the body at Death, the Big D, (and this news came to me only several months after watching the Big D obliterate my uncle and grandfather), and that this drug is, as we would say, available for recreational consumption.

The DMT trip is supposedly the explanation for alien abductions, out-of-body experiences, and near-death experiences. It is a hypothesis. Unproven.

Nevertheless, sometimes hypotheses are all that’s needed.

I learned somewhat later that one of the itinerant improvisational rock and roll bands I followed somewhat at that time, a band by the initials of the DBs, had a fanbase that had recently or at least somewhat recently begun indulging in said Substance, to use the DFW term, and learning more about said Substance and its effect on the proverbial Map/Territory, I, who was generally at least mildly inquisitive and experimental, decided to proceed with all deliberate caution.

It wasn’t until several years later that I was finally offered the Thanic pomegrantes as it were, in an apartment in Northern Liberties of friends of friends who I had never met before but decided to see a puppy they had just bought — it was a male and a female, and they were in love, and knew two individuals who I had gone to high school with, and had just bought a new puppy, and the girl reminded me of SS of USS Elsewhere somewhat, from where I had come approximately one year prior, but anyway, back to Northern Liberties, where we were sitting, and smoking the proverbial, to use the phrase, Bob Hope, and she, whose name might have been Caroline, I think, tells a story about a new band that was breaking out right around then whom she had stood in line in the rain for called Arcade Fire, and there was an amazing poster of said band, whom I had never heard of, on the wall, and there was also a puppy, brown I think, small, and adorable, and then, after a certain amount of time, and we talked about children, how I felt I was completely unready for them, but Caroline and her significant other beside her felt far more ready, especially Caroline, and then after that, the couple decided to take DMT, the substance I had heard of, and it was offered to me, out of unremitting generosity, and I can’t say I considered it — but I did just say no, one of the few and only times in my life where I have decided to just say no, and so, maybe, for that one moment, I should thank Ronald Reagan and the McGruff the Talking Dog, and the Brought To You By This Is Your Brain on Drugs Omelet, and of course, they were super ok with, but I told them to go right ahead, and I think they would have anyway, and I sat there for a moment as they enjoyed at least the crest of the high, which my research had and continues to tell me is the most intense part, where you are literally, man, on another fucking planet slash dimension, (and I want to say I did not interview them about the experience, but I do believe that before they partook, I did ask a few questions about the rumors I had heard and the substance’s general intensity level and they did say it was good but not that bad, though they suggested LSD as a potential touchstone, and I had not done that either, so was unable to connect), but anyway, after that, maybe another ten more minutes, after I perhaps took one more hit of Hope, said my goodbyes and made my excuses and went on my way.

I believe that night had started with me trying to tag along with a certain young hippie woman who I found fairly attractive and compelling, possessing some spark of joy or something that I found compelling, but had spent the night sort of being ignored by this said interest, but yet had made fun with some of the others, being good-natured and jovial about the whole thing. As said before, this was someone else’s whole new circle of friends, and it was interesting to see it, new stories, and I hoped that I would see them all again.

I never really did, I began dating one of the loves of my life shortly thereafter and did not come back up for air until January had become October.

That was in either 2005 or 2006. Last fall, while at a Rolling-Stones cover band festival in Indio, California, for possibly the current kings of itinerant noodling music, I did finally run into Caroline and her significant other again. They were standing next to us, and bumming a pipe, and he was wearing a Phillies cap (it was the World Series, and we were in it, for the second time in a row and the third time in my life), and we were all somewhat nervous about the pipe, as it was our only one, and after Caroline’s Other used it he passed it back fairly far, but nevertheless was sharing his Hope with us, and apparently it was very good, and we did the Philadelphia geography for a second, not recognizing each other, of course not, it has been years, five years give or take, but the Philadelphia geography sounded familiar to him, when we established that he knew two people who had gone to my high school, and then  he remembered me, and said “I know who you are” and said “do you remember coming over to an apartment in Northern Liberties years ago — and then never seeing us again” and I said, for sure, I remember that well, there was a puppy, and he called Caroline over and said remember, and I’m not sure if she did, but I remembered the Arcade Fire story she told me about and recounted it to her, and we talked for a moment about the strangeness of it all, and he showed me a picture of the dog, who was large and no longer a puppy and that was about it —

A digression in a half this one.

I guess SS of Elsewhere had had a copy of Infinite Jest down there in Greensboro, and during those four or five months I was down there, I read Ulysses, and then Gravity’s Rainbow, and I guess Jest would have been the third one, but I never got to it, got out of dodge before it happened, I guess I was waiting for the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment which is next year apparently, and it’s strange, DFW did seem to anticipate at least NetFlix, and a few other things too, maybe, and it’s a big book, and a great book, and Jesus, he wasn’t afraid to take you to some pretty dark places, some very dark places, and that’s life I guess, he said he was trying to write about how life really was, not some stupid escape from life —

And I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid, and I guess I still want to be a writer, and I’m no DFW MacArthur Genius Grant award recipient (though I feel like they gave that to someone else recently who seemed on hearing this to be somewhat less meritorious), and DFW erased his own map about a year ago, one of the early chapters of Jest reads like the suicide note, just endless pain that would never go away — horror, not sadness, is how the character puts it —

I don’t know if I can do it. Embrace total horror and darkness and look at it, look  at the unveiled deformity and study it and sketch it and hold it close, and breath its breath and then extrude it out — H.I. at the end, thinking about one room full of food and one room full of shit —

That’s how long I’ve lived. Tuesday’s child, full of grace.

Cold cold Whistle Pig burrows his nose out of the deep dark earth, sniffing at frost air, looking for light reflected across the back of his own sad brow —

Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,
Should I leave them by your gate,
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?