Nicole Simpson: The Untold Story

Of all the images and imaginings with which her murder invested the collective consciousness, none has more residual impact than the decapitation. It was not so much repressed as held in psychic abeyance throughout the saga and its subsequent retellings. That should not surprise, since the phantasm of a headless body is certainly derivative of the collective unconsciousness and a rather cruel impinging of unconsciousness on consciousness, not as a catharsis consequent on a therapeutic dynamic of some sort, nor as a total breakdown of control as might be commonplace among psychopaths or among those meek repressed little nobodies driven beyond the edge whom we're always hearing about, but instead as a simple matter of something that was in the newspapers because it was something the newspapers were more or less obliged to report. The gruesome image as a fact of life is therefore altogether unavoidable from the public's perspective, yet who can blame the public for trying not to think about it too much? The picture of the young woman's head lying beside the body flickers into our awareness and flickers out again, and one may hope it might be somehow bottled back up again like a disruptive imp, yet consider how just such an image, indeed that precise image, lingers a full half-century since the decapitation of Jayne Mansfield in a car accident. We think more now of her head than of her once-celebrated breasts, the head being the penis we expect both genders to carry about with them in the daylight world. Decapitation as an ultimate castration must therefore also explain the rage of the West when terrorists decapitate journalists. Beheading, at least in the form of guillotining, is a lot less painless than numerous other forms of execution; in fact, it probably isn't painful at all. Yet we dread decapitation more, and we are enraged when those whom we see as our implacable tribal foes do it and so audaciously videotape the deed. The French, along with everyone else, were certainly outraged when Daniel Pearl was beheaded in 2002, and who can blame them; after all, the French hadn't decapitated anyone since 1977 (an Arab, as it happens). Even the Three Stooges were susceptible to an irrational dread of beheading, or else with equal dread they intuited the radically atavistic trappings, as when Curly told Moe that he'd rather be burned at the stake than have his head chopped off, because a hot stake is better than a cold chop. In Simpson's case, moreover, the executioner was a black man, and for the world he thereby played a more unbearably fearsome role than even that of racial sex polluter. Simpson also did it with his own two hands, to our knowledge a unique and uniquely momentous rendition of the murderous act. The sexual element is ineluctable however you slice it, which is why Mathilde de la Mole like Queen Margot kisses the lips of her dead lover's severed head. And of course, there was Salome. The castration of God's forerunner is certainly something to think about.

Franklin Roosevelt said, "He's a sonofabitch, but he's my sonofabitch." Some say he was referring to the Nicaraguan dictator Tacho Somoza. Some say he was referring to the New Jersey political boss Frank Hague. Some say he was talking about the exigencies of foreign policy. Some say he was talking about the practicalities of domestic politics. The fact that there is confusion as to which is more interesting than either statement on its own. There is a dynamic, a kind of dialectic, that results directly from the confusion, an intriguing juxtaposition of two possibilities vivifying both. Juxtaposition does that: it creates ideational potentialities that could not possibly have otherwise existed, and what makes it magical is that such juxtapositions can be totally arbitrary. This process of accidental substantive dialectic is alive right now, right here, in this idea of accidental substantive dialectic as I've just articulated it, juxtaposed with the immediately preceding ideas related to decapitation. We may well ask what alchemy brews from this specific combination of otherwise unrelated ideas or, if not a combination per se, links from which new trains of conceptualization might ensue. Walter Benjamin once had a nervous breakdown because Theo Adorno said his thinking was insufficiently dialectical, which, while doubtless an extreme reaction, is not altogether incomprehensible.

What Adorno himself never ventured was to create an actual drama of dialectical juxtapositions and, by drama, I mean just that. Imagine a morality play in which ideas are the personified characters. One character is named "One time when I was listening to one of Beethoven's late quartets, I had this haunting sensation that I had heard it before, as if it were some sort of Platonic real that the music had brought to earth. In fact, I actually had heard the piece before; in fact, I had heard it before more than once. But that doesn't obviate my initial exultation. The very fact that its revivification from the depths of sensory memory instilled in me a sense of it as an eternal music, an unshakeable real, qualifies it as just such a real. It humanizes Plato as well, because the origins of it as recollected perfection are sensory; it allows the body to participate in what is still essentially (no pun intended) a Platonic attainment." This character is a lanky, sandy-haired youth, rather affable in manner, with a penchant for casual, often sloppy attire.

By contrast, "I could not begin to understand Rothko until I heard someone call his paintings 'pictures of consciousness'" is an impulsive, rather ill-mannered woman who has a tendency to express hostility out of context, showing anger at one person because she's mad at someone else. But she is very pretty, in some ways all the more attractive because of the inchoate energy bubbling inside her. "Mime as a French art (Marceau, Barrault) is a disfigurement of Mallarme's silences" is "I could not begin to understand Rothko until I heard someone call his paintings 'pictures of consciousness'"'s father, a grave but not unkindly man. He has been successful in business, and it shows in his manner, though never as a conscious effort to dominate a conversation or dismiss perceived inferiors.

Scene 1 takes place in a public park in a not-too-busy part of the city. "One time when I was listening to one of Beethoven's late quartets, I had this haunting sensation that I had heard it before, as if it were some sort of Platonic real that the music had brought to earth. In fact, I actually had heard the piece before; in fact, I had heard it before more than once. But that doesn't obviate my initial exultation. The very fact that its revivification from the depths of sensory memory instilled in me a sense of it as an eternal music, an unshakeable real, qualifies it as just such a real. It humanizes Plato as well, because the origins of it as recollected perfection are sensory; it allows the body to participate in what is still essentially (no pun intended) a Platonic attainment" enters stage left and speaks: "Gosh, I'm tired."

A few moments elapse as he rests on a park bench. "I could not begin to understand Rothko until I heard someone call his paintings 'pictures of consciousness'" also enters stage left and walks behind "One time when I was listening to one of Beethoven's late quartets, I had this haunting sensation that I had heard it before, as if it were some sort of Platonic real that the music had brought to earth. In fact, I actually had heard the piece before; in fact, I had heard it before more than once. But that doesn't obviate my initial exultation. The very fact that its revivification from the depths of sensory memory instilled in me a sense of it as an eternal music, an unshakeable real, qualifies it as just such a real. It humanizes Plato as well, because the origins of it as recollected perfection are sensory; it allows the body to participate in what is still essentially (no pun intended) a Platonic attainment" and stares at his back with a kind of dazed interest. She speaks absently, eliciting no sign from "One time when I was listening to one of Beethoven's late quartets, I had this haunting sensation that I had heard it before, as if it were some sort of Platonic real that the music had brought to earth. In fact, I actually had heard the piece before; in fact, I had heard it before more than once. But that doesn't obviate my initial exultation. The very fact that its revivification from the depths of sensory memory instilled in me a sense of it as an eternal music, an unshakeable real, qualifies it as just such a real. It humanizes Plato as well, because the origins of it as recollected perfection are sensory; it allows the body to participate in what is still essentially (no pun intended) a Platonic attainment" that he can hear what she's saying. At this point, the audience doesn't know whether her spoken words are actually spoken or a theatrically stylized stream of consciousness: "Love should be so easy, and what kind of fucking alloy makes it so hard instead? I mean, look at this guy here." She starts singing the Cole Porter song, "Easy to Love." You'd be so easy to love, So easy to idolize all others above, So worth the yearning for. She stops singing. "I'll bet it's worth the yearning for. The real yearning, well... we just never know what we're yearning for... I mean, Jesus! I'd fuck this guy on that bench right now but, but... Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus! Here he comes..."

"Mime as a French art (Marceau, Barrault) is a disfigurement of Mallarme's silences" enters stage right: "Hi, sweetheart!"

"I could not begin to understand Rothko until I heard someone call his paintings 'pictures of consciousness'": "Hi, Daddy."

"Mime as a French art (Marceau, Barrault) is a disfigurement of Mallarme's silences": "Are you in the mood for fish? I made reservations at Oceana."

"I could not begin to understand Rothko until I heard someone call his paintings 'pictures of consciousness'" turns her head, so that the following is clearly an internal monologue: Oh Jesus, if he goes into that same bullshit about how if you want to make money in the fish business, just keep changing the names of the fish... you know, can't sell enough flounder, call it sole... can't sell enough lotte, call it monkfish... can't sell enough sea bass, call it branzino... if he goes into that shit again, I swear I'm going to plotz, I'm going to just fucking plotz! She turns her head back to face her father, then speaks: "Yeah, sure, fine."

"One time when I was listening to one of Beethoven's late quartets, I had this haunting sensation that I had heard it before, as if it were some sort of Platonic real that the music had brought to earth. In fact, I actually had heard the piece before; in fact, I had heard it before more than once. But that doesn't obviate my initial exultation. The very fact that its revivification from the depths of sensory memory instilled in me a sense of it as an eternal music, an unshakeable real, qualifies it as just such a real. It humanizes Plato as well, because the origins of it as recollected perfection are sensory; it allows the body to participate in what is still essentially (no pun intended) a Platonic attainment," having overheard their conversation, watches them walk away and begins to speak after they're off-stage and out of earshot: "It occurs to me, if you want to make money in the fish business, just keep changing the names of the fish. If you can't sell enough flounder, call it sole. If you can't sell enough lotte, call it monkfish. If you can't sell enough sea bass, call it branzino."

The dialectical whirligigs abound. There are the interactions between the names and possible congruences or oppositions between each name and the others, and the pregnant relationships between their names and what the characters say. There are likewise the synthetic ideations that occur as a result of implicit actions or inactions. For instance, if "I could not begin to understand Rothko until I heard someone call his paintings 'pictures of consciousness'" has conflicted affect toward her father—which she does, as evident from her sweetly saying "Hi Daddy" while exasperated over the likelihood that he will tell his fish story—it suggests a dynamic, however latent, between the specific comment on Mark Rothko and the observation about mime and Mallarme. In all likelihood, this particular link resides in the idea of "pictures of consciousness" and a discoverable ambivalence between the wordlessness of the paintings and the wordlessness of a pantomime performance. Adorno might or might not agree but such thoroughgoing dialectical potentiality suggests a new universal formalism in which there is, theoretically at least, no possibility of disconnection, since every thought or action bears some relationship, ontologically at least, to the thought or action that follows on.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the more hidden the dialectic, the better, since obvious counterpoints make for obvious thought or obvious poetry or obvious art. We tend to discount obviousness. That said, obviousness can be aesthetically effective if it's obviously the case that the thinker or writer or composer is playing with the obviousness or flaunting it or using it for some particular effect, as when Beckett starts his famous trilogy with "I am in my mother's room." However, the standards by which we commend obviousness or not would seem to be highly subjective. To these ears, "I am in my mother's room" is a stunning way to birth a long literary venture. To these eyes, Robert Motherwell's painting "Pancho Villa Dead and Alive" is a rather silly affair, what with Villa having a cock over here and not having a cock over there. Yet I am hard-pressed to more exactly say why the Beckett "works" and the Motherwell does not, as both can lay equal claim to a certain primal austerity.

"Austerity" is an important word as its presence or absence can be morally as well as aesthetically definitive. The old gods and kings maintain palpable austerity even while bickering meanly on Olympus. They compel. Zeus and Hera and Saul and David compel. Time makes austerity, and history is the language of time. It may be that nothing fully enters history until it no longer exists, and the gods of that which still exist are weighed and judged no more indulgently than the thieving alderman on the street corner or the abusive employer in his office. The American Civil War is not yet history because the Union army still exists. So, we judge McClellan differently than we might Pyrrhus or even Darius. The TV show MASH suddenly fails and remains failed when Colonel Potter replaces Colonel Blake; Blake was a buffoon and his lovable buffoonery supports an attack on the patriarchal system responsible for the horrors of the Korean War. But Potter's characterization is a valentine to that patriarchal system, which means that the show, like its audience, wants it both ways—to still have faith in the authority structures that oversee our experience, while simultaneously lambasting the produce of that authority. That problem will persist until the American Army ceases to be. The inner contradiction (itself a dialectic, of course—indeed, the very way in which dialectical materialism works) was even more obvious (an obviousness itself neither commendable like Beckett's nor clumsy like Motherwell's) in the popular The Caine Mutiny. We must have a few good men overthrowing Queeg; Queeg is mentally incapacitated and conveniently unsympathetic. But we cannot overthrow the patriarchy that created and molded him. Enter Barney Greenwald who brings it all to an unsavory synthesis in which the real villain is the scheming intellectual manqué into whose coward's face the lawyer, enamored of all that the patriarchy has achieved, hurls the censorious cocktail. It's quite an ordeal for Greenwald as it is for the author, both of whom are Jews, which suggests another have-it-both-ways dialectic. The Jew, himself a prototype of patriarchy (the Jews being among the ur-patriarchs, after all), reaffirms and reassures the patriarchy that the dark outsider (himself as Jew) is on their side and, if he happens to be a brooding intellectual (as many Jews purportedly are), he's not a danger to their world in the same way that the brooding intellectual Tom Keefer character who instigated the mutiny so obviously is. Prospero may or may not have been Shakespeare, but Barney Greenwald is definitely Herman Wouk.

Contemporary lexical usages don't often effectively express the crux of something but in this case the popular word "ugh" seems to. It's not surprising how popular both MASH and The Caine Mutiny were, since both answer the public's craving for just such a tensely poised balance of attitudes and affects. To be sure, the craving likewise resonates in how capitalism itself plays out in the hearts and minds of those who live it, successfully or not. The concept of it is deemed unimpeachable even as its determinations are often thought to be deplorable, be it pornography on the Internet or baseball players who make too much money. The collective balancing act will remain torturous until all of it ceases to actually exist in the actual world, recedes into the mists of time; until the inner contradictions are no longer our problem but someone else's, in the same dark company as the ancient Greeks or the ancient Hebrews or the denizens of fabled Renaissance city states. Once that retreat to the shadows happens, mythology happens as all contradictions resolve in poetry so that Lear can at last become as huge as the storm he crawls in.

As with people, so with buildings. In its day the Parthenon may have been no less oppressive (however more observant of enduring aesthetic standards) than Empire State Plaza; both structures redolent of ostentatious power. But as a ruin, its stately grandeur is unimpeachable. Vagaries of the marketplace! And vagaries as well of the law that governs it when social mores persuade changes in the allowable. That being so, why should jurors heed instructions from the bench when a few passing revolutions persistently reformulate the moral parameters within which the law operates? The irony's been noted in how Street of Shame helped to finally illegalize prostitution in Japan even though it is the only one of Mizoguchi's films on the subject to take an ambivalent position, as in this particular film prostitution is a lot better than marriage. What may have happened is that the last extraordinary shot is so heart-rending, so emotionally if not politically conclusive, that, seeing it, the public made up its mind on the spot. The scene is a coup de-grace that settles the matter, irrespective of whatever contrary points and ambiguous attitudes may have enriched the film earlier on. Here too there's a complex interaction, of the purely aesthetic—i.e., a great affecting scene in and of itself, even were prostitution an old anomie no longer part of the world—and the tendentious. In other words, the impact of the scene combines beautiful acting and cinematography with how we the audience feel about prostitution and what we think ought or ought not to be done about it. Separating the two is difficult, in the same way as it is difficult to separate any aesthetic appraisal from the larger socio-cultural context. With music in particular, the whirligigs become so deeply socio-cultural as to become personal. We do not necessarily pass judgment on someone who may not like Shakespeare; not even on someone who thinks that Grandma Moses was a great painter do we pass such judgment. But on people who love elevator music, we most definitely pass judgment. We regard their emotions as trite and sentimental; we disapprove of the very way they love, no matter how happy their marriages may seem. In short, we disapprove of their souls. Conversely, we don't necessarily have an opinion one way or another of someone who loves a novel by Ralph Ellison, but we quite justly recognize a superior soul in one who loves Negro spirituals. So, a book like Adolescents and Their Music has a refreshing candor about it, not because we can ever bear to listen to the thunderous caterwauling these anthologized contributors dote on, but because the book is based so coherently on a narrow ideology by which all music is assessed. Perverse, no doubt, but it certainly has the virtue of a compelling cultural position, and one in which the Platonic reals that "One time when I was listening to one of Beethoven's late quartets, I had this haunting sensation that I had heard it before, as if it were some sort of Platonic real that the music had brought to earth. In fact, I actually had heard the piece before; in fact, I had heard it before more than once. But that doesn't obviate my initial exultation. The very fact that its revivification from the depths of sensory memory instilled in me a sense of it as an eternal music, an unshakeable real, qualifies it as just such a real. It humanizes Plato as well, because the origins of it as recollected perfection are sensory; it allows the body to participate in what is still essentially (no pun intended) a Platonic attainment" so seems to cherish (after all, his very name suggests that he does) have no value or relevance whatsoever. Fair enough; would that you were, as they say, hot or cold but that you are lukewarm, I spit you out.

Now comes a turning point, as I must find some connective link from what I just said to Anne Morrow Lindberg, whom I would like to talk about next, or, alternatively, rely on the aforementioned ontological dialectic by which there is always a linkage somewhere between what just was and what is about to be and, by definition, there is no such thing as disconnection, Actually, I needn't have recourse to either; a further ontological quantum wave has just allowed a connection because I brought it into being simply by announcing the necessity to find one. The question at hand is whether Anne Morrow Lindberg reworked her youthful diaries for the publication of Bring Me a Unicorn in 1970 and, if so, how does that change our response to the book. Much of it, and I'd just quickly cite her portrait of J.P. Morgan, seems the product of a mature adult's more practiced hand and refined, wiser sensibility, unless we are to believe that the young Anne Morrow Lindberg had something of Jane Austen's prodigiousness. (That prodigiousness is grossly underrated. Isn't it likelier that an eight-year old would write the kind of music that Mozart wrote at that age than that a woman in her early twenties would have the profound knowledge of human relationships that Austen had?) If Anne Morrow Lindberg at the age of 16 when she started this writing, or 22 when she finished it, had even a tittle of Austen's supremely competent maturity—and even a tittle of it might likely be enough to enable the finely settled prose in this book—it would certainly bespeak a dulling of upper-class sensibility from her time to ours. (I recall an old football gag: Ok, I give up, why a tittle?") Who among current upper-crusters could write even so simple a thing as "Mrs. Neilson always leaves me with fresh nice thoughts, like leaves swirling around that I remember at odd times later, when they blow in." On the other hand, wasn't Dwight Morrow a parvenu? Maybe his modest Midwestern roots informed the literateness of his children? Conversely, if the book was retouched in the late 1960s, she was actually writing an autobiography despite her professed discomfort with that form. A dishonest book, perhaps, but a good one at any rate. Also at issue is why I would have sexual fantasies about her. I do not believe it has anything to do with how or what she writes, and I can barely see what she looks like in the book's photos. And I certainly don't cherish the thought of cuckolding her husband. To the contrary, any woman who'd sleep with Charles Lindberg would ordinarily strike me as repulsive for doing so. The fantasies lay dormant for years until they were awakened when I happened to read that she had had an affair with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. On my first day in Paris, I walked past where Saint-Exupéry lived, across from Les Invalides. I went to the Place des Vosges and it was well-nigh invisible in the rain, magnificent. I went to Père Lachaise and saw Bizet's grave. I meant to go to Montmartre Cemetery where Dumas is buried 100 meters from Marie Duplessis. Armand and the narrator dug up Camille's corpse, marveling, sickened and all-a-tremble at the sight of it. The necrophilia that defines all opera has a correlative here and Verdi's opera naturally feasted on it. I would have liked to have been a leader of the labor movement in those days, a confrere of Reuther and Dubinsky, who falls in love with Anne Morrow Lindberg, who reciprocates once her essentially decent father learns to live with it, who after Morgan dies becomes a Roosevelt supporter, which is where his politics and mine meet in the center, which, if it doesn't hold, mere anarchy is loosed, the blood-dimmed tide, which is the dissolution to which the Era of the People inexorably and noisily takes us until the Era of the Father begins again, which is the revelation of circularity, which may or may not be driven dialectically although a dialectical construction is always of course findable in the macrocosm no less than the micro. East and West was a tension just as narrowly constructed before what used to be called the Orient was at all known to what used to be called the Occident and vice versa. Troy was East, all the more so for its Phrygian alliance, and yet Rome, the Occidental beacon, was founded by Trojans. Aristocratic Roman families avidly traced their lineages back to historic Trojans, so the Eastern taint wasn't necessarily just darkly pre-conscious or unconscious, or perhaps it did finally still remain a buried, unsettled, unsettling dream, although at that point the Trojans would not have been its agency, the Trojan DNA having been effectively purified of Eastern contamination when Aeneas the founder abandoned Dido, a Cleopatra prototype of the East, her Carthage still more darkly Eastern for its Levantine root than Rome for its Anatolian. Caesar can bed Cleopatra and leave her, as Aeneas did his Dido; won't acknowledge Caesarion. Antony tarries and is tainted, acknowledges proudly his children by Cleopatra, yet Cleopatra names the son after Alexander, avatar of the Occident who dispelled the Eastern shadows of imperial Persia; who is raised by Octavia, sister of the Caesar who punishes Antony for his defection to the East and that way reaffirms Western hegemony. How inextricable this tangle of cultural antipodes, or are they more than that, forces rather of the raging universal global mind grappling confusedly with its own parts of light and dark? It was already 150 years since Hannibal engendered what had been the Occident's fiercest terror because the great general with his Phoenician genes invaded from the North—from the North!—which said to the citizens of the West that the East can creep up and get you from any direction, that whatever daylight world they had in mind was outflanked by night. Worse, from the mountains, from on high; buried consciousness, not from the bowels of the earth where buried things are supposed to reside, but from the Alps, from on high. Venus in Furs, which has neither clinical nor erotic interest, does have interest as it touches on North/South conflicts of order and sensuality that will reverberate throughout Hesse, Mann, Camus; of pagan innocence and Christian corruption (seventeen years before Nietzsche wrote The Genealogy of Morals,) and loss of will as we find it in both brothers Mann. The East simmers in it too: Wanda as odalisque, and the Jews for whom the book was important, Kafka and Leopold Bloom (the latter named for Sacher-Masoch). Jews as harbingers of the East achieve great prominence in England because England was the emblem and the standard-bearer of the Occident, its second and in many ways greater empire; the English not being distinguished for Jew-baiting; there was Disraeli, after all, and Harold Abrahams. But Shylock. Villainous Jews take on unexampled monumentality in English literature. Fagin. Creature from the nowhere everywhere East where the opium dens, London's most fabled spaces, come from too. Charlie Bates is actually a much more interesting character than the Artful Dodger, who is closer to a stock character, albeit an enjoyable one. But Bates is complex. His crazy laughter through most of the book, which at some points makes him seem a little moronic, shows that he never quite understands the horrific seriousness of the world he is in until the understanding is forced upon him by Nancy's murder. Then he rages at Sykes. Bates grows up in the novel, which makes him real. Has anyone ever commented on the syntactical successions of colons and semi-colons in Jane Eyre? It creates a terse, staccato narrative more effectively than any of her first-person reversions. For Wallace Stevens in 1904, "Spring is something of a Circe." For Wallace Stevens in 1907, "People do not look well in Spring. They seem grimy and puffy..." Supreme sensibilities evolve slowly, in fact, tectonically, they take on continuities, anchor substrata from which supreme fictions evolve, reveal consistencies that are anything but the hobgoblins of little minds. Hi Simons tried to tie Stevens to Mallarme, but Stevens had no sense of a relationship to him and never would. By contrast, Stevens has at first an indifferent attitude toward Valery but little by little he gets more interested and his Letters chart that progress, from "too much to do to get round to him" in late August of 1945, to his thinking something he read about Valery in the journal French Studies "makes his skeleton ring, and yet as I read it I kept saying Who cares" in early December of 1948, to his assessment of Elizabeth Sewell's Paul Valery: The Mind in the Mirror as a "truly wonderful work," to "I want to know Valery better" in early December of 1954. He finally accepts an invitation to write two introductions to Valery's Dialogues, which is especially interesting since Stevens at this point in his life (age 75 and soon to die) is feeling the preciousness of time and rejecting a variety of other fairly similar solicitations. So, what did Valery have that Mallarme did not? A classical sensibility less intruded on by modernism for the sake of modernism? A poem presented in an undergraduate English class, it was called "Skyhook," which started "As a finale to selves." I don't remember more, but the instructor praising it compared it to Stevens. Après him such a fortunate deluge of fine poets in the United States, more so per capita, perhaps, than England or Italy or France in the postwar era, and this in a society fabled for its materialism. The Beats aside, most of the luminaries functioned somewhere near the mainstream, so what can it mean when this Cheever-esque world begets James Wright and Roethke and Bishop and so forth? Of course, none of these three I happen to mention were exactly country club goers or hula hoop manufacturers, but they did not seek out counter-cultural affiliations as did their colleagues in North Beach, maybe they should have, they'd have survived easier, but they wouldn't have written the same poetry.

The percolations of East and West, the sullenly predatory gaze with which some parts of our body scheme against their counterparts on the other end of our navels. Hippies and Buckminster Fuller dreamt up globalization and now it's hippies who decry it. Is globalization an imago of Kautsky's "ultra-imperialism" after all? Kautsky was wrong (and Lenin right) about the inevitability of war among imperialist factions in 1914. But was Kautsky prescient about a next stage of imperialism, namely, the present one in a way that Lenin wasn't? I should have known not to read Frederick Barthelme's Bob the Gambler when I saw a blurb on the back from John Barth. The same flaccidity in both writers, only Barthelme affects fewer words and Barth too many; Barthelme's been compared to Hemingway and that's apt, as they're the only writers I know who feature such flabby minimalism. Although the geographical contrarieties roil our world, East and West, North and South, Arab terrorism seems almost trite compared to what the Romans had to deal with, elephants bearing the Eastern darkness down upon them from the tops of snow-white Alps. And friendships at stake, my friend with his can-do Anglican enthusiasm, he of the reindeer hunter Northern nomads who conquered the Continent, and I with the insistence of the fatalistic South that the Catholic Church is the body of Christ on earth but, you know, bodies belch and bodies fart and bodies butt-fuck little boys, so what can you do? And I like to stay at home if I've nowhere in particular to go and I prefer not to be in a museum in summertime, I'd rather be outside when the sunshine in New York reminds me of the light I saw shower down on Epidaurus while the tourists were crowding the theater at the top to hear the sounds of the coins jingling down upon the proscenium at the bottom because the tour guides were showing off the acoustics. How marvelous that the Greeks could build that theater four-hundred years before Christ and yet we with all our technology couldn't get it right the first time when they built Avery Fisher Hall. Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood. I fear as I write that it will be glibly characterized as stream of consciousness, it's nothing of the kind, I've told you, haven't I, I'll tell you again, that in a world of quantum dialectics, there is no such thing as disconnectedness. Nabokov said that stream of consciousness is misconceived because no one actually thinks in the phrases that Dedalus and Bloom think in. But let us not speak ill of stream consciousness; let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. Though it is interesting that the first epic after Tom Jones was Ulysses, skipping over all those Victorian novels, vastly long as those novels may have been. Their purviews were too localized and temporized to encourage epical journeys through all that their civilization had encompassed to that point. Carlyle may have influenced The Tale of Two Cities but Dickens doesn't quote liberally from him, much less from Horace or Terence. I'm ignoring many candidates, Whitman and so forth. But concerns had shifted. It is stream of consciousness that allows Joyce to take survey of all the world, and I'm not sure it could have been done any other way, although the idea that dialectics demolish the possibility of disconnectedness also allows a similar survey or at least the latent possibility that, if I never stop writing this, it can theoretically include every idea that ever grew from human experience and thinking. One may wonder why anyone would want to engage in this awful discipline of writing except to write an epic, to capture everything that ever was in past time and present time in a way that everyone who will ever live in the future will find compelling. One may wonder why poetry in particular exists except to sing the infinite. Why do poems that aspire to anything else exist? Are they really musical? Do they really charm? Why does a ditty like Yeats's "Politics" exist? Why do we bother with it besides the fact that a great poet wrote it? In the struggle between form and substance, instinctive tendencies either way obviate the ideal of the indissoluble. Invitation to a Beheading is the best example I know of how well-wrought a bad book can be, but I suppose bad books are often just bad books. There are people who actually think that The Triumph of the Will is a great movie because it was so well-made. I think Olympia is a great movie because it was so well-made, which suggests that a glorification of the fascist ideal can indeed be a great glorification whereas a glorification of a particular fascist indeed cannot.

For the 21^st century, an additional problem with writing an epic is that, to be an epic, it must embrace aspects of social media and pop culture that are demeaning to even know about much less reflect on. Attacks on the fashionable are at least as old as Socrates but never before in the history of the world have the three words "I don't care" been more important: arrogant dismissive words, on the subject of the Kardashians, that are the duty of conservatives and scrupulous liberals alike to intone as a veritable credo when the culture is on the verge of inevitable transformation, if the human spirit is to survive as part of whatever it is the era is transforming into. Then, for the writer of epics, the trick becomes to somehow reference or incorporate such detritus of our civilization in some sort of off-handed way so that it is included in the overarching narrative but without obtruding on the fundamental tale being told, which is the tale of God's ways and man's, which narrative, to be an epic, must, after all, encompass the totality of the present as well as the past. A corollary duty involves the same three words spoken in response to the culture's dismissive indifference regarding what one does love and care about; in other words, not to care if the culture no longer cares about, say, Chaucer. Here, though, the writer must differentiate between meaningless erudition and erudition that is not meaningless, remembering always that Veblen chose to end his book with a discussion of how the mastery of dead languages is as much a chancre of conspicuous consumption as a plastic cow on a big lawn. For less ambitious writers whose passion is to capture the inner essence of a contemporary scene, and that scene only, the trick becomes to view the scene from a sufficiently Olympian perspective so that the narrative does not become dated a mere few decades hence, a fine chore which Updike, for one, performs in Rabbit Is Rich but not in Rabbit Redux. To that end, tumultuous eras require finer hands, maybe Faulkner's, whom you don't normally think of as chronicling the same kind of a society as an Updike or a Cheever was always trying to chronicle, but the description at the beginning of Chapter 6 of Intruder In the Dust, of the newer homes with hints as to the lifestyles lived there, seems at first a commonplace portrayal of the banality of life in the 1950s, except it's not yet the 1950s, it's 1948, so the description is predictive. The modern suburb jumps out unexpectedly cast against what we'd been thinking all along was still only the old Faulknerian landscape of poplars and pines, dark brick jails and lynch mobs. It's one of Faulkner's final tableaux and therefore all the more powerful as a personal reminder from him that the imminent lynching, a post-Reconstruction horror, is built into this new world as well, which isn't yet the New South but moving in that direction; a reminder that, in any event, the plastic world is the direct heir of the guilty legacy.

If stream of consciousness was one way, at the time the only way yet conceptualized, to write an epic, abstraction is the only way, post-Renaissance, to paint one. Clifford Styll is a candidate for that distinction in a way that cannot be concretely stated but only abstractly suggested; I never paid much attention to his work until I saw one painting in a spacious enough room at the museum to show off the grandiose spatiality of the work itself to advantage. Pictures that are all straight-line abstraction or studiously repetitive forms must be either monumental like Styll or spiritual like Rothko or primordial like Kline or else it's all just design like Albers. The "I don't care" credo has to be spoken, not scathingly, which could ultimately only suggest that we do really care, but with airy detachment, of the sort a young man whose name was Kip meant when he said, "It takes substance not to give a damn." He was as good as his word because what he said about not giving a damn he said rather indifferently, the medium as good as the message, as if he also did not much give a damn about not giving a damn. He was barely aware he was saying what he was saying, but isn't that often the way, the things we say that other people remember we say casually, even parenthetically, not likely to remember those of our own utterances that most deeply and permanently affect others? The conversation with Kip to which I refer happened, in fact, a half-century ago. The credo is also all the more venerable a part of our code of conduct because, absent it, we quickly begin to hate, and I do agree with whoever it was (Cheever, maybe) who cautioned that to hate your world is a despicable thing. Better to stay as far from the tribalisms, the so-called culture wars, as possible. It's the germ that breeds Kim Philby, our need to see Alabama ravaged even if by the same kind of people who destroyed Bamiyan and who would destroy everything else we believe in. But then again, tribal purifications are natural and inevitable as well as peculiarly vicious. Why the Mau Mau killed a lot more Kenyans than they did British. Why party primaries are usually more vicious than general elections. With Philby, though, and certainly Blount, it may be as much a matter of their just not getting the recognition from their own tribes that they thought they deserved; that, more than any substantive animadversions. In our world, it's like hating and betraying the Kardashians simply because they think they're better than us. All clerics, be they political pundits or poets, will predictably turn on their worlds or else rally to it neo-conservatively, itself a kind of perverseness. John Simon is relevant in this context. A sentinel against the enthusiasms of his decade, he lambasted The Last Picture Show and was right, and too bad he wasn't around to have at that Titanic nonsense in 1997, or to deal with the general consensus that Anthony Hopkins's performance in The Silence of The Lambs was anything better than laughable, although he also excoriated A Clockwork Orange with the same breath and was wrong. Lamentably gratuitous ad hominem attacks gutted his message as when he wrote that Cybil Shepard in Taxi Driver looked like a "bloated Mussolini." Is that the price we must pay for aesthetic coherence? And wasn't Mussolini bloated to begin with? Street Scene offers one noteworthy solution, which is to harp on and mimic clichés and other demotic usages as a measure of social debasement. Three times in Act I, someone asks "hot enough for you?" which stuck in my mind because it's a cliché my wife makes fun of. The truest epic should also encompass the saga of language and all the permutations to which words are subject and all the embryonic anthropologies that reside within them. Only Finnegans Wake aspires to and in many ways achieves this feat. The epic should encompass all the different syllabic parts of words that play off dialectically against each other, as well as new usages and their potentialities a la Finnegans Wake, and the different affects and contrasting interpretations of different words. "Bosom" is a loaded word. Obscene and grossly sexual to little boys, it is used to highly comic effect in Stagecoach. In Pathways to Madness, one boy uses it as an invective against his mother. For adults, it usually becomes neutral, or literary, or as comforting as whoever invented the word may have meant it to be. A true epic would contrast the history of the word to the word "breast" and offer suggestive hints as to why that history is different. Paradoxically, a true epic might be strung along a fairly thin ideational line. If we are to allow Leavis's point, and it's a point worth considering, that carpe diem is too thin a truism to support a large edifice like The Ambassadors, then the same must be said for the even thinner theme of romantic novels as agencies of derangement, as I believe is first presented in Don Quixote. I doubt that Leavis would carp at Don Quixote, he's not the type to bitch about a book that's historically enshrined to such an extent, although Edmund Wilson did, perhaps perversely, but which I appreciate since like Wilson I didn't much enjoy Don Quixote, but maybe it was the translation. If one takes contrarian positions, especially to question the greatness or importance of anything deemed great or important, one must scrupulously self-examine as to whether one is being perverse, a Peck's Bad Boy, or if there is abiding integrity to one's nice judgment. I, for one, do not like jump cuts; they're arty and they make me nervous to watch, and I don't like films that feature them, and that includes Breathless. But I'm not sticking my tongue out at the cineastes; I do not like jump cuts, truly. The corrupting power of romantic bilge water is much more effective as a motif in Madame Bovary where it is only one thematic thread among many, and also because, written at that time in that century, the corruption of Emma's mind as a result of her reading lousy novels equally implies a pointedly discomfited look at the Romantic Movement as a whole. If Tom Jones was the last epic in the realist mode as Auerbach codifies and commends it, the Old Testament was the first. It's a pity Auerbach, who greatly valued Fielding, never gave separate consideration to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. How he would have marveled at its perversely insistent mimesis in such incongruous circumstances as Fielding finds himself.

One also writes epics, or for that matter creates any substantial body of creative work, in order to give back. I am not talking about giving back out of some heartfelt desire to make a contribution as one might leave money to a foundation or set up a trust for some worthy recipient. Aside from the ego gratification that motivates all artists who dream of being icons two and three centuries hence—Auden wrote that Freud is no longer a person but a whole climate of opinion. Can you imagine being a whole climate of opinion?—there is also a veritably biologic need to give back. You've been stuffing yourself with all of the leavings of all the cultures you can wrap your mouth around, including your own, and now your lower intestine is swollen to gargantuan size. It hurts. You've got to shit it out. Richard Freedman, who was a professor of mine before he left academia to review movies for the Newhouse newspapers, once referred to the scholarly items in The Explicator as "turdlets." I've listened to a lot of music in my life and I've got to get it out of my rectum somehow, not by humming Beethoven's this or Mozart's that, but by telling the world (which is ultimately responsible for my gut being stuffed in the first place) that, in the 20^th century, classical music and jazz reached the same impasse. There was twelve-tone music in which the former was mired and, for the latter, the New Wave and its cacophonies. I respect both; have listened attentively, have been occasionally rapt in what I heard. But as a general rule I don't exactly look forward to Erwartung concertized nor do I rush home to play Albert Ayler recordings. It took audiences what? five years? ten years? to pleasurably accustom themselves to what the Eroica so radically signaled whereas Erwartung was composed well over a century ago and still forbids. The minimalists came to the rescue with music that was new, that did also signal new directions, but is both compelling and pleasing to the ear. Efforts to forge similar next directions in jazz have been more fitful, while Marsalis and Blanchard and Chestnut sound like they could be playing in the 1950s. One solution is World Music, which jazz should come to naturally as its roots are after all African. In recent decades, jazz musicians have made admirable sorties toward a more consciously adapted World Music orientation—Roswell Rudd's The Incredible Honk comes to mind and when one night I went to a Jajouka concert, Ornette Coleman was in the audience—but too bad there hasn't been more of a self-aware groundswell in this direction. I've read enough poetry in my life and I've got to get it out of my rectum somehow, not by reciting the poems so that they live in the ether, but by telling the world that, in the same year, 1941, two major poets both published poems about fatal car wrecks: Karl Shapiro, "Auto Wreck," and Roethke, "Highway: Michigan." I've really had a lot of James Joyce up the proverbial yin yang and I've got to get it out of my rectum somehow, not by hanging around Bloomsday events until three in the morning, but by telling you how interesting it is that a young Joyce once wrote a letter to Ibsen identifying himself as "one of the young generation for whom you have spoken." There's much irony to that as Ibsen had stolidly sat through a lecture by a young Knut Hamsun castigating the "decadence" of Norwegian literature and blaming it on Ibsen and a few others, Ibsen right afterward writing The Master Builder with the dread of such young supplanters basic to the story. Interesting too, this letter from a writer who'd go on to chronicle the tortured dynamics of sons and fathers as they're writ large in the stars. An actual drama of ideations, like the one before when "One time when I was listening to one of Beethoven's late quartets, I had this haunting sensation that I had heard it before, as if it were some sort of Platonic real that the music had brought to earth. In fact, I actually had heard the piece before; in fact, I had heard it before more than once. But that doesn't obviate my initial exultation. The very fact that its revivification from the depths of sensory memory instilled in me a sense of it as an eternal music, an unshakeable real, qualifies it as just such a real. It humanizes Plato as well, because the origins of it as recollected perfection are sensory; it allows the body to participate in what is still essentially (no pun intended) a Platonic attainment," "I could not begin to understand Rothko until I heard someone call his paintings ‘pictures of consciousness'," and "Mime as a French art (Marceau, Barrault) is a disfigurement of Mallarme's silences" all met in a park, would have a particularly efficient laxative effect, since drama moves and actions happen. A drama could really get the ball rolling, so to speak, if "It may have been Bazin who made the strong point that filmmakers must find correlates to translate from another medium to theirs; it is really Kubrick's fine achievement in A Clockwork Orange, using dance to replace Burgess's language" were to enter stage right, a thinnish nervous man, well-dressed. He peers uncomfortably, a little angrily as he watches "Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government is a masterpiece of its type of shrewd political positioning as Lenin begins by discussing the retreats of 1918, the higher pay for bourgeois engineers, etc., in the daunting wake of Brest-Litovsk, the shadow of which haunts every sentence. Lenin explains away the concessions and reaffirms the coercive tasks of the new government. It is an apology for weakness and a reaffirmation of power that, as Lenin must have known, comprise a full dialectical cycle" enter stage right. "Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government is a masterpiece of its type of shrewd political positioning as Lenin begins by discussing the retreats of 1918, the higher pay for bourgeois engineers, etc., in the daunting wake of Brest-Litovsk, the shadow of which haunts every sentence. Lenin explains away the concessions and reaffirms the coercive tasks of the new government. It is an apology for weakness and a reaffirmation of power that, as Lenin must have known, comprise a full dialectical cycle" has a deferential manner, yet the audience should sense his reservoirs of self-affirmation and self-confidence.

"I demand that you stop paying visits to my wife," says "It may have been Bazin who made the strong point that filmmakers must find correlates to translate from another medium to theirs; it is really Kubrick's fine achievement in A Clockwork Orange, using dance to replace Burgess's language".

"Your wife can make decisions for herself, can she not?" replies "Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government is a masterpiece of its type of shrewd political positioning as Lenin begins by discussing the retreats of 1918, the higher pay for bourgeois engineers, etc., in the daunting wake of Brest-Litovsk, the shadow of which haunts every sentence. Lenin explains away the concessions and reaffirms the coercive tasks of the new government. It is an apology for weakness and a reaffirmation of power that, as Lenin must have known, comprise a full dialectical cycle," not trying to challenge or defy "It may have been Bazin who made the strong point that filmmakers must find correlates to translate from another medium to theirs; it is really Kubrick's fine achievement in A Clockwork Orange, using dance to replace Burgess's language" but with the confidence of a man who knows he has right on his side.

"We're having problems, and your hanging around doesn't help solve them," says "It may have been Bazin who made the strong point that filmmakers must find correlates to translate from another medium to theirs; it is really Kubrick's fine achievement in A Clockwork Orange, using dance to replace Burgess's language," a slight tremor in his voice.

"The fact is, I care about her and, if you must know, I care for her," says "Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government is a masterpiece of its type of shrewd political positioning as Lenin begins by discussing the retreats of 1918, the higher pay for bourgeois engineers, etc., in the daunting wake of Brest-Litovsk, the shadow of which haunts every sentence. Lenin explains away the concessions and reaffirms the coercive tasks of the new government. It is an apology for weakness and a reaffirmation of power that, as Lenin must have known, comprise a full dialectical cycle".

The hyper-dialectic conversation can be augmented for additional laxative impact by having the characters discuss ideas, for example: "Virgil is the first great tragedian of civilized experience. The gate of ivory in the Aeneid must be taken at face value, not some obscure reference to the time of day or night. Civilization is joyless, a loss, a bleak inevitability to which Aeneas has no choice but to accede," says "Velikovsky is a critical pioneer for his commentary on the homoerotic motif in War and Peace and one wonders why Pierre's sexual dream about the old Freemason is not more widely commented on".

"Perhaps, but conflicted ideas toward civilization as both a way to live life and as an autonomous belief system had been by no means unusual for centuries before Virgil. Even the specific imagery, of horn and ivory, goes back to Homer," replies "Soldiers' Pay gives us small hints of the grandiose Faulknerian style that would break forth a mere three years later in The Sound and the Fury, but it is equally interesting as a display of the stylistic path not taken—of a tight compression, an intense compression. Had he taken that path, he would have been better at it than Hemingway".

"Of course, but The Aeneid was unique up to that point as an epic about civilization itself, its founding, and how, in its founding, it takes on the genetic consistency of ivory. No one had really written anything with that specific subject before," says "Velikovsky is a critical pioneer for his commentary on the homoerotic motif in War and Peace and one wonders why Pierre's sexual dream about the old Freemason is not more widely commented on".

"Oh, I agree with that. In that sense, it is the direct precursor of just about everything Henry James ever wrote," says "Soldiers' Pay gives us small hints of the grandiose Faulknerian style that would break forth a mere three years later in The Sound and the Fury, but it is equally interesting as a display of the stylistic path not taken—of a tight compression, an intense compression. Had he taken that path, he would have been better at it than Hemingway".

"Especially The Golden Bowl," smiles "Velikovsky is a critical pioneer for his commentary on the homoerotic motif in War and Peace and one wonders why Pierre's sexual dream about the old Freemason is not more widely commented on". "I mean, considering the central metaphor which gives the book its title."

"Indeed," enthuses "Soldiers' Pay gives us small hints of the grandiose Faulknerian style that would break forth a mere three years later in The Sound and the Fury, but it is equally interesting as a display of the stylistic path not taken—of a tight compression, an intense compression. Had he taken that path, he would have been better at it than Hemingway. "That fundamental crack in the bowl's very makeup is, I suppose, James's version of the ivory gate."

To once again note how the dialectical specifics contained in such dialogue can be parsed, we'd note how the name of one character in the piece includes a writer (Faulkner) taking one path (convoluted, globular prose) versus another (minimalism) even as both characters discuss an epic hero (Aeneas) taking one path (the gate of ivory) versus another (the gate of horn). It's God's plan, in the same way as the structure of an atom mirrors the structure of the solar system. However, the existence of a plan, this plan or any other, does not preclude the possibility that, in a world where there is a God, everything is as equally possible as in one where there is no God, and possibly equally awful. The existential and the religious (or at least the mythopoetic) coexist within us and suggest two wholly different, usually incompatible, ways of feeling existence. Camus's description of Jesus as a "style of living" seems a rather feeble attempt to synthesize the two. The existential—and how unfortunate for the human race that such appraisals of experience as rendered by Sartre and Camus should now have become unfashionable—is by definition a grappling with the finite except insofar as neant implies infinite possibilities of what might yet be, however anguishing the process by which the choices as to those possibilities are to be made, while the religious is by definition a grappling with the infinite. Protestants can conjoin the two—Kierkegaard is, after all, the singular fulfillment of all that Luther was and Lutheranism is—while meta-myth can also be construed as the existential rendering of the religious experience insofar as it is a story that explains what the story actually is. Here, the Christians have done what the Jews and Moslems, the Hindus and Buddhists, have not done. The New Testament celebrates the existential fact that the sacred would appear in the form of a god who dwells for a few decades in the finite realm of the profane. All myths and religions are revelations by and of God, but the story of Jesus is about revelation, it defines revelation, it's not just an example of it. So, I suppose when Stevens, for example, writes meta-poetry, and all his poems are about poetry, he examples one kind of imitatio Christi. A meta-epic would be not just a creative summation of a civilization but also a work about what an epic is. The first meta-poetry ever written may have been embedded within an epic, within The Iliad in the verses about the making of the Shield of Achilles, and how marvelous is it that Lattimore's translation starts with Hephaistos forging a shield "that was huge and heavy," thus recalling in the world's first great epic the author of its last who had set out over three decades before Lattimore published his translation to forge the uncreated conscience of the race. Once again, after over three decades or so, I am thinking sexually about Anne Morrow Lindberg. Existential in any strict sense or not, women compel destiny; Fortune is conventionally personified as a woman. Heldar, early on in The Light That Failed, is almost blinded by Maisie, which foreshadows his actual blinding. Then Bessie, a reduced Maisie figure, destroys the painting that would have redeemed his blindness. Throughout the novel, men discourage each other from entanglements with women; Heldar won't tell his friends about Maisie. Yet just a year after he published this novel, Kipling himself married the horse-faced Carrie Balestier in what would be described as a "sour" marriage. He'd had a nervous breakdown during the interval, the only explanation of why he could ignore his own misogynistic presentiments of the fate that awaited him. Modern man is no better at resistance than the heroes of yore who hardly tried to resist, as when Circe advises Odysseus to ignore his own aggressive instincts as Scylla is eternal evil and cannot be defeated. Odysseus obediently accepts the advice; Ahab and others among our own world's voyagers might try to defy the advice but they are crushed for their defiance. Dame Fortune in the last analysis is a mother because, like all mothers, she is given us, we cannot choose some other womb in which to gestate. Their wills be done; their rages like their sorrows raven on. I took my mother once to a concert where they played Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra and once to another concert where they played Age of Anxiety. This unsophisticated woman loved both; the various discordances were music to her ravening soul. Destiny presupposes its own agency, whoever the woman is looming in the wings. Kipling just happened to meet Balestier as I just happened to sit next to a young man in a crowded classroom whose girlfriend happened to have a roommate whom I married a few years later. Were I to have sat in any one of the hundred other chairs in the room, my daughter would not exist. God's will, maybe, the religious in existential format, but I wonder if God might have been just as happy had I sat somewhere else. I suppose that's the sort of question people ask in order to take punches at organized religion, which is often a proxy punching bag, often disingenuously so, when it's the religious idea itself they really want to attack; not that that might not also need some attacking, but it's a line of fire our liberal sensibilities may tend to preclude insofar as discrete religious ideation separated from its institutional trappings usually falls within the boundaries of free thought, the honoring of which is our one inviolable venerated principle, or else, if no actual thought is involved one way or another, but only blind faith, we may have aged aunties whom we love and respect, and whose blind faith defines them too much for us to derogate their faith. If we're speaking in vast generalities, "liberal sensibilities" is itself a vast generality. Well into the second half of the 20^th century, a discourse like Nixon Agonistes hinges around an old-fashioned notion of liberalism that encompasses Utilitarians, social workers, free speech advocates, Horatio Alger and laissez faire capitalists, welfare bureaucrats, those who believe that environment is destiny, those who love environments, those who love factories, Charles Dickens, feminists, and Nixon himself—just about the whole of our civilization other than the Tom Haydens who were roiling the world in which Nixon Agonistes was written, or the papish mindfulness that predates the Industrial Revolution into which liberalism was born. The god is the marketplace, there are many stalls in that marketplace, and conservatives always get lost in the Kasbah especially if like Wills they are at heart National Review-type conservatives who predictably honor such values as restraint, honor, respect, even sobriety and chastity, while the deliberations of the marketplace are inevitably unrestrained, dishonorable, disrespectful, even sotted and salacious. Their problem is the marketplace per se is still the ideological deity, so they're trapped. So they might as well just call the whole goddamn shebang liberal and in that way maybe be able to continue to worship the outer conceptual shell, the idea of the marketplace, even as they decry or lament its specific impacts. Which works. Until they discover how equally market-driven are all radically counter-cultural creativities; no wonder those creativities are easily co-opted, having themselves all along been subject to the laws of supply and demand that govern civilized experience. Until they discover that, in fact, there is nowhere to go, absolutely nowhere that is not ruled by marketplace forces, that is not a marketplace per se. Until they realize that if we call the whole of 19^th century politics and economics liberal, if we call Richard Nixon liberal as well, you'd might as well concede that the entire universe is liberal, all of creation beyond the universe including the quasars and quantum waves liberal.

Such conundrums predate Adam Smith; Swift characterized the Church of England man as Tory in Church, Whig in politics. When the Brobdingnagian king holds Gulliver between his fingers and asks if he is Whig or Tory, you can hear the cosmic laughter. Swift himself was as enraged (even unto madness) as any conservative who's ever been hoisted on the petards of the marketplace. But this more sanguine 20^th century author is a Jesuitical soul, Jesuit-trained, and he seems to be hoping for some sort of Jesuitical trick that will unlock the trapdoors of existence itself. One can always hope. After all, when Wills wrote the book, it was still a few years before Jerry Rubin fully shed rebellion's sartorial emblems and experiential accoutrements—his doing so defined the end of that brief era of foment at least as eloquently as the 1972 Presidential election—so Wills might at that point have yet anticipated counter-cultural epiphany. His next book, Bare Ruined Choirs, bewails the unavailability of the other opposite solution, opposite because hierarchal, to the reductionisms of a marketplace in which it is now Vatican II that has fired up the supply-and-demand engines. This guy Wills is still alive; I wonder whom he's voting for. I never cared all that much about Pius XII's purported sins with respect to the Holocaust; the drift toward fascism happened much earlier as a result of the perceived horrors of both socialism and rampant capitalism that inspired Rerum Novarum and the Church's spasmodic grasping for an alternative to the very notion of a marketplace. Another conservative, Leo XIII, wrestled with cosmic laws from which there was no exit. It might have worked, his grab at a third way, if any ideology were capable of beginning elsewhere than with human beings understood as primordially and essentially economic. And it might not have been quite as sullying, from the standpoint of moral reputation, if Hitler had never lived. He's the one who gave fascism its bad name, not the Italian futurists or the Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis crowd and certainly not Wagner, whose misty rites of passage and rebirth are still glorified every season at Lincoln Center in the heart of liberal Manhattan. One year, PBS spent a fortune to broadcast a Ring cycle, only to televise a lecture at the end of it in which Peter Gay says something to the effect that he can see no way to not characterize these works as fascist. I felt a certain American pride that such a compromising viewpoint was so blithely allowed on air at that point in the show. So, Wagner's in Spezia all febrile with dysentery and obsessed about finding the right key with which to kick off Das Rheingold. He goes into a kind of delirium, sees green water all around him, and, as Speight Jenkins wrote, "the pure triad of E-Flat Major surged from the recesses of his brain." Ah, what visionary genius! What else but E-Flat Major to capture the mystical swirling waves of the Rhine! That was 1853. I take no small pleasure in telling you that, three years earlier, Schuman published his Rhenish symphony in... yup, E-Flat Major! Opera, not just Wagner's, is so overloaded. The world is overloaded and, since it's always with us, that's too bad. Buttholes are overloaded. Minds are overloaded. News cycles are overloaded. Social schedules are overloaded if you happen to have one. (A single dinner date smudges an otherwise pristine horizon.) Henry James's characters are overloaded, with perceptions. Traffic patterns are overloaded. Restaurants are overloaded. Lawrence's characters are overloaded, with affects, until like James' they come dangerously close to no longer being characters at all but rather repositories of perception and emotion, which may have been intentional, at least on Lawrence's part as he was seeing the disappearance of egos that were inundated for better or worse by primal forces or else starkly denuded in attempts to resist those forces. Remarkable that Ursula and Gudrun still seem effectively differentiated even though one might be hard pressed to list for either a series of distinguishing character traits of the sort one finds in more conventional novels. Music is certainly overloaded, not just with sound but with time, and time makes it impossible to own music, to fasten in on any one piece of it in order to eternally contemplate it as one might eternally contemplate a section of a painting or a single line or word of writing. The only recourse we have when it comes to music is the repeating scratch on a vinyl LP that allows us to listen long enough to an isolated moment of music, in which moment all time is contained so that we can incorporate into ourselves the singular sound and go on incorporating it for as long as the repeating scratch repeats, which is for always. Alas, the day will come when turntables will no longer be on the market or vinyl so scarce, technology evolving and eternity devolving, that durable immersion in a sound will be a thing of the past only and so we'll lose another part of our souls. I suppose some sort of similar loss may be occasioned with film, which also obviously moves through time, especially if like Herzog filmmakers eschew storyboarding. The storyboards for Kagemusha are better than the film itself (and for me as good as examples of modern Japanese painting get, although I haven't seen a lot of modern Japanese painting). But then with film, you can always freeze-frame a shot, which is an example of how technology can giveth, not just taketh. Of course, in the days before vinyl, we didn't even have repeating scratches nor recordings of any sort to play over again and over again, there was no recourse, music could never be immutable in those days, the human race had to let it wash over and wash away, we never owned that part of our souls even while Mozart was writing it. Souls are always in peril, disfigured by being deprived and vice versa; antebellum days make those of us who were there and those of us who imagine being there equally sententious, if not sentimental, which is something you can sense in the first ten pages of The Age of Innocence. Opera is not only overloaded, it takes so long; so do buttholes and brains, it can take a lifetime to unclog them, and maybe not even then. Opera is supposed to take too long because, along with underlying necrophiliac lust, it's all about the drama of coitus interruptus after coitus interruptus after coitus interruptus until the final unloosing. That's why opera is for adults; kids are too impatient. Genius, says Michelangelo, is eternal patience. Even with stock plots like La Forza, it takes Alvaro so long to fight. And never mind Tristan, of course. Will the night never come? Will this turd ever drop? Brakhage's Eye Myth is the shortest masterpiece in the history of the world, exactly nine seconds as the crow flies.

Hitchcock relied on storyboards, and the boards for North By Northwest are great to look at. Too bad he knew who Freud was and was himself neurotic enough to care; confronted by Freudian content in a story like Spellbound, he then loses his healthy contempt for plot, plot lines become more serious than maguffins. The movie gets leaden. Disclosures of why a character is sick, and why the sickness motivates the actions or inactions of that character, are no more interesting or important than the plot twists in detective stories. Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd and who cares why Jack is such a mess or Jill is such a mess or why Little Jack Horner wanders now desolate on the darkling plain of his own useless hopeless cathexes—except insofar as the content of any such revelation directly correlates with something larger: in Suddenly Last Summer, for instance, where the lobotomist in search of one woman's pathology happens to detect the nature of nature. Scientists were as careful as their inescapable discoveries allowed—until quasars came and quantum waves forced unprecedent speculation about the nature of nature. "I know so much about how the universe was created but I have no idea why," said Hawking on television, or words to that effect. Asperger, his name was, praised me for being more intelligent than most readers of A Brief History of Time because I knew I didn't understand it. Meanwhile, philosophers, anxious like Freud was to merit the respectful collegiality of mathematicians and biologists, essentially retreated to positivism; essentially retreated to Hume; essentially fired up anti-Romantic vanguards less sustainably anti-Romantic (in light of the quasars that came and the quantum waves that forced our realization that God does indeed roll dice) than the excoriation of Shelley and the cult of inexactitude by 20^th century critics, although the chief such critic, Eliot, had no qualms about promoting Hart Crane, the Shelley of his age as Lowell dubbed him. Donne and Shelley were equally imaginative; ideation wasn't the issue, just the words and imagery, so the anti-Romantics prevailed, which for poetry was probably for the best. Psychoanalysis bent over so far backward to ingratiate itself that Freud felt compelled to quarantine the "wild analysts" in order to protect his "science" from their frenzies in the same way he worried about whether or not he could ever protect his fledgling praxis from practitioners who fuck their patients. So, he discouraged poetry in his programmatic iteration of the psyche and its dynamics but he never could be anything else himself but a poet of sorts because what "science" is based on a tragic vision of humankind?

Yes, no.

If there was ever a scriptural directive perverted through the eras, it's "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." For Chrissakes, he's asking whose picture is on the coin in answer to the question, Should we pay taxes? So "yes, pay your taxes" is the only thing that Jesus is saying. He's not saying cheat, lie, steal, ignore honor and discount integrity. He's not saying, Render unto Caesar the things that are God's. The irony is that the last thing that the populous miscreants who commonly quote the passage are agreeable to doing is paying their taxes. Bud Powell is to Tatum as Schoenberg was to Wagner. Both were overwhelmed by torrents of sound that had them wondering how to possibly make new music after everything the musical intelligence can possibly absorb had already been unloosed. (No accident that Tatum's nickname among musicians was "God.") So, they sought to reduce instead of compete; to play a different music altogether, flee to twelve-tone rigor or relatively simple comping in lieu of the vastly intricate left-hand filigree that has an effect of wholly separate compositions. But the ghosts would never go away for good; how Tatum-esque Powell's playing at Massey Hall. The beginning of Women in Love reads like a conversation between two characters in Jane Austen; is it not the very "persiflage" that Birkin will despise? When we confront an opaque or even indecipherable text, something either does or does not jump off the page that makes the reader want to either illuminate and decipher or simply not bother. Eliot read Anabasis a half-dozen times before he figured it had "imaginative order." What made him press on? What hints lured him? How effectively stealthy the Bullivant scene with Miss Eade in The Odd Women; it foreshadows the inquisition of Monica, her own reservations about how the relationship with Widdowson begins, and, most astutely on the part of the author, the evidence against her when Eade sees her in the bus with Bullivant and the spy sees her knock on Everard's door. It was only by accident, from an old New York Times article, that I learned while I was reading The Bingo Palace that Michael Dorris suicided. That news made reading the book a different experience (and added more interest to Erdrich's smile in the photo on the back jacket). Both readings are valid, one when we know, one when we don't. C. S. Lewis said he understood Paradise Lost better than most people because he actually believed the story. That is true. It is also true that people who don't believe the story understand Paradise Lost better than Lewis. The hollow awful mirthless laughter of the thugs in Goodfellas—I'm sure Scorsese was inspired to it by the very same kind of laughter in Key Largo. If the Gurdjieff canon culminates with the enneagram, it is also where that canon collapses. He constructs the symbol with the "shock" of Number 6 between sol and la, rather than ti and do where it more coherently belongs. The philosopher's stone needs a little more work. Gurdjieff acknowledges the problem, then fails to explain the solution; to the extent any real effort to do so on his part is evident, he's much like a Catholic theologian who can ratiocinate his way out of every dead end. Such mental trickery is a kind of "mechanicalness," the antidote to which is precisely what these tortured esoterica affect to provide. But Gurdjieff is interesting enough withal to warrant this attention and, besides, these mystics need to be read phenomenologically; that is, as particularized systemic contrasts to the master narratives around them, notwithstanding Gurdjieff's penchant for evoking or referencing prominent contributors to that narrative such as Nietzsche, Trismegistus, Jung, or just about any classicist who ever thought dialectically, from Lucretius to Hegel. The same need for phenomenological reading applies to Crowley, Blavatsky, etc. The better naturalists, for all their avowedly exclusive focus on record-keeping, cannot avoid symbology, an obvious example being the great scene in L'Assomoir where the working class wedding party gets lost in the Louvre. Here is an example of a writer being better than his own pretension: the "scientific" intent that underlines the Rougon-Macquart novels is pedantic balderdash, yet it may be seen to empower the patented intensity which Zola invests throughout; to fire up a genius that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with poetry. The same can be said about the stipulations of Epic Theater, which are oppressively Marxist; yet these plays compel us, the terms of Epic Theater elevate these intellectualized agitprops because Brecht's rules, whatever intrinsic value they had or did not have, served as a muse. Jokes that are really kind of stupid in the telling can be transformed by a different kind of telling, in other words, if used as the plot line for short stories or even novels. So, this rabbi walks into a bar with a frog on his shoulder. The bartender says, "Hey, he's kind of cute. Where did you get him?" The frog says, "Oh I got him in Brooklyn. There's plenty of them over there." Now consider adding in 20 or 30 pages about the rabbi conducting a service, kissing the Torah, remembering his student days at the Yeshivah, retiring later that day deeply preoccupied with an undisclosed personal issue. The next few pages describe a sylvan scene; actually a suburban setting, but there's a nice lake and, just like at Shaker Lakes which I remember from when I was a child, there are snails and frogs along the edges and kids are collecting the snails and trying to catch a frog or two. In the next chapter, the rabbi has one of those frogs on his shoulder as he surreptitiously enters the saloon. The bartender has his back turned; he too is mulling over some undisclosed personal issue. All we know is that it may have something to do with his sister. The bartender turns around and says, "Hey, he's kind of cute. Where did you get him?" After the frog says, "Oh, I got him in Brooklyn. There's plenty of them over there," shadows from just beyond the window start flitting around the room. The punch line, of course, is all-important in any such narrative but expanding the joke in the way we suggest allows us to achieve many things that a simple joke cannot, like vivid depictions of the Jewish community in Brooklyn—but I'd say, more important than anything, the problems besetting both the rabbi and bartender must remain undisclosed, there must be a suggestion of dormant powers that cannot be specifically defined or made to explicitly appear either in art or in life; the shadows at the end of the story say so much about the unseen, about ever-present tragic as well as divine potentiality, a subtext that can never be literal, the temple walls enclose too deep a mystery and, though you may pierce that veil, still Mallarme's silences cannot be disfigured as Nicole Simpson's story remains untold.