Reflections in the Forest

While walking with Nina and the dog through some nearby woods today, the following notion came to me, unbidden: Adulthood is the sadness of understanding that feelings, grandiose and overwhelming, ultimately mean very little.  Adulthood, that is, consists in the unavoidable primacy of mere behavior.  When what you do is more important than what you hope or intend or can imagine, you're officially old.

Where did that come from?  I have no idea.  But I have a sneaking suspicion that a character in a story somewhere is going to have a similar revelation very soon.

In any case, wherever, whoever you are, here's hoping your Christmas has been decidedly child-like.

A Pit Bull Named Chaos

It was his idea, my compatriot.  Call him Ewan.  He wanted to visit the Occupy DC camps in downtown Washington, and just...hang out, meet and greet, feel around for the funny lumps and angles of the whole "Occupy" idea.  He wanted to pass out cigars and hand-warmers, by way of both ingratiation and condolence.  He said he didn't want to provoke, and I know what he meant, and I believe him, but you have to know him; next to "twinkle" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Ewan's left eye.

In any case, we went.  We stood in the cold, first on K St., at McPherson Square, and then in Freedom Plaza, across from City Hall, where the respective Occupy camps are sprawled, with their uproar of tarpaulins, cardboard, and sad artwork, their predictable air of grimy disorientation.  We did hand out cigars.  Or, rather, Ewan handed out cigars; in the traditional manner of socially baffled writers everywhere, I smoked my own and listened as Ewan endeavored to draw out the various protestors.  Few were reticent, though some were incoherent.  One became unresponsive in the process of attempting to, it seemed, devour his gifted cigar.  I don't know how to explain this better; he appeared crazed by something--hunger, cold, boredom, heroin, indifference, something--and simply seized on the tobacco.  We left him to his deepening inscrutability.

We talked to a shaggy portraitist who told us he'd volunteered to leave his apartment so as to spare his landlady the sad business of evicting him.  This was not ironic.  She was kindly, and he didn't want her to suffer the misery of legal proceedings against him.  He, flat busted, didn't want her to suffer on his account.

We heard from another occupier that somewhere on site there was a pit bull named Chaos.  Chaos lived, apparently, in "Camp Chaos", his own little fiefdom within the larger assembly, and was helping the roving cats and sanitation committee members chase off rats.  We looked for Chaos, but to no avail.

Through all this, not surprisingly, perhaps, words swam at me.  Descriptive words which nonetheless remained discrete, refused to coalesce into any sort of explanatory narration.  There was, simultaneously, too much and not enough to report on.  Leaving me to fall back on the few fragments that suggested themselves: decency, futility, inchoate rage, debasement, waste, betrayal, helplessness.  The same fragments experienced and embodied by the protesters themselves, I suppose, even if most of the protestors don't have names for them.

American Augie

I cannot imagine a more electric opening for a novel than the one I've just read.  It is from The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow, and it goes like this:

     "I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.  But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
     Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."

My God.  I mean, my God.  Such juice, such recklessness.  Who does this anymore, who has the courage to be so brusque and essential?  I'm only fifty pages into the book, I don't know yet what Augie's going to grow up to do or be (if you know, please don't spoil it for me), but he seems to announce himself here as a kind of butcher.  The frankness, the almost rude clarity of his formulations--whoever else he is, or will be, Bellow seems to indicate to us, Augie will cleave.

Of particular interest are the first four words: I am an American.  I can't get over it.  It feels like just about the most audacious thing anybody could ever say, it feels just berserk with irony, guts, muscle, regret, paranoia, almost disbelief.  But here's the question: did it feel that way to readers in 1953 when Adventures was published?  Did it feel like that to Bellow?  Or were we all a little more matter-of-fact back then?  How much, if anything, can we understand about ourselves by trying to understand the difference between what Augie's proclamation meant at mid-century, and what it might mean now?

Maybe I'm making too much of this.  As I'm working through it, it's beginning to sound a little like, I don't know, rehash Tom Brokaw or some such.  And I have to admit the chapters that follow Augie's opening salvo seem to me already to have taken a detour or two down the side alleys of their own rambunctiousness and rather herky-jerky enlightenment.  (All of which is, of course, entirely forgivable--the fifty pages of Adventures are the only fifty pages of Bellow I've ever read, but his restless mastery thus far earns him precisely what every author must earn: the right to follow his or her own inner dictates.)

Well, enough with the snooty parsing already.  I suppose the distillation of all this, the point, is to note, for the benefit of...whoever might benefit from it, that Augie's opening is no less than the reason any of us are in this literature business to begin with: the peril, the responsibility, the thrill of self-definition.  I am an American.  Beat that.