O Vienna!

Is Vienna the most civilized city in the world?  Surely.  Vienna is almost what we mean when we say civilized - clean, competent, aloof.  Haughty.  Richly layered but not gross or vulgar.  There's schlock and depravity abroad, probably, but it would seem to be well cordoned-off and subject to sufficiently prohibitive disapprobation.  In the park there's a statue of Strauss.  Handel is played in the open-air Christmas markets.  Beethoven and Brahms were buried here, as was Mozart (twice).  The influence of Klimt and his Secessionists is all over.   There's cappucino and sachertorte at the Cafe Eiles behind the Rathaus, and down past the Staatsoper, there's Wilhelm, Jungmann & Neffe, tailors to the Imperial and Royal Austrian Court since 1881.  O Luxury! O Propriety!  O Worldly Refinement!

Well, ok.  Normally this is where I'd go all English major and begin to problematize, contextualize, qualify, hedge and second-guess.  But nuts to that.  Who has the energy?  And besides, I really mean it, I like this place and I wish I were a part of it.  With due respect to my otherwise innocent parents, I wish in every way that I were a different sort of creature, more Germanic, not subject to the dictates of these milky, broke-down Irish genes of mine.  If I could be anybody, I'd be one of these stolid, literal-minded industrialists, I'd be some financial bureaucrat, or engineer, or Austrian economist: fat, straightforward, healthy, bearded, bald, respectable and overeducated, square of jaw, shoulder and soul.  Untroubled by any useless sense of mystery, any sense of sin or surpassing purpose.  I'd have my lusts and duties, and I'd feel at home in the world.  In the processes of computation that would fill my days.

O functionality.  O stone and logic.  O Vienna.

The Gutter of Love, or, What I Might Have Learned From Lou Reed if I'd Ever Listened to Lou Reed

This small thing that feeds me,

it's quicksilver,

it puffs away.

I slip on as well,

Everyone just slips on,

crumpled.  We give up.

Our food gives up on us, 

it's a spat,

the knots of ego and exhaustion.

The gutter of love.

The Surprisingly Easily Overlooked Question of Whether or Not I Believe in the Soul

In the September 16 issue of the New Yorker, excerpts from the diary of a young (very young--21 years old) Flannery O'Connor are reprinted.  O'Connor apparently used her diary as a mechanism, a vehicle for prayer: she began each entry with the address, My Dear God.  There are pages of yearning, self-castigating entries which would be familiar, almost embarrassingly recognizable, to any intelligent Catholic kid.  And then in the middle of it all, standing alone, there is this:

No one can be an atheist who does not know all things.  Only God is an atheist.  The devil is the greatest believer & he has his reasons.

It's been a while since I last had reason to believe that such lightning lived in homely, ordinary folk.  My current circumstances get in the way of paying real attention to the soul, mine or anyone else's.  But I figure I must believe in it.  I must.  Otherwise I'd care more about the quotidian business of finance, trade, sales, etc., and less about such music as this above.  Such clarity, and such potential in a Southern girl...

An Argument for Unknowability

It is a strange thing to read characterizations of men (or women, of course).  As someone who deals in them, both as producer and consumer, I know how they can grip us and flip all our switches of recognition.  They are almost unbearably intimate things--if drawn with care and conviction, they can leave us trembling with insight.

But what are they, really, these conclusions about the general type of a person?  Or perhaps better, to what/whom do they correspond?  To ask this may well be nothing less than to ask that great wrenching question forever being tossed up by the western world: what is a man?  Is he ever, in whole or in part, that which somebody says about him?  And furthermore, irrespective of any Thomistic or Aristotelian essentialist-type issues, what has anyone's summing up got to do with the operational decisions faced by the individual in question?  Can a man learn what to do by following who he thinks he is?  Or is he fated to try to puzzle out who he is on the evidence of what he does?

My prompt for this predictably gooey and solipsistic meditation is Henry Kissinger's depiction of Richard Nixon at their first formal meeting as President-elect and would-be adviser.  This from Kissinger's hefty memoir, White House Years, v. 1:

"I did not know then that Nixon was painfully shy.  Meeting new people filled him with vague dread, especially if they were in a position to rebuff or contradict him.  As was his habit before such appointments, Nixon was probably in an adjoining room settling his nerves and reviewing his remarks, no doubt jotted down on a yellow tablet he never displayed to his visitors.

When at last Nixon entered the room, it was with a show of jauntiness that failed to hide an extraordinary nervousness.  He sat on a sofa with his back to the window overlooking Fifth Avenue, and motioned me to an easy chair facing him.  His manner was almost diffident; his movements were slightly vague and unrelated to what he was saying as if two different impulses were behind speech and gesture."

This is rich stuff, and compelling.  The subject is not a confused derelict, or a defeated, distracted sales manager from Indiana, but the President-elect of the world's preeminent nuclear power.  How do we reconcile this shaky man with the unarguably shrewd (if bitter) observer of foreign and domestic events, atmospheres, capacities, trends?  In fact, this breaks down into two questions: 1) To what extent is Kissinger's characterization, well, relevant?  Even if he's right (and he likely is), he's right about such a fraction of what constitutes a human.  He's right about a moment, one moment among the zillions which together make up a single life.  Here we edge up on the experience, in real life, of Derrida, who said that nothing is ever finished.  Kissinger's impressions may have held, Nixon, in some respects may have been consistent, a repeater of indicative behaviors, but so what?  The constant flux of phenomena, of emotional throughput in one human heart of the course of even a few moments produces a storm of data beyond all processing capability.  Our consciousness is ever on the knife's edge, tipping and tipping, by the milisecond.  In case you missed it, this is an argument for unknowability.  2) Since we don't generally sense, though, in our everyday lives, that we are unknowable to each other, this second question arises: What is happening inside a man (and in society) when he finds himself in a life to which he's both so ill-suited temperamentally and so drawn by his own obvious skill and effectiveness within it?  Is it self-discipline in pursuit of a higher goal? (Kissinger would, in other writings, say yes.)  Or is it something more mysterious and imponderable?  Something inaccessible even (or especially) to the subject himself?

I'm sorry, I know this is exhausting, and perhaps an odd exercise all around, but the take-away for us is this: Is there some ultimate merit in pursuing precisely that which we dread most, in binding ourselves to a life of dismay, uneasiness, confusion and disappointment?

I don't know.  By most accounts, Nixon was a miserable man.  Did he drive himself to it, to the rancor and paranoia that ultimately undid him, in service to a great ideal?  If he did, then the question for us is, Is that really a viable life choice?  Can I really sublimate my every instinct toward the right life to a vision of a possible life?  Would I necessarily be mad to do so?

Stone Street is Back

After a regrettable hiatus of many months, the Stone Street podcast is back.  Check out the interview with Ambassador Robert M. Beecroft here, or click on the RSS feed to the right of this post.


Ambassador Beecroft has worked on virtually every major U.S. foreign policy question of the second half of the twentieth century. From the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) of the 1970s to Egypt-Israel relations, to the post-Warsaw Pact enlargement of NATO, to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the Ambassador’s career encompasses some of the most complex global issues in history.  I caught up with him while he was in Vilnius as part of a Dept. of State inspection team conducting a review of the embassy.  One note: if you listen to the interview, you'll hear me referencing another interview he gave several years ago, in which he gives extraordinarily detailed accounts of the policies, events and personalities he's worked on, for and with over the years.  It's an extraordinary document, which you can read here.

Enjoy.

The Unexpected Applicability of J. Alfred Prufrock to a Memory of Chemotherapy

The other day I thought of a line from the great T.S. Eliot poem (I grow old... I grow old.../ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled), and so went to my old Norton Anthology to check out the text.  And saw this there:

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am not a prophet--and here's no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, 

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

In short, I was afraid.  It's the starkness of this, the bare admission.  And the obliquely apropos reference to baldness...

Nothing else to say about it, really.  It just caught my eye and felt right.

Marilynne Robinson and the Project of Imaginative Compassion

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, stop it now, and check out from the library or buy on Amazon all the novels of Marilynne Robinson.  There are only three of them: Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home.  They will improve you, I promise.  Truly, there is no wiser, more generous, more patient, or (therefore) more powerful voice in literature.  I would describe her wisdom as devastating--her insights are so pure, so true, so right, that one trembles before them and begins to get a sense (in our non-theistic times) of what the ancients might actually have been up to in describing, and prescribing, a righteous fear of God.  That may sound like giddy overstatement, and I suppose it is, but she is the first writer in some time who has left me saying, My God, this is what literature can do.  Of course, literature can do other things as well--goodness knows I believe deeply in more volcanic stuff, Rushdie, Bellow, William Kennedy, etc.--but Robinson's great project of imaginative compassion is simply unparalleled in its directness, humility, clarity and moral force.  I've long had the sense that art can save us; if you are committed to the idea that it cannot, I wish you luck in maintaining your view upon reading Robinson.

Ashes

Friends, you haven't lived until you've had an infusion of chemotherapy drugs on Ash Wednesday.

I find I am crazily moved by the joy of ashes.  Gorgeous ashes, silvery, strange and potent.  Why would ash ever be an emblem of denial or irretrievable failure?  Ash proves a great success of burning; ash is memory.  We are made of ash, and this is beautiful news.

What a fearsome, magnificent, poetical day.

Athletes

I've been thinking a lot about athletes.

The primary task of an athlete is mastery.  Mastery of so many minute and continually recurring tasks.  And this is what I can't stop thinking about.  What does it entail after all?  Control, of course, but that's surely only a first step.  For ultimate control, final, comprehensive control, is never possible.  Thus, if mastery exists at all, mustn't it involve to a tremendous extent the ability to accept the unalterable universe?  The force of that universe, the limits it imposes?  Isn't mastery then, primarily a function of knowledge?  Of understanding limits, possibly even delighting in them?

The question is how to arrive at that delight.  For the process of coming to understand one's limits (of endurance, of skill, of creativity, of determination and patience) is a miserable business.  Nothing but the serial experience of thwarted objectives.  Whence, out of such grand frustration, might  satisfaction finally arise?  Whence derives our ineradicable certainty that mastery is its own reward?

Of course the question doesn't apply only to athletes.  Rather, it applies to anyone whose life is or has become a second-by-second challenge.  For it is in that continual drip of seconds that the most fearsome desires come: for relief, or achievement, finally.  Relief from pain or tedium, relief from the weight of insignificance.  Achievement of recognition.  The flaring of such desires is a temptation away from mastery.  And mastery, in turn, is the knowledge that those desires, because they will never relent no matter how many external consolations we obtain, are immaterial.  Mastery is its own reward, it is the comprehensive acceptance of disappointment, and it is the only thing we can ever really accomplish.

This was surely all worked out by a small Asian man in the 9th Century B.C., but it's helpful for me to parse it afresh now as I count hours and cycles of treatment, and as I try to assess the potential yet remaining in my body, its capacity to run, jump, lift, breathe, ride, walk, stand and so on, in spite of so many inducements no longer to do any of the above.  Really, I don't know how cancer patients think of anything else...

I feel like an athlete.