Off to the Side, Jim Harrison

FAMILY

Norma Olivia Walgren met Winfield Sprague Harrison in 1933 at the River Gardens, a dance hall just north of Big Rapids, Michigan, on the banks of the Muskegon River. When young we children were somewhat embarrassed to hear the story of our parents’ probably feverish collision on a summer evening early in the Great Depression. The river has to slide past until we ourselves are in love and bent on mating with the scant ability to lift our eyelids high enough to see that it happens to nearly everyone. Norma was a very strong and somewhat irascible character and remained that way until her death at eight-five. Winfield was obsessively hardworking, playful but melancholy. He must have been troubled at the time because he had worked his way through Michigan Agricultural College, graduating in 1932, but the convulsed economy only allowed him a job driving a beer truck and he was lucky to get that. I think I was twelve and we were trout fishing when he told me that I had nearly missed existing. One hot summer day on a hangover he had taken an after-lunch nap in the shade underneath the beer truck. His employer had driven by with a friend, seen his abandoned truck with its valuable cargo, and driven the truck off, a back tire slightly grazing my father’s head.

A close call with nonexistence, a vaguely stimulating idea until I think of the nonexistence of my brothers and sisters and my children. At the time, though, of first hearing the story while driving home from the Pine River, it seemed part of the carelessness of adults similar to my uncles drinking a case of beer while fishing and falling off the dock into the lake at the cabin in a semi-stupor. My father’s younger brothers, Walter and Arthur, had had a long and tough time in the South Pacific during World War II and their general behavior was never up to my mother’s high standards. My father’s side of the family was verbally witty and Walt and Artie’s talk was full of sexual badinage, some of which puzzled me at the time. Of course their wives, Audrey and Barbara, were young and you could imagine how much passion got saved up during four years in the armed services on ships with thousands of other men all mooning for home.

For a boy forced to attend church and Sunday school every week there is the fuzzy paradox of Bible lessons not jibing with what he hears and sees. One part of him feels slightly priggish about the behavior of adults. Young people seem not to know that they are going to get old, but older people know that they are not going to become young again. And the other part of the boy is sunk in his growing knowledge of the natural world and farm life where the sexual lives of dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and cows is an open book, not to speak of the tingly warmth he feels when there’s a glance up a girl’s skirt at school or when he sees by happenstance a lovely aunt’s breast while she’s squeezing in or out of a bathing suit at the cabin. I’ve always been a bit cynical about the existence of the Oedipus complex but having a number of attractive aunts can be tough and dreamy at the same time. Your sense of wrong and right is tenuous and you drift around in a goofy haze of instinctual curiosity with your hard little weenie an almost acceptable embarrassment. At the time I was amazed at my childhood friend David Kilmer, who would heroically pursue the quest. David was a doctor’s son with an ample allowance and would bribe certain girls with a quarter for an inspection, or their somewhat retarded housemaid a couple of bucks for a peek. I recall he wasn’t the least bit fixated, spending most of the time fishing, killing frogs and turtles, repairing an Evinrude outboard, riding his bike off a gangplank at the end of their long dock under the erroneous assumption that he would truly fly through the air. It was, however, my decision to quit looking at the photos of women in his father’s medical books. A woman is included in the book only if something has gone “haywire,” we agreed, and the photos weren’t pretty.

There is a specific melancholy to hardship that accrues later as a collection of gestures, glances, and dire events. I don’t remember anyone ever saying life is hard but it was hard to a child in other puzzling ways, say at Great-uncle Nelse’s shack when we joined him in eating possum, beaver, and raccoon, and I asked my dad why Nelse ate such strange things and he said, “He came up short on beef.” I do remember Nelse embracing the keg of herring we brought him for Christmas, the salt brine soaking through the slats enough so that the wood was grainy with crystals to the touch. Nelse had been unhappily in love, rejected in his twenties, and retreated to the woods forever.

Neil Peart, Far & Away: A Prize Every Time

“I was ‘far and away’ riding my motorcycle along an american back road, skiing through the snowy Quebec woods, or lying awake in a backwater motel. The theme I was grappling with was nothing less than the Meaning of Life, and I was pretty sure I had defined it: love and respect.

Love and respect, love and respect — I have been carrying those words around with me for two years, daring to consider that perhaps they convey the real meaning of life. Beyond basic survival needs, everybody wants to be loved and respected. And neither is any good without the other. Love without respect can be as cold as pity; respect without love can be as grim as fear.

Love and respect are the values in life that most contribute to “the pursuit of happiness” — and after, they are the greatest legacy we can leave behind. It’s an elegy you’d like to hear with your own ears: “You were loved and respected."

If even one person can say that about you, it’s a worthy achievement, and if you can multiply that many times — well, that is true success.

Among materialists, a certain bumper sticker is emblematic: “He who dies with the most toys wins!”

Well, no — he or she who dies with the most love and respect wins...

Then there’s love and respect for oneself — equally hard to achieve and maintain. Most of us, deep down, are not as proud of ourselves as we might pretend, and the goal of bettering ourselves — at least partly by earning the love and respect of others — is a lifelong struggle.

Philo of Alexandria gave us that generous principle that we have somehow succeeded in mostly ignoring for 2,000 years: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

1952-2020

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

“What did the Jews think of this Pentecost thing?” Hiro says. “They were still running the country, right?”

“The Romans were running the country,” the Librarian says, “but there were a number of Jewish religious authorities. At this time there were three groups of Jews, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.”

“I remember the Pharisees from Jesus Christ, Superstar. They were the ones with the deep voices always hassling Christ.”

“They were hassling him,” the Librarian says, “because they were religiously very strict. They adhered to a strong legalistic version of the religion; to them, the Law was everything. Clearly, Jesus was a threat to them because he was proposing, in effect, to do away with the Law.”

“He wanted a contract renegotiation with God.”

“That sounds like an analogy, which I am not very good at — but even if it is taken literally, it is true.”

“Who were the other two guys?”

“The Sadducees were materialists.”

“Meaning what? They drove BMWs?”

“No. Materialists in the philosophical sense. All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world — hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world.”

“Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe.”

The Librarian raises his eyebrows. “How does that follow?”

“Sorry. It’s a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent information. So I was joking  that I have to believe in a binary universe, that I have to be a dualist.”

“How droll,” the Librarian says, not sounding very amused. “Your joke may not be without genuine merit, however. Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing — this pivotal separation between being and non-being — is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.

“Even the word ‘science’ comes from an Indo-European word meaning ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate.’ The same root led to the word ‘shit,’ which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us ‘scythe’ and ‘scissors’ and ‘schism,’ which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.”

“Tell me about the third group — the Essenes.”

“They lived communally and believed that physical and spiritual cleanliness were intimately connected. They were constantly bathing themselves, lying naked under the sun, purging themselves with enemas, and going to extreme lengths to make sure their food was pure and uncontaminated. They even had their own version of the gospels in which Jesus healed possessed people, not by miracles, but by driving parasites, such as tapeworm, out of the body. These parasites are considered to be synonymous with demons.”

“Interesting. I wonder what they would have thought about computer viruses?”

“Speculation is not in my ambit.”

“Speaking of which — Lagos was babbling to me about viruses and infection and something called nam-shub. What does that mean?”

“Nam-shub is a word from Sumerian. Used in Mesopotamia from roughly 2000 B.C. The oldest of all written languages.”

“Oh. So all the other languages are descended from it?”

“Actually, no,” the Librarian says. “No languages whatsoever are descended from Sumerian. It is an agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words — very unusual.”

“You are saying,” Hiro says, remembering Da5id in the hospital, “that if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sound like a long stream of short syllables strung together.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would it sound anything like glossolalia?”

“Judgment call. Ask someone real,” the Librarian says.

“Has anyone figured out what the word ‘nam-shub’ means in Sumerian?”

“Yes. A nam-shub is a speech with magical force. The closest English equivalent would be ‘incantation,’ but this has a number of incorrect connotations.”

“Did the Sumerians believe in magic?”

The Librarian shakes his head minutely. “This is the kind of seemingly precise question that is in fact very profound, and that pieces of software, such as myself, are notoriously clumsy at. Allow me to quote from Kramer, Samuel Noah, and Maier, John R. Myths of Enki, the Crafty God. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989: ‘Religion, magic, and medicine are so completely intertwined in Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating and perhaps futile work... [Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate connection between the religious, the magical, and the esthetic so complete that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort the whole.’”

High Weirdness, Erik Davis

Let's take, as an example, the attempted levitation of the Pentagon in 1967. A week or so before Halloween, tens of thousands of demonstrators, including New Left activists, pacifists, and hippies, massed in Washington D.C. to protest the Vietnam war. After hearing speeches on the Mall by civil rights leaders and Dr. Benjamin Spock, around 50,000 people set off towards the Pentagon. Among the crowd was what the East Village Other enumerated as “witches, warlocks, holymen, seers, prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans, troubadours, minstrels, bards, roadmen, and madmen.” The very diversity and excess of this sacral list already tells us something: not only were spiritual practitioners present in force, but they were manifesting what historian James Webb calls an “illuminated politics.” Allen Ginsberg led Buddhist chants, Hare Krishnas danced with their ringing chimes, the New York underground folk group the Fugs led a (partly?) tongue-in-cheek exorcism, while the West Coast experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger performed hidden magickal rites without the slightest bit of irony. On the one hand, the attempted levitation of the building — which somehow also involved turning it orange — fits in with what Todd Gitlin described as the Yippie “politics of display,” of ludic and media-savvy pranks. But the levitation was not just nightly news theater; for some participants at least, it was also mass ritual magic, however carnivalesque. As such, the event became an icon for heterodox politics of consciousness that was at once oppositional, playful, and enchanted.

[Robert Anton] Wilson and [Robert] Shea capture this ontological politics in one of the great set pieces in Illuminatus!: an extended scene, set at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, that takes up much of the first novel of the trilogy. During the convention, the future Confrontations editor Joe Malik — who, like Wilson, was an “ex-Trotskyist, ex-engineering student, ex-liberal, ex-Catholic” — overcomes his skepticism and embraces the esoteric radicalism represented by a wild freak named Simon Moon. After his conversion, Malik “was game — for astrology, for I Ching, for LSD, for demons, for whatever Simon had to offer as an alternative to the world of sane and rational men who were sanely and rationally plotting their course toward what could only be the annihilation of the planet.”

Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies.

The Year Of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs

“Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times” is Auden’s most thorough account of how best to live as a poet in a technocratic world.

It is at least possible, as Edward Mendelson has suggested, that the substance of this poem, if not its light-hearted tone, was shaped by an event in the poetic world, not at all world-historical, or not apparently so, that had occurred earlier in 1946. Bennett Cerf, Auden’s publisher at Random House, had announced that he would excise from a forthcoming anthology of American poetry all poems by Ezra Pound on the grounds that Pound, who had made radio broadcasts from Italy during the war in support of Mussolini’s government, was a traitor. Auden wrote on January 29 to tell Cerf that in light of this decision he saw “no alternative for me but to sever my connection with your firm.” He made a point of insisting that he made this protest not because he admired Pound’s poems: “I do not care for them myself particularly,” but for a different reason: “Begin by banning his poems not because you object to them but because you object to him, and you will end, as the Nazis did, by slaughtering his wife and children.” And Auden truly did not believe he was exaggerating. He continued,

As you say, the war is not over. This incident is only one sign — there are other and far graver ones — that there was more truth than one would like to believe in Huey Long’s cynical observation that if fascism came to America it would be called Anti-fascism. Needless to say, I am not suggesting that you desire any such thing — but I think your very natural abhorrence of Pound’s conduct has led you to take the first step which, if not protested, will be followed by others which would horrify you.

*****

It is telling that Auden read this poem at Harvard. One of the dominant figures of American culture at that time was James Bryant Conant, a former professor of  chemistry who had become Harvard’s president in 1933. He participated enthusiastically in the techno-utopian mood of the mid-1940s and played a significant role in Washington: he was a member of the secret Interim Committee that had advised President Truman to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities, and Auden suspected that Conant’s vote to bomb had been decisive. When back in Cambridge, Conant was striving to transform Harvard from a finishing school for cultured gentlemen into a frankly Apollonian research powerhouse focused on science and technology. In so doing, he dramatically de-emphasized the humanities, believing them to have little to contribute to the postwar Pax Americana. Some months after his visit to Harvard, Auden told Alan Ansen, “When I was delivering my Phi Beta Kappa poem in Cambridge, I met Conant for about five minutes.” In the poem, he had characterized the Hermes-Apollo dichotomy as “Falstaff the fool confronts forever / the prig Prince Hal,” and he said of Conant, “he is the real Prince Hal and gives the notion of sheer naked power.” Auden was polite to Conant, but: “‘This is the real enemy,’ I thought to myself. And I’m sure he had the same impression about me.”

Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism In An Age Of Crisis

Ron Rosenbaum in conversation with Walter Schaber, “one of the last living survivors of the Weimar press wars.”

“What you have to remember, what people forget about that time, is that everyone was searching for a Heiland.”

“A Heiland?”

“Yes — healer, holy man. It was a time when you had healers, seers, prophets emerging all over the countryside. There were seers here, prophets there, all over.” He spoke of a certain Louis Hausser, a former champagne maker who set himself up as a prophet and called upon Germans to do penance for their sins, to heal themselves, to avert apocalyptic retribution. He spoke of a Joseph Wiesenberg in Berlin. “He claimed to heal people by laying hard white cheese on them,” and despite such dubious claims attracted a fanatic following of believers. “And then there was Hanussen the mystic and astrologer, who was in Munich with Hitler. They were all around, these people promising the messiah, all of them together created a mood from which Hitler could arise. An apocalyptic mood all over Germany. One Heiland after another, and after all the small Heilands came the big Heiland, Hitler.”

“You’re saying, then, that there was a pervasive appetite for some kind of apocalyptic figure, some kind of healer/messiah/saviour, a longing that  paved the way to accept Hitler, however strange and outlandish he seemed — in fact, because he was strange as he was?”

Yes, Schaber said, the very things that led conventional politicians and statesmen to underestimate and dismiss Hitler as outlandish and unsuitable, a hopeless outsider — that nicht natürlich strangeness, that alienness — were the very things that constituted the subterranean power of his appeal. Hitler’s other stigmata of strangeness, the apocalyptic fits, the trances, the occult, somnambulistic, mystic ravings, then — while they may have alienated some rational citizens — were perfectly attuned for the wider, deeper longing for a figure of higher irrationality, a Heiland, to rescue Germany. People who’d lost faith in conventional politics were looking for a political faith healer.

Something about this aspect of my conversation with Walter Schaber stayed with me for some time after I’d left Washington Heights. Something about the way he spoke of the longing for a Heiland led me to consider further the root in German of the word “Heiland,” holy man, healer: Heil. To consider further the deeper purpose behind the ritualized incantation of “Heil Hitler,” the all-purpose greeting, bond of solidarity, mass chant in the Hitler movement. To consider whether it might not have been designed deliberately to evoke the longing for a Heiland, for a healer, a holy man. Was that effect a deliberate creation, an example of Hitler’s conscious genius for manipulating mass psychology, or a fortuitous reflection of the preexistent unconscious longing for a Heiland it tapped into — or both? Was there always a deeper level than salutation, mere hailing, in the incantation “Heil Hitler”? A sense in which the speaker, the chanter, was imploring, urging the Führer: Heal Hitler. Heal Us Hitler. Heal Germany, Hitler. Less a salutation than a prayer.

When I asked Schaber for his reaction, as someone who lived through the awful period when “Heil Hitler” grew from the tribute of misfit sociopathic sycophants of a barbaric crank to a massive roar of near-religious national assent, he was skeptical at first. It struck him as a novel idea, “Heil Hitler” as “Heal, Hitler,” but after considering it, he told me, “I think there may be something to it.”

Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum

Leonard Cohen: the determinator, Details Magazine, July 1993

Leonard Cohen, the maestro of melancholy, answers questions on love, obsession, and despair

What’s the one thing men ought to know about women? A.B. (Berkeley, CA)
    They are deeply involved in a pattern of thought centered around the notion of commitment.

What’s the one thing women ought to know about men? T.M. (Worcester, MA)
    A man steadfastly refuses to eavesdrop on his conversation with himself.

Is there a difference between love and obsession? F.S. (Phoenix, AZ)
    It is the same difference between the Sermon on the Mount and the Crucifixion.

What do men really want? B.B. (Houston, TX)
    A square deal.

What would be the most appropriate thing for a guy to say to a girl after sex? J.H. (New York, NY)
    Thank you.

I am twenty-eight; I work and attend college. I have been single for three years and love women but have developed a strong attraction for Italian men only. I have repeated dreams about them. What should I do? J.G. (Los Angeles, CA)
    This habitual drift toward the trivial will continue to make you suffer.

Is it possible to be madly in love with more than one person at a time? M.B. (San Jose, Costa Rica)
    It is possible to be in love with more than one person at a time but not “madly in love.”

Is honesty always the best policy? G.W. (Hartford, CT)
    In my case, yes. In your case, rarely.

How can you tell if you’re in love? C.H. (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
    You dissolve your strategy for the other.

Why is having an orgasm so exhilarating? N.P. (Portland, OR)
    You stop thinking about yourself.

How can I remain friends with my former lover? R.A. (Chicago, IL)
    Move to another country.

Is it possible to achieve love without desire? S.O. (Washington, DC)
    Yes.

Are there any examples of good or healthy sexual relationships in the Bible? P.R. (Cleveland, OH)
    The patriarchs and their wives stand as shining examples of possible human marriages. The love of Jesus for Mary Magdalene continues to inspire me.

Is loneliness necessarily a sad thing? M.C. (Atlanta, GA)
    Yes, it is designed to be that way.

How long does it take to recover from a bad relationship? S.T. (Baltimore, MD)
    You never recover from a bad relationship.

I feel humiliated and exposed by my needs and my desires, even when they’re reciprocated. How can I deal with this? T.D. (London, England)
    You feel humiliated and confused anyway. Do not confuse the issue with your needs and desires.

Does there have to be democracy in sexual fantasies? I love tying up my lover, but I don’t want him to tie me up. C.H. (Middlebury, VT)
    You are already tied up.

Why do people marry? M.D. (Hudson, OH)
    I don’t know. Ask the man who owns one.