Warning: Adult Content ahead…
Oh, and while we stand by for the final Gotterdamnrung, w/our fetishes of vouristic inanities and our lust of the “death urge” here’s a little ditty to feed on:
I like to watch

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 5 2004 19:33 utc | 3

BTW, do you remember those incidents, when the Army was bombing alleged al-Zarqawi safe houses? What was their intelligence to do so? Personally I can imagine one local clan tipping them off to bomb their rivals as revenge. Some prank call.

Posted by: MarcinGomulka | Oct 5 2004 20:13 utc | 5

Forgive the long post…
Harper’s Magazine, Sept 2004 v309 i1852 p57(5)
In defiance of gravity: writing, wisdom, and the Fabulous Club Gemini.
(Miscellany) Tom Robbins.
It had been a long time since I’d contemplated suicide. In fact, I don’t
believe I’d ever before considered the corporal DELETE key an option. Yet there
I was, teetering on a bridge high above some oyster-lit backwater from Puget
Sound, thinking about closing my earthly accounts with a leap and a splash.
Why? My romantic life couldn’t have been sweeter, my health was close to rosy,
the writing was going well, finances were adequate, and while the horror show
that that cupidinous cult of corporate vampires was making of our federal
government might be enough to drive me to drink (a trip I’m seldom reluctant to
take), the political knavery does not exist that could drive me into the drink.
No, the truth is I was being prodded to execute a Kevorkian header into the
Stygian slough by a short story I’d just read in a back issue of The New
Yorker.
Entitled (ironically enough) “Fun With Problems,” the piece was composed by
Robert Stone, and you can bet it wasn’t Stone’s prose style that had weakened
my will to live: the man’s a crack technician whose choices of verb and
adjective can sometimes floor me with admiration. He’s a smithery of a
storyteller who’s hammered out a stalwart oeuvre–but holy Chernobyl is he
bleak! Stone apparently believes the human condition one pathetically unstable
piece of business, and, frankly, at this stage of our evolutionary development
there’s a shortage of evidence to contradict him. Nevertheless, I’d always
counted myself among those free spirits who refuse to allow mankind’s ignoble
deportment and dumb-cluck diatheses to cloud their grand perspective or sleet
on their parade. On that day, however, Stone’s narrative prowess had been such
as to infect me (unconscionably, I now contend) with his Weltschmerz.
In fairness, Stone alone was not to blame. For too many years my edacious
reading habits had been leading me into one unappealing corner after another,
dank cul-de-sacs littered with tear-stained diaries, empty pill bottles,
bulging briefcases, broken vows, humdrum phrases, sociological swab samples,
and the (lovely?) bones of dismembered children: the detritus of a literary
scene that, with several notable exceptions, has been about as entertaining as
a Taliban theme park and as elevating as the prayer breakfast at the Bates
Motel. “Fun With Problems” was simply the final straw, the charred cherry atop
a mad-cow sundae.
So who knows how things might have turned out that glum afternoon had not I
suddenly heard, as I flirted with extinction, a particular sound in my mind’s
ear: the sound, believe it or not, of a distant kitty cat, a sound that
instantly transported me away from the lure of fatal waters, away from the
toxic contagions of sordid fiction, and into a place–a real place, though I’ve
only visited it in my imagination–a place called the Fabulous Club Gemini.
The Fabulous Club Gemini. Where is it, anyhow? Memphis, probably. Or Houston.
No, actually I think it might be one of the ideologically unencumbered features
of Washington, D.C. In any case, some years back, a music writer for The
Village Voice made a pilgrimage to the smoke-polluted, windowless, cinder-block
venue, wherever its exact location, and while being introduced to some of the
ancient musicians who’d been playing the Fabulous Club Gemini practically since
the vagitus of time, the pilgrim became so excited he momentarily lost his
downtown cool.
“I can’t believe,” he quoted himself as having gushed, “that I’m talking to the
man who barked on Big Mama Thomton’s recording of ‘Hound Dog’!”
“Yeah,” the grizzled sideman drawled. “I was gonna meow but it was too hip for
’em.”
Okay, perhaps I’m overly fanciful, but I have reason to suspect it might have
been precisely an echo from that crusty confession that, as incongruous as it
may seem, enticed me down from the kamikaze viaduct. I do know that I’m often
reminded of it when I glance at the annual lists of Pulitzers, Booker Prizes,
or National Book Awards; when an interviewer’s question forces me to reexamine
my personal literary aesthetic; or when speaking with eager students in those
university creative-writing programs where prescribed, if rarefied, barking is
actively promoted and any feline departure summarily euthanized.
There’s some validity, I suppose, in the academic approach, for, as Big Mama’s
accompanist would attest, our culture simply has a far greater demand for the
predictable bow-wow than for the unexpected caterwaul: orthodox woofing pays
the rent. In a dogma-eat-dogma world, a few teachers, editors, and critics may
be hip enough to tolerate a subversive mew, a quirky purr now and again, but
they’re well aware of the fate that awaits those who produce–or
sanction–mysterious off-the-wall meowing when familiar yaps and snarls are
dearly called for.
Let me explain that when I refer to “meowing” here, what I’m really talking
about is the human impulse to be playful; an impulse all too frequently
demeaned and suppressed in the adult population, especially when it manifests
itself in an unconventional manner or inappropriate context. To bark at the end
of a song entitled “Hound Dog” is just playful enough to elicit a soupcon of
mainstream amusement, but Fred (I believe that was the sessionman’s name), in
wanting instead to meow, was pushing the envelope and raising the stakes,
raising them to a “hipper” level perhaps, a more irreverent level undoubtedly.
There’s a sense in which ol’ Fred was showing a tiny spark of what the Tibetans
call “crazy wisdom,” a sense in which he was assuming for a bare instant the
archetypal role of the holy fool.
Now, the fact that Fred would have denied any such arcane ambition, the fact
that he may only have been stoned out of his gourd at the time, all that is
irrelevant. It’s also unimportant that Fred’s recording-studio tomfoolery
lacked real profundity, that while it may have been eccentrically playful it
was not very seriously playful. What does matter is that we come to recognize
that playfulness, as a philosophical stance, can be very serious, indeed; and,
moreover, that it possesses an unfailing capacity to arouse ridicule and
hostility in those among us who crave certainty, reverence, and restraint.
The fact that playfulness–a kind of divine playfulness intended to lighten
man’s existential burden and promote what Joseph Campbell called “the rapture
of being alive”–lies near the core of Zen, Taoist, Sufi, and Trantric
teachings is lost on most Westerners: working stiffs and intellectuals alike.
Even scholars who acknowledge the playful undertone in those disciplines treat
it with condescension and disrespect, never mind that it’s a worldview arrived
at after millennia of exhaustive study, deep meditation, unflinching
observation, and intense debate.
Tell an editor at The New York Review of Books that Abbot Chogyam Trungpa would
squirt his disciples with water pistols when they became overly earnest in
their meditative practice, or that the house of Japan’s most venerated ninja is
filled with Mickey Mouse memorabilia, and you’ll witness an eye roll of
silent-movie proportions. Like that fusty old patriarch in the Bible, when they
become a man (or woman), they “put away childish things,” which is to say they
seal off with the hard gray wax of fear and pomposity that aspect of their
being that once was attuned to wonder.
As a result of their having abandoned that part of human nature that is
potentially most transcendent, it’s no surprise that modern intellectuals
dismiss playfulness–especially when it dares to present itself in literature,
philosophy, or art–as frivolous or whimsical. Men who wear bow ties to work
every day (let’s make an exception for Pee-Wee Herman), men whose dreams have
been usurped either by the shallow aspirations of the marketplace or by the
drab cliches of Marxist realpolitik, such men are not adroit at distinguishing
that which is lighthearted from that which is merely lightweight. God knows
what confused thunders might rumble in their sinuses were they to encounter a
concept such as “crazy wisdom.”
Crazy wisdom is, of course, the opposite of conventional wisdom. It is wisdom
that deliberately swims against the current in order to avoid being swept along
in the numbing wake of bourgeois compromise; wisdom that flouts taboos in order
to undermine their power; wisdom that evolves when one, while refusing to avert
one’s gaze from the sorrows and injustices of the world, insists on joy in
spite of everything; wisdom that embraces risk and eschews security; wisdom
that turns the tables on neurosis by lampooning it; the wisdom of those who
neither seek authority nor willingly submit to it.
Oddly enough, one of the most striking illustrations of crazy wisdom in all of
Western literature occurs in a pedestrian piece of police pulp by Joseph
Wambaugh. The Black Marble is so stylistically lifeless it could have been
printed in embalming fluid, but the rigor mortis of its prose is temporarily
enlivened by a scattering of scenes that I shall attempt to summarize (though
it’s been decades since I read the book).
As I remember it, a relatively inexperienced member of the Los Angeles Police
Department is transferred to the vice squad. No sooner does the new cop report
for duty than he’s introduced to a strange lottery. There is, it seems, an
undesirable beat, a section of the city that no vice cop ever wants to patrol.
It’s a sleazy, filthy, volatile, extremely dangerous area, full of shooting
galleries and dark alleys and not a doughnut shop in sight. So great has been
the objection to being assigned to that sinister beat that the precinct captain
has devised a raffle to cope with it. At the beginning of each night shift, he
produces a bag of marbles, every marble white save one. One by one, the cops
reach in the bag and pull out their fate. The unfortunate who draws the single
black marble must screw up his spine and descend that evening into the urban
hell.
Around the drawing of the marbles there’s a considerable amount of tension, and
the new man quickly succumbs to it. Just showing up for work is twice as
stressful as it ought to be. In the station house, negativity is prevalent,
jovial camaraderie rare.
The new cop draws the black marble a couple of times and finds the dreaded zone
to be as violent and unsavory as advertised. However, he not only survives
there; he learns he can tolerate the beat reasonably well by changing his
attitude toward it, by regarding it less as a tribulation than as some special
opportunity to escape routine and regularity, by appreciating it as an unusual
experience available to very few people on the planet. Slowly, his anxiety
begins to evaporate.
One night he shocks his comrades by emptying the bag and deliberately selecting
the black marble. The next night he does it again. From then on, he simply
strolls into the station house and nonchalantly requests the black marble. He
no longer has to fret over the possibility of losing the draw. For better or
worse, he controls his destiny.
Ordeal now has been transformed into adventure, stress into excitement. The
transfommr is himself transformed, his uprightness replaced first by a kind of
giddy rush, then by a buddhistic calm. Moreover, his daring, his abandon, his
serenity, is contagious. Vice-squad headquarters gradually relaxes. Liberated,
the whole damn place opens up to life.
And that, brothers and sisters, although Wambaugh probably didn’t intend it, is
crazy wisdom in action.
Admittedly, when the cop made the short straw his own, when he seized the nasty
end of the stick and rode it to transcendence, he put himself in extra peril.
That’s par for the course. Only an airhead would mistake the left-handed path
for a safe path.
Although serious playfulness may be an effective means of domesticating fear
and pain, it’s not about meowing past the graveyard. No, the seriously playful
individual meows right through the graveyard gate, meows into his or her very
grave. When Oscar Wilde allegedly gestured at the garish wallpaper in his cheap
Parisian hotel room and announced with his dying breath, “Either it goes or I
go,” he was exhibiting something beyond an irrepressibly brilliant wit. Freud,
you see, wasn’t whistling “Edelweiss” when he wrote that gallows humor is
indicative of a greatness of soul.
The quips of the condemned prisoner or dying patient tower dramatically above,
say, sallies on TV sitcoms by reason of their gloriously inappropriate refusal,
even at life’s most acute moment, to surrender to despair. The man who jokes in
the executioner’s face can be destroyed but never defeated.
When an eminent Zen master, upon hearing a sudden burst of squirrel chatter
outside his window, sat up in his deathbed and proclaimed, “That’s what it was
all about!” his last words surpassed Wilde’s in playful significance,
constituting as they did a koan of sorts, an enigmatic invitation to rethink
the meaning of existence. Anecdotes such as this one remind the nimble-minded
that there’s often a thin line between the comic and the cosmic, and that on
that frontier can be found the doorway to psychic rebirth.
Ancient Egyptians believed that when a person died, the gods immediately placed
his or her heart in one pan of a set of scales. In the other pan was a feather.
If there was imbalance, if the heart of the deceased weighed more than the
feather, he or she was denied admittance to the afterworld. Only the
lighthearted were deemed advanced enough to merit immortality.
Now, in a culture such as ours, where the tyranny of the dull mind holds sway,
we can expect our intelligentsia to write off Egyptian heart-weighing as quaint
superstition, to dismiss squirrel-chatter illumination as flaky Asian guru woo
woo. Fine. But what about the Euro-American Trickster tradition, what about
Coyote and Raven and Loki and Hennes and the community-sanctioned blasphemies
of the clown princes of Saturnalia? For that matter, what about Dada, Duchamp,
and the ‘pataphysics of Alfred Jarry? What about Gargantua and Finnegans Wake,
John Cage and Erik Satie, Gurdjieff and Robert Anton Wilson, Frank Zappa and
Antoni Gaudi? What about Carlos Castaneda, Picasso, and the alchemists of
Prague? Allen Ginsberg and R. D. Laing, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Lewis Carroll,
Alexander Calder and Italo Calvino, Henry Miller, Pippi Longstocking, Andrei
Codrescu, Ishmael Reed, Alan Rudolph, Mark Twain, and the electric Kool-Aid
acid pranksters? What about the sly tongue-in-cheek subversions of Nietzsche
(yes, Nietzsche!), and what about Shakespeare, for God’s sake, the mega-bard in
whose plays, tragedies included, three thousand puns, some of them real
groaners, have been verifiably catalogued?
Obviously, although crazy wisdom may have been better appreciated in Asia,
nuggets of meaningful playfulness have long twinkled here and there in the
heavy iron crown of Western tradition. (It was a Spanish poet, Juan Ramon
Jimenez, who advised, “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”) The
question is, when will we be hip enough to realize that these sparklers aren’t
mere rhinestones or baubles of paste? When will our literati–in many cases, an
erudite, superbly talented lot–evolve to the degree that they accord buoyancy
and mirth a dime’s worth of the respect they bestow so lavishly on gravity and
misfortune?
Norman N. Holland asked a similar question in Laughing: A Psychology of Humor,
concluding that comedy is deemed inferior to tragedy primarily because of the
social prevalence of narcissistic pathology. In other words, people who are too
self-important to laugh at their own frequently ridiculous behavior have a
vested interest in gravity because it supports their illusions of grandiosity.
According to Professor Donald Kuspit, many people are unable to function
without such illusions.
“Capitalism,” wrote Kuspit, “encourages the pathologically grandiose self
because it encourages the conspicuous consumption of possessions, which
symbolize one’s grandiosity.” I would add that rigid, unquestioning allegiance
to a particular religious or political affiliation is in much the same way also
symptomatic of disease.
Ironically, it’s this same malignant narcissism, revealing itself through
arrogance, avarice, pique, anxiety, severity, defensive cynicism, and
aggressive ambition, that is keeping the vainglorious out of their paradise.
Among our egocentric sad sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more
popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to
pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional
masturbation. Taken out on others, depression becomes a weapon. But for those
willing to reduce and permeate their ego, to laugh–or meow–it into
submission, heaven on earth is a distinct psychological possibility.
It’s good to bear the preceding in mind when trying to comprehend the
indignation with which the East Coast establishment greets work that dares to
be both funny and deadly serious in the same breath. The left-handed path runs
along terrain upon which the bowtiesattvas find it difficult to tread. Their
maps are inaccurate and they have the wrong shoes. So, hi ho, hi ho, it’s off
to the house of woe they go.
Nobody requires a research fellowship to ascertain that most of the critically
lauded fiction of our time concentrates its focus on cancer, divorce, rape,
racism, schizophrenia, murder, abandonment, addiction, and abuse. Those things,
unfortunately, are rampant in our society and ought to be examined in fiction.
Yet to trot them out in book after book, on page after page, without the
transformative magic of humor and imagination–let alone a glimmer of higher
consciousness–succeeds only in impeding the advancement of literature and
human understanding alike.
Down in Latin America, they also write about bad marriages and iii health (as
well as the kind of governmental brutality of which we in the United States so
far have had only a taste). The big difference, though, is that even when
surveying the gritty and mundane aspects of daily life, Latin novelists invoke
the dream realm, the spirit realm, die mythic realm, the realm of nature, the
inanimate world, and the psychological underworld. In acknowledging that social
realisnr is but one layer of a many-layered cake, in threading the inexplicable
and the goofy into their naturalistic narratives, the so-called magical
realists not only weave a more expansive, inclusive tapestry but leave the
reader with a feverish exaltation rather than the deadening weariness that all
too often accompanies the completion of even the most splendidly crafted of our
books.
Can we really take pride in a literature whose cumulative effect is to send the
reader to the bridge with “Goodnight Irene” on his lips?
Freud said that wit is the denial of suffering. As I interpret it, he wasn’t
implying that the witty among us deny the existence of suffering–all of us
suffer to one degree or another–but rather that, armed with a playful
attitude, a comic sensibility, we can deny suffering dominion over our lives,
we can refrain from buying shares in the company. Funnel that defiant humor
onto the page, add a bracing shot of Zen awareness, and hey, pretty soon life
has some justification for imitating art.
Don’t misunderstand me: a novel is no more supposed to be a guidebook to
universal happiness than a self-indulgent journal of the writer’s personal
pain. And everyone will agree, I think, that crime is a more fascinating
subject than lawful behavior, that dysfunction is more interesting than
stability, that a messy divorce is ever so much more titillating than a placid
marriage. Without conflict, both fiction and life can be a bore. Should that,
however, prohibit the serious author front exploring and even extolling the
world’s pleasures, wonders, mysteries, and delights? (Maybe all this neurotic,
cynical, cry-baby fiction is nothing more than the old classroom dictum “Write
what you know” coming back to haunt us like a chalky ghost. If what you know
best is angst, your education commands you not to waste a lot of time trying to
create robust characters or describe conditions on the sunny side of the
street.)
In any case, the notion that inspired play (even when audacious, offensive, or
obscene) enhances rather than diminishes intellectual rigor and spiritual
fulfillment, the notion that in the eyes of the gods the tight-lipped hero and
the wet-cheeked victim are frequently inferior to the red-nosed clown, such
notions are destined to be a hard sell to those who have E. M. Forster on their
bedside table and a clump of dried narcissus up their ass. Not to worry. As
lung as words and ideas exist, there will be a few misfits who will cavort with
them in a spirit of approfondement–if I may borrow that marvelous French word
that translates roughly as “playing easily in the deep”–and in so doing they
will occasionally bring to realization Kafka’s belief that “a novel should be
an ax for the frozen seas around us.”
A Tibetan-caliber playfulness may not represent, I’m willing to concede, the
only ice ax in the literary toolshed. Should there exist alternatives as
available, as effective, as potent, nimble, and refreshing, then by all means
hone them and bring them down to the floe. Until I’ve seen them at work,
however, I’ll stand by my contention that when it comes to writing, a fusion of
prankish Asian wisdom, extra-dimensional Latin magic, and two-fisted North
American poetic pizzazz (as exotic as that concept might seem to some) could be
our best hope for clearing passageways through our heart-numbing,
soul-shrinking, spirit-smothering oceans of frost. We have a gifted,
conscientious literati. Wouldn’t it be the cat’s meow to have an enlightened,
exhilarating one as well?
Tom Robbins is the author of eight novels, all of which are currently in print.
His Villa Incognito was published in 2003 by Bantam.
more here

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 5 2004 23:15 utc | 7

Perhaps this link to MARK CLINTON and TONY UDELL’s Counterpunch article
“ Another casualty of Bush’s war
won’t surprise visitors to this blog. Nevertheless it deserves to be read.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Oct 6 2004 9:51 utc | 9