Introduction

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The inspiration for this blog has been scurrying around the gloomy recesses for some time now. Partially though not exclusively related to: questions about futility, questions about courage, questions about placing one foot in front of the other when the gathering storm feels like it will be insurmountable; if not this time, then surely the next.

What makes us go on, what mechanism does that?

Originally, I thought I’d place some kind of viewer discretion advisory here — Warning: this blog contains bleak, existential disquiet and hopeless despondency, that kind of thing — but, no, if you read the poem by W.S. Merwin (after a line of which this blog is named), it captures that sense of near inexplicable faith in all its rousing sorrow. And when I say faith, I mean it in a secular, agnostic sense, since religious faith is something quite different, I think. No, I’m interested in that human spark we call hope or faith or trust in the face of daunting odds, maintained with no attendant promise of redemption or reward, such bewildering yet moving optimism. A thing that seems barely sustainable.

Anyway, a couple of things came together in the last few days, pertinent enough to kickstart this blog. First, I was reading online about the book after which this post is titled: The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Without attempting to divine or even discuss a book that I haven’t yet read, let alone a work so immense in scope, it’s enough for now just to quote from the Preface since Burton’s (tongue-in-cheek?) motivation mirrors my own in starting this blog:

I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.

It’s worth noting that the “melancholy” of which he speaks is closer to the contemporary psychiatric concept of depression than the slightly twee and poetic air the word suggests nowadays, although I think I want to merge both senses of the word here. Prone to depression, I welcome the diversion of thwarting that dismal intruder by exploring the dekes and feints I (we) employ once it embarks on its insidious campaigns.

Coincidentally, while the blogging imperative grew stronger, I learned last night of the death of David Foster Wallace. Now, he is by no means my favourite writer or even someone I’ve thought about a great deal — the often bloated, occasionally baroque, generally brilliant Infinite Jest is by a fair distance the best book I’ve never actually read, having been stuck somewhere in the vicinity of page 328 of the soft cover edition for the last two years, in a kind of exasperated hiatus — but it struck me that his relative youth, his success and his obvious literary virtuosity (bordering on genius, frankly) ought to have mitigated against any such stark an act as wilful self-destruction. Yet it didn’t. I know nothing of his story, but I’m truly sad that it didn’t. I wish he could have found that spark, the spark that seemed to ignite his complex, layered writing, the spark that made him create furious whirlwinds of fizzing light and sprays of exuberant heat amid the cold blackness, the spark that must have deserted him at the end. I don’t fully love what I’ve read of his work, but I do love the mind that could counter the grey march of banality that contemporary life can so often be, its courageous denial of same through levels of detail and rumination and structural pyrotechnics not seen since, I don’t know, Gravity’s Rainbow even?

And I’m scared that one moment of inattentiveness, perhaps, was all it took to let go of the spark, to be plunged into utter darkness, to succumb.

So, then, a blog inspired by two works, masterpieces even, one of which I’ve never read and the other only partially. Not the most auspicious of starts, then. And yet, all being well, it will serve as my own spark, a constant reminder, my unfathomable thank-you to the unnamed, unknowable void in the face of the world’s jeers and jabs, my negation of Burton’s pessimism:

Now desperate I hate my life,
Lend me a halter or a knife;
All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so damn’d as melancholy.

As far as such a monolithic bloc exists, the international political Left has had almost twenty years to come to terms with some unpalatable truths regarding its own allegiances during the Cold War since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European state Communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was famously preceded in 1987 by Ronald Reagan’s crowing, simplistic cry of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”. It was portrayed as an overwhelming victory; of a virtuous Western Capitalist system over an evil state-controlled Eastern Marxism; of the forces of American-led freedom over oppression… a caricature, in other words.

However, as we surely must know by now, nothing on such a scale is ever as simple as the hastily glib and the prematurely gleeful wish it to be.

It was inevitable that a system which had, in part, existed in opposition to another equally vast and complex, would — when deprived of its adversary, the flipside to its own tired and teetering coin — find itself ever more rampant, out of control and ultimately bankrupt in every sense of that word. Inevitable that unrestrained greed and an abdication of any genuine oversight would be every bit as damaging to a society as the overbearing mishmash of philosophical idealism, bureaucratic corruption and repressive brutality it believed it had bested and replaced on a global scale.

Our world exists within the tensions between opposing impulses: between fascism and anarchy; between faith and reason; avarice and envy; selfishness and altruism; the individual and the collective. Remove one and, as if in an excruciatingly slo-mo judo move, the imbalance will eventually topple everything. 

I’ve talked about the Left, but what of the Right? 

It seems to me (and I’m far from alone in this [the two linked articles are strongly recommended]) that conservative thinking after the apparent defeat of the Left — instead of taking the opportunity to settle into nuanced subsets of political thought — coalesced into a broad triumphalist ideology which, among other accepted tenets, embraced free market, unregulated capitalism above and beyond any kind of pragmatic sense of compromise, was cemented in the 1980s under the catch-all of Reaganomics (alongside Margaret Thatcher’s Milton Friedman-derived UK variant), or trickle-down economics, or supply-side economics, or libertarianism or whatever you want to call it, and has not been abandoned or even seriously questioned until (possibly… hopefully) now. Now that all those ageing chickens have finally hobbled home to roost, so exhausted they can barely even squawk. 

Tangentially yet crucially, I also believe that something very dangerous compounded this. “Dangerous” because something not altogether dissimilar tore Europe apart in the 20th Century. I’m referring to nationalism — not just ordinary nationalism, worrisome in itself, but a particular type of American nationalism often referred to as American exceptionalism. Tethered to a type of military fetishism, it has been the underlying ethos, the milieu, the unquestioned backdrop for a kind of righteous moral certitude, an example of circular reasoning which postulates that the American way of doing things simply has to be the right way because, well, America’s the greatest country in the world. And if you don’t agree, you’re suspect, perhaps even evil. Which has led to a kind of self-fulfilling situation in which much of the rest of the world did indeed hitch its financial wagon to that of the United States — almost literally buying into that perilous myth, or at least afraid not to — and is now in the process of being wrenched around and possibly even torn asunder in the agonizing crash upon which the dust has still not yet settled.

But now we have arrived at an accounting. And an awkward, shameful one at that. A generation or two (or three) living high on the hog: recklessly mortgaging their children’s and grandchildren’s futures; almost belligerently purchasing (or leasing, another convenient smoke-and-mirrors measure), with a what-the-fuck-are-you-going-to-do-about it defiance, the fossil-fuel-guzzling Hummers, the sprawling, wasteful McMansions that overwhelm their suburban lots, and countless other completely unnecessary so-called big ticket items; nonchalantly living so far beyond their means on apparently (though never in reality) endless credit that they (we, let’s be honest) were surely half-mad in our part-Panglossian part-bacchanalian sense of entitlement and denial, deluded in our utter selfishness, almost repugnant in our self-indulgence.

My tone is as angry as it is perplexed. A question I have asked in many other circumstances (the Iraq War springs immediately to mind) is this: as an average person, with no vast knowledge of international politics or any formal education in global economics whatsoever, how is it that I — and many others like me, ordinary citizens of the world, family, friends strangers — how is it that we knew all this and yet the people at the helm were blind to it? How is it that it was manifestly, patently, blatantly, irrefutably obvious that George W. Bush and his travelling neocon circus were hellbent on invading Iraq and that WMDs or not (another clear red herring), the war was a fait accompli? How is it that — details and complexities aside — we knew in our unschooled guts and inexpert hearts and voiced it hundreds of thousands of times in our living rooms and classrooms and workplaces that this system would not and could not work forever, that we had been living in a sybaritic bubble, a narrow yet extravagant window of opportunity never before experienced by the vast majority of our predecessors and one that is now perhaps irrevocably lost once more for our descendants? We might say good riddance, that perhaps this is an opportunity for a kinder, gentler, less avaricious and less tribal world… and yet I worry. I worry that we in the West have built up a karmic debt so vast, have stood on the backs of so many around the globe (not to mention our own legions of the poor and underprivileged) in order to sustain our lavish lifestyle, that forgiveness will be in short supply, that when the opportunity for vengeance for a long-endured hurt is available, human beings usually tend to take it. And for that, our children and their children will pay and keep on paying.

But now there’s Barack Hussein Obama. And the work starts. Hope, sure, but genuine hard fucking work too; a monumental near-Sisyphean task, really. But a start. A second chance to get it right. In all probability, a last chance. Although I admire the man immensely, I wouldn’t want to be in his trail-weary shoes for all the pie in Ohio.

 

First, this, an intriguing insight into the unravelling if not downright implosion of a political campaign.

Second, if I had to sum up how I feel about the difference between “us” and “them”, this very short and sweet video would probably be Exhibit A.

Here’s a quick thought experiment. I’ve been imagining I am in the shoes of an averagely-informed “Joe Sixpack” who is leaning toward the Republicans and how I might react to this recent characterization by the McCain camp of Barack Obama as a “socialist”. If I’m old enough to remember the Cold War, I might associate this with communism. It might make me somewhat wary of Obama if I were still undecided at this point. But wait, think logically for a second: if McCain and his supporters really believed that Obama was some kind of commie, why would they have waited ’til now to raise it? Until we are two weeks from the election and, let’s face it, our side is way down in the polls. If it had been true all along, and assuming we were politically astute enough to recognise it (and if we weren’t, we had no business running at all) wouldn’t this have been mentioned at the beginning of the campaign? Isn’t this just another in a long line of scary boogeymen the McCain-Palin ticket has tried to attach to Senator Obama — pals around with terrorists, un-American, shady or troubling associations, doesn’t think like us, far left lib’rul, is connected to electoral fraud, doesn’t wear a flag pin, he and his wife are unpatriotic — one or more of which we’re praying will stick?

Hmmm…

I might also have noticed Colin Powell, during his endorsement of Obama, saying that we already redistribute wealth through taxation. And that reminds me: I’ve noticed plenty of other sane, sober people who clearly love America and yet are solidly in the Obama camp. If he were as scary as McCain’s people are portraying him, how could this happen?

Collective psychosis?

Media manipulation?

No, I don’t buy it. Anyway, whatever, it isn’t really working, so move along, folks, nothing to see here…

[Edit: I can’t believe I left out Muslim, celebrity and elitist from that list! What are they going to try next — Barack is a gay vegan?]

Joe. Your average Joe. A cup of Joe.

It’s as if we’re deliberately being encouraged to ignore the real-world problems of a global financial crisis, of war and terrorism and the disastrous consequences of America’s reaction to the latter, of genocide in Darfur, of melting ice-caps, endangered species and increasing levels of CO² that suggest we’re slowly — although with increasing intensity — cooking in our own waste…

But no, we’re gonna discuss Joe. Evoke Joe. An everyman. You betcha.

Joe Average.

Joe Blow.

Joe Sixpack.

Joe Shmoe.

Joe the Plumber.

It’s like some last-ditch koan, some hail mary haiku, some desperate poem. Only with less artistry. Something to distract; a sleight of hand.

But whatever you think of the manipulation, of the clearly targeted demographic, you have to be able to see the stakes. That every time they raise the spectre of Joe the Plumber, they’re pandering to our propensity for lazy thinking, assuming and hoping that we will collapse into some homogenous, mindless middle instead of shearing off into independent reflection. No wonder they pretend to loathe elitists and intellectuals; any amount of miniscule consideration usually destroys their positions automatically and thoroughly.

So, anyway: Joe.

Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman (McCain’s preferred choice as running mate), Joe Sixpack, Joe the Plumber, Joe McCain (John’s brother, who described a large swathe of Virginia as “Communist”), Morning Joe, Joe Conason… What next, Joe Stalin? Oh wait…

This Joe thing is getting weird, isn’t it? It’s a cartoon, a caricature, a clumsy cipher; it’s contemptuous of the very audience it is targeting. Speak to the electorate as if it is comprised of ignorant children and let’s hope Bob the Builder and Dora the Explorer bring their big fat Crayolas to the polling stations in order to place a nice satisfying X next to the name of the only grown-up on the ticket, Barack Obama.

Anything that provides some reassurance that the forces of bigotry are not prevailing right now is to be welcomed:

[Original post edited: YouTube video embedded Oct 23, 2008]

Levi Stubbs’ Tears

by Billy Bragg

With the money from her accident
She bought herself a mobile home
So at least she could get some enjoyment
Out of being alone
No one could say that she was left up on the shelf
‘Its you and me against the world, kid’ she mumbled to herself

When the world falls apart some things stay in place
Levi Stubbs’ tears run down his face

She ran away from home with her mothers best coat
She was married before she was even entitled to vote
And her husband was one of those blokes
The sort that only laughs at his own jokes
The sort that war takes away
And when there wasnt a war, he left anyway

Norman Whitfield and Barratt Strong
Are here to make everything right that’s wrong
Holland and Holland and Lamont Dozier too
Are here to make it all okay with you

One dark night he came home from the sea
And put a hole in her body where no hole should be
It hurt her more to see him walking out the door
And though they stitched her back together they left her heart in pieces on the floor

When the world falls apart some things stay in place
She takes off the Four Tops tape and puts it back in its case
When the world falls apart some things stay in place
Levi Stubbs’ tears…

For any British Columbians still uncertain how they’ll be voting today, or for those in our province looking to strategically prevent a Harper majority, there is a very useful article in this week’s The Tyee magazine.

[Disclaimer: in general, politics are not my main focus for this blog, but lately, they seem to be all-consuming on both sides of the border, and consequently will merit a disproportionate degree of attention between now and November 4.]

Here in Canada, we vote in our own Federal General Election tomorrow.

I’m slightly embarrassed that I am far more captivated by the election in the U.S., but I can’t really deny it. All indications are that we’re headed for a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” scenario, which isn’t exactly inspiring. I know how I’m voting — in a word, strategically; by voting for the only candidate who has a chance of ousting the Conservative in my riding — and incidentally, now that I hold Canadian citizenship, this is my first ever vote in an election in this country, at any level. That at least is a good feeling. But the prospect of another few years of a minority government headed by the Tories is not a good feeling. Far worse would be a Conservative majority, of course, so we should not allow our relative indifference translate to apathy at the polls.

So, slightly shamefacedly, and in lieu of all the posts I ought to have made about this crucial run up to tomorrow’s election, I’ll instead link to another blog in which the author provides 30 handy reasons not to vote for Stephen Harper. All very, very good reasons. See you at the polls, fellow Canadians. Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving.

[Edit: Wanted to quickly add this excellent link to a Canadian Electoral Map I just found.]

I realise that by not posting frequently, I invite the assumption that the forces of despair are winning, so here I am to disavow anyone of that notion. What has happened over the last couple of weeks is that I’ve become embroiled in election fever, and while for many that translates to a flurry of furious blogging, my nature leans more toward absorption than it does to disgorgement. In general, at least. That said, and due to the sheer volume and ferocious intensity of electorally-related events both in my own country (Canada) and in that of our immediate southern neighbours, the time for disgorgement has arrived.

First, regarding Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, I want to point something out that no-one else seems to have covered in terms of specifics (and I do realise I’m behind the news cycle here), but something very obvious (to me) needs to be highlighted: namely, that when you look up a definition of the word “maverick” you discover that one of its synonyms is “loose cannon” (incidentally, this is from the Oxford American Writers Thesaurus, 1st Edition, which is standard on Apple computers):

Now, at the best of times, which this clearly isn’t, you don’t want anyone who can be described as a “loose cannon” anywhere near high office, let alone a “Hail Mary” away from launching the nuclear attack codes.

I know the media and the Obama campaign have settled on the slightly less alarming “erratic” as their preferred descriptor for the Republican nominee, which admittedly is only a slight softening, but this really needed to be said — somewhere, and by someone — in the starkest terms.

 

Marine Building Reflection, Vancouver, BC

A couple of mid-September days spent wandering the sedate and sun-speckled streets of downtown Vancouver, eating and drinking, watching the passing peoples of the world: a partial cure for the impending autumn blues; that annual ache of regret at the inevitable passing of such warm and shining days (lately, the past is nearly always idealised; the future not so much). Granville Island. English Bay. Stanley Park. The Aquarium has been especially popular this summer since the birth of its new, as-yet unnamed baby beluga whale, and she is indeed a delight, but my contemplative side is always drawn to — of all things — the jellyfish in their aquamarine tanks, floating like cosmic explorers, waving gentle white fronds to the rhythms and currents of their surroundings, serene as prayer flags. The very existence of such a creature seems at once arbitrary and inevitable, a Zen koan posed by nature.

Given this aquatic theme, it’s perhaps odd, then, that I should stumble upon a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace (whose recent death partially inspired my launching of this blog) in which he employs a fish metaphor in order to explore

the difficulties of daily life and ‘making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head’

I’m almost tempted to quote the entire speech here — partly because the always-fluid internet may at some point deem it a copyright breach, and we’ll then lose it — but really because, in light of his apparent suicide, it is at once a tragic and urgent document, wrestling as it does with despair, winning that tussle on paper yet ultimately failing at a real life level (which means we can learn something from it, right?). It’s solipsistic. Frustrated. Anxious. Generous. Hateful. I now wonder: did that very solipsism he seemed to believe resides in everyone become the seed around which his eventual self-annihilation grew? Is suicide just the scary flipside of such self-absorption? Can we avoid self-negation through avoidance of an over-emphasis on The Self? Perhaps. This, in part at least, will have to be my goal here in this blog. A delicate balance between the lonely subjectivism of modern life and the elusive collective — whether that be a Jungian collectivism or some modified Marxist version. Either way, we don’t exist unless in relation to the Other. That conservative North American individualism is a doomed cousin to nihilism in its consequences. We need to belong. Even if the fluorescently lit, Muzak-filled aisles threaten to kill us in our leaden tracks. Even when the fat, dead-eyed lady screams at her kid at the checkout. Even when the voracious H3 cuts us off in traffic. Even when our heroic aspects are ignored by the world while our laziness is not only noted but pilloried.

And DFW believed something similar, which makes it all the more sad. He progressed from this:

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I’ve worked really hard all day and I’m starved and tired and I can’t even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.

To this:

If I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do – except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn’t have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible car accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am – it is actually I who am in his way.

Alright, that’s far-fetched, but he’s not asking for likely, just plausible. This is key.

Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible – it just depends on what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important – if you want to operate on your default setting – then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying.

I think he finds something transcendent here, not in the usual religious sense, but in some nameless cosmic sense, as New Agey as that sounds:

But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things […] You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Of course, exactly what you decide to worship also matters:

The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you […] Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

Who has not felt these things? The contemporary world we have created via consensus and momentum and inertia and a thousand other impetuses encourages our surrender, because

the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.

Yet what of freedom? Can we extricate ourselves? I believe we can — through an immersion in beauty, in art or nature or even personal sacrifice to a larger Something, admittedly a highly unfashionable concept. DFW seems to concur:

But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

He concludes:

None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness – awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

Ugh, I almost can’t describe the sorrow I currently feel that David Foster Wallace — one of many sensitives who at one time floated and basked in the nurturing life force of our collective love and compassion and creativity — forgot to reckon with the water, forgot to either notice or acknowledge it while it spiralled and eddied around him, choosing instead to believe he was drowning in a vacuum.