Covid-19 Diary, part 58: The one about gnosticism and not getting haircuts.

1477.

Beth: Maybe you could get a haircut before Thanksgiving?
Me: Sure. I’ll just . . . risk my life to get a haircut.
Beth: Don’t they wear masks there?
Me: They’ve closed all indoor eating in the entire state!
Beth: If you loved me . . .

1478.

A state employee out in Utah found a 12-foot high metal monolith in the middle of the red rock desert. It could be an artist’s prank, some space junk, or a message from ancient aliens who seeded our planet with life. 

1479.

Clearly the work of some prankster-artist, the metal plinth soon disappeared. There isn’t enough mystery in the world. 

1480.

Or maybe there’s too much. 

1481.

Researching my new book, I came across a strange factoid. Thomas Dixon, the author of Birth of a Nation, made a sequel to the smash film adaptation of his book and play. It’s titled, The Fall of a Nation. The film follows a German invasion of America. Dixon adapted it from his own novel. It’s lost. There are no existing prints. 

1482.

Shit like this makes me wonder. About what is saved and what is lost. Only about a tenth of silent cinema was saved. 

1483.

Things Beth and I have argued about the past two weeks:

How to pronounce Hegel (I was wrong)
The colors on the Italian flag (I was wrong)
When I first started making my own bed as a child (I was right)

1484.

We get a Christmas tree. I water it. 

Beth: Is the tree taking up any water?
Me: Yep. 
Beth: Are you sure?
Me: Um, yeah. . . . Why would I lie?
Beth: Because you’re a liar. You love to lie.

1485.

“Writing being the spectacularly powerful form of the word, contains at one and the same time, thanks to a lovely ambiguity, the being and appearance of power, what it is and what it would like you to believe it is.” — Roland Barthes

1486.

I discuss with a student the gnostic Gospels. He wanted to do it. It’s a strange world to peer into, the castoff Bible verses informed by mostly forgotten mystery religions in the ancient world. They are very strange texts to interact with. They feel important, and full of wisdom, but it all seems just out of reach.

1487.

From The Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said, ‘Become passers-by.’”

1488.

From The Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said, ‘Whoever has come to understand the world has found (only) a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.’”

1489.

From The Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said, ‘Show me the stone which the builders have rejected. That one is the cornerstone.’”

1490.

I started a novel with the monks who hid these scrolls. The book is a hot mess, all over the place, kind of terrible, a crime novel and a supernatural thriller, with absurd occult symbols and borrowed mythology of the Nation of Islam. The title: Sons of the First Man. Here’s the first couple of lines:

1491.

“Thus it came to pass that in the scriptorium, where the holy books were writ. Before the plague years, before the new religion unleashed a purge upon the lands, before the new royal dynasties and the nation states, this in the old years, the waning days of the Roman Empire, when the citizens lived about the Mediterranean chubby from the spoils of war but knowing, knowing, knowing that things could not last and that the high times were nearing their end.”

1492.

I always choke up when I listen to “Puff the Magic Dragon.” There’s a line: “Dragons live forever, but not so little boys.” God. That line gets tougher and tougher as I watch my daughters get older. I’ve never admitted this to anyone. 

1493.

I’ve never made it through Harry and the Hendersons without crying. That’s another thing I’ve never told anyone. (I’ve only watched it once.)

1494.

I’ve dipped into Gnosticism for the last two decades, stemming from a friend’s throw-away comment (about the comic Preacher): “That’s so Gnostic.”

1495.

I read Elaine Pagels. I read Hans Jonas. But the greatest distillation of Gnosticism is Philip K. Dick’s last couple of novels: Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. These are slightly fictionalized accounts of his interaction with a pink beam of sunlight—a delivery woman wearing a Christian fish necklace reflected sunlight into Philip’s eyes; he later realized it was a divine being communicating with him, through raw cosmic information—the defining event of his adult life.

1496.

(He was also a hardcore amphetamines addict, with a history of hallucinations.)

1497.

I buy into some of the basic concepts. That good and evil are equal forces, locked into eternal conflict. That existence is a mistake, or if not a mistake, a flawed construction. (I’m not fully onboard with the Demi-urge.) There’s some kind of spiritual realm. Wisdom is attainable. But there are strands of false and dark knowledge. The material world cannot be fully trusted. 

1498.

Or put another way: reality is so much weirder than most of us think.

1499.

It comes back to writing in a way, that being and appearance of power. Writing is an alchemical act. So is reading. When you read a novel by a person long dead, you are interacting with a mind that no longer exists. Only, it obviously still does.

1500.

 I challenge anyone to read Caesar’s The Gallic Wars and not feel the spark of necromancy.

1501.

I used Hans Jonas a character in a novel, tentatively titled Crow and the Stone Machines. It follows Joseph Cambpell, Hannah Arendt, and Jonas through their professional and personal travails in the 20^th Century. It’s my take on the intellectual novel. I think it’s great. Here’s the first line:

1502.

“Prague, 1939, and Max is fleeing.”

1503.

My hallucinations are exclusively auditory. They can be disturbing or haunting, but I feel fortunate to have something like this in my life, despite how troubling it can feel. It’s my own little corner of the hard to explain, a reminder that the brain isn’t the ultimate arbiter of reality, and often can’t be trusted.

1504.

Beth would agree. About my brain, anyway. 

1505.

I embrace the irrational.

Covid-19 Diary, part 2: No fields of sunflowers.

15.

We start the day, every day, with a summary of the bad and the terrible: the news. “The sewers are backing up,” my wife says. “People are flushing baby wipes into their toilets.”

“Baby wipes?”

“That’s right,” my wife says. “We are now in a sewer crisis.”

I shake my head. She is making scones. I am re-heating coffee. “I would rather a toilet paper shortage than a coffee shortage.”

“Really?”

“I mean it,” I say.

A few minutes later, I say: “There is no one, at least cinematically speaking, as well equipped to deal with this situation as me.”

16.

It’s true. I matriculated in post-apocalyptic movies. I’ve seen them all, even the forgotten ones. I watched The Ultimate Warrior twice. 

17.

A Boy and His Dog, The Last Man on Earth, On the Beach, Logan’s Run, Pontypool.

18.

Did World War Z get it right?

“Movement is life,” Brad Pitt tells a bunkered family. But in our current crisis, isn’t this exactly, precisely wrong? He should have said, “Staying in place is life.” He should have said, “Bunkering is life. Doing nothing, nothing, is life.”

19.

I’m reading, or trying to. One non-fiction book and one novel, with some comics and articles and short stories tossed in. 

20.

For nonfiction, I suggest either weighty topics with a light touch, At the Existentialist Cafe, or pop culture topics taken way too seriously, such as I Wear the Black Hat or anything by Chuck Klosterman, Griel Marcus, or Lester Bangs. 

21.

This is not the time for poetry. I love poetry but it evokes yearning. Poetry peddles desire. Poetry inculcates ache.

22. 

How long with the mail last? Do I need to forage for seeds? What weeds are edible? Is my miniature wooden bat a sufficient weapon? These are some of the questions rattling around in my head.

They’ve replaced: Why is there evil? What is the purpose to all this striving? Why do humans have ten toes?

23.

One of my favorite movies is the original Dawn of the Dead. Consider it a primer. The zombies are deadly but predictable; it’s the other humans you really have to look out for.

24.

(And I don’t really believe this. I think most people are decent and helpful and good. But, I kind of do think this, that beneath the surface theres a roiling combo of chimp and snake brain: appetite and anger and fear.

25.

I always planned to write a sequel set 100 years later, in the suburbs. Humans have fractured into clans, and live in the second stories of houses, with aerial, wooden walkways connecting the tops of houses. New religions have appeared. Some clans are cannibals, some are herbivores, some raise domesticated livestock. The zombies mill about in the backyards and living rooms. One clan decides to eradicate another. There’s a love story. That’s as far as I got. 

26.

I remember a John McPhee article where he lives off foraged food with some oddball survivalist. Boiled acorns. Dandelion tea. I’d like to think I would be some wise leader in the new society, but who am I kidding, I’d be one of the cooks. 

27.

Are the trees rooting for us to fail? Ae the zoos tittering with the happy riot of gleeful nature? Do the fish know that we are recoiling in fear?

28.

We’ve been listening to Puccini. It doesn’t mean anything, or it means everything. 

29.

It Comes at Night. The Thing. They Live. Brazil. The Running Man. Alphaville. Akira. 

30.

If this were an H.P. Lovecraft story, the virus would be an elder go, waking from eons of slumber. Philip K. Dick would have it be a self-aware alien, maybe not trying to hurt us at all, but help us curb our addiction to fossil fools and red meat and self-sabotage.

31.

Beth: “They’re predicting possibly 140 million Americans contracting the virus by mid-summer.”

Me: “If the death toll stays at 1 percent—”

Beth: “That’s one and half million dead.”

Me: “Jesus Christ. Just . . . Jesus.”

32.

Can one conversation stand in for every conversation? Are we so much more alike than I thought?

33.

Beth is knitting. Pearl is painting. Simone is reading. Bernadette is napping. I am writing. I can hear our landlord talking through the ceiling. He sounds angry. He’s never angry. 

34.

In Children of Men, Danny Huston’s character has pilfered great works of art in his domicile. What are would I steal? What art would give me the most happiness? 

Van Gogh’s field of sunflowers. 

35.

I wrote a novel once, where the various characters repeat the same line: “All time is happening at once.” It’s an idea I stumbled across in some obscure text. I still don’t quite understand it. Here are others: the time is running backwards but the human mind experiences it forward. That there are infinite realities all running next to each simultaneously. That, according to Joyce, there is only one event in history and that it’s the manifestation of God.

36.

Our past selves are real but don’t exist. Our future selves exist but aren’t yet real. We can visit the past but not the future. We can envision the future but not the past. The human mind is a strange organ.

37.

The Corona-virus: an extra-dimensional being manifesting in our dimension?

38.

All the other pandemics—Sars, ebola, H1N1—invasions of gaseous intelligences leaking into our reality through permeable membranes?

39.

With this thought, I’ve disgusted myself. 

40.

Outside, it’s snowing. It should be beautiful, but somehow it isn’t. There’s less magic in the world.

Covid-19 diary, part 1: The Darkness isn’t total.

1.

I’ve been walking at night, once Bernadette is asleep, and it is an eerie, discomfiting experience. The houses are dark. The streets are empty. The restaurants are closed. The few cars on the road drive reckless and fast. It feels like a movie set. Omega Man. The World, the Flesh and the Devil. Vanilla Sky. 28 Days Later. The few people I do see stay away from me, and I stay away from them. Everyone seems dangerous, threatening, sinister.

I catch a glimpse of a red, neon sign from a liquor store. In the quiet night, it radiates a burning vision of hell: our civilization—gawdy, tacky, chintzy, and gutter-bound—devoid of people.

I walk in an alley along the train tracks, thinking about how this would be a great place to film a movie. The mind is a bizarre organ. I imagine the tracking shot. I can see the crew blocking the scene. I hear an engine and notice a car, in the alley behind me, its headlights heading my way. I dash under the EL and pretend to go into a building. The car passes me. A doofus, in the vicinity of 60, fumbles with his i-phone as he speeds past. So much for menacing.

I hear the chorus of a Nick Cave song rattling around in my ears: “If you’re gonna dine with them cannibals, sooner or later, darling, you’re going to get eaten.”

I don’t know, in my own disordered thoughts, who the cannibals are, not anymore.

2.

I turn to sci fi for succor. It doesn’t offer much, but there’s something about alternative realities that makes living in this one easier to take. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe provides a meta-aware existence where time travel is possible but, weirdly, doesn’t fix anything. “The good news is,” the narrator tells us, “you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past. The bad new is, you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past. The universe just doesn’t put up with that. We aren’t important enough.”

I take comfort in how small our suffering is in comparison to the larger heat death of the universe. Somehow, it works, knowing that none of this really matters.

3.

We’ve descended into the tomb world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The dominant religion is Mercerism, where individuals put their hands on an empathy box and are transported into the consciousness of a doddering old man. The old man is trudging up a hill and someone, or something, begins to throw stones at him. The stones strike him in the face and head, he stumbles and he never reaches the top of the hill. That’s the entirety of the religion. But it allows the disconnected, disenchanted humans to feel part of something larger, even if it’s only for a few pain-filled seconds. Who wouldn’t want an empathy box right now?

4.

The last Star Wars movie has a resurrected corpse wizard hoarding star cruisers under vast sheets of ice. It’s a bad movie. There, I saved you two hours of your time.

5.

I have a friend, he’s a writer who used to be a professional fighter, and he has a tattoo on his chest: “The function of man is to live, not to exist.” Now, there’s a fucking line I can get behind. My wife just turned to me and reported that the scientists are predicting two million deaths in the United States alone, as a worst-case scenario and that no one knows what society is going to look like afterwards, mass unemployment, extreme disruption to food and water, and an eventual gasoline shortage. It sounds just like Mad fucking Max. We are living in the future.

6.

Or the distant past. I keep thinking of the middle ages, when priests and scribes worked in caves and windowless scriptoriums, by eye-ruining candlelight, spending their lives illuminating ancient manuscripts. They were heroes. Collectively they saved much of the world’s wisdom. This ancient wisdom, rediscovered in the 1500s, kickstarted the Renaissance. The world, it seems, works in a cycle, discovery, loss, rediscovery. We thought we had evolved past this cycle. We. Were. Wrong.

7.

Last night, in Chicago, thousands of people waited in lines for St. Patrick’s Day festivities at bars around town. They smoked, told dirty jokes, flirted, paired off, danced, drank, and acted as if nothing has changed, that life is for living, that the tigers and dragons in the world cannot touch them, not here.

8.

It reminds me of “Masque of the Red Death,” the Edgar Allen Poe short story where a wealthy count locks himself in his castle with all of his royal family and friends, and in boredom they host a costume ball. Outside, the black death rages. The ball is a success, the revelers are having a blast drinking and dancing, and everyone marvels at a wonderful costume. Someone has dressed up like a sick man, dying of the Bubonic Plague. He lurches around, in character, pretending to spread the plague.

9.

Of course, it isn’t a costume, and he isn’t pretending. The plague is inside the walls. I take no satisfaction out of writing that line.

10.

At night, the darkness isn’t total. I can see trees, streetlights, even the light from distant stars. The light is traveling at a constant speed, over unimaginable distances. I am literally looking into the past. I find solace in the idea of ancient things. Recipes from ancient Rome. Creosote bushes. The Epic of Gilgamesh.

11.

Gilgamesh tells the story of a terrible god-king, who becomes a good leader through friendship with Enkidu, his double. When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh sets out to discover immortality. By book’s end, he is lonelier than ever, certain he will die, and shackled with despair. He is, in a word, fully human. Suffering turns him into a better person.

12.

Writing is useless. It can’t avert disaster, plant crops, repair engines or stabilize an economy. Writing can’t even rewrite history, as much as we’d like it to. Philip K. Dick, in The Man in the High Castle, reveals an America that has been bifurcated by the victorious Axis powers. The Germans have the East Coast, the Japanese the West. Various characters are all obsessed with a novel that posits a different history, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. In that book, our reality, the Allies were victorious.

13.

Books, he is saying, are doorways to other worlds. But where is Philip K. Dick now?  I can’t write an escape pod for my friends and family. I can’t imagine a better world and also transport us there. It’s the flaw in fiction; we can’t ever, not really, supplant reality.

14.

So, I sit and write, and in true 21^st century fashion, the act of writing becomes the reason I write. I take no solace in self-aware prose; in many ways I detest it. But there is something shiny, and vital, in refusing despair. In doing something, anything. As the light of distant stars hurtles through the cosmos, bravely making its way to our weary eyes, I fight for comfort in the fact that everything matters, because nothing is important. Suffering makes us better. We are living in the future, which is another way of saying we are living in the past. The darkness isn’t total. The function of people is to live, not just exist. Let’s get on with it.

Digital artifacts: Philip K. Dick whispers in his sleep

I’ve spent the weekend writing, recording and editing a short video for a class. I don’t like my voice. I struggled with the recording process. I’m not 100 percent happy with the video. I started out with one idea, then decided to do another, and then tried to kind of mash them together. The words read better than they sounded.  Anyway, I thought I would share. The images are almost all William Blake paintings or Jack Kirby line drawings. The music is Moby and Underworld. Everything else is me.

Best short stories ever written, and when Simone can read them

Quick: think about the best short stories you’ve ever read.

I went to a teaching conference last year where a speaker named Alfred Tatum explained his method of using literature as therapy. What he does is this: he asks students—usually inner city males—to write down all of the important stories, novels, poems and movies that have shaped them. He would then teach a number of stories and novels that he felt spoke to the urban male’s experiences. And he claimed anyway that the males he taught came out of his class better writers and better people. This moved me, so I spent the rest of the lecture writing down every novel, short story, and non-fiction book that matters to me.

These are the stories I hope to share with Simone, although that’s probably a few months away. I’ve forgone the usual summary/response/reflection to let these stand alone, instead opting for the age when I think she’ll understand them. If you have any stories you think need to be added, drop me a line.

“Holy Quarrel” by Philip K. Dick (artificial intelligence gone awry; age 6)

“Faith of Our Fathers” by Philip K. Dick (amnesis and the discovery of awful reality of life, and perfect encapsulation of everything that makes PKD so great; age 7)

“In the Park” by Herbert Huncke (young boy loses innocence; age 50)

“The Killers” by Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway’s one shot at a crime story; age 10)

“A Good Man is Hard To Find” by Flannery O’Connor (Best short story ever; age 3)

“Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor (philosophy of nothingness; age 4)

“Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe (carnival in face of apocalypse; age 12)

“Two Fragments: Saturday and Sunday, March 199-“ by Ian McEwan (disturbing exploration of dystopian weirdness; age 13)

“The Universe in Miniature in Miniature” by Patrick Somerville (wacky tale of graduate students studying dada style nonsense; age 15)

“The King In Yellow” by Robert Chambers (early horror about a book that will drive you mad; age 16)

“The Immortal” by Jorge Luis Borges (Memory, time, identity loops, Borges; age 18)

“Last Evenings on Earth” by Roberto Bolaño (A boy sees the complexity of his father; age 2)

“Delicate Prey” by Paul Bowles (Ghastly revenge tale in the Sahara; age 30)

“Dragged Fighting From His Tomb” by Barry Hannah (Offbeat story of Civil War with my favorite line of all time: “Tell me the most exquisite truths you know”; age 15)

“Best New Horror” by Joe Hill (Story of a editor of horror anthologies who falls into the plot of a horror story; never quite shook it; age 45)

“Barn Burning” by William Faulkner (Studied it in college, never shook it, hard-nosed father seeks constant revenge; age 11)

Bringing up a badass baby, part 1

We named her after Nina Simone. The Nina Simone of “Sinnerman.” The Nina Simone of “Mississippi Goddamn.” The red lights, white lines, smoke-filled lungs of forgotten night clubs in the French Gothic quarter Nina Simone.

My wife and I argue about everything, but we agreed on her name from the start. Beth wants her to be a dancer. Beth’s grandmother wants her to be a singer. My mother wants her to be happy.

And I want her to be a writer.

Simone is 19 months old. Some parents worry about their children’s college scores, professional prospects or first boyfriends. I simply want her to be cool. Not run of the mill cool, no. Top shelf, black label cool. Apocalyptically cool. Incinerate your neural synapses cool. Norman Mailer in the 1960s cool.

I have questions. I don’t know if this will work. At sixteen, will Simone care that Philip K. Dick is cool and Brian Aldiss most certainly is not? Will it matter if she can recognize a Truffaut film from a Godard? And, will all of this exposure to the good stuff simply result in an over-read nerd?

It’s time to get started.

This is a blog of the movies, books, music and comics that I hope to expose her to, why, and in what order. From the British New Wave to the Brothers Grimm, this is a staging area for how to create an interesting adult.  Reviews, lists, stories and hearty doses of me and my own neuroses—this is what you can expect to find here.

Of course, this isn’t really a blog about my daughter, although she’ll make appearances. It’s really about the (pop) culture that matters.