The Feral Detective, a novel by Jonathan Lethem

The protagonist, a thirty-some woman named Phoebe, travels from New York City to Southern California to search for the daughter of a friend. The missing woman left her college dorm and cut off communication with her mother, and the only lead is her fascination with the singer-poet Leonard Cohen who died when the results of the presidential election of 2016 were determined. The shock of that election hangs over Phoebe as she enlists the help of a detective who specializes in such cases, and their search takes them far from modern Los Angeles to the city's wild edge of mountains and deserts among people who live off the grid.

Phoebe as the first-person narrator gives the reader an early sense of where the novel goes when she says "The story involves a missing person, and it could well be me. Or you or practically anybody." Or as the detective puts it, "Who's not missing?" It's a good question for anyone who had their assumptions about the American people and American politics shaken at that time.

The witty and talkative Phoebe contrasts with the laconic and mysterious detective, and the New Yorker cannot help expressing her wise-cracks even though she realizes they are falling on the unappreciative audience of the detective and the people living in Manson-like communes in the desert. Her comments, however, provide levity to an often tense story.

I enjoyed this book very much although, judging from the mixed reader reviews, many did not react so positively.

The fly fishing literary tradition

It's a tradition that is centuries old. Fly fishing is not normally the most efficient method of fishing, so maybe the periods of not catching fish lead to musing about the activity. Then, with the thought processes already going, when success comes it leads to other musings about why. Whatever the reasons, fly fishers write about their avocation. I can think of only two who are accomplished painters but many who are writers, and some of these writers are well known and respected literary figures.

I'm thinking about fly fishing and literature because of a book, Teaching Trout to Talk- the zen of small stream fly fishing, by Stuart Bartow, a professor of writing and literature at State University of New York. In 172 pages Bartow includes quotations from the following:

Yeats
Emerson
Melville
Rilke
Thoreau

He also quotes from William Humphrey, Rick Bass, and Richard Brautigan who all wrote fishing pieces as well as novels. Then there are Harold Blasdell, George Harvey, and Izaak Walton who are known only for their fishing writings, as far as I know. And finally, Bartow quotes from The Odyssey, The Old Testament, Dr. Suess, and a number of Asian Buddhist writers and poets.

With all those literary references, one may wonder if the author has room left to include much about actual fishing, but he does and what he has to say is honest and accurate.

Music of the Mind

I recently finished the most provocative book I've read in years, Music of the Mind by Darryl Reanney. The scope is wide with the major points following in logical sequence, and any attempts by me to summarize them wouldn't do them justice. Instead, I'll describe some of the thoughts which particularly resonated with me. (The author would find my use of the word "resonated" as notable.)

Previously (12/6/13, and 10/22/14), I have written of my discomfort with the split I often note between the sciences and the humanities, and beginning with the introduction Music of the Mind holds that this divide is both unnecessary and damaging, that science and the humanities are not just consistent but are interrelated. Throughout the book quotations and foot-noted references appear from literary and religious as well as scientific writings.

Music and especially rhythm has always been of interest to me, and in recent years I have learned and written about the importance of rhythm in the universe in everything from the heart beats of humans and other animals to the orbits of planets. (11/9/13 and 8/26/14) Reanney writes on page 90, "Music is the most alchemic force of all, for the resonances it sets up can vibrate in tune with the inner logic of the universe. This is because the universe is rhythmic at root..."

The beginnings of this universe of ours are described in the early pages of Music of the Mind as the author explains the interconnection of all of us to everything else over the past 15 billion years since the Big Bang. He observes that the carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen of our bodies owe their creation to this 15 billion year old event so that "we are the children of the stars." Astronaut Edgar Mitchell who died a year ago has spoken of this realization while in space:

In a story he retold through the years, Mitchell described a moment during the return trip to Earth, as he gazed out the window of the spacecraft and saw the sun, moon, Earth and stars.

“Suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft and the molecules in the body of my partners were prototyped and manufactured in some ancient generation of stars,” he said in an interview for “In the Shadow of the Moon,” a 2007 documentary.

“And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness. It wasn’t them and us, it was, ‘That’s me. That’s all of it. It’s one thing.’ And it was accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of -- ‘Oh my god, wow, yes’ -- an insight, an epiphany.”

Mystics from different religions and people with near death experiences often speak of this "oneness" in similar words as astronaut Mitchell. Reanney doesn't use the word pantheism, that God resides in everything, but that concept could be an interpretation. The author doesn't enter the realm of religion directly, and his references to God are few and often are quotes by others. Instead, he states that all atoms in the universe contain a "memory" that they were all together in the brightness preceding the Big Bang and desire to be reunited; that this desire is what we call gravity.

Music of the Mind's explanation of human consciousness and thoughts are complex, and although the author develops these explanations patiently, as I mentioned earlier, I would not attempt to summarize them here. This section of the book did, however, provide me with some insight as to why human communication is so difficult, a subject that I often pondered during my working years. Once I was one of the principle managers of a business and reported to the owner. Two or more times a week he would call me into his office to discuss general concepts he wanted me to put into practice in my organization. These concepts often sounded simple and obvious which would cause me to wonder why we were going over the same ground on multiple meetings. Then suddenly through a change in phrasing, or more likely an experience, I would finally grasp the full meaning of what he had been attempting to make me understand.

Darryl Reanney would describe this breakthrough as "knowing", a collapse of " the wave function of the relevant quantum ripple yielding a 'sharp-edged thing'-a word or a particle." No, I'm not going to try to explain what I just wrote even though I could follow it as I read along through Music of the Mind. As I read I often argued with specific points or phrasing and, although I doubt the author is right about everything he says, I found it stimulating reading. It will stay with me for a long time.

 

Existentialism and personal identity

Just over two years ago I wrote about my thoughts concerning a character in a Richard Ford novel and his concept of a "default self", that a person's identity is defined by what they do. This concept came back to me this semester in college during a philosophy course where among the readings was a selection from Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

Ford's character's default self is very similar to Sartre's idea of "facticity", a person's essential nature. Sartre believed humans could transcend their essential nature by their own decisions about their actions. An example would be a shy person who chose to become a public speaker. Choices such as this give humans what Sartre calls "radical freedom." I suspect Ford was familiar with these ideas because he stresses that the default self is a person's own creation. His character's musings seem a slightly different slant on Sartre's concept of transcending facticity. I remember Sartre's plays, novels, and writings on existentialism as popular when I reached my early teens. I read a little Sartre, but I think I was too young to fully understand what he was saying. Being a little older, Ford may have gotten it better.

Both Sartre and Ford were looking at personal identity, a subject of interest to me especially when I look back to when I was younger. The philosophy instructor is a young man who recalled that when he first left home for college people advised him to "be yourself, Andrew", but he didn't know what they meant. I understand his confusion. Many young people resolve their questions of personal identity by joining a group which gives them an identity and sense of belonging. Jock, nerds, sorority girls are all groups which provide roles and identities. The large identity group when I was young were the hippies, although we more commonly referred to ourselves as freaks, and everyone else was the straight world. After college when I began working jobs which required wearing suits and ties I felt a clash with my established identity.

By the late 1970's, some college-educated people I knew began referring to themselves as professionals which seemed to have a broader definition than the traditional one of doctor or lawyer, and young, urban, professional became "yuppie". I suspected this group self identity served to set them apart from those who were not college-educated.

I never completely understood the "hipster" identity of my children's generation, but I believe it's some combination of hippie and yuppie although maybe I'm wrong about that. I'm often wrong or fail to completely understand things about young people now that I'm old.

Words and images

A course I took a few years ago entitled "Why Poetry Matters" made me think about how much poetry surrounds us in the way of song lyrics. Most of it is bad poetry, I would admit, but it's poetry nevertheless. In addition to song lyrics, we are bombarded with words constantly from radio and TV in addition to from people in our work and personal lives. Regarding written communication, the internet has added a huge amount on top of traditional newspapers, magazines, and books.

In a similar fashion, the art history course I'm currently taking makes me muse about how many images modern humans see daily. Movies, television, publications and, once again, the internet give our eyes a constant stream of images. With a few keyboard strokes, people can view images of the paintings of the great masters that once were available only to the select few owners and their friends.

I have read that it's been estimated that about 80 billion humans have lived on earth. That estimate depends on, among other factors, the length of time Homo Sapiens have existed, but I believe the current generally accepted figure is 250,000 years. What is certain is that for most of those years the amount of words and images available to humans was infinitely smaller than what it is today. The images drawn on the walls of caves in Lascaux 17,000 years ago and in Chauvet 30,000 years ago must have been regarded as precious to those who saw them. The number of animals in the Lascaux paintings have been speculated to represent either past hunting experiences or rituals to bring about the success of future hunts. Words were scarce as well since it's been just a few thousand years that they have been stored in writing. Oral story-telling was valued, and I envision extended families huddling around a fire at night listening to a practiced speaker recounting old tales of valor. This is how the Homeric epics were handed down.

So now we're comparatively wealthy in words and images, but maybe that abundance has cheapened the product. Here, I'm thinking of the internet again. Anyone with a computer can throw words out there, and a great deal of that content is simply false while much of the rest is cruel, crude or both. (I'm not oblivious that I'm adding to the total.) Images flood us as well, both still and motion, but the value of certain iconic images gets diminished in that flood. A few weeks ago in the art history class, we were analyzing Di Vinci's "Mona Lisa", and I realized the masterpiece has been reproduced and parodied so often in my lifetime that studying it as a painting was difficult for me.

Being provided with so many words and images makes us not spend time on any one of them. Often I hear complaints that people don't fully read e-mails and miss important points. The average museum visitor spends about 17 seconds on each work of art they view. We feel we have to hurry through all these words and images, so we have trouble adjusting to the ones that deserve plenty of time. The professor of the poetry class recommended letting a poem "flow over you" without getting too hung up on trying to figure out the meaning of each line and then going back for analysis. The art history professor had us study an established six step process: look, observe, see, describe, analyze, and interpret, with each of those steps explained.

Maybe the rule should be to devote the time to taking in an image or a written or oral statement as appropriate to how much time was expended in the creation.

Will my life be changed?

I just finished reading Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Although this current translation of the overall title is more accurate to the original French, I prefer the original Remembrance of Things Passed as more poetic, which is no doubt because the phrase was lifted from a Shakespearean sonnet.

Whether or not I'll proceed to the other six volumes, I don't know. This first volume was over 400 pages, and the others must be about the same length because the total number of pages is over 3,000. Swann's Way stands on its own as a novel, so I don't feel a need to read further to attain a greater understanding of what I've read. Since I enjoyed it, however, I like having the option of reading the remaining volumes at any point in my life.

No, I don't think reading Proust will change my life, but I certainly had to adjust my reading style. The sentences are so long and the descriptions are so detailed that I had to go very slowly. That's a good adjustment for me because I normally have a tendency to read too fast which can lessen appreciation of good writing. Once I adjusted, I found that entering into Proust's world was worth the time.

History

When I was growing up in the 50's and 60's, there was a common perception of generational progression, that I and my peers would be better off and have more opportunities than our parents. This assumption of progress goes back to America's founding as a quotation from John Adams shows:  "I am a revolutionary so that my son can be a farmer and his son a poet."

History as progress has not been universally accepted.  Some Eastern cultures see history as cyclical while Medieval Europeans viewed history linearly but as proceeding towards a Biblical end-time. As a history major in college, I began to question my assumption of historical progress and to particularly question whether humans ever made any moral improvement. These were years not long after the Jewish Holocaust and the other horrors of WWII, and seeing any moral progress in the face of these events was discouraging. The best I could do was to rationalize that humans were no worse in behavior now than in the past but that technology provided means to kill on a larger scale. Since then, a greater knowledge of the damage industrialism has inflicted on the environment calls the desirability of even technological progress into question.

I suppose I never really ceased thinking about these and other questions about history. The protagonist of a novel I recently read is a history teacher who, along with his wife, are facing life crises. In Waterland by Graham Swift, the history teacher deals with the crises by recounting to the reader and sometimes to his classes the history of his relationship with his wife, the history of his family, and the history of his region in England. History, he says, is man's search for explanation, and telling the stories is, I believe, his attempt to understand how his life got to where it is.

This history teacher is skeptical of idea of progress: "So-called forward movements of civilization, whether moral or technological, have invariably brought with them an accompanying regression" and he cites examples such as the spread of Christianity as causing "wars, butcheries, inquisitions, and other forms of barbarity" and the invention of the steam engine leading to the "miseries of industrial exploitation and to little children working sixteen hours a day in coal mines." He touches on the Great Man and cyclical theories of history but not on economic determinism, but this is a novel not a textbook.

Americans, I am told, are increasingly doubtful their children will lead lives as good as theirs, and the United States is falling behind many other countries in terms of social mobility. It's hard to retain the optimism of historical progress, generational or otherwise.

A description of a legend's music that captures it for me

"...there was just something different in Mr. Williams's music, the way some paintings are more vivid, more real than others..."

This was from Rick Bragg's book Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story writing not about Jerry Lee but about Hank Williams.  For years I've tried to express what stands apart about Hank Williams's music, and I admire how Bragg puts it. His words about Williams's music also describe the way I feel about Hemingway's writing about fishing and the outdoors as compared with the thousands of words I've read from other writers, many of them quite skilled.

Lately Pam has brought back from the local library a number of memoirs and biographies of musicians- Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, Gil Scott-Heron, and all contained some worthwhile reading, but Rick Bragg's book about Jerry Lee has been the most fun.  He has an incredibly colorful subject, the expression "larger than life" actually seems too tame to describe someone as outlandish as Jerry Lee Lewis. Bragg is a skillful writer and, also from the deep south, he has a feel for its land and people.  He made me wonder if another place or time could have produced a Jerry Lee.

Bragg has a southerner's gift for story-telling, and his subject's antics over the years produces many great stories.  Since reading this book, I can't help passing on some of these stories to my friends and family at any opportunity.

"But nobody loved it more..."

In a collection of Tom McGuane short stories I've been reading, one character asks an older man who used to fish with his father whether his father was a great fisherman.  "Not really, " the older man replied, "but nobody loved it more."

This is actually the second time McGuane has used this piece of dialogue.  I remembered reading it years ago, and it stayed in my head because I always thought it was a beautiful thing to say about a fisherman.  I've read a lot of McGuane and was convinced I recalled the quote from one of his essays and spent a couple of unsuccessful hours this afternoon going through collections of fishing essays in my extensive library of outdoors books trying to find the place it first appeared.  Then Pam came home and found the source within a few minutes of searching the internet.  (I had also tried the internet, but she's much better finding things in general, whether on the internet or in the refrigerator.)

McGuane originally used the exchange in a novel, one of the few we don't own, so I apparently read a public library copy.  It's such a great quote it deserves repeating.  I wouldn't be upset if it was said about me and would readily understand if some friends who fished with me only a few times when I happened to be having bad days (casting in the trees, poorly tied knots, etc.) could've concluded that for a guy who talks about fishing so much, I'm actually not that good at it.  By contrast, someone who happened to have observed me when everything seemed to going great might believe me better than I am.  Either way, I would hope that to anyone it would be obvious that nobody loves fishing more than I do.

Aha!

In my English Literature course we recently read Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" poem, and I was struck by the similarity in thought of a passage in it to the lines at the end of one of my favorite novels, A River Runs Through It.  I was so struck that I was certain that author Norman MacLean must have been familiar with the poem and remembered that MacLean had been a college professor.  Checking with Wiki on the internet told me that he indeed was an English professor and that his specialty was....the Romantic Poets! 

The passage in Wordsworth concerns the interconnection of all things and reads:

 "A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts;  a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things..."

MacLean wrote:

"Eventually all things merge into one and then a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs under rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs." 

 You may love a passage in a book as I have that one and still come to a further understanding of it after 4o years.

Royal Blood by Eric Jager

Rather than just mentioning a recently read book in passing because of a train of thought it triggered, I am writing this to specifically recommend one. 

The story of Royal Blood begins with the discovery in the 1660's of a thirty foot parchment scroll which was the original police report of a murder in Paris 250 years earlier, in 1407.  In charge of the investigation was Guillaume de Tignonville, provost of Paris, who in many ways was history's first detective.  Rather than relying on the standard crime-solving technique of the day, forced confession through torture, he directed a massive investigation through an examination of the crime scene, the dispositions of witnesses, and countless interviews with anyone who could possibly possess a helpful lead in his honest and courageous search for the truth.

In his epilogue, author Eric Jager writes of the scroll in and doing so zeros in on some of the reasons I find his book so fascinating:

"Besides providing a record of Guillaume's diligent sleuthing, the scroll preserves the only lasting trace of dozens of ordinary Parisians otherwise lost to history.  The events of November 1407 lit up their lives like a flash of lightning and the provost's scribes briefly capture their excited and worried voices, which then fell into silence and near oblivion.  Theirs is a story of everyday life and an extraordinary crime.  Centuries later, they speak to us:  the baker and the broker, the water carrier and the florist, the interrogator and the carpenter's apprentice- and, of course, the provost himself."

I like views into everyday life among ordinary people in the past.  That's why I like looking at paintings from the Dutch Renaissance, and this was indeed an extraordinary crime, a major assassination whose fall-out was felt throughout France and beyond the borders.

It's difficult to make a comparison with the assassination of Louis of Orleans to a hypothetical modern situation.  Louis was the king's brother and often the default acting king when his brother was incapacitated by one of his periods of insanity. Since France was involved in the Hundred Years War with England, we can wonder what if Franklin Roosevelt was so ailing during much of WWII that his Vice President assumed the responsibilities of his office and then was assassinated?  This isn't a satisfactory comparison because, among other reasons, it doesn't take into account the defused power structure of feudalism and how a feudal country can break apart under stress.

In addition to the glimpse it provides into the lives of everyday people, Royal Blood gives the reader insight into the Medieval tensions between the universities and the surrounding communities ("Town and Gown"), the judicial system and the military weaponry of the day, and the personal and political rivalries among the French and their English enemies. 

Royal Blood also contains enough sex and violence to hold our attention when we're less inclined towards appreciating historical themes.  Its story is suspenseful and contains a hero.  A dust jacket blurb about another of Jager's books says it should be the one to read if one reads only one book about the Middle Ages, but I think that description could also apply to this one.

We are what we do

For some time I've thought that people should be judged morally on their actions, what they say and do because we don't really know what's in their hearts.  A person, for example, may have bigoted and prejudiced thoughts, but if they don't talk or act on those thoughts, to me they are not bigots.  I cannot look into souls.  I've come to believe that, in my case at least, self-identity is similarly determined by actions.  For the past forty years this identity has been as a husband, father, businessman, fisherman, etc. because most of my daily actions were in accordance with those categories.  While I have my political beliefs, taste in music, and other things important to me, those are subordinate to the more important categories above because there are less actions associated.

I'm thinking these thoughts because of a passage in a novel I just read, Richard Ford's Let Me Be Frank With You.  On his way to visit his ex-wife, the protagonist muses that she is an essentialist who believes we all have essential selves, a character we cannot do anything about.  This contrasts to his beliefs that "we have only what we did yesterday, what we do today, and what we might still do."  He is about my age and has come to act and view himself according to what he calls his "Default Self" although he concedes "it's not that different from a bedrock self, except it's our creation, rather than us being its."

This Default Self concept sounds similar to thoughts I've recently had about a certain freedom concerning the stage of life I share with Ford's character.  In the role of a manager in business and as a father, I felt I had to act at times in ways I would have preferred not to, to enforce rules and push people away from or in line with certain behaviors.  Now, my children are grown and I no longer work, so my actions are more consistent with what I want to do rather than what I feel I have to do.  Ford's protagonist would probably say that whatever I do now is consciously my creation of a Default Self whereas his wife would probably say I'm acting now more in line with my essential character.   Whichever the interpretation, it is one of the better aspects of growing old.

Gotta listen to the songbirds

Like most people who like the outdoors, I notice birds.  The reason that many non-birders own bird books is that we want to identify and have some understanding of what we are seeing. While I am familiar with some bird sounds- the cranky screech of a disturbed great blue heron and the high pitched call of a hawk (inappropriate, I always felt, for such a fierce bird), I recently realized that I can't really identify any song birds by their calls.

It was Lyanda Lynn Haupt's The Urban Bestiary which called my attention to this deficiency in my nature appreciation.  Her book contains tons of information about a variety of animals which may be found in cities and close-in and far-out suburbs, and she writes with wit and eloquence.  Chapters are devoted to coyotes, moles, squirrels, bears and others, but her real love seems to be birds.  She wants others to share this love by tuning in to all aspects these creatures and advises the useful beginning point of  learning the robin's song.  "If you do this", she says, "you will be more familiar with birds than 98% of Americans."

Many of the song birds (or perching birds or passerines) have left the area for the season, but some will remain and I'm developing the habit of listening more closely while outdoors.  Using all our senses is a way of being in greater touch with the earth, a way of being more alive.

Arts and Sciences

Writing about a recent TV debate on whether the nature of Islam conflicts with Western values of tolerance, Slate Magazine writer Andrew O'Hehir argues against the view of Islam critics TV host Bill Maher and especially his guest Sam Harris.  For O'Hehir, Harris' opinion is colored by his particular brand of atheism which views religion as "failed science."

This attack on Islam as opposed to those who take a more conciliatory attitude about the religion reflects, according to O'Hehir, the difference between science majors and liberal arts majors.  He writes, "When I say that one side is primarily concerned with facts and the other with narrative, or that one side understands the world primarily in subjective, experiential, and relativistic terms while the other focuses on objective and quantifiable phenomena and binary true-false questions, that may help us frame the profound mutual misunderstanding at work.  Harris' conception of religion as bad science, which seems like a ludicrous  misreading to those who understand religion as a mythic force that shapes community and collective meaning, is a classic example.  One side insists that the only important question is whether the truth claims of religion are actually true;  the other side says the question doesn't even matter, and then wonders what 'truth' is anyway.  It's the overly literal-minded versus the hopelessly vague."

Author Lyanda Haupt in The Urban Beastiary sees no conflict in incorporating both myth and science in her descriptions of animals.  Early in the book, she quotes Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth that "mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings."  Armstrong considers it "a mistake to regard myth as an inferior mode of thought which can be cast aside when humans have attained the age of reason.  Mythology is not an early attempt at history and does not claim that its tales are objective fact.  Like a novel, an opera, or a ballet, myth is make-believe;  it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities."

My own view is closer to Haupt's and Armstrong's than to O'Hehir's.  My degree in history 44 years ago came from the University of Maryland's College of Arts and Sciences.  It is now the College of Arts and Humanities, but the old name better suits me.  As I wrote in this blog last December in a post titled "Between Poetry and Science", I'm comfortable in that position, respecting both the scientist systematically extending our knowledge and the artist inspiring us.

Hemingway and Faulkner as Hunters

Both Nobel Prize-winning writers, their lifetimes spanned almost exactly the same years.  Their writing styles were dramatically different, but the outdoors figured prominently in their lives and in their writing.  Hemingway wrote about both hunting and fishing whereas Faulkner, to my knowledge at least, mentioned fishing only in passing, but the two activities are essentially the same with different quarry and usually with different tools.

Hemingway was a world traveler, and much of his writing about hunting takes place in Africa.  In his short stories and in The Green Hills of Africa he is often very precise about the specific gun calibers and bullets used.  The locales of his fishing stories span from Michigan to Spain and to Cuba and are similarly detailed about equipment and technique.  Faulkner focused on his home area in northwest Mississippi, and although very descriptive of the terrain and the hunt he gave only a general description of the gun, letting the reader know not much more than whether it was a rifle or shotgun.

Pursuit of fish or game heightens senses:  sight, sound, and smell.  In social situations, Faulkner quietly watched and listened.  Hemingway was quoted as saying he disliked cigarette smoking because as a hunter he was sensitive to the disagreeable smell.

Hunting and fishing have not been necessities for most people in the world for some time, and those of us who are drawn to these activities often ponder what it is about them which entices us.  This pondering leads some to questioning about humans' place in nature and how other human activities might reflect these very basic urges.  For me, in very different ways both Hemingway's and Faulkner's writings display these questions.

Faulkner and Race Relations

Like many readers, I don't find William Faulkner's novels easy-going.  The pace is slow, the sentences long, and the action tends to meander along.  However, during the spring semester at the University of Maryland,  I sat in one day on an English course that featured a student presentation on his last novel, The Reivers, and decided to read it.  I enjoyed the book very much, and it caused me to think about Faulkner's attitude about race.

In general William Faulkner was a white southerner of his time.  In the three or four of his novels I've read, African-American characters appear often, but they tend to behave in accordance with the accepted mores of the Deep South in the first half of the 20th century.  I don't believe Faulkner ever politically challenged these practices, but I do think he saw black Mississippians as individuals. 

In The Reivers, Faulkner portrayed his black characters as he does his white characters in that some were smart, others not, some were honest while others deceitful, and some were kind, and others less so.  One character in particular, Ned, is generally the smartest guy in the room in his scenes although he is generally careful in showing off his intelligence around whites.  The most despicable characters are white, and they often display their meanness and dishonesty in their interactions with the black characters.  In these choices he made about characters and action, I believe Faulkner was communicating something about his attitude about black people.  At the time The Reivers was published in 1962, the first signs of change regarding race relations in America were taking place.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott was six years earlier, and the Greensboro sit-ins began two years earlier.  Faulkner had to have been conscious of these occurrences and how they would effect what was sometimes called the southern way of life.

The Reivers is primarily a coming-of-age story, and the main character, an 11 year-old boy, at one point reflects on his growing anger as he becomes aware of how people act in the world.  Among the targets of this anger are "white people behaving exactly as white people bragged that only Negroes behaved."  Since Faulkner died the year The Reivers was published, I choose to think that at the end of his life this is what Faulkner thought.

Neil Young looks back

A cliché about the 1960's is that if you remember them you weren't there.  This always struck me as not only untrue but confusing because it implies that the notorious substance use of that decade would have wrecked the memories of the participants.  Maybe so if the substance was alcohol, but the dominant drugs of the sixties were marijuana and LSD.  Like a lot of us, Neil Young discovered marijuana in the sixties, and he continued using it until recently yet remembers most everything.

His memoir is casually conversational, and at times he speaks directly to the reader in a stream-of-conscious manner.  He mentions once that the sequence of the songs on any of his albums is important to him, so I assume the sequence that he recounts his life is likewise deliberate.  It certainly isn't chronological.  It probably also isn't an oversight that he doesn't furnish an index, something I find useful in any nonfiction, but he may have decided an index might encourage picking and reading subjects at will when he wants to reader to go through the book in order.  My initial reading was slow because I sometimes put it aside to do some reading for my classes, not because it was ponderous.  Indeed, it was a fun read, and when I completed it I went back to the beginning and skimmed back through it.

Neil Young strikes me as a sincere man who is honest about his faults. When he tells about first driving from his native Canada to California with a small group of young men and women, he describes deciding with another traveler to abandon the rest of group without warning.  He doesn't express any guilt over this, but a few pages later he recounts a conversation with fellow musician Stephen Stills years later in which they discussed the concept of loyalty and the conflict with the drive to be continually moving forward.  He also admits to avoiding confrontation many times in his life.

Young's life has not been entirely one long hippie joy ride.  Since childhood, he has been beset with serious health issues, and the health issues he has had to deal with regarding two of his sons have been daunting.  By many accounts other than his own, he has faced these issues with courage and persistence and has been a loyal and loving father and husband for over thirty years.  He continually expresses love and praise for his friends and family and has very few negative things to say about anyone.

The reader hears a lot of detail about things of importance to Young:  guitars, model trains, cars, but ultimately it's the music, always there in the background when it isn't the dominant subject.  I think I'll listen to some Neil right now.

Between Poetry and Science

When outdoors I'm not inclined to quantify.  I often say about catching fish that I lose count after three, and although said jokingly it's generally true and comes from this disinclination.  Since most of my fishing is catch and release, counting and measuring fish to comply with laws is generally not an issue.  When I plan to retain my catch it's usually on someone else's boat on the Bay, and because captains are conscientious about fishing regulations they keep track of size and number of fish without depending on the anglers.

In the business world where I worked for about 40 years, I quantified in order to make and justify decisions.  Time, money, output and other variables were tracked and analyzed constantly.  Doing so was an ingrained habit for me at work, but outdoors I behave differently. If I were a scientist systematically expanding our knowledge of nature, I wouldn't have this freedom.  A book I recently read, Why Birds Sing by David Rothenberg, contains a passage which describes this difference:

"The response of nineteenth-century naturalists to bird song falls somewhere in the valley between science and poetry.  A  naturalist spends long hours paying complete attention to nature, not to conduct experiments or derive a satisfaction in certainty, but for the sheer pleasure of awareness.  To look, listen, and learn, and to come home with that kind of knowledge that is closer to acquaintance, to gain a familiarity with the world of birds, to share in their experience, not necessarily to explain it."

Between a scientist and a poet seems like a comfortable place whether the focus is birds or fish or anything else in nature.  One accumulates data to test a hypothesis, and the other obtains inspiration for his art.  Those of us in the middle are free to experience the Now.

 

The Beat Goes On

Rhythms surround us and are within us.  Near the ocean I become very conscious of the rhythms of the tides going in and out.  On those visits I often say that I want to get in tune with those rhythms, probably from some vague sense that if the gravitational pull of the moon and sun has such dramatic effect on the ocean, then it probably can also affect my body which is mostly water.  That thinking can lead to pondering about the rhythms of the rotations of the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun, one forming our month and the other our year.  It all marks time.

Our internal rhythm comes from our hearts beating approximately 60 times a minute.  Humans can maintain rhythms somewhat faster and somewhat slower than that pulse, but if we try to keep up a beat much faster or slower it breaks down. Whales, many times larger than a human, can maintain a rhythm as slow as every two minutes as they sing while the sounds of small insects like crickets and cicadas display very speedy, complex rhythms. And there is another, much slower rhythm associated with some cicadas in North America: the 17 year cycle of their emergence from the longest gestation period of any animal.

Author David Rothenberg has written a trilogy of books concerning animal noises which he considers from a musical stand point.  His book on insects, Bug Music, How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise, I read and reread because of its emphasis on rhythm.  He believes early man learned rhythm by listening to the insects of the forest sing at night.  You could consider this is as the origin of music if you view music as essentially rhythm, as did the poet Ezra Pound who Rothenberg quotes:  "Music is pure rhythm, pure rhythm and nothing else, for the variations in pitches is the variation of rhythms of the individual notes, and harmony is nothing but the blending of these individual rhythms."  Rothenberg comments, "This far-reaching poet got the insight that frequency is also rhythm, the point at which a vibration eases from steady tone to rapid beat is a key moment in the perception of the highest value of sound."

What is merely insect noise to many people is music to Rothenberg, "Bug music is the most ancient and the most primal music, the emergence of great rhythmic complexity from the minds of creatures who have no conception whatsoever what they are in the midst of.  Dance, song, evolution, transformation-really, do you need to know any of it to grasp the power of the beat?  Of course not."

The power of the beat.  Reading Rothenberg's book drove me to pull from my book shelf Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart's Drumming at the Edge of Magic, a Journey into the Spirit of Percussion.  His experiences of falling into a groove with his fellow musicians from the power of the beat, he came to understand as an example of entrainment, the inevitability of similar rhythms in close proximity to  synchronize.  The Law of Entrainment was first recognized in 1665 by the Dutch scientist Christian Huygens who noticed when two clocks were place next to each other they would soon begin ticking in perfect synchrony.  Both Hart and Rothenberg believe that entrainment has wide implications, that humans entrain with each other and the surrounding rhythms of the natural world.

I've come to believe that this is a way to look at our lives, that we are a part of these various pulses and vibrations.  Somehow, I feel like this awareness of the importance of rhythms brings us into closer harmony with our  bodies and our surroundings, closer to the universal beat.  And the beat goes on.

Summer reading

In addition to The Brothers Karamazov, I read three other novels this summer.  Although the authors are not likely to ever to placed alongside Dostoyevsky, they are generally respected despite working in lighter genres.

John Le Carre's Smiley's People was an excellent novel to read at the beach because there was sufficient time to read it in large chunks.  In smaller portions, such as in bed at night, the details would have been difficult to retain from one reading to the next.  Wars often produce writers who come to be associated with that conflict, and Le Carre might be remembered as the novelist of the Cold War.

Earlier this summer I read Carl Hiaasen's Bad Monkey.  Like his other novels I've read, it's a comically grotesque crime story with environmental themes.  Hiaasen is a native Floridian who's an avid outdoorsman, and underneath his humor is anger over the damage greed and corruption have done to his state.

I'm currently about to finish James Lee Burke's Light of the World.  Like Hiaasen, Burke's love of the outdoors shows in his writing.  Unlike Hiaasen's, However, there is very little humor in Burke's writing which generally feature acts of extreme violence.  This novel is set in Montana where I believe the author currently lives, but many of his books take place in his native Louisiana.  Both locations are accurately and vividly captured in his descriptive prose.  The plot of this one proceeds and climaxes like an action movie, but the observations about people as well as nature elevate it above similar stories.