The life cycle of perpetual hope: Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens

Jonathan Lethem has been one of my favorite writers since February 2007 when I read his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism” in Harper’s Magazine in my freshman dorm room at Syracuse University. I can still picture the unadorned, white-walled room with its two beds and desks. My roommate was pleasant enough, but his temperature ran hot, and he would leave the window cracked overnight to upstate winters. I’d lie awake shivering, thinking. When I stumbled across Lethem, I shivered with the electric thrill of his ideas. His worldview nurtured my own burgeoning cerebral sense of myself in the world. I do not use the “g” word lightly—I bristle that we must call the MacArthur Fellowship, which Lethem won in 2005, the genius grant—but the profundity and lasting influence of that essay tempt me. I have since read two of Lethem’s essay collections, The Ecstasy of Influence and The Disappointment Artist, and almost all of his novels: Gun, with Occasional Music, Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, Girl in Landscape, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, and Dissident Gardens. In 2013, Lethem published Dissident Gardens into the wake of the 2007-2008 global economic crisis and the fall of 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement (“We are the 99%!”). The book incorporates these contemporary upheavals into a century of revolutionary angst and ideology. The book’s six protagonist characters are motivated by social and psychological forces which we might variously call revolutionary animus, resistance to hegemonic systems, radical hope, and persistence in defeat. In this historical novel, Lethem profiles four generations that come of age into personal and historic disappointment. Like most of Lethem's more social-realism work—he also works a sci-fi angle—the book centers on New York City, where he grew up. It starts out in the city in the 1930s in Queens and tends to return there, despite several characters escapes. Lethem’s characters are bound together by social relationships and ideological tendency towards revolutionary ideas, often subtle. Otherwise, they are very different. Lethem writes from the perspective of a disillusioned Jewish communist, Rose; Rose’s horny, nerdy, cousin, Lenny; Rose’s hippyish revolutionary daughter, Miriam; Rose’s black cop lover’s fat, black, and gay chess prodigy turned cultural theorist professor, Cicero; Miriam’s husband, the Irish Protestant turned Greenwich Village folk singer Tommy Gogan; and Miriam and Tommy’s kid, Sergius, who becomes a music teacher and Occupy Wall Street wannabe. If the list of names and characteristics boggles your mind, consider how much erudition and skill Lethem must bring to bear to master so many minds and times. This is a bit of a break for Lethem, who has rarely addressed identity so nakedly in his novels. Lethem’s mother is Jewish, and his relationship to various strands of Jewish experience is clearly important, if nuanced and layered, like anything Lethem. In earlier novels, Jewish markers hide in plain sight, requiring no special qualifications to decode, but rarely stated outright. Jewish identity is an important but not integral layer of experience, additive, but not necessary to enjoy or understand the books. Protagonists Lionel Essrog of Motherless Brooklyn and Dylan Ebdus of Fortress of Solitude may seem Jewish by their names, if nothing else. Ebdus is finally described as a Jew by his girlfriend on page 460, who observes that he has always called Jewishiness the least important part of his identity. In Dissident Gardens, Jewishness is central. Lethem illuminates identity from inside and out, the way it is experienced. Even when we see the world from a non-Jewish character, Jews play central roles. Folk singer Tommy Gogan’s manager is Jewish, his Jewishness as important in the 1960s Greenwich Village scene as that of Bob Dylan and Jack Elliott, "the most authentic cowboy singer Tommy or anyone had met." Tommy “stalks chimeras of authenticity in the counterfeit world,” pondering the unparalleled and exalted fakery of these Jewish folk figures, as Lethem puts it. Lethem seems to be both wrestling with and celebrating the history of American Jews in New York, his own history. Three of the six protagonists are Jewish: Rose, Lenny, and Miriam. They come first and Rose and Miriam cast influence on the rest. But their identity is no more vital or exhaustively plumbed than that of Cicero, Tommy, and Sergius. Lethem treats Jewish experience as black experience, gay experience, female experience, immigrant experience, Commie experience, Queens experience, radical hope, revolutionary zeal, striving and disappointment, love and disillusion, all, with great humanity and scintillating detail. To some degree, markers and boundaries blend or fade into the mosaic. More importantly, Lethem writes individuals, not stereotypes, communities, or generalities. Each character is singular and whole. Tommy Gogan arrives like any number of immigrants into New York City’s 1960s cultural ferment, invited by two older brothers to join their Irish folk trio. He soon finds himself an exalted fake, and grows disillusioned with the narrow stereotype of Irish culture he and his brothers feel forced to fit into. He doesn’t seem capable of finding himself, or fitting his found self into New York City, so he makes a new self, or is made anew. Tommy gravitates to what he sees as authentic America: black, rural blues. But can he make authentic what is not his, and will anybody care anyway? Cicero ends up in a similar mess. He escapes New York to get a PhD in the kind of convoluted cultural theory that is so deep and devious it’s devoid of meaning. As a gay black man at Princeton, in buttoned-up New Jersey suburbs, he escapes right back to New York City to participate in anonymous orgies in uptown trailers, and to visit Rose. Lethem builds this sense of recurrence. Lethem celebrates detail with a discriminating and omnivorous eye. Everything deserves his attention, a riff. Here are some examples: “The morbidity behind the sales pitch.” “Fershlugginer blues.” Shea Stadium, a "Sterno can in Band-Aids of orange and blue" that "heaved into view two stops before the Willets Point exit." Library books arranged on a bookshelf. Bob Dylan. Cicero’s dreadlocks. German chocolate. Jazz. Dim Sum is Chinese soul food. He balances the concrete with the abstract; pop culture with ideology, history and politics; sex and ideas. Kid Cicero wonders how Miriam makes it seem like "everything was secretly and sexily connected." Kid Cicero falls innocently in love with Miriam because of the “efflorescence of Miriam’s details.” You might wonder, as I did, what is efflorescence? It is the migration of a salt to the surface of a porous material, or the action or process of developing and unfolding as if coming into flower. Efflorescence is a process. Lethem's character become, find, strive, fall, hope and despair. They are born and molded into being in front us in the face of implacable forces. They play parts, affix themselves to causes, improvise identities, and clutch at each other for purchase in a world where change happens at levels entirely out of their control. They are not heroes slaying dragons. They face more prosaic and for that more heroic, more revolutionary challenges. "The true Communist pulled the tab on another tin of sardines in her kitchen...The true Communist was waiting." Dissident Gardens is Jonatham Lethem's most ambitious novel yet. It’s wise, compassionate, brilliant, wide-ranging. Not every section is a home run. Some set pieces, like Sandinistas and Archie Bunker, strain my appreciation. Some unruly demises seem more preposterous than meaningfully symbolic, or sympathetic. Lethem does a better job winding up than winding down. He has a magic for connecting everything in seamless, sinuous sentences, but sometimes I got fatigued by them, or lost in them. Still, you could do worse than getting lost in Lethem’s intricate and rich worlds.

Like the characters in Dissident Gardens, I latch on to Lethem's voice and, to me, ingenuous striving to make meaning (not to mention money) in open art. I identify myself with his many identifications. I feel the richer for it. A decade and counting, and I am still mesmerized. 

Too much text

Vladstudio's Quiet Night.

Dis and braggadocio in Icelandic Sagas: Part III

How are the medieval writings of Icelanders, notably the sagas, like contemporary American rap music? In content, each raises the exchange of threats and insults to the level of ritual. I discuss the art of dis, or trash talk, in Part I of this series. What about the conditions in which the sagas and rap music came into being? I don't want to make too much out of the similarities, but there are some.

Each was born in violence. Rap blossomed in the poverty and systemized, racialized violence against African American and immigrant communities in American cities. Following on the heels of the blues and hard jazz, hip-hop culture came of age after rust-belt declines, white flight, crack epidemic, and the draconian policing and racialized sentencing that devastated black men. The sagas were written down in relatively peaceful, settler Iceland, but following centuries of oral tradition that idolized old-time Viking ways. In historical works, Scandinavians went Viking: raiding, trading, and exploring across great swaths of the known world, from Constantinople to the mythic north and North America. During these times, Scandinavians organized into warring factions following local chieftains and eventually kings. Not only did bands go abroad in high Viking style, they also warred among themselves. In independent Iceland of the 12th and 13th centuries poverty was acute, the land was in decline due to overuse and an encroaching 'Little Ice Age', there was no centralized state, and disagreements were adjudicated in large part by numbers and the sword.

The sagas were, and rap lyrics are, meant to be delivered verbally: recited out loud to an audience. Whereas rappers often speak with their own voice in the first person, saga orators take on the voices of characters from the past, from their collective past. Artists of both cultures engage in verbal contests that are more than symbolic. At stake are honor, reputation, and economic winnings. The words are important, verbal skills valued. Dis and bragadoccio enable speakers to show off and tear down their enemies at the same time, one step short of pulling out a spear or glock. These creative forms comprise medieval flyting and reach an artistic pinnacle in modern rap music, where whole songs are often dedicated to them.

Separated as they may be by close to a century, it’s no surprise that performers from both art forms come out swinging, so to speak. There’s a neat parallel between Loki’s boasting, “If it’s just we two who wrangle with wounding words: I’ll turn out rich in my replies,” and Big Daddy Kane’s boasting, “I'm the authentic poet to get lyrical / For you to beat me, it's gonna take a miracle.” Writers and performers talked themselves up to distinguish themselves, trash their competition, and capture attention.

Each art focuses on manhood and the loss of manhood in sexual deviancy, with rappers referring to “penis envy” and the Sagas “cock-craving.” Homophobia comes as no surprise in these rather male-dominated contexts, found in the many taunts and insults from Odin saying Loki “played the witch” to Eminem commanding a would-be competitor, presumed male, to “suck a dick.” In the Old Norse Poem Lokasenna, Njord says that Loki has “borne babies himself,” reference to another myth when Loki transforms into a mare and gets knocked up by a stallion (his babies are horrific monsters). This may be akin to modern transphobia.

Much rap music, especially early rap, has been one-sidedly misogynistic in a way that the sagas and other medieval Icelandic texts often avoid. The sagas present roles for women that are often more complicated, or multiple. But there is a place in both art forms for powerful women. Female rappers, like Niki Minaj who calls herself, “A bad bitch,” have found ways to exercise their verbal, sexual, and commercial power and subvert the male-dominated preserves of rap culture. In these lady wordsmiths, we see saga women like Gunnhild, who curses Hrut not to enjoy sexual pleasure with his intended in Njal's Saga, and the indomitable Spes, who cuckolds her unimpressive husband with Thorstein, a manful Icelander, in Constantinople in Grettir's Saga.

The presence of potty and scatological humor in Icelandic and contemporary texts says much about the supposed evolution of art over time. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Dis and braggadocio in Icelandic Sagas: Part II

In the Icelandic Sagas and Old Norse Myth, people routinely get so mad, over who gets to strip a beached whale, say, that they maim and kill each other. Occasionally, they demonstrate an odd kind of restraint, limiting the exchange to wounding words. It's obvious why medieval authors would have chosen to include these rich skeins of dialogue. They are entertaining.

The stylized battle of words is called flyting. Literary scholars recognize it as a compositional unit in Old Norse and also Celtic texts. In a flyting, combatants exchange boasts, threats, insults, and challenges the way they might exchange blows in a physical battle. Some have described flyting as more like a duel, a symmetrical back and forth between two speakers. But this is inessential and inaccurate in medieval Icelandic writing. I cite three examples of flyting (also called senna) where at least three people sling words and more spectate. In Lokasenna, Loki bandies words with many Aesir. In Njal’s Saga, Skarphedin trades insults and threats with various chieftains. In Bandamanna Saga, Odleif excoriates the scheming chieftains then passes off the responsibility to Egil Skulason, though some scholars see these as two separate flyting.

Carol Clover traces the linguistic, historical, and literary origins of the flyting into the muddy waters of senna, which she calls “quarrel” and encompassed the threats and insults traded, and Mannjafnaðr, which means “man-comparison” and was a social process of matching two men’s reputations, and so captures boasting. Senna is specifically a kind of medieval trash talk, whereas the proud words and phrases of Mannjafnaðr are like modern braggadocio. According to Clover, while there may have at some point been basis for delineating between senna and Mannjafnaðr, by the time Norse writings appear, they have mixed into one event we call the flyting. Clover adds a third ingredient to the flyting, nið, “the vague but spectacular category of sexual defamation for which Norse literature is rightly famous.” Each flyting is unique, although they all pull on the literary cliches and conventions of the type, to more or less degree, including nið.

The flyting can stand alone as it does to some degree in Lokasenna, or be embedded in a larger work. Embedded, it can move narrative forward. In the flyting in Njal’s Saga, Skarphedin bandies barbed words with the chieftains he and his kin are courting for support in their Althing case over Hoskuld’s killing. Skarphedin’s very presence seems inimical to recruiting when each chieftain formulaically ask the band leader Asgrim who he is, describing him as “big and frightening,” “pale-looking,” “sharp-featured,” “wicked,” “luckless,” “fierce but troll-like” and “as if he had come out of a sea-cliff.” If Skarphedin’s presence is bad for the cause, his words are worse. He calls Haf the Wealthy a “milksop.” His remarks repeatedly destroy their chance of winning support to the point that Asgrim orders him to tone it down before their meeting with Thorkel Bully. Skarphedin just grins. He then threatens Thorkel Bully with his axe, saying, “I’ve never lifted a weapon against any man without hitting my mark,” and forces Thorkel to stand down. When Gudmund the Powerful hears about the exchange, he decides to support the Njalssons after all.

The voluble verbal dialogue of the flyting flies in the face of the stereotype some have of the sagas as stark and laconic in a particularly Scandinavian way.

Dis and braggadocio in Icelandic Sagas: Part I

You need not look far to find scholars effusively praising the sagas and mythological writings of Icelanders. In her book, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough says, “The sagas are medieval Iceland’s unparalleled storytelling legacy to the world.” In the Guardian, Ben Myers asks, “The Icelandic Sagas: Europe's most important book?” Nancy Marie Brown points out that the sagas are superlative not only for literary and historical merit, but because we have them: “More medieval literature exists in Icelandic than in any other European language except Latin.”

We adulate the sagas. They have inspired luminaries from J.R.R. Tolkein and W.H. Auden to David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman. It may come as a surprise to many just how smutty and wry they can be.

In a memorable episode in Njal's Saga, an Icelandic Chieftain visits Norway. He falls under the spell, so to speak, of the king's mature mother. Gunnhild arranges for Hrut spend nights with her in "the upper chamber.” She shows him patronage. Hrut gains glory in battle, as doughty Icelanders were wont to do in Norway. After a while, he seeks to return home to Iceland, much the richer. Gunnhild does not try to stop him, lavishing gifts, but inquires if he has a sweetheart back home. Hrut says no, but Gunnhild knows. She is a sorceress in truth, and curses him so he will not please his intended wife. Back home, Hrut marries Unn, but their marriage is troubled. Unn eventually confesses to her father: “When he comes to me his penis is so large that he can't have any satisfaction from me, and we've both tried every possible way to enjoy each other, but nothing works.”

The sagas are timeless because of their creative deployments of comedy, sex, rough talk, and of course violence, not in spite of them. These elements continue to entertain, surprise, and delight readers.

Nowhere is such material more concentrated than in the flyting, a compositional unit in literary theory, used in medieval Old Norse and also Old Irish literature. The flyting, also called senna, was a stylized battle of words. In a flyting, combatants exchange boasts, threats, insults, and challenges the way they might exchange blows in a physical battle. The abuse takes on a deviant sexual cast. Not all of it is funny. Misogyny is not uncommon. Homophobia is routinized.

Much of the same can be said of contemporary rap culture for much of its evolution from the late 1970s to today. I have found a striking similarity between Old Norse boasts and insults and the braggadocio and dis, or trash-talk, of contemporary rap. Like the saga writers of old, hip-hop vocalists have ritualized and raised these expressive forms to new heights.

To celebrate saga and rap affinities in off-color glory, I propose a new party game. It’s a group guessing game called “Medieval Iceland or Contemporary Rap?” The rules are simple. Someone stands and recites a line, lines, or line fragment from medieval Icelandic writings or contemporary rap. The text must contain an instance of boasting (braggadocio) or insults (trash-talk). The group’s job is to guess if the text is from contemporary rap or medieval Iceland. Bonus points for whoever can name the rapper/speaker or the song/text.

What, nothing comes to mind?

Well, let me suggest a few examples to get the party started (see references below):

1. “I’ve never lifted a weapon without hitting my mark.”
2. “If it’s just we two who wrangle with wounding words: I’ll turn out rich in my replies.”
3. “I'm the authentic poet to get lyrical / For you to beat me, it's gonna take a miracle.”
4. “I sell ice in the winter / I sell fire in hell … / I sell water to a well.” 
5. “Pass me the scalpel, I'll make an incision, I'll cut out the part of your brain that does the bitchin'.” 
6. “You have no more brains than an ox or an ass.” 
7. “Blame God, he blew breath in my lungs / Second to none, wicked, I turn wives to widows” 
8. “Why so silent, you puffed-up gods: have you nothing to say to me at all?” 
9. “Pick from your teeth the pieces from the mare’s ass you ate.” 
10. “You know we show love, motherfuckers, cause Venus sent me… / Pussies calling us assholes for penis envy.”
11. “It’s said you played the witch… / beat the drum like a lady-prophet… / that signals to me a cock-craver.”
12. “…you are the sweetheart of the troll… / he uses you as a woman every ninth night.”
13. “Suck a dick, the day you beat me pigs will fly out my ass… / The best part about me is I am not you.”
14. “Shut up … / As for each here inside … / at one time you’ve been their bitch.”
15. “A bad bitch … / First things first I'll eat your brains… / And if I'm fake I ain't notice cause my money ain't!”
16. “When you awaken, your manhood will be taken.”
17. “I never thought that you… would try to get money out of your manhood.”
18. “There are many who can’t tell by looking at him whether he’s a man or a woman.”
19. “Shut up and sit down… I don’t find it funny, though your servants laugh…, when you sit with your legs tight, rubbing your thighs together.”
20. “Even if I stuttered I would still shi shi shit on you.”
21. “Hymir’s daughters took you for a toilet / which is why they pissed in your mouth.”
22. “You’re dripping with shit, dairy maid.”
23. “You straddled your brother… / and then you farted.”
24. “Come now, you can’t have been sitting on your ear when you were standing up.”

See the answer key below.

Amigo mio

Amigo mio, señor menos sibilante que la brisa,
Hoja en perpetuo otoño,
Pétalo que viaje por paracaídas,
En los remolinos del viento.

Debajo de las plantas,
Y en fondos de arrugas profundas,
Encontrarás el último polvo de arena,
En que vagaban los discípulos de Jesucristo.

En la nave levitan cánticos trapenses,
En la cueva elevan levaduras indómitas,
En el marfil captan deseos destapados,
En la torre estiran océanos auroras,
En los astros cruzan cuerpos errantes.

Polilla empolvada,
Criatura de sombra y cielo,
Criatura de luz,
El viento roba tu esencia,
La brisa te lleva al numen,
Aleteas contra la noche,
Me encuentras
En un peldaño inadvertido.

Juggling

A few years ago, I picked up juggling on a whim. It was a thing. A thing I couldn't do. A thing I wanted to do. I started practicing.

For those that can or have tried to juggle, you know that while it's simple it's not easy. Two hands, three balls, repeated arcs. No complication, complexity, or chaos here. How hard can it be?

Try it. Depending on previous experience and fine motor skills, you might be able to pick up the three-ball cascade in a few hours of practice. That's all it takes: practice and pushing yourself. It took me days of 30-minute sessions.

Some beginners start with handkerchiefs, but following Teddy Roosevelt, I used what I had, where I was. Lacrosse balls, in the basement of my parents' house, where I was living. Days later, I graduated to juggling walks around the neighborhood, chasing dropped balls down hills. A cigar-smoking neighbor said, "Can you chew gum at the same time too?"

I branched out. I bounced balls against walls. I learned to run and juggle, or "joggle." I juggled in tandem with other people. I learned a few three ball tricks. I bought antique, laminated, balanced oak juggling 'clubs' on Craigslist and learned to juggle them without more than a split lip. Eventually, I ordered a set of fluorescent-green molded plastic clubs, which are more reliable, more resilient, and less likely to knock me out. Even more eventually, after a few years, I learned how to juggle four balls.

Over the years, I've learned a few things from juggling.

Redefine the possible

Fiction

I sat on the chapel steps and watched the drones dismantle the university. They emerged one by one from some crawl space onto the roof of the Hall of Languages. Tethered to an anchor on the ridge line, they pried off slate tiles, which smashed on concrete sidewalk or lodged in the grass like graves. I remembered reading Shelley in room 405 with Professor Van Trogle, “Look on my works ye mighty and despair!”

At the music college, the drones were further along, working from the top down. Slate, beams, nails and fasteners and insulation puffs littered the ground. The stately spires now looked like icecreamless cones. I watched as the centuries-old bell was trucked off in an overfull bin with the rest of the detritus. Drones chipped mortar from blocks of rust-hued sandstone steeped in Mozart, Sibelius, and Ives.

The drones were well trained. I could see that. They had been recruited from the fraternities and now labored in yellow hats and brown boots. Stolid. Professional. Unhesitating. They had found their calling. They destroyed simply, deliberately, secure in the task and connected to greater purpose. Building by building, desk by desk, book by book, blackboard by blackboard, they undid more like time than humans. It felt right.

We had agreed, all of us, to abandon the human project. The striving, building, colonizing, propagating. All that growth. Once we had agreed to stop, it was an easy step down slope to the destruction consensus. Why not let another force take over, find another model, not merely accept but facilitate time’s implacable erosion?

Not everyone was able to abide by the accord of organized erasure. I saw the first protesters arrive in jeans and sweatshirts, wearing work gloves, toting hammers. They milled in front of the chapel waving signs that said, “Destruction for All,” “Rosie the Rivener,” and “Civil De-Engineering 101!” Somebody played and then promptly smashed a guitar.

Campus security guards appeared to oppose the troublemakers, but they were outnumbered and apathetic and eventually sat, with me, on the steps. We didn’t budge when the group of protestors swelled past some threshold and stormed the chapel. Black high tops and knee-high boots swept past, keen to denature, tear down, obliterate.

The guards and I looked at each other and shrugged. Reason and consensus said look to time, but these students and community members followed another authority: their bodies. They worked to erase the human stain in the spirit it had spread, the only way they could. Now that this force was unleashed, we were powerless to resist it; we gave ourselves into the destruction.

Japan, photos

Japan, observations

I'm a mad dasher, I might as well admit it. I'm more comfortable running around, packing in the activities, losing myself in action. When I wake, I feel an urge to move, the stress of stillness...

Eerily quiet on the Hibiya line. Not a single voice heard in the packed subway car station after station. A girlish utterance absorbs into unforgiving human forms. What are these clean, self-contained, silent individuals on the express train thinking about this weekday morning...

The girl powdering her cheeks and limning her eyes smiling happy in her pouty prettiness. The guy massaging his temples. The advertisement banners hanging down from the center roof of the train that would never fly in New York; people'd put their heads through the paper ads like door curtains. The little subway dance, when someone needs to disembark around you, and you have to shuffle with tiny steps, like dancing with a six-year-old. People are more careful, quiet, and considerate here. Less of the closed-in fear and stressful almost-shoving induced by seemingly imminent door closings. I lean against the ‘back’ door and then it opens at the next station. An unexpected reversal. My logic proved faulty. Touché, subway...

What Manami said: there are two Japan's. Tokyo is not Japan!...

Japan, even Tokyo, is more structured and ordered . There's less of the disordered vibrancy that characterizes America; also called diversity or mix or "low" culture. Consider the ubiquitous umbrella, the occasional parasol...

Perfectionism is the opposite of fatalism...

Onsen tubs. Reed brooms. Raised train lines. Sea to mountain declines. Street fair food stalls. Monstrous insects. Sylvan shrines: Miyazaki...

At 5pm exactly monks ring temple bells all through Kyoto and people leave offices. Sidewalks throng with men and women in formal wear and black shoes. In some quarters, some women wear kimonos, white socks, wood sandals. They nod to smartphones waiting for the light to change...

The assumption now is that travelers will go on, are in the middle of long-term vagabondings. It wasn’t always like this. I remember the first time I heard about someone picking up and running off, how it surprised and titillated me. Now it's par for the course. Ever more wanderers...

Back at the hostel, the Italian says, “Where can I go to meet the girls!,” laughing and leering at the young Japanese woman, Siuri, staffing the hostel at 10pm. She’s says, “Why are you laughing? Haha. Too Italian!”...

Monstrous coy and carp jockey for position in the park pool. Feed me!...

I'm going to see some thing. I'm already imagining taking photos of the thing, showing those photos to other people, and how they will react to the photos. A mind divided upon itself will fall...

The vampire of regret sucks joy out of the present...

I grasp my walking stick and plan each foot-plant on the mountain trail. The wind blows the tree-tops; I think the trees are breathing. I follow their lead, take a deep breath and then another. I think, “The forest teaches you things. How to breathe, how to be patient, present...”—I blunder face-first into a spider web, drop my stick, and clutch face and hair in mortal fear...