Small Deaths

In a few days will mark the 7th anniversary of my father’s death .

I was living in Castiglion Fiorentino at the time, and had just returned to Austin for a job interview at the Harry Ransom Center, where I would soon become the Curator for Academic Affairs for a few years. During the interview process, of which there were several days, I was walking down Duval street, near where we had lived for many years and were renting out our house and I was staying in the garage apartment, and Charlton, a friend of the family, pulled over in his car and told me that people were looking for me, my father was in the hospital.

He died soon afterwards in Louisville, Kentucky, where he had been living, racing cars, teaching surgery, and living hard as he always had. I remember calling my ex-wife at the time, who was visiting Rome with her mother, and just said, “He didn’t make it.”

I flew to the funeral, attended it, gave a eulogy along with my sisters, and then went back to Austin, finished the job interview process, then flew back to Italy, where we were wrapping up an eventful two years, for better and for worse, with a small death of our own, and was about to repatriate to the US for what would just be a couple years before coming back to Europe, this time here in Belgium.

While I was a visiting professor at L’Università di Bologna, I had the pleasure of teaching a course on James Joyce’s Ulysses with the eminent Joycean scholar Rosa Maria Bosinelli, for whom I am grateful for introducing me into the international community of Joyceans in Italy and Europe.

It was during that course that I was able to flesh out the Ulysses portion of my book on James Joyce, and specifically with regards to the chapter that is often colloquially called “Circe” within the novel and is often considered to be the chapter that ushered in the post-modern within the novel. Superficially it is a play within a play, but that is nothing new, and Joyce already makes the cameo of such a literary device in the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter, directly given the nod to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” which itself plays a critical role in the novel, and most certainly in “Circe” as well.

My book is about the relationships of Memory and Death in the works of James Joyce, and how like the Ancient Greeks believed, we die two deaths. One death is the physical death, the small death, but the big one, is if we are forgotten. To truly kill an Ancient Greek was to forget him or her after his or her death.

Thinking about my father this week, there is still something hanging over me, as what happens with Odysseus. Odysseus learns from Circe that he must go to the Underworld and to propitiate a hungry ghost, that of Elpinor, a minor character at best, before he can unlock the lips of the dearly departed to find out more about his own Fate in the world of the living. Elpinor was amongst the partying crowd of Odysseus’ sailors, who in their revelry, got drunk and Elpinor fell to his death from a second-story roof, breaking his neck. The point was, though, is that Elpinor’s ghost was unquiet, or hungry, because he had been forgotten when the ships left again to try and return to Ithaca. As such, Odysseus had to pay homage to his ghost and to appease the Shades of Hades in order to continue with his own life.

Although I buried the hatchet with my father when he was alive as I remember our last conversation very well as it was from a small phone shop in Castiglion and for the first time in my life, instead of asking “why are you doing x, y, or z?” and this time the “x” factor was “living in Italy,” he just seemed genuinely happy for me. I am also very happy with my eulogy and that I was able to deliver one, given the timing of it all.

However, I still have part of his ashes here in my apartment, and there is something that I have yet to do. One of the few trips that I took with my father, and one of the few decent moments of that trip, was to Scotland when I was giving a paper in Dundee at a James Joyce conference there. We traveled some afterwards and one of the places we went was the battlefield of Bannockburn, where King Robert Bruce (whom my father dearly hoped we were named after, me being a Junior to his Senior, though he went by Bob) and his Scottish highlanders gave it to the British in the turning of the tide for Scottish Independence in 1314.

It was on that battlefield that I really sensed the power of place, or being in situ for an event in Time. My father was transformed, and I believe that that day he saw Robert the Bruce and his armies fighting. He was on the battlefield of Dharma , and the godhead of History was revealed to him. It was one of the times that I saw my father cry, though not the self-pitying maudlin crying that he was wont to do after too many beers, but tears of a lost Time and a lost Place.

It was then that I made a promise to myself to one day take his ashes, should he be cremated, which he was, to that field and to scatter them. I am sure that I will bring a recording of “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes or have a live piper go with me, for my dad would play that at screechingly loud volumes when he was enthused by the mood, and I believe that then I can put his ghost to rest, or at least the part of him that is with me in my apartment in its small urn. Though a small death in the grand scheme of things, he was my dad, and I loved him, faults and all.

I Saw Something Nasty in the Woodshed

Everyone's got one.

A woodshed that is.

We've all got our own paralyzing fears that have dictated our lives for so long, and we replay them over and over in our minds, injecting a soul-numbing toxicity into our well-being, but for what?

The problem with woodsheds is that we often spend too much time worrying about every else's woodshed instead of our own. We wonder, "what could be in his woodshed?" Or, "I bet her woodshed is dirtier than mine..." And, so on.

I had a woodshed in Austin, Texas, where we lived for many years. Our home was built in the 1930's era by hand by the original German owner. It was, as is typical, a wooden house on a pier and beam construction. Hand-crafted and felt like a home. Soon after moving in, we converted the garage, which was a euphemism for a gigantic cockroach apartment complex, complete with multi-plex theater, full-service gym, a few restaurants, a park for the little cockroaches, and, well, you get the picture. So, I gutted the garage and had Ed the construction guy from North Carolina, along with his hired-gun electrician, John, who inexplicably wore women's underwear and drove a Corvette, renovate the space into a utility area, darkroom, and guest bedroom with bathroom.

In order to not then just have a blank wall where the garage door used to be, I went to Home Depot (which was Builder's Square at the time) and got me a woodshed. (Actually, it was a toolshed, but that doesn't work for this extended metaphor from the movie...so, it was a woodshed). And, with some finagling, I put it together and soon had a bona fide, particle-board woodshed, complete with shingles. I painted it to match the color scheme of the house, which was semi-legendary in our neighborhood I might add, and voilà and voici, there was a woodshed that blended into the house.

However, there was one problem, it was of inferior quality to the house. It looked good and fine on the outside, but on the inside, it was a mess. Try as I might, there was no getting rid of the roaches in the woodshed, and the other myriad of insects, including termites. We had the entire grounds treated for the termites, and it worked for the house, but the damage was done on the woodshed. It continued to rot out over the years, and continued to get junkier and junkier, despite my feeble efforts to clean it out.

So, one day, after many years of having a sub-par woodshed, I emptied it and I tore it down. Razed it to the ground in a triumphant heap of debris and had it carted away with a neighboring construction project. Then, matched the old paint, re-painted the side of the garage and had two window put into that façade. Suddenly, it was a new garage apartment. On the outside, it looked great. On the inside, there was light and air.

Often we try and we try to maintain an old woodshed, or keep shoving junk in there and closing the door, thinking it will just go away, but it doesn't. Sooner or later, we have to tear the woodshed down. Raze it to the ground, and build up something better in its stead.

I admired the craftsmanship of that house, and I insulted it by placing a cheap, knock-off, fake woodshed next to it. A coat of paint won't cover the defects, so it was time to go.

Tearing down the woodshed gave me new perspective on things. You can see new possibilities which were clouded before, and when you don't have the woodshed any longer to throw your junk into, then you stop collecting junk.

Something to learn from the clip below as well. When we are so wrapped up in our own misery, we forget the world around us. Moreover, perspective is a wonderful thing to gain.

Keeping the Fire

I just returned from northern New Mexico, which is where I was born, and is easily the least "American" place in the contiguous 48, but at the same time, could only be found in the US.

I guess I don't have much to say beyond a simple list of the things that are so dear to me there for now.

--Kiva fireplaces

--More stars at night than you can shake a stick at

--Green Chile

--Shed Red sauce

--Chile Rellenos

--Sopapillas

--Ponderosa Pines and Douglass Firs

--Aspen, with or without leaves

--Deer, Elk, Turkeys (and Bears, oh My!)

--Colors

--Piñon in the air

--Mineral springs

--Camel Rock

--Sunrises and Sunsets over the mountains

--Ravens!

--The Slowness of Time

--The Vastness of Space

S.H.A.Z.A.M.!

I was moved to say, "Shazam!" today in a certain instance as it used to be one of my favorite interjections growing up in Kentucky, and what kid didn't want to be either Isis or Captain Marvel, seriously? They were the bomb. (I think that is clearly evinced by the popularity of the either real name or nickname of many women today across all races in America, that being Isis.)

Yet, like with many things, looking at things we knew in childhood can mean something quite different as adults. For me, the great challenge is to find the balance between the wonder of that little boy in Kentucky who wants to be Captain Marvel merely by shouting out "Shazam!" and the middle-aged man in Belgium who says it out of nostalgia, but had to go to Wikipedia to refresh his memory about the show, namely, what the hell does, "Shazam!" mean?

For many, it is a freakishly adept application out of an Orwell or Huxley novel that can "read" music on the radio and tell you what it is. I cannot even begin to fathom that one.

However, the original usage in the show was an acronym for S.olomon, H.ercules. Atlas. Z.eus. Achilles. and M.ercury. Whoah, now that is some power. These were the elders whom Billy Batson would invoke when he needed some extra star power to get the job done as Captain Marvel.

What got me thinking though, was, which "elders" would we call upon today? I am intrigued by the ones who were chosen then:

S.olomon, a wise and judicious lawgiver
H.ercules, a demi-God who had to prove himself through 12 Labors, (though ultimately went berserk and killed his wife,...not in the Disney version, but pretty status quo for a Greek Hero)
A.tlas, the metaphor for ultimate punishment of Duty
Z.eus, all-powerful sleaze bag
A.chilles, demi-God who begrudges his Duty in battle, til it becomes personal, then goes berserk and desecrates Hector's body, who, BTW is waaaaayyy cooler than Achilles
M.ercury, the messenger God, who lives between the Gods and Mortals, aka Hermes

Pretty interesting Rogue Gallery there, ranging from Justice to Injustice, Gods to Human, Power to Defeated, and fallen heroes.

So, whom would America pick now from the Pantheon of Gods and Demi-Gods? What qualities would we value above others? Which would we call upon in our Time of need?

More importantly, perhaps, would we use that council and experience to help others, or to help ourselves? How often do people call out to the Gods for the sake of others, without asking for something for themselves? I wonder. Does that go contrary to the very grain of who we are as Humans?

Since I am stuck in the 70s and 80s today it seems, one of my favorite LPs (Long-Playing, for you young'ins) was Rush's Hemispheres. Being a typical Rush concept album, it tells the story of the emergence of Cygnus X-1, which is the name of a massive black hole, as a New God within the Pantheon. There is a battle amongst the Gods and Goddesses, and the narrator, who becomes Cygnus X-1, watches on in horror and dismay at the dissolution of the Universe. The two main fighters are Apollo and Dionysos, which is clearly a nod to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy.

Apollo, the God of Reason and Music, and Light battles with Dionysos, the God of Intoxication, Decadence, and Darkness, a thinly veiled metaphor of the individual soul, much like Plato's well-known allegory of the Soul as a charioteer trying to harness the power of a Light and a Dark horse to keep an even balance.

Ultimately, a new God is needed, Cygnus, who becomes "knighted" as the God of Balance, a perfect sphere of Light and Dark, much like the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang , something Light and something Dark. For Nietzsche, the clash of the titanic Gods of Apollo and Dionysos, the result was Art, forged out of a mixture of passion/intoxication and reason/restraint, Rausch und Rede.

I'll go with that. In essence, that is what Shazam! then is: a mixture of Reason, Passion, Strength, Failure, Success, Mediation, and Mitigation.

Not quite the Super Hero qualities that we see today, though paints a pretty good picture of the complexion of humanity, bringing the full spectrum of our qualities, the Good and the Bad into one, single phrase.

Shazam!

Oh Lord, Won’t you buy me an AFC Win?

Ok, I’m going to be the guy who unceremoniously farts in the Tebow rose-perfumed elevator which is currently stuck between floors. 

I’ve tried to keep my mouth shut and fingers off of the keyboards for this topic, and had hoped the beleaguered and bruised Steelers would do something to dispense of this media-induced malarkey, but alas, Big Ben and the Terrible Towel club couldn’t pull it off, so here we are with yet another week of talking heads yapping about Tebow “Magic.”

If you have been following the NFL this year, you will be well aware that this is most likely the greatest line-up of quarterbacks the League has ever seen, and that is inclusive of the fact that Peyton Manning has been sitting on the sidelines all season.

If you pick the top 6 ranked quarterbacks: Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Eli Manning, Matthew Stafford, and Philip Rivers, you will have an AVERAGE of 4,992 yards, 14 interceptions, 38 TD’s and a quarterback rating of 103. Those numbers are staggering if you have ONE quarterback with them on the stat books. If you know anything about NFL numbers, this should have made your jaw drop. Again, that is with the elder Manning sitting out for the season and Roethlisberger having a very, very bad season in comparison.

It has been quite a year for rookie Quarterbacks as well: Cam Newton, Andy Dalton, and T.J. Yates all have had outstanding years with nary the hype that previous rookies such as Matt Leinhart (who?), Vince Young (What?), and Sam Bradford (Where?) have recently had.

But, what is the story that all of the media picks up on? Tim Tebow and his “magic” and the fact that he kneels on the turf, which ludicrously beyond all possible words in my head can fathom, has become known as “Tebow-ing” as if he invented the single-bended knee prayer position. Excuse me while I existentially barf. 

I love good stories in Sports, I really do, but this is not a good sports' story, but rather a story which confirms how bankrupt America is in its ideas about religion and what is important in life. I really, and I mean really hope that an Omniscient, Omnipotent power is not busy taking sides on American Football. Seriously, people?

I know that this should not get to me, and in reality, it does not get to me, but it does make me pause long enough to sit down and write this out. What is fundamentally wrong with this picture? Many things come to mind.

Some secular, some sacred, some downright ridiculous and illogical.

On the secular front, this just stings of the American preference for spectacle over substance at times. And, this is a shame because Americans and America are not superficial, but boy, we sure do little to dispel that myth at times, this being a prime example. Why have we not heard more about  some of the other QB’s this year in relationship to the Tebow factor? Simple, his team has won several very late-in-the game close calls, and then he prays and suddenly it becomes magic, and a one-man show.

To be sure, Tim Tebow threw the final pass that won the game against the Steelers, but it was Demaryius Thomas who caught the ball and ran with it while his other teammates made the rest of the play with pass protection and blocking. Yet, to read the media reports, Tebow descended rejuvenated  from the heavens, threw the best pass ever known to man, (so it must be divinely inspired magic), and saved Denver’s pride while the stadium erupted into unbridled jubilation of the second coming of Elway, while even the great Elway himself cracked a smile.

The only truth to that hyperbole is the phrase, “the great Elway” because he was great. And, he was great over a long period of Time, and even when Denver lost, Elway was usually still great. He has come under a lot of fire for not (Te)bowing before the great, white Hope and heaping praise upon praise on him for winning six close games. Well, as in the case of this past game, if Tebow had been doing anything in the entire last HALF of the football game, Overtime most likely would not have been necessary. I just see it as, if he had not made the winning play (he is the damn Quarterback after all, it's his JOB), then he really blew the rest of the game. Fine, he “pulled the trigger,” but at that point, he and Roethlisberger had been playing Russian Roulette and they had cocked and fired five times. One of them was bound to get the shot off. One play does not win a game. The entire build-up to an Overtime is that two teams played either equally well or equally bad, or in this case, equally MEDIOCRE. This was not a good game. The Steelers literally limped into this game, so it was hardly a stunning surprise to seem them defeated. And, this was no miracle, nor magic, nor anything remotely divine.

Imagine what would have happened if Tebow had lain prostrate in the direction of Mecca, for example, after this play, before doing his victory lap (do you think Jesus did victory laps after his deeds?), praising Allah, instead of “the Lord”? We would be having quite a different discussion in the newspapers. Or, if he had busted out into an ancestral dance that he had been raised with? Or, if he thanked the great God Shiva for his all-powerful help. Or, had gone to a Santaria voodoo ceremony the night before, still having chicken blood stains on his hands.

What then, America, would you do? How would you respond?

The country I was born in claims to be based upon religious tolerance, but in cases like this, I believe that tolerance would be exhausted quite quickly.

The Dallas Cowboys, or affectionately known as God’s Team by the zealots of Interstate 30,  famously built a stadium so that God, while not organizing and running the universe, could idly watch the Cowboys....LOSE??? Oh, wait, so God doesn’t even like His/Her/Its own team?

The point is, I shouldn’t even know that Tebow is a believer, of any faith. This is Football, not the salvation of souls at hand.

But, the sadder fact is that this is what people will hold on to as religion. Is that so bad, one may ask? Well, in a word, yes. Yes, it is that bad. How can substituting a 24 year-old kid who kneels on the football field for any real look into the substance of faith, belief, or divinity be a good thing? It could only, and I mean only argued that it is a lesser of two “evils,” meaning at least people aren’t dying over this. That is about it. This is a damn football game.

Wake up. It’s not Tebow Time on my clock. 

This is not Divine Intervention, America. It's just a game. There are bigger, much bigger things in this world to be attributing such power to.

Death and the Madman, A Tragedy of Sorts

On January 3, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche broke down.

Living in Torino (Turin), Italy, while sitting on the Piazzo Carlo Alberto, he cracked. He had long been plagued by migraines, possibly from a suspected illness ranging from diagnoses of syphilis to manic-depression to full-blown psychosis. No consensus has been reached.

In my romanticized version, I believe it was a philosophical crisis that broke him. Since the medical field has yet to come up with a more plausible cause, I will go with that.

I was talking with a friend about this event the other day, regarding the various contradictions of his life, as Nietzsche indeed is a self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to being misunderstood. He welcomed it as much as he shunned it.

A favorite example of mine is the phrase that Nietzsche is most famous and simultaneously infamous for, that is, “Gott ist Tot!” (God is dead!) This comes from a scene in which a madman is running into a marketplace, proclaiming this shocking news, to which he is mocked and derided for his madness. This is often picked up as “proof” that Nietzsche was indeed the Anit-Christ or that he was an atheist, or it is picked up by angry, all-too-angry young people who don’t quite get the nuance of the situation.

None of them is accurate. Nietzsche proclaimed himself to be the Anti-Christian, in much the same way that his near contemporary Kierkegaard (a staunch believer of Christ, but also Anti-Christian) was against the hypocrisy of the Christian church in Europe near the turn of the 19th Century. Nietzsche wrestled with God, but did not deny It/Him/Her. That would be too simple.

The fuller version of that familiar phase is never, like the motto of Socrates , or at least seldomly repeated, namely “Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!” (God is dead! God remains dead! And, we have murdered him!). According to Nietzsche, the God of humans was created and murdered by humans, because we can only know what it is to be human, be-ing humans, and thus create a god in our image. Nietzsche was quite aware that there was something bigger, much bigger and more powerful than we are.

However, what he introduced is the oft-maligned, highly mis-contextualized and tragically mis-appropriated by the Nazis (Nietzsche was catatonic from 1889 until his death in 1900, long before the Nazis. His sister Elizabeth is responsible for that connection...though that is for another time...) concept of the Übermensch, or the Superman, though literally the Overman.

In short, for Nietzsche, this meant that humans could be better than what we are, but only one person at a time, and the only person who could better him or herself, was, you guessed it, yourself. No one else can make you better or worse. You are responsible for your self, and you can be better. The name comes from the idea of over-coming your weakness. For Nietzsche, the human being was a work of art in progress and the artist was the individual. He had high hopes, perhaps too high, for humans, and in January of 1889, I believe that illusion had its fatal and chronic consequences.

As the story goes, Nietzsche saw a man beating a tired and sick draught horse on the square. The horse was shrieking, but was too feeble to fight. The man continued to beat the horse mercilessly. Nobody moved to help or intervene. Not my business. Nietzsche is reported to have run to the horse, and embraced it, as it died. Although Nietzsche lived for another 11 years, he never uttered an intelligible word after that incident, and relatively soon thereafter spent his remaining life in a drooling, catatonic paralysis.

I believe that Nietzsche saw man for whom he was, just a man. It was too much. This was not the man who could over-come himself. It was a creature that would beat a dying horse to death with his bare hands while the rest of humanity walked idly by.

Yesterday, just days after having this conversation about Nietzsche’s breakdown, I saw an article in the online Belgium newspaper. It was about a video, which was included and that I watched, from US troops in Afghanistan. It is only thirty seconds. It is nauseating. An infantry man bludgeons a goat to death with an aluminum bat. You can hear each metallic clang, followed by someone saying “what the fuck?” about the damn, stubborn goat who keeps getting up, staggering, twitching and going ultimately collapsing into a seizure. Cheers from young Afghan boys fill the air and “manly” guffaws and encouragement from the Troops goads the assailant on. Finally, the goat stops twitching after several more direct blows to its skull, rounded of by a chorus raucous of cheers, high-fives and hell yeahs.

That is man.

Tragedy originally means “goat song” in ancient Greek as it represented the darkest in humanity, the saturnine, the sadistic, and the satyr.

That is the message that some of our Super-men are sending to the world.  I don’t care if it is isolated. It is part of our reality, as humans, and we need to wonder at what we see.

WTF People?

No, Mind if I Fart?

Kudos to Robert Griffin III and the Baylor Bears for “their” Hesiman Trophy win, but tonight I am thinking about another Waco person, namely the comedian Steve Martin. Although Martin was raised in California, it is somewhat comforting to know that at least he was born in a town called Wac(k)o. Martin was the definition of American comedy of the late 70s and early 80s, along with Eddie Murphy, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Robin Williams, and many others of the vintage SNL era.

And, what better line to remember Martin’s wit with than the classic response to someone who asks you if he can smoke in a restaurant, “No, mind if I fart? It’s one of my habits.”

To me, that sums up quite a bit. As I get older and crustier, something that I notice quite a bit about people is that they don’t really want “to go there” even if they initiate the conversation. I have heard many times in my life, “can I ask you a personal question?” or “can I ask a frank question?” Well, my answer is simply, “Absolutely, if you can handle a frank answer.” Most people can’t, I have learned, because I can give an answer frank-er than Sinatra...wait for it...

Like Martin, we (and, yes, I include myself in that “we”) want to initiate, but when it comes to the response, when it is something that perhaps we don’t want to hear, we become uncomfortable, we hesitate, we stall. We want to smoke, but we don’t want others to fart. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men, “we can’t handle the Truth.”

I have spent the greater part of the last week having one, long, frank discussion with a very dear friend of mine whom I have recovered and re-dis-covered from the obscurity of the past. There was no mediation, no pretense, no guard. Nothing but exposure. To be frank. 

Being an American here in Belgium and recently also in India, I am somewhat exposed on a different level, whether I want to be or not. People have ideas about us and US, again, like it or not. Stereotypes exist, and we play into them, confound them, or confirm them. I also had an interview with a potential client this past week as well at a high-level international organization, in which there were certain stereotypes about being an American I felt inclined to either dispel, or at times embrace. We do have the ability to chose, to be frank, and to be honest, but most often we opt out for the softer, easier way.

That is a shame, but I’ve been there. I know the sham comfort of crawling behind platitudes of clichés and habits and hiding behind a mantle of denial and distrust, both of myself and others. But, over time, the moths eat away that mantle, exposing the frailty of the fabric we once believed to be so strong, so permanent, so real.

However, when we can release that fear of exposure, of casting off the cloaked illusion of security, we can have breakthroughs, we can learn to live again. To, in essence, be re-born, a word that my sister put into my mind, and to suggest that the word for next year be just that, a Re-naissance.

After I dropped off my friend at the airport in Brussels and had come back to Antwerp to meet my apartment, seemingly so empty and alone again, I later went to the local Buddhist “club” to listen to a guest speaker. She was to speak on “emotions” as I found out upon arrival. What she opened with, I found to be interesting is that for the most part, when we see such a title, we immediately think of our negative emotions, those that hinder, that bind, that hold us down. Instead, she wanted to talk more about those that release and free us from suffering. Although the talk went downhill from there in my eyes, that thought did stick with me. What emotions can indeed free us?

Given that I have gone through the full range of my emotional gamut in the past days, I realized that it does not really come down to the emotion at all, but rather what Martin gave us, honesty. That’s it.

Mind if I Fart?

That is about as honest as it gets, slapping us in the face with the force of one hand clapping against our skin. But, can we handle that honesty when the tables are turned? Can we hear what we have been telling ourselves, but what happens when it comes from another person?

What I have learned is that if I’m not willing to have someone fart in my general direction, then I had better not idly blow smoke in his or her eyes.

To be frank.