MO(U)RNING CONVERSATION

MO(U)RNING CONVERSATION

The first ray of light bathes the fifty-foot cottonwood with the warmth of a July dawn. It touches the brow of Gimbley, principle caretaker of trees in the forest. Accustomed to

Gimbley

dosing off at this hour in the AM, a sunbeam evokes an expected agitation and grumpiness. Another new day, announcing another phalanx of topsiders – called the diurnals in the clan – preparing to desecrate nature once again – his personal trees, the forest, the animals. Not something he welcomes but which has strengthened his character and inured him to crisis and loss.

For better or worse he notices that his unpleasant awakening is not his alone. Flanking him on his left and right he notices the same disgruntlement on the faces of Gamji, Vidar, and Oroki. Oroki glances back at Gimbley

Gamji

and remarks, “Is it that time of the moon?” Gimbley answers, “What do you mean?”

Vidar

“Well, you know. Two times a year the morning sun hits its mark on our brows just as we’re going to sleep. It wakes us up and irritates everyone.”

Just then the four of them hear the loud snorting of two fellow sylvans from across the small meadow which they all share in a circle. In his own intemperate

Oroki

voice Sarymun is lecturing Took on something too far away to hear and which concerns only them anyway. Apparently it has something to do with snoring – or – maybe it concerns Took’s dead branch having fallen across Sarymun’s backside. In any case, it’s obvious that they too suffer an absence of

Sarymun

any beneficent good cheer.

Gamji gives a loud good morning and hears nothing back. Finally, it’s Vidar who speaks up and reminds them all of the early hour. “Gentlemen, it’s obvious that this is not our time of day. We’re spirits of the night, and having been out ’til just before dawn we’re ready to withdraw into the crevasses and shadows. Alas, the morning light stopped us and forced us to expose ourselves to daylight. Now, any early-morning passerby circumspect enough to look up will see our crooked faces and, hopefully, simply muse. He may even call attention to us and inspire some human to draw our faces, in which case we will be forced to stay motionless for hours. It’s exasperating enough to be up at this hour, to see humans in the daylight. But we can add humiliation to that mix if we find ourselves having to freeze expressions for some amateur artist. Gentlemen, this is why we are so grumpy this morning.”

Oroki jumps in. “Yes, this is all true. But let me add another displeasure which is causing us to recoil: We thrive on what humans exhale, and we turn it back into breathable air – for them. But lately my leaves have been wilting and I’ve been suffering fevers because what we inhale isn’t human exhalation but unnatural poisons in the air. I cough constantly. Sarymun, this is why Took’s branch has fallen across your bow. It’s not his fault. Soon we will all be suffering weak limbs.”

Took responds: “Yes, have you noticed the leaves and limbs of all our trees in this forest lately? It saddens me. But more than sadness, it enrages me.”

Took

Just then, a silence cuts through the grove and all they hear is the soft wind cutting through the land from west to east. Gimbley decides to speak. “Since the beginning of time our needs and demands have been simple and fair. We’ve never intruded anywhere on anyone. Even where our seeds have landed in the most inhospitable places, they simply grew quietly, inoffensively, and beautifully, until of course when a human decided to call it a term he himself invented – ‘weed‘ – which always compels him to kill. It’s serial infanticide, and they don’t even know it.”

Vidar clears his voice and says, “I have heard that some humans, not many but a few, still live who still understand our rules, and they listen to us. These are indigenous beings rooted to the land. And I have to say, I get a certain good feeling from this kind of human that I do not get from another. And it is worth noting that those seemingly rooted this way come through here more and more during the night. Some also visit in the early dawn and late at night, almost as if they wish to flee their own species as much as we do. Such humans have actually climbed my limbs to rest, and I was at peace with it. I felt safe with them.”

“Yes, but such beings are a small minority,” says Gamji. “Much too small!! … And this is what worries me. We’re outnumbered and overpowered by violent and unpredictable actions which they have become very accustomed to. Violence executed with tremendous volume is an earmark of day-to-day activity for their species. It doesn’t matter what kind of violence – whether it’s towards each other, killing trees, forests, animals, the air and water, or towards mother nature indirectly to which she responds in her usually slow but deliberative and powerful manner.”

“And this is what scares me,” adds Took. You see, it isn’t just about fallen branches, yellow leaves, and acidic rain. It’s about the message it sends to others who know only violence. Their first impulse is to kill, to raze to the ground and level, and reduce everything to an inert and safe deadness. It means reducing you and me to ‘usable parts’ and our non-usable parts to dust. Their word is ‘pulp.’ They don’t even make the effort to replace what they destroy. My own seedlings cannot replace me where I now stand. They must disperse on the wind and find sanctuary somewhere on their own, in some safe niche on a hillside, along a busy street, or in some yard where hopefully they won’t be run over or cut down. Never has survival for us been more harrowing.”

Seeing where this conversation is going, Sarymun jumps in and tries to inject some light humor: “Well, if appearances in wood makes a difference, they surely won’t take Took and Elesius. They’re so twisted and full of knots, fitting to their personalities, there’s no way to make them into chairs. Maybe part of a knotted pine wall – maybe.”

Elesius

Elesius speaks up. “Pardon me, but I’m not laughing. I’m not a large and imposing cottonwood like you. I’m a much weaker red willow which anyone can bend and twist to his liking. But I’m also wiser for my diminutive stature. Those you’ve been describing as dangerous don’t even look at me, don’t even see me. They’re busy looking at you, my friend. Furthermore, I bend. You do not. The tempests which have come through here in these past years had you scared witless. Do you remember? Whereas I leaned nearly all the way over to the ground. Finally, I may not live as long as you, but my seedlings are found everywhere. Yours are not. I wouldn’t be you if you gave me your best soil and those that fertilize it, thank you very much.”

The others summon enough sap in their veins to force a chuckle and some minor grins. But they also look downwards in fear, towards the earth which sustains them all – the womb of all things, and the tomb of all things. The morning’s conversation has all but silenced Sarymun’s humor. Gamji says, “We’ll, we’ve mentioned The Mother here already. Let’s awaken our dryadic sister-of-the-woods/maiden-of-the-oak, and see what she has to say about all this.”

Mythrael opens her eyes. Appearing out of moss-covered wood which had fallen long ago, she takes a deep breath and stretches upward as if from nowhere. She says, “I’ve been

Mythrael

listening to you all, and I hear your concerns. But please keep in mind what is at your own roots, and what wisdom those roots touch everyday – and which you all seem to forget. We’re all part of a great circle, are we not? Nothing is permanent. And rest assured that when we die we’re born somewhere else. There is no end to us.” At this point a small limb of hers swings around and points to her dead sister – once a beautiful oak but which failed to elude human destruction. – “Look, she was stripped of her life while in her prime, made into an ornament for

sister

someone’s amusement. But I hear even she has reappeared already. I’ve been listening to the reports from ravens and resident mice that her form has regenerated somewhere. As yet I do not know exactly where, and neither do they. They’ve heard it from other ravens and mice. But the rumor lives. I need to be patient.”

Just then, viewing her sister’s desecrated state, Mythrael flares up in a rage sending all the others inside their barked cocoons. Her flareup is so enormous that she leaves her solid form and her spirit assumes the shape of the most dreaded ghost in the forest – a “night wraith” – neither dead or alive, half-human, half-antelope, feared by all things sylvan, winged, and four-legged. She kills at will anything in her path and consumes what’s left. As she advances everything in the immediate area – birds, mice, squirrels, deer – vanish. Only the loud silence of a soft wind remains.

A few minutes later she exhales and her rage deflates, she loses her theriomorphic form, and she returns to her previous dryadic state. She closes her eyes, regretful, and apologizes for her “indiscretion” – a “lapse of remembering,” she calls it. But it’s a reminder to everyone that one crosses Mythrael at its own peril. The most composed and congenial “maiden of the oak” will kill an entire hectare of forest when provoked.

With this Gimbley redirects the conversation to a more digestible subject. “I have noticed across the fence-line to our east a seedling very similar to Mythrael’s sister, Are we, my dear, witness to the promise of another beautiful and ageless tree? If it is not your’s, at least someone has found a safe and fertile bed in which to incubate. It is a female tree too. It bodes well for the future.”

Mythrael rather sullenly responds: “Thank you, but it doesn’t grow a leaf familiar to me. I wish it did, but it does not. Still, we wish it well, and when it grows beyond a seedling let us not hesitate to send our support and council over the fence by way of our carriers – raven and mouse – to comfort and parent her the best we can. Let her know we’re here. It’s going to need us.” Without hesitation the limbs from everyone sway in unison in loud approbations. “Yes,” says Oroki, “we must be attendant elders to the young ones, wherever we see them surface. And we may never really know how many will in the coming spring. Maybe we shouldn’t be so down on our future.”

A long silence follows, as is the custom of this arboreal clan. They bathe quietly in the wind massaging their tendrils and which brings renewed moisture to forgotten joints. Staying limber is the key to prolonged life and vitality. Several hours pass and everyone begins to finally find the sleep they were so brusquely deprived of hours earlier. Then suddenly a small herd of deer appear over the hill and enter the grove. The trees notice that it’s the same small herd which came through four moons ago. Only this time one member is missing. Gamji, Sarymun, and Took send down some succulent leaves for them to graze on and gain their attention. “Hey there, how are you?” asks Gamji.

The matriarch, a proud elder who has led her clan for many years, lifts her head and is shocked to see her towering friends still awake. She responds, “Its surprises me that you are not all asleep now. We usually say our hellos in the dark of night. Why are you up and awake?”

Oroki is the first to respond: “It’s that time of year – the sunlight you know.” “Ah yes, I know,” she says, at which time she lowers her head again to graze. Took then asks the obvious question which has them all curious: “You’re minus one member. Where is she? Did something happen?” The matriarch does not respond. She just lowers her head again to graze. “Hello, I’m sorry to ask again, but ….” Just then a dark energy fills the grove. It quickly becomes a topic not to pursue further.

Another hour passes in silence. Only the wind marks its presence. Then, in what feels like prepared timing, the matriarch answers what already seems like a very old question, one asked too many times: “She was young and pregnant, and we were so proud of her. And suddenly, a loud explosion rang through the countryside and over a large empty swath of prairie – and she fell. We ran in terror. And when we stopped and turned to see what happened we saw two humans hauling her away in a truck. I mean, for years humans have at least given us fair warning of their predatory habits by way of ‘seasons’ for killing. But now some of them don’t even bother to wait. As far as we know now, it’s open season year round – on us.”

Another long silence fills an already depressed moment. Suddenly, giving no warning and robbing them of a chance to absorb what they had just heard, sounds of a chainsaw are heard just over the hill. The matriarch looks up and says, “we’ll see you tonight – hopefully.” And without pausing they flee in the opposite direction.

Instinctively, the arterial passages in which the adrenaline of life gushes through a tree’s trunk, from the roots to its smallest branches, begin to pulsate with tremendous ferocity. The tree clan instinctively grow silent and motionless. Fear grips the grove. They know that one of their own, either already dead or still alive, is being sacrificed to an instrument of terrible destruction. Sadness, rage, and finally helplessness infuse an already rooted fatalism which has been growing for several seasons now. Took looks over at Sarymun and sees a look he hasn’t seen before. It’s a look of quiet detachment and resignation, and it scared him.

Then, in just a few minutes, the noise spewing an ordure of toxins and smoke suddenly stops. Then it starts again … and stops. This cycle continues for the next hour, and eventually the initial fear on the faces of Vidar, Oroki, Took, and the others begin to show the signs of attrition in their faces. But it is the look of pain on the face of Mythrael which defines the moment with tragic poignancy. She weeps like a willow and hasn’t the energy for any more rage. She looks weathered, and it’s as if time had suddenly made her old and brittle.

An hour passes and the awful sound from over the hill finally stops. And it takes another hour for anyone to lift his brow and look around to say something. Finally, it’s Sarymun who speaks. “As you know, I usually don’t say much. I prefer to listen. But I will say something now. These times will pass. They’re just a flash of light on dewdrops in one very temporary moment in our lives. Listen to The Mother on this. We were never meant to stay forever. Nor will those who destroy us stay forever. We’re just grist in a much larger mill. And that’s life, my friends. And I would hope that through it all we would find some solace in that. That’s all I have to say.”

By now it’s mid-afternoon, and the day’s violence has given way to exhaustion. The clan folds up and eyes close almost in perfect unison. Sleep now becomes imperious and non-negotiable. The earth has sucked the woodland spirits down into her roots where they begin gathering their strength for nocturnal dancing in the night. Where they will once again meet the deer clan, when everyone dances to the light of the moon, and all of the day’s worries dissolve in the pungent incense of black earth, the silent sounds of faerie wings, and in the lunar magic of silvery blue light on the land.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

I AM THE NIGHT

I AM THE NIGHT

Je suis la nuit! – a phrase/title? recently heard among the latest films of 2019. I have no idea what it’s about, or if in fact it is a film or if such a title even exists. But it doesn’t matter. It captures a state of mind, a mood, fitted to a certain climate which engulfs many today. Hence the transfer of one’s sense of belonging to the night, to the nocturnes of the human psyche.

It’s the underworld to which I’ve inducted myself. The subterranean layers of myself are now “the face” I’m incapable of losing. And “faces” we all are! I suppose, perhaps, the removal of a face is the thumbprint of nocturnal encroachment, which scares people. But I don’t see it that way. I see woolen cloaks and midnight masks more than uninvited exposures, and a serious need to hide.

The subject necessarily invokes two related subjects – the bohemian spirit and anarchy. The first invokes a worthy anti-hero: Henri Murger – a name I would be shocked to hear anyone knowing today. He was an obscure writer and poet who spent his entire life in in Paris in the early- to mid-1800s, and the quintessential bohemian.

What is a real bohemian? To dispense with some misconceptions, we might start with the fact that despite its links to gypsies and vagabonds, its essence has nothing to do with either one. Neither does it have anything to do with liberalism (a political term) and all things also wrongfully associated with it (liberal sex, liberal drug-taking, liberal actions, etc). A penchant for “wandering,” anti-convention, independence, nonconformity, and radical/unorthodox thinking in music, art, and literature, even voluntary poverty at times – to all of these, yes.

About the only thing we can thank the gypsy artists (the Romani) for was their filtering into Paris in the 19^th century (the Romani people hailing from northern India – not the Czech Republic – and finding the low-rent districts, one of which was the Left Bank near the Ile de la Cite. Instantly judged heretical by the Catholic Church, Honore de Balzac was its chief defender. And just to slow the race to quick and easy stereotypes, there were also the haute boheme (“high bohemian”) – wealthy and privileged bohemians. But to place them in the same category with the former only reminds me of wealthy young Republicans who say they read the underground press and smoke weed (in my day it was playing Bob Dylan records while smoking weed). Hence, their presumed associations with liberal causes, saving whales, and knowing what an atelier is. – Sorry, it doesn’t fly.

What does fly is a state of mind which instinctively identifies with the spirit of anarchism. But what is anarchism? – as opposed (again) to its modern misconceptions? Again, without surprise, it’s the very antithesis of the conservative view which so easily condemns it. Since its very beginning, during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods (which also severely condemned it), it simply referred to “seek[ing] to identify structures of hierarchy, domination, and authority which constrains human development” (Chomsky). To which it then “subjects them to a very reasonable challenge – to justify themselves. Demonstrate that you’re legitimate.” If you cannot, adds Chomsky, “the structure should be dismantled… and not just dismantled but restructured from below.”

Through time it remained alive and well in the Libertarian and Socialist traditions. There was the 19^th and early 20^th century “Left, anti- Bolshvik Marxist” tradition, and later “Anarcho-Syndicalism” which in the 1930s Fascism, Stalinism and western democracy (together) attacked because “the effort of free people controlling their own lives had to be crushed.” There is even a tradition of Christian anarchism. And today it continues through feminist and human rights activism. Chomsky added that anarchism should actually be called “Truism” because what it seeks are universally understood rights and principles.

Anarchism-Truism is an essential part of the bohemian underworld agenda. Hence its subterranean nature needing to “hide” those who identify with it. And why do we hide? Because investigations into the principles of freedom can go so deep that it crosses into regions verboten to most, even to liberals. One wanders into mental/psychic/emotional/archetypal terrain never anticipated but which nonetheless begins to question the existential legitimacy of “everything.” It becomes a “dark night of the soul” initially but promises “cracks” of higher perception never expected or (sometimes) even wanted. It disillusions before becoming a jolted awakening. In the end it often creates antisocial (coping) problems in the pedestrian world. – I’ll speak for myself.

To survive a journey so described leaves one no choice but to go “undercover.” Some fellow travelers are brilliant enough to translate their experience into forms and structures which entertain (even inspire) the bourgeois crowds. Hence they don’t often need to take cover. They engage easily with others. Alas, I don’t have that talent. My mind turns to “mush” in many cases when confronted by those “topside” – the diurnals I call them – or heliotropes. I suffer too frequently from the much hated esprit de l’escalier (“wit of the staircase”) – i.e., appropriate responses thought of only too late.

Which is why I gravitate to seemingly kindred (mostly obscure) souls like Henri Murger. He was born and died in Paris (1822-1861). He was the son of a janitor and received little if any formal education. But at a young age he began writing poetry which eventually caught the eye of noted writers. Soon he landed a job for a Russian Count and decided to write about “anything” that could produce a few francs to live on. Soon he was writing prose at “five centimes a line,” “eighty francs an acre.”

At the age of 27 Murger was living in abject poverty in a sixth-floor attic. It was the end of living eleven years in dark misery. “To spend one day’s hungry and ill-shod, and making paradoxes about it, is the dreariest kind of existence.” He visited the hospital several times, as did his friends living in frigid rooms. Even his mistress suffered physically and died young. Her body was treated with the same indignation by authorities accorded to all homeless types, having it forcefully taken and used for dissection. The attic was squalid and crowded, and it was best to spend as little time there as possible. Many found it advantageous to seek the warmth in a roll-call of cafes.

The best remembered cafe was The Momus which became blighted with unsuccessful writers and artists who shared “one cup of coffee for three” and usually left no tips. Painters set up easels there for the better light it provided, lithographers brought their copper plates, and writers wrote feverishly until sunset. Returning to the garrets of the Quarter was depressing.

Murger’s breakthrough came with La Vie de Boheme in 1851, a collection of short stories set in the Latin Quarter in the 1840s. Its characters were based on real people living as bohemians. Though his profiles were presented in a spirit of levity, he really set out to explain the meaning of bohemian life to a largely unknowing public. He needed money to survive but his real intent was to enlighten. His sudden notoriety allowed him to leave the Corsaire, the literary magazine which first published it, and get noticed by editors elsewhere. For the first time he was able to live in rooms with “carpets underfoot and chairs to sit on.” And adding to this, he said, “you don’t know what it is to find yourself sitting for the first time next to a woman who smells nice.”

Detailed references to “the bohemian” he hoped would finally rid the term of its associations with gypsies and vagabonds. “Any man who enters the path of Art, with art as his sole means of support, is bound to pass by way of Bohemia.” He wasted no time listing the most illustrious bohemian artists through history (Moliere, Shakespeare, Rousseau, etc) whose only talent preserved them through their own hard times.

“Bohemia is a stage in the artist’s career; it is the preface to the Academy, the Hospital, or the Morgue.” From this he derived three levels of bohemian learning: dreamers, amateurs, and stalwarts (or “official” bohemians). He largely ignored the first, had nothing but loathing and contempt for the second, and admired the third. The “rank and file” hierarchy he fabricated is mindful of an ancient (Castaneda-like) apprenticeship one faces as he seeks spiritual guidance from a master. Indeed, he almost warns the dreamer and amateur of foreboding steps along a path into a netherworld: “Unknown Bohemia is not a thoroughfare; it is a cul-de-sac.” Author Malcom Easton elaborates: “It is a life that leads nowhere, extinguishing the intelligence as a lamp goes out for want of oxygen. The man who stays too long in Bohemia is doomed, or can escape only into the neighboring Bohemia of crime.”

Out of the hard lessons fated for all dreamers and amateurs, a few inevitably survive and earn their “official” status. They will have proven their tenacity, talent, and independence. But they also maintain an ethic of moderation and living a simple life – never forgetting the conditions of the attics and forced sanctuary to the Cafe Momus. Nothing is overly indulged or taken for granted.

Tragically, throughout his life Murger was plagued with financial woes and ill health. Yet by the time he died at the young age of 38 he had contributed so many notable works of fiction, poetry, and scripts for “little theatre” that the government paid for his funeral. Hundreds raised money to erect a bust of him in Luxembourg Gardens (Paris).

Again … Paris. The underground comes close to the surface in the place du Carrousel as described by Balzac in 1838. His district is the impasse du Doyenne (from his novel Cousine Bette):

“These are all that remain of the old quarter, in process of demolition since the day when Napoleon decided to complete the Louvre. The rue du Doyenne and the blind alley of the same name are the only passages that penetrate this sombre and deserted block, inhabited presumably by ghosts, for one never catches sight of anyone here….

These houses… lie wrapped in the perpetual shadow cast by the high galleries of the Louvre, blackened on this side by the north wind. The gloom, the silence, the glacial air, the hollow sunken ground level, combine to make these houses seem so many crypts, or living tombs…. [A] chill strikes one’s heart, one wonders who can possibly live here and what may happen here at night….”

Balzac’s time was roughly the same as that of Murger’s – 1799 to 1850. Balzac lived 13 years longer. Both experienced even the same misfortunes in their romantic lives. Descriptions of women were those which hadn’t changed since the days of Louis XIV. Where Murger rarely met a woman who “smell[ed] nice,” Balzac found only “practiced jades” who all looked alike. They were unam cogneras omnes noras (lit. “all from one cut or coin”) and owning “nothing of nature nor passion.” Finding someone half-educated (and rose-scented) required leaving their frigid environs and flaneuring over into the middle-class districts (mostly on Paris’ westside).

Again, it’s inside the cafes where meetings, planned and serendipitous, peaceful and raucous, between the successful and unsuccessful, happened. One poet who frequently wandered through the working-class districts at night, where the city steps were like “flights of lyricism,” was Francis Carco. In 1941 he wrote in his Nostalgie de Paris:

“It was while he was passing this establishment at about 4 in the morning that Mery bumped into Balzac and asked him what brought him to these parts on his own. Balzac was wearing dress trousers and a frock-coat and velvet lapels. Immediately pulling out of his pocket an almanac which noted that sunrise was at 4:45, he replied: ‘I’m being pursued by bailiffs and forced to hide during the day … but at this hour they can’t arrest me: so I walk.’”

An image which is a fitting coda to this entry – and nostalgie. We (Murger, Balzac, etal.) remain residents of “official” Bohemia, hopelessly bound to a spirit of anarchy. We make up the past but reside eternally now. Writing in the first-person and present tense magically covers a rich past, just as the past prologues the present – a nostalgia for what was remains what is in the darkness of night and beneath the city. As the visitor to Luxembourg Gardens says while entering the gates, “’Oh, my childhood,’ I cried. ‘There you are! Oh my God! There you are in this place!’”

Meanwhile, I am the night! I am the moon shadow dancing across the yard, the delicate prancing of satyrs and faeries coming down from the thickets and trees to dance. I am Mr. Mischief, the masked bandit who visits my door at 4 AM for bread, the frissons of midnight coffee served up in spoonfuls, and the incense of Turkish tobacco rolled in Rizla rice paper. I am the music of midnight jazz, its heartbeat laid down by stand-up bass, tempo set in motion by brush-to-pigskin-to-symbol, ocean waves sent floating in smoke-filled air by mellow sax and piano riffs. I am all of that moving in sync with augmented back-beats, cross-rhythms, and “grooves.”

And with that I’ll sign off, not saying goodnight, but andante – pianissimo – affettuoso – con amore!. More beautiful perorations have never graced the human ear.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

TIME TRAVEL

TIME TRAVEL

It’s taken exactly a hundred years to once again demonstrate a prologue sifting from the past, and in that sense proof that nothing really changes. I find myself relating to a famous fraternity of artists and paying for that passage by facing the same host of dilemmas.

Consider: In 1918-20, the US refused to join the League of Nations. Trump has isolated us from everyone. In Washington the Ku Klux Klan was celebrating a resurgence with marches down Pennsylvania Avenue. (Trump has re-legitimized the existence of White Supremacy). A huge anti-labor movement quashed the efforts of the Progressive Era. (Trump is aggressively anti-labor and anti-union). The country was being run by Warren Harding, followed by Calvin Coolidge (Trump’s predecessors to big business and corporate monopolization). The stock market was busy “selling short and riding the boom.” (Today’s Wall Street is “riding the crests of undertows”). – The only real distinction between now and then was Prohibition. Thank goodness, because without drugs and alcohol most of us (and I particularly) could hardly stomach the Trump Administration.

Time conflates is yet other ways as well: The great fly pandemic of `1918 killed more people than the war itself. The number of Americans killed by the flu between 2010 and 2017 was 36,714. Last year it was 79,400. Twenty-three states today still make “slavery” or “involuntary servitude” legal forms of punishment (source:” Harper’s Index).

It was right after the war that those like Dos Passos, MacLeish, and Hemingway who saw art and literature in America not going anywhere in the sense that they needed. They thirsted for a new and different horizon and found that joining Gertrude Stein, another American who had already expatriated, was the place to be. Paris was a magnet for artists from virtually everywhere – a bohemia where rules were meant to be broken, the complete opposite of what was happening in America. It was the place where “everything goes, and it’s cheap.”

Those Americans soon found themselves in the company of an august crowd – Picasso, Braque, and Leget re-imagining how to see, Stravinsky and Revel re-imagining music, and Cocteau and Stein re-imagining prose. Stein’s salon at 27 Rue de Fleur became a mandatory stop for conversations on culture and more importantly to ferret out a kind of intellectual baseline for what was going on. Stein said, “America is my country, but Paris is my hometown.” It was the validation they needed to hear.

The “lost generation” did not hold a patent on that label. Being lost in exactly the same way has survived an entire century. But my own drifting is compounded by yet a second dilemma: There is no Paris left to which expatriation could serve up such a delicious sanctuary. Paris, especially the Left Bank, is a quaint memory memorialized in postcards and pictures. It’s been taken over by expensive law firms and boutiques, and going to France today (and living there) is no longer “cheap.” It’s not even a place where “everything goes.” As we speak, labor riots fill the streets on weekends as workers feel the pinch from Macron’s wage suppression and soaring inflation. Macron is a latter-day Harding and Coolidge.

Hemingway felt horribly stranded and stunted in the midwest in his early 20s. He felt like he was suffocating by the oppressively conservative norms around him. He hated where he was. And depression took him to the point of being unable to stay employed – which then earned him the rebuke of family members who told him to either find work or “get out” – and he wasted no time bidding his adieus.

Being “stunted” and “suffocation” does not discriminate with time and place. Coming from the midwest myself (south Chicago) I can attest to the atmosphere Hemingway suffered which unfortunately did not depart with him. Certain intangibles remain undetected, and the year 2019 transposes easily with 1919 in just a moment of reflection. Colorado (now home) proves further that geography alone does not automatically fix it. The “mood” drifts with you, and new places have an uncanny appetite for mimicry and repetition. After 45 years in Colorado “bohemia”for me has become a mental geography, a landscape of the imagination. It assures me at least that no one can storm in and desecrate that world.

I relate just as well, maybe more so, with those writers who remained stateside in the ’20s, or those who went to Paris and returned again for unfortunate reasons. F. Scott Fitzgerald (and (Zelda) returned because of his financial problems and because she was “insane” (said Hemingway) and by 1930 became schizophrenic. Edna St. Vincent Millay went to Paris is 1921 to be a foreign correspondent for Vanity Fair, and realizing that New York was making her feel “old and sterile.” She needed “fresh grass” to feed her muse, saying “I’ll be thirty in a minute.” At first it worked for her, and she the American sculptor Thelma Wood who inspire her. But she became exhausted, lost her interest in Frenchmen, got pregnant, had an abortion, hated French food, got sick, fled to England (which didn’t help), and came home.

Others came and went, while others never left America. Many notables were members of the notorious “Gonk” – the Algonquin Round Table in 1921, namesake of the famous hotel on West 44th street – Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Robert Benchley, Alfred Lunt, and a host of other lesser-knowns to those outside that literary circle. Each found his/her own Paris, a romanced and personalized metropolis, behind an Underwood (or Corona #3 portable) in the confines of ineluctably hardwired American imaginations. Their themes were American, as were their characters and plots. But inside their subtexts, verse, witticisms, and “fresh hells” voiced by those like Parker, despite the Algonquin being bathed in “Edwardian gloom,” they managed to form a Camelot addressing issues like America’s obsession with money, prohibition, and “prairie anti-Semitism.” Paris (and T.S. Eliot) may have measured life out in coffee spoons, but America did so in bootleg alcohol. The domestic version of the salon were hotel parties where the likes of Irving Berlin, Tallulah Bankhead, and Harpo Marx would drop in at all hours.

“Time wasted” seemed to be more of an obsession with these writers who failed to expatriate. Where Edna St. Vincent Millay said “I’ll be thirty in a minute,” Dorothy Parker was quipping “Time doth flit, Oh shit!” It seemed as though if one wanted to maintain some peace of mind around sex, marriage, children, affairs, and illness, an American writer almost had to confine herself to a life of celibacy. Edna Ferber said it very well: “Being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning – a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.”

Time wasted is a problem lost to Parisian artists. In fact through most of French history, particularly in the years to follow, they faced the opposite problem – getting back home after forced exile to other places, including New York. And when “home” one didn’t waste time worrying about being somewhere else which allowed him to concentrate inwardly. Malraux lived his life “as a novel,” with himself as hero. Aside from his anti-Fascist contribution to literature, he remained devoid of political concerns and engaged in not having to prove anything. A friend commented, “If he were making a movie called ‘Malraux” he wouldn’t play it better.” Gide, and many others, knew where home was and simply waited out their exiles while writing for underground presses. He settled down to a routine of writing and meditation and recognized “the rare, the exceptional, the unique” allusions to himself, which addressed all humanity. While in Tunisia he had enough breathing room to ask, “In what way can I serve henceforth? In what way will I be needed?”

The theme of (failed) flight was best taken up by Orwell, a figure who lived half-way between “then” and “now” (closer to “then”) and who remains a fitting link not just between America and Europe but with the ubiquitous need to “get away.” It seems, said Raymond Williams, that in most of Orwell’s fiction “this experience of awareness, rejection and flight is repeatedly enacted…. [M]ost of Orwell’s important writing is about someone who tries to get away but fails.” Indeed, in Writers and Leviathan Orwell describes with eerie accuracy my own experience growing up with familial and public authority: “We have developed a sort of compunction which our grandparents did not have, an awareness of the enormous injustice and misery of the world, and a guilt-stricken feeling that one ought to be doing something about it….”

In Why I write Orwell addresses one of those “Catch-22” dilemmas from which we cannot “get away.” “[B]efore he even begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.”

Paris was/is measured out in spoonfuls, no doubt, but also in circles – arrondissements – which in my mental world has become concentric layers of mental terrain. They invite intrigue and enticement without which, today, I would suffer a second case of being “lost.” Here a balance must be weighed – between actual experience and what I wished it to be (getting “lost” in old Paris). The danger is over-romancing what never existed, being plus Francais que les Francais, while not paying enough attention to the life which is mine.

Again, in Why I Write Orwell ends with some painful truths: “[B]y the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it…. [E]very book is a failure.” “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand…. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a window pane.”

Such are the dilemmas one wants to escape with flight to exotic places – where then he only faces the carry-on baggage he takes with him. And yet as he does leave (if he can) there’s no looking back. Darkness comes in shades which only get darker or lighter as we look over our shoulders. We can only look ahead for sanctuary which can provide a “clear space” long enough to clear the mind. And when we arrive there, it’s important not to change it to but to leave it alone, to understand it, identify with it, and appreciate it. Then, as Orwell said in Politics and the English Language, “Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations.” – Rest assured that it will change you.

A Paris of the mind therefore remains my baseline, a destination for which to keep buying a one-way ticket, to know ports of call and its ports of entry. Not just to evade the cretinous “drool” (myxedema) from the mouths of midwestern trolls, but to somehow make lemonade from lemons – “garbage in: synthesis out.” To stop striving for “that place” (even though once there we may have already “outgrown it”) is to lay down and die. Life is movement, even if it’s pushing boulders up mountains just to do it. We create our own purpose … and then we die.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

AMERICAN THIMBLERIG

AMERICAN THIMBLERIG

Occasionally I “get it” when the best artists and writers show their sardonic wit in political matters. Oscar Wilde’s weapon was paradox hoisted by intensive dry humor – casual about serious things, serious about the most perfunctory things, the daily minutia. Jim Morrison found comedians to be “the most serious people of all and the most serious people the most comedic.” Both Wilde and Morrison, the most unlikely of bedfellows, found their resting places in the same ground – Pere Lachaise.

And I think both would laugh at the seriousness with which Americans still believe that they live in a nation run by free markets and spirited competition. Of course the alternative for citizens is to lend gravitas to that which puts both on trial over and over again – socialism – which they will never respectfully acknowledge. However citizens would have no choice if they ever looked at the facts of what “competition” means anymore.

Let’s look at some of those facts.^* Monsanto owns 90% of the soybeans and 80% of all the corn in the farming industry. It also forces farmers to use genetically-modified seeds and pesticides like the now officially “carcinogenic” Round-Up (which is also killing honey bees). It charges farmers whatever prices it wants. Farmers are squeezed also as sellers of their products to processing companies which also monopolize costs, which means it’s a miracle the grower comes away with anything at all in the end. The benefit of course is not to the consumer as claimed but to the middle-man, corporate execs and shareholders.

Four companies now control 82% of our beef-packing, 85% of soybean processing, 63% of pork-packing, an 53% of chicken-processing. All of our food products and brands now come from 10 huge companies – Tyson, Kraft, Pepsico, Nestle, AbInBev, Dean Foods, Smithfield, Con Agra, General Mills, and JBS.

Even the smallest of items we never think about have been seriously monopolized: Seventy-two percent of toothpaste sales come from two companies – Crest and Colgate. Eight-percent of the sunglasses we wear come from just one company – Luxottica – which also owns all the eyeglass retail stores. Virtually all cloths-hangers in America’s closets are owned by one company – Mainetti. Two companies own 75% of all the catfood – Mars and Nestle (both together owning Temptations, Sheba, Whiskas, Iams, Proplan, Fancy Feast, Eukanuba, and Kit Kahoodle)…. and on and on.

Not surprisingly, health insurers are the worst. In 2011 there were eight major companies – Aetna, Coventry, Humana, Metropolitan Health, Anthem, Amerigroup, Cigna, and Health Spring. In 2015 there were four – Aetna, Humana, Anthem, and Cigna. By 2016 just two – Aetna and Anthem – which is why our premiums, copayments, and deductibles are never going down. Meanwhile, drug companies pay the makers of generic drugs made abroad to “delay” their cheaper off-brands – illegal in other countries but not here, thanks to lax anti-trust enforcement. We’re charged $3.5 billion a year for brand names. We might add here that hospitals are run quite literally as “businesses” – not unlike hotels. They are said to be “doing well” when all the beds “are filled.” It’s another way of saying American healthcare leans on the notorious “sickness” model, as opposed to a “wellness” model.

Discount airline tickets and hotels remind us everyday that we have lots of competition. But those offers and ads are owned by just two companies: “Priceline.com” owns Booking.com., Kayak, OpenTable, Agoda, and Rentalcars.com. “Expedia Inc.” now owns Orbitz, Trivago, Hotwire, Hotels.com, Travelocity, Homeaway, Egencia, Traveldoo, Classic Vacations, Silverrail, and CarRentals.

Through endless mergers and acquisitions our cable and internet services (where we get virtually all our news and entertainment) are owned by four companies: Comcast, TimeWarner Cable, AT&T, and Verizon (as of Dec. 2018). Sixty years ago there were over fifty companies in highly spirited competition forcing each to maintain high standards and business integrity. Since then it’s turned into what The Nation magazine (in the 1990s) called “the National Entertainment State.”

Employees have less choice on who to work for especially in the rural community. Local businesses are now dominated by one major retailer (usually Walmart) which drives wages down for entire regions. They set the wage-rates even for other competing businesses. Walmart has enormous political clout which is again why antitrust laws are systematically ignored.

So how did all this get started? The first regulation on corporate power was the Sherman Antitrust Law in 1890 – created to reign in the burgeoning railroad, steel, and telegraph cartels, then called “trusts.” A handful of “robber barons”were already running America – Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan. They made enormous wealth through workers allowed no worker protections, given poverty wages, forced to work 10-12 hours a day in dangerous and unsanitary conditions, with no child-labor laws, and so on. They gouged consumers and corrupted politics.

Then, in 1901, Teddy Roosevelt attempted to stop it, first going after the railroad cartels run by Morgan. The Supreme Court ordered his Northern Securities Company (owning the Great Northern Railway, Chicago Burlington Quincy, and the Northern Pacific Co.) dismantled. In 1911 Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust was dismantled as well. However, just prior to their “forced retirements,” Morgan and Rockefeller managed to change the small-print/boilerplate in the law, saying that worker conditions were “objectionable” only if they were an “unreasonable” restraint on business. The Court and Teddy Roosevelt both compromised and allowed it to stand.

Later Woodrow Wilson and his adviser Louis Brandeis said simply that regulations weren’t enough. They wanted “all monopolies” broken up. And for the next 65 years both views — antitrust enforcement and regulations – dominated the scene keeping big corporations in check. Even if companies weren’t guilty of anything except simply getting too big (e.g., Alcoa in 1945), they were deemed guilty of breaking the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

This system worked until the 1980s. Then Robert Bork wrote a book entitled The Anti-Trust Paradox. He said size and power create “efficiencies” and bring down prices. He said trusts should be legal again, and this immediately won great favor from the notorious Chicago School of Economics (Milton Friedman, Richard Posner. Gary Becker, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase). It was also immediately embraced by the Reagan White House. And ever since then the antitrust laws have all but disappeared from sight.

In “the new economy” today, where high-tech information and ideas are the most valuable forms of property, Google and Facebook monopolize the lion’s share of the social media. Amazon is the first stop for 55% of consumers wanting to buy virtually “anything.”

Since the 1970s the rate of new companies starting up has declined by almost half. Corporate lawyers and lobbyists have created formidable barriers to new competition. Google’s search engine has become so dominant that it’s now a “verb” in the national lexicon. The EU filed antitrust charges against Google which was forcing consumers to shop on its platforms. And in 2017 it fined Google $2.7 billion in the antitrust ruling. But the US has done nothing. Google and Facebook are the equivalent of Walmart in the rural community – having enormous political influence over how markets are organized, maintained, and enforced.

Needles to say, competition is an monumental hoax in the US. It’s one of the biggest cons ever told the American people – most of whom still believe it. Everyday we’re force-fed endless commercials coming at us from all directions, and we listen to companies bragging about healthy competition, being the “most popular,” the “most endorsed according to studies.” We’re led to believe that free enterprise is blazing trails in new fields – and it’s all good. But behind it all are mega-monolithic giants scripting and controlling everything with names few have ever even heard. There’s just one conclusion to take away from it all, quoting Robert Reich himself: “It’s time to revive the antitrust laws.”

Does anything ever really change in the course of human events? Does time really alter our intolerance for the truth? Pere Lachaise might be instructive here – where Wilde and Morrison share common ground in other ways. Wilde’s grave site has been repeatedly smashed and defaced by the progeny of intolerant philistines. It’s the only site in the entire cemetery (with the exception of Morrison’s) displaying warning signs against vandalism. The only difference is in the reasons for vandalism – Morrison deified as “lizard king,” Wilde excoriated for homosexuality. But both artists saw the dark humor locked in the imposture, deceit, masquerades and ambuscades of their worlds. And people still evidently don’t appreciate it, as evidenced by repeated desecrations.

We might say they stood at acute angles to their subjects, seeing through the hypocrisy of laws and customs benefiting the rich and screwing the poor (even as Wilde himself schmoozed with London’s elite) – as did also Vidal, Lapham, Hitchens, Chomsky, and others (a rare fraternity)

who simultaneously exposed the thoughts, habits, and collusions of the very rich. Such individuals rarely confine themselves to the narrow compass of just politics. They must view a wider terrain if they are to see with “eyes unclouded by longing.” The next step after that is simply being honest – as Mr. Reich has been.

We think we have rights and “options” as citizens which we call “freedoms.” But those rights actually translate to a very narrow spectrum of insulting minutia (the kind Wilde would be very serious about): “vote or don’t vote,” “window or isle seat,” “paper or plastic,” “cash or charge,” “smoking or non-smoking” (now defunct), “pay now or later,” “drive or commute.” As for voting, we do have that option. But all of us know that candidates are chosen for us along with what information we are to know about our political options. Meanwhile the corporate giants again (controlling the media) make all the decisions about the nation’s wealth, war, the economy, healthcare, and education. They script and edit the entire national conversation.

It would all be, quite frankly, “comical” if it weren’t so serious. But in fact, Americans are seduced by the scent of simple entertainment, hedonism, and escapism – fast food, movies, mega-malls, drugs and alcohol, and Sunday Night football. The majority don’t know who Robert Mueller is (let alone Robert Reich), what the Federal Reserve is, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, or who the first president was. They do know the amount of the new Lotto drawing, the newest I-Phone bells & whistles, Beyonce’s newest album, what shoes are on sale at Walmart, and the family “Big Bucket” dinner combo at KFC.

The first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay, said “those who own the country ought to govern it.” In 1947 Averell Harriman told the American people to “go to the movies and drink Coke” and leave running the country up to “the experts.” In 1950, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson, announced, “What is good for General Motors is good for America.” – These are the corporate mantras which still convince Americans that competition is alive and well and that capitalism promotes democracy and fairness to all.

Employers don’t even bother anymore to feign sensitivity to their employees, because they don’t have to. There’s the Saul Bellow story, one well known by now which is a warning to all young people seeking work or simply wanting to keep their jobs. Moral: you’d better believe what you’re told – even if you don’t even know what the boss is talking about.

It was 1945, and the future Nobel Laureate “thought” he had been hired as a book reviewer for Time Magazine. One day he was “called in.” Sitting behind the desk was a portly Whitaker Chambers (one time Soviet spy turned conservative and who testified against Alger Hiss). As Bellow entered the room Chambers said loudly and coldly, “Sit down, Mr. Bellow. Tell me, what did you study at university?” He replied, “English Literature.” He was then asked to give his personal opinion about the poet William Wordsworth. Bellow simply replied that he knew him as one of the Romantic poets. “There is no place for you in this organization,” yelled Chambers. Instantly, Bellows realized he had been fired before even being hired. – Years later he pondered what answer could have possibly saved his job? He concluded that what Chambers wanted to hear was that the “revolutionary poet” had a Damascus moment and became a new-born conservative.

We’re so wrapped up in the myth of equality in every conceivable way that the more equal we are, the more “American” we are. Noun and adjective are now synonymous. Alas, the equalizing of things too quickly comports to a dull sameness, which comports to mass conformity, albeit with just tiny variations (again – paper or plastic, cash or charge). This is what Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans were all about, and what Henry Ford meant when he said, “any color is fine as long as it’s black.” We’ve been hypnotized by specters and political thimblerig for so long, we don’t know true north anymore.

I often think of the game show Let’s Make a Deal (with minor variations of my own). There’s Door #1, Door #2, and Door #3. We’re given the rules of the game along with “stuff” we don’t need and wouldn’t want in the first place (if we weren’t told we need them). We’re then told that we can wager “our stuff” on different “stuff” behind each door, each promising to be very different and unique. But it all hails from the same sweatshops owned by a handful of companies. The only difference are the prices.

I use the door metaphor especially when thinking about the news media: Each door is a television screen showing three different news organizations. Comcast, TimeWarner, AT&T, and Verizon pull the strings on all three. There might be some variance in what and how something is reported; but what’s said, what isn’t, and how its packaged is formulated by scriptwriters, ad execs, and “think tank” media analysts.

The definition of propaganda today is, not what we’re told, but what we’re not told – what’s kept out of the national conversation. It’s much more effective, and when culprits are caught they can simply claim innocence for what they did not know – for reasons of “national security,” because “sources were compromised,” or they were “in the dark.”

The humor in all this, as Wilde (& CO.) knew, comes in the fact that it never stops. It never stops because we never learn from it. And “we never learn anything because we never remember anything,” said Gore Vidal. The effect is more astonishment than anything. It cycles around in a feedback loop like a Mobius Strip. This is a big part of who we are, what we’ve become, dancing with mere shadows of the truth, conning ourselves with bogus trade-offs. We concede certain lies for comforting Potemkins (e.g., corruption may be evil, but it’s “necessary” for the greater good – at the end of all evil lies “planned optimism”). Just listen to the commercials and believe the world as brought to you by the makers of Colgate, Tyson foods, LL Bean, ProPlan, Anthem, and Travelocity. And all will be well.

In the end, we can only do what our friends at Pere Lachaise did – laugh. There may be tears underneath along with some bitterness, but the older we get the laughter (brought on by incredulity and irony), is all that remains. It’s the only thing that survives (said the Buddhist Hotei). It’s the big “cosmic giggle.” The astonishment is at ourselves.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

*The following information was taken from recent lectures given by Robert Reich, professor of law, former Sec. Of Labor under Bill Clinton, and business and economics analyst and commentator.