ANOTHER DIMENSION OF SIGHT & SOUND

ANOTHER DIMENSION OF SIGHT AND SOUND

I’m feeling more and more like an unwelcome stranger in this world. Or should I say I’m the one inhospitable to it? It just feels wrong, out of sync, and toxic. I just got an e-mail this morning saying that two-thirds of the planet’s existing wildlife will be extinct by 2020. Ecologists are also saying we have “twelve years” left to save ourselves (and our children) from unsustainable conditions? How can anyone continue to believe in the pacifying notion of ”human ingenuity” to bale us out of a global cataclysm?

That aside, how does anyone even know what’s true anymore, who’s being honest, and if they even know when they’re being dishonest half the time? The situation itself seems insurmountable. Nature does survive, but just barely, and it’s a marvel of marvels that, as it hangs by a thread, it still hosts the human family and all its schemes and forgeries.

Nothing is not touched by human hands anymore. We’ve finally gotten what we wanted – total dominion over everything, from surveillance cameras to air-borne metals reaching the remotest mountain lakes, the (not so) frozen tundra, and nature’s food-chains. To put it in the simplest and most honest vernacular that I know, nothing is not fucked up anymore. It’s “anything but” a brave new world. It’s one of cowardice, denial, betrayal, and planned (legal) evasions all in the name of power and profit. The money-god rules absolutely. It’s no wonder that the Twin Towers were (still are) the most conspicuous monuments to man, not just in America but the world. They symbolize all that is most coveted and most hated at the same time.

Not to belabor this streak of “in your face” misanthropy, at least it offers an explanation for diving into my thoughts and fantasies which are becoming an almost permanent sanctum. I can’t get out of that orbit which has but one function, to find meaning, intelligence, and inspiration. I can’t escape it, but nor do I want to. There’s nothing else. Call it nostomania – a desire to go home.

When I speak of “night,” it is by no means circadian. The mind is a perpetual nocturne. But again, that’s okay. It’s instructive, and instruction is therapeutic, Tonight (which is this morning) I’m descending into another time-warp – a portal in the fabric of time. Without being able to explain it, I seem to be a “datum” in the validation of “loop quantum gravitation,” “wormhole theory,” “space-time bends,” “string theory,” and/or parallel universes. Whatever it’s called, I’m suddenly in a different time and place. It even smells of a different time/place on earth – if only for the absence of toxic fumes in the urban air.

The title of this entry belongs to Rod Serling. And it’s fitting because tonight is a Twilight Zone – “a fifth dimension… the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, [lying] between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination.” – It also escapes “what man has deeded to himself” – a loaded phrase too monstrous to contemplate.

I’m flaneuring tonight. I turn a corner and step through that rip in space-time. It’s still the 21^st century, but it might as well not be. I stumble into places which are ancient but which fascinate me. The first is the Cafe Tingis, in Tangier, Morocco. Not so long ago Tangier was the hangout for artists and writers like Matisse, Genet, Burroughs, Camus, and Bowles. It was Paul Bowles who romanced it the most – and still does. To Burroughs it smells of “hashish, seared meat, and sewage,” and the native residents themselves “have a high tolerance for mad people.” It’s the place to “smoke hashish and pet my pet gazelle.” Life as a story of trade-offs and melodrama finds no better home than here in Tangier.

But these survivor-expats from the war are latecomers. The city has been resurrected and reinvented ever since the Phoenicians, then the Romans, the Portuguese, and even the English. As a city of “people with pasts craving somewhere else,” the expats are only a passing busload of tourists. The Beat Generation is only here for fifteen years. Today (whenever that is), it’s a port city at the intersection of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Residents live from the sea – old nets and boats trained on harvests and customs that stretch before time.

Just inland from the Port of Tangier is the Medina, which means “fortress.” In the northern corner of the Medina is the Kasbah, in the south the Gran Soco, and in the middle the Petit Soco. The Petit Soco is the epicenter of everything – center of the universe. Burroughs calls it “the last stop,” the “switchboard.” It’s here where everyone comes to the Cafe Tingis. – Turkish coffee, espresso, and Turkish tobacco are indulged in wooden chairs older than one’s grandparents. It’s the template for Hollywood envy. It defies categories and (stereo-) types.

If the smells of figs, raisins, nuts, olives, strong cheese, garlic bread, olive oil, and fish does not offend, it then spins you into its aura and fills your pours with salt air. One then fills himself with the incense of tobacco and coffee beans for dessert. One smokes kif and eats majoun (cannibus jam) – what alcoholics still call a “social menace.” To Western noses, one either “stinks” horribly or disappears in the redolent aromatics of a driftwood and cobbled culture.

Writers past and present speak to me personally. Paul Bowles says, “I’ve always wanted to get as far away as possible from the place that I was born, both geographically and spiritually – to leave it behind.” A writer/journalist from our 21^st century, Jonathan Dawson, says “Some people need to leave their home to find their home. I’m one of those people.” Dawson has lived here for twenty years. These are kindred souls with whom a deep connection finds it linkage again once we’re underground together.

The second place I pass is Arabian. It seems inevitable as I follow the redolent traces of tobacco and coffee. I’m on Hamra Street in Beirut – chic but ancient. The “rich & shameless” came here for years, to “the Paris of the Middle East.” One wouldn’t know it today, but it was its own Left Bank and Boulevard Saint-Germain. The late 20^th century of course took care of all that – simply couldn’t tolerate “meccas” not having to do with war and death.

Still, amid the rubble and dust survives the “Hidden” Cortado Espresso Bar in heart of Beirut. It’s part of an entrepot of cultures – French, English, Arab – experienced most dramatically in its teas. This epicenter presents itself as something ultra-modern and “hip” while simultaneously wearing the scars of the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian Genocide of the First World War, and the present-day Social Nationalist Party (which could just as easily call itself the National Socialist Party). This is the “party of god” du jour waving swastikas, suicide bombs, and claiming dominion over everything.

But a more resilient Beirut survives here. Martyr’s Square, using the full irony of that term, presents its citizens in western clothes (no hijabs and keffiyehs), eclectic music, and an almost militant disdain for any signs of hysterical zealotry or martyrdom. People are young, educated, and very “western” in their Levi’s and political opinions. Like the Petit Soco in Tangier, Beirut is “the template and cockpit of the region,” says prime minister Saad Hariri. “Anyone wanting to deliver a message in the Middle East sends it first to Beirut.” There’s the old city and the new one – two millstones grinding away as a dress rehearsal for an uncertain future. There are always the degenerate thugs, but then also the protesters of all forms of thuggery. The streets are by no means “one-way” in this city – a fitting augury for this region.

I pass the Old Arabesque Cafe and smell patrons smoking shisha and swilling Lebanese coffee. Old timers are playing chess and backgammon on weathered outdoor tables. I pass the Al Naser Cafe and then the Cafe Saliba where patrons are all thickly mustached and “old” — members of a brotherhood going back before time. They appear somewhat agitated tonight. Evidently the old cafes are closing one-by-one and turning into clothes and trinket shops dictated by western values. It’s like robbing a man of his home, a table, a chair, and a partner at cards that have been his for 50 years. He gets up and shuffles over to the next cafe which has never been his (terra incognita), but he’s forced to invade another man’s space just to find sanctuary – only to be shuffled to a third, and then a fourth cafe. A tragic and sad resignation fills wrinkled eyes filled with stories we can only imagine. It’s a local diaspora no one talks about.

I move on. This region is riddled with too much violence and politics, despite its oases of enlightened intelligence. As the itinerant Mr. Bowles said frequently, “So, I’m off tomorrow. I can’t stand this rain any longer.” So I change direction entirely and face another time portal. I step through and suddenly I’m no longer anywhere near the Middle East. I’m back in Italy – another land of breads, olive oil, garlic, pasta, and coffees. To the gastronome there’s no beginning of end to this land. The natives will tell you this is where cuisine really started. Not to argue the point, my attention turns to something entirely unrelated to food. I sense history instead. Standing before me is a metaphor, the perfect symbol of the kinds of ruin inflicted upon nature and native peoples not unlike those in their Beirut cafes. This is the Piazza des Miracles – “center of miracles” – aka, Pisa, Italy. It’s also a city planted in a lagoon.

The symbol in question is no mystery. The famous tower was built over a two-century period ending in 1372 AD. (same time period as Notre Dame, also taking just under two centuries). The village already has many towers, and they all lean. In fact, everything in Pisa leans, so “leaning” is a non-issue. The architects simply compensate by simply making columns longer on one side.

In 1173 the foundation is laid and it already begins to settle wrongly – but to the north, not the south as it does today. In 1178 construction stops and is abandoned for another hundred years. By the 13^th century construction resumes, but now it leans to the south. By 1370 it’s completed. The fitting of a bell-tower is supposed to correct and stabilize the entire structure. It does not. In fact, it makes it worse. Hence they install more steps and larger bells on the one side. – This is becoming the lesson of the proverbial “digging one’s hole deeper,” only this time ascending upward… the hole that gets higher.

In 1540 Galileo drops his balls, so to speak, from the belfry and makes his calculations about gravity. And nothing more is said or done about the tower until the 19^th century. By now the south base has sunk 10 feet into the ground. Part of the first floor is almost gone. So in 1838 an architect (Alexandro de la desca) tries to remedy the problem by digging around it. But he accidentally hits the aquifer and the entire town is flooded. The tower lunges yet another foot to the south. It’s “a miracle” that it doesn’t crash to the ground by now. In fact, in 1902 another tower nearby crashes, an 18,000 ton pile of dust and rubble.

In the 1930s they try injecting cement to stop the water from weakening the foundation – only to make it lean again another 3 inches. – Then the war begins. The village scatters and residents became refugees. There’s no time to fix it. Then in 1944 the Allies enter Pisa only to find that the Nazis had demolished all the bell towers, thinking they were observation posts. Inexplicably, this one tower is left untouched – another miracle.

By the 1980s it’s leaning “17 feet off the perpendicular.” In 1989 another 900-year old tower crashes to the ground in another village (and this one isn’t even leaning).

In 1990 the Italian government declares the tower off-limits to tourists indefinitely. It’s a sad day for all of Tuscany. But another effort is put forth by a committee of engineers to “seriously” save it. In 1992 a state-of-the-art monitoring system with censors is installed to detect further movement and cracks. But by 1995 it’s determined that there are simply “too many doctors on this patient” making the whole situation worse yet again.

Finally, in 1997 an idea dawns on “the experts” that could have come from a child: “remove” soil from the north side. This idea is actually proposed in 1962 but is ignored. – It reminds me of the story of the large truck which can’t fit through a tunnel due to its height. All the experts toil over engineering diagrams, theories and formulas. Then a 13-year-old girl in a passing car suggests that they simply let air out of the truck’s tires. They do, and the truck is on its way.

So, in 1999 and only $25 million later, the tower actually readjusts “one-half inch north.” Eureka! The strategy works. But then, again, they run out of money and the government is forced to stop restoration. And for the last 20 years, having done nothing more to it, the decision is made to “not” fix it anymore, in fact to keep it famously crooked – “for tourism.” To straighten it they say is the equivalent of “removing the smile from the Mona Lisa.” They rationalize their waste, embarrassing ineptitude, and torpor by “intelligently” turning lemons into lemonade. — Oh, how clever and politically expedient! We humans are the only animals that blush – and flatter – or need to.

The tower story is man’s legacy to himself, a monument to man’s stupidity, technology becoming “tech-no–logic” and progress becoming regress (and “congress” – bureaucracy). It’s the equivalent of intelligence being measured by nothing more than the quantity of information one has – not in what he does with it. The tower is a symbol and metaphor for all the futilities which have surfaced today in the name of progress. We toil on the wrong side of our towers, dig holes which just get deeper, and try to capture sunlight by drawing our shades down. As Alan Watts said, we attempt to capture the air by grabbing it; capture our breath by holding it (only to lose it), and accordingly, try to save our souls only to lose them.

I seem to be doing a full-circle around the Middle East and back to France again. But here I’ll stop. The warp and woof of time has no ending if I choose to indulge it. I need to come back to “this moment” (the morning) and carpe diem (or the noctis). – Interesting that Horace’s original injunction was carpe diem quam minimum credula postero – “pluck the day, trusting as little as possible in the next one.”

This may have sounded like a tourist’s travel-guide, but as Bowles himself asked: “What is a travel book anyway?” It’s not hotel information on where to go, what to wear, and what to eat, but a “story of what happens to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that.”

All I can come away with after this excursion is that things change while never changing – plus ca change. The human tragi-comedy simply dons new clothing and does the same dance for every audience in every place (geography) and time (generation-to-generation). I suppose wisdom is all about knowing this and extricating oneself from it. The emphasis then quickly shifts to “meanings,” to the journey itself.

Somehow I think of the limerick This is It by Alan Watts intended to answer the question of purpose: “I am It, You are It, He is It, She is It, We are It, They are It, It is It, and That is That!” – The journey is the meaning. I am my own journey. I am “It.” Paraphrasing Bowles, the “story” is me.

The Bhutanese, a people I could have visited had I continued my trek farther East, insist that “this is all an illusion.” They say not to get caught in its web. It’s just a dream – something I intuitively know and say to myself like a mantra but sometimes forget. NONE OF THIS IS REAL. What a revelation that is, a confirmation of what the soul has been trying to say all along.

It’s amazing that we can have dreams about the dream we’re in. We escape from the ritual escaping done from our real work in “other dimensions of sight and sound.”

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

THE BOURGEOISIE

THE BOURGEOISIE

A sign, symbol, social class, expletive, status, warning, imposture, and cross to bear which still has so much power that it’s difficult to dismiss. It therefore grabs my attention. We either are, or are not, bourgeois or are in some manner affiliated or influenced by it. Many were once part of it but fell away from it. Others never were but aspired to be. For Europeans it was something hated but which still survived, and today it seems to have been forgiven its inequities and indulgences.

What is it? It’s a French term born out of the Middle Ages, from the Old French burgeis meaning “walled city.” Inside those walls evolved a social class which became identified with materialism and hedonism. But they weren’t the nobility. They were the artists, craftsmen, and merchants who owned their own businesses and had power of their own. This evolved into a “middle class” between peasants and landlords, between slave labor and the owners of production. They became businessmen and controlled the city’s capital. During the French Revolution they were members of the Third Estate (the common people) and had the power to resist the clergy (1st Estate), and the noblesse (2^nd Estate).

In more modern times the term has come to mean something far less dignified. Slowly it began referring to privileged “philistines” who were ignorant and vain. They were the worst – the haute monde – “rich & shamelessly” naive. Today one needs not go far to recognize them.

Moliere in the 17^th century was the first to portray them negatively – the exemplars of snobbishness, superficially trying to learn the arts, but failing. And yet it was okay, forgiven and tolerated because “he pays well, and that’s what our Arts need now more than any other thing.” “He’s a man who … speaks ignorantly about everything and whose applause comes always at the wrong moments, but his money corrects the judgments of his Mind.”

During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, despite their insulation, isolation (from the arts) and status, many were actually progressive-minded and involved in issues concerning class division and human rights. By the 19^th and 20^th centuries this had all but ended and they were known for serving only themselves. Marx saw the owners of production as exploiting slave labor. Flaubert referred to “bourgeois stupidity.” Balzac and Daumier portrayed them as the bloated incarnation of greed and stupidity dressed in frock coats, leggings, while trying to emulate the “enlightened” aristocracy. Twentieth century writers like Sartre, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty made their hatred of the bourgeoisie a matter of literary faith.

The irony of the French Revolution was that the victors, having overthrown the nobility, simply replaced it with their own versions of the same thing. They craved money and power no less so. In fact it was often said that it was the bourgeoisie who started the Revolution “for themselves,” using short-lived upheavals, republics and restorations to advance their own commercial interests. A writer named Emile Keller accused the Revolution of “having betrayed all and sold everything, beginning with its soul, in order to continue to eat gold and dividends.”

Alas, a residuum of this class survives today. In Paris one can still visit the Seventh and Sixteenth Arrondissements with their imperiously styled building in cut stone, wrought-iron railings, slated roofs, carved window frames, red carpets, furnished foyers, and gilded wrought-iron elevators. Some live as intellectuals on the Left Bank, others as stock brokers, and still others as “preppies-yuppies” – the sons and daughters of old money, studiously but casually dressed and driving BMWs. They don cashmere sweaters, tweed jackets, and silk scarves. The “look” is everything, constantly aspiring to an old “petit-bourgeois modishness.” It’s a shrinking class (not unlike the one-percenters) but one that’s powerful and still seen everywhere. They socialize with celebrities and kings which gives them the notoriety needed to feed a surplus of vanity and ego.

The hated bourgeois was absolutely essential to the French creative scene. It stood as a necessary Judas-Goat, a backdrop against which all the great modern art movements “pushed.” Like inlines to outlines, figure to ground, the greatest art has always been protest art – against (social, political religious, ideological) status quos. Turmoil always calls forth creative energy and pushes us forward into the unknown. As Edgar Wind famously said, “Art is – let’s face it – an uncomfortable business…. The forces of the imagination … have disruptive and capricious power which [the artist] must manage with economy.” It forces intellectual and spiritual growth, higher bars to meet, and tolerance for new precedents. It’s the “yin to the yang” without which there’s no movement at all – a notion not uncomfortable to conservatives (who fear change).

The Belle Epoque (1871-1914) on the surface had no need of protest art since it was a “beautiful era” of relative peace and prosperity, particularly for France. It was also the era of Progressivism in America. It was a “golden age” when art had almost free reign in literature, theater, music, and the visual arts. There existed a firm class structure between rich and poor, but those class-based identities actually supported the Belle Epoque.

But behind the scenes were movements against what the Belle Epoque symbolized. Socialist and labor parties (the Second International) fought for human rights. Impressionism, post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, and other strong movements protested with strategies to epater les bourgeois (“to shock the bourgeois”) – that is, the oppressor class. It was this polarization between haves and have nots which kept both very much alive. And the First World War soon put an end to the “beautiful era” anyway. After the war major art movements would find their modus operandi through continued resistance to the status quo. – Today, one might say the only art remaining truly in the protest spirit is graffiti art, against a backdrop of corporate billboards and multinational banks – a pale reminder of protest art’s once formidable past.

And here’s my point. There never really has been a major protest movement in America – the equivalent of a European style avant-garde. This is because the bourgeoisie has always been packaged and sold like a product under the perception of an American Belle Epoque – which never existed. In other words, throughout the 20^th century the middle class has always striven to be bourgeois, materialistic and hedonistic (ignorance, indulgence, and vanity were fringe benefits). The poor may have hated the rich, but envy is the more accurate word for it. To shamelessly brandish money and snobbery is something Americans have always worshiped. It’s the equivalent of the “American Dream” as dictated by market capitalism. Money is happiness. It’s the god from which all blessings flow, the proof of omniscience, the final alpha and omega to literally everything.

This ethic can be traced all the way back to the Puritans and Calvinism itself: “wealth over benediction, profit over salvation.” The Puritans pushed “economic prosperity” where poverty was a sign of moral failure. And with “predestination” the Calvanist was literally driven to find external and verifiable signs of election. – This still applies. Why else do Americans watch Real Housewives, The Kardashians, 90201, WAGs, and Rich Kids of Beverly Hills as blueprints on how to live the “perfect” life? — There have always been protest movements in America as well as radical art, but they’ve never coalesced into a unified avant-garde against the culture of consumerism and consumption.

I say this with a pronounced melancholy as an American subversive writer. I’m fully aware of what I’m up against in this culture. My views are seen as “quaint,” fringe, too radical, anachronistic, passe, irrelevant, and dismissed with other “specious” theories that never make it out of the classroom – Marxism, workers’ rights, universal healthcare, and the direct vote. The “subversive” shall always remain synonymous with mild terrorism: “a cause of overthrow or destruction.” But no matter. These are opinions which receive their manna from “underground.”

Tragically, since the last war France has also learned to “Americanize.” The war forced it to put aside its class differences and come together (rich and poor) to fight Hitler. And after the war it hadn’t the energy to resume what seemed like trivial pursuits compared to post-war national survival. Some say this softening of sides even began with the First World War and progressed slowly. But either way, by 1945 the idea of materialistic lifestyles appealed greatly to a growing middle class. International markets, goods and services (mostly from the US) were also arriving along with the principles of capitalism (pushing aside socialism). Hatred of the old bourgeoisie had lost its punch. Again, with the exception of the 1968 Paris riots, socialist movements and protest art survived but never regained the power they once had as a powerful avant-garde.

The “new bourgeoisie” is more sophisticated, articulate, and intellectual in Europe than in America and presents a “gentle” rebelliousness. But it appears more like young people trying to simply set themselves apart from the older generation. It comes across like adolescent “oppositional defiance” dressed in tattoos, razor-cuts, and men’s earrings. It reeks of artificiality and naivete. Again, it’s because of an erosion of class antagonisms in the name solidarity and competing in the global arena. The whole bourgeois image has in fact been upgraded, and having money and status is no longer evil. Today’s “hero” recognizes power, and power is money and property. It’s light-years away from the days of Moliere and Daumier.

The subversive “movement” (if there is any in the US) is met with the same dismissal as Europe’s “new bourgeoisie.” The status quo looks down at us – perplexed, bewildered, somewhat embarrassed – and like a parent to a teenager queries, “Why are you so disruptive? Are you trying to prove something? What is it you want?” — Out goes the once legitimate epater les bourgeois as a serious political tool which demanded respect. Today’s symbols of protest in art (punks, skinheads, public graffiti) are treated as a “criminal element” – apprehended and prosecuted. While huge corporate-owned billboards hawking SUVs, trucks, drugs, and cosmetics are seen as perfectly legal and normal (messages which do not deface America), graffiti and street art (theoretically with the same First Amendment rights to deliver its message) are deemed criminal. While graffiti is “unAmerican,” the corporate billboard IS America.

This is the feeling one gets while living and defending the subversive philosophy. “Above ground” society has become insipidly conformist, mass-produced, and thoroughly indoctrinated because there’s nothing pushing against it. It swallows all opposition in the jaws of market capitalism – where everything (abstract and concrete, real and imagined) is packaged and sold as a consumer product. — If I were to announce myself publicly with an important message, the media would treat it as “copy,” worth whatever ratings it brought. I’d be made into a story, reduced to a few simple labels, packaged into a stereotype, and marketed. Any “message” I might have would be irrelevant to today’s market value in the tabloids (and nothing is not tabloid news anymore). And the minute I failed to rally public attention, I’d be instantly sent home and forgotten as yesterday’s flavor of the month.

Like John Lennon said, “if you want to be heard, you must do it with gimmicks and salesmanship.” In other words, you must turn into a buffoon willing to “shock” (entertain) in the cheapest and most embarrassing ways imaginable. And when standing on your head and whistling Dixie fails to entertain anymore you must immediately find other ways of drawing attention again – over and over again. It’s show business, even when it’s about the most serious issues that concern everyone. The most serious philosophers and writers in America are “celebrities” who must sell themselves on entertainment talk-shows. They must schmooze with comedians, singers, and hosts who turn everything into a joke – for audiences with 30-second attention spans, bad diets, who watch daytime soaps all day, and whose total intellectual currency lies somewhere between Disneyland and Lifestyles of the Rich.

Is it any wonder those with serious convictions and messages “drop out” in order to not “sell out?” We simply don’t play the game. Those who don’t are the ones who find themselves drifting below ground for camaraderie and reassurance. We don’t get heard, but integrity is never traded for notoriety. It’s lots better than standing on your head.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

GRAILS

GRAILS

Sometimes I wonder if what every person needs is a grail. I’m not talking about religion and mythology, but a chemical reaction working at the cellular level actually working to turn waste into sustenance, confusion into clarity, randomness into compass bearings, lead into gold. For most of us it seems like the “small things” in our daily existence are what offer exactly this. Without them we’re lost. We’re caste out onto that big black water without a map or a rudder.

Call it another dimension to grassroots, but everything seems to begin at “the root” – beneath the feet of the individual. And that means the fate of everything comes down to one’s access to his own personal grail. Make no mistake, clarity does not erase the mystery of things, the kinds of confusion meant to inspire and intrigue. A grail is there to express what is deepest, most mysterious and inexpressible about ourselves. It’s there to give form to the formless, even when that form makes no sense on the outside and to other forms content on invalidating yours.

If allowed to grow and develop, your grail eventually links up with other small grails like roots twining themselves between trees. The trees remain separate above but find their real nutriment in the subterranean linkages below.

Funny, but the word “radical” derives from the Latin for “root.” That means if you ever want to get to the root of something you must go radical. Hence religion and politics resisting efforts to go to the real root of things. It would upset everything. It would bring about the closest scrutiny of motives. Hence also the censure of a radical’s closest cousin, ally, and ultimate purpose – “the free man” (L. liberalis).

A grail’s purpose is bringing all these elements together into a readable text. The text itself is careful not to become doctrinaire or orthodoxed. It stays fluid and open to interpretation (not unlike the Constitution – America’s Holy Grail). The very definition of a grail is “the object of a difficult quest.” Through flexibility comes the magic of returning us to basic fundamental meanings through many interpretations. The “quest” is finding flexibility, the “object” is in the meaning, and the meaning is found in the basics. The “basics,” the “fundamentals,” never change – just the details.

Lately in our history the individual has been robbed of his grail, and society no less. So we grasp at anything we can to anchor us, to find safe harbor and moorings to soften our confusion. It’s gotten so bad that we confuse the currents below with rudders and compasses. In other words, tails wag the dog. We’ve also forgotten that those “undertows” are anything but random. They’re the forces manufactured by others to a) kill spiritual meaning, b) keep confusion and desperation strong, and c) to offer faux sanctuaries from the storm. Once safely docked in port, the ropes of confinement tighten. No more liberalis, no more linkage to roots.

The Holy Grail for me is books, literature, and the scribes writing them. They’re the captain of my ship, navigator in charge of rudder-operations. But again, they remind me of a deeper fundamental – as vector to the mysteries of myself, to my personal “constitution.” Like a dream, they become actors in a psychic play, on a stage made of decking and ropes and sails and wind. They’re the voices of my soul speaking back to me. And they warn me of dangerous crags and “shallows” which will most certainly leave me aground and lost.

The water metaphor is fitting – the quintessential symbol of ancient alchemy. One’s personal balancing of water and fire, solutio and calcinatio, is the most personal of quests. And once balanced it never remains stable on its own. It requires a constant vigil, shouts from the crow’s nest, constantly redirecting the handlers of ropes and sails on where to navigate. The waters are never still except in knowing them well.

Should it be at all surprising that water surfaces most violently in the presence of dry-docked politicians and pirates hawking stolen goods. They fear the waters, eluding them and inventing myths about Odyssean water demons and monsters (huddled between Scylla and Charybdis, which means “between two evils,” a “rock and a hard place”). The dry and arid mind is one that calcifies, land-locks, and freezes one to fixed reefs. There’s no movement and no breathing. It worships the hard rocks which gave rise to maritime graveyards. It also tries to constantly resuscitate the dead and gone – the past. It fears movement and change, the freedom of fluidity. It seeks to “drain the swamp” of undefined, uncontrolled, unmanaged movement unseen from the shoreline, and then fill it in with sand.

The grail of conservatism is found in the lesson of wagging dogs – that is, the bulldozing of land to build more safety around itself. The more it digs the more it uncovers water below its own feet. It runs into the aquifers of its own unconscious. The faster it digs, the deeper its hole. Today, our politicians are so lost in this conundrum that their only recourse is to nervously build higher and higher landings away from sea level. They live in towers and refuse to look below to what surrounds them. But once they settle in they’re quickly reminded of the unstable ground on which their towers rest. And they quake along with the unsettling of their creations, the creaking and moaning of a ship of fools.

I think of Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools – trying to carry off the “bestiary,” the lepers and insane – the vessel being the Church, what Bosch called the “seat of all vices”.It sailed at a time when alchemy was science, superstition was gospel, and heretics were burned. It swabbed its decks compulsively – needing to erase guilt. It kept “the unclean” in the lower gallows not knowing that the vessel itself courted disease by condemning it. The righteous climbed the spars and held up in the crow’s nest looking down on the unsaved.

Then there is the rest of us today. Those floating on the waters of our own uncertainty. The (grass)roots we seek are in the smallest places imaginable. They must stay small too, lest those policing our waters confiscate and monitor what we do. What they fear most is “freedom.” Too much fosters strength, and strength fosters demand – and finally democracy. So, we stay “under radars” while allowing our roots to entwine like that of trees holding hands below and out of sight. This is our grail-bond. It is the unum in our pluribus, the circulus quadratus (squaring of the circle), the One inside the many. But we won’t find it until we first trust in our private grails which must first be ours separately. Reach within before trying to reach to another root.

There are glyphs on every person’s grail wall, instructions on how to proceed. The first thing you must do is forget everything you’ve been told regarding what you need. This is the outside loudly, desperately, telling you who you are. In your mind you must be the first human being, the first Adam, to have walked in nature, with your pores open to every sensation. Everything is real and possible. Then it becomes a kind of undoing, unscripting. That is, it’s about losing yourself, annulling yourself, by silencing the self – hence, said Walter Benjamin, “not finding the road you are looking for.” And by not finding it, you find it. You are going nowhere, hence where you need to go. No appointments avails us to the very appointment waiting to guide us.

Our past frustrations become a compass. They propel us into a kind of perpetual motion if only to elude those frustrations. But that motion takes us into new spaces, and the grail wall instructs us to “stay open.” The next instruction is not to look for a sign, message, or anything profound along the way. This again is the outside obstructing the process. Again, you must lose the outside by losing yourself.

There is nothing to grab because no one is there to grab it. I think of D.E. Harding’s experience of “headlessness” in his book On Having No Head: Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious. That is, “all mental chatter died down… I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine…. Lighter than air, cleaner than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.” Insight is “an adventure down a unique Path….” The path is the quest which is “perfect emptiness.”

In a sense, this is art taking over. It is life imitating (becoming) art. It’s bigger than we are and becomes a kind of love of life. And as “love,” quoting Gibran, it “gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. [It] possesses not nor would it be possessed….. And think not that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfil [sic] itself.”

I simply cannot live without my grail. It is, to quote Whitman, the “song of myself” – guiding, instructing, scolding, humbling, inspiring, and parenting me. I die into it as one drowns in a cosmic sea with its currents and undertows, its wildlife and marine forests. It creates a kind of insanity as well, a difficulty navigating on “dry land.” But it’s the sacrifice one makes for his muse. It’s the power of an amulet inside of which the muse swims in cobalt blue, staying with us as we walk forward. We can slip inside the crystal at any moment when the world stops us.

The perfect cosmic storm: my grail quest visualized as an ice cave inside a crystal. I climb through its rocky crags while edgy “headless” slivers reach out from below and above like nature’s arms. Each has a message and a lesson locked in frozen stasis. This is “the truth” fighting off the ghostly toxins of dry-docked rules and limitations. My grail flows and becomes its own waters as I manage to melt the mysteries to myself. Then they become me. I die, and what surfaces from that remains unknown – a humbling metamorphosis.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

DOTTIE & SAM

DOTTIE & SAM

Dorothy Parker is contemptuous and irascible – eternally pissed off and never satisfied. Or, it seems that way to anyone not knowing her. She says marrying her husband was just to get a nice Gentile name. She routinely ridicules her employer Vogue, hates women (“they get on my nerves”), loves men but finds them dull, drinks like a fish (hangovers “ought to be in the Smithsonian under glass”), flaunts her sexual prowess (annoying Hemingway), takes painkillers, had abortions and miscarriages, and disdains America’s constant obsession with money (while hailing from wealthy Jewish stock – a grandfather prospering in “gents furnishings,” J. Henry Rothschild being her father). She’s acerbic, witty, irreverent, radical, hypercritical, and anti-establishment (until it brushes against her Gatsby lifestyle).

One day Noel Coward looks at her and remarks, “You almost look like a man,” to which she replies, “So do you.” On another day, at the Round Table, she notices other women looking at a man whose shirt is unbuttoned, and she says, “Well, Frank, I see your fly is open higher than usual.” Incurably pessimistic she expects negativity whenever the smallest things happen. The doorbell rings and she announces her most famous line: “What fresh hell is this?” Yet by the 1930s she’s become the most socially sought after woman in New York, by 1927 the “wittiest woman in America.” As she ages she knows her wilder days are numbered (“I’ll be thirty in a minute,” “Time doth flit, Oh shit”), and in her autumn years, struggling to pay bills, her best companion is a dachshund named Robinson.

It’s the weekend and again I slip down into the All Night Cafe. I’m in the mood for another nightwatch into the subversive. I stop inside and to my right I see Mr. Samuel Beckett pounding away at a classic portable Corona #3 (black, with leather carrying case) – a collector’s item today, even though it’s turned into an ugly workhorse with sticky keys. I motion to him, but his gaze is trained on his work and a cigarette whose ashes have already collected between the Z and M keys. I get no acknowledgment back, but it’s okay. The man’s busy.

To my left and in the corner, at a large table, sits Ms. Parker. She’s looking straight at me and motions me over. A lump swells in my throat and I mumble “oh shit.” I put on a smile and walk over to her table. There are eight chairs lined all around the table, and she points to the one she wants me to take. Suddenly I find myself sitting directly across from her and looking eye-to-eye. I take a deep breath and then hear myself impulsively letting go with my only thought. Out of what I could only surmise is nervousness, I smile and ask, “So … what fresh hell is this?!” She laughs and puts on a Mona Lisa grin dispelling any question of losing her edge for sarcasm and disapprobation. Mona Lisa she is not.

“You don’t like me, do you?” she asks, not wasting any time cutting through the formalities. I say, “I don’t know. I’m not sure if reputations which precede us are always a good thing.” She nods. I say that all I know is what I’ve read about her. She responds, “Be careful what you read. I lived in a cliquish world where reputations were more important than substance and character. I chose that world because I was born into it and was successful at it. What do you expect?”

“Character is something you hide,” she adds. “You almost shun it as it exposes the truth and blows the very cover you need to survive a night of debauchery. You’re supposed to wake up, with hangover, and feign invisibility. You’re expected to invite more of it. If you don’t you become insipid and passe, and before you know it you’re no longer writing for Vogue and Vanity Fair. As a writer you had to be ‘clever and entertaining,’ and when your boss says never to forget ‘that little old lady sitting in Dubuque,’ you have to write about serious subjects sandwiched between polo seasons and ‘how to be idle and rich.’ You figure it out. Real character would have you divorcing the polo crowds and moving in with the lady from Dubuque.”

I say, “So, it’s a little like Spinoza or Jefferson saying religion is okay when taken in small doses?” “Something like that,” she says. “It’s about balance. Otherwise you lose who you are, your soul. There’s something in my Prussian-Jewish heritage that keeps me grounded, never allows me to forget who I am. You don’t understand because you’re not Jewish.”

I decide to change the subject. “So, what are all the other chairs for?” She responds, “We’ll, you’ve heard of the Round Table haven’t you? We called it “the Gonk.” I’m expecting guests tonight.” Suddenly the room fills with the ambiance of the famous Algonquin Hotel – opened in 1902 on West 44^th Street in Manhattan, originally conceived as an apartment hotel, then repurchased and converted into full-time residencies (resold several times, tragically sold off to foreign investors, and today owned by Connecticut company overseeing Marriotts and Hiltons). The Round Table is just one more thing Dorothy loves to spread malicious stories about, even as a member – all “hypocrites and show-offs.” Even an ordinary banquet meeting looks like a “road company for the Last Supper.”

As she speaks I think of what might have been Paris’ equivalent to her Gonk. That would be the Right Bank with its posh hotels, marbled lobbies, and the literary salons. Even the artist’s garret in a small way, since the writers she frequently draws around her are young, ambitious, and full of “cheeky” attitude. But it doesn’t matter to Dorothy (“Dottie” as they call her) – as long as they have talent.

Alas, the Paris rain, her loneliness there (many “nunnish months”), her nonexistent French, her subsequent depressions, drugs, and most of all her abhorrence at witnessing a bull fight in Spain (for which she never forgave Hemingway) slows her poetry and fiction-writing. Overall, despite being feted in Paris by admirers, her memory of Europe is basically “rain and death entwined.” Besides drinking, the only thing which brings a smile to her face is the purchase of a Scottish terrier. It makes Paris bearable.

For a moment I find myself finding some common ground with this woman. “You spoke openly about animal cruelty, didn’t you.” “Hemingway lured me to Spain where he spoke proudly of its history and customs. Then he took me to a bull fight. The first thing I saw was a bull gorging a picador’s horse and its intestines falling out everywhere. Then to watch the senseless killing of animals for public amusement! I don’t give a damn if a matador gets killed because of his own stupidity. That has nothing to do with justifying a tradition of such cruelty.”

To this I respond, “touche to that.” She adds, “I hated Spain after that. It was backwards, illiterate, and indifferent to its own customs. And Hemingway felt personally insulted when I spoke up. After that all he did was speak about me dismissively and insultingly.”

Then she starts off on a spree of “for the record” rants in order to clear the air about a very checkered past. “First, let’s get something straight about my family. My grandparents and parents worked hard. I also knew a thing or two about misfortune. My mother died young, as did my stepmother. My brother vanished without a trace, and my uncle Martin Rothschild died on the Titanic – a small phobia I kept hidden whenever I sailed to Europe. As for women, I’m not the only one who was openly contentious and disdainful. For instance, you should have heard Zelda. She found them predictable and cowardly. In Scott’s novel she says that the only reason women collect men is to shake their boredom.

“As for drinking and smoking, let me say that when I was in my early twenties I was insecure. I needed a faux family around me. That was the Gonk. The fact is, before the Round Table I had never smoked a cigarette or taken more than a sip of alcohol. I hated both and they made me sick. But here I was, skinny, wearing glasses (‘men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses’), shy, and I needed to make an impression. I needed to be a flapper – sophisticated, urbane, well-read, able to hold my own with the men. This is also why I still like hotel life. The beauty of it is in its safety – clerks, chambermaids, valets – it’s my faux family. It’s something I need, especially at night, like when I come here. I contemplated suicide several times and at one point, when married to Eddie, slit my wrists. The hotel saved me at that moment. It was safe sanctuary. And I might add it was diversion – a place to lay a hat and a few friends, if you know what mean.” She chuckles.

“And yet,” I say, “when you died of a heart attack there was very little left of your estate, and what you did have left you bequeathed to Martin Luther King, Jr. Is that right?” “Yes, that’s right. And after he died it went to the NAACP. Everyone hated me for that, wanting a piece of me. Lillian Hellman who expected to inherit all my work, called me “a goddamn bitch.” I then ask, “But why MLK, Jr, especially since the two of you had never even met?” She answers, “It shocked the hell out of everyone. I looked around when I knew I was about to die, and King was the only one who seemed to show any integrity. I didn’t have to meet him. I knew his work. It didn’t take much to decide.”

“And strangely enough, you also outlived almost everyone at the Round Table.” She reacts, “Those I’m about to meet here tonight. And would you like a rundown of those soon-to-be arrivals? Too many for the number of chairs available here tonight, about which I simply must talk to the manager. But no matter. I don’t think most will show anyway: Franklin Adams, Henry Wise Miller, Gerald Brooks, Raoul Fleischmann (the butter guy), George Kaufman, Paul Hyde Bonner, Harpo Marx, Alexander Woolcott, Heywood Braun, Robert Benchley, Irving Berlin, Harold Ross, George Backer. Do you want me to go on? And we can’t forget the women: Beatrice Kaufmann, Alice Miller, Joyce Barbour, actresses Margalo Gillmore, Tallulah Bankhead, and Peggy Wood, novelist Margaret Leech, and more.”

Just then I see dark figures approaching from the back. I say to her, “I’d like to visit more, but I’m taking up one of your chairs. And I have another person across the room I wish to visit. He’s been waiting, even though he looks busy at his portable Royal #3.” Dorothy smiles, “That’s fine. Another time perhaps.” We shake hands and I leave the table.

As I float on across the room I’m struck at how different my impression is of this woman, despite her rough edges and many notorious flaws. There’s something fresh, scathingly honest and rare even by today’s standards. Her poetry and articles cut right through hyperbole and obfuscation. While others accuse her of having no soul, she speaks directly from it and to those afraid of showing theirs. As for hedonism (what she calls “paganism”), she finds it flawed:

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,

Love, the reeling night through,

For tomorrow we shall die!

(But, alas, we never do).

As for love, she confesses her inability to find any. She realizes that she’s attracted only to men who reject her – “This, no song of an ingenue, This, no ballad of innocence….” And the same applies in reverse: “I loved them until they loved me.” And during moments when she no longer considers suicide, she is amazed at herself:

And when it came November,

I sought my heart, and sighed’

“Poor thing, do you remember?”

“What heart was that?” it cried.

As for any guilt, author Marion Meade says this: “Her first memories … were of a family whose every comfort depended upon a system that was merciless about squeezing the lifeblood out of helpless people. Whether or not she ever saw the inside of a sweatshop is immaterial, because she surely absorbed the essence of the conflict between bosses like J. Henry Rothschild and the cloakmakers he employed. In 1927, she began to recover pieces of her past and apply them to the present. – Three decades of rage came roaring to the surface.”

Dorothy had (still has) a life’s project which is difficult to define. Her Jewishness, wealth, and cheeky chutzpah is gathered, packaged, and redelivered in the visage of a scapegoat. She becomes a willing target and flouts the very worst in herself to reflect a) her status of which she has no control but great disdain (while loving her family), and b) to amplify the same hypocrisies in those around her who are afraid of the truth.

I end up walking away with a strange and hard to define respect for this woman – for her intelligence, her difficult path amidst unreconciled wealth, her stilted recherche, and painfully wicked “take no prisoners” honesty. She’s right, I don’t like her at all. Her personality smells every step of the way. I can take her only in measured spoonfuls. But I also return, in measured increments, as if wishing to capture something lost and very rare, a mystique or an essence which only comes along with serious offense. As she seems to say in between volleys of calculation and timed abrasiveness (borrowing an old adage), “Don’t judge my book by the chapter you walk in on.”

Looking and feeling rather tattered I stumble my way to the other end of this smoky room – what feels like the bridge across forever. A much smaller and quieter corner, Mr. Beckett is living up to his reputation as a solitary man. Feeling like I had just stepped out of a whirlwind, I sit down. His eyes leave the typewriter just long enough to look up and smile. They then return to what appears to be a very serious project, with which I’m completely at ease. I feel like I need to rest my mind anyway. For what seems like a quarter of an hour we both sit in silence, except for the banging of keys. I lose myself in the frescos on the wall trying to piece together my visit with Ms. Parker.

As he works my mind shifts to what traits this writer and I might possibly share. This is an intensely private man, atheistic, introversive, and here to do what writers do – write. I’ve heard that he suffers the same dilemma I do in public places. Many (most) Americans visit cafes with books and pens, but their real intent is to socialize, kibitz, and

create party-like atmospheres. The books get put aside and feelers go out in terms of who recognizes whom for potential “gatherings.” Mr. Beckett is not unsocial and definitely not antisocial. He’s quite amiable and approachable. But he comes here to write. The cafe atmosphere provides the perfect energy from which to vicariously draw for razor-sharp observations. By contrast, the home environment is all but dead, even with caffeine, and “we” end up writing very little. – Louis L’Amour was this way too, only he found a more expeditious way to solve the problem. He rented an apartment directly above a saloon in Durango, Colorado. He was there and not there at the same time.

Alas, Beckett has been accused of snobbery. If onlookers would only engage him to discover the truth. But because he prefers a quiet corner and his books to “the party,” people interpret that as rejection. I relate so well to this that it almost hurts seeing it happen to someone else. I imagine he would see me as someone who “missed his calling,” who should have been raised in England or France where “tables for one” are not just routine and normal but sacred spaces.

Beckett admires Watteau. He knows is work. And I wonder if he’s even aware that Watteau was here just last weekend. It doesn’t matter. He draws to antagonists who are clownish, tragic, as well as to expressionistic (Romantic) landscapes. His own characters tangle with existential loose ends and how (if at all) man fits in the world. He disagrees with Watteau that man and nature can reconcile. There is communion but never total union for Beckett.

It reminds me of the Catholic concept of substantiation (as opposed to consubstantiation and transubstantiation). The first leaves man alone and helpless. The second dignifies “communion but not union.” The third is “Oneness” with nature and God. Beckett seems to stop where Watteau moves on.

The actors in his plays are absurd but serious, simple-minded but convoluted and complex when managing to touch those inner aspects of ourselves. It reminds me of those very subtle features of the human comedy so well drawn by Watteau. We are the simplest when appearing to be complex and most complex when finding our simplicity.

If Watteau is the “first modern artist” as some say, then Beckett is the “last modernist” writer. They seem to be like bookends — parentheses around a revolutionary period. Beckett’s own “bookend” could possibly be his involvement in man’s worst episode of all – helping the French Resistance in World War II, being captured by the Gestapo, escaping and fleeing to safety, awarded the Croix de guerre and Medaille de la Resistance. He stays in the trenches so to speak even after becoming famous, giving away all the money won for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He kibitzes with fellow war writer-artists Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Marcel Duchamp, and others. Meanwhile he lectures at Trinity College and has an affair with Peggy Guggenheim. His passion is Joyce and tries to meet the standard of writing set in Finnegan’s Wake (with which he helps Joyce gather material). He humbly gives up trying to match Joyce’s genius knowing his limitations. He then begins to discover his own style.

Before the war he’s stabbed in the chest by a crazy man who then claims he “doesn’t know why he did it.” Beckett visits him while still healing from his wound and they both seem to share the same question – as if allies facing a common demon. He finds the assailant contrite, troubled, and humble. Based on that he forgives the man, drops the charges, and lets him go free. There is a deep empathy for people of violence who never have a chance to explain why they too are victimized by violence.

Beckett’s life can divided in three phases: the pre-war years up until 1945 when he’s obsessed with Joyce; the next 15 years when he realizes he’s too much in the shadow of Joyce, writes Waiting For Godot, pondering existentialist themes, and myriad theaters of the absurd; and from the 1960s until his death when his themes become abstract and minimalist. From here on he’s clear that, where Joyce went in the direction of fulfillment, he was going in the direction of “impoverishment, in lack of knowledge … subtracting rather than adding.”

Sitting before me is the man in all “three stages.” It’s almost like the parent who sees his infant son’s entire life before him – youth, adulthood, and old age. He is, paraphrasing Siddhartha, “like the river … at its beginning, middle, and end all at the same time.” Looking into Beckett’s eyes is to see the young, mature, and aged artist and the scars of war and sacrifice. I’m rather humbled. But I’m also intrigued with what he’s typing at this moment. Is it an observation from any one phase? Or is it a detached view of seeing how life unfolds and how we get caught in the webs of our naivete?

He tells me how Godot was the result of seeing a psychoanalyst years ago before the war. “How can you not see yourself in the characters you write about, when you yourself are trying to fit in the world? We’re all waiting for redemption, forgiveness, answers, love, friendship and validation.”

Then he looks directly at me and without hesitation shares an observation about literature and creativity. “It seems that writing today seems to be a question of ‘scoring’ more than dealing with emotions and the substance of human conflict. It’s about demystification and the erasure of ambiguity. Don’t writers today understand that creativity is all about embracing ambiguity, letting it follow its own course?”

I’m overwhelmed, but I also realize that we are on the same page. He continues: “Everything is formulaic, genuflecting to a public need for instant resolution. Evil is too feverishly killed by heroes in Arthurian body armor, swinging laser beams and phallic projectiles. This is why nothing ever penetrates too deeply, at the risk of sounding Freudian. Your public can’t handle it. The result is a terrible absence of the kind of edge which is needed to maintain tension and hold the reader’s interest long after the story ends.”

I agree. The new mythology is all about ending ambiguity altogether – the hero’s entrance, killing off the last remnants of uncertainty, rescuing the world, and giving it a Disneyland ending. There no longer exists the patience for loose ends. And it mirrors the political-spiritual atmosphere in which we’re situated. It’s a mythology about sheer power and the utility of violence, and little more. It’s about “warrior righteousness.” We have little tolerance for prolonged fantasies of “killer wish-fulfillment.” The John Wayne Western still leads the way in this manner. It dictates the American state of mind. It tells us we’re living righteous lives, and if there’s darkness over the horizon all we need is perseverance, prayer, and renewed allegiance to Manifest Destiny. God is in our corner – we wear the white hats.

This mirrors America’s disillusionment with an enormous lie. The American West today, where I live, is living testament to this dilemma – where citizens still go to live the “cowboy dream.” By and large it is a colossal disappointment. The dream isn’t there. What is there are modern urban corridors, over-population, pollution, boundary disputes, abused lands, and government intrusion. Many feel betrayed and “the dream” quickly dies while watching more and more people arriving with the same dream. It’s the 1930’s great “California or Bust” migration all over again – the metaphor of migrants ending up in work camps run by brutal union-busting bosses. “Take a number, get in line, and wait” for your dream-life in “Pleasant Valley” and “Rolling Meadows.”

This is what sends Beckett (and myself) underground – here tonight. Instead of seeking clarity from ambiguity, we move into it, embrace it – to deconstruct, to make all things contingent, to open closed systems and question master narratives. A thought which also forces me to look across the room at the newly formed Round Table. It’s a kind of awareness that renews a sense of empathy for Ms. Parker and her “faux family.” It all makes sense.

“Literature is the last banquet of the mind,” says Beckett. “It offers whatever we put on the table.” I’m reminded of a quote by writer Paula Fox: “Hard and unremitting labor is what writing is. It is in that labor that I feel the weight and force of my own life. That is its great and nettlesome reward.”

At this juncture in the evening I can’t help but feel like a cheap matchmaker. What would Beckett look like next to Harpo Marx and Tallulah Bankhead at the Round Table? I wonder, especially since Beckett lived in France and Parker visited there, if the two had ever met. Parker died in 1967, Beckett in 1989. Both lived through the war and knew the giants of literature. – Nonetheless, I remain silent. It’s not my place to force alliances that don’t happen of their own accord, with outside prodding.

I take Beckett’s final comment to heart. Also his critique of modern writers and the American need for simplicity and finality. We live in a culture of “Dick & Jane” sentences. Where literate people used to back into sentences with participial phrases, we now talk in the very manner that Gertrude Stein coached Hemingway on how not to write: avoiding complex sentence structures and unnecessary words. Like Hemingway, we like it tough, simple, direct, quick, and in easy John Wayne catchphrases. If it’s too long-winded for Wayne, you’re “going the long way around the barn.” If you’re moving too fast, “don’t jump in til ya know how deep it is.” If he talks too much, “I’m running outa breath. Now you talk.” And “I won’t be wronged, lied to, or laid a hand on” – simple creed of the (nonexistent) Old West. The world is black & white, just like the 1950s TV screen.

I take Beckett’s final point. But then it’s something he didn’t have to say in the first place. I remind him again that it’s that understanding which brings us here tonight. He smiles. He then returns to his typewriter and begins hitting the keys. I take one last look and realize he is a man of few words, except when written. I say goodnight. Without looking up, he nods.

I get up from my chair and turn in the direction of the evening’s “Gonk.” As Dottie is chatting away with Robert Benchley to her side, cigarette in hand, her eyes lock onto mine. We both smile and send our adieus in silence. I turn to the door and leave. This night has been full.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt