marc pietrzykowski

Reading Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, which is fascinating, or maybe just really propulsive in an intellectual way, and certainly twee in spots. For example he makes the point that seems almost overdone at this point, that we have, as a global civilization, lost our way, that the future seems untenable, that progress has halted. He makes this point framed as a college lecture given in the future after a series of great global calamities, and as a precursor to the two people teaching the course becoming lovers, which undercuts the apocalyptic story, though not in the way I think he intends–the effect is not to show “despite it all, people will fall in love,” but to reinforce the idea that there is nothing we can do, humans are shit at thinking forward and changing the world for the better, so we might as well fuck. Still, I am enjoying the story, he really is great at characterization and narrative force, just wish he wasn’t saying the same old thing we all seem to be trying to convince ourselves, that the world is screwed, we did it, and there is nothing we can do about but keep calm and carry on.

The reading part of re-ordering my head is goin well, as I have found several books that held me fast, which is the difficult part. Thomas Szalay’s Flesh was “cunningly made,” as they say, some Hemingway-esq minimalist language and disaffected male narrator in service of a pretty complex moral tale. The ending is perfect, I spent a time starting at the wall after the last sentence. Also read Michael Crummey’s Galore and also The Adversary, much more gothically lush than Szalay, just enough magical realism and Faulkner place witchery to drive the well told, meandering stories (in Newfoundland, excellent). And then I’m nearly done with Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai, which I read in preparation for reading her current book, Your Name Here. The most experimental of the which I often have limited patience for, but she pulls it off magnificently, I see why so many lauded this when it came out. Thanks for writing these books, all of you, it gives me hope.

I travel a county road to work and back during the week, four lanes, then two, gently inclined and barely curving for 9 miles through farm country. I pass a can reclamation center, a pet hotel, a church, and a squat building that sells “storage solutions,” as well as scattered homes and silos and barns. It is the kind of road that can make people impatient, especially when they are late for something or are simply made impatient by empty space. I’ve seen many a car in the culvert at either side, in all seasons, and have driven slowly past the aftermath of at least one fatal crash. I get distressed too, sometimes, and pass others going 10 or even 20 miles below the limit, and always feel chagrined afterwards, but I understand the frustration. I also have things to do.

During today’s drive, a green Lexus SUV ran up on my bumper, then darted out to pass my car, and also the tractor trailer in front of me, causing the car coming in the opposite lane to brake, hard. The tractor trailer turned at the next cross street–this is why it was slowing down–and I went on, stopping at the next stop light right behind the SUV. My face did not smirk, but my mind did, my soul even, and again I felt chagrined, because the soul has no business smirking.

At least, some instinct insists that is so, that the soul is meant for nobler things than a smirk, and then I realize that I don’t really know what I mean by “soul,” that I am, as usual, leaning on some ricketty ideas gifted me by other humans. I do appreciate the concept, but I can’t find any Goldilocks version: the soul as ectoplasmic essence, gifted by the gods or God, communicating with the brain through the pituitary gland–wild stuff, but not right. I’m not convinced of the immateriality of the soul, even as I recognize it is something more than body and some electrical signals blinking on and off until eventually the patterns grow fixed, and lo, a person! Also not right, Mr. Skinner.

I am fascinated by the ancient Hebrew concepts of nepesh and ruach, meaning something like “body” and “breath,” and the way the interaction between the two is the point–per Walter Eichrodt: “If nepesh is the individual life association with a body, ruach is the life-force present everywhere and existing independently over against the single individual.” The body is inert without breath to animate it, and breath exists prior to and even without the body, in other words, and it is easy to see how the Greeks and later Western Christian tradition pried them apart and made the of the soul a separate thing. The body/breath idea also reminds me of Taoism, and the idea that we al emerge from a field of potentiality, the uncarved block, but again, while close, neither concept is quite right, and I may fall asleep in this comfy bed before the bears return.

All these ideas are helping me understand what a soul is not, so I run the risk of discarding the idea entirely unless I can figure out why I believe it exists. First, I am made of the same stuff as everything else is made of, just arranged in a particular manner, so materially, I am ineluctably part of the world. However, the manner in which my material is arranged, the cells and organs and all the rest, allows for the possibility of self-awareness, something that much of the matter around me does not appear to possess, at least in any way I can understand. So maybe the soul is this potential, the conditions by which a person can become a person, interacting with the world, forming attachments and ideas and emotions and other such expressions of selfhood, all connected to that initial set of conditions. That way, the soul becoming a self might be compared to a mushroom, popping out of the soil, and we see the mushroom but not necessarily the network of mycelium that allowed for the mushroom to appear. I guess that is really not so different from what various religious and philosophical traditions have communicated, atman and jiva-atman, which seems a lot like nepesh and ruach again; I am surely mangling what are very subtle traditions and concepts, so once more: the soul is the process by which a certain arrangement of matter is achieved, and thereby allows for the emergence of an individual self. The self is not the soul, but it is inseparable from the conditions which allow it to persist, and what happens to it after we die, well, damned if I know. 

What I do find important is the idea that we are, to some degree, in control of what we do with the self that emerges, even though we may be genetically predispositioned in certain directions, and that our learned experience is enormously difficult to analyze and understand. Still, I chose to smirk at the driver of the Lexus, and as I said, it seemed like the smirk came from pretty deep within the layers of myself, and the soul from which it constantly emerges. No one was there to see it, had I even smirked physically, I was simply taking small and stupid schadenfreude, and as soon as I felt it I knew it was not worth feeling, but I’d felt it anyway. As I’ve clarified for myself by writing these words, I was disappointed because I believe the soul is something we should always be working on, improving, perfecting–better be working on your soul, as they say, and I was reminded I still have a long way to go. 

A smirk is a conceited kind of smile, an arrogance, a sign that I was placing myself above the person in the Lexus, and my idea of a life worth living is to work to rid my soul of any such feelings, because I know them to be false. I could argue that a smirk, or other pettiness, or even intentional cruelty are simply different ways a soul have of emerging as the self forms, but such relativity means that hurting someone is the same as helping them, that being the best at harming another is aspirational the same way being compassionate is. There are several reasons this is nonsense, not the least of which is that one approach liberates the soul and encourages it to flower (compassion), while the other binds the soul to a perpetually unsatisfying cycle of harm and being harmed, pain and loss, which stunts the soul, rather than helping it grow. To find oneself alive, the incredible unlikelihood of the chain of events that led to the existence of every human being, seems a shame to squander on a cycle of dominance and submission, bootlicking and lip-bloodying, that will only end in pain and shame as the spigot is turned off. We only have to look around to see what it does to people, to those who need power, who need to humiliate and demean others, the burning froth of need and pain in their eyes as they go on trying to feed the beast they have created, the one eating them from the inside. It’s no way to live, and even if avoiding such pain is the motivation for shaping one’s soul toward compassion, it’s a start.  

Mike Monteiro: https://www.worldsgreatestartist.com/

Ai Weiwei: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ai-sunflower-seeds-t13408

Other animals playing: https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2010/03/all-animals-except-man-know-that.html

Searching for alternatives, pt 1

I am rambling through a variety of media, looking for different ways to of thinking about the current state of things, since the world seems pretty bleak and, more importantly, limited in terms of our ability to respond, individually or collectively. First, I should really identify some of the factors responsible for this boxed in feeling.

The ossification of the internet is one such factor, as many have noted—the promise of the early internet was that ideas which challenged that status quo would have a greater chance of being heard, and assessed, and discussed, and anyone could, theoretically, join in the conversation. The internet was supposed to be a digital commons, an agora, and it was, for a while. Then the usual, capitalist thing happened: something that should be considered a public utility became viewed as a source of profit, and the bloodsuckers came. The tragedy of the commons is not that humans will simply deplete the resources of a shared space, but that a small group of bad actors will deplete these resources and move on, absent some kind of restrictions on allowing this to happen. This is what has happened to the internet, thanks to things like search engine optimization, which limits the reach of smaller voices (like this blog), the proliferation of bots, AI generated content, and host of other factors, all of which have had the effect of making the internet feel more like watching an endless infomercial, rather than participating in a conversation.

The grinding catastrophe that is climate change is another tragedy wearing down people’s ability to think of other possibilities, other ways of being. I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War being the great existential threat, and remember the surge of hopefulness that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Climate change is even more monolithic, and more glacial (dark pun intended) in pace, so expecting some great event that might mark our emergence from its shadow seems even more unlikely. Add a pandemic to the mix, and, well, it is not hard to see how a general malaise has settled in.

I am glossing over so much here: how social media and cell phone tech have managed to short circuit most of our attention spans, let alone ability to read and process information, political balkanization and the rise of far right extremism—I could go on, and then I could point out all the man ways our world is so much better off than it was even just 30 years ago, but the knot I am trying to untie is the one that inhibits people from thinking about other ways to live and think about the world.

I can, of course find dozens of ready to wear alternate lifestyles available for purchase with a simple search query, which pretty much sums up the situation. Then again, even before the internet, most people sucked their cultural water from the same hose, and all of the meandering complaint I have just foisted would apply just as well to 1980, or 70, or even the 60s. I cannot speak to the state of things before the advent of mass media, maybe that is the next direction my reading should take.

In any case, there are so many other ways to be, and searching them out and thinking about them is one way to resist. It’s the way I learned, anyhow.

I’ve been catching threads of commentary about the state of human culture–global culture, since that is what we talk about, now that the internet has stuck us all in one room. Anyway, threads about how we are in a period of ennui, or imaginative recession, the idea that we have access to so much and nothing is worth doing, that everyone is exhausted and no one can summon the imagination to do things differently. This essay by Dimiter Kenarov is a good example of what I mean: https://www.switchyardmag.com/issue-1/bulgarianfrontier, and has some excellent photos to boot.

I noticed this phenomenon creeping in before the pandemic, and before social media began to limit self-expression so profoundly, but now it seems like it has entered the zeitgeist, as we once called it. And that is a good thing, because that means things are changing, because the zeitgeist is always a little behind the actual spirit of the age. Once we get to the point where some loose consensus is reached about the shape of the world, it becomes clear that said shape actually dissolved into something else, and here we go again. What is this new turn? I can only hope it involves another surge of creativity and imaginative exploration of possibility, but in case it is not, I am going to spend a few weeks searching for alternatives to the current bowl of broth, as Kenarov put is (borrowing from Thomas Mann), and remembering that “searching” is not something affixed to the word “engine” without limiting the potential for surprise.

I’ve been enjoying 130 poems by Jean Follain quite a bit, ripe with poems like this one:

Signs for Travellers

Travellers in the immense spaces
when you see a girl
twisting in her resplendent hands
the long black fleece of her hair
and what’s more
when you see
near some gloomy bakery
a horse lying dead on the ground
by these signs you’ll know
you are where humans live.

(Translated by Christopher Middleton, Anvil Press 2010)

I have had to find new ways to carve writing time for myself out of the very packed days I am living, and remembered I started writing here in 2008–good lord, can it really be that long? Well, sure. time marches on and all that. And I do want to get back to watching the 100 movies with my love, but I fear that may be even harder to accomplish. Might have to just soldier on with that project myself (read that in a whisper, so Comfortina does not find out).

But first: Engine Summer. I read Little, Big, and found it alternately hypnotizing and annoying, so I put off Engine Summer (by John Crowley) for a bit, and once I did, well, it has been knocking around my head the way the best books do, coaxing new dendrites into being. It’s a pastoral post-apocalyptic novel, devoid of zombies or feral gangs or really much violence at all, thankfully, but still manages to be almost unbearably sad by the end, and moreso upon reflection. I just finished Riddley Walker (Russel Hoban) before starting this one, and that, too, was all embracing (once I got the hang of the invented dialect), but also was much more typical of the genre in terms of the brutality of the humans who lived in the shadow of the fallen civilization. Why so many post-apocalyptic novels? T’was not an intentional selection, I just had the books in a pile, though they certainly do resonate with news of climate change growing more and more dire, and the general shrug that most people have adopted as their standard response to the crisis. Anyway… Little, Big was something else, and I won’t spoil it by revealing more of the story. Sad and beautiful, it is.