Feedback

"Death is the road to awe." – The Fountain

If you don't know what causes microphones to feed back (that lacerating squeal), I can explain it in a few sentences: the mic captures sounds and turns them into an electric signal that it sends to an amplifier; the amplifier takes that signal, boosts it, and pushes it out speakers so everybody can hear it. The result of this subtle sorcery is a new sound that's louder than what went in. That is the essence of amplification. Unfortunately, if the microphone is in the wrong place, like in the path of the speakers, it catches that new, amplified sound and sends it right back through the cheese grater only to come out even louder than before, and then catches it, and then amplifies it... on and on, in an ever-loudening cycle. This loop is referred to as feedback and it happens fast, like a matter of seconds.

For years the concepts of feedback and reincarnation have been joined in my mind but I couldn't say why, until recently. I've been absorbing the book Living, Dreaming, Dying in which Rob Nairn, a devout Buddhist with an illuminating perspective, breaks down the impenetrable and fantastical Tibetan Book of the Dead into a common-sensical manual for dreaming as preparation for death. The core idea of Buddhism is the fleeting nature of the self, which Nairn compares to a mist over water. This is how I've always seen it only maybe a little darker and more destructive, like a tornado, whipped up out of nothing, making a powerful and chaotic case for its own existence. As this tornado of self careens along, crushing a path of rebirth, it's bound to meet with enough resistance that it can't go on any longer pretending to be something and, after losing force, unravels. The feedback in this, the loop of ever-increasing intensity, comes from the extra weight we give to things by allowing them to persist–the reoccurring themes of ignorance which we pull with us from life to life. All ideas about transcendence are variations on this idea; of one piece of continuity threading through separate cloths and gaining importance from repetition alone. U2 made a career out of it. They discovered that if you plunk the same note repeatedly and change the chords underneath it (three chords is usually enough), you have a musical metaphor for transcendence. And we all get goosebumps.

In The Fountain, Hugh Jackman plays three versions of the same soul. The first is Tomas, a 16th century conquistador in love with Queen Elizabeth, who is afraid she won't survive the Spanish Inquisition. She sends him on a mission to find the Tree of Life–hidden near a Mayan pyramid–and, with it, save the kingdom. His relentless loyalty to this quest, and stubborn refusal to accept any form of defeat, even eminent death, are his feedback, the themes he will carry with him for more than a thousand years of rebirth. Of these, we see Tommy, an oncologist trying to cure his wife's cancer through experimental research; and Tom, an astronaut hurtling alone through space in an invisible craft toward the golden nebula where he believes the soul of his dead wife can be reborn. The superficial differences between their times and circumstances create a relief against which we can see their fundamental sameness. It's not a story about eternal love as much as eternal persistence; a devotion to illusion so strong it distorts the truth and stunts acceptance.

There is another way the soul is like sound. There's never just one. The things we hear, like human voices or plucked guitar strings, begin as a single sound wave. But what reaches our ears is not pure and separate but a mixture of the original wave and a scattering of its reflections, called harmonics.

illustration "Pure Fractal Frame" by Cory Ench

The source sound is like a theme and the harmonics are its variations. We have the illusion of hearing one thing, but it's really many. In nature, sound is never alone.

The Fountain is a story of the harmonics of a man. His stories are just variations of the same plucked note refracted and warped into higher and lower pitches and scattered through time. As Tommy, the present-day doctor, he takes a fountain pen in a fit of sadness after losing his wedding ring and tattoos a band on his ring finger. By the time he is reborn as Tom the astronaut, the tattoos go all the way up his arm, like the life rings of a tree, marking all the incarnations, and their singular path of frustration, that stood between. The movie is full of this kind of visual rhyming. Every image mirrors another, reflecting in all directions through time.

In music, one of the results of feedback is distortion, which is a blurring of detail and a changing of the shape. I think there is a similar feedback effect that comes from the way we interact with culture; that is, our experience of it is so amplified it is indistinct and no longer dynamic. Think about the first time you listen to a piece of music that you will come to love. Your musical memory is like a fresh slab of vinyl without the grooves carved in. The etching happens later through repeated listens and at some point your memory of the music doubles, and even anticipates, the hearing process, to the point where you're projecting as much as you are taking in. You had a nice first experience. Then you wanted that experience again, but now you've put what that feeling was like into a drawer in your head and, when you come back to the music, you expect something from it; expect to know what drawer to find that feeling in. By doing this, when it does deliver it is now amplified by your anticipation of, and participation in, the act of listening. You get more of a good thing. But not really. When we come back to art this way, expecting to recreate a moment of feeling, we are likely to find it – because we are looking for it – but it's never really the same.

I've been thinking about the way I first saw The Fountain and how that context, or lack of it, prepared me to appreciate it in a whole new way. Like a lot of people my age, I've become some kind of half-assed expert on consuming culture. Because of my love of movies, I've developed a hyper-awareness of the industry that makes them. The internet and the DVD extra pushed this along. I don't just go to the movies, I check their composite scores on Metacritic first. I might look up the cast on IMDB. And I don't just know the names of movie stars, I know the people playing the small parts too. I know directors; producers; soundtrack composers. Even the occasional cinematographer. Yet somehow The Fountain slipped through my filter. It might be because I wasn't hot for writer/director Darren Aronofsky's previous two films Requiem for a Dream and Pi and so wasn't anticipating his next move the way I might one of my favorite directors like Richard Linklater or Noah Baumbach. But a little looking (on wikipedia, the secret weapon of a culture whore) reveals that it probably had more to do with the lack of promotion by the studio because The Fountain was a problem project which is lucky to have been released at all. Originally supposed to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, filming began in Australia in 2002 only to be scrapped halfway through preproduction when Pitt pulled out to do something else. Aronofsky revived the project, reconceptualizing it with a modified special effects approach at half the budget and new leading actors (Jackman and Rachel Weisz). While the finished film is clearly phenomenal, it's easy to see why the studio would have trouble marketing something so esoteric since the essence of movie promotion is the promise of something you've seen before (feedback).

So I went in blind, purely on the recommendation of a friend who thought I would like this new sci-fi film with a gritty, CGI-free aesthetic that reminded him of the first Star Wars films. The theater was completely empty, which turned out to be an ideal setting for a meditation on death. My friend had told me I would probably like the movie. He didn't tell me I would be rendered mute, or that I was about to see the first film that I would ever consider necessary. When I left, I drove around in my car for a while, not wanting to break the spell by going home. I thought about it intensely for days. I still think about it.

Why did I react so strongly? Going back and watching the DVD only made me appreciate it more, but in a totally different way–as much for its compression of content as its visceral spiritualism. And it also helps that The Fountain is pure eye candy and its beauty doesn't diminish with return. But while I'm positive that The Fountain will develop a cult following because of the power of its metaphysical themes and breathtaking art direction, I think the intensity of my response was based on something more fundamental: I saw this film outside of The System. The System is something I actually help create. It's the combination of marketing and media that I've customized to my tastes over time. It's the sites I use, the magazines I read, etc. I have similar systems for music; books; television. But seeing The Fountain was different. It was a system-free experience. And not only did I come to it culturally virginal, in a way it was made outside of the system. Or rather, it was made in spite of the system. One of those stubborn, career-injuring labor of loves that are only permitted to be by the sheer momentum of the creator's past successes. And it's easy to see why it faltered under Hollywood's nurturing. There is no marketing template for sci-fi buddhist meditations that lure audiences with brand-name actors and then confuse the shit out of them.

In a review of the film that is about to come out, I describe The Fountain as a demanding masterpiece of such singularity and compressed articulation it transcends the whims of popular culture and rises to the level of spiritual edification. And wrote that it will likely be to film what Siddhartha was to literature – the definitive western poetry for eastern mysticism. Once I began to think of The Fountain as a work of art without precedent, I started trying to come up with other examples that went even further, of art outside of culture. If The Fountain is a work with its own genre, it is still within the broader context of film and besides, it's based on ideas drawn from the religious systems of eastern mysticism, another context. But is anybody making art in a cultural vacuum? That is, outside of the confines of an industry? This brings up the question of what art is. My personal definition is: truth in expression. Does that kind of expression, in a cultural form, exist outside of industry? And by industry, I mean the gross growth of mass production, magazines, web sites, criticism and scholarship that eventually forms like an exoskeleton over all great forms of expression and choke the life out.

My generation has experienced the thrill of new forms plenty of times. I'm sure most people can remember the weirdness and urgency of the first time they saw reality television. It's since solidified into one of the most unexperimental formats of television around, with music and editing techniques that seem to come out of a rule book but, once, it was new. With the internet, we've seen several new opportunities for self-expression. A website used to be a functional thing until it became a great medium for declarations of style. Social networking sites like MySpace can be used expressively. I have a few friends (e.g., Trevor or John) whose pages look art-directed without being overcooked (proving once and for all that they are cooler than I will ever be).

In a blog last year, I described the manager of a local Baja Fresh (a Tex-Mex franchise restaurant whose burritos soothe my soul) as one of my favorite artists. I was probably reaching with that one, but what I was trying to say was that his kindness and professionalism were revelatory. They were something he created on a daily basis that I learned from and enjoyed. I also described a local guitar tech, Mike Koontz, as a great artist. Mike exudes a force field of benevolence. And though he does work with his hands and you could describe his extremely gifted craftsmanship as being artisanal, it was the calm and kindness he brings to his interactions with customers that I was referring to as great art. While I still believe that decency and goodness are forms of creativity and are the primacy of art, is there anything else outside of culture that is closer to what we traditionally think of as being art forms? Like an event or new media?

Well, there is Jim Denevan, a "45-year-old nomadic chef, sand artist, and founder of the culinary road show known as Outstanding in the Field," who was the subject of a feature in GQ Magazine's June edition. I'm quoting from Howie Kahn's piece:

Every summer, Denevan fires up his bus and travels the country, staging elaborate dinners on farms, in parks, and on beaches, from Alaska to New York City. His goal is to free us from the cult of celebrity chefs and the limits of the restaurant experience. Wearing red flip-flops, jeans, no shirt, and a blue baseball hat with SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME embroidered across the front, Denevan stops in a spot he has seemingly claimed from afar. "This is perfect," he says, and starts converting this stretch of dirt and grass into the setting for a carefully executed food-driven experience–his singular take on dinner.

Over the next half hour, Denevan hoists flattops, two at at time, over his head. Soon, several tables linked end to end parallel beds of emerging vegetation: Swiss chard, Bull's Blood beets, purple-crowned alliums. He removes chairs from a trailer and carries ten at a time, unfolds them, pops them into place. Volunteers drop tablecloths like parachutes and lay down silver- and stemware, paying close attention to the symmetry of their settings.

Initially, Denevan's Oustanding in the Field operation cooked for the paying public on California farms to showcase local farmers and their food. He put on three dinners in the summer of 1999, two in 2000, took the year off in 2001, came back with seven meals in 2002, and eight in 2003, when Denevan, the longtime chef at a popular Northern California restaurant called Gabriella Cafe, left the kitchen for good. In 2004, convinced of his company's reach, Denevan bought a streamlined 1953 bus for $7,000, hired a staff, and began touring North America. His troupe hosted weekly dinners throughout the summer and fall, and most of the time Denevan handed over the cooking duties to chefs of local renown (the thought being, local chefs would know better how to handle the local ingredients). "We had this idea from the beginning," says Denevan, "that the farmer should be the star, that the chef should be of secondary importance. It needed to be done. The chef was rising in stature as a culturally significant figure, and the farmer wasn't talked about. Maybe that happened because people didn't see farming as a creative pursuit. But I would argue that it is. Have you ever heard a farmer discuss his crops? Why he chooses to grow acidic peaches instead of white ones? Why one year he chooses to plant a special green Romans like to eat with anchovies? All these choices are stories created by passion, and story is the substance of food."

I was excited by the Denevan story because, beyond Outstanding in the Field being such a great idea, it seems like a genuinely new form–an original, communal event–a concept for expression pulled seemingly out of thin air. But this isn't the first example of playing with new forms for Denevan. Before he created Outstanding in the Field, he was also known for his sand art, and the story behind how he began drawing on beaches is just as interesting. He was a model in the mid '80s, living in Milan and working for a prominent talent agency:

While his peers snorted lines, he cultivated an appreciation for olive oils and herbs, focaccia, pizzas topped with raw egg. "I was involved in a pretty superficial pursuit," he says, "but I found meaning on my plate." In 1986 he would return to California and take a job in Capitola as a cook at a good Italian restaurant with an obsessively authentic menu. In less than a year, Denevan, the autodidact, would be promoted to chef.

Restaurant work kept him happy until the mid-'90s, when his mother, a doctor of mathematics, fell ill with Alzheimer's. The disease crashed her brain and erased all the numbers. As her problem solving capacity diminished, her second-youngest son–Denevan–poured himself into a new pursuit: sand art. he left the restaurant, took to the beach, and found himself consumed by shapes. "My mom was losing her mind, and I was pretty much losing mine, too," says Denevan, who also knows of deep cerebral discord from growing up with three mentally ill brothers. "I had always been interested in creative activity, but watching my mother–who was very gifted–deteriorate really pushed me over the edge. I experienced so much stress that I couldn't endure the intensity of the kitchen, so I pretty much drew in the sand for a year." He worked at low tide with sticks and rakes, drawing for hours, making entire beaches with impermanent but perfect images: conjoined triangles, interlocking spirals, three-dimensional rectangles. They looked like hourglasses, abstracted clock hands, and coffins–until the tide rolled in and erased them. "People always ask how it feels to have them wash away," he says. "But who would want it to not wash away?"

I love the impermanence of Denevan's forms. The fact that they can't be reproduced and, by their very nature, resist culturalization.

It's impossible to separate Denevan the artist from Denevan the chef. His dinners, like his sand art, have evolved into grand, temporal compositions. They appear in a specific place for a short period of time. They happen and they vanish. "I like the idea of coming to a farm where there's no table," he says. "It's a patch of land that just happens not to have plants in it at the time. It could be zucchini in three weeks. Or a few weeks before, it could have been something else. But at the moment, there's room to put a table there. The whole field is a constantly changing composition. It's not just the table that's transitory."

The two typically dissimilar things–visual art and feeding people–began, for Denevan, to conceptually mirror each other eight years ago. By then he was into his seventh year at Gabriella Cafe, but having taken time off to draw in the sand, he realized that restaurant life no longer suited him. The gig started to feel stale, punishing in its monotony. "The real creativity there was when I first started," he says. "Gabriella was packed every night for years, but creativity waned once the customers became consistent and dependent. People expected all the same things. They considered them vital."

Denevan had little interest in repeating himself, so he created Outstanding in the Field. "I felt like I was escaping," he says, "crossing a boundary, discovering the world." From the onset, he established lofty goals. "I wanted to do something culturally significant, something needed. I figured if we presented the model in a thoughtful way, people would copy it without thinking where it came from. They'd think: This is what people do. They go to the farm. They learn about it and have an interesting, meaningful, and delicious experience. Eventually, they won't know who Jim Denevan is and what Outstanding in the Field is, and they won't need to." HIs method, however, was entirely down-to-earth: He connected eaters with food producers. He served dinner at its source. He brought taables to places you only dreamed there were tables: an Alaskan farm, an urban garden in Manhattan, the belly of an illegally excavated California sea cave. Denevan even enlisted John Sundstrom of Seattle's Lark restaurant to push a barbecue through a marsh at dawn in preparation for an evening of spot prawns and roasted pork on the very same isthmus where Denevan would himself return a year later to draw 320 perfect circles in the sand.

Though Denevan imagines his work as being a new form that can be copied and absorbed into culture, he doesn't envision the work being attached to a particular person, least of all himself. The very transience of this is more likely to make copying Denevan an antidote to culture than anything else. It would be resistant to the feedback effect smearing our appreciation of culture in the first place; the same effect that caused Denevan's customers at the restaurant to come back wanting the same meals he had already made, not new creations.

I was at a show at the Detroit Art Space before it closed (r.i.p.) and had arrived in the middle of one of the opening acts, Prurient. I walked in to find that some guy (Dominick Furnow) had assembled a wall of speakers about eight feet tall on the floor in front of the stage. He was shirtless and had a microphone plugged into the stack, which, naturally, started to feed back. In the most enraged performance I have ever seen, he stumbled around in front of the speakers as if drunk on the noise and alternated between screaming into the mic and pointing it back at the stack until the feedback squeal was unbearable for the rest of us. It was completely antagonistic and you could see him get worked up into a confrontational state to the point where, when one of the workers at the space bumped him trying to pass by, Furnow took a blind swing. He did this for about ten minutes and it was such a violent and exhausting thing to see that I actually had the sense I was going to get hurt by watching it. He did in ten minutes what it takes three good hardcore bands to do in an entire night–a projection of anger compressed like performance concentrate. The utility of it, the sheer immediacy of it, made actual songs seem drawn out and redundant in comparison. At the time I didn't know what more to think; I only knew how I felt. I tried telling the promoter how blown away I was but he seemed unfazed and mentioned that he had seen Furnow perform before. He wasn't being critical. For him, the fact that he had absorbed the experience once and already contextualized it had tamed the beast of experience. He knew what drawer to find that feeling, while I'm standing there like, what the fuck did I just see!




Looking back, I don't know if this was the Furnow's intention but he could have been making a statement about the distorted effects of cultural feedback. About how too much culture robs us of culture in the end. If he was, the fact that he skipped the stage, the expected location for musical performance, was a great place to start. That his entire show consisted of wrestling with feedback, and nothing else, said the rest.

You know who you look like?

Mr. Johnson

In my adventures in the local public school system as a substitute teacher, I am asked a certain question on a daily basis. Actually, it's an hourly basis because I get a new mob of students every period. And the first thing those little turds do is point and laugh and say, "You know who you look like?" At first it was kind of offputting, but I've learned to roll with it and say, "Yes. I know exactly who I look like," and then rattle off the complete list.

It's a short list which, depending on my haircut, may deviate a bit, but for the most part it's always the same. The old faithful is Ben Stiller.



I've been hearing this for years and I think it has a lot to do with my mannerisms. That and the slightly-more-evolved-and-well-groomed-cave-man thing we both share (it's all in the eye sockets and brow.). I've also got a lof of Sein in me.



Horse face, droopy eyes, an affinity for tight jeans and white sneakers. But nobody seems to have noticed since college, and I doubt these kids have even heard of Jerry Seinfeld. So Ben Stiller it is. There is a universal constant at work here: all black people think I look like Ben Stiller. Sometimes I like to turn the tables on them just to keep them on their toes.

Student: You know who you look like!

Me: Why no, who?

Student: That guy! On Meet the Fockers! Yeah, you look just like him! Ha! [Points in my face]

Me: So all us white people look the same to you, huh?

Student: Um...[Wanders off.]

Lately, though, there have been rapid, surprising additions to my look-alike oeuvre. For years I could cut them off with, "Yes, actually. I do know who I look like. His name is Ben Stiller. Now sit down and do your worksheets." But a few months ago, coinciding with the popularity of the TV show "Heroes," the comparison to some guy named Peter Petrelli (played by Milo Ventimiglia) started to happen a lot. I think this was also because I started parting my hair.



Also as a result of the hair part, Toby Maguire.



I always kind of viewed the Toby Maguire comparison as half-assed because I clearly look nothing like him. He's pasty and has no jaw. We just both have brown, parted hair, and if hair cuts alone define resemblance then Ben Wallace and Ronald McDonald look alike (or something equally stupid). So when one of the duller students throws this down, I look at him with scorn and go back to doing my sudoku.

For some reason, last week the 40 Year Old Virgin mentions started happening everywhere, simultaneously. Which is weird because we're talking about multiple schools in multiple districts, all within the same few-day period. It's as if a bulletin went out on the smart-ass wire. It just started one day and then was everywhere. I didn't change even change my haircut. I was a little baffled. Maybe it's because I started wearing short sleeves and polos with the warm weather, which reveal a little chest hair at the neck. And that is kind of a 40 Year Old Virgin look I would have to agree. (For the record, I lost my virginity in my late 20s.)



I don't really mind the comparison to Steve Carell. He's a decent looking guy, and damn funny. But you try walking through throngs of strangers on a daily basis being referred to in a collective whisper as a middle-aged man who can't meet women. It has a dampening effect on the ego.

Also, I've been getting "The guy from Maroon 5," once in a while, just to keep things interesting. I had to look this one up:



I'm assuming they mean the guy on the left with the clenched jaw muscles and neanderthal forhead. I have no idea, but a student who uses this will receive my thanks and appreciation for their originality and I will not "accidentally" throw their homework in the trash.

Well, one of these days, I'm going to blow all of their minds with a pop quiz and the promise of a free ipod to whoever gets it right. It's going to say:

Who does Mr. Johnson look like:

A. Peter Petrelli

B. Spiderman

C. The 40 Year Old Virgin

D. That guy from Meet the Fockers

I'm going to give them a few minutes and then collect their answers. Then, when they're all quiet and full of anticipation I'm going to scare them by shouting, "Surprise, motherfuckers! The answer is E! None of the above!" And that's when I'm going to whip out a picture of this guy:



"That's right! I look like Adam Goldberg. Now get it right!"

He's not the greatest looking guy, not even out of the Dan Clone Club, but even I can see I look just like him.

The Last Resort

The following is a short story that I wrote this spring. It's the first time I've tried to write fiction. It's on the long side for a short story so, if you're game, maybe printing it out is the better way to go. If you do take the time to read it, thank you truly.

The Last Resort

There were two days left in April the day Jackson boarded the bus. It was evening and the warm Houston dusk was swelling like a bruise, from blue to black. Whiffs of drying tar and severed grass careened with pollen in the breeze like suns in a broken universe. He stepped on gnawing an apple and yawning, feeling blank. He was drunk on the punch of Spring, spiked with adrenaline and a cheap sense of progress after a whirlwind of yard sales and internet liquidation that had consumed everything from the material facts to the dreaming embers of his discounted little property of existence. Many things flowed into his heart and mingled at the mouth of feeling, canceling each other out and making him yawn.

He had never traveled this light. Instead of luggage he had only a thin, sand-colored jacket, a three-month-old copy of Vogue he had lifted from a salon an hour ago and an mp3 player. The cleanliness of the bus surprised him. He chose a seat by a window near the back and dipped approvingly into a soft, ink-colored cushion, which reminded him of one of his daughter's plush animals. The windows were tinted in grim indigo and the twilight poured through them onto the blue seats, dyeing them a made-up, cerulean shade. All that blue and humidity made it seem to Jackson that the blood was being drained from everything while soaking in a warm bath.

He was the first on and watched the following arrivals in limp curiosity. Together, their facial expressions formed a dour bouquet and had a shared vanilla quality – nice enough but colorless. He lost interest in people watching almost immediately. Like Jackson, none of them carried any bags and boarding for the entire bus was finished in a leisurely ten minutes. He noticed there were no luggage compartments. A vehicle for detachment, he thought. He turned and looked out at the asphalt lot, which was now lit ghoulishly by incandescent lampposts and the runny half-egg of the cracking sun. As soon as he had turned, he felt a familiar peripheral pull and looked back just in time to see the crest of a redhead settle into a seat four rows up. Beautiful women have their own magnetism, like planets, he thought. Then, I should write that down. He reached for a trusted notebook that had saved the life of so many fragile phrases but remembered he had just thrown it away; and then why. He sunk back into his seat, learning for the first time of his affection for that little notebook and its grave, funereal attire of black leather binding and white paper collar.

Night finished falling and the bus belched a diesel smell before gliding gumpily onto the expressway. After an hour or so of brain-dead window gazing, which consisted of watching black blurring, he tried and failed to read his women's magazine, yawning more than ever as he did. It was written in the language of human interest, a code he now found uncrackable, not to mention slightly indecent, and he buried it in the seat pouch in front of him. He turned to the mp3 player for help and scrolled the wheel of options coldly before settling on a recording of the later, more famously difficult, Beethoven string quartets, which he hadn't had a chance to listen to yet. He nestled his ear buds in, smudged his forehead against the window and pressed play. Within seconds, he stopped it and sat up. What the hell? He had just been listening to an assortment of whines and scrapes – audio nonsense that wasn't, the way a foreign language sounds indecipherable yet organized. There was no way he was going to spend this drive trying to get into that. Forget you, Beethoven, he thought while he rolled the wheel trying to find something more famailiar. He chose for comfort: the sound of the California Dream itself, Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street." He pressed play with confidence, slouching toward the window, but stopped mid-lean. Track one, while still smothered in an expected honey of layered harmonies, was a garble; opaque and, somehow, maddeningly impossible to concentrate on. Have I lost my mind? he wondered, fuming more from irritation at the indignity of this small loss of control – today of all days, this trip of all trips – than actual worry about his brains. He was reminded of the Bible story of the Tower of Babel where an enterprising community had tried to build a ladder to the stars and God, in the limitless pettiness of his Old Testament style, had thwarted them by scrambling their speech and leaving them stammering like idiot chickens. Lately it seemed everything reminded him of Bible stories.

He wrapped the black wire of the headphones around the gadget and showed it to the man to his left.

"Want it? I'm done with it."

"What!" The man unrolled a prefabricated grin that was cold to look at. In this grin, it seemed to Jackson as if all the varieties and instabilities of the chemical, fluctuating life didn't exist. No bright raptures. No dim valleys. Jackson was repulsed as much by its empty ease as its dirty afterscent.

The grin said, "Really, man? Yeah, thanks!" Then he turned ominously, like a ratcheting tank turret, and focused his full beam of positive vibes at Jackson's head in a practiced way that had been calculated for maximum annihilation. "Maybe I'll take this with me on the launch. Go rocking out!"

The man's diaper breath wafted in and out of Jackson's nostrils and he was astonished at its rank strength, as if it were a soul he was smelling in decomposition.

"Sure," Jackson said, rolling away. Ryan Seacrest motherfucker. He took his jacket off and made a pillow. It was his third bus in two days and he was surprised at his new napping chops. Within minutes he passed out, lulled to sleep by the jostling of the road, his neck bent to the side and mouth open as if cut down dead from a gallows.

At twilight they stopped for gas in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Jackson opened his eyes to see the low silhouette of a mountain shielding a sliver of flashlit crayons melting over the horizon. He had a parched, tense-necked realization that he had slept through the night and all of its stops. His spine ached a little but not much considering how long it had been kinked. He unscrunched his jacket and stretched as he threaded his arms through its sleeves. Then he joined the zombie herd shuffling with slow, wordless determination out of the bus and into the convenience center.

Inside he wandered through the aisles in want of a craving, squinting from the copious fluorescence. He noticed the redhead standing in front of the toiletries and reflexively took a pack of chewing gum off a shelf and put a stick in his mouth. She wasn't what he'd imagined. Her impatient crinkle of a face was pretty in an annoying way. She caught Jackson looking and he winked. She stared at him sleepily, unimpressed. He stared back while he picked a random candy bar and dropped it in his pocket. What do you think of that, snuglepuss? he thought, watching for signs of crinkled judgement in her face. But her cheekbones rose in smiling disapproval and a wicked mirth sparked from her flinty eyes. Why you devious beauty. I had you all wrong, of course, he thought as he muffled a massive yawn. One of Jackson's favorite things about himself was that his first impressions nearly always proved to be wrong.

He was distracted by the need to piss and turned to do something about it but stopped cold at the site of a line, ten men long, outside the restroom. He walked instead through the front door, around the back and urinated a blurry heart on the flecked paint of the station wall.

A moment later, back in front, Jackson saw a small, still gathering of people watching the mountain range, which was lit more now by the extra few minutes of twilight. Turning now to look at the monumental rock, he noticed that it resembled a humongous pipe organ. He considered the body language of the group and thought about how it was separate but communal, the way a huddle of smokers can say nothing while appearing to share an experience. It was then that he noticed the little girl with the smirking dark arches for eyebrows and lion cub's underbite. He froze with adoration and rage. Who brought their kid? She was standing in familial proximity to a skeletal blonde with a sickly dye job and eyes that were watery and blood-soaked like fish paper. He stared, trying in vain to get the woman's attention to spit at her with his eyes, but she was lost in the tumult of private dawn terrors and didn't notice. With newfound expertise, Jackson yawned in acceptance, handed the lioness his stolen candy bar, and got back onto the bus.

In a few minutes the rest of the travelers migrated back into their seats as quietly as they had left. As the bus resumed its course, heading north onto I-25, Jackson watched the dawn in disbelief, the birth of light reflected in his eyes. Spiked leaves of Yucca shrubs lay everywhere on the reddening plain like medieval weapons. He passed out.

Just before eight, the bus curved off the highway, turning onto a white belt of desert road and parting a wake of billowing sand as it went. A few hot hours later the sound of crunching rock finally stopped as the wheels met the newly smooth pavement of a gated driveway. The bus slowed to a stop on a circle drive ringing a bleached stone fountain. Several strips of lizards stuck to it, grilling in the sun.

They disembarked into the gushing heat. As soon as Jackson set foot on the blazing pavement he took off his jacket and smiled to himself, thinking of the old bat at his yard sale who had wanted to buy it and how, suddenly sorry, he had changed his mind and told her it wasn't for sale; and about the sound of her geriatric shrieks as they fell into a preposterous tug of war. She had eventually relented, settling for speakers and a lamp. He considered his cloth friend, folded in one hand like a limp kite. I suppose I loved you, too, jacket. He dropped it the nearest trash bin.

And there it was, seeming thin and temporary like a Hollywood prop. It had looked better in the brochure. While the others hurried into the cool lobby, Jackson stood facing the wide chalk of adobe walls. He felt sorry for the beautiful old mission and its garish new sign, seemingly fastened in afterthought onto the orange clay roof. It read brightly: The Last Resort.

–

There had been something of an orientation in the lobby. Out of the chaotic chatter sprang a sharp blade of a voice from a tiny pocketknife of a woman. She was compact and stunted with jagged hair and closely tailored clothes that lent precision to her bosom, which heaved as she spoke. She had ascended a small wooden box and was giving them the rules in nasal lightening bolts like it was holy law. The lobby was open-aired and the cool shade was soothing but light kept jolting into the sides of Jackson's vision as if his eyes were an overexposed camera. This gave him a headache and a craving for a nap. When he started paying attention again she was talking about formal wear, which they had been fitted for in advance and now needed to be picked up. Jackson had been measured over a month ago, back in Lewisburg, and had completely forgotten about this part of the event.

"All we ask," she thundered, "is that you see the tailor no later than three p.m. This will give them ample time for any necessary alterations. You should receive a stub with your claim number but the tailors will call your room as soon as–" And so on, all of it relayed with the sort of giant certainty of some minute people. Jackson yawned so big it squeezed tears from his head like fruit. "Dinner is served at seven." She took a quick survey of the room and reconsolidating their attention. "Also – and this is important – there will be a curfew. We ask that all guests be in their rooms to stay by ten. There will be absolutely no one permitted outside of the western wing after that time."

The lobby became a cage and went still. That last bit about the curfew had piped a sense of stifling surreality back into the air. The fact was, the freshman class of The Last Resort (and this suddenly seemed pathetic) had been actually bustling, comforted and distracted by the familiar exchange of identification and keys. The routine of it, attached as it was in their memories to the modest odysseys, meager escapes, and mapping of their sexual geographies, created a thin mist of normalcy, which evaporated at the mention of a curfew. Freedom surrendered, even freely, was still bars. Now there was quiet – and the light was really bothering Jackson's eyes, causing him to close them as he listened.

"There are maps on that table there if you need them." She paused to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything. "Launch, of course, is at dawn."

When she had dismounted and slid the boost under the closest table, activity returned to the room, if not energy. Jackson fell into one of four forming lines and stood, blank and cattle-like, like the others. When it was his turn he asked for a room facing east. "What's in the east?" asked his concierge in a welcoming but detached tone, eyes downward, rapidly typing.


"The future," Jackson said in his unbeatable deadpan. The future, motherfucker.


The concierge was gaunt, with dark freckles and spoke in a heavy baritone. He performed his job upright, with a sense of gruff rhythm and dramatic pauses. Jackson imagined he had been doing this long enough to care about something like timing, but not so long it had gone slack with overuse. "I'm sorry," he said, "but all of our rooms face west. You'll have a nice view of the past though."

"Well," Jackson said, "Just make sure there are curtains."

The concierge leaned in and a crude tattoo of the sun done in a cave-drawing style peeked above the horizon of his collar. Jackson had a second of vibrant déjà vu.

"You know, the curfew–" The concierge stopped himself. Up until now he had been speaking in a fairly loud and impersonal volume and he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial rumble. "After curfew, you're supposed to stay in the western wing. But there's no rule that says you have to stay in your room."

Jackson felt like he had been winked at. Then, with nothing so overt as a nod, the concierge lightly aimed his face at a place behind Jackson, two lines over. He was indicating a sultry redheaded woman; Jackson's sultry redheaded woman. With his face motionless in her direction, he slipped Jackson a silver key card that was overly futuristic, as if created to the specifications of an interstellar feng shei. Jackson stared at the card. He was halfway to a nap as it was, and it took him a moment to absorb the fact that the concierge was trying to get him laid tonight.

"Well, thanks for the tip," he said, putting the key in his pocket. "That's quite a service you provide."

"Happy hunting," replied the concierge before thrusting his attention back over Jackson's shoulder and belting, "May I help who's next?"

–


He had no trouble finding his room. The entire resort was about the size of a suburban grade school, with four wings forming a giant cross of bleached stucco that, from the air, looked as if someone had dropped a crucifix on a beach. He swept the preposterous card through the reader and opened the door to what were modest and fairly beautiful accommodations. The room was furnished with the preordained discretion of upscale home decorating chains, but with undertones of uniqueness, as if someone at some point had cared enough to impart something of themselves into its formation. He looked around for the usual items of hotel décor – an ice bucket, miniature toiletries, plastic cups in plastic bags – but they didn't exist here. There wasn't even a television. He then began to notice the subtle, exquisite details. There was a vase of see-through black glass sprouting a bouquet of lilies with slight white petals. Through its dark glass the submerged stems formed an ominous silhouette of a black hand poking through soil. Next to this was a porcelain figurine about the size of a coffee pot, all soft edges and white. Its mute, Asian features had a totemic quality, like a god waiting to be painted to life. He picked up a heavy black ink pen with chromed trimmings. It had been laying on a thick pack of stationary a shade of olive that, until now, he had not known existed anywhere else but his true love's skin. His chest winced. Reminded of her, and standing before the simple forms of paper and pen, there came a fleeting and seismic feeling that he could finally explain himself, right here, with that pen and that paper, in the vivid succinctness of scripture. Whole sentences popped fully formed into his mind. Then, with a brutal aestheticism that now came easy, he suffocated the whim and picked up the phone, hoping to wrangle a whiskey out of room service. It rang without answer.

He set down the phone and pulled the window curtains aside. His room looked out onto a courtyard of sand and brush split by a small stone pathway. Its emptiness reminded him of his empty afternoon, in which he had only the one responsibility: to visit the tailor. There would be plenty of time to sleep. And so, drowsy with boredom as much as a fatiguing will, he limped onto the bed and instantly collapsed into a dream.



He was seeing himself asleep on the bus last night, dreaming. And he could see the dreaming as well, and was in it as well as apart from it. He had fallen asleep resting his head on a paperback book and all of the book's contents seeped by touch into his dream through a kind of macro osmosis. Alongside the bus in which he was sleeping rode figures from Arabian antiquity, on camels in the darkness, neck deep in the sand billows. Impossibly, their camels ran with the galloping form of horses, only far faster than horses, and they kept up with the bus, racing at the furious speed at which Jackson's life was falling away from him. Dipped dreaming, as he was, into the source, he recognized them for an army of 30,000 warriors under the command of Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman that had miraculously beaten 150,000 Persians in the battle of Nihawand. And now here they were, nearly 1,400 years later, to finish the job. A phrase of incantation looped in his mind and its repetition seemed to ward off the deadly mirage. He became the wind to swim within the wind within the sin within her. Then all the Jacksons, split like reflections on the broken mirror of dream, began to cry. Soon, the bus, which was Jackson too, sped up not to be outrun by camels, but the warriors kept pace. The bus responded by soaring to unsustainable, rattling speeds. But the warriors kept up with ease and he knew then that they were after his iniquity – the capitulation of his illusive, Zoroastrian will. And then all of them were moving faster than the speed of tangibility, faster than the speed at which a thing may think of itself as one thing, moving into each other, and their pallid pillars of unity – Jackson, Bus, Warrior – flaked apart like salt statues. As they crumbled, he saw the warriors for the sand that they, and he, had been all along, scattered out of the simple rub of wheels over desert road. And with shame and hilarity he understood that the bus had been engaged in futility – of trying to outrun the scattered byproduct of its very self. And still, even after understanding this, he made one last attempt at solidarity and took a plastic bag out of his pocket with a sandwich in it, opening it and holding it out lamely to catch some last part of his crumbling self. But it caught nothing and he just fell apart holding a bag with a sandwich. And that was crumbling too.


He woke up making a choking sound. Stillness. Hum. The lily vase. The black hand. The faceless god. The unwritten confession. He looked around the room blankly, licking the rock salt out of his dry mouth. His mind was syrupy and lost. The clock read six forty. Fuck. Dinner was in twenty minutes. He had missed the tailor. There was no way they'd still be open for him to pick up his tuxedo. He snatched the phone and dialed the front office but again it just rang. Now what? He could show up to the dinner dressed as he was. But he didn't feel like being the only idiot there not in black tie. He took stock of his urges, looking for direction. He wasn't hungry and the thought of gathering together with those lunatics in some kind of half-assed social ritual seemed embarrassing. He looked out his window at the dimming courtyard. It would be an evil dusk. He decided to go for a walk.



When he stepped out of his room and saw the other guests leaving for dinner, he noticed the difference. They were decked out in pressed formal wear, the women jeweled, perfumed and over-caked with death masks of makeup. There was a restless, nervous gloom in the air. But the difference was in Jackson, who was now completely indifferent to his kind. The human features seemed suddenly grotesque and arbitrary. Faces and bodies were just a random assortment of appendages, growths of hair, and bulges of flesh. Only their eyes retained something Jackson could remember as personality, and were varying degrees of mannered worry. He listened in on a conversation:


"...said they just ran out. Out into the desert. Can you believe it?"


"They'll die!"


"Oh. They'll die terribly."


"Do you think anybody'll go after them?"


"What for?"


Escape, Jackson thought. It should have been obvious that it was useless. The system was like a perfect chokehold, the key being that there were no buses out of The Last Resort. The ones that came in left immediately after dumping their contents, while everybody was still tanked on curiosity and before anybody could really lose their nerve. He had no idea how often a fresh busload arrived. Once a week? Every day? Could it be every day? That was theoretically possible since every single guest would be gone shortly after dawn, allowing cleaning and preparation time for a new group before noon. The thought of this kind of efficiency, of the Auschwitz-like turnover, made him hate this place even more than he already did. But no, coming here was a choice which there was no way back from. With no buses out the only recourse for the squeamish and regretful was death by consumption from the arid desert elements. Still, he wasn't surprised to hear some had fled. As Jackson saw it, life begins in a state of baffled panic, walled in on every side by decay and force. From there, the dissonant din of reality, of every note between ecstasy and desecration playing at the same time, in which all choices have their own logic as well as their own insanity. To choose death, as the organism frequently does, is insane. But to continue to live, and believe in living and the stories about living grown weed-like from the rock of antiquity, is just as mad. It was a consideration of degree.

He caught himself sinking into reflection and snapped out of it moving. If there was one thing he was good at, it was finding a place to be alone. He had a talent for it and a series of guessed-at doors and random turns in hallways, all the while navigating only by a sense of where he was not supposed to be, led him finally up a series of darkened stairs and out onto a short balcony that he imagined continued around the resort roof. Jackson, who had been both the winner and the victim of a lottery of amoral luck that left him as susceptible to falling pianos as shooting stars, had stepped outside at the precise instant of the sun's setting. If the dusk could have tolled like a bell, it tolled at the papery snapping sound his shirt made from the rippling wind. Then he noticed the man standing to his right, as if conjured from the sound, contemplating the bluing desert in front of them.

They stood without speaking. Below, he could see the ant-like activity of uniformed men busy with the maintenance of a massive catapult. It was larger than he could have imagined, easily the length of a football field and nearly as long as the resort itself. For some reason he had assumed it would be crude and wooden like a Roman cross. But it was metal, hard and gray with large components, any one of its joints larger than a man. The dusk dirtied everything now and they worked by lights. The work seemed only precautionary and technical; no tightening of lugs or fastening of straps; just the swarm of savages with clipboards bustling underneath their mammoth idol.

Finally Jackson faced the stranger. He had swallowed a heaping of dread in that first moment of seeing him and his stomach had been half rotting ever since. The man was dressed with impeccable severity; a white oxford, open at the collar, and thin, gray linen pants. It wasn't the clothes, but the way he wore them, that gave the impression of priesthood. He was slight, with thin skin and hair, the hair graying, the skin fossilized with light blotches. He wore no watch or belt, and his only accessory was a bronze ring without markings on his right index finger. He was missing a pinky finger on the same hand. He was the most refined looking man Jackson had ever seen and something about this austere apparition disgusted and relieved him at the same time, as if he were pissing away his very self in his pants after holding it in for so long.


"You're him," Jackson said.


"I'm who?" the stranger replied with a lacerating voice.


Jackson didn't answer and the stranger said, softer, "I'm who? Your angel?"


"No. Him."


The stranger worked the ring on his finger. "Oh, right. Him. You mean the devil."


"Right."


They rubbed gazes and Jackson saw slits of wretched moonlight reflected in his cat's eyes. "Well, if I am the Devil, who is it you think you are?"


The last word of that sentence was like the final spoken ingredient of an incantation, which set things to work and stung and shook Jackson. His mind, thwarted and falling like dominos, bucked and sloshed down spills of comprehension and truth into his learning, feverish heart. His mouth hung a little open and his eyes pinched.


The stranger said, "Don't answer. Instead, tell me, why you came here?"


Jackson felt sure that in this moment of destroying and acceptance he would be able to reach down finally, past the filthy backup of black energy clotting like slime and hair in the blocked drain of Jackson, deep enough to produce a totally pure answer to the stranger's question; the first of his life. He believed he could see past his own shifty virtues and aborted revelations to grab a terse answer for this man from the swarm of truths that now swam, invitingly within reach, in the shallow pool of his urgency. Trying, he said, "Sometimes I think that I've already died. But not just at some vague point in the past. I've even narrowed it down to a few possibilities. Maybe fall of '98–"


"You're not dead. For all intents and purposes you have life to lose."


Jackson sagged into himself. "If you say so. But… I feel useless. Like shed skin." He went to the edge of the balcony and hopped up on its wall, hanging his legs over the edge. "I wish I could remember it. Just remember when it happened. So that I..." He sat staring at invisible plagues with bothered prophet's eyes.


The stranger said, "Do you remember the story you read once of the god who created the world but forgot, and spent his life wandering his own kingdom, cursed in ignorance?"


Jackson nodded, half listening as he watched him working the bronze ring between the thumb and pinky nub on his left hand. Wasn't he missing a finger on the other hand? He heard the question late. "I get it," he said. "I'm God."


"I wouldn't go that far."


Jackson swiveled off the ledge to face the stranger. "So are you the devil or not?"


"I am a reflection. From the heat that escapes the sand at the end of the day. It's you who are the devil without the devil's memories."


"Meaning what?"


"That all of this," he used his wounded hand, the right one again, to indicate the desert night, which hung veiling the rest of the earth, "is yours, Prince of the Air. Your dream. The world's riches, so to speak, are yours for the remembering."


Jackson said, "I can't remember my parents' birthdays, let alone creating the universe." The quip lay flat in the air and embarrassed him.


"It's not a question of memory as much as acceptance. You've known, always, what there is to know."


"It's funny. I think my dad used to wonder if I was the devil. Or like the devil was speaking through me. We'd be having these arguments about religion and he'd say stuff like, 'Dear God Jackson. That's the same thing that Lucifer said in the Bible.'" He looked at the stranger for a reaction that never came. He leaned back against the wall. "But my dad saw the devil in everything." Then he stood back up, as if remembering something. "Wait. Why would you say it like that? That I'm the devil. If I made the world, why not just say I'm God?"


"They're words. We both know words."


"True, but..."


"You are the Dreamer. But a demented dreamer, with a soul in doubt."


"Doubt is good," Jackson said in a hard tone. This was one of his only real beliefs.


"Doubt isn't right or wrong, but dreamt in sickness just the same."


"So then… is there… something more pure?"


"I have no idea," the stranger said.


"You have no idea."


"I can only know what I see. And I see what the world sees. Heat needs to go somewhere. The wind has to go somewhere. The earth's truths, like its forces, are in motion. Because of your immense vacancy at this moment, I have come into you."


Then they didn't say anything for a while. In the distance the sound of music and people was getting louder as the dinner turned to dancing. Thin, diamond clinks of glass and silverware punctuated their silence. Finally Jackson said, "This all reminds me of something..."


"The temptation of Christ."


"Right."


"Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. And the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 'All this I will give you,' he said, 'if you will bow down and worship me.'"


"That's it."


"It's just a story. Duly mangled in translation."


"In what way?"


"In a way that makes it mean a completely different thing. Jesus was tempted not in the desert, but by the desert. Tempted to believe that the world was not his and could be given to him. That it was not of his making. There was no devil. At least no devil apart from him."


"You're saying Jesus was the devil too?"


"In a manner of speaking. The devil was part of a conversation he was having with himself. An invention, like all of life, of the desolate soul."


"That's your insight? That Jesus was talking to himself?"


"Yes. We all are. All of the time."


More silence passed. These silences were not awkward with the stranger. They seemed to both reach the need for pause at the same time. There was more wind now and Jackson was scratched by the sand it kicked up. None of this, however, seemed to touch the stranger.

Jackson said, "When I was a kid – I grew up in the city – and I would have this nightmare that the world was turning into concrete. That it was spreading over everything. The funny thing is, this nightmare was basically the same thing I would fantasize about during the day. Only in my daydreams it was great because everything – lawns, parks, trees – was paved. Which meant I could skateboard on it. I remember just staring out the windows at school all day, picturing riding all of those great shapes. But in my nightmares it was terrible because I was turning into concrete too, and my parents would be waking me up. They'd tell me I'd been crying and saying, 'I can taste it! I can taste the concrete in my mouth!'" Jackson laughed but the stranger just listened.


"And here I am, twenty years later, and I'm doing the exact same thing. Only I'm out here, in this desert, and I think the world is turning to sand. I would say I lack imagination."


The stranger, who was fading, still said nothing. The wind whipped meanly, sweeping more sand into Jackson eyes, and tiny blue veins of static crackled in the kicked-up dust.


"Genie, where are you going?"


–


That night Jackson slept well, thick and without dreams. It was as if his body had stopped making them the way women's bodies stop making estrogen later in life, when the ovaries have no more magic to perform. He had woken in the black minutes before dawn feeling more rested than he could remember. He sat on the edge of his bed now, before a mirror, showered and dressed in his only clothes. His stomach was empty but not hungry. He had an overwhelming sense of rightness; of satisfaction, not just with his physical body, but his entire self. It seemed to him this morning that his hair was the perfect length for his face, not too long or too short. That he was the right weight. He felt a rightness about his understanding, too; that a day more of life experience would have soiled his truth; any less and it would be incomplete. His head was free of music; his thoughts of distraction or detail. He felt none of the usual habitual impulses to touch his dick or floss his teeth. He was like a piece of fruit on the verge of ripeness, about to be detached from the tree. Before leaving he stopped and picked up the pen to write something on the stationary but couldn't think of anything and set it back down before walking out.


As he made his way toward the catapult, he tried not to stare at his fellow guests, many of whom were still in last night's black tie. Some looked worse off than others, with half-removed makeup on pale faces of shock, squirrelly, uncombed hair, missing earrings, half zipped dresses – there was one man who, defying belief, had switched into golf shorts and sandals while leaving the top half of his tux in tact – and a good many more who simply wore the defeated uniform of middle-class leisure; ill-fitting shorts and T-shirts, as if dressed for dirty work. They marched unkempt through the halls looking like the washed-up passengers of a cruise ship that had wrecked mid-ball. Jackson felt a satisfaction with his own clothes, which, unremarkable as they were, lent him comparative dignity. Because he was Jackson, he doubted the motivations of the rest. He wished they weren't here and as they walked he imagined and resented their rash annihilation fantasies, petty spirits, and dearths of imagination. They were soiling the white sheet of his perfect act like the crude peripherals of an otherwise tidy dream. But he had a genius for loneliness and soon he was able to drown them out, coddling himself in a familiar inner sanctuary where life sought his permission. In this place, before something could be right or wrong, before it could please or pain him, it faced the lasers of circumspection of the wounded judge, covered in burn scars and cruel from love. From here he was safe to rejoin his own heart and, eventually, the others as well. He knew that they were, all of them, alone to understand this world, and if he rejected them as deficient gods, he still felt linked to them as animals.


Outside, the seep of twilight was easing the desert into detail. He heard soft crying and squinted admiringly at the morning, which was already warm. As he stepped in line for the catapult his mind was clear with a second wind of resolve.


Jackson was the ninth person to be launched that morning. When it was his turn he slid out clumsily into the massive sag of fabric and padding that formed the catapult's basket. Once in, there was nothing to do but lay down on his back. In its center it sunk so low that you couldn't see anything but the basket and the sky above. He lay there calmly and looked up at the pool of light blue, ready to dive in. Then, there was a metallic tearing sound and he was hurled heavenward at hundreds of miles per hour. The thwarting world, which had resisted him passively at every turn, now fought him outright and his face bubbled back against the pressure. Within seconds his vision went red as the capillaries in his eyes burst like pomegranate juice and he left the world the way he came in; weightless, confused, and blinded by blood.

Las Cruces

I thought it would be fun to do a google image search for something and post the random pictures that it brings up. I've been writing a story that takes place near Las Cruces, New Mexico (which I actually drove through last summer on tour), and so Las Cruces seemed a good search topic. The results were better than I thought they would be.

The mountain you see in a lot of them is Organ Mountain, which got that name because it looks like a giant pipe organ.

From the Wik:

Las Cruces' name (Spanish for "the crosses") has been a disputed topic among historians. One of the many folklore tales is that in 1830, there was an Apache massacre of a party of nine travelers, including a Mexican Army General, a priest, and five (or four) choir boys. Only one choir boy survived the massacre, and buried the others, marking the graves with crosses, according to the story that "Tio" Tuseño told tourists for a handout. According to one of the folktales, the area became known as "El Pueblo del Jardín de Las Cruces" ("The Village of the Garden of the Crosses").

I Love Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is someone you should read before you die. To be reminded you are alive. He writes beyond writing, from the source of humor and romance. I won't even try to describe it. Try this short story, which is like a sampler of his delicacies. If you like it, try one of his novels like "Love in the Time of Cholera" or "One Hundred Years of Solitude" to see what he can do with that style stretched into longer form.

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

The World is Losing, Two to One

I would like to share three things here, the evil outnumbering the good two to one.

1. There has been a lot of attention given to the cause of debt relief for third-world countries. Bono, in particular, through the Jubilee 2000 campain, helped give it a high profile and eventually the cause succeeded in getting the richest nations of the world via the IMF and World Bank to let a large amount of this debt go. It was a happy story. We need more happy stories. But oops, now, that work is being undone by Vulture Funds. "Vulture funds are companies which buy up the debt of poor nations cheaply when it is about to be written off and then sue for the full value of the debt plus interest - which might be ten times what they paid for it."

Check out this article. I mean, these Vulture Fund guys are devils, right?

2. Rob Nairn is a love ninja who wrote a book called What is Meditation (on Amazon right now used for under three dollars!) that has been very valuable to me and my broken mind. It's short, clear, and powerful. I've read it seven or eight times in the past two years. He comes at Buddhism and meditation with an insight into the way that the western mind fails in dealing with those concepts and explains the psychological benefits of simple forms of meditation and confronting your mind. I've turned several people onto this book. It was the least I could do. Almost as good as the book is this interview online which I keep coming back to.

Part 1

Part 2

3. I saw the movie Breach last night about the "greatest security breach in U.S. history," by a cheeseball FBI agent named Robert Hanssen. (It was pretty tight. Christopher Cooper is kind of one of the best actors there are.) I am a nerd, and so when I got home I Wikipedia'd Robert Hanssen - or rather, I Wikipedia'd Robert Hansen, leaving off a crucial consonant, and discovered this psycho, a serial killer who captured his victims, flew them in his private plane to the wilderness of Alaska, and hunted them like game.

Starfish

Thomas sat on a barstool in a damp, dark bar, and was having difficulty with his drink. The heavy glass was literally brimming and yet, if he raised it to his mouth and tipped it, nothing came out. He performed this motion several times, identically, like an idiot. As if an exercise in form, each movement was a deliberate copy of the one before, until suddenly he blanked, as if seeing himself in the third person, and stopped. He set down the glass and smiled his dog smile - lips opened, teeth together - the one that showed his frustrated sense of humor. "I see. You fooled me once. All right. Well, more than once. But no more."

It was then that he sluggishly noticed the starfish. A clump of them, like petrified Christmas cookies, clung to the mahogany bar quietly, insidiously, brown blending with brown, as if hoping to go unnoticed. Then they were everywhere he looked in little camps of wet warts, splattered on tables, chairs, light fixtures; there was even one in his drink. He was sober. How could I not have noticed them? he wondered, the thought bringing perception itself into doubt, and thus a swift, animal fear that boiled his cells. Details were hard to come by in the unlit room, and he had a nauseous certainty that the gloom masked their numbers, that the place was quietly teeming, every surface being covered and sucked in malevolent stillness. From this awareness came another, and then another, in suffocating blooms of logic. First, that his movements were slurred with an invisible inertia. Then, that this was because he was moving through water. Finally, that he moved through water because the entire bar was at the blackened bottom of a sea. He was shocked with panic and forgot how to breathe. And then, as if an army in waiting, throwing off its camouflage at the moment of ambush, hundreds of starfish glowed in electric synchronicity. The light seeped from the center of their heart-bellies out to the barnacled tips where it leapt off to join the gleam. In a swell of an instant, the room was washed in a white finality as he was blinded and drowned at the same time.

He woke in his old car, the little Honda his father had called The Roller-skate, stalled on the margins of an iced-over freeway overpass, begging God to reconsider and deliver him from this place. He took turns grinding the ignition and beating the steering wheel with his gloved fists and groaned a groan deeper than weeping. The cabin was losing heat quickly and he could already see the ephemeral wafts of his breath, there and gone, like half-remembered ghosts. Outside the car were nothing but miles of white and black, light and void, stretching without end in an approximation of Indiana snowdrifts underneath a January night. But Thomas knew better.

The Nab

So I just discovered the Nabokov. Would you listen to this guy?

From an interview with Playboy in '64:

You have also written that poetry represents "the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words." But many feel that the "irrational" has little place in an age when the exact knowledge of science has begun to plumb the most profound mysteries of existence. Do you agree?

This appearance is very deceptive. It is a journalistic illusion. In point of fact, the greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery. Moreover, I don't believe that any science today has pierced any mystery. We, as newspaper readers, are inclined to call "science" the cleverness of an electrician or a psychiatrists's mumbo jumbo. This, at best, is applied science, and one of the characteristics of applied science is that yesterday's neutron or today's truth dies tomorrow. But even in a better sense of "science" -- as the study of visible and palpable nature, or the poetry of pure mathematics and pure philosophy -- the situation remains as hopeless as ever. We shall never know the origin of life, or the meaning of life, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of nature, or the nature of thought.

Man's understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?

To be quite candid -- and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill -- I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

Claire and the Baby Tractor

CLAIRE AND THE BABY TRACTOR

Claire and her dad loved to take walks in the park. They loved the trees, the ducks, the water and the birds. One day they were walking in the park when it suddenly began to rain. They laughed and ran as fast as they could under a large tree to stay dry.

As they stood under the tree giggling and shaking the rain off, Claire noticed that they weren't alone. Next to them under the tree was a very tiny tractor, with very wet headlights.

"What's the matter, baby tractor?" Claire asked. "Why are you crying?"

The baby tractor looked up at Claire's dad and Claire could tell that the little tractor was feeling shy. She knew how scary grownups could seem sometimes. She bent close to the tractor so that it could whisper in her ear. "It's okay," Claire said. "You can tell me."

The tractor whispered to Claire that it was all alone. It had been playing in the trees and got lost from its family. Now they had gone home without it and it was all alone. At this the tractor began to cry again, even harder.

"Daddy!" Claire exclaimed. "This baby tractor is all by itself. We have to help it find its family."

Claire's dad knew from experience that once she had made up her mind about helping someone there was no sense arguing with her. He bent down on one knee in front of the tractor and Claire so they could figure out a plan. "Well," her dad said. "I know of a tractor store back in town. I'm sure they would know where this little guy's family is. We could drive back to town and ask them to help us."

Both Claire and the baby tractor smiled when he said this.

"There's only one problem," said Claire's dad. "If I'm driving our car there'll be nobody left to drive the tractor."

"Um, I can," Claire said, smiling and rolling her eyes.

"You?" her dad asked with a strange smile on his face. "You're five. Since when do you know how to drive?"

"I've been practicing!" Claire said. "At Granny and Grandpa's house. On my truck."

Claire's dad thought about this for a minute. It was true, Claire's toy truck and the little tractor were just about the same size. And if there's one thing he knew from experience it was that when Claire decided to learn how to do something she learned how to do it well.

"Well, okay, " he said. "We'll try it. I think there are enough dirt roads between here and town that we can make it back without taking the highway. But stay close behind me, keep your seatbelt buckled, and no complaining that I'm driving to slow."

"Yay," Claire said, laughing. Then she hopped right into the baby tractor and turned the ignition. It made a ROOM-ROOM sound and blinked its headlights. "You see, Daddy," she said. "It's feeling better already."

They waited until the rain stopped and when the sky seemed clear enough they headed out back to town. A park ranger at the gate had to blink a couple of times when he saw them pass through. "That's funny," he said to himself. "It looked for a minute like a little girl was driving that tractor. I think I'd better get my eyes checked."

The trip back to town was going along just fine. It turned out that all of Claire's practicing had paid off and she had become a pretty good driver. Her dad smiled with pride as he watched her in his rearview mirror. As for Claire, she was having the time of her life. This tractor, like many other tractors, had no roof or windows and she loved the feel of the wind on her face and in her hair as they went. Her and the baby tractor took turns singing their favorite songs they'd learned in school. Wow, Claire thought to herself. I can't wait until I'm old enough to drive a real car.

They had gone quite a ways when the tractor began to make a funny sound. SPUTTER, SPUTTER, SPUTTER. Looking in his mirror, Claire's dad could tell from her face that she was worried and he pulled over to see what was wrong.

"Um, Daddy," Claire whispered in his ear so the tractor couldn't hear them. "The question is, what's wrong with this tractor?"

Concerned, her dad looked the tractor over. He looked under its hood. Then under its carriage. They he looked at the tires. Finally, he looked at the instrument panel. "Well Claire," he said. "There's nothing wrong with the tractor. But it is almost out of gas."

Claire's dad was a little worried now. When they left for the park that morning he hadn't brought any extra money with them, just a couple of sack lunches and a loaf of bread to feed the ducks. After all, he had never expected they'd be helping a baby tractor find its family. How will we ever get the baby tractor back to its family now if we can't buy it any gas?, he thought. But before he could say anything to Claire about this he saw that she had pulled a white change purse out of her pocket. It was shaped like butterfly and had been a present from him on her last birthday. "Daddy," she said. "As you may or may not know, I've been saving up my allowance for something special. And now, I've decided I'd like to spend it on gas for this tractor."

"Claire, I had no idea you'd been saving that money all this time," her dad said. "We sure are lucky that you're so smart. And so generous."

So they drove a little ways up the road until they came to a gas station. The attendant at the station had to blink a few times when Claire, whose head didn't even come up to the top of the counter, reached up, handed him her money and said, "Put it all on pump one."

"I think I need a nap," he said to himself, rubbing his eyes.

With that problem solved, Claire, the baby tractor, and her dad set off once again back to town to find the tractor's family. But they weren't on the road for very long when the sky began to get cloudy again and the wind began to blow harder. Claire's dad was worried. It was surely going to storm soon, he thought, and there would be nothing to protect her from the rain. He pulled over.

"Claire," he said. "We've got a problem. It's going to rain any minute and that tractor has no roof. You'll be soaked!"

Claire smiled and looked at her dad with her look that seemed to say, are you kidding me? "Um, daddy, there's a bridge right over there," she said, pointing down the road. "We can hide under it to stay dry until the rain stops."

"Oh," her dad said. "I hadn't thought of that. Now that you mention it, that's a pretty good plan, Claire. Good thinking."

Claire shook her head and giggled. "You're silly, Daddy," she said.

Claire and her Daddy parked under the bridge and just as they did, it started to pour buckets. They waited there for a while as it rained and rained. "I'm hungry," her dad said. "I sure wish I had something to eat."

His stomach made a GRRRLLLLLL sound.

"Um, Daddy..." Claire said.

"Yes?" her dad replied.

"Our sack lunches..."

"Oh, right!" Claire's dad said, relieved and happy. "You know, sometimes I don't know what I'd do without you Claire Bear." And at that Claire and her dad tore into those sack lunches and ate three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a bag of crackers, an apple, two puddings, two juice boxes and a half a banana quicker than you could say "fifty fat fairies."

Just as they were licking their fingers and cleaning up from their lunch it seemed to get quieter. "Daddy," Claire said quietly. "Listen. It's stopped raining!"

"You're right," her dad said looking around. "It has, but we'd better hurry up if we want to make it back to town before dark."

They set out on the road, and Claire smiled again as the wind blew through her hair. The air seemed cleaner after the rain and her and the baby tractor thought of all the songs they had learned in school that had the word "rain" in them and sang each one again and again, without ever getting tired of them.

As they went, the sun began to set and the sky turned pink, then purple. Just when it seemed they would never make it back before sunset they saw lights and signs in the distance. They had finally made it back to town! Claire's dad led them past a grocery store, past more gas stations and past a coffee shop before pulling in to the parking lot of a large tractor store. There were rows and rows of tractors and Claire's dad started worried that they wouldn't be able to find the little tractor's family in all those lines. But almost as soon as they'd entered the parking lot the little tractor began to hop up and down with excitement. A group of tractors near the middle of the lot had recognized the baby tractor and were rushing out toward them. It was the baby tractor's family. They had found them!

Claire and her dad stood watching as the tractors laughed and took turns hugging the baby tractor again and again. This seemed to go on forever. "Pick me up," Claire said to her dad. He looked down at her, smiling. "Aren't you a little bit big for being held," he asked, and then bent down and scooped her up anyway. When the tractor family had finally loved on the tractor until they couldn't love on it anymore, they turned toward Claire's dad and said, "We can't thank you enough for bringing our precious baby back to us."

"Don't thank me, thank her," Claire's dad said, nodding toward Claire. "After all, it was her idea. Claire don't you want to---"

Claire's dad stopped when he saw that she had fallen asleep on his shoulder. "Well, I'll be sure to tell her how grateful you were," he said to the tractor family. He waved goodbye then walked back his car and buckled a sleeping Claire into her seat. He kissed her chubby cheek. "Sweet dreams Claire. You've earned them."

Sexy Beast

I watched Sexy Beast again the other night. It was almost a totally different film than I remembered. What I remembered was stylized escapism, crisp and superficial, like a bank lobby or a copy of British GQ. But last night I now saw a parable, as if by Hemingway, about people who had survived their bad choices now living for love, idyllically baking away like lizards on rocks under a hot Spanish sun. A parable of people sneaking at joy - with guilt about their joy - and being haunted by a dark pursuer. In the special features commentary, Ben Kingsley says that if he had to sum up the film in one terse line, as mythology, it'd be: There once was a man who was happy; and so the gods sent to him the most unhappy man in the world.

In Sexy Beast this misery's missionary (Ben Kingsley) is portrayed as a man who is a manifestation of a demon. The demon beast itself, which appears in slurred edits, wears closely tailored pants and dress boots and is shirtless, with long limbs, patchy hair hanging from them like diseased bear fur, finger claws and a wretched rabbit's head. It's usually waving a firearm, and staggering deliriously, drunk with rage, toward its prey. The incarnation, as man, is only slightly less ominous, more composed by degrees, with bothered eyes and neatly pressed clothes. He comes on a mission to convince one of the happy people to leave paradise and return with him to hell. It's an impossible sell, which he will make anyway through sheer willpower, bullying - sometimes physically, but mostly in a different way: he intimidates through indecency. His jagged, berating nastiness and unpredictability are an open threat, leveraging the fact that he will always be angrier, always want confrontation more.

Watching this movie with new eyes, deep resonances caused a vibration. In my way, I've always felt pursued in my paradises. As a child it was as simple as the constant rub of "reality" against wistfulness. "Take this seriously, Daniel!" shouted while I lay in the outfield grass during a little league game, abandoning my post to cloud watch (corny as it sounds). Eventually a kid like this can develop habits and overgrowths of competency. A kid like this can learn to worry like everybody else, but it'll never look good on him. Seriousness won't suit him. Like people who hate confrontation and look raw-eyed and unhinged when they are pushed to confront, not because they're cowards, but because it's not in their nature and is a form of extremism for them. In this way, I've agreed to take the world literally and this literalness is deforming.

But the flakey kid who becomes an over-serious man can't shake the pursuer. He'll think, "I thought by accepting the world's worries it would leave me alone, in privacy, so I can sneak at dreaming." But the gods will hate his talent for concern and practicality even more and resent his duplicity. They'll know his mind drifts in private, like a balloon waiting to be let go; that he disappears between a pair of headphones or out open windows, and punish him for these excursions. They'll send him the most unhappy sexy beast in the world.

There's a biography of Jeff Buckley and his father Tim Buckley, which contrasts the stories of their lives in alternating chapters. The men actually never knew each other but lived nearly the same 30 odd years of failure, twin lives of coincidental ruin. More aware, Jeff often talked of his dark pursuer and of his cursed blood. His Demon John. A generational curse is a thing which meaning can't be made about. There's no knowing who the gods will choose to thwart, or why. About eight years ago, I asked my preacher dad (a mystic with strict parameters for his superstition) if he ever thought there was a curse in our family. He surprised me by not being surprised. And then he changed the subject.

Jeff Buckley's demon John makes me think of Sal Paradise in On the Road, and his shadowy Shroud which, in nightmares, hunted him across the continent. The Shroud had an earthly form: Dean Moriarty, the hipster imp who inspired Paradise and corrupted his mind with wild ideas.

I want to understand everything (so I can control it). Even my dark pursuer. I can put myself in the demon's place. It's not that hard. In myths, vampires lust after the unperverted mortals with a naked will to corrupt. The ones deprived of innocence, deformed by hyper-awareness, envy the purity of the oblivious. Lucifer's being was forever altered by information. Possessed with the energy of a fuller truth, what choice was there but to cleanse the universe of its unaware, of its minds not yet blessed with ruinous knowledge? I use to wonder how it is that molested children sometimes grow up to be adults who molest. How they, of all people, could damage a child in the way they were damaged. But it's vampire logic; The ruined wanting to ruin; the blessed wanting to bless. We impose our ideals as well as our corruptions on others, asking the world to conform to our image.

Lately I chew on one question, over and over again like a mangled toothpick: What to do about the sexy beast. Fight? Bow down? I have a head cluttered with the conflicting truths of movie morals and children's stories. Being educated in pews certainly didn't help since there is no greater embrace of inconsistent principle than the American Christian church, which told me to both turn my cheek and vote for the best defense.

It's in my nature to fight back. Sometimes I'll be alone in my dark basement, working on my computer with my back to the room. I'll feel something standing behind me, breathing hateful vomit down on the back of my neck. There'll be a second of panic before I'll turn to meet whatever's there so that I can look at its face and choke it if necessary. I feel partly ashamed about this. I don't know why I respond this way. Why I don't turn with empathy for my demon. If I had a hero's heart, I would find the thorn in my demon's side and risk removing it, like Chihiro in Spirited Away. If I had a buddha soul, I'd let it devour me. I don't have the guts or the nature for either. I'm scared, so I fight.

There is more than one way to fight. The world is getting a lesson in non-linear warfare. For a poor zealot with humble resources, there's no sense in lining up on the battlefield against a superpower. To defeat a giant, break its will, not its skin. Take the side door, ignore the rules of civilization, kill your own people, kill yourself if you have to. It's passive aggression. It's Judo, to use the enemy's force and strength against them. But ultimately this is just another form of violence, and every bit as corrupting.

In Beast, the hero tries to take a third, meeker path of passivity. He's the larger man, but lowers his head and never makes eye contact. He tries to diffuse his demon's anger by not fanning the flames of its aggression. This doesn't work and his decency only makes the beast angrier. Thinking people love to play at pacifism, accessorizing their belief system with it like a pair of earrings. But I don't personally know anybody who is really willing to take non-violence as an absolute: to be overrun by anyone who simply has the will. The pacifist dream, one of the great earthly dreams, is born to crumble; a means to an end, but never an end in itself; ultimately discarded, in deference to the immense imperative of our will to power.

I wish the movie gave an answer I could do something with. In the end, the happy people blow a hole in the chest of the beast with a shotgun and bury it beneath the pool, under tiles laid in the shape of a heart, leaving it to eternal writhing. Despite the symbolism, they didn't kill it with love. They killed it so that they might go on loving. As far as I can tell, this is the ultimate moral of our conflict narratives: to defeat evil by overcoming its will with our own. Our reasoning will ultimately reduce all aggression to an abstraction of Hitler which we are happy to burn in effigy. I've been paying attention to the things my daughter watches and reads and there is literally no exception to this. The Care Bears will line up against an enemy and shoot a beam of good vibrations at it, overpowering it with care. LOVE was the Beatle's fluffy weapon of choice in Yellow Submarine. But the outcome is the same. The imposition of will, which is the definition of a violent act, even if it's covered in Care Bare cream. Our stories say: good should triumph over evil by the good imposing their will on the evil. But don't look at that sentence for too long. The words get mixed up and pretty soon, good becomes that which we will.

The fourth way - the Jesus way - is just something I was never taught as a child. Does it exist? I can't get my head around why I should lie down before a tank.

Raised religious, I look for the sermons in things. But I see through a glass darkly. That is, I see through dark eyes, of glass. I listened on the radio Sunday to a man who lost the use of his legs to spinal cancer talk about the great religious value he had found in his affliction. How he had embraced the dark pursuer eating at his physical body. But it just seemed like a mind inventing; compensating in beautiful ways for the ugliness of its experience.

In Beast, what finally wears down the happy people is not the ugliness of the aggression, but that the beast relents and then unexpectedly returns. Its not the onslaught, but the respite followed by onslaught, which is almost impossible to cope with. To have survived the dark pursuer, stronger and wiser, comfortable under your quilt of life lessons, only to have it return and wipe those lessons away. This is what I would find unbearable about cancer or any struggle with remissions. The thought that it might never go away for good and so I might never make a permanent meaning out of the affliction.

I want to understand my sexy beast. To believe it's not a vain struggle. Not senseless (and therefore unbearable).