thinking something else

 

Like many people – hell, I’m going for the vulgar generalization and saying like ever-y-body – I am always thinking of something else. I don’t think it is a bad guess that when Descartes wrote “cogito ergo sum”, he was thinking of something else – where am I going with this? Is the woman across the canal going to be in the fruitmarket again? I wonder if I should have some chicken broth? Hmm, bet those foutus Jesuits are going to piss in their gowns over this part, but ha ha – I’m out-Augustine-ing you, mes freres! Things like that.

A good deal of thinking, in my experience, is thinking of something else. I go down the street and instead of thinking about the street and its multiple ghosts and encounters, I am thinking about, say, writing about thinking of something else.

Yet the cogito’s thinking is supposedly a straight shot, from subject to object. The “else” that gets in there doesn’t figure much in philosopher talk. Yet my head is as filled with “else” as a pinball machine is filled with combination shot opportunities. Some people spill that else into conversation, making it hard to keep up – the conversational topic keeps reeling around. In moments of physical action, say in brushing my teeth, though I do look at the teeth and the foam churned up in there by the brush, I often find myself thinking of a news story, or a person in the news I hate, or the laundry, or money.

Else does not correspond directly with a logical function. It is chased about in Grice’s rules of implicature, which put a premium on pertinence. Else’s book is Tristam Shandy – or Potocki’s Manuscript found in Saragossa. Etymologically, else is an other – it is related to the Latin alius and the Greek allo. An other, a foreigner – thinking of something else has a certain retroactive power, making the subject a foreigner to itself.

To “only connect” is to come home – but the possibility, in every homecoming, is that the homecomer is alien to the home by the very nature of his trip. He’s someone else. How did he get there?

Odysseus found this out the hard way.

 

poem for Stevie Smith

Isn't it dishonesty

this felt disproportion

between the gaps in my head

and the words in my mouth?

What I do around here

What I do

Is lie in bed

Dressed in Grandma's clothes.

In the movie

The old samurai

Dusty at the entrance to the village

Unsheathes an eloquent sword

With a rusty gesture.

I can identify.

To take strategies from the fox

Arbitrager’s carnivore

To fill my hunger

Clucking like an old hen

With oafish bit players

Instead of dangerous prey...

Oh chateaux – oh bandes dessinées!

Maybe I should exit stage left.

It's the dishonor I can’t stand.

Not the woodman’s necessity sharpened axe.

For Daniel Ellsberg

The background story to the Pentagon Papers started out with a payment of 6,742 dollars. That is how much the U.S. government, in its majesty, decided to shell out to the family of Thai Khak Chuyen, who was a Vietnamese “translator and informant” who worked with the Green Berets in Laos. That the Green Berets were in Laos was, itself, a rather iffy proposition – who authorized that? And who authorized the torture and murder of “Mr. Chuyen”?

The first question is answered, in various stories about this incident, with the phrase: “covert mission.” In the semi-democracy of the United States in its Cold War phase, “covert missions” could emerge, with no traditional legal warrant, at the whim of the executive branch, and be carried out with the compliance of a Congress that took on the role of the blindfolded observer, the Daddy warbucks who passed the bills doling out money to intelligence agencies who worked for the “Defence Department”. In the end, as the Nixon regime battled to pull out with “peace and honor” from Southeast Asia, some Congress peeps even sought to exert some control over executive whim.

The Cold War foreign policy struggle was ultimately won by the Cold Warriors – Truman through Bush, the whole lot.

The second question, though, was a story now pretty much forgotten. Highlights: Mr. Chuyen appeared, or so it was thought, in a secret photo that showed him talking with a North Vietnamese officer. But he was suspected, as well, of being a channel to the South Vietnamese, to the government of Thieu. And the Central Intelligence Agency, which was ultimately pulling the strings in Laos and in much of South Vietnam, wanted to control the information that went to Thieu’s government.

Thus, Mr. Chuyen, unconsciously, was at the center of both a geopolitical and interbranch conflict.

At the same time, Mr. Chuyen had made friends with some of the Green Beret’s he was interacting with. One of them, a sergeant, Alvin L. Smith, went to Saigon with Mr. Chuyen, Phem Kim Lien, his wife, and Lien’s sister. “He was always going to Saigon with Chuyen for one thing or another. But it didn’t seem wrong until afterwards,” his Captain, Robert F. Marasco, testified.

At some point in June, 1969, questions arose about Chuyen. These questions were circumscribed by the situation of the Green Berets, who, under the indirect direction of the CIA, were part of something called Operation Gamma. Operation Gamma was enacted outside the purview of American law, and involved hazy incursions into Cambodia and Laos.

Smith “decided that because he was the only enlisted man, a non-commissioned officer, involved in the Chuyen thing, that we did not trust him and would kill him,” according to Marasco, who also said that was “ridiculous.” It might be the case that Smith had seen how killing could be done to not seem like killing – how a man could be told to head down a trail, for instance, by people who were pretty sure he wouldn’t come back. It might not have been so ridiculous.

Even for an American. For Chuyen, what happened was: the Green Beret’s arrested him, hooded him, took him to an island prison camp, pumped him full of sodium pentothal and for six days interrogated him, depriving him of sleep. But they couldn’t get him to confess.

At a certain point, then, the question was elimination, or what other people call murder. Consulting with their CIA contact in Saigon, they got an ambiguous answer. The CIA wasn’t opposed or for. They were tossing the question back to the Green Beret group. They weighed letting Mr. Chuyen go, but then, what if he spilled the beans, dread thought, to the Saigon government? Fighting for a democracy that had never been a democracy was one thing, but telling the government in Saigon what the Americans were doing was something else.

The solution came out of the Green Beret discussion, in which the options were: drop him out of a plane over the Sea, land him in Taiwan and let the secret police disappear him, garrot him, or do the right thing, the only thing – put two bullets in his head and dump the body.

Captain Marasco did the shooting. Then they dumped the body in the sea, wrapped in two iron chains. And then their consciences began to work on them.

Meanwhile, in Saigon, Ted Shackley, the CIA head, decided that they shouldn’t eliminate Chuyen. So he asked the Green Beret unit to put him in touch with Chuyen. The unit responded that he’d gone back to Cambodia. Shackley knew what that meant, so he laid the matter down with General Abrams – making it an army matter. The army investigated, questioning the CIA contact in Saigon, who said: “I advised Major Crew that eliminating Chuyen couldn’t be approved. However, I did say it was the most efficient course of action.”

The wheels grind. The Green Beret unit is arrested on the charge of murdering Chuyen. And this is where politics enters in. Nixon’s people were advised by the CIA that if it really came to trial, they might have to testify about Operation Gamma – essentially, blowing the cover on their illegal operation. Nixon’s people did not want the cover blown on Gamma. Nixon’s people were all about delivering a hard body blow to the North Vietnamese and their allies so that Nixon would have time to withdraw with “honor” from Vietnam. But Nixon’s Defence Department was, after all, at war as well with the CIA. The Defence Department said that at the trial, they would call CIA agents to the stand.

Helms said no. No agents could be called to the stand. The Defence Department, on September 29, announced the trial couldn’t be held, and the men were free. The headline in the NYT read: ARMY DROPS BERETS’ CASE AS C.I.A. BARTS ITS AGENTS FROM TESTIFYING AT TRIAL.

The Los Angeles Times had a similar headline. It was read that morning by Daniel Ellsberg in Malibu. He had had been moving towards the decision to leak the documents he’d been copying, and that story decided the matter for him.

Mr. Cuyen’s murder was a small thing in that murderous war, and it is just its smallness that should make us wonder about Nemesis and her instruments. Out of that murder arose the decision that resulted in the publication of the Pentagon Papers. And out of that leak arose the decision to stop leaks, leading to the formation of the White House Plumbers Group. And out of that group arose a number of decisions – the burglary of Daniel Ellsburg’s psychiatrist’s office, for instance – that led up to the Watergate burglary. And out of that fifth rate affair, as Nixon called it, arose the investigations, the Senate and House Committees, and the resignation of President Nixon.

On December 29, 1972, Edward Lorenz gave a talk to the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science with the title: Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas. Scientists don’t dicker with nemesis. Novelists do. Yet at that date, all unconsciously, the splash of a weighted body being lowered into the South China Sea one June night in 1969 was causing, in its small way, the overthrow of the American emperor. Who had just celebrated the biggest landslide victory in twentieth century history.

cormac

 

To sic James Wood on Cormac McCarthy is unfair to the sensibilities of both writers. The New Yorker obit/review of the two last McCarthy book tries for the sweeping overview, but Wood is permanently not in the mood for McCarthy - hence his elevation of The Road, surely one of McCarthy's minor novels, as the major work over Blood Meridian, against which Wood tosses such howlers as: "Of course, his earlier novels explored “themes” and, in their way, ideas; an academic industry loyally decodes McCarthy’s every blood-steeped move around evil, suffering, God or no-God, the Bible, genocidal American expansion, the Western, environmental catastrophe, and so on. But those novels did not purvey, and in some sense could have no space for, intellectual discourse. These books were inhospitable to intellectuals, with their characteristic chatter." For Wood, an intellectual must either work at the New Yorker or teach at some respectable Ivy League school. They wear an I badge. But anybody who reads Blood Meridian and encounters the Judge encounters intellectual talk as high placed as that iof the figures in Moby Dick. The inability to see ideas in ordinary life - in ordinary American life - marks Wood's odd relationship to American letters.

Dwight Garner, god bless him, is much better in the NYT obituary. He gets McCarthy's oddness right. McCarthy's world is marked, like the world of Melville's Pequod, by a startling absense of women, of the feminine in general. But the homoerotic bonds don't find their hetero places as friendships - male friendship is as passing a state as, say, marriage. These are books essentially about loners and their disastrous effect on those about them. The Border Trilogy is McCarthy's exploration of what it might be like not to be a loner, but there is a certain static in that exploration, a certain sacrifice of narrative magnificence.

The truly American torture is solitary - something visited upon thousands of men every day in that God forsaken land. It is an extension of, a sort of diabolical parody of, individualism - that strange and very hetero fantasy ideology, which suppresses the mother role entirely, which seriously holds, among people whose lives were spent, as babies and children, eating free lunches, breakfasts and dinners, that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Taking that asociality into the wilderness - or its shadow, the backwards culture of pre-Civil Rights Dixie - is what makes McCarthy fascinating. It is also what makes McCarthy repulsive - especially to someone like James Wood, who can't "see" it.

This, from the great - or in Woods' view, unsound- Blood Meridian. The Judge is sketching and writing things in a notebook:

"A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man. Webster smiled and the judge laughed. Webster regarded him with one eye asquint and he said: Well you’ve been a draftsman somewheres and them pictures is like enough the things themselves. But no man can put all the world in a book. No more than everthing drawed in a book is so.

Well said, Marcus, spoke the judge.

But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book.

My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all."

 

Nathaniel Mackay's oppositional nostalgia, and mine

 

The poet Nathaniel Mackay wrote a brilliant, manifesto-like  essay in 1987 entitled “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol” that begins, as most American poetic manifestos do not begin, with a consideration of anthropological fact. Mackay begins with the belief about sound and music – bird music, wind music – of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. Kaluli myth – rather like Greek myth – locates the origin of music in the moment in which a human being is transformed into a bird. Philomela of course has left her mark on modern poetry – jug jug to dirty ears/so rudely forced. In the Kaluli case, a boy and his sister are catching crayfish. The boy begs some of the crayfish from his sister. She refuses. He puts a crayfish over his nose, which becomes a red beak. Then he spouts wings and flies away as a muni bird. Rather like the Grimm’s tale, the Juniper Bush, in which the soul of a murdered boy becomes a bird that sings an accusatory song, the muni bird’s song goes: "Your crayfish you didn't give me. I have no sister. I'm hungry . . .”

Mackay begins in Papua because he wants to make a point about the world.

 

“One easily sees the compatibility of this musical concept of the world, this assertion of the intrinsic symbolicity of the world, with poetry. Yeats's view that the artist "belongs to the invisible life" or Rilke's notion of poets as "bees of the invisible" sits agreeably beside Zuckerkandl's assertion that "because music exists, the tangible and visible cannot be the whole of the given world. The intangible and invisible is itself a part of this world, something we encounter, something to which we respond.” Victor Zuckerkandl is the musicologist whose story of the Kaluli is sampled by Mackay.

Which brings us to the question: isn’t this all just pre-scientific nonsense?

Mackay’s argument, his poetics, begins with the rejection of the overarching positivism that poses that rhetorical question and comfortably answers it with an “of course”. But Mackay doesn’t want to reject that positivism for some reactionary theology. Instead, in a wonderful coinage, Mackay calls for an “oppositional nostalgia.” Mackay’s essay is centered on black music, the orphaned boy’s song, but moves widely among a number of texts, including Toomer’s Cane. “Cane is fueled by an oppositional nostalgia. A precarious vessel possessed of an eloquence coincident with loss, it wants to reach or to keep in touch with an alternate reality as that reality fades.”

My own sense of politics is absolutely in touch with Mackay’s poetics. My mature life has coincided with the fading of all the postwar social democratic institutions. And I have seen the left hamstrung by a rhetoric and conceptual structure that, while useful to the making of those institutions, seems at a loss to defend them. I’ve seen that especially lately in France, where Macron’s killing of the social security system is opposed by the vast majority, which is an opportunity that the left does not know how to take advantage of. But this is an old story, as old as my twenties, the years of Reagan and Thatcher. The reification of revolution only gives us a past to break from. But a larger perspective shows us the need for an oppositional nostalgia – for the reference landscapes of childhood, for instance – those landscapes that have been decayed and attacked by our petrochemical treadmill of production, to the point that they are turning against us.

There are many levels of oppositional nostalgia. I think I have moved within that term, without knowing it, my entire life, and I think I know some of those levels.

The reference landscape and the big fire

 

It is hard to keep hold of an emergency feeling when the urgency is sliced and diced by the news cycle. We know that the past twenty years have been crucial. We know that once, in the old days at the end of the Cold War, we – we meaning the developed economies of the world – actually acted to prevent the ozone hole from eating us up. And we know since, we have done squat as we watch through our windows, on our nature specials, on our vacations, the world as we know it undergo what fire historian Stephen Pyne calls “the spectacle of unremitting loss.”

As the atmosphere emergency drifts South and West, the focus turns to the usual trivia. Well, naturally. Still, a good time to read Pyne’s essay in Aeon.

 An excerpt:

“I see the world through a pyric prism. In the reforging of Earth, I see fires, especially those burning fossil fuels, as a cause. I see fires, mutating into megafires, as a consequence – and fires everywhere as a catalyst. The Anthropocene is, for me, a Pyrocene, as humanity’s fire practices create the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age. But fire, and even the charred landscapes it can leave in its wake, is more than an issue of human health, busted ecosystems, creaky institutions or bad behaviour. This is also a matter of aesthetics.

This thought came to me during a field trip to the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico in 2014. Three years earlier, the Las Conchas fire, part of a wave train of conflagrations, had blasted across the Pajarito Plateau and into the Los Alamos National Laboratory. When its plume collapsed, the fire sent hot air across forested mesas and through gorges, like the pyroclastic flow from a volcano. The flames culled woods, dappled the forest with blowouts and, in some sites burned down to bare rock, not even blackened stumps remained. Craig Allen, a fire researcher with the US Geological Survey, was our docent, and as we scanned the still-scorched countryside, he described not so much the scene before us as the scene that the fire had taken from him – a vision of the land restored to its precontact state.”

The contact – a term which has displaced the old Eurocentric term, “discovery”, but which has still not found its poetic bearings. The warmer climate has been thought of in terms of mounting ocean levels, and it is that. But so far are we from the trees that have sustained us, that we don’t see the fires mounting up, just for us.

"Lord Krishna said: The universe (or human body) may be compared to an eternal tree that has its origin (or root) in the Supreme Being and its branches below in the cosmos. The Vedic hymns are the leaves of this tree. One who understands this tree is a knower of the Vedas. (15.01)

The branches of this eternal tree are spread all over the cosmos. The tree is nourished by the energy of material Nature; sense pleasures are its sprouts; and its roots of ego and desires stretch below in the human world causing Karmic bondage."

Werner Sombart,  an early twentieth century historian of capitalism – a man of the right, I should say – saw how the trees were necessary for the ships that formed the logistical core of imperialism and trade up until the late nineteenth century. Da steht ein Baum – well, Rilke’s Orpheus was smarter than he knew. Marx’s economic enlightenment came about when he discovered changes in the laws on gleaning wood in the land around Koeln. The Russian novelists depict feckless landholders whose wealth is measured by the forests that they sell to entrepreneurs. Set the Dead souls to one side, it was the trees from Russia that went into the great liberal era in Europe.

Another excerpt from Pyne's essay:

"Yet I wondered what my grandchildren might see if they were present. I recalled a comment by Bertrand Russell who said that what most people mean when they speak of returning to nature is really a desire to return to the world they knew as a child (or, I would add, the world they knew when they came of age). What existed then seems natural. Whatever comes next – new species, new habits, new machines – seems intrusive, disturbing and alien.

That childhood world – what we might call our ‘reference landscape’ – is the marker by which we measure the present and coming world. It’s how we judge the new world as welcoming or hostile, lovely or marred. A reference landscape might be personal, but it might also be shared by a society or nation. When the world itself is being overturned, personal grief can become intergenerational."

Our reference landscapes are coming apart. Russell, a product of the nineteenth century industrialized Britain that produced, among other things, the first diagnosis of allergy, had a reference landscape that was already radically different from that of his eighteenth century ancestors.  I think of Shelley's reference landscape and how the seeds, in the coming storms, will be all burned to a crisp:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Cain's papers

 

Few writers have seen their best sentences become their death sentences. Morris Markey, though, was one of those few.

Lawrence Morris Markey. He is best known, if known at all, as an early New Yorker writer. He wrote novels too – about Dixie. His wife was related to Margaret Mitchell, but he married her before the latter became the author of Gone With The Wind. That must have peeved him – he’d been the one to leave Atlanta behind and make it in New York and the big time. The big time dwindled in Hollywood, in Holiday Magazine, in writing radio spots.

As well, while Mitchell went in for 19th century prose, Markey’s reporting on murders, vagabands and riff raff was very much Neue Sachlichkeit, the American version.

Markey is associated with two engrossing articles about murders, some of which are still recycled for the mystery and the podcastery in them. One was the murder of Starr Faithfull, whose body was tossed up on the shore of Long Beach, Long Island on June 8, 1931. The other murder, also of a flapper, was of Dot King, who was found murdered in her “love nest” on the 15th of March, 1923. Both murders have generated books and websites.

The second paragraph of the Mysterious Death of Starr Faithfull  begins as follows:

“It lies within the very nature of a mystery story that it must be told backward. The only possible beginning is the corpse. And then things are learned and told about the corpse and the creature that existed before it became a corpse…”

Did I say that Morris Markey and James Cain were friends?

Of course, the corpse is definitely a given, but it need never be discovered, or it can be discovered within the elastic schedule of the writer’s telling.

However, I rather like it, gruesomely, that Morris Markey, who left an imprint on the Cold Blood genre, was a creature who left a mystery with his corpse himself, one that the coroner left open: suicide, accident or murder.

On July 12, 1950, the Atlanta Constitution published a story that began: “Gunshot kills L.M.Markey, ex-Atlantan: Lawrence Morris Markey, 51, former Atlanta newspepr reporter, died Monday night of a gunshot wound in his home in Halifax, Virginia.”

And thus, the corpse with the small .22 entrance wound behind its ear.

In the Constitution story, Markey was found “in a downstairs hall and that a .22 caliber rifle lay nearby, one cartridge fired from it.” It doesn’t tell us if a relative of Margaret Mitchell was in the house.

The coroner relied in his account on the testimonies of those in the house, but he must not have relied entirely, since he does leave the case open. A question mark that could be seen as an accusation against someone in the household.

In his biography of James Cain, Morris Markey holds a considerable place. Markey introduced Cain to Harold Ross at the New Yorker.  When Helen Markey called him up and told him Morris was dead, and invited him to the funeral, Cain went. Oddly “Helen had not said how Markey died, and it was not until Cain reached Petersburg and bought a Richmond paper that he learned Morris had been shot.”

Truly, here’s the set up for a short story. Cain, the author of Double Indemnity, goes to Halifax Virginia and spends a few days snooping about, hearing stories about the death of his friend. Cain heard the tale from Morris’s brother, Marvin Markey.

“On the day before his death… Sue [his daughter] had driven to a store and along the way had seen four little puppies on the side of the road, where somebody had abandoned them. Deciding they should have a merciful end, she took them hom, got out the family .22, and shot them. When she went to bury them, she left the .22 in the hall.”

The family agreed that Morris, drinking and depressed, had jammed the gun against his head from behind and shot himself, presumably to make it look less like a suicide and more like an accident. Insurance reasons. But it made it look like somebody shot him from behind.

Cain, according to Hoopes, wrote this all down in a letter he sent to Laurence Stallings, a mutual friend.

And, to make a true mystery writer’s death  true mystery, the letter has not, as far as I know, been published. It is among Cain’s papers.

Which is a potential title, no? Cain’s papers.