"Gentlemen, as long as one poor cockroach feels the pangs of unrequited love, this world is not a moral world."

--William James, in an aside to his students at Harvard, as quoted by Robert D. Richardson

Commute (16)

We can calculate and trace and map the melting of the polar caps, the decimation of the forests, the extinction of species. There is not yet a way to quantify the gouging-out of our spirits, or the cementing-over of our eyes.

Commute (15)

At 30 a woman is Christmas Cake: too late, too late!

So the students at the women's university tell me they will marry at 28. And when they become pregnant they will stop working. That’s the system.

They also say: Men are more logical than women. Men are more powerful than women. Women need men to take care of them.

Commute (14)

Recently I read a book about hikkikomori, the estimated one million Japanese who shut themselves into their rooms and do not come out for years.

The book describes not one but two men who were restored to life by going to Thailand and discovering that the buses there do not leave on time.

Commute (13)

No bird comes to this world casually anymore. Not on a lark. Just by looking at them you can tell: these birds are determined. Their acts of color and attention postpone the collapse of the office buildings.

Commute (12)

I see a woman sitting from girlhood to old age holding a jagged chunk of concrete. By the time her hair has gone gray the concrete is still concrete and at the same time it is entirely changed. She has discovered properties in concrete no one knew, or else she has imbued those properties. Sometimes it can be said to weep. If you watch closely you can see it dreaming, shuddering in its sleep.

downstairs from love and time.

Upstairs are two men with opposite attitudes toward time. You’re not conservative, are you? Actually they are sleeping together. They’re a couple. I know. Go figure.

I hope you’ll still consider living here. Even as we hear them upstairs fighting now: one with a bb gun, the other with a metal paint can: ping, ping!

Do you notice you always lie to yourself in the future tense? says one.

And the other says, Do you notice you always lie about sex?

You talk instead of act: I’m going to exercise, I’m going back to church, I’m going to make love to you every night, I’m going to change my life!

I have been BUSY everysinglesecond and I will get around to all those things.

Assuming you live as long as Darwin’s tortoise who by the way recently died as will you.

And what do you accomplish, actually, by being all the time uptight? This is a religious experience? It looks like a panic attack!

Indeed the uptight man (let’s call him Mister Now) is tremendously unpleasant. He is so obsessed by the passing moment, by the brevity of life, that he is entirely incapable of thinking straight. His house is always on fire. Which is poignant for about two seconds and afterwards really annoying.

The Tomorrow-Tomorrow guy (let’s call him Mr. Later) is only wasting his own life whereas Mr. Precious-Unrepeatable-Never-Come-Again-Here-It-Goes-Moment annoys the hell out of everyone.

Everyone, that is, except Mr. Infinite-Time-to-Waste, whose soul of inertia keeps him packed in existential blubber so thick that, even if you pierced him with, say, the inevitability of death, within thirty seconds housekeeping has already shown up with a can of paint. He’s been white and comfortable this long—who’s to say he can’t surf it right to the end?

Mr. Later would have been entirely all right, in fact, if only he hadn’t met Mr. Now. He would have gone on living here, peaceful as a cauliflower, until someone came along and lopped his head off.

Oh lucky man, who comes equipped with his own spiritual morphine drip! Every six minutes Mr. Later pushes the button and the optimism shoots right into his veins. Indeed, how else could he endure living with Mr. Infinite Panic of the Now, who must always remind you that this may be the last coffee you’ll ever drink, your last sunrise, your last irritating moment with Mr. NowNowNow.

You understand why we have a hard time finding renters to live downstairs from these two. One all the time singing “Summertime” and the other poking you in the eye. Have I mentioned that heat and air-conditioning ARE included?

And--let me warn you now—now and then they actually get through to each other and then, god forbid—

they switch.

Life is short! says Mr. Later. Run away with me tonight!

And lose my job? asks Mr. Now.

Live for the moment! shouts Mr. Later

And Mr. Now says, But I’m comfortable here.

It’s no wonder the neighbors have all disembarked and this space is available cheap—no deposit. All we ask is that you sweep out front—and serve referee for Mr. Now and Mr. Later. The location is wonderful. The neighborhood is (otherwise) first-rate. A steal at this price, a great opportunity for anyone willing to live downstairs from procrastination and sheer panic.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

RANDY MESMER'S PUNK BAND MIND

Randy Mesmer found the way forward was clear, the instruction simple: just don't believe your mind at all. Pay no heed.

A straight-forward and impossible situation.

As if he were, for example, an impoverished graduate student struggling to complete his dissertation (William James, cosmic consciousness) while living in a small broken-down van with, hello, a punk band.

A full-blown punk band, complete with electric guitars, drum set, groupies, heroin, and all members stumbling about improvising, drunk at 7am wearing nothing but t-shirts (Christ could you at least put on some underpants!), checking to see if the microphone worked--testing, testing, bigger than Jesus, fuck yeah!--and all he had to do was ignore them, put his two million 3-by-5 cards in order and quietly finish his dissertation.

Of course the punk band wasn't real--YEAH, try telling that to them!

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

BACHELORS IN PERSONAL INSANITY

Randy’s family was forbearing, resigned, or too drunk to notice. Certainly they were not shocked. Addiction was the family talent. Between the lot of them, they’d managed to work up a dazzling variety of addictions. Gin and tonics, far-right politics, fishing, beer. Oxycontin, dieting, crosswords, tomato sandwiches made- just- so.

Together they suffered depression, mania, insomnia, nightmares, lethargy, panic attacks. They were either too shy to speak or couldn’t shut up. Everything Was Traumatic. Nonetheless they managed both to work and to marry, which only goes to show that some people’s lives aren’t complicated enough already.

Everyone was functional, at least intermittently, excepting of course, dear Aunt Lucy, hospitalized for life up in Laconia. Schizophrenia—though she didn’t really seem that crazy, did she? Well, sometimes. She did what the rest of the family did—she just took it a little bit further. Like they’d all gotten their B.A. in Personal Insanity, but Aunt Lucy had gone all the way, completed the course, and actually made a career of it.

Commute (11)

When the city crumbles our habits will persist, like drunks, like flaccid old men making the rounds at the baths. Years from now, men will come and carry the husks of the train cars from station to station. And they will make a great point of leaving at exactly 8:27.

Commute (10)

What happens to reality, what happens to the world, when it is left entirely un-watered by attention? The first step appears to be: it turns entirely gray.

Commute (9)

‘Convenient’ is the cousin of ‘automatic’ and requires almost as little attention. This is a terribly convenient city: we live with no attention at all. The most fashionable and coveted possessions, cell phone and iPod, are tools for ignoring one’s surroundings. Why not make a new ad campaign: Anywhere but here!

Commute (8)

In one of the legends of the Holy Grail, Parsifal, a young knight on a quest, wanders into a parched and devastated land where nothing grows. When he arrives at the capital of this wasteland, he finds the townspeople behaving as if everything were normal. They are not wondering, "What horror has befallen us?" or, "What can we do?" Rather, they are dull and mechanical, as if under a spell.

-- Tara Brach

Commute (7)

Why have we created a world we can hardly bear to show up for?

Commute (6)

Excuse me, how do you expect people to get to work? If everybody stopped to talk. . . It’s called efficiency. Hello?

Commute (5)

I am in a hurry too, planning what I have to do, wishing for a coffee or a beer, but now and then, in the middle of my routine, I show up and look around and it occurs to me that I am living in a cemetery. What else could be so perfectly ordered? How could anyone be so obedient, without having been previously cremated?

Commute (4)

From the train I hurry to the convenience store where a line of six cashiers awaits and each time they say the same speech, ask for my point card, and pass me my change on top of my receipt without a glance in my direction. It’s a perfect system: no one’s here.

Commute (3)

On Monday at 8:27 I board the same car through the same door at the same moment I did the Monday before. The strangers are also the same. This took a long time to recognize. I’d assumed strangers were by definition random. But this is no accidental meeting: we occupy the same seats, the same space to the left or the right of the door. Like a chocolate box, if chocolate could look acutely depressed.

Commute (2)

It is a surprise, then, when the train arrives at Shirokane-takanawa, to watch the businessmen lunge across the platform to transfer to the Mita line. The first year I lunged too. It took forever for me to see it didn’t matter if I boarded third or sixth. Still, every time I must talk to myself to keep from shoving and sprinting with the rest of the crowd. Like at a scary movie when the movie starts in. I have to remind myself: this isn’t real.

Commute (1)

Their suits are not actually black. Black is for funerals, for interviews, the very most official functions. The suits are dark gray. Charcoal. The suits are only nominally occupied, like a building left with a guard. The gentlemen will arrive later, behind their eyes, to occupy their suits. This is just the commute. Even when we are so jammed together our feet leave the ground, we are not here. Especially then.

All About H.Hatterr and Other Endangered Books

My life has been enlivened and sustained by books, many of them peculiar and idiosyncratic, printed in small editions by a band of believers living, more likely than not, on instant noodles.

I cannot imagine my life without the books I adore. I am wildly and permanently grateful to them, as I am to the people who hauled me in off the street when I was lost and grief-stricken. Where else could I have learned that I could have my own vision of the world, of language, and not just accept someone else’s hand-me-down?

Thus it is an act of loyalty for me to speak up for the books I love. Many of them seem on the verge of disappearing, bobbing in and out of print.

Thus it was with great delight that I discovered that NYRB classics will re-issue
G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr. This book is near the top of my list of books that must not be allowed to disappear. I am very grateful that other, more powerful, people are concerned about it as well.

The pyrotechnics and word-juggling of Mr. Rushdie come hugely from this book—by Rushdie’s own admission. For me this book encapsulates the crazed gorgeous inventiveness of Indian English. It is an extraordinary book and for years you couldn’t find a copy on-line for less than 100 bucks.

I remember when I found my copy, buried in the back of a bookshop in Varanasi. For years I’d looked for it and suddenly there it was, looking like it had had a wide range of traumatic experiences which it did not wish to discuss but nonetheless intact.

I am known, of course, as a singularly sedate person, a veritable sea of equanimity, but I no doubt would slug anyone who so much as touched my copy of All About H. Hatterr. Thankfully violence is no longer necessary. You can get your own copy.

NYRB classics has performed a number of acts of literary heroism, including publishing Robert Walser, Nirad Chaudhuri, and Tatyana Tolstaya. What would I have done without these books? If you haven’t read Robert Walser, I just don’t understand how you are getting by.

The rescue of this book has made me think of other endangered books. Here are a few:

1) The stories of Lucia Berlin. The work of this American master is on the verge of disappearing. Every time I think of it I want to run into the street screaming.

2) One thousand and one-second stories by Inagaki Taruho, translated by Tricia Vita. One thousand and one seconds is longer than this book was in print. I know half a dozen people who want it and none of us can get it. (If you have a copy, don’t tell me. I will come to your house and steal it.)

3) Halldor Laxness’s books go in and out of print. It’s maddening. Someone needs to come out with a multi-volume Every-Last-Fucking-Scrap Collected Edition. Please.

4) Mahasweta Devi. Does anyone in America read her books? Sheesh!

5) James Broughton’s Ecstasies.

6) Henri Troyat’s biographies. Of course we need Chekhov: A Life so we can learn how to be a magnificent human being, but we also need Gogol so we can know that it is still possible to make something brilliant and beautiful even if you’re screwing up pretty much non-stop.

THE RESCUE OF PRINCESS MASAKO

an optimistic fiction

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

THE NAKED HOLY MAN OF UDUPI

In Udupi, Krishna’s city, Randy Mesmer discovered a naked holy man ducking around the Tata buses at the station.

Randy pursued at once, tailed the sky-clad renunciant through the crowd, following his big flat feet, his smooth brown bobbing ass as he strode among the middle-class Indian mamas and their dull polyester-clad mates, all of whom carefully avoided looking at him.

How stunning to be naked out in the world. This must be how it feels, Randy thought, to tell the whole truth for the first time in your life.

Randy followed the naked holy man into the vegetable market, where an old woman offered a fistful of long beans, which the holy man took without saying a word.

The naked holy man walked like he knew where he was going—and with good cause. This was not an ash-smeared old man, nor a fearsome Saivite with bloodshot eyes. The holy man was young, his body lean and supple, and Randy had glimpsed his enormous Cadbury chocolate eyes. Better for him to keep moving: folks were bound to come up with creative uses for doe-eyed buck naked holy man.

Such radiant displays of holiness would elsewhere not be permitted, but this was Udupi, Krishna’s city, where the god at the temple cross-dressed every Friday and required all male devotees to be shirtless in the inner sanctuary. This was a city ruled by a god with a rare sense of delight and appreciation.

Still, what a burden beauty must have been to the holy man, like a chronic backache or an aged mother. Like the Tibetan nuns Randy had seen in the Himalayan foothills, who hurried along with their eyes on the ground. Renouncing all vanity and worldliness, these unlucky women shaved their heads, abandoned paint and ornaments, and wound up drastically more beautiful than they’d been before.

Decay is unstoppable, death too, but blooming also intrudes and insists upon itself.

The holy man turned now to look at his pursuer. Randy in his faded ragged clothes, skinny from six months of dysentery and beans, his face shot through with longing. One of those well-fed foreign children who run away to India to live like beggars and careen about in manic Technicolor delusion, chasing now an elephant, now a swami, now a buck-naked holy boy standing among the marigold garlands and the cabbages.

It is said that a pickpocket in a crowd of saints sees only pockets.

Randy, likewise: here was no pious wizened saint’s prick but a generous fleshy welcoming member of the sort a philandering sensualist might pray to be equipped with.

Desire pinned Randy’s feet to the dusty earth; the holy man turned and fled into the crowd of pilgrims.

NYTimes. "In Myanmar, Fear Is A Constant Companion"

"ALL THAT THE HUMAN HEART WANTS IS ITS CHANCE." -- William James

Why Do You Always Write About Such Embarrassing Things?

Obviously I would rather write about cancer, about nice people having affairs, about the Immigrant Experience, or growing up on a farm. I would prefer, of course, to write about writing professors who sleep with insatiable teaching assistants, about the sordid underbelly of creative writing programs in these United States of America.

Unfortunately these subjects are already taken; the quota is full. Everyone wants to be a writer nowadays!

What’s left is humiliation, shame not feigned or artful but smelly and sulking. Bad sex, waking up with the clap, sitting in the public STD clinic waiting to have my urethra swabbed by a nurse who remembers my name—this space available!

Obviously I would rather write about Nice Homosexuals. But you know how it is—the Nice Homosexuals are all taken. What’s left are a few bitter-faced members of the International Sex Army: men with sour hearts and bad breath. On retrovirals. Drunk.

The men who make mistakes occasionally—they were taken long ago. Ditto the men who often make mistakes. What’s left are a few men with unpleasant personalities and unremarkable genitals who make mistakes more or less constantly.

Obviously I would much rather write about cancer. But I do so want to be a writer—and there are so few spaces left available.

And so I devote myself, my heart and living hours, to smallness, humiliation and degradation, to everyone no one else wanted. (I myself cannot claim to like them.)

Bitter-faced, small-dicked, petty-minded queer army: accept me as your humble representative.

Reality

From center stage, with a blue wig and gold eyes, Le Mado surveys her kingdom and announces, “You can be naked. Of course it is against the law to be naked. And the law is completely ignored. . . Like pot. We smoke wherever we want and nobody gives a shit. So, please: be naked.”

Le Mado on a huge screen hangs above the city. A banner on the horizon: gold blue glittery laughing Le Mado. “Did I just say that?” A playful little gasp. “Did I say that out loud?”

“I am allowed to say anything. Because I am not real. I am a drag queen. After the show I will go back into the valise.”

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Robert D. Richardson, biographer

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
Robert D. Richardson

(also: Thoreau: A Life of the Mind and Emerson: A Mind on Fire.)

Richardson’s biographies of Thoreau and Emerson are two of the best books I’ve encountered in my life of voracious reading and this is one is just as wondrous. I cannot read any of these books in public, because they all make me want to weep and clutch my chest and shout, "At last! Everything has been revealed!"

I wish I could explain why Richardson’s biographies are different from anyone else’s. It’s not just an artful piling up of delightful and distressing facts. Instead it’s like the doorbell rings and you have a new best friend: William James. There’s something magical and occult about this. It’s not like he went to the research library, it’s like he drew mystic diagrams on the floor.

Richardson writes that one of James’ gifts was “his uncanny ability to pick up redemptive ideas from his reading.” And it is Richardson’s gift too, to fill each page with life-giving ideas. These biographies are as purely inspirational as a strong Lao coffee with sweetened condensed milk. Reading them makes me prone to fits of euphoria.

Richardson points toward the sources of James’ genius— one of the most important of which was James’ own depression and heartbreak. He writes, “James had a remarkable capacity to convert misery and unhappiness into intellectual and emotional openness and growth. It is almost as though trouble was for him a precondition for insight.” How hopeful that is!

Richardson’s compassion for his subject spills out, somehow, to the reader, and makes one feel that one’s own nonsense and bleakness do not render one disqualified for a whole human life. What more can I ask for?

Up front, let us unfashionably admit. . .

Up front, let us unfashionably admit: it’s a scary holy world. Anywhere you put your ear to it, the world goes WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP like some freaky kind of space ship.

And all this fucking is, admittedly, just a way of keeping God at bay.

Because it is a very scary holy world. Like a horror movie when the girl’s alone: all she does is open the refrigerator and scream:

oh holy world!

". . . I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden." -- Montaigne (CW, 72)

Tokyo Garden

A Tokyo garden. No garden at all. Thirty-seven pots. Not to everyone’s taste. Not exactly tasteful. Thirty-seven pots inches from the highway, tripping up passersby. Mixed pots. Sprigs of this growing in that. Succulents in the ivy. Bamboo grass in the tea roses. Impatiens, marigolds, cactuses. A dull jade tree. A prize winning miniature cherry chained to the curb. Hydrangea. Chives. A little, old lady, not sweet and not nice, everyday solemnly trimming and pruning, refusing to toss out what ought to be tossed out.

If it were all terracotta—

But no. Plastic pots, cruddy blue and white, forlorn white hooks. Who in their right mind would harbor a Christmas cactus--eleven months of the year a collapsed gray green. What else? Even as far as a ceramic gnome, maybe, sleeping it off in the dirt.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

PLASTIC AND THE AFTERLIFE

Randy Mesmer died expecting the boy-next-door and the rest of the coveted neighbors. Husband, father, son, big brother. Those sins. Their corresponding punishments. Instead muscled arms and hairy asses just protruded here and there beneath a heap of plastic bottles and coffee cups, beer cans, junk cars, and burger wrappers, in a cloud of monoxide and chlorofluorocarbons.

The angels trailed plastic bags from all night pharmacies. One angel—now grounded due to acid rain-- explained that lust had lost rank in the new list of sins against the body.

“The twenty-first century has transgressions all its own,” explained the angel. ”And they have a helluva lot to do with trash.”

Carnal lust, fearsome as the Bengal tiger, is now likewise direly endangered, and hunts forlorn in scabby patches of jungle. “We can’t get them to mate,” moaned the angel. “It’s something in the water.”

Between heavy metals and depleted uranium casings—nostalgia for adultery now sweeps the heavens. “We don’t worry about wet dreams. We worry about hormone disruptors.”

“Retribution was simple when you just killed a man,” said the angel. “Then maybe his grandchildren killed yours. Now that toxins poison 100 generations down--frankly it’s hard to know what to shoot.”

On the Moment to Moment Instability of Beauty and Ugliness

Someone, I’m sure has written about this. I just haven’t come across it yet. It’s too obvious--and also too unsettling. This scandal: that the beautiful are not beautiful, and the ugly are not ugly, consistently.

That the beautiful are sometimes ugly is a disgrace. That the ugly are, without warning, beautiful is heartening.

Why struggle to befriend the beautiful people? By the time you catch up to them they could very well be hideous.

I am disconcerted. I’d prefer if people just stayed in one camp or another. Beautiful or Ugly. Permanently. The world would be easier to understand then, and easier to prepare for.

Some oscillation, some divergence, can be blamed on late nights, on whether one is beloved or forsaken, on the consumption of salmon, on happiness or unhappiness, and of course on beer—but the greater, more significant change remains a mystery. Does it change with the moon? Is it karmic or atmospheric? Should I not wait so long between haircuts?

Because nowhere is this more disruptive than in oneself. Other people can be forgiven. Here comes the day of the family portrait, it’s date night, and you think, I’m doing okay. Of course, I’m nothing special, but I do make it to the gym now and then. I moisturize.

But you look in the mirror that day and find a haggard aged goblin struggling to contain her eating disorder by means of IV drugs. Aghast at your reflection, you ask: where has this weight come from? Why is my skin this color? Have I managed to die without noticing? Yesterday I somehow imagined I was remotely okay. What happened?

That this happens is well-known. I don’t know why more people haven't written about it.

Conversely, a sudden shift from ugliness to beauty appears to be positive. However this shift is likewise calamitous and generally causes more trouble than sudden ugliness.

Imagine then, this situation. This situation which is very familiar to me. You are not attractive. Your features are unfortunate. Your body sags. Your genitals are unspectacular. You’re getting on in years. And you’ve accepted this.

You say to yourself: now it is time to focus on my spiritual life. Now I will learn to meditate and let go. Now I will study the Collected Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Now I will give back to the community.

Enough, you say. Enough nonsense. Enough vanity.

You no longer seek out mirrors but, then--one can’t really avoid them. You glance and there is a nanosecond of pure astonishment.

Hmmm. I’m not half-bad.

A nanosecond—and then you fall at once to plotting. Because if you look this good, then doubtless there are attractive people somewhere who would not object to sleeping with you. And hadn’t you better give them more opportunities to do so?

There is anxiety in this, heavy-duty anxiety, because you are well-aware that, not only will these good looks be gone in twenty years, they may very well have vamoosed by the next time you look in the mirror.

So you rush back to the mirror. Careful now not to turn on the overhead fluorescent. Still okay. Phew.

And the next moment you’re out in the street, flagging down a taxi on your way to (at best) that overpriced cruisy coffee shop or (more likely) that bar where no one wears anything but boots. Just boots. Nothing else.

Beauty and ugliness alternate back and forth. The Collected Essays of Montaigne remain unread.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE OF MANNEQUINS

At the age of seven Randy Mesmer became renowned--at least within the family—for groping a mannequin at Filene’s.

Curious Randy clamped his avid hands on the stolid gentleman in turtleneck and corduroys and had to be pulled off by his mother, who shouted when she discovered him in this compromised position and, to tell the truth, never looked at her little boy in quite the same way again.

Thereafter, Randy was designated: the third son, the gimp-legged one. Who gropes mannequins. His family guessed, accurately as it turned out, that little Randy was going to be a world of trouble in this arena.

The cause of this commotion--the mannequin’s nether regions—were lackluster and un-compelling. One side, in fact, was much like the other.

Misinformed thus, Randy managed several respectable years. Until age 13, when he groped his first non-mannequin and discovered a situation more complex and appealing than he’d hitherto supposed.

Of all the excesses that came afterward, his family would only sigh and explain, “What do you expect from a boy who gropes a mannequin at Filene’s?”

Indeed.

epigraph

from Montaigne, our ishta-devata, our pal Michel,
the patron saint of “on the other hand –“:

We are all a patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

GREEN LUST

Randy Mesmer was alarmed to discover his lust had expanded, past men and past women and—thankfully skipping the animals—was now headed straight for the trees. The feelings once reserved for “rugged uncut Latino hunk” were now equally called forth by the phrases “stand of white birches” or “big old oak.” Horniness had expanded, somehow, so that now he found himself with a hankering for the whole green world.

Of all the ends to which people had warned his rampant lust would lead him, this one had not been mentioned. A fetish for green. Green, which presses in everywhere, which fills every crevice, every neglected patch of dirt. This devouring, insatiable green.

Funny how, it turned out to be true, the Junior High tease: green means you’re horny.

He learned quickly to beware the sexy pictures that came in brown recycled wrappers from Audobon, Orion, and the Sierra Club. He could easily be sent into a binge and find himself at the end of the weekend with an entirely immoderate number of houseplants.

If one must have this feeling, fine, but shouldn’t it be reserved for orchids, for roses, for high-end botanical woo-woo? But, in greenery as in men, he preferred the more common varieties. It was more than a little humiliating. He was not even above geraniums.

And so many things had to be reconsidered, now that the naturalists had turned out to be every bit as alluring as the naturists. Certainly he’d never look the same way at old ladies gone bird-watching, looking so pious, clad all in canvas within the forest glen. Those ladies, he suspected, were probably getting off hard as a sailor on shore leave.

And, not to flatter himself, but he was pretty sure the trees liked him too. Somehow he just knew. And there was this great benefit: the lightning-struck black walnut did not give a damn how old he was, how clumsy or unshaven.

These perversities, of course, were no more acceptable than any of his previous ones. People were appalled—this ecology goes too far!—when they found him at the party in the corner, in flagrante delicto with a potted palm.

MONTREAL MUNICIPAL SEX LAW: Explanation for Visitors

Visitors to Montreal, bewildered by the vision of so many perfect men, may be overwhelmed by feelings of personal inadequacy. To be just ordinary, just average, may seem a cause for shame. Fortunately this is needless. For it is with this heartache in mind—and the corresponding bitterness, resentment and loss of tourist income—that municipal laws have been enacted which require city residents to have sex every day.

Frequency is dictated according to age and attractiveness. A man of seventy, dapper in his neat white suit and straw hat, is only required to have sex once. Whereas a twenty four year old with washboard abs, puppy eyes and three days growth of beard is required to have sex at least six times. Six times! It is sobering to consider what a strenuous sacrifice the citizens of Montreal have made in order for the city to be as thriving, popular and well-loved as it is today.

The core of this is that, with such tremendous quotas and requirements, even the plainest looking tourist is bound to get swept in occasionally.

Therefore, do not be surprised if you find yourself being offered sex by someone more beautiful than you would be eligible for in any other city on Earth. Do not be bashful or apologetic. That ridiculously gorgeous man is simply attempting to follow municipal law. As a responsible visitor, you should also respect the law.

It is common that residents find themselves, at nearly midnight, still short of their quota. They may call on you to help. You should do so, if humanly possible.

Residents who fail to meet their quota are fined. Habitual offenders must attend classes where they are made to watch porno and consume oysters.

The recent strength of the Canadian dollar—and the corresponding drop in tourism—has meant residents must look even further a field in order to discharge their duty. Tourists may very well be overwhelmed by appeals for help.

Some predictable questions and doubts:

Unlike the laws against public nudity and marijuana smoking, these laws are actually enforced. Violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, etc.

Married couples who wish to remain monogamous may be granted a waiver for religious reasons. It must be admitted that these people are generally looked down upon and may face discrimination in the workplace.

Why are tourists so popular? After all, residents could fulfill their quota by having sex with each other—and leave the rest of the world bereft of inspiration. The answer is simple. When calculating one’s quota, tourists are worth 33.33% more. Fucking tourists is more efficient. Also, residents who welcome visitors receive coupons from the Chamber of Commerce redeemable for exotic underpants, Belle Guelle pilsner and marijuana, all of which are very expensive and highly prized in this area.

Many visitors, entranced by the city’s warm welcome, wish to remain in Montreal for the rest of their lives. Prospective residents must ask themselves if they are up to the demands of the city’s hustle and bustle. Are you willing to have sex every day?

Other visitors may be disgusted—or simply exhausted. They may choose a city where sex is frowned-upon or banned outright. It is unnecessary to name such places. They are legion.

Inconvenienced

Frida Kahlo did not accept her crippled leg and kept it hidden beneath her flowery exotic skirts. “Every year I hate it more,” she said, matter-of-fact and without complaint. I love her for that.

In public I keep peace with my withered leg, its mangled hoof. To inquiries I’ve learned to say, “It’s a birth defect,” in the sunniest possible tone, as if I’d just spotted, in the distance, a bluebird or a cardinal.

Dutifully I strap the foot into its plastic brace, like an aged relative who merits attention even though he can do almost nothing. When I’m alone it’s different—I throw a blanket over it.

Still, it is shameful to be bothered with it, here on the beach at Sihanoukville, where the mine victims crawl, tourist to tourist, across the beach and the rule seems to be that you can't be a beggar unless you’re missing at least two limbs.

I had a lover once who was paraplegic. A Vietnam vet paralyzed below (not at) the waist. He always insisted he was not crippled. Not disabled either, or handicapped. “I am only inconvenienced,” he insisted. “Some of my friends are quads. That’s crippled.”

His arms were extraordinarily strong, especially at night, when, returned in dreams to Vietnam, he grappled in combat and, howling in his sleep, hurled me from the bed.

Refuge Vows

Today is the 14th anniversary of the day I took Buddhist refuge vows with Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche in Dharamsala. I was twenty, living in the monastery, imagining I would be a monk. I knew I liked men by then, of course, I just wasn’t quite ready for just how much I liked them.

Rereading Shantideva today. I swore to be a bodhisattva—and it’s still hard for me to give up my seat on the train. I’m sitting comfortably and some old woman totters onto the train, she’s maybe 104, one leg amputated at the knee, and, bodhisattva me, I think, “She’s just going for the sympathy vote. She doesn’t look that bad off. And as for me, I’m tired.”

I go for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.
I go for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.
I go for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.

On the Buckle

It really is one of the happiest sounds in the universe: the jangle of a man fumbling with his belt. For this reason belt buckles ought to be as large and ponderous as possible, so that a man feels proud, just hauling one around, and also cheered to unbuckle one and send it, clattering, to the ground.

Rich Sons

One afternoon in Phnom Penh, over many cups of coffee, he told us about one of the rich sons of Cambodia, who, in a moment of irritation, had opened fire on a crowd.

Rich sons, it is said, are never punished. Here was the test. A crime so heinous, committed before dozens of witnesses; the rich son slouched in the courtroom, looking bored and wearing sunglasses. Even the cynics thought he might not get away with it.

So it seemed until the morning the judge announced the verdict. There'd been a break in the case, he said. This boy was framed: now the real villain had been found.

As proof, the judge held up the perpetrator's passport. The passport was real, made late the night before for a man who did not exist.

(The testimony of witnesses counts for nothing. The witness of the poor is a bill of minute denomination and subject to constant devaluation.)

The man who did not exist was sentenced to life in prison. A terrible sentence, which no one likes to think about.

The lives of imaginary men are unspeakably long, their suffering almost unimaginable to those of us who die more easily.

The verdict: innocent people, gunned down in a market, leads to the imprisonment of an imaginary man, pulled into creation only to suffer, to serve on behalf of the rich son who walks, with his sunglasses, back out into the sun.

Fidelity

Do mosquitoes have a sense of family? Does the female mosquito long to return, at the end of the night, blood-engorged, to her mate?

Few things, then, are more melancholy than a mosquito trapped on an overnight bus. It all seemed so promising when she buzzed in the door—so many bodies pressed together, crumpled shirts exposing skin, and the travelers too tired to protest a small deduction from their veins.

Full of blood, she finds herself confined and, when she finally tumbles out, groggy with the rest of the passengers, she enters an atmosphere sultry and dense, unlike any she has known.

Heavy with blood she sinks in the air. Success counts for nothing.

She is unfamiliar with the predators of this place.

A gecko snares her.

(Vientiane, 02.05.07)

Sentence

Here I will briefly pay tribute to the most important sentence in literature.

The sentence is from Dostoyevsky, but it doesn’t really belong to him. You can use it too. Like a pair of good black pants, it’s suitable for all occasions. Like a tiny flashlight, it may suddenly become crucial. Theologically, the sentence is one of the incarnations of Vishnu, unless you’re talking to a Christian, who will pronounce it “grace”. Published by Dostoyevsky in 1844, the sentence is actually as old as the universe, which may rightfully be said to have begun with it.

Notes from the Underground, page 144. “But at this point something exceedingly strange happened.”

Note

Please keep in the mind that this guttersnipe, devoted servant of guttersnipes, also welcomes the advice of venerable, venerable you.

In fact you have some responsibility, don't you, to keep us out of danger? Elsewise we may end up descending into obscenities and mis-matched plaids.

For example, in the previous post, there was an extremely tacky use of the word "circumsized". It has been corrected now, don't worry. But please do send notes from time to time or else we fear there may yet be more disasters, botched circumcisions, et cetera.

Respectfully,

Ever Yours,

G.S. Das

Glory Holes

I’m hiding behind a sign on which FOREIGNER is written in stinking black permanent ink. Only a little bit of me sticks out: sometimes my pink face, sometimes the other part, also pink.

As for them, they’re behind signs that say JAPANESE—it isn’t written out in full—and when we get drunk together, well, we’re both drunk!

Amazing how much sex you can have, even with 97% cardboard. Hardly gets in the way at all. You just put your mouth down to the little hole. “Pardon me, honorable sir, is there some piece of you, you could send over here?”

Shoulder to shoulder in the gutted factory: what’s left of the machines is covered in rust and jammed with bones.

Doesn’t work? Doesn’t need to work! You’re getting 6,000 yen an hour, mister. Pretend it works.

The classroom is shared. The answer to number one?

We think it’s A.

No, Elana says it’s C. Next!

Number two? C?

No Elana says it’s B. Next. . . No Elana says it’s B.

No, Elana says. Elana says!

(No, I don’t know what’s up either, Takashi. And, sorry, no, there isn’t time for questions.)

(The Ugly Daughter, illustration by Akemi Shinohara)

Dream: The Ugly Daughter

I dreamt I was at an opera being held in a great field. I was with my husband but I walked away from him to where a family was seated in special boxed seats made of concrete and rabbit wire: a sallow mother, a pallid father and their only child, a daughter.

I walked right up to her. “So—You’re the bad daughter,” I said. And she was. A fat ugly poor white girl with bad skin and dull eyes.

The daughter nodded her approval of me. Her parents left us alone. The ugly daughter was smart and tough. We liked each other a lot but after my brash greeting I was very careful and formal. I understood that she was a being of vast and profound power.

I had to go then. The show was starting.

As a parting gift the ugly daughter gave me a box of delicate and slender arrows.

“I’ll put these in my check bag and not my carry-on,” I said. She laughed.

When I left her I thought, “I was a crazy, to go right up to her like that. She's unbelieveably powerful, the ugly daughter.”

Then I comforted myself. I do things other people won’t do and go places they won’t go. That’s why the gods can use me.


(from 04. 30. 06)

Traveling Companion

By the end of breakfast on the first day it's already clear that the person I’ve chosen to travel with—who seemed so nice, admittedly in a quirky way—is actually a total nutcase.

The way he stares down strangers, his affected tone of voice, his obsessive need for a schedule, his compulsion to fill up space with senseless talk, his repellent mix of timidity and vanity— it's intolerable.

When sex enters the picture—an attractive stranger, say, at the next table--then we really get the dark side. The pious timid gentleman abruptly becomes as devious, as calculating and relentless, as a Kashmiri carpet salesman. It is frankly more than a little creepy. I must make my own safety—and sanity—a priority. Therefore, I am determined to be rid of him at the earliest opportunity.

There remains this overwhelming difficulty: I am traveling alone.

( Bangkok , 01. 25.07)

Calamity

A new thrill’s a calamity. A violent accident. You’ll have an ache now, where there wasn’t one before.

or it’s a newly introduced foreign species (I’ve forgotten the term) some iridescent fish that looks so delicate, a brilliant purple flower on a creeping vine. (It’s all right. It’ll never take root here. It’s too cold.) Before you know it, the vine swarms over the telephone poles and the native fish—dull-colored bottom feeders—have all but disappeared.

The wonder is how a new desire appears in your life fully formed, as if it had been there all along. A room in your house you’ve never been. The door was papered over, the doorknob hidden in the pattern, but the room was always there, with white walls and a straight-backed wooden chair and an elegant slender lady, very tall, sitting for years in a brocade dress, hands in her lap, face painted for the Easter service, waiting for the bell to ring, so that she can come out through the wall, and tip her head and show you her enormous prick.

Please visit HITOTOKI, "a new literary site collecting stories of personal, singular experiences in Tokyo." They are creating a new map of Tokyo--a map of stories.

This seems to me a meaningful part of the painstaking work to re-enchant Tokyo. (Or was it enchanted all along and I've just been slow to notice?)

One of my stories "Ham Egg Pie" is there, along with half a dozen excellent and specific others.

Bask

illustration by Akemi Shinohara

Bask

The anaconda, it's revealed, can shorten its period of gestation by as much as 100 days just by basking in the sun.

Nothing furthers the unborn snake as much as just lazing around.

I learned this from television. I may have to reconsider television. It may be that the medium has been redeemed. I've always loathed television as a pathetic waste of the human life. As for myself, I've been ceaselessly diligent. I make a schedule and keep it; I am strict with myself.

And I’ve accomplished nothing. Filled out index cards on 4000 unrelated subjects. Nothing completed. Nothing has turned out.

To think of how many years I've wasted being diligent!

Never once did I imagine that dreaming might be the best advance.

The clue may be in the verb—to bask. Not to fritter or to putts, no anxious finger-tapping: bask.

One hundred-forty-four baby snakes: curled around each other, growing silently within. The snake must do what the snake must do; the Sun must do what the Sun must do. Inside the snakes grow in warmth and stillness. Do not interfere.

( Bangkok , 01.26.07)

The pretty coffee girls . . .

The pretty coffee girls at my kissaten have been replaced by pretty coffee boys. Not a bad way to start the day! Still, I miss the girl who, after seven months of Tuesdays, said, “the usual?” Confessions like these are illegal under the Constitution. (MacArthur hated being asked, “The usual? He wanted to be all the time new, and tall, our MacArthur.) She may as well have ripped off her head scarf, her head

Now she’s been taken away and boys sent to distract me. Boys! Indeed it is hard to think past them. These boys will never say “the usual?” Never, in any language, will these boys admit to knowing or to being known. Even some (rather formal) fellatio would be more likely. At least in my system of hoping.

(April 4, 2007, Tokyo)

Masks

When I was a child, I understood a great deal. I was what you'd call ‘disturbed’. Luckily, as time passed I understood less. I became dull. Now I am functional. More or less.

One thing I understood was that every face was only a mask and beneath it was another mask, a maddening succession of masks, so that you could stand at the mirror all day, tearing off one mask after another, until the room was littered with masks wobbling in the afternoon breeze, smelling vaguely of feet, and you’d still be no closer to the face.

Eventually a blank face emerged, with only the shape of a face but not openings, no distinguishing marks, like a paper mache dummy or a corpse wrapped in bandages. This is the end, I thought. This horror is the truth, the face.

This awful certainty lasted approximately a minute before I noticed the blank face peeling away at the ears. A new succession of masks—red, white, gold or black, weeping or laughing or sneering—proceeded. The terrible blank face was just another mask tossed into the corner.

I don’t remember when I tired of tearing off masks. Certainly I never chose one decided to stick with it. Likely I was called to dinner—maybe there was something good on TV?—and just marched off wearing whatever mask I had on at the time.

Later I forgot all this for a long long time. Also, my mask appears to have become stuck. Odd as it is, I’ve become attached to it. Every day I daub at it with expensive useless creams. I am afraid it will fall off.

After a long silence and many adventures, I have returned and will resume posting here. Postings will not be as frequent as before--I am aiming for twice a week.

Anyone willing to serve as a reader for longer work will be served with many respectful pranams and email attachments. I have been afflicted with the aspiration to submit work to magazines. Please pray for me.

Thank you very much for your notes of encouragement. I always feel grateful and astonished to hear from anyone.

Respectfully,

Guttersnipe Das

Vocation

It is natural to be committed to something one does well. Everyone understands that. Whereas there is something pathetic, mysterious and vulnerable about being devoted to something one does poorly.

How comic that I should be a traveler. Ten minutes pass before I’m brave enough to speak to the waitress. I am afraid of crowds, dogs, noises and strangers. (This is also a list of things I love.) I cannot cross the street. Recently, on a street corner in Cambodia , I waited helplessly until a soldier came, smiling, took my hand, and led me tenderly across. Helplessness is rarely so lucky.

Tone-deaf musicians, one-legged dancers, lecherous monks. I imagine they feel the same shameful compulsion I feel, as I sit down to write. There’s no escape from being ridiculous. Try to relax into it.

I love Taoism because heaven is a huge bureaucracy and you just have to find the right office. There are problems with this system, however, and they show up in places like these. The official in charge of vocation—the lady who makes the calls—has no communication with the lady who passes out talent. They had a falling out several millennia ago, over some no-good man.

This is no excuse for me, I know. I ought to stick to doing things that I do well: clearing tables, polishing silverware.

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams, Imaginations

Imaginations is a collection of five of WCW’s early works, most of them a strange amalgam of poetry and prose. Kora in Hell is here, one of the cornerstones of American prose poetry. It is one of those books that feels like being handed an invitation or permission slip.

For me, however, Spring and All is the book’s great pleasure. Spring and All contains some of WCW’s best poems surrounded by wild prose that offers theories of poetry and rants and zany plans to destroy civilization “west of the Carpathian mountains (also east)”. So much of this material has been extracted and made to look respectable and buttoned-up, like a child at church. It’s so much more exhilarating to read all together.

I should admit that there are several books here I cannot yet decipher. I open pages at random and roll about in this great strange mind and hope to live a long time and become smarter and more patient.

I like to carry this book when I have almost no time to read or think. Somehow WCW was able to make these strange fragmentary books in the midst of doctoring and exhaustion. These are messy books, messy in a way that gives me courage, full of plans and frustration and paths leading nowhere.

Williams’ poetic theories are quoted so often—and yet I found that the most fun, most liberating, part of Spring and All I’d never seen before. I immediately had a fantasy of aspiring writers being made to recite the following, like the Gettysburg Address.

“The writer of the imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste to enjoy the free world, not a world he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he,

A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him (as it most certainly is) with which he has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independent – moving at will from one thing to another – as he pleases, unbound – complete

and the unique proof of this is the work of the imagination not “like” anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth – at least one small part of them”