Boy, how about this weather we're having? It's not like I thought it would be. No siree, weather in my imagination is always of a piece. In my head, if it's sunny, the skies are sky blue and it stays sunny. If cold, the sky is gray, the wind blows something fierce, and the only possible change is that it just gets colder. Other imaginary weather possibilities like "rain" or "darkness" or "kite-flyable winds out of the North-West" are similarly stable systems, but I've never imagined days like the ones we've been getting, where change is the only constant, and the big sun pops in and out of the sky like a Grandfather pendulum. (Though, I did dream last night of falling asleep on the beach at night while the tide was coming in and waking up in a start with water close at hand and nowhere to turn, the gray-blue light (not at all like moonlight) coming from somewhere
Does he know what's happening? And why?
unclear. But are dreams imaginings? And even so: Are tides weather? I have my doubts.) For some reason I find it hard to imagine dramatic change. Is it a failure of my imagination?
Memory is hardly much different. Sifting through my memory banks, I can find the time I watched a horizon-to-horizon thunderstorm over the grasslands of Teddy Roosevelt National Park in Western North Dakota, the epicenter of forlorn weather, but I can't tell you about before or after the storm. I guess I remember one time where I was standing outside in a small, treeless town watching the sky turn green, a sure sign of a tornado, but most of my remembered scenes are snapshots of static cling, frozen moments where clouds and shadows are frozen, static, probably eternal. Simply put, my imaginings conform to a certain pattern whereby complexity is reduced, and if strange things are happening its due to the fact that William Shatner keeps popping his mug into the foreground, or the recurring marshmallow sensation, and not due to the infinite butterfly-flapping-in-Chinese chain reactions.
Contrast this with real life, especially nowadays in our post-modern Greenhouse effect weather event horizon, where winds gust and floods flood like never before. Certainly reality is more complicated, complex, and usually more surprising than imaginings and dreams. You might disagree about this, but you don't have my dreams, where William
The Eastern solution?
Shatner appears with sitcom-esque regularity. Today's weather is much more unexpected, given its tsunamic turbulence, and it's getting harder for me to draw a decent line in the sand. Which is what I'm getting at, that line, I mean . . . I've been having this idea for separating this from that -- you know, saying 'this' is this, and 'that' is that, and - whoops - here's this again, and there, that's that, and now we have this and that, and isn't everything pretty, or so I think for a second until along comes some smart-ass meterologist saying, "well, what about the other thing?" and I respond, " I don't give a damn about the other thing, I'm talking about this and that over here," and he and his highnose colleagues let loose a chuckle and then Shatner joins in, laughing, reading poetry . . .
Well, enough of that. This is my distinction: there are two kinds of writers. First, wordy writers who become part of what they're writing. They focus on the ink, they dive beneath the meaning into the wordiness of words, they wrap the signifier round their shoulders like a shawl, they hear a voice speaking as they write, and the voice has a funny accent, something like Scottish or Dutch and sometimes its an ancient Japanese shogun and sometimes its William Shatner's golden throat. If a wordy writer is writing and you're in the same room talking to her and
Collection of wrongs
she doesn't hear you it's because she's in word world, where words are everywhere, and she's writing in her head and she's writing on the page, occupying elsewhere. Wordy writers are introverts and they are misanthropes. And they write from their imagination. In fact, they prefer do this from a safe haven like a library or alcove, by sending a missive or recorded song. If you're lucky enough to get one to talk right to your face, you're lucky indeed.
Second, worldy writers are those who write because for some reason they think they ought to be writing, and also mostly because they have nobody to talk to at that moment, and furthermore because despite their alone-ness they still have something to say and feel as if they should be saying it. Thus, they write, and write prolifically for a while until they become popular and/or successful enough to have an entourage by their side at which point the literary process comes, if not to a complete halt, to a slow Sam Beckett crawl. Or, should they not make literary friends, they keep writing, usually on the internet, until they invaribly run out of steam, ideas, or paper. But, despite the profund pathological nature of the worldy writer, their writing is usually chock full of the world around them. Interviews,
Opposites attracting
eavesdroppings, personal narratives. In their missives, you'll find such scads of worldy happening. Its a treasure trove of reality.
The differences between the two types are palpable indeed(!), but the distinction isn't related to voyeurism, nor the subjective and objective voices. Famous worldies would include the recently self-destructed Hunter S. Thompson or E. Hemingway, I assume, while wordys like Garrison Keillor, or J. D. Salinger don't scream "shut-in" so much as "prickly wall-fly." It's not a matter of writerly quality, either, because what wordlies lack in writerly quality they often make up in topicality and chutzpah. (As far as the distinction goes, it's hard to know what to do with the expatriates, because on the one hand they are disengaging themselves from their natural environment, but on the other hand they are exploring the world like a little literary Vascos de Gama. I digress?) The distinction is a question of how to engage with the society around you, but, from a strictly personal point of view, as I write this I have little choice of path.
What I mean is, I'm sitting at a powder blue plastic bench within the Maryland Coin Laundry in Saint Paul surrounded by pleasant Chinese people. For all I know, they're cursing like sailors in a barfight, but to me they sound sweet and gentle, and a six-year-old boy wearing a
Shrug
neon green tank top just pressed his nose against the outside of the window, so I stuck my tongue out at him but he pretended not to notice. Even if I wanted to worldy myself up, be congenial, and incorporate the atmospehre, I'd be unable to actually talk to anyone here. Surely, the dad of the nearby family wouldn't understand me, even though his Spongebob Squarepants belt buckle gives a false hint of pop cultural awareness. But on the other hand, I'm really unable to fully imagine myself into another place altogher. I'm left in-between.
Old man Nelson spent the last decade of his life pruning a pair of apple trees in his front yard, twisting them as they grew one around the other, so that the two trees looked like the Asklepian snakes, utterly intertwinied. With patience and careful application of the hedge clippers the two trees grew to about five feet and in perfect symmetrical harmony until the old man died one Saturday morning. If you look at the symbiotic apple trees today the one with the large white blossoms is in full bloom, but its twin is hardly alive, having lost the race to the springtime sunshine years ago. Its hard to keep two
Habeus corpus baby
forces alive and balanced for very long. One usually ends up dominant, though I'm sure somewhere underground the roots of the tree with the pink flowers are worm food.
What I really wanted to talk about wasn't the weather at all, nor was it writing. See, I'm having this whether dilemma whereby I can't figure figure who has the upper hand, optimistially speaking, when it comes to the free market. One the one hand, the free marketeers (Q: Do they get special 'Free Marketeer' hats?) seem filled with optimism. They appear throughout the news world touting how things are getting better all the time, and they use hope-inspiring words like "progress" and "tomorrow." The basic premise seems simple enough: if governments have the courage to get out of the way, the market's rising tide will lift all boats. Just look, they say, at China or India or the Asian Tigers or anywhere but Africa or South America (or Central America or Central Asia or Calcutta, etc.) Good things are happening, and they're happening because its natural that economic beneficence spread itself out equally. By now you're surely famliar with the near-religious way in which the free market is treated in our fine nation, as if a law of nature was at work encouraging media conglomerates to grow, encouraging oil company mergers, encouraging outsourcing, encouraging cost cutting measures on the labor side, things like rising heath care premiums and pension fund insolvency. All this is part of the natural plan for human society, and to question the logic of the market is to embrace a dangerously pessimistic view of the world. To question the market is to don puce colored glasses, hang one's head in defeat, to lack faith.
On the other hand, there's a way in which free market optimism is an abandonment of faith. Since time immermorial the role of the nation-state has been to intervene collectively to provide those things which the market isn't able, things like heath care, national defense, natural disaster relief aid, etc. One of the more charming things about Enlightenment philosophy was its belief in the power of science to solve most any and all social ills, and the noble examples of Freud, Hegel or Marx are, if anything, optimistic in the extreme. They believe profoundly in our social ability to think through the world's problems. They, the pro-interventionist social scientists, are convinced that they can figure out solutions to problems (e.g. crime, poverty, health), and if the current remedy isn't working (e.g. the war on drugs) they'll figure out a better one. Its quite Hegelain, and its something that the free marketeers reject out of hand. That, they say, is meddling, social engineering, and another example of Liberal elitism. Better yet to let things work out for themselves, according to the inevitable laws of natural social mores. Well, I say, which is less?
