Bob Dylan

Tags

bob dylan, literature, nobel prize, poetry

In 1963, at the RCA store, in Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, England, I bought my first Bob Dylan album. I was not yet thirteen. It was his first album too. Since that long-distant date, I have purchased every Dylan album, in vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, and DVD. I must have bought many two or three times in various formats. I have dozens of bootlegs too, as well as rare recordings – like Dylan singing Hard Rain with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra – and acetates of such things as the acoustic versions of Like A Rolling Stone, and Just Like A Woman, from one of the great recording sessions, Blonde on Blonde. So you could say I am a fan. And, as such, I am utterly delighted to hear that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It is a little less than delightful to hear some of the responses to this news, however. The author of Trainspotting, whoever he is, termed it a sop thrown to the festering prostates of “senile, gibbering hippies”. Well, as a senile, gibbering hippy (whose prostate is still, God willing, still in a pre-putrefaction condition), I can only say: What’s wrong with that? CBC News, on the radio at least, seemed uncertain whether or not listeners were acquainted with Dylan – too young or, improbably, too old? They played snatches of songs, the most current of which was from the late sixties – nothing wrong with that, they are great songs. But the point is this artist has been writing superb songs for well over fifty years. Also on the CBC, an alleged Dylan authority, one David Kinney, suggested the Nobel Prize people were misguided. Dylan is a musician, he said. His songs were not meant to be read as literature on a page. We’ll get to this in a moment, but Kinney was also questioned about Dylan’s supposed plagiarising from numerous sources. Having been accused of so-called plagiarism myself, I was fascinated to hear Mr. Kinney characterising Dylan’s allusions or borrowing as a “re-purposing” of the original text. I must remember “re-purposing”, I thought, since all writers are literary magpies, taking whatever they need from whatever place it’s found – even the faintest memory of a text. I could cite hundreds of examples of Dylan plunderings from all over literature. But his own album, Love and Theft, best exemplifies the reality of literary resonance. Dylan’s very roots are in the hoary tradition where an old song continually became a new one. The question-reply structure of Hard Rain, for example – “O, where have you been, my blue-eyed son…I’ve been out on the side of twelve misty mountains…etc.” – goes back into antiquity. Songs of lost love echo poems of lost love, by Blake, Poe, Yeats, and so on. Literature breeds literature – you cannot write it unless you read it, and, when you read it, notes of beauty, poignancy, sheer love remain as part of you forever. Love and Theft plays with the love of and theft from songs – most of them in public domain – that go back to when the Blues was tangled up in Gospel, Country, Jug, and when Rock ‘n Roll was the bastard child. A more recent album, Tempest, even begins with what sounds like an ancient recording from that early period – although it turns into a contemporary version of the same urgent sound, and a song about the Dukane Whistle, whatever that is. One would have to wade through the Smithsonian Museum’s extensive archives of early American music to gain even a hint to the provenance of many Dylan songs. Anyone who listened to his radio show on the Satellite Channel will be well aware of the depth and scope of his expertise in musical history. As the droll, and sometimes silly DJ, half the songs he played each week were by people I’d never heard of – some from wax-cylinder recordings made when the nation was still mostly legend, still young and hopeful. No artist will say, “I took this from here and that from there”, because it doesn’t work that way. First comes the love, and then comes the theft. But, if Dylan is indeed nostalgic – by no means certain – it is for a time when musicians were just entertainment, and no big deal.

As his memoir, Chronicles, reveals in rather harrowing detail, however, Dylan’s life has been an oppressively big deal. His book vies with Miles Davis’ autobiography for the accolade of best musical reminiscence. In particular, it shows what went on behind the scenes during that most mysterious, and hence most-speculated-on period in Dylan’s life. To this day, it fascinates pundits, critics, et al – who seem unwilling to take the man’s word for what happened. There were two albums – Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde – which single-handedly changed the course of so-called pop music. Then there was silence. Some said drugs. Some said a bad divorce. Others said a nervous breakdown, and/or a motorcycle accident. Whatever happened, the long silence was broken by Nashville Skyline, an album of country-inspired music, that even featured a duet with country legend Johnny Cash. Fans were somewhat perplexed, but in the end they loved this record, which included the now-classic Lay Lady Lay, with a syrupy-voiced Dylan sounding…well, unlike Dylan. The result was a huge interest in country music – until then regarded as a redneck backwater by hipsters – and the emergence of a new country-rock genre, with people like Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, and, eventually, the Eagles. What had happened to Dylan during that long period of silence? Well, the way he tells it in Chronicles, the pressure from drug-addled fans convinced he was the messiah, or some such, began to destroy his life. He had retreated to a farm in New York State, to spend time with his children and rebuild a crumbling marriage. But the fans and the media would not leave him alone. In print, the wildest allegations were entertained – heroin, space aliens – sometimes by a crackpot calling himself a “Dylanologist”, who rummaged through Dylan’s garbage in search of clues (a candy bar wrapper, a blackened teaspoon – must be junk!). Fans in various states of derangement trespassed on the farm property. None of the few statements Dylan made to the media helped disabuse obsessed monomaniacs of whatever bizarrely idolatrous views they held. He was like poor Brian, in The Life of Brian, who cried out “I’m not the messiah” – but everyone responds, “Only the true messiah would say that!” To which Brian says, “Okay, I am the messiah,” and everyone yells, “You see – he is the messiah!” Dylan says his response was more practical: he would record an album in the most despised current genre – Country. That would surely work? But no, it didn’t, and Dylan resigned himself just to making music, writing songs, and exploring every genre that took his fancy – Blue Grass, Rockabilly, Gospel, Reggae, Rap, you name it. But he made each style uniquely his own. Those who can’t abide his inimitable voice and his own versions, can enjoy his songs in renditions by every imaginable artiste, be it Aaron Neville, Mavis Staples, even Frank Sinatra – right up to Lady Gaga, and no doubt beyond, probably forever.

For the fact is that Bob Dylan is now the most prolific songwriter in history – some say 1500, some far more, and no one knows, perhaps not even Bob. It is one of the most effusively pullulating displays of creativity in all of civilization, and it has continued, seemingly unabated, for over half a century.

David Kinney says Dylan’s songs were “not meant to be read on a page”. Perhaps not, but neither was most poetry and prose until 500 years ago, when a “page” was invented. As a lady on the Nobel committee pointed out, Homer and Sappho’s work was designed to be heard, not read. Most early lyric poetry was sung to music. More people probably heard Thomas Wyatt, and even William Blake sing their poems than ever read them in books. It is obvious from whence the term “lyric” springs. As echoes in his songs show, Dylan has always been well aware of lyric poetry’s European origins in the Troubadours, Arnaut Daniel, and Dante, as well as their continuation in Verlaine and Rimbaud. It is easy to deduce he is a great reader. And a highly eclectic one, effortlessly turning from a book about Japanese gangs to an account of the Titanic’s sinking. Many try to pinpoint what material induced his greatest songs – is it anger and broken love, or spiritual yearning? – but this is like trying to impose your favourite dish on someone else at a grand banquet. Perhaps every dish is good – how will you know if you don’t taste it?

I met him on a few occasions – shy, very funny, reticent, and ultimately enigmatic. We played chess and he was astoundingly good. I later learned he had paid Bobby Fischer to give him lessons. We talked purposelessly of current issues. We deplored the advent of the personal computer – he was something of a Luddite, and perhaps still is. But it was clear to me he had devised a persona that was not easy to know. As Yeats said of Eliot, “That man will not let me look into his soul”. Dylan would not even let me look into the left side of his face. He kept it averted, like someone with a hideously scarring disease, and looked sideways. I was not trying to be his friend – it was a creative venture he liked for a while – but I did get a sense of how difficult that would be, of how enclosed and private he had made himself. I imagine the Nobel Prize is a mixed blessing to someone who loathes any intrusive media attention. For a man who still performs some 200-odd concerts a year – and has done for decades – he has achieved a remarkable degree of anonymity. His own band-members only get to meet him on stage. His tour bus, the penthouse on wheels, pulls up near the stage door. Typically, Dylan walks out at 8 p.m., or whatever, and launches into the first song without a word to the audience. Fans may not even see him – these days he often plays an organ to the side. But I once saw Miles Davis play with his back to the auditorium. When the set is over, Mr. Dylan returns to his bus, no encores, nothing. It’s a job. His few close friends know better than to reveal a down-time Dylan. Jack Nicolson has referred to his sense of humour, which I found marked, and which is evident in Martin Scorcese’s masterful documentary – where Dylan seems to loosen up with a talent he has always envied, sometimes with disastrous results.

Besides his deliberate attempts to sabotage his own career, Dylan is extraordinary for the number of times he has failed calamitously at something in which he evidently wished to succeed, and yet survived with his reputation intact. There was the spree of typing known as the novel, Tarantula – about which the less said the better. There was the twelve-hour movie, Reynaldo and Clara, in which all one could discern was a very fat man playing Bob Dylan, and Bob Dylan playing someone called Reynaldo, whose role in the film was obscure. Joan Baez played Clara. They rode in a carriage with white horses at one point. At another point, Allen Ginsberg had his beard shaved off and looked…well, like his own Yiddisher bubba. It was hard to say what the story was about, or even if there was a story. I saw the savagely-edited eight-hour version in LA, and found nothing helpful missing. The project was only saved by its plethora of concert footage, in which a Dylan wearing whiteface headlines a concert featuring such vaudeville curiosities as Tiny Tim – ukulele, shopping bag, Tiptoe through the Tulips… This was around the period when Dylan released the album Hurricane, whose songs were largely co-written with a New York theatre friend. The lyrics are unusually tight and very literary, with Dylan’s voice soaring like a cantor at times. The title song concerned the wrongful imprisonment of Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, a black middle-weight boxing champion, arrested for a murder of which he was innocent:

 

But Ruben sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell

An innocent man in a living hell

But one time he coulda been

The champion of the world…

 

In point of fact, Ruben Carter probably couldn’t have been the champion of the world, and, while almost certainly innocent of the murder for which he’d been convicted, was definitely guilty of others, and of various horribly violent crimes. Dylan visited him in jail. Many people did. He was a cause celebre for the white guilt then surfacing for the first time in America. Some Canadians lobbied for Ruben’s release, and achieved it. A movie was in the works – eventually made a decade later by Norman Jewison. But what everyone who’d had any contact with the free Ruben Carter found – including Dylan – was that the man was an astonishing pain in the ass, pushy, boastful, greedy, and, according to the cops, very guilty of something. Jewison used Dylan’s song for his film’s credits, and it summed up in ten minutes the fable of Hurricane far more succinctly than two hours of rambling celluloid. Long before, though, Dylan had decided Ruben Carter was dubiously bad news, and thus, seemingly, so was the co-written album – which many have said was his best. Ignoring the truth about Ruben, Hurricane is still a tremendously good song, as are many other co-written songs on the album. Dylan never sings any of them live. He’s had other successful collaborations too. Brownsville Girl, written with playwright Sam Sheppard, is a remarkable kind of talking Blues, a very quirky story:

 

The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter was that his name wasn’t Henry Porter…

 

Other ventures are with Willie Nelson, George Harrison, and Roy Orbison. With the last two, Dylan even formed a band, The Travelling Willburys, under the watchful eye of Tom Petty. Their albums are extremely good, and Dylan’s contribution is markedly brilliant. Yet no matter how successful these collaborations have been – include here Daniel Lanois as a superlative producer – Dylan moves on and moves off, seeking new ground. Many new albums are produced by “Jack Frost”, a Dylan pseudonym, whose basic principle for a session is do it in a day, one take a song. Yet this somehow suits the raw feeling of his later work, where he sounds like a superb band in a small club with a singer afflicted by laryngitis, or worse. But to dismiss Dylan now as “a nostalgia act” is not to hear the new songs – and not to observe his current audience.

As I write, my daughter, age 23, is about to attend a concert in LA with Dylan and the Rolling Stones. She has been to previous concerts as well, and views Bob as the marvel he is. The songs are ageless, the music now flawless – it didn’t used to be.

Whatever remains of western culture in 200 years, if anything or anyone remains, Dylan will be a giant. All by himself, he took popular music from “I wanna hold your hand” to:

 

In the dime-stores and bus stations

People talk of situations

Read books, repeat quotations

Draw conclusions on the wall…

 

In 1963 no song had lyrics like:

 

Twilight on the frozen lake

A cold wind about to break

Old footsteps in the snow

The silence down below –

You’re beautiful beyond words

Beautiful to me…

 

You had to live through those times to appreciate the enormity of Dylan’s contribution to the course of musical history. He may have now found the plateau as “song and dance man” he always claimed he was, but no Dylan album has ever disappointed me. His recording of Christmas songs, five years ago, would have been preposterous in the late sixties – and the first track was somewhat risible – yet it is ultimately notable for the sincerity with which he sings these simple, perennially-popular ditties. Similarly, his take on the Great American Songbook recently – a lounge act in essence – presents some finely-crafted material sung by someone who clearly loves it, and loves the whole idea of being an entertainer. This was evident when Bob played at Frank Sinatra’s 80^th birthday party too. Half the audience looked shocked when his name was announced, expecting disrespect perhaps, but Dylan sang a simple traditional ballad about a lovable outlaw, said, “Happy Birthday, Mr. Frank,” and was gone. It was a tribute from one great entertainer to another. During the 1991 Gulf War, when Dylan received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy, everyone wondered what he would do. There had been no celebrity protests as there had been during Vietnam. Many were yearning for someone to condemn George the First and his bombing. What would Dylan do or say? Surely he couldn’t ignore this travesty? With an awful band, Dylan played what only aficionados could have discerned was Masters of War – a very powerful protest songs from 25 years earlier. You couldn’t hear a word of it, and I wondered why. The answer, I concluded, was that anyone who didn’t know the song by now wouldn’t be moved by it anyway. Dylan was saying, “I’ve done that, been here before, and now it’s all noise…” His speech was similarly calculated. Shifting a hat back and forth on his head, like Chaplin, he said, “My Daddy used to say to me, he said, son…well, he said a lotta things….” He paused for so long the audience was laughing, and then nhe added, “Sometimes you can do things so heinous they burn your soul, but just remember there’s a power always ready to forgive you if you are sorry…Thank you very much…” It seemed ad libbed, but it wasn’t, not any of it. He’s not someone who leaves things to chance. The only time I have ever seen him off-guard in public was when he won an Oscar. He was in Australia via videolink. He clearly did not expect to win. The prize was for Things Have Changed, a cynical twist on The Time’s They Are A-Changin’ — and an incongruous soundtrack for The Dead Poet’s Society. Wearing his bizarre lounge-lizard’s pencil moustache, he hardly knew what to say when told he’d won, yet was charmingly grateful all the same. So many moments of Bob, so many years…

In some ways I have measured out my life with Dylan albums. I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard a new record. In Kathmandu for Blood on the Tracks. In LA for Slow Train. Oxford for Hurricane. Hundreds of songs now float around my brain, emerging at times, appropriately or otherwise. My first love was to a Dylan album – Bringing it all Back Home – and my last love has now been serenaded by a number of recent albums. Like any great work, I can return to Dylan at any of his many periods and always find something new – and always think, “My God, this is a great song.” It makes me feel grateful. Only Leonard Cohen continues to do that as well. It was thus heartwarming to find that my gratitude was expressed by the Nobel Committee, on behalf of all who have had cause to find solace, love, comfort, inspiration, and sheer joy in the work of Bob Dylan. Thank you, Mr. Bob, and congratulations. It is eminently well-deserved.

 

Paul William Roberts

 

Facebook and Other Media Travesties

Tags

amazon, cia, dick cheney, facebook, kindle, literature, media, publishing, social media

                Full disclosure: I think Facebook is crap, possibly of use to businesses, inchoate revolutions, the socially-challenged, and those too lazy to personally contact their ‘friends’ or family. My wife, an artist, admittedly uses it, and had one of her paintings, featuring a nude – or, in fact, merely bare-breasted female taken down from the site for ‘obscenity’. Like any fascist state, no explanation was offered, nor any appeal possible. One wonders what would happen to any national art gallery. Yet, on hearing that Dalhousie University male dental students could post a Facebook page detailing how they would chloroform and ‘hate-fuck’ some of the female co-students, one also wonders who or what is in charge of censorship on the staff of this overrated, self-important, tyrannical, and utterly ill-thought-out website, whose negatives far outstrip its positives. There are far better ways of communicating with clients, relatives, or friends – such as personal websites lacking arbitrary censorship, e-mail, the telephone, and, god-forbid, actual letters, which few admit they still enjoy receiving because they reveal genuine affection. When Facebook has to remind you of someone’s birthday, you don’t really care about that person at all.

 

Kindle and Amazon

 

When I hear that an author has received an e-mail from Amazon telling him that his online Kindle book has been taken down because it contains too many hyphenated words – 100 or so in 90,000 – I wonder into whose hands we have placed our literary culture. The author referred the writer of this ludicrous e-mail to the Oxford English Dictionary’s section on the rectitude of hyphenated words, only to receive an automated reply claiming that terms like ‘blood-soaked’ and ‘razor-sharp’ must be deprived of their hyphens. The mind is boggled. For a start, there are no grammatical rules in literary fiction – need I cite but two of the 20^th century’s very greatest authors, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett? What would Kindle Publishing do with Finnegans’ Wake, for example? Secondly, upon what criteria do the illiterates at Kindle-Amazon base these risible decisions? Evidently, we learn, upon a reader’s complaint that the book in question had too many hyphenated words. This is like banning Ulysses – consistently voted the best novel ever written – because some functionally-illiterate idiot complained that the last 100 pages contained only two sentences and no punctuation at all. I suggest that, unless these vast corporations start employing staff familiar with literature, with the appropriate qualifications to prove it, then they ought be boycotted by any serious author, if not legally prevented from publishing themselves altogether. A cultural decline like this is a slippery slope, although I have just heard that Kindle Publishing is trying to make amends to the author in question. Readers still ought to keep an eye on these monolithic cultural tyrants.

 

Dick Cheney, CIA, Media

 

Is it just my connection – which works fine on other sites – or is their a problem with every website featuring the Dick Cheney confession, justification of, and scapegoating regarding the CIA’s torture program? From CNN to Al-Gezeera, the video of his desperate attempt to escape criminal prosecution – which, being blind, I could only listen to – stopped every few seconds, and for up to a minute, before continuing for a few more seconds, making it unintelligible and impossible to tolerate. We know that anyone can slow down or stop a site by flooding it with traffic, so why not the CIA? There is also now a curious media silence regarding this monstrous scandal. Perhaps it is just paranoia, but readers can judge this for themselves when I put Mr. Cheney on trial in an upcoming entry. A very bad man, and a disgrace to his country.

 

Love from Paul William Roberts.

LETTER FROM GEORGE SAND TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Tags

letters, literature, politics

LETTER FROM GEORGE SAND TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, 12th January, 1876

 

My cherished Cruchard [note: a term of endearment],

I want to write to you every day; but time is lacking absolutely. At last here is a free moment; we are buried under the snow; it is the sort of weather that I adore: this whiteness is like general purification, and the amusements of the house seem more intimate and sweeter. Can anyone hate winter in the country? Snow is one of the most beautiful sights of the year!

It appears that I am not clear in my sermons; I have that much in common with the orthodox, but I am not of them; neither in my idea of equality, nor of authority, have I any fixed plan. You seem to think that I want to convert you to a doctrine. Not at all, I don’t think of such a thing. Everyone sets off from a point of view, the free choice of which I respect. In a few words, I can give a resume of mine: not to place oneself behind an opaque glass through which one can see only the reflection of one’s own nose. To see as far as possible the good, the bad, about, around, yonder, everywhere; to perceive the continual gravitation of all tangible and intangible things towards the necessity of the decent, the good, the true, the beautiful.

I don’t say that humanity is on its way to the heights. I believe it in spite of everything; but I do not argue about it, it is useless because each one judges according to his own personal vision, and the general aspect is for the moment poor and ugly. Besides, I do not need to be sure of the safety of the planet and its inhabitants in order to believe in the necessity of the good and the beautiful; if the planet departs from that law it will perish; if the inhabitants discard it they will be destroyed. Other stars, other souls will pass over their bodies, so much the worse! But, as for me, I want to gravitate up to my last breath, not without the certitude nor the need of finding elsewhere a GOOD PLACE, but because my sole joy is in keeping myself with my family on an upward road.

In other words, I am fleeing the sewer, and I am seeking the dry and the clean, certain that it is the law of my existence. Being human amounts to little; we are still near the monkey from which they say we proceed. Very well! a further reason for separating ourselves still more from it and for being at least at the height of the relative truth that our race has been admitted to comprehend; a very poor truth, very limited, very humble! well, let us possess it as much as we can and not permit anyone to take it from us. We are, I think, quite agreed; but I practice this simple religion and you do not practice it, since you let yourself become discouraged; your heart has not been penetrated with it, since you curse life and desire death like a Catholic who yearns for compensation, be it only the rest eternal. You are no surer than another of this compensation. Life is perhaps eternal, and therefore work is eternal. If this is so, let us do our day’s work bravely. If it is otherwise, if the self perishes entirely, let us have the honor of having done our stated task, it is our duty; for we have evident duties only toward ourselves and our equals. What we destroy in ourselves, we destroy in them. Our abasement lowers them, our falls drag them down; we owe it to them to remain upright so that they shall not fall. The desire for an early death, as that for a long life, is therefore a weakness, and I do not want you to admit any longer that it is a right. I too thought that once; I believed, however, what I believe today; but I lacked strength, and like you I said: “I cannot help it.” I lied to myself. One can help everything. One has the strength that one thinks one does not have, when one desires ardently to GRAVITATE, to mount a step each day, to say to oneself: “The

Flaubert of tomorrow must be superior to the one of yesterday, and the one of a day after tomorrow more steady and more lucid still.”

When you feel you are on the ladder, you will mount very quickly. You are about to enter gradually upon the happiest and most favorable time of life: old age. It is then that art reveals itself in its full sweetness; as long as one is young, it manifests itself with anguish. You prefer a well-turned phrase to all metaphysics. I also, I love to see condensed into a few words what elsewhere fills volumes; but these volumes, one must have understood them completely (either to admit them or to reject them) in order to find the sublime activity which becomes literary art in its fullest expression; that is why one should not scorn the efforts of the human mind to arrive at truth.

I tell you that, because you have excessive prejudices AS TO WORDS. In truth, you read, you dig, you work much more than I and a crowd of others do. You have acquired learning that I shall never attain.Therefore you are a hundred times richer than all of us; you are a rich man, and you complain like a poor man. Be charitable to a beggar who has his mattress full of gold, but who wants to be nourished only on well-turned phrases and choice words. But dear brute, ransack your own mattress and eat your gold. Nourish yourself with the ideas and feelings accumulated in your head and your heart; the words and the phrases. THE FORM to which you attach so much importance, will issue by itself from your inner digestion. You consider it as an end, it is only an effect. Happy manifestations proceed only from an emotion, and an emotion proceeds only from a conviction. One is not moved at all by the things that one does not believe with all one’s heart.

I do not say that you do not believe: on the contrary, all your life of affection, of protection, and of charming and simple goodness, proves that you are the most convinced individual in the world. But, as soon as you handle literature, you want, I don’t know why, to be another man, one who should disappear, one who destroys himself, who does not exist! What an absurd mania! what a false rule of GOOD TASTE! Our work is worth only what we are worth.

Who is talking about putting yourself on the social stage? That, in truth, is of no use, unless it is done frankly by way of a chronicle. But to withdraw one’s soul from what one does, what is that unhealthy fancy? To hide one’s own opinion about the characters that one puts on the stage, to leave the reader therefore uncertain about the opinion that he should have of them, that is to desire not to be understood, and from that moment, the reader leaves you; for if he wants to understand the story that you are telling him, it is on the condition that you should show him plainly that this one is a strong character and that one weak.

L’Education Sentimentale has been a misunderstood book, as I have told you repeatedly, but you have not listened to me. There should have been a short preface, or, at least, a good opportunity, an expression of blame, even if only a happy epithet to condemn the evil, to characterize the defect, to signalize the effort. All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached with, because people did not understand that you wanted precisely to depict the deplorable state of a society that encourages these bad instincts and ruins noble efforts; when people do not understand us it is always our fault. What the reader wants, first of all, is to penetrate into our thoughts, and that is what you deny him, arrogantly. He thinks that you scorn him and that you want to ridicule him. For my part, I understood you, for I knew you. If anyone had brought me your book without its being signed, I should have thought it beautiful, but strange, and I should have asked myself if you were immoral, skeptical, indifferent or heart-broken. You say that it ought to be like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he reveals his own thoughts and the aim of his literary enterprise. This is false in the highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to sink or swim with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his work, you neglect it, or you give it up.

I have already been in combat with your favorite heresy, which is that one writes for twenty intelligent people and does not care a fig for the rest. It is not true, since the lack of success irritates you and troubles you. Besides, there have not been twenty critics favorable to this book which was so well written and so important. So one must not write for twenty persons any more than for three, or for a hundred thousand.

One must write for all those who have a thirst to read and who can profit by good reading. Then one must go straight to the most elevated conceptions within oneself, and not make a mystery of the moral and profitable meaning of one’s book. People found that with Madame Bovary. If one part of the public cried scandal, the healthiest and the broadest part saw in it a severe and striking lesson given to a woman without conscience and without faith, to vanity, to ambition, to irrationality. They pitied her; art required that, but the lesson was clear, and it would have been more so, it would have been so for everybody, if you had wished it, if you had shown more clearly the opinion that you had, and that the public ought to have had, about the heroine, her husband, and her lovers.

That desire to depict things as they are, the adventures of life as they present themselves to the eye, is not well thought out, in my opinion. Depict inert things as a realist, as a poet, it’s all the same to me, but, when one touches on the emotions of the human heart, it is another thing. You cannot abstract yourself from this contemplation; for man, that is yourself, and men, that is the reader. Whatever you do achieve this, your tale is a conversation between you and the reader. If you show him the evil coldly, without ever showing him the good, he is angry. He wonders if it is he that is bad, or if it is you. You work, however, is to rouse him and to interest him; you will never succeed if you are not roused yourself, or if you hide it so well that he thinks you indifferent. He is right: supreme impartiality is an anti-human thing, and a novel ought to be human above everything. If it is not, the public is not pleased in its being well written, well composed and conscientious in every detail.

The essential quality is not there: interest. The reader breaks away likewise from a book where all the characters are good without distinctions and without weaknesses; he sees clearly that that is not human either. I believe that art, this special art of narration, is only worth while through the opposition of characters; but, in their struggle, I prefer to see the right prevail. Let events overwhelm the honest men, I agree to that, but let him not be soiled or belittled by them, and let him go to the stake feeling that he is happier than his executioners….

**************

Note: George Sand died later this same year, before she could read Flaubert’s last completed book, Three Tales, one of which, ‘A Simple Heart’, was specifically written to please her and take some of the above advice to heart. Their friendship spanned many decades, producing what is generally conceded to be the greatest of all literary correspondences (which now exists in a far better translation than the one quoted above).                                                               ******************

It would be remiss of me not to throw in a word on politics here.

 

“The history of the human mind is a history of stupidity.” Voltaire

The proposed bill in Ottawa effectively to ban prostitution proves Flaubert’s maxim that “people get stupider by the hour”. Has anyone in the House of Idiots ever read a history book? No government has ever succeeded in banning prostitution, just as no nation has ever managed to drag Afghanistan out of the twelfth century. The bill, if anyone is dumb enough to pass it, would simply further endanger the lives of sex-trade workers by outlawing the safe haven of the brothel and making street work somewhat impossible (since is there a street anywhere where one can be certain not to encounter someone under 18?). I suggest a lie-detector test for members of the kindergarten on the hill asking, “Have you ever paid for sex or thought of doing so?” Those who pass clean can vote, the rest must abstain. I imagine, human nature being what it is, that the mere threat of such a test would leave this bill dead in the water. Hypocrites all of them, not to mention inveterate and pathological liars. We’ll leave the Ukraine hypocrisy for another time, but bear this in mind: Democracy does not work, and for reasons stated succinctly by Plato, but still more succinctly by Voltaire above. With tender good wishes, Paul William Roberts.

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Quebec: Into the Void

Tags

India, literature, meditation, publishing, redcommended reading, spirituality, writing

              This entry often deals with things that are beyond the reach of words, even beyond the realm of thought, and thus the mind itself. They are states which can only be experienced; there is no subject-object relationship, thus no observation or examination, in the usual manner. I shall endeavour to be as precise as possible, yet the use of metaphor, analogy, allegory, and other poetic devices will be inevitable; as will the deployment of Sanskrit terms. As many have observed, Sanskrit, with its compound words and personification of inner states, seems to be a language specifically devised to deal with issues of the soul and consciousness, of life’s quintessential reality. I shall explain the Sanskrit to the best of my ability, but the reader must be aware that all translations are imprecise, often unable to convey the root forms of words, and thus losing deeper resonances carried within them.

              Here we go:

              In my last entry we arrived at a point where I had begun to study and practice Buddhist forms of meditation and philosophy, setting aside the Yogic method into which I had been initiated nearly 40 years earlier. What is the difference?

              Perhaps I can best summarize it like this: the Yogic idea runs, you are aware of your body, therefore you are not your body; you are aware of your thoughts, therefore you are not your thoughts; you are aware of your mind, though not in sleep, therefore you are not your mind. What you call a ‘self’ is merely a collection of disjointed memories, shifting emotions and ever-changing ideas; this does not amount to a self. The real self is unchanging, does not act, but is merely a witness of actions, feelings, and the rest. True reality, the Self, or God, the Yogi would say, is Sat Chit Ananda, which can be rendered as ‘Existence, Consciousness and Bliss’. When the Witness witnesses this state, he or she has achieved moksha, or ‘Liberation.’

              Now, the Buddhist teaching closely follows this same form of self-inquiry, but the Buddha adds, You are not the Witness either. So where does this leave you? The disconcerting conclusion can easily be that there is no ‘you’. One translation of the term Nirvana, a stated goal of Buddhist practice, is ‘blown out’, or, in other words, snuffed, ceasing to exist. Nothingness and non-being are terms that frequently seem used where others might use ‘God’. Most people know that the Buddha’s first Noble Truth is that All life is suffering; but few are aware that ‘suffering’ is more accurately translated as ‘unsatisfactory’. This makes the teaching far more comprehensible, since we have all experienced the fulfillment of desires and ambitions, no matter how great or small, as anti-climatic, nothing like they promised to be. Watching a child after all the Christmas presents have been unwrapped sums this up succinctly. We come to learn that desire is like an itch: scratching appears to relieve it, yet in fact only makes it worse. No one ever has enough of anything until he or she learns the truth that enough is in fact enough. In our culture, all too often, enough is defined as ‘too much’. The fact that we will all die cannot be termed suffering, although it may entail some, so much as an unsatisfactory ending to all our endeavours. Besides, no one believes they will die – a globally ubiquitous notion, pointing, surely, to something fundamental in the human psyche? In the Bhagavad Gita (Song of God), the god Krishna tells his friend and devotee, Arjuna, on the eve of a great battle, that the soul is never born, thus it cannot die, simply moving from body to body in a ceaseless round of reincarnations, whose purpose is that the jiva (analogous to our ‘ego’) will come to realise that its sense of separation from God is an illusion, thus it is itself an illusion; at which point it merges into the divinity, its existence and consciousness acquiring the bliss which is its true nature. A common image is that of the water droplet falling into an ocean: although it is now no different from the ocean, does it still not continue to exist? [Don’t apply molecular biology to metaphors]. In Sanskrit, another word for the individual soul is Atman, whose relationship to another word for God, Paramatman’, is irreducibly precise.

              Hinduism, in its subtlety, complexity, generosity of spirit, and sheer breadth of scope makes all other religions pale by comparison. Yet it is not really a religion itself, so much as a portal into ways of experiencing the divine. These ways range from selfless work (karma yoga), through worship of a symbol or divinity (bhakti), to intensive meditation on the nature of the Self (advaita, or ‘non-dualism’, which is not monotheism at all, acknowledging that everything in the universe is one, and this One is God). This latter form most closely resembles Buddhism, yet it can also employ in its doctrines the Hindu myths and metaphors in order to illustrate points impervious to language. Non-dualism, which is purely experiential, without dogma, theology or ideology, is a hard path to follow for most, yet its freedom from religious trappings gives it a wider appeal to those who find their inherited religions lacking in essential substance. I will explain, in a later entry, and with extensive quotations, why I find the Indian philosophy, or spiritual science, by far the most profoundly wise yet pragmatic guide to self-realization the world has ever known, and the probable source of all human civilization.

              Now to my own experiences with Buddhist teachings as revamped by contemporary Western ‘gurus’, and even by transplanted Eastern ones.

              What is the purpose of meditation? It is, essentially, a way of stilling the mind by attempting to hold its activities to one single thought alone. This thought can range, depending on the practitioners’ preferences, from a sacred word or phrase, through sacred images, of divine beings, or symbolic objects and art works, all the way to focusing exclusively on one’s breath, or even on a blank white wall. No technique is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, though some may be better suited to one person than another. But why reduce the mind’s activities to one thought? The scoffers deride this process, saying that the mind is designed to think its thoughts. This is perfectly true, yet it rarely performs this function at our instigation. Everyone has the experience of having one idea embark on an associative chain of memories, fears, worries, and so on, ending up in some irrelevancy and then wondering how one arrived there, sometimes able to retrace the chain, sometimes not. What this ought to make apparent is that there has been thought, yet no thinker. The random chain of thought has generated itself. This is not the same as directing the mind to perform a function, like write, or solve an equation in algebra. Holding the mind to one thought, contrary to the skeptic view, sharpens its ability to be a tool of the will, rather than stultifying it. Yet this one-pointedness is only an initial stage of real meditation, and is usually termed ‘concentration’. True meditation itself only proceeds once the rippling thoughts have been entirely stilled, and, in William Blake’s words, the doors of perception have been cleansed. Then, he says, everything will appear as it really is: infinite. Let us try to understand what mystics mean when they declare that the world is an illusion. In dreams, we can create whole cities, landscapes and people, often in great detail. Yet upon awakening we no longer think that these dream creations are real. The world we do regard as real, however, is perceived as so purely from the sense perceptions processed by our brain. Someone born with no sensory organs – no sight, smell, touch, taste or hearing – would still exist. But where would they exist? Their universe would lack every quality by which we define our own: no shape or dimension, no solidity, no up or down, no time or space, and no good or evil. Thus, a reality exists independent of brain and mind, of subject and object. Consciousness is that reality, and deep meditation takes one into this consciousness, which is seen to permeate everything that exists, binding stars to atoms, and the individual self to a single Self. This Self, within all yet beyond all, is what we call God. “I and my Father are one,” says Jesus. “Everything that lives is holy,” declares Blake. One could quote from all faiths the same message, which is the sole Truth: that the universe is a unity, the consciousness of its Creator within every particle of it. Asked to summarize the Torah while standing on one foot, the sage Hillel said, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.” Because there are no ‘others’ when all is one. Is there a form or character of this divinity? Asked his name by Moses, God says simply, “I am that I am” [which can be translated also as “I am that I will be”, the Hebrew tense in some manuscripts being uncertain]. Questions such as why suffering exists, or why babies die, cease to be asked when the doors of perception are cleansed. Since deep-state reality shows that death is an illusion, causes create effects, and, to quote Shakespeare, there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. When the mind is controlled it makes a wonderful servant, but, as Plato observed, is usually like a ship on which the crew has mutinied, killing the captain and pilot, and unable to navigate any course, blown hither and thither at the mercy of capricious winds. It is thus essential to keep our captain and pilot in control. For the world and nature are not what we want them to be, and nor is life. We are not apart from nature, we are of nature, and must see its processes as they really are, not as we would wish them to be. Nature devours itself, life feeds upon life – and this is the reality in which we must learn to place ourselves in order to be fully alive. Only an awareness of pure consciousness can enable us to do this. And the various forms of Yoga are the only tools for achieving that goal. This is why I meditate, but the practice is not without its dangers.

              In changing from my old practice of concentrating on an image and the repetition of mantra, I began various Zen Buddhist methods, mainly breath-control and a focus on emptying the mind of any image or concept. The goal was a state of no-mind, or emptiness, a journey towards something called Nothing.

              One day, deep into a state where my only consciousness was of breath going in and coming out, I began to forget about the ‘I’ witnessing this activity altogether. I started to feel as if falling through endless space, a space in which there was nothing at all, and where my fall would continue for all time. The bottom dropped out of my plexus, just as it does when a rollercoaster begins its descent; yet this rollercoaster had no ascending phase. It only plunged on down into nowhere. It was an indescribably terrifying feeling; not like the ego-death of an LSD experience – which you have been taught to expect, and is followed by a simulacrum of bliss – but like an utter eradication, a dissolution into the Nothingness of which everything seemed composed. No light, no love, no union with an ineffable, no meaning, no purpose, no wisdom, no compassion: just Nothing. Surely this was not the state of emptiness to which people aspired and devoted thousands of hours in rigorous practices? It was when this thought arrived that I realized a witness had returned; there was still an ‘I’. Forcing my mind to resist its own emptiness, I repeated my old mantra, and prayed to all I held sacred to restore me to this world of illusion. Quite suddenly, the nightmare descent ended, and I was back in my familiar room, seeing it with new eyes, no matter how blurred and faulty they were, and with love. The clock told me four hours had passed since my sitting had begun. But time had meant nothing in that void. I wished dearly that I had a teacher or guru from whom to seek guidance on this experience, but I had no one any more, at least not on a physical plane. I had only my audio books, which I now reviewed carefully, finding that many warned readers of practicing deep meditation without a teacher. There were snares and traps unknown to normal consciousness, and only someone aware of such menaces could advise the student about dealing with them. Were these states, I wondered, the Dark Night of the Soul, or the Valley of the Shadow of Death? But little is written about them, largely because meditation techniques are taught under conditions of secrecy that no written text can provide; not because there is much to be secret about – apart from arcane practices that would be misunderstood by the casual reader, or, like certain arduous breath-control exercises, hazardous in the extreme without proper preparations and guidance – but because no student requires the same instructions as any other.

              When next I sat in meditation, the fear of entering that void once more made the practice impossible. I felt the message being delivered was that I needed to wait, to purify myself, to create more order in the chaos that had, for so many years, comprised my life. I would listen to books, walk in the beauty of nature, restore my health, and pray. But I yearned also for work.

              All I can really do is write, however, and, since writing is in fact actually rewriting, which entails reading, I feared that I would never be able to write again. I could scribble a first draft, but I could not read my handwriting, so the work could not progress beyond a stage too basic even to show anyone. Nabokov characterized showing first drafts as “dangling your sputum in the public’s face”. God forbid. My method of writing was always to go over and over a text until I could find no more to add or change. Sometimes 50 drafts, with more discarded than used. Even then, on reading a publisher’s galleys, I usually found my books unreadable. But I never had the luxury of being able to set aside a work for several months, then revise it again, refreshed by the space away from it. I wrote to deadlines and for money. It was prostitution in the name of mortgages, children, clothing, and all those things that flesh is heir to. I will never do that again, especially since big publishers are little better than criminals, exploiting writers shamelessly, their sales figures and accounting practices impossible to fathom, their costs far less than they pretend, the author’s share of profits a joke – since there never seem to be any profits. I now even find my books pirated in digital form, without my authorization or notification, by publishers whose contracts may have included ‘electronic rights’, yet were drafted long before the so-called E-Book existed, thus can hardly argue they own that right. Never have I received a statement from any publisher, except to say my advance is not yet earned out. Only once did the publisher of one of the world’s three major houses, who was also a close friend, tell me my book sales showed I had been heinously underpaid, by as much as six figures. He clearly had access to such inside information, as all publishers do, yet he was leaving the business in disgust, so placed little value on its secrets. He did not, however, tell me how to access the source.

              Thus, bereft of God, unable to write, I faced a new life with trepidation, yet with hope, and faith. My next entry will be on this and the riches of Indian wisdom. And so I remain, as always, sincerely, Paul William Roberts.

Recommended Reading

Gods, Demons and Others by R.K. Narayan. A retelling of Hindu myths and legends by one of India’s greatest writers in English. Graham Greene hailed Narayan’s novels as masterpieces revealing the Indian soul more acutely than any other work in the language. Here, in the persona of an old village storyteller, he brings to vivid life the beauty, wisdom and subtlety of tales that have fueled and fired the Indian imagination for millennia. An education disguised thoroughly as superb entertainment. Indispensable.

 

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Quebec

Tags

addiction, alcoholism, Canada, literature, Quebec

Quebec: the bonfire

I find this scarcely believable myself, so I sympathize with the reader who won’t credit it with truth. For advice on kicking the alcohol addiction, I actually turned to the Consul in Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano. If you haven’t read it, do; it is one of the 20^th century’s truly great literary novels, filled with vast flights of sheer virtuoso writing; yet its plot summary is hardly magnetic, which is why John Huston’s misguided attempt to film it tanked horribly. Huston claimed to have read over thirty scripts before finding the right one, the one that simply followed the plot. Here’s the plot: a British ex-consul in Mexico is drinking himself to death because his wife left him; his wife returns, yet he continues drinking himself to death, finally succeeding, though in an unexpected manner. The end. Even starring Albert Finney and Jaqueline Bisset, it’s difficult to imagine how such a story could work. Anyway, the Consul, as he’s known throughout (although he is no longer a consul, is indeed extravagantly unemployable), drinks Mescal, an especially nasty form of Tequila with a dead worm in every bottle, for reasons unknown. Ostensibly, he views all other beverages as soft drinks. It’s the Mescal that undoes him, along with drinking it all day and all night, frequently plagued by demons and feeling he’s in the Klippot, a Kabbalistic term referring a realm of shells and satanic forms, a kind of mirror version of the Tree of Life, where all one’s imagined spiritual progress up is, in reality, taking you further down. It is trickier than mere hell, where torments are, well, torments, free of sardonic mockery, obvious. Like all alcoholics, the Consul is forever planning to kick the habit, claiming at one point that he had a foolproof method for doing it, a method that had worked for him many times before. Ignoring the glaring implications of ‘many times before, it was this method that I selected to separate me from Demon Rum. It was admirably simple too: you just sit drinking beer all day and night, and it’s all over in three or four days. You’re off the hard stuff, free and clear, if not exactly clean and sober. As the Consul himself proves – a fact I had failed to notice – the method most emphatically does not work. I sat down in our basement, my eyes, or the 5% left of them, being highly light-sensitive, drinking cases of Guinness, until the stuff made me literally sick, while doing nothing to the craving for something 4% proof or more. After a few days I decided that beer might work in Mexico – a climate thing? – whereas Quebec, with its obsessively French milieu, probably required a soft drink like wine. This being a therapeutic venture, we bought boxes rather than bottles of wine, which I guzzled straight from their faucets. Now, I have never liked cheap red wine. It gives me what used to be called ‘heart burn’ but is now elevated to the term ‘acid reflux’ – and, wow, did my acid reflux down there in the dark, uncomforted by my comforter, lost in vinospace. I was crunching my way through a bottle of Tums a day; and, when I slept (if you can call lapses into unconsciousness ‘sleep’), I would awake with a raging fire like an arc-welding torch in my lower esophagus. The Quebec Method obviously didn’t work either. Thus it was, with Kara’s staunchly loving encouragement that I determined to go it cold turkey, without knowing that you cannot do this safely unless serious medication is also involved. This was when I got my first glimpse of what a motherfucking dangerous drug alcohol actually is. The words of John Lennon’s heroin song kept ringing in my ears: Temperature’s rising, fever is high; can’t see no future, can’t see no sky… And my cold turkey did indeed keep me on the run; I might as well have slept in the toilet – if, that is, sleep were even possible. I began shaking so fearfully that I was forced to crawl up and down the stairs like a baby, or an aged lemur. My teeth chattered uncontrollably, and a desperate feeling of dread and panic pressed into my solar plexus with the tangible force of a sword. I had no appetite for food whatsoever, yet still continually threw up something unrecognizable, alien, besides squirting a foul yellow bile from my arse. For four days I did not sleep at all, not a wink, resorting to a massive dose of Nyquill, a truly horrendous over-the-counter alleged sleep aid. Instead of aiding sleep, it made me collapse with disorienting dizziness. True, I had far exceeded the recommended dose, but who knew this store-bought crap was so potent? I’m surprised it isn’t more abused by the type who likes sniffing glue or inhaling gasoline fumes. It definitely fucks you up with equal proficiency. I hear you ask, Why not consult a doctor? This is why not: in Quebec there are no doctors, due to a staggeringly low pay scale, and those that do exist (generally because they’re rubbish or can’t speak English) will either not see you, or else put you on a ten-year waiting list. If you are doctorless and sick, you must take your ailment to the St. Agathe Hospital’s emergency ward, where the average wait-time is ten hours, unless you’re bleeding to death, possibly – they don’t, like the Pentagon, do a body-count. The idea of waiting for ten hours in my shuddering state was simply untenable; so I toughed it out, hallucinating bizarrely from lack of sleep as much as lack of alcohol, haunted by the dread that I was about to die — which, it turns out, I could easily have done, from cerebral aneurism or some such bodily reaction to sudden booze deprivation. I felt so stupendously awful that I couldn’t even smoke. My mouth tasted as if some small creature, a mouse or shrew perhaps, had crept inside to die, using the place as its sarcophagus. After four days, however, miraculously, the symptoms subsided and I was able to sleep, albeit fitfully and wracked by extraordinary nightmares, many of them lucid, ones in which I was conscious of being asleep, yet unable to wake myself. There were ruined labyrinths populated by hostile beings, not quite human, the ground awash in muddy slime, and me, the dreamer, fruitlessly searching for a way out, since Ariadne had left me no thread to follow, and I was far from certain that a way out even existed. At some point, I felt a crack on the head so hard, as if from a metal rod, that I woke up immediately, fearing I’d suffered some cerebral disaster. This happened, with varying severity, several times over the next few days, the shock and reality of the blow always waking me, always making me think some neuron-circuit had blown up. There was another dream in which our house had been invaded by total strangers who were holding a raucous party there, wine bottles spilling, glasses broken on the floor, complete mayhem. I approached one of these strangers and said that I feared I’d had a stroke, on account of the skull cracking. “No,” he told me, “you’re okay. It’s nothing. Have a drink.” It was in this dream-reality that I first realized I actually did not want a drink, indeed found the thought of a drink nauseating. When this self-detox was finally complete, or seemed to be, I felt like someone who had survived a shipwreck and was now safe ashore, wrapped in a blanket and drinking hot cocoa before a roaring fire. The experience had been no different from any account I’ve heard of heroin withdrawal, yet this was only government-sanctioned-and-sold booze, the official, the socially approved drug. I was shocked. I’d had no idea that its dark side was so impenetrably dark, even if Freud’s Death Wish does incline us to play with fire. There was also the book that revealed subtle images of sex and terror, hard cocks and gnashing sharks, air-brushed into ice cubes featured in whiskey ads. You are not supposed to see them – that demolishes any symbol – but the mind registers them subconsciously, making the flame still more attractive to any moth encountering it. I don’t know if the ‘Madmen’ still do this stuff, but, since there are no depths they won’t plumb to sling their products, they might. Check out the ice cubes, especially ones in so-called male magazines. The ones examined in the book were from Playboy, I think. I would have a look for you, but, alas, I can’t do that anymore.

I wanted to share this hooch revelation with friends, but I could sense the disinterest. It was merely my fault for drinking too much – which is probably true – so instead I shut up, concentrating instead upon a regimen of exercise, diet, and, yes, meditation. Ordering from the blind society’s audio library every spiritual text it had, and it had a surprising number of them, I was soon back at my old task of inner enlightenment. Om. After wading through the Old Testament, in which there is precious little spiritual advice, unless you turn to the interpretive genius of Kabbalah, I tried the New, with its conflicting accounts of the same story, and the disturbingly paranoid protestations of St. Paul (who caused riot wherever he went, and was clearly being called a liar by someone with clout), finding, nonetheless, a fair bit of wisdom in what Jesus has to say, when, that is, he isn’t baiting the authorities. But, as I found when writing my book, Journey of the Magi (retitled in the U.S. of A., predictably, In Search of the Birth of Jesus – because books with ‘Jesus’ in their title apparently sell better than ones without it), it is hard to imagine how an entire civilization managed to found itself on such nursery texts. I listened to Juan Mascaro’s superb translation of the Bhagavad Gita some fifteen times, on the other hand, finding there, as I always had in the days of yore, undiluted wisdom and guidance, which one could easily understand as the cornerstone of a great civilization. I found the same true of the Buddhist Dhammapada, where narrative is non-existent, and the sole purpose is to convey tenets of spiritual guidance. Then I turned to more modern sources. I even found great value in the works of Deepak Chopra, who I’d previously assumed to be another charlatan on the make. He’s not, and he provides much interesting scientific data on the proven virtues of meditation. In Krishnamurti, alas – a sage I’d once loved to hear speak, and even on one occasion had lunch with in Bangalore – I found mere sophistry, seemingly profound statements that led nowhere, and were of no help to the seeker, since they denied all methods and practices leading to enlightenment, and disparaged all teachers and gurus. Krishnamurti, who claimed he was not a teacher or guru, while doing nothing but teach and guruize, obviously felt he was the exception to this rule. As a tutor of mine at Oxford, Bill Byrom, once remarked, K. was like a man who has used a ladder to climb into heaven, then pulled it up behind him, denying that any ladder is needed. Indeed, his first book, At the Feet of the Master, recounts his own experiences with his guru, as well as the spiritual disciplines it entailed. So why do we suddenly not need anything of the like? My impression of him over a tete a tete salad (almost tasteless, an oddity in India) was of a tired and disappointed old man, who rambled on about the terrible state of the world, and the vital importance of vegetarianism, yet was strangely lacking in spiritual advice on a personal level. This was strange indeed, since he had just delivered an inspiring talk seemingly full of such advice. His talks were always magnificently eloquent, the product of a razor-sharp mind capable of coming up with apparently irrefutable syllogisms; yet, in retrospect, I usually found, immediately after listening to him, that I had no idea what he’d been talking about. I also disliked his frequently arrogant impatience with anyone asking a question, a tendency that, understandably, discouraged further questions. Like so many gurus, he was not what he appeared to be – something that makes me wonder what or who he actually was, and what he thought he was doing in this world. But when you’re told you are the Messiah in childhood, and then, coming of age, deny that you are, thence finding yourself unfit for any other job than being a Messiah, life is likely to be strange, conflicted, boxes within boxes. After this cosmic let-down, I started listening to very recent writings on Buddhism, by such people as Alan Watts, Joseph Goldstein, and the excellent Dr. Mark Epstein, all of them either scholarly or pragmatic, refreshingly free of religious dogma, yet aligned with leading-edge psychology, and related fields of science. They were stimulating and empathetic, being mostly a mixture of personal experience and practical fact. One could relate to these contemporary seekers in a way impossible to manage with the ancient texts.These works, however, were also to prove my severe undoing – a subject I will save for my next blogarithm, while remaining, always sincerely, Paul William Roberts.

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On New Year’s Eve, 2009, we packed a U-Haul with all our worldly possessions. When I say ‘we’, I mean Kara and her friend, Sandy. I was more fruitfully occupied, buying a firkin of homemade grappa from a friendly restaurateur, under the counter, then a bad but large pizza from the nearest dive on St. Clair Avenue. With 5% vision in one eye, you have to know your routes well and put up with the consequent dearth of choices. I believe a friend of mine came over at some point, and we drank grappa while watching the girls work on the loading. We did share the pizza with them, however. It was a long night, although there appeared to be a brief interlude with champagne to welcome in the year of 2010 (at my age these dates make me feel I’m living in the Roman era rather than the future I had expected from them).

At the crack of dawn, we left Toronto, with Kara driving a huge truck that I was not at all convinced she would be able to drive. But I had my gallon of grappa on hand, so anxiety soon became low on my chart of worries. Now, if you think Montreal is a long five-hour drive from Metro, try it in a big overladen truck. It was night by the time we arrived at the chaos of ongoing construction projects the city likes to imagine as a highway system, and through which Kara had to find her way to a certain ‘Laurentian AutoRoute’—not that any signpost bothered to identify any such road. By now I had drunk myself sober, and was no longer sure whether I had a hangover or simply poisoning from over-proof bathtub grappa, or possibly both. So I drank some more, which seemed to solve whatever problem there may have been.

The AutoRoute Des Laurentides, once we’d divined its existence, proved to be the only decent stretch of highway I’d ever seen in Quebec. Although we had stopped once along the unrelievably dismal 401 East to eat some of the shit that seems to be the only permissible food for long-distance drivers, we were both now very hungry, and we also still had a long way to go. The thing about this highway to the Laurentians, as we soon discovered, is that there is literally nothing on it, nowhere to stop, not even a gas station. It was very dark, too, and snowing. By the time we reached St. Agathe it was late, much later than we’d agreed to meet the owner of the house we were renting, in order to collect the keys. Yet I was under the impression we’d now be there at any minute. No. Val-des-Lacs, our destination, is not as near to St. Agathe as I had somehow thought it to be. It is also not easy to find once you have turned off the final strip of highway, especially during what had become a blizzard. The road is nothing but hairpin bends, some of them indicated, others not. It took us half an hour to reach the metropolis of Val-des-Lacs (one church, one store), yet still we were not at the house. This was when things got complicated and our directions proved useless. What ought to have been ten minutes took half an hour, with the snow falling in a torrent of fat feathers, and a total lack of signposts. Eventually finding the right Chemin, we experienced much trouble with the street numbers. Some were invisible, others did not exist. Finally locating the number preceding our own one, we found that there was no other house for about a mile. But this next house did indeed prove to be ours. Kara turned the truck onto a steep driveway, and as we sped up it the rear wheels suddenly slithered off into some kind of ditch. At least we had arrived, though; and the owner, who lived nearby, did not seem to mind that we were three hours late. She even dragged out her aged father, who brought his tractor to drag us from the ditch, and not without some difficulty. When they spoke together (their English to us was excellent) the language sounded to me like Croatian, Moldavian, or some such East European tongue. It takes quite a while to realize that the rural Quebecois actually speak French – but more of this later.

We loved our new home, although we still had to return to Toronto and pick up our car, besides another truck-load of stuff, which a dear friend, Jamie, was kind enough to drive this time, since Kara had a carload of cats to ferry up herself. Within a week, however, we were finally at home up in the mountains for good.

But was I happy? Nope. And I was drinking at least a bottle of rum every day. Every alcoholic has his or her reasons for resorting to the hooch, and none of them are valid. Not really. But mine were as follows:

My ex-wife died in the middle of divorce proceedings, which are generally a waste of time, since the Law states that all assets must be divided equally – end of story. She did not want to do this, alas, forcing me to spend $70,000 on a lawyer. Her untimely death, one would have thought, ought to have terminated this futile squabble. But oh no. Her brother, named as executor of her will, decided to keep it going. Now, this brother, a real mama’s boy if ever there was one (and we know mama’s feelings about me), has done some fairly unforgiveable things, yet none was worse than actually hiring a bouncer to prevent me from attending his sister’s memorial service, held in what was still technically my own house. Fortunately, my daughter begged me not to come, so I complied. Had I not, however, and found myself manhandled by some 300 pound thug, I could have simply called the police and said that a stranger had threatened me with violence for trying to enter my own house. Respect for the dead and my daughter’s wishes prevented an ugly scene. Yet the brother – possibly disappointed by missing the opportunity to humiliate me – chose to ask friends of mine to leave the gathering instead, embarrassing them horribly in front of many people they knew well, yet also revealing himself as the ignorant asshole he is. For these friends were not just mine, they were also his sister’s friends, and their son was one of my daughter’s particular friends. They had grown up together. All of us had spent the Millennial New Year’s Eve together. We had vacationed together on numerous occasions for twenty years. And this pompous imbecile asks them to leave! Me I can understand, although I still think it shameless and ill-cultured to prevent anyone, even an ex-husband, from mourning the loss of his children’s mother. This was and is the unforgiveable deed. Prolonging the fight over money was merely irksome, unnecessary, and typical of his spectacularly greedy nature. Thus I drank to fend off the anxiety of waiting for the legal solution, since I needed the money that was rightfully mine in order to buy the house we were then renting.

Mediation was eventually decided on, a process for which we had to return to Toronto. A horrible business it is, too. The brother was there, a Scrooge-like spider hunched over the boardroom table, and even having the temerity to say, “Hi, Paul”. I wanted to kick his balding head, but wisely just ignored him. He had even dragged my kids to this ordeal, for no apparent reason beyond malicious coercion. Both parties are asked to sign an agreement that whatever decision is finally reached by the mediation will be binding, a document that, of course, had to be read to me, my hand guided to the signing line. Then the parties retire to separate little rooms, and the Mediator shuttles back and forth with the offers on hand. I looked to my lawyer for advice on what was fair. My daughter was even sent in once to badger me, an act I consider heinous, and presumably the brother’s brainless scheme. At the end of what seemed to be an interminable day, we arrived at what I was advised to consider a just settlement. Whether it was wise to grant my son $200,000 I doubted as a sound idea – a doubt verified now by the fact that he blew the lot on drugs and whores within months of release from jail. My daughter obtained the same, spending it wisely, however – although I was perfectly prepared to finance her education etc. I was, nonetheless, quite content with my share, leaving that sterile legal hellhole joyously, for it was finally over, and I would never have to deal with that greasy toad of a brother again. I also could not wait to get out of Toronto, a place now only of heartache and bad memories.

This was in February. I waited for my check to arrive patiently enough, but since we had already concluded an offer on the house my patience could not afford to be unlimited. I began to phone the lawyer daily, asking if the money had arrived. And the longer I waited the more I drank. It was only in April, I think, that I learned the brother had all the money, and it was he who had to issue my check. Knowing his astounding greed and pettiness, I imagined he would hang on to that cash and gather its interest for as long as possible, if not forever. He is one of those people who loves having money but hates spending it, which is really all you can do with it. He will spend it on property, since that is an investment; yet spending it on such frivolities as a restaurant meal is anathema. It would make him ill (like all assholes, his bowels are a major problem, especially under stress). I was quite surprised to learn that the pinched nose, admirably suiting his pinched nature, was actually a nose-job; and that his mother and sister had their noses done by the same plastic surgeon, possibly in a three-for-two deal. Early photos do indeed reveal quite a beak, but each to his own. My concern was that he still had my own. It took legal threats finally to squeeze that check out of him, which was couriered up me in May, nearly four months late, but just in time to buy our lovely little house. I pictured the agony on his face at having to write so large a check to me, of all people. His bowels must have been churning like the fabled ocean of milk, his hair falling out in hanks, the sweat on his brow like tears of Niobe. But I think that is enough of him forever, no? I suspect I’ve made my feelings about the so-called man clear.

Now we settled into our new house and new life happily ever after. Didn’t we? Well, not quite. First I had to deal with what had clearly become a drinking problem – whereas before it had seemed more like a drinking solution. I had no reason to guzzle anymore, and imagined I could now just stop. I was, I began to notice on country walks, in diabolically bad shape, and the drinking was not so easy to stop. Then the demons emerged, as if annoyed by the fact that my life was no longer so sufficiently plagued. But this will have to wait until the next bloggishness. I remain, always sincerely, Paul William Roberts.

New Feature: Recommended reading based largely on what I have been listening to.

Tags

books, literature, mythology, spirituality

New Feature: Recommended reading based largely on what I have been listening to.

 

1. The Enderby novels: by Anthony Burgess. Hilarious yet poignant account, over four books, of a minor English poet, who drinks too much, despises his publishers, loathes foreigners and their cities, marries into money, yet decides he prefers solitude in poverty…It goes on, the flawless skill, fine Joycean observations of character, and often sheer beauty of the language, making this a perfect introduction to one of the most prolific, daring, and masterful giants of 20^th century literature.
2. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: essays by David Foster Wallace. Where Harper’s magazine invariably sent me to report on apocalyptic warzones, its editors, in their infinite wisdom, seem to have sent Foster Wallace – whom I regret never meeting – off to cover events for which they were certain he would be unsuited. Like the Indiana State Fair, or a luxury Caribbean cruise, to name but two. The results, however, are far from predictable. Wallace becomes obsessively intrigued with prize hogs, for example, or willingly joins in the highly-structured on-deck activities in shark-infested waters, although he refuses to go ashore at the various island ports-of-call, citing agoraphobia. Few accounts ever penned are funnier than his describing a defeat at chess by a nine-year-old girl. The collection makes a useful introduction to his novel, Infinite Jest, which I am coming to regard as the 21^st century’s first American masterpiece, as staggeringly original, outrageously funny, and painfully human as the Joyce of Ulysses, or the Burroughs of Wild Boys. I will return to it in detail later, since no audio version exists and I have to rely on Kara for the reading. It is not short. David Foster Wallace took his own life a few years back, a loss his novel makes all the more hard to contemplate. Had Harper’s, or indeed anyone, suspected the actual severity of his psychological problems – the addictions, the electro-shock therapy, the bottomless depressions – I doubt if he would have been placed in such untenable positions.
3. The Financier by Theodore Dreiser. The classic American business novel, curiously contemporary with its account of overweening greed, corrupt politicians, and the cartels that in reality run our world for their own benefit. Over a 100 years old, the novel is a startling reminder that if elections changed anything they’d be made illegal.
4. Selected Stories by Mavis Gallant. She died, aged 90-odd, earlier this year, in Paris, where she was widely revered as one of greatest exponents of the short story in its history, every bit the equal of Chekov, Kipling, Joyce, and Turgenev. Her childhood and youth, however, were spent in Montreal, which, of course, means she is virtually unknown in Canada. Faultless, exquisite sentences, finely etched characters, quotidian situations, but often highly unexpected twists of narrative are her hallmark. No one who enjoys writing at its most precise and revelatory level can fail to fall deeply in love with Gallant.
5. Myths to Live By, edited talks by Joseph Campbell. This is a great introduction to the work of a man who, in any other society, would be hailed as a Socrates, or Nietzsche, a teacher of genuine and self-realized wisdom. His subject is the coherent interrelationship of all world mythology, and its vital, ongoing relevance in our own lives. His insistence on seeing every religion as essentially mythical, a product of the collective unconscious, has, predictably, made him reviled by those who still cling to their own scriptures as factual truths, indeed the only real truth; yet his learned, compassionate comparisons of global mythologies, if followed with unbiased attention, make it impossible to reject the argument that every race regards itself as ‘chosen’, has a messianic figure, born of a virgin, and sacrificed for the good of humanity, whether to save it from sin, usher in the Golden Age, or simply assure fertility and abundant harvests. Cruel death, followed by resurrection, are ubiquitous concepts across the Middle Eastern religions, from Osiris and Tammuz, through the Hebrew Messiach, to Jesus and the Sufi martyrs, like al-Halaj, who was also crucified for claiming, “I and my Father are one.” Campbell has little time for the exclusivist monotheisms, however, preferring the rich subtleties of Hinduism and the Eastern systems, which have always known that their stories of gods and demons are merely metaphors for inner states, eternal verities, rather than irrelevant pseudo-historical yarns. Jesus has no more historical reality than the Exodus of Israelites from Egypt, or the conquest of Jerusalem by Mohammed. Even the texts themselves are provably unreliable, conflicting, existing in many versions, thus very far from being ‘the word of God’. To fundamentalists, Campbell is anathema, since he knows the actual scholarship, the original languages, the variant manuscripts, and thus can point out that there is no word in Hebrew capable of being translated as ‘God’; that the Decalogue brought down from Sinai by Moses are not ‘commandments’ but simply ‘utterances’; that, to American Indians, the earth is not ‘dust’, as the Book of Genesis scornfully terms it, but rather a nurturing mother, the source of all life; that serpents are generally revered as wise and sacred by most mythologies; and that the divine is viewed by all mystical systems as within every living being, not remote from them, not a wrathful puppet-master, cruel and unpredictable, but a life-enhancing point of love and light to be sought in solitude and contemplation. “Follow your bliss,” was Campbell’s exhortation to his students, urging them all to take the hero’s journey, and conquer life’s monsters and obstacles along the way, in order to return to their place of origin, knowing it and themselves for the first time. Anyone searching for a spiritual element in their lives, yet unable to accept the stilted orthodoxies, with their deadening dogma and preposterous theologies, could do worse than adopt Joseph Campbell as a guide and guru, who will, at the very least, lead the seeker to still-richer troves of soul-treasure.
6. Talks with Ramana Maharshi. If I could only take one book with me to the desert island, this would be the one. Spiritual insight and wisdom distilled to its quintessence. I can say no more, since words do not reach these realms.

Work-in-Progess

Tags

books, Canada, literature, new work, Prince Edward, publishing, Queen Victoria's Secret, royalty

Since the response to this blog-thing has been overwhelmingly heartwarming (I particularly thank the gentleman from Atlanta for his kind and thoughtful comments), I feel obliged to digress from my stated intentions to continue the narrative –such as it was- into Quebec, and instead offer the reader an update on the book upon which I am now working, an excerpt from which will shortly appear in EXILE magazine. It is titled Queen Victoria’s Secret, and is a fictionalized, though largely factual, account of the life of Victoria’s father, Prince Edward, later Duke of Kent, who died when she was only six month’s old. She thus obviously never knew him, and the novel is constructed almost as a letter to her from the father she would never have, confessing certain reprehensible aspects of his life, and setting straight many misconceptions. He wanted her to know him as he really had been. For Edward was maliciously, and highly successfully, maligned by his elder brothers, partly for his widespread popularity and socialist leanings, partly because he had produced an heir to the throne, and they had not. So maligned was his reputation that Victoria, who had never been told a good word about him ever, forbade any mention of him whatsoever in her presence (one may recall that in the film Young Victoria, the sole mention of Edward is a highly disparaging, and a historical comment made by that column of virtue, the Duke of Wellington). Indeed, the only formal biography of Edward presents such a loathsome image that one wonders why the writer bothered with the project at all. Yet all the historical evidence points to the opposite: he was a sober, decent man, much concerned with the welfare and education of the poor, and much loved by all who encountered him, many of whom were in Canada, where he spent a number of years, first at Quebec, then later at Halifax. As some wag recently remarked, “No man is an island, unless you happen to be Prince Edward”. We also have a Prince Edward County. The man was clearly not disliked.Yet few can tell you that the prince in question was also Queen Victoria’s father. But the book is more than a quixotic effort to restore the reputation of a man more sinned against than sinning. It is the portrait of an age in momentous transition, extending from the French Revolution, through the Napoleonic Wars, and up to what is recognizably the dawn of our modern era. Edward experienced aspects of all these events first-hand, and was certainly the first member of the royal family – if not of the general aristocracy – to recognize that the new future lay in the hands of entrepreneurs, inventors, industrialists, and so on. He also realized the need for mass-education as a means of creating a more egalitarian society without violent revolution to precede it. He wrote many letters (too many, in fact – an average of three per day), so we do know much about his activities. Since all letters of these periods were assumed to be perused by many more than just those for whom they were intended – ditto with most diaries – we rarely glimpse the writers’ innermost thoughts, emotions, real opinions, etc. But if action is character, Edward’s actions speak volumes in his favour. He begins life with a father, George III, who inexplicably hates him, ending with one who is blind, deaf, mad, and still hates him. Love was what he craved, and love was what he found. Tragic love, war, villainy and stupendous decadence in high places – what’s not to like? Hence the book, which, thanks to Barry Callaghan and Exile, may soon see a glimmer of daylight.
A word about Barry: I have known him for, God, 30 years. Indeed, he published excerpts from my first novel (butchered by a major publisher in the end – in fact I might put the proper version on here one day). Not always the easiest person to get along with – unlike me – Callaghan has done more for Canadian literature than anyone of whom I am aware. I am too English, of course, to dream of saying what follows to his face: but he is a great poet, translator and novelist; he is also a very fine painter (one of whose works I would gladly accept in exchange for the rights to all of my extant books); he plays and sings a mean blues and jazz piano; and he has hosted the only real literary salon in Canada for, well, ever since I was here, at least. All this while keeping Exile Publishing alive while financial carnage destroyed virtually all truly Canadian publishers. Oh, and also, he’s among the three or four best guests on TV or radio I’ve ever heard. In fact, Rex Murphy recently said that himself. Being blind, I do listen to an awful lot of radio, and in five years of rarely missing Cross-Country Check-Up, I have never heard Rex say that about any other guest. So there it is, Barry, I have put down my feelings in writing, assuming, of course, that you do not read Blogs (man, I hate this term, which makes me think of Black men who have somehow become loggers, as in ‘lift a bale of wood’, or otherwise blocked toilets –—– in England a crapper is also known as the ‘bog’). I say to Ottawa, give the man an award; few deserve one more.
No doubt I will return to my main theme (which was what?) next entry.

But, as always sincerely, love from Paul William Roberts.