One Hundred and Thirty Eight

Last month, when Leonard said he was selling his house and moving up north to live with Eric, he also told me not to come over anymore. He said his real estate agent would be bringing a lot of people to see his house, and he didn’t want me there when they arrived.

Perhaps he considers me an undesirable neighbor, or someone who people interested in buying his house might consider an undesirable neighbor.  

Leonard and I have little in common. We're friends, or what other people call friends, only because we’re both old and alone.

I’ve often wished Leonard would leave me alone; but he’s done me too many favors for me to end our relationship without good reason. I suspect he feels the same about me. But now he was moving away, so there was no need for either of us to keep pretending we’re friends.

That was a month ago. I haven’t seen Leonard since then. 

Neither have I seen any strangers enter or leave his house. But I hadn’t expected to. 

The real estate agent told Leonard his is a desirable property. But however much people may desire it, I doubt many of them can afford to buy it unless they’re willing to go into debt. And after the last financial crash, people are more reluctant to go into debt.

Yesterday morning I saw a man’s jacket hanging inside Leonard's screen door. Thinking he was bringing his clothes downstairs because he was moving out, I knocked on his door to say good-by.

To my surprise, he invited me in.

Leonard said the jacket wasn’t his. Eric left it behind yesterday, when he and Danny were visiting. Leonard hung the jacket inside the screen door so that when Eric returned for it, he could take it without having to come inside Leonard’s house.

Leonard said Eric and Danny are refurbishing their family’s old house, and since they were in the neighborhood they decided to visit Leonard. At first I thought they were refurbishing the old house because Eric and Leonard would be living there, but Leonard said Eric doesn’t want to live with him.

Eric lost his house, his job and his wife, so Leonard was sure he’d be happy to share expenses with him; especially as Leonard receives two pensions. But Eric doesn’t want to live with Leonard, not even with his two pensions.

To make matters worse, Eric and Danny are refurbishing the old house—adding a ramp for a wheelchair—because Leonard’s ex-wife, Eric’s mother, will be living there.

Leonard said he’s taken his house off the market and will live in it until he dies. I’d pity him if I were still capable of pity.

One Hundred and Thirty Seven

I went to bed early last night. I go to bed earlier and earlier every night, and stay in bed later and later every morning. Around ten o’clock last night I was awakened by a loud explosion.

At first I thought the transformer had blown again. It blows every summer, on a day when everyone’s air conditioner is turned on high. But the last few days haven’t been that hot. 

Then I heard another explosion, and another. I was still half asleep, and for a second I thought people had finally had enough. The revolution had begun. Then I realized that was absurd.

The age of revolutions is over. People no longer believe we can change things, except for the worse. But most of us never did believe it. Namque pauci libertatum pars magna iustos dominos volunt, said Sallust. No one believes our masters are just, but we all know they could be worse, and probably will be soon.

I realized then that what sounded like explosions were fireworks. I didn't know or care what they were for, but I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I read an article in the NYRB about the demonstrations against Putin.

There’s no organized opposition in Russia, no party with leaders and a program, which proves the demonstrations aren’t organized but genuine and spontaneous. That's their strength, and their weakness.

When questioned, demonstrators said they want an end to the corrupt status quo, but can’t define what they want to take its place. According to the pundits, this proves Russians don’t understand how democracy works. But Russians understand that what they’ve been told is democracy doesn’t work, just as what they were told was communism didn’t work. 

Russians are disgusted with politics itself, or what they're told is politics. Americans are equally disgusted with politics, but still allow their masters to define what politics is. This failure of imagination explains why revolutions, even when they succeed in ending the corrupt old order, fail to replace it with a new and better one.

The explosions continued, so I went online and learned that today is the one hundredth anniversary of the city's incorporation, and they're celebrating with fireworks.

There’s nothing to celebrate. The city has a well-deserved reputation for corrupt politics. It's sound and fury signifying nothing.

Again and again I resolve to pay no more attention to politics. But if not politics, then what? 

Politics is the art of living with others, one we've yet to master. We must have masters, just or unjust, if we can't or won't master ourselves.

One Hundred and Thirty Six

Einstein supposedly said doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, is the definition of insanity. He didn’t say it, but he should have, because not only is it a good definition of insanity; it’s a good definition of life. 

Silenus supposedly said it’s better to die young, but best is never to be born. He didn’t say it, but many have.

When we set out on life’s journey, we think we won’t make the same mistakes those who came before us made; but eventually we realize we’ve made exactly the same mistakes. Those of us who haven’t, made different mistakes. Living is the first mistake, and it leads to others.

I listened to Scheherazade today. It has only a few melodies, repeated over and over again, and it’s popular for that reason. We're limited beings who can hold only a few ideas in our minds at any one time. We forget them, and then we remember them. Thinking they're new, we repeat the same ideas over and over again in different words.

Shah Riah thinks his wife loves him as he loves her. When he discovers she’s been unfaithful, he has her killed. Believing all women are the same, the shah marries a different woman each night and has her killed in the morning, before she can be unfaithful. Until he marries Scheherazade.

She tells him a different story each night, and tells it so well that each morning the shah lets her live another day so that she can tell him how the story ends that night.

But it’s always the same story, repeated over and over again in different words; and it always ends the same way. The hero always triumphs, always wins a woman who loves him as he loves her; and they live happily ever after.

The shah listens to this story each night, as a child listens to a favorite bedtime story, because he wants to go to sleep and dream of love.

All men are misogynists; but it’s not just women they distrust. We all set out on life’s journey thinking the world loves us as we love it; and we all discover that the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

No one wants to live knowing this. Like Shah Riah, we want to kill the world we loved for betraying us; or else kill ourselves. But most of us do neither. We just go back to sleep.

One Hundred and Thirty Five

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. What does this mean? we ask, pretending not to know.

We keep telling ourselves the same old story in new and different words, so we can pretend not to know what it means.  

I know where I’m going

I know who’s going there with me

I know who I love

But the devil knows who I’ll marry.

We set out on life’s journey thinking that while we may not know everything, we know enough. But sooner or later we lose our way, as Dante did.

Beatrice sent Virgil to lead Dante back to the Western god. But now we’ve lost faith in all our gods, and don’t have enough faith left to invent new ones.

Westerners see loss of faith as a disaster. They follow charlatans who promise to lead them back to their god, as Virgil led Dante, because they assume their way is the only way. Easterners see it as a revelation that our world and its gods is an illusion, but Westerners go on fighting the same war because they'd rather die than admit the gods who bless their battles are illusions. 

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground

And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.

“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.” 

“None,” said he, “save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours

Was my life also. I went hunting wild

After the wildest beauty in the world,

Which lies not calm in eyes or braided hair,

But mocks the steady running of the hour;

And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

For by my glee might many men have laughed

And of my weeping something had been left

Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,

The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Now men will go content with what we spoiled

Or, discontented, boil bloody, and be spilled.

They will be swift, with swiftness of the tigress. 

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery;

Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery.

To miss the march of this retreating world

Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, 

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

I would have poured my spirit without stint

But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now. . . .” 

A hundred years ago this month he wrote this, and still we're sleeping.

One Hundred and Thirty Four

There are no absolutes. If there were, I’d agree with those who claim bringing a child into this world constitutes child abuse. But this world isn’t absolutely terrible. There are moments when it’s wonderful. But are those moments worth enduring the hours when its not?

I don’t think anyone believes they are. We say they are because we hope that as we grow older, we’ll grow wiser, until we finally know how to live well. But we never do. Instead we learn that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse, and probably will

Things get better from time to time, in some places, for some people; but they’re the exception. The rule is entropy.

We’ve lost faith in the old gods, and can’t imagine new ones. Time and time again we've made gods of what we imagined was best in us, only to have them bring out what’s worst in us, until we finally lost faith in our ability to imagine a better world, much less build it. We’ve lost faith in ourselves.

It’s a mistake to have absolute faith in anything, including ourselves, Especially ourselves. 

We used to know that we’re limited, and strove to know what those limits are; but our early successes misled us into believing we had no limits. We thought we could do anything if we put our minds to it. Now we know better.

In time we might have recovered from this funk, and having learned from our mistakes, do better. But we don’t have time. The world’s dying, and won’t wait for us to learn to do better.

One Hundred and Thirty Three

I’ve been reading a lot today about Trump and his supposed friend, Putin.

Rarely do powerful people have friends. They have allies aka accomplices (every government, no matter the conditions in which it was established, eventually becomes a criminal conspiracy against the people it claims to govern). They may have common interests and/or similar temperaments, which make it easier for them to work together; but these don’t make them friends.

Putin and Trump are so different, in temperament and in interests, that Putin must work hard to make their alliance work. He works hard because unlike the feckless Trump, Putin’s a politician, and knows it’s to his advantage to be Trump’s ally. Trump’s not a politician. He’s a con man who bluffed his way to power.   

It’s pointless to ask, as my online correspondents insist on asking, which of them is worse. Trump is a figurehead who’s surrounded himself with predators far more dangerous than he is, while Putin apparently sees himself as a statesman doing what’s necessary to fend off Russia’s predators.

Trump embodies American individualism at its worst. He thinks only of himself, enriching himself at the expense of others. Putin, like most Russian rulers, seems to have persuaded himself he’s doing what’s best for Russia. Even Stalin seems to have done that. 

Americans can't understand that Russians aren’t as self-centered as Americans are taught to be. Russians must believe they’re doing what’s best for their country, their class, or whichever group they identify with. If and when they realize they’re deluding themselves, Russians are either overwhelmed by guilt, as my grandfather was, or they embrace their evil, as Alec did. Americans do evil things, but they refuse to admit they’re evil; so they remain innocent, at least in their own eyes.

One Hundred and Thirty Two

I find it kind of funny

And I find it kind of sad
That the dreams in which I'm dying 
Are the best I've ever had

I had a vivid dream last night, one Jung would probably have called a great dream. Perhaps my unconscious is compensating me for the emptiness of my waking life.

She and I are visiting some tropical country, and staying at a hotel on the beach. It’s a huge building, virtually a city in itself, surrounding a garden atrium. There are numerous shops on the ground floor.

This building has appeared in many of my dreams. It's the Tower of Babel, and its numerous shops are Vanity Fair.

We wander through the garden together. Then we decide to split up and explore the shops separately, meeting back in our hotel room afterwards. 

I once had a true love
I loved her so well
I loved her far better

Than my tongue can tell 

She stepped away from me
And this she did say
"It will not be long, love
'Til our wedding day". 

She stepped away from me
And moved through the fair
Fondly I watched her
Move here and move there.

I wander from one shop to another. Each one opens into the next, as they always do in these dreams, like a series of connecting showrooms inside one big department store.

All the items for sale in all the rooms are made of glass. They shine and glitter, blinding me, so I go back into the garden to clear my head.

Between huge tropical flowers on thick stems, as tall as trees, I see a blonde wearing glasses. I know it’s not her – she didn’t start wearing glasses until she was old(er), and in my dreams we’re always young - but I follow the woman anyway.

I lose her, so I decide to go up to our hotel room. Surely she’s finished her shopping by now and is there, waiting for me.

I get into the elevator, and the doors slide shut. Their shiny metal surfaces remind me of the glass in the shops. Music is coming from a speaker overhead.

I push the button for the seventeenth floor. The doors slide open again, but no one enters. I must have accidentally pushed the 'open' button, so again I push the button for the seventeenth floor.

It’s a long ride up. Bored, I start to sing along to the elevator music.

Suddenly I become aware that a young (she looks to be about twenty) black woman is standing next to me. She must have gotten into the elevator when the doors opened. How could I not have seen her?

Embarrassed, I apologise for singing. She smiles and says she didn’t mind because my voice is quite good.

A young black man, who I also hadn’t seen before, stands beside her. I assume he’s her boyfriend.

He looks at me as young men used to look at me when I was young myself, and their girlfriends spoke to me; but I know he’s not jealous. I was a good singer when I was young, but I'm old now.

And whether or not I do still have a good singing voice, I wasn’t using it. I was singing along with the elevator music ironically, as I often sing along now when there's some particularly inane song on the radio. When the girl said I had a good voice, she was just being polite to a lonely old man who sings to himself. Her boyfriend is frowning at me because he doesn’t want her talking to weird old men.

The elevator stops at the seventeenth floor, and the doors open. I step out and, as always happens in these dreams, I can’t find my hotel room.

I walk around and around the hall, looking for it. Then I see the blonde again. Again I follow her, and again I lose her.

I’m tired of chasing her, and my eyes still hurt from all the dazzling glass in the shops below. There’s a small table in the hall, with a vase of flowers on it, so I take my glasses off, lay them on the table and rub my eyes.

When I pick the glasses up and put them on, my vision is blurred. Then I see there's another pair of glasses lying on the table, almost hidden behind the vase of flowers. The blonde must have left her glasses on the table, and I’d picked them up by mistake.

I put my own glasses on and walk down the hall. I now know where my room is.

Often in these dreams, if and when I finally find my room, I find I don’t have the key. This time I have it.

I enter the room and look for her, but she isn’t there.

Then I wake up.

In these dreams I always get off at the seventeenth floor. Why the seventeenth floor?

Then I remember the ICU ward was on the seventeenth floor.

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
Stay and hear! Your true love's coming
That can sing both high and low.

Trip no further, pretty sweeting
Journeys end in lovers' meeting
Every wise man's son doth know.

What is love? 'Tis not hereafter
Present mirth hath present laughter
What's to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

One Hundred and Thirty One

Insanity hasn’t become the norm. It’s always been the norm. We know that when we’re children. Growing up means forgetting what we know, and pretending to believe what everyone else pretends to believe.

I used to play that game. I think I played it well because I didn’t take it seriously. I took nothing seriously, because I knew life is only a game, an illusion.

I was wrong not to take it seriously, because illusion is all we have. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. We don’t wake to reality. We die.

I’ve always been immersed in depression by this knowledge, as fish are immersed in water or other people are immersed in illusion. From time to time I rise above it, as fish leap out of water or other people experience enlightenment; but reality is not our natural element.

We call ourselves homo sapiens, but we’re the most ignorant of animals. Other animals don’t delude themselves, as we do, that they’re more than animals.

Instead of killing myself out of despair, I’ve stayed alive because I hoped I'd eventually understand why the world is as it is, and be able help others. But now I’ve accepted that I’m as capable of understanding the world as a flea is capable of understanding calculus, and I no longer want to kill myself because a flea doesn't seem worth making the effort needed to end its suffering. If I respected all life, as I know I should, I’d kill myself.

One Hundred and Thirty

We are limited beings; limited in space and in time. Cogito, ergo sum, and the first time I became aware of myself as a thinking being was when I asked myself why I’m limited to being this person, in this place, thinking this thought.

I wasn’t asking why I wasn’t someone else, somewhere else, thinking something else. I was acutely aware of being myself, and knowing that self was more than it appeared to be.     

I knew that, like Whitman, I contained multitudes. I was also part of a multitude, one cell in a body composed of cells. But if the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm, why was I aware of being only this cell, and not the others? 

Easterners say the self is an illusion. Westerners say the same thing, though they don’t realize they’re saying it. All Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato, and Plato said change is an illusion - only that which is eternal is real - therefore we, who exist for only a limited time, in a specific place, aren’t real.

I’ve always known this is true, and false. Everything that can be said is true in one context, and false in another. As I grew older, I became aware that other people didn’t seem to know this.

Americans seemed to believe that who and what they are is self-evident. Emigrés, who struggle to translate what they know from one language into another without falsifying it, know better.

We know nothing, or so near to nothing that the difference hardly seems to matter; yet that difference, like the 1% difference in DNA between other primates and us, makes us human.

The most ignorant among us are those who don’t know they’re ignorant. Or rather they pretend not to know it. They tell themselves that if they don’t know everything, they know everything worth knowing, and presume to teach the rest of us what they think they know. These fools fool no one except other fools.    

These thoughts were inspired by an article in the latest issue of the LRB, which arrived today.

The article, by John Lanchester, is about Facebook, the most famous, because most successful, of the websites purporting to be virtual communities providing virtual friends for people like me, who have no real friends.  

They're successful because real communities no longer exist. “'There is no such thing as society” said Baroness Thatcher, telling us what we already knew (Politicians are among the people ignorant enough to believe they know everything worth knowing, therefore they always learn things long after everyone else does). "There are only individuals". She told the truth because she, and people like her, are destroying what little is left of society, leaving only the market, in which individuals buy and sell each other.

Lanchester calls Facebook the greatest information-gathering tool in history. But that information isn’t the so-called news it delivers to its members, which is mostly propaganda and rumor. It’s the information Facebook gathers about its members, their likes and dislikes, and sells to advertisers. 

Online social media do this better than the print media, but both do it. Newspapers and magazines don’t make money by selling information to their readers, but by selling information about their readers to their advertisers.

Online social media aren’t more successful than print media because they’re more reliable sources of information, but because they pretend to be communities. People turn to these virtual communities because they hunger for the real communities that no longer exist; and they keep returning to them, as addicts return to their drugs, because that hunger is never satisfied.

What most people crave isn’t information, much less the truth, but community. We’re social animals, but our society teaches us to be anti-social, to invent an individual self that’s not just indifferent, but actively hostile, to the other individuals of which our society is composed.

Or rather it used to teach us to be actively hostile to others, to see them as our competitors in a war of all against all. Now it teaches us to compete passively, as children compete for their parents' attention, asking our masters to do for us what we can't and/or won't do for ourselves. We are selfish children, refusing to work together for the common good, which allows our masters to do whatever they please to us. They rob us, and our refusal to defend ourselves makes us their accomplices.

Lanchester said the turning point in Facebook’s history came when Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel invested $500,000 in the company. 

In college Theil majored in philosophy, and believed in Girard’s theory of mimetic desire.

According to Lanchester, Girard said when our need for the necessities of life, such as food and shelter, are satisfied, we look to the other members of our community to see what they have that we might want. “We don’t know what we want or who we are", said Lanchester. "We don’t really have values and beliefs of our own. What we have instead is an instinct to copy and compare”. 

Theil saw Facebook as mimetic desire in action. Its members don’t know what they want, so they look at what their virtual 'friends' have, and decide they want it, too.

I haven’t read Girard since I was a child, but this seems not entirely false. Neither is it entirely true.

It was obvious to me, even when I was a child, that Girard’s theory of mimetic desire is itself an example of mimesis - his response to Freud’s Oedipus complex. Both describe a triangular relationship between two males and a female, whose archetype is the nuclear family of father, mother and son.

In Freud’s version, mother and infant son are one. The infant sees no distinction between his body and his mother’s until he becomes aware of his father as his rival for her. Then, and only then, does the infant become aware of himself as a separate individual – separate from his mother, who belongs to his father.

In Girard’s version, self-awareness comes at a later stage in the child’s development. The son becomes aware of himself by comparing himself to his father, who is not his rival, but his ideal. He admires and respects his father, and wants to be like him. That includes having a woman like his father’s woman.

It was obvious to me, even when I was a child, that neither Freud’s nor Girard’s theory was entirely true or entirely false. One seems true, and the other false, only to people who think a statement must be either true or false, but not both. As if we are capable of knowing, much less saying, the truth. 

People don’t know who and what they want because they don’t know who and what they are. Neither do they know their society well enough to know what they can reasonably expect from it, and what they must do to get it.

They don’t realize their needs change as they change. The last thing a person with a full stomach needs is more food, but most people are now obese because they don’t know what they need or want. Food satisfied their hunger at mealtime, so they keep eating.

I'm tired of eating. I know this world has nothing that can satisfy my hunger.