Victoria

Knut Hamsun

No, I’m smiling, the husband says. It’s my way of smiling. I want this grimace to be uniquely my own.

Thank you, thank you, Johannes, dear; it’s so sweet of you not to be furious with me, she said, wiping away her tears. But you mustn’t think I don’t love you too. By God, I’ll come and see you much more often than before and do everything you desire. It’s just that I love him more. I didn’t want it that way. It’s not your fault.

Love is God’s first word, the first thought that sailed through his brain. When he said, “Let there be light!” there was love. And everything that he made was very good, and no part thereof did he wish undone. And love became the world’s beginning and the world’s ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.

Love is not just. Love does not deal in equality, nor does it acknowledge rights. Like the unreasoned whims of fate that make one man tall and smart while another is left deformed and brainless without even material comforts as compensation, love gives to the undeserving and takes from the worthy.
Love is the truth in "To those who have much, more will be given, and to those who have little, even what they have will be taken from them." Love gives and takes in scandalous disproportion. Like Joseph Merrick, love is a misshapen Elephant Man. Like Proteus, it shapeshifts while we try to pin it down (which never we can) but we will try anyway.
You disagree? Love isn't out of its mind? True love anyway. But what of all things is true love if it isn't a madman on a dream? Who would say that scaling Cliffs of Insanity, enduring the Pit of Despair, and fighting Rodents of Unusual Size is anything but a wildly inappropriate response to life?
Love is inappropriate.
If you seek balance, do not venture near love or any of those who move in that circus crowd: mercy, selflessness, humility, kindness, compassion, sacrifice, forgiveness, and grace--these are not well-balanced individuals. They are a set of lunatics prancing about in their underpants; they are flower bedecked babies fully grown, who have scraped their knees and elbows. Their giddiness makes us feel embarrassed for them, but that feeling's tricky since in its loftiness it has pity which might be disdain and if we look at it our embarrassment on their behalf looks very much like jealousy on their account. After all, they do seem to be enjoying themselves, for all their scrapes and bruises. And love is their tyrant leader, the great extortionist.
Do you see, love just isn't just. You'll pardon that literary atrocity because love works in atrocities and outrages and in disturbing and in discomfort.

It is Victoria who is writing this, and God is reading over my shoulder.

Dark Shadows Falling

Joe Simpson

One distressing incident in this storm illustrates the selfishness of some of the trekkers. Two Western clients had abandoned their Sherpa when he was too weak to move form his tent to the helicopter. The clients broke trail out to the aircraft, which had been unable to land nearby, and then took off, leaving the poor man to die. When asked in Namche why they had abandoned the Sherpa, the same trekkers replied that they were anxious to reach the airport at Lukla so that they would not miss their international flight connections.

If you would like to lose all respect for people who don't belong in the wilderness, read this book (just be careful, you might be one of them).

The Ice-Shirt

William T Vollmann

Do we carry our landscapes with us locked in our ice-hearts, and can we fit them over what was there just as we can clothe ourselves forever in the stiff and crackling cloaks that lie in the churchyard permafrost at Herjolfsness?

The lambs crunch grass very watchfully, but the old ewes and rams do not look up at your approach because nobody has ever hurt them and they do not understand the meaning of the sheep-skulls that lie in the grass they graze on. – The birds, on the other hand, await the worst with hysterical foreknowledge, so that if you venture into their nesting-fields, where the grass is green and then white, as if frosted, thousands of them begin to swoop and scream and flap until their gull-cousins on the rocks offshore are infected with alarm, and sob like babies. (Would you, reader, rather be a sheep or a bird? I say that the sweet sheep have no cares, and for that reason their stupidity is to be prized).

In those days you had to be careful what you thought, because your thoughts would come true. Nowadays you have to be careful what you think because if you think it, it will never happen.

Oh, that game of Changing! The players did not really want to be anything; they only wanted to be what they were not. Nobody saw that change came of its own, unfolding as was ordained, so that one would be as ungracious to rush it as to stay it.

Was a woman something she was supposed to be? But she had not started out being one, and she did not want to be one. She did not necessarily want not to be one, but she wanted to be several things. A woman was not all she was.

So, too, Freydis’s selfish cruelties were not originally hers by nature, but came about simply because her stepmother Thjodhild would not own her in her heart – or so it is incumbent upon a historian to believe in this age of compassionate first causes, for how could we hope, if people could be born wicked?

It seems like there’s nothing like a close brush to bring you down to earth, and make your priorities in your mind very clear (for a good while, anyway). I started considering what the fuck I was doing here and realized that while I think it was a step in the right direction, doing that kind of thing, my priorities were all fucked up, that I just had to quit doing things so much for show, just start doing things just ‘cause I wanted to. Real honest things that I wanted to do. I was so ashamed of myself. After that I had kind of a miserable night. Thought entirely too much. And in the morning I packed up and headed out.

In those days there was Power everywhere. You did not have to be wise to find it. Power lived in pretty feathers; Power was in stars and owls’ beaks; Power was in the patterns that the women painted on everyone’s shirts so that they could find the animals they hunted and kill them; they could bring back meat to eat and clothe everyone in their skins and they could all dream of the Star People who dwelled on the black roof above the trees and sparkled at their images in brooks and lakes; they dreamed also of the Plant People who came on green legs bringing corn-gifts and tobacco-gifts; and all the gifts had Power; but the most Powerful color was red, and the women made paint from red earth and birds’ eggs and painted special things on everyone’s shirts, so that red cloth of the Jenuaq was highly prized.

The first part of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, Vollmann begins an impressive project--to detail intimately the various first interactions between North Americans and Europeans. Vollmann's choice to embrace the story-telling histories of various places and peoples instead of generating the traditional history or historical novel, provides a startling conception of our history. Seven Dreams (or what I've read of it so far) opens the mind to a host of new thoughts on history.
Often times histories attempt a detailed look at where we were then but fail to acknowledge where we are now, and comparatively many fictional works attempt to reveal what then was through a reality of now. But Vollman, by a combination of interviews, histories, myths, fiction, and personal experiences, finds a way to tell the story of then and now. What makes him so succesful is his basic theory that he must walk in the footsteps of the histories he is going to tell. The Ice-Shirt circles around the Viking discovery of North America; Vollmann writes their story while he is walking along the shores of Greenland and moving about from island to island in Northern Canada.
There are so many understated but interesting approaches to history in Vollmann's Seven Dreams that one has a strange sense of urgency reading the books. Like any truly novel idea, you read it with some strong sense of disbelief--like watching magic trick, or better, like seeing the impossible made reality before your very eyes. It's very exciting.

Vain Art of the Fugue

Dumitru Tsepeneag

As I stepped onto the bus I felt an urge to look back, as if someone had called out to me or tapped me on the shoulder or perhaps just looked at me, the way you look at a person who seems familiar and whose name you want to call out (what name?), or the way you stand at the window or the garden gate, gripping the green or black bars, and follow someone with your eyes as long as possible as he walks away, and--for no real reason, knowing he'll turn around anyway--you feel a tightness in your chest as you will him to look back, focusing on the nape of his neck or a point between his shoulders, not thinking of anything so that people might say you were staring into space down a street that'll soon be empty, where a dog sneaks along the side of the house, and a woman looks vacantly towards the man who's turned the corner, hurriedly walking along with his head slightly bent, clutching a bunch of flowers rather awkwardly, slowing almost to a stop to look at a front yard, unsure of himself, then starting up again, crossing one street and another, approaching the stop where the bus is already about to leave, running the last few yards, jumping onto the step, and glancing back: I couldn't resist the temptation and therefore moved my head with a sense of shame because I couldn't control myself, no one had called out to me, no one was behind me, and then the wheels of the bus began to turn, I climbed the next and final step, felt in my pocket for some change, and the flowers got squashed a little against the ticket-seller's counter.

A fish was passing, in flight above the garden.

I wanted to write a thought imitating the style of Vain Art of the Fugue but this is not the place for that. I have never read a piece that had so much of the form of music. Tsepeneag's story is really a one-chapter story that is told thirty times, but never quite the same. It's not a story being told and retold from different perspectives, although it encompasses that, but it's a story being told differently thirty times. Tsepeneag repeats certain notes, maybe at different octaves, but certainly the same notes, in each revision of the story. I did not think the conventions of plot and story could be disregarded so blatantly with such success. Vain Art of the Fugue is a challening read, but more rewarding than many things I have read recently. It is an entirely different way of telling a story with an emphasis on the things in the story rather than the story as a whole. In a way it is the opposite of what Steinbeck tried to do in his story-play Burning Bright. Where Steinbeck took the broader story of his piece and repeated and expanded it with different pieces, Tsepeneag places the emphasis on the continuity of the pieces though the story may be different. As with anything that is associated with GEB, there's math somewhere nearby.

K2 the 1939 Tragedy

Andrew J Kauffman
William L Putnam

Commendable but not recommended as a way of life.

History with an agenda is always a little unnerving. History is always a little unnerving. Though Kauffman and Putnam go about "setting the record straight" with the necessary nods at the opposing viewpoint, it is clear that they intend to leave one sort of taste in the reader's mouth. Perhaps if they hadn't been quite so blatant about their project, or perhaps if they had never acknowledged that they were doing it, my mind would not have put up so many fences and walls to keep them from getting into me. While it covers an interesting story, it fails to do more than be finger-pointing.

Riding Toward Everywhere

William T. Vollmann

I am not a brave man at all, but a cautious, even timid soul who makes himself pull off one stunt after another for his own good.

Above all, how luxurious it is to travel I care not where for no good reason! As my best friend Ben likes to say, What you get is what you get. And I hope that as what I get diminishes, thanks to old age, erotic rejection, financial loss or authority’s love-taps, I will continue to receive it gratefully. But there is no gainsaying the fact that what I’ve gotten is more than many people’s share. Contempt for my privileged railroad follies may or may not be warranted. The question is what I make of them. When Thoreau went to ground at Walden Pond, he got free use of Emerson’s land. When he was jailed for refusing to pay his poll tax, a lady bailed him out. Do these two footnotes of dependency vitiate the integrity of his eloquence? It may well be that Thoreau lacked gratitude for these favors, or that his self-reliance was never as perfect as he pretended or I once imagined. What of that? During the time of their fashioning, words may or may not dwell with their maker in a relationship of “sincerity.” After the maker has finished with them, they live to the extent that they inspire us. I might not have been allowed to be, nor wanted to be, Thoreau’s friend. But Walden gives me pleasure and makes me braver. So does riding the rails. If this essay can do the same for you, then my material comforts, even if in your eyes they render me a dilettante or a hypocrite, have been useful means to that end. If this essay fails, the fault must be in it, in you, me, the orange bucket or some combination of the above; all the same, it was still written “sincerely.”

Hypocrisy is a great shadow over life. We are all possessors of hypocrisy just as we are all possessors of shadows. Like our shadows, hypocrisy grows and shrinks but never fully leaves us. The great length of humanity's shadow sickens us. From the privileged college kids discussing poverty to the fearful readers of high adventure to the many residents of church pews on Sunday, few, if any are able to match up the ideals of their worldview with the reality of their worldlife. Most live a disgustingly righteous life in their minds while their actual actions are dirty, sticky, dull, and muddy with selfishness. Every great proponent of anything has failed to live up to his own advice. We are often in word but rare in deed.
How many people have become embittered at the sight of so much hypocrisy, at such a shadowy land? No one can last long in such a shadowland without being driven to anger, bitterness and hatred. You've met these people. Former idealists who have been hurt too many times by friends and fellows, prematurely retired zealots who found they didn't have the strength to push through on their own and now recognize the shadows in others that are similar to their own. So their shadows grow long with the lengthening shadows of the world and it seems the sun is setting on them.
Standing beneath a tree, it's hard to see anything but shadowy shapes. Walking through a shadowed valley, few wildflowers are noticed. Sitting in the shade of a porch, dimness. But we cannot forgot that shadows are always produced by realities in the sun. What looks to be ugly and dark is only our perception of a thousand bright-shining leaves. What look like great walls looming forbodingly over us, are the gentle green slopes covered in heather and red. What is dimness, is the misperception of goodness. Hypocrisy will always exist and often in great quantities, but like shadows it is a slight impression made by a good reality. To dwell in shadows, to search them out first, to roll oneself up in them, to find them about you is to fail to use your eyes and to gaze at a flat, monochrome representation of the truth. If you live in shadows, look at the sunlight side of the shadow-caster.
Get pissed if you would like. Sit down in your little shadowland and find the world unintersting and gray and dull. But remember, this is not reality. So look atVollmann and Thoreau and myself and anyone who has ever let you down, all great paragons of outspoken hypocrisy, and recognize that it couldn't be so shadowy if there weren't such a bulk of goodness standing between you and the sun.

A Furnace Afloat

Joe Jackson

Good luck had consequences.

Perhaps he didn’t know it yet, for Fred was angered beyond words. This is what it comes to, he thought: a high-hat’s offer of money for something more precious than gold. He hated Henry in that instant as he stared back at the gaunt face, wide eyes, mouth frozen open in hope and surprise. Why didn’t the little bastard just ask for water instead of going on about how much his watch would bring? As if there was a pawn shop here in the Pacific; as if he could eat the watch case and mainspring. That’s what the rich always assumed of the poor—that they were slaves to the price of a trinket, lackeys to be bought and sold. It didn’t work like that, not here. Sure it was easy to take money, but what people like Henry never understood was that you did so to survive. Survival was what ultimately mattered: the fuel that drove the anger, that primed the panic of starvation, that lurked in every shadow like a thug. Survival was the chasm dividing the rich and poor, a divide the rich would never bridge because they hadn’t experienced what such life did to a man. It twisted him to something brutal, turned him inside out with vengeance till he was ready to kill just to be heard. Eventually he assumed that killing was the only way to be heard. The gap would grow wider, the hatred deeper, until the entire world was like their little boat, swept by a wrath that raged like a furnace till nothing was left but ashes in a drifting hull.

A clipper ship set afire and sunk through one man's carelessness; a 4,300 mile voyage in a longboat; a class war enacted in the microcosm of a castaway's world--survival does not induce democracy any more than a voting system.