You Bright and Risen Angels

William T Vollmann

This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality's brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles. 

An owner of an apple orchard has a bad year because his apples aren't selling. He believes that the reason they aren't selling is that people have suddenly started eating more oranges. At a town-hall meeting, he tells a group of community members who don't know much about orchards, What we're talking about is oranges, not apples. The implication of this statement is that most people think the important issues is apples, and while they matter, the true professional knows that there is something else going on.

In a recent interview with Barbara Walters, General David Petraeus, US head of command in Afghanistan said, What we're after is increasing security for the population, not trying to kill or capture every single Taliban in the country.

The implication here is that most people believe the US is trying to kill or capture every single Taliban in Afghanistan. The last time you heard about people trying to kill or capture everyone in a specific group, didn't it sound like genocide? Though we do not always think about what we say, Petraeus' comment reveals something very disturbing to me in how America thinks about its War on Terrorism. Petraeus' comment was not a harsh correction or a firm reminder; he spoke calmly and it did not seem that capturing or killing every single Taliban in Afghanistan was a thing that should be avoided, only that it wasn't as good a goal as providing security to the population. One got the sense that capturing and killing every single Taliban in Afghanistan would be a nice by-product, but regrettably it was not as important as security.

It's dangerous when any nation or group of people decide that another group needs to be captured or killed. This is a very troubling idea to me. Few Americans would have difficulty digesting the statement: Our mission is to kill every terrorist. Yet, terrorist is a term that we reserve the sole power of applying. I'm willing to bet that Osama, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Islamic extremists do not think of themselves as terrorists. When they get together at Ramadan for family reunions, and mom asks what Osama is up to now days, the answer is not, Oh, he's still a terrorist, probably will stick with it for a few more years, there's a lot happening in the field right now. Since we have the right to apply the label and the label removes its bearer's right to life, shouldn't someone be asking some questions about this?

The Atlas

William T Vollmann

Scissoring legs and shadows scudding like clouds across the marble proved destiny in action, for the people who rushed through this concourse came from the rim of everywhere to be ejaculated everywhere, redistributing themselves without reference to each other. A few, like the small girl who sat on the stairs holding her bald baby doll, or the lady who stopped, shifted the strap of her handbag, and gazed at the departure times for the New Haven Line, delayed judgment (and an executive paused in his descent of the steps, snorted at the girl’s doll, and said: I thought that baby was real!). But no one stayed here, except the souls without homes. Above the information kiosk, the hands of the illuminated clock circled all the directions, and condensed into meaningless animal sounds. There was a circle and its spokes were their trajectories. But the circle turned! They did not understand the strangeness of that. Creased black trousers, naked brown legs, merciless knees, skirts and jeans, overalls swollen tight with floating testicles, paisley handbags passing as smoothly as magic carpets, these made noise, had substance, but the place become more and more empty as I sat there, because none of it was for anything but itself. The belt of brass flowers that crossed the ceiling’s belly meant something, made the place more like a church; the tunnels where the trains stretched themselves out, gleaming their lights, were the catacombs. One of those passageways went to the Montrealer, my favorite train. Canada’s railroads continued north from Montreal, which was why when I peered into that tunnel (I’d ridden the Montrealer so many times, and wouldn’t anymore), it was almost as if I could see all the way to Hudson Bay; one Canadian National sleeper did still went to Churchill--

Whores for Gloria

William T Vollmann

He remembered how Melissa had said to him well one of the things I used to do to combat that boredom was building forts, building like a little cave with the sheets, crawling under it, like a little tent I was inside by myself, setting up housekeeping, just pretending I was somewhere else. It was kind of easy in the dark environment. That's what being a kid is about, pretending. You've got to pretend you're this, pretend you're that, pretend you're a grownup, pretend you're not, pretend you're somebody else. --That's right Melissa, sighed Jimmy to himself sitting on his bed and when you're a grownup you've got to pretend you're with somebody else. What a lot of work and trouble everything is.

Prostitution is a topic that is very interesting to me. Putting a price on something so intimate as love--love being a thing that should be out of the realm of economies as much as eternal is out of the realm of time. Love surely does not operate by any economic law. So prostitution is one of the few places love subjects itself to economics.

As much as prostitution is paying for a physical feeling, it must also be paying for an emotional feeling; nothing can be so close, so physically personally close and not be emotional. If there's any sense you get from Whores for Gloria, it's that prostitution is about much more than paying for sex.

Rising Up and Rising Down

William T Vollmann
Abridged

In short, satyagraha is correct only if the sacrifice is for something, and only if the oppressor will eventually be moved to cease his aggression should the sacrifice become of sufficient magnitude. If one or both of these conditions remains unmet, then counterviolence is justified.

That was the beginning, their pact to be one family. Gandhi prayed and fasted to keep it so. he failed; mass loving-kindness perishes; but maybe violence, wrong, rivalry and envy can be sublimated into emulation. hence this Spartan definition of the best government: The one in which the largest number of citizens are willing to compete with each other in excellence and without civil discord. But a child stole another child's pretty rock, as he would have done before people came together. A woman liked somebody else's husband. I ask you, Plato: Who is too rich or too poor for that to happen? And you, Spartans: Tell me how she can leave one man for another without civil discord? --A family feared, hence hated, another family's God. A man kept pretty cattle, and he knew that other men wanted him to die so that they could get them. Meanwhile, Julius Caesar's bodyguard was growing ominously large. It was time for government. Unfortunately, it is always time for government.

Martin Luther in the Heidelberg Theses of 1518 had warned that too vivid an apprehension of the beautiful things would give a moral actor confidence--which by the Lutheran definition must be unwarranted--in his own moral capacity. The works of men are all the more deadly when they are done without fear, he wrote, and with pure and evil assurance. (A modern restatement: When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow.)

Carry out your program, please, not your ideology.

The gloomy conclusion begins to appear that whenever violence defines my relationship to you, I must be an apple and you an orange, and only dust upon our peeled carcasses can make us one; that because the stakes can be so high (literally, life and death), violent confrontations tend to be predicated on insoluble disagreement.

My own aim in beginning this book was to create a simple practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it was acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth--cold-blooded enough, you will say, but life cannot evade death. Have you ever shot a cow in the head, slit her throat, cut her hooves off, skinned her, gutted her and quartered her so that you and others can eat? Have you ever been the doctor who must decide which one of ten patients gets the life-support machine? Surely it is better to have a rational and consistent means of doing these things than to do them trying not to think of what one is doing.--Suppose, then, that the calculus can prove that one ought never to kill. --Well and good. We are surely better off for seeing it proved.

As a factory worker, my productive power becomes potentially unlimited. New machines decrease the amount of time it takes me to make something, thereby allowing--that is, requiring--me to make more such items than before, for the same fixed wage. It is as if I suddenly found myself digging not one ditch for my lord but ten. I may expend no more effort than I did in completing a single ditch, and so in a certain sense opaque to Marxism am not exploited at all (or at least I'm not more exploited than I was), but thanks to capital, embodied in the new machine, the gap between my wage and my lord's profit has increased by an order of magnitude. The distinction between absolute and relative poverty suddenly becomes much more important. It is no longer what I make but I myself who am for sale.

Were they just cynical loyalists? Maybe not. Arkhipenkov's persecutors must have been quite sure of themselves, one would think. So they were. As the secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, a fellow who is known to have worked in a grain confiscation brigade noted about new people 'raised up' by the Party: 'It's hard to find the right words to express this confidence, but I'll try. It's a feeling of power, might, and serenity that comes from the realization that the mighty Soviet people, a hundred seventy million strong, is behind you.' Joan of Arc, and those who burned her, could have said the same thing, substituting God for the Soviet people. They too were sure that they were right. And perhaps the secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers was right, too.

Again and above all, no clay-eater can be blamed for wanting to do something about his hunger.

But what about states' rights? asks Lincoln derisively in his speech. Well, if the citizens of Nebraska can invoke those to keep slaves, then it is certainly within their rights to go to Africa to buy slaves, and we've already made doing that a capital crime! --Not that anybody's yet been hanged for it...--For Lincoln the struggle between state and federal authority can be resolved in only one way; we never hear him argue that the federal government ought not to have the power to regulate slave trading. (Oddly enough, however, when the issue of granting statehood to Utah comes up, he says that there is nothing in the Constitution which allows the government to prohibit polygamy there, which is precisely what the government ultimately does.) Trotsky and Tolstoy speak of natural law; and there does seem to be a natural law that authority enlarges itself indefinitely, whether by frenzied growth in revolution or by incumbency's subtler increase. Given the rights of the self, it seems to me that authority possesses the right to self-aggrandizement only through imminence or incumbency. Most of the time, it grows without right.

An Aztec war hymn runs in part: 'I go forth, I go forth about to destroy, I, Yoatzin; my soul is in the cerulean water.'
Meanwhile Cortes addresses his men at the very beginning of the expedition to New Spain: 'We are engaging in a just and good war which will bring us fame.' Doubtless he prays for his good success every day when he goes to Mass. 'He was devout and given to praying,' recalls his secretary; 'he knew many prayers and psalms by heart.'

Metaphors ought to be left outside both courtroom and battlefield; metaphors and political action (to say nothing of metaphors and violence) make a dangerous mix.

Overreliance on context might lure me into the false assertion that the functionary of an evil regime must be evil--or, more vulgarly still, that the 'objective' nature of that context allows for only a certain moral decision. Trotsky tells us that he was prepared from childhood to be a revolutionary, simply as a result of seeing around him so much injustice. But his parents, who saw the same things, did not become revolutionaries. Context does not determine; it only contextualizes.

The most illuminating way to perceive the shoddiness of your own ideals is to witness someone else practicing them.

Lincoln's victory in the American Civil War was justified certainly by the abolition of slavery it brought about, and arguably by the fact that the South attacked first. But one result of his victory, and the main point for which is was fought--federal control--was not justified.

The letter itself is much shorter than its signature pages. The terrible year of 1992 has dwindled away from these people now; they live on or they have died. This letter accordingly means nothing. Their names mean nothing today as they meant nothing before the evil men and women whose policies locked them fast to the front line of a besieged city. Let them stand in for all the other people whose names have meant nothing to war criminals.

Most of the people I've helped are either in jail or dead, he said.

The same comment/quote made of Europe Central applies to Rising Up and Rising Down as well: How could you not know what goes on in this world?

Did you know that there are parts of Kingston, Jamaica (Trenchtown, Rema, Tivoli) are almost wartorn? Did you know that in 1999 Kosovo residents had to run everywhere for fear of being a sniper's target? Did you know that in 1995 the UN pulled out of Somalia (see page A24 of your local newspaper)? Did you know that Khmer Rouge executed people with pickaxes? I guess the exhaustive list of violence committed by humans would be a violence itself, since so few could be faced with such a condemnation. So I'll stop woefully short.

I am a sheltered person. I have made feeble efforts not to be, but they have amounted to very little. I would not want to unfairly condemn my generation, class, or nation, but I feel that those who partake of these three with me, also partake of my shelter.

How can we not know what goes on in this world?

We may have an obligation to ensure that we do know, at least a little of what goes on in this world, but how can we dare to know what goes on in this world? Who could bear that burden? Both valid questions that together leave me right here.

Vollmann makes a courageous attempt to face the violence in the world and he speaks from experience--true he doesn't speak from the experience of a boy in Rema or a woman in Kosovo, but he did his best to share some of this with them, without mocking the blessings of peace he has been given. You wonder by the end how he isn't dead--if not from all the danger he has placed himself in, than from the sheer horror of what he's researched, witnessed, and been told. My only answer is that even he, a man without faith, still has hope. If Vollmann can have hope, no Christian ever has the excuse of giving hope up.

It's sadly funny that Vollmann had to abridge his seven-volume opus into this so much condensed edition in order for it to get read; it's sad that his seven volume edition probably anoints many a university library shelf like a bottle of forgotten, disliked perfume sitting in the back of a bathroom drawer. But at least in its abridgment it reaches a few more voices with its potency, even if there is less of it.

If you read this post and read Rising Up and Rising Down, it will probably make you feel like a thief, at least a little, for the gifts and blessings and peace you most likely have. Count yourself lucky, if you do feel like such a one, for 'This day you will be with me in paradise'.

Europe Central

William T Vollmann

In the era of total war, coddling musicians might appear to be a weakness. But our apparatchiks knew better. Music inspired harder work and distracted the toilers from dangerous thoughts. Besides, music was all we could offer just now. The Seventh and Seventy-third Armies of the Northern Front, the Eighth, Eleventh and Twenty-seventh Armies of the Northwestern Front--thirty-nine divisions and two brigades in all--they held the line against the Fascists, but they were dwindling by the thousands. (Many had been liquidated by the SS Death's-Head Division.) And those squat, propeller-driven MIG-3s in formation over Leningrad, they weren't ready just yet; first we had to relocate our airplane factories out of Hitler's reach, and then we'd need to so to speak, you know. Where were the T-34 tanks? Wait two years; we had no tank armies yet. That was why loudspeakers chanted from every street corner (Akhmatova was on the radio); that was why even along the White Sea Canal, on whose construction a hundred thousand people died, there'd occasionally been convict orchestras huddled on concrete slabs, their horns drooping down like the beaks of perishing ravens as they played inspirational melodies.

It was Nina's fate to always give, but hurriedly and quick-temperedly, so her gifts were not received with gratitude. He for his part was a generous man without anything to give.

He knew that he could hold on until death. He'd always been brave; he'd endured many discomforts: but this miserable and quite possibly hopeless struggle had stripped away everything but truth: He was ready; he was worthy; he believed fully in himself. How grateful he felt to Coca for believing in him all these years! He had needed her faith; if this beautiful, passionate woman of royal blood stood willing to be his comrade for life, then his rejection by the Navy, his father's dreary career, his own reserve in friendship, could be regarded with the smiling tolerance with which a man remembers the missteps of boyhood. He'd won the prize!

He told the boys the tale of Simple Hans, whose princely brothers despised him for a fool but who won the princess in the end because he saved the ants, ducks and bees from harm, a favor they requited by coming to his aid when he was set humanly impossible magic tasks in the castle of stone effigies: The ants gathered up and counted all the scattered pearls, the ducks dove down to find the lost key, and the bee queen tasted the lips of each sleeping princess to find out which girl was the most charming.

A month later he was summoned back to Prague, to receive another suitcase. He had two hours before his train. (There went his colleagues, marching in a light as straight and grand as the Doric columns of Schinkel's Neue Wache.) This time his footsteps guided him to an antique store's ticking clock, bare-breasted porcelains, fake pearl necklaces and dead women's black gowns. Something for his wife...He allowed himself to imagine how Christian's face would have lit up had he dropped around his neck that eighteenth-century Cross of the Order of the White Eagle which Captain Wirth had forced on him; boys always love militaria, and this was an eight-pointed star of gold, garnished with silver and diamonds! Actually, what he should have done was to sell it and feed his family. Instead, he buried it in the Polish earth, praying softly for its former owner, the grey-green trees going ethereal beyond his tears as they would have done in any rain. Rain of blood, rain of steel, rain on the rich green grass of Auschwitz! Tears and prayers are both supposed to refresh one's soul.

Elena was conscious of him, of course; she knew that he was reading what she was reading; but later on, years later, he suspected that she had been oblivious of his pain; for who are we to think ourselves of such interest to others, even to our spouses, that they can truly read us?

Operation Citadel commenced at 0430 hours on 5.7.43. It concluded on 19.7.43, after seventy thousand of us were dead.

I remember the fairytales that Grandmother Elsa used to tell me that it's necessary to follow without the slightest deviation the advice of the fox, fish, sleepwalker, raven, telephone, ragged dwarf; moreover, this advice grows all the more valid as it disguises itself as nonsense: When stealing the golden horse, saddle him up in the worn tackle, not the jeweled harness which hangs on the other peg. When stealing the Golden Princess, who offers to come with you willingly on condition that you permit her to say goodbye to her parents, you must forbid her precisely this. Be firm; let her weep! In other words, the reward will fall only to him who obeys blindly and faithfully.

When four dozen ebony men in chains appear, you must not reply when they ask who you are. You must allow them first to beat you, then to cut off your head. When T-34s converge on you, you must gaze steadily up at their snouts. Don't yield a single square centimeter to them! IF you follow these orders faithfully, then the talking serpent will change back into a princess for you to marry, and you'll become King of the Golden Castle.

She's too high, too far away. That's how I've felt about each woman in my life. For their part, women have tried to understand me, but what is there to understand? I am nothing more than I am.

A pyramid of flame (to pick a familiar wartime example) possesses a specific shape at any given isntant, adn a general shape over time; we call it a pyramid only for convenience; it's writhing upward, getting nowhere in particular, doomed to subsidence.

All magic spells fail without belief. We enforced belief. In place of ruins we offered the wide white monumentality of Stallinallee, arched, windowed, black and white, fading magnificently into the East.

(In the street he saw a man slip his arm around a woman and that was extremely painful.)

Maybe the only person that an artist can be faithful to is himself. Maybe he's got to betray everybody else. Will you kindly get that martyred look off your face? That's just how it goes. Sometimes I think you're not even conscious of it. A pair of dark eyes comes floating toward you, adn you can't help yourself; you follow them like a sleepwalker--

Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn't marry me.

What's that sound? Have you ever seen the expressionless faces of people in a queue to send parcels to their spouses in prison camps? They mask themselves out of knowledge that the 'organs' are watching. Or perhaps they've developed this habit simply because our Soviet Union is a cold country; one learns to hide oneself simply to, so to speak, stay warm, to, to, to, well. In this opera, however, we're in the ancient times of Russian bear-hunters: Swamps and forest of Russian misery press all around, besieging the walls which jail Katerina. In our time life will be more, so to speak, JOYFUL: The walls will grow higher; the Fifth Symphony will end with hordes of perfidiously bristling bug-legged notes and chords strung on the music paper's barbed wire; Opus 110 will scream like invalids in a burning hospital (by teh way, screaming is also the task of an intellectual in crisis); unfortunately, 'Lady Macbeth' remains trapped in the prerevolutionary era; poor Katerina's on her way to Siberia! But she's happy, she sings Seryosha's name. What is it that those idiots always say about Zoya? Not long but beautifully did she live! Ha, and then those Fascists hanged her! Beautifully, all right! Sometimes I want to spew. And Katerina's just another, you know. They'll want me to compose her in a major key: Not long but JOYFUL. What a...It might have been well for her had she troubled to consider the studied blankness of her fellow prisoners' faces, because then she might ahve found the mockery interred so shallowly beneath the twitching earth of their grey lips--buried alive! Well, that's par for the course in Opus 110.

And from a Polish father, a Jewish mother, how could you not know what goes on in this world? And then what happened to your mother, you, well, that's how it is for all of us. Irinochka, please, please forgive me for my, for, for speaking to you in this monstrous fashion; I know I'm a...Poor child! What a lot of pain I've caused you! And you knew it anyway, didn't you?

Europe Central is the closest thing I've ever found to a novel written in the second person plural. Vollmann writes a novel we live. Focusing on many historical actors--D D Shostakovitch, Roman Karmen, the Soviet general Vlasov, the Nazi general Paulus, the German artist Kathe Kollwitz, the Christian member of the SS Kurt Gerstein, and others--Vollmann tells the story of all the hurting people of central Europe. It's a story that comes at time when we need to hear what we are living. Vollmann tells the story of we because we are at risk of not recognizing our membership in we.

Vollmann puts more flesh and bloody rags on the structure of history than many author's I've read. He takes the history we think we know, and turns it into the stories of people and makes us realize that it isn't like anything we knew. Since the general attitude towards WW2 is pleasant--because we're far enough from it now, because we won it, because it was a white war, because we have to have something to be proud of--we rarely dwell on the atrocity of that bloody period. It's shocking to thick that more gruesome atrocities were being committed seventy years ago in Europe than we hear about in most troubled areas of Africa. From the Holocaust to Stalingrad to Dresden to the Soviets, people proved to be wildly inventive at inflicting fiendish pain on each other. So much for WW2.

Through all of it, there is the nerve-twisting music of Shostakovitch. Shostakovitch might be the central character of Europe Central and what a central character he is: weak, cowardly, stuttering, soft, tormented, adulterous, yet capable of courage for his art, and with the heart of a lover to bring fame to love. The story of Shostakovitch, dreary, sad, tormented, terrified, beautiful, is the story of his times. For a generation that has come into adulthood in the 2000s, it is hard to imagine the awful destruction and poverty and pain that Central Europe spent most of the 20th Century slogging through.

How could we not know what goes on in this world? Well, if we're as insulated as I feel, as insulated as the people I meet seem, as insulated as the media proves, it seems that the answer is quite easily. We are privileged because we can choose to not know what goes on in the world. Exercising this right of ours, do we risk losing our ability to choose? What if we live in chosen ignorance so long we no longer realize the choice? We have access to more information than any generation before us; we have the ability to travel more freely, we have the calm of a country whose land has been at peace for over a century: How could we not know what goes on in this world?

Poor People

William T Vollmann

At any rate, here follows one more sad and probably useless categorization of the "dimensions of poverty."

The terminal cancer patient who believes in cures, isn't he better off? The "healthy" soul who looks forward to tomorrow, which is a day nearer the grave, the man who knows that the Americans will do something, the homeless men who marry prostitutes for money, the strivers and opium addicts alike, the devotees of placebos and the strategists who can solve all the difficulties provided only that it is given to them to dispense more aid, better directed, why not cheer them on instead of pity them?
I propose that false hopes are as good as true, provided that they cause no harm; and that anyhow between true and false we can but infrequently tell the difference. --Oksana had said: I was the kind of person who always had hope and never begged. --Now she always begged. --Shall we demean her former hope by calling it wrongheaded? --Until he's dead, who am I to say that the cancer patient is truly terminal?

Every man is rich or poor; says Adam Smith, to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life. But after the division of labour has once thoroughly taken place, it is but a small part of these with which a man's own labour can supply him.
Well, then, what if, as did Thoreau, one rejects the division of labor?
Children, the unemployed, artistically inclined imaginations such as Elena's, all such people live in an undivided or at least less divided world.
People who by First World standards are underemployed, people with slow lives, divide their labor less than others.
Might there accordingly be some way for them to redefine their necessaries, conveniences and amusements back within reach?

Could it be that sharing resources and responsibilities works best when there is not much to share?
In that case, people with almost nothing and people with almost everything might be better off than the ones afflicted with relative poverty--who have enough to lose but not enough to be happy.
I prefer to hope and believe that a culture of communalism, however attenuated it may become as a result of material enrichment, can mitigate each and every one of the phenomena of poverty. Invisibility, deformity and unwantedness cannot defeat true neighborliness, at least not all the time. Dependence and accident-prone-ness are more powerful monsters: A band of refugees, or the dispossessed homeowners of Nan Ning, might start their journey to hell with all the mutual goodwill in the world, but should the impoverishment be poisonous enough, any resistance to it, single or collective, will be ineffective. But even if no other sustenance is available, unfortunate people can offer each other comfort, as they can when they have no medicine for pain. I remember the mothers and fathers who sat with their sanctioned children in Saddam Hussein Pediatric Hospital; my government would not let any medicines through, a freedom-loving policy which the doctors bitterly assured me had caused numbers of these children to die needlessly; but surely they were better off dying with than without their parents rocking them in their arms. As for numbness and estrangement, the same considerations apply.

Weakness, traditionally, is not seen as a virtue. Nor is weakness recognized as one of the more prized traits. Indeed only coward pacifists who are usually more two-faced than they are principled or more principled than they are loving, only these and idealistic college students and a few radicals who have forgotten even how to pick their nose (or picked it too often), only these are foolish enough to claim weakness as virtue--well, these and Jesus, but of course he meant it much differently.
Jesus, when he said, blessed are the weak, did not mean, and no way he ever could have meant, pursue weakness. Or go out there and get it for yourself. To think such a thing is just plain stupid at best. At worst, it's a vile form of hypocrisy and pompous patronization that leads to pleasuring oneself with the smell of one's own farts.
If I were to be such an asinine product of wealth and spoil as to suggest that weakness were a virtue, not only would I be considered arrogant, but I'd also be found guilty of an evil that disqualifies me from participation in the human race. It's not like that's happened to anyone before.

But for a moment, indulge me by withholding your indignation. Weakness can be a virtue. It takes a weak man to say this. And, though I may not be weak in some ways, I am weak in others. It has to do with benevolence, which is also a virtue. While it requires humility to accept benevolence, it requires weakness to be received. Charity always involves benevolence. This means Charity requires weakness. But what gives so many instances of charity their off-key twang is not that it involves weakness but that it only acknowledges that benevolence can flow one way.
When was the last time you accepted benevolence from the object of your charity? If no instance comes to mind, it is because you are not charitable or because you cannot see that an object of your charity has the capability (potential) to be benevolent towards you. Accept benevolence from the poor--they have it to give and often give it in greater quantities than the rich--and you do much for yourself. If you are not interested in your self, but rather in the selves of your charitable objects, you should recognize that you will never be able to refer to someone who receives your charity as anything but a nameless "they" or an even more distasteful "object of charity", in fact you just might find that you are not even benevolent.

But beyond this, if by some chance you are convinced a little, you are going to have to not only acknowledge your own weakness in order to receive benevolence, you are going to have to pursue this runt virtue in order to acquire it. Don't forget that virtues are formed by habits.

Rifles

William T Vollmann

He had the knowledge that manhood isn’t something you only earn once, even when you’ve been circumcised by the Elders or you’ve killed your first tiger, but something that must be achieved over and over, always by pursuing what you fear; if you stay still you will only come to fear more and more things. Being a man doesn’t mean being afraid of nothing; it means being warned by the fear, not mastered by it. There was nothing wrong with being afraid of what he was about to do. He had never done it. He was doing it. Later he could feel proud or ashamed of it.

It is strange when the light fails. Since it happens so gradually, you are deceived. The river is still blue – surely the same blue! The fractures in the rocks on the far side are as numerous as ever (not that you counted them), and the tundra is still there with all its little mosses and leaves. Everything is still there, and yet everything is harder to see. Logic proves that certain things which were visible a quarter-hour ago cannot be anymore. But which?

A polar bear killed a man and didn’t even get to eat him before it was shot.

Maybe life is a process of trading hope for memories. When the snow was deep in September maybe you did not remember very much. But you did remember, I am sure, how many flat rocks of a sulphurous color there were which had been shattered into slabs stacked neatly one against the next like the slices of a loaf of bread; you could pick up a book of these slabs and turn their livid-yellow pages in your hands, reading the words of lichen-dots and listening to the moaning of the wind; then, if you chose, you could skip the pages into some Arctic lake one by one, and watch them smash into two as they struck the water, sink, and lie shimmering among the greenish rocks, and the water rippled over them in the wind, as if trying to turn them, but they would never turn or be together again. – All books are like this; they stand shoulder to shoulder in the library stacks; perhaps they are ‘popular’ at first, perhaps not, but eventually they stand anonymous, unread, forgotten; and that is how it should be, for that is how it is with lives.

These appearances, however were but gimmicks of the present, whose artifice it is to make everything seem new.

When a Native American first fired a rifle, he agreed to the unstated contract that doomed all American tribes and guaranteed European success on the North American continent. This is because technologies, like species, can have catastrophic consequences when they migrate. You have heard of invasive species--the rifle was an invasive technology.
A technology develops in a specific context and when the higher levels of that technology migrate to another context there is always the risk that the balance will be so disturbed that the context will be driven to extinction before it can reattain equilibrium--and this is usually through ignorance.
When European traders brought firearms to North America, the natives were presented with a vastly more effective tool that was also much easier to use. But what natives did not understand was that firearms rely on a massive infrastructure which is in turn based on an even more sweeping set of technologies and values. By using a rifle, a native endorsed and became a part of such things as mining, manufacturing, industrialism, corporations, markets, capitalism, western philosophy, and even Christianity. Without passing judgment on any of these things, it is safe to say that their transplantation into a society might be dangerous--and is undoubtedly worrying when they are transplanted in secret.
In Western society, where the aforementioned technologies and values were evolved, the society was adapted to their presence and at balance with them. But when they were brought to North America, the same protective shielding of slowness and time was not available to act as a buffer to their integration into native societies. The technologies were available and ready-to-use, so who could wait?
But with their use came a reliance on Europeans because native society lacked many of the technologies off which firearms are based. They had to blindly agree to these without the ability either to develop them for themselves or observe and consider how they would change their society.
After fifty years of rifle use, what was left of the original hunting technologies and cultures of natives? Not enough to kick the addiction to European supply of ammunition and firearms and technology. It was in this way that Europeans conquered North America.

Currently, we have the moral enlightenment to shake our heads and wag our fingers at this behavior. We think we would have had more respect. But at the same moment we advise developing countries to accept our boon of modern medicine (just as an example, there are millions of advanced technologies that we are giving as impossible debts). Many of these countries cannot help but take this fruit we offer--it's miraculous after all--yet they do not understand that by taking their are agreeing to all the technologies and values that are the context for the development of modern medicine. And in many cases developing countries are also agreeing to a reliance on developed countries that sometimes looks more like subjugation than philanthropy and aid. And so when they've forgotten how they used to do medicine, when their own technologies have been choked into extinction by the invasive species of a far more pernicious species, what will they do if the new species suddenly dies off? What will they do if they decide that they don't like these new flowers? They were hooked but they didn't even know it.

And on an even more startling scale (well, maybe not, but it will be to you, because if you're reading this, you'll probably care more about what I'm about to say than what I just said), all technology is the same. We never really understand what we are getting into when we adopt a new technology, especially in our culture where new is a very good word and old is often a bad one. We've been raised to believe that if it's new it's worth our attention and maybe worth a shot. But who knows how addicting the technologies we develop are? What if one shot is enough to hook us?
So now we've got the Internet, cell phones, television, plastic, nuclear bombs and we don't really understand all we've agreed to in our contracts with these technologies, nor do we even know if there is a way to go back. We assume that if a technology catches on and becomes widely in use it's good. But by that definition, we are forever doomed to what is new and can never, never go back. If five years from now we find out that the Internet is actually more of a chain than freedom, we won't have anything for it but to bind our wrists a little tighter.

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.

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.