Last Words

“Don’t let it end like this.
Tell them I said something.”

—Pancho Villa

On the last trip, I picked up a little book of Famous Last Words. I don’t really want to ask my mother what my father’s last words were. I suspect though, that they were the words he said as she helped him into the emergency room:

“I’m in bad shape.”

He died very shortly after he arrived. I’m sure he was stuffed full of tubes, and not in the position to provide an intelligent commentary. I’ve been thinking a lot about how little he really said to me over the course of my life. We didn’t really need to talk much. Especially in the last few years, I think it was just enough for me to be there. I felt pretty much the same. We already knew what we agreed about, disagreed about, etc.. There wasn’t really much need to talk about it. We were never a physically “touchy-feely” kind of family, though at least for the last year we always hugged when I left. There was enough assurance that we loved each other without much in the way of verbal or physical signage. He was in a good place, with most of the conflicts of his life resolved. I was in a good place too, moving forward to finally doing what I wanted to do in this life—with his help. And I know he felt good about being able to help me. Now it is my turn to help my mother. She is doing well through all this, but I know there may be more rocky moments ahead. They were inseparable. My parents were always a team.

One of the quotes in the deathbed book did make me smile. Franklin Roosevelt’s last words were:

“I have a terrific headache.”

Dad was very proud of having voted for Roosevelt once. I’m sure he’d be amused that their “last words” were so similar.

Ego where I go

It is strange for me to not write each day. The confusion of existing in two states with so much business to take care of has left my public space a blank. But not my private one. Eventually, I will get back to keeping up on the public goings on, but for now I’ve just been taking it a day at a time. This has been the longest hiatus I’ve had in years from writing. The ephemeral nature of my thoughts keeps urging me to get back to writing, in the fear that so much of what I’ve been working my way through will just disappear.

Sometimes, people say, you just have to take time for your “self.” I’m hazy on that concept. Just what is a “self” anyway? I tend to think of my “self” as fractured and heading a thousand directions at once. I was very amused by Harold Bloom’s contention in a recent Atlantic interview:

You like to tell your students, “There is no method except yourself.” What do you mean by that?

I believe that very passionately. My friend Paul de Man with whom, as I say, I used to argue endlessly, would tell me that after a lifetime of searching, he had found the method, the “Troot,” as he put it—that Belgian pronunciation of “Truth.” I would say, “No, dear Paul, there is no Truth. There is only the Self.”

What theory did the great critics have? Critics like Dr. Samuel Johnson or William Hazlitt? Those who adopt a theory are simply imitating somebody else. I believe firmly that, in the end, all useful criticism is based upon experience. An experience of teaching, an experience of reading, one’s experience of writing—and most of all, one’s experience of living. Just as wisdom, in the end, is purely personal. There can be no method except the Self.

The self seems to me a room full of mirrors, reflecting imperfectly all that we have experienced. Our conception of “self” is always skewed like a fun-house mirror. So, for Bloom then, the only real method is self-involved perversion? I was amused by that thought.

Who I am is inseparable from those I have known. I watch my mother cope with the changes in her life, and I see myself. It might be a matter of biology, but then again, it could just be my own urge to shape the world in my own image. I’m not sure that there is an escape from that, and yet I feel certain that the answers are not inside me, but rather, out there somewhere. Otherwise, there would be no reason to do anything except sit under the Bo tree.

* noted for my own reference: I wonder what Harold Bloom would say about the extreme modes of self-consciousness referenced in this post by Ampersand and the ensuing comment debate?

Bugged

Besides being at a loss for what to write, I’ve also been splitting my time between here and Oklahoma. I haven’t felt like messing with the dial-up connection over there and haven’t been reading blogs except in small doses about one day a week. I’ve got to develop a new routine and I don’t know where to begin. For now, I can only offer a blanket thank-you to those who have commented or e-mailed. Hopefully I can do more later. There are lots of stories to be written, and lots of things I’ve been reading and thinking about.

I noticed a strange confluence of my thoughts regarding death and bugs.

A couple of years ago when my eldest brother David died, I wrote a story called wound. It was non-fiction. I really did wake up with those welts above my heart. In the aftermath of my father’s death it has been a little different—rather than three welts, I’ve now got dozens—mostly on my hands and around my elbows. It really itches like hell now.

The strange part of it is that when I think of my father I think of his hands. The most frustrating thing about getting older, for him, was the loss of dexterity in his hands. He still would not allow anyone to do things for him. I remember him painfully fixing a lock while I looked on last year, and just three months ago he changed a wax-ring on a toilet rather than call anyone, or ask my brother Steve for help.

When I touched his hand as he lay in the casket, it just wasn’t my father’s hand. It was like porcelain, smooth and white. It wasn’t my father laying there, it was some china doll impersonation created by a cosmetologist. They made his skin pink. My mother nearly fainted when she first saw him, because it was the same hue he had during the final moments of his heart failure. It took several calls to the funeral home to get it somewhere near normal, though still far more flush than his ghostlike appearance in these last few years. But that didn’t worry me nearly as much as the hands—his hands were never that smooth. I wondered who this strange impersonator was.

My father’s only surviving sibling, his older sister, arrived just before the funeral moments after I helped the cemetery employees set the casket in place. We opened the pine box so that she could see his likeness just one more time. I got nervous when Oklahoma’s rather persistent flies got near him. I stood close, and brushed them away. Bugs always liked my father too.

Apologies for the abrupt interruption of blogging. On June 26, my father died.

He was in a great deal of pain the night before, and in the early hours of the morning decided that he needed to get medical attention. With my mother at his side, he drove himself to the hospital. He suffered a heart attack in the emergency room and died.

Dad always did everything for himself and seldom asked for help. He celebrated his sixtieth wedding anniversary on March eighth of this year. He was seventy-eight years old.

Blogging is likely to be light as I sort things out.

The photograph of him at the top of this entry was taken around twenty-five years ago. Other than the loss of his perennial tan, he looked much the same when I last saw him on Monday at his funeral. But he wasn’t smiling.

Maximal Desire

There was a thought I wanted to finish, or more precisely, expand, regarding aphorisms. But I was interrupted by seeing my name in rather large type on someone else’s site. Frank, might I suggest that you and Mike (hoping that it is okay to refer to you in the familiar) take a moment to read Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences by Edgar Allen Poe rather than continuing the project of misreading (obviously what must be happening) each other? I don’t think I’d be too far off the mark to suggest that diddling is what we are all doing here.

I find diddling to be endlessly fascinating. The universalist trend neatly lampooned by Poe suggests that there must be a science behind everything—even diddling. However, it is by diddling about that many great discoveries are made. The post that Frank felt wasn’t worth diddly rests at the core of an issue which deeply concerns me. I fail to understand at all why “marriage” would have anything to do with Foucault’s concerns, or mine, which are quite different from Foucault’s.

Foucault explores the social and epistemological function of sex, with an implicit critique of any purely material (Marxist) or psychological (Lacanian) approach. Critique does not imply dismissal, but rather a complication of standard methodology. My interest is different—I am less interested in the relationship between knowledge and power than I am in questions of desire—not questions of alliance, not social construction of gender—but rather questions of value. Not value in the economic or socially constructed sense (i.e. Bourdieu’s cultural capital) but the sense of a predilection towards certain patterns of desire which are not adequately addressed by any of the above methodologies.

Hence, I am concerned with why humans tend to desire the simple maxim rather than a more complex narrative. Occam’s Razor is not an adequate explanation for me. As far as post(whatever) theorists go, I actually prefer Roland Barthes, who writes a pretty mean aphorism, to Foucault’s intensely ordered and methodical style. Foucault’s thought resists reduction to a maxim at all costs.

Oddly enough, this also means that Foucault’s agenda is easier to comprehend than the agenda of a theorist like Baudrillard, Deleuze, or Barthes. Theorists that use maxims are often more dense and impenetrable than those who don’t, although those who don’t (like Foucault) often suffer the critique of people who haven’t read anything they have written, preferring to repeat what others have said rather than read long and dense volumes. They glean all their thoughts from the secondary literature which continually replicates confused and contradictory readings. Of course, it is’t just theorists that suffer this. The same thing is true of William Blake. Most people who trot out Blake as an exemplar of their own agenda have never read Blake.

Contemplating this paradox, and the paradox of why in the face of all evidence to the contrary, people prefer universal theories to particular theories (how does preaching commonality account for the persistance of difference?) is a continual fascination of mine. It’s a strange desire. But I have no delusions. It is also a diddle.

Your true diddler winds up all with a grin. But this nobody sees but himself. He grins when his daily work is done�when his allotted labors are accomplished�at night in his own closet, and altogether for his own private entertainment. He goes home. He locks his door. He divests himself of his clothes. He puts out his candle. He gets into bed. He places his head upon the pillow. All this done, and your diddler grins. This is no hypothesis. It is a matter of course. I reason a priori, and a diddle would be no diddle without a grin.

Edgar Allen Poe

Memphis

Excavating the northwest bookcase, I found a heart-shaped box underneath.

I haven’t been near that bookcase in a couple of years. It contains most of my William Blake books, and the rest of my romantic poets collection.

I bought the box for a friend, who was hell-bent to drive to Memphis. He struck out in the middle of an intense ice-storm around midnight, determined not to sleep until he was at the gates of Graceland.

I picked him up at a Waffle House in North Little Rock the next morning. As a Californian, he just didn’t have a clue how bad weather could get.

He never made it to Memphis. He left almost everything he brought with him behind, and took a bus back to California. I gave his car to a guy I worked with, in exchange for hauling it off. He left the heart-shaped box behind, with a child’s drawing and a handmade key chain inside.

After discovering the box under the bookcase, I looked and saw an Edith Piaf CD set that belonged to another friend—a friend from Memphis. She stopped by on her way to visit the Dali Lama in Indiana. There were some CDs of Russian folk music, and some tapes that I really must box up to send back to her.

My friends always seem to leave something behind when they stop by.

Housekeeping

Finally, I’m starting to get some stuff done around here. The 2.0 version of the blog is now accessible, but not quite pretty yet. There are some big link color issues to be sorted out. But the search engines, and ugly archive pages are now listed on my sidebar. The big problem is trying to reconstruct the design of that blog from memory.

One of the causalities of the big server crash was the entire category I had dedicated to Arnold Genthe. The images I scanned are still in place, but I’ll need to completely re-enter that stuff sometime. I’ll be getting back to Bourke-White soon though, and I’ve had about all the coding I can stand.

But I’m relatively thrilled with the progress I’m making around the house, too. I’ve been trying to solve the book heap problem. It’s very difficult to move about in my place right now. There was a carpet of books around eight inches deep covering ninety percent of my floor. I can see about sixty percent of it right now. Yay!

I’m still stalling on the five or six crates worth of articles that need to be filed, and the dozens of spindles of CD’s I’ve burned. Summer cleaning? That doesn’t sound right somehow.

It’s more like a sort of nesting/home improvement phase I guess. Strange, since I’m probably going to move in a month or so. But at least I can try to get my electronic environment a little tidier while I’m at it. My research site is due for some big expansion, and I’d like to put some more longer form papers online. But then, the Foucault seminar starts in a week or so, and that may head me off at the pass.

However, at least for now, I can revel in my newly found patch of floor.

verting

This week has been totally strange for me. Usually, I test on the borderline between introvert and extrovert. Most of the time, I seem to land on the extrovert side. This week, I’ve been feeling exceedingly intro.

Part of it is probably getting up in the morning. Then, spending time with a bunch of smart people makes me have to at least appear to be reasonably intelligent. That takes energy. At the end of the day, I’ve felt really drained and wishing that I could get back to my research. Just some time in my mossy cell to process all the stuff I’m picking up.

I have distinct hermit tendencies when it comes to actually thinking. In public, it always seems more like performing than thinking. In public, you want to fall back on a sort of social autopilot that can guide you through the stuff you know while picking up as much energy from other people as you can regarding the things that you don’t know.

I think that is one reason why heavily “community oriented” practices always seem to imply a sort of “dumbing down.” A person’s cognitive processes loose steam when they have to simultaneously express that thought in a social context. It becomes more rehearsed, more rote. At the same time though, as far as germinating ideas, it is really hard to beat interacting with your peers to get a new look at things from outside your own head. It’s such a weird dichotomy.

Apologies for the lapse in blogging—it’s been mostly due to the day-long meetings, and end of semester collapse. I need some reflective time, and then I’ll hopefully be able to get back to writing more thought provoking stuff. I’m not used to being so bleary, and not being able to snap out of it. I started to develop a theory that each hour of sleep between six am and noon is worth three hours of nighttime sleep. At least for me, anyhow. I’ll be able to get my schedule back to normal soon, I hope.

Limbo

Since I have managed to survive the semester, barely, I suppose it’s only fitting that according to the silly web-test I end up the same place that I feel I already am.

While I’m not so sure about the virtuous tag, it was nice to see that even with my increased workload this semester, students still seem to like me. One of my favorite comments, which I seem to get every semester is:

“You talked to us like we were people instead of something beneath you.”

This time, it came from a student on her second go-round in Comp. I. She wrote me a very scathing appraisal of her first teacher. She passed this time, barely. The weird thing is that most of my first-year students seem to feel more able to communicate with me than the graduate students I sit in the same classrooms with. They think I’m miles ahead of them, at least theory-wise. The thing that most of them just can’t believe is that I teach the same sort of theory to my first-year students (minus most of the jargon) that I talk about in graduate classes. The first year students are actually more interested in it. That makes me kind of sad.

I should take some time to relax, but I can’t seem to. Nothing seems finished, even though technically, it is. It looks like I’m going to be an assistant for a web-class next fall. I’m going to miss the classroom. I really enjoy talking to people in person. I enjoy trying to get something across, something worth spending money on. I can’t believe that other teachers just make students write for no apparent reason other than to grade them at the end. Grading is the worst part. Teaching is the best.

Barriers

My father never talked about freedom. There were no flags, no symbols littered around our house. But it was behind everything he did. It was taken for granted that a person had the power to shape their own world. We never had that much, but most of what we had he made.

Looking through old snapshots of the first house he built with my mother, there were pictures of me and my two brothers playing on his stone fence. He hauled stones from the creek beds surrounding Ojai, and free-stacked them into a massive three-foot wide wall. He shaped them with sledges and chisels, and built a barrier between his home and the neighbors. He never wanted to leave that place, where the street bore his name. He was the first to build there. But we had to move, when the oil fields started shutting down.

The next house was a tract home in Bakersfield. The lot was large, a third of an acre, and he planted an orchard and vineyard out back. He stretched chain-link fencing along the sides. I learned what a “come-along” was, and ran and played at the age of seven while he sweated the fence taunt.

Dad had a mountain of tools. Many of them were scavenged and repaired from the oil fields, including a huge third-horsepower drill that sounded like a locomotive when he fired it up. My father’s knowledge came much the same way, scavenged in weekly trips to the public library. He encouraged me to do the same. I don’t remember him buying much of anything except tools. And those, he only bought when he couldn’t make them.

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