War with the Newts, by Karel Čapek

This review appeared first on the Dark Mountain blog, but it fits with what I usually publish here, so I thought I would post it again. Robert Wechsler, who publishes the novel as well as several other excellent volumes of Czech literature in translation, did point out in the comments that Čapek's last novel, which I thought had never made it to English, was completed by his wife and published in 1941 as The Cheat. Čapek is an author I've felt very close to recently, so I'm sure the book is worth seeking out.

The best way for this 1936 Czech novel to find its readers is simply to describe the plot.

In an isolated corner of the South Seas, a Dutch captain discovers an unknown species of newt swimming in the shallow waters of a cove which the locals have always avoided. When the captain docks on a neighboring island, the newts seem fascinated by him and strangely able to decipher his signals. The adults, who are almost four feet tall, have a build something like human children, and when on land walk on their hind legs. From the captain’s instructions, the newts bring up some pearl oysters, and the creatures even prove able to use his blade to open up the shells themselves.

Despite these skills, the newts have remained trapped in the cove for untold centuries, because they cannot swim in the open ocean and their population is kept in check by the sharks who come by regularly to devour them.

A scheme occurs to the captain, based both on greed and what seems to him like compassion. With the help of a Czech industrialist, the captain begins to transport the newts out of their cove using a tank on his boat. He spreads them to other local shallows where they can thrive unmolested. In return, the newts collect the pearls that human divers have been unable to reach.

Without frequent visits from sharks, the newts multiply at an astonishing rate (one female can release hundreds of viable eggs). Soon, predictably, they have gathered so many pearls that the bottom drops out of the market. By this point, though, it has been discovered that the newts, given tools and a bare diet, are excellent at a variety of underwater work: excavating harbors, shaping and extending coastlines, and other tasks useful for modern nation states.

Under the direction of a syndicate, huge numbers of newts are now bred and shipped around the world. Countries with coastlines begin rapidly expanding their borders, dredging and reclaiming enormous stretches of land. Fantasies of new continents rising out of the waters begin to circulate—why, after all, should so much space in the oceans and seas be wasted when it could be put to man’s use?

Troubling moral questions arise as the worker newts show increasing levels of sophistication. Scientists maintain that newt behavior is mere mechanical imitation, but soon this becomes impossible to accept. Expert opinions in the novel are constantly, drastically wrong, but no one ever admits a mistake. Instead, people simply move forward into a world where everyone now believes the opposite of what was once maintained.

Things move so quickly that the reshaping of the planet is far along before people can even begin to absorb what has happened. Is it defensible to use newts as slaves? Might there be problems with changing the shape of coastlines? Do these creatures have souls? (Čapek’s invented reply for George Bernard Shaw: “They certainly have no soul. In this they resemble man.”) Newt questions are hotly debated, and these discussions change things a little (schools for newts, more humane working conditions) but the reformers are a few people rowing chaotically on a ship in full sail intent on moving in only one direction. Anxiety only reaches a noticeable level when there are newts blanketing the coastline of every nation, with tools and underwater explosives at their disposal.

A levee breaks in New Orleans, flooding the city. There are other accidents, new inundations, and a sense of things falling mysteriously apart, but no one suspects the newts are behind the problems until they release a statement. They bear humans no ill will; they simply have needs of their own.

No need for alarm. We have no hostile intentions towards you. We only need more water, more coasts, more shallows to live in. There are many of us. There’s no longer enough room for us on your coasts. That’s why we have to dismantle your continents. We shall turn them all into bays and islands. In this way the overall length of the world’s shoreline can be increased by a factor of five. We shall construct new shallows. We cannot live in the deep ocean. We shall need your continents as fill-in material.

The newts still require humans, of course, for surplus food, metals, and other land-based raw materials (perhaps they also find us charming, like pandas, and wouldn’t want to be entirely without us). When denied these materials, the newts are quite willing to use violence.

On one level, they have learned these habits from years of human tyranny, but the novel also hints at another explanation, the same one that Leopold Kohr would advance a few decades later in The Breakdown of Nations—once a certain critical mass of power has been reached, in terms of numbers and technological sophistication, power-hungry, expansionist behavior seems to develop almost spontaneously. It is the only way that massive systems can absorb the resources they need to keep functioning.

As with lemmings and arctic grass, the planet’s ecosystem in Čapek’s world has become so simplified (newts, humans, and the things they eat and need) that it can only be moving towards a pattern of seesawing crashes. Most countries, nevertheless, keep selling the newts weapons and food. It would, after all, be an economic catastrophe not to. Water begins to spread across every continent, and the remaining humans are pushed higher and higher into the mountains...

When War with the Newts was published in 1936, it was seen as a simple parable about the Nazi threat. As a writer in Czechoslovakia, which had existed precariously as a republic for less than two decades, Čapek was acutely conscious of this danger—but if the newts began as the Nazis in his imagination, they soon sent branches in all directions to become one of literature’s great protean symbols. At different points in the novel, for example, the newts call up both the people on whom the Nazis conducted their experiments and the torturers themselves. Every time the book threatens to become schematic, it slithers away and turns into something else.

I have ruined nothing by describing the plot. The delight of the novel lies in the little eddies and swirls around the narrative—from the mating rituals of the newts, which Čapek catalogs in a few magical pages, to the pamphlet welcoming newt dominion in which I saw a few of my own ideas perceptively mocked.

War with the Newts is not all sophisticated parodies of Spengler, though; in addition to being smart, it is also quite engagingly stupid, with jokes about Hollywood starlets and various farcical footnotes. Part of this is a canny narrative strategy where the book slowly lifts itself out of the frivolity in which prosperous humanity has been drowsing—but it is also something simpler: why not make a silly joke, even in your serious book, if one occurs to you? Unlike the largely humorless, almost oppressive greatness of writers who feel that they speak for nations—like, say, Thomas Mann, a contemporary who admired this novel—Čapek’s pages are lit with a kind of elfin spirit.

As I was reading this book, I kept being reminded of Leopold Kohr, that defender of little states who grew up a few hours from the Czech border. In both writers I recognized the same unwillingness to keep delight out of their pages, even when the ideas within point again and again to an impending collapse—the shared conviction, useful for sanity in bad times, that the most natural and becoming expression of the human face is a smile.

While reading his books, I find it worth remembering that Čapek was often in immense pain—he suffered from severe inflammation of the spine from the time he was a child. In the last story of Tales from Two Pockets, Čapek’s brilliant collection of mystery stories, a narrator who suffered in this way writes:

“I’ve had such respect, such a reverence in me; everything seems more important to me now…each little thing and each human being, do you understand? Everything has enormous value. Whenever I see a sunset, I tell myself it was worth that incredible pain. And people, their work, their ordinary lives…all of it has value because of that pain. And I know it’s a terrible and unspeakable price to pay—but I truly believe that it isn’t some evil or punishment; it’s only pain, and it serves to…to give life this enormous worth—“ Mr Skrivanek stopped, not knowing how to go on.

As the country’s best-known writer, Čapek lobbied for the great powers to resist the Nazis’ demands for Czechoslovakia’s border territories. After Munich, he told a friend, “My world has died. I no longer have any reason to write.”

I can believe that, in a dark mood, he said this and meant it, but it wasn’t true. Čapek knew he would be arrested as soon as the Nazis invaded (he was, in fact, second on their list), but spent the days before the inevitable invasion trying to rescue his beloved garden from heavy autumn rains. He also worked for long stretches on his last, unfinished novel, which has never been translated into English, and spent late nights talking with friends. What else, after all, are you supposed to do?

Čapek caught a bad cold in the garden and didn’t bother to rest. A few days before the Nazis swept into his country, he died at home, spared an execution or a likely death in one of the camps—like this novel, one of literature’s small mercies.

Forever Endeavour, by Ron Sexsmith

I've written a few times about my love for Ron Sexsmith's music. I own all of his albums, and have come to expect, every few years, another infusion of the spirit that has filled his work since his first eponymous album. Along with folk songs, and some classics by Dylan, Sam Cooke, and the old soul and country legends, I sing Ron's songs every few weeks just to feel them moving through me.

I picked up Sexsmith's most recent album, Forever Endeavour, on the day it was released. I listened to it for several weeks, and found, after years of what could be described as satisfied greed, that for the first time something felt off. The melodies were memorable, the production was intricate and tasteful, but the spirit that I had come to expect was missing from most of the album.

I don't usually bother writing about complaints. I should make it clear that I owe this man and his art an enormous debt of gratitude, and he owes me nothing at all. Still, I thought my sense of what was missing might be useful, because Forever Endeavour strikes me as succumbing to one of the few temptations that threaten great artists.

People often talk about musicians becoming commercially-compromised. I actually think that true artists have a difficult time selling out—not because they aren't tempted to do so, but because I suspect that they're not really sure how to manage it. Pandering is a special skill that the gods in their wisdom tend to grant to people who would never be able to produce something good anyway.

Although commercial compromise has affected some of the production on Sexsmith's albums, it has never threatened his songs—they come from a place that simply won't supply a mass product. Instead, I think that much of this album, like just a few of Sexsmith's older songs, is immortality-compromised.

To be immortality-compromised is to set out in advance to create a work of art that is going to continue to connect with people. It is the courting of posterity in the process of composition. We can start with the title: Forever Endeavour. Sexsmith explained in an interview that it refers to the aspiration to write something that would last. The idea has appeared before in his work. In “Chasing Forever,” off Destination Unknown, he wrote “Once it dawned on me what a song can grant you, I learned to write / In every songbook on every piano, eternal life.”

This may seem harmless enough—isn't a just a way of saying that, as an artist, you're going to do your absolute best? Or the fancy that we allow to play over a finished work to enhance the feeling of pride, or later, during bad days, to drive away despair when no one much cares for what we've made?

Sometimes, though, it is not harmless. You can see the fingerprints of that mysterious audience, posterity, on a song like “If Only Avenue.”

With the luxury of hindsight
The past becomes so clear
As I look out on the twilight
My days have become years
It's strange, as people we're prone to dwell
On things that we can't undo
And we're liable to wander down
If Only Avenue

This is not bad, certainly. The melody is lovely; the lyrics are coherent and well-crafted. But this song, like so many others on the album, is about Everyone living in Anytown. It is a transmission directed towards the future, where the people all have blurred faces and their needs are unclear.

Compare this song of generalized regret to the very specific regrets found in “Dandelion Wine,” which relates to the painful collapse of Sexsmith's first marriage. A young couple gathers dandelion flowers to make wine (I have always wondered how to do this) and creates a concoction that ends up being less than tasty—“we drank it anyway,” he sings, “for love had made it fine.” I have never had any of the experiences in this song, but whenever I sing or play it, it reaches to a place of regret—because genuine instead of abstract—that “If Only Avenue” can't approach.

It's true that some of Sexsmith's best songs are written out of a sense of desperation that it would be unfair to expect anyone to feel on a regular basis. Most of his songs, though, are not confessional and still do not drift away into this universal territory. These is always something concrete, some individual strangeness, including some lines that I don't think we're even meant to understand, like the ones about “dumming down and talk shows” on “Seem to Recall” (it's spelled that way in the lyric sheet).

Sexsmith has even written message songs before, sometimes about the very same subjects, but on this album the tendency to generalize has taken over. Here, for example, is “Blind Eye.”

Our sleepy town of denial
Where all of the tears people cry
Fall on deaf ears
For we turn a blind eye 

This is the same little town that contains If Only Avenue: a landscape without a single actual suffering person. Compare these lines to “Ghost of a Chance,” off a truly great Sexsmith album, Exit Strategy of the Soul. which begins with a magical line: “With the graceful and grotesque the morning rings / see the garbage truck roll by, hear the birds begin to sing.” The narrator looks at the world around him and sees the same suffering that is the subject of “Blind Eye,” but produces these lyrics:

I'm on the trail of a storm
And everywhere I look
I see the ones that life has torn
Like pages from a book 

I've always remembered this image of people floating around like torn pages from a single volume. How many poets could have captured a sense of what we owe to each other as a community in such a beautiful line, let alone set it to such a lovely and flowing melody?

In Forever Endeavour, though, one feels that Sexsmith hasn't stepped outside his door to look at a real place, and is instead netting airy universal truths in a kind of vacuum. It is the danger of aiming for immortality: in trying to satisfy the needs of a future one knows nothing about, one subtracts and cuts and sands away the peculiar, aiming for the permanent, and the finished piece is an “essence” that ends up feeling like less than you started with.

Some sample song titles: “Deepens with Time,” “The Morning Light,” “Lost in Thought.” What deepens with time? Holding a beloved person's hand, hearing a mother's voice, an old song—again, any song, any voice, any mother. So, instead of a strange, personal reflection like “God Loves Everyone,” we get lines like these, on “Back of My Hand”: “Like the back of my hands / I know if there's a god / That only he understands / What to us just seems so odd.”

Odd? Plenty of people might be repelled and offended (or moved and stirred) by “God Loves Everyone.” I was casually dismissive of Sexsmith's spirituality when I first wrote about his work, but I feel my mistake now partially because the song convinced me. No one will have a similar reaction—or any particularly strong reaction—to the bouncy sentiments in “Back of My Hand.”

When Sexsmith steps away from Elysium, it is clear that none of his talent has left him. The songs I like the best on Forever Endeavour are actually the goofy ones, because they are so much less self-conscious: “Me, Myself, and Wine” and “She Does My Heart Good.” And there is one folk-y song, “Sneak Out the Back Door,” with just Sexsmith and a guitar, that is simply great. It's the only one off this album whose chords I immediately felt the need to figure out so I could sing it myself.

Will the song last? I have no idea. We have no idea what the needs of posterity might be and how we can meet them, or the strange paths by which a work of art sticks around. Many of the world's greatest artists—Shakespeare and Pushkin come to mind—have shown utter indifference to the preservation of their writing, and once upon a time most artists didn't even bother to sign their work. Increasingly I find this something to admire. You do your best, make some reasonable effort to get an audience, and then you let it go.

Time does its work; it saves some of Shakespeare's plays from the fire, and destroys almost all of the ones that Sophocles and Aeschylus wrote. It is currently extirpating hundreds of languages, and all of the stories and myths and songs that were created through them. The idea of posterity (we forget this, I think, in countries that have had their way for a while) relies on one's confidence in the continuity of a cultural tradition. If this confidence breaks apart, it can be paralyzing (I speak from experience) until one finally decides to push this idea of immortality quite forcefully away. Whenever I am tempted by it, I remember the idiot critic who goes around shouting “Glawr” through the centuries in Virginia Woolf's Orlando (he means gloire), while remaining continuously blind to the beauty in front of his nose.

This idea of lasting work—of eternal songbooks and Western canons—has always struck me as making art a kind of substitute religion. Since I've always had a hard time embracing any religious faith, I once found it an attractive one. I now feel like it's a bad religion for both its devotees and its priests. To aspire to create something eternal is an anti-spiritual idea, because it aims for a permanence that has never been true of human works of any kind; it also assigns a transcendent value to artistic activity that simply doesn't belong to it, and does so moreover with the aim of self glorification.

I think we are always punished for such presumption. The spirits withdraw a little, and then some more. If anyone can call them back, though, as he has so many times over the years, it is Sexsmith. And I hope he names his next album something like Way Station or All Things Must Pass.

Solnit, Abbey, Day: Three American Anarchists

My latest essay for Dark Mountain has just been posted. It covers a good Rebecca Solnit book about the communities that form after natural disasters, an Edward Abbey novel about a post-apocalyptic America, and Dorothy Day's memoir The Long Loneliness (her picture is below). I tried to use the three books to get at what bothers me about certain American writers and their glorification of self-sufficiency, an ideal (or rather, a way of naming an ideal) that has always struck me as ludicrous, since from birth to death we are never anything but dependent, both on other people and the natural world. All we can aim for is closer relationships, rather than distant and impenetrable ones, with a world on which we are always and entirely dependent; this is all "self-sufficiency" can really mean. Maybe a new term is in order?

Also, readers of this blog may remember that I am a fan of the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia. I reviewed another novel of his called Equal Danger for my Lost Classics series on the Ploughshares blog. (A previous entry dealt with an excellent novel by Selma Lagerlof.) Please feel free to suggest other books that might be good to review. I was planning to write about David Jones's long WWI poem In Parenthesis but ended up getting rather confused about what was going on and finally put it aside, to be taken up (maybe) on another day.

Somehow I seem to have stumbled into my own genre: long, essay-like reviews that compare disparate books of ecological and literary interest as an attempt to get at general truths! Alas, this is a genre for which, as far as I can tell, no market currently exists. I remain hopeful, though, that if I keep on dropping these bizarre fruits on the forest floor, some undernourished creature will eventually come along to see if they can be used for food. Thanks as always for giving them a try,

Akshay

A Few Notes on Election Spending

I have been doing my level best to ignore the election for the past several months. Some time ago, I realized, politics in America simply became a branch of the entertainment industry, but for some reason discussing the ins and outs of a campaign—unlike celebrity gossip or the pennant race—still earns one respect as a serious and intelligent person. I once enjoyed being such a person, but for several years, I have been unable to enjoy elections even in the spirit of entertainment. The body count has gotten too high, and it is hard to enjoy the flubs and one-liners when one thinks about the varieties of state-sanctioned murder that are going quietly undiscussed.

Of course, without real determination, one cannot entirely escape these people. In Massachusetts, where I live, the most expensive congressional race in the country is taking place. I have been forced to pay some small quantity of attention to it, and this has produced the single political thought that has occurred to me during this election season, which I would like to share.

Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren are running for Senate. Since I grew up rooting for the Orioles, I have watched a few baseball games this year, and have thus been exposed to dozens of ads from both of them. Brown's ads stress his willingness to share in the responsibilities of a household (he cooks occasionally for his daughters) and imply that this shows unusual nobility. Warren ads indicate that she wants to create jobs by investing in infrastructure.

While watching this Warren ad, again and again, something occurred to me: each airing of that advertisement is itself a job. If she chose not to air one of these thirty-second spots, she could pay a volunteer a healthy salary for months. Eschew the ads for several innings and she could create a proper job, perhaps several.

As a sample of the sums at stake, the Boston Globe reported that, in a six week period in July and August, Brown and Warren raised about six million dollars. (I have heard estimates for the total cost of the presidential race that run close to a billion.) The bulk of this money went to advertising. The first stops for both candidates after raising these funds were two huge Virginia ad agencies: Multi Media Services Corp. for Scott Brown, and Media Strategies & Research for Elizabeth Warren. Think hard about those names and how difficult they are to keep straight.

This is simply how all campaigns run—you raise money; you spend it on ads—despite the fact that no one is sure if this advertising has any impact on how people vote. The only widely accepted consequence of advertising is that, if the ads become negative, they depress turnout because of widespread fatigue and disgust (and how).

Now, forget about Scott Brown for a second. He is obviously an idiot. He is welcome to spend all of his money asserting that he has a pleasant relationship with his wife and daughters. But Elizabeth Warren, like many progressive candidates, has made the issue of greater income equality central to her campaign. She is sitting on a truly enormous pile of cash, enough to create hundreds of jobs, and she instead chooses to spend the bulk of it on advertisements that promise to create those jobs later.

What if, instead of trumpeting her support for struggling homeowners, and pledging to create an agency to provide counselling to help prevent foreclosures, she hired a few people to actually give out such advice? Or—on a simpler level—why not pay the volunteers who make phone calls and wave signs? Make an effort, if you happen to care about them, to hire the poor and unemployed.

If Warren—or any candidate—isn't willing to demonstrate her ideals through the structure of an organization over which she has complete control, why should anyone believe that she would work toward these ideals when in power?

Are there shades of the old machine system here? Yes, absolutely there are, and that's fine. I prefer the machine to the current system, where all the average voter receives is rhetoric about putting people back to work and stimulating the economy, while campaign funds, which increasingly come from large donors, swirl around in the same elite stratum from where they came—or go from the pocket of some temporarily enthusiastic person to finance a fraction of a second of a television advertisement.

At some point, more people in this country are going to notice that the pendulum that swings back and forth between parties every few years is actually being used for hypnosis. It is the swaying of a pocketwatch—change, hope, greatness, change, hope, greatness—while the wars, extra-legal assassinations, despoiling of air, water, and land, growing system of surveillance, and utter lack of accountability for every disaster continue with eerie consistency regardless of the new bodies in the suits.

Eventually, though, when things reach a certain pitch (as they will, I suspect, before the decade is out), candidates will emerge from outside the current system: either new parties, or powerful fringe movements within the two major ones. I have faith that this will happen, because the American system of government is well designed, and capable of rejuvenation or at least slower decay.

One way to know when a genuinely different candidate has arrived—and this is my single thought for the election season—is that the money they receive will be spent to a large extent on the ground level in their community. Even an unsuccessful campaign, then, will be of some benefit to the district's constituents. My guess is that people are already so immune to political advertising that spending money in this way might actually be a better way to win. And if voters feel that the campaign is spending money in dishonest or unwise ways, it is significantly easier to evaluate such tangible actions than sussing out a candidate's character from ghostwritten speeches and carefully crafted advertisements.

Dorothy Day, who did more good with modest resources than most politicians manage with entire treasuries, said something worth remembering: “I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.”

If a campaign is filled with inspiring talk about supporting the middle class or (more exceptionally) the poor, simply take a look at how the candidate spends her money: does the lion's share go to a few consultants and media companies, with a smattering for caterers, buses, hotels, another smattering for a few core employees, and virtually nothing for the people who do most of the work?

If so, expect the perpetuation of policies that encourage just such a distribution of income when the politician is in power. If a person's own organization cannot be a model of the kind of society they say they want to create, they are not worth wasting a second of attention or enthusiasm on. What they are doing—consciously or unconsciously (it is usually the latter)—is providing a little momentum to help the pocketwatch swing across the eyes again. I look up sometimes and search for the hand that is holding the chain. For all my paranoia, I can never make it out, and I don't trust people who claim to have seen it. But, as it swings by again, I am quite sure that the clock is ticking.

Dark Mountain 3: An Interview with Dmitry Orlov

For the past few weeks, I have been reading through the third Dark Mountain anthology. It is a lovely book, and has a maroon color and tough hardcover binding that makes it look a little like my old high school English anthology ("Voyage to Literature" or whatever it was), which I never returned and discovered years later was full of wonderful stories.

The Dark Mountain book, too, is a pleasure to hold and look through. Pretty much everything I have read so far—the essays by Hannah Lewis and Charlotte Du Cann, the interviews—has been worthwhile, and "Dark Ecology," an essay by Paul Kingsnorth, is on its own worth the price of admission.

Or would have been, had I paid for the book—they sent me a copy for free because it contains some of my work, an interview with the writer Dmitry Orlov, who currently lives in Boston and sat down with me for coffee a few months ago. For the curious, this lecture is probably a good introduction to his work, and his book, Reinventing Collapse, is well worth reading.

Orlov is a formidable man, and our interview is a little dance between my not particularly well-informed good spirits (for whatever reason, I am happy most of the time), and his dark, witty, and more knowledgeable analyses. A sample:

AA: A quote from your book: “We may be hurtling towards environmental doom and, thankfully, never quite get there because of resource depletion...” This might be a mystical question, but is there some sense in which the planet will not allow itself to be destroyed? Do you have any sort of faith in that?

DO: No. We could generate gas by setting spent coal pits on fire. That will take care of the rest of the ecosystem. We could have open pit nuclear reactors using not just the spent fuel, but the nuclear weapons. We could make the whole place radioactive just for the sake of keeping the industrial systems and the military systems going a little longer. There's really no limit to human stupidity. If people set their minds to destroying this planet, I'm sure they'll manage to do it.

Any of my readers who have been interested in the reviews I've published with Dark Mountain would, I think, find the book worth owning. It is a little expensive, especially for people outside the U.K., but it's a beautifully produced volume, one that I'm proud to be part of. Like "Voyage to Literature," I think you won't regret keeping it around.

 

Jefferies, Jensen, and Catastrophe

Dear Readers,

I apologize again for the enormous delay in posting, but at least I have still been writing. I recently published a review on the literature of catastrophe, focusing on Richard Jefferies, the Victorian nature essayist, and a number of much lesser modern writers. I think this one is a pretty good piece of writing.

I also wrote a less satisfactory review of the second volume of Derrick Jensen's Endgame, which was a difficult book for me to engage with. Nonetheless, Jensen's work is worthy of respect, perhaps more than I gave him. Here is the review for the curious.

Also, in case I have readers in India, my essay about Joseph Tainter's book is being republished in an Indian environmental journal called Eternal Bhoomi, copies of which are apparently sent to various schools there. The dominion of English in India is a troubling phenomenon, but one that I have no right to criticize, considering my skills in Hindi and Kannada. In any case, if my writing finds an audience in my home country, I can only be grateful.

I think I have been writing a little too much about impending doom. It's probably time for something else. I might review Catherine Carswell's fascinating book about D. H. Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage, or the wonderful poetry of Thomas McGrath. The abyss, after all, is not going anywhere. In the meantime, my mysterious audience, be well,

Akshay

Fantasy Sports and the Destruction of Awe

Sports have been a big part of my life ever since I came to America. I spent afternoons playing basketball and football with my friends, of course, but there was an exponentially larger amount of time spent watching games, checking scores in the paper, and listening to chatter on the radio—the whole business of following professional sports. I have been thinking lately about how my personality was shaped by this investment, and what an enormous role sports continue to play in the lives of most Americans, particularly men. Also, I want to tell you about why I hate fantasy sports.

I was eight when I arrived here. Within a few years, I became devoted to following professional basketball, football, and baseball in a way that I had never followed cricket in India. In America, I watched as many games on TV as I could, and on most nights I tucked a radio beneath my pillow and struggled to stay awake until the end of the Orioles or Bullets game (they are the Wizards now, and as uncompetitive as ever).

The next morning, I would open the sports section and read almost all of it. Obsessions began to coalesce around certain teams, players, and races. One year, I became deeply invested in the duel between David Robinson and Shaquille O'Neal for the regular season scoring title. I was rooting for Robinson—the quiet and classy player—and I remember being elated when he scored 71 points on the last game of the season to secure the title.

I shunned the obvious stars like O'Neal and Michael Jordan. Instead, I followed second-tier notables who I decided were in some way morally superior to the stars. Tim Brown and the Raiders were one mysterious obsession. For several years, I desperately rooted for the Trailblazers to beat the Bulls in the Finals, which never happened. I fixated on Terry Porter, the Blazers' point guard, who had a strangely-shaped head and a fantastically accurate three-point shot. He hustled; he was a good ball distributor, calm and never showy; he never argued with refs or got into fights. He played the game, I decided, the right way. All of my favorites were finesse players, soft-spoken, who usually fell in the end to more determined and (I thought) ruthless teams.

Sometimes, when I think about the time and emotion I spent on sports, I feel like I must have wasted half of my childhood. Lately, though, it occurred to me that something valuable happened during those years, that I was building a personality and a place in the world using the tools at my disposal. Already, in my choice of idols, I was feeling out the kinds of success that, at my best, I would be capable of. Other children, of course, chose differently. Locked up in the bubble of modern childhood, we all found heroes to act for us—with us, it sometimes seemed—as a way of developing an identity and a sense of consequence.

“Recognize the natural power in the man, as men did in the past,” D.H. Lawrence writes in Apocalypse, “and give it homage, then there is a great joy, an uplifting, and a potency passes from the powerful to the less powerful.” On dozens of nights, this energy passed into me, both joy and despair, through a television or a crackly radio, with an intensity that has rarely been equaled in later life.

When Jordan pushed Bryon Russell at the end of Game 6 to get off his jumpshot, and no foul was called, I learned something about the privileges of the powerful. When Jeffrey Maier interfered with what should have been a long Yankees fly-out, I learned something too. The play was called a home run, and probably cost the Orioles the game. I was in a rage for days, but some knowledge started to move inside me about how nothing in the real world was going to live up to my theoretical ideals of purity. Obviously, these lessons were coming through the world as well, but in sports, as on stage, the inessential drops away, and how much more memorable the action becomes! Certain games and plays become talismans for a lifetime: instructive, illustrative, sometimes beautiful.


As I got older, my sports fixation weakened. I left my hometown; I became more able to influence the circumstances of my life; and I stopped forming as many profound relationships with players and teams. Increased free agent movement was maybe part of it. I also no longer had as much time to devote to following sports. With less information, the moral qualities I attributed to these players felt more like fantasies, unsupported by their behavior on the field or court. So I went in search of other heroes.

Sports were always there, though, in the background. I still like the sense of community they can create with very different kinds of people. A more authentic foundation for community would probably be better, but, well, as in childhood, you take what you can get. A regional identity based on sports is better than none at all. Now that I've been in Boston for a while, I even have the stability and information to form new identifications. Tim Wakefield is a hero of mine (recently forced into retirement by the increasingly soulless Red Sox); so is Ray Allen (still playing with the Celtics, also increasingly soulless, as demonstrated by the awful Kendrick Perkins trade).

Even though I still care about a few teams, I've never returned to the kind of attachments I had when I was a child. A few years go, though, at the request of friends, I joined some fantasy leagues and started to follow baseball and football more closely again. This is not uncommon; as far as I can tell fantasy sports are becoming an American obsession. Some people I know spend as large a portion of their free time following sports as I once did. The spirit, though, is very different.

I suppose most people know how fantasy works by now: you choose players from real teams to form an imaginary one. The complex network of interrelationships in every game is reduced, by league consent, to a handful of tracked categories. The players' performance in the real world then generates points for you, and you compete against other players in the league based on this statistical ground.

This is fun at first. People watch games with the computer in front of them; the stats update every few minutes. Very soon, though, as anyone who has participated in fantasy knows, it starts to change how you interact with the players and the sport. The game begins to appear through a lens of numbers. You start to root for meaningless things (late touchdowns, inconsequential yardage), watch games in which you have no interest, and weaken emotional attachments to players as you cut and bench them. There is no such thing as an honorable defeat or a shameful victory in fantasy football, only larger or smaller numerical margins. It is roughly analogous to reading a book to count how many times the word "the" appears, or counting the number of B flats in a symphony, and then comparing your total to an opponent. You destroy the point of the exercise for the sake of ending up with a number.

Why are so many people participating in something that works to drain the emotional significance out of sports? It took me some time to think of an explanation, and here it is. I think this is actually the whole point of the endeavor.

Spectators are devoting a great deal of their lives to following the ups and downs of a group of people who are, for the most part, stronger, more graceful, better paid, and more respected than they are. What relationship can one have with such idols? Well, you can bow before them. This is what children do. I think this is healthy, especially if the heroes are genuine. David Foster Wallace's beautiful essay, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," is an example of how this can occur as an adult. The feeling of awe is more sophisticated, more analytical, but it is awe all the same—it is a species of what I felt as a child. And it is the only way you can justify spending any part of your life watching strangers play games. The same applies to being a spectator of an art form. If you aren't looking for gods, and willing to pay homage when you find them, you are wasting your time.

To love a hero requires humility, though—the willingness to kneel, the consciousness of one's own inferiority. In a paradoxical way, it requires strength. The problem is that most Americans, especially American men, find kneeling an impossible posture to maintain. They are drawn to the spectacle of power on a grand stage, but are uncomfortable with worship or even sincere admiration, which acknowledges that someone is, in a profound and genuine way, better than you. At the one football game I went to recently, I was amazed at how much abuse was heaped on the players the instant a few plays went wrong, only to change back to cheering when things went well (all of this noise blurs together on television).

This crowd, I realized, resented its own idols. They were uncomfortable with their own adulation. All across our society, you can observe people acting out this anxiety. Listen to sports radio and you will hear an endless parade of know-it-alls who put themselves in the position of the general manager, suggesting trades and line-up changes. On television, the commentary is increasingly devoted to ranking plays and players, which is not the same as acknowledging superiority. To arrange things in an order of merit is a way to assuage a sense of insecurity through control—to place yourself above the people under consideration and move them around like pieces on a board. I know this because I used to enjoy making such lists.

This is the appeal of fantasy sports: to become a listmaker. Then you can push around what were once heroes and reduce them to sets of numbers, which are then used to achieve meaningless victories over your peers. It is the epitome of what Stephen Harrod Buhner calls the statistical mentality, which of course invaded real sports before the virtual ones. The hero of Moneyball, for example, is a manager who makes moves and trades based on computer-based statistical analysis, although it is unclear why this is heroic rather than merely clever (the movie insists on the former).

The players on such a team become irrelevant; all of the prestige goes to the coordinator and his computer sidekick, which is exactly the appeal of fantasy football. This is part of a larger trend of withdrawing admiration from the people directly involved in an activity—those who actually do things and make things—and transferring it to their coordinators. The problem is that there can be no beauty or courage or grace in coordination. To focus on such activity is to distance yourself from everything that makes a performance meaningful.

You do achieve something by creating this distance, though; you abandon the possibility of awe and instead experience a sense of phony power. One of the scenarios I've seen in several new ads is an ordinary fan berating a player for his poor fantasy performance.

A quote from Goethe: “The only way in which we can come to terms with the great superiority of another person is love.” Randall Jarrell added a perceptive modification: “But we can also come to terms with superiority, with true Excellence, by denying that such a thing as Excellence can exist; and, in doing so, we help to destroy it and ourselves.”

Jarrell, as an American, knew that something needed to be added to the quote. It is the danger in our otherwise noble egalitarian rhetoric: because power flows in both directions, anything we refuse to revere eventually becomes less worthy of reverence, and finally not even worth paying attention to.

Maybe this seems like too much weight to put on sports. Certainly we should all spend less time sitting on our asses. Still, when I think back to the intensity of my childhood memories, I feel like there was something of value in the way I cared and followed and obsessed. Even today, I can still be stunned into admiration by what human beings are capable of. Some of the most inspiring tennis I have ever seen has been played in the last few years; the football playoffs from this past year were incredible too. These are some of our society's few collectively shared pleasures, and in the right spirit they are genuine ones. Shut off the computer; try not to ruin it.

Some happy developments

Hello, dear neglected readers. It's been too long and I will post something soon; the world is still full of good books. But, in the meantime, several pieces of my writing have appeared around the Web.

First, Paul Kingsnorth, whose collection of poetry I reviewed a few months ago, discovered this blog and generously invited me to be part of the Dark Mountain project. They are re-publishing some of my old reviews -- starting with this one -- and then I'll be writing new essays for them as well.

Also, a surprise: Energy Bulletin reposted that article. I wasn't a regular reader of this website, but there's very often interesting things there, and I recommend the site to anyone who doesn't find my recent gloomy preoccupations entirely baffling.

Next, a friend at htmlgiant asked me to write a review for them. I saw Stanislaw Lem on the list, a writer I loved in college, and requested The Cyberiad. It was just as enjoyable as the other books of his I've read, and unlike many other science fiction writers, contained little outdated techno-messianism, just a deep feeling for the limits of human understanding as well as a rollicking sense of humor. Here is the review. Htmlgiant publishes its reviews anonymously, to facilitate honesty/nastiness, but I am quite happy to identify it as my own work.

Finally, I secure my livelihood partly through the generosity of the literary magazine Ploughshares, where I work to put together the issues and often write for the blog. So far, I've reviewed a recent Tolstoy biography, the poetry of A. S. J. Tessimond (who I discovered through the wonderful blog First Known When Lost), and the Japanese writer Kanoko Okamoto. I also contributed to or assembled our lists on books for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the Winter.

That's all for now. Some good books that I've read recently, but probably won't write about, include Joe Bageant's two books, In Zanesville, by Jo Ann Beard, and the Blackmores' excellent translations of Victor Hugo's poetry.

The Somerville Poetry Project

I live in Somerville, Massachusetts, a little town next to Cambridge. My wife and I moved here mainly because the rents were low, but over the last several years we've developed a love for the place, from our plot in the community garden to the Chinese takeout place down the street. About a year ago, a friend told me that Somerville gave grants to writers. I don't normally try for such things, but I sent in a few pieces and several months later they told me I had gotten one. The Council's only requirement was that I complete a community benefit project. A meeting with some other grant recipients to work on a project together predictably didn't amount to anything, so I came up with an idea on my own. In case the concept is useful to anyone else, here it is.

For most of my life, I was indifferent to poetry. I liked words in pretty much every other form, but something terrible seemed to happen when you spaced them out. In ninth grade, I remember our English teacher gave us a poem -- I think it was by Robert Frost -- about (I thought) snakes slithering down a hill. The teacher asked what the poem was about; before I could chime in with my snake answer, someone said it was about the sun coming out and melting the snow.

This was apparently the correct answer. I read the poem again; it still seemed to be about snakes. I decided then that I was going to keep my mouth shut about poetry, because it was sneaky stuff with no purpose other than making the uninitiated demonstrate their stupidity.

I held to this opinion through most of school. One exception: I remember being shaken by "Dulce et Decorum Est," because we hadn't ever read it in class; the poem just appeared on a test. I read it twice, and remember sitting stunned and feeling the words work inside me, until eventually I roused myself and went about labeling the rhyme scheme and stresses. Completing the test defused my interest; I didn't seek out any other Wilfred Owen. The only pleasure I got from poetry in those years was the sense that I had extracted the meaning that the author had, for mysterious reasons, decided to hide.

Eventually, though, I discovered that the actual problem was that I had only been reading poems in school. Poems don't offer themselves to people approaching with weapons in hand; they leave a husk of dry meaning behind and then disappear down some burrow. It took several years out of school for me to approach poetry unarmed, with no papers to be written, when I made the attempt for new reasons: I wanted to feel cultured and to impress women. The muses considered these reasonably worthy motives and consented to brush against my hand.

A few years ago, when I was reading a lot of Milosz, I discovered his poetry anthology, A Book of Luminous Things. Certain poems in that book began to affect me in a profound way, and I finally understood why verse, until recently, had been acknowledged by almost all writers as the supreme literary art. Poets I had read in school with almost total incomprehension, like Hopkins, began to make a great deal of sense. And it seemed a shame that so many people who love to read never even consider sitting down with a book of poetry.

Some of this is simply taste, but some of it, I am convinced, is that the art form remains freighted with anxiety from school, where students are given extremely difficult work much too soon and then forced to decipher and analyze it.

So: I thought, why not present some great poems in a tension-free environment? My idea was to make booklets of some of my favorite poems in the public domain and leave them around Somerville. I typeset the poems, printed the pages, bound the booklets with waxed thread, and left them where people would find them: coffee shops, bus stops, libraries, and assorted park benches.

Inside each book are several blank pages, with a note encouraging the reader to write a few words in the space and leave the book elsewhere: a poem, or song lyrics, or any words that seem worth writing down to them. Frankly, I expect a few pages will be filled with obscenities, but that's fine. Hopefully, the books will make the rounds for a few months before wear and tear, weather, and carelessness remove most of them from circulation.

I'm not sure yet if it's been a success. All I know is that the booklets aren't where I left them anymore. A few local outlets were nice enough to write about the project. It was, in any case, a pleasure to spend some time re-reading favorite poets, and discovering a few new ones, and to think about what kinds of poems could communicate with a large group of people.

The arts have always felt threatened in America, and this is especially true in hard times. Poems don't feed anyone or help pay the rent. They do, however, tell us something about how hunger and poverty have been borne in the past, and borne with dignity. The dignity does not lie in the poet prescribing certain actions or responses -- equally great poems can call forth anger and calm, stoicism and despair. The dignity is in the language, the sense that the sorrow has been shaped and transformed.

There is comfort, too, in joining our individual fate with countless others. To quote Robinson Jeffers, "prose can discuss matters of the moment; poetry must deal with things that a reader two thousand years away could understand and be moved by." In poems, I feel how little humanity has changed, and how much I can share with a Tamil woman in the twelfth century or a Chinese bureaucrat in the eighth. This sense of fellowship is both a steadying and enlarging influence, and an antidote to the sense of meaninglessness produced by too much throwaway culture.

I remember a passage in Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, where the narrator describes the teaching of literature as trying to sell a real diamond on the street for a quarter. Almost everyone will pass it by, because who among the uninitiated could believe that the diamond was genuine, and that a mind and spirit could be enlivened for a lifetime because of a few old pages and some quiet attention?

Well, my thought is that you stop trying so hard to sell the diamond. Just leave it somewhere, and hope that a few people might pick it up and turn it around in their hands. If anyone would like a copy of the PDF, feel free to send an e-mail to somervillepoetry@gmail.com. I tried to have a mix of the famous and fairly obscure, so hopefully there's something for everyone.

Kidland and Other Poems, by Paul Kingsnorth

A few months ago, I discovered the work of the Dark Mountain Project. It is a collective of artists/scientists/environmentalists with some shared premises: that our society is not actually serious about solving its environmental problems; that we are driving towards a wall of firm ecological limits; that, even with the parts falling off our industrial machine, we will fairly soon hit this wall with a greater or lesser degree of violence; and that any environmental vision that imagines our Western lifestyles continuing unchanged with a few solar panels and hybrid cars is an unworkable fantasy.

The sooner we abandon this fantasy, they argue, and acknowledge the coming cataclysms, the sooner we can start talking about—not solutions, but other visions of society and culture that might work in a world of severe and chaotic weather, depleted soil and oceans, and very little remaining oil.

There are statistics to defend these claims, but if you haven't felt, emotionally, the bankruptcy and destructiveness of the modern industrial project, I doubt they will convince you. For whatever reason, I am already at that place. When I read the Dark Mountain manifesto—and I am not usually the sort of person to read manifestos—I felt page after page the ring of absolute truth.

I still have to get copies of the Project's two anthologies, but I read some of Paul Kingsnorth's contributions—he is one of the Project's founders—and felt a deep affinity. His favorite poets are also mine—Edward Thomas, John Clare, Robinson Jeffers—and he has a belief, which I hope is not delusional, that the arts have something to contribute in changing the consciousness of people who are losing faith, with good reason, in industrial society and its promises.

Kingsnorth has mainly written journalism up to this point, but from his website he seems to see himself fundamentally as a poet. Kidland is his first book of verse. It may seem strange to see a cyclone on the horizon and emerge from your shelter to present the storm with some poems—but, well, the world needs poems along with guides on organic farming; they make life worthwhile whether disaster is a year or centuries away. And in any case disaster is always approaching.

The question remains, though: what kind of art does one make for a society that has no long-term future? If you believe this is a silly question, and aren't convinced about any of the premises I mentioned in the first paragraph, don't bother with Kingsnorth, because his work won't make sense to you. If any of them struck a chord, though, I think his poems will be worth your time.

I read Kidland with pleasure and with disappointment. It is an extremely uneven book: too eager to make points, heavy-handed, and now and then very beautiful. It reminded me of a Robert Musil quote that you can't feel profoundly out of step with your society without doing some damage to yourself. Rage and a sense of disconnectedness from one's potential audience—and from humanity as a whole—injure as much as they inspire. Declining civilizations often cripple their own genuine talents in this way; this is part of how the disease wards off the possibility of healing.

Let me give an example. Here is an excerpt from “Kidland,” the long narrative poem at the center of the book. It is about a man who has set up camp in a forest in Northern England—a “utopia of one,” in his words—because of disgust with the ecological destructiveness of his species. There is also a young city woman, Sarah, who stumbles upon his camp, and a farmer who is abandoning his land in the area. The quote below is from the man in the woods, who is speaking to Sarah:

Where is the urgency? he was saying. Can you not see
how things are? The great forests are burning, the great
   forests
of the world. The breath of your lungs is taken from you
and what do you do? There are a million jewelled creatures
that you will never see, that the world
will never see again. There is poison in the water
and in the air and in every cell that you are made of.
Poison: our gift to the world. Do you ever wonder
What the place would be like without us? Free
I would say, to breathe again.

Every one of these thoughts can find a home in my mind, but when I read these lines they are just words. The music is missing—that something that carries the words into the deeper consciousness and makes them larger than the ideas they contain. “Talk / is cheap,” Sarah responds, a fitting response. This long, ambitious poem then goes on to feature a heavily allegorical rape and a sudden death. As with some of Jeffers' narrative poems with their extremes of emotion and violence, for anyone expecting realism the story can feel a bit ludicrous.

I think it is telling that Kingsnorth's most ambitious poems are, to my mind, the least successful, while the small lyrics are often wonderful. Here, for example, is the poem that follows “Kidland.”

and the trees

and the trees on the hill stand waiting to reclaim the field
and the field lies yellow and cut beneath the sky
and the sky hangs grey above the grassline
and the grasses quieten at the approach of night
and night comes and I rise and move towards the trees
I hope they will have their way soon
and I tell them so

Let that sit for a second. Try to read it slowly if you can; I know the monitor makes it difficult. The thought is the same—the sense of sympathy with the non-human world, the question of what it would be like if we were gone, or at least left things alone. Here, though, the lines sing. They are coming from a deeper place, as they do in another poem about trees, “A chaos of you,” which ends with this description: “They dream, rooted, of the hills beyond their kerbside / and in the autumn, unexpected but meant for the moment, / their dreams are carried away to be born.”

Robinson Jeffers wrote something interesting once in a letter to Mark Van Doren about Van Doren's now-forgotten poetry: “I have a criticism,” he wrote, “and no doubt from me it will surprise you. I think you are too (vulgar word) pessimistic...Civilization is bitter to the singer, it is bitter in that essential way to everyone, but I think we can remember that there was a time before it and will be a time after it, and can keep an important part of us timeless enough to be uncivilized.”

Jeffers knew that he was handling material that was difficult to make poetry out of—but he was rooted in the natural world and also in a historical sense of the ebb and flow of civilizations. He often seems to be flying at an enormous height where he calmly sees the wreck of our modern civilization just a few miles down from the ruins of Rome and Kahokia and Palenque, along with the mountains and rivers that have survived them all. The fact that his society was in decline did not strike him as an unprecedented calamity but part of a longstanding historical pattern.

Kingsnorth's best poems have some of this timelessness, but a great deal of his work is instead filled with an entirely understandable disgust, not just with the world modern man has created, but with humanity itself. There is almost a longing for apocalypse. In several poems, a character stands in for Man and Kingsnorth writes about fundamental flaws in his character: too much greed, too little foresight. Again, one can sympathize, but the attitude makes the poetry captive to a few ideas: “I give you what you ask for, / you ask for more. I leave you / alone in the place, you wreck it all,” says the creator figure in “Changeling.”

Disgust, I think, is hard to make poetry out of—you say temporary things when you are disgusted, and in such moods it is best not to try to make points about humanity. In one of my favorite poems, “Parable of the tares,” though, the disgust deepens into a kind of acceptance, and Kingsnorth captures the fury and distraction of the masses living within a disintegrating system—it is a worthy successor to “Rearmament,” the Jeffers poem that gave the Dark Mountain project its name.

Nothing is permanent, everything pulling apart, cascading
away from the highest peaks. Vibrate the strings of this
   once green world
one final time, make merry, go with laughter
and with fury, almost-masters.

“Almost-masters”—there, I think, is the hand of a real poet. If there are only a few such moments in this book, that's more than most of us ever manage.

I wrote earlier that declining civilizations find ways to resist their own renewal, not only by how they treat artists but also by stunting and distracting the public that might encounter the ideas these thinkers produce. The machinery of distraction, though, requires resources, and eventually it comes apart along with everything else. As the official narrative frays, once marginal ideas begin to get a hearing. Many of these ideas will be crazy; the Dark Mountain Project and Kingsnorth are not. They strike me as some of the few people looking at our likely future with open eyes. As a poet, Kingsnorth is still finding his voice, but he is walking down a genuine path and has my gratitude.