Films

It was raining. He got a phone call, so during his absence I spoke with his daughter, who reminds me a bit of Judy Garland. We seemed to be the only people in the entire park.

She asked me, "You know about Francis Galton? He had this idea that people could be divided up into groups by what they looked like, that if you had sad eyes you were in one group and if you had a chicken neck—like my dad—you were in another group. And each group had the same personality and that sort of stuff."

"What group is mine?"

"Maybe the always-sit-in-back-and-watch-everyone-else group?"

"Go on."

"He would take a bunch of pictures of people and stack them up and make one picture and that was the average."

He caught up and we talked about other things. But now I had an idea for a new way of thinking about life.

Maybe there are beings that you can think of as two-dimensional films. They come into existence as one-dimensional points only to expand as they age. But they only grow in two dimensions. They could be the size and outline of, for instance, Galicia, and a few measures of time later they're Italy. And they exist as a society by meeting along lines. One film being can intersect vast numbers of others, and as they age they tend to intersect more and more.

In times of crisis, fields of disturbance behave like the legs of a water skimmer on the surface of a pond, dimpling a given film in countless places, wrenching it into three dimensions.

These films are a way of existing that defies much agency because they do not control their surfaces, but they are sentient, and they communicate at points of intersection. The form of the communication is light.

I expect that the films would have many of the same kinds of experiences we would, that a book could be written about them that would look very much like one of our novels. But there would be some differences.

Have I a type?

A friend declared a foxy-faced woman "a perfect example of her type," later explaining that she was not his type. While I do not find every man and woman I meet beautiful, I wonder whether I have a type—or even four types. I may prefer smooth skin to perturbed, slimness to paunch, large eyes to beady, but when it comes to color and length and texture of hair, to height, to freckles, dimples, earlobes, foreheads, eyelids, to the contour of a lip, the weight of a breast, I don't care. Jewish/Catholic—I don't care. Fair/dark—I don't care.

[more to come]

Improvement

I'll never write a book so fine or so fascinating as Making sex, but I can and will improve on it. Here is the first sentence:

An interpretive chasm separates two interpretations, fifty years apart, of the same story of death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with the problem of distinguishing real from apparent death.

I shall improve it stylistically and substantively. First, I delete the egregiously superfluous "interpretive." Already it's better. Next a flurry of other changes. So I have

A chasm separates two interpretations, fifty years apart, of a story concerning death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with distinguishing death from its living double.

Now I home in on a substantive problem: Laqueur never explains the fifty year gap mentioned in his opening. He cites three interpretations of Jacques-Jean Bruhier's story: Bruhier's own (an edition dated 1749 is cited; the first ed. appeared in 1742), Antoine Louis's (1752), and Michael Ryan's (the 1836 edition provides the date Laqueur cites). What happened, Thomas?

Context suggests that Laqueur located the chasm between Louis and Ryan.

A chasm separates two interpretations, eighty-four years apart, of a story concerning death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with distinguishing death from its living double.

for Lizzie

We went east. We drove up into the mountains. Snow was on the trees, on the ground, on the rivers. We went into the woods with skis. Snow was in our faces, on our clothing, on our skis. We inhaled snow. Wind blew snow. We drove to the cabin and the food we had was lentil stew and apples. More snow. The sound of the snow under our boots was crisp never sorry.

The trees bore snow on their outstretched bowed limbs. The birds were nutcrackers. I scared somnolent fishes.

A quartet of hot springs collected in a pool, warming our feet our thighs our tummies our hands and arms.

We woke up at night when snowflakes infiltrated our cabin and we talked about our dreams. You were with us, nodding, smiling.

Dictionary

allegations.—always troubling.

antidepressants.—cause suicide.

Bible.—source of all truth or of all evil.

bottled water.—nothing is more wasteful.

caffeinated.—refers to people, not beverages.

cancer.—death by is always preceded by a long battle with.

comic books.—a form of literature.

decline.—always precipitous.

die.—used of plants and animals; never suitable for individual humans.

drop.—always precipitous.

ensconced.—always happily.

Flaubert.—le mot juste.

Freud.—based all his theories on his own neuroses; a dinosaur.

generalize.—do not.

grill.—always being fired up.

Harvard.—a school in Boston.

Hemingway.—always wrote short, spare sentences.

homosexuality.—a genetic condition.

increase.—always dramatic.

Jung.—we are all Jungians now.

lawyers.—make all important decisions for big corporations.

literally.—metaphorically.

Middle East.—it's all about the oil.

monolithic explanations.—reductionist and doomed.

oak.—source of all problems with wine.

pass.—die (of human beings).

periods.—use liberally.

poets.—no longer know anything about meter, rhyme, or trees.

Pollock.—mention only in the context of bowel movements and vomit.

potassium.—bananas have lots.

race.—does not exist.

reference.—a verb, meaning to mention.

revenge.—best served cold.

soy.—most poisonous substance known (see also wheat).

truth.—always set in quotation marks.

wheat.—most poisonous substance known (see also soy).

writing.—loneliest of professions.

yeah, no.—yeah.

Compass points

Somewhere in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains that those animals that act to maximize the well-being of close kin can pick out their cousins, aunts, and so on. Dodging the question of how they recognize relatives, Dawkins says they "just know." The authors of Baboon Metaphysics offer a similar observation. I feel that my ethics and lots of other behaviors are part of my "just knowing." I never saw my dad do it, I can't remember anything he said to me before I was sixteen, he drives me crazy, but in countless situations I act just as he would, as he must have.

Did you ever choose a certain course of behavior because it was championed in a tv show you watched or in a neatly reasoned argument endorsed by Rawls? Or did those things just come along, adhering to your awareness because they squared with your predisposition? And where did that come from?

Orphans grow up without the terrible insufferable models we with parents are cursed with. Lucky, lucky orphans! Free to fuck up without feeling even dumber about it because your fuckuppery was handed you with your diapers, your bunkbed, your first car.

Original sin

Why is it Sarah's habit of baring her teeth to take food from her fork irks me far more than Alex's abominable politics? Why do we overlook a president's decision to cut off food to a hungry people and rail against him for putting his cock in a young woman's mouth? Why do we scold our children for failing to greet new acquaintances warmly when we ourselves pass up daily opportunities to lift the fallen and succor the sick?

We register the world through eyes addicted to beauty, ears long since spoiled by the most exquisite sonatas. We go for the close-up when the wide shot offends. We move along.

By the time I was thirteen I knew pretty much how things were supposed to be, and it was my job to open the eyes of anyone who'd gotten that far, or as far as fifteen, fifty, without seeing what was right in front of them. Things further off—my binoculars never quite gave me the focus I had when peering at beach glass damp in the cup of my hand, or Colby's hand. In retrospect, that all seems misbegotten, but there's no fixing it, there's only the occasional possibility of smiling with a hint of self-mockery as the correctives come pouring out.

Joe told me in 1997 that I was better then, a shade more tolerant, than I had been in 1980. Maybe. Or maybe I'm just better at the manoeuvre that elicits a compliment. The circles within circles make explanations as unending today as they were in my supremely self-conscious adolescence.