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Daniel Silliman
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| 24.5.03 |
Man\ line\ tree
If there is a word opposite plunge, the 50-year-old fir tree was doing that into the sky. It was a healthy thing standing over the neighborhood in the mist of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
This one had made the mistake of running its roots under a house and now the tree was coming down. When the wind blew the house would wiggle and tremor. On some days windows on one side of the house wouldn’t shut and on other days it was the windows on the other side that wouldn’t.
The ground was tense as the tree curled its long toes into the earth.
The trunk quivered as my boss, spurs biting bark and wood, arched back against the rope securing his waist to the tree and dropped another heavy branch.
I stood below. Lineman. The rope running through my hands curved up, tightening. It pulled up, around a branch serving as fulcrum, and dropped into a knot ‘round the belly of the limb, cut and swinging free from the tree. I leaned backwards on the line, making it support me and holding steady the heavy branch, lushly green with spring’s sap and needle.
It hung above me, heavy.
Slowly I loosened my grip, intending on easing the branch to the ground. The line slid, speeding and burning, biting and ripping into the palms of my glove, tearing across my arm. Fingers feeling heat of friction, the limb tumbled, needles shaking. My thoughts formed two centers: heat and rope.
Gripping, I slowed the plummet but only slowed it and the limb hit the ground cracking and smashing.
Releasing the rope I waved my hands. “Arrhhhhaaa!” My glove palms showed a line of leather frayed by heat. The fingers were half-way into holes. Across my arm, where the rope wrapped from behind me into my hands, was a curving red welt that reminded me, for no plain reason, of snakes.
“It wasn’t this hard before,” I said to myself, but I can’t remember how, exactly, I lowered the branch slowly to the ground. “Before” was the summer before I entered college, when I worked with a tree company eight or nine months and learned the job of a lineman, along with art of pruning. Most of the time I had been dragging branches around for $12.50 and hour, but I had learned those two acts I considered skills.
And now I seemed to have forgotten the one.
“It should be natural. My body should remember without a description,” I said. “Damn. And that hurt too.”
I thought the phrase ‘like a bike,’ but then castigated it as a cheap cliché and condemned the beggardly expression to a corner.
The tree shook as my boss released another limb from the trunk with his saw. The tension of the earth beneath us eased as the roots relaxed, the tree’s weight lessening. I leaned backwards tightening the line in it’s run through my hands, to the tree, over a limb and into the knot around the swinging sappy stub-end of the branch.
My hands moved. I looked, surprised, and they moved. First the right, then the left: hand over hand slowly letting the limb lower to the ground. The unreleased rope, always secure in one hand or the other, lost all its wild fury.
“Huh,” I said, and the rope was silent.
White chips and dust scattered through the air, sprinkling confetti smelling of Christmas and swirling like a snow globe down.
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 23.5.03 |
Mozart Laughed
Purgitorial Paying for the Sins of One's Time
On this plain we saw an old gentleman of a worthy aspect, with a long beard, who drearily led a large following of some ten thousand men in black. He had a melancholy and hopeless air; and Mozart said:
“Look, there’s Brahms. He is striving for redemption, but it will take him all his time.”
I realized that the thousands of men in black were the players of all those notes and parts in his scores which according to divine judgment were superfluous.
“Too thickly orchestrated, too much material wasted,” Mozart said with a nod.
And thereupon we saw Richard Wagner at the head of a host just as vast, and felt the pressure of those thousands as they clung and closed upon him. Him, too, we watched as he dragged himself along with slow and sad step.
“In my young days,” I remarked sadly, “these two musicians passed as the most extreme contrasts conceivable.”
Mozart laughed.
“Yes, that is always the way. Such contrasts, seen from a little distance, always tend to show their increasing similarity. Thick orchestration was in any case neither Wagner’s nor Brahms’ personal failing. It was a fault of their time.”
“What? And have they got to pay for it so dearly?” I cried in protest.
“Naturally. The law must take its course. Until they have paid the debt of their time it cannot be known whether anything personal to themselves is left over to stand to their credit.”
“But they can’t either of them help it!”
“Of course not. They cannot help it either that Adam ate the apple. But they have to pay for it all the same.”
“But that is frightful.”
“Certainly. Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and are responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty. You must have had a remarkable sort of religious education if you did not know that….”
--Herman Hesse in Steppenwolfe
by Daniel Silliman @
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Reading a book that approaches directly that which I had felt recessed, I become excited and uncontrollably grab for a pen to scrawl across the delighting page with circles, lines, brackets, squares and parenthesis.
And so I go mad in declaring my presence, declaring against the page, against the text.
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| 20.5.03 |
Reading in the Street
I am waiting for Jeff. We had lunch together at a pub down the street and I’m spending time—I wouldn’t call it wasting time—browsing the philosophy and literature sections of one of the U. district's used bookstores. I laugh at the juxtaposition of philosophy and true crime at the end of the shelf, and move on to consider the linguistics shelves.
Buying Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for $1 at Magnum books during a weekend with Jeff in Seattle, I wander outside. It’s a warm day with all the accessories—sunshine and a street fair on the Ave.
I walk down the block in a walk that I always describe as “wander,” listen to what must be the worst carnival act on the west coast, admire some traditional hats being sewn as I watch, and wander back in the direction of the bookstore, thinking perhaps Jeff will have returned from his errand.
It’s a good day and I had a good lunch and it’s the first time I’ve spent with Jeff since Christmas and I want to laugh at the carnival/county fair/craft fair that is this milling thing on the street, so I sit down, back against a brick wall feeling warm through my shirt.
I pull out Heart of Darkness and begin to read, smoking slowly and absorbing Seattle.
Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outward, resembled an idol.
“Hey.”
“Have a seat,” I tell Jeff, “the bricks are warm and the street is fine.”
“What’re you reading?”
“Joseph Conrad,” I say.
He grins.
“We’re gonna be here a while and I didn’t bring a book. Let me run grab something quick.”
“Alright, I’ll be here.”
He came back shortly, after what he described as a “bookstore blitz” with a history of Greece and something about Charlemagne. He sat, and we read and smoked, interrupting the rite with conversation. The kinda conversation that makes one incredibly scintillatingly fascinating, or the dullest of boring, depending on the point of view.
“The interesting thing about the sociology of street fairs…,” Jeff begins.
“The thing about irony is, I could never learn it from the definitions,” I say. “I read half-a-dozen definitions of irony and they never made any sense. Now I get it and when I talk about irony I sound like some Zen lunatic going ‘Irony is like a grin’…”
“But if a politician speaks about art, he’s attempting to co-opt it. We wouldn’t let some politician take Eliot…,” he says.
“‘ “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”…to him the meaning of an episode was not on the inside like a kernal but outside, eveloping…,’” I read.
And on like that. Which is to say it was like our entire friendship. The intellectual is the personal, and we’re not really sure what other people talk about. For years, with us, is has been one great conversation sprawling across the landscape, looping in and out in the synthesis of the esoteric.
Jeff interrupts the act.
“We need a sign,” he said. “Will read and talk for money!”
I laugh.
“Give me your hat.” And I throw in a handful of change and leave it sitting on the sidewalk in front of us.
“This is art,” he say.
“A performance. An existential act of intelligence in presence,” I say.
We laugh, easy with our own insanity, and went back to reading.
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 19.5.03 |
Neocons without a definition
Conservatives of the post-New York Intellectual Straussian Jewish pro-war Imperal-America anti-Communist former-Trotskyite-and-kept-moving-right tax-cutting Regeanites without a Kirkian or Burkean attention to tradition, culture and eternal contracts, the formost of them writing for the Weekly Standard, the new version of National Review, and created National Review Online stripe.
As soon as anyone stumble's across the definition of Neoconservative, please contact the mothership. They can't seem to find it.
by Daniel Silliman @
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Ted Joans Lives
I am not familiar with the work of the recently passed on Beat poet Ted Joans, and miss him for not having known of him. I suppose he is the straggling end of the era.
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I will not take a national politician seriously until I find one who can speak of aesthetics and holds an intelligent relationship between politics and art.
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Afghan Press
Editors in Afghanistan are being threatened, questioned, shadowed and intimidated for operating free presses. The journalists, according to the news piece, are resolute, holding firm to the freedom of the press.
"'We will keep publishing and printing newspapers until they set fire to our office, or the government puts us in prison,' said Sistany, the Aftab editor."
This story also shows up a serious and disturbing corruption the government there.
by Daniel Silliman @
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Gargantuan in Failure
I would have been upset, but that I had really low expectations that were solidly met.
I was a mixed fan of the first film, believing it to have a basic flaw in the philosophy of the premise (never asking the question of "what is 'real'?"), though I enjoyed it and consider it on of the defining films of the decade. I had, however, hopes the secod film mght mak me a fan.
This review at the New Yorker is a dazzling review or the atrocity:
On the hodge-podge of the philosophy:
"It would have been nice if some of that complexity, or any complexity, had made its way into the sequel. But—to get to the bad news—“Matrix Reloaded” is, unlike the first film, a conventional comic-book movie, in places a campy conventional comic-book movie, and in places a ludicrously campy conventional comic-book movie."
The sillyness of that underground city:
"Like every good-guy citadel in every science-fiction movie ever made, Zion is peopled by stern-jawed uniformed men who say things like “And what if you’re wrong, God damn it, what then?” and “Are you doubting my command, Captain?”"
Summig up the betrayal of The Matrix in The Matrix Reoaded:
"For anyone who was transfixed by the first movie, watching the new one is a little like being unplugged from the Matrix: What was I experiencing all that time? Could it have been . . . all a dream?"
The freeway scene:
So "unbound by any rules except the rule of Now He’ll Jump Off That Fast-Moving Thing Onto the Next Fast-Moving Thing that they are tedious to watch."
I would only add three comments to his review. 1) The philosophy reminds me of community college students with a penchant for philosophy: They've read too much to be nicely dumb and normal and too little to be interestingly intelligent. 2) The word to describe this film is gargantuan, and (being the oppsite of "epic") that is not a compliment. 3) This films shows a complete lack of understand of almost all aspects of culture.
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