San Sargasso

Weeds

[After reading a translation of a "Confessionario" (which amounted to a kind of religious interrogation to root out so-called sinful thoughts) and thinking about how the Spanish missionaries apparently exterminated systematically the culture and lives of an entire race of Indians:]

In human socio-political environments, these destructive ideas (such as the Spanish missionaries' misappropriation of Christ's teachings) are like weeds: when they take root, they are extremely hardy and spread more quickly than other ideas, to the point where no other ideas can take root or breathe or receive nutrients from the ground, that is, the hearts of human beings.

Of course, though we want to cast this inexorable growth as sinister, we must not forget that from the point of view of the weed, this is success - even when the host - along with every other idea - is killed.

Like that brand of Spanish Catholicism that exterminated the Indians, the weed dies out eventually, loses its hold or reappears in new forms, and the game continues. (I don't want to cast this as a "struggle" or "battle" - that is the wrong metaphor because it implies that there is a heroic end and a victor; it should rather be considered more as an unending chemical reaction or catalysis).

[I came across an excerpt from the Confessionario in an article entitled "[Catechism] I Never" starting on p. 26 of the Feb. 2004 issue of Harper's magazine. The source of the article is given as follows: "From Francisco Pareja's Confessionario: A Documentary Source for Timucuan Ethnography, edited by Jerald Milanich and William Sturtevant, translated from the Spanish by the Florida State Department. Pareja, a Franciscan missionary, wrote the following questions in a guidebook for converting the Timucuan Indians, who occupied large portions of what is now Georgia and Florida. The Timucua were extinct by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and much of what is known about their culture has been reconstructed using documents such as the Confessionario. Professors and students at the College of William and Mary are currently preparing a new translation." An online version of the excerpt can be here.]

Chance Encounter

[Journal entry dated December 1, 2003, about a chance meeting with a Navy fighter pilot I had a fling with years ago. In that romance (which existed mostly in my head), he would go away for six months' duty on an aircraft carrier, so I played the part of Catherine Deneuve in Umbrellas of Cherbourg:]

This morning at about 11:00 I went to Dietrich's to pick up some coffee and Rob P. was there, standing in line in front of me with a friend. I had just been thinking about him a few days before. We had not seen each other in over three years.

I had been painfully in love with Rob, and he had more or less brushed me off the last time I saw him during a White Party weekend in Palm Springs.

When I realized it was him needless to say I was stunned. My first impulse was to speak to him, but I felt I looked horrible - unshaven, unkempt hair, bad breath. So I pretended I hadn't seen him. But as I was ordering he noticed me and greeted me warmly and remembered my name. As I spoke to him I was nervous and my hands trembled a bit but I don't think it showed too much.

He was with a goodlooking guy whom I assumed was his lover. But he introduced him as a friend. He said he was doing great and had only a year and a half left in the Navy. I mentioned that Michael and Sonia had just had a baby, and he said that was "awesome." He said it must have been 2 or 3 years since we had last met, and I said I thought it was 2 years. But then he mentioned he'd been with his partner 3 years so it must have been at least that long. I suspect he was dropping that bit of information as a hint to let me know where things stood, but he didn't do it in a mean way. I was considering offering to exchange phone numbers but thought better of it.

He was very warm and seemed disposed to talk to me, but I couldn't bear it more than a few minutes and finally said "it was great to see you." I think I managed to be genuinely warm back to him. The whole interchange was probably 10 minutes in duration.

When I got home I looked in the mirror and felt a little better because I didn't look as horrible as I had thought.

Aside from the strange coincidence of his being there at exactly the same moment as I, seeing him was especially poignant because I had been feeling lonely and unloved over the weekend - I had cried while watching the last part of The Virgin Suicides and then broke down again while discussing it with Terry. Seeing Rob I think struck me more with the strangeness of it than sadness. I wondered whether "It" - the universe or whatever - was trying to tell me something, and I wondered what the message was. I thought maybe it was that I should get back to writing.

Theatrical and Acute

During a radio interview I heard some author make one of those typical categorical statements about how 911 has changed the world forever. Again it struck me how absurd this idea appears in light of the fact that there are so many events, large and small, present and past, that could be considered horrific, even horrific on a grand scale. It is simply the theatrical and acute nature of 911 that prompts these idiotic statements - and even more, it is the question of to whom the event occurred. If 3,000 peasant farmers had died as a result of a terrorist act in a Third World country, would this qualify to Westerners as an event that "changed the world forever"? Hardly. What about the number of animals that are tortured and slaughtered each day to produce carcinogenic "meals" for humans or worthless consumer items making a brief stop in someone's medicine cabinet before ending their days in the landfill?

Even if you consider the number of lives lost in 911, it is hardly impressive in comparison with the the number of lives lost per day, month or year to, say, smoking-related illnesses. If you took the number of people who die of such illnesses in a year and put them in a building and crashed a plane into it, only this would appear to qualify as a perspective-shattering event; the invisible, untelevised agonies in hospital beds, the suffering and mourning of children, the people who continue to smoke and blow smoke in their children's faces in spite of their knowledge of the dangers, these things strangely do not serve to change anyone's perspective, because they have become part of the habitual and the unquestioned.

Sick Games of the No-Longer-Beautiful

I've always wanted to write a novel in which I could revel in (and perhaps exorcise) a certain kind of bitterness I sometimes see in myself and others. It would be called Sick Games of the No-Longer-Beautiful, and it would start like this:

*   *   *

Everyone is born a superstar.

After a certain amount of time spent tapdancing in the glowing footlights of that sweet parental love that's blind to your plainness and lack of distinction ("I've writ-ten a let-ter to dad-dee / His ad-dress is heav-en a-bove ..."), inevitably you stumble onto a strange road and wander into the glaring, shriveling headlights of oncoming Truth -

[Sound of tires squealing; bloodcurdling shriek; sickening thump; silence.]

And so therein lies the eternal source of your bitter hatred for your parents (and by extension for all authority, and finally for the entire human race): How could they have lied to you? How could they have led you to believe that you were the center of the world, that you were a superstar? How could they have told you that the world was a wonderful place made to order for you? That all was toys and ice cream and Disneyland for ever and ever? Do they wonder then that you dye your hair lurid shades of green and shoot up in bathroom stalls for recreation?

And so goes a decade or two - the best years of your life - dedicated to spite; eating your heart out.

But then, you wake up one day (as the cliché goes), breathe a sigh of relief, and say, "Thank God I've gotten that out of my system!" An immense burden lifts, clouds part, the heavens open, the sea becalms.

However, that very same day, you happen to catch a glimpse of your own reflection in a mirror. You're startled by the strange aging person who stares back at you - all puffy cheeks, bloodshot eyes, receding hairline. Laugh lines indeed.

It occurs to you that your youth is now gone, wasted, tossed away like garbage, irretrievable, no way to get it back. And now you're on the express train to Old Age and Death. Worst of all, you realize that you're no longer beautiful.

And that's when the real fun begins. Because someone's gotta pay …

Sargasso Sea

I find writing to be charming when it is like a Sargasso Sea - the legendary one, not the real one - where one encounters in the same sentence or paragraph the most diverse, strange and unlikely objects and ideas, noble or base, lost at sea, having drifted and become beautifully entangled and entwined in the living seaweed.