Totalitarianism. An Immigration Story

Fed up with certain complacent tics in the liberal press after the recent border brouhaha (i.e. President Trump’s attempt to enforce his “zero-tolerance” policy on illegal immigration by separating the children of illegal immigrants from their parents detained in custody) I fired off this letter to the New York Times. I hope it was at least worth a chuckle. You judge. (To the Times, who didn't publish me: thank you at least for not alienating me from all my friends.)

Dear New York Times,

I wonder if your style editor might consider researching the word “totalitarian,” frequently used by your editorial columnists these days, and banishing it from your style book (if banishing words from a style book is not too totalitarian)? The word is liberally applied by writers in your paper to immigrant-bashers in the Trump administration, for reasons I will try to explain. “The horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism” warn us about “forces pervading the politics of the United States and Europe today” (especially as they pertain to issues of immigration) wrote Richard J. Bernstein in your paper, June 20, 2018, shortly after the border fuss, in a typical outburst of overwrought journalism. I know some people will bristle at the word “fuss.” I just want to splash some cold light on deliberations.

Let me stress that I am not for or against immigration. The body is nothing but a swarming republic of immigrating and emigrating molecules. Immigration represents intrusion, disruption and opportunity all at once. We are all immigrants, members of a powerful antique brotherhood. European settlers in America, empowered by a sense of privilege and destiny, gained admittance to this club by proving themselves nimbler, smarter and more ruthless than the now effectively extinct race of indigenous Americans—themselves Asian immigrants—who once tried to block their immigration.

(To scientifically-minded know-it-alls who swear indignantly that there is no such thing as race—a word of obscure origin—I use the word in its ordinary, pre-scientific sense. In English it once meant “wines of a characteristic flavor,” all sparkling, so to speak, with distinct possibilities.)

I believe many share responsibility for immigrant family separation, including past administrations and illegal-immigrant parents themselves. Pro-immigration Democrats in Congress, allied with the same Republican business interests who stalled the promising e-verify program, block effective border-control legislation, hoping that the ensuing border chaos will blow up in the administration’s face. American parents are routinely separated from their children after being charged with a crime. I welcome genuine discussion about the issue, without words like Hitler and totalitarian being hurled indiscriminately. It grieves me to see children used as ammunition in a propaganda war. I actually agree with Anne Coulter for once. (Who needs a red pill or a blue pill when reality is so damn purple?) There is no such thing as “woke” or asleep. Life is an in-between.

Count me as an open-minded member of the environmentalists for sensible immigration law, who regularly face scurrilous accusations of “greenwashing” their racism. I am willing to throw open the borders to unrestricted immigration, but not without a debate. I know that history is an airy soufflé sustained by hope and unintended consequences. In this letter, my interest is narrowly focused not on immigration but on words, and on the excesses of political rhetoric. My curiosity piqued by passages in the press like the one above, in the following paragraphs I try to make sense of the stubborn grip the elusive word “totalitarian” (an immigrant itself, as it turns out) has on our popular imagination.

In use, the word seems to have little content beyond its formulaic links to Hitler and Stalin. If you call someone a totalitarian, you might as well be calling him a Nazi. But there are persistent attempts by commentators to fill in the empty space enclosed by the word with actual content.

Many of these attempts stem from the resistance of old-school philosophy to the mid-twentieth-century ideas of postmodernism, including its critique of the correspondence theory of truth. According to this theory, truths (statements of fact) correspond to the facts they express, and this correspondence is what we call truth. Truth is something like the totality of truths. There are countless attempts in the philosophical literature to understand the nature of this correspondence. Despite its ancient provenance, it is a theory well-suited to the information age, where all processed facts are already several layers of abstraction removed from ordinary language.

In his article Bernstein, seconding Hannah Arendt, deplores totalitarianism’s Nietzschean (i.e. postmodern) nihilism toward what he calls “factual truth”—real, honest-to-goodness truth, as opposed to mere “poetic” or “religious” truth. Modern man accepts the binding authority of plain facts as a medieval peasant once accepted the authority of Holy Scripture: unconditionally and reverently. Like Arendt and George Orwell, both adherents to the correspondence theory, Bernstein equates facts with truth. “One of the most successful techniques for blurring the distinction between factual truth and falsehood is to claim that any so-called factual truth is just another opinion—something we hear almost every day from the Trump administration.” (An opinion is a statement that lacks correspondence with a fact.) Old-fashioned policy makers (liberal technocrats) who could once hold the floor by reciting a laundry list of facts suddenly feel threatened by populists (i.e., the rabble) who are deaf to information. (The People are hard-ass dudes.) “What happened so blatantly in totalitarian regimes is being practiced today by leading politicians with great success,” Bernstein alleges. (Why are contemporary accusations of totalitarianism almost never leveled at leftist populists?)

Bernstein longs for science to provide the same truth-grounding role in the new world which God played in the old one. But if he thinks he is opposing totalitarianism by clinging to old-fashioned Enlightenment superstitions about science, he is pathetically mistaken—especially since he doesn't have a clue about what the word is really supposed to mean.

 

Like others who swoon at the occult magic of the word “totalitarian,” Bernstein misinterprets the casual mystification, cruelty and gaslighting practiced by bullies, thugs and murderers at all levels of the power chain as if it were dictated by an office memo, or written up in a company mission statement. Compare the elaborate regimen of torture and psychological conditioning through which 1984’s Winston Smith is implausibly forced to renounce his belief in 2+2=4, Orwell’s secular version of the True Cross. Monochromatic conspiracy theorists like Bernstein and Orwell see things in black and white, but the truth is multicolored. (Forget the banality of evil. Worry about the banality of slogans.) The bully and thug doesn’t need a rogue’s playbook. He is an instinctive manipulator, with an inborn knowledge of human psychology. He takes perverse delight in his work, unlike the unconvincing bureaucrats in Orwell’s famous novel. (Compare the convincing bureaucrats in a Kafka novel.) Evil joy is his keynote emotion, one that consoles him in the day-to-day drudgery of his thankless task, and gleeful enthusiasm at the wreckage he leaves behind.  He makes few long-range plans. His knack for mayhem is its own reward. In his political avatar he never lays the foundations for a lasting state. (Even in the case of the Soviet nightmare, aided by “scientific” socialism and its yen for facts, the terror was relatively short-lived). His reign is invariably as brief as a blazing meteor. Think of Edmund in King Lear. Inspired malice, not programmatic intent, rules his actions. Programs are for cucks and E.U politicians. As the sun sets on its nighted plans, evil leaves pretty contrails in the sky. Any contemporary politico who practices the art of disruption feels a kinship, however slight, with the legendary monsters of the last century.

The word “totalitarian” gives us a spooky little chill when we hear it, like the word “Orwellian,” and convinces us at once that it holds the key to a mystery that concerns all of us nearly, the problem of evil—i.e., the problem of Hitler and Stalin. It assures us that are we are free of complicity in the crimes of these men. For the key element of totalitarianism is its cultivated hostility toward facts (like Orwell’s famous 2+2=4) which we, for our part, cherish. “Nothing is true; everything is allowed,” in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche. Man is innately good apart from the corrupting influence of bad ideas. But the comforting feeling the word “totalitarian” gives us that we finally understand the source of our fears evaporates as soon as we actually examine it.

One thread in the tangled skein of our overused word “totalitarian” is the idea of a centralized economy. Having undermined “factual” truth as the first step in its plans of world domination, totalitarianism then seeks to solidify its hold on power through total control of all other aspects of the lives of its citizens. But the German economy under the popularly-elected Hitler was a loose association of autonomous corporations—Krupp, Siemans, Porsche, Hugo Boss—much like ours. (IG Farben even supplied Zyklon B to Nazi gas chambers.) Neighbor exerted on neighbor far more pressure to conform to the state than did the secret police. Such conformity is the universal glue of all political unions, murderous or benign.  Responding to a latent cruelty in his people, an inspired leader brought that cruelty to light and unleashed it on the world. It was the source of his power. Whether in a tyranny or a democracy, all governance is a partnership between leader and people. They form a totality. So why exactly do we reflexively label Nazi Germany (but not ourselves) totalitarian?

Benito Mussolini used the term “totalitario” (totalitarian) to describe a state that fulfills a totality of its citizens’ needs (and demands a totality of their loyalty in exchange). The word “totality” has a nice “I really mean it” sound to it. It expresses commitment and devotion, a total investment of one’s being, and has a “modern” ring. (Compare Ernst Jünger’s 1930 essay, “Totale Mobilmachung,” total mobilization: life as a soldier’s struggle and achievement.) Mussolini liked that. It satisfied certain aesthetic needs. It evoked memories of the Church Militant. Soldiers of Christ united in a cause. Onward, Christian soldiers, to salvation (the universal goal of history) with our race leading the way. A new secular church for the twentieth century. (Compare the modern liberal ideal of total inclusivity—with its “merit”-selected architects leading the way.) What country doesn’t want a population of energized citizens, especially in difficult times? Supreme leader as high-school coach giving a half-time pep talk.

The word “totalitarian” was then turned against its inventor by nameless anti-Fascists (it is hard to track down exact sources) and used as a general term to designate states that are oppressive, or illegitimate, or something.  Should we just say Fascist? But we have to use the lowercase word “fascist” if it is to be a general term applicable to any state, and then the whole tug-of-war over meaning starts again.  The signification of the term (what does it have to do with totality?) has never been satisfactorily explained, even by its creator. E pluribus unum, isn’t that the definition of totality? But in most people’s mouths totalitarian is practically a synonym for authoritarian, an equally slippery term, and not exactly one which springs to mind when we read the motto on our currency.

We recoil from the idea that our autonomy and free will have their roots deeply planted in a—what should we call it? Totality? Something which embraces, sustains and gives rise to our very individuality. This is partly the reason why the word “totalitarian” gives off sinister vibrations for us, and why we are so eager to apply it to evil regimes. At the same time, we sense that our belief in our self-sufficiency arises from confused ignorance. Philosophy has always sought to understand the paradox of a freedom subject to nature (compare Kant).

Something of a philosophical buzz surrounded the concept of totality before its use in a word by Mussolini. In Hegel’s Logic totality (one of Kant’s categories of pure reason) is a very primitive—and deficient—manifestation of the Absolute Idea. (Bear with me here.) Imagine infinity and eternity exhaustively itemized in a bookkeeper’s ledger. That’s totality.

Martin Heidegger considered the concept of “totality” to be imbued with Western Metaphysics and the forgetfulness of Being. But he located the source of this baneful forgetfulness (and the debasement of language that emanates from it) in the United States. Having immigrated from the continent, the word “totalitarian” became associated by educated American readers with the name Hannah Arendt (Heidegger’s refugee Jewish friend and student) after the publication of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. Its history forgotten, the word “totalitarian” was then applied in the post-war years exclusively to Communists (the original anti-fascists!) by the American press and State Department. It was linked to pejorative shibboleths like a “centralized economy” and “rigid adherence to a creed,” with a blizzard of ill-defined terms like “ideology” supporting the whole lexical edifice on a foundation of air. Muslim Jihadists, godless Communists and Evangelical Christians (compare The Handmaid’s Tale): all our enemies in the culture wars are totalitarian under some definition or other.

Hannah Arendt’s own treatment of the term in her book, infused with her personal history, only adds to the confusion—confusion carefully cultivated as an effective rhetorical tool in a thousand applications of the word to the Trump administration in Vox, the Guardian, the New Republic, the Washington Post, the New Yorker and the New York Times, to name a few. (Of course, all these outlets are careful to say that Trump and his associates only “recall” or “threaten” totalitarianism—in other words, wish to summon it like ghosts from the deep.) Hannah Arendt’s totalitarian regimes are invariably old-fashioned despotisms enhanced with twentieth-century technology. Arendt never—unlike her teacher, Martin Heidegger—exhibits much interest in the essence of technology, or asks whether it is despotic in some more original sense than a murderous tyrant. Technology undercuts and dominates every clash of personal wills and fuses, as Michel Foucault saw, the oppressed with the oppressor in an indissoluble totality. In many ways technology—to which the idea of recursivity is central—is the very embodiment of a self-enclosed totality, and therefore totalitarian in an eminent sense.(The representation of nature as a dynamic ecological system according to the science of control systems is technological, hence also totalitarian.)

In short, the misused word “totalitarian,” newly dusted-off by the liberal press to refer to our Orwellian enemies in the Republican Party, with their reputed disrespect for facts, is just an empty propaganda slogan—a debasement of language. Unseemly name-calling. Republicans are far from having a monopoly on the degradation of language, which Hannah Arendt considered primarily a cause rather than an effect of the rise of totalitarian states. (I confess I have not always been scrupulously fair to Arendt in this cantankerous manifesto. Feminist hagiography makes Arendt off-limits to criticism in our totalitarian lecture halls.) When Republicans brazenly deny facts, for the most part they are just trolling Democrats, who are inordinately fond of facts. (If only they were always fond of the right ones!). Who can resist? Democrats should not take the bait. Let’s stop confusing facts with truth. Since there is something like an economy of knowledge, those with wealth and privilege will always have more ready access to facts than those who are fact-impoverished. An extensive infrastructure supports the collection and validation of facts. Democrats are rich in facts. But only an elite technocrat with a defective sense of reality thinks they have a fast track to truth. Let our managerial classes concern themselves with facts. Leaders tap into a future more real than the factual present.

Read Stanley Fish’s recent Stone column—“‘Transparency’ Is the Mother of Fake News,” New York Times, May 8, 2018—on the ponderous irrelevance of most facts. Facts are overrated—even overabundant—but the truth is in short supply. Just because you think your pet fact demands everybody’s immediate attention doesn’t mean that it really does. The Fact—standing alone outside history and purged of all interest and motive—is a creature of metaphysics. Even the most mundane fact is impregnated with a forgetfulness that closes off the future and all its possibilities. A so-called "possible world" is just a cloned variation of the actual one, woven out of select abstract negations of the same attenuated facts with which we construct our world rather than dwell in it (and are constructed by it in return). Why be caught in a factual error when, like a good liberal or conservative pundit, you can weave a story that highlights irrelevant facts and casts the important ones into obscurity, all the while remaining willfully ignorant of what you are doing? (An "important" fact is simply one which is upfront about its questionable bearing on truth.) In other words, why ever lie when you can just—lie? There is hypocrisy in proclaiming truth while remaining ignorant of the true nature of facts.

I love America, but I wish I could enlighten her fathomless ignorance. Still sitting on a preponderance of the world’s wealth, legacy of two centuries of genocide and slavery, America pretends to fulfill the totality of its citizens’ needs by promising us “freedom” and supplying us with the latest expensive technological gadgets like social media. It uses targeted advertising to elicit—or create—the totality of our deepest desires, dreams and opinions, in all their diversity, and to satisfy and disseminate them with marketing expertise. It demands loyalty to its core values in exchange, values which it honors with reverent lip-service, like everybody else. So I guess that makes us totalitarians—like everybody else.

And “exclusionary” to boot. United we stand against the enemies of democracy, the one true religion, soldiers in the cause of universal salvation: the reduction of every facet of human experience and natural existence to commercial exploitation.

With the help of Amazon, Facebook and Google—facilitators of our dreams and maestros of artificial intelligence—America calls the shots on the world stage. Immigration has always been a vital cog in her wheel. Migrants come, wave after wave, astraddle on the dolphins’ mire and blood, from struggling countries well-stocked like Amazon fulfillment centers with low-wage labor. They are at the disposal of American capitalism, which seems to cultivate foreign poverty like U.S. agribusiness cultivates El Salvadoran bananas.

Liberal: sworn to hard-fought principles of freedom.

Generous: from the Latin word generosus, meaning high-born, high-minded.

When did these words come to denote the cynical indulgence a master—enslaved by his own lavishness—uses to pacify his slave? Technology exudes prodigality as its chief poison. Talk about the banality of evil! The toy-store banality of the sleek new products on display at a tech expo positively glistens with evil possibilities, regardless of any of the military or surveillance uses to which these beaming novelties can be put. Technology polices and surveils, so as to better serve. It arrogates to itself the sum of human aspirations. As for migration, a much-used term in cybernetics, it means to move data or software from one location to another, so as to maximize efficiency and distribute resources evenly. Everyone profits in the shuffle. As far as business is concerned, we all know that the name of the future is mobility and fluidity. Mobilismo (to coin a new word). Futurismo.

(Futurism. Marinetti. Boccioni. Lest we forget the paramount importance of art in the creation of any national-scale criminal enterprise, I want to stress that all politics is a product of the creative imagination. Count Lincoln Center as a major factor in our global expansion.)

Lords once spacious in the possession of dirt, now rich in intellectual property, we skim above the treetops in a dream of weightlessness like Marvel franchises on crystal meth, slaying populist dragons with the obscene versatility of our facts.

(And stop harping on Russia and its stiff-necked strongman, the ice hockey-adept Vladimir Putin, that nettle in the West's sneaker. Swallowed up by this web of totalities, all the fir trees in the Siberian forest are destined one day to become either oriented strand board or display specimens in a nature theme park. Let us hope Russian backwardness spares them a while longer.)

How fast is your processor? Everything is fluid, blurred by motion. Whatever has the solidity and composure to stand still is left behind in the rush (Rausch, intoxication) and is resolved into its constituent metallic ores like a quarried mountain in order to make a smart phone. (At least our phones are smart.) As Martin Heidegger said, only a god can save us.

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The Phallic Corpse Flower and the Mirror of Eros

August. The air is snarling. From the carrion maw of the subway station entrance issues the bad breath of the beast. Breath of the dog-star. All wet tongue and hot panting wind and exposed teeth. I see my reflection in Le Pain Quotidien.  Submarine loaves of air-conditioned boutique bread submerged behind a cool vitrine like sea sponges, fruits de mer glacés, next to an elegant barista in a blue apron, afloat like a mermaid at a cherry-wood bar, embellishing a menu with colored chalks.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: “catoptric tristesse,” the sadness of being shut out of a mirror. Definition of eros.

(Science of catoptrics. Study of reflected light. Reflection. Refraction. Bending. Breaking.)

The New York Post barks at me with the voice of Cerberus as I descend onto the subway platform, swallowed by  furnace heat. Rare flower at the New York Botanical Garden. Another entry in the taxonomy of sadness.  Thank you, taxonomic poets, for Amorphophallus titanum, or “corpse flower” (titan arum). Its name and perfume capture the titanic amorphous phallic sadness of human life, its tumescence, its evanescence, its stink of death. (A name is like a dog’s humid breath, or a weed’s rank scent. It permeates your skin, even coats your eyeballs with glue-like meaning. You can’t stop seeing what the name names.) Human life. The phallic corpse flower.

Soiled Macy’s ad, cast away on a subway bench next to the Post. Little girl in fringed buckskin leather mukluks, slender naked legs disappearing under a short dress of see-through dentate ivory lace. Sherpa vest, pompom knit beanie, cute hedgehog mittens. Back-to-school sale. Delirious with the heat, I see her materialize under brisk October skies near the seventieth street children’s playground on Central Park East. As she walks she seems to straddle a slender pink cord of immature vaginal flesh, invisible under her clothing, as if she were scooting on her crotch along a tightrope, a carnal violin string whose high-pitched, squealing music only a pederast can hear. Like a katydid, making stridulous music with her thighs. A moist highway of illicit sex. Schlitterbahn. Pissy little darling. Cold as a fish. Wiping the sweat out of one ear, I flip through the ad one last time and toss it into a bulging green trash canister with a white “recycle” logo printed on its phallic lip.

Tumescence. Evanescence. Stink of death.

(The subway, where dark, disturbing dreams incubate, and large machines burrow phallically through the urban substrate like maggots through a corpse, enriching the soil. Lady, whilst the machine is to him. Like father like son.)

Like a reptile in the desert heat I seek the cool shadows under your skirt, where pale pastures glimmer in the dark like the cheeks of planets. I lodge myself rattle, fangs and all in the chasm of your charm. In a fury of anger, desire and pompous rectitude and lechery we pounce upon artless innocence and rape it, like shoppers at a Black Friday sale, and then out of shame at what we’ve done we murder it.  Because it is really better off dead anyway, we reckon, seeing as how it is now defiled and all. We rapists are very considerate cowboys. Return it for a full refund. The mirror of eros, sealed portal to a mystery beyond our comprehension, slides open like the glass doors of a suburban shopping mall retail outlet as we rush past the security guards and trample the merchandise. But the “merchandise” is our own skin. Mortality is self-inflicted punishment, we realize with awe and gratitude, like heroic aid-workers in Ebola countries who self-quarantine. We must not carry our disease into the mirror world, so pristine and serene, and fragile as an alpine pool stocked with clouds. Intangible in the strict sense of the word, and incorruptible. So we trample our own skin in the rush for bargains, self-reflexively, in a process some call “aging.” Murder itself is murdered in the great shopper’s stampede we call “death.” Our skin is imprinted with immortal characters, campaign ribbons, medals of valor. Tokens of restraint and perseverance. (And, yes, liver spots.)

Vintage clothing. Items marked down for liquidation. Soiled and damaged merchandise. Bench-crafted leather. Hand-tooled cartography of time. Weathered pigskin. Scarred scorecard. Ominous lampshade. Translucent beauty.

Old people probably make better lampshades than children. Their poor, punished pelts display more velvety grain and velum than the milk-fed latex bubblegum skins of pre-adolescent children, those pampered darlings—deliriously supple and radiant in life, dull and featureless no doubt when stretched on a wire frame—ever could. The skin of old people is not chalky and dead but seems to glow with the intense inner diffused lamplight of their senior years. They are already licked within by flames of the lower world, the distant fires of Acheron. They look like they could burn your hand if you touched them, as if age was a communicable skin disease, like scabies or a fire rash. As if life was an ancient parchment defaced with obscure characters, already burning in the fires of purgatory. Hot as a New York subway platform in August.

Human life. The corpse flower.

                                      
                                   Amorphophallus titanum, the phallic corpse flower

Boy and Earth: An Environmental Love Story

                                                                 
Children, a musician once said, are born wordlessly imploring their mothers to sing to them. The human body is, at its core, an instrument of song. And so, of course, are celestial bodies, though we hear them only in our sleep.

Melting blue marbled earth breathing wordless music in vast throaty syllables of lung-tissue softness. (Somewhere east of Samoa, the heaving bosom of the ocean swims under her see-through negligee of clouds like the detachable blue lung in the transparent chest of the scale-model manikin you built as a child.) Touched by felt hammers of darkness, her velvety vocal cords are stretched to the circumference, parallel lines of force that begin from nowhere and intersect there, on infinite arcs, somewhere beyond the electromagnetic spectrum. Deerskin pelt: Arabia seen from space. Tawny suede. Softer than under a blouse, or a skirt, which she shimmies to her ankles with an electric rustle after unbuckling her Van Allen radiation belt. Wriggles out of her Doppler shift. Humid, dewy gem. Naked to the heavens, caressed by the hand of the void. Waiting for a solar wind to lick her moisture off. Poised to strike astronauts mad with her beauty, as they hover weightless, peeping like boys through a Pyrex porthole on the international space station. In sleep we wear the earth like earmuffs, tête à l’étau, as if she sang with her thighs. Leg-locked in the music of the infinite. (We all know the music women make when they’re pleased.)

                                   The blouse of clouds that hide your beauty’s form
                                   Obliterated by a summer storm
                                   You stand nude to the horizon: this is what
                                   Set all things stirring once in a boy’s gut.


We all have skin in this game. “Human” derives from “humus,” earth. Our nostrils are never totally disencumbered from the soil of our birth. We imbibe her essence, the mother’s essence, through our nostrils every time we breathe, like craft cocktails. Sex On the Beach. The Slippery Nipple. Eye of the Komodo. (Jörmungandr, the old Norse World Serpent. Our olfactory bulbs are close to our reptilian centers, two regions connected like the East Side and Williamsburg by the Canarsie tube of the mind.) La Puesta Del Sol, vermouth and red grapefruit juice. Her drowsy fumes make the sun sleepy. To breathe mortal air is to be always more or less tipsy on her sunset perfume. We would constantly lose our heads if it weren’t for the stars to guide us. The stars are our principles, our conscience, our mathematics and our Last Judgement. Constellations are our tea leaves, parliamentary rules of order and city council by-laws. The sober man wakes before Phosphorus, to feel his flesh shrink and skin harden and sting under a cold shower of stars. But with her arts of seduction the earth eventually invites every man under her warm, mouldering blanket of human compost, giardino delle delizie terrene, which at this very moment sticks to the soles our shoes.


Rocks tower in the distance, seem to float in the blazing blue sea like volcanic dumplings. Black Sea. Black dumplings. Sweet as honey, a child kneels on a pine bench, hair in a pirate’s kerchief, elbows propped in front of her on a mahogany yacht railing, her little bikini-diapered derrière protruding backward like a sticky bun wrapped in pastry parchment. Russian plutocrat’s daughter. Made his money from God knows what environmental obscenity. Vast salt basin where the Aral Sea once stood. But his daughter is sweet, with her sunburned nose. She is the earth. Every outrage to the virginity of the sea, the forest and the mountains seems to render her more intact. “I will bury you,” she seems to say to her industrialist father as she smiles, like Khrushchev, with apple-cheeked serenity at peaks in the distant Caucasus, whose snows streak the air like clouds.

Chilean Fruit: A Parable of Globalism

                                                                     I

March 15, 2013.

Bodies in freefall. Levitation. Resurrection.

I know what everyone is thinking. Not another essay on suicide.

You dine on fresh fruit flown at extravagant cost from Chile. But you know you have become enslaved to a new global economy of produce, and so your fruit smacks of slave food. You want to buy it from the Amish farmer down the road, but there is no such farmer, and the road is a freeway, and heavy chains rattle and gall your flesh. What to do?

A woman from New Jersey stopped her black Dodge Durango in traffic on the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge, vaulted two guardrails and leapt—complete with handbag—200 feet into a surprised swarm of soft gray chill March water molecules, aguas de marco, “waters of March,” babbling in divine Português to the accompaniment of some non-existent Jobim soundtrack.

Needless to say, the water molecules presented a united front against the assault of this alien body hurtling 122 mph in freefall (terminal velocity—look it up on Wikipedia). A solid body, moving at great speed, tends to liquify in contact with stationary water. Splash.

Moral: Walk softly over the earth. Carry a parachute. (Sometimes awkward in the subway.)

The steel architecture of the George Washington Bridge continued to laugh and soar. (“Here steel architecture finally seems to laugh” said Le Corbusier in 1937 of “the world’s most beautiful bridge”—again, Wikipedia.)

In truth, the great GWB can stretch your heart on a rack. It makes the sky seem monstrous blue.

One feels impaled on harp strings, like the unfortunate in that curious painting by Bosch. One’s body ascends face-first to heaven on an elevator of twisted steel cables, which sing in the wind. There is music in the bridge.

Swan dive off the George Washington Bridge. I arrived at 2:05 or 2:10 pm, on my triathlon-rigged carbon Pinarello, bound for a training run in the untrammeled freedom of the New Jersey Palisades. The Palisades: curtains of towering purple granite that fence the mighty waters of the Hudson for twenty miles upriver. The sky was like a huge blue lung that seemed to breathe, collectively, for the entire human race, even for my mother, recently dead of lung cancer and emphysema. Hence the bromide  “breath-taking.” Spectacle to revive the dead. Two police officers, already on the scene, shielded their eyes against the inhuman, superhuman glare of the merciless, mineral-blue waters, which spread out like a palace floor—a sea of agate trod by Thetis’ feet—beneath the bridge. Thetis, Greek sea goddess. Clutching the guardrail of the bike-path with one hand, the near officer swiftly released his visored hand from his brow and extended it down-river in a pointing motion like a military salute, mouthing the faint word “There.” “There” expanded deafeningly in the awful vacuum of azure space. A police radio chattered. A police boat raced upriver. A helicopter hovered frantically. Two attractive joggers eyed the policemen shyly. A sharp March wind kissed my face eagerly. It was like passing a funeral cortege, only “closer to life” as art connoisseurs say. Death as exhibition. Blue ruin.

But what lovely behavior of silk-sack clouds! Skittish, colt-like, curvetting effortlessly over heaven’s blue ballroom floor. You would have melted in blue admiration for those mild, melting, nursery-school behaviors.

I wrote a poem to the Hudson’s merciless beauty, dated Valentine’s Day, 2013 (one month before you jumped). I now dedicate it to you.

                                                      Hudson River,
                                                 George Washington Bridge

Unraveled from your rain spool, O mist-spun
River, a smeared jewel  in the noonday sun
Crowned with a feast of aether! Stray clouds pass
Locked enthralled in your high tower of glass

Like parsley flowers strewn on a hillside’s crest,
Spars or ribs in Jupiter’s mighty chest,
Florentine tresses plaited with wildflowers,
Worlds on a dial of planetary hours

Enameled with celestial animals—
Flora and fauna that a light wind mauls.
Crushed like unwrinkled water I fall too
Prostrate under this avalanche of blue.

Thus the hours of day dream on the water,
Night-scales and day-scales of the ocean’s daughter,
And as time creeps toward his lightless deep
Under her steel-gray dragon mantle sleep.

                                   ( February 15, 2013)

Sleep well in the coils of the dragon, purse lady. The ghost of your Dodge Durango, dressed as if for a funeral, keeps watch for its mistress beside the guardrail, its passenger-side door still open in stunned disbelief (and no small measure of hurt feelings). I pass it three times a week on my way to the Palisades.

                                                            II

Strong and weak forces. Gravitation (die Schwere).

“Sons of the Earth” (Söhne der Erde) like the Rhein and the Hudson—said Friedrick Hölderlin in his hymn “Der Rhein” (1808)—are “alliebend” (all-loving) “wie die Mutter” (like the mother). “So empfangen sie auch mühlos, die Glücklichen, Alles.” So they bear their burden of happiness without effort. Mortal man, by contrast—der sterbliche Mann—“when he bethinks himself on his burden of happiness, and the sky he has heaved on his shoulders with loving arms”—

                                Wenn er den Himmel, den
                                Er mit den liebenden Armen
                                sich auf die Schultern gehäuft,
                                Und die Last der Freude bedenket—

is “terrified” and “dismayed” (“erschröckt” and “überrascht”).

                               Denn schwer ist zu tragen
                               Das Unglück, aber schwerer das Glück.

For happiness is a heavier burden to bear, says Hölderlin, than unhappiness.

The Thirteen Colonies

July 4th. Noisy, incandescent bouquets of explosive lithium salts (hollyhock red) and barium compounds (chrysanthemum green) bruise the sky, already bruised with toxic greenhouse gas emissions. Bombs bursting in air like liberty’s aneurysm. Paroxysms of public anxiety masquerading as celebration. The great national stupor. Eyeballs hammered with explosive percussions so loud you can’t see. Windows to the soul. Stiff breeze rattles the shutters closed. Take five. Rationality’s snooze. Good for the national psyche. Cudgeled brains soak up more patriotic music. Mallet for tenderizing the meat. Like Ariel, I drink the air before me and depart. Goodbye, anxiety, says America. Don’t bother to write. We never liked your cucumber vinaigrette. And the twee silk socks you wore under your tailored suits.

My name is anxiety. I fled your feast to lighten your festivities. Small thanks I get, or expect. I am designing a new Independence Day. My musket is propped beside the drafting table. But first I must assemble my thirteen colonies for review. Parade ground, march!  À nous la liberté!

From the moment explorers and navigators discovered a new world—me—I have been intent on colonizing this virgin continent (though I blush to say “virgin.”) The explorers and navigators published their findings in the poetic tomes and novels of my youth. But I have always been a careless reader. And the progress of colonization has been, I confess, painfully slow. But I intend to let it proceed under the strictest ecological principles. I approach the whole problem of colonization like a naturalist, not a planter. I embark on a study of the wilderness behind the curvature of my own cheekbone, where splashing rivulets of blood course through rugged channels of bone and cortex. Special emphasis will be directed to avian specimens of imagination and memory, lurking in the vegetation of time. All of it will be written up in a special calf-bound box set, available only by subscription. Reserve yours now.

There is a pool called the Eye of Time. A stone pitched into its center slides with a gulp down a long gullet of water and disappears into another world. Around it are ranged the thirteen cavities—I mean colonies. Here yeast cultures flourish in humid clefts of rock. One yields the wine of courage (really more like a seasonal artisanal beer). Another breeds the strong milk of retrospection. One sweats a fermented concoction of enlightened desperation and hope. Beads of icy sangfroid collect on a cold stone curtain of granite obscured by ferns. One cleft echoes with the laughter of knowledge.

Here fortitude, a master free-climber, wedges two chalky fingertips in a minute crack, on a sheer rock face thousands of meters below the spongy forest floor. In one dripping crevice a lone salamander bathes in royal perfume. In this chink, a visitor sniffs inevitability. In that one, top notes of demure sadness steeped in revery, disenchantment and remorse.

Pain luxuriates in another recess, with its children. This one reeks with the good old barley malt. A third gives off poisons of ratiocination. Finally, this one stinks like a female orifice.

These are the thirteen colonies in which I nurture cultures of freedom. Out of them flows the serpent of freedom. Divided by seven cervical and five thoracic vertebrae (the ones directly between the shoulder blades) like the tail of a rattlesnake, it coils like incense through the hole at the base of my skull to blossom like a fruit tree. Unite, or Die. Don’t Tread On Me. Burnished apples blaze like eyes in the dark.

Summer Rain

Copper flue. Middle-school honey. A lick of flame. Things that glow in the dark. Things that glow in my mind. Boyish breasts too. In a girl’s lacrosse-team locker room somewhere north of my medulla oblongata. An indecent daisy chain of floating aquarelle images. With this ring I thee wed. Wear me when you spray yourself with the warm rain of the bath (Ovid). May my excitement not get on your clothes.

Does every adolescent boy dream of stumbling into a girl’s locker room?

Globally, hundreds of species of coral engage in primordial rites of mass spawning tied to seasonally warming waters and the lunar cycle.“It’s like an underwater snowstorm,” said Emma L. Hickerson, a veteran diver and research coordinator at the Flower Garden Banks, a coral reef 100 miles off Texas in the Gulf of Mexico.

The bizarre details of coral reproduction. The bizarre coral-pink details of girls’ reproductive anatomy. Both tied to the lunar cycle. Trillions of eggs and sperm that swarm once a year nocturnally in the ocean and in my mind, leaving both awash in pink flotsam. Like floating petals from flowers that bloom in the night, under a streetlight, under a plaid skirt. In June, amid the sweet stink of lindens.

Sometimes I wish I could see around the corners of time. Because everything is there. Just not in the window frame. The copper flue in the dank locker room etc. The ocean of pink molecules swarming behind a smart blue lacrosse blazer slashed by a copper braid, or under a woolen skirt, dark as the sea, warm with the stink of linden trees in bloom. I know the trick is to realize that nothing is “in your head.” Your head is in everything and sometimes you wonder if you can bear the wonder. A glass buoy borne up by the mystery of girls in flower. And the scent becomes stronger as I decline into age. And sometimes I feel enveloped by one of their kind, on the street or on a subway platform, like a warm summer rain. Shouldering a bookbag. And I walk carefully so as not to break off branches of coral. The moon in the cavernous darkness of the subway station, which is tiled like a bathhouse (“86th Street Station”) and glimmers with aquarium light, is about to signal a momentous event. The subway doors slide open all at once, and excitement swarms the platform. Thank you Emma. Thank you moon. Thank you pink coral flower mystery. I feel drenched. I will peel you off, one day, as I peel off wet neoprene, along with all my other memories. After a bath in a girl. After a summer rain. Under a blanket of wet leaves, garden mould in my nostrils.

6/24/2016