Oscillate Wildly

Year's end approaches, and while the new year promises time enough to address your collective indignation for the oversized Palin photo, I now must busy myself with boxes, a sick and hateful (but adorable) rabbit named Mushroom, forms and new numbers and all manner of paraphernalia for reconstructing in spackle, or carpet samples, or "hey, let's not look at the conspicuous tooth marks deposited on the kitchen linoleum" magic avoidance blanket what my two healthy rabbits, like beautiful little Ozymandiites--look on their works, ye mighty, and despair--have patiently dedicated the last eight months to uncreating. May our unreturned pet deposit prove that whatever man has done, rabbit can cause to be undone.

So before time obscures me in a story about a story about a statue, I reflect on what this twenty-ninth anniversary of the birth of a crucified Jew king has taught me about writing caustic, posturing criticism on an invisible electronic post-it for an audience that consists solely, probably, of me, Slothrop, and Dr. Woo.

1. I should read ever increasing volumes of Arthur Symons essays. Only the British, with their tireless striving to think morality into every single fact of creation, can properly understand and appreciate a Gaulish gluttony. They are connoisseurs of the poverty of excess, and with his studied, deliberate experiments in the decadent literatures, Symons made self-sickness an education not to be tolerated, as his French models would profess, but to be relished, mastered, and imitated. And of course, to do so, to move beyond the melancholy of disease and to endure its joy--and to propose in all seriousness and with a rudely persuasive logic that to fulfill the ideals of classicism we must exaggerate them into grotesqueries, requires a particular, and particularly moral, taste for fineness. What the Continent makes secular and sordid--reason, causation, governance--England makes moral, but with the qualification that immoral acts, whether committed or merely conceived, when tempered by the mysteries of the senses, can themselves become instruments of the greatest goodness: the discrimination between what is common and what is continuous.

2. We trivialize comedy, and we live the unfortunate happiness of its truths. Laughter is the mind's reflex against metaphor. Jakobson wrote many provocative papers on puns--how they get created, how they function as propositions--and in the end he concluded that humor stems from our innate ability to transform incongruities among interacting levels within a semantic field--the form and function of an utterance--into a higher level of resolved meaning--an abstraction that is simple and clean but satisfying. We enjoy disorder, and we delight in its resolution. So the next time a comedian says something funny, remember, he uses the same basic process by which we inherit the Aeneid.

3. Lappland seems like a good place to call home. (See picture.) One day Seorin and I will go there, and we may have a son named Bear, or perhaps several rabbits, but either way, people believe Santa Claus lives there, and Finns don't speak a language related to ours in any way--it isn't even Indo-European--and I like snow and eternal night or day, whichever. So after we finish not finding jobs in Madrid, we'll move to Santa land and raise rabbits with our boy Bear.

4. Accident rules us, and when not accident, habit, which conditions us to believe that accident is predictable, which it isn't, because if we could predict accident by indefinitely repeating our behaviors until they become custom rather than intuition, we would not learn to fear the imminence and ubiquity of difference. Everything is change, and change is unmotivated. We do learn to fear difference, because chance is incredulous and unsafe, and being animals, we distrust what we cannot control. Unhappily, we ourselves express accident: neurons fire randomly; desire burns capriciously; empires rise impermanently, because they anticipate their ends, and fall permanently, because they cannot regain their first splendor; history wills or does not will its evolution; what is created comes, and then comes no longer. I accept this, but it still frightens me.

5. I want to work with more languages. They seem to be alive, but they aren't, and I believe I can spend the next forty years contentedly not comprehending that paradox. Sadly, humans speak all the interesting languages in deadly mosquito swamps or on that fifth plateau up a mountain in the country you can't get a visa to visit, because dictators and intimidating men with machetes don't pardon the linguist his curiosity. By our best estimate, this planet is home to 5500 languages. In the next hundred years, 5000 will die. And unlike bones or pottery or fossilized ancient bugs, languages preserve in their extinction no evidence of their having existed. Without explicit phonological and syntactic grammars, which probably 250-500 of those 5500 languages have, they vanish. So pick up a pen and go to the jungle, where no one will understand you and you'll probably get dysentery. At least you will die doing something valuable, until that asteroid hits us in twenty years and nobody will be saying much of anything.

6. It occurs to me that in the last twenty-nine years, I've seen fewer than twenty plays. In fact, I don't even think about plays as plays until I see them, and when I do, I always feel as though I'm watching an ungainly adaptation of some work never intended to be watched. I am thoroughly uncultured and in need of a good Pygmalionizing.

7. Being ill or in recovery does not justify watching old Schwarzenegger movies. Eventually, you will get better, and on that fateful day you must reckon with your many bad decisions to rent True Lies and Kindergarten Cop.

8. For the first time in my life, I am confident than I'm doing everything right, which is funny, because I still feel terrible. Previously, I had expected a miraculous, life-changing positive commitment to health and good love and kindness and honesty to make me feel calmer, or if not calmer, at least saner, but I don't. I feel just as bad as I always did when I was unhealthy, miserly, misanthropic, selfish, and deceitful. I guess whether Swift or Gay, corrosive industrial poison or antioxidant elixir, fools are fools, and I happen to be too stupid to know what I'm good for--besides ruing my stack of overdue Schwarzenegger movies from Blockbuster.

9. Surround yourself with beautiful things, because they are better than you. My girlfriend is prettier and kinder than I, and much smarter; my rabbits are simpler and more spontaneous; my literature more eloquent, my family more generous, my technology faster and more accurate, my world more baffling and dynamic and just more. When you experience their extraordinary betterness on a daily basis, when you saturate your action and your expectation with their richness, their subtlety, and their comprehension, you come to know, and to respect, your limits. It is wise to know where you stop and where creation begins; it is also wonderful.

10. Can I make this year quiet? I hope to. So I read Meredith for his doubt, Herbert for his conscience, Lamb for his sinew, the Rubaiyat in all its serpentine permutations, for its permutations, sage George Eliot, stammering Leigh Hunt, soft, incendiary Clough for his coldness and patient, sane Newman for his assurance. I watch Demetry Martin and name him among my betters; I listen to Bach and Dowland and accept their contrary kinds of genius; I admire Pater's lapidary verbal tribute to arts he could no more reproduce in color and shape as increase their beauty with his silent witness; and, when I have the courage, I return to Van Gogh, whom I knew when I was stronger, to remind me that while compromise is a cowardly answer to life's difficult rage and a weak Aristotelian evil, the unconsidered pursuit of life as a religion can steal from the soul, by building within the body its own compromise, its most cherished and essential strength.

Thanks, friends, for making me better in my weakness and weaker in my reluctance to become strong. You encourage me to live without assumption, an unenviable though indispensable battery in this long, "my-soul-is-a-city-and-Jesus-needs-to-conquer-it" spiritual capture. I may not be a healed person, but without my rabbits, my lovely Seorin, my family, my friends, my five seasons of The Wire, and my dream of Finnish reindeer, I would be uninteresting as well as unbalanced. Happy year to you, and apologies for my being personal.

And the song in the title? Yes, even though it sucks and has no changes--not even ugly ones let alone Wilbur and the beautiful changes--it has a happy history, and we should acknowledge slim men with tall hair, especially now, in the colder months, when they tend to get stuck that way.

Slothrop: As long as we're spreading Holiday cheer, Slothrop would very much like to thank his two favorite gay negroes for helping him and each other be stupendously retarded all year long. And also to our non-existent readers who fill us with nothing but loneliness, the echoes of our solitary voices and tears. Happy Scandinavian Elf Day!