The next pages of “Tinkers” are taken up with Howard’s wife’s decision to commit him to a funny farm.  It’s easy to set up Kathleen, as a bitch, but this would be to remain at the level of good guys, bad guys, witches and angels (or vampires and angels), and of course that will  not do.  Kathleen simply can’t make ends meet: this is not meant in the financial sense; the ends in question are the ends her husband seems in pursuit of, and she can’t for the life of her make heads or tails of any of them.  His recent epileptic seizure is the tipping point in her decision to have the poor man taken away.

Howard discovers his wife’s plans, and decides to split.  We all know lot, or think we do, about marital infidelity.  We think we know what’s coming down, what’s at stake.  But here there is a breach of trust, from the vantage of Howard, and a breach in the bubble of love, from that of Kathleen.  Sexual misconduct creates breaches like this, but this one makes all sexual sin pale in comparison.  Here is something nobody can do anything about — this was the sphere of tragedy in Greece.  Howard either decides to leave or to submit to a destiny every bone in his body is sure cannot be his own.  He does not submit.  Here is Howard thinking at the most intense level of thought, more intense for him than his seizures:

God knows my shame as I push my mule to exhaustion, even after the moon and Venus have risen to preside over the owls and mice, because I am not going back to my family — my wife, my children — because my wife’s silence is not the forbearance of decent, stern people who fear You, it is the qiet of outrage, of bitterness. It is the quiet of biding time.  God forgive me.  I am leaving.

…

Howard thought, Is it not true: A move of the head, a step to the left or right, and we change from wise, decent, loyal people to conceited fools?  Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely: Sun catches cheap plate flaking — I am a tinker, the moon is an egg glowing in its nest of leafless trees — I am a poet; a brochure for an asylum is on the dresser — I am an epileptic, insane, the house is behind me — I am a fugitive. His despair had not come from the fact that he was a fool; he knew he was a fool.  His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two-penny religious magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head andsee him as something better.

Howard and Kathleen, together as eternity will keep them, intact in memory.  This is a point that many men have experienced, the moment when one’s wife can no longer turn the trick of perception and judgment like the sun does, revealing dismal morning shadows for brilliant nooks and crannies with infinite potential.  We know these moments, don’t we.  As an American novelist said once in France: a woman is like an automobile.  It can break down once, and repairing it is an option.  But twice, you might as well get rid of it.  This is whee Howard fnds himself.  The tinker, the  poet, the epileptic, has been able to maintain a semblance of balance until this moment when it is all transformed into the life of a fugitive.

The amazing thing?  Like George, Howard will have to return.  To no avail, but he will return. 

George waited until Saturday to run away.  He hitched Prince Edward to his father’s wagon and led the animal and wagon out to the road …

Kathleen said to Howard, George has run away.  He said, How do you know?  She said, He left Joe alone in the toolshed.   He didn’t split the wood.  He didn’t get the water.  He didn’t help Darla with her numbers.  He took Prince Edward and your wagon.  He said, I don’t think he’ll get too far.  He thought, I hope he makes it. …

It was not difficult for Howard to find his son.  The fresh wagon and mule tracks left from the yard, away from town.  Howard walked along the road and looked at the winter weeds poking up from the new snow.  There was more variety than Howard had ever noticed.  There were papery shells of burst pods and thorns and whitish nubs at the ends of pannicles.  Some were bent over, broken-bracketed, with their tops buried in the snow, as if they had been smothered in the front.  The interlocking network of stalks and branches and creepers was skeletal, the fossil yard of an extinct species of fine-boned insectoid creatures.  All of these bones, then, seemed to have been strained by sun and earth from an original living white to brown, and not the tough fibrous flower and seed-spilling green they actually once had been.  Howard wondered about a man who had never seen summer, a winter man, examining the weekd and making this inference — that he was looking at an ossuary.  The man would take that as true and base his ideas of the world on that mistake.  He would concoct narratives about when those thorny animals picked through the brush and fields, sketch outlandish guesses, publish papers, give talks in opulent rooms to serious men all wearing some forma suits, draw conclusions, get it all wrong.  Howard thought,I do not even know if that is ragweed or Queen Anne’s lace.

When he came to the turnoff for Ezra Morell’s farm, he saw the wagon tracks turn from it.  There was a moment of sorrow, disappointment, and deep love for his son, whom he at that second wished had had a chance of real escape.  Never mind why or whether or who or what consequence or ramification — the wake of sorrow and bitterness and resentment you would trail behind you, probably mostly for me — I just wish that you had made it beyond the bounds of this cold little radius, that when the archaeologists brush off this layer of our world in a million hyears and string off the boundaries of our rooms and tag and number every plate and table leg and shinbone, you would not be there; yours wouldnot be the reamins they would find and label juvenile male; you would be a secret, the existence of which they would neveer even be aware to try to solve.  An image arose in Howard’s mind of an archaeologist examing the small bones of George’s hand and explaining to his colleagues that the boy whose bones these had been had at one time been bitten by another person, anadlt, perhaps part of some savage ritual or because people were more like wild animals in this place in those times than had ever previously been imagined.

Howard stepped into the shed.  Light came between thelog cribbing where first the original grass and mud and then the wadded-up comic pages from Sunday newspapers had dissolved.

George.  Where are you?

Here I am, Daddy.

Where?

Here.  George crawled out from behind the old door.

…

Mother’s worried, George.  You have to come back

I know, Dad.

I’m sure people will be reading this book in a hundred years.  Or, finding it and reading it in a hundred years.  Perhaps it will be assigned as an American classic in a hundred years.  This passage is as violent as anything in Cormac McCarthy.  There is something unique in all literature in an epileptic father biting off the fingers of his well-loved son.  During a seizure.  This is part of the reason why George had to leave.  But couldn’t.  Couldn’t leave the chalk circle of his experience, much to the regret of his father.  I suppose you read books to inquire and test the meaning of words that come to you before you know what they mean.  Words like love.  Howard’s love for his son is cosmic in its dimensions, and perfectly epileptic.  He deserves to be put away in a looney bin.  Yet he to will leave rather than allow his wife to do precisely that.  And he’ll be much more successful in it that his son.  But he too will have to return one day.  And that makes for yet another memorable passage.

The most striking thing here is what might appear to a “good parent” to be Howard’s incredible distraction.  While he’s out looking for his son, he has time to reflect on grass, on the seasons, and the way the place will look in a  hundred years.  He may be considered by professionals as suffering from ADD, attention deficit disorder.  On second reading, on third reading, after memorizing this unforgettable passage, it appears that George’s father is in the eye of the storm called love, divine love, not the love of psychologists.  He knows where his son is hiding, and he knows why.  He knows so much there’s despair in the air at the possibility that there be nothing more to narrate.  This is what the idiots in this world take to be his distraction.  His way of looking at the earth from the vantage of a boundless creaturely love.  This is what brings the passage into planetary conjunction with the novels of Cormac McCarthy.  It’s a love violent beyond bounds, beyond description, beyond what humans usually consider the term to encompass.  Harding has gone to great lengths not to romanticize Howard’s epilepsy, and he succeeds in turning it into a problem of electricity.  But here is something that belongs to what the Greeks call divine madness.  It deserves to be read and taught and praised a hundred years from now.

This is one of the finest days of 2010, at least here in Trégastel.  It’s sunny but cool, with a constant breeze.  I can’t help be go back over the pages of “Tinkers” where the wind plays the role angels played in the Old and New Testaments.

Max Weber was right to see and state that auratic and carismatic leaders and phenomena must fade to bring on far more ordinary occurences and personalities, people like beauracrates for example.  It’s the same for the wind.  The West Wind and Harding’s fierce messengers have to yield to wind chimes.  This too is something we owe to Japanese sophistication and mass-marketing.  There aren’t many people my age who have never had a wind-chime, or heard one of the porch or back door of their neighbor’s.  Wind chimes and mud lamps are artifacts of our generation.  When I was down and out in Paris one day, Helen far away, I called my friend Brian to see if I could stay over at his place at least for night.  Of course I could!  He still had a mudlamp, close to an acquarium with fish as glorious as the birds here on the seven islands.

I’ve lost the track to winds and breezes.  Except that I don’t think I have.

There is much to be said for “Inception.”  It’s not something that will go away with a whimper.  People will continue talking about it, and when it comes out in DVD Blue Ray, etc., the conversation will be rebooted.  In the meantime, despite the images and the musical score of this unusual surprising film, I remain with the Dads in “Tinkers.” 

It seemed to me that this was a dream of my father’s death, a sort of rehearsal for when it really happened, rather than a simple fact of  the waking world.  It was difficult for me to distinguish the actual from dreaming during that time, because I often had dreams in which my father came into my bedroom to kiss me and cover me up with my blankets, which,  restless sleeper that I was, had fallen to the floor.   In those dreams, I awoke and, seeing my father, felt an overwhelming sense of how precious he was to me.  His having died once, I understood what it would mean to lose him, and now that he had returned I was determined to take better care of him.  Dad, I said to him in those dreams, what are you doing here?  I’m not gone just yet,he would tell me in a humorous tone that I should have recognized as belonging to a dream, since he had never used it in life, although I had often wished for it.

But what, scurrilous babbler?  Shall your barren wind slake the flame burning within my own heart?  By no means!  For mine is theflame that does not consume,and the guff from your bellows shall only fan it, that it burns all the brighter, the hotter, and the more surely.

… Felt an overwhelming sense of how precious he was to me. 

… Now I understood what it would mean to lose him

… Now I was determined to take better care of him.

The last section (scurrilous babbler) evokes the righteous indignation of a preacher fed up with the shenanigans of his son!  I’ve never seen or felt anything of the sort coming from my father.  Yet no one fits the bill of “scurrilous babbler” better than I.  It was one function of the “humorous tone” of my father to mark the place of that unlikely and preposterous babbler, with neither violence nor objection.   Only humor, affection, and bemusement.  If I could make it make it back to tell him just that, it would be worth the risk.  Does anybody have a synonym or another periphrase for “scurrilous babbler”? 

All of a sudden I realise there are no fathers in “Inception,” except Cobb, who has a dead wife and two children, but no father, and his dead wife’s father, played by Michael Cain.  Center a person on any chessboard or stage in this life or another, and you’ll find a father in a central role. 

This is the transcript of a conversation with Paul Harding, the author of “Tinkers.”   It can be referenced at OpenLoop Press.

My maternel grandparents grew up in northern Maine and led very difficult, very impoverished lives, and even though I always went back up there with my grand-father fly-fishing and all this sort of stuff, subsequently, they were just — I don’t know — was it generational? –, whatever combination of things it was they would not elaborate, they would not talk qabout their lives.

This is a big deal.  Yes, it’s no doubt generational, and no doubt quite personal to boot. And crucial to the health and intelligence of upcoming generations.  I come from a family who led difficult impoverished lives but would never let anyone say so!  I was allowed to believe that the comparative ease and comfort I enjoyed had been bestowed by the American way of life, but I was never allowed into the inner recesses of how much that had cost the previous generation of Americans.  You have only to read today the Vacketta chronicle and its rosary of goody-goody gumdrop progaganda to conclude that Paul Harding is talking about something quintessentially American.  (It comes up, through every pore, in Brian Wall’s “The Baird Farm” but no one would have made the road easier for Brian: he had to remember, invent, fill in the blanks and connect the dots all by himself.)

I was very close to my grandparents, particularly my grandfather, and he told me “Oh, my father had epilepsy and he left the family when we were twelve because he got wind of his wife’s intention of having him committed to an asylum,” and I would ask my grandfather to elaborate and he just said, “Nope, those days are over.  Those are the facts and I don’t like to think about them.  I don’t like to talk about them.”  Then my grandfather died and you realize that link to the past is not there anymore.  So I took those little factual tidbits and started writing my way out of them.

Perhaps this is what I’ve been doing over the past two years.  Not only with the Vackettas, but with the Collins’s and the Elghammers too.  On my first trip back home with the boys, I was gifted with engrossing accounts of the Elghammer family, as if the arrival of a foreigner had momentarily lifted the ban on the deepest aspects of family life.  This didn’t last long, as I managed to lose the trust and confidence that had been invested in me.  The same goes for my father’s side of the family, and of course for the Jenkins’s.  These two family stories are at least as sad, almost tragic, as the Elghammer’s; all three of them are violent, and as American as they come – like cheesecake, Playboy magazine, and drunken brawls.  Of course I identify with the author’s words: “I would ask my grandfather to elaborate …”  Perhaps this is a mistake.  Perhaps there is nothing like elaboration.  In that case, there is not much in the idea of a link to the past that dies with one’s relatives.  I have a strong case of that belief.  That should be clear by now.  But I feel like the only way out will be to write my way out of these sad and tragic stories.  (I’ve just rewritten this part of the post, writing about how difficult it is to understand what Harding means by elaboration.  I lost it, but it’s still in memory — mine.)   

The older you get, the further you fall into the past (Paul Harding).  This is not just what writers do, trying to offer travelogues of this fall; it’s what families used to do with young generations as captive audiences, before they all emigrated to America.

These passages have yet to be commented upon by the critics.  They are among the most dense and beautiful of the novel.  Charlie finds a book in a box in an attic, and brings it with him to George’s bedside.  But even this is subject to doubt.  Was it Charlie who found the book?  Or George, who found it and ended up with him beside his bed?  We’ll never know. 

You don’t remember writing this?  The handwriting looks very much like yours.  Very much like mine, too, with the f’s that look like elongated s’s with dashes through their middles.  And the mix of script and printing.

Who’s speaking here?  Is it the grandson Charlie?  Maybe.  It could be George though; it may have been George who found this book — it’s more than probable.  Just listen to this:

The dust in the air was made up of the book I found.  I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it. … The handwriting looks like yours.  It looks like you wrote the book. 

I think the handwriting is Howard’s.  Howard left it behind when he split, and his son George found it.  This makes sense.  Howard is the only poet in the family.  His wife is fed up with this reputation, and would like to tell the whole world what a ridiculous figure her husband cuts on the horizon, beginning with his being a poet!  The wind fragments (borealis) prove to the reader, should he or her need proof, that he was in fact one hell of a poet! 

Another possibility (envisaged by Pat Holt on his blog “Hold Uncensored”) is that the handwriting is that of George’s grand-father, John, the protestant minister who gradually yields the sharp edges of his faith in exchange for a Shinto like belief in the inter-relatedness of all living matter.  Perhaps there is no final answer to the question.  But that’s doesn’t keep it from being important.  And it takes nothing away from the pre-socratic beauty of the passages, which call out for authorship while, perhaps, refusing to be corralled into such a narrow space as that of an individual author!

One of the most pertinent categories I have come upon in my “travels” (from one blog to another) is the idea of the tear-jerker.  Everybody uses this expression — it’s immediately understandable.  Maudlin would be the college dictionary equivalent. 

I’m reading “Tinkers” by Paul  Harding, and I’m saying to myself: this is pretty much of a tear-jerker! 

It’s too late in the day for me to recap this novel.  It’s short: 191 pages.  It’s about people who have had a hell of a time making ends meet, and getting along with each other, and, each in his own spectacular style, managing to die.

Because I am momentarily in contact with John Gerulski, I am suspicious of myself.  I’m someone who doesn’t cry.  This is unusual in the Vacketta family, who have made a ritual of it.  People die, and you can count on the Vackettas to cry a blue river over that.  I remember being very critical of this ritual, and here I am struggling against my own blood-line!

This is something to which I’ll have to return.  Thanks to John (Gerulski) I now know a little about “Teddy Bear.”  The CB rat with a god-awful disease that pinned him down to his bed like a butterfly, but who could use the CB as a shuttle to move back and forth all over America.  Of course I don’t know John Gerulski very well (something tells me I must have met him in 2003 at the family reunion, but nothing is less certain), but I got pinned down when he talked about this country song (penned and sung by Red Sovine) as belonging to the genre tear-jerker.  I thought he was putting it down, but I’m no longer sure about that.  This is the second time on this blog I’ve had dealings with Johns about country songs.  The first is Gerulski’s memory of Teddy Bear, and the other is my own son’s John’s brief description of listening to a similar song about Abraham and his boy Jacob.  The second song indicates a possible exit from tear-jerking: God himself stays the hand of the father, so that the son can live and the father believe: no tears, just the assignation of a road to be travelled.

There’s too much here that needs the light of day.  John Gerulski’s first comment on the Vacketta blog was a comment on the saga of Ken Pavlick, something I picked up on the Commercial News.  A story about a guy with muscular distrophy who used to love his bike, and who was enabled by him and his family to continue beyond reasonable limits to engage in his, let’s say, favorite pastime.  The Gerulski’s reacted, implying when they said that they would never be caught driving behind a contraption half way between motorcycle and automobile on interstate 74!  They didn’t say as much, but they reacted as any highway cop would upon setting their sights on such a weird contraption, and such a fucked up driver!  That’s what set John’s memory into action, and how he came up, inadvertently, with the memory of “Teddy Bear” by Red Sovine.  When you listen to it, you understand how the brain works.  It’s a story unto itself, from Ken Pavlick to Teddy Bear back to all the people in the world who love their bikes perhaps more than life itself.  Certainly more than the idea of being law-abiding citizens.

As you can see, there’s not much left of the idea of a tear-jerker in the way I handle all this material.  I don’t cry much, but it takes an effort.  Like Jacob struggling with the angel.  I hope John stays on board.  His was a true and heart-felt reaction to Ken’s.  Ken ought to be informed that all of this is going on.  It’s part of the mystique of being a road warrior!

On the 23rd I copied out two exerpts from “Tinkers.”  Please remember how the second one begins:

“A wind would come up through the trees, sounding like a chorus, so like a breath then, so sounding like a chorus, the breath of thousands of souls gathering itself up somewhere in the timber lining the bowls and depressions behind the worn mountains ….”

And how it ended: “My father would say, The forgotten songs we never really knew, only think we remember knowing, when what we really do is understand at the same time how we have never really known them at all and how glorious they must really be.”

That was Howard, talking about his father, feeling the thousands of things left when people conclude that he’s passed.  Now listen or feel George, Howard’s sun, who suddenly realises there’s somebody reading next to him on his deathbed.

During the days, Georges was aware of a large group of people murmuring and flowing in and out of the room as if on tides.  At night, though, when he awoke, there was only and always one person sitting on a couch next to his bed, reading by the dim light of a small pewter lamp set on the rolltop desk at the far end of the couch.  The person was always familiar to him, but he never knew exactly who it was — if the person was a man or a woman, relative or friend.  It was as if every time he tried to gather his senses and focus on the person — hair, eyes, cheekbones, nose — in order to recall a name, the person retreated to his peripheral vision, this even thought he person remained sitting in full view.

The first night he found the benevolent stranger,he asked, Who are you?  And the person looked up from the book and smiled and said, You are awake.  He asked, What time is it?  The person answered, It is very late.  This exchange seemed to occur with him or the person speaking.  … It seemed even that when he wondered this to himself, the person answered, You are right here, speaking to me.  You are as clear as a chime.

George attempted to see the person clearly by looking away for a moment and concentrating on the still-life painting at the opposite end of the room and then looking back, concentrating on trying to look straight into the person’s eyes.  When he did this, the person seemed like a will-o’-the-wisp, seemed not to sit on the couch, but to hover just above its cushions, and, whenever looked at, to dart to the left or fight, up or down, without apparent conscious effort, as if the movement was a reflex, somenatural defense, so that instead of being observed directly,he or she always presented an elusive visiion flickering against a background of curtain, lamp, desk, couch.

The person was young — not a child, not an adolescent, but much younger than George’s eighty years, at least in body; the person radiated a sense of possessing hundreds of years, but as a simultaneity: the person contained hundreds of years, but they overlapped,as if the person experienced any number of times at once.

I was just thinking, the person said in a silvery voice … I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you.  Thank you.   Now, let me read you something to get you back to sleep.

The reader is then saddled with three sections, called “Cometa Borealis,” “Domestica Borealis,” and “Homo Borealis.”

We all know the Aurora Borealis from school and perhaps, for a few of the lucky ones amongst us, from experience.  “Borealis’ comes from the proper name “Boreas,” which was the Greek name for the north wind.  So whatever it is that is in conversation and in care of George, it’s something, or someone, with the most intimate ties to the wind George’s father, Howard, encountered when he went out looking for his father.  He didn’t find him, but he found the wind. 

It would be easy to make fun of this book.  A reader in the grasp of enthusiasm feels like reading with a shotgun or a samurai sword next to him, to ward off intruders, and to separate good from evil.  Reading a very good book brings you back to a time when you had issues all over the place, including an intense interest in the many things violence can solve, at least viewed from a certain angle.  Then you mellow, mature, progress perhaps.  But I wouldn’t want anyone to mess with George. 

I vacationing in Brittany, at the seaside resort town of Trégastel.  I left “Hidden Buddhas” behind in Paris, but I want to do something here, an exercise of sorts, which was often practiced by cinema critiques, both in English speaking countries and in France, i.e., to talk about the film based only on your memories of it.  This allows for interesting gaps between what you think and what you see; between what you feel and what you can substantiate of that feeling, etc.  So I’d like to do that here, with Hidden Buddhas.

Tops on my list of things I hate about this novel is the cornerstone of the plot.  The idea that the hibutsu were sculpted to watch over the world, to protect it like gardien angels, to influence the play of karma and to modify the inroads of chaos.  Until the day of the new Buddha. 

Imagine the field day all the “new atheists” would have with such a thesis!  How quick they’d be to point out how easy it is to imagine supernatural help from somewhere, anywhere, as long as it allows us a breather from having to assume responsibility for what’s going on. 

The reason why I hate this is that I have to come clean on what I believe to be (still) true about religion.  Nobody, outside the field of professional philosophers (and perhaps James Wood) of religion and theologians, is comfortable with this demand for account-giving.  I’ve been all the way to China and back with Liza Dalby on this: she has become an imaginary interlocutor on the past and future of belief and faith.  Thus must I modify the configuration of my dislike or hatred.  I don’t like a novel making demands of this nature on me.  This is not pleasure, this is hard work to be initiated, and it’s too late now to wipe that off the to-do in the kitchen!  So I’ll have to return to basics, remove the reason for hating this plot, and see what I can do to salvage a minimal discourse in the wake of a novel whose main effect is precisely this after-effect.

Noberu, Koji and Jun and Professor Maigny are the four male protagonists who survive the final exposure of Philip to destruction.  Koji is a lovely character, but he doesn’t have a clue what is going on in the wings.  Even Philip’s death doesn’t phase him, and when he’s finally in phase with himself and his life, it’s mainly due to the influence of Philip’s former girlfriend.  As much as we can and do like the guy, he is placed by the author outside the huge stakes that the plot keeps generating.  Noberu is central, on the other hand.  His mistakes, however, monstruous and debilitating, should send him to a plot-line limbo, but instead he is saved by Mayuki’s touch.  At that point, it seems a totally intra-psychic affair with no consequences for the world whatsoever.  (And when the reader goes to consult Mayuki’s blog and store-front, this impression is reinforced: is it but a front for the new goddess?)  Prof. Maigny seems bemused and amused to be back on the track of his hibutsu in the form of bees.  Jun and Nagiko form a strong union after everything they’ve been through.  They have worked their way around to the position where they will be able to take care of Mayuki, although she doesn’t need much care by then.  Jun remains hastily, or craftilly sketched: he has world-wide responsibilities, and he is what all the new atheists must recognize as a contemporary superman in the Nietzschean sense.  A combination of Amartya Sen and Alexandre Kojève!  Yet the reader can’t manage to forget the incredible and secret pilgrimmages this man made throughout the novel.  This is the key to his friendship with Philip, and to his secret link to the metaphysical structure of care that underpins the whole thing. 

A metaphysical structure of care.  Yes, that’s it.  The novel tells the tale of how difficult it is for the potentially great carers amongst us to get rid of their ordinary cares and worries in order to take up the call of the wild!  How difficult it is, in other words, to get rid of the ego in order to be about “my father’s business” to use a Christian metaphor and marching order.  What the novel does and doesn’t do, but what has to explode in your mind in the first week after a first or second reading,is that we are at a moment of care which, like all moments (in the German sense of the term), is a moment of crisis.  People start looking around for help, because there’s not enough care to go around.  The metaphysical structure, with angels and saints, was a truly masterful solution to this problem and crisis.  But it has been destroyed, revealed, undermined and demythologized.  That’s why this novel made such a big splash in the minds of 5 or 6 readers (which is already a riot — a mass movement!).  No one in this novel resisted the movement of destruction and destructuration of the metaphysical structure of care.  And yet, in a “what if” novelistic way, a call goes out for something else than the narrow mutual caring society which, in its immanence, will choke us all to death. 

I’m sure Liza Dalby can read French.  It would be wonderful it she read a book on Nietzsche called “Nietzsche et la critique de la chair,” by Barbara Stiegler.  Both these women are, I think, mobilized by theocentric motives, and both come up, at the end, with images of godheads accoupling like lovers and substituting for the fathers whose hum has died out.

Here we are back with the seagulls.  There’s a wonderful passage from “The Thousand Autumns” describing the flight of gulls over myriad human realities, most of which have been touched upon in the novel.  Nobody anywhere who has paid attention to the sights and sounds produced by gulls can be indifferent to this idea that their flight is a totally enviable state to achieve: up up and away, with periodic plunges to capture food for the kids!

I’ve just returned to one of the first blog posts here, dated 24 July, 2008.  It seems like the same person writing as the one writing this morning (on this Sunday update of our 2010 greetings from Trégastel).  Happy to here, for the first time, and already getting down on my knees begging Dean to accept a few secretarial duties to get the shuttle project out and running.  That wasn’t going to happen.

In lieu of that, there were the seagulls.  They offered shelter from the storm.  Experts at finding places to go and chill out!

There were two posts written in August, 2008, one of which describes what it’s like when seagulls begin to do your thinking for you.  The first post is basically boilerplate “I’m so happy here” whereas the second, where the seagulls are enough to recap an entire life, was written on August 19th, with the following title: “The secret life of Tom Collins.”  The quote by Walter Benjamin is a diamond: the seagulls are the womb.  It’s worth your while to spend a little time on that one.