Son of Monday Fragments

Walking in the rain on campus, I see a young man and a young woman on the other side of the street. He’s got an umbrella, she does not have one.

It’s pouring.

They are clearly together, as I see them talking to one another. Yet he keeps the umbrella over his head only and does not share it with her.

Maybe she’s okay with that, what do I know? Maybe she’s even prohibited him from sharing the umbrella with her because it’s too reactionary or whatever, and a drenching is the price she thinks she has to pay for her independence. Anything is possible in this culture. Maybe he’s just a jerk and she doesn’t want to call him on it. Maybe they’re both crazy.

Whatever the explanation, I know one thing with certainty: I will not live in this world in which they are apparently living.

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Same rainy day.

I’ve just been inside a gym for the first time in a few weeks, owing to a very minor injury and my pathetic ability to make all kinds of excuses for prolonging my absence from exercise based on said very minor injury well after it is objectively justified. I am pumped up with activity-produced neurotransmitters that seem much more profound in their effects than the last time I experienced them, lo those many weeks ago.

As I walk into the rain (with my umbrella!) at the end of the ordeal, headed home, the Fates have decided that the next thing cued up on the playlist I’m listening to is one of my favorite short Bach keyboard pieces, the Invention no. 14 in B-Flat Major, played by Glenn Gould.

My soul is immediately too big for my body, too big for the world, and I climb dancing to the top of the solar system to see what can be seen from that vantage point, just to do it, no other reason.

What a miracle, this life.

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At the university where I teach, in addition to first year reading programs that feature little reading, they organize “faculty writing boot camps,” at which professors are collectively peer pressured by their colleagues into doing the one thing they are apparently admitting by joining such groups that they least want to do: write.

I try to think of an “NBA basketball shooting boot camp” at which professional basketball players, who otherwise of course would avoid playing basketball like the plague, had to be exhorted in a similar way against their will to pick up a basketball and repeatedly throw it toward and hopefully into the basket.

Just try to convince me that we’re not systematically recruiting the wrong people to work in these institutions of “higher education.”

Go ahead. Try.

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I give you a fragment from a letter H. P. Lovecraft wrote to the editor at Weird Tales in 1923, imprecisely and hastily rendered as I am working from Houellebecq’s French in his book on the American writer and I could not find the original online.

The writer so haughty and so pure in his craft that he essentially assures himself a readership of one in advance. One cannot copy him, of course, if one wants to be read. But may I at least admire this expression of the absurd perfection in artistic self-sufficiency that no writer (not even Lovecraft, who of course had readers) can attain?

“Dear Sir,

As I have the practice of writing strange, macabre, fantastic stories for my own amusement, I was recently set upon by a dozen or so well-intentioned friends who urged me to submit a few of my gothic horror stories to your newly established magazine…I don’t know if they will suit you, as I have no concern as to what “commercial” texts require. My only goal is the pleasure I get from creating strange situations and effects of atmosphere, and the only reader I take into account is myself…If, by some miracle, you would consider publishing my stories, I have only one condition: that you cut nothing. If the text cannot be printed as it was written, to the last comma and semi-colon, it will with gratitude accept your refusal.”

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Lest anyone ever think I do not give the ‘60s counterculture due consideration and a fair analysis in the midst of all my criticisms of it, and even after all the adulation of the Beatles and Hendrix here, would you please consider digging my favorite CSNY song?

This extended version of a cut on the Déjà Vu LP is magical. The guitar interplay between Stephen Stills and Neil Young is so soulful and attentive, each one of them clearly listening to the other, taking turns, complementing what the other is playing, collectively working to lovingly move the song where they want it to go.

The way they take the piece over the top at the conclusion of the vocal, starting around 4:45, is euphoric for me every single time. I played it once for my oldest in the car at night while we were driving in a remote area and almost went off the road into the woods when that part arrived.

I felt David Crosby’s lyric when I was 20 years old. I still feel it today, if no longer for the cultural content (life more or less forces you to outgrow that kind of narcissistic sentiment, and Crosby is today, regrettably, something of a walking advertisement for how not to grow old gracefully) but rather for the melodic invention and the emotional investment. It is impossible to not know that he is all in here, even if you think that not cutting your hair because you feel like you owe it to someone is a goofy sentiment. (A goofy sentiment, I repeat, to which I adhered quite firmly when I was nearly the age these guys were when they made this record…).

It turns out that it doesn’t really matter if you are sincere about the same thing the musician is sincere about. The energy produced and your ability to tap into it and go with him or her on the musical journey is not at all dependent on the particular object of the musician’s sincerity.

And I saw this on the YouTube page beside the CSNY and had to give a listen. I fully expected to turn it off after a few seconds (“Looks too recent, can’t be any good”, goes the curmudgeon’s preset), then I was prevented from switching away by my head being unceremoniously blown off.

Props to this young man (not quite as young now, as the video is from 2008) who clearly has the original’s spirit. And, yes, YouTube commenters, you are correct—that Strat tone is disgusting.

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My daughter’s bike needed the brakes fixed and I’m too lazy to do it myself, so I took it down to the local bike shop and dropped it off.

A few days later, I was called in to pick it up.

A lovely young Mennonite woman with a small baby on her lap was behind the cash register, smiling beatifically as the little one looked around in wide-eyed innocence at the surrounding world of which I was quite happy to be a small part.

I asked how old the child was. She cheerfully replied: “Almost eight weeks!” “Brand new!” I said. “A beautiful child, congratulations!”

She thanked me and averted her gaze, blushing. The man I took to be her husband was standing just down the counter, and I smiled and nodded my head respectfully at him. He had a look of gratitude and satisfaction I will not even attempt to describe.

I walked out of the store with my child’s bike and a renewed faith in humankind.

If only we could all get us some of what that woman and that man so indisputably have…