October 14, 2021 : Issue #1
WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse
WELCOME!
Approaching age seventy, I’ve been having a harder and harder time finding (let alone placing) the kind of quirky, not necessarily topical or peg-driven or egregiously attention-squeezed long-form narrative nonfiction writing I used to glory in, back in the day. And I’m talking about general interest magazine writing, not so much books. Places where common readers might expect to find themselves surprised and presently absorbed and entrammeled, ending up somewhere altogether different than they might have imagined they’d be landing when they’d picked up the journal that morning. And then being able to discuss suchlike with other like-minded readers who’d also read the thing as the week progressed.
There are fewer and fewer conventional venues still making room for that sort of readerly experience, and even they are under relentless market pressures to cut back and tighten up and pavlov down, when they’re even surviving at all. Such at any rate has been my experience, trying to get recent such efforts of my own commissioned and published. This, of course, amidst the wider jostling clickbait welter of digital and audio offerings.
Sometimes I feel like if it weren’t for superannuation, I wouldn’t have any nation at all.
Though then again, maybe not. Maybe there still is an audience for the sort of thing I’ve been describing. That being the wager, at any rate, undergirding this current fortnightly experiment.
Every two weeks I propose to offer up a fresh jumbo serving of the Miscellaneous Diverse.
There will always be a MAIN EVENT, a relatively longer piece (a profile, say, or perhaps, as in this current issue, a widening foray into bricolage). But then there will be a rotating roundelay of other sorts of features: Occasional visits to the AUDIO VISUAL ROOM for select recent talks and conversations. Or gleanings from my forty-years-plus of COMMONPLACE BOOKS. Convergent adventures. Wildly digressive FOOTNOTES (as you will see) from a forthcoming book of mine, the entirety of which you may never want to read, but still… and then later, perhaps, even more wide-ranging footnotes from never-to-forthcome notional volumes. SHORT TAKES, now and then, on events of immediate import (I’m not entirely opposed to topicality). Deep dives into my ARCHIVE of long-ago pieces which first appeared in out-of-the-way places but may in the meantime have become pertinent all over again. Over the past thirty years I’ve been keeping a log, now over forty pages long, of url-links to cool, jaw-dropping VIDEOS and suchlike that I’ve stumbled upon across my various lollygags about the web—maybe we’ll sample some of those. And occasionally I may simply give the whole platform over to friends, similarly torqued questers and boulevardiers. The whole thing will be a work in progress: no set limits in advance.
At the outset, for the first several months, it will be offered up for free, open to all. Three months or so in, we’ll take stock and perhaps attempt to set up a subscription-based paywall for at least some of the material.
I say “we,” which bring me to my wingman for this enterprise, David Stanford, a pal going back fifty years to our days together as fellow slugs at Cowell College at the University of California at Santa Cruz (“The Pursuit of Truth in the Company of Friends”). David has enjoyed his ongoing career as an independent book editor (for the likes of Ken Kesey and Jack Kerouac, among others) and serves as Duty Officer to Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau, but already back then he was compiling home-made booklets of his cartoons under the Animal Mitchell Publications imprint, and continues drawing to this day — and so an ANIMAL MITCHELL cartoon will bring up the rear of each issue.
I hope you will find WonderCabinet of interest; we welcome your feedback.
So: Onward!
* * *
This Issue’s Main Event:
CORONA GARLAND:
A Polyphonal Braiding From the Early Days of the Pandemic
{April-May 2020}
Pertinent leaves from forty years of my Commonplace Books
“I have shored these fragments against my ruin.”
*
Walker Percy
(from the opening of his 1971 novel Love in the Ruins, 1971):
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last? […] Undoubtedly something is about to happen.
Or is it that something has stopped happening?
Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?
*
Ernest Hemingway
(from The Sun Also Rises, 1926):
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.” *
*
That Polish generation that survived the War—the Holocaust, the razing of their entire capital, millions upon millions dead--and bore the burden of such survival, they understood….
“Could Have” by Wyslawa Szymborska
(trans. Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanaugh):
It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.
You were in luck -- there was a forest.
You were in luck -- there were no trees.
You were in luck -- a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant {…}So you're here? Still dizzy from
another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn't be more shocked or
speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me
From Zbigniew Herbert’s “Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision”
(trans. John & Bogdana Carpenter):
And yet in these matters
Accuracy is essential
We must not be wrong
Even by a single one
We are despite everything
The guardians of our brothers
Ignorance about those who have disappeared
Undermines the reality of the world
*
From Linda Gregg’s “The Precision”:
There is a modesty in nature. In the small
of it, and in the strongest. The leaf moves
just the amount the breeze indicates
and nothing more. {…}
There is a directness and an equipoise in the fervor,
just as the greatest turmoil has precision.
Like the discretion a tornado has when it tears
down building after building, house by house.
It is enough, Kafka said, that the arrow fit
exactly into the wound that it makes. {…}
*
Marie Howe, “The Last Time,” from What the Living Know:
The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant
with white table clothes, he leaned forwardand took my two hands in his and said,
I’m going to die soon. I want you to know that.And I said, I think I do know.
And he said, what surprises me is that you don't.And I said, I do. And he said, What?
And I said, Know that you're going to die.And he said, No, I mean know that you are.
*
From Sartre’s What is Literature? (regarding the 1945-47 period):
We were not unaware that a time would come when historians would be able to survey from all angles this stretch of time which we lived feverishly minute by minute… But the irreversibility of our age belonged only to us. We had to save ourselves in this irreversible time. These events pounced upon us like thieves and we had to do our job in the face of the incomprehensible and untenable, to bet, to conjecture, without evidence, to undertake in uncertainty and persevere without hope. Our age would be explained, but no one could keep it from having been inexplicable to us.
*
Fifty years ago, I was in college and Nixon had just invaded Cambodia and we were of course all up in arms, the college had convened as a committee of the whole in the dining commons--the students, the professors, the administrators--what were we going to do? how were we going to respond?
Our distinguished American history professor got up and declared this moment the crisis of American history. Not to be outdone, our eminent new-age classicist got up and declared it the crisis of universal history. And we all nodded our fervent concurrence.
But then our visiting religious historian from England, a tall, lanky lay-Catholic theologian, as it happened, with something of the physical bearing of Abraham Lincoln, got up and suggested mildly that "We really ought to have a little modesty in our crises.” He paused. “I suspect," he went on, “that the people during the Black Plague must have thought they were in for a bit of a scrape."
Having momentarily lanced our fervor, he went on to allegorize, summoning up the story of Jesus on the Waters. Committed secularists virtually every one, we glanced at each other and then at our feet, in embarrassed cluelessness. "Jesus," he reminded us gently, "needed to get across the Sea of Galilee with his disciples, so they all boarded a small boat, whereupon Jesus quickly fell into a nap. Presently a storm kicked up, and the disciples, increasingly edgy, finally woke Jesus up. He told them not to worry, everything would be all right, whereupon he fell back into his nap. The storm meanwhile grew more and more intense, winds slashing the ever-higher waves. The increasingly anxious disciples woke Jesus once again, who once again told them not to worry and again fell back asleep. And still the storm worsened, now tossing the little boat violently all to and fro. The disciples, beside themselves with terror, awoke Jesus one more time, who now said, 'Oh ye of little faith'—that's where that phrase comes from—and then proceeded to pronounce, 'Peace!' Whereupon the storm instantaneously subsided and calm returned to the water."
Our Historian waited a few moments as we endeavored to worry out the glancing relevance of this story. "It seems to me," he finally concluded, "that what that story is trying to tell us is simply that in times of storm, we mustn't allow the storm to enter ourselves; rather we have to find peace inside ourselves and breathe it out."
*
THE SILENCE, AND THE SIRENS
The uncanny silence of the streets pierced by the occasional (actually all too frequent) wail of the sirens: and I am put in mind of the scene toward the end of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, where Peter Walsh (Clarissa Dalloway’s long-ago would-be suitor, recently returned from India), approaching her front door, hears…
One of the triumphs of civilization, Walsh thought. It is one of the triumphs of civilization, as the light high bell of the ambulance sounded. Swiftly, cleanly the ambulance sped to the hospital, having picked up instantly, humanely, some poor devil; someone hit on the head, struck by disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so ago at one of these crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was civilization. It struck him coming back from the East—the efficiency, the organization, the communal spirit of London. Every cart or carriage of its own accord drew aside to let the ambulance pass…
All of which is quite lovely and stirring, except that we readers know that the ambulance in question is actually racing to the site where another of the book’s principal characters, Septimus, a once idealist young poet who emerged from the War a devastated, shell-shocked wreck, pithed of the ability to feel anything, has just hurled himself out of an upper story window to his death on the pavement below. Civilization, indeed.
And a similar doubled vision comes over me, listening to the ambulances stream past. This pandemic was proving to be the great equalizer, or so we were constantly being told at the outset, striking rich and poor, the mighty and the minor alike, none of us immune to its fearsome depredations. And yet, as became increasingly obvious, a shockingly high percentage of the virus’s actual victims were proving to be the destitute, people of color, and the working poor—and for all the obvious reasons (why the shock?): it wasn’t just the packed living conditions that made social distancing so much more difficult for them than for the far more privileged minority of the country; nor was it the higher incidence of the so-called prior conditions (asthma, hypertension, diabetes and the like) in their historically underserviced communities; on top of all that, of course, such folk made up an extraordinarily high percentage of the “essential” workers –the farm workers and truckers and grocery store shelvers and check-out clerks, the hospital janitors and paramedics and nursing aides, the very EMT workers manning those wailing ambulances—who were having to risk their own lives, and that of their families, in this, the richest country in the history of the world.
“Show me a plague, and I’ll show you the world!” declared the late Larry Kramer, the great AIDS activist and survivor, in his 2015 novel, The American People: Volume One.
Indeed, and like AIDS before it, the Covid-19 virus has been tearing through late-capitalist, neoliberal American society like a veritable MRI, rendering its essential structure visually patent, for good and for ill.
*
Jester D, aka Aaron Meier, a San Francisco sanitation worker in the midst of the pandemic, unleashes a tweet that quickly goes viral:
I’m a garbageman, I can’t work from home and my job is an essential city service that must get done. It’s a tough job, from getting up pre-dawn to the physical toll it takes on my body to the monotonous nature of the job, at times it’s hard to keep on going.
Right now though, right now I am feeling an extra sense of pride and purpose as I do my work. I see the people, my people, of my city, peeking out their windows at me. They’re scared, we’re scared. Scared but resilient.
Us garbagemen are gonna keep collecting the garbage, doctors and nurses are gonna keep doctoring and nurse-ering. It’s gonna be ok, we’re gonna make it be ok. I love my city. I love my country. I love my planet Earth. Be good to each other and we’ll get through this.
*
From Tomas Transtromer
“Sentry Duty” (trans. Robert Bly):
Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation does a little work on itself
*
Headline deck from Buzzfeed News, April 20, 2020:
Smithfield Foods is Blaming “Living Circumstances in Certain Cultures”
for one of America's Largest Covid 19 Clusters
New details show how Smithfield Foods failed to take action in the crucial days before the plant turned into one of the nation’s largest coronavirus clusters.
*
Jean Rhys
from Good Morning, Midnight (1939):
The narrator, Sascha Jensen, a salesclerk, is about to be fired. Her stream of consciousness:
He looks at me with distaste. Plat du jour – boiled eyes, served cold…
Well, let’s argue this out, Mr Blank. You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That’s my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly damaged in the fray, there’s no denying it. So you have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month, to lodge me in a small, dark room, to clothe me shabbily, to harass me with worry and monotony and unsatisfied longings till you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry at a word. We can’t all be happy, we can’t all be rich, we can’t all be lucky – and it would be so much less fun if we were. Isn’t it so, Mr Blank? There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours. Some must cry so that the others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary…. Let’s say you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple – no, that I think you haven’t got. And that’s the right you hold most dearly, isn’t it? You must be able to despise the people you exploit. But I wish you a lot of trouble, Mr Blank, and just to start off with, your damned shop’s going bust. Alleluia!
Did I say all this? Of course I didn’t. I didn’t even think it.
I say that I am ill and want to go! (Get it in first.) And he says he quite agrees that it would be the best thing. ‘No regrets,’ he says, ‘no regrets.’
And there I am, out in the Avenue Marigny, with my month’s pay – four hundred francs.
*
Everybody seems to be reading Albert Camus’s The Plague again these days, which is of course understandable. It’s interesting to recall, however, that at the time it was first published, in 1947, many critics expressed consternation at the way Camus seemed to be allegorizing the politically loaded Nazi occupation of France by way of what seemed a decidedly apolitical or even nonpolitical microbial infestation. He seemed to get the visceral experience of living through the quarantine siege of such an illness uncannily right (in part perhaps thanks to his own reading of such chronicles as Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year), but did such a depiction do justice to such far more confounding issues as collaboration, genocide, and the like?
Of course, nowadays, the polarities are flipped: we are living through an actual pandemic, though in this instance under siege from submicroscopic entities that aren’t even microbial and barely even alive, exactly. And yet, this plague is proving an extraordinary excavator of all sorts of political issues, and in fact the swath it is cutting through society is entirely bounded by age-old political topographies.
Meanwhile, there’s a spookily prescient 1970 poem of Joseph Brodsky’s that’s been making the rounds, “Don’t Leave Your Room,” one that flips the viral quarantine backdrop a whole other way:
Don’t leave your room, don’t commit that fateful mistake.
Why risk the sun? Just settle back at home and smoke.
Outside’s absurd, especially that whoop of joy,
you’ve made it to the lavatory--now head back straight away!Don’t leave your room, don’t go and hail a taxi, spend,
the only space that matters is the corridor, its end
a ticking meter. She comes by, all ready for caressing,
mouth open? Kick her straight out, don’t even start undressing.Don’t leave your room, just say you have the influenza.
A wall and table are the most fascinating agenda.
Why leave this place? Tonight you will come home from town
exactly as you were, only more beaten down {…}Don’t be an idiot! You’re not the others, you’re an exclusion!
Choreograph the furniture, essay wall-paper fusion.
Make that wardrobe a barricade. The fates require us
to keep out Cosmos, Chronos, Eros, Race and Virus!
The tone of this poem is of course satirical, its context decidedly political (the virus here, as in Camus, being allegorical, though in an obverse way). The scene is Leningrad in 1970, and Brodsky, veteran of 18 months internal exile in an Arctic mental hospital, is chide-mocking all his pseudo-liberal compatriots who refuse to venture out of their own snug apartments and join the fray. Within two years, for all his like such provocations, he will himself be expelled from the country.
*
Several have commented on the science-fiction eeriness of life these days, each of us relegated to our own little cells, communicating with each other, diverting ourselves through our interactions with all these atomizing and digitizing screens. So futuristic, we say. And yet how uncanny to realize that well over a hundred years ago, in 1909, E.M. Forster had already seen it all clear in his novella The Machine Stops. (Look it up, it’s all there on Google. Just as predicted.)
Someday, decades and decades hence, following some terrible ecological collapse, all mankind has been reduced to living underground, in hexagonal rooms “like the cells of a bee” with no apertures but throbbing ventilation, and yet everyone is connected to everyone else by way of a vast hive of interconnected video plates. Zoom avant la lettre. Which is how Forster’s story begins, with a son calling out to videochat, as it were, with his mother on the other side of the globe, to chat and to complain,
“The Machine is much, but it is not everything.
I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you.
I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.”
And the tale unfurls from there.
*
From the ending of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, my collection of over thirty years of conversations with the artist Robert Irwin:
The afternoon was winding down, the lightwell facing Irwin’s drafting table was filling up with dim.
I reminded him how he often talked about expecting not to live to see the realization of the sort of world his own art was aspiring to, that such a realization could indeed still be generations off. What, I now asked him, did he have in mind? Was it (I was suddenly in a tweaking mood, wanting to dispel the mood of somber sobriety that had strangely overtaken us) a question, for instance, of not yet having sufficient computer power, such that artists in the future, properly endowed with the requisite terabytes, might be able to infuse visors with ecstasies of virtuality barely even dreamed of…?
“Of course not!” Bob erupted. (I’d managed to provoke exactly the rise I was hoping for.) “The point is to get people to peel off their visors, to remove the goggles, to abandon the screens. Those screens whose very purpose is to screen the actual world out. Who cares about virtuality when there’s all this reality—this incredible, inexhaustible, insatiable, astonishing reality—present all around!”
*
Friederich Nietzsche, from The Gay Science
(one of Oliver Sacks’s favorite and most oft-cited passages):
Gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened—the gratitude of the convalescent—for convalescence was unexpected… The rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow or a day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again.
*
“Deciamos ayer”
Fray Luis de Leon, the great humanist scholar (and Hebraicist) of the Spanish Golden Age and one of the sages of Salamanca University was condemned by the Inquisition for translating the Song of Solomon and spent four years in prison before being allowed to return to his lectern at the university, where he began his first lecture with the phrase, “Deciamos ayer”—“As we were saying yesterday….”
*
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, from “The War has had a Place” (1945):
We have learned history, and we claim that it must not be forgotten. But are we here not the dupes of our emotions? If ten years hence, we reread these pages and so many others, what will we think of them? We do not want this year of 1945 to become just another year among many. A man who has lost his son or a woman he loved does not want to live beyond that loss. He leaves the house in the state it was in. The familiar objects upon the table, the clothes in the closet mark an empty place in the world...The day will come, however, when the meaning of these clothes will change: once...they were wearable, and now they are out of style and shabby. To keep them any longer would not be to make the dead person live on; quite the opposite, they date his death all the more cruelly.
*
Comte Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand:
Nobody who wasn’t alive then will ever know the sweetness of life (la douceur de la vie: the sweet/soft plushness of life) before the Revolution.
*
Ryokan, “Reading the ‘Record of Eihei Dōgen’”:
Longing for ancient times and grieving for the present,
my heart is exhausted.
*
Ugandan proverb:
“The axe forgets, the tree remembers.”
* * *
A-V ROOM
Over the past several months, I have been taking advantage of an invitation by the Arts Letters & Numbers consortium to curate a series of Zoom conversations for the Italian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architectural Bienniale, and I will be providing links to them in sequence over the weeks to come here at Wondercabinet. (After that A-V will occasionally offer up other sorts of fare.)
As for this first one: In his spare time, Walter Murch—the legendary sound and film editor behind such classics as the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient—pursues all manner of marvelous side passions: transposing the uncanny journalism of the Italian midcentury master Curzio Malaparte into English poetry; resurrecting long-abandoned theories of gravitational astroacoustics (subject of an earlier book of mine, Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists); deciphering the geometry of the Egyptian pyramids; chronicling the art of his eminent painter father, Walter Tandy Murch; and now, approaching his own eightieth year, completing Suddenly Something Clicked, a combination memoir cum successor to his seminal 1995 meditation on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye.
As part of this last project, Murch has been making all sorts of unexpected discoveries, including astonishing observations concerning the way the Golden Ratio Φ (1.618…) keeps showing up, not only in spiraling galaxies, DNA, nautilus shells and sunflower pods—but also in the human face itself (anyone’s face, your face). And even more astonishingly, how the faces of actors are regularly but unconsciously placed within the frame by cinematographers according to the Golden Ratio Φ — a phenomenon spanning ten decades of cinema history and crossing all cultural boundaries.
Murch and I try to worry out what to make of all that here.
* * *
FOOTNOTES FROM A FORTHCOMING BOOK YOU DON’T HAVE TO HAVE READ, OR EVER READ
I will be publishing a new book by the end of the year, for further details on which, stay tuned. But in the meantime, all you need to know is that the main text will be about 13,500 words long, but that that text has in turn occasioned a delirium of endlessly digressive endnotes, well over 25,000 words worth, several of which seem to work equally well just standing alone. So we will be sampling some of those in the weeks ahead, starting with this one:
Footnote #4
An image which in turn put me in mind of one of the cardinal distinctions imparted to me on one of my first writing assignments, back in the late seventies, by the eminent Hollywood “rebbe” Melvin Brooks, whose directorial labors on his at that time next film, High Anxiety, the editors at the Village Voice had dispatched me to chronicle. “A man is walking down the street,” the Good Rabbi, pulling me aside at one point, endeavored to explain, “and he slips on a banana peel, goes flying head over heels through the air past a milling group of utility repairmen and right into the manhole they’ve just recently uncovered—crash, clatter, screaming, moaning, groaning—the ambulance is called and presently the poor fellow gets reeled out, every limb in a sling, his head all bandaged, groaning, moaning, and he’s hauled away. Now, that’s comedy! On the other hand, if I get a splinter on my pinkie: that’s tragedy.”
Which in turn also reminds me, come to think of it, of an incident I once encountered by way of a news bulletin—true story—about a guy washing his hands in the bathroom cubicle of one of those superfast French TGV trains as it raced somewhere between Paris and Marseilles, when his wedding ring slipped off his finger and caromed into the open toilet basin below and then down the drain. Undaunted, the gentlemen rolled up his sleeve and reached deep inside, grabbing the ring but getting his arm stuck so deep in the process that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t wedge it out. He tried to kick the door to summon help, but he couldn’t quite reach it. People on the other side of the door meanwhile began angrily pounding, demanding to be granted their turn. Eventually the conductor was called, at length he managed to unlock the door, and the whole sordid situation was revealed. Other conductors arrived, everyone trying to free the fellow from the trap. Eventually the hurtling train had to slow down and pull to a complete stop at a little village station so that the pompiers could be called to the scene. While TGVs all over Europe began grinding to a halt in cascading response to the ensuing blockage, the pompiers ended up summoning the village blacksmith, who sawed the entire unit out of its mooring and transported the conjoined fellow and toilet out onto the platform, where, in full view of everyone on the train and half the village’s gawking population, a good half hour of further ministrations proved necessary until they finally managed to free the sorry fellow from his misery. And the thing of it was, Jerry Lewis—I kid you not—happened to be on the train in question and got to watch it all, and was subsequently quoted as saying that this might have been the happiest moment of his life.
ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford.
NEXT WEEK
Part one of an extended profile of Jack Brogan, the wizardly nonagenarian fabricator behind much of Southern California’s Light and Space art movement; another shaggy dog of a footnote, this one about penis bones; a bovine Derrida-Nabokov convergence; and in the AV room, disability activist and artist-memoirist Riva Lehrer…
It’s free! You’ll receive a new post via email every other Thursday.