Luckily for a Yeasayer

Naysayers we know. To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others.

Luckily there is another cant to this questy.

--James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 108-109.

I'd intended to finish Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake before I dove into the Wake itself, but I couldn't hold myself back. I've been preparing myself to read the Wake for at least ten years, and now that I'm so close, I can't help but jump before the gunshot.

You have to understand what Joyce means to me. In the presence of Joyce, I become giddy, awestruck, reverential: Joyful. And finally I am allowing myself his masterpiece. The power of his imagination is unspeakable. His associative abilities are indescribabble. In his presence, I am jawstruck. Here comes an imagination set loose.

I remember my grad-school room-mate Danielle asked me about Ulysses, which I had recently finished, and I said when I read the final sentence, I felt like I had received first communion. She asked if I was saying that myself. It sounded like a quote to me too, but I was sure it wasn't. It was just the description that came to me, though the canned vibe to the words was uncanny. Because I meant them; for me reading Joyce is a religious experience-- a religion of joyous affirmation and the wildest untamed Yes available to our almost waking imaginations.

I know I'm carried away and about to swim back into it, but I just have to say that I am doing it, right here. Right now.

The Philosophical Uggh

I woke up this morning to a frozen world. The temperature just outside my window was 0 Fahrenheit. Nevertheless, I braved my way through a frigid Prague and made it to my 7:30 lesson at T-Mobile. Thanks to a late cancellation--money for nothing--the morning lesson was all I had scheduled for the day.

When I returned home, I decided I deserved a hot breakfast.

And the weirdness came upon me.

Remember what they taught us in school? Well, one of the things was if you add heat to a solid, it becomes a liquid. If you add heat to a liquid, it becomes a gas. Thus, ice becomes water, and water becomes steam. And if you add heat to a gas, it becomes a plasma, but that rarely happens because the required temperatures are unimaginably high, so you only find plasma in the heart of a star or in the veins of someone about to donate blood.

As I set about making my hot breakfast, I put some butter in a pan and put the pan on the stove. The butter, which had been solid, soon became a liquid with the addition of heat. I thought, I'm witnessing science! And I wondered about the scientific label--is this some Law of Thermodynamics happening in my kitchen? Or does the label sound less awesome?

Then I added the eggs.

Disaster!

Scientific truths tumbled to nothingness before my astounded eyes!

Liquid eggs become solid with the addition of heat!! The umpth Law of Thermodynamics is a farce!

I thought, get a hold of yourself Michael. Be level-headed and rational. And I reasoned: in most cases, the umpth Law of Thermodynamics holds true, but in the case of eggs, well, hmm--stay cool, just think it out, use your head--ok then, it must be a miracle.
Every time I cook an egg, I witness a miracle. Nothing to be upset about; it's even kind of cool.

Then I wondered, is it still a miracle if it can be manifested on command? I have an idea that miracles are supposed to be a glorious surprise, impossible to replicate in laboratory conditions.

So I realized, cooking eggs isn't a miracle: it's magic. Every human has the spooky power to reverse the supposedly inviolable umpth Law of Thermodynamics, at least in the specific case of eggs. Most people wield this power without ever knowing its nature, like I used to. Maybe in some undeveloped parts of the world where the natives never thought to consume animal excretions, they'd say we're crazy: no way could an egg become solid over heat, they'd say. Haven't you discovered the umpth Law of Thermodynamics yet?

Yes, we have. You have to discover the rules before you can break them.

Then I put some hot sauce on my eggs and ate up, altogether satisfied with my adventure into the kitchen.

Obsession

Mutant, monster Rats in full combat. Collectively referred to as The Herd. Orestes Herpetulian in confrontation w/said entity. Landscape: The Dump, officially known as The Fresh Kills Landfill. I am in the process of imagining and actualizing this scene.

The inspiration for this scene came months ago, and I made a few quick notes before I tossed the whole thing back into my subconscious. Now I'm bringing the monster to life.

There's no point denying that I'm basically ripping off Moby Dick--which I've never read & don't plan to; anyway I know the gist--and Pynchon's V. with the white alligator who lives in the NYC sewer system. Herpetulian finds his perfect nemesis, and why shouldn't it be an animal?

How can I possibly talk about Pilgrims Dream without talking in circles? I must go around to come back again.

This entire sub-story of The Herd is backstory. As far as I'm concerned, the Genesis of the universe of Pilgrims Dream happens in the coffeeshop, when the pilgrims first meet. From that moment, the adventure begins. They launch into The Quest. But that moment also retroactively justifies that which brought them to the adventure. But, I think I will tell the backstories alongside the central story. The moment of creation must come at the beginning, even if the past came before the creation.

(I've wondered about what might actually hold the pilgrims together after they meet in the coffeeshop in that moment of Genesis. The rest of the novel needs them to stay together. But what could drive a group of five strangers who meet by accident in a coffeeshop to go off on a trip to the Amazon immediately? Of course, we the readers know the meeting isn't so accidental since Agents Grossberger & Troutslop were ordered to track the meeting even before it happened, seemingly by accident. Still, what is the pilgrims' motive? So: all of them have had someone very close to them disappear. And they feel the weird pressure of recognition before the uncanny truth comes out. Wundersprocket's teenage daughter. Herpetulian's fiance. Lux's mother. Laura Cloud's husband.

The strangeness of the encounter forces them to realize that none of them ever confronted the loss of their loved one. And how can they? This is the trouble with ghosts, the paradox of loss: how can one confront that which is not? And the answer is that one cannot confront paradox, but, as Kafka indicated, one must rise above it. Coincidentally, an early title for Pilgrims Dream was Everything Rises.)

So, Herp's backstory: he'd worked as a pharmaceuticals rep & had a typically successful American life. Then his fiance disappeared. Forever. The life he'd built became transparent, insubstantial, without the woman whom he'd founded the rest upon. So he quit his job. He wanted to do something real. After a few months, he took a job w/the Sanitation Department. As far as Herpetulian was concerned, the only real thing in the modern American world was garbage, and lots of it. Soon he finds himself working The Dump.

An old black man near retirement named K takes Herpetulian under his wing. K gives Herpetulian the nickname "Herps".

(Interestingly, K is a character I first wrote about over ten years ago. He was based on a real person--the only real person I ever wrote about. And somehow he found his way into this story.)

Before Herps' first excursion into The Dump, K lends him his .44 Magnum--Dirty Harry's gun. Herps asks what it's for. K says it's for the rats, which grow quite large in the unnatural, toxic environment of The Dump. But, K also says that as long as Herps leaves the rats alone, they'll leave him alone.

Herps goes along, doing his job. But he senses that something is going on with those rats. He eventually hears whispers about The Herd. There is a weird vibe. Old-timers talk about The Herd as if it is intelligent.

One day, Herps runs into a guy wandering about the hidden mounds of The Dump. The guy has gone commando. Basically I'm ripping off Apocalypse Now, & Heart of Darkness w/the Kurtz character. Herps learns that this guy used to work for the Sanitation Department before he dropped out of normal life to dedicate all of his time to fighting The Herd. The guy now lives in The Dump. He tracks The Herd, learns about all of it's secret tunnels, develops intelligence.

When Herps gets back to the locker room, he tells K about the character he met. K tells Herps to forget about it--stay away from it man. Like I told you, just leave them alone and they won't bother you neither.

But Herps can't stop thinking about it. The Herd. How could they possibly be intelligent? And what are they working toward?

Soon after, Herps dreams about Grandaddy: the great white rat leader of The Herd. He both sees the rat & knows it's name.

Next day in the locker room, Herps asks K if he thinks The Herd has a leader.

--I already told you to leave it alone, Herps! Drop it, man.

Herps says he had a dream.

--Shit. You saw him, didn't you?

K asks if the leader in Herps' dream had a name. Herps confirms it. K tells Herps to quit the job immediately. Move out to Kansas, or something. Get away. Fiji. Tijuana. Just get out. But Herps won't drop it. K sighs and asks, Was the white rat called Grandaddy?

Yes.

The old-timers never talk about it--the name "Grandaddy" is taboo. But, fact is, several good men have gone commando over the years, and each of them dreams of Grandaddy before they disappear into the wastes of The Dump forever.

Next day, Herps actually sees Grandaddy. He follows him. Grandaddy reaches the top of a high mound, the setting sun behind him, and turns to face Herps directly. They share a soul-exchanging moment. Suddenly Herps realizes he's been led into an ambush. The Herd has him surrounded, and Herps has the low ground. He looks again to the eyes of Grandaddy. And, how is this possible? it must be a hallucination, the entire impossible episode, because Grandaddy disappears into thin air, and Herps is left staring into the sun. The Herd has vanished.

When Herps gets back, he quits immediately. No notice. K pleads that Herps take a vacation somewhere far from NYC--just don't go back into The Dump, man.

Herps brushes off everyone's advice--they're all living in a fantasy world: willful ignorance of The Herd & it's malicious implications--and Herps decides to take one last trip into Manhattan--one final goodbye to New York, the city he's loved so well--before he dedicates himself to full-time rat combat.

Except, of course, his final trip into the city leads him to meet the other pilgrims, and Herps is launched instead into an adventure of a different sort.

A Progression of Cycles

The Divine Comedy is before my eyes and in my mind. I believe I've mentioned in a previous post that I read with an agenda. With Dante & my previous read, Parzival, I've been reading with an eye toward Finnegans Wake. I've read The Inferno maybe three or four times & even taught it in a world lit. class, but I'd never read the entire Comedy. I'm halfway through The Purgatory, and I think I like it better than The Inferno, which surprises me. I'd figured all the narrative tension would vanish after Dante gets past Satan. It's not your typical narrative arc: Dante, as pilgrim, confronts & overcomes the greatest possible antagonist, and at that point you're only a third of the way through the story. This plot not only defies Hollywood logic--it defies the logic of all stories. Imagine if Odysseus had already returned home a third of the way through his poem; imagine if Hamlet had confronted his uncle in the beginning of the second act; imagine if Gatsby had resolved his issues w/Daisy by page 70. Yet, somehow Dante, as poet, makes it work.

I decided to tackle the Comedy now as a final preparation for the Wake. Joyce has a definite medieval vibe, and I'm swimming down into it beforehand so I'm acclimated before I read that famous first/last sentence. The medieval vibe is a sense of the cyclical. The Divine Comedy is a great evocation of the cyclical. It requires a lot of emotional, intuitive, and intellectual work to truly appreciate the sense of cycles--at least for us. Sure, most of us will readily assent that everything goes in cycles, but that's only words. The truth is us moderns don't think in cycles, or at least we aren't conditioned to appreciate them.

We think in Progress. For us, things go ever forward. To us, the future is a mystery: we can't imagine how things will be in ten years, nevermind fifty. When someone mentions the future, we wonder about technological developments: will everyone have a universal translator implanted in their pineal glands? even dogs, so we can finally understand what we sense they so desperately want to say to us? Will miniature robots clip our toenails while we sleep? Will we finally achieve time travel so we can arrive on time to that important meeting we slept through so many years ago?

Even I, who have devoted so much time and effort to warping the constructs of my mind, have trouble dropping Progress when I want to enter Cycles. Because it's more than a recitation of words or an intellectual grasp--you have to overload the intellectual for long & hard enough that the sense passes into the emotional/intuitive, because only then do you achieve understanding. It's a process I'm becoming familiar with.

Look forward to see backward. As it was in the beginning, is now, and always shall be.

Thursday night, I broke through.

I saw a new world.

I finished a lesson with a student and, while I walked to the bus stop, I looked to the field across the street. In the summer, it grows some variety of leafy green vegetable. The field itself is impressive, especially to a city boy like yours truly. It's large, and it slopes gently upward into the horizon. There are three trees just beyond the slope's crest, and they look as if they are falling off the edge of the world. I once saw the full moon rise over that horizon, and I thought of Godot, and T.S. Eliot's line about three trees on the low horizon.

This time, it was covered in snow and moonlight. It snowed a week ago, and the temperature hasn't risen about freezing yet, so the snow remains.

I thought of how in Florida, when the temperature threatens to drop below freezing, all the farmers spray water on their crops. If the temperature does in fact drop below freezing, the water turns to ice, and the ice actually serves as insulation against the cold.

I looked at the field, and I thought, well I didn't think exact words, but I had a feeling like--the snow covers the field like the ice covers the plants. It protects the life beneath it. I thought of the work, the death, that field must go through so it can produce life again in the next season. The snow, patient & enduring, had kept still for a week and counting so that the work of death, which is the work of life, could continue in the soil of that field. It was breaking down a particular form of life into its essence so that it could nourish a new form of life, which is yet to be born.

I had never felt snow like that before.

And I thought, This is how people used to think 600 years ago. And I thought, I'm finally making real progress on this whole cycle thing.

Implementing My Magical Dynamic

A month ago, in the midst of another harrowing experience I'd rather not write about, I learned that the school I work for will close at the end of January.

Startled, to say the least.

At the time, I was actually praying--in my fashion--that my school would give me a few more classes a week. I earned enough to pay rent, buy groceries, and even go out for a beer occasionally, but I wanted more so I could travel about this fantastic new continent, go out to a restaurant every now & again, and eventually save enough so I could visit my friends & family back in the States. Instead of getting more lessons, I got laid off. Teachers aren't safe either in our current economic habitat--or, as my Czech students call it, The Crisis.

Disorient. I'd been in Prague long enough to know I truly love it. I'd been teaching long enough to know I could enjoy teaching for quite awhile longer. Just then, the floor vanished from under me. The moment of terror: long enough to love it, then it leaves.

But, like Hunter Thompson said, When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. So that's what I did. Here's how. Watch closely.

This is how magic works.

I am incredibly lucky. That's my first premise. Always have been, always will be. When the world disappears on you, you go back to your basic premises. Before I know anything else, I know that luck is with me; luck is a type of grace granted to those who believe they already have it. As far as I'm concerned, you can do this too. When people say they have bad luck, I cringe: that's the dark side of this magic.

So:

1. I'd lost my job.

2. I had basically zero savings.

3. I was living in a foreign country, which made facts 1 and 2 more troubling.

I wondered, How do I reconcile these facts with my basic premise? Where does my quintessential luck fit in this picture? I realized: something magnificent must be waiting for me, and it can't come until I get rid of my current job.

So be it. Amen.

Seek, and you shall find.

Several of my students, upon learning that my school was closing, said they wanted to continue with me privately. So, instead of my students paying the school and the school paying me, my students would pay me directly. Cut out the middle, man. Otherwise known as poaching, and it is contractually forbidden. But since my school is closing shop, they had no qualms & even encouraged students to continue with their teachers privately, if possible. I'd long known that the real money is in private teaching, but I didn't know how to find private students. I more than double my pay-rate by working privately. Well, when my school went belly-up, all of my students instantly became potential private clients--and they already knew what kind of teacher I am. No need for recommendations & references.

I don't claim to be a great teacher. I simply don't have enough experience for that. But my TEFL course was truly excellent, and though I haven't quite implemented everything I learned during that course yet, I know what a good lesson should look like. Just knowing where I should go in the future, I think, makes me better right now. Also, and perhaps more importantly, I care about my students--they know it. Put that all together and you got a teacher worth paying for.

I put out my feelers, readied myself for the opportunity, friends helped me out, luck shined her light upon me, and beginning next month I'll be making almost the same money as before for half the time worked. That's what private lessons can do for a teacher. Hopefully I'll continue to build my reputation & find even more private students.

I still need to work for a school--though my school closed, there are other schools in Prague that are hiring. I don't need a full-time job anymore, just enough hours to get me to the amount I'd wanted in the first place. Though I'm in a position where I could earn serious cash if I worked a full schedule, money has never been one of my obsessions. Instead, I'll work enough to make enough, and I'll devote more time to my novel.

Because this is all only a part of that larger dream.

Official Policy

The Czech Republic updated its drug laws for 2010. For an American, it's hard to believe such leniency exists anywhere in the galaxy. But I would argue the laws are strict exactly where they are needed. This link goes to a Prague Post article describing the new policy. Look at this:

Starting in 2010, possessing the following amounts of drugs is no longer a criminal offense.
Marijuana 15 grams or less (15 GRAMS!!! *personal note to mark my astonishment. Street value, that's over $200 of weed. In Amsterdam, only 5 grams or less has been decriminalized. And I had thought that amount was plenty.)
Heroin 1.5 grams or less
Cocaine 1 gram or less
Methamphetamine 2 grams or less
Amphetamine 2 grams or less
Ecstasy 4 tablets or less
Hashish 5 grams or less
Hallucinogenic mushrooms 40 pieces or less
LSD 5 tablets or less

I have a hard time imagining the States decriminalizing even a couple of grams of marijuana. 15 grams is some serious weight. And then look at all these other drugs which have been decriminalized, in not-so-small amounts! I consider myself fairly liberal--or maybe the word is conservative: however you want to describe someone who believes an individual has the right to act as he sees fit, so long as he doesn't hurt others--and even I would hesitate to decriminalize methamphetamine.

Just imagine having the legal amount of all these drugs in a backpack. If a cop stopped you, yes, he could possibly give you some legal hassle, but it's written into the law that he has the option to issue nothing more than a warning. Just be polite, and you're fine. Act like a jerk, and yeah, he could probably lay some tickets on you and make the whole encounter expensive and time consuming. So, be nice, which is a good rule of thumb anyway. But, just think: he could look through your bag, maybe give you a hard time, but you would have absolutely no fear of jail-time. I think holding such amounts in the States, especially of LSD, would get you life in prison. Just look at the pharmacopeia you can legally carry! A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff. Or Prague, for that matter.

So one would be tempted to think the Czech Republic is an anything goes country. For an American, it's true that the freedom here is astounding, almost dizzying, but the Czechs are smart where it counts.

There is no drug as dangerous as alcohol, though in the States we've been trained to think of drugs as Evil and alcohol as ok: pools, girls, barbecues, etc. In the Czech Republic, every driver who is stopped by the police is automatically given a breathalyzer test. Which is rational, and much stricter than I could ever imagine in the States. Sure, they have the right to test you in the States, but I personally have never seen it done. Yet I think it's safe to assume that Budweiser is responsible for more deaths through auto accidents and violence than any of these drugs. Not to mention how alcohol degrades so many bodily systems--but that is a personal choice that harms no one else.

I don't mean to say that the CR is down on alcohol; the beer is fantastic and cheap, and everyone seems to drink a good amount of it.

Anyway, this is the cognitive dissonance I love about living in a different culture. Reading this article would've meant nothing to me had I never left the States. It's something shocking how differently people can decide to handle things, and in such unexpected ways. Get pulled over in Prague with that loaded backpack, and you got nothing to fear. But you will be given a breathalyzer, and there ain't no sweet-talking around it.

Hot Sauce Fragment

While eating dinner, I had a vision of a meeting at a 12 Step program devoted to hot sauce. People stand, say how it started innocently enough--maybe on a dare at a birthday dinner someone dips their sushi in wasabi, then the person finds himself putting something spicy in soups, sandwiches, eventually it gets down to the hot pepper sauce in stews, eggs, tuna fish, etc. until they begin to contemplate what hot sauce might taste like in let's say chocolate pudding. And wouldn't a little hot sauce in your cereal be the perfect jolt in the morning? Interesting thought, isn't it? (If your response to the first question is, Hmm, with a nod, then you belong at the meeting.) At this point the person knows he has a problem, but there's no turning back. And when he realizes he uses hot sauce in every meal, there's only one way to go: hotter hot sauce. He begins seeking out the hard stuff. Now, he can't taste anything unless it has hot sauce in it. Plain old Tabasco is vanilla. He needs the fire.

And that's as far as that vision went.