Month: June 2023

Unraveling Ratner’s Star From The Inside Out – quotations and an excerpt

Quotations

“His mind blunted by the cybernating drone in the distance, he leaned toward the console and put his head on his arms just as he’d done so many times first grade during the two-minute rest period every afternoon, nicks in the wooden desk, sleep pulling, chalk trails in the air.  From a series of three dreams had evolved a life fulfilled in mathematics and philosophy. The dreams occurred within a single night.  The first two concerned the terror of nature not understood and the last of them harbored a poem that pointed a way to the tasks of science. The world was comprehensible, a plane of equations, all knowledge able to be wielded, all nature controllable.”

…

“‘We can discover the truth or falsehood of our own final designs only if we teach ourselves to think as a single planetary mind.  This is the purpose of Field Experiment Number One.’”

…

“‘Consider science itself.  It used to be thought that the work of science would be completed in the very near future. This was, oh, the seventeenth century.  It was just a matter of time before all knowledge was integrated and made available, all the inmost secrets pried open.  This notion persisted for well over two hundred years.  But the thing continues to expand.  It grows and grows…’”

– Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p. 64-65 (Billy and then LoQuadro)

An Excerpt

There are only two characters in the novel Ratner’s Star smarter than Billy and they are both on the far side of the borderland to what we call madness.  There be dragons.  Endor was the last man tasked to solve the alien message.  He fails, and because he failed, he leaves the community of Field Experiment Number One, and moves into a hole of his own creation which he digs by the hour with the hook end of a clothes hanger.  He can tell you about science…

Endor hasn’t completely abandoned his scientific roots, but he has started to butt up against things he doesn’t understand.  And this fucks up his ability to carry on doing what he has always done, which is to do science, to use science to solve problems, explain things, come to conclusions.  The alien transmission evaded his understanding.  There was no math he knew that would unpack it.  And so he went to live in a hole where he ate insect larva and dug himself deeper and ever deeper into the earth.

We will return to Endor but it is worth noting now that he is a thorough-going materialist.  It should also be noted that the primary literary allusion for the name Endor is the biblical Witch of Endor from the Old Testament Book of Samuel.  In the book, the king Saul hires the Witch of Endor to summon the dead prophet Samuel to read his future.  She does and predicts that he and his three sons will all be killed in a battle with the Phillistines.  And so they are, which introduces Philistinism—the quality of having no appreciation or understanding of culture or the arts. Although it’s a cultural reference twice removed, it seems applicable to Endor and the scientific culture that to which he belongs, and indeed , must belong else he loses his very sanity.  What does this say about the scientific view of logic that to admit the existence of anything outside of science is to negate the mind itself, the methodology of reason, the rules of logic, and the ability to engage in rational thinking.  But science is absolutist, a jealous god that will have no other god before it (nor suffer a witch to live).

Another Quote

“‘Mathematics is the only avant-garde remaining in the whole province of art.  It’s pure art, lad.  Art and science.  Art, science, and language.  Art as much as the art we once called art. ‘“

– Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p.85, (Endor)

Use of quotations from DeLillo’s novel Ratner’s Star constitute fair use in this context– the analysis of a work of art.

Truth and/in the Narrative Age

Modern people, journalists and government people especially, like to talk about events in terms of “the narrative,” as if the real world events they’re describing are elements of fiction and not accumulations of fact.  For a while now, this has disturbed me.  Shouldn’t such people, possessors of the public trust and the duty of honestly informing the people, be telling the simple truth about things that verifiably happened and not “constructing a narrative” about them?  Because to my mind, constructing a narrative is not the same as providing a truthful account of something, nor is it consistent with the intention of fully informing one’s auditor.  It’s not that at all.  Rather, shaping the narrative is one systematic and insidious step removed from “spin.”  Meanwhile, spin is at least honest about its intentions which are to mislead, even to lie (almost).  A constructed narrative is not.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.  First, there is the factual telling of a real-world incident or situation.  This is what we expect from government officials and their journalists (naively, of course). 

Then there is the self-serving use of language to tell the same story in such a way that the listener gets the impression that the narrator wants them to get, even though that impression is not true. An honest government with honest motives would not need to construct narratives.  This should tell us something about the quality of information fed to us by spokespeople and media.  But maybe I’m still not making myself clear.

Example:  A country (let’s call them The Enemy) invades another country (The Proxy) after years of manipulation and tinkering on the part of a third nation which would like to take out The Enemy by having the proxy country fight them in a war.  This third country (let’s call them The Instigator) tells people that The Enemy has wantonly invaded the The Proxy without any provocation at all in order to fulfill its goal of world domination.  Many if not most people, hearing this narrative, believe it to be true, despite any stubborn facts to the contrary.  But in the current instance, the only part of the narrative that is strictly true is that The Enemy has invaded The Proxy.  The rest is spin: language employed to convey the false impression that The Enemy is solely at fault for a state of affairs that was largely set in motion, not by The Enemy but by The Instigator.

If we actually cared, we would have a problem with people in positions of public trust “shaping the narrative”–by so doing, the truth gets drowned in waves of false allegation, and we the people who listen uncritically to these narratives are misled, perhaps because we want to be, but misled all the same.  Like it or not, we accept lies and half-truths as truth.  

For a long time, this has gone on.  People love to tell stories; embellishing the truth is a time honored tradition of tall tale tellers from the fireside hearth to the halls of Congress.  But when we create names for this phenomenon which make it plain that we know the stories we’re telling ourselves are lies, and then use those lies to justify very dangerous and damaging real-world actions (such as wars and slander), yea, when we speak of constructed narratives as though they were true accounts of real events composed of indisputable facts, then we are miles past the use of fiction for entertainment (as in the art of creative writing) and well into the territory of self-serving mendacity.

Although no one really knows why this is so⁠1, we do know that lies are harmful and the truth is good.  It’s just that unless one’s actions are motivated by a desire to do good, telling the truth can be hard and painful. Hence we lie, or as we say today, spin.

In the case of government officials and so-called politicians, we do this as a matter of course—it’s what we do, our modus operandi, our standard operating procedure.  Constructing the narrative in this context has no other purpose than to mislead and consequently, to elicit a desired response from the people who believe us.  It’s consciously taking the facts as we know them and twisting them with other facts or convincingly-worded half-truths, and telling a different story—one that’s in line with our interests, not those of the people we purport to serve.  The established practice of spin is manipulative and frankly rotten, and we shouldn’t tolerate it, much less make up innocuous sounding labels for it like “shaping the narrative,” as though we were just rounding off a few rough edges, although, in fact, that’s just what we are doing—the omitting the inconvenient facts that tell the real story, the whole story, the truth and nothing but the truth.

But then, people don’t naturally tend to be truth-tellers.  Here in America, we need to be made to swear on a Bible (an obsolete sacred book) under penalty of law that we will tell the truth before we will do so reliably.  And even then, we might not, the Ten Commandments be damned. So when someone talks about the narrative, beware.  This is not an honest rendering of fact.  On the contrary–you are being lied to.

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1 So: a needle pulling thread… conjunction meaning (in this case) “the case” or (to translate, “why this is the case” or “why this is true.”

Writing as Both Noun and Verb

Recently I’ve been trying to figure out ways to increase my writing — the amount I complete, publish, and otherwise bring to fruition; the amount of time I spend doing it.  For some time now, the answer to the first part has been “zilch,” while the second value has hovered just above “very little.”  I spend very little time doing almost no useful (publishable) writing.  So we have that out of the way.

Naturally, this is not the state of affairs I prefer. 

I enjoy writing and once I get started, I can write happily, sometimes for hours.  But the part I steadfastly avoid is getting started.  For some reason, I resist writing, or for that matter, any creative effort, whether it’s what I do naturally (write) or something I do because I need to exercise some different skills (arts and crafts, gardening, cooking).  Is it because I’m not required to be creative that I can’t engage?

Whatever the reason, I find I’m like the cat who can’t decide what to do next. Faced with too many options, the cat will groom.  In a similar position, I plan.

I can plan all day.  I love to plan.  I make lists like it’s nothing.  Think and plan—not do.  When it comes to action, I lose my resolve and fall into what DeLillo calls “drift and lethargy.”  Oh what a relief that even the great DeLillo has problems with procrastination.  But then he has this crazy thing called discipline.

Because it’s relevant and also fun to read, here are a few comments from brilliant and prolific author Don DeLillo on writing and work habits.  He writes:

I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle—it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours. Back into book time, which is transparent—you don’t know it’s passing. No snack food or coffee. No cigarettes—I stopped smoking a long time ago. The space is clear, the house is quiet. A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary. To break the spell I look at a photograph of Borges, a great picture sent to me by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín. The face of Borges against a dark background—Borges fierce, blind, his nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks painted; he’s like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of steely rapture. I’ve read Borges of course, although not nearly all of it, and I don’t know anything about the way he worked—but the photograph shows us a writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So I’ve tried to make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.”

Don DeLillo, from an interview  the Paris Review, 1990s?

How wonderful. I find this statement almost as inspirational as DeLillo finds Borges’ photo.  It’s a “guide out of lethargy and drift.”

Inspired by this snippet of DeLillo, I have begun to read Borges finally, after years of wanting to but never being able to remember his name when I was in a bookstore.  Or pronounce it, for that matter.  His name, the name of this great author, thinker, and student of literature is Jorge Luis Borges.  He writes short pieces, often as short as 2-3 pages, with evocative titles and playfully misleading premises.  People like to talk about how he writes reviews of imaginary books, which he does, but playful as it seems, it’s so much more than just a game.  He’s such a genius at fantasy that after a very short while, the author himself starts to seem fictional too.  But returning to imaginary books—why?

(An answer—suppose a book needs to be written, but no one has written it.  Why go to the trouble of writing this book when you can just take its existence for granted and comment on it yourself? This is Borges.)

I’m reading Borges and like DeLillo, I find Borges’ face haunting, especially his upward gazing eyes on the Grove Press cover of Ficciones.  The silver nitrate-colored oblong that fills most of the front cover portrays Borges in a theater-like space, clearly looking, seeing.  But Borges is blind.  This black and white screen, this tesseract of potential vision, is a cinema of the mind, faceted beyond the limits of imagination.

I’m inspired by Borges, his writing (what little I’ve read), and the man himself, who emanates mystery and, again quoting DeLillo, opens the door “into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.” How can you not love this?  Eliot would have, T. S. that is, had he read him.  (The two were contemporaries.)  The reader enraptured, the writer enflamed.

Borges says anything is possible in writing, language, and literature. Anything can be created, interrogated, forced to give up secrets. In like manner, Borges sees writing as a tool to approaching life’s knotty questions, all of them really, from “why are people so messed up” to “life, the universe, and everything.”  Borges says that you don’t need thousands of words to do this.  From 5 to 5000, it might be enough.  The goal is simply to answer the questions.

Moving away from my inspirators, who are only peripheral to this narrative, I know there are a lot of things I’d like to sell, but not here babe.  (Every time I turn around, I find I’m shot.)

Why do I mention Malkmus?  What does Pavement have to do with my writing practice?  Oh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that Malkmus read DeLillo, not just the big sexy books like White Noise and Libra, but the quirky, early stuff like Americana, from

which I feel sure Malkmus plucked the line “there’s no coast of Nebraska” on his band’s own tour de force, Brighten the Corners.

Everything connects.

One day recently, after allowing all the fore-written to ramble through my brain for a sufficient amount of time for it to settle comfortably into my subconscious and simmer, I started to get useful directives.   Nothing deep, nothing heavy, man.  Just simple, easy things to do. Here’s one.

1.  Write every day even if only for 30 minutes.  Write every day.  Write for 30 minutes, or longer if you want.  Write for as long as you want but at least for 30 minutes, no matter what you think the outside world wants of you. Write every day.

Here’s another:

2. Publish this writing somewhere, most practically on a blog or other web site.  Your post can be short, very short, indeed.  All that’s necessary is that you say something.

And that’s that.  Do these two things every day.  Do them early and do them with enthusiasm, and you will not go wrong.

Postscript:

Another writer who has inspired me with his description of his work ethic is Ernest Hemingway; chiefly, the bits of avuncular advice  on writing that I’ve been able to glean from his early memoir A Moveable Feast.  There he writes that he likes to write every day, often in a cafe, out of doors, (the Closerie Des Lilas, most frequently).  What makes his approach uniquely useful is the transition from one day to the next.  Specifically, he likes to end his sessions with something juicy to get started with the next day⁠1—a sort of “writer’s cliffhanger,” if you will. And so to that end, the next essay in this series will be about the corruption of the narrative.  Only I know what I’ll say,  but it’ll be good.

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1 “I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.” – Ernest Hemingway, “Une Generation Perdue” from A Moveable Feast, p. 26