The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley admits up front that writing about how philosophers died is, well, odd, and that reading about such things is perhaps even odder. Then again, there are lots of good reasons to write and read about death. It’s inevitable, after all, the one truly irremediable cipher confronting each of us. We know nothing about death (though plenty about how it gets caused), or would say so if we were truly honest about the limits of our cognitive abilities.

And of course we’re fascinated with ciphers, mad to construe their hidden meanings and to make sense out of what, so often, is a devastation for those of us who go on living.

Besides, philosophers are especially good at dying. Not all of them, of course, but the good deaths (the ones that fascinate, the ones that cause the brow to crinkle, the ones that cause us to splutter, wave the storyteller away and take drink with a secret, hidden smile lurking on our lips) tend to be remembered, to be passed on down the line of storytellers. A good death becomes a point of imaginative departure. Here are snippets from Critchley’s wonderful vignettes on my three favorite philosophers.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom Critchley considers “a saint for our time,” had terminal cancer. Wittgenstein died one night in 1951 with his boots on, in the company of his friend, Mrs. Bevan. Wittgenstein stirred the pot by questioning the questioners: he interrogated the norms of Western philosophy (though he was notably ignorant of its history, as Critchley points out) and caused a wave that has come down to us as post-modernism, or more generally as a bumper sticker: Question Authority. For Wittgenstein, the authority was language, and it needed close scrutiny: words, slippery with the oil of human intercourse, had to be refined into the fuel of truth. That last night, when Mrs. Bevan told him his friends would be coming to visit the next morning, he asked her to tell them “I’ve had a wonderful life.”

Heraclitus, known as the weeping philosopher because he was so distressed at the crappiness of our moral fiber, may have shuffled off his mortal coil by drowning in cow dung. He thought it would draw out the bad humours—and he was always of fairly poor humor. His surviving writings (or sayings, since he wasn’t the type to write things down; “everything flows,” he said, nothing stays the same and permanence is an illusion) are wonderful: droll, biting and often mysterious: “Souls have a sense of smell in Hades.” Or perhaps he didn’t drown in shit. Another version of his death has it that his friends couldn’t scrape the crap off the philosopher and had to stand by, watching in horror, as dogs devoured him. So it goes.

Diogenes the Dog, the Cynic, always a willful bastard, is said to have committed suicide by holding his breath. And thousands of miles away and on the same day Alexander the Great died, at that. The philosopher would have been about 90. Both Heraclitus and Diogenes lived in an era when Greece was having a lot of intercourse with India, so it’s not so surprising that both philosophers have strong resonance with ancient Hindu and Buddhist thought. Heraclitus saw through the veil of maya and Diogenes tackled the ego by living like an animal. (For years, all he carried was a staff and a bowl. Then one day he saw someone drinking out of her cupped hands. He threw his bowl away.) Another story has it that Diogenes died from eating raw octopus.

One thing I learn for sure from Critchley’s marvelous book is to be careful what I put in my mouth.

We should also be careful about what we put in our heads, which is to say, we should be generous with good books. Critchley has read a lot of good books (many of them, no doubt, in odd, difficult and long-dead languages) and gives them back most generously. Feed your head; read some dead philosophers.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book.

A Hu-Li is at least 40,000 thousand years old. She’s also a fox in both the literal and the vernacular sense of the word—a fox who happens to be a member of a species who morphologically resemble human women. And live a long time without growing old—or even, necessarily, mature.

A Hu-Li and her sisters are sexual predators. They are, in other words, a top-level crypto-predator species that happens to feed on human sexual energy. Obviously, then, a fox’s perfect disguise is as a high-class prostitute. What better character to skewer the norms of society than the prostitute who pops the bubble of every hypocritical prick along her journey to enlightenment? A Hu-Li and her sisters are not human and don’t care about our values. A Hu-Li has her own. She’s not a liberated sex worker, she’s a predator.

An enticing one, too: she wears her years of experience with cunning wit, style, pragmatic grace and imperial wisdom—most of the time. The narrative sweet spot Pelevin has found in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and the one that powers this character-driven novel, lies in the friction between A Hu-Li’s human enculturation and her animal instincts, a friction awash in a superseding assumption: all beings are searching for the levels of their souls. A Hu-Li manages to remain a haughty bitch while purporting a profoundly leveling philosophy.A Hu-Li is a Buddhist with Taoist inclinations. In previous Pelevin novels (Buddha’s Little Finger, obviously among others) religion has played an important role, even to the extent of becoming a character but in The Sacred Book we get a close up look at a Pelevin messiah, and she’s working hard to convert us, often by quoting ancient Buddhist scripture. Her yearning for enlightenment, her desire to enter the “Rainbow River,” tempers the animal magic of her tail, the tool of her predatory trade. This yearning is not what makes her human; Pelevin presses her foxy difference. Instead, A Hu-Li’s yearning is the mark that signs us all as beings seeking the levels of our souls. Here she is talking to Alexander, a general in love with her, about his choice of reading material:

Speaking in very simple terms, I can say this. Reading is human contact, and the range of our human contacts is what makes us what we are. Just imagine you live the life of a long-distance truck driver. The books that you read are like the travelers you take into your cab. If you give lifts to people who are cultured and profound, you’ll learn a lot from them. If you pick up fools, you’ll turn into a fool yourself. Wasting time on detective novels is… it’s like giving an illiterate prostitute a ride for the sake of a blowjob.”

A Hu-Li dissembles, feigns, passes as human. Unlike her lover Alexander, it’s not her web of human contacts that make her who she is. She’s a were-fox, a mistress of deception. Furthermore, she doesn’t give blowjobs. Foxes have a secret weapon: they have telepathic tails, instruments productive of supreme human sexual bliss. But to learn how that works, you’ll need to read the novel.

Ikkyu, the great Japanese poet and Zen master of the 15th century, said: If you want me, look for me in the whorehouse. Soul searching, in other words, is classless—or should be, according to a fox’s sense of judgment:

It is usually assumed that were-creatures are not concerned about spiritual problems. People think you turn into a fox or a wolf, howl at the moon, tear someone’s throat out, and all the great questions of life are instantly answered, and it’s clear who you are, what you’re doing in this world, where you came from and where you’re going… But that’s not the way it is at all. We are far more tormented by the riddles of existence than modern humans. But the cinema continues to depict us as complacent, earth-bound gluttons, nonentities who are indistinguishable from each other, cruel and squalid consumers of the blood of others.”

It’s true: vampires get all the good press. With the were-fox A Hu-Li, what we get is a 40,000-year-old cynic philosopher, one who remembers inscriptions and conversations across thousands of years of human history, a philosopher dancing madly across all barriers of sociopolitical correctness, and one who takes her Buddhism pretty damn seriously. A Hu-Li is a babe, a bodhisattva, she’s a cruel mirror, and she’s very, very funny. This fox has bite.

review by Brian Charles Clark

So I was reading the Bay Area Guardian, something I do exactly as regularly as I vote, and I ran across something that I thought might interest you. It seems San Francisco has a Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force to explore life after fossil fuels. Of course few take them seriously.

And I replied:

Do you mean that people locally don’t take the task force in SF seriously? Or don’t take post-oil seriously?

The peak oilers are sometimes hard to listen to because they’re so apocalyptically pessimistic. They see the energy packed into a hydrocarbon molecule and moan, What can possibly replace this? They don’t see anything on the shelf that can replace oil, so assume we’re all doomed. I do admire their historical analysis, tho, and I think Hubbert was right; well, he was right, US production peaked right when he said it would. A year or so ago the Saudi Minister of Energy said the planet was running out of oil and had to get ready. And now the King of Saudi Arabia has created a $10-billion endowment for a new university, sci and tech research, that will be a mini-kingdom unto itself in order to free it (and thus attract students and faculty) of Sharia, the heinous religious law of fundamentalist Islam. The king’s reasoning was explicit: Saudi Arabia won’t be an energy economy for much longer and needs to transform itself into a knowledge economy. Amen, brother. At last we agree on something.

I just watched a fairly well done documentary called “A Crude Awakening.” Very peak-oil pessimistic. It’s my impression, and this flick is a prime example, that most people concerned about energy focus on transportation. No doubt a key stone in the arch of civilization, but agriculture, as she is practiced, uses at least as much and, if you count peripheral parts of the industry beyond diesel for tractors and fertilizers for soil and include food packaging (transport is of course huge here, but no one compares total transport to total food system energy costs, not much anyway)–well, we probably spend a third on transport, a third on packaging and moving food around, and a third growing and processing food. So they way we do ag is the elephant in the room–not to disparage elephants.

I think more and more people are taking post-petroleum seriously–or are at least entertaining the idea to see if they can make a buck. Peak oilers are marginalized because they speak fear–and, well, fear is static, it lacks directed motion. It’s one of the four Fs, for Pete’s sake. The energy marketplace, though, is at least an extension of known territory, and we’ve long had multiple sources of energy. That’s why I’m partial to the addiction metaphor: we’ve long had a choice of drugs and I like my marketing to have a sharp, recognizably dangerous edge, but also have hope for change.

Beyond that, and into true intellectual honesty, IMHO, our human energy situation exceeds in complexity any single-theory explanation. Peak oil is true, addiction is true, human ingenuity is true, tipping-points of bi-polar Mama Earth are true–and that’s already too many bags of variables for any group of human minds to wrap around singly, much less together–at least at the present. We don’t know what is going on. We don’t know the true cost of energy any better than we know the true cost of the food we eat.

So what’s new? There’s your historical analysis.

But we humans are fungus-like: we keep shooting out filaments and slimes of technology to save ourselves from the slings and arrows. So here’s a hopeful filament: nano-scale machines that gather energy from a heartbeat to power that body’s pacemaker. That, my friend, is pretty damn close to a free lunch. And that got me thinking, Why not my typing harvesting energy (like brakes in your hybrid) to power my laptop? We keep goofing off with nanotech clothing that flashes and whirs, so why not design it to harvest the energy otherwise lost when walking? As a dancer, you can perhaps visualize how motion is mostly wasted energy; when waste is minimized, we call it grace and beauty.

The arrangement and interpretations of the I Ching’s hexagrams can be attributed to the astute analysis of human nature in many contexts by many contributors over many years. It’s much more difficult to account for the uncanny accuracy, reasonableness, and wisdom of the I Ching’s answers to one’s questions. That, at least, has been my experience.

The I Ching is the ancient Chinese book that accreted around a series of 64 hexagrams. A hexagram, in turn, is an arrangement of six lines. Each line is either solid or broken. Here are the first two hexagrams, the Creative and the Receptive:

Hexagrams are formed by chance action (e.g., the rolling of three coins, and taking combinations of heads and tails for either a solid or broken line) from the bottom up. The lines are taken to represent a temporal sequence, the unfolding of change over time.

Lines themselves can change, and a changing line is indicated by chance action, as in the roll of three heads (a changing broken or yin line) or three tails (a changing solid or yang line). In the above example, if one tossed a set of three coins six times—once for each line in the Creative—and each roll came up three tails, each line would change into its opposite. The result would be two hexagrams: hexagram one, the Creative, would change to hexagram two, the Receptive.

The odds against a six-in-a-row coin toss are astronomical. But, then, what are the odds in favor of receiving a response that strikes one as both wise and a propos to the question?

Questions. Where do they come from? You, me, worrying the hems of our lives; John Cage, wondering what it really means to compose; and anybody, really, who engages in the act of breasting change with a story of self in mind. To put the previous question another way, What are the odds of a story emerging from apparently unconnected facts, experiences or observations?

As with most fortune telling systems, the odds favor making sense—if you can accept enigmatic replies as sense. For me, the difference between the I Ching and, say, the tarot (which has much sexier images), is perceptual: the I Ching responds in poetry, the tarot in cliché. One enlightens me, the other makes me vomit. It’s not the tarot’s fault; it’s cultural chance. The Romany, vectors of prognostication by chance action of card dealing, eschewed written language until relatively recent times (and then a palette of languages pattern Romany texts, rather than a national language); the Chinese, just as ancient, famously co-pioneered written language. The Romany poetry of the tarot is, at best, confined to a small group of disrespected people while the written texts of the Chinese have become venerated for their wisdom and verisimilitude.

History 001

The I Ching is one of the oldest continuously read and written about books on the planet. The modern view, based on archeological evidence, is that the book was first compiled around 800 B.C. By then, the use of the hexagrams had gone from attempting to influence the gods to attempting to gain penetrative insight into the courses of events that ebb and flow around us. From a purely mimetic fetish (cracks in oracle bones and shells) embedded in a bio- and political-regional oral tradition, the hexagrams became written and trans-regional nodes of interpretation, based specifically on the Dao or way of virtue (of which more soon).

The Book of Changes, as it’s often called in English, or simply the Changes, caught on in Europe thanks in part to Leibniz, the German mathematician and philosopher. He was intrigued by the arrangement of the 64 hexagrams (which came to his attention through deeply circuitous and context-stripping paths), and recognized that they formed a binary sequence that could be used for computation. Like everything else he wrote, Leibniz’s comments on the hexagrams (he seems not to have been aware of the I Ching, the fortune-telling computer formed by the arrangements of hexagrams he perused) are hard to penetrate, which is likely why Newton beat him to fame for the invention of the calculus.

In the 1960s, when all things Asian found themselves groovy, the I Ching began a new life. New “pop” translations began to be published to compete with the two older, standard translations.

Of the available translations, renderings and versions available now, only a few are notable. James Legge’s mid-nineteenth-century translation is horrible, but it remains in print. It’s choked off and blocked by its overgrowth of Romanticism.

The standard, and still the best, translation in English is the Wilhelm/Baynes version. Richard Wilhelm lived in China for many years (as did his son, Helmut, who was also an I Ching scholar, and a fine one). His translation of the Changes into German was followed by the fine rendering into English by Cary Baynes.

Richard John Lynn’s translation of the second-century Wang Bi’s interpretation of the I Ching is deeply informative, but the poetry of Wilhem/Baynes is completely lacking. In English, the enigmatic potential of poetry is needed, even if the original is prosaic (which, anyway, it isn’t; much of the original Chinese is as opaque as it is in any other language; life, after all, is a mystery). In my reading of Lynn’s translation, Wang Bi’s interpretive contribution was mostly by way of reiteration and mundane paraphrase, as if he were breaking ground for the future of the self-help best seller.

R.L. Wing has produced an I Ching Workbook that I’ve used for a long time. Each page presents an interpretation (based on and inspired by Wing’s reading of Wilhelm/Baynes) of the hexagram faced with a page of line readings with a column of white space for notes. This is useful over the long term, as patterns of change are a fact of individual lives, gathered communities, and nations of many stripes. Knowledge of them, obviously, contributes to knowledge of both self and others.

Fortune Telling 101

I’ve consulted the I Ching on and off for about ten years. It’s a decision-making tool, one that adheres to the way of the Dao, a rigorously moral path the precepts of which are articulated in a sequence of paradoxes in another ancient Chinese book, the Dao de Jing. I dipped into Legge’s atrocious translation of the I Ching as a teenager and, of course, was not impressed.

Decades later, one morning late in 1998, my friend and (former?) lover Susan Birkeland (dead; breast cancer; November, 2006) was consulting her Wing workbook, scribbling notes and angels in her journal while cross-referencing her Wilhem/Baynes, as we sat drinking strong coffee in a Mission District cafe. I’m pretty sure Susie saved my life when she explained what she was doing, and why: “It’s therapy, babe.” I know she introduced me to scripture that has since that day inspired and guided me, even when I put it down for years. (But then, the I Ching always said one of my issues was faith.)

The I Ching is deeply conservative even when it advocates revolution. Ko, Revolution, hexagram 49, is “a last resort” after all other peaceful means of change have been tried. When justice is not served by other means, violence is just. So conservative is the I Ching that I sometimes abhor it: The Marry Maiden (hexagram 54), for instance, suggests that “peaceful means” include selling one’s daughter to avoid war or to otherwise manage relationships. War, after all, is politics by other means, and the political is never least personal.

For me, interpreting the responses to questions the I Ching gives is always an act of creativity. Which is a polite way of saying I’m always in the dark as to what I’m being told.

Except when I’m not. The beauty of poetry is always the burst of illumination; that’s what makes poetry addictive and worth pursuing. I’ve spent a lot of time, in other words, learning to narrate to myself the consequences of bad decisions and tough breaks.

The real question, though, is the question. What does one appropriately, sustainably, profitably ask the I Ching?

History 110

How do we ask the I Ching about the changes we’re going through in order to get the greatest insight into a situation? I have no clear, simple answer to that, but from what I’ve read and experienced, there are a couple rules of thumb to keep in mind and heart.

In my experience, the main thing the I Ching informs me about is myself. This seems to be the consensus in the writings of serious and sincere writers about the I Ching. Any expectation of an externalized and precise delineation of what is to come will be foiled by the Changes’ demand that we examine self through the prism of the many.

I think it was Louis Pasteur who said “chance favors the well-prepared mind.” This little gnomic utterance precisely captures for me the utility of the Book of Changes. It’s not that I need to know that event X will be followed by Y and Z; any pretension to such precision is, in my opinion, charlatanism. Life is far too interdependently complex to predict what is going to happen with any certainty. Rather, the I Ching shows us what might happen, and indicates what we need to do, in terms of spiritual readiness, in order to be best prepared for inevitable change.

As I mentioned, the I Ching adheres to the way of the Dao. (The Dao, or Daoism, refers, depending on who you talk to, either or both an ancient Chinese folk religion or a philosophy that is much more widely embraced in the West than in China.) Simply put, the way of the Dao is the way of virtue.

Win or lose, all life’s changes can be met honorably by following the way of virtue. Indeed, I suspect that the Changes would just as soon have us quit asking questions of the Book and ask them of ourselves. Trying to make a decision about something? Then ask yourself, What is the most just path through this situation? What is the path of innocence (that is, we must ask ourselves about our motivations and agendas)? What is the path of constancy (that is, is there a path available that allows us to remain faithful to family, friends, community and self)? Sincerity, resonance, leadership and generosity are also, in my opinion, paths of virtue. (You’ll find these virtues, using various terminology, in both the Wilhem/Baynes version and the Lynn translation.)

The virtues are simple and, however they are enumerated, every culture has a set (and a set of corresponding vices). Reality, however, is deeply nuanced; the paths of the Dao are like the roots proliferating in a wildly healthy ecosystem: plants and fungi form rhizomes, communities where individuality blends undetectably into multiplicity.

Sometimes a vice is a virtue, and vice versa. Constancy, for instance, is clearly a virtue for a married couple—unless or until the marriage becomes destructive. The I Ching can be very helpful in situations where cultural expectations (e.g., the longevity of monogamous relationships) butt up against individual or community well being (e.g., the need to preserve, to be constant to one’s self in order to continue along the way).

The reason I said Susie Birkeland saved my life was because the year before I’d ended a long (for me) relationship; the same month, my brother died by drowning in the middle of a desert. I was certain that I’d broken up with my one true love, even though the day I was driving away (and even before) I knew that was a crock of romantic bullshit, that I was getting myself free, even if at the time, and for years afterward, I didn’t know what “free” meant. The culturally bound stories we tell ourselves about how we should live, love and die are great, but they need to be grounded in particular contexts; they are not principles. That’s a truth Susie reminded me of as we sat drinking coffee and she working on her readings.

Nevertheless, for many years after the breakup and death I was a rudderless wreck. I invented a thousand stories to explain that brutal love-and-brother-death month in ’97, asked the I Ching a thousand questions, and got pretty much the same answer: time will heal. Remain calm. Hide your light under a bushel. In other words, don’t inflict your pain on others, and when it’s time for your light to shine again, it will, and without effort.

I asked question after question about women I met, either in passing ( the eye-catch on the San Francisco Muni was a favorite source of inquiry, inspired in part by the “Missed Connections” classifieds in the SF Bay Guardian) or in some closer capacity (work, for instance). I thought the love of (another, a different) woman would be a magic bullet. Attraction has that effect on me but, as the third line reading of Inner Truth, hexagram 61, says, “Hi finds a comrade. / Now he beats the drum, now he stops. / Now he sobs, now he sings.” In other words, love for love’s sake makes of us a yo-yo, waxing enthusiasm until we wane into depression. The I Ching is clear: this is neither good nor bad, it is a personal choice.

From 1998 until I quit asking in 2002, the Changes was clear: you’re radioactive, so don’t mess with those girls. Did I listen?

Not really. I rebounded, semi-aware of the harm as I went with the rapids of the flow and regretful in the humiliating awareness of the turbulent wake, bleeding all over friends, family and lovers careened into along the way. And in direct defiance of the I Ching in 2002, I teamed up with a kind, beautiful, smart woman, G. In 2008, I left her, too, preferring to be on my own.

What questions was I asking the I Ching and what led me to such behavior?

Fortune Telling 111

In my attempts to fathom the sometimes nearly intolerable pathos, numinous moments, and sexual ecstasies of my life, I’ve been guided by a few simply shapes; the first is two dimensional, the second is, more appropriately for the I Ching, the omen of time, four dimensional.

The Arc: “What does the future hold for X and me?” I’ve learned that it is safer to start with something very general. The I Ching has severely ridiculed and reprimanded me for asking such questions as “Will X and I become lovers?” (Until recently, I mean.) So cautious have I become, after defying the way for so long, that I first quiz myself: Do I really want the answer? If I can stand to ask the most general of questions, I then sometimes try to drill down in search of more specific advice.

The Arrow (of penetration): “How shall I proceed with X?” I want to know how to act. Should I be bold, follow, lead? (I’m too bold, or brash, or awkwardly gregarious, too often without being direct; the I Ching is always telling me to chill: “hide your light under a bushel,” as Baynes captures it in his lovely and often King Jamesian rendering.)

Those have been my two guiding questions. This pair continues to guide me since I started asking again in late 2007. “X” could be anything; frequently, the name of a woman, but also a collaborative team (I could care less about sports), a situation, a potential job, a geographic move (probably to hook up with a woman or maybe a grad school I can’t afford or couldn’t anyway get a visa to attend).

These are also fairly timid questions, reticent questions, cautious questions. The last thing I’d like my reader to do is assume I presume to give advice. No, I only want to set a comparative context because the I Ching is not, as is often said (and as the article in Wikipedia currently claims) “the universe in miniature.” There’s nothing miniature about the Changes; the readings are as manifold as the thing itself; the interpretive territory of the answer is as large as the imagination of the question. The I Ching solves the mapmaker’s problem with poetry; through compression and interpretive unpacking the map is as expansive and detailed as the landscape thus mapped.

What brought me back to consulting the I Ching was an experiment in using it to write creatively. A la John Cage (an unlistenable hero), I wanted to let the hexagrams guide a narrative. After all, the I Ching perfectly captures the range of human experience, in a way that is at once both gnomic and expansive. The I Ching, I found, finds this an insulting waste of time, and discourages it even while providing exciting twists and turns. I tend to personify anything that moves me, but I find this ancient book a sexy beast.

A monster, if fact. How to reconcile, if we read historically, The Marrying Maiden (hexagram 54) with anything but sexual slavery, princess diplomacy, and otherwise pimping pussy for peace and power? The I Ching always considers the personal to be political, and sexual politics is a powerful undercurrent in the Book. The Marrying Maiden is, traditionally, the image of one who stands beneath and is powerless except for the favor of “the superior man” (a phrase that recurs constantly in Wilhem/Bayhnes) based on, presumably (enigmatically, context-dependently), a certain (sexual) attraction.

The political undercurrent of The Marrying Maiden, though, is defiant, insisting on the right to wait for the right time, and this is probably more in keeping with the Dao than not. Initiation, after all, is not a matter of specific age (first menarche, say) than of a sophisticated psychological assessment of spiritual readiness for transformation. Exceptions must always be made in the face of context. Carpe diem, they said in Latin: be prepared to seize the day.

But let the day come to you, not the other way around. The I Ching is an uncanny crapshoot, and like the Dao De Ching it is enigmatic and paradoxical. The ways of virtue and change are intertwined, that much is clear.

And that’s what the I Ching tells me. There comes a point where an infatuation gives way to constancy; even unrequited: perseverance may be rewarded. Perseverance may also be just plain stupid, at times. We don’t know what the future might bring; all we can do is prepare ourselves for the best we’re capable of being.

After all is said and done, nature bats last and chance favors a well-prepared mind (and body, I’m finally learning).

Terrence McKenna reads the opening to Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

Made with Audacity and Sony ACID XPress 5.0 (both free).

Made on a Dell I rescued from a dumpster with a 930 MHz Intel Pentium III processor and 512 MB of RAM. All I did was add a CDRW drive rescued from a dead computer and reinstall the OS. It is hooked up to a 20″ Trinitron monitor pulled out of a dumpster. The keyboard, mouse and powered speakers came to me the same way.

I would hope that the mention of James Joyce and Terrence McKenna speaks with more meaning than anything I could say. If these artists go unknown to the audience then I have little expectation that my musings would prove illuminating. It seemed appropriate to me to use Finnegans Wake in a layered mash up. Truthfully, I doubt any other text could be more relevant to such a process.

This is placed in the genre of general semantics. The great debt semiology owes to general semantics recently came to my notice. Thank you Alfred Korzybski for saying, “The map is not the territory.” Anyone who reads Roland Barthes ought to find this meaningful. And if you don’t read Barthes, then the meaning is still up for grabs, isn’t it?

When you die, hearing is the last of the physical senses to remain.

Greathouse submitted two versions of Shot; I like them both (especially The Fall in First Shot), so here they are: First Shot and Second Shot.

Learn more about Terrence McKenna here–and download goodies, including more of McKenna reading Finnegans Wake.

The Plot to Save Socrates
Paul Levinson
Tor Books, 2006

Socrates said he knew nothing but, even so, he was the smartest guy in Athens. Apparently a lot of Athenians found that amusing—at least for a while. Eventually, though, he got on enough people’s nerves, and in ancient Athens that was enough to get a death sentence. (In the contemporary U.S., it just gets you a life sentence, unless you’re being held in Guantanamo, in which case nobody bothers with a trial.) Paul Levin’s novel, which resonates with the current political climate, is premised on the thought that some future time traveler might time-warp back to 399 B.C. (or whatever they called it back then) to try to persuade Socrates from drinking the hemlock.

Trouble is, Socrates doesn’t want to be saved. He is, however, intrigued by the idea of time travel. And, well, who isn’t? That’s the charm of Levinson’s novel: he bootstraps the time travel paradox into an airy castle of baroque proportions. (The time travel paradox, in case you need a quick refresher, is quickly summarized in the classic question: What would happen to you if you traveled back in time and killed your grandfather? But I’m sure you don’t need a refresher because you remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer [hey, wasn’t he a Greek?] squashes a butterfly back in dinosaur days and turns his house into a cupcake decorated with Bart and Lisa candles.) Alas, that is also the trouble with the novel: Levinson is having so much fun watching his characters going boing-boing across the centuries that he forgets about the key word in his title: plot.

I’m not sure I really care. This book is fun. Heroine Sierra Waters is sexy as hell—what (straight) guy wouldn’t fall for a brainy grad student of the classics? She’s just the sort of character to curl up and conjugate a few Greek verbs with. And then there’s Levinson riffing on the history of philosophy—what’s not to love? When he doesn’t get it right (and who, really, is to say, since the sources for ancient Greek anything are postage-stamp-sized shreds of burnt papyrus) there’s a reason: Levinson is subversive. Of course he is: his major source for the trial of the Socrates is renegade leftist I.F. Stone who, after retiring from a long career as a journalist, taught himself Greek, read the source materials, and retried Socrates in a famous (and idiosyncratic, to put it politely) book called (how’s this for stunning titles) The Trial of Socrates. Socrates came up guilty once again – though not, this time around, for atheism and contributing to the moral delinquency of minors – but rather for pushing anti-democratic and downright totalitarian ideas. There’s a terrible irony at work in Levinson’s choice of inspiration: Socrates was tried and executed by a vote of his fellow (all-male, land-owning) citizens who had their doubts about democracy and then condemned again, 2,400 years later, by a jury of one who was a dragon-slayer of an anti-totalitarianist. It’s my bet that it is I.F. Stone who is the novel’s invisible nemesis, Andros.

We meet Andros only in fragments of a never-before-seen dialogue (perhaps or perhaps not by Socrates’ student Plato, the prime novelist of the ancient Socrates) which eerily mirrors various Platonic dialogues concerning the last hours of the old man (specifically, the Phaedo and the Crito). Andros tries to get Socrates to come to the future with him. Socrates objects on various grounds. Andros counters with the thought that no one will be the wiser, as Andros is prepared to leave a clone in his place. Let the clone drink hemlock and you, Socrates, come with me, I.F. Stone/Andros, to the future—where I’ll put you on trial for various thought crimes. Or maybe not: Levinson seems to get dizzy at the twirling shenanigans and admits “that the free soul [meets] its match in the labyrinth of time travel.” Especially when he sends in the clones…

President Karl Rove is busy rewriting history (like a recovering alcoholic, one day at a time), so why can’t Levinson? Let’s see… let’s make the arch-traitor Alcibiades a hero. It’s The Gospel of Judas reworked for the contemporary agora of ideas. Maybe Karl Rove is Andros; as one character says, “I believe that in order for discoveries and new principles of knowledge to be well implemented, they have to be first introduced to people long before.” Anyone got a spare Mesopotamian battery? At least Alcibiades plays a major role in the novel. As Sierra travels to various times and places she becomes various famous (and not at all famous) personages (all of them sexy as hell). For instance, the much-beloved Hypatia of Alexandria. This wise woman was murdered by a Christian mob (why does that not surprise me?) in 415 A.D. But the novel never gets to Alexandria and we never see Sierra as Hypatia—it’s like somebody sawed an arm off the body of the book. Just as well: I love Hypatia even more than Sierra, so to have the two of them become one would have been simply too much for this weak heart to bear.

So, okay, there’s a certain slop-factor to this novel that seems to make it “light reading” (as so many reviewers have said). I’m not so sure it is light, and I’m willing to concede that the slop-factor is really cunning on the part of the author. Maybe. There’s a bite to Levinson’s wit that makes me think he is wielding his pen as a sword. Socrates says, “I know better to waste my time with students, who are likely to wound your heart, in due time.” Amen, brother, and of course, Plato, in writing the fiction we know as the dialogues, wounded Socrates just as Levinson is wounding (or “revisioning”) the history of philosophy. Every reader (and thus, every writer) is engaged in a conversation with the past and every conversation, since it requires memory, is an act of time travel. Readers, then, are time travelers wounding their grandfathers. Same old story, new every time.

That’s the beauty of the time-travel riff (with clones!): you get to wound the past even if it’s still the future because it really is the same old story. In Levinson’s New York City of 1889, for instance, a character grumbles about “the bankruptcy of the electoral college,” while Sierra, from the New York of 2042, is a grad student “at the Old School” which, presumably, used to be the New School of Social Research. And that, in the end, as Socrates is buried “in a small, private ceremony… in the Bronx,” is what’s up with this “novel”: social research. So take it lightly if you want but read into it if you can.

Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
by Reza Aslan
Publisher: Random House, 2006

Reza Aslan has written an important and wonderfully readable book on the history of Islam. A devout Muslim who cares deeply about his religion, Aslan is also a thoughtful humanist. No god but God generously, gracefully and intelligently incorporates both these sets of values. It’s important for Americans to read this book: we keep asking, Why do they hate us?, and reply foolishly with thoughtless answers like, Because they’re jealous of our freedoms (as George W. Bush has maintained for the past several years). More likely, it seems to me, the answer lies in our own ignorance: what do we really know about Islam? Recently I was asked to teach an Introduction to Humanities class at a community college. The regular instructor bailed out at the last minute; I was given a textbook on a Friday and told to be prepared to start teaching the following Monday. I read fast, but knew I had to skim most of the required textbook in order to prepare. One of the chapters I read in detail, though, was the one on the history of Islam. To my horror is read, in this widely used textbook, the authors’ claim that the Prophet Mohammed married Fatima. This kind of ignorance of other cultures and other faiths is deeply offensive. In this case, Fatima, as we all should know, was the Prophet’s daughter (his wife’s name was Khadija). How could the authors (an archeologist and a theologian, both of prestigious U.S. universities) implicitly accuse Mohammad of a crime—incest—that all the children of Abraham find offensive?

Indeed, when I taught the history of the three dominant monotheisms, my students were quite surprised to learn that Judaism, Christianity and Islam in fact share a common origin. We are, it seems, even ignorant of Christianity’s origins. This makes books like Aslan’s all the more crucial. “One could argue,” he states—and this is a fine example of his graceful sidestepping of our ignorance in favor of displaying humanist generosity—“that the clash of monotheisms is the inevitable result of monotheism itself. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it rejects not only all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God.” “Religion,” he continues by way of pointing out the importance of myth, “is not faith. Religion is the story of faith… that provides a common language with which a community of [believers] can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence.”

“It is not important whether the stories describing the childhood of Muhammad, Jesus, or David are true. What is important is what these stories say about our prophets, our messiahs, our kings”—in other words, about our cultural millieux. This is a crucial point for Aslan, especially in conjunction with the idea that religion is a “story,” a narrative of faith. For as he relates the long history of Islam, and especially its early years, Aslan argues that contemporary Islam doesn’t have to be the way it is: Muslims could change the story of their religion. By implication, this is true of all three monotheisms—Christians don’t have to suppress women or murder homosexuals. This, though, is only an implication in Aslan’s book: the subtitle claims it’s about the “future of Islam,” but he doesn’t waste too much time prognosticating. What Aslan does claim (though with almost no comparative analysis) is that Islam, at 1,500 years old, is in approximately the same stage Christianity was when Martin Luther and others instigated the Reformation. This is a fascinating idea, but I suspect it may be wishful thinking on Aslan’s part.What I especially treasure about this book is Aslan’s discussion of the first generation of Islam, which is well researched and beautifully articulate. As with all textually based religions (meaning, again, the religions of “the Book,” the three monotheisms that trace their descent from Abraham) there is a dirty little secret at the heart of the matter, namely, that the authors of the texts had political agendas. ‘Twas ever thus with stories but, when there are a billion or more people basing their lives and everyday actions on a text, it’s important to consider the sources. Muhammad and his Companions worked out a communal way of life in Medina but, for the most part, the Prophet’s revelations and laws were not written down until after his death. (Though not, as Aslan argues, because Muhammad was illiterate; how could that be when he was a successful businessman with records to keep and orders to place?) All three monotheisms are deeply misogynistic but that doesn’t necessarily implicate Jesus or Muhammad: “when the Quran warned believers not to ‘pass on your wealth and property to the feeble-minded (sufaha)…’ the early Quranic commentators—all of them male—declared, despite the Quran’s warning on the subject, that ‘the sufaha are women and children… and both of them must be excluded from inheritance’.” Again, the parallels to the early history of Christianity are worth keeping in mind. When Paul wrote “Let your women keep silence in the churches” in Corinthians and again in Timothy, “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence,” we may be looking at Paul’s misogyny or that of one of his later editor’s. The point I take away from Aslan is that we must wrestle interrogatively with these texts and we must also always remember that we can change the stories we tell about them.

No god but God is not without its biases and flaws. Aslan holds an MFA from the famous Workshop at the University of Iowa, and he makes an embarrassing English major’s math mistake in his discussion of the community at Medina. Muhammad and his Companions, driven out of Mecca, found refuge in Medina where there were already both traditional Arabian polytheists as well as a large community of Jews, of whom, Aslan says at one point, the Jews “may have totaled in the thousands.” Some thirty pages later he discusses the massacre of Jews (an infamous sore point between the two religions) by the first generation of Muslims, stating that “the total number of men who were killed vary from 400 to 700 (depending on the source)” while “the highest estimates still represent no more than a tiny fraction of the total population of Jews who resided in Medina and its environs.” Whether we take the original population of Jews in Medina as 7,000 (which is in line with Aslan’s first statement of “thousands”) or even 70,000, that adds up to either ten percent or one percent “of the total population”—not “a tiny fraction.” What Aslan fails to acknowledge, as so many apologists for monotheism fail to do, is that monomythic religions are necessarily competitive for both resources and believers—and that competition inevitably results in some sort of violence. His discussion of contemporary militant Islam is likewise hampered by a strange elision: he begins with Pakistan and promises to come full circle but never returns to the situation there.

If Aslan hedges his bets as regards the violence inherent in monotheism, he is elegant and (especially in our contemporary climate of monotheistic textual fundamentalism) courageous in insisting on a historical understanding of Islam. His explanation of the split between Sunni and Shi’a is the clearest I’ve yet read, and his discussion of Islam’s beautiful mysticism—the Sufis—is a pleasure to read. For those wanting to understand the history of Islam, Aslan is ideal on all but the last one hundred or so years. If his portrayal of the violence of Islam is flawed, his hope that that narrative can be overcome is admirable.

[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book]

Mencius
Trans. D.C. Lau
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Meng Ke, whom we know in the West by his Latinized name, Mencius, was a wandering sage who taught widely and advised the rulers of the state of Qi during the Warring States Period (403-221 BC). Mencius himself lived from about 370-290 BC, having been born just a few miles from the only other philosopher know in the West by a latinized name, Confucius, who lived about a century before Mencius. Towards the end of his life Mencius despaired at the possibility of effecting change in government and so retired from public life.

The basis of Mencius’s philosophy is the assertion that all humans are basically good. It is society’s influence that causes good people to do bad things. This immediately raises a question: What is society composed of if not people? The answer is nowhere specific, but the cumulative impression is that the reason society can be a bad influence on individuals is habit. The analogy in Western logic might be the concept of “the slippery slope.” One person slips from his moral obligation toward the good and soon everyone around him is, too. Or, to put this idea another way: One dog barks and they all join in.

It’s hard work to be a good person: “Slight is the difference between man and the brutes,” Mencius says. “The common man loses this distinguishing feature, while the gentleman retains it.” To the modern reader the category of “common man” and “gentleman” may be somewhat offensive, but the classist distinction is historically accurate. More importantly, though, the difference might be better described as that between a “bad” man (“the brute”) and a “good” man (“the gentleman”).The book ascribed to Mencius, and which bears his name as its title, makes for wonderful reading as it is composed of philosophical vignettes, each related as a tiny story, usually about an encounter and conversation with a king or other nobleman. Here’s a sample:

After seeing King Xiang of Liang, Mencius said to someone, “When I saw him from a distance he did not look like a ruler, and when I got closer, I saw nothing to command respect. But he asked ‘How can the realm be settled?’ I answered, ‘It can be settled through unity.’ ‘Who can unify it?’ he asked. I answered, ‘Someone not fond of killing people.’ ‘Who could give it to him?’ I answered ‘Everyone in the world will give it to him. Your .Majesty knows what rice plants are? If there is a drought in the seventh and eighth months, the plants wither, but if moisture collects in the sky and forms clouds and rain falls in torrents, plants suddenly revive. This is the way it is; no one can stop the process. In the world today there are no rulers disinclined toward killing. If there were a ruler who did not like to kill people, everyone in the world would crane their necks to catch sight of him. This is really true. The people would flow toward him the way water flows down. No one would be able to repress them.’”

Mencius employs both the parable and the Socratic method (the question-and-answer exploration of an ethical or political problem) to great effect. His bite-sized morsels are easy to read but provide much nourishment for thought. There are many parallels to Western philosophy to be found in Mencius (such as the idea that the people may overthrow a corrupt government, something Americans should more frequently remember is enshrined in their Constitution) as well as striking parallels. Chinese philosophy in general, for instance, was never particularly burdened with the great logical indignity of dualism (the idea that the mind or soul and the body are two separate entities).

Lau’s fluid translation (first published by Penguin in 1970 and presented here in a revised version edited in collaboration with scholars at the Chinese University) is complimented by an appropriately windy and academic introduction in which he thoroughly situates Mencius within the context of Chinese philosophy and draws the big picture that is the Confucian-Mencian system.

[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book]

Iron John: A Book about Men
by Robert Bly
Publisher: De Capo, 2004

Poet Robert Bly has for a number of years now worn another hat: Men’s Movement guru. Iron John was first published in 1990 and was a bestseller, a cultural phenomena. Women read Iron John openly, hoping to glean some insider information while men read the book furtively—at least at first. By the mid-1990s, one could observe men dressed in tatters of leather, middle-aged bellies flapping in the breeze, beating drums in circles in the parks of many major, and a few minor, American metropolises. And those were just the straight men…

Like all fads, the Men’s Movement has lost its shiny-because-grubby allure over the years, though it’s by no means gone away. Da Capo has reissued what has become a “classic” of sexual politics. The reissue features a new preface by Bly in which he states that Iron John “belongs to a simple literary genre,” the fairy tale. That’s not quite true: it belongs to a much more complex genre, depth psychology, which for most of the twentieth century has harvested fairy tales for their psychological nutrition. The founder of depth psychology was either (depending on whose history you read) Freud, whose brilliant analysis of the Oedipus story launched a century, or Carl Jung. It was Jung who first analyzed folk stories for their psychological content. His students, Marie-Luise Von Franz, James Hillman, and many others, developed depth psychology over the course of the twentieth century.

Bly is indebted to James Hillman, especially, for the structure and analytical content of Iron John. Hillman is himself a prolific author, perhaps best known for his bestselling The Soul’s Code but admired by students of depth psychology (or, as Hillman calls it, archetypal psychology) for his books on the phenomenology of emotion, his controversial essay on suicide, and for his work on narrative and nightmare.

Iron John’s thesis is provocative yet simple: fathers aren’t doing a very good job of raising their sons because they are “absent” and also because our culture has lost the use of ritual in marking off the phases of maturation. In keeping with twentieth-century ideas of cultural construction, Bly argues that the roles of “man” and “father” have changed significantly over the past few generations, especially since the end of World War II. It’s hard to assess this later claim; as the great historian Fernand Braudel said, History doesn’t begin for fifty years. It’s been just that since the end of the Second World War.

It’s much easier to check Bly’s claim that fathers in the second half of the twentieth century were “absent” because they worked such long hours. Men, and women, were often “absent” for most of the day since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. When those “dark satanic mills” kicked into high gear the children were often “absent” as well, as they were working long hours right along with their parents: but it wasn’t one big happy family working the power looms. Men, women and children all had separate tasks (women, with their long and slender fingers, worked the looms—at least until a shuttle nipped a finger off). Parents, and especially fathers, have long been absent from most children’s lives. We can listen to the angry-bee buzz of the religious right and convince ourselves, along with the very-leftist Bly, that there’s something critically wrong with our particular day and age. But there’s little new under the sun; humans have always been, in sum, pretty half-assed parents.

Where Bly clearly hits his mark is with his claim that we’ve lost all sense of maturation ritual. In our culture, puberty rites consist of obtaining a driver’s license and a cell phone. Forget vision questions; in fact, forget any type of prolonged solitude at all. The thing is, Bly never clearly articulates how one might go about initiating a boy-child: do you drop him off for a weekend alone in the woods? Make him walk the back roads between Boston and D.C. alone? Study for the SAT for days on end while sitting in a tree top? He’s better at recognizing that urban street gangs are groups of fatherless boys attempting to initiate themselves. The need for rites of passage clearly exists; what is not clear is just how we, as a culture, reinvent something that at best seems quaint and antiquated and at worst is labeled “pagan” and “satanic.”

This has made Iron John, twice in ten years, a frustrating read for me. His liquidescent prose and heartfelt analysis of the Iron John story are a delight to read and an inspiration. His commitment to grief, sorrow, sadness and melancholy are commendable and liberating. But just what is one supposed to do with this inspiration and liberation? Kill a small mammal, skin it, make a drum and join a Men’s group? Perhaps.

The answer, I think, lies outside of Bly’s book and in most of Hillman’s. Following Jung’s lead, Hillman suggests psychologizing. The soul, Hillman says, is largely ignored in our culture—and that’s bad, very bad. We pay a high price, in neuroses and physical ailments, for ignoring the soul. And, he continues, all the soul really wants is to talk. To converse with one’s soul sounds simple, and perhaps it is; Hillman suggests that one needs a powerful and disciplined imagination to, first, even notice the soul standing over there (in there, whatever: the geography of interior space, as you can read in Jung’s memoir, is confusing) and then, second, to engage it in conversation. As Hillman loves to remind us, it was Heraclitus who pointed out, some 2,500 years ago, that the soul is shy; like nature, she loves to hide.

I highly recommend Iron John but with a caveat: don’t stop there. Read Hillman’s Healing Fiction and his other work (A Blue Fire is a good place to start). If you must, dip into Thomas Moore (The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life), a sort of Reader’s Digest condenser and popularizer of Hillman’s ideas. Bly’s book is a great starting point for a foray into the rich ambiguities of depth psychology and the work of the soul.

[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book]

The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative
by Thomas King
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005

In The Truth about Stories, Thomas King, a Native novelist and professor of English at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, explores creation stories, Native history, racism, and the image of the “Indian.” King is upfront with his opinion about narrative: “The truth about stories,” he claims, “is that that’s all we are” (2 and passim). We tell stories, he says, to inform ourselves about where we’re from, where we’re going, and who we are along the way. In this series of essays, originally delivered as the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, King is funny, eclectic, smart, searching, straightforward and, I’m convinced, right: we are our stories.

However, readers looking for evidence in support of King’s claim that we narrate our lives will have to look elsewhere. The Truth about Stories is highly subjective and anecdotal, and full of bold claims like this one: “‘You can’t understand the world without telling a story,’ the Anishinabe writer Gerald Vizenor tells us. ‘There isn’t any center to the world but a story’” (32). But one only has to look just outside of literary studies (where narrative theory is weak, bound, as it is, to an antiquated misconception of identity between “plot,” “story,” and “narrative”) to find powerful support for King’s claim. Narrative, Ochs and Capps write in an interdisciplinary review of the literature on the centrality and importance of story, “is born out of experience and gives shape to experience. In this sense, narrative and self are inseparable. Self is here broadly understood to be an unfolding reflective awareness of being-in-the-world, including a sense of one’s past and future…. We come to know ourselves as we use narrative to apprehend experiences and navigate relationships with others” (Annual Review of Anthropology 1996:20-21).

It’s precisely King’s subjectivity that makes The Truth about Stories so fascinating and worthwhile. The book is, in fact, composed entirely of stories, making it not only a primer on narrative concerns within the Native community but also a more general meta-commentary on the socio-political workings of narrative. Take, for example, the story of a character King names “Charm”: she’s a sort of subatomic particle, a quark, if you will, who cooperates in the process of the creation of Earth. Charm starts off on another planet. She’s a very curious woman and one day, while looking for something new and different to eat, she pokes her head into a “hole so she could get a better view” of what might be available there (13). But, of course, she falls through the hole, and down she goes “into the sky. Uh-oh, Charm thought to herself. That wasn’t to smart” (13). She falls toward the blue-green marble that is Earth: a planet covered entirely with water. Students of Native stories will instantly recognize this story as a version of the Mud Diver creation story. For once Charm splashes down on the watery Earth, all the animals—who really love living in the water—help Charm to find some mud upon which to stand.

This creation story, King points out, stands in stark contrast to the one found in Genesis:

A theologian might argue that these two creation stories are essentially the same. Each tells about the creation of the world and the appearance of human beings. But a storyteller would tell you that these two stories are quite different, for… the elements in Genesis create a particular universe governed by a series of hierarchies… that celebrate law, order, and good government, while in our Native story, the universe is governed by a series of co-operations… that celebrate equality and balance. (23-24)

Charm “falls” to Earth, but this creation of Earth as we know it is not the “Fall” as it is in Genesis. These are both stories, and as stories they inform our way of knowing: story is all we are not only ontologically (as Ochs and Capps imply in the passage cited above) but epistemologically as well. King avoids the obvious follow-on to this insight—which world would you rather live in?—because he doesn’t want to be “Thomas King the duck-billed platitude” (27). Neither does he claim that he’s stumbled on something new and original here. The onto-epistemological centrality of narrative, he suggests throughout, is ancient news to Natives. But it may be news to Western culture, since scholars in the Western tradition (such as “cranky old Jacque Derrida” [25]) have made a big pile of hay out of it in recent decades.

Of course, narrative can also be deceptive. Wars are started by telling lies, a pernicious genre of story that maims and kills. Knowledge, after all, is power, and narrative is epistemological. The history of North America is awash in a sea of narrative blood—but also real blood, the blood of Natives murdered and then buried under the shifting sands of white man’s lies. In The Truth about Stories King, himself half Native and half European, is particularly concerned with “the Indian… in mind” (chapter 2). It was a painful realization, he says, to grow up not looking Native (and in California, no less, where virtually all traces of Native culture have been assimilated by the image-machine of Western culture). The image-machine mows down everything in its path and “In the end, there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian simply has to exist in our imagination. But for those of us who are Indians, this disjunction between reality and imagination is akin to life and death” (54). The semiotics of identity, then, “form[s] a kind of authenticity test, a racial-realty game that contemporary Native people are forced to play” (55). King, here, isn’t in the business of proffering solutions; he’s telling us what he knows about the world by telling us his stories. For anybody who has ever wondered and struggled with cultural identity (which far too few of us have), it’s easy to step into King’s shoes and keep the story going.

Another story he tells is one that cuts right through all real and imagined cultural boundaries, and it’s one he sums up in a single fragment: “Sanctioned Addictive Drugs and Banned Addictive Drugs” (157). Why, I wonder along with this deeply thoughtful writer, is the use of alcohol—by anybody’s measure clearly a toxin—merely sanctioned (that is, for use by those over 21 except while operating heavy machinery, such as cars) while cannabis—an ancient medicine—is banned? Why does Western culture continue to tell itself so many lies? Why, to return to the contrast between Charm’s cooperative mud divers and the Book of Genesis, are we stuck with brutal, hierarchical Yahweh when we could have gentle, neighbor-loving Jesus? It would be best to weep over these questions, I think, and to taste the salt of experience before rushing forth with policy decisions in lieu of considered answers. It would be best, I think, to read along with King as he suggest that “The magic of Native literature—as with other literatures—is not in the themes of the stories—identity, isolation, loss, ceremony, community, maturation, home—it is in the way meaning is refracted by cosmology, the way understanding is shaped by cultural paradigms” (112).

Thomas King, I read you loud and clear. I hope others will take up this little book and meditate on its various implications. I hope we’ll take King’s stories and do with them what we will, but not say “in the years to come that [we] would have lived [our] lives differently if only [we] had heard [his] stories” sooner (passim). We’ve heard them now.

[Originally published in Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts]