Remembering Babylon: COVERED IN BEES

 
A dust-jacket synopsis of David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (1993) would probably misrepresent the novel as a hoarse note in an exhausted refrain of Western literature: that of the settlers and the savage.

Scene: an isolated community of European homesteaders in Queensland, circa 1860. The settlement's toilsome and sweaty business as usual is disrupted by the arrival of Gemmy, a "white black:" in his former life as a cabin boy, Gemmy was pitched overboard, washed up on the Australian shore, and taken in by an aboriginal tribe. By the time he stumbles upon the settlers' village, he is well into adulthood and has lost his ability to speak coherent English from years of disuse. The villagers regard Gemmy with a mixture of disdain, paranoia, and wonder.

You've heard it before: a story of the commerce, conflict, lessons learned between European settlers and an indigenous representative of their host continent. But Remembering Babylon explodes through the rhytidome of this old theme, propelled by Malouf's talent for diagramming the obscurities and profundities of social relationships and the elan he brings to transcriptions of adolescent frisson (which we'll see presently). Moreover, the focus here isn't so much on the social relations and bad blood between the European and aboriginal contingents, but rather on the pristine Australian landscape and the varying modes of living in and/or with it.

In several respects, Remembering Babylon recalls Heart of Darkness—although the former is much less capital-P problematic and certainly more lowercase-P postmodern. Here the primeval "Absolute Dark" represents not brute savagery and the danger of regression, but the existence of (and opportunity for) an alternate mode of being. As Malouf's narrative lens flits across the village, the most significant and persistent characters tend to be the ones who are compelled to cross the boundary, as Mr. Kurtz did—although what they discover on the other side could not be further removed from The Horror, The Horror.

Semantic erratum: on 'feminism'

I ran out the door after finishing the previous post and belatedly remembered a conversation with a woman who professed that "feminism" is a word that no longer has any specific meaning, and "feminists" no longer refers to any one particular group advocating a common ideology. What somebody means when they espouse feminist ideas, or who they're saying they are when they identify as feminist, is dependent on how they position women's issues (and on which womens' issues—which issues, which women) within the schematic of intersectional identity politics.

Perhaps I don't have the right to opine on this (as a male), but the germ logic of feminism is that women are not second-class citizens and should not be treated as such. That's all I mean when I say "feminism."

This definition is only a starting point. "How should women be treated?" "What do women need?" "How should women behave?" The more rigorously these questions are examined, the more divergence there will be in the answers. But the original statement is uneffaceable and inarguable.

A rephrasing of the earlier point: a progressive movement that allows or encourages the equitable concept of feminism to be obfuscated by sectarian vindictiveness and dogmatism is not doing itself any favors.

Brief: note on the 'regressive left'

To anyone who might have been missing them (I can dream), I apologize for the lack of updates lately. I've been busy with a project that—well, it's a project. Maybe it will pan out, maybe it will die in the water. We'll see.

Quick note on a topic we've alighted on from time to time: the aggressive tribal zealotry of (some) social progressives. You know the broader movement has a snowballing PR problem when young, intelligent, otherwise liberal woman are complaining about feminism/feminists. I'm not going to name names (I've mentioned them here before), but two women I'm close to, both in their twenties, recently expressed their distaste for feminism/feminists and the rhetoric of the social justice conversation. (One was referring to activist cliques in West Philly; the other is just fed up with quote-unquote SJW harangues in online fora.)

Their complaints were of the same tenor. "They're shrill, they take everything to seriously, everything offends them. They don't want equal treatment, they want special treatment. They hate men, they treat men unfairly. They're just mean people, I'm tired of them." Etc., etc.

Question: is it Problematic for a man to tell a woman why feminism is a good thing?

'the grandiose stimulation of the grandest illusion'

Sarah Sze, Night

Last week I read Philip Roth's prurient opus The Dying Animal (2001)—which I think I'll need to roll through a second time during the next month, and find someone with whom I can discuss the ambivalent exchange punctuating the novel. (Who's Kepesh talking to, what do we think he decides to do, does it matter, etc.)

Roth writes with the sharp precision of an acupuncturist, so here I have another paperback with the corner of every fifth page folded down. The deepest dog-ear isn't on the page introducing the tangential history of Thomas Morton and the scandalized Puritans of old New England, the incredible sequence where a bedridden, palsied stroke victim tries to undress the wife he's been cheating on for decades, or the page with the magnificent line: "Because only when you fuck is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily, revenged." It's actually on the pages recounting the flair and festoon of the moments when December 31, 1999 clicked over into January 1, 2000. The inauguration of the new millennium. It's an exquisite reckoning of an event I remember and wrote about in The Zeroes—though with hardly a fraction of the incision and prescience Roth brings to it, which is why he's won a Pulitzer and I, uh, won't.

We watched the New Year coming in around the world, the mass hysteria of no significance that was the millennial New Year's Eve celebration. Brilliance flaring across the time zones, and none ignited by bin Laden. Light whirling over nighttime London more spectacular than anything since the splendors of colored smoke billowed up from the Blitz. And the Eiffel Tower shooting fire, a facsimile flame-throwing weapon such as Wernher von Braun might have designed for Hitler's annihilating arsenal——the historical missile of missiles, the rocket of rockets, the bomb of bombs, with ancient Paris the launching pad and the whole of humanity the target. All evening long, on networks everywhere, the mockery of the Armageddon that we'd been waiting in our backyard shelters since August 6, 1945. How could it not happen? Even on that very night, especially on that night, people anticipating the worst as though the evening were one long air-raid drill. The wait for the chain of horrendous Hiroshimas to link in synchronized destruction the abiding civilizations of the world. It's now or never. And it never came.

[one reason] why I have no hope for the future

Bren Bataclan, 'Landfill'

(Meanwhile, a recent study suggests that sea levels will probably rise even higher than we thought—three feet—by 2100.)

So I have a job. It's not a great one. We've gone over this. At the risk of divulging too much about how I earn my paycheck and where, I'll say that one of my occasional responsibilities is to check on a few trash bins. If the bins are full, I am to remove the refuse-laden bags and put empty ones in place. The full bags are deposited into a large cart in a back room, and are eventually wheeled into the basement and unloaded into a couple of dumpsters by the loading dock. There are dumpsters for rubbish, single-stream recycling, and flattened cardboard.

The trash bins are clearly labeled. One says "TRASH" in adhesive white letters, stark against a hinged aluminum lid. The other lid bears the universal recycling symbol (♻). There is no ambiguity as to what kinds of materials are meant to be placed in which bin.

We Americans aren't exactly renowned for our scrupulousness with regards to consumption and waste minimization. This innit no third-world dictatorship. This is the land of the free, spacious skies, for amber waves of grain. I own a petrol-powered automobile and it's my Christian responsibility to drive it to any destination farther than two blocks away. I eat meat with every meal, beef five times a week. If the town wants to bulldoze another tract of woodland to make room for another Starbucks, Qdoba, and Target, I say wonderful, job creation, shorter lines at all the other Starbuckses. I won't be unplugging my clothes dryer, cutting back on hot showers, giving up air conditioning, or withdrawing my support for monocropped produce anytime soon. But I recycle! I recycle, god damn it, so don't tell me I'm not doing my part.

Recycling is the one no-brainer of personal ecological responsibility (particularly here in the northeast). More Americans recycle than vote. You'd think we'd be better at it.

NPM

For the first time in five years, Beyond Easy will not be celebrating National Poetry Month.

No, it's not that I don't like poetry anymore. I read The Writer's Almanac almost every morning; I'm stoked to get my hands on a copy of Herman Melville's Clarel (which is, incidentally, the longest poem in American literature); I consider the best thing I've read in a lit zine so far this year is Emily Schultz's poem "Everything of You Resembles a Human;" poetry collections are still some of my favorite material for bathroom reads. But I'm pretty much out of material to share. Most of my old favorites have been covered at this point. I'm no longer living above a library with a healthy and diverse poetry section. And I don't have the time or impetus lately to read stacks and stacks of journals and anthologies to cull and curate my favorite pieces. (I'm simultaneously writing/revising/finalizing/rewriting like three 10,000–20,000-word stories, and that's using quite a bit of my personal bandwidth.)

So yeah. That's that.

Oh—what the heck. Here's one for the road: a short piece (anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2013) by Tim Seibles, a poet born of Philadelphia, the city that's been lighting my cigarettes lately.

 
Sotto Voce: Othello, Unplugged
Tim Seibles (1955 – )

Iago, it was not Desdemona but myself

I loved too much. So many battles found me
unharmed, but the want of beauty struck

like a kind of death. My rank only served
to wound my head with bigger dreams.
Didn't I deserve better than the tricks

every season brings? All my years

had stumbled into shadow: my own
dark face, harder and harder to find

in this cold kingdom. You knew my soul
ached for a woman who could conduct
my blood——that I might be in love alive

with the sharp sublime flinting
her eyes. All mine! My heart nearly
doubled     until you made me doubt——

not so much Desdemona as my own
worthiness: if what I was couldn't make love

faithful     I thought better to be done with

her     than to know myself a smaller man.

ignorance & infidels

Lately I get the sense that the term "ignorant people/ppl" is semiotically congruent with the medievalist appellation "Saracen." It has become a tribalist slur against an Other, an anonymous corporate entity somewhere out there that isn't like us, doesn't see things the way we do, and deserves nothing but our contempt.

When we accuse someone of ignorance, we're not stating that person is, to our regret, unaware of certain facts as a consequence of a lack of education of life experience. We're basically saying that person is an irredeemable heretic.

This is not to say that ignorance of the facts and of the world isn't a problem in any society. (Of course—in the the filter bubble paradigm, the question is: which facts, whose world?) And it's not to say it's not that the American body politic isn't embarrassing itself with the persistence of climate-change denialism or the horrifying viability Trump's candidacy. But the tendency of people—mostly on the left, from what I've seen—to use "ignorant" as shorthand for people with political beliefs at variance with their own has me worried.