The Worship of the Dead

The worship of the dead is not optional if you live long enough to experience the full spectrum and varieties of love.

My dead, my family, I worship them, but sometimes like on Memorial Day I feel all the weight of all the dead and I feel they are like ghouls who want me to join them.  They don’t know me.  I’m not one of them.

These envious and vengeful dead don’t have any of the living to love them.  They are surrounded by such a profound emptiness they are compelled to react.

I’m a deep-sea diver disciplined and limited in my pursuits, by fear of exhaustion (boredom) and an awareness of the urge to self-destruct.  Granville Hicks said about Malcolm Lowry, “Self destruction is the final ecstasy of power.”  I believe it about Lowry, human culture, and all of mankind.  Freud spoke elegantly about Thanatos, the Greek impersonation of the death lure.

“It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros.  But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.” [1]

In other words, the desire to destroy is irrevocably linked to man’s desire to control Eros, to impose his will upon all his perceived enemies, including himself.

I’ve watched hundreds of people destroy themselves trying to be great.  If they hadn’t been attracted to delusions of grandeur which permeates so many of our people today they would have been good regular people making a living in the Trades, sales, transportation, administration, teaching, political activism, banking, etc..  Once they took the leap, they lost their compass.  They resorted to alcohol, drugs, sex, extreme beliefs and murder to keep their unrealistic dreams alive.  They all seemed to have one thing in common:  they hated themselves.  “Surely, I’m not just this,” they said.  They untied themselves and unleashed their creative potential without practicing, studying, going to school, or, at least, testing themselves against others.  If they did and happened to win an award, or recognition of some kind, they often turned into the two-headed monster – the fucked-up talent which, in the West, has been appearing quite regularly since the 1960s.  Many of these truly talented people killed themselves.  In the world of writing, the names are legendary.  The most recent self-inflicted tragedy (that I’m aware of) was David Foster Wallace.  I don’t know much about his particular situation, but I’ve known many writers who never developed solid psychological foundations.  Seen through such an unbalanced lens they looked at their own work (once it was completed) and thought it a fraud.  They couldn’t find distance from their preoccupations.  It seemed they were playing an all or nothing game.  All is obviously unattainable.

Well, one might say yes, society is built on certain assumptions – the best will most often rise to the occasion or do what it takes to survive and prosper.  I believe but rejection always results in rebellion sometimes positive, mostly negative.  Rejection fertilizes the human soul so anger and despair may grow.

My heroes and heroines are those who leave their good thoughts behind for us to ponder.  That’s all.  Life is difficult enough for everyone: geniuses, regulars and pawns alike.

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[1] “Civilization and its Discontents,” p.117-18 in the 2005 W.W. Norton & Co. edition.

Gardening at Night

After working say for 25-plus years creating new worlds, built with the living pulsing pieces of your own psyche, a writer looks around, talks with friends, family, people - they don't get it, can't see it - means nothing to them.


I think of the writers whose isolation and pain I felt - Bill Styron, John Cheever, Philip Lamantia, Denise Levertov, to name a few - the isolation is the main problem. Rods shooting out of the luck power, lack of an effect on the community, the writer feels like a has-been, an antique, in some circles a joke. In the old days when art was commissioned by the heads of the community and practiced and valued by the community as a whole, work was appraised, debated or excoriated, but always had value as a vessel for stimulation and communication.


In 1846 when Dickens exposed the hideous pollution of coal burning and effects of an inadequate sewer system, he made the elites see it and feel the pain. The writer artist had become an agent for change. In the early 20th century, Rilke, Pound, Williams, Joyce and Breton were stitching something new: revolutionaries breathing a deeper world. Did they have an inkling what their progeny would look like? Orwell knew what his world would become - our world. A mother loves her child though he or she be a monstrously insane nitwit criminal.


A nation's people embraces whatever becomes the status quo until it turns again them. Our technology has turned against us. Bombarded by meaningless phrases, constant violence, standing in an assembly line of shallow emotions, we all feel isolated from one another, and therefore from ourselves. After the creations of Joyce, Pound, Williams, this alienation became a major theme in the middle of the 20th century.


Though Melville had written Bartleby 90 years earlier it wasn't until Camus and Sartre that the reading public became full aware of it. Today only the courageous fact-finding journalist is regarded as dangerous. Writing is an art; reshaping has no audience and therefore no power. But the writer-artist is not dead. We are trying to create a new community and a new aesthetic. The building of community occurs simultaneously with the struggle to develop forms which contain the will of the community. We are far from that place, but inching along. We have planted seeds and had a few good harvests; our future depends on how we care for the garden.