Tr. from French by Anne-Laure Tissut and Laird Hunt

Shorter works always seem more poetic than longer ones. Maybe it’s for efficiency’s sake. An author with 500 pages to spread a narrative across has time to work the long con. Consider 2666, with Roberto Bolano’s story taking nearly a thousand pages to wind its way down the metaphysical sinkhole that is Benno von Archimboldi’s mysterious identity. There’s no rush. The words build like sediment, and the effect is a cumulative one, at first hardly noticeable.

At 98 pages, Brando, My Solitude, by French author Arno Bertina, doesn’t wait for you to notice a story developing around you. It begins with staccato intonations: “He’s born 1910. Has an older brother, will later have a younger brother and sister.” The tone is conversational, but pointed. It’s aggressive, yet intimate.

It’s obvious from the first few pages that what Bertina — who serves as both author and narrator — is trying to do is use everything at his disposal to reconstruct his grandfather’s identity: memory, story, fact, and wishful thinking. “As I was becoming a teenager, that is to say a serious person, he was becoming an eccentric, at 70, an inconsistent and flighty person. We missed each other,” Bertina explains. All of these tools are utilized hodge-podge, so that it is impossible to really pick apart and sift the fact from fiction.

Bertina doesn’t give you time to, anyway. The book moves at a clip, in a wonderfully strange language, both highly energized and highly poetic, which forcefully announces that you are outside the world of the banal memoir. The sentences are oddly constructed, the words deeply estranged from mundane language. Descriptions meander around strange metaphors. Incandescent images pop and disappear. The way in which the grandfather’s life is remembered mirrors the enigmatic way in which he lived:

The body he inherited grows rounder, slips under. The force of habit builds so many low walls, as difficult to get past as real walls, or to step over as emptiness.

The narrator tries to ensnare his grandfather in prose just as tenaciously as his grandfather attempts to transcend himself.

Bertina’s grandfather is elusive in the way that only people to whom you are genetically connected can be. The major movements of his grandfather’s life are known to the family: the war, his government service in colonial French Africa, the scandal of an interracial love, his various quirks and his personal failings, and his eventual return to his native country where he fails to adapt and drifts into a pattern of eccentricities. Each new summit of strangeness that he achieves as an elderly man, be it going out in a bed sheet toga or insisting that empty church pews are actually full, is explained as his mental space having “further expanded.” So as the narrator tries to hunt him down, the barrier separating them isn’t just time, it’s also dementia, which the narrator is forced to interpret in order to make some sort of sense of his grandfather.

The Brando of the title is, by turns, obvious, then obscure. The grandfather finds Marlon Brando late in life, discovering in the actor’s seductive sadness a sort of double for his own alienation from his family and his country. He asks about buying a VCR to watch Brando’s movies. He broods on the actor, finding in Brando’s “feminine” solitude his own desire to be completely alone. Another one of his autumn eccentricities was learning Russian, in which he makes the note that:

One should understand solitude in the way that madness was understood in the XVIII century, in a park. I did not write “My madness is named Brando” but “My solitude is named Brando.” My solitude needs to be transported back to the XVIII century, in a park. Some mystics withdrew to the desert. The Port Royal de Champs desert, for instance, in the Chevreuse valley. I wrote “My solitude is named Brando” but one should read solitude the way desert was read in the XVIII century, and madness too.

The grandfather is doing to the actor what the author is doing to the grandfather: using sparse evidence and random clues to build an identity for a stranger, then using prose to fuse that identity to his own.

Literature doesn’t necessarily have an obligation to do anything. Regardless, books wind up filling unexpected roles. This wonderfully cryptic novel, a work put out by Counterpath, a press/bookstore/performance space in Denver, ends up doing a few things.

First, it’s a pretty accurate description of eccentricity, especially of eccentrics in our own family. It often happens in the elderly, veterans, or the dying, that mortality gives people the impetus — the courage really — to aspire to more uninhibited versions of themselves. As odd as these people may become, it almost seems like a right that they’ve earned through the accumulation of so many painful experiences.

Secondly, the book is an attempt to reconstruct a man in full. Using memory, stories, conjecture, documents, and fiction, the narrator tries to cobble together a person. You can say all the obvious things about the impossibility of ever really knowing someone — of our futile attempts at real intimacy — but you come away from this book not with a depressing sense of failure, but with awe that we even have a desire to try.

Michael Schapira: There is a moment early in the book when your protagonist, Reno, first falls in with a set of New York artists. You write:

“There were tacit rules with these people, and all people like them that I later met: You weren’t supposed to ask basic questions. ‘What do you do?’ ‘Where are you from?’ ‘What kind of art do you make?’ . . . Asking an obvious question, even if there were no obvious answer, was a way of indicating to them that they should jettison you as soon as they could.” 

I found this to ring very true, albeit with my far more limited experience navigating the art world. How did you pick up these lessons or develop an ear for the way artists and gallery owners speak? 

Rachel Kushner: I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I’m interested in what they say and how they say it. But perhaps the quote above, if true, is true of certain kinds of people generally and not just of those in the art world? I’m not sure. I might even be one of those people myself. Not one who would or might jettison somebody — no, I hate that kind of exclusion — but I do prefer to converse in a way that is “in medias res” perhaps. Catching a wave with someone, getting on a topic, having an exchange that feels real and interesting, and isn’t a formula for “getting to know you.” When I see someone for the first time in a while and they ask, “How have you been?” or “What have you been up to?”, it’s politeness, but a bit of a conversation stopper. Also, the general resume information isn’t always the thing that tells you much about a person, is it? Not everyone wants to be reduced to these formulae for identity.

I think being sensitive to that, to how to get to know someone on his or her own terms, is one of the nuances of sociality. And the narrator is kind of figuring this out in the moment of her immersion. It was an opportunity to describe something I feel I understand, or have at least experienced — both ends of it.

Beyond this, there are different initiation protocols, if you want to call them that, that Reno experiences throughout the book. There is her immersion in the New York art world, her discomfort in the Valera’s villa at Lake Como, her easy though ambiguous acceptance into a radical political group in Rome. Did you look at this as a way to weave in a bildungsroman aspect to a book that gains so much of its strength from building out these different environments? Or was this more a way to tease out the broader theme of how art, economics, and politics were inescapable forces in shaping all the characters in the book, despite their efforts to deny this?

Well, gosh, thank you for so thoughtfully stating all this. Both. Every scene in the book is meant to, I mean should, both deepen the characters featured in it, and put pressure on the subjects, themes, and various kinds of meaning that come up in the writing. The last part of your question is a nice argument that one could make for the book or what I’m getting at, but when I am writing, I’m not going for effects. I mean, wait. I am going for effects, actually. But not arguments. Although books make excellent occasions for arguments — such as that characters are shaped by the forces of history and of culture. But those occasions come after, with the book as an instantiation of the argument.

What I mean to say is that I am writing for pleasure, and in hopes of trying to activate in the writing many different aspects of who I am and what I believe, and that any biases I have about how character comes into being, in life as much as in art, burble up unconsciously rather than polemically.

The book is wide ranging, but I thought there was a very interesting affinity between the art scene in New York in the 1970s and the Autonomist movement in Italy. In his introduction to The Unseen Antonio Negri writes that Nanni Balestrini “represents the invisible yet powerful transformations from material work to immaterial work, from revolt against the boss to revolt against the patriarchy, along with the metamorphosis of bodies brought about within this movement, and the imagination that this new historical condition (social and political to be precise) brings to speech.” In a way the New York artists (e.g the land artists that inspire Reno) were also challenging the status of work, of “the work” that went into a work of art. 

You have been asked about the relationship between the revolutionary moment in the book and current social movements. There are certainly scenes of people pouring into the street or of police clashing with protesters, but I was wondering if you thought that a challenge to the nature and status of work, so present in the art and political movements of the 1970s, still rings true today?

This begs a bit of defining, or redefining, as to what Negri’s position was, in regard to the autonomist and workerist movements, and his role as a primary theoretician of organized autonomy. It is a basic fact that in Italy the sites of antagonism slowly spiraled out from the factory protests (Fiat, Pirelli) of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” in 1969 to an outright refusal of work by an unproductive class in the broader metropolis, whose desires had nothing to do with the productivity of capital or with proletarian needs. I don’t claim to be an expert on these things, but my understanding is that Negri comes out of a theoretical and political tradition in which the worker and factory remained central, even to the diffusion of antagonism to the city itself.

When it was clear, in the years 1973 to 1977, that there was an entire class of non-workers involved in protest in urban sites of refusal, Negri called this class the “socialized worker,” who operated beyond the sphere of the factory, in the milieu of the “diffuse factory” of the metropolis. This has been critiqued as Negri’s rigid insistence on reincorporating non-workers into his own conception of class identity and the role of the worker in revolutionary politics. As Jason Smith has written, summarizing the French political collective Tiqqun’s critique of Negri, “organized Autonomy’s theoretical proposals — especially Negri’s ‘socialized worker’— represent a commitment to the fiction of the social and to the metaphysics of production.” Tiqqun’s position — and perhaps Smith’s, too — is that Negri made a grave and crippling miscalculation, in his insistence on a class identity based on work.

Negri, Tiqqun seems to assert, could not recognize the true and real site of antagonism, which, by 1977, had little to do with work, and with a classical geometry of worker, institution, and state, but was about a new incivility that rejected the entire sphere of work as such, and society as such. There are some, like Tiqqun, who see this incivility and rejection as relating directly to contemporary times, perhaps calling for the emergence of an “imaginary party,” a new ghost built in the leftovers of a nonexistent or defunct class war. The nature and status of work, to try to directly answer your question, was already crumbling in the 1970s. In fact, the 1970s was its death, and burial, and also a moment when the question arose, as to what is to be done when the sites of antagonism are no longer the factories but the entire world, spread through with reproduction and consumption. What is to be done now? We are still asking this question, and attempting to answer it.

The art question above I’ll respond to separately, even as I agree with you that there is some resonance between them. In the late 1960s and very early 1970s there were artists in New York working in ways that could be seen as perhaps problematically romanticizing working class life, and even reproducing class structure while pretending not to, like Robert Morris driving a forklift into a museum in a hardhat, a stogie in his mouth like a labor boss, as the critic Julia Bryan-Wilson pointed out in her excellent book on the Art Worker’s Movement. Morris, Carl Andre, Richard Serra and Donald Judd were all artists whose work utilized factory aesthetics and modes of production. They dressed like factory workers. They theorized that art was labor, but was it really labor? A privileged site of it, to be sure.

Just slightly later Lucy Lippard wrote about the dematerialization of the art object and this, in the hermetic world of art, was certainly a shift away from sellable objects, it was a rejection of the marketplace . . .  but only for a moment. The market, the dealer, and the artist have all learned to get around this playful challenge to sales and profit.

In any case, I don’t make easy parallels between art and politics. A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political. It’s about the careers of artists and their oedipal resistance to the museum that they need so badly. That said, I’m not really sure art is suitably the arena for politics. And neither is the novel. Ideas can drift through both, but never as driving forces. Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

Writers will often bristle at being assigned a function or being told they are needed, but one key difference between the Autonomist movement and conceptual art in the 1970s seemed to be the role of writing. Autonomism influenced poets like Balestrini and Umberto Eco and spawned a unique style of Marxist criticism in people like Bifo and Paolo Virno. Writing seemed central to the movement.

However, much of the work of conceptual art, whether it be performance art, land art, or minimalism seem less dependent on developing a style of criticism or explaining one’s work. The goal seemed to be to collapse the distinction between discourse and practice and thus blur the distinction between art and life. In general, do you think that political movements benefit from developing a specific style of writing? Or is there a lesson that political actors can learn from art that moves away from a focus on writing?

But the artist’s movements you mention — Land Art and Minimalism in particular — spawned entire discourses in the art world and even the very tradition of artists developing their own theoretical claims in order to define, from inside, what it was they were doing.

These artists developed their own terms of discourse, really entirely. This is a moment when all of these artists were writing long theoretical pieces in the pages of Artforum. By the early 1970s, you have Avalanche Magazine, which was specifically founded as an outlet for artists to articulate the theoretical underpinnings of their own practices. A great deal of Robert Smithson’s discourses on his work and on entropy originated in the pages of Avalanche. Bomb Magazine, later, was founded on a very similar principle. It answered to a need in a time when it was important, suddenly, for artists to explain their own work. Donald Judd wrote long pieces about Minimalism. So did Carl Andre. So did Robert Morris. These people took it upon themselves to define what they were doing.

Smithson’s writings are still being read by young artists, they are perhaps as important as the earthworks he made. I joke, in the novel, that the ethos of Minimalism — “what you see is what you get” — the thereness in the room of a simple and industrial looking thing — is always problematic because in fact to really get the thereness of an object you had to have read about Minimalism. The object does not detach cleanly from its discourse and rise up in its thingness for the uninformed viewer. Those who know about Minimalism are able to situate the thereness by virtue of an instructive discourse they read about beforehand.

I really liked a piece you wrote in Bookforum recently on Clarice Lispector. Do the habits that you build up as a critic or editor bleed into the writing of the novel? You clearly have done a lot of research, so is one of the pleasures of writing the novel introducing people to a new world (conceptual art, radical politics of the left and the right in Italy, motorcycle racing)?

Thanks for mentioning the piece on Lispector, which required a much higher research-to-word ratio than The Flamethrowers. I welcomed that assignment because it would force me to attempt to become an expert on her, spend a period of time as a Lispector inspector.

With fiction, I see the role of expertise maybe a bit differently. Although not completely differently. I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable; like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn’t even have to mention them out loud to each other. A writer who cares about the world and about the smaller but not insignificant details that can be cracked open to find humor and meaning. That’s how I like to feel when I’m reading and what I try to go for when I am writing, in the sense that I want to activate what I know but in a manner that is organic to the narrative, and not simply knowledge for its own sake.

The novel is a special occasion, or a whole array of them, occasions in which only something very filtered and metabolized and appropriate to context can be called upon. I don’t like the info-dump, as it’s known. Finally, I actually didn’t do a lot of research. The novel enfolded certain areas of knowledge — art, politics, motorcycles — that I had acquired just in the course of life, as a person. These things were not fields of study that I pursued in order to write about them on this occasion.

In the Bookforum piece you wrote admiringly of Lispector’s disregard of classical narrative. “Let no one be mistaken,” Lispector writes in The Hour of the Star, “I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.” There is certainly a narrative thread that runs through The Flamethrowers, but did you draw on Lispector or other authors to afford yourself more freedom in the story that you wanted to tell?

I love that line. “Let no one be mistaken, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”! You could tattoo every line she’s ever written on someone’s flesh and it wouldn’t be a waste. I mean, as far as those “sound-bite wisdom” tattoos go. Her simplicity is an achievement, a precision that can only be arrived at with her intelligence and her ambition, her need to close in on the truth. But I did not draw consciously on Lispector. I was thinking of her in a sustained way only later, after I finished my novel.

That said, I do perceive the narrative thread as doing multiple kinds of work, one of which is to buy me some space to do other things besides further a plot. Lispector is different. She isn’t digressing, as there is practically no narrative, and by the end of her life, there was none at all, and those are the best books! I like certain works that have a story, but don’t sacrifice nuance to that story, and that try also to pour in complicated meanings that don’t inhere in “plot.” Like Gaddis’s The Recognitions. The early DeLillo novels, End Zone, for instance — a classic and a favorite. Celine, Journey to the End of the Night. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke . . . Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and 2666, which to me are one grand tapestry. Pasolini’s crazy and unfinished Petrolio. There were many books that enabled and influenced my own, but not directly or explicitly. I name those but there are always so many.

The first major setting in the book is the Bonneville Salt Flats, where Reno is trying to set a land speed record on a motorcycle. Your descriptions of the landscape are very beautiful. They struck me as very accepting of the landscape, which in the book is contrasted with the way New York based land artists viewed the “real authentic West.” Even though you’ve spent so much time in New York and other big urban areas, do you still consider yourself a Western writer? Does that designation even have any meaning to you?

It’s a good question. But no, the designation “Western writer” strangely holds no meaning for me. That said, I love certain writings about the West, but it seems not to matter to me that the writer be from the West. In any case, I find people’s firm and insistent grip on identity and origins to be sad and arch. Who knows what defines us? What interests me and excites me at a given time — that is what defines me. And I will go ahead and feel suitably proprietary about whatever it is I want to understand and transmute into fiction.

But it’s true, I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don’t identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the west, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles. I know the landscape so it was not difficult for me to write about it, and it is tissued into the primary scenes, if you will, so it was there, waiting for me, as material. But I think anyone who has been enraptured by the west can write about it. You don’t have to be from it. Robert Smithson, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, have all contributed to a Western canon of some kind. Blood Meridian was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer. And I think McCarthy is from Tennessee, right?

I don’t listen to it all the time because I think it is the best album in the world. I listen to it all the time because, like many people have done with many forms of art, I have instrumentalized music. (Instrumentalization = it is used as a means to an end, not that it is performed with instruments).  Most of the time I don’t listen to music to listen to music. I put it in my earholes to 1) drown out my coworkers because I work in an open office and need to concentrate or 2) get pumped up in the gym. “God Hates Us All” is the perfect album for what I want music to do. It is loud, angry, and constant.

So, after listening to “God Hates Us All” about five hundred times, I’ve started to notice some of the goofier lyrics. They’ve weathered through like dinosaur bones peering out of a Dakota cliff face. Two songs in particular, “Threshold” and “Exile,” stand out.

“Can’t control the violence that’s spewing from me.” - Threshold

This line gets me pretty pumped and I love it. What makes it funny is that the song is performing exactly the kind of sublimation the lyric disavows. He is controlling the violence and turning it into a song about that experience, which is exactly how Wordsworth  defines poetry: a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranquility.

“Can’t you understand

Everything I do doesn’t stem from you

It doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with you” - Threshold

The first of a few lines that verge from “fuck you” to “fuck you, Dad.” If you listen to the song you’ll hear there is a break after “fucking thing” which underscores the feeling that this began as a diary entry and was later fitted imperfectly to the vocal melody.

“Even though some things are better left unsaid

There’s a few things I need to get off my chest

I need to vent – let me tell you why” - Exile

Look, I was very clear when I said two percent milk. One percent is not the same. I mean sure I’ll drink it, I’m not going to throw it away, but I just wanted you to know.

“Give me a reason not to rip your fucking face off” - Exile

I love this lyric because it captures so much of the Slayer worldview: ripping someone’s face off is the default. NOT doing so requires a reason.

“Just tell me fucking why everything becomes an issue” - Exile

Two things: first, the placement of “fucking” is exactly where I would put it if I was speaking this line in conversation, but not where any self-conscious wordsmith would put it. Second, it’s adorable that Araya complains about something being an “issue,” especially on an album where 80% of the wordspace is used to swear brutal physical violence on everyone around him.

“I will never become your fucking scapegoat” - Payback

That’s not really in your control, is it? Being a scapegoat means someone else has falsely imputed blame to you. It’s nothing to be ashamed of; if anything, the shame belongs to the person who would make you a scapegoat. And in fact, heavy metal already DID become a  scapegoat for youth violence in the U.S.. It’s not your fault, dude. Well, actually it is your fault because you wrote a bunch of songs about Nazis and torture, but you know what I mean.

Photo Credit: Teo Grossman

Ramona Ausubel’s prose, concepts, and stories: they’re the kind that make a reader stop, take a breath, and reread. Her lyrical story collection, A Guide to Being Born, shepherds the reader through portraits of families, parents, pregnancies, births — and invites some unconventional, mind-expanding material along for the ride. Bound by their collective humanity, the stories re-infuse wonder into a somewhat overwrought cultural conversation. Human lives springing from one another. There is something inherently magical in it.

Meredith Turits: I’ve read that you worked on all of these stories before doing the heavy lifting for your novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us. How did the experience of going through a novel cycle affect the outcome of the stories in A Guide to Being Born?

Ramona Ausubel: I think all of them were in existence prior to the novel, but I would come back to them to save myself from what felt at the time like an endless spiral of what felt like not going anywhere good with the novel. Writing a novel takes so long and there’s such a period of having to keep the faith because it just takes a really long time until the thing has emerged and you can really see it. So I would come back to the stories as these little resting places where, even if they weren’t finished, they were there, and they were a present, and I could trust that I would do many more drafts before I finished them. But they were living things, and the novel felt like this kind of scary, sloppy place, and I didn’t know if it would come together.

I love that about short fiction. There’s more pleasure in there, more quickly.

The stories in the collection strike me as varying in their deliberate trajectories and directionality than others. Do you think short fiction always must have a defined trajectory?

No, I don’t think so. Because of the length, even if the story is just asking a question, since it’s only a few pages long, it asks it really pointedly. I think even if [the story] is opening up to something that’s sort of a blankness, the reader feels like they’re given that really specifically. In longer works, you kind of meander through and you’ve got a bunch of different feelings and different themes, which is beautiful too, but in a short story, you’ve been handed this thing that’s so distinct. It’s so edited down that it feels pointed.

In regards to the short story as an art object, how do you feel about stories existing in virtue of linguistic or semiotic brilliance instead of having a direction?

I’m always good with linguistic brilliance. [Laughs.] I love that no matter what. I love stories and I love the way an arc of a story will work on you, but there’s something about language that to me is so special, and I feel like it goes right past all my logical brain workings. It feels like a drug. It’s a little shot of something and it jostles everything around, and I love that. I love Ben Marcus, I love Lydia Davis—give me those writers and I’m happy.

Have you always written and read for language?

Yeah, I have. I wrote and read poetry for many years before I wrote prose, so that’s
where I learned everything I know, and that’s kind of the thing that feels the most pure.

What were your strongest fantasies and thoughts from childhood, and how did they influence the collection?

I love this question. I was definitely an imaginative kid, and I didn’t get a sibling until I was eight and a half, so I spent a lot of time on my own or with an especially close friend. I lived in the country, so we would do a lot of wandering around in the mountains after school. I’d make stories up — a lot of these odds and ends crept in… I think I still feel really interested in characters that act upon ideas or some sort of imaginative scenario, even though I’m not brave enough to do that. But I think that’s sort of seeded in childhood — the idea that you can go out and try something, and watch the world react to your emotions.

Do you think you had any illusions from childhood about pregnancy and birth that made it into the collection?

Who could not? It’s such a strange situation, the idea that two people take their clothes off and mash around for a while and later a completely new life comes to be. That’s always seemed completely amazing to me. I do remember my mom being pregnant with my sister because I was big, so I understood the concept. And I was there when she was born, and I’m sure that made an impression on me.

You’re a mother now. When you were a child, did you always envision yourself in that role?

I definitely did. I imagined the rules I would make for my kids, and it would be totally fun all the time. . . When we got to the point in my later-twenties when having a child was a reasonable thing to do, it became much scarier. It went from being, “Yay, I can’t wait until I get to do that,” and being part of a family with new little people, to, “I don’t know if I’m up for that—that sounds a lot of responsibility and a lot of weight to hold.” I think a lot of this book is about that weight of love, and how much it asks of us. And that choice to make a person your whole entire life: the way you transform and are upended by it.

Are you maternalistic about your work, too?

I’m protective of the work when it’s not done yet. I don’t show people anything until it’s formed and living. I do have a reading group, and friends, and I do show things to PJ [Mark, my agent] eventually, but it’s not until I think I can see things breathing very well, and then after that — once I’ve gone over the stories forty million times — that I love to send them out in the world to have their own lives. It’s surprising how much I don’t feel controlling about them. Their job is to go do something else. I’ve done everything I can do with them, and then they go out and do whatever they feel like doing.

What kind of influence has your own motherhood had on your stories? Has it changed any of your visions or illusions about the process of being born?

Yeah, it’s hard to even put into words how vast it is to be a mom. It’s a completely gigantic experience, so in that way, it’s exactly like I thought it would be, but it’s also like I got a completely rewired heart. The best part about it is that I get to love this person in a way that I didn’t know I was capable of. There wasn’t an agreement about whether we were going to be in a relationship together. We didn’t have to hash those rules out and we didn’t have to grow it like when you fall in love with somebody — which is also huge and amazing, but is something that’s made by adults. Whereas the feelings I have for my son are just hard-wired. It feels like it’s part of my body, in a way.

How has that discovery — relearning your world and opening yourself an entirely new kind of relationship — manifested in these pages?

Motherhood hasn’t changed these pages, since the stories were fairly well finished before my son was born, though I’m sure this new relationship with the world will influence what I write in the future.  There are sad things that happen to children in both A Guide to Being Born and No One Is Here Except All of Us that I would have had a much harder time writing now that I’m a mom. Maybe I’ll struggle to resist the impulse to save all my characters, but at the same time the extra-exposed nerve-endings also feel like a good thing for a writer.

In the collection, we spend a fair amount of time with the perspectives of children. Was that a natural voice for you to inhabit?

It must have been, because I kept doing it without meaning to. I didn’t have a plan for the collection in the beginning. I just started writing, and it became pretty clear that there were themes emerging, and themes that I was really interested in at that point.

The book is divided into four parts: Birth, Gestation, Conception, and Love. Why “Love”?

When I was organizing the collection, I wanted to ask the question of how to press the issue of this transformation, so all the stories have this component of transformation or mutation, but I wanted them all to ask that question together, as a chorus. I thought, “Well, what if the book took the shape of a birth?” It felt like, you have to start with love. Although, some of the stories — like, for example, in the story “Atria”. . . the child is not born from love. The question of love, or its absence, has to enter the equation, so you can’t have a transformation without asking where love was in that moment: whether it was directly involved, or its absence. That’s what it all comes back to.

The piece originally appeared here, at samkriss.wordpress.com, and  has been republished with the blessing of the author.

Richard Dawkins wakes some time before dawn. He doesn’t blink or yawn or stretch — his eyes clang open with all the force and suddenness of a steel door. He stares at his ceiling, blue and brown swirling in his irises like cars and livestock in the centre of a tornado. Richard Dawkins’ head is fizzing with mad thoughts. He chatters under his breath as he strides out of bed and down the stairs of his Oxford home. His wife gives a small grunt and goes back to sleep. Outside a shimmering band of turquoise near the horizon brings a soft sparkle to the beads of dew hanging from trees in early bud; the heavy clouds in the distance look peach-pink and insubstantial; so do the old pale brick houses that line his street. The birds are singing in riotous chorus. “Accept my genetic information, females of my species!” they sing. “Observe my superior fitness for survival, as evidenced by the strength and clarity of my voice! Oh, and, by the way, as a bird I have no concept of God or metaphysics, but I do believe in strict gender roles and the principles of Aufklärung!” Richard Dawkins sets off into the world.

As he shambles down his street a few small birds burst from a shrub, scattering at his approach. The famous scientist suddenly breaks from his mutterings and watches them carefully. “Horses!” he says, finally. “Flying horses. Nonsense. Balderdash. Not now. Not yet. One day. Tiny flying horses, tiny flying horses, millions of tiny flying horses. One day. One day.” Later, an upended bin gives the bestselling biologist some cause for reflection. Foxes have tipped it over, sprawling its contents over the pavement. “Hitler’s brain!” Dawkins exclaims. “Save Hitler’s brain, study Hitler’s brain, gain Hitler knowledge. Hitler science. Science Hitler. Hitler Hitler.” Soon he is heading down from his wealthy suburb into the medieval heart of Oxford, towards the University, seat of learning and discovery for over nine hundred years.

A few vans making early-morning deliveries trundle past him. He smiles and waves. “You want to see some films of a lady giving birth?” he shouts happily. “Fantastic stuff. Two million years old. Baby porn, baby.” By the time he’s on Market Street the sky has lightened and there are already a few pedestrians on the road — postgrad students with their morning coffees, undergraduates still stumbling home from the previous night. Some stare as he passes; some turn their backs. Suddenly, Richard Dawkins stops dead. He raises an accusatory finger at a horrific building standing in front of him. His face is twisted in fury. It’s not a church, though — it’s a charity shop. “WHERE DO AMPUTEES BUY THEIR SHOES?” the internationally renown secularist bellows, spitting and grimacing, tears rolling down his face. “DO AMPUTEES THROW AWAY ONE SHOE?”

His journey is almost complete. As the sun, burning with nuclear fusion’s blasphemous glory, begins to float above the crenelated urban horizon, Richard Dawkins is climbing Magdalen Tower. Finally he is at the summit, surrounded by its magnificent Gothic spires. As dawn becomes day, Richard Dawkins looks out at a gloriously mechanistic universe, and begins to laugh. “There is no God!” he shouts. “There is no God! There is no God!” As he does so, his testicles sway freely in the breeze, swinging slowly, with all the dignified solemnity of old church bells.

*    *    *

Richard Dawkins has gone insane.

It’s probably for the best. In his more lucid moments his proclamations tend towards an unselfconscious misogyny and Islamophobia — his thought bears the ugly stamp of the bigot who thinks that not believing in God lends his opinions some kind of Rational Objectivity. His links with the far right are extensive; it might not be a coincidence that his personal foundation shares a logo with the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. Far better for him to be endlessly wittering about Pleistocene porn and Hitler’s brain. I’d like to think I helped in some small way: I am, after all, one of the voices that reminds him daily of an inconvenient truth. But really it was inevitable; it’s inscribed in his ideology. The ‘New Atheists’ should, I think, more properly be called the New Young Hegelians; much of their bad politics comes from their refusal to accept that their ideas were thoroughly refuted by a pair of bearded weirdos over 150 years ago. This is aggravating enough, but the madness comes in when their insistence on rationality turns from an irritating ideological quirk into a full-blown psychosis. You can’t talk to these people. “I prefer tangerines to oranges,” I say. “I’ll believe that when I see the proof,” they thunder in response, glutamated granules falling from their beards like dandruff as they shake their heads in scorn. “Maybe the juridical categories of proof and evidence aren’t universally applicable?” I suggest. The whining chorus: “Got any evidence for that?” Wander too far down the path of rationalist dogma and it’ll be no surprise if you end up like Richard Dawkins, sunning his genitals in a world that no longer makes any sense.

But what if it’s something more? What if Richard Dawkins’ madness isn’t the end of his story, but the start of his elevation to something entirely different?

*    *    *

Richard Dawkins is not new. Richard Dawkins has been with us for thousands of years. Xanthus of Lydia writes of the presocratic philosopher Empedocles:

Having reached the summit of Etna, he threw himself into the flames, believing that with the scourging of his body by the fire he would arise as a god. From that day he was known to the people as Μαργίτηἅγιοσ (Margithagios).

What is a margithagios? The word recurs several times in Greek writing without much in the way of elucidation. In Latin it was translated as furiosus sanctum, or the holy madman: the Roman jurist Sextus Pomponius wrote that ‘the holy madman is he who, having been a great man, places himself by his own will beyond the limit of the law and its reason. Thereafter he is the property of the gods; he is theirs to kill or take in sacrifice. That the gods will claim their sacrifice seems to be a given. Of the individuals later described as margithagies or furiosi sancti, few tend to meet a peaceful end.

The fourteenth-century German theologian Thomas von Klöt was born to an aristocratic family but renounced his worldly wealth in the service of the Church; he was at one point considered a candidate for posthumous canonisation. However, his preaching became steadily more bizarre and began to verge on the blasphemous: he began to insist that God manifested Himself in vegetable life and forbade his followers to eat any plants or anything which fed on them (flies, worms, etc. were at the time believed to emerge through spontaneous generation and were therefore considered safe to eat). He was killed with two of his disciples when he was crushed by a falling tree. Comte Xavier de Mazan, commonly considered to be an inspiration for the Marquis de Sade, took to calling himself Priapus Invictus and walking around Paris in specially designed breeches that allowed his penis to protrude through an opening surrounded by rubies and sapphires; he died in 1761 when an improperly cut diamond tore through his femoral artery. At the close of the nineteenth century, the British imperialist and industrial magnate Harry Suggle began to take an interest in Hindu cosmology and eventually proclaimed himself Īshvara, the supreme ruler of Vyāvahārika or the World Inside the Veil, to a crowd of his workers. He was killed when a rotary blade in his beet-processing factory came loose and sheared off the top of his head.

A general theory of margithagies was first devised by the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his 1972 work Les Hommes à l’extérieur. Lévi-Strauss connected the figure of the margithagios with the Outside Men of Amerindian society — those madmen who, unlike prophets or shamans, would live within the camp but not take part in its rites. The position of the Outside Man was an ambiguous one: at once man, god, and beast. In times of grave general danger (such as drought or war), the holy madman would be ritually sacrificed; however once the rite was carried out it was forbidden to speak of it on pain of death. Perhaps the most systematic analysis of the sacred madman, however, is in Giorgio Agamben’s 1996 Margithagios: Dissent and despotism from the classical to the modern. Agamben argues that the margithagios formed a ‘state of exception’ allowing ancient societies to allow for dissenting or contradictory opinion to be at once openly expressed and rejected as madness (and potentially cut short with the life of the holy madman). In his conclusion, Agamben explicitly identifies the margithagios with freedom of speech in liberal democracy, proclaiming that ‘in the twenty-first century, we will all be furiosi sancti.’ Notably, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the holy madman in Plateau 10 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia:

We refer not to prophets or seers, molar aggregates all, but themargithagios, for whom the revelation is always a becoming: becoming-God, becoming-flames, becoming-ashes. Can we say with certitude that Empedocles did not, in the end, adopt the trajectories of an Apollo? In the margithagios space becomes a field of n points, n-dimensional movements, intersected by n plan(e)s. Margithagios haecceities form lines of flight extending in every dimension, the contagion of the sacred madman is effected through these backchannels, in which deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation form a loop or sequence connected not by graduation but consistency. There is never a city, there is only a city and a volcano, never a volcano, only a volcano and a sandal, never a sandal, only a sandal and a god. Rhizome.

The theoretical margithagios is diverting, but you get the sense that Deleuze and Guattari have missed the point a little. The holy madmen existed. For a short time they transcended our world while continuing to walk within it, and then they all fell. They were sacred to something. Something took them back to itself, something greater and more powerful than we can imagine. As he babbles about tiny flying horses and people with more shoes than legs, a question is forced upon us — is Richard Dawkins about to prove the existence of God?

*    *    *

Richard Dawkins stands on the top of Magdalen Tower. The sun is rising over Oxford. The fires of Etna shine their feverish light over his naked body. He smiles.

 
Sam Kriss is a writer and dilettante living in the UK. Watch him tweeting incessantly at @sam_kriss and raging into the void at samkriss.wordpress.com

This was my context when I picked up Jeanne Thornton’s The Dream of Doctor Bantam. When most people read the word cult on the back of a paperback, they either think of the Illuminati or Scientology, and Thornton’s given a few interviews saying she was inspired by the latter. I assume other readers will bring some similar associations to Doctor Bantam, plus or minus Lawrence Wright’s recent treatments.

But I recommend leaving the Scientology context behind when reading Doctor Bantam. It would be a shame for readers to decide what the book will be like before they even crack the spine. The book doesn’t really function as an examination of life in one cult or another. Instead, it’s about what it is to be the kind of person susceptible to joining a cult — and how close we all are to being that kind of person. It’s also about what it is to be the kind of person who falls in love with someone in a cult, and how close we may be to becoming that kind of person, too.

The person who falls in love is seventeen-year-old Julie. Her wilder, older sister Tabitha recently died in what might have been an accident or what might have been a successful suicide attempt. Still mourning, Julie sees a girl on the street who smiles like Tabitha does. The girl is Patricia, a member of the Institute of Temporal Illusion; Doctor Bantam of the title is the completely unseen cult leader. Julie latches onto her new friend, taking a job in the apartment building Patricia manages on behalf of the cult and becoming something like a willing live-in servant for Patricia, who can barely manage to feed herself or count money properly. At the same time, Julie is coming to grips with her homosexuality and her attraction to Patricia. She worries she’s a pervert but cannot stop from masturbating in Patricia’s bathtub. The girls’ lives tangle together perilously as Patricia’s instability threatens to sink them both.

Julie’s perspective dominates the novel, an excellent choice on Thornton’s part. Spending too much time inside Patricia’s jittery head would be overwhelming. Julie is as fragile internally as Patricia, but that fragility is tempered with hardness. She loves Patricia but is constantly mean to her and disparaging of Patricia’s relationship with the Institute, calling it a cult even as Patricia tearfully begs her not to. Where Julie’s sister died or chose death, Julie works very hard every day to live. At one point in the novel, Julie symbolically takes Tabitha’s spirit into herself and chants “This time, survive.”

Julie’s adolescent confusion is both familiar and visceral, as in the bathtub scene I mentioned earlier:

She turned on the lights and the hot water and she set herself a deadline: by the time this bathtub fills up, you have to decide whether or not a pervert is the kind of thing you want to be for the rest of your life. She paced, her bare feet leaving ghostly footprints on the dirty tile and in the end, as she settled into the rising water, she still couldn’t decide.

Patricia’s fragility is successfully off-putting and worrisome while her sweetness and earnest striving to better herself make the reader understand Julie’s attraction to her and desire to care for her. Their twisted romance, the main thrust of the novel, is honest and exciting.

Despite the strong depiction of the main relationship, Doctor Bantam isn’t a completely successful novel. As I read, I felt there was something wrong with the book — something keeping it in the range of good instead of great — and couldn’t put my finger on it until I got to the “Intermission” halfway through the novel. Then I realized the problem: like in The Master, the cult wasn’t scary enough.

The “Intermission” is a transcript of an interview between an unnamed and unknown Institute member and Patricia’s ex-boyfriend Gregory. During the interview, Gregory is hooked up to a disturbing machine, the “Bantam Memory Elucidator,” and subjected to a special kind of Institute questioning. We know about the machine because Patricia used it on Julie earlier in the book. But before this “Intermission,” the cult was basically window dressing; all the fear I had for it was fear I brought to it from my own knowledge of Scientology and other cults. That fear was second-hand, not strong enough to feel viscerally. Without the danger of the cult looming, Patricia’s choices seem less foolish and Julie’s position less precarious.

Following the “Intermission,” the second half of the novel communicates that cult-y unease more thoroughly. Julie’s fuck-the-world attitude gets her in real trouble for the first time. One of her friends is driven out of town by a semi-fictional smear campaign, and Julie discovers the cult is responsible. Fear finally creeps into the narrative.

The novel’s final act is spectacular, as Patricia goes off the rails and Julie, at times too self-absorbed and at times too empathetic, clings to Patricia while failing to save her. The novel’s short last section finally plunges the reader into Patricia’s mind, and it’s like diving into freezing cold water, invigorating and excruciating. But the propulsive second half can’t erase the problems of the languid first section. I anxiously await Thornton’s next novel, but Doctor Bantam can’t be great.

Over the course of two hours, friends, colleagues, comrades and former students paraded across the small stage painting in their eulogies a portrait of a man who will clearly be missed by many. Hobsbawm was famous as a historian and widely popular around the world with people of all political persuasions, the rare Marxist who receives a complimentary obituary from The Economist. He came to communism as a Jew living in Vienna in the 1930s. He’s best known for his trilogy on the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism, but he was a prolific, versartile writer. He contributed op-eds to The Guardian, essays to the London Review of Books and, for a while, served as jazz critic for The New Statesman. His history books, and his essays, are easy and enjoyable reading.

Italian President Girogio Napolitano sent in a pre-recorded video. Neal Ascherson, a Scottish journalist and former Hobsbawm pupil, recounted lessons in morals as well as history. As a young student at Cambridge and recent veteran of the Royal Marines, the professor told Ascherson to be ashamed of wearing a medal he received for his service in putting down an anti-colonial uprising in Malayasia. “He made me think about what I’d been doing and for that I’ll be eternally grateful,” Ascherson said. Martin Jacques, the former editor of Marxism Today, delivered a political biography, tracing Hobsbawm’s politics from the time of Hitler to the time of Thatcher.

But what I found most interesting in the portrait of Hobsbawm that emerged was not that he was a great teacher (unsurprising), or a great writer (obvious to anyone who has read him), or a committed Marxist (well known), but that he resembled an archetypal bourgeois public intellectual. From the photographs of him in a cardigan and oversized glasses, to the hobbies of birdwatching and jazz, Hobsbawm was something of a stereotype, though not a malevolent one. He was a wide reader and deep thinker. He kept friendships mostly with writers and other intellectuals. He enjoyed the trappings of a comfortable middle class lifestyle. The art historian Simon Schama peppered his eulogy with references to French restaurants and fancy hotels, allusions lost on me, if not most of the crowd. Schama recounted a dinner party at which the “historian from below” found himself seated between Benazir Bhutto and David Frost.

The writer Claire Tomalin, who was tasked with discussing Hobsbawm “as a friend,” talked about these apparent contradictions the most lucidly. Tomalin recounted going to visit Hobsbawm for the first time at his home in Hampstead, a picturesque, leafy North London neighborhood with some of the city’s most expensive real estate. “I asked Eric how being a communist fit with this,” Tomalin recalled. “He said, ‘If you’re in a ship that’s going down, you might as well travel first class.’”

[Simon & Schuster; 2013]

The divine and the base is one popular answer — from Ancient Greek thought to the doctrine of original sin and beyond. The middling, mostly male characters of Middle Men, the debut story collection from Los Angeles writer Jim Gavin, are just so situated. But the list of poles they find themselves between goes farther. They’re between God and beast, yes, but also between triumph and defeat, between socio-economic classes, between paychecks, between their own irreconcilable urges, between each other.

In telling these stories, Gavin presents a totally different kind of middle-ness: the sharp grace of narratives poised between humor and sentimentality. The stories in Middle Men are raucously funny, but never cheaply so. The collection begins with a coming-of-age story called “Play the Man.” The story opens with an uproarious account of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, somehow told reverently despite its sacrilege:

They tried to set him on fire, but his flesh would not be consumed. They pierced his heart with a sword, but a dove issued from his chest. The afternoon dragged on like that, miracle after miracle, until they finally cut off his balls, or fed him to the Sarlacc pit monster, or whatever.

All this is to explain the words on the gymnasium wall at St. Polycarp High School, a divine whisper: “Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man.”

At St. Polycarp High, the story of a so-so highschool basketball player unfolds: he transfers schools, gets a job at Walmart, and watches his family and idealized future crumble as he accepts his lust-filled, earthly station. As with the collection as a whole, the story’s profound comic sense arises from Gavin’s knack for unveiling the divine amidst the mundane. “I focused all my attention on the local news anchor,” the young protagonist confesses at the story’s end:

her lips and the curve of her neck. I felt something rising in me, a sense of life maybe, this life, here, in a motel by the sea, and just like that my Gnostic phase was over. I jerked off three times in an hour. Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

From the architecture of the whole collection down to this careful succession of sentences, the profane becomes the profound, and the result is at once hysterical and sobering.

Middle Men predominately deals with the financial and existential struggles of young Californian men, but this thematic and geographic milieu encompasses a variety of stories and structures. In “Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror,” we see the contrast and communion between an unemployed, aspiring inventor and his dejected white-collar cousin. “Elephant Doors” recounts the tragicomic tribulations of a failing stand-up comedian, whose groping toward mediocrity is thrown into relief by the absurd success of a neurotic trivia show. Both the range and coherence of vision of Middle Men distinguishes it as a debut.

Yet, for all its masterful strokes, Middle Men has its amateurish missteps. Gavin’s prose is so tightly paced and evocative that the moments when he gets lazy stand out all the more. This is the case, for example, in “Bewildered Decisions,” when Gavin writes, “She closed her office door, thinking she was about to cry. But she didn’t. Something rattled in her chest, but she didn’t cry.” The same is true at the level of narrative structure. Gavin intelligently thwarts tropes of the American realist short story; he often cleverly interrupts what seems ready to become the quiet climax of a sudden epiphany with something apparently too loud and abrupt, but in fact just right. So when he resorts to structures that seem defaulted to rather than chosen — like the stilted and perfunctory exposition that opens “The Luau” — the reader is taken aback and disappointed.

And then there is an aspect of Middle Men that might be a flaw or might be genius. Many of Gavin’s narrators blur into their stories and into one another. Their particular qualities wash into the harsh locale of Middle Men’s California, which is of course a stand-in for anywhere people reach and fall. Except for a few particularly vivid moments, it becomes difficult to remember the specific characters and tensions of each story.

Is this blending an imperfection? Maybe. Perhaps, in the future, Gavin will learn to give more individual integrity to each story. Or maybe this deep-seated imbalance is not an imbalance at all, but instead is the key to Gavin’s vision. It is a vision of something essential and even sublime in the middle of things, when the particular fades into the archetypal.

I would like to suggest that Anne Carson’s Red Doc> is a clock, a clock that takes the measure of its readers and their world by entrancing them with anachronism and myth.

It’s also, of course, a follow-up to her 1998 novel in verse, Autobiography of Red.  Set in a world at once contemporary and mythic, both works elaborate on the ancient Greek myth of the red, winged monster Geryon, vanquished by Herakles (aka Hercules). Carson’s Autobiography is a monster’s kunstlerroman, the story of sensitive, artistic Geryon’s childhood and adolescence and his creative attempts to document his red life.

I first read Autobiography at a coffeeshop in Chicago. It was 2004; everyone went to Filter to smoke. I turned a page. The smoke fluttered. “Geryon was trying /to breathe but a red wall/had sliced the air in half.”  His lover, Herakles, was breaking up with him, urging him to catch the bus back from Hades to his mother’s house on an island called the Red Place. Silvery ribbons looped from the black plastic ashtray, garlanding the book.  Carson leaves wounded teenage Geryon flexing his wings at the lip of a Peruvian volcano.  It’s only in hindsight that I notice it was smoky.

Red Doc>, published fifteen years later, locates Geryon (now called “G”) after a similar interval of time. In aging Geryon and his friends roughly at pace with the world, Red Doc> manages to tell, along with Geryon’s story, something of the toll the last 15 years have taken on all of us, and on the earth. The characters’ grief for losses sustained in their anachronistic, mythic world becomes an elegy for losses in our own world.

Carson grants both the future and the past the power of movement, the power to advance and impinge upon the present moment that we (to some degree) share with the characters. In Red Doc> time has at last confiscated Herakles — bold and youthful for two thousand years — and reassembled him as an aging warrior known as “Sad But Great” or just “Sad.”

The novel begins with dialogue featuring rumors about Sad’s fate; two voices assemble the tale of his transformation:

. . . I miss her martinis [stubs cigarette] so what’s he

up to now/just got out of

the army/ wounded/

 

messed up/are they giving him care/a guy shows

up with a padded envelope

of drugs every night I

guess

 

it’s care

Like many veterans of the wars of the 21^st Century, the hero Herakles (now Sad) has returned home changed. “Messed up” Sad suffers from flashbacks, and struggles, like Red Doc> itself, to see the present entirely as such.  Sad is “at this moment staring at/Ida and seeing the most/grievous day of his life/rematerialize before him” while a “wave of war” – perhaps the 21^st Century war suggested in Red Doc>, perhaps the violence characterizing Greek mythology — “bears him along” into a future.  The past and future materialize in Red Doc>, so much so that reading the novel sent me in pursuit of Carson’s “real” references, both recent headlines and classical sources.

“To stand in time with your/back to the future your/face to the past what a/relief it would be” muses war veteran 4NO, a character in Red Doc> whose vision of the present is compromised by foresight.  Red Doc>, as both sequel to Autobiography and a meditation on earlier mythology, points us to the questionable pleasures of hindsight. In Red Doc>, Carson explores questions like: can studying the past help us to understand the present or to prepare for the future?  Do we need hindsight? Are the past and present continuous? Overlapping? For 4NO, “every molecule” of the future “is advancing. . .like perfect/works of art they form a/sparkling flood. They saturate him and/confiscate the present moment.”

Carson asserts that “time [is] paper folded to look like a mountain,” and, in pointing simultaneously toward the past and the present, she shows us that what stands between contemporary readers and the ancient world only appears to be substantial.  Like paper, mountains in both Red books are flammable, ticking time bombs destined to erupt and send forth wavy, rolling lines of lava which might, after all, be verse.

Peering into the prose “documents” that account for history from a safe distance, Carson suggests, we risk falling into the active, generative abyss, a volcanic past that promises to flow into the present and freeze itself over our shapes: Here we are where Herakles eats MREs.  Our mythic heroes suffer from PTSD. We’re about to be covered up with ash, even though no one smokes anymore.

At one point in the novel, characters seek refuge inside a glacier, where they discover a secret military prison/nursing facility overseen by the Chief Medical Officer (CMO), “a minotaur who swallows/other people’s labyrinths.” It doesn’t matter what mythic or military power the CMO has.  A glacier perched on top of an active volcano is destined, like our own glaciers, to melt; it’s only a matter of time. In Red Doc>, as in our world, discussions of violent conflicts have overshadowed renderings of environmental changes.  But (as one of Carson’s narrators chides readers who may have been neglected to notice signs and foreshadowing) “don’t say you weren’t/expecting a volcano.”

“Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.” — inscription on the gate of The Garden, the Epicurean commune in Athens

“The three main points of the Dead Head worldview are the warm sharing of a family; the hippie contempt for commerciality that makes them stubbornly condescending to most other rock bands; and a noisy but peaceful determination to have a good time.” — Dennis McNally, CALIFORNIA LIVING, September 1980

There’s a moment during the Grateful Dead’s 1971 show at Bucknell University, about three and a half minutes into their rendition of “Chinacat Sunflower / I Know You Rider,” when Bob Weir achieves a state of tranquility the Epicureans called ataraxia. It may sound like a bold claim — that the rhythm guitarist of a band most people associate with the lazy, drug-addled, and burnt-out could momentarily achieve a state of consciousness that the philosopher Epicurus dedicated his life to cultivating. But it’s there. You can hear it.

Weir deftly slides out of the supporting role of rhythm guitarist, providing texture to Jerry’s lead, while pushing his own melodic ideas to the surface. The erratic, bluesy chords he had been using to buttress the rhythm of the groove step to the front of the song and Weir begins to clearly articulate a lead melody that, if more traditional than Jerry’s, is definitely searing, seductive, and enigmatic.

And even though I’m a huge Dead fan, you have to trust that I’m not leading you astray when I say that for those few, transcendent measures, Bob Weir gets it. It’s that moment in a Dead show that Heads discuss in hushed, reverent, tones. Sometimes it lasts for a only a few seconds. Sometimes it’s just a single song in a single show, and sometimes, although rarely, it’s the entire show itself.

Achieving this painless bliss, this moment of ataraxia, is the reason why people taped every Dead show. It’s the reason why people gave up their comfortable middle class jobs and hit the road to follow the band back and forth across the continent. It’s the reason the band itself, who played more live shows than any other in human history, continued to take the stage hundreds of nights a year, decade after decade. They were dedicated to the cultivation of ataraxia. To be free of sorrow. To be tranquil. To experience, even temporarily, a painless existence.

If the Grateful Dead will always be stuck somewhere between band and cult, Epicureanism itself has been stuck between cult and philosophy since it was founded by Epicurus sometime around 300 BCE. The Epicurean school of philosophy was above all else a lived philosophy. It wasn’t something to be argued over from a distance, it was a method of existing. Epicureans were atheists. They were materialists. And they believed that the only measure of good and bad was whether one is happy or not. But how does one become happy?

By not being a hedonist, for starters. Although the “Do What Thou Wilt” dictum of Satanists and Capitalists alike seems an obvious way to mainline happiness, Epicurus and his followers came at it from the other end: through the limitation of desire. By streamlining our expectations and practicing a sort of spiritual minimalism, we can create for ourselves the kind of life in which happiness, or ataraxia, is possible.

The Epicureans set up shop halfway between the Stoa and the Academy, the two other Greek centers of philosophy and learning, representing the Stoics and the Platonists, respectively. Calling their school The Garden after their community-run source of food, the Epicureans lived simply. They cultivated friendship. They drank wine and had sex. They tended to the garden. And, most importantly, they stayed out of politics. In fact they were almost anti-political — Cicero famously denounced them hundreds of years after their founding, citing their lack of civic participation as a sign of hedonistic rot.

As with their Greek predecessors, in order to consider the Dead political in any sense, you have to expand the definition of a political act to include day-to-day activities. For the Dead their actions and music were not intended as political statements, but rather as lifestyle choices. As friend of the band and hippie comic Wavy Gravy said, “Taking a shit is a political act . . . smoking it is even more political.”  

Simplicity was only one half of the Epicurean lifestyle, though. To be happy you also have to be a good person, and to be a good person according to Epicureanism, you have to be nice to people. Epicurus’ conception of Justice was a contractual one, in which we enter into agreement with others to basically leave each other alone, to live and let live. This is known as the Ethics of Reciprocity, or as you called it in Kindergarten, The Golden Rule. It could also be considered the unofficial motto of The Grateful Dead.

“The crew that goes to Grateful Dead shows is a special brand,” Bronx native and Dead Head Don Posner told THE PENINSULA TIMES-TRIBUNE on September 24, 1980.“They don’t screw around. They just do their drugs and enjoy the music.” In fact, wanting to be left alone, and leaving others well enough alone in turn, was sort of the Dead’s business model. To have a moveable bubble of energy floating around the country, meandering endlessly from city to city, a self-contained spiritual revival-cum-circus. The nightly shows were the Grateful Dead’s Epicurean Garden.

There’s a line by John Perry Barlow in the song “The Music Never Stopped,” an uptempo Bob Weir vehicle, that says “the music played the band.” That line stands out as representative of the Dead’s philosophy, that it was always about more than just the music. The Grateful Dead haven’t just played more live shows than any other band, they’ve also played more _free_ shows than any other band. Where most groups focus on hits and albums (read: commodities), the Grateful Dead focused instead on perfecting the communal experience of people using art and drugs to have a good time together.  

Which brings us back to that night in Pennsylvania. Bob Weir was certainly approaching his destination, at least in that particular rendition of “China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider,” but he didn’t get there alone. There was Bill Kreutzman stabilizing the song on drums. There was Phil Lesh on bass, off somewhere in “Phil Zone,” to be sure, but threading a solid melodic structure through the song that emphasized its rhythm. There was Godchaux on keys, clomping down thick chords; as with Lesh, Godchaux’s attempts to stabilize things song are quirky, but effective. And of course there was Jerry himself, taking a step back from the spotlight for a moment and switching jobs with Bob, adding his own chords to the rhythm. Weir took his turn in the most visible position, but he couldn’t have done it without the rest of the band. And the band couldn’t have done it without the audience. The Epicureans weren’t ascetics, they didn’t go off alone to distant mountain tops to think about the nature of happiness. They built a community and cultivated it.

Likewise, the Grateful Dead didn’t spend their careers hiding in a Californian studio, moving units and counting money. They toured the entire continent, with some of the more die-hard members of their community following along, and others meeting up with them along the way. And that’s something that might be even more important than having the same philosophical ideas as the Epicureans — the cultivation of a community focused on happiness. It’s this emphasis on actual cultivation, on the experimental lifestyle itself, that makes the Grateful Dead the most successful contemporary embodiment of Epicureanism.