T.S. Eliot wrote: “If you complain that a poet is obscure, and apparently ignoring you, the reader, or that he is speaking only to a limited circle of initiates from which you are excluded – remember that what he may have been trying to do was to put something into words which could not be said in any other way, and therefore in a language which may be worth the trouble of learning.”
The rhythm of a writer’s HUMAN VOICE is the most important thing.
The more original the rhythm, the more groundbreaking the voice.
There is always more ground to break, because the world is never the same. (This is what is meant by “process.”)
AI tells me that there are not more than 2,000 to 10,000 people alive on Planet Earth at any given moment who can truly begin to comprehend the most cutting-edge English-language creative writing and poetry, when it first comes out (as of 2026 AD). For this, I completely agree (because I know, in my gut, that it’s a fact) with AI. (It is a small city that can be called the eternal city.)
The truly newest new human writing challenges, very directly and at the same exact time not so directly at all, the way that almost everyone else on the Planet is thinking at that exact moment.
What is really rule-breaking and breaking-new-ground writing looks like mistakes and slippages and even “bad writing” to almost everyone else because this has never been seen before, by anyone, anywhere, ever. (They will be offended and they won’t know why.)
New writing has, by definition, NO ready-made audience for it. If it did, it would be anything but truly new writing.
It needs to create its own audience, one new reader at a time.
This has always been true, from Paul’s letters unto now.
Paul’s letters speak directly to his readers and it sounds like he KNEW HIS READERS PERSONALLY (including many women, which was his first radical breakthrough) even though he did not know all of them personally. He was writing to dozens, or at the very most, a few hundreds (like 200 or 300), of readers, and often, far less.
The greatest writing displays a process; and quotation = allusion or it isn’t worth anything, especially now but not especially.
“The LORD is my Shepherd; I shall not want.” – David
“I am the Good Shepherd.” – Jesus
END NOTE: The above appears as the introduction to a lengthy series of poems collectively entitled “micropoems” selections of which shall be appearing here this week. Thanks for your attention – or inattention, as the case may be.
END NOTE 2: Sentimentality is a cheap trick, if trick means paying a hooker.
“I write for children and angels.” – William Blake
The posthumous book THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING: THE LITERARY LETTERS OF HAROLD BLOOM was recently published (in 2026) by Yale University Press. It is a small, thin book, and there is no doubt that many of the literary letters Bloom wrote over his 89-year-life are not included. But this book is a representative sample, condensed and where every example has its relevance; as such, this book is like part of the gospel for anyone who loves creative literature in the twenty-first century and beyond.
Creative HUMAN literature, that is. In a world of lies and delusions, both mass and personal, one thing (at least) is for sure: the half dozen or so technical “wizards” right now who are building AI do not understand human artistic creativity, or its importance for our species, at all.
They are purely technical minds, so divorced from an understanding of real and true human, artistic creativity that they themselves are almost inhuman. THIS is why they have no problem trying to turn everyone who is now (still) human into a dollar-making (for them) robot.
THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING was published by Yale University Press with a grant. That means this is not a commercial book. The number of people who purchase this book will not be enough to make back the money it took to publish it. Whoever was behind this project understands that some things in the world are more important than money.
I said it was gospel. The letters of Paul (including the ones written in his name after his style that are included in the canonical Gospels) are some of the greatest creative writing that has been written on Planet Earth, any place, any time. THAT is why they’ve had such a profound impact for both (mostly) good, and ILL (just barely behind the good they have done). The surviving letters of Paul amount to a double handful; they were written for free and have changed the world more than any other human writing, ever. That is because they are WRITTEN SO WELL. (Paul’s letters survive all translations, and become new things that have grown from the old and so are part of the original source with consistent ties going back two thousand years, more relevant now than they were then.)
Bloom spent his life channeling the fact that HOW WELL something is written is the first criteria that should be considered when considering creative Literature with a capital L. Political considerations are also commercial considerations, one way or another. Any political agenda the good and true reader of classic imaginative literature brings to the material will be a highly imaginative, extremely fluid one, and it will be secondary. Rigidity of thought and purpose are not part of the highest (human) creative arts. Bending the mind and breaking the rules is what creative writing is for. Therefore, it will always be trampled into the dust by THE MACHINE, but it will never die there. It will rise from the mud like the most beautiful flowers that have ever been born on Planet Earth. This is because imaginative literature in its highest forms contains the very wisdom of humanity itself, not less and not more. So many of the greatest writers are essentially comedians in the end because this viewpoint finally transcends the tragic viewpoint. It sometimes seems heartless to make the mind rise above it all but this is what the greatest writing actually does, which is one reason (but just one reason) why it is often called “transcendent.” It strips away the delusions and shows humans what they are, what they were, and what they might become. The comic viewpoint in the highest levels of writing transcends all tragedies. After taking very deep account of them first.
In one of these letters, Bloom writes about himself: “Lord knows what I am. Not a poet, critic, scholar, historian, psychoanalyst, philosopher, or theosophist – but a worthless mélange of the gang of it.”
All creative writers worth anything in 2026 need to be all of the above, and even more, somehow. That is just one reason why it takes almost all the best of the best writers so long to find their voices, starting now, or yesterday. The complexity of the world has blown itself way out of proportion. The writer who ignores this is not doing their (or his or her) job.
There are at least 200 separate academic disciplines in the world today. In most of them, the number of experts in the world who can truly understand the real and true cutting edge of that discipline amounts to a few dozen at most.
This is probably also true for the most cutting-edge imaginative human literature right now, which is the most cutting-edge discipline there is (by far).
As such, it is a dark time.
As the world plunges down toward more darkness now, in the end the light will grow – or it will be extinguished.
“Theosophist” means imagining somewhere else (without abandoning the here and now).
“What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
– William Blake
NOTE TO READER: This is a philosophical kind of literary essay. That is why it is written in such an awkward, simple, friendly, open-hearted way. (1,000 words.)
There are enough technocrats in the world. Them and their billions and billions and billions of followers, who follow them because they follow the Golden Calf ($).
Some of these technocrats even believe that God is a computer game, and we are the characters.
These are some of the “smartest” minds in the world, in a technical sense. And their religion of the computer game matches real religion minus all of the redeeming qualities.
The world needs more philosophy, art, and religion, much, much more.
Philosophy, art, and religion are not the same things.
You need the first thing to build the second thing and the first two things take you to the third thing without you even knowing they are doing so and the third thing (which is the most important thing) continuously feeds back into the first two things, which are then strengthened accordingly, which makes them feed back into the third, and the process goes on into the future strengthening the philosopher, artist, and religious adept who is all the same one in different guises that sometimes meld with each other.
PHILOSOPHY = a mental way of living on this Planet and making it through without tearing your hair out (too many times) or hurting anyone else (as much as possible). It is a way of being, and the best philosophies do not even have names because they are so individualized and psychologically specific. The best philosophy for your life belongs to you alone and only aspects of it can ever be shared with anyone else alive on the Planet in any way. This is one reason why some of us end up communing with the dead so very, very long and very often.
LITERATURE = communing with the dead. Literature Is communing with the dead. It is not, totally NOT “canonical.” It is anything but academic. Literature itself is communing with the dead in a way that’s more alive than anything else. When you read Christopher Marlowe and get him, living ghosts are crowding your brain, including the ghost who created it all, most of all, Christopher Marlowe, who remains the single greatest creation of Christopher Marlowe, who is far more alive than most living humans are. Another reason why some of us end up communing with the dead so often is because so many of the “living” ones around us are dead. (It can be like Vincent Price in the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth.) Marlowe lived and died like his fictional creations lived and died. That is honesty.
Not all of the writers a good writer reads are dead; but the majority are. It is one of the very few known situations in life where your power increases vastly, slowly, and steadily after you are no longer here in the flesh.
(“So long lives this and this gives life to thee,” said the man who learned more from Marlowe than any other.)
ART= LITERATURE. Literature is the first art, and it started with the first meaningful grunt or groan that led to the First Word, when one human said it to one other human and that other human understood and said it to the third human and then they all understood, together. And next time, they did it again with the same sound, which was called The First Word. Now we have “language;” AND LITERATURE IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF LANUAGE. (The English language, the largest human language in the world, has a vocabulary so large it is technically uncountable.) You cannot create art without a philosophy of life. The philosophy of how to live (and how to stay alive) comes first, then living it, then saying it to someone else in a memorable way, which is literature, and takes forever to master and understand. Without a philosophy of life that comes first, you cannot create art, which takes a lifetime to perfect. The effort to live with the philosophy, then create out of it eventually (while practicing along the whole time), leads to feelings of real religion (leads to the artist becoming a religious adept), defined in the next paragraph.
RELIGION = imagining the possibilities beyond what our senses tell us in a serious, individual way. It is like a “sixth sense;” an invisible third eye; a soul feeling; something you turn to; NOT someone else’s rules; anything BUT someone else’s rules; everything that is NOT someone else’s rules, at the deepest level. Harold Bloom’s metaphor for this is “the oldest part of one’s self.”
REAL RELIGION does not involve other humans in the sense that everyone needs their own internal religion that no one else can understand or relate to or take away from them under any circumstances, and that means any circumstances. Then and only then can it be shared with any other humans in any way, including writing, which, in the end, only scratches the surface (but is enough up to a certain point; not after).
Harold Bloom called the above “a religion of one.” This turns you into a king or a queen on the face of the earth even if your pockets are empty and you have nowhere to stay; even if they have you behind bars, symbolic or literal ones (or both).
ALL THE PROBLEMS the world is having right now ARE CAUSED BY a scorching lack of philosophy, art, and religion in their truest senses. None of these things are only for an elite, they are for everyone in their own way. The theaters of Marlowe and Shakespeare were thronged with groundlings.
In the state of nature everyone is a poet but now hardly anyone knows it and almost no one acts like it. That is why the “smartest” minds in the world believe we are all just characters in a computer game.
END NOTE: In order to avoid being surveilled, all you need to do is step away from their machines. There is still PLENTY OF ROOM to do this whenever you want to – in the Americas.
“You’ve got to fight to keep your legendary love.” – Lou Reed
Franz Kafka said: “I have always been haunted by the feeling that I understand more than others, yet cannot make them understand.”
How a Reader reacts (perhaps, but not really perhaps) to this quotation says everything about who that Reader is.
Such a condition has nothing to do with formal education or monetary status. It has everything to do with the core essential Self.
All can read the quotation on a literal level.
Those who scoff and mock are in a VAST SUPER MAJORITY, while those who ponder and understand are in the tiniest of tiny minorities.
The quotation can be interpreted at least two general ways.
One: It is about the plight of the modern artist, even more now in 2026 than ever before.
Two: It is about the plight of modern humanity (what they used to call “modern man”) in general. That is, ultimately this is about the Universal All in the modern world (the modern world that started in its ultimate beginnings ten or twelve thousand years ago as far as we know it now).
Kafka’s three perhaps greatest works explore this profound, essential, existential condition in a way that few others have ever done.
THE BUG: the man who turns into a literal insect because he is so persecuted by both society at large and the basis for all society, the family.
THE TRIAL: the man who’s punished, ostracized, exiled, and finally murdered by society for absolutely no reason he ever even has time to figure out (he dies as a young man with a kind thrust of a knife into his chest by two strangers).
THE CASTLE: the man who must attain shelter within the Castle or freeze to death outside: and who’s only let in by “them” when it’s already too late.
Kafka’s (so-called fictional) prose visions are not “nightmarish,” they are realistic. They are dreamlike, but they are not fantastical. The world has not always been like this, but the world is like this now.
In the end, everyone is crucified, even Judas.
Dale the Drifter (images provided by Dale the Drifter)
Dolly Parton’s grandfather inspired her entire life in numerous ways. He was a wandering preacher who also played music. In many parts of Appalachia, preaching and music and religion and happiness and the Good Book all go together. Dolly was a gorgeous flowering of all that.
Their kind of religion is not the bad kind of religion. It is not even the judgmental kind.
It is the life-giving kind, the happy singing kind, the joyful kind, the everything-will-be-okay-including-DEATH-ITSELF kind.
In this kind of religion, anyone who suffers in any way at all is seen as holy instantaneously (more holy than they already were), and as someone we should all LOOK UP TO, not pity. Even children. ESPECIALLY CHILDREN.
There is little pity in this kind of religion.
What there is here is LOVE. Just love. Only love. All love. And love is the only thing there is. Even when it doesn’t LOOK (or feel) like it at all. You don’t even have to believe in God.
The best preaching never happens in churches, as Dolly’s grandfather knew very well.
It happens on the streets, on the sidewalks, in the parks, in the mountains, in the cities, or anywhere just one person suddenly feels the Holy Ghost inside and decides to connect with another “just one” person who also feels the Holy Ghost within themselves. These are epiphanies, moments, flashes of sunlight from behind the dark clouds, not constant things; but they leave an afterglow.
You can be gay, you can be trans, you can be black, white or green, you can be any color or creed under the sun or above it, you can be anything you want to be and already are.
The best preaching is informal, brief, fast, sudden, spontaneous, and OFTEN WORDLESS.
It often happens in less than a single second, with a single glance of the eyes. And then you pass on by. You always pass on by.
All it takes is two willing people who will remember one another even though they don’t even know each other’s names.
“The time will come when you’ll be blue.” – Hank Williams
It is hard to see someone crying (mostly genuine) tears over you even as you know they’re cheating on you (even though they won’t admit it to you) as you say, with great and utter finality, “I’ll see you around.” Your own tears do not appear in the moment; they appear, unannounced, years later, when you are long gone, somewhere else.
Willie Nelson, perhaps the greatest heir of Hank Williams of all time, used to cheat on all of his wives, all of the time.
And all of them would catch him at it. And the thing is, HE WOULD NEVER, NEVER, EVER admit it, not even when the women placed the red-handed evidence right in front of the Red-headed Stranger’s face.
And I know how that goes. It is called “acting” like nothing ever happened, and some of us are (just naturally) as good at that kind of acting as Marlon Brando was at the art kind of acting (and he is the greatest American actor of all time, alongside Marilyn). (Addiction is a great teacher of acting: “No, OF COURSE I haven’t been drinking again,” etc. etc. etc….)
The song, “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” is a song that has been said to literally DEFINE ALL OF modern American country music.
Hank dictated the lyrics to his fiancé, about his recently ex-wife, as they rode/drove in a car from Tennessee to Louisiana. The lyrics suddenly appeared before him, almost as in a dream, all in their full glory, and he just let them come out, while she wrote them down. When something like that is happening to a person like Hank, you don’t take time to criticize, IF you understand him at all, which she did. (Hank also died in a car not too long afterward – literally.)
His voice as he sings this song is powerful, brokenhearted, and hillbilly. The powerful and the brokenhearted are utterly raw and natural. The “hillbilly” is/was entirely an act, but a brilliant act, like a Shakespearean thing.
Hank was also one of the first people to take the cowboy hat out of the American West and move it on over to the US South. Now, cowboy hats are everywhere down there, like in Nashville (even though they kicked him out when he was alive). Yes, the cowboy hat thing is because of Hank, who sometimes called himself Luke the Drifter. And that is just one reason why (just one reason why) he really is the Shakespeare of American country music. Country music, along with the blues and folk, created rock and roll. Just one reason why Willie Nelson is great is because of how he combined “hippie” and “redneck” and turned them into something all-new.
When Ray Charles sings this song, his voice is sad, slow, sweet, stately, surrendering-to-the-moment, soulful: “truth and beauty,” to quote John Keats, who has a lot more in common with Ray and Hank than most people will ever know (or care to know). Just one reason why Ray Charles is great is because he could sing ANY kind of music with utter conviction, which is also Shakespearean.
This week the hapless schmuck who sometimes calls himself D the D (which is a way of marking the passage of time, the shifting of personality, and the ongoing, never-stopping flow of human evolution) offers little more than quotations by another writer (at the end).
This is NOT because the Dale Barrigar guy behind the Drifter persona (character) has nothing to say, but because this week he has decided that only Saint John the Divine can say it better.
When he wrote the 12,000-word book REVELATION, John was an exile on the island of Patmos. In other words (as with Ovid, Dante, Dostoevsky, and too many others too count), they kicked him out and sent him away. When they sent Dante away, they said to him: if we see your face around here again, we will chop off your head and burn you at the stake. And they definitely meant it.
No wonder he went away and imagined them all in hell for the rest of his life (until he started writing about heaven when he figured out he was about to go there soon). He loved his home city and his home region and never saw it again. He started loving Beatrice instead, who he had seen in the flesh exactly two times, nine years apart, for less than one minute total. She inspired the most beautiful, heavenly, memorable dream he ever had in his life.
Us folks in the USA often cast stones at Russia because they’re always sending everyone to Siberia and we should indeed do so if we value human freedom at all.
But in the meantime, us Americans should also look around us a little bit, since we have our own AMERICAN SIBERIA that is more invisible but no less (usually) PSYCHOLOGICALLY traumatizing.
Psychological trauma, or damage to one’s brain and personality, causes physical pain and illness, too. But many people also often forget that struggle and trauma also (often) cause IMPROVEMENT in the one who undergoes the trauma; very often, that is, they become, and continue to become, a better person because of it.
In 2014, there was a guy in Chicago who lost his job because of TEACHER BURNOUT (after twenty years), wicked bipolar depression, and contentious disagreements about technology usage in the classroom (he was very much against it, and they were very much for it, and trying to force him into it) with the “powers that be,” then couldn’t find another job because of current conditions.
Eventually he tried everything else, including manual labor and clerical work in a book-binding warehouse. Then it was slaving away twelve hours a day as a vastly underpaid (making the equivalent of less than minimum wage in Illinois while being responsible for seventeen students including during the covid pandemic since the Catholic schools went back right away, at least half of the students having behavioral problems and three of them having medical conditions so serious that they required near-constant monitoring; one undersized kid’s lips would turn blue from a heart condition, another obese one would have a diabetic emergency, and a third would have what appeared to be seizures from his autism; there were three girls in the class who were like brilliant angels and a few other students who he stayed for), Catholic elementary school teacher. He left all the other jobs he attempted, including this one, only after literal mental and physical collapse: manic depression again, but also the impossible circumstances.
Since he had never been on Facebook because he hated it and its creator the moment it came out, all of the people who used to know him back in the old days thought he was either dead, or most likely in jail, or even more likely, the madhouse.
He was aware that most of the people who used to know him thought this about him, and a few people seemed way too comfortable telling him to his face that they thought it.
A decade of internal exile occurred (time slips away so fast), but during that time he also continued working on something else very happily in secret.
And he quietly turned himself (almost without knowing it) into someone who could, quite simply, do all the things he’d ever wanted to do.
In the meantime, there was one half-assed suicide attempt caused by hypomanic insomnia (three Adderall, nicotine-patch, caffeine-fueled days of no sleep) leading to total, stumbling, falling-down, not-thinking-straight, delirious exhaustion.
He was saved when he looked over and saw his Siberian Husky puppy sitting there looking at him in deep concern, which immediately made him drop the suicide idea he was half-pondering and rush over to comfort the dog instead.
He also had several other bipolar nervous breakdowns that were not job-related (a few of which did indeed land him in the hospital for a little bit), an ongoing battle with more substances than can be listed here, a stroke that culminated it all, and a war against anonymity that he ended up winning so successfully that he now embraces his anonymity and seeks to extend it indefinitely and as long as he can.
The handful of other authentic, genuine literary artists (not just writers, who are cheaper than a dime a dozen, and not even just good writers, who are amazingly rare) he knows, or knows of, in America have all had their own equivalent battles and wars (in their own ways) with AMERICAN SIBERIA.
“BLESSED ARE THEY WHO READ, AND THEY WHO HEAR THE WORDS OF THIS PROPHECY, AND KEEP THOSE THINGS WHICH ARE WRITTEN IN THEIR HEARTS: FOR THE TIME IS AT HAND.”
“I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA, THE BEGINNING AND THE ENDING, SAITH THE LORD, WHICH IS, AND WHICH WAS, AND WHICH IS TO COME: THE ALMIGHTY.”
“AND HE SAID UNTO ME: THESE SAYINGS ARE FAITHFUL AND TRUE: AND THE LORD GOD OF THE HOLY PROPHETS SENT HIS ANGEL TO SHOW HIS SERVANTS THE THINGS WHICH MUST SHORTLY BE DONE.”
“AND HE CARRIED ME AWAY IN THE SPIRIT TO A GREAT AND HIGH MOUNTAIN.”
“This malignity is renewed every day against man, as it is written, Psalm 37, 32: ‘The wicked watches the righteous, and seeks to slay him.’”
– Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) was one of the most brilliant scientists and mathematicians who ever lived (he invented the calculator). Suddenly, toward the end of his life (and he probably did this because of intuitions that the end was coming, although it did not come immediately), he largely dropped science and mathematics and turned to religion instead.
He wrote a mostly secret book that was not fully published during his lifetime, and also was not published until almost a decade after his death.
The title now is Pensees. It’s a French word which means “Thoughts” in English.
All of the thoughts are about religion, per se.
But the thoughts are not only for so-called “religious” people.
These days, in places like the USA, Canada, and the UK, in so-called educated circles (which are very large, made up of millions of people), being “religious” is considered a badge of shame.
I myself used to share this attitude, for years.
But I grew out of it.
I realized long ago that I “grew out of it” because of enormous personal struggles and pain that “drove me against the wall,” so to speak. In other words, the equation became, for me: believe or die. A lot of that had to do with getting over my own alcoholism, which gradually, then suddenly, turned into the most extreme variety of alcoholism ever known to humankind on Planet Earth. I never went to A.A. (except twice) but I read many books about it and devised my own form of the exact same thing.
I’ve already promised myself that if I live to the age of 80, I can (maybe) start drinking and smoking (perhaps in moderation) again. Only twenty-one more years to go!
…
I’ve been fascinated with the Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky ever since I first discovered him and his works in 1983, A.D., when I was an uncertain, shy, questing, and rebellious sixteen-year-old living in Quincy, Illinois, USA, a town along the Mississippi River twenty miles away from Mark Twain’s Hannibal and known for producing uncertain, shy, questing, rebellious sixteen-year-olds.
There was a reading class at the high school and the teacher had a hideous skin disease that made her hands and face look, almost, like she had leprosy.
She was also enormously overweight.
She was one of the most human, most understanding women, or people, that I’ve ever met, and ever known.
She didn’t make me do any of the things the other students were doing, and had to do.
She didn’t even make me show up on time.
I was late every single day.
And she let me be late.
All I had to do was read.
During that semester, I read all of the major works of both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. That means all of it, all of their long novels, and all of their well-known stories too. (Both of them also wrote thousands of pages of nonfiction and correspondence, and I did not read this material at that time. Wow, their hands, and eyes, must have gotten tired.) I hung out with friends a lot, but also, I did not hang out with friends a lot, at all. I stayed home, alone, reading, not because I had nothing better to do, but because I wanted to.
I didn’t write papers on the material, either.
All I did was read. And occasionally she would ask me to sit with her and tell her about what I was reading while she drank her coffee. That was all.
Dostoevsky’s life always fascinated me as much as his writing did.
After joining a radical reading group, he was found out by the secret police and sent to Siberia for nine years when he was in his twenties.
First, the Czar staged a mock execution where he made Dostoevsky and the other prisoners literally face a firing squad and think that the rifles pointing at their faces and chests were about to go off, blowing them to Kingdom Come, immediately.
One of the prisoners, immediately, turned into a gibbering idiot and never recovered.
A horseman had ridden up at the last minute and informed the prisoners that they were being sent to Siberia for nine years, not executed. The whole thing was staged. And they were granted their reprieve at the very last second before they thought they were about to die. No joke!
They knew Dostoevsky was a writer who loved to read. The illegal reading group he’d been a member of read secret pamphlets about issues like freeing the serfs, which would happen soon anyway but was also unthinkable (for the Czar and others of his ilk) at the time.
“THEY” did Dostoevsky one favor. (Russians are very strange.)
As he lived his life in the Siberian labor camp for four years (his other five years in Siberia were as a common soldier) among murderers, rapists, gang-bangers, and thieves, they allowed him to read one book in the evenings.
That book was the New Testament.
He read the whole thing cover to cover so many times that, after the four years was over, he never had to read it again, because he had it memorized, for life. The former educated agnostic was never an agnostic again. The murderers, rapists, gang-bangers, and thieves around him, and the New Testament, put together, had changed his tune, BIG TIME.
All of his subsequent writings, like Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov, have to be read in this light, no matter what one’s religious beliefs are or are not. Both Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein, called The Brothers Karamazov the greatest novel ever written. With blurbs like that, from folks such as those, you can’t go wrong!
When Blaise Pascal dropped everything and turned to religion, he was doing so because he suddenly knew that he was going to die. Such things wake you up pretty fast, unless you are really (mentally, spiritually) just sleeping.
Blaise had always been a sickly, although also life-loving, person (many sickly people are very life-loving, often more life-loving than so-called healthy people, I’ve found). He had always known he was going to die. But suddenly he knew it in his heart, soul, bones, liver, limbs, fingertips, toes, and blood. It is called his “night of fire.”
There are some of us who can quietly accept the dissolution of their bodies and spirits and quietly accept that fact believing that nothing will happen after death. They believe that death is the end of everything, for everyone, always, everywhere. Maybe they are just tired, and want to go to sleep, period. And that is okay.
Even when I was a so-called educated agnostic like all the rest of the educated agnostics out there who throng the world (I’ve never been an atheist, or rather, not for very long), I had a very sneaking suspicion that death isn’t, as in IS NOT, the end. I was, and still am, enormously comforted knowing that Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and Hank Williams (aka Luke the Drifter), a half dozen of the smartest, most creative people I’ve ever heard of, all believe(d) the same thing/s, deeply and lastingly. They’ve encouraged me (almost) as much as the Bible has (although they were all encouraged by the Bible in the first place), and, as such, I think of them as comic, open-souled prophets as much as singers and songwriters.
Then again, my very first waking moments (that I can remember) told me that I had already been alive, somewhere else. It was a real dawning of consciousness and it had more to do with the “somewhere else” than it did with the “here and now.” It cannot really be put into words other than saying “it cannot be put into words” (so I won’t even try).
In the old days (as in during the nineteenth century and for the rest of human history before that), almost EVERYBODY believed these things. Even Charles Darwin, even Mark Twain. Although sometimes they also said they did not believe these things – like any rational, thinking person might tend to do now, sometimes.
Jack White sometimes says on stage before beginning a song, “I always feel like I’m in the right place at the wrong time.”
He also says, in the song “Seven Nation Army,” by the White Stripes: “Don’t want to hear about it. Every single one’s got a story to tell. Everyone knows about it. From the Queen of England to the Hounds of Hell. And if I catch you coming back my way, I’m gonna serve it to you. And that ain’t what you want to hear. But that’s what I’ll do.”
Jesus shouted out more than once at the people around him, including the disciples, “HOW MUCH LONGER DO I HAVE TO STAY HERE WITH YOU INCREDIBLE FOOLS!?” He never physically attacked anyone; but he verbally crushed people all the time, and tried to get away from them as much as he tried talking sense to them, sometimes. See the Gospels.
Pascal also quotes a Midrash from the Jews: “Better is a poor and wise child than an old and foolish king who cannot see the future.” This quote is both literal AND symbolic. It applies to literal kings and literal wise children; but also, it’s about SYMBOLIC wise children, and SYMBOLIC “evil kings,” like that ex-boss you hate/d so much, or the wife or husband or parent who’s always trying to lord it over you.
Stephen King is right. There are many evil clowns among us who are always watching, waiting, peering, peeking from the bushes with their pants down around their ankles – watching where they are not wanted, waiting where they are not needed nor required, with their greedy, fascinated, perverted, envious, covetous, delirious, red-rimmed eyes.
We do not need to look at the top of the pile to find evil.
Enemies surround us. All of us!
Some of us even within our own homes, until and unless we, somehow, escape.
No one knows why there is evil. I think not even Jesus, the human, and the smartest person who ever lived (see the Gospels before you say no), knew why. His intelligence was, among other things, the culmination of the Jewish prophets Joseph, Moses, David, Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, and the others. He could never have existed without them, as he knew and said. He knew the Bible (as it was written at that time) better than anyone else. See the Gospels.
Most of us (or maybe even all of us) don’t even know what evil really is!
Critical and Crucial Literary End Note: One of the best depictions of the life of the spirit, as it really is, that I’ve ever read, is in Leila Allison’s wildly imaginative short story “My Fair Wiccan,” as well as in her Feeble Fables of the Fantasmagorical and many others of her works. That is why (among other heartfelt reasons) I feel so honored to be her Co-Editor at SARAGUN SPRINGS!
He was only nineteen but he’d always been sensitive to the weather and he could tell that it would snow soon.
The year was 1986. It was seven days into the new year and he was standing on a train station platform in downtown Chicago, waiting for the train that would take him to see his friend at the Great Lakes Naval Base on Lake Michigan, forty-six miles north.
The train would stop at a lot of stops along the way so he was looking at a ninety minute journey.
He had a shoulder bag over his shoulder with a single change of clothes in it, plus a few personal items and paper and pencils.
In his hands, he held a copy of Henry Miller’s book Tropic of Cancer which he’d just purchased yesterday and hadn’t started reading yet and a large, hot cup of black coffee.
His friend had asked him to come and visit, in his mysterious way.
His friend had not wanted to join the Navy.
He’d been forced into it by a judge, who’d given him the choice of the Navy or jail, son.
The crime had been auto theft.
The reason for the crime had been joy-riding and a love of breaking the rules.
…
As the train moved north and the snow began to fall outside the windows, he’d begun to read the Henry Miller book.
He was blown away by the opening pages, so blown away that it was like the top of his head came off showing him the sky with Moses in the clouds and an ax had chopped open the frozen sea within him so the ship could move again.
When he came to the following quotation, he was so blown away that he sat looking out the windows at the falling, blowing snow for a long time, thinking about it, reveling in it, loving it, fanning the pages and smelling the book, which smelled wonderful. This work was as good as Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway – or better.
“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”
…
He got off the train and the station platform was abandoned, as in, there were no other people anywhere.
The train pulled away and the snow kept falling.
It was a blizzard now.
He had no idea where to go or how to get there.
His friend was supposed to meet him here, but he was nowhere to be seen, which wasn’t a surprise, after all. His friend was one of the most unreliable persons he’d ever met.
The payphone was broken.
He huddled under the platform shelter with the snow blowing into his face and he pulled his cap down over his ears and forehead and kept pulling his hood tighter over his head, huddling and moving around for warmth.
He kept looking around but there was really nothing to be seen other than snow.
Lake Michigan was very close and it is known to help produce some of the biggest blizzards in North America whenever it wants to.
He kept looking around, but all he could see was snow. No roads, no people, no sidewalks, no towns, no lights other than the few on the station platform, which glowed yellow. It was nighttime, completely dark.
Suddenly he saw a Jeep blasting through the snow way over there at an enormous speed with its headlights cutting into the darkness and then the Jeep skidded, slipped, and slid and looked like it almost rolled over into a ditch and he knew his friend had slammed on the brakes, which was a habit of his.
He ran down the stairs of the station platform which were thickly covered in snow and headed toward the Jeep, jumping through the snow, because he knew it was his friend.
As he climbed inside the Jeep which had its covering on, it was warm and cozy and his friend told him they needed to hurry back to the base because he’d “borrowed” the Jeep and he needed to replace it ASAP before they noticed it was gone.
And they blasted off together through the snow, laughing and talking.
…
The barracks looked like an extra-stark, extra-stripped-down college dormitory. They sat down on two bunks opposite each other in the otherwise empty and abandoned room, and lit their cigarettes.
That was when the main character of this story’s friend told him that they weren’t supposed to be smoking in here and that there weren’t supposed to be any visitors in here at this time, either.
Then again, he continued, they weren’t supposed to be drinking in here either. He reached under the mattress, pulled out a pint of cheap vodka, twisted off the cap, took a huge swig and handed it to the main character, who also took a large, greedy swig followed by another hard drag on his cigarette.
We also aren’t supposed to be smoking weed in here, said the main character’s friend, as he removed an enormous joint from his shirt pocket and fired it up.
They ashed their cigarettes straight onto the floor and dropped them into an old beer bottle with a little water in the bottom afterward. They finished the joint and continued passing the vodka back and forth between them. It was Saturday night and most of the sailors, said his friend, were out at the bars right now. Most of us who live around here, said he, never even go out on ships, but they still call us sailors. What a fucking joke!
The main character’s friend jumped up and went to the closet and yanked it open and showed him a case of tuna fish cans. All I ever eat is tuna fish and water because I can’t stand the mess hall with all these idiots in the Navy.
I’m going insane and I wish that I had gone to jail instead of this. And the truth is I just got out of jail because they threw me in the brig for dereliction of duty after I slept in one too many mornings again. And all they have me doing is useless routine paperwork that doesn’t mean anything and that nobody ever checks. When I was in the brig there was a guy in the cell next to me who was in a straightjacket. They said, so he won’t hurt himself. Maybe so. You should have seen his eyes.
Let’s go out on the town! said his friend. I have a friend I want you to meet. We can borrow that Jeep again. Fuck ’em!
The main character said Great! and headed to the bathroom first.
There was an extremely muscular sailor coming out of the shower dripping with water and wearing nothing but flip-flops and a towel around his waist.
As soon as he saw the main character, he flashed a huge, toothy grin, dropped the towel, and turned around.
The main character hightailed it out of the bathroom as fast as possible. He would have to take a piss out in the snow on the way to retrieve the Jeep.
…
The strip club where they were meeting the friend was called Cowgirl Country and it was crowded with sailors. It was loud, smoky and filled with rock and roll music being blasted on the massive speakers all around the joint for the girls, and they were girls, as in teenagers, or very young women, to dance to, over there up on the stage. In the bathroom, Cowgirl CUNTRY was scrawled in huge, dripping pink letters across the wall above the urinals and it had a heart with an arrow through it above it too, dripping with blood.
The main character and his friend were chaining down their cigarettes, chugging their beers and ordering shots of whiskey so frequently that the waitress started asking them, Are you sure?
The main character’s friend was fascinated by the strippers over there but the main character was fascinated by the mysterious waitress, because he’d instantly fallen, deeply, in love with her the second he saw her. She was better-looking than the strippers and her eyes were fascinating and uncanny and she smelled like an unbelievable dream and then it occurred to him that maybe she was sometimes a stripper too, or maybe not, and he wondered which one.
The main character’s friend’s friend arrived.
He was wearing his sailor suit and he had a small mustache that instantly reminded the main character of none other than Adolf Hitler, unfortunately.
But the main character decided to think that the guy looked like Charlie Chaplin instead.
This guy was strange. The main character was leery of him. The guy was friendly enough, but he was a strange fellow somehow. It was hard to pin down. But he was strange. He was weird. There was something up with him. There was something about him. He wasn’t completely normal. He wasn’t totally kosher. The main character continued to analyze him out of the corners of his eyes as they all drank together, smoking and rocking out to the music. LIGHT MY FIRE by The Doors was blasting from the speakers at the moment and two lovely ladies up on stage were performing a routine that Sappho would perhaps have appreciated, if she had been an American drunk like everyone in here was. They drank and smoked and rocked out to the music but it was far too loud to have anything resembling an extended conversation. That was okay, the alcohol was pulsing in everyone’s veins better than morphine, better than holding hands and making out, better than literature (because it was literature), better than anything, and the music was thrilling. Now the song BLASTING from the speakers was WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS by Zeppelin, which has got to be their greatest song, he thought.
IF IT KEEPS ON RAININ’, THE LEVEE’S GOING TO BREAK. AND WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS, I HAVE NO PLACE TO STAY.
Just as Robert Plant sang, I’M GOING TO CHICAGO, the main character’s friend leaned over and shouted in his ear, LET’S GET OUT OF HERE! We know somewhere better than this.
The guy with the Hitler mustache in the sailor suit was staring at him and then they saluted each other and smiled.
…
There were four gigantic American, small-town, white-bread sailors sitting around the kitchen table in the apartment smoking freebase cocaine. They passed the bong from one to the other of them in a mechanical fashion and never did anything else. They did not speak, they did not look up, they did not say hello or sayonara, they just passed the bong between them. The smoke was as white as the fresh snow piling up outside, as white as Moby Dick, whiter, so cold it was hot, so thick and dense it was like, it was like, it was like sex.
The guy who ran the show was a small black man, as in maybe four feet ten inches tall. He wore wide blue bell-bottom pants, cowboy boots and a flowery purple shirt with a big collar. He had a large Afro and his face was covered in scars, worse than Charles Bukowski. He collected the money periodically as he refilled the bong for the sailors. The four sailors were giants and this little man was a badass, such a badass that his badassness radiated off him. For sure he had a gun hidden away just out of sight and knew how to use it, fast. The four gigantic sailors treated him like he was the king of the universe. All they wanted was the freebase cocaine, over and over and over, and over, again. For hours, maybe for days. The little man could give it to them, and would give it to them, as long as they behaved themselves. It was weird. You could tell that everyone was expected to behave themselves. If they didn’t, they would be gone, probably escorted from the apartment at gun point. How the main character knew all this he didn’t know, but he knew he knew it. He leaned against the wall, drunk as hell, or heaven, smoking a cigarette and watching the show. His friend and his friend’s friend were in the other room of the small, dumpy apartment, doing who knew what at this point.
The king of the universe had taken a liking to him. He didn’t know why, but he knew he liked the man back. The man would periodically smile at him in a sad, serious way. The man liked him. And he liked the man back. Neither of them knew why. And neither of them cared. The reason didn’t care. The world didn’t know. The sky didn’t understand. The sympathy between their black and white souls was what mattered.
The small, powerful black man came over to where the white main character was leaning against the wall. He offered the main character the bong. For free, he said.
The main character took it, mostly out of curiosity.
The white, snowy smoke poured through the tube of the bong into his lungs.
It was like shooting to the moon. Better than an orgasm. Way, way better. MUCH, MUCH, MUCH BETTER!
He glanced over at the four giants at the table. They were all staring at the tabletop with their heads down, waiting for the bong to be returned to them. He knew why now.
The king of the universe was at the stove cooking up some more of the stuff. He looked serious, businesslike, and sad. And like a badass.
Charlie Chaplin came into the kitchen as if on a mission and handed the main character two tabs of LSD with pictures of Jupiter on them, like synchronicity. The main character impulsively took the tabs and placed them on his tongue, in honor of Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the Grateful Dead. This is my body and blood. Eat these in remembrance of me.
…
Suddenly he found himself leaning, not against the wall, but against the stove.
The king of the universe, even though he was much shorter, was suddenly in his face with his face so enraged it was insane, it was madness, it was terrifying.
YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER! DO YOU SEE WHAT SHIT IS SITTING ON THE STOVE! YOU GONNA BLOW THIS WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PLACE SKY HIGH! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THE STOVE! ANYONE ELSE ASS WOULD BE THROWED THE FUCK OUT NOW! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THE STOVE!
…
The main character was sitting on the couch in the other room when the four lovely ladies arrived. Charlie Chaplin and his friend were over in the corner, engaged in some sort of wild conversation about utter nonsense. He had bowed out of the conversation and come over to the couch because they were talking such utter, useless bullshit. It was the way of the world. The main character couldn’t stand small talk. He was, when small talk was going on, the quietest person in the world, always looking for an escape route. Anyone who knew him at all well knew that he was always suddenly disappearing without warning. They knew he frequently disappeared that way, but they didn’t know why. NO. They didn’t know why. And they would never know why.
The four ladies were all beautiful, all black, and all wearing long blonde wigs and fur coats which they threw off and very tiny clothes, very-very tiny clothes, such tiny clothes that he observed them and wondered if the clothes were clothes, or were they underwear, pink and yellow and white and purple undies. They were laughing and joking around and they all smelled so good the main character was transported to Shangri-La, or was it Katmandu by Bob Seger (the song started playing in his head for a moment), by their perfume. Holy shit. Smelling good was one thing, but how in the world could they smell THAT GOOD! Like a magic carpet ride just smelling them. Impossible.
There was one lady who was more special than all the other ladies.
Her skin was glistening and her blonde hair was glistening and her big, beautiful, long-lashed eyes were glistening and shining.
Suddenly she was sitting in his lap.
Her arms were around his neck.
Her wet tongue was in his ear.
Then she whispered into his ear and asked him if he wanted to go into the bedroom.
He noticed that his friend and his friend’s friend had disappeared with the other three ladies, obviously into the bedroom or maybe into the bathroom, or maybe both, maybe separately, maybe together. The world will never know, he thought.
The main character did not want to go into the bedroom.
But he did want her to keep sitting in his lap. She was soft and sweet and beautiful.
He hugged her, smelled her beautiful smell, snuggled his face into her neck and then down on her chest near her breasts, which bulged from her tiny, white, bra-like top.
She stayed in his lap for a long while hugging him back and sometimes smiling at him with her gold-capped teeth.
She said, I like you. You okay.
Then she jumped up out of his lap, landed on her high heels very gracefully and danced away out of his life into the kitchen.
He missed her. Wow did he miss her! Man did he miss her.
And he would miss her for the rest of his life.
…
Charlie Chaplin was standing on the carpet in front of him, hovering there.
Then he turned into Adolf Hitler, who saluted him.
Then he turned into Charlie Chaplin, who laughed at him.
Then he turned into Adolf Hitler.
Then he turned into Charlie Chaplin.
Then he turned into Adolf Chaplin.
Then he turned into Charlie Hitler.
Hitler laughed at him and Chaplin saluted him.
Then they disappeared out the door into the snowy American night.
…
His friend and himself were running, they were running side by side across the snowy American fields, so fast and so far that they were not running, they were flying like astronauts, then he finally collapsed into the snow because he couldn’t breathe, his lungs burned, he struggled for breath, and his friend fell down beside him.
He realized he hadn’t eaten any food in over twenty-four hours. Then he saw that they were on the frozen, wind-swept, abandoned Lake Michigan beach.
He looked up, and saw the sun rising over the lake. It looked heavenly, angelic, magnetic, prophetic. It glowed like God’s smiling face. Then it turned back into just the sun, red and yellow and gold. It comforted him to know that most Americans believe, they believe, these idiot, ignorant American people, in life after death.
I am an American, Chicago-born, he said, inside, to himself, quoting Augie March. Then he added, God bless the world!
He realized he’d said it out loud and got embarrassed.
But his friend said, Yes. God bless the world.
The blue, icy lake looked as pure and blue as a glacier, like the glaciers that made it, and the sun shone down upon it, somehow biblically. Ten or twelve thousand years ago this place was an Ice Age.
They lay there in their boots and coats and stocking caps in the snow, both looking up into the clear blue sky. The main character kept thinking about Ken Kesey again, and Jerry Garcia with his missing finger, and Jack Nicholson, and the Nurse, and the Chief, and how one, just one, one, and only one, flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
As if reading his mind, and maybe he was, because sometimes he did, and always had, which was just one reason why they were friends, and always would be, even after they would never see each other again, his friend said, They’ll throw me back in the brig because I borrowed the Jeep.
