ORE OR GENE

On Salon, in a piece by Scott Rosenberg (whoever he is), this sentence, sweet and unchecked, caught my eye:

“It's a mistake to think of human creativity as a kind of limited natural resource, like an ore waiting for society to mine; it is more like a gene that will turn on given the right cues.”*

I am always amazed at how easily we do exempt the mind from fetters.

No American in her right mind would dare to ascribe athletic prowess to each and every one of us, yet there we go: Inside each of us lurks an untapped Picasso; if given just the right mix of Cabernet and Pinot Noir, our pens would flow with abundantly touching visions of our inner Macondos; yes, inside every Sarah Palin hides the ghost of Thomas Jefferson; in every humdrum architect sings Sir Christopher Wren.

Is the reality so hard to swallow, then? The plain, humble acceptance of the fact that most of us – present company most certainly included – are simply not that great?

--
* It would be interesting to see this point argued rather than posited. I cannot think of any study that shows this, but then I perhaps haven't worked in the field of creativity research long enough.

WHAT FICKLE GOD

(This piece appeared in slightly modified form and with a different title -- what's up with that, dear Editor? -- in Issue 13 of The Drawbridge, Summer 2009)


The ice was already melting when Specialist Sabrina Harman posed for snapshots. She hunches low in the frame, her gloved right hand raised in a glorious thumbs-up, a radiant smile lights up her face. Inches from that beaming face: the mouth of a man, agape, stopped in mid-rattle, bandages over his eyes, coagulated blood streaking his cheeks. This man, she was told, had died of a heart attack. There was no way, she knew, this man had died of a heart attack. Still: her fabulous thumbs-up and her radiant smile. After the pictures were taken, Specialist Harman zipped up the body bag. And walked away.
Manadel al-Jamadi had been arrested at his house in Baghdad early in the morning of November 4, 2003. According to eyewitnesses, Jamadi was conscious – walking, talking -- when he was led into a shower room at Abu Ghraib for interrogation. Forty-five minutes later, Jamadi was dead. His interrogator had the prisoner hooded, his hands tied high behind his back, shackled to a window bar. This position is known as Palestinian hanging, or strappado. It crushes the ribs; the lungs and the diaphragm have only little room to expand. Put simply: Manadel al-Jamadi was crucified. He died within thirty minutes. On his way home, the interrogator threw Jamadi’s bloodied hood in the trash; the hood was never found.
When questioned about the photographs, Specialist Harman said: “I guess we weren’t really thinking: Hey, this guy was just murdered. I know it looks bad. But it was just -- Hey, it’s a dead guy, it’d be cool to get a photo.”
We only know of Jamadi through these photographs. His arrest and transfer were never recorded, let alone his death. Jamadi simply did not exist. His corpse was smuggled out of the prison on a stretcher, an I.V. in its arm; a local taxi-driver was paid to dispose of the body; the body was never found.
When questioned, his interrogator confirmed that no information was obtained from the prisoner.

* * *

In the Pathologie -- the mortuary – of the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, half an hour north of Berlin, a skull stands on the windowsill of the small shared doctors’ office. Tibetan monks use the skulls of their masters as bowls to drink milk from, but this is nothing like that. An electrical cord runs through a bullet hole in the back – one or the other handy surgeon had converted the skull to a lamp, light streaming out of the eyes and nostrils, light seeping from between clenched teeth. Likely the owner of the skull was one of the thousands of Soviet POWs that passed through the camp during 1942. It was cheaper to kill the Soviet prisoners-of-war than to feed them. They entered the camp through Turm A; then they were marched directly to the crematory -- Station Z. In the antechamber, an SS doctor told them to disrobe and took their vital signs. Then he showed them into the next room, where their height was to be measured. This room was double-walled; a gramophone blasted military marches. The prisoners put their heads against a set of slats with measurement marks; there were holes between the slats and behind the holes stood soldiers with their guns. No last words for these prisoners, no last look at their loved ones. Extinguished ,just like that: a bullet through the brain stem and down they went. You could just picture some young internist marveling at the neatness of the hole in this particular skull – dead center and just the right diameter. Later, in 1943, a gas chamber was installed in Station Z. Much more efficient. Much cleaner. In case of attempted escape, there would be a public hanging in front of the assembled prisoners; strappado was the method of choice.

* * *

Sometime in March or April 1943, Stella Goldschlag stood at her window in the Sammellager – the former Jewish nursing home in the Grosse Hamburgerstrasse. It was the early evening of a gorgeous Spring day, and heaven knows those are rare in Berlin. From her window, she had a good view of the Jewish cemetery -- right underneath was the grave of Moses Mendelssohn, the great scholar and philosopher from the time of Frederick the Great. Mendelssohn had been a big proponent of the integration of Jews and Germans; he had done the first Hebrew-to-German translation of the Torah, as a service to the gentiles. On an open space in that venerable cemetery with its picturesquely sunken monuments, Stella noted much laughter and merriment. A few of the guards had taken off their uniform jackets; they were playing soccer. Four jackets marked the goal posts. The ball they were using must be flat, Stella thought, it refuses to bounce. Then she looked more closely. The object that the guards kicked back and forth was not a soccer ball. It was a human skull.
Stella had a secret of her own. Stella was a Greifer, a catcher: Each day she went into town and made her living pointing out fellow Jews to the Gestapo. For every person she brought in, the Gestapo paid her 20 Reichsmark. More importantly, for every person she brought in she could point out a prisoner – a friend, a family member – and that person would be spared. Except that they wouldn’t. When Stella found out, she did keep up her gruesome business, if just to save her own life and that of her fellow-catcher boyfriend.
The very first person Stella ever denounced was her husband.

* * *

These stories add up. Because they are true – in many senses of the word. Because the world is not the same without them. These stories tell us who we are. Terror, torture, wanton executions -- this is what humans do. Sure, we love. Sure, we paint and write and dance and sing. But this cavalcade of horror is not an aberration. We paint and write and dance and sing. We are built to play. And players like their toys. Need their toys. All you need to do is convince yourself that this human being is not at all like you, and he becomes -- your toy.
Holding another life in your hand is the ultimate possession. You carve a person’s flesh. His mind, his identity, his future, his fate rests in your hand, and yours alone. You can twist his very soul until it breaks and – oh yes – you will. For he is — wholly — yours, and how could you resist? Yours to toy with, yours to maim, yours to kill. This human being is now your literal slave; he has no recourse, no mercy, no law, than the recourse, the mercy, the law that is you.
You may try to deny it. You may grab into your bag of many selves, to pull out cunning masks and sly disguises. You may invent reasons; you may invent reason. But deep down you know – you know you have now become a god, and that gods are destroyers of worlds, for what else is left to do after you first made it all?
Shock. Horrify. Appall. Move on. Repeat. Let humanity’s inevitable inhumanity intersect with humanity’s equally inevitable insistence on humanity at some vanishing point way beyond any rational horizon.

* * *

Josef Mengele, the doctor who oversaw the triage on the arrival platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau – the inmates called the arm-flapping physician der weisse Engel – was also the chief medical officer of the Zigeunerlager – the Gypsy camp. Twenty thousand Roma and Sinti in total. Families were allowed to be together; more than 300 children were born there. Whenever Mengele walked through the camp, the men would play their fiddles, delighting him with waltzes and mazurkas and polonaises, and the women would hit their tambourines and dance—they all knew how much the Herr Doktor loved music. “Uncle Mengele!” the children cried. “Uncle Mengele!” And he gently stroked their little heads and softly squeezed their wasted cheeks, and he put sticky chocolates in their eager little fists. The story goes that on the day the last remaining three thousand Gypsies were to be killed – August 2, 1944 – Mengele sought out his very favorite child. He took him by the hand and stuffed his mouth with candy and then he walked the boy all the way to door of the gas chamber.
Holding hands.
Just like when, against a backdrop of the bluest of skies on the most luminous of Tuesday mornings in lower Manhattan, people -– random strangers -- joined hands to jump –- together -- from the 102nd floor of the North Tower, not knowing by what decree of what fickle god they were dying, but knowing they wanted to do it together.

* * *

I have this feeling that when humanity will finally have managed to get the planet rid of its presence, the one god still remaining will watch the plumes of smoke with detached neutrality.
Then she will sit back, relax, and at last enjoy the silence.
Our biggest fear is this: That we live for the same reason Jamadi, the nameless Soviet prisoner, Stella’s victims, Mengele’s little Gypsy friend, and some 3,000 Manhattan office workers died.
For no reason at all.

PEN 2009 VS MONTEREY 1969 -- THE MASH-UP

(I wrote this earlier in a comment on Chad Post's blog piece where he respectfully submits some suggestions for future PEN World Voices festivals, and perhaps it fits here as well. I realize posting this will never get me re-invited, but that's fine.)

For a festival about literature, there was achingly little literature on display. We had writers reading other writers, or writers being interviewed, or writers orating on panels. The only writers allowed to read from their own work where the ones we’ve heard before. Younger/unknown folk (like me) need a showcase, and we don’t get it at PEN. Hugely disappointing, may I say. For Pete(the-g*d-of-literature)‘s sake: Have a series of readings, somewhere. Let us hear those weird Hungarians, give them (oh dear) a VOICE.

To me this festival was a bit like Monterey 1969, except that instead of hearing Jimi Hendrix play, we got to hear him debate Pete Townsend in a panel on alternative tunings, and then he had a five minute deejay spot.

DEFIANCE

Photos from the rather odd PEN World Voices Defiance event are online. Audio would have been nice too, but well, words/words/words, right? (Odd: Because there is something slightly out of whack about asking writers to read only other writers' words. The oddity of that became absurdness when Sergio Ramirez's introduction -- about his own experiences with death and near-death in the student protests in Nicaragua under Somoza -- managed to eclipse even the Neruda poem he went on to read.)

IN WALKS THE TRANSLATOR

Allow me to open with a simple statement of fact.
We do not know what planet writers come from, but we do know the precise place of origin of their translators: They all, without exception, hail from the planet Tralfamadore.

Allow me to elaborate.

But before I do that, I’d like to take you on a trip to Upstate New York first.
There’s a Zen Buddhist Center there that I once visited with a friend who was so much into that kind of thing he had his head shaved and took vows, or whatever they call it. The head monk of the Center was a nice Jewish lady with a decidedly military haircut; she went by a Japanese name. If you wanted to speak to her, you needed to prostrate before her, thrice. You didn’t call it a talk either, you called it doing dokusan. In the meditation hall, we bowed before a small imported statue of the Buddha, my friend and his companions slipped into black robes -- the nice Jewish lady’s was a gold-embroidered monstrosity that was all sleeves and pleats -- we all bowed some more, sat down cross-legged on Japanese cushions, and then we chanted – in no language known to man.
“What on earth was that?” I inquired about the chanting.
Turns out the chant was an ancient pronouncement of the Buddha’s, originally delivered in the Pali language, but written down in Sanskrit, then translated and transliterated into Chinese, picked up about 1,200 years ago by some Japanese monks who brought it to their island, where it is chanted using the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters. It is this American approximation of the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese version that is chanted in Zen groups across the continent.
Everything, my patient friend explained – the robes, the funny names, the bows, the lotus position, the chanting – was to make sure that no essential part of the teachings got lost in translation. We do not know, after all, what can be safely changed, and what needs to stay exactly so.
Still intrigued by the sound of twenty or so earnest Americans chanting Japanese mispronunciations of Chinese phonetic attempts at Sanskrit that should have been Pali, I asked: “And what is that that you chant?”
“It’s the Heart Sutra”, he replied. “You know, the one that states that Emptiness is Form, and Form is Emptiness?”
When I remarked that this was a rather elaborate but quite splendid way to get this simple point across, his smile suddenly seemed somewhat strained.

There is the opposite side of the argument too, of course – the argument that all writing is in essence translation. A writer has a vision, so the argument goes, and that vision is put into words, which invariably soils it somewhat. Groovy little gyrations you’ve got going on there, son, but, woah, wait a minute: They’re totally incidental and totally irreproducible. Case in point: If we had actually read your work and therefore locked you up in a cell for subordinate activities, and you would try to recreate your masterpiece on squares of toilet paper with charcoal obtained from burning matches, the words would come out quite differently now, wouldn’t they? (And please leave the latrine as tidy as you found it.)
The answer here, I think, is that writers and translators have different loyalties. Translation is, after all, a business of rigid motion, with an allegiance to accuracy; writers are wedded to – and I apologize to use this word in polite company – the truth. Now, the truth is not some funnelform procession of ideas, neatly marching down the mind’s broad boulevards to come to some inevitable conclusion – no, the truth is a momentary thing, crawling and hiding inside the cool fissures of what is otherwise a sizzling brain, making the cortex tremble oh so slightly with meager resonances that are simply too hard to pick up on any given rainy day. To know the truth, you have to get up early, forego your shower, don a bathrobe or (better still) stay in your boxers, and bang away at the keyboard until your fingers are numb – twelve hours of work done in a single instant, with a single sentence to show for it. Where was I? I thought I was quietly watching a rerun of the Simpsons in my head and now I am staring at the ceiling of an ambulance? Where is this taking me? Do I even want to know?
-- When you write, in other words, the world shifts and moves. You are, emphatically, certainly, positively driven, but you are not the driver. If it works, at the end of the day you may sink into your warm puddle of words, the song that cannot be unsung, blisters of joy on your lips; otherwise you’ll find yourself at midnight weeping into the open fridge, your tears freezing in their ducts. Yes, writers, like all lovers thrown into a fling, are tempted by the illusion of destiny, reaching for a heaven that exists only in their carefully rearranged memories, all the while trying to figure out if reality is more a wilderness of mirrors or a pillar of smoke. If you know where you are going, if the vision is clear, if you know the exact note that will come out when you open your mouth to sing, you are not a writer. Give up on the idea that writers are gods. They have no overview, the mere thought of their omnipotence is laughable, they are most ungracious, and certainly not in the possession of any mercy whatsoever. (Watch them kill their characters!)
In walks the translator. Doesn’t he look a bit like a plumber’s friend, with his suction cup neatly planted on the ground, so eager to teach the writing Earthling many wonderful things about time? Linear or non-linear, it doesn’t matter, because the text is there and the translator ploughs through it at will, and from every angle. The translator is an honest-to-god liar, pretending to believe in a truth that is entirely somebody else’s – yours -- cross-wiring his dreams with the wind that whipped some other fellah’s plains -- yours. The irksome paradox is that in his command of the fourth dimension, the translator becomes shallower, not deeper. He sobs over the death of every character, but not inconsolably so – it’s only a book, and the character lives on, forever on the page. True, the translator is powerless to prevent your mistakes, but he is gracious and merciful towards them. So it goes, he says, and he either shrugs his shoulders or tries to smooth it out. Did you notice that he is stylishly two weeks overdue for a haircut, while your hair gets brutally trimmed every six months by your lover, in your sleep, with very blunt scissors? Did you notice he’s wearing a full set of clothes while he translates, and never skips a meal? He is extraordinarily precise, your translator, he wants to render each and every one of your puns, he wants to bring each of your clever nuances to light – the best of translators are so good, you can’t believe it’s not writing.
This, obviously, is why the Italians call the translator a traitor: He is completely unlike you; he is a smooth-talking interplanetary god. Your translator is unforgiveable: Your wonderful Pali translated in Sanskrit, rewritten in Chinese, butchered into Japanese with an Upstate accent -- and it’s still all there: Emptiness is Form, and Form is Emptiness.

BURNING BOOKS AND BURNING ANGELS

Find a link here to an excerpt of OM (about burning books and burning angels) at the PEN World Voices web site.

NOBODY BUYS OMEGA MINOR, BUT IT'S WORTH 113 BUCKS?

I was happily trolling Abebooks in between meetings, looking to see if someone had a galley of Inherent Vice available (quod non).

Then I ego-surfed and found the blurb below.

So: You go give a reading in far-off lands, someone buys one of your books and has you sign it, and then sells it on Abebooks with a 900% mark-up. (So, that was what was up with the one dude who didn't want his name in it.) Cojones with a nicely reduced sauce of gall. Well, given the complete and utter lack of attention for my book in the States: Good luck, my friend!

(But if that copy sells, I'm-a-gonna get me an Abebooks seller account. Like pronto.)

Anyway, and also: My final public appearance as a writer ever (I'm sick and tired of flying for hours and plunking down hundreds of dollars to meet 5 folk -- honestly) will be at PEN World Voices at the end of this month. Something in a bar, something on a panel. Nothing major. Stay away, in droves, and go see Nadeem Aslam instead. Or Lou Reed -- a fellow member of the Syracuse-loathers club -- if you must.

Omega Minor - SIGNED Verhaeghen, Paul
Bookseller: Mungobooks (Bournemouth, ., United Kingdom) Bookseller Rating:	Price: US$ 113.79 [Convert Currency] Quantity: 1	Shipping within United Kingdom: US$ 5.16 [Rates & Speeds]
Book Description: Dalkey Archive, NY, 2007. Trade Paperback. Book Condition: Near Fine. First Edition. 1st Australian and true 1st edition 1st impression paperback original. Book in near fine condition with no inscriptions apart from author's signature. SIGNED on his visit to the UK at Jewish Book Week. Not a book club edition, ex library or a remainder. Please request a scan if required. Signed by Author. Bookseller Inventory # 004677

3 FABLES ON WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS

The online magazine for literature in translation (because, well, it obviously ain't the same as literature in English and ain't that a bitch) Words Without Borders has my 'Three Fables' up. Which you read here first, and which I'll repost when the April run of WWB has ran its course.

WORDS HURT

My current light bed-time fare is Alberto Manguel's rather fun historical romp The Library at Night. He re-reminded me of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's 2003 comment to a writer of an anti-Harry Potter book (Herr R. currently occupies a post a tiny step up from cardinal n the hierarchy of the Catholic Church) :

"It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly."

First point: the Harry Potter series deal with magic, or so it is claimed. The idea that magic exists and works is not just "opposed" to the Christian faith, it is also opposed -- more directly so, I would venture -- to the idea of science. Yet I don't think I've heard any academic or engineer or researcher exclaim, a propos these books: "Those are subtle seductions and by this deeply distort the sense of logic and the thirst for experimentation in the mind, before it can grow properly." I kinda think we scientists simply assume that the young mind outgrows childish stuff and that by the time the prefrontal cortex kicks in comfortably, said mind turns its sense of wonder to the natural world, and applies thought to it. And neatly shelves HP as neat and wondrous entertainment.

Put differently: If the very foundations of your worldview can be shaken by mere words and thought (and therefore you have to ban such words and thought), maybe you should reconsider those very foundations. (Or at least give 'm some thought. He-he.)

Second point: unthinking Holocaust denial, dear Herr-Mister-Pontiff-Sir: Not as vile, dangerous, and distorting as Harry Potter, it seems, hm?

ON THE BEAUTY OF LANGUAGE (2)

Yesterday, George W. Bush gave his first post-presidency speech (you apparently had to pay more than 3,000$ for the privilige). In Calgary, that hotbed of, uh, uh, that center of, uh, uh, that wellspring of whatchamacallit. Right: petroleum industry!

The big news is: Bush is going to write his memoirs. Here is a press account:

Bush said that he doesn't know what he will do in the long term but that he will write a book that will ask people to consider what they would do if they had to protect the United States as president.

He said it will be fun to write and that "it's going to be (about) the 12 toughest decisions I had to make."

"I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened," Bush said.

Did you catch that? An authoritarian voice.

And then we cog psych types claim the Freudian slip is dead.

ON THE BEAUTY OF LANGUAGE

Today, in the aptly named Pharr, Texas, a man used a drive-through bank lane to stick up the Lone Star National Bank.

Me, I got stuck at the semantic implications and phonological resonance of the AP headline: "Bank drive-thru hold-up".

A drive-through hold-up! If that ain't cowboy poetics, I don't know what is.

PV PODCAST

Jewish Book Week (shout-out to the wonderful and amazing Geraldine D'Amico!) has their 2009 audio/video clips up.

Are they freakishly fast, or what?

You could listen to the clever and alert Boyd Tonkin interviewing clueless and winding me, if you must, by clicking here.

DOING WRITE BY HISTORY

[This essay appeared earlier in The Jewish Quartely, Dec 2008.]

‘Nothing to see here,’ said the cameraman. And before I could even object — ‘But that’s the point!’ — the crew had started their long slog back to the U-Bahn station. Their patience had been overextended one time too many.

They were right.
There was nothing to see.
And I was right too.
That was exactly the point.

The camera crew was there to tape a three-minute segment to be aired on Belgian television on the occasion of my nomination for a literary award (which I didn’t win). I had just finished this big brick of a novel, a web of interweaving stories set largely in Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s (and in Los Alamos and in a barely post-GDR Potsdam). The Flemish Broadcasting Corporation had dispatched a crew to Berlin, the city that forever sings and sighs, and I had schlepped them to the Scheunenviertel, the old and former Jewish quarter, to the spot at the Grosse Hamburger Strasse where the Jewish cemetery used to be. Since its conception in 1672, some 12,000 people had been buried there; in 1943 the Gestapo decided that the presence of these dead Jews in the heart of the city was too offensive to be tolerated – they dug up the remains and threw them out, and reused the gravestones as trench supports. The twenty-eight stones that somehow survived are now set in the wall, and in 1990 a new monument was erected on the site where Moses Mendelssohn’s grave was presumed to be. The rest is an unnamed park, a sorry expanse of grass and mud. Next to the cemetery stood the Jewish nursing home, which became the collection point for the deportation of the Berlin Jews — from here 55,696 left for the flames.

Nothing to see there.
Which was exactly my point.

What I saw, was this. Or at least, this is what I had written in Omega Minor:

Stella and I stand by the window. She tells me about the old Sammellager in the nursing home at the Grosse Hamburger Strasse in the heart of the Scheunenviertel — in the shadows of the golden dome of the Great Synagogue. You could see the oldest Jewish cemetery of Berlin from her window. She had a good view of the grave of Moses Mendelssohn, the great scholar and philosopher from the time of Frederick the Great. Mendelssohn was a big proponent of integration of Jews and Germans. As a service to the gentiles, he had translated the Torah into German.

Her very first night there Stella stood at the window. On an open space in that venerable cemetery with its picturesquely sunken monuments there was much laughter and merriment. A few of the guards had taken off their uniform jackets; they were playing soccer. Four jackets marked the goal posts. ‘The ball they were using must be flat, I thought, it refuses to bounce. Then I had a closer look. The object that they hit and kicked back and forth was not a ball. It was a human skull.’ Stella wipes her eyelids with her thumbs. That window, with its view of her captors toying with death while the fruit trees bloomed, all that was long past — way back in the springtime of 1943.

This happened. That is, somebody witnessed this scene and remembered it long after the war and wrote it down and when I was working on my novel I read that account and reimagining the scene I wrote it down again. And you, dear reader, have now read this scene as well and now you too have a vivid image and you too will see this in your mind’s eye when you visit Grosse Hamburger Strasse in Berlin. When you go there you will be, like me, surrounded by ghosts. Or, more accurately, by ghosts of ghosts.

When the three-minute segment aired on Flemish TV, there was a lot of voice-over; the footage was of the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag and Alexander Platz.

Something to see there, I suppose, something to catch the camera’s eye.

* * *

One of the enduring mysteries of humankind is this: Why are we addicted to art?

Addictions tend to be opportunistic artifacts of evolution. Heroin usurps the μ-opioid receptors of our painkilling system and does a much better job at curing life’s aches than our home-made endorphins do. Nicotine tickles the reward centre of the brain and then snubs it, acting just like the fickle lover we cannot leave. And art (music, literature, sculpture, painting, ballet, architecture), it seems, is a byproduct of humanity’s most urgent social need, the need for gossip.

Or so the story goes.

Apes have this grooming habit: they stroke one another’s fur, and so they build their social circle. Make a new friend? Groom. Want to get something done? Groom. Need to apologize? Groom. Humans tend to gather in groups of 150, way too big for grooming. That is, claims Dunbar, why we grew a large forebrain and that is why we grew the joys of language. Instead of cementing our ties of friendship hands on scalp, we say it with words.

It turns out that evolution’s invention of the word was pure genius.

We live by gossip; dish is the preferred food of the human mind. The Daily Mail fulfils a much more ancient need than the Times; without Paris Hilton or Britney Spears there would be no Shakespeare; slap the sobriquet ‘Based on a True Story’ on any book or movie and folks will flock.

A well-groomed chimp’s brain is soaked in opiates. So is yours when a fellow human being engages you in banter — any banter. You will get positively giddy when that person shares the utmost gift with you: the gift of gossip.

The gift of story, in other words.

Or put still differently: our need for gossip is primal, the world of ideas and chiseled prose and Freudian analysis is a freebie, a side effect, the dust of cocoa on the morning latte.

* * *

Words, sentences, stories. String enough of them together, and you have the world. Read all of them, and you know the world.

Many of us are embarking on that project right now. To read. Because we cannot experience everything. Reading is not a substitute. Reading is experience.

Omega Minor started exactly that way. With a stutter of unknowing, a craving for the story. On a cold February day in 1995, when I, much younger, emerged from a subway station in Berlin on to a vast expanse of neo-classical square — the Mitte station, because Mitte means ‘centre’ or ‘heart’, and the heart of the matter seemed as meaty a place to start my explorations from as any — and was greeted by a faint glow emanating from the pavement. When I approached, I found a small underground chamber, lined with empty white bookshelves. Next to the hole a plaque with a Heine quote: ‘That was only the beginning. It starts by burning books, soon human flesh will burn.’

Of course I knew the history; of course I had heard of the book burning of 1933. I knew the history — I did not know the stories, and at my feet now lay a well of them. The void underneath that glass pane was never merely an absence of books. Again, from Omega Minor:

Righteous Jews so respect the name of God that they do not dare pronounce it or write it down without at least censoring the vowels, and they never throw away even the smallest slip of paper for fear it might carry the Lord’s name and that they thereby are destroying a piece of YHVH Himself. In the Jewish archive in Cairo everything gets saved: marriage contracts, love poems, bookseller’s catalogues, everything, including shopping lists. In the shtetl, in the eastern lands, every synagogue has a big wooden vat in the back where the faithful deposit their old books and newspapers. The vat is emptied from time to time but the paper is stored indefinitely in the temple’s basement. Read all those old stories from the Talmud and the kabala and the folktales from Poland and Russia: long-lost books reappear in hidden caves, letters rise up from the page, names are etched into foreheads. The correct pronunciation of a word can make the difference between heaven and hell. Burning a book means more than giving up a part of one’s possessions: it means selling one’s soul to an evil spirit. From now on, all personal quests into the roots of the world and all free research into the limits of morality will be illegal pursuits.

The void in the heart of Berlin is not just the absence of books, or even of their owners or their writers. It is the chilling absence of God Himself.

* * *

Young writers are often told to write about what they know.
That advice is solid.
Except that it is often read as: write about what you already know.
Nine times out of ten, that leads to something utterly dead.
I say: if you want to write, go out in the world and get to know something.Then write, with wonder, about your fresh discovery.

Nothing trumps the need to know.

Or rather: the need to remember.

History is the memory of a society and memory equates identity. We are not what we’ve lived through; we are what we remember we have lived through — there’s a difference. Alzheimer’s disease is a prime example: every Alzheimer’s patient has her past intact; what is happening is that the memories of that past fade away until the patient is awash in an interminable present. That present makes no sense, for there is nothing that precedes it. There is still a temperament, a personality; there are motor memories and gestures, the end results of lifelong conditioning: a frame if you will, but the portrait that once hung inside it is irretrievably lost.

The memories that make us are not the facts of our lives. They are not lists, not words, not even sentences. They are a tangle of episodes, a mess of hyperlinks, the self-perceived arc to our human years. Our memories are stories.

So too it is with societies.

I am not speaking here of the oft-proclaimed requirement to keep the past alive so we can learn from it. (Or, more sinister, the powerful attempts by totalitarian regimes to bury it so that the regime can feel exempt of history’s rules.) One of the lessons from the past is that we never heed the lessons of the past – Rwanda, Darfur, the invasion of Iraq: it’s all déjà vu.

When Primo Levi wrote the first instalment of his Holocaust memoirs in 1946, no serious publisher wanted to have anything to do with them. Nobody wanted to read that depressing stuff, they said. They were right, for a while. The first edition sold a mere 1,500 copies. Levi’s was a tale we were not ready to face, back in 1946. It finally reached us — like Wiesel’s and those of countless others. Because it had to.

There are many such artists. Kurt Vonnegut forced America to deal with the massacre of Dresden. He had to, he felt: he had lived through it. But living was not enough, the detailed description insufficient. Vonnegut refused to write about the fire bombing until he got the form just right; it took him almost 25 years. He needed to invent time travel first, and a planet where everything happens simultaneously so that there are no unknowns but only inevitables, and so that his book was as little anti-war as it was anti-glacier. So it goes, he famously wrote on almost every page. In other words: this is who we humans are — there is no nobility in us, and no learning. Our time is up. Now go and deal with it. Francis Ford Coppola reincarnated Conrad’s Congo story in the mad chaos of the Vietnam War where America was fighting for the ‘biggest nothing in history’. The ease of transposition should have warned us that the story was more timeless than its setting suggested. Toni Morrison insisted on keeping slavery alive in her nation’s awareness; she did so with the simple story of a single woman killing her child. Solzhenitsyn showed the world what the Whiskered One was really up to. And so on. Each of these writers and artists managed to take a breathtaking subject and do something even more breathtaking with it, something that could not have been conveyed through however many newspaper clippings or however many stacks of professorial treatises. When I want to learn about, say, America in the 1920s, I turn to F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos first. Berlin at that time period? Alfred Döblin. Like newspaper journalists, writers squeeze the juice of details out of life, but they pour it into a wider river; like historians, they insist on the overview, but they also follow each individual leaf of grass as it tumbles down the stream. And then it all meets the ocean. Evaporates. Condenses. Precipitates. Repeat.

Here is another metaphor: storytellers spin their tales; inside those silk cocoons lie the biting worms of truth.

Take Stella — you met her in the opening paragraphs. I based her on a ‘real’ woman, Stella Goldschlag, who although Jewish worked as a ‘catcher’ for the Nazis: she made her living pointing out fellow Jews to the Gestapo. For every person she brought in, the Gestapo paid her 20 Deutschmark. More importantly they promised her that for every catch they would not kill one person of her choice. That was a lie. When Stella found out, she decided to keep up her gruesome business, if just to save her own life and that of her fellow-catcher boyfriend.

Clearly, Stella is not a person any of us would want to be. But her story haunted me all the years I carried my novel around in my mind and in my heart. Stella kept asking me the same question, over and over again: what would I have done? Would I have betrayed countless nameless strangers to save my mother? And when my mother was gone, would I have done the right thing and placed those handfuls of nameless lives above my own? Then it hit me that I would never know. We cannot fully know a fellow human being unless we are them, unless we are placed in the exact same circumstances. A trite lesson, but a lesson nevertheless. In my book, I let her be. I had to. She appears, she plays her part, she is who she is. I left the worm gnawing.

* * *

When I sank on my knees to peer down into the glass pane on what used to be Opernplatz, I did not know what I was going to see. Empty bookshelves and my own reflection, darkly, those were to be expected — but there also appeared an unknown host of folks behind me. Stella, it turned out, was one of those coinciding with my mirror image on the milky glass. She came unbidden and unwanted, but her story became one I needed to tell. Her ghostly presence and that of so many others — 55,696 and more — did not make Berlin a more beautiful or a more inhabitable place to me. But it did make the Berlin in my mind truer to itself.

That is the magic of writing: to make, by creating, the world more like itself.

* * *

The Grosse Hamburger Strasse has many authors, Josef Goebbels among them. His fever to make Berlin Judenfrei extended even to the cemetery; even dead Jews were an affront to the Aryan nation. Maybe he took a walk there in the early snow of November 1943, hands folded behind his back, murmuring both happily and sadly to himself: ‘Nothing to see here’.

I see his hunched back in the retreating back of the cameraman.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF OPTIMISM

While the USA is in the grips of the extremly urgent debate whether or not presidents should be allowed to work in shirtsleeves while in the Oval Office, Europe is -- uh -- hopeful.

Or in need of hope, rather, one would think.

We over here dragged you Europe-folk down with us, this century isn't exactly shaping up the way we envisioned it, and if looking back at the 20th century is any indication of what is to come, a world war will break out in the next decade or so.

Time, then, for an Anthology of Optimism!

The Flemish theater group Campo thought so too, and they are traveling a small part of the world (Linz, Vienna, Copenhagen, Brussels, and perhaps next year NYC) with exactly such a thing. It's a snowball of a piece, picking up new texts as it rolls across the continent. Yours truly donated Awake to the performance -- a piece now so obviously entrenched in the dark damp days of the Bush regime that rereading it only shows how far we've traveled [politically and societally, if not economically] in the past few weeks. Pieter, 1/2 of Campo, emailed me to tell me that the premiere in Linz went exceedingly well: People were 'moved' and 'intrigued'. Move you, intrigue you, by chance make you shake a little in your boots -- that's what we artists are after.

I hope to see the performance when/if it travels across the Atlantic, but some of you might live closer by the action and be able to witness it all sooner.

Optimism! It's the new naivite.

BITCH-SLAPPED BY THE JURY WHO GAVE YOU A LIT AWARD

So, Sebastian Barry won the Costa Award.

Hurray for Sebastian! and all that.

Turns out some of the members of that jury are very willing to talk about the flaws in the book. Very willing. We didn't like the ending, this or that character wasn't believable, etcetera. Bitching, basically. But then they gave him the award anyway and had a long good therapeutic talk with the newspaper.

Presumably, that made them feel better.

But what about Mr. Barry? Will he slap the bitches back? Ask, for instance, what a frigging comedian is doing on the jury of a lit award? Inquire, sweetly, which of the members of said jury has, indeed, produced an undisputed masterpiece? Or will he simply go for the fastest revenge -- go the ceremony and sit and grin until the 25,000 pounds get firmly ensconced in some inner pocket of his tweeds?

I WRITE TOO OFTEN AND TOO MUCH ABOUT SEX...

...or so critics/reviewers/readers of the English version of Omega Minor (oh, gimme a break, you don't want actual links here, do you?) have told me.

To which I have replied: (...)

That is, I am too lazy, too tired, and too g*ddamn blasé to actually take the trouble to defend my literary choices, to stand up for the carnal incarnations of my imagination. Plus, you know, postmodern guy and all that: The text, my friends, nothing but the text, and @#$& the author! @#$&! I say! (And hang the DJ while you're at it.)

Still. It nags. Can they not read, those self-declared Friends of Letters, those self-assured Pruners in the Gardens of the Word, those perilous potentates of semi-porous poetics, those gaudy groundhogs grinding their teeth underneath my bed? The writer tries to shrug it off, but oh -- the gnashing and gnawing at his feet!

Well. One reader, so it seems, can. And did. And wrote about it.

Lazy I still am, so read, if you must, Mr. Lambert's blog entry, wasted on my ever-shrinking novel. (Mr. Lambert is not lazy: He wastes a whole damn blog entry on my frigging no-good death-of-me broke-my-back brick of a book.)

An excerpt (including an excerpt):

The novel opens with a description of a sexual encounter that sets the tone for most of the sex in the novel. There isn’t that much of it in terms of pages, but what there is shares a relentless, near-pornographic quality that might have something to do with Verhaeghen’s not being a native speaker. It’s a strange amalgam of the poetic, the urological and the simply weird, as in this extract from the second page:

Behold the purple head that sways so swiftly on its heavy stalk; see how it glistens with her spit and juices; watch the little crater at the top spit out its zigzag line—out shoots the slime, the whirling weathervane, the drunken comet that climbs past the stars: In the moist cloud chamber of Donatella’s room, a signal lights up in silvery white, an almost perfect circle described by the tumbling ribbon of spunk, an acrobatic snake snapping at—but missing—its own tail: an ancient Greek symbol, the latter Omega, capitalized—Ω.

This opening scene does more than establish the tone and central elements of the novel’s theme. Crucially, the sexual act is being described not by a protagonist, but by someone who observes, himself unobserved. The novel is deeply concerned with what it means to be a witness, and with the kind of power, and lack of power, this involves. It goes beyond this to question the nature and permeability of the boundaries we draw between those who act and those who watch, and how historical and personal blame should be apportioned between these two groups, taking into account the extent to which any distinction made between them might be facile, or false. Dangerous ambiguities are evoked as the novel progresses – through confession and dissimulation - and even the aphoristic moral certainty of such a sentence as “There is a world of difference between an act that is permitted and an act that is permissible” is undermined by what the novel does.

What the man says, man.

Why do the readers who, the writer feels, understand always have to live too far away to simply buy them an honest beer?

MUSICAL UMAMI

Here was my Sunday homework for next week's class, in case you want to emulate:

a. The first 10 seconds of Stevie Wonder's Superstition, on repeat, over headphones. Close your eyes and concentrate on those hi-hats -- those hi-hats! I said: THOSE HI-HATS!

b. The Adagio Cantabile from the Beethoven's "Pathetique" Sonata. How to make a yearning melody by starting a third above the root, tease the listener by going down, but then go up, and generally postpone the appearance of the root until measure 8. Then cursorily skip&hop away, of course. Beethov': you tease!

c. Burial's Near Dark. Beats done and undone, shells clattering, surf breaking, heart aching -- After which sure-fire remedy had to be applied:

d. Feed the Animals, by Girl Talk, at full volume, fingers pointing disco-stAAAHl, while fixing some chiles anchos rellenos con picadillo de tofu. (A man's got to eat.)

So, thank you, Daniel Levitin and Jonah Lehrer, for a corticofugal afternoon the neighbors will never forget.