Like Moby Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped is one of those books I had never read and thought everybody else had. Like Moby Dick, I found the book exhausting and dense and eventually learned that few have actually read it.
The problem with the book is three-fold, the biggest challenge being the archaic language, with words like slockens (moisten), gliff (look), clour (hit), kittle (difficult) and argle-bargled (argue) permeating the text. On top of the language is the convoluted politics of the 1700’s where you were either a Whig, a Jacobite or a repressed Highlander, Stevenson assuming the reader understood the background to all of this. (Which I didn’t.)
View of the highlands from Ben Nevis
At the heart of the problem however is the narrative, which is a story of a young man who is knocked on the head and put on a ship for the slavery in the Carolinas only to escape and find his way tediously back through the highlands. It’s a never-ending journey that plugs on and on, like Ahab and his whale, until it doesn’t.
Beached Pilot Whales on Sanday Island, Orkney
I eventually made it to the end but with little satisfaction. And I would not recommend the journey to anyone else, unless you know bauchle and kittle and can tholefashious things.
I’m coming back from two weeks in New Orleans where I was tired and uninspired and did very little writing. Instead, I read and drank and walked around. “It’s good for you,” I was told time and time again. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like life was pointless. I felt desperate.
My father always said that if you don’t like work, you’re not going to like life. Jim Henson concurred: “I love to work. It’s the thing that I get the most satisfaction out of – and probably what I do best. I think much of the world has the wrong idea of working. It’s one of the good things in life. The feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying that finishing a good meal or looking at one’s accumulated wealth.”
The idea of being idle, either enjoying the company of family and friends or, worse, in retirement, are presented as goals in our society, a tendency toward inertness that has been furthered by our self-destructive attraction to our screens and just be generally stupid.
My dream is to be like Henson and my father, to be working until the end, projects on the go, one close to completion, others in production, another one or two in development, and then getting up from a table, moving onto another thing, I just don’t make and am no more.
The subjugation of women started long ago, Gunter Grass postulating in The Flounder that it was the moment men figured out childbirth was not a secret of women but the result of fornication.
Whatever the moment, the persecution has continued unabated throughout history, well documented through the portrayal of women as The Fates, Furies and Witches, all tortuously guiding men to their downfall.
Macbeth’s Witches ThreeOrestes Hounded by the Furies
The portrayal of witches has evolved somewhat today, some still hideous and evil, others sexy and fun, but all remaining an essential threat to men.
Cher in EastwickSam in BewitchedThe Witch of WitchesWitchie Poo in HR PufnStuff
The fear of women remains rampant throughout the world, especially so in the United States, because they really do have a greater power than men. It isn’t because of their vaunted role as mothers – preserve us from that pronouncement – nor their intuition or dreaded scorn. Rather it’s due to the fact that they aren’t as petty, childish and stupid.
Given that young women have been trained to sexualize themselves for approval and financial security, they now need role models to find their way.
PJ Harvey on stageDee in My bad SideDee in Anori
Intelligent, talented and, yes, beautiful, Ms. Harvey mines the essential ooze with acuity and supreme confidence, enough to terrify any man. As does Dee in my novels My Bad Side and Em, hopefully soon to be in print.
Men just need to accept that they are babies and let these witches take over the world.
What I mean to say is “I appreciate you”. Each and every one of you.
The ruling is a simple one. Stop being a fucking baby. There’s no paradise thing. We made every step, always our own, never for another, pretending maybe, but that’s a child’s game.
Life has to be lived, the same as it’s always been. It doesn’t matter how long or short the game, black-outs and cash-outs included, it’s played to the end. Grow the fuck up and keep posting your dog and cat pics. They’re fucking hilarious.
If you were to ask me how I’m doing, I would say I’m pretty good. A bit tired but getting some reading done, recharging my battery, all that. And then I’d ask how you are, and we would go on like that, like usual. But I’m not. Doing well that is. On a scale of 1-10, I’d give myself a one or two. I’m low. I’m losing the point of this. Fight on. I can’t go on. I must go on. All that. But we’re in the shitter. I am anyway. I’ve lost the faith, if I ever had it. It’s not just Trump & Putin, although they’re sure part of it. It’s the hubris, the lies and hate, mine too.
I’ve always enjoyed reading biographies, Mark Twain, Robert Kennedy, Orville & Wilbur Wright, Georgia O’Keefe, Mahatma Ghandi, Leo Tolstoy, Judy Garland, Agnes Varda, Zenobia. The story is clear: You’re born, you do stuff and you die. They all struggled, found success in something, struggled again, maybe found success again, and then died. I just finished When Breathe Becomes Air, the autobiography of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. It is a rumination on mortality, littered with literary references, including Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” He dies before he finishes the book.
I also read Matthew McConaughey’s Green Lights. As facile as it sounds to consider an actor best known for “Alright, alright, alright”, it still has all the same moments, struggling and succeeding, trying to make sense. Alright, it is a trite read, and a little tiresome in the end, but he’s earnest and banged a whole beautiful women. And he’s not dead. Yet. Yeah, and he’s hot.
It’s better to live a life doing things, finding some sort of meaning and ‘indulging’ as McConaughey confesses. Then what? The key seems to be remembering, reflecting and sharing. But what if you don’t? What if you lose all that? You forget it all? My mother succumbed to dreaded Alzheimer’s and remembered nothing in her last years. Once a very insightful and intellectually demanding woman, she forgot everything including her beloved Mozart and The New Yorker. It was the one way she wanted to go. I’ve forgotten moments too, entire nights, years gone by and indulging too much, and all of the enjoyment I assume I had, is gone too. Like everything.
Whether we lay this planet to waste or not, this will all be forgotten. Not just my little old blog but everything else, Barbie, Mozart, Krakatoa, This space we fill will be empty and dark. There will be nothing at all. And so maybe I’m being generous with myself. I’m definitely not a two. I’m more like a one or zero.
I have neglected the blog over the past two months (sorry!) as I am immersed in teaching and spend many weekends out hiking. My regular destination is in the Hudson Highlands, from Bear Mountain Toll House to Anthony’s Nose, which I documented with a monthly picture from multiple spots over a year.
The above pictures look up the Hudson River toward the Bear Mountain Bridge.
The steady decline in water levels at Broccy Creek is just another sign of things gone awry.
It was an exercise in patience and focus, framing and remembering the right spot. And getting out every month. Sadly I missed the snow and peak fall colors.
His drug addled brain wouldn’t let him sleep but he remembered being trapped in an MRI machine, his arms pinned to his side, and looking back above his head at the sterile room, trying to call, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. The machine caught on fire and he woke up. He left the hotel and met Delia, a former student, sitting by the river.
She told Davis the story about when she worked at a high-end bottle service club and a patron had reached up her dress. “My mother told me I was asking for it.”
“You get along with your mother?” Davis asked.
“Mothers are overrated.” Delia eyed him. “All that self-sacrifice stuff, I get sick of that.”
He watched the clouds over the building tops and thought about going to look at the Viking ships in Roskilde in the morning. “They like to be martyrs and they hate it when they can’t sacrifice themselves.”
“I mean, my mother’s fine.” Delia looked at herself in her phone. “It’s not that I resent her for anything. She’s just my mother.”
“I forgive my mother for whatever she was supposed to have done to me.” Davis downed half of his beer. “I had this dream, more of a vision really because I think I was still awake. I was with my mother and she was in a smart button-down dress, and she looked beautiful, conservative and smart. She was younger than me and we were on the classic propeller plane going somewhere. But she was at the front of the plane with her friends.”
“That’s it?”
“I was sitting there, thinking that she would come back to me. And she didn’t.”
It was a spur of the moment thing, and she was excited to have me. She was an old friend, a successful writer, and lived on a farm north of Kingston. The conversation was animated, remembering times past.
“You were always someone I knew I could turn to.”
“Really?”
“You looked out for me.”
Dopamine was a go-to topic. “Gotta get our shot of dopamine. That’s what it’s all about.”
“Swipe left, swipe left!”
“That’s what we do.”
I drove across the bridge later that day and thought about how we only spend time with one another to be disappointed. That is what we do. That’s what she would have said too.
George Mackay Brown is one of the more well-known writers of Orkney and is perhaps best known for his novel Greenvoe which is dotted with understated phrasings. “Scots do wrong to call the devil by half humorous names such as Auld Nick, Sneckie, Prince of Darkness and Clootie.” (107)
C3PO and R2D2 on Sanday Roadside
“She was said to be a beautiful young woman, though rather lascivious. The principal light keeper was very solicitous.” (196)
Olivia de Havilland in Captain Blood (1935)
“Go to hell away from here, you faggot,” said a voice from the interior. “Horse-face, bugger off. Don’t relieve your conscience at this door, Away, you centaur.” (180)
A number of years back, an influential agent took interest in novel, My Bad Side. He had his reader review the opening 50 pages and gave me advice on changes to make, which I did. I received a follow-up on moving the back story to a later stage. I questioned this idea, explaining the benefit of where it was. That was it. I was out.
A year or so later, I pitched him my new book, Anori. “Not for me.” The one time an agent had taken an interest in my work, a one-night stand as it was, I hadn’t done as I was told and was cancelled. I’ve thought back to this moment often and wondered what might have happened if I had complied. What success would I have reaped? If only, if only…
Today, hundreds of indifferent rejection emails later, I feel something coming, some long-awaited breakthrough, not with them as much as me. I’ve made it somewhere, not a revelation as much as a state of mind, I suppose. Probably the booze but more of a clean sure hike up, getting to where I can see where I am. Which is here. Nowhere else but that.
My latest opus, The Vanishing Pill, will be ready in the spring.
