Of God and Automobiles

I’m standing in line at the Jefferson County Courthouse to register my new car–sitting in line, actually, because the wait is too long for standing–and thinking depressing thoughts. Being in a long line inspires morbid thoughts, especially at the Jefferson County Courthouse, which is significantly underfunded and understafffed due to an occupational tax that was ruled to be illegal and a state legislature that doesn’t give a damn enough to make the tax legal again.

Here’s what I’m thinking about. Years ago I went on a long hike in the woods near my home. I was looking for a family of graves out in the woods that my mother told me about, four graves from the late 19th century or therabouts on top of a little hill, surrounded by pines and outlined in sandstone. It was a good place to lay your others into the ground.

After getting lost, I finally found what I was looking for; all the graves were there, intact and laid out just as I imagined them.
But the surrounding area was not at all as I imagined. The trees had been torn down, and the undergrowth butchered by the tracks of the bulldozer still parked nearby.

It had been raining heavily when I found the graves, and because there were no trees and the undergrowth and grass had been torn apart, there was nothing to keep the red Alabama earth from washing down the hill in small rivers of blood.

Everything changed for me then, for good or for ill is still being decided, when I realized that nothing is promised to us on earth. No God or guru is going to help us in this life. It is all up to us. Our successes and our failures are ours alone. Not even in death are we looked out for.

You may think this depressed me, but it felt like a great burden had been lifted off my shoulders. Before then, I believed that God had it in for me, that he was determined to fill my life with suffering and mental anguish. I learned Instead that he just looks on indifferently or, at the least, without interference.

Whether I believe in this anymore, I can’t say for sure, I don’t even know that I still believe God exists; either way, I know my life is my own, and I’m grateful for the knowledge.

Which means I have to register my own damn automobile.

Neither Here Nor There: On Turning 40

Except for a bad foot and a bad knee, I feel young. My mind feels young, and maybe that’s what troubles me the most. Despite what I perceive myself to be, I am 40. Forty is half of 80, and 80 is no certainty. Thirty is half of 60, and I can see myself turning 60 very easily, but 80 is another matter.

As of 2011, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs listed the average life expectancy for males in the United States as 75.3 years. So if I live an average life span, I will die either on April 19^th or 20^th of 2028. That’s a good 35 years from now.

Of course, I do not live an average lifestyle. I took a quiz on livingto100.com that takes lifestyle, family habits and current medical conditions into consideration when determining life expectancy. It predicts I will live to 76. So I am above average by only a few months. Both numbers feel too optimistic to me. I don’t feel like 75.3 or 76 is doable at this stage in my life.

I get a lot of points for not drinking or smoking; but I consume enough sugar to have the liver of an alcoholic, and if a heart attack doesn’t kill me, cirrhosis surely will. My immediate family is healthy for the most part—I mean, they are still alive and no one has cancer—so I get points for that, and that gives me hope.

Something else to consider: by 2028 surely someone will have come up with a cure for dying before your 80. At least that is my hope.

Fifty is something to really worry about. Fifty is half of 100, half of dirt, half of nothing. While 80 is not statistically likely in my case, 100 is straight out. I know of no family member that has lived past 100, so it is an empirical fact that, should I live past 80, at some point in the next ten years I will cross the halfway point. This fact scares the shit out of me.

It’s not that I fear “the other side.” Years of religious education has taught me that the afterlife is very much like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory (It’s Scrumdidilyumptious!), so I’m not too frightened about that. It’s the physical act of dying, the moment when the lights fade to black and the curtain closes for the final time. What will I be thinking? Will there be regret? Will I be alone?

Okay, so I’m scared of the afterlife. I don’t believe in heaven as I was taught by preachers and teachers during my church-school upbringing. That level of perfection is difficult to believe. It is wrought with logical fallacies. There is no death in that heaven, no sickness. We are given new bodies, but which bodies? The bodies we had at our physical peak, or the bodies we had when we were born? Will my nose be slightly off-center in heaven, or will it be straight. Will I be bald in heaven, or will I have a full head of hair? If I have a full head of hair, will that hair be manageable, because when I had a full head of hair, I couldn’t manage it for anything.

But is it not those imperfections that have made me who I have become? So, if everything is perfect, and my body is perfected, how will anyone recognize me? How will I recognize myself? If I am to experience the rewards of heaven, I want the me as I currently know him to experience it. Otherwise heaven is meaningless.

I don’t know what’s on the other side, and I don’t want to live my life as if I do know what’s on the other side. I prefer to stay ignorant, but ignorance is not bliss. Certainty cannot be derived from uncertainty, and I hate uncertainty. Uncertainty to me is like that strip of fur on a Rhodesian Ridgeback that grows in the opposite direction. Why the hell does its fur do that?

I don’t like being 40. When you turn 40, there are no more excuses. Death is either imminent or in the calculable future. You can no longer say to yourself “I’ll do that in a couple of years,” because by 40 you’ve learned that a couple of years quickly turns into ten, and after ten years have passed you’ll either have forgotten what you wanted from life or you’ll be too worn down by it to give a damn anymore. It’s the latter that quickens death, that invites it in and lets it sleep in your bed. I’ve spent most of my life in a perpetual state of discouragement. I’ve always hoped for myself but I’ve never believed, and it has worn me down.

The author James Agee turned 40 on 27 November 1949. Of that day, he wrote the following to his friend, Father James Harold Flye:

It was a deeply melancholy day for me: forty, of all things. I imagine that by fifty one is a little better able to accept it—by then it would be utterly impossible to retain any confusing delusions either of youthfulness, or of living forever. Now that the day itself is over, I feel neither here nor there, except that Time’s a-wastin’.

Five and a half years later, on 16 May 1955, Agee entered a New York City taxi cab, had a heart attack and died.

That feels about right.

Light in August

[I began this but never finished it.  According to the Word file, I've been holding on to it since October 12, 2012.  That's, like, a lifetime ago.  It's a shame too because Light in August is one of my favorite Faulkner novels.  I should probably find a way to finish it, but I can't remember where I was going with it.  So, here it is, mistakes and all.  Enjoy, or not.]

I have come from Alabama, a fur piece.  That’s what Lena is saying to herself as the novel opens.  She’s pregnant, not very bright and “a-walkin’” trying to find the father of her child so he won’t be born a bastard.

The father of Lena’s baby is Lucas Burch a/k/a John Brown, also not very bright, who worked at the mill for a spell and then went into full time bootlegging with Joe Christmas.

Byron Bunch.  Probably more like me than anyone else.  I think his character is best exemplified by this moment of his internal dialogue, [quote here what he says to himself before he tries to kick Lucas’s ass, about Lucas twice turning down in nine months what he never had in all his 35 years.]  He kind of feels sorry for himself.  He has physical limitations—he’s short—and he probably doesn’t have much else going for him.

Joe Christmas, also has physical issues: he’s mixed raced.  It brings about a lot of confusion internally for him, but not just him, the people he comes in contact with as well.  Isn’t Ms. Burden just as guilty for getting turned on by his mixed heritage as everyone else is guilty for hating him?

Rev. Hightower, DD (done damned).  Shamed preacher, cuckolded by his wife.  He mistrusts women, and he advises Byron not to get caught up too much with Lena.

There are a lot of social taboos getting tested in Light in August: miscegenation, children out of wedlock, being cuckolded, gossip.  What are the answers?  What even are the questions?

I like how, instead of just giving us dry exposition, Faulkner lets a character—Doc Jones, Jones’s wife, or Gavin Stevens to his professor friend—tell us what happened, and each with a distinctive voice.

* * * * * *

One more thing.  I found the t-shirt below while looking for the picture I used at the top of this post.  Why are people compelled to wear these things?  It’s a pretty cool cover, but I don’t know if I need it on a t-shirt.  I think it would be even cooler if there was no picture at all, only the words “William Faulkner, Author of Sanctuary.”  Because you’d be underscoring your coolness by ignoring the fact that The Sound and the Fury, one of the greatest novels in the history of novels, preceded Sanctuary.  You can tell people, “Oh, but I really think Sanctuary is the better novel,” and pretend to mean it.  Or, perhaps, the cover of Pylon, and then underneath it the words, “By William Faulkner, Author of Mosquitoes.”  It would be like living in an alternative universe where Faulkner only wrote shit¹.

* * * * * *

¹Making fun of Mosquitoes and Pylon never gets old.

 

Flannery O’Connor and Group Sex: A Primer in Neither

I’m reading a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s lectures and essays called Mystery and Manners. In “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” O’Connor uses the structure of Caroline Gordon’s short story “Summer Dust,” as an example of how seemingly unrelated parts are in fact quite related.

I mention this not to give a lecture on short story writing, but to point out two things: One, I have never heard of Caroline Gordon; and two, I find I need to seek out her work. Why is this? It partly has to do with a need to read a variety of authors and partly because Gordon, by mere mention in an essay, has been given Flannery O’Connor’s imprimatur–at least to my satisfaction. Whether Gordon is worth a damn remains to be seen.

I’m a novice reader, and I try to come upon new writers and novels any way I can. By novice I mean to say that I came to reading late, that I never read as a child, and thus never properly evolved to find writers on my own, or to even know what the hell I liked. Because of this I’m easily influenced by the suggestions of peers and heroes. If I stumble upon someone I find interesting reading an author I’ve never heard of, I’m likely to investigate and seek out that author. I find the randomness suits me, and keeps me from spending all my time in Yoknapatawpha¹ County and places thereabout.

Until a few days ago, I never considered myself a fan of Flannery O’Connor. Why this is I can’t quite put my finger on, but it had something to do with how she ends many of her stories and my prejudices toward how stories should be written. The change of heart came from a re-reading of Everything that Rises Must Converge and my own need to wipe the slate clean and unlearn everything I thought I knew about writing short stories. I can’t explain yet why I now consider myself a fan, but I’ve decided to read this year everything she’s written. She died young and does not have a large body of work, so it should not be as daunting as The Faulkner Project. I’m also going to be reading The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon, and I’m looking forward to it.

In my research I found another Caroline Gordon, and this Caroline Gordon seems to be an expert on group sex, writing timeless classics such as The Beginner’s Guide to Group Sex: Who Does What to Whom and How. At least I believe it to be a different Caroline Gordon. To be honest, there’s a part of me that wishes they were the same person. What would it say about Flannery O’Connor? Academics would have a field day analyzing the implications.

¹I had to search “Yoknapatawpha” to make sure I spelled it correctly. That’s how long it’s been since I’ve worked on The Faulkner Project.

The Master

I meant to post this a while back, but I never got around to finishing it. I still haven’t finished it, but here it is anyway.

Almost 24 hours later, and I still don’t know what to make of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Like Terrence Mallick’s Tree of Life, I was awed by the visual experience but left kind of cold by the story.

According to reports, this is PTA’s take on Scientology, but don’t get caught up in that. It’s really about. . .well, I’m not quite sure what its about. There’s a lot of themes to choose from, but maybe the one that fits best is this: that man can not rely on a charismatic figurehead for deliverance; he must learn to find his own way. Yet, even as I just wrote that, I still didn’t buy it.

Like everyone else, I admired the acting. Phoenix gives a brilliant physical performance, and I can watch Philip Seymour Hoffman do just about anything. At the first ever convention (?) of “The Cause,” Hoffman delivers a “sermon” that doesn’t make any sense to me but is nonetheless fun to look at. The camera zooms in on his face, and in over the span of only a few seconds, Hoffman gives us four or five different looks, and it encapsulates everything his character is supposed to be: a stern but charismatic leader, but also a salesman.

The trick to building a cult following is to believe in the bullshit yourself.

My E-Mail to Rave Cinemas upon Viewing Lawrence of Arabia

You might be able to figure out that I had a not so enjoyable night at the movies tonight.  Once again, I saw a 2-D film projected with a 3-D projector and, as usual, the night scenes were so dark no one could tell who was speaking.  Had I not seen the film several times before, I might have never known.  I got home around midnight, and here it is close to 1:00, and I’m too angry to sleep.  After the same thing happened with Raiders of the Lost Ark last month, I wonder if I will ever be able to see another movie in town again.  (I gave up on the other theaters in town a long time ago.  Rave was the last bastion of quality.)  Anyway, because I’m mad and want to stir up trouble, I’ve pasted the e-mail I wrote to Rave Cinemas customer service.  Take no prisoners!

To Whom It May Concern:

Tonight I attended the seven o’clock screening of Lawrence of Arabia at the Rave Patton Creek 15 in Birmingham, Alabama, and while the movie was good, the projection was horrible. The problem was that the night scenes were too dark, so dark that sometimes you couldn’t make out who was speaking or what was going on. I’ve been a fan of Lawrence for a number of years, I own a DVD copy, and not once have I ever had a difficult time making out what was going on. In fact, the colors in daytime scenes are rich and vibrant; not so in your theater tonight. I had the same miserable experience watching Raiders of the Lost Ark at the same theater a month ago.

The common denominator between my viewings of Lawrence and Raiders, is that they were both screened in theaters reserved for 3-D. As many film lovers know, if 2-D film is shown on a 3-D projector, and certain filters are not removed, the image will be darker, as it was tonight for me. I can’t begin to tell you how unlikely it is I will ever pay $12.50 again to see a movie there, or at any Rave again, which was the last theater chain in Birmingham that I trusted. I enjoy the movies, but in the last few years, it has become very difficult to put up with.

Please, at the least, stop showing classic films. To desecrate Lawrence of Arabia is unconscionable.

Sincerely,

Garry Evens

UPDATE: Rave Responds.

Mr. Evans,I would like to extend my sincerest apologies for your movie experience last night. I am also a film buff and enjoy getting a chance to watch older cinema classics on the big screen (sometimes for the first time). I know the excitement you must have felt leading up to the re-release of both Raiders of the Lost Ark in Imax and Lawrence of Arabia and I sympathize with your frustrations that neither experience was up to par for you. I would very much like to not lose the attandance of any individuals such as yourself that have a deeper appreciation for quality movies. I would like to offer you passes to give our theater another try. I can assure you that we will do everything in our power to ensure your movie experience will be a pleasant one. As a result of your criticism of the picture quality, I will be getting with our contract provider for projection maintenance to determine the problem ( as all 3D filters were removed) and find a way to improve upon the picture quality. I hope that you have a wonderful day and that I see you someday soon.

Thank you,

Considering how I’ve always had good experiences at Rave theaters, I’m leaning toward believing that the filters were indeed off.  So then why was the picture so dark?  I have absolutely no idea, but I’m hoping they are sincere when they tell me they are looking into it.

Who Knew? General Patton also tried to read all of Faulkner

I was shocked, Shocked, to find out that General George S. Patton, at the end of the great war, also tried to read all of Faulkner (at least all that had been published up until then). And like me, he too stumbled on Mosquitoes which, it is rumored, confounded him more than any sumbitch Nazi, or any no good sumbitch Commie bastard ever could confound him. And, also like me, he stumbled on Pylon, and because his experience with Mosquitoes was still fresh on his mind, he wrote a prayer to get him through it. I reprint it not only for myself, but for all others struggling with lesser Faulkner.

Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee as we read lesser works by thy humble servant, William Faulkner, to restrain these immoderate compound words with which we have had to contend that do not exist in any known dictionary in any known language or dialect and which are not nearly as clever or humorous when the surrounding material fails to live up to Thy servant’s great standards. Grant us fair weather while reading Pylon. Graciously hearken to us as readers who call upon Thee that armed with Thy power and adequate lighting and a good chair–not too good but good enough to keep us from falling asleep amidst the words of Thy servant–we may advance from page to page, and crush the mediocrity of lesser Faulkner, so that we may get on to Absalom, Absalom! and establish literary justice among readers. Yair!