Against Nature

Nature is regarded as a respite, a solace, a source of man’s power and a reflection of his inner being, as in the notion of the pathetic fallacy. But what if nature is inimical to man, dissonant with man’s inner being? The beauty of the natural wonders of the world has the power to ennoble. But these wonders can just as easily alienate when they conflict with the inner sensibility of the perceiver. It is truly horrible to schlep all the way to the Grand Canyon and find nothing but tourists mouthing off meaningless hosannas of “Wow!” “Awesome!” “Spectacular!” Such hyperbole makes it impossible to objectively reconcile the inner our outer circumstances of existence.

Or take the sea. Much has been made of the sea, the waves, the salt water out of which life itself is supposed to have emerged. Yet the sea is also full of riptides, undertows, and ferocious gales. It erodes shorelines and its sandy beaches have increasingly become the repository for shards of glass, due to the resurgence in popularity of the long-neck beer bottle

Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote a book called Against Nature. It is a novel about a cosmopolitan, a dandy, a lover of the culture of the mind, with a penchant for the perverse. It is also an invaluable antidote to the unrealistic overvaluation of the natural, particularly as it relates to sexuality (an alternate translation of the French title, A rebours, is Against the Grain).

It’s not that nature should be destroyed, the seas polluted, the forests leveled, the fish and cattle killed (not to mention the rodents and reptiles). No, the equanimity of the ecosystem hinges on a more pacifist attitude towards nature. Removing greenhouse gases and preventing a meltdown of the polar ice caps is an obvious priority. No sense in turning polar bears into refugees or leaving seals in a sweat.

But nature is a little like government. Nature doesn’t always have the individual’s best interests at heart. Nature is not necessarily an ally. What is the story of Noah but the first attempt in the history of literature to describe man’s efforts to take up arms against nature? Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was another depiction of the battle between man and a supposedly accommodating habitat. The lack of realism about man’s relationship with nature and beauty borders on the criminal, and in this case it is not a victimless crime.

Let’s face it: nature is overrated. The admiration of nature is purchased at the price of self love. Nature is like the kid who figures out the Rubik’s Cube. Most people just can’t keep up with him. The sublime beauty of the deserted factory may be the best testament to man’s place in the universe. Nature is a con artist creating the impression of mystery, of possessing something that others don’t have. Nature is like the soul who seems to have a monopoly on self-possession. Nature has driven men to suicide, and even murder, when the ugly imperfections of human existence stare them mockingly in the face.

Diasporic Dining: Episode I

This is Empire of the Sun territory, or better yet Children of Men. Diasporic in feel, Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles is a hole in the wall on the corner of Doyers and Bowery, where $5 bowls of noodles come with everything from oxtails to fish balls. You can even call in your order ahead of time.

The owners emanate from Fugian Province. Knife-cut noodles are one of the specialties, and it takes time to knead the dough. The chef looks more like a baker, and the dough could be challah. A sea change is occurring in what it means to eat out. Vestibules replace the huge pleasure domes of Buddakan. Going out has become less a search for pleasure than a quest for a safe refuge where the prices rival the cost of cooking at home. On all counts, Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles fits the bill.

This is post-apocalyptic dining with a prelapsarian feel. You won’t go away hungry, or surprised by hidden charges on the bill, although the steamed dumplings, with their delicate skins, look like subdermal hematomas. Wittgenstein would have appreciated the self-explanatory name—Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles. “The world is that which is the case,” he said.

Short Story of the Year (Thus Far)

“The Fountain House” by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (August 31) is the best short story published in the The New Yorker this year. The runner-up is Craig Raine’s “Love Affair with Secondaries” (June 1), and both are coincidentally set in the former Soviet Bloc.

“The Fountain House” is a retelling of Shakeseare’s The Winter’s Tale. A man, heartbroken about the death of his daughter, seeks to bring her back to life, and succeeds. The tone of “The Fountain House” is hopeful, but the hope is so exultant, so extraordinary, so outlandish, that it betrays an underlying despair. Ultimately, the father awakens to the reality of the operating room and the morgue, but in between are marvelous dreams.

In one dream, he brings his daughter her lunch, as he did when she was a young child attending an idyllic summer camp. When he opens the sandwich, he sees an uncooked heart and is afraid his daughter will die if she eats it. He quickly tries to steal it away, but suddenly his daughter’s arms become supernaturally long. He eats the heart himself, thinking he will die, but instead wakes up on a gurney about to give blood.

“The Fountain House” upends the dread of loss and death with the infectious colloquial quality of the great Russian storytellers. The dream sequences recall Akaky Akakievich’s delirium in Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” Indeed, when the father seeks out his daughter, he comes across a harassed morgue attendant, a functionary wonderfully dissociated from death. Everyone has been looking for the same body and he is simply annoyed. He has work to do. What do these people want?

The story falls within the surrealist tradition. It is a parable, without a moral, that negotiates freely between humor, aggression, and death. Looming in the background is the mysterious explosion, the potential final scene of the girl dying in her father’s arms, cut and pasted into the story’s second paragraph. The net effect of “The Fountain House” is Sisyphean, the optimism as delightful as it is hard to grasp.

Like Clockwork

There has been much talk about the huge disparities of wealth that emerged in the years leading up to the most recent stock market collapse. Professionals who had spent years of study to obtain degrees in law or medicine found themselves economically marginal in cities like New York, where hedge fund managers put even relatively unremarkable dwellings out of a the reach of a once affluent class. The collapse of the stock market has not improved matters appreciably, since now the glut of available apartments is rendered inaccessible by the insecurities of the job market.

Educational disparities are an even more dispiriting prospect. There are two societies emerging in America. One is developing exponentially higher levels of educational sophistication, while the other is moving in the exact opposite direction. If Anthony Burgess were alive, he would have been the writer to distill the predicament of a culture in which educational anorexia leads to disenfranchisement. The same competitive parents who bought up all the desirable apartments were at the same time fighting to get their children into the best high schools and colleges. When the race is fixed, it’s hard to compete, and there are whole segments of American society that simply refuse to nourish their children on the educational fast-food served up by woefully under subsidized public schools.

Like super rats whose survival skills have been honed in subway tunnels, dead eyed, pistol-packing third graders are the stuff of contemporary urban legend. There are also super rats graduating from Ivy League institutions, the supreme products of our culture of consumption. Whatever the residual truth about the existence of these different species of miscreant, they constitute the cast of a sequel to A Clockwork Orange that has yet to be written. Brutal and self-seeking, speaking languages they barely understand, the super rats that emerge from our institutions of higher learning, or alternatively our prisons, populate a new Inferno. “What doesn’t kill you will make your stronger,” quoth Nietzsche. But certain strengths are adaptable only in the context of pathology, and at what cost?

The Debt to Pleasure

John Lanchester wrote the bestselling The Debt to Pleasure during the same period in the late '90s when Long Term Capital Management, the giant hedge fund, failed spectacularly. The fund’s collapse, while surprising at the time, proved to be providential.

English novelist Margaret Atwood addresses debt in her latest work, the book-length essay Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, published as the United States deficit approaches one trillion.

Debt is in the air. Derivatives like securitized mortgages and credit default swaps have increased obligations to the point where the hallowed halls of finance have been shaken to their foundations. Venerable institutions like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers have crumbled, while Bank of America, AIG, General Electric and Citibank wobble as if the ground underneath them were in the throes of a tectonic shift.

Debt is something we all take for granted. Most businesses can’t start up without debt. Without debt, it’s impossible to buy homes, whose prices usually exceed the assets the average family needs to live. Like economies of scale and the division of labor, debt is a centerpiece of any capitalist economy.

But at what point does debt, or pleasure, get out of hand? The title of Lanchester’s book was oddly prescient about the nature of the financial calamities that would strike a decade later.

All debt reckons with the future at the expense of the present. We use money that we don’t have to enjoy something that we will pay for tomorrow. If the value of the object goes up, then we are able to sell it or refinance the debt. If it goes down, we owe even more money. In the subprime mortgage crisis, the value of assets suddenly went down. Why? Because demand, which had been high, decreased until there was a glut of goods on the market.

Why did demand decrease? China holds the mortgage on America. When the payments, which filter down as higher costs to the consumer, get too high, there simply is no money left to pay back the future. Existing loans fail and there aren’t any new prospects to take their place. Demand for goods, like houses, plummets. Blame China? Better yet, blame pleasure.

Hindsight is always 20/20. After the crash of l929, who would have thought that practically the same thing could happen all over again? Sure there were differences. A year ago, there were no cries for margin, no black Tuesday. It was all much quieter. On the screens of computers in somnolent trading rooms the market simply stopped functioning. The financial system froze, as if inhabited by one of those viral worms that infect computers. Life came to a halt and then proceeded to fall apart. It wasn’t as good as science fiction, for it lacked the willing suspension of disbelief. People are still trying to write the story, even though no one wants to believe it.

The China Syndrome

In the collective unconscious of the American spirit, China is a black and white Charlie Chan movie with proverb-chanting Charlie played by the Caucasian actor Sidney Toler. China is take-out Chinese food or the Cantonese restaurant, circa 1955, with big oriental shades, Han dynasty murals, and impassive Confuscian waiters in white jackets pulling the silver covers off the #1—egg roll, chow mein and fried rice. China is foot binding (less brutal than the clitorectomy, but torture nevertheless), Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, Sun Yat Sen, Chiang Kai Shek, Mao, the Long March, the rape of Nanking, Zhou En Lai, The Gang of Four, the Cultural Revolution. China is the Forbidden City and the Great Wall as pictured in Richard Haliburton’s Book of Marvels or William Hinton’s Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. This sleeping giant epitomizes the Orientalism of Edward Said’s famous essay.

But while the mythology of China festers in the imagination, a real China burgeons. Shanghai has 4000 skyscrapers, which is double that of New York. Embedded within the structure of an ostensibly communist society is an engine of wealth production that cannot be adequately accounted for by the usual terminology—free market, economies of scale, division of labor—employed to describe capitalist production. This new China is a socio-economic chimera, an authoritarian head presiding over a free market body, the overactive superego accommodating the demiurge.

China is science fiction to the extent that its wealth is like a black hole. Imperial America has declined, leaving in its wake stealthy expansion through magnetic pull. China doesn’t invade (with the exception of secessionist provinces like Tibet). Its expansion is by way of attraction rather than promotion.

America is about to be foreclosed on by China, which more than ever holds the mortgage to our property. In The Man in a High Castle, Philip K. Dick envisions the Axis powers winning the Second World War, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America imagines the rise of anti-Semitism as Lindbergh beats Roosevelt in the 1940 election. The WMD of the China novel is bound to be a credit default swap.

Wordmonger

Words have personalities. There’s prolepsis, a condition of answering an as yet unasked question, and morganatic, which refers to the untitled bastards of nobility. Inspissation is a thermodynamic word referring to the behavior of high density liquids in narrow spaces.

There’s the neurological term perseveration, which refers to irrational graphic repetitions; limpid, which doesn’t mean what it sounds like; labile, which has nothing to do with the vagina; and the two vens, venial and venal, which have practically opposite applications despite the similarity in sound and appearance.

Then there are the technical words for mental states, like anagnosia, and states of language and meaning such as aporia, which refers to the presence of two equal and opposing views. Now, an aporia is not an oxymoron, since it doesn’t refer to nouns. How to get out of this quagmire, this syzygy, in which the sun moon and earth are aligned, without the help of a quisling, a person who takes after the Norwegian diplomat who was discovered playing both sides against the middle?

Samuel Johnson devoted his life to words, and Boswell devoted his life to the randy, carousing Johnson, but all their words have outlived them. Words are organic in that they are growing, changing, adapting like the multiple cells that populate organs. But unlike organic matter, words never really die. They are transformed by time, but they never seem to falter, even in the case of languages like Yiddish, which experience a life after death. Words can be extant and extinct at the same time. Has the Yiddish oy become a form of preverbal expression, or was the preverbal expression turned into a word? And then there are words and expressions that travel freely between languages, as if they were given some kind of diplomatic passport. Concierge is one of those words that have free passage between England and France.

Words are like clay. They can be molded into wonderful monuments to emotion, or, in the hands of jargonistas, can be turned into the KFC of expression. Narcissism and self-involvement are two words that have summarily been denuded of meaning through indiscriminate, unprofessional use. The city agency that hands out summons for noise should also ticket people who emasculate words like narcissism through after-hours use.

And then there’s feckless. That’s a simple word that hasn’t gotten its due. Feckless has a long way to go before it reaches the breaking point, as is the case with apoptosis, another one of those technical words, albeit one with some degree of poetic significance, to the extent that it refers to cell death.

Logorrhea is diarrhea of the mouth, but it is also a nice word in that it uses its Greek roots to pinpoint a condition that does to words what spendthrift does to money, which is to exhaust resources for the sake of dubious and ephemeral gains. Is this post an example of persiflage?