Closing credits

What happened in 2023? It’s a blur. I get through a day at a time. I barely look ahead or behind.

Mostly, I chase after children who live only in the moment. They are rather wicked. (As I compose this, one of them is removing his diaper and peeing on the floor.) My wife kindly looks after them a few hours every third evening so I can record my thoughts on this blog; a week later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve written.

I steal moments to do a little reading. A book or two later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve read.

Someone at a party asked which books I liked best this year. I said Shakespeare, Harry Potter, and Narnia; I had trouble remembering anything not in a series. I had to check my list of “completed” books after I got home.

My life is turning into a series of disconnected events. I’m becoming the hero of Borges’s “Funes, the Memorious,” only without the memories.

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Before I forget, I wish to complain that the previously serviceable app Grammarly has quietly gotten much too big for its britches. Yesterday, I was typing in a document, and Grammarly sneakily auto-corrected “resistible” to “irresistible,” which is THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I MEANT. This illustrates a larger point, that 2023 was the year when a lot of ordinary people started noticing (or reading online) that AI had “jumped the shark.”

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“You need to go to therapy, Sweetie,” says Karin. “This is the bleakest entry ever. ‘I remember nothing, and the robots are coming.’”

She is too young to understand.

Now that I think about it, it would be amusing to pay a stranger to listen to me read my blog entries out loud.

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Allegedly I groan a lot, even when I’m sitting still.

Do I groan, or purr? Jasper snuggles next to me as I type this, and our noises sound alike.

Jasper is middle-aged now; Ziva is almost middle-aged. They’ve both mellowed out. They hardly fight each other anymore.

I look forward to my sons’ attainment of this happiness.

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Every year, I read the book of Zechariah; and afterward, I am sorry to say, I forget about it until the next year.

It ends like this.

[14:16 ff. (NIV):] Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, and to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. If any of the peoples of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, they will have no rain. If the Egyptian people do not go up and take part, they will have no rain. The LORD will bring on them the plague he inflicts on the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. This will be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles.

On that day HOLY TO THE LORD will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, and the cooking pots in the LORD’s house will be like the sacred bowls in front of the altar. Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the LORD Almighty, and all who come to sacrifice will take some of the pots and cook in them. And on that day there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the LORD Almighty.

So when you worry about war in Israel, or anywhere, think about that.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 39: Beavis and Butt-head do America

Beavis and Butt-head lie on the ground, in the desert. They’ve had many adventures. Now, they are dying of thirst.

“The sun sucks,” says Butt-head.

His life flashes before his eyes.

Beavis and Butt-head, one year old, sit on the couch, watching TV …

Beavis and Butt-head, two years old, sit on the couch, watching TV …

And so on, until age 15.

“My life was cool,” says Butt-head.

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Beavis remembers even farther back, to his spermhood. He recalls how he penetrated the egg.

“I scored,” he says.

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These are their life-quests. They want to watch TV, and they want to score. But they are so stupid, they can’t always figure out whether, in the present moment, they are or are not watching TV, or scoring or failing to score.

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Harold and Kumar, in a different movie, are questing to eat White Castle hamburgers. They, too, have fantastical adventures in pursuit of a mundane goal.

But they are not so unintelligent. Nor does their goal of eating White Castle hamburgers dominate their lives; it’s more like an irresistible momentary urge. We understand Harold and Kumar well enough.

In Dumb and Dumber, the questers, Lloyd and Harry, are formidably stupid. Their imbecilities are so terrible that, perversely, they seem downright brilliant.

But there is no unifying principle that explains the stupidity of Lloyd and Harry. It is just a brute fact about them. Their minds are freakish to us.

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Beavis and Butt-head are just as stupid as Lloyd and Harry; but, like Harold and Kumar, they are familiar to us. Indeed, they are utterly predictable. They are governed by a few basic drives and habits that we all have – and only by those drives and habits. Arguably, it’s the dominance of these things that makes Beavis and Butt-head so stupid.

They aren’t totally witless, but their wit is of the most rudimentary sort, fueled by scatological and sexual association (and nothing else).

So, when they travel to Butte, Montana, and to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, they are greatly amused, because BUTTE looks like BUTT and the petrified forest has lots of WOOD.

Viewers who have themselves ventured into this reductivist mindset, or who’ve known young men who’ve done so, will be amused to see how amused Beavis and Butt-head are made by these puns.

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Of course, real teenaged boys are more complex than Beavis and Butt-head. Perhaps Beavis and Butt-head are meant to embody just one or two features of ordinary psychology, magnified to hyperbolic and exclusionary extremes, rather in the style of Borges’s “memorious” Funes. Or perhaps it is better to think of Beavis and Butt-head as Don Quijote – not good-hearted, of course, but governed by a similarly erroneous and rather narrow conception of the world. They dream. They hallucinate. They mistake a kindly old woman for a Las Vegas party girl, a chauffer for a blind man, confession booths for toilets. (In each case, light is traded for darkness.) Beavis slips in and out of the persona of his bizarre alter-ego, Cornholio. Toward the end of the movie, in a single lucid moment, he senses the futility of his quest. “We’re never going to score!” he says in an impassioned speech. “We’re never going to score!”

In their TV show, Beavis and Butt-head are critics: they mock the various aspects of mainstream culture that the show wishes to satirize. The movie, however, turns its critical gaze upon Beavis and Butt-head themselves. Yes, the world around them is mad; but there is just as little sanity in Beavis and Butt-head. Their contempt for the world leaves them ill-equipped to function in it. Nor is there any quixotic idealism in them. They have their desires; those desires are frustrated. That is all.

Judge not, that ye not be judged.

May’s poem

This month’s poem, “In Praise of Darkness,” is by Jorge Luis Borges.

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Old age (or so it is called by others) / can be the season of our happiness. / The animal has died, or nearly died. / The man remains, with his soul. / I live among vague and luminous shapes / that are not yet darkness. / Buenos Aires, / which earlier was spreading into suburbs / toward the endless plains, / is once again La Recoleta, El Retiro, / the smeared streets of El Once / and the ramshackle old houses / we still call the Southside. / There was always too much going on in my life; / Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes so he could think; / time has been my Democritus. / This half-light moves slowly and causes no pain; / it flows down a mild slope, / it is like eternity. / My friends do not have faces, / women are what they were so many years ago, / the streetcorners may have changed, / there are no letters in the pages of books. / All this ought to terrify me, / but it is a sweetness, a coming back home. / Of the many generations of books on earth / I shall have read only a very few, / which I go on reading in my memory, / reading and alchemizing. / From the south, from the east, from the west, from the north, / the roads converge, / the roads that have brought me to my secret center. / Those roads were echoes and footsteps, / women and men, death throes, resurrections, / days and nights, / dreams and between the dreams, / every moment of yesterday, even the meanest, / and all of the yesterdays of the world, / the unflinching sword of the Dane, the Persian’s moon, / the deeds of the dead, / the shared love, the words, / Emerson and snow and so many other things. / Now I can let them go. I have come back to my center, / to my algebra, to my key, / to my mirror. / Soon I will know who I am.

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(Translated by Robert Mezey)

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In his article “Against Narrativity,” the philosopher Galen Strawson denies that humans typically organize their lives according to narrative patterns (in any sense of “typically” that is more than just statistical). He also denies that it’s typically good for a person to organize his or her life in this way. Some people, Strawson contends, naturally orient themselves “episodically” rather than “diachronically.” In so doing, they incur no moral cost; but it would be costly for them to try to reorient themselves.

Giving an example of an episodically oriented person, Strawson mentions Borges.

I thought of Borges as an example before Strawson mentioned him. But I’m not quite sure what he exemplifies.

Is the Borges of this poem episodic or diachronic? Is he concerned with narrative, and, if so, how?

These orientations occupy a spectrum, according to Strawson. Borges’s Funes is at the strongly episodic end. Augustine is strongly diachronic. People can be anywhere in between.

But I’m tempted to place the Borges of this poem onto more than one position on the spectrum.

The election

For my birthday, I’ve been asking for books by G.K. Chesterton.

Today at Bethel I spent one class session making the students read Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” and the other making the students take a quiz. I was able to sit quietly at my desk. Such are the sessions that I truly love to teach.

Tomorrow, due to the election, I’ll enjoy six hours off from work. Whom shall I vote for? Not Trumpie, and not Hillary. I’d vote for Hillary if Indiana were a “battleground” state; but, according to the polls, Trump is certain to win here, rendering my vote causally irrelevant. And so I plan to use my ballot to declare my preference for a decent human being.

In Ecuador, the people simply stage a nice coup if the president turns out to be a knucklehead. (Setting aside the “coup” that was held against him in 2010, the fact that our current president has been in power so long is one indication that he isn’t such a knucklehead.) Our military is obliging in this respect. It allows coups to proceed against the unrighteous. Not so in the United States, or in any country where a rebellion would be put down by the invincible and loyal guardians of the regime (and where, moreover, the civilians would be at a loss as to how to rebel). I quote from Chesterton’s essay about Rudyard Kipling:

Now, Mr. Kipling is certainly wrong in his worship of militarism, but his opponents are, generally speaking, quite as wrong as he. The evil of militarism is not that it shows certain men to be fierce and haughty and excessively warlike. The evil of militarism is that it shows most men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable. The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines. Thus the Pretorian guard became more and more important in Rome as Rome became more and more luxurious and feeble. …

In the U.S., no institution is more important than the local Pretorian guard, which is constituted by the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and so on. This guard was built up ostensibly to defend citizens from aggressors and would-be aggressors (the British, the Native Americans, and the Spanish; and, later, the Germans, the Japanese, the Soviets, and the terrorists). But its chief function, which no one discusses, is to be so big and powerful and disciplined that civilians could never overthrow the likes of Trumpie or Hillary – or any knucklehead who should be elected.