Why You'd Want To Live Here

nixa, missouri

everyone here was born somewhere
else, in a different country,
even if that place was named
the same as this one. it is changed
now. the horizon much more crowded
than you last remember. the suburbs
huddle nearer each year. bunch
in overplanted crops that bear diminishing
yields. the future is shrinking. salt ruins
more soil out by the coasts every day.
I approach the town I grew up in
from two angles. it is never the same
twice. and never changes.
you can’t go home again, no
shit. but, remember this, neither
can you ever leave.

I Don't Actually Have a Daughter

on the occasion of my daughter’s graduation

I also only wanted
a home, like you
seem perpetually to be seeking,
running in circles, always
& never finding yourself
where you started or thought
you would ever end up. This disguises
some other desire. Your need to be right
about something. To locate a certainty,
attach yourself to it & pray, each day
for the rest of your life, to never be left
alone in the woods again. No matter
how many times I tell you bears don’t live
around here, you refuse to close your eyes
in the daytime. This is a matter of trust.
Not in me, or yourself, but in the upcoming
seconds of time, the possibility the world
might cease to exist if we stop willing it
to behave in exactly the fashion we need.
Does this sound ridiculous? I admit
nothing. There’s no telling how
long this search will continue. How you
may someday find yourself exhausted
in the face of the impossible. What then?
Then you will read this
again.

I Like John Ashbery

[title]

I often think of that imaginary time
when it was much more clear
how I should go about living in the world, or better
not think, just follow an invisible
yet unmistakable plan through the heart
of the city, a road laid in golden light
direct from the setting sun that leads
right up Broadway to the steps of the library,
its bronze-domed roof tinted red and the names
emblazoned there, Plato & all the rest, floating as shades
of purple and gray, their marble façade throwing a long shadow
getting longer, clamming the air with knowledge
cool as a tomb & just about as useful
when the pressure drops a thundering rain,
obscures even the night within a fog, here
everything once so clear
to Descartes – who saw,
really saw what he knew,
what he was – ducks into hiding
behind the surface of things, into apartment buildings
where the party continues, you know the one
we meant to attend but missed
again
last weekend when we arrived at a different
address, went the wrong way down 4th Street,
and got caught in crosstown traffic for hours,
stuck in a cab, with a jackknifed semi,
immobilized, blocking our view of the water.

This is Very Long

2666 and the Pursuit of Everything

The question’s inevitable: is 2666 a bad book? In more than one respect it qualifies. Long stretches of boring writing. Seemingly irrelevant or meaningless major characters. Nazis. An ambiguous ending of suspicious literary value. At times it feels more like a test of wills, an endurance contest or existential challenge, certainly not what fools call a pleasurable reading experience. But a better question might be: is it possible to write a good book about dead hookers and Nazis? The answer would seem to be obviously not, so perhaps the joke is on us. Or perhaps Bolano sought out the most absurd constraints possible, plot mechanisms sure to doom any story instantly to pulp fiction. Perhaps. Any attempt at writing about this book is necessarily in the realm of speculation because, despite the assurances of the executors, one never knows what the book would have been had he lived. Now does one. Then, too. But let’s go over the specifics.

This book only intermittently can be said to have a plot. Who the fuck is Oscar Fate and why is he here. Same question re: Amalfitano (though, honestly, I like that guy). For that matter Archimboldi? His name is Reiter. Get it? But what are his books about and why do we care? One of them is about seaweed. The others? Presumably they have something to do with Nazis. And possibly a Prussian baroness. That’s about all we get. Even the critics talk only about talking about the novels. And what is the meaning of their joint appearance? Perhaps the book should be read as a collage of genres. We begin with romance, continue through variations on the overpopulated Dostoevsky-esque madman motif, a brief sports episode then onto the serial murders in the mystery section. Then, history with our friends the German fascists. One could be excused for wondering: what the fuck. And also for yawning at the exhaustion of it all. But this brings us no closer to getting it, if there is something there to get.

Which we must assume there is. For sport if for no other reason. We are all in the same boat (sorry) in having no existing thought or literature to guide us in encountering this book. Not to mention Bolano is no longer alive. He must be watching us with a serious amount of hilarity. The afterword from the executors is a piece of inadvertent genius. I’ve never read its equal in the category of blind stabs at meaning from those nominally in charge of a work of art. It’s clear they have not the slightest idea what to do with this book. And yet they did well! Certainly better than me. Because it means something, that much is clear. Bolano has not done nothing. He frontally attacked one of the more sick and outrageous crimes of the current world (there are many) and attempted to make something out of it. Or not make something out of it. Which gets at one of the deeper questions the book raises: how does a person write about the world, meaningful things in the world, the vast fields of death in the world, and what is the responsibility (to hazard a highly pretentious word) of the writer, the Reiter (again, sorry), and the writing in shaping, naming and saying this has meaning, this is not as senseless as it seems. Or doing exactly the opposite. Saying this is exactly as senseless as it seems except much more so than you currently believe. The meaning is that it’s much worse than you think, and you’re horrible for not realizing this earlier. Wake up, goddamnit, it’s later than you think. Bolano is no doubt doing this, saying this, screaming this as loud as can be done in a 900-page novel. But of course the direct evidence has been lost while shuttling between cities in the desert.

But if he is doing this, he is doing hundreds of other things. Let’s consider the epigraph. “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” Is this a real Baudelaire quote? Does it matter? Either way it’s the best possible description of the book. What more can be said? It preempts any attempt at plot summary or characterization. I’m not sure why he bothered to write the thing after that. Need I say more about it? This indicates whatever boredom the reader experiences is wholly intended. Bolano seems to have a pessimistic view of things, to understate it a bit. He believes life is a not-very-interesting curse only occasionally punctuated by episodes of disgusting violence. This violence being a salve of sorts to our bone-crushing ennui. He is out to mimic life as he finds it, not pretend it is something better than it is. The idea of literature acting as a means of transcendence, a precious search for meeeeeeaning for Bolano is not naïve so much as it is the worst kind of despicable lie. Something not worth spitting upon. A crime. The sort of game engaged in by craven hucksters without the dignity to sell snakeoil or run for Congress. How do these people live with themselves? he wants to know. How indeed. The idea of wresting meaning from the small genocide of women in Juarez more than mocks the idea of meaning itself. But the idea of not trying is morally abhorrent.

So Bolano doesn’t try exactly. That would be too easy. Nor does he not try. The book contains an implicit imperative – that literature, if it is to maintain its self-respect, must at least try to confront real events and create a world adequate to that world. It must not take refuge in fantasy or become lost in the imaginary problems of the first world middleclass. Such novels wither when held next to the events 2666 portrays. But what is the nature of those events? Despite the fact the first and last sections only glance at them, the book’s center of gravity is certainly the killings. Amalfitano (?) at one point even claims that the killings contain “the secret to everything,” which is as obvious a statement of purpose/mission/theme as it is vague. But this phrase is so clearly striking the executors also pulled it out in the afterword, if only at that point to marvel at its obscurity. But is it so obscure as it seems? I admit I was waiting for Bolano to eventually tell me what the secret is, but by now it should be clear that would defeat the whole point. And in any event, it’s not as hard to fathom as one first assumes. What are the killings? Mass murder of women with impunity. What do they suggest? A misogyny so casual and so thorough it’s invisible. Many women are also migrants, maquiladora workers, refugees of the global economy trading one kind of desperation for another, and if they are lucky, they will have the opportunity (no sick pun intended, really) to trade that desperation for another in the kitchen of a restaurant in San Francisco, where they will merely take residence upon a different lowest rung. But only if they are lucky. Which most of those we encounter in the novel are not. Most of them are dead.

And if justice eludes them in life, it dances on their graves in death on the orders of the police commissioner whose “old friend” is a well-known drug trafficker, Pedro Rengifo, who himself survives an assassination attempt by a judicial policeman who in turn may be moonlighting as a professional assassin. Viva la Mexico, says Bolano, and here the killings begin pulling strings within the government and the economy, both of which are dominated in unclear degrees by the narcos. The police are bought and sold, and the only murders that are solved are those that are committed by angry husbands, boyfriends and the occasional low-level gang member. These killings occur frequently enough to suggest a serious problem with gender relations, but the majority of crimes suggest something much more insidious – that the hunting of humans has turned into a national (or at least regional) sport. It should be no further surprise that the major suspect must be considered the son of Dean Guerra (it’s possible his name should have given that away – Bolano is simultaneously opaque and almost comically transparent, see: Reiter), who, in addition to being seen driving the kind of black car conspicuously observed at many crime scenes (and also outside Amalfitano’s house as Rosa leaves through the back door), is protected by dint of his connection with the most powerful people in the city, including the university rector and that man’s brother, the police commissioner. So don’t expect breaking news out of northern Mexico. The genocide is by definition a gross moral outrage, but the most soul-deadening facet is the broken record refrain of “and then the evidence was lost” or “then the police gave up” or “everybody at that point lost interest in [insert name here]” or “Juan de Dios held out no hope of solving even one of these murders.” The scale of corruption Bolano must have observed in Mexico demanded he write Part 4, which as emotionally brutal as it was only covered the first several years of the crimes. He could have gone on much longer.

But he made his point. The secret to everything is there are certain people who are below the law, who do not exist with full human rights, who are even more ignored in death than they were in life, which even they would not have believed possible. The secret (how bitterly ironic does Bolano mean to be?) to everything is that social forces in Mexico conspire to perpetuate these circumstances – though “conspire” is not forceful enough in that it implies secrecy when nothing could be more blatant than the collusion between the authorities, organized criminals and a generalized apathy as ubiquitous as air. The secret to everything is this is more the rule than the exception. The secret to everything is the longer one stares this fact in the face the more one forgets anything else exists.

Hence the title, which Bolano stole from himself and which suggests a sense of drowning by overattention. An attention that cannot be broken, however, because to ignore reality would be a worse crime than the suicide this attention implies. Sort of a Catch-2666. And it is here that Bolano’s project overlaps with Archimboldi’s undescribed novels, which we can safely assume carry the burden of coming to terms with horror – but which consequently circles us back to the unresolved question (which Bolano likewise did not resolve) of what literature can really accomplish. The passage at the end of Part 2 in which Amalfitano laments the dearth of ambition among not just novelists but readers indicates Bolano favors the ambitious, if flawed, Hail Mary fight-the-devil approach to writing as opposed to the assiduous polishing of minuscule diamonds. But his faith wavers. Writing is an act of semblance – a concept that possesses the book’s final few hundred pages – which is an act of fakery, which undermines literature’s claim to seriousness.

Bolano’s goal, among others, is the end of semblance. This is what Ansky loved about the original Arcimboldo’s paintings. Bolano sees most literature as a hazy curtain upon which phony images, scenes and emotions are projected, a haze that obscures the life (and death) occurring behind it. Semblance is the lie we tell ourselves (and more criminally, writers tell readers) about the world and what it’s really all about. Bolano disdains metaphor. He wants the book to be lived, not read. To be sufficient to life by being “everything in everything,” as Ansky again notes of Arcimboldo’s work on 734 – with of course the small caveat that some of his work is a trick, paintings that can be hung either rightside-up or upside-down, portray either a meal or a mercenary with a mercenary grin. And obviously this caveat could easily be applied to Bolano as well.

But it’s the end of semblance that’s important, which Reiter begins to realize as he begins to make himself a writer. “Semblance is an occupying force of reality,” the opposite of which is the impulse “toward freedom, toward sovereignty” as Reiter experiences in one of his periods of desertion. Yet the escape from semblance may prove impossible for all but the most committed dreamers, he thinks at the same time. Domestic love. Pain. Youth. National Socialism above all. Even willpower. All semblance, Reiter decides, and simultaneously resigns himself that he will never escape semblance himself – concluding that the only things that are not semblance are his love for his sister and Ansky’s wandering, Ansky’s 14-year old commitment to the “one true revolution.” Only refusing to grow up is not semblance because growing up, by definition, is the acceptance of certain realities (read: semblances) – economic facts, received ideas about the limits of the possible, boundaries for dreams and behavior dictated by the socially influential – as defining obstacles to what, for example, the 14-year old Ansky believed the destiny of the future, the early modern, adolescent yearning for total revolution that everyone desires and nearly everyone casually or hurriedly discards in exchange for the reception into adult society – a welcome that is really a thinly-disguised contempt.

Reiter’s later life though begins to resemble (no pun intended) Ansky’s, which begs the question whether this means he discovered a way around or through semblance (and by extension did BOlano, whose life was similarly, if to a lesser degree, peripatetic) by becoming a wanderer, by avoiding the settled domestic routine. Or if because he was insufficiently committed, because he didn’t really believe, the end of semblance was denied him. The only thing required is a faith in the end of semblance, but Reiter lost that faith and knows it impossible to recover.

Reiter lost his faith in the war, of course, along with the rest of Germany and much of the world, “for once the nakedness of the slaughterhouse was achieved, everything else was unacceptable theatricality.” Everything after is semblance because a certain extremity had been reached and left far behind. No one enjoys themselves in postwar Germany, yet life inexplicably continues, drenched in shame and self-loathing. Everyone fucks even as if sex is but a slightly more interesting game of tiddlywinks, as if to take any pleasure at all, to feel passion or desire would be such a phony pose, an act of such unwarranted fakery or stylized playacting that it would be not simply absurd but beyond conceiving. The idea of it defies belief.

Of course, even as he assaults pervasive fakery, Bolano (engaged as he is in writing a novel) necessarily works in the realm of metaphor. The post-Nazi theme is an allegory of sorts for the insulation from the deep hard bones of reality (the long list of dead women, corruption, etc.) he sees free-floating in the air in northern Mexico (and presumably elsewhere). What Bolano calls for is a raw belief, a stripping of the velvet curtains of literariness (in, well, literature), phoniness and convention (in the public world) in the name of a more profound, full-bodied engagement, a two-handed clutch on the bars that imprison us and separate us from the revolutionary world at the end of the imagination. But this idea is not unproblematic, implying as it does a purity of will – as if a writer or work is self-justified by dint of its heroic intent and the coherence of its ultimate form, an idea made just slightly more problematic by its context here in Germany, 1945. So Bolano distances himself from this as he is drawn toward it. A last word, of sorts, is reserved for the old man who rents Archimboldi his first typewriter. So having considered the book’s thoughts on the purpose of writing, we might leave the rest to the old man, who has a lot to say about how writing lives in the world.

The old man is a writer who quit writing and found his salvation in reading. Writing is a trap, a hopeless and narcissistic quest, in most cases, an exercise in the limitless vanity of petty humans chasing their own inflated visions of themselves. But even as writing is folly, someone must do it, for otherwise there would be nothing to read and the old man would have no reason to live at all. The trouble is, he says, the only writing worth producing is masterpieces, which are few and, worse, are sometimes hard to see for all the lesser works crowding the view. And here it’s worth thinking about the novel’s critical reception. 2666 has been universally hailed, nominated for awards, brought its author a rare posthumous glory, but no one in the invisible atmosphere of literary decision-making seems to know why, in fact, this book is good or not. the reviews are laughably vague and often profess their own confusion. In their defense, it is a large book, with plot tendrils spinning in various and not-entirely-connected directions, and one gleans a sense of purpose and worth even if one does not understand why. This finally might be its profoundest lesson – and its most comic about the operation of literature in the world. I imagine Bolano laughing and stamping his feet at these critics who embrace him without really knowing why, without bothering to think the book through. Just as he at times mocked the narcissistic critics in Part 1, their jockeying and performances at conferences with self-important names, and their work – which is reduced to a missing persons search they end up being too lazy to actually prosecute, a vacation of whiskey-drinking (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and sex with minors. Minors they, critically, abandon to the abyss of violence they are too self-involved to see ripping the skin of semblance before their over-trained first world eyes. They come and go, leaving only empty promises, hard currency and the sentence of death they could hardly be bothered to face when the opportunity for (an albeit inadequate) redemption was offered, never to be heard from again.

Not that they would have been saved had Espinoza taken Rebeca to Spain or Pelletier insisted on finding Archimboldi and learning whatever secret drew him to Santa Teresa. That is not an option given us to choose. But to do other than try, and this is Bolano’s essential approach to the world – while trying is but guaranteed failure – is to sin against life and one’s fellow prisoners of war in thie ongoing losing battle we fight against death everyday. So this is our choice: we must tilt against windmills or submit to being even more compromised than we already are. Bolano doesn’t need to opine on how most people choose for us to know what he’s talking about.

Another California Poem

lost coast

clear-cut vaginal canyons split open,
slice into cliffs like legs matted with moss
wet & green & beating the waves with screams
in the mist amidst the California coast.
sword ferns poke their tips off hillsides,
fuck the air. this forest, studded
by broken totems of an uninvented faith,
no longer whole, still oozes humidity.
rain makes curlicue streaks in the mud,
fingers a pattern of letters. black sand
smeared with water spells desire.
salty, thirsty siltstone heaves
with graywacke so slow, so hard
pressed together gives
an intuition we might live
like geologic processes, or trees,
a giant redwood in a hidden grove:
open to sky, light
as kites in wind, wings bent, cut under clouds
to branches blind to everything
& nothing. all its history
written on skin speaks
the only adequate language. Braille
tongues into bark. a thousand-year record
scribed on its neck, naked, tall, exposed
to the blade, regrows itself. the roots
reach out, intertwine another
trunk like human ribs
seem sometimes fused in the morning,
sweat on the sheets, trees through the window
breathing summer heat, limbs knit, the smell of sex
sticks its wet red sap to the walls.