Correspondence / 12

"...she held up the bottle 3/4 gone and exclaimed, "We drank all this?!!"

"No, sweetie, we used it on the fish!"

Heh, guess she's more on the ball than expected. I do admire your honoring her sensibilities.
Sometimes subterfuge is the better part of valor.

I had a fondness, as a boy, for all things cursive. Pens, paper, inks. But mostly pens, which I think I
intuited was a sacrament of the power of expression, probably with some phallic undercurrents.

I haven't broached the subject with Evan. He rarely answer my emails. I should just dive in and broach
it. Maybe if I suggest, say, a week this summer. I'd love to hang out at the old place for a bit.

The seeds of Evan’s unraveling may always have been there. It started to spin out of control, from what
I've been able to gather, when his depression went clinical and he took a buy out at the university,
where he told me he was harassed. I remember him being exceptionally bright and perceptive. We had
many long conversations. He always listened with deep attention - and reflectively - a great
compliment. He had a knack for intuiting the content of the gaps, filling them in, taking the
conversation deeper. He was light-hearted. I don't know how he lost it, or when, exactly. He's in
survival mode now, which has no doubt disastrously condensed his perception of things, and response
to them.

The planet appears to be heating up in a lot of ways that go beyond climate change. Fever and
acceleration.

Seems Dzhokhar fell into the gravitational pull of the black hole that was his brother’s ruined soul. That
does not excuse his moral cowardice nor the choice he made about to whom his loyalty ultimately
belonged. As for Tamerlan, that an urge to mayhem finds an imprimatur in religion is nothing new.

I was reading, this afternoon, in another synchronicity that haunts my reading, the Talk Of The Town
section of an old New Yorker (August 28, 2006) about the president’s summer reading list. It
apparently included Albert Camus’ novel “The Stranger.” The columnist, Adam Gopnik, observed
about the novel: “Camus’ purpose is to dramatize the psychology of pathological violence as a self-
defining act... To look too narrowly for rational purpose in it is to mistake its very nature. The freedom
to act includes the freedom to do evil, and the murderer within us is no further away than a walk on the
beach in a bad mood. People kill because they vaguely imagine, in a moral haze like the one
overhanging the sun-scorched sand, that on the other side of murder lies some kind of expiation, or the
thrill of rising above the mundane, or a way of pushing past alienation, or a shortcut to significance.
People kill because they can.

“How closely this truth touches the heart of this summer’s various horrors... The bright young British
Muslims, with their innocent-looking sports drinks, seem to have decided on mass murder not because
they had exhausted all other possibilities but because, Meursault-like, in the madness of young men, it
seemed thrilling and self-defining and glorifying - just as the zeal of the neocon pamphleteers of
summers past seems now to have come less from any strategic certainties than from the urge to some
kind of muscular self-assertion, as wishfully defined as it was impossible to achieve.”

The same can, of course, be said of Adam Lanza, James Holmes, and Ted Kaczynski. Everything old
is new again, including the “perpetual human temptations” that Gopnik identifies in Meursault’s crime. 

I haven’t seen Zero Dark Thirty but If it’s ambiguous enough (call it scrupulously neutral) to leave the
impression with “unsophisticated” viewers, which [Michael] Moore implies, however regretfully, are
most people, that the outrages depicted are justified, then I for one must conclude that the net effect is
not helpful. I was talking to a right-wing neighbor a couple of weeks ago who had seen it. His take
away: “Hey, if children get in the way and have to be killed to get the bad guy, so be it.” He thought it
was a great movie.

It’s midnight and raining. The neighborhood dogs have gone inside, or withdrawn to what shelter they
could find, chastened and silent. The rain rules this blessed night.