11 Years And Still Counting

Way back on June 1, 2002 — 11 long years ago — I started writing what I’ve come to accept is a “blog.” I refused to call it a “blog” for many years because it was more than just a few sentences strung today, but consisted of casual, personal essays that had beginnings, middles, and endings. It was a structured thing, a literary act written in a calm, natural tone of voice. It was unlike what most “bloggers” were writing back then, which were just random, hit-and-miss comments of a few, loose-fitting sentences.

A French friend of my dear French friend, Gisele — a fellow named Marc — designed a website for me on a French server in 2002. And I was off and running and kept running on that French site for the next eight years.

My very first few sentences on that very first writing day said this: “Does the world really need another Web site filled with yet another person’s words expressing yet another miscellaneous collection of miscellaneous thoughts?

“Aren’t there already too many words and opinions out there clogging up virtual space with enough chatter to choke a galaxy of gigabytes?”

Those were, of course, rhetorical questions. The fact that the answer to those make-believe questions was an obvious “NO!” did not stop me from adding my own two-cents’ worth to the already choking galaxy of gasping gigabytes.

Since those words were written 11 long years ago, the number of bloggers on the Internet has multi-quadrupled into the billions. Nowadays, it’s almost as if you don’t really exist if you don’t have a blog, or at least a Facebook facsimile.

But back in 2002, I was the only person I knew who had a blog, whether or not I called it that. And there was no such thing as Facebook or Twitter. I guess you could say I was one of the early birds.

I wrote a lot about my life and American life and global life and cosmic life and especially about my life in Paris. Those were the years when I was traipsing over to Paris every four to six months and staying for two to three weeks at a time. I made 16 different trips to Paris in those days. It was wonderful. I always stayed in the same room — room #32 — at the Hotel Lyon-Mulhouse near the Place de la Bastille. I had my own balcony, and at night I could lie in bed and look out my tall French windows at the Eiffel Tower.

And I wrote about all that stuff.

But over the years, the French server started having more and more technical problems. It was becoming more difficult for me to navigate the site confidently. And so when my American friend, Robert Musco (who lives right around the corner from me here in New Haven) offered to build me a new site on an American server or site or whatever, called Word Press, I jumped at the idea.

I immediately dropped the French site and began writing on the site you’re reading me on now. In two days, I will be marking my third anniversary here on Word Press.

The reason I mention all this is because just today, I noticed for the first time that George Orwell, the author of “Animal Farm” and “1984,” also publishes here on Word Press. Of course, Orwell died in 1950. So he’s not publishing anything new anywhere.

But his diaries are being published here on Word Press. They run from August 1931 to April 1949.

You can read them for yourself, if you like. Just go here:

http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/

It really pleases me to share the same site/server/whatever it’s called with the great Orwell. I have admired him for more than 50 years and have read most of his work. I even own the 597-page book edition of his Diaries, plus the 4-volume set of his essays, journalism and letters, plus a dozen other books by him. He is one of my writing heroes. He wrote good, plain, clear, down-to-earth prose that tried to cut through much of the world’s bullshit.

Today — the 25^th — is his birthday. He is 110 years old. Except, of course, he isn’t. He died of tuberculosis at the young age of 46.

And so I carry on as best I can, with or without Orwell, with or without Paris, losing readers fast and furiously.

Once upon a time, I had hundreds of readers. Nowadays, I’m lucky if I have 80. My last essay attracted 82. That’s a recent high mark. If I keep going at this rate, I’ll end up writing for the exclusive company of one: Me.

Of course, if the truth be told — and Orwell would insist that it be told — I basically write for that exclusive company already.

But once I begin to bore even myself, this whole blogging episode will finally come to a crashing stop.

But not yet. After 11 years, I sort of hate to give up writing this thing — whatever it is — while my brain still seems to be working every so often.

And so on this near-anniversary day, I say thank you for sticking with me — some of you for the full 11 years — as I keep throwing my little literary mud balls against the shifting, virtual brick wall of the Internet.

I may not have a lot of readers. But the ones I do have are of excellent quality.

 

Oysters And A Boy With A Stone

My birthday was yesterday. It was a nice enough day. I spent time at Lighthouse Point watching the oystermen in their boats dunking their cages down to the bottom of the bay and then hauling up their catch.

I don’t eat oysters. I don’t eat fish, either and, of course, I don’t eat land animals. I’m a non-animal-eater, and have been this way for more than 30 years. And I hate to see animals farmed for their meat. But oystermen hauling up oysters doesn’t bother me so much. The oysters are so tightly encased in their nearly impenetrable shells that they don’t look like animals. They look like battered, odd-shaped rocks.

I don’t know how sensitive an oyster’s nerves are. Does it even have a central nervous system? Can it even feel pain or fear or anything more than temperature? I don’t know. An oyster seems like one of those animals that barely qualifies as an animal. So aesthetically and temperamentally, I can put up with oystering — from a distance.

But there’s always this: An oyster would probably prefer to stay alive than to die. It spends its whole life, like you and me, trying to stay alive. So why shouldn’t it be allowed to keep on going? It’s not alive by accident. It’s alive by effort. It does everything it can to stay alive, and then we come along and pluck it out of the water, smash its shell, rip its guts out of its home, and swallow it naked, with maybe a touch of Tabasco.

The will to go on living — if it is a will — is probably just as alive in that oyster as it is in me. And I don’t want anyone coming into my life, ripping me out of my shell, and swallowing me naked. Not even a pornographic film of me being swallowed whole would make my death appealing. Not to me. Why should it appeal to the oyster? Just because an oyster can’t read Shakespeare or watch “War and Peace” on TV doesn’t make his life worthless.

You could say the same about elephants and wolves and dogs — although I suspect dogs do watch TV and often discuss it among themselves.

When you have a birthday at my age, you think about it differently than you did when you were half that age. That earlier age was the time when you had lived as long in the past as you could expect to live in the future. But the longer you live, the more distorted that equation becomes. I’m now at the age when I have a ton of years behind me and only a few pounds of years ahead of me.

I just went on the website for the Social Security Administration to see what it says about my life expectancy. It said that I have about 11.1 years left. It said I can expect to check out of my oyster shell when I’m 87.1 years old. I was hoping I could make it to 90. I still hope I can. We’ll see.

It just so happened that last night, on my birthday, I read a letter Kurt Vonnegut had written to a friend and colleague in January 1987 about the recent death of Vonnegut‘s former wife. The last paragraph of that letter said this: “My first wife Jane died after a five year bout with cancer on December 19, with, amazingly, her very close friend, Mrs. Donoso, by her bedside. Jane remarried, as you may know and was Mrs. Adam Yarmolinsky. We remained good friends, and had a wonderful long talk on the telephone only three days before she died.”

 

I remembered that talk on the telephone. Vonnegut had written about it in detail in his book, “Timequake.” I love that book and have read it four or five times and will read it four or five more times. It’s part-fiction and part-nonfiction, part-novel and part-memoir.

In “Timequake,” Vonnegut said that the last phone call with his former wife took place two weeks before she died, not three days. She died of cancer, as he said in his letter.

This is what he wrote in “Timequake” about that last phone call:

“Our last conversation was intimate. Jane asked me, as though I knew, what would determine the exact moment of her death. She may have felt like a character in a book by me. In a sense she was. During our twenty-two years of marriage, I had decided where we were going next, to Chicago, to Schenectady, to Cape Cod. It was my work that determined what we did next. She never had a job. Raising six kids was enough for her.

I told her on the telephone that a sunburned, raffish, bored but not unhappy ten-year-old boy, whom we did not know, would be standing on the gravel slope of the boat-launching ramp at the foot of Scudder’s Lane. He would gaze out at nothing in particular, birds, boats, or whatever, in the harbor of Barnstable, Cape Cod.

At the head of Scudder’s Lane, on Route 6A, one-tenth of a mile from the boat-launching ramp, is the big, old house where we cared for our son and two daughters and three sons of my sister’s until they were grownups. Our daughter Edith and her builder husband, John Squibb, and their small sons, Will and Buck, live there now.

I told Jane that this boy, with nothing better to do, would pick up a stone, as boys will. He would arc it over the harbor. When the stone hit the water, she would die.”

I guess if I wanted to know what the exact moment of my death would be like, a made-up story like that would be something I could die peacefully with. A quiet scene. A Huckleberry Finn kind of boy throwing a stone for no particular reason. The stone splashing in the water, the way stones do. Like stones I too have thrown across a harbor at Leetes Island in Guilford, Connecticut, many, many years ago, when I still had plenty of time to wonder what to do next with my life, and still had many more stones to throw and many more splashes to make.

Vonnegut ended this section about that last phone call this way:

“Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength. She was raised a Quaker, but stopped going to meetings of Friends after her four happy years at Swarthmore. She became an Episcopalian after marrying Adam, who remained a Jew. She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I’m so glad. Why? Because I loved her.”

Both Jane and Kurt are dead now. Kurt died in April 2007, at the age of 84 — exactly 10 years after the publication of “Timequake.”

I, meanwhile, am still alive, and have — theoretically — 11.1 years to play with. I wonder how many oysters in the New Haven harbor can say that?

The End of White Majority in America

The New York Times reports today that white people in the United States will be a racial minority in about 30 years. Isn’t that interesting.

The spiritual descendants of Adolph Hitler will not be pleased. Can someone like Hitler even be said to have “spiritual” descendants? Let’s just say that right-wing fascist, white-supremacy folks will not like this news.

For them, the white race is the godly race. If God had skin, they say, it would be white. Of course, other racial groups beg to differ. God is black in Harlem and yellow in Chinatown.

It appears, when you look at the theological kaleidoscope, that God is like the biblical Joseph with his coat “of many colors.” He is what people want him to be, and always has been. But He hasn’t been a racial minority as a “white man” in the United States for centuries.

White people were a minority in America before there even was an America. When Columbus and his band of thieves and rapists landed in North America back in the 15^th Century, they were the only white people around. The same with Leif Ericsson who discovered a different part of North America — around what we call Nova Scotia — 500 years before Columbus.

And then when the English Puritans landed in America in the 17^th Century, they too were the only whites on the continent.

Of course, Columbus and Ericsson didn’t really “discover” America. The people already living here — what we today call “Native Americans” — had discovered the land they were living on a few thousand years before those white guys showed up. But they don’t count, because they weren’t white.

That’s the thing about white people. We always think we’re the first in everything. As if nothing really important happened before we showed up to claim it. And so throughout history, we have tended to beat the crap out of people who were already living where we wanted to be.

We did it here in America. We did it in Africa — all those European colonies. We did it in parts of China and India. We have been throwing our white power around and terrorizing the natives ever since we could build big ships that could sail across large oceans.

Today’s Native Americans — our “Indians” — are still suffering from the white man’s abuse. And apartheid so crippled Africa for so long that the continent is still reeling.

The white man’s legacy has mainly helped other white people, but not so much people of other colors. We white people in America have ruled the roost ever since we stole the roost from the Indians.

But now, the worm is turning. Sometime within the next three decades, reports the Times, white people in America will just be one more minority.

I won’t be here to see it. I don’t have 30 years left on my ticket. But some of you will be around. I wonder what the change will do to your self-image.

For the first time in more than a century, the Times reports, more white people have died recently than been born. It wasn’t a big difference, only about 12,000. And those numbers were supplemented by the many more white people who immigrated to the United States.

But experts who study census data say that this is a significant shift in racial patterns, and that in the lifetime of some of you, the discrepancy between white births and white deaths will propel the white race in America into minority status.

The majority of births in America today are to Hispanic, black, and Asian mothers. White mothers are a distant fourth. At this rate, those three minorities will nudge white people into their own minority ranking.

It will come as a shock to older white people. I can imagine there will be violent outbursts here and there among white “patriots.”

How can America not be the white man’s paradise? It must have been Obama’s fault ! They always knew he was a Commie Outsider. And this just proves it. Just ask the Tea Party.

Will the change make much difference? Yes, I think it will. America will look different than it does today. It will present a different image to the rest of the world. (Minorities are also slowing taking over the racial makeup of Europe, too.)

More and more intermarriages will lead to more and more blended colors in children. The language will sound different — a mix of different ethnic vocabularies. More and more power will shift from white hands to Hispanic and black and Asian hands. There will be no more “white advantage” in employment or housing or education.

The only ones who will continue to be screwed will be Native Americans, who have no power base to begin with. They are the perpetual odd-man-out. They were here first and will forever be counted last. It’s one of history meanest tricks. We should all be ashamed, especially we white people. Like slavery, our treatment of our Indians is a poison that has infected our very identity.

But soon that identity will undergo a radical shift. We white people won’t be top dog anymore. And everything we thought we were and thought we would always be will have to be revised.

There will always be a struggle for power, of course. Only now, that struggle will involve a more volatile mix of colors and races. Assumptions will change. Retaliation for past abuses will be acted on. Alliances will shift. Ideologies will fracture. Extremisms will fester. Pockets of resistance will hunker down. Violence will permeate society.

In other words, things will remain pretty much the way they are today.

The Cicada’s Brief Song

I am moved by the story of the cicada. It seems sad to me, even tragic. A metaphor for the brief flicker of life that touches us all. The fragile, transient flutter across a field, across a meadow, across a yard, a street, a driveway, a highway, a lane, a path, the climb up a tree, a walk across the grass, long, raspy singing under the sun and in the dark at night, a brief mating. And then, after two short weeks of life free and joyous, singing and sex, the sudden preordained, fated collapse into death — by the millions.

All of then gone . . . just like that. They arrived together suddenly, out of the blue, out of the ground, by the millions, and then all died together, suddenly, by the millions, gone for good, gone for the remaining length of many people‘s lives.

Mine, for instance.

The cicadas in my part of the world, the so-called Brood II, will not appear again until 2030. I will be 93 in 2030. The chances are slim that I will be here at that time to watch them shed their skins and emerge as adults, and to hear them sing their high-pitched raspy songs again.

They come and go — we all come and go — as briefly as a comet’s tail streaking across the silent sky.

The brief cicada song, followed by long years of silence. Unlike the robin who returns each spring to sing his song, the cicada disappears from sight and sound for nearly half a human generation.

This moves me.

Some of us speak of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wolf, Brother Bear, Brother Eagle. There is also room in our family, it seems to me, for Brother Cicada. His brief life is a kind of synopsis of our own.

In Middle English times, a story survived in writing of a sparrow that flies inside a king’s castle, from one side of the huge room to the other side and then out the window. The story was seen then as a tale, not just about a sparrow, but about us, metaphorically, whether king or peasant, nobleman or commoner, flying briefly through life and then disappearing in death, like the sparrow through the window.

I see the cycle of the cicada in the same light.

The female mates with the male and then deposits her eggs — sometimes as many as a hundred — into slits she has cut in the bark of nearby twigs. When the eggs hatch, the “nymphs,” as they’re called, drop to the ground and begin to burrow. Down they dig, down, down into the earth, down deep, from one foot to eight feet down. And there they stay for 17 years, in the dark, encased in the earth, sucking on the root juice of trees.

And after more than a decade and a half, they begin to dig their way out and emerge on the surface of the earth, no longer as nymphs. They shed their outer, transparent skin on a nearby plant and take their place at last — and ever so briefly — as fully grown adults.

And for two weeks, they sing their song like they’ve never sung it before. It is their first and only song. It’s now or never. Sing your song for all you’re worth. Sing it as if there’s no tomorrow.

Because soon, there will be no tomorrow.

Soon, there will be no more song.

Very soon.

Very, very soon.

Letters in Books

I’ve had the first edition collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s letters for six months or so, and I’m still reading them. I’m in no hurry. I read a couple of letters, maybe three, and then put the book aside. A few days later or a couple of weeks later or a month later, I’ll read a few more, and then put the book aside again.

Collected letters are not like novels or nonfiction books. You don’t just — or at least I don’t just — read them straight through. I take my time, read them with a little space in between, as if I were receiving the letters through the mail.

They’re the only letters I do receive, either through the mail or in book form. I already told you about the letter I got a couple of weeks ago from the reporter and columnist Randall Beach. Randy handwrote it in ink on two sides of personal stationery and mailed it to me in an envelope on which he also handwrote my address. It was a nice letter, charming and personal and . . . rare. I never receive letters like that anymore. I never receive letters, period.

Even most emails I receive are less than 40 words long, and many are only 20 words long or just 10 words long or just one word long. I guess people feel they don’t have anything much to say, and maybe they don’t. Or maybe they think I’m just too boring to write to — too boring, too old, too . . . incidental.

I pretty much live in a letter vacuum. Life goes on around me, and I sit and watch it like a sphinx. If I were to die tomorrow, hardly anyone would notice. Certainly, no one would write me a letter of condolence.

I’ve already written my obituary, to save other people the trouble when the time actually comes to tell the world that I am gone at last. People wouldn’t know enough about me to make a decent summary and farewell on their own. So I’ve put it together myself. That way, I got all the good stuff in.

Vonnegut’s letters, by the way, aren’t the only collected letters on my bookshelves. I also have letters by Kafka, Hemingway, James Joyce, E.B. White, Chekhov, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, the correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, and the “Wind in the Willows” letters that the British author of that work, Kenneth Grahame, wrote to his young son, and which I wrote about a couple of essays ago.

Of course, not everyone likes to write — letters or anything — and that includes famous writers. In a letter Vonnegut wrote to his publisher in December 1975, he referred to a recent chat he had with his friend and fellow writer E.L. Doctorow about something the writer Renata Adler had said.

“Ed Doctorow told me,” wrote Vonnegut, “Renata Adler’s definition of a writer at supper yesterday. She says a writer is somebody who hates to write. That sure includes me,” added Vonnegut in his letter. “And, as Max Wilkinson once said, ‘I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil.’ “

Vonnegut then added, “Hi ho.”

To which I add my own, Hi ho. And a twiddley dum, too.