Willy Loman is not Lazy!

Tragic, yes. Despicable, yes. Pathetic, yes (just clarify connotation, please!).

But not lazy!!!

William Loman wants nothing more than to be all the things he seemingly cannot be. A good father. A good husband. To be well liked. And he pursues these things -- deliberately and with energy -- like a hamster on a wheel with a cute little fedora and matching briefcase full of merchandise. Only the hamster is able to stop whenever he wants. Willy cannot. Therein lies the rub.

Because Willy is doomed to forward motion, he is incapable of true reflection. Because he is never, ever truly alone with his thoughts. To be clear, he has full access to his memories and a host of questions, mostly self-depracatory, but he has no such access to introspective thought. He cannot slow down his self-doubt; he refuses to release himself from his own guilt. In short, he cannot actually move forward.

Revision: Willy is doomed to perpetual motion, limited to circular angles, prohibitive of forward progress. Willy is stuck. But not by laziness. Not even by a lack of morals. He cannot overcome himself. He cannot face up to the sum of all his parts. Certainly, some of these parts are rotted wood: the affair, his parenting skills, his backward sense of reputation in the business world. But taken together, Willy Loman is not a bad man.

Low, maybe. Which is what makes him tragic. Which is why we murder to dissect him and stash him away nice and neatly into a mislabeled corner. We don't like to look overlong at such a man. We may start to see a bit of ourselves tucked inside a dimple or stuck to an eyelash. So we must kick him lower than he really is, to distance ourselves.

Do not, gentle reader, seek this distance. A little grit is not a bad thing.

Cash Bundren's Great Secret

Once again I find myself leading my intrepid literary troops through William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and once again I am struck by a singular character:

Cash Bundren.

Eldest child, focused carpenter, absolute truth-teller. His first narration in AILD is nothing more than  a list, a quick how-to on coffin-making. He even fails to mention that it is for his mother that he toils. Emotion-dodging? Deflection-by-insulation? Or space case? We quickly jump to the latter, feeling (fearing?) something is a little off with the oldest Bundren offspring.

Cash, however, strikes me as having access to some secret that I am not privy to, or if I am, then it is a secret I care not to look at for longer than a moment or two. Like staring at the sun overlong. Or a car crash before the ambulance.

He knows what it means to stay on task. Whether the task is concrete like constructing a coffin or abstract like demonstrating kindness, Cash knows how to see it through, regardless of time frames.

Like Dick in Waterland or Lenny in Of Mice and Men or Forrest Gump himself, it is their vacuous nature which allows them to outstrip, in this one small arena at least, the other great men which surround them.

I must confess, I don't like the hollowness of Cash's devotion. And not because he is "slow" or a "dullard," and not because he is "simple" and "rural;" it is entirely because it is something I cannot do. It is a skill-set which I do not possess. And I am not dull or slow; I am witty and sophisticated. I read and discuss and posit great ideas and challenge the great ideas of others.

In fact, it would seem as if I am so over-burdened by my wit and sophistication that I cannot clutch a single devotion to my chest for longer than a few moments.

Was it Thoreau who claimed "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!"? I feel, gentle reader, that Cash is nodding a slow nod right about now. And he will probably continue to nod until I get it, not a moment before. Not even long after his head hurts.

Poor Grendel's Accident

Poor, poor Grendel. What, gentle reader, is this guy's (monster's...) problem? I mean, Beowulf has won, Grendel has lost his arm, and he has been clearly shown that nihilism has failed him. So what gives? Why the pouting? Why the pathetic holding-on to a miserable attitude? Why the need to act so humanly?

To quote Aldous Huxley: "Experience teaches only the teachable."

Your thoughts? Are you teachable? Can you even assess this for yourself? A dangerous notion, that. Trying to self-discover one's ability to accept teaching. Not even criticism, but teaching.

Now hold on. This is not a teacher's rant. This is not about comma rules or MLA formatting or even about how to write the bigger, better thesis statement. No, no, no. This is about learning something. About yourself. About the real world.

About being human. Why is it so tricky to join that club?

Getting What You Deserve.

According to John Gardner's Grendel, it is Hrothgar who draws first blood. And like any great reference to Rambo, it is expected that the retaliation be spectacular. Gruesome. And final.

Yes, in this story, King Hrothgar strikes first. As he stares up into a tree in which a juvenile Grendel is stuck by the ankle, he ponders some pseudo-religious reason for the tree-spirit-fungus to be angry and then, without any direct provocation, he takes a friend's war-axe and chucks it at Grendel's shoulder.

Yikes!!! Waaaa indeed, gentle reader.

So the root of all the trouble is Hrothgar's hasty turn to violence. Yet it is Grendel who sustains the destruction for twelve "idiotic" years. Who is to blame for this awful scenario, the one who starts it or the one who finishes it?

Now technically, Grendel doesn't finish anything. I mean, he's still attacking a shriveled kingdom by the time Beowulf arrives to clean up the mess. But he has ended other things, like Hrothgar's hope, the Danes' place in the world, and many, many family trees. Surely he is to blame for all the madness, right? Because he would not relent even when he could. Surely, after a certain breaking point, we allow Hrothgar off the hook?

No way. The blame stays with the king. Accountability, baby. Before you disagree and say that's too harsh, consider what it would take for you to throw a battle-axe at someone. Literally or otherwise. Perhaps this level of forethought is not optional after all? Indeed, if I was targeting such an uncertain thing with such a certain degree of poison, then I would deserve every bit of reprisal that came my way. I would not like it, but then that is not what deserving is all about.

Beowulf the Hero and the Man

The new school year has started and with it, as always, comes Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. I love this story because Heaney's poetry is beautiful and majestic, stark and blunt, big and small, like Beowulf himself. Every year, the great debate rages over Beowulf's larger than life persona and his arrogance, his self-delusion, his boasting. "Be the man I know you should be" he scolds Hrothgar. "I will fight Grendel without swords" he shouts at the Danes. "I did beat Breca" he corrects Unferth.

Is he a punk?

Sure. Why not?

Typically the discussion takes us back to different passages that demonstrate Beowulf's handle on the situation and how those around him seem to receive his boasts. And typically, he comes away fairly clean. But I say let him boast. Let him be arrogant.

Who cares!

I don't. I have decided that I want a little dirt on my heroes. Those who are perfect are also boring. They are self-serving. They are people I don't want to examine. Besides, I propose that Beowulf-as-Hero and Beowulf-as-Man can coexist in the same space. Why does it have to be one or the other, a black and white cookie-sheet cutout of a man? It doesn't. It shouldn't.

Beowulf can get away with a little arrogance here, a blatant boast there because Beowulf, Hero and Man, is made up by his constituent parts. The half moon is still a full sphere in space, even when we cannot see the other side. So too with Beowulf. If he decides to show a part of his Human self, then we still know with confidence that the rest of him, the Hero self, still resides attached, unnoticed for now, in the shadows, waiting to be reflected later. And I am glad for this assessment, that we may allow for this kind of duality. If I were assessed by such an all-or-nothing measuring stick, then surely I would be among the most despicable. Depending on when you caught me.

Beowulf is a hero. And he is arrogant. At times. And I say let him. Because ultimately, when he finally turns his gaze fully at us and we see the whole man, we understand. He is better than Hrothgar, Unferth, Wiglaf, Grendel, Hygelac, us, because Beowulf gets it right most of the time. His tally is better than ours. He is much more Hero than Man.

And even at 51%, this is a good majority.

Equations of a Great Villain

According to my Kindle, I am 76% done with Stephen King's The Stand. It is a spectacular read. A terrible, government-produced superflu is accidentally released into the world and 99.999% of everyone dies. Then the survivors find each other. Some are good, some are not. They all have dreams, and they all seem to possess different versions of ESP that either leads them to the Free Zone in Boulder, Colorado or to the new flagship of bad guys in Las Vegas (of course Las Vegas!). And who is in charge of Las Vegas?

The dark man. The Walkin Dude. The hardcase. Randall Flagg.

Randall Flagg is the devil incarnate. He is terrifyingly calm and logical. He offers all kinds of awful salvation, "all you have to do is ask." He is that perfect combination of limitless danger and unflappable calmness. Flagg doesn't get rattled. Flagg doesn't even raise his voice. He smiles and makes funny pop-culture jokes and says the things everyone is thinking but won't say and he doesn't look back.

Why are the calm ones the most terrifying? Consider:

1. Voldemort is scarier when he is NOT yelling.
2. Michael Myers is still the most unsettling horror movie monster because he never hurries. Ever.
3. Every great comic book villain has the qualities of the wise old man (think Magneto here) and lets his/her mindless henchmen do the crazy, emotional dirty work.
4. The Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian dances and plays the fiddle...among other things, but that is him portrayed at his most physically vigorous; everything else occurs off-page or is implied.
5. Randall Flagg inspires fear, he does not exact it.

What is the difference?

I think the spookiest, most resonating villains are the ones who reside firmly within our goosebumps, and they get there not through brute violence or debauchery but through the cool, shivering gamma rays of control. They seem to be okay with the awful around them. They seem to expect it. Or even worse, they seem indifferent to it. No emotional reaction at all. We as an audience seem to connect our own most basic negative emotions to the bad guys: anger, frustration, violence, etc. only we understand these things on a milder level. So when we see it on the page or big screen, we cringe but relate. Not so for the big villains. They are apart from us, and that chills us. They do not connect with our visceral emotions because they do not feel them at all.

And we fear what we don't understand. A simple, but effective equation.

That is not it, at all

It has been several weeks, gentle reader. My other non-doer activities have kept me from the keyboard, but here we go again. And we go with gusto. So. I watched the apocalyptic film 2012 tonight. It's a Monday, in case you're keeping score at home. I always wanted to know what that pit of dread and (hopefully) human redemption feels like on a Monday. Much different from a Friday or Saturday. Tangier. Anyway, I was just considering that if my own ship were going down, which high theories of existence I would cling to for comfort and guidance... and which I would discard like so much flotsam. Would I turn to Carraway's boats and currents; or Hamlet's slings and arrows; or Underground Man's heroes and mud; or Candide's garden? Would I give a rip about any of it? Chances are I would simply grab my family into a suffocating bear hug and not let go. But even that is uncertain. I mean, really, who knows what the heck I would do if my toes were on the edge of the abyss. I think I would want clarity, though. I think I would want some black-and-whiteness about me. No time for gray in a moment like that, wouldn't you say, gentle reader? The term because would surely fall away into the abyss with everything else not yet nailed down. I would hope to be nailed down.