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July 12, 2003
Productive Solitude
My wife reminds me that I have about 6 more days to frolic with her and the girls before they join my son in the hither and yon. He is spending the summer with his biomom, and soon they will pack up and be off to Michigan. I will remain here in Los Angeles.
That means I will find myself after a few days, several pounds lighter, running around half-naked and deeply engaged in my solitude. It will be productive solitude, it will be the sort, depending upon whether or not I find work, in which the fires of my mind will take over my waking life. I will have spectacular dreams, and my writing will improve. I will wake up to my old self and become angry that I haven't done anything since last summer. In preparation for that time, I have purchased a 1000 page O'Reilly book and Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2.
After our afternoon swim at the Y, I found an old letter from my father who suggested, evidently in February of this year, that I read Powers. Normally I will glance through his photocopied article and assuming that it was a headline I had already consumed online, I would chuck it. This article remained in the side pocket of my VW Beetle, now going on six months. It gives me a small bit of comfort to know that my system worked, and I probably wouldn't have had time for Powers until this moment, but the shock of recognition.
My father acts as if he is convinced that my intellect approaches that of Power and were it not for the cruelty of racial injustice I would be writing books equal to his. He's only half right; he'd have to be rich enough and anti-bourgie enough for me to live in his extra house and not mind that I didn't work. All this after he paid for my higher education. But I'm here somewhere in that limbo of unrecognized and undernourished brainfire: geekland. Too smart and curious to not feed our brains, we drag ourselves through the anti-intellectual desert of American society from soul quenching oasis to oasis. We can't just stop and live at the oasis, our work, our families keep us trekking the wastelands. So eventually, inevitably we stare our laziness in the face when words such as these strike us in the face:
..I heard a lecture by Terry Waite, who told about his five-year captivity in Beirut. After the lecture, he took questions from the audience and someone bluntly asked, "What was the main thing you learned in being locked up for five years?" In the moment after my stomach lurched at the question, I ran through all the possible answers: "Love life while you can," "Never take people for granted again." But his answer was shocking. He said, "Contemporary humanity has lost the ability to engage in productive solitude."What do you think he meant by "productive"?
POWERS
He wasn't using the term in the way late-capitalistic market society would mean productive. He wasn't talking about General Motors's definition of productivity. The currency he was speaking of is very much the care and tending of individual salvation.
To me, his comment legitimized the process of reading and writing. The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted. It's a threat to the GNP, to the gene engineer. It's an invisible, sedate, almost inert process. Reading is the last act of secular prayer. Even if you're reading in an airport, you're making a womb unto yourself—you're blocking the end results of information and communication long enough to be in a kind of stationary, meditative aspect. A book is a done deal and nothing you do is going to alter the content, and that's antithetical to the idea that drives our society right now, which is about changing the future, being an agent, getting and taking charge of your destiny and altering it. The destiny of a written narrative is outside the realm of the time. For so long as you are reading, you are also outside the realm of the time. What Waite said seemed like a justification for this unjustifiable process that I've given my life to.
Damn!
Just this morning, I saw a man gesticulating like a minister. But it was C-SPAN2. It was Jonathan Brent and he was talking about the beginning of the end for Jewish doctors under Stalin. As I watched him, I waxed nostalgic for the days I used to sit watching CSPAN and taking notes in my living room, trying to figure out the complicity of the CIA in the fate of the Allendes, or watching the Soviet coup unfold. But mostly I remembered words uttered by Albert Murray, that literature is his religion. It's mine as well, but I have been abandoned by and have abandoned the faithful. I live outside of the gates. I am a man alone in his intellect, a solitude made bearable only by the fact that this blog technology allows me to recall what I've been thinking as well as share it with whomever drifts by. I don't have time to go to seminars and lectures, everything is disembodied knowledge. It brings be directly to Richard Powers.
(I can't find the article now, so skip the illucidation on why I like him before I read him. It's Emily Eakins' "Science Guy" piece. You're a geek, you look it up.)
I've been looking for somebody to follow up Eco, DeLillo, Littel, Stephenson, and Pynchon. It may very well be Powers. We'll see.
As a side note, I'm not particularly interested in his thing on race, the latest book. I'll read Turnipseed instead. One step at a time.
Posted by mbowen at July 12, 2003 08:15 PM
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