The Dostoyevsky Reader and the Protestants

As Ukrainian forces continue their campaign into the Kursk region of Russia, we’re starting to see the sort of video footage we saw in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – distraught Slavic girls weeping over the loss of their homes and villages, talking with special pain about barely getting their beloved pets out. And yet compared to their Ukrainian counterparts, these Russians are treated by the commentariat with rather less sympathy.

The top comment: “Welcome to your special military operation.” And if anything, the other comments were harsher.

Even as cynical a fuck as I can be, there seems to be something uniquely horrifying about gleefully cheering on the suffering of civilians in combat. It’s nothing new, but it remains awfully grim. But while the media has long assumed this kind of sadistic glee to be standard in the Global South, what I find particularly bleak here is that most of the enthusiastic rubberneckers here are from the heart of the metropolis of the Global North, and would likely describe themselves as broadly liberal in their outlook. So I have to wonder why that is.

I won’t try to draw a full genealogy of how liberal political theories and ethical systems emerged in sync with the Age of Reason, but tl;dr, ethics were no longer exclusively seen as being concomitant with personal virtue or divine grace. Rather, nifty new systems – consequentialism, Kantianism, and so forth – were presented (correctly in my book) as more reasonable and humane approaches, and became standard among the more liberal elements of society.

Yet a certain Puritanism remains, and I use this word very deliberately not in its usual sense (i.e. being a fucking buzzkill) but to mean a certain kind of Protestant attitude manifested in the various religious strands that draw their lineage to the writings of John Calvin. One in which, lacking the possibility of salvation through the institution of the Church, it ultimately fell on the individual to demonstrate their salvation or lack thereof, and among the New England Puritans and the Dutch Calvinists, this was manifested in both the form of a rigid theology and a full-throated enthusiasm for mercantile capitalism. The two go hand in hand – demonstrations of value on both the spiritual and material planes.

While not many people would call themselves Puritans or even Calvinists per se anymore, but the specter remains strong in the Anglosphere. You are either a good person who believes good things and whose works are by definition good works, given your moral virtue, or the opposite is true.

And so this girl becomes a proxy for the moral failings of her nation, rather than an individual suffering the consequences of a brutal conflict.

It’s not just her, either. It’s hard to ignore a larger-scale demonization not only of Russia’s illegal invasion, but of its people and history. Western symphony orchestras refuse to play the Russian classics, and Russian artists and filmmakers find their work so often no longer welcome in the NATO member states. A certain bitter irony, considering how many of these musicians, artists, and filmmakers have risked their livelihoods and even their lives in support of those very Enlightenment values of personal freedom, secular and egalitarian governance, and resistance to the authoritarian pall that has so long been over Russia. At least back during the Cold War, dissident Russian writers who made it stateside could count on the Western establishment to wax rhapsodic over Pushkin and Tchaikovsky while they feted them at Ford Foundation events. Now even the dissidents – who, in contemporary Russia, are all the only ones making decent art – are too often given the cold shoulder at best.

And this irony is doubled when you consider how many of those calls for the exclusion of Russian culture seem to be from my fellow Americans – where were the calls for the boycott of our culture during our pretty damn unspeakable and illegal invasion of Iraq, for instance, or any of the horrors of American empire that persist to this day?

This isn’t to say that a mass boycott of my own nation should have been done – it would have been moronic. Because people are not their nations. And especially in the sphere of art and culture, that is where we should find our solidarity and common humanity, rather than conflating people with the nations they happen to be citizens of. A liberty-cabbage attitude isn’t going to get us very far.

I say this particularly as someone who has always adored Russian art, and the many strange forms it has taken on the creepy and ragged edge of Europe, always peering into the core of Western civilization from just outside. In the early years of the 20^th Century, Scriabin, in his peculiar and dissonant compositions, sought to explore the secret mystical codes that undergirded human behavior. Across town, Malevich looked for forms that evaded representation and which captured pure feeling, and Vertov chopped and screwed the language of cinema just as Eisenstein was inventing it. 

But my first and greatest love is for Russian literature. Because what I have always adored is the transcendence and cruelty and absurdity and individuality and nuance and experimentation of it all, often in the same paragraph. Raskolnikov kills the old woman for barely any reason, because everything is awful and life sucks. Dead souls are sold on the steppe for crisp brand new rubles. How can one not gasp at an opening line like the following…

“Once upon a time in Russia, there really was a carefree, youthful generation that smiled in joy at the summer, the sea, and the sun, and they chose Pepsi.”

- Victor Pelevin, Generation Pi

Pelevin wrote those lines in the chaotic period around the breakup of the USSR, when the economy cratered under shock-therapy programs while Western talking heads still chirped on about freedom, when the authoritarian Old Guard effortlessly transitioned from devout communists to devout Orthodox conservatives, interest quietly accruing in Swiss bank accounts. What better to read in a time of hopelessness and weirdness and outright grifting?

In the mid-1980s, Paul Simon, despite the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa, went to Johannesburg, fascinated by the cassettes he’d heard of black musicians in the townships. Rather than shutting out artists merely by dint of their nationality, he used his star power to champion the voices of those suffering under apartheid, listening to their songs and stories, discovering their unique musical idiom. And with them, he put out Graceland, which, while it’s easy to deride as your mother-in-law’s favorite album, remains one of the best singer-songwriter albums of the decade, and one of the few later albums by a ‘60s titan that is actually good. He chose not to excommunicate, but to engage.

I don’t have his connections, but I can engage. And what could give me greater pleasure, on this rainy night, than a little Shostakovich before bed?

In the Floating World

A few months ago, in Osaka, I explored the quiet local museum of ukiyo-e woodblocks in the heart of the entertainment quarter depicted by so many of those same prints. These depicted the so-called “floating world,” the society of courtesans, geisha, boozy rakes, louche actors, petty criminals, and profligate sons of the samurai class as it existed in the twilight years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, before the Tenpo Reforms of the 1840s largely put an end to the production of woodblock prints of the floating world, part of a larger-scale series of attempts to shore up the hermit kingdom and failures to resolve the contradictions of a feudalist society by restricting consumption and declaring war on what was perceived as the degeneracy of the nascent bourgeoisie. 

And upon my return to my equally louche tropical city, I once again found myself among a population not too different – decidedly spendy when it comes to food and drink and entertainment, artistic in ethos if not in production, with a significant number of moneyed people who are awfully bad at keeping their hands on their money and a significant number of less moneyed people who are awfully good at cadging their way through this particular iteration of café society – a population I’ve come to call the Negroni Caste, owing to the standard drink of choice.

Not that this is anything local or particular. The idea of a decadent and glittering society is pretty baked into the public consciousness, in whatever manifestation you can imagine – Weimar Berlin, ‘70s Downtown New York, Lost Generation Paris, Hollywood throughout its history, and all the rest. Where Christopher Isherwood was a camera with its shutter open, where Eve Babitz used to be charming. We’ve heard plenty of enchanting stories of coquettes and absinthe.

But even in those stories, you can find allusions to a different perspective on dissolute lifestyles and Dionysian pursuits. When Fritz Lang made Metropolis, he called his pleasuredome high above the slums “Yoshiwara” – an allusion I have no idea how many 1920s German filmgoers would have gotten, to the licensed pleasure quarter of Tokyo, in the old “low city” zone of Shitamachi along the Sumida River, where so many of those ukiyo-e are set.

 

 

Rather, the key is in the name. Floating. Not decrepit and corrupted, as in the writings of, say, Zola or Baudelaire, but simply floating there.

The term has different cadences in English and Japanese. In English, “floating world” sounds rather pleasant, a dreamy and serene land among the clouds. And yet within the Japanese and more specifically Buddhist context, it implies a fundamentally temporary and fleeting mode of existence, one stop on the great wheel of samsara. This can be something treasured for its transitory beauty, and it can be something illusory, something that ought not to be held onto or attached to, lest the suffering set in, the cherry blossoms falling on the path.

But while this concept may not have been fully metastasized into the Western (broadly speaking) context, how different, really, is the (originally) American cult of youth? In its more wholesome form, this would be the eternal manic grin of Dick Clark on New Year’s Eve, but it seems more frequent that eternal adolescence takes on a more grotesque form, the thing that has spent far too long in the liminal space.

When I was maybe 18 or 20, I spent a lot of time getting drunk and high. This, of course, is correct. It is known that American 18-20 year olds enjoy getting drunk and high. I’d seen the same dumb movies we all had, and recognized that these were to be the dedicated beer-bong years, with the assumption that at some point fairly soon, this would cease to be. The idealized line-graph of the classic male American dream would state that after the relatively brief secularized rumspringa known as “college,” one proceeds to seek out a picket-fence existence with the gal – whether as a loving father-knows-best or a neurasthenic Willy Loman.

It didn’t cease to be. When I look around me, what I see are people in their 30s, 40s, and hell, 50s, still living in the same way, which of course can quickly become a grotesque aspect – the lecherous and beer-bellied C-suite executive pawing at the intern freshly graduated from Michigan State, an elderly Madonna still trying to prance about like a Disney Channel starlet.

Part of me is tempted to say that this is part of a larger-scale liminalization, of an increasingly uncertain and precarious and frenetic world in which, with our planning capacities diminished and pessimism setting in, our behavior becomes increasingly adolescent, whether that’s through chemical recreation, various deeply unhealthy sexual and romantic patterns, or getting lost in the electronic mirror maze. Maybe this is just a stoner thought, but it suggests to me a psychic response among the educated and generally anxious classes. Either that or they frantically protect their status, barricaded into cultural or physical garrisons.

Which again takes us back to the river banks and alleys of Tokyo’s Shitamachi, where, in countless Japanese films and novels, the attitude towards life was also transitory. What you’ve got is here today, gone tomorrow. An attitude reflected in the gruff working-class accent of the neighborhoods lined with crushed wooden pallets and flowerpots, occupied by alley cats and daytime drunks, to be contrasted with the polished tones of the wealthy Yamanote districts further west.

It's a class distinction highlighted in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days – the main character, the stoic toilet cleaner who seeks refuge in Lou Reed cassettes and Patricia Highsmith stories, also seeks refuge in his tiny tatami-mat apartment in a rundown Shitamachi neighborhood. We know little of his origins, but in the brief encounter with his elegant sister, we can assume he’s from wealthier Yamanote stock (can’t speak to his accent, my Japanese is nowhere near good enough), and he commutes every day to urbane and cosmopolitan Shibuya to clean its toilets.

The emotional climax of the film (this really doesn’t count as a spoiler) comes with him, isolated and inconsolable, with a pack of Peace cigarettes and a few cans of Strong Zero, the cheap canned shochu-and-mixer popular among drunk salarymen, along the banks of the Sumida River at night. Where he’s joined by one such salaryman, dying of cancer, sharing his cigs and cheap chuhai.

I had been there – definitely that exact spot, equally inconsolable in my mood. I recognize these places intimately – the bridge, the peculiar big concrete cone, the view of the neon-streaked Tokyo Skytree. On some chilly Novembery evening a long time ago, cold moonlight and the Asahi sign flickering in the murky water. I’m pretty sure I had a Strong Zero in my hand.

The moonlight too seemed to float.

Reunion

Am I the only one who's sick of the multiverse as a plot device?

I can’t speak to the actual physical concept of the multiverse. I don’t know enough about it, or enough about its viability versus that of the Copenhagen interpretation in explaining our world, I barely even know how to use these concepts correctly. And yet I’m sure that many of the screenwriters out there have even less of a grasp. But I get their perspective, truly, as hack writers – it’s an easy premise for them to play with, like Groundhog Day but with a veneer of scientific credibility. And, like Groundhog Day, it appeals to an inner desire we all have.

We want to know what the person did who had made the other decision. Somewhere you did it differently, and ideally did it right. You did get into Dartmouth, you did complete that touchdown pass junior year and a scout was in the audience, he finally proposed to you and you said yes.

And therefore, it was all I could think about when I walked through the streets of a West Coast city I used to call home, where I misspent my youth, and thought about that person I might be. And to find those little points at which my life and his life would have been one and the same.

What were they? Looking back, they dance across my visual cortex like the flashing images of a magic lantern.

In the South End, old wooden bungalows still sigh on overgrown lawns, threatening to be strangled by the blackberry bushes, stoops decorated with blue-robed virgins with arms outstretched and whimsical metal folk art and Tibetan prayer flags. They had once been the homes of union men and their families, airplane mechanics and longshoremen and shipyard welders. How many of them had stayed on? Their little bungalows, with their warm old wooden fixtures were selling for north of $750,000 now.

The slightly rundown streets of White Center still held their familiarity – the Salvadorean bakery, the pizza place, the bikini baristas in their little plywood shacks, the cardboard boxes of jackfruit outside the grocery stores with Khmer signage, the metal clang of machine shops, a woman smoking a cig and scrolling through her phone on the passenger side of a parked Ford Ranger outside. A blue-haired women in Marvel sweatpants and a mobility scooter rolls past, inclusive pride flag – one of many variations of the inclusive pride flag I was to see over the coming days, like those of marginally different statelets in the Holy Roman Empire – fluttering in the cool breeze.

Cresting a nearby hill, Mount Rainier stood there, as jawdropping as it was the day I first saw her, bright and distant in the sunlight, a nearer and somehow reassuring presence in the 10:00 p.m. twilight reflecting off the glaciers, lights on at the high school baseball stadium, teenagers in hoodies coming home late from band practice, squealing as they jumped on one another’s backs.

I stayed at the cheapest spot I could get that looked like it wouldn’t be a stop on a human trafficking circuit, which I remembered from years ago as douchey in a very specifically ugly, very specifically late ‘00s kind of way – a mix of hard-rawk grunge-era memorabilia, a logo that uses the Brazzers font, and once-sleek black and red furnishings just starting to show their wear and tear. The walls are thin, there’s a woman in Harry Potter pajama pants on the edge of tears in the lobby, but there is something about crumbling downtown hotels, those that have survived in any meaningful capacity, that still resonates with me. Some adolescent fantasy of hopeless mid-century adultery and highways as escape routes to the liberation of a coastal city, no matter how many times those themes have been retread.

The late sunsets are still fucking with me. I think it must still be early, we can’t have been drinking for long, my eyes and body to used to the steady diurnal cycles of the tropics. The wine is sneaking up on me – it’s a natural Austrian red served chilled, because this will be thought of as the era of the chilled natural Austrian red. The only time I can remember eating bacon ice cream was back in Obama’s first term, down the street from here, and I knew then that that time would be thought of as the era of bacon ice cream. Some of the same people were there that day as were here this evening. Everyone was prettier than I remembered.

In the market, the street preachers and the napping junkies and crowds of Asian tourists gathering around the original Starbucks were still there, and somehow I’m glad of it – I even recognized a homeless man from years earlier, actually looking a bit more trim and healthy.  The little shop where I had first haphazardly tried to write something daring and long-form was still there too, and I stopped in and drank tea and remembered what it was like to have a whole life of writing ahead of me. The overenthusiastic Millennial theater kids had grown up and were replaced with corseted femboys. The corseted femboys on both sides of the cashier’s counter talked about what time they would be at the party that night, the same way we had when we had stood on both sides of the cashier’s counter.

Bacon ice cream. Chilled natural Austrian red.

And that night, they went to their party. And I went and danced and sang with some of those people who were prettier than I remembered, as I celebrated the nuptials of two of the sweetest people I know, and they too were prettier than I remembered, as they had their first marital kiss on a boat with a gorgeous view of the skyline, and the rain turned to a perfect clear sunset after.

And then we danced and the Fernet flowed and we sang karaoke in the same Korean-style noraebang that we used to sneak liquor into in our early twenties. Coming back from the bathroom, I saw a solo couple through the slit in the door, his cock in her hand, and somehow I could only think… good for them.

The next morning, I drank the free coffee in the lobby, because of course they proudly advertise their complementary Stumptown. My old high school buddy picked me up and we walked around the Ballard Locks, and around my old neighborhood, and the cemetery where Bruce Lee is buried. We still talked with the same dorky passion we did in high school, about satellite photography and cooking techniques, about the assorted insanities of the world we’d inherited. He didn’t have time to play music as much anymore, I didn’t have time to bake bread like I used to. In the evening, the lights of downtown seemed colder than ever. The cold light emanates forth from the not-quite-geodesic domes on Lenora Street, in what I had remembered as a neighborhood of old shipping warehouses just starting to be replaced with noodle bars and hot yoga studios, made all the more hideous by their being not quite geodesic. An architecture that feigns the organic. “Look, Daddy’s balls.” We bro-hug and I wave him goodnight. I do my best to turn my eyes away from the cold fluorescent lights above, the ugly glass-box bars with ESPN playing silently with closed captions, with business Americans getting schnockered on IPA.

And yet I couldn’t avoid them, at least not fully. I tried to give each of the devils their due. I tried to listen to and empathize with the loudmouthed tech bro, before he referred to his “vibe tribe” (I researched that to see if that was an actual thing, and it’s also the name of an Israeli psy-trance DJ, natch). I tried to smile and nod along to the conversation of a wealthy Harley-Davidson collector from the Midwest, before he began verging into QAnon territory and his wife pulled him back – “honey, not everyone believes the same things you do.” I couldn’t help but prod the wine bar day-drunk businesswoman as she talked about fucking her way around The Villages, Florida (yep, the giant retirement community) and loudly accusing me of being judgmental in my silence – a reminder that women are the only ones who still try to imitate the cast of Mad Men, that particular boys’ club having long devolved into a bunch of cargo-shorts douchebags, gamers, and Wall Street man-children. All three, really, seemed to be chasing a vision of America – a hippie utopia, a white picket fence and crewcut 1950s suburb, Don Draper in a suit – that had long since dissolved.

“The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.

 

For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it…

 

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.

 

All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

 

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

 

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

 

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”

 

-- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, who himself abandoned his family and walked down the railroad track in the midst of a psychotic break, not long before penning those words.

But even in a world of grotesques you find that true beauty. You wind up moving past them, and in the dive bar with your old friend, seeing more people, all of them pretty in their own weird way, Italian and Filipino, Ethiopian and Lao, dancing over the sticky floors. You chase your dirt-cheap Rainier with Chartreuse Verte. Around the corner, there are brass bands playing and the local Bandidos chapter is parked out front, and they seem, strangely, to be vibing just like everyone else. You meet another writer, maybe a decade or so older, and she tells you about trying to express yourself in the fundamentally uncaring world in which we find ourselves.

And in this moment, there we were. Me and my other self. Our paths met, crossed.

Before diverging in new directions again.

And not long after I poured the last of my American change in a coffee stand tip cup at Seatac. And I was back over the ocean again, neatly tucked into the path that I had chosen.

Being a Socialist Sucks, I Do It Anyway

Really, the title says it all. That’s my for-sale-baby-shoes-never-worn for life. But if you have similar desire to elaborate a catechism of masochism, in a manner inarguably said better by people cleverer than myself (and yeah, after I started this and before I finished it, I read Amber A’Lee Frost’s Dirtbag, shrill and smug as she is, she is also far more articulate than I am), read on.

So why am I this way?

To go back to the beginning, it was sometime as a teenager that I first had to confront the American political spectrum in any real way, with the beginner’s mind of a young person who has to begin to negotiate their place in the world. But it was hard not to feel alienated (pretty normal, that). Not only was the reprehensible Bush II in the White House, the Democrats seemed like pussies at best, coconspirators at worst. Even when Jon Stewart functioned as the lone voice in the wilderness against the editorial boards of the NYT, WaPo, and so forth in his steadfast opposition to the Iraq catastrophe, he just seemed so damn smug about it (although now that 15+ years have passed, I’ll give him credit for calling his series on Iraq “Mess o’ Potamia,” yeah that’s clever).

So I foolishly – since I knew I didn’t much care for Republicans or Democrats – thought of myself as a “centrist” of some kind. Both parties, despite whatever the ideological differences they may have, primarily consist of dipshits. I despise, and continue to despise, the conservative values of allegiance to nation, religion, and tradition, and I despise, and continue to despise, the American liberal use of guilt as an organizing principle. In my defense, I was like 15, and given the alienation of political news in America from concrete or material concerns, I barely thought about policy, as the news media had lulled me, into focusing on superficial cultural signifiers in lieu of analysis. And as I was disgusted by the era in which I found myself, I found myself likewise disgusted by the neocons and neolibs.

Dissatisfied, I cobbled together what I could. After all, humans are bricoleurs, and in particular teenagers. And about all the things, human are the most bricoleur about their politics, regardless of the labels they assign themselves. Which in my case was some combination of New Deal and Great Society social democracy, the legacy of the 19^th Century prairie populists and IWW, and more pertinently, Dead Kennedys and Rage Against the Machine lyrics.

It was only when I got out of my little yellow-dog Democrat town that I realized my ideas could be better understood not as centrism at all, but as socialism, or even (gasp!) communism. So, being a dork, I read and read. I read the people I continue to look back to, Adorno, Benjamin, Naomi Klein, big Karl M himself, and countless others on the way. I read, I argued, I tried to figure out my position in the world and on the world, beginning with the simple proposition that political democracy was only a first step, economic democracy would be second. But I knew even then that I was setting myself up for disappointment.

Because, well, one thing you learn early on is that socialists have a tendency to lose, and the finer the socialist, the more likely the loss. To find the truly noble spirits, you have to look to Salvador Allende, offing himself in Santiago to avoid capture by Pinochet’s men, to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg gunned down by German cavalrymen, to Fred Hampton shot in his sleep by the Chicago PD, to Jacopo Arbenz in lonely exile after the CIA organized his ouster, stalked by spies, forcibly separated from his family, until his own lonely death. And even the quiet reformers, the European socialists who pushed forward the meteoric rise in the average standard of living across Western Europe in the wake of World War II, all I had to do was pick up the newspaper to look at how their victories were even more quietly being reversed.

But in the darkness, one’s eyes are keen for a glimmer of light.

And in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, as I saw myself become yet another precarious subject tossed about on the waves, I saw points of light come and go. I saw the Occupy movement rise spontaneously and then fall just as spontaneously – despite the admittedly real attempts at sabotage, crackdown, and infiltration, law enforcement could safely bet that our own foolish horizontal organizing pattern would be our downfall. I watched with shock and delight as the 2016 Bernie campaign picked up massive momentum across the post-industrial parts of America, only to be ratfucked hard by the Democratic establishment who didn’t want anything to interfere with the coronation of Hillary Regina (whoops). I was really ready to reload for the 2020 Bernie campaign, after four years of idiot rule, my attitude more militant than ever… only to see the same pattern repeat itself, with my side being radically unprepared to handle an unfair playing field. I was delighted to see righteous anger in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd (which while not being socialist protests, did highlight broader themes of injustice), only to see cops play the crybully card and emerge even better-funded.

And then as the pandemic continued, as our leaders shock-doctrined their way into even greater wealth, as ordinary people further barricaded their mind palaces of one kind or another -- whether that’s QAnon shit, or vampire’s-castle radlib tone policing, or zero COVID paranoia, or any other kind of flagellating attempt at answers at a time when all hope is extinguished.

We failed. The horror continues unabated.

“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era--the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run...but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch the sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda...You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

And that, I think was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs. We all had the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

And I, too, retreated. Not that I was ever a capital-A activist, but I was an enthusiastic participant, one with actual political hopes that are now pretty much dead. I was inside for a while, and then I wasn’t. My sense of hope, however flickering, never really returned.

My material circumstances have become less precarious, and I’ve settled into a placid bohemianism (none of my post-2008 alley-scrounged mattresses). I may not have gone full white picket fence, but I am approaching what the French have called “bobo” status for decades, a term which was once fine, but was then ruined by the criminally smooth-brained David Brooks. But suffice it to say that the volumes of Marx on my bookshelf abut my wine collection.

An old friend who once vomited in my face once had a better word for it, stilyagi status -- A reference to the Moscow youth toward the end of Stalin’s reign who cultivated a vaguely “American” aesthetic sense. No matter how much Westerners like to gush about the political subversion and transgression of countercultures, they pretty much all constitute a capitulation. It’s been a long time since anyone went from abjuring culottes to chopping off Louis XVI’s ugly head.

But – and I don’t know what sickness this is – I can’t bring myself to truly not care. I still thrill at every successful unionization drive and successful insurgent leftist political campaign in the Global South, I still feel the need to tend to my library of Frankfurt School thinkers, to seek consolation there, and pray that somehow a path forward remains. In my slightly pathetic way, I still have a vague hope that truth can still equal beauty.

Leaving the Manazuru Station

Was I the only one who got off the stop at Manazuru?

I was priced out of the posh hotels in Hakone. So I looked on Google Maps. Just down the coast, I recognized the name nearby. Manazuru.

Someone close to me had stayed here. But now that I think about it, I didn’t ask her whether she liked it or not.

And in her novel of the same name, Hiromi Kawakami had a way of describing Manazuru as a slightly decrepit seaside town, with the same starry-eyed tone that she used in novels like The Nakano Thrift Shop and Strange Weather in Tokyo. Yet in those, it felt a bit too fluffy. Manazuru, though. It hit me across the jaw.

I do adore slightly decrepit seaside towns. I imagined, as I booked my hotel, long days of sightseeing finishing with Asahi and grilled fish by the pier, shops getting ready for high season, goofy statues of Poseidon.

And now that I think back on it, it seems a bit embarrassing. Letting a book choose your fate has the potential to be a shitty trope. Something from a saccharine NYT-bestseller magical realist book, something sufficiently “young adult” to prevent any meaningful challenges seep in.

But I am a fatalist. Even if I don’t believe in fate. So I booked a hotel.

It had been a long day of travel. First, Kanazawa to Ueno Station, where the homeless day laborers who had, decades earlier, built Tokyo, dozed against the art deco columns, where the crowds of tourists crammed onto the subway after taking their cherry-blossom selfies in the park, and where I switched trains to the pokey local on the old Tokaido Main Line, past the endless drip of Tokyo suburbs, through faceless Shinagawa, Kawasaki, Yokohama, before crossing into open countryside around Odawara, and eventually arriving at this little town on a little peninsula, hard pressed between the mountains and the sea.

“In Tokyo, we have a life. We can hide in our everyday life. There is nothing in Manazuru.”

What the hell was I doing here?

I had no other choice. I dragged my suitcase through the street. The streets, empty. The port, empty. The hotels, boarded up. The plum trees were in full bloom and the rain fell on them, scattering the petals to the ground.

My hotel was left over from Japan’s economic boom years in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The online reviews all mention how good the food is. They were not serving food.

The only way to shower is at the communal onsen. One would say this was a bit awkward, but it turns out that I am the only guest. The doors of each room are left open, lights off, futons neatly folded, carpets perfectly vacuumed, waiting for no one in particular, the hum of the ice machine the only sound.

The rain falls heavier. I find a sushi place down by the empty harbor, which supposedly closes at 9. I’m here at 7, and the old man behind the counter barely acknowledges my existence. He is already closing up shop.

“Le meilleur ‘sushi’ de nos vacances!” says an enthusiastic note accompanied by a yellowed photo of a Frenchman with a much younger version of this chef. From an era when “sushi” had to be put in scare quotes.

It wasn’t bad sushi.

I pour myself a little glass of Old Overholt and stand out on the balcony of my hotel, and I can hear the waves crashing 100 meters or so below.

The next morning the rain dissipates enough for me to walk down to the cape at the tip of the peninsula, across the putting green and through the woods. A torii gate is perched high on an impossible spire over the sea. It was built by the Tokugawas to protect Japan from the unknown menaces of the exterior world.

And then I return from whence I came. I cross the putting green again. Ancient Japanese men in flat caps and cable sweaters play out like projected holograms, and I wonder if someone is going to ask me if they saw me last year at Marienbad.

I spend the next few days making my way around this odd little stretch of coast west of the Tokyo metropolis, where fairytale railways and funiculars make their way up steep slopes to the old leisure towns of the Tokyo middle classes – to Hakone, like a version of Japan as seen in a Viewmaster of an old World’s Fair, cozy, manicured, with its old shrines in the cedars, and its futuristic sculpture garden with children of many nations hiding behind Henry Moore reclining figures, to the old restaurant in Odawara with its dusty light fixtures and grandmotherly porcelain-cabinet plating of simmered snails and delicate fishcakes, to the hideous, raggedy tourbus parking lot town of Kawaguchiko at the foot of Mount Fuji that took me five long train rides to get home from due to overcrowding.

Although I just learned that that very raggedy tourbus parking lot town is blocking certain views of Fuji due to the omnipresence of slackjawed yokel tourists with no sense of propriety. Much in the same way that, a few weeks previous, I was one of the last foreign tourists to walk the back streets of the Gion in Kyoto before our banning. And nothing will make you feel more reprehensible in your status as an outsider than seeing a poor geisha getting mobbed by dickheads with cameras like she’s a Kardashian when she’s just trying to go to her job that evening.

But now I was in Manazuru, and I was alone. And the contempt could only be directed inwards.

I spent the next few nights taking the train back to the deserted Manazuru Station, past the gravel parking lot with the stroad-side Nepalese restaurant and the smell of reheated butter chicken, up the mountain road to my softly lit and utterly empty hotel. I would slip into the burble of hot spring water coming into the onsen.

“On a date one month before his disappearance, in a ballpoint pen’s thin strokes, he had written ‘Manazuru.’ I fold the sheet of paper into a square and stick it back between the diary’s pages. Ma. Na. Zu. Ru. I whisper the syllables. I hadn’t noticed. Or had I forgotten?”

The central question of Kawakami’s novel is what happened to the protagonist’s husband, who had disappeared without leaving a trace some years earlier.

It was only a week or so before I arrived in Manazuru, that, by coincidence, I was reading about the johatsu, the population of the disappeared in Japan. Numbering in the tens of thousands, these are those who, like the missing husband of the novel, simply disappear. Sometimes they flee debt. Sometimes they flee shame. Either way, it is, like hikikomori, an almost uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Supposedly they wind up in large part in the fly-by-night quarters of Sanya in Tokyo and Kamagasaki in Osaka, refuges of quasi-homeless, quasi-employed Japanese men living in rundown boarding houses, something akin to the Bowery or Bunker Hill in past iterations of America.

There, they can live unbothered. They can pay people to disappear them: I looked up one of their corporate websites, as sunny as a suburban real estate office (I was originally going to link to their website, but that seems unreasonably edgelord even for myself, search for yourselves, it’s not hard you filthy ghouls).

Just as incidentally, I found myself, in the sunny, piney mountains above Manazuru, compelled to listen to a song by Connie Converse. I, too, was in between two tall mountains.

And I had somehow neglected the fact that having been wracked apart by her personal failures and disillusioned by an America that stubbornly remained just as ugly and racist and warmongering as ever, she, too, became johatsu.

“Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it. So let me go, please; and please accept my thanks for those happy times that each of you has given me over the years; and please know that I would have preferred to give you more than I ever did or could – I am in everyone’s debt.” – Her last letter, left behind in her home in Michigan

It occurred to me, then. I was in a ghost town of the elderly, dying on the seashore below Tokyo, plums in blossom, the winter’s citrus rotting on the tree. A coastal town they forgot to bomb.

And before I left, on the way out, I stopped on the hillside above, where Hiroshi Sugimoto collected and arranged his artifacts – ancient Japanese architectural features, allusions to local history and primitive astronomy, fossil beds, representative flora, representations of the mathematical forces that govern our universe, a remnant of a Shinto shrine scarred by the atomic blast at Hiroshima.

I have been there many times in my dreams. Chances are you have too.

Only as I was typing this did I learn that this approximate site – not mentioned at the installation itself – was the approximate location of a landslide that killed hundreds in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1922, among other things crushing a passenger train at the little station where I had alighted.

Now all that is left are mandarin orange trees. The oranges are excellent.

“What was it there, in Manazuru? Momo asked. I don’t know. I remember it, and yet I can’t remember.”

To Tokyo – to the rundown room near Shinjuku Station, in dense streets where Korean signs dominated and an ajumma who spoke neither English nor Japanese slept behind a partition down the hall. There is a sad Thai streetwalker who stands in the next door down, behind the vending machine, barely murmuring her come-ons to passing salarymen.

Before switching to a discount “art hotel” in Shibuya with faux-graffiti art, subway tile, lo-fi hip-hop, complementary Keurig cups with only the shitty flavors left, and free IPA for an hour.

A place where one could so easily disappear. And one where you’re reminded of the futility of doing so.

When you travel, you are, to a certain degree, not you. In the tribal imagination, you could get lost forever if you didn’t complete the ritual and come back home.

So I flew home. And in the vicious summer heat, waking up after a few hours’ sleep, putting on my H&M buttondown to go into the office, running a brush with my hair, I have to stare at myself in the mirror and confront who I am.

Place, Grief, and a Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Once upon a time, there was a watering hole I loved deeply – it wasn’t just that they made good drinks, that’s dime-a-dozen. It was the excellent bartender, who not only was handy with the shaker and bitters, but had great chat and knew how to wrangle some of the ornerier customers, who left feeling respected even as they were being 86’d. And more importantly, it functioned as a gathering spot for all of us fucking weirdos – bohemian fuckups, queer artists, masochists weeping over the ramifications of coldness and cruelty, cocaine enthusiasts zipping to and from the bathroom, veterans of the hospitality industry hardened by years on the line or behind the stick, septum-pierced and preening Onlyfans girls, mainland Chinese alienated from the Beijing consensus retreating into a world of wine and letters, and every other kind of degenerate that I had the privilege to call a friend, or at the very least a drinking buddy.

And yet owing to a recent change in ownership and staffing, what is left feels like a skeleton. The menu is the same, the live jazz remains excellent, but the clientele is different, the mood is different... something’s just wrong. And it’s honestly painful to witness.

This shouldn’t bother me as much as it does. After all, there will always be places to socialize and imbibe. So why is it that I’m in this mood?

Millions of pages have been written about our relationships with the people in our lives, but one of the strongest and most affecting relationship we have is to place. The concept of "home," however we choose to define it. Maybe it's the maternal farmstead, the place where generations of your ancestors were laid in the ground after lifetimes of trying to bring forth life from the exhausted soil. Maybe it's the rattrap urban apartment you fled to after that maternal farmstead rejected you, the place where you decided, on your own terms and with your own values, what constituted the good.

Or maybe it's something larger scale, a community, a nation, a language, a religion, again whether inherited or chosen. The only thing it really cannot be is humanity writ large. Because the concept of "home" is fundamentally an interior standing in contrast to an exterior, a place in which one can be as close to one's "authentic" self as that fractious term will allow.

Which is why the idea of losing one's home (small-scale) in, say, a fire, or (large-scale) a human conflict is so horrifying. And why the term "refugee" triggers such strong emotions, whether that is an empathy with those who can no longer return home or a visceral fear and desire to cast out, lest we be reminded that we too might eventually occupy such precarious positions.

But it doesn't have to be home. It is just as much the little corners we carve out that we mark with our memories. The favorite wooded glade where, as a child, you were free to be Cinderella or Aladdin. The house down the street where you had your first kiss. The hospital where your daughter was born.

Or simply that curve of the highway you love because it's where the trees and the sun line up in just the right way.

We live in a world in which housing prices around the world are spiraling out of control, "third places" as we commonly understand them are dying throughout the English-speaking world owing to market forces that have little capability to provide the sorts of coffee shops and arcades that can act as second homes for a minimal fee, and hell if we're going to be catastrophic about it, in which environmental horror threatens to dislocate millions and destabilize billions.

So we hang on to those precious few spots in which we feel something like what Heidegger called the heimlich, which can be very roughly summed up as a sense of ease. The effacement of one of those places is, inevitably, bound to hit a pain point or two.

So when we find those little places, it can be, conversely, a singular bit of hope.

I'm finishing my evening in a quiet, 100 year old tavern in Kyoto. When Secretary of War Henry Stimson made the decision to spare Kyoto from the bombings so many other Japanese cities were subject to, he not only saved the city's ancient temples, but also its fine stock of Taisho Period commercial architecture and its attendant businesses of the sorts depicted in ukiyo-e paintings of the 19th Century. And so it is here, with the tobacco-stained ceilings and well-worn tables.

Out there? America is trapped in an improbable political and economic morass with no positive outcomes, the UK is slowly sinking into poverty, with the average British child having lost a full centimeter of height over the past 10 years due to malnutrition, Eastern Europe is embroiled in war, the Middle East is worse than it been in my lifetime with countless Palestinians murdered and starved with the tacit approval of the developed world, heat indices are set to reach record highs globally, everyone over 50 is facing the future shock of being unable to parse reality, while everyone under 50 is facing a future that has rarely looked bleaker... and unlike in previous bleak times, all the bleakness is on all our screens all the time.

But here I am, beneath those smoke-brown ceilings, among the bottles of forgotten brands of tonic water and rye whiskey in my clean, well-lighted place. I'm the only customer left, save the elderly salaryman already passed out in front of his highball, cigarette already long turned to ash in his hand. And yet here, somehow... I'm at peace.

Ue o muite aruko

Namida ga kaborenai youni

Omodaisu haruno hi

Hitoribotchi no yoru

- Kyu Sakomoto, 1961

For this moment.

I Don't Hate People Anymore

Some version of dedicated dismissal of the human species has always stalked the official narratives, whatever they may have been, from Diogenes the Cynic in the ancient world barking at Alexander the Great, all the way forward to the dedicated neurotic fuck-yous of Richard Lewis and Janeane Garofalo in the Comedy Cellar in the ‘90s, with countless stopovers and loops on the way. Maybe the draw was Nietzsche writing his little zingers in his garret, maybe it was Lou Reed flipping off all you guys, and all you girls with all your sweet talk. 

Because the official institutions and their associated narratives that constituted mainstream opinion in whatever form they took – religious orthodoxy, civil society, the reassurances of the Hollywood ending – allowed the misanthropic alternative to thrive as an omnipresent shadow figure. Alceste, the original titular Misanthrope of Moliere’s play, was a serious pussy-getter who got exiled for being too real, man. 

But that was then. Religious orthodoxy continues to flare up, but not as an all-encompassing weltanschauung, but rather as a series of reactionary fevers. Civil society and the prospect of a commons or a shared destiny are memories at this point. And to find an unironic Hollywood ending, one has to go to the emerging and shamelessly populist morality-play cinemas of Bollywood, Nollywood, and the dopey nationalist action movies coming out of Shanghai and Moscow.

So I can't help but feel that some form of misanthropy has gone from a subcultural current to a mainstream opinion. This is regrettably logical. If we live in a world of unprecedented loneliness, that loneliness is stalked by an unprecedented misanthropy. In the era of climate change, information overload, future shock, panoptic social media, and the levers of power being gripped onto by alternating teams of psychotic nationalists and psychotic neoliberals, it is difficult not to be pessimistic – like I said, a natural and reasonable response, if sad. But that pessimism needs an outlet, and it has an unfortunate way of manifesting itself as a contrast between one's own ego and the repulsive mass around us.

“In spite of everything, I still believe people really are good at heart” – Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl

“They should be rewarded for not being people. I hate people.” – Aubrey Plaza as Depressive Pixie Dream Girl re: cute aminal friends, Parks and Recreation

The various figures of the contemporary commedia dell'arte reflect this widespread attitude. Facebook boomer dads with receding-hairline opinions think they're the heirs to George Carlin, autistic teenagers without relationships or hobbies can dedicate themselves to self-flagellating as they demonstrate their correct opinions, and viral TikToks show imaginary arguments between a random 32 year old creative and himself with slightly different hair. He, of course, wins that argument.

In the atomized space of online communication, it is comforting, a guaranteed win. In your Madison Square Garden of the soul, you will always be the Harlem Globetrotters, they will always be the Washington Generals.

Because in this world, everyone is an idiot but me. Crying-laughing emoji crying-laughing emoji.

Unfortunately, this is not too far from my own natural state of being. Any smart, oversensitive kid quickly learns that many things sucked. And now, let's run some teenage hormones over those existential-angst default settings, add the usual edgy boy inputs (the complete discographies of Nirvana and the Dead Kennedys, repeat viewings of Fight Club and The Usual Suspects). That gets one to the usual teenage fuck-you, the kind that comes with a bottle of Fireball that rolled under the passenger seat of a 1995 Ford Tempo.

Now add high-art texts, chosen pretty much at arm's length, one leading to the other. Kierkegaard seemed like a high priest of anxiety and isolation, and after listening to Nevermind and taking a swig of that Fireball, I accepted Sartre's proclamation that hell was other people more or less as a prime directive. L'enfer, c'est les autres. Fuck the normies, pass the Doritos bitch, I got hella munchies.

But when Sartre said that, he didn't say that other people were hell -- the vision of the hell he didn't believe in that he puts forth in No Exit consists of anxieties, fears, conflicts, resentments, and projections, not the people themselves. And even then, this most famous quote was not a philosophical statement – it’s a quote from the character of Garcin, and, well, he's a bit of a dick. So it's no different than the other teenage boys who took Tyler Durden (or for that matter Eric Cartman) at his word. It’s a natural desire to be known as a heretic with an unforgiving vision.

And yet while I said as much... I didn't hate people, not truly. Sure, my fellow man disappointed me more often than not, but at the end of the day I found people more frightening and confusing than worthy of contempt. Some might have called my attitude misanthropic, but perhaps the better word is weltschmerz, the “world-pain” engendered by the inability to account for the cruelty of the world.

Many years ago, my beloved high school Western Civilization teacher (hard to believe such a thing still existed) asked us where we were on the scale of belief in the capacity of humans – were we John Locke, optimistic believers in tabula rasa and the liberal democratic politics to follow, or were we Thomas Hobbes, inveighing against the nasty, brutish, and short life of the uncultivated man? As a wee edgelord, I of course agreed with Hobbes more, but… I didn’t like the implications, the belief that therefore man must be steered by a tyrant. Nor should I have.

And misanthropy does lead to reactionary politics, whether that’s Hobbes’ Leviathan, or the puritanical belief that we are all sinners in the hands of an angry god, or the strict delineation of a dar al-Islam as the only locale in which peace may reign. I clearly didn’t vibe with that, because, well, I liked things like democracy. And being free to smoke a bowl whenever I damn well pleased. I may have disagreed vehemently, albeit purely intuitively, with my teacher at the time, but that may have been a moment when doubts were sown as to my contempt for the human species. My pessimism existed because I felt bad for my fellow man, not because I hated him.

Furthermore, the misanthropy itself was also infinitely more charming when it was an undercurrent. Diogenes and Heraclitus and Lucian, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Stirner, Richard Pryor and Dave Attell and John Kennedy Toole, they all spoke their truth, and sometimes they were right, sometimes they were wrong, but they at least felt like original and necessary interpretations and counterpoints.

So the older I get, the more my love and empathy expand. I’m not in a childhood bedroom or grotty college dorm anymore, and I’ve somehow against all odds managed to live a life of travel and art and letters. And when I flaneur around, staring at the infinite sea of faces, all I can think is how utterly fascinating they all are. So when I feel hopeless about the brave new world we inhabit, it’s more that, well… I just feel bad for all of them. I still think I’m trapped on a burning planet with a bare minimum of hope, but I feel lousy for even the most pigheaded and deluded of my fellow prisoners.

Now I can already hear certain protestations. This could itself be a new version of the contrarian hipster attitude -- I was misanthropic before it was cool.

Perhaps that is true, but if so, I’d like to think this isn’t me being even more of a dick. Rather, it’s a generalized sadness at no longer being the canary in the coal mine. All the humans followed me down, even as I gasp and flutter my last as the white damp sets in.

So, dear reader, let it be known that this canary loves you, even if he’s wondering why the fuck he’s here.