[Ed: I’m currently studying for a Master’s in Psychoanalysis with the wonderful folks at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies (GCAS). My work requires writing weekly reflection and research papers, and I’ll be posting variations on these to the Department from time to time. Today’s entry is from a course on radical theology and theopoetics, from John D. Caputo].

In 1964, Martin Heidegger delivered a letter to a group of theologians assembling at Drew University in New Jersey to discuss his thought. In the letter - published later as The Problem of a Nonobjectifying Thinking and Speaking in Today’s Theology - Heidegger is circling the singular triumph of philosophy: the subject-object distinction, that great gulf between self and world which allows the world to be perceived and experienced, held at a distance, manipulated. But this is late Heidegger, deep inside his “age of obscurity”, turned decidedly against the bright clear thrust of the philosophical project he helped build in Being and Time. He is searching for another way of speaking and thinking, a collapse of the divide he had earlier anatomised, an erasure of distance and difference.

Philosophy doesn’t have a language for this; perhaps theology does. But theology, in Heidegger’s day and ours, suffers from a sort of status anxiety - it borrows freely from the language of modernity to shore up its own devotions, to re-assert and redescribe truths that should be timeless, that should outpace the spirits of the ages. In this letter, as I read it, Heidegger is asking theology to drop this anxious habit and speak to us and the world out of its own language - to speak, as it were, “to the human being as human being in its very nature.”

What is this nature of ours? How does it speak? Out of language, for one - language is, as Heidegger explains, the arena inside which all thought paces, “the realm within which the thinking of philosophy and every kind of thinking move and reside.” Heidegger’s conception of language is mutable and hard to pinion, but he seems here to treat language as a primordial or original substance or totality, something from which thought springs, and in which we live and move and have our being.

This is a difficult notion to grasp. As modern people - materialists of greater or lesser fidelity - we are in the habit of assuming all complex things arise from simpler discrete parts. But language doesn’t work like this; it works in reverse. Language is a unity, an intentional system that lends meaning from the top downwards, coursing through structure outwards to its particular instances - to the individual symbols that mark its flow on paper, on screen, in mind. Symbols, as the philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart notes, “never exist in isolation, they exist only within an entirely replete semeiotic ecology”, an entire language in which the functions of syntax (form) and semantics (meaning) are already “wholly in operation, both of them sustained by a fully realized capacity for symbolic thought.” Language does not emerge piece by piece from the protean murk, through some slow accumulation of pure sound into shimmering and intelligible coherence. It is a prior and fundamental unified field “wherein”, says Heidegger, “our entire reflection has to gather itself.”

But we tend to treat language only as an instrument, one of many at our disposal. We seek to tame and master language as we do all things in creation, making it a codex to open up and manipulate the representational world. This rewards us with mastery over things, but it is a mastery that misunderstands the things it moves. The scientific-materialist mode of thinking, per Heidegger, can only calcify the “intrinsic flow of the ‘life-stream’” that has no proper architecture, no set form.

Before we dismiss this as so much misty maundering, we should consider Heidegger’s warning. By treating language only as instrumentality, an implement for exerting force over objects, we are at risk of losing something vital. We fail to see that all our mastery only happens “in reference to and from out of an already spoken language”, and so we miss the ways in which language shapes the world we see, and how we see ourselves. On a deeper level, we fail to recognise the world for what it is, and ourselves for what we are.

Spirit in silicon

Consider Large Language Models (or LLMs), the default wonder of our time. ChatGPT is an increasingly useful tool, bordering often on the uncanny. We type words into a white box on a screen, we watch a cursor blink and move, spilling facts and information in the hesitating asymmetric stutter of a friend, a thousand miles distant, typing out a message. New models are ever more powerful, ever more efficient. And they may prove to be mere preliminary, the first breath of wind before the stormfront.

LLMs are, on a technical level, a sophisticated exercise in next-word prediction reinforced through human feedback. They are designed, as Charles Carman explains in the New Atlantis, “to notice how earlier words (or tokens) can influence the sense of later words in a sequence.” Through repetition and reinforcement, the algorithm “slowly picks up on certain patterns, accounting for the wide variety of use cases any one word might have depending on the context: the shot of a gun, a shot of espresso, shot by a camera.” It is a progressive narrowing of the probable down to a gleaming needle-point guess, generating “a final prediction that in this case the word “gun” is the most likely to be used with “shot,” or whatever the case may be.”

As LLMs develop in complexity and power, they imitate ever better the real openness of semantic meaning as we experience it, from inside the broad sweep of intentional consciousness that is our birthright. But they remain only that - an imitation, a simulacrum. LLMs do not, as Hart explains, actually think - thought itself requires “a kind of phenomenal reflexivity, a kind of awareness of thinking that refers back to the knowing subject.” When we think, we experience ourselves thinking, as a subject immersed in Heidegger’s flowing life-stream, submerged somewhere below the rushing waters of sense-impressions. This is the distinctive quality of human metacognition, apparently unique to us as conscious agents, instantly recognizable to anyone who’s bothered to roam inside the funhouse mirror of self-reflection, silhouettes redoubling to the edge of sight.

No, computers cannot think; code is a set of protocols for physical processes, and code’s output only has meaning when perceived by us, living minds interacting with the end product. ChatGPT might appear conscious, but only to us, who delight to witness the predictive-patterned responses as they emerge from the blinking cursor and march in serrated rows across our screens, who see in its stylized close-tracking mimicry a creature like us, spirit inside silicon.

In ourobouros

If true, doesn’t this render the computational theory of mind nothing but a beguiling category error, a stylish and harmless metaphor with no sway over our lives? I don’t think so. If language is an eternal form, co-equal with life and mind (it definitely is, but…another day) then the metaphors we use can shape us as surely as we shape them. We, for our part, are always eager to see ourselves reflected in the world around us, and easily mistake similarity for likeness, outlines for deeper affinities. We look at computers and see a mind at work, a mind like ours.

But this is a false reflection - doubly so, as we take its undulating distortion as a true picture of ourselves, too. Hart calls this misrecognition the Narcissus fallacy, where we mistake shadows for other selves and ourselves for other shadows. We are caught inside a double helix, trapped in the static between infinite and intertwining images, our encircling pictures of reality devouring themselves all around us like an ouroboros.

This misrecognition is not, I think, an accident. We will it, we are complicit in it. Why? Because it’s a useful mistake. The scientific-mechanistic approach - a focus on discrete elements untethered to metaphysics, a slow and patient exploration conducted far from the forbidding light of formal and final causation - has cracked open the skin of the world and unleashed wonders. It has granted us power over things. Why wouldn’t we extend this as far as we could, snagging all under heaven in our net?

Heidegger, for his part, was alarmed at the march of mechanistic metaphor, which carries inside it a ferocious drive to quantify all qualitative relations, reducing us to software and the world to so much data. It is not simply reductive; it is also malignant. This type of thinking threatens to swallow all realms of life, turning everything into “an object of possible manipulation and control.” We think we wield it; it wields us. In the end we could become, Heidegger thought, “being as standing reserve, mere material for technological manipulation or a kind of meaninglessness.”

But we also seek out control because we are afraid. We are afraid of everything that cannot be tallied without remainder, everything that spills over rims and borders, everything that moves in the shadows beyond the reach of firelight. We are afraid, too, of difference, and we put distance between ourselves and what we see as separate from us. To do otherwise requires recognition of kinship and intimacy, acceptance of reciprocal relationship, the collapse of whatever separates us from the other. It requires us to cede control, something we refuse to do, even at the price of our own alienation, which is self-induced, and nearly comforting. Meanwhile we are making a machine of the world; we have, in Hart’s words, sealed our ears against its living voice, and we “long for the silence to be made complete.”

Theology is exhausting. I spent far too much time with it too early in life; I struggle these days to understand what it is saying. I don’t know whether theology offers any respite or rescue, in this or any age. But as the future approaches - as we try to turn neurons to silicon and convert living thought to data streams - I hope theology moves with Heidegger outwards, beyond the screen-glow, embracing all that is uncertain and indeterminate. I hope it forsakes control, ceding authority and sure stewardship over matter and miracle alike. Perhaps theology can lead us out to the shores of the sacred, stand beside us as we savor the salt spray on our lips and the cry of the gulls wheeling overhead, their wings flashing white against the deep blue.

[Ed: I’m currently studying for a Master’s in Psychoanalysis with the wonderful folks at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies (GCAS). My work requires writing weekly reflection and research papers, and I’ll be posting variations on these to the Department from time to time. Today’s entry is from a course on Buddhism and psychoanalysis].

I grew up in a religious tradition with a special genius for collapsing the distinction between thought and act. In its telling, human character is set already and stamped from the beginning, our inner natures and futures fully known and unalterable absent supervening grace. Thoughts are acts, an equivalent step on an already-set causal chain. Agency and free will are effectively eradicated, abstractions exiled to the arid upper reaches of dogma. We are automata, dead machinery vivified and saved (or not) by the white light of another world.

Early on I struggled to find space inside my own experience, space to roam and to maneuver, to hold things loosely, to let things go. As I grew up, I often felt there was very little distinction between my thoughts and feelings and the world outside my head. Seeking distance, seeking something, I turned to meditation.

I started with the Western basics - deracinated concentration exercises, instructions whispered to me in smooth airless tones via smartphone app as I sat cross-legged in my Berkeley bedroom, struggling to focus, golden afternoon sunlight filtering between half-drawn shades. My mind felt hard and overheated; I scrambled across its surface, tracking my thoughts compulsively, struggling to let anything go for any length of time. I soon gave it up. I was a bad meditator, I lacked some essential capacity for discipline and patience.

The COVID-19 pandemic resurrected my experiments. The world outside turned strange and foreign overnight; questions of interiority and inner space surfaced and pulsed. Psychic calm was at a premium, so I tried Transcendental Meditation (TM), an ungainly outgrowth of ancient Hindu mantra practice beloved by the Beatles and David Lynch. One spring morning I arrived at a nondescript Midtown Manhattan office block for training, bearing a fresh apple and a bouquet of flowers that was and was not an offering, intended for the shrine of a long-dead yogi who was and was not a guru (the rituals were confusing, as were the bespoke metaphysics). I was given a mantra, a “personalised” word I was told meant nothing in particular, aimed only at stilling the psyche and fostering a sense of “deep relaxation and transcendence.” The mantra, turning over in my mind, felt sonorous and subterranean; a traveler from some cavern or lightless place deep under soil and rock. Expecting little, I repeated the mantra and slipped, almost immediately, into a profound trance.

My memories of that day are shadowed and murky, dissolving already in the weird viscous suspension of lockdown recollection. Still, I know I felt glimmers of what Freud called the oceanic feeling, and his followers called “the primary narcissism of the infantile state” (a phrase that can feel itself like a mantra, vacant, emptied of content, the words treasured more for their mouth-feel and their looping guttural snarl). I felt I was immersed, in brief jewel-bright flashes, somewhere below the surface of the wide and undifferentiated waters of the entire world, embedded in the glistening heart of Freud’s “ego-cosmic ego.”

Seeking cure, seeking fantasy

These days I wonder often what I’m searching for in meditation and in psychoanalytic theory. Freud was mocked, in his time and in ours, for treating only the “worried well” - the neurotic middle class strivers, the teeming everyday miserablists - and not the hard cases, the genuine hauntings. But there is something too easy and dismissive about this story. Eric Fromm, in his 1960 essay collection Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, says that even us sophisticated moderns are spiritually bereft, unable to answer the singular questions of our existence and thus unable to take over our own lives, unable to move our experience inside the shape of what Donald Winnicott called “useful” or “healthy” omnipotence, the everyday world of agency and choice, cause and effect. There are deep wells of need everywhere, inside everyone. What needs does meditation meet - or therapy, for that matter? What are we looking for?

Enlightenment, perhaps. But the concept is porous and hard to grasp, its light red-shifting as we hurtle onwards through our lives. Plus, one doesn’t really search for enlightenment; it is always moving under its own power. Enlightenment arrives or it does not, and the harder we look for it the farther away it wanders. Read any Zen text; too-eager seekers are always getting tossed out on their ear and whacked about the head with sticks while their gentler and wiser brethren find revelation washing rice bowls or falling off of bridges into various bodies of water. Enlightenment is nice when we win it, but we shouldn’t expect it.

Importantly, the search for enlightenment is always also a search for something else, something less noble and less understood, half-hidden inside of desires we struggle to show and to conceal. We are all of us in thrall to what Barry Magid, psychoanalyst and Zen teacher, terms curative fantasies. A curative fantasy, he explains, is “a personal myth that we use to explain what we think is wrong with us and our lives and what we imagine is going to make it all better.” Each of us is seeking safety, trying to heal ourselves in one way or another, “but often our hopes go underground and we are never quite clear just what we are seeking or how we imagine we’re going to get there.”

One of the most powerful curative fantasies is that of erasure, of elimination, the extirpation of some hated part of ourselves in the hopes we can bypass it, move beyond it completely. In meditation we can go to war against our own minds, “trying to cut off emotion or thought altogether as if we could rest once and for all in an untroubled blankness.” We want spiritual practice, claims Magid, “to be a kind of mental lobotomy, cutting out everything that scares or shames us, perhaps even cutting out thinking itself.”

We might think we choose meditation (and therapy) because we hope to suffer less, to find a meaning that’s deserted us, to add shape and texture to lives we feel are slipping away from us. We do not, as a rule, seek spiritual and mental solace in a transparent attempt to hijack our self-understanding in service of our own manipulations. But this is often what we do. Our desires - and our resistances - are so strong that they colonize and warp our conscious intent, even the very words we use to express ourselves.

Buddhist insight tradition is alert to this impulse, but it does not actively seek to address it. In his 1990 paper “Beyond The Oceanic Feeling”, Mark Epstein explains that while Buddhist meditation lays great emphasis on “illuminating the representational process” that constitutes the slipstream of conscious thought, it does not really resolve intrapsychic conflict, which remains with us. As a general rule, we are not working through internal chaos when we meditate. Perhaps our minds are a little quieter at the end of a sit, perhaps things rest more gently on our conscience and our psyche. But our battles always remain our own, and we are left alone on the field with our choices. We have to choose to engage or to bypass.

There is always ample opportunity, says Epstein, for meditative practice to be used as a defense, “for libidinal or aggressive urges to be dismissed as ‘just thoughts’ or ‘just feelings.’” There is no area of psychic life untouched by our wish-fulfillment. We can, and do, co-opt meditation, as we seek our own ends in everything.

Symbolic trouble

But I think I was looking for something specific in meditation. I sensed, somehow, that I was having trouble with symbols. As Alessandra Lemma and Susan Levy write in their 2004 book The Perversion of Loss, the capacity to symbolise allows us to represent our experience mentally rather than concretely. Symbolic reflection gives us a little distance between thought and object, some space for us to hold our experience and observe it as if from the outside - to watch the world as it moves, so to speak, under certain light and atmospheric conditions. In psychoanalytic terms, symbolic functioning is created everywhere there is a recognition of difference between the world (as inner object or representation) and the self, everywhere the capacity for an inner dialogue is required. Symbols bridge the wide uncertain gap between childhood and adulthood; we grow to maturity in the narrow space between self and world.

Our troubles with symbols come, I think, in two broad categories. The first is symbolic collapse, which is psychologically catastrophic and often caused by trauma or overwhelming mental illness. The distance between things caves in; to think of or about something is to think it directly, to bring it into immediate existence. Traumatic memories may be so painful and disturbing that they cease to be memories at all - they break into the present as literal experience, overwhelming psychic defenses. In symbolic collapse, language can be stripped of its value and meaning, as we lose our ability to put feelings into words. “Goodness and hope”, explain Lemma and Levy, “are felt to be lost to the self, and alongside them, reason and reflection.”

But there might be another type of difficulty at play, which I will term symbolic degradation. This is where an otherwise healthy and active symbolic capacity (which most of us possess to some degree) slips sideways. The lines between things begin to blur, becoming slick and indistinct. Things we know are not equivalent begin to feel equivalent, and we start to act as if they are equivalent because we no longer have enough distance in our psychic life to enable robust reflective capacity. Problems cease to be manageable and work-a-day; they loom, they fill the horizon. A flash of anger at a colleague becomes an entire history of a relationship, a fundamental pronouncement on the type of person they are and will always be. Internal critique for a minor failing becomes an eternal excoriation, a cruel verdict we can’t escape. We struggle with time, we struggle with distance, we struggle for room.

Trouble with symbols is trouble with everything, and trouble (in psychoanalysis and in life) begins early, with the dramas of childhood and the advent of deficits. It might start when someone (like me) internalizes a particular sort of spiritual language and outlook at a very young age, a language that invites this type of collapse between thought and act, between what Freud might call primary and secondary process. Then again, all worldviews are formed from the gelatinous stew of early and unexamined impulse, constructed out of half-remembered doctrines and topped by a thin film of late-arriving rational thought. We all harbor unconscious fantasies about ourselves and our lives, pulled from the early radio static of our childhoods, ideas that repeat and recur, that slip under our skin and into our souls, tugging the outside world into the shape we’ve set for it, whether we realize or not.

Meditative practice can, I think, function as a form of mental containment, as an attempt to grab hold of certain facts about our existence, to circle them and to hold them, to present them for reflection. Insight meditation, as Epstein outlines, requires our moment-to-moment attention to “thoughts, feelings, images or sensations as they arise and pass away within the field of awareness.” This discipline can foster “a therapeutic split in the ego, encouraging the ego to take itself as object.” We learn to attend to the world as it coalesces and fades away, we learn to attend to ourselves in the act of reflection and representation. Experience becomes something to be examined rather than simply endured. I think I sensed this somehow - I thought meditation could serve as a wedge between myself and the world’s skin, forcing open a narrow gap, allowing me air, light, reflective capacity.

Anattā and ceaseless change

Buddhism, of course, seeks to move us beyond all this. Buddhist meditation is intended to uproot the settled illusory self-images we cling to like totems, forcing on us a recognition that the self we think we are lacks solidity and content, has no final ground (anattā, no-soul, no-self). The aim is to set up an existential confrontation with the nature of things, an experience that is (as Epstein acknowledges) “much more likely to be terrifying than oceanic.” To leave the waters of samsara, we must be stripped of our illusions.

This is a different sort of project, requiring a heavy dose of time, courage, wisdom and luck. But it is a project common, in some ways, to both Buddhism and psychoanalysis - a sustained attempt to overcome our affective resistance and our narcissism, so we can finally experience our lives as ours, as structures we can live inside, as actions and determinations we can remember and understand instead of simply repeat. It is an attempt, maybe, to shake us loose from our habits of thought, to set us on course towards something like freedom, the whisper of wind in open space, outside of cyclic time and ceaseless change.

In the beginning there is only pleasure and unpleasure, relative tension; then reality breaks in. The stage is set, the opponents marked. We become human in the open space between straining inhuman force.

Freud first formulated this picture - of a mind seeking pleasure and avoiding pain - in his Project for a Scientific Psychology in 1895. It mutates throughout the rest of his writings, reappearing dressed as the “unpleasure principle” in his opus, The Interpretation of Dreams. Pleasure is buttressed by the reality principle, the limits and margins set by the ego. But it is always working to escape. Freud saw dreams as wish-fulfillments, the psyche working out its litany of desires underneath the cover of night and slumber. Our desires are polyphonic and capable of subtle gradation, but their architecture is more or less comprehensible. Pleasure, too, has its endlessly supple variations, but we are always chasing it, whether or not we realize that is what we are doing.

So much, so straightforward. But then came World War I, and with it a flood of soldiers bringing ghosts back home from the front. They dreamt of the same terrible things, again and again, every night. They woke gasping, covered in sweat, overwhelmed by dread. Their dreams had nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure, no wish they were trying to win and realize. These dreams - trauma dreams, hallmarks of post-traumatic stress - were a problem for Freud and his careful theories. Trauma dreams thrust us back to the source and overwhelm our defenses. Energy overflows and swamps our interiority. Our psyches, usually so wily and creative, so adept at getting what we barely recognize we want, are paralyzed.

Even worse - we cannot dream our way through the experience. We keep waking up. “The mind seems”, as philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes, “actively to disrupt the dream process, and traumatize the person all over again.” The dreaming mind tries to master the trauma in retrospect, but it cannot - it is disrupted, short-circuited. Meaning is sought but never captured, and our psyches defeat all attempts to make this widening senselessness sensible. Nothing is resolved, nothing is healed or understood.

Faced with this challenge, Freud went back to his theories. He revised them, something he did often, with apparent ease. In a discipline otherwise marked by arrogance and edict, Freud stands out for his willingness to rework his previous notions. In his tinkering, Freud discovered that wish-fulfillment was not, in fact, the original purpose of dreams. They are in thrall, as are we, to something older, something primeval.

Freud’s reconstruction centers on the compulsion to repeat. We do what we do not want to, we do not do what we want. We revisit and revive the very worst parts of our lives, the worst habits of mind and body, the things that swallow us in anxiety and in dread. We do this all the time, whether we are in therapy or not. We do this even though it causes obvious distress. “Patients repeat all of these unwanted situations and painful emotions in the transference and revive them with the greatest ingenuity”, says Freud. “None of these things can have produced pleasure in the past, and it might be supposed that they would cause less unpleasure today if they emerged as memories or dreams instead of taking the form of fresh experiences.”

Our circularity is not, as Freud originally supposed, simply how the cards fall in the perpetual struggle between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Rather, both pleasure and reality are arrayed in Eros, the life force, against a far stronger and older opponent, “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon, under the pressure of external disturbing forces.” We are compelled, Freud thinks, to move backwards - to dissolve, to disintegrate, to return to the inorganic things we were before.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, Freud tells us he's found “the final goal of all organic striving”, the motive force moving beneath our feet. “The aim of life”, writes Freud, “is death.”

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a strange, dense text, rich in speculative philosophy set amidst the minutiae of a life science primer. Jacques Lacan called it “an extraordinary text, unbelievably ambiguous, almost confused” (he would know). Throughout it Freud states his uncertainty more limpidly than his theories, and his thought - normally clear and coursing - seems shrouded at times, wrapped inside an essential bewilderment. Still, the death drive strikes me as a grand concept, a theory of elemental and tectonic force. The careful language of early-century microbiology masks its import and its impact on our lives. As Jacqueline Rose writes in her pandemic-era meditation on the death drive, Freud is saying that there is, somewhere in all of us, “an unconscious demonic principle driving us to distraction.”

Psychoanalysts, by all accounts, have never known exactly what to do with the death drive. It is essentially a creature of shadow and protean murk; in the light of day it can appear vaguely embarrassing. It seems flatly wrong as a description of conscious activity - we hold life very dear, after all. We cannot imagine our own non-existence. We abhor death, run aground on it. While alive we scrub away all death’s traces, burying them as though we possessed, in the words of Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, “some kind of chthonic instinct, something deep within us that urges us to move death down to the earth whence we came.” When death arrives for us we seem surprised, as if we did not realize we were mortal.

There are powerful theoretical objections, too. For Freud, the death drive is an outgrowth of repetition-compulsion, following on from it like a logical proof. Lear has no truck with either concept. Freud tends to talk, he says, as if we are compelled simply to repeat - as if repetition itself were the aim of the compulsion instead of a symptom, a signal of some other disruption. Instincts drive us forward, repetition beats us back - why would we see this as some dumb and total law, inscribed on our chromosomes, instead of a definite attempt by the mind to revisit a wound in service of healing? The true drama, thinks Lear, lies in the mind’s disruption of mental activity, in our waking from the dream, rather than in some mysterious edict of repetition and destruction we are helpless to contest. “There is no primordial principle beyond the pleasure principle; there is mental breakdown.”

Freud was a gifted speculative thinker and fantasist, which history has not forgiven him for. His “talking cure” perseveres, but the man and his ideas move in and out of fashion. He is a genius to some; to others a cheat and a charlatan. His scientific work, in particular, is of a time and place; much of it is already eclipsed. But his poetry still remains. Freud was a committed materialist doomed, I think, to be a mystic. He knew that any whole theory of the mind must be a theory of life and everything in it, an entire history “of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun.” For Freud, as culture critic Sam Kriss puts it, “our neuroses are made of the same stuff as myth. They speak to us from our animal prehistory and the inorganic world that was there before.”

Motive forces operating deep inside the unconscious can, now and again, break into conscious awareness. The death drive has a mythic movement to it, a centrifugal pull and a cadence, and I think we know it. We must grow up, we can never grow up, we must move forward, we are trapped in stasis. There is some senseless thing that pulls us downwards, towards quiescence and the grave. It does not feel like destruction disguised as wish-fulfillment, or an automatic but splintering attempt to work something out, to reach a resolution. It is something stranger and less explicable. “On every new thing”, W.G. Sebald writes in his novel The Rings of Saturn, “there lies already the shadow of annihilation”, and annihilation moves inside the laws of its own strange geometry.

It makes sense, then, that the great theorist of the hidden and the subterranean might one day encounter and describe for us tidal forces we all know and perceive, however dimly. In all of Freud’s work, submerged things surface offshore and secrets glimmer darkly in mirrors. To me, the death drive has the special gravity of truth at its most mysterious, heavy and squat, positioned at right angles to reality, warping the world’s skin. Freud’s theory is in the breath we inhale, inside the architecture of our lives. The poets know this, even if therapists do not.

But theory, however suggestive, needs some link to everyday experience to have an afterlife. It is no accident, I think, that the death drive is a product of a specific and singular loss. Freud’s favorite daughter, Sophie, died with her unborn child in 1920, during the third and final wave of the Spanish Flu. At the time, Freud was only half-finished with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and there was no inkling of the death drive in his working draft. The drive appears first in Freud’s personal correspondence, a few weeks after Sophie’s death. Afterwards, as Jacqueline Rose explains, “[a]n entire new chapter, Chapter Six, the longest by far, was added to a later draft, taking up almost a third of the published text.” The death drive transforms Beyond the Pleasure Principle; it becomes an entirely different sort of book. It is therefore “fair to say”, writes Rose, “that Freud owes the genesis of this unprecedented concept” to Sophie, and to her loss.

Freud’s biological speculations in Beyond are, in Rose’s view, simply an excuse to allow him to go on thinking about the things that really interest him, the things of genuine importance to our souls and psyches. Endearingly, Freud is always crafting theories he needs to hear, whether or not he is aware of this (usually he is not). An early dream-memory of his father pronouncing that he will “never amount to anything” generates the propulsive force of Freud’s whole life and the entirety of psychoanalysis, including his intuition that a father’s words carry heavy weight, and that we all carry early wounds. Freud’s own principle of repetition-compulsion flickers on and off throughout his life, as he establishes and severs intense connections with a string of surrogate sons - Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Sándor Ferenczi. There is always uncertainty at work, and a roaming curiosity. In Beyond, Freud admits that he does not understand repetition-compulsion, this titanic thing he has hauled into view and assigned such power. This, Jonathan Lear complains, is “tantamount to an admission that Freud does not yet understand the principles of psychoanalysis”, the discipline he founded. Perhaps he does not - perhaps that is the point. To follow the Freud of Beyond, writes philosopher Todd Dufresne, is to follow him “beyond psychoanalysis proper.” The hereafter undercuts the everyday; death subverts psychotherapy.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle we find Freud working out his grief for Sophie via cosmic speculation and the stuff of myth, inside the whole history of the earth and its relation to the sun. He makes sense of her death by positioning it as a violation of natural law. The natural organism, posits Freud, wishes to die “in its own fashion”, under its own authority, on its own terms. But Sophie’s death is sudden and terrible; it breaks with the long slow parade of the death drive, becoming something offensive and unbearable. It is easier, in Freud’s words, to “submit to a remorseless law of nature” than to think we can bend fate to our will but have somehow failed to do so.

In this I think Freud is half-aware of what he is doing, and how it sits alongside what he needs. The death drive may function best as a motivated or constructed truth, a shelter or safe haven where he, and we, can wait out life’s disasters and try to bear the weight of the world as we are able.

Where does all of this leave us? Between Eros and Thanatos there is life as such, the world as it is. We begin at the beginning, mewling and undifferentiated. We seek pleasure, we avoid pain. Then we grow and change; reality mediates our desires and our deficits. The reality principle becomes, in a strange sense, the protector of whatever pleasures remain. We encircle our delights and hold them close, tending our fantasies and private revelations, keeping ourselves warm. Beyond that is mist, and storm surge, and whatever lies at the far end of death. The unique domain of psychoanalysis, writes Rose, is found in “the complex reckoning with life and with death.” Not so unique, I think - we are always reckoning with these things. Perhaps that is simply what it means to live.

Ed: This is Daniel’s first and only dispatch from Tokyo. Shortly after posting, he was deported back to the United States for committing acts detrimental to the security interests of Japan.

This city is deathly quiet. Wandering through Kōenji, the especially quiet town where I am staying, footsteps sound like bass drums. You can hear your own shadow; the heartbeat is a crescendo, the breath a resounding scream.

I’ve heard multiple reasons for this: Japanese people are courteous, the city’s infrastructure absorbs sound, the vast system of rules which governs this land wields a scepter of silence, muffling every cry, every shout of ecstasy, etc. No matter the reason, the silence is blaring. Even loud silence should be peaceful, a welcome escape from the searing digital hum ever-present in our ears, but I cannot find this peace. Always far away yet perhaps just around the corner.

Do Japanese people complain? Probably. I have not heard one yet. Granted, this is because I know a total of four Japanese phrases, but is there even enough time to whine? Rushing headlong everywhere, body and mind squeezed tightly into their proper shape. I complain constantly. Remonstrations pour from my soul at such a high frequency that menial observations contort into child-like wailing. It is quiet, it is cold, these letters make no sense, the train stations are large, I bought a chicken sandwich at the convenience store without realizing that the chicken is purchased separately, etc. Left with a coin purse full of complaints and a bun slathered in mayo, I trudge through the city streets, bow-legs staggering beneath a Dostoevskian hunch, beanie welded onto my head disguising its receding hairline. Goddamn I am beautiful. A woman loves me!

She has so many tattoos that I struggle to remember them all. This of course immediately inspires anxiety: do I love her enough, as she should be loved? Does love forget ink etched and stretched across familiar curves?

Let’s see what Reddit has to say:

From u/square-pulse: “If you're doubting or have the slightest spark of doubt whether you love them or not, you do not love them.” Oh no! I don’t like that one. Let’s try someone else. From u/Any-Bird-7974: “I just got married. Love is a choice you make every day.” Panic attack averted; I have mastered the wind and stars.

In Christopher Paolini’s timeless Inheritance Cycle, the invincible villain (Galbatronix) is defeated by a simple spell, a masterwork in magical creativity–he is made to understand the totality of suffering wrought with his hands. His mind breaks, the heroes win, the dragons reproduce. Regretfully, this mortal plane is dragon-less. People are having thoughts, scary ones, sexy ones, sad ones, sweet ones, all over the world, all the time. Innovation has taught us to broadcast these ideas through every possible medium of communication. We have bastardized the grand human quest undertaken so faithfully by our ancestors: to be heard by the heavens. Commenting, asking forums if we love our lovers, screaming into techno-oblivion: This is the Tower of Babel. We know entirely too much about one another and still so little.

Galbatronix would hate Reddit; like everyone else, he would love Instagram reels.

My magnificent Marxist ideology tells me that mankind is united in solidarity, possessing the capacity to overcome all obstacles and create a better world. This is a lie. The only thing that unites us is Instagram reels. In Thailand, on an ethical elephant adventure farm one hour outside of Chiang Mai, a tour guide is utterly locked inside an endless stream of makeup tutorials. Motorcycle taxis in Bangkok use the moment of rest provided by red lights to scroll, without sound, through a grand assortment of opinions lit by ring light. In San Diego, California, my father is watching videos titled “Five ways the Allied Powers pressured Hitler into war,” or “Milton Friedman’s BRUTAL takedown of LAZY SOCIALIST MEXICAN strikers” and having the time of his life.

On the trains here in Tokyo, they scroll with such class, such precision! Sometimes, a notice will appear on the information screen concerning a slight delay due to “personal accident or injury,” which usually means that a person has just thrown themselves under the wheels somewhere down the line. Everyone ignores it. After the initial shock, the recollection of how common suicide by train is here in Tokyo, I ignore it too. After all, my music is turned up so loudly that it drowns out any thought deeper than surface level emotional reaction, and I am busy judging everyone for being on Instagram.

Despite feeble attempts to forge a unique path, I am nevertheless a child of these times. More than half of my adult life has been spent hooked to some sort of device. I am wired to this dead machine; orgasm after orgasm I slide naked into the Lethe.

I met a man in a bar who studied abroad in Nebraska. He used to get in trouble with his host family for sneaking Megadeath CDs into his room. He bought me whiskey and forced the bartender to play Joy Division because of the tattoo on my arm. I had coffee and toast with two old women as we poorly communicated our dismay concerning the fires in LA. They gave me gelatinized coffee with condensed milk on top. A sweet man explained what I should get at a restaurant before telling me that I should let him cut my hair. This is really the only reason to live.

At 5:30 PM the city can feel like steel, a sharp wind crawling up the back of your neck, a cold sheet of glass against your skin. These little moments suffuse the cramped expanse with color; jumbled English and broken Japanese, there are fireworks everywhere. Perhaps I might find some confidence here, lift my head from the muck, or write a good poem. I can taste the words already, on the stumbling journey home and the packed train, missing love.

I leave you with the lyrics to Godspeed You Black Emperor’s “Dead Flag Blues.” There is good in every one of us, it has always been there and it always will be.

The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel

And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides

And a dark wind blows

The government is corrupt

And we’re on so many drugs

With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine

And the machine is bleeding to death

The sun has fallen down

And the billboards are all leering

And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

It went like this

The buildings toppled in on themselves

Mothers clutching babies

Picked through the rubble

And pulled out their hair

The skyline was beautiful on fire

All twisted metal stretching upwards

Everything washed in a thin orange haze

I said, “Kiss me you’re beautiful

These are truly the last days”

You grabbed my hand

And we fell into it

Like a daydream

Or a fever

We woke up one morning and fell a little further down

For sure as the valley of death

I open up my wallet

And it’s full of blood

Last December, the New York Times reported on a book club that took 28 years to read Finnegan’s Wake, the famously opaque final novel by James Joyce. They began in 1995, finished in 2023, and immediately started all over.

It is is an impressive demonstration of fidelity towards a book that’s sat unread on my shelf for years, lurking above my daily browsing, waiting for me to remember it, open it, scream, and return to Ulysses, which I also haven’t finished. It’s like a ritual. It marks the seasons, and reminds me there’s always something left to read, or to leave unread.

The happy interviewees note that Finnegan’s Wake, unlike our lives, “isn’t finished; it’s an ongoing experience.” But our lives, unlike Finnegan’s Wake, are ephemera, and retain that special beauty reserved for things that are already passing away.

In that spirit, here are a few notes on endings to help you welcome new beginnings, and another new year on this planet.

Matsuo Bashō, an Edo-era Japanese poet and a haiku master:

Lightning flashes -

Close by my face,

The pampas grass!

The philosopher Keiji Nishitani, glossing Basho’s poem in his Religion and Nothingness:

A living man experiences himself, as living, in the image of the skull on the pampas grass. There is more to be seen here than simply a meadow. It is what is being pointed to in the Zen saying, “Death’s heads all over the field.” Let the field stand for the Ginza or Broadway; sooner or later the time will come when they will turn to grassy meadows…One can see the Ginza, for instance, just as it is, in all its magnificence, as a field of pampas grass. One can look at it as if it were a double exposure—which is, after all, its real portrait.

For in truth, reality itself is two-layered. A hundred years hence, not one of the people now walking the Ginza will be alive, neither the young nor the old, the men nor the women….In a flash of lightning before the mind’s eye, what is to be actual a hundred years hence is already an actuality today. We can look at the living as they walk full of health down the Ginza and see, in double exposure, a picture of the dead.

Rachel Berdach, from her 1938 novel The Emperor, the Sages and Death:

I want to know why we, like upside-down sunflowers, turn to the dark side rather than the light.

Ram Dass, a man at peace, going home:

And something has happened to me as a result of my meanderings through the realms of consciousness over the past 30 years that has changed my attitude towards death. A lot of the fear that death generated that led to denial has gone from me. Death does not have to be treated as an enemy for you to delight in life. Keeping death present in your consciousness, as one of the greatest mysteries, and as the moment of incredible transformation, imbues this moment with added richness and energy that otherwise is used up in denial.

Death is not an error. It is not a failure. It is taking off a tight shoe.

Jon Hopkins, setting Ram Dass to music.

Kenkō, Tsurezuregusa, Meditation 74:

They flock together like ants, hurry east and west, run north and south. Some are mighty, some humble. Some are aged, some young. They have places to go, houses to return to. At night they sleep, in the morning get up. But what does all this activity mean? There is no ending to their greed for long life, their grasping for profit. What expecations have they that they take such good care of themselves? All that awaits them in the end is old age and death, whose coming is swift and does not falter for one instant. What joy can there be while waiting for this end?

The man who is deluded by fame and profit does not fear the approach of old age and death because he is so intoxicated by worldly cravings that he never stops to consider how near he is to his destination. The foolish man, for his part, grieves because he desires everlasting life and is ignorant of the law of universal change.

Pink Floyd, Time:

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Seamus Heaney’s own words as epitaph on his gravestone:

Walk on air against your better judgement.

T.S. Eliot, in the fourth (and best) part of The Waste Land, “Death By Water”:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

                                   A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

                                   Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Shusaku Endo, Deep River, pondering an entirely different death by water:

I have learned, though, that there is a river of humanity. Though I still don't know what lies at the end of that flowing river. But I feel as though I've started to understand what I was yearning for through all the many mistakes of my past.

What I can believe in now is the sight of all the people, each carrying his or her own individual burdens, praying at this deep river. I believe that the river embraces these people and carries them away. A river of humanity. The sorrows of this deep river of humanity. And I am a part of it.

Daybreak, a poem by Roberto Bolaño, my very favorite author:

Trust me, I'm in the middle of my room
waiting for rain. I'm alone. I don't care
if I finish my poem or not. I wait for rain,
drinking coffee and through the window watching a beautiful
landscape
of courtyards, with clothes hanging still,
silent marble clothes in the city, where wind
does not exist and far off you only hear the hum
of a color TV, watched by a family
who's also, at this hour, drinking coffee together around
a table: trust me: the yellow plastic tables
unfold into the horizon and beyond:
into the suburbs where they're building
apartments, and a boy of 16 atop a stack
of red bricks contemplates the machines' movement.
The sky in the boy's hour is an enormous
hollow screw the breeze plays with. And the boy
plays with ideas. With ideas and with frozen scenes.
Inertia is a heavy transparent mist
emerging from his eyes.
Trust me: it isn't love that's drawing near
but beauty with its store of dead dawns.

And, of course, Finnegan’s Wake:

“bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!

Happy New Year.

Ed: This article is part of an ongoing series by Robert called Devotions Upon Divergent Occasions. Read his introduction and Meditations #1, #2 and #3.

Her frightened eyes stared back at me, inarticulate voids of inexpressible pain. She had always been faithful, my companion for over ten years, shared my bed, been my comfort in grief, solace in pain. Her form and shape and movement were my daily delight, and I think it was from her and with her that I first glimpsed something eternal in the beauty of the world; a beauty that was both beyond reckoning and as personal as touch.

And now here I was, abandoning her, leaving her to an uncertain fate, knowing I would never see her again. I did not know then that this is what a broken heart looked like, the opening of a wound that would await healing. I looked up at her and could not form any words; my throat constricted; I was beckoned and turned away, glancing back one more time into the room, into those fear-filled eyes. A final turning and walking down the stairs forever.

She had been given to me when I was eight years old by our eccentric and wonderful friend, Harriet, an elderly Dutch expat who lived in a delightfully cluttered house bearing witness to seven decades of travel across many continents. We had returned home to Brazil after burying my brother on a beautiful California hillside alongside his friends who died with him in a car accident. Perhaps Harriet sensed in me the confusion of a boy who had never made sense of the world and maybe never would.

She did what intuitively kind and beautiful people do: she invited me over for tea and gave me a kitten.

I named her Foxy because she was a gray tabby and I thought she looked like a fox. It was perhaps fitting that I had no notion of the sexual connotations in her name. As a Christian boy raised to ignore and ultimately suppress sexual desire there is a wry irony in this naming, in the thousands of times I called out “Foxy!”

For all of you who have and have had pets, I don’t need to account for the indissoluble bond between you and the furry, feathery, or scaly new family member joined to you by serendipity. So it was with Foxy. She waited for me by the front door every day for when I returned from school, rubbing against my leg, arching to receive my hand.

I lived a mostly solitary life, for although I had siblings, they were much older than me and never my playmates. Alone in my room, beside my refuge of books, Foxy curled up to me, purring. So my life unfolded, anchored in a room of reading, listening to music, dreaming, always with Foxy by my side, my fingers in her fur, her purr resonating like a chant.

For the next ten years the selfless and constant love of Foxy accompanied me, grounded me in ways I am only now beginning to understand. After graduating from high school in Sao Paulo we made plans to return to the US. It was only then that my parents gave me the terrible news: “We cannot take Foxy back to the States.” Reasons of expense and her age and the impracticality of it all were advanced. I protested, but eventually acquiesced to the inevitable.

But I wonder. We all try to make sense of our childhoods. Ram Dass said: “We are all walking each other home,” and in that walking back we are visiting the places of pain; the pain we measured out in coffee spoons. We can choose to sit with that pain, or we can do what I did for almost 50 years: drown it out with other pain, other loves.

Through the fog of the years as I now choose to sit with this particular pain one thing is clear: Foxy deserved to be loved till the end. Her wordless grief has silently accused me all my life. I’ve looked into her eyes times beyond counting. I abandoned her. Not my parents - me.

Let me be clear: till the end I am certain that Foxy never did, never could have, formulated an accusation. This is the perfect love of pets.

In a recent plant medicine journey that was much like a dream I met Foxy in that room again, looked into her eyes and asked her forgiveness. The evil and aching pain of my abandonment of her was washed away. I think this is the only reason I can write of this now. Whatever existence looks like beyond this life, I offer you my vision and hope of a place of forgiveness, forgiveness to give and forgiveness to receive.

To Foxy and the many pets since her: I love you, and thank you.

Ed: This article is part of an ongoing series by Robert called Devotions Upon Divergent Occasions. Read his introduction and Meditations #1 and #2.

If it is true that our story is inevitably also the story of someone else’s pain, then my journey through pain and suffering took definite shape when I was eight years old.

September 6, 1969, evening. I was playing with an elaborately constructed Hot Wheels ramp on the stairs of our home in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My dad got a message to go next door. There was a call from the States, fielded for us by our neighbor, who was a ham radio operator. Phone service in Brazil in 1969 was sketchy at best, and the only semi-reliable means of communication we had established with the outside world—including with our family and friends back in the United States—was through our neighbor’s short-wave radio. This meant we could talk occasionally to my sister, Ethel, and my two older brothers, Dave and John, who were all attending university in California. My brother Jim (8 years my senior) and I were still living at home.

Dad went next door to take the call. Mom joined him; this kind of interruption to our life was unusual and she obviously wanted to hear the news.

I don’t remember registering anything until Dad walked back in the front door with bowed head, followed by Mom, ashen-faced and biting her lip. Dad called my brother and me upstairs.

They had heard, through a ragged connection, my sister Ethel shouting:

“John killed! Dave injured! Make arrangements to come home!”

That was it. No context (“They were on their way home from a youth retreat and it appears their car was hit head-on.”). Just unthinkable pain and grief, boiled down into three simple phases, cried out over blurry radio waves. Their second son dead; their eldest son injured and possibly dying. Their lives forever changed; and now they must pack up and find a way home to bury at least one of their sons. 

(This was easier said than done. The  military government in Brazil, embroiled in a  political crisis, had shut down all international travel. Only a few very select flights and people were approved for departure. Miraculously, in 24 hours, we were on one of those flights.)

Upstairs, I was seated cross-legged on the floor, looking up at Dad, solemn-faced and composed, uttering the fateful words: “We’ve just received news that John has been killed in an accident and Dave is seriously injured.” I remember very little of my childhood, but this night is etched in my memory. I don’t remember having many feelings about the news itself. The truth is I barely knew my elder brothers, who were nine and eleven years older. We had an ocean between us and little shared memory. But I do remember the quiet in that upstairs room. Dad doing his best to hold it together for the family; Mom silent, head bowed, lost in her grief. They didn’t weep.

My brother Jim did. He was closer in age to Dave and John, and grew up alongside them. The loss was painful and real to him. He cried, and I vaguely remember that Dad or Mom hugging him. 

These memories—especially of Mom not crying—remain within me.

I remember Dad prayed a prayer, asking God to keep Dave alive and give his doctors wisdom. He also prayed that somehow this tragedy would be turned into good, affirming his faith in God’s presence in our lives. Dad held his ever-present Bible in his lean, veiny hands. He opened it and read a passage. I can’t be sure of what he read, but it was probably from the book of Romans, verse 28, the cornerstone of many a home like ours in times of trial:

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

What was certain was that we were called according to God’s purpose—half a world away, doing His work. The rest of my life was anchored in that moment, in this truth: we were part of a chosen few, elite spiritual commandos pressing through pain and loss and tragedy to keep the mission alive. 

(Later, this motivation was aptly captured by the inscription on my brother John’s grave, taken from the foremost missionary of our faith, the Apostle Paul: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day.”)

But back to the night of September 6, 1969. There is one more memory that lingers: I’m sitting alone in my room, retreating into myself as the rest of my family processes their grief with the busyness of packing to leave Brazil. For those of you familiar with the Enneagram, I’m a Five, and I think I can trace my becoming a Five to this night: withdrawing from a confusing world where my needs, especially my emotional needs, were not a priority. Service to God, focus on the evangelical mission, making an eternal impact on the lives we met; these things defined us. My parents—both raised during the Great Depression, both serving as officers in WWII—had no emotional tools to help them make sense of what they were going through, still less to help a quiet son whose natural retreat was inward, to a solitary life of books and imagination. I was on my own, always, even in loss.

Emotional distance from my birth family has characterized most of my adult life. The isolation I felt from them led me to find my identity in learning, in books, in music, in sports. Over the years those closest to me emotionally—who I chose, who were part of my own personal extended family—were my classmates, friends, and fellow athletes. This extended family supported me, laughed with me, cheered for me, admired me. From coaches and teachers I received the recognition and encouragement that were largely absent at home, where the spiritual mission was paramount. 

I was not bitter about this; I don’t remember even thinking about it. It was just the way life was. This is what service to God, living for a higher purpose, was all about. Occasionally I noticed that my parents’ lack of involvement in my life was very different from the way my friends’ parents supported them. I was successful athletically, but it was unusual for my parents to attend my games. They were always happy for my success, but if it came down to scheduling a Bible study that conflicted with watching me compete, well, I would understand. And I did.

The community and family of school friends and teammates is a well-known phenomenon. While this love helped me cope during my formative years, I am only now realizing how crippled I was emotionally. My psychological framework was a defense mechanism against a hard and confusing world. I doubled down on scholastic and athletic achievement, poured myself into close friendships, and lived a life of fantasy when it came to understanding romantic relationships.

And over all of this presided an omnipotent God whose wisdom was unfathomable. If I couldn’t see that an apparently meaningless tragedy was actually God’s hand working all things for my good, well, I had a lifetime ahead of me to learn to love Him, whether I understood him or not. 

I do not understand God in those terms any more. But I cannot shake the conviction that universal love is behind the liminal experiences I’ve had where the Eternal, the Other, God Themselves have broken in upon me, transforming ordinary conversations, ordinary interactions, ordinary walks in the woods…into something extraordinarily beautiful, suffusing my life with meaning and joy and purpose.

In the chapters ahead I trust this love will become more clear to me, and whether I understand it or not I live in the belief that the Psalmist elsewhere affirms: 

“Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life.”

The relentless Love that has pursued me now surrounds me, urging me forward along practical paths of love.

In his re-recording of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, released last year, Roger Waters gets busy contemplating endings. “The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime”, he mutters. “You shuffle in the gloom of the sick room / and talk to yourself as you die.” At the far end of his life, Waters is revisiting the central theme of his work, the same thing he knew when he wrote “Time” fifty years ago. We are nothing but our deeds - but our deeds are nothing much. They “come to naught”, as often as not, “or half a page of scribbled lines.” And time is always running away from us.

Dark Side is pop music’s great meditation on time and mortality, negotiating the world of the living with frank uncertainty and a touching lack of confidence (stop booing me, I’m right about this). Distilled, the album orbits in the gravity of a single question: How do you live?  The answer - shuffling in the gloom, spooling out over a restless 43 minutes - is stark: I don’t know.

Hayao Miyazaki has been asking the same question all of his life. The revered Japanese animator - founder of Studio Ghibli, mastermind of films like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke - has built a legacy on wide-field, searching inquiries into the nature of things and our experience of and among them. The Boy and the Heron, released this year, is Miyazaki’s much-trumpeted final film (he’s already working on another one). It is a capstone and a rumination, a long look back at the fruits of a singular life and the lessons it holds (if lives are things that can hold lessons, or lessons are things that can be held). The movie is ever-so-loosely inspired by Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live?, a philosophical text disguised as a Japanese children’s classic that has a brief cameo in the movie but no pull on the plot.

The book may be nearly absent, but the question - how do you live? - is everywhere.

Into the dreaming

What is The Boy and the Heron about? A synopsis, courtesy of David Armstrong over at A Perennial Digression:

“The Boy and the Heron follows a boy named Mahito, whose mother dies in a hospital fire in Tokyo during World War II. Mahito and his father, Shoichi, leave Tokyo a year later and move to the countryside estate of Mahito’s mother and her living sister, Natsuko, whom Shoichi has married and impregnated. Shoichi is a distant, but not bad father: he runs a factory making airplane pieces for the war effort, just as Miyazaki’s father did. Mahito takes coldly, but not, per se, rudely to his “new mother,” who makes an effort with him but seems both unable to connect as well as to connect him with her own grief for her lost sister.

At the estate, Mahito meets a variety of old women-servants…He also begins to be stalked by a grey heron that talks to him, telling him that his mother has requested his presence in another world. Mahito initially tries and fails to kill the heron in a series of dreamlike sequences, until Natsuko goes missing and Mahito finally confronts it in the estate’s mysterious tower.”

So much, so unclear. In the tower, Mahito finds other worlds and otherworldly objects - a windy ocean, a cityscape, a mysterious birthing room, an animist stone. He has run-ins with cannibal pelicans, fascist parakeets and malevolent curtains. He meets and befriends Kumi, a younger version of his mother, who can manipulate fire. He climbs to the Edenic tower summit and meets its creator, his maternal grand-uncle, who is something like a god. At the climax of the film, he is offered a singular choice.

“Dreamlike” is the watchword for the entire film. Indeed, The Boy and the Heron is a dream - it follows the inscrutable demands of dream-logic, keeping time with the rhythm of the unconscious. Miyazaki’s movies are often like this, but The Boy and the Heron is a summa of sorts, a visual treatise on dreams and the things we know and cannot know about them. The movie is faithful to the dreamworld and to the experience of dreaming life (the hosts of the New Yorker’s Critics At Large podcast compared it favorably to Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a movie about dreaming that feels nothing like a dream, subject as it is to linear narrative and semi-sensible plot). At his best, as Armstrong notes, Miyazaki “uses the imagination as a medium where the line between the sensible and the intelligible becomes blurry and indistinct.” Dreams do this, too. That is their geometry, their special provenance.

Dreams are strange things we are free to take more or less seriously, and they probably grow or shrink to fit the roles we set for them. There are unique forms of operation and knowing that occur only in dreams - they can make perfect sense without strictly making sense, and they carry real emotional resonance, which lingers long after we wake up. Dream-images can be overtly surreal and hallucinatory while suggesting an esoteric sort of inner logic or knowledge, something waiting to be revealed. Sometimes they seem to open at the slightest touch, volunteering lessons before we ask the precedent questions. It is very easy to assume dreams have a direct meaning, to treat them as things to be decoded and understood. But if you keep at them - worry them, harry them, dig your teeth into their structures and images - they usually retreat to the horizon, their lessons shrouded, resistant to anything that seems like genuine understanding.

In psychoanalytic thinking, this experience - the sure-footed conviction that flees at your approach, the pregnant apprehension that dissolves at your touch - is the beginning of understanding dreams (and, maybe, the beginning of understanding anything). Dreams always point beyond themselves, and they mean more than they seem to be saying. Freud thought that dreams were “nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep.” It is the interpretative act that matters; “It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature.”  

The task of dream interpretation, then, “is to unravel what the dream-work has woven”, to consider how dream content fits within the dream as a whole, and how the dream as a whole fits within the overall life of the dreamer. If we’re diligent, and a little lucky, we can sometimes take a shard of dream-image and follow its trail through a series of associations to something like meaning. We can understand, in Jonathan Lear’s telling, how latent dream content “gets itself expressed in the dreamer’s whirl of psychic activity” and we can travel with those strands as they extend outwards, into waking life. 

In The Boy and the Heron, Mahito has trouble with dreams. His memories are raw and violent. In his reveries, flames consume his mother again and again. Her spirit is yanked from his embrace by a terrible wind. Her loss overflows Mahito, spilling out from his unconscious and into consensual reality, forcing him inward, into the tower (into the dream-world) to grapple with her departure and its consequences.

The movie is dreamlike in other ways, too. For example, the dreams of those who suffered early childhood trauma or abuse are often filled with incredible violence. The violence is directed inward, targeting a symbol or image that (perhaps) represents something like innocence or vulnerability. This sort of traumatic, interrupted dreaming can stalk the dreamer throughout their life. In a startling scene, Mahito gets into a fight at his new school. The results are nothing much, a scuffed face and an injured ego. On his walk home, however, Mahito picks up a rock and strikes himself in the temple, splitting his head open and leaving a visible scar. The injury seems to set something in motion. In bed recovering, Mahito has a vision of the heron (who he also attacks). He is pulled into the dream-world soon after. Mahito later admits that he struck himself out of “malice”, out of a powerful hatred or agony turned inward.

In an evocative passage from Paradiso, the final stage of Dante’s Commedia, Dante’s lifelong love and heavenly guide Beatrice demands he leave behind childish things. “From dread and shame I want you / to evolve / so you no longer speak / as in a dream”, she tells him. Miyazaki hints that dreams, and dream-language, are not so easily dismissed. Perhaps dread and shame are the proper language of dreams, shadows too deep for the waking world, native only to the only place we can freely ruminate and repeat and reach an uneasy détente with them and with ourselves. Perhaps these shadows need honesty as antidote, and perhaps we only ever speak honestly in dreams. Perhaps dreams are simply interesting, and we should spend time with them.

But Miyazaki, by and large, leaves interpretation to his characters and his viewers. He is demanding, asking that they (and we) do the heavy lifting, pulling what meaning we can out of his menageries. We are required to do his dream-work, which means that his films have a wonderful and bewildering expansiveness without parallel in modern cinema of any genre. But they also suggest that dreams, and their interpretation, are no set codex, no holy scripture. At most dreams offer hints and glimpses, brief bright flashes of something like understanding. They are not signposts. They do not point the way home.

Childhood’s end 

There are no childish things to put away in Miyazaki’s stories (or perhaps there are only childish things; perhaps childish things are the only things worth knowing). His films are centered on children and their significance. Children are open to the world, attuned to rhythms adults have forgotten. The children in his stories often know more than the adults, who are peripheral figures. Miyazaki understands that adulthood can breed an easy omnipotence, a conviction (often unconscious, or nearly so) that the world is knowable and therefore not worth the effort. But children realize that life is porous, miraculous. The horizon is no hard border, but it is always shifting and changing, always moving away from you.

Childhood and its mists are good subjects for Miyazaki’s work, which is profoundly ambivalent. Ambivalence, as the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips explains, does not mean mixed feelings, it means opposing feelings. We are always “ambivalent about anything and everything that matters to us; indeed, ambivalence is the way we recognise that someone or something has become significant to us.” Ambivalence, too, suggests an ongoing lack of resolution, a judgment forever suspended, a question never properly answered. Things are other things, things are multiple things, things are opposing things. They do not cohere.

In Miyazaki’s stories, motives are always in opposition to each other, images are doubled or tripled, things stand for other things, things stand for many things. There is no such thing as unadulterated evil in his worlds, and there are no outright villains. In a strange and moving scene from The Boy and the Heron, Mahito stumbles across a sailor plying a wind-swept expanse of ocean deep inside the tower. Together, they feed and nurture the warawara, balloon-like spirits of souls yet to be born, who rise towards “the world above” (the temporal world, where Mahito comes from) en route to ordinary life. But they are devoured mid-flight by a school of ravenous pelicans, who flee only when Kumi appears and attacks them. Later, Mahito discovers a dying pelican crumpled in a garden, who tells him that they do not eat the warawara out of malice. They are trapped in this world, marooned by an unknown creator, scavenging a cursed sea while their young forget how to fly. 

This scene is unusually didactic for Miyazaki, who generally prefers to bury such insights deeper inside his work, further from the surface. But he is always asking us to look closer at things, and to look at them from different angles. He wants us to nurture ambivalence. In his own words:

“You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.”

“The divine power made me”

Ambivalence is also present in the story-arch of The Boy And The Heron. The film is, on one level, a straightforward iteration of the hero’s journey, the archetypal “monomyth” that, according to Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, forms the backbone of human story (Anne Carson: “Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.”) The beats are familiar and probably over-simplified. The hero ventures forth into the world, encounters the supernatural, weathers a crisis, completes their journey, returns home, understands something vital, becomes something other than what they were. 

Dante’s Commedia is an obvious example, and The Boy and the Heron consciously mirrors it. The door to the tower bears the same inscription as the gates to Inferno: fecemi la divina potestate - the divine power made me. Like Dante, Mahito journeys inward and downward, into strange and unearthly realms. He is accompanied by guides of uncertain purpose and varying reliability. He has elliptical conversations where obscure lessons are presented, interrogated and subverted. He finally ascends the tower to a garden, a hilltop, a paradiso, where he speaks with his grand-uncle, the creator. He returns to the world. He is changed.

The film also recalls, at points, Carl Jung’s Red Book (or Liber Novus). Penned between 1915 and 1930, after a traumatic break with Freud and exile to the professional hinterlands, the Red Book chronicles Jung’s own psychic disintegration, a collapse of startling magnitude and duration. Jung, beset by hallucinations he took to be near-prophecies, systematically induced a series of “active imaginations” - participatory internal fantasies peopled by characters with whom he interacted and conversed - to investigate his own unconscious. (Euripides: “I went mad, a god hurt me, I fell.”). Jung traverses the alien surroundings of his mind, led by his guide Philemon, an ancient magician with bull horns and a kingfisher’s wings. He wanders forests, mountains, seas, volcanic craters. He goes to hell (several times). He severs a knot in his own brain and is dangled between heaven and earth like the Hanged Man of the Tarot. In the delirious denouement, Jung stands “with arms outstretched like someone crucified”, his body wrapped by a giant snake. He is transformed into a lion-headed god.

There is a resolution to these epics that belies, even betrays, their fundamental stakes. Dante, as I’ve written elsewhere, makes it out - he descends into hell, summits the Mount of Purgatory, ascends into Paradise, and returns to the realm of the living a changed thing, bearing cosmic secrets. For Jung, The Red Book is a travel journal for his own individuation, a term he used to describe the process of reaching psychological wholeness by integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of inner life. Jung treated the Red Book like a religious text, considering it “the numinous beginning” for the rest of his work and the rest of his life.

I think these stories are wise about change and its nature but false about the direction of either. The Boy and the Heron retains, intriguingly, the fundamental irresolution with which Dante begins his journey in Inferno (“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray / from the straight road and woke to find myself / alone in a dark wood…”). This is a function of the choices Mahito makes in the dream-world. At the film’s climax, Mahito’s grand-uncle invites him to become his successor, to stay in the tower, to build a world free from suffering, to become (in all relevant respects) a god. Contra Jung, Mahito refuses the offer. He chooses instead to return to the “world of chaos”, the world where his friends are. In this he is, as Armstrong notices, something like a Buddhist Bodhisattva, an enlightened being who forfeits nirvana to save sentient creatures from the ocean of samsara, the near-bottomless cycles of time, suffering and illusion we all swim inside. “Like King Nimi of the Nimi Jataka, a former life of the Buddha”, says Armstrong, “Mahito surveys the cosmic reaches and then returns to life on earth, choosing the chaos there explicitly for the sake of the friends he will make that will make life meaningful. In other words, relationship in the ordinary world here takes precedence over the possibility of divine knowledge, power, or station: Mahito forfeits control.”

In a moving final passage, Mahito and Kumi embrace and depart to their own separate timelines; Mahito to bring his stepmother home, Kumi to live out her short life and die in the fires of wartime. But the movie ends suddenly, on the eve of Mahito’s return to Tokyo. In a handful of quiet scenes, the film hints that Mahito has learned something in the tower, has in some sense “grown up”, has found, perhaps, a measure of peace.

But these are only hints. We do not know how Mahito’s life will work out. We do not even know whether he made the right choice, whether it was wise to forfeit the power on offer for friendship, which is always fickle, always contingent (Euripides: “Friends disappear / or they are powerless / This is what misfortune means / an acid test of friendship / I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”). We know only that Mahito’s world is ours, and our world is finally indeterminate, giving no answers to any question of any importance. 

In this way Miyazaki’s work is sometimes closer to the great Attic tragedies, to ancient Greek authors like Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus. Their plays invite, as philosopher Simon Critchley argues, “neither the blind impulsiveness of action, nor some retreat into a solitary life of contemplation, but the difficulty and uncertainty of action in a world defined by ambiguity, where right always seems to be on both sides.” Progress is made, of a sort. Lessons are learned, of a type. But knowledge is always provisional, and loss is always certain. (Carson again: “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”) None of us are assured of virtue because we do not understand ourselves, let alone others, who are driven by motives and experiences we are not privy to. We are assured only of change, of never crossing the same river twice. 

How do you live?

Jung thought that we move through our lives like the sun, emerging from the misty depths of the unconscious en route to the threshold of revelation, reaching our apogee midway through life, then setting. He thought, too, that our lives are long but bend towards unification, a final resolution (if we’re lucky, and preferably in Jungian analysis) of separate things, a synthesis of opposites.

Miyazaki lacks this omnipotence, this sure-footed conviction, and I think his art is better for it. To Miyazaki, we are born with all the fullness of life. We know early on as much as we will ever know. Life is intelligible - the world is something we can open and read. But we are not good readers. We’re hasty, we’re avaricious, we’re sloppy, we’re blinkered. We are caught between the contrapuntal pull of inner and outer worlds, but outer life never resolves and inner life amounts to nothing much (“half a page of scribbled lines”). We have eyes to see but we do not, ears to hear but we cannot. “In life ascending or descending”, as a character muses in Malcom Lowry’s great modernist novel Under the Volcano, we are “perpetually involved with the mists, the cold and the overhangs, the treacherous rope and the slippery belay.” What answers there are elude us, usually. We move away from certainty, into deeper water.

How do you live? I don’t know.

“Deep breath…let it go…” 

I’m rising from 60 feet below the ocean’s surface, looking up at massive, waving fans, purple, tubular coral, and the feathery seagrass of the coral reef. The sun filters through the shallows, highlighting a tapestry of colors and shapes. A school of blue tangs swims purposefully from left to right between me and the sun, illuminated, living gemstones. Translucent yellow fish I cannot name follow, lemon-colored memories I still see when I close my eyes. The abundance of life is staggering; it will take a lifetime to begin to know this beautiful, alien world. 

Diving of another sort is on my mind these days as well.

Diving into the deep end of childhood trauma and reliving the most painful times of my life has been amazing therapy. I can almost feel myself shedding layers of depression, pain, and self-loathing. Still, as the saying goes: it’s real inner work. I had started what I thought would be my next essay—a sustained look at one of the most traumatic experiences of my childhood (coming up in my next chapter), when I had to stop. I wasn’t breaking down emotionally or feeling like I just couldn’t go on; it was exhausting in a very different way. I’m sure many of you know this experientially—happily, this kind of work is a common part of many lives in this generation. But for me, it is relatively new. Listening to an inner prompt, I laid that essay aside and focused on work and other pursuits.

One of those pursuits is hot yoga, and when I’m home from my regular travels I take as many classes as my schedule allows.

“Deep breath…let it go…”

Today, during one of my favorite classes, a candlelit, slow-paced stability session, my yoga instructor Amy spoke those familiar words. And I understood why I was so weary of writing about my childhood—I needed to give myself the grace to pause and breathe. I’m learning to hear this inner voice better, to lean into the wisdom of my body and my heart, which I have spent most of my life distrusting and suppressing. 

These two life-giving pursuits—hot yoga and scuba diving—have been instrumental in centering my life, my body, my soul, my spirit. Appropriately, at the heart of both is the art of breathing, of being completely present in the moment. In scuba, it is more than merely enjoying the undersea world in all its arresting beauty. It is also a matter of life and death. A lot can go wrong underwater. The calmer you are—breathing quietly and conserving your air and energy—the better (and safer) your dive will be.

Similarly, a calm and centered mind is the core experience of yoga, and we are regularly encouraged to “come back to your breath.” There are, of course, many other meditative practices that enable the practitioner to be present in this moment, this day, this eternal Now. This is mine.

To all of you who are doing the work of communing with Nature, listening to your body, learning to trust your intuition, I leave you with this blessing, adapted from Sister of St. Joseph Catherine Nerney’s compassion meditation.

May you be happy.

May you be blessed.

May you be free and peaceful.

May you be ever loved.

May you be always loving.

May your paths bring you to a quiet wood where birds are singing.

May the sun meet you as you rise through the silent beauty of a distant reef. 

The Garden of Earthly Delights

I visited the Museo del Prado in Madrid last week, home to The Garden of Earthly Delights, a painting by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516). It’s a trip - see above.

The Prado’s note on Garden calls it Bosch’s “most complex and enigmatic creation” but suggests it is, in the end, an exercise in pessimistic moralism. Maybe. According to many religions, we live in a brief interregnum between eternal realities, suspended between fall and restoration. But infinities don’t make any sense - they skip off the surface of the mind. They are limitless and therefore alien to us, who are ruled by limits.

Garden reflects this, I think. Bosch’s Paradise is staid formalism, a postcard of proper doctrine and right behavior with barely a hint of inventiveness. There is little delight here, little that sticks in the mind. Hell is mesmerizing, as always. Cruelty’s good for the imagination - fear carries further. All sorts of sins are served up for punishment by Bosch’s nightmares. The avaricious, for example, “are devoured and immediately expelled from the anus of a theriomorphic creature with a bird’s head…seated on a type of child’s lavatory stool.” It is a whirlwind of terror and dream-image.

Still, life gets the centerfold. Our world is the core of the triptych and the largest part of the painting. It is basically one huge orgy, a scene of wild deviance and ecstasy. Like all good religious art, Garden is a moral warning with a doubled meaning - sin, Bosch suggests, brings both death and a great deal of fun. You walk away from Garden uneasy, but you can’t shake the impression that the world is vivid, alive, good, and worthy of all its delights.

Bosch was an early progenitor of Surrealism, a movement obsessed with the distance between us and everything else. Things are not “real” - they are not directly observable or immediately experienced. They are always mediated. Our vision is always blurry, our ideas go haywire, and our dreams seem to understand things we do not. There is a shroud between us and the real, something akin to a permanent separation.

But we are alive, and life is always interesting.

Death in the round

Last Friday, the Biden Administration announced it was sending thousands of cluster munitions to Ukraine. The bombs have now arrived in the country, headed for the front around Bakhmut.

Cluster munitions are depraved things. The weapons are designed to break apart mid-flight, scattering huge quantities of explosive “bomblets” over wide areas. But the bomblets regularly fail to detonate. They spend years lying where they fall, killing and maiming people long after a conflict ends. They are particularly dangerous to children, who often mistake them for toys. Since World War II, cluster bombs have killed an estimated 56,500 to 86,500 civilians globally. Their half-life is so uniquely awful that over 120 countries have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans them outright.

The U.S. is not a signatory to the Convention. Neither is Russia or Ukraine, who have used cluster munitions during the war. Still, U.S. law imposes severe restrictions on their export (restrictions Biden waived by executive order to greenlight the Ukraine transfer). Jen Psaki, Biden’s former Press Secretary, has suggested their use constitutes a war crime. Just last year, America’s ambassador to the UN said they had “no place on the battlefield.”

Those are yesterday’s reasons. Ukraine, barred from NATO and immersed in a grinding counter-offensive, is burning through ammo at an astounding rate. Plenty of people are defending the Administration’s choice, citing tactical benefits and mitigating circumstances - New York Times columnist David French, who is wrong about nearly everything of consequence, tweeted a whole series of them. A sampling: Cluster bombs are lethally effective in trench warfare. Ukraine needs the ammunition. Ukraine is using the bombs on its own territory, not scattering foreign fields with unexploded ordinance. Ukrainian citizens will suffer the consequences, so Ukraine has every incentive to clean things up once the war ends. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Advisor, said Ukraine had provided “written assurances” that they will use U.S. cluster bombs "in a very careful way.”

But cluster bombs cannot be used carefully. They are weapons designed to cause indiscriminate harm, and they function as designed. America carpeted Southeast Asia with cluster munitions during the Vietnam War, dropping over 270 million on Laos alone (a neutral country). An estimated 80 million didn’t explode. Five decades on, only 1% of that unexploded ordinance has been cleared. Hidden bombs have killed 20,000 Laotians (including many children) since the war ended. Munitions experts say clean-up could take another century. In Kosovo, cleaning may finish in 2024, nearly 25 years after hostilities ceased.

The U.S. talks a lot about a “rules-based international order”, where countries play by independent edicts on something like an equal footing, constrained by a moral superstructure operating outside the confines of state interests. It is a fantasia, a masquerade. In the international sphere, rules only work if they’re applied consistently and fairly - “otherwise, they become tools of power and imperialism.” As I’ve noted before, the U.S. is a key architect of modern human rights law but routinely subverts its precepts. We act as if none of this has any consequence, but it does. It is effective nihilism, the will to power subordinating all else.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions promised a future where people are something more than the playthings of empire, where routinized child mutilation isn’t simply “collateral damage” for long-dead wars. That future, it seems, will never happen.

“Am I enjoying this? Am I enjoying this now? How about now? Am I still really enjoying this, really?”

In January’s issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Greg Gerke considers French film critic Serge Daney, a voice of New Wave cinema who died young at 48. Daney’s work has only just appeared in translation. In an extended elegy for what we view and how we view it, Gerke wonders about cinema’s place in today’s world:

Because a very high percentage of cinema is now received outside of the temple of the movie theater — not in a “cinema,” as the very trappings of the word timestamp the landscape — in half-light, daylight, or even phone-light. It comes to us deformed, caricatured, and much more personal for being less beautiful, less tied to a medium that still — in a movie theater — casts its images digitally and sometimes in actual film 20 feet wide by 12 high.

Gerke worries that social media feeds a neurotic response to art, an endless stocktaking whereby we watch ourselves watching something, wondering all the time whether it’s worth it, whether we are actually enjoying it at all. We cannot “suture ourselves into cinema” - the distance is too great, the terrain too alien. “A more Daneyian response”, Gerke suggests:

would be beginning to feel, not discriminate — a trace of emotion loops in from far off, and it doesn’t matter if the couch is uncomfortable or that we need a drink of water. We are there…

Movies can be a gateway to the slipstream of presence. In our era of degraded (stolen) focus, Daney’s legacy suggests they are an essential contemplative tool.

Ron’s place

Ron Gitten, a Liverpool native and lifelong eccentric, spent 33 years transforming his rented Birkenhead flat into a classical villa, unbeknownst to nearly everyone (including his landlord). Horus and Osiris, Egyptian deities, stalk the central corridor. Euripides and Sophocles patrol the walls. There’s a Roman altar in the kitchen, and a series of magnificent fireplaces scattered throughout - one a lion’s head, the other a hand-sculpted Minotaur.

A Longreads profile describes Ron’s place as a sterling example of “outsider art” or “art brut”, a tradition populated by “artists—often untrained—who work outside the classical tradition (and frequently the law).” Jarvis Cocker, the British musician, called the flat “a personal universe”, adding that “everybody decorates their house in some way, Ron has just gone that extra mile.” Whatever it is, Ron’s flat is a glimpse of the wild and lovely things that can make up a life, otherwise hidden from view.

Phoning the dead

From David Bentley Hart:

The Japanese phrase kaze no denwa (風の電話) means “wind-telephone” and refers to a phone booth, ideally but not necessarily installed in a garden, with no connections to any physical telephone lines. Its purpose is communication with the dead. That is not to say that it is a medium of interlocution with the deceased; the idea is not that one should use it to receive messages from the other side. Rather, one merely uses it to talk to someone who has departed this life, expecting no reply. The first such booth was built in 2010 by a landscaper and gardener named Sasaki Itaru for his own garden in Ōtsuchi on Honshu as a way of dealing with the loss of a cousin to whom he had been extremely close all his life. He intended the booth for only his own use, but the following year brought the great earthquake and tsunami in Tōhuku, and Sasaki-san opened his wind telephone to the public, as an aid for the bereaved. It has received many thousands of visitors since then, and other such booths have appeared not only in other parts of Japan, but in various countries all around the world. My only thoughts are “How wonderful,” “How Japanese,” and, needless to say, “It works, of course.”

Montreal, Canada

Quick Canada recap before I get into Austria.

It was a rainy weekend in Montreal, with two practice sessions and all of qualifying affected by the weather. Free Practice (FP) 1 was dry, but after the session was red-flagged for Pierre Gasly who had some mechanical issues early on, it never resumed due to issues with the track cameras and CCTV. FP2 was extended to 90 minutes to make up for this.

There were a couple more red flags in FP2, as the other Alpine (Esteban Ocon) dealt with mechanical issues as well. The rain came into play in torrents near the end of the session, which Hamilton topped, and continued through FP3. According to Alfa Romeo driver Valtteri Bottas, it was “good weather…for a duck.” Unfortunately for Ferrari, Sainz hit the wall hard in FP3, severely damaging his front wing and nose (the car’s, not his - Sainz has a mighty fine nose, see insert).

Rain and red flags continued to hamper the weekend with the drivers starting on inters at the beginning of qualifying before switching to slicks once the track dried out and then back to inters by the last part of the session. 

Ferrari CONTINUED to struggle with communication issues on track and seems to have forgotten YET AGAIN that they need to keep their drivers apprised of the cars around them. They didn’t. This led to YET ANOTHER impeding incident during qualifying, much to Pierre Gasly’s (Alpine) chagrin. The incident was costly for both Ferrari and Gasly as Gasly was knocked out in Q1 and Sainz received a three-place grid penalty for Sunday’s race, dropping him from eighth to 11th.

The rain always mixes up the grid, which makes things more interesting come Sunday. This was true in Canada, with some big names out of the top 10 (Leclerc, Perez, and Stroll) and Nico Hulkenberg (Haas) ALMOST starting from P2 (go Haas!). Hulkenberg received an after-the-fact three-place grid penalty for speeding under red light restrictions, dropping him to P5 behind both Mercedes and bringing Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin) up to take his place.

Unfortunately for all the Max haters (☺), he’s also unbeatable in rainy conditions, so no surprise that he took pole.

On Sunday, Max got off the line well and Hamilton was able to slipstream his way past Alonso into P2. Max is clearly in a league of his own, so the battles for the remaining podium spots, and the points positions, are what to watch for. George “Lap One Incident” Russell (Mercedes) made it all the way to Lap 12 before driving into a wall out of Turn 9, triggering a safety car. The team was able to get him fixed up and back out on track after a long stop, but he later retired from the race with brake issues.

Lando Norris was given a five-second time penalty for “unsportsmanlike behavior” because the FIA/F1 is trying to pull in NFL fans by using their lingo. In all seriousness though, this penalty was talked about quite a bit as it is rarely used. The penalty was based on Norris driving unnecessarily slowly under the safety car, creating a gap between he and his teammate Oscar Piastri so they could double stack in the pits, and subsequently backing up the rest of the pack in the process. McLaren petitioned for a right of review over this penalty (which cost Norris a points place finish) but it was ultimately rejected by the stewards.

Ferrari made a good strategy call for once in their life and brought home fourth and fifth-place finishes. (Ed: I have it on good authority Ferrari is now feeding strategy calls directly to ChatGPT). Max, Alonso, and Lewis were the podium finishers, in that order, with 11 world titles between the three of them, no big deal. The battle between Alonso and Lewis was fun to watch. Max’s win was actually special in Canada, as he brought home Red Bull’s 100th win and his 41st, tying the late, great Ayrton Senna. Max signed his suit from this race and auctioned it off for charity along with a meet and greet and tour of the Red Bull factory. My brother wouldn’t loan me the money to bid which I found rude considering it was clearly a great use of resources and someone else took home the suit for the low price of $142,746. (Ed: Maybe Red Bull’s catering department can loan you the difference).

Here are links to the full qualifying and race results so you can check out how your favorite driver did in Canada. 

Spielberg, Austria (Here’s Lookin’ at you, Lando!). 

We’re back at the Red Bull Ring in Austria with another Sprint weekend! If you need a quick refresh on the Sprint format you can take a look at my coverage of the first Sprint in Baku here.

Tl;dr:

• Max was first in qualifying.

• Max was first in the sprint shootout.

• Max won the sprint.

• Max won the Grand Prix.

• Lando Norris had a really strong weekend thanks to new upgrades and walked away with his highest finish this season – fourth.

• Everyone and their mother exceeded track limits.

Friday: Qualifying (for Sunday) 

Ferrari and McLaren both introduced new upgrades this weekend, which were clearly effective in qualifying. Ferrari debuted a new front wing and changes to the floor edges, while McLaren rolled out the first of a three-part upgrade with a revised floor and sidepods. McLaren was initially set to bring these upgrades in Silverstone but fast-tracked them for Lando Norris’ car, contributing to his strong running in qualifying that put him in P4 for Sunday’s race. 

The Ferrari upgrades that everyone has been looking for the past two races seem to have made an appearance, giving us a much-missed Ferrari sandwich for Sunday’s race start. Sainz put together a strong qualifying session and got himself onto the second row for Sunday, starting in front of Lando, his former teammate. Leclerc looked incredibly quick on his last flying lap (as he always does in quali), and for a split second seemed like he might beat out Max for pole. But alas, the Flying Dutchman took pole at his home race for the fourth consecutive time (*gasp*). [Although there was a minute there where his pole was in jeopardy when he was summoned to the stewards after the session for impeding Kevin Magnussen in Q1. They determined no further action was necessary and he kept pole position.] [Ed: Oh hello again, Max “No further action is necessary” Verstappen].

Unfortunately for Red Bull, Checo continued to struggle in qualifying. For the fourth time in as many races, he failed to get through Q2 and started 15th on Sunday. While Checo wasn’t the only one to struggle with track limits in Austria (I’ll talk more about this later), his inability to pull off a clean lap when it mattered highlights the gap in talent between him and his teammate. Team Principal Christian Horner laid into Checo a bit after the session stating to Sky Sports F1, “He’s got a car that was easily capable of being on the first or second row, he was matching Max’s times; stay in the white lines.” Perhaps that could have been a private conversation, Christian?

For those who don’t know, there is a white line around the outside of the race track that delineates where the limits of the track are. If a car goes over this white line with all four tires this is considered exceeding track limits. If a car exceeds track limits, its lap time is deleted. In a race, if a car exceeds track limits three times, they are shown a black and white flag and warned if they exceed track limits again, they will receive a five-second time penalty. 

A total of 47 lap times were deleted during this year’s qualifying session.

Unfortunately for everyone, qualifying was only the beginning.

Saturday: Sprint Shootout (Qualifying for the Sprint) 

Norris was quick again in the sprint shootout, snagging a third-place start for the sprint later that day, just in front of Haas’ Nico Hulkenberg (go Haas!). Lewis Hamilton was eliminated in Q1 thanks to a deleted lap time and traffic on his final attempt which forced him to bail out. There were some issues between Max and Hamilton (of course), and Mercedes’ Team Principal Toto Wolff accused Max of enacting a “revenge plot” and deliberately screwing up Hamilton’s final lap due to an earlier incident of impeding. I’m a Max fan to my grave but even I can admit that situation was a bit sketchy. I’m surprised it wasn’t more of a topic this weekend. [Ed: Another rousing triumph for Max “No further action was necessary” Verstappen]

Aston Martin continued a lackluster weekend, with a seventh and eighth-place start for the sprint. Aston seems to be falling off the pace a bit, with the other front runners showing better gains after various upgrades. It may just be track specific, so I’m still holding out hope for Alonso’s “El Plan.”

Saturday: Sprint 

The Red Bulls clashed on the first lap of a rain-soaked sprint, with both blaming the other for multiple close calls. They smoothed things over after the race once they both realized the incidents were unintentional (not convinced Perez didn’t see Max, but I digress). This little rivalry gave Hulkenberg an opening and he snuck through into second (go Haas!), where he remained through Lap 12 before Checo overtook him.

Unfortunately for Norris (again), he started second and dropped to 10th within the first lap after he went into anti-stall in the first corner. Mercedes had decent damage control, with Russell coming back from 15th to eighth to claim the last points position, and Hamilton recovering from eighteenth to tenth.

Sunday: Grand Prix 

Sunday’s race began cleanly and everything looked well and good, with Leclerc giving Max a good run for first before Max inevitably pulled away. The race itself was clean, with no major racing incidents and only one retirement (Hulkenberg with an engine failure). There were some excellent scraps in the mid to upper-field. Checo put in a great race (much needed given his recent struggles) and came back from fifteenth place to snag the last podium spot away from Carlos Sainz.

The good times didn’t last though, as the track positions began to descend into chaos when the stewards started doling out track limit warnings and penalties aplenty. A total of SEVEN drivers received time penalties during the race (Hamilton, Tsunoda (x2), Sainz, Magnussen, Sargeant, Albon, and Gasly), further frustrating Hamilton’s already difficult weekend.

Mercedes was back in old form, much to my delight. Lewis struggled with pace almost immediately, radioing in on lap 12 to let his engineer know “This car’s slow mate.” When his team alerted him that he’d received a black-and-white flag for exceeding track limits and would be penalized if it happened again, he responded that he couldn’t keep it on the track because the car wouldn’t turn. So clearly some additional work’s needed from Mercedes to find the pace they had last weekend. Lewis ended up receiving two penalties for track limits, one during the race and one after, which dropped him from seventh to eighth.

The penalties Lewis and others received after the race was courtesy of a protest lodged by Aston Martin, who claimed that a number of cars were not penalized for exceeding track limits but should have been. According to The Race, F1’s policing system was overwhelmed with over 1,200+ potential offenses (some suggest it was closer to 1,500) and race control was unable to keep up with the violations during the race. Aston Martin requested race control review of each of the potential violations.

After three hours, the stewards released a document identifying each lap that was deleted due to track limit violations. (You can view the document here, by clicking the link and selecting the document titled, “Race Deleted Lap Times.”) 83 more laps were deleted after this review, leaving only George Russell and Zhou Guanyu without a violation. Eight drivers received post-race penalties, six of which were knocked down the order: 

• Sainz: 10-second penalty, dropped from fourth to sixth

• Hamilton: 10-second penalty, dropped from seventh to eighth

• Gasly: 10-second penalty, dropped from ninth to 10th

• Esteban Ocon: 30-second penalty (two five-second penalties and two 10-second penalties), dropped from 12th to 14th

• Nyck de Vries: 15-second penalty (one five-second penalty and one 10-second penalty), dropped from 15th to 17th; and

• Yuki Tsunoda: five-second penalty, dropped from 18th to 19th.

In addition to applying the penalties above, the stewards noted that they “very strongly recommend that a solution be found to the track limits situation at this circuit.” I very strongly agree. Which begs the question, how? Seems best to go back to the old policy that was more flexible and allowed for leniency, especially in the final turns. 

It was yet another dominant weekend for Red Bull on their home turf. To further underscore how confident they are as a team, Max decided to pit on the last lap of the race for new tires so he could go for the fastest lap and get one extra point. After a 2.3-second stationary pit stop (excluding the time through the pit lane), he came back out still 4 seconds ahead of Leclerc. Unstoppable, yet again.

There are four races over the next five weekends! Next up is the iconic Silverstone circuit. Let’s see if anyone can de-throne the King.

Here are links to the full qualifying, sprint, and race results so you can check out how your favorite driver did in Austria. 

On a final, tragic note: 18-year-old Dutch driver Dilano Van ‘t Hoff was killed this weekend at Spa, a famous Belgian circuit that’s a regular stop on the Formula One calendar. Van ‘t Hoff was competing at the Formula Regional European Championship. He spun in heavy rain and was struck at high speed by another driver. It’s only been four years since the last fatality at Spa, when Anthoine Hubert was killed in a multi-car crash during an F2 race, along the same stretch of track. There are serious questions about safety at Spa, and frankly, no one should be losing their life racing - not with today’s technology. I don’t know what reforms are needed, but I do know they’re overdue.

Rest in peace, Dilano.

If you’re in Tokyo, and you have a free evening, take the JR Yamanote line to Ikebukuro Station. Walk due east about three blocks. Midway down an alley, there’s an apartment building on the right. Take the elevator four floors up. Turn left. Open the door.

Paper Moon was opened all the way back in 1975. In Tokyo, it is one of a long lineage of vinyl record bars, small corners of the dense metropolis devoted to drinks and music, usually jazz. After World War II, imported vinyl LPs were too pricey for most Japanese to purchase. So record bars (also called music kissas or cafes) sprang up all around the recovering city. Salarymen wiled away late hours listening to the latest from overseas. “The act of going to a cafe and listening to a new release in a social, group setting became the norm for a generation of Japanese jazz fans”, writes Anton Spice in a lovely photo essay for Vinyl Factory. “At its height, areas like Shibuya and Shinjuku in central Tokyo had dozens of these cafes and bars scattered around the main station plazas.”

Not many remain. Still, Tokyo retains its reputation as a haven for audiophiles, where people pay good money to sit in small spaces, close together, nearly silent, listening to music on exquisite equipment. Meikyoku Kissa Lion, in Shibuya, is a Baroque cinema of sound that serves chilled coffee to patrons as classical music pours from the ceiling-high stereo system and a giant bust of Beethoven presides over the proceedings. In Bar Nightingale, a seven-seat hovel somewhere in the middle of Shinjuku’s chaotic Golden Gai, the bartenders are mostly hostile and the music is a wilfully, wonderfully inaccessible mix of noise and drone. In sHeLTeR, a basement near the city’s outskirts, DJs mix experimental vinyl as a mirror ball glimmers overhead.

But Paper Moon is especially lovely. As Time Out has it, “Paper Moon is as close as it gets to being a Showa-era jazz dive in the 1970s, all seats at the L-shaped counter, all ears tuned in to the music.” Jess and I visited Paper Moon four years ago, on our first trip to Japan. I loved everything about it - the wood-topped bar, the low-slung ceiling, the exposed wiring, the walls brimming with jazz LPs. And the stooped, grey-haired proprietor Yamamoto-san, serving you a whisky and selecting records he liked, propping up the sleeve so you could view and approve of his choices.

We spent a long time there. We met a German, who travels to Japan often for work. He said he comes to Paper Moon every chance he gets. He said that Yamamoto-san is the last of an era, more or less the final practitioner of a certain type of nightlife that is on the way out. Tokyo is changing and it doesn’t have time for memories like this. I guess that was an overstatement but it fit the vibe.

I went back to Tokyo last weekend. I was sure that Paper Moon was gone, done in by COVID or time or an electrical fire. But it’s still there! I spent most of Saturday night at the bar, drinking and listening to Eric Dolphy (Last Date and Live in Germany). I ate some popcorn and wrote a little. I met a local jazz musician who said he plays the violin badly but comes here basically every week. When he left he told me he’d say hi four years from now when I came back for another round.

I think that many true loves start out as affectations. When we’re young it can be hard to tell the difference, in ourselves and in others. We grab hold of an image or an idea - a way of being, a way of moving through the world - and we hang onto it. We conscript it, make it part of us by force. I have it on good authority that I was pretty insufferable when I was younger. I feel embarrassed about that, even today. But the flip side of spending a lot of time pretending to enjoy something you don’t understand is that, sometimes, you wake up one day and realize you’ve actually fallen in love.

Jazz is like that for me. Jazz is a vast and difficult genre, formed by histories and tidal pulls I can’t fathom. It is vertiginously complex, embracing and repudiating tonal and technical rules that never made sense to me. Jazz is as much a mystery to me today as it was two decades ago when my mom bought me A Love Supreme on CD. I listened to that album for probably two years before I fell in love with it. But fall in love I did, and the door opened.

Another lesson - I used to feel that there was some warm center to life I couldn’t find, that I was permanently excluded from whatever it was that made other people so interesting. It turns out that feeling is common to all. And it fades over time. There is in fact no center to anything, no holy of holies, no inner sanctum. The world holds no teleology that we can easily discern. Life is not a journey towards some fixed point on the far horizon. But it is vast, and rich, and precious, and astoundingly beautiful. It is is a series of contingent moments, each of them perilous and miraculous, each of them different from the other. And we ourselves are different things, as we move in and between them.

Cormac McCarthy passed away last week. I finished his novel The Passenger on the flight home to Bangkok. It is a strange book, lacking (thankfully) the wearying brutality of his earlier work. But it is true to form - beautiful and desolate to the last. And I think the novel is something like McCarthy’s final word on the matter, his theory of everything.

What is his theory? As near as I can tell: The world is finally indeterminate and gives no answers to any question of any importance. It is full of great and terrible beauty that vanishes when we leave it. What it all means, and what comes after, is a mystery - a tale told by an alien intelligence in a language we do not understand. In that way, it has nothing to do with us.

Of course, McCarthy said that his books didn’t need interpreting seeing as everything was right there on the page if you would just go and fucking read it yourself. So, here you go:

When we and all our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy? Where would such a being be found? And by whom?

And later:

If we are not after the essence, Squire, then what are we after? And I’ll defer to your view that we cannot uncover such a thing without putting our stamp upon it….But listen to me, Squire. Where the substance of a thing is an uncertain business the form can hardly command more ground. All reality is loss and all loss is eternal. There is no other kind. And that reality into which we inquire must first contain ourselves. And what are we? Ten percent biology and ninety percent nightrumor.

I think McCarthy is probably right about all of this. But also, as Eugene McCharraher puts it, “Matter is good; material life should be cherished and savored as the sensuous gift of creation.” That is not an antidote, and it is not a contradiction. Both truths exist alongside each other. If anything they are dependent. They inform each other, speak to each other, map out each other’s borderlands.

In Essays in Idleness, the Japanese Buddhist monk Kenkō wrote:

If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. Consider living creatures - none lives so long as man. The May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring nor autumn. What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live even a single year in perfect serenity! If that is not enough for you, you might live a thousand years and still feel it was but a single night’s dream.

It is the limitedness of things that gives them their beauty and their grief, and maybe in some sense their meaning. Backstopped, always, by sheer wonder that things exist at all, and that we are here to see them.

These days I don’t have a theory of anything in particular. I think that the world has meaning but not coherence. I think we move through it learning nothing much, or learning the wrong things. I believe with Kenkō that it is stupid to “insist on complete sets of everything; imperfect sets are better.” I think the world is always beautiful and I think that we notice this beauty often. I think that Paper Moon is a good place for noticing. Visit, if you’re ever in Tokyo, and you have a free evening.

Ed: This article is part of an ongoing series by Robert called Devotions Upon Divergent Occasions. Read his introduction here.

In his children’s classic, Stuart Little, E.B. White describes the life of a misfit trying to find his place in the world. The protagonist, a mouse born into a nice, middle-class family in which he struggles to belong, goes through a series of adventures and misadventures in his quest for significance, love and meaning. The book closes:

“Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north. The sun was just coming up over the hills on his right. As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.”

This passage always echoed within me. Looking back over my life, Stuart’s journey seems an apt metaphor for mine, especially now: over 60 and well into the last half of my life, I finally feel like I am heading in the right direction.  It so happens that I’m writing this while looking out at a bright, if chilly, Easter day, when renewal and new beginnings are in the air. The enduring appeal of this theme—reflected in nature and in our lives—reminds us that the starting point of resurrection hope begins in the grave, in darkness, defeat and confusion. 

In meditating on this I realized that the only way to begin recounting my journey was to revisit the darkest valley in my life, when all that I thought I had built—everything of enduring value—fell apart. A number of low points preceded it. I’ll begin with them, if only to illustrate that I had to go through a lot of pain before I was willing to reevaluate the course of my life. 

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased”

It was no secret in our family and among our friends that my wife and I had struggled in our marriage. Seeking help from licensed therapists was deemed dangerous, unbiblical, and frowned upon in our church community. We sought help from our pastors, but their lack of training left them ill-equipped to understand our relational issues (or anyone else’s for that matter). So, while we dutifully went to counseling sessions with them, read books, and attended marriage retreats, we were left without constructive help and a way forward. Our pain and despair deepened. For practicing Christians, this left us in a bit of a quandary: what to do when the place that had given meaning and purpose to our lives could not help us navigate the one relationship that was most important to us?

Mostly, we did nothing. We lived an uneasy truce between reality and our expectations, which never quite died. We never entertained the idea of divorce; that was beyond the pale. We clung to the idea and form of a relationship and moved forward with a life marked by an unfulfilling marriage, surrounded by friends and family who loved us, and with whom we were honest about our struggles. 

Not surprisingly, this uneasy truce could not last. We were sad and frustrated enough to finally make the difficult (at least for us) decision to seek professional help. In therapy we dug deeper than we ever had, uncovering pain and hurt and offenses that forced us to reckon with who we really were, and if we were willing to make the changes necessary to build a new relationship. This essay is not about our marriage. Still, the reckoning in our marriage began a process of ongoing growth and healing that continues to this day. Facing the reality that I had issues to deal with if I hoped for a life of love and joy, I began the process of unraveling the image and persona I had created and presented to the world.

During this time a series of family crises further destabilized the once-firm ground that I had stood upon. My elder sister, and the only truly maternal figure in my life, came down with cancer, leading to a rapid decline and death. In many ways, she had held the siblings and our families together through the force of her personality. After her death, we continued to have family functions like Thanksgiving meals at our home, but these were never again the same. The semblance of a happy, extended family had been irretrievably lost.

The next blow came when my eldest brother was unmasked as a pedophile, arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. Every family has its issues, to be sure, but this shame is uniquely awful. I had taken enough ground in therapy to embrace the shame while realizing I did not need to carry it with me. And yet, my tendency was to try to understand what might have happened to my brother and the choices he made to live in the hell he created. With wise counsel and following a stronger inner compass of self-understanding, I laid this pursuit aside to focus on my immediate relationships, especially on my marriage which was in crisis. But I had no doubt, and still have no doubt, that the questions raised by this tragedy will one day have to be faced.

Then, one of my nephews died, suddenly and tragically. The meltdown of anything that looked like a happy family seemed complete. Within the space of a few years, I had lost two close family members, my brother was in all important respects lost as well, and I was attempting, with marginal success which felt more like failure, to put my marriage back together. Humpty Dumpty was my soulmate.

And I had not yet reached the bottom.

“Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow”

[Note: The following I write with the encouragement of my daughter, Bella, with whom I enjoy as close and happy a relationship as I ever dreamed I could have. But that closeness was a dark valley away.]

It was a day like any other when our son-in-law showed up at our door with the announcement that our daughter was leaving him. In a culture where this pain is a normal part of many lives, it’s hard to convey just how shocking and crushing this news was to us. And, in fact, my mind refused to accept it. We immediately hopped in the car, fear rising in our hearts. I remained convinced that this was an overreaction to something, or perhaps a call for help. But whatever it was, I was sure it was fixable. Surely our daughter—our daughter—was not going to rip apart her family and inflict the pain of a broken family on her sons, our only grandchildren.

One look at her face, when we entered their apartment, told me that the unthinkable was indeed happening. In the charged conversation that ensued, we cried and implored her to give her marriage another chance. It was as emotionally manipulative as I think I have ever been. At the heart of this manipulation was a Fear. I feared for her soul, I feared for what our grandsons would become in the wake of a broken home, I feared for their eternal destiny.

The fear of Hell operates in the psyche of every true evangelical. If you believe that every person’s destiny is either a heaven of peace and joy or eternal torment under the perpetual wrath of God, then the only sane and logical and loving way to live is to do all you can to keep those you love on the path to heaven. We succeeded in impressing upon our daughters the importance of committing their lives to Jesus. My understanding was that the parables Jesus told of fire and wrath were explicit warnings about an eternal hell. I’ll more thoroughly explore the subject of hell in the future; for now, I just want to communicate what a choking fear it is to think that your children, whom you love more than you ever imagined it was possible to love, might be separated from you forever.

It probably seems a stretch, if you are unfamiliar with the culture I’m describing, to see how I could go from “my daughter is divorcing her husband” to “her sons are now more likely to reject our faith” to “those I love are likely going to hell.” I’m still trying to understand this myself. But believe me that this fear is palpable, seems rational, and excuses virtually anything in the service of preventing what seems the inevitable destiny of someone breaking from the cultural mores we cherished. If you have never been under the sway of this fear, then I hope what I write helps you develop a degree of sympathy for those of us whose lives were ruled by it.

My journey from the tear-filled appeals to our daughter to a depth of despair I never thought possible was my version of what Christian mystics call the dark night of the soul. Many times over the next few months I would pull over to the side of the road, unable to drive because of weeping, filled with sadness as I thought of the pain and heartache my daughter was bringing upon herself, her sons, her husband, all of us.

The nadir came during one night of weeping on our porch, pouring out my agony to my wife. It had become clear in the intervening months that Isabella was firm in her intention of leaving her husband. In a final moment of helpless anger, I screamed curses towards my daughter, into the darkness.

 In the quiet aftermath of my abusive eruption, my mind cleared. Somewhere, somehow, I had lost my way. The loving Father that Jesus had proclaimed God to be, that I loved and had dedicated my life to serve - that Father seemed far, far away. 

A dozen scenes of my life with Isabella flashed before me: the beautiful baby I had held, the even more beautiful woman she had become, the little girl I had taken on countless dates, had read The Lord of the Rings to, her bright smile lighting up my life as we talked about what we loved, the dreams we shared. In my deepest despair I remembered how much I loved her. The profound repentance and turning from the path of destruction that I had prayed would come to Isabella finally came; it came to me. The sad and broken man looking at the rubble of the life he thought he had built -  this man had to die. This man, thank God, was dying.

In all the thoughts and prayers preceding that night, through all the appeals to God to fix this by turning our daughter away from the path she had chosen, never had I stopped and asked: “My daughter says she loves God, she knows that the step she’s taking is drastic, life-changing, and devastating. Why is she doing this?” This bright, kind, and intelligent woman was stepping into a terrifying unknown. I was not meeting her in her confusion and pain. I had shepherded her, as best I knew how, through all the major transitions of her life. How had I come to curse her? How was I leaving her alone, feeling the weight of my disappointment, my bitterness?

That night on our porch was the most significant turning point in my life. During these days God was revealed to me as so much more than the male authority figure of my imagination. The God who met me in my pain was not the righteous judge who was disappointed in my failure. They (I can think of no better pronoun) were generous Father, nurturing Mother and guiding Spirit. This God I hardly knew was leading me back to the person I was always meant to be, to a better self I could only dimly imagine in the dark grave of that darkest of nights.

“That perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart”

At the end of Stuart Little, before he climbs into his car and drives into a new day, Stuart has a conversation with a telephone line repairman who is resting by the side of the road. Upon hearing that he is headed north the repairman comments: 

“There’s something about north, something that sets it apart from all other directions. A person who is heading north is not making any mistake, in my opinion.”

“That’s the way I look at it,” said Stuart. “I rather expect that from now on I shall be traveling north until the end of my days.”

I have been orienting myself all my life to a true north, seeking a centering compass direction for my soul. This journey has been filled with many course corrections, detours and surprising twists. I’ll explore more of these in further Meditations.

To my fellow northbound travelers, grace and peace.

It’s been a minute! Since my last article covering the Baku Grand Prix, a lot has happened in the F1 world, including what some have said was the most boring race this season (Miami), a second race cancellation (Imola), quite possibly the most exciting qualifying session I have ever seen (Monaco), and a first look at the effectiveness of many of the upgrade packages (Barcelona).

But first things first (and a little tl;dr for you): Max Verstappen is the best F1 driver ever in the entire world hands down, forever and always.

Let’s get into it.

Miami Grand Prix (May 7, 2023)

The starting grid in Miami signaled a potential title race shakeup, with Sergio Perez (Red Bull) starting on pole, followed by Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin) and Carlos Sainz (Ferrari). Max Verstappen (Red Bull) was set to take pole but had to settle for a ninth-place start due to an error in session three of qualifying coupled with a red flag brought on by yet another Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) crash.

The Red Bull drivers were on two different tire strategies, with Checo starting on medium compound tires and Max starting on hards. The key differences in tire compounds are explained in depth here, but for you laymen:

• Soft = makes the car go fastest, but wears out quickly; 

• Medium = mid-range on speed and durability; 

• Hard = slowest over one lap, but lasts the longest.

I won’t belabor this recap since it happened a bit ago, but there was a period of time where it looked like Checo was on the better strategy (starting from first didn’t hurt) and Max wouldn’t be able to pull off a win from ninth place. But, as previously stated, Max is inevitable. He went from ninth to second in 15 laps and took the lead in Lap 21 when Checo pit for hards. At this point both Red Bull drivers were on hard compound tires and Checo’s were 21 laps younger (in better condition) than Max’s. Max somehow managed to make his tires not only last much longer than they typically would, but he also managed to pull away from Checo and build up enough of a gap that he easily took back the lead after he pit on Lap 46.

While social media users went on and on after the race about how boring it was (underscored by Alonso’s radio message where he appeared to be watching his teammate Lance Stroll on the big screens around the track), as a Max/Red Bull fan, I gloried in Checo’s downfall enjoyed the battle between teammates and it didn’t hurt that Max won in the end.

I understand wanting a more competitive grid, but I also think we should give credit where credit is due. [Ed: is winning every single race this season credit enough or do you need more]. The Milton-Keynes team has built an incredibly impressive car. As with any top team, there will come a time when Red Bull gets dethroned. McLaren had its time at the top in the late 80s and early 90s, Ferrari was unbeatable for five straight seasons in the early 2000s, and most recently, Mercedes dominated for seven impressive seasons before Red Bull took over. For now, can we just sit back and appreciate perfection?

The rest of the grid passed under the checkered flag in a fairly predictable order, with Alonso adding another third-place podium to his roster and Sainz in fifth place yet again. Mercedes left Miami in fourth and sixth place, with George Russell beating out his teammate Lewis Hamilton. Unfortunately for Charles Leclerc (Ferrari), he wasn’t able to recover from his seventh-place start after his qualifying crash and finished in the same position he started from. McLaren had yet another disappointing and underwhelming result with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri finishing in 17th and 19th respectively. 

Here are links to the full qualifying and race results so you can check out how your favorite driver did in Miami. 

Imola (May 21, 2023)

The Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix was canceled due to extreme flooding in and around the Imola region. F1’s resident hot-head, Yuki Tsunoda (AlphaTauri), who currently calls Italy home, stayed in the area to help with the clean-up effort while other drivers and teams shared information and resources on how to support the affected community.

If anyone is so inclined, feel free to donate via the information and resources link above as Imola is still grappling with the devastating effects of the flooding.

Monaco Grand Prix (May 29, 2023)

If you’re still reading this, stick with me. Remember what I said at the beginning about the most exciting qualifying session I have ever seen? Let’s get into it.

To set the scene, let me introduce the Circuit de Monaco. This track is the pinnacle of Formula 1 and is aptly referred to as the “crown jewel.” Opened in 1929, it is the second-oldest track on the F1 calendar (surpassed only by the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza which opened in 1922). It is arguably the most well-known Formula 1 circuit due to the opulence of Monaco, the stunning harbor views along the track, and the inhuman way the drivers speed through the narrow streets. With six wins to his name, Ayrton Senna holds the record as the winningest driver in Monaco.

Although Monaco is the “crown jewel” of Formula 1, it is widely criticized by both drivers and fans because of how few opportunities there are to overtake. More than any other race on the calendar, qualifying is what counts. 

Leading up to the race, there was a lot of speculation that Monaco would be the undoing of Red Bull’s winning streak. The RB19 is clearly quick in a straight line, with the Drag Reduction System (DRS) adding over 10 mph to its already impressive speed. Monaco, however, is not a quick track. It has one DRS Zone, which is short and basically useless given how narrow the track is.

Qualifying started off with a bang for Red Bull (literally). Pre-Monaco Checo was so hopeful, so eager, so filled with anticipation like a little brother stepping out from underneath his big brother’s shadow. Post-Monaco Checo likely had a good cry in his trailer. Checo won Monaco last year and as the resident “street king”, had an excellent opportunity to put a dent in Max’s championship lead. Unfortunately for Checo (and I mean that sincerely), he crashed in session one, had to have his car craned off track (exposing Red Bull’s proprietary underbody), and started from last place on Sunday. I think now is the time for him to recognize his place in the team and settle into his support role. Harsh? Yes. Realistic? Yes.

Mercedes was set to introduce upgrades in Imola, which were instead debuted in Monaco due to the cancellation. However, Monaco is a one-off track that requires a very specific car setup, so the full effect of the upgrades was not evident during this race. They struggled a bit throughout qualifying (and in Free Practice 3 where Hamilton crashed), with Hamilton looking like he was out in Sessions 1 and 2 before pulling together last-minute laps that put him through to the final session where he placed sixth for the start. George “Lap One Incident” Russell qualified eighth (far away from Max thankfully).

Other than Checo’s incident in Session 1, qualifying was relatively uneventful with the occasional back marker appearing at the top of the leader board prompting a lot of “Where did Yuki come from??”, “Albon??”, and “Ocon???” texts to my brother.

And then came the final round of qualifying. Max and Alonso spent most of the session swapping back and forth between provisional pole, with Ocon briefly on top, and the King of Qualifying and home-town boy Charles Leclerc jumping to the top with less than two minutes to go. Alonso answered Leclerc with an incredible lap and put himself on provisional pole with under one minute left in the session. Max, who was in fifth at this point, had one chance to take pole. 

When you watch qualifying, there’s a time tracker on the bottom of the screen that shows how fast a driver is completing the lap. The tracker is split into three sectors. throughout the lap, you can tell how a driver’s speed compares to prior laps based on the color that appears after each sector is completed. Yellow means the driver is going slower than their personal best time, green means it’s their personal best, and purple means they are faster than any other driver in that sector.

During Max’s final qualifying lap, the tracker stayed green throughout sectors one and two, showing that he was setting personal bests, but not matching Alonso’s time. Going into the third and final sector (which is also the shortest), Max was down by 0.204 seconds. 

But in what some have called the most remarkable final sector Monaco has ever seen, Max pulled it off and won his first-ever pole position in Monaco by 0.084 seconds. I can’t even explain how cool this was to watch.

In his post-qualifying interview, Max talked about scraping the wall multiple times over the course of that last lap, as evidenced by the damage to the side walls of his tires. Please just take a moment to think about how insane and impressive that is???

As the Race F1 Podcast noted, the RB19’s design means the tires don’t heat up particularly fast, so Max had to do two prep laps before attempting a “flying” lap (at full speed). But the extra prep lap meant the tires were slightly more degraded than the rest of the field, and the Red Bull couldn’t match Alonso’s pace through the first two sectors. Max had to do it all in the final sector, where the Aston Martin had been poor all weekend. He was maybe the only driver on the grid capable of pulling it off (*sideyes Lewis Hamilton*).

The starting grid for Sunday’s race was a Red Bull sandwich, with Max on pole and Checo starting from the back. Although Leclerc qualified third, he received a three-place grid penalty after an impeding incident with Norris during qualifying and had to start sixth. 

Monaco is known for its many race incidents, with most teams including the high likelihood of a red flag in their strategy decisions, so it was almost unnatural to watch everyone get away from the starting line without a red flag and only some minor contact between a few drivers in Lap 1. The first 50 laps of the race were relatively uneventful, aside from the usual Ferrari mistakes and misjudgments that put Sainz into the back of Ocon and damaged his front wing. However, everything descended into chaos on Lap 51 when it started to rain. One moment which saw Lance Stroll bouncing around like a pinball was particularly comical. 

Unfortunately for Alonso, his team made a bad strategy call when it started to rain. They called him into the pits and swapped his hard tires for mediums, instead of intermediates (intermediates are used in wet weather when it isn’t a heavy downpour, but there’s enough water on the track to warrant additional grip). Verstappen went in and switched to intermediates, and one lap later, Alonso had to pit again for intermediates. Had Alonso been given intermediates when he first pitted, he would have been ahead of Max with a reasonable shot of bringing home his 33rd win (Aston has gone back and forth on the veracity of this “reasonable shot”). Instead, he found himself over 15 seconds behind Max for the rest of the race.

In what was perhaps an answer to Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi’s negative comments towards his team’s performance this season, Esteban Ocon finished third, claiming his third career F1 podium. Mercedes, Ferrari, and McLaren rounded out the best of the rest, with a strong fourth and fifth-place performance by Mercedes likely due to their new upgrades. Mercedes’ team principal Toto Wolff wasn’t particularly thrilled with George Russell’s day though, which saw him penalized for an unsafe rejoin/crash into Perez and a separate error that cost him a podium finish. Ferrari had yet another disappointing weekend with a sixth and eighth-place finish. McLaren had both drivers finish in the points for the first time this season, with Norris in ninth and Piastri in tenth.

Here are links to the full qualifying and race results so you can check out how your favorite diver did in Monaco.

Spanish Grand Prix (June 4, 2023)

Barcelona was a weekend full of a lot of “same old, same olds,” with a few surprises sprinkled in for good measure. Verstappen dominated (no surprise there), a McLaren started in the top three (big surprise there) before losing roughly 20 places on the first lap (no surprise there) and the phrase “Mercedes has a great race car” was spoken out loud and unironically for the first time in over a year and a half (biggest surprise).

Mercedes and Ferrari were set to introduce significant upgrades to their cars in Imola. Barcelona was the first track where the teams could fully utilize their new upgrades because it’s a track with long straights and high-speed corners (unlike Monaco).

Some key takeaways:

• Mercedes finally stepped away from their problematic no-sidepod design and are happier for it;

• Ferrari seems to have misunderstood what an upgrade is and have in fact downgraded their car.

Realistically though, this is one race and it is too early to fully understand the strengths, or weaknesses, of these upgrades (and others). 

Verstappen grabbed another pole position in qualifying, in front of a surprisingly diverse mix of drivers behind him with seven different teams in the top ten (Red Bull, Ferrari, McLaren, Alpine, Mercedes, Aston Martin, and Haas). Carlos Sainz slotted in behind Max for his home grand prix and Lando Norris rounded out the top three spots for Sunday’s race. The diversity in the top ten was largely due to some big-name knockouts early on, with Leclerc out in Q1, and Russell and Perez both out in Q2.

The race started out like it normally does, with Max off the line and five seconds ahead of Sainz within 10 laps (although Sainz was ahead of him for maybe 0.2 seconds going into Turn 1 [Ed: Indistinguishable from winning the race according to my well-placed Maranello sources]. In a really crummy turn of events for Norris, he made contact with Hamilton in Turn 2, and sustained damage to his front wing which ruined his race. He ran in last for most of the rest of the race and finished seventeenth, just ahead of Magnussen (Haas), Bottas (Alpha Romeo), and Sargeant (Williams).

Mercedes started fifth (Hamilton) and twelfth (Russell) and Hamilton quickly (yes, quickly) made his way up into the podium places within the first 10 laps of the race, where he ran comfortably for the rest of the race. Mercedes walked away from the weekend with second and third-place podiums and is now sitting second, ahead of Aston Martin, in the Constructor’s Championship. While Hamilton was never a real threat to Max, the car looked quick and balanced throughout the entirety of the race and he was understandably ecstatic with the jump Mercedes made this weekend. With his contract negotiations underway, he is likely feeling a bit more enthused about walking into that meeting with Toto this week. [In my role as the Department’s leading F1 correspondent I reached out to Mercedes to ask for comment on Hamilton’s contract negotiations but they did not respond].

Ferrari had no race pace at all yet again, and Leclerc struggled to make up places from nineteenth on the grid while his teammate struggled to keep Mercedes at bay. In the end Sainz lost out to both Mercedes and Checo and finished fifth. Aston Martin had an unusually poor weekend, starting with an early mistake by Alonso in qualifying that compromised the floor of his car and put him in ninth for Sunday. During the race, both Aston Martins looked sluggish compared to their performance so far this season and they walked away with a disappointing sixth/seventh finish.

In another questionable call by the stewards, Yuki Tsunoda (AlphaTauri) was handed a five-second penalty for forcing Zhou Guanyu (Alpha Romeo) off the track in Turn 1 on Lap 56 of 66. This penalty bumped Yuki down to twelfth and cost him a points-place finish (he was predictably chill about it, though). While there was, of course, a lot of back and forth after the race about whether this penalty was warranted, the call underscores a continued inconsistency of the stewards’ decisions this season. Just last week, Haas team principal Guenther Steiner heavily criticized the stewards’ inconsistent decisions after Nico Hulkenberg was penalized for some contact during Lap One in Monaco. Steiner called on F1 to appoint professionals to these positions rather than leaving it to “laymen” to decide “the fate of people who invest millions in their careers.” Steiner was subsequently reprimanded by the FIA.

Is Mercedes officially the “best of the rest”? Will they be able to close the (very large) gap to Red Bull before the end of the season? Will Ferrari ever win a race ever again? All questions to be answered throughout the rest of the season. Let’s see what Canada will bring a couple of weekends from now on June 18th.

Here are links to the full qualifying and race results so you can check out how your favorite diver did in Barcelona.

In 1974, Argentina’s ruling military junta tried something new. Led by General Jorge Rafael Vidella (the “Hitler of the Pampa”), the junta launched an all-out assault against the Argentinian populace, targeting leftists, trade unionists and political opposition figures. “Subversives” were kidnapped, dragged away in the dead of night, imprisoned, tortured and murdered. In John Lee Anderson’s harrowing telling:

Hundreds of suspects were buried in anonymous mass graves, while thousands more were stripped naked, drugged, loaded onto military aircraft, and hurled into the sea from the air while they were still alive. The term “los desaparecidos”—“the disappeared”—became one of Argentina’s contributions to the global lexicon,

The regime called it a “Process of National Reorganization.” History calls it the Dirty War.

As many as 30,000 people were killed or disappeared during the Dirty War. Many of the victim’s children were stolen by the state to be raised by their parent’s murderers or sold on the black market. Like most state atrocities, the information we have on the Dirty War is muddied and incomplete. We will never know the full story. To this day, the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared are still searching for them.

General Vidella was questioned once about los desparecidos. His response was strange:

“The disappeared are just that: disappeared. They are neither alive nor dead. They are disappeared.

“If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.”

Henry Kissinger knew what was coming. The Dirty War was an outgrowth of Operation Condor, described by the CIA as "a cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion.” In reality, Condor was a ruinous U.S.-backed campaign of political repression and state terror. It joined eight South American military dictatorships – Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador – into a single security cooperative, combatting “revolution” by sending death squads across borders and exterminating supposed dissidents. 60,000 people died during Condor, half of them in Argentina. Kissinger - Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State and the man in charge of U.S. foreign policy - wasn’t phased. “In evidence that emerged from previous declassifications of documents during the Clinton Administration”, Anderson writes, “Kissinger was shown not only to have been aware of what the military was doing but to have actively encouraged it.”

Two days after the Argentine coup, Kissinger was briefed by his Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, William Rogers, who warned him, “I think also we've got to expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina before too long. I think they're going to have to come down very hard not only on the terrorists but on the dissidents of trade unions and their parties.” Kissinger replied, "Whatever chance they have, they will need a little encouragement . . . because I do want to encourage them. I don't want to give the sense that they're harassed by the United States.”

Encourage them he did. Kissinger, obsessed with the notion of a Marxism-haunted southern continent, spurred Congress to grant millions in military aid to the junta. “We understand you must establish authority”, Kissinger told the Argentine foreign minister in an early meeting. “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.”

The world as it is

Henry Kissinger, who turned 100 last week, is an outsized man amid outsized times. A German-born Jew who fled to New York as child before Kristallnacht, Kissinger returned to Europe as a member of the 84th Infantry Division, helping to liberate the Ahlem concentration camp outside Hanover. After the war, he enrolled at Harvard. He wrote an undergraduate thesis on “the Meaning of History." He joined the Council on Foreign Relations, studying nuclear weapons. He worked as a consultant and public intellectual, advising presidential campaigns. He became Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and, later, America’s first Jewish Secretary of State. He negotiated an opening to China, a feat of diplomacy so spectacular it has its own opera. He pursued détente with the Soviet Union and helped contain the 1973 Abrab-Israeli war. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. He survived Watergate. Along the way, observes one biographer, Kissinger managed to build “his own perpetual motion machine; the purpose of American power was to create an awareness of American purpose.”

Kissinger cultivated a distinctive brand of unsentimental political realism aligned with realpolitik (a term he disdains). For Kissinger, a stable world resembles the Peace of Westphalia, populated by “a multiplicity of political units, none powerful enough to defeat all the others, many adhering to contradictory philosophies and internal practices, in search of neutral rules to regulate their conduct and mitigate conflict.” The real world is darker - a place where “chaos threatens side by side with unprecedented interdependence.” Stability requires strong men with good judgment, serving their nation’s interests.

These days, Kissinger is enjoying a long second act as gravel-voiced public sage, fêted by the many and the powerful. There he is, opining on U.S.-China relations. There he goes, telling us how to avoid World War III. Kissinger is a master custodian of his own legacy, a self-certified great man of history. “No one,” notes a recent biographer, “has thought more deeply about international affairs.” And no one, perhaps, has come to conclusions quite like his, which so often “run[] so counter to what Americans believe or wish to believe.”

Kissinger was celebrated in the years after he left government, but his legacy has curdled with time. The slow creep of declassification and disclosure gave us a more detailed portrait of the man and his actions. It is lurid and disturbing. Nowadays, as Anderson notes in his profile, Kissinger is “but of a line of men held in fear and contempt for the immorality of their services rendered and yet protected by the political establishment in recognition of those same services” - William Tecumseh Sherman, Curtis Le May, Donald Rumsfeld. But Kissinger’s record is especially long and wide-ranging, and it’s worth reviewing.

“The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

During the Vietnam War, Kissinger orchestrated the illegal carpet-bombing of Laos and Cambodia, neutral countries used as staging areas and supply routes for Viet Cong fighters. At its high point, U.S. B-52s flew 3,875 sorties between March 1969 and May 1970. Kissinger personally approved each one.

The bombings lasted four and a half long years, eviscerating the two countries. Somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 civilians perished, all casualties of Kissinger’s superior air power. In Voices from the Plain of Jars, one Laotian survivor remembers:

"We lived in holes to protect our lives. There were bombs of many kinds. I saw my cousin die in the field of death. My heart was most disturbed and my voice called out loudly. (The airplanes came) until there were no houses at all. And the cows and buffalo were finished. Until everything was leveled and you could see only the red, red ground."

The bombings were wildly indiscriminate. They left a power vacuum, too, particularly in Cambodia, where it was quickly filled by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The regime murdered 2 million people from 1975 to 1979. And the U.S.'s role in their rise didn’t go unnoticed. In testimony before a Cambodian war crimes tribunal, the jailer Kaing Guek Eav (Pol Pott’s “chief torturer”), gave credit where due. “Mr. Richard Nixon and Kissinger” he testified, “allowed the Khmer Rouge to grasp golden opportunities.” Another regime cadre was more direct. “Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.”

The bombings were also an elaborate secret, shielded from Congress and the American public. Planes were rerouted in midair above Vietnam to bomb their real targets in Cambodia. Documents were forged. Evidence was burned - a furnace dedicated specifically for this purpose ran, according to the U.S. commander of armed forces in Vietnam, “probably 12 hours a day.” The bombings were strategic nonsense, too, far worse than useless. “K. We have had 10 years of total control of the air in Laos and V.Nam,” Nixon wrote Kissinger in 1972, as he was touting the air war during his re-election campaign. “The result = Zilch.”

Word got out, finally. When Nixon was impeached, the unlawful bombing of Cambodia was the first charge leveled against him. But its legacy lies heavy on both countries, even today. “You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present”, historian Greg Grandin explains. “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Kissinger has many such legacies. He approved the Indonesian invasion of East Timor a day before it began, telling President Suharto (whom he considered a “donor-client”) that “it is important that whatever you do succeed quickly.” The invading forces used U.S.-supplied weapons, subverting a legal ban. Genocide ensued. 300,000 people died. But the U.S. supported the illegal occupation for decades, incurring (in the words of one activist) “an enormous moral debt.”

Kissinger vigorously backed Pakistan’s 1971 invasion of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), which killed 3 million people in 8 months. Refugees flooded into neighboring India, a country Kissinger viewed as a hostile power. As the killings mounted, U.S. staff on the ground pleaded with Nixon and Kissinger to intervene. They were refused. Nixon’s infamous White House tapes captured the extent of the duo’s indifference (from the New York Times: In the Oval Office, Nixon told Kissinger that the Indians needed ‘a mass famine.’ Kissinger sneered at people who ‘bleed’ for “the dying Bengalis.’”). The U.S. consul general in Bangladesh formally dissented from U.S. policy, claiming genocide. He was removed from his post, and Kissinger labeled him a “maniac.”

Closer to home, Kissinger’s influence was just as malignant. He was, Anderson notes, “the ruthless cheerleader, if not the active co-conspirator, of Latin American military regimes engaged in war crimes.” In Chile alone, he helped overthrow the popularly elected Marxist Salvador Allende, observing that “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” He ushered in the demonic General Augusto Pinochet. He supported a CIA-backed murder of General René Schneider Chereau, the commander-in-chief of the Chilean military, passing it off as a botched kidnapping (Christopher Hitchens: “[U]nder the law of every law-bound country (including the United States), a crime committed in the pursuit of a kidnapping is thereby aggravated, not mitigated. You may not say, with a corpse at your feet, 'I was only trying to kidnap him.’”).

There’s more. Kissinger orchestrated political cover for the apartheid South African regime. He helped Nixon sabotage the Paris Peace Talks in 1968, prolonging the Vietnam War by five years. He betrayed Iraq’s Kurds, encouraging a 1975 uprising against Saddam Hussein before abandoning them when political winds shifted. He invited Turkey’s bloody invasion of Cyprus (during discussions with Turkey’s foreign minister on circumventing a U.S. arms embargo, Kissinger cracked: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”). The list goes on.

Human action is complex, especially on a grand scale. Cause and effect are hard to trace. But Kissinger embraced industrial-scale violence as an essential tool of statecraft. Judging by his significant influence and his own joyful eagerness to take credit for the world and its turnings, he can credibly claim to have wrecked millions of lives.

The trials of Henry Kissinger

There’s a case to be made that Henry Kissinger is a war criminal. It rests on the international law theory of complicity or accomplice liability, making a knowing contribution to another’s international crime. Several of Kissinger’s choices - in Cambodia, in Chile - fit the rubric well.

But Kissinger’s been on trial for years, really. Christopher Hitchens put him there, as did Seymour Hersch. He’s been sued by victims of the conflagrations he helped stoke. He’s been sought by judges in Argentina, Chile, France, Spain and elsewhere to give evidence and testify in proceedings related to atrocities committed on his watch. Activists have urged his arrest for violations of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. But laws, observes Hitchens, are like cobwebs - strong enough to hold the weak, too weak to hold the strong. For American men of state, they may not exist at all.

Kissinger, for his part, has rarely shown public remorse. When pressed, he can be callous. A new Intercept report, published just days ago, found evidence in Cambodia of “scores of additional bombings and ground raids that have never been reported to the outside world.” These atrocities remain mostly unknown to an indifferent outside world. And they are traceable to Kissinger. “When questioned about his culpability for these deaths”, the report notes, “Kissinger responded with sarcasm and refused to provide answers.”

Anderson’s profile touches on this trait in an anecdote about Robert McNamara, former U.S. defense secretary and Kissinger’s sometime comrade:

In Errol Morris’s remarkable 2003 documentary “The Fog of War,” we saw that McNamara, who was an octogenarian at the time, was a tormented man who was attempting to come to terms, unsuccessfully, with the immense moral burden of his actions as the U.S. defense secretary during Vietnam. McNamara had recently written a memoir in which he attempted to grapple with his legacy. Around that time, a journalist named Stephen Talbot interviewed McNamara, and then also secured an interview with Kissinger. As he later wrote about his initial meeting with Kissinger,

“I told him I had just interviewed Robert McNamara in Washington. That got his attention. He stopped badgering me, and then he did an extraordinary thing. He began to cry. But no, not real tears. Before my eyes, Henry Kissinger was acting. ‘Boohoo, boohoo,’ Kissinger said, pretending to cry and rub his eyes. ‘He’s still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty.’ He spoke in a mocking, singsong voice and patted his heart for emphasis.”

The mothers of the disappeared

In its very first sentence, the UN Charter says it exists “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” In the next, the Charter reaffirms “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” The two statements are interlinked. The first is a fact, a documentary statement about the bloodiest century we’ve ever seen. The second says that it mattered.

In international law, the modern doctrine of human rights is a response to Auschwitz and the atomic bomb. The sheer scale of the bloodshed during the 20th century was so totalizing, so outrageous, that something had to be done. The succeeding years saw a flurry of international treaties outlawing humanity’s worst crimes and guaranteeing fundamental protections - the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, the Convention Against Torture, the Refugee Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are magnificent documents, stirring statements of principle and collective intent. But they are also fragile, subject always to the colder calculations of state sovereignty and national interests. The rights they protect are non-violable in theory but routinely violated in practice, casualties of chaos, malevolence, and simple human failure.

As a moral principle, the phrase “fundamental human rights” references the absolute and the universal. But as a working concept - a notion in time, a trick of language whose power waxes or wanes as and how we use it - it is something very different. It is complicated, contingent, socially determined. It is open to interpretation and interpreted by how it is used, especially by those who say they value it. “Fundamental human rights” was the watchword of the American Century, a pure principle for a young and powerful country that believed itself set apart, different, divinely inspired, essentially good. America was never that, of course. But it believed otherwise, for a while. Later, human rights became a byword for American hypocrisy and hyperpower, betrayed by the country that claimed to stand for it first above all else.

Go back to the UN Charter for a moment. Go back to that beguiling word again, faith. It suggests that human rights may be true, but they need believing to be real. They demand reaffirmation, like a religious creed. They require action. They require protection. And they are something that we can lose. They can slip through our fingers.

Henry Kissinger’s life and work suggest he sees fundamental human rights as mutable, devoid of real content, untethered to anything beyond itself. Concern for human rights is a social statement, a way of speaking, one interest (at best) among many. It is a nuisance, basically. “I hold a strong view”, Kissinger said, “that human rights are not appropriate in the foreign policy context.” His actions bear that out. To Kissinger, human rights are the currency of activists. They are not the concerns of serious people because they are abstractions.

Are people abstractions? General Vidella seemed to think so. Los desparecidos, in his telling, are neither alive nor dead. They are uncertainties, unobserved and unknown states. They are ghosts. They were never really here at all.

He is wrong, of course. Every one of the disappeared was someone wholly unique and irreplaceable. When they were murdered they were lost, finally and forever. There is no proper human language for their loss - poetry, maybe. But in politics - in the self-styled language of the world as it is - the doctrine of human rights may be the closest we ever come to recognizing people as individuals, and individually sacred. 

We are mixed creatures and we leave mixed legacies. Henry Kissinger is no exception. But he used his considerable brilliance for terrible ends. His genius wrought destruction. He betrayed the only thing truly worthwhile about the American Century. The world is worse off for him and his choices.