Thinking about Thinking

About these texts

Essays? Not quite. Fully researched and documented academic treatises? No. Perhaps musings? More deliberate and developed. Some composite that challenges the more conventional literary genres? I hope so.

These texts, most of them shorter than the usual essay, range over a variety of subjects. Almost all are spinoffs from a word or idea, something that appeared in a dream, struck me while conversing about an entirely unrelated issue or when engulfed in the silence in which I immerse myself while exercising or just before giving myself to sleep. Some are urgent responses to the problems we live with today.

I don’t meditate. I’ve tried the practice and acknowledge its benefits for many, but have never been able to sufficiently empty my mind. There’s always that bit of cadmium red teasing at the far corner of my vision or a sudden movement that takes me somewhere on the wings of memory. Most meditative practices are also religious in nature, and I tend to shy away from anything that smacks of religion. My mind wanderings are more personal and also more practical.

Never Quite and Homunculus were the first pieces I wrote for this collection. Others quickly followed. Some, like Our Time Has Come, Abandoning Either/Or, On the Gender Spectrum, Preserving Racism or Preserving History? and Was Shakespeare a Political Poet? are relatively current. Art and Technology through Time and Space is the most recent. Some respond to current events, immediate and dramatic as the wars we resist, the prospect of losing our habitat, or the covid-19 pandemic that assaulted us just as I was gathering these texts into book form. As the crisis unfolded, its sudden and overwhelming nature kept provoking my need to respond. Other pieces address issues I have grappled with most of my adult life and some when I was still a child. They reflect my passions and what I want to be saying about them as I move through my ninth decade. In this era of flagrant lies and so-called fake news, I believe it is more than ever important to make sure that every word we utter means exactly what we intend it to say.

— Albuquerque, December 2020

Speak—

But do not split the No from the Yes.

Give your saying also meaning:

Give it its shadow.¹

— Paul Celan

It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with;

it matters what concepts we think

to think other concepts with.²

— Donna Haraway

1. Speak, You Too. Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, trans. Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, p. 149.

2. Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press, 2016, p 118.

Never Quite

I am reaching back through time and space, my outstretched arms flailing through a murky sea, heaving and tossing. Objects, broken or whole, collide with me, although there is no danger of damage inflicted. This is not a physical exercise but one of the senses, the mind. Time seems to expand and contract, but no discrete event comes into focus. I am searching for something elusive—whether I give it my utmost concentration or the freedom of totally letting go.

Some would surely search for their birth, that volatile frontier between amniotic waters and first gulp of air. Or a preview of their death. These are frontiers about which humans have wondered since the beginning of time. There are plenty of tales, none of which have ever seemed reliable to me: too unimaginative, too clichéd, too much in the mold of religious dogma. Besides, I am sure memory itself works differently on either side of those impenetrable lines, its function and exercise operating by rules we cannot know. Too much to expect our memories to bridge such disparate territories.

I am also less ambitious. Seeking out less dramatic, more conscious, change. For example, it would be a welcome accomplishment were I simply able to distinguish those words that first gave name to colors and how I responded to them. Mother would have pointed to ordinary objects, encouraging me with a question such as What color is this? and after much trial and error I would have responded in a way that fit the question, causing her a smile of pride and satisfaction as my infant voice announced blue or red. What was my perception like before I was able to give these answers?

First color or number. First ability to link two or three words in something that could be called a sentence. First identification of words on a page. First successful effort to produce those words myself. First utterance completely of my own creation. First narrative. First successful lie. Such moments as these are the ones I would retrieve now, through the long fog of eighty-four years of mindless accumulation. The muddled moment before, and illuminated one after, learning to read. The before and after that outlined in brilliant light an understanding of how I might add a dart of my own discovery to someone else’s equation. Learning to sit up or crawl or walk: such physical advances seem rote by comparison. It’s the imaginative moment of just-attained consciousness I hope to lay bare, repossess.

The impossible journey began this morning as I lay on the couch, eyes half closed, trying to heal from a flu that beat me to submission more than a week ago. Fever can free one’s thought process, level the playing field, and remove obstacles standing in the way. It was February of 2020, and I had recently returned on a very long flight from Uruguay. In retrospect, I may have come down with a mild form of the coronavirus, not yet in most of the world’s vocabulary. covid-19 or not, at times I was near delirium.

My mind traveled to the unknown and unrecorded instant when for the first time I didn’t simply understand that one train of thought or another was logical, believable, important, but injected something of my own into the exploration, thus expanding or changing the direction of its meaning. A creation of my own, building upon knowledge itself, that ragged tangle: millennia of linked ideas, a patchwork beginning long before written history and continuing seamlessly into a future that may or may not come to be. That moment in which I may claim my place in the storyline. Impossibly elusive and at once deeply precious.

The nature of human aging seems to erase initial memories even as it acquires new ones. We lose those made early on as we replace them with those of more recent vintage. A reversal of sorts occurs in people diagnosed with dementia: they may lose more recent recollections while retaining or revisiting those made long ago, often surprising loved ones resigned only to loss. So little is known about such painful memory change, and it is so often misinterpreted, that generalizing about the phenomenon leads us into dead-end conjecture at best.

As I ponder this, I realize that what most interests me are not really those break-out moments in which I was first able to identify a color or decipher a word on the page. For years, throughout early and middling adulthood, I walked an increasingly complex map on which I waded through choices: does this or that explanation for the mystery of life seem more reasonable? Who among the thinkers who have gone before inspires the most confidence in me? Who can I follow? Whose thinking must I shed? At some point, following was not enough. I needed to lead, or at least to be part of the leading contingent. And I found myself adding a question here, an idea there. I recognized my own ability to shape the conversation.

A lot of it is about passion. And questions, our reluctance or readiness to ask them. We are conditioned to believe our world is peopled by experts who have all the answers and the rest of us who are destined to follow their advice. And so, we have situations such as that of the famous British anthropologist Eric Thompson who, in the nineteenth century, set the work on the decipherment of Maya glyphs back at least one hundred years because no one dared challenge the direction of his research—which turned out to be wrong. Or the respected linguist Noam Chomsky, a century later, who posited that language acquisition was in our dna. That, too, turned out to be an erroneous assumption, delaying research in the field by decades. Our great thinkers deserve our admiration. But anyone can be fallible with regard to one or more aspects of a problem, and discovery often comes from unexpected sources. Questioning is a vital part of learning. In an educational system designed to produce mimics rather than original thinkers, it is rarely encouraged.

I have come to understand that today’s extreme specialization fragments the connective tissue that renders the map readable. Contrary to common assumption, the more we concentrate on each piece of the whole, the less we may understand. The more holistic our approach, the easier it is to enter underpasses, detours, and byways, cross bridges, and wander footpaths. A sure-footed mountain goat may lead us along the faintest of trails. A mole may take us beneath the earth’s surface into its hidden abode where there is no light, only sensation. If we could bring ourselves to be humbler, if we respected the smallest ideas and were willing to move as easily into them as into the largest, we might be surprised at what we find. If we could resist reductionist thinking for holistic vision, we might be able to go further.

And so I search, allowing my mind to wander through my years, ignoring limitations born of class, culture, race, gender, and habit. No direction is left unimagined, no pathway is too insignificant. I may yet find a sliver of what I seek. If I do, I hope I don’t let it slip through my fingers out of ignorance, intimidation, failure of the imagination, lack of confidence, or fear.

Sometimes we can only really see with our eyes closed.

The Horse and the

Eighteen-Wheeler

The writer Edward Abbey was best known for masterpieces such as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang. But we went to the University of New Mexico together in the 1950s and I remember an earlier novel, now forgotten by all but a few devoted fans. The Brave Cowboy, published in 1956, is a Western story at the end of which the protagonist gallops out of the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque headed for Mexico. Just as he crosses Tijeras Canyon, braving the traffic on what was once old Route 66, he is hit by an eighteen-wheeler barreling through. After Abbey became famous, The Brave Cowboy was made into a movie with Kirk Douglas playing the lead.

Those who believe in fate assume that the journeys of horseman and truck were predestined to collide at that moment and in that place. Those, like myself, who favor chance would say the two just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The collision was a terrible accident. Either way, its impact on rider, horse, and truck driver would have been the same. But its implications for the way we think about the sudden turns our lives may take couldn’t be more different.

Some people claim that everything happens for a reason. This belief extends even to such horrific episodes as the Nazi Holocaust and the Cambodian Genocide. For atrocities such as these, unabashed power abuse, extreme racism or classism, and a particular sort of political moment must converge.

Those who credit fate generally believe in God. When asked to explain how an all-loving deity can allow such things to take place, they respond with some version of: He works in mysterious ways, It isn’t for us to question, or We must have faith. Or perhaps they simply explain it more secularly by saying: What’s meant to be is meant to be.

Those of us who are inclined to interpret Abbey’s story scientifically believe that an unforeseen, meaningful, shocking, or even fortuitous collision—of people, events, or ideas—is the result of an infinite number of variables that bring the principals together by chance. Something like the butterfly effect, by which small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system.

Each occurrence depends on the one before. And each can no more be predicted than prevented—or provoked. They include everything from the Big Bang to the surge of love I feel for my wife and the kisses we exchange. The brave cowboy and the trucker are fictional, but such events happen every day in real life.

On August 14, 1997, twelve European hikers set out to explore the northern Arizona desert and its canyons. Most were from France, one each from England and Switzerland. A local man warned the group not to enter a narrow limestone slot, but their Los Angeles-based guide, Pancho Quintane, couldn’t imagine why. He looked up at the sky, which was cloudless. Later, Benson Nez, a ranger on the Navajo reservation, confirmed that: Rain hadn’t fallen where they were hiking.

The storm came without warning. A cloudburst fifteen miles away sent heavy runoff down a normally dry stream bed in Antelope Canyon and toward the unsuspecting hikers. It caught them in a narrow slot canyon from which there was no escape; an eleven-foot wall of muddy water, slurry, and fast-moving debris killed most of them instantly. Only the guide escaped with his life. His clothes had been ripped from him. He was battered and bloody but alive. All the others perished. One woman’s body was later found miles away in Lake Powell. Several of the bodies were never recovered.

People think of the desert as a dry place where loss of life is due to dehydration. That is true. But it is also a place where one can die by drowning. For the latter to happen, the elements must come together in a perfect recipe for death. Not fate but random occurrences.

I remember another moment of sudden rain, not tragic but illuminating. An eighteen-wheeler played its part in this one as well. In 1963, the great National Museum of Anthropology was being built in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park. It was decided that the immense statue of the rain god Tlaloc, found a century earlier in a dry stream bed near the town of Coatlinchán in the state of Mexico, should be placed at the museum’s entrance. And so, on April 16, 1964, the statue, weighing 168 tons and standing twenty-three feet tall when upright, was mounted on a specially conditioned truck bed and began its journey to the capital.

I was one of the twenty-five thousand onlookers lining the streets the day Tlaloc arrived. The sky was a brilliant blue. It was the dry season and there wasn’t a sign of rain. As the statue made its slow way through the city’s central plaza—the Zócalo, where the Aztec pyramid of Tenochtitlán once stood—torrents of water suddenly descended from that clear blue. This was, after all, the rain god. I don’t think anyone there that day thought the downpour strange. Many may have believed it to be a supernatural event. I believe it to have responded to some law of nature we do not yet understand because we are so unwilling to consider any but our Western scientific approach.

Even those of us who believe in chance understand that there are forces and motives that lead to fortuitous or ominous collisions. I am thinking now of yet another eighteen-wheeler, this one thundering along an almost empty stretch of road that runs south to north through New Mexico Navajo country near the Arizona border. One night some years back, a young man named Aaron, desperate about life prospects he must have felt powerless to control, got drunk and ran out into the pathway of that truck. The driver, horrified, slammed on his brakes but was unable to stop in time. Aaron’s suicide, like those of far too many Native American youths, was preordained in a way. Not by fate, but by a neocolonialist system that punishes the poor in a profoundly racist society. You can only imagine that this sort of tragedy is about destiny if you believe the few deserve everything while the many remain bereft of opportunity. Or that poverty exists because some people are lazy or don’t work hard enough.

I am fascinated by the disparate journeys that bring people, locations, events, or ideas together at a particular moment. I have gone to places where history was being made and ended up living in those places during periods of dramatic social change. Such experiences allowed me to understand the world in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise. When people asked me how or why I took that route, I used to say: I guess I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I don’t say that anymore. I have come to understand it wasn’t true.

I didn’t just happen to land among the abstract expressionist artists and poets who were inventing a new creative language in the New York City of the late 1950s or to travel the length of North Vietnam during the last six months of the U.S. American war there. I didn’t just happen to go to Cuba during that country’s second decade of revolution, or to Nicaragua during its first years of Sandinista struggle. I chose to be in those vibrant places at those historic moments. Not fate or destiny, but idealism, curiosity, and decision determined my choices.

In the same way, every major event in my life has been based on choice, a conscious determination to nurture or create. I chose to have each of my children. I resolved to be a writer. I decided to join the struggle for justice wherever I