Push Through the Pain

With summer rampaging through the Midwest,a topic of conversation the other day was lawn-mowing. It's one of those things I refuse to do. Given my spoiled upbringing and living situations, this has been a feasible stance for me to take on the issue. Oh, I've done it before. But I struggle to think of more than a handful of times that it happened. Why this attitude? Well, for one, the smell of fresh grass nearly shuts down my lungs. I have to hold my breath and start smashing buttons on my AC if I pass a mowing crew on the highway. The other thing is that I am just not outdoorsy. I don't like bugs and I don't like being hot. I read somewhere the other day that there are things we just subjectively like or don't like, and trying to put that in rational terms that others will understand will just drive us plain crazy. I don't know if that applies only to the subjective fields of art and music or could be expanded to even personality quirks like hatred of mowing. Nevertheless, I find introspection to be a fun mental exercise, so I guess I'll continue with my thoughts even if they are mere rationalizations.

My step-mom asked me what I was going to do when I got my own place and simply had to mow the lawn. My first choice would be to figure out a situation in which I don't have a yard. But I would kinda like a kitchen garden some day, even with the bugs and the hot. And since it seems like I'm destined to take the family chihuahua with me when I go (he's firmly attached himself as my cat's best friend), it would be nice to have a yard for him. My second response was that I would somehow find an ancient push mower to use, but that was mostly a joke response because I didn't realize how feasible it would be. I just liked the idea of having an old push mower. I think part of it is my desire to not acquire things that will end up breaking in a way that I can't fix them. I was raised by carpenters and electricians, so I have a lot of intuitive problem-solving abilities when it comes to these things, but I know my limitations. Add too many parts, and that's it, I might as well buy something again. Plus, with the push mower I wouldn't need to worry about gassing it up and pulling a bunch of levers and throttles or whatever those contraptions have. I wouldn't have to worry about bothering my neighbors if I decided to do it early in the morning before it got too hot. It might even be a bit gentler on the grass and not throw out as many allergy-inducing pieces. All around, I like the idea.

I think I also have an attachment to the idea because I have memories of my cousins and I being maybe 9 or 10 and playing with an ancient, rusty metal push mower around my aunt's front yard. Why were pre-teens being entertained by a tetanus-inducing heap of scrap metal? Well, because I had one of those awesome childhoods that was un-blemished by helicopter parenting. If you wanted to wander the woods all day, crossing the creek (pronounced "crick") on dubiously structured overturned logs and jumping into the deep parts of the water that later turned out to be wastewater drainage ponds, well, those were your mistakes to make. That last part? Totally happened to my cousin and his friend. I was part of the contingent that did not jump into that water and got to laugh as he got hosed down in the yard and smelled, literally, like shit for the rest of the day. We also played make-believe Boxcar Children, and our grandpa would take us down to the country dump-site for various things to help our little imaginations.

Anyway, I was so shut off to the idea of lawn work until I went on this little foray that I didn't even realize they sold modern push-mowers. I have tunnel vision when I go to places like Lowe's or Menards because I hate going there if I can avoid it (wandering a store the size of a city block so I can find the exact door hinge that I'm looking for but will probably not find when I do reach the correct aisle is just not my idea of fun), so it's not like I'm browsing the shelves for the latest trends in home maintenance. One of those trends, green living, means that when I do get my own place with the tiniest yard I can find, there will be numerous choices for my hippie yard-work desires. Woo!

Yes

The Passage

Only I would take a "break" from Moby Dick to read a 750 page monstrosity for my own amusement. I'm happy I did, though. The weird thing is how and why this book caught my attention in the first place. Well, not entirely weird, since Momo basically just sent me the NY Times article on its release. What I mean is that the focus of the NY Times article was on how this entire book's publication and fast sale of the movie rights (both happening I think before the book was even finished), was because it was supposedly a vampire story. And I guess it is, in some vague sense. Definitely more Bram Stoker lore than Twilight, that's for sure, but the fact that the infected resemble vampires isn't really a focal point of the story. Going into it the only things I knew about the story were in that article. I really didn't know what I had signed up for at all. I just picked it up and started. Lucky for me, the only kind of book I like better than a cheesy vampire romance is an apocalyptic outbreak drama, which is exactly what this is. (How great is that wiki article for those of us predisposed to checking our way through reading lists?) In my list of all time favorite books that I have read over and over again, The Stand, World War Z, and The Andromeda Strain rank high. There have seriously been times where I have finished one of those books and had the desire to just flip back to page 1 and start all over again (and sometimes I have done just that). Also, I will watch any awful tv-miniseries version of those books, even if they do "star" Benjamin Bratt. I don't know that anything could be said to star that stilted-acting-generically-attractive man. (I'm not sure I even knew I had a thing against him until now. I think it's the fact that an episode of Law & Order with him in it means I am being denied Jesse L. Martin, and I really only like that series for the holy trinity of Orbach, Watson and Martin).

The Passage is a little too long to indulge myself in reading it that way, but it holds my fascination in the same way as those books do. Even when the premise seems laughable (a disease that creates murderous zombie rage or blood-sucking superhumans), the plausibility of the human reaction is what makes the story so great. I just got chills thinking about some of the common scenes that these books have. Nearly all of them have passing scenes in which the protagonists find a church, full to the brim of people getting their last minute worship on, or performing mass suicide to avoid the inevitable, or performing mercy killings of children to spare them the coming danger. That's the lesson, kiddies. It's always easier to die than survive, to pray rather than do something, anything.

But that's just Act 1, Scene 1. This book is like 5 books in one. And 5 styles in one. At times it would be more like World War Z or a Crichton novel. There were passages that were meant to be documents and data that were released as a historical or scientific inquiry. The author may claim he's never read Twilight, but I would be shocked to learn that he hadn't read Z or Andromeda. Possibly The Road, too, but someone who has read that one will have to fill me in. But there was this whole supernatural element that was much more Stephen King. I know I'm just listing off other stories and using those to describe this boo, but that is completely what it read like. It was like someone combined all of those books into one and maybe expanded into a little bit of Orson Scott Card's Xenocide, and there you go.

There are a few reasons that I bring up Xenocide, but I'll try to focus on the parts that for one, aren't spoilers, and for another, are things I can easily explain, since it seems like I am the only one in the world who has read that line of Card's Ender series. After the first part of the story, the disease-ravaging part, the story focuses on a community of survivors. Not only that, but it skips ahead 100 years to the descendants of those survivors and the community that they have built. In Xenocide, a series of events leads to the opening up of the star system, and groups of people choose a planet and start to build their own world there. Over time and generations, they become isolated from the rest of the galaxy. Space travel takes too long to make travel between the communities feasible, and although their means of communication is instantaneous, the happenings of the outside world become less important than the day to day drama of crops and interpersonal relationships. It's this disconnect from the outside world that is common to both stories. But what I enjoy is the author's mental exercise in socio-cultural origins in these situations. What lingo would we develop to refer to things? What words and concepts would we lose entirely because they were irrelevant to our existence now or the technology was gone? And how would that change us, as a people? What mistakes would we make again, when all the people who remembered the past were all gone? As I said, The Passage is a bunch of books in one, and it moves on from that examination and back into the stream of the battle between infected and survivors, but the glimpse into a world where children might as well be born on a different planet for all that it resembles our own upbringing is one of my favorite parts of this book.

I just re-read that article and realized that he has plans for a trilogy. That is a word that makes me shiver with anticipation my friends. Love it. Although it does make me re-evaluate the ending, since I thought that I was going to have to mentally and emotionally adjust to deal with the loose threads that he had left. I don't know that I would be disappointed if he decided not to finish it. There's something poignant about the ending, however unresolved, and there are mysteries that may be diminished by a resolution.

p.s. I just glanced at the Amazon reviews as I was adding links to this entry, and someone noted that this was definitely not Twilight; they won't be making "Team Babcock" shirts any time soon. Please someone else finish this book so that they can find that as hilarious as I just did. Now I'm tempted to do just that. What a conversation starter that would be.

"I'll die a pagan"

I'm supposed to be reading Moby Dick with a friend. I was also supposed to be blogging. Let's just ignore the hiatus and attempt to get into this thing. First, an aside.

I'm a bad reader. Granted, I'm fast. But I read like I do a great many other things in my life - all at once or not at all. Meaning that whether a book is 150 pages or 1500, I want to read it beginning to end in one sitting. This is great for being able to say that I started at the beginning and saw all the pages hereafter, but it makes for a meaningless journey and sometimes a complete inability to recall anything I just read outside the general structure of the plot. This explains why I gravitate towards the simple stories - the young adult, fantasy, sci-fi, the recurring character series in which the entire series is explained over and over again in the first few pages. I enjoy and have enjoyed more complicated fare, of course, but it just utilizes a whole different part of my personality and brain to do so. Anyway, that's why this has been difficult, in a nutshell. I get distracted when I stop in the midst of a reading, but if I blow through it I can't remember any of it to discuss with others. I finally decided that I would divide the book into 5 portions, each one about 100 pages, and just tackle one piece at a time.

When a friend texted me late one night asking whether I thought the whale from Moby Dick hated Ahab, and then subsequently decided that she wanted to attempt a re-reading of the story to find the answer, I agreed to participate, to change my m.o. I've read it before, for a class in college (Great American Lit). My approach to it back then was kind of amusing. For one, I had a crush on my professor, so I was determined to have his esteem. I even read The Emperor of Ocean Park in my free time because he was giving a talk on it at a school function that I had decided to attend. Nerd-crush. Anyway, I also decided that if I was going to tackle this thing, I was going to do it right. I was not going to use study aids. I was not going to skim when it got boring. I was going to read every single word on those pages so that I could say with all honesty at the end that I had done it. And you know what? I still didn't remember a single thing outside of the general plot. Sure it was like, 8 years ago, but there are just a number of things that stand out to me during this re-reading. I have found myself laughing out loud while reading it. I'm completely entertained by Melville's sense of humor, but also amazed by the poetry of his sometimes over-dramatic tirades. Have I changed so much in those years that these things passed me by back then?

In an effort to parse my writing (I really could use an editor), I'll try to give broad sweeps. You can read the story for yourself, or barring that, you can read the Cliff Notes or Wiki or what have you. I'm just going to say what I thought, pretending that we have all read it and are just having a discussion. Starting with the Extracts/Pre-Chapter text. I'll just say I don't know what the point of it is. Perhaps someone else can enlighten me? To me, the first portion, about the usher, seems to mock a person who would obsess over the words, the names of things. Maybe it is telling us not to be concerned about the names of things, the words one chooses to use. Or maybe it's just the opposite, that words have importance. The second portion, about the sub-sub librarian, also seems to mock obsession. The librarian collects every mention of a whale, but he will never be able to tell the full story. I think it seems like Melville is apologizing in advance for the fact that he will be unable to ever cover all of the bases when it comes to whales, even though he has obsessively tried to do so in the text.

If any book was designed to get you from the start, it's this one. For all that he is clearly and very apparently a learned man and a good writer, Melville created in Ishmael (or re-created himself in Ishmael), a man who defends slaves, cannibals and the riff-raff of sailors. "Who ain't a slave? Tell me that," he says, and he claims that they're the ones who see things first hand and actually determine what happens after that. The first line of the story is a classic, but it's the following paragraphs that get to me. He talks about how the land makes him mean-spirited and how just has to get to sea and away from the land.

Those were the parts that enchanted me. The ones that made me laugh out loud mostly centered around Queequeg, the cannibal that Ishmael befriend's on his land-based journey to the Nantucket ships. I loved imagining Ishmael having a crazy fit when the landlord told him about his roommate being a cannibal and a head-hunter. I could just see the sputtering, the indecision. Their subsequent spooning in bed and Pagan friendship-marriage is bizarre, but for some reason I like the idea of Ishmael having someone to watch his back. It comforts me for some odd reason. Although his cannibal nature worries the Quaker owners-captains of the Pequod at first (even though they are "fighting Quakers...Quakers with a vengeance"), when they see what he could do with a harpoon, Captain Peleg announces: "We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats." I was sad to see the ship disembark and leave Captains Bildad and Peleg behind.

The cannibals and Quakers allow Melville/Ishmael to expound on one of his favorite subjects and mine - religion. It's part of the reason I like Ishmael so much and am so invested in his character's fate. He is an all around accepting and egalitarian man. Husband to a cannibal ("I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy."), tolerant of the religion of others even if it forms no large part of his own personality, and able to see the poetry of a good sermon. I don't think I have ever enjoyed a real-world sermon as much as I loved Chapter 19's sermon in the sailor's chapel; it was as if I had never heard the story of Jonah before now. In one memorable portion, Queequeg asks Ishmael to join him in his evening worship to his idol, named Yogo. Ishmael justifies joining him by saying that to worship is to do the will of God, and the will of God is to follow the Golden Rule. Since Ishmael would have Queequeg join in his own particular form of worship, it follows that Ishmael must join his. That means he has to worship a pagan idol. Clearly, Christians have never really subscribed to the Ishmael school of religious theory. Also, Ishmael should have been a lawyer.

Chapter 23 is one of the shortest chapters (although they're all pretty much just snippets in the grand scheme of things), but I love it's language and the story it tells. Truly, these little "pointless" asides are the reason the story is so long, but who would deny Melville these little jaunts when they're so lovely? For whatever reason, Ishmael is commenting on seeing a familiar face as they're leaving port. His name is Bulkington, and he was a man that Ishmael had encountered when he first sat in Peter Coffin's Inn. A group of whaling men came in from a ship that had just returned to port from a long voyage. This man, Bulkington, had just returned from one voyage only to sign up for another on the Pequod. "The land seemed scorching to his feet," Ishmael comments. He compares Bulkington to the ship itself. To others, the port and land stand for safety and comfort. But for a ship, land is dangerous. Coming up on the land would destroy her. "With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuse's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!" This chapter, which Ishmael/Melville calls the stoneless grave of Bulkington, breaks my heart for all of its seeming randomness. There are several instances of Melville doing this - talking about fighting against inevitability. Or that's how I interpret it anyway. For one, the sermon talks about how obeying God is disobeying oneself, and how that's the hardest part. Then, Ishmael ruminates on how he thinks that perhaps this life is just a shadow, and that death is the real thing - that in death he would shed the bad portions of himself and become a better man. Maybe like falling is easier than fighting gravity and staying upright. Now this - the ocean, supposedly a ship's only friend, constantly tries to push her into the land and destroy her, and she must fight to remain out at sea. I'm still thinking on this theme, I'll try to expand on it later, because as of now I still don't know what he's trying to say. Is he saying that it's worth it to fight or not? Is he a fatalist?

So those are some of my impressions, as briefly as someone like me is able. But because there are so many parts that I love, I'll leave you with a few other random bits and pieces of this amazing writing.

"Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions?"

"The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself."

"Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan."

"He was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him."

"Very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another."

"Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans."

"I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug."

"If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication."

"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!"

"Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!"

"It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me."