Books 9 and 10 of 2018

Denis Johnson has passed away. While he was in the process of dying he composed some final stories which feature characters who ruminate largely on mortality and dying. Or at least on finding ways to kill time while waiting for death to arrive.

If you have loved Denis Johnson stories in the past--for example the collection Jesus' Son: Stories, which first caught my eye 25 years ago when I was Literature Department Bookseller at Borders Books & Music store 043 in Towson, MD--then you should definitely get this as a worthy final chapter in the work of a fine writer.

The stories are reminiscent of Cheever, or Carver, or even Sherwood Anderson. They have a thin veneer of middle-class suburban respectability belied by derangement and perversion, obsession and addiction. But there is a deep empathy for the misguided and lost souls in his work, along the lines of George Saunders. And though his work can shock or disgust, often the jolts are hilarious.




I read in this breezy esoteric rumination that Jupiter is the potential Sun of a new solar system, where certain advanced souls who've progressed beyond Earthly re-incarnation gather in order to work out their final karmic debts before becoming a glowing manifestation of perfection similar to our Sun. I've read this idea in Ouspensky as well, and of course if you've seen Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, you are also somewhat familiar with this ancient teaching.

I was of course fascinated to learn that Guatama Buddha has reincarnated on Mars in order to fulfill the Christ mission for its denizens. And that St. Francis is there to help him.

Steiner only achieved access to this knowledge by following Goethe's methods of scientific observation: ie, trying to meditate on plants and seeds until their true impulse was revealed. Soon he was visited by a representative of an esoteric order who initiated him into the Temple and allowed him access to the Reader's Digest Condensed Akhasic Records.

Netflix

I've only watched The Great Ecstacy of the Sculptor Steiner so far. Took me right back to ABC's Wide World of Sports and Jim McCay's "the agony of defeat," repeated weekly over footage of a ski-jumper crashing off the end of the ramp. Jim McCay lives in Parkton, near where I went to high school. I used to help him load his groceries when I worked at Graul's Superthrift grocery.

But back to Steiner and Herzog. Steiner effortlessly breaks ramp records wherever he jumps, and despite passing the safety limit and regularly falling he keeps doing so. Herzog ties Steiner's urge to fly to his wood carvings and the pent-up energies the sculptor sees stored within uncut chunks of branch and stump. There is a lot of beautiful footage of athletes soaring in slow-mo, and there are several disturbing crashes. Steiner in flight gapes with his mouth wide open in an obvious state of transcendence. What mysterious force drives people to launch themselves more than 150 meters down a hill? Steiner recites a story about a raven he raised as a child which was eventually tormented by other ravens, but I suspect this might be a Herzog script inserted into the documentary--he's been known to do that. Perhaps not. It seemed too 'perfect' somehow, the way it mirrors Steiner's torments as undisputed master of his craft.

I look forward to the short documentary about my home state of Pennsylvania.

Harper's had an interesting article about Herzog a few months back that I forgot to mention here. I like the way it closes:

...I told Herzog how much I admired him, and how thankful I was that he had agreed to see me. Herzog seemed neither surprised nor pleased by my effulgence. Instead he looked at me for a disarmingly long time--so long, in fact, I began to feel like a character in a Werner Herzog film. Finally, he said: "There is a dormant brother inside of you, and I awaken him, I make him speak, and you are not alone anymore." We shook hands and he was gone. I walked outside, through a curtain of Los Angeles sunshine, to the street's edge, where I stood for a long time, ecstatic and not quite alone.

Tom Bissell, December 2006