Book #27 of 2020: Horizon by Barry Lopez

"You can say their names as they were beads on a rosary or something, remind yourself of Sojourner Truth, remind yourself of Whitman, remind yourself of the writings of Thomas Jefferson about "the rights of man," even though he didn't get the implication of what he was saying. There's a connected set of figures, a repository of dynamic, moving, conflicted, half-wrong-all-the-time figures who are trying to sort through the values that would make human life possible. And we at this moment particularly need them."  Robert Hass interview, The Paris Review Summer 2020

Barry Lopez takes us on a journey around the world to places he's visited. Along the way he thinks deeply about heroic figures and their ambiguity: sea-faring explorers, Arctic adventurers, settlers in the Outback, theorists and philosophers, industrialists and artists. Lopez, who has himself journeyed widely and inhabited extreme environments and written thoughtfully about his experiences, is troubled by the state of Earth and the systems of oppression and exploitation many of his childhood heroes opened up with their exploration. We move from the Arctic Circle to the Galapagos, from Africa to Australia, and finally to Antarctica. There are moments in the Pacific Northwest and Asia and South America sprinkled throughout. There are many troubling questions raised, and no answers. Hence the title Horizon. A horizon is of course a physical boundary--the rim past which one can't see. Lopez at a young age was inspired by explorers to go past physical horizons and discover and experience as much as possible. But there is also the horizon of time: what comes next, now that the Earth has been "ravished and plundered, ripped and bit, tied with fences" in the words of Jim Morrison.

Lopez posits that indigenous wisdom and voices likely point the way to a healthier and more just future. My favorite character from the book is Ranald McDonald. Lopez uses McDonald and his motivations and exploits to counterbalance Captain James Cook, who Lopez still wants to admire despite some obvious imperialist flaws. By rescuing indigenous voices and heroes, by privileging them now before its too late, we might be able to prevent the next horizon from being a tip over into global catastrophe.

Book # 29 of 2020: The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen

I like to consider myself well-read, with a fairly wide experience of World Lit and a strong knowledge of American and European novels. But Elizabeth Bowen has somehow eluded my erratic truffle-hunting. What a great novel!

The book is divided into three chunks. In the first a young English girl is dropped at a house in Paris en route to visit her grandmother in the south of France. She encounters a young boy who is also waiting here, a boy adopted who is to meet his birth mother for the first time that day. Henrietta and Leopold are mysterious and their encounter is unpleasant. We watch them behaving without adult supervision and it's a bit creepy how adult they are despite the stuffed animal toy and their reliance on Miss Fisher as they transit to their next destinations. There are a lot of echoes of The Turn of the Screw: the children seem unnaturally aware of the adult world, as though they've been exposed to some grown-up grotesquerie which the narrator hides. Something is haunting them, but not necessarily supernatural.

In the second chunk we find out about Leopold's parents and their connection to Miss Fisher. There is an affair with profound consequences. Leopold and who he is and why become more clear. The haunting is rendered less mysterious.

In the third chunk we return to the present of the novel. I shall say no more lest I spoil it.

Bowen's prose is exquisite, particularly so in her rendering of place. The characters are real people with depth, and their pain is first rendered with tender clues and only eventually made manifest through back story. Were I to choose a current writer of similar skill it would be Colm Toibin.

Book #30 of 2020: The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

There is a long-running debate about Conrad's little novel and what it means. Any work of lasting quality should have such a debate (there's a nice exploration of the salient points here). Was Conrad racist, and was he using tropes of 'savage Africa' in indefensible ways? Was he against one form of imperialism but for another? Was his work reinforcing European superiority?

I'd argue that Conrad was 'woke,' and was laying the groundwork for what it means to be 'woke' today, over 100 years ago. He was trying to express his burgeoning anxiety, an anxiety that all the structural underpinnings of his society and culture were based in immense criminality and shocking cruelty, and that the vast majority of people who benefited from these systems of oppression were blithely unaware of this reality. All the myths and propagandistic 'history' and the 'heroic' actions of admirable men were laid bare for him, and this cast him into a void. If the civilization whence all your morals and beliefs and knowledge derive turns out to be devoid of morals and built on lies, what next? Heart of Darkness is full of the radical tension that results when perceived truths and conventional wisdom are stretched taut and burst over the raw red wounds of slavery, butchery, conquest, and exploitation. Suddenly the heroic and civilizing are revealed as the truly barbaric, and one is confronted with the questions: Whose side are you on? How best do we confront this?

For Conrad it was to reveal "The horror, the horror" in a rich and demonically ambiguous work. It's impossible to revisit it without the ghosts of Apocalypse Now--many times when picturing scenes or characters as I re-read it, Dennis Hopper or Martin Sheen or Laurence Fishburn or Marlon Brando would intrude. That film used Conrad's novel to punch holes in the myths around American imperialism.

Yesterday in Baltimore a statue of Columbus was pulled down and cast into the Inner Harbor. Young people are feeling the anxieties which drove Conrad to write more than a century back, and they are acting on them. They are writing their own reactions to "The horror." Will this lay the foundation for new, more just economic and governmental structures, or will there be a harrowing collapse into chaos or reactionary violence? Time will tell.

Book #25 of 2020: Mindfulness in Action by Chogyam Trungpa

I've been struggling to get back to meditating daily since we moved to Panama and became expats two years ago. I gave away my zafu and zabuton before we moved, and never found a replacement spot to do 12 minutes of silent time at a pop. Tried prone meditation or sitting in a chair, but never really got it down as a regular practice. Tai Chi is of course a form of mindfulness, but it isn't the same as doing that cushion work each day, so while I continued the Tai Chi I still ached to sit still and observe my foolish mind spinning ego-justifying tales as restless thoughts and emotions unspooled themselves.

So I broke down and ordered a new DharmaCrafts Classic Zafu and Zabuton Set and had them shipped here, and used this practical little guide to restarting my daily practice. It's not really a book by Chogyam Trungpa--it's been cobbled together from lectures and old manuscripts. But it's nonetheless very useful and contains valuable insights into starting and maintaining a practice. I've probably read two dozen useful little guides to starting and maintaining a regular meditation practice, and this one has the best advice and the most down-to-earth and relatable analogies and examples. Though a Tibetan expat, Tungpa had a gift for finding creative (and often hilarious) ways to communicate complex Buddhist ideas into Western suburbanite language.

Highly recommended.

Book #24 of 2020: Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman

I enjoyed this second foray into the works of Robert Aickman as much as my first. These half-dozen or so carefully crafted novellas are exquisitely wrought masterpieces. Included herein is perhaps the best vampire story I've read, about a young English girl who goes down for the Count (see what I did there?). Also, there is a murderous Siren mermaid thing with an unsmiling red gash of a mouth filled with teeth. A cheap attic flat in London becomes a prison for a pornographer when a new tenant moves in below and brings a haunting along.

The characters and settings are vivid and drawn with a master's brush. The pristine realism of the stories is only quietly disrupted in the most unsettling and nigh unnoticeable ways.

If you like quiet creepy and cerebral spook stories, try Aickman. You shan't be disappointed!

Any one of these stories would make an excellent creepy film. Perhaps someone will pick these up and script them for Netflix or Amazon, much in the way Amazon made Philip K. Dick stories into the excellent series Electric Dreams.

Book #23 of 2020: Death Sentences by Toby Olson

A few years ago Toby Olson released a beautiful memoir of his wife and her prolonged deterioration via Alzheimer's. Now he has written a vivid and potent examination of her absence from his life. Death Sentences is a series of poems about what is left to him since her death. Reminiscences blend with current settings, Miriam physically present in past tense and solely in memory now. These are evocative and powerful short musings on loss and grief and aging alone. As with his earlier work, jazz standards often serve as thematic backdrop. Toby's imagination and gifts remain in full flourish, and I feel the hurt in this volume but at the same time note its pristine elegance and beauty.

Book #22 of 2020: The Eternal Drama by Edward F. Edinger

Edinger has marinated himself in Jung's works and has added many worthy volumes to the Jungian literature. I've read a few over the past half-decade and would recommend all of them. This short volume is no exception. Its utility as a reference for psychoanalysis I'm sure is obvious, but it serves multiple other purposes for the Humanities freak: a quick refresher of salient myths and bios of Gods and Goddesses, a useful primer on the recurrence of mythic themes and symbols in dreams and current events for analysis of literature or the news, a valuable resource for Tarot readers who need to deepen their card and client reading skills...

Edinger's loose and comfortable familiarity with Jung's oeuvre and his experience distilling down works like Mysterium Conjunctionis for average human intellects makes his writing rigorous and compelling, but non-threatening and accessible. There is some Jung jargon, but if you are familiar with the basics (Archetypes and their roles, the structure of the Self/Psyche, synchronicity and dream and symbol analysis, perhaps some basic awareness of Freud and Adler) you will be able to more than stay afloat here. I particularly enjoyed the Jungian analysis of the Perseus myth and had not considered how the feminine is repressed and eventually undoes that hero. The readings of the Iliad and Odyssey are also top-notch, with asides about the sorts of people and stages of life bits and pieces of the epics are bound to speak to (or manifest via).

Highly recommended.

Book #21 of 2020: The Discovery of France by Graham Robb

We think of France and we think of an established, wealthy nation with a long history, not all of it worth celebrating. We think of philosophy, art, and literature. We think of landmarks, wine, and renowned cuisine. We think of the Enlightenment and wars of religion and Crusades both interior and exterior to the country.

But until very recently France was a nothing more than a loose association of tribes, and the spectacular natural beauty of the country was largely undiscovered by residents, let alone tourists. Robb's book shows how "France" was forced upon most of its residents, who often did not speak or read its language into the 20th century. A cartographer on a Royal mission is assassinated by suspicious locals. Beaches are regarded as unhealthy and residents avoid them at all costs. Cats and tripe are common fare in restaurants. Locals don't drink the local wine, which they regard with contempt. Soldiers conscripted into the army at the advent of WW1 have never heard of France and speak only local dialect. Much of France's tourist industry and many of its sports came from English adventure seekers trodding all over mountains and discovering things. It's a very interesting take on nation-building, and very eye-opening. At a time when France had enduring imperial experiments in Asia and Africa, the government had yet to colonize much of its own territory.

The book is full of delightful anecdotes told with humor, deep insight, and warmth. I highly recommend it. There might be lessons here for the current situation in the United States.