I think you’ve explained the cardboardy taste in our mouths. We are all the stuff of fiction. That explains why Chandra Levy and Monica Lewinsky leave their i.d.’s at home or show their thongs, and men with names like Ford, Bush, Gore (and Bush again) undertake the serious business of governance. Could anyone but Madeleine Albright call us the indispensable nation? Anyone else would have gotten socked in the face. Alex Comfort wrote sex books, and D.T. Max–I suppose I should market a line of designer jeans. I know you weren’t born a Harrison, so I think the examination won’t extend to you. Exogamy has given you complete freedom. Use it well, Kathryn. Fiction still has awesome power. For me nothing is as unsettling, as scary, as its own description. We will not be the last, I don’t believe.
I have a bright niece, and over the past few years I watched her learn to read. The effort, the focus, the relentless desire to figure out those little symbols, she saw in them, on her own–for she has excellent, happy parents, but this comes from the inside, the place no one can reach–a lifeline out of the confusion, disorder, or boredom that characterized her preliterate world.
Words–they’re where the real action is. That we can agree on, you and me. But why does the history of writing not bear this out? An interesting question. The earliest writing was used for business transactions and tax records. This in Sumer. You have a racehorse and use it to drag a plough? It always upset me deeply. Now I’ve had the pleasure of reading in a remarkable article about Mayan scribes in the Times two days ago, written by a man with the appropriately grand byline John Noble Wilford (he first reported the moon landing, if memory serves), that writing developed independently on different continents. The Mesopotamian tradition was Earth-bound from the beginning, but the American tradition was the reverse. Writing here was the province of the nobles, the thing of kings. Consequently, when one king overthrew another, he killed the writers. Didn’t just kill ‘em: pulled out their finger nails and lopped off their dicks. While I wish all of us long, healthy lives (in fact I’m counting on one), there’s something a little flattering, gratifying, ennobling about being chosen among the first to die. It’s the children and the women who got sent to the lifeboats, not the Fords, Gores, and Bushes.
I’d like to end with a little poem I made out of the Monday “Metro” index in the Washington Times. You can find these lines here. (The verse bars are mine): Bomb dogs investigate deadly blaze/Bee population devastated by mites/Lott asks Condit to resign over tryst/Driving home a lesson in control.
God bless.
