Pre-nostalgia and The Rawness of Leaving

I wrote this post in my last month in Parma (October), in an attempt to capture my feelings. So much has happened since then and, of course, memories evolve. This is from the rawness of leaving.


It’s days like today that I wish I could share Parma with you all. It can be lonely at times, even alienating, especially now that most of the Masters students have left for their internship adventures (including Rani)… but after a gelato of Bacio di Dama e Panna Cotta on the steps of the Duomo, I feel on top of the world.

I spent most of the day inside, finishing Slaughterhouse 5, and decided that after a few hours of Dresden fire-bombing, I deserved a break. So here I am, perched on the 600 year-old steps of the Duomo gazing up at the dwarfing clock tower, its uneven bricks peach-lit by the setting sun, but half a kilometre from my 500 year-old apartment building, doing what people do on Saturday afternoons in Parma: people-watching. It’s a pastime that never tires. I can’t get enough of the purple polo shirts, the upturned collars, the gaudy women made-up for pantomime – I will always be enthralled by the ‘as long as I look the part’ mentality. (If you need a visual, imagine a middle-aged Italian woman: now imagine that she has just died; and now, that she has been reincarnated. Into the same body. With the same face. Times by 20,000 and you have the streets of Parma by twilight. Ghoulish.) I see a woman from a distance who looks rather elegant: blonde hair, black stilettos, black skirt, pink poker-dot chemise, abbronzata… She comes right by me, a face like an absolute pug, the skirt barely concealing a number of rubber tyres not out of place on the hull of a PnO. I don’t object to the warts. We all have them. It’s the deception points.

But while I’m going to town on the women, really, I must be fair and talk about the men of my adopted city. May I speak of Wolverine in white chinos? I’m talking tufts of chest hair positively brimming from shirts, hair styles locked in eternal 70s flashbacks, Brylcreem churned to perfect viscosity and applied liberally to one giant Lothario bouffant that sweeps the city like a Roman wall. In the distance – the Gentlemen’s high-waisted-pants-brigade has left their tubas at home and donned their retiree-blazers to enjoy a tour of the Piazza, led by a small woman with a short brown bob: as I make notes from the steps, she is going ape-shit about the architectural features of the Baptistery. Are they listening or wondering which testicle will be first to recede?

But today didn’t belong to the groups of bizarre Parmagiani – it belonged to the abundance of babes teetering about the cobblestones in between stiletto towers. To my left is a serious looker in a micro-mini, a white cotton shirt and a pink jumper tied delicately around her shoulders, varsity-style. An ensemble plucked from Preppie Heaven. She’s can’t be older than two. I can see her at home, choosing the combinations herself, screeching as Mummy tries to pick something more demure (like knee-high boots). I watch her climb the steps with her stubby legs at least 30 times. I watch her weave in and out of bicycle traffic. I watch her almost get crushed by a bike. I watch her mother register mild concern, her eyes barely leaving their up-and-down obsession as the older female competitors swing by.

But really I’m getting sidetracked. Because what I want to say is how beautiful Parma can be – the sun sets stunning as the Summer yields to cooler seasons, the pastel buildings at their most romantic, the ambience eager to savour the last flavours of its own delight, and I’m beginning to feel a sense of pre-nostalgia – the feeling that I can’t quite get enough of this moment, that soon it will be gone and I’ll be gazing glassy-eyed wishing myself back to these steps with my gelato and my pastels and my clock tower, and as I do a part of me seeps out to take root, sinking down between the cracks to make a subterranean home for my wanting. And at the same time I have the sense that nostalgia is a feeling that must be shared, can’t be experienced alone – not fully anyway – and here I am, alone, with no one to share this moment with, with no one I know who can gaze back at this particular memory, instead just moments dissolving, setting like countless peach suns, and below me a well of emptiness opens because the people I know and love will never understand this place. Can’t.

How to assuage this feeling? I need to go past tedious comical portraits. I want to go beneath but I’m beginning to realise that it may not be possible for me. Not because I’m an outsider. But because whatever depth there is is not of interest. The lives are no less complex than yours, and yet, in a way, because living in the moment is second nature to Italians, I find it virtually impossible to delve into any hidden psychology, any real sense of continuity. The complexity of life here is the trickery of smoke and mirrors. Your attention is constantly diverted from seriousness: by fashion, by food, by football, by so many balding variety hosts and leggy attachés, so naturally what takes the ascendancy is pleasure – the Now. This is both wonderful and terrible. (I’m an optimist, but let’s start with terrible.) It’s disconcerting for those from cultures where in time, one can be sure to discover where the humanity of a society truly lies, where its people are engaged and what issues fire in the social engines. Parma has its pistons and its problems. I could tell you about the southern Mafiosi cooling their heels in two bedroom apartments blue-lit by daytime tv; the heroine addicts shooting up behind the Farnese palazzo; the horrific bike injuries and mangled bikes (of which I was a recent near-miss, an almost-statistic); the $2500 it costs to use gas and lights for six months; the African men selling fake Fendis on every corner who scamper when the Carabinieri come by; the stand-off outside the Casa della Musica between 30 socialists and three Nazis on May-Day; the front-page article about prostitutes soliciting around the corner from my apartment, near the European school where I pick up Giacomo every day – the feature photo honing in on two African women.

I’ve seen or heard all these things but I don’t know much more about them. And I wouldn’t even know whom to ask. They’re not part of any official history. Only background noise. Depths reduced to static, static upgraded to symphony. In the foreground are all the parts we like: prosciutto festivals, pretty girls and boys, window-shopping, cobblestones, old churches.

That's Parma, right?

Crop Circles and Unbelievable Melons (no, not that kind)

I've always been something of a cosmic child. Even as a kid i could be found holed up in my room, lying on the floor, reading opuscules on the paranormal, Egyptology, yettis - cradling copies of UFO Today and at intervals, springing up to skulk about like Christopher Walkin. On clear nights, my parents would have to carry me inside and whack me in a neck-brace from excessive star-gazing. Point is: I was a real 'wonder'-kind.

So it was with serious relish that i attended my first Crop Circle Conference in Devizes, Wiltshire, UK in August 2009, thus fulfilling a lifelong (admittedly fringe) dream. I fully intend to do a separate post about that to share some amazing photos, some of my ideas about the greater meaning of the phenomenon, and to deal with frequent comments like "Isn't it just a bunch of kids/farmers/maths geeks fucking around?". Aside from the theories proposed (many of which were extremely enlightening), I was dumbfounded by the pure, elegant Mystery of it all; the ineffable quality of the circle formations. It was a cumulative and integral sense I had, one which I felt rather than thought, after walking inside some circles (a misnomer, since the perimeters of many are not circular, but nevertheless an historically convenient label), after seeing designs so vast and so geometrically complex that my mind could no longer apply rational processes to comprehend them. Reason dissolves in the face of overwhelming beauty. Occum's razor becomes but a crude tool of neolithic mentality.

It seems to me that what we have lost in a world advanced and dominated by scientific materialism is a sense of wonder at the mysteries of the Universe. It need not be 800 meter-wide fractal formations in wheat. Or orbs of light in the sky. The mystery and the wonder resides as much in the microcosmic as it does in the heavens. It is present in the miniature, the organic, the synchronous, even when we doubt its presence in the firmament - when we diminish miracles as nothing but CGI FX.

My partner Rani had already drawn my attention to a strange little melon-related coincidence in Cambodia. You can see it here (or click the link to check the original post on our friend Ali's blog):

http://alijones.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-be-domestic-goddess-khmer.html

When Ali cut into her melon, she found this naturally-occurring smiley face comprised of seeds. Ha. We smiled. Doesn't Nature do funny things.

And then I returned from the crop circle conference, awash with mystical information, spouting factoids about the spontaneous appearance of spirals, orbs of light etc. The usual hippie clap. (I may look like I escaped from United Colours of Benetton; I may dress like a Revenge of the Nerds fratboy; but inside, I'm fuckin Yoko Ono man. All of which makes my particular brand of metaphysics so damn sneaky.) And then, late one night, at one of those terribly pedestrian domestic junctures (in between putting on boxers and brushing my teeth), Rani yells from the bedroom: "Do you want some watermelon?". "Sure" I said tentatively. It was a little late, but i guess when melon calls....So i grabbed an uncut Italian-grown soccer-ball sized melon from the fridge and cut it open.

This is what I found inside (unfortunately, the photos aren't as clear when compressed, but if you look closely you should see six swirls):

'It's got to be an illusion. A freak. A prank.' So I cut a cross-section of it, and this here is what i saw:



I cut a number of cross-sections, and the pattern/design runs all the way through. Notice how the texture or fibres of the melon actually flow into the straight lines and spirals. The geometry is pretty incredible too. Stick a ruler to it and see.




I don't know how to explain the straight lines or the spirals. I'm aware of geometries in nature and the mathematical universe: the golden ratio in plant stem distribution, the Nautilus shell, the fibonacci sequence etc (sure, we've all read The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons)...but I've eaten a lot of melons in my life, and I have never seen anything like this one. Nothing to suggest a pattern born of primordial bouillabaisse. I showed various people with fairly sound non-hallucinatory psychological backgrounds. None could explain it either. One woman is now a devout melonist.

Naturally, we ate the melon. I've had some pretty trippy dreams since. Coincidence? Psychoactive fruit? I'm not really prepared to say. I'm just here to dessiminate the Mystery.

Holocaust Collage

(I read this piece at a Reading in April held by the Parma Writer's Group in the Ilari Alpi International Library. It was filmed for posterity, so hopefully I can upload the footage of me reading and then...choking up.)

How can I approach the topic of the Holocaust? I can’t, really. I wasn’t there. When I think about it, my mind is a collage of borrowed memories.

At age 16, my grandmother, her father and her mother were taken from Czechoslovakia on cattle trains, packed in with 120 strangers. They travelled for days, never knowing when one ended and another began for all the darkness around them. They slept on top of each other. In the middle of the carriage, there was a bucket. “Where are we going?” No one knew. At checkpoints they were sprayed with just enough water to wet the palms of their hands.

When finally the transport reached Auschwitz, my grandmother told me her spirit was not so much broken as in shock: her belief suspended above the twin realities of Nazi resolve and her family farm - the memories of two giant St Bernards licking her fingers still as fresh as yesterday’s rye bread spread thick with liverwurst. These memories have become assimilated with my own. I have heard them for as long as I have understood History. My mind is impressed with hiding places, false papers, turnip peels, bedsores, Typhus. When my grandmother makes apple compote, a sweet stew for digestion, I think of DDT – because that’s what they sprayed her with, naked, head to toe, to kill the parasites feeding on her slow decay. That’s what made her stomach weak.

“I don’t eat lamb,” she announces at family dinners. “You know why?” A rhetorical pause. “Because the smell reminds me of burning flesh.” We roll our eyes.

My grandmother has an unreal gift for associations. She can relate any topic you can think of to the Holocaust. There are only six degrees of separation between Everything and Hitler.

My grandmother’s mother survived the camps. On the day when the American and British Liberators came, bearing flags and offering cans of beans, the 30-kilo woman died in her daughter’s arms.

I was 24 when the program 60 Minutes flew my grandmother back to Auschwitz for the first time, with my mother as chaperone. There she walked through the memorials stoically, her arm linked with her daughter’s. In the dirt under their feet, my mother saw pieces of human bones.

When the cameramen stopped rolling and my grandmother took a tissue to wipe her eyes, a screw in her glasses fell out. A few moments later, a screw fell from my mother’s. When she told me this, I got chills. I wish I had been there: to see what the cameras did not. To put my arm around her, tell her it was ok, that it was all in the past. The shaved heads and the bunk beds full of lice - they were all gone. But I know it’s not true. And I wasn’t meant to be there. I am only meant to listen to her tell the story, like she has always done.

Sometimes, I wonder what happened to the two St Bernards. Just how long did they wait for their Masters to come home?

As a boy, visits to my grandmother’s house were bittersweet. She fed us until we bulged with Bohemian delights: rye bread, Hungarian salami, frankfurts with sauerkraut. During dinner my sister and I listened to stories – I had an unusual curiosity for a boy of 10 – like the time she convalesced in hospital in Pilzen, nourished back to life from 22 kilos by a nun’s humanity. She’s told me the story more than once, but it’s one I never tire of hearing.

After dinner, the routine was always the same: my grandmother would wash the dishes by hand. We weren’t allowed to help. The sink had to be obsessively clean and dry. To leave a single drop of water was a serious affront. So we waited in the TV room, enjoying ten minutes of reprieve, before watching a documentary about the Holocaust. An hour later, on our way upstairs to brush our teeth, she would remind us plaintively “Please don’t touch the walls.”

Before bed, filled with grainy images of marches and mass graves, she told us Slavic folktales of Struwel Peter with his long fingernails and wild hair. Then she’d trace her nails in a circle gently around my palm, reciting ‘Round and round the Garden, Like a teddy bear’ in Slovak - ‘Varilla varilla mishishka kashitchka…’ - lulling me to sleep and away from camps and hospital beds. It was soothing to feel her fingertips gliding along and watch her dimples winking at me in the dim light, the ones I had first noticed in a photograph from a beauty pageant.

Then she kissed me goodnight and I lay there, blinking. I will never forget how dark the room became after she closed the door.

LA: The Capital of Excess

When I step off the plane in Los Angeles on a sunny day, my first inkling comes from the gut: I need fast food and I need it now.

For all the dietary babble, the streets of LA boast a fatty trim of fast food joints all promising the same supersized thing: cheap tasty junk. Much of it is fried and polysaturated. For someone who hardly ever eats junk food, it’s all rather hard to resist.

Los Angeles is renowned for doing everything bigger and better, and when it comes to food, it’s true. A single day of eating in LA can square a year of binging anywhere else. Before midday, I have already downed a burger at In-N-Out on Sunset Boulevard, famous for its ‘secret menu’. Curly fries entangle in my belly as I head down to Manhattan Beach for corn chips and college football, aka ‘Lunch’.

Come afternoon tea, after a one-track degustation of carbs, my mind is full of fuzzy images: buskers on median strips; tacky souvenir shops; never-ending highways with saintly nomenclature stretching away to some salvation. Everything in between is just billboards and burger joints.

It’s at a cookie Valhalla in Westwood Village that my fast food indulgence culminates. Joining the back of a twenty-metre line, I’m on the cusp of a transcendental junk food experience, LA-style. The people ahead of me seem like normal city folk. But when I get closer, they all have a hysterical look about them – that of children on family road trips before they enter small-town lolly shops. I have arrived at Diddy Riese Cookies: home to the ice cream sandwich, zenith of sweet pan-American dietary zip.

When I make it inside, I’m confronted by twelve flavours of ice cream and what looks like hundreds of cookies. The business of choice is completely DIY and seemingly limitless, just like LA.

Dark-haired boys speak tersely from behind the counter: “Yah,” they ask, which translates roughly as ‘What would you like, Sir?’ I’m not really ready, so I blurt something out. “Oatmeal raisin…with rocky road, please.” In the capital of excess, no combination of cookie and cream is too outlandish. Within seconds my choice materialises and I’m outside having a 250gram sugar coma.

The whole experience is empowering. Life, Liberty, and other Amendments are enshrined in the sweet act of calorie consumption. It’s the small things that make a democracy – not voting rights, but the right to get in one’s car and drive 15 miles on heavily clogged arterials, radio blaring, to line up for 20 minutes just to choose two types of cookie and one type of mind-blowing ice cream, whack them in a cup, with or without a spoon – you decide, all for a $1.50. It’s sticky elbows and spiking insulin levels as you return to the Valley in your rented SUV, but 10 minutes later, sated by 500 calories of pig fats, corn syrup, fructose, colouring and cookie dough.

All hail the five American food groups.

Parma - A Winter Sketch

Think Italy? Think food. It’s as simple as word association for most of us. But in Parma, home of crumbly cheese and cured meat, when you hit the ground it’s the people who demand primary attention.

At midnight on a weeknight, the cobbled backstreets of Parma centro take on an unreal quality. Often eerily quiet and impressionistically lit, the narrow Vias and Borgos fill with a thick mist that floats above the stones, a result of cold fronts that regularly swoop down from the Apennine mountains. Because of its position in the Po valley, Parma is a wet city in winter. It’s the sort of wet which lingers, drizzling, not quite British in persistence, but subtle and steady. Ditches and irregularities become fast hazards for those unaccustomed to walking historical Italian streets. But the Parmigiani themselves are oblivious.

No matter what the weather, by day the streets team with sartorial Italians effortlessly skipping puddles, wielding umbrellas and casting off ciao’s and salve’s to shopkeepers loitering in doorways. Pairs of bambini forge ahead in strollers wheel to wheel, designer booties first, while their mothers teeter along in stilettos, heel to heel, fur coats too dashing to be faux, chattering in tones that sound angry and sexy all at once. These are the beehived women – not all, but most – with hair-do’s stylised into vortices, each one a conical improvement on the next. These are the women who leave shoe-sized crop circles in the snow stamped with Loubouton (no mystery there), and whose primary occupation is to window-shop, occasionally leaning over the pram lid to adjust a pink or blue cappello and breathe warm air onto purple little faces. Make no mistake: there is real money in Parma.

Wandering down unassuming stradas peppered with shops bearing frutta e verdura offers up innumerable film noir experiences. Here you find distinguished gentlemen in neat chequered caps and beautiful woollen coats and brown walking shoes, taking their daily passeggiata – a walk that is neither about exercise nor going somewhere but about being seen – and sucking on serious looking cigars. With the cigar, the barrel is positioned square and straight, none of this Jimmy Dean hangin’ from the side of the mouth couldn’t-care-if-this-kills-me aloof kind of smoking, but with a touch of the consigliore about it, not mean but stiff, poking out of the mouth as if to say ‘Yeah, I’m smoking a cigar at midday in the street, what’s it to ya?’ and they don’t even remove it to puff, not two fingers not a hand nothing, they just sorta open their mouths in a halo-shape, teeth still clenched around the wad, and excrete smoke in a circular waft that looks exactly what I imagine ‘Fuck you’ to look like if it was communicated in smoke. Crossing the road at these times affords both safety and a better vantage point. And as they disappear around corners which look remarkably like all the other corners in Parma centrale – old, stoney, historical - there is no geriatric dilapidation in their gate but a message which lingers like the night mists long after they’ve gone: Papa’s got a freehold on cool.

‘Youth is wasted on the young’ said George Bernard Shaw, and nowhere is it more acutely true than for Parma’s teens. Today, they smoke publicly and obviously at every opportunity, as if smoking had been a prenatal pastime, but with none of the dignity of their grandparents. Waiting for a bus to Colorno (25 minutes out of town) is a gang of teens with shoulder bags and puffer jackets, mostly in black, occasional rat’s tails and diamond studs for boys, glittery hightops and eye-liner for girls. They light up in huddles and blow bravado into each other’s faces creating a bubble of aspiring maturity. But their avuncular smiles and childish flirtations give them away and the veil is pierced long before their giggles and slang have moved onto the bus. On Wednesdays, school’s out at 1:30pm, so the mamas and the papas are joined by students that move only in groups; typically, it’s the phalanx, 2 wide, 3 long - an obstreperous unit that leaves a trail of panino wrappers and mobile R'n'B in its wake, a kind of postmodern excrement in a free range pen.

And come Friday or Saturday night, Via Farini is a circus of youth, though this time it’s uni students who do the gathering, always outside the bars, talking to each other, to their mobiles, to both, smoking with only slightly more maturity than their younger brothers and sisters, and sizing each other up in Parma’s third most popular meat market after culatello and prosciutto. But who can tell the vendors from the emptors?

Across a strictly demarcated region inside Emilia Romagna, olfactorily gifted quality controllers from the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma test and authenticate all 10 million legs of ham by inserting a thin horse bone into the fat of each and sniffing it like some suino speed ball for a microbial hint of being substandard (an efficient method since horse bone relinquishes smells quickly). But come Saturday night in the meat market of the streets, women are the only quality controllers, and given how inept Italian men can be at the preternatural subtleties of dating, it should come as no surprise that they rarely, if ever, get to put the bone in the ham. A little gauche, maybe, but the parallels and intersections between eating and mating are simply too delicious to ignore.

It’s common linguistic knowledge that 70% of human communication is non-verbal, but if Italians had their way it would be 110%. Even ordering a meal requires hand gestures so elaborate they’re virtually pornographic. It’s fitting since in no other country is eating so sexually charged. Parma’s vivacious inhabitants have been meeting in the same spot on Via Cavour for years to link arms with friends and prepare for the night’s courting activities. The gastronomic chemistry of the occasion lends a sparkle to the air. Round the corner on Farini, mere eye contact is tantamount to an invitation to explore mutual compatibility. But match-ups end as furiously as they begin, with both parties scurrying back to their respective gender dug-outs to debrief a half-moon of coaches and spit putdowns like tobacco juice. Luckily there are plenty of other distractions if things don’t work out, including the tantalising smells of torta fritta – warm fried bread sometimes filled with ham - which waft down the open mall, weaving their way through the heated outposts of wine bar after wine bar from a small but steaming deli-style outdoor stall. To compete, the bars fill entire tables with gratuitous delectables for drink-buying customers - an equally enticing proposition if you love an aperitivo. Or twelve. These spreads are simply decadent, each one an ever-replenishing artisanal smorgasbord presenting cured meats of all declensions: culatello, spalla, cotto, speck, crudo, bresaola – the list goes on. The bar staff are obliging when it comes to complimentary eats and drinks, and a pleasure to watch as they spin platters with the dexterity of cocktail artists. Even in conservative little Parma, the battle of the sexes is palpable come midnight, when at least one of two hungers has already been sated.

Nationwide, it only became a crime to pinch a woman’s bottom four years ago. And in Parma, there are plenty worth pinching on both sides, what with all the cycling that goes on. Historical Parma is a whirring mass of bottoms so peachy they make Mars and Venus drop arms and strum the lute over bottles of proseco. Even your average Nonna has buttocks so superbly toned from pedalling that papas be dipping their umbrellas to hide their salutes, the mink of their racoon headgear flattened in the breeze and their musty perfumes all but dispersed into aromatic madeleines. Sprightly does them no justice, these grand m*thers zinging around on classic little bicis like bipedal pacemakers.

Aside from the physical benefits, cycling also presents new avenues for the twin Italian philosophies of Style and Beauty. When they’re not being upstaged by their grandmothers, the young men of Parma cycle care-freely, handlebars unattended, hands hanging loosely by their sides, dismounting outside cafés with all the poise and alacrity of gymnasts. Women with botoxed lips and metallic aviators perform similar feats, adding to the discipline a basket full of shopping bags (Gucci not Grocery), all of which are magically extrapolated before full-length leather boots even touch the ground. The puddles barely ripple with the landing.
And where are all these navigationally frugal commuters going? As the Duomo bells toll to signal 7pm each day, the only clockwork strictly followed in all of Italy – that of mamas calling their sons – can be observed simultaneously across town. At this moment, the bikes stand still. In a local trattoria north on Via Trento, two men in suits sit opposite each other talking on their blackberries issuing Ciao Mama's in unison. Piatti primi is enjoyed in between the day’s perfunctory report card: a crumbly bread always with three lumps, Certo mama, non parlerei oggi perché…, a plate of tortellini or penne, no Mama tutto e posto o-kay, and a carafe of vino rosso di tavola, Mama sto cenando…, before a secondi which could be anything from osso buco with the marrow still seeping from the bone or cotoletta so mouth-wateringly good you would call your mother every day if it meant you could eat it at the same time.

If the years of bar-hopping and icy bartering have paid dividends, the misty hours of the morning will find you in the driver’s seat adjacent your bello or bella. Here the mist is of a different kind, condensing inside the two-doored tryst where lovers steal moments of steamy privacy. To spy a silhouette on the lap of a man, his head tipped back in adrenalin-filled lust, is not unusual but is unjust given the low ceilings of your average Fiat. Two pairs of darting eyes signal the perpetual adolescence of the moment: by 2am they can see Mama peaking through the curtains wondering how, in Gèsu’s sacred name, it could take so damn long to go for a gelato. But it’s a double-bind, because although grown Italian men and women deserve more than furtive teenage bliss and parental scrutiny, the adrenalin fuels the addiction, and even in bliss they know that the food at home is simply too good, the Catholic imperatives too lofty, the bachelorhood too bottom-pinchingly liberating and so the romantic status quo remains until matrimony. Here lies the familial design of our two Parmigiani passengers: they pay symbolic deference with headlights that always shine, in ever-vigilant readiness to move, a light for the chastity of each.

The Metaphysics of Norman Mailer

“A noisy, nasty, competitive display of putdowns; an audacious act of flashy self-confessed self-aggrandizement.” That is how essayist Cynthia Ozick described Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. The description is typical of the attention Mailer received for his entire career. He was even the target of fictional graffiti in Anthony Burgess’ novel M/F: “Mailer sux”. Martin Amis has said: “programmatic self-destruction has always been the keynote of Mailer’s life and times”. What critics have always missed about Mailer is that he was a ‘free-lance explorer of spiritual dangers’ who set himself the goal of revolutionising the consciousness of his time, with scant regard for his reputation. The Epigraph to The Deer Park by Andre Gide which says “Please do not understand me too quickly” is an important reminder that attempts to reconcile Mailer’s work with his life are impossible unless we appreciate his peculiar brand of metaphysics. And while Ozick may claim elsewhere that “an author’s extraliterary utterance may infiltrate journalism” but “cannot touch the novel itself”, this delineation between Life and Art has never applied to Norman Mailer, and for very good reason.

One might well ask at this point, now that we have Mailer’s final literary exposé On God, what more is there to know about his metaphysics? The book reveals that Mailer’s conception of the Cosmos was much like his conception of the Novel: a place where the artist plays out his dreams as the “Supreme Creator.” We discover that Mailer sees “God… as the greatest artist.” The book posits a theory about humans and the universe, in which God and the Devil compete for human allegiance. But rather than being passive conduits for supernatural war, human souls represent the third cosmic force in play. “God was in the slime from the beginning…God has grown with us” says Mailer. A more poetic book-end to an author’s life would be hard to find. But it is precisely the perception of Mailer’s ‘programmatic self-destruction’ which demands that we delve more deeply into the origins of this paradigm, tracing Mailer’s literary lineage from DH Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and finally Henry Miller, and examining his evolution as a writer and a man.

Mailer’s nascent aspiration was to become the literary champ. That aspiration came to fruition with the The Naked and the Dead. The quickdraw success had an unnerving affect on the 25 year old. Some time later, Mailer wrote about the direct challenge to his manhood:

“I spent the next few years trying to gobble up the experiences of a victorious man when I was still no man at all, and had no real gift for enjoying life…”

To save his career from premature decline, Mailer felt that he had to become ‘a man’. The only way forward was a conscious erudition in “Hemingway’s discipline”. At the heart of this borrowed approach was Mailer’s belief that:

“…even if one dulled one’s talent in the punishment of becoming a man, it was more important to be a man than a very good writer, that probably I could not become a very good writer unless I learned first how to keep my nerve...”

Here we uncover the careful hierarchy of values that set the tone for Mailer’s career: first become a man; then you will become a great writer. But in the process of self-actualising, Mailer would “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”

In oIn the years between Naked (1948) and Advertisements (1959), Mailer set about keeping and finding his nerve. He found it mostly in very public and sometimes violent ways. In his first TV appearance on Night Beat with Mike Wallace, he remarked: “President Eisenhower is a bit of a woman”; he opened his New York Mayoral campaign with “Fuck you, fuck you All!”; there were various fistfights, one which left Mailer “with his left eye ‘almost out of his head’” according to Amis. In In the Belly of the Beast he wrote that “society should seek to cultivate the potential of its violent citizens”.

For critics oblivious to the spiritual game, Mailer’s public obscenities contaminated a holistic understanding of his Art, which explains why Gore Vidal wrote:

“There has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression.”

The comparison to Manson was sloppy, but the comparison to Miller was apposite. While Hemingway had been Mailer’s guru on finding one’s nerve, by the time Mailer was appearing regularly on TV, it was clear he had more than found his nerve. He had become it: a giant twitching reflex channelling messages from on high to the benumbed ganglia below. He had no more need for his old guru Hemingway; for he was no longer inhibited by fear of emasculation. Miller inspired Mailer to realise his goal of revolutionising the consciousness. In Mailer’s own words “…Miller took off at the place where Hemingway ended.”

Depending on whom you believe, Miller is either an unparalleled narcissicist or an egoless mouthpiece for the Overmind. Defending his book Sexus to penpal Lawrence Durrell, Miller wrote “…only a man without ego could write thus about himself.” According to Gore Vidal, “Only a total egotist could have written a book which has no subject other than Henry Miller.” “…to make art of self-confession it is necessary to tell the truth. And unless Henry Miller is indeed God… he does not tell the truth.”

Henry Miller may not be the God, but he admits to being his own god in The Cosmological Eye. So strong was his worship of Self that he wrote most of his books on the topic. Tropic of Cancer was a “turning point” in his life. This is Miller:

I decided that henceforth I would write about myself, my friends, my experiences, what I knew and what I had seen with my own eyes…I learned not to be ashamed of myself, to talk freely about myself, to advertise myself…

Enter Norman Mailer.

From the outself, In oIn November 55, Mailer took out a full-page advertisement in The Village Voice for his new book The Deer Park. Paid for and composed by Mailer, the ad featured various grabs from the book’s worst reviews including “Gauche”, “Golden Garbage Heap” and “The Year’s Worst Snake Pit in Fiction”. He wrote about the stunt later in Advertisement. Like Miller, Mailer was a god unto himself who shared the unabashed conviction to advertise himself.

The most austere judgments of his behaviour can be found not in the media, but in his own work, where he appears as both hero and villain, Christ and Anti-Christ. The catharsis of self-exposure allowed both writers to explore the truths behind human condition. “What’s the truth?” asks a young actress of her director. And Sergius O’Shaughnessy overhears the director retelling the story in The Deer Park: “I said it could be defined as the real relation between human beings.” Sometimes this approach to truth meant personal truths suffered. Mailer offers a clue to his weltanschauung in his own dissembling self-analysis: “Saying the truth makes us burn with the desire to convince our audience, whereas telling a lie affords ample leisure to study the result.” The result which we can study, is a spectrum of actions and illocutions which are as much part of the fabric of Mailer’s writing as the tendrils of the words themselves.

Surrealist Andre Gide wrote that “Our biggest and most salutary work of art is our life.” The cosmology of Norman Mailer sits comfortably within the sparse potential of these words. There can be no doubt that it is with Henry Miller that Mailer found his guru on living one’s art. “My aim, in writing,” Miller said, “is to establish a greater REALITY”. And what is reality but the flow of consciousness, which was for DH Lawrence “an end in itself”. The ‘greater reality’ which Miller sought to establish was one in which art coheres with life. Here creating is breathing, where the fantastical potentialities of Art become manifest. This is Lawrence in the poem We Are Transmitters:

“As we live, we are transmitters of life. And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us. That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards. Sexless people transmit nothing. And if as we work, we can transmit life into our work, life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready and we ripple with life through the days.”

And this is Mailer, speaking through the character of Charles Eitel, in the Deer Park:

“…one day he would take his life and transmute it into something harder than a gem and as imperishable, an art work.”

We can ground the lineage of Embodied Art even further. Inherent to this idea of Life as Art is an element of divine creativity. Listen to Mailer’s description from Advertisements of writing the last 6 lines of The Deer Park: “Then, out of some flesh in myself I had not yet known, with the words coming one by one….like the touch of being coming into other being, so the last six lines of my bloody book came to me…” The event is close to creative stigmata. Mailer virtually bleeds his ectoplasm.

When the artist contemplates with pen in hand, poised over the page, creative intention leads to manifestation. In life, it is the same. What we think creates our own reality. Yet there is a second hand too. In Art, we call it Inspiration; in Cosmology, we call it the Absolute. The primary conceit of fiction is to allow the author to create alternate realities in which to live as a multidimensional being. The characters she creates are the result of a co-creational process, and the novel is a place where the artist plays out her dreams as the Supreme Creator. Miller venerates Dostoievski for this reason: “Dostoievski never lived the life of Stavrogin…He had to create him in order to live out his other life, his life as a creator.” He fashioned out of Stavrogin an inner god, “the fullest portrait of God which Dostoievski could give”.

In his critical encomium for Henry Miller, Genius and Lust, Mailer says of his guru: “There is not one Henry Miller, but twenty...”. Through multiple selves, Miller is capable of indulging his crazy cock and contemplating his navel. Moods and modes tumble along at breakneck pace gathering speed like great avalanches of experience. When Miller criticises contemporaries like Proust and Joyce for creating a dying world, in which “The Absolute remains outside their works”, where there is a disconnect between art and existence, he is really criticising the fear of that divinity which connects each of us to the Spiritus Mundi.

Notice Miller’s choice of words: ‘the Absolute’. This is the language of a pantheist experiencing a connection to all things. And Mailer is arguably an existential pantheist. Recall Cannibals and Christians where he states that “The truth is found first in the Gestalt” which he defines as the “totality of an experience” and “the harmony or discord of the life present in the context”. This harmony he also calls ‘Mood’- akin to “a psychic organism” which “reacts to each new breath of the environment”. When the Interviewer asks Mailer to pinpoint the Mood, Mailer chastises his scientific reflex: “It may be possible that literature has more to offer on the nature of the universe than the cyclotron” he quips. Call it Gestalt, Brahma, Tao or The Absolute, the point is Art cannot be external to life any more than Art can be ripped from the matrix of existence. Art is part of the interconnected universe, and so we have no choice but to live it, as we live our biology and experience our physics. In Miller’s words “The artist does not tinker with the universe: he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.” When Mailer came to redraft The Deer Park, he started “with the conscious thought” that he would “tinker just a little” but eventually found that “the book had come alive” and he learned “how real a novel is.” Notice how he talks in terms of the general rather than the specific. A novel is real. We are back to the organism again - breathing. Flesh.
In both Miller’s and Mailer’s universe, Art is an expression of human creativity which allows us to express infinite potential. Therefore, the “worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfilment instead of an horizon.” Miller considers that:

“Unconsciously…every great artist is trying with might and main to destroy art. By that I mean that he is desperately striving to break down this wall between himself and the rest of humanity.”

If we start creating in our lives with unbridled passion, we no longer need to express creativity through Art. The end of art, for Miller, represents the beginning of human connectedness. Here is Miller’s eschatological imperative: the end of ordinary reality and reunion with the divine (not to be confused with his scatological one). Here lies the ‘horizon’ he speaks of – not physical, but perceptual. He may achieve it through all kinds of chicanery, but it’s a small price to pay for shifting the consciousness up a gear.

Norman Mailer also perceived life through the liminal prism of the artist’s mind. He once told V.S. Naipaul: “We must create drama by our own actions.” Through his actions, he advocated a style of living that pushed the boundaries of reality. In Cannibals and Christians he admits, “the first art work in an artist is the shaping of his own personality. An artist is usually such an incredible balance of opposites and incompatibles that the wonder is he can even remain alive.” To observers unaccustomed to this brazen style, Mailer’s active philosophy appeared nothing more than the jejeune antics of a perennial superbrat. In fact, Mailer’s transgressive behaviour bore his most elaborate lies about himself, delivered live on stage, so that he could sit back later and “study the result”. Life was simply another branch of literature.

The periods of study afforded Mailer the detachment necessary to observe the effect on and behaviour of his audience. Through this reciprocal play, he would draw conclusions about human nature and put them down on the page. And to prevent criticism for being self-righteous, he conjured himself as a character in the narrative subject to the same creative whims as the rest of the cast. In works such as Armies, The Fight, Miami and the Siege of Chicago and Of a Fire on the Moon we find Mailer inhabiting the role of the third person protagonist. In all, he is a hybrid of participant and observer, making him part-character and part-journalist. Factually, Mailer was not always the centre of attention, but by making himself the fictional centre he was able to mock the pretensions of ‘objective’ history and still critique his own part of it. These metafictional incarnations allowed him to draw out the narrative aspects of life, and the real aspects of fiction. The subtitle to Armies of the Night – ‘History as a Novel, The Novel as History’ – aptly expresses the intersection of his Life and Art.

Set amidst events of national if not global significance such as wars, space races and Presidential campaigns, Mailer’s work is still inseparable from the man. His best works are their own picaresque, in which every landscape is Mailer. The world simply happens within the boundaries of his being. What appears solipsistic at first glance was Mailer’s subtle way of exposing the fictions inherent in all histories. The more Mailer explored himself in context, the more authentic his art became, and the closer he got to his own personal truth. In his own words: “The spirits of literature may be the nearest we come to historical truth….the great confessions of literature are apart from their authors.” Mailer may have passed away, but his art of self-confession has cast him as one of our enduring spirit guides.

From the beginning, Mailer’s major goal was to revolutionise the consciousness of his times. For the artist, there is arguably no higher end, and achieving it is limited only by imagination. In Susan Sontag’s essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, she criticises the failure to assimilate pornography as a form of art which reflects the lack of collective cultural nerve. This arguably gives new meaning to Evelyn Waugh’s description of Mailer as “an American pornographer”. Mailer’s fervent search for his individual nerve was therefore a disproportionate compensation for the failure of his contemporaries such as Hemingway to find theirs.

“One of the tasks art has assumed”, Sontag writes, “is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness…and reporting back what’s there. Being a free-lance explorer of spiritual dangers, the artist gains a certain license to behave differently from other people…His principle means of fascinating is to advance one step further in the dialectic of outrage. He seeks to make his work repulsive, obscure, inaccessible…” Mailer embodied this description by exploring consciousness without heed to laws or social mores. In an Interview called The Metaphysics of the Belly he agreed that scatological thoughts give life: “studies of loneliness…corruption… monstrosity…and death can give life…violence…insanity…hell, perversion…these are the states which must in some way be digested, transcended, if one is to make one’s way back to life.”

What critics have always missed about Mailer is that he was one of the rare obscurantists. When he writes unabashedly in Advertisements “I was on the edge of many things, and I had more than a bit of violence in me”, this is Mailer on the frontier of unassimilable states of consciousness. Mailer’s weakness was having no internal filter as the self-designated medium for his era.

With the benefit of frank disclosure, we now know that Mailer’s fictional explorations of the relations between good and evil in human existence were entirely earnest. In each example, his Manichean propensities offered another reflexive opportunity to explore his own psyche, often through the spectral analysis of characters like Jesus Christ (God) and Adolf Hitler (the Devil). Examples of this Manichean paradigm were present from the beginning: in The Fight Mailer reveals the Bantu philosophy of Zaire, which deemed that a man was not only the sum of his personality, but also the forces that “inhabit him at any moment from all things living and dead”; in The Executioner’s Song, Nicole asks Gary Gilmore “Are you the Devil?”; in The Deer Park, Marion Faye remarks “I used to think Eitel was a god and a devil all in one”. And finally in The Castle in the Forest where God and the Devil battle for mastery of human nature, we learn that Mailer’s metaphysics is as much a reflection of human duality as it is a real cosmological paradigm.

And if we are loyal to the principles of the embodied art, then Mailer’s works form a set of crib notes to his beliefs. They teach us that if humans operate subconsciously at the juncture between God and the Devil, then moral action becomes less monochromatic, and stories of the young Hitler become more palatable. As soon as we accept that there is a structural relation between absolute good and absolute evil, human virtues and vices begin to converge, and the complexities of personality can be assimilated. We would all know more about Norman Mailer if we could find in him a little Hitler and a little Messiah.

But perhaps Mailer was “too worrisome for us, too out of measure”, as if he possessed the same quality he ascribed to Henry Miller: “the unadvertised mystery of how much of a monster a great writer must be”. Because the closer we come to transcendent qualities, the more we approach the limits of human experience, beyond good and evil, where the fibrous connections of our moral perceptions foment, and the new nervous system begins. We may call this ‘cosmic consciousness’. It is here we find polarity without judgment, which also happens to be the final vantage point for all literary critique. Final, because to judge art from an amoral perspective marks the death of art. We approach frontiers that look like Nothingness – a force Mailer admits could be even more powerful than God. The world is no more ready for the extinction of art than it is for the extinction of the universe. For the same reason, it was not quite ready for Mailer. If it were, artists like Mailer would not be understood too quickly.

Mailer’s message is clear: art and life possess a natural symmetry. But by analysing his Life of Art we also see that his exposition is incomplete. For there is one force missing from his triptyche: that is Art itself, that hyrbrid of deity descended into flesh, and man ascended into deity. Art is the unifying field which allows us to see Mailer’s life as a masterpiece. For Norman Mailer was a pornographer of the spirit, who captured in the cinema of his soul the bestial relations between man and all his sacred cows.