It's a thousand pages give or take a few . . .１番

If you ever go in the kind of bookstore that has a coffee bar and someone playing jazz harp you will notice that near the door, right next to the remainder tables, is the magazine section. The front, most visible shelving is, of course, reserved for the better selling serious news journals. “People,” “US,” “Cosmopolitan” and other purveyors of Truth the American Way. But farther back, usually near the cooking and gardening section, you will find those pricey, little periodicals with names like “Humping Turtle Review” and “Nebraskan Zen Poetry Semi-Quarterly” that are filled with the meaningless stories currently fashionable among the graduates of the more exclusive writing workshops.



You know the type of story I’m talking about. They take place in some quaint (i.e., paint peeling off the walls and no plumbing) locale name Rue d’Elitist or Via Pretencion; dwell for pages on the film left in the basin after she washed her underarms; take three hours and two cups of very strong coffee to read; and in the end leave you screaming, “So bloody what!” and wanting to slap the main character, the author, and the next person you happen to meet. Of course, to cover up for the fact that you wasted eight dollars on an occasional quarterly printed on paper more at home in former Eastern Bloc restrooms you tell everyone it was a powerfully minimalist portrayal of neo-urban sexual tension reminiscent of Kafka if he had written that way instead of the way he did.

The readership of these journals is pretty much limited to a few graduate students trying to suck up to the chair of their doctoral committee by reading his or her latest seventy-three line ode to crossing the street; and a few seriously intellectual types given to wearing pieces of metal in body parts most of us don't even like to touch all that often.

Over the years several, if not the majority, of the stories published by these journals have tried, with wildly varying degrees of failure, to describe the mind. Not the contents mind you (those are usually too bizarre for words, at least in polite company, and even Poe avoided talking about most of them); nor how the contents fit together (that, by long-standing tradition has been the stomping grounds of psychologists, mothers (sometimes in-law), and other club footed busybodies); but the actual space all this other junk is thrown into.

At various times, corrected to and uninvaded by E.S.T., this space has been described as a room, corridor, series of closets, file cabinet, movie reel, filthy stinking cesspool, and the only place in the known universe to contain a true vacuum. (The last two were expressed during the rather passionate divorce trial of the couple formerly known as Mr and Mrs Avery Bodet. As it turns out they were both right, but not for what you might consider the obvious reasons since the two qualities in question tend to be more universal than we have been led to believe.)

Needless to say, but if you are paid by the word you tend to say more than is really necessary, a condition known technically as Clavellism, all of these attempts have somehow failed.

The reasons for their failure are almost as varied as the actual attempts, but are mostly concerned with the fact that the few individuals actually out of their minds far enough to be able to make a disinterested description are usually too full of chemicals to hold a pencil.

Philosophers, unwilling to let any debate go unmuddled, especially one so patently pending no final solution, have tried to measure the dimensions of this troublesome area, but when they find their results getting dangerously close to agreeing they sidestep the question by arguing about the proper length of the ruler (usually somewhere between that of Lady Jane Grey and Louis XIV); seeking new philosophical positions with one of their more attractive, and reasonable, students; or diverting public attention by blaming the whole mess on some poor innocent by-stander like God.

In other words, they also failed. They just covered up their failings a little more cleverly than the rest of us by being so condescending that we were convinced we had asked the wrong question, or were too stupid to appreciate the more than obvious answer. (The French have used a similar technique to convince the world they know how to cook.) Kant, on the other hand, used the more direct approach of simply being incomprehensible.

They failed primarily because they fell victim to that old wives' tale (which for some reason is usually supported by old men) that if Truth, Beauty, and Reality aren’t actually the same thing they have enough in common to make no difference. This insidious concept was given a big publicity boost by Plato, the third most evil man in the history of the world. Attila the Hun might rape, burn and kill you (in any random order), but afterward he left you pretty much alone. Plato, on the other hand, not only separated your body from your soul—which up until then had been the job of an executioner—he then shoved you in a cave with your back to the door. At least Attila left your remains in familiar surroundings.

The first and second most evil men in the history of the world are, of course, the composer Richard Wagner and the man who invented conference calls.

The truth, as any poet could tell you if he or she wasn’t too busy with poetry slams and other forms of verbal mediocrity, is that it can’t be done.