Truth and Philosphy

Truth and Philosophy

I detest those motherfuckers who are nobodies but think others are just like them, despite the overwhelming evidence that stares them in the face. Once again, take the case of the bitch Lund/VAW. Here's an absolute fucking nobody who had to repeat classes in college, had no fucking talents none whatsoever, had a job that barely paid above minimum wage and couldn't even hold on to such a job, dumped by husband, shunned by relatives, kicked out of the local Association for Senior Citizens for stupidly talking nonsense and raising dumb questions during meetings, lousy in bed, ignorant, stupid and uninformed, and living on handouts. Yet the bitch thinks she is a lady (sic!). Talking about delusions. The bitch can't write English worth a damn, despite being trained as an English teacher. The bitch can't write an essay, a poem, or a short story in any language. The bitch can't understand philosophy and I have not seen her read a serious book from start to finish. Her intellectual life is non-existent and she is sick in the head. Once she asked me to help her draft a letter to Obama, saying that she was "an expert" in some esoteric Tibetan physical exercise and she would like to travel around the country teaching the American soldiers in their military bases how to do that exercise! Of course, I refused to help her write such a letter. I did not want to look ridiculous. Oh, she wanted me to travel with her. This was shortly after I had dumped her because I realized she was a total waste of my time and money. She resorted to low class language in her thunderous denunciations of me after I dumped her like a bag of garbage. I ignored her emails. Then she said I was a coward. I just responded in kind to her with my emails. She didn't know me at all. She had better not mess with me. 

Another bitch went on and on about the evils of gambling, and yet when she was in Las Vegas, she had the stupid, but clever, audacity to ask me for money so she could play the slots! Like a stupid fool, I handed over some money to her. I lost all respect for her after that. Talking about being a cheap hypocrite. If she wanted to gamble, why didn't she gamble with her own money? You don't really know about bitches until the question of money comes up and their true nature shows.

When I told Harriette about these two women and others (three) like them, she threw up all over herself and some on me, too. She said, "Roberto, you are no better than them. Why did the fuck you associated with those whores in the first place? Couldn't you find any decent women?" I sheepishly replied that I was into a sociological and anthropological research and wanted to know how the stupid and the deluded lived their lives. Harriette threw her soup content at my face and stormed out of the restaurant. The waiter rushed over and asked me if I was okay. I said, "Of course, I am okay. Can't you see? The soup tasted good. I would like another cup." Stunned, the waiter asked, "Are you sure?" I smiled and said, "Son, I am as sure as a hole in my head. Do you see any hole there?. By the way, I do need a warm clean wet towel to wipe my face. Do you have one handy, please?" 

Unlike Bertrand Russell who turned to philosophy with hope of finding certainty, Wittgenstein  was drawn to it by a compulsive tendency to find answers to a question such as the following:

"Why should one tell a truth if it's to one's advantage to tell a lie?"

Wittgenstein was both admired and feared for his relentless pursuit of truthfulness. A sister of his once wrote to him, saying that he was a great philosopher, and his written reply was, "Call me a truth-seeker, and I will be satisfied."

In many, many ways and fundamentally speaking, I am a truth seeker. That does not mean I don't lie. I do, mostly in my fiction. Harriettte also lied consistently but her lies were white lies, while mine have been very dark. But that didn't mean she was immoral. She was the most moral woman I knew. The only person that does not lie is Omar. He's very weird. He is made differently from us, having a heart as big as the sky. I told him I feel like a big brother to him, trying to protect him against the evils of the world. He is very innocent, thinking everybody is as sweet and trustworthy as he is. But he is not diplomatic nor eager to please. He just does not talk much and he trusts people. Now Harriette is dead, Omar is my anchor and connection to morality and sweetness. Harriette was my answer to the nature of Love and Wittgenstein is now being my connection to Truth and Reality. 

Everyday I write in my blog. Writing is my way to meditate, to sort out the clutter in my mind. The way biitches and scumbags have reacted to my blog told me one thing very clear: most humans are garbage. They are not like the writers and thinkers I met in books. The bitches and scumbags hang on to a fiction that they established about themselves a long time ago and refused to accept those realities which contradict that fiction. They are annoyed that I have been clamoring that I am superior to them, at least intellectually and linguistically. They stupidly asked for "proofs". So I said, "how about you motherfuckers look at how you express yourself in English and how I do it. Are you fucking blind or something? Can't you see the big difference? How about you only know one language and you aren't even adequate at it while I comfortably navigate in four languages and can read six more? How about you motherefuckers don't know Jack shit about anything remotely connected with intellectual matters. You know absolutely nothing about history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, the world of business, stock market, poker, cognitive science, and literature. You are not readers like me. You motherfuckeres are complete ignoramuses and I despise you every time you open your mouth and expose your ignorance. You motherfuckers have made me sick of your stupidity, ignorance, and denial. You motherfuckers are not even human in my book. I regard you as bugs to squash underneath my feet. You cannot reason. You are afraid of facts and truths. I have learned nothing from you except that I am different from you. Let me go back to my books. I don't want to associate with you motherfuckers anymore because I have learned nothing from you."

Life is a hill for most folks.

I strongly reject the concept of respectability politics, which postulates that a style of dress or speech justifies injustice, and often violence, against particular groups of people or explains away the ravages of their inequality. 

I take enormous exception to arguments about the “breakdown of the family,” particularly the black family, that don’t acknowledge that this country for centuries has endeavored, consciously and not, to break it down. Or that family can be defined only one way. 

I don’t buy into the mythology that most poor people are willfully and contentedly poor, happy to live with the help of handouts from a benevolent big government that is equally happy to keep them dependent. 

These are all arguments based on shame, meant to distance traditional power structures from emerging ones, to allow for draconian policy arguments from supposedly caring people. These arguments require faith in personal failure as justification for calling our fellow citizens feckless or doctrinally disfavored. 

Those who espouse such arguments must root for failures so that they’re proved right. They need their worst convictions to be affirmed: that other people’s woes are due solely to their bad choices and bad behaviors; that there are no systematic suppressors at play; that the way to success is wide open to all those who would only choose it. 

Any of us in the country who were born poor, or minority, or female, or otherwise different — particularly in terms of gender or sexual identity — know better. 

Misogyny and sexism, racism, income inequality, patriarchy, and homophobia and heteronormative ideals course through the culture like a pathogen in the blood, infecting the whole of the being beneath the surface. 

So it is to the people with challenges that I would like to speak today. I know your pains and your struggles. I share them. It is incredibly dispiriting when people are dismissive of the barriers we must overcome simply to make it to equal footing. I know. It is infuriating when people offer insanely naïve solutions to our suffering: “Stop whining and being a victim!” I know.  

But I also would like to share with you the way I’ve learn to deal with it, hoping that maybe it will offer you some encouragement. 

I decided long ago to achieve as an act of defiance — to define my own destiny and refuse to have it defined for me. I fully understand that trying hard doesn’t always guarantee success. Success is often a fluky thing, dependent as much on luck and favor as on hard work. But while hard work may not guarantee success, not working hard almost always guarantees failure. 

I frame the argument to myself this way: If you know that you are under assault, recognize it, and defend yourself.  

Trying hard and working hard is its own reward. It feeds the soul. It affirms your will and your power. And it radiates from you, lighting the way for all those who see you. 

When I am asked to give speeches, I often include this analogy: 

For some folks, life is a hill. You can either climb or stay at the bottom.  

It’s not fair. It’s not right. But it is so. Some folks are born halfway up the hill and others on the top. The rest of us are not. Life doles out favors in differing measures, often as a result of historical injustice and systematic bias. That’s a hurtful fact, one that must be changed. We should all work toward that change. 

In the meantime, until that change is real, what to do if life gives you the hill? 

You can curse it. You can work hard to erode it. You can try to find a way around it. Those are all understandable endeavors. Staying at the bottom is not. 

You may be born at the bottom, but the bottom was not born in you. You have it within you to be better than you were, to make more of your life than was given to you by life.  

This is not to say that we can always correct life’s inequities, but simply that we honor ourselves in the trying.  

History is cluttered with instances of the downtrodden lifting themselves up. The spirit and endurance that it requires is not a historical artifact but a living thing that abides in each of us, part of the bloodline, written in the tracks of tears and the sweat of toil. 

If life for you is a hill, be a world-class climber. 

Charles Blow

Another Uncommon Interview

Another Uncommon Interview

Leslie Lovely, the strange, weird, sharp-tongued journalist who worked for a "family publication" called me back and begged for another interview. This time, she said her employer would offer me some financial incentive. Naturally, I asked her what the financial incentive entailed. An eight-day first class cruise for two around the Society Islands, airfare included, or $13,000 in cash, she informed me. I gave her the routing and checking number on my bank account.

She showed up, doll-like, with tasteful make-up---slight rouge, almost indiscernible eyeshadow; with a low-cut white blouse, sporting a jade pendant between two nice pyramids topped by perky, pointed nipples, hardly covered by sheer white bra; and stylish jeans on top of expensive-looking shoes, enhancing her statuesque shapely figure and height of around 5'8". She dressed as if she went for an informal date with an artist. I liked what I saw on her, but I didn't dispense any flattering remark after giving her a quick-over with my appraising look and sporting a most friendly smile on my still drop dead gorgeous, handsome face.

I offered her a choice of tea and biscuits or wine with an assortment of nuts. She opted for the latter. It was Thanksgiving eve. Dinner time. I didn't invite her to dinner. I never gave a woman an opportunity twice. She didn't say anything about the view of the city this time. Lights were already all over town. A big globe of full moon was on the rise over the mountains in the west. Instead, she asked me if it was okay to look at the books on my bookcase which was lined up against the wall in the living room.

-You sure have a lot of interesting books. You read all those?

-No, they are for show. 

-I thought so.

-Leslie, I don't really care what you think. Are you here to talk about me or about you?

-What's eating you? You sure are not friendly this evening. What's wrong, honey?

-Don't "honey" me, please. So are we proceeding with the interview or you're preferring with chitchat over sweet nothings?

-Okay, Mr. Wissai. Please tell our readers in ten words who you really are. They want to know. And I want to know, too. I've been intrigued.

-Poet-philosopher-writer-hunter-poker player who loves taking risks. 

-Elaborate, amplify, elucidate, clarify, please.

-Look, after being able to put food on the table, I'm not interested in hoarding money for rainy days. I'm not terribly intelligent. I know that. Everybody knows that. But I am always attracted to the idea that I am different than most, better than many. My ideas are different. My values are different, maybe even better. Very few humans impress me. I look at my fellow men and I see mostly loud-mouthed monkeys, neurotic chimps, and defective, stupid, greedy, lying humans. I don't want to be like them. I can be like them, but I don't want to. That's the difference between me and most human beings on this planet. You can write that down and take it to the bank. So I read, trying to know who I am and what was out there beyond the noise and the din. I wanted to write poems for a long time, but I couldn't because I was stupidly bogged down by rhyme and meter and all that shit. Then one day about 15 years ago, I got a breakthrough. I ignored all the rules. I just concentrated on the rhythm. And I have not looked back since. About being a hunter, any moron can be a farmer. All you need to do is to follow the rules and the weather and the politics and you survive until retirement. Then you really start to live. For many it's too late. Most monkeys are proud of that regimen, however, at least outwardly. They skimp and save for rainy days while their life is slipping away from them. I could not be a farmer, not for long. I have a temperament of a nomadic hunter. I hunt dangerous carnivorous beasts, besides easy herbivores. I feel alive when I hunt. I feel a rush of adrenaline when my life is in danger and a calming, satisfying feeling of triumph when I bag a prey and carry it back to my tent. Hunters usually don't have a respect for farmers, for easy, safe living. I am not rich, but I am not starving either. You can see that.

-Yes, I can see that. Like I said last time, you seem to do all right. 

-Let's talk about love. It features predominantly in your writings. 

-What's there to talk about? I wrote about love but I don't believe in it anymore, after being mistreated by whores and douche bags. I don't know women. I gave an impression, even bragged, that I knew women, but I didn't. I still do not. 

-Do you love any women right now?

-Are you kidding me? Are you hard of hearing? 

-What's wrong? 

-Nothing's wrong. It is what it is. I don't believe in love anymore. No women love me. And I love no women. That's fair. That's an equation. 

-Are you feeling lonely then? (Leslie gave me a seductive smile. She bent forward, fingering her pendant, watching my reaction. Her pyramids were in full view. The nipples were fully erect and inviting.  I leaned back, giving a sigh)

-I am too tired from hunting to feel lonely, too disillusioned and angry to feel horny. In fact, I feel like killing some woman, maybe two or three right now.

-Really? How exciting! Do you really? Or just a thought, an idle thought, and not really an obsession?

-As I told you the last time, killing is not hard at all. It's dealing with the aftermath, that's hard. 

-Are you prepared to deal with the aftermath?

-I don't know yet. But right now, I don't give a shit about love and loneliness. I just don't.

-Mr. Wissai, honey, yes, I am calling you honey, please allow me. Tell me what's going on. Can I help? I really mean that. Fuck! Can't you see I am being sincere here? I didn't tell you it was I who badgered my boss into going back and getting another interview with you.

-Leslie (I was sighing, once more. I looked away, at the moon now high above the mountain. I could see the snow on the mountain summit reflecting the moonlight. It was quite a lovely sight), certain realities just dawned on me. A midget bitch called me names. I was suppressing the anger. Now it's rebelling, demanding me take immediate action. I told it to wait, telling it that in hunting you must learn to wait for the right time to strike and that you must maintain silence. You don't want to alert and scare the prey away. Talks and threats are cheap. 

-Roberto, I hope you don't mind if I call you you by your first name. You've been calling me Leslie. It's only fair, right? All what you just said excited me beyond measure. Do you know that? Nobody has talked like that to me. Nobody. You're the first one. I smell blood. I smell passion. I smell pain and anger. Deadly combustion. The result is either jail time, even death or great literary works in the waiting. Of course, I want literary works, not a mundane court trial, then long prison term. That would be too boring, too predictable, deep down, although it looks exciting at first, ratings would go up. I would profit tremendously. I could write a book about you. No, honey, you are too good for any bitch. You don't have to stoop down to their level. About the midget bitch, she is not worth your trouble. She is scum. She is human trash. A cheap parasite. She is not even self-supporting. She is living on charity. And yet she has the stupidity to be proud of herself. Of what? She can't fuck, can't cook, can't read, can't understand what's the fuck going on with the world because she's half-assed literate. She should just roll over and die like a little bug that she is. I understand you were lonely at one time and she was your plaything for a while. But you are okay now. You have money again, health, good looks, and talents. Forget the bitch. Let's go to the gym and work out. I lied to you the last time I was here. I am no lesbian. I am a full-blooded heterosexual woman. I like you a lot. In time, you will like me. I guarantee you that. Don't be shy. Let's go. But first, I need to go to the bathroom. Honey, please show me where it is.

When Leslie came back from the sojourn in the bathroom (she stayed there for a long time, at least half an hour. I didn't know what the fuck she did in there. Either she had a very bad case of constipation or she was playing game, testing me if I became impatient and then knocked on the door, asking what the hell was going on. I didn't do anything. I stayed fixed in the living from, thinking. She could have dropped dead in there for all I cared. I was in my violent misogynistic mood), she was surprised that I just looked at her with my eyebrows raised. She sheepishly smiled. I silently pointed to the chair, indicating that I was not in any mood to go anywhere. Not yet. Then I opened my mouth,

-I was thinking of what you had said about the midget bitch. Her name is Lund, by the way. That's my nick for her, very pregnant with meanng. Look it up. You must be a linguist, well versed in many languages, to know what it means. The other nick I have for her is VAW. Exotic, but mundane. If you can figure what that means, that would make my day. Anyway Lund/VAW Is just a very stupid bitch. She didn't understand me at all. She thought she would make me angry and mad with her fucking cheap insults. She didn't know by doing so she travelled into a fucking dangerous terrain. Everything looked so fucking clear in hindsight. She was kicked out of an association of exiles. She quarreled with her neighbor, screaming bloody murder at the top of her voice in the dead of the night, waking the whole fucking neighborhood up. Her neighbors called the cops. They and the ambulance arrived, sirens blared off, the whole fucking scene of mayhem and black comedy. She held a lowly job which paid barely above minimum wage. She has no job now. Who the fuck would want to hire her? One must be stupid and crazy to hire her. The woman is a ticking time bomb of troubles and annoyance. She speaks broken English. She does not know shit about anything, except sitting on her ass all day watching TV. She is living on the kindness of humanity. Her relatives disowned her because she quarreled with them. She quarreled with everybody. She is a fucking parasite, and yet she had the gall to criticize me for being a lousy lay in bed, and of my erratic income for being a hunter! I am self-supporting. I don't live on handouts as she does. I play the stock market. I am into consulting. I make money in poker. I am financially independent. I have money to travel, to go anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat. Lucky for me, I didn't show her what I had in the bank, otherwise I would be more upset now. I didn't want to tell her that I was a stud in bed with Harriette out of the kindness my heart. I didn't want to tell her I performed poorly in bed with her because she had a lousy, unsexy body and she didn't know how to excite a man (At that time, Leslie interjected, saying, "I do! I do!", I smiled warmly at her). I'm telling you, she is a walking defnition of failure in every sense of the world. Her ex-husband beat her, chasing her all around the neighborhood. She had to take refuge in a neighbor's house. She is a midget but has a very big mouth. She was full of Midget Complex. You no doubt wondered why the fuck I went out with her. She chased after me, not the other way around. I am a man. I want to experience life, high and low. As simple as that. Anyway, I'm tired of talking about the bitch. Let's go. You said you like me, heh? I have that effect on women. Don't be so bitchy and tart-tongued, all right? I am in no mood for that. I want to relax, taking things easy. 

(To be continued)

My "Development"

My "Development"

In these last days on this planet I've been reflecting on my life, trying to come to terms with it, have peace, and be ready to say both good bye and hello once more to all things terrestrial, hence my repeated reflections on the subject that is me, me, me.

I don't know about other humans, but to me, one thing that has nagged and gnawed at the core of my being is my awareness that I must and should be of the type that is not mediocre, ordinary, humdrum, dull, and boring. I have seen up close the lives of several cowardly and common monkeys and I don't like what I've seen. Self-deception sickened me. Mediocrity brought tears to my eyes and made me yawn.

At the age of eleven, all by myself I realized that God, as commonly conceived by humans, was a fiction. At the age of twenty-three, I began suspecting that Romantic Love was a fiction, too, at least for me although not necessarily to me. My heart was bigger and more sensitive than most. I am about to hit sixty-five years of age, and my perceptions of God and Romantic Love have not changed. 

I never worshipped money nor power. I like the arts and philosophy. I respect artists and philosophers while I view merchants and politicians with distaste. I always try to do things that few are able to do because they just don't have a fucking ability and temperament. As I said before, mediocrity brought tears to my eyes and made me yawn. I have known so many self-important, but mediocre monkeys. They don't look pretty. And they have really nothing to write home about. After they die, nobody knows about them. They are just like a piece of shit on the roadside, at first stinking, then dried up, and eventually washed and blown away by the rain and the wind. They leave nothing beautiful or striking behind, except their genes, but barnyard animals can do that, too. Having offspring is no big deal. 

So I read and studied and reread. Now, I have been challenging my "peers", acquaintances, and friends if they know as much about book knowledge as I do;  if they know as many languages as I do; if they can write as lyrically and cogently as I do; and if they understand the subjects of philosophy and history as well as I do. I have not yet met anybody who can translate from Vietnamese poems into English as beautifully as I do. Yes, I am arrogant, but I know I am rare and beautiful. I am no mere man. I am dynamite. I am not a picture of mediocrity. Don't come too close to me. You may get blown up along with me. 

I have been an immigrant for most of my life, two-thirds of it. I have come to terms with displacement, loss, discrimination, and anger. I have learned to seek refuge in library, the building of knowledge and true power. Immigration is reinvention. I have reinvented myself. I have forged myself a new identity to deal with a feeling of estrangement with my fellow men, for whom I have had a mixture of pity and contempt. I called myself Roberto Wissai. I invented a hero for my fiction, Omar Sabat, based mostly on my conception of who I should be. Omar is the first name of my best friend, a good Christian and a very caring high school math teacher. Sabat is the take-off from Anwar Sadat, an Egyptian president assassinated for making peace with Israel in return of the captured Sinai Peninsula. Ba is my first name in Vietnamese. Omar Sabat in my fiction is my alter ego. He is much more of me than Omar the math teacher in real life. He is my way to deal with the rising tide of manic-depression, of bipolarity. Through fiction and poetry I have tried to bridge the unbridgeable. Through the medium of my adopted tongue, English, I have tried to find joy and pride. Unlike many immigrants, I don't suffer from language barrier. But I suffer from the ignorance and stupidity of common monkeys and defective humans who think they understand me. How could they, when they don't even have a feel for the English language, a language to which they have exposed for over thirty years? They have tin ears and scattered brains. Everyday I read their stupid, ignorant chatter and self-important prattle on the Net and I throw up. 

Yes, I do know---Buddha was not the only one who knew---that they and I are all interconnected, but I can't help but feel superior and disdainful to them, especially when they try to lecture me or tell me that I am cowardly for not replying to their stupid, insulting, ignorance-filled emails. As I often point out, stupid is as stupid does. Stupid monkeys do stupid things; they can't help themselves. Stupid monkeys and defective humans ironically don't know they are stupid. They think they are normal, even clever simply they have managed to survive. They think survival is a big thing. They forget about real accomplishments of which they have nothing, zilch, nada, rien, nichts. I have an old and ugly monkey sitting on my right hand right now. For the past hour, it has been yakking non-stop in a monologue about everything under the sun. It looks stupid and sounds stupid, but of course it does not know that. I hope to you, I am not old and ugly monkey. But if I am, so be it. To each his own. 

Thus spake Roberto Wissai

Self-Honesty

""Why Adam Lanza did what he did is apparent from your article: untreated psychosis. Psychosis is a brain disease. In some people it can create a private world of misperception and misinterpretation, of danger and obsession, of an imperative for action that has no relation to external reality. "

The above quotation has stayed with me day and night, ringing loud and clear in my brain 24/7 because it is good and true, crystal clear and concise. It is a beautiful illustration of the effective use of language to describe realities and awareness. 

Several Monkeys I know will never be able to recognize themselves in those words. They don't know they have psychosis. They are not smart and strong enough. They are too busy to protect their fragile ego instead of looking for realities. They don't want to look for realities because they cannot handle realities. They are not strong enough. They dare not look into the abyss of their soul. So they look away and in the process and in time have acquired a strange notion that they are okay, even "good" and "normal" and "happy" simply because they live a life of that of barnyard animals. They cannot live a life of true humans. It's too hard for them. They don't have the will-power and the desire to do so. And yet they jump up and down like stupid epileptics whenever I remind them that they are horribly mediocre and absolute nobodies, consuming resources on this planet and contributing nothing positive to the genetic pool. I laugh and chuckle and snort whenever I see them open their mouths and opine. Stupid and ignorant monkeys say stupid and ignorant things. They rely on trite and platitudinous sayings and expressions to make their points. They seize on simple facts without knowing what they think as facts have shifting properties and limited shelf life. They are not smart enough. I know. They used to come to me for info and opinion so they could navigate through the maze of the world, so they could make sense of what was going on in the world. One was so stupid to think that the Americans would not elect Obama because he was black. Well, the Americans, including myself, did. Twice. 

Unlike them, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and I are students of the human mind, of realities, and of language as a tool to convey realities. 

Thanksgivng once more

Thanksgiving 2013

This is my second letter about Thanksgiving 2013. The first one was full of myself and how precious and pretty my life turned out to be. This second one is more "sober". 

I am thankful I am still alive and finally have gained some wisdom of not being bent of shape nor vocalizing my surprise and annoyance at those who sought my help and never once acknowledged it after help was rendered. "Thanks" to them I learned about how certain humans are truly animalistic. I hope they read my blog and are not too thick-skinned to ask me for help again because all they will get is a silence from me. And many thanks to a special lady who taught me the meaning of true love and made me want to live forever. Many women (24 and counting) have told me that they love(d) me, but their words were mere utterances of hot air, except hers. 

I am thankful of not yet being afflicted with terminal illness and have to take extreme measures to prolong my life. I hope I will not do so when the time comes. Quality precedes quantity. That's been my motto. 

I am thankful for growing up poor but amidst an atmosphere and ambience of love and sacrifice.  Unlike what happened to others, poverty didn't drain my spiritual strength, it toughened my spirit; poverty didn't damage my hopes and dreams, it nurtured them. It helped me to not sink into despair after I threw away 1.2 million dollars. It opened my eyes as to who really loved me. 

And now back to the eternal object of my adoration: I am thankful that I age gracefully. I am still drop dead gorgeous and have a nice physique for my age. May I continue looking that good, well into my 80's. Yes, contrary to a bitch's delusion, I need no chemical help in a certain department. With her, I did because she was not really a turn-on, I am sorry to say. Love transformed me. I now look younger than I did five years ago. 

The Wall

The Wall

No, I cannot love a wall

No matter how pretty and tall; 

I used to try to kick down the wall

In order to reach you;

I used to try to go over the waterfall

In my homemade canoe,

Thinking you'd be over on the other side.

I thought my feelings for you would never subside.

But they did and died, like the vine on your wall. 

Language and Reality Once More

Language and Reality Once More

We use language to tell others who we are

But we wonder why nobody seems to understand.

Don't we all speak English, leaving the door ajar

So others can see our scars and how much we had to withstand?

To love is to open the heart to possibilities and 

To understand, accept, and then respect the other; 

To love is to see oneself in the other and more:

To care for the other, to dream and grow old together; 

It's no longer the concern for the old self of yore.

Love, once understood is really simple.

We need nobody to decipher it for us, absolutely.

A true human knows what true love is, not monkey.

Psychosis

"Why Adam Lanza did what he did is apparent from your article: untreated psychosis. Psychosis is a brain disease. In some people it can create a private world of misperception and misinterpretation, of danger and obsession, of an imperative for action that has no relation to external reality. 

If recognized and treated, psychosis may be a painful and debilitating illness, but not one that is dangerous to others. The failure to speak and write clearly about psychosis, instead using such vacant euphemisms as “disturbed,” impedes our ability to care for its victims and protect the public."
WILLIAM IRA BENNETT
Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 26, 2013   
The writer is a psychiatrist.  

Lanza was a 20-year-old mass shooter at Sam Hook Elementary School, where he used to attend as a kid, killing over 20 children and some teachers after shooting his mother dead at home. Lanza was diagnosed of having Asperger's syndrome. The human brain is a dedicate organ and highly vulnerable. After seeing all the defense (a misnomer, really) mechanisms---including denial, self-projection, blaming others, denigration (including self-denigration, but this inward denigration is rare), cruelty, aggressive lashing at sources of discontentment---exhibited by monkeys and defective humans, I concluded that a clear-eyed acceptance of self and others is essential for mental health. If we have to act out, it's safer to do so via displacement and sublimation. Monkeys and defective humans tend to have an unduly inflated sense of self despite glaring realities, and hypocrites always present a self that is the opposite of what it is. All these sorry pieces of being are not comfortable with realities, especially the realities as to who they are, and the discrepancies between their aspirations and actual accomplishments. They live a life no different from that of barnyard animals: eat, shit, sleep, have sex and offspring, and then die. They leave nothing of themselves behind that is contributory to human culture or advances---they are not good enough, yet they proudly present a false front of happiness and contentment and they are full of excuses as to why they have not been able to do as well as others have done ---they never once entertained the thought that their failure to do so lies at the their lack of ability and/or drive. Monkeys and Pygmy chimps have excuses. Real humans have strong desires and drives and determination, on top of having a better brain. There lies the differences. 

Wissai
canngon.blogspot.com

Thanksgetting and Thanksgiving

This year some woman sent me a surprising Thanksgiving card, saying that she was thankful of my being her friend and thus relieving her much of existential loneliness and angst. She ended the effusive, gushing panegyrical epistle by oddly hoping that I will hang around on this planet for at least another year so she will find the energy to go on with her life. She sent the modern e-card via cyberspace, complete with electronic falling multihued autumn leaves on the desolate though pretty-looking path in the woods somewhere in the temperate zone. I didn't know her real name or whereabouts. I didn't pry and she didn't supply. I just know her by her nick "LonesomeLucy". She is my penpal and penfan. She wrote to me after seeing my improvement over e.e.cummings's lips to lips and eyes to eyes on the Net, stating that my version is far more accessible, poetic, and memorable than the original. 

Her card inspired me to sit down and say thanks to my deceased parents for giving birth to me; to the forces of chance that the sperm and the egg that constituted me were of the romantic and fantastic kind; to my listening to my own heart and being who I am. Thanks also to those who have loved me and hated me, for without your being a catalyst to my tortured soul, I would not have been able to write all those far-out, nonsensical, but eloquent and, if I may say so, beautiful letters and poems that I didn't know I had within me. Last, but not least, I thank Snow Clouds for putting up with me through all the years and months, I love you in a way that words would have difficulty to convey. 

Of Skunks, I, and Wittgenstein, and the true Nature of Fraud, an excerpt from Wittgenstein's journey.

Wittgenstein was different, all right. He was a genius. I am also different. Many people have told me that they have not met anybody quite like me. Yes, I am different but I am not a genius, not like Wittgenstein. I don't have a striking, original thought or framework of thinking to share with the world. My interests are scattered and far-ranging, maybe more than those of Wittgenstein's. I have diluted myself, but that's okay. I know my place in this world. I am proud of who I am. I am ethically better and more intellectually honest than most, far more sensitive than a majority of monkeys and chimps who have human appearance, and I have creativity with words. I can write with impact and originality of expressions. I am no fraud. Wittgenstein was accused by many of his detractors as frauds, maybe out of jealousy or failure of understanding. Peter Gray-Lucas, a talented linguist, fluent in German, played his part in WWII at the top secret  decoding center at Bletchley Park, where so much of the Nazis' fighting strategy was undone, here said something about Wittgenstein. 

"(He was) a charlatan....He missed his vocation: he should have been a stand-up comedian. In his funny Austrian accent he could do all sorts of mimicry of accents, styles of talking...I remember one evening he got up from his chair, talking in this funny voice, and said something like, "What do we say if I walk through this wall?" And I remember realizing that my knuckles were going white gripping my chair. And I really thought he was going through the wall and that the roof was going to fall in. That must have been part of his spell: that he could conjure up almost anything." (Edmonds, p. 24) 

Several stupid women have accused me of being a fraud, after being dumped by me because I found them---belatedly, of course---cheap, selfish, vicious, and boring. They could not take rejections. But what do they know? They are just unaccomplished, untalented little peons, short in stature and abilities, but big in fantasies of themselves so they can live for another day. They  have not accomplished a single damn thing comparable to what I have done. They have not read a serious book from cover to cover. They cannot write a poem, a short story, or an essay. In fact, they cannot write a paragraph without making at least five errors either in spelling or grammar or both. They cannot express themselves coherently. All they could do was to have sex and then got pregnant and had babies, just like a little sow in the pigsty or a wandering, roaming mongrel  bitch on the streets does. And yet they stupidly fancied they were my equal. They wanted me to give them proofs and evidence that I was superior to them! One of them gave me a long list of reasons as to why she thought I was a nobody. I rolled on the floor laughing. Here was a woman who had a lousy scholastic record, was rejected by men and close relations and society at large, and lived in isolation, and yet entertained delusions about herself. Nobody knows about her. She has made no name for herself, no splash, because she could not do it. She is an absolute nobody. And now she goes around thinking I am a nobody like her. Stupid people, as my Hindu friend in India whom I met during my visit there told me, do stupid things and I should laugh at them and at their stupidities, instead of getting mad at them. "Why should you get annoyed at skunks for exuding foul odor when their sense of being, their self-conception, is threatened? Just stay away from skunks. Don't associate yourself with skunks. Avoid them."

But let's us hear from Wittgenstein himself on what it means being a philosopher. To me, what he said below contain echoes of Nietzsche and there are awareness of pushing the limits, and maybe going beyond of reason and sanity, expressed in the aphoristic manner like that of Nietzsche. What we take as truths, after spending our lifetime reflecting on them, we don't bother to supply with long supporting arguments. We express them in pithy, concise, oracular, muscular statements. Like-minded kinsmen would understand us right away when we pronounce them. Others would not understand or agree with us anyway even if we write long books to explain what we mean. Truth is like Poetry. You must be ready for it and have a capacity for it.

-When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

-A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

-Working in philosophy---like work in architecture in many aspects---is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)

(Rorty p.422)

A Talk with a Hindu, an extract and a detour from Wittgenstein's Journey

So, in the twilight of my life, I am slowly recognizing that all human beings hold fast to a certain self-conception as an anchor to go through life, a certain pride, a certain peace, even if that self-conception is based on a delusion---and for many, it is a big and helpless delusion. I will never forget a wise Hindu man told me when I was traveling in India that, "Mr. Wissai, all humans---I am not sure about other sentient beings because I don't know how they think. I only know how and what I think, and by extension and extrapolation, what and how other humans think. Don't be an absolutist. We all practice self-projection, but the wise and more understanding among us do so with more sensitivity, more empathy, with constant revisions based on updated info gleaned from the words and actions of others----find a reason to live for. I suggest you do likewise. Even a man universally condemned vile and vicious as Hitler thought of himself as a good and caring man, doing all what he could for Germany. We all practice self-deception without being aware of that. Yes, based on our long talks of the past three days, and they were among the most scintillating talks I had, I know you are very diligent of not doing so, but you are still human. The secret of happiness is to be lax on others and be critical on yourself. You laughed at people living lives of animals, having no or being incapable of higher aspirations and values, but that's okay. We are all constricted by our circumstances and our limitations. Do you know what makes a beggar happy? Just to have enough money to buy him some food for the day or maybe some leftover for the following day. Yes, he follows the biological imperative to live. We must respect him for that. We must respect his sanity, his strength, his refusal to give in to the temptation of giving up and killing himself. A beggar's life may not mean much to you, but it means a lot to the beggar. In the final analysis, life is life, no life is better than another's. You laugh at certain women who have lived like barnyard animals, having sex and having children and being very proud of that while having accomplished nothing worthy to write home about. But those women have lived the kind of life you described and held in contempt because that was all they could do. Their lives were governed by the limitations of their abilities. You should not ask them to do more than they could do. It does not matter they have delusions and fantasies about their self-worth. I repeat, we humans have all those so we could carry our heads high. Yes, we are not honest with ourselves, but please, remember we are like that because we want to live. Too much self-honesty tends to lead to despair and suicide. Don't be annoyed if they turn the table around and ask you what you have done with your life. Stupid folks ask stupid questions. That's why they are stupid in the first place and too stupid to admit and accept their stupidity. It's your mistake to associate yourself with them in the first place. If you sleep with dogs, you will get fleas. Have a higher standard. So, you go ahead and feel good about yourself for being a philosopher on top of being a poet and a writer of occasional exquisite, transcendental, lyrical prose. Yes, go ahead and fancy that you are dangerous, in your contempt of others who cannot remotely think as critically, to argue as cogently, and to write as beautifully, both creatively and critically, as you do. We all have our private contempts. Yours is just too public. It's not pretty and it's not cool. I wish you peace and I wish you strength in the rest of your journey. Namaste."

Things you must say to yourself everyday, every conscious and unconscious minute of your life

1. Respect facts. No excuses. You must be strong for facts, too.

2. Go beyond the trite and the obvious. Dig deeper. 

3. In the end, softness and silence are best approaches to almost everything.

4. Don't sweat over small stuff.

5. No whining. Only victims are victimized. People walk away from unpleasant things and situations. Be a fragrant flower, not a stinking piece of shit. 

6. Each of us is a center of our universe. We don't mean shit to anybody else. No, we do not, deep down. Pay attention to what people do, not what they say. 

7. You're born broke, you die broke, everything else in between is just fluctuation.

8. You don't need others to understand you. You only need to understand yourself and others. 

9. Laugh and smile at all times. The worst thing that will happen to you is you die. And we all die. Life is not all that cracks up to be. So don't act too important to anybody. Nobody misses you or grieves after you are gone. You are only important to yourself.

10. Be cool at all times even if you are about to die. Die with dignity. Be a samurai. 

Limits of Understanding (and Thinking)

What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say what we cannot think. Is it possible a lower being can understand a higher being? Can a part understand a whole? Can a monkey understand a human? Can a monkey "know" that it cannot be a human, no matter how much it tries to ape its owner? 

When a stupid human fancies that she is not stupid, that she is capable of self-understanding and self-reflection, that she is smarter than she actually is, can she ever grow? When a stupid human parrot the words of a wise human, that does not mean the stupid human understands those words. You must live those words, must have the necessary experiences from where the words come in order that you are able to understand them. Thus, all truths are private and personal. 

Speech

Speech 

"They are speaking, like you and me, to fill a void, to pass the hours, to assert their identities, to pretend that they’re truly connected to someone, anyone else. Making noise is what they do to keep out the silence that’s waiting to step in and devour them. Of course, they like to hear themselves talk. It’s how they make sure they’re alive."

They speak, but they don't care if we hear them, let alone understand them. Noise is the essence, not the understanding. They gave up on understanding a long time ago. To live is to engage forever in a battle with silence. 

I know about their speech and the noise they make. I am a writer, don't you see? I write to connect myself with myself, to make noise and music with my words, to dance on the precipice of the abyss while wrestling with existential questions. I am happiest when I write. 

One Difference (among the multitude) between a Human and two, maybe three, Monkeys

An old but venturesome female Colobus Monkey, named Tweedle Dee, one day left the forest and ventured into human habitat. It chanced upon a shining mirror in a public bathroom. It pointed to the mirror and said, "Ha, ha, ha, you're an old, ugly monkey. " The image in the mirror pointed the finger back at the monkey at the same time a voice echoed in the tile-walled enclosed bathroom, "Ha, ha, ha, you're an old, ugly monkey." Frightened, it sought refuge underneath the sink, all shaken with fear and defecated and urinated on the floor, stinking the place.

Another ancient female monkey walked in. Its name is Tweedle Dum. It is a Pygmy Marsoset. It also saw itself in the mirror, uttered the same remark, hid underneath the sink, and shit and pissed on the floor exactly like the other monkey did. 

A female aged, decrepit bonobo walked in. It recognized itself in the mirror. It said nothing. It tried to squeeze some pimples off its wrinkled, weather-beaten face.

A handsome, virile, tall, athletic, middle-aged human male walked in. He saw the bonobo. He came over and knocked on its head, "Is anybody home?". A resounding empty sound came back. The man smiled and said, "Just as I thought. Empty-headed. Your skull is an empty vessel, devoid of thoughts." He then saw the two monkeys trembling and clinging to each other underneath the sink. He said, "You two look familiar. What are you doing here? You two should be back in the dark jungle where you belong."

Language and Reality

Today I read a polemic in which the writer confused the verb "to entitle" with "to enable". My first impulse was to correct him, but I overcame the impulse because I have Wittgenstein to contend with. He made me feel stupid and inadequate. 

Yet, in spite of Wittgenstein's assertion, language is both universal and private because it is never precise unless one has to define and qualify key words in every sentence one uses, but doing so is so tiresome. That's why when we read others, we must have a modicum of sensitivity to the words they use, and not blindly projecting ourselves and our own meanings on to them like a moth to the flame. In other words, we must leave ego at the door and travel free of baggage into the interior world of the writer. To understand others is poetry; to misunderstand them is mere prose.

E.L. Doctorow said, "Reading a book is the essence of interactivity, bringing sentences to life in the mind.”

Here's what the self-regarded smart guy wrote. The polemic contains two short sentences but has three errors. One involves word usage. The other two are about grammar. That's just stylistics alone. Forget about his "thought" which is obviously crippled. 

"His money entitles him to do whatever he wants to with our government.

 God forbid anyone attempt to regulate that.

JP"

Thank You, Mr. Veteran and the Aftermath

The poem "Thank You, Mr. Veteran" and The Aftermath

I shared the poem with Omar. He read it and then called me up about it just when I was having one of those unforgiving, sad, bitter moods. He just hung up a few minutes ago. So the conversation was fresh in my mind.

-Roberto, the poem you just sent me made me feel like learning Vietnamese. If the translation was that smooth and unstilted and memorable, then it must be awesome in the original.
-Thanks, Omar. Don't stop at feeling like doing anything. Don't be a mental masturbator. Be a Nike. Do it.
-Okay, boss. Boy, you are in a great mood, aren't you? Anyway, I liked your translation very much. I liked its musicality. 
-I don't know from whose point of view the poet wrote the poem. That of the crippled veteran or his former girlfriend or a social critic who decried at social injustice? 
-Ambiguity is always good for arts. You can interpret it at whatever angle you want. No black or white. Just 50 shades of gray. 
-Is that so? A literary fan of mine wrote to me indicating the poem turned her off for its content. She thought it was cruel toward the veteran who sacrificed his life, gave part of his body to protect the noncombatants. When I pointed out to her that life is basically cruelty, injustice, and indifference; that cynicism is the order of the day if one wants to go through another day without having own's heart breaking into a thousand pieces; and that is why true love is a balm and big in demand, she wrote back, saying given a choice of unavailability of true love and loneliness, she would choose aloneness.
-Ah, what does she know about true love, loneliness, and aloneness? I am an assassin of the heart, a killer of despair, a terminator of self-pity. I bet she just used words for the rhetoric of it. She does not know their meanings, their private truths. Ah, the language game humans play! 
-Go on elaborating, Mr. Samurai.
-You see, true love is what everybody talks about, but they don't know what the hell it is because they don't have it within them or are exposed to it. It is like God, a God that you know, your own private God that only makes sense to you, and to nobody else. It is not trite at all to say Love is God and God is Love. It is the goodness inside you, the capacity for giving all of yourself for a person or for a cause that makes living meaningful, relevant, magical, transcendental, and beautiful. The two bitches you told me, VAW and JAW, the two idiots, the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, didn't have any love within. All they have within is shit and an unhealthy inflated sense of self. That was why they said nasty things to you, trying to arouse anger and hate inside you. They are suffering and they want you to suffer, too. 

Tell your fan there will be a time-- and I hope well before she is invalid, crippled, bedridden and "alone" in bed with feelings of regret consuming her---when love will hit her like a bus, no matter what bus it is, school bus, city bus, or tour bus, she must be ready for it. Seize the day. Carpe diem. Act. Stop thinking and "feeling". Jump into the abyss. Climb Mt. Everest. Kiss a leper. Live. It's not you she must love. No, I don't mean that at all because I know you. You have moved beyond love and hate. You are now in a realm of darkness. You have become Lucifer. You have become Prince of Darkness. Quite a pity. But that's your choice. Life is about making choices, in whatever way that makes sense to you. I apologize when I said "quite a pity" in describing your choice. I should not have done so. I should not have passed judgment. I have no right. But I am your friend, the only friend you have in this world and I care. Anyway, go break young girls' hearts, as the song Billie Jean says. Do whatever makes you happy. I hope your conscience is strong enough. 
-Omar, you make feel like crying.
-Didn't you just lecture me a few minutes ago that "don't feel. Be a Nike. Just do it!"?


"Billie Jean" Lyrics

[1st Verse]
She Was More Like A Beauty Queen From A Movie Scene
I Said Don't Mind, But What Do You Mean I Am The One
Who Will Dance On The Floor In The Round
She Said I Am The One Who Will Dance On The Floor In The Round

[2nd Verse]
She Told Me Her Name Was Billie Jean, As She Caused A Scene
Then Every Head Turned With Eyes That Dreamed Of Being The One
Who Will Dance On The Floor In The Round

[Bridge]
People Always Told Me Be Careful Of What You Do
And Don't Go Around Breaking Young Girls' Hearts
And Mother Always Told Me Be Careful Of Who You Love
And Be Careful Of What You Do 'Cause The Lie Becomes The Truth

[Chorus]
Billie Jean Is Not My Lover
She's Just A Girl Who Claims That I Am The One
But The Kid Is Not My Son
She Says I Am The One, But The Kid Is Not My Son

[3rd Verse]
For Forty Days And for Forty Nights
The Law was on her Side
But Who Can Stand When She's In Demand
Her Schemes And Plans
'Cause We Danced On The Floor In The Round
So Take My Strong Advice, Just Remember To Always Think Twice
Do think Twice

[4th Verse]
She Told My Baby We'd Danced 'Til Three
Then She Looked At Me
She Showed A Photo Of A Baby Crying
His Eyes Looked Like Mine
Go On Dance On The Floor In The Round, Baby

[Bridge]
People Always Told Me Be Careful Of What You Do
And Don't Go Around Breaking Young Girls' Hearts
She Came And Stood Right By Me
Then The Smell Of Sweet Perfume
This Happened Much Too Soon
She Called Me To Her Room

[Chorus]
Billie Jean Is Not My Lover
She's Just A Girl Who Claims That I Am The One
But The Kid Is Not My Son
Billie Jean Is Not My Lover
She's Just A Girl Who Claims That I Am The One
But The Kid Is Not My Son
She Says I Am The One, But The Kid Is Not My Son

She Says I Am The One, But The Kid Is Not My Son

Billie Jean Is Not My Lover
She's Just A Girl Who Claims That I Am The One
But The Kid Is Not My Son
She Says I Am The One, But The Kid Is Not My Son
She Says I Am The One, She Says He Is My Son
She Says I Am The One
Billie Jean Is Not My Lover
Billie Jean Is Not My Lover
Billie Jean Is Not My Lover
Billie Jean Is Not My Lover
Billie Jean Is Not My Lover
Billie Jean Is Not My Lover

The Things They Carried. Read the Book, if not, hear the voice. I've read the book. Several Times.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED 

By Tim O’Brien 

Read by Bryan Cranston 

Playtone/Audible. 

“Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you until 20 years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again.” 

This passage, from a chapter called “How to Tell a True War Story,” gives succinct voice to some of the themes that preoccupy Tim O’Brien in “The Things They Carried.” Described simply as “a work of fiction,” the book is self-evidently autobiographical, a record of the memories of a writer in his 40s named Tim O’Brien, who two decades earlier was a soldier in Vietnam. His account of what happened — amid the hamlets and forests of the Batangan Peninsula and in other areas of operation — to him and the other members of his platoon is punctuated by rueful, sometimes anguished reflections on the elusiveness of meaning and the fraught relationship between truth and invention.  

War — perhaps especially a war that, on the American side, began in deception and continued in confusion — has a way of blurring such distinctions. What happens in combat can be grotesque, absurd, senseless and transcendent, sometimes all at once. Capturing this in prose that upholds the post-Hemingway, Raymond Carver-era values of plainness and specificity is a challenge. “In any war story, but especially a true one,” O’Brien writes, “it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” As a result, the standard of truth is not epistemological, but visceral: “It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.” 

“The Things They Carried” has lived in the bellies of American readers for more than two decades. O’Brien’s third book about Vietnam (following “If I Die in a Combat Zone” and “Going After Cacciato”), it sits on the narrow shelf of indispensable works by witnesses to and participants in the fighting, alongside Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” Tobias Wolff’s “In Pharaoh’s Army” and James Webb’s “Fields of Fire.” While he conveys the details of grunt-level life and death — the weight of boots and weapons, the smell of mud and vegetation, the split-second swerves from tedium to terror — with startling immediacy, O’Brien is also haunted by the way experience is altered by the passage of time, by the gap that opens up between his young and middle-aged selves. Some of the most wrenching moments in the book find him back home, at 43, with a career and a family and a restless itch to make sense of his earlier transformation from a Minnesota college student with mildly antiwar politics to a member of the squad whose stories he will eventually borrow. 

In 1990, when Houghton Mifflin published the book, Vietnam was still recent history, its individual and collective wounds far from healed. Just as the years between combat and publication affected O’Brien’s perception of events, so has an almost exactly equal span changed the character of the writing. “The Things They Carried” is now, like the war it depicts, an object of classroom study, kept relevant more by its craft than by the urgency of its subject matter. The raw, restless, anguished reckoning inscribed in its pages — the “gut hate” and comradely love that motivated the soldiers — has come to reflect conventional historical wisdom. Over time, America’s wars are written in shorthand: World War II is noble sacrifice; the Civil War, tragic fratricide; Vietnam, black humor and moral ambiguity. 

Which is partly what makes Bryan Cranston a more than suitable choice to narrate the new audiobook edition of “The Things They Carried.” Thanks to his role on “Breaking Bad,” Cranston may be the most charismatic embodiment of moral ambiguity we currently possess. There was always something comforting as well as menacing in Walter White’s voice, and Cranston attacks O’Brien’s sober, sinewy prose with slightly scary authority.  

In print, “The Things They Carried” is a fast read, less because of narrative momentum — it is a compendium of vignettes and digressions, not a traditional novel — than because of the intimate urgency of the voice. There is an Ancient Mariner quality to the narrator; he needs you to listen to his tale, even if he remains uncertain of its import. You need to know the names of his comrades (Rat Kiley, Kiowa, Norman Bowker and Ted Lavender) and to hear the gruesome and comical facts of their lives and deaths. It is impossible, it feels insensitive, to turn away before the recitation is finished. 

Cranston’s reading has a similar quality, and in any case, if you were a binge-watcher of “Breaking Bad” it will be no big deal to spend six hours in his company here. His calm, gravelly diction, unmarked by any noticeable regional accent, carries a faint echo of Walter Cronkite, who delivered the news from ’Nam with a matter-of-factness inflected with moral concern. But Cranston is also a capable mimic, and he does the Army in different voices. Characters who on the page are names, fates and identifying attributes grow into a chorus of American regional and ethnic types — Native American, African-American, Midwestern, Southern.  

Sometimes the impressions feel a little too on the nose, as if we are watching a corny World War II platoon picture, and the voices of Vietnamese and female characters edge close to caricature. But for the most part the individuality of long-dead, sparely sketched people is honored and restored. The novel’s two best sections — the account of an aimless drive around an Iowa lake interspersed with flashbacks to a horrible night in a Vietnamese bog, and the chronicle of an abortive flight to Canada on O’Brien’s part — take on new and gripping power. 

This audiobook is one of the first fruits of a collaboration between Amazon’s Audible and Playtone, Tom Hanks’s production company, that aims to bring important works of American literature and history into the format. “The Things They Carried” certainly qualifies, and so, in its modest way, does “The Vietnam in Me,” an essay by O’Brien included as a bonus, read by the author himself. Originally published in The New York Times in 1994, it juxtaposes scenes from a visit to Vietnam O’Brien took in the company of a younger girlfriend with his bitter reflections, a few months later, on the end of their relationship.  

“The Vietnam in Me” is a rougher piece of writing than “The Things They Carried,” and hearing them together makes you realize that the book, for all its anguish and unsettlement, is a highly disciplined and polished literary performance. Hearing O’Brien read the essay aloud is also startling. He has a writer’s voice, not an actor’s, sometimes short of breath and usually rising at the end of a sentence in the default cadence of spoken-word performance. You detect Minnesota in the flatness of his vowels and also, perhaps, Vietnam in his scratchy, weary, nervous vocalization. What you also hear is some of the grief and anger that were always part of the invisible baggage of “The Things They Carried,” and that turn out, 20 years later, to have been the point of the story all along. 

A. O. Scott is a chief film critic for The Times.

ALM revisited

Adolescence, Love, and Memory Revisited 

I posted Claire Needell's piece on Gone With The Wind in my blog. We all have our GWTW. Mine is Catcher in the Rye. Whenever I hold the tattered, Signet paperback issue with the price 50c embossed on the cover, memories of the summer of 1968 rushed back and wrapped me in an odd cocoon of innocence, stupidity, melancholy and sorrowful flutterings of my stupid, romantic, tender heart. I learned then and relearned over and over again as I moved through life that love was a strange but universal longing and only the attainment of the big-hearted and the mature. Selfish and childish humans may long for it but will never have it, not the pure and unadulterated version anyway. 

We say and do things to restore balance inside. Thus, liars sometimes unburden themselves and say the shocking truths. Seemingly gentle, nice folks say and do cruel things. Friendly people are deep down cold and distant. And stingy, miserly guys like me threw millions of dollars away. And Manny Pacquiao now has compassion for his boxing adversaries and regularly hold Bible study and prayer sessions for his entourage. So I should not be surprised to see short, fat, ugly, stingy, unaccomplished bitches think highly of themselves and accuse me of being a fraud just because I have stayed away from them after getting glimpses of their ugly interior. Harriette told me over and over again, "Honey, you don't know shit about women as you think you do. They are all liars and manipulators, at least the ones you told me about. Not a single one them deserved your affection. You are way too fucking good for them. From now on, I only want you to associate yourself with only nice, accomplished, dignified women, not trash and garbage and refuse and sewage. You hear me, honey? You have true love now. No need for you to look for it in the wrong places, with the wrong women. Have some respect for yourself. Go look at yourself in the mirror. A man like you deserves the best, not scum, not dredges and detritus of society, not the leftover, not the discarded, not the unwanted. You understand me, honey?"

Adolescene, Love, and Memory

When I was in middle school, I read Margaret Mitchell’s epic romance, “Gone With the Wind.” Not once. Not twice. But continuously. Each time I finished the novel, I began again, flipping open the broken-spined paperback so many times the book split in half, yielding two portable sections of text. I preferred a break of at least several hours between readings, but sometimes compulsion forced me to begin again only moments after finishing it.

I told myself that I could resist, that I’d read some other book, some “real” book, that I could read on the couch in front of family members without raising eyebrows. For my parents, it was the repetitive reading of a single text that seemed deranged, and for my brothers it was reading such an enormous tome in the first place, but my own sense of shame arose from my deep ambivalence about the novel itself.

Even then, I knew that reading “Gone With the Wind” was not transformative; that its portrayal of romantic love as the only prize worth having was wrong; that the book presented a distorted view of womanhood. My obsession was based purely on titillation, the excitement of following the fatally flawed Scarlett O’Hara through her breathless, war-torn, starvation-marked pursuit of love. “Gone With the Wind” was my “Twilight” series. 

At the same time, the book was also a repository for all my adolescent loathing, of both self and others. The beginning section represented everything I hated about middle school. Scarlett was the perfect stand-in for my arch enemy, a girl who resembled her in each particular — green-eyed, brunette and brutal. The first line of the novel dazzled me with its concise encapsulation of a distinct feminine mystery: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.” How could this be? This was the central question of middle school. How could the most vital fact of female existence — were you a beautiful girl or not? — be surpassed by mere will? Scarlett O’Hara controlled male perception. She created her own reality. She was a genius. She was also a slave owner. When Scarlett returns home after the war, she is aghast that any of the family’s slaves had run off, and the reader, who wants Scarlett to survive so she can get on with the essential work of pursuing Ashley Wilkes and succumbing to Rhett Butler, is forced into the uncomfortable moral position of empathizing with her. In other words, the end of human bondage in America is a subordinate concern to whether or not Scarlett is able to use her charms to get the man she wants. (Despite the frustrating fact that you know from the moment you are introduced to the principal characters that Rhett is the right man for Scarlett and Ashley is utterly wrong! Why then read on? Why then the obsession?) 

Because, in the world of “Gone With the Wind,” romantic thinking trumps everything, including war, civility, morality, starvation and childbirth. The book amazed me with the grandeur of its delusion.

It also made me guilty, perhaps above all because reading “Gone With the Wind” made me feel that a part of myself might be like Scarlett, that I, too, might be capable of caring about the wrong things in life, so long as I was loved by a man.

I finally put aside “Gone With the Wind” once I entered high school, and discovered “Goodbye, Columbus,” “Slaughterhouse Five” and the dizzying complications of actual teenage boys. Years later, when one of my brothers bought me a commemorative edition of the novel, I sulkily stashed it in a dark corner. How, I wondered, could anyone who knew me well think that I’d wish to be reminded, would treasure, an artifact of such a shameful episode in my literary explorations?

And so I forgot about “Gone With the Wind.” Until recently, when I was talking with a friend about our daughters (now in middle school themselves), and their fascination with impossibly lengthy, endlessly repetitive supernatural romances. I casually mentioned my romantic epic of choice, and it occurred to me that “Gone With the Wind” was in fact the ultimate young adult novel. The choice between two starkly different lovers (one gentlemanly, one roguish) appears, for the very young, to be a choice between two utterly distinct potential identities, two possible roads through life. 

I realized then that I was, for the first time, outside that romantic paradigm. I am getting a divorce, and so I am now on my own path, rewriting my life’s narrative to include that most modern of twists: interruption. In my darker moments, it feels as though time itself has stopped. Having been married for nearly 18 years, I find it hard to imagine exactly how one day unfolds into the next outside the dynamics of coupledom.

I can’t help but be reminded of the one part in “Gone With the Wind” that I routinely used to skim: the postwar section, in which Scarlett is married to the pathetic Frank, whom she stole from her own sister. This is the one loveless section in the book, when Scarlett cares more about food, shelter and money than she does about either Rhett or Ashley. It is the one moment when real life appears as more than a set piece for the conjured world of love. It is Scarlett’s reality test; the suspension of the girl-dream of romance as the core of one’s being.

But — perhaps thankfully — this section doesn’t last. In the end, it does not matter that Scarlett’s true love scorns her, so long as the reader knows that love exists and that Scarlett will continue to pursue it. 

Talking about the book with my friend over lunch, I felt no rekindled desire to read it. But I did feel a fondness for the girl who had done so those many times over — an admiration for the adolescent voraciousness that compelled me to search again and again in the same place for resolution to a story I knew had none. I realize now that this youthful tenacity might be a source of strength I need again to drawn on. Although I am a mother and a mature, single woman, newly awakened to the perils of love and the demands of reality, I can’t deny in myself a Scarlett-ish sensibility, the drive to believe that there is in the idea of tomorrow another story line worthy of pursuit, something dazzling to ponder, if never quite possess. 

This almost redeems the book for me today: It is a romance grounded in absence and error. Its end is a beginning, not of an idealized life, but of pursuit and desire. It is a thousand-and-some-page proof of the human need to seek love. It is the young adult novel I am now too experienced and humbled to scorn. 

Claire Needell is an English teacher at a public middle school in Manhattan and the author of the forthcoming collection of short stories for young adults “Nothing Real.” The above piece originally appeared in New York Times on November 23, 2013

Tạ Ơn Anh ( Thank You, Mr. Veteran)

Thank You, Mr. Veteran

You no longer have the feet 
That used to glide on the dance floor
Your arms are here no more
So my sleepy head can meet

You no longer look quite human
But you are not yet a beast
But why on your lips spreads a smile
And your eyes are like two bright stars in the sky

You were in the days of yore
An angel in a red beret
You wore jumping shoes that I adored 
While guiding the parachute against the wind

Were you of the local militia
So the village could sleep in peace 
Or were you a Green Beret
Guarding the fort at the fighting front, really neat. 

The motherland's ground has not sung you a lullaby
The war has ended, the flag is in tatters
You arms and feet now serve as fertilizer 
For the blooming wild flowers 

Once you were armed with grenades and knives
Now all you have is a begging cup
Yesteryear you put away pieces of artillery and tanks
Now into your cup are poured left-over soup and rice

In the past marched proudly you and thousands of comrades 
The marching shoes made resounding sound all over town
Now you are separate from your former comrades 
All alone in this corner of a local market

Twenty years came and went 
Like an interrupted dream 
All you have left is a broken body
That longs for days of former glory

November 22, 2013
Translated by
Wissai
canngon.blogspot.com

Follow-up:

Dear J:

You have made many good points. Thanks for raising them. Your intelligence showed in the points you made.

I was not disturbed by your raising them. The poem was meant to be a shocker. It was very cynical, but very true nonetheless. People did and do pay largely lip service to the sacrifices veterans made. 

Being a soldier and then if you are lucky enough to be a veteran, and not a casualty, is to accept the sacrifices and not expecting gratitude. Expecting gratitude just invites pain and bitterness into your life. Life is not fair. Life is cruelty and indifference, largely. That's why loneliness is heavy and true love is such a balm and big in demand. 

The original poem in Vietnamese is cruel and cynical but I like its eloquence, musicality, and unforgettable imageries. 

Please allow me to share your points to a larger audience, with your identity kept intact.

Wissai

canngon.blogspot.com

Dear R.W.
I hate to say this but I don't like this piece Ta On Anh at all. It sounds terrible with "your arms and legs are now compost for the vegetables" and "now you are a nobody lying around regretting the glory of the past" 
I am glad your translation made it lots better, but still, enough is enough. !!! : How dare they  tell a war veteran that he does look neither a human, nor a beast !! Then what is he? Oh I am so angry !!! Who left the veterans eat leftovers and who left them begging at the market place? What do foreigners think of us and of Vietnam when they read that ? It is not nice to talk about the "before" and "after" without mentionning the why in between. Here, the veteran got into this degradation situation, being a degenerate person BECAUSE HE WAS DEFENDING OUR COUNTRY AGAINST THE ENEMIES WHO TRIED TO KILL HIM.
If this poem is aimed for getting the social services/ government to do something to help, then that would be another story, and I would understand; at the beginning we read that the woman has been sleeping with him then where is she now???? Would she leave him behind in this atrocious situation? Where is the TA ON ANH? I didn't hear anybody say "thanks, for having tried to save my life ?" Ok OK I am sorry I have disturbed you by dumping my trash in your sweet and gentle site. Please throw it away for me. I feel better now, but I  still don't like them treating soldiers and veteran like waste. It was nice to see Omar and Castaneda : You are right on about Castaneda. Only the first and the fourth books were good. If I remember it right.
Take care and thanks.
J.

Wissai

canngon.blogspot.com

On Nov 22, 2013, at 7:10 PM, wissai <wissai@yahoo.com> wrote:

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Castañeda and Don Juan Matus, Wissai and Omar Sabat

Castañeda and Don Juan Matus, Wissai and Omar Sabat 

Carlos Castañeda was a literary sensation in late 1960's and 1970's. A South American student in anthropology at UCLA. He wrote a sensational "field work " study about an American Yaqui Indian named Don Juan Matus, which earned him a M.A. in Anthropology, released under the title The Teachings of Don Juan. He followed with Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, and Tales of Power. They were all bestsellers. He wrote other books, but I found them tiresome and repetitive and devoid of fresh insights and enthralling language present in his former books. His creation of Don Juan Matus character was superb. Even forty years later, some of the things Matus said have stayed with me and strengthened me and given peace. In the past, in times of sorrows, I usted to turn Castañeda and Nietzsche for help. Now, Castañeda seemed too much of a fraud to me. He didn't practice what he preached. He was an artist, not a true thinker, not like Nietzsche. 

I created the character Omar Sabat in my fiction. It was fiction that I wrote, hence I didn't feel like I was a fraud. I am basically a writer of fiction and tales of fantasy and wishful thinking. I make up stories as I go along. I mine my fertile imagination with inputs of incidents in real life and news accounts. Some readers whose personal lives are afflicted with failures, disappointments, and feelings of despair and unfulfillment, have projected themselves onto my words and my life and my world, and have declared that I am full of fraudulence and bullshit. I think those readers are incapable of self-reflection. Neither do they have a capacity for truth. They don't have a mirror in their homes; thus they don't know what and how they look like to bystanders. They don't know what irony means. I could easily unmask them; expose their pathetic lies and self-lies; denigrate their essence which is essentially that of an animal and an unaccomplished, untalented, stupid, grandiose animal at that, but I won't. I don't want my soul get contaminated by just thinking and writing about them. I could easily squash their phony, delusional self-conception with a litany of facts and solid reasoning, but I won't, because I want to write beautifully about Omar and in the process writing about myself. I am an artist with words while those who have denounced me are nothing but short, fat, ugly, animals. I am sorry for crossing their paths. They re too stupid of not knowing that meeting me was a momentous event in their lives and they should have seized upon that opportunity to improve themselves. Instead, they kept wallowing in delusions of grandeur and phony, false, and stupid self-conceptions. They never look at themselves in the mirror and ask the question, "Do I like the short and fat and ugly image that I am looking at?". They never examine their lives and ponder and shudder at the whole meaninglessness of their existence for realizing that they have not done one damned thing that is outstanding, that is artistic and creative; and that they have not had a single thought that is striking and true. They are dissatisfied with their lives. They know that. Those who have crossed paths with them know that. I know that. And then they stupidly asked me what I have done ! They have taught me that it is futile and useless and totally not beneficial for me to associate myself with certain animals. I would rather spend my time with a dog instead of running around with human bitches, and bitches are those short, fat, and ugly women. 

Omar, Who Art Thou?

Omar, Who Art Thou?

I called Omar up and told him that several readers of mine had expressed an opinion that the dude named Omar Sabat, living deep in the interior of Texas, was a very interesting, charming, even admirable character,  and wondered if he was for real. Omar chuckled and said, 

-I must give it to you. You gave me a much larger than life picture. Just tell your readers that I am your friend, and a 30-year-old thoroughly assimilated, third-generation Hispanic math teacher. I am lonely and don't even have a girl-friend, unlike you. I don't have your looks, your physique, your gift of gab, your charm. 

-You forgot something vital.

-What's that?

-That you are a caring teacher and one of the finest Christians I know.

-Thanks, Roberto. I thought you meant I had forgotten to say one more nice thing about you. Unlike you, I am not into self-advertisement and flights of fancy. I am not an assassin, that's for sure. I don't believe in killing, especially for hire. The idea is totally repugnant to me, but apparently very appealing to you. Sometimes I just don't understand you.

-Don't worry about that. I don't even understand myself most of the time. When are you flying up here to see me?

-Next June, when school is out. 

-See you then, adios, mi querido amiguito.

-See you. Say hello to all your novias for me. 

Billy Jean

Everything and every being on this planet and in the universe are interrelated, some more closely than the others. Humans affect us the most, because we are very similar (not identical) to them and we live in close proximity to them. Properly speaking, all experiences involving humans are "good" because they are catalysts and opportunities for growth, but there comes a point that some humans are so stupid in their ability to understand us and they are causing us so much annoyance that it's not worth the growth opportunity in associating with them. 

Anyway, it's been raining all day here. In the desert, no less. Would you believe that? Drizzling cold rain all day long in the desert. Desert is supposed to be dry and hot. Not here. Not now. When I was suicidal, I feared of the weather like this. I didn't know then one way to combat depression was not to drink beer, watch TV, and feel sorry for yourself. You must get active. You must not stay inside your house. You go to the mall and be surrounded by people. Then you go the gym and run or ride the bicycle until you are exhausted. Afterwards you get into the sauna to relax your muscles. You massage your body, bringing blood to the tired muscles sore from the build-up of lactic acid. Then you immerse yourself in the whirlpool. Try to laugh as much as you can. Live one day at a time. Be wary of people. Don't seek sympathy. Don't confide in anybody. If you must talk, call the suicide hotline. Don't take sleeping pills. Instead, install a punching bag in your house, and hit and kick that bag. You must get mad. You must get yourself energized. You must not get depressed. If you can't sleep, don't worry. You will be tired enough to sleep. Hell, at one time for three weeks straight I survived on three hours of sleep a night. Don't get scared or worried. Fear and anxiety will kill you faster than lack of sufficient sleep or healthy food. I repeat, no fear nor anxiety. You only die once. You only live once, too. Be strong and smart. Learn to forgive yourself. No woman loves you like your own mother does. Trust no woman. All bitches lie and manipulate. A hard man is good to find. And you are such a man. Go out buy a record of Michael Jackson's BillyJean and set it to play over and over again. Dance with the song. Dance like Michael. Do the moonwalk. Okay?

Now you go out and break all the women's hearts

Old, young, and all in between

Woo them, sing them songs, and then say so long

Go, go, go, believe in yourself, I wish you a nice start

A bitch facilely accused me of being a narcissist, thinking I would be angry with that label. Of course I am narcissistic. It's as clear as day. Everybody can see that I am in love with myself. Why not. That's far healthier than hating myself.