Captain Supremo

I find it particularly amusing whenever someone reaches my site because of my “Preben Vang” tag. I have oft referred to Mr. Vang [while quoting him] as “my favorite Danish guy,” and so I thought I would take this opportunity to show why that is no meager compliment by providing a list of other Danish men who are worthy of considerable esteem, but still not as favored as our dear Preben Vang Jensen. (this also gives me an excuse to use the “Preben Vang” tag again.) ahem:

Søren Kierkegaard - philosopher - Christian. laid the groundwork for existential theology. He is my second-favorite Dane.
Niels Bohr - physicist - formulated the “Bohr model” of the atom, and got a prize - a nobel prize that is. (booyah!) A true personal hero.
A. Niels Bohr - physicist - son of Niels Bohr, shares most of his name. Won a nobel prize, just like his daddy, for work on subatomic particles. He was probably immensely disappointed with his own son, a person who is not famous for anything, so far as I can tell.
Hans Christian Andersen - Famed author of a lot of children’s stories which are frankly far too frightening for children.
Mads Mikkelsen - actor - He was the bad guy in the most recent Bond flick, Casino Royal. had a really great bleeding eye in that movie. totally Oscar-worthy, that eye.
Viggo Mortensen - actor - Probably best known for his role in Hidalgo. kidding. He was Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings movies. great with a broadsword because he’s Danish! (or half-Danish, at least)
Brigitte Nielsen - actress - She played the really intense Russian wife of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. She is such a good actress that I was totally convinced that she was Russian and not Danish.
Victor Borge - comedian, musician - Put this AmeriDane behind a piano, and he will make you laugh your socks off, my he rest in peace.
Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen - Explorer - Considered the “father of Eskimology”, which is possibly the coolest thing on this entire list. or at least it was until we get to…
Jørgen Jørgensen - Adventurer - Sailed to Iceland in 1809, a Danish colony at the time, and promptly declared the island to be an independant nation, and himself the ruler. He ruled Iceland for two months. Then Denmark took note and came and got him and sentenced him to a life in England.
Beowulf - Monster slayer - I have a tough time letting the Danes fully claim this guy when it’s clear from the epic poem that shares his name that he was a Geat which is probably more like proto-Danish or Swedish. But wikipedia said “Dane”, so I included him.
Hamlet - Shakespearean Sap - Danish prince in the play Hamlet, who ends his life in a tidy matricide/suicide combo. A quite famous character, mostly famous for his poetic babbling.

There you have it. Our Preben Vang, theology professor extraordinaire, tops them all.

Captain

how wonderful is it, the word “always”? for call
it luck or providence, but despite its meaning, its
sound makes no gesture toward the idea of time.

its beauty, for me, is not in its common use.
not in the sense of “the sun always rises”
[although that is a beautiful thing, to be sure]

but in the way that it lends itself, this “always”,
to the preservation of a moment -
a pure and solid something of time. and “always”,

tethering a moment to the shores of
existence, beyond which it would otherwise
pass with as much ease as every thoughtless

breath i have never known. (not even
forgotten; less than that. never remembered.)
all of that, but for “always”. for it is not

“all times.” few things are. it is the promise that:
in all the tunneling through this great
big block of “what is” that passes for space and

time, always i am thirteen years old, and i
am learning to play the guitar, my fingers
and voice both as wobbly as a day-old calf.

and always, i am where i am when my father
dies. and always, i am breathing one very last time
and not worrying about what i won’t remember next.

and here’s a question: do you think Jesus cried -
probably not on Sunday morning, but maybe on
Monday or Tuesday - because it was finally over

and it had been so hard? that always there is a
man, and he is alone and weeping outside a city
because he is the first to find any rest on this earth?

we are neither a past point in time, nor are we a
final result. we are the impossibility of transforming
every “always” to every other “always”, realized.

I finished Notes from the Underground, by old Fyodor a couple of weeks ago. I think I will need at least a year to absorb it (and even then, not completely), but so much of it resonated with so much of me (who I am and who I have been) that I don’t think it’s too early for reflections - even if they are no more than reflections upon myself.

“I am a sick man… I am a wicked man.”

I was sitting in a very very American coffee shop in the Middle East called Starbucks, perhapsyou’veheardthename? It is a strange thing when one, standing in a desert in North Africa, climbs a staircase planted in the middle of a sea of asphalt, and when his last foot finds that last step he is lifted high off the ground and set down only a few hours later on a different continent, wearing different clothes, reading different books, drinking different coffee. It is just curious enough to inspire the word “surreal”, even though the religion of being rational is a bit too dogmatic to allow such superstitions to linger too long upon the mind’s stage or the lips, even.

But, if just for a moment I could blaspheme, then I would tell you that the whole thing was surreality within surreality, nested to so many iterations that even now the rediscovery of every layer evokes amusement in me, like a child’s first encounter with Madame Matryoshka and the company she keeps.

For the man of the undergound was all at once himself, an earnest but bitter slave of intellect, and then also (one layer out) he is a satire of something earnest and bitter, and in both of these ways he was myself also, and he was sitting in Starbucks. Or else he was sleeping through days in his college dorm room for hours upon hours. And in the understanding of all of this - while I was both the bitter man and also the satirist - between them, I was also the young man who woke up 30 minutes earlier on Sunday mornings in order to walk across a sleepy college town to get to church, knowing that he needed all of that time in order lose all his sanity and gain it again before he took his place in that “dark winter pew” that was so infinite.

It is a comfort that when you see yourself at your worst, all typed-out and printed up, justified from left-to-right on the page; that when you are looking at yourself like that, that you are not only that person, but you are also another [if only ever so-slightly] better person who can hold a book and see it all.

I do not know where I am going with all this, except to say that if I ever was the man in the underground - this anti-hero and mouse - then I still am, somehow. But if I was ever more than this, then that I also am, too. And it is this latter one in which I rest. It is this latter one which will rise one day from the underground, incorruptible, Lord have mercy.

Captain

P.S. Based on a lot of reviews and also a good bit of reading about their translation technique and philosophy, I’ve come to view the translations of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky as probably the best choices out there for Russian literature (trans. into English) - or at least a good place to start. So, that’s my recommendation on which translation to read, which is a pretty important decision. If you happen to know more about Russian-English translations than I do (which can be easily accomplished) feel free to offer your own insights.

Have you ever been reading a favorite book (for the tenth time) or listening to a favorite cd (for the hundredth time) or doing something in that vein (for the nth time) and you get to that part of it that is probably your favorite part and the thought occurs to you, I’m not sure that anyone could possibly understand me, as a human being, unless they love this album [or book, or film].

I know, that sounds a bit dramatic (especially when I say ‘film’ instead of ‘movie’), but I’ve thought it before. Not about a lot of things, but there are a few. Here they are…

:The Short List:

Sufjan Steven’s music - Pretty much all of it (except for Enjoy Your Rabbit, and certain parts of A Sun Came and The Avalanche which I could take or leave). I’ve been unable to move on from his music, despite the pressure that is [or at least that i perceive to be] so real in the music scene to be constantly moving forward in search of the next great thing. Maybe it’s because I’ve invested so many of my own experiences in the music, and anything that is so invested-in cannot help but be dense with meaning. How else could I explain that simply the line “what the water wants is hurricanes” is like shorthand for the story of a year of my life. Sometimes I even find that the songs are a truer voice for the expression of my faith than anything I’ve ever sung in a church group.

Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, by Franz Wright - Chris Harrell first introduced me to this book. He had a habit of tagging poignant quotes (or lines of verse, or anything really) onto the end of his xanga posts, and one that repeatedly caught my eye was from this book. The line was this: “Thank You for keeping Your face hidden, I can hardly bear the beauty of this world.” It got my attention during a troubled time in my life. It was a time in which I began to doubt that I believed in anything. Not a time that I questioned things, mind you - that has been going on for years and years, and I think it will never stop - the questioning, i mean. But a time in which, although I strongly wished and desired to believe, I began to think that I quite simply didn’t and couldn’t any longer. This book was one of the greatest factors in the restoration [and transformation] of my faith. I’ve read it a hundred times, at least. Although Franz Wright’s other poetry is excellent and beautiful, I doubt that I will ever connect to any of it in the way that I have to this book.

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien - the books, I mean - not that I’m bashing the movies, but I don’t really feel strongly about them. I’ve read this series six times now - the first time was in the seventh grade. I can’t help but think that they’ve been formative in my entire worldview. I don’t doubt that the way that I understand courage, loyalty, wisdom, beauty, and probably even good, evil, and mysticism has been shaped by these books, and I’m not ashamed of that at all. (I’ve read The Hobbit once and The Silmarillion twice. They’re both wonderful, too.)

:The Long List:

The Life Aquatic
Lost in Translation (film and soundtrack)
Til We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Everything Is Illuminated (film and soundtrack - still haven’t read the book yet)
The Transfiguration of Vincent, M. Ward
Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut (prerequisite reading: at least 2 other Vonnegut books)
“Concluding Unscientific Postscript”, by Søren Kierkegaard
(and now) the Arabic language

Of course, it’s silly of me to think that loving all of these are required for true understanding. It goes deeper than any of this (and all of it, too). But these are some of the things that I link my identity to, and I thought, eh, can’t hurt to just put it all out there and share a bit.

Captain

audition pose for team zissou.

backdrop:
the Gulf of Obstacle,
Sinai Peninsula,
and
blue terrestrial atmosphere

I was sitting at a restaurant today. Exactly, I was sitting at a table in a restaurant. As I began to much on my food, I thought to myself, “My, this is tasty, but if only there were some sort of mildly spicy paste nearby to add a touch of piquancy to the flavor, then I would be truly satisfied!” And lo and behold, there was a little yellow bottle of Heinz mustard sitting on the table - the very paste that I’d had in mind! I lifted it off the table with my left had and gave it a hearty shake, so as to homogenize all the mustard-juice inside, and then squirted its contents gracefully onto my sandwich in slender little zig-zags. I paused to examine the bottle.

“Mustarda,” I read aloud.
“Mustarda?” I wondered to myself.

“What is that? Italian?” I placed the bottle back on the left-hand side of the table, a bit discomfited by the ambiguity surrounding the origin of the condiment. “Portuguese? Surely not. Europeans don’t eat Heinz Mustard,” I thought to myself, quite confident in most stereotypes of European dining customs.

“Ah, of course. I am an idiot.”

This was the conclusion that I came to. But, I admit that I am a bit proud of my idiocy in this case because the moment that I thought to myself “I am an idiot” was the same moment that I realized that there were no Latin characters on the side of the mustard bottle, so this bottle of “mustarda” couldn’t have come from Italy or Portugal or anwhere that uses our alphabet. It was right then that I realized that the sound of the word “mustarda” had popped effortlessly into my mind as I’d looked at the row of squiggles that just happens to spell out “mustarda” in Arabic.

When I feel like I’ve not had much to celebrate in a while, a victory even as small as this one can be a very nice thing. Today, for just a second, Arabic was as natural as plain old thinking. So yeah, considering this last week or two, it was a very nice thing.

Cap.

i have an interesting way of falling asleep, sometimes. before I tell you about it, however, you should know that i almost always have considerable trouble putting my mind to rest when i go to bed. it seems that every evening, as soon as most external stimuli are reduced to their least intrusive states - lights are turned off, doors are closed to muffle noises and seal out unpleasant, rogue odors - my mind immediately begins to celebrate its freedom from extroversion by entertaining innumerable ideas, simulating a slew of scenarios, and contemplating countless queries.

also before i tell you about my interesting way of falling asleep, i should tell you that i have noticed how at other times when i find myself battling sleepiness (for one reason or another) i am deceived into sleeping by some sort of segue-way dream which begins in seemingly-wakeful territory and before long has plunged me deep into the realms of slumber.

i imagine that both of these experiences are fairly universal. i have attempted to combine them in a way that i think is somewhat novel, though, and the result is an interesting way of falling asleep. rather than trying to curb the careenings of my mind, i simply try to shape them into something that is as much like a dream as possible with the hope that the more dreamlike my thoughts are, the more likely they are to become actual dreams - especially if i am already at least a little tired and also lying in bed with the lights off and sounds muffled and odors banished. and for all i can tell, it often works.

but what is it like? what do i mean when i say i make my thoughts dreamlike? well, i’m glad you asked. usually, i start out by imagining that i am myself, and i am a part of a story, and i am going somewhere. and then, i just let my thoughts become a part of the story. for example, if i think of an elephant, then perhaps i will pass an elephant while i am going. and then if i should suddenly think of polka-dots, then perhaps it will be a polka-dotted elephant. or perhaps it will be an elephant selling polka-dotted neckties. and i try not to get too hung up on logic either. for example, if for some reason my dear friend andrew shepherd should pop into my head, then perhaps now the elephant is also andrew shepherd, the polka-dotted tie salesman from Rowlett. and should i then suddenly think of the forest, then i am there and maybe my elephant friend, also. and so on. most anything can happen - happy things or sad things or sinister things or heroic things or all of these things, diversely polka-dotted, at the same time - but what i have found almost always stays the same is that i am myself, and i am part of a story, and i am going somewhere. at times, it feels almost as real as if i were actually dreaming.

so it was last night. i walked through a forest somewhere and arrived at the edge of the sea. and i looked long and far into it, and it was there that i decided that it is appropriate to weep when standing on the shore, looking out over the sea. it is appropriate to do a whole number of things like swim or fish or sing or dance, and you could even do all of those things at the same time if it pleased you and you were talented enough. but standing there with the waves bluer than anything i have ever seen, their crests sparkling whiter than any white that nature ever really shows you and their troughs blacker than any black you will ever find outside your own mind, and seeing how it went out so far, on and on like a longing for something vast and nameless, i decided that it is appropriate to weep at the sight of the sea. i knew that somehow, everything which had ever been lost had been lost here. everything that could have been but wasn’t had slipped beneath the surface here and drifted into impossible darkness here somewhere. and too, i knew that the sea does not destroy for it seemed to mourn destruction. it does not drive things to oblivion, for the very sight of it was like remembering. and i was reminded.

and always, i am myself, and i am part of a story, and i am going somewhere.

captain

like so many things in this world, the speed of light being just one of them, productivity is a very difficult thing to measure. however, unlike the speed of light, which is 2.99×10^8 m/s (to a certain degree of accuracy), productivity is difficult to measure because it is difficult to decide what one measures producivity in - the units, i mean. the speed of light is difficult to measure because it involves a lot of mirrors and usually a lot of time, and often a lot of turning of a little knob and counting of tiny little bands of light, which is a serious strain on the eyes (trust me); however, everyone (everyone i’ve ever talked to about it, at least) agrees that c can be measured in units of how many meters light travels in a second, so if you are willing to put in all the time with the mirrors and knob-turning and light-band-squinting-counting, then you can measure it (to a certain degree of accuracy, of course).

productivity, however, is an incredibly difficult thing to measure - even though the attempt may require the use of no mirrors whatsoever - because it is difficult to say what constitutes productivity and what does not, and really it all depends on what you’re trying to produce. in the past two or three weeks, i have written and recorded a song (which i like very much, by the way), replied to a good many emails promptly and with sincerity, traveled to a far-away city, read some books, discovered a new way of making coffee, implemented a [quite modest] exercise program, and mastered more than a few words in a foreign tongue.

and although i’m sure that i could come up with another accomplishment or two to wedge into that little list there, there would still be many, many things missing, and i am ashamed to say that the most glaringly absent things are also the most important. what this leads me to is the conclusion that in spite of all that i’ve done, i have not been productive - not really, not at all - and with that comes a kind of crippling guilt which is self-perpetuating in that i feel guilty enough to feel like not doing much of anything except sitting around and bemoaning my guiltiness. and so on. it is cyclic, like a great many things - this blog post being one of those things.

so here i sit, heavy with inertia - a phrase with some ambiguity, to be sure. not inert in the sense of being still, but inertia, in the sense of being unable to accelerate. and heavy both in the sense that it describes the magnitude of the hold this inertia has on me and in the sense that just as it is quite difficult to move a very heavy object (or stop one which is rolling down a steep incline towards you), i too am quite heavy - a metaphorical quality that might perhaps be measured in metaphorical kilograms - perhaps even so many metaphorical kilograms that it would require an infinite amount of metaphorical force to cause me to go even a little bit faster, metaphorically. which would mean, according to a metaphorical Albert Einstein [this is getting quite silly], that i am travelling about 2.99×10^8 metaphorical m/s (to a certain degree of metaphorical accuracy) - all of this assuming that the laws of physics still hold within figurative language. and, for the record, the metaphorical speed of light is most definitely a very difficult thing to measure, much like productivity.

*communal sigh*

captain

[ the meta-post: i'm attempting to make good on that promise to post more. because of that, i fear this entry is more a matter of stubbornness than inspiration. i wrote what i am thinking of, and wrote without great emotion or investment. i felt i owed you this disclaimer. ]

these days i find myself speaking a good deal more arabic than english. today, when i was in a rare english-speaking situation and had an idea that i wished to express, the first thought that came to my mind was “i wonder if I have enough vocabulary to express that idea”, and then i remembered that i speak english fairly well. or at least i used to.

and, well… you have probably all heard of something called “translation”, by which something [like a word] is converted from one medium [language A] to another [language B]. it is a myth. every vocal lilt, every hand motion, every cadence that underlines the final words of each american-english thought is utterly untranslatable. i hear a story, and i cannot even ask the questions which race through my american-english mind because arabic does not ask such questions. it wonders different things.

to speak another language is to think like another culture, adopt a different history, take a new name [and still never be fully a part of any culture but the one you were born into].

i fear i have written a post which only a very few will understand in part, and only i, myself will understand in full. but, if you read and if you find that you understand something [anything], then let me know. i fear that what you will read lacks unity, but these were my thoughts just as they came, and i hope that will be enough:

i have often taken space (or time) to verbalize my thinking about music and how it can function as shorthand for memories, how listening to a song can be the closest thing to re-experiencing a certain memory.

so i will try, briefly, to describe what it is like for me to hear the album Post-War by M. Ward, because it is what made me sit up in bed and pull my computer out and write.

["one."
the guitar strumming begins,
"one. one. one or two won't do..." ]

early february, 2007.

i have a new bedroom, and it is in virginia, and i am in it. the empty white walls are so bare i could almost believe that it’s impossible to fix anything to them. the carpet on the floor is the incredibly thin, cheap kind. dark grey-blueish-green. it is my mattress: i have been sleeping on floors for a year now.

the place is not sterilized like a hospital. it is chaste like a monastery - but not really sober. not stern like a the monasteries that populate our fiction. it is more like a monastery i once visited in Southern California.

the austerity reminds me of things i could not bring into the room. not a matter of prohibition, really, but more like trying to bring darkness into the light. it simply cannot come. i am on a journey that began a few years back in Los Angeles, thanks be to God.

the light will come in through the windows everyday. the light is so fresh here that it makes me doubt if light really comes in windows everyday elsewhere on earth.

i will spend a few days wondering, perplexed about what i am doing. most days, however, i will wonder what i could possibly have been doing up until now.

and now, remembering, i think of dear friends. the little things that i should never have said. some big things maybe i should have said. and the hurts that all these “should-haves” have caused in others, and how if i were to turn back the clock i would try something different, although i do not know what. [i made a lot of mistakes.] dark classrooms commandeered for movie-watching with dearest friends or other more clandestine activities. a surreal glimpse of the future: 72 angelic beings in their mid-twenties, just returned from the four corners of the earth [barefoot and carrying no staff, i imagine them], facing joblessness, plan-lessness, being-understood-lessness, all gathered in a huge room laughing at a russian dance because each one knows what it’s like to watch people doing things that seem ridiculous and have to pretend it’s the most natural thing in the world.

back in north africa, i think i am lucky that we humans are too small to see how very far from home we often are. i can see what is around me: a skyline over here, over there a long dry stretch of dust-meadow spread out all the way to the horizon, the hills that punctuate it here and there. but i am not able to see all the forests, the deserts, the oceans and coasts, and the miles and miles and miles between me and every other place that I ever considered home.

captain