Not Vegetarian
As a needed literary palette-cleanser I picked up a Murakami novel. I'm beginning to outgrow certain books... or expecting more than I get. Murakami is always admirable for trying... one often reads for the mystery factor... and he is literate and understands music, art... it's reassuring and good. This time it was Kafka on the Shore... my expectations were different (the title, lol) but it was okay.
For months I've been waitlisted at NYPL for a couple of Han Kangs... The Vegetarian came last week and I devoured it in an evening. Maybe it was the still-lingering taste of Murakami, but I was underwhelmed. I felt like I'd been there, I'd known these people-- all of them, with their issues and a sort of projected character-narcissism I can't help attributing to the writer? I am sinning here, I know... but with my limited years of life, diminishing by the moment, I feel annoyed when I am disappointed. Murakami.. how can one compare (?); but his ambition never fails to impress even when he is less successful. And his characterizations-- well, they are so much less pretentious. If I had bought this book, I would have felt duped. Apologies to the Nobelist.
A story in the Times today about an eccentric tough professor-- a kind of hoarder... who upon her death left sizable sums of money to selected students. It felt meaningful, and in the context of recent relentless meditations on death, wills, afterlife... it was a kind of solution. Obviously, being memorialized with a New York Times post-mortem story had its own merit.
The river of death continues to flow past me... the mounting losses among friends, and the utter failure to honor these people who touch us so profoundly... and become a small paragraph-- a post, a broken heart meme... what can one do, without becoming a professional mourner? Aside from the Pope and former presidents, funeral rituals have become less stringent since Covid. One adjusted to the idea that a gathering or service would perpetrate more death, and postponed. Reading history-- whole civilizations were characterized by the way they handled burial and afterlife philosophy. What one leaves behind has ever-increasing longevity as opposed to the meagre years we are given here. Not even an eye-blink in the monstrosity of time.
I was forced into a major discussion this week with a teenager who had decided he'd had enough education, and college would be meaningless. Go ahead, I said... I mean, there are pictures of everything... does one really need to read the captions? It's useful... and the richness of everyday existence is really measured by the resonance of experience-- how a song reminds us of something.. a piece of melody-- the way some assortment of trees calls up a Monet image or vice versa. Art-- something not always understood... the process, the pieces. How will you know about what came before? How will you know what there is to know? Dead writers are not often reviewed in daily media... but they are the foundation. They are my intellectual family... my teachers.
Once the actual experience of death is comprehended-- terrifying and unknowable-- it is the eternal obscurity that is depressing. What we have been, what we have done-- it's just so temporary and unimportant in a culture which deifies the moment-- instant fame. No longer 15 minutes-- it's more like 15 seconds. One wonders that these monstrous people like Sean Diddy Combs are proving evil more memorable than goodness. They receive enormous media time... and what is goodness? Pope Francis became a kingpin... we are fascinated, but we go on sinning and wasting time and failing to rescue opportunities.
We cannot save people... The Vegetarian author knows that. I had a longtime best friend who suffered various mental illnesses and I acknowledge I grew tired of being sympathetic. It was exhausting watching her refuse food and company when she was one of the most artistically gifted people I'd ever known. Part of it-- I was furious at losing my BFF who was better than I was at drawing and maybe singing. And I adored her. But the option of choosing a kind of death in life seems so selfishly anti-humanitarian. Not to mention requiring an enormous amount of medical and psychiatric attention.
Personally I have befriended darkness and process this as a kind of shadow without which there is no light. I have disallowed mental illness but subscribe to psychological variety in the extreme. I want to see art which explores these channels without shouting about it. Without promotion there is no exposure, I suppose. It is the paradox of this culture which prioritizes marketing above product... which monetizes just about everything... and defines success in amounts. Our heroes are in a way half baked... some of them suffer from the guilty pleasure of fame but many just continue the glam-squad lifestyle and continuous partying. Maybe it is the new 'B-side' of creativity-- alternating phases of production and then celebration.
I keep returning to the classics-- I am obsessive and worried about my lapses... my failures to discover important things that are no longer popular or even in libraries. The printed word-- it's so important. Currently I am reading Colm Tóibín's The Magician.. another digression before I start my next difficult 1200 page opus. It tells the story of Thomas Mann... really just leads one to the writer himself... I wonder if he is read as widely as the Tóibín novel was in this decade.
Daily obituaries remind... one must memorialize oneself I suppose-- this is the appeal of instagram? That one's 'legacy' is copious and therefore significant? And if one is undiscovered, is this worse than death? There's a universe out there... an infinite, incomprehensible chronology... ever-expanding like the ratio of death to life. Until we have done ourselves in... all of us. All of the art-- from cave paintings to Stonehenge to the $4 billion-dollars-worth of paintings sold at auction last week. All of the books... the beautiful buildings-- the Sistine Chapel. We can all sense goodness... it doesn't necessarily make us famous, but while we are living-- this tiny gift of time-- we can make something, we can leave a mark. And we can 'not-fail' the ones who came before us, who sit patiently on library shelves, waiting... collecting dust, tottering on being remaindered in the next generation... Eek. Amen.
Labels: anorexia, Art, Colm Toibin, Han Kang, Instagram, Kafka on the Shore, Mental Illness, Murakami, Pope Francis, reading, Sistine Chapel, The vegetarian, Thomas Mann