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The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

When Paul Bowles and his wife moved to Tangiers, the blue-eyed and tranquil city on the Mediterranean coast of then French-ruled Morocco, they were both in their 30s. Not long after they moved, they decided to stay, never to return to New York. Two years later, Paul Bowles issued what would become his magnum opus, a work reminiscent of the choices he made when he was in his 30s.

Sheltering Sky (1949) is a story about two Americans who escape from a life tied to expectations. Port and Kit are a married couple who will set off to reconcile an ailing love in the pale shadow of an unforgiving desert. These are Bowles’ two young travelers who will succumb to the siren-song of a distant adventure for its promise of renewal and rebirth:

Before I was twenty, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth… Now you know it’s not like that. It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs taste wonderful, and then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it’s nearly burned down to the end. And then you’re conscious of the bitter taste.

Like Port and Kit — the author Paul and his wife Jane were two independent, self-guided individuals whose lives overlapped. Married, but intimate with partners of the same-sex, they lived side-by-side. They too had extricated themselves from America and traveled through Africa to boil down life to its bare essentials:

How many times his friends, envying him his life, had said to him: “Your life is so simple.” “Your life seems always to go in a straight line.” Whenever they had said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach. He felt that what they really meant to say was: “You have chosen the easiest terrain.” But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way — encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance — that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified.

Port and Kit are the two entirely unassuming and strangely naive characters Bowles will drive deep into the Sahara to wager a bet with nature: can they be reconciled amid that terrible heat?

Departing from Tangier, Port and Kit are still laden with the trappings of the America they have left behind — hand bags and travel chests, mosquito nests and bug repellent — and comically, they lug their luggage with them everywhere they go. Kit unpacks her things and sets them up in her room, just to feel as if she had arrived. Had Port led their adventure today, they’d be the ones outfitted with 80 liter backpacks and Lonely Planet guides for Morocco, Algeria and the Sahara, because you never know when you’ll need a hotel recommendation in the desert.

That question familiar to travelers — do we stay or do we go? — Port and Kit split. Port says yes when Kit says no. Had Port said no, Kit would have said yes. They are accustomed to disagreeing about trivial matters and agreeing about profound ones.

The trip is not without consequence. Port succumbs to diptheria. Kit has a mental breakdown and finds herself the subdued wife of an Arab desert herder. The nomad’s three other wives aren’t jealous, nor would they be, Bowles writes, even if they found out that this new arrival disguised to look like a man is the soon-to-be fourth wife. The cultural customs in the Sahara are different from what she might expect, had she ever expected to end up the wife of a nomadic herder.

In what is the book’s well-troweled and concrete moment, Port describes death as piercing the fine fabric of the sheltering sky. Few would say the sky protects. There is of course the snow, rain and sleet. Arguably, the blue orb above does little to block that oppressive, penetrating Sahara sun. The sky is anything but impermeable, opaque and hard-tack. Why then does Bowles use that word? In describing the sky as shelter, Bowles is alluding to the a-materialist philosophy. To Bowles, and like-minded men, the less you have, the more nature becomes. The sky is shelter abent a roof. Only a man with a sympathetic view of humanity would describe the sky this way.

Donald Miller, in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, writes about a family who can’t afford a house along a lake, so they buy the lakefront, and for two years, live happily in tents along the shore. To these happy-go-lucky few, the sky has the quality of protectress. Hemingway, for all his love of Africa, was happy to shelter beneath a canvas tent so to speak; his sympathies never extended to the natives.

If Paul Bowles chose to excise what he thought was excess — the cars, the babies — he did also with the kind of possessions coveted by creative types: book contracts, literary awards, and close relationships. Bowles lived far away from the New York literary society of his upbringing. (He trained with Aaron Copland and produced a great deal of music). After fifty years, he had written only four novels, all of them by 1966, and not one after the death of his wife in 1973.

The other American who garnered a reputation as a travel writer, Paul Theroux, described Bowles in a 2010 interview with The Atlantic as a man who was able to live and write (and smoke dope) only because he wrote for Holiday, the great old travel magazine. Bowles maintained a permanent address, the de-facto gathering spot for itinerant writers and playwrights, and later in life, strangers who wanted to interview him.

*Process* gives Sheltering Sky 7.5 out of 10. There are characters whose treatment could have been rounded out. Tunner, Port’s tag-along friend from New York, could have had a more central role. Port’s life-to-death journey through the Sahara might could have been described through the eyes of a man who knows Port’s history. Tunner has a filial attachment to the protagonist. It’s a shame Port has to die alone. His friend could have guided him through the fine fabric of the sheltering sky.

Tragically, those who take possession of things lightly can mistakenly do the same with friends. Since Tunner is the one most attached to their friendship, he alone will grieve the loss of the American couple who naively set out to let the desert teach them about human belonging.

Innovation, climbing and babies

Her Pen, His Phalanx

Dorota Maslowska was just a baby when she published her debut novel, but a baby with a foul mouth and searing tongue, ebullient and unashamed. At the center of Snow White, Russian Red is her protagonist Nails, whose mother imports cheap cigarettes and whose brother hides away speed in the snack closet. Both potentially taming influences are absent from the novel during the weekend of its duration. The protagonist is on his own.

At the start, Nails has just tossed away his girlfriend, and we encounter him in a bar. He’s trying to assuage his grief with speed. From this point onward, Maslowska will take us on a protracted march through his turbulent mind on a drug-induced clown parade. Nails will suck down speed, violate and intoxicate, even urinate on a pair of canaries for no reason. In the plot point that seals his fate, he steals a pair of walkie-talkies from McDonalds.

The actions of Maslowska’s protagonist are inferred as much as described, and it’s hard to know what Nails is really doing. By the end of the novel, we’ll learn there is no Nails, just Maslowska playing puppet master with a protagonist by that name. After two days, he’ll have disintegrated and only she will remain.

In the novel’s most well articulated and penetrating  sequence, Nails will stick his cock in a sleeping virgin on the eve of the Assumption — August 15, 2002 — a day that’s celebrated because Mary is deemed too holy to suffer the grave. A day of longstanding tradition, Maslowska’s fellow countrymen will parade  red and white flags in a swell of national piety for the Madonna, and young people her age will walk halfway across Poland to visit the Black Madonna shrine at  Czestochowa.

The holy Mother is a religious symbol and a patriotic one, believed to have sustained the nation through various occupations and divisions by the Prussians, Germans and Russians. Honoring her is an act infused with patriotic zeal. Having the protagonist decimate a virgin on such an occasion is a way of rejecting the values of conservative patriotism.

The novel’s recurrent symbol is a plastic “Sztorm” pen, the plastic outer-casing through which Nails inhales speed. It’s no wonder she asks, in a question posed to reader, “Was the pen phalanx?” There is no Nails, just Maslowska rubbing her thighs on his teenage rope, a little shy and a bit angry, trying to give form to the underworld of men. The author is trying to resolve the shear animal in man with her fascination for his sex. Her pen is his phalanx in hand.

Maslowska is good at unwinding tension under the cover of novel to tell us what she really thinks of a certain track-suited, head-shaved, thoroughly Polish male. (Not much.) To the novel’s detriment, Maslowska can be a writer writing about the process of becoming a writer, which will be lost on readers who are not writers.

Maslowska injects herself into the novel twice. At first just in passing reference and later to confront her protagonist in the flesh. This time she’s a stenographer in a police station typing up Nail’s statement. There she’s subjected to the crass humiliation of her hero, though curiously, Nails has desecrated every female in the book but has no aggression toward her.

Here I find the act of self-insertion a reminder that she’s a young artist experimenting with words. There’s also an artist’s imposition going on here — and Maslowska is saying it takes the author to end the protracted explosions of her enfant terible. She’ll have to enter the text in person to do it. Of course, it’s convenient to write yourself in as the sympathetic centerpiece of an unsympathetic hero. (He is after all your hero. You created him). But is the mercy deserved?

*Process* gives it 6 out of 10 for what critics have been quick to point out: she’s a writer unconscious of being observed. Even though Maslowska’s skin-headed hero is both xenophobic and unnerving, as a running metaphor for her own fragmented experiences of youth, he works.

***

A book review of Snow White & Russian Red, 2005, by Dorota Maslowska, translated by Benjamin Paloff, [Wojna polska-ruska pod flaga bialo-czerwony]

Poland’s Tragedy – 96

On the occasion of the terrible tragedy,
I offer this poem to the memory of the victims.

96

The Vistula flows backward today
From the shoreline of Gdansk
To the watershed of the Carpathian
Even her banks are weeping

For sorrow is a flooded field
For whom springtime will not come
The early shoots of rye retreat
Beneath the rising waters

Justice is the asking question
The why? The how? Why us?
In the mouths of half-mast fathers
And mothers with bleary eyes

Red & White today black-banded
What’s lofty rises half its height
Though unified in sorrow stand
Her mass of grieving mourners

Too early for the words to mean
But spring-time seems to say
Should ninety-six have to perish
May death bridge old divides

Be comforted, Polska, to know
The Eagle is not alone, nor will be
For as She stands for freedom
For freedom stands the world

***

Article on Lech Kaczynski from The Economist
Article I co-authored with Wojciech Kosc for Transitions Online
(Contact me for full text)

Pork or Piggish?

Animals it would seem are forever at the mercy of man. They are whipped to do field work. Their eggs and milk are promptly snatched away. Dogged by cold in winter and tormented by flies in summer–in the end, none escape the butcher’s knife.

George Orwell, who died at 46, was best known for Animal Farm,  a political fable about a group of forward-thinking animals who wrest control of the farm from their owner.  Orwell’s novella (28,000 words) was rejected by three publishers because the Soviet Russia he wished implicitly to criticize was still as yet a British ally.

Old Major–a prize-winning boar–has a dream revealing a future in which animals have taken over the farm from their relentless taskmaster Mr. Jones. The ideologue Old Major inspires the others to revolution with a sing-song that goes:

Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland/ Riches more than mind can picture/ Wheat and barley oats and hay/ Shall be ours upon that day

Old Major dies but his battle message is picked up by Snowball and Napoleon, two pigs. Into the furry ears of the rabbits and the lazy minds of woolly sheep they foment their ideas about revolution. Not long after the  takeover, Napoleon usurps power from Snowball, as the heart of a pig is easily corrupted.

The farm’s various calamities are attributed to Snowball. He’s scapegoated for the failed windmill project and disparaged of the war wounds other pigs will claims were never really earned. Later Snowball will be written out of the revolution’s history entirely. In the “Battle of the Cowshed,” one pig will say, Snowball was really just an enemy spy.

The animals white wash seven commandments on the black tar of a nearby barn to shore up the moral foundations of their new society. These few and noble ideals are soon disregarded–the commandment, “No animal shall kill another animal” is changed to read, “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.” Thus a select groups of pigs and their gang of guard dogs pave the path for the occasional bloodletting of the weaker animals.

At the start, they made a promise never to do business with humans. But by the end, Napoleon and his numerous litter have invited the adjacent farmers over to play cards and drink beer. When both man and pig pull an ace of spades from the pile, Orwell concludes,

“From man to pig, and pig to man, it was impossible to say which was which.”

Fast-forward some four decades, to the fall of the Berlin wall, when Animal Farm was made  required reading for high school students in Poland. Across the Soviet bloc, communists were losing their grip on power and their ideas were open to criticism. Because allegory is a shade away from commenting overtly on political matters, it’s a safe choice for a society in transition. In Poland, Animal Farm [Folwark Zwierzęcy] helped to prod the collective cows to action without having to point an incriminating finger at those still in power.

For its general accessibility and long shelf life *process* gives it [9 out of 10.] It would seem to me that Animal Farm deserves a contemporary reworking, an allegorical novella about the rise of China and the threat posed by its intolerance for human rights.

The Shock Doctrine

There are few heroes in Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine.” But those singular individuals provide a moral example that will raise the hair on your neck. Like the Argentina writer Rudolpho Walsh, who one year into Argentina’s junta-led counter revolution, spoke openly about the poverty forced upon his people:

Without hope of being listened to, with the certainty of being prosecuted, but true to the commitment I took up long ago, I will bear witness in difficult times.

After denouncing the deteriorating living conditions in Buenos Aires, he was shot dead, his body was burned and his remains were dumped into the La Plata River.

Or Salvador Allende, Chile’s socialist President, who was killed in the CIA-backed coup which brought Augusto Pinochet to power, and who addressed his people in a final radio address as the troops were attacking his residence:

I am certain that the seed we planted in the worthy conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans cannot be uprooted. History is ours and the people make it.

He was dead within hours, killed by his own bullet.

These are Ms. Klein’s martyrs and they will die for the belief that wealth, at least some wealth, should be shared among the people. For forty years, the so-called Washington Consensus has steered intellectual life in the opposite direction. In broad contours, the Washington Consensus is something of an intellectual rationale for freeing up markets by privatizing state-owned companies and eliminating trade barriers. It’s an economic philosophy grounded in the assumption that human self-interest is the best organizing principle for society’s relations.

As the thinking goes, let self interest rule and you will  produce the most wealth for the most people. The challenge is the transition–old norms must be uprooted and the new ones installed in their place. Most of the time, a great upheaval (Klein’s shock) is needed to establish the new order.

The main proponent of the Washington Consensus was the late Milton Friedman, a Chicago school economist. He was famous for his mild poetic aphorisms usually seasoned with a measure of economic calculus: “It’s impossible to do good with other’s peoples money.” He and his followers abhorred the government; anything that might should be done by free markets and free people. For this reason, he called himself a liberal.

***

The 2008-09 financial crisis has exposed the weaknesses in so-called neo-liberal or conservative economic theory. Human self interest can do just as much harm as good. No relevant economist today would argue that the state has no role in reigning in its excesses.

Ms. Klein would like that role to be greater. She argues for the creation and maintenance of a “public space” where the needs of the people are met by a broad range of government services. Certain functions, such as managing city hall or fighting a war, are not only better done by governments but are the basic functions of a state. If done  away with, she asks, then what remains?

Corporations who would like to do the government’s work aren’t accountable to elected representatives and the profit-motive can lead to entrenched interest. The most conspicuous example Klein returns to time and again: the market for private security services created during the Iraq war.

Ms. Klein’s 450 pp monograph gains a healthy momentum by the sneaker wear she accrues globe-trotting to talk to both the victims of global capitalism and the proponents of a middle ground. For her extraordinary effort *process* gives her 8 out of 10. She doesn’t go easy on Jeffery Sachs, a Columbia economist, whom she accuses of a grave naivety in thinking that the USA, fresh from victory in the cold war, would fund a “Marshall Plan” for Russia. When the billions in aid failed to materialize, “crony capitalism” in Russia produced a few billionaires and a few million more poor people.

She argues that if civil society is weak, than in the aftermath of the “shock,” wealth is transferred unwittingly from the many to the few: “Russians fronted the money for the looting of their own country, in an elaborate shell game where one paper company was used to buy another.”

Ms. Klein dances between polemical prose and sympathetic advocacy. To my mind, the uncommon strength in her book derives from its moral force, though at times she declines into petty repetition, and paints the Chicago school as a breeding ground for economic fascism: “Like all fundamentalist faiths, Chicago School Economics is for its true believers a closed loop.”

What she means is that if neo-liberal theory is the only way, than anyone who differs is by definition wrong A middle ground between would have won her skeptics, and given many a centrist republican second thoughts about the merits of cable television’s Extreme Makeover applied to foreign policy.

***

Shocks–financial, economic or political–are used to re-write a nation’s laws without the consent of the people. This is her tabula rasa thesis, and to find support for it, she describes closed door, late-night cram sessions to get a liberalization agenda passed in Chile, and similar clandestine efforts by the Sri-Lankan government to strip fisherman of their coastal land after the tsunami. In both cases, a shocked populous was in fear for their lives; distant law-making mattered little.

In South Africa, it was the pure inexperience of the ruling party in the wake of apartheid. In exchange for political power the ANC gave up economic control. She is most strident talking about Iraq where she explains how the neo-liberal agenda used the domestic turmoil–in 2006 when things were falling apart–to pass an oil law that transfered wealth from the nation to a few multi-national corporations. Klein is most convincing when she opens a chapter with a personal account, as she did in the chapter titled Erasing Iraq: “I had been in the country for less than three hours and it wasn’t going well.”

There are weaknesses in her thesis, and they come not from what she argues but from what she avoids. She gives no mention to the roll-back of democratic freedoms in socialist countries such as Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. For such a strident defender of democracy, it’s unusual that she avoids criticism of these certain socialists gone wild. In her history, Evo Morales is an inspired populist reclaiming Bolivia’s treasures for his people.

For a journalist whose commitment is leftist, and who describes her parents as communist activists, she’s most likely to be attacked for her “go workers, go!” cheer leading. Contrary to what her critics have written, her sources are drawn widely from both academic sources and the partisan popular press–the NY Times, Washington Post and USA Today are all given their due–and she quotes at length from agencies who do their own “reporting”, ie. the World Bank, IMF and CIA.

An improved thesis would account for shock and tyranny across the political spectrum. Hugo Chavez in particular needs painted in less flattering prose. The shock therapies of both right-wing juntas and left leaning dictators should equally be condemned. Excess is the mother of tyranny, no matter what color the flag.

Ms. Klein’s take home lesson? Beware of anyone who utters the three words, ”Everything has changed.” If you hear that, it’s about to.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Instant Mesagging, Light-Years Away

Imagine if intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe could send us a message. What would it say? And more importantly — could we even read it? Such is the premise of Stanislaw Lem’s novella “The Master’s Voice” [Głos Pana, NWU Press, 1969].

Lem, the celebrated Polish author of the mid-late 20th century, puts his tale in the mouth of an astro-physics professor with a heightened moral sensibility. He’s not the “mad professor” persay, though he thinks he is, and the book opens with an extended warning to the reader regarding his own proclivity to act immorally. Buyer beware! Such an opening leads the reader to suspect the professor, if given the chance, will use the decoded message for his own illegitimate ends.

On the contrary, when the professor discovers a partial interpretation of the distant message gives humanity the unprecedented ability to warp a nuclear explosion through a space-time hole (and say blow up Moscow without the Kremlin suspecting), the professor collaborates with his lab buddies to render the device benign. They do, and in the denouement, Lem exhausts his polemic on the philosophical implications of light-year-long instant-messaging. Can we even communicate with distant beings? After all, their message would reach us long after its been sent. Thus the away message: “Parker is idle” would have to read: “The late Mr. Snyder’s grandchildren are no longer living.”

What’s it bear on *process*? Lem has dealt himself the book-jacket challenge: to write a predominantly philosophical treatise in the cloak-and-dagger guise of a Los Alamos suspense novel. Readers will come onto the book for its page-turning premise. They’ll walk away with a discourse on astro-philosophy and the nature of evil. But they won’t be disappointed. The work is valuable for its intimate and detailed cold-war portrait of life in a Los Alamos laboratory as perceived from behind the curtain.

His subject matter — a hypothetical message — presents one acute dillemma. What to do with the senders? There is, after all, a second half of the book somewhere “out there.” Lem leaves its to his reader to conjecture; *process* would have conceptualized the world, or even hinted at its unique character. After all, these mysterious beings are as interesting to a 21st century reader as Lem’s cold-war tale with geo-political underpinnings even more remote than the distant planet.

*process* gives it [6 out of 10], and recommends it to readers for its enigmatic digression into a man facing the firing squad — the escaping general compels himself to sustain a highly implausible belief in reincarnation for 15-20 minutes to distract himself from the fear of his impending execution. Brilliantly conceived, by the master’s own literary voice!