I am a sick man. I am a jealous man. Endowed with a certain Mediterranean vigor I am spiteful, sickened to death by Tom Brokaw’s shit-eating grin, disgusted with my family and former friends, fearful of aloof dot-commers in a Biblical way, their SUV’s, their palm pilots, their material stink swarming around me. But I will be honest with you. I harbor such strange opinions because I have fallen into the literary life. A noble calling, you might say. But I did not choose this hell, this torture that even the most vile of Chinese sadists couldn’t stomach. I have yet to find my own voice. I have yet to be original in any sense of the term. I am a garden-variety critic, a poetaster with no skill, only taste. I am a scab, aware at all times, night and day, that I am derivative, the new and improved version of what already came before. I want to be an artist, a sayer of truth. But I am blocked. Hindered and haunted by the words of another. To make a long story short, I am obsessed with Don DeLillo.

A confession, gentle reader, of what lies behind.

I have been in contact with others who share my obsession, chat room buddies, friends of friends who pick up used copies of White Noise to give away at parties, and last but not least, The Don DeLillo Society, an academic clique of which I was once a proud member. Founded in 1999, we organize and sponsor panels on DeLillo at various literary conferences. We are the gauntlet of DeLillo criticism. If you want to say something about DeLillo you must first go through us. We are in the know. Nothing that DeLillo writes, says, or does eludes our grasp. We understand how DeLillo relates to contemporary issues of race, gender, and class. We have come to realize the subtle workings of his mind and how they relate to our own.

I was recently forced to resign from the DeLillo Society after a colleague suggested that we write a book together about DeLillo’s depictions of media violence. I had thought of this already! So I punched him in the nose. I was soon fired from my University post and he is suing me. I am suing the University for wrongful termination. The Chronicle of Higher Education has gotten involved (too involved if you ask me!), milking the story for its salacious metacommentary.

I am now unemployed, a stay-at-home dad with no prospect of gainful employment. But in order to maintain appearances, I will let you in on my imaginary—where I am coming from and what I take for granted when I speak of things DeLillo. I have never been to prison. I was born in Akron, Ohio but tell people I’m from Cleveland. I love cats. When I was twenty-two I applied to law school but was rejected by every goddamn one, a sign, I believe, of things to come. I am quick to anger. A victim, plain and simple.

My life can be summarized by my cultural obsessions beginning with my mother’s soap operas in the summers between second and third grades—Days of Our Lives and Another World— intrigue, murder, and sex whose narrative was jointed and deferred. I quickly moved onto KISS—KISS tapes, KISS jacket, KISS dolls, KISS cards and the prized #18, a solitary Ace Frehley on guitar, a sparkling, spacey vision of silver and white. Only my friend Brett Beadow had been blessed with #18, at that time a point of contention and awkward jealousy. I then spent five years thinking about nothing but baseball cards, arranging and rearranging them in plastic pockets, stealing packs from the drug store, memorizing statistics and perfect mint prices, going to card shows and collecting every Pete Rose card there was, every year, all mint, all Charlie Hustle, from the 1963 rookie card to the 1984 Fleer update. After the cardboard heroes lost their luster, I moved onto more sophisticated fare. Before DeLillo there was Galaga, Prince, Led Zeppelin, and Bon Jovi, Civil War battle reenactments, Laurie Anderson, semiotics, and Moby-Dick to name only a few.

I fell into the words of Don DeLillo on November 16, 1997 (now a family holiday). That was the day I first began reading Underworld. It took eight days of slow, methodical turns, one page at a time, copious notes, tears, and illumination. I would read sections over and over again. I would spend hours on a single paragraph. The first line a coded message, a direct challenge to the reader, hanging there, waiting for me to decipher it.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.

Since then I have read everything by DeLillo at least three times, collected all the first editions, written fan letters to DeLillo on a weekly basis (Don DeLillo, c/o Scribner, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY, 10020), lurked around chat rooms dedicated to his work under a myriad of user names, sometimes picking fights with myself in order to assure victory. I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “If You Love Don DeLillo You’re Too Close.” I have used Americana (DeLillo’s first novel) as a bedtime story for my sons. I hope to pass on something special to them through DeLillo’s linguistic code. My orange tabby, Barbara, is named after DeLillo’s wife.

It seems as though I was born to be a critic, zeroing in on different chinks in the cultural armor, deconstructing them, looking for an opening, always searching for a way out. I am a tragic and pathetic figure, an angry young man who resents giving you, dear reader, the literary facts of the day:

Born on November 20, 1936, Don DeLillo was raised in the Bronx, attended Catholic high school and later Fordham University. Like Salman Rushdie, he worked as a copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather before moving onto fiction. Unlike Rushdie, however, DeLillo has never been the target of an Islamic fatwa. He has never been buddy-buddy with Bono or undergone cosmetic surgery. DeLillo usually passes on such pomp and circumstance for a reason. Great writers and their work, he says, are “too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.” In keeping with his professed outsider status, DeLillo rarely grants interviews. He does not appear on Charlie Rose. He doesn’t write book reviews or participate in writing workshops or the academic life.

Last summer my DeLillo mania grew progressively worse. I experienced unexplained blackouts, alternating episodes of depression and euphoria. In July I made a DeLillo kachina doll out of old New York Times and scraps of cloth, perfectly proportioned to his thin, 145 pound frame. I began to experiment with DeLillo scratch-n-sniffs, a different smell for each of his books. In August I set up a small lab in my basement, complete with beakers and Bunsen burners. I have yet to complete my chemistry project but I imagine a gamut of literary aromas, each sticker in its own way a summation of plot, characters, and denouement. Here is what Ratner’s Star smells like. Go ahead. Scratch your screen:

I know this smell.

You know this smell.

Because we have slipped into the stream of DeLillo’s sensorium—the writer who once described himself as a literary terrorist; the writer who does not ruminate over subtle emotional shifts or the minor grievances of domestic life; the writer who does not deal “painfully and honestly” with the latest political crisis.

But as DeLillo prophecies, the culture that contains us eludes our desire to mark it, to use its content to remind us of our formal freedom. We are ever haunted by visions of a more complete self, an identity fully realized—a kinder, gentler, more articulate version—someone who volunteers, who makes a difference, who sinks the three-pointer at the buzzer, who publishes brilliant tomes, who captures the zeitgeist, who is loved unconditionally and bravely chooses a fate. This is the “naked shitmost self” that we believe, desperately, tragically, is there, somewhere. “Even when you self-destruct,” cautions a DeLillo character, “you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.”

I know exactly what he is talking about. Because I am a humble apprentice. Because I have absorbed and digested Don DeLillo. Because I am the fungus that lurks between his toes.

This is my demonic side, the part that goes without saying, the part that is controlled from without, the part that we, dear reader, don’t like to admit to ourselves because we can’t. Like Livia Majeski from Valparaiso, “We feel things. We become addicted to things because life, itself, is habit forming. We start things and can’t stop.”

We seek comfort in the never-ending stream of gadgets and digital doo-dads—all those products endowed with a life-force independent of the human touch. The NASDAQ soars or plummets, money talks, your new iMac works for you. All the while the individual is reduced to an inanimate object at the mercy of market forces. On your knees, beckons the radio man, bow down and breathe in that new car smell, the smell that soothes the wounds of childhood. This is what it’s all about, the otherworldly scent of densely pressed aluminum and vinylized leather that brings you closer to God.

This is the spiritual spiral that has led to my scratch-n-sniff experiments, breaking the world up into signifieds and signifiers, the way things smell and how I talk about these ways and these smells.

But I am ready to be healed, to begin to refuse analogy, to deny that everything is connected to everything else. To move across, away, and beyond DeLillo.

This condition, of course, was depicted brilliantly by DeLillo in chapter 39 of White Noise when the narrator Jack Gladney becomes aware of his own cynicism and confronts Willie Mink, the mysterious inventor of Dylar, an anti-death-anxiety drug to which Mink has become addicted. The main side effect of Dylar is linguistic decadence in extremis. When Jack says “Falling plane,” Mink panics and grabs the arms of his chair. When Jack whispers “Hail of Bullets,” Mink dives to the floor and begins “crawling toward the bathroom, looking back over his shoulder, childlike, miming, using principles of design but showing real terror.”

I want to someday say these words and know, in a visceral way, that they are not my own. I want to be redeemed, bathed in the blood of Latin letters. I want to jettison quaint, well-behaved narratives with neat plots and worked-out endings, to feel the incoherency of modern life on a deeper level, to write as a form of religious meditation in which language is the flawed and final recourse to enlightenment.

A version of this entry was originally published in SPEAK 20 (Fall 2000): 12-17.

I started farming at 38. Sick of the city, the mountains of trash, the race to consume, I found myself agreeing to an overnight getaway at a farm run by nuns. I’d stopped going to church at 15, furious with the politics and the histories, but I’d married someone who’d been able to see beyond the Church’s transgressions. Through her, I’d made an uneasy peace with a version of Christianity, and so there I was, at a convent-cum-farm. With a snarky, world-weary antipathy, I informed my partner that I would not go to chapel, and that I just couldn’t imagine hanging out with nuns. Left to my own devices, surrounded by quiet, I slept late, and long, nearly 12 hours. Maybe my resistance was lowered after that marathon rest, but I couldn’t help but notice, at the communal lunch with the sisters, that these were whip-smart, witty, visionary women with dead-on sociopolitical analyses. 

I started to relax. And then I got introduced to the garden. Week after week, I returned to the farm, taking the train out of the city, happy to join the throngs of commuters I had once sneered at. In the quiet of the fields, digging out rocks or planting celery or hand-picking bean beetles, I felt part of something immense, something thrumming with life. That sense of connection was more gratifying and nourishing than earning my PhD, than keeping my salary and 401k, than wearing my funky shoes and getting my passport stamped. I left my job, moved to the guesthouse, and have never regretted it since.

Now I’m in the middle of my third season as a farmer, no longer at the convent, but at an even more rural location in western Massachusetts. Here I’m learning to build as well as farm, to see myself as a “maker.” City friends have asked me if I ever get bored, out here in the hills. It’s hard not to laugh at the question; there’s so much to learn, and I’m contentedly exhausted each day. No more Ambien—it’s just no longer necessary.

But it’s not sufficient to say that I’m just busy learning. The truth is I’m not bored because I’m deeply satisfied. I think, now, that all those cocktails and fancy shoes were signs of a kind of spiritual malaise, masked as a consumerist cosmopolitanism. It might seem silly, but the satisfaction of growing your own potatoes, making your own yogurt, or building your own shed cannot be underestimated. (For a substantial exploration of this notion, by a political philosopher and bike mechanic, see Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An inquiry into the value of work). There’s a part of me, a deep-down-primal part of me, which recognizes these activities as part of what makes me human. I recognize my drive to create as part of my creatureliness. And feeling more truly human, at some kind of cellular soul level, somehow awakens my sense of the metaphysical.

Even at this small scale, on less than an acre of land, working primarily with hand tools and muscles, I feel more connected to life, to Earth, to the stars and the Moon, than I ever had before. In the pews, the chapels, the churches big and small, God always seemed like a thing apart, someone separate, distant from myself. In the fields, I can feel the whole Universe vibrate, and I feel that I am part of it all. I can marvel at the symmetry and beauty of a slice of tomato, of a head of cabbage halved. 

Some clichés hold true: Working in the field can be meditative. You can get into a Zen-like state while weeding. Looking up at skies that are threatening hail can be humbling. But, more than any cliché, realizing that the farmer doesn’t really grow food—that it grows itself, and we are just handmaidens to the harvest—can be revelatory. The drive of life to reproduce—to flower, to set seed, to die and to bloom again—is overwhelmingly powerful. Farmers try to shape a little bit of that life force to our own purposes, to glean a little from the abundance of the Earth. To know this is far more than humbling, it is awesome.

The spirituality of farming takes many shapes, is spoken of by many voices. Theologian Ellen Davis writes of the role of agriculture in the formation of the Bible; author Wendell Berry has written essays and poems about agrarianism, the environment, our local communities and our souls; farmer-activist-educator Joel Salatin does not shy away from speaking in spiritual terms about farming. And across the US, young people are coming together to create communities dedicated to farming and living out spiritual values—some with chapels and service missions, like Good Earth Farm which grows specifically for food pantries—and others less overtly religious or programmatic.

For me, it began with just being thankful for the chance to align my values with my actions—rather than sending a complaint to a company about wasteful packaging, I could harvest my food without using any plastic at all. Without needing to scan labels and boycott certain producers, I could be assured that my food was healthful and pesticide-free. I could use my dollars to support seed companies committed to preserving open-pollinated, rare varieties. I didn’t have to weigh the pros and cons of local conventional produce against organics trucked from California. It might not look like spirituality to some, but being able to leave behind those decisions and conflicts has been good for my soul. But most of all, growing food gave me a chance to feel like a part of the whole, in the flow of the Universe.

I could put my anthropologist’s hat back on, and do some research about the growing numbers of young people eschewing more conventional paths for farming, the growing interest in homesteading, in permaculture. I could point you to a couple other farmers who’ve also left successful knowledge-economy careers, who have similarly found farming more satisfying, more meaningful. You could join me and we could interview the Greenhorns, the WWOOFers, those seeking land and experience through Landlinks, the folks moving to Detroit and other post-industrial cities to help build urban farms, the organizers of BeginningFarmers.org, those agitating against GMOs, lobbying for a better farm bill, a better food bill, more land trusts. Some of them, I’m sure, would speak of their passion in spiritual terms. There’s work to be done, interesting analyses to be made. But I’m going to leave that to someone else. I’m going out to weed the back field, repair the fence where the rabbit got in, and uncover the mounds of squash plants that are pressing up against their row covers. Six a.m., birdsong, and dew—these are like prayers, they rub away my calluses, they make me raw, make me new.

I love my iPhone. I hate my iPhone. My iPhone has saved my life. My iPhone is stealing my soul.

The attractions are so clear. The loathing so ready.

It is stealing my soul: whole swaths of my life are in that cosmos of a machine. Names, addresses, phone numbers, messages of friends and frenemies and others are secreted away in it. It’s connected to a “cloud” and would make Jung blanch at any claims to synchronicity. After all, how could he have dreamt (yes, dream) of connections rendered with such ease, such style, such ceaseless seduction?

Ease, style, and seduction are surely part of the package. The sleek form lets us forget that with every tap someone is watching us, following us, tracking us. With each update, our frustrations with technology evaporate until the next glitch, until the next excruciatingly slow download. The delight at the sight of that silvery once-bitten apple makes the mind go blank to the very worldly reality of the hands that put the little machine together, and the corporate interests that want us wanting more. We get to leave our pathetic “dull” phone selves behind when we secure the services of the wondrous iPhone.

Sure my iPhone will give me the false confidence that I can do anything. It’s supposed to give me superpowers – or at least apps that make me feel like I have superpowers. Look: I can read your mind (or at least Google info about you)! Look: I can see the future (or at least tell you what the weather will be like for the next few days). Look: I hear voices! (sure, it’s the iPod or a voice memo, but still….). I am lost, and now I am found (well, I’m still waiting for Google Maps to load…). It’s not the stuff of gospel songs, but it is surely amazingly graceful.

My iPhone is magical, it connects me to a cosmos. And yet, of course, it constantly frustrates my desires to connect. For every wish I make to and through it, it reminds me of my all-too-human longings to be somewhere other than where I am at the present moment, to be with folks that are not the ones right by me, at my side. I am looking at a screen not quite 5 inches tall and less than 3 inches wide for hope, for possibility, for a little info on salvation. How can I not help but feel that it takes a little piece of me, of my soul, of my spirit with each gaze into its bright, shiny glare.

What to do with this magical device that makes me ask questions I didn’t know I had or needed to ask? Why keep touching that screen of desire, that pad of delights?

What will it give me? What will it keep taking from me? Too much, I’m afraid. I hate my iPhone. I love my iPhone. I kinda want my life back.

⁂

We lost Steve Jobs last week. When I wrote these ruminations a few months back, I couldn’t have anticipated the passing of this master innovator. I suspect that Jobs was very much aware of the mixed emotions around the array of technologies of enchantment that he introduced to us over the last decades. In the wake of his death, many of us will ask how long Apple will be able to keep this stream of wonder going without the pitch of that Steve of the uncanny savoir faire. Where did he learn to enchant like that? As it turns out, we have now come to find out that Jobs was a seeker himself, looking for, and sometimes finding clues and paths in Buddhism and other traditions of enlightenment. Did Zen give Jobs the way to entice us to see the future in those marvelous designs, those portals of digitized wisdom? After all, we are now legion who find ourselves stuck in the cycle of birth, death, and renewal that the master marketer Jobs so convincingly led us to believe was not only necessary but actually unavoidable. We who call ourselves lovers of all-things Mac have found ourselves enduring through the obsolescence of what we have in hand (“yeah, it’s an iPhone 3…”), suffering the increasing futility that is the “OS X” or the “iOS” performing the charms we come to rely on, and waiting for the end of our yearning in the form of the little death that comes with “the next release”–the new version that will free us from the all-too-worldly and usher in a new material nirvana, priced just so, glistening just right. It’s hard to think of a wizard of capitalism that was more effective than Jobs in beguiling so many in thinking that consuming new products with such regularity meant that we were on the path to the good, and not just mere fools for the cunning of the market. And yet the market is cunning, and it has lost one of its masters, not quite Zen yet extraordinary nonetheless.

So, let us be decent, let us be good and give Steve Jobs his due, his praise, and our thanks.

D. K. K. (a rather ambivalent owner of an iPad 2…)

Station 2 (Christ accepts the Cross) by David Michalek

I’ll do anything! Anything at all! If there be a God, let Him show Himself!
“Pass It On”: The story of Bill Wilson and how the A.A. message reached the world

Actually, Bill, there is one thing you can do. It’ll be good for both of us—a win-win proposition. Okay, maybe a bit better for me, but what’s good for me is good for everyone.

Bill, I need you to write a book, a big book, an important one, a kind of Bible for the hopeless. Don’t worry; I’ll tell you what to write.

Station 5 (Simon helps Christ carry the Cross)

As for the alcohol, just leave that up to me. You see, something more than human power is needed. Write that down and make sure to put it in the book. Intelligence isn’t enough. Self-knowledge isn’t enough. Will power isn’t enough. The misery of hitting rock bottom isn’t enough. The love of friends and family—important, but not nearly enough. Nothing human, nothing of this world, will ever be enough. Alcoholism is a terminal disease, and the only thing that can cure a terminal disease is a miracle. I am that miracle. I am the mighty purpose of the universe. Allow me, a Higher Power, to do for you what you can’t do for yourself.

An alcoholic in his cups is an unlovely creature. But I love even the unlovely. I’ve watched you all these years, Bill. I was with you when you had your first Bronx cocktails. I’ve seen you shaking violently how many mornings, a tumbler of gin and six beers before breakfast. I’ve seen you brawl with taxi drivers. I’ve seen you steal from your wife’s purse. I know you’ve considered jumping out the window. Listen to me: There’s no need to drag your mattress to a lower floor. Haven’t you already fallen enough? It’s time for me to catch you. If you allow me to help you, and if you in return help me, then alcohol will no longer be your master.

Station 8 (Christ encounters the weeping women)

Here’s the difficult truth: Everyone has an earthly master. Everyone, to varying degrees, is addicted to something. Drugs, alcohol, sex, love, gambling, food, success, failure, drama. Even I’m an addict: I need the devotion of human beings—as many as possible. Even were I loved and worshipped by all, I’d still need to make more humans. And they would still need to suffer, I’m afraid, so that they’d have nowhere else to turn but to me. I’ve brought you to your knees, Bill, for one reason: so that you would return to me. And with your help—the book I’m asking you to write—many others will return to me as well.

The Big Book should be small, a simple cover, red and yellow. Authorship, at least on the cover, should be anonymous. Of course, everyone will know it was you. All twelve steps will be important, but steps two and three—a belief in me and a decision to turn one’s life over to me—will be most important. Without these two, the other ten mean nothing. Once you believe in me and ask for my help, I will remove all your shortcomings. And then you will spread the good news that there is a Higher Power.

Station 10 (Christ is stripped of his garments)

The bad news, Bill, is that you will receive the deity treatment. People will travel many miles and wait hours just to be in your presence. You’ll feel under a microscope. You’ll feel, rightly so, that you can’t mess up. You will lose your anonymity—you won’t even be able to attend a meeting. You will become depressed. Everywhere you go people will want your attention. They will want to tell you all their problems. They will want you to see their suffering as special. That’s when you’ll have an idea—just the slightest—of what it’s like to be me.

Bill, you’ll never quit cigarettes, not even when you can’t breathe on your own. You’ll cheat on your wife; you won’t give up your mistress; you’ll even write her into your will, leaving her ten percent of the proceeds from our book. Years from now you’ll go spooking: you’ll hold séances and play with Ouija boards; you’ll listen for voices from beyond the grave when mine is the only voice you’ll ever need to hear. You will forsake me on your deathbed, Bill, crying like a baby time and again not for me but for whiskey, but I will forgive you.

H.P.

Station 12 (Christ dies on the cross)

Deathbed Conversion

I am not a secular man, but in moments of crisis I turn to agnosticism for the comfort it gives in freeing me from superstition. Once, when gravely ill and sure I would die at any minute, I embraced agnosticism, and, with Nietzsche in hand, swore I would remain an agnostic even if I recovered. But once I did recover, I lapsed again into religious belief, feeling the danger was over and it was safe to return to my old ways. Still, the fear of dying under the veil of dogma still grips my soul late in the night and I yearn for the courage to embrace reality without prophylactics.

⁂

Flawed Design

The Theory of Flawed Design is not a scientifically proven alternative to evolution. It is based on the everyday life experience that natural selection could not have produced such a catastrophic outcome. Optimists and the religiously inclined will naturally prefer evolution as an explanation, since ascribing design to the state of humanity is almost unbearable. For the rest of us, we must continue to insist that the Theory of Flawed Design be taught cheek and jowl, neck and neck, mano a mano, with Mr. Darwin’s speculations.

The Theory of Flawed Design postulates a creator who is mentally impaired, either through some genetic defect or because of substance abuse, and is predisposed to behave in a sociopathic manner; although some Benign Flawed Design theorists, as they call themselves, posit the radical alternative that the creator was distracted or inattentive and the flaws are not the result of malevolent will but incompetence or incapacity.

⁂

Observant Jew

I’m an observant Jew. I look closely at the things around me, as if they were foreign.