“This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole.”

The news of John Spencer’s death makes me very sad.

Ever since Bartlet walked out of the Oval, having signed over his presidential powers to the Speaker of the House, I have hardly watched the show because, to quote Sam, “they forgot to bring the funny.”

But for a few years there, that show was deeply important to me, out of all proportion for a television show. It was important to me the way the Daodejing is important to me, or Gravity’s Rainbow. And the role of Leo McGarry was pivotal to its importance. Leo was the basso continuo.

Raise a glass to his memory.

We are hosting our nieces this weekend. They are 12 and 10, so our dinner last night was chicken fingers and french fries; I made a special trip to the corner store for ketchup, since the decree went forth to all corners of the realm that fries would under no circumstances be consumed if not accompanied by lots and lots of ketchup.

I went in to work yesterday to make up some hours, so they went out looking for xmas trees without me. We’ve gotten by for ten years with a two-foot tall munchkin but with our new, grand front windows, we decided it was time to upgrade to something a little bigger – after all, the little thing was more ornament than tree.

They found an artificial, pre-lit tree, set it up, and decorated it as evening fell. I could see the tree shining in the living room window from the lightrail as I came home.

I woke up this morning to the first snowfall. I turned on the tree and brewed some coffee. From my study window, I look out over a small city park. I can see people bundled, walking their dogs, who frisk and caper in the snow. All the trees and powerlines are still accented with thick white lines. The boundary between earth and sky is blurred. The eye, with nothing distinct to rest on, falls upward into the clouds.

In the last week or so, I advanced to Volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time. So far, we have returned to the youthful narrator’s perspective, and we are hearing about his naïve love for Swann’s daughter, Gilberte. We are also gaining more insights into Swann’s obsessive and disastrous affair with Odette, and we understand a little better how they came to be married, despite Swann having arrived at the sobering realization, at the end of Swann in Love, that Odette really just isn’t his type.

And Proust continues to do a very strange thing with the point of view; he regularly slides from his own first-person account of things to an omniscient narrator privy to everyone’s internal motivations and back again. He somehow manages to do this fluidly, without the slightest jolt to the narrative; we simply shift from, say, a dinner party at which the narrator is present, to deep background regarding events from years before the narrator would even have been born.

I experience no jolt because, I think, of the absolute trust he inspires. He could tell me about anything, however dull or otherwise not to my taste, and I’d happily listen for as long as he wished to speak, because he has proven beyond doubt that he can make insightful and profound use of anything at all, including wallpaper, furniture, mediocre Romantic sonatas — and of course madeleines dipped in herbal tea.

By a curious coincidence, my wife spotted a Proust reference in an unlikely spot. As a ramp up to the imminent theatrical release of its sequel, some cable channel has been repeatedly airing an action flick called The Transporter. At one point, a character bakes some madeleines, prompting a revery from the French police chief on the nature of memory and observation, noting that Proust, being a “details man,” would have made a great detective; he adds that in fact it had been his reading of Proust as a youth that inspired him to become an investigator.

She had just told me of this scene when we turned on the TV — and there was the movie, moments away from the very scene in question. And in a typically Proustian way, I experienced the scene twice — but the first one seemed more real, because it had been Ana’s story, and the actual film itself, upon which her version was based, seemed like a mere enactment.

(The silly Python song faded weeks ago, thankfully — except when my wife asks me, “And in the second book: what did Proust write about, write about?")

Mere pages away from the end of Swann’s Way — so close in fact that I don’t know if I should even haul it to work or not; I could finish it on the ride in this morning, and I hate lugging dead books with me. Volume 2 is somewhat larger, so I sure as heck don’t want to drag them both. Ah, the quandaries of a reader.

But more about the book itself:

It is breathtaking. He slows time down for you to draw out, over many pages, the refractions of a single moment. The narrator sees, for example, a girl through the hedge, falls instantly in love, and we then read about how the mind so often latches onto some framing detail, the colors of the leaves and flowers in the hedge, the flash of a beach ball, the sound of some distant wind high in the trees, as the crucial mnemonic detail that will forever stand in for the luminous flashing moment of first love. The mind can only grasp that first moment by approaching as it were obliquely, by way of some indirect and innocuous aspect.

The novel within a novel, Swann in Love, which I just finished, is a study of sexual jealousy, agonizing and embarrassing in its brutal and lacerating accuracy. A trainwreck in dreamlike slow motion. And Odette isn’t even his type.

I have at long last taken the Proust plunge. I began the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation about six years ago, but stalled out. I tried picking it up again this spring, and faltered once again. Then, on a whim a month or so ago, I poked around online trying to tease out what had always struck me as its bewildering history of translations in English. I found that there are essentially only two. The first is the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation. Moncrieff died before finishing, so Kilmartin rounded out Time Regained. Later, D.J. Enright worked his way through M/K, revising it considerably.

And the only other English translation, it turns out, is the one instigated by Penguin a few years ago, where each of the seven volumes has been assigned a different translator. Lydia Davis takes on Swann’s Way, and it is this volume that I bought, and am surging through on the train each day. I cannot speak yet to any qualitative difference between this and the M/K, since I’d rather not get distracted (and, frankly, I don’t remember much from my previous two incomplete passes), but suffice it to say, I have found myself completely enthralled, which is not how I would have described my previous attempts. Thankfully, I ride to the terminus of each of my commuter lines (at least on the way home), so I have not missed my stops.

One unpleasant side effect has been that I’ve been incessantly singing and humming, “Proust in his first book, wrote about, wrote about”… This will pass, I hope, once I move beyond the first book.

I think people follow sensational news stories that escalate into media frenzies at least in part to try to figure out why the stories have been whipped up into frenzies at all. We wait for some news outlet to supply us with something genuinely revelatory, the newsworthy fact that will justify all the live feeds and up-to-the-minute rumor-mongering, correspondents in parkas before the hotel, the impounded car.

Do we hear anything during these updates that sheds profound light on the human condition, or exposes some deep flaw in law enforcement, government, morality, ethics? Anything that makes us strive for something better, improve our relations to each other or ourselves? News that stays news? No. Instead, we get tawdry and callow soap operas, embarrassments of voyeurism. Nothing we haven’t seen or heard a thousand times before. Aerial shots of a white bronco passing slowly underneath the overpasses of LA. Posters of the pretty girl on telephone poles, her body later found in a trash bag at the base of the canyon.

To whom — besides the stubbornly naïve — is the news ever in any way surprising? Are there still hermits and anchorites so insulated that they are startled to learn that powerful boys of privilege will think themselves above the law? Every generation has its Raskolnikov, probably every family does. Who is still alarmed and surprised by human behavior? Are we not all human here? Don’t we all have vile thoughts that we struggle with? Do we not all find ourselves humiliated at one moment and smugly triumphant at another? I am all sorts, and so are you. The only surprise for me comes when I do not identify with something glorious or grotesque, and it is a rare surprise indeed. My mind is capable of imagining all sorts of horrors. I commit none of them, but I do not underestimate other members of my species to take that step. Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow.

There is indeed an appeal for a poetry in which the author is “a connoisseur of yourself” because the vast undifferentiated mass of humanity drifts through life, somnolent, watching Fox news, always surprised, baffled, alarmed, terrified. Every moment. And the calluses build up over their raw, tender parts. Their carapace of fear prevents them from sensing almost everything that comes at them, and indeed pretty much everything within themselves. Mute and distant shocks, like a submarine striking a manatee. Those few among us who can say with Socrates, “I know nothing,” startle and amaze the rest of us. You have robbed me. God, I am naked. What shall I do?

So a poetry that offers such otherwise banal insights into the same self we have entombed within ourselves, like Paul D’s little tin box — this poetry can sell, and can actually seep into the groundwater of these polluted little ghetto-selves that would otherwise watch with rheumy eyes the clock ticking down to their unremarkable deaths. These are facile shocks, but useful to the anesthetized masses to simulate wakefulness.

But we want from poetry something truly startling, and not merely predictably shocking, not the shocks we can get used to; we can masticate with our rotted gums almost any pap dished out to us. Shock is easy, and mass-producible. We can commodify horrors.

We want from poetry something gently revolutionary, something sincerely strange and unfamiliar. Instead, we get the pretty girls, the fleeing black men, the millionaire sons blasting their sleeping parents with shotguns. We find a strange comfort in these images, we can sing along to the refrains. We can excitedly recite the verses with one another. We can forge a community from such familiar elements. Is that really what we want?

We are pattern seekers and meaning makers: we cannot escape form. Even a depiction of chaos will be, in some fundamental way, formal. Indeed, chaos is simply the unfiltered and the uncategorized. As soon as I call this bit “this,” and that bit “that,” I have performed an act of creation. We cannot choose to be formal; we can only choose how heavily we lean into it. Seeking patterns and making forms is simply our minds in the work of comprehension. Cognition is a winnowing, a series of choices that constrain. But constraints do not limit us, they free us. We sit down to write a poem: where to start, and where to go from there? Instead of all the cosmos, an endless wordhoard to intimidate and overwhelm us, we merely need something that rhymes with “now”, or three more syllables, or only six words.

I have been attracted to the Hay(na)ku form recently because the constraint (three lines of six words: 1-2-3 or 3-2-1) sits so lightly on the composition process. I may have half-formed ideas, or notes, or single words lying around, and no other place to put them. Thinking of five more words to go with these fugitives, or reworking a phrase to bring it down to the count, is a playful and surprisingly friendly way of working. It’s almost like not working at all. And yet, like all miniaturist forms, it is challenging in a way that long, discursive works are not. As Pascal quipped, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.”

Some years ago, I heard a music reviewer criticize a band for “not furthering the discussion.” They were, he said, bringing nothing new or interesting to the form or structure of whatever sub-genre of pop they purported to belong to, nor were they engaging coherently with their own history or influences. He said they were simply making the kind of noise you make when you’re a band that wants to be “A Band.” Three chords, guitars, verse-chorus-verse, typical “Hello Cleveland!” crap.

And I remember reading an essay by Hayden Carruth, in which he talked about Paul Goodman’s sonnets, and his innovation of putting the couplet other places than at the end (quatrain, couplet, quatrain, quatrain; or whatever). regardless of what you think of Goodman, or sonnets (or, for that matter, Carruth), and whether you think this constitutes “innovation” on any meaningful scale, at least Goodman was goofing around with the form somehow, furthering the discussion, seeing what spaces he could find within the form.

Someone once said: “a good number of people using them [formal structures such as sonnets, etc] now are using them badly and for the wrong reasons.” Actually, I think the real problem is that too often people are using them for no reason whatsoever, other than that they’ve been led to believe that this is the sort of noise you make when you want to be “A Poet.”

I definitely don’t intend to start up any sort of mudslinging between neoformalists and verslibrists or whoever. I don’t care about any of that. (Though I would add that lots of sophomores make all sorts of noises when they’re trying to be “poets;” the particular noise is usually determined by what hero they’re trying to emulate, be it Jorie Bly, or Seamus Frost, or Gary Ginsberg, or Lew Kerouac, or Octavio Neruda, or Sharon Pinsky, or Kenneth Berrigan, or Jack Ashbery, or Lorine Zukofsky, or William Carlos Laughlin, or E.E. Cunningham, or whoever.)

I bring it up because the idea of “furthering the discussion” has shaped my critical perspectives for most of my adult life.

Furthering the discussion means, first of all, endorsing the idea that the discussion is useful, valuable. Second of all, it means doing what you can as a participant to encourage others to contribute, rather than discouraging them from participating; discussions are by definition collaborative. Thirdly, it means seeing that discussions are additive, and are themselves processes. They are not objects, they are events. Objects are static, closed; events are fluid, ongoing. A discussion cannot be static or closed. A discussion must flow, must move.

This also means that a discussion, to be completely healthy, cannot serve the agenda of any participant; if it does, however implicitly, then it will be unliving: it will be an object, it will be a stone cast by that person (or persons) who controls the message. It will certainly not be collaborative or open-ended. It will, in serving only one goal, serve no real goals. To live, to serve any goals, a discussion must serve no goals other than that no one can know ahead of time what’s going to happen.

If you can’t stand that sort of spooky indeterminacy, you’d better not join in. And you should head back to the nineteenth century, where you’ll be nice and cozy. You can have the past, just leave us our future.