The 2024 Election

THE 2024 ELECTION

I went to the polls this past Wednesday to vote in the 2024 Election. 

I think we can all, regardless of our political beliefs, agree that this is the most important election of our lifetimes, perhaps in the entire history of our nation, even of the human race. Hence, I wanted to make sure to participate fully in the event by voting early.

The week before, I had received in the mail a missive from the pro-turnout Super-PAC "Democracy in Action." The ad featured a grainy photograph of me, taken apparently from across the street near my house, and pinned to an ordinary piece of lined paper. Above the photograph, scrawled in black marker, was the message: "IF YOU DO NOT VOTE WE WILL KILL YOUR FAMILY." 

Since the Pandemic, the roads I would ordinarily take to get to the polling site have been "Closed for Repair," blocked off with yellow tape and barbed wire and barricades and medical checkpoints. To get there now means a dangerous journey down the River; and as I lacked the requisite funds to hire the well-armored personnel transports that serve most voters in my generally upscale neighborhood, I had to make do with one of the "General Admission" voting ferries sponsored by Bain Capital, LP as part of a get-out-the-vote effort ultimately masterminded (according to Internet rumor) by Kamala Harris' husband's aunt's former accountant, now the CEO of an Albanian arms company with ties to the UAE. 

I set out just before dawn so as to arrive at the jetty in time for the scheduled 7:15 AM departure time; but as it turned out, the ferry was nearly three hours late, arriving just after 10 AM. When I first arrived at the jetty, there were only a few elderly women there, apparently Kamala Harris campaign volunteers, in oversized, lime-green t-shirts worn down to their ankles, clustered around a large pot of stew stirring and adding herbs from fanny packs around their waists. One of them offered me a cup of soup, but as I had already eaten breakfast I declined. 

After about half an hour, a few apparent voters arrived, one an old man dressed in rags, barefoot, with a long grizzled beard, wearing a MAGA hat on his head; the other a tall, thin young woman bundled up to her eyes in blue-tinted furs, who (after eagerly accepting a cup of soup) eyed me suspiciously and crossed to the far end of the jetty to sit crosslegged on the planks. The morning was cool and dim, and fog shrouded the banks all around us. From time to time, I pulled out and checked the sample ballot in my pocket, or sat and watched the huge, dark shapes moving in the water below. 

When the boat had still not arrived at 9:30, I found myself hungry once again, and belatedly approached the old women, who eyed me eagerly, licking their lips. "C-could I have some soup please?" I stammered. 

The tallest of the old women, with rank, black hair that might have been dyed, dipped a cup of the soup out of the cast-iron pot, began handing it to me, then stopped, her eyes going dark, and hissing out of suddenly pressed lips: "Which side are you on?" I said nothing, and after another moment she smiled again and handed me the cup of soup. There was no spoon.

The soup had been cooking on an open flame for hours, and by this time had something of the consistency of glue--but its pungent flavors of sage and rosemary reminded me irresistibly of long summer evenings on the patio at Luigi's Pizza, and I wolfed down the whole cup in a matter of minutes. 

A few minutes after 10 o'clock, the jetty was abruptly flooded with passengers, all, male and female, clad in the loose brown tunics and smocks typical of peasants in the lowlands, many with campaign buttons pinned onto the smocks, and all bearing pilgrim's staves and large rucksacks. A few led mules or donkeys, and all pointedly refused the old women's offer of soup. Some wandered sociably around the jetty from end to end, while others sat with their feet swinging off the end and throwing stones or pieces of bread from their rucksack into the water for the creatures below; but all talked loudly with each other about the election, the journey, and the latest poll forecasts and modeling from FiveThirtyEight. 

The young woman, meanwhile, had gotten up and fled to stand with the old women, who spoke to her and stroked her hair comfortingly while (almost imperceptibly) pulling off small pieces of it to add to their pot. 

A few minutes later, when the ferry at last came into sight, the assembled passengers broke into raucous applause, cheering and throwing their rucksacks and bits of bread into the air. The day was cool, dark, and misty, so at first the yellow light streaming from the ferry was so overwhelming that I had to shield my face with my hand.

Story: The Hotel

The Hotel

The elevator doors opened, the mirrored image of his own face parting in two and departing to be replaced by a long, carpeted hallway. He glanced at the small, pixelated number in the display screen above the control panel–the 23rd floor–and gingerly stepped over the threshold.

With a piercing chime and an almost inaudible whir the doors began to close. He turned his head just in time to see his image come together again, with only a small seam in the middle: a tall, stooped man in black, cleanshaven, with a scarred lip and a rather worried expression. He smiled, as if to himself–and looked, to himself, all the stranger.

With no warning, a scream sounded behind him–muffled and almost indistinguishable from the background hum of the air-conditioner, but loud enough that he spun around at once. 

The hallway stretched in front of him, with no one in sight.

He stood there for a minute, studying the scene, as if waiting for something or someone to emerge. 

The carpet was gray but patterned with odd bars of brown and tan, scattered in a strict but haphazard-looking pattern, all pointing in the same direction. The walls were papered in gray with similar patterns of bronze bars, but connected and at right angles, forming odd, swastika-like formations in and around the white featureless doors, set in patterns of three and two on alternating sides of the corridor, each with its own bronze and black number plate. The ceiling was large white panels patterned with small flecks like birdseed; small, compact lights, bulbs enclosed in four-cornered black metal cages filled in with panes of clouded glass, were positioned every ten feet along it, each one casting a faint pool of light onto the floor below. 

After more than a minute, the scream had not been repeated; and he began walking, slowly at first, tentatively, his stride lengthening, growing firmer with each step. He did not look either to the right or the left until he came to a crossroads of sorts, where one path branched out from the main hallway to the left at a perpendicular angle. After a momentary hesitation, he took the path, passing around a squared bend as he did so; fifty feet more, and he reached a T in the corridor, the blank wall ahead of him looming over a single table, green formica, on which was set an angular bronze lamp with a subtly patterned tan hood set over it. The lamp was off.

Story: The Meeting

 [This story is based on real events.]

“Where is Jeanine? The meeting is about to start.”

The menu of the Rockhouse Cafe had changed again–an extra page at the front with seasonal specials. Minerva’s face twisted uneasily as she flipped quickly past it to Entrees. Her finger found the chicken with potatoes, rested there in reassurance for a moment–and then a spasm of energy drove it away, back to her cellphone.

“She said she would be coming–where is she? Don’t worry, we still have ten minutes before the meeting: more people will be coming.”

This last remark to the thin young man with bleached-blond, spiked hair sitting at her right hand, who was trying to occupy himself by looking carefully over the seasonal specials.

“If we don’t get five more people, the vote won’t be valid–we won’t have a quorum.” This remark to the plump, comfortable-looking woman on her other side, who was looking rather sleepy and had not opened her menu.

“Well,” the woman said. “I’m sure they’ll turn up soon.” She yawned.

Minerva’s thin face crinkled. “I don’t know why they keep those asparagus on the menu–it’s an embarrassment. Where is Jeanine?”

She grabbed the phone lying next to the red plastic glass of water and dialed the number again. Before it could go to voicemail, she thumbed it off and dropped it onto the table again. “Anne, do you have the Mitchells’ number?” 

The plump woman smiled. “No, I think Bob does, though. He should be here soon.”

“Tell Bob he’s going to be late!” Minerva barked to the thin, frightened-looking older man sitting across from her. He flinched.

“Um, honey…”

The door opened, and Minerva spun her head around; it was the Marvins, both thin and blond and frowning. They sat down at the other end of the table, as far from Minerva as possible.

“See? More people will be here.” She nodded to the young man again, who was in the process of drinking from his water cup. He coughed, spilling some water on the table, and she frowned.

“We still need three more people to make a quorum!” she hissed at Anne.

“Can I get y’all anything else to drink?” Minerva started: the waitress was back, a thin young woman wearing a black vest with a broad smile on her face.

She turned over the menu card: where were the drinks?

The young man at her right had already piped up, smiling as he did so. “I’ll have a Dr. Pepper.” The woman smiled back, and Minerva frowned as she glanced between the two of them.

“Anne, what are you having?”

“White wine, please.” Anne yawned again. “Cabernet.” 

“I’ll just have a Coke.” Bob had arrived, a large man with a round face and a well-groomed beard. He sat down heavily next to Anne and looked with interest at the young man. “So you’re the artist!” 

The young man smiled. “John,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” 

“Bob,” said Bob, looking down at his menu. “Do they still have the oysters special?” 

“No,” the waitress said. “I’m sorry. We do have oysters at our regular price, though. And the new special is Seafood Scampi.”

“Bob,” Minerva said, glancing over at him in annoyance. “Don’t you think we should wait to order food until everyone gets here?”

Bob shrugged. “Is anyone else coming?”

Column 03/13/2024: Interiority and the Preternatural: Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and The Curse

 Interiority and the Preternatural: Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and The Curse

In art and life alike, it is important not to confuse the supernatural with the preternatural.

The supernatural, what is super naturam, "above nature," refers, properly speaking, to the genuinely transcendent--that is, what it is distinguished from the natural not by a straightforward conflict or addition, but by totally superseding it, nullifying it, prefiguring it in its totality, and/or drawing it up whole into itself. The genuinely supernatural cannot be anticipated by the natural, or portrayed in terms of it: it can only, to a limited extent, be conveyed by its action on and through the natural. Hence the proper mode(s) of the Sacred Scriptures and other theological and mystical writings.

The preternatural, what is praeter naturam, "next to nature" or "outside" it, is not like this: most properly, it refers to those things that do not transcend the natural, but rather exist alongside it, adding something to it or in some way operating outside its normal bounds. It is the preternatural that is the more common purview of human art and literature. 

Even here, one can distinguish two senses of the preternatural, one of which is more proper than the other. In the first place, the term preternatural is often used for entities that, while not properly supernatural, are nonetheless more spiritual or powerful or higher in some sense, and thus have greater power to act on and even against nature: demons and angels and ghosts and human persons. 

In itself, though, there is nothing unnatural about these entities, which are in the most immediate sense simply one group of created natures among others. I have never seen a ghost, but I have had a few encounters with demons--and I can assure my readers that there is nothing particularly exciting or artistic about such experiences. The existence of an entity that is strong or difficult to detect or even very intelligent and who wishes to harm you may be frightening, but there is nothing intrinsically interesting about it, any more than about a cockroach or charging rhinoceros or human murderer. 

Still, while these entities are not beyond nature in a strong sense, the reality is that if we examine the bulk of art about spiritual beings, indeed the bulk of art about even threatening human beings or animals, we find that it is layered with a great deal of strange, eerie "preternatural" effects. The reason for this, though, is found in the relationship between such entities and the preternatural in the proper sense. 

Hence the central thesis of this essay, namely that the "preternatural" in human and artistic terms refers precisely to the interiority of human experience and action, and in particular to two troubling features of this interiority: (1) its frequent opacity, and (2) its susceptibility to being acted upon and affected.

A human person does not merely exist as an entity in the world, one object among other objects acting and being acted upon: they exist, rather, by receiving and interiorizing the world, and then communicating what they have received.

Hence the essential paradox of human life and personhood as such: every human being lives in the same objective world, yet every human being exists in a sense in their own world, which is not merely a "subjective" as opposed to "objective" world, or a false as opposed to a true world, but which is precisely the world as received and related to by themselves. As both Trinitarian theology and Christology in their several ways show, the person in its actual, particular existence and relationality is precisely what cannot be comprehended within nature, but exists "outside of" it, "alongside" it. As an intellectual entity, an entity that fundamentally is intellect--that is to say, a pure receptivity that is actualized and exists only in its receiving and relating to and even becoming what is other as other--every human being simply is the whole world received according to a particular relation. 

In theory, there is nothing dangerous, nothing even false or non-objective, about this state of affairs. Each person receives the world according to their particular, truthful relation to it, characterizes that world comprehensively according to that relation, and then gives that world back as their own to other persons. In this giving and receiving of the content of the world and all things according to real and true relation, this essentially Trinitarian dynamic, is the whole glory and beauty of intellect and personhood and, in its most perfect and transcendent form, the very life of God himself. 

Yet in the world as we find it, this reality of personhood can go very badly wrong. Each person lives in, lives as, a world: but these worlds are frequently constituted as much by falsehood, disconnection, privation, and malicious intention as by true and objective relation. When we encounter people, when we start to understand them, we get not so much a sense of their psychology or their identity in a straightforward sense: we get, rather, a glimpse of the world in which they exist, the world as which they exist. Without a doubt we have all had the experience of encountering someone (perhaps even ourselves) and getting a glimpse of the world in which they lived--and finding it a hellish, illusive wasteland.

At the same time, the worlds we construct or exist in are never merely our own creations, based merely on our own relations. As persons, starting from the time we are infants, we all form our senses of the world and our personalities through receiving from and relating to others. Without this, no true relationships among people are possible, and indeed we cannot really function as rational beings, cannot really live in the world or form our own sense of it. We are beings that by our very nature and inmost operation are aimed at receiving other peoples' worlds, other peoples' interiorities, and reconciling and uniting them to our own. 

At its best, this process of communication is a constant ongoing process, a constant reception and correction and expansion and integration of our sense of the world that brings us deeper and deeper into relation with each other and the depths of being. At worst, though, this process of receiving our worlds from without can become the most brutal type of violence, a violence that threatens to efface our inmost selves. We have all almost certainly had the experience of being overwhelmed, deafened, deadened, perhaps even totally annihilated by someone else's hellish interiority, someone else's false sense of the world and their and our place in it. 

It is here that the less proper sense of the preternatural relates directly to, and is only comprehensible in terms of, the proper sense of the term.  In principle, everything in the world has some power over our interiority, some place in the worlds we form. The more something--a time, a place, an object, a melody, a work of art, a relationship--directly impacts our interiority, shapes and characterizes and constitutes it, the more we perceive that thing as somehow "beyond nature," strange, wonderful, luminous, eerie. 

"Spirits" and human persons alike are not preternatural in any sense that transcends this--they are simply entities in the world with the capacity to impact our interior lives. Yet as intellectual beings with interior lives, thoughts and intentions and designs and worlds of their own, they are entities who have a great deal more power to shape and even dominate our interiorities than any other. In the final sense, indeed, only other persons, other intellectual entities, are or can be preternatural. Only they can give us our senses of the world, alter them, or destroy them. 

Hence, it is quite true and even quite literal to say that for the saint the world is heaven, and that for the evil man one and the same world is hell. Indeed, the saint in a real sense is heaven; his whole existence and personality is found in the communication of the world as given and received and lived in beatitude; and as evil men grow more evil, they in a real sense become Hell, their existence consisting in little more than the communication of their own misery and damnation to others. It is this interplay and drama of personality, of the communication of whole cosmoses, that constitutes most of the actual substance of our lives in this world.

To illustrate the point, I will now turn to examining a few works of art that bear on this question, and show how they all reflect, to varying degrees, this fundamental reality of human life: and how their use of "preternatural" elements in the exterior sense is ultimately a mask and means for examining the ways in which people's interior lives are impacted, illuminated, deformed, or destroyed by the world and other persons. In these stories, ghosts and demons and other people alike are ghostly, not because they threaten us without, but because they threaten us within.

Column 09/11/2023: The Trial of Donald J. Trump

The Trial of Donald J. Trump

[Given the strong interest in the media right now about the possibility of a trial of former President Donald J. Trump, I thought people would be interested in the contents of a holographic tape recently uncovered by archeologists digging in the future ruins of Philadelphia. As you can see, it purports to be a record of Trump's upcoming trial. Given the oddities of the events portrayed, however, it is likely that it in fact contains a later reproduction or dramatization of the original event, dating from as late as a century afterward--perhaps in the form of a school play, or some sort of fertility ritual. While the accuracy of this record and its meaning cannot be deduced with accuracy, it undoubtedly was considered an important document by the future culture that produced it, and is thus relevant to scholars for that reason alone.

Please note that the below written transcript of the original holographic record was created by AI, and may contain errors and other artifacts. Viewer discretion is advised.]

A room, completely dark. Suddenly, a single shaft of red light rises, piercing the darkness, revealing a dais on which three draped figures sit.

Judges (in unison): When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?

A red light goes up under the face of the first judge. It is LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA, in full costume as Alexander Hamilton.

Judge Miranda: How do a bastard, an orphan, and the son of a whore grow up to be judges?

The light goes up under the face of the second judge. It is Hollywood Actor ROBERT DOWNEY, JR, dressed in his Iron Man suit.

Judge Downey, Jr: We're sort of like a team.

The third judge is revealed as OPRAH WINFREY; she is the only one of the three wearing judicial robes, and a powdered wig.

Judge Winfrey: Surround yourself only with people who are going to take you higher.

Small yellow lights like stars come up overhead, revealing that the trial is being held in a massive theater with an arched gothic ceiling and red velvet seats. Most of the stage is still dark, but a red curtain can just be made out at the back. The audience goes wild, cheering and applauding and screaming, encouraged by the judges, who wave their hands wildly in answer.

Judge Miranda (enthusiastically): Look around, look around!

Judge Downey, Jr (firmly): It’s not about how much we lost, it’s about how much we have left. We’re the Avengers. We gotta finish this.

Judge Winfrey silences the two men with a wave of her hand. She stands.

Judge Winfrey (severely): Youth, with its enthusiasms, which rebels against any accepted norm because it must: we sympathise. It may wear flowers in its hair, bells on its toes. But when the common good is threatened, when the function of society is endangered, such revolts must cease. They are non-productive...and must be abolished!

Advocate for the prosecution, please make your opening argument.

Column 07/07/22: How I Met Elon Musk at Waffle House

[Please note that none of the below events have ever actually occurred.]

I met Elon Musk at Waffle House recently. Given the stature of Waffle House's contributions to American society, I think we can all agree the story is worth recounting.