Educated Guesswork

Some trepidation is normal when visiting a old friend with whom one has not passed any time for many years. One fears that he has changed, that you’ve changed, that neither of you are the persons who once shared the deep intimacies and easy bonhomie that make up true friendship. How pleasant it is, therefore, to find mere moments after your reacquaintance that the bond you’d created is still strong and unsundered, that the joy and stimulus you’d found in the other’s company was unalloyed and lively, that—to put it frankly—you still were friends.

Such was my happiness upon rereading Confessions Of A Crap Artist for the first time in decades. I immediately found myself swayed by Philip K. Dick’s deceptively simple language, his seemingly deep understanding of human thought, and his deft keenness at slicing apart the worst tangles of people’s snarled relationships. I have always loved Philip K. Dick’s works, and reading this novel, which was his only non-genre fiction published during his lifetime, reminded me why. But did I speak of ‘unalloyed joy’ above? Sigh. No, I can’t really speak of Crap Artist in such terms, for I found its pleasures somewhat tarnished by one of Dick’s two primary faults, and in the process I broke my cardinal rule of never learning about the lives of the artists who create the works I love. A brief line or two in Wikipedia was enough to lower my estimation of Philip K. Dick the man; I still feel, however, that his oeuvre and this novel in particular are works of genius that will always be well worth reading. I shall always love Confessions Of A Crap Artist, even if I am no longer sure that I would want to have had Mr. Dick as a friend.

The plot of the book is quickly told: A high-strung woman and her successful husband move her mentally defective brother into their beautiful house in the sparsely populated land of coastal Marin County during the mid-1950s. The brother becomes involved with a local UFO group while his sister becomes involved with a (slightly) younger married man who has recently moved into the area with his wife. Complications ensue. The end. [See below for Trigger Warnings.]

But of course nothing is that simple; it never is with Philip K. Dick. Each chapter is told from a different point of view, a completely realized internal voice of the brother, the sister, the husband, or the married man that Fay (the sister) begins an affair with. The spot-on accuracy with which Dick depicts the thoughts and concerns and internal dialogue of each of these quite disparate persons is a large part of his genius as a writer. It is not so much a stream of consciousness as a deft recreation of the monologue that (as I imagine) we each keep up with ourselves as we consider our troubles and our environment. Anyone who reads much of the writer’s work notes his penchant and proficiency for writing in this style. It is this which makes Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? an entirely different work than Blade Runner (though who really wanted to see Harrison Ford as a henpecked husband in a dead-end job as a glorified repo man?). Dick’s ability to perfectly project the perceptions and foci of his characters is, in fact, the entire plot of Eye In The Sky, the first novel of his I ever read and a work written only a year or two before Confessions Of A Crap Artist.

But entering into the thoughts of his characters means surfacing some unpleasant thoughts, some of which are very dark indeed. We find in Confessions not only something of an apology for wife beating, but also the unrelenting hateful thoughts of people trapped in relationships that they have both fallen into and have also carefully constructed, tangled knots of patterns so deeply tied into their lives that only a Gordian solution can resolve them, but of course the blade of Alexander severs more than mere threads. We want to ask: Do people really think this way? Do they obsess over the imperfections they see in their partners while remaining entirely ignorant of their own deep character flaws? Of course they do. At least, I know I do.

But even saying “something of an apology for wife beating” points out the difficulty inherent in a work like this one. There are many for whom such a characterization will be immediately disqualifying, either of my review or of the novel. Happy is he or she who has never come close to the psychic tendrils of a couple in deeply twisted, malformed love. There are such pairs, wounded themselves, who proceed to wound each other with emotional cuts which may indeed lead to physical blows. I myself once knew a couple whose relationship teetered upon an unstable fulcrum of bad feeling that all too often pivoted from suppressed loathing to hateful words and possibly worse. Unfortunately for me, they considered me part of the family. To write about such twisted relationships is a rare talent indeed, and Philip K. Dick had such a gift.

Besides the gift, of course, he also had the insight and knowledge, and that knowing was likely garnered from personal experience. As a victim? Or as a victimizer? Well … let me just say that one of Philip K. Dick’s two primary flaws is his deeply rooted misogyny. His female characters are almost always just one of two stereotypes: either a palely beautiful waifish free spirit living beyond the constraints of ordinary, dull reality, or—and this is always more likely in Dick’s works—a shrewish harpy of coldly calculating evil and near psychopathy. As my daughter might say, “Awwww, baby … Who hurt you?” But the record shows that the hurting was not only one-way in Philip K. Dick’s case.

I make it a rule not to learn anything about the personal lives of the authors, artists, actors, musicians, creators whom I like. If I truly love a particular poem, picture, or piece of music or prose, I fear that I’ll lose my pleasure in that work if I know, for instance, that the poet got involved with a petty squabble with a fellow poet over imperialist ideals, each sniping and badmouthing the other in the contemporary press and society. And I’ve always known that Philip K. Dick had problems. You don’t have the record of ‘serial monogamy’ that he did without some deep-seated issues. (I’m looking at you, Dad.) But while trying to look into the history of this singular straight fiction novel by the science fiction author (though published in a limited run in 1975, it was written in 1959), I read a single sentence about his personal life on his Wikipedia page with seriously lowered Mr. Dick in my esteem, and which I now fear I will drag behind me every time I read his novels or short stories.

And that would be a shame.

Because Philip K. Dick is a brilliant writer, whatever faults he had as a human being. Indeed, human faults are his forte, and perhaps no other writer so perfectly captured the inner life and language of we imperfect humans as we go about just trying to live our dooméd lives. (Or, perhaps more likely, it is only I who think in this same unabating nattering way.) He writes of people afflicted with neuroses and perhaps even psychopathy, of the difficulty of true human relationships, of the almost impossibility of communication between men, women, and others who paradoxically are compelled to expend endless words in the attempt. And Confessions Of A Crap Artist is one of Dick’s three best novels.

As the novel runs through the internal musings of first one then another character, the tortured marriage of Fay and Charley Hume is strained to the breaking point. Finally we come to a chapter of true noir nightmare, in which one of the characters shatters the fragile world they have constructed. I had forgotten that chapter from my earlier reading, had perhaps even suppressed it, and it is one of the reasons for the Trigger Warning section below. I initially thought that this denouement disqualified the powerful writing which had come before, but found that the close of the novel used the horrific events of this chapter to uncover deep truths and to somehow reveal an even deeper humanity (in its best sense).

For we are all flawed human beings (The Bible tells us so), or at least all the interesting humans are. And love exists, if it doesn’t always triumph, not in spite of, but through the flaws, transcending in some strange way the burdens we humans seem always to bring to every situation. The Confessions of Jack Isidore, the ‘crap artist’ of the title, as he confronts his own flaws—it is easy to look at others’—leave us better people for having read them, like all the great confessions of literature have always done.

Trigger Warnings: Spousal abuse, violence. Do not read this book if you are sensitive to the same topics as my wife. If you are unsure what I mean, email me at steve@educatedguesswork.com.

or, Through the mirror of Curt Hopkins’s poetry, and what I found there

The first book of poetry by Curt Hopkins, The Dog Watches and other poems, shows off this American writer’s talent for picking out the poetic shards of life from the collision between humans and the onrushing train of time and thought. In the title poem (which occupies over half the pages in this slim volume) as well as the ‘other poems‘, Hopkins proves himself a true poet: a seer with a telling eye for detail, a perfectly tuned ear for sound and sense, and a heart in love with words and language. The vision offered here is one of regretful sighs and loneliness in the big city, of the persistence of hope in the face of overwhelming evidence, the end of dreams, and the emptiness between streetlights and stars. You should read this book; you can buy it here.

People come with complicated dreams

And leave with much less complicated failures.

from “A New Jerusalem”

Curt Hopkins has been writing for as long as my daughter has been alive, longer, and that is a very long time indeed. Besides poetry, he’s written much on technology (in its current sense of computers and that ilk), as well as criticism, journalism, and plays. Yes, plays. He is also the greatest living authority on the surrealist works of Bob Folder, a quite possibly fictional personage of no small poetic talent himself. In The Dog Watches and other poems, however, Hopkins remains focused on the biggest of the big questions, so big that even asking them leads to even bigger questions. This book is his answer.

But who was the man I was when I was a man,

Before, when I was nobody, but before I was nothing?

from “The Dog Watches: V. Excavation”

As I shall dilate upon more at the end of this book report, I am not the best reviewer of poetry. My skill at exegesis is poor, like the dull knife that no longer holds an edge in your kitchen drawer that you haven’t brought yourself to throw away yet. Please remember as you read my words that much of what I say may be eisegesis instead of insight, and that you would do much better to read The Dog Watches and other poems yourself. Really, what’s stopping you? It’s only $5 bucks for the Kindle version, if you read stuff in that format. The link is right up there in the first paragraph above.

The hollow-eyed children of the Place Vendome

Have their tailor-made sackcloth and ashes

from “On moving to Paris to start a wan tubercular literary journal”

These poems ask “Who am I?” like a pestering child with frangible dreams and implacable persistence. Like a modern Zen koan, the verse of Hopkins holds up a mirror and asks: Who were you before you were born? Like most koans, the question itself is the answer, though the poet brings enough Whitmanesque solipsism to the page to push back the encircling shadows of doubt and darkness that threaten us all.

The world is what I say it is

And what I say today is this:

* * *

       even if awareness

Ends and never is reborn,

A thing thought stays thought,

Not as thought and not as thing,

Beyond the touch of time until

That time itself shall end

And still that thing shall not.

from “A history of non-existent objects”

The “touch of time” is ever present in these tender slices of poetry, threatening to subsume life in its awful embrace, leaving only memories and then not even those. Many of these poems describe the most difficult subject imaginable, the interstitial emptiness between galaxies and souls, that longing isolation that has engendered much poetry, though rarely of the great quality found here.

A lonely proposition, life.

You lean your head against the rainy light,

The windows cold as space between the stars

from “Rain from another country”

The title poem of the book, “The Dog Watches”, is a six-part (seven if you include the preface) threnody or perhaps a paean on death and dying, about the passing of friends, culture, Buddhas, dreams. It is an appropriate work for a poet who spent so much time in the San Francisco Bay Area, and who thus can see the ruins left behind by the collapse of the twentieth century. Each section deals with death—his death, her death, my death, our death—and struggles with the tension between the accomplishment of finality and the continual failure of living.

God forgive us for the multitude of deaths

Our lives leave in their wakes,

Including our own, including our hopes’.

from “The Dog Watches: III. The world is the celebrated boy”

A sharp though sweet loneliness permeates these verses, a contemplative judgment somehow unadulterated by melancholia. Hopkins sinks often into reflection, but never into gloom. Even in his darkest thoughts upon the human condition, he never forgets that each of us has his or her own unique loneliness, and somehow this observation becomes an affirmation in “The Dog Watches”.

Each man and woman waste their life a different

Way

from “The Dog Watches: I. The ape, upright”

This title poem starts off with a bang, with the end, with death and death and death. A three-time loser is the subject of the first section of Hopkins’s long poem. We all have—or will have—this experience with the death of a friend, that death which will always nag at our consciousness like a missing tooth, that death which may define our life, if we’re not careful.

He’s dead, irretrievably dead,

Irrevocable, third-hand and involuted,

Not simply dead, he failed and died and failed

Again and died again, until he finally

Died for good, went down and stayed there.

from “The Dog Watches: I. The ape, upright”

But in this opening section the poet promotes the difficult idea that it is only in death that we become whole, become important, have meaning, that only after we die can our lives and our purposes be fulfilled. I personally find this idea impracticable and unreasonable; my own experience is that the dying fade from the memory like … well, I don’t know what, I’ve forgotten. But poetry should make us face up to uncomfortable ideas, and maybe my own resistance to this one is only a vote for nervous nihilism as opposed to what I imagine is an egotistical solipsism. Hopkins’s premise seems to be that death is what is real, while life is merely fluid and faulty.

                    Life’s predictable

And dull until it ends, at which point

It grows green, pale as a melon rind

And never-ending, revisited. Life,

As it is lived, is inevitable and cramped,

But inasmuch as it has ended, it begins.

ditto

What is Hopkins talking about, however, speaking of death, save lonely life? In “The Dog Watches” as well as many of the other poems included in this book, the “Who am I?” question preponderates, and perhaps he is intimating in this opening section, “The ape, upright”, that this question can only be answered after the fact, and then only by those who are ‘not-I’. Life as lived may not be illusive or delusive, but certainly seduces and distracts from the crux of our precarious situation.

(Any more of poison life and I’ll

Develop credibility, brand

Loyalty, and wisdom, the vulgarity

Of believing yourself when you speak.)

from “The Dog Watches: I. The ape, upright”

In our strange time after the collapse of meaning, the poet asks what substitute we can find. It is not entirely clear whether there is a substitute, or if words still have power. Substitute for what? The past centuries and the now collide and we are but innocent victims and guilty bystanders.

Gigantic statements are useless to us now

But what shall we replace them with? Does

A desultory hand mix our bones together

In the dust?

from “The Dog Watches: IV. The world eater”

In the penultimate section of his long poem, “V. Excavation”, Hopkins surveys death and dead cultures through the lens of archeology, and the sundered fragments left behind. He speaks of the earliest days of Hebrew history, a time of which the great preacher Frederick Robertson said, “In the first of these periods names meant truths, and word were the symbols of realities.” Or, as Curt Hopkins puts it:

                         the words

The same as what they said

from “The Dog Watches: V. Excavation”

Though he rages against failures including his own, and though he sees futility as the ultimate product of eternity, still Hopkins refuses to give up, refuses to stop refusing. He has a program for the end of days, and it involves picking ourselves up once more, again, and once more again, ever again, and moving on. And it also involves the journey of stopping, of taking time to halt and notice where we are, who we are.

We must risk grinding to a halt,

Never to move again.

We must explode, then grow still,

Explode again, then fall silent,

Even at the risk of never speaking or moving again.

Because significance lies not in our doing, but in our being

And not in our being, but in the being of others

And not in the being of others, but in the being of things,

Such as stones and wind, and water and stars and trees,

In seeing them and recognizing their being,

By doing that, being one with them,

And, in the process and product of being one with them, being significant,

Substantive, particle and wave,

Which we cannot do when we are shouting and running.

from “The Dog Watches: IV. The world eater”

Even his primal question “Who am I?” seems to be contradicted in the first of his ‘other poems‘, the homage to emptiness “The Outer Sunset”, where he asks (but does not answer)

The question (before who am I?) must be

How did I get here?

“That question does not deserve an answer.”

from “The Outer Sunset”

Still, poets are like politicians, in that both hide their secret purposes by saying what they mean, and meaning what they say. Curt Hopkins writes in The Dog Watches and other poems of futility and failure, and strangely derives hope from the very impossibility of success, which itself is a beautiful success.

     take comfort from the fact that not

A single one of your memories nor anyone else’s,

Not a single memory of anything you’ve done

Or that anyone else ever did, will survive.

from “The Dog Watches: V. Excavation”

I did have a few quibbles with Hopkins’s poems, besides my difficulty with his idea of life as a poor second to death. Like the Russian ambassador in the war room asking for fresh fish, I note that Bobby Darin’s name has only one ‘r’, and even in this narrow volume we note his partiality for the words ‘slough’ and ‘batting’. Entry into a frowsty room has especial meaning for this poet, and perhaps this idiosyncrasy is indicative of the basic problem of writing about loneliness: Are our personal visions meaningful only to ourselves? Occasionally, the delight Hopkins takes in wordplay comes across as almost trying too hard.

It takes so many words to make the world blank

You must summon the patience to wait them out:

Hail Dorothy and back to the I in time

While the lacquer cracks in the cup

And crushes the lack in its black shell

Where the silver silk’s stretched tight

Across its frame of sanded beech.

This nothing is epagomenal day.

I believe in them both.

from “The Dog Watches: V. Excavation”

But the overwhelming fact of The Dog Watches and other poems is its remarkable insight and persuasive power. Not only does he show himself the poet best suited to limn Bay Area communities (Burlingame here gets the most poetic treatment it is ever likely to get), Curt Hopkins compels us to our own introspective contemplation through the power of his words and the deft strokes of his pen. The poems he offers here well worth reading, and will repay your attention much more than another listicle you’ll share with your co-worker and forget. His words are quotable, relatable, remarkable, and honest. On every page presented here, he reminds us that poetry is a verb.

Ideas are the money that we spend

And when you’re broke, you’re broke,

And we’re broke

from “The Dog Watches: III. The world is the celebrated boy”

N.B. The problem with writing about poetry is that everyone who does it imagines himself a poet. I am a poor substitute for the perfect reviewer of Hopkins’s book, being only a meagre poetaster of little or no ability, though flabby in most other aspects of life. My only previous experience in poetry criticism was an indulgent demolition of one of the worst poets the vanity press has to offer, Ms. Mattie Jaxx. I prefer rhymed poetry to free verse, which is what we find mostly in The Dog Watches and other poems (though Curt Hopkins offers us several sonnets in his book, and even a sestina!). My tastes are pedestrian and faux classical, and I like the tiny intricacies of an A.E. Stallings more than the psychoanalytic insights of a Tony Hoagland. As well, I am ignorant of most modern poetry and poets. My favorite poem is “Ulysses”. I am a Cancer. I am also personally acquainted with Mr. Hopkins, or was about one-and-a-half lifetimes ago, and that always prejudices everything.

It’s sad to recognize the ending,

So few value its voluptuousness:

Mornings blessedly drained of all that is not

Regret

from “The Dog Watches: V. Excavation”