STORM SYSTEMS OF GROUP SUFFERING: A 2011 YEAR END...

4 months ago

STORM SYSTEMS OF GROUP SUFFERING: A 2011 YEAR END LIST AND CATCH-ALL OF THE ZEITGEIST USING EPISTOLARY FORMS

by Evan Scott Bryson

Of the two people I’ve ever loved—the one is in Afghanistan, and the other I dumped on Tuesday. I’m ready for 2012. I’m ready for anything.

—

5 December 2011

Hey Evan,

[…] also, mom said you got quite emotional on the phone last night. So, like a good investigator that I am, I’m asking if everything is going okay for you right now, if your emotional and psychological well-being is on shaky footing. Are you regular? Sleep is key.

loves,

—

The best thing to come out of the Occupy Movement, for me, has been M83. “Midnight City” was posted and reposted by my estranged friends in Manhattan, kids I’d gone to college with in the Midwest. (One friend—Nathaniel—drove from Albuquerque to live under tarpaulin in the small gray park.) I’m not certain how a band that emulates yuppie boho discotheque from the height of Reagan’s bubble has become the go-to for my déclassé peers, but I really like the double-album. I listened to the song over and over again with my boyfriend last week. We drove through Nashville holding hands while I tried to make the chirpy-balloon-busty beats: “A DOOT DOOP deep DOOP! A BEEP boop BEEP DOOP!” Then after a day of silence I broke up with him. Now he’s my ex-boyfriend. I still listen to M83 but the resonance is different. He really liked the song “Raconte-moi une histoire”,so of course now that song makes me seize with shame and remorse—and it’s about licking a fucking psychedelic tree frog.

—

My Facebook wall has become a who’s who of those who have a vested interest in occupying and those who reply with photos of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, photos of blond boys holding an assault rifle in one hand and in the other an “I am the 1%” placard: “I love God, my country, my job. I worked hard for everything I have and I count my blessings. You trustfund hippies don’t know how good you got it. Get a job, get a life, stop asking for handouts.” I should say that since entering graduate school, I’ve been on Facebook a lot more.

My great friend Jeremy has been in Kandahar for a little over three months now. He’s attached to the JAG unit of the 82^nd Airborne as a paralegal, and graduated top in his class at jump school, and has won several merit awards. I think he’s cocky and silly and soulful. Here’s an example of our enflamed, self-righteous, liberal, bigoted Facebook patter:

EVAN: Jeremy plz circulate “we are the 1% pictures” like othr enlistees!!!!1 it’s killing me to see all these 20yrold soldiers holding guns and talking about hardwork. I don’t doubt the hardwork, but i wonder about their employment during peacetime. (heck, during war time.) poop in my pants, that’s what i feel like.

JEREMY: I havent seen these pics. But as for enlistees holding guns… probably 95% would be unemployable(?) during peacetime. And they all hate President Obama for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. It blows my mind how uninformed most service members are. I blame facebook. And the Republican presidential race.

We are being—yes—disgustingly unfair and unapologetically so. We come from a small town in a small county in a small state. A disproportionate number of the kids we went to high school with have joined the military, come back home, married, spawned, divorced, married again, gone back to Iraq or Afghanistan. I have degrees in English and art. Jeremy has eight credit hours of Chinese to finish before he get’s his BA in whatever—economics? But first he ran into debt.

—

Earlier in the year n+1 ran Kent Russel’s essay “Ryan Went to Afghanistan”. Jeremy was at Fort Bragg waiting for overseas deployment, and pushing paperwork mostly to do with on-base sex scandals, prostitution and drugs and what-not, and hanging out with lesbians. (Isn’t it intriguing that before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed, gays were totally overrepresented in military legal offices?) I wanted Jeremy to read the essay but he couldn’t get a hold of a copy of n+1. I sent the editors an email that went like so:

Hi Editors,

I’ve been trying to get my friend Jeremy to read “Ryan Went to Afghanistan” for a while now, but he’s adamantly against paying the for a digital subscription (he cites “bills … and hoes in different area codes” as strains on his finances); also the PX at Fort Bragg doesn’t stock your fine journal. Jeremy’s reference to hoes is used as a pat jocularism—he is a gentleman and a scholar.

Jeremy deploys for Kandahar in September. He told me this via text message Friday night while I debated seeing Pirates of the Caribbean 4 by myself. Here is a portion of the exchange:

Evan: No one wants to see new pirates movie with me. What is wrong with this country?

Jeremy: Haha… too much pirates may be a part of the problem.

Evan: Im already in line in my heart for the fifth installment. Nevertheless.

Jeremy: I’m holding out for the Michael Bolton version.

Evan: Well. As long as its pirates! … … … :’(

Jeremy: Deploying to Kandahar Sept 10. Just found out today. Haven’t told the rents yet. Mom is going to be a wreck.

Evan: Is that like a Thai food place? Like a really shitty Thai food place?

The movie did not recover my spirits. I’m a little in love with Jeremy, since like high school, etc. And he really isn’t a cheap ass, I swear. He just gave 14,000bucks to Sallie Mae. (He joined the army in part to pay off insurmountable student loan debt; he hopes to use his G.I. Bill to pay for law school.)

And anyway! I was wondering if n+1 could do a Memorial Day bonanza, allowing our august soldiers of the awful War on Terror either a military discount or a free article—perhaps articles exclusively to do with War(s)? It will probably be seen as in bad taste (“Torture and Its Known Unknowns,” while beautiful, virtuosic, amazing, is liable to make readers cry; “Mogadishu, Baghdad, Troy” about same), but eventually people will understand that the PX lit vendors have historically underserved n+1 (though they do stock Harper’s), and your side is working in good faith to correct this, if “for one weekend only!” Logistically, I have no idea how this could work. Interns?

I think our soldiers need to read Kent Russell’s story. It may help them to understand the depths of the compassion and confusion of the friends they leave behind when they go to fight far from our United States. And for those soldiers who have yet to deploy, it may in some small way, in some capacity of its wisdom, prepare them for the incalculable strangeness of war, the way war makes strangers of friends.

Have a great holiday weekend,

Evan

Carla Blumenkranz—angelic Carla—replied:

Dear Evan,

Thanks for your note. I’m glad to hear you liked the piece. I’d be happy to send a PDF for you to pass on to Jeremy, if you’d like. And the Memorial Day series—good idea. We’ll try to figure out we can do it.

Best wishes,

Carla Blumenkranz

I got Jeremy the PDF and then he bought a Kindle and then a mag subscription, so it was in fact cost-effective for everyone involved. Then Jeremy shipped out one evening when I was unawares—he just got on a plane and left the country, and it’s really really scary over there. Over Facebook message Jeremy thus describes:

Afghanistan is seriously lacking in generally everything but dirt.

And rockets. FUCK!

So many rocket attacks throughout the day.

They lob them onto the base from the surrounding mountains.

Just wooden shoes flying everywhere on impact

—

I began an essay about Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and it went something like this:

In Architectures of Time, a very difficult (nigh, unreadable) study of “the modern history of time,” Sanford Kwinter makes at least an interesting contribution to this essay. Addressing Kafka’s story “The Great Wall of China,” Kwinter notes “that it exemplifies a fundamental movement underlying all of Kafka’s work: that it dramatizes the movement of God turning away from humanity as humanity turns away from God.” Isn’t that beautiful? As if man and god were performing the quadrille, and upon the dance floor found better partners with to touch hands, and then politely, skeptically, mozied off.

This flavor of deism pervades Pirates of the Caribbean, even if not much else about the series is Kafkaesque. The idea of the British Crown extending itself into the Caribbean has not the missionary zeal of its Spanish corollary (manifest in On Stranger Tides), and most of the divining bureaucracy is many months of mail-cargo away. The government outpost on Port Royal, Jamaica, is more Elizabeth Swann’s girlish play-island, where her father’s stature as governor affords her free reign on its beaches, and many splendid dresses. The usual heathen dangers have been expropriated by the lower whites on the island, soldier-types in carmine velvet and brass buttons, ivory whigs, carrying swords. Other subalterns operate tack repair or man the ale houses under the palm fronds. The absence of a slave trade eases many of the local tensions, and clues us to the pervasive fantasia of these movies if its supernatural pirates could not. The polity of this Eden is somewhat undermined in Elizabeth’s relationship with Will Turner, whom she befriended as a young girl when she helped recover him from a shipwreck. Like herself, Turner grows into a canny person and handsome figure. Any class disparity between the young man and woman (he is, after all, the son of a pirate!) will seal up with a kiss, although it will take many hours in the motion pictures to officially marry off the couple.

For the record—Pirates of the Caribbean is a franchise that I celebrate. I can stand to watch all eight hours of it, in peaks and troughs of glee.

On its opening night, I came out of the third sequel knowing Rob Marshall’s On Stranger Tides is boring, muddy, and shallow, yet something of its surface effects began to break apart on the drive home. The viewing underwent a half-life in my mind, and as its images disintegrated the skeleton of a larger, enigmatic structure took shape in the night. What the hell did I see? I saw empire. But I couldn’t make a convincing essay out of it. Even the scrap I’m sharing bores me and doesn’t feel true. Putting it in context with Jeremy and Afghanistan does feel true. Movies—what the fuck.

—

I spent the year hiding in movie theaters by myself, or sitting beside Cody, whenever he came into town or whenever I drove down to see him. In May, the week Osama bin Laden was assassinated, Jeremy and I were heatedly discussing the events—I called him a “hoary cunt” at one point—and also in our exchange, I said this about Source Code:

I saw Source Code this weekend—I think I might be writing about it soonish; I’m shaping a response; my reaction Sunday evening to your post was definitely a continuing feeling out—and if you haven’t seen the movie, I’ll just tell you that it is about a government agency that has hijacked the corpse of an American captain slaughtered in Afghanistan, and having rehabilitated this corpse, makes it do ghost work in the field of quantum mechanics.
The movie is also about a ticking bomb on a train to Chicago, but that’s a surface account.
It was a nightmare scenario to me through and through. I bought my own fucking ticket. I was hungover and expected to nap through it. The pounding score and the lakeshore vistas of Chicago kept me awake. Then shit hit the fan. Things got debased, philosophical.

My reaction was visceral. Unheeded. You would have been embarrassed to have sat beside me—and I’m pretty sure Cody was just like, “Why the fuck is my boyfriend a choking mess over here? Jake Gyllenhaal just saved the world and got the girl…” I think mostly, I was reacting to the existential quagmire of the premise—that we have so little insight into the psychic turmoil of soldiers coming back from the War on Terror, that we make movies that recursively embellish and then loop their suffering. A very backhanded way of criticizing the establishment, the war, and its means, while banking on the banal everyday lives lost along the way. For all its horse-shit feel-goodery, gaping ontological black holes, and hackneyed romance, the biopolitics described in Source Code are some of the most subtle and heinous I have yet encountered in the films of this war. Near the film’s end, we realize that the captain has not been communicating with a voice but with text on a computer interface. This detail was soul-crushing. Vera Farmiga co-stars and, as is typical, her understatement is heartbreaking. Gyllenhaal was just such a broken young man. Literally. His remains are kept in a hypovat and hooked into wires.

Anyhow, I was thinking particularly that not having combat experience, I don’t actually have an experiential vocabulary to assess my extreme reactions to this genre, to these stories. What I have is confusion; turmoil; angst. It is unplaceable, implacable. Pending my enlistment (don’t count on it), I think the next closest emotional loci informing my violent reaction is the application of these fictive experiences on to people I do know who are in/were in/will be in combat zones, people who will be at the mercy of the American military industrial complex. That’s yourself (and Jerrod), right now. So Afghanistan has been in my head. What is happening there, what may end there.

—

I watched Attack the Block with Cody in September. I had this to say about it: “I understood maybe one out of every three words spoken in the film’s dialog but loved it just the same, with the same ferocity I reserve for British period fare.” Marginal Gloss, a contributor to A Bright Wall in a Dark Room, left these comments for me:

[…] 2a. Attack the Block is good isn’t it. It’s hard to understand even if you’re from London but it feels authentic. My gf is from the area of South London where it was shot. We had great larks recognising some of the locations. But it’s not as bad as the film makes out around there! (okay it kind of is but still.)

2b. Then again people used to talk like that when I was at school, so at the same time it’s kind of a second or third-hand reading of that culture — Joe Cornish, the director, is better known over here for being part of a (very fine) comedy podcast duo with Adam Buxton, and if you know their work it’s fairly clear that the dorky middle class pot smoking kid in the film is a stand-in for his own experience.

2c. Also it made a woman physically sick in the screening we were in. And those are my thoughts on ATB.

—

5 December 2011

A.J.,

[…] I’m like not on a precipice or anything, if that’s what everyone is worried about. (She’s worried about that.) Mom’s soothing voice just pierced me, especially re Todd being home for a few days in December. Also, I was reading to her the news that J had died—D (white witch) had posted the most treacly bit of In Memorium-like poesy, and the cheesiness activated on me. I think it was, “And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you gave away.” I’m not certain that 1) that’s aphoristically true, w/o necessarily being logically effective, and 2) if it is true, I was getting emotional about how one can for certain calibrate the facts of possessing love or relinquishing it—if it’s only after you’re dead; if death provides objectivity, or if this is magic religious thinking? I know my terms aren’t quite the same as “taking” and “giving,” but. I was wound very tightly around this tortured logic. It came very fast. It was wildly inexplicable and fairly embarrassing. I don’t know how Mom lives with such volatile young men falling to pieces hither and yon.

And truthfully, I was upset about my relationship w/ Cody. I don’t need to elaborate the blinking blackhole I’m feeling about that, but it was of apiece with the sentiment “the love you take is equal to the love you gave away,” even though as I type that tripe again my heart begins to carbonize. And actually my chest gets this big wet weight in it and begins to pull at my eyes. I think my ballsac is the only thing not cantilevered to psychic pain in this regard, because my arms feel very tired and my nose runs constantly. On the other side of that, my house is consistently 56 degrees, so this could all be the downside of being very cold all the time.

I met a young man for lunch yesterday—it was a platonic lunching, after the party I don’t remember. P is a friend of a friend, affable, intelligent, witty, empathic—studied architecture, now does contract work elsewhere; handsome, wears his hair long, it’s a very British cut. He came into town on Friday specifically to go to the party on Saturday, and, in some respects, I gathered, to meet this mythical me. Isn’t that flattering? I think it’s flattering. At the party—and I have multiple corroborators—I was, for 90% of the time, the usual mythical me of the party scene, and then 10%, near the end, I was by myself outside on the steps looking fargone and very sad, trying to sleep. Katie told me her only thought was, “Oh, this is what a Bryson boy looks like when he’s sad!” and that it was very romantic and striking. I staggered into someone’s doorway, whirled back to a corner of the cement balcony separating apartments, and threw-up on a landing (I do remember this—I remember thinking, with my hand holding me up against a wall, “Why is there stuff on my shoes?” and then answering myself, “Because you threw up”), which is when Katie gathered me up and took me home. (Beth and Meg were also at this party—they had fun, they say. They say the gays were jubilant, interested, and affectionate.) Even in this wrecked state, I was, apparently, fascinating and controlled, so win/win. And this P guy still wanted to get lunch/coffee the next day. So despite the brown out, I’m giving myself “extra credit” for looking trim and acting polite whilst locomoting on a lizard brain, or at least a brain soaked in Goldschläger. (It was a “Fancy Dress Party”—I thought the gold flakes would be really fancy. I wore a tie all evening. When I danced I threw it around like “ice,” or “floss,” I’m told.)

Let’s refer to Mating? An early chapter, “Why Do We Yield?” has the pertinent description: “I feel like someone after the deluge being asked to describe the way it was before the flood while I’m still plucking seaweed from my hair, Denoon being the deluge. Despite my metaphors, the last thing I want to do is fabulize Denoon and make him more than he was. I hate drama. I hate dramatizers. But it was distinctly like a building falling on me when I met him. Why? Why do we yield? I’d like to know as a [man] and a human being, both.” There was the night when I fell in love with Cody. And it was gigantic and still burns over-bright in memory, and seems to have used up a great deal of its warmth in keeping us gravitationally bound-up with one another, despite growing far distant and maybe even disinterested. If I’m the disinterested and distant party, that’s well enough—I’ll own up to it. I feel very changed. I feel (cf. Mating) “sexually alert,” and “[w]anting company [has] entered into it.” I do feel like a “detached white [man] with a few social graces, even someone feeling very one-down.” I meant to suggest, earlier, that meeting this P fellow “was distinctly like a building fall on me.” I cannot adequately express the gallantry of the enterprise—the IHOP lunch, the bucket of coffee/Diet Pepsi I consumed, the easy and interesting conversation. His eyes are very intense and are slightly close-together (the bridge of his nose is somewhat skinny, I think). Anyway. It brings P’s eyes closer, in a way that suggests seriousness and depth, and possibly striving. A total coup de foudre. I think he is also a lot smarter than I am, in material ways that I’ve long lacked. (I didn’t know, for instance, that Comcast price-gouges everyone in this area, because they lack competition. Maybe it’s dumb to be impressed by this stuff? He also likes the architectural work of Philip Johnson, although he did not know that Johnson is a fellow gay! But I did. Because I do know some things, like, mainly the scandals.) Also he is a polyglot—he’s done a comprehensive undertaking of Romance languages, and speaks fluent Parseltongue to boot.

All to say—what I had been feeling suddenly crystalized around this dopey possibility of something else, maybe not something better, but different, and that had a confusing force and appeal. I went back to Katie’s apartment after the meal so she and I could dissemble the night’s events, and also my luncheon, and then P called just to tell me—should he have?—that he knows that I’m in a relationship, but that he wouldn’t forgive himself if he never told me that if the situation were different, he would of course have asked me out, for a night in the city, or whatever. It was very affecting. I said, “Oh, why, thank you,” feeling gnawed on, cored, like an apple full of worms.

Obviously I pooped hugely yesterday!

Obviously I’m not in Gaborone! I guess it’s overblown to quote Norman Rush so much. I was switching rather frantically last night among Mating, Mortals and his stories in Whites, to dredge up something like wisdom re my “situation,” which might, in essence, look like “I don’t love Cody anymore,” but is rather that I simply love him in a different way, that should no longer constitute a long distance romantic relationship. So this sensation—the sensation of this fact—over-came me while I was discussing w/ Mom J’s death, which was, in fact, me sounding to myself the death of something else.

So. I’m just thinking through these things right now. I’m a little angry and a little displeased with the pain these thoughts are causing me, and with the real likelihood that I’ll be causing another person severe pain, as well, with these thoughts. I’m going down to Nashville this Friday to live with Cody for a week. I want to feel a shared life w/ him, not a roving sort of vacation-living. I want to know if I can share a life w/ someone else, too, maybe a better life, with greater fullness. On the obverse side, maybe I just want a simpler life, with less horizon, less travel, less telephone negotiating and upkeep. I can’t tell how selfish I’m being. I know that selfishness is coming through, but “that misrepresents my motives.” (cf. Mating.)

Love,

Your brother,

Evan

—

In June, I said this about Super 8:

The third time I saw Super 8 was with my father. We went to the latest showing because he works nights as a sheriff’s deputy, and is most alert long after sunset.
I convinced him to see the film (and also to buy my ticket) by ruminating on the movie’s deference for local law enforcers. In its schizophrenic Spielbergian mode, Super 8 savages military conduct and personnel, but lovingly dotes on its lower authorities. My father has a cop mustache. Our county’s sheriff does contentious things—like living in another county. A recent scandal involved a woman bringing in the department to hunt for her missing dog, the location of which she had pinpointed with the assistance of a pet psychic out of North Carolina, I shit you not. I told Dad he would appreciate the subtleties of J.J. Abrams’ deputies. A deputy produces a map in Super 8 by marking the locations of recovered dogs in a circumference around Lillian; the dogs ran off to the outlying communities in Montgomery, Preble, even Butler counties. Lucy, Joe Lamb’s dog, made it as far as Brookville, Ohio. I wanted to pay special attention to the map because it is my territory, in a sense, or my commercial purview—only I’m Indiana stateside. I went to Dayton earlier today to put together an outfit for a wedding this weekend. This precipitated (naturally) a crushing financial blow, but with my new digs, none of Cody’s family could possibly comprehend my absolute poorness, and whom have people in Nebraska to compare my charms? Yesterday I got my haircut in Oxford. I look astonishingly angry however thin and well-heeled. I am not on the map but these places are. Abrams’ evocation of Ohio’s summer verdure is more or less accurate. Aliens can’t hide in the cornrows yet (they are knee-high) but the trees are lush and full. In Camden in the fall its citizens hold an annual Walnut Festival. Now they are setting up a street fair with carnival rides and holding a community-wide yard sale. Boys and girls ride down the wide pavements of Germantown and Miamisburg on their bicycles; they seem like awkward kids, middle schoolers, unabashedly bored. These are old brick towns, with two-hundred-year-old houses trimmed in gingerbread topped with turrets and cupolas. The Great Miami River has bare brown banks from all the water in May. Incidentally, Lillian seems modeled off Aurora, Indiana, where a Seagrams distillery makes the town smell like eggs. The Ohio River should flow as clean as gin there—but it doesn’t.

I watched Super 8 another three times with Cody and family over Thanksgiving break. There is an emotional scene at the 2/3 mark of the film wherein the young boy and young girl are divided by a beam of light. They are sitting on the floor and a film projector’s light divides them. On the sixth viewing of Super 8 I fairly disintegrated thinking about the profundity of this scene, the way really only light ever divides us—the medium that carries the image of us to our beloved. And how we make love in the dark so that nothing divides us.

And how monsters get us in the dark.

—

5 December 2011

Evan,

[…] You seem to be having a major crisis in the confidence of your relationship. I know remember when Tayler and I told each other we loved one another for the first time but I don’t exactly remember when I fell in love with her, was like, I love that girl. It was very soon, probably after a first kiss or something. Awestruck was I. I didn’t realize how much I loved her until I didn’t have her anymore. It might be odd to calibrate how strong my feelings for her were by how painful her absence was, how painful being dumped by her was but everytime we have an argument I cannot help but think about what it was like not having her around and that’s how I calibrate the HOW MUCH issues.

I know this is not Evan-Cody centric speaking which might seem like I’m not talking about you but obfuscating, and I’m really trying not to. I’m watching the London Chess Classic streaming right now. It’s fascinating.

Also; falling in love is a lot of fun. It feels nice. I fell in love with my bank teller the other day and with the Senora check-out girl at El Caballo Blanco. She spoke almost no English! But being in love is different and I want you to consider these things. Tayler’s aunt H is currently in the swoons of falling in love and she is full of those signs of excitedness and bubbling happiness that comes with the rush of making perfect connections and saying exactly the right thing, succeeding at a relationship.

Well. I don’t really know anything. I think these experiences are different for everyone. Go spend some time with Cody and tell him what you’re feeling and see if things are worked out or changed.

Also, yes, Comcast does have a monopoly because there is no competition and this lack of competition is actually a violation of trusts/monopoly laws. But it cannot be proven! This has stalled almost all litigation in that regard.

You need time and space to think. Runs and what not. I have been entirely unhelpful and for that I apologize.

bye, love,

—

Lars von Trier made a very measured and reasonable film about lives in crises. I watched Melancholia with Cody in December and have this to say about it:

I don’t think I would marry someone who bought me an apple orchard, either.

If the world we’re ending tomorrow afternoon, I too would make a stick fort on a golf course and weep hysterically inside.