written February 2018
It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As it turned out, I nearly did not make it. Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment; I wound up living in the streets.
The main character, Marco Stanley Fogg, tells the account of certain phases of his life as a first-person narrator, in retrospect. In chapter One it is the 1960s, it is his college years. And he manages to reach Ground Zero. Nothing left to lose.
Growing up fatherless and then even without a mother from the age of 11 onwards, being under the care of his musically talented, yet most of the time unsuccesful uncle, he struggles with such things as: roots, identity, coherence.
He lives in an apartment with over a thousand books his uncle gave to him. In no particular thematic order they are stuffed in boxes. Boxes that he turns into furniture. Furniture, therefore, that Marco Stanley Fogg creates out of nothing. Nothingness is the ground of his life, the source of his being. An unknown father, a dead mother. An uncle who loves to try and fail, moves from city to city, never arrives and never manages to make something out of himself, except for one successful summer with his band. Destroying and recreating is part of the family history. Fogelmann was the grandfather’s last name when he reached the United States as an immigrant, but someone shortened it to Fog. And then at some point another g was added. Fogg. A foggy past, foggy origins, a misty presence in the mayhem of the 1960s. Of course there is no future…
I don’t have any pictures of my mother, and it is difficult for me to remember what she looked like.
More often than not she was dreamy, given to mild sulks, and there were times when I felt a true sadness emanating from her, a sense that she was battling against some vast and internal disarray.
There it is again: the foggy impression of a mother that simply disappeared at some point, but even in those years, before her death, somehow vanished, slowly, into her hidden secrets.
About the unknown father we read:
There was no evidence of him anywhere in the house. Not one photograph, not even a name.
No face, no name. Nothing to hold on to. Nothing to relate to. No one to love and no one to hate.
He characterizes his uncle as – like all the Foggs – having a penchant for aimlessness and reverie, for sudden bolts and lengthy torpors .
His uncle manages well to waste his talent. To live an incoherent, arbitrary life. Trial and error. A thousand times. Being the sort of person who always dreams of doing something else while occupied…
At least there is a striking honesty, authenticity in his uncle Victor, whose name is more than ironic. He is never victorious, just sometimes a bit lucky. But: he did not pretend to be something he was not.
And then his uncle calls the novel’s protagonist “Phileas” after having seen the movie “Around the World in 80 days”…
he never tired of expounding on the glories hidden in my name. Marco Stanley Fogg. According to him, it proved that travel was in my blood, that life would carry me to places where no man had ever been before.
Marco Polo. Phileas Fogg. The American journalist Stanley. Names, words come into the void of nothingness. Constructing meaning – out of nothing.
And as we all know: names are bound up with identity. As the protagonist’s name gets mutilated throughout his school career, he is left with a feeling for the infinite fragility of his name. Of course, it is the infinite fragility of his identity, of the core of his being, of being himself… the infinite fragility of being someone who emerged out of nothingness, fog, mist, secrets, things unknown and things unnamed, the infinite fragility of being all on your own…
Every man is the author of his own life. His uncle utters this sentence, when he discovers that Marco Stanley Fogg starts to sign papers with M.S. Fogg – like M.S. for manuscript, uncle Victor thinks. Your life is an unfinished book. Still a manuscript. A feeling for the infinite incompleteness of being… who again?… the author of your own life… A postmodern abyss… Nothingness… all substance dissolving into process… processes without an aim… Is it true or false that every man is the author of his own life? Both. It is very true and it is very false. It is first of all most definitely false. But then, secondly, it is always true.
Then there is this one successful summer for uncle Victor’s band, as they play shows throughout the western part of America, throughout the desert, the wilderness. Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, California. Vast arrays of dust and nothingness, of past and future and a life never lived. Who knows if some new truth will not be revealed to me out there?
But there is no God in this 1960s American desert world with moons hanging across dark skies and moons visited by man for the first time. So how could the desert ever start to speak? Speak the truth?
Yet meaning – an endless search for meaning everywhere. One thousand four hundred and ninety-two volumes of books, Victor gives to Marco before he heads out for the desert tour with his band. Victor goes west, Marco all the way east to New York for college. 1492 books. Reminiscent of Columbus and the discovery of America. Books of all kinds, covering all topics. Uncle Victor gives a little semi-ironic and semi-pathetic speech, handing over his little kingdom to the young Fogg, calling him Phileas. Everything works out in the end, you see, everything connects. The nine circles. The nine planets. The nine innings. Our nine lives. Just think of it. The correspondences are infinite. And in their infiniteness they do not define anything any more. They connect everything and nothing. There is connection. But where is the One who connects? Where is the One who connects things not arbitrarily, coincidentally, but with purpose…
Uncle Victor dies and Marco Stanley Fogg loses the very last connection – to reality, to humanity, to the ground, the earth, to belonging to someone somewhere. He has to spend a lot of money on his uncle‘s funeral – money actually that was supposed to cover for his college studies. So the young Fogg is confronted with a problem that all encounter at some point during their lives: You need some money to keep your life spinning and you have none. What do you do? A real grown-up‘s approach would be: You find a reasonable solution. You get out and find work. You apply for a college fund. Everybody who has certain aims, objectives in life can do that, right… Yes. True. Once your identity is as given to you as the moon and the sky hanging down from above you, is just a somehow physical, natural thing, you can live a life. You can build towards your aims in life. You can set goals and accomplish them. You can revel in your successes. Enjoy every clap on the shoulder. Take pride in your wit to live life in a smart and efficient way. But M.S. Fogg is not someone with a given, almost natural, unquestioned identity. And so which aims. Which goals. Which purposes. Which mountains to climb. His life moves in circles, as circular as the moon. And the moon is not a physical thing in his universe. It is that transcendent light, that big white hole in the dark veil of the sky…. Maybe you can catch a peak behind the curtains. Who knows if not some truth will be revealed to me… While other people have an identity like animals have instincts… are all physical… M.S. Fogg becomes, more and more, a mere “spirit”… What does the moon’s light ever reveal… from behind clouds it sheds a foggy, dreamy, flickering stream of light into the night… but, as every romantic knows, at least an idea, a longing, a desire for the truth beyond the limits of the natural, physical, touchable, calculable. What is life under the sun anyways but a vain effort, a hasting for wind… Fogg knows that without fully knowing it. And so he does not even start to try living a normal life that could amount to something. He chooses to add another chapter to the family history of silent self destruction, aimless wandering and presupposed inability to manifest anything tangible, like a “real” family, or a “real” career, or a “real” apartment with “real” furniture.
All kinds of options were available to people in my situation (…) but once I began to think about them I found myself stricken with disgust. It was a sudden, involuntary response, a jolting attack of nausea. I wanted no part of those things, I realized, and therefore I rejected them all – stubbornly, contemptuously, knowing full well that I had just sabotaged my only hope of surviving the crisis. From that point on, in fact, I did nothing to help myself, refused even to lift a finger. (…) I was in despair, and in the face of so much upheaval, I felt that drastic action of some sort was necessary. I wanted to spit on the world, to do the most outlandish thing possible. With all the fervor and idealism of a young man who had thought too much and read too many books, I decided that the thing I should do was nothing: my action would consist of a militant refusal to take any action at all. (…) I would turn my life into a work of art…
The art of sabotaging yourself perfected. The diction about everyone being the author of his own life turned upside down and practically, existentially negated. M.S. Fogg refuses to become the author of his own life, the king of his own little universe, the mastermind behind a carefully drawn out and carefully executed life plan. He opens up an infinite space of opportunity for chance or God himself to enter into his story. His authorship is a no to authorship, his name prefigures a manuscript rather than a finished book. Yet the execution of his self-sabotaging impulses strikes with precision. Accurate until he is without furniture, without food, and still without answers. In his tight financial situation he willfully deprives himself of basic physical necessities in order to save money, and so he spends himself, until the interior leaks out of every cell of his body, with bones coming through and hallucinations accompanying his starvation… The search of an ascetic for an unknown truth to be revealed when all is lost, and all is gone, and all has been stripped bare.
Jewish candles instead of electric light. Storing food outside instead of using a refrigerator. Adjusting to a basic diet of bread and eggs and some cups of coffee. All the while he is keeping his studies up and going. Reading through every book his uncle gave to him in the random order they come along his way, which makes his furniture made out of boxes filled with books slowly disappear. Eating books, eating words instead of bread. Binge-reading his way through the life of his dead ancestor as it was accompanied by books, symbolic meanings, connections found and connections lost. Young Fogg despises modern life, the comfort of the exploding material wealth of the 1960s. To his friends he explains that people should talk to each other face to face, for real, not over a telephone. He stops using a telephone because of his lack of money, but manages to construct his new habit into a richness of wisdom. People should meet physically…. Are not body and mind connected, inseparable… How can people be comfortable with starting to live life like disembodied ghosts… He lives like an ascetic monk in search for God and at war with modern life, a life in which you need money to study, to become educated – more educated than wise actually.
At that time he makes some money by selling his old library piece by piece to Chandler, a man of utmost practicality. Chandler judges books by their cover. By the amount of marks and annotations and dog ears that indicate that it was used, read a lot – the price he offers then goes down. The more a book was able to interest, engage and educate the reader, the less it can be repackaged and resold, recustomed into an arbitrary commodity of “the change everything for everything (or nothing for nothing) by means of the world’s most scary abstraction called money” market economy that supplies people with ghosts for substance, with the neat cover of Blaise Pascal’s pensées more than with their excruciating, messy essence. Modernity: life without tradition, without pioneers before you, an aseptic agreement to not even try to get to the bottom of things, but to leave the books on the shelves shining, unread, and everything must be claimed anew by every individual lost in the vastness of nothingness on his own, but never understood. The content of the book is of no value to Chandler. Yet it is all that counts for Fogg. What is the book about, and how much truth is it containing and revealing? The stark contrast between Fogg’s and Chandler’s calculations of value point to Fogg’s overarching struggle: living life under the sun within the realms of modern practicality, in the universe of materialism and utilitarianism, when he is one of the moon people, one of those who flourish at night and hide throughout daytime, one of those who seek nourishment in the spiritual and are utterly unfit for feeding themselves or others fruits which might look good and sweet on the outside, but contain the poison of meaningless efforts under the sun – meaningless efforts which have not yet reached or revealed the level of brokenness necessary to acknowledge their futility. Chandler might never reach Ground Zero in his life. He might keep buying and selling things for all eternity.
I wound up sounding like an anarchist hermit…
The anarchist hermit revolting against life under the sun and his own destiny loses weight. The hallucinations start and he understands that mind cannot win over matter. In the end Fogg is not able any more to read and understand the books he plunges through, so starved is he, so deprived of energy and focus.
I could feel my eyes making contact with the words on the page, but no meanings rose up to me anymore, no sounds echoed in my head. The black marks seemed wholly bewildering, an arbitrary collection of lines and curves that divulged nothing but their own muteness.
After eating it all, comes the realization of unstilled thirst and hunger. After diving into it as deep as you can to tear a piece of truth out of it, you hit the hard ground of a silence whispering to you as loud as loud can be.
And then he witnesses this moment of spiritual significance. Man landing on the moon…
The big color television set was on, glowing eerily over the bottles of rye and bourbon, and that was how I happened to witness the event. I saw the two padded figures take their first steps in that airless world, bouncing like toys over the landscape, driving a golf cart through the dust, planting a flag in the eye of what had once been the goddess of love and lunacy. Radiant Diana, I thought, image of all that is dark within us. Then the president spoke. In a solemn, deadpan voice, he declared this to be the greatest event since the creation of man. The old-timers at the bar laughed when they heard this, and I believe I managed to crack a smile or two myself. But for all the absurdity of that remark, there was one thing no one could challenge: since the day he was expelled from Paradise, Adam had never been this far from home.
The landscape of the moon: a desert, a wilderness, a place of emptiness and void – those kind of places that are originally open space for encounters with God… a place of death and scarcity where many found the burning bush speaking to them… But here it is the vast dusty skin of a demystified, almost physically violated goddess. Fat astronauts, contrary to Fogg’s skinny figure, resemble toys and drive around golf carts and pierce the goddess with an American flag. A theme park up on the moon. There is no coming back from this kind of death. The president’s voice speaks the very words of death, emanating its very essence through the ether. The greatest event since the creation of man. Man can fly to the moon and back and trample with astronaut shoes the size of an elephant’s foot every ancient meaning, every hidden significance, every last undiscovered and unpinned open realm of possible encounters with the Creator into the dust of nothingness, into the ashes of the final step – a small step for a man but a giant leap for mankind… a reminiscence of the fall, of losing paradise, and of marching on obliviously – into airless, hopeless realms of oblivion… transmitted through radio waves like seismic convulsions throughout the whole world. And so Adam has completed himself, completed his infinite incompleteness by piercing the moon, image of all that is dark within us…
Finally, the hungry and exhausted Fogg ends up gorging himself on all the food that a couple of strangers in the old apartment of his friend Zimmer share with him on a Sunday morning, as he quite randomly joins their sitting together. As he is trying to impress Kitty Wu, a small Chinese girl of nineteen or twenty with silver bracelets on both wrists and a beaded Navaho band around her head, who will eventually become his lover, Fogg gets into a long rambling about odd literature – including the moon people from Cyrano’s voyage to the moon.
Their money is poetry – actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
Then, some days later, his daily portion of two eggs drops to the floor before he can boil them.
Those were the last two eggs of my current supply, and I could not help feeling that this was the cruelest, most terrible thing that had ever happened to me. The eggs landed with an ugly splat. I remember standing there in horror as they oozed out over the floor. (…) I felt as though a star were exploding, as though a great sun had just died.
Broken eggs representing, bringing into a vivid image all the fragility and brokenness of his life, of his existence. Trying to comfort himself, Fogg gets himself a meal at the Chinese restaurant called “Moon Palace”, whose neon sign, visible from a certain standpoint in his tiny apartment, had already helped, years ago, to make him feel connected to his uncle and at home in the hollow, empty place of his loneliness.
The whole chapter eventually closes with a conversation between Fogg and the building superintendent Fernandez, who lets him know that he has to move out the next day, after having not paid his rent for a while. Fernandez hands out some practical advice. If you want to be able to pay your rent, get a job! Fogg replies in a way that reveals both his existential despair, as it expresses itself in a paradoxical mixture of authenticity and self-mystification, and his tremendous inner strength to face himself and life itself at the bottom of the bottom:
But I do have a job. I get up in the morning just like everyone else, and then I see if I can live through another day. That’s full-time work..
The next day, Fogg leaves his apartment, taking with him just a few things and his uncle’s clarinet, and with it he leaves the last piece of outward normalcy and starts the journey he probably had been desiring, waiting for subconsciously all along. A pioneer on his way, never to return.
I turned south, paused for a moment, and then took a step. Then I took another step, and in that way I began to move down the street. I did not look back once.