Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollman Reader Book

I haunt Washington DC and environs. (I haunt them because I do not live here; I pervade its essences; I appear at its locales and then disappear from them; I am known and unknown here; some friends would claim I am dead, it has been so long since they've seen me, while others have shared a drink with me last evening; I haunt this city because my mortal life extends before and behind me, but drifts off at the horizon of both points, into a nothing-neverness-void, where I will ultimately be worth less than nothing, because memories of me will only detract from the here-and-now of the rememberer [don't pity me, you also only haunt places and nothing more.]) This city is populated by IMPORTANT AND RICH PERSONS who are beautiful and clean and well-dressed and achieve things and purchase wine and tapas at bars and walk dogs and smile bright bleached white smiles to each other in semaphore and have sex with each other sometimes and exchange business cards and generally do a swell job of arousing the envy of their peers and some of these people influence history and make laws and erect ideologies that affect other human beings on earth. These are Good People. There also lives here that .1. thing I saw at .1. in the morning in the belly of the Gallery Place metro station that was neither man nor woman but some swollen mass of vibrating flesh dressed in a pink workout suit with blood on its brow limping and using an umbrella as a cane and walking like a broken clock (like I imagine Beckett's Molloy walking); it would stop every few stunted steps and hock green and red gobs onto the third rail and they would sizzle and spark. The thing looked at me from the opposite platform and made a ghastly face and it was either Death or touched by Death and it looked like disease incarnate. It had a blonde wig on and its eyes were terrifying vortices. This thing dwelt underground but there are similar ones who live out in daylight in close proximity to the smiling professionals and weavers of the Law. Sometimes they attack and devour the Good People; but mostly they are forgotten or rendered invisible or a nuisance, like a bothersome insect. When one drags its stinky tatters into a pleasant park where the Good Bright People are picnicking everyone sort of closes their ranks and cups the glass shimmering with Sancerre and speaks in low tones and looks over shoulders until the threat has dissipated. Often police will take care of these situations, and then the Good Smiling People are put at ease and stop having to waste their time and valuable thought-energy thinking about those things that dwell underground and limp about and smell awfully in the sunlight. Washington DC is a fabulously wealthy town, where sometimes a single tapa can cost upwards of .20. dollars and mix drinks are as little as .15.. New cars are standing still on all of our streets, but don't leave bags or anything valuable in them for too long unattended. There has been an ongoing local debate about why our metro stations generally smell like Death, and in the city paper some of the speculations were given voice: sewer gas escaping ducts, the burning stench of the metro trains' new organic brake pads, general filthiness, or the rotting of accumulated rat corpses. My opinion is that the stench is a prophetic emission from the earth itself letting us know, in a medium other than language (because who gives credence to words and pledges in this town anyway?), that it is space-time's explicit mission and purpose to churn us under the dirt into wormfood and grub-feces, and that all of our striving and creating of infrastructure and industrial churning out of trinkets and manufacturing of laws protecting capital and creating special economic zones and non-profit clean needle programs and food and clothes donation trucks will do nothing as bulwarks against oblivion. Those half-dead ones spitting their serpent's venom on the third rail and smiling horrific smiles as it sizzles are only getting ahead in the real world; being half-dead already, they've ceased playing games; while all around them the successful, motivated, proactive populace of Our Nation's Capital is engaged in a manic frolic of Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush.


Vollmann peering through the border fence.

I'm turning 36 soon and I've been thinking as I'm haunting this world what it means that I am an American phantasm living so much at the center and heart of millennial America. (The heart is dull concrete; police on every corner remind me I'm a dutifully taxpaying Roman; parking meters chirp; when it rains the droplets soar upward stealing the green from the parks which turn gray.) So I've been reading more American literature, because who speaks better to fellow ghosts than the disembodied voices of our most useless civilians, and trying to pinpoint what, if any, good can be said of this late-capitalist utopia. (And a utopia it is, all you have to do is grit your teeth and grind them down to the nerves and steel yourself against empathy and common sense and you're a third the way home). I suppose if you could check one off in the column for the "good guys" you could check off Vollmann. The impetus for his body of work seems to be to resurrect the discarded and the forgotten humans (those things) into some more dignified realm of being; to rally attention to the abuses that make possible We Good People's blind, ignorant, callous comfort. There are systems of power and historical forces that have created such strange circumstances, which inevitably become modes of life, and in Vollmann's work we have a documentation of this: a fully-opened eye admitting its naivete but giving a go at understanding. Attempting to avoid hypocrisy, Vollmann goes and lives with his subjects, participates in their rituals, dwells with them in the darkness and risks things to know them and be able to write of them, so that it is not exploitation but a very dignified, humane act, his art. All these clean lawyers and World Bankers and do-gooding non-profiteers on Constitution Avenue and in K Street bars after a tough day at the office would require about a Mac Truck load of Purell to feel fresh after a single one of his stories. (But no worries, they have memories attuned to dispersal and reprogramming, a wonderful strange selectivity of memory, where the longest, dullest legal briefs can be recited ad infinitum but the weeping, congealed eyes of the starving mangy mutt on the street outside the office is erased immediately.) This is easy, but it isn't hyperbole. Remember, these images are easy because ubiquitous. Vollmann's images, his words, drawings, and photographs, are neither easy, nor purposefully difficult, nor too self-serious, nor too other-pitying, but utterly humane. Life is stilled and captured as it is; not how we dream it to be. The flux of labor and capital are laid skeleton-bare. The baton is stilled above the cowering body; the finger is stopped on the cusp of the trigger. The consequences and the lives are rendered. Black and white, light and shadow, obfuscating color spectrums, voices.

Expelled From Eden: A William T Vollmann Reader cost me 66 cents plus shipping. Imperial, 1300 pages, years of research, and originally a 55 dollar list price cost me a few buckskins, far less than a tapa, and it is in pristine hardcover. The accompanying photographic book, a gorgeous, huge volume, carefully and lovingly printed, cost me about the same. A couple of bucks. I could say this is because no one gives a good goddamn; but I prefer to believe that it is because price of sale does not even contain a symbolic representation of value.