Among Jon Langford’s cowboy portraits, he has a few of Hank as Saint Sebastian – shirtless, bound, and run through with arrows. Hank is the Hillbilly Shakespeare and the Godhead for  previous generations of country music. I’ve heard him described as the sin-eater for southern whites, his self-destruction saving others from themselves, if that’s how it actually works.

But Hank doesn’t get enough credit as a psychiatric diagnostician. On social media it’s standard now to diagnose one’s ex as having either borderline or narcissistic personality disorder. Hank specialized in the detailed illustration of the borderline and narcissistic personality structures dyad, a relationship where two terribly broken plates fit together perfectly until one or both shatters.

Listen to “First Year Blues” for proof.

Hank Williams was the Redneck Sigmund Freud.

In Not Always So, a compilation of lectures by the Zen priest, Shunryu Suzuki, he declared: “My mind is a garbage can,” with a sense of joy, referencing the freedom to accept all thoughts that pass through without clinging to or refusing them.

The poet Charles Simic said, “A poem is a place where affinities are discovered. Poetry is a way of thinking through affinities.”

The Heart Sutra says, “form is emptiness and emptiness is form…” this ‘emptiness’ is not nihilism but is an interconnectedness of all things and a lack of the narcissistic sense of self which separates us from all things. Nothing can be defined without the existence of and comparison to all other things. The self doesn’t exist without recognition of all things and in those moments where all things are recognized, then the self ‘is’ also, but only for the moment... Zen monk, Dogo Barry Graham once said, “There is no self, but go sit on a hot stove and see who screams.”

As a child in Belgrade, Simic survived the German bombing and Nazi occupation and his childhood became a series of disruptions and displacements as he and his family crossed boundaries delineated by violence, ethnicity, culture, and language. In his poetry, the trauma of multiple displacements is presented by crossing boundaries between consciousness and dreams, magic realism and brutal reality, religious mystery and black humor and accepting each paradox as true. He describes his family’s survival during war:

“… we used to barter our possessions for food. You could get a chicken for a good pair of men’s shoes. Our clocks, silverware, crystal vases and fancy china were exchanged for bacon, lard, sausages and such things. Once an old gypsy man wanted my father’s top hat. It didn’t even fit him. With the hat way down over his eyes, he handed over a live duck.”

Life and death intermingled with absurdity and chance. Buster Keaton again. How else does one survive war and how does one keep their soul? How much do we have to feel in order to, simply, not take it all so seriously while simultaneously knowing this is exactly what life is? How do we reconfigure our perception of the world after trauma redefines the world for us? An absurd, unpredictable universe becomes either a perpetual threat or a chance for freedom.

Simic describes a meal in a restaurant with his Uncle Boris, both of them new to the U.S. after emigrating from Belgrade. Two women at the next table, well-to-do Americans, cannot place their accents, so they interrupt to ask. Boris, a perpetual trickster, gave a sad sigh and explained, in detail, they are part of the last Caucasian tribe of Africans and their language is a dialect that will go extinct with them. This, Simic also says, is poetry: “Poetry should contain every possible lie that can be told.”  

But this is the trickster lie, held lightly in order to explain another truth. The trickster lie is the joke told serious, explaining indirectly. The manifest alludes to the truth beneath, exactly the opposite of the stuff of conspiracy theories and the paranoia of the American political climate where the manifest statement declares exactly what’s happening with a certainty that is nearly psychotic.   

The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: The Zen of Charles Simic

It seems like there’s always laughter in Charles Simic’s poems. Not in the line or action, subject or narration, but there’s almost always the sense, no matter the darkness of the actual text, that he knew someone was laughing somewhere. Simic was always sharing the joke of the impossible world.

In his notebook of aphorisms, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth, Simic continues to circle around a definitive definition of poetry, at one point finding poetry as a scene from a Buster Keaton short: “… That’s what great poetry is. A superb serenity in the face of chaos. Wise enough to play the fool.”

For Simic, Buster Keaton was as inspirational as Heidegger. We are thrown into being, standing still as the house falls perfectly around us. Simic’s notebook is filled with musings and explanations of poetry, working out the impossible paradoxes in his mind, much like Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis, where definitions are always to be reconsidered.

Simic wrote:

“The poem is an attempt at self-recovery, self-recognition, self-remembering, the marvel of being again… A poem is a piece of the unutterable whole.”

But he also wrote:

“If I make everything at the same time a joke and a serious matter, it’s because I honor the eternal conflict between life and art, the absolute and the relative, the brain and the belly, etc…. No philosophy is good enough to overcome a toothache.”

There is more than a touch of Zen Buddhism in Simic’s acceptance of paradoxes, of the impossibility of solely occupying one space in life, that none of this is what it looks like, while also, whether we like it or not, the world is exactly what it looks like.

The Invention of Solitude is Auster’s memoir of his father, a meditation of the man so disconnected from his own life he might as well have not existed at all. If he left any mark of the world it was an empty space where he should have been, affectively, standing at any given moment:

“Devoid of passion, either for a thing, a person, or an idea, incapable or unwilling to reveal himself under any circumstances, he had managed to keep himself at a distance from life, to avoid immersion in the quick of things. He ate, he went to work, he had friends, he played tennis, and yet for all that he was not there. In the deepest and most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man. Invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself as well.”

City of Glass and The Invention of Solitude are searches for a father who is absent, or dangerous, or both. Each book examines the same psychic space—that created by the schizoid retreat of the self or other—and both books seem to collapse into each other. Auster describes the search for his own self within his father’s history and through the gaps between dissociated states. He finds each gap has a complement and an opposite:

“I understand that each fact is nullified by the next fact, that each thought engenders an equal and opposite thought. Impossible to say without reservation: he was good, or he was bad; he was this, or he was that. All of them are true. At times, I have the feeling that I am writing about three or four different men, each one distinct, each one a contradiction of all the others. Fragments. Or the anecdote as a form of knowledge.”

The anecdote as a form of knowledge creates new patterns that ascribe meaning to chance encounters and allow patterns not evident to reveal themselves and create these meanings.

In her study of UFO narratives during the 1990s, Susan Lepselter emphasized the underlying sense of the uncanny running through her subjects’ lives while also discerning the poetry created within their own narratives. Through their observations of the world, her subjects created new patterns that “follow that quick leg of the semiotic journey where the public sign is internalized, and then reproduced as another sign, or another story...”

There is a difference between finding meaning and creating meaning. The apophenia Lepselter describes—the experience of perceiving connections between random or unrelated objects—is also a key element in Auster’s writing in which signifiers change as coincidences are given meanings and the unknown spaces are filled in. Anxiety is explained by a new narrative that creates another narrative, pulling an individual into a newly acknowledged reality before settling again. As Lepselter describes, “this affect as it moves from a fleeting sensation to the center of things,” helps to create the conspiracy theories and fantasies that explain our lives.

In the opening passage of City of Glass, between the prototypical detective-novel introduction and the denial of any objective meaning in the story, the narrator says of Quinn: “Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance.” Chance allows us to find our own meaning, accepting the possibility that we disappear, or that we do nothing but collect bits and pieces that may or may not comprise a narrative; a narrative that also disappears as soon as we think we are certain of the meaning, or certain we are understood.