herzog : saul bellow.

Ah, Herzog. I’ve made a surplus of notes on the book—it’s Proust-like ratio of action : meaning; the blurring of the line between funny and desperate; the letters that frame the fragmentary passions of Moses Herzog. MH, as I took to referencing him in my notebook. As I read through it, my part, the part of reader, became more and more complicated; my note-taking began to borrow a non-sequential tendency from the narrative, and I let it tend as it would, a half-intentional effort to more closely feel the pulse of Saul Bellow’s prose. I would disqualify no train of thought from my notes, not even the trolley cars, which are just for fun. That way, I would really get into MH’s dilemma.

MH, I wrote again. These initials are mine, as well. That’s right. This makes sense, my note-taking continued, given the complex layers of patience I’ve had to develop. like MH, people in this world have heedlessly thrown trials in my direction, and i’ve countered with tribulations of my own creation—at my most heedless, i’ve mocked them by thinking myself to a standstill and making the situation worse than they ever could. Bless his complicated, initials-sharing soul, MH understands this--he set the damn bar for it. In the world where everyone has a kindred spirit on television, Herzog’s is George Costanza, who, during a previously muted break-up conversation, hollers, You’re giving me the ‘it’s not you it’s me’ routine? I INVENTED ‘it’s not you it’s me!’ nobody tells me it’s not them it’s me. if it’s anybody, it’s me. George is legitimately hurt in that moment, but it's what hurts him--not being dumped so much as having his own hollow line used on him--that parallels exquisitely back to the inclinations of Moses Herzog, his way of dialing in on a set of variables that may seem incidental to the uninformed eye. The thoughts and travails of Herzog are testament to nothing if not the likelihood of meaning in the minutiae. Although it may take some looking, during which there’s sure to be crises of cyclical analysis and general doubt. But doubt is the toothpick to the samurai sword of self-awareness, and, getting back to my point, I understand this. I, MH, understand better than some the burden of Moses Herzog. I’m not a Jew, I'm a commitment-phobic protestant, but even still.

The other day I read an entry in FreeDarko, an NBA blog a handful of writers have reserved as a space to put strangely compelling pictures and write unevenly about pro basketball, in whatever terms they happen to encounter, but always erring on the side of meta-. Sometimes with a nifty under-note of common narrative. The mention of Herzog came right at the outset of the piece, but well before the really juicy existential bit; so, sorry, it’s a long quote.

Silverbird’s promising academic career was not built on this sort of celebratory posturing... Yet somehow, FreeDarko brought out the booming rector in him.

There’s a good reason for that: since its inception, FreeDarko has been rife with overtones of prophecy, revolution, imminent change, and apocalyptic fervor. Hence the preoccupation with Futurism, the Old Testament, Islamic extremists, the Black Panthers, Heidegger, the First Continental Congress, and Herzog. I can’t exactly say what draws me to these things, other than ennui and impatience...

History’s over in art and music, but maybe basketball has yet to ride out that tide. The ripples of team destiny are what every fan’s truly after, and I’m stuck trying to do this for the league writ large...

That raises the question, though, of whether FreeDarko-ness beckons because we hate stuffy NBA thinking, or whether we hate that thinking because of a strong allegiance to FreeDarko-ness. I honestly couldn’t tell you; it’s a bit like asking if revolutions are motivated by hatred for the present or hope for the future. FreeDarko walks like it does in part because it needs to dignify its hit-list, but also because we want to believe in basketball’s future. And the only way to do that now is to hope for change, to aggressively note it at every turn. If we sometimes force the issue or appear delusional, it’s because someone has to camp at the vanguard for when reality’s caught up.

The sentiment the writer expressed at the end—the deflective call-out that hey, I might look crazy to people, to you, but “someone has to camp at the vanguard for when reality’s caught up”—bound itself back to Herzog; it drew a neat picture of Herzog’s ultimate ennui and impatience, to borrow a phrase. The language, “camp at the vanguard,’ struck me as something he’d be comfortable with. What Herzog vaguely stands up for as the story opens is this definitive sense of being ahead of the rest—not ahead in the sense of lengths on the racetrack, but something more intellectually effete and important and as-yet-ineffable than that. His stumble and stop with his critical masterwork is a black-sounding drum note in his internal narrative, and the other parts of his life—his lack of a life at home in which to invest, his listing and recording of hesitations with people (and aspects of himself) he wants to trust but no longer does—all these are tin notes sounding the loneliness that descends with the dark, out here at the end of the long peninsula, at the campsite on Vanguard Point. It’s cold, and we’re running out of matches. But of course it’s nice to stand bravely alone, too.