An Experiment in Misery

Stephen Crane's "An Experiment in Misery"
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In 1894 Stephen Crane imagined imagining himself a boy dressed in the stained and slack garb of a Golden Age, New York City Bowery bum. In university I read Crane's "The Open Boat," and I immediately bookmarked it as one of the best, most complete works of short fiction I had encountered. It read like moving impressionism—every detail somehow blurred, but each sideways metaphor hung awkward and poignant. This past summer I read his famous war novella "The Red Badge of Courage," and was again surprised by the impressionistic prose. Crane's colors are vivid and possessed, yet blurred into an unfocused foreground. The battles more like dreamy tableaus than violent exposes.

Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis when he was 28. He was famous at 24 with The Red Badge of Courage and worked as both a fiction writer and journalist. In "An Experiment in Misery," Crane writes from the perspective of a boy who dresses, for a day, like a Bowery bum to see if he could "discover his point of view or something near it." Without actually dressing as a bum, and simply by imagining himself a young man in a soiled suit with only a few pennies in his pocket, Crane paints, in a few short pages, his impressionistic vision of poverty in the forgotten hovels at the feet of an economic leviathan. The final paragraph crescendoes:

And in the background a multitude of buildings, of pitiless hues and sternly high, were to him embelamatic of a nation forcing its regal head into the clouds, throwing no downward glances; in the sublimity of its aspirations ignoring the wretches who may flounder at its feet. The roar of the city in his ear was to him the confusion of strange tongues, babbling heedlessly; it was the clink of coin, the voice of the city's hopes which were to him no hopes. 

He confessed himself an outcast, and his eyes from nder the lowered rim of his hat began to glance guiltily, wearing the criminal expression that comes with certain convictions.

Crane's story is a testament to the flexibility of the human mind. I'm often too quick to arrive at a conclusion regarding the matters of my generation—and Crane gives us another option: imaginative empathy. In the coda of his New York City experiment, he concludes:

"Well," said the friend, "did you discover his point of view?" 

"I don't know that I did," replied the young man; "but at any rate I think mine own has undergone a considerable alteration."

Maciej, the Polish Solider

I met Maciej at a dive bar a few blocks from my house: Dillingers, a place I'd been to once before and had spent the night dancing to CCR covers with a young drunk and married girl. Sunday night, the place was very quiet; just a few girls at the bar flicking their fingers on glowing cellphones.

I got a beer and a few dollars in quarters, I asked a guy in the pool hall dressed in a loose black button-down (who I hadn't noticed upon walking in) if the adjacent table was open. "Oh yeah man, she's waitin' for you." I racked the balls and broke, and he said, "Hey, you want to play a game?"

"I suck man. I'm practicing. Maybe in a half-hour."

A few minutes later he stepped over to my table and began offering advice. "You see, if you're going to bank the four-teen here, you've got to put spin on it. But if you're banking, it's a mirrored spin. Left goes right. Right goes left. Give it a try." His arms were covered in tattoos. A flag. A knife. Some time-worn script rendered unreadable. All blue. Blue tattoos.

Following a few ineffectual but valiant stabs at it, he ushered me out of the way. "Let me see if I'm not crazy..." and he sunk the ball effortlessly. "So, you're strippers?" he said. Thus commenced the game.

He had on a black ball cap, but removed it to reveal a long wave of hair pulled back with a hair tie. "You know," he began, "she's always gettin' angry with me. I had it all for a bit - the girlfriend, the boys. But she's always at me," here he makes a face like an angry feline and raises his tense claws. His eyes dart around behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. His jawline is slightly grizzled .

We played a few games of pool, both of which I was mercifully treated to the softest defeats. Occasionally we'd take a break so he could purchase another shot of whiskey or bottle of Budweiser, and he'd stand at the bar showing pictures of his dogs to a couple of questionably of-age girls smiling in the bar light.

He told me about his time in the Polish Army. "We were fighting like England," he said, "not like the Americans. We spent most of our ammo on wolf spiders. Those fucks..." he went on. "One girl came into town with a child in her arms. She was strapped with TNT and blew up the market. After that, we killed a few of their camels to send a message."

And he told me about teaching: "I teach breakdancing," he said, "to kids." I imagined him spinning on his head like a guru-gone-wild. His yellow teeth smiling as he twirled into an ecstatic tornado, spiralling, spiralling, into a light so bright, you can't look at it directly. I met Maciej.

"I'm good to know around here. I know a lot of good ones and bad ones. There are some bad ones. But forget about them. Play pool." 

Yes! Full Surely 'Twas the Echo by William Wordsworth -- Analysis

Wordsworth's poem, "Yes! Full Surely 'Twas the Echo" is a meditation on the pseudo-science of divine conversation. When I was in Ecuador, I drank the psychedelic brew of Ayahuasca under a thatched hut. Closing my eyes, a world of neon-nature-patterns bloomed, flowed in an ever-changing tapestry of vision. A voice called out to me, it advised me -- it said, "Shut up and Listen!"

Wordsworth opens the poem listening to a Cuckoo's echoing song. It's a "Solitary, clear, profound" song, and is reimbursed "sound for sound" by an echo. He ponders the origin of this echo -- "Whence the voice?" he wonders, "from air or earth?" Here -- the poem begins leaning toward the spiritual, as if the echo is of divinity born.

The echo was similar, but "oh how different." What, after all, is an echo, but a sound that hits a wall and bounces back? Wordsworth disagrees -- an echo is not a re-sounding, but an Answer. This poem might have been called, "An Echo is God Answering his iPhone" if written in 2014.

The poem takes a turn here -- "Hear not we, unthinking Creatures!" Wordsworth turns his posey-scope on human beings. "Slaves of Folly, Love, or Strife," he laments, we are no simple birds, yet, "voices of two different Natures." But, as the Cuckoo's got its song reverberating back to itself, human beings have a kind of boomerang-consciousness as well.

"Have we not too," Wordsworth asks, an echoed song? "Yes we have." Yet, our echoes come not in song, but in the form of Answers. "Echoes from beyond the grave," Wordsworth writes. And this voice comes from within ourselves: "Such within ourselves we hear / Oft-times, ours though sent from afar; / Listen, ponder, hold them dear, / For of God, of God they are!"

It's a strong, God-waving finish -- and one I actually agree with. If we turn into ourselves, look deeply in our intellect, our heart, and our consciousness, the answers to our most existentially-debilitating questions are revealed. So, like a Cuckoo, I'm off to sit in meditation and listen for the All-Knowing Voice.

Yes! full surely 'twas the Echo,

Solitary, clear, profound,
Answering to Thee, shouting Cuckoo!
Giving to thee Sound for Sound.

Whence the Voice? from air or earth?
This the Cuckoo cannot tell;
But a startling sound had birth,
As the Bird must know full well;

Like the voice through earth and sky
By the restless Cuckoo sent;
Like her ordinary cry,
Like—but oh how different!

Hears not also mortal Life?
Hear not we, unthinking Creatures!
Slaves of Folly, Love, or Strife,
Voices of two different Natures?

Have not We too? Yes we have
Answers, and we know not whence;
Echoes from beyond the grave,
Recogniz'd intelligence?

Such within ourselves we hear
Oft-times, ours though sent from far;
Listen, ponder, hold them dear;
For of God, of God they are!