From “The Bass Violin” in the collection “Decemberlands”
The Seventh Day
It was one of those winter mornings when you look outside and can’t bear the thought of being inside another minute—the sky blue as a storybook sea, the sun slanting in, hitting the window hard, throwing a golden square on the bedroom floor, and, in the center of the square, the sharp-edged shadow of you. These are the mornings when you throw open the window—never mind the frost, the unmistakeable sensation of your nose turning pink with chill, the sound of your mother telling you you’ll catch your death of cold standing there in your cotton pajamas, never mind all that—you breathe in deep and the air tastes like mint and the day ahead feels limitless. Yes, you’re already old enough to know that every day has its limits. You know that days like this in particular can’t help but disappoint. You’re no fool, after all, the most levelheaded of all the levelheaded kids in the Bronx. But you let yourself expect, if only for a moment, that something wonderful will happen today…
Read more in my illustrated holiday short-story collection Decemberlands, available at Amazon.com.
Illustration by Svetlana Larionova Miller, from Decemberlands.
From the Archives: Gorby and Me
How the leader of a foreign superpower changed my life—and a few others, too
[Originally published in the Las Vegas Weekly, March 25, 2004]
When I was a little kid—and I must have been an odd little kid, now that I think about it—I always dreamed that I would grow up to be the guy who ended the Cold War. Then along came Mikhail Gorbachev and ruined everything for me. I was 15 when he came to power and 22 when he left it and even his theft of my prospective life’s work couldn’t peel me away from my desire to study the country he’d led and lost. A master’s degree and three periods of scantily remunerated, definitively non-world-transforming work in Russia later, I was 27 and sick with the certainty that I’d become irrelevant. I beat a path back to my hometown, Las Vegas, to try to find a new mission in the real world. I’m still looking.
That’s one story. There are others.
Gorbachev, the former and final leader of the Soviet Union, came to UNLV last Monday, March 22, to talk about how to make the world a better place. I listened attentively. I took notes. I was truly interested. But my interest in the man’s words was in constant competition with my awe at his presence. Every time he spoke about our future, I kept thinking about his past. Every time he spoke about our world, I thought about the extent to which he made it what it is. This is the pathos of displaced greatness: The central historical figure of our time was standing in the Thomas & Mack Center telling me and several thousand others his prescription for restructuring global priorities, and my mind was not on the implementation of his new ideas, but the impact of his old ones.
OK. Full disclosure. My mind, as minds will be, was also on my own life. I felt a little ashamed of myself. What kind of person goes to listen to a Nobel Prize-winner speak and sits there thinking, Boy, that guy really did a number on me! But he did a number on millions, not such a bad number, all things considered. If we all sit and think about the numbers he did on us, the numbers start to add up to something like a revolution.
★ ★ ★
By the time I was in third grade, I had effectively grokked the meaning of deterrence. When the subject of the Cold War came up—and, believe it or not, at Lewis E. Rowe Elementary School, it did—I liked to say things like “strength makes peace.” At the same time, I’d tell people that the original reasons for the arms race were pretty much lost beneath all the shiny missiles. I was against the unilateral-freeze movement, but I figured that if the two sides could be brought to discuss not their weapons but their actual differences, they might realize together that neither of them really needed the capacity to blow the world up a 10th time. Leonid Brezhnev was not listening, and I don’t think they heard me on this side of the pond, either. I decided to bide my time.
Several years later, Mikhail Gorbachev announced to the world, and perhaps more courageously, to his own generals, that effective deterrence didn’t really require that many bombs, and advocated a defense stance not of supremacy but of “reasonable sufficiency.” Gorbachev’s idea worked. I bore him no grudges. I was a good kid that way.
★ ★ ★
An actor named Boris, wearing a cowboy hat and a dusty vest, was to burst into a saloon, doors swinging behind him, and shout out, “Which one of you bitches is my mother?”
No. That was Phoebe Cates in Lace. The mind plays tricks that way. In any case, Boris, a good guy playing a bad guy, was to barge in and make some sort of menacing cowboy declaration, and I was to coach him to say it well enough, cowboy-like enough, that at least the dubbing wouldn’t look ridiculous. We were on a closed Russian military base outside the provincial town of Golitsyno and about an hour from Moscow by slow bus. It was July of 1993, during my first trip to Russia, and we were shooting an Italian-American-Russian joint-venture western called Jonathan of the Bears, starring Franco Nero and a nice South African girl named Melody. Franco had been raised by bears; Melody was a Native American named Chaya. Then there was Boris. Boris, with a long, bent nose, bulgy eyes and a snaky frame, was taking care of some sort of Old West dirty work or other. I think he may have been some kind of cowboy scientist.
My job was to help everyone with a little bit of everything—dialogue coach, occasional translator, mover of things from one place to another and back. Sometimes my job was to do nothing at all. One day I was sitting with a group of Russian actors and stunt-men in a circle around a puddle. We were throwing pebbles in the puddle. We were watching the circles spread. “I want to work,” I said.
“This is work,” Boris answered.
I liked Boris. Read more…
From the Archives: Revolution Square
It’s 1996, I’m writing for The Moscow Times and wandering the parks and alleys of the capital, gathering it in, allowing it to become a part of me, each day finding new mysteries in its cool air and cold lovely stone. It’s my third tour working in this country; I’m no longer entirely a stranger here. But Russia, weird and wondrous, can’t help but leave even the most experienced foreigner feeling just a little bit strange. Here’s one of my adventures—and maybe not my proudest moment—described in a 2012 essay for Vegas Seven, “Revolution Square”.
From the Archives: The Morality of Slow
In 2011, I was editing the weekly city magazine Vegas Seven and recalibrating my sense of place in the hometown to which I had only recently returned. The city was at once deeply damaged by the Great Recession and, as always, energized and ready for change—constantly reshaping itself beneath our feet while we hurried from one moment to the next trying to keep up with it. Meanwhile, our digital existence seemed to echo our civic life, skittering about in our mental space, ever-shape-shifting, keeping us continuously looking down to make sure we understood where we were, seducing us into forgetting where we had been, telling us not to slow down, not ever, lest we fall behind. Amid this instability of both physical and virtual space, I reached a point where I sat down at (where else?) the keyboard and typed a thousand words that, I suppose, amounted to one: “Enough.”
Here’s the result—“The Morality of Slow.”
Seven years ago, with Las Vegas still digging out of The Great Recession, a national commentator argued that The Smith Center was the tomb, rather than the launching pad, for the city’s civic energies. I disagreed, a lot. This was my reply in the late, great Vegas Seven. How does it hold up?
Miller-March 29, 2012-Is The Smith Center the Last Good Thing?
The Set in the Woods
I stand on the edge of an artful world,
Where the red of the fire
Is dimmed by smoke.
Don’t be alarmed:
Everything is under control.
Only the eyes
Flash like traffic lights
Beneath the pale sunset moon
Of a temporary town
In a dried-grass clearing.
We have work to do:
“Quiet on the set!” they cry,
Out of pure habit—
Nobody is saying anything anyway;
Only nature speaks its night language.
They seem dissatisfied with the semi-silence,
But uninterested in its source.
Who wants to concede that the world goes on without us?
Even the wild dogs
And the dying leaves
And the face of a child in the forest
Go unnoticed, unheard, unseen, except by me,
Here on the edge, lost on the job
In the temporal space between last and next
And not-quite-now.
It’s never quite now with me.
I am not exceptional,
But somehow I am an exception,
Dazed by incomprehensible pauses in the action,
By my own elusiveness when community beckons.
I never knew life had such breaks.
I thought the story told itself, beginning to end,
In such a way that made it difficult for the characters to simply run off.
I wander into the woods, no purpose, no plan.
Like a hero from Cooper,
The child steps on a twig beneath dry leaves.
The twig—such lonely applause!—cracks;
From behind the cover
Of a lightning-struck stump,
A dog turns with a start,
A muffled growl, and then
A bark.
The child jumps,
The shimmer of surprise upon him like a feather on the soul.
Where had that dog been hiding?
And how did he get lost out here
Among the cedars?
The boy drops to his knees
And against my unspoken recommendation
Pets the lost mutt.
From the edge of the clearing
I smile to myself.
The kid is safe, I assume,
A local boy. I turn around
To those traffic-light eyes
Which now flash in the dark
As the director’s commands
Drown out the dog’s bark.
– Greg Blake Miller
Outside Golitsyno, Russia, 1993
How Much Caring Goes Into Your Sharing?
When we wander into Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel The Circle, the first thing we must do, akin to adjusting a watch when landing on faraway soil, is reexamine the notion of “Sharing Is Caring.” Eggers paints a portrait of a massive social-media corporation—The Circle—that gradually but relentlessly redesigns society, extending its circumference from its sylvan California headquarters outward to the city, the nation, the world. The engine of this radical growth is the corporation’s capacity to make the absurd seem inevitable. In smooth rhetorical steps, it reframes service to the company as service to society, privacy as theft, and erasure of self as selflessness, trusting that nobody will wade into philosophical waters to ask whether one can be selfless if there is no private self from which to give. The Circle’s guiding principle is “All That Happens Must Be Known,” but those grand words are dependent on the more innocent slogan, “Sharing Is Caring.” Those words provide the pseudo-ethical foundation for every step the company takes, for the most outlandish actions of its leaders, for Eamon Bailey’s overweening dreams and Tom Stenton’s cynical schemes. They also offer a window into the way we live today.
At first the phrase seems innocuous, or even, in a bumper-sticker sort of way, wise and loving. But upon closer examination, within the specific context of The Circle or, more importantly, the broader context of life in the age of social media, it develops shadows, first around its edges and then at its very heart. In these contexts, “sharing” does not mean what it seems: It does not connote the voluntary handing over of some portion of one’s worldly goods and privileges to another who is in need. For the most part, it also does not signify the voluntary, mindful sharing of one’s time and effort to help or console a person, animal, or community in need. Rather, the ancient ethic of opening one’s door to the stranger is invoked here only in the most cynical of ways: In The Circle, the knock on the door comes from the new governing authority—The Circle itself—the opening of the door is far from voluntary, and the one who knocks seeks not your aid and hospitality but your will and identity. In the broader social-media context of our lives outside Eggers’ book, there is a less direct sense of an authority barging in with its bogus warrant, but in its place there is often a more insidious type of authority at work: A bland but almost binding cultural rule of the road that we must leave our doors open and consent to being raided, observed and robbed. Our time, attention, data, creativity, and sense of self are suddenly available for the taking, like so many old possessions scattered on the lawn for a garage sale.
What does “Sharing Is Caring” mean when the sharing becomes obligatory (you have no choice but to share), ceaseless (you cannot stop sharing), unvaried (you cannot decide what to share and what not to share), and ubiquitous (everyone shares everything all the time, so that any effort to opt out is socially deviant)? In our world outside The Circle, of course, this sort of sharing is less obligatory, and we have more choices about when, how and what we share. But do we tend to allow the “Sharing Is Caring” ethic to become a sort of de facto rule in our online lives? Does yielding our time, attention and data become a custom so ingrained in our way of life that it is difficult to opt out, or even to consciously grasp what exactly we are yielding? Are we in the grips of McLuhan’s Narcissus Trance, so consumed by a communications medium that we no longer understand the way it controls the pace, scale and pattern of our lives? Have we become Dallas Smythe’s Audience Commodity, a resource ripe for harvest?
In ancient monastic traditions, the notion of voluntary self-emptying is a path to enlightenment. The ego yields and the individual dedicates self to something (God, spirit, community) larger. The bumper-sticker value of “Sharing Is Caring” is built upon its subtle association with this saintly ethic, half-remembered from old tales and dusty sermons. But The Circle uses the phrase as part of a cynical bait-and-switch. When “Sharing Is Caring” is based on obligation (in The Circle) or mindless surrender to cultural norms (under the de facto rules of our online lives), sharing cannot be caring. Caring implies that one has been careful—full of care—in ones choices, particularly in the willful decision to serve another. When sharing is obligatory or mindless, it derives not from caring but from obedience or reflex. It is demonstrably not caring. Sharing, in this case, is set above caring. It does not really matter whether you care or not.
There are times when the notion that “sharing is greater than caring” might be useful: Think of reasonable taxation that allows us to maintain a judicial system and build schools and foster public safety and protect the nation and stitch together a social safety net. There is no admonition in the Constitution that we must care—with all of the individual will and empathy the word implies—in order to give our government the necessary resources to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.” Paying for these things is the price of admission for Americans. We can shift the shape and scope of our public expenditures through political action, but short of revolution, civil disobedience and garden-variety tax avoidance, we cannot selectively opt-in or simply opt out. In the broad sense, when it comes to paying for the upkeep of the nation, it once again doesn’t matter whether you as an individual care or not. Your tax bill arrives all the same.
But we have traditionally drawn the line between such sectors of life where sharing is greater than caring and those where sharing is the outgrowth of caring. We cherish a private sphere, a zone of self-ownership. Traditionally, we share the details of our lives with those whom we care about and who care about us. We try to make conscious choices about how we spend our personal time and who we invite to share that time. We choose our causes. We devote ourselves with care. We express solidarity when we feel it. We guard our thoughts and experiences and convey them to others when and if we’re inclined to do so. When it comes to sharing the content of self, we like to believe that we pick our moments, control our message, and choose our audience. But do we? How much do we share by reflex? How much do we share out of a sort of numb conformism? How much to we share without even knowing we’ve shared? How mindfully do we empty ourselves? Is our sharing unconscious? Or is it conscious but cynical, as we craft alternative selves, identities designed and constructed to suit the norms of our online community—the circle we live in, one that does not need Eamon Bailey to set the agenda because we ourselves help set it every day. Are we reshaped by the alternative selves we construct? Are the alternative selves, that is, constructing us? Are we sharing or being shared? Do we care?
– Greg Blake Miller
Mar Monte
The hole was dug,
Neat and square.
The boards were laid.
Hands worked here,
They placed these boards,
Bracketed the corners
To frame the pour.
The barrel of the truck spun through the dark of night.
The foundation was poured,
The sludge made solid.
The gray of concrete reassures.
You can trust gray.
Sludge filled the square.
This all happened long ago.
It dried smooth,
Ready to be
Dressed in hardwood. Danced upon.
A grandparent, a great grandparent.
Your people were married here, in this building.
The pour was hard and strong. No cracks but the vents placed for pressure.
Eighty years go by with a gasp and a cough and a sigh
And the birth of three generations.
You return here, where you have never been, but they have, and you are
The legacy of the pour.
The cracks have grown. The vent was not enough.
You look upon the crumbling verandah
And you know that you, that we, have a responsibility
Not only to live
But to mend.
But you have grown in a different age
And have not built those skills.
– Greg Blake Miller
June 19, 2017
Summer in El Segundo
Pale children in purple bathing suits,
Siblings, I’m sure,
Carve angry faces in the sand
And the elder spits slowly upon the younger’s creation.
Closer to the surf, Little Leo cuts his foot on a shattered seashell. The tide stings his wound. He does not cry out, only winces.
A bright jet roars over and nobody hears that Leo is not crying.
Sue pulls down her shades as the sun glints off the refinery walls.
A former footballer, I’ll call him Henry, is sucking in his disobedient belly, remembering the man he once was and imagining that he remains that man.
Is Sue watching Henry?
Henry would like to be seen.
Sue is not watching.
Nor is Big Beverly, who chars beneath a two-oh-six sun,
Dreaming,
One presumes,
Of igloos.
All this I pretend to know
On a lonely windless afternoon,
When I’ve forgotten to bring a book, and
God’s in his heaven, and
Everything is delightfully
Not right with the world.
– Greg Blake Miller, August 6, 1998
First Light (TGWP 7)
From the novel This Game We Play, by Greg Blake Miller, continued from “Madness” (TGWP 6). This is the beginning of the novel’s second section, “The Basketball Boy,” which returns to Tucker’s childhood. Photo by Svetlana Larionova Miller.
I am periodically and not unpleasantly haunted by a childhood image that I can neither place in time nor dismiss as a dream. In this vision, I am sitting atop Mud Pony Mountain, arm’s length from a cloud, a collection of just-gathered rocks spread before me on a rust and tan plaid blanket. An uneaten drumstick from a red-striped chicken bucket bastes in its own grease on a paper plate. My dog, a brindle boxer named Brassy, looks up at me as if to say I’m not gonna eat it either. A few feet away my mother and father and brother are eating and talking and laughing. The noontime sky hangs like a great cracked eggshell over the valley. The mountains look silvery and gaseous, as if one could walk through them to a different room beneath a different shell. I look straight up at the sun and then close my eyes to see how long its ghost lingers. I prop my feet on patient Brassy’s back. I sleep—or, rather, I brush the edge of sleep but stay awake, just enough awake and just enough asleep that the world appears to be a dream but is still the world. I have mentioned this vision to my mother, and she has assured me that we took neither Brassy the boxer nor a red-striped bucket of chicken to the top of Mud Pony Mountain, which, in any case, as far as she knows, is accessible only by helicopter.
This much is true: The oldest memories I have are of my keen pursuit of a waking dream-state, where there was only a slim and dimly understood barrier between physical sensation and magic. I was three years old and full of desire and I did what it took to feel what I wanted to feel. In the evenings, just before bedtime, my mother would put a wet load in the dryer and shut off the laundry room light and from across the house I could hear the room begin to hum. I’d finish brushing my teeth, stroll down the hallway in my pajamas, slip into the laundry room and lie down on the cool blue linoleum. The dryer had a single fluorescent tube up top and it bathed the room in a ghostly gray glow. The place was irresistible.
I was always on the ground somewhere, like a puppy, or an ant; my world was defined by the textures of floor coverings. In the kitchen we had lumpy tan tile that was always cold, and I liked to sprawl there in the path of the warm wind that blew from beneath the refrigerator. Carpets, too, I liked. The hallway semi-shag was thick and soft and the color of avocado, but if I brushed my hand across I could change the shade to something like lime. I could amuse myself for a good while with such tricks. If I followed the hallway far enough, I’d get to my parents’ room, then to their bed, where the brown bedskirt had a sharp edge that tickled my palm in a way I rather liked.
I don’t know how I got away with spending so much time lying around. My brother got used to stepping over me on his way from one room to the next. My mother would do entire loads of laundry in the dark while I lay at the foot of the dryer. Once she turned on the light, and I stood with a start like an awakened cat, and stretched, and left. I think it made her sad to see my peace disturbed so, and she didn’t turn the light on anymore after that.
By the time I turned six, my brother Simon had become a basketball star. When he wasn’t playing down the street or in a league, he’d go out to our backyard hoop and shoot 15-footers from around-the-world stations, testing the comfortable old two-handed from-the-chest set shot against a grown-up one-handed jumper. He set me up under the basket to rebound for him and tell him what I thought. He’d shoot a set shot from the left side and say “chest,” then a jumper from the same spot and say “overhead.” And I’d say either “overhead” or “chest” depending on which shot looked better to me. This was an issue of today’s comfort versus tomorrow’s hard-earned success. It was a foregone conclusion that overhead would win. Still, I was flattered to be consulted. And I understood what it was he wanted: I wasn’t to base my judgment on which shot went in, but on which motion looked better. When the overhead shot looked as fluid as the chest shot, Simon would know he was in business. My brother didn’t expect things to come naturally; he knew he had to make them become natural. As a fifth-grader he sat on the couch for hours each night with his feet on the coffee table and a full, forgotten glass of milk in his hand, memorizing Spanish verbs. Here, too, he included me. Peinarse-to comb one’s hair; peinarse–to comb one’s hair; peinarse–to comb one’s hair. To comb one’s hair? And here, of course, I was to say peinarse.
At the time, I hadn’t fully quit the sensual habits of my younger years—I suppose I maintained the lifestyle a little longer than most kids—but next to Simon’s laborious learning, all my lounging around seemed terribly unproductive. The feelings worth having were to be had through work. Soon enough, I decided to want the same things Simon did. I still wanted to feel the kind of feelings I felt at the feet of clothing dryers and refrigerators, but I stopped seeking the feelings out, stopped cruising the carpets and floors and appliance air vents. By the end of kindergarten I was sitting on the couch with my feet on the table and a glass of milk in my hand, spelling friend over and over with the help of my teacher’s mnemonic trick, “FRIday is the END of the week.” I also went out to the backyard and set myself up with perfect grown-up Simon form (overhead!) and pushed the ball at the basket, which was much, much too far away. As for the old desires, they sank into the creases of my life like pennies you lose in the car seat. Desire, which demands to be fulfilled, turned into longing, which is content to remain exactly what it is. Desire never forgets what it wants; longing, in time, becomes inchoate, a thing in itself, the reason for which can be utterly forgotten. It’s safer that way, anyway. You scare yourself less when you decide you’re unlikely to get what you’re hoping for, when you consign it to an impossible dreamland, a paradise lost, a childhood moment of green grass and shameless sunshine that flared and faded and you don’t know why. You can feel your longing, wonder what it’s all about, then shrug your shoulders and get on to the business of wanting the things that matter.
– Greg Blake Miller
Reentry Shock 