Appleseed on the bench

 It is profoundly embarrassing to me to be broke around Christmas.  

I’ve played Santa Claus, in my way, and I’ve thought that a major work of mine is to be Santa Claus in a peculiar way, or at least Johnny Appleseed.  

This spring I did do my bit a couple of times – of course, I chafe a little at not having spent everything on Gwen during the time when we didn’t yet know the deadline had come, but I’m still glad I did when I don’t think of that.  Carol in New Mexico said she was going to be starving for reading material during her teacher’s summer vacation, so I sent her a box of choice vintage science fiction and fantasy.  Christy was curious about psychotropic drugs, so I sent her a decent psychedelic drug mini-library.  
 
Sometimes it works out.
 
It’s an old thing.  I try to give what I always wanted to get, and what I sometimes did get – the surprise that opens a world or worlds, little or big.  And because this involves NOT necessarily or directly getting the person what s/he already knows s/he wants – or involves doing this but always at a new skew – I have always figured the way to do this was with a shotgun, not a sharpshooter’s rifle:  the person should receive a crateful of different attempts, in hopes that something in there will click.  
 
(Yes, it’s a little paradoxical.  The various takes on the best gifts usually center on simply getting something that the person wants, already does want, knows s/he wants.  And in a broad way this is absolutely right, on the commonplace theory that a gift should make the person happy.  What I can say about what I do is that I am aiming to make a particular kind of happiness, one that is by no means a sure thing or a simple matter to achieve, or perhaps even to define.  The almost religious way I am about it, I could say it differently, poetically: the kind of happiness I am aiming for is not quite of this earth.)
 
The way I am about giving has something to do – and I do not know if I am awake enough to properly characterize the relation – with the way I am about books.
 
A book is a deep, complete experience that takes you into itself and is a full, massive context.  Which is four big vague adjectives, but they contrast with the natural backdrop these days for any book, which is the internet.  The internet is made of all kinds of individual works, but they are almost all abbreviated compared with a book, and they live far closer to all of their alternatives than any book on a bookshelf is close to the books next to it; the internet is as seamless as any user’s propensity to click.  The internet is an ocean.   A book is a tidepool.  You can look at the ocean all you like, and learn things, but you are aware, if you are intelligent, that everything you glean has just been one tiny section of a single vista of the ocean; you are likely to be learning simply to live with the ocean, which contains endless different things and so is likely in its hugeness to seem static – perhaps too static to think about ever transforming.  A tidepool is small.  It is particular.  You can grok it deeply.  And in exploring a tidepool in depth, you can think about remaking the entire world with what you have found there.
 
The internet is radical.  It lets you find so many things that in former decades you might have spent years simply wondering about, if you remembered to wonder, and that would have been very difficult to track down even with a good library at your disposal.  It is the fulfillment of the momentary maxim of an old friend of mine, "everybody’s out there," and gives ways for us to find each other.  Yes.  Obviously.  I owe most of my life, or the parts of my life I care about, to the internet since 1997.  But the internet also yammers at you that you are outnumbered, in a way that may work on you like surf on a shoreline.  You are not outnumbered with a book, or with books plural.  You are in conversation.  You are a judge; you have the opportunity to seek into things to the depth needed for judging.  And you and the author contend for or conspire toward the right light that should shine across the entire firmament.  
 
And the internet – subtly, subtly – has no memory.  It is only obvious in shock.  We are inundated with so many news articles from way back – we see plenty… but an essential part of growing up with the internet, that has to be experienced to be understood, is to find that a particular extraordinarily useful resource, a particularly vital point of clarity, has been taken down.  That website, that server, is no longer there.  It is absolutely gone.  There is suddenly a hole in one’s slow-assembled thinking world, and what used to be a stroll of a few steps in refreshing oneself or communicating something is now an impractical or even an impossible trek through a unexpected wide desert of obscurity.   A central matter can become secondary or tertiary, even for you who understood the importance, simply because it is suddenly much more difficult.  Books don’t do this.  Copies of books gather dust somewhere, in places unplanned by any central authority or anything except multifarious fate, until someone picks them up again.  And discovers an unabated flavor of clarity undefeated by fashion, full of old nooks ready to be pored through again with new eyes.
 
This much to say about often giving books when I am doing this kind of giving – about the emphasis on books.  It doesn’t have to be books.  If I knew a tool or something else that would have that cubic centimeter of chance to it, I’d give it, if I could afford it.  The range is limited by my own knowledge and cleverness.  
 
The Essential Whole Earth Catalog – I don’t know what the equivalent is now.  They’ve stopped making Whole Earth Catalogs, and certainly the internet makes them less necessary… perhaps.  But I don’t know that centrally they are less important – and I know of no comparable turnpike compendiums that we exchange now that do the same thing: what are the (or some) really good things, here, here, here, and here?  The Essential Whole Earth Catalog remade my world.  It shaped my reading for years afterward, and it started the freight going on intellectual railroads that I still run trains on today.  If I count – probably most of my railroads.  Could I still give the Essential Whole Earth Catalog today, or the "white album" Millennium one after that that finished the series?  Technically yes, if I could find a used copy.  Would it "work"?  Open question.  Would a reader be sparked to go and find good books that were published back before 1986?  Universes out there – but would it connect?
 
(Ah, the bittersweet.  There are so many old books that would revive old topics that are not dead, that did not die of their own weight.  Universes, yes.  Which is right yet wrong: the topics are about this universe, not harmlessly faerie or angel-ballet others.)
 
All this in the thought of discovery: that magical thing that is all I know of magic, that moment when you know of something bright and particular and beautiful when you did not know it before.
 
And, as I say, I am broke this time, again.  I have friends, I have relatives, the relatives have little kids, and once more I don’t do it.  
 
That has happened too many times over the years.  🙁  Considering how essential I think it is – and considering how quietly appalling (or loudly appalling) I find some other lines of fulfillment of the business of gift-gifting – it is a matter of dishevelled shame for me.  Johnny Appleseed does not have an infinite number of years in which to try.   There haven’t been nearly enough awkward moments when people have been opening my presents.  
 
(Not kidding about the awkward quotient.  Particularly every now and then.  If you read the topic here simply as a monstrous ego trip, you will need to assume that I’ve chosen one of the least flattering ego trips I can think of, in practice.)
 
When it works – for you, for me, for anyone – it’s all there is.  What do you think life is?
 
***
 
What to get me?  My instructions have apparently always left people pitifully confused.  I tell people I want a surprise, something new to me, a short translation of what I get people… and they almost always look panicked.  Sometimes I gabble out something else, just to put them out of their misery.  This time I told someone I wanted a bag of weed – primarily for a poignant coda to the running gag Gwen and I had all winter and spring, where I’d respond to all the endless political pseudo-incidents or just to boredom by blurting, "I want some pot!!!"  (Wonder if I’ll actually get it.)  Often they end up getting me a book,  usually a good bet with me, and sometimes a great success.
 
But mostly I’m not thinking at all of what I’ll get.  I usually forget to expect anything. The big game is elsewhere.  
 
(Why do you think my own bookshelves suck so badly?  Any really landmark-good book gets enthusiastically gifted to someone within a year or two, and I’m terrible at getting around to buying myself replacement copies.  So the second-string collection of books I actually have at any one time… really, I’d turn up my nose at ’em.  *smiles*  What a random trashheap!)