Hanging Out with Lafcadio Hearn in Vung Tau

As published at SubStack, 4/13/24:

Though barely remembered, Lafcadio Hearn is a national treasure of two countries. The man noticed and wrote about everything. Life’s minutiae reveal much. Tiniest minds smirk.

Hearn’s recipes for making Boston brown bread, Mississippi corn bread, soda biscuits, Graham bread, potato bread, sponge bread, corn batter bread, milk rolls, Virginia rolls, flour puffs, rice cakes, sally lunn, pain perdu, Indian breakfast cakes and Haly’s buckwheat cakes will save your radiated ass after Commander in Chief Biden pushes that button. If you must go to town, there’s Hearn’s instructions for Miss Lester’s tea rusk, cream of tartar biscuits, Charlotte russe, rich soda biscuits with cream of tartar, sourmilk doughnuts without yeast, Wisconsin fruit cake, nougat fruit cake and cheap fruit cake. When nothing’s available, nothing will be cheap, so even plain donuts will be extravagant. You’ll need eggs, cinnamon and nutmeg.

Tirelessly walking, Hearn paid close attention to others’ private mumbling:

They are of various ages; but most generally advanced in years. The action of the younger men or women is usually quick and nervous; that of the older, slow and meditative. The former often speak angrily as if brooding over some wrong; the latter, rather in sorrow than in anger. All of which is quite natural and to be expected from those who talk to themselves.

Those were the soliloquists of New Orleans. Two syllables overheard in London haunted Hearn for decades:

One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I heard a girl say “Good-night” to somebody passing by. Nothing but those two little words,— “Good-night.” Who she was I do not know: I never even saw her face; and I never heard that voice again. But still, after the passing of one hundred seasons, the memory of her “Good-night” brings a double thrill incomprehensible of pleasure and pain,—pain and pleasure, doubtless, not of me, not of my own existence, but of pre-existences and dead suns.

It’s not its literal meaning but her tone that resonated, so we’re talking about the emotion behind that trivial “goodnight.” We’re talking about music. Living in a tone deaf era, it’s even harder for us to understand. Though thoroughly deformed and perverted, music is our last recognized art form. Poetry, painting, sculpture, theater, dance and film have long been tossed from the corpse freezer. Serious novels are used as shelf decorations or door stoppers. To impress dinner guests, leave one or two by your shitter.

As for Hearn’s “pre-existences and dead suns,” they’re dormant in each of us, to be awakened by a pencil line, inspired word choice, camera angle, funky glissando or colors perfectly tuned. This capacity is snuffed out if we’re constantly drowning in sonic and visual garbage. Right in front of me at Cóc Cóc Coffee is a young man dead to the world. Ever since he got here two hours ago, he’s been glued to his phone. Bombarded by electronic ephemera beamed by those who hate him, he’s not even aware of the present, much less the past.

A collector of ghost stories, Hearn understood how we’re nourished by the long gone, “The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains,—to be startled at rarest moments only by the echo of some voice that recalls their past.” Gazing backward into our haziest beginnings, Hearn has become increasingly weird, if not distasteful, to modernists, progressives, hipsters and, now, wokesters. Dude’s a reactionary freak.

Worse, he believed in each nation’s uniqueness. Born in Greece to a Greek mother and Irish father, Hearn spent his formative years in Ireland, before landing in Normandy, London, New York, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Martinique then, finally, Kumamoto, where he found something like stability and contentment. Having experienced intimately different cultures, Hearn knew full well their profound differences. Global citizens are self-deluding dilettantes, neocolonialists or sex tourists. Narcissistic, they’re also the ultimate provincials. Just before his first child was born in 1893, Hearn wrote to Ellwood Hendrick, “I hope my little one will never have to face life in the West, but may always dwell in a Buddhist atmosphere.”

If Hearn soured on the West 131 years ago, what would he make of it today? Far from being rejected, Hearn was among America’s most beloved writers. Only Twain and Stevenson had more recognition. Sailing from New York in 1890, Hearn never touched American shores again. With his infinite curiosity, Hearn’s probably revisiting this ghastly country as a ghost. Beholding Biden, Trump, Diddy, Madonna and Beyoncé must make him vomit.

America’s narcissism, petulance and sadism have gotten much worse, as has its “contempt of old age.” Only the “Eternal Feminine,” Hearn’s term, is worshipped, hence the spectacle of a creepy Madonna in adult diaper dancing. In Seattle, there’s a public defender, Stephanie Mueller, who’s a 70-year-old transgender with a masklike face, puffy lips and huge breasts, which he/she features with a lowcut blouse. He/she also wears leather pants to court. As Venus Xtravaganza says in Paris is Burning, “I would like to be a spoiled, rich white girl. They get what they want, whenever they want it.” Queer, you can screw a girlish boy like a teenaged Justin Bieber. Diddy’s lawyer can claim he’s just a contemporary Athenian or Allen Ginsberg. This joke is far from over.

Initiated, snow white Bieber got tatted and tried his best to be ghetto. He even became a regular clown for Floyd “Money” Mayweather Jr.’s ring walks. After each win, Bieber could bask next to the undefeated boxer. Now, we know why. Bieber served as the perfect model for pasty boys everywhere.

Violence or posturing doesn’t make a man. Only the arrested flaunt shades, tatts and bling. An attachment to objects betrays sentimentality, domesticity and fear of just about everything. Most interestingly, Hearn isolates this pathology to leather shoe dependence:

The footgear represents in itself a check upon individual freedom. It signifies this even in costliness; but in form it signifies infinitely more. It has distorted the Western foot out of the original shape, and rendered it incapable of the work for which it was evolved. The physical results are not limited to the foot. Whatever acts as a check, directly or indirectly, upon the organs of locomotion must extend its effects to the whole physical constitution. Does the evil stop even there? Perhaps we submit to conventions the most absurd of any existing in any civilization because we have too long submitted to the tyranny of shoemakers. There may be defects in our politics, in our social ethics, in our religious system, more or less related to the habit of wearing leather shoes. Submission to the cramping of the body must certainly aid in developing submission to the cramping of the mind.

Since the Japanese was not overly attached to stuff and comfort, he’s more resilient and mobile:

Before a Japanese moves he has nothing to consider. He simply leaves the place he dislikes, and goes to the place he wishes, without any trouble. There is nothing to prevent him. Poverty is not an obstacle, but a stimulus. Impedimenta he has none, or only such as he can dispose of in a few minutes. Distances have no significance for him. Nature has given him perfect feet that can spring him over fifty miles a day without pain; a stomach whose chemistry can extract ample nourishment from food on which no European could live; and a constitution that scorns heat, cold, and damp alike, because still unimpaired by unhealthy clothing, by superfluous comforts, by the habit of seeking warmth from grates and stoves, and by the habit of wearing leather shoes.

In a more Westernized Japan, such men have mostly been replaced by office drones and hikikomori, but racial characteristics can’t be wiped out in two or three generations. Soon enough, we’ll see who has the wherewithal to survive.