October 14, 2025
"Art is magic liberated from the lie of being truth."
- Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
It is hard to keep your head when all about you, nuts are knocking on it to remind you of things that are not true in a world where reality is hard to find because of endless propaganda, artificial intelligence, personal betrayals, and nuts who know nothing but can't stop telling you the nothing that they know. They are always falling but seem to be reborn endlessly, popping up in new clothes as advocates for the latest fashionable truths that they rejected only yesterday. They always jump on the band wagon, aka the nut wagon, where they trade old falsehoods for new truths to create chaos. It makes one a wee bit suspicious.
Knock, knock. Who's there? You're nuts. What about them?
See what I mean? It's very hard these days. Nudniks repeat the same circular explanations for why things are as they are until you feel your head will explode. One minute you expect the world to end in a nuclear war; the next you are munching on peanuts and sipping wine as the full moon rises with a grin as if to say it's time for a Moon Dance "'Neath the cover of October skies / And all the leaves on the trees are falling / To the sound of the breezes that blow / And I'm trying to please to the calling / Of your heartstrings that play soft and low." But everyone knows the Irish are nuts, crazy romantics and always looking for a fight or a roll in the hay after a few drinks.
Which reminds me, my ninety two year-old mother-in-law, who had dementia in her last years, once said to me, after I asked her at dinner if she would like a roll, "Well, that's the first time a man has ever asked me that!" So I passed her one.
As chance would have it, as a refuge from the nuttiness of the 1970s, the so-called "Me Decade" of navel gazing, Watergate, the death of the anti-war movement, the Arab Oil Boycott, the Son-of-Sam killings, and the conservative retrenchment under Ronald Reagan, among a few highlights, we came to live in the beautiful Berkshires mountains of western Massachusetts, an area that produces many nuts.
One day in August 1980 when we were living in New York City, my wife and I were walking north along the Hudson River in Riverside Park. About fifty yards or so in front of us a woman jumped in fright, screaming as three big cats crossed the path in front of her. As we approached, we saw that they were monstrous rats, who then recrossed the path to their cozy abode in the big rocks along the riverbank.
Sometimes rats are just rats, this time they seemed oracular. It was time for us to leave.
Within a few weeks, having put some belongings in storage, we got a small tent and sleeping bags and headed north to western Massachusetts, where we had previously lived. While camping up on a mountain side, I went down to a pay phone that we passed on our way up and made a chance phone call to a number I had seen in the local newspaper, a call that led that very night to an apartment and the start of our forty-five year long life in the southern Berkshires, an area of exquisite natural beauty, despite or maybe because of the nuts.
"I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then," sings Bob Seger in "Against the Wind." Those lines come back to me as I walk through the sun-dappled woods these luminescent October days. It sure seems like paradise. The breeze in the trees and the fluttering multi-colored leaves, the pine needles like a soft bed underfoot. Most migratory birds have headed south but the remaining ones are flitting about. The cool air intermingles with sunny warm spots that stop you in your tracks in wonder at the beauty of the world despite its man-made horrors.
And then, of course, the reminders of what as a boy I didn't know then but do know now that follow me everywhere, even as I try to revel in the beauty of my enclosure in this magical forest. Not the revelations of the nuts who know nothing but can't stop telling me the nothing that they now tell me they know - that they have just discovered - but the truth about the CIA's MKUltra mind- control program that is now nearly synonymous with the digital life of the Internet and the intelligence agents posing as liberators of the public mind. Mind-control on a vast, vast scale of false trails to lead the nuts into thinking they have cracked the shell to grasp the inner truth. As Adorno puts it:
It is precisely the critical element that is wanting in ostensibly independent thought. Insistence on the cosmic secret hidden beneath the outer shell, in reverently omitting to establish the relation between the two, often enough confirms by just this omission that the shell has its good reasons that must be accepted without asking questions.
Look, they seem to say, this is the secret truth, but unlike the King's Men, their revelations always put Humpty Dumpty's shell back together again. And so it goes, as the nuts rain down on our sore heads.
I try not to think of such things as I walk, but when I return home with bumps on my head from the nuts hitting me, I sit and reflect on what crept to mind when I was walking, trying to forget.
I think also of my trust in others when I was a boy, and how in recent years that trust has evaporated as people have used me and my writing for their own agendas. Always taking and never giving, always asking me to review their books and never reviewing mine. Using my words as if they were theirs. Acting as if we were walking the same dissidents' road together when their forked tongues had them secretly following the one most traveled. I am saying this with a sigh, that what Bob Seger passionately sings in "Against the Wind" seems so true: "And the years rolled slowly past / And I found myself alone / Surrounded by strangers / I thought were my friends."
If it sounds like I am complaining, it is because my head is sore. The woods are lovely, dark and deep this time of year, and I return from my walks with pockets full of mumbles of false promises together with black walnuts, chestnuts, hickory nuts - even acorns and pine cones - that the wind has blown down to hit my head hard to remind me to wake up. As another singer, Paul Simon puts it in his great song, "The Boxer": "All lies and jest / Still, a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest."
"Well, I'm older now but still running against the wind."
Reprinted with the author's permission.