Gabe Hudson: Dear Mr. President.
Knopf, 2002. 192 pp.

Art is alchemy.

Deconstruction doesn’t touch the alchemy. Take a Rolex apart, talk about the pieces, where they came from, who designed and made them, who put them together, and you haven’t touched—have in fact ignored—the miraculous "watch-ness" of the thing-at-work.

Yes, it helps a lot to understand what’s in Shakespeare as well as what’s not. Just as it also helps a lot to understand the context of the thing-at-work when it’s being performed or read, to know what the performers bring—and don’t bring, to know what the reader brings—and doesn’t bring—to the thing-at-work.

But reductivist analysis—taking the thing apart—is in the end no more than very clever reductivist analysis which remains mute before the mystery of the thing-at-work. Just as science, for all its rewarding clevernesses, remains silent before the blooming flower, the dying child, even the growing fingernail.

Arthur C. Clarke noted that technology at a certain level becomes indistinguishable from magic. So too art.

Just as the alchemy of technology ranges from the simplicity of the Zippo lighter to magic of a videocam, the alchemy or art ranges from the kindergartener's finger painting to, well, we don’t really know where to, do we?

That old goat Picasso tried to simplify and exalt what the thought he was doing when he said that art is the lie that tells the truth.

"Lie"? "Truth"? It was precisely the unreachability of those concepts that led finally to deconstruction and that whole mess of dead-end trouble. Denying that "truth" exists doesn’t mean it doesn’t. It only means you’re acting as if it doesn’t, which is fine, as long as you remember that what then ensues is puredee pretense.

Alchemy neither lies nor tells the truth. It just is. So too art.

Lying and telling the truth may—or may not—be part of art. We don’t—and probably can’t—know, and thus to that extent the deco-guys were on the right track. Only problem was, they stopped too soon, right before rounding the bend where before one’s wondering eyes the Unnameable Unmeasurable (what Buddhists call "the Void") opens out in the immense vista of mystery, the open, endless range where artists roam and hardly a discouraging word is ever heard.

Roaming, palettes or notebooks to hand, they make feverish notes before fleeing back to the comfortable security of the Land Before the Bend (what we call "reality"). Back among the ever-credulous, they try to make some kind of transmuted, transmissible sense of their notes.

We anoint the degree of their success with words like "great" and "immortal," or, for lesser efforts, "noteworthy," or "derivative."

As the semi-organized violence known as war has burgeoned in bloodiness in recent centuries, it has attracted more and more often the attention of artists. This activity has given us a rich legacy now, ranging from the blind patriotism of kindergartener art ("Uncle Sam Wants YOU") to the somewhat less blindered snapshots of ambitious apprentice art (Guernica), to nearer glimpses of what lies around the bend (Apocalypse Now).

Wordsmiths too have been busy with reports from the new field of mass slaughter:

Alchemy for sure, but because we remain myopic, you apparently can never have too much alchemy.

Now Gabe Hudson, in his first book, Dear Mr. President, has had a go at this terrifying territory. Moving on from the classic battlefield venues of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Hudson in seven stories and one novella plops us down in the Middle East and what the Pentagon wants us to remember as Desert Storm but which all us global villagers think of as the CNN War.

The blurbs and the reviews push the book as "funny" and "surreal." Using words like that for this book is like wearing Ray-Bans to watch a hydrogen bomb explosion. There may be less light-damage to your eyes but the radiation is still gonna get you.

Hudson piles reality on reality (is that what "surreal" is supposed to mean?), leads us cleverly—and, yes, often funnily—down to the place where the geopolitical rubber meets the road.

Far from the pious, patriotic mouthings of our leaders, far from the brutal survivalist indoctrinations of Parris Island drill sergeants, right down to the minute-by-minute, second-my-second reality of the grunt alone in the Iraqi desert.

What we get are fragments, glimpses of soldierly selves shattered. There’s none of the awesome, blinding, unifying sweep of Trumbo, or Vonnegut, or Heller. Shards of young humans on the edge of hell, making do. Or not.

Light glints this way and that from these fragments, illuminating for a moment not only the violence of battle but the crumbling foundation of American comity at home: a remembered pick-up game of basketball suddenly reveals how the madness of Timothy McVeigh of Johnathan Muhammed comes to be; a transcendent moment of loving charity transforms a hardened Marine into a cross-dresser; the origins and effects of homphobia become clear in a hidden bunker beneath Highway 8 between Basra and Baghdad.

Funny? Yep. Surreal? Yep. But to leave it at that is to be happy with your Ray-Ban-tinted view of the world.

I have no doubt that Hudson did not write this stuff to be funny, or surreal. His—and our—leaders sent him to a place where he went around the old metaphysical bend. Now he’s come back to report on what he found.