Underworld

"There's a word in Italian. Dietrologia. It means the science of what is behind something. A suspicious event. The science of what is behind an event."

The word that explains nothing in this case is lontananza. Distance or remoteness, sure. But as I use the word, as I interpret it, hard-edged and fine-grained, it’s the perfected distance of the gangster, the syndicate mobster—the made man. Once you’re a made man, you don’t need the constant living influence of sources outside yourself. You’re all there. You’re made. You’re handmade. You’re a sturdy Roman wall.

Nick Shay
Don DeLillo
Underworld

It is fitting that Don DeLillo who spent so much time updating religious mysticism to fit modern times should have written his magnum opus, Underworld, as if he himself had received an undecipherable vision from God. A plotless plot using multiple views revolving on themes of lives unlived & unloved, beliefs centered around objects of transformational value that must either be the icons of your life’s journey, or just another baseball. The Todo y nada of St. John of the Cross. What made you the person you are today? It was everything; it was nothing.

One day walking the banks of the Cardoner River, St. Ignatius of the Society of Jesus¹, experienced a mystical union with God. He began to understand many things & experienced such great clarity that even if he gathered up what he had learned after that moment it would not amount to a scrap of what he had received during that union by the river. It takes time. Thinking, contemplating, introspection, deconstruction—that garden must be pruned weed by weed.

Libra, Mao II, and White Noise were the fission events, the multiplying chain reactions that would lead to Underworld. Not unfamiliar to those who know about the German V-2 rocket, first the flash then the explosion. Lives where the belief in America as a force of good is shattered. Where only violence can reach the masses because violence is the only thing that can’t be incorporated into our corporate-media-constructed reality, where the Christian promise of fruitfulness is found in New York Italian Meat Markets, they are our Gothic Cathedrals of Pork.

Nick Shay is our protagonist. He believes he stands alone, complacent in his solitude. Like all Americans, he is living in a Post-War America without a war ever being fought. He thinks he is an Italian gangster, loves to do the accent, is confident his father got whacked for running numbers, killed a man with a sawed-off shotgun & like a true mobster his job is in waste (W.A.S.T.E²) management.

We built pyramids of waste above and below the earth. The more hazardous the waste, the deeper we tried to sink it. The word plutonium comes from Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. They took him out to the marshes and wasted him as we say today, or used to say until it got changed to something else.

Don DeLillo
Underworld

But it is all a lie, a false narrative that gets him through the day. Important to the plot is the home run baseball by Bobby Thomspon that won the New York Giants their game against their cross-town rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Nick was a fan of the Dodgers, & we peel back the history of the ball from Nick paying a ludicrous sum to a collecter that maybe can officially trace the ball to the young black fan Cotter (Caught-Er) Martin who actually did grab it. By learning about the ball we are also burrowing deeper into Nick’s life.

Nick’s wife is cheating on him with his friend. He cheats on his wife with a swinger who he tells things he never told anyone before including things about St. John & clouds of unknowing. Nick as a young man, helped his lover get a stealth abortion in Mexico before breaking up with her. The man he killed was a stand-in for his father & everything he taught was cool about that man was the symptoms of a future suicide victim. He simply smiled and said the gun wasn’t loaded when Nick pointed it at him.

Perhaps he thought it would be a perfect move because it would put him out of his misery and viscerally dissuade Nick from pursuing the life of an Italian Mafioso. Nick sleeps with Klara Sax, the thirty-something wife of his brother’s chess mentor as a seventeen-year-old. Even chess is gangster.

Theories about the psychology of the game, frankly, leave me cold. The game is location, situation, and memory. And a need to win. The psychology is in the player, not the game. He must enjoy the company of danger. He must have a killer instinct. He must be prideful, arrogant, aggressive, contemptous, and dominating. Willfull in the extreme. All the sins of the noncarnal type.

Don DeLillo
Underworld

Mario Badalato, an Italian heavy who eventually hears everything about anything criminal, even tells a young Nick that he heard no word about a hit on his father. At that small level, you work things out. Yet Nick continues to believe in his own myth since it makes up his life. The novel does not flow linearly, it is organized according to the internal logic of the author. In the first part of the novel after the Prologue, Nick the gangster is driving in the desert to meet Klara Sax, the woman he slept with over forty years ago and has had no contact with since. Less gangster & more like Travis Henderson from Paris, Texas. A shell-shocked survivor from the mushroom explosion of life, the type of trauma that turns your soul into fissionable material.

The author Jed McKenna called spirituality a young man’s game. The older you get the harder those layers of accumulated waste get. It’s hard for someone even in their thirties to admit they should have turned right when they turned left over fifteen years ago. & the cost of your newfound independence in your latter years might have devastating effects on parents, partner, progeny.

Nick Shay is an exemplar of the questioning man in The Talking Head’s Once In A Lifetime. He is digging through his life trying to find something that was real, an object that is solid—so he can build his life on that instead of the pile of waste he felt it has become. Waste on waste on waste and we never stop wasting until the waste is so high piled up we can’t breathe.

1. The Jesuits as they would later be called, have been found in Paris, Perkins, telling Kings when to marry, when and how to go to war, serving as astronomers to Chinese emperors or as chaplains to Japanese armies invading Korea. Have provided education to Voltaire, Castro, Hitchcock, Joyce, and DeLillo. They have also been sheep farmers in Quito, hacienda owners in Mexico, wine growers in Australia, & plantation owners in antebellum United States.

2. WE AWAIT SILENT TRISTERO’S EMPIRE