Finding Hope and Joy Once More
Union Spring Literary Review, Winter 2025/26
I went out to Dimes Square by myself a couple months ago in August to sit outside in New York City. Nine months out of the year it’s too cold and the businesses shutter and there’s not a patio to be found anywhere around, and given the available time, I made use of a short opportunity.
Some of the bars still take reservations even for their outdoor tables, but a few do not, and I found myself at Clandestino eyeing around waiting for a seat to pop open first-come, first-serve. I noticed a group of four young men paying their check and asked them if I could take their seats. They said they had received two beers for free, a mistake in ordering or something, and they said they were going to drink them. They didn’t say, “we’ll be done shortly” or “no problem, give us just a minute,” but they said something closer to “we’ve got new beers” and left it at that. The waiting was implied.
Luckies From Now On: Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move Shifts Narrative Modes for Want of Salvation
A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Summer 2025
“NOT EVERY DAY COMES OUT SYMMETRICAL, BABYLOVE.”
Denis Johnson serialized his eighth novel, Nobody Move, on deadline and in seeming opposition to every impulse that preceded it, presented nearly entirely in dialogue and without any backstory. Published in four parts by Playboy in 2008 and appearing with the slimmest prose from the minimal master, Nobody Move shows the clearest shift in redemption and grace in the author’s narrative focus, asking readers to consider what it means to find salvation here on earth.
Johnson never averred to a true dogmatic principle of any kind, but managed to compose a wide corpus of work that examines where characters receive their salvation even as they meet their ends. His canon is filled with the kinds of souls and citizens, powerless against to their own vices on earth, that could only be redeemed by a spiritual savior. It represents, in Johnson’s words, “…a fascination of some kind, a religious impulse. Basically our culture does not have a religion… So, to some extent, there’s a lot of vitality in a religion where spirituality feeds itself, is reflective or is called everything by everything, rather than just the church.” But where the author might have found religious mythologies inherent to and within cultural and historical shifts (as written into his second novel, Fiskadoro, which allegorizes the Christ in a post-apocalyptic future), Johnson spent the back half of his career removing nightmares, dreams, and prayer from his novels, and instead replacing them with earthen motifs of water, dirt, and acceleration, the very things we touch, see, and smell as we move about in our only guaranteed existence.
Evil Always Already Exists in Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist
Union Spring Literary Review, Summer 2025
The paradox of cinema sometimes comes into violent collision with the push into new phenomenological territory. Reducibly we are here to be entertained and persuaded, but then there’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi opening his latest film Evil Does Not Exist with six-minutes of tilt-panned tracking shots staring straight up the forested sky, slowly rolling under the trees of a small village in Nagano prefecture. He’s asking us, what are we thinking comes next?
Projections onto the scene meet the audience seated in their expectations. The act of buying a ticket and viewing the cinematic arts comes with its grounded genre realities, this is a drama, it will be dramatic. What we already know about nature and the unending great blue yonder above – as a source of life, of wonder, and of, principally, the state of nature distinct from human involvement – comes crashing down in vertical illusion onto the viewer suspended in place waiting for something violent to occur. This is merely presage.
It’s in that manner of addressing the cinematic arc, through the introduction of pensive backward gaze into the possibilities of the natural past, that Hamaguchi anchors his work with equal footing in the specters of human history as well as the ghosts of our impossibly collapsing future. Evil Does Not Exist tells the forward coming event of capital encroachment on the home village of Takumi Yasumura, played by Hitoshi Omika, which we know from trailers, reviews, and YouTube shorts, will involve the for-profit installation of a glamping campground that could (will? already has?) upend Yasumura’s ecological balance. And even if you caught the film without knowing that in advance, the teleological presence of the film’s title does the work for you – something wicked this way is coming. This is what makes the unbelief of cinema a tacit act in believing itself.
Commentary on a Better Future
Union Spring Literary Review, Winter 2024
I used to keep a printed copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The American Scholar in my US Army assault pack. Those are the backpacks issued to soldiers for use during foot marches and, well, assault. In carrying it like that, I had intended for The American Scholar to provide some kind of inspiration on regular occasions throughout my military career, a sort of annual reminder to keep my chin up. I knew Emerson’s speech would go with me everywhere that way and be there when I needed it. I folded it half and threw it in the hydration pocket near the back of the pack and usually forgot about it.
This all rushed back to me a couple of weeks ago for reasons I can’t recall. I think I was just in the middle of another of life’s crossings and wondering where to look for grounding as the memory came back. Most certainly in that particular moment I was probably meditating. I sit on pillows and close my eyes for a few minutes at a time. Thoughts come and go and I swat them away, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but whatever channel of recall that led me to remember that particular thing I used to do for a while, the carrying Emerson around thing, I knew immediately on recall that it was time for another read.
“In the right state, [the scholar] is,” Emerson spoke, “Man Thinking.” All printed editions of his oration capitalize those words. They’re not my words and they’re out of date, but he continues, “In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
I won’t linger on the obvious there. But let’s remember Emerson’s distinction between Thinking and the thinker as ways of being. One active and constant in state of work, the other static.
THOMAS JOHNSON 