Kajaki Press

Death on the Installment Plan

Tamim Ansary

Recently, someone asked me what books have had a big impact on my life. I went blank for a moment, even though, until I was in my 20’s, I inhaled books the way speed addicts snort coke. Then a novel popped into my head: Death on the Installment Plan, by Louis Ferdinand Celine. I read it the year I moved to San Francisco and started working for an outfit called The Asia Foundation, my first real job.

The novel is about a young boy from a very poor family in Paris whose parents are desperately trying to equip him for life by placing him in some situation that can grow into a career. Ah, but he’s a scamp, oblivious to his parents’ desperation. He just wants to run off and play, and what can you expect? He’s a little kid, that’s how little kids are: it’s the Pinocchio syndrome. And so we follow this kid through a series of circumstances his parents put him in, each one more hectic and awful than the last.

All of these episodes follow a pattern, but the one I remember best is when the little boy’s parents apprentice him to a man who publishes a magazine about inventions. It’s a bustling enterprise with a wide readership, because it’s the early 1900s, a boom-time for technology, and lots of people are fascinated by inventions. When our hero is given a place there as an errand boy, his parents feel like, phew! Finally, they’ve found a niche for him! Here, their little boy can learn marketable skills and become employable. What he’s got his foot on is the first rung of a ladder, and all he has to do now is climb that ladder, rung by rung, climb and climb: eventually he’ll be in a position to earn a living as a respectable member of society.

But a crucial portion of the magazine’s money, it turns out, comes from a contest it runs periodically for inventors. People send in blueprints of gizmos and gadgets they’ve invented, and the magazine picks a winner. They publish an article about this winner and give him a prize. The magazine has some status, so winning the contest confers prestige on the winner and gives him a leg up on securing a patent and getting investors interested.

But it does cost a little money to enter the contest. Not much, but a little. The magazine gives out only one cash prize, a sizable one, but the magazine rakes in tons of money, because most of the would-be inventors competing for the prize are kooks, basically, and there are tens of thousands of such kooks in France in this era. Eventually the kooks realize that 99.9% of them have no chance of winning the prize, and were never intended to, and they begin to picket the magazine. The pickets turns into protests, and soon mobs of kooks are closing in on the offices of the magazine. The publisher and the boy escape with their lives, and the boy goes back to being just another penniless urchin with desperate parents.

Later in the book, the parents get their son, now a young man, a job with a private school in England. He’ll be earning a salary, learning administrative skills, and picking up English, which will land him translation jobs in the trading sector when he gets back to France. What his parents don’t know, however, is that the school is coming unraveled. Its buildings need repairs, it owes money, some of the teachers have left. The school officials can’t let any hint of their troubles leak out to the parents or to anyone else really, because the school’s survival depends on the tuition money flowing in. That money will keep coming as long as the parents think the school is still running and their kids are actually getting an education. So the school officials keep publishing ads, keep sending out report cards, keep giving the parents and public a rosy picture of the learning environment—while in actuality, they’ve lost their buildings and property, they’re living in tents in the parks, and the remaining faculty and students have devolved into a horde of petty criminals foraging through the neighborhoods like feral creatures.

This book is embedded in my memory because as I was reading it, I saw that Celine was illustrating a profound truth about social reality—its existence depends entirely on belief. As long as everyone believes a social institution exists, it does exist. All the enterprises Celine dramatizes operate on the belief of others that they are what they say they are, and as long as the belief is solidly there, the enterprises do just fine, they can keep going. As soon as the belief starts to fade, the enterprise begins dissolving into an illusion.

As I mentioned, I was working for The Asia Foundation at the time: it was my first “real” job, by which I mean it was the first job I had that was appropriate for a person of my supposed credentials and social background. I was born into a family that enjoyed respect in Afghanistan on account of its intellectual traditions. I came to America where I was a curiosity from an exotic place that nobody had ever heard of at the time. Somehow this was a plus on a college applications. This distinction was the one real asset I brought to the table, but with this chip, I was able to get into some well-respected schools: first Carleton College, and then Reed, from which I graduated with a B.A. in literature. Presumably, this gave me the tools to make something of myself; but I didn’t know how to make any actual thing of myself. For the first six years after graduating college, I had lots of jobs but none that required the college degree I had earned. I was an assembly worker in a furniture factory, then a warehouse clerk, then a postal worker, then a waiter.

The only thing I really knew how to do was read books for edification and enjoyment; so the only thing I could think to be was a writer. The works I liked to read were short stories and novels, both literary and commercial. So when I sat down to do what writers do, I wrote short stories and novels. I sent the former out to magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly; then to literary magazine such as the Paris Review and Ploughshares; then to eccentric little literary magazines such as Jabberwacky and Briccolage—oh, you haven’t heard of those? Well, that’s my point. Even those magazines, which paid only in contributor copies, usually sent back form-letter rejection slips. With those rejection slips, they sometimes included subscription forms.

Sometimes, these magazines which paid zilch also charged money for reading your work. If you wanted to submit something for consideration, you were welcome to do so: you just needed to include a check for ten dollars and a stamped, self-addressed return envelope. Sometimes, some of these magazines ran contests. The winner got a cash prize and a credit to tout when they went to publishers with their novel.

Such was the world I saw around me the year I was reading Death on the Installment plan and working at the Asia Foundation. Celine was describing both the Asia Foundation where I was working and the world of literary magazines that I was trying to push my way into.

And what was The Asia Foundation? It wasn’t something that existed in objective reality as a material fact. It was an idea that existed in the social landscape only because many people could see it. We told the world we were an entity that sent people to poor underdeveloped parts of Asia, places like Afghanistan; there, our people looked for interesting projects that needed just a little money to get over some hump; and we gave them that little bit of money. Wherever we did this, seeds sprouted and good things grew. By making this case, we convinced people who had money to give us some of that money so we could do this wonderful thing that we did.

Were we really watering seeds that grew into lush gardens? Well, you know, nothing’s perfect. As long as people believed we were doing it, the money kept coming in. We all got salaries. We paid our rent. We bought groceries, we went out to eat. We took vacations. Belief was the fire we had to keep feeding, in order to keep our enterprise going.

Let me interrupt myself to note: The Asia Foundation actually was busy trying to do what it said, and it did have some good projects, and it might have been doing them too, for all I know. But what did I know: I was in San Francisco, the projects were in Asia. The point I want to press is this: whether or not we were successfully doing what we said, we would have said we were, because our existence depended on saying it and on people believing it to be true.

As soon as I saw this about the Asia Foundation, I could see it in everything around me: because the landscape I lived in most significantly was not the physical world but social reality. Social reality felt as solid as the material facts of the physical universe I could see with my eyes and touch with my fingers. Yet its fundamental substance was nothing but a fabric of belief shared among a crowd of people. Clubs and countries and corporations, fellowships and foundations and communities—they all felt like they existed in the same way as rocks and rivers and clouds, but actually, they existed only as incarnations of belief. Mountains are something we see because they are there. Countries by contrast are there because we see them. This was the idea that emerged for me out of Celine’s novel Death on the Installment Plan, back in 1978, when I was working at the Asia Foundation, laboring to be a writer who would, I assumed, not be appreciated until long after he was dead.

Memoir: How Memory Works

What’s your earliest memory?

Someone posed that question one day, when a bunch of us were sitting around chatting idly about life. I didn’t have to think about it.

Or at least—thinking had nothing to do with what abruptly happened. An earliest-memory flashed up inside me immediately, bright with color, rich with detail. I don’t know if it was actually my “earliest” memory, but it was certainly a very early one. I must have been about three.

Since then, I’ve lost access to the memory itself. I cannot now see all that color, all those details. What I have left, now, of that “earliest memory” is just data: just information. But when I recount the information, I experience brief glimmering glimpses of a remembered life. Each flash sets off another flash which sets off another flash, which sets off another and another, because that’s how memory works: link to link to link.

I can say with confidence now, for example, that we lived in Kabul when this remembered episode happened. My father taught something, I never knew what, at the University. My mother taught English at Malalai, the first girls’ school in Afghanistan. My parents also had a classical Western music program on Radio Kabul, which aired once a week. They did the show live, which means they went to the studio on those nights, and played records on the radio. We at home—my sister Rebecca and I—listened to the radio on those nights. The program intro was the William Tell Overture. I can still hum that tune on command.

My mother was ferociously devoted to classical Western music, and my father seemed equally devoted, although he had other interests as well. He listened, frowning, to the news in the evenings, which was delivered in both Farsi and Pushto on Kabul Radio. After the news he listened to the local musicians they broadcast: Ustad Sarahang is the one I remember: a classical master.

Kabul Radio played popular Indian music as well. But we didn’t have to listen to Kabul Radio to get Indian music. We had a record player of our own at home—a record player! An amazing new piece of technology at the time, at least in Afghanistan. And we had popular Indian and Arabic records to play on our record player: there was Lata Mangashkar, the foremost pop singer of India at the time. She sold way more records than Elvis Presley ever did, if I’m not mistaken. And later we had Ferouz records: she was the leading female pop singer of the Arab world. The record were ‘78s: about the size of dinner plates and made of hard plastic. The smaller “45s” that played a single song on each side came later; and the thin, flexible discs known as 33s, later still.

We lived in a yard surrounded by a wall, and we kids never wandered out of that compound by ourselves. But we traveled sometimes, with family, to other compounds. I have vague impressionistic memories of weddings, and of being at my grandmother Koko’s house. I have memories of her and others, telling stories around the sandali, a big low table set in the middle of the room and covered with a heavy blanket. Under the table was a pan with hot coals. We kids and adult storytellers sat around the table, under the blanket, huddled together warm and cozy, listening with rapt attention to stories filled with magic and fabulist imagery.

I have a couple of sharp memories of riding on the back of a bike about that time, with my cousin Khalil operating the pedals. He was probably 10 years older than me, an adult to my eyes: I remember him taking me somewhere beyond the traffic circle that interrupted Deh Mazang Highway, the road nearest to our house, a ten-minute ride across an empty field–unless a band of nomads was camped there. They came every so often and when they did, you had to skirt their encampment. You didn’t want to get close to that ominous clump of black tents. Big mastiffs with enormous jaws patrolled the environs of the nomad camp.

My best friend at that time was Suleiman Shah, a boy who lived in our yard. I was told his family were kinar-nisheens of ours. Kinar-nisheen means “the ones in the corner.” They were a poor family living in the corner of our life. We lived at the edge of the city, and it wasn’t good to be alone out there, because bandits sometimes came over the walls at night. Daddy, as we called our father, felt that we would be safer with more people in the yard, so he found this other family and gave them rooms separate from ours but within the protection of our same walls. They didn’t pay rent, they didn’t work for us, they weren’t our servants. They had their own life separate from ours. The mother was the homemaker for that family. She had a baby, and a boy my age, and she cooked and cleaned and shopped for her family. The man of that family went out and did some job somewhere.

They didn’t work for us, but there was never any doubt that they were on a social level below ours. I don’t remember some revelatory moment when I realized all this, and after I realized it, I had no judgment of it. I was busy trying to bring the world into focus. Where was I? Who was I? What was this place? What was I doing here? What was I supposed to be doing? Who were these people I was living with? What was going on in this place? As the picture came into focus, a life that was mine came into focus. As this life came into focus, I came into focus, for myself. The person living this life? That person was me. Who was I? The person living this life. Now I understood. Sort of.

Me and the little boy of this other family were buddies. He was a street-wise kid. I was very fragile, very much in danger of being broken. I knew this to be the case because my mother let me know. I should never leave the yard alone, I should be very cautious around strangers. Everyone I met might mean me harm. My buddy’s family wasn’t precious about him. If he wanted to go out, he could go out. He didn’t have to ask anyone, he just went. No one tracked him or set schedules for him. To me, therefore, he was the guy who knew what was what out there in the wilds. From him I could learn.

We used to hang out in the kinar-awb and talk naughty. The kinar-awb was the outhouse. It’s where people went to poop, so it smelled like shit in there, but I didn’t notice the smell much, it was just a normal part of where I lived. And there I sat with Suleiman Shah, on a little built-in mud bench, and he told me about his adventures in the world outside the compound walls. He told me he regularly sneaked into all the other compounds in the neighborhood. In many of them, he told me, he had girlfriends and he fucked them regularly.

We were, let me emphasize, four or five years old at this point.

Sometimes, he told me, he refused to fuck one of his girlfriends and this made her very distraught, he said, very sad. I listened goggle-eyed to these reports. What a world it was out there! How I wished my mother would let me go out there sometime. I had no idea what fucking was, but it sounded like kite flying, from the way Suleiman Shah talked . On Fridays, sometimes, dozens of boys flocked to that big empty field outside our compound and flew kites. I wasn’t allowed out there, and I didn’t know how to make or fly a kite, but I longed to try it. If fucking was anything like kite-flying, I wanted to try that too, if I ever got a chance. I knew I never would, of course. A guy like me? Not a chance. But a boy can dream.

These are some of the memories I can get to, link by link, from that vivid glimpse that flared inside me when someone posed the question “What’s your earliest memory?” The memory itself, however, I can no longer access. My access to the vivid moment itself has washed away like a bridge in some storm. The information remains, but not the lived experience of three-year-old Tamim, not the aroma of hot chocolate on that morning, nor the rainbow-colored bubbles in the chocolate, nor the emotion that swamped that boy when the meaning of the bubbles hit him. Today, I remember that moment only as the image that flashed in me when the question was asked: only as a fleeting fragment of a larger, later memory.

So today, I can only access the rainbow-colored bubbles in that hot chocolate through the memory of an afternoon in 1973, in a house in Portland, Oregon, on the corner of 27th and Main Street, when twenty-five year old Tamim was telling the story of his earliest memory, to Margo, who lived in that house, and to Beth Glazer, whom I met there. Margo I still know, but Beth I never saw again after I left Portland.

But even as I write these words I realize that, no: that actual memory is gone too, because I wrote about the day the question was posed when I was fifty years old and writing a book called Road Trips, a memoir about the Portland years. So today, when I bring up the earliest-memory-story, what I’m actually experiencing is being fifty years old and working on Road Trips.

And someday, I realize, all of this will exist only as a memory of 76-year-old Tamim, sitting in his basement office, late one November morning, in San Francisco, working on a post for this website.

Philosophy: Majoring in Leadership

What if Genghis Khan had gone to college?

I pose the question because many colleges now offer courses in “leadership,” and I’m wondering: could Genghis have profited from those?

Or Napoleon, for that matter? What distinguishes a Napoleon Bonaparte from a Billy-Bob Bonaparte? Can the quality be packaged into a course? You know what I’m thinking:

Could I (with the proper schooling) .. be the next Napoleon?

Age-old quest

People have long wondered if there were techniques one could learn to become a great leader. Books like Machiavelli’s The Prince provided cynical advice for how to wield power successfully, advice that was positively. . . um, Machiavellian. But these books didn’t tell you how to become a leader-type if you weren’t one already.

In the 19^th century, sociologists launched systematic studies of leadership in their quest to understand organizations. Their inquiries bubbled along for decades, but they went pretty much unnoticed by anyone outside academia.

Then in the 1960s the real world crashed into the ivory tower. Disenfranchised groups of every stripe demanded access to power. Gates were grudgingly opened.

But opening gates wasn’t enough, as it turned out. There was also something in the excluded groups themselves that held them back from taking charge. Feminists, for example, saw a need for “assertiveness training workshops” to restore a trait that society had suppressed in women. Analogous programs sprouted for African Americans and other minorities. All of this ferment soon exposed an inconvenient fact: no one really knew what made leaders leaderly.

It was then that a century of academic interest in the subject acquired new relevance. Out of this interaction between social need and sociological research came a new discipline known as leadership studies.

Before this time, American universities had offered leadership training only incidentally in the form of “campus activities.” Prospective leaders cut their teeth in college by going into student government or organizing frat parties.

By the late eighties, however, over 600 colleges and universities were offering formal leadership courses, and soon courses of this type proliferated throughout and beyond the universities. Today, corporations sponsor countless workshops for executives and managers. Every sizable city has development centers for aspiring civic leaders. In America, the state department, the military, the CIA, and many other branches of government have programs of their own. Leadership is widely treated as a subject to be taught and learned, just like medicine or law or ancient Sanskrit poetry. But…

What is a leader?

The simplicity of the question is deceptive.

Is a leader “a person who runs things?” No, that’s a boss.

And although every leader may in some sense be a boss, every boss is certainly not a leader.

The irreducible minimum definition of a leader is “someone with followers,” but that bare bones formulation begs the question: Why do some people (and not others) attract followers?

History has seen a parade of theories. Sociologist Max Weber speculated that leadership involves a mysterious force that some people are just born with, which he called charisma. But what charisma was, or how to get some, if you didn’t have any, Weber couldn’t tell you.

Some have said leadership isn’t in a person but in a whole situation and how any given person fits into it. A leader in one context might be a loser in another. This theory would say the French Revolution created Napoleon, and if Genghis Khan were transported to a modern American university, he wouldn’t be in the student senate, he’d be in jail (perhaps after organizing some frat parties).

In fact, given the right situation, according to this view, anyone can be a leader. Picture, for example, a group hiking through the woods. If they meet a bear, the short, weak, stupid, cowardly guy might well be the first to do the right thing and bolt, followed by the others, making him suddenly—briefly—the leader!

Leadership theorists often discriminate between power, authority, and leadership. A man with a gun has power, but that’s not leadership. A supervisor has authority, but that’s not leadership either.

Leaders don’t push, they pull. They don’t enforce, they inspire. Leaders lead, which implies a destination, someplace to be that isn’t here. They attract followers by flashing a light ahead, and starting in that direction and radiating conviction about going that way.

The corporate world bristles with seminars and workshops that purport to teach leadership, but what they actually teach is management.

Managers don’t start things, they keep things going. Management is a content area, like medicine. Anyone can see that practicing medicine requires expert knowledge. If we don’t have medical schools, we won’t have doctors. But if we don’t have leadership schools, we’ll still have leaders, because humans clump into groups and follow someone; that’s our nature.

What a leader does, fundamentally, is get many individuals to operate as some single entity. A leader does this by articulating a vision that strikes a chord and builds a narrative that people believe in and feel themselves to be a part of. All the specific mechanisms of leadership may go into achieving this: charisma’s in there, favorable personality traits play a part, a conducive situation is an ingredient…

Before the fact, however, if an aspiring leader were to ask a teacher how to forge some vague milling mass of separate individuals into a cohesive group united by a great purpose, the answer would reside in a vision yet to be articulated. In that sense, leadership is like poetry. Can you teach people to be poets? Yeah, sort of. You can improve their language skills, build their vocabulary, teach them about rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration, show them great poems others have written… all this will enable the poet in them to emerge and shine—if they have a poet in them.