The Unmoving Grasshopper and the Oddball Friends Who Say “I Love You”
Reading Josef Pieper while thinking about a jarful of goose guts and a shock of hair.
September 30, 2025
I was in Atlanta for a few weeks in 2022 to be an extra in a Marvel space opera. Weekends in my crappy motel I worked, ate, and tried to get some rest.
Matt, a veteran paratrooper friend who “got blowed up” in Afghanistan, called from Texas one Saturday night. He never remembers that he does not keep me up on his life, and began to race into a story for which I had no context. He seemed mildly irritated when I interrupted to ask him to clarify something he said about his wife, whom I called by name.
“She was never my wife,” he said with some surprise.
It was hard to respond at the pace of conversation. What about their wedding photos on Facebook? I finally asked. The congratulations and warm wishes in the comments? And all those posts about her grounding him and making him a better man?
They had been partnered for a time, Matt said, but the marriage ceremony was faked so their kids from previous marriages could feel more settled. Anyway, they were no longer together, and he was married, again, for real, to a different woman entirely.
He continued. His wife had been working her side hustle as a server at a local bar, and she called to say a group of guys were harassing her. Matt went down there, and in the argument that followed one of the guys pretended to be a peacemaker and held Matt back by the arms. While he was restrained, the peacemaker’s buddy punched him. Matt’s PTSD rage kicked in. He fought all five guys at once and broke one of their faces—a surprise to them both, he said. The man’s family was connected in that county, and Matt said he might go to prison for this one, but it would give him time to write his novel and quit smoking. He was taking legal advice from a high-level lawyer who had been at DoD or State. Matt knew many people with experience in multiple sectors of life.
I began to pace the hard, dirty carpet. Life was stranger and more complex than any comic book movie I might hope to write about.
Matt’s PTSD rage kicked in. He fought all five guys at once and broke one of their faces—a surprise to them both, he said.
Matt told me that Mean Mulligan was his “brother” now. I remembered we had met someone who called himself Mean Mulligan several years earlier in San Antonio, when the man and his wife were walking their pit bull and mother-and-son Chihuahuas through Matt’s neighborhood. Mulligan was a contractor and a biker who cosplayed, daily, as a steampunk time traveler in a top hat, goggles, and vested outfit.
I had brought a street photographer with me on that visit, to cover the Southside Dirties Motorcycle Club, who hoped to get sponsorship from the Bandidos MC, and he loved shooting Mulligan. They got along famously. (That was also the visit during which someone I considered a friend called, sobbing, to say they had collapsed at work and had been diagnosed with malignant kidney tumors. We discussed it at great length, maybe hours. The next day they said they lied about it all.) Matt and Mean Mulligan went on to become good friends and then business partners.
Mulligan went shirtless now and was baked dark by the sun, Matt said, but his guts were divided by a hernia in some sphincter, “so he basically has two stomachs.”
“Jesus,” I said.
Matt laughed and told me that he, Matt, had decided to be an influencer. Everybody else was doing it. He was “gonna put goose guts and yellow liquid grease in a jar with a shock of hair on top and carry it around the country,” posting photos of it on Instagram. He had already taken it to the Grand Canyon on a holiday trip with his family. It would go viral and make money.
I began to pace the hard, dirty carpet. Life was stranger and more complex than any comic book movie I might hope to write about.
Matt was interested in my gig with the movie production, but for an unexpected reason. He said Disney security was “a 10,” the best, which was widely known through the intelligence community. His buddy had been hired to build out some big corporation’s security division and based it on Disney’s.
“Their GSOC is fucking incredible,” he said. (GSOC, I learned later, meant a Global Security Operations Center.) “All those guys are CIA or Delta, maybe it goes down to Ranger battalions, but that’s a stretch. Disney needs to keep China from ripping them off and keep terrorists out of parks and off their cruise ships.”
When he said goodbye, Matt told me, as he often does, “I love you, brother,” and I said I loved him too.
Why is it only certain characters among my friends—the recovered addict who got rich from disaster services, the photographer who did federal time on a RICO conviction, the former scout and paratrooper with traumatic brain injury—tell me they love me? My polite friends, the “normal” ones, the ones with long, seemingly solid marriages and steady white-collar jobs and no priors, do not say such things, despite often having been in my life longer or more directly.
• • •
I finally wrote about being an extra a couple of months ago and told a young friend about my usual problems: finding shape for the material, teasing out second-level meanings, building in motifs, compression, coherence, tone. I told Sam about Matt’s call and how his mishmash of stories did not fit my piece but might have been used for something possibly better, something on the world’s dizzying weirdness intruding on more banal productions.
“Is Matt okay?” Sam said worriedly, choosing a different story. “Because a bottle with hair on it doesn’t sound right.”
Plenty of things trip my breaker for alarm—violence, chief among them—but a mild satire of pop culture does not. (I follow a guy on Insta who dresses as a coked-up disco lizard and feeds cereal manically to a pig with a shared spoon, as a cockatoo dances to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.” That’s it, video after video. In our time, it feels downright wholesome.)
I said Matt just had an enlisted person’s sense of humor and an appreciation for the surreal.
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I’m around a lot of people at work who have been in the military and that doesn’t sound normal to me.”
Matt laughed and told me that he, Matt, had decided to be an influencer. Everybody else was doing it. He was “gonna put goose guts and yellow liquid grease in a jar with a shock of hair on top and carry it around the country,” posting photos of it on Instagram.
I did not point out that Sam had worked the office job for a year and had never experienced the indentured servitude of enlisted life, where the only release from its boredom and misery comes with the end of a multi-year contract, or by maiming or death.
What we can understand determines how we take (and tell) stories. “The book is a bodied mind,” says William Gass in Finding a Form. My interest is always in making that book better.
• • •
About that time, I was also reading the postwar German Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper (1904-1997), whom I got to by way of Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s essay collection A Defense of Ardor.
Both writers are interested in how perception (often at foundational levels we might call personality or even soul) figures in the way we can think and feel as we search among seeming dichotomies such as earth/heaven, despair/hope, work/leisure, and knowing/not-knowing.
The real question for them is: Which sort of poet/philosopher gets it most right by seeing most comprehensively, and so fulfills a creative life/grows closer to God?
Pieper begins “The Philosophical Act” (the second essay in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, originally published in German in 1948) with an example drawn from science. Pieper explains how biologist Jacob von Uexküll (who originated the idea of Umwelt: “environment” or “self-world,” picked up by Heidegger) published a study that showed that crows cannot “see” grasshoppers, their prey, if the insects do not move.
“Up to that time, as Uexküll himself puts it,” Pieper says, “’it was generally assumed that all animals with eyes saw the same objects.’” (95) Pieper gives Uexküll the longest block quote in the book, which ends, “If [grasshoppers’] motionless form simply does not exist in the field of vision of their enemies…they drop out of that world with absolute certainty and cannot be found even though searched for.” (96)
Because, Pieper says, “the world is a field of relations,” and to “have a world is to be the center, the coordinator, of a field of relations,” he uses Uexküll to define levels of perceptual relations. A stone, he says, has no “world” that it perceives. A plant does, in a fashion, because it turns to the sun and reaches for water.
Both Josef Pieper and Adam Zagajewski are interested in how perception (often at foundational levels we might call personality or even soul) figures in the way we can think and feel as we search among seeming dichotomies such as earth/heaven, despair/hope, work/leisure, and knowing/not-knowing.
Animals, he says, are higher in the hierarchy: “The animal’s capacity to establish relations is greater in so far as it is capable of being sensibly and sensually aware; ‘to be aware’ of a thing is an entirely new mode of relating itself to a thing…a new manner of relating itself to the ‘outside,’” which includes the ability to extend its world by moving around. (95)
Humans, higher still for Pieper, have “the capacity for spiritual knowledge…the power of establishing relations with the whole of reality….” (98) Yet even though “the spiritual being” is “capable of grasping the whole of being,” (99-100) most of us are caught up in the everyday life of “common need.” This is his argument from the first half of the book, where “common need” is “the world of work in so far as work is synonymous with doing things for useful ends” (78). To be stuck in it is something like being a hungry crow for whom the quiet grasshopper is invisible.
Piper says there should be (and is, in some societies) a larger category of “common good,” which would include “another [philosophical/spiritual] voice” “among the myriad voices in the factories and on the market square (Where can we get this, that or the other?)—that all of a sudden” asks, “’Why, after all, should there be such a thing as being? Why not just nothing?’” (80)
Pieper says societies that have lost the ability to nurture this kind of openness to “the whole of being” often focus exclusively on artes serviles (the creation of products and services) and turn away from the vitality of artes liberales (21), which can have a hard time justifying themselves, as in a world of market fascination and technology that now includes AI.
(Interestingly, neither the stock markets nor AI are well understood, even by those fully invested in their utility. Recent attacks on higher education in the US could be seen in part as anger at the thought of being slowed in the wider use of instrumental systems by irritating questions about their consequences, to include extinction. “Surely the sudden effect of poetry in the realm of means and ends comes as strange and remote as a philosophical question,” Pieper says, echoing the plight of humanities departments across the country. [81])
If someone with worldly experience and a satirical personality puts a shock of hair on a bottle of goose guts, props it up at tourist sites, and posts photos of it online as if it were a celebrity, he implies unpleasant things—about social media and the attention economy, e.g.—that could be seen as an unwelcome shout of, “Why not just nothing?” (The object, after all, is exactly as desirable as many others being sold.)
• • •
Pieper’s (and Zagajewski’s and most any good writer’s) project is to perceive more of the world, inner and outer, and still be able to live with that knowledge. This may be more difficult in an era such as ours, with its assumption of dehumanizing “total work,” which Pieper illustrates with a quote from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: “One does not work to live; one lives to work….”
(Weber footnotes hymnist Nicolaus Zinzendorf (d. 1760), who says, [“I]f there is no more work to do one suffers or goes to sleep.” Doomscrolling, used as “brain rot” distraction, puts our suffering to work for the corporations too. Now if only they could indenture our sleep.)
The solution to better perception, Pieper believes, is leisure. Not as we know it, with “leisure goods,” or Travel + Leisure; not as consumption or “idleness…the very opposite of leisure,” but as Aristotle knew it, “a form of silence [that] is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality.” (46) Pieper points out that the Greek word for leisure is skole, the Latin scola, which becomes the English word “school.” (19) Freed from manual labor or other drudgeries, you go to school to be “open to everything” (47) and do the work of active study and contemplation, the outer and inner ways of knowing.
The other half of the project—living with what you learn—may be the trickier part. Even the rewards (senses of “wonder” and “marvel”) from “spiritual” study, which includes the liberal arts, are open-ended wins. Secular or religious, one must live with mystery.
The solution to better perception, Pieper believes, is leisure. Not as we know it, with “leisure goods,” or Travel + Leisure; not as consumption or “idleness…the very opposite of leisure,” but as Aristotle knew it, “a form of silence [that] is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality.”
In his title essay, “A Defense of Ardor,” Zagajewski refers to Plato’s metaxu: existing “in between…our (so we suppose) comprehensible, concrete, material surroundings, and transcendence [which] defines the situation of the human, a being who is incurably ‘en route.’”
(That would have been useful for a different piece about working as a “humanoid” space refugee for Marvel.)
“We’ll never manage, after all, to settle permanently in transcendence,” Zagajewski says. “We’ll never even fully learn its meaning.” (9-10)
And what about managing—here I begin to speak of myself—the combination of jagged and soft things learned in one walk-around life?
My own study has led me to believe that the original mystery was and remains presence, difference, juxtaposition, weirdness, violence, cruelty, loss, discovery, beauty, and compassion.
Zagajewski’s answer is this: “For those who try to think and write…we can come to rest neither on the heights nor on the ground [so] we must keep close watch on our selves and—if we seek a higher reality—guard against the rhetoric to which some pious persons fall prey.” (11)
Pieper, of course, must answer eventually with “faith”—that is, theology over philosophy, for which he makes his most direct but weakest argument near the end of Leisure:
In the act of philosophizing, man’s relationship to being as a whole is realized—he is face to face with the whole of reality; that was how we defined it. But long before the appearance of philosophy on the historical scene, from time immemorial, man has always had a given interpretation of the world and a meaning to attach to reality…. ‘From time immemorial’ man has been born into a doctrinal religious tradition offering an image of the world in its totality. […] Some theologians have held that these primitive traditions can be traced back to a first, original revelation, traced back to a communication granted to mankind ‘in the beginning’…a revelation overgrown and encrusted with accretions but still surviving in the myths and traditions of all peoples. This is not the place to pursue this particular train of thought. (127)
But the mass of Pieper’s Leisure can be read as a text with catholic, not just Catholic, interests. He writes so straightforwardly that it is easy to mentally translate a few key terms as you read and have it be, I dare say, useful to your own search for understanding. In fact, I can see the book as a sort of great, warm kitchen party with people from many different sectors in meaningful conversation: scholars of the early Church, poets, philosophers, Buddhists, secular staff writers from university publications, and not a few odd veterans.
Here, for instance, in this warning from Pieper, I swap out the word “pray/prayer” for “write,” even before he begins to speak eventually of “spurious poetry” and “utilitarian verse.” You can substitute your own word:
It is possible to [write] in such a way that one does not transcend the world, in such a way that the divine is degraded to a functional part of the workaday world. Religion can be debased into magic. Then it is no longer devotion to the divine, but an attempt to master it. [Writing] can be perverted in this way, into a sort of technique whereby life under the dome is feasible. Moreover, love too can assume a debased form in which all the powers of devotion are bent to serve the ends of a limited ego. That debasement springs from timid self-defense against the shock of the greater, deeper world that can be entered only by one who truly loves. (83)
My own study has led me to believe that the original mystery was and remains presence, difference, juxtaposition, weirdness, violence, cruelty, loss, discovery, beauty, and compassion. It is a lot to hold, all at once, but I keep trying to extend my perception of the world, out and in. If you have read to this sentence, you will recognize that I have also tried to mimic the problem by using a form for this essay that contains both the blowed-up and the oft-cited.
When certain friends tell me they love me, I hear their acknowledgement of a mutual attempt to hold jagged things in the mind with soft ones. “Love is the highest form of knowing,” says Augustine. No timid self-defense.
Another book. Another call. More marvels.
