Bianco Luno: Notebook IX

Bianco Luno

Notebook IX
9/8/1993 – 9/26/1994

a variety of cockroach

The reason why I write in the morning (and sometimes upon waking in the middle of the night).
Toward the end of each day, it seems to lose point.
In the idiot morning everything happens as though it had never happened before: the darkness is strangely inconceivable.
By afternoon I feel chased, alerted to the special circumstances of the minute.
Each one has earned the mortal appellation 'now' by then.

Human contact?
It is a sign of my still undeveloped respect for animals that only my cat receives my spontaneous touch.
I have become so sensitive to the claims of humans that this kind of behavior toward them has become an imposition.
I vent my sadism only on the soft fur around his neck.
Are we to listen to the individual and respect just those claims he or she volunteers?
Should we devise rules that cover every case, just in case?
I am not complaining that I don't know how to act—for I do.
I am remarking the direction: The dire tendency to moral suicide; the moral tendency to destroy oneself or to feel the inappropriateness of life in each breath.
A child senses the normative when it is asked to behave.
It must sound as though I am being normative, exhorting you to some reform, but I am not.
I am saying go right ahead: die—only gracefully, I am impelled by this will to grace to add.

The last image to wear off the face of rocks will be the nostalgia for a time when desire was beautiful above all else.

Sensitivity breeds resentment.

Lawrence believed somehow we might arrest this development and even set ourselves back a little.
Mellor's bouncing buttocks,¹ as an emblem, express the alternative to the correct perception that we are adjusting to the morality subtending among stones.
His Christ, appalled at this enervation, equally as tragic as the Christian one, substituted semen for tears as the fluid of his hope.²

I'm trying not to make it my hope that you do anything gracefully.

I would rather excuse myself from all this, as one might at the trial and execution of a war criminal.³
Owing to monumental self-restraint, I have not become one yet.
Since I cannot find it anywhere in my heart the sacredness of your life—not the sacredness of life generally, since I don't pretend to know from where that notion might stem—I strive to convince myself that the landscape would be wanting without you in it.
You ought then to enchant me with your decorative value.

Why then does it pain me to kill the fleas or disturb the spiders in my room?
The malice induced in me at the sight of the specifically human overcomes my self-effacement before nature.
Unable to comprehend both the hatefulness of consciousness and its inevitability, I am bitter.
Instead, you might have me celebrate but that would lead to callousness too ugly for me and my penchant for grace.
It is just conceivable to celebrate without ugliness (Lispector, Wittgenstein, Porchia come to mind), to attain an intermittent but genuine transcendence.
Such a state, delicate as it is, is born of a pure sadism that I guess you would not openly endure.
I say 'openly' because you probably do suffer it, but not in the face of your children, those of your flesh, hubris or velleity.

Whose heart do you break when you tell a child the truth—when you strip a hope to its genitals?

"The serpent and the dove..."
Kant used to repeat.
Tall order aside, he was being humorous.

From the prayer of a man possessed by wrath:
"Now I must choose between loving or hating.
I know that to love is slower, and urgency devours me.
Cover my fury with your love, for I also know that my wrath is simply not to love, my wrath is to cope with the unbearable responsibility of not being a plant.
I am a plant which senses its own omnipotence and yields to panic."
—Lispector⁴

Picture a celebration.
I am having difficulty.

Like any little boy's mother, I will have my heart broken.
When he leaves me, when he dies, this always half-feral cat.
As a survivor I will have a tangible sorrow to chasten me.
I vainly scramble through these abstractions to brace myself.
The old logicians' joke about the inexperienceableness of death, hence our immortality ("When I am alive, I'm not dead; when dead, I am not.") has this much truth in it: Death is an event only for non-participants.

Hate recalls love only in the sense that it also wishes your utter destruction.
To be hated is to be an offence to the beautiful in the landscape.
As with other aesthetic judgements we are more passionate about what we find fetching or repulsive than about a stricture or ground rule of that scape.
It would consume you in a less patient, more seismic cataclysm in contrast to the erosion of affection, polishing its stones with nervous care.

We are free after and before the fact of behavior: Not on the threshold of the fact.
Verbal freedom is ours in the discussion of what we could have done and in what we plan to do, and since it is in these tenses that memory and aspiration reside— together constituting the mass of what we call our lives—of course, we can say we have free will.
The New Year, for instance, is celebrated in anticipation, at the countdown or in the first moments of the succeeding year.
Celebration, as any human act, occupies time, and in that unimaginably brief division between past and future there is no human time in which to act.
It is not even clear that we have a presence at that cusp; hardly could we act freely.
But we permit ourselves to make resolutions and to take responsibility for acts as long ago as now.
This is done from spite, the ore of finer passions.

Why this mendicant and not that?
Shall I slip him alms or the other?
Somedays my heart bleeds more or my hand is looser or my wealth disturbs me—but most often spite drives me:
The signs in shops that say not to give them money (for it will only be spent on alcohol).
At the zoo, the signs about not feeding the animals...
Charity also offers an opportunity for the spread of hatred.
This one and not that one because when I passed that one it was the busy ones, the properly socialized, the vectored statuary, who were, at the time, experiencing my charity.
Today, that one will just have to suffer through no effort on my part.

Does it soften the surgical contours of pain to know—if one can even know at the time—one is being observed by another, suffering for the privilege?
Walking home last week, among fallen Italian prune leaves, near the sidewalk, frightened of my approach even in its throes, snapped spine, front legs dragging, it struggled with its rear legs alone to push its twisted upper torso away from me and over on its side to see me clearly with its one upturned eye, an unnatural bulge on its chest.
From its one remaining eye it viewed me.
Its nerves persisted tugging muscles...
The right thing to do, I thought, is to crush its neck with my shoe... I walked on.
The next day at the same place in the same last position, but still and cold.

I have no memory from before the point when ignorance became culpable, that is to say, became stupidity for me and all my acts ones of cowardice.

Fatalism is self-evident as explanation in history, but not, for us, available without self-incrimination as an excuse.

The play of etiquette among nerves is the grace I was referring to.
That, it was hoped, would see us through the responsibilities of stupidity and the storm of nameless emotions.

(Imaginary principle:)
It's important that through our sensibilities we distress the surface of morality, erode its platitudes, so that when pitted against a formidable pain, it will crumble, revealing a void in which the residue may echo.
A sound without substance, cause or consequence which we should be prepared to find lovely.

Nature.
As capable of crime.
It must have been cruel of her to cut down this hapless squirrel even with the aid of a human conveyance at this time of year when it is driven to range frantically across paved expanses.
The cold fog, her justice, cooled the chemicals in the plum leaves.

In possession of the truth, these oracular intonations are intended to mow our weedy opinions.
Why I can agree with you that maybe we would do better to listen to a more diverting song on occasion.
But my tolerance for that kind of music is undeveloped.

The "basically good" are so because they die very young; as for the rest, they also die young, but the vinegar of lies preserves them for a long time before the earth totally mulches them.

Bathing is entirely related to this guilt about untimely burial.

If I said, "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are basically evil at heart," I would be as much a liar as Anne Frank, only not of the sort who is loved.

"You sound dead."
Even Cioran might say this of me.
An arsonist, he'd tire watching me watch structures turn spongy under moss.
Would that it were true and I would have an easier time of it struggling with impatience at culpable ignorance.
I want, for instance, before it's too late and the last ones die, to tell a concentration camp survivor that Hitler is to be celebrated, that I may experience the level of denseness— impermeable to reflection—of the one who will console me when my cat dies by saying he was just a cat, his passing natural and predictable, my attachment disproportional.
This disproportion, the stupidity of which is infinitely curious to me, the sun in winter cannot apologize enough for.
When a child lies, isn't it pure charm?

Picture a deity (or just an ordinary person, for that matter) extracting her delight from the sight of slow tortuous deaths over a span of sixty to eighty years or so.

Children have to be very young before I am able to sense their innocence.
I wonder if I've ever seen a child that young.

The kindest thing to be said about Cioran is that he is in the possession of truth.
n.b., the distinction between being in possession of and being the possession of: The latter is genius, while the former is a disability, akin to the virtue of the one-legged mountain scaler, the ruthless ambition of self-effacement.
A dizzying feature of the connection is the intoxicating self-regard which results.
The experience is rewarding, as these things go.

The impulse to extract a moral...

The truth is indelibly written on the face of things (notwithstanding its illegibility) and ever a temptation to the imagination to decipher.
"Communication", she says, "not 'truth' is the thing. It secures a survival, a space for us to live in. The truth is blankness."
Another thing I'm not good at.
Without irony, a little sadly and despite appearances: Survival, all to itself, is indulgence to the point of being wasteful.
Nothing in Nature quite resembles the truth, which truly does have the look of a blank wall.
So what obsesses me, standing outside Nature, is meaninglessness itself.
"Outside?"
If I am not allowed to pretend, if I am confined to what I am obviously confined to, if we bloat the concept of Nature to such inclusiveness that my blank wall is imported into your secured space,....
I think you would just as soon have me stay boy and quaint.
"I talk to you, and you talk about it."

"Perhaps I am too polite to strike you dead but this is hardly excuse for you to carry on as you do."

The discovery of oneself in another is less of a task for the imagination, requisite in compassion, than the transmogrification of self into the other.
Attainment of this out-of-soul experience is futile, though its pursuit an enhancement in moral quality.
So, in all but the strangest cases, compassion salvages by evisceration.

A lie can sometimes—by dint of its naked beauty—be converted to truth.
How else explain all this around me?

It is a lie that I was ever actually born.

The fine manners prerequisite to social and political arrangements are liable to confusion with a kind of moral uprightness.

At a point in the afternoon light, and at no other time, mockery—as its complement, sincerity—is consequential, i.e., possesses an ontology on the order of physical violence or a stone wall.
The better part of the day it is dismissed.
Preparations for nightfall supervene presently and edge out time for induced melancholy.
Appearances completely take over.

To spite them all I hope the man lounging on the sidewalk drinks himself to death with my coins.

I was brought up well (as you can see).
I learned that it was not polite to talk about them—so I talk about you.
This has put me at odds with all righteous people, put me on the wrong side of every canon, made me value decorum above the insinuations of morality, feel that hatred, though never justified and often humorous, can, nevertheless, sometimes prolong innocence, its appearance, or, at worst, a recollection of it.

To Nietzsche:
Thanks to my splayed reason that I have not yet died of disgust.
All the carnage about: the effect of imaginary diseases that strike only the wistful and implied children of past ages.
Like my retarded charges, I've escaped.

The fine manners are important because nothing else is.
Nothing else can be without engendering these wistful, implied children... I want to...

I will drop, momentarily, this politeness and genuinely accuse you of something:
Arrogance.
You expect to be thrown a morsel of hope.

"No dog would linger on like that," to paraphrase Goethe.
We perhaps misjudge dogs.
Not that they would live like that, but that they fall short of capacity.
The real issue, you insist, is dignity.
We are supposed to be on a higher plane.
Suppose we aren't.
You grow indignant.
I fear you might bite...
All the same, I agree, we are not on the same level as dogs.
The level where dogs are—scarcely visible from down here—we have made a point of demoting, much in the same way as dogs, in their turn, despise the airs of cats.
Despite my threats you will find something amusing in all this and an excuse for passing me off.
But I tell you, we misjudge dogs.

I committed a heinous crime this morning.
Early, on my walk to the university, under the bridge I pass, a man slept against a stanchion next to his shopping cart.
While he sleeps I approach and pull from my wallet a bill and slip it under his blanket.
When he wakes he will go to the nearest convenience store to buy an alcoholic anodyne and shorten his life a little.

It is always the motive of love to shield from justice, itself, the principle form fakery assumes.

With his pants down to his knees, squatting against the pylon of the Interstate, the man relieves himself in view of traffic.
Only I was brought up too well to live like this.
Perhaps I would feel less shame accused of a murder.
To steady himself better in the squat, he braces his forehead against the cart, piled high with dumpstered goods.
Your murder could be borne shamelessly.

The truest responsibility accrues to those acts incidental to our motives: the exact inverse of the standards of knowingness and intentionality applied in the ceremonies of justice.

It would not be shame but something else I would have to contend with at your murder.
I would seek out a warm place: your blood in death would run warmer than mine.
Perhaps I would be drawn toward the heat of the outrage studying and assessing the affair, and submit (they would say) meekly to the disposition of the case.
It would have to appear to them that I was guilty and not merely so pronounced.
It's not likely that I should ever be strong enough to endure this, and murder is not the worst I can imagine happening to you.
I know this because very occasionally I feel a pain that were it prolonged indefinitely would make death seem kind.
Shame we reserve always inappropriately.
It has about it the trappings of fakery associated with the invocation of justice as an explanation for otherwise anserous passions.
We might do better to remark the grime on our shoes when we hang our heads.
It accrues for much the same reason as guilt.

"Busy hollowing out the pillars of social sanity, namely: justice, honesty, sincerity, guilt, shame, responsibility, love, compassion, sympathy, etc.
—even if on some rarefied tier a noble endeavor—you must know how ludicrous you appear in the human landscape you undeniably inhabit.
Nothing on any of our horizons quite answers to the descriptions you leave us with.
You repair to your absurd little dance when faced with the reality we have to live in.
What do you expect from us?
We have an agenda, it is true, it is in our blood, in the very molecules of our cells.
Are you some test of our indulgence?
A philosophical curiosity?
A benign tumor?
(because there is not enough coherence in your antics to affect an honest toxicity).
You take from the motions of our busyness still pictures for your museum of head things.
How does one shape a smile at you without fostering an impression you will go on to frame for the benefit of some child's conceit?"

As sweet, diligent, reliable, flat-faced and oblique-eyed as fifteen years before when I first saw her in the same cafe.
Everyone around the busgirl then has long since vanished into the fog of their lives.
Mine, my philosophy has the same sameness as Down's disease.
When was the last time my eyes widened?
A sweet Christian-like disposition.
Chrétien —cretin.
Expressly so characterized because you needed no end of opportunities, through a life-long call for unconditional love, for ennoblement.
Still human (to remind ourselves), i.e., not animals, notwithstanding.
Here, suggested: maybe I have a role.
Perhaps you will need—to enlarge and complete your humanity from the other side—me as an object of hatred.
From the side you cannot fathom you have.
And not, be it clear, any of your familiar, closet varieties of hatred.

In a hospital cafeteria, moist strains of Bach mixed with a "A Whiter Shade of Pale" drip from the suspended ceiling, from speakers near the sprinkler heads.
The whole system designed to avert panic and disaster.
O is having an operation.
Her once solipsistic pain, now graduated to objective, palpable proportions, forming growths near the center of her being and the source of a small river of blood.
She likes to say that I am dull, dense, insensitive in comparison to her, that I haven't a clue to the nature of her isolation or the heart of her storm.
The code I've devised to speak in, it must seem to her, hasn't made its necessity clear to her.
It indicates a suspicious remove inserted between the part of me that feels and the part of me that castigates, that I wear a farcical smirk in between long blanks.
She most admires faces that play music and mine seems taken over from some fermatized child.

I have come to love the keening sound of the truth—and it no longer matters who or what.
Only that someone is disturbed enough to cry, my denseness precludes understanding past that.
So will you forgive me my moral (not to speak of political) anarchism?
That I can barely dream what frightens you so much that you believe the fallacies that lend hope to your agenda?
We will have to come to some agreement regarding my molecules.
They probably have evolved to a point of decline or taken a turn for a past so dim that not even your embarrassment can light up to probe.
Not until you have humiliated every particle of your being can your heart open to the daft melodies of Chabriér's "Idylle".

"Despair at being unable to see good causes you to settle for seeing the beautiful, counting on the sureness of our capacity for delusion and romance."

An answer that appeases curiosity is already a lie.

At the moment when you, in my place, with all your instincts, would have spoken I stayed silent.
I am accused of withholding information of value to you.

"...displaced anger, bitterness trained on the face of the world.
You delight in honing that blade, a dire abstraction, to excise and bare to plain view each heart's softness.
But you spare those in your life at hand the cause of your craven attitude.
(Like a serial killer who targets any woman except the true mother of his hatred.)
The pain you address has its source in individuals you do not apprise sufficiently for them to know you for fear they will pity you."

"...a cruel thing to say..." as though one could be excused for saying something true because it was cruel.

"Human truth, of whose existence you seem barely aware, is not a blade; it is an extrusion of molten hope and fear."

The state of my health becomes too easily a selfish concern of yours.
The uses to which compassion is put obscure its intentions.
It would have to operate both anonymously and unconsciously; in other words, per impossibile.

It is this inability to address 'them' (i.e., conspire with you) that puts me at odds with your treasured sentiments.

Where compassion is no virtue at all, humility is a false one.
Schopenhauer's bombasts against Hegelry: even his defenders (and perhaps especially so) fail to see too often the over-the-edge press of his self-promotion.
Self-parody, not humility, benefits from being brought to the surface of consciousness.
On your behalf I will make the plea that arrogance does not exist.

Among human joys are those halcyon moments when our raging sensitivity to torture abates.

Note on the Concept:
The project of telling the truth is always and everywhere inhuman.
The incoherence of the idea of sincerity together with the necessity of living with others requires deception, especially that of the self.
Each space or moment of comparative contentment, emotional quiescence, or connection with the world is one robbed from the purely philosophical project of truth.

The truth as something lived or spoken as opposed to known.

Sympathy become laced with disgust, viz., become pity.

It is better to err on the side of perfection.

"Let us not forget that names of peoples are usually abusive names."
Nietzsche, The Gay Science.
'Usually' has become now 'nearly always' and the classes of humans so affected without exception.
The term 'woman' in the mouth of a man is, without regard to context, already suspect—the slight, the insinuation audible to even the densest woman.
The expression 'person of color' annoys me (who would be so described).
Intent matters little.
I think I begin to sense offense even when my first name is called.
Intent matters as little because we know the speaker has not suffered enough to earn the privilege of addressing me.
(I said "me" because it is never a "us".)
We, as Nietzsche would have wanted it, have become gods, and it is wounding to be taken in vain.

The profound sadness of amor fati.
Having been driven to this extreme:
To combat pity in the defense of this sorrow.

How Nietzsche would have reacted to Himmler addressing his generals, abjuring them to see the stacks of bodies as evidence of a magnificent accomplishment in the service of the perfection of the race.
It is a small defense of Nietzsche to say the sight would have hurried his breakdown.
Too gentle, still too marinated in Judeo-Christian moral ideology to have not been broken by this picture of the ultimate bastardization of his philosophy.
He would have been crushed by his own stupidity in failing to see how naturally members of the herd would come to deem themselves overmen whose glorification required the sacrifice of 'inferior stock'.
This is no defense of him; he didn't and couldn't live out his own philosophy: not slaughter his own meat.
That part of him that was human (to the extent any part was and existed) and was comprehensible in Jesus Christ also could not have faced, without retching, the crusades, the wars of heresy, inquisitions of faith, tortures, exterminations, dehumanizations... that were to be carried out in his name and wake in the centuries A.D.
Had he known (and no doubt the one part of him did) his crucifixion would have been a crime only in that it didn't occur sooner.
Mary should have aborted him—than have allowed another, who could not slaughter his own meat, to smear across history his vanity.
[Reaction to a lecture on Nietzsche.]

What meat do I speak of?
All possibility of joy, of life on the planet.

Is it that horrible never to have been born?

Do I use my pain as an excuse to slander the world?
(As Nietzsche's commentator, Kaufman, put it.)

Do I exaggerate with a view to dampening your joy in existence?

Approached circumspectly, it is called seduction or romance; approached in another less bashful way, it is called rape: the truth.
We are so virtuously inclined to be celibate in regard to.

"—the illusoriness of the notion of moral progress.
The more brutal forms of evil that go are replaced by others more subtle and more poisonous.
Our moral horizon moves with us as we move, and never do we draw nearer to the far-off line where the black waves and the azure meet.
The final purpose of our creation seems most plausibly to be the greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness, through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity of characters."
—"Dilemma of Determinism"
James' posed depiction of a Schopenhauerian pessimistic Gnosticism.⁵ The ethical consciousness reaches critical saturation in death.

Never to have set foot in existence.
It would have been better.
But every cell of your body screams in protest.
Not every one.
The voices of a tiny minority in the brain rise above the rest for the space of an instant.
The dissent, too small, too brief, swallowed in the margin of error of more raucous truths.

Glancing contentment.
The one kind, an hour like a crisp shining morning setting out for the woods, or waking beside a lake in the mountains in the night to a moon bright enough to read by...
Scarcely accessible, rarefied, fleeting, aspiring to happiness—these moments, crowding out the anxiety of truth or pain for their duration and then only as memories with a will to be repeated, serve to excuse the charade of sentiments that inevitably attend them.
These and also those of the struggle to realize their recurrence, when the image persists vividly enough to excite a delirium that dips pain in comicality, drowns meaninglessness in a teeming sea of songless Empedoclean fish,⁶ and attributes warmth to the smiles of strangers and love to the attentiveness of intimates.
Are the simpler pleasures that?
Like—finding just the right position to sleep in, which relaxes, or stretches least, the largest number of ligaments, or the apt amount of covering to resecure an archaic feeling of being enwombed but without suffocation or fetters...?
We used to speak of gratitude at such times—an incipient religious feeling.
Prayers before bed.
Between that feeling and the heroic narcotic of accomplishment you seek some synthesis.
We are permitted to ask for one.
Ask.
Though continue to breathe freely, naively, beseechingly.
Doestoevsky feared that with the death of God all would be permitted: Such an immense way of suggesting that pricelessly little is permitted.
We only sometimes dream of permission.

Appearance itself refutes this compunction for discovering the lie of things.
Some melioration is always called for.
No art, science or philosophy can responsibly end like this, nor even perseverate so indefinitely.
Because we are addressing not stones but sentient beings with all the demands of existence their sentience extorts.
They have to be told something...
to love their predicament, if nothing else.
Even at this I balk, why?

The whole enterprise, the love of wisdom is at stake.
Shall we betray this love for—for what?
For another—to be betrayed later in its turn?
(For what did this first love do to deserve betrayal that another won't as well?
Not anything done brings on betrayal but what is.)
Shall we look to stones for spiritual guidance?
Immovable in their exemplary arrogance.
Or better: mud?
Humble to the point of always willing to sink lower.

BBC Radio, Rwanda: "...she was forced to choose between a slower painful death from blows of a machete or a faster one with a machine gun.
Which, would be decided by how much she was willing to pay."

An act of compassion must meet these requirements: Knowledge of it, as a fact, must be guarded from the object being and from all others, above all, from the perpetrator.
To this end, it must always retain the character of confusion and ambiguity.
It must seem to the object being as though good fortune had smiled but nothing more.
It must not be recorded by third parties to be used as an object lesson or as an instance of an endorsed species of act.
It must not become for the object being an occasion for indenturement.
Finally, it must be unrememberable, as having never happened.

Remarks after Wittgenstein's On Certainty⁷:

The comfort and distraction of the creature.
The missionaries' offer of trinkets to persuade.
(sec. 612)
The truth of a system of beliefs as demonstrated in its potency for overrunning or eroding the foundations of other systems... finally to the picture of the woman offered a choice of deaths: among the first blossoms of civilization.
The migration of barbarism to a cooler part of the nervous system, where luxury, at least comfort, or the general containment of hell has become its glory, not to say, its bane.
A grand conspiracy, the attenuation of pain—what atrocity will we not hear of to insure ourselves participation?

"The child learns by believing the adult.
Doubt comes after belief." (sec 160)
Woe to the child for whom doubt barks at the heels of belief.
A lifelong chase begins.
(Consciousness and, its correlative, stupidity will mark off his soul as their latrine.)
It becomes his obsession to keep examining and re-examining the environment for functions too patent to the child with an easy speed or with only a toy dog in pursuit.
As a dullard to survive, if he does, he will be obliged to develop the conceit that he should somehow be admired for coming up the rear, when it is only his perverse curiosity to determine whether the dog really has teeth—a fact, again, too obvious to the others.

(sec 283)
The world is like a very crowded church.
Operating at all, we operate on faith.
It has never been otherwise, rumors to the contrary.

Has the enterprise a usefulness?
Perhaps this:
It may in some circumstances permit a modicum of integrity, a point of dignity (however buried in the folds of your vanity), when you collapse, like all the others, under the tyranny of some idea, instinct or sentimental exigency.
It has a value that invites exaggeration.

"... they have to be told something..."
The dead must wonder about those who gather at their funeral.

Hope is a variety of cockroach.
It was the first thing to creep about the ruins at Hiroshima.
Worse, imagine a pest sufficiently accredited you would be shamed not to consort with.

There are no great thinkers who are unredeemed nihilists, who do not by cleverness re-enter the cage they so triumphantly escaped (as Nietzsche chides Kant for).
The fox is undone by his cleverness, we say.
In the cage again, but is he somehow changed nevertheless?
Wiser for the escapade?
Shall I spoil it for you with an answer?

The intellectual passion seeks always to discover and explore uncharted regions of its unrestricted universe of discourse, scale exotic peaks, move about obscure ruins, plumb still deeper trenches...
How many adventurers make it a part of the plan not to return?
Is there a responsibility to report back?
At the very heart of the desire to take these risks is the coy wish to be relieved of this duty.
When it sometimes happens, news never reaches us.

The elitism in Nietzsche, so offensive to many, springs directly from his vision of life as potentially (at least) magnificent, in opposition to cowering Darwinian tardiness, the subhumanization of Christianity, or the sterile patness of scientism.
The magnificence of coming to love life as it presents itself to us.
Amor fati.

Even the kinder option of having one's organs transpierced a dozen times a second by small pieces of lead...
The man presenting her the choice—was not his edification more magnificent for not buckling under the "internal distress and uncertainty" occasioned by the weight of his act?
(The cry of the suffering, a music serving to heighten the moment...
No sarcasm is intended.
This is what you cannot accept.
You will lie yourself to the grave before...
And you will always have the comfort of knowing you have vast company in your censure of my insinuations.
But just this instant you might as well be alone; for the truth that undoes your composure is audible only then.)

The irresponsibility of desire.

A lecture in philosophy.
The speaker takes each auditor aside to whisper something in confidence.
Not for all to know for certain what each heard robs the proceeding of its overwhelmingly communal importance:
The root of the desire of some logicians and philosophers of language to want to operate purely on the basis of extension.

Apart from the question of its possibility, it was never Wittgenstein's intention to leave any cage.

For many years I trained with the feeble-minded.⁸
I learned that gaiety was a desperate ploy; its effectiveness consists in rendering desperation aseptic and undistracting.
"Of what use would the truth be to you in any case?"
Nietzsche might say to me.
As a threat, it would make the blood of lies race faster.

It must be the truth is so devastatingly pat that we are thrown back on a field of description in which one could wish to linger forever.

I distort philosophy as I read it.
I distort it to make it interesting.
My love for the subject arises from its complicity.

Born mute, to speak I must become another, less real.
Speech and touch, instruments of my isolation, therefore, seeds of my malice.
Reality, for me, is a concocted state of affairs, and for you a process, a living thing with all the emphasis that living things can muster.
What endears his furred presence to me is that he never says anything stupid, i.e., something that he would not be willing to defend with his life.
That is to say, an exercise, an ornament on a shelf of the soul.
A grand collection of these amount to what we speak of as a life.

A jealous, fungal growth.
I am less virile or fecund than you.
"We can destroy only as creators."
A darkness mongering mushroom, poisonously foisted on you.

She pretends to see things through eyes she doesn't have.
The presumption offends my mincing delicacy; I find myself insisting on an alien propriety.
I must stop trying to behave in kind, telling her what it is she sees.
From the badge of solipsism I must eke out relief.

100

On a bus: "Nobody gives a damn about the truth except when it gets in their way!"

101

Had Nietzsche been a little more elitist, he would have foreseen the Third Reich.
He far overestimated the advancement of the general run of humankind.

102

A drug addicted ex-soldier in a Haitian hospital, while being treated for 'post traumatic stress syndrome', tells of entire villages decimated, mass executions, tortures, rapes...
In one village a woman approached him, her dress in tatters, blood dripping down her legs.
She took the pistol from his hand, held it to her head and fired.

103

I am trying to make myself happier perhaps by fixing my hopes on such images.
There are worse realms, more stifling, than solipsism.
Between it and its opposite pole, where figures of justice (or any such human contrivances) seem ludicrous—the world where we are both victim and torturer, once described by Clarice Lispector, where only the depiction of extremest pain momentarily quiets our self-serving preachments...
Evil is an insufficient explanation for malice.
There is a real need to laugh nervelessly, to emerge from the vast pit—in between—of sanity, i.e., selfishness.
I posit you as a miracle, unbelievable, or I am you enough to be sickened by the experience.

104

Who would blame you, as efficiently, if I didn't?

105

Quizzing her cook for a reaction, Lispector describes herself on hearing of the apprehension of the notorious bandit killer, Mineirenho; in a gunfight with the police he is shot thirty times.
Sometime before the thirtieth, the cook means to say, he is already in heaven.
Lispector agrees: "But while I can listen to the first and the second shot with a sense of relief, the third shot makes me alert, the fourth leaves me restless, the fifth and sixth cover me with shame, the seventh and eighth cause my heart to beat with alarm, the ninth and tenth cause my mouth to tremble, the eleventh shot finds me invoking the name of God in terror, and at the twelfth shot I call for my brother.
The thirteenth shot kills me—because I am the other.
Because I want to be the other.
I repudiate this justice which watches over my sleep,...."⁹

106

Interspecies attachments (like mine for my cat-friend) arise as strong as they do because the parties can interpret and speak for the other's behavior, assured of never being gainsaid.
All attachments, even within a species, approach this ideal as far as they can.

107

The good of all, to the extent this applies to me, may indeed be the worthiest pursuit.
But that good, peculiar to me, is not one to be pursued; it is native and merely needs leaving alone.

108

"At small expense to yourself, you have gotten us to confess a dependence upon a panoply of social divinities. What more do you want?"
It would have been better never to have been so needy.
"Why?"
It would have founded our moral pronouncements on truth, in that rightness they so much purport.
It would have given the arrogance of a 'should' a character of intelligence.
It would have made my heartache and only my heartache the just cause of your pain.
I should not have needed to enlist an army of excuses.
('Should': only because it would have been somewhat less beautiful otherwise.)

109

Only one kind of violence is sanctioned.
(Others will void our warranty.)
A secret self-directed violence, unobservable—except, perhaps, in its final effect.
First values and basic instincts are to be harassed, hunted down, demoralized, washed of foolishness to the point of despair by a constant rain of undiluted truth until driven to—until all desire is compacted in one aching will to death.
The key word is 'secret', however.
Not a sign, gesture or word to show for the tribulation.
If it were feasible to die without ostentation, this too would be a requirement.

110

This too will become a requirement.

111

When it happens to you, you need to be in a specially prepared place.
All your dear little things in order.
Have stayed healthy, followed the laws, greeted neighbors, honored relations, etc.
Elements of the scenery tied with the strings of your heart to the bells of your spirit.
It must have by this time all seemed unshakably worth it to you.

112

Expression of an aesthetic.

113

The ancient evil human impulse to form a group, and exclude others—if it could be escaped, an ethic might be engendered.
On the scale where individuation is variously appraised, only at the extremes would there be an opening.
To spread prematurely one's ashes across the face of everything, or to make the world contingent on my presence and comprehension.
That is to say, admit that the world has, for its existence, me as a necessary condition, or beg its pardon for having passed any judgments at all...
Death or insanity.
As it is, the impulse is never curbed.
So evil becomes a euphemism for something darker...from which an ethic can never emerge.

114

Because children generally outlive their parents, the latter persist in dying innocents.
Hope, which attaches more to survivors than to forebears, cleverly perpetuates itself thus.
Those of us with only animal dependents may learn a different, unintended, unnatural lesson.

115

I must have been placed here that I may come to enjoy my lament.

116

The example set by the wave on the labyrinthine cliffs that Nietzsche noticed in The Gay Science (sec. 310).¹⁰

117

"...at the highest degree of pain one automatically loses consciousness." (sec. 326)¹¹: now I understand humanity and how fortunate I have been in comparison.
And how, if I am to develop, the worst is still ahead for me.

118

Hope is immanent.
It can be embodied.
A news photographer in Rwanda¹² captures the image of a cholera stricken girl, legs almost too thin to walk on, struggling to reach a refugee camp, collapsing every few steps in the dirt—and above, in the same frame, on a rock, a patient, observant vulture.
A poster girl.
The photographer wept helplessly after taking this picture and having taken enough a week later took his life.
The girl, we are told on the radio, did reach help and probably survived.
The vulture, because there were thousands like her, also did well.

119

Owing to the shortness of memory, hope thrives all around.

120

Compassion as reflex.
No intellectual conscience; no banner, march, or right.

121

My biggest contradiction is that my rudeness endures, though I prize etiquette above all else.

122

I can be excused for having no conception of that "happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, even when the poorest fisherman is still rowing with golden oars.
This godlike feeling would then be called—humaneness."
(sec. 337).¹³
It is evening and I cannot forget.
I am not human enough.

123

The ideal life.
One in which so little is needed that if it were lost the event would go unnoticed.

124

To minimize the damage done it is best to cut short the spread of one's selfishness, keep its purview the crampest possible: confined to a naked, however disgusting, ego.

125

The badge of some courageous self-knowledge or the untutored face of stupidity: the concept of sincerity performs duties as diverse as these.
Set to a music, with an accompaniment it might be possible to philosophize before a public.
Otherwise, it should remain this closeted activity, a private function of the head, much as prayer is of the heart or gas of the bowels.

126

Art permits us to lie with impunity and, as this is the limit of our approach to the truth, it provides useful occupation for a destructive, redundant consciousness.

127

What is "the good" but what facilitates the protocol of death, prepares for and welcomes civilly its arrival.
The questions that will strike you then should occur to you much earlier when you can imagine yourself with the luxury of answers and the time for them to have effect.
All else we call "good" is an amenity.
But maybe these are adequate for you?

128

The godlike feeling of the poorest fisherman rowing with golden oars!

129

So if I murder you, I would have to ask myself: is this a mercy killing?
and am I capable of that extreme a compassion?

130

"Not a sign, gesture or word to show for the tribulation...": it might be misunderstood, suggest to the impatient that pain is asserted to have privileged meaning, and the idea earn the dismissive label 'pessimism'.
This would round off a discussion, polish the ragged non sequitur that truth haunts to a smug sheen.
Pain, death and truth are only related by circumstance: The rest, all of it, has little use for them.

131

Nietzsche's contention that some of us are born posthumously is entirely too optimistic.
It makes me cry to think that it might be true, though.

132

I have returned from the dead to have a word with you.
Not necessarily for your own good; though with no special malice either.
The prodigality of my eternal state affords me the luxury of acting without motivation.
See me as a forbidding extreme of climate and terrain, far removed from any need to be visited by you, but perhaps fatally attractive to an improbable, hapless, gratuitous few of you.
As content for a vacant topic in your agenda should any escape the occupation of a daily care.
Or behold me as a beautiful storm, a stimulus of emotions from corrupt fear to mischievous gratitude to effete delirium.
Avail yourself of me as a gifted simile to employ faced with threatening inscrutability—when your reason fails, your heart is rented and only cowardice excuses you from death.
In your last loneliness this vision may help.
Not so much give you courage as fool you with the efficacy of anger.
For just conceive a life unable to be fooled by anything, unable to sleep dreamlessly!
A skill you will need when you join me.

133

Death is marvelously coy.

134

For fear that I would be revealed for what I am, I shun social gatherings.
Curious, since it has already been disclosed in the act of avoidance.
But not quite, because my absence will be interpreted open-heartedly by exactly those who could benefit by the revelation.
For these—for whom shyness is charm—my reality would strike like an ax blow to the face.
Out of cowardice—that is to say, compassion—I spare us both the trauma.
I should be as generous and interpret this as their motivation too.
This must be what it means to be 'humane' or free of integrity.

135

But always, I distort the language, don't I?
Shall I never learn what words are intended to mean?
Feel their longing to embrace, to kindle mindless warmth?
I must be asking that we behave freely as animals yet think like gods, but neither with bad conscience.
Or better, both with the same conscience.
The blood that races through our veins races for a reason, with purpose, not to say, a vengeance.
A definite distance to go.
The truest of all our goals.
The intent behind all our intentions.
Toward that day when it will not race anymore.

136

What were you thinking?
Could anything have been more obvious?
Spare me your concern; my assignment is to be envied.

137

My right to roll my barrel across the street is protected by your preparations for war.¹⁴

138

Gravid women.
Go ahead and have your babies.
It is not time yet to stop.
We have still to pay the full price and we are not apparently that wearied and, besides, we are so dutiful...
and my sect of barrel-rollers has not significantly grown in the past 2500 years.

Editor's Notes

¹ D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, (New York: The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1959), p. 161.

² D. H. Lawrence, St. Mawr and The Man Who Died, (New York: Vintage Books, 1953). In the story, "The Man Who Died" Lawrence's retells the last days of Christ.

³ Luno probably had Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie, in mind, having seen and admired Marcel Ophuls' 1988 documentary film, Hotel Terminus.

⁴ Clarice Lispector, The Foreign Legion, trans. Giovanni Pontiero, (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1986), p. 165.

⁵ William James, Essays in Pragmatism, (New York: Hafner Press, 1948), p. 54. "Dilemma of Determinism" was originally delivered as a lecture in 1884.

⁶ A reference to the Empedoclean fragment, "Leading the songless tribe of fertile fish" (DK 31B fr. 74) in John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, (New York: Meridian Press, 1957), p. 216.

⁷ Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, eds, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).

⁸ Luno worked intimately with the severely and profoundly mentally retarded for eight years and considers this an important part of his philosophical training.

⁹ Lispector, p. 212-3.

¹⁰ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman, (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 247.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 256.

¹² See Scott Macleod, "The Life and Death of Kevin Carter", Time, September 12, 1994, vol. 144, no. 11.

¹³ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 268-9.

¹⁴ The story goes Diogenes of Sinope drove a barrel with a stick from one end of the street to the other while all of Athens prepared for war. When asked what he was doing, he answered he wanted to seem as productive as they.

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Caveat

Prolegomena

Notebook XII
the world is my Vienna

Notebook XI
iridescent blossoms

Notebook X
what you don't want to hear

Notebook IX
a variety of cockroach

Notebook VIII
rosary esophagus

Notebook VII
gall in the service of

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