« reductio
Bianco Luno
Notebook VII
9/15/90 – 4/13/92
gall in the service of
I am not allowed to work out my bleak logic without suggesting some way to avert what it describes.
I don’t profess to be an example for you, but I offer this counsel: without turning your face away stop seeing it as bleak.1
~
I have Flaubert’s fascination with and shyness toward religion.2For the sake of what little purity there is in it, I might have slaughtered half of Christendom, beginning with myself.
Actually, myself would suffice.
~
Between profound prejudice and a saturated confusion, foils for each other, the drama, the thaumaturgical play on emotions, the rest follows.Not ideas, there are no ideas, only murderers and victims, hate and fear...the rest of the time we ‘enjoy life’, that is to say, rehearse enjoying it.
A cheery view.
Because it endures suffering at face value, stoicism is a sham.
What do you call the opposite of stoicism? Whatever that may be, it is also a sham because it doesn’t face the finality of suffering: no past or future joy can erase pain now.3
Time, invented to this end, erodes the basis, grinds to already forgiven pieces the occasion.
~
Last night, again, a dream:Atop a mountain peak, the abyss all around growing because the peak I stand on keeps getting sharper.
So needle-sharp, I will be impaled through the one foot on which I’m balanced.
Lightning flashes in the background.
(A cartoon, which I don’t even remember liking: Rocky and Bullwinkle.)
My ‘philosophy’ self-caricatures.
An averted pregnancy, a menses, a masturbation.
What does it have to do with health or even resignation?
A pussy exudation: soak it up.
I am hardly an existentialist.
I am a bandage, a sanitary napkin ...because the peak I stand on keeps getting sharper, sharper.
~
Epistemic states oscillate between prejudice and confusion.All else is spite.
~
Pain and beauty.The beginning and end of the Goldberg Variations and Gould’s humming, barely audible on these so soft endpieces.4
Struck dumb from pain, a whole philosophy is developed, from the first stirrings of doubt through despair to resignation.
Truth having never made an appearance.
The history of philosophy in 33 chapters.
~
To speak the truth is to hum.(How we do it in the West; maybe, sometimes, we also whistle.)
~
I have to speak this way, do you understand?Not sure why I embroil my personal defense with ours before an empty bench, as though it were some final ‘hope for humanity’.
~
I could tell you how uncomfortable I am with the shape of my nose.If you saw it, you would respond considerately, saying perhaps that most people have awkward noses, and you would miss my point.
Where is their discomfort?
Even people with the most perfect noses are uncomfortable with them, you were going to say?
"What discomfort? Spare me, no, you mean just this nose, your nose, your personal sore spot, is what makes you an Kierkegaardian ‘individual’, with a skin the color of no other, a one-person race, and you a racist.
Yes? This is what you tried to mean, but didn’t: you were not up to meaning anything.
What I am going to say to you is the truth.
(Please hold back your knowing smile for the moment.)
Your nose has nothing to do with anything.
You are enchanted with jealousy, other people’s noses, notwithstanding.
If you had no nose, your ploy would be different but your snot the same, only more accessible.
Then, your rhymes could come to rest on your physical deformity.
As it is, your deformity is invisible.
I could discourse forever on the nature of this invisibility.
You are so patent, such a perfect backdrop to everything that happens around you that the most inconsequential biographical or material fact about you will loom smaller than your impossibly microscopic ego.
You began by saying you had to speak this way, but you lie.
Your speech is hardly within the range of hearing,5 let alone distinguished by some special quality.
The casual assertion of godliness only clinches the matter: carry on, call yourself ‘God’..."
~
From under her skirts, the boy makes fun of the woman’s indignation.A sucker for innocence, whose true enemy has a body covered in down and a voice of a still purer soprano.
~
But men are truly disgusting creatures, one can hardly blame her.But, again, disgust is connected with power and to be so invested is to have maggots teeming in the soul.
~
I met Jesus yesterday on the street.But for the fact that I knew it was him, I never would have guessed it.
He smiled, walked past, knew I had recognized him.
I saw Jesus, my son.
~
Marx and Smith and the division of wealth.Contemporary therapeutic psychology contends with a similar distributive problem in the concept of ‘empowerment’.
Self-interest is as much a canon as altruism, as much an excuse, and as deadly.
I have never been able to ally myself with a scheme for the division of wealth.
Psychic, no less than economic, victims of abuse are too apt to adopt their oppressors’ standards.
I refuse all solutions, and so it appears I support all sides, or none.
~
A saying among logicians, "one man’s reductio is another’s modus ponens": having reduced an opponent’s argument to absurdity, the temptation to swivel to an alternative conclusion.Against this psychological bent in logic I struggle.
A reductio leaves us with ashes.
The Phoenix-like inferences, you see rise, are moist apparitions, tear-ghosts, every bit beyond your will as the estimious sentiments evoked at a proof’s finality: quod erat demonstratum.
At the top of the mountain, over the grated pit, the vulture-logician picks corpses clean.
When the pieces come white and slip through the grate of the Tower of Silence, I enter to cart them away and build a cage with them, which one day, when large enough, will house the moist apparitions in a sort of zoo for the edification of the plain and simple person, the unborn, and for the kind eyes of God.
~
The age of therapy—inaugurated by Freud, etiologically dead-ended by Wittgenstein, et al., early heralded by Hume and maybe Pyrrho, vermiculated by Foucault, Derrida, and friends, (why stop here? why not include everyone in the history of Western literature and philosophy since Gilgamesh6 and Enkidu?)—is soon to be superceded—not for lack of imagination on anyone’s part—by an age of spite, resentment, by an age in which a surfeit of pride makes the sick hold their heads up high and the cured higher still and the-never-having-been-afflicted able to see to the ends of Alexander’s estate.Finally, by an age of old age.
~
This knowing about everyone but ourselves is what is meant being a ‘social animal’.We are best groomed by others... It strikes me as sad.
I am not made to feel closeness, or I feel that closeness as suffocation.
Your ambition to see my condition eased...well, do you see what I mean?
Wittgenstein spoke of the experience of feeling "safe"7 as though it were some profound discovery at the bottom of ethics, as indeed it is, despite what we are asked to believe.
But for me, it is too quickly followed, not with the accepted emotional valence, not with warmth, instead with an extreme breath-sucking heat, but not...
My illness, if you wish to call it that, stems in great part from your wishing to make me well.
(A thousand years ago it would have been unmysteriously labeled ‘sin’.
What do you suppose we will call it that long from now?)
~
What do you think I mean by insulting God?(The compulsion, I don’t fully understand.)
I think of him every moment, so much is clear.
Piety?: But for the fact that he has no right to exist.
~
Someday, it’s possible, I will feel closeness: you will have to lend me your imagination.~
Partiality toward blood- or familial-ties is not (except in democratic politics) judged another prejudice to uncover and expunge.Should we ever though, then we will have to crack down on emotional ties.
~
Fellini, my cat-friend, is teaching me closeness.I’ve never met anyone who, by their willingness to be observed, has more convinced me that they are capable of loving.
How to explain this: their powers of persuasion are inadequate, or my discernment, or I am looking in the wrong place altogether: I should be observing how an animal might favor them.
It is a quality that can only be observed in a flawless mirror, not directly, no matter how closely.
~
The motion from the irrational to the rational is the classic move in art.The movement in reverse is romantic.
Not either alone.
It is clear system-building or reductive philosophy is a species of the former.
And the better part of the time what I am doing is romantic: showing up reason’s pride, wallowing in the ridiculous, making toasts of hemlock, etc.
Every insight upon being made clear is, in virtue of this clarity, false.
The paradoxes that ensue from self-reference indicate the place of the absurd and the places where we are comfortably sane, literate, judgmental, and the principle source of presumption in the universe.
But art could never be content being in the service of anything.
Like a murderer, with a slit to the throat, it must drain the color from your face.
How little this matters to the fact of our lies and their capital deserts.
To death, if we should think.
And if we take care not to, we deserve nothing, whatever we may experience.
The importance of art is that it permits us a moment or two of what it is like not to think, and not to deserve anything, to re-experience being adiaphorous—reason enough, in itself, for common morality to perceive it as mortal enemy.
~
Equally fickle in their development, moral and aesthetic values—but the latter travel in circles (wide arcs from our perspective).Both move, a possible and ominous surprise to some about ethics.
The moral is linear, "the straight and narrow", and like an arrow in flight, it is displacing, moving with a very clear (if, just the same, highly deniable) direction.
A vector, aimed at the Good, the Ultimate Good, that is to say (that is to whisper), Death.
So the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill", has the suppressed qualifier: "all of a sudden".
In due course, without impatience, and with respect for the moral order, which is not the same as ‘upholding’ the moral order: it has us firmly by the scruff and scarcely needs our complicity.
We are only free to march to the scaffold like, deep down, the good aristocrats we are.
But the history of art are the paths traced by stray balloons through the vapors, squatting over the moribund city, and though there are infinite reasons to, we are not rational and so there is no requirement to be sad.
The joy of death is difficult to celebrate but the muses do not skimp on supplies.
To sum up the Decalogue, trite in its profundity: "Be a good sport about death."
~
"What a jerk! A snide-ass tease, waving your perfumed pussy around!"—to paraphrase a male friend of O’s on reading some of this.Perfume?
The logic of perfume would be a fit subject for a poet-logician.
~
The expected immediate reaction, when most resisted, is infuriating to all but the dead and their emulators.How should I react, not sure which camp to pander to?
The Christian precept—turn the other cheek—is the most offensive, virtually obscene, gesture I can envision.8
This Jesus was a liar in his heart.
I don’t particularly mean the historical Jesus: I could say as easily "Nixon was pure of heart", with the same accurate intent.
You may have an image framed in a tidier portion of your memory—that Jesus was a liar.
The historical figure, like this given woman or that man, is barely interesting to me.
My criticism is of archetypes and their attendant tropisms.
Take any man or woman and my hapless idiot compassion would forgive them murder in the stark glare of the knowledge of their consciousness-mongering guilt.
That guilt, which if you presume yourself Christian, can easily derive from well known premises; if your curiosity is paganish, you will have noticed that death, combined with naturally occurring compassion, is one of Nature’s greatest triumphs.
An attempt to deny this is only human, consequently, more cause for guilt or consciousness (the newer term for the same).9
And you will notice where she, with Draconian inferences, steers the argument: toward the compost heap.
Perforce, if your curiosity is unbounded, how can you avoid having death’s stake driven home with "truth’s hundred-ton hammer"?10
~
As logician the imperative is to labor the obvious; as poet to make it cryptic.~
"What is so much gall in the service of?" Really, I don’t know.Something I haven’t learned, or can’t, haunts me continually.
~
Why can’t I learn from others?The form my question invariably takes on.
It is as though, outside looking in, I’m not able to covet appropriately the visible beatitudes.
Acutely aware of where I am, I am blind to the brightly colored passions so necessary to the faces worn by others.
How express or how express enough my native repugnance for the alternative, the going back—for it does seem to me ‘a going back’—to these vivid colors.
It is natural, I claim, for me to feel this way, notwithstanding its contrived refinement.
I try to keep in view the horizon of the direction I am facing and have no illusions that it isn’t freed of color and, mildly put, black as death.
I will not accept that dignity is a fair trade for passion—for it is not.
I am not going to pretend to any superiority: I can match their appeal to elemental forces in Nature with a set of my own (she is perfectly content playing both sides), but that is as far as I dare.
It is too easy to see my place in the larger scheme.
It is very easy not to—or to keep running up the same tree, replete with the same inconsequential fear.
This appears to be what I am doing just now.
I detect that I am moving slower, glancing back at the cat over my shoulder with a growing sympathy for him—fatal or not, flaw or strength, uncertain.
~
"You seem to want to side with oppressors against their victims?"The best I can do, by way of explanation, is to note lamely that every oppressor was and will be again a victim, hard as it is for the presently oppressed to consider.
What hater would listen to what I say?
They would listen as carefully as some Nazis heard Nietzsche.
I ask you to show more discrimination than is generally expected of you or you customarily credit yourself with in polite company.
I speak up to you.
You don’t deserve it, but, in the nature of the case, I have placed myself beneath you.
The view from here you will never grow accustomed to.
~
Compassion.How could Jesus have imagined asking that of us?
~
Grist for your mill.I have sexual feelings for the mentally retarded women I work with, for most young girls, some older women and even certain species of plants, however, my homosexual development was early somewhat arrested, and animals yet don’t do much in that regard for me.
Serial killers obsess me; I catch myself, often unawares, picturing people I pass on the street in all sorts of colorful agony.
I ponder how very adventitious the distinction is between eating and killing, mishap and murder, the private parts of females and public parks...
Put me in Hitler’s place and it probably wouldn’t be Jews—but I would think of some group...
No confession intended.
That more than anything galls you: that I should think that thus I am fully qualified to speak of you.
~
Among locally oppressed groups, blacks, animals and the retarded are least suited to this status; Mexicans, women and forests most suited.You oppress us further by lumping us together.
~
"You will be misunderstood."How is that possible?
Upon first opening its eyes, will a child accept everything it perceives, or does it mistake reality for something else?
There is no other way but literally to take me.
Truths are inveterate killers; they systematically kill each other, and each kills and kills until it is killed.
The last truth is a laugh, entitled to a figure and ripe for misconstrual.
~
You observe, I rarely talk about ‘justice’.Be assured, I’m not going to start now.
~
For all my solipsism I am remarkably unprivate.I never confess personal sins or secrets, without having first to implicate you.
I deflect personal responsibility by declaiming our conspiracy.
In this way I can move from the smell of my own farts to the glory of God.11
I am not to be trusted; I will stab you in the back the first chance I get.
But my perfume is a real lure, isn’t it?
Why do you keep coming to me?
Why are you so weak?
~
History and mathematics.Less pain per se is caused by immolating two people than by starving one.
It takes many more gassed to equal one starved.
~
A soft dew and the patience of eternity may overcome a "hundred-ton hammer".How many people in the world knowingly starve themselves?
How many starve to death?
...then, who starves them?
~
The compunction to shield from horrifying thoughts, art-objects, substances, experiences...:small children and women...If I didn’t feel that an eight year old ought to be introduced to pornography at the first spark of curiosity, toured through a slaughter-house as part of a school field trip, permitted to drink and drive, make free use of any mind-altering substance or medium (e.g., television) as might encourage them to dream of worse things, witness an execution or shadow an ambulance—if I might have my way and every child learn by watching its parents copulate about the beginning of its history, and curiosity only determine not just which but the order of its objects—if I expected much result from this, then I would not object to the request that my writing be more accessible.
But although I am able to vouch for its usefulness in a small chamber of my heart, I expect it everywhere else to convey back to the keen ears of haters the sympathy scrutable in the lined faces of the "innocent" and "sensitive", who alone can appreciate what horrifies and outrages; the others, who define and hoard "horror" and "outrage": poseurs all.
~
While I do not easily suffer from an -ist attitude, I am susceptible to the autistic disorders that assail estranged existences.~
I used to notice more.My sight is not as impressed as before by what is commonly in focus for us.
I see patterns pretty clearly.
Answers crowd my mind before a single genuine question can enter.
Before the fierce white light cauterizes her retina and renders her sensible, a mad person must cup her hands to her eyes to hear.
~
A little bit of sexism."They don’t need your sympathy, they need your humiliation.
Learn to crush all that makes you most male.
How can you maintain your dignity in the face of that? Your dignity is the very thing in the way.
Be crushed and you shall crush, and you must crush what is male in them to have yours vindicated.
This can only be achieved by a kind of spiritual self-violence, though they—being what they are: averse to sudden movements—will not stand for this.
But always remember, be courteous, for even if you fail at the bigger task (and you will), if you do this at least, you will be well thought of.
And isn’t this what you want? No? Tell me, you pathetic creature, you."
~
Metaphor for Rationality: A Ticking Clock.Each piece of the finely wrought mechanism, working through the properties and the permission of matter, of physics, does its job, what it was designed to do, in a way we are drawn to admire because we (like it) are such small creatures in time which almost casually—in return for being measured—will (and also not without its own grace) confer upon this machine a last conscious moment then recover its parts for itself.
Now logic, it is in respectable quarters assumed, is as reliable a guide as we may possess to the better understanding of what happens in time.
It is the most reliable thing in the universe, I think.
(Reliable, as though this had much interest for us.)
Like this clock, it attempts by taking the measure to possess what destroys it.
It is the most reliable thing in the universe, all the same.
For what is time?
What does it promise you?
Why do we expect it to stop for us?
~
Some persons have a moral right to oppress others; you will reckon which those are.We need hope they are compassionate, or at least informed by a passion of some kind or other for us to curry.
Why can’t I take comfort in the laws of logic or morality or even a historicist’s conversation? I think I am broken or misbegotten.
Don’t dash my hope—contra-indications aside—that you maybe aren’t.
I stroke my cat and begin to weep.
I revert.
I become the emulsification of holy water.
My body aches.
I believe that even in death I will know pain.
Because I don’t know that it (death) is sufficient to kill off the knowing smile, and because, while alive, I never learned to smile properly, according to custom.
I can’t experience even self-pity as the handbooks say.
My tears must not be real: blood of the mind or something.12
~
How come I never talk about what I had for breakfast?Or the fact that usually I write in this little notebook in a university cafeteria against a din of slapping trays and scraping chairs and a beach of conversation.
Sometimes I write at work surrounded by small children in big bodies.
Or the weather?...
I do mention my cat; he breaks through but little else.
But is this true?
More used to.
I talked about a flower box I made once, about the people I shared a house with, the old ones at the retirement home, the people I met hitch-hiking, spring walks in the parks, at the market, by the lakes...
(Didn’t I recently mention Gould’s humming?)
What has happened?
Nostalgia is disquieting, the future plastered with fate, the present insists always on being bearable, doesn’t it?
What else can I say about it?
(A wisecrack peeks around the corner.)
~
The soft rose complexion of a woman’s face.(You will want to know—but I won’t say—which.
It would invite misunderstanding.
And on this subject we can always use more, no?)
An older man’s reaction to it.
(A younger one’s would be seamlessly connected with it.)
To put a finer point on it: he could be moved to tears by the sight but it should still be called rape and he should be punished accordingly.
His eyes should be gouged out.
~
The only people who have no right to an opinion about rape are the fathers of daughters.For similar reasons, mothers of sons, gone off to war, on war.
~
"What’s brittle doesn’t bend."When he stops being a generic boy and catapults himself from the cloying intimacy of his mother, he, facing only forward, cannot—on pain of dissolution—look back.
His isolation, for better or worse, from woman, all women, hardens into crystal, so bitterly hard and brittle, it forms his most deniable tragedy and inspires disbelief in every woman.
I read in the paper where a large icicle fell from a lofty eave and impaled and killed a woman.
~
Picture Otto Weininger13 with a twinkle in his eye.I can aspire to this kind of unsettlingness.
~
The fundamental gender of things explains why English is better suited to abstractions than, say, Continental languages."Darkness" and "Light"—of the two, the first is male.
Most feminists implicitly agree.
~
Not Hitler, but the outperforming Stalin of the spirit.~
Studies show: exactly half of all human endeavor is evil.For men, the proportion is usually greater.
The behavior of women manages to dilute the concentration, a delicate titration, without actually diminishing contamination.
All the time, it remains exactly half...
~
"The truth is foreign to me because I am flesh.In death I shall attain it." My ex-wife dressed in red.
I return to the same idea.
A cold winter morning sun.
You frighten me with your mood changes.
"—would it not be scandalous to leave this corpse behind, the body still quivering with fear and giving off pestilential odours, reeking of the sudden decomposition set off by the fear we hold within ourselves our whole lives long?"
—Marie-Clare Blais14
The modal auxiliary ‘shall’ prescribes not a future performance but a present, probably already past, hope.
If I should be doing anything in particular after death, it will be contemplating this.
In the meantime, I have fear to occupy me.
And I shall call the cold sun, the color red, you, all beauty to its altar.
~
The logical form of male thinking:Such and such and this and this.
So, I will do...
Practical illation.
You will never cease reminding me that it is possible to escape it.
Always, we are escaping: this bothers me.
Your solution no less than my problem.
~
I would rather murder than father a child.And as for the other reason for sexual contact: it has become a nightmare.
~
For some time the keeper of these words has been a fiction.But the reader he envisions is certainly more so.
What is most real, what is the most cowardly fact of all, is the writing itself.
It is an antiphrastic account of my moral world and its shameless seams.
~
William James said there was no problem of good.15A crow—beyond a fast walk, an airborne walk—skips along the coping of a brick parapet, lunging into the face of January’s breath.
There is no corresponding problem of good because we expect compatibility of some sort with the world.
A mother’s affection is not supposed to be an object of wonder (in the sense of suspicion).
I think it is.
The first sight of her child can turn a murderess into a saint.
The ‘good’ also requires explanation.
On a sunny winter morning this crow skips like a child.
~
I run from pain but the running brings with it pleasure.~
At 3:02 in the morning at the airport my memory is sharp, visionary....saying to Kathy from a balcony overlooking the Ave that I was alright, I was going to live.
(Four years ago.)
I had thrown up two days worth of undigested food, stored in my distended esophagus.
Skate-boarders roared by.
I sipped my canned apple juice.
Kathy is a dear character in my life, haplessly dear, like my cat.
You are not that, not exactly, not yet.
Maybe you are my conscience, something always to be at war with.
I can mention her name, I can only refer to you as "you" with the same uneasiness with which I address it.
You needn’t feel slighted, I would not leave you for Kathy.
I don’t know if there is a creature I would leave you for.
The level of pain and its attending grace, I’ve come to expect and demand, wouldn’t permit it.
But you won’t think I love you in the way you want to be.
No one ever believes that.
~
Morally, I don’t suffer; aesthetically, I have a right to claim a supreme competence and, as you see, I do.~
17 January 1991/23 February 1991.16War—I am almost left opinionless—is appalling.
It is an embarrassment to terrorists everywhere.
~
Without ever wishing to understand myself too completely...the effort.~
The "wise choice" in love: better not to love at all.~
We need more idealists!Else, where shall we recruit for tomorrow’s cynics and find relief from the scheme set down in Aristotle?
~
How do we fit my small attitude into an ego this size?I am not remembered to the community; where would they find room for me?
The quantity of becoming it would take, the dissolution of my precious being...
I was driven forth from the land, so to speak, fifteen years ago, when I began in earnest these letters-turned-journals.
To document my exile for the odd person in some future generation.
The mystery of participation, of what is called "good" (no matter James’ comment).
No matter that I’ve succeeded in the person of my person in being judged kind, considerate, steadfast....
Deliver me from this "good" that permeates all things.
What crime could do this?
~
Arguing with Mill about the ineradicable penchant we seem to have for the ideal, especially in the face of utility, James conjures a world where the mass enjoys an undisturbed bliss paid for by the uninterrupted torture of one solitary individual.17How repugnant, he permits himself to say.
But now picture this: a moral state of affairs where just a sampling enjoys a modicum of bliss, while the rest....
This is not so repugnant I gather from looking about.
This is not a Marxist sarcasm, but a sound literal evaluation, pressured by the only measure of repugnance available, free of lip-servitude.
Is lamentation insincere then?
It may serve some biological function, I guess: the way irony, on occasion, does.
(It keeps me, for instance, from acts of physical violence.)
Just now, I am not moved to claim more for it.
~
Maybe a million people died yesterday on the other side of the earth on islands in great typhoons and in the horn of Africa of not enough pity.Acts of God?
Certainly, He was complicit.
(And if He doesn’t exist, I accuse Him of that.)
But the important thing is the difference that makes to you?
~
Living with her—and perhaps with anyone—would have a certain element of hell about it.~
Freeze-dried passion, the icy intimacy of nightmare.A clinical voice, but with the syntax, emboldening familiarity, found in diaries.
An accomplishment, an act with tortuous though forgiven consequences under a white moon.
I will be forgiven in time, more or less.
What difference does that make to you?
By what grace will you dismiss me?
My ugliness, the terror that attracts (not pursues) me I cannot give names to as you will assuredly give me.
You will conflate the logician and poet in me to save yourself, to spare yourself yourself.
I am, over and over again, a sharp instrument in your heart.
~
Now everything has become ingrown that early on was admitted—and the rest apparently sealed off—to this self-infected hypochondriac.He was a cheerful boy once, as can still be observed between fatigues and headaches and digestive upsets.
But now, caught up with stealing the pleasure others may take in accusing and cataloging him, he even recoils instinctively with them from his own image.
His ‘I’, already become ‘you’, is straining toward ‘he’.
He (while we may still speak of him as such) feels he might be able to breathe more easily were he to speak in the fourth person, possibly a place in the grammar of a language spoken only by the all-the-way dead.
~
To repeat: What is the difference that makes to you?~
It is no accident that I dress like Mr. Rogers;18 could I ape his soul?~
Not the co-existence of evil and good that is so appalling as that there is no breach between them, all the while a very forward justice masquerades as the bandage for this hypochondriac’s wound.~
When you left, saying we had been "off" all day and unable to take my silence about all that wasn’t mundane, that class of things you so despise and which functions for me, when anything does, to stave off a hopeless, utterly lightless, pall...Unweaned, I cannot seem to handle the smallest abandonment.
On my bed, holding my cat expectantly—my body conjuring the familiar state just before a chest-fit or mock heart-attack, as it hasn’t in so long; and I expect always it will settle, on just such a day, my arrears.
The pain I owe this god.
~
I was accused yesterday of being sincere and resigned.~
Unbelievers that we are, obliged to make divine the seams between our great ideas, my relationship to the mundane is, thus, one of terror.Talk it up, sidle up to it, as Pascal used to say of faith,19 maybe he’ll give you an "A" for effort?
So if I discuss apartments for rent, the different textures of the cats on our walk, how the neighborhood has changed...
I know everything! I see can everything!
but only when I can keep my eyes from welling up, you see.
They do this too easily, it is unbecoming of a terrorist.
~
An object of sentiment; a young girl with a stuffed animal, a doll or cat; women with babies or almost any child:The surface vulnerability is irresistible.
How are we to place blame for suppressing the obvious?
That the teddy-bear is stuffed with rags, cotton or foam; the doll, air-filled plastic; the likelihood that the warm, vibrating ball of fur is only tolerating the proffered intimacy; or the boy’s indifference to or even resentment of motherly attention.
Ask too pertinently how it feels to be the object of another’s affection, we are met with a scowl or a pout.
Lest we spoil the pleasurable effusion.
Dare we suggest that a boy might be permanently "scarred" by a mother’s love?
(The girl is better equipped by nature and convention to handle this kind of abuse.)
Could it occur to her that she might use me as a man might a centerfold?
Why am I forced to break her heart?
How many victims of instinct can you fit on the head of a diaper pin?
~
It must be that [sex] differences, which make every act of love or pretense to intimacy onanistic, are wholly immaterial to the species larger purpose.How psychically self-contained each side is?
At this, the picture of health, they look who can’t be pained to notice.
What am I supposed to do with this information?
If the only non-illusory relation that can obtain between a woman and a man is an ethical one, we are faced with a "terrible crushing of spirit and stifling of soul" that rightfully debases the ethical.
The consequences are ugly, ever evident and cynically shaped.
~
The accusation that I am sincere and resigned irks me.I sit and write where I can see faces but be alone.
I seek another face to find my bearings in my private sea.
The escape in social and political involvement is, to my eyes, so much more sincere but also the province of imbeciles.
There is no communal cause I can identify with.
No injustice greater than my isolation.
Preoccupied, the faces are indescribable.
I would like to apologize to each.
I am constantly saying I am sorry.
Against them I cut the most pathetic figure.
No one speaks to me without at the same time speaking to themselves.
My one ever act in earnest is my apology.
The act of writing and keeping for myself a record of my isolation, however, is continued aggression.
One of us, the lot of you or me, is going to have to die to fix this.
And it can’t be charity on my part that I fear more for you than myself.
~
Boy dreams.The victim of a crime is never sincere.
I can suffer the language of sincerity (and it fills me with awe) but I don’t know if I can those who speak it.
Here’s how I figure it:
If I can take on these absurdities sincerely—make them correspond with every knowable intimation of truth in me (and it seems I am convinced there is sufficient evidence for this)—then the very concept, the idea!, of sincerity must be a chimera, a hoax, a virus even, injected by the mother of lies into the marrow...
But the evidence is spare, on second thought:
I found a single serving box of Cornflakes unopened in a neighbor’s trash can, while exploring the alley behind my parents shack in San Antonio.
The unpaved dirt and gravel was cool and massaged my bare feet.
Behind the fence a neighbor’s permanently parked Studebaker sat covered with fallen pecans, in their rotting still green skins.
Sitting on a cinder block in the shade, I opened the box.
An angel appeared to me and began to speak about loneliness and imagination and about how too much of the latter would push me against the former and that this was fine so long as I never lost sight of her.
She said I would come to loathe the feel of my body from the inside to the point that I would be tempted to relinquish it to the other presences enveloping it, whose bodies connected more tightly both to their occupants and to others in a way I would only ever be able to witness.
She offered me a green pecan, said I could use it if I wanted to, to throw at her if I started to feel she was lying to me.
I was not supposed to feel now or ever again the breath of an untruth without suffocating.
Increasingly as I got older this would become a burden and eventually pieces would fall together and I would come to see through the mother of lies, the imagination, all that still escaped me then, but I would persist, as long as I lived, thinking I was connected to other presences.
She said, "You will go on lying to yourself, abusing others furtively, dishonorably, in the dark, in your room, at night, while they sleep, or even while they are up and about but too sluggish to notice.
They will see in you a living image of something inordinately pertinent to them.
The kindness they give off will be like the odor of wisteria to you, sickening you slightly, making you an embarrassment to them.
I think you will probably never get over that smell, but your lies will inevitably overcome you and you will suffer in such a spectacularly selfish way that it will not be for anyone to pity you except, as will often happen, through misunderstanding.
(And not even I can prevent that goodness owing to stark idiocy.)
You will, in these straits, have to learn to pity yourself and perhaps you can do this gracefully and maybe it will garner some admiration but it will not help your case at all in your own eyes which shall be capable of penetrating to unknown strata of ancient vanity.
You are doomed to mill about the unmentionable, unknowing peace except as evasion or numbness.
I don’t fully expect this to sink in now.
Finish opening your box of Cornflakes."
A very brown little boy, in my T-shirt and shorts, an ant crawling over my toe, I set the green pecan in the opening of an ant-hill.
I edged my cinder block closer to the vine-grown fence, adjusting to the changing pattern of the shade.
Honeysuckle blossoms, vermilion and syrupy, poked through in a hundred places.
I put one in my mouth.
Maybe I would offer her one?
She glared at me a little impatiently but not unkindly.
"You sweet boy," she remarked, "when you were born I was busy.
Your mother suffered a great deal, she nearly died, did you know?...
You will master the language but all without learning to speak...(Am I being too prophetic?)...nor listen in the way that prepares the soil of the heart for belief?
I imagine the truth will ring for you but without content; your eyes, like those of a bat, redundant and for that reason unemployed.
All your senses shall be dulled.
What succeeds in breaking through to you will have to be the result of your bat-like faculty...."
I know now where the image of her comes from.
My parents had a calendar with religious pictures, saint’s days, etc....and on one there was a print of a painting I was to see again on the cover of the German magazine Sterne 20 years later.
The angel hovered over two children crossing a rickety footbridge spanning a raging cataract in the night.
~
Because I can write in this language and because you can read it too...Where does my bitterness come from?
(Only a rhetorical question: the mistake you so often make is to try to answer.)
~
I don’t remember what it was like before.~
A certain portion of doting comprises the critical part of love.You must stay still long enough for me to memorialize an image and participate in this excess.
~
One day I shall get past these elementary pronouncements on women and men, progress to a wisdom or attitude more worthy of an adult..."No, first, become an adult."
When will this happen?
I have been waiting for a sign from Heaven.
The humanscape about me is comprised of only the worst sort of children.
~
Can a person in pain have an unconscious?~
Killed a pregnant cockroach, flushed it down the toilet, egg case protruding from under its carapace.Since last summer I’ve let them have the run of my apartment.
Now, I’m starting to kill them.
Their numbers exceed my compassion.
God comes to feel this way about us.
~
Arrogance in its most virile form preempts criticism from others by outdoing them in the task of diminishing you.Why have I made a virtue of holding together the pieces?
The godless, pointless state or process can care less.
~
"Revolutions, wars, cataclysms—what does this foam mean when compared to the fundamental horror of existence?"20~
Take a group of people together with a cause, no matter how noble...I understand now (this minute) how Christ could forgive his tormentors.
The opportunities for evil in the group are not so much augmented as transmuted—all of it together becoming imminently pardonable.
We say he died for our sins, playing on the ambiguity of the collective; not yours or mine, because each one of us, alone, would tax his mercy infinitely more.
He did the easy thing.
The group always seeks in what it does to approximate the adiaphorous state of nature or—more revealingly—embody an "act of God".
~
The terribly artistic thing about Aristotle’s moral theory is how fitting, entrenching and right it is...As I watch the idiot,21 inhabiting the White House, defend himself against the morons trying to unseat him.
What do I contribute?
It isn’t enough that I complain?
"The point is we have to live together."
...and Aristotle announced a civil way to go about this.
But I can only see it as drama.
Without dissimulation from whence would the interest devolve.
Every lie requires someone to announce it to support action, change and then a new lie.
This makes the cyclical progression understandable, but in so doing confirms its removal from the sphere of the ethical, which is hopelessly linear.
Art is essentially free of the fear of hope.
There is too little fear in Aristotle.
~
A logic student asks me, "What does logic have to do with anything?"Nothing, but by its very inutility it sometimes can give one the sensation of beauty.
Like the coins in the pan handler’s dirty palm, it can be imagined as vital and perfectly optional.
~
Obviously, I am taken with the idea of power.I would like to say power over myself in mitigation of the untoward appearance of such preoccupation, but there is no broaching the notion without implicating other people.
There is just one form power can take and it involves a collective.
(Another reason why ‘egotist’, used as an epithet, sounds a complaint about the weather.)
Power over myself would be this: the strength to undo in me what you have done there.
But I am no Alexander:22 emasculated, you and your kind got to me so early the only balls I have I contrived from the scrap of your messy work....
No taste at all for lording it over you in the honest man’s way, I am committed to living on what falls from your table—even the gift of your shadow my Diogenean syndrome will not let me enjoy.
Just give me my sunny rock.
We both know this is hardly an abdication of power: Alexander flinched, just as you do now.
~
The softness, vulnerability, generosity, optimism, etc.or their appearances I don’t permit myself here is reserved for daily life.
What I am left with when I come to write is this utter pall.
Which will scarcely be read anyway.
Or, if read, not comprehended...or if that, only by those who cannot acknowledge it.
~
Am I afraid to drop the slightest moisture of consolation to those dying of thirst beneath the grate?Show myself affected, a regular sort with a normal portion of feeling?
I begin now to stop answering questions like these.
~
Vast episodes of human shame and injustice the well-meaning will not allow us to forget...(thinking about Jerzy Kozinsky).What is not being allowed to forget supposed to do for us?
What do we do with the information?
Keeping the memories fresh does serve these functions for sure:
First, no one will be able to say we haven’t done this before when we do it again; and, second, it provides a base, a threshold for surpassing ourselves in the future.
Next time we’ll kill more non-Jews as well,23 or we’ll slaughter a hundred thousand in less time for less cause, e.g., instead of cheap speed, next time it really will be broccoli we go to war for24—or should it be a good banana picked by a free-enterprising hand?
(Again, I have no right to use the pronoun ‘we’; it in no way corresponds to any feeling in me that wouldn’t seek to confront you.)
~
The most wretched dog, mangy and ribbed, living on the street will wag its tail.25~
Today, Valentine’s Day, a man called to say to me, "It would be nice to have your hard dick in my mouth."He also noted that my voice was soft and sweet, etc.
He said his name was Michael Anderson...
A trampled nerve.
Maybe I understand (a little) what it must be like for a woman.
I think hardly past this experience this day and the next.
I was aroused enough to be depressed, but what else stems from the humiliation?
That I have a sufficient presence in the world to be victimized, that someone out there could peel back even a corner of my self-regard?
How can I avoid using him as an occasion?
What if I had been raped?
The way I would have tilted my head looking at the fallen pieces...
Michael will never read this, will go on thinking my voice soft, sweet...
~
A man plopped a card on my table with the American Manual Alphabet for the Deaf on one side, and a smiley face and "I am a deaf person selling these cards for a living" printed on the other.As he made the rounds of all the tables in the university cafeteria, a manager accosted him and asked him to leave.
The deaf man made a loud protesting sound that turned heads, and the manager, frustrated and momentarily swollen in his role, raised his voice for all to hear (who could): "I don’t encourage anyone to give this man money!"
I don’t know if I would have left the man a dollar on the table if the manager hadn’t asked me not to; but this is the form charity takes in me.
Only tell me that the beggar will drink himself stupid with my spare change and I find new reserves of compassion and aggression.
If you were drowning, I would probably not stop myself from helping you, but it would be foolish of you to thank me.
It is because I think you know this already that being helped is so humiliating.
Thus, the undercurrent always justifies ingratitude.
~
How could I avoid reacting to you long enough to say something true?The person I am in your face and in what I manage to reveal here both stumble through effort.
Yet each meliorative or integrated instance of what is called "healthy" in this matter is inutterable stupidity.
I don’t see a way out.
Even acceptance of this fact is a last dream of the dying.
~
I don’t impugn Hope because it is false (that would be ceding it too much) but because it arises from a decaying integrity, because it is morbid.Where do I steal the right to rail against the morbid?
(At what point do these questions turn silly?—but if they ever become that, they were so in the beginning and, again, I run up against stupidity, the spitting image of which I observe just now, watching a man, standing in line, making faces at a woman’s child.)
~
In this series of masks, which you readily acknowledge as that, what determines which pleases you?Your interest lights upon one from time to time, is repelled by some, indifferent to most...yet this one or that will eventually mar the polished surface of your consciousness.
They all stop too short, too short of expressing a small ordinariness.
You will not so readily acknowledge this.
That at every point I am unremarkable is a lesson presented to your judgment.
~
You cannot have it both ways: either I am peculiar and dismissable or ordinary and unsettling.(Said this once before.)
~
She would have me incorporated, re-embodied (assuming I was ever), reabsorbed, as it were...my choosing to play out of her sight is discomfiting to her.Coy, cryptic, and, as a consequence, erotic, we employ a similar charm, are subjects in competition for the same object: to seduce in order to betray.
~
Logic may govern the relations among the propositions that are objects of our beliefs, but it is the etiquette of faith and, like all etiquettes, it is, in the first interests of life, dispensable; we need not stand on it.In fact, we gain integrity, a certain wholeness or decency, by losing it, but at the cost of also losing the righteousness that paradoxically, when rigorously exercised, accomplishes a more advanced integrity—an integrity farther along in some direction.
I won’t say which, only that nothing written anywhere on the sky or in the earth or any part of the empire26 indicates whether we should rest here or move on.
But since we must, one or the other (logic insures this), the future is so frighteningly clear that we are disposed to be blind to it.
~
It is the man who makes faces, the woman who owns the child, and the child who must learn from these two!(I can make faces and say idiot things to my cat but he will not learn from me.)
~
I see everything as on the verge of befalling me.I am terrified, so I am arrogant.
~
A kind of murderous, diffuse suicide.Out to destroy myself in you or anywhere I see my reflection.
So little of me left here.
~
Almost one half of who I am I will never be able to write about in these pages.That part stands in absolute opposition to the reason, grammar and morality of the language.
I can tell you best about it by describing you.
~
If I keep mentioning ‘you’ enough, it may occur to you who I mean.I needn’t identify you more precisely than as my little voyeur, my sweet beleaguered reader.
My ego performs its lude antics for your salacious pleasure.
Together we mock the morality of the language.
All bare-assed reference with no meaning.
I could clothe my ego more congenially, tell you who I saw today, what we discussed, what I did, what happened to me, what affected me, mention a few people other than myself, describe them, show some imagination understanding their predicament, be kinder to their politics, their loved ones, their jewelry, drop the snideness, fake some good humor at least, try to recover my gift for depicting the bucolic and picaresque (long, long ago I was obsessed with the evocations of mountain flower names— "rose pussy toes", and cataloging gumspots on city sidewalks)...
My sentimentality indulges itself now only through occasional reference to my cat, the sole remnant of a failed relationship...
But tomorrow I go to Lucia di Lammermoor with O just after we dine at the Bamboo Garden, a Buddhist, vegan Chinese restaurant.
This morning I did a load-test on the batteries in my electric car.27
Next week, with the new quarter, I get busy tutoring logic again at the university; and, as for the last several years, on the weekends I go to work at a group home for developmentally disabled adults, etc....
But behind all this cheerful activity, the sad indolence of a trapped spirit, a cowardly wad...and the violence there, sprung and trembling, should come as no surprise.
~
Why have I made a virtue of holding together the pieces?The godless, pointless state or process of things could not care less.
~
Reading this, Gombrowicz would have found it (at best) too Bach-like in its mathematical precision and distance, less sissified than Proust but just as shut in."Values are formed in the space between people" and I am reluctant to stray into this space.
It was his thought that in their redefinition or in the attempt to redefine them some salvation might be had...
The contrition or mystical repose of Bach or Borges28 slightly affronted his mercurial uneasiness; the yearning he discerned in the last quartets of Beethoven was more congenial.
Perhaps because I am not a musician or because Bach was not a writer or thinker I can impute to him almost a plumbless, magnificent depth.
Similarly with Borges...until I consider what he said in interviews and am reminded of how desperate I must have been to share in his enlightening imagination and in the confidence of his repose.
Or when I recall Bach’s 22 children and how simple a man he must have been...
I do not yearn for simplicity, or if I do, only in moments of undignified despair, when the knife in me is twisting.
Pain, which the cello suites help with, keeps me yet from resignation.
What is my relationship to pain?
Do I really want it to end?
What would end with it?
We are most vulnerable to contrition not when in pain but during the first few minutes of its subsidence, while the pain is paused but memory is still fettered by it.
~
"Why the two-facedness, why don’t you express your true self in public?" You want to live (as all arrogant things do), and perhaps so do I.~
Practice that look, smack of lips, matronizing censure, the seed of a certain violence, of a kind if never against the deserving mother then the next most available female.~
A third path?Either we overpopulate ourselves to death...
or we premeditatedly underpopulate ourselves to extinction.
What makes moderation seem credible?
Our instincts rage uninterrupted in the first direction, but ‘consciousness’ has at least dreamt of the alternative.
Aristotle’s ideal of moderation is no less a pipedream than Plato’s tableness, his chairness, etc.
Where in nature do we find temperance persisting over time as something other than the lowest point in a pendulum swing?
When does it stand still?
(While continuing to breathe.)
Is it the affliction of the asker of these questions that he keeps slipping outside human time, pretending to a view sub specie aeternitatis, betraying his spiritual, unnatural leanings?
For Nature, reason is an alpine blossom, a pastime, even once an enthusiasm, but hardly a career.
She dulls all pointed questions, acknowledges no ‘shoulds’.
Such thoroughgoing nihilism is unspeakable to us.
But she has very kindly provided us with the wherewithal to move beyond questions to a fine state of being when the contents our brains reinvigorate the soil.
~
How do I back off from this precipice?Nostalgia, jettisoned some time back, it isn’t as though it were a matter of retracing my steps.
~
"You have no vices."But, I do.
I have bad thoughts, worse than anything you could commit with your hands or lips.
~
Before we were born we were shown vastly different pictures of what it would be like.Yours must have come closer.
It has to be said for it, though: my vision, however little there has been to remind me of it since, has continued to color, that is to say, darken my perspective.
This through some vivid virtue of its own or some gift for compensation of yours or shortcoming of mine.
~
Imagine the evil roiling in the heart of the medieval liar and thief whose arms were cut off and tongue ripped out.~
Maybe I was born blind.
Notes
- A reaction to a view expressed by James in, among other places, the 1880 essay "The Sentiment of Rationality" that we are somehow under an obligation to interpret reality in its best light. Luno, who enjoyed reading James, would hardly argue that this isn’t what happens. That it should unfailingly be recommended, he would dispute. We may learn from the attempt not to, or at least, derive a useful correction of attitude.
- Especially evident in Salambo, The Temptation of St. Anthony and in Three Tales.
- The inverse point cannot be made: past or future pains are always in the business of diminishing present joy. The "rehearsal" consists in struggling with these forces.
- Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of the Variations, also heard on many of his recordings of J. S. Bach.
- Usually so soft spoken, it can be a matter of some annoyance to the few persons Luno has dealings with.
- The three thousand year old epic of inconsolable loss and the wakening of consciousness resonates deeply throughout Luno’s Notebooks.
- "Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics", The Philosophical Review, LXXIV, Jan. 1965, pp. 3-12.
- Cf. Notebook X, passage on "cheeks".
- The step from consciousness to guilt is too short to merit a distinction for Luno. He would add, "And it is growing shorter even as we back away from the anthropocentrism of religion."
- "A Stake driven by Seven Blows of Truth’s hundred-ton Hammer into the Throat of every Spreader of lies and Calumny concerning Jehovah and all his Friends, male and female" (Title of a book), quoted in A Voice from the Chorus, Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), Fitzlyon and Hayward, trans., Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1976, p. 86.
- Recalls a bathetic passage from Jean Genet, in Our Lady of the Flowers, who was also prone to a scandalous religiosity. Bernard Frechtman’s translation, Grove Press, Inc., 1963, pp.166-7.
- Cf. Wallace Stevens’ poem, A Weak Mind in the Mountains (1938), in The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems, Holly Stevens, ed., Vintage Books, 1972.
- Viennese philosopher and author of Sex and Character (1906, English edition) who committed suicide at age 23, thus setting an example of genius which haunted Wittgenstein most of his life. His book was lauded by Strindberg, recommended by Gertrude Stein and influenced Freud, Joyce, Kafka, E.M. Cioran and many others. Luno has characterized him as "a Kant gone mad" with admiration. See Notebook XII for much more on Weininger.
- Deaf to the City (trans. Carol Dunlop), The Overlook Press, 1987, p. 79.
- op. cit.
- The Gulf War.
- "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" (1891). The argument is not specifically with Mill as with consequentialism in general.
- In the latter half of the twentieth century Fred Rogers hosted a much admired children’s television program. But it was his button sweaters that Luno coveted.
- A premise in his Wager argument, section 223 in the Apology part of the Penseés, called Infinity-Nothing. The dubious idea that one may overcome doubt by playing the part of belief is critical to understanding Luno’s doctrine of the impossibility of coincident sincerity and integrity. It underpins his view that the concept of sincerity (sometimes referred to in the Notebooks as "the Concept") is incoherent all by itself.
- Diary I, Witold Gombrowicz, Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 17.
- George Bush.
-
A. I am Alexander the Great
B. I am Diogenes the dog.
A. The dog?
B. I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy and bite louts.
A. What can I do for you?
B. Stand out of my light.This version of the anecdote is from Herakleitos and Diogenes, trans. by Guy Davenport, Grey Fox Press, 1979, p. 44. The story, so emblematic of uncompromise, is a frequent reference in Luno. He probably first became acquainted with it in Kierkegaard, another fan of the "Socrates gone mad".
- Responsibility for human atrocity Luno never considers a local matter.
- The Gulf War. President Bush was reported to have been unfond of broccoli (in contrast to Luno) but an enthusiastic speed boater. Luno can never forgive democracies for electing leaders that so accurately represent their constituents.
- A perfect Diogenean image. Cf. Neitzsche’s notion of "joyful cynicism" or gaia sciensa.
- The empirical, phenomenal, world. Sometimes Luno also refers to it as "Alexander’s Estate" after Alexander the Great, "The Ruler of the Known World".
- At the time Luno owned a 1976 CitiCar, a tiny limited production electric vehicle, which he got from me. It was his reaction to the war with Iraq. He later gave up owning any kind of vehicle but perhaps a bicycle.
- Gombrowicz’s ambivalence toward Borges (largely shared by Luno) is expressed in his memoir, A Kind of Testament, Calder and Boyars, London, 1973, pp. 89-91. Borges confessed in various interviews his incomprehension of certain existentialists (e.g., Kierkegaard and Sartre) and a fascination with more "crystal-headed" thinkers (as Luno characterizes them) like Bertrand Russell. The passage reveals clearly Luno’s ultimate allegiances. As a trained analytic philosopher he greatly admires logical clarity but only as a special kind of aesthetic (i.e., adiaphorous) preference. Perspicuity can claim no special moral weight. Edification arises from meditating on the ruins of these crystal palaces. As in a Tarkovsky film, philosophy, for Luno, is a wandering among these places. A willow-the-wisp mysticism about the corners of our fields of vision may be all that returns with us from the excursion.
Copyright © 1998 Bianco Luno and Victor Muñoz
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