Bianco Luno: Notebook VIII

Bianco Luno

Notebook VIII
4/14/92 – 9/8/93

Part 1

"At times we must choose between the lesser of two evils."
In a democracy, when is this not the case?

Characterizing O—are these criticisms?
Memory: that others do not invest enough in your words to remember them.
Words: the intense, immediate, passionate, unalloyed significance of them for you (but sometimes at the expense of larger stretches of meaning that consume time and fundamental patience).
Feeling for animals: a too(?) vivid focus on the possibilities of their suffering (which an awareness of the place of suffering in general will not blur or temper).
How much of a slap in the face is it when people don’t remember what you say?
It shows they’re not alive to anything but pain inflicted on them.
If each of your words were barbed they would remember—and you would be 9/10ths alone—but how ‘together’ ever?
Not appreciated information, the way we don’t want to know really the agony that goes into what we eat.
All this is scarcely a criticism and, consequently, it is more terrifying.

It all dissolves in cleverness.
The accusation is so acknowledged it doesn’t even sting.
Pain is the cleverest, though: I envision an X-ray of a ‘corkscrew’ or ‘rosary’ esophagus.

Pain assures me that criticism, in the guise of some altruism, is impossible.

Having been brutalized by some youthful illusion, now our business is to "be real".
On and on like this until this perception, too, is undone.
In the paper I read about a graduate student shooting himself in the head in Ravenna Park.
Academically outstanding, athletic, lots of caring friends, active in social causes, close family...but though he counseled others well, everyone repeats, he was unforthcoming about his own deepest concerns, etc.
(An advertisement for a crisis clinic is appended to the article.)
He must have had some?
And he was articulate and we have a sound or gesture in the language for every feeling and what we can’t express others, given the chance, would surely be able to infer, all of us, of course, partaking in the same humanity?
(I am compelled to lend these handy assertions the inflection of a question.)

On a second story window perch I built for him, overlooking the backyard, partly overgrown with blackberries, Fellini stretches out his long body in the morning sun.
We remain staring at each other for a long time.
My hand passes over the short fur between his ears and, when it moves too quickly, he attacks it.

"So much pent up hatred..."
You say this with a very public sympathy, as though it might be relieved against them, or as though it wouldn’t be trained on you.
If injustice existed I would hate less.

The intimacy I’ve espoused by not addressing them, but you, is uncivilizing.
I intend to make sure every breath you take has been discarded by me.

Max Frisch overhears someone at a neighboring table who doesn’t know him speak of him with positive hatred.
Admitting his astonishment¾ "I realize, almost for the first time, that when one writes one always reckons on sympathy."¹—he goes on to suggest perhaps we couldn’t even begin to write without doing so.
Is this so?
An astute ‘humanity’ pervades his postwar Sketchbooks: his reaction to German self-justification, a tour of a death camp, the tragic/pathetic flights of a Teutonic amoralized spirit, Letzigraben (his marvelous public pavilion and swimming pool), admirations of Brecht and Wilder, judicious excuses for Swiss philistinism...
The case for a responsible artist: I picture him looking out at the mudflats from his ample architect’s workroom, swilling a Steinläger...
My sarcasm is too rancid to convey neatly the fresh reaction called for by his six year old daughter’s remark.
He recounts her asking whether he should
enjoy death, and like, a knowing parent, he turns the question back to her.
She says, "No, not now, but later, later I shall enjoy dying."²

I must exist as an infringement.
Ambient pity, not sympathy, I could not begin to write without.
I’ve lost the ability to imagine in earnest to what use people would put sympathy.

See what this inspires:
(Perhaps it will criminalize me in your eyes, at least lower your estimation of me—where possible. Better this than what I know some will accuse me of—for their own collective reasons—: being normal.
But because its topical and because I wouldn’t want to seem so otherworldly as to excuse myself entirely from your company, here’s my story.)
I sexually abused my sister.
With a straw I blew at her vulva.
We took turns and she blew at my
genitals.
We did this sitting in a closet in a room used for storage, thinking we were hidden by a vanity backed up against the entrance to the closet.
She was three; I was six, and, we will say, in a relative position of power.
My father caught us and spanked me.
I remember especially his face when I looked up.
I have been trying to describe and understand it ever since.
He offered no discussion, reckoning probably on my already knowing, because we were hiding, that it was wrong.
There were a few more sexual contacts as we got older, but he never found out about those.
Not long after, I was being punished for something else, I forget what, and had to spend one whole day confined to a bathroom.
By late afternoon I had taken a razor blade and cut the tip of my penis.
A little scar is still there.
(Good title for a memoir!)

"Why does moral outrage not qualify as pain? The idea makes you laugh."
There is no ‘moral pain’.
Morality consists of pain.
The pleasure you take in being part of us
(positing consensus) precludes otherwise.

1 May 1992³
Violence in the streets.
But there isn’t any: no fires, no looting, and no innocent people are being beaten.
We are shown it all on videotape, but what does videotape prove?
Confused, we require expert exegesis: fire is not hot, pain does not hurt...
A racist is only a small part of what I am, for I judge people by everything visible, surmisable, and incomprehensible about them; and this leaves me pretty well blind.
Had I been on the jury, I would have insisted his skin is not truly black.
Obviously, the system does work because I would never be selected to appear on a jury judging you—though I could be the only expert here.

"The truth shall make you free,"
¾ in much the same way death will.

The rest is experienceable only as a joke.

Registered and went to vote.
Tore my ballot into four pieces and placed it in the slot.
In a democracy, "if enough people...," blah, blah, blah.
If enough people don’t....ditto.

Faith: one day I will mature to the point of understanding.

"...in those countries people are tortured and killed for trying to vote..."
Yes, that would certainly make the privilege valuable.
And here—in this country—what are people being tortured and killed for?
Whatever that is, it must be equally valuable.

Decency is moral, i.e., within range, but justice is poetic, serendipitous and, simply, no other kind exists.

Two in the morning; music video; charged motions of bodies...
The sexual or—more civilized and spiritually circumscribed—the romantic tropisms undo human costumes.
Women and men then cease being human
for the duration; but not in order to reveal a deeper being (whatever imagined thing that might be).
Rather, those costumes cannot be worn at once.
Something similar in war: genesis of Smedley’s phrase about fairness in love and war.
Desire and hatred alike will not be compassed by the normative idea of being human.
Woman as object of his desire and/or hatred, and, at best, a man is an object of comfort, facilitating a relationship, for her.
Becoming friends, they become human, viz., neutered—or they stop minding being objects, which is just as easily effected, to watch them behave the better part of the time, watch them lose their heads in solemn mysteries...
I think nothing can pressure me to pass beyond these recurring sentiments on the mutual opacity of women and men.
That they are not true, that I distort the meaning of the separation or that they are so but causes to rejoice—are not for me viable responses.

At work I am appreciated for my wry humor.
Thus I skirt the obligation (in social work) of saying commiserative or positive things and expressing anything of what I write here.
I’ve become afraid of being stupidly silent; a marked change in this persona, for I used to sport a quiet sincerity.
Alone with the retarded—on our little outings or on the night shift, as now—a truer side of myself can breathe.
After ten years now—as though it wasn’t clear in the beginning: the lie.
Social work is nourished on the assumption that it is possible to truly help other people (though less obviously than in business, politics, government or education).
Obsolete and defective people are clothed in epithets, calculated to enhance their decorative worth about the fringes of the community.
We help them by helping ourselves.
And it had better be true that we can do that at least.
This self-concern will be our last and most intrepid excuse.

"What do you accomplish, assuming you’re right, by denying us the capacity for charity?"
Marx as landscape painter.
The precept that we decide what you need, not you, is universally operative.

Consensus as an expression of the face: the eyes appear to glaze over.

When my ex-wife left me I came close to killing myself.
I groveled before her, unable to breathe because I couldn’t hate her without seeing my own wretched image.
That May the cherry blossoms and the weather were especially lovely.

How do you imagine that I see myself?
Sometimes as a precocious boy, more often as an imbecile.
But these are not offered as a sordid bouquet of suspiciously convenient self-deprecations.
The hatred I have is too great yet for a boy or an imbecile and never releases you from its sight.

When my ex-wife left me I nearly died.
We were hardly married, and to the extent we were, what did that mean?
The ceremony, held in her apartment, was witnessed by two deadbeats living next door, kindly interrupting their fishing trip to toast us.
She baked a cherry pie, which we all shared.
The county collected forty dollars.
The affair seemed to mean something to her.
We were together two and one half years.
My last year as an undergraduate I lived with a woman, and when she left me I nearly died too.
(Grist for a mill.)
What an image, what a relief it should have been!
For many years the ‘you’ in these notebooks was her.
I can’t be sure anymore who it is.

The term ‘arrogance’ is so woefully inadequate to the task of describing this mix of exhaustion and impatience.
It begins as an affront; we can hardly expect humility in its course.

When I see her (rarely) on the street, after a short nervous exchange, she wants to give me a hug goodbye.
It seemed to mean something to her, and yet I was the one who nearly drove his miniature car into a concrete wall.

Not often an admirable trait: nearly killing yourself when left.
(Much more flattering at the beginning of a relationship.)
What does it betray?
Cowardice?
Hormonal maladjustment?
An attempt to clear the air?
A tantrum?
A violent act aimed at unglazing all eyes involved?
Malice?
It is, whatever else it might be, a terrific opportunity to glimpse something of the truth that haunts the vastness just outside the purview of the streetlight we, like bugs, loyally orbit.

A generation later, in his second Sketchbook⁴, Frisch is closer to where I am now; I am thinking of the irony with which he says he believes in the constitutional state.
What will I think at his age?

My feelings—always so precise and clear they seem fake.
Articulated as pronouncements, in place of gesture or sigh, I give them an outline they do not have.
I don’t grant them all the rights by custom an artist is committed to defending on their behalf.
But, displaced, we see what effect they have.

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