Bianco Luno: Notebook X

Bianco Luno

Notebook X
9/27/1994 – 11/30/1995

what you don't want to hear

Question for the oracle:
Why so much chatter about death?
"Death is the mirror of truth.
If when you come before it, the mirror gives back nothing, then, indeed, your escapade from oblivion to oblivion was for naught.
What weight there is to be had is by death conferred in the form of graceful transience.
The greatest weight is given art for its role in the creation of that image, morality derives its value, in turn, from art (what of it it has) and, lastly, innocence."

At my death will I be able to say, "This is how it was always going to be"?

What is truth?
The positive and complete exposition would consume a lifetime.
For practical purposes (the only ones you can ever excuse yourself for having) truth is special to you and valuable almost in proportion to your reluctance to hear it.
It is, in short, what you don't want to hear.

Who is hurt by my not seeking to be loved by you?

Yet, surely, the course I've taken has made me inordinately vulnerable to rejection.
I should sulk a long time in my hiding place if you judge and set me aside.
You might even wring from me an apology or a concessive word.
Then I will feel betrayed by myself.
Then anger.
Then I will plot with fresh resolve against the triumph of your shallowness to bring you down, me with you if required, to a depth from which no one rises awareness intact.
Bobbing to the surface, the cells of our mind logged, we will have lost most of the wherewithal of truth, expended in survival.
We may tweet like birds.
I swear we will.

"But you will never die, because you have never lived."
This is the plan.
Admittedly, one of cowardice.
We are not all equally afraid of the same things.

Ingrown, dialectical, this language cannot describe the love harbored in the world just past my nerve endings: It isn't as if each day were not an argument against what I pretend to reveal here.
But this is, your incredulity aside, the proper use of the language.
Together with consciousness (its emergent property) it remains a toxic inorganic substance, against which the whole of your nature marshals forces to combat.
This in no way entitles you to the comfort of a judgment.
Have you sunken so low that you not only want to seize life but approval too?
I merely remind you of an obviousness.
All approval is self-generated.
Craftily, you will extract from this a stiff breeze for your sails.
In case there had been more than a momentary puzzlement about me.

"Philosophy is dangerous when it goes to the head."

What is beautiful leaves us wanting; but for the gratuitous pain, it would be the envy of morality, which would dull its edge: It is the interest of only a few and only at special points in their lives.

The truth seems to require that knowledge of itself be fleeting.

The force of an affirmation is its anonymity.

Beauty is horror disguised.
It so suits us to be alive and painless.
It clothes us, covers our shame, illegitimacy and true intentions, that is to say, our worst.
"But how can you say our intentions are always our worst when you deny us the capacity for good ones?"
The one good intention—because it would end all your intentions—sets you apart from approval.
Acting on this one, you act alone.

At the moment, the autumn sun feels very kind on my skin; I live in a very beautiful part of the world; I have reason to be happier than anyone I know.
Through my window: at this latitude even the fallen oak leaves cast very long shadows on the walk.
It is 59 degrees F.
With an old shoelace my cat and I dance about on a carpet recovered from a dumpster behind a lawyer's office on the eve of the rains that now will soon wash the dust from his fur.

I admire those philosophers who prize clarity above all else, who manage to uncover the depths of the pond without disturbing the surface, who can be that still and nerveless and appreciate the beauty of their pose and struggle against the sorry instinct to superimpose some other value on the enterprise, i.e., the good life, rationality, or some such humane thing.
The difference between striking a pose and being stricken by one.
I am thinking now perhaps most of J. L. Austin.

In the expectation of an innocence reclaimed I advert to the objects in my room or the words that suspend them in my consciousness.

Atonement inexorably devolves to sin also—indeed compounds it—nevertheless, it goes a way toward "richness of character," which in turn, may forestall suicide until the last possible moment,...may even make it unnecessary, we so much pray.
So it is we can manage parenthetically by inserting every quibble our reason can generate.

Wallace Stevens saw fit at the very last minute to become a Catholic.
A vision appeared to him under the palm at the end of his mind, the clutter of materiality, blue guitars, etc., having cleared just enough to make way.
And the moment called for ceremony.

Here, I've lit upon a manner of expressing our moral relation to suicide: We should live in a way as to make it unnecessary.

(And should it overcome us in our arrogance anyway, death will supply its own consolation.)

Those philosophers who prize clarity—what would they think of the dust and cat fur congesting my lawyer's carpet?
Isn't the fragrance offered by blossoms of that rude thing "truth" quite enough, in itself?
Yesterday I was reminded by the carcasses of two animals in close proximity to each other on the street: Another squirrel, opened up by a wheel, and a pigeon, its neck broken on a curb.
Also, last evening I was revisited by my old pain.¹
A very quick visit, thankfully.

It is not because we share so much with animals that my heart goes out so easily to them (though I may feel less alone around them), it is our moral debt to them.
We, unlike they, have no important business here.
Nature developed a need to reflect upon itself?
No, this hardly convinces, coming from where it does.
Like a hole in her head.
Yes, very much like that: the knack that swells us so found a space to inhere, a whole realm of experience to infect.
All her illnesses are necessarily self-limiting.
We are not an exception.
If we could accept this less gracelessly.

"Such rubbish! Your fatalism should not at the risk of contradiction allow you to languish in melancholy." Among the sundry narcotics you present me with I like this one...
The humour somehow becomes me.
Maybe a little more malice in my heart than Walser, but essentially the same obsequity.
It is necessary for sanity to now and then threaten someone with murder and lend clarity to the relationship.

It will come as a shock to me if I am understood as offering anyone but myself advice.
I merely inform of what will happen to you, sometimes by embodying it.

Long ago, many years ago, I began this journal as a suicide missive.
Though the intention has remained determined, a thousand diversions, remarks deemed necessary, confessions, pleas, commentaries, face-saving excuses, etc....
No sentence wishes entirely to complete itself.

Mired in solipsistic idiocy, it became my ambition to destroy all hope, an ever more daunting task the more considered.
...leaden sky, moist decay underfoot, moss grown trunks...
Fear, too, cannot survive deep into this season.

He is not truly ill who can be special in his suffering.
He does not deserve the moral right of the epicure in convalescence.
(Walter Benjamin on Robert Walser)

In which arrogance and every other anti-humane impulse asserts itself as a furtive literature.

I have come to learn the sentiments of the critic so well I cannot even momentarily empathize with her without seeming to mock her in the same act.

I apologize for the delay.
But I am not so strong as I wish for you to be.

From a confusion of motives I tend to exaggerate my pain.
So magnificently poised above your living hell, I want to be like you, to participate in a communion with your kind.
My calm facade warrants for its respect some excruciating substrate.
Lest I be taken for the wrong ilk of fool and my ignorance not of the hallowed Socratic sort, I peer silently into the offing as though the objects of my investigation were not as self-evident as the crush of vanities I swim in...
From these I demand of my pain deliverance.
Have I got it backwards?
Tell me.

I am as happy as it is possible for a human being to be.
I only look around to see just how happy that is and I feel sad again.

On the back of a T-shirt of a boy with a bicycle helmet under his arm: "THE COST OF LIVING IS DYING, everybody pays. No fear."

Why should you pay the price of my ill humor, my railing righteously at the falseness of your best intentions?
A true fan, I swoon before the truth's freezing majesty.
Nobody is suckered better than me by her (the first lie) sexless immobility.
But perhaps love grows out of her infinite capacity for abuse, and, like Diogenes' practice statue² she becomes the standard to embrace, forever available to attune you to the pure white lie of the thing.
My first thought on being born was to console myself thus.

Pander to the illusion that the choice is between guilt and innocence when it is between guilt and stupidity.

It amazingly has nothing to do with us.
Here I am swooning.

Why does it appear incumbent on all these lights to reject nihilism (Darwinian, Freudian, Wittgensteinian...) in favor of a decency?
What has decency to say for itself ever?
Other than to say nihilism is, in itself, already dismissible, and decency, an embrace only the most abject would choose to stand off from.
Also, that it has for its side all the resources of conversation, while its disjunct, only what its name would suggest.

My bitterness has a rightful place beside your unwarranted enthusiasm at having been born.

It is important for me that you see me as a threat.

A woman in Sarajevo is described as no longer scared but something worse: "bored with fear".

The darkness so vast and deep it fears no light.

"Anti-life..."
Not so much as that I will not be suckered by you.

And if my sadness is affectation, tu quoque.

Arrogant boy.
The normal measure of self-respect comes from being woven into the 'social fabric'.
Resisting this all of my life I illustrate the consequence.

Capital punishment.
After a public trial for guilt, it is permissible only as privately ritualized vengeance and never by the state.
Only by a willing, witting survivor sufficiently close to the victim to convince us of the authority of their outrage.
They (if anyone) must pull the trigger, lever, switch or give the injection.
Never an arm of a social or political institution.
The rational motives of punishment—detention, deterrence and rehabilitation—are perhaps excusable acts of societal self-preservation.
But never retribution.
Groups of people (for whom exclusively the notion of rationality was invented) never have a right to get emotional.
Only individuals, and for them, it is not a right so much as a physiological exigency.
The notion of 'right' is already twice removed from the pain of flesh by being abstracted from the rules of a social game, itself, a too exquisite calculation of aggrandizement.
Only thus is the moral closure of the event of murder possible.
The survivior/executioner is made victim so that where the dust of barbarism settles is kept neatly circumscribed.

Policy on crime: It is important that we make ourselves victims before someone else robs us of the privilege.

At birth, alone in a wash of images and sensations, and again near death...
The rest is shared experience.
But it is the reconstructed memory and anticipation of these opposite moments that feed this arrogance, ever conscious of the envelope of loneliness.
You expect the impossible of me when you offer me the nerve-steadying benefit of your hope or the stupefying warmth of your body.
'Meaningful dialogue': I'll show you two who are being lied to.

Like the wild ducks on the Rhône, peaceful among the high marsh ferns, Miss Stein describes, who alone were happy about the war because the hunters' guns had been confiscated—she and I, ourselves, no luckier ducks.³

The extremity of the circumstances requires belief in grace.
In contrast, hope is a gratuity, not a cool requirement.

"Two wrongs don't make a right." But a sizable collection comprises a marvelous facsimile.

A way to know everything about everything without actually knowing anything about anything.
If we can effectively fake it, why bother with the rest?
Philosophy.
It is by sincerely deceiving ourselves that we come to be worthy.
Detritus from Pascal's wager.⁴
By successfully marketing the features of life we may (after much patience and address) triumph over the implication of death.
Good.

I don't know if I am capable of love, but I know that (at a level of certainty greater than any possessed by Descartes about his own existence) that my companion cat loves me.
Don't ask me how.
I would sooner doubt the filling of your skull...

This is the type of murderous conviction that we must relinquish and that we are not likely to in the course of a foreseeable number of generations.
The unshakable belief that we have an importance to some being other than ourselves.
But by reducing the crowd of such beings and, then also, to more fugitive ones, we may approach 'precarity': the ragged edge where only grace, if anything, guarantees us another moment.

Not "the grace of God"—grace, pure and simple.

...and not even that in the end.

"With the demise of God it has seemed to many that a morality might be founded on its own pure principles (whether rational, sentimental or pragmatic), themselves, so sound as to call for no further grounding in, say, aesthetics, a consequence which would surely lead to an unhealthy nihilism."
Were it allowed, I might say "God help us," if this should turn out not to be the case and my abstention from a capital crime involving you results in large part from a obsession with a moral fad.
I should fear what I only marvel at.
Of course, I am filled with fear but not of the appropriate things.
My fastidiousness is targeted too low, at a play of motives so unbecoming as to be a source of shame.
Yet mostly I respond to fear with pride at having lost my judgment at the behest of a just barely perceivable truth.
My smile no longer cares how it is understood.

Scepticism can never be an excuse for behavior, though it illuminates the entire field of excuses.

Turing's machine child⁵ is adjured to "not go too near the edge."
We are not "bound to fall over unfenced cliffs."
But, yes, we are.
The cliff shall claim us.
In the blood, Searle might say⁶.
Rabid intentionality, raised by the power of a vain biology to self-awareness, insures it.
Not, to be sure, prematurely in the run of cases.

That level of maturity or over-ripeness which entails suicide...

"They suppose that the fighting has scared the birds out of Italy and out of Germany and that is the reason there are so many of them [in France near the Swiss border]." Stein, (1944)⁷
The most basic function of the mind (its metaphysical importance or unimportance aside) is to aid in the survival of its attendant incorporate being.
Anything it does besides is luxurious.
We add, however, it is not a quite dispensable adjunct.
For it serves the useful and amusing cross-purpose of distressing and worrying that survival into the ground.
Useful and amusing—to whom or what?
To the frightened birds, to whatever comes after...
to my splayed reason.

An old Indian proverb, quoted by Chamfort, translated by Beckett, tinkered with a little by me: "Better to stand than to walk, sit than stand, still better lie, better still die, best: to have never been born."⁸

Obscene luck.

Both keep diaries through the same years of the war, both Jews under German occupation, one confined to an attic in Holland, one in the southeast of France with breads and cakes and eggs and goat milk but no real chocolate and her poodle, Basket, and countryside for long walks and companion Alice.
One young, soon dead; the other, two years before her death after a long very creative life.

Fear of death corrodes principles and the threat of their dissolution re-erects them.

Would Miss Frank's generosity toward souls have become in a just number of years Miss Stein's studied bemusement?
Witnessing enough wars enforces a stupidity.

Survival and stupidity.
The fittest are the stupid.
The premium on survival should ring hollow.

Or have I got it backwards (again)?
The hooded eyes of stupidity, our crowning achievement?
The senility that sets in our late youth already claimed me long ago?

The enforcement of stupidity as a norm occupies the larger share of the social contract, whatever may have been its intent.

This eternal frustration of intent adds to the wonder over its claim to an efficacy beyond the thin film—iridescent with possibility—that grimes our actions.
We, meaning myselves, have skated that surface too nimbly, too long not to suspect its insubstantiality.
Kant's noumena, far from being inaccessible, are actually just above the surface of things, their vulnerability all that is precious and tragic about existence.

It is alright to desire knowledge of the cold truth.
Our lies require a foundation, not in the sense of justification but of explanation.
The latter it is our fortune always to despair of.

I build things, fix things with my hands.
This, and nothing we say, helps me to shore up the dike of fear between my little plans and oblivion.
For fear, in a moment of weakness, as we know, can be overpowered.

Circumstances, apparently horrible enough, collapse the normal distinctions of language into distressed cries and consolative noises.
The term 'resistance' as used by Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors to describe the actions of a group of prisoners who plotted to burn down the crematorium.
Succeeding, their plan was immediately uncovered; they were tortured and killed.
Some were fed alive to the ovens.
This last act served to give meaning to an inexorable death...
(And, also, those who suicided themselves on the electrified fences were called "resisters"!)
As well those who contrived to linger another day, each a fresh slap in the face of their persecutors—to bear witness, to live to see revenge, or die hating (as a few are excused for doing).
The term, because of its laudatory connotations, is finessed to describe even those who—constitutionally removed from the engine of spite—melted into a puddle of self-abnegation and compassion.
In memory, all in one sense of the word or another "resisted," and all honored.
Why do I think it should be different?

But who were the oppressors?
Not Hitler, not the German people.
The pity was that all resisted too late.
When it would have mattered—long before they were born—all were bathing in the warm stupid waters of some faith.
God was the oppressor.
Why was He not resisted?
And some meaning salvaged from the ensuing pointlessness?
We acting through God devised the conception of a "chosen people," an earlier license granted a "master race," not content to die miserably alone as we are born.
Where is my race, where are my compatriots, my co-believers, the miserable lot of my sex, my siblings, my mother or the entire species in which I would be classified?
Never content, are we?

"Never again." I would surpass Socrates in ignorance to believe that.
Someday yet my deficit may yawn that wide.

I believed more exaltedly than you.
How else explain the depth of my disappointment?

No one experiences pain like you.
Calloused by reason, a veneer of discipline, or some dense pride, I cannot fathom your vulnerability or your despair at being unable to find relief.
The flaccid melancholy of the wisteria at the gates of the Isle of the Dead⁹ wafts resignation for me, though for you it is a stench of persistent anguish.
My headaches from that fragrance, I can manage to subsume under a figure of calm.
I sleep on a bed of logic, rest my head on vanity, dream the most unvivid, unremarkable, inbotherable estimates of commonplaces.
My immortality derives exactly from never having been born.

Jesus spoke: I am the truth.
This will have to do, this shift from epistemology to ontology.
Unable to know we will simply have to be it.

Logic.
From a contradiction everything follows.
From everything a tautology ensues.
Absurdity and platitude.
(My students suppress their amusement.) Unsatisfactory descriptions.
The truth is so illusive because it does not behoove us to see it.
To woo our satisfaction we require a small excursion, at least, across a broad plain, over mountains and lakes.
We expect and demand a nice time.
Divert us some before bringing us up the opposite shore.

Was Kierkegaard finally able to "be it" after his heroic struggle?

The license of decadence should shame ever prevail...
The license of morality should its self-esteem ever falter...

"Cebes burst out laughing: 'Try to persuade us like scared children, Socrates. Actually it's probably not us but a child in us that fears such things. So try to reassure him not to be frightened by death like the bogeyman.' 'Yes,' said Socrates [on the day of his execution], 'we must sing him incantations everyday until we've charmed his fear away.'"¹⁰
I like it when a naive remark resists the acid of critical reflection.
Like curiosity in a child the beginnings of crime are so beguiling.
I won't say this pleasure is the highest and lead you to believe 'maturity' has its consolations...

My stupid hands and fearful heart...

Fear becomes me.
It adorns and helps to compensate for ugly ignorance.

Wake up, stretch.
To which god shall I pray today?

To the one who purifies my arrogance of sympathy (that falsely celebrated corrupting force)?
To your god, who would tax "unimaginable" truth with silence and decency?
I know that I really shouldn't pray at all.
Should I try to counter this vice by excusing myself from participation at large?
But we know how silly the excuse of suicide is.
If only the alternative were always able to sustain itself, or show itself practiced enough not to suffer embarrassment.
"If life is meaningless" death can't have much point either.
But how kind this remark.

The part of us that isn't a child: what can we say about that part?
Are we supposed to magnify its influence?
Is there an imperative to nurture its development?
Assuming there is, how can it mature without delusion?
Perhaps the imperative is only that we never cease dreaming of development.

Nature (all that is not what we lovingly call 'human') has articulated a spectacular syntax, decorated all of extension to no end.
Devoid of meaning?
Certainly not.
This is where we come in.
This is what our business is.
To fill in the blanks of Plato's Forms.
We are an essential part of the evolutionary bureaucracy.
We are not doing our job (as I do not do mine) to query the system.
Except that, of course, no part of the system is eternal—leaving aside, for the moment, the question of the infinity of the system itself.
Certainly, humanly scaled portions of the system can't be said to aspire to longevity in the order of things.
But even if they could—would this sanction a semantics or render intelligible an honest rejoinder to the question why not just die forthwith?
"But you have simply slipped off the tracks of language.
These ends were never planned for at the start.
The words 'infinite,' 'eternal,' 'absolute,' 'meaning,' 'purpose,' etc. were engineered for specific domains and tasks..."
Except that—as I was going to say—all parts and the whole are bounded by the incapacity to penetrate tautology and contradiction.
Between the trite and the cryptic good sentences can bounce for a long time.
Still only for discrete parcels of time.
The forces of erosion attack a stone at its boundaries.
This is where I come in: (if I may so insert myself) I am one of those forces.

The difference between dream and delusion is a snore.

Decadence: joy at the possibilities of human vagary.

As Glaucon said for 'injustice', I say it is "the highest pitch of insincerity to seem sincere when you are not."¹¹ How do we tell?
Throughout my philosophical education this was the critical question.
To capture all that might be publicly observable about sincerity I refined the concept of honesty—made of it a term of art—to place in relief what, if anything, remained of sincerity once its content is excised.
What is 'faith' but good works?
What is 'love' but self-gratification in fine disguise?
What is 'compassion' but roundabout self-pity?
The case is not as much one of self-deceit as of insistent mystifying incoherence.
We can't tell.
Yet we persist in resting momentous conclusions on benighted premises.
Is this the whole object of the language surrounding the concept?
To make and keep it so?
Run up against a paragon of virtue, we are shamed into silence, stoned by glances for having violated decorum.
Thus I can call Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa megalomaniacs, Hitler, a useful mirror of ourselves, the most helpful character in recent human history as a matter of fact,—because, for sentimentally-correct people (i.e., wishing to be on the 'right' side of controversy), he is not likely to be confused with themselves...
And Jesus (a related character), a stooge.
Not for shock value only.
(As though anything so jejune could rouse you from your moral stupor.) But because it is literally true.
As literally as I should take your aspirations for the day after tomorrow.

It is no argument against what I say that my casting aspersions on an array of moral, romantic and religious impulses may lend succor to an already slothful drag on the perfection of the race generally, i.e., my scruples are elitist.
You, who must (secretly) consider yourself among the vanguard of the species, have purchased this debt: Convince me that your blush has to do with the thinness of your skin?

It is an argument against what I say that you are a saint incognito.

My beloved cat friend murders and sometimes tortures birds before eating them.
He brings them home for me to see.
If I still can, I try to save them...
Equally instinctive our actions, neither in themselves capable of justification: arrogating the authority to sit in judgment on our behavior too easily panders to a sensitivity.
As long as I refrain from aligning these behaviors along the wall of reason I can avoid embarrassment, fear of which is the foundation of all our wonderful jealousies.
The stark irregularity, especially apparent against that wall, either gnaws at my nerves or becomes an object of admiration.
Embarrassment, covetousness, spite: our raiment and protection from the elements.
In its final distress, before his jaws sink into its spine, the bird emits a cry.
The only sound in Nature that can clothe truth: Recalling the image from the dark side of my eyes, it is graced with tears.

There may be a biological necessity for God to exist, or at least belief in the proposition.
Spleen, vanity and the curious requirement that experience cohere pretty much guarantee that we will elevate some proposition or other to the top shelf, out of reach of critical reason and its suicidal ambitions.

As lies go, it might as well be 'God'.
It is a distinct advantage of the elevated proposition that it be absurd: That way reason is kept at bay and our affections unmonopolized.
When the checks and balances of the tripartite soul are working it is true some fleeting Greek-like notion of harmony or justice is a discernible possibility!?

The profound ennui of eternity makes us salivate at the thought of oblivion.

So perfectly willing we are to sacrifice all our traits to humility but this one—that we indulge to the last, source of our ultimate dignity, the one thing about me you cannot besmirch with your grimy jealousies.
For its sake I would kill you a thousand times, and no hell could make me repent, for among sins this is the most holy.
You would have to wash my awareness of identity, mulch my consciousness to amend some monstrous idea of union with something greater than my grandiose petty nervousness and fear.
Yes, shame me into my solipsistic corner...
but of course, you are the object against which I define myself.
You must admit, certainly, that my flower will make your humus sweeter, and that the production of such ornaments as me cannot entirely have escaped your plans.

To hear you say it, I'm inclined to say the opposite.
I want to say at those times when we wax mystical, as at no others, there is a good deal less mystery.

I, nothing, am the conscience of everything.

100

The very essence of Godforsakeness, a particle in the undefined hell of Jupiter's atmosphere, an alpine meadow's decaying bloom in the darkest night of winter, six months into the dissolution of the body of a strangled prostitute,...
'Addicted' to every imaginable substance, surely you've imagined release.
I am you.
At your loneliest.
The pursuit of your life is a flight from me.

101

The purpose of a heart is to bleed.
"If it could think, the heart would stop." —Pessoa¹²

102

Is life a motive?
The question arises in connection with self-deceit and its moral status.
The quality of this act cannot suffer from such a motive.
Can it be that no act at its behest can be tainted?
It somehow purifies all acts as it lends them permission to misrepresent?
Drains them of the fluid that for a time sustained them in a separate existence?
Even the idea of death itself is doomed to fall victim to this vampirous force, impossibly swollen and always requited.
The "separate existence" is assailed on all sides by the most powerful force in the universe, no less than life and death in alliance.
A metaphysical willow-the-wisp, a gratuitous flash in the swamp.

103

Is there really any danger of that separate existence's incarnation?
The mere conception a matter for sleep or proud conjecture?
My worry.

104

The artist who oversteps the boundaries of a canvas (not as much in the interest of garnishing credit as to infect the world with the virus of an ecstasied ego up to then quarantined within the frame or, what amounts to the same thing, because of overweening empathy for the moisture of living things) eschewing structure, embracing incoherence—and well she or he might—shares the same boat with the pathologically insecure ethicist, as anal as you like, wishing to anchor the dinghy with the sheer weight of conviction in waters whose exact depth it is forbidden to know.
Both would be well advised to avoid explanations and simply carry on.
(As though either would attend my counsel.)
I say this because what accords each license revealed would be anathema to the cool stupidity so necessary to their tasks, the temperature of stupidity being a function of our participation

105

Arrogance of bones: Nothing mysterious about our nature—nothing at all!
You find this irritating: Plato was right.
We only recall what we already know.
Our retrieval mechanisms a bit slow?
True, but this is the program.
As we become a more long-lived species, not surprisingly we get wiser, i.e., recall more.
You hear right, answers abound and we are coming to know them.
My optimism is in this respect healthy, healing and oozing toxins from the apertures of my body, my element becoming purer, less and less ore, more and more a cause for concern for no one.

106

It should be a crime to divulge one's secret happiness.
It does no one good to know of it.
Tell me of your pain, dress it up for me as you would for a lover.
Make me believe in your heroism, prostrate myself before this, your ordinary happinesses.
These are okay, there on your sleeve, inspiring disgust, no worse, banal at best: they can do me no harm.

107

The most treacherous aspect of pain is its capacity to bore all who surround its victim.

108

When it has engulfed the consciousness of its host, completely inoculating it from distraction in preparation, as it were, for degradation to the status of bystander—then it has achieved its intended effect.
"Intended by whom?"
Diversion for all those whose turn it isn't just now.
"By whom?"
By the ghosts of birds from another hell!
Birds ready to take advantage of our self-distraction, waiting in line, a line extending to the vanishing point of creatures eager to take our place, a line formed before a cliff, the thrill of falling off of comprising the inescapable attraction.

109

Unlike Pessoa or Walser, my good manners are laced with malice, whose origin might once have been traceable to some primeval injustice, but has long since arrogated its own privileges through long contemplation of the exquisite reactions it extracts from a cumbersome humanity.

110

Kindness, consideration, graciousness is, be warned, the absolute prerequisite for betrayal—for, in the best instance, its magnificent unfolding.
Asking, whatever gave us the right to be disappointed?

111

Accused of "taking it philosophically," there welled up in me a lubricious desire to murder, the full light of blind guilt greasing its pursuit.
Not a violent person, by and large...
Not that you don't merit or even have a right to be departed...
Your continued existence hangs by a thread long ago stitched by a mother dense to all but her adoring ministrations.
The executive terror of her fulsome craftwork marginalized fleeting acts of truth...
You are allowed to live because as lies go you take up so little space.

112

The only guilt worthy of the name is that for not wanting to know the source of itself.

113

Not a violent person—out of so much esteem for decorum and because so much haste might tumble down my lovingly constructed house of vanities in which I would so much enjoy entertaining guests.
But they never come to see and appreciate the table of delectables laid out for them.
Are my tastes so irreparably specific to me?
Is my cooking poisonous or just poor?
Alone in my little castle of constraints, boasting the state of the art in skeptical plumbing and a fine system for disposing of the hope that gathers on the immovable furnishings of melancholy.
Is there not enough cheer in my wall hangings?
Too many resources expended on the design of furniture for monstrously deformed bodies?¹³
Are they afraid?
Do they think I might really stab them in the back as they stand dumb struck in admiration of a precious Ohr-like¹⁴ piece of pottery, its insides out—despite my repeated monitions of the absolute unpermittedness of plain treachery in this house?
Have I not made it clear the requirement that you tiptoe about here in the most ethical shoes in your possession, or better, none at all, in order that no commonplace mud or home made sin sully my carpets, woven of only the purest, all-natural, sadism by labor, not only slave, but tortured?
And, on this score, I consider myself self-sacrificially indulgent because I know that your toes are not adequately scrubbed, and couldn't possibly be, so ingrained into them the grime of too many paths contaminated by the feet of untold numbers of pilgrims seeking mercy and a nice time.
I am able to excuse this because I am vulnerable to horrific reveries where I awake gasping for air in my coffin with the late realization that you and the host of circumstances which framed you all this time were but the figments of my yearning loneliness, my sole genuine emotion: All the others having been manufactured for the purpose of civil association with the likes of you, yet paradoxically the wakening serving to prove once and finally the dreaded fact of your nonexistence, whatever the possibilities I might have entertained up to then.
I am alone.
Not as I suspected, but rather knew.
What I suspected was company, now exposed for the ruse of my teasing vanity.
What existence you may have or have had for yourself has meant only what I could conjure up for it in me.
Don't blame me if the furniture poorly fits the true form of your body, or if my curios strike you as too curious or inordinate, or if my table is spread with slaughtered vegetables and bitter patés, still wearing the flavors of the animal's final agony.
You were bid here by a desperate, heavily encrusted imagination.
Your invitation a farce, a product of an unquestioning perverse desire to frustrate and alienate.
With an ulterior motive like malice, who needs others?
What was ruder?
Having awakened in my coffin or having been put there initially?
To be sure, as a dead person I should have been interred or cremated; the dead undealt with are liable to spread consciousness in the population; for just as the living the dead also procreate.
Not even us dead escape that universal imperative to crowd ourselves into loneliness.
As if we were not content enough to be lonely by ourselves we create company.
Perhaps now it is clear how you come to be invited.
But it is not solely a spectacle of overwrought civilization you are here to witness.
I gather you grudgingly admire some of what repels you.
Guess what instinct is behind this.
Not your better sense—you abandoned that some time ago.
But maybe we shouldn't go too deeply into that just yet.
Only consider there is no going back for you.
The door to all natural innocence is shut and secured forever against you.
For a long time you will toy with ersatz semblances; continue to believe your deformity can be made over, your misshapen organs and extremities still be made to fit forms from what, for you, has become history, seek out healing recipes for kitchen projects so far gone as to threaten returning to life, gather and form societies for the preservation and restoration of decrepit memories, promoting nostalgia as a sensually transmitted disease.
Alone in my bungalow of hubris, velleity, spite and logical entailment, where softer forms, to avoid being pinned to crosses, are obliged to go limp and slither about lower accesses like Nouveau snakes around the entablatures of columns of ruined temples to primordial divinities of the periodic table.
Shall I show you (or is this too rude of me?) my collection of stapled Christs and impaled goddesses?...
For mine is the only gathering of the art of this period that works its aficionados, dilettantes and gawkers alike into shapes to suit its agenda not theirs.
Its splendor will not breach being auxiliarized to the odd, incommodious reach of your awareness.
Hysterical with impatience at the drag of your evolution, eager for a resolution of the question of your appropriateness for survival, you are target, foe, the cross-haired object of its violent passion.
You disgrace the air you breathe.
You embarrass the space you take, make stumble the rhythm of the hours, days, you persist.
And yet, since it might as well have been otherwise for all the difference it makes to my spleen, we know you are hardly an excuse for my puddle of emotion...
Let me stroke you, preconize your merits (atrocious though I can't help seeing them as), welcome you to my precious hovel.
Let my house be the place where you can be at ease with your hell.
Take a seat, would you like some hemlock?

114

I came to philosophy and literature to assuage the loneliness of having nurtured a way of thinking that separated me from everyone around me.
I am not clear what would satisfy me, warm my heart, or put stillness in my soul.
Is it a like-minded thinker I seek?
While there are a dear few who come close—a short list would include Diogenes of Sinope, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Cioran, Flannery O'Connor, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, Stevie Smith, Ernst Juenger, Otto Weininger, Clarice Lispector, Fernando Pessoa...
no one succeeds in making me feel I have found myself.
(I am describing, not complaining.)
Inevitably each proceeds, after a long companionship, down one corridor or through one doorway where I cannot follow.
A fact as much relief as disappointment.
I realize that it is not any approximation that would consummate my search.
The same dogged process of differentiation that set me on the quest to begin with also warrants that it will not end.
I will always have some qualm, find some excuse to say, "This is not me."
Is it anything less than a doppelganger that I seek?
If so, how is it going to end?
(Assuming I will never find it.)
This is answerable: I will go on until I die.
But what would I do, per impossibile, should I stumble before then on this entity like no other in the universe but me?
This is the worst conceivable case.
Because I don't know.
(This eventuality is, to hear them speak, not at all uncommon among those who were never lured down this path.)
In a closet, at the end of the last hall, when the search was finished, Wallace Stevens, after a lifetime of sauntering among his images, discovers a palm.
He turned Catholic and died forthwith.
(A Vermeer applying himself to still lifes instead of preoccupied women—or is there a difference?)
How can I justify going on knowing how it will end?
Life flourishes not in spite but because of smug ignorance.
It can only seem that I could make a mistake, here, near the end—if this is in fact what happens (happened)—because all was determined by a chain of imperatives leading back to the delirious vision of the angel when I was apprised of what awaited, and robbed of life.
Such is the treachery of philosophical momentum that I continue to denigrate what I gave up to belittle the loss...
And buoy myself up by recalling that treachery is universal.
Vis à vis you, at least, I am happy for the space of the moment and nothing can take this away from me except the next.

115

Reasons against suicide:
(ordered by whim)
1. Life still amuses.
2. Compassion for loved ones.
3. Plain fear.
4. Cowardice.
5. Uncompleted projects.
6. What people will say.
7. Strangers will paw through my private midden of belongings.
8. I will be forgotten by most, remembered by few and then only painfully.
9. I will miss a good bit of gossip, news, events, opportunities to vote or not vote.
10. On my shelf, too many books left unread.
11. I might set a bad example for others,
12. or forgo the chance to comment on my own death and be misunderstood without the chance to further contribute to the confusion.
13. I would dearly miss early morning walks on sunny winter days.
14. My beloved cat.
15. Sometimes nursing my bitterness at the world is positively enjoyable.
16. The waste: what lies in store for us after death will keep, the food in my refrigerator will not...

What happens?
The list dissolves into facetiousness.
Kept to the best attempts at sincerity the list cannot be over short.
The cleanest, most chaste sentiment on the matter is inexpressible.
Such is the rigor of this tyrannical concept.
So listed, spelled out in a naked array of shameless characters they seem paltry, don't they?
Compounding its difficulties with nonexistence, the truth is so modest!

Reasons for—are so numerous that a lifetime is required to enumerate them.
Thus and so far, I linger.

116

Occam's Razor—the principle of parsimony, "What can be done with less done with more is done in vain"—what other impulse could possibly be whispering to me?

Editor's Notes

¹ Luno is known to have suffered from a rare nervous disorder of the esophagus, causing unpredictable episodes of excruciating chest pain similar to angina. The condition, however, is not directly life threatening.

² Diogenes of Sinope is said to have suggested beggars should practice for their work on statues. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, trans. A. Robert Caponigri (Chicago: Henry Regnery company, 1969), p. 141.

³ Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen (London: Brilliance Books, 1984), p. 101. Originally published by Random House in 1945.

⁴ " 'I confess and admit it. But still is there no way of seeing the cards?' Yes, Scripture and the rest, etc. 'Yes, but my hands are tied and my lips are closed; I am forced to wager, and I am not free; I am not released, and I am so made that I cannot believe. What am I to do?'

You speak true. But at least get to understand your inability to believe, since reason leads you to belief [at least as Pascal describes the wager argument], and yet you cannot believe. Do your best then to gain conviction, not by an increase of divine proof, but by a decrease of human passions. You would fain reach faith, but you know not the way? You would cure yourself of unbelief, and you ask for a remedy? Take a lesson from those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all they possess. These are they who know the road you would follow, who are cured of a disease of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began, that is by making believe that they believed, by taking holy water, by hearing mass, etc. This will quite naturally bring you to believe, and will calm you...will stupefy you. 'But that is what I fear.' Pray why? What have you to lose?" Blaise Pascal, Pensées trans. H. F. Stewart (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), p. 121.

⁵ Turing was describing the logical rules that would be required programming for the intelligent operation of his thinking machine. He suggested that not every imaginable fallacy needed to be fenced off, "we are not bound to fall over unfenced cliffs." We might get away with a rule that said "Do not go too near the edge." Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind 59, no.236 (1950), pp. 4-30.

⁶ A reference to John Searle's debate with artificial intelligence functionalists (descendants of Turing). Searle's brand of type physicalism confines thinking to biological beings: "...the mind is just as much a biological phenomenon as digestion." John Searle, "Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?", Scientific American, (January 1990), p. 31.

⁷ Stein, p. 153-4.

⁸ Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems in English and French, (New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1977), p. 127. Beckett's version:

Better on your arse than on your feet,
Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot.

⁹ Luno has in mind The Tomb of Böcklin by Ferdinand Keller, not, at least, immediately one of Arnold Böcklin's famous Isle of the Dead paintings. Only Keller's painting, which is a tribute to Böcklin, actually depicts wisteria.

¹⁰ Plato, The Phaedo in The Symposium and the Phaedo, translated and edited by Raymond Larson, (Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1980), p. 74, (77e).

¹¹ "The unjust man, if he is to reach perfection, must be equally discreet in his criminal attempts, and he must not be found out, or we shall think him a bungler; for the highest pitch of injustice is to seem just when you are not." Plato, The Republic, translated by Frances MacDonald Cornford, (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 46, (361a).

¹² Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: A Selection, translated by Iain Watson, (London: Quartet Books Limited, 1991), p. 58.

¹³ A possible reference to a scene from the story "There are More Things" in J. L. Borges's The Book of Sand, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), p. 58. (Luno may have read the story in the original Spanish.)

¹⁴ George E. Ohr (1857-1918), a leading, if eccentric, light of the American "Arts and Crafts Movement," also known as the "mad potter of Biloxi."

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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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