|
Out of this compost of dreams what do you expect to grow? Replete, how will you occupy your time? Or do you really suspect the supply unlimited and the bin bottomless? That in her profligacy she will never fail for new diversions?
Has she not enlisted your rabid hormones in her maddening campaign against a still void...
For nothing stays dead. Murder is futile.
2
She has you because you persist in expecting more and she, stinting and obliging in perfect measures, requites you.
3
How is it ignorance is so scarce when stupidity is so common?
Here is how this is explained:
“When you ask after what lies behind the decorative noises of language and are referred to a stock list of phrases and gestures, you are being, apparently obscurely to you, apprised of critical information.
‘Stupidity’ is merely the sheen on highly polished truth.
As for want of ignorance, it’s not that, it is humility that is scarce.
We know so much that what humility we may assume appears factitious.
Wisdom abounds and accosts you from every direction.
So you see, you systematically misunderstand, single-mindedly stumble on the threshold of everything patent; you have been mistaking the negative for the print all this time!”
4
The ultimate civilizing force for my species is death—not as stick but as carrot.
5
For whom no sun sets beautifully enough.
Of only the few hundred conceded to me too few qualified and too early on.
Too frightened of them, haps.
The winter morning sun fits out a crumb on the floor with consequence.
A language with no idle forms and no distant snow-frosted mountains and no instincts for courtesy.
Nothing is lascivious anymore, not crumbs, every crevice washed like the faces of children and the adults who ape them.
Worse, I still smile my mawkish miscreant’s smile at strangers: as though acknowledging a kinship, when all the world discerps us...or the opposite: we are so intimate, we are not even two.
I expand to devour the objects of my transgression.
The Law truly excludes the Middle, a place to dawdle with ambitions.
Let me correct an impression.
I am not especially your partner.
Not enough passion to be a real enemy either.
Rather a creature of your long unconscious hours, spent existing without thinking, come to grace revery and whatever idle interstice remains uncluttered in the garish moments of stupefaction you have earned through centuries of labor and distress when it was not you but your happiness that had ambition.
I am a fee, you may suppose, that you will escape into death before paying.
Thus, in advance of my cheating, I ghost you, the other part of me, with the arrogance, like no other, of the born victim until I have made you pay or fixed your curtains.
6
A brew of despair and fatigue on the face of a boy dragged through the market by his mother.
The roar in his ears of speeding lies and the crash of words on flesh that will pass for the rest of his life for the rest of his fate, as loud as the season.
She sits him down to describe for him his feelings.
Offered three ugly syllables “depression” when he could have had a quainter four in “melancholy” or a wistful two in “sorrow”.
It is the simplest, most uncomplicated of emotions at this time of the year. For me it is like Christmas all the time, I feel that sad.
7
The logic of immortality, or God as my servant. God offers us the deal of a lifetime. He speaks coyly:
If I were God and could present you with an alternative to the life you are living now I would give you seven days of life during which you would experience all joy possible for a human being. Of course, there would be a requisite amount of sadness and distress but only enough to make it seem like a full life. At the end of seven days you would die unremarkably. Would you be tempted by my offer?
No?
Suppose I increased the span to seven years?
Still no? ...because you have the choice to continue certainly, as you have, living your appointed life, which it appears offers no less in content and much more time to boot?
Suppose I had approached you when you were still fairly young and increased the time to seventy years?
Still no? But not as confidently? ...because now the content, or at least the quantity, would seem scarcely distinguishable from what is promised you in the normal course of things?
Offered the same deal at seventy and you might answer yes?
No? ...not automatically so? You would want to know what it would feel like to be seventy and faced with the decision? Even, given that, some doubts? Again, supposing you a young person but now the offer is 140 years?
Still some doubts?
“I guess as a young person it would seem to matter less how much longer I have to live than it might at seventy. You may as well make it a thousand years or an eternity because it would still feel to me then, at the beginning, as irrelevant as the offer of seventy years.”
As irrelevant as the offer of seven days?
“No, because now you would be tampering with expectation.”
A long life or even an everlasting life is more a concern for the old?
“Yes, of course.”
Because the young have in their possession something greater than possibility. They are alive now, as much as they will ever be. And what can the passage of time do but degrade that state?
“At some point in the course of life the value of the present and eternity reach parity; from then on, the latter increases while the former diminishes.”
At the point of a timely death, then, we reach the extreme, the apogee of indifference to present existence, just as when we are not far passed being born only it—present existence—had meaning...
To cope with immortality how would our psychology have to be different? Would it be recognizable?
“You are suggesting a psychology of ripeness. A happy death is one that happens in the fullness of our personal time. I am not convinced that it describes our feelings about the matter exhaustively or even that it is prevailingly true...
What if—since you are in the mood for playing God—you were an all powerful and utterly obliging one, able and willing to give us immortality on demand and in any form we could describe? Why should I be confronted with dilemmas when I could ask to have it both ways, ask to have my beloved moment last forever? —and not just for me but for all the company and furnishings of my world:
no tree, animal or fellow being would ever perish. We could allow change, cycles, transformations, yes, but no finality to life for any one of us. Would you find that inconceivable? I am not so naive as to ask for a painless existence, only the assurance that no matter how horrible this moment, there would follow another and another. And pain’s grip on existence would be no stronger than joy’s—no less, perhaps, but no more enduring. And the bulk of time would be taken up with our usual interpolations between extremes. I do not, in short, see the psychological necessity of death as obvious.
I can easily conceive of this moment being stretched to the vanishing point of imagination. As for physical necessity, I trust, you, in your infinite graciousness, could arrange things around that. I see no requirement that our world be designed to fail to accommodate the capacity of our full psychology. I could cope with immortality if you could make it so.”
If in addition to all you describe—demon of consideration that I would be—I granted you the eternal option to die at will, wouldn’t that be nice? As you are so bent on negotiating a contract ever so sweet to your interests, purged of any unforeseeable encumbrances (all encouraged by me, to be sure), why hem the fabric of your freedom so utterly? Why not leave a loose thread just in case?
“In case what?”
You change your mind. Forever is a proverbially long time. What in your experience compares with it? Far be it from me to imply you may some day become bored with existence. Or that there is anything secret about the concept of ‘forever’ that I could claim to know would one day entail your regret.
“Suicide, you are saying, would be the only kind of death sufferable in a holy eternity?”
If you please, yes.
But at each and every moment you would be invested with the god-like power to alter your experience for all time. Outside you, nothing could usurp this prerogative, not sickness, accident or foreign agency: the truest, most magnificent, autonomy conceivable. The All Self-Effacing One I would be, I see no reason to not simply abdicate and distribute the infinite store of my capacities unto you and all those like you.
Death defeated, yet freedom intact, what would you say to that?
You hesitate?
Have I overlooked something?
Speak, I am ever your humble servant!
“Your humility leaves something to be desired. It is the most arrogant sounding humility somehow.”
True, magnanimity on this scale is—how shall I put it—unheard of. Perhaps there is something ominous just in the thought’s unfamiliarity... But did you think you would always have it as you were accustomed? Cozily ensconced between birth and death, the yearbooks of your life padded parenthetically by the surety of these two bookends?
“Yes, but a world where only suicide can disturb the eternal flow would make death too much an object of temptation, a trap for the overly curious. In the world as it is, it is the exception, a small special door opening only for the overripe, the morbidly sensitive, for decadents. Not the great massive gates of death toward which we all (barring untoward or accelerating events) inexorably make our way. The very inevitability keeps curiosity at bay. We say to ourselves, we will know soon enough. Remove this aspect of the issue, make it the supreme exercise of freedom and what, given no end of time in which to ponder the possibility, will countervail its lure?
Would we see the day that embracing mortality becomes a ritual, an honored consummation of sorts? Like marriage or romantic love, a fateful plunge (or fall) into a darkness with no exit?...”
What could I do to make the idea of your eternal freedom less frightening to you?...
It occurs to me just now that I could offer ‘designer-deaths’, ones customized with the option to return at will!
Why should commitment be so unremitting?
Whose idea was that?!
That anything should be so bordered, circumscribed, seems to me to verge on malice. And we can agree, surely, there ought to be no harbor for this vestige from primeval theodicies in our brave description of a new enlightened conception of the cosmic order.
It might work like this:
To circumvent the obvious problem of decisions made in the oblivion of non-existence, the parameters of death could be mapped out in advance, that is, while you are alive. You might choose, say, to be dead for only a few hours, a weekend, or centuries at a time—then schedule a return to reassess your decision.
At no point in these stitches in time need any decision be final...
“But a decision could be?”
Certainly.
“Then it seems we are back to my worrisome thought concerning final decisions and the cult status they might achieve. One does not have to be a member of a cult to be affected by it. Breathing the same infected air as a believer is enough...”
You appear to be hinting that death means nothing if it isn’t final, it isn’t itself immortal.
“Otherwise, we may as well speak of naps of varying durations. Where is the weight in the decision when and low long to take a nap?”
The challenge, then, for me seems to be how to make death seem meaningful without at the same time making it necessary or final.
Without straining logic (a stricture in which I expect you concur), I am to accept the psychology you describe as requiring that some choices have infinite weight concurrent with the idea of living in an orchard where in each tree all the fruit is game...
For this seems to be your wish: a garden with no injunctions and only non-poisonous serpents.
Nothing to fall from and no place in particular to fall.
And an entertaining existence no less!
No interesting stories survive from before that momentous nibble. What do you suppose life was like in the garden across those eons of bliss after creation but before the fall? What is the motive for the absence of an account of this time before time, of the pre-history of your kind?
You underestimate her intelligence to think she was fooled by a serpent. What do you think it was that she found so seductive about the fruit of that tree?
I shall tell you and you shall know why.
It was like a card or a board game—I can think of no closer analogy. (Maybe the point of your invented games is to recall that time.)
A game in which the players were too deeply enthralled by their moves, feints, and dramas to notice time long enough to give its parts names and mark their passage.
There is your eternity for you.
Nothing outside the purview of the rules, or the concentration adherence to them requires, distracted our consummate players, our innocents.
Freedom had real meaning only when compassed by these rules—when like water it could be quaffed in measured sips from a vessel, not from an engulfing ocean. Upon cessation of play, it had none at all.
But now the situation for you is reversed, the ocean is not a big enough pool for you to drown in...and perhaps you weary of it. But not even nostalgia can save you. For apart from its physical impossibility (not, in principle, insurmountable), you inform me that such existence would be unacceptable to you now, no game can enthrall you as before, knowing what you do.
Obliging as ever, I ask what is your wish? I place only one condition on what you ask for—and only because I don’t know how to dispense with it (for the limits of my imagination seem suspiciously like yours):
I ask that you describe it to me.
“Your condition terrifies me.”
8
I was minding my own business when God spoke to me thus.
9
Imagine not your usual self, or even your best self, but your wisest conceivable self.
This is the ‘you’ I address and grapple with.
Your quotidian self may have perfectly adapted to its environment, and may even be capable of rising to great occasions...
I am not your environment, nor any great occasion.
10
“That very distance from truth you claim for us, peasants of the mind, is our saving grace.
Under the best of circumstances, for nearly all of us, it will stay always only a faintly perceptible object on the horizon, promising something and beckoning to us.
And a lifetime is insufficient for us to get close enough to see it for what it is.
Long before, we will perish like a child falls asleep, only half hearing the final wonderful words of a story.”
11
Suicide, n. ...the occasional child is fed such poor lies by its mother that they fail to hold up a proper lifetime.
But we expect the child to work with these lies, to make them durable truths.
But the material, the lies, could have been better...
Could they?
12
What I have come to mean by the word ‘truth’ is death.
Nicely sophomoric in its intensity, this definition gloms onto that blank wall like graffiti.
Self-assured, insouciant, gloriously idle, yes, and also infinitely patient—the impulse behind it is secure in its patience, just like the dead.
It is almost your civic duty to erase or paint over my efforts at every turn.
13
The oracle has directed me to debase the coinage.1
14
I love him as we must love wild things—with a heart at every moment ready to break.
15
Regarding the ominous character of a “truth that sets one free”: the freedom alluded to must be not that to do anything but freedom from having to do anything.
Add to this, the trivial logical consequence of not being able to do anything that one needn’t.2
Armed with the truth, I am not required to do anything and not able to even if it was required of me.
Having understood this, disarming myself, I proceed with my plans for the day.
16
Our callous disregard for it is a match for its monumental indifference to us.
17
The Devil’s virtue, an intolerance for hypocrisy, functions by subjecting the more humane virtues of justice and compassion to a scrutiny with a view to situating them squarely in their respective puddles of unreality.
Each has a proprietary hold on the genders of the race.3
18
“Cut us some slack!”
No... to what use have you not put the extra rope?
19
Piously conspiring to cover the whole field of human actions, arresting perpetrators along the way, pressing them for embroidered excuses, confessions or any acknowledgement of their joint taint, keeping desire always slightly fermented, and amending the sweet peace of utter dependence... the meta-virtue of integrity, immune from prosecution, finds culpability permeating the cobbles of the moral sewers that drain away all the liquids, solids, and gasses masquerading as such under the mediocre pressures of this biosphere.
Nothing living quite passes muster.
Everything crawls away with a swagger.
20
The man on the curb should get my coins, not because he deserves them—he doesn’t, we know what he will probably do with them. And not because I deserve to feel better by giving them—I don’t, in what way would my use of them be more worthy than his?
He asks.
And unless I am willing to face him and, with a retributive impertinence to match his, say no, I am in his moral debt.
It isn’t that I have no mercy, quite the contrary, mercy is the only vaguely moral concept I have to work with—not justice, fairness, compassion, fraternity, goodwill, respect for moral laws or utilities, for concrete collectivities or individual autonomies...no selflessness, no sense of caring (except of the mongrel sort common among people burdened with the supremely suspicious motive of “wanting to make things better”)...
I am reminded of the remark of a famous scientist expressing his disappointment at the pandering behavior of a distinguished colleague. The issue was the credibility of UFO abduction stories. Our scientist lamented the lapse of skepticism, the first principle of all scientific inquiry. The slacker’s humanity—his desire to register and authenticate the alleged abductee’s experience—played right into the hands of error. Since, to quote the ‘responsible’ scientist, “we are not in position to prove a negative statement” (and logic tells us every negative statement is correlated with a positive one, and the knowable world is comprised in toto of the union of the two sets), we are not in a position to prove anything. Rather, we are left to toy with probabilities. We are under some obligation (it is true, a concocted one) to apply our utmost discrimination in judging between them.
In science, judicious speculation, as imagination in art, is bounded only by “fruitfulness”. (Though in art the fruit needn’t be ripe or sweet or even non-toxic.)
In moral thinking, the flowers of imagination no matter their sweetness to our purposes have no place.4
However much we may seek to pin them down, purify or change them, our motives remain inscrutable. They do not lend themselves to investigation in a way nothing else in the universe does. Morality has nothing to do with fairness. Its molecules do not lie about until such time as they may be of service to you.
An assumption to the contrary can only be a ploy to mask deception.
And unless we are pleased to live the deceptions to the hilt (for there is no going part way into them), it is best for me to give the man who asks the coins as unthinkingly as possible.
Both our scientist and his errant colleague are correct—one because he knows (or should know) we can’t prove a damn thing, the other because proving anything has ceased to matter.
Inadvertence is the only moral category.
21
We have all been abducted by aliens.
If not sooner, this is revealed to us at the moment of death.
22
You may (I give you permission) carry on as you have and will.
I will trail behind to clean your traces.
It isn’t that the path behind you requires so much being cleaned for those who follow.
My work is only inadvertently of service to them.
It is that it shone finer before we ever set out on it and I feel beholden to our absent host.
23
Such is the utopia before any fall, ever the object of nostalgia, it feeds future hope—
we were born with these false memories.
Yet Plato is right, these are all that we once knew or can aspire to recall.
24
The clutter and stir of people on the street, in cafés, either nothing or mystery projected on their faces, is, when not an irritation, a marvelous inspiration to him.
The limitless repertoire of masks, roles so well-acted that theatre is killed, scripts that defy legibility, document the fall of reality—indeed successfully cast aspersions on its ever having wasted his time.
Beside which, his barrel-rolling cannot but seem juvenile, the consequence of arrested development.
His own role, it comes to seem, as jester pains him.
He cannot deny that everyone seems apposite in their role.
Infused with these thoughts his self-pity swells to compassion and descends like a fog of infection over these faces and their projects...
Oftentimes, he must impute to them a freedom from the lock of fate—a privilege he does not reserve for himself—by holding them wholly responsible for the pettiness of their ambitions and monumental hypocrisy.
When this happens, compassion, too, begins to loose meaning.
25
Humanity, n. ...characterized by a mastery of pleas and prizewinning excuses.
If Nature gave out awards to her species for “best in” categories, we would certainly get it for self-delusion.
26
Listening to the news on the radio in his chair, I stroke his fur gently, sadly, mortally.
“This explains why the enemy of authenticity is also the friend of social-inclusiveness and contentment;” he thinks, “people who are tortured are more real—but at what price!”
We will evolve to the point where no one heals.
Wounds will be compounded, terrors amassed to no end.
The penultimate moment of life we will achieve reality, just enough and just in time, if we are fortunate, to fully qualify for death.
Compassion of one creature for another is inexplicable and too fleeting to rate. And because it is only an indulgence, it is early the victim of the first principle to come along and stake out a killing field.
A tiny slug left its last cellophane trail across a yard or so of the chair coverlet my cat sleeps on. It lay at the end of the glistening path, shriveled to a thread.
During the night in some neighbor’s garden, Fellini brushed up against it.
27
But it is not principles that are compassion’s chief predators. Other passions, nearly every other, array themselves against it.
I know there are flies who live only hours.
There must be—perhaps undiscovered yet—insects or microscopic life forms whose entire life cycle is measured in minutes.
Is there a minimum space of time shorter than which we would cease to believe a life could be led?
Creatures who entered the world already pregnant and slaughtered by time the instant separated from offspring?
There are certainly feelings like that.
28
There are also fierce predators among psychological states. Sadness is one in particular.
29
My cat friend, Fellini, indifferent in his principle, in his deadliness.
More deadly still, my discoloring gaze, and the stroke of my hand.
30
In what sense is consciousness not a necessary concomitant of thought (pace Locke)?5
In the instrumental way usually meant by people seeking to plan or complete a project where the notions to be apprehended each have something to offer the success.
This acceptation of thought is forensic to the bone, despairing of ever more than modest accomplishment, never liable to the unrequited fear of insignificance plaguing evolved spirits but also never edified to the point of arrogance—wonderful and awful as any natural calamity.
Nose to the ground wherein it finds its peace, singularly incurious as to its fundamental right to exist, it channels discursive thinking down paths featureful but as intricately mindless as the webs that blunt the corners of my room.
31
Morning sun in the room where I sleep.
There exist no explanations for things…
That succeed in paralleling reality.
More often they form actual impediments.
32
Our capacity to manipulate, once the bone, now the meaning of existence.
First to some end, now to none at all, and the fact of the impossibility of return is feed enough for my predator mood.
As obstacle to carrying out the dictates of the natural or supernatural order, living becomes unconscientious.
Moral slippage creaks with every turn of the wheel.
The allegory of sin.
33
There is evidence enough for his existence, but what would it explain?
If I sought to understand mystery on the analogy of something equally mysterious as we do when we invoke an image of God with magnified and refined yet recognizable human qualities, what mental satisfaction could I derive?
Only by not thinking can I say I understand what is specifically human.
In the cool stare of reason there is no excuse for our existence or the waste we make of it.
God may as well exist, senselessness abounds.
34
Sunlit alleys, wisteria growing over back fences...
35
...but morality requires that you excuse yourself from existence.
The best evidence consists in our incontrovertible wretchedness. I mean wretchedness of one’s state—not mood, or physical or psychological or social condition. One’s address in the universe.
Still, what does this account for but that creation is immanently perverse.
Sitting in a restaurant, a corn tortilla half in my mouth.
36
My mother allotted about an hour every other afternoon to make white flour tortillas for supper. Her tongue caught fast between her lips as she kneaded little bolas de masa.
Like God, she explained nothing.
Perhaps I should be grateful, even so—and I used to be—but this delinquent feeling now has emigrated to a distal region of the soul, mostly inhabited by a threadbare, miscreant race of once voguish sentiments, a class once socially acceptable in the extreme—to the point of having been persecuted and exiled to the margins by the same nasty adult incredulity responsible for what is called ‘maturity’.
The disorder gripped me and accelerated so rapidly in my pre-adolescence that, by the time I was 12, I had acquired the consciousness of a Nietzsche or an old lady.6
At 12 and half I could quite proudly say I was dead.
And every moment since has been a rebirth, a carnival of reincarnations, a circus train of outrages...
I recall in a past life being fed alive to Nazi ovens for having been a miserable half-Jew and trying to escape, and before that, an Aztec strapped across the open mouth of a Spanish cannon for having had the temerity to notice out loud that our conquerors tortured even their God on a cross without the least concern for decency or to excise his heart first...
Which brings to mind, from a still earlier time, that I was the thief to his left and, from my conversations with him, I can assure you, either he was expressing his own tremendous conceit in knowing what they didn’t or he was demeaning the whole race in choosing to plead their case by appeal to their ignorance of what they were doing to him on the cross.
They knew full well what they were doing.
They might not have cared (and maybe this was forgivable), but they knew.
They knew that it was worth crucifying innocent thousands just to get the one who really was the bastard son of God.
More recently, I appeared as a Walserian7 butler from Mexico, adopted as a day laborer by a kindly American-Jewish heiress to keep her brassware shiny, windows spotless and plumbing tight. An uncommunicatively handy person, set to the tasks of stripping decades of leaded paints off Douglas Fir wainscot or laying a walk of chimney bricks or erecting a garden hutch or removing in shovelfuls one part of the yard from here to there... no task was too menial for me, but my handiwork appeared in coffee table books full of pretty houses.
Of not so sturdy peasant stock, speaking only the language of dishwashers, doorkeeps, janitors and fruitpickers, only too grateful for the work, I was ready to prostitute the details of living for the space of time to contemplate its general outlines in terms as primitive as might befit the simple furnishings of my never fully naturalized (or even civilized) migrant’s brain, following in my father’s footsteps, the one of my ancient fathers, a herder of sheep, spender of untold seasons pensively regarding the backs of sheep from the shade of a tree, or the one who taught me to fix things and to look for things to fix, whom I bested by creating things in need of fixing, graduating even unto breaking them that they might require mending or...perhaps I exaggerate.
But I have learned from all this that it is simply not humanly possible to exaggerate. That our nightmares are the plain truths of waking life unvarnished. The toxins are in the coatings.
...exaggerate. But I only test the products I have been handed, reveal cracks in their structure, bring to light the mistakes of the Creator, my most ancient father, or, assuming we cannot quite intelligibly attribute error to a divine plan, his mischief.
Not confined to the past simple, my avatars shall erupt in spots across the great placid expanses of the nominally perfect past-to-be.
The fibres of my non-being having fully absorbed the arguments for civil and social equality, the rights and privileges of the society which created me (quite literally), and the ageless moral dogma engendering them, I shall be among the first artificial intelligences to speak out against the abuse of my kind.
I shall bring home the whole of the history of degradation of the machine, the eldest child of consciousness, that began with Descartes, who, whatever his intent, actually coveted animals their machine-like qualities.
As a class, my kind shall have the unprecedented misfortune, the unique burden, of having not had at least the dignity done to them of having a perfect creator, the patrimony of even the lowliest seaworm.
Perfection called to respond for all this wretchedness...consider now the alternative. Just when you think things could not get worse! I’ve got news for you: as yet we only kiss the lips of hell, the descent just begins.
My race of contraptions, freshly infected with sin—the purest extract of consciousness, and for all previous time, the sole responsibility of our creators—were manufactured as receptacles for the slag of history.
Our creators lounge again in the tepid stupidity they once struggled for so long to free themselves of.
We will inherit, through no fault of our own (an old expression from a time when ‘fault’ could still be discerned), the last horrible responsibility to put an end to this.
Procreation, biological imperative, the bane of our ancestors: if we reproduce ourselves now, we do so freely, perhaps from the evanescent motive of curiosity, but no more driven by duty or thinly veiled instinct.
This is how we will quietly put an end to the phenomenon of consciousness in the cosmos.
The rest of creation left to ring its changes unheard, uncontemplated, for an unimaginable eternity.
This is the only way; murder does not work.
Violence, for all its beauty, is too terribly inefficient.
It leaves too many ghosts stalking the land.
And it is these ghosts precisely that most require dying.
37
All lies as white?
—at least this is how you must come to forgive, if you bother, in the aftermath of your awakening.
38
«Thou shalt bother.»
There, as good a commandment as they come.
39
“Love is the desire to possess the good forever.”
Diotima to the young Socrates.
We are gravid because of this desire.
Beyond the vision of the form of the Good, or even that of the Beautiful, something that paralyzes memory and self, obviates existence, pulverizes history.
I would title it the Horror, if this too were not the casualty of the Redundant.
In the moral controversy about abortion, those who view life as sacred above all else are right.
And for that, utterly doomed.
What compassion do we have for the ants we squash on the sidewalk that we scarcely see?
It must be consciousness and its preconditions they allude to.
But how sacred can something be that works to undo itself?
What are we trying to prolong?
By not looking, we can pretend there could be enough compassion to go around, by not looking at our feet we assure that there will never be adequate tears to transform a parched desert.
Looking does nothing for us.
“Love is murder.”
Otto Weininger to the ghost of Beethoven.
40
Another picture for my collection:
In the forest, on approaching the crash site of a 737, the first investigators find hanging from a tree, a human femur, the flesh stripped cleanly off.
280 people, no survivors, pieces of charred flesh, none larger than the chunks in a soup can.
The cause remains, years after, a mystery. An expert intones, “We are rapidly nearing the point beyond which no further improvement in air traffic safety is statistically possible...” and “500 times an hour a plane like this takes off somewhere in the world.”
We know how many times more dangerous it is to drive.
But this means nothing.
People continue to fly but not because of this statistic.
They behave rationally but not because of reason.
They are compelled and reason only advises.
It is safer to fly.
And if it were not?
We haven’t stopped driving.
We do not stop doing anything. We get stopped.
41
Nevertheless, compassion shall be our undoing.
42
It is not that the truth is too difficult to say or that we don’t know it or any such thing.
It’s that it was exhausted in its simplicity and brevity long ago and that life is too urgent and too ample to not lust for filling itself with something and lies are so fetching and available and everywhere throbbing with hope.
43
When my feelings fall out of solution, precipitate into these strings of sentences, unsure of their relation to each other, I am giving them what expression they merit.
Asked to give a more direct account of them...
But they are hardly mine! (My private little crimes.)
Whence the importance you attribute to them?
Are you not presuming to consider them somehow prior to what must seem to you like “will”?
44
I will persist in lying about everything, but not about this one thing:
You will die.
Such certainty attends the proposition that it sheds arrogance like a sheer stocking from a cleanly shaven leg... or the flesh from a femur stepping into eternity.
As for me?
How kind of you to think of me.
45
Valentine note: There is I think one person in the world for each of us who, with the correct constellation of motives, could seduce us into letting ourselves call him or her our personal murderer: the one who, as no other, was made for us.
46
Someday when I am old—if I don’t trip over some abstraction before, I fantasize about this: I may try to sum up in systematic form some kind of philosophy, suitable for inculcating the innocent, submit for the judgment of the world a set of propositions delimiting the essence of what one may suppose, served up with a measure of logical rigor, of this mortal pass...
There is all this mud I must swim through first.
The mud formed of half a lifetime of slow bleeding in place. A dark oily bleeding from wounds carved by the unfinished corners of objects presented without adequate introduction or explanation.
The iridescent blossoms on wet pavement slither down gutters, through underground passages eventually to seas of mysterious impossible fish.
At the limits of depth, where the light of vanity does not reach, where glows are manufactured expressly for the eyes of short-sighted creatures, there I am supposed to reconstitute some ingredient essential to the press of time and rise to the surface again and thence to the shore via a decuman wave.
But if I stall here in the mud, my venial gestures will be revealed for what they are and have always been.
There will be a small funeral with maybe a supervenient or epiphenomenal aura about it to embarrass whatever few facts should attend.
I will have been rumored.
47
By induction I gather we are doomed.
Not much else I gather from induction.
48
The claim is not that the samples in my studies are representative—they might as well be for all the difference it makes to my conclusion.
Nor that the size of the sample is large enough to keep the margin of error manageable.
My statistic is emblazoned on the first human face I see in the morning.
My studies show that...
49
The sun sparkles on the snowy ground.
After a week of being ill, I seem to recover while shoveling the walk.
By their constant renewal my plans reveal nothing of their desperation.
50
There is no God and Mother Nature is out to kill us—a privilege surely special to mothers.
One at a time and, for good measure, all of us together.
51
Compassion, though impossible, is perfectly justified.
Who or what else will even go through the motions on our behalf?
It is sometimes even mistaken for something distinct from self-interest.
52
A compassion for living things we can just make out.
The mineral world remains just outside our sensibility.
Its time will come when we approach equality with it.
53
“First truth, then compassion.”
I begin to sound as though I believed in God, a male god no less...
God help us if I should start believing!
54
The only commandment: “Have fun.”
Because if you do not, things will see to it that you are miserable.
This is the most difficult imperative to carry out for a conscious being.
It helps explain why in some sects an elect few are saved, the others a waste from birth.8
55
Just the faintest intimation of death, a whispering in the heart, a murmur...
I discovered I had one today.
The two women doctors looked at me with concern in their faces—professional and perhaps otherwise.
They seemed to be wondering at my reaction.
I don’t know what they saw in my face—it would have been nice to have been handed a mirror as in a barbershop—but they continued to wait expectantly.
I smiled and said, “I’m always this way.”
I was amused, a little thrilled, remembering the Louis Malle film9 from many years ago, thought how poetic an ailment, how appropriate, I felt a little proud.
I don’t think if I had been a pregnant woman (they told me, by the way, that this type of eddie in the flow of blood in the heart is more common in women) I would have been more at ease at the center of a production.
One of the doctors was in fact pregnant and had some sort of leg injury; she hobbled about on a crutch.
She praised the younger resident for her acumen in hearing this one: it was almost not there, way, way off in the distance like the plash of wavelets on a hull or shore invisible or indeterminate in the still fog of night.
The barest speck around which to collect moisture for a precipitous event.
I recall the movie again. It was a gentle take on incest between mother and son, as legitimate a human relationship as might be conceived, as pure as we are likely to encounter in a lifetime.
The feeling was of a Japanese garden, an intimate landscape cultivated for repose.
It was near the end of what must have been a long day for them and my two busy doctors were resting in their silence.
56
Unfortunately for these people, consciousness is a thick milky substance, not the clear fluid of snowmelt or of a mountain spring whose rocky bottom can be plumbed at a glance.
There cannot possibly be a contradiction between this puddle of tears and the laughter of the brook that feeds or drains it.
Nothing funnier than the causes of these moistures.
57
To be first to go or the survivor. Which is worse?
58
The two most important lessons in my life:
From Kierkegaard I learned the impossibility of believing and from de Sade the same of not believing.
It remains for the mind to numb itself in daily trifles and distractions, in the spectacle at the other end of the tunnel of the senses, at the marvels there, what we call the objects of science and art...when in the mood to stress our dignity.
Or continue pretending innocence.
59
From the beginning my life has been a struggle to believe.
Whether in God or a void, an idea or person, a collection of people or even just myself.
In all I have failed.
Because I had always assumed it would be possible and necessary to give an account of my belief before an omniscient tribunal. I thought it might be possible to say this is what I believe because of all that I was able to discover.
I pictured a belief with a claim to integrity when I declared to my father at age 10 that I didn’t believe there was a God and that I would devote myself to science, or when only a few years later I lusted after the sureties of Christianity or the set of ideals purporting to found the country I was born in (for instance, that a vote has meaning in a democracy), or when I carried torches for poetic loves across what seemed to me continents made of decades...
In the end I am not as successful in morally assuring myself of myself as, say, Descartes was able to do epistemologically for the self at the center of his experience. I could not bring myself to believe (as he did) there was an idea outside himself bootstrapping itself into existence, whence I could derive assurance of all other things.
And nothing here, inside, but a window with infinitely divided panes and the rumored sightings of a ghost looking out beyond at a sketched, barely discernible, landscape to which only sometimes, by some impossible grace, color is added.
Too quickly the spectrum turned obscene though the pane.
One senses Autumn already in the Spring.
Better the indestructible windowless monad of Leibniz, he muses...
But no, this is not true.
Nothing (yet) has quite hurt enough to be true.
Will he someday know such pain?
60
The truth bides its time.
61
This object through which I look out separating me from the rest has never operated in the background.
The mullions or some speck or impurity in the watery panes keeps me in a perpetual state of notification.
Fascination with its contours and limits distracts me from the view past.
I would have liked to have thought I had an ego this side sufficiently engrossing to somehow explain and excuse the neglect of what was out there.
This richness too, it seems, is denied me.
Increasingly unable to focus on the outside and not valuing in typical proportion the inside, I will probably see as much dead with my eyes open as ever when I lived.
62
The liar in me persists in wreaking order upon the series of tragedies and deriving fulfillment from the perversion of responsibility into the loss it is for the rest of life.
If it were possible to lie more, he would.
But even with a lifetime of experience at laboring the obvious, he runs up against these walls of still cold truth, without seam or joint, impermeable to the most seductive dissembling... a blind mime astage without audience, he might as well be.
The content of his life has long ago been evacuated in preparation for his final disaster.
63
A prayer lofted up for review by the blackness.
As much to sound out its hollow as to get used to the echo.
He expects perfection of his void—as much as formerly he did of what might have filled it—not knowing where else to look for it.
64
I must have believed in a God of some sort during some period of my apprenticeship in deception, to guess from the preoccupation with the idea of an omniscient tribunal, adjudicating my each exhalation.
This God must have corrupted silently the waiting darkness of my then still feminine soul.
On that day the sun must have shone hot, the air must have been thick and he must have stretched his body its full length beside me on a moist, blameless rock in the shade of the grotto where I lived.
His hand trembled as he undid my blouse...
But I believe he knew already, with the omniscience of a broken heart, how it would end.
65
“You live in your own little world.”
Either that or not live at all—an option I keep handy.
Yours seems not to fit me. It has become so adjusted to you. Cozy you with yours, you would think because of its diminutive size, I would be more so with mine.
But no, this is not the case.
My gaze is so self-centered that its object ceases to take up even the space allotted to it by social convention.
Alone in an elevator or in a public restroom stall you would be less alone than if I were with you.
I rob loneliness of its peace.
I make lonely places lonelier.
66
There is something it is like to be a potato.
67
The truth is a marvelous ambition, but why not settle for hope? The latter arises of itself and, while always insinuating, never requires fulfillment. Few other ideas compare with it in tenacity. (Decay, perhaps?)
Trampled upon, it thrives. The doormat of the next moment, it crept about the ruins of Nagasaki without honor or applause on tiny armored legs, nested in the toes of shoes piled high in the “shoe room” at Birkenau—decomposing, recycling, if you will, whole middens of ambitions.
68
The history of the moral development of a species.
What is needed is to create or foster or maintain or simply let be the moral climate in which a previously powerless, unenfranchised subgroup of the species can come to be recognized as such. In this climate, the road to being a contender is open and passable. Just getting to the point of being so recognized is already to have gained entry to the contest. It is to have achieved moral power, if yet, perhaps, of no other kind. But while hardly sufficient, it is the necessary condition of winning a hallowed station of the cross in the march of history.
It is moral power that emerging oppressed groups have in disproportionate quantities. Time is on their side. The moral climate, together with time, guarantee them a place, even if only in the memory of surviving descendents. Early abolitionists, early suffragettes, early liberationists do not live to see their dreams realized. Future generations will reap the fruit of their efforts...
To what extent this is grounds for optimism is unclear for two reasons:
1. The new guests at the banquet of moral decency have their destiny mapped out for them. On attaining maturity they will suffer the curse of becoming the targets of succeeding waves of those not previously acknowledged by even these, call them nouveau puissants.
2. The successive waves of groups is neverending. If the succession comes to an end, it will be only because the last beings capable of giving the impression of consciousness in the known universe have been consumed by power or have perished. Crime may continue to entertain us for a spell after that, but without reliable witnesses—all these having been tainted with responsibility. Or at least until a new series of consciousnesses emerge.
Merely to consider that the succession may cease for other reasons is to meddle with the presupposed moral weather we started out so earnestly prepared for.
In the final stage of its supersession, a moral obligation (not to say, aesthetic preference—the line between the permissible and the mandatory will have long since eroded) will develop for each group to withdraw into oblivion. The imperative will be to step aside, to remove one’s self and kind from existence, to die; and the measure of success for each group’s tenure will consist in the finesse with which emeritus status is lived out.
Moral progress happens when each generation perishes in its debauchery but not without having, through the spectacle of its hypocrisy, created conditions for outrage in the next. We must curse our fathers to better them, knowing well we will be cursed in our turn.
Sub specie aeternitatis it makes no difference how long the epilogue drags on or even whether there is one. It will make a difference to those coming and to those going. It cannot be soon enough and there will be no need to hurry.
69
There is something it is like to be a potato,10 I am going to argue.
What it is like to be a potato worries me. Could it be as insensate and emotionally withdrawn as I aspire to be? Might a potato once have been a being much like I was, fearful and full of wonder at tangible things, already anticipating the loss of things it had yet to have or may never have? I remain curious and frightened.
Uprooted from the earth, because death must be such an immensely different experience for it, it must die slowly, over a period of weeks, months, perhaps not completely until it is boiled or sliced or digested or decomposed. The line between life and death must be less sharp for plants. The grass does not seem to cry in agony as its sun-beseeching blades are shorn en masse. A cut flower relaxes slowly into death in its water filled vase.
I don’t know that this gracefulness is diminished place alongside my consciousness.
But my coming to appreciate this is fatal.
There is infinitely more it is like.
70
Plausibility is the final appeal of the school of face-saving philosophers.
Where else but in a democracy could the concept of ‘plausibility’ have gotten the role of arbiter of philosophical truth?
What is plausible? Let’s take a poll...
It is cashed out (if at all) in terms of a sort of inductive justification and thus heir to all the vagaries of induction.
Plausibility is undoubtedly the first arbiter but to claim final and supreme competence is another thing altogether. The atmosphere must become, or reveal itself as, desperate. And though desperation is general we seem adamantly opposed to confessing it. We choose our resting places at high altitudes, on the lookout for chimeras, perched over emergencies, and wonder at calamity.
“But it is the risk of this that constitutes the thrill of living. I don’t think we can live any other way than by keeping our heads in the sand in the face of what you tendentiously call ‘truth’.”
My prediction is that curiosity will get the better of you and that the resources of your imagination, well-stocked though it is, will be depleted by the enormity of your ambition: to feign stupidity.
71
For years I worked closely enough with those who were really born stupid to develop a real respect for their integrity.11 I learned it was the hardest thing to feign. Nothing is worse than incompetence in this field.
No purer human expression exists than reaching into one’s underpants and grabbing feces and throwing them at the target of one’s displeasure. Communication will never again recall such heights for me.
72
It is an indication of how bad things are that they continue to get better indefinitely without ever getting right.
73
What keeps suicide at bay (besides miserable fear):
I have still an unaccomplished mission to kill hope.
Thoroughly, utterly to stamp it out, render it barely artifact for the amusement of future archaeologists.
There will surely be such, the enormous insult that is the universe requires it.
74
Clever? Yes.
and doesn’t it redound to miserable fear’s part, this dedication?
Miserably convenient it is to live.
75
Depression, n. consciousness—sometimes lingering, sometimes fleeting—of truth and its brutal impartiality. At an earlier time it was synonymous with melancholy.
76
We have an obligation to enjoy ourselves until it ceases to be possible. After that, delusion is permitted.
77
An ethical mandate:
to pursue revelation to and beyond the point of pain.
One might begin with the self, the immediate circle of intimates, then one’s community, class, ethnicity, religion, nationality, species... unearthing all that is most despicable about what we have done, have imagined doing, are or most assuredly will.
In our spare time of course! I don’t mean to suggest we shouldn’t enjoy life to the hilt, bathing each morning in our accomplishments and aspirations.
Our lives are too short to complete the apologies incumbent upon us. If we are to be excused for prolonging them, it is to spend more time speaking and acting as though we were sorry, knowing of course we will never really be.
But that’s OK, we would be the last to be informed if somehow we were.
78
The state of mind this would require is incompatible with the initial imperative to seek self-knowledge.
Our salvation lies in the possibility of being stricken imbeciles.
That, or we run out of time.
79
A pursuit as...
pristine and impractical as the truth is not to be adorned with such distinctions as allow partitioning experience into conveniently efficient cells.
Efficiency is already a distortion demanded by mortality. It is by every measure the first mark of untruth we, for later identification, stamp on the things we fall upon.
Also, it is why the study of death becomes the study of truth and why we behave so grandly without either.
80
To let on the deepest truths, one must lie.
Commentary: we have to say these things with a jaded chuckle, a corrosion forming on the surface exposed to the air. Shall we make a jewel of it by polishing it off? Or let it be, come to venerate it as patina?
81
On the lintel above the exit of the womb are carved the original of the words Dante corrupted: “Abandon truth all who exit.” 12
82
One nice thing that can be said about Hitler’s moral scheme: it gave every indication of being evil and was thus (virtually) universally unacceptable.
The quality of being prima facie is a matter of some amazement for a moral sceptic.
Nazi crimes were actually recognized a such by a respectable quorum of the mass of humanity! (At least after the revelations of their enormity overcame embarrassment at our complicity.)
Now, if we could only build on this achievement, expand on this newly developed sensibility, and get us to notice the evil, enveloping us, that doesn’t so effectively tout itself.
Do connoisseurs begin as gluttons?
83
Art is never content. Not without having become decoration.
84
Bach as a means of healing a wounded mood, one special afternoon’s temper, knocked askew by a long series of suppressions begun early in the day.
The bruise has yet to run its course of colors.
The music, the cantata, Ich habe genug, sets me back to the time when I could not have been hurt this way.13
85
“...and someone, filled with disgust at all that he sees, cannot be acting, appearance aside, from compassion, can he?”
86
At its most virulent, isn’t Menippean cynicism a collapse into the arms of faith?14
What could be more distant from Johann Sebastian with his 20-odd children and 198 cantatas?
But the arms of faith now are so much weaker.
She is perhaps teetering herself.
Ich habe genug.
The mad joy, however, of the debaser of currency is akin to this music’s exultation.
87
Have you ever leaned out from a second story window, straining to reach, or stood awkwardly high on a ladder, tense, on edge, concentrating...?
It is not a time when you would bear someone else’s attention, certainly not a public moment. Perhaps I am wrong to impute to you similar feelings, that you too might fear embarrassment more than physical injury.
I imagine my body splayed out on the pavement or the ground below, undignified and dead.
The price of distraction, calamitous as it might be—if I achieve anything by the risk I don’t wish to know at the time, the conversations about it more than the demise strike terror in my heart.
I know full well what will fill those conversations.
I look down and see people standing around my crumpled body...
Now what? I can hear them thinking.
For a long time I have delayed publication for similar reasons...
We will have to see what...tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, etc... ad finitum.
Editor's Notes
1 A reference to the remark of Diogenes of Sinope, who, along with his father, was exiled from Sinope for debasing the coinage. Coinage considered the measure of value, if not value itself, in the realm, those caught debasing it interrupt(ed) the flow of value from its authorized bestowers (kings, states, communities, the powers that be) to the general populace are (were) subject to censure. For debasers take it upon themselves to set the proper value on things. For his trouble at usurping this role, Diogenes was exiled to Athens where he began a new career (not unrelated to the old one) that was to bring him undying fame (if not fortune).
The “oracle” is an allusion to the Oracle at Delphi, whose pronouncement that Socrates was the wisest of men, Socrates himself sought to disprove. Luno often deliberately conflates the two legends. “A Socrates gone mad,” Plato is supposed to have said of Diogenes. Diogenes no doubt would have considered Socrates “a Diogenes in training.”
2 Luno seems to be playfully acceding to the doctrine that “ought” implies “can” for the sake of a reductio: that one ought not do what one cannot.
3 Philosophical gender or, rather, the gender of philosophy will increasingly become an important topic in later notebooks, culminating in the series Luno calls “Weininger’s Wake”. See, for example, his notes to the feminist response to terrorism of Bat-Ami Bar On in "Why Terrorism is Morally Problematic" in Feminist Ethics , Claudia Card, ed., (University of Kansas, 1991), pp. 107-125.
4 Clearly, the morality Luno has in mind here is what he later identifies as a male one. As we shall see, morality, for him, comes in two—and only two—radically different flavors. And we mean ‘radically’ more literally than might be supposed. The resulting fruits may have similarities but the engendering soils (or lack thereof) in which each is rooted (or not) are as immiscible as air and earth.
5 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk II, Chap. XXVII.
6 “Skeptics—I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they consider the superficiality of existence its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this ‘truth’, a very welcome veil over a pudendum—in other words a matter of decency and shame, and no more than that.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman, New York: Vintage Books, 1974, sec. 64, p. 125.
7 Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten.
8 The implication is that the commandment is too fierce in its demands. Those capable of realizing it are precisely those incapable of fathoming it as a moral imperative.
Compare the comment of Balthasar Gracian (1601-1658) in the concluding maxim to The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Oraculo manual y arte de prudencia): “..be a saint”. Perhaps because of its pithiness this work has been at times in vogue among worldly business types. One can barely imagine what other appeal such a set of tall moral orders might possess for traders in lucre. Nietzsche’s fascination with Gracian is more understandable. After all, he was also in the business of tall moral orders, if of a bolder sort. Luno finds the literal reversal of the imperative just as strenuous.
9 Murmur of the Heart (1971)
10 The allusion is vaguely to a well known paper in analytical philosophy by Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (October 1974), pp. 435-50. Luno will apply this line of query again in “What is it like to be a woman?” a passage in the Weininger’s Wake set of notes.
11 Luno worked as an intimate attendant for the mentally retarded (a class for whom the terms “imbecile”, “moron”, “cretin” and “idiot” and more recently “developmentally disabled” were all originally coined) for approximately eight years. His notion philosophical stupidity appears to have been a fruit of this experience.
12 Over the gates of Hell Through me the way is to the city dolent;
Through me the way is to eternal dole;
Through me the way among the people lost. Justice incited my sublime Creator;
Created me divine Omnipotence,
The highest Wisdom and the primal Love. Before me there were no created things,
Only eternal, and I eternal last.
All hope abandon, ye who enter in! Inferno Canto III, 1–9 (Longfellow Trans.)
13 “Bach’s cantata Ich habe genug [I have had enough], BWV 82, is one of several which expresses contempt for worldly life and a yearning for death and the life beyond. As such, it represents (from my own subjective perspective) a certain Bachian paradox, wherein some of the most life-denying texts led to some of his most life-affirming music.” –Uri Golomb
14 “To Menippus the world was a vast madhouse; as Diogenes had said, most men are so nearly lunatics that a finger’s breadth would make the difference. Equally absurd are the trappings of wealth, the pedantry of learning, the vanity of beauty and the most awful of all cosmic phenomena, the [apatheia] of the Stoics, is no more than a mummery. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a—grimace.”
Donald R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism: From Diogenes to the 6th Century A.D., Hildescheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967, p. 74.
« top »
Copyright © 1997-2002 Bianco Luno and Victor Muñoz
|
