Equivocities, analogies & univocities

How distant the moment now seems when I bid you farewell, turning back for a last glimpse at you in your thick wool scarf and checkered tweed jacket that your mother never liked. Is she well? You must send her my warmest regards. Are you making progress? I chanced upon Edward at one of Christina’s dinner parties last Thursday evening, and he told me how your latest work reads, as usual, like the polished engraving of some commemorative plate in a narrow Parisian street, reminding passers-by of the assassination of some less-than-fortunate revolutionary who was assassinated on such-and-such a date. Despite the overly dramatic imagery of his judgment, all he meant of course was that your writings strike everyone as unnecessarily solemn. In itself, solemnity is no terrible sin. It is however the target of your solemnity, or rather the activity with which you embark upon with such solemnity, what you choose to throw into your cauldron of solemnity, which I write to you about. You seem to have an obtuse incapacity to recognize what seems obvious to everyone else around you, and your struggle is not important to anyone other than yourself. You seem to me as well as to the others of what used to be our gang as a small child who retires to the corner of his kindergarten class while the other pupils are gathered together in the middle of the room, building a giant castle of colorful wooden blocks. You’ve taken with you just one block, which you stand up in front of you, then knock down, then stand up again, alternating back and forth repetitiously, all the while, with the most solemn of visages, as if you think you could solve what you take to be the riddle of blocks’ mystery if you could only grasp exactly what happens when that first block is stood up, before any other blocks are placed upon it. The other children in the class forget you are even there, being naturally too engrossed by their palaces and walled cities to worry about you and your self-imposed Sisyphean struggles. And even when they do glance over, it usually turns out that it was not so much to look at you, as it was to formulate a plan in their head for how to build a passageway between two towers, hanging perilously over their soft little heads. For it is not so much that they are incurious about your project, although they are, as that they recognize you as a river-diver, descending to the riverbed, to turn over rocks and pull up waterlogged logs, in search of some sort of liquid which could be the nectar of life. You get the point, darling.

 

Frederick read the lines carefully. Gabrielle existed no more than did his project.

 

Frederick crumpled up the letter and tossed it behind him in a self-consciously haphazard manner. Then, he shook his head, leaned back, turned around and reached behind him, picking up the crumpled ball of paper. He pulled himself back into his original position, and repeated the over-shoulder throw.

 

Frederick folded the letter in half, then pulled one of the corners down, and continued to fold, fold, fold until a tiny elephant, crumpled trunk and all, stood in front of him on his desk.

 

Gabrielle looked down at her work, folded the letter twice, and slid it into an envelope. She licked it once and then again, folded it shut, and tucked it into her brazier as she left her bedchamber.

 

Gabrielle took the scissors and began to cut the letter into tiny pieces, letting them fall into a box which was already full to the brim with confetti, which would be used for the celebration of Frederick’s newest book deal.

 

Frederick wept as he read the letter, and then looked up into a mirror placed over the sink of his bathroom. He looked anemic, his skin unhealthy at best, red dots populating his lower face and neck, his hair was falling out in front and back, the whites of his eyes were more red than white, his head jutted out in front of him due to bad posture, his teeth were an unmistakable yellow as he stretched the tips of his mouth apart to form a sort of horrified smile at himself in the mirror. He was hideous.

 

Frederick did not know where this thing was going. Neither did Gabrielle.

 

The only question is whether I will take it like an Attic urn and hurl it off a cliff, to be smashed on the rocks below, or find it to be soft and malleable in my hands, so that I can flatten it out, or make it round, turn it into a disk, or a hammer, or a little room, adding more water as it begins to dry, in the interest of later mutations. 

 

Yellowing shabby lamp shades;

Turkish tinkers tinkering;

Whining sellers in wine cellars;

Simplistic slap-happy song-singing;

The browsing of antique zoographic paraphernalia;

Finishing the Finnish fish-fin;

Transvestite tramps trapping trilobites with a trampoline’s nylon net;

Your yummy yoni-yurt;

Fact-checking the checkered past of the Chinese champions;

Figuring out how to fold the fig with five fingers, i.e. the five-fingered fig-fold;

Knocking out the far-out know-nothing phonies;

Washing clean the cement mixer’s markings;

Rallies of tramways teaming the streets of Timbuktu;

Buck-toothed beaming eager beavers.

 

He pranced out the front door into the morning sunlight, forgetting he was a drawing.

 

She straightened her back up in her seat, quietly adjusting her blouse.

 

Frederick had worked in the soap factory for seven years now. He had been around soap in such large quantities and for such prolonged periods of time that he could taste the smell of soap, and it seemed sometimes that he could smell how it would taste, were he to place it in his mouth and clamp down with his teeth instead of accomplishing the artisanal job assigned to him, that being carving into each bar the insignia of the company. Onto each block, he inscribed an oval around the last name of the owner of the soap company, Wally. There was another detail of his life relevant to his overexposure to said brand of soap. He received free soap from the company each month. Thus, his body smelled of lavender, the sole scent offered by Wally, Inc. It was however not quite lavender, but a mixture of the industrial smell of soap intertwined with a pungent odor of lavender which had been ground up and stirred into a watered-down substance to be poured into the concoction which would harden, the product finally destined to be placed into a plastic wrapping and sent to the shelves of expensive stores specializing in personal hygiene. Gabrielle, his girlfriend of five years, had been pressuring him for some time to quit his job so that they could move to a big city and experience the exciting life she had been dreaming of since she had seen her first Woody Allen film. She was 11 at the time, and had an idea of New York which she expected would be awaiting her on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, were she ever to escape Burlington.

 

Having arrived, he set up his table, after scoping out the walkways for police. He did not think he could get in any serious trouble for selling photographs, but figured accordingly: If it were legal to simply sit out on the sidewalk selling items and wares, more people would be engaging in similar activities. He lit a cigarette, and opened the bag in which he had brought his work. He had been tossing around the idea for some time now of selling his photographs to tourists, but had the feeling that the idea lacked a certain appearance of originality- he needed an idea that would attract people to come over and look at what he had. He was staring at some wine bottles in his room one morning, and thought about the ships people put in bottles- wouldn’t it be groovy if he knew how to do that? What could he put in bottles, though, absent his putting-little-wooden-ships-into-bottles skills? Photographs! What about putting photographs  he had taken into the wine bottles, and sealing them with a cork? He could take photographs of famous monuments, people, dogs, bridges, stairways, put them in bottles, and sell them! Even better- he could take photographs of boats, and put them in the bottles! All of the above! What about a name for such an M.O.? He might be able to make a living like so! He could stay in Paris! The money he made from the work would fund his progress in photography and writing! It might all come together! He had already ordered a camera to take black and white photographs- it would be here in two weeks. For now, he was reading up on photography- history, aesthetics, and techniques. He wanted to stitch photography and literature together, placing bits of language onto the photographs. Black and white photography seemed perfect for the kind of literature that he wrote, which was always a departure from reality, rather than an attempt to copy it precisely. He did not want to put reality into words, but rather to create reality with words. Photography was a way of toying with the creation of reality, in that it takes a bit of life and freezes it into different colors. Shades of grey. The bottle-idea would allow him to act out his name, Deboucherville. Déboucher in French means to break out, to escape, to spring forth. Thus, the bottle-idea worked on several levels. He started taking out his bottles and standing them up on the table. Parisians and tourists rushed by. He had no worries. The future was changing. There would be stoppers, browsers, talkers, purchasers.

 

He had noticed that weekend that the people he was surrounding himself with did not expect much of him. They had all placed him in a certain niche of character-types in their minds and were perfectly content to keep him there. He knew he had to distance himself from such people. Another thing he had noticed was that his acquaintances were all self-satisfied. He wanted to make his life a struggle with himself and the world. He wondered if these words were simply repeated from his readings, or whether they had a grain of truth when applied to his case. Did he struggle with himself? He certainly drank a lot: there was where a struggle might be worth undertaking. Were he to cut down on alcohol-consumption, he would save time- how many evenings had he passed away in an alcohol-addled fog instead of above in the clearer heights to which he was from time to time capable of ascending when he set his creative powers upon a task. Also, another dimension of his life where he could engage in struggle was where nourishment was involved. He spent far too much on food. He ate too much. He ate the wrong kinds of foods. He ate at the wrong time of day. Were he to regulate his food intake in a more productive manner, his interaction with what was around him would be more fructuous. The food he ate, after all, did not just feed his muscles, but also his mind. He realized that, no matter all the latter 20^th-century French philosophy into which he had immersed himself over the last few years, he still thought in terms of a separation between his body and his mind. He continued to think dichotomously. The brain was not separate from his body, however- he thought this. But the dichotomy of mind and body would impose itself back into his thought stream, into the language offered forth, in spite of the fact that he wanted to think of himself as a giant machinic apparatus of bone and muscle and organ and blood, brain and all, interacting in the world without separating itself from it, interfacing and inserting his tentacles into the interstices of the world, with the world to form another larger machinic apparatus.

 

Adding up adders in the ashes

Betting bags of banknotes

Catching cat-naps

Dilly-dallying in Dallas dive bars

Etch-a-sketching empathy

Forming functions with nasty fad-bashers

Great gales of Gaspésie

Happy happenstances

Ignoble intentions

Japanese jailbirds

Killer kangaroos from Kenya

Lint and lacquer and the din of laughter

Mysterious march of the mummies

Nasty nail-biting nobodies

Open-minded ogres dressed in old loafers

Parting ways with one’s pathetic past

Quitting Queens for Qatar with an old guitar

Running restlessly through the Russian tundra

Sitting desperately still but still frantically stammering

Tilling with tigers’ toenails

Undergoing one’s own undoing

Venting at your vacuous valentine

Wives washing whites while wiping windows

Xenophobic xylophones (the ones with the black keys make the ones with white keys uncomfortable, and vice versa)

Yeasty yesterday

Zinc and zebras

 

The universe is always blooming and wilting, springing forth and backing up, expanding and then receding, shrinking until a new force takes hold of it, captures it and pushes it forward irrationally. It’s irrational- life. Why expand if the inevitable recession will undo any progress? It’s all very silly. But I shouldn’t think like this- I’m thinking too mathematically, in terms of addition and subtraction, and the concept of zero. Perhaps if life cannot be rationally explained as having some ultimate value that never disappears, then it is rationality which should be abandoned for the sake of life. I know that life put me here. Life continues my presence here. Life provides me with everything I need and many things that I desire. Life should be engaged with- Instead of sitting on the side of the river, watching people and things float by toward a waterfall, I should jump in, grab a log, pull it off to shore, fashion it into a boat, i.e. remove any cumbersome branches that my body might find less than comfortable, and strike out for where the river will take me, Huck Finn-like. 

 

A lot of it was sloppy, come up with and written down the same moment, with little or no careful thought. Could he improve his craft like so? It was similar to the way he had spent a lot of his time learning French- a lot of times, he didn’t try to listen to the actual words of people who were speaking, he merely let the language seep through him, hoping that he would perhaps subconsciously learn the language without the strenuous mental effort which was necessary to decode the sounds and make sense of what he was listening to. He was simply throwing words together on the page- it might be better for him to engage in forcing the strings of words to follow a route towards a common goal, in a common general direction, vers un but commun. I sit down wherever I am and record the thoughts as they come, setting down a record of the flows of my thought stream, changing it, idealizing it here and there, whitewashing it there, but all the same, there are echoes of what is going on inside of my head on the page. It is an externalizing, or getting out into the open, or extending the reach of my thoughts.

 

He sat up in bed. He didn’t know where he was. He was in the dark. He was discombobulated. He sensed that he was in danger. He had been staring at a massive black spider that had been hanging from his ceiling, and now he didn’t see it, which meant that it was somewhere else in the room- hiding. It was not just a big spider- it was bigger than spiders were supposed to be. It was the size of one of the medicine balls that women in tank tops and short shorts lean against and lie upon at the gymnasium where he ran laps a few times a week. What made it worse was that the spider had been conscious of his presence in bed, just as he was conscious of its presence next to him in his tiny room. It most likely also knew that he had been watching it. It had been moving its legs around. It had been hairy. It had been contemplating him. It had been not far away- a few feet away from his bed. He was terrified. It might be in his bed. He jumped out of his covers and ran to the light. He had to see. Where had it gone? He frantically flipped the switch. He looked at his bed, and around his room. There was nothing there. It had been real life. He was back in his dream. He felt the relief that always had accompanied these realizations. It’s OK. It was only real. It wasn’t pretend. It wasn’t a dream. There were no enormous spiders here. No such beasts even existed here. He still felt the panic that had engulfed him only a few moments before. A part of him knew that there was no spider, but the impulse or a certain amount of the fear remained- the mood of the fear remained, even though the fear was not aimed at anything concrete, as it had been before.

 

Everyone looked upon him with contempt. Everyone disliked him. Everyone disapproved of him. Everything hated him. Everything thought he was an overhyped disgrace. Everyone was less than impressed by his meager skills. Everyone was dying to get away from him. Everyone wished he had never been born. Everyone found him to be even worse than what they had expected. Everyone wished he were elsewhere. Everyone gave him the evil eye. Everyone was checking their watches as they pretended to be interested in what he was saying. Everyone nodded and smiled as customs dictate as he told them about his daily affairs, and then rolled their eyes toward the pock-marked ceiling in a gesture of desperation when he wasn’t looking. Everyone glanced at each other nervously as he talked. Everyone was counting down the minutes until it was time for him or them to leave. Everyone wished he hadn’t been invited. Everyone found him a nuisance. Everyone didn’t know what to think of him, in a bad way. Everyone was still waiting for him to leave. Everyone secretly wished he would die. Everyone found him revolting. Everyone disliked the way he dressed. Everyone didn’t like his mouth. Everyone thought he smelled bad. Everyone wondered what his parents had done to him. Everyone looked at him for the same reason they looked at a car accident while driving by on the freeway. Everyone made a mental note to avoid social gatherings where he might be present. Everyone was scowling at him. Everyone wished they were dreaming when they realized an encounter with him was inevitable. Everyone drank more than usual when he was around, in order to forget that fact. Everyone had a bad taste in their mouth when they left him. Everyone’s memories of him were disagreeable. Everyone cringed at the sight of him. Everyone discussed the minutia of their distaste for his person over delicious hot coffee in nice little white coffee mugs with cheerful aphorisms about appreciating life printed in playfully childish font. Everyone had more self-confidence when they thought about how they could be him, but all the same, resented the universe capable of producing someone of his caliber of lugubriousness. Everyone had nightmares about being locked in a small room with him forever. Everyone crossed the street when they noticed him approaching from the other direction. Everyone never admitted it if they had spent time with him when they discussed what they had done that day with other people. Everyone moved away, when they realized he lived next door. Everyone didn’t pick up their telephone for fear that it was him.

 

These sessions are beginning to resemble more the blips of a Russian submarine’s radar than the continuous flowing of rapids over rocks. “Bleep…bleep…bleep…,” rather than “kshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” Capital has a long-term as well as a short-term recording device. Receipts are Capital’s short-term memories. The vast majority of them will disappear. I don’t read. I grapple. I don’t write. I stumble.

 

Writing allowed him to give voice to the megalomaniacal voices within him whom he found obligated to repress when he found himself in a social context. The one thing he knew he had to work on in his writing was longevity, or sustaining his focal lens on a given subject for lengthier periods of time and space instead of taking a quick photo and then pointing his lens in a different direction, toward something else.

 

One thing to work on is to wrest my desire-to-write from my desire-to-be-recognized-as-valuable. Even if the former may have been born from the latter, I think that it is salvageable, like an infant son from what will eventually be an overly protective mother should he not be rescued, sticky and slimy but nevertheless now perfectly separate. Another thing to work on, which is related to the preceding, is the elimination of self-satisfaction springing from reflection upon what I’ve written. One reason for eliminating pride is pragmatic. Self-satisfaction slows my writing down. Self-satisfaction is what makes me scroll back up to look over the paragraphs I’ve written, not for editing, or even rereading, but merely to gaze upon the blocks of words that I’ve formed. “Look at all this territory I’ve created. I hadn’t recognized myself as capable of bearing language forth to such excess.” It is essential that I extinguish the inclination which creates that voice. I hate that voice, and I hate people who talk and talk and talk, and the point of everything they say is, “Look at me! Listen to me!” Such ruminations might actually be productive if they help me to continue to reach further. Each extension should however be a reaching forward, not toward a given static point, but a reaching toward more reaching. I should be producing modes of production instead of products.

 

Another reason that he enjoyed writing was that the page was the perfect listener. The page had no personal issues to ponder while pretending to listen to the writer. The page not only recognized each word thrown toward it, but threw them back at the writer at his bidding. The page was like having a perfect memory. But what made the page the perfect listener was not only the fact that it listened patiently to everything the writer told it, and had a perfect memory. The best part about the page was the fact that it forgot. Were the speaker to embark upon a monologue ex tempore with a human listener, there would always be the chance that he would stumble upon his words, or worse, say something regrettable, which would taint every future word that the speaker told the listener. “Yes, that is well, but even so, it was prefaced by that…” The page, on the other hand, will forget upon command. The writer can have the page forget entire sentences, or individual words, replacing them with others, more precise or less revealing. He can patch together fragments of thought which had previously laid far one from the other.

 

“Hmm,” she inquired to herself, “why is he giving me his contact information?” He thought she was probably wondering why he hadn’t asked for her contact information, instead of giving her his, which insinuated that she would be the one who would seek him out for the following encounter, were it in the cards for there to be such an encounter. The truth was, he had done so for two reasons. The first was that he was horrified at the thought of being the guy who badgers a girl who finds him bothersome. He couldn’t think of a more contemptible, pathetic or truly execrable role to play in society’s grand comedy of manners. The other reason went along with the first, but expanded its reach. His interest in her disappeared if she were not mutually interested in him. This puzzled him a bit, when he thought about it hard. He couldn’t decide whether or not this should be considered cause for shame, or indifference. Was it even important? Moreover, mightn’t it be better to treat it as if it weren’t important? Wasn’t he risking missing his cue if he dwelt overly intensely on the possible authentic or hypocritical motivation of the various twists and turns as well as the entire modus operandi of the quests he embarked upon at the behest of his libido? On the one hand, wasn’t it a pretty healthy way to find a friend? If the woman wasn’t attracted or interested in him, what use was it for him to waste time pining away for her? Pining would not make her fall in love with him. Pining would render him even more pathetic in her eyes. Even if she did decide to give him a chance, she would be settling for him, which would end up being even worse. She would doubtless find someone more suitable for her in the future, and would destroy him by leaving him for the new guy. On the other hand, he couldn’t help but to detect a bit of the ubiquitous egotism tainting his resting of his libido’s drives upon the contingency that the object of his fancy desire him in turn. He posed the question to himself in the following way. Was the object of his desire’s desire for him necessary or sufficient for his requited desire? He liked to think of it as necessary, but not sufficient, and tried to prove it to himself. He had in the past found himself desired by members of the opposite sex, as well as members of the same sex, and not desired the desirer in turn. This seemed to rule out the hypothesis that desire-for-him was sufficient to pique his libido’s interest. Further, there had been many incidents in his life where he had noticed that the girl he found himself desiring found him a bore, unattractive, superfluous, or detestable. He had consequently been capable of turning off the attraction he had previously harbored for her, which immediately morphed into a sort of resentment, and then into indifference. If she doesn’t recognize me as valuable, how valuable can she be? It was the converse of one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, of which the following is a periphrasis. “How could she be worthy of respect, if she finds me respectable?” Or Woody Allen: “Why would I want to be a member of a club that wants me for a member?” However, if he had previously been under the impression that she did indeed desire him, especially for a longish period of time, say, a week or so, the realization that she did not, in fact, desire him, plunged him into a cataclysmic depression and hopelessness as to his chances of ever finding a “mate” or even connecting with the world in a healthy and productive manner. Such a state debilitated him and prevented him from accomplishing anything. Instead of working on his many projects, he would temporarily forget about his feelings of abjection and the sense that he was superfluous in the universe by staring nihilistically at photographs of strangers engaging in sexual acts while manually simulating the sensation of real love-making until he felt a momentary warm feeling of opening out between his legs, which disappeared all too soon, at which point he would realize how tensed up he had become, and would relax his shoulders and lean his head back behind them, and remind himself that he and his life story was shit, in the big scheme of things. And so, in a different context, he reflected to himself that the fact that his desire for a woman could be based at least partly on her desire for him, and that his quest for love was itself only a more sophisticated and risky form of self-pleasure. The woman involved was merely an extension of his hand. Upon further reflection, he realized that it was possible that that was merely a hurdle on the obstacle course that one must have the courage and tenacity to traverse if one is to find someone with which to share one’s bed and secrets. Why should a woman desire a man who is not confident enough in the value of his own desire to risk asking for her contact information, and in so doing, risk being the guy who desires a woman who does not return his desire? The truth, for all she knows, is that he does not believe in the value of his own desire, and consequently is afraid that she will probably recognize its worthlessness, and therefore, does not want to risk throwing himself into the situation where said worthlessness is openly recognized, i.e. where attention is called to the recognition of the worthlessness of his desire and by extension, him/his-life-story. He would rather it go unsaid, so that he could move on in other directions, in the search for a woman injudicious enough to attribute value to worthlessness. The desire to be desired by someone worked both ways. “He must take me for a fool,” she will whisper to herself. For who would neglect to risk embarrassment at the prospect of love, if there were even a marginal chance that the proposition would lead to happiness and an end to one’s loneliness? The desirer must believe his chances are far worse. Either he underestimates the perspicacity of the woman he desires, or he does not hold himself in high esteem, and who is a better judge of a man than the man himself? The woman knows this, and wisely turns away from him for another man. For she desires a man for whom it is unthinkable that she would choose another over him.

 

And as for you, we never have fun, and to tell the truth, I don’t know if we ever did have fun together. Can you remember a specific time when you ever felt like we completed each other in a platonic way, or when you were happy being wherever we were, with only me, without any desire for anyone else to be there? I can’t seem to be able to do so, as horrible as that sounds for the future of our friendship, not to mention our past. It seems to me on the contrary that I always passed time with you as opposed to others by default. There were no others more interesting or satisfying for me to hang with, but you were always there, so you were the chosen one. And I can tell that you feel the same way about me. The time we spent apart dissolved perhaps your recognition of how dreadfully tiresome you found, find and will find me if we continue to pass away the months like we always have for the next half-year or so, and me likewise you. Whenever we’re around each other, walking through the streets talking to ourselves (never to each other), it’s like we’re not walking through real streets, but over an enormous bubble that’s blown up around the earth, hovering about a hundred or so meters from the ground, so that we can see what’s going on far below, without any chance of actually partaking in any of it. Our conversations are narcissistic, in that they dwell on the banal minutia of our everyday existences. We never touch on anything genuine or authentic. We never confront each other when one of us says something the other doesn’t agree with or that even horrifies the other, which is to be expected, as we’re not really even listening to each other. Aren’t we only dwindling away the time we’ve been allotted for our younger years? What’s even more bothersome to me is that we’re not even creating any good memories. Will I ever want to recount to you or anyone else the time we were walking around in the rain and I told you about how someone stole the butter I had bought a day before from the community kitchen at my apartment complex?

 

Looking over what he’d written, he realized it was the first time in a while that he felt that things were headed in the right direction. He felt that he had accomplished something, and that he was capable of accomplishing much more, if he continued likewise. Looking at himself in the mirror, he didn’t only see a face, for once, but the face of someone, the face of someone who writes.

 

Looking over what he’d written the day before, he realized that he’d made up for lost time. He had previously set himself the goal of writing 500 words a day, had missed 3 days over the last week, and had written a total of 2000 words the preceding day. So it was as if he had written 500 words per day after all. Of course, he didn’t like the idea of writing just any 500 words. They had come from his life. While reflecting on why the deluge had been triggered, he turned over in his ideas the fact that nothing of what he written had been completely fictional. Usually, he sat down and tried his hardest to make whatever he wrote distanced from his reality, whether past or present. The day before, on the contrary, everything he had written had come from his life. He didn’t want to say that he was really expressing himself. It was not that it had come from a real place, or that it represented him accurately, but rather that he had harnessed his thoughts which had been based upon his life, and transformed them into violence. They weren’t realist, or an accurate description of his feelings or emotions, in any kind of Romantic sense. Once he had put them down on the page, and reread them, he didn’t find himself thinking, “Yes, that really happened.” Rather, nothing he wrote really happened. There was some sort of cipher or sieve through which his thoughts passed on their way to the page, which sifted out all the elements of the real, so that something remained of them, but any connection to the real had disappeared.

 

She gazed at his hideous ear. It was twisted up and gnarled like a massive long-deceased oak tree. Most ears are in fact gnarled, but his ears took the usual gnarling a bit over the edge. They looked like some clumsy neophyte ear baker had taken a bit of ear-dough, and kneaded it into the form of a less-than-perfect pretzel, and then, not satisfied with his work, had kept kneading and intermeshing it and adding water until it looked more like scrambled eggs than a pretzel, much less an ear. Said greenhorn aural baker, though competent enough to see that the quality of his work was under par, had decided it was better to produce something than nothing at all, and that it being his first day and all, his supervisor would most likely be understanding, and had divided said soupy scrambled eggs-like would-be ears into puddles, cooked them until they resembled uneven mounds, and haphazardly slapped them onto each side of his head, not even caring to make them resemble each other. He apparently had exceptional hearing, demonstratively more sensitive than that of the shrewdest hunting dog you can imagine. One had to whisper in order to avoid startling him. He pricked up his scrambled ears whenever he thought he heard something strange or unfamiliar, which usually turned out to be someone next-door gently stroking their beard or someone else’s beard, if they didn’t have a beard, which to him sounded like some lethal climate-related catastrophe were headed straight toward him and his company. Can you imagine? The next door neighbor would run some hot water in order to boil some potatoes, and he would think a freight train were bearing down upon the house, and would burst through the wall at any moment.

 

Marx talks about use-value and exchange-value. But what does value mean, in itself? Aside from the prefixes use- and exchange-, what does it mean for something to be valuable? I want to avoid substituting a synonym for a word; for example, I don’t want to say something that is valuable has worth. My definition should flesh the word out, instead of skipping over the blank space behind it, leaving it empty in the end. Perhaps I should ask what it means for a thing to be more or less valuable first, and from there, I might be able to ask what value, in itself, is. As a preliminary attempt at defining value, I would say that something is the more valuable the more it attracts human subjects to it. There is an attraction: something that is valuable either causes human subjects to come closer to it, or to endeavor to draw it nearer to them, in order to appreciate it in some way, whether that mean to consume it directly (through an orifice, say), or indirectly (to be entertained by it, for example, which means it speeds up the passage of time as it is perceived by them, or allows them to forget about time altogether, effectively abolishing it), to bask in its aura, to allow it to give them pleasure (which is the same as the last quality, only more intense), to allow it to make their life easier (i.e. to allow them to spend less energy) or to keep it constantly near them so that it becomes associated with them in the minds of others (possession of jewelry, for instance, or other luxury and non-luxury items). But does this always work? A lot of times people are attracted to what many people would describe as worthless things. By some sort of hoax, they are under the impression that something is valuable, when it seems to others, perhaps to many others, that this is not the case. But it seems that my definition of value does not get to the heart of the matter. I have only described the consequences of value, or what I observe to be the case in objects (or people) of value. What causes something to be valuable? There is something in the subject, rather than in the object, that makes the object valuable. The question should be posed thusly: “What is it about us that makes things valuable?” rather than, “What is about things that make them more or less valuable?” Once again, we find that what we are searching for is not to be found in the place we are searching. 

 

Why shouldn’t kids choose a new name for themselves when they get to such-and-such an age? Parents effectively brand their kids for life when they choose a name for them without even knowing what their personality will be like. A person’s name usually only seems to match up to their personality if they’re the kind of person who’ve molded themselves to fit their parents’ expectations.

 

« Non, ce n’est pas que je ne les aime pas, c’est que je ne m’amuse pas avec eux. » “No, it’s not that I don’t like them, it’s that I don’t have fun with them.” What am I really saying here? What does it say about what I look for in social situations? First of all, I should establish what it means to “not like” someone. Does it simply mean the opposite of “to like” someone? This does not seem to be the case, because in a lot of cases, “to like” someone means to want to be liked by that person. It is not simply an attraction that is aimed from a subject to an object, but rather a wish or a desire for the object to like the subject in question. Is this really it though? If this is it, then that means that in turn, what the subject is really wishing for is that the object wish for the subject to desire him or her. This is going nowhere where I want to go. I need to break out of the Kojèvian pseudo-dialectics. In French, it seems like a harsh, if not overly cruel justification for my rejection of a group of people. When I look at the sentence in English, it seems different. What makes it different? First of all, if I were to say this in English, the latter part of the sentence would be rather, “it’s just that I never have fun when I’m around them,” or something along those lines, which sounds less blunt. It is true that it’s not that I “don’t like” them. However, I don’t like them. I think that what is making this complicated is that for me, to “not like” someone is something much more than being indifferent, but carries alongside it a big suitcase full of antipathy. I’m not antipathetic towards these people. It is possible that the root of the unattractiveness of the idea of passing time with them could be that they don’t seem to like me, or they seem to be puzzled by me, or they don’t seem interested in the same things I’m interested in, or they don’t seem to be interested in getting to know me, or they only seem interested in sitting around telling each other witticisms instead of actually talking to each other about stuff.

 

Isn’t it strange how many women seem to be attracted to power, whereas I don’t think women in power attract men to the same extent, as far as their power is concerned? When I think of a woman in power, the power that’s associated with her doesn’t seem to add to any sexual attraction I might feel for her, which is not to say that it deducts from the attraction, but that it doesn’t add to it. I’m thinking of men like Bill Clinton, Dominique de Villepin, as well as other politicians, many of whom are not as good-looking or as rhetorically skilled as the aforementioned. I’ve talked to many girls who’ve talked about men such as these, and it’s obvious that their looks and rhetorical skills have a certain something added on top which make them the crème de la crème. When I think of, say, Ségolène Royale, or a Hillary Clinton, or any other powerful woman, if I find her attractive, it has nothing to do with the fact that she is a very powerful woman in society, and I don’t have the impression that it is different for other men. What is power, anyway? A woman’s attractiveness comes from her ability to say things that I don’t expect from her, from the way she looks at the world, and yes, from the way she dresses and the way her cloths interact with the way she acts in the world. Radiating eyes and a certain amount of authenticity are a plus. Political power over other human beings, however, adds absolutely nothing.

 

I think if someone is sufficiently sure of him or herself, and demonstrates that he or she has reason to be sure of him or herself, they can look like just about anyone. If someone is able to thus transcend their appearance, I think they get a lot more credit in the eyes of a lot of people than if they acted the same way, said the same things in the same tone and with the same gestures, just as lively and fun and all, but looked like a more conventionally attractive person.

 

There’s this guy who writes badly for a weekly journal, he was hired to write badly, in fact, for the weekly journal, they count on him to write badly, to produce bad writing for them to publish on a weekly basis, but the problem is that he ends up getting pretty good at writing by writing badly for them, once a week.

 

He was too much outside of himself, watching from some outside vantage point instead of playing the game directly, engaging with the world, becoming a crucial part of the stream of events. Reality demanded that he be on his toes. Instead, whenever a crucial situation presented itself, his blood pressure went through the roof, and he hopped outside of himself, in a way, looking with horror at his failure to act quickly and decisively, looking with horror at his hopping. However incredible, inexplicable even, the facts at hand may seem, Quinn was nonetheless one of the most notorious secret agents in the world of transnational espionage. First-class international secret agents are on unremitting watch for double, triple or even quadruple agents, after all. In order to be at the top of one’s game as a secret agent, one must talk and think quickly and decisively, and at the same time, plan several alternative sequences of one’s next moves in one’s head as one talks to the man to whom one is pretending to pretend to treacherously supply top-secret information from the top-secret organization that one is pretending to pretend to represent, as well as make precautions should something go awry, i.e. should guns be drawn or a trap door open up unsuspectingly.

 

He could see himself sending his book to his old professors. He could imagine them opening the book and recognizing his talent. He could see himself answering phone calls from journalists who wanted interviews, and receiving letters and emails from admirers who tell him they will be in town and could they get together for coffee or a drink. He could see himself walking down crowded streets and realizing his relationship with humanity had irreparably changed – he saw himself as no longer a stranger wherever he went. He saw himself in a hotel room with a beautiful woman who wanted him to use her body in whichever way he saw fit. He saw young people listening to his voice on the radio and looking wistfully out of their tiny windows. He saw himself on talk shows, condescending to answer the most hackneyed questions thrown at him from across the table by the boringly attractive host. He saw himself contacted by old acquaintances, who would never have dreamed of contacting him before, who now dropped his name to their friends and co-workers. He saw himself as finally being looked upon with respect by his parents. He saw himself as never being at a loss for someone to go out for a drink with. He sees himself turning on the radio to hear that the voices are talking about his latest book. The voices are talking about him on the radio, as he sits at that stop light in his car. He sees himself contacted by famous filmmakers and authors and actors and actresses and musicians and photographers and artists of all sorts, asking to meet him, telling him that they’d been ‘blown away’ by his latest work, and here is their contact information, should he ever find himself in their part of the world. I see myself reading interviews of other artists in journals and newspapers and finding that my name pops up when they are asked if there are any contemporary writers whom they read religiously. I see myself being contacted by professors who will be teaching a course on my work, and would I be interested in visiting for a few days, the university has agreed to pay, and hold a class discussion on a topic of my choice. You see yourself contacted by academics who would like to extensively cite your work. You see yourself as an object of fascination to the world because of your work. You see yourself as a well-known and recognized writer, winning literary prizes and giving lectures for obscene sums of money, and you have already failed before you sit down and begin to write.

 

“How are you getting there? Are you flying?” “Yeah, well..not exactly…my neighbor has one of those gigantic trampolines, so I’m just going to get a good running start…you look skeptical. You don’t think it’ll take me to London?”

 

Produce, produce, produce. Production. I’ve got to usher in words, put them together with words which had already been there, and then usher copies of them out, all aligned and syntactic. Usher out my troops, to take over the world through sheer replication.

 

I’m sick. Something inhabits my body. Something seeks to destroy it and therefore me. But my body will fight back. Just give it time. My body will eliminate the intruder. What happened to the writing? It was doing well. Something was growing. Something was going in the right direction- or in a direction, at least. Now, it’s as if it’s in the doldrums again. It goes nowhere. It drifts here and there with no goal, no hope of even having a goal. I’m sick in more than one sense. My body might not be capable of sustaining a struggle for long periods of time, a struggle where no sign of development or progress is signaled, where it is easy to toss hope overboard and turn back. The only way for me to possibly become a writer might be to accept that I probably will not become a writer, but at the same time, that there is a small chance that I might become a writer, if I continue to read and write. Read, write, read and write. Perhaps I need to make more of an effort to make my writing a direct or indirect engagement with what I read. Or, to make what I read a direct or indirect engagement with what I write. I think that might be what I am doing already when I read Deleuze, whose name is not included within Microsoft Word’s dictionary.

 

We are living in a crucial and ultimately perhaps less-than-crucial age. On the one hand, in the span of about 3,000 years, the aggregate of human minds has developed a way to undo billions of years of biological development. Pessimists and misanthropes whine on about the inevitable annihilation of life on earth. However, despite the massive power of our self-destructive capacities, we probably are not capable of destroying all life on earth – nuclear annihilation, even if it wiped out every cell of life on the seven continents, might not eliminate biological organisms which live in the abyss of the oceans. Since they are the germ from which we ultimately sprung, and since time exists in such massive quantities, fish will once again crawl up beaches, their extended swimming-tools once again transforming into extended crawling-tools, and life will happen over again, or repeat, but of course in a different way, since the environment will be much different than it was millions of years ago when evolutionary biology made its way onto land. In fact, this entire evolutionary process which has led to the state of the world today could be thought of as just a beat of life’s patterned rhythm, one beat in an unending continuous rhythm, whereas other planets much too far from our sense organs (in spite of the accessories we’ve built for them, viz. telescopes and microscopes) are emitting their own life rhythms, which differ from our own but might be in some bizarre but profound sense similar, for instance, we might be the equivalent of a beat of a drum, whereas another bigger planet whose life lasts much, much longer might be the blast of a saxophone, at the climax of a long improvisation, so that the entire universe is one massive rhythm of time and space, of which we are ourselves a tiny manifestation, a tiny beat. The question then becomes – a rhythm for whom? Is there something which is conscious of what is going on in this universe? Is something paying attention? Is something listening to the universe’s rhythm, but at a speed which would seem to us billions of times faster than the rate at which we perceive it, and at the same time, listening to it on a colossal scale, so the entity can hear everything happening across light years of space? Our life beat on earth might be sounding off just before that of another planet light years away, and both are picked up (and who knows, registered) in succession, in the time of what we would consider to be two seconds. One, two. We have the attention of the listener for only one beat, one instant, less than a second, and then we are forgotten, just as we forget an ordinary note of a Mozart sonata after it disappears and is replaced by the next. Moreover, just as a note of that sonata loses its sweetness when listened to by itself, but becomes a necessary and meaningful step of the song’s dance when placed between the two notes surrounding it, our beat means nothing by itself, but becomes listenable only when perceived among other beats of the universe’s rhythm. Moreover, our entire universe is only a source of entertainment for some sensitive entity, some listener, some perceiving-machine occupying too large a quantity of time and space for us to fathom. Think Horton, multiplied in size and longevity by one hundred trillion, then by another one hundred trillion, and then by one last one hundred trillion, and minus Horton’s pathos. There is where real truth about our significance begins.

 

He hated the phrase, of course. Nothing was true, of course. 

 

Notes sur Artaud

 

Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière

 

Ce texte commence avec le regret de Rivière de ne pas pouvoir publier les poèmes qu’Artaud lui a envoyé dans La Nouvelle Revue Française. Rivière est fasciné par l’homme qui a écrit les poèmes cependant, et lui invite à passer par son bureau : il voudrait faire sa connaissance. Artaud admet dans sa première lettre qui apparaît dans le texte (qui a été écrite apparemment après un ou plusieurs rencontres entre les deux hommes) qu’il souffre d’une effroyable maladie d’esprit. Le problème, c’est sa pensée qui l’abandonne. Il est difficile pour lui de fixer sa pensée dans une forme harmonieuse. Il s’agit d’une lutte de quelque sorte entre l’inexistence et l’existence : même si sa pensée, en sortant du néant, produit des vers mal venus, il préfère que sa pensée dans sa forme présente existe, au lieu de disparaître dans le gouffre de l’oubli. Il demande à Rivière : « Pensez-vous qu’on puisse reconnaître moins d’authenticité littéraire et de pouvoir d’action à un poème défectueux mais semé de beautés fortes qu’à un poème parfait mais sans grand retentissement intérieur ? » Sa pensée est donc défectueuse mais authentique : les poèmes, qui sont les manifestations de sa pensée, contiennent d’une certaine façon les vrais tourments de son esprit, qu’il vit dans sa vie réelle. Dans la prochaine lettre d’Artaud, il retourne à sa confession  de sa lettre précédente : « Cette confession, voulez-vous me permettre de la compléter aujourd’hui, de la reprendre, d’aller jusqu’au bout de moi-même. Je ne cherche pas à me justifier à vos yeux, il m’importe peu d’avoir l’air d’exister en face de qui que ce soit. J’ai pour me guérir du jugement des autres toute la distance qui me sépare de moi. » Ces phrases ont un air fort nietzschéen. Première phrase : la force active, qui cherche l’air pur et sain de la santé au lieu de l’air puant et sal du ressentiment réactif, va jusqu’au bout de ce qu’elle peut, à n’importe quel prix. Deuxième phrase : l’homme actif n’a pas besoin de justification des autres (ni de n’importe quelle justification) pour ce qu’il fait. Nietzsche aurait probablement considéré la justification comme un produit du pouvoir du christianisme sur l’esprit moderne : selon les prêtres, il faut que l’homme se justifie en se comparant à un idéal qui existe hors de son existence terrestre. L’esprit noble vit de manière qui suppose que la vie se justifie en elle-même. Chercher la justification dans un au-delà est donc nihiliste, puisqu’une telle démarche nie la valeur de cette vie-ci en elle-même.  Troisième phrase : il reconnaît une distance qui le sépare de lui-même. Zarathoustra dit qu’un ami est toujours un tiers qui existent entre le je et le moi. La distance qui existe dans l’esprit de celui qui se transforme, qui se vainc, qui se surmonte, qui se détruit pour transformer en quelque chose de nouvelle. Toute création de soi se fond sur les ruines d’un moi passé. Dans ce cas, cette distance est comme un bouclier qui protège celui qui se trouve jugé par autrui. S’il y a donc un détachement entre soi et soi-même, on ne peut pas être efficacement attaqué par autrui, parce que ce sera toujours l’autre soi qui sera ciblé par ses jugements (c’est-à-dire, ceux d’autrui). Autre chose notable dans cette correspondance : Artaud reconnaît quelque chose en lui-même qui détruit sa pensée. Il y a donc un ennemi qui existe dans son esprit, qui le hante. Son ennemi est plutôt lui-même, et non pas autrui. L’artiste nietzschéen qui essaie de devenir quelque chose d’autre, qui essaie de se surmonte, et trouve des embarras, ne blâme pas d’autres gens pour ses incapacités. Il reconnait la source de ses difficultés dans lui-même. Rivière lui écrit, en demandant si ça lui intéressait de publier leur correspondance, mais en substituant des noms fictionnels pour leurs noms. Artaud lui répond que oui, il aimerait bien publier leurs lettres, mais il lui demande le suivant. « Pourquoi mentir, pourquoi chercher à mettre sur le plan littéraire une chose qui est le cri même de la vie, pourquoi donner des apparences de fiction à ce qui est fait de la substance indéracinable de l’âme, qui est comme la plainte de la réalité ? Oui, votre idée me plaît, elle me réjouit, elle me comble, mais à condition de donner à celui qui nous lira l’impression qu’il n’assiste pas à un travail fabriqué. Nous avons le droit de mentir, mais pas sur l’essence de la chose. Je ne tiens pas à signer les lettres de mon nom. Mais il faut absolument que le lecteur pense qu’il a entre les mains les éléments d’un roman vécu. Il faudrait publier mes lettres de la première à la dernière et remonter pour cela jusqu’au mois de juin 1923. Il faut que le lecteur ait en main tous les éléments du débat. » Ceci traite de la relation qu’a ou que n’a pas la littérature avec la vie. La littérature en elle-même n’importe pas à Artaud. La littérature, quand elle est séparée des tourments de la réalité, quand elle n’a pas comme but d’entrer et jouer un rôle dans la réalité comme événement, ne lui intéresse pas. Il faut faire attention ici, parce qu’il y a une différence entre la mimésis et la participation dans la réalité de la littérature d’Artaud. Le rôle de l’art n’est pas de reproduire la réalité, d’être ainsi de la non-fiction. Il faut plutôt que la littérature se constitue de la vie ; il faut qu’elle soit elle-même la vie.