« part 1
Bianco Luno
Notebook VII
9/15/90 – 4/13/92
Part 2
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"What’s brittle doesn’t bend." When he stops being a generic boy and catapults himself from the cloying intimacy of his mother, he, facing only forward, cannot—on pain of dissolution—look back. His isolation, for better or worse, from woman, all women, hardens into crystal, so bitterly hard and brittle, it forms his most deniable tragedy and inspires disbelief in every woman. I read in the paper where a large icicle fell from a lofty eave and impaled and killed a woman. ~ Picture Otto Weininger13 with a twinkle in his eye.I can aspire to this kind of unsettlingness. ~ The fundamental gender of things explains why English is better suited to abstractions than, say, Continental languages."Darkness" and "Light"—of the two, the first is male. Most feminists implicitly agree. ~ Not Hitler, but the outperforming Stalin of the spirit.~ Studies show: exactly half of all human endeavor is evil.For men, the proportion is usually greater. The behavior of women manages to dilute the concentration, a delicate titration, without actually diminishing contamination. All the time, it remains exactly half... ~ "The truth is foreign to me because I am flesh.In death I shall attain it." My ex-wife dressed in red. I return to the same idea. A cold winter morning sun. You frighten me with your mood changes. "—would it not be scandalous to leave this corpse behind, the body still quivering with fear and giving off pestilential odours, reeking of the sudden decomposition set off by the fear we hold within ourselves our whole lives long?" —Marie-Clare Blais14 The modal auxiliary ‘shall’ prescribes not a future performance but a present, probably already past, hope. If I should be doing anything in particular after death, it will be contemplating this. In the meantime, I have fear to occupy me. And I shall call the cold sun, the color red, you, all beauty to its altar. ~ The logical form of male thinking:Such and such and this and this. So, I will do... Practical illation. You will never cease reminding me that it is possible to escape it. Always, we are escaping: this bothers me. Your solution no less than my problem. ~ I would rather murder than father a child.And as for the other reason for sexual contact: it has become a nightmare. ~ For some time the keeper of these words has been a fiction.But the reader he envisions is certainly more so. What is most real, what is the most cowardly fact of all, is the writing itself. It is an antiphrastic account of my moral world and its shameless seams. ~ William James said there was no problem of good.15A crow—beyond a fast walk, an airborne walk—skips along the coping of a brick parapet, lunging into the face of January’s breath. There is no corresponding problem of good because we expect compatibility of some sort with the world. A mother’s affection is not supposed to be an object of wonder (in the sense of suspicion). I think it is. The first sight of her child can turn a murderess into a saint. The ‘good’ also requires explanation. On a sunny winter morning this crow skips like a child. ~ I run from pain but the running brings with it pleasure.~ At 3:02 in the morning at the airport my memory is sharp, visionary....saying to Kathy from a balcony overlooking the Ave that I was alright, I was going to live. (Four years ago.) I had thrown up two days worth of undigested food, stored in my distended esophagus. Skate-boarders roared by. I sipped my canned apple juice. Kathy is a dear character in my life, haplessly dear, like my cat. You are not that, not exactly, not yet. Maybe you are my conscience, something always to be at war with. I can mention her name, I can only refer to you as "you" with the same uneasiness with which I address it. You needn’t feel slighted, I would not leave you for Kathy. I don’t know if there is a creature I would leave you for. The level of pain and its attending grace, I’ve come to expect and demand, wouldn’t permit it. But you won’t think I love you in the way you want to be. No one ever believes that. ~ Morally, I don’t suffer; aesthetically, I have a right to claim a supreme competence and, as you see, I do.~ 17 January 1991/23 February 1991.16War—I am almost left opinionless—is appalling. It is an embarrassment to terrorists everywhere. ~ Without ever wishing to understand myself too completely...the effort.~ The "wise choice" in love: better not to love at all.~ We need more idealists!Else, where shall we recruit for tomorrow’s cynics and find relief from the scheme set down in Aristotle? ~ How do we fit my small attitude into an ego this size?I am not remembered to the community; where would they find room for me? The quantity of becoming it would take, the dissolution of my precious being... I was driven forth from the land, so to speak, fifteen years ago, when I began in earnest these letters-turned-journals. To document my exile for the odd person in some future generation. The mystery of participation, of what is called "good" (no matter James’ comment). No matter that I’ve succeeded in the person of my person in being judged kind, considerate, steadfast.... Deliver me from this "good" that permeates all things. What crime could do this? ~ Arguing with Mill about the ineradicable penchant we seem to have for the ideal, especially in the face of utility, James conjures a world where the mass enjoys an undisturbed bliss paid for by the uninterrupted torture of one solitary individual.17How repugnant, he permits himself to say. But now picture this: a moral state of affairs where just a sampling enjoys a modicum of bliss, while the rest.... This is not so repugnant I gather from looking about. This is not a Marxist sarcasm, but a sound literal evaluation, pressured by the only measure of repugnance available, free of lip-servitude. Is lamentation insincere then? It may serve some biological function, I guess: the way irony, on occasion, does. (It keeps me, for instance, from acts of physical violence.) Just now, I am not moved to claim more for it. ~ Maybe a million people died yesterday on the other side of the earth on islands in great typhoons and in the horn of Africa of not enough pity.Acts of God? Certainly, He was complicit. (And if He doesn’t exist, I accuse Him of that.) But the important thing is the difference that makes to you? ~ Living with her—and perhaps with anyone—would have a certain element of hell about it.~ Freeze-dried passion, the icy intimacy of nightmare.A clinical voice, but with the syntax, emboldening familiarity, found in diaries. An accomplishment, an act with tortuous though forgiven consequences under a white moon. I will be forgiven in time, more or less. What difference does that make to you? By what grace will you dismiss me? My ugliness, the terror that attracts (not pursues) me I cannot give names to as you will assuredly give me. You will conflate the logician and poet in me to save yourself, to spare yourself yourself. I am, over and over again, a sharp instrument in your heart. ~ Now everything has become ingrown that early on was admitted—and the rest apparently sealed off—to this self-infected hypochondriac.He was a cheerful boy once, as can still be observed between fatigues and headaches and digestive upsets. But now, caught up with stealing the pleasure others may take in accusing and cataloging him, he even recoils instinctively with them from his own image. His ‘I’, already become ‘you’, is straining toward ‘he’. He (while we may still speak of him as such) feels he might be able to breathe more easily were he to speak in the fourth person, possibly a place in the grammar of a language spoken only by the all-the-way dead. ~ To repeat: What is the difference that makes to you?~ It is no accident that I dress like Mr. Rogers;18 could I ape his soul?~ Not the co-existence of evil and good that is so appalling as that there is no breach between them, all the while a very forward justice masquerades as the bandage for this hypochondriac’s wound.~ When you left, saying we had been "off" all day and unable to take my silence about all that wasn’t mundane, that class of things you so despise and which functions for me, when anything does, to stave off a hopeless, utterly lightless, pall...Unweaned, I cannot seem to handle the smallest abandonment. On my bed, holding my cat expectantly—my body conjuring the familiar state just before a chest-fit or mock heart-attack, as it hasn’t in so long; and I expect always it will settle, on just such a day, my arrears. The pain I owe this god. ~ I was accused yesterday of being sincere and resigned.~ Unbelievers that we are, obliged to make divine the seams between our great ideas, my relationship to the mundane is, thus, one of terror.Talk it up, sidle up to it, as Pascal used to say of faith,19 maybe he’ll give you an "A" for effort? So if I discuss apartments for rent, the different textures of the cats on our walk, how the neighborhood has changed... I know everything! I see can everything! but only when I can keep my eyes from welling up, you see. They do this too easily, it is unbecoming of a terrorist. ~ An object of sentiment; a young girl with a stuffed animal, a doll or cat; women with babies or almost any child:The surface vulnerability is irresistible. How are we to place blame for suppressing the obvious? That the teddy-bear is stuffed with rags, cotton or foam; the doll, air-filled plastic; the likelihood that the warm, vibrating ball of fur is only tolerating the proffered intimacy; or the boy’s indifference to or even resentment of motherly attention. Ask too pertinently how it feels to be the object of another’s affection, we are met with a scowl or a pout. Lest we spoil the pleasurable effusion. Dare we suggest that a boy might be permanently "scarred" by a mother’s love? (The girl is better equipped by nature and convention to handle this kind of abuse.) Could it occur to her that she might use me as a man might a centerfold? Why am I forced to break her heart? How many victims of instinct can you fit on the head of a diaper pin? ~ It must be that [sex] differences, which make every act of love or pretense to intimacy onanistic, are wholly immaterial to the species larger purpose.How psychically self-contained each side is? At this, the picture of health, they look who can’t be pained to notice. What am I supposed to do with this information? If the only non-illusory relation that can obtain between a woman and a man is an ethical one, we are faced with a "terrible crushing of spirit and stifling of soul" that rightfully debases the ethical. The consequences are ugly, ever evident and cynically shaped. ~ The accusation that I am sincere and resigned irks me.I sit and write where I can see faces but be alone. I seek another face to find my bearings in my private sea. The escape in social and political involvement is, to my eyes, so much more sincere but also the province of imbeciles. There is no communal cause I can identify with. No injustice greater than my isolation. Preoccupied, the faces are indescribable. I would like to apologize to each. I am constantly saying I am sorry. Against them I cut the most pathetic figure. No one speaks to me without at the same time speaking to themselves. My one ever act in earnest is my apology. The act of writing and keeping for myself a record of my isolation, however, is continued aggression. One of us, the lot of you or me, is going to have to die to fix this. And it can’t be charity on my part that I fear more for you than myself. ~ Boy dreams.The victim of a crime is never sincere. I can suffer the language of sincerity (and it fills me with awe) but I don’t know if I can those who speak it. Here’s how I figure it: If I can take on these absurdities sincerely—make them correspond with every knowable intimation of truth in me (and it seems I am convinced there is sufficient evidence for this)—then the very concept, the idea!, of sincerity must be a chimera, a hoax, a virus even, injected by the mother of lies into the marrow... But the evidence is spare, on second thought: I found a single serving box of Cornflakes unopened in a neighbor’s trash can, while exploring the alley behind my parents shack in San Antonio. The unpaved dirt and gravel was cool and massaged my bare feet. Behind the fence a neighbor’s permanently parked Studebaker sat covered with fallen pecans, in their rotting still green skins. Sitting on a cinder block in the shade, I opened the box. An angel appeared to me and began to speak about loneliness and imagination and about how too much of the latter would push me against the former and that this was fine so long as I never lost sight of her. She said I would come to loathe the feel of my body from the inside to the point that I would be tempted to relinquish it to the other presences enveloping it, whose bodies connected more tightly both to their occupants and to others in a way I would only ever be able to witness. She offered me a green pecan, said I could use it if I wanted to, to throw at her if I started to feel she was lying to me. I was not supposed to feel now or ever again the breath of an untruth without suffocating. Increasingly as I got older this would become a burden and eventually pieces would fall together and I would come to see through the mother of lies, the imagination, all that still escaped me then, but I would persist, as long as I lived, thinking I was connected to other presences. She said, "You will go on lying to yourself, abusing others furtively, dishonorably, in the dark, in your room, at night, while they sleep, or even while they are up and about but too sluggish to notice. They will see in you a living image of something inordinately pertinent to them. The kindness they give off will be like the odor of wisteria to you, sickening you slightly, making you an embarrassment to them. I think you will probably never get over that smell, but your lies will inevitably overcome you and you will suffer in such a spectacularly selfish way that it will not be for anyone to pity you except, as will often happen, through misunderstanding. (And not even I can prevent that goodness owing to stark idiocy.) You will, in these straits, have to learn to pity yourself and perhaps you can do this gracefully and maybe it will garner some admiration but it will not help your case at all in your own eyes which shall be capable of penetrating to unknown strata of ancient vanity. You are doomed to mill about the unmentionable, unknowing peace except as evasion or numbness. I don’t fully expect this to sink in now. Finish opening your box of Cornflakes." A very brown little boy, in my T-shirt and shorts, an ant crawling over my toe, I set the green pecan in the opening of an ant-hill. I edged my cinder block closer to the vine-grown fence, adjusting to the changing pattern of the shade. Honeysuckle blossoms, vermilion and syrupy, poked through in a hundred places. I put one in my mouth. Maybe I would offer her one? She glared at me a little impatiently but not unkindly. "You sweet boy," she remarked, "when you were born I was busy. Your mother suffered a great deal, she nearly died, did you know?... You will master the language but all without learning to speak...(Am I being too prophetic?)...nor listen in the way that prepares the soil of the heart for belief? I imagine the truth will ring for you but without content; your eyes, like those of a bat, redundant and for that reason unemployed. All your senses shall be dulled. What succeeds in breaking through to you will have to be the result of your bat-like faculty...." I know now where the image of her comes from. My parents had a calendar with religious pictures, saint’s days, etc....and on one there was a print of a painting I was to see again on the cover of the German magazine Sterne 20 years later. The angel hovered over two children crossing a rickety footbridge spanning a raging cataract in the night. ~ Because I can write in this language and because you can read it too...Where does my bitterness come from? (Only a rhetorical question: the mistake you so often make is to try to answer.) ~ I don’t remember what it was like before.~ A certain portion of doting comprises the critical part of love.You must stay still long enough for me to memorialize an image and participate in this excess. ~ One day I shall get past these elementary pronouncements on women and men, progress to a wisdom or attitude more worthy of an adult..."No, first, become an adult." When will this happen? I have been waiting for a sign from Heaven. The humanscape about me is comprised of only the worst sort of children. ~ Can a person in pain have an unconscious?~ Killed a pregnant cockroach, flushed it down the toilet, egg case protruding from under its carapace.Since last summer I’ve let them have the run of my apartment. Now, I’m starting to kill them. Their numbers exceed my compassion. God comes to feel this way about us. ~ Arrogance in its most virile form preempts criticism from others by outdoing them in the task of diminishing you.Why have I made a virtue of holding together the pieces? The godless, pointless state or process can care less. ~ "Revolutions, wars, cataclysms—what does this foam mean when compared to the fundamental horror of existence?"20~ Take a group of people together with a cause, no matter how noble...I understand now (this minute) how Christ could forgive his tormentors. The opportunities for evil in the group are not so much augmented as transmuted—all of it together becoming imminently pardonable. We say he died for our sins, playing on the ambiguity of the collective; not yours or mine, because each one of us, alone, would tax his mercy infinitely more. He did the easy thing. The group always seeks in what it does to approximate the adiaphorous state of nature or—more revealingly—embody an "act of God". ~ The terribly artistic thing about Aristotle’s moral theory is how fitting, entrenching and right it is...As I watch the idiot,21 inhabiting the White House, defend himself against the morons trying to unseat him. What do I contribute? It isn’t enough that I complain? "The point is we have to live together." ...and Aristotle announced a civil way to go about this. But I can only see it as drama. Without dissimulation from whence would the interest devolve. Every lie requires someone to announce it to support action, change and then a new lie. This makes the cyclical progression understandable, but in so doing confirms its removal from the sphere of the ethical, which is hopelessly linear. Art is essentially free of the fear of hope. There is too little fear in Aristotle. ~ A logic student asks me, "What does logic have to do with anything?"Nothing, but by its very inutility it sometimes can give one the sensation of beauty. Like the coins in the pan handler’s dirty palm, it can be imagined as vital and perfectly optional. ~ Obviously, I am taken with the idea of power.I would like to say power over myself in mitigation of the untoward appearance of such preoccupation, but there is no broaching the notion without implicating other people. There is just one form power can take and it involves a collective. (Another reason why ‘egotist’, used as an epithet, sounds a complaint about the weather.) Power over myself would be this: the strength to undo in me what you have done there. But I am no Alexander:22 emasculated, you and your kind got to me so early the only balls I have I contrived from the scrap of your messy work.... No taste at all for lording it over you in the honest man’s way, I am committed to living on what falls from your table—even the gift of your shadow my Diogenean syndrome will not let me enjoy. Just give me my sunny rock. We both know this is hardly an abdication of power: Alexander flinched, just as you do now. ~ The softness, vulnerability, generosity, optimism, etc.or their appearances I don’t permit myself here is reserved for daily life. What I am left with when I come to write is this utter pall. Which will scarcely be read anyway. Or, if read, not comprehended...or if that, only by those who cannot acknowledge it. ~ Am I afraid to drop the slightest moisture of consolation to those dying of thirst beneath the grate?Show myself affected, a regular sort with a normal portion of feeling? I begin now to stop answering questions like these. ~ Vast episodes of human shame and injustice the well-meaning will not allow us to forget...(thinking about Jerzy Kozinsky).What is not being allowed to forget supposed to do for us? What do we do with the information? Keeping the memories fresh does serve these functions for sure: First, no one will be able to say we haven’t done this before when we do it again; and, second, it provides a base, a threshold for surpassing ourselves in the future. Next time we’ll kill more non-Jews as well,23 or we’ll slaughter a hundred thousand in less time for less cause, e.g., instead of cheap speed, next time it really will be broccoli we go to war for24—or should it be a good banana picked by a free-enterprising hand? (Again, I have no right to use the pronoun ‘we’; it in no way corresponds to any feeling in me that wouldn’t seek to confront you.) ~ The most wretched dog, mangy and ribbed, living on the street will wag its tail.25~
Copyright © 1998 Bianco Luno and Victor Muñoz |
Part 2
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