Bianco Luno: Notebook VIII

Bianco Luno

Notebook VIII
4/14/92 – 9/8/93

Part 2

‘The-people-we-support’: most current expression for the people whose feelings we are not supposed to be hurting while we help or do what we do to them.

Arlene, one of the-people-we-support, on her way to the floor—her eyes turned up to look at her eyebrows or the lightning in her brain, a possible side effect of haldol or inderol or tegretol or dilantin or cogentin or all of them together—stretches out the last syllable of ‘yellow’, pronounced YEH-YO, into a long wail.
Doubled over, her head screwed between the kitchen garbage pail and the corner, the noises she makes become less urgent and she falls silent after so many seconds. She moves slowly, her left arm extended, palm out, as though to say ‘stop’.
She is incontinent...
The light switch cannot be on enough, the door shut enough for her compulsion; the people in the kitchen are not where they should be: she says "Move!" and shoves.
All six dining room chairs must be lined in front of the piano.
The cupboard emptied of cups and stashed at one end of the counter.
Specks in the sink fixate her.
Her face red with acne, blotched, and broken skin at the corners of her mouth.
She wants a hug from me: next she throws herself, with a strength much greater than any believable from her tiny frame, at the first new person entering the room.
She punches them in the face and is restrained by two staff, until a requested prn arrives, approved by the nurse over the phone.
Three small white tablets of ativan or chloral hydrate, enough to put most people twice her size out, merely contain her sufficiently to allow us to let go of her.
She politely asks for "cah-pee-pee" (coffee, please) and sniggers.
Like this, almost everyday lately, for Arlene.
"We don’t really know what’s wrong with her... [and proceed to suggest] mental retardation and some form of psychosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, epilepsy... If we knew precisely we wouldn’t know what to do about it."
We ‘support’ her by secreting the severity of her behavior behind drugs and patience, and keeping her out of the state hospital where she might disappear, lost to even the illusion of participation in the world.
So far, we’ve managed to keep her in the community, surrounded by people who can be hurt by her and who likely deserve it.
At some point, when she becomes less recognizable as human and we become more calloused or less religious, when she goes one day too far and something serious happens, we will come to the decision.

If we knew what was wrong with her, we could insult her as well as mistreat her.

How dank, musty and pointedly male the perspective is here.
My unacknowledged responsibility for others and contempt for consensus—whom am I faulting as an impediment to my individuation?
Don’t I sometimes feel the caricature of boyish striving to trash the ‘ties-that-bind-us’?
I value (so predictably) the individual disproportionately?
How long can I go on degrading the connection that is essentially all that we are and can become?
It is my contention that the conflict between individuals and—not other individuals but—the relations they enter into is undeveloped.
The fall into one another’s arms must be so hard it almost kills (and in some cases does)—or else, it is no tragedy at all and the truth was never more than an inscrutable whisper in a prenatal dream.

My ex-wife was concerned with the relationship between us—and laudably took action.

As for me, I wanted to individualize myself against that unforgiving rock wall.

The radio reports a street kid’s comment from Rio de Janeiro, a city cleared of hordes of street children just before an Earth Summit: "I am an addict of everything."

The source of icy resentment at a woman’s stoop (for it is a stoop) to maternalism: she pretends to think she can actually make things better.
Contrast the corresponding paternalism:
He really thinks he knows better.

On the one horn of the dilemma, self-deception; on the other, despair.
Squarely impaled.
But you, good-natured (we will concede), think we can drive right down the middle?

The curious thing about violence against women is that violence against men, so commonplace as to seem appropriate, counts for very little.
Each sex cultivates its own brand.

The person you would meet were you to meet me in person would not be that person but a person more like yourself.
That person, the two of you could say, is more real than either of us exactly because he does not have to live among us...
So we can dismiss him and his antics from the technological distance afforded us in the concept of ‘we’.

The most stable form government takes is oligarchy, rule by a circumscribed set.
Monarchy, tyranny, benevolent dictatorship at one end, true democracy at the other (each appearing as violent reactions to conditions) have short shelf-lives.
Their tremendous romance, however, lends them a greater reality than we have room to accommodate most of the time.
The oligarchy, to which little romance attaches, will, of course, ape one or the other as the age accords each in turn a place of honor.
For Plato, the person of the philosopher-autocrat, the construction of his literate class, was the ideal, the politically correct way of masking power.
In these times, democracies imagine themselves into existence with the same ease.

"The capacity to understand what someone else is experiencing"⁵ (Gilligan) which signals moral maturity in a woman breaks down at exactly the place one might wish it wouldn’t: when the other’s personal integrity is threatened by the waxing of relationship, forming a terrific synapse across which sparks fly but very little light.

An intense light emanates from the eyes when swollen with bottomless conviction. Everything visible is very clear and sharp, and there are no shadows, so what may lie in them we cannot see, try as we might.

But every conviction sleeps in one shadow or another.

Report from the fighting in Bosnia or some reverie based on such a report.
Not far from the ancient heart of Western "civilization and culture", a woman was found impaled on a ten foot iron spike.
The spike entered through her vagina and exited through her mouth.
Further up on the spike, her small child...

(If you would bear the thought of having your child ponder iconography such as this before each meal, as a form of grace—we would not want for incidents—I might excuse you for having had this child.)

In the sculpture of war, flesh is the medium, conviction the tool.
It is, like it or not, the most important, the most affecting human art...
The handiwork is telling.
By contrast, this bombing of installations and infrastructure (and only incidentally of civilian shelters) from a technological distance is kitsch.

The infant, further up on the spike, was genius.

I don’t think the ‘privileged few’ can imagine who they are.

Not even the images of post-World War I German Expressionism depicted in The Trench of Otto Dix measure up:
"...filled up with hideously mutilated bodies and human fragments. From open skulls brains gush like thick red groats; torn-up limbs, intestines, shreds of uniform,... Half-decayed remains of the fallen, which were probably buried in the walls of the trench out of necessity, and were exposed by the exploding shells, mix with the fresh, blood covered corpses. One soldier has been hurled out of the trench and lies above it, impaled on stakes."
(Walter Schmits)⁶

But these were men—and the word ‘victim’ applies, in the darkness of their pride, only with difficulty to them.
The report of the impaled mother and child may be apocryphal; I doubt photographs exist or whether the media (which, for my taste, is still far too squeamish in its presentation of the objects of popular outrage) would dare display them if they did.
Yet, even untrue, the image occurred to someone.
Art, like insult, need only purport to be true to deliver a reality of its own.
The mother and child on a spit easily supercedes the crucified son as our religious symbol.

You, I’m sure, refuse responsibility.

Full of some ancient philosophical hatred.

Throw them a morsel: by revealing a vulnerability, while you may disgust a few, alienate some, most will be gratified, knowing now in which pocket to place you.
Accessibility is the key to betrayal.
And for yourself, it provides a chance to destroy a new persona.

Added to the already impossible burden of justifying their rights to existence and participation, there is the hardly escapable absence of dignity in the literature of the oppressed...
It is the last prize before they become fully invested and recognized as oppressors in their own right.

Each day, every hour, from Bosnia-Herzegovina, East Timor, Somalia, El Salvador... incidents more pertinent to my theme than I can make up or envision.
Why pick this one?

Not a pacifist, I can’t say there isn’t anything you might do that would provoke me to kill you.
But war, like love, is not something I would want the state to make on my behalf.

It’s a rare dream that compares in impact to my waking visions.

Despite a valiant attempt at fairness in her treatment of female moral development, Carol Gilligan can’t seem to help performing a revaluation in favor of the predisposition toward continuity, prioritizing the relationship, the network or web of connection over separation, autonomy, and the isolating tendency of marking out obstacle strewn paths of individuation traditionally dear to one sex.
Though I can appreciate her view as corrective, I interpret differently one critical image she educes.
She quotes Jake, an eleven year old boy, who considers that one should have the right to destroy oneself with "a hand grenade" but not with "an atom bomb"⁷ (as then, presumably, the rights of others would be involved).
The image of violence is blindingly bright to Gilligan.
Amy, the eleven year old girl, (not in so many words but to the same effect) stresses the importance of communication and the responsibility we have for one another, and that the right thing to do is what preserves the relationship, not simply sustaining the negative obligation to refrain from trampling the rights of others...
My partisan reflex is to wonder which of these two small voices I find more immediately offensive:
Her responsible coziness or his brutal rambunctiousness?
In the boy’s defense, Amy is utterly humorless.
Might not the boy’s explosive humor be more indicative of a deep vulnerability to the idea of autonomy and a greater, more vivid, concern for its uglier consequences than her premature sincerity is of an understanding of the human connections at stake?
"...but not in the instance of any given bratty boy."
And in the instance of this solemn girl?

I dreamed you had left me but without leaving me.
You had found this sharp, sweet, kind, slightly elegant young man who filled your eyes with light.
You introduced him proudly, fondly to me.
He was gracious and disarming.
You said we were still together but that ‘we’ now included him.
He embodied that combination of sensuousness and expressiveness that would never come from me.
"But I’m not going, I’ll always be here," you said. "I want him to be with us too."
Then a too familiar tightening in my chest, the air thick with doom, a pre-death panic choked me.
I wanted to go on living but couldn’t see how.
The desire was stalked by a horrible demand for justification.
"You need help, counseling," everyone said to me.
The boyish man offered to help, to take me somewhere.
You were compassionate but from an abominable distance, as though I were drowning in the Indian Ocean and you were thinking of me.
All the phrases to describe how I felt were, of course, clichés—used once and then placed out of my reach—so I couldn’t say them.
And I couldn’t breathe.
My philosophy was killing me, and to abandon it was a surer death...
Wake, write this down quickly.
My nightmares are rare but precise.

The best ‘correct’-thinking people—in the philosophical literature on our moral relations with animals—have already made a decision in the animals’ favor before they proceed to suffer justification founded on whatever their theoretical predilection.
The idealists speak of a fundamental reverence for life, the utilitarians of the greatest contentment of all those eligible in virtue of some capacity or trait, the natural language philosophers find the morally acceptable orientation embedded in existing mores and sentiments...
If I didn’t already think they were right I might not be convinced.
But what sets us on the agreed most just path to begin with?

How quaint the contrasts I preserve between women and men, people and animals.
Won’t these come to an end, coalesce, resulting in simply one category of sentient flesh?—and eventually, just matter, substance as we expand our rights-conferring consciousness to engulf everything?
You, at some distant point in the future, when you come to judge me antique in my discriminations, will you understand that I am playing my music on period instruments, the best I can strain to acquire?

Truth, not as a correct representation of the world, but as an act of terror. A terrorist theory of truth.

What if I were to admit that—the tone of what I write here aside—I am really not much unhappier than you?
Would you believe it?
I can’t resist dreaming about what might happen or I might do tomorrow.
I make delicious plans that make my hands tremble.
In person, they seem to think I’m either funny or quietly serious.
Little of this bleeds through.
My attachment to my cat is painfully close; I revel in his every move or sleeping pose.
While I don’t seek them out, even shun them, writers with some appreciation for this sort of animal garner my attention, I am embarrassed to say.
Céline and Ernst Juenger, two, for instance.
I fear what is going to happen when he dies.
I sprained my ankle last week, and have taken to drinking a cup of coffee at a café most mornings this week.
[Since writing this, I’ve given up coffee for tea.]
I was asked yesterday if I really had no hope.
I said no, but made some vague remark about some force stronger than hope that continues to sustain me.
The same fuzzy lack of integrity pervades my life.
I insist on implicating others.

The most hateful thing about me is how transparent I am.

Pose after pose.
Why ever settle for sincerity as long as we can keep this up?

Céline traipsing through war-torn Europe with his cat, Bébert: the image also recalls an incident from Ernst Juenger’s Storm of Steel⁸, his World War I diary:
In the ruins of the original no man’s land between enemy trenches, ravaged to the Gothic intensity of Caspar David Friedrich, had he painted a half century later, a white three-legged cat—the one leg shot off—
took cover by day.
But by night, an inspiration to all, he grew fat visiting friends on both sides who grew thinner...
Their Nazi sympathies—these writers—clinch nothing for me so much as their appreciation for the enigmatic mix of pride and vulnerability in this animal.
It will not suffer the ministrations of your hope.

Who wouldn’t sympathize with the Nazis?
As a dark-skinned, non-Aryan, with a distaste for authority, no less, I’m sure, had I been available to them, I too would have been fuel for their ovens and contributed to the peculiarly greasy soot that settled over the Polish countryside.
But I am available to you and my time may yet come.

Please don’t unfurl your kindness toward me; if it does you a favor, it does nothing for me.

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