Bianco Luno: Notebook VIII

Bianco Luno

Notebook VIII
4/14/92 – 9/8/93

Part 4

I know that what I entertain here shall be construed to the least effect.
It shall stand as evidence of a disabled character or illness on my part.
And the children of your flesh and dreams, your ever-fearing love will shield from this.
"What a waste!"
Not that what I say isn’t eminently forgiveable—for I know I have already been forgiven: you think too highly of yourself not to.
Just that the waste is unnerving.

My ex-wife: it must have been for her like it was for Bardamu (Céline) when he left Molly.
She was an uncommon female fan of the writer.
I have no doubt that in her own way...

Have I found "what scares those bastards so" in the darkness at the end of the night?

What is not absolutely horrible is desperately sad: the forms of happiness sketched against this field.

The children of your flesh and dreams stand between us.
Beguiled into selflessness, you are experience without a center, to whom I must appear as quite the egotist, a eunuch in the choir, tailored for the surreal descant from the back of the hall.

I hear a poet say, "Poetry puts us back to how it was with the first people, when everything was God..."
Through the fear and the knowledge that followed there must have been tremendous evil perceived, and demons everywhere, and this, as well, might have caused their words to twist and bend backwards.
A newer face of arrogance, attempting to recover primordial stupidity, emerges as the apposite form for the honesty remaining.

The price of clarity.
The number of premises of my life, as though it were a good argument, are few and too elegant to be undangerous.
If I lost my cat or O. I would come to a conclusion.

I don’t know that violence ever actually happens.

"Is there anything that makes you happy or at least content?"
Humming seems to have this effect on me.
Whether it was the drone of an oscillating fan on a steamy Gulf Coast afternoon of my childhood as I lay on the cool linoleum floor, or Glenn Gould’s vocal accompaniment to keyboard Bach, or the irregular motor sounds my cat makes sitting on my chest... Wittgenstein’s feeling of being ‘safe’¹⁵ (for the time being) and still, in a world of tyrannical displacement and alarm...
"But is it possible that a purposeful human act be pleasing to you?"
No, I can’t right away think of any.
"Yours is a passive, one could say, negative vision of what is humanly possible."
One does say that.
"Do you feel this is sufficient, comprehensive enough? That maybe more might be demanded or expected of the world?"
The world brazenly volunteers so much, I can’t imagine what might still be held out for.
"The things you mentioned seem so undeliberate, incidental, auxiliary to the main business of..."
These sorts of ornament offer me some pleasure.
"Would a useful, constructive act ever?"
To the extent it failed and became beautiful.
"It seems your attitude would curtail investment in the world. You seem always to be cutting your losses."
Goodness abounds.
My losses?
My shortcoming is that my own industry is too susceptible to a seriousness that real accomplishment will never confirm.
Confining my attention to the few steps ahead of me, I notice progress, but the feeling that purposeful movement is somehow desirable is undercut by a glance at the ever receding horizon.
Even this dialogue with you, as far as I appear to be defending a point of view, is frivolous; it is sophistry.
"But you once said that the point of life lay in focusing on those few steps in front of you."
I did.
?
It was a lament, as, for instance, Aristotle’s moral philosophy, interpreted in the best light.

Glibness indicates the liar.
But how can this be when it is all our ears can pick up?—when whatever we would call the opposite of a lie is heard only at frequencies within the range of beasts, small children and the occasional idiot?
What Kaspar Hauser¹⁶ (in Herzog’s film) gathered from the sound of the wind in the grass, a rolling apple, the testing puzzles of an examining academician, and in the tinny hammers of an ill-tuned clavichord.

It used to be like the sun which would blind you but now it seems like the horizon which you must either see as beautiful, in itself, or avoid looking at altogether and never think that it is some appalling place you personally will visit, howevermuch it is our destiny.

"But in everything you are trying to eschew some responsibility."
And why not?
It is you against me.
The intervening order that your notion of responsibility supports is what I seek to topple.
"To what end?"
The End in general: I want to act, in all respects, as instinctively as you, with the same disregard for ends in general.
I am compelled to face you and view every truth you do, but what is in the shadow of the light emanating from your eyes is what I see.
My eyes are intimate with darkness; it is what I see as clear as day.

Over against Hume and the moral sense theorists, I can vouch for a depravity of my own: this is how I understand Nero and the crowd of cheering Romans or the teasing mob at the suffering of an animal.
Just as crowds can view public suffering with ecstatic pleasure to the point where you wonder where human sympathy could so thoroughly hide, there arises in me a rancor at the sight of the frenzied horde at some athletic event.
Witnessing such unbridled public pleasure elicits an ugly bile from my guts and installs a kind of murderousness in my eyes.
The injustice of its vastness—that pleasure could be anything but furtive—is intolerable to me.
The mechanism of empathy is as fully capable of operating inversely.

To the extent our sentiments are educable they cease to be ours.

But untrained, unfettered, "in the moment", they are not then ours either.
They belong properly to that force acting through us to which we sometimes even take pride in abdicating responsibility.
The mother of all mothers.

Yet this rancor at least is alive beside the withering thickness of the air at a wedding, a celebration, a party, a line of people waiting to vote, any public gathering that isn’t to hang someone.

I drove my electric car in a politically correct neighborhood parade for children.
The theme was ecological.
The children dressed like recycling bins, bottles and cans.
I was invited because my car was cute and supposed to be emblematic of some higher social responsibility.
The hope was to tattoo the little consciousnesses with a set of ideals to last the ages.
I had begun to worry when on my way home from the fifteen minute parade one kid threw a rock at my car, relieving my concern.

But when do the mothers behind these costumed children and—in these enlightened environs—the fathers who oblige them not gather to hang someone?
By way of explaining my presence there.

"Mommie bought her textbooks here."
She, the very mommie in question, says to her boy in the bookstore.
Not ‘I’ but ‘mommie’, as though this eminence could not address directly.
Mommie this and mommie that until one day the boy thinks to rape a mommie-type whom he never learned to apprehend as a ‘you’, a subject with a consciousness to penetrate: the body of this self-distancing object having to suffice.

But since blame can hardly attach to a mommie, no accusation is dared here.
For all the difference it makes, we’ll say,
she merely sets the stage for the dissolution of the race, in which the principals—the catalysts of responsibility—ordinarily, more constitutionally than historically, are men.
Why don’t mommies teach their baby boys what it is they want when they are in the singular position to do so?
It cannot be that they are too young to understand, for when they reach that age, if ever, they will be proof against any psychic incursion from her side.
It is then or never.
And it is not a question of understanding in any event: she is in the potent position of laying the foundation of what he will later come to call ‘understanding’.
Almost invariably, her mothery egoism prevails.
This, her boy, will be no other woman’s ever.
It would require some loss of her power over him now so that other women may one day find him more accessible.
Unenfranchised elsewhere, for her, the boy becomes the tool of her vengeance.
She wreaks violence this way, telegraphically.
So it is not true that, as Marguerite Duras says, most men are homosexual under the veneer of socialization.¹⁷
Certainly, they act as though they were; they show too little interest in the subjectivity of women.
But in fact, and less dramatically, they are generally bisexual in some measure.
(The pure extremes of homosexuality and heterosexuality are appropriately rare.¹⁸)
Their bisexuality is patent, though compartmentalized; as appreciative of the female body as they are charmed by its emotional effusions, but observe that, at the same time, they prefer the male mind—and they are, as trained, disconcerted to find them ever in one being, and would just as soon not.

Remember to always keep the veil of manly conceit thin enough to keep visible the awed boy.
This will make you attractive but fatal to their purposes.
You shall not beget a child.

The irresponsibility of the truth will make a boy out of a man.

I played at being homosexual when I was six or so with a visiting cousin (like nearly everyone).
We were doubled up in the same bed by unthinking parents (are not all parents thoughtless?).
What a sadness descends upon me now.
I am made uneasy in the company of gay men, straight ones as well, and women too, now as an elderly boy.
The whole business of human contact has left and gone to the moon.
You agree with me on the facts but think this was somehow avoidable, or at least desirably so.

It must be metaphysically restful for a woman to be a mother.
Nothing a man could possibly engage in approaches that degree of natural honor, so garnering the world’s stamp of approval.
Platitudes, to get back to them, thoroughly explain everything.

"It makes me smile in my mystery. My mystery consists in my being simply a means, and not an end, and this has given me the most dangerous of freedoms. I am not stupid and I take full advantage of my freedom. I even do harm to others, believe me..." —from the story, "The Egg and the Chicken"¹⁹.
Clarice Lispector, cooking eggs at breakfast for laughing, quarreling children; compensation for having been born a woman.
Not enough surely, for her, but just the same.
Just the same, even with all the power you may vomit up at my insistence, all the arrogance I can muster through my modus ponens, the same for me.
My sickly excuses.
Yes, but how superior you make me feel, thinking, as you do, you aren’t in need of as many.
Radio commentary: "Society only becomes aware of a fraction of the number of rapes of women by men."
And each woman will only become aware of a fraction of the number of times she is raped in the course of her life.

I’m fond of oppressed groups, particularly the kind that have been oppressed almost
out of existence—or who are, still better, completely extinct.
Beautifully dead and gone.
I can champion their cause with the skimpiest reservation.
Among oppressed groups, then, women are special and problematic.
How can we imagine their oppressors outliving them?

Sarcasm, bankrupt sincerity, is a very specific sadness, like the graining on a piece of wood.
The rot of resentment alludes to injustice, to a dream of fairness, to a never ceasing muttering, to the monition that we will one day not stand for it anymore.
Then what will we do?
...after the music-induced tenderness, etc...
I genuinely feel sorry for people.
We disagree because you generally feel there is some virtue in that.
At that, my pity goes limp.
We agree pity is never less appreciated than when it alights upon the source of our esteem.

Socialization: somewhere to go or something to do.

Compassion is silly.
Witness Francis Ponge: a furnishing, a morsel of landscape, a cleanser.
It will attach itself to anything, and where it is resisted, it becomes your Kantian duty to force the issue.
Where it is suckered, there I may want to leave it alone, or it will snarl something murderous at my aspersions.

...to anything, wisteria snaking up a trellis of a pergola, where it will spread out and bask.

"...ours was the love of those who take pleasure in loving..."²⁰ —Lispector.
This, if you want to know, is what is so fatal in mothering.

My earliest ambition was to be a corner grocery clerk.
Returning the can of paprika my mother had sent me to get, I observed the clerk reading comics.
I showed him the bugs crawling in the can
and he said it was okay to exchange it.
He seemed to have a nice job, and, as far as I could see, had an important role to play.

Being a housewife and mother also appealed to me.
My mother, compulsively too industrious, was not the inspiration here.
Nevertheless, for me, being around the house all day could be quite fun.
I wanted to be left alone.
I wanted to pretend to have the least impact on the world.
And more, as a mother I could have taken a righteous pleasure in something.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."
You lie, or you reveal some truth.
Tell me, which is worse?

The whole planet has been populated by rapists.²¹

Editor's Notes

1.
Sketchbook 1946-1949, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 189.

2.
ibid., p. 250.

3.
Riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict.

4.
Sketchbook 1966-1971, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 56-64.

5.
In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 57.

6.
Quoted in Art Journal 51, Spring 1992, pp.72-4.

7.
op cit., p.36.

8.
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1929).

9.
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 109.

10.
This is, for Luno, a freighted question. His intimated answer undoes all human pretension to morality. He has in mind a very specific Kantian morality—"the only one worthy of the name", not because it has much to do with how people actually behave but because it is actually consistently normative and not a codification of practice.

11.
Petrarch's Secret or the Soul's Conflict with Passion, trans. William H. Draper (London: Chatto and Windus, 1911). Many years earlier Luno had also read the portions of Petrarch's Rime collected in Songs and Sonnets from Laura's Lifetime, trans. Nicholas Kilmer, (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981).

12.
Luno's right eye was (is) affected by a muscle imbalance.

13.
Book V, Chapter IV, called "Rebellion".

14.
A. J. Ayer, "Freedom and Necessity" in Philosophical Essays, (London: Macmillan, 1954), pp. 271-284.

15.
"Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics", The Philosophical Review, LXXIV, Jan. 1965, pp. 3-12.

16.
Werner Herzog's 1974 film of the same name, aka Every Man for Himself and God Against All.

17.
Practicalities: Marguerite Duras speaks to Jérôme Beaujour, (New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1990), p. 33. Luno may have changed his mind on the question of male homosexuality in light of his reading of Weininger. See Notebooks XII and XIII. He would probably now agree with Duras.

18.
At the time this was written Luno had yet to begin his intensive reading of Weininger.

19.
Clarice Lispector, in The Foreign Legion, (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1986), p.54.

20.
Lispector, ibid., p.89.

21.
The male deep blindness and disinterest in the genuine feminine experience—now in light of Weininger and Duras—prompts Luno to say this. But it is remarkable that the pronouncement comes six or seven years before he began a serious reading of these writers.

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