Bianco Luno: Notebook VIII

Bianco Luno

Notebook VIII
4/14/92 – 9/8/93
rosary esophagus

"At times we must choose between the lesser of two evils."
In a democracy, when is this not the case?

Characterizing O—are these criticisms?
Memory: that others do not invest enough in your words to remember them.
Words: the intense, immediate, passionate, unalloyed significance of them for you (but sometimes at the expense of larger stretches of meaning that consume time and fundamental patience).
Feeling for animals: a too(?) vivid focus on the possibilities of their suffering (which an awareness of the place of suffering in general will not blur or temper).
How much of a slap in the face is it when people don’t remember what you say?
It shows they’re not alive to anything but pain inflicted on them.
If each of your words were barbed they would remember—and you would be 9/10ths alone—but how ‘together’ ever?
Not appreciated information, the way we don’t want to know really the agony that goes into what we eat.
All this is scarcely a criticism and, consequently, it is more terrifying.

It all dissolves in cleverness.
The accusation is so acknowledged it doesn’t even sting.
Pain is the cleverest, though: I envision an X-ray of a ‘corkscrew’ or ‘rosary’ esophagus.

Pain assures me that criticism, in the guise of some altruism, is impossible.

Having been brutalized by some youthful illusion, now our business is to "be real".
On and on like this until this perception, too, is undone.
In the paper I read about a graduate student shooting himself in the head in Ravenna Park.
Academically outstanding, athletic, lots of caring friends, active in social causes, close family...but though he counseled others well, everyone repeats, he was unforthcoming about his own deepest concerns, etc.
(An advertisement for a crisis clinic is appended to the article.)
He must have had some?
And he was articulate and we have a sound or gesture in the language for every feeling and what we can’t express others, given the chance, would surely be able to infer, all of us, of course, partaking in the same humanity?
(I am compelled to lend these handy assertions the inflection of a question.)

On a second story window perch I built for him, overlooking the backyard, partly overgrown with blackberries, Fellini stretches out his long body in the morning sun.
We remain staring at each other for a long time.
My hand passes over the short fur between his ears and, when it moves too quickly, he attacks it.

"So much pent up hatred..."
You say this with a very public sympathy, as though it might be relieved against them, or as though it wouldn’t be trained on you.
If injustice existed I would hate less.

The intimacy I’ve espoused by not addressing them, but you, is uncivilizing.
I intend to make sure every breath you take has been discarded by me.

Max Frisch overhears someone at a neighboring table who doesn’t know him speak of him with positive hatred.
Admitting his astonishment¾ "I realize, almost for the first time, that when one writes one always reckons on sympathy."¹—he goes on to suggest perhaps we couldn’t even begin to write without doing so.
Is this so?
An astute ‘humanity’ pervades his postwar Sketchbooks: his reaction to German self-justification, a tour of a death camp, the tragic/pathetic flights of a Teutonic amoralized spirit, Letzigraben (his marvelous public pavilion and swimming pool), admirations of Brecht and Wilder, judicious excuses for Swiss philistinism...
The case for a responsible artist: I picture him looking out at the mudflats from his ample architect’s workroom, swilling a Steinläger...
My sarcasm is too rancid to convey neatly the fresh reaction called for by his six year old daughter’s remark.
He recounts her asking whether he should
enjoy death, and like, a knowing parent, he turns the question back to her.
She says, "No, not now, but later, later I shall enjoy dying."²

I must exist as an infringement.
Ambient pity, not sympathy, I could not begin to write without.
I’ve lost the ability to imagine in earnest to what use people would put sympathy.

See what this inspires:
(Perhaps it will criminalize me in your eyes, at least lower your estimation of me—where possible. Better this than what I know some will accuse me of—for their own collective reasons—: being normal.
But because its topical and because I wouldn’t want to seem so otherworldly as to excuse myself entirely from your company, here’s my story.)
I sexually abused my sister.
With a straw I blew at her vulva.
We took turns and she blew at my
genitals.
We did this sitting in a closet in a room used for storage, thinking we were hidden by a vanity backed up against the entrance to the closet.
She was three; I was six, and, we will say, in a relative position of power.
My father caught us and spanked me.
I remember especially his face when I looked up.
I have been trying to describe and understand it ever since.
He offered no discussion, reckoning probably on my already knowing, because we were hiding, that it was wrong.
There were a few more sexual contacts as we got older, but he never found out about those.
Not long after, I was being punished for something else, I forget what, and had to spend one whole day confined to a bathroom.
By late afternoon I had taken a razor blade and cut the tip of my penis.
A little scar is still there.
(Good title for a memoir!)

"Why does moral outrage not qualify as pain? The idea makes you laugh."
There is no ‘moral pain’.
Morality consists of pain.
The pleasure you take in being part of us
(positing consensus) precludes otherwise.

1 May 1992³
Violence in the streets.
But there isn’t any: no fires, no looting, and no innocent people are being beaten.
We are shown it all on videotape, but what does videotape prove?
Confused, we require expert exegesis: fire is not hot, pain does not hurt...
A racist is only a small part of what I am, for I judge people by everything visible, surmisable, and incomprehensible about them; and this leaves me pretty well blind.
Had I been on the jury, I would have insisted his skin is not truly black.
Obviously, the system does work because I would never be selected to appear on a jury judging you—though I could be the only expert here.

"The truth shall make you free,"
¾ in much the same way death will.

The rest is experienceable only as a joke.

Registered and went to vote.
Tore my ballot into four pieces and placed it in the slot.
In a democracy, "if enough people...," blah, blah, blah.
If enough people don’t....ditto.

Faith: one day I will mature to the point of understanding.

"...in those countries people are tortured and killed for trying to vote..."
Yes, that would certainly make the privilege valuable.
And here—in this country—what are people being tortured and killed for?
Whatever that is, it must be equally valuable.

Decency is moral, i.e., within range, but justice is poetic, serendipitous and, simply, no other kind exists.

Two in the morning; music video; charged motions of bodies...
The sexual or—more civilized and spiritually circumscribed—the romantic tropisms undo human costumes.
Women and men then cease being human
for the duration; but not in order to reveal a deeper being (whatever imagined thing that might be).
Rather, those costumes cannot be worn at once.
Something similar in war: genesis of Smedley’s phrase about fairness in love and war.
Desire and hatred alike will not be compassed by the normative idea of being human.
Woman as object of his desire and/or hatred, and, at best, a man is an object of comfort, facilitating a relationship, for her.
Becoming friends, they become human, viz., neutered—or they stop minding being objects, which is just as easily effected, to watch them behave the better part of the time, watch them lose their heads in solemn mysteries...
I think nothing can pressure me to pass beyond these recurring sentiments on the mutual opacity of women and men.
That they are not true, that I distort the meaning of the separation or that they are so but causes to rejoice—are not for me viable responses.

At work I am appreciated for my wry humor.
Thus I skirt the obligation (in social work) of saying commiserative or positive things and expressing anything of what I write here.
I’ve become afraid of being stupidly silent; a marked change in this persona, for I used to sport a quiet sincerity.
Alone with the retarded—on our little outings or on the night shift, as now—a truer side of myself can breathe.
After ten years now—as though it wasn’t clear in the beginning: the lie.
Social work is nourished on the assumption that it is possible to truly help other people (though less obviously than in business, politics, government or education).
Obsolete and defective people are clothed in epithets, calculated to enhance their decorative worth about the fringes of the community.
We help them by helping ourselves.
And it had better be true that we can do that at least.
This self-concern will be our last and most intrepid excuse.

"What do you accomplish, assuming you’re right, by denying us the capacity for charity?"
Marx as landscape painter.
The precept that we decide what you need, not you, is universally operative.

Consensus as an expression of the face: the eyes appear to glaze over.

When my ex-wife left me I came close to killing myself.
I groveled before her, unable to breathe because I couldn’t hate her without seeing my own wretched image.
That May the cherry blossoms and the weather were especially lovely.

How do you imagine that I see myself?
Sometimes as a precocious boy, more often as an imbecile.
But these are not offered as a sordid bouquet of suspiciously convenient self-deprecations.
The hatred I have is too great yet for a boy or an imbecile and never releases you from its sight.

When my ex-wife left me I nearly died.
We were hardly married, and to the extent we were, what did that mean?
The ceremony, held in her apartment, was witnessed by two deadbeats living next door, kindly interrupting their fishing trip to toast us.
She baked a cherry pie, which we all shared.
The county collected forty dollars.
The affair seemed to mean something to her.
We were together two and one half years.
My last year as an undergraduate I lived with a woman, and when she left me I nearly died too.
(Grist for a mill.)
What an image, what a relief it should have been!
For many years the ‘you’ in these notebooks was her.
I can’t be sure anymore who it is.

The term ‘arrogance’ is so woefully inadequate to the task of describing this mix of exhaustion and impatience.
It begins as an affront; we can hardly expect humility in its course.

When I see her (rarely) on the street, after a short nervous exchange, she wants to give me a hug goodbye.
It seemed to mean something to her, and yet I was the one who nearly drove his miniature car into a concrete wall.

Not often an admirable trait: nearly killing yourself when left.
(Much more flattering at the beginning of a relationship.)
What does it betray?
Cowardice?
Hormonal maladjustment?
An attempt to clear the air?
A tantrum?
A violent act aimed at unglazing all eyes involved?
Malice?
It is, whatever else it might be, a terrific opportunity to glimpse something of the truth that haunts the vastness just outside the purview of the streetlight we, like bugs, loyally orbit.

A generation later, in his second Sketchbook⁴, Frisch is closer to where I am now; I am thinking of the irony with which he says he believes in the constitutional state.
What will I think at his age?

My feelings—always so precise and clear they seem fake.
Articulated as pronouncements, in place of gesture or sigh, I give them an outline they do not have.
I don’t grant them all the rights by custom an artist is committed to defending on their behalf.
But, displaced, we see what effect they have.

‘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" (Gilligan)⁵ 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.

"We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. [Because] to abstain from violence toward the violent is to become their accomplice." Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror⁹.

The end of history—when ‘you’ and ‘I’ conflate to ‘we’, according to Marx—seems barely conceivable to me.
In Marx, as a descriptive thinker, I see no threat.
As when dead, it cannot matter to me then, at that time, as it so much unnerves me, still existing, now.
When the hardness of my separateness dissolves, so will my fear.
But as a normative theory it is a very hard sell; it may, I suspect, in fact, be the right thing to advance, but only according to a conception of rationality no individual (and who else could be the target of the promotion?) can think.
Like my plan for depopulating the planet, it will have to be seen as a joke, however intended.

Every time the boy brought home something he thought precious, found in a ditch, he was met with derision, and the lattice of feelings, on which he’d trained to grow enough hope as to seem inhuman, crumbled.
What he selects now from the gutter is decomposed or barbed or smelly, and ready—the boy is now always, like a scout, ready.

It must be, you feel, the boy might have reacted differently, or can now.

The mother and child on a spit.
Putting aside the twisted smile of the situation—is it that in describing it we are so liable to distortion, or that the image renders impossible spontaneous reaction?—in the face of this, what would you take for an acceptable response?
A witness to atrocity could not better instruct me, an innocent to such scenes.
Anything effected with the mouth would seem insincere.
The question is complicated because I would not be satisfied with either the first expression of the face or any cry filtered through the language.
The mouth might reflect the pain of the victim and at once, with the same muscles, the vicarious thrill of the absent sculptor in flesh.
The eyes, aware, would have to be clear and helpless.

Stupidity n., term of art: the subconscious suppression of an unprepossessing truth for comfort. Suppression for survival should tend to be more conscious—for survival, i.e., to avoid suicide, insanity or worse—and perhaps excusable through being tragic.

I am obsessed with this mother and child on a spit theme; the idea is so apt, looking in the eyes of the people on the street.
News: only fifty people a day are dying now in Baidoa (Somalia) and most of them not of starvation but of disease.

Panhandler: "Not all that bad, Christmas, for business. Folks get sappy and reach in their pockets. Worst time is summer. Everybody thinks you’re having too much fun and they walk on."

Incompatibility of consciousness and sincerity.

Two women in conversation in a café.
I can only see the face of one and barely hear anything.
Her expression alternates between amazement and nodding acknowledgment or approval.
Do I ever have conversations where I can make use of such faces?
Or am I just unaware of my substitutes for them?

Why can’t kindness to others also be a kindness to oneself?¹⁰

There is no going back.
If there ever was a golden time it is irretrievable.
Without sounding too hopeful, we must come to embrace the darkness more and more.
Yes, we lie ourselves to the grave but it appears to work.

Are my mannered questions lightly disguised, now antique, aphorisms?
Is an awareness of the impossibility of things a feigned ignorance?
Are we shirking the responsibility of sincerity?
Don’t I really know enough to be sincere?

Cold morning sun, like faith.
Like Bach.
I have not lost everything.
I can still remember the rapture of what it was like to believe.

The acidity of mind.

Bemoaning the loss of faith may be human but it is not the right thing to do.
The latter will always be just out of
reach.

The music in church was the only thing that never seemed phony to me.
I still find pleasure in remembering when it still didn’t.

The violence St. Augustine adjures Petrarch (in Petrarch’s Secretum¹¹) to do his refined devotion to Laura—the lovingly carved dado on which he has rested his life’s ornate meaning—is quite terrible.
The same corrosive truth that corrupts her flesh and even the image he has of her in his heart... can be turned against Augustine’s appeals to mortal reason and the pragmatics of faith.
The exigencies of embodiment: that to hook Petrarch on a higher peg he should enlist reason at all.
What remains proof against this acid is that, if you grant that we are truly drawn to the everlasting, then for certain there is something in all this soul-scrubbing for us.
What a grand presumption—that we care about forever when our capacity for caring drops off so rapidly in time.
We, for whom effective imperatives are hypothetical (that only if this) and whose eyes can only fog up, in supplication or disbelief, at the sight of a categorical from on high.
Religion is insane.
The alternative is paltry.

I care about this homeless mendicant, so I give my change.
Certainly, I say to myself.

It is not even true that we care only for ourselves.

Prudent—if we were that, we would never know regret.

Self-love is an exaggeration.

Cynic: one who has not let off trying in earnest even after it has become rather amusing is most deserving of the badge of the dog.

Petrarch: "Such glory as belongs to man is enough for me."
Contemporaneous with this flurry of soul-searching at the dawn of humanism in Europe, the natives of central Mexico were baring hearts: also not content with the middle colors of the spectrum.
Violence to the person, the more extreme, the more it cleanses of vanity consciousness.
But since there is no going back to the time when we could stand the sight of blood, the development of the newest forms of violence eschew the reds in favor of the cooler violets of the deepest bruises.
It is not entirely true that we have any choice, contra Merleau-Ponty.

Fate is terrible until she has sapped all thought of glory from you.
Petrarch’s modest portion is like a recipe for a balanced meal which all his poetry belies as sustaining.

Someday, to be sure, men will be violent after the manner of women today, who, it is hoped, will have progressed to as yet unimaginable forms.

"You remain so dense. Out of the language of reason and truth you think you wring new inventions. The rules of thinking predate your integrity and will not brook your having enthroned it. The point of living escapes you."

The woman, who calls herself the most intense and alive human being she knows, with whom I spend time when I spend it with anyone, said to me, "I’ve never been more alone in my life...", leaving me to finish the thought, "...than now with you."

The point of living.

The obvious notwithstanding, we can no longer stand the sight of blood.

The meat we cannot stand to slaughter.

You cannot bear that I turn into a question of taste what you deem a question of right. But no relativist, I think there are absolute standards of beauty in the universe, and though unattainable, they are somehow connected with moving through difficulty while embracing it...
Or into deeper and deeper difficulty.
And the worst difficulty I can imagine is the absence of hope—not merely its absence but that it never can exist; its every appearance a sham.
And this is unconscionable to you.

I try to imagine a pure real hope, what form it would take, how I would recognize it, as I might, say, a liquid feeling in a line of Bach...
The logical function of sorrow: welling in the eyes momentarily blurs the unforgivingly sharp outlines of truth.

How possible is it for a genuine Marxist to experience a local sadness or personal joy?
Marxism is ethically unimpeachable; its trained manners (trained to proscribe indulgence), on the highest plane; the rest of us, profligate sentimentalists, worthy of the scaffold.
But the urgency for violence is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the rest of us will quite voluntarily wither away when our eyes are fully opened—that is to say, when we learn to look through them.

This though: there is no Marxist aesthetic.
"...and its opposite is fundamentally immoral."

A moral rule of thumb: to do the least amount of evil, as it is easier to know, and good is never unalloyed.
A calculus of pain can scarcely succeed where Bentham’s of pleasure fails, but this failure too, one can at least tone down by morally retiring in the face of consciousness.

"You make a clever joke of anything serious."

The image of my upended dignity (which doesn’t consist of anything but a kind of algorithm) is so frightening to me that I think I will go to my grave shirking all the costumes of sentiment except perhaps one, a stately sadness.
I forfeited the rest when I decided I would not cry as an infant, when the angel told me what was up.
What faces were left to me?
But the very face of distraction: a wandering eye, unsteered but by pretense and will.¹²

The Devil’s refrain: I would gladly see the truth but for the person telling it.

At the funeral of a girl who committed suicide, a man with a video camera, trained on the mother in mourning, captures on tape another man approach and fire a gun directly into the head of the woman and continue to fire on her body as she collapses to the ground.
The frame reels, the man who controls it makes noises "like a wounded dog".
The television news anchors are visibly uncomfortable showing the tape.
The woman probably deserved to die, according to her ex-husband, who shot her: she was the cause of the daughter’s suicide.

So many of us deserve death—not because of anything in particular we might have done, but because we did nothing to deserve being born—and continue behaving as though this were not true.

But it is not even death, quite, that we deserve.

The real scandal was the camera man’s squeal and the news anchor’s squirm.
The crime was committed against them; for the rest of us can repose in all of the little that we really are in private: the tape showed discernible pieces of flesh splashing from where the bullet entered...

Plumbless sadness at the eternal regularity of the surf, the ground bass ostinato, the plodding series of the naturalest numbers...
But the otherwise is frightful too.
That it was always going to happen this way; that something unprecedented (for the fated is, in essence, precedented) may happen, rationally unencumbered.

The boy in his cell took his excrement and smeared it across the wall.
He tried to make something beautiful but could do nothing about the smell.

It is the only thing going for the truth—that you can call it that—as it is, in all respects and at all times, painful.
What can function so well without this concession scarcely needs it.
If no blossom were ever truly beautiful, but only seemed to be, what would change?

The truth is a kudos, a token of our appreciation of its bravery, that we award a statement.
What has the view sub specie aeternitatis to do with the moral efforts of the instant?
By dwelling so on the remote prospects of the race are we not undermining our capacity to carry on?
The perseveration, whether virtue or instinct, is worth cradling, isn’t it?
The question is curious because it is not rhetorical; if asked, it is answered no.
But nothing forces the curiosity; indeed, the din involved in giving point to living seeks to smother it.
Even the perversity of the question can be turned to good use, can’t it?

Rereading the chapter¹³ from The Brothers Karamazov where Ivan nervelessly continues to lament the suffering of innocents...
The children and the animals perhaps didn’t suffer: the girl of five, beaten into one large bruise, locked in a privy, excrement smeared over her face and stuffed into her mouth by her mother, all the while crying "dear kind God"; or the feeble little nag whipped on its "meek eyes" for not being up to its burden; or the boy of eight, shredded by hunting dogs in a display before his mother for having injured the retired general’s favorite dog’s paw with a thrown stone—
perhaps none of these suffered in a sense appreciable by us.
True suffering implies an awareness we exonerate these victims of in the same act of according them that innocence so endearing to us.
We suffer more than they in contemplating what happens to them.
This is how it is.
Merely consider that it is not evil that cries for explanation, rather the awareness of evil in the notions of harmony, justice, kindness, a benevolent God, a perfectible species...
The innocent, though our best victims, still do not suffer like we do.

"A cynic is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
—Oscar Wilde
Wilde, like many, confuses the cynic with the pessimist.
Diogenes would have quoted you the price joyfully and marveled over how impossibly valuable nothing really is.

Not between a rock and a hard place, but between a rock and something that will turn the rock into powder.

Ayer¹⁴, for instance, relieves the stress
from the freedom/determinism impasse by showing us how freedom, as we commonly use the term, implies an absence of constraint, not a dearth of causation, a clear requirement for avoiding freedom’s devolution to sheer chance.
The terms, ‘determinism’ and ‘causation’, are given a threatening cast by our fear of being forced, brought to heal by others or circumstances when all they suggest is that it is possible to provide an explanation in the light of past events for present or future events.
His critical distinction—that cause is not constraint but an observable enabling regularity—intended to soothe our alarm and give the determinist her or his minimum, itself, however, too facilely assumes we will compromise with fate.
All along we could have done that with less ceremony and stilled this inquietude and many others were we willing to live within the small boundaries of facts.
It is hardly accidental that we allow the figurative grime on our terms the reign we do.
What you so coolly, offhandedly, offer me as a facilitating circumstance I choose to view as blackmail because I want to read meaning in excess of what I would attribute to you if you were a stone.
It is from a kind of love that I accuse you of the greatest crime in the world: impersonating a stone.
But my hatred, too and not less, would honor you.
Ayer surely jokes.

Eyeballs spooned out, impalings through body cavities, genital mutilations...
A few of us engage in this sort of thing and worse; the rest delight (and not even secretly) in hearing about it, reading about it, expressing offense.
This is supreme love.

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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