Where would you seek the purity of silence?
Would you plunge for it into the depths of your soul,
The deepest recesses of your mind,
Where the water's dark as wine?
You'd find a cavern winding
Down into the depths of the earth,
Where the eventual dearth
Of light becomes the flash of crystal and the bright
Burning of the pressure smoothed rock,
The deep and intense core of being
Beyond control, and floating in the hot
Lava islands of cracking metal,
Sinking, from submersion rising, hissing with a moan
and a shot into the icy dark, the spinning globe of night.
Saturday, January 31, 2004
Friday, January 30, 2004
Where did I go in the darkness of the night? I wandered down one alleyway, out into an opening of grime and soot, through the black streets, to another; trash-cans and alleycats, the smell of dirty laundry and waste, feces.
Hoodlums on the walks, traveling in sometimes small groups, chains clanging and reflecting lamp-light like steel sparks on a grindstone. At one point I emerged into a clearing of glittering lights. An old man, black, was playing a guitar, stubbly faced, head half covered by a dirty, tight-knit cap. He was jammed up against a brick wall, legs arching to meet the cement, feet protruding from it like a natural edifice of
stone. I walked over, listened to him sing for awhile, a few bars of a song even the streets had forgotten, or it was so raspy that no one could have recognized it. The air was getting cold, wind roving through the clogged up skies -- the grey clouds had disappeared with the last choking embers of twilight, but their dull residue suffocated whatever star-light might have gauzed the purple sky. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a dirty nickel, threw it in his cap.
"Thanks," he called. A rich baritone voice, like in an Arby's commercial. He seemed entirely carved out of the wall, out of the walk, out of the rock, strumming his guitar, like some small monument to a lonely past. I walked on. A theater opened its doors. A crowd of hats, suits, blue, navy-blue, dark-blue, purple, black, grey, dark-grey, mahogony streamed past me with the sound of their voices; a high buzzing, the low conspiracy of whispered tones, the drone of matrons, the chitter of young ladies, laughter, the occasional twitter of a yawn, a sigh, a loud voice arguing yes, a dull trombone dissenting. I couldn't make any of it out.
The theater-lobby was a bright long space of polished gold, marble, carpet in a light tan, red banisters, curving and circling stair-cases, and sleepy attendants tasseled, polished, but sagging and frumpy, sweeping and collapsing into a darkened ante-chamber; beyond it a sarcophagus, a tomb. I imagined the stage and the long rows of empty seats, spreading diagonally, vertically, and across like a vision of the empty sweep; the wood, the hidden canisters of paint, the tables in storage, the shop, the props and the propped up scenery -- long, vibrant valleys, trees shivering in the wind, turned out of fashion to face the walls: far climbing brick. Only the ghosts of shadows shiver across the stage, only the occasional belch of a radiator or a fan or the hum of an emergency light; the stage is a thing of darkness, like the world before God.
The lights in the lobby switch-off, and the shadows invade the ante-chamber like soft streaks of blue paint. The last of the attendants leaves, props the door open with his left foot, cranes his neck, looking backwards, searching for some final sign. Then he fumbles in his right pocket, extracts a pack of cigarettes, stamps it with his left hand against the palm of his right; three, four, six times, like the stamping of hooves, an impatient gelding, a night-carriage; he flips the top, extracts it so small I can't make it out, puckers it in his lips, cradles it against the wind and cold with his left hand, flicks the lighter with his right. The clapping sound of metal, sparks. It infuses hot, dark-burning, a little signal light. I turn away from him, afraid he might notice me, staring; large buildings towering like monsters, the sky is clearing just a bit and through the dull conglomeration of clouds, I can make out an occasional star like a lamp shining through fog. There are beggars sleeping in the alleyways. I'll stay with Max tonight. Sleepiness is settling on me like a mist.
Hoodlums on the walks, traveling in sometimes small groups, chains clanging and reflecting lamp-light like steel sparks on a grindstone. At one point I emerged into a clearing of glittering lights. An old man, black, was playing a guitar, stubbly faced, head half covered by a dirty, tight-knit cap. He was jammed up against a brick wall, legs arching to meet the cement, feet protruding from it like a natural edifice of
stone. I walked over, listened to him sing for awhile, a few bars of a song even the streets had forgotten, or it was so raspy that no one could have recognized it. The air was getting cold, wind roving through the clogged up skies -- the grey clouds had disappeared with the last choking embers of twilight, but their dull residue suffocated whatever star-light might have gauzed the purple sky. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a dirty nickel, threw it in his cap.
"Thanks," he called. A rich baritone voice, like in an Arby's commercial. He seemed entirely carved out of the wall, out of the walk, out of the rock, strumming his guitar, like some small monument to a lonely past. I walked on. A theater opened its doors. A crowd of hats, suits, blue, navy-blue, dark-blue, purple, black, grey, dark-grey, mahogony streamed past me with the sound of their voices; a high buzzing, the low conspiracy of whispered tones, the drone of matrons, the chitter of young ladies, laughter, the occasional twitter of a yawn, a sigh, a loud voice arguing yes, a dull trombone dissenting. I couldn't make any of it out.
The theater-lobby was a bright long space of polished gold, marble, carpet in a light tan, red banisters, curving and circling stair-cases, and sleepy attendants tasseled, polished, but sagging and frumpy, sweeping and collapsing into a darkened ante-chamber; beyond it a sarcophagus, a tomb. I imagined the stage and the long rows of empty seats, spreading diagonally, vertically, and across like a vision of the empty sweep; the wood, the hidden canisters of paint, the tables in storage, the shop, the props and the propped up scenery -- long, vibrant valleys, trees shivering in the wind, turned out of fashion to face the walls: far climbing brick. Only the ghosts of shadows shiver across the stage, only the occasional belch of a radiator or a fan or the hum of an emergency light; the stage is a thing of darkness, like the world before God.
The lights in the lobby switch-off, and the shadows invade the ante-chamber like soft streaks of blue paint. The last of the attendants leaves, props the door open with his left foot, cranes his neck, looking backwards, searching for some final sign. Then he fumbles in his right pocket, extracts a pack of cigarettes, stamps it with his left hand against the palm of his right; three, four, six times, like the stamping of hooves, an impatient gelding, a night-carriage; he flips the top, extracts it so small I can't make it out, puckers it in his lips, cradles it against the wind and cold with his left hand, flicks the lighter with his right. The clapping sound of metal, sparks. It infuses hot, dark-burning, a little signal light. I turn away from him, afraid he might notice me, staring; large buildings towering like monsters, the sky is clearing just a bit and through the dull conglomeration of clouds, I can make out an occasional star like a lamp shining through fog. There are beggars sleeping in the alleyways. I'll stay with Max tonight. Sleepiness is settling on me like a mist.
Thursday, January 29, 2004
The rain came down in torrents. The whole city was flooded in streams and the roads swirled into eddies, flowing rapidly back from some source in the teary-eyed horizon. I ran down Garden Avenue, to the gothic brick building, up the steps, and knocked on the door to my professor's apartment.
"Come in," he said.
I opened the door and was engulfed in a radiant heat; the dusty smell of old books, a fire. He was sitting in a chair, staring out at the rain. From his window I could see the pattering drops striking the little pools on the walk below and spreading out: dripping off of doused concrete, spreading into the thirsty brown grass that dotted the lots. Frail trees quivered with the cold and invisible motion of atmosphere.
"I'm withdrawing from my classes," I told him. He looked up, as if coming out of a spell. He got up and went to the stove, where he retrieved a little brass teapot engraved with the Chinese symbol for peace. He filled it with water, lit the stove, and set it down to boil. He handled the whole affair with an exceeding care, an attention to detail down to his pared and polished fingernails -- their placement in relation to the brass.
"Where will you go?" He turned and looked me straight in the eyes. I shrugged, looked at the floor, at a rug, at a dance of Persian patterns.
"I'll work. I'll get a job. I'll volunteer somewhere. I'll go out into the city. I'm going to live. Somehow."
He sighed. He walked to the book-shelf and took out a slim volume of poetry, bound in leather, kept with care. His reading glasses were sitting on the coffee-table, slight metal above the illustrated cover of a book on modern art. He took them, and gnome-like, licking his fingers, flipping through the pages, he found the one he was looking for. His fingernails were pink on cracked yellow, like a tender wound.
"Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother," he closed the book. He put it back in the shelf. The tea kettle hissed. He read like a child reciting the Credo.
"I'm going," I said. He was pouring hot water into a ceramic cup. He took a small bag with a yellow tag that said, "chamomile," and ceremoniously lowered it into the surface. The water took the little bag, it sunk like a submerged vessel and then disappeared below the surface of the luminous sea. Tea stain spread through the cup.
I tapped him on the shoulder, but he didn't respond. I took a book out of my back-pack, a heavy one he had leant me, I don't even remember the title anymore, and I laid it on the coffee-table above the modern art book.
"Would you like a cup of tea?" I walked quietly out of the room and closed the door. When I left it was still raining, but the rain had subdued to a drizzle. I headed down the streets, avoiding the still-flowing pools of water, cold from the long descent.
"Come in," he said.
I opened the door and was engulfed in a radiant heat; the dusty smell of old books, a fire. He was sitting in a chair, staring out at the rain. From his window I could see the pattering drops striking the little pools on the walk below and spreading out: dripping off of doused concrete, spreading into the thirsty brown grass that dotted the lots. Frail trees quivered with the cold and invisible motion of atmosphere.
"I'm withdrawing from my classes," I told him. He looked up, as if coming out of a spell. He got up and went to the stove, where he retrieved a little brass teapot engraved with the Chinese symbol for peace. He filled it with water, lit the stove, and set it down to boil. He handled the whole affair with an exceeding care, an attention to detail down to his pared and polished fingernails -- their placement in relation to the brass.
"Where will you go?" He turned and looked me straight in the eyes. I shrugged, looked at the floor, at a rug, at a dance of Persian patterns.
"I'll work. I'll get a job. I'll volunteer somewhere. I'll go out into the city. I'm going to live. Somehow."
He sighed. He walked to the book-shelf and took out a slim volume of poetry, bound in leather, kept with care. His reading glasses were sitting on the coffee-table, slight metal above the illustrated cover of a book on modern art. He took them, and gnome-like, licking his fingers, flipping through the pages, he found the one he was looking for. His fingernails were pink on cracked yellow, like a tender wound.
"Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother," he closed the book. He put it back in the shelf. The tea kettle hissed. He read like a child reciting the Credo.
"I'm going," I said. He was pouring hot water into a ceramic cup. He took a small bag with a yellow tag that said, "chamomile," and ceremoniously lowered it into the surface. The water took the little bag, it sunk like a submerged vessel and then disappeared below the surface of the luminous sea. Tea stain spread through the cup.
I tapped him on the shoulder, but he didn't respond. I took a book out of my back-pack, a heavy one he had leant me, I don't even remember the title anymore, and I laid it on the coffee-table above the modern art book.
"Would you like a cup of tea?" I walked quietly out of the room and closed the door. When I left it was still raining, but the rain had subdued to a drizzle. I headed down the streets, avoiding the still-flowing pools of water, cold from the long descent.
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Conference
A practical entry. Conference is always annoying, but today it was especially so. Now I am going to comment in more detail on my impressions after I write this, so before any of you say, "He's a jerk! What a cad!" -- hear me out with patience, the one necessary.
Whenever I say anything in my conference, I'm sure that people don't listen to what I have to say. I make a speech and by the end everyone is crowding in to contradict me. Otherwise I'll state my opinion and the entire conference will move on, in effect ignoring me.
These are things that have happened. Now we shall take upon ourselves the unhappy task of finding causes. I am writing this because conferences have been, for me, an always rather unpleasant aspect of the Reed experience and because I think, by publishing my concerns along with my conceits, I will be able to improve myself, and we will all be able to begin thinking rationally about improving (if in no way else than self reform) on an aspect of the Reed experience that should be most beneficial but is often most banal.
Now first, I believe that I have a tendency to ramble in conference, as in writing. When I say ramble, I do not necessarily mean that my "monologues" are lacking in direction. I rather mean that I enjoy expanding my point, polishing it, rounding it, adding in unnecessary examples: I like the feeling of authority that comes from giving a lecture, and also the manner in which various possibilities open themselves up in my mind the longer I talk.
Now someone accused me and I have furthermore more than once been accused by others of making extraneous references to unassigned readings. For example today I compared Prospero to Faustus and claimed that Elizabethan playgoers might have been able to recognize Faustus as a prototype for Prospero in Shakespeare's Tempest.
So the first thing I'd like to say about this is that it is extremely relevant and interesting to me. I anticipate this objection: "Keep those things to yourself if you like them, but we don't care; if you must, save them for later" -- well yes. Ideally I would keep those references to myself. I wouldn't raise my hand (I hope) to make a completely extraneous point, and especially not in order to be merely extraneous. But, on the other hand, these things occur to me in mid-flight, in mid-monologue, as it were, and I can't help but to say them simply because I'm speaking as I think, so what I think tends to be what I say. And furthermore the parallel is never my main point, but always simply something drawn up to support what I'm really getting at in the first place -- though it does fill me with wonder and happiness to have discovered this parallel, and it deepens my interest. Furthermore, I often explain the parallel in such a way that it does not feel to me knowledge of the original is exceedingly crucial. I am alluding to Faustus, but I am not *analyzing* Faustus.
The problem becomes deeper at this point. Because even though I may be able to understand myself that the reference to Faustus is interesting and relevant, I will never be able to prove it to the conference. Furthermore, to others there, I'm already engaged in a long monologue, which is in its way self-indulgent and conceited, so that to add touches like obscure references to works that not everyone in the conference has read seems, in this person's words, truly rude, and not a little conceited.
Do I mean to be rude? Is there some deeper conceit behind my failings? In high-school, I regarded most of the other students in my class as competitors. There was a teacher whom I wanted to engage, who knew the answers to my questions, and the other students didn't appreciate the subject or else had nothing insightful to say. I consistently dominated discussions and it was always my highest desire to grab at the teacher's attention, to get the teacher interested in me, to, on a low level, be recognized for my "brilliance," but on a higher level to engage in a good conversation about the topic with someone who knew it well.
In conference, I maintain the same respect for my professors, but I think my central failing, my tragic flaw, is that I don't have any respect for my fellow students. I'm not interested in their opinions on the subject, because I wonder what opinions they could really have. Now to admit this is to admit to being a misanthrope and a bastard, but please see what I'm trying to do: I'm trying to address a shortcoming in my character and make it understandable, make it clear to myself and others why I would do something low and dishonorable and why the action is wrong but the impulse is good. I believe that I don't truly wish myself harm, and because to make others dislike me is to harm myself, by extension I don't truly wish harm to others. That's the most pragmatic way of putting it, but I like to even think that I don't want to hurt others, that I don't want to lord over them, that I don't want to seek my own advantage at the price of another's pain.
The reason, ultimately, that I think I am deficient in conference is that I am not interested in the conversation. I am not apart of it. Is that a failing in myself? Is that a failing in the others? Is that a failing in the professor? I cannot with any justice blame anyone but myself. But how am I supposed to reconcile my own interests with the interests of a group without somewhat giving them up? And especially when those interests are by nature subjective, being intellectual? How can I be happy about pursuing questions that seem to me dead and unimportant? How can I learn something from answers that don't even engage my questions?
Suppose I read the Tempest, and the thing that really strikes me is that its like Faustus -- and this is my sole interest in the entire play, or rather, the only spark that, for me, keeps it alive. Am I supposed to put my insight away as irrelevant and listen to others make dull analysis that doesn't touch me, that doesn't engage me with the play, that ultimately is meaningless to me? This is not an insignificant problem, and I hope to the dear universe that it is not a problem inspired simply by some heinous and Satan-like conceit on my part -- it is rather the basis of a very important question: how in the world can we learn anything during a conference?
I could briefly expand on this by noting that the impressions I have about a work or an author that are interesting to me are often the most frowned upon things in the context of the class. On Shakespeare, today's discussion began with a question I asked, "What is his style?" The reason I asked this question was because, in my opinion, people in our culture sometimes idolize Shakespeare as a stylistic God and I myself simply don't see it -- I see nothing of genius, though some things very good, but I dislike the very idea of genius when it applies to that man, or any. Now this problem interests me, but it is beyond the scope of the conference. But at the same time, those things which are covered by the conference ("How does The Tempest reflect 18th century ideas of rulership?") I find to be either straightforward or obsolete, and they do not strike at my core, and unless someone can convince me that they are more worthy of discussion than my own questions, I think that to learn about these others is to waste my time on merely "scholastic" pursuits.
Or perhaps I should put it in the meannest and most conceited way possible: if we are a bunch of students who know nothing about the text, how in the world are we supposed to learn anything about it or overcome our ignorance of it if we simply discuss it among ourselves for some four odd hours with a teacher? Tremendous amounts of scholarship, commentary, hover over each and every word we read -- do we dare to think that our efforts to explore the text will dig nearly as deep as the hundreds of brilliant men and women who have been exploring the text for as many years, if not more?
So I submit this paper that is nothing more than damning evidence against myself before you, my inquisitors. I ask that you strike at me with the hottest and truest words you can produce from the very back of your throats. But I also ask that if you strike, please tell me who you are and how you know me. I have taken offense at comments in the past that make me feel reprehensible but give me no sense of the occasion wherein I offended (of which I am often most lamentably ignorant -- our errors, which are most glaring to others, are sometimes least obvious to us) and thus no hope of correction. I damn myself knowing full well that experience tempers our imperfections, and hoping to strike against my own. And may I always be the most bitter and acrimonious witness against myself, so that I am ever in conspiracy against my wicked natures that would themselves confer to overthrow me.
A practical entry. Conference is always annoying, but today it was especially so. Now I am going to comment in more detail on my impressions after I write this, so before any of you say, "He's a jerk! What a cad!" -- hear me out with patience, the one necessary.
Whenever I say anything in my conference, I'm sure that people don't listen to what I have to say. I make a speech and by the end everyone is crowding in to contradict me. Otherwise I'll state my opinion and the entire conference will move on, in effect ignoring me.
These are things that have happened. Now we shall take upon ourselves the unhappy task of finding causes. I am writing this because conferences have been, for me, an always rather unpleasant aspect of the Reed experience and because I think, by publishing my concerns along with my conceits, I will be able to improve myself, and we will all be able to begin thinking rationally about improving (if in no way else than self reform) on an aspect of the Reed experience that should be most beneficial but is often most banal.
Now first, I believe that I have a tendency to ramble in conference, as in writing. When I say ramble, I do not necessarily mean that my "monologues" are lacking in direction. I rather mean that I enjoy expanding my point, polishing it, rounding it, adding in unnecessary examples: I like the feeling of authority that comes from giving a lecture, and also the manner in which various possibilities open themselves up in my mind the longer I talk.
Now someone accused me and I have furthermore more than once been accused by others of making extraneous references to unassigned readings. For example today I compared Prospero to Faustus and claimed that Elizabethan playgoers might have been able to recognize Faustus as a prototype for Prospero in Shakespeare's Tempest.
So the first thing I'd like to say about this is that it is extremely relevant and interesting to me. I anticipate this objection: "Keep those things to yourself if you like them, but we don't care; if you must, save them for later" -- well yes. Ideally I would keep those references to myself. I wouldn't raise my hand (I hope) to make a completely extraneous point, and especially not in order to be merely extraneous. But, on the other hand, these things occur to me in mid-flight, in mid-monologue, as it were, and I can't help but to say them simply because I'm speaking as I think, so what I think tends to be what I say. And furthermore the parallel is never my main point, but always simply something drawn up to support what I'm really getting at in the first place -- though it does fill me with wonder and happiness to have discovered this parallel, and it deepens my interest. Furthermore, I often explain the parallel in such a way that it does not feel to me knowledge of the original is exceedingly crucial. I am alluding to Faustus, but I am not *analyzing* Faustus.
The problem becomes deeper at this point. Because even though I may be able to understand myself that the reference to Faustus is interesting and relevant, I will never be able to prove it to the conference. Furthermore, to others there, I'm already engaged in a long monologue, which is in its way self-indulgent and conceited, so that to add touches like obscure references to works that not everyone in the conference has read seems, in this person's words, truly rude, and not a little conceited.
Do I mean to be rude? Is there some deeper conceit behind my failings? In high-school, I regarded most of the other students in my class as competitors. There was a teacher whom I wanted to engage, who knew the answers to my questions, and the other students didn't appreciate the subject or else had nothing insightful to say. I consistently dominated discussions and it was always my highest desire to grab at the teacher's attention, to get the teacher interested in me, to, on a low level, be recognized for my "brilliance," but on a higher level to engage in a good conversation about the topic with someone who knew it well.
In conference, I maintain the same respect for my professors, but I think my central failing, my tragic flaw, is that I don't have any respect for my fellow students. I'm not interested in their opinions on the subject, because I wonder what opinions they could really have. Now to admit this is to admit to being a misanthrope and a bastard, but please see what I'm trying to do: I'm trying to address a shortcoming in my character and make it understandable, make it clear to myself and others why I would do something low and dishonorable and why the action is wrong but the impulse is good. I believe that I don't truly wish myself harm, and because to make others dislike me is to harm myself, by extension I don't truly wish harm to others. That's the most pragmatic way of putting it, but I like to even think that I don't want to hurt others, that I don't want to lord over them, that I don't want to seek my own advantage at the price of another's pain.
The reason, ultimately, that I think I am deficient in conference is that I am not interested in the conversation. I am not apart of it. Is that a failing in myself? Is that a failing in the others? Is that a failing in the professor? I cannot with any justice blame anyone but myself. But how am I supposed to reconcile my own interests with the interests of a group without somewhat giving them up? And especially when those interests are by nature subjective, being intellectual? How can I be happy about pursuing questions that seem to me dead and unimportant? How can I learn something from answers that don't even engage my questions?
Suppose I read the Tempest, and the thing that really strikes me is that its like Faustus -- and this is my sole interest in the entire play, or rather, the only spark that, for me, keeps it alive. Am I supposed to put my insight away as irrelevant and listen to others make dull analysis that doesn't touch me, that doesn't engage me with the play, that ultimately is meaningless to me? This is not an insignificant problem, and I hope to the dear universe that it is not a problem inspired simply by some heinous and Satan-like conceit on my part -- it is rather the basis of a very important question: how in the world can we learn anything during a conference?
I could briefly expand on this by noting that the impressions I have about a work or an author that are interesting to me are often the most frowned upon things in the context of the class. On Shakespeare, today's discussion began with a question I asked, "What is his style?" The reason I asked this question was because, in my opinion, people in our culture sometimes idolize Shakespeare as a stylistic God and I myself simply don't see it -- I see nothing of genius, though some things very good, but I dislike the very idea of genius when it applies to that man, or any. Now this problem interests me, but it is beyond the scope of the conference. But at the same time, those things which are covered by the conference ("How does The Tempest reflect 18th century ideas of rulership?") I find to be either straightforward or obsolete, and they do not strike at my core, and unless someone can convince me that they are more worthy of discussion than my own questions, I think that to learn about these others is to waste my time on merely "scholastic" pursuits.
Or perhaps I should put it in the meannest and most conceited way possible: if we are a bunch of students who know nothing about the text, how in the world are we supposed to learn anything about it or overcome our ignorance of it if we simply discuss it among ourselves for some four odd hours with a teacher? Tremendous amounts of scholarship, commentary, hover over each and every word we read -- do we dare to think that our efforts to explore the text will dig nearly as deep as the hundreds of brilliant men and women who have been exploring the text for as many years, if not more?
So I submit this paper that is nothing more than damning evidence against myself before you, my inquisitors. I ask that you strike at me with the hottest and truest words you can produce from the very back of your throats. But I also ask that if you strike, please tell me who you are and how you know me. I have taken offense at comments in the past that make me feel reprehensible but give me no sense of the occasion wherein I offended (of which I am often most lamentably ignorant -- our errors, which are most glaring to others, are sometimes least obvious to us) and thus no hope of correction. I damn myself knowing full well that experience tempers our imperfections, and hoping to strike against my own. And may I always be the most bitter and acrimonious witness against myself, so that I am ever in conspiracy against my wicked natures that would themselves confer to overthrow me.
A Love Letter (Posted Mainly to Be Kept):
Hey,
I'm just writing to say goodnight. I dunno...I feel lonely, bad for no reason, now that school's started. Just working all day like I used to to depresses me -- I wish I were back home and reading at my leisure, where it's sunny and the days stretch on and there's nothing to do. But here I am. Work is my companion and solitude my most constant comfort.
I wish I weren't a complicated person and I wish that I didn't get interested in people, because I'm afraid those things will make you not like me and will make you not want anything to do with me, especially since now you're having all these troubles. Perhaps you're disturbed and I can feel the ripples of that disturbance gripping me, tossing me, overtaking me.
So I don't ask for anything, except that in asking for nothing, I ask the only something you can give to me, which is, for me, your all: if I tell you that I like you and I think you're nice and I look forward to seeing you and I enjoy being with you, I hope that this will make you happy because you feel the same way about me and because attraction finds greater joy in the company of mutual affection.
What I mean is this: I miss you and I think about you. I'm afraid feeling this way about people I meet, especially people I know only a little, is some crime and the punishment for that crime is longing and loneliness. But a bud has to push hard against the soil to come out of the winter and into the spring. I like your light.
Alex
Hey,
I'm just writing to say goodnight. I dunno...I feel lonely, bad for no reason, now that school's started. Just working all day like I used to to depresses me -- I wish I were back home and reading at my leisure, where it's sunny and the days stretch on and there's nothing to do. But here I am. Work is my companion and solitude my most constant comfort.
I wish I weren't a complicated person and I wish that I didn't get interested in people, because I'm afraid those things will make you not like me and will make you not want anything to do with me, especially since now you're having all these troubles. Perhaps you're disturbed and I can feel the ripples of that disturbance gripping me, tossing me, overtaking me.
So I don't ask for anything, except that in asking for nothing, I ask the only something you can give to me, which is, for me, your all: if I tell you that I like you and I think you're nice and I look forward to seeing you and I enjoy being with you, I hope that this will make you happy because you feel the same way about me and because attraction finds greater joy in the company of mutual affection.
What I mean is this: I miss you and I think about you. I'm afraid feeling this way about people I meet, especially people I know only a little, is some crime and the punishment for that crime is longing and loneliness. But a bud has to push hard against the soil to come out of the winter and into the spring. I like your light.
Alex
Thursday, January 22, 2004
(We sit down at the booth. A rather dark corner. Only a slight flickering candle on the table and some atrocious painting of a large Italian woman holding a loaf of bread on the wall, but wonderful because everything about it is painted black, rich brown, red; earth tones -- bread tones -- a hideous subject, but a stunning piece of work, like VanGhogh's potato eaters. The waiter hasn't come, the little candle flickers. I'm staring into it because I'm trying to avoid your eyes. I fiddle with my watch, my napkin, balance my spoon in my hand, feel the weight of gravity pressing down. Anything to avoid you.)
You (Looking up suddenly, after your own long silence): Listen, I think we should talk.
Me (Still fiddling with my napkin, looking down): Yeah.
You (Leaning forward, taking my hand): Look at me.
(Hesitantly I look up. I catch the blue of your eyes. It's like looking out at the ocean, with sunset. We stayed up late last night and there were tears, so your eyes are red-rimmed).
You: Now the things you did and said last night were inappropriate. You had no right to say half of them. You don't really know how the world works -- you barely know yourself and I can see that you're struggling. You're like a spider hanging by a thread in the wind -- it's strong material, tougher than silk and more elegant, but it's still a single thread. But I'm worried about your conceits: you live in your own place, you refuse to educate yourself, you're really very ignorant, but you think you have the right to pass judgement on people and on things, and you pass some terrible judgements.
Last night, you saw something beautiful and you clutched at it and you grabbed it, but it slipped out of your fingers, fell on the floor, shattered. Don't mourn the loss. After all, doesn't Epictetus say that if you love a jug, when it breaks you should love it even more, recognizing its nature and transient shape, form? You really need to think about the things you read and start figuring out how to apply them to your life. Now as for the things that you say on this journal: you can't just spill your guts out here. You have to be honest, but part of honesty is being fair -- if you write about how you hate everyone and how you want to be left alone, then everyone will hate you and abandon you at worst, and at best they'll look at you and they'll pity you. And you know what? I love you. You aren't pitiable -- you're absolutely beautiful. You're one of the most beautiful creatures I've known in the world. I don't mean that you're some kind of rare bird either, but I mean that everything I see, even things patched and torn, even broken grass stubble clutching out of the dirt, even the trees swaying in the midnight fog and the weeping willow on woodstock, sobbing night leaves in the mist -- each moment is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. When I hold my love in my arms, even if I see nothing in his face, I see his eyes and I look into him.
(You hold up your hand when I protest) Now I know you don't have a lover. And I know you're rather bitter. But someone once said that before you can love others you have to love yourself. I think, though, that you really love yourself too much. You need to start working on loving others -- on really loving others. And things. And places. If you don't wake up in the morning and think how beautiful it is to be alive, then no one is going to make the world beautiful for you. You are going to be alone and frail, perched on a rock, looking down from a pitiful height at the cold, dark depths of your soul. Put your energy and love into the world, let the world be your lover, and lovers will come. Lovers will throng from all corners of the sky, from the four edges of the ocean, from the future, from the present, from the past. Suddenly the world will ignite in the fire of love and everything will be light and a glut of colors spilling over like something bubbling and rich on the stove, like a hot vanilla pudding. Doesn't Plato say, after all, that the love of others is only a prelude to the love of the divine? And according to Spinoza, isn't the love of the divine simply the love of the world? And isn't the love of the world the love of life? Then life will be love, and love will be divine, and divinity will fill the whole world, and the world will fill with love. Life will be sweet.
You said last night that you don't have the power to redeem the suffering of others, but you don't realize how much power you have to redeem your own suffering. And if you make even yourself happy while you walk in the busy streets and stare up at the tall clutching sky-scrapers, haven't you illuminated at least your part of the world? Redeem yourself and you'll redeem others; in short, imitate Christ.
*
Dedicated to you, and with all apologies for last night.
You (Looking up suddenly, after your own long silence): Listen, I think we should talk.
Me (Still fiddling with my napkin, looking down): Yeah.
You (Leaning forward, taking my hand): Look at me.
(Hesitantly I look up. I catch the blue of your eyes. It's like looking out at the ocean, with sunset. We stayed up late last night and there were tears, so your eyes are red-rimmed).
You: Now the things you did and said last night were inappropriate. You had no right to say half of them. You don't really know how the world works -- you barely know yourself and I can see that you're struggling. You're like a spider hanging by a thread in the wind -- it's strong material, tougher than silk and more elegant, but it's still a single thread. But I'm worried about your conceits: you live in your own place, you refuse to educate yourself, you're really very ignorant, but you think you have the right to pass judgement on people and on things, and you pass some terrible judgements.
Last night, you saw something beautiful and you clutched at it and you grabbed it, but it slipped out of your fingers, fell on the floor, shattered. Don't mourn the loss. After all, doesn't Epictetus say that if you love a jug, when it breaks you should love it even more, recognizing its nature and transient shape, form? You really need to think about the things you read and start figuring out how to apply them to your life. Now as for the things that you say on this journal: you can't just spill your guts out here. You have to be honest, but part of honesty is being fair -- if you write about how you hate everyone and how you want to be left alone, then everyone will hate you and abandon you at worst, and at best they'll look at you and they'll pity you. And you know what? I love you. You aren't pitiable -- you're absolutely beautiful. You're one of the most beautiful creatures I've known in the world. I don't mean that you're some kind of rare bird either, but I mean that everything I see, even things patched and torn, even broken grass stubble clutching out of the dirt, even the trees swaying in the midnight fog and the weeping willow on woodstock, sobbing night leaves in the mist -- each moment is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. When I hold my love in my arms, even if I see nothing in his face, I see his eyes and I look into him.
(You hold up your hand when I protest) Now I know you don't have a lover. And I know you're rather bitter. But someone once said that before you can love others you have to love yourself. I think, though, that you really love yourself too much. You need to start working on loving others -- on really loving others. And things. And places. If you don't wake up in the morning and think how beautiful it is to be alive, then no one is going to make the world beautiful for you. You are going to be alone and frail, perched on a rock, looking down from a pitiful height at the cold, dark depths of your soul. Put your energy and love into the world, let the world be your lover, and lovers will come. Lovers will throng from all corners of the sky, from the four edges of the ocean, from the future, from the present, from the past. Suddenly the world will ignite in the fire of love and everything will be light and a glut of colors spilling over like something bubbling and rich on the stove, like a hot vanilla pudding. Doesn't Plato say, after all, that the love of others is only a prelude to the love of the divine? And according to Spinoza, isn't the love of the divine simply the love of the world? And isn't the love of the world the love of life? Then life will be love, and love will be divine, and divinity will fill the whole world, and the world will fill with love. Life will be sweet.
You said last night that you don't have the power to redeem the suffering of others, but you don't realize how much power you have to redeem your own suffering. And if you make even yourself happy while you walk in the busy streets and stare up at the tall clutching sky-scrapers, haven't you illuminated at least your part of the world? Redeem yourself and you'll redeem others; in short, imitate Christ.
*
Dedicated to you, and with all apologies for last night.
How could I fucking do that? How? I'm numb. I'm like a wall of ice. I'm shattered, I'm hard, I'm slick glass and I'm either broken or whole and unfeeling. How could I do that? Fucking A!
I did it again. I asked someone out and he didn't like me. Because they never do, because that's the way it goes. This is not out of self pity. This is fact -- scientific evidence observed from experience. Of course I can't expect you to sympathize, my audience -- to you I'm that eccentric guy who writes, in my delirium, antiquated prose worth nothing more than ridicule. I myself am an object of curiosity and ridicule -- worth a wise-crack comment on the board sometimes, sent anonymously, occassionally hurtful but more often just obscure enough so that I'm not in on the joke. And what is the joke?
My life! My life is the joke! The fact that I have asked out at least three or four people this semester, all in my bumbling, graceless, awkward way, and all of them have rejected me. Just like the girls. I'm not attractive at all. Maybe physically, I'm worth a fuck. At least more than most people. Well the hell if that doesn't change. Someday I'll be old and fat and ugly, and then I'll have nothing except my brain. My fat, voluptuous, fucking brain. My brain is overweight -- I need to go on a mental diet. All this lounging, reading, I didn't know I wasn't making my brain fit at all, I've been gorging it. I hate myself! I hate myself! I hate myself!
Why do I ask out people that don't like me? Because NO ONE, NO ONE, fucking ever no one asks me out. And you know why? Because I'm completely unattractive. I'm an object worthy only of pity (and an occasional fuck -- unsatisfying because I never have sex with anyone...I'm then in that case one of those pretty boys who just looks beautiful and is a bad fuck). I'm that man you see in the movie who has the curiously obtuse face, very angular, granite-like features, and he's a complete jerk through the movie. Then, suddenly, he has this moment of truth with the young and attractive hero who's on his way up in the world. And the young attractive hero extracts from him feelings of pain and worthlessness. The audience zooms into his stony face and we see a tear trickling down his cheek, a tear as lonely and singular on the roughness of his face as he is sitting perched on this rock we call Earth. And then we feel for him. We pity him. Now mind, we don't particularly like him. We still don't want to hold his hand or become apart of his life in any significant way. In effect, we've murdered him, because he's surrendured his cold facade but he is unwilling to join the whole world; his worldview simply has been exposed for what it is -- something insignificant and obsolete.
"Why don't you come into the world of the living?" "Because I don't want to be weak like you!" And I don't. I want to write my great prose and poetry and be a fucking immortal and leave you all in the dust. This is the truth: I hate you all because all of you hate me. Because none of you will have me. Because none of you will want me. Because I'm like that Victorian kid looking in the window at the sweet-shop, and it's cold and no one will let him in. Or you know when someone is socially awkward or you see a beggar and you feel sorry for him but you don't want to particularly sacrifice what you've got going to help him? Well that's me too.
If I could only reach out and touch someone...in whatever fucking way you well please. But I can't. I'm here alone in my little glass tower. All alone.
And don't worry. I'm not fucking going anywhere.
And if you're going to say, "I really pity you for the way you see things," then save your breath. I'm doing enough pitying for the both of us. Although it's strange. I feel right now kind've in that state of shock -- you know, when you feel as if you hardly even exist and you're surprised that your life isn't a dream.
I did it again. I asked someone out and he didn't like me. Because they never do, because that's the way it goes. This is not out of self pity. This is fact -- scientific evidence observed from experience. Of course I can't expect you to sympathize, my audience -- to you I'm that eccentric guy who writes, in my delirium, antiquated prose worth nothing more than ridicule. I myself am an object of curiosity and ridicule -- worth a wise-crack comment on the board sometimes, sent anonymously, occassionally hurtful but more often just obscure enough so that I'm not in on the joke. And what is the joke?
My life! My life is the joke! The fact that I have asked out at least three or four people this semester, all in my bumbling, graceless, awkward way, and all of them have rejected me. Just like the girls. I'm not attractive at all. Maybe physically, I'm worth a fuck. At least more than most people. Well the hell if that doesn't change. Someday I'll be old and fat and ugly, and then I'll have nothing except my brain. My fat, voluptuous, fucking brain. My brain is overweight -- I need to go on a mental diet. All this lounging, reading, I didn't know I wasn't making my brain fit at all, I've been gorging it. I hate myself! I hate myself! I hate myself!
Why do I ask out people that don't like me? Because NO ONE, NO ONE, fucking ever no one asks me out. And you know why? Because I'm completely unattractive. I'm an object worthy only of pity (and an occasional fuck -- unsatisfying because I never have sex with anyone...I'm then in that case one of those pretty boys who just looks beautiful and is a bad fuck). I'm that man you see in the movie who has the curiously obtuse face, very angular, granite-like features, and he's a complete jerk through the movie. Then, suddenly, he has this moment of truth with the young and attractive hero who's on his way up in the world. And the young attractive hero extracts from him feelings of pain and worthlessness. The audience zooms into his stony face and we see a tear trickling down his cheek, a tear as lonely and singular on the roughness of his face as he is sitting perched on this rock we call Earth. And then we feel for him. We pity him. Now mind, we don't particularly like him. We still don't want to hold his hand or become apart of his life in any significant way. In effect, we've murdered him, because he's surrendured his cold facade but he is unwilling to join the whole world; his worldview simply has been exposed for what it is -- something insignificant and obsolete.
"Why don't you come into the world of the living?" "Because I don't want to be weak like you!" And I don't. I want to write my great prose and poetry and be a fucking immortal and leave you all in the dust. This is the truth: I hate you all because all of you hate me. Because none of you will have me. Because none of you will want me. Because I'm like that Victorian kid looking in the window at the sweet-shop, and it's cold and no one will let him in. Or you know when someone is socially awkward or you see a beggar and you feel sorry for him but you don't want to particularly sacrifice what you've got going to help him? Well that's me too.
If I could only reach out and touch someone...in whatever fucking way you well please. But I can't. I'm here alone in my little glass tower. All alone.
And don't worry. I'm not fucking going anywhere.
And if you're going to say, "I really pity you for the way you see things," then save your breath. I'm doing enough pitying for the both of us. Although it's strange. I feel right now kind've in that state of shock -- you know, when you feel as if you hardly even exist and you're surprised that your life isn't a dream.
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
I would like to give my critics some space, perhaps a half of an hour or an hour, of my valuable time (valuable because each moment is after it burns out extinct, is perishing, is effusion of heat like the icy, distant stars). Now I would like to have those utterances of theirs in front of us, so that we can see them, so that we can inspect them. They will be first like exhibits at an art galery (and very fine sculpted icicles) and then we will chisel our own meaning into their thoughts. So I produce them unadorned in this gaudy, gilded little room (you're quite cramped, I'm sure, and it's difficult to breathe -- when you entered the ceiling was an overhang a bit too low, scraping your scalp, skinning the nape of your neck in rough granite, harsh):
"It's amazing how vapid you are in person"
(on a little plum velvet cushion, resting like a diamond, a small little gold in ornamental ring the kind you put on your lover's finger if you ask her to wed -- the diamond catches the light, and sparkles ruby-red).
Now I shiver and shake. Now my fingers are not steady producers of words. Now an agony of shivers through me and out of me, but I was practicing the flute and I can assure you it made the notes shake in a most admirable canter. But we must steal ourselves, even as these words steal us away, and like Catullus, obdure. The next:
(Presented on a magnificent canopy, with very plush cushions and a drab of silk draped over the luxurious commode, with patterns of Japanese symbols and a woman with black hair extending into a billiard ball and slit eyes like a snake very attentively fixed on her dressing, which is itself flowing like a waterfall flows into a river I mean out into the silk expanse; lying on all this, reclining you might say, on the commodious oriental recliner, like a woman at her ease, of delicate fingers holding perhaps a tinted and sparkling glass of wine, a now really pudging from her pouty lips, like a perhaps aging hollywood matron, or a guest on I Love Lucy, this voluptuous phrase)
"An inability to say something obvious hovers over everything you say -- or possibly the even greater inability to say nothing at all".
Now it is Confucius, who pulls my cheeks and flounder-faced turns me to him (holding in long claws) and I like sushi, "Silence!" hisses (though this is uncooked meat).
So these commodious things in the little room with fauns dancing frescoed o'er the walls almost bulge out of it like post-modern architectural angles and perhaps we can see also above the dancing fawns, in Greek engraving, racing lutes and horns, the jealous faces of disapproving and spurned lovers. First Nabokov speaks,
"In my early days, in the prodigious beginnings of youth, I too would write scribblings, and honestly I can hardly blame him, for style is the least graceful of genius' attendants, and if the parade comes early, then she is late, but if she does not attend them, then they attend not her and she walks alone like a nimble whore and a wretch."
James Joyce, gibbering as always,
"Well I encourage the lad. Forge in the smithy of my soul and all that. He is a priest of the imagination: he is lighting the way to the avid debaucheries of his mature years. And if he is spurned then I will retire to France to make my life into literature, and he is well on his way."
(And did you notice the composition of that? Invent something until it came with God).
Now Moses never has anything appreciative to say, but perhaps it is because he was recently moved and sits in a dark and unappreciated corner of the room, and he has not a very good view of the pasty, glimmering gem or the symposium in a stool (and is it stool?).
Plato, however, is very angry, and his light makes shadows flicker through the dark room -- and in these lengthening and decreasing shadows (as happens with a glare) the fawns turn and almost seem to dance and strut about the facade, their grins seem almost wickedness and some impish cruelty. We needn't record what he says, for he won't deign to speak in jambs of any kind.
There is, however, a type-setter who is very pleased (perhaps it is Guttenberg, his picture more ordered than needed, and hardly placed with care). Now Guttenberg says, "Of cliches, I have had no more avid customer or consumer. So many lovely little pastel words he lays that it keeps me lock, stock, and barrel tied within my richest home. The more words, the more print, the more print, the more silver -- so let him emboss his speech with cheaply gold.
Does Shakespeare have anything to say? No. He is aware how much I hate him (although Harold Bloom, with a sly look, already came traipsing 'round here and pronounced a verdict, and it was a piece of work).
So shall we allow these dumb displays to speak? Shall these mute interlocutors talk? This would require something of sustained philosophy, for which I haven't breath, but on a few points I will try to pick the lock, unbar this granite block that keeps me from the clear air.
Reader: Well what I want when I read is something I can sink my teeth into, something tasty, something dripping like a steak; juicy with exotic spices and delectable, but palatable and nutritious.
I: I love fromage, and I love all the fixings, dresses -- I love spice, I like the smell of nard; every fragrance I encounter I'll mix with my food -- and even shit if it provides something of the right texture and the correct feel.
Reader: I have no joy for dainty dishes, and I'm no gourmet. Give me something hot off the ladle, filling and appeasing, satisfying; give me a strong and hearty gruel.
I: How can I? How can I resist serving up in a fine silver ladel the finest allusions?
Reader: Now seriously. I would not talk like this. You have something obvious to say, and it's your life. So say that. Now see how much we professed to enjoy it when you talked about sex. Are you going to string us along on your blind song for much longer? What cannot be spoken of we must pass over in silence.
I am mute and dumb at these reproofs. I can only say that I tried, in the ecstasy of a moment, to express -- with whatever words came handy. Oh there was nothing of Machiavell in that, and no philosophy. But my words are like pearls, precious pearls of my twilights taken from an overburdened chest. I like each of them no matter how long the glittering string, and I can't bear to be parted from them. In truth it bores and saddens me so that I have no satisfaction and I lie bleeding in the mess.
White attendants! Pale ghosts take me on the monstrous couch and lie me down, give me the precious gem and set it on my crown, so that in the spirit of my past, and my profaners' clasp, I may sigh and breathe my last breath, filled with the inutterable exhaust of all these myriad perfumes.
Now virtue has something to say:
Alex Leibowitz, I take my leave of you. Your back was made for the whip and the scourge. If you continue to speak this way, you'll end up a babbling fool like Joyce over there, like an itinerant player full of sound and fury but locked up in his own madness for whom all profess pity but none express love. Do you see that man behind me? He's Dante, the height to which that one aspired, and he failed to tower high enough. If I slap you in the face 'til tears pour from your eyes as if you were seething in a chamber of your own stinking sweat -- and if I kicked you so you recoiled in the stomach and rolled into yourself like a bloom imploded by the gravity of a sudden brush -- it would not be enough, and let alone caresses, is more than you deserve.
However, as for them -- never pay them heed or mind. It is most un-Christ like to dictate others' speech, and what they speak they speak in jest, or otherwise surely they would have submitted even their blessed names to the test of your approval: for fools and cowards leave neither thought, nor name, nor trace. And I have seen it often on these forums and I do not most approve at all, that those delectable beings who record and leave some fleeting residue of their lives are yet besieged by the calumnies not of time but of these haphazard scrawls and gestures as inappropriate as the graffiti on the thesis tower bathroom's walls. So fie on you all, wretches! Hear the crack of the whip! Leave your name, your number, and your address and we'll see what comes of it! We'll see, we'll see it all; say something as ferocious as it can be, but kind, and saperpouille to you! S'blood and saperpouille!
"It's amazing how vapid you are in person"
(on a little plum velvet cushion, resting like a diamond, a small little gold in ornamental ring the kind you put on your lover's finger if you ask her to wed -- the diamond catches the light, and sparkles ruby-red).
Now I shiver and shake. Now my fingers are not steady producers of words. Now an agony of shivers through me and out of me, but I was practicing the flute and I can assure you it made the notes shake in a most admirable canter. But we must steal ourselves, even as these words steal us away, and like Catullus, obdure. The next:
(Presented on a magnificent canopy, with very plush cushions and a drab of silk draped over the luxurious commode, with patterns of Japanese symbols and a woman with black hair extending into a billiard ball and slit eyes like a snake very attentively fixed on her dressing, which is itself flowing like a waterfall flows into a river I mean out into the silk expanse; lying on all this, reclining you might say, on the commodious oriental recliner, like a woman at her ease, of delicate fingers holding perhaps a tinted and sparkling glass of wine, a now really pudging from her pouty lips, like a perhaps aging hollywood matron, or a guest on I Love Lucy, this voluptuous phrase)
"An inability to say something obvious hovers over everything you say -- or possibly the even greater inability to say nothing at all".
Now it is Confucius, who pulls my cheeks and flounder-faced turns me to him (holding in long claws) and I like sushi, "Silence!" hisses (though this is uncooked meat).
So these commodious things in the little room with fauns dancing frescoed o'er the walls almost bulge out of it like post-modern architectural angles and perhaps we can see also above the dancing fawns, in Greek engraving, racing lutes and horns, the jealous faces of disapproving and spurned lovers. First Nabokov speaks,
"In my early days, in the prodigious beginnings of youth, I too would write scribblings, and honestly I can hardly blame him, for style is the least graceful of genius' attendants, and if the parade comes early, then she is late, but if she does not attend them, then they attend not her and she walks alone like a nimble whore and a wretch."
James Joyce, gibbering as always,
"Well I encourage the lad. Forge in the smithy of my soul and all that. He is a priest of the imagination: he is lighting the way to the avid debaucheries of his mature years. And if he is spurned then I will retire to France to make my life into literature, and he is well on his way."
(And did you notice the composition of that? Invent something until it came with God).
Now Moses never has anything appreciative to say, but perhaps it is because he was recently moved and sits in a dark and unappreciated corner of the room, and he has not a very good view of the pasty, glimmering gem or the symposium in a stool (and is it stool?).
Plato, however, is very angry, and his light makes shadows flicker through the dark room -- and in these lengthening and decreasing shadows (as happens with a glare) the fawns turn and almost seem to dance and strut about the facade, their grins seem almost wickedness and some impish cruelty. We needn't record what he says, for he won't deign to speak in jambs of any kind.
There is, however, a type-setter who is very pleased (perhaps it is Guttenberg, his picture more ordered than needed, and hardly placed with care). Now Guttenberg says, "Of cliches, I have had no more avid customer or consumer. So many lovely little pastel words he lays that it keeps me lock, stock, and barrel tied within my richest home. The more words, the more print, the more print, the more silver -- so let him emboss his speech with cheaply gold.
Does Shakespeare have anything to say? No. He is aware how much I hate him (although Harold Bloom, with a sly look, already came traipsing 'round here and pronounced a verdict, and it was a piece of work).
So shall we allow these dumb displays to speak? Shall these mute interlocutors talk? This would require something of sustained philosophy, for which I haven't breath, but on a few points I will try to pick the lock, unbar this granite block that keeps me from the clear air.
Reader: Well what I want when I read is something I can sink my teeth into, something tasty, something dripping like a steak; juicy with exotic spices and delectable, but palatable and nutritious.
I: I love fromage, and I love all the fixings, dresses -- I love spice, I like the smell of nard; every fragrance I encounter I'll mix with my food -- and even shit if it provides something of the right texture and the correct feel.
Reader: I have no joy for dainty dishes, and I'm no gourmet. Give me something hot off the ladle, filling and appeasing, satisfying; give me a strong and hearty gruel.
I: How can I? How can I resist serving up in a fine silver ladel the finest allusions?
Reader: Now seriously. I would not talk like this. You have something obvious to say, and it's your life. So say that. Now see how much we professed to enjoy it when you talked about sex. Are you going to string us along on your blind song for much longer? What cannot be spoken of we must pass over in silence.
I am mute and dumb at these reproofs. I can only say that I tried, in the ecstasy of a moment, to express -- with whatever words came handy. Oh there was nothing of Machiavell in that, and no philosophy. But my words are like pearls, precious pearls of my twilights taken from an overburdened chest. I like each of them no matter how long the glittering string, and I can't bear to be parted from them. In truth it bores and saddens me so that I have no satisfaction and I lie bleeding in the mess.
White attendants! Pale ghosts take me on the monstrous couch and lie me down, give me the precious gem and set it on my crown, so that in the spirit of my past, and my profaners' clasp, I may sigh and breathe my last breath, filled with the inutterable exhaust of all these myriad perfumes.
Now virtue has something to say:
Alex Leibowitz, I take my leave of you. Your back was made for the whip and the scourge. If you continue to speak this way, you'll end up a babbling fool like Joyce over there, like an itinerant player full of sound and fury but locked up in his own madness for whom all profess pity but none express love. Do you see that man behind me? He's Dante, the height to which that one aspired, and he failed to tower high enough. If I slap you in the face 'til tears pour from your eyes as if you were seething in a chamber of your own stinking sweat -- and if I kicked you so you recoiled in the stomach and rolled into yourself like a bloom imploded by the gravity of a sudden brush -- it would not be enough, and let alone caresses, is more than you deserve.
However, as for them -- never pay them heed or mind. It is most un-Christ like to dictate others' speech, and what they speak they speak in jest, or otherwise surely they would have submitted even their blessed names to the test of your approval: for fools and cowards leave neither thought, nor name, nor trace. And I have seen it often on these forums and I do not most approve at all, that those delectable beings who record and leave some fleeting residue of their lives are yet besieged by the calumnies not of time but of these haphazard scrawls and gestures as inappropriate as the graffiti on the thesis tower bathroom's walls. So fie on you all, wretches! Hear the crack of the whip! Leave your name, your number, and your address and we'll see what comes of it! We'll see, we'll see it all; say something as ferocious as it can be, but kind, and saperpouille to you! S'blood and saperpouille!
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
I hate poetry. What I want is a man. Everyone of them I see, be they blue eyes (very deep and luminous, like the sun glinting off of a lake) or straw brown hair (farms) and strong muscles (mountains?) below. Legs pushing and throbbing, the force I can feel if I only push myself into it, and the glint in the eyes, hungry (I am something succulent, devour me). I can't describe him because I have not seen him. Is he in the sky? Or below the earth? He is you that I saw today, though I didn't dare to admit. He is the moment of change. He's the dark-eyed one I've seen before walking between buildings between classes between words and I wanted myself to throw him right there down on the ground and bring him ecstasy (the shock force of an explosion, you didn't know you were hit, it happens when you least expect it) -- but I was planning. I was planning slinking in the corners. I was planning poised on the top of the rock (and I could feel the rough bits between my feet). You see, I was planning it when I made the sky -- especially for you, all fiery bits of red. It was the hot Calvin Klein model with the rippling abdomen and the pecs (pectorals -- almost like a bird, pteradactyl, and don't pronounce the P -- what we call a little sexy meta-narrative) and he had a lost look in his eyes. He was an Italian and he came from Italy and he wrote poetry in his free time and fucked men, lifting their legs high up into the air and making them moan and squirm with a nubile glea (or nuptials? It comes from new, the new life, the new and clinging fragrance, the) he had a long, arching face like a mountain or an eagle and spectacles perched fiery and brooding over their nest, eggs, the rock of his mind (the rock of his balls, deep spuming with seed), something deep in him that poured out fierce in the pen (so that it was graft, a very particular passage from Edmund White, something stolen from the heart of me into a cerebral ecstasy of sound -- first genius). And I lay myself down to him. And I was soft, like falling feathers. And I was vulnerable. And I was high on the cliff. And the wind was cold.
You, reading this, I don't want you. You're ugly. I won't have it. It's over.
But I will whisper to you sweetly in your air when you're not looking or hearing, and then I'll dream over you. What dreams will I make? Little whispy and not very philosophical clouds that aren't responsible and don't take into account cause or effect or reasoning from induction. It won't be very scholarly -- it will be written in pastels. The pastels will be nice, but a little bit gay -- a little bit like men taking it up in the ass, and it will not bring to mind an image of Erasmian responsibility (but of course, reading this, you're thinking -- post-modern bullshit. Now who influenced it? Well it wasn't John Donne...no, her name was Anne, and she was a friend of Ginsberg's, and we all know that Ginsberg fucked his share of men -- and quite a few of them in all probability had fleas, though according to Hume that's no satiable reality -- but let me tell you, mmmhmmm, those men were sated. Have you ever read "Howl"? It's like being fucked).
Of course it's quite lewd and offensive and not in the least bit organized. There will be little shells and strings of pearls and eggs; it will be something fragile and experiential like a vase experimental made of smooth blue glass, tall and cubic rectangular, on display on a white pedestal in a galery in New Mexico. And when you see it you'll think of color combinations and not love or ecstasy -- my love or ecstasy was the hot fire shaping the glass: the crass desire for ass. The vase bursts; I'll admit, I made it so I could shatter it. Desire leaks and lust burns. I saw two men go up the stairs, followed them like Rimbaud with my eyes, undressed them with my eyes. Undoubtedly going to FUCK in the thesis tower.
It was the inappropriate exculpation of an age. Unfit for the eyes of small children. These children on the edge of age, these small, these unprofitable beings. Don't know love. I don't. I cling to the edge of the cliff and it is a very long way down, things are small and outlined blue and white and little specks of green (not blue big blue of eyes and endless fields of straw) so I won't jump. Take me, I am fleet like a wind moving through the cold of night, and if you touch me so warm and small and fragile like an eaglet (with a sharp beak and talon claws). But hold my warm body. I can feel you rising to meet me as I fall (in love, two type-pieces held together in print by the heat an ejaculation).
You, reading this, I don't want you. You're ugly. I won't have it. It's over.
But I will whisper to you sweetly in your air when you're not looking or hearing, and then I'll dream over you. What dreams will I make? Little whispy and not very philosophical clouds that aren't responsible and don't take into account cause or effect or reasoning from induction. It won't be very scholarly -- it will be written in pastels. The pastels will be nice, but a little bit gay -- a little bit like men taking it up in the ass, and it will not bring to mind an image of Erasmian responsibility (but of course, reading this, you're thinking -- post-modern bullshit. Now who influenced it? Well it wasn't John Donne...no, her name was Anne, and she was a friend of Ginsberg's, and we all know that Ginsberg fucked his share of men -- and quite a few of them in all probability had fleas, though according to Hume that's no satiable reality -- but let me tell you, mmmhmmm, those men were sated. Have you ever read "Howl"? It's like being fucked).
Of course it's quite lewd and offensive and not in the least bit organized. There will be little shells and strings of pearls and eggs; it will be something fragile and experiential like a vase experimental made of smooth blue glass, tall and cubic rectangular, on display on a white pedestal in a galery in New Mexico. And when you see it you'll think of color combinations and not love or ecstasy -- my love or ecstasy was the hot fire shaping the glass: the crass desire for ass. The vase bursts; I'll admit, I made it so I could shatter it. Desire leaks and lust burns. I saw two men go up the stairs, followed them like Rimbaud with my eyes, undressed them with my eyes. Undoubtedly going to FUCK in the thesis tower.
It was the inappropriate exculpation of an age. Unfit for the eyes of small children. These children on the edge of age, these small, these unprofitable beings. Don't know love. I don't. I cling to the edge of the cliff and it is a very long way down, things are small and outlined blue and white and little specks of green (not blue big blue of eyes and endless fields of straw) so I won't jump. Take me, I am fleet like a wind moving through the cold of night, and if you touch me so warm and small and fragile like an eaglet (with a sharp beak and talon claws). But hold my warm body. I can feel you rising to meet me as I fall (in love, two type-pieces held together in print by the heat an ejaculation).
Sunday, January 18, 2004
The master Zheng Lee said
I was sitting on the shore of the river
Hunan, watching the decked wrecks
Of broken wood float by. Where is the blue
Sky, stretching tower over the ancient altars, the sacred pyramids?
The goddess heard me and spoke with her red burning lips:
The convoy of ships has failed – spices, musk; fine nard and incense
Will not reach their destination – A hand will not caress
The lovely hips; her hair will not flow silver
Like a mist and fall to the ground when she unbraids the clips –
Like a waterfall he will cry; she will stand in darkness by the side
And near the tumult of a roar will be (the moans and sobs)
– For Mheng Kai has died – that luminous captain
Whose lips are very like granite, and whose eyes
Blaze like the light in snowy skies:
He hears storms, he thunders breath, he sees
All manner of panthers and jackals devouring his corpse:
The yellow limbs (and fingers broken off), the chest
Ripped and green with dew and blood, by the trees
Hung thick with foliage, and heavy with the mossy tips
Of fungus and the red mist – it blazes
Like the lovers’ ruddy eyes and the goddess’ burning lips
Of sunset where the sailor lies.
But I think Lheng Zhee concluded in the dying light
That his shadow still flickers a ghostly blue
In the purple fire of the night.
I was sitting on the shore of the river
Hunan, watching the decked wrecks
Of broken wood float by. Where is the blue
Sky, stretching tower over the ancient altars, the sacred pyramids?
The goddess heard me and spoke with her red burning lips:
The convoy of ships has failed – spices, musk; fine nard and incense
Will not reach their destination – A hand will not caress
The lovely hips; her hair will not flow silver
Like a mist and fall to the ground when she unbraids the clips –
Like a waterfall he will cry; she will stand in darkness by the side
And near the tumult of a roar will be (the moans and sobs)
– For Mheng Kai has died – that luminous captain
Whose lips are very like granite, and whose eyes
Blaze like the light in snowy skies:
He hears storms, he thunders breath, he sees
All manner of panthers and jackals devouring his corpse:
The yellow limbs (and fingers broken off), the chest
Ripped and green with dew and blood, by the trees
Hung thick with foliage, and heavy with the mossy tips
Of fungus and the red mist – it blazes
Like the lovers’ ruddy eyes and the goddess’ burning lips
Of sunset where the sailor lies.
But I think Lheng Zhee concluded in the dying light
That his shadow still flickers a ghostly blue
In the purple fire of the night.
Thursday, January 15, 2004
A new prose occurs to me: it is sublimate and rich, dripping dark with chocolate; it is the black or all good texture and taste (curve in my mouth, slip in the lips) of chocolate -- I mean the slip for the turn, the sharp function of hands, the good movement of making with a spatula -- cooking, mixing, butter, batter (that slightly bitter sound that comes, undoubtedly from rhyme). Rich like this I write, with plenty of sharp and wholesome sounds -- but not just sound, or the repetitions thereof, or the piling up of inadequate and useless words (to the task, I must say, rescued from obscurity by a generous philology); characters -- the flow of experience like a river, lying on the silt and gazing out towards the ocean. By the ocean I symbolize eternity, the ripe edge of experience, the rotting slip of a decadent darkness. I will be all places and transcend time: I the narrator, like Dante. Because I intend to personify, to bring back this instant that oft-criticized, the allegory; my ideas I will bear to life. If I make a mistake, Virtue will reprove me (cast in a white veil with the pallor of mourning) -- if a reader is discontent, I will bring the reader to my prose, into the class-room of my own creation, and in a battle of wills I will dominate, and then be whipped for my presumption by the aspersions of Wisdom. Towering wisdom will become a goddess, a goddess to worship at the altar; and yet my poetry will flow into my prose; a thousand eddies, whirls, rips, streams, tides -- words piling into life and life piling into words: this is the silt and this is the sand, the fiat lux of my creation. By making my own dispersions and wanderings into a character, by typologizing to follow Dante -- and I will follow Dante. Bring him to my prose. Make him speak, with Virgil as a guide. Ah, of such great horizons is the human mind, casting over the shore like a sea-gull, the shadow and the sharp beak, master of all that it surveys (and yet a little white blip, fading into that vast blue sky, the canvas of my own making -- Vincent VanGhogh, sun-flowing and sharp twisting trees)!
Taken Extempore (With Chai)
A cup of caffeine will do that to you. Already I feel it surging through my veins, the exhiliration -- already the liquid transforms and arcs into art. Like a waterfall, like rapid waters, like the gurgling roar of a stream; a square becomes a circle and transforms rapidly into a triangle, a diamond of piercing light. Piercing light spreading on things -- things of vision -- the blue of the sky, the white of the piercing peaks; as if it were a thread or cloth. I cannot stop; words fall into rhythm, rhythm beats with the harmony of sound, and everything comes so trippingly off the tongue, the tongue partakes of that joy that only taste or the strain of exercise on the harsh weakness of muscles engenders. Speech engenders speech, and sound flows like a river out of time to eternity in an instant, and paradise in an hour.
If I could write things meaning words that captured the instance of an experience, I would struggle at it, but everything I write is sound. So I sit and I listen and I quite admire it; I admire it to the exclusion of meaning, I admire it to the level of golden calves, or the levelling of gold to produce golden calves in the heat of the desert sun. Stern men frown -- at least one, Confucius, with a long black mustache dripping over the sides of his mouth and a scruff beard, dragon-eyes (Chinese, the one that rides at new year's) would accuse me, his wagging finger not unabetted by the wagging of another finger stetching across time, a Confuciust scholar prone to opinion and taken cum commento. Gripping with harsh, pointing painful nails (perhaps like a scarlet lady?) he would turn my head from the spit-flecked, well-flexed, torquing and combobulating, harsh and masculine declamation of some Cicero and make me see the long, tall trees, bamboo stretching upwards to Heaven.
A cup of caffeine will do that to you. Already I feel it surging through my veins, the exhiliration -- already the liquid transforms and arcs into art. Like a waterfall, like rapid waters, like the gurgling roar of a stream; a square becomes a circle and transforms rapidly into a triangle, a diamond of piercing light. Piercing light spreading on things -- things of vision -- the blue of the sky, the white of the piercing peaks; as if it were a thread or cloth. I cannot stop; words fall into rhythm, rhythm beats with the harmony of sound, and everything comes so trippingly off the tongue, the tongue partakes of that joy that only taste or the strain of exercise on the harsh weakness of muscles engenders. Speech engenders speech, and sound flows like a river out of time to eternity in an instant, and paradise in an hour.
If I could write things meaning words that captured the instance of an experience, I would struggle at it, but everything I write is sound. So I sit and I listen and I quite admire it; I admire it to the exclusion of meaning, I admire it to the level of golden calves, or the levelling of gold to produce golden calves in the heat of the desert sun. Stern men frown -- at least one, Confucius, with a long black mustache dripping over the sides of his mouth and a scruff beard, dragon-eyes (Chinese, the one that rides at new year's) would accuse me, his wagging finger not unabetted by the wagging of another finger stetching across time, a Confuciust scholar prone to opinion and taken cum commento. Gripping with harsh, pointing painful nails (perhaps like a scarlet lady?) he would turn my head from the spit-flecked, well-flexed, torquing and combobulating, harsh and masculine declamation of some Cicero and make me see the long, tall trees, bamboo stretching upwards to Heaven.
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Apologia Pro Biblione
To the Christians, the New Testament was (and is) a response to the harsh "justice", if you would so call it, of the Old Testament. The God of Justice was replaced by a God of Compassion. Now I will grant you this -- the interpretation is not valid, it is not particularly fair -- but I am just as disgusted, I must admit, when I hear a blindly pious Jew or Christian or what-have-you extolling the veracity and infallibility of Scriptures as when I hear an atheist attacking and (for this is the best word and the only word I can think of) debauching them. It shows a certain arrogance and assurance in one's own morality and world-view to attack the Scriptures as the documents of barbarians -- the same close-mindedness, in fact, that one displays when he extols them and lauds them as a perfect guide to the living of life.
I preface my own ironic defence of the very books I am questioning by admitting that many of them are not true in the sense of recording factual events. Doubtless there never was a universal flood, it is even likely that Abraham did not exist, and certainly the Exodus from Egypt is not to be regarded in the same way as the Battle of Thermopylae. Nonetheless, since when do we ever admire literature for its assiduous devotion to historical or scientific fact? It remains that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic History, coupled with the poetry of the Prophets, the Psalms, and at least including the Book of Job, Song of Songs, and Lamentations are masterpieces of world literature and have as much right to a place in the canon as most of the literature from Greek and Roman sources, though of course the virtues of each respective source are different and I think that certain thinkers like Plato and Aristotle are, in their way, better foundations for a humanistic education than the direct and immediate study of the Bible. As for who wrote them, who cares? The writers were skilled, the editors (or as they are called in the scholarly literature, redactors -- I am not ignorant of the origins of the Bible) were ingenious, and they were rightly canonized by those who, finding themselves at the end of a long chain of epic events, a great human legacy, like all survivors sought to make some sense of the fragments that were left -- to compose from the past a new moral order -- in short, to restore civlization by plucking from it the greatest and sweetest of its fruits.
I will say this much in defense of the Bible: when I read it I am constantly inspired, awed, and challenged -- it is an experience in the same way that reading the Iliad is an experience, that listening to Confucius speak is an experience -- neccessary and useful because it allows me to see things in a way I would never have considered them before. Do you think that it is a bizzarre accident of superstition that so much of mankind is held in the thrall of this book, and other books of equal gravity? If the Bible were a knockabout affair, empty and devoid of meaning or value, if it had nothing to say to us, if it were not in its own way a powerfully persuasive (I might even remark the most powerfully persuasive ever written) account of the world, the divine, and history, would it have gained such a great magnitude of followers? You could answer that men's minds are naturally devoid of wisdom and are attracted, like flies, to those things which are most becoming of their character; that this superstition and predisposition to dogma rather than truth, eloquence rather than fact, and rhetoric rather than logic must be severed from the mind in the way that we take pains to separate gold from an alloy; that, in short, the mind must be forged like a weapon against these heresies -- but I am not so skeptical of man's basic devotion to truth and beauty. If the Bible compels our minds, it is because it is a fine piece of work, not because mankind is gullible; it is because we do see in it some spark of truth; because even the basest of characters worship the light of the sun, even if they bow down to the moon. The greatest scholars of all ages, and even ours, as enlightened as it may be, have been tantalized by the majestic obscurity of these books, and one abandons them only with grave error -- if the error is not moral, if Confucius is wrong in saying that there is found in a certain studied manner a zeal for goodness, then certainly it is one of ignorance and misunderstanding: simply put, to abandon the Bible, to learn nothing from it, to overlook it would be as unprofitable as refusing to read the books of the canon altogether and living life without the aid of literature. It can be done, but the products are nothing other than those very qualities, that very ignorance, that you so decry as manifest in these books. And as Jesus says, we should judge the tree by its fruits.
Now a final note about violence and immorality in literature: whose violence, whose immorality? Are you so confident in your ideals that you think that one is only through your knowledge able to embark on the path to goodness? This, I believe, is a conceit as dangerous as anything written in Mein Kompf, and perhaps indicative of the spirit in which that book was written. I have heard devout atheists call Hitler a Christian but I rather agree with those who call him a pagan -- he desired to destroy monotheism, and his first target was the Jews. Now I am not convinced that there is anything in monotheism that is inherently superior and I all too readily understand the ideological implications of calling Hitler a pagan, the position it places the allies in, and so forth, but what I object to is what I believe (if I may here make any comment on history, however humble and plagued with error) was his steadfast devotion to an ideal, a cause: the value of learning is that it shows us the tenuous natures of ideals, that it forces us to question our causes. We would stand alone; to be a philosopher is to be voluntarily in exile; we would attach ourselves, as Nietzsche remarks at least in the Case Against Wagner, not to the transient, but to the eternal, a sentiment echoed by a number of great philosophers stretching well back not to Plato but to Socrates' speech, at the end of his life, on the preference of death to the unexamined life. So thus I object to the self-righteous attitude of so many atheists, who believe that to quote Scripture is to understand it, in the same was as those zealot Christians who live in the Bible Belt that swells every day like a glutton's gut. And consider your position -- if you do not believe in God, if you believe that death is the final passage from life into darkness -- does it then make any whit of a difference if one believes so or not? Leave to the Christians their folly, leave to the Jews their stumbling blocks, and leave to all believers at all times their psychological incapacities; "deinde ut ea in alterum ne dicas quae, cum tibi falso responsa sint, erubescas", so that finally you may not say those things against another which, when falsely attributed to you, make you blush.
The danger is not that people will read or consider the Bible, or even that they will finally deem it a worthy guide in life. And besides, how far different are the strictures of the Bible from those of Aristotle -- there is not such a horrible chasm between Platonism and monotheism that they weren't finally reccomended in the same breath by Augustine (the breath, you might say, of the Holy Spirit), and Aquinas did not consider Aristotle so foreign to the ethical directives of the Church that he couldn't dare to reconcile them, a labor that, were the two really so disjointed and at odds, he never would have even considered, let alone dared to undertake. And yet how many advocates claim everyday, in schools and universities, in private and in public, in the forum and from the court-benches, that to read these great thinkers is to gain access to the seat of moral understanding? The danger is not that we *read* anything (and here I am inclined to agree with those whom I chastised above about the literal nature of the text) -- the danger is that we read it without understanding, without skepticism. Only then are we truly like those who Asaph chastises, who "neither know nor understand; they walk in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken".
I am no theist, but against all the rambling and prevarications of committed atheists everywhere (men, it seems, who have fallen more under the sway of that indelicate Science, wayward daughter of her rightful mother, Sophia), I must say that you yourselves are not philosophers but doctrinaires; Plato made Socrates turn even to the poets for wisdom, when he despised the art as misleading and false -- shall we, then, find nothing of merit in the Bible?
To the Christians, the New Testament was (and is) a response to the harsh "justice", if you would so call it, of the Old Testament. The God of Justice was replaced by a God of Compassion. Now I will grant you this -- the interpretation is not valid, it is not particularly fair -- but I am just as disgusted, I must admit, when I hear a blindly pious Jew or Christian or what-have-you extolling the veracity and infallibility of Scriptures as when I hear an atheist attacking and (for this is the best word and the only word I can think of) debauching them. It shows a certain arrogance and assurance in one's own morality and world-view to attack the Scriptures as the documents of barbarians -- the same close-mindedness, in fact, that one displays when he extols them and lauds them as a perfect guide to the living of life.
I preface my own ironic defence of the very books I am questioning by admitting that many of them are not true in the sense of recording factual events. Doubtless there never was a universal flood, it is even likely that Abraham did not exist, and certainly the Exodus from Egypt is not to be regarded in the same way as the Battle of Thermopylae. Nonetheless, since when do we ever admire literature for its assiduous devotion to historical or scientific fact? It remains that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic History, coupled with the poetry of the Prophets, the Psalms, and at least including the Book of Job, Song of Songs, and Lamentations are masterpieces of world literature and have as much right to a place in the canon as most of the literature from Greek and Roman sources, though of course the virtues of each respective source are different and I think that certain thinkers like Plato and Aristotle are, in their way, better foundations for a humanistic education than the direct and immediate study of the Bible. As for who wrote them, who cares? The writers were skilled, the editors (or as they are called in the scholarly literature, redactors -- I am not ignorant of the origins of the Bible) were ingenious, and they were rightly canonized by those who, finding themselves at the end of a long chain of epic events, a great human legacy, like all survivors sought to make some sense of the fragments that were left -- to compose from the past a new moral order -- in short, to restore civlization by plucking from it the greatest and sweetest of its fruits.
I will say this much in defense of the Bible: when I read it I am constantly inspired, awed, and challenged -- it is an experience in the same way that reading the Iliad is an experience, that listening to Confucius speak is an experience -- neccessary and useful because it allows me to see things in a way I would never have considered them before. Do you think that it is a bizzarre accident of superstition that so much of mankind is held in the thrall of this book, and other books of equal gravity? If the Bible were a knockabout affair, empty and devoid of meaning or value, if it had nothing to say to us, if it were not in its own way a powerfully persuasive (I might even remark the most powerfully persuasive ever written) account of the world, the divine, and history, would it have gained such a great magnitude of followers? You could answer that men's minds are naturally devoid of wisdom and are attracted, like flies, to those things which are most becoming of their character; that this superstition and predisposition to dogma rather than truth, eloquence rather than fact, and rhetoric rather than logic must be severed from the mind in the way that we take pains to separate gold from an alloy; that, in short, the mind must be forged like a weapon against these heresies -- but I am not so skeptical of man's basic devotion to truth and beauty. If the Bible compels our minds, it is because it is a fine piece of work, not because mankind is gullible; it is because we do see in it some spark of truth; because even the basest of characters worship the light of the sun, even if they bow down to the moon. The greatest scholars of all ages, and even ours, as enlightened as it may be, have been tantalized by the majestic obscurity of these books, and one abandons them only with grave error -- if the error is not moral, if Confucius is wrong in saying that there is found in a certain studied manner a zeal for goodness, then certainly it is one of ignorance and misunderstanding: simply put, to abandon the Bible, to learn nothing from it, to overlook it would be as unprofitable as refusing to read the books of the canon altogether and living life without the aid of literature. It can be done, but the products are nothing other than those very qualities, that very ignorance, that you so decry as manifest in these books. And as Jesus says, we should judge the tree by its fruits.
Now a final note about violence and immorality in literature: whose violence, whose immorality? Are you so confident in your ideals that you think that one is only through your knowledge able to embark on the path to goodness? This, I believe, is a conceit as dangerous as anything written in Mein Kompf, and perhaps indicative of the spirit in which that book was written. I have heard devout atheists call Hitler a Christian but I rather agree with those who call him a pagan -- he desired to destroy monotheism, and his first target was the Jews. Now I am not convinced that there is anything in monotheism that is inherently superior and I all too readily understand the ideological implications of calling Hitler a pagan, the position it places the allies in, and so forth, but what I object to is what I believe (if I may here make any comment on history, however humble and plagued with error) was his steadfast devotion to an ideal, a cause: the value of learning is that it shows us the tenuous natures of ideals, that it forces us to question our causes. We would stand alone; to be a philosopher is to be voluntarily in exile; we would attach ourselves, as Nietzsche remarks at least in the Case Against Wagner, not to the transient, but to the eternal, a sentiment echoed by a number of great philosophers stretching well back not to Plato but to Socrates' speech, at the end of his life, on the preference of death to the unexamined life. So thus I object to the self-righteous attitude of so many atheists, who believe that to quote Scripture is to understand it, in the same was as those zealot Christians who live in the Bible Belt that swells every day like a glutton's gut. And consider your position -- if you do not believe in God, if you believe that death is the final passage from life into darkness -- does it then make any whit of a difference if one believes so or not? Leave to the Christians their folly, leave to the Jews their stumbling blocks, and leave to all believers at all times their psychological incapacities; "deinde ut ea in alterum ne dicas quae, cum tibi falso responsa sint, erubescas", so that finally you may not say those things against another which, when falsely attributed to you, make you blush.
The danger is not that people will read or consider the Bible, or even that they will finally deem it a worthy guide in life. And besides, how far different are the strictures of the Bible from those of Aristotle -- there is not such a horrible chasm between Platonism and monotheism that they weren't finally reccomended in the same breath by Augustine (the breath, you might say, of the Holy Spirit), and Aquinas did not consider Aristotle so foreign to the ethical directives of the Church that he couldn't dare to reconcile them, a labor that, were the two really so disjointed and at odds, he never would have even considered, let alone dared to undertake. And yet how many advocates claim everyday, in schools and universities, in private and in public, in the forum and from the court-benches, that to read these great thinkers is to gain access to the seat of moral understanding? The danger is not that we *read* anything (and here I am inclined to agree with those whom I chastised above about the literal nature of the text) -- the danger is that we read it without understanding, without skepticism. Only then are we truly like those who Asaph chastises, who "neither know nor understand; they walk in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken".
I am no theist, but against all the rambling and prevarications of committed atheists everywhere (men, it seems, who have fallen more under the sway of that indelicate Science, wayward daughter of her rightful mother, Sophia), I must say that you yourselves are not philosophers but doctrinaires; Plato made Socrates turn even to the poets for wisdom, when he despised the art as misleading and false -- shall we, then, find nothing of merit in the Bible?
Monday, January 05, 2004
VIII. Le Chien et le Flacon (de Baudelaire)
"O my precious, O sweet lil' doggie-poo -- come here and smell this excellent perfume purchased from the city's finest purveyor of eaux de toilette."
And the canine, wagging his tail (the sort of expression, I think, that passes among their kind for a smile or laughter) approached me and curiously placed his moist nose above the uncorked phial. Then, recoiling in sudden dread, he growled at me as if in reproach.
"Eh! Miserable cur -- if I'd offered you a parcel of shit, you would have sampled it like a connoiseur and possibly even devoured it. But as you are, the unworthy companion of my melancholy days, you resemble the public, who must never be presented with delicate scents to make them gag, but rather with only the choicest of nuggets, selected with care from the dump."
"O my precious, O sweet lil' doggie-poo -- come here and smell this excellent perfume purchased from the city's finest purveyor of eaux de toilette."
And the canine, wagging his tail (the sort of expression, I think, that passes among their kind for a smile or laughter) approached me and curiously placed his moist nose above the uncorked phial. Then, recoiling in sudden dread, he growled at me as if in reproach.
"Eh! Miserable cur -- if I'd offered you a parcel of shit, you would have sampled it like a connoiseur and possibly even devoured it. But as you are, the unworthy companion of my melancholy days, you resemble the public, who must never be presented with delicate scents to make them gag, but rather with only the choicest of nuggets, selected with care from the dump."