†††

--APPENDICES--

Appendix 1: the SCAR

C'étaient des femmes quelconques...

She passes me on the street, unknown. She is standing still, deciding which way to go. She is squinting in the sun. For a moment I can see her. I can see that it was at least some months earlier she had written the word SCAR across her chest with a knife or perhaps the edge of a broken bar glass. The SCAR is permanent.

I could see the letters A and R through the opening of her blouse, but as the blouse was partially transparent I could make out, through the fabric, the other letters as well, reading SCAR in their entirety. I was left standing there as she walked away.

The word arched across her chest from the top of her right breast to the top of her left. It seems it was written with both fury and precision: the SCAR is deep, yet its letters are in proportion; the marks stand out in a rich rose color.

But she is not the type to have such a scar. Her blouse is rather fine to be framing it, and her age is perhaps 29. Her hair is long and auburn, her look calm and educated.

I find the scar irresistible on her--especially now that the perplexity of reading it has worn off and I have let her walk away to who knows where.

Why didn't I begin to talk with her? Had I, I know I would have been wise enough to talk of anything but the word there on her breast.

But even as I spoke it would have been the scar leading me to do so. It would have been evident there below her mouth even as she responded to me. Her mouth would have responded with words inevitably colored by this scar, colored rose red as my words also would have been inevitably colored.

To have an affair with such a woman, never asking about or even mentioning the word before you.

That I've been mesmerized by the sight of her becomes quite amusing when I contrast it with the fact that just before walking out onto the street where I saw her I'd been in the café reading the last pages of "Noms de pays: le nom." These are the pages in which Marcel dwells on the new generation of women, the elegance of whose manners and dress he cannot himself believe in. The contrast of two such texts read both during the same hour of a summer afternoon leads me to wonder: Can I believe both in the beauty of Proust's writing and in the beauty of the writing glimpsed on this woman's breast?

Appendix 2: the SCAR

--.

In the beginning was not the One or unity, but already difference. What's more, I do not believe the redemption means a coming erasure of difference: rather it means a reorganization of the difference that was there from the beginning. Difference is always constitutive of being.

--.

A blank notebook. A slim blue spiral notebook made by the Koyuko company, a Japanese brand. The notebook is new, completely blank, and it contains one-hundred narrow-ruled leaves of paper.

I know that on the meeting of these blank pages with this ballpoint pen, upon the careful tracing out of the looping lines of written words, it is possible, at least possible, for this blue notebook to contain a text that would overturn the world, a text of such necessity as to complete what is essential in all previous texts, while relegating to oblivion all that is inessential.

This notebook and the pen in my hand evoke the thought of what is there as potential: they suggest what could be brought forth in the act of their being used up.

According to the anecdote, Michelangelo was able to see the sculpture trapped in the block of marble. Or at least this was one of his confidence tricks. His work was to bring forth the latent sculpture, to chisel away the marble imprisoning it.

What I'm thinking now of this blank notebook and pen before me--is it in any way similar to Michelangelo's thought? Perhaps it is, but only in some slight way. Perhaps the two instances of creative vision are at best allegories of each other.

A sculpture is a three-dimensional object: one can visualize it in space, and so it can be there already in the marble. The outlines of a text cannot be visualized, of course, or at least not in the same manner. What kind of text would one come up with if one thought of writing as the chiseling away of all that one did not want to say, if one imagined the literary tradition, and one's language, as a sort of block from which one chiseled away all that was inessential? Some have through of writing this way. Certainly there are writers--I think of the American minimalists, or the melancholy Duras--whose poetics have elements of this.

But the text I imagine above, the potential text in this notebook, the one whose appearance would overturn the world--this text is surely something other than that of the master sculptor. Its appearance would be something positive, something breathed into the writer, rather than something negative in the sense of having been chipped out of dross. Its appearance would necessarily be a kind of theophany.

Though certainly written in a fallen language (English, for example) such a text remains beyond all imagination as to its outlines and details. Only God could provide it.

--.

Evil exists, but where does it reside? Evil is not simply the "resistance of formless matter to God's creating will." I'd have trouble in any case believing there is such a thing as "formless matter." Evil resides rather in a kind of willful coup of some part of God's creative forming. Evil is a willful coup of forms that, taking unto itself further form-like character, propels what might be called pseudo-creations. Detached from the divine, pseudo-creations bear the stamp of non-being. They ring hollow, and this hollow ringing can be recognized as their mark of provenance.

--.

APOLOGY FOR THE IDOLS

Just as the ear needs to hear words of love and anger, so the eye, if it is to be the eye of man, needs to see the idols.

The earliest recorded dream is that of a Mesopotamian woman, written down thousands of years B.C. The woman was a temple guardian. One night she dreamt that she went into the temple and saw that all the idols were gone and that the people who should have been there worshiping were gone too.

This ancient dream shows an ancient anxiety, an anxiety still with us today. We fear that the idols will go missing and that if they do there will be only empty space where they once stood. We fear that if this happens we might be voided out as well.

Our eye, having nowhere to rest in the flatness of space, begins to wander aimlessly, and in that wandering our essence is lost.

Whether of wood or stone or otherwise, man needs the idols. This doesn't mean that man worships the idols. Such is the old misguided fear of the iconoclasts. The idols merely allow man's eye to focus, which is what allows man to worship at all. The idols bring the eye to rest in order that the spirit may roam to the right places, seeking the divine.

In ancient Israel, if the prophets succeeded in extirpating the idols, the Temple became an idol. In the Diaspora, the Jews had to carry their idols with them into exile: the new idol thus became the Torah itself, a scroll containing the sacred texts. The Jews became "the people of the Book."

As for the Muslims, they forbade all representational art (i.e. idols) so that the Koran itself or calligraphed texts from the Koran could take the idols' place. Under pressure of the interdiction against idolatry, the Muslims created the world's most striking examples of manuscript illumination, works that nearly take the breath away for their subtlety and balance.

In Europe the Protestant revolution made a similar displacement: the paintings of saints and the reliquaries had to go, they said, and they lifted up the Bible in their place. Translated into the vernaculars, the Bible could henceforth hold the eye of this new people of the Book.

That the Bible is now bound in one volume, that one can clutch it, that its words have the thin but stark substantiality of black ink on paper--all this allows it to continue in its function.

Along with the other nightmares our new millennium brings us, there returns the same ancient nightmare of the missing idols. The flat computer screen with its constantly shifting contents and its hypertext links leads the eye to wander in unprecedented ways. Where and how can the eye focus? Doesn't it rather become fatigued and diverted? I myself can never read a text online. If I want to really read something I must download and print it. But like many of the faithful, I wonder about the people around me. I wonder if they may not be drifting into a Diaspora they themselves only vaguely suspect: an ultimate Diaspora away from the possibility of worship, away from man himself. Is this unduly pessimistic? Is it only a bad dream? Uncertainty and persistence. Our concentrated waiting will tell.

Appendix 3:

Taiwan Journals: June-July 1995

--.

May 1995. Mission accomplished.

--.

The Ernst Robert Curtius Society. The Walter Benjamin Society.

Two imaginary literary endeavors the potential fruits of which... But as usual, it is for me a matter of two figures I much admire who are supposed to stand in stark opposition to one another.

I am always pitting such "opposites" together like this, and then projecting in my mind how one, then the other, approach at the level of writing what is the essential for me. Here it is a matter of projecting the imaginary work of two different societies: two different societies that, ideally, would overlap each other in the same manner the stages of the development of Rome overlap each other in the metaphor erected by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents.

--.

Not an intellectual, but a scribe.

Not an intellectual, nothing quite so glorious. No program.

--.

Rimbaud will be exiled to Cyberia. It is there that his legacy will be played out.

--.

Mallarmé's Tombeaux for Poe and Baudelaire appear to be written more than anything under the aegis of the latter's brief biography of Poe and his epigraph from Gautier at the head of this biography.

--.

"Celui qui veut aller à Dieu sans passer par le Christ qui est 'le chemin,' celui-là va au Diable, disait énergiquement Luther." --de Rougemont

Et celui qui veut reçevoir la grâce de Dieu sans passer par son Église qui est le chemin de cette grâce, celui-là va à Luther, dit énergiquement le Diable.

--.

"On a coutume de déclarer inexplicable le succès prodigieux de l'Astrée." --de Rougemont Cette phrase est d'un genre que l'on rencontre souvent quand il s'agit des grands succès du 17e siècle. Et pour raison: ce "grand siècle" français nous parait comme une pays impossible peuplé de poupées ridicules. Et pour raison...

--.

Je pense comme une fille enlêve sa robe.

--Bataille

MOI: J'enlêve des robes des filles comme Bataille, d'habitude, pensait.

BATAILLE (là, dans ma chambre): Hah! Et vous pensez comme Simone Weil enlêve sa robe à elle!

MOI: C'est-à-dire?

BATAILLE: C'est-à-dire à peine, monsieur, à peine.

MOI: Vous avez raison. Peut-être vous avez raison. Néanmoins, j'écris comme Benjamin.

BATAILLE (triste, pensif): Benjamin, le pauvre. C'est un esprit d'ange. C'est lui, la vraie pierre angélique. (Et Bataille, il n'est plus là.)

--.

de Rougemont, p. 202.

The necessity of formulating toute une doctrine: "une action, une mise en ordre, une purification." I have known this necessity already, and have done much, perhaps the essential, in the Testament. My work hereafter should be but an elaboration and strengthening of this blueprint, a reading of it in the form of study and writing in its margins.

--.

Certain figures fall in my estimation. It is perhaps strange that although I recognize in Nietzsche and Bataille the most stunning insight, the most impressive intellectual powers, I have for some time sensed in the former a kind of immaturity, and now sense in the latter a kind of irrelevant hypocrisy that only becomes more and more annoying as one studies him. How this great admiration of mine for the powers of these two writers (admirare) is to be reconciled with the fact that, in some more significant manner, I look down on them as evident products of ressentiment (!), how these can be reconciled I do not know.

Why should I attribute the deafness of Nietzsche and Bataille to ressentiment? This requires elaboration.

--.

The phenomenology of the Chinese world.

That the Chinese do not feel the world is coming to an end, as so many Westerners do.

My youthful realization, stoned, of the primate character of social behavoir, thus of ourselves. How this experience would not be as radical for a Chinese youth. Their world is not as "ideologized"? A more "real" phenomenology?

--.

Lady Flimnap.

One of the surrealists should have painted an erotic painting of the Lilliputian Treasurer's wife and Gulliver meeting privately in the latter's forsaken temple of a dwelling. The peeping head of a spy or three visible at the corners of the temple's windows.

Or perhaps this painting would have been more appropriate from one of the pre-Raphaelites.

--.

Frequently over the years I have imagined a genre of landscape painting in which a contemporary city is depicted having been depopulated and abandoned to the forces of nature for 50 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, and so on. One scene of the downtown, for example, painted as it would present itself after each of these time periods had elapsed: thus a series. Or the painter could of course paint different scenes of the same city 1,000 years after it had been abandoned--though this does not seem nearly as compelling as the study of destruction over time in a single scene. In any case, my painter would be a painstaking realist, and would study the kinds of flora and fauna that would invade the city given its geographical location. He would also have to study the precise manners in which different materials erode (cement, glass, paved surfaces). This imagined genre corresponds no doubt to a fantasy of mine--probably what should be called a misanthropic fantasy.

While in Chicago, I have often been led to wonder how long the Sears Tower would remain standing were it left to its own devices. Doubtless very long. Various of its windows would give way first, letting in birds and vegetation. The whole would perhaps eventually become, long before tumbling, a kind of massive Hanging Gardens. Would such a structure ever actually lean and fall? Or would it merely dwindle? What is the attraction of these fantasies?

It is no wonder that such misanthropic fantasies have returned to me here in Taipei, given the pollution of the place, the palpable feeling one has that there are too many people, both here in this city, and here on this satellite of the sun.

Now would be a good time for one to take up this genre of painting, for as one's skills increased as a realist of the city invaded by plants and animals, the planet would simultaneously be suffocating under the weight of civilization. In the course of one's life work, the world's environmental catastrophes would perhaps begin to make themselves felt in unavoidable ways. Perhaps these catastrophes would even start to be felt in the First World. But this latter is something of which none of us can be sure. No one knows how long it will be before our population and our manner of living bring forth universally palpable results in the ecosystem. How long before some swift and universally registered disaster?

Throughout history men have bemoaned the "human condition," which regardless of the breakthroughs of science has remained generally the same. But isn't there something particularly depressing in what we can see currently, in the sight we have before us, namely that of various world tribes frenetically eating themselves out of house and home? My own distress in this face of this situation is probably partly responsible for these misanthropic fantasies. I imagine a careful realist who can represent, and thus somehow master, the city's ruin.

--.

The hotels in which one can take a room for two-hours. I find this a mark of civilization. I believe it's illegal in the States for hotels to offer rooms for less than 24-hours. The stiff idiocy of triumphant Protestantism.

--.

Swift on clers et secula: "...[whether these bishops] had never been compliers with the times while they were common priests, or slavish prostitute chaplains to some nobleman, whose opinions they continued servilely to follow after they were admitted into that assembly." (104)

The King of Brobdingnag on the British: "I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." (107)

Does one find such dense and rhythmic fury before the early modern period? If one does not, is it perhaps a sign of our modern shallowness?

--.

The conte philosophique should move from 1) intellectual conundrum to 2) objective correlative to 3) writing.

--.

Gulliver's Travels, III, v. The Grand Academy of Lagado. Satire after my own heart! Swift's work gets more impressive as it progresses. Can it reach any higher than this intellectual summit of Laputa?

--.

Master Ah-Ming's Southern Estate, on the outskirts of Kaohsiung. I always end up in places like this. The structure seems somehow suspended in air, it looks more than anything like a huge and dilapidated cement houseboat. Our host, Ching-Ling's friend, is around sixty, and has a perfectly straight white beard hanging loosely from his chin. Ah-Ming's shrimp ponds are visible from the back of the mansion, and cover four or five acres.

Upon arrival, we are all invited to be seated, Ah-Ming cuts up a watermelon for us, then he positions himself at the first of the four organs, playing with great feeling a magnificent protestant hymn. The heat is stifling, there are four revolving fans on the ceiling, dozens of lizards scampering about the walls, and at least a hundred chickens rummaging through the chaotic gardens visible through huge open windows. In this setting, it is hard for me to describe the impression of these staid protestant hymns droning forth from the organs as if they were lamenting their exile from some Norwegian Lutheran church in Minnesota. The word wacky comes to mind, or the word crackpot, and the sentence: "I always end up in places like this."

At the end of each hymn drone the two long and familiar notes of the protestant Aaa-aa-ahhh-men-nn-nn, and these two notes, drifting out the windows and wrapping themselves round the palms, seem the most incongruous of all. Tired from the ride, I can only hear them as Aaa-aa-ahhh-Mingggg. With the heat and the rest of it, I feel I am beginning to go crazy.

Later I realize that this reaction is clearly based on my own naïveté. In fact nothing is more characteristic of the fruits of missionary work than this tropical scene I suddenly entered. It is just that I had never experienced tropical Calvinism first-hand. Even in the most sweltering climes, the early protestant missionaries clung to their salted European food, their thick European clothing, and this dour musical genre, bringing along with them, whenever possible, the cumbersome instruments on which it was played. Though nominally iconoclastic when it came to much of the Church's art, they demonstrated nevertheless a dogged fetishism when it came to these particular accoutrements of European life and faith: as if the black coat, or dried and salted meat, were objects necessary to the glory of the cult. The early protestant missionaries were not likely to undertake anything like the Jesuit Matteo Ricci's strategy of cultural mélange: they would not put on Chinese clothes or try to become Chinese so as to convey the Word. Better to die of sunstroke clutching an English Bible to one's breast!

After finishing several hymns, Ah-Ming begins to discourse in Taiwanese upon his philosophy of music. Music is a metaphysical language more powerful than speech. It addresses itself directly to the heart and carries the heart where mere discourse cannot take it. For Ah-Ming, music is a representation of life lived in faith.

Though I don't know traditional Chinese music theory, all of this seems particularly European, most particularly Romantic in fact.

Later in the evening, Ah-Ming took us out to his shrimp ponds to explain the trade, netting us a handful of shrimp fry and demonstrating a little blue and yellow "feeding boat" that cruises around one of the ponds, mechanically spraying food out of its sides according to a set timing device.

--.

Ah-Ming is an excellent host. After the shrimp pond tour, we all cleaned up and he sent us in a taxi to the best seafood restaurant in the area, himself following behind on a motorbike. At the restaurant, where he is well known, he spent some time at the counter ordering dishes. The staff did its work with consummate speed and accuracy, and we were served an endless succession of dishes each more succulent than the last, all of it prepared from the freshest seafood, much of which was still swimming around its tank when we arrived. There was squid, sashemi, patties of fried fish roe, soups with fish, shrimp and crab. There were mussels, pork kidneys, escargot, fresh bamboo, and more. We found later than the meal was surprisingly cheap (given what we had consumed), but that our host had still spent almost $100 on us.

Ah-Ming apparently spends his money only on what gives him pleasure. As a good Taiwanese, he places good eating among the highest priorities. His garden is another of these priorities. Maintaining his mansion, however, is not. The whole of it is hopelessly dilapidated, and many of the rooms are cluttered beyond use, except, that is, for the use the chickens put them to as fine roosting territory. While I am here, I do not even intend to look in the basement, the floor of which is below the level of the ponds. Ah-Ming's windows are always open, there are no screens, and sparrows and bats fly in and out regularly, as do his dozen or so pet songbirds which come and go from their open cages. The varnish is wearing off on the plank floors, which warp here and there from exposure to water. A rather serious bees-nest is situated in the wall just behind the sink where we do the dishes.

Ah-Ming explains all of this with a smile: "Ahh! I've lived the single life for some years now."

--.

The minute the sun dips below the horizon, the bats begin their careening around. And really, they must get quite hungry hanging upside down in the dark all day. Which gives me an idea for a new diet book.

--.

In a characteristic gesture, Ah-Ming said that he would have five of the chickens caught and prepared for tonight's meal. This would mean one chicken for each of us. I don't know if this meal is going to come about. We'll see. But our host doesn't seem to be one not to carry out such an offer.

--.

During the first hours of darkness, when the lights go on, lizards climb up and cover the powder-blue ceiling. They gobble up the insects attracted by the lights. At 8:30, there are perhaps seventy-five of them. But by 11:00, they have dropped in number to perhaps thirty, the rest having crawled back down to the nooks and crannies they came from. What seems to have happened is that by 10:00 or so the majority have gotten their fill of gnats and whatnot, and are now going to retire, calling it a day.

--.

Missing the labyrinth already. --I'm reading Roberto Calasso's book on Greek religion. Though I was nearly ravished by the first fifty pages, I am sad to say that his arguments seem to get more and more gratuitous as the book moves on. The fall (with Greece as with Calasso's book) seems to come with the introduction of theory into the weave of things.