--APPENDICES--
Appendix 1: the
SCAR
C'taient 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 caf 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.
--.
Mallarm'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 Dieu sans passer par le Christ qui
est 'le chemin,' celui-l va au Diable, disait nergiquement Luther." --de
Rougemont
Et
celui qui veut reevoir la grce de Dieu sans passer par son glise qui est le
chemin de cette grce, celui-l va Luther, dit nergiquement le Diable.
--.
"On a coutume de dclarer inexplicable le succs prodigieux
de l'Astre." --de Rougemont
Cette phrase est d'un genre que l'on rencontre souvent quand il s'agit
des grands succs du 17e sicle. Et pour raison: ce "grand
sicle" franais nous parait comme une pays impossible peupl de poupes
ridicules. Et pour raison...
--.
Je pense comme une fille enlve
sa robe.
--Bataille
MOI: J'enlve des robes des filles comme Bataille, d'habitude,
pensait.
BATAILLE (l, dans ma chambre): Hah! Et vous pensez comme Simone Weil enlve sa robe elle!
MOI: C'est--dire?
BATAILLE: C'est--dire peine, monsieur,
peine.
MOI: Vous avez raison. Peut-tre vous avez raison. Nanmoins, j'cris comme Benjamin.
BATAILLE (triste, pensif): Benjamin, le pauvre. C'est un esprit d'ange. C'est lui, la vraie pierre
anglique. (Et Bataille, il
n'est plus l.)
--.
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
navet. 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 mlange: 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. All the facility of
structuralist mythography starts spinning its wheels with the discussion of the
Iliad. Rather troubling to
see such a promising work drift into fast-paced, speculative typing, if that is
what is happening here.
My
other reading so far this summer: L'Amour et l'Occident, Hollier's book on
Bataille, Baudelaire's essays on Poe, most of Poe's tales, Gulliver's
Travels, and an irritating little book of art history called Sayonara
Michelangelo.
--.
The doctrine of the "natural goodness" of man is clearly
among the early modern doctrines most to be blamed for the horrors of our
century.
--.
The satyr to Dionysos: "The only cure for the stings of love
are the stings of a new love."
--.
I have to face the fact that my work, culminating already in the Testament, weaves tightly
together what is a very difficult mix of elements, among them my theological
understanding of our existence, my understanding of the importance of writing,
and my academic training in modern European thought. These are merely the basic elements, ignoring the voice
which demands that they clash and meld together. Because of that voice, this culmination is for me a
religion, after which there is no question of choosing to proceed with the
study of any one of its elements to the neglect of any other. The weave of these elements is not
simply a juxtaposition, but is something more perilous and luminous, a body
that came forth from the flames.
How could I now merely discourse about this body? I cannot, and should not try. Rather I should try to live according
to this religion, as something opaque in itself, as if it were itself a
doctrine whose mysteries I only partially know. Because in this doctrine the essential has already been
vouchsafed to me.
--.
We have been moving about, staying with friends. Nanto, Pou-Li, now Yuen-Lin. All cities situated around the same
group of mountains.
At
times I am overcome by a sentence like the one that hit me in the street this
evening: I love this dismal place.
And: I will always miss it when I am away. I immediately felt that the word dismal was not on the
mark. For instance: East Berlin
was dismal. The tangles of
traffic and rubble, the heat and noise, do not quite make Taiwan dismal. Which is a wonder.
I
love this dismal place. Such
sentences do not come to me in Taipei.
Perhaps because Taipei is nearly dismal.
I
have already remarked that the Chinese do not seem to feel that the end of the
world is coming. In general they
seem to be content to live as well as they can on the surface of things. Which may not imply a criticism of the
Chinese. Which may not even be a
suggestion that they are epistemologically nave compared to Westerners. The contrary may be true. In any case, those who live on the
surface of things have a certain tenacity about them.
--.
I oughtn't refer to this body that came forth from the flames as a
doctrine. I know it to be
rather--at least regards myself--a dispensation. The inauguration of a dispensation that needs to be worked
out. This working out: writing;
study; bringing my joy to others.
--.
"Patient and erudite, Plutarch answered the question that he
himself put: 'Who was Carila in Delphi?'"
--.
A nightmare this morning.
Somehow I had forgotten to leave the French department, and there I was,
standing before my own section, having already taught the first week or
so. Then I was outside,
walking. A paper was due for
Douglas Kelly, a paper I hadn't quite begun. The image of a few half-written paragraphs on a computer
screen. In the place I was
walking the ground was all torn up: a construction site.
--.
That pathetic American phenomenologeme: that nothing has actually
happened unless it makes it into the papers.
--.
Interesting that Calasso's book begins to shimmer again when he
leaves the Iliad.
--.
Georges and Simone.
A book of these two thinkers as they invade my thought. A long-term work.
The fragments begin as if lectures on their thought.
--.
It is my family's wealth that has allowed me, in some measure,
these researches. This is not to
say that I have depended on it completely.
My
family did not really approve of a life of thought and writing. There is nothing out of the ordinary in
that, for they are, in a modest way, part of the bourgeoisie.
Nothing out of the ordinary, either, in the fact that they could not
really articulate their disapproval according to some ethic appropriate to
them, according to some philosophy.
For in the particular class to which my family belongs, there is wealth
with its attendant diversions, and non-wealth with its attendant stigma of
failure. There is little
articulation of anything beyond this dichotomy. And this dichotomy itself needn't be articulated, as it is
signified everywhere one looks.
The idea of wise living, as a category of thought or endeavor,
does not even exist in their heads.
One is simply to waddle along, acquiring goods, gadgets, and
prestige. And no one even bothers
to defend this manner of living, which is taken to be self-evident. Even an infant will reach out to grab
shiny and colorful things.
--.
Principle of the book.
One is not to present oneself, with one's concerns for this kind of
work, as a neurotic outcast, a special case of bohemia. I am as healthy as the next man, if not
more so. Which is to say? Which is to say: I am troubled, I am always on the
verge of overflowing what I have learned are the prescribed limits of things, I
feel I am the result of a formula, and that many other formulae are possible,
certainly many that would overflow the limits in ways that are just the ways I
intend.
--.
Finish translating Halleluiah.
--.
Orestes' bones buried beneath a blacksmith's shop. The oracle: "there where blow
follows blow, wrong lies over wrong."
The Spartans come looking for the bones. They are needed to bring down the city of Tegea.
--.
Those who would confidently deny my faith, basing their confidence
on what they suppose to be "evidence." Ask them: Do
they know what time is? Can they
seize or define it? Do they know
what lies behind appearance? Or
are we to suppose that nothing does?
Or that chaos does?
Whence comes the voice that speaks to me? If I say it is heard, clearly I am using a
metaphor. But that side of the
sensorium seems most appropriate to what I call "voice."
Do
they not feel how limited the sensorium, as the positivists would use it, how
limited it is when placed next to the thought of Being, or the thought of what
lies behind appearances?
If
they have heard no voice, if they thus lack faith and are skeptics, that is one
thing. But on the basis of what
other than shallowness and dull stupidity are they so confident in this skepticism
of theirs?
--.
Aestuarius.
--.
How Hui-Ling told me of the Chinese woman writer for whom writing
brings something to appearance, for whom writing is the only thing that gives
meaning to her life. My feeling
listening to this--how it is hard to define, how I felt "Yes, that is how
I think of writing." And my
feeling looking at the woman's picture--perhaps she is in her mid-thirties--and
at the pages of characters totally unknown to me, but embodying somehow,
nevertheless, a similar idea of writing.
Is this possible? Does this
woman really have the same experience: the experience of most everything in
life put, as it were, on the path toward writing?
--.
The secret luxury of Lycurgus. In a chamber dug in the corner of his hut, it is found
that the lawgiver had been cherishing a worn Pliade edition of Ë la
recherche du temps perdu.
Scandal! What's more, the
citizen who took up residence in the hut after the founder's demise found with
the volumes of Proust a nearly half-completed attempt at a Spartan translation.
The text is written in the
unmistakably plundering hand of Lycurgus himself. Horror!
Those close to Lycurgus (everyone and no-one) exclaim in exasperated
whispers: What is to be done?
Inevitably a cover-up was the only possible course of action. This cover-up (along with the evident
anachronism of the whole episode) is the reason we find no mention of the
affair either in Herodotus or Plutarch.
The text of Lycurgus' Proust survived for some time, however, and a
stylistic analysis by the little read late antique rhetorician [his name
escapes me at the moment] reveals that Lycurgus would normally break up
Proust's long French sentences with seven or eight Spartan sentences.
Noble and enviable laconism!
Today we can only imagine what it was like to read this work.
--.
Curiosity: desire for desire.
--.
The question of the value of continuing the work Freud began.
"One is on the democratic left. Where else can one be?"
The acts of analysis, elaboration, play.
Literature
is seen as a constant rescue operation.
A
writer like Poe becomes a case of neurosis, to be cured. And the elements of that which the Poet
revealed to us, they are each assigned their place under the tendentious gaze
of the analyst. Tendentious? Why yes: for everything is on the way
to a cure. The question of whether
psychoanalysis is not inimical to literature.
Rand would read Poe's texts as first approaches toward a cure, as cries
in the direction of a cure. Thus
the place of the psychoanalytic critic: he is there to finish the work.
The question of whether or not psychoanalysis is not actually a new
genre of literature.
--.
Always remember the story of Mark, who eventually became a bicycle
repair man. I knew him my first
year in college. He had dropped
out because of an existential crisis, or because of psychological
problems. He didn't want to do
anything. In fact, more than
anyone I knew, he didn't want to do anything at all.
Mark's parents were on his case, "very concerned," and he
didn't know how to tell his mother how dismal the world looked to him. He told her if she wanted to understand
him, she should read Camus' The Stranger. And she did.
Soon after his mother calls him, hysterical, and his father is on the
phone too, yelling at him. How
could he do such a thing? They'd
always treated him so well! How
could he be so blatantly cruel to his mother?
Mark protested. He didn't
know what their problem was.
Finally his father read him the first few lines of the book:
"Mother died today. Or maybe
it was yesterday. I don't remember
any more."
The father summarized: Obviously Mark wanted his mother off his back:
he didn't even mind it if she died!
There was no escaping it now: Mark finally had to admit that he had
never read The Stranger. Someone
had told him about it, and he had gotten the impression that the book presented
the same ideas he himself had. And
this is perhaps true. For just as
the mature Meursault would probably not have bothered to read The Stranger, neither did Mark.
Mark's father--mainly unhappy, I suppose, that he had had to put up with
his wife's outburst--was doubly angered by his son's confession that he had
never even read the book. After
all, Mark had claimed his case was so hard to understand. He had put on airs. He thought he could play the
intellectual based on half a semester of college. And he had claimed that this novel was the key to
understanding him.
"At least," his father concluded, "at least when your
aunt told you that reading the Bible could help bring you out of this state
you're in--at least she was suggesting you read something she had taken the
trouble to read herself!"
--.
Hollier (157): "All of Bataille's reading of Hegel takes as
its main line that the subject and knowledge are mutually exclusive."
--.
The thick drape that has fallen over them. They cannot see through it. Only in certain times and places a tiny
glimmer or spark of light. Their
fatigue and confusion tell them they suffocate. Yet they cannot see the drape that has fallen over
them. It has been there too
long--they find it the normal state of things--it is thus invisible.
Only a glimpse of the sparks, followed by thought, can bring the drape
into relief. But on the eyes of
most this drape has come to weigh so heavily, they are so distracted in its
darkness, how shall we get them to see what flickers so rarely through its
weave?
--.
Meph. I'll fetch him
somewhat to delight his mind. (Dr.
Faustus: II.i.82)
A
fine epigraph for an age of diversion.
--.
Interesting the nature of Faustus' desires: always to see, to see,
to see. He would be a great
traveler, and he would have his name admired. Rather modern.
The idea that one would fulfill one's lust by spending a day verifying
mapmakers' work! Rather than
indulge in them, he gets to see a morality play of the Seven Deadly
Sins. Theorein. Marlowe's Faustus is a damned
scholar indeed!
--.
Reading Marlowe one appreciates all the more Shakespeare's genius
for structure.
--.
Faust. ...I do
repent and yet I do despair:
Hell
strives with grace for conquest in my breast. (V.i.69-70)
In these lines, to repent is to have hope, whereas to despair is
the path to hell. Admirable
orthodoxy.
Meph. Thou traitor,
Faustus...
Yes, he who has hope is a traitor to hell. For hope is linked to faith.
Thus the danger orthodoxy sees in the via negativa. For on certain of its bypaths hope
itself is abandoned.
Meph. Therefore
despair, think thou only upon hell...
(V.ii.86)
--.
Skelton becomes rector of the parish church at Dis. Oh, how fine!
--.
My experience confirms what I felt some years ago concerning the
"dull mugs" of my contemporaries. These dull mugs signify a lack of courage in the face of the
world, a craven pragmatism.
--.
I had wanted to read Tristram Shandy as well this
summer. Ching-Ling has taken out a
copy for me from the library at Tai-Da.
But I haven't gotten it yet, and soon may be leaving.
--.
On this visit I see for the first time in Taiwan a gay couple
walking arm-in-arm through the night market. And a lesbian couple in one of the malls. Another male couple, eating dinner and,
somehow, not concealing the signs of their homosexuality. Interesting how, suddenly,
homosexuality is out and about here.
--.
I remember when I was twelve looking through a catalogue of
insects I had ordered. I was
interested particularly in the large, exotic beetles, most of which came form a
place far away, somewhere in the jungles of who-knows-where, a place called
Formosa. I could order preserved
specimens of these beetles for a price well beyond my allowance. One that I desired particularly was
called, if I remember correctly, the Formosa Stag Beetle.
Now I am actually in Formosa.
It is one of those dear ironies of growing up (and perhaps of the exotic
as well) that I could now buy all the beetles I like, but that I no longer
would know what to do with them.
I
was recently in the mountains, by Sun-Moon Lake, and a shopkeeper had a
terrarium full of Formosa Stag Beetles.
I watched them battle each other, and asked the price out of curiosity
(around 25NT apiece). I didn't buy
one, of course. But I did keep
people waiting while I watched the beetles battling.
--.
After many years and millions upon millions of dollars in funding,
the Taipei metro system is still not functioning. Many people suspect it will never function. Over the city's streets one can see the
massive raised platforms upon which the rail-tracks and the metro-stations were
to be built. I was discussing with
Ya-Pei the possibility that the metro plan will simply be abandoned before it
drains any more of the public's money.
And all the unsightly platforms?
Should they be torn down?
The cost would be enormous.
There is a far better solution, which I should present to the press,
being the originator of this solution.
The
Taipei city government could build elevators up to these platforms, then sell
the platform surfaces as real estate.
The platforms could become like little city squares or elongated parks,
with cafs, restaurants, shopping, etc.
I could offer suggestions for some of the names of these suspended
businesses: National Shame Caf, Corrupt Official Memorial Mall, Pay-off and
Run Disco Roller Rink, The Brawling Senators Steak House, and so on.
But one encounters an obvious problem with my plan. Can the Taipei transportation authority
really handle the logistics of building elevators? Will not the money for this project end up--with a lot of
other monies--in several overseas banks?
And the people of Taipei, instead of getting elevators, would probably
get seven or eight half-rusted scaffoldings bought from some collapsing hotel
and converted specially for public use.
--.
The ridiculous English names certain companies here have adopted
in order to catch that glimmer of prestige that comes with the idea of the
West. A women's clothing company,
with several branch stores, is called Single Noble. One thinks of a personals ad: "Single noble, 32, seeks
ambitious Duke for..."
A
shop selling kitchen furniture and furnishings is called Dictator. One reads the letters in bold capitals
above the door.
--.
Perhaps it is true that psychoanalysis is the most certain path,
of all the discourses I have studied, to that which concerns people.
How has my culture been convinced to drift so far from it? To abandon it more (I believe) than
Europe has? What has led them to
refuse what psychoanalysis can reveal?
Freud would say that it is psychoanalysis itself that can best answer
these questions.
Poppycock.
--.
1050-1750. According to
Curtius, this ought to be considered the great period of our literature as
Europeans. Before it comes the
literature of Antiquity and the Bible.
After it, Curtius offers us Goethe as a stepping stone, as a possible
link. What does this leave for us?
It leaves us the possibility of
living in this tradition, or the possibility of default.
But of course Curtius' view represents, already, a rather historicist
manner of thinking. For the great
writers who wrote between 1050 and 1750 were certainly not doing so in order to
"preserve Western civilization." They were writing according to the accepted ideas of what
was the true, the just, the Eternal.
If Curtius would have us write in this tradition, he should demonstrate
that, in fact, the traditional texts offer the most profound literary
examinations of our experience as such.
Would we say that Curtius engages in a kind of "identity
politics"? Does one who would
study and valorize the origins of "our world" practice an identity
politics? Where so much is put in
terms of "the bases of," "the origins of," "the roots
of"?
I
am not one to suggest there is anything wrong with Curtius' conservatism. One senses a kind of radiant health in
it. Curtius doesn't have to
demonstrate anything for my sake.
My questioning is along the following lines: Would there be a better
way than his of going about this conservative polemic?
--.
The case of Chaucer.
A full involvement in the life of all classes of men, yet a detachment
from faith in any particular class.
He can write as a "bourgeois realist" and he can write in the
high rhetoric of courtly love. He
was ever busy in the world, here and there. He cultivated a talent for diplomacy.
Chaucer is certainly a fine model for a writer to follow.
--.
The exemplary mood of Swift's Christianity, his Christian
polemics.
--.
The place of antique literature in Christian culture. The harmonistics of Caldern "in
the sense of" the Christian Gnosticism of Clement of Alexandria. (Curtius,
244)
Against the Catholic poetry of
Spanish "Baroque," we have "Italy, cramped by classicistic
preoccupations, and France, infected with Jansenism." (245)
--.
Gravity: "A mysterious carriage of the body to cover the
defects of the mind." --Sterne
quoting La Rochefoucauld.
--.
I'm forced to recognize that much of my work exudes the tone so
typical of contemporary writing, that tone which could easily be called cocky. What's unfortunate about this is that I
myself am annoyed by this tone almost wherever I encounter it--and encounter it
I do, everywhere.
Over the past few years I've begun to feel that this tone, this
particular cocky tone, is something we need to escape from under. Because it has come to weigh upon us
like a curse, or rather like the special sign that we are cursed. If one were to rewrite the Inferno now, one would
have to add a special circle for the terminally ironic. But what would the punishment be?
One of Saz's maxims, one that always returns to my consciousness, seems
to remark this same predicament: "Irony is destiny."
--.
Sterne's wonderful novel!
Everything about this work is congenial. I feel I am now in that privileged position of not yet
having finished my first reading of it.
And there are only so many works that can make one feel this way.
He
gives me, under the heading, I would say, of vive la Bagatelle!, the following
sentence: "his judgment, at length, became the dupe of his wit." So far--I am only at I, xix.--this most
congenial formula characterizes no less than three of the work's major
personages: Yorick, Shandy's father, and the narrator. A sign of its irresistibility for that
magnanimous spirit Sterne.
And: "Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine..."
--.
"Jason was old now, shunned by everybody. People told his adventures to their
children, with the result that he couldn't find anyone to tell them to
himself." (Calasso, 334)
--.
II, iii. --At this chapter--tsk, tsk--Ching-Ling takes
back the novel: she must return it to that furnace of a library.
Worse
than a special circle for the terminally...
--.
The Homeric perception of what comes after death: "Not
another life, and not even a punishment for their lives, but an enervated and delerious
physiology, which stops short of life."
This is ghosthood, the lost state of one who has not known God, who has
not been seized by his Word, who knows no communion with the source of that
Word--the source-beyond-all-appearance.
This is also the ghosthood of those who in life had been
"lukewarm"--those mentioned in Revelation. Those who had been lukewarm and were "spat
out"--that is to say left in their ghosthood.
What, then, does this Homeric perception mean?
--.
The Romans and the historical sense: "Does not precisely this
pious [Roman] treasuring of the past exclude a historical view of the
world?" (Curtius, 252, note)
--.
Here in the middle of this reading on the "Ancients" and
the "Moderns," in this Taipei caf, I look up to see the name
"Homer" placed as trademark on the grill of one of those omnipresent
blue trucks. As Harry Levin
testifies for Curtius' book itself: "an eloquent testimonial to the
continuity of Western culture."
Blue--not quite "wine-dark"--but blue: that
quintessentially Greek color.
Thalatta-ta-ta-ta-ta-
- -
--.
"The public will read only 'ancient' poets, Horace
complains." (235)
--.
For the Middle Ages, the Christian Revelation and the Fathers
belong to Antiquity. Thus the
"dividing line" was not placed at 1BC.
--.
The formula from the Catalogue of Women: "Or like she
who..."
Could be used in Exemplary Lives.
--.
One way the spell may be broken. The beautiful patroness of the
caf in which I spend some of my afternoons. She is part--only part--of the reason I go there, and my
eyes often watch her as she goes about her work. But then, today, a man shows up whom I don't notice at
first. In fact I don't notice him
until he answers the phone, thus brining attention to himself as someone
connected with the caf. Then I
see--as he turns toward me--that he has the same face as the patroness. But he is ugly; he is frail; he is even
a bit hunchbacked. It
seems the man is her brother!
The reflection of the sister's face in his is uncanny. It immediately breaks the spell of her
beauty, which suddenly seems as though it had always been only the most meager
of spells in any case.
Such a sudden evaporation of beauty can only push one to
questioning. What was her beauty
to begin with that it can be so swiftly dissipated by a bad copy?
And there is an attendant observation, which may lead one toward a fine
question for Socrates, or a paradox at least. As for this brother, even if he is four years older than the
sister, he naturally will take on in my mind the character that a parody takes on in
relation to its original. Thus he
inevitably arrives second: he could not have been in existence
first. He is the nasty and
tendentious parody that breaks the spell of the original.
--.
Calasso's dogged insistence on the fleeting, on betrayal, on the
transitoriness of things. These
are that which is Greek. He
grinds it into the reader.
He
throws all of them against Christian culture as so many reproaches.
--.
"For us a temple is not a house; it is a construction
site. For us religion is ever
incomplete. In a way, our worship
is our attempt to complete it. Of
course we realize we are getting no closer to completing our religion, and all
we can say with any confidence is that in our attempting to do so, we know we
are in some way closer to doing so--to actually completing our religion--than
if we were not to attempt it at all.
This is because our attempts bring us ever up against incompletion and
lack--this horrible incompletion we face.
And isn't this knowledge of incompletion that we have--isn't it a step
toward the work of completion? I
call it a work. Maybe that isn't
right. But isn't it us especially
who realize the necessity of this work?
"If you think there is a kind of hilarity in this incompletion--I
did notice you laughing during the rites--so be it. We know that our divinity is one who laughs, and we think
that he even laughs mostly at us.
I see you are laughing again.
Well... Perhaps you should
consider joining us. Yes, I've
thought it for some time.
"You haven't seen everything today--that's for sure. Don't think you have. And we know many hilarious stories
about the history of our religion, stories that are much funnier than I
am. But of course we can only tell
these stories to initiates, those who've reached a certain point. So you can put away your notebook. We don't want just anyone laughing at
us, you know.
"That I've told you this much shows I have faith in you. You seem to be a good sort. I tell you what I'll do..."
--.
Baudelaire's wounded and whimpering pride, his touchy
arrogance. His is the arrogance
that feels always compelled to explain the bases of its claims, to snub in a manner clear enough
for any "educated reader" to understand. Flaubert, more essentially aristocratic, wasn't interested
in this kind of thing. Who is he
trying so hard to convince? It is
as if he were writing: "You don't understand me. Yes, you, Sir! Pay close attention, and I will explain
the nature of my superiority to you." Baudelaire's ivory tower flies a flag.
--.
Baudelaire's admirable description of Delacroix the man (section IV).
--.
The Cosmo texts, though part of the Testament, are nonetheless a
kind of allegorization of what is essential in it. They are a celebration of the essential. This is to say? This is to say that my good fortune in
meeting Cosmo di Madison gave me the possibility of writing a kind of menippean
celebration of what was my greater fortune in suddenly knowing the presence of
God.
Many "religious" people would find this strange. They would say that laughter is not a
manner in which to celebrate God's grandeur. They would insist that satire is not the proper genre. I should be singing hymns.
Tant
pis! I am humorous
at heart, and I have always felt that laughter--at least the kind of laughter I
love--was indicative of magnanimity.
And such magnanimity--is it not more appropriate to the grandeur of
God--to the celebration of this grandeur--than the kind of stiff gravity one
associates with these "religious" people?
"A mysterious carriage of the body..."
--.
On our flight out, I can see Taipei through the smog, and I try to
locate the Grand Hotel--somewhere near the mountains to the East of the
city--but cannot. Then with my
eyes I follow the highway to Keelung, Ya-Pei's home, and finally, as we
increase in altitude, I can see less and less clearly through the haze. The last thing I see of Taiwan is that small
island of rock visible from Cho-Fen, the gold-mining community in the
northeast.
Appendix 4:
from Letters
to H.
[In August of 1996, I moved from Madison
to Taipei. During my first year in
Taiwan, I corresponded mainly with H., a friend of mine from graduate
school. The following is one of
the letters written to this friend.]
6/1/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
All that simply means that something is there, something which
Barnabas has the chance of using, something or other at the very least; and
that it is Barnabas' own fault if he can't get any farther than doubt and
anxiety and despair.
--Kafka's The Castle,
K. to Olga
The way you and I think about things is fundamentally
different. In this letter, in a
summary fashion, I will take this up.
You must know these differences yourself. I think it's curious we haven't fallen out by now, that
we've managed to continue communicating.
Of course I will take up only my side of the bargain, because your side
I can only get at secondhand.
For one thing, I am a Christian. This is something you must have already recognized, though
at what level you recognized it I'm not sure. But in fact I've been a Christian since before the time I
met you.
I
ought to make clear at least something about how I believe, since the fact of
this belief is something you--I know this much--find hard to accept.
First of
all, you should know that I am not a Christian merely out of some kind of
"conservative" cultural solidarity. These kind of non-believing Christians exist by the
churchful, but I am not one of them.
They have been taken in by the Enlightenment; I have not. I actually do believe in God and in the
soul and in revelation.
I
am not of the fundamentalist mindset either. My understanding of things is quite different from the
fundamentalists. The revelation,
as given in Scripture and elsewhere, is not a kind of literal transcription of
the truths of the divine, but is rather oblique: it points to an Otherness that
couldn't be represented in language in any case. This is not to say, however, that I think there is nothing
true about the specificity of the Scriptures. The opposite is the case. I am not a believer in cultural relativism when it comes to
such things. Rather, there is a
specificity in revelation. The
texts of Buddhism, for example, are not part of it, or are only so in a very
weak manner. The poems of the
Mayans, whatever they may have been, were not part of it, or only in some weak
and tentative manner. The
revelation given in the Bible is not that of a particular culture, but is
rather the revelation as given to man as such. This is to say it concerns the destiny of man as such, the
meaning of man as such.
These
few remarks begin to define what I believe, what I mean by saying I am a
Christian.
You and I know each other because of our mutual concern with
literature. But of course here
again our thinking is fundamentally different. I have some idea of your thinking of literature from being
in classes with you and from reading your dissertation proposal. My own understanding of literature has
little in common with yours. I may
get at my understanding of literature by beginning with what I could call the literary
absolute.
For me,
the texts of the Bible are literature's highest meaning. Literature's ultimate meaning is to be
the textual medium of revelation.
It is a matter of text, and revelation. Literature is that which results from the meeting of these
two things. Even the manner in
which many of the most important Biblical texts came to be written--as a
choosing, an editing, a kind of layering one could indicate by the metaphor of
a heavily beleaguered palimpsest--even this for me makes the texts of
revelation more compelling as the examples of literature. They define from then on what the word
literature is to mean.
Literature for me is a question of canons even more than it is a
question of rhetorical tropes. The
Biblical texts are the Primary Canon and the great texts of Western literature
are what I would call the Secondary Canon. They are a secondary canon because they are written after
the fact of and under the dispensation of revelation. Following this understanding, the literature of classical
antiquity must then constitute a Third Canon, being neither the Primary Canon
nor the literature of the culture of the revelation, but being important to the
formation (mainly the generic formation) of that latter literature. These remarks indicate how literature
is arranged according to my understanding. If I continue reading and studying literature, it is partly
in the hopes of an ever-greater understanding of the relationships holding
between the major canons. This is
not to say, however, that literature is a scholar's game. If I read Villon or Dostoyevsky with a
particular delight, it's because these canonical writers articulate parts of a
world whose general structure and meaning is founded in the revelation given in
the Bible. And this is to say, for
one who believes, that they articulate parts of the world as such. Thus it is that those who are not
interested in the real world are not much interested in literature.
This is not an apology for the West. Of course I'm writing of the world as such in a manner that
would make cultural anthropologists and the politically correct cringe. That doesn't concern me. There is in fact much offered by the
West (such as the cultural anthropologists themselves) that doesn't concern the
world as such. I mention the
current academic intellectual culture, but could choose the West's
"literary" culture as well.
I could take up the American Thomas Pynchon as an example.
As
for the world represented in a Western writer like Pynchon, it is amusing, to
be sure. It is full of interesting
gags and twists; it is a very colorful and subtly modulated world; the reader
enjoys moving about in this world as one enjoys being taken into a film. I have once or twice suggested you read
Pynchon because there is something unique in his writing, something
entrancing. He is, or at least for
a time was, a major American writer.
Ultimately, however, I do not find Pynchon's writing to be serious
literature. It is not
Literature. His is a flimsy world
that does not recognize the bases of its being. It is one that is becoming quickly a world of mere surfaces,
a dumb show of empirical data--nothingness. This is why many who seriously take up Pynchon as a subject
of study will read his books five or six times, read much of the criticism,
then suddenly feel a total lack of interest fall upon them. Diversion is not the stuff of life: it
is rather something to keep one from taking up the stuff of life. The need for reality eventually makes
one tire of such writing. But the
readers around us, what do they do when they tire of a writer like
Pynchon? Since so many of them are
only willing to read contemporary writers, they put down Pynchon only to pick
up another contemporary with similar strengths. Such writing as Pynchon's--and the West offers much of it
now--shows a soul impoverished, a soul that has been seduced into believing
that the dumb shows of science and technology are all there is. Intuition shut down, the soul's
hearing shut down, language's revelatory power curtailed, the data of the
senses organized by a logical machinery much smaller than language itself. Of course the literature arising from
this general situation is comic.
It is merely comic.
This is to say that it is not even humorous in the stronger
manner in which much of the great European literature is humorous. Don Quixote, the story of Jacob and
Laban, Prince Myshkin. This latter
strong humor, the possibility of this humor in man, is one of the mainstays of
my understanding of man's place in the world. The critics of literature that most interest me have all
understood this humor to some degree: Bakhtin, for instance, or Benjamin.
I am a Catholic in most things, but am not certain if I am a
Catholic, or rather if I can be accepted as a Catholic. At least many Catholics would probably
not recognize me as such. There
are things about which I believe the Catholic Church is wrong.
The Catholic Church is most crucially right in its understanding of the
Mass. The Mass is the ritual that
defines the destiny of man: it is the central sacrament. The Mass is the gathering around which
men might eventually gather.
Perhaps they will eventually gather around it. This is something the Catholic Church knows better than the
other branches of the Church.
I know you must disagree with these things, and of course I can
live with such disagreement.
We are both concerned with the question of how language reveals
presence, but the register of the presence that language most essentially
reveals--that is one basis of our difference.
That you are a secularized Jew makes you even further from me than
if you were a believer in Judaism.
For regardless of the gripes Jews may have with Christians, I don't have
as much gripe with Jews as I do with the secular. The fact that you are a secularized Jew means to me that I
have no reason to consider you other than, say, the secularized Christians all
over America. This is to say, in
part, that I don't know in what you consider your Jewishness resides. I know this is an infinitely discussed
question, one that receives much of its immediate importance from the
nightmares of the twentieth century.
The Jews as a religion are very close to the truth that I follow, and
their understanding of the truth of revelation is of great concern to me, much
more, say, than the Zen Buddhist understanding of truth. I would never step on a Menorah, though
I would certainly step on Diderot's Encyclopedia, or even
Voltaire's hand. So you should
know where I stand.
That you and I have managed to communicate. Perhaps it will continue. It is like Origen maintaining a
correspondence with Lucretius.
ON THE EPIGRAPH--
I
had read most of Kafka before, but it was only recently that I've read The
Castle.
Some readers find in Kafka an apparent restatement of the universe
projected by the Kabbalists.
Benjamin is the great exponent of this reading. Benjamin's Kafka wrote allegories of a
kind of Kabbalist faith or hope.
Other critics disagree by leaning on the fact that Kafka was not a
"religious writer," that he was an atheist, that he was not a scholar
of Kabbalism, etc. I am one of
those who think that Kafka needn't have been a "religious writer" or
a Kabbalist to write the kind of allegories he wrote. These allegories are Kabbalist allegories, if you will. Kafka was a Prague Jew, after all.
The
dichotomy set up between a "religious writer" and a "secular
writer": what does it amount to unless we are considering precisely weak
writers
or journalists or, again, cultural anthropologists?
The
Castle seems to me, after this first reading, a kind of allegorical
romance. K.'s quest is nearly
fruitless--that is apparently the case--and yet K.'s life in the shadow of the
Castle seems more a life than that, say, of Kafka's father in the shadow of a
cash register.
Kafka's K. shows a certain
daring in his quest. He is not
struck with the same kind of unreasonable awe that strikes the people of the
village. Threatening or not, he
would be there where the Castle's power is manifested. He would know its workings and sees
such knowledge as the only thing worth struggling for. Any other activity--cobbling, tanning,
running an inn--is a species of biding time that concerns him not.
Does Kafka, despite his atheism, make it into what I have called the
Secondary Canon? Evidently so.
Was Chretien de Troyes a "religious writer"?
E.
Appendix 5:
Rimbaud and
Exorcism
I.
Rimbaud's oeuvre is a pack of lies.
Rimbaud was too busy barking and howling to listen.
What kind of poet is this anyway?
An admirable teen rebellion.
Beautiful blue-eyed Demiurgette.
Pint-sized Promethiite.
We scribes don't give a damn for his virtuosity, his pyrotechnics.
A poet of the visual spectrum. All in all a rather more charming child of the Enlightenment
than most. Toy trains, the Corpus
Hermeticum, romantic oriental fetishes, obsessive inventiveness, the "new."
His color is nasty blue--the same blue as on our flags, but more
fluorescent. Blue approaching the
shiny blue of certain species of hornet.
Baudelaire's colors are faded gold leaf, black, purple, blood red,
black, Avignon ochre, ash, ivory or ebony flesh, black, etc.
Baudelaire: the master of Latinity in our two centuries.
III. Mystique...
A clear night sky. After
so much hashish--this time!--how the stars flatten out and press down upon me!
Tiring of the sky, he lies on his side near the campfire, gazing into
it. --[--We know he doesn't really
understand mysticism. --He has
perhaps read of the Zoroastrians?
--Who doesn't know of these hashishin microcosms?]--
After
so much hashish--this time!--the crumbling logs heaped in the fire become for him a
landscape in flames.
Off the top of the hill formed by the logs in flames, bits of ash rise
with the heat; then, whirling, descend.
They are tiny angels spinning in grey-white woolen robes.
On
the left, a darkened log crackles and smokes. Ruts have broken into its surface: the charred remains and
sounds of a battle.
On
the right, embers glow in white and mystic heat: Oriental splendor! The wisdom of ages!
The fire hisses and cracks, and as the stoned youth turns to gaze
upward, eyes stinging from the heat and the drug, he sees brown and black
curdles of smoke rising away and rolling. --Are they the lost time of men? --Are they that which is burned away? --Are they the remains of all the
struggles and nights?
The starry sky behind the campfire, the vague flicker of light against the
trees, stretch down like a canvas or a basket, the whole scene collapsing into
the broken perspective of hashish and medieval murals, turbulent foreground
pushed up against flat background.
Down at the very bottom--wrapped round the hottest embers like a mantle
of purest candy--the soft glow of blue flames: the liminal color.
Once--when
I may have dared to taste!
V.
Why is it that I actually fear Rimbaud--as if in
his texts were the machinations of some demon? As if "Rimbaud" named the site of an unforeseen and
irresistible temptation--as if his texts had the power to force one, suddenly,
into believing fervently some terrible delusion.
To
many mine would seem an odd distinction: for I would [...] In the same breath, however, I'd insist
that Rimbaud was completely under the sway of the Devil--that he had all the
demonic paltriness of the non-world--all the clean madness of a shopping mall:
Nol sur la terre!
Yes, we know just what sort of Nol you mean--here in the New
World!
Il faut tre absolument moderne.
But why is it that I actually fear Rimbaud?
VI.
Quel mr! Every
guttersnipe a Vulcan! Ahhh! Nos peaux d'or occultiques! Argghhh! Des yeux darnes, rouges et noirs, tricolores--tricolores
surtout!--d'acier infus d'toiles d'or; des visages comprachiques
jamais! Ahhh!
Crve! Danse! Danse! Arrggghhhh!
VII.
To read Rimbaud is to stand for a time before a jewelry shop
window. It is all very brilliant,
yes, but after a few minutes one recognizes that "Well, it's a jewelry
shop window--of course it's brilliant.
Of course it all sparkles and catches the eye. That's the way jewelry is." Then one moves on.
VIII.
Rimbaud's is a thoroughly interventionist poetics: it is as if, armed
with a nailclipper, he were running toward an exploding volcano with serious
plans to direct the lava here and there, wherever he would, the whole
eventually to be cooled in the form of a New World Order--an Order made
possible for you, for me, for animals too!--by the combined force of his
nailclipper and his very pure love.
X.
Never has there been a harder poet, with contours so hard, so
unforeseen.
Des faibles se mettraient penser sur
la premire lettre de l'alphabet, qui pourraient vite ruer dans la folie!
It is all true, all of it.
It is true.
XI.
I understand Rimbaud.
I look into him as into a mirror.
I understand his shame. It
is all true, all of it. It is a
shame so absolute. It is the
encounter. All of Europe. It is much deeper and harder than . .
. It is a wretchedness in the very
Shaman's Dance of Europe, a wretchedness never cleansed or appeased, for which
no sacrifice . . .
[XII.
Case in point.]
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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