LIV.1
Politicians pose as actors, and generally we take them as such. But really, they are symptoms.
In writing as in painting, use the particular to evoke the infinite.
Every deal but the real.
A clinically thin and carrot tanned woman d’un certain âge, skinny-jeaned and high-huracheed, sports a black cap-sleeve teeshirt printed in white “Chanel” lettering: COCO MADE ME POOR. She wanders, with the others of her tribe, amongst the bronze Koonzes in the sculpture well of the Whitney.
Back in the movement, if someone balked at ratcheting up the militancy level, we used to say, often with a certain contempt: “Too heavy not ready.”
It was one way that radicals, those prepared to go all the way, separated themselves from liberals.
If one invoked the phrase oneself, usually preceded by a Whoa!, it signified that a proposed action was “adventurist” or tending toward the suicidal.
Something about those words keeps ringing, though, as one encounters slippages in language that attempt, often unconsciously, to domesticate that which is too awful to face.
Recently you came across a fascinating passage in David Leeming’s biography of James Baldwin, where, on page 117, Leeming cites a statement made by William Faulkner in 1956. Interviewed by The Reporter, Faulkner said that if push came to shove in a hypothetical war over desegregation, he would have to side with his fellow white Mississippians “even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” This statement Leeming terms “unfortunate.”
It nearly goes without saying that Baldwin took Faulkner – whose writing he admired – very much to task for this remark. One can, with profit, read his line of argument in the essay “Faulkner and Desegregation.” But that is not my point. It is rather to observe something revealing in Leeming’s biography that arises a hundred pages down the line. We have moved ahead to 1962. Faulkner has recently died, more or less coincident with James Meredith’s registration in the previously all-white University of Mississippi. Meredith’s appearance on campus is attended by twelve thousand federal troops, whose presence, Leeming writes, “prevented the realization of Faulkner’s nightmare of black and white Missippians killing each other in the streets of Oxford and Jackson.” Now was this all-too-possible bloodbath really Faulkner’s nightmare, or was it something a person of conscience, such as Leeming, would find nightmarish – in short, a projection onto a magically re-idealized Faulkner? Judging from the previous text and from Faulkner’s own words, it would seem it was the idea of integration itself that Faulkner found nightmarish – to the point where he was prepared to shoot Negroes to prevent it. As quoted, Faulkner’s statement stands unmediated, and has, at least, the virtue of honesty – the sort of honesty Baldwin valued so highly, because it is truthful – truth, in Baldwin’s cosmology, being the essential and potentiating substrate for love.
So what happened here, between pages 117 and 216? What are the mechanisms, psychological and literary, by which we slip-slide into revision – not just of history, but of thought itself?
Counting the carbs on the New Jersey Turnpike…
And Lady Mondogreen.
Lead story on the Times front page, August 16, under the heading NEWS ANALYSIS:
“Critics Point Fingers at Obama as World Boils.”
Boils, or super-saturates?
Moreso the latter it seems, though they are not mutually exclusive. And how much longer will any flow be possible?
The Lesser Gatsby.
Ring them grooves.
As The World Boils.
All My Children.
Edge of Darkness.
The art of association: practiced forever. Always unfolding. Without limit.
As if rules existed for the killing of people! Said Tolstoy.
Once there was a count who made an accounting, and discounted himself.
It is told that on a visit to Hampton Court in 1782, Lancelot “Capability” Brown – the great English shaper of landscapes, and, by extension of perception and sensibility, encountered the writer Hannah More. In what manner, she asked, did he achieve his remarkable effects? Playing to his interlocutor, Brown replied in terms “grammatical”: “’Now there’ said he, pointing his finger, ‘I make a comma, and there’ pointing to another spot, ’where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.’”
That which is filled up lacks capacity.
The heart, when filled up, can no longer contract and expand, it contains no room for emotion resonate within it.
The eye which is filled up cannot allow perception to pass through it.
A filled-up mind cannot accommodate thought.
This is not theory, it is life. Or its cessation, when we can’t a-void it.
The great dream, perfected in America, but now gone globally viral, of passing seamlessly from Asperger’s to Alzheimer’s without ever encountering the terror-shadow of the self.
New York’s gates are flung wide and the Chinese arrive in droves, but not like cattle, no. They have more style, more money, more energy. Marry one if you can, or become her or his object. Or kiss it all goodbye, baby.
People pass wearing Aeropostal tee shirts. Your brain glitch reads Aeroapostle.
We have learned to abhor the void, to associate it with death. Thus our project has been to fill space with things and to designate as dead the space “between” things.
Did the first void abhorrers not also abhor the wombs of women, and fear their capacity to bleed, yet not die? Were they not attracted by and repelled from the voids from which they sprang? Is this ambivalence, that rigidified as antipathy, not the origin of our thinking? It is not nature that abhors a vacuum, but rather that the idea of “being” can neither tolerate nor fathom it.
Woke up, it was a Chelsea Manning – no, a warning
And first thing that I heard
Was the sound of laddies to and fro
Talking of Mike and Angelo.
And laid him on ye greene.
Who moved my causality?
New York City will teach you anarchism if you let it. It will demonstrate that coherence does not grow from rules but inheres relationships.
An elderly, white-haired, nearly black man sits begging outside the Village Citarella’s. A man of great beauty and few teeth. To every passerby, he calls out: Can anybody spahr? Can anybody spahr? As though this were a question beyond his necessity, but the kosmik question itself.
Is segregation a synonym for disintegration?
There is a moment in a vintage Warner Brothers cartoon where Bugs Bunny, having been koshed and captured by Elmer Fudd, wakes up, trussed with rope, neck deep in a cauldron of steaming water. Still dazed, he scents the air rapturously. “Mmmm, rabbit stew.” A beat. “Rabbit stew!”
Aletheia mon amour.
When legality and reality arrive at a crossroads at the same moment, which allows the other to pass?
