LIV.2
Littering
Public urination
Open container
Riding bicycle in park
Sale of a box-cutter to an under-21
No brake lights
Unlawful possession of marijuana
All in all, about sixty four of us waiting on Judgment.
Called, you leave your pew and approach the bench. The bailiff reads the charge. A court attorney stands at your right.
Judge, addressing attorney: “Twenty dollars.”
You, to attorney: “When the officer issued the summons, he said there would be no fine.”
Attorney to you: “They always say that. They don’t want an argument.”
Out into the hall. Behind you in Room 3, four female and one male court guard, all wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying 9mm pistols.
Return to the scene of the crime of your conception.
The literary journal which you help edit, Tupelo Quarterly, has a motto beneath its name, a well-intended one, designed to signal openness and inclusivity: We hold the gate open. These words evoke a happy image for the writer seeking shelter for her or his work, weary of bouncing off the surface of hermetically-sealed publications defended by unspoken, yet nonetheless impassible barriers.
But here we reach the border between East and West, for to hold the gate open means we must make a concerted effort – perhaps even subject ourselves to a heroic test of strength and will. What is implied is that if we do not hold it open by main force, the gate will shut. It might even crush us, one of our limbs, or, worse yet, our guest in slamming closed. It raises the question of how long we can maintain this posture before we become exhausted.
By comparison, the traditional Chinese character for “between” 間 presents a different image of the gate. In the seal script form, the stylized moon appears above the gate, its two leaves closed, but not completely side by side. Jullien writes that “according to the etymological commentary, the main gate has to be closed at night but, though it is closed, you can still perceive the brightness of the moon because there is a median space between the leaves of the gate that allow the moon’s rays to pass through. That internal emptiness – opening or fissure – that lets light through is also what allows for play within the very articulations structuring beings and things. [“Not Quitting, Not Sticking,” in The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Non-object Through Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 94.]
In relation to the body, Chinese physiology and Daoist meditation practices locate several “gates” along the ren and du meridians. These gates regulate passage of qi/breath and they open and shut naturally with our respiration. Forcing qi/breath through them, or restricting its passage, can be equally harmful.
Returning to Jullien: Neither “without” nor “in” but between: that “between” is the modality of the nonontological. Whereas without makes us abandon the concrete and deprives us of it, and the in makes us stick to the concrete and get bogged down in it, between lets us move freely (spiritually) through the concrete and keeps it communicating-operative. Early on, [beginning in the 5th century] the Chinese treatises on painting gave a name to the virtue of that between, which opens the thing wide from the inside and, allowing passage through it, keeps it deployed. …[But] it is not really a name but a binomial, implying play between the two terms and letting pass: qi-yun, “breath-resonance” (or “energy consonance”). [ibid, p. 95.]
This “breath-resonance” confers “life and movement,” in this case within painted figuration, but applicable as well (without exerting effort) to the images evoked in the poetics of prose.
She reveiled herself just in the niqab of time.
Don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that jing.
Binary KO’d.
Ode to Billie Joe on a Grecian Urn.
Counting Descartes on the New Jersey Turnpike…
By the light of the slivery moon.
The event is in the jaws of dogs.
The mourning dove wants me to follow her west,
but then from the tree to the east,
the call of the cicadas rises up.
When I turn toward her again, she’s gone.
So I remain.
Tell me, friend, have you ever seen so many bees
at work among the passiflorae?
It is categorically impossible for the artist, the sage, or the infant to waste time.
Caveat lector: leaps ahead.
Only by contrast with an authentically demonic “Jew” could the idea of a Master Race be fully validated. This is related to Baldwin’s formulation that the American idea of “whiteness” required the construction of a “nigger.” I think the root of this splitting is bound up with the way in which, by evoking in the representation of objects “the notion of a duplicating transposition whose aim is to promote essence, the Greco-Roman world, then Renaissance Europe, pushed the requirement for resemblance further and further. The passion for it was never satisfied, could never be satisfied.” [Francois Jullien, The Great Image Has No Form, p. 109.] In short, the requirement for resemblance would give birth to a corresponding requirement for absolute not-like-us-ness.
Yet coinciding with the perfection of technologies of resemblance and duplication in the 19th Century, came a rupture in the myth of Zeuxis’s realer-than-real painted grapes. The apple that would astonish the City of Light was hardly a “likeness.” By the 1930s, the Nazis were attempting to build Roman cities out of pre-stressed concrete and erecting “realist” barriers against a tide of “decadent” art that refused the duplicative mode and sought to bring essence back into representation by the unusual door of expressionism.
But the dualist mode of thought, with its obsessive search for truth, when fully deployed, is inherently nihilistic – it can only lead to mass murder, the degradation of the human spirit, and it extends into a generalized assault on the planet’s tendency toward homeostasis and the generative principle as a whole. Killing the planet, murder of all that is organic and mortal, is the true object of this drive, but this can rarely be known, much less thought or said, for it is a truth that the truth-seeker cannot bear about himself – and most frequently and virulently that self is a Him. Any man of European descent who looks in the mirror honestly will find Plato there, with Aristotle backing him up. If he can’t see them, there’s an app to help with that too.
There is a relation too between an obsession with “security,” which Baldwin posits as incommensurable with love and its inherent assumption of risk, and the obsession with determinative certainty – the drive behind that “love of wisdom (founded upon) knowledge.” The known: tightly grasped, yet vaporizing as we cling to it, and the unknown, always vague and huge and menacing. Life permeated with tremendous anxiety. An anthrax-ebola of the mind. Because the more we know, the more we have to worry about all that we don’t know – can’t possibly know – and whether what we do know, or think we know, is true. This is the West, sir, and America is the West par excellence.
And love, or simple reality, one that refrains from determining, is a not knowing. Que sçay-je?
Montaigne weather, mon amour.
