XXXIX

 

Money = liquid you can burn.

 

Arthur, nibbling on his pizza, alone in the alien, splendid capital [Paris], tries to make something coherent and bearable out of all that he sees, and doesn’t see.

For that, he needs another: in order to see what he fears to see, he must, himself, be seen. He needs to give himself to someone who needs to give himself to Arthur.

He has been tormented by this for a long time now, but he cannot honestly say that he had been confused. Crunch [his former lover] frustrated confusion by thrusting on him an anguish absolutely lucid: so lucid and so total that it would have been nearly a relief to have been able to find a haven in guilt and shame. Yet guilt and shame nag at him, too, when he worries about his father’s judgment, or anticipates mine. (He is not worried about his mother’s judgment, but is worried about causing her pain.) At bottom, he really feels that his father, and brother, will not love him the less for the truth. In a sense, he feels obligated to tell the truth, both for our sakes, and his own. For is perfectly possible, after all, that it is his judgment that he fears and not ours, that he reads his judgment in our eyes.

Still, the step from this perception to articulation is not an easy one. He has faltered and turned back many times. And yet, he knows that, when he was happy with Crunch, he was neither guilty nor ashamed. He had felt a purity, a shining joy, as though he had been, astoundingly, miraculously blessed, and had feared neither Satan, man, nor God. He had not doubted for a moment that all love was holy. And he really does not doubt it now, but he is very lonely.

Hall Montana, via Baldwin, from Just Above My Head.

 

Baldwin writes, in what I will call his passages of internal exposition, at the speed and rhythm of thought: thought as it evolves in the human mind. Many such passages can be found in his novels. And when one of his characters is thinking about another, or others, as in Just Above My Head, p. 470 (Hall thinking of Arthur in Paris thinking of Crunch and Jimmy), the writing takes on an astonishing unity of energy, in which the reader is as profoundly implicated as any of the people present in the text.

 

The alternation between extremes does not constitute balance.

 

Usually it is only the profoundly damaged who take restitution seriously. How does one keep from overcompensating in the opposite direction?

 

The man at the next table with the accent from who know where takes a cell call. After some palaver to which you resolutely don’t listen, he begins to bring the conversation to a conclusion. “OK,” he says, “Good. Have a gray day. Have a gray day.”

Look out the window. It certainly is.

 

Detour for access.

 

Becoming a better child will not protect you.

 

Beware the definitive.

 

Raise that city. Raze that city. Command it and a thousand men will at once begin and work without pause until their task is complete. It takes little force to set all that energy in motion.

Sail that sea. Three times around Troy. Funeral games.

 

And Jacob, who does he wrestle with? For the Devil is too easy.

 

It’s amazing how much damage may be mended if the nature of the damage can be faced.

 

I’ve been feeling a little unter dem Schloss lately.

 

Danae in the golden rain.

 

Dance, Memory.

 

You know it. Can you think it? Then allow it to return to knowing again? You almost said “return to nothing…”

 

Stink of the Manetta, ring me home.

 

A woman passes through the park swinging a shopping bag that says: AEROSOLE. You read: ARISTOTLE.

 

Oh, Lawzy me, dat chil’ done been bit by de hydrophobic weasel of relativism! (S)he’s a gonner for sure!

 

A shave, three haircuts, nine blowjobs, a kneecapping, six weddings, two point five funerals, a triple axel, and ren, our awareness of the fundamental solidarity of all beings.

 

When the tiger roars the valley wind comes.

When the dragon arises great clouds appear.

            So the ancient (I’m just) saying goes.

 

Perhaps being white is not a conceivable condition, but a terrifying fantasy, a moral choice.

Posits Baldwin’s narrator in Just Above My Head.

 

You sit, you begin to notice things. A hoard of small children in identical huge yellow teeshirts being herded through the park like a chain gang of midgets. Like the dreadlocked man half-leaning, half-lying, canted northeast on the bench down from you. And the half-sulfuric, half-sewer-funky smell of Manetta wafting Delphic vapors from the vent under the bench near your left foot.

Like the young woman, circumambulating the fountain, passing every three minutes or so, a yard from your bike’s handlebar. Straight backed, sexily booted and slightly scuffing her heels, edge of counter-cultural, head inclined into her mobile device as though it were an invisible violin.

Round she comes again and each time it seems only the dispositions of the pigeons has changed. That may or may not be Bobby surveying from his roost twenty someodd floors up on Bobst.

“Yeah, the team felt it would be awesome if…”

The man to your left doesn’t move. The shadow of the window recess is too deep to tell if that’s Bobby’s silhouette against the dark, or if your eye is fooling you again. You wonder when they’ll turn the fountain on.

Skuff-skuff.

            “Yeah, we set it up with the venture guys so that the rollout…”

Time has come today. Stick your legs out and rotate your feet, one direction, then the other. Rice crispy sounds from your left ankle. Inspect your bike for signs of winter wear and tear. Yes, it’s pretty surely Bobby, motionless in his niche. The pigeon man enters the scene from the western spoke and with his dove whisper seduces the flock. Two tourists stand amazed.

You get up and put your gloves on and pop up the kickstand. She has to detour a bit around you. Skuff-skuff.

            “I think this will be a different app experience than you all are used to…”

Washington Square Park. A week into official spring. What a difference a half century makes. Different shit. Entirely different day.

Skuff-skuff. Time.

 

Sure you write for the seven billion – or at least the hidden spark within them – but the truth is you’re content with the conspiration of a handful of fellow respirateurs.

 

You fly out of the park on a northwest axis.

“Hey, bike nigga!” the dealer calls. “Magic!”

You notice that the sign “English Elm” has vanished from the English Elm. It’s maple and cedar-jumpier pollens that dry and water your eyes though. Rounding the corner of Waverly and 6th: happy spring, a big hachoo.

 

 

Does anyone dare remember? Is it possible? If she had not been stricken still and dumb by her last sight of the flaming city, perhaps Lot’s wife could tell us – perhaps, indeed, she does. But memory cannot be a pillar of salt, standing watch over a dead sea: we need a new vocabulary.

Hall, Arthur’s brother, in Baldwin’s Just Above…

 

Who is water? Who is stone?

 

Catch of the day: mock empathy.

 

A welfie: photo of oneself taken while waiting for Relief. Think Dorothea Lange. Think Biafra. Click.

 

Don’t have to live like a refugee. Or do you?

 

Stop making sense break down, hellhound.

 

If I have one life to live, [!?] let me live it as a blind, fundamentalist cleric. Ojalá.

 

I was a blind, fundamentalist cleric for the FBI.

 

And the world doesn’t have any morality. Look at the world. What the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety.

Jimmy Miller, Arthur’s lover, via Baldwin in Just Above…

 

1924:   James Arthur Baldwin born in Harlem.

John Edgar Hoover appointed director of Bureau of Investigation (later Federal Bureau of Investigation).

Vast quantities of commercial fertilizer head south to farmers attempting to push their cotton crops to early maturity ahead of the boll weevil cycle.

 

Book of the World Courant, wherein it is noted that Chiang Kai-shek, photographed as a young man, does not look entirely unlike Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Ralphie: a photographic self-portrait taken while vomiting.

 

Schnellfie: very fast selfie.

 

Modernity: hurried, anxious. The right hand freedom – don’t know what the left hand security is doing. Electric motor. Manhattan. Skyline. Times Square. This ain’t no bullshit I’m running down, this is history, yo. I’m serious.

 

But compared to what?

 

What’s it all about, Ralphie?

 

I’ve got motive. I’ve got opportunity.

            I’ve got sunshine, on a cloudy day.

 

Don’t do the time if you can’t do the crime.

 

All theories queer.

 

The past isn’t.

 

What is the relationship between freedom and mobility?

 

Ah, the many desperate peoples of the world. Did I say disparate?

 

Grayed minds think alack. With or without comma.

 

Geep the faith, baby.

 

Where have all the funeral games gone, long time passing?

 

Every form is different, no one is easier than another. They all kick your ass.

Said Baldwin once to Paris Review.

 

This flag had been planted on the moon:

it will be interesting to see

what steps the moon will take to be revenged…

            Baldwin, “Staggerlee Wonders, 1,” Jimmy’s Blues, p. 4.

 

The high cost of being saved.

 

Is you is or is you ain’t

(my baby?)

 

Tarnished by a touch of the tarbrush.

 

Agnotology: a word coined by Robert Proctor, a Stanford U. historian of science. Agno, derived from Neoclassical Greek “not knowing,” and Attic Greek “unknown,” agnotology is the study of the social production of ignorance. The word also implies the condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before. Or, perhaps, a “subject” more uncertain of itself.

To knowledge-based folk, such as said Greeks and their philosophical descendants, such a condition would be anathema – whoops, Greek again. But as for yours truly, every day he tries to tolerate knowing just a little bit less. And he wonders, like and unlike “Stagerlee,” about the relation between ignorance and knowledge. And he also wonders, without dwelling on it, whether the social production of ignorance is intended or unconscious, or simply a byproduct of certain quotidian practices, or some combination of factors in different moments.

 

You been telling me you’re a genius

Since you were seventeen

In all the time I’ve known you

I still don’t know what you mean

The weekend at the college

Didn’t turn out like you planned

The things that pass for knowledge

I can’t understand.

Sang Donald Fagan and Walter Becker of Steely Dan, oncet, “Reeling in the Years.”

 

Might it be also worthwhile – in addition to opposing knowledge and ignorance, and studying the various means by which they are produced and consumed – looking into the relationship between knowledge and awareness? For surely the two are not synonymous.

 

What makes you feel like a superior being? What makes you feel like an inferior being? Is this not a trap?

 

Strange multiple meanings of the word fix.

 

Skeuomorphology, mes amourgos.

 

Skeuomorphism calls into question, from a potentially oblique angle, the relation between form and function. And perhaps more essentially, meaning, form, and structure.

 

From Greek: skéuos, (container or tool).

 

Ringing in the ruins.