Paul and Annette Discuss Ida Lupino and Nothing Ever Was, Anyway

I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives. -Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

An authorship that began with Either/Or and advanced step by step seeks here its consummating place of rest at the foot of the altar, where the author, personally most aware of his own imperfection and guilt, certainly does not call himself a witness to the truth but only a singular kind of poet and thinker who, "without authority," has had nothing new to bring but "has wanted to read through once again, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old, familiar text handed down from the fathers" -Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, from the preface to Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays

Toward dawn, he dreamt he had hidden himself in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. [...] A librarian wearing dark glasses asked him: What are you looking for? Hladik answered: God. The Librarian told him: God is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the 400,000 volumes of the Clementine. My fathers and the fathers of my fathers have sought after that letter." -Jorge Luis Borges, from The Secret Miracle

When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object  Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment.   Transparent things, through which the past shines! -Vladimir Nabokov, from Transparent Things

This is the story.  This is the story that I have been writing.  It is the story I began long ago, and that I have been writing since.  The things I say I want, I had and lost, and have again, and have had again, and again, and have always had.  The story is my life.  This is not the story of my life, however.  My life is the story.  And, although I am not a character in this story, I am every character.  How could I not be?  I do not exist except in their eyes.  They do not exist except in my eyes.  The story is the world.  The story is the word.  The world does not exist without my witness.  I do not exist without the witness of the world.  The words in the story are stars in an endless universe.  The universe is but a word.  And lost?  And have always had?…lost, then, does not always mean gone?  The story is not here.  The story is everywhere, and nowhere.  Is it circular or linear?  I only ask because I do not know.  I am as frustrated as you with this story.  It seems to begin in the middle of something that has no middle.  And yet, within a word or two later, I (we) are in some other place, some other time, a time that is briefly the present, a time that recedes into a verifiable but ever shifting past.  The past itself is not shifting, but as we listen again to a piece of music, or read again a poem, we have changed, if imperceptibly, forever and ineluctably.  You, the reader, are no longer where you were or who you were when you began the story.  The evidence is everywhere, ubiquitous, incontrovertible, and ultimately irrelevant.  We all know that we are hurtling through space and time, and that we are composed of gyrating particles, which themselves are composed of smaller gyrating particles, and that solidity and tangibility are illusions.  And, this does not take into account entropy.  The story, then, is an illusion.  This is not an ontological assumption, but simply an observation that is also irrelevant.  It is not relevant to the act of writing, nor is it relevant to the act of reading.  It is for philosophers to undertake questions of being and not being.  Certainly Aristotle may make an appearance in the story, or Descartes may stroll through eating an ice cream cone.  Look, there is Kierkegaard clipping his toenails.  A moment later, one of these gentlemen may become either victim or murderer.  The delineation of his actions and his motives concomitant with their ultimate consequences, i.e. plot, theme, characterization, dénouement, will play differently in the infinite theaters of the mind upon which they are projected.  Who is speaking?  It is I and Thou.  Do you hear my thoughts, His thoughts, Her thoughts, or is this narrative (Is this a narrative?) homodiegetic?   Such terms: heterodiegetic, figural narrative, overt omniscience, will all lead in the wrong direction, toward narratology and semiotics.    Someone is speaking of these things within the story; perhaps Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov are in a café in Prague discussing Kafka.  Barthes says,

"The death of the author is the birth of the reader." Am I dead?  Are you born?  The text will go on without either of us, or never was, or always was, and always is.  This is the story.  This is the story that I have been writing.  It is the story I began long ago, and that I have been writing since.  It seems to begin in the middle of something that has no middle.  Do you hear my thoughts?  The story is my life.   The evidence is everywhere.  Who is speaking?  The things I say I want, I had and lost, and have again, and have had again, and again, and have always had.    You, the reader, are no longer where you were.  This does not take into account entropy.  The story is an illusion.  It is I and Thou.  The words in the story are stars in an endless universe.  This is the story.  This is the story that I have been writing.

Death and Transfiguration of a Blog

In The World as Idea, Schopenhauer writes:

No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea.  This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise.  All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject.  The world is idea.

Certainly it is a continuation of the Cartesian notion, and certainly it allows for the writer as perceiver a reason to write or connote an idea.  Thus, perhaps, is the simplest justification for the existence of this blog: cogito ergo sum.  Yet to avoid the fulsome effluvium (a phrase stolen from Vonnegut) of cliché, would I not have to name it something like, Crack Whores and Cheese, and write without the use of pronouns or conjunctions?  As it has been, cliché may be the best I can say about it.  The worst of it is summed up by Yeats in his poem, Remorse for Intemperate Speech:

                                              

            I ranted to the knave and fool,

But outgrew that school,

Would transform the part,

Fit audience found, but cannot rule

My fanatic heart.

I sought my betters: though in each

Fine manners, liberal speech,

Turn hatred into sport,

Nothing said or done can reach

My fanatic heart,

The final stanza is less applicable (for me, not for Yeats), and, thusly, is omitted.  I have spilled the ink of my thoughts into an impenetrable Rorschach blot, ergo blog, where text becomes noise; the text separates into meaningless cuneiform, which dissipates further into the white noise that surrounds us.  Trying to define insanity is itself a form of insanity.  I had intended a few words that would tend toward the opposite of didacticism, toward Barthes’ description:

… poetry is a regressive semiological system that aims at reaching the meaning of things themselves.

However, as I stumbled outside of my sphere of influence, a circumbendibus in which I was pursued and preceded by mediocrity like my own shadow,  the daedal theses and antitheses became nothing more than intemperate speech; text gone wild.   These narrative excursions became very similar to my own quotidian exercise of going out the door with, let’s say, the above paragraph of Schopenhauer to contemplate on my daily walk, which I probably would refer to as my diurnal hegira, whereupon scarcely into my peripatetic journey of epistemological inquiry I would find the world as idea more accurately the world as distraction.  Shadows, sounds, smells, comforts, discomforts, the cracks in the sidewalk, and pragmatism suddenly all demanding my moronic attention; lists of quotidian details summoning themselves, all vying for pyretic position, and all just sticks fallen over like toppled Giacomettis.  By my return home I am aware of little more than my own breathing and paucity of verdure.  There is no narrative, only textual evidence of an attention deficiency disorder.  I have wandered into ordinary madness with new shoes. 

The point of all this is simple.  The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) has a census of blog sites, 273,986 weblogs of which it has indexed, with approximately 2 billion weblogs in queue, not yet verified, and it estimates 180,830 active blogs.  To me this reads like mass hysteria.  Perhaps, however, we are so technologically Neanderthal that in the incipient future blogging will approximate striking two stones together.  Being that, however precariously, I am in the now, and not the ineluctable future, I must decline from screaming into the void.  If any catharsis is to occur, it will not be on the world wide web.  Governments, geopolitics, global economics, wars, crime, plagues, natural disasters, and the mountains of minutiae regurgitated by the ostensible main stream media in a self-actuated Marshall McLuhan nightmare (“And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time…”) and deconstructed infinitely by any of those 200,000 bloggers perpetually, time having become another irrelevancy, has caused me to reconsider that which I have been doing, thus, that which I have become. 

I had already reached the conclusion that the polemic of U.S. politics had become Kafkaesque in its absurdity and corruption, and Orwellian in its hegemonic and Judaic-Christian totalitarianism, be it ever so incipient.  Out of something like capitulation, I posted my last piece on July 20^th, halted by the shrill noise of my own intemperate speech, the screech of tires locked and careening toward my narcissistic diatribe.  Not quite an epiphany, the moment was more darkness than light.  I agreed with Mencken’s notion that, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”   To end the vigilant and interminable perusal of every news source, of every article/op-ed/blog/book/periodical that may reveal the DNA code of our collective destruction, was suddenly and determinately the only choice.  What could I read in The Nation, that I had not already come to understand by reading Kafka’s, The Trial?  Indeed, one reading of Charles Maturin’s, Melmoth the Wanderer, would suffice to illustrate the intrinsic nature of our species, and all other literary works of fiction ultimately shine the light of truth  into the corners of human affairs, revealing the detritus of lives lived.  Without creating a paean to Art, I would humbly suggest to the reader a more sapient exposure to the works of individuals who have labored outside of the static, whose unique vision bears collective witness.  For my part, I returned to my fiction in progress and to articles on esoterica and Thoreauvian quiet desperation.  A respite from the inexorable flow of information and email into my laptop was requisite and welcome.

Then something like an actual epiphany occurred; I finally checked my email.  An old friend had located me after centuries, by stumbling across my blog.  The infernal regions of the house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s, House of Leaves approximated the internal fall into my own Gordian knot of fears, memories, illusions, and psychoses that reside within my inverse universe.  Realizing that someone from my youth was reading these harangues on the lunatic fringe, felt like looking up from the homeless sidewalk in any city where someday a real rain ‘ill come and wash all this scum off the streets, after a break in an otherwise ceaseless monologue to myself, to imagine that I recognize the face looking down at me in horror and disgust.  It was as though I was caught masturbating on a live feed to every television in the world.  Oh yeah, if you post your trivium (see McLuhan) on the internet, it may actually get read.  Of course, the specific memories of the friend’s indelible effect on me came back in a torrent of joy, horror, embarrassment, laughter, and ineffability.  I remember his mother, a sweetheart actually, had told him that I was a bad influence upon him; a perspicacious observation from a loving parent.  Nevertheless, his family took me along on their summer vacation, whereupon he turned the color of a horse chestnut and I burned every layer of epidermis, derma, sebaceous glands, and blood and lymph vessels, down to and including the bone.  He was a youth with ferocious talent who wrote beautiful compositions on the piano, played the double bass with unparalleled virtuosity (and could be playing today in the manner of Gary Peacock or Dave Holland, George Mraz or Christian McBride, Charlie Haden or Boris Koslov, who plays with the Mingus Big Band), and once wrote a poem entitled, A Sinner Who Died in a Fire, that I would present here if I could.  He was a prodigy, a talented basketball player, an enigma, and someone who would laugh hysterically at my most inane utterances.  In Denmark, as a bassist, he recorded an LP with the Erling Kroner Quintet upon which his composition, I’ve Grown Accustomed to the Race, shines in perpetuity.  What ever happened to the quintet’s original drummer?

This humble diary in its present form is at a point of repose.  I do, however, rage against the dying of the light; the light of our democracy, our liberties, our possibilities.  Perhaps there is no point of repose, the way in Steve Swallow’s composition, Sweeping Up; the simple chords in a modal progression of 7 bars never cease to be.  The original Erratum will stay up briefly, its embalmed body of work grotesquely on display for the perversely curious, after which the text will be cremated and spread upon the waters of moirés. 

To (re-)read this and all future posts go here.

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