“The truth is foreign to me because I am flesh.
In death I shall attain it.” My ex-wife dressed in red.
I return to the same idea.
A cold winter morning sun.
You frighten me with your mood changes.
“—would it not be scandalous to leave this corpse behind, the body still quivering with fear and giving off pestilential odours, reeking of the sudden decomposition set off by the fear we hold within ourselves our whole lives long?”
—Marie-Clare Blais
The modal auxiliary ‘shall’ prescribes not a future performance but a present, probably already past, hope.
If I should be doing anything in particular after death, it will be contemplating this.
In the meantime, I have fear to occupy me.
And I shall call the cold sun, the color red, you, all beauty to its altar.[/b]
Between that and this…
[b]Blaise Pascal
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity
before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the
infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I
am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no
reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me
here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to
me?[/b]
…lie all the things that occupy me.
As for what is true, I’ll leave that for others to decide.
The logical form of male thinking:
Such and such and this and this.
So, I will do…
Practical illation.
You will never cease reminding me that it is possible to escape it.
Always, we are escaping: this bothers me.
Your solution no less than my problem.[/b]
Would it really make any difference if you knew what the problem and the solution were? Only, I suspect, if you entirely miss the point.
I would rather murder than father a child.
And as for the other reason for sexual contact: it has become a nightmare.[/b]
An antinatalist perhaps? As for the other, was it necessarily a nightmare?
For some time the keeper of these words has been a fiction.
But the reader he envisions is certainly more so.
What is most real, what is the most cowardly fact of all, is the writing itself.
It is an antiphrastic account of my moral world and its shameless seams.
This is the argument I made time and again to Olivia. Or, rather, I think I did. To be consumed with writing is not to be consumed with the futility of writing. The writing becomes analogous to religion. The words to God.
William James said there was no problem of good.
A crow—beyond a fast walk, an airborne walk—skips along the coping of a brick parapet, lunging into the face of January’s breath.
There is no corresponding problem of good because we expect compatibility of some sort with the world.
A mother’s affection is not supposed to be an object of wonder (in the sense of suspicion).
I think it is.
The first sight of her child can turn a murderess into a saint.
The ‘good’ also requires explanation.
On a sunny winter morning this crow skips like a child.[/b]
Is this not a reality constructed out of words? We could construct a world in which determinism prevails. This would be another world in which there was no problem of good. Or a world in which there are conflicting goods able to be defended equally merely by positing different sets of assumptions.
The crow will never be like the baby unless the baby is taught to be like the crow: good mechanically.
I run from pain but the running brings with it pleasure.[/b]
What then are we to make of those who run toward it? Or who push others into its path?
At 3:02 in the morning at the airport my memory is sharp, visionary.
…saying to Kathy from a balcony overlooking the Ave that I was alright, I was going to live.
(Four years ago.)
I had thrown up two days worth of undigested food, stored in my distended esophagus.
Skate-boarders roared by.
I sipped my canned apple juice.
Kathy is a dear character in my life, haplessly dear, like my cat.
You are not that, not exactly, not yet.
Maybe you are my conscience, something always to be at war with.
I can mention her name, I can only refer to you as “you” with the same uneasiness with which I address it.
You needn’t feel slighted, I would not leave you for Kathy.
I don’t know if there is a creature I would leave you for.
The level of pain and its attending grace, I’ve come to expect and demand, wouldn’t permit it.
But you won’t think I love you in the way you want to be.
No one ever believes that.
Or maybe you are the hapless character created by Kathy. You are obviously created by someone other than the one you want us to believe you are. Some believe you are created by me. But we both know a thing or two about fabricating personas. It begins at birth and it ends at death. With all the stuff in the middle becoming no less enigmatic.
Morally, I don’t suffer; aesthetically, I have a right to claim a supreme competence and, as you see, I do.[/b]
Even if you suffer morally it is only because you are unaware that suffering is merely the embodiment of the same connundrum: dasein. And that such points of view are – aesthetically – only as competent or incompetent as we think they are.
17 January 1991/23 February 1991.
War—I am almost left opinionless—is appalling.
It is an embarrassment to terrorists everywhere.
Oh, they’ll make up for it. In a word: W. Next to him, Osama is a piker.
Without ever wishing to understand myself too completely…the effort.[/b]
The burdon is lifted considerably however once you acknowledge the problematic nature of identity. You cannot hope to understand something that is always under reconstruction. Especially something that was never constructed entirely from a blueprint.
The “wise choice” in love: better not to love at all.
The exception [possibly] being cats.
We need more idealists!
Else, where shall we recruit for tomorrow’s cynics and find relief from the scheme set down in Aristotle?
Indeed, just as conservatives tend to evolve [not devolve] from liberals. I know I did. Though I prefer the term “realist”.
In the political sense, of course.
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.[/b]
This is particularly applicable to moral, political and religious values. Something is true if we believe it is true. And if we believe it is true passionaitely enough we can wreak havoc on the lives of others.
How do we fit my small attitude into an ego this size?
I am not remembered to the community; where would they find room for me?
The quantity of becoming it would take, the dissolution of my precious being…
I was driven forth from the land, so to speak, fifteen years ago, when I began in earnest these letters-turned-journals.
To document my exile for the odd person in some future generation.
The mystery of participation, of what is called “good” (no matter James’ comment).
No matter that I’ve succeeded in the person of my person in being judged kind, considerate, steadfast…
Deliver me from this “good” that permeates all things.
What crime could do this?[/b]
This is how to rationalize something as obscure and inconsequential as these observations: accummulating them for “the odd person in some future generation”.
We accummulate them for ourselves now because, really, what is the alternative?
Arguing with Mill about the ineradicable penchant we seem to have for the ideal, especially in the face of utility, James conjures a world where the mass enjoys an undisturbed bliss paid for by the uninterrupted torture of one solitary individual.
How repugnant, he permits himself to say.
But now picture this: a moral state of affairs where just a sampling enjoys a modicum of bliss, while the rest…
This is not so repugnant I gather from looking about.
This is not a Marxist sarcasm, but a sound literal evaluation, pressured by the only measure of repugnance available, free of lip-servitude.
Is lamentation insincere then?
It may serve some biological function, I guess: the way irony, on occasion, does.
(It keeps me, for instance, from acts of physical violence.)
Just now, I am not moved to claim more for it.[/b]
This is the world many refuse to look at: “…a moral state of affairs where just a sampling enjoys a modicum of bliss, while the rest…”
The world we actually live in. The world of Walmart and commodity fetish.
Instead, they rationalize it: it’s their own fault: overpopulation, refusing to embrace our way of life, the color of their skin, ethnic blunders, choosing the wrong God etc.
But being moved to violence reinforces all the more the relationship some [like me] are shackled to—the one between outrage and fear.
My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.[/b]
That’s one way to look at at. Fortunately, there are other ways too.
Maybe a million people died yesterday on the other side of the earth on islands in great typhoons and in the horn of Africa of not enough pity.
Acts of God?
Certainly, He was complicit.
(And if He doesn’t exist, I accuse Him of that.)
But the important thing is the difference that makes to you?[/b]
The important thing [for some] is whether or not it ought to make a difference to anyone at all. In fact, it can be argued that we invented God in order to insist it must.
Living with her—and perhaps with anyone—would have a certain element of hell about it.
Hell is, after all, other people. And being alone is bliss. Right up to that point [and it’s coming] we begin to fall apart at the seams.
This actually reminds me of the problem creative people have once they are known to the public. The incredible pressure to repeat and create ‘according to their identity’ as judged by critics or fans. (or their own self-pressure) That we are always stopping flow, trying to get control of what ‘worked’ and even people who hate the very ugly way capitalism can suck resources - nature, talented people, workers - dry, do the same things to their kids, ‘artists’ they love, and even themselves.
I tend to agree with Kafka here. My quibble would be that many things can act as drugs and its likely that Kafka partook in some of these ‘drugs’. Some drugs even prevent socialness. Probably most do.
Regarding “controlled substances”, I tend more towards the perspective of Tom the priest from Drugstore Cowboy:
“Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that someone can use drugs to escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots.”
But there are a lot of different ways to encompass a “terrible fate”. Still, it infuriates me I don’t have access to the dope that would ameliorate mine.
Freeze-dried passion, the icy intimacy of nightmare.
A clinical voice, but with the syntax, emboldening familiarity, found in diaries.
An accomplishment, an act with tortuous though forgiven consequences under a white moon.
I will be forgiven in time, more or less.
What difference does that make to you?
By what grace will you dismiss me?
My ugliness, the terror that attracts (not pursues) me I cannot give names to as you will assuredly give me.
You will conflate the logician and poet in me to save yourself, to spare yourself yourself.
I am, over and over again, a sharp instrument in your heart.[/b]
A logician who fancies himself a poet more or less than a poet who fancies himself a logician. Too close to call? Not really. What I read are the gaps between words and worlds from a mind that knows enough about relationships in which there are no gaps at all. We agonize more over what we come to conclude we cannot know: the things that matter most to us.
Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity…[/b]
From my vantage point now, this sentiment appears more noble, stirring and inspirational “up there” than “down here”. Down here the absurd comforts me more from the opposite direction: the great equalizer.