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BOMB SEASON

by Michel Basilières

An Electronic Book from OmniMedia

© Copyright 1995 by Michel Basilières

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CAUTION:  Adult situations and language.

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Book Abstract

OmniMedia is pleased to announce the first publication anywhere of Michel Basilières’ novel Bomb Season.

Bomb Season is an ambitious novel set in Europe during the final years of the Cold War, between the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the fall of the Berlin Wall.  In a series of parallel, call-and-response monologues it tells the story of two brothers.  One falls desperately in love with a woman who takes up with him simply as the result of a bet.  The other is taken hostage by terrorists and must learn to preserve his life and sanity with a precarious balancing act of submission and collaboration.

Drawing on emerging post-industrial theory and harkening back to the marginalized roots of modernism, Bomb Season is a pataphysical, surreal journey through physical desire and subjective meaning.  At times explicit, at times oblique, it is literally an inside look at how our daily reality interacts with our rapidly fracturing epistemology.

CAUTION:  Adult situations and language.


Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Explorations Program of the Canada Council.

I would like to thank my family for their support, especially Lorne Stephens and Vivian Basilières.

Enfin, je tiens à remercier Raymonde et Denis Gilbert pour leur confiance et leur support durant les temps difficiles.


Table of Contents

(click directly on the dark blue text to move to the indicated section.)

Title Page

Book Abstract

Acknowledgments

Copyright Notice and Terms

About the Author

Bomb Season (click on the desired chapter)

Under the Cloud
Bad Grammar
Invisible Journeys
Desire Considers Disaster
New Heresies
Signs of Nothing
The Secret Manifesto
(Note:  Chapters 21 through 44 of this TITLE have been protected by SoftLock™ software.  To read these chapters requires the one-time purchase from SoftLock of a password, unique to your computer.  Details for purchasing the SoftLock password are given in the window which appears when you attempt to read any of the protected chapters.  You will find the purchase procedure to be very easy and convenient.)

About OmniMedia


Copyright Notice and Terms

This electronic book, “Bomb Season” (the “TITLE”) is © Copyright 1995 by Michel Basilières (the “Author”), and is fully protected by United States Copyright laws and international treaty provisions.  This TITLE was produced/published by OmniMedia (the “Publisher”).

Because this electronic book is protected by SoftLock™ software, the Author hereby gives all others permission to electronically duplicate and redistribute this TITLE provided that none of the files associated with the TITLE (see text file ‘bombseas.txt’ for a complete list) are omitted and/or altered in any manner.  Some examples of forbidden alterations to this TITLE include the disabling of the SoftLock feature via any means, the distribution of an electronic file produced by capturing or extracting any portion of the text, and distributing to others a printed copy of any portion of the text.

The Author and the Publisher encourage you to distribute this electronic book far and wide (as outlined in the previous paragraph) so that many others can enjoy it.

This TITLE, including all files, installation programs, and documentation, is provided “AS IS”, that is, you use this title at your own risk, without warranty of any kind.  This includes, but is not limited to, defects/errors with the format of this TITLE as well as defects/errors in the media used to distribute this TITLE to the supplier and/or purchaser.  The Author and the Publisher further disclaims all implied warranties including, but not limited to, merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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Should you have any further questions about the contents of this section, please contact the OmniMedia.

(Note:  Chapters 21 through 44 of this TITLE have been protected by SoftLock™ software.  To read these chapters requires the one-time purchase from SoftLock of a password, unique to your computer.  Details for purchasing the SoftLock password are given in the window which appears when you attempt to read any of the protected chapters.  You will find the purchase procedure to be very easy and convenient.)

This book is a work of fiction.  All the characters and events are imaginary, and any resemblance to real people or situations is entirely coincidental.


About the Author

Born in 1960 in Montreal of mixed French and English Canadian roots, Michel Basilières has traveled more extensively in Europe than in North America.  He wandered through several faculties before leaving university without a degree.  His first stage play, Cassandra, was written in four weeks in a burst of inspiration and accepted for production immediately.  The following year he received an Explorations grant from the Canada Council on the Arts to write this book.

He currently lives in Toronto where he is at work on another novel, set in Montreal, and a stage play set in Enlightenment Paris.

You can contact Michel Basilières via Internet e-mail:

michel_basilieres@tvo.org


Chapter 1

Under the Cloud — 1

Under the Cloud

If she were a kind of Helen, could I rescue her from some kind of Troy?  The Troy that steals her from me is not one she’s likely to want rescuing from, and not just for the sake of Paris.  Or Berlin, more properly, where the first meetings of our lives unfolded as if scripted, as if we were only actors.  That string of clubs along the Ku-dam, the only sights and sounds penetrating the overwhelming fog of the Cold War, which in those days seemed just as eternal as our longing for its end, just as dreaded as Scheherazade’s dawn, just as incongruous as Berlin Zoo:  a city of caged animals within a city of caged humans, and those in the cage so much better fed than those without;  and hence, eyed with mistrust, envy, and a hatred so muted it might some day be dispensed with altogether, if the doors should spring open and the occupants come sniffing over the transom.  But like a smudge, of blue or red—usually red, the illicit color—or yellow like fading hopes, like a smudge through the fog, the thunder of the bass drum and blinking of incandescent signs don’t so much beckon as they dare, as they entice like Sirens—like false Sirens, Banshees at heart—wailing through the mist and puffing out billows of tobacco as if the buildings themselves were smoking, as if the fog were their own idea:  Big Eden, says one, Xanadu another, El Dorado a third.  And paying the doorman dressed in black, whose skeletal smile says abandon hope, suddenly the panic realization of having passed under a sign which reads Labyrinth without laying out a trail of bread crumbs or a thread, suddenly the concussive pressure in the inner ear like an enormous heartbeat, suddenly the fear of stepping into the ring with the bull.

What kind of a fear was it exactly?  Which I couldn’t have asked myself at the time because I didn’t know there was anything of either sort going on;  I didn’t even realize I had been the fifth man through the door since the bet had been made;  and if I’d known the very idea would have been more dehumanizing than even the explosion, which we heard later through the fog because we made love with the window open and the lights on, but which we only realized was that same Labyrinth the following morning when the Japanese concierge offered the Tribune with the coffee and rolls, and so years later I was to think of the two events as the prologue in heaven and the prelude on the stage, or the wager and the disaster, because that’s the order they came in for me.  Though I can’t think of Aida as in any way heavenly, she’s certainly theatrical enough, literally, and of course I was just an innocent victim of a childish dare, I was number five just to prove some kind of obscure point but even now when I think of that stick-figure tattoo on her ankle and the way she smoked while I worshipped her, it breaks my heart.  It’s easy now, to look over the papers, the books, the videos and the photos and say, look this naturally connects and here’s the trail that leads elsewhere, but hindsight is all imagination and lies, really, and only ends up assigning blame.  Not that I feel innocent, or even remember the feeling of innocence, in fact that’s the problem exactly, that I took such delicious pleasure in the illicit offerings, offerings made precisely to destroy some kind of imaginary innocence, like those fabulous arguments Aida and I would have over anal sex, which she would never consent to not because the act itself was taboo or distasteful or one she wouldn’t perform with others or even in public if it were scripted and Equity approved, but because she knew I would consider it the ultimate surrender, the ultimate victory and hence the only purely innocent act left to us.  I begged, as pitifully as I knew how, that she would consent just the once, one single absolutely pure act which would bind us permanently, in spite of the intervention of distance or time which was inevitable, but she rightly claimed that once was all I would want, it was useless to plead like a child for a single kindness since only once would it be a pure act, because second helpings are the first symptom of decadence.  So to show her how willing I was to descend into decadence for her, I charged into a campaign of anal sex and always arranged for her to be aware of it, to have her catch me under her leading man in the dressing room between acts, the time I bound her to the kitchen chair and sodomized myself with one of the neighbors before her eyes, etc.  But “It’s no use,” she finally said one day, “what you really want is for me to do you, and I can’t.  I just can’t.”

A lack of caring enough, is what I always felt was really missing, but after that day she was the only one I could make love to any more, as if she had reduced my obsession with her to the monotony of television, of lecture halls, of confession, which maybe was the right way to approach it after all because my obsession with her had something to do with the day on which we met, a day I could never get out of my mind as long as you were hostages, and that was a long time, baby:  one hundred and forty three weeks exactly, two years and eight months, or as the poet says a thousand and one nights of trying to save your life in such a constant state of desperation it never occurs to you that it’s become a tedious existence somewhere beneath the terror, an existence like a sinus headache, like that Riopelle exhibit, something you’d be crazy to want to prolong if you’d stop to think about it.  And for us on the outside the whole situation was hopeless, we were suddenly blinded by the world itself because we were not confined;  which became meaningless because you were, so what should we do?  What could we do except lead our lives and hope, like we’d always done;  but you’d just proved by being swept away, and not killed like those in the Labyrinth, how spurious any ambition was, even the smallest desire for a pathetic kind of comfort like a hot cup of tea, let alone a normal life, smashed more thoroughly than if you’d been killed outright, which is always baffling as a fact, but your continued existence was an ongoing process of unraveling everything commonplace in our lives, like discovering our own dark secrets or worse those of our parents or suddenly realizing everything you’ve told your analyst is either true or false.  An unnatural kind of resolve—to treat the whole situation the same way as we had done with the disappearance of the cat when we were children, which was to frantically scour the neighborhood only long enough to appease our sense of responsibility, of guilt, and afterward to go ahead and get another cat, or the way we had replaced our first loves with unsuspecting dupes—rose up in me to attach myself to this woman I ordinarily would have just plain fallen in love with but whom I now needed to make into a career of self-humiliation, to fill the suddenly open space of legitimation in myself which had your name on it.


Chapter 2

Under the Cloud — 2

The world is a great absent presence like a film seen in childhood or having remembered something while dreaming, an enormous amorphous zone beyond my control, beyond the walls of these rooms, this house, a safe house for some, like the one I call Artaud because he insists we are divine and saves our lives thereby.  It is Artaud who hates us least and it will be through him, if at all, that finally we will be allowed paper, pens, some news from outside, medicine in emergencies and to know when our birthdays are.  He’s been the only constant in all these days, or rather in this perpetual day of isolation, remaining when even all the others have gone elsewhere or been arrested or fled the country or been killed;  he’s the only one who’s never killed one of us, the only one who refuses to torture us, to rape us, the only one to accompany us when we are inevitably shuffled from one coffin to another;  he’s been more constant even than one of us, for he was here before I came and now I’m the one longest here, as others including our captors have come and gone like ideas in this Plato’s cave, and whether they’re alive or dead doesn’t even seem to matter to me any more;  they’ve succeeded in alienating me from the world so well I can’t remember what you smell like and I used to enjoy smelling you so, even if I could never remember what size of anything you wore and you ended up with a closet of ill fitting gifts which you refused to return or exchange or even give away to friends or charity because you said they could only be the wrong size for you, they would actually fit whoever you would give them to and hence loose all their meaning, reduced to objects.  Whereas you would actually wear them and every time a sleeve brought you up short or you tripped over a pant leg you’d think of me and how I loved to smell you, and the times I actually woke you out of a sleep because I was sniffing loudly enough for you to hear, “Like an absolute dog, at an absolute asshole,” as you used to say.  There, I heard your very voice in those words, which for me remains as the voice of hope, which strangely I began to hear in my own screams back in the days when there was breath enough to scream with, before nothing remained but the numbness like the runner’s wall, like hitting the wall, the numbness becomes a redemption beyond which no pain can reach, beyond which all voices are the voices of my friends, my family, my colleagues.  The surprising comfort of hearing the voices of friends and old lovers, even the long dead Maria whose voluptuous rumble dropped a whole octave with the cancer into a still erotic rasp until the final sensual hoarse barking as the kiss of darkness descended on her and on my heart, the surprising felicity with which I can come to regard the stock phrases of my captors, like “No one is innocent” and “Your ignorance is criminal,” or “We will kill all of you for our freedom” because the voice was that of my mother or my old philosophy professor and the actual words I heard were belied by the tone of concern in the voice over just how swollen my feet had become.  Funny the way the beatings become the events which mark the time in the absence of natural light or newspapers or radio, beatings like going to church on Sunday morning not wanting to endure it but requiring it for your soul, beatings which are not penance for not confessing transgressions but beatific moments, you can see the words are so similar, moments in which you can reaffirm yourself in being beaten beatific, moments of physical pain which are reminders you are not yet dead, not yet hopeless like Maria who clung to her pain the same way she clung to her cigarettes, to the very last embracing the pain itself as proof, as validation for the suffering, made bearable by understanding through the pain itself that it really does exist apart from you, your body proves that your suffering is real, it’s not just masochism, not just some perversion of abandoned reason, the beating endured as a ritual act to induce the purity of weeping in being.  Those remain the last moments of pure happiness possible to me, the only moments when the material world is once more invested with what Artaud, both of them, that one and this one, madmen and holy men both, with what Artaud calls divinity, like the time they were working away vigorously behind me and I actually saw the motion of atoms in the dirt floor like a great living net, truly an enormous school of fish of a floor, a flock of birds, a herd of bison, a spiral DNA of a surface so that when my face was pushed roughly into it my whole head entered the swirling mass of frantic motion like leaping into life itself and I understood it was right and necessary that I be sodomized so thoroughly, that the dirt in my nose smell so strongly of lye and that tomorrow’s bread be stale, that all of existence itself had such a magnificent negative quality to it, a naive recessive bafflement in the face of its own very thing-ness.


Chapter 3

Under the Cloud — 3

A kind of buffoonery like a shoeless elegance, that’s what remains of the whole evening, the remains of the whole evening out:  the Labyrinth, the party, the business with the neighbors, the pointlessness of being happy together, not considering the wager on number five (me), not considering the drugs.  Not considering the episode of the drunken taxi ride and swerving so sharply to avoid running directly into the Wall that the Wall and the cab exchanged paint, so that now the door of the cab reads Vacation in Other People’s Misery and the Wall reads Kreuzberg Cab Company, and me leaping unbidden into Aida’s lap, slamming my head into the glass and her knee into the door handle;  a scar of providential grace which she will carry for years, which maybe she is still carrying today, which maybe some other tongue now traces the length of, unknowingly invoking my drunken, forgotten lust;  the flood of lights and the yelling and the pointed machine guns of two contested social paradigms, all of them laughing at our confusion and Aida’s exposed left breast on climbing out of the car, me trying to figure out why I was bleeding up behind my ear and standing just outside the American Zone at this point in the world’s existence.  In our drunkenness not realizing the strange joy taken by the guards at arguing whose jurisdiction we fell under since technically we were in the DDR if still on the western side of the Wall, for god’s sake it’s that wall, what the hell were we doing here, the cab driver swearing loudly at us in three languages as we staggered to where we thought the U-bahn might be, into the darkened streets.  In fact the whole summer, that whole period of my life in that place which couldn’t any longer be Europe was like standing in a closet full of winter clothing, like Baader-Meinhof according to Gerhard Richter, a sort of sneering at the Werther in myself from a Molieresque plateau, a Rameau’s nephew of egotistic fatalism.  Just as, for whatever reason, I couldn’t tell then and I can’t tell now, which always happens with things of that nature—things about women, or rather things which occur to me in the presence of women, whether about them or not—why, but I realized I’d never slept with a woman of my own nationality, in that precise moment that I obsessed on her neck as she danced, as I danced so as to be able to keep my eyes on her Degas of a neck, my feet, her lips, bumping into another patron on the floor, that flying pre-Raphaelite hair, my heart beating out of time.

Now I think of things she said to me on other days, days wrapped in an innocent dishonesty free of the kind of hypocrisy of normal romance by virtue of that privileged space which opened before us for our friendship, in the field where the Potsdamerplatz used to be, things like her plans for travel, and the mysterious objects which had suddenly appeared in photographs her husband had taken, which I said must be imaginary, and she said exactly only the imaginary has any validity any more.  But at the time before the explosion I only rejoiced in her company unreservedly, breathless before her Chagall-green eyes, the Kandinsky of her outstretched arms and the veritable Aubrey Beardsley of her Venus to my Tannhäuser…  I laughed because she was Greek, one of the things which made her desirable, and again here was a woman from some other country whom I wanted to end up in bed, despite the fragility of foregone conclusions, despite the somehow suspect nature of her interest in me and my total carelessness in the face of her unknown self, her history, her life;  but the air of the evening, at least as much of the air as could be inhaled through that fog of sodden tobacco into my marinated reality, was so right for it as to provide further proof of the determinism of reality.  Like those times when the future is not only predictable, it’s so clearly visible as a sort of pre-existing memory that to deny it or question it is not only foolish but a denial or questioning of the present moment as well;  and I had never been with a woman who Was so thoroughly, who Was so affectedly, so naturally, so etc.  How, I wondered, had I managed to work that out in my life, and did it have some sinister or merely comical meaning?  Because it had never been my intention to search out expatriates as girlfriends, in most cases nationality had been a detail like the cream for the coffee or the particular brand of scotch, or whether there was time before the film began, a totally after the fact discussion which couldn’t possibly alter the realities of shoe sizes, of chosen colognes, of mother tongues.  Once there was even a person who’d sent a card, postage due, a photo from the moon landing, and scribbled on the back the only words were I’m American, as if that explained her absence.

Copper hair, brass earrings shining through the ringlets and olive skin.


Chapter 4

Under the Cloud — 4

Trying to create a representation without values, a doomed attempt which in itself is representative of some kind of value, like this is not a pipe;  there’s an always present absence at the heart of that, as in a book by Foucault struggling against itself in order to remain true to itself, a text which is such an example of its own thesis that hidden agendas are purloined letters, like beauty lying around wherever you happen to find it, like the pipe in the painting of something which is not a pipe;  even at the bottom of the sea, beauty smiling at existence in that hidden place just to irritate Kant, beauty simply for the purpose of annoying the bureaucrats of esthetics and entertaining whatever fish happens by, beauty reeling in German academics with drift nets like categories squeezing tighter until the panic sets in.  Beauty in the panic, which is what I must learn to regulate, though I might as well attempt pumping my heart manually, it’s a hopeless dream, a chimera of well-being denied me by the irregularity of the hours they impose on me, the erratic meal times and consultations, the sudden bursting open of doors like a stroke which paralyzes me with fear, fear of being once again beaten until some part of me ceases to respond or function, until the beating becomes the validation of my existence, until I thank them for the blessing of the pliers, the benediction of a dislocation.  Exactly those things which I want so much to remember just as they happened, without any kind of sentimentality or vitriolic prejudice on my part, to remember them clearly and transparently so as to be able in some imaginary future, like in the settings of pulp novels, to sit down and remember, having already decided now what the words of that remembrance will be, to sit in front of a microphone or camera, or just a typewriter, and transcribe verbatim this experience, this time sliced out of my life which I had already now set in words which I had chosen for their declarativeness not their connotativeness, which I had strung together in just the right way so that I could remember their order/number/significance like Homer, repeated to myself over and over as if to the Greeks, like a parrot after a cracker, a hundred hail mary’s like a penitent after redemption, to inscribe within myself these words, this catalogue history of my life inside which I have no other means of recording.  A mantra I repeat over and over every conscious moment;  and maybe even when I’m dreaming, since some times I can no longer tell which is which without the light, these words which have become my life, my life which has become a medium for these words, the whole having become my bible, my brain a sheet of paper, the words upon it my life, my body the instrumentality of my experience, the immense totalizing of every physical action and response and every stray thought and conscious consideration of this situation, all of existence itself so totally wound up in this interior spot around which the entire universe resolves.  The universe itself only this spot and its surrounding and these words and my remembering them, so that if I ceased to remember, a part of some reality dissolves, like repainting houses, like sand piling up over the ruins, like beer going flat.  Just as I’ve already lost the face of the woman in the hallway at the hotel, the woman unlucky enough to come around the corner as we were being herded out and so decisively eliminated she was a sieve leaking blood before she understood, she was gone before the smell of powder, like someone’s dog we’d swerved around on a Sunday drive, like catching the falling plate, like walking by a panhandler.


Chapter 5

Under the Cloud — 5

To always be elsewhere and without a complete set of papers, among a small number of friends, a number shrinking in fact as memory clouds remembering, the choice of not belonging but residing, that’s what it was to live and work in Berlin under the cloud;  impossible to say, to love in Berlin with any sort of self-respect.  The Wall and the cloud, that spring the cloud descended over most of Europe, even the Wall couldn’t keep it out, radiation airlifted in for the benefit of those stranded in the open city, so that our vegetables, too, could set Geiger counters into chattering paroxysms, and every meal was undertaken, not eaten, undertaken in either fear or defiance as if we were in East Berlin, not West, as if we were the prisoners of poisoners.  That obsessive business of hunting the rabbits in the Tiergarten, as if we knew how to dress one, as if we were starving, and then being left by our own perverse sense of a thing to do with a mutilated but still blinking animal, until Aida just swore and asked for its death and it was left to me to bash its head with a rock, which was when I learned how soft the earth really is because I could feel it give under the skull so that I had to carry the poor thing to the sidewalk and try again, what with the traffic rushing by and the light reflecting off her sunglasses as she watched and me chanting I’m late, I’m late pounding away at a rabbit’s head when the cops came.  And then the only choice left was either to go to jail or have a scandal connected with her name, since she was famous that week, famous enough to keep me at liberty but not famous enough to squash the whole affair;  and because my name was worthless and I couldn’t imagine incarceration I pleaded with her for the scandal;  and because there was nothing in her contract about fidelity or propriety, she consented;  and because it was there and then, no one noticed.  Or the game of crossing to the DDR just to stand in line and buy an ice cream that tasted like pasteboard and Juwel cigarettes which surprised us when we liked them, just to marvel at the unvarnished wooden floors in the department store, how beer and sausage could taste so bad anywhere that was still after all Germany, not being able, after searching for it all day, to enter Brecht’s house and so just staring at the door and each other and not talking about that invisible block as if it were a painful memory which denuded our guilt.  A silence broken, finally, by Brecht’s own words, since she still retained the dialogue from her first National Theater production and I remembered the lyrics from the Alabama Song, I tell you we must die, and next time, she said, next time we visit temples, not mausoleums.  Of course it wasn’t being there which made us ill, it was coming back;  it was coming back to the rich sauces and the imported condoms, the disregard for the electric bill and the annoyance at the dry cleaners, the junk mail of civic elections and the respectability of pornography.  What redeemed us from all that was the lack of closing hours, so that drinking was always possible, I haven’t got a clue what would have become of the entire town otherwise, what would have become of us without das bayerische Reinheitsgebot, taking refuge in German purity laws and the excessive variety of KDV’s food department, eating only those delicacies we’d managed to taste first in their native lands, which was a game by which we revealed where we’d been all each other’s lives and what exactly we were made of gastronomically.  A game which had grown into the ritual which bound us to the lunchtime clock and each other with the glue of our gluttony in the shadow of the cancer which was waiting to claim us all, and you always winning with herring from Stockholm and today’s tsatsiki, express from that little place in Athens where the girl with the slightly crossed eye, and Black Sea caviar like oiled pearls just to put the cap on it, enough to clog even a stomach pump.  A game I tried to introduce Aida to, but one she resisted with rehearsals and doctor’s appointments after the first try where I ended up yelling at Gislaine because of some remark about catering a kidnapping and then the four of us weeping uncontrollably in the crowd before poor Aida who had the misfortune of appearing in my life just as you disappeared and kept trying to make her own exit from me, using others as doors to slam in my face.

What a remarkably fragile thing the network of our lives turns out to be, which can be destroyed, damaged, torn by the slightest breeze, set aflame by the mere proximity of heat, just the glow of the dwindling inferno, transformed for better or worse by things so totally beyond our control, so unpredictable, so invisible even as they strike us;  how few events, how little time, what small unconscious gestures it takes for us to fall in love.  The sight of a chipped tooth revealed by a smile, the way cotton falls off a shoulder, the casual placement of the lighter and cigarettes, the challenge of a stare.  The total irrelevance of conversation, even if it were possible over the sound system, the laser lights, the smoke machine, the enormous quantity of scotch, and having found her in the stairwell by the washrooms with the blond man enormous in her hand, trying to raise her skirt and lick her lipstick off simultaneously.  Then later, trying to explain an inability to explain the shock of the decisive moment and feeling inferior, because conscious that articulation excuses inaction, as I stammered and grunted fleeting syllables, overcome with her hair in my face and the folds of her ear, all that kept me from taking it into my mouth was the hanging brass and the hook, “We have to try to escape the linearity of language,” she said with a tongue we held in common, “like this,” drawing my mouth to hers, kissing me lingeringly, languidly, linguistically;  sharing with me the other’s slippery fluid and her own sticky lipstick, her hand at the back of my head like a mother, reconciling the pressure of our conjoined lips:  more, less;  her lips giving, flattening, her lips rounding and resting there, not covering mine:  the kiss held with our lips just resting against one another, just resting… slowly exhaling into my mouth the scent the other had left in her, her breath warm and sweet, like old woolen blankets, strong, hot tea, sandalwood incense… without removing her lips from mine, describing an inverse arc across my upper lip with the tip of her nose;  my mouth dry from inhaling her breath, almost gasping, until my lungs protest, me swallowing dryly, but not daring this or that, not daring anything because the pulse in my neck, centimeters from the tips of her fingers;  because the coolness of the air as our lips separate and the bond of the lipstick giving slowly, the bond of the other’s fluid giving wetly.  Me swallowing again, inhaling deeply.  She smiling, still holding the back of my head, now our noses touching.  “And that was just lips.”  A kiss like a life of luxury, like a surprise inheritance from an unknown relative, like a pregnancy after all;  and the short silence during which I could not think, when what I wanted, desperately, was to lick.


Chapter 6

Under the Cloud — 6

The choice is isolation which can kill you more than once before mealtime, or a proximity so suffocating you begin to gnaw one another’s extremities off without thinking.  The stories, the endless chatter eventually dissolving into a continuous narrative, like instinctively finding the right road home, like Quixote’s horse, the stories can either save you or drain you.  Stories of their own banalities, a catalogue of quotidian irrelevancy which itself sometimes induces the nibbling.  Stories as if they didn’t believe in ghosts, as if there weren’t happy endings, as if true love were a myth.  And after the months have worn away the patina of mistrust and hatred, the stories of our captors themselves, they’ve got a thousand and one, every one of them trying to explain their own madness, their own vision of violence as the only moral choice;  at least they think about their actions, unlike bankers as they say or social workers or shoe clerks who never think of the evil they do which only increases that evil exponentially precisely because the world doesn’t go around looking in a mirror, making it easier to transfer the pain to someone else’s shoulders.  Interesting that we here against our will are mostly the ones who’ve abandoned hope, faith and God itself while Artaud mostly, but the others as well, are constantly invoking the divinity in an effort to proselytize through the physical experience of the universe, the material awareness which we have come to consider enough;  for them it’s just the proof of its own triviality and they beat one another and themselves as much as they beat us.  Trying to beat into us a sense of the holy wondrousness that there should be anything at all, they to beat us, the beating, we to receive the beating;  a kind of gargantuanly complex system of transference of divine energy through the medium of pain.  Which has become their sole obsession in regards to our presence lately, totally other than what they originally desired in kidnapping us, totally at poles with their then averred idea of the political utility of captives as a bargaining chip and symbol of their resentment and opposition to everything Western and capitalist.  Now at least some of them seem to have come to consider us not as their enemies, as prisoners of war, but rather as charges, as children, as novices.  Like the day Artaud decided that Alex had to die, and told him so, to prove a point, to make a kind of essential and unignorable impression on us, even on Alex himself, and so announced that Alex was to die, and before all our eyes, at a specific time, which was three hours away.  And then came back every fifteen minutes in the first hour to tell us that fifteen minutes had passed, and then every ten minutes in the second hour to remind Alex how little time was left, and finally every five minutes during the last hour, that door would open and in would come Artaud, now carrying the Uzi himself, with the two others waiting in the corridor smoking and laughing.  So we had enough time to think about what to do about it and even Alex admitted in a pathetic voice like a parody of old movie serials that resistance was useless, it was a provocation to them, almost all the justification they would ever need.  Nevertheless we discussed the possibility of a response that might do justice to Alex’s loss and their intentional transgression of their own professed identification with the divine;  but there’s never enough time to really figure the one final gesture that validates yourself and repudiates the rest of the world and your murderers, so poor Alex just made a small noise and succumbed to the gunfire as anyone else would, as that woman in the hallway had.  And then in the silence afterwards I saw in Artaud’s face that he was desperately looking for our devastation, for our uncomprehending comprehension of this event and what was left of Alex;  and instinctively I said as flatly as I could manage, “So what’s your point?”  Which grace supplied us with the sight of Artaud himself collapsing to the floor and sobbing;  which remained the sole victory I managed to wrest from their hands.  A victory only possible by caring less than he, by valuing ourselves under his expectations, an inversion of his rhetoric which shows he can’t help but believe he lies not just to us but to himself, just as I do, just as you do, just as Einstein did.

It’s gambling, that’s what it is, cards or roulette or riding the bus, doesn’t everyone pray just like in church when we play dice with the universe, one foot in front of the other, because our faith tells us there’s another bit of ground there, we’re not at the end of the tightrope yet, and maybe we can fly anyway.  But there goes the rent on the roll of the dice, and now the comforting certainty of the eviction, here comes the drunk driver and don’t worry you’re off to the hospital, all it cost you was the price of the bus ticket and the faith that you’d actually arrive at your destination unharmed.  Unbelievable that everyone ignores the role of chance in their lives, except when something happens, that no one realizes how improbable it is that nothing at all happens, that the X factor fails to intervene, that plans run smoothly;  how strange that I lived so long without being part of someone else’s political process, even voting, that ignored privilege, that ruse of the moneyed.  Like never being able to finish a book because of the phone calls, the water dripping from upstairs, the bulb burning out;  like missing the beginning of the movie because of the accident on the bus, meeting an old classmate, showing up at the wrong cinema;  like losing your life by being in that particular place at that particular time, and the growth of the uncontrollable despair, the leviathan of hatred, the obsession with particular spots of pain around which the universe begins to revolve, cycle and epicycle, perihelion and eclipse, an entire oscillating emotional register grounded only on the gravity of my hatred, the weak force of the pain.


Chapter 7

Bad Grammar — 7

Bad Grammar

Lives of the Emperors, Lives of the Saints, Lives of the Painters, Lives of the Poets, Lives of My Parents, Lives of My Girlfriends.  Lives of myselves.  Lack of perspective, but what’s perspective but an ideology, a false paradigm of objectivity, a way of thinking that control is possible or desirable, like those old paintings without it, didn’t artists always paint what they saw, and therefore didn’t the world really look like that to them?  How could Picasso have found his way home, then, or perhaps he was already at home that was the point besides he changed just like everyone does, the world begins to change on you, it looks so much different now than then, and then becomes something almost indistinguishable from a novel or a film or a story someone told me in the dark, like Luc and his discourse on death that night at the party.  How could I have gone to so many parties, who could believe so much free time in the face of everything, when the famines, the wars of all temperatures, the plagues, the carnivals and Ramadans and theater festivals, the sunny days at the beach, the real estate boom and other people having more children.  Despite being surrounded, despite knowing the fact of the airlift, despite always running across the Wall in the most unexpected places, ignoring anything but an immediate gratification because that’s what she was like, carrying you along in a storm of nothing else matters right now, just have another drink and lose a little more hair, it doesn’t make a difference as long as no one gets hurt and we can always work some other time, sit down and talk to Luc.

Sitting at the large bay window, Luc and Aida and I, with the streetlamp outside illuminating our part of the room like gathering around the fire in the cave where we are alone, because Luc is drunk and everyone else has wandered off to another conversation;  Luc is drunk and talking to me about death, Aida watching his mouth;  occasionally I remove my gaze from Luc’s smiling, ecstatic face to look at her, to make some kind of communication because neither of us can say anything to interrupt the drunken rush of Luc’s discourse on death, having to shout over the waterfall, but she doesn’t let her eyes stray from his lips.  Realizing with a start that everyone here knows that I’m older than they and that Luc is drunk and saying drunken things to a person who knows better, like a passage from a book, leaping out at you like the beast in the jungle, it rips your throat out while still in mid leap, a Zen way to die, and only after can you stand slack-jawed and bewildered by something so threatening you couldn’t see it coming.  Luc, of course, is oblivious to everything but the lovely sound of his own voice and the remarkable wisdom of his discourse on death, and I am oblivious to his drunken discourse on death and his excited, happy voice;  because I’m aware that we’re in the circle of light from the streetlamp outside, which is the only light in the room, and Aida is staring at his lips and I’m staring out the window to the front yard and the shadowy figures of some people waiting for a late night bus at the stop, and it’s not Luc’s words that I hear but the voice of you and the voice of Maria;  and you’re not saying anything in particular, but just everything you’d ever said to me all at once;  hearing not his words but your voices.  Behind me I hear people shuffling around and eventually it becomes apparent, even though I don’t have eyes in the back of my head, that the room has emptied and there are only three people sitting in it;  me, Aida, and a drunken fool who cannot tell the difference between party conversation and Death.

Luc runs out of energy and ends his drunken discourse on death with a “You know?” and a huge smile on his face that means he’s waiting for me to agree with him, to tell him what a brilliant discourse on death he has delivered, and I find that my mouth is opening and I am saying something.  What am I saying?  I can hear the sound of my voice but I can’t make out what I’m saying;  finally now Aida is looking at me, but because now it’s safe to look at me because I’m talking to Luc and looking at Luc so I can’t be looking at her at the same time;  it’s not that she’s afraid of me, but who could dare to listen to what I was saying and look me in the eye simultaneously?  Luc.  What am I saying?  I can hear my voice, I understand it’s the sound of my voice, but I can’t distinguish the words because the words are the words I never got the chance to speak to you, to Maria, so I can’t hear the words but Luc can.  Luc is listening to words that I never got a chance to say to you and to Maria and he begins to look a little frightened, as if he is being presented with a ghost.  (Of course it can’t be a ghost even if it is what I am saying, whatever that is, because a ghost is historical;  a ghost is out of the past, and what I’m saying is what hadn’t been said, what hadn’t ever been said between specific people;  but what might have been said in some unimaginable future, some parallel universe where Luc is right about the beauty of death that does not touch;  so perhaps he is frightened because the possibility of a parallel universe frightens him, or because the possibility of the future frightens him;  perhaps that is why he loves death, because it saves you from the future.  Well, really it might be because I’m talking about Death;  or perhaps he’s just drunk.)  Luc passes out because he’s so much in love with death that he’d like to rehearse for a little while;  his timing is perfect because everyone thinks it’s me, but really I’m not responsible, it’s really his own drunken discourse on death, and I carry him to the couch and Aida helps me lay him down and we throw someone’s overcoat on top of him and he rehearses for a while, and Aida and I get some more cheap wine and join the others, and we all decide that dancing is in order now.


Chapter 8

Bad Grammar — 8

Matador upended, a miss-step in the bull dance, dangerous games like hopscotch or rugby or marriage or a career in anything at all, and you end up with the blood from the nose again, wandering bewildered at the fact of wandering bewildered.  As if we really had been switched at birth, and you’re really me, and I’m here in your place instead of where I belong, where you are, wherever that is…

Perhaps Freud had been wrong (of course Freud had been wrong), the book should have been The Morphology of Everyday Life, or perhaps in an infinite universe somewhere it was, somewhere it was the correct book but lying around in the wrong iteration, where it does me no good at all.  But it isn’t a bad thought, that there could exist a universe where Freud had some validity, frightening though that would be, because it would mean it was possible for others as well, that those who were marginal to reality (this iteration) were merely displaced persons, it wasn’t their fault, they weren’t square pegs, it was the world that was trying to round their corners at a blinding speed and if that loosened a few screws, well, who could blame them for being mad?  Morphologically speaking, the world was metamorphic, a continual, oscillating collection of simple morphless morphs, the undifferentiated utterance of a herd of wet, smelly sea lions, morph morph morph, the world truly a blind man’s zoo, what would an animal think of being felt up so much?  Cold, hard hands always demanding stasis, inertia, cartoon outlines in thick black ink, everything inside the line is you, everything not is not, everything outside the line is something else.  But what good are the lines to the blind man?  Those lines disappear in this darkness, like ideas dying with the embers, ideas which can be as modest or extravagant as is called for by the context, but if one does the math, considering this is about all the work ever done in this area, it turns out to fall exactly average, and on the median result as well;  which is to say, the shortest distance between zero and infinity.  Further, if one imagines the line connecting the two, one realizes that measuring that distance can begin from any point on that line;  the distance between a given point and zero added to the distance between that same point and infinity will be the shortest distance between zero and infinity.  Since this is true of every point on the line, the shortest distance between zero and infinity is always wherever you happen to be.  Jarry’s Faustroll whose boat is a sieve, from Paris to Paris, a trip to escape paying the rent, a true Cronopio, an epiphenominal personality, a ghostly metaphysique.  Frightening, at first, to see such anti-rational company, and wondering whether it isn’t just the other hostages, or even Artaud or one of the others, but what does it matter, even if it’s just my solitude manifesting itself, at least I’m not alone, I’m here too.

Groping around in the darkness, trying to distinguish objects by their outlines and the little light there is, glimmering off the chromed tap of the sink, no water from it or in the toilet either, they’ve put me in the toilet.  Duchamp would call it art, standing on his own head, let them chew their beards, as if the argument, the mere words from their faces, would alter anything, or preserve anything which is more likely their hope;  how can such idiocy survive, who can believe in the total meaninglessness of words, like trying to stop crime by passing laws.  Yet still, I defecate into the bowl as if it made a difference here, or outside, anywhere, I still defecate in the bowl, it’s been so long the stench no longer makes me ill, which didn’t help, throwing up into the bowl on top of it all.  If I’m here long enough, the fermentation process will be complete, there’ll be some kind of life stirring in there—bacteria, at least, something to kill me from my own wastes, the inevitable self-destruction in this continual chain of being, bound in chains.  A complete revolution, as if turning around ever changed anything, the room is different but it’s still a prison, as if left or right had any absolute difference when the peasants are still being shot, when committees, when studies, when the rules are still rules even though.  That kind of obsession of the politically active, just like any other obsession, just like pedophilia or heroin, just like neurotics or fundamentalists, that anything else is irrelevant and who can control themselves anyway, who isn’t subject to their own obsessions?  Trying to examine my hands in the pale glimmer cast by the tap, if only there were a match, if only a light bulb, a window, then I could examine the state of my body, the outlying provinces of my feet, the principality of the top of my head;  scabbed or just matted hair?  That’s why the lack of light, to separate me from myself, instead of the torture of the bulb which I expect will come later:  when I’m unrecognizable even to myself, then the constant exposure under the light in the hall of mirrors, a labyrinth of strangers I’ve become, a beast staring myself in the face at the center of my own existence, but will I be me looking out or them looking back?

Every act of destruction is an act of creation.  What are they making of me?  What do we make of ourselves, what do we make of our worlds, children, fortunes, loves, careers, beliefs?


Chapter 9

Bad Grammar — 9

Dog on a leash, I put the ring in my own nose like the time I actually applied for university as if that were an act of redemption, as if I’d confessed or wanted to confess my ignorance, my ability to be indoctrinated:  degrees available, ideology included, normalcy induced.  So leaving the party in formation, not soberly considering any actions or options, and passers-by maybe thinking we were two couples.  Comforting, in the rain, but then distressing that I might need comforting about anything.  Walking around Aida, circling her for the scraps of her attention like looking for the proper landing strip, circling for a runway in the fog;  the clearest image of all that time, all those events, all that talking, doing, being, is that ever-present billowing fog or cigarette smoke, like steam from trains obscuring everything yet written or since remembered, seeing your own breath on cold nights.

Raining again, laughing along the street, Luc and Sylvie holding hands, she dragging him along when he stops to look into a window, just like that same dog straining on the leash, Aida smoking tiredly but thoroughly, holding the cigarette in her right hand, the same one she uses to brush the hair from her face, and watching her put the filter between her lips;  she leading us through the streets, across the wider boulevards with people still sitting staring out into the night:  “Where are we going?”  “ Oh, not far.  I’ve got a little place a few blocks away, there’s a bottle of wine there I think.”  “Why didn’t we stay at the party?  They were still drinking.”  Laughter.  “If we’d stayed any longer one of those men would have tried to pick me up.  They were getting ready, you know.”  “How can you tell?”  “It’s disgusting.  They start making an effort to treat you like a person, to have a real conversation with you.  What the fuck do they think I’m doing at a party, if I wanted conversation?  Or a man, if I wanted a man I know where to get one, it’s not at parties like that.”  Walking ahead of the others, slowly, Aida looking around as if she’d never walked that street before, alternately brushing her hair out of her eyes and taking a drag on that cigarette;  so noticing her ring, her whole life is in that hand, I think.  “So where do you go to find a man?”  “Don’t be an idiot,” shouts Sylvie from behind;  Luc laughing.  “She goes,”  continues Sylvie, pointedly, to my childishness, “to bars.  To bars.”  “This is it,” Aida says.  Opening the smaller door in the gate, stepping into the courtyard;  a small fountain in the center filled with garbage and weeds:  consciousness of gates, of enclosed spaces, transgressions and purgatories, the entirely metaphorical nature of absolutely everything, and then the physical nature of the universe returns, the gravel under the feet, the damp air, the smell of old wood and plaster, underwear binding as if in warning;  the imaginary nature of memories dissolves, like waking in the hospital without an organ:

On the left they entered, and climbed another crowded oval spiral.  “Be quiet,” Aida said.  “The neighbors are a pain.”  He followed her closely, because it was pleasant to do so, figuring she would think the darkness the reason;  that, too was a reason.  Luc and Sylvie were whispering and giggling behind them;  Luc yelled sharply.

Instantly above them on one of the upper floors a door opened and light spilled into the stairwell, like the moon come from behind a cloud.  The four of them groaned, covering their eyes.  A couple emerged and stared down at them, yelling.  “Hey, it’s late, shut up!”

“Shit,” said Aida.  She rubbed her forehead.

“Oh, it’s her,” said the woman to her husband.  “What a type.  I told you, didn’t I?  This is too much.”  She leaned into the railing, staring straight down at them.  “Whore.  Take your junky friends elsewhere, and shut up about it.”

“This is a respectable house,” said the man.

Luc and Sylvie burst out laughing, gasping for breath.  He snorted, looking up at the neighbors.  He saw Aida’s back swelling as she took in a deep breath.  He’d thought she was going to laugh too, but then, louder than he’d thought possible, she yelled.  “Dried-up old crotches, the both of you!  For Christ’s sake, can’t you even remember what it’s like to be horny?  We make new citizens to pay your pensions, you should be grateful, instead you stay awake at night to watch who’s sleeping with who and complain about it.  What’s the matter, want us to come up there and fuck you?”

He was as stunned as the neighbors, but Luc and Sylvie were still giggling, lying on the steps and wiping their faces.  Perhaps they were more drunk than he had thought.

Wordlessly, the neighbors retreated to their apartment, slamming the door.  Once safe behind it, they began yelling again.  Someone else opened a door, without letting out any light.  “What the fuck?  Shut up, everyone shut up!”

Finally, laughing and relieved to be sitting down again, they settled into Aida’s apartment.  It was only a single room with a closet for a kitchen and a bathroom that had no bidet, just a tub and a toilet, and no door.  There was a large double bed pushed up against one of the two windows (both on the same wall) and a couple of wooden kitchen chairs.  He sat on the floor, and after a short debate, so did Luc and Sylvie.  Aida took off her shoes and brought a bottle of wine and glasses out of the cupboard.  She settled on the bed.

“Do you really live here?”

The couple burst into giggles again.

“No,” said Aida.  “I just like to keep a place downtown to sleep.  We live in Auteuil.”

No, that’s all wrong, that’s just some story, and anyhow it’s in the wrong city, down some dead end in a deserted corner of Paris:  Impasse de Pensées;  just like every other memory sculpted to our desires or fears, out of place or time, a real différence as the French would think.  But there was a time in that place, somehow it seems like the same events in both cities, or two simultaneous lives, but a rainy night is different in every city on the globe;  precipitation, like character, is influenced by landscape—in other words, when it’s a rainy night in Paris, it’s not ever the same rainy night in Berlin, or wherever you happen to be reading on a rainy night, a rainy night, when it’s cold out and the streets are shiny, and it’s dark inside with just your reading lamp and maybe some music, and the book you’re reading describes some characters interacting in a damp but warm fourth floor apartment in a back street in Paris on a rainy night;  no one there has any better place to be or money to be there with, and some of you are talking about something intellectual, something theoretical, and it occurs to you that someday this moment will be a memory and so it won’t be the same moment anymore, it’s always different when a moment recedes into the past and must be reconstructed in your mind, superimposed on the immediate scene.  Sometimes the moment is improved for being a memory;  that is, I remember that I was cold that very rainy night in Paris, that the damp crawled inside my clothes, seeped upwards from the bare wooden floors into the folds in my clothes, but now when I think of it I remember the cold but I don’t have to feel it—I can ignore the cold and acknowledge it at the same time, I can remake the cold into a positive aspect of that evening, even though at the time I really wanted just to be warm in bed with Aida, was hoping seriously that this dumb conversation should be over with and Luc should get up and leave with his girlfriend whose name I couldn’t remember (she was more beautiful than Aida, at least most would have thought so, but Aida was alone at the moment—that is, her husband was out of the country) so I could make my pass at Aida, and either we would make love warm under the covers of the lit conjugal or she would throw me out and I could get back to my hotel and take a hot bath.  Now that cold is a perfect part of a mystical evening I’ll never forget, it doesn’t matter how it turned out with Aida, whether we slept in that enormous bed warm under the covers or whether she threw me out into the drizzle and the damp and the cold to walk back to my hotel in the Quartier because the Metro was closed;  I did walk back in the drizzle to my hotel, but it could just as easily have been the next evening, or the morning after;  it doesn’t matter whether we made love or just talked, or whether none of this happened this way at all, because this is the way I remember it happening, and that’s what counts.


Chapter 10

Bad Grammar — 10

All these stories just reflections of our myriad fears, we had good reason to be lost in them, we were the mice in their maze except we got to rearrange the walls according to our obsessions, like turning left because we couldn’t see straight, or we were all left-handed, or when we were children a wrong right turn horrified us.  We went darkly beneath that solitary night, with Artaud as our guide, who claimed he could show us the way but couldn’t follow us.  He reveled in showing us the dead, those who’d gone before us, those whom he’d ushered to the threshold as an example to us or to others whom he held responsible for an injustice, a persecution, a conspiracy to keep him angry.  Like the stories we insisted on telling which infuriated him because he said we had the wrong viewpoint, our lives were what he called a perceptual mistake, but one has to remember that a story can’t be told from it’s opposite point of view, and pointing out how each incident, each character, even our own selves in our autobiographies, had some other spiritual or metaphorical meaning which sane men could only be offended by.  Only madmen knew the truth, that this was the end of the world, all around us if only we’d look where we were leaping, instead of pretending we weren’t driving under the influence, as if we were gripped by that other form of madness, which consists in laughingly acknowledging our madness as if that proved we weren’t mad, the hyperreal insanity we thoughtlessly embrace as the mark of our normalcy.  The ritual of self-erasure;  the gesture of Heidegger’s, not Christ’s cross:  the crossing-out in invoking a Being before all being.  It never fails, nothing ever fails, if only anything ever succeeded then perhaps failure could be possible, could be welcomed, celebrated along with birthdays and other arbitrary measures of the self against the world;  funny how least of all what I miss is my work, my work which spoiled all vacations, all weekends and special plans, without which I was not.  My work around which my life revolved, now clearly exposed not as the spiral of my life but the path the spiral follows, more a relation of power than a set of rules, existing only in its exertion and perhaps in the traces it leaves behind, like marks on paper.  So much paper, so many dissertations, articles, notes, essays;  pages like snowflakes, each one different, individual, a testament to the infinite imagination of the divine inspiration, or the endless well of verbalization of being, or the droning conceit of the life of discourse;  all melted away in this alchemical theater of cruelty, purged, purified of the impurities of my own texts by Artaud and company, who purify us all of our thoughts.  If only there were paper and pens, if only the ability to think in a straight line on paper, to transform the perception into rationalization—but no, no more masterpieces, no more slavery to the text, all writing is pigshit, the trick is to get Artaud to do the writing, until then Homer’s method is the only possibility;  rote, repetition, which is all any writing ever is;  grey-eyed Athena, Athena always with the grey eyes, Homer whose name means captive, how could he, blind, have known Athena’s eyes were grey?  Borges also blind, and Milton, too.  Lost paradises and Labyrinths, captives of the external darkness wandering the internal light, a sheer case of us against them, what else but death is there to hope for, what else could cap this ritual existence, this constant yes of ourselves against the constant no of their denial, our no at their anger, our no becoming a yes, like Alex, like Maria, like so many of us.

How many no’s in my life, how many yes’s, how many times fates are sealed with single sibilant syllables, and who’s to blame or reward, a single yes or no different and we all would have married someone else, would have fathered someone else, could have been someone else, or maybe that’s just dreaming, perhaps it doesn’t matter whether we say left or right, we still end up being us;  because it’s impossible to imagine Maria, for instance, being anyone else no matter whether yes or no, despite the world turning out as it did, without her and with so much distress at her absence, still clocks run and appointments are missed, still I’m mistaken for the other with the similar name or the entirely different face, still no one votes the way I think best.  A fact of life which gave rise to my belief in pleasing myself, in being selfish with my happiness, which still seems like the only point of anything at all, but in these circumstances, even a place to pee in comfort is a luxury, never mind the unopened wines left at home, the books unread, the concerts I’m missing, the waves I’ll never hear.  Just a simple coffee, a clean sheet, a chance to feel guilty over not working on a sunny afternoon;  just a fundamental human right like being overcharged or shortchanged or snubbed by a waiter, a chance to be sold low quality goods or deceived by idiot film critics, insulted by the genuinely awful work of charlatans, denied the promised refund, scorned by a floor manager;  without these tools of normal life, can I maintain any satisfaction, or anticipate its return, like winter, summer, annoying relatives?  A matter of supplying myself with new tools, tools better suited to this present environment, hammers and tongs and saws and knives more fit to available materials:  tell myself another one, dress it up for the others, for surely my chance will come to continue the tradition, or so the poet says.


Chapter 11

Bad Grammar — 11

Plagued by things I would never see, I imagined writing letters to you on yellow legal pads, I imagined buying space in the Tribune to publish them in the hopes they’d allow in newspapers, wherever you were held, I imagined giving interviews and writing memoirs, I imagined attending your funerals, as if having attended funerals in the past I was somehow willing to admit more of them into my life, like finally falling down hill and not being able to get to the bottom, a kind of anti-Sisyphus of grim reapers which helps none of us.  Scenes of pain and torture, of deprivation and despair, bad photos of the remains, packages being opened oh so gingerly by bomb squads relieved to find only a finger, an ear or maybe an eye trailing some connective tissue like a giant sperm, dried blood and a collage note to the authorities repeating impossible demands.  Impossible because the authorities care less for your lives than your captors, for even your captors must interact with you as people while to the authorities you are merely a situation, an incident, a political problem.  Like bad polls or a scandal before an election or a mounting debt, but in cases like this reminders were everywhere, all we had to do was find the Wall, as if that were hard, as if it were likely to be lost, with those towers and the razor wire and the uniformed thugs around every corner.  Going to the East, just like we always did without thinking, but now because of you it involved some kind of thinking, just the process of having our papers checked and changing money, like an official bribe, but those guns leaping into our sight;  they couldn’t have known, of course, guns to them were a part of everyday existence, we had always accepted them as a fact of the crossing, up until the knowledge of you living under other guns held by other thugs.  Suddenly I understood a brotherhood of thugs, it didn’t matter whose uniforms or what kind of guns, how could it?

And the Pergamon, the point of the trip, one had to pass the Tomb with the eternal flame, and the goose-stepping, and sticking out like anything because we were Westerners.  As if we were in Asia with red hair, or cats in the dog pound;  Aida with determination and me without any German, anathema to the Easterners, who feared English, which must have meant Stasi entrapment to them;  Pergamon, where they made us pay our five cent tickets, a pointless exercise designed to demonstrate not that state museums could be self-supporting, but that everyone could have a job, ticket sellers, ticket printers, official scowlers otherwise unemployable except thank god for socialism, where else could you fill a room with an entire temple façade, an object so sacred, so monumental, like an eternal epiphany, it could only exist in an atheistic environment, so close to the Ishtar gate, like being in the room where light and darkness meet for the first time.  But Ishtar, ancient Babylon, how could it be anything but a myth, how could we touch it for ourselves, yet the purple tiles and golden lions as if nothing had happened, as if it were only natural here and now, like my own socks or jet engines or time zones.  A bad habit to have fallen into, following her around on her trips to the other side, following her around to the theater, to dinner, to bed and anywhere she wanted to go, letting go of myself like that, letting go of everything other than her, and even then somehow knowing it couldn’t have made any difference, because what matter what we make of our lives, what possible difference between a career and hedonism, between work and sleep, it all adds up to twenty-four hours at the end of the day and we’re all just another hopeless case, aren’t we, its just a series of lost causes and futile disappointments, because the terrible secret we all know is true, in the larger scheme of things anything in particular is just too small to make change over, and everything becomes its opposite in the end, if there could be an end at all, one day we’re paying five cents to get in and the next we’re yelling at some foreigner without the proper change;  how could anyone not understand something so impossibly simple as following the rules, it’s printed right on the receipt.  What the hell, it’s all Linear B to me, but the day infused me with an insatiable desire for ruined temples, for someone else’s rituals, for other taboos.  Precisely the point of being there, I suppose, to bump up against a stranger’s expectations, precisely the point of being with Aida, precisely the point of your captivity perhaps, as if there’s a line tracing the path from me to you, from me to everyone and everything, or between the rest of the world and my apprehended, apprehensive self;  like being lost in the lines on my own hand, or that conversation on the train to Prague, where four of us were needed for that one exchange between English, French and Polish but nevertheless it only took one match to light four cigarettes;  or anything else entirely, it’s not so much the place itself or the getting there, but the path traced between them, between the getting there and the place itself there arises a path which can only be traced in space, in the space between and never on maps or globes or representations of any kind;  a sort of unmanifested metaphor, a gesture, a trope which exists on the periphery, like a silent passage in music or a blank page, the opposite of that page in Tristram Shandy, where the story ends with our birth;  either because we’re the culmination of creation or the last item required, just the ribbon to wrap the package in a totally disposable way, because after all, after all is done.


Chapter 12

Bad Grammar — 12

Here, not even the young are unencumbered, like the other hostage, Raoul, who is a painter and says he works extremely quickly because when he is working his bowels are bad and he spends as much time in the toilet as before the canvass, which is a story made up by some critic he once slept with and now has become true, and so famous that when asked to contribute to a charity auction he gave them feces, which commanded a better price than any canvas.  Which is not true but just the kind of thing one expects to hear or say, just as everything we hear or say is something we want heard or said instead of an autonomous utterance, everything a piece of our puzzle.  Even puzzles and pieces, which isn’t how reality works at all, it’s just another easy model in the face of whatever it’s in the face of.  Or the woman in the red shirt, a well-known author of anonymous Victorian erotic novels, full of lace and a kind of purity in the indiscretions, the incests, the delicious flagellations and humiliations which transgress what we allow with what we want, as in Bataille, but the red shirt is now in tatters, and if we reveal to our captors the nature of her livelihood she’s more than likely to receive even worse treatment than so far;  I’d say, hard to believe, except now nothing is hard to believe after what’s been demonstrated so empirically, scientifically, over and over in experimental, experiential fashion;  they would respond with de Sade to her Bataille, with Lautréamont to her Klossowski, with Mirbeau to her Roussel, a Gilles de Rais response to her failing Jean d’Arc.  But that’s their response to everything we plead, everything we are, as if they’re beating back the darkness in us, as if we challenge their light, their reason, their spiritual revelation by playing Lucifer to their Yahweh, there’s a comparison they’d kill for, as if we were the angels revolting and this dungeon were our expulsion from Heaven, our Fall, our own private circle of hell.  Vultures, they eat our livers daily as if punishing us is their right, their duty, the justification of their lives.  While for us there can be no justification possible outside our own skins, outside our own minds;  their reasons for the physical treatments seem somehow insulting, as if they’ve been sheltered from reality and so their concerns are just a trivializing of our felt experience, but then who isn’t willing to sacrifice someone else’s liberty for their ideals, someone else’s life for humanity, someone else’s humanity for everyone’s benefit.

An unwillingness to change ourselves, as if it were easier to change the world around us than our own attitudes, as if others could be convinced more easily than we;  which must be the spirit in which Artaud lectures us, for he has begun almost daily to explain himself to us, a torrent of rhetoric incomprehensible in its details though explicitly clear in its message of the essential nature of reality, the nearness of joy to pain, the truth of naked horror, of which we are occasionally forced by our own experience to confirm, especially with our own blood.  But who could deny the central falseness of complacency disseminated over the airwaves, in newspapers, novels, films and pop music;  the narcotic effect of movies of the week and sitcoms, talk shows and minimum wages just high enough to keep us from dying outright, but so low freedom is impossible, for even those of us who embrace capitalism as the least of all possible evils realize that nothing escapes its grasp, not even ideals, because it isn’t really economics, it’s power, its the electricity flowing through the system, which is always people management.  Like mass transit or hospitals or elections.

A provocatively senseless argument, a flirtation with an obvious spouse, an endeavor undertaken without any expectation of result, that’s what arguing with Artaud was like, but not arguing with him was keeping the cork in, and that was painful, not arguing was implicitly assenting, which was slitting your own throat—not always an unappealing prospect—not arguing was bowing before his wisdom, which sometimes seemed the correct thing to do, after all, the arguments so dense and self-referential it took a few minutes to realise they wound through dead ends and abandoned spiral sophistries, a looping the loop intellectually, an ending up on the same wrong road asking directions of the same deluded traffic cop.  Talking in circles, literally;  taking turns confusing the issue, helping one another to total bafflement, a purely human enterprise.  I’ll be Rameau to his Artaud, I’ll play the fool in all its permutations of mad, satirical, prophetic, wise, inconsequential;  but I’ll be no Devil’s advocate, no public defendant, he dons the mantle of Mephistopheles at his own peril, so to speak:  if only his embracing that role hadn’t really affected me;  but then every role we take on affects everyone else, every source of light shines infinitely in all directions, every object exerts its pull on every other, doesn’t it?  It’s just a matter of getting the right forces in the right combinations, the right ingredients in the right amounts, apply a little heat and we end up with either gold or nuclear winter, and not much to choose between them.


Chapter 13

Invisible Journeys — 13

Invisible Journeys

What I remember most are the interminable train rides, the smoking in the swaying corridors, the dim, yellow-grey lights, being caught without a bottle of water over night, the woman screaming in Russian at the receding, deserted frontier crossing at three in the morning, the conductor finally taking the bribe of soda pop bottles, Yugoslavia a no-man’s land stretching between Budapest and Athens, greyer and more dismal than belief can bear;  Belgrade an enormous sewer, who could live there but the oppressed, the slaves to the chain-smoking of Turkish tobacco;  even the children, nasty, brutish and short, as if nearby there were some disaster looming which couldn’t possibly distinguish Serb from Muslim, Slovenian from Gypsy, even in the light they were all covered with despair and unwashed clothes, with broken hearts and bad shoes, with tainted meat and historical materialism, crushed under a devalued currency and a Balkan fatalism.  And then the train from Belgrade just to flee a place that said “Flee!”, a place that had rejected you like a bad transplant, no longer just a tourist now you’re a D.P. as the old man used to say just before you flinched.  So of course it was really just a matter of circumstances, being with these others by pure chance in the same compartment, and their conversations had that same nonchalance and insignificance, as if crossword puzzles or paperback novels, embarked upon solely because they were at hand and one had to pass the time somehow, one really shouldn’t ascribe any importance to them or presume upon anything other than a temporary and careless acquaintance;  even though this happened to strangers on trains every day all over the world, and to transform this trivial familiarity into a reality complete with all the dishonesties of an ongoing friendship would require much more time and effort than anyone present was willing to expend, even so, as gradually the desire to relieve straining muscles and be comfortable overcame the instinct to preserve each one a separate space, and leg lay beside hip and toe rested on thigh or back, each in turn woke momentarily and gazed at the others sleeping.  And once, when I was contemplating Aida’s pale face and regular breathing, because she was beautiful and because those we watch sleeping are always angelic, I felt a kind of calmness despite the noise, the motion of the train and the cramp in my neck;  and as I slowly closed my eyes, I saw hers opening, we both smiled and suddenly she reminded me, senselessly, of Ingrid Bergman, and I realized the privileged intimacy of watching an unknown woman sleeping, realized that she was watching me sleep, too, and that I was about to drool.

And then, suddenly, along with the full force of the conceit that she shouldn’t see me with spittle running from my mouth, the full force of the guilt that I should be running from you, from your captivity into my own, that I could dare escape when you couldn’t;  that I shouldn’t be there for the phone calls, the press conferences, the diplomatic meetings and the public and private pleadings through mysterious intermediaries.  All the drafting of the public statements from the friends and families of the victims, the ad hoc committees of the sufferers, the liaisons with the official strategists whose recommendations on our activities and consciousness of our phrasings, pretending the international importance of a slip of the tongue, a pressure to conform to their desires for the administration of this crisis, as if it were wheat they were bargaining for, or treaties for duties on lumber;  so now in fact it seems very natural I should have run from that just as you would have run from your captors, and on top of it the countervailing confusion of being in her presence.  Had I the right to allow myself that confusion, that over-the-precipice headlong rush to be crushed under her heel, could I at once be worried about both you and myself?  Was there room for a foolish struggle for obsessive togetherness, aside from her lack of ever noticing that my life included anything but her, was there, despite my actions which seemed so much not my own, any reason I should have felt what I did for her, for all those months, for myself, or was it merely a severe reaction to the circumstances of your absence, was I that misery which loves company, and she only another kind of vacation, another long nap, another I’ll think about it tomorrow?  I used her as I used everyone else to shore up a gap in myself, but that’s all we ever do with other people on one level, that’s all we ever do with friends, lovers, paintings, films, apartments and sunny days.  If only there were enough sunny days perhaps we’d need less to shore ourselves up, that’s reason enough for any trip to Greece, the sun and the shore, so different from the northern reaches, where the sky is a treat, where light is heavy, where up is a ceiling.  But the piers and the stone walls, the olive trees and the unpaved roads, the buses through the mountains, the squid and the lemons, the straw beds and the smacking of chicken’s heads against the outdoor table, the boats and the week-old newspapers, the nescafé, the blood running in the market, the bananas off the backs of trucks, the sunken churches;  the whole of my life should be bathed in that incessant Greek sunshine.  But it was in truth only a matter of weeks, almost everything is only a matter of weeks, in truth or in dreams, take your pick, in cases like this it’s all the same, after the fact the material reality is meaningless or the oneiric reality is meaningful, one or the other.  The episode of the lemons, climbing into the throne room, the other traveler’s wife, despite all those moments with Aida, despite the phone calls home, despite a sense of someone else’s sorrow, as if my own weren’t enough, as if yours were totally forgotten.  Not a self-overcoming but an overcoming of Nietzsche, an overcoming of a Foucaultian resistance, a desire to drop into the vortex, an arguing for the same result, which was a mask with a façade for an obverse, an image without a mirror, nothing but a space between.


Chapter 14

Invisible Journeys — 14

What I chiefly seem to remember are small and miniature things, because those were the ones that I could really see, the simple small objects whose existence couldn’t be challenged, impervious to sophistry and an arch conceit that all the world is a dream, there’s a nail in a board, there’s a rat’s dropping, this is a coin;  the illustrations in the encyclopedia and the dictionary, I remember them quite well, with the engravings of animals and pyramids, the text might be something other than itself, but these objects signify themselves and nothing else, in a universe of things which bespeak only being, not even an operation before being.  Items so simple they deny that infinite regression of:  first, being, and then the object, because their being is bound up in its material manifestation, there isn’t any before or after about it.  Being bound and gagged for the move, hidden in the undercarriage of a truck, wrapped like a mummy and arriving with several layers of my backside burnt off by the muffler’s proximity, but what I remember so explicitly is not the pain or the terror or the cramped space but the texture of the rag in my mouth, the way the dirty, coarse cotton absorbed all moisture and the play of my tongue against the woven fabric, the stress of an open jaw, my own urine infiltrating layers of clothing, wrapping, bindings, an infantalization undreamed of until then.  But they were brutal parents, consciously engendering hatreds they dismissed with a casualty, a casualness one associates only with presidents, Popes and schoolyard bullies, whose metaphysical concerns are profound but narrow, extending only to the limits of their own back yards, their own moralities, their own conscience, with that megalomania one excuses only in God, in insects, in objects themselves.  What good is an abiding moral sensitivity if it’s nothing more than a sore prodded by the disregard of others for others, if it’s only what keeps someone else from suffering your desires, if it becomes our avenue of self-defeat.  Like losing ourselves to our own habits, like Maria, like contradicting our own beliefs by merely paying taxes, like consciously having one drink too many;  an atmosphere of uncertainty, of immanent disaster, an acceptance of the Russian roulette-ness of this kind of life.  An ability of the forces we release to devour us, to eat us up at the most insignificant of moments, a Marat Cordayed in the tub, a Kerouac watching television, a one hundred and twenty days of sodom.

All that and the yelling in the other room, too, in the days before and after the moves;  it becomes almost predictable that the ordeal will be repeated when for whatever reason they start to feel closed in upon, they start to suspect that they’re suspected and it’s time to change basements, houses, apartments, shacks, because they begin yelling at one another instead of just us, they get that panicked look about them, as if they’re about to be wronged, as if they can see the dust cloud of the Khan’s army on the horizon, and bundle us up like household goods, like their family fortunes, like their virgin daughters.  Twice now I’ve seen others not survive that kind of voyage, being hauled out from the undercarriage and unwrapped only to be packaged up again and hurriedly disposed of who knows where, buried or sunken like treasures, cast off like tin cans, left behind like broken furniture.  And both times, afterwards, when it became possible to speak, asking Artaud how much good it had actually done his cause, how much political use had been drained from those lives, how much closer to success was his vision thanks to their darkness;  so that in a rage, after the violence and the requisite blood to pay for this insult, into my swollen face he had actually ground a newspaper, wiping my blood with the ink spilled over his latest atrocity;  an attempt to prove the validity of his actions by the condemnation of his imagined enemies, to show their callousness by their own despairing, helpless attempts to “crack down”, to be tough, inflexible, morally superior;  but we’re all part of one vast, interlocking killing machine, that steamroller of history, that mother night, that systematic structure which works just as well no matter who, which makes us all valueless, all expendable, all equally prisoners.  A sandbox, a playpen, a backyard garden:  an intense period of playing with the toys, of recognizing them as toys;  trying to fit experience into understanding, having to revise a previous expectation of anything, everything:  what if it were someone else, what if it were you and not me, could I ever hope to recapture your innocence of my reality, could I ever hope to assimilate, to internalize, to accept these days;  will I not carry every one of these moments with me, will I not be that one who stares blankly at nothing, who with that haunted look, who overcome by that unexpected silence, who so forcefully aware of being, of doing, of speaking and silence, of physical and spiritual fetters, of tastes and smells, of light and dark, of full and empty, of gravity and grace, of ellipses and full stops, semi-colon and ampersand, parenthesis, interrogation point, exclamation.  The problem of pain, but life, in the end, all we have in common in spite of dead Arabs on the beach, in spite of confessing after all, in spite of bringing our loved ones back from hell, a pillar of salt, a cloud of radiation, an act of god, a photograph of the dead, photographs found among the effects of the dead, a final revelation of a personal privacy no living person can maintain, a privacy which becomes ours to protect by default, no living person can maintain, no living person can maintain, a privacy, a revelation by default, our loved ones back from hell.


Chapter 15

Invisible Journeys — 15

A Fauvist nightmare, almost surrealist, a Maxfield Parish moment in this Chagall existence, that sharing of a compartment with the young Greek couple, our expedition to Delphi to touch the clouds, to pour libations, to make things even more difficult for ourselves;  and those two strangers, joining in the spirit of the enterprise, for she was reading Hemingway in the original, and he, Adorno in French translation.  Adorno, so difficult in any language, let alone one neither yours nor his, so difficult that even the titles can baffle me:  Negative Dialectics, that’s enough to keep me guessing for weeks, who needs a text to follow.  Aida as text, surely I followed her closely enough, made contact with her, exposed myself to her enough to claim some kind of familiarity, but still, just like the Frankfurt school, she was my Berlin School, even if I followed her over the whole continent, over that whole summer, wherever the radiation went we were sure to go;  constantly reading in the papers that places we had just left were on the danger list or that cafés we had frequented in Paris had been blown to the heavens by perhaps the same people who’d snatched you from our lives, from your own midst.  An eager hesitancy, a tourist’s approach to people or conversations, unable to engage in any real discussion at all, a fear of the discourse in conversation, problematizing everything approached by verbal means with an examination of the exteriority of its vicinity;  constantly removing myself from what I’d just said, a retrograde motion, like walking up a hill backward in bad shoes, and arriving at the summit facing the wrong direction, only seeing where I’d already trod, blind to the precipice behind until the cliff rushes away into the distance and the wind whispers, you’re falling, you’re falling…  That same day, staring out the window of the train, I would almost like to say I dreamed this image, which I believe is worthy of a great painter, but the truth is I saw it with my own eyes:  A herd of black goats drank from an olive-green river, standing on the red-brown slope of the bank beneath the fingers of old trees, trees which were wrists with a hand at each end, one clutching at the receding soil of the bank, the other reaching to the birds.  That was what Aida meant about the linearity of language:  for this truly was an image grasped wholly in an instant, as the train rounded a corner, and now I write it down in a sequence, which is a totally other experience of it.

A decisive moment, through the lens of the train’s window, and then plunging around the corner again and on to some other stretch of mountain or valley, but engraved now in my consciousness, a vision which revealed itself to me in its own chosen instant for its own reasons, slowly developing in my memory, bound somehow to the Greek reading Adorno in French, to its own colors, to my hunger, to Aida’s black dress, to other dreams;  I dreamed that a day would come when I would know in advance what I meant and would only have to say it, I dreamed I dreamed a terrible thing, that the world and the book were made up entirely of physical particles in fields of force.  But books are alienating, and buying them is paying for your own alienation, even remembering that every story is always told from it’s opposite(’s) point of view, as if to step outside of some reality and look backward on what is presently taking place, hoping that Heisenberg was fooled by his methods, by faulty experiments like a disappointed love;  obviously it was doomed from the hopeful start and the only thing that redeemed either of them or the act itself was the sadness of it all, which in the first place only assumed a pathetic kind of faith in there being an inside to reality anyway;  if there were, surely someone would have described it to us among all these interminable and overly explicit reports.  There’s a kind of desperation in all strongly maintained beliefs and dreams of a transparent language capable of rendering the experiential and the experimental indistinguishable, as if there were only a physical existence, or only a metaphysical existence, or neither, as if we were all part of the control group and our lives were mere placebos, our joys and our pains only as real as we can imagine them, whereas reality lies somewhere beyond imagining, beyond anything at all, beyond leaning into the window frame and feeling the smooth cold glass against my arm, the corner of the moulding digging under a shoulder blade, the sun warming just the top of her head where her hair was parted and looking across the compartment through the window along the length of the tracks like lines to where the vanishing point and the horizon meet and who knows what’s beyond if only you could get there and take a look—but no, you either never got there or found yourself there all of a sudden without ever getting the chance of looking before leaping, which would be useless anyway, didn’t we already decide that looks were all anybody ever had and leaps were the only antidote to inertia;  leap like sleep without the s, like love without the sex:  we leapt together last night because we didn’t know any better and the alternative was to let that horizon rest, we leapt together and now we’re leapters, beyond the pale, pale color of my face in the mirror this morning.  Which isn’t any kind of an explanation, even to myself, which isn’t any kind of excuse for not being home by the phone, but a description of how confusion itself was home, and therefore a geographical mistake was being made which only served to activate my guilt, a button which was pressed with every newspaper, every hotel room television set, every phone call, every sense of being relaxed and free;  and what was there to be guilty over, my actions or your situation, my pleasures or your pain, my thinking or your being?


Chapter 16

Invisible Journeys — 16

I think of the anger of Achilles and wonder why some angers are acted upon, others left to fade like photos, eyesight, sunsets;  why some prompt violence, why others are adjudged less important than lives and personhoods, for if I live through my captivity certainly I will be a changed self, an other person, if I resist fading into the darkness, an operation which tests my will, just as my anger itself tests my will, pits my will against Artaud’s, sets my anger against his;  our wills, our angers, there’s the history of the world, there’s all the stories you’ve ever heard:  Here comes Sindbad, back from the wars, ten years gone.  To enjoy things purely and undimmed by my will, the luxury of not having to think, blessed oblivion:  love is infinite and infinitely variable, but death is absolute.  In some strange way, after Alfred Jarry, we hope, along with Hamlet, we dearly hope but daren’t believe this might be true, if anything can be said to be true, if true itself isn’t just an inadequate trope, a baggy sweater or tight shoes or a reversed hieroglyph translated from left to right instead of right to left, like Fellini on television, like pasteurized cheese, like explaining your ambitions to your father;  but nothing is ever what we expect it to be, even ourselves, even as we practice being natural suddenly our consciousness yanks us out of our illusory reality into our metaphysical illusion, walking beside ourselves on the street, observing our own every action as if we weren’t actively engaged in ourselves at the same time as observing ourselves, and thinking about observing ourselves.  An out of body experience, a near-life experience, watching as we buy a hot dog, take a cab, suffer a blow, scream under the knife, cover our head with our hands, the convulsive business of swallowing tears, fearing for our future safety, not being able to restrain ourselves from wolfing down the inedible, inevitable bowls of gruel.  And thinking how different, to be feeling outside looking in after so many years of looking through our own eyes out at the world, to feel our own ghostly presence somewhere just beside us, perhaps just above, gazing down and watching over ourselves, considering our actions, surprising ourselves, revealing at last to ourselves just why that particular mannerism so annoyed Maria, and just how thin our hair is getting lately;  look, there’s father’s face in my eyes, and now those lines in the forehead just as he always had, and yes, there’s sister’s agony in my mouth, after all.  The day I awoke and realizing my consciousness was so overbearing I broke into tears, which is now a morning ritual—unless I’ve been waking in the afternoon or at night, but no matter, it’s just an expression, just as the tears are just an expression, what isn’t just an expression, as long as there’s anything there’s nothing more than that, uttering, speaking, being.  A discourse of existence, an economy of expenditure with limitless growth, unlimited resources, infinite everything.  This language which says nothing, which is never silent, even in my solitude, even when I’m not around to comfort myself, still the language itself drones on for everything is a sign, everything is a symbol, even the most tortuous pain, the most labyrinthine pain, the most torturous labyrinth, pain is a labyrinth, language is never innocent of meaning;  no language without deceit, no language which does not address being, perhaps then no being without deceit;  Heidegger must know that, that must be his torture for the hell he’s put us through, that his language is all lies and unable to approach the desired object of pure being;  whereas Artaud’s abandonment of the text itself, in search of a more elemental gesture, a more innocent avenue, a more transparent, essential, immediate revelation is reflected in his choice of weapons, bombs, machine guns… but what can shock us today, what has become of our theater of cruelty, when cruelty has become a way of life, how far must we travel to offend when both pornography and censorship, when capital punishment and abortion, when child slavery and daycare, when we protest hypocrisy with borrowed ideologies, when we wipe our ass with recycled paper packaged in plastic, refuse veal but accept chicken, refuse even chicken or fish but accept bananas, central heating and movies.  All our ideas about life must be revised in a period when nothing any longer adheres to life;  and hence, the revenge of things;  the poetry is no longer within us and we no longer succeed in finding it in things, suddenly it appears on the wrong side:  suddenly, the unprecedented number of crimes whose perverse gratuitousness is explained only by our powerlessness to take complete possession of life.  Yet what else is my desire except to return to veal, to mass transit, to the illusion of free will and a life soaring above the poverty line like a kite on a clear day, to believe somehow that I’m not excluded, denied, exploited, dispossessed, reduced, overlooked, silenced, extinguished, on the wrong side.


Chapter 17

Invisible Journeys — 17

Trying to objectify such an internal experience, to sort out the temporal, the geographical, the habitual, the imaginary.  Into the center to stand still and look about without the centrifugal forcing me back to the periphery, a dizzying experience, like what we used to call the spins but now we don’t even need the alcohol, the cigarettes, the poorly furnished apartments, each other.  To end up reduced to carrying her bags, to becoming her entourage, and happily so, especially that great leather sack of hair spray and lipstick and bottles, which I thought she treated as objects of religious devotion, so that one night backstage when I’d been allowed the privilege of the pre-curtain visit and she’d been in the hall whispering with the stage manager, I’d actually bent down on my knees and lifted my hands in prayer, seeing my own face in the mirror behind the jumbled array of cosmetics like some horrific before picture gone tragically wrong, my unadorned self at her gilded altar, I the tabula rasa before the implements of a theatrical alchemy, the inks and paints and brushes awaiting their use:

Powders, creams, ointments, oils… some scented, others not, scented, unscented, de-scented, some smelling of the base or pure ingredients, others guaranteed never having been touched by humans or tested on animals;  lipsticks, eyeshadows, pencils, rouges, bases to cover and enhance;  then soaps, alcohols and astringents to remove these and leave the underlying face once more free of foreign agents, however pure or efficacious themselves.  Balms to moisturize and smooth the skin, unguents to restore smoothness and remove the lines of experience, medicaments to ease dryness or oiliness, heal blemishes and eruptions.  Mirrors in various sizes, mirrors which enlarge or reduce, round mirrors, square mirrors;  illuminated mirrors and sacred mirrors—that is, souvenirs, gifts from friends or inherited from relatives—framed in silver or gold or with or without covers and matching instruments:  brushes of finest fibers, sponges on sticks, cotton pads and swabs properly sterile, tissues moist and dry;  tubes, vials, boxes, pouches and containers of all sorts, bearing the names of manufacturers or designers or cosmeticians in enameled or gilt script, or designs and devices, company logos and badges embossed in plastic or woven into the cloth itself… and all these things, so mysterious and enticing, useless without the knowledge of which comes first, in what quantity, for which exact effect;  and when administered with the proper care, by one instructed in the great art, it was possible to transform one’s ordinary face into pure, natural gold.

Somehow, by some secret process all these things could be made, were made, to produce a sign, a signal, an essential something so easily recognizable in its purity, its individuality, that crowds would cheer and applaud upon her entrance, and yet something so ephemeral that between acts she could strip all this away and begin again to become another manifestation, another piercing shriek, another singular, unique individual:  act one, Gretchen;  act two, Helena.  Later, in bed, after the midnight dinners and taxi cabs, the shrieking strangers and the drinks back once again in the Labyrinth:  act three, Aida, in the cramped apartment with not much more than the bed of our infidelity, the small implements for incense and drug use, the dark drapes ill-fitting and haphazardly arranged over the window and the chair, the opened books in many languages on the pillow, the table, the bed, the jewelry new and old, my astonishment and my guilt, the lava lamp shining in the darkness like an egg with a creature inside, vials, tubes, spray bottles and ashtrays by the bed, a bathrobe with a pattern of stars, and in the toilet a portrait of Hegel, that stone of philosophy, disapproving of my flushing condoms.

Was I once again making love to a woman in the absence of love, and how many times had I (how many times had she?) done so before?  Not many, really;  I thought of three women offhand, three offhand women, remembering I’d known each time there was no real affection between us;  nevertheless we’d made love, and even acted toward one another as if there had been a delight in each other’s company, as if it might be possible we really cared for one another, as if the act itself might bring forth the hidden emotion, the secret desire that one held for the other, as if pronouncing the words would be enough because the word and the thing (we’d hoped, at least this once) were one.  But all those times, the only result was proving yet again that the action, the word and the thing itself were separate, and that’s exactly where the desire lay.  I’d thought, too, that it was possible to make love without wanting to be in love, that sometimes sex could be a game;  I’d heard it spoken of that way, even by women I’d slept with, but I’d thought wrong as it turned out.  Startlingly capable of having sex with someone I’d no real feeling for, I was forced to admit that it was only possible if I at least attempted to love them.  Inevitably, the disappointment;  either love failed, in which case it seemed somehow obscene afterward, as if I’d merely used another person to masturbate and now was left to face them knowing this, or worse, I recognized that I’d been in some measure successful, that there was the possibility of growing to love her, but she of course was careless;  and that was always worse because shame is easier borne than rejection, for shame requires her presence while rejection dictates her absence.  I would continue, however, living the role whenever the opportunity arose, because even if one remained emotionally untouched or even drained by it, the alternative of physical deprivation was unendurable;  I remained in a vertiginous swoon between the Scylla of chastity and the Charybdis of free love, wanting only to be proven wrong, wanting only to be shown that the transubstantiation of desire into love, its opposite, was possible.


Chapter 18

Invisible Journeys — 18

Artaud in a fury because the world has gone to sleep, a condition which drives him to demand more and more attention, a condition which naturally infuriates me also, which reveals to me that the world shares the blame by its indifference, just as it always has, just as it always will.  An unthinking attempt to surpass reason through violence;  it seems to work for him, it seems in the end to calm him, to satisfy him;  though it only lasts as long as the residual pain, the soreness, the blood visible beneath the surface of the skin like fish in a pond.  Enough of this punishment, deprivation, indoctrination, unceasing worry and we all begin notice the effects;  they turn up in our furtive conversations, our forbidden stories, and even in the directives issued us by our captors, and so I wonder if it’s just my hearing or if they’ve managed to transform themselves unwittingly, purposefully, habitually.  Naturally it means no less strife for those around them, though whether it means more is something undefinable, undiscoverable, unimaginable;  imputing meaning in the reading itself, but a strange sense of accessing the text only through translation from another tongue, as if everyone were speaking in tongues, and finding myself incomprehensible to my own ear as well, unfathomable to my own plumbing, invisible before my own eyes in the mirror, suggesting that the vampire is I, feeding on my own blood as if I believed with Artaud that we are all responsible, that he’s merely the instrumentality of our own desires, our own complicity in that global diabolum which he so gleefully supports even in his denial, as if by an involuted reducto ad absurdum wherein the point is to inflate the balloon beyond capacity, beyond all reasonable desire, beyond even a critical mass;  if ever the masses were critical then Artaud would cease, he claims, would step aside from his self-appointed position as spokesperson for the silent majorities, the unheard oppressed, the hopeless.  Like a censor, he smashes the innocent for the sin he perceives against himself, against all others who must certainly be just like him, an unwitting embrace of the fascist ideal, that all others must be just like him, and that expressed thought is rewarded with another religious lesson, another close examination of the spiritual which leaves me gasping, praying, bleeding in my cell, denied my precious bread and tea, wondering just how long a body can tolerate untreated open wounds, remembering pictures and television footage of refugees, victims, prisoners, displaced persons of so many eras and countries, thinking I must have that face now, I must have those eyes that see something horrible, something ghostly that couldn’t have been imagined in a previous, privileged life, that can’t be erased from consciousness, that will appear before life itself for ever more, before meals and work, before beds and ceilings, before marriages, births, possessions, pavements, newspapers, clean shirts, that will appear before everything except funerals and corpses.

Another ritual of the body, the funeral, a celebration of the cessation of suffering, caskets like beds, cremations like consummations, purified by fire as if the Phoenix, as if Joan, as if an invisible journey, a sign of nothing at all, all ambitions fulfilled, all paintings painted, all sayings said;  our stories are eulogies, each of us leaving our lives as some kind of example, indifferent to our previous concerns and perhaps for that reason Artaud is beginning to listen to the stories, a phenomenon which surprised us with its touch of familiarity, one couldn’t decide to label it hopeful, for it didn’t seem to keep him from executing the storyteller, an action which would undoubtedly alter the nature of the stories themselves, which was perhaps why he continued his strategy, a daily removal of consciousness some of us had come to view almost as a blessing to be feared, like going to the dentist or a transplant operation;  but then the sense that the stories became stories for him, stories for Artaud, and was that proper when we couldn’t tell just exactly what his fascination meant to us or to him, if we were doing ourselves or him any good or any harm, and which was desirable in the end, except to say that in cases like this the narrative itself had some redemptive power for all involved, ourselves and him, and if that somehow involved the absolution of the executioner, well, then, imitation of Christ and all that.  But there, that’s how the ritual developed, the one daily communion of the condemned and their executioners, the gathering for the story, the only permission to speak ever granted from them, though even that was never expressed verbally.  A surreal experience, a form of gathering around the fire not for the comfort but to view the elemental, a process of forming a bond through the pain and the hatred, through the fundamental misunderstanding of each other’s value in each other’s face, a time of monotonous verbalization droning like a mantra under the narrative, a fascination with the seeming senselessness of fables from the mouths of the tortured, until finally I saw Artaud himself in the stories, I saw the faceless presence of something essential in our communion in the darkness, our awareness of the fate of the speaker, the speaking subject, and our knowledge that we too at last would speak, as if being heard were the object, as if suddenly sense could be made of Lautréamont’s impulse, of Sade, of our childhood cruelties, of whatever we feared.  Which itself became a fear, that any understanding or bond or sense of sympathy between us was possible or permissible, that we might see ourselves in that other, that Artaud could be a mirror in which our faces might appear if we’d let them, if we had them, that the abolition of pain was possible, that the severed ties to our other lives were mendable, that unimaginable things were becoming imaginable after all, that undoable things were being done as we spoke.


Chapter 19

Desire Considers Disaster — 19

Desire Considers Disaster

A journey visible, but unseen, recognizable by the traces it leaves behind, by the ruptures beneath the surface, by the usual detritus of tourism:  photos, postcards, ticket stubs, receipts and handfuls of foreign coins in the bottoms of drawers.  Yet every step of the way on sacred ground was obscured by the phantom images of Berlin, of you, of lives left behind in suspension, disbelief, disarray, darkness;  the clouds, the rain, the radiation advancing into the West with alarming speed, as Aida and I penetrated further and further south just as quickly, just as unconsciously, just as accidentally.  But the sun, at least, in our striving to get closer to it, didn’t disappoint, and the sky remained or became what we expected of it in those climes:  an effect, not an object, like love or hatred or hallucinations however induced;  the sky almost imagined, perceived but illusory, punctured by blinding light from the sun, pierced by stars, defeated by telescopes and satellites and weather maps;  a kind of mental image of something nonexistent, like an unrequited love, or imagining ruins before their ruination, or letters never written, never sent because of the impossibility of deliverance:  but then all that contradicted by the smallest of objects, or objects of indifferent sizes, material things which were a piercing shriek to penetrate my consciousness;  like the leather belt nestled so closely to her navel, or the taste of an orange or salt water in my eye or the relief of undressing, the anguish of watching her undress.  The idea of committing everything to paper, to giving it a physical existence, a graphomania doomed to disappointment in the gap between what I have and what I can give, and so grudgingly accepting life in that gap, accepting that anyone else’s conception would be formed by that gap, a gap revealed or displayed by ordinary things exposed to sunlight or my own actions or whatever anyone else wants to make of it;  the act of circling around the well, the bottomless, truthless comedy of language, like a marker on a roulette wheel, balancing chance against gravity, hope against certainty, desire against disaster.

The story of Mycenæ, another mountaintop of course because falling requires a height, an unexpected occurrence and the certainty of gravity.  The whole of that morning taken up with traversing the plain, a sense of the horizon actually being below you, and slowly climbing the foothills, tavernas beginning to crowd the way, forming a street rather than a road, a sense of being drawn closer to the center of the web, and then standing on the summit poking around in the grave circles, poking gracelessly with a stick at what turned out to be a nest of spiders, thousands of tiny infants fleeing my stick.  That fossil turned up from the friable walls of the grave shaft, a mollusk’s spiral shell imprinted in the earth itself like the will of god or a strip mine or those lines on the Nazca plains, as if that X marked the spot, and so in I fell, drained.  The little fossil which I still carry, a constant reminder of the necessity of imprinting oneself physically on the universe, a material transcendence which remains as the only hope of any… of anything at all:  Cleave the rock and there you will find me.  But in her eyes, I was the substitute for nothing, I couldn’t possibly impress myself physically upon her, she was too much and too constantly aware of her own physical self, a problem for me which was absolutely no problem for her, a woman who used her sexuality for her own pleasure and nothing else—not for power or money or love or self-love, enjoying sex the way she enjoyed sleep, thoroughly, and at her own discretion, like that afternoon in Berlin when she revealed to me that her canvas had been executed with a whip, and my erection was an epiphany:  unheralded, illuminating, overwhelming.  A Sacher-Masoch of a moment whose surprise was sublimated in the unspoken nonchalance, the matter-of-factness with which she accepted my self-surprised submission, a game entered into with my amusement disguising the secret desperation, with her amusement by turns cruel, knowing, accepting, comforting.  A background of Catherine Wheels, a red robe in a black room, the gloomy reflection of my expectations in my eyes in the mirror in the bathroom.  It isn’t any spiritual sympathy which is growing in me;  it’s a physical subjection, coming on slowly, but for that reason more absolutely.  Were she less virtuous, I would be completely sane because it’s not our judgment that leads us;  it’s neither the advantages nor the faults we discover which make us abandon ourselves, or that repel us, but an endless number of indifferent and worthless things, a parade of charity, faith, hope, loyalty, chastity, thrift, punctuality, moderation, cleanliness, wealth, intelligence, beauty, charm.  I perceived that by frequenting caves and taking refuge in inaccessible places, I was transgressing the laws of logic by arguing in a vicious circle;  but I shall look away, that will henceforth be my sole negation, for at Mycenæ I walked over the incandescent dead…  What have I experienced?


Chapter 20

Desire Considers Disaster — 20

Just a question of not taking enough liberties, after all, a question of being afraid of disturbing a continuity, interrupting a daydream or a nightmare or a careless vacation;  the plains and caves and caverns of my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things:  half-lit faces of my fellow captives, strident faces of our captors, the earnest and tortured face of Artaud;  funny that his face seems to me tortured, not those of the tormented;  scraps of paper hoarded and hidden about our bodies, the reverse sides of candy wrappers on which we’ve inscribed the briefest of notes to ourselves, the paper so small and precious that the notes become a kind of code:  June?  Ankle, broken.  Rice.  Moves, 5.  Bits of shoelaces woven together, hidden inside a hem, an old sock I’ve been carrying so long without remembering where or when it appeared in my life, but its precious softness is my only reminder of comfort, of property, of walking without worry;  a period of sharing a room with two others until it was obvious to our captors that we’d agreed on the division of space, established a personal relation involving yours and mine and then because of that, the shouting, the anger, the monotony of another beating and the pain of another move.  An empty ketchup bottle, an old battery, a memory of a kitchen table, a door which doesn’t fit in its frame, the light which pours in through the gaps in myself, a collection of dust and dirt piled up where they won’t take it away from me, all the muddy labyrinths of matter which seem to matter so much even without the barrage of advertising or the brand name printed as large as the object itself.  The sheer physicality of my memories, I can feel them working around inside myself, the firmness of a handshake, the softness of a lip;  a new and total awareness of myself and others as purely physical beings, a knowledge of the intense spirituality of materialism:  mysterious forces invisibly creating a genuine surface so impermeable it begins to exist, to reflect light, to partake of the human world and interact with other bundles of forces spinning and pulsing with so much delight that science itself becomes possible, if not advisable, that gives rise to Newton, Descartes, Einstein, and all the other villains.

That moment, in the dark room, when the image reveals itself to me through the verbalization of the other, a voice in the darkness whispering a story which can’t be real, but then those stories about everyday things which leave out the incredible, the coincidental, the magical:  they must be the fantasies, for I’ve seen the spirit world and felt its presence like an ocean around us, like an invisible cloud which heals or sickens imperceptibly, one of those forces, strong or weak or indifferent, which are made up to explain the irrational;  an orgone box, that’s what my captivity is, a prolonged exposure to n-rays, an internalized out-of-body experience, like sex itself or fainting with pain or prayer or LSD.  A hallucination induced by the lack of a lead apron, the lack of proper nourishment, the lack of sex, the lack of normal human society;  monks they’ve made of us, involuntary followers of a path carved out by St. Carlos himself, a holy man who could work miracles, we fight therefore we are, even if in doing so it makes us millionaires, still the cause is what counts, the way, the shining path, the great leap forward which transforms mercy from a virtue to a luxury, a bourgeois decadence, a weak link in the grand chain of being, chain of chance.  Artaud speaks of the necessity of machine guns, the cleavage between us and life, the revenge of things, the profound spirit of anarchy;  but I will practice the revenge of the intellect upon him, for that’s a thing he cannot stop in me, the inner workings of myself, a re-digestion of his actions and their meaning, for the eye must tell its own story in the battle of meanings, no parole at the end of this sentence for this prisoner in this theater, even if the eye is gazing inward, like the prisoners staring back at the guard in the center of the panopticon;  and so when my turn comes, instead of a story which no matter how much we try to use it as a subversive tactic only legitimizes, comforts, absolves, languishes, instead of all that, a series of gestures in the darkness, gestures only half glimpsed in the shadows, movements indicative of only essential elements, striking at the heart with a stake.  A play unscripted, unrehearsed, unthought, undirected, unacted, and hence as real as possibility allows;  not even an audience to sully its solitary purity, not even a creator to violate its transcendental universality, not even anything at all for any reason whatsoever:

The Secret Manifesto (a play):  The stage is divided into two levels, the higher upstage, the lower downstage.  On the lower level there are no exits or windows.  On the loft, there is a door upstage center, another upstage right, and a window upstage left.  The whole set, however, is painted in trompe-l’oiel style, illustrating a sinister baroque luxuriance;  dark drapes, many shadows, false columns, paintings of paintings, etc.  On the lower level, downstage, ARTAUD is writing at a small table, left, facing right, and LAUTRÉAMONT is pacing back and forth behind some pots of paint and a placard set on the stage.  LAUTRÉAMONT is doodling in a small notebook he holds.  This goes on for some time before the dialogue.

LAUTRÉAMONT (Addressing you):  Let me tell you about the ineffable—

ARTAUD:  Oh, shut up.  (Yelling) Shut up!

LAUTRÉAMONT:  Excuse me, I’ve just written this down, and it’s very enlightening, and perhaps they’d like to hear it.

ARTAUD:  (As he writes) All writing is pigshit.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  And those who write it?

ARTAUD:  (Snorts) Pigs.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  So we agree.

ARTAUD:  (Stands, holding his head with both hands) How can I work with all this racket?  (Looking to LAUTRÉAMONT) Louder, louder!  Go on, continue, tell them!

LAUTRÉAMONT:  (Clears his throat) Let me tell you about the ineffable.  Let us consider the absolute existence of unspeakable things.  Let us not shrink from our irresponsibilities.  Let us not imagine we have any responsibilities at all, or that those who tell us we do are not doing us an inconceivable violence.

(The door upstage center is forced open, and VATHEK and ZADIG enter, dragging JARRY.  They struggle to get him through the door, and then throw him to the lower level.)

JARRY:  Clearly, we are revered in this country.  As it should be.

(All the other characters in concert yell at him, “Shut up!”, and everyone stares at one another as he stands and brushes himself off.  VATHEK and ZADIG exit upstage center, ARTAUD returns to his writing, and LAUTRÉAMONT kneels and fiddles with the paints and placard.  JARRY wanders around taking in the decor)

JARRY:  Ah.  The Palace of Subterranean Fire.  Our spiritual homeland.  Ought we not better to have been cast in, than out?  (He looks back and forth to the others, who ignore him) Fire, desire, perspire… expire.  (to ARTAUD) Hoi, hoi poloi, ha and ho and hail.

ARTAUD:  (Looking up) Good.  Good, good.  I like your words.  They’re very… (significantly) significant.  But meaningless.  Totally meaningless.

JARRY:  Ha?

ARTAUD:  (Looking back to his writing) You’re a genius.  The pure kind.

JARRY:  Ha?

ARTAUD:  The manufactured kind, the patchwork mind, the tortoise rind.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  Tortoise rinds!  Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.  I remember a young girl with a razor and her pets, she’d make a soup, nipping off the extremities, plop plop plop into the pot, and then the body, shell and all.

JARRY:  Ha?

LAUTRÉAMONT:  And crack them, when they were done, like walnuts.

ARTAUD:  Don’t speak to me of food.  Don’t speak to me of bodily things.  I’m interested in absolutes and essences.

JARRY:  Essences!  Our dear man, we are brothers.  (Extends his hand)

ARTAUD:  Do I look like you?  But that would be a marvelous idea, to look like someone else.  Yes, to look like someone else and yet still be myself.  To feel myself looking like someone else but feeling like myself.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  How else?

JARRY:  (Shaking his own hand) Of course.

(LAUTRÉAMONT goes back to his sign, ARTAUD returns to his writing.  JARRY stands beside LAUTRÉAMONT and they bend down over his work.)

JARRY:  We believe you have misspelled “officious” and “perspicacious”.  (they both nod;  JARRY points)  That would be better placed in the center top, opposite its contrary.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  Hmm.

JARRY:  You might have varied the vocabulary a bit.  It seems flagrantly banal.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  Hmm?

JARRY:  These drawings, are they hermaphrodites, or postmen?

LAUTRÉAMONT:  Ah.  Well…

JARRY:  What is it?

LAUTRÉAMONT:  I am painting a sign.

JARRY:  Stop?  Exit?  No Dogs?  No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service?  No Smoking?  No Loitering?

LAUTRÉAMONT:  No, sir.

JARRY:  Ah.  (they straighten up, admiring the sign) Then it’s perfect.  A veritable hippopotamus of sordid mobility.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  I have disappointed myself.

JARRY:  How so?  It pleases us.  It is the most significant sign since (he turns to you, and yells):  Shit!

LAUTRÉAMONT:  But I didn’t want a sign.

JARRY:  No?  Then We misunderstood.  (shocked) Can it be?

LAUTRÉAMONT:  I wanted a painting.

JARRY:  Of a sign?

LAUTRÉAMONT:  Yes.

JARRY:  Ah.  We see.  Well, We sympathize personally, but as a critic We maintain that as a sign it is a veritable hippopotamus of sordid mobility.

ARTAUD:  We must respect the judgment of the critics, who furnish us with ready-made opinions.  Otherwise we should be arguing constantly.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  True.  I suppose I like it after all.  But it pinches my testicles to hold opinions I disagree with.

JARRY:  There is always something to pinch one’s testicles.

ARTAUD:  Yes.  I have this device.  (he brings a device out from under the table and sets it down beside his ms.)

JARRY:  Besides, if one were to agree with one’s own opinions, one would cease to think.

ARTAUD:  Ah!  Is that the secret?

JARRY:  Sir?

ARTAUD:  To cease thinking!  What a vision of heaven, to see nothing, to hear nothing… to know nothing.  Tell me, is it possible?

JARRY:  We believe some have done it.  Landlords, for instance.  Civil servants.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  Taxpayers.

JARRY:  Taxpayers.

ARTAUD:  So then, must I file returns to deprive myself of my own money?

LAUTRÉAMONT:  Unfortunately, that would require an income.

JARRY:  That’s true.  And We don’t see any employers here.

ARTAUD:  (With his fists against his temples, melodramatically) Why am I stuck in this Hell?

LAUTRÉAMONT:  Practically speaking… (all three shudder) we were thrown down here by those goons.  Metaphysically speaking… (all three shudder) because you can’t be somewhere else simultaneously.  Every idiot knows that.

JARRY:  We have done it.

ARTAUD:  Have we?  I mean, have you?

JARRY:  Most certainly.  We are doing so now.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  And where are you now?

JARRY:  Well, We’re right here.  Can’t you see?

ARTAUD:  Yes, but where else are you?

JARRY:  Where else would I be?

LAUTRÉAMONT:  And how should we know?  You might be in Patagonia.

JARRY:  Very good!  Patagonia!  Very good indeed.  Ha ha.  Pata, ha?  Gone-ee-a, ha?

ARTAUD:  Or Poland.

JARRY:  Impossible.  We’re right here.  One can’t be in Poland and anywhere else simultaneously.  That really is impossible.

ARTAUD:  It is my duty to strike out at those who believe in the impossible.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  Would that be those who believe in things which are impossible, or those who believe that anything is impossible?

ARTAUD:  I do not split hairs, the way your young girl splits tortoises.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  You’ll never get anywhere that way.  Hares or tortoises, it makes no difference, both are infinitely divisible.

JARRY:  And aren’t all beings infinitely divisible also?

LAUTRÉAMONT:  It follows.

JARRY:  And what about the fields of Time and Space?

ARTAUD:  Also divisible.

JARRY:  So, to sum up, We are divisible.  Time and Space are divisible.  Therefore We may divide ourselves into Time and Space.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  For what reason?

JARRY:  Obviously so that we may be in two places at once.

ARTAUD:  This man is a genius.

JARRY:  No, sir.  A Pataphysician.

LAUTRÉAMONT:  What does that mean?

JARRY:  It means We posses a Doctorate in Pataphysics.  A d.P., a Pt.d., a D. pata, et cetera ad naseum et tedium and so on and so forth.

ARTAUD:  What a fine motto.  Slogans always sound better in a noble and dead language:  “And so on and so forth.”  Lovely.

But no, that’s all wrong, that’s just some story, and anyhow it’s in the wrong place, the wrong circle of hell, it’s not a theater but a cell, not some virtual reality but an empirical existence;  my notion of the possible having been confusedly enlarged in ever widening concentric circles, but a shapeless form pursues it madly, in its wake, amid the dust, a chorus of replicable sensations, replicable ideas, the very notion of the real depending on its already being reproduced, a necessary plagiarism underpinning, underlying, undermining the community of reality itself;  my green, your green, my sweet, your sweet, my words, our words, everyone’s words.  A conspiracy of conformity giving rise to our existence, our gods, our unspoken suppressions of other things;  but no, I shall look away, henceforth that will be my sole negation, the only necessary negation, how many negations does the world truly require, what an enormous number of negations the world engenders, nurtures, protects.  An era in which speaking becomes negation, against the received idea of uttering affirmations;  an endless number of negative utterances, a manifesto of erasure, a considered denial against desire, against will, against divinity, sublimity, a force to counter immanence itself, to beat back the essential, the necessary, the sufficient.  Against bodies, those agents without sufficient reason, those innumerable attacks on the principle of non-contradiction.  I will mind my body, my body of learning, my body of work, my body of water;  I will declare against all physical masses, all physical constraints, all powers dependant on material force, all forces of physical power;  I will strike at the heart of its condition unconditionally, unreservedly, mercilessly;  but I will subvert with a welcomed negation, I will go to bed when I choose, to the sound of celestial music, without saying my prayers.


Chapter 21

Desire Considers Disaster — 21

A paranoiac would consume or produce complicated texts, stories developed like arguments, constructions posited like games, like secret constraints, but Aida paid little heed to the printed page, to the contradictory lies she told me, to plans made in advance;  so that directors were forever nervous about her lines though she threw them off as if she had actually rehearsed and whether she’d even read the script was anyone’s guess, was as probable as full houses, whether she even knew in advance what the next cue would be or whether she was like the weather, “what the hell difference does it make,” she’d say, “I’ve seen plays before, I can tell when I’m supposed to yell or cry or swoon—god, for a script without a swoon!”  That seemed to be a life for her, without swoons, entered into heedless of the proper costume, and then accepting the gasps of the audience as applause and encouragement, just as when I caught her with another or when her husband caught her with me or when we caught ourselves with something else entirely.  Forging through innocent of any illicit conspiracy, guiltless and guileless as if she’d been found putting on stockings or sweeping the floor or completing a favour:  incapable even of being caught in the trap of being accused of not knowing the difference between the stage and the world, she’d dismiss the accusation as being manipulative, condescending, self-righteous, the point as being unsupportable, irrelevant and insufferably bourgeois.  Her ability to be so right about so many things, to be outside my expectations, to be so unbending in her desires, a frightening, deliciously charming characteristic which forced me every moment in her presence to an awareness of my own desires, never letting up my obligation to choose for myself at every step beside her or behind her—but never before her, never in advance, never leading, always following her constantly surprising path, her exhilarating sudden detours, her terrifying stepping between my expectancies like falling pianos, mislabeled packages, slipping on banana peels and all the other continuously unexpected contingencies she made of life against my unconsciously centered, anchored existence.

What would Aida’s presence have been for me in the lack of your absence?  Forever that curious awareness that you might never know who she was and how she made of me that person none of our friends recognized, that either you might never meet her, or might no longer be able to meet anyone else, and then wondering if I had ever met her myself, after all;  after conversations and sex and arguments and knowing silences.  Had she even once told me the truth, about anything, or was I totally wrong, and everything she said completely honest?  Did it matter what she would claim about her past statements, or was it wholly up to me to accept or reject them?  Was she Caucasian, I wondered;  Greek, she’d said, but probably only meaning she’d been born there, since afterward, sometime between the bath and breakfast, somewhere between truth and conversation, she’d said something about born in one country, named after characters from another by parents from a third and fourth.  Let’s see, she spoke Greek and French and Spanish, some German from living in Berlin—but languages were meaningless, you could pick them up anywhere for any reason, that’s just exactly what happened to one in life, wasn’t it?  Well, then, how to pin her down?  Another one of the episodes of Aida’s pleasure, the strangers in the hotel, the woman who looked like an owl, the man hesitant, balancing on the precipice of temptation, forgoing sainthood and an untainted marriage by waiting in the hallway in the middle of the night for Aida, who wouldn’t disappoint.  Peering through the keyhole at them, opposite the owl behind the crack of their bedroom door, two peering eyes framing the prohibited ritual of anonymous ecstasy, and then realizing that he was indulging in the taboo while for her it was as playful an act as running, as splashing water, as petting a dog;  the sordid, the cheap, the degrading aspects were all entirely his, it was his desire which lent those characteristics to the event, and his wife’s voyeurism, his wife’s desire to catch him transgressing—so at last to justify her own desire to transgress, which I was to discover the next evening, a memory which still causes me to confront my own desire for the illicit, a memory which still inflames me, even though it wasn’t her physical self which invoked the reaction.  She was not desirable, she was not like any woman I had ever wanted—not any reflection on her beauty, just upon my taste—but her lust was the temptation, her lust was contagious, her lust was the kind of reaction to me that I’d been trying for so long to induce in Aida, so that there was no question of resistance, no question of a will of my own at all, no question of limiting our intimacy;  we indulged in it the way we did in the air, the light, the colors around us:  unthinkingly, unconsciously, uncomprehendingly.  But the delicious denouement, the sublime pinnacle was only achieved in Aida’s presence:  that she watched as we reduced ourselves before her was for both of us the point of the act, the motive;  and in the end, satisfied, the both of us looked not to each other, but to Aida for comfort, approval, a smile, which she generously bestowed upon us just in advance of her laughter.


Chapter 22

Desire Considers Disaster — 22

I hear in the distance the sounds of trains, of elephants crying, prolonged cries of the most acute pain:  Artaud dispensing death as simply as the heart pumps blood, words expressing evil which are destined to take on a more positive meaning, at least the in the strained discourse of his imaginings, his rhetoric.  But he seems unaware of the subversive nature of his own language, the ability of what he says to contradict his own intentions, the very fact that others can hear differently what he says, just as Maria never listened to any of us, buying that car, moving to Paris, dying.

I have become the scribe, Artaud has given me paper and instructed me to translate for their propaganda;  what a word, translate, what immense freedom is opened up to me in that one simple word, so much freedom that I have to explain to Artaud why my scribblings go on forever when his mumblings drift into silence;  and then he asks me to read them back, and again I exercise my freedom, it’s a three-part process:  I listen, I write, I read, and every step is a new revelation of something, a new being in itself, a new challenge before existence.  His dissatisfaction at my translations, at the difference between what the two of us utter out loud and what I get onto the paper is not assuaged by my lecture on translation, by my explanation of the slippery gap between my mind and my hand, and so here is an other reason for the application of a purifying violence, I’ve been purged so often at his behest I must be empty of all contamination, I must be free from all taints, I couldn’t possibly think evil thoughts;  for now I am a holy man, I must be, I can feel the infinite inside me, everything else has been beaten free of my material being.  I glow now with my own presence, I revel in the application of the ritual beating.  No longer any physical pain, now just a comfort in the regularity, the structure of the ritual itself:  it brings a sense of community to our little group, and we’re no longer horrified when anyone is led away for the consecration to crime, as we have come to name it;  even the final, the daily, the execution takes on a new meaning for us, we recognize that we are taking leave of the material and can’t see any regret in that any longer, and wish one another well at leaving, carelessly wondering whether we’ll be back or not, tortured or killed, its all the same to us, just another episode in the story, another step in the process, another link in the sausage.

I’m no longer disturbed by my loss of weight, the lack of water, the filthy conditions, living among insects and rodents, eating moldy foods, thin gruel;  the lack of a bed to sleep on, clothes to change, newspapers to read, skies to look at;  no longer offended by the sight of blood, the treatment of others, the casual cruelties;  no longer conscious that none of this is what I used to call normal, living life among fragile and absurd things.  What bothers me is thinking and thinking—without letup—about all possibility, the pointlessness of big words and every sort of solemn exhortation, the minute examination of the most insignificant thing in the least amount of light, bringing to bear my relationship with ideas upon objects, events, turns of phrase, absences of common things.  I am no longer able to perceive ordinary manifestations as just simple phenomena, I must discover in everything a complex metaphysical immanence, I must hear the cry of particles and forces, I must see the links between myself and the hard barrier of otherness, feel the pull of mysterious desires binding myself to reality, to what is behind reality and what is in front of it.  I have sublimated an immense desire for fornication, I have passed through a period of identifying human bodies only with sex or death and not much difference between the two;  a fortnight or more, only a guess at how long, when extreme states escape control of the will and erections resulted from thinking about the pain, the blood, epiphanies of semen, the contiguity of eroticism and mysticism, my obsessive need to make love opening on death like a window on a courtyard.  Clearly I have seen myself undergo myself, undergo everything not me, a giant grasping of an immense imprinting of my consciousness on itself, on the world;  I have become a window which looks out on itself looking back inward, a two-way mirror, a closed loop admitting nothing alien, nothing other;  but admitting everything without discrimination, without prejudice, without sorrow.  Giving myself my poor tired huddled masses, my dispossessed, my marginalized, my excluded, my hopeless:  whatever it takes.  An attempt to live for something other than the suffering, that’s what’s required to find the stamina, to outlast this nightmare;  therefore having to give up on hatred at last, it’s served it’s purpose and now harboring it within myself becomes counter-productive, but letting it go is easier for me than for Artaud, for the other captives and the other captors.  Turn the other cheek I say, but they can’t understand why it works for me, even explaining that I reserve the right to resume the passion under other, more favorable circumstances doesn’t help.  Look at it this way, I tell them, I’ve become a monk without a god, an undirected prayer, an empty ritual, because the basic crime associated with the saints is erotic, related to the transports and tortured fevers that produce a burning love in the solitude of monasteries and convents.  Hatred, they say, hatred itself is what keeps us alive:  we fight, therefore we are.  A fighting against, a fighting for, a struggle to increase the pain of someone somewhere for some reason, as if pain were the grail:  what unfamiliar reality pursues its end (different from the goals we see) or pursues no end at all through such noise?


Chapter 23

Desire Considers Disaster — 23

General impressions which add up to particular things, as in the rehearsals for Faust, Aida playing both Gretchen and Helena, two roles she reveled in, for her false, naive deluded expectations of a male consciousness which couldn’t imagine women simply as people, yet roles she played with such an ease and a pleasure that even she would stop and wonder at her own lines.  Or that unspeakable opening night, like an open wound, which began with champagne and flirtation and ended with the absolute existence of unthinkable things, and me in my underwear submerged in a tub of tepid water.  Me with no idea why I was angry enough to be spending time with a naked stranger instead of the married woman I kept telling myself I was in love with;  me seducing the man I had found her with, despite my immense revulsion for his conclusive hairiness, and a profound suspicion that he might in fact be her husband, or have been her husband once upon a time.  Her coming upon us in the washroom, he standing only in a dress shirt up against the tub, me with that enormous penis in my mouth, like the body of Christ, and my own erection peeking out of the water.  A scene I found so essentially erotic I became nauseous;  and thereafter in my life I would never be so horny as when I had a sore throat.  I now understand the masculine Eros, and I marvel at Socrates for having remained virtuous in view of an Alcibiades like this.  Or being thrown out of the Kempinski drunk because she was there with the director who was trying to play Paris to her Helena, to my Menelaus, universal cuckold, ending up in the dark, in the club where a man who claimed to be Charlie Parker convinced us all with his salt peanuts and showing us the track marks before passing out, a living up to his own expectations which surprised no one, or the moment of intimacy when she showed me her husband’s photographs, one of her at a bar with a tower of glasses just before the lurch which brought them crashing, one of their wedding in a hurry, one her parent’s house with her mother on the balcony, a pile of personal things she arranged in order on her naked belly, and made a story with beginning, middle and end, “even though,” she said, “I’ve never felt particularly Aristotelian,” and then made love to me with an unfamiliar dilatoriness and affection.

Which particular thing is her unpredictability, which particular thing is my rage, my anger, it comes upon me as my humiliation weakens, looses its sway over me, lets me go like pollen from stamen, like leaving home, like following the sun, like water from fountains.  But what a useless development, something totally inefficacious and unwarranted, something I bear unwillingly, an embarrassing characteristic.  I’m tempted to attribute it to the violence of our emotions, but that would be totally inaccurate, for she was totally calm if not passive about every one of these things, and it’s not true, either, to say then that it was my violent response, because there were no outward outbursts—though I’m sure there were times, probably all of them, when my face or posture revealed something, if not everything.  Really what happened was that she continually caused in me an aggravated surprise, a kind of Artaudian panic, which came as the immediate response to so strong an initial response;  she awoke in me desires I had never known I’d harbored, which scared me silly;  she was both the Siren who summoned me and the rope which bound me to the mast, and I am desire considering disaster, fluttering vertiginous between the semi-divine and the celestial, trapped between my heritage and my fear, yet somehow always unable to shake the feeling that this obsession, this affair, this throwing myself under a train for her was a misplaced fear, a panic of helplessness over you.

As if by extending my emotional energies in any direction at all would lessen the blow, as if physical things were a substitute for contentment, as if metaphors ever really meant anything even in context, even in rehearsals, even in bed.  Rehearsals and beds, those were the sites of her life, the intersections of her and anyone else, the places where the full meaning of her control, her deliberate enjoyment of games of all sorts manifested itself, revealed its innocence and its justice, its continuity, its awareness of its own self-regard.  Ironic dialogues, pillow talk, intentional transgressions, flirtations, explorations of all kinds were for her the natural form of existence, designed to deflate any reasonable expectation, any social ritual no matter how innocuous, any synchronization of watches.  Like showing up early for our appointment at the Europa Center, like the expedition to the Pergamon museum to see Schleiman’s artifacts in order to insist the costumes be all wrong, not anything remotely near authentic, to see for herself that authenticity was an idea insulted for its bourgeois attachment to nostalgia, to indoctrination, to the great steamroller of history.  A game of struggling with everything, with people and money, with the Bundesposte and the rest of the cast, with landlords and immigration officials, with sealed plastic packages and the weather, with my grief, with her own grief, with the warnings to stay inside, not drink the milk, not eat the lettuce or the tomatoes spoiled by the blanket of radiation.  “One must meet the world with derision and joy, like Buñuel or Cocteau,” she said, “or one succumbs to Sartre and Dostoyevsky, the great oppressors of the spirit, the fathers of all nuclear accidents.”


Chapter 24

Desire Considers Disaster — 24

Never apologize, never explain, says Artaud by way of explanation, apologizing for whatever guilt he still harbors beneath himself, but I assure him with a smile and we discuss the fact of the daily storytelling;  a continuity, I say, a structured ritual whose predictability is its reassurance, it doesn’t matter what the story is, the act itself, the speech act, the voluptuous release of the letter is what counts;  it is our clock, our rock;  but he doesn’t seem entirely to believe me, he suspects there is more to the stories than that, that they are some kind of a code, some kind of mysterious plan being developed under his very nose, some kind of a language he cannot grasp.  And so he orders another execution, and as usual someone else carries it out.  At once I try to convince him that the stories are meaningless babble, yet that they must be allowed to continue;  that they are harmless to him, but make his captives more malleable, less cornered dogs, less desperate, more subservient.  But no use, you can’t save a life that way, because the executions have become his clock, his rock, he gathers strength from our diminishing numbers, and whenever a newcomer arrives he flies into a fury, another to feed, another to beat and restrain, it takes too much out of him, it’s too much to ask, a man only has so much to give.  Newcomers are usually quick to pick up the thread of the stories, they fall into the rhythms naturally;  it’s the beatings which are harder on them, it’s our familiarity with our captors which makes them suspicious, incredulous, alienated and altogether feeling a helplessness like a malarial fever or getting the spins or being enraptured.  They address us with mouths agape, wondering at how long we’ve been here;  they ask but we’ve no idea what the date;  they supply it and calmly we reply:  six months, two years, three years.  Oh, don’t worry, we assure them, it seems like a hard life, true, but one gets used to being cut off from the rest of the world, it becomes almost peaceful that one’s expectations become limited to a few square meters of space, barely enough nourishment to live on, interminable silences, physical pain and deprivation.  Think of yourselves as penitents, we say, consider yourself in a mediæval monastery, and realize the liberating force of living in your own head, unencumbered by the bewildering, unpredictable complexity of commuting to work, ordering in restaurants, having children, visiting zoos, digesting the news, voting, dressing, reading… choosing.

Choosing to steal:  can that still be a transgression, under these circumstances, is it a greater or lesser crime?  Impossible to place the same value on possessions when by definition they are forbidden us;  once, a newcomer, beaten, barely conscious, slumped into a corner of a dingy basement, had been left in his own clothes and there, peeking out of a trouser pocket like a beacon of purity, like an open door, was the hint of paper.  A pull so strong I couldn’t possibly resist, like loosing my legs to the undertow and falling face first to the surf;  I stole it while he slept, straining in the darkness to make out just what was written on it.  Is it a delirium of my deranged mind, is it a secret instinct independent of all reasoning which impelled me to commit this crime?  And then, quietly, obsessively, with the tips of my fingers, erasing the pencil markings.  Weeks of rubbing, both sides, yielding a few square centimeters of virgin paper that I might make my own marks upon.  A pentimento approach, one which afterwards left the trace of the previous writing legible beneath my new scribblings, so that mine were merely excessive, superfluous, a kind of plagiarism, but a kind necessary in the absence of a tabula rasa, more of a Rossetta Stone declaration:  here are my words, here are the original words, what the hell’s the difference.  Choosing to live, another kind of transgression, but one of the few choices, one of the few transgressions left to we penitents in our penitentiary;  choosing to die, a few have done so—other than on Artaud’s terms, that is, on their own terms precisely because it was truly an insult, a violation which could only go unpunished and nothing infuriated our captors more, nothing was more instinctively contrary to their sense of the natural unfolding of the universe, a place where their only weapon was our non-existence, their only possible utterance was our screaming, their only lever was our fulcrum.  A delicate balance of politics and annoyance, desires and obstructions, theory and praxis;  as if anyone really cared about our well-being, didn’t the months of inaction prove that, wasn’t time alone enough of a message from the outside, that the outside was beyond the pale, unthinkable, unresponsive, uncaring;  and what possible use were we as incentives, rewards, threats, what possible use were we as tools in the construction of a better world, what possible outcome of this nonsensical position.  Wherefore we came to represent for Artaud the outside, a kind of metonymy took place and instead of assassinating presidents, blowing up banks, overthrowing regimes, began the brainwashing, the re-education, the co-opting, for when we took the place of the outside in his eyes, he began to work on us as if he had captured the outside itself and seized the opportunity to put his ideas into practice.  Practice, like a physician, like a pianist, perform as in operations, spectacles, in a theater, European theater, like the war, one of several all being fought concurrently:  Cold War, war against oppression, war of nerves for all the neurologists:  when the connections are made, poof, my brain feels like a bomb, night and day, it must expand, it must expand, a man’s brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe, but I am packed away in a suitcase, in a box, disguised as a radio, awaiting only the proper moment, the decisive moment, how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen;  time bomb of my brain, it expands;  it only destroys because it broadens;  even so, thought only destroys because it broadens.  It is better to leave the world’s evil meaning unchanged;  who will give warrant that I shall not abuse my insane desire?


Chapter 25

New Heresies — 25

New Heresies

What a strange sense of liberation, returning to Berlin with properly stamped travel visas under the watchful eyes of armed guards, on specifically designated access roads, as if we would cheat just for the fun of it, leaping over the barbed wire into the DDR, as if there were ever any attempts, as if they couldn’t control the influx into paradise:  chain link fences, guard towers and razor wire for the gates of heaven, angels armed with Kalishnikovs to keep back the hoards of sinners who’ve decided their sheer weight, their collective mass alone could get them through, like lemmings to the sea;  some will die on the journey, but the promised land beckons.  Really what beckons is an apartment full of things:  Coltrane records, familiar sheets, newspapers piled up by the door without your name in them anywhere, but never mind, there are countless stories of burglars caught napping, cats voting, old women mugging tourists, any number of common things which cause cancer in laboratory researchers, and the latest polls indicating everyone should just shut up and be quiet about everything, what else can we expect?  I expect a lifetime of senseless, minute things, things which seem now ever so insignificant;  everything I own recedes into the distance, shrinking with the perspective, a day further away for every day you’re still away.  No miracles to return to, no surprise of your face at my door, no change in the menus of the cafés on Fasenstrasse, as if a new meat or a new spice had fallen upon us like manna, as if anything undone were ever undoable, etc.  Returning to a life which left me puzzled, like finding myself in Belgrade and wondering how the hell did I end up here, there’s no rational explanation for any fixed point, except one never expects this feeling on coming home;  now there’s no where else to go, there’s no first train out of town because there’s no possible destination, any other place might even be worse, a scurrying here and there would be succumbing to an aleatory lifestyle—but that’s exactly what happened to me in the Labyrinth, wasn’t it, succumbing to Aida, to the half-revealed, to being out of my depth.  Hadn’t I known, couldn’t I have seen?  Of course, of course, knowing and seeing don’t prevent the desire for the duration of a single moment do they, the wish one day to actually want an everlasting yes, a moment of certainty untinted by discomfort of any kind;  not even so grandiose a fantasy as happiness or joy, just ease, just freedom from disease.  But things like that couldn’t possibly be manifest here, not in this town, this eye of the storm, at least not in our lifetime, it’s a geographical mistake as large as bumping into the New World on the way to India or not noticing the map’s upside down or getting on the wrong train.  Or not being able to distinguish ordinary from anything else, as when I recognized the form of the lamp and recognized the form of the angel;  but couldn’t separate them in my mind, when in fact they were in reality cleaving to one another, forming only one free and independent body;  but some cloud passed before my eyes, just like that first night in the Labyrinth, those clouds of smoke causing me to loose something of the excellence of my eyesight and Aida causing me to loose something quite different.

That was the start of the notes, those precious pieces of paper some of which I’ve kept ever since, sometimes they’re startling reminders of just who we were, sometimes just fond or torturous memories, like the dentist’s office or playing post office.  It was like cashing cheques, to receive one of those notes, almost a bureaucratic process, but one which in the end promised some kind of reward, even if it sometimes took days to clear, like the first mysterious note in Greek for which I had to go to the library and consult a phrase book;  of course even the notes in German were puzzles to me despite the locale, my difficulty with languages extending every direction into my life, but the Italian and the French were not so bad, I even recognized the quotations well enough to show up beside Nefertiri’s head in the museum just in time to watch the photo sessions, and recognized the name of the great materialist philosopher who now has a street named after him, so I found the address and joined her at the party.  But she quickly tired of the games, though not of the notes, and they became more reasonable, more personal messages, more instantly affecting, simple passages of information or ideas, as when she mailed a postcard from a café just to say that she thought she’d seen me on the U-Bahn, and wouldn’t that be delightful, just to meet by chance on our daily rounds, on the subway or the street or having lunch with co-workers.  Which sent me racing across town on public transit for days until I phoned and her machine said she was gone for the week.  And then it was only when Luc and Sylvie found me with our depleted coterie, having our lunch game standing up at KDV that I found out it wasn’t true, of course it couldn’t be considering the rehearsals;  but I showed up at the airport anyway the following Sunday night and she came through the arrivals door with passengers from a Lisbon flight, which shattered the earth for me, and said, “Let’s pretend we’re tourists, find me a cheap hotel.”  A single room, a disapproving stare from the concierge, an elevator so small we were pressed together along the length of our bodies and she worked her seductive magic upon me by avoiding my eyes all the while, all the while I could smell her, her clothes, the kindred smells of patchouli, leather and hashish, the intoxicating sight of her lipstick, the memory of a tiny tattooed scarab on her back, but a shapeless form pursued me madly, in her wake, amid the dusty smell of a closed room opening on a dirty court, and a shameful practice I would gladly have discarded altogether if she’d offered me hope of anything else.


Chapter 26

New Heresies — 26

Trying to retain the small person inside of me, nurturing my homunculus, as if I were the egg, or the chicken warming the egg rather, trying to protect the last vestige of myself, my humanity, from this interminable despair;  how to turn this dross into gold so far from the light of reason, of heaven, so far from life itself.  A final strategy:  to give in, submitting while there’s still time to retain some dissent;  I will become a servant rather than a slave, they’ll never know the difference if I hide my homunculus well enough, the way we hide our fear, the way they hide their weaknesses.  Artaud smiling, a rare sight, embracing me, no one is more welcome than the convert, for the convert proves the validity of the ideals, but I will be a Salman to his Mahound, polluting the word of God with my own profane language;  or better still, I will outdo him, I will teach him what he really means, string him along with my translations:  where he’ll speak Mao, I’ll write Baudrillard, where he curses with Lenin I will bless with Lyotard, I will bind him with Eco, a Labyrinth of words, and trip him with Foucault, whose very intellect was a torture chamber, an anti-everything let alone Oedipus, amazing how simple it all becomes, how when the time is right one little realization, one infinitesimal decision can re-organize all of existence, the old, evil, weary, festering world falls away into disbelief.  Hitting bottom is the only release, the only liberation, it becomes so easy to choose when there’s only one remaining option, for only the damned can be saved:  to be born again first you have to die.  Don’t forget that Lucifer—the Bearer of Light—was originally the most beautiful of the angels;  I will teach a philosophy that is dangerous to life, but one at the heart of which is the absence of anything that gives birth to everything, where everyone walks naked, the good and the bad, side by side, where prayer is (not) a false act.  And so, because one must not be dominated by the accidental, I have said to him, do whatever you wish, whatever you please;  lock me up for ever in a dark prison with scorpions as the only companions of my captivity, or pull out my eye till it falls to the ground, I shall never reproach you in the least;  I am yours, I belong to you, I no longer live for myself.  The pain you cause me will not be comparable to the joy of knowing that he who wounds me with his murderous hands is steeped in an essence more divine than that of his fellows!

I had just been given the privilege of witnessing the death-throes of several of my fellow beings;  but “don’t worry,” says Artaud, “we have others to kill.”  New tremors are being felt in the intellectual atmosphere:  it is simply a matter of having the courage to face them, to face the intermittent annihilation of human faculties and still guard my homunculus.  My little man begins to speak to me in the darkness, he speaks with your voice and thus I give him your name, Celine, now we are three brothers, like children with an imaginary playmate:  only I can see him, only I can hear him and I guard his presence from all, captives and captors alike.  It’s the external ones, the other people, the hard surfaces of cells, floors, bludgeons, which become so hard to focus on, so indistinct, so peripheral to existence;  it becomes harder and harder to remember what any of them look like, so that occasionally I fail to recognize them, even Artaud, though other captives are always easily recognized by that look in their eyes, the total alone-ness staring back at yours, yet whether they are new friends or old is sometimes hard to say, especially when sometimes one will behave toward me as if I’ve betrayed someone or something, and then at another time they look at me as if I were the only hope;  but I’m a sorry saviour, in my rags, not having seen a razor in an infinite amount of time, bleeding from my own wounds which are no different from theirs, without any influence where it counts, unable to release anyone from any captivity, all I can do is guard my little man, make him a captive as well, but a captive from, not a captive of, I cannot speak for anyone or help anyone, I am only what I am, there’s trouble enough speaking for myself, speaking at all.  The word, we must concentrate on the word, the word and the world, le mot et le monde, I will attack them through their own thinking, since Artaud defines the limits of my existence I will reshape his definitions, I will tell him a story that explains the world, a narrative of legitimation which turns back on itself, on its author, on its reader, I will lead him with a golden thread where he wouldn’t go by himself, I will lose him in a twisting hall of mirrors, like Piranesi’s labyrinthine prisons, which reflect only back on one another infinitely, not ever in any particular direction, not ever in any logical manner—and I will have him sign his own name to it, I will have him declare it his ideology, a pataphysical trap for a patently philistine rat.  His manifesto will contain my secrets, my playing with words, my revenge.

Nervousness, a trait gaining prominence in Artaud’s demeanor, a subtle shift in levels of confidence, my assurance grows as his weakens, I gather strength from his indecision, as if he’s holding from me the news that my work upon their propaganda, their communications to the authorities, the newspapers, the public at large, is having an effect, the response to them is changing, my secret manifesto is getting through, like messages from space, but it will take an enormous stroke of fortune to be heard by anyone not simply a nut, for who in the world is not a nut?


Chapter 27

New Heresies — 27

Then there was the U-bahn, the trip from the museum back to Kreuzberg, a wandering in the depths that always depressed me, a subterranean journey disorienting in its quotidian banality, how the train slows on coming into Bernauer Strasse station, dimly lit, everything the dark, burnt orange of oppression and suspicion, how the train doesn’t stop, no one stands up to get off, just slowly rolling by the empty, deserted platforms with the grim figures of armed guards watching us, holding us at bay, and the ridiculous conversations we held under their gaze:  “Which of us are the fish in the bowls?  They’ve got the guns and the malignant stare, but we’re riding through to the West.”

“As if that matters, don’t forget we’re all bound by something.”

“Or someone.”

“No, something, people can’t bind you, it’s an illusion to keep you from recognizing what you’re bound by.”

“Or that’s an illusion to keep you from recognizing your captor.”

“It’s an eternal regression, it has something in common with an eternal return, eternal recurrence.”

“Oh, please, let’s not undergo that.  Let’s talk about our lunch game, it’s been weeks what with everyone away for totally insufficient reasons.”

“The stomach again, even while enduring this passage.”

“It’s a requirement, this passage has nothing to do with it, it doesn’t matter what I see or think here, I’m still going to have to deal with lunch.”

“I wonder what kind of lunch they have, whether they bother with sufficient reason or just go eat when they’re hungry?”

“That’s what I’m saying, except in their case, they’re on duty, they can’t go when they want, they’re required to threaten anyone on a passing subway with their gloomy countenances, their gloomy prospects.”

“They certainly look like they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot, gloomily or otherwise.”

“Otherwise, of course, everything is always otherwise in life.”

“That’s precisely why no one’s ever figured anything out, why we can’t explain each other or Disneyland or what the hell we meant when we said that.”

And buying the pornography for the next trip, a caper of an indeterminate sort, holding up hardcore pictures to the window as we slowly wheeled by those poor bastards, a totally otherwise prank which none of us could comment on as we were doing it, as if we were holding up our own sins in confession, not even laughing at the baffled expressions of the guards or their disgust or indifference, but afterwards trying to determine whether we were inviting them to the West or apologizing for it, or displaying our own kind of suffering to fellow creatures.  “I think it’s just an absurd gesture, like shooting into a crowd.”

“Then ‘just’ would be the word for it, and you’re mistaken, shooting at crowds is surreal, not absurd.  Shooting yourself is absurd.”

“I though shooting yourself was existential.”

“Not if Hemingway can do it.  Anyway, why would anyone pay for that stuff, who wants to look at things you can do for yourself?”

“Not everyone is capable of every act.  Some of us are bound more tightly than that, some of us could never allow ourselves to be bound by those acts.”

“Goethe says that the act is the beginning, as if acting will set you free.  It’s in the play.”

“Yes, but acting binds you to a course, to consequences, to the world.  We find such great freedom in our chains.”

“Only because we still live as if, despite everything, despite the least thing.  Everything leads back to challenging the illusions we cherish, it’s all smoke and mirrors.”

“Pass the cheese,” etc.


Chapter 28

New Heresies — 28

Confined in my own head, a madman’s dilemma, but the lunatic did not go mad for his own amusement, and I shall not for Artaud’s:  my homunculus directs my thinking just as I direct the secret content of Artaud’s press releases and communiqués, like pornographic messages embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models, which makes for a terribly difficult experience, those tea parties, those danse macabre consultations on the text, the simplest ransom note, where I insist no handwriting is safe, where I belabour the point of using traditional collage techniques, a Tristan Tzara strategy;  and when Artaud finally gives in, there before me are spread magazines and newspapers is several languages:  Italian, German, French, a profusion of linguistic reality, an explosion of words—the violence of the letter—so unexpected, so typographically pure, rows and rows, page after page, columns of justified text, after such a long absence, like an imposed illiteracy;  and then, managing to bring some with me back to our cells, sharing them with the others, suddenly realizing that those words could be read, that those words were meant to connect to things, that there was a kind of content or message aside from the characters themselves:  suddenly realizing that in recognizing the letters as letters I had forgotten how to read them as clues to the outside.  Realizing the change that had overcome the outside, the shifting meaning of the very concept itself, outside no longer represented to me my former life or something I hoped to escape to or even communicate with, the way we make long distance calls or vacation plans, but more as if it were an inner space, a non-material and indifferent absolute to which one could only speak, or pray, but which would never return with a voice of its own, never respond except in your own estimation of how it works its subtle magic upon you, its will directing your emotions and feelings so delicately, so infinitesimally, you’d never notice or you’d come to notice only years afterwards, realizing that all your choices had been someone else’s, all your epiphanies had been implanted without your permission—like Artaud’s indoctrination of the stick—like speaking to my homunculus, that’s just exactly the kind of relationship we had, closer even than any I’d had with women, with family, with myself.  Because all those had been so overt, so loud, so obviously a gang of kids in a sandbox, and now the obverse, as if a cloud of silence embraced us in our sleep or descended upon us as we bowed our heads in prayer or caressed our desires as we looked elsewhere.  Elsewhere, everywhere, anywhere, I was that other Odysseus, I was anyone in my years of wandering back and forth within the same room, prowling the endless, reflexive, corridors which appeared within me and behind me as I regressed into Circe’s waiting arms;  but for Artaud it was necessary to describe it in terms which Scheherazade might use, and so substitute Sindbad where I wanted to scream No One, and hold my own arms in check where I wanted to pierce an eye, like trying to bind myself to the mast, not to restrain any libidinous desire but to keep me from loosing his confidence.  Now it was imperative that I not insult him, that he recognize my sympathy for his cause, that I be thoroughly Stockholmed if I wanted to be… to be.  Now was a time of tightrope walking, Now was a turning point, Now was when everything could realize itself, or when nothing would any longer matter at all;  now was what kept us all slaves to necessity, now was that eternally present moment which robbed us of our humanity, demeaned our ambitions and negated all our potentials;  only an evasive future moment, a temporal horizon, could save any of us from our petty hopes, from anyone’s petty hopes, but God help those who sail off the edge, God help those who discover that here there be monsters, who loose sight of the Pillars of Hercules.

A strange sight, those magazines with their frightening pictures of ceremonies, weddings, inaugurations, train wrecks, their banal reports of Afghanistan, Bhopal, Chernobyl.  “A little bit of the hell we’ve escaped,” another captive remarks.  “Just little enough to bring me to tears.”  Tears, a form of self-pity I’d forgotten, one we used to indulge in on the slightest pretext, a broken love, a sick relative, other, less worthy corollaries, as if we were rich and tears were champagne, a universal lubricant.  But the tears spread, from one to the other, pouring over glossy photos of news events, new fashions, toothpaste adds like recruitment posters, until the room was awash, one couldn’t tell if one was crying one’s own tears or another’s, salt water’s all the same to Sindbad after all.  I’m coming close to the laceration of reason—and within me happiness grows, and with it a growth in my evident inability to possess it, happy homunculus, how he stares uncomprehendingly out at these others, but I tell him don’t worry, they can’t help it, they’re just in the grip of their own obsessions, it’s not their fault, they’re possessed by powers beyond their recognition, the subtle workings of an invisible will imprinted upon them in the earliest days, before these safe houses, before electric lights, before industrial revolutions, an invisible will worming it’s way across history through humankind, swimming blindly in the ironic waters of ether, as if it were seeking the bleeding prey of hope, continually buoyed up, through the immense regions of space, by the implacable snow plough of fatality.  And in the face of that, the others take their turns being indignant, uncooperative, belligerent, demanding, defiant;  the result of which is they end up beaten, bound, starved, crying, despairing, dead.

Slowly the tale takes its place as our mass, the daily gathering in the darkness to hear the monotonous, repetitive retelling and reworking of the same beginning, middle, end, each iteration somehow transforming itself and we with it into something entirely new, and occasionally I try to work the sense of it into Artaud’s text, and when he looks puzzled and asks why we keep telling and listening to that same story over and over, just what significance does it hold for us, after all we’re not all of one religion or nationality and aren’t we bored with it yet, then I dismiss it for him with after all, everything’s just the same story over and over, isn’t it?  Not the great struggle, not the revolution.  Yes, even that, for revolution just means turning around doesn’t it, another metaphor for more of the same, perhaps with new colours or hats, but just another game of someone hurting someone else just because it’s their turn.  Which reminds him to choose another sacrifice from our number, which reminds me how sometimes words can kill, which reminds me how uncertain is any material reality.


Chapter 29

New Heresies — 29

A thousand and one nightmares, a nightmare is holding the pen, I try to piece the notes together, to arrange them into some kind of a pattern, but it involves ignoring languages, ignoring chronology, ignoring which side is inscribed and which is blank, because sometimes it’s what’s unwritten on the back which is important, or sometimes it’s what’s written behind the back;  another game for me, another ritual for her.  Her surprise at seeing them arranged on my kitchen table, surprise that I haven’t thrown them out, but no, I say, they’re artifacts;  oh no, she says, they were gestures, it’s wrong to try to preserve them, they existed only in being enacted;  but here are their traces, I point out;  but all arranged in your own manner, she says, none of this is me any more, I must repudiate everything;  aren’t we tired of repudiating everything with every gesture, I ask;  what else is left for us, she says disrobing, repudiating my indifference.  Sex has become for us a kind of laughter, a hopeless sort of pastime, an opportunity to miss appointments, be late for work, anger others in so many small ways;  the whole of one disconsolate afternoon played out in that same original cheap pension bedroom where because I couldn’t get you out of my mind, I couldn’t get it up, but that was only the first of the impotent instances, the worst aspect of which was her unexpected solicitude, her manifesting a concern which deflated me instantly, irrevocably, coupled with your constant presence in my mind, like my conscience or a spirit possessing me, always there in a manner in which you never were before your absence, as if you’d traded a physical existence for a ghostly one and haunted me, as if you now needed my eyes to see with and sat behind them staring out with me at a world in which you no longer existed, a world radically different, a parallel universe in which every sight, every touch, every act goaded me into remorse.  Acclimatizing myself to a permanent presence not myself within me and the pre-nauseous, empty-bellied, guilt-tinged shrinkage of my stomach, was harder than accepting my softness despite her efforts because it wasn’t the physical that I lacked from her, it had never been that, it was something else, it was an admitting that I wasn’t free of her, that she too was bound by the way she dealt with me, but getting her to admit that would be getting the Pope to renounce God, it would destroy more than just a single person, even Satan would challenge it, even science would challenge it, all those institutions founded on an imaginary reality and devoted only to keeping themselves in existence, all it would take from them is the declaration that what ever opposed their ideals simply didn’t exist, one could prove it merely by holding one’s breath and insisting.  Which was one way we dealt with each other when there was the patience for playfulness, as if we were children, or perhaps that was the way we wanted to be naturally, and otherwise we were just acting like nonchildren, like our parents, like bureaucrats.

It was a theatrical event, and I collected the reviews and the press clippings, the programs and the ticket stubs, inserting them into the empty spots which opened up in the patterns of the notes on my table, counting them in different ways, including photos or not, was this really two notes or one, until I discovered a hidden numerology:  it occurred to me that quantities exist only in mystical numbers, so that it wasn’t, for instance, significant only that the opening night bouquet was of roses, but also in what particular tally, that there was a threefold subtext to the offering;  the tradition had become a mask and a medium to both transmit and conceal a meaning whose extent, if spatial, and density, if material, caused it to collapse back upon itself, to irrupt into its own gravitational force;  which maybe was the cause of the brief and striking impression Aida made on me when I, applauding with the crowd, received her bow, for there must have been a particular reason for the exact number of kisses thrown, of returns to the stage, of glances into my eyes, you must have felt it too, nothing is innocent of meaning, even meaninglessness itself is only a way of pointing, a kind of sign even if it only signifies itself, because life is too hard, that’s all there is to say about it.  And the proof of that is the extravagant number of foreigners and ghosts who inhabit what is supposed to be an open city, deep inside a totally closed political system, surrounded by fences, walls, guards, towers, guns, despair and all manner of interference in personal life, so many foreigners and ghosts one is surprised to find Germans at all, one is constantly on either side of the question, where are you from, as if Berlin itself were a giant airport, or transfer station to elsewhere, or the place where you end up because you couldn’t fit somewhere else, or because you’d been punished for some human action, some intolerable crime, like desire, or happiness, or hunger.  A place one could never leave, because here all the temptations were put in your way every day, here everything was accessible, the sacred and the profane, every street lead to a new satisfaction, satisfactions previously unthinkable but now necessary, yet every satisfaction leading back to itself, circling around until you lost sight of your very self, lost in the circles without a guide to lead you, a maze where only the left hand led anywhere at all and it could have been down as well as up, who could say, Berlin itself was a dizzying spectacle which could only leave you purged and drained if it left you anything at all;  more than likely only an empty husk would remain where once a person was, and one would slip slowly, imperceptibly into the certainty that everyone in this fog was a ghost, even oneself, that now only a spectral existence was possible, the only thing left to do was to haunt;  and so one returned nightly to the same cafés, the same bars, the same ethereal friends and insubstantial pleasures.


Chapter 30

New Heresies — 30

Trying to follow, in the darkness, the thread of Artaud’s thought, it’s more like a trail of bread crumbs, uncontinuous, uncontiguous, what’s needed is a little light, trying to keep to the trail so as not to get lost in those dangerous woods;  really, an attempt to guide the path as I walk it, hoping he can’t see any further ahead than I, hoping to find the way back instead of the way forth.  Like the blind men and the elephant, passing words back and forth like objects, feeling them, smelling them, trying to imagine what they could possibly be.  Attempting to fit them into one another like pieces of a puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle without the visual clues, we drift between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either, becalmed in an intellectual Sargosso, a little ship of fools, a lost Crusade.  Odd, to feel in the same boat with Artaud, a bull with a man’s head like him, and to speak to him as if I don’t intend to separate the two, as if our being together were some natural kind of occurrence like a friendship or a love affair, to speak to him of totally physical things, as opposed to anything the other captives are willing to discuss, because for captives material things are the great absent things, the unattainable, the unavailable, the hypothetical;  whereas metaphysical things take on a more substantial existence for captives, spiritual ideals and feelings are all they’re left with, they deal with them every day, a surfeit of conversions, just like in prison, it’s no surprise God is found so often in solitary confinement;  somewhere in the endless corridors of the self is a god, just as somewhere in the tortuous windings of the Labyrinth is the Minotaur, just as somewhere for each man there awaits discovery a particular image capable of annihilating the entire Universe, an image like a black sail, or a life finished like a puzzle, or a universe as large as the unseen elephant, encompassing everything between trunk and tail with no more effort than digestion.  Which has become for most of us an effort, finding the value in the gruel, retaining anything at all in our stomachs, any exit will do, it’s not the nausea or the pain so much, it’s not even the smell, it’s the humiliation, a thing which pleases Artaud, it seems to be part of his plan or part of his goal, if anything can be said to be part of his goal, itself a fluid concept, in a state of flux, I wonder does he himself have any clear idea, any clear idea at all, it’s getting harder and harder to discern any ideas at all in this darkness he holds us in, this incubation which so far has given rise only to bile and my homunculus.

Offerings of food are made to me, food the like of which I haven’t even thought about in months:  clean, fresh, hot;  but I realize it’s only a temptation, it’s a trial, he expects me to refuse, and so I please him by refusing;  he’s convinced that the day I accept it is the day he can relax with me, the day he has won me, and I plan to refuse just long enough, to seem as if I’ve finally given in to temptation, just to convince him, to put him at ease, to gain more confidence.  And I know the food will make me ill, finally I’ll give in and accept it, wolf it down, even be thankful for it, but it won’t stay with me, I’ll give it all up again because my stomach will be in no shape to accept it.  Food is nothing but a sign, a breaking of bread together, a communion, it’s important he not see me throw up, it’s important he see that my body can accept his offering, just as I’ve come to accept the stick, accepting it now so easily it’s use declines, another kind of signpost disappears, I used to count the beatings as a way of locating myself in time:  thirty-two beatings, I am now thirty-two beatings old;  fifty-five beatings, I am now fifty-five beatings old, god knows how many beatings, I am now god knows how many beatings old, I almost miss them for that reason, for I’ve lost track now that they’re not so frequent, so predictable, so comforting in their own way, like a bad mattress you’ve grown used to or shoes you’ve worn through, or a bad meal made just to please you, a thing capable only of intimating that at least you are alive;  what I mean by alive—not to shrink from what is most difficult:  to change one’s image of oneself, to revise our images of others by changing our image of ourselves, like the surprise at finding out what a terminal illness will do to a person, Maria, for instance, so like a slave in her last days, so totally powerless in the face of her fears, her pain, her addiction, that brief second when her eyes met mine, that instant when she had to see what I saw when I looked at her, and then the defiance in her voice ever after, as if I saw something shameful or sad which she couldn’t accept from me;  or father’s last days, when he retreated from us, when it was obvious we no longer made a difference, when not much made a difference, and helping him pee, the sudden realization that this was to be his final urination, the color and the smell wouldn’t have it otherwise, but still he made you trim his hair, his beard, after all there were women all over the ward, as if nurses would treat him any differently;  or maybe it was someone else he was trying to impress, someone we couldn’t see, perhaps he had been seeing that other person all along, when we thought he was drifting he was watching someone else, but at the time we thought it was just another manifestation of his baffling vanity.

But why should that occur to me, those other deaths, when there are so many so much closer now, when those ones recede further and further every day, recede from my sphere, my emotions, my homunculus, why should I think of father’s vanity, Maria’s desperation, that room full of caskets in all price ranges where I couldn’t help thinking why do we care, do we need caskets, can’t we leave now, that whole year was full of caskets for us, we wore our suits often that year, every time we thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse the phone would scream at us in the middle of the night, accusing us of finally getting some sleep, how dare we in the face of all these deaths?  And the train rides, back and forth, from one funeral to another, the monotonous rhythm of the tracks leading us to wakes, processions, pyres.  It wasn’t even as if it were just the passing of a generation, because nobody was the same age at all, it was just disease, it was just the cancer of the times, it was just bomb season.  Suddenly it occurs to me to think that Artaud himself might have been responsible for the blast at the Café de l’Opera, where if you sit long enough everyone you know will come by and be your pallbearers, where we lost Mother, where we were late and she was early, where they’ve probably mopped up the blood and rebuilt the café, where we couldn’t ever meet again.  Would that be some form of irony, that there would already have been a connection between us, or is it simply a matter of being connected to everyone in the world through someone else, a matter of that vast killing machine, a love of bombs near opera houses, galleries, cinemas, museums;  or just simple bad luck.


Chapter 31

Signs of Nothing — 31

Signs of Nothing

Calm moments in the tub when she told stories, it was always liquids in one form or another which prompted the stories, of herself and how she reacted to the world at large, reactions which somehow seemed just slightly wrong, as if she’d missed the point of everything that had happened to her, or as if anyone else would have behaved normally, but Aida by default, Aida as a matter of course, to remain herself, had to make a point of not being anyone else, make a point of being baffled by simple things, defeated by daily occurrences but unmoved or unaffected by overwhelming events, like how she continually dismissed the seriousness of your situation, after all, she said, I’ve never met him, how do you expect me to grieve, or when she told the story of her parent’s bitter divorce with a smile because she ended up with most of the wine cellar and they had gone on to die within a year of each other anyway;  or was it all made up, had she ever told the truth about anything, or was that feeling my fault, was I just listening incorrectly, listening for a lie and hearing one wherever it pleased me.  Opening my eyes to her sitting on the edge of the tub, smoking, listening to water trickling, echoing, down the overflow drain;  faintly, overhearing conversation in some other washroom of some other apartment, a bath so hot my feet shriveled, sweat ran, I breathed heavily and brought water up to my chest with alternating hands.  She watched my hands and asked, how do you feel about your body?, oh, I could lose weight, reached out and took the cigarette from her, a form of self-abuse I had avoided since father, since Maria, that’s not what I meant, she said.  Drawing the smoke in, I meant phenomenologically, how aware of your body are you?, the smoke was hot, it was always hot when it burned so close to the filter, I think about myself differently from most people, that’s why I ask.  Acrid;  it curled under my tongue, flowed around my teeth, dried out my mouth, most people aren’t even aware they have bodies, they just live in them.  But myself, I’m always aware of my body no matter what I’m doing:  I’m conscious of every action, every sensation, my throat was irritated, I suppressed an urge to cough, remembering that coughing would only make it worse, I think others have a more innocent physical experience of life than I do.  I don’t think they think about physical experience, they just experience it.  It’s as if they’ve never even imagined a separation between mind and body;  the smoke had filled my lungs, I could inhale no more;  that was what I wanted, not the taste, not the heat, not the irritation but the fullness in my lungs, the completion of the act, like cleaning your plate, finishing a novel, passing out drunk, staying awake to see the dawn, completing a race;  the used-upness of it, the exhaustion, but in my case, I’ve always been aware that I can think and feel separately.  I don’t mean that I can’t enjoy physical things, or that I’m schizophrenic, that somehow I’m not connected to myself, as if I’m watching myself from without, I exhaled through my nostrils, like a dragon, until I felt absolutely empty, watching the smoke rise, the taste still on my tongue:  bitter, unpleasant, somehow claustrophobic, in fact, I feel the exact opposite;  I feel like I’m observing from the inside, that my body is merely a vessel in which I’m riding.  Or hiding.  But what had she ever hidden from anybody, except what anybody wanted to see, suddenly this off-hand confession seems to me a key to her life, a missed opportunity;  if I’d recognized it for what it was then, perhaps there’s be more left of her to me than just the photos and the notes, perhaps I wouldn’t have agonized so much over her bodily indiscretions, I might have anticipated them, I might have been able to help her work that out;  but no, it’s all just wishful thinking, even if it had worked out differently, even if we’d been happier, inevitably everything’s always just wishful thinking, a point of view, a way of dealing with an unsatisfactory quantity of anything.

Always entering into stories backward, it turned out that whole discourse had been a way to introduce the fact of another infidelity, I couldn’t tell if she took pleasure in letting me know or if it was just a matter of fact circumstance, a keeping me up to date, like how the performances were going, or where the party was this weekend, because I certainly wasn’t her husband, it was always a puzzle as to just who was, whether he was hovering around backstage somewhere, or out of town, or even a real person, maybe he was just an excuse to create a distance, maybe all the indiscretions were that.  She had a period of physical trouble, during which time and space were irritants to her, tripping her up, so that she entered by the wrong doors, throwing the other actors off their cues, infuriating the director and confusing the already overworked audience;  she spoke of her body, of touching things, of meals and smells, as if they gave her pleasure only after careful consideration, or not at all, or unexpected pleasures, startling her by merely existing, that a bed should be comfortable, that the sun should please her on her face, that an orgasm could be achieved so easily.  The spontaneous occurrences surprised her, anything that didn’t have to be worked at and yet could still be enjoyed, everything previously had been such a chore, everything had only been as rewarding as it was difficult;  I took this as a sign of progress, I took this to mean that renouncing my humiliation, reclaiming a kind of autonomy had been what she wanted from me all along, but then, I failed to account for that change having taken place only in my mind, I failed to account for her own continuing manipulation of myself for her ends.


Chapter 32

Signs of Nothing — 32

A window has opened up, figuratively, of course, air and light are reaching me once more, perhaps because my homunculus grows within me, perhaps because I have begun to think again of you and father and Maria, and suddenly my sorrow seems very much just another thing to be endured, like air pollution or dull relatives or overtures.  Suddenly I’m able to eat the food Artaud offers me and not worry about keeping it down, suddenly I’m able to argue with him over the wording of the texts, even the size of the notes, suddenly I’m able to listen with real ears to the nightly stories, so much so I feel it may soon be my turn to speak:  narratives of legitimation, story of my life, fairy tales.  Imagining myself Theseus to his Minotaur gives me a renewed strength, a renewed optimism, even if I’ve no Ariadne at the other end of a rope, doing without ropes at all could be healthy in this circumstance, fewer means by which to be bound to anything at all, a great weightlessness wells up within me, a lack of gravity which lifts a veil and now everything is seen more clearly, all material is transparent, the ground that supports me, the envelope that sheathes my body, everything is seen not as a fluttering of impalpable wings but as an inferno of grinding and ingesting, a landscape not just of material beings bound by physical laws, but of moral dangers, spiritual heights, divine rewards for those of us who can see the way through the maze, through each separate circle, each individual step to Artaud at the center.  The task is to preserve my homunculus, to nurture this small magical being which I will exhibit to Artaud as if a weapon, as if a kind of idol against which he will prove powerless, impotent, shameful, defeated.  Is it always another’s defeat that we seek, is there always a negation, a destruction at the end of things, or is it possible in any world to build up something without tearing down another thing?  How difficult it is to impose our expectations on an uncaring universe, how hard we must work to bend it to our own will, even if we never notice how hard we’re working at it, like the weight of the air on our skin or the sound of our blood circulating or our nails pushing out from our hands and toes or our hair escaping from our scalps, an unconscious expenditure of energy into which we could never tap, like believing in our parent’s religion, or in the difference between up and down, or the difference between thinking and language.

If Artaud could see myself through my own eyes, if he could see what he has taught me, but of course he’s failed, he couldn’t even transfer to me what seems an evident truth to him, all his haranguing and beatings have only managed to induce an opening to something beyond his petty concerns, to the fundamental sameness of all material things, their slavery to forces they obey unthinkingly, to the minuteness of particles, themselves only forces bound more intensely to themselves, the connectedness of everything to everything else and the amoral, amaterial, aspiritual nature of the whole ball of wax, the total indifference of existence, the lack of an existential anchor in anything at all.  Which makes his earnest face just a mockery of itself or his imagined enemies, which negates even the seriousness of his crimes, which renders him powerless over me or any of the others, as if he were a rejected lover or a wrong number or a debt paid.  Of course it’s the certainty of his vision which is his power and his anchor, otherwise he’d drift with the currents, unable to steer himself clear of life, unable to free himself from the fetters imposed by the real world, accepted through indoctrination like mother tongues or tastes in food, unable to live outside the body.  A place that has become so familiar, so comforting, so large in recent… days, months… years?  A place without those values, without light and dark, without companionship or loneliness or anything to do, a place much easier to comprehend, less hallucinatory than dark basements, windowless cells, enclosed yards, closets with other bodies, gatherings of fellow hostages of all sorts, a collection of puzzling topologies like waking in the middle of a dream to find only some other illusion, some other experience from some other’s life, like the maps in Belgrade clearly marked in English but the street signs all in Cyrillic, there’s supposed to be some correspondence, but it will always escape you like the horizon, like everything horizontal, which is just the vertical on its side after all.  But what an immense emptying of a bladder it all is, a release of the bowel without even voiding, a sleeping on air, this letting go of all previous concerns;  no longer caring about careers, family, possessions, no longer caring about a body almost expired, almost useless through abuse but considering all things only as things, their importance and meaning solely as imputed by circumstance, by context;  considering context itself merely as a construct, a toy and a tool for my own use:  an ability to get nothing but pleasure from the external, including the physical shell, in effect to have changed places in my relation with Artaud, so that now for him it is a ritual and for me just a game.  If he ever had any power it was because of his possession of my person, but even I can no longer say I am in possession of my person, I have no desire to be able to say anything of the sort, and so I now wield whatever power is invested by my physical presence, or well-being, and even if this remains unspoken between us, it seems he too senses the shift, he senses the difference it has made for my peace of mind, it makes him uneasy and wary of me;  yet he acts as if he believes I have truly crossed sides, defected, transferred allegiances.  Naturally, I tell him, I don’t expect him to give me his weapons or open the doors for me, naturally he will be distrustful of me for some time to come, but eventually my sincerity will become obvious, eventually the need for animosity will disappear.  Because in the end we all fly too close to the sun.


Chapter 33

Signs of Nothing — 33

A barrage of medical tests, blood, urine, x-rays, cardiograms, in fear of radiation poisoning because of those trips to the East where the dubious food, in fear of sexually transmitted diseases because of those bodily indiscretions, like the private room at the Labyrinth where the hermaphrodite, in fear of a general lowering of resistance due to the interminable stress of waiting for news of you.  After so long you’d become the great, hollow absence which trails me like nothing, nothing was beginning, and your lack and your negation were like an enormous stone with no surface or cracks, a hollow of stone where the emptiness left no space for anything, not even laughter or disinterest or forgetting.  The incident of the abortion with Aida not in tears but convulsions, not even any conception of mine but I was the one to accompany her to the clinic because I was the only one who didn’t disappear, I was the only one who answered the phone after not being able to see her, other than at the theater as Helena or Gretchen, for weeks on end, but when it came to the existential matters, then she called me.  An act which caused us both to stare at one another differently, it wasn’t the fact of the pregnancy, it wasn’t the time she’d spent ignoring me, it was that she had fallen back on me because she knew that I’d do her bidding without question, she knew I’d refuse her nothing if she’d allow me anything;  it said something to us both, that the only one she could depend on would be the one who couldn’t refuse, not out of any sense of duty or friendship, how could it have been under the circumstances, but simply because I was used to her humiliating me, I sought it throughout our time together, but here was a case where we were both swallowed in it, it benefited neither of us because she couldn’t affect a superior stance, which was the key to the whole business of love between us;  and now this physical matter had spoiled our emotional link, our reason to be together, the basis of our story.  What was I supposed to do now that she’d proven herself capable of a simple humanity, vulnerable to her own indiscretions, and frightened enough to let even me see that, what would I do with the waiting and the empty spaces of you, the no longer empty spaces of her and those illusory objects of desire which now faded with my anger, my purpose, my center.

Negative, negative, negative, came back the results confusingly;  was negative a felicitous response in this case, was negative ever or always what we were after, leaving the clinic less burdened than when we arrived but feeling less human, stopping for tea near the Charlottenburg Palace like any other tourist, inviting her to Budapest for the week, it’s a conference, I’ll be busy you can be by yourself at the hotel, that’s funny, you’re supposed to go away to get it done, not after, besides I’d feel like you were taking care of me and that’s not us, is it, besides there’s the show, besides it would remind us of Greece to be in a hotel together, and so I ended up alone looking for Karl Marx street which was still on the map but not on the signs, showing up at the state museum and finding it closed which reminded me of the Brecht incident, not paying any attention at the seminars, marveling at the number of refugees sleeping at Kaleti Pu, wondering if she could really go on with an empty stomach, an empty bed, an empty conscience.  The back and forth of it all, it seemed a period of intense mobility but the furthest distance was always the one between my apartment and her bedroom, there was nothing I could do about that, a little comfort so far away, and for some reason Budapest seemed like a place you might be near, it was gloomy enough and cold and other worldly enough to be full of privations despite the pastry, the cold  Turkish coffees, the high rate of exchange.  Which maybe means it was fundamentally a time of waiting for everything, an in-between existence, a non-functional life, as if there were merely potentialities without manifestation swirling around in an æther unbreathable, but a shapeless form pursued me madly;  is mine a boundless patience or a desperation without end, what am I waiting for, or what have I given up waiting for, in what time am I immersed?  The thought of a time outside my experience is intolerable, anti-revelatory, a dissolution of fundamental principles, a tail-eating worm of an idea, an involuted, recursive impossibility.  Which only serves to identify for us that which isn’t, that which we couldn’t allow, a limit without transgression, a lack of an outerness beyond even everything we’ve suffered, together or separately.  Yet it’s still her hair, her skin, her smell, her gestures;  it’s still the physical things we did together which awaken in me pains like needles, like cramps of despair or longing, it’s not any of the things she did without me, or with others, the thought of a physical life apart from me is just meaningless, after all.


Chapter 34

Signs of Nothing — 34

I am a primitive, a child, or a maniac, I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, for any reservation about culture means a terrorist position, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own, I am a saint, a holy man who works miracles;  and when I forget this I am as tired, hungry and desperate as the others, I am as frightened and weak as a sick beast.  I recognize that I myself am Artaud, that he can be no different than me in essence, in substance, in that innocent age before the accident of corruption, of experience, of subjugation before the dark spot in our souls:  he began by murdering his oppressor, his enemy, which although criminal is understandable, here there was a motive;  but he advanced to murdering people who were not his enemies, just those who happened to appear before him, and murdered them because of an insult or a look, for the sake of a string of beads, or simply as a way of speaking, it’s as if he were drunk, or delirious, as if having overshot some sacred limit within himself, he begins to exult in the feeling that there is no longer anything sacred in him, as though he felt an irresistible longing to transgress all law and authority at once, and to delight in the most unbridled and boundless freedom, to delight in the sinking sensation in his heart which is caused by his own apprehension of himself, as if he had looked down from a high tower into the depths below his feet, and had been glad to throw himself downward head first, so as to make an end of it all as soon as possible.  He delights in the terror he causes, loves the disgust he arouses in others, he affects a kind of desperation, but in the end his affected desperation has become too much for him to bear.  Which is why he is so glad to share it with me, which is why he delights in my company, even if we argue, even if I twist his words, he feels that we have achieved the same abandonment of inherited moralities, have both arrived at the same juncture, even if by different paths;  it seems he believes he is responsible for my awakening, my realizations, my degradations, which have led to this summit, this crossroads from which we can survey below us the hopeless castoffs of humanity, the lost and forsaken, all in their cages, afraid of the unlocked doors, afraid of the dazzlement of reason, of night in broad daylight, the darkness that rules at the very heart of what is excessive in light’s radiance:  I open my eyes upon the sun and see nothing, I do not see;  in dazzlement, the recession of objects toward the depths of night is the cause of the suppression of vision itself;  at the moment when I see objects disappear into the secret night of light, I see myself in the moment of my disappearance, I see Artaud traversing a bridge as high as an eight-story house standing out against the sea, across which people are filing, one after another, like Ideas in Plato’s cave, I see the immense gentleness of the turbulence of things, I see your face, I see through Homer’s eyes, through Oedipus’, through yours.

Was he really Artaud as I have named him, or Carlos, or was I both of those, was he nothing but an instrumentality of forces which may have been my own;  but no, I cannot subsume his reality in my own, my ego cannot eat the whole world, he must exist apart from me, as an other, a whole human being despite his actions or mine, or my circumstances, or what we do to each other.  It’s like being led to the gates not by what he says but by what that does to me, not shown the promised land by Moses, or Paradise by Vergil, but by Stalin or Hitler, another approach, an unexpected deliverance, as if to be redeemed one must be absolutely damned, no half-measures will do, the light must be found in the darkness, in the beginning it was good, and now it’s all so complicated, there’s no good without evil, one has to worm it out for oneself, what a cruel trick has been played on us, there’s nothing we can do to ensure salvation because good and evil are lies like freedom and innocence, like speeches and contracts, like truth and morality.  Nothing to do except perhaps to eat the past, tear it apart with our teeth and extract from it the nourishment to keep us functioning at the same time as destroying it utterly, removing it from the universe and canceling its power to taint us, to linger in our consciences and infect our desires.

Or, more simply, to preserve a sense of well-being in body and spirit, under whatever conditions, the holy task, the daily task, undertaken through work and family, leisure and study, sleep and digestion;  or attempting to refute your captors before their very faces, in seeming to agree with them or possibly truly agreeing with them, in attempting to survive the deprivation, the malnourishment, the sense of imminent disaster, the mistrust of all other human beings, even those who also seem to be captives, even those who join the storytelling, even those who don’t, even those who exist merely in your imagination with soft voices and welcoming gifts of food and soft beds.  But no, stale crusts and dirty water, gritty clothes and blankets threadbare and ripe, torn shirts, wounds which refuse to heal, sore teeth, cold rough cement, insects, stopped up toilets, stolen pencil stubs, calendars of forgotten years, infections, fading memories, fading hopes, marks around wrists and necks not necessarily from ropes or captors, a blind man’s knowledge of a cell, sleeping upright to relieve congested lungs.  How could anything have ever mattered to me, to anyone, how to explain television and money and vacations, new cars and movies, adultery, greed, pride, novels, careers, regulations, schedules, anyone’s opinions about anything.  How to explain pleasures and accomplishments, possessions and sacrifices, how to account for all this;  that must be the job of God, to pass judgment, for it’s beyond me and I reject Artaud’s, reject anyone else’s;  perhaps I reject God’s as well, or perhaps he rejects me, perhaps that’s what this circumstance is, this condition, this purgatory;  perhaps not.


Chapter 35

Signs of Nothing — 35

There was either some kind of a sense of joy in it, or a desperation like jumping free of a runaway train, or a blind obedience as if alternatives were nonexistent, or a hopelessness.  She was that which revealed a terrible reality to me, she showed me myself lost in a world of corridors, hallways without end, journeys without destinations, like Christmas Future without the warnings, without it being only a dream, only my conscience;  yet in the end it was her I feared for, not myself, perhaps typically, since it seemed she led others only in order to follow before them, that she was immobile without a dog to be walked, that none of the streets existed for her feet alone, or her feet at all, that I made up the surface beneath us as we traversed it, solely to keep us both from falling into a dark abyss.  As if having stopped in an unknown town and conversing in a foreign tongue with strangers, an incident initially unremarkable which somehow over time has retained or gained some ambiguous significance without referent;  as if, in the carnal act, we taint the limit of our being even while, in the process tainting ourselves, we cross it, as if she had been right all along and the only remedy was to relax and enjoy the scenery.  There had been more pleasure in it at the beginning, when she had overwhelmed me, when it was all a great surprise, even if there was also the surprise of your disaster;  perhaps that was what made it all so questionable, perhaps at another time it would have been clothed in an innocence thick enough to mask its ignominy, but given the pain, how could the pleasure retain any purity, and so the investigation of myself, my motives, my desires in regard to Aida were just a mask for the fact of tragedy, the indifference of evil, the impossibility of what life had become.  No other person had done that to me, no other had brought forth my expressions of self-loathing, only she had stumbled upon me in that precise moment;  so perhaps it was just a case of my substituting her affections for your presence, my trying to induce in her a regard for me to take the place of yours, to fill that empty space.  But perhaps it was her hair, perhaps it was her eyes, perhaps it was herself which released what had always been latent, which set free a desire to be bound, a desire once contained by a conventional life but then pried loose by an uncommon woman.

Or it might have been the unbearable fact of life going on anyway, despite anything, giving rise to a horror at the indifference of others to the cataclysms of my life, that events so fundamentally challenging to my existence should be matters of little or no concern, even to my friends, to those who knew us both, who insisted on still eating, still going to the theater, still having a life undisturbed, as if it had all been some nightmare or a minor illness, or as if we were all naked and yet no one noticed, or if they did notice, just shrugged and took off their clothes too.  Not only that, but ignoring even the health warnings, even the radioactive rain, even the increasing gangs of skinheads in Kreuzberg, the defections from the East, as if it were necessary to slap someone in the face to see whether they were still alive at all.  Like listening to your records in your empty apartment, the Coltrane, the Bird, the Satie, drinking your wine for you by myself because the others said they couldn’t come, it would be frightening, eerie, without you there and the pictures of Maria still on the wall, but in the end they did show up, one by one, surprisingly Aida first of all and surprisingly she seemed for once to be sympathetic to my concern, and then Luc, I couldn’t let you sit here by yourself, but since Aida’s here I’ll just work on the puzzle, your puzzle he sat down to at the breakfast table and came back to us hours later, saying it’s a Bracque, I think, or a photo of an elephant, and by that time there was a roomful of us, not having a conversation but managing to reply to each other’s thoughts in some pataphysical way, like shouting at each other over a bad phone line, or trying to talk to your parents, or god knows what.  And watching the tanks roll by on Grolmanstrasse when the rumbling became so loud it drowned out even Thelonious, but Aida refused to come to the window with us, she hated the tanks, they’re heading for the Wall, someone said, there’s no where else to go, Aida replied, and they scare the children;  but there’s no children out now, they’re all asleep, its so late, said Sylvie, anyway, said Aida, they tear up the pavement, it’s useless afterward, you have to drive on some other street until it’s repaired, but you never drive, you always get someone else to do that, to which there was no response at all, the tanks were right under the window by that time and any other sound was masked, the whole building shook, an endless train of massive metal guns, sometimes a soldier with his head out looking around, bobbing up and down like doll’s head, always the spotlights piercing your eyes, lancing into the darkness, waving like antennae.  Now it’ll be hell to move the furniture, how will we bring the truck onto the street, said Luc, so we postponed closing the apartment, something I never wanted to do anyway, how would I fit your life into mine, where would I put your things?  But that was the purpose of being there, to size up the job, see what was there and what kind of a burden it would be, but somehow that was all that was said that night, and I slipped into unconsciousness on the sofa before anyone left, we all just drifted off in our various places, and in the morning Aida made the coffee, this is how we used to do it in the countryside when I was interested in such things, she said, throwing grounds into a pot of boiling water, someone went out for rolls.


Chapter 36

Signs of Nothing — 36

I have been unable to clean beneath my fingernails for an interminable time;  dirt gets under my skin, in my wounds, and retards the healing, sometimes causes infections, but the progress or decline of my physical self becomes a kind of comfort, one of the few ways in which to judge that time is still passing, that slowly things change, moments accrue behind us with or without our participation.  Because if I had ever felt that time had come to rest, that any of those moments would have persisted beyond a natural span, that my circumstance had attained a kind of permanence, surely I would have lost my connection to myself;  surely I would have been unable to nurture my homunculus, or would have exposed him to others inadvertently, unthinkingly, in some kind of desperation, which would have been his end.  Thankfully I’m coming to realize the fictitious nature of infinity, the prevarication of all abstract claims, systems, concepts, like Santa Claus or representative democracy or structuralism.  It’s a virtual sea we live in, an atmosphere crowded with ideas, with invisible strings running from every object and it’s associated ideas to every other way of seeing or meaning, and back again to every desire and person, like Oliviera in the madhouse, a Rube Goldberg world, an existence without holes or cracks or interstices, no way to break out of it, no entrance into the discourse without just lodging yourself into the midst without introduction or preamble, slap and wail to announce your presence, there’s no alternative, not even absence or silence, despite centuries of theology, of philosophy, despite logic and emotion, despite whatever I’ve previously said or thought.  Now it seems only the very simplest things matter, things free from the burden of speaking or meaning, things about which only idiots would have too much to say, rather than grasping them immediately, like those endless Russian novels or German philosophers, things as small as buttons or scraps of paper, or the taste of ripe oranges, or the softness of Maria’s skin, or the freedom from work, the sun on one’s face, a bordeaux, a tune by Bird, the nonsense of a Miro, sleeping without dreams.

That whole business of helping Artaud write his propaganda, what the hell was that, what could that have accomplished for anyone, except maybe to baffle the recipients, the newspapers and government officials who opened envelopes full of impossibly convoluted metaphysical propositions, when they should have expected mere proto-Marxist rants or more demands or threats on our lives.  I suppose it was a kind of situationist response, surely they would devour the missives with an almost religious glee, full of recursive sentences and polymorphous references, a syntax only technically correct but the product of a diseased mind, an infected soul, a sort of Rasputin;  which of course had been the only way to talk to the one I refer to as Artaud, what else would have been practical in the face of an essentialist, a mystic, a fellow sufferer.  A space of my life which was a theater of cruelty, scriptless, directionless, bound to an ideal of total revolution, an idea which revealed an almost pathetic belief in alternatives, in there being another way, another, less trodden path, which might be accessible through drastic action or extreme measures, but the only other way is an abyss, or an emptiness without room to enter, a milieu which engulfs everything but remains inaccessible by being siteless, invisible, heedless of time, a capricious trickster coyote Loki.

It helps me to get from here to there, to sleep, to eat, to defecate, to listen to the story of the Labyrinth, this must be our thousand and first night, it helps me to see thing in focus once more, to take some physical pleasure in not feeling immediate pain;  it helps me to nurture my homunculus, this process of undermining my own thinking on every subject, a conscious negation of everything that logic leads me to, or everything experience teaches me, to stand aside and ask, but is this so, is this so, is this not so, even the results of such thinking must be challenged, so that every moment of consciousness is at once a searing pain and a reason to continue, to break through to moments of peace and serenity;  especially helpful during the beatings, rarer now than ever, but still occurring, or moments of another captive’s beating, of hearing the sufferings of another, or of hearing the sharp little explosions of an execution, or during the moments of other kinds of torture:  the day I was forced to eat, an inhuman conception, inducing a kind of illness I’d never expected, stuffed like a goose and left to myself afterward in the vomit, unconscious.  The whole experience does nothing but underscore the pointlessness of individual suffering against the claims of the state, or the revolution, it’s just a way to increase the pain in the world, to hold any person symbolically responsible for the generalized condition of anyone, making scapegoats of random sufferers without realizing that whatever power you feel you’re resisting is just as willing as you to give up scapegoats, the state won’t grind to a halt for any individual, it doesn’t matter who.  But perhaps that’s not the point in this case, or perhaps our captors aren’t capable of reasoning these things out, or perhaps their reality precludes any conclusion I can come to.  Some of them, even, after all this time, seem to have grown accustomed to inducing pain, seem to have come to derive some kind of satisfaction from seeing the suffering of others.  Whoever has once experienced this power, this unlimited mastery over the body, the blood and the spirit of another, this complete freedom to degrade in the most humiliating manner, will lose control of themselves, of their own spirit;  the most abnormal phenomena become accessible, pleasurable, desirable;  and any society which can look upon such a phenomenon with indifference is already contaminated in its foundations.  But is this so?


Chapter 37

The Secret Manifesto — 37

The Secret Manifesto

Another episode written down for someone’s benefit, but never mailed because of the unbearable circumstance of your captivity or perhaps from a confusion over whom to address it too, or from just having too many doubts about the gaps in the narrative, or further, from not in fact writing anything down at all just as so much of the rest was totally imaginary, like the episodes of pleasure, the episodes of mortification, like the reading of novels:

Objects seem to be solidifying around me, or appearing gradually before me, or perhaps I’m slowly waking up to them, like suddenly realizing the fact of my nudity in the shower, what should I do now, just wash?  Another unexplained occurrence, life is just one damned thing after another, what with everyone else’s activities impinging on your plans, like Chernobyl turning the milk and infesting the tomatoes, like Aida in everything she did, like you.  Berlin’s a cold town, look at people out jogging by the Wall while their cousins or mothers or girlfriends are swearing allegiance to the DDR only meters away, look at the cafés and hotels and clubs all full of a normal life while the socialist realists are chipping away at humanity, look at the sex for sale in so many clubs, in so many stores and brothels, on so many street corners, look at the opera, the symphony, the street cleaners, the tourists, the squatters, the deserters and defectors, look at all my friends slowly coming to life again in your apartment, I’d better telephone the office, says Sylvie, oh to hell with work says Luc, let’s go have a real breakfast, he’s always been a child, says Aida, he doesn’t care about anything.  What about you, Luc responds, you’re pretty selfish, yes, she agrees, but it’s because I believe only in the self, I’ve thought this out, it’s not just a petty desire, I’ve devoted my life to this idea;  I thought you’d devoted your life to the theater, oh that’s just my mind, my talent, my body’s another story.  Ah, if your body could only speak, says Sylvie, what a tale it would tell.  But the body and the soul are one, I add, you can’t strike one without hitting the other, maybe we could build a wall, like Berlin, says Luc, one side has all the fun and the color, while the other has the hangover.  It’s our Greek heritage, we can’t get away from that kind of dualism even if it does us no good at all, I say;  look at Socrates heaping scorn on bodily pleasure while buggering teenage boys, as if it were a metaphysical exercise instead of a perversion, says Sylvie;  and look where it’s gotten him, he’s dead but still revered, still studied and taken seriously, says Aida, all the great thinkers and artists were scum, they all indulged their bodies.  No, I say, they were just humans who were given a license, we’d all do that, we’ve all already done that, haven’t we?  There’s that hangover again, says Luc.

It’s just an endless series of hangovers, purging and binging, worrying first about oneself then about someone else, then oneself again, but there’s really no evil in any of it, it’s a fairly straightforward way of living, like animals or insects, free of an overbearing moral sensibility, if only we could all live like that, then god truly would be dead and would we be better or worse off?  But also no better than objects, things, we would loose all sense of being distinct from the material of existence, we’d be just another mass in the gravitational field, as if most of us aren’t anyway;  but why then does it matter to us, or some of us at any rate, why do we matter to each other, like mothers and their children, or sports teams or lovers, or newspaper reports of inconsequential things in foreign countries.  Why that empty feeling when packing up your things, why the tightness in the belly at making arrangements as if you had died, was it the fear that you might actually have died, and if so, why that fear, why was I so convinced that all that mattered were the others in my life, that none of the things counted as I gingerly wrapped your keepsakes, your dishes, your books and videos, your letters and papers.  Of course I could never explain any of my fears no matter what my state of mind, anything I was afraid of always had a strange fascination for me, a repellent attraction, like Aida, whom I longed for, whom I loved precisely because she caused me so much trouble, allowed me so little freedom, so little attachment to herself.  But what was more difficult was closing the door on your apartment the day we finally removed everything and handed back the keys, it was like closing the door on you yourself, as if I didn’t expect you back any moment, as if there were an unspoken agreement to abandon hope in your case;  I couldn’t help feeling there wasn’t ever an excuse to take those kind of measures, that once we’d started there’d be no end, none of us would be safe from that treatment, we’d all come home from work to find our apartments rented and arrangements made to liquidate our assets, that we’d been declared hopeless or dead without any proof or hesitation on the part of someone who just couldn’t be bothered to wait, I truly expected to have to apologize to you the next day or the next week, so sorry, it’s just that we didn’t realize you’d have any further use, we didn’t think you’d be back… so soon.  Like getting our hands stuck in the cookie jar or having to leave without our pants.


Chapter 38

The Secret Manifesto — 38

The satisfied ones are the dead ones, lotus eaters, a metaphor in opposition to all those of questing and searching;  so many more tropes of emptiness than of fulfillment, as if we should naturally accept and be satisfied with less than enough, as if being unsatisfied were ultimately more satisfactory, which if so must make captives the most content of people.  But at this stage it’s necessary to ask oneself, would there be a point in escaping captivity, would freedom itself bear any meaning for me, for any of the others;  would it even bear any meaning for our captors to lose us or give us up, or die in some attempt to free us or capture them?  That would amount to the extent of the revolution, that the captors become captives, wouldn’t it, that must be the whole point of a hostage taking, to manifest the unseen shackles around us all, to denude the human condition, a gesture of honesty, a cleansing explosion of dazzling light, as if the spirit of profound anarchy at the root of all poetry had unleashed itself in a violent and concentrated action, a kind of lyricism summoning up supernatural images, a bloodstream of images, a bleeding spurt of images in the poet’s head and in the spectator’s as well.  There, that’s thinking with my captors, that’s the kind of discourse they encourage in me, that’s the kind of language they seek for their pamphlets, notes, press releases, who am I to deny them, who am I to say they are wrong, or right, is this kind of narrative any different from the one we listen to in the darkness, the one we live by every day, the one we lived before we became what we are?  But before the word is the deed, no matter how slender the thread, before it’s unwound to its full extent, even if it’s never laid out straight;  a problem for us on the inside, the deed is restricted to the most negligible acts like smiling or remaining silent or telling another story.  Long ago they gave up truly enforcing silence upon us, so now we have our furtive conversations like all prisoners, but softly, in whispers, since official permission to speak has never been forthcoming, it’s been merely tolerated if not too loud, we mutter to one another and ourselves like monks.

What would I have to do to integrate myself back into a previous existence, could it be possible after all this, would it be even desirable, or should I remain alone with my homunculus;  it grows, it grows, I feel a tiny germ has become a small mandrake, do others who’ve intentionally rejected the outside consider it as I do, do they consult their homunculi, or is there some other activity monopolizing their consciousness, so that it happens by itself without their intervention, by their very neglect?  Who will know, how can that be asked or answered?  My homunculus will tell me;  yes, that’s the reason for its existence, that’s the justification for the care I take to insure its purity, its freedom from the others, from my captors;  my homunculus at the moment of its parturition, will reveal to me any meaning I may impute, at will, uninfluenced by events or ideals, any reason for anything at all.  I have not seen my own face in this life, this retreat, Artaud has not resorted to the torture of mirrors, but carefully kept them from us, so that we all try to imagine our faces by what we see in each other, we all try to imagine ourselves in the way we tell of the Minotaur, but before Artaud can inflict upon us a reflection of ourselves from outside of ourselves, I will have nurtured my homunculus, I will see with my own eyes, through my own actions, in my own manner, whatever I have become through both my own will and this retreat, I will have defeated his purpose with my own;  doubtless this at least must have some meaning.  Unlike the manner in which I used to judge myself by Maria’s face, or yours, there was a time of unquestioned acceptance of another’s face, her smile or her frown, the movement of her brows in approval or disapproval or sarcasm because of plans or mistakes or surprise presents, it used to seem so long ago and far away, yet now she seems closer than ever, as close as my homunculus, that must be what is meant when someone says, she’s a part of me even if she’s gone, I feel as though somehow she’s reclaimed me, as if she’s found me again, but why this should be so is mysterious to me, since no one but our captors know where to find us;  I feel her strength in me, not my own, I’ve none left, I sense her hand behind the events, the plans, the daily survival.  The capricious back and forth, up and down of hope, rage, despair, peace, have left me empty of everything but her, and my homunculus, and the wounding presence of my own wandering consciousness.  My heart still beats, but only of its own volition, and although I’m not yet dead, although I’m not tired, it’s pointless to continue digging this grave, so now undress me and then put me in it.  I’ve earned the right to that comfort, if anyone can be said to have earned anything at all, if the whole idea’s not just a spoiled conceit, to repose in that smallest of safe houses, without windows or doors or telephones, without an address, without visitors, when’s the last time anyone visited a grave except as a tourist, except on an anniversary or for a formal reason, there’s a habit which needs cultivating, an awareness of the dead behind us, after all, there’s so many more of them than us, they have so much more experience of the world than we, they’ve been around so much longer, you can see them looking out through anyone’s face, you can hear them speak in the defeated voices of any disappointed person, any suffering animal, any hungry child, as if no matter what question was put to them the answer would always be, there are more dead than living, there are more dead than living, there are more dead than living.


Chapter 39

The Secret Manifesto — 39

A very late evening of wandering the streets, that’s what happened to Aida and I, that’s how we proceeded after that, after the unspoken revelations, the disappointment of having to deal with one another on another level, without the original masks, like losing ourselves in some Expressionist film, playing hopscotch across town, an unexpected dead end turn in the shadows, in the fog, but it gave rise to different games, she would run ahead and wait for me at another street corner, pretend to solicit, once I had to rescue her from an unsuspecting customer, once she wouldn’t let me, where’s the line between real and false, she asked, and in that spirit I found another woman on yet another streetcorner, there seemed little else to do, but afterward I mysteriously awoke in the East and had to run to make the midnight crossing curfew, as if the horses would turn back to mice, a real cold war thrill, back to the Labyrinth, wind back the thread, more dead ends and walls everywhere;  sometimes they’re suspicious if your papers are in order, there’s nothing they won’t find fault with, and the slow crawl of them doing you the favour of their jobs, it can take up to an hour for a simple border crossing, as if they’re waiting for someone to run up with orders to shoot you or search you.  But finally the U-Bahn, finally the Ku-Dam, finally there she was dancing with the others, not a mention of anything previous, not the merest turning away of the eyes or staring too long into them, a deliberate attempt to regain a lost sense of herself, of me, of the original reason for our intimacy, the whole night just an attempt to remind me of the arbitrary nature of life, to remind me not to assume any rights, despite months of giving myself up, despite answering any summons, despite myself in the face of her weakness.  In some ways the beast at the center was myself, or you, but she was a capricious Ariadne, an Ariadne more like the Fates, like Helena or Gretchen, like Medea, like no one at all, in fact she was exactly like anyone I chose, just as for her the point was not to choose at all, anyone would do, anyone at all as long as it was no one, as long as the only risk was physical.  It wasn’t that I was such an unacceptable candidate, it was that she was no judge, she refused to pass sentence on anyone, it wasn’t part of her lifestyle, even if it were part of everyone else’s, I don’t care for anyone else, she’d say, and that incident at the clinic was the one episode of her being like anyone else I ever met, being like me or you, being afraid.  Which was why I pursued her madly anyway, because she was an other, an unknown, a frightening reality which I couldn’t possibly understand, which would never submit to being reduced to anything within my existence or under my control or within my power, even the natural, simple expectations of two people in the same bed.

It was only natural for her to refuse to sympathize with me over you, to walk away from any of the conversations or news reports or telephone calls which had anything to do you.  I won’t mother you, I’m not a mother, I’m not even a sister, she’d declare and leave me holding the telephone or a newspaper or a letter.  It’s not cold bloodedness, you’ve got others to turn to, I just don’t fulfill those functions.  Why did I persist in thinking there was anything wrong in this, in her being independent, in her making herself in her own image, free of the winding, widening traps which surrounded all the rest of us?  As if I were an anti-Werther, having her body but not her heart, as if we were all trying to contain her within her physical self, as if in the carnal act, we taint the limit of our being even while, in the process of tainting ourselves, we cross it.  Which of course was nothing but a monotonous bourgeois droning on my part, a stuffy kind of morality in the face of something more essential, more divine, more liberated, but in cases like this it always takes forever to puzzle out what really happens behind the events and the cursing.  So she refused to come to my apartment after that, because it was stuffed with objects you had touched, you had owned, they still had your presence about them, she said, they had taken over my life and enslaved me, and whenever she came I did nothing but talk about you, that clinched it;  ever after I’d have to go looking for her, I ended up at the theater most often, waiting in the green room, watching the other actors perform for each other those extravagant post-performance rituals of yelling and handstands and naked soliloquies, wearing pieces of one another’s costumes, Mephistopheles’ cape with the Emperor’s crown, Wagner with the witch’s shawl, Menelaus as the black dog, mixing Goethe with Brecht with Durenmatt with obscene gestures and flashes of genitals;  and afterward either following her to one of the parties where all that continued until dawn or having a quiet supper together on her block, watching Cocteau films in her apartment or having sex in the Tiergarten, behind the Kaiser Wilhelm, by the Wall in sight of a guard tower in the East;  whatever she felt would surprise herself, whatever would induce in her a sense of novelty or corruption or denial, a bumping up against the normalcy of life, a pushing of the limit, a gesture toward the limitless, it’s an effort I make, she said, in order to improve myself, to keep from resting, to push death away.


Chapter 40

The Secret Manifesto — 40

Frightening changes are taking place beneath our noses, without our seeing them or understanding them or worrying about them, like individual raindrops lost in the storm, like termites in the walls, like someone else’s unspoken opinions of us, like the progress of an undetected cancer before the pain, that’s usually what it means for the captives, a sudden explosion of unsuspected activity like moving locations or new faces among the captors or a new schedule of feeding or a surprise gift of fresh air and exercise in an enclosed yard under a moonless and clouded sky, a gift that brings its own pains with the discovery that legs and backs don’t work as well as they used to, that any space larger than a closet can be so frightening, that there’s just as much darkness for others as for us.  Which possibly explains Artaud’s interest in our Labyrinthine stories, our bedtime murmurings, our parables of captives and beasts, selves and others, corridors and corridas, sacrifices and threads, an infinite number of myths which dealt with our existence, changed every day, repeating everything every day, which bore no direct relation to our past personal lives or current circumstance except metaphorically, just as if we were telling the stories of our lives and their twists and turns and unexpected heartbreaks and panics and triumphs, just as if we were making small talk at parties, just as if we were explaining something to other travelers on a train, just as if we were reading novels or dreaming.  But his darkness was of a different kind, ours was indifferent while his was intolerable, his was threatening, he was terrified of the encroachment of an infinite nothing, that absolute which makes everything relative, everything subjective, everything meaningless, as he replied to the suggestion of everything equal.  His awareness itself was what frightened him, his intelligence was his problem, it revealed to him that he was after all just a person like the rest of us, that nothing he could believe would redeem him from what the universe was or might be in his nightmares, that doubt existed despite his absolute certainty, there wasn’t a thing he could do to banish it, overcome it, explain it, that he was subject to it along with us, along with his enemies and friends, along with material objects and abstract concepts, along with his clothes, his memories, even his fears;  it was those fears which proved his humanity and ours, which caused him to be one of us, which  shored up his stubborn insistence on absolute values, it was those fears which caused themselves.  He was hardened by a reality which by its unequivocal existence was unacceptable to him, but which couldn’t be made acceptable by admitting its mutability, its illusory qualities, its aleatory nature, as if he felt all he had to do was rearrange some solid objects in a limited space to reveal how everyone could be happy in the same room.  How could he fail to see just how close to a game this all was, or rather a ritual, not exactly the same thing, a given number of objects is shifted within a given space, at times submerged by a quantity of new objects, at times worn out and not replaced, and the rule is to shuffle them each time, try to assemble them, try to keep everyone else from arguing about their placement;  but he was one of those constant arguers, one of those pointlessly contrary and angry and solemn complainers whose only joy was in spreading misery, in tearing down, in sharing his pain, it was like carrying a Sartre or a Dostoyevsky around inside you and the only way to let it out was through your mouth, through your eyes, through the screams of an other, of many others, of all whom fell under your judgment.

And it was at its worst in the beginning, at the start of the ordeal, when he saw us only as the symbols of his own oppression, his own pain, before he began to see us as poor weak humans whom chance had placed into his care, such as it was, before he discovered us telling fairy tales to each other, when he suddenly became more fatherly, more protective, still harsh and brutal and demanding, but demanding like a master rather than a jailer, as if we were disciples, which is what I had played upon, his self-satisfaction of my questioning him, arguing with him, my revising his vision of his work, my suggesting alternatives to his rhetoric;  but now, inexplicably to us, the tension returns, its obvious something’s afoot, we’re all afraid we’ll find out at the worst possible moment, we’re all afraid it will result in more pain for us, more deaths among us;  though of course there are one or two who are convinced, without foundation, that our release is imminent, that any change can only be good news for us, it’s been too long without any developments for any other possibility;  but they must believe that, it’s their way of enduring, of remaining themselves;  they of course are the ones who’ve been here shortest, the newest among us;  all the rest, all those of a certain tenure, have given up any thought of release, have merely accepted a change in what life is, are merely trying to adjust to what our lives have become.  It’s challenge enough, to find oneself in a new landscape, with different forces at play, one can’t even count on gravity here, or one’s worst expectations, which are constantly being refuted, because within us there are such fearsome expectations that even a deliberately cruel universe could never meet them, let alone some other humans.  It’s a sudden realization that all the surreal aspects of existence are mere shades of reality, that Miro and Bosch were just playing with us after all, that even de Sade was an amateur when it came to what was immediately graspable, that humans can endure far more than they can describe or imagine;  go and see for yourself if you do not believe me, go and prove me wrong by refusing to endure, but remember that even suicide must be endured, that even the afterlife or the absence of the afterlife must be endured, there’s no escape, we’re all like rocks on the beach, slowly eroding into the sand without effort or concern on our part, without even despair;  for that’s our one great comfort, that’s the key which comes along with the endurance:  conscious or not, willing or not, being or nothingness, it’s all the same, it’s all equal, it’s the single position which infuriates Artaud, and therefore the one I nurture in my homunculus.


Chapter 41

The Secret Manifesto — 41

It was hard to see in Aida any reason for being with her, except to say that the only reason for anything is to try on a little happiness, see if it fits, especially after the desire began to wear thin, which is always a puzzle, just where does it go, perhaps if she had been a more positive influence it would have grown and developed, but an interest like that, an interest in debasement, can only go so low, and then it’s like turning the final page, there’s only the memory of something with an oneiric quality, a stepping out of reality, of yourself, of local conditions.  At the same time that if fills me with a kind of lonely resignation, a sadness at the waste of time, the waste of each other, the waste of our values, I can’t help but be happy for having endured her affections, such as they were, I can’t help feeling that in the long term it signifies nothing, that nothing at all matters, really;  a feeling I was forced to pick up due to your case, I had to feel any immediate apprehension was merely a temporal, ephemeral phenomenon which rejected any burden of significance, any spiritual value or permanence;  that would have meant an unimaginable suffering on your part, and the world was much too full of suffering, of bad news, of a painful immediacy.  It was as if, given the mass of hardship and sadness and deprivation, those of us who could in any way derive a sense of well being, of satisfaction out of life, were obligated to partake of it to the fullest possible extent, that the privileged class of the full-bellied were responsible for the world’s happiness, and if we couldn’t or wouldn’t wring the most out of all our experiences, even our pains and troubles, then we were shirking our moral duty, we were whining, we were getting a free ride on the backs of others, a thing we’ve always been accused of anyway, a thing mentioned in ransom notes and manifestos, a thing it was impossible for us to properly address.

There were entire lists of things we would never agree on, couldn’t even argue about, lists posted to fridge doors, apartment doors, dressing room doors, as a kind of shorthand between us which sometimes puzzled others, random groupings of things which were totally arbitrary, like the order of the alphabet, things whose only connection was our disparity:  Wittgenstein, Peristroika, waterbeds, transcendence, Portuguese restaurants, kidnappings.  It was all part of the growing fascination with having things actually written down, it had started with the notes, now it was the lists, but we argued even over what it meant to write things down and why we were doing it, we acknowledged our graphomania as a kind of anchor, a way to ground ourselves not to each other but to our own feelings, to what we had thought of at a certain moment, to a sense of self;  as if little by little, with each new list or note we could incrementally build up a self for our selves, and at the same time demonstrate that to each other.  As if a self could be separate from a person, and we could hold them up to view together, apart from our physical beings, these splendid autonomous systems, and examine them in company instead of alone inside our heads.  That was the obvious point at which we abandoned sex with each other, or at least the expectation that sex between us could be something more than a joint auto-eroticism, that was the point beyond which it became a seldom practiced act for us, its character relegated to a utilitarian thing, like showering or dressing, because it was occasionally necessary.  It became also a period of intense sexual freedom between us, for we no longer worried about each other’s feelings, and would request of each other things which we never would have previously dared, or even wanted:  caresses, closeness, tenderness;  things we were safe in displaying now that it was obvious they could only ever be false between us;  nevertheless they were things we had been unable to derive from others, from ourselves even, from life.  It seemed so incongruous that it should have happened between us at the end of the Cold War, that precisely then the Wall fell, or crumbled rather, that the great spillover and reunification began, that the world changed overnight without our participation or approval, that the television carried such dramatic images of people tearing down the concrete with their hands, with simple tools, dancing amidst its ruins, reveling drunkenly in their freedom to visit friends and relatives on either side, just when we discovered that the kind of intimacy we had built between us was just what kept us apart, that our newfound closeness was the very abyss we had fallen into, a darkness from which no rescue was possible, there would be no voice from on high to redeem us at the end of act one, no mothers to reclaim us or comfort us at the end of act two, as she said, as she performed still every night, to smaller and smaller audiences, because the show was now out in the streets, not in any theater.  And on top of this I of course thought of you, still captive somewhere if not dead already, wondering if you knew of any of this or of it could possibly matter to you, or whether you, too, had discovered the insignificance of things, the vanity in events, the empty wind blowing from our lives.  How could we have fallen so far, all of us, all of us at once, without any warning or premonition, as if the world itself were ending on a whim, without any reason or purpose or any guide at all before us, or behind us, or within us, without you?


Chapter 42

The Secret Manifesto — 42

Of the myriad forms of despair, I’ve chosen indifference, since I’ve been isolated so long from the intricate webs of things necessary for caring, for maintaining an interest beyond myself, for cultivating a sense of humanity within, it’s a choice which suits me far better than adopting an elevated sense of the worth of our captors, or any of the other captives, or the insignificant things which have taken on an immense importance in their eyes:  ordering their pathetic possessions (bits of string, scraps of paper, torn clothes, their own teeth), calculating how long it’s been, deducing where we are, what month it is, whether it’s night or day, planning for freedom as if there were a hope despite the still occasional executions, despite the several deaths from abuse and ill health, from despair, from simply coming to the end of the story, that’s when you meet the Minotaur and we can’t all be Theseus, some of us must be sacrifices.  But I begin to understand my complicity in their propaganda, what I was searching for in my mistaken attempt to thwart them from within:  a reason to understand, to believe from their point of view that my position, my suffering, was necessary, even though I thought I was engaged in sabotage, squirreling my way into their defenses in order to destroy them, it had no effect in the end, my influence on their confused ideology was marginal, I couldn’t have confused them more or clarified anything either, a quixotic attempt at taking power, at being in control of myself or them or anything at all, which only gained me the now understandable enmity of the others;  still, it’s a tactic like everything else any of us has attempted, whether we undergo or overcome, it’s just a reaction like water flowing to the sea, like shivering, like laughing.

What to do with this self-incriminating evidence?  Did I ever really believe any of this, do I now repudiate it?:

Our culture is rapidly becoming a global system;  this fact is inescapable and irreversible.  The new, systematized mass no longer operates on human principles or by human design, but it does operate on human beings.  As a consequence, human concerns are subordinated to systemic concerns and even the human instrumentalities of the system are unmoved by individuals and their needs.  The great strength of the mass is its very silence, its disinterest in the pronouncements and functioning of the system;  thus no single human agent dares exercise any power except that of the system for which they are merely the instrumentality.

In order to effect any change one must speak to the system and not to individuals, be they bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen, educators.  All these people are merely agents of power, not wielders thereof, who have given over their individuality for their comfort and their lives for their careers.  However, we can not afford to have our concerns swallowed up into the silence of the mass, imploded into nothingness.  Therefore, we must directly and insistently manifest our concerns to the system at large in a way which engages the system in a dialogue wherein it recognizes these concerns as, ultimately, its own, and recognizes us not as an attack on itself but a fundamental part of itself.  We must be seen to be acting in a manner which is the only one allowed to us, speaking within a vocabulary we have all been taught.  Contrary to our naive predecessors, we do not attempt to “strike at the heart of the state” for we are the state.  We are the conscience of the state, attempting to strike outwards from the heart.

Since no one wields power, since no one is irreplaceable to the system, political assassination is no longer meaningful and anyone may be an effective target.  Any person will do, since all individuals are equal, and equally valueless, to the system.  It is not who dies or when, but how and why.  It is only the how and why that makes the deaths meaningful.  Accordingly, the time and place of our manifestations, our explosions, shall be random and arbitrary.  We invite our future victims to confront and challenge the meaninglessness of their own lives by continuing to do as they always have done, and assure them that should they form the medium of our message, they will have found the sole available method of imputing meaning to their existence.

Which was a strange attempt at convincing them not to kill us, that we weren’t worth the effort, in a convoluted kind of way no one was, the effort itself was already co-opted by the system, it was impossible not to be a part of human existence no matter how alienated they believed themselves to be, that no matter what their acts or opinions or statements, if they concerned others at all, even their political enemies, then they resided firmly within the circle of human society and it was a bit like your left hand strangling you in your sleep, or consciously eating spoiled food to punish an unsatisfactory digestive system, or holding your breath.  But perhaps only I could have seen it that way, since I wanted to, perhaps all that wasn’t implicit in what I wrote, in what I did and why I did it;  perhaps it’s possible even to perform acts without understanding why, or even feeling a particular desire or compulsion to do them, a little like Leopold and Loeb or Faust, perhaps sometimes one acts only to see whether in acting one will feel anything at all.  Which is precisely why that incident of the final day still haunts me, more than many of the other, less explicable and more gruesome details;  first because it belongs to those events closer to me in time, even though in many respects it differed little from a thousand others, but maybe mostly because in spite of my efforts it wasn’t possible to partake of any experience, enjoyable or otherwise, just as it’s still so difficult to imagine if anything will please me, if any, even the smallest of pleasures or satisfactions is possible in the manner they once were.


Chapter 43

The Secret Manifesto — 43

Getting locked in the museum seemed just as stupid a thing as being unable to enter Brecht’s house, but neither were really our own fault, except that perhaps we should have paid more attention to newspapers, to the general upheaval around us, then maybe it wouldn’t have been such a surprise that that day all of East Germany should be shut down early, all state employees rushing home to find out if they still had obligations, jobs, leaders, even a country, it just seemed to us that all of a sudden the world turned upside down, people running about yelling, back and forth, jumping into the air, others walking silently, ploddingly, not knowing what to do or think as if possibly it was all a trick, a test, a nasty trap, a giant wooden horse of an event, somehow no known rules applied;  but the period of waiting in the huge, empty museum for somebody to return and answer the alarm we’d set off by trying a door, those minutes together had an eerie quality not explained just by the empty, hollow silence of the rooms while in the distance, outside, the noise was like thunder, armored cars rolling by, crowds cheering or yelling, marching or running, windows being broken, the laughter of thousands.  So we kissed on the steps of the temple of Zeus and Athena, we argued as if we didn’t understand it would be our last argument in front of the Roman Forum, we held hands along the Processional Way and through the Ishtar Gate, we ended up upstairs where Aida insisted on putting some lust back into the proceedings by making love on top of that Persian wall, it was always a wall of one sort or another in Berlin, a city in love with its corridors, both sides, even though the Wall is now gone I suspect it was just a ploy to easily double the number of corridors in the city, certainly the Berliners were never open, everything done behind closed doors, except now there emerge the skinheads, the Nazis, the moles, the traitors and the spies, remarkable just how many people turn out to be spies, how we can so easily betray those people closest to us, now that the world is crumbling to rubble the rats are emerging from the protective cover of respectability just as our most sordid desires emerge when the rules are relaxed.  I still have the piece of the Wall I took that night, a shapeless bit of concrete as a souvenir of our game of crossing back and forth just to remind ourselves of the vicissitudes of life, as if you and she and everything else weren’t enough, a way of underlining the enormous role chance plays in our lives, in everybody’s, there but for the god of grace and all that;  but it was precisely then that another of those splits opened up and swallowed a part of my life, before the regurgitation of another, of you, before the broken Wall as we struggled to get through like thousands of others, not because we were escaping something but because we were attempting to return to something, to our lives in the West;  for once having or not having papers was meaningless, there was no one to check them, no one to present them too, it was just a mass of bodies pouring through and enlarging the gaps in the Wall, like the resurrection or the dead returning from heaven when I reached out to claim my souvenir, and then she was gone as if deliberately, as if I’d imagined her all along, ideas I considered as explanations for her absence, but then decided we’d merely been careless and lost one another in the crowd and she’d be waiting for me where she always was, or not waiting but just where she habitually turned up, at the Labyrinth (but of course I never saw her again, when I got there it was so empty they threw me out and locked up and went to the Wall themselves, the first time they remembered closing at all);  so back I went into the West and another, thoroughly huge and drunken crowd, although this one dancing not just for joy but for the cameras, as if they were all actors not just Aida, though here too there were armed soldiers and tanks at the periphery to underline the similarities between freedom and oppression, that feeling good about one’s form of captivity is just a matter of propaganda, of relentless brainwashing, of a full belly, of finding your way.  That was the only place she could have lost me, the only place where certain habits of the world could be shaken off, in the generalized panic and upheaval, it made displaced persons of us all, it shifted allegiances right under our feet, it negated all the work we had done concerning each other, heedless of how that might have affected us, without regard to our ambitions, making a mockery of our expectations, teaching us that after all none of us has the right to any expectations of anything, nothing is secure, not even banks, not even currency, not even paradigms, not even the uncomfortable feeling that others existed only on the periphery, and that in the end even she didn’t matter, even she was beside the point, she herself was only one of a series of mirrors hung in front of my own face by my own deficiencies, that I was the impenetrable secret, that the mystery itself was always within my own grasp because it didn’t even exist, a process of recognizing everything external to me as another skin on the onion, but from the inside out, that I was the final layer to be peeled back, which of course would reveal an absolute nothingness, a fabulous formless darkness;  or else not at all, even that was too egocentric, that the center of my self should be any different from anyone else’s, so absolute even in its corruption, in its negation, in its secret desires, the crimes it dreams of committing merely to establish its own individuality, to intentionally break with the universe and stand alone, outside, untouched and untouching, unheard and unhearing, falling from the unlimited, lost and unintelligible aspects of the skies into the lonely sea with its countless smiles, without attracting the attention of fishermen or fish, or the pity of the sun itself or of the sea, graceless and full of gravity.


Chapter 44

The Secret Manifesto — 44

Dog and master or dog sniffing anus, which of us was which, had it ever made a difference, was there ever a reliable method of ascribing reality to any of it, or calling it truth, was it really such a rupture in my life, a space between normalcy or an existence like an ill-fitting jacket, at which points had I been conscious and how much of it was imaginary—and therefore valid—but it was natural in the circumstance that Artaud appealed to me in desperation, I was the only one among the captives who wouldn’t have spit at the suggestion, because, he said, we had a special bond, we understood each other as men even if we weren’t after all on the same side, the sound of gunfire and screaming in some other part of the building, the Dada-ist spirit overrunning the entire world, a sudden realization that the building seemed to be on fire, a wall collapsed and smoke billowed in, in the confusion I found him kneeling before me offering me a pistol, I’m your captive, please take me prisoner, nothing else will save me;  it was the hour of his test, and that was how he met it, choosing life.  Which made me think of acts, and the divisive effect they have on one’s life, before and after, or how some seem insignificant, like peeing, just a step to get on with things, in cases like that I always took the pistol, it was the expected thing and a natural reaction which one only later realizes possessed alternatives, in any case, there I was with the gun and Artaud kneeling before me because only I could save his life, which meant that the building was being stormed, a position fully as dangerous to any of us as to our captors, for god knows how easily hostages die while being rescued.  Which left me time perhaps for one more simple, brief act and the opportunity to discover whether there was any human sympathy left or whether I had invested absolutely all that remained in the nurturing of my own homunculus, who at that moment began to kick like a baby, reminding me I had once thought that since Marie was gone I’d never know that kind of experience, another odd, unexpected circumstance, I raised the pistol to his head, what else was there to do, his neck bent under the pressure, I asked him if there were any lasting impressions of taking a life, would I like it, it wasn’t anything like the time Marie had actually been pregnant and we discussed being parents and she had asked all her friends, should we be parents or is it more than we imagine, is it painful, can you think of anything else afterwards but in the end she miscarried anyway, too much of our lives had been spent in hospitals, not enough of it in the fresh air under the sun, since there were people running through the corridors toward us now I couldn’t afford to be indecisive and pulled the trigger because too much of my life had been lost opportunities, you don’t think I’m that stupid Artaud said, I hadn’t even considered it I said and then they were in the room and it was I who got shot, naturally, standing there with the gun at his head, but it was Artaud himself who stopped them from killing me, he really saved my life, it was a pity I couldn’t save his, once they were convinced of who was really who they just shot him in front of all of us and announced he’d died trying to shoot his way out, I marveled that it didn’t seem to bother them until I realized I had stood in the same spot only moments before, there wasn’t any marvel in it, the marvel was in getting out alive, dying was the easy part, everybody gets their chance.

It was a nightmare parturition, being herded out of there just as we had been forcibly taken from the hotel in the first place, in the first place all the lights were too bright, even daylight is still too bright, I can’t get close to the sun, and the insane offerings of comfort they tried to enforce upon us as if they had a relevancy for us, like what date it was and what country we were in, everything was a through-the-looking-glass gesture, because we were still inside our cells and they expected us to gasp in wonder at being let out, to fall at their feet and make them our new masters, where the hell had they been all this time, it’s not fair of them to let us assimilate into that kind of hell and then expect our gratitude at being shoehorned back into the past—or the future, really, what the hell happened to the world we knew;  it’s almost an insult, after so long, to be on my own again, to be made to face a continued existence, hasn’t there been enough, haven’t I spent enough time with my own body and my own consciousness, why must there be more than this, why can’t this be all?

I must carry this faraway look in my eye for another space, I cannot speak or live with others until this task, too is done, but what it means, what that task is, is not something I can identify, not something I can undertake like a job or a project or a meal, and it’s meaningless to me that others have seen this in my face, that they think they understand this, that they have patience with me, for that is their way of congratulating themselves, of dealing with their own expectations, their own desires, their own reality.  Having endured, I say it’s possible to endure, at least, but whether endurance itself has a meaning, whether it is a value, is still left somewhere in that darkened cell, the birthplace of my homunculus, which now, finally, emerges, now reveals himself to me as a separate being, and without even a backward glance or a tender hesitation, rises into the sky like Icarus in his haste, and carries off into the air with him that which was not a fixed point.  I stare after him because it is somehow less painful than what else is visible.

The end


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