KEYWORDS: Cars; Criminals; Drugs; Mutes

(Denis Johnson's 1988 story "Two Men", ' abstracted' for searchability at the New Yorker online. The story was later published as part of Jesus' Son.)

"Story about three men, the narrator and his companions Tom and Richard on a night when they encounter two other men. These three aren't exactly friends, but they hang out together and commit petty crimes together. One night they left a dance after the narrator was caught kissing a woman whose boyfriend, Caplan, he was afraid of. They found a man asleep in the backseat of his car; the man seemed to be a deaf-mute. They agreed to take him home, but the woman in the first house that he directed them to wouldn't let him in. The narrator worried that Caplan was chasing him to hurt or kill him. The second place they go is empty They then go for a long way out into the country and find a third house. They hear jazz playing, and inside are a woman wearing a bra and skirt, a large black man, and a college man with a beer mug the size of a wastebasket.. It turns out that the deaf-mute's name is Stan, he used to be a football player, and he isn't a deaf-mute. However, they are all "encouraged" to leave and the three friends take off. Stan runs alongside the car, but finally lets go of the door handle when he runs into a stop sign. On the way back in to town the narrator sees a man who sold him some bad drugs at a gas station. They chase him and find his car parked, empty, behind an apartment house. They find the right apartment, but he isn't there. They terrorize the woman who is there even though she says she doesn't know where he is. The narrator enjoys the feeling that the man and woman are afraid of him."

"North on Rte 1"

If it is proper to speak of an eternity for anything,
--And it is, I think--
Then I would bet it's like
Looking out across a cold pond.
More like this than like some mountains.
The only foundation of permanence is,
Probably, that stuff has to be forgotten.
--What color trash, wrappers near the road.

Totally pleasant yellow grass wet in the sun.
--Yeah but who fuckin knows.
The only question is, Does it make sense at last,
The wholesomeness offered in nature but withheld.
The scum all over everything.

FROM FACTS TO MEANS (instance to Idea)

“What Wikipedia is not”

1) Wikipedia and the fantasy of infinite recourse: all from one to all

The first proto-Wikipedia article, written by accredited knowledge experts. The lure and mythos of “scholarship”: we believe in history, facts, technological record, which distinguishes our epoch. There is no “dreamtime,” only privacy (the things in our private thoughts and records. We believe others have a private truth for themselves and a private existence.)

2) ‘Techno ugg’ Arthur and Marilouise Kroker- the nihilism of technology and the will to blah blah blah about the revolutionary new future, just crap and erotic lure of destiny, fumes of the Pythoness

3) James Wood- Don DeLillo replaces religious transcendence with, the same thing...

4) The central idea of the novel: everyone’s life is a chronological sequence, you must sit down and live through it this way, from beginning to end, through reflection and recycling: the record of how days on earth, walking around as a unit of life, is spent. Everyone fulfills the same conditions and lives in the same requirements: these are not vague or poetically general, but rich and specific: evolved from lower primates-lives in a language world-needs riches and peer attention to thrive-has curiosity and thirst for wisdom but is in darkness-born from woman, dies: dies before human history has ended. Lives with animals and bugs inside them and outside them. Processes heat, seeks sex and wants pleasure and comfort. Stimulated and repulsed by the universe, which is perhaps hostile to life, an unsupportable aberration.

The (punchline) Anecdote as the smallest unit of compression. And then the Day, as in “Today I repeated my usual duty, then met my needs, and thought of redemption.”

5) The right to block people from walking and seeing. (If I want to walk somewhere, the geographical point where my motives are questioned, my body is restrained, and I am in danger from the Enemy. The warzone civilians stay out of.)

The right to kill- the final arbitration; in the name of transcending principle. “I have spent my days Killing, with the hope that others may live..” XX

The totality of wanting to relax and have a City of God on Earth, but probably that isn’t possible and in history it’s been called blasphemous, which represses certain biological urges to secure peace and love for the family.

The Western idea of leisure and the surplus which creates culture and stockpiles abstract thought in an archive.

(To define wisdom as “resistance to reality” vs conformation; requires a position first as Enemy, an adversarial position that you have to declare based on deep intuition. “This isn’t Wikipedia data in an indexed public archive, it is a determined form of social life, where injustice creates oppositions” - the poetry of thirsting, hungering for justice)

To stay aware of division, in the “optimism of the will,” versus to stay lost in lifeyness, the dream of homo ludens and the ‘obvious scenario,’ the winnable contest: at what point in one’s life history do you begin to consider this choice, with any conviction?

Speaking to our friends, even in lying we give over a greater truth.

Gloats on Camp

The "Prologue" to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography, written 1956.

"WHAT I HAVE LIVED FOR.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what -- at last -- I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

'In the scene before Prince Andrei's coffin... where Tolstoy uses the past tense of the verb "to weep" (plakat') no less than seven times, Pevear and Volokhonsky are the only translators not to flinch from using "wept" throughout: Garnett says "cried" four times and "wept" three; Louise and Aylmer Maude say both words three times each, omitting one verb altogether; Edmonds has "wept" four times and "cried" thrice; while Anthony Briggs says "wept" five times, omits one verb, and then breaks the repetition with "gave way to tears."'

--"Tolstoy's Real Hero," Orlando Figes, NYRB

The Rainbow of His Will

Here, a counterpoint to Charles Altieri (one "encounters the ultimate nothingness or absence of meaning, which is perhaps the result of all pursuits of sheer lucidity."). Augustine has a long intellectual conversation with his dying mother and undergoes a transforming epiphany, recorded in Confessions:

“If fleshly importuning were to fall silent, silent all shapes of earth, sea, air; silent the celestial poles; silent the soul, moving (oblivious of self) beyond the self; silent, as well, all dreams and shallow visions, all words and other signs, silent everything that passes away, all those things that say, if one listens, ‘We did not make ourselves, He made us who never passes away’; if, after saying this, they too were silent, though alerting us to hear the One who made them; and if He should speak, no longer through them but by Himself, for us to hear His word not as that is relayed by human tongue or angel’s voice, not in cloudy thunder or confused meditation, but if we harkened to Him we love in other things without those other things (as even now we strain upward and, in a mind’s blink, touch the ageless wisdom that outlasts all things else), and if this were made constant, all lesser vision falling away before it, so that this alone held the universe in its grip, in its enfoldment and its glad hidden depths, and eternal life resembled this moment of wisdom that we sigh to be losing—would that not be what is meant by the words ‘Enter the joy of your God’?—a joy that will be ours when?—only when all things rise (though not all are changed)?”

"Pizza Girl"

I was on the phone with a friend. I could hear my daughter’s TV program in the other room. My friend was saying her husband was acting funny around her. I was telling her that from a man’s perspective she shouldn’t worry. I had the newspaper open to the classifieds and I was circling ‘Driver Wanted’ ads. I specially starred jobs where the listing said ‘Previous Experience Not Necessary’. My friend’s husband had been on long business trips but my instinct was that they weren’t affairs. Was something else the matter? When the doorbell rang I put the phone down to answer it.

The pizza delivery boy turned out to be a girl of about eighteen with dark hair pulled back. Her face was beautiful and honest. My wife and I were separated although not divorced. Still, I knew I shouldn’t linger over the girl’s face and body. But when I paid for the pizzas and the box down she stepped into the house, saying, ‘Are these Rothko?’ They were just hobbyist paintings my wife had liked. They came from an upstate craft fair where my daughter had gotten a bad bee sting. I said,

‘Yes, do you like his work?’

She smiled at the two prints. Her nose wrinkled. She told me she loved art and that she was learning to paint. Her keys jangled from a clamp on her belt loop. Sylvia, my daughter, opened the pizza box without noticing the delivery girl. We smiled and said good night to each other.

That Saturday I went to the car show by myself, which is one of my activities when Sylvia is with her mother. The pizza girl and her boyfriend were there looking at cars. We passed each other along a row and she saw my face. As I was leaving, we bumped into each other. ‘Thanks for the tip, that made my night,’ she said. They were there for the record show next door. They came to look at the car show because, what the hell. Today, she wore just a little makeup around her eyes. She was tall enough that her mouth came to my chest.

She left to grab something and there we were, myself, a forty-two-year-old man with no steady income and a pending divorce, balding and maybe getting an issue with my prostate, and Greg Pinzcek, her boyfriend, who turned out to be the son of a realtor I had done graphic design work for the previous year, an honest and even-tempered guy I might get more business from. But if I ever turned on the computer in my study I would have to look at the iPhoto CD my old college roommate Geoff had mailed to me in March, The images all showed the co-ed I went with and was in love with when Geoff and I roomed together, only she was a porn actress now, breast implants, hard-core. For four weeks I hadn’t entered the study. I was behaving irrationally.

Greg was out of high school but didn’t have college plans. He was going to tour with his band around Essex County, then for the summer rent a house on the shore. He had a broad, guileless forehead with freckles at the edges.

‘Look at her, man’, he said as we watched the pizza girl, ‘she asks everybody every single question that pops into her head.’

‘She’s great,’ he was saying. ‘She just doesn’t really get me. She thinks I’m some kind of burn-out because I don’t want to go right back to school,’ he laughed.

I said, ‘You know what, Greg, she really likes you, and that’s what’s important when you’re your age, she’ll stick by you.’ I liked that we were speaking intimately. ‘I can tell you’re somebody who’s going to follow his dream no matter what, and if she really cares about you she’ll be behind you.’ I never spoke to my daughter this way.

Recognizing the record under his arm, I said ‘You’re probably not going to believe it but I went to see that band in New York City. They used to play at a place called 7A.”

“No shit, I mean...”

“No shit. Actually, coming home on the train back, that’s where I met my wife.”

“You married?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, Chrissie. She’s with my daughter right now.”

He was studying an engine for a long time, and finally said, “If I ever got married I’d want to know everything about life first. To know, like, what I was missing.”

“That’s how I felt, too,” I said.

He glanced over his records and we saw the pizza girl approaching. “Because, like, I could never give up certain things, I feel like,” he said.

"Catena" (Mark)

Some hustler, one of the young wriggling newts of the New York art world, had coaxed Mark into sub-letting the cabin in the Adirondacks, where the newt had been keeping a studio through the summer and early fall. Mark had nowhere else in particular to go. There was no heat in the cabin and so Mark slept outside. There was nothing left to eat after three days and he had no provision for a ride to town. He dug up a last paint-flecked vodka handle and cradled it in his sleeping bag while dusk turned into night and the trees stood apart to let a chill breeze through. His body fell asleep inside a film of what seemed like July grease, and his sleepy mind troubled itself with recollected fragments of the lost summer. There was a pond in the clearing before the cabin, and he had spent the morning stagnating goldenly. At twilight an owl had flown out of the pines at the pond’s edge and given a sad cry, which was like a piercing call-to-arms.

He imagined taking out each perfect organ one by one, drawing each sphere or sac out through his navel, his pearlescent darlings, wiping them all around with a soft clean lens cloth, caring for them. Wiping each soft sphere clean of ichor and gently returning it to its foxhole beneath his ribs. (xx) His guts swam like fish through rotten logs. The fish spine, the smell of life. The ticklish pulse of piscine life, the glimmer of fish in an overgrown pond. Then all of a sudden it’s September. There’s all this ragged fiber and no rope to make a knot with. Miss Catena, her day-lit shoulders newly freckled, prods the sleepy, ropy form in its fish daze. He dreams on about snow in August, puns in the tabloid headlines about the aberrant weather and what it could mean for the commuter.

Mark came around again. A dog was barking, far off. He felt Catena nearby, peeing along the bank of the pond, obscured by reeds, clouds on the moon, low-shadowing pine boughs. There was a soft odor of urea and new menstrual blood rising through the golden, stagnant smell of choked aqueous dirt. He rolled over in his sleeping bag and studied the dark shape of the pond edge. He was drunk and the white moon reflected on the water’s surface fell and fell away each time he fixed it in his vision, like a hail of meteors streaking earthward. He rolled on to his back. There was the moon itself, if this was the real one, bobbing like somebody was rolling it around with a computer mouse, and there was no Catena. He closed his eyes again and wished for a great fish-hook to fall down and catch him up by the lip and reel him into the murmuring mountain clouds. He remembered the last time he had checked his email, the note from “CATENA & ALEX” and the jpeg he had opened, without really wanting to, and it had shown them cuddling under the doodle-scripty announcement. It didn’t change anything but what was the use of lying? It changed everything about the summer, because he had waited for her while she experimented with him, and now the summer had turned out not to be a wait after all, but a long empty time that he had spent drinking and getting high. It was dazzling how magnanimous she must be thinking she was, thinking she was going to invite him, and Alex was going to joke together with him, and they were going to be a bunch of cool friends like once upon a time, it was so dazzling, it defied credulity and it dazzled him.

Mark thrashed out of the sleeping bag and crawled to the bank of the pond to vomit. The crackers and vodka came up swiftly, tingled in his eyes and nose, splashed like frogs around the reeds. There was moonlit floating scum, sending a warm vapor up. He found himself standing up with his forehead propped into a tree trunk and he tried to pee. Only a tiny drip. He had dehydrated himself. Fragrant pine needles were in his mouth and he bit some to chew, that would freshen him. Like the gum. He hadn’t brushed his teeth in three days. He wasn’t wearing shoes; was he wearing socks? There was a bright light hitting him from the left side. He turned his head and blinded himself. There were voices, how many?

“What are you doing, man?” A car was idling. Daniel was coming down the hill at him and his form blocked the car lights, Mark couldn’t see his face. He tried to zip his fly and saw puke shining on his fleece. “Jesus Christ, you have like a bad trip?” Daniel’s big dark head came right up in front of him and a bird squawked.

“I’m fine, I got a little sick,” said Mark. “I got a little sick... I was laying here and I don’t know what happened, I started feeling...”

“Felt like yackin?” said Daniel.

“Looks bad?” said Mark. He brushed one of the stains with his sleeve.

“Looks like you’re not having a good camping trip man. Do you want a ride out of here? I got my car over there. It’s fuckin cold.”

There was still a wind. Mark fought the urge to hug himself. The surface of the pond was skittering. He wondered if there was food in the cabin. On the hill, the car’s interior light went out.

“Who all’s in the car?”

“Alex.”

Mark unzipped his fleece and dropped it in the leaves. Daniel craned his neck at the car. “Come on, man, leave your stuff here. We’ll come back. We’ll go fishing tomorrow.”

“Can’t,” said Mark, “it’s my sister’s birthday.”

“Come on. Get the sleeping bag. Get that stuff.” Daniel moved to pick up the sleeping bag, rolled the glistening bottle with his boot, then rushed back as Mark fell to his knees. “Hey. Hey. Hey. We’re gonna go for a drive, man, okay?”

“Can’t fuckin go,” said Mark. Daniel got an arm under his shoulder, began hoisting him, and gave a loud whistle. “Can’t fuckin go.” The car’s interior lit blinked on again. Mark cursed louder and louder until he coughed. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve as Daniel walked him up the hill in the headlights. Mark wasn’t wearing shoes or socks and his feet had gone numb and felt small.

“You’re being an idiot man. This is a bad vacation. Why don’t we go to your sister’s house and we can chill out there for a while. We’ll go for a drive, okay?”

Alex wore a thick flannel overshirt and a deerstalker cap with black furry muffs. He was moving junk out of the back seat. There was a pile of records and a bicycle wheel on the road by the car. Alex straightened up and offered his gloved hand to Mark, who leaned over to help so that Alex and Daniel had to stand him back up again and chuckle. “Looks like you had a bad camping trip, man. You feel okay?” said Alex.

“I think I probably drank to much and it’s fucking freezing,” Mark tried to say, but ‘fucking’ came out as a squeak and his teeth chattered involuntarily. Alex’s big blue eyes were shining with sympathy as he leaned a little to look at Alex. “Are you gonna be okay to ride?” Mark looked at the bicycle wheel and the empty cassette boxes. There was a Palmcorder and a tripod with stickers on it. Finally he nodded.

“Mark’s driving,” said Daniel. The trunk slammed.

Alex patted Mark on the arm. “I’m gonna call your sister,” he said slowly.

Music

“Swallow reality/ Belch the truth” -Wayne

"Ours is a time in which every intellectual or artistic or moral event gets absorbed by a predatory embrace of consciousness: historicizing. Any statement or act can be assessed as a necessarily transient 'development' or, on a lower level, belittled as mere 'fashion'. The human mind possesses now, almost as second nature, a perspective on its own achievements that fatally undermines their value and their claim to truth."

--Susan Sontag, writing in 1968, apropos of a philosophical work published in 1956 (E.M. Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist).

‘FATALLY’: this means that, for the dwindling crowd of readers for whom philosophy is a means to an end and not a diversion, the birth of a new thought is a milestone in the history of futility and sorrow, like the birth of a man in Ecclesiastes. The real keynote of Sontag’s appraisal comes later. Regarding the ‘transvaluation’ of historical thinking, she proposes the following course:

“Perhaps... one must look to those thinkers, like [John] Cage, who—whether from spiritual strength or spiritual insensitivity is, to speak bluntly, a secondary issue—are able to jettison far more of the inherited anguish and complexity of this civilization... For relief, it may be that one must abandon the pride of knowing and feeling so much—a local pride that has cost everyone hideously by now.” She cites Cage’s Silence: “Error is a fiction, has no reality in fact. Errorless music is written by not giving a thought to cause and effect.”

Today, music owns this territory indisputably. Music is the form easiest to achieve effects in: if you line up two words, or two lines in space, they will be dead in the water without an effort of contextualization, on the part of the artist, or reflection, on the part of the audience. But if you play two notes in harmony your audience will be gratified.

‘Whether from spiritual strength’—the clause’s ungainly nesting above betrays its primacy. The drug rap braggadocio of musicians like Lil Wayne can claim, in our era, a unique profundity and scope. And spiritual strength isn’t exactly the name for what force vouchsafes this music. Because Wayne, for example, isn’t afraid to rope together the most divergent, bizarre sentiments over a few supremely confident bars, his songs are able to impose a world of indescribable power and authority under the sign of a speaker’s tone, a tone of studied and flawless effortlessness. The art of the most capable, most charismatic rappers transmutes death itself into punch lines; the easy authority of the gangsta rapper’s technique renders the speaker’s persona inviolable, like the narrator of the Iliad who was given to describe the most shocking derangements of human beings in love and at war.

When we are truly at war—fighting the wars we were born to fight—spiritual error is a fiction. The gods excuse every excess. Violence, then, like music, has a law of its own. But is this the way forward, following the path of the gulliest musicians (spiritual insensitivity) and the most jaded (‘strength’)? The pleasures of music are certainly one great, turbulent affinity between Sontag and her subject. Among other forms of culture, Cioran may have had music in mind when he characterized Western history: “Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming.” Like Cioran, who hoped that the punishment for believing in the truth of great music was to burn forever in its flame, Sontag was an ardent, if anxious devotee. In a year-end wrap-up in her diary, she recorded that a particular moment spent listening to the Beatles had been the year’s most profoundly moving experience. And so a synthetic resolution must wait for a discerning reader of both. Can music (and the question concerns pop music in particular) be construed as a part of ‘life’, or do we consign it to the cesspool of hedonistic escapes, with sex, drugs, etc.? Music seems like bondage. (I was intrigued by athletes who compete with music blasting. Why doesn’t it throw you off, how do you reconcile it with your efforts to dominate at any tempo? And soldiers who raid cities with music blasting. Why doesn’t rap music distract you from efficiently killing people?)

The bait set for Western man, the terminal counsel, is: “Relax and tap your feet to the music.” What if there is no music?

You get sucked back into these preposterous proofs.

1. The Absolute is eternal.
2. In its historical manifestations, the Absolute has material qualities.
3. We enjoy a finite amount of time in which to figure out how our material lives should be spent.
4. Our decisions affect the Absolute.

This sequence can abort right there because it triggers a bodily response: an “ukkhh” noise, like hacking a pretend hairball. One starts pretend-drumming bass and ride-cymbal with one’s hands. Music is bondage. In my bondage I know nothing but the truth, I feel nothing but the sirocco of truth.

What they were playing in STARBUCKS one morning while I tried to read:

The Smiths—Radiohead—Dave Matthews—The woman from Morcheeba—Morrissey—The Beatles—Nancy Sinatra—Vintage Blues—Vintage Bluegrass—‘Bootleg’ Bob Dylan—Alanis Morissette

I Cannot Read, and Therefore Wish All Books Were Burnt

"FAUSTUS. Tell me, are there many heavens above the moon?/ Are all celestial bodies but one globe,/ As is the substance of this centric earth?"