Je l'aime et je la respire

Read a book. Make tea. Tell me something. What do you want to hear? The sounds of wet, loving, foreign tongues. A cold rain. A forest. A bed of poison ivy. A secret patch of mushrooms that "broadcast on transcendental frequencies"- Robbins. A body of work, tatooed, stamped, branded, owned, sold, thrown away and picked up again.

"This is terrible," she said, looking up from the sheet of crumpled notebook paper, over her glasses.

"I know," I replied. "But sometimes I just find myself in a liminal space, like maybe I could burst out in every direction at once, except that I can't escape the stasis. Or maybe I'm nowhere."

"Well, see, that's just garbage. Introspective sloth. You're just too lazy to really ask yourself the hard questions and figure out why you feel the way that you do. That's why all you can do is spout twisted half-clichés and nonsense. What you've got to understand is that it's not enough to be authentic. It's not even enough to be honest. And they're not the same thing. No, the important thing is to be rigorous. To understand, or at least to come as close as possible. Or maybe to understand why you can't understand. But this visceral shit don't fly no more."

"I think I understand what you mean. You've got to have ideas, reasons. Otherwise, it's easy. And no one wants easy. But what if my ideas are so obscure that even I can't untangle them?"

"Then you don't really have any ideas."

Cupid's Trick

I took the bus home from work last week.  The rain had already sucked all of the autumn out of the leaves and the unseasonable warmth made me think of rot.  As we crossed the river I glanced out of the window and watched the runoff pour in from concrete drains.  I huddled into my jacket; it was damp and uncomfortable, but the AC was blasting cold air at me, and my leggings were soaked with rain and puddle-water.  The bus took a right at the end of the bridge and made a stop.  An old man had rung for it, and as he stepped out into the foggy drizzle, he slipped and fell on the curb.  The driver put the bus into park and got out.  With his help, the old man got up slowly as the other commuters idly gazed out at them or did their best to ignore them or ignored them without trying.  I was sitting on the opposite side of the bus, next to last row, so I didn't get a great view.  

I came home to an empty, dark house, just as I had hoped.  Something about the light in a dark house on an ugly day...I like it.  So I stripped off my jacket, kicked off my shoes, and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on.  My first instinct was to turn on the TV, but I couldn't bring myself to break the stillness.  This kind of solace was something to savor.  So instead, I walked up the stairs toward the bathroom and wriggled out of my sopping leggings.  Without turning any lights on, I sat down on the toilet and studied my legs.  My feet were dirty in spots, and my toes had turned to prunes.  I lifted my left foot in the air, leaned it against the sink, turned it so that I could see the crook of my knee in the soft blue light.  Then I started cutting.

I'm an expert at this.  I don't do anything too deep or visible, and I never cut in the same place twice.  Even the closest inspection of my legs doesn't reveal any scars.  I just popped a blade out of a fresh razor and began making the slightest vertical incisions on the inside of my left thigh.  Parallel lines, three, four, five.  You don't need to cut deep to get a lot of sensation.  The blood looked bright black in the dark as it rolled down and dripped onto my panties.  When I was done I stripped the rest of my clothes off and stepped into the shower.  I let the blood trickle onto the floor for a moment before I turned the water on.  The cold shocked my skin at first, then it warmed slowly.  I washed myself, paying particular attention to my dirty feet, then stepped out, dried off, and put a bandage over my thigh.  I walked downstairs in my towel and found my kettle cold.  I had forgotten to turn on the burner.  I switched it on and waited for my tea.

Short Essay

"The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own.  Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter.  Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism.  To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

-Theodor W. Adorno

Joanna reporting from Thanksgiving weekend.  Adorno writes that "there is nothing innocuous left," that even the apparently "simple" pleasures of life are actually lies which serve the forces of cruelty and terror and repression by concealing their very existence, by encouraging those of us who can afford it to ignore them.  For him, the only true pleasure can be found in contemplating "horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity, holding fast to the possibility of what is better."  It is not a new argument.  It is, however, a call to action.  

From an ethical point of view, Marxism is not all that different from certain strands of Christian thought, particularly those whose ideology derives from the Sermon on the Mount.  It is this moral code that is taken up by Hegel in his discussion of Lordship and Bondage.  This exploration of a hypothetical first encounter between two subjects, or self-consciousnesses, describes the dialectical link between Fear and Desire that ultimately results in battle, and the emergence of one superior and one inferior subject (the beginnings of society, perhaps).  Hegel goes on to explain, however, in a characteristic twist of logic, that the apparently superior Lord is actually inferior, and the Bondsman in fact is superior.  This is because the Lord exists only as an empty vessel of sensation, a receptacle for pleasure and nothing more.  The Bondsman, on the other hand, acts upon the objective world, realizing a part of himself, effecting real change as he creates in order to satisfy the Lord's demands.  And in the process, he learns the (Beatitudinal) values of self-discipline and humility.

Exactly what Hegel meant to describe by his thought experiment is obscure, but there can be no doubt that Marx read the piece historically, with the Lord representing the ruling class and the Bondsman representing the downtrodden workers.  So Marx's ethic is clearly aligned with that of the Sermon.  But while Christ promised his poor flock the Kingdom of Heaven, Marx was a fierce atheist, and so religion, like the pleasures scorned by Adorno, comes to be viewed in this discourse simply as another distraction, and worse, a lie told to conceal the real horror that surrounds us.

In the past century, of course, we have attempted to compensate for God's absence by creating aesthetic productions whose beauty can help us escape the prosaic awfulness that increasingly surrounds us.  But although this may comfort us it cannot save us; the Nazi obsession with aesthetic perfection is no coincidence.  For this reason, and for many others, perhaps, the beautiful can no longer be beautiful; only the ugly can.  And only in gazing upon the horror of reality (the reality of horror), and in it discovering the possibility of realizing a better world, will we be able to rediscover the truly beautiful.