“What’s the most offensive is not their lying—one can always forgive lying—lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth—what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying…” — Razumikhin, Crime and Punishment

§

When I was little, stories about UFOs and alien abductions terrified me, but I was also endlessly interested in them. I remember staying up late one night to watch a long “special report” by Peter Jennings on the UFO phenomenon. I don’t think I slept normally for weeks after, likely as much from excitement as from creeping unease.

Growing up in New Mexico, with its unending sky, its Air Force bases, the relative proximity to both Sandia Laboratories and Roswell—to say nothing of the local story of Paul Bennewitz,1 which I knew nothing about until much later—it all seemed quite possible.

Beyond the fear that I felt at the imagery of weird lights coming in through your windows at night, faces with big, empty eyes watching you in the dark, the idea of waking up in the woods with missing time, these images of the highly UFO-saturated media atmosphere of the 90s and early 2000s, there was also an immense sense of wonder. Fear and wonder.

Lovecraft, in his essay on supernatural horror, names fear as the oldest and most powerful emotion. And Schopenhauer, very early on in The World as Will and Representation, affirmatively repeats the ancient dictum according to which wonder is the beginning of all philosophizing.

This oldest emotion and this most basic impetus to thought, I believe, arise simultaneously, just as Freud thought that the earliest sexual impulses were also essentially investigative. One does not really feel the kind of deep fear that Lovecraft is concerned with without also succumbing to the abyss of exploratory wonderment. And one wonders little without the possibility, hanging over it all, of fear entering into the world, as if from some impossible to locate non-place of an “outside”—or else some difficult to conceive if, removed interiority.

In the moment of their most confused beginnings, fear and wonder may even be identical.

It was probably around this time, when I was eight or nine, that my mom would have told me about the book Communion by Whitley Strieber. She didn’t actually get very far into it. Living alone for the first time, in her first apartment, she read the first few pages while staying up late, only to permanently close the book at the part where the narrator/author, Whitley Strieber, wakes up to find something watching him in his room.

This fragment of a synopsis, combined with the admittedly striking cover of Communion, was enough for me, literally. My interest in the book—all about Strieber’s experiences with “visitors” and his hypnotic regressions and purportedly recovered memories—was met in a perfect moment of emotional homeostasis by the fear, or its mere anticipation, suggested to me by my mom’s refusal to continue reading.

Then, when I was older, I became totally disinterested in the book, which I still had never tried reading, because of Strieber’s weird claim, first made in Communion, to have witnessed the University of Texas tower shooting on August 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman shot 46 people, 15 of whom died, from the tower of the campus’s main building.

But this is convoluted. In Communion, Strieber claims that he claimed to have been there and witnessed it—except that he knows that he didn’t witness the shooting and is surprised at his own lie. The explanation for this weird pathological behavior is that the memory of the shooting is actually a screen-memory (as he understands it) protecting him from recalling further details about “the visitors.”

But prior to Communion, in a 1985 interview,2 Strieber does indeed claim that he was there, describing in almost cartoonishly gruesome detail the scene of the shooting, even though his mother says that her son was only in town that day but not actually on campus. This seems like an obvious case of retconning one’s own fabrications in a more complicated fantasy.

Alright—this anecdote totally compromised any interest in reading Communion. This is because the subtitle for the book is A True Story. The claim is all but explicitly one to non-fiction (although I cannot actually find that compound word printed anywhere on or in the book), and more than that, to TRUTH.

That is an indication of a problem:

Can non-fiction also claim to be true?

At first glance, this is only redundancy. But any such claim to truth (not facticity, which would also be redundant and odd) remains not only secondary but negative and throws the suggestion of a text’s status as “non-fiction” into question. If you subtitle your novel, which is simply understood to be fictional, with the unsubtle words A Fabrication! all sense loses itself in a short circuit of naming.

The man doth attest too much. (This is disregarding the plausibility of the claims themselves.)

Fiction is not affective because the reader suspends their disbelief of the text as somehow factual. I am inclined to say that the resonance of any work of fiction is actually something of a mystery and determined every time anew in each work. The question of its status as factual is either unimportant or inessential.

Non-fiction may be factual, but a book of lies and deception can also be non-fictional. Fiction ≠ lying and deception. And the truth, as opposed to mere fact, is the business of fiction, of art. Of course, none of the borders here are fixed.

(Take My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. We know, based on interviews and what the book says about itself, that Knausgaard is writing about his own life as honestly as he possibly can. But it is still a novel. To call it a memoir [non-fiction] just because much of what “happens” in the book also “actually happened” would be the ultimate misunderstanding. What matters is form, mode, register, internal consistency—not some fantasy of correspondence between language and an “external reality.”)

But regarding Communion, here is the worst part: the above subject is more interesting to me than anything in the book—which, after the further passing of years, I decided at last to pick up. My feelings, after all, about fiction, non-fiction, genre, truth, fact, falsity, lies, deception, and on and on, have changed. They are quite open to the confusion of some, many or all of these in a given work. But it must be done well, whatever that means, which here it is not.

To be clear, my judgment of the book has nothing to do with a belief or disbelief in the claims of Whitley Strieber. I didn’t believe his claims, and I still felt like giving the book a try.

There are people who tell stories similar to Strieber’s, if only in certain key details, who I do believe. I believe that they believe their own stories. I mean this in the least dismissive way possible. At a very basic level, I do not think everyone who claims to have been “abducted” is lying whole cloth. I do, however, think that something other than the alien hypothesis is happening, all of which is beside the point here.

Had what I was able to read of Communion simply been fiction, it still would have struck me as unremarkable. His style is no style at all. He writes with totally impoverished parataxis whose dream of a page’s turning is thwarted at every line by the bogginess of his repetitive pretense to candidness. I am the idiot for thinking anything of the book would be good, even as a lie—which I did; I thought that as a lie it might be compelling, as so many lies have it within themselves to be—for more than a few pages.

The Dante and Auden epigraphs actually introduce such a gap into the text as to suggest the unconscious urge toward a jester-like self-abasement. A paradoxical exercise in extreme humility. But I know this is a kind of freewheeling overthinking on my part.

Having only been able to make it 60 pages in: I do not believe that Strieber believes his own story—even as a good lie. This is the writing of a person who cares only for effects and affectation, and I value my mom’s story of reading and not reading Communion in the early 90s infinitely more. However, I also, in contradictory fashion, can imagine that Strieber somehow does believe his own lie, which is either worse or better depending on how you spin it... But what does this even mean, “to believe one’s own lie?”

Such a question leaves us in the realm of the senseless, or at best the vague, but all we have to fall back on is some clunky prose and paired with some ideally frightening imagery. It’s really too bad.

The best thing about Communion, from a narrative perspective, is that Strieber does not actually call what is happening in the book “alien abduction,” and he does not call the beings “aliens” as the cover of the book basically suggests they are. He calls them visitors. This is a simple ambiguity that, in the hands of another writer, could be made into something arresting.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your indecision regarding what you should read next is to read as much as you can of a book that fails you on every page and from every possible angle of interpretation and, furthermore, that embarrasses itself without seeming to possess the ability to discern anything approaching its own obligation to that embarrassment. (The almost insulting claims of recorded hypnotic regressions being reproduced “verbatim”…) After so many pages of this, it is the most relieving thing to close the book, separated from your bookmark which will not be reentering its pages, close your eyes, open them again and let the title on some other spine jump out at you. You open up to the first page and feel as though you have stepped out of the heat and muggy air into the cool placidity of a lake or a pool. That’s worth something.

One hardly knows how one learns. It may be that the “feeling of learning” is only the memory of maybe having had some impression—you feel yourself rebounding back slowly into a previous state. The feeling of the impression vanishing out of you, pressing the surface of some part of your being back into a continuous recognizability: this is not the “feeling of learning,” which may actually be more like a feeling of being hopelessly stuck.

Something breaks. Something does not break.

Something flows forth out of a broken something. Something does not flow forth.

“Nobody knows what learning is. Nor does anyone know its feeling.” Nor does anything break.

The idea of anamnesis—maybe learning as an uncovering, literally as “unforgetting”—is as clear and comprehensible as these other metaphors we are so accustomed to using that we no longer admit to ourselves that they are only metaphors: “He held within himself a deep store of knowledge.” You could just as well say: “It deepened in him.” Or, borrowing a phrase from the Wilhelm I Ching: It furthers.

“He read a poem and did not feel—neither within nor without himself, nor anywhere—that something was as if very simply forgotten.”

“He burned his hand on the stove. Now, he remembered every time in his life he had ever burned his hand on a stove.”

He burned himself and forgot every time he had ever been burned. Had he also forgotten all of this somehow in one place(?). Surely, the hand forgets, the hand remembers, just as —.

The word “remember” standing out there alone in the blueness of some field. Clear eyes—full or empty; either.

The word “forget” walking down the virtual line of a vanishing point—“She even seems happy in the lines of her silhouette.”

“A man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”

Forgetting and remembering—and so “learning,” too—stand in some collapsed, polar simultaneity: “coming to town” after having become a stranger on a journey. No one knows if this town is ever the same town.

Subscript

_{One could imagine that aphasics are those who could “speak just like the others.” Only, one would then add, “they have a better memory”: they have “not forgotten the former inability to speak” (or “the former being-able-not-to-speak”). Their memory would then be much better than [merely] good. For it would extend to the age of infant babble in which every individual life begins. It would reach back to the “epoch of life” to which no “sign”—other than the blankness of the unmarked “transcript” itself— would be adequate. Silent, the aphasic would obstinately bear witness to what was never written and what could not be said. One would then be obliged to conclude that at times, remembrance can be as destructive as oblivion can be productive: in this case, the end of memory would lie in muteness, and forgetting would lead to speech.1}

II.

What can one ever want from a book but that shivering gloss _{(shivering glossolalia)} of infinite suggestion and suggestibility, which itself only ever glimmers up from the surface of its finitude? It is like glimpsing the limber body and the cruel-beautiful face of a woman who one feels the eerie draw of the possibility of loving as—maybe she is smiling, maybe it is as if she were hunting you for sport, an expression of feline predation held up by the capstones of her dark brows—she evades you in a dark forest, as new as it is ancient: In such a wood, in this weird garden of bracken and thorns and grasses and flower petals (glow in twilit morning dusk and sleep dully in the double shadows of noonday and noonnight), I come to my senses. I am seized by the sobriety of the play within a play. Take this book (!) and the shivering gloss with it. I want the woman(!).

Everything that I do in this house for the next few days and weeks will feel like the first time I have ever done those things, buoyed forth somehow by the memory of having done them so many times in other places.

There is something edenic about having moved not for the first time (but surely that too, if I could only remember strongly enough what that was like) but for what I certainly hope will be the last time in a long time. Edenic: I, the sole Adamite of this House World (for Victoria, my Eve, is at work right now), will walk through the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, naming every object anew, simultaneously and retroactively creating a totally new language. If it happens to look like the old language, so much the better for me. My simulacrum of the eternal return of the First Day of Moves is a little paradise, a dictionary of sorts whose entries glide around in enclosed elliptics, defining itself tautologically over and over again until at last something in it fails and reaches out into that greater world of Not-House.

We have a huge window in our living room. A single pane of glass. At night, of which there has been only one (it happened to be the night in which all cows happen to be black), it feels like moving about it a diorama of one’s own. I’ve always been interested in dioramas, and I like the feeling. I don’t think Victoria likes it, because she is always the first one to close the curtains. I also put things off, prolong things as much as I can, whereas she thinks ahead. This quality of wanting to prolong things, stretch them out—this desire to create time and always find time, as if it were something in space that I could seek out and gather up more of, which it is not, no matter how inexorably we fall into using the language of space to refer to time—this facet of my character, to other people, can probably look an awful lot like laziness.

A deep concussion of thunder has punctuated the above train of thought. It is the first thunder I have ever heard in this vita nuova. And the first lightning—the first bluish white cutting flash. The storm outside, which makes the morning seem later and later, darker and darker, is the first storm. It comes down so hard that I think it might tear the house down. How am I to know what this little roof is capable of withstanding?

Everything is new and my emotions are as sensitive as those of a child. They mirror the world of my perceptions, unsure of themselves and immediate, unable yet to go out on their own in this new place.

The ice maker (do we have an ice maker here?) makes a loud noise behind me in the kitchen, and I wonder if maybe a tree from the backyard is falling through the window above the sink.

So dark out now that the lone streetlight outside has turned on. And I had thought they were on a timer.

Well, what do I know. I am like Simplicius Simplicissimus when he sees the forest hermit, who takes him in and brings him up after his family is tortured and driven away at the beginning of the Thirty Years War, reading a book and silently moving his lips and thinks that he, the hermit, is talking to the pages. I live now in a world of effects. Effects and mysteries! Causes and regular teleology, no more. How anything relates to anything else is unknown, unknowable, and I can tell that my mornings will be taken up with relearning the grammar of daily life.

A car drives by in the rain.

Times passes and it remains rather dark out.

I hear birds painted over this background of thunder.

The rain is loud.

I see my neighbor running through her big garden in the downpour from a shed to her back porch.

Another person.

“Dwell in your own home and you will see how strangely the world is furnished.”

When I go to stand on the front steps to hear and feel the extent of the storm, the weirdly boughing, tall deciduous tress and the gray-green deluge make it all feel very Southern, even though we are basically right on the 45th parallel. Somewhere, so very indistinctly remote, the suggestion of the Sun turns things a yellowish tint, like when smoke from a distant wildfire covers the sky. I am hit with a remarkably warm spray of rain. When I go back inside, another blast of thunder rises up. Yes, it does not come down from anywhere. It feels as though the thunder were rolling up through the earth itself, and I wonder for a moment if the basement, newly below my feet, is adding its resonance to the storm.

Haven’t I been in a house with a basement during a storm before? Of course, but I cannot remember or know right now what that was ever really like, because this is the first. Once, I had to stay in the basement of an IKEA with my family, and with many other families, while a tornado destroyed the small town around us. Once, I huddled, frightened, under a doorway in my great-grandparent’s basement while another tornado tore through town, air raid sirens uselessly wailing in consonance with the wind sounds. I can see, as if through the basement window of this memory and of memory as such, my great uncle in his shorts and sweatshirt out in the yard picking up pieces of hail as big as golf balls. We all—I thought—thought the tornado was going to kill him, but instead, luckily, it just tore a tree out of the ground, and he was fine.

I try to imagine what memory must be like in a paradisiacal state, as depicted in the story of the Garden of Eden. In Dante’s Earthly Paradise, in Purgatorio, he is careful to show that the Lethe, the river of forgetting, runs through the garden. And there is no remembrance without forgetting; without—whether mistakenly or by mere force of circumstances—stepping into a Lethe of one’s own, of forgetting, in the immediacy of a new place, the memories of all those old places.

If something is forgotten, it could be because one has remembered it in something else without even being aware of it.

The first two of William T. Vollmann’s

SUPERNATURAL AXIOMS:1

1. To the extent that the dead live on, the living must resemble them.

2. Confessing such resemblance, we should not reject the possibility that we might at this very moment be dead.

Applying this to the speculation about “Paradise’s memory,” I might say: To the extent that our memories become overlayed with further memories and thus lapse into a latent state of forgetting, the present must nevertheless resemble them. We should not reject the possibility that we might at this very moment be living in a memory.

THE END

This morning, there is a fog. Standing at the coffee maker, looking out of my kitchen window up the street, I can see only three houses out and then everything softens into a warm white cloud. Birds are still going. They start early this far north. I often hear them around 4:30, before sunrise. And that quickly : the fog has both brightened and become thicker. The only solidity outside of the big living room window, where I am now, are the branches and leaves :: all now as if one single, indivisible object :: of the great, green Box Elder. The fog makes everything else :: streetlamp, car, mailbox, dog, squares of grass :: into the other side of my antinomy (it would be, technically, the 2^nd moment of the antinomy; the 2^nd Conflict of the Transcendental Ideas) where there are either no simple objects, only an infinite divisibility, OR only simplicities, indivisible (with the mediating factor of “composite substances” in either case). That’s the one that makes me feel sick. Nothing about the rest of the antinomy affects me in this way :: big cosmological questions :: free will, God, infinite space: unfree willing, No God, finitude. Fine ! : these collapse into each other at my feet. I stand alone on my planet, all dusty, all deserted::: Even the stellar winds do not reach me here, that is how alone I am, and yet I hear a sound like an eternal, slow exhale of breath. An atmosphere made entirely of ex-halation (lit., out-glowing). Here, dust has hardened into an unresponsive layer, like a plaster held together with time, the ooze of old time run dry, desiccated, which forgot to move for too long ‘‘‘‘of itself’’’’, but time does not move, and here, space does not move either except in the person of myself as my will wills it, unfreely or freely is all the same to me. The distance (can I even say that this distance has a locality at all? it verges on a piece of Heideggerian nonsense : although I am rather moved by his brief passages on “remoteness”) between me and the god must be an infinite distance, minus one shaving of a micron of incidental extension::: This dark flash of an incomprehensible distance between me and the god is the only knowable quality of the god, by negative inference : that the god :: to whom I have in a friendly way deliberately appended the definite article and decapitalized :: does not entail anything like existence. The god cannot exist. If the god exists, it cannot be the god. I exist and my wandering planet with its timeplastered dust exists. The god is some-no-thing else : there must either be a kind of being that is creative that does not entail (its own) existence : a some-no-thing that only entails that very existence which it creates but whose creation does not turn back upon its creator to give it existence : no::: It does not “have” existence. Can the demiurge get fully inside of his own diorama without ripping it apart? Well, maybe the demiurge or the infinite antepleromic regress of the demiurge’s demiurge (i.e., the god) is so small _{:: small indeed, a kind atomic subscriptum ::} that it has no locality to speak of::: But here, we arrive not at the cosmological question of the Creating god and its Creature but at one of the vanishing points of the 2^nd antinomy. Size. Divisibility. Simplicity. Objecthood. And though I stand alone on some wandering planet, a rounded, deathheath lightless but for the glow of my own sounding heart, nothing about the god’s inexistence makes me ill. The Uncreated One/s : to that I say “Hello” or “Yes.” Nor does my unfreedom or my freedom put the nausea over me. This bothers me least of all even though when I was younger it worried me constantly. If I didn’t have free will but only experienced myself as “having it” like Spinoza’s thrown stone::: I thought about it all the time. Eventually, I began to cling to the antithesis of the “unfree” will in order to force myself to see how as long as there was a will that willed, questions of free versus unfree were probably nonsense. Word and counterword. Free and unfree were aspect perceptions : one, a fuck, the other a ribbit (the famous drawing of the fuckribbit). Will. That was all. The real antinomic contra would then be between unitary willing and a kind of willless multiplicity of drives : so, was the will divisible or indivisible? And again, rather sickening::: The 2^nd antinomy whipped its tail in the cosmic plasterdust, rearing its composite serpent’s head. God. Will. Finitude / Infinity. Does space go on and on without limit? Or does it cease? But cease where? How? How could space cease, as if it were some hunk of matter? Space ceases (only partially, internally, like a word ceases in the breath of spoken sentence) in every single one of its substantial determinations. I stand here, limiting that space which I also generate. I ripple through it in my smallest movements. My measure of sub-spatial negativity goes forth and up and down like a ball in a wave. Surely this is the antinomy most obviously related to that 2^nd one, my ruling antinomy : my haunting antinomy. It is the question of divisibility and simplicity turned inside-out and projected into its own medium. For me, all of these questions, however much I am able to separate them in my mind :: in my sentences :: stand totally in thrall of that otherwise most boring antinomic Sibling the 2nd: WILL. THE NO-GOD. SPACE W/ INTERNAL LIMIT → Mark these edits resolved ←

I see my question written now in the starless expanse that makes me feel both as colossal as a moon of iron and as miniscule as a fragment of decayed cesium on the head of a louse lounging on the pubic hillside of my slatternly Angel.

Born on the I^st day of Scorpio : thus is my ruling category Separation (written elsewhere as Division). The I^st, 3^rd and 4^th of those cosmological ideas that I have maybe arrogantly subsumed under their supposed equal :: to recapitulate :: are no bother to me on my planet’s surface : :: I. Absolute completeness of the Composition of the given whole of all appearances. (excision) 3. Absolute completeness in the Origination of an appearance. and 4. Absolute completeness as regards Dependence of Existence of the alterable in the field of appearance. OKAY. I return to the reigning monad in the star of my scorpionic constellation. The internal ruler of my indebtedness to the irresolvable feeling of and for Separation. [2.] Absolute completeness in Division of a given whole in the field of appearance.

2^nd and Primary Conflict of the Transcendental Ideas of Myself

2a. Every composite substance in my world is made up of elemental parts, and nothing anywhere exists save the elemental or what is composed of the elemental.

2b. No composite thing in my world is made up of elemental parts, and there nowhere in my world exists anything that is elemental.

I spit myself :: sic :: in 2

I go to pour my II^nd cup of coffee:::

The fog has become a fine rain.

I feel an expansive relief in all of my Faculties.

Magnanimity.

If the II^{nd antinomy is only in pure reason, it is in that part :: unfortunately for my nausea : but it’s okay when you have a sense of wonder (!), a sense of humor :: as if reason had parts, that is also in the world.} _{But the rain comes down in one long soft rushing :: I do not have a tin roof, which would make it into a crushing waterfall, but eaves and their thin gurgling gutters such as one can find anywhere :: sound : ssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhuuuuuuuttttttt uuuuuuuuuuuuppppppppp .}

So, I order books in fits and starts. I try to do so with a pacing that approximates that of my reading so that I can begin this or that as it arrives in the mail.

I am capable of entertaining this delusion to an alarming extent. If I have eight books at varying stages of their USPS journeys to my mailbox, I will, in perfectly good conscience, assure myself that they will all be more or less read in the next two months—before Summer is even half way through, easily (!).

Ok. Well, a few books are in the mail. Some Hackett editions of The Faerie Queene. A galley or two of upcoming novels. The first volume of what is supposedly one of the best accounts of the Spanish Civil War by José Peirats. My non-galley copy of The Beginnings should get here any day now.

Earlier this week, however, my girlfriend told me about bookstore #6, which I had long ago, sadly written off. I knew about it, having driven by it many times, but it had always been closed. The last time I went by this most isolated of all the bookstores (it’s at the very tip of the peninsula, before you get to a ferry that will take you out to a small island, which, at its northern end, has another ferry that will take you out to another, even smaller, island, which is supposedly horrifically haunted), it had a sign that said “permanently closed”. My girlfriend said she’d heard the owner died some time ago and that the new owners of the building were having a sale. Every book = $3 w/out exception. Only open a few hours on the weekends. —So we drove up on Saturday morning to get there as early as possible on what would be the second or third day of the store’s liquidation run.

I made sure to eat a good breakfast, drink a lot of coffee, take a lot of cash. Get my head on straight!

We hopped in my rusty, green Buick and wound up the coast—took about an hour, and we got there at 8:30. The doors were wide open and only one or two other people (elderly characters with stacks of local history hardcovers) were there. I talked to the new owner for a moment—friendly enough!—and came to a happy if mercenary judgment: I don’t think this guy knows books.

Taking a hard left into what was primarily an art section, the first thing my eye settled on was a hardcover first edition of Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes.

Shoutout to . He’s the only reason I know about the damn thing in the first place. An insane first find. But it was not to be the most insane.

I crept along the art / architecture section and started making a pile. I picked up Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, a hardcover of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt, even though I already have the two-volume Harper Torchbooks edition . . . but this was within seconds of entering this store with probably tens of thousands of books—so, realizing that with the cash-only sign, I had a hard limit for the morning, I chose to be more selective and put back the latter two copies. The new cover of Hopscotch is nicer anyway, and I think the Burckhardt might’ve been abridged.

I went to a different section and right away saw three copies of The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk’s fantastic biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I’d never owned it myself, having read (Wittgenstein-scholar) Idris Robinson’s battered copy years ago. What was weird was that the day before, I wrote a note to myself saying something like “I need to finally get a copy of the Ray Monk book.” I related my minor (?) synchronicity to the politely faked surprise of the store owner. I saved it a little bit, or maybe I just annoyed him more by saying: “Wow, I know, a book in a bookstore! What a coincidence!”

I wandered, trying to divine the system of categorization of the maze. One thing that was initially confusing but which I really like is that the original owner shelved criticism with its subject. So, if you wanted a critical biography or book of essays about Thomas Mann, you would also find Mann’s own work beside these. There was no “classics” section—it was all directly shelved under “Literary Criticism”.

Another thing I began to pick up about this guy—the old owner—was that he had plenty of books on communism. This is by no means uncommon in a certain type of remote, American bookstore, except the books are always called some nonsense like The Red Menace and they’re by Henry Kissinger. Not the case here at all. Based on the sections on China, Russia, Vietnam, Latin America and politics / history in general, this guy was a veritable sleeper agent of the bygone Sino-or-Soviet contending powers of yesteryear. It was impressive.

Now: in plain view, face-up on a countertop, I found a small chapbook, gorgeously designed: On Turning Eighty by Henry Miller.

I stood there, looking at it for a moment. The owner happened to pass by, and I asked him if he was sure about the $3 thing. No exceptions? No exceptions except the one exception, he said: some books on local history that many of the old timers in the area wanted badly—they were printed by the old owner himself. That was it.

“Okay,” I said, adding the little chapbook of my favorite countryman to the pile.1

One thing I should say about diving into a massive bookstore like this, which can feel rather overwhelming when everything feels like it’s the next best thing from free: Don’t look anything up. I was going through the German literature, found something by Raabe or Döblin and did something that, upon reflection, I find distasteful: I merely considered pulling out my phone to see what these books were “worth”. But—I paused and saved my own soul.

“Why would I need to look anything up? I’ve been training my whole life for this shit! Follow your heart!”

When I got home, I did look up the Henry Miller chapbook. As it turns out, there were only 200 copies ever printed, and each one is signed.

Go ahead and look that up if you feel inclined.

(How had I not seen this while I was at the store???)

The only thing that makes me apprehensive about the Henry Miller signature is that it looks significantly different from the signature in my Paris first English edition (Obelisk Press) of Black Spring. HOWEVER: the name is HANK and it is dedicated to a FRANK. I detect in this rhyme a certain sense of humor and lightness proper to Henry Miller. Hank being a variant of Henry, I believe I’m in the clear, especially given the fact of there only being, apparently, 200 copies of On Turning Eighty in existence.

(All pictured below:) I bought a book on ancient Chinese printing that was originally penciled in at $300—I got an old hardcover of The Family Mashber by Der Nister—a coverless copy of Nettles by Lawrence—two Library of America slipcase hardcovers: Poe’s Essays and Reviews and Melville’s Typee, Omoo, and Mardii—a Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville’s Pierre—a hardcover first edition of Green Henry, Gottfried Keller’s classic Bildungsroman, published by Grove Press, which I’m reading now, alongside The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin—then, Red Calvary by Isaac Babel; The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono (with the paperback dust cover! His books rarely still have those); Willehalm by Wolfram von Eschenbach; and, lastly, German Romantic Criticism by Novalis, Schlegel, Schleiermacher (and others).

A final word on trusting one’s heart at the bookstore,

addressed to the simultaneously abstemious and greedy asshole with his scanner (it was a fucking PDT—a PORTABLE DATA TERMINAL) going through every single book to see what was of monetary value: you are not my enemy! Indeed, you are probably a bookstore owner and so my friend, by default. My ire is certainly misdirected. I want your bookstore to succeed. (!) However—I did not get to look through a good deal of the Latin American or Russian literature because of your impassable physical presence + your wheeled crate, and now, when I go back to see what’s what, I will know that it has been vultured through . . . and yet, I am certain I will find something of great worth—to me. There’s no PDT for that, is there—. I guess those copies of Terra Nostra and On Turning Eighty (and Green Henry! it doesn’t even have an ISBN) didn’t have barcodes, huh? . . . If only you’d gone into it with courage & heart.

⁂

“𝕃𝕠𝕧𝕖 𝕙𝕒𝕤 𝕚𝕥𝕤 𝕝𝕚𝕞𝕚𝕥𝕤 𝕓𝕦𝕥 𝕙𝕒𝕥𝕣𝕖𝕕 𝕚𝕤 𝕓𝕠𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕝𝕖𝕤𝕤”

— The Tunnel, William H. Gass

The principal aspect of my personality

: This is difficult—almost to the extent that, after sitting here and thinking about it—not even for very long—I want to say that indecision is the principal aspect of my personality. But this would be like saying “filling out the Proust questionnaire is the ruling trait of my character”: the immediacy of interrogation is not the medium of the answer.

“Indecisiveness”: when you’re writing, things about you can get turned upside down. Those aspects of oneself that are most pronounced in day-to-day social life, whether among friends or family or strangers, become lost when writing, which is to say, liberated—turned loose like a dog in dark woods.

When I begin writing . . . —But I never “sit down to write”: I blink, or stumble, or cough, or recite a touchword, or shake my eyeballs around auto-nystagmatically in their eye-caves, and then I was already doing it, and I find myself submerged in that pseudo-continuity of my handwriting where “sitting down to write” or “opening my notebook” becomes a backthrown fiction . . . Is it the “principal aspect of my personality” that guides what I say? Or do I speak from the place of this vacuum left behind by the self-removal of that principal aspect, which allows all those lesser, minor aspects of myself to rush in together like a coup d’état of the Affects?

The scene is like that of the kabbalistic idea of tzimtzum, found in Isaac Luria.

The tzimtzum is the moment the Creator removes Itself from Itself (removes itself from a state of undifferentiated Being; removes itself to make room for its creation) . . . it is the negative moment of creation, when, in Fichtean terms, the 𝔑𝔦𝔠𝔥𝔱-ℑ𝔠𝔥 arises, alienated from the ℑ𝔠𝔥, or the Self-/-Creator, as it exits its own fullness so that the determinate space of creation may arise and open itself up to difference—to modes.

In Hegel’s lesser Logic, this is the moment when pure being and pure nothingness, which before are indistinguishable, split themselves asunder:

𝔅𝔢𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔥𝔬𝔴𝔢𝔳𝔢𝔯 𝔦𝔰 𝔞𝔫 𝔞𝔟𝔰𝔬𝔩𝔲𝔱𝔢 𝔞𝔟𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔠𝔢 𝔬𝔣 𝔞𝔱𝔱𝔯𝔦𝔟𝔲𝔱𝔢𝔰, 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔰𝔬 𝔦𝔰 𝔑𝔬𝔲𝔤𝔥𝔱. ℌ𝔢𝔫𝔠𝔢 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔡𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔠𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔟𝔢𝔱𝔴𝔢𝔢𝔫 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔱𝔴𝔬 𝔦𝔰 𝔬𝔫𝔢 𝔬𝔣 𝔬𝔭𝔦𝔫𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔬𝔫𝔩𝔶, 𝔦𝔱 𝔦𝔰 𝔞 𝔮𝔲𝔦𝔱𝔢 𝔫𝔬𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔞𝔩 𝔡𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔠𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫, 𝔴𝔥𝔦𝔠𝔥 𝔦𝔰 𝔞𝔱 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔰𝔞𝔪𝔢 𝔱𝔦𝔪𝔢 𝔫𝔬 𝔡𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔠𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫.1

Glenn Alexander Magee, who wrote a great book called Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, says that

for Luria, the crucial question is this: How can the world exist at all if we grant the existence of God as Ein-Sof [the infinite]? If God is truly infinite, no space is left over for creation. Thus, given that the world exists, it must have come about through God’s self-limitation of His infinite nature. This self-limitation is called by Luria the tsimtsum [...], which means “concentration” or “contraction.” [...] Scholem describes the tsimtsum as a “withdrawing into oneself.”2

The form of the tzimtzum need not only apply to God, the Ein-Sof and creation: it may also be a formula for one’s own personality, the principal aspect of which creates all the others in preserving itself, canceling itself, and thus, executing its tripartite 𝔄𝔲𝔣𝔥𝔢𝔟𝔢𝔫, lifting itself up.3 It finds expression by withdrawing into itself.

The principal aspect of my personality—here I seem to have sleepwalked all the way to something else I’ve been writing:

One of the apparently fundamental traits of my character seems to be that I do not want to participate—that very often, I would rather be not-doing; I would rather be standing at the edge or at the border-zone: of a field, of a ledge, a road, a room, a country—. Conversely, and as a corollary to this basic tendency, if not fact of myself, it seems incomprehensible that I will not do, be and become everything that there is to do, be and become in the world before I die.

Here, it is possible that I could substitute “apparently fundamental traits of my character” with “principal aspects of my personality.” It is true that I would rather sit at the edge of the table of life, circling, either on the point of exit, or—to shift images—like a bird hovering over some body of water, at the lightest point before diving down, broken light bouncing off the scales of the fish in and below its black Seagull’s eye . . .

(The word for this is 𝔖𝔠𝔥𝔴𝔢𝔟𝔢𝔫.)

In an earlier version of the Proust questionnaire, the wording is different. It just says

Your favorite virtue

My favorite virtue must be that virtue which I keep to myself to such an extent that I remove it from my world entirely, bathing everything in the light-colored shade of its absence. I hoard my favorite virtue like Gobseck hoards piles of pre-revolutionary gold. It concentrates, contracts and removes itself so that all other qualities may express themselves fully in its absence. It is what executes the tzimtzum of my phenomenal world. In this way, my principal aspect, and my favorite virtue, must be my hatred.

I understand this Lurianic Affect—which I am calling “virtue” —to be invisibly embedded in one’s being, action and thought. It doesn’t, strictly speaking, exist—it is a pure exiting. My hatred, therefore, has nothing to do with ressentiment, which entails an envious, oblique, burning want of what others are and have (an involuted hatred of oneself). It has everything to do with an inextinguishable sense of wonder thrown out, over and into everything. It is also related to love, a subject the treatment of which I will defer until some other time.

My principal virtue is that Affect—or drive—which has been taken into myself and rendered, if only at intervals, inoperative: my capacity for hatred, contracted (both made small and signed by my own hand, as in, under contract) and withdrawn spherically into itself with all the glimmering, superdense finitude of one’s reigning Monad. And my Monad glimmers.

𝚆𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚍𝚒𝚍 𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚘 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚝𝚢𝚙𝚎𝚠𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝙱𝚞𝚋𝚒𝚜 𝚑𝚊𝚍 𝚐𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚗 𝚑𝚒𝚖? 𝙷𝚎 𝚏𝚕𝚞𝚗𝚐 𝚒𝚝 𝚘𝚏𝚏 𝚊 𝚌𝚕𝚒𝚏𝚏 𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚛𝚘𝚌𝚔𝚜!

When I was 15 or 16, I heard a very famous writer—whose event I attended last-minute somewhere within the recesses of the University of New Mexico—say something like:

You have to write your first drafts by hand, because typing on a computer gives everything a falsely finished look and makes you write poorly.

The thinking here seemed to be that a typed first draft (never mind the fact that most people are bad at formatting to say nothing of being their own typesetters) gives the visual impression that the work has already been “published” (finished off!) and is therefore adequate as it stands, which, further, will stop the writer from changing it as it (certainly) needs to be changed.

As happens when you hear an opinion on a subject that you have not first thoroughly considered yourself under the dim lantern-light of personal experience,1 I took this to be a basic truth, that writing by hand is always somehow more serious than typing on a computer. For years and years, I always wrote by hand first (never pausing to consider that a keyboard, too, is operated precisely by hand), and if I did type, I regarded what appeared on the screen with a measure of distrust.

(I’m not going to say what writer it was that I heard speak at UNM! Too embarrassing! . . . But I listened to him, it was important for me at that age to hear advice—any advice!—no matter what it was, from someone who I believed would know. ⸻At the end of the event, which took place on or around Halloween, the writer threw bags of candy out to the crowd. After he ran out of candy and turned away to leave, he took the marker—seemingly as an afterthought—which he had used to sign books, faced the crowd one last time and hurled it over our heads. Without so much as stepping away from the standing-room-only spot I occupied near the back wall, I reached out and excaliburly closed my fist around the handwriting instrument.)

Years after integrating this piece of advice, I read Bolaño’s 2666. There’s a part where Hans Reiter (Benno von Archimboldi), the fictional author around whom the novel revolves, throws his typewriter off a cliff onto the rocks after buying a laptop computer that he uses to write all of his subsequent books. It’s not as if he throws his notepad and pencil into the ocean, but the anti-sentimental force of the image was enough to make the handwriting-first/only idea sound silly. Here was Archimboldi (I didn’t care that he was a fictional character—nothing matters less than this) throwing away his typewriter! It was as though Archimboldi (and Bolaño with him) had tossed the handwriting advice onto the rocks, too. And there was nothing romantic about this being thrown onto the rocks. The rocks were also discarded.

A temperamentally sympathetic image: I started typing more often and writing much, much more in general—by hand, just as much.

A few years later, I came across the advice exactly opposite to that of “handwriting first.” I don’t remember who said it, but it was something like this:

It’s good to type first because—by seeing the sentences regularized and controlled through font, spacing, margins and so on—one is able to distance oneself from the text in order to make more sober, depersonalized changes.

(It matters less what the rules of war are than that rules exist in the first place.)

This method, that of alienating oneself from the text so as to more appropriately judge it as something outside oneself, is one that I immediately felt to be correct—it confirmed what I had already emotionally decided while reading the computer-dashed-against-the-rocks passage from 2666.

It occurs to me now that the “handwriting first” advice only makes sense from the perspective of a writer who is already used to frequently seeing their work in print. What could such a writer possibly do with this advice?

The truth is that it doesn’t matter how you do it, in the same way that it probably doesn’t matter which translation of a book you read first: someone prefers Remembrance of Things Past to In Search of Lost Time. Either way, you’re reading Proust. Some trust the translations of Pevear–Volokhonsky, and others admire and remain with Constance Garnett for their Russian. It’s all Dostoevsky to me.

If you read both translations of a single text, the original may reveal something of itself to you like the hovering specter of a line of Augenmusik, played by neither the left nor the right hand and yet implied in the negative inflections between the two.

But there will always be people who sulk and hedge about not being able to read the original French or Russian or whatever. These whiners often use the precious, almost superstitious esteem in which they hold the original as an excuse to avoid the dangers of reading anything at all.

One or Several McVeighs

The Truth has the structure of a fiction.

— Jacques Lacan

That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by, then filling the void with associations. He knew that Freud knew nothing about wolves, or anuses for that matter. The only thing Freud understood was what a dog is, and a dog’s tail. It wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t be enough. The Wolf-Man knew that Freud would soon declare him cured, but that it was not at all the case and his treatment would continue for all eternity under Brunswick, Lacan, Leclaire.

— Deleuze and Guattari, “One or Several Wolves”1

Is any given person always a perfectly monadic unity? Or is a person something more like a shifting signifier within an irreplicable multiplicity?

Or, instead, are you more of a “lone nut”? Or are you (also) an entire pack? Of the two, which strikes you as the more phantasmatic?

Speaking only for myself, I am neither wholly lone, nor wholly a nut—but, however alone I may sometimes find myself, I often nevertheless feel “several,” and though my feelings toward “the crowd” are ambivalent (the logic of the crowd is, after all, valence), I do feel an affinity for the image of the pack (what Canetti in Crowds and Power sees as the molecular structure, so to speak, of the crowd). The roving pack is, to me, the most believable analog for what we otherwise like to think of—maybe with good reason but certainly also in a mythological, provisional sense—as cleanly discrete individuality. Who among us does not contain multitudes? And from a certain angle, a multitude looks as though it contained an individuality.

It is to the acute credit of Wendy S. Painting that she is able to bring out these valences embedded in the multiply contradictory, non-fictional configurations of the life of the (convicted) Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, in her Aberration in the Heartland of the Real. Painting is not taken in by this myth of the perfectly consistent oneness of the individual, along with its attendant uncritical theories of truth, which may, in the end, only produce uncritical fictions.

Apparently, this book is about Timothy McVeigh and the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building, which killed 168 people (19 of whom were children). Before I read it, all I knew about the subject derived from the meaningless certainty of analytic judgments:

Q: What do you know about the Oklahoma City Bombing?

A: Well, I am aware that there was a bombing, and, furthermore, that it took place in Oklahoma’s very own City.

Q: And what do you know about Timothy McVeigh, the OKC Bomber?

A: That’s easy! I can tell you with a priori certainty—.

I didn’t know anything about the bombing. I didn’t know, for example, that all of the footage (taken of the bombed building itself from various, unconnected CCTV security systems) was confiscated by the FBI, never to be used in court to prove that there was indeed only one person (McVeigh) dropping off the truck bomb, as the FBI claims. I didn’t know that out of the hundreds of eyewitness reports of McVeigh—from the day of the bombing—not a single one of them described him as being alone; he was always seen with at least one other person, often several others. I had no idea that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) had offices in the Murrah Building and that all ATF employees who worked there were told not to come in on the morning of the bombing, which was also the anniversary of the fire at Waco.

I did know—but had somehow forgotten—that McVeigh was at the siege of the Branch Davidians at Waco. This gets nailed by the government as McVeigh’s motive for bombing the Murrah Building: terroristic, lone wolf revenge for the feds’ violent infringement on the lives and constitutionally guaranteed rights of its citizens.

But the book is far, far weirder than a compilation of surprising, suggestive facts. The real heat in Aberration is given off by the crazy-making internal contradictions that exist (or insist) between every possible arrangement of the facts of Timothy McVeigh’s life, as well as the bombing.

Above, I used the phrase “uncritical fictions.” To be clear, I am talking about the accepted version of events of, and leading up to, the Oklahoma City Bombing replicated/reported by the Rachel Maddows of the world, one of the most concise renderings of which appears in Aberration’s epilogue, “Wearing the Wolf’s Head”. Painting recalls MSNBC’s bizarre “The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist, narrated by Rachael Maddow.”

Although presented as a “documentary,” its theatrical production places it more accurately in the category of “docufiction”; a genre wherein “documentary and fiction breed to create a better truth.”

The show used a look-alike actor to portray McVeigh in key scenes leading up to and after the bombing, sequences made more realistic by digitally placing McVeigh’s face, mapped in 3D, over the actor’s and overlaying previously unheard audiotapes of prison interviews with McVeigh conducted by the authors of American Terrorist. Viewers hear McVeigh narrate his confession while simultaneously witnessing cartoonish versions of Nichols and McVeigh building the bomb; McVeigh, alone, pulling the Ryder up to the front of the Murrah building, igniting the detonation fuse, and calmly walking away as the ground shakes underneath him. Such scenes are interspersed with interviews of victims’ family members, survivors, first responders, defense and prosecution attorneys, law enforcement officials, McVeigh’s former friends, and Dr. John Smith, his now deceased prison psychologist.2

Aberration’s profusion of research, interviews and analysis convinces me that the easily enunciated story told above—the thrust of which is moralistic and gets used for political ends, like, e.g., laws for guaranteeing a stronger security state, “better communication between agencies,” etc. —is an outline of everything that did not occur (or did not occur in that way, in the context asserted and assumed as true).

(Significantly, after a quick search through YouTube, I was not able to find footage of McVeigh at Waco without the very same framing and commentary that Painting has shown to be essentially political. The thinking goes like this: Timothy McVeigh was a disgruntled, right-wing veteran who loved guns and was concerned to the point of paranoia that the Federal government was hollowing out our civil liberties by way of an increasingly powerful security state. As a consequence of his ridiculous paranoia and hatred of the government, he took revenge by way of a lone wolf act of terrorism. Therefore, the Federal government should speed along all the things that McVeigh was worried about in order to prevent the creation of future McVeighs [even though, according to this train of thought, this is the state of affairs that created the conditions for his actions in the first place]. You hear this over and over again in news clips and documentaries. It’s a pretty tight story, though they usually don’t frame it as sarcastically as I have here.)

The Wandering Signifier of McVeigh is the ostensible subject of Aberration—but Painting’s arresting title (taken from Don DeLillo’s novel Libra, about Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination) stopped me again and again throughout her singular, at times experimental book. Does the title refer to McVeigh? I’m not sure that it does. That is, after all, what the subtitle of the book, The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh, is for. It is something of a meta-biography. But its subject is far from easy to name.

We are presented with a crowd of McVeighs, which makes his very name into something questionable. The problem with lining up examples, as I might do here, is that they compress easily into the image of one story about one guy. They give a false image of certainty—a character. Painting does not ever allow her subject to become a mere character, and she seems to do this by isolating and presenting many possible/actual characters under one highly unstable name.

Finally, he knew that he was in the process of acquiring a veritable proper name, the Wolf-Man, a name more properly his than his own, since it attained the highest degree of singularity in the instantaneous apprehension of a generic multiplicity: wolves. He knew that this new and true proper name would be disfigured and misspelled, retranscribed as a patronymic.3

— Deleuze and Guattari, “One or Several Wolves”

Various people later reported that from this time until the day of the bombing they had known the man they saw in the televised perp walk, not as Timothy McVeigh, but as (alternately) Chuck, Daryl Bridges, Steve Murphy, Robert Kling (born April 19, 1972), Mike Havens, Mike Foley, Sergeant Mac, Shawn Rivers, Joe Rivers, David Gilmore, Richard Mentan, Tim Tuttle, Tom Tuttle, Terry Tuttle, Jerry Tuttle, Tom Snead, Tim Sneed, Tim McEegie, Tim McNay, Tim McVey, Tim Johnson and Timmy, among other names.

— Painting, Aberration, “Leaving Buffalo: Late 1992–Early 1993”

Constitutive Incompleteness in Fact and Fiction

Before I started reading Aberration, a few different people all told me versions of the same thing: “Good luck with that book.” I thought their dismissiveness referred to the book’s length (the massively detailed endnotes take it into the 700-page territory) just as much as its subject matter, its “content.” But one conversation I had with [REDACTED COM-POSIT INFORMANT] gave me the impression that Aberration might have some serious shortcomings “as a book.” I replied to this with my usual, “I’ll see about that!” Our conversation shifted toward other reading, and Roberto Bolaño came up.

My interlocutor’s judgment of Bolaño’s two “big” novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666, is something like: “The Savage Detectives is a much better book. It has a directed plot-structure, more consistent characters, it’s long but not too long,” etc. On the other hand, “2666 is all over the place, it goes in too many directions, it needed a better editor and, anyway, it’s technically unfinished.”

While I acknowledge many of these same details, I personally judge the two books differently. I think The Savage Detectives has serious shortcomings. It may even be my least-favored of Bolaño’s. Many of these “shortcomings” come precisely from the book’s relatively “polished” quality. I don’t know when I will ever feel compelled to reread Detectives, however much I enjoyed it the first time around. On the other hand, 2666 is one of the novels that I think about most often. I know I will read 2666 again, and not just once. Its indirectness and its incompleteness are, for me, some of its best qualities. There are even multiple orders in which one can read and reread the five books of 2666. I don’t think the same could be said of Detectives.

Fine—what does this have to do with Aberration . . .

One might say that the difference between The Savage Detectives and 2666 is like that—condensed in my novelistic example—between two different models of reality, or more precisely, two different visions of the “Real”4 —and therefore of how truth must be approached, whether in a novel or in a historical/biographical case study such as Aberration. It’s not a matter of simple divisions between fact and fiction. What is important here is the form via which either of these are approached.

Consider Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, my lay-recounting of the conclusions of which go like this:

Axioms, which ground or guarantee the consistency of a given logical/mathematical system, are always only assumed. If they are to be spoken about in a way that does not result in paradox, this speech must take place outside the system and its axioms.

In other words, for mathematics (or propositional logic) to function consistently as a language that describes a world, its very foundations must remain inscrutable—there remains something of an aberration at its core, an event horizon of sense beyond which the operations of our otherwise reliable mode of discourse cannot pass.

A perfectly complete (logical or mathematical) system, all axioms of which could somehow be recursively spoken about, would short circuit into a closed incompleteness. The system’s axioms would become, so to speak, unmoored but with nowhere to drift.5

I think something analogous holds with fiction, as well as with non-fiction (the barriers separating these being frequently porous). If a novel is too consistent with itself (The Savage Detectives), its ability to describe the world in an inexhaustible way hits an eventual limit. Its “system” closes in on itself—collapses. It does not give us that weird shiver that is truth’s echo in our own being.

Now, if a novel is inconsistent with itself (riddled with openings and all the inscrutability of a set of axioms beyond which we cannot conceivably go further, already from the very beginning), surprisingly, it opens itself up to the world. Such a novel cannot account for itself—very much like our own being—but it can do something, it can go out and expose itself to the world.

The Savage Detectives, with its strongly causal plot—Arturo Belano’s and Ulises Lima’s search for the poet Cesarea Tinajero—is like an enclosed finitude upon which we see a mere picture of infinity. It is a shining hall of mirrors with the interiority of a Leibnizian monad with “no windows through which anything could come in or go out.”6

2666 is a radically finite creation that exposes itself to the actual abyss of the infinite, the bewildering ripple-effects and echos of the Real.

A speculative hypothesis for critics: it’s not so much that any given novel is either The Illiad or The Odyssey but that it is either Leibnizian/monadological (The Savage Detectives) or Spinozistic/Affective (2666). There is the further-complicating speculation that Spinoza’s metaphysical system could conceivably be contained within Leibniz’ (the latter acting as a kind of descriptive meta-metaphysics), in the same way that 2666 is itself narrated by Arturo Belano, a main character from Detectives. One is superior to the other, but the “weaker” of the two is able to contain the “greater” in a dizzying mise en abyme of descriptive7 apparatuses.

The former is a fantastic novel—but the latter, which Bolaño died before “finishing” (although I believe that 2666, as I’m attempting to suggest here, is a fundamentally unfinishable, i.e., constitutively incomplete book, like all three of Kafka’s novels) is literally the author’s struggle against death. If it fails on many fronts “as a novel,” that’s the least of what I care about.

2666 and Aberration in the Heartland of the Real are two books of certainly differing literary orders that nevertheless share a deep affinity in their radically finite self-subjection to the “Real,” which cannot be directly approached but only circled, outlined, questioned, parried in a profusion of language. This points toward the eerie conception of the Real that Mark Fisher outlines so well in his 2017 book, The Weird and the Eerie.

Fisher asks, at one point, what the enigma of places like Easter Island or Stonehenge really consists in—we might also try to imagine the same enigmatic character that a place like the Oklahoma City Bombing memorial will acquire once the official narrative underpinning its existence has been shown—as it is in Aberration—to be basically false:

The problem here is not why the people who created these structures disappeared—there is no mystery here—but the nature of what disappeared. What kinds of being created these structures? How were they similar to us, and how were they different? What kind of symbolic order did these beings belong to, and what role did the monuments they constructed play in it? For the symbolic structures which made sense of the monuments have rotted away, and in a sense what we witness here is the unintelligibility and the inscrutability of the Real itself. Confronted with Easter Island or Stonehenge, it is hard not to speculate about what the relics of our culture will look like when the semiotic systems in which they are currently embedded have fallen away. We are compelled to imagine our own world as a set of eerie traces.8

This is relevant to both titles in question, literally.

The numeral 2666 is one of the central riddles of Bolaño’s book. It pulls at us from a distance, like some dark celestial body, throughout the horrific and apparently causally disconnected elements of the novel: the Holocaust, Prussia, human trafficking, criminally poor labor conditions, the drug trade—and the murders of women in and around Ciudad Juárez during the 1990s and early 2000s. You almost forget about the title as you read, but the question returns like an apparition. The uncertainty of its meaning becomes more and more eerie and acute once we see that it likely represents a date in the future. We are force to “imagine our world as a set of eerie traces” the culmination of which lies in the future and must remain, to all of us as finite participants in the incompleteness of history, an ominous mystery.9

If Bolaño locates his own aberration in the heartland of the real by way of fiction at some date in the future, Wendy S. Painting does so by way of multiple non-fictions within many places and during many moments emanating out of the past. The remit of Aberration is not only what happened and what did not happen but also the disruption of the semiotic system in which both what did and did not happen are embedded.

This disruption is the best picture we have of the Real, but it is not the Real.

Sometimes he looked around him, horrified by the weight of it all, the career of paper. He sits in the data spew of hundreds of lives. There’s no end in sight . . . Let’s call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let’s devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption . . . We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men . . . There is much here [in the] aberration in the heartland of the real.

— Don DeLillo, Libra (1988)10

Knots and Excesses

The experimental thrust of Aberration comes with Painting’s typology of “five commonly told narrative variations [on McVeigh and the bombing]: The Lone Wolf, The Pack of Wolves, The Closely-Watched Wolves, The Guilty Agent and The Experimental Wolf.”

These five narrative types are all given highly detailed treatment throughout the book. The one that comes off as the most improbable, at times almost laughably so, is the Lone Wolf (i.e., official) narrative. Disturbingly, all of these narrative types—including that of Lone Wolf—are shown to have originated in McVeigh’s own weave of internally contradictory storytelling.

What we are confronted with is a chaos of multiple non-fictions. Painting has the intellectual honesty never to pretend as if she were telling us what “really happened.” The truth, unfortunately, isn’t available to us in such a way.

At the beginning of one of Slavoj Žižek’s newer books,11 he quotes from a personal communication with Jure Simoniti that I think describes a far more evasive but compelling picture of the “truth”:

Traditionally, truth seems to have posed as a regulative idea of a state of direct accord. However, this aspired directness was then compensated with the infinite postponement of achieving it. It is perhaps time to reverse this formula, hence, to conceive truth in the frame of indirectness, and then let it happen fully in the here and now. A mere change of perspective enables us to detect an entirely different “life of truth.” Instead of conceptualizing “truth” as perpetually approximating to a certain idealized state of full satisfaction, we will rather shift our attention to the instances of truth emerging actually within a particular historical reality, either inciting events of great magnitude and irreversible temporality, or producing incontrovertible and inextricable knots and excesses in everyday life, or producing unexpected surpluses in the flukes and flaws of speech. Truth seems impossible and is at the same time inevitable; it gives itself the veneer of eluding our grasp, but then crops up abruptly, even accidentally, and engages us in its discursive bindingness, its compulsory and inescapable effects, its political force and historical exigency, and perhaps its logical necessity.

This remarkable passage could be obliterated into multiple discrete elements (irreversible temporality, knots and excesses, flukes and flaws of speech, etc.) and annotated, filled back in and composited, with examples from Aberration: evidence destroyed by the FBI, conversations and communiques the effects of which are partially known but whose contents must remain forever speculative, as if somehow blank, slips of speech, confession through obfuscation, a proliferation of names, aliases, false leads and contacts . . .

This conception of truth as elastic, dynamic and uncanny is not lost on Painting. Deep into the text, she includes a line from Deleuze’s Différence et Répétition:12 “In this situation, understandings of “conventional history,” in this case the Lone Wolf story, or any other purportedly true version:”

. . . may be only one possible system, one that has screened out most “rings” and whose “points of intersection” are strictly defined by cause and effect. However, if history is conceived instead as an open system or a conglomerate of interacting systems, the opposition between random event and cause/effect sequences would no longer obtain: certain occurrences would appear to be random only because they are located on “rings” that are not intersecting at visible points, and certain “patterns [could] emerge outside the bounds of cause and effect.”

This dizzying, highly unsatisfying understanding of truth as that which emanates away from the inscrutable axiom of some deeply embedded, ever inaccessible and generative Real, is expertly shown in Aberration in a similar way as it is in 2666 (though in a very different register). The paranormal feeling of dread that pervades the latter book is brought into frightening relief in the former.

The dread has as much to do with how facts can immediately trade valences with fictions, and how fictions can long be taken for fact—but the real issue is that neither are adequate in themselves for truth: that is because fact and fiction are the effects of the same truth, and however carefully we reach to grasp these, like eddies in a river, we grasp nothing, producing only more eddies, more echoes, traces upon traces.

One can only hope that if these traces, in all their mutually rebounding manifestations, are somehow recorded and held up together, in all their contradictions and apparent correspondences, then the process of this recording (research, investigation and the creative process itself) might nevertheless yield an illuminating map of truth-like relations. And that is to say nothing of the mode of truth that oneself is or may be.

*

Setting all that aside, I tend to suspect, based on this very disturbing book, that the Federal Government bombed itself, along with the daycare center located in the Murrah Building, with the aid of the Aryan Republican Army, Timothy McVeigh, and a bunch of other freaks via a program, however obliquely, called PATCON, none of whom were “on the same page,” and none of whom will likely ever go to prison, to say nothing of “acquiring a veritable proper name.”

But even that is too clean of a proposition. False flags and things of that nature are far more diffuse—far more eerie—than their hypothetical narrativizations.

You really should read the book.

ℕ𝕀𝔾ℍ𝕋 𝕀𝕊 𝔸 𝔻𝕀ℂ𝕋𝕀𝕆ℕ𝔸ℝ𝕐

𝔻𝕀ℂ𝕋𝕀𝕆ℕ𝔸ℝ𝕀𝔼𝕊 𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕂𝔼ℕ in their reader the nocturnal, grammatical sense, the paradigmatic drive that fires the activity of the art thief and insomniac perambulator: the escaped scalpel of the surrealist insurgent.

𝕋ℍ𝔼 𝔻𝕀ℂ𝕋𝕀𝕆ℕ𝔸ℝ𝕐 is any work open to lexicographical necromancy. They are undead books.

Words and editorialized entries that have the strongest potential for new life are those that even two hundred years ago were regarded as archaic, strange and dead.

ℕ𝕀𝔾ℍ𝕋𝕋𝕀𝕄𝔼 𝕀𝕊 a place’s very own dictionary revealed; the compendium or lexical bestiary of its soul.

When daylight fades, the real diction of a place—a city, street, cafe, lakeshore or harbor, mountain top or cemetery—begins to speak clearly, unhindered by the fumes of practicality and the demands of syntax that dominate daytime life.

𝕋ℍ𝔼 𝔻𝕀𝔸𝕃𝔼ℂ𝕋 𝕆𝔽 𝔻𝔸𝕐𝕋𝕀𝕄𝔼: speed, phones, news, billboards (Benjamin’s dictatorial perpendicular), all ruled by the forces of work, murder, servitude, mastery, subterfuge; the cloying requirements and astringency of the reality principle.

But written on the horizontal page of the dictionary of nighttime, things don their second meanings: a phone call becomes the disembodied voice, the soul flowered into the voice of the long departed dead, whispering old desires through the aether of irreversibility; an ugly advertisement glows strangely, denying its ostensible message by its very medium—it smothers itself in an indulgence of color and electric light.

ℕ𝕀𝔾ℍ𝕋𝔽𝔸𝕃𝕃 is almost never sad but portentous and full. Nightfall ushers in the world of second meanings.

Sunrise, on the other hand, especially for one who has stayed awake through the night, has something melancholy about it.

𝔸 𝕎𝔸𝕃𝕂 𝔸𝔽𝕋𝔼ℝ 𝕊𝕌ℕ𝕊𝔼𝕋 is enough for the courage of nocturnal ideas to take hold. The daylight, and the morning, is something like the familiar study of our regular lives, and—this is a secret of which children are intensely aware—staying up very late breaks the (necessary) spell of temporal regularity. At twilight hour, one can pretend toward eternity.

*

If you become a paid subscriber to COM-POSIT (for one month only), I will mail you four colorful cards w/ the above text—they make great coasters

At the risk of making the answers too chaotic to read, I have left them completely unedited—meaning that I didn’t correct or italicize book titles. I didn’t add commas, nor did I regularize capitalization… I didn’t regularize anything.

The responses were very interesting for me to read. I imagine they will be for you too, so why would I mess with them?

The only thing I have done is redact personal identifying information. I have also intermittently added images to break up the text: I chose these based on the frame of mind or general mood that a cluster of answers put me in after thinking about them for a moment.

I personally like how the orthographic laxity highlights the composite response to the question:

“Which book or books have deeply affected you recently? Why?”

* * *

RESPONSES:

1.

Tanith Lee's Electric Forest kinda solidified her as my favorite woman SF author. She's tremendous. I just finished Shock Doctrine the other day and now I think I wanna read less nonfiction as we head towards summer. Some of the more upsetting stuff from When the Clock Broke (Ganz) and especially Kill Everything That Moves has weighed on me.

2.

went through the experience of a miscarried pregnancy with my fiancée while reading Sarah Bladder Hrdy’s book Mother Nature, which has a chapter or two on foundling house (mortality rates in the high 90s) creating what amounted to centuries long state sanctioned mass infanticide — tossed myself headlong into our apparently genetic tendency to dispose of life that we have an instinct or a chemical signal telling us we can’t sustain

3.

The Tyrant by Michael Cisco. I was blown away by the breadth and depth of its vision. Only Michael Cisco can write a novel about a man who literally goes to war with heaven and hell and Earth. It made me giggle from the sheer brio of its inventiveness.

4.

the house on mango street by sandra cisneros. it reminds me of my grandmother and our life together when i was little. it is simple and familiar and beautiful in an unassuming way. 2. the aneid by virgil. i will always return to this one when i’m in a reading slump. it’s classic and exciting and comforting to me.

5.

I’m too self-absorbed to be affected by any one book. I insert myself in place of characters and my own struggles in place of plot, to the extent that I’m only ever reading the same book over and over again. Impotence and desire. The only difference between Lolita, The Sun also Rises, and Charlie Brown is mere setting.

6.

Black Skin White Mask by Frantz Fanon. Although I don’t agree with every assertion he makes in this book, racism is still alive but the 50s were a very different time to be a black man in the world. So I get what a lot of it is in response to; but I appreciate the book mostly for the questions within myself it raised, reflecting on parallels that do still exist today, and making me want to read more black philosophy.

7.

The Hollow Men by Eliot... too real man

8.

“East of Eden”. I was engaged with the characters and saw traces of biblical themes throughout. There was good emotional payoff, which I don’t always get. “White Noise”. So absurd that I laughed at nothing in particular every few pages. It captured a lot of postmodern angst with a subtly simple plot.

9.

Pensées and Other Writings by Blaise Pascal is a book that has deeply affected me (sort of) recently, been in a reading slump ever since. I think I would say it's due to the almost bleak way of writing that he adopts in the former half of the book to emphasize his examination of human existence. Especially in the way that he labels the contradictions of life. Our simultaneous greatness and misery, our dependence on distraction, our inability to find lasting fulfillment in a world without God, and that reason alone cannot solve these paradoxes. His observations are empathetic and psychologically perceptive even though he does this in order to compel readers to walk the path of God, they are in a sense comforting to read. His reflections do feel intellectually honest. Even independent of his religious conclusions, his exploration of mortality and the search for meaning feels profoundly relevant even in this age.

10.

I’ve discovered the work of Anna Kavan, specifically her collection Machines In The Head. She was a depressive, a heroin addict, constantly in and out of institutions. She wrote these distressing, hallucinatory stories about people in metal hospitals, about paranoia… She went on to write science fiction in this style also. Very affecting. Her stories feel like the depressive experience.

11.

Margaret Atwood's On Writers and Writing. I thought it was going to give me tips about writing. Instead it's about how writers can visit the dead. And I knew writers have unique relationships with death, but I didn't know a famous one wrote an entire book about this.

12.

Da Sound and Da Fury

13.

sophie calle, please follow me. check the version with baudrillard. check this to gather why [REDACTED]

14.

Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation in combination with Saint John of the crosses' The Cloud of Unknowing (which Merton is inspired by). I actually think these book are secretly about the act of creating Art and Poetry as a contemplative practice versus Religion. Thoughts as as divine emanations. Art and Poetry as manifestation of divinity. I disagree with him at times but I love Merton's intensity. He is actually very hardcore in this book. Platnov's Fro. Devastatingly beautiful. I recommended him before but received feedback that he is boring but I am convinced they put it down to early. I can't understand how one could call the River Potudan or Fro boring. So of the greatest things I've ever read. Vita Nouva. Read it it during a recent road trip. So beautiful the story of Dante's total devotion to Poetry. The encounter that dedicated him to the life of a poet.

15.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Not only was it fascinating to read Joyce's first novel in light of everything he achieved after it, but it was also exciting/moving/impressive to see the style evolve in tandem with Stephen's burgeoning into an artist. And I'm a sucker for art about art. Mostly, though, I was infatuated with the verve and lyricism of the prose.

16.

Peter Gays Style in History - very effecting to watch someone be so observant of people i'd never heard of. we can know anything we want to if we pay it enough mind.

17.

Life is Elsewhere by Kundera, short story collections of Isaac Babel, John Fante. I think only as i've reached an age possible for me to contemplate youth...

18.

Oblivion by David Foster Wallace and Voices from Chernobyl by Alexievich have both really knocked the wind out of me for opposite-ish reasons. Oblivion is all about loneliness and the sort of pathetic malaise of the petit-bourgeois in America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He finds such inventive and powerful ways to crack at it. And Voices from C provides an array of people who seem to actually believe—or to have believed—in some sort of collectivity, they don't feel alone, they trust their neighbors and friends and lovers, but they get fucked up anyway. Simultaneously made me feel so moved by how people banded together to save each other, but also sort of overwhelmed by the possibility that love is not enough, or that the corp-governmental machinery in place is too big, too strong, has too much momentum to be stopped or diverted, even if it kills tens of thousands, and affects ten times more.

Rather than another image, I’m going to include a link to William T. Vollmann’s “Invisible and Insidious”, an excerpt from his book on Fukushima, nuclear power and related matters. The included photographs are very striking.

I seriously enjoyed reading all of these—thank you again to those who answered. I’m impressed by all of you.1

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Giorgio Agamben writes with an intransitive directness that has almost nothing to do with an interlocutor. He is not concerned with “communicating.” For Agamben, what is important is the clarity of the language itself for the sake of that around which it opens—what it allows to become visible—whether for you, for nobody, or for me does not seem to matter; all of that comes after.

Thankfully, with Agamben, it is never a matter of “making a point.” There’s a difference between a person who wants to show you something and a person who wants to prove something to you. The difference is that between “still open” and “already closed.”

If something nevertheless seems to have been proven to us in his work, as if retroactively, we still never feel like we have been dictated to via arguments. The impression is always one of seeing something ourselves in a newly cleared space—we feel as if surrounded by light and air and the conspicuously weightless joy of thought. You may inhabit or not inhabit this new place, walk into or walk away from it.

When asked in a Spring 2013 interview with Leland de la Durantaye, “What do you think of my dog?” Agamben replied,

The other day I was walking in the countryside, in Tuscia, and came upon a horse in a fenced meadow. It suddenly came over to me and reached its head across the wooden paling, trying to touch me. I pulled up and gave him a handful of grass in response to his courteousness. He accepted it, though purely out of courteousness. A few moments later I ran a few strides and he immediately broke into a gallop alongside me. For the ensuing hour we communicated perfectly and profoundly. One thing this proves is that those who think that language is for communication are wrong. Language is not made for communication. It is made for something else, something perhaps more important, but also more perilous. Language is, in fact, the principle obstacle to communication, which animals know perfectly well. They watch us sometimes, filled by a strange compassion for us, caught up as we are in language. They, too, might have ventured into language, but preferred not to, knowing what might be lost. I imagine you have experienced something similar with your dog.

Paths and knots

“[N]othing renders a work so obscure and illegible as its canonization.”1

If “canonization” is the process of “enrolling a beatified person” […] “officially in the [...] calendar of saints,”2 Agamben de-canonizes. He takes people, books, ideas out of their assigned location in the frozen space of historical homogeneity that renders them visible but unreadable.

Occasionally, the paths that Agamben leads us down in his books are winding—a quality that is as necessary to his subject matter as it is exciting for the reader to retrace—but the paths described in The Kingdom and the Garden, a genealogy of the concepts of paradise and “sin,” are relatively straight, and their convergences are natural, occurring as if out of their own volition.

Agamben’s method remains one of equally poetic and philosophical elucidation. If you are not familiar with his work, it’s important to know that he takes “[t]he Schmittian principle according to which all modern political categories are secularized theological categories” seriously.3 So, when, as in The Kingdom and the Glory (from Homo Sacer, not to be confused with The Kingdom and the Garden), he retraces the, to us, insane minutiae of theological disputes about the nature of the Holy Trinity—namely its “economy,” or oikonomia (οἰκονομία), literally, the “ordering of a household” —one must keep in mind that Agamben is not at all participating in that same minutiae in the way a theologian would. Instead, he is going back through the strata of a theological concept so as to better destroy the hold that its secularized political form still has on us today.

Rather than getting tied up in theological argumentation, Agamben begins from a place of what you could call “self-grounding speech” —in the case of the present book, a brief discussion of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych “known as The Garden of Earthly Delights,” read as a codex of the Adamic “paradise” —before he approaches the already-existing (“canonized”) knot of ideas and patiently, though with surprising swiftness, begins to loosen, retrace and untie its multiple threads.

At the end of this process, when a few brightly renewed strands lie before us, it is amazing to think back on the shape of the knot with which we began. In some cases, we might not have even known, or cared, that there was a knot at all. And we can imagine how a less careful thinker might have simply cut away at it, using the adjective “Gordian” as an excuse and destroying its parts in the process—these threads which did not tie themselves.

Over and over in his work, Agamben shows the clear pathways back to an open moment before theological sophistries tied the conceptual knots that fasten the West’s entire political paradigm.

The stakes of these old theological disputes, victories, sleights-of-hand and evasions are rather high.

If it is true, as Walter Benjamin suggests, that in the idea of a classless society Karl Marx secularized the idea of the messianic kingdom, it is not surprising that here there are produced the same aporias and the same diatribes that divide theologians over the way in which one should think the articulation of eschatological time. The problem of the interminable duration of the transition phase between prehistory and history, between the society divided into classes and that without classes, on which the Soviet Revolution made shipwreck, corresponds perfectly to the genuinely theological one over the timing of the coming of the Kingdom. And to the problem of the compatibility between the Church and the Kingdom there corresponds the equally aporetic [internally irresolvable] one of the compatibility between the party and the classless society.4

This is why a refutation, in Garden, of the Catholic–Augustinian doctrine of original sin—a fundamentally sinister notion in which I simply do not believe in the first place and so would not otherwise need refuted—shines with all the significance and urgency of a clarified political question.

After a strikingly condensed (anti)theological untying, we come to this place where “Augustine must have recourse to the doubling of human nature worked out by sin: the possibility that was available to man in the paradisiac condition was lost when his nature was corrupted and estranged itself from grace, which he now needs, like a sick body, as a remedy. This and nothing else is the meaning of original sin.”5

This logic of a corrupt, self-divided human nature, in need of an earthly power to guarantee its life and conscience—renting humanity’s wholeness back to it—is the ur-form of the modern conception of the citizen, over which the sovereign—in whatever guise—wields the power to decide life and death, innocence and guilt.6

Agamben calls it “the economy of salvation,” and even ties it to the disappearance in the New Testament of the word demos—the people. Instead, we get ochlos, “translated into Latin as turba or plebs” and a few other words, all translatable as “mass” or “the masses,” which, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, become “secularized in order to be constituted as the subject of political movements.”

The massa perditionis, which, in Augustine’s words, had become the possession of demonic powers (possessio perditoris), must now be liberated from these latter in order to affirm its dominion […]. And yet, once restored to the theological perspective from which they originate, the masses’ repeated attempts at emancipation in our time could only fail. The massa damnata, insofar as it by definition cannot be liberated by itself [as formulated by Augustine], but only through a divine intervention, falls necessarily into the hands of leaders and parties that make use of it for their own ends. The political subject of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century ends up in the horrors of camps and extermination.7

Dante’s ancient forest

“The water” I said “and the sound of the forest contend in me with a recent belief in a thing I have heard contrary to this.” — Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII8

In The Kingdom and the Garden, we arrive very early on at this older, pre-Augustinian interpretation of the Garden of Eden in Genesis. It is emphatically not, as it is according to the church and the common understanding of the story, both a place irretrievably lost to the past and infinitely deferred into some promised yet empty future. The Garden of Earthly Delights—as the Bosch painting is called—is the image of human nature. It is with us now as an ever-present potentiality.

Garden opens with German scholar Wilhelm Fraenger’s interpretation of Bosch’s triptych, which arose out of “the heresy of the Free Spirit[.]”9 Fraenger:

The kingdom of the Spirit has been restored; the evangelium aeternum has become flesh and blood in countless awakened human beings who are already living in a state of paradisical innocence on earth. [...] The disciples of the Free Spirit were accustomed to call their devotional community life “Paradise” and interpreted the word as signifying the “quintessence of love”. It is in this sense that the “Paradise” of the central panel must be understood. What it shows is an idealized reality, a “today” at once real and mystery, symbolic down to its most minute details. This instantaneity determines the whole composition of the triptych. Instead of the representation of a chronological sequence, in which the Garden of Eden—the beginning of all things—would have been separated from the “Paradise” of the central panel—the future restoration of the original condition—we find here the perfect simultaneity of a single state of consciousness (Fränger 1951: 103–04).10

Garden’s six chapters are linked together in an elegant, cascading envelope structure, which—if I remember Robert Alter’s footnotes to his gorgeous translation correctly—echos some of the poetic structures of Genesis:

1 → 6 ⸻ (The Garden of Earthly Delights → The Kingdom and the Garden)

2 → 5 ⸻ (The Sin of Nature → Paradise and Human Nature)

3 → 4 ⸻ (Man Has Never Yet Been in Paradise → The Divine Forest)11

At the risk of drawing too harsh of a diagonal through this structural beauty (from 1 to 4), we should compare the opening image of the Garden with that of Dante’s forest, the Earthly Paradise. This is one of the most arresting images invoked in Agamben’s book. When I think of it, my heart flutters in a way that almost hurts.

But first, it is also important to clarify Agamben’s view of Dante, which departs from a prominent view of him as merely a poet who takes his ideas from elsewhere (namely, from Aquinas) without creatively thinking in his own right. “As if the mind of Dante (who often took care to define himself explicitly as a philosopher) were not, for originality, incentive capacity, and coherence, infinitely superior to that of the scholastic philosophers who were his contemporaries, Aquinas included[.]”12

We then come to Dante’s encounter, in Purgatorio, with Matelda, the “lady enamoured,” in the forest of the earthly paradise.

[Dante’s] originality and inventive capacity finds testimony above all in his description of the “ancient forest” of the earthly paradise, which, if it shares some aspects with traditional representations, departs from them to such a degree that one can say that the image that results is decisively new, if not heretical. Not only have the four rivers from Genesis 2:10–14, the Pichon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates, which are an essential part of all the descriptions, disappeared, replaced by two others, which are now called Lethe and Eunoe and which carry out an important function in Dante’s itinerary towards innocence; not only do there shine on Eden four stars (which are also nymphs), of which Genesis makes no mention, but—and this is truly unheard-of—the garden, which, according to a constant tradition, must be empty or in which only Elijah and Enoch have found a provisional dwelling, is inhabited by a woman in love who sings and dances.13

Here, rather than include Agamben’s two-line quotation from Canto XXVIII (immediately after “dances” above), I want to include a fuller picture—from the beginning of the Canto right up to where Agamben leaves off—from John D. Sinclair’s prose translation of Purgatorio. The beauty of the passage more than justifies my quoting at some length:

CANTO XVIII

The Earthly Paradise; the fair lady and the stream […]

Eager now to search within and about the divine forest green and dense which tempered to my eyes the new day, I left the slope without waiting longer, taking the level very slowly over the ground which gave fragrance on every side. A sweet air that was without change was striking on my brow with the force only of a gentle breeze, by which the fluttering boughs all bent freely to the part where the holy mountain throws its first shadow, yet were not so much swayed from their erectness that the little birds in the tops did not still practise all their arts, but, singing, they greeted the morning hours with full gladness among the leaves, which kept such undertone to their rhymes as gathers from branch to branch in the pine wood on the Chiassi shore when Aeolus looses the Sirocco.

Already my slow steps had brought me so far within the ancient wood that I could not see the place where I had entered, and lo, my going farther was prevented by a stream which with its little waves bent leftwards the grass that sprang on its bank. All the waters that are purest here would seem to have some defilement in them beside that, which conceals nothing though it flows quite dark under the perpetual shade which never lets sun or moon shine there.

With feet I stopped and with eyes passed over beyond the streamlet to look at the great variety of fresh-flowering boughs, and there appeared to me there, as appears of a sudden a thing that for wonder drives away every other thought, a lady all alone, who went singing and culling flower from flower with which all her way was painted.14

Agamben’s own inventio—which can mean invention but also discovery—is that this ancient forest of the Earthly Paradise—inhabited by a beautiful woman in love and by the river of forgetting, Lethe, that flows through hell, as well as Enoe, Dante’s river of remembrance—is that this forest is the very same dark wood out of which he began his journey in Inferno.

CANTO I

The dark wood; the sunny hill […]

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense, the thought of which renews my fear! So bitter is it that death is hardly more. But to give account of the good which I found there I will tell of the other things I noted there.

I cannot rightly tell how I entered there, I was so full of sleep at that moment when I left the true way; but when I had reached the foot of a hill at the end of that valley which had pierced my heart with fear I looked up and saw its shoulders already clothed with the beams of the planet that leads men straight on every road.15

If the “dark wood” really is also the “ancient forest” of the Earthly Paradise—meaning, the image of a fundamentally uncorrupted human nature, this garden of delight into which we may freely come and go at any time without need of an interceding power—it may very well be that Dante had stepped into the river Lethe before the beginning of his Divine Comedy: “I cannot rightly tell how I entered there” —or else its sister river of remembrance, Enoe, whose eddies we must poetically recaptiulate.

Any version of the above interpretation turns the Commedia into a systematic bildungsroman—a spiritual anamnesis—always orbiting the paradisiac core of humanity, in all its radical innocence. Agamben clarifies the political and spiritual nature of Dante’s endeavor:

It will then be a good rule, suspending at least for the moment every interpretive hypothesis, for us to stick to what Dante himself directly or indirectly tells us. It is in fact the case that he pronounces beyond any possible doubt what is for him the meaning of the earthly paradise. I am thinking of the passage from De monarchia (3.16.4) in which, expounding the doctrine of the two beatitudes that constitutes one of the cornerstones of his thought, he writes:

“Ineffable Providence has assigned to man two ends to which he tends: namely, the beatitude of this life, which consists in the operation of his own virtue and is prefigured by the earthly Paradise; and the beatitude of life everlasting, which consists in the enjoyment of the vision of God, to which man’s natural powers may not attain unless aided by divine illumination, and which may be understood by means of the celestial Paradise.”

[…] [T]he episode of the earthly paradise does not relate only to the life of the individual by the name of Dante, but also has an immediately political meaning, which concerns the human race in its entirety[.]

Agamben’s analysis of Dante’s poetic vision goes in several other mutually intersecting directions, but what strikes me as crucial is the image of the ancient forest (the fullness of human nature that is at once, dark, divine, bright and amorous) as an ever-present material possibility to be acted toward in the spirit of love, intellect and beauty rather than under the forces of guilt and oppression.

[…] Jesus’s response to Pharisees who ask him when the Kingdom will come […], does not mean “it is within you”, but “in the midst of you” or, more precisely, “at hand, in the sphere of possible action”.16

Further reading

A few years ago, I reviewed Agamben’s book, The Adventure, a philosophical genealogy of the concept of adventure. Years later, it’s still one of the books I think of most often.

The eclectic collects; he builds a museum; he is sovereign. He does not go behind the work of art, the idea, the philosophy, to reach the disturbing experience that prompted it: he stays at home. His taste may be excellent, but something is lacking. He is like a man who assembles snapshots of works of art and prides himself on the catholicity of his appreciation, but knows only the surfaces: what is lacking is dimension, depth, going out of one’s own safe world to enter into what is strange.1

It is too easy to concede all of one’s thinking to the mechanisms of eclecticism—to fill in the space between a non sequitur; to offering up uncritical infinite judgments, such as, for example, glib derivatives of Hegel’s famous “𝔰𝔭𝔦𝔯𝔦𝔱 𝔦𝔰 𝔞 𝔟𝔬𝔫𝔢” without having first arrived at either 𝔰𝔭𝔦𝔯𝔦𝔱 or 𝔟𝔬𝔫𝔢 by the winding path of the phenomenologist, to say nothing of their surprising appearance together in subject-predicate form.

If your hands are used to that stage of the writing process that Walter Benjamin somewhere compares to weaving, any random material may well do. Whether this is always an honest approach is another matter. (In Benjamin’s estimation, weaving is only a stage, not an analog to thought itself, which can have no firm analog.)

One can pick out any writer, musician, philosopher or artist and just as well pick out another, as if out of a hat. Watch.

Here I have Clarice Lispector: her collected short prose works, Too Much of Life, is the book my eye lands on as I throw the virtual dart of my gaze at the bulletin-board of my bookshelf.

Again—but this time I will get up from where I am writing this, close my eyes and walk toward my shelves with a hand outstretched, my right index finger leading the way, and I will record the title and author I push into the recesses of the shelf, as though I were blindly searching for the mechanical lever that will open a secret passage—and here we have (the books slides back; I open my eyes) Metapolitics by Alain Badiou, joining Lispector.

That’s good enough for this experiment: “Badiou and Lispector”! Very eclectic.

The first thing that occurs to me now is a great piece by Lispector that crystallizes a political and ethical idea toward which I feel sympathetic (I also feel this way about Badiou in general, so my path, as eclectic critic-explorer, has already been half-blazed for me). Lispector’s piece is even short enough to fully include:

IT’S ALSO IMPORTANT NOT TO FORGIVE

A woman interviewed on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour spoke about her experiences as a prisoner of war:

“When you’ve suffered a lot, you learn to pick up on peoples weaknesses, their good and bad qualities, even among your enemies. Why should your enemy be completely bad or the victim completely good? Both are human beings and both are good and bad. And I believe that if we appeal to people’s good side, we’ll almost always be successful.”

I know what she means, but she’s wrong. There comes a time when we must forget about being human and compassionate and take a stand, however wrongly, for the victim, and take a stand, however wrongly, against the enemy. And return to a more primitive stage of dividing people into good and bad. The moment of survival is the moment when the victim is allowed to be cruel, cruel and angry—when not understanding others is the right thing to do.2

Stopping not at all to admire this beautiful, affecting feuilleton, all I have to do now is open up Metapolitics, flip around for a few seconds—maybe even a minute or two.

To interrupt for a second, while I flip around, here’s another tip: if any of the random names you choose are communists or left-wing in any way, you can almost certainly find their work for free online, that way you don’t even need to get up and look through real books. You can open the PDF, close your eyes—maybe even doze off… begin daydreaming, really about anything; I, for one, am thinking about how Clarice Lispector was really hot… she was beautiful too… beautiful and hot—and she could really write… damn… so anyway, you can just ctrl + f search your way through the PDF with some keywords while fantasizing about Lispector or whom- or whatever else.

Here we are—and this is kind of amazing, I didn’t even need to search anything or read: This is simply the first line I fell upon in my Badiou book, perfectly by chance:

In the discernment of good and evil, the apperception of evil comes first. For evil is precisely what puts the in-common, or the share, in question. One sees here the opening of a theme dear to Revault d’Allonnes: radical evil. Political judgement is first and foremost resistance to evil. To judge is ‘to attempt to resist impending evil in fear and trembling’. I have already said what I think of this doctrine in my little book Ethics. I believe it to be inescapably theological and, moreover, politically inoperative. For every real figure of evil is presented, not as a fanatical non-opinion undermining being-together, but on the contrary as a politics aiming to ground authentic being-together. No ‘common sense’ can counter it; only another politics can do so. For all that, one will recognise in the reduction of political judgement to pure negation (‘resisting evil’) what has always been said about parliamentary democracies: that, while admittedly not good, they were ‘the least bad’ alternative.3

Personal daydreams and the actual power of such disparate writers aside, it is slightly surprising to have narrowed down these sections from two writers that otherwise have no discernible connection with each other—I didn’t have to think much or dig around for any elective affinity (other than having read these books already, although my eclectic experiment exposes that fact as purely incidental…).

There really is enough of an affinity here between the two passages to write some kind of essay, maybe called 𝕃𝕚𝕤𝕡𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕠𝕣 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝔹𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕠𝕦: 𝕎𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕖𝕚𝕟 𝕀 ℂ𝕙𝕠𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝔼𝕧𝕚𝕝. I even have an idea for an epigraph. We can quote Saint-Just, the French revolutionary, himself quoted, of course, by Žižek:4

It’s all very cozy, sitting around the fire with Uncle Žižek and Grandpa Badiou, who are, luckily for this essay’s sense of cohesion, contemporaries. Not to mention Clarice. (“Is that alright if I call you Clarice?”)

But shit… I’m honestly disappointed to be using all of the above—it could be so good, so clever! But right now, it remains an example of the easy kind of thinking and writing that I want to call into question as “mere eclecticism.”

As an exercise, so long as you do not rely on it overmuch, eclecticism might work. But random eclecticism, “the catholicity of [the eclectic’s] appreciation,” as a substitute for one’s patent lack of ability to forge real creative affinities should remain a tool and not one’s entire method.

In fact, my example cuts both ways. I am aware that it also brings good tidings to any would-be eclectics reading this.

So, to examine the other cut, it might be good to include Thomas Mann’s thoughts on the matter. (I didn’t use any bibliomancy to get this quote, just good old memory.) Mann approaches this question of the “and” of potential eclecticism, although he does not use this latter word, at the beginning of his essay, “Goethe and Tolstoy”:

Goethe and Tolstoy. What sort of arbitrary and unseemly combination is that? Nietzsche once reproached us Germans with a peculiar clumsiness in the use of the word “and.” We said “Schopenhauer and Hartmann,” he sneered; we said “Goethe and Schiller” too—he was very much afraid we even said “Schiller and Goethe”! Setting Schopenhauer and Hartmann aside; as far as Goethe and Schiller are concerned, Nietzsche’s highly subjective dislike of moralists and theatre people should not have led him so far astray as to deny a relationship which is not less valid because of the inherent and typical contrast it displays. Its best spokesman, indeed, was its supposedly affronted half!

So, while I feel inclined to Nietzsche’s distaste for the ease with which 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔭𝔥𝔦𝔩𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔢𝔰 throw around the connective “and,” I cannot say, especially in the hands of Thomas Mann, that any real violence to intellectual conscience has been committed through it—although I take issue with dismissing Nietzsche’s perfectly natural dislike of moralists and theatre people as “highly subjective.”

What bothers me, however naively is precisely this violence against intellectual conscience. The eclectic that I am talking about—described so well in the epigraph above, taken from Walter Kaufmann—is no straw man and should be criticized—externally in others and in oneself, too. I can’t stand this writer who “knows only the surfaces[,]” lacks dimension and depth, and “never [goes] out of [their] own safe world to enter into what is strange.” When I am angry with myself, it is because I have failed this criterion.

I’ll let Mann have the last word and end it there, because I think I can almost feel a thought of my own brewing somewhere in the aether… indeed, I believe an “AND”5 might be splitting the void of my imaginative apparatus…

Another precisely similar instance is the conjunction “Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.” On the other hand, if we deny the “and” its right to point a contrast, and confine its function to asserting essential affinity, essential similarity—what then? Would there not at once take place in our fancy a change of partners? On profound intellectual, nay, rather, on profoundly natural grounds, would not Schiller and Dostoyevsky move together, and on the other side—Goethe and Tolstoy?

You will be feeling far from satisfied. Obviously. […]6

Actually, I’m not going to end it there.

I’ve successfully fended off my near-thought (above) by remembering a well-known scene from my and everybody else’s favorite show, Twin Peaks. It’s from the second episode (not counting the pilot) of the first season: “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer”. Agent Cooper takes Deputy Hawk, Sheriff Truman, Deputy Brennan and Lucy out to the woods. After placing several glass bottles at a distance, all of which correspond to a suspect in the Laura Palmer murder case, Cooper reads out the names of the suspects and throws a rock toward the collection of bottles. If the stone hits a bottle, the associated suspect-name is recorded as having heightened importance—although the meaning of that importance remains unknown and open to further investigation.

Significance is not decided by mere eclecticism, which at most refreshes our attitude or our configuration toward the facts of the case. It gives our aspect perception a shock.

This might be the proper way to use the tool of eclecticism.

It is essential, in the fictional world of my Twin Peaks example, that plenty of real investigative work has already occurred and will continue to occur after the stone-method, punctuated by new and increasingly strange modalities of the tool of eclecticism: dreams, oracles (the Log Lady), riddles and so on.

If you’re trying to “think like an Agent Cooper” (or a Benjamin Horne in the latter half of the show, when he goes Don Quixote-mode on reading with both breadth and depth), it’s good to consult the Log Lady and throw stones at bottles so long as you do not confine yourself to these methods alone.

THE HONEST ECLECTIC’S MAXIM:

NEVER SUCCUMB TO THE CATHOLICITY OF MERE TASTE.

ENTER INTO WHAT IS STRANGE.

I will conclude—actually, this time—with a recommendation in a positive direction: recently wrote (another) great, fruitfully eclectic piece on Philip K. Dick— “Truth as Terrible as Death” —and the I Ching, in what is a good meta-example of an honest use of eclecticism. (“meta-,” because PKD’s own artful use of eclecticism is also present.)

Negatively speaking—and rather than going for some poor, perhaps well-intentioned Substacker—I will only say that when I see an “essay” involving the asinine conjunction, “Nietzsche and Catholicism,” and some other nonsense in the same breath about Lana Del Rey… well, one certainly suspects that a certain writer’s body is currently spinning in his grave in a whirlwind of justified anger against the increasingly vile use of the “and” which, while living, he was right to identify as a suspect—along with moralists and theatre people.

I wake up in the morning and make a few notes, maybe adding up to a page, before pouring the last of the coffee and sitting down to read in earnest until I either have to go to work or am impelled again to make another note and therefore open up a new expanse of paper. This is all done as soberly as you can imagine. Later at night, however, if I have had a few glasses of wine before dinner, I will sometimes open up another page, even if I am already buzzing from the single glass poured into my empty stomach. (The last regiment of vaporous booze pushes itself across the front line of the blood–brain barrier.) But never have my words or sentences come out “drunk,” to the extent that I almost think that written language, and maybe just the fingertips which type or operate the pen, is impervious against this lowly, base form of intoxication. The mouth, on the other hand, does become drunk, and one often says more than one would have otherwise meant (sometimes the truth), or the wrong thing altogether; speech slurs and the hands that so often facilitate talk knock over glasses, bump into people, hit walls and so on, and everything coming out of our mouths goes awry as we drink. And why shouldn’t it.

But it doesn’t matter whether you write while sober or drunk: things will appear mostly the same. What I think can make a difference, however, and I mean a difference for the better, is writing during a hangover.

When I wake up into that beating, pulsating world of a headache after a night of drinking, the most important things, terribly urgent, are: water, coffee, and (tentatively) food, in that order. Taking care of these doesn’t get rid of the headache, doesn’t settle the stomach and doesn’t clear up your foggy vision. Nor does it make you look any better. But meeting these three requirements staves off the worst of a hangover, and you’ll be able to avoid crawling back into bed, or throwing up, or both.

Writing in this state, at first, is extremely unpleasant. Each word that materializes in front of you is a nausea test. Words and sentences are rarely vetted so rigorously as in the harsh, heightened sensitivity of a hangover.

Discomfort, if not actual pain, seems to be the ideal state for writing. Anecdotally, I think of Apollinaire, who would write very uncomfortably hunched over a tiny kitchen table (surely hungover at times!). This image is actually dear enough to me that, in the past, I have superimposed (mistakenly) my favorite writers onto it in an over-determined frenzy of under-imaginative fancy. After reading about the original Apollinaire anecdote, it became Balzac who sat uncomfortably hunched over the tiny kitchen table, writing as though to break the sound barrier with the nice view of the courtyard outside to keep him company. For years, this is how I remembered the image (almost talismanic). Then, I read Zweig’s biography of Balzac and realized that I had superimposed Balzac into this kitchen (he wrote at a real desk). But Apollinaire did not come rushing back through the door to take up his rightful place at the small chair. Instead, Blaise Cendrars came in and made himself comfortable—and that, I eventually thought, is how I know he doesn’t belong here, in this kitchen: he kicks his feet up as if he were sitting at a vast coffee table with more room than could possibly be useful to him at one time, lights a cigarette with his left hand while his empty right sleeve hangs down (he lost his right arm in World War I), waving in the breeze that sucks through the window. No, he is too comfortable, and who would come in through the door but Chaïm Soutine, the painter. He comes in and pours Cendrars a drink without a word, without asking, he knows how to act, and they chink glasses, Soutine reaches out his right arm, Cendrars his left, the two connecting in a straight line. Was it Soutine who worked, cramped and fruitfully, at this awful table? But it’s not him either, he had just come over from the other side of the courtyard (Was he living here? Or the Villa Seurat, and so where was here—) to fetch Cendrars, who gets up after draining his glass to follow the painter out the door just in time for a wily, wiry cast of less than minor characters to push their way in through over the threshold, ignorant of the table and the chair in the corner—they are here to rummage the fridge for cheese, bread, olives, fish, vegetable ends (for what, soup?)—their faces freakish, their bodies indistinct, their clothes shiny with age, and now they too are crowding out of the door, through the hallway, down the stairs and out into the night, and the table is sitting here empty and I cannot picture that Apollinaire (with his head wrapped tightly from his war wound) would write his little calligrammes here, like this, his big strongman’s body hunched and concentrated downward into a square of paper. Ferdinand the Bull sitting at a tiny table in his stuffy kitchen. . .

Everyone seems to agree that morning is the best time to think: one has just taken the first sip of the discomfort of living, and the image is still undisturbed, like a cool glass not yet dirtied by fingerprints.

There are people whose thoughts are insomniac and night-like. (I have often imagined that these are the kinds of thoughts that predominate when life becomes materially comfortable and unworried.)

To be able to stay awake until sunrise every night just in order to say a very few words to oneself, and then collapse, and to do this every day of the week as though the year were just a chain of differently shaded Sundays, life vanishing continuously like phase-shifted colors into the horizon—.

What is interesting about drinking, I suppose like every drug, is that the first few sips, the first moments when it is still just knocking on the phenomenological door, always seem new, as if they might lead to something as yet untouched and unknown. In the space of the first glass—especially if it is hot outside, and quiet—it is as if the activity of the alcohol occurred not in your body, your eyes, your skin, your stomach, but in everything except what you consider to be yourself; the alcohol is in the leaves in the blueberry bush just beside you, it is in the warmth of the wooden planks of the porch touching your bare feet, in the sound of ice and glass in the neighbor’s yard, just out of view, the cloud darkening the horizon and giving depth to the evening, which would otherwise be in danger of a certain two-dimensionality—it is in everything but you, and at its nearest, it feels like it is inside an active, sentient dew collecting over the surface of your iris, only the colorful part of the eye, while the pupil dilates and contracts, opening and closing with the erratic light, which in a few moments will be absorbed, and then it will be inside you and everything else will lose the porous quality that you felt you could almost see, becoming again a surface, and the sun is getting low, the cloud larger, the sky cooler, and now someone is talking and you are onto the second glass, very soon to approach the early zenith of intoxication from which you will smoothly plummet as the night goes on, drunker and drunker, and then into the nadir of dizzy sleep and at last the next day, hungover, truncated, disconnected from yourself more or less unpleasantly, ready to risk making yourself sick with a few words.

Thank you to Cory Nolan and BarBar, for originally publishing this in the print anthology, The Shortlist.

There is a single bee here playfully threatening me. My scalp tingles under my hair, already turning blonder in the warm light, at the thought of a season—vitalistic qualia transmuted into a feeling for time—giving me a little sting where neither of us die or hurt. We trade our old wintry static charges like a kiss or a handshake—these die, dissipating in the atmospheres of our bodies.

I’m hot in the sun. I’m keeping this can of beer cold in the snow on the grass beside me.

There are birds everywhere above, in the blue–green treetops. The deciduous trees are still leafless, but the evergreens are bright like the eyes of teenagers who have stayed awake through a long night into the morning.

There’s a tiny plane gliding over the lake. I would never get into a plane that small, even to see the freshly thawed water—I can already see the water just fine. The trees hide it from me almost entirely, and that’s how I see it.

There’s a tan leaf from last fall by my feet. A light breeze flips it over and I jump, mistaking it for a hopping bullfrog.

I want to say something about the bee who has returned, this time to crawl over the top of Victoria’s can of beer. We talk to him and try to get him to take a drink⸻to be a little bee drunk at midday in the first week of spring.

Fuck me and my vitalistic qualia! Fuck your metaphysical dog visions. In a few moments, April will already have come.

I received more answers to my COM-POSIT INTERROGATION FORM than I expected I might. I’ve had a great time going through them—I liked all of the answers, even the catty ones recalling such childhood exchanges as:

Q: Can I go to the bathroom?

A: I don’t know, can you?

Every detail and every absence of detail contributes to the composite sketch.

The body of these interrogations, read altogether with minimal supplemental information, creates a varied and fascinating composite map of the world of its participants.

METHOD

There are a few ways I could do this, and to be totally honest, I barely thought of how I would approach the answers I received prior to receiving them, imagining that the quantity and quality of the answers themselves would show me the way.

I could lay out my survey questions below and include each person’s answer to each question: this way, you’d basically get to see things the way I see them. But, because I’d like to actually add something of my own to some of the responses, even minimally—so many of them warrant a response—laying everything out like a spreadsheet seems both too chaotic and too impersonal.

I have opted for a more linear, readable format.

My questions appear in bold type, as befits an interrogator—answers are included in block-quoted sections. All images, links, footnotes, etc. are mine, even where they appear within block quotes. Occasionally, I have edited responses lightly for readability (I italicize book titles and add a comma here and there “[,]” like that).

Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond (even though, as I’m sure you’re aware, these interrogations were mandatory).

I sincerely appreciate all of the kind responses to my sixth question, none of which will be included in this report or any reports to follow.

FIRST INTERROGATION

Which book or books have deeply affected you recently?

The Wolves in the Forest of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Ford of the Foxes by Anna Starobinets, and The Scorpions by Sara Barquinero. I’m a Spanish reader. I believe the first one has been translated into English, but the other two haven’t yet.

Response: I have read the Knausgaard book in English translation—I like your above title (maybe a translation of a translation?) much more than the simpler The Wolves of Eternity. Mamma Andersson’s paintings that they use for the UK editions of the Morgenstjernen books are gorgeous. She may be one of my favorite living artists, recalling the work of both Grandma Moses and Anslem Kiefer (I just found this profile on Kiefer by Knausgaard: “Into the Black Forest with the Greatest Living Artist”).

Tell me about a painting you think I should look up.

130 / 5.000 I have two friends who I think are great painters, Juan Antonio Baños and Irma Alvarez Lavidada. Perhaps you’d like Juan Antonio better.

What is an outdated or disproven scientific theory that you nevertheless find attractive? If you can’t think of one, tell me about a superstition of yours.

Because of something I’m writing, I’ve read a lot about “Mitochondrial Eve.” There was an old video game about that topic, and I think that’s where my fascination with it began....

[Interrogator notes, for internal use only: subject resistant to some questions—the present interrogation’s evasions are expressed by this form’s brevity; further questioning recommended.]

SECOND INTERROGATION

Which book or books have deeply affected you recently? Why?

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In many ways too strange to explain, I feel as if I’m reading about myself.

Heard any rumors lately? Got any weird tips or anecdotes?

All literary readings suffer from a common ailment: no one is there for the art, and no one knows how to perform the art. Changes are in order.

[Interrogator note: further questioning recommended into the nature of intended changes.]

Tell me about a painting you think I should look up.

El Asesinato del Gobernador Bustamante by Félix Resurreccion Hidalgo

Tell me about a dream you had recently.

I dreamed of people I’ve only known on the Internet. We were in a long room laureled with lights in colours known and unknown, and we talked about nothing for what felt like eternity, or a second, I couldn’t really tell. There were eruptions of darkness, then movement, sudden, vicious, kinetic. It seemed to me a moment of Futuristic dynamism or Dadaist anarchy. Then I woke up.

What is an outdated or disproven scientific theory that you nevertheless find attractive? If you can’t think of one, tell me about a superstition of yours.

Hollow Earth. Few things are as beautiful.

THIRD INTERROGATION

Which book or books have deeply affected you recently? Why?

For the past couple of years, I have had a Le Guin book be my first read of the year. I have CPTSD and issues with dissociations and find the energy of the holidays to be... not totally destabilizing (I am past that point) but still dysregulating. I really require a lot of sameness and routine to stay grounded though I am getting better at being a little more tolerant of changes. Anyway, I started doing it because I would become so discombobulated by the holidays that I just end up wandering around the house literally all day from room to room unmoored because my nervous system was unsettled. I still do it and doing it is a sign that I am overwhelmed. This is how I would start the year. It is hard to explain because it doesn’t make any sense. There’s a lot of media representation about having so much anxiety that you become frantic. There’s a lot of media representation about being depressed and not wanting to do anything. I personally have not seen anything that has struck a chord for what it’s like for me when I am not quite overwhelmed and not quite depressed. It’s like becoming a compressed spring. I have all this energy and I can feel it in my body but 1.) nothing is actually happening that needs to be addressed (there is no problem to be solved) and 2.) nothing feels right to be doing (I can’t relax because my body thinks there is a problem to be solved and it’s looking constantly for the “right” thing). So now, Le Guin book at the start of the year is my routine. It is... undemanding. This year, I read City of Illusions. I’m grateful to have access to something that is so simple and beautiful and immersive. I always feel like it ends so quickly! Suddenly! I’m so sad that it’s over which is something I typically only feel if it’s something that I’ve invested quite a bit of time into. The level of the intimacy attained within such a quick read is really astonishing. I don’t know how she does it. It’s like magic to me. And that’s how I want to start the year. It lightens my heart.

Heard any rumors lately? Got any weird tips or anecdotes?

Becoming an increasingly loving person is actually the hardest thing in the world and any one who tells you differently is absolutely a fucking liar!! It also does not make life easier, it just makes it lighter. You still have to do the work to get to the point of acceptance... every single time. Every single time forever! Forever! You just get better at doing it. It’s not an attained state. It’s a practice. I don’t know if this is true. But I am trying to find out.

Tell me about a painting you think I should look up.

When I moved to Chicago for college, I originally came to draw and paint at SAIC. I hated being there and I felt really isolated. I had no fucking money. I barely had money for food let alone paint. I was also, as previously stated in this interrogation, severely mentally unwell and did not have any resources to start to remedy that. I just was not ever going to be able to make that work. But while I was there, I had a figure painting and drawing teacher named Marion Kryczka whom I loved immensely. He really saw me. He loved me and was the only person there that made me feel like maybe I deserved to be there. He had Parkinson’s and was always smoking spliffs and we would listen to Son House while we worked. He would call me by my Slavic last name and tell me I looked like I was from the 40s. He passed away a few years ago and I am still sad about it. He was such a beautiful artist. I am so lucky to have known and been taught by him.

I appreciate you telling me about him. I am enjoying going through the work on his website.

Tell me about a dream you had recently.

I write a lot of poems in the space between being awake and being asleep. I wrote my best one yet (in my opinion) recently. I’ve been having a lot of dreams in pieces with no structure. I had a nightmare that someone I love was mocking me while I cried on the bathroom floor. They were leaving and I said will you come back and they said maybe. This is a relationship that I find myself constantly coming face to face with myself within. It’s actually really difficult but only because I am me.

What is an outdated or disproven scientific theory that you nevertheless find attractive? If you can’t think of one, tell me about a superstition of yours.

Everything about aether (this is part of the dream poem actually).

My good friend’s boyfriend is actually a physicist and is working on something but unfortunately my friend and I are just not at a level of understanding where we can even discuss what he is doing. Supposedly if he what he is working on is true, it would be like a VERY big deal. I wish I could explain it to you. I love my friend and her boyfriend and I want him to be successful so, to me, whatever he is working on is true.

I am also fascinated by “aether”1: I will conclude this round of interrogations with a passage from Glenn Alexander Magee’s book, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition:

Aether was still a living idea for scientists in Hegel’s time, indeed well into the nineteenth century. Herder, who was deeply immersed in the Hermetic tradition, took up Newton’s esoteric aether theory in its entirety and incorporated it into his own Hermetic cosmology. Aether also figured in Schelling’s philosophy of nature, which was probably the most direct influence on Hegel’s doctrine. Unfortunately, Hegel’s “aether doctrine” has come down to us only in fragments—and the fragments are among the most enigmatic in Hegel.

For Hegel the aether is metaphysical bedrock. It is an ultimate plastic medium that is nothing in particular, but has the potentiality to become everything. H. S. Harris writes, “The aether is characterized objectively as ‘absolute elasticity’ and further as ‘uncloudable transparency.’ Unlike Aristotle’s prime matter, it is an active potentiality. It is the unity of intellect and thing, not ‘prime’ but ‘absolute’ matter, matter that can give itself form.”2

SIX DEFINITIONS

1. Drag, v. t. [Sax. dragon] To draw along in contempt.

2. Slag, n. The scoria of a volcano.

3. Creature, n. A human being, in contempt; as an idle creature; that which is produced, formed or imagined.

4. Possession, n. The state of being under the power of demons or invisible beings; madness; lunacy; as demoniacal possession.

5. Curse, n. Malediction; the expression of a wish of evil.

6. Impregnated, v. t. To Infuse particles of one thing into another.

SIX THESES

1. Art is where Flesh and the World meld into indistinction: sᴏʀʀᴏᴡ and ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀʏ.

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2. Time cannot be made (as in πρᾶξις [praxis]) but only created (as in ποίησις [poiesis]); Time is of the ᴄʀᴇᴀᴛᴜʀᴇ and not the object.

   1. The former has elsewhere been called 𝔷𝔲𝔥𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔫 (𝑜𝑝𝑒𝑛) and the latter 𝔳𝔬𝔯𝔥𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔫 (𝑐𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑒𝑑) —but this suggests symmetry.

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3. Reading is the only ᴘᴏssᴇssɪᴏɴ and can never be exorcized, being the only food of the δαίμων (Demon).

   1. “‘Demon means here the necessary and limited individuality expressed at birth … the innate force and [quality] that more than anything else rules over the destiny of mankind.’”

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   2. “Bringing together the demon and chance in a personal destiny, Goethe1 gave expression to his most secret belief.”2

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   3. “It is thanks to this pact [with the Demon] that Goethe could fashion his life as if the most insignificant episode or the most casual maxim showed the demonic signature that sanctioned its inevitable outcome[.]3

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4. God4 has no grammar but only designations (ᴛʜᴇ ɴᴀᴍᴇ) and ᴄᴜʀsᴇs.

   1. The curse is also the mark of ʟᴜᴄᴋ.

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5. Concepts may not be approached without dishonor or shame. They must be courted like Angels.

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6. The Subject is the Night ɪᴍᴘʀᴇɢɴᴀᴛᴇᴅ by Life.5 Day is the womb of Death, the sepulcher and realm of the object.

DON’T EXPLAIN, ONLY DESCRIBE.

— WITTGENSTEIN

Crystals and pixels

“We’re a bit disconcerted by this novel!” the man added all of a sudden.1

The Beginnings by Antonio Moresco—the first book in his Games of Eternity trilogy, newly translated by Max Lawton for Deep Vellum—opens in a seminary. The reader traverses now smoothly and now in staccato fashion the visual-proprioceptive world of the observing narrator, who, maybe importantly, has also stopped speaking.

That seems like almost all—for a while. The plot of The Beginnings is divided into three parts, like three separate threads dipped over and over into the solution of Moresco’s prose around which increasingly strange crystallizations form.

The narrator moves through three worlds in parts 1, 2 and 3, respectively: that of a seminary student; that of years-of-lead Italy, with its chaotic street clashes and riots; and that of a comically paranoid (and weirdly recursive) literary/publishing world. He seems to graduate from each one into the other, remaining—as one faithful to the words of Rilke or Meister Eckhart—a beginner. These vertically hanging plot threads provide the elementary structure of the novel, but what I’m interested in—and what made me read almost 700 pages of vertiginous, crazy prose—are the crystallizations creeping over these threads.

The image of crystallization is an appropriate one. I think of the scene in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, where the borders of the organic and inorganic are made wonderfully but also disturbingly ambiguous before the eyes of the young narrator.

The crystallization vessel in which this [experiment by Adrian Leverkühn’s father] transpired was filled to three-quarters with a slightly mucilaginous liquid, diluted sodium silicate to be precise, and from the sandy bottom up rose a grotesque miniature landscape of different colored growths—a muddle of vegetation, sprouting blue, green, and brown and reminiscent of algae, fungi, rooted polyps, of mosses, too, but also of mussels, fleshy flower spikes, tiny trees or twigs, and here and there even of human limbs—the most remarkable thing my eyes had ever beheld, remarkable not so much because of their very odd and perplexing appearance, however, but because of their deeply melancholy nature. And when Father Leverkühn would ask us what we thought they were, and we hesitantly answered that they might be plants, he would reply, “No, that they’re not, they only pretend to be. But don’t think less of them for it! The fact that they give their best to pretense deserves all due respect.”2

The pace of the descriptions (forming around the plot threads) create a mounting effect of suspicion—not a “mounting suspicion”; a mounting effect of suspicion—as though creeping around behind the reader, behind every phenomenological world-description, behind every oddly chosen word, maybe behind the “narrator”—it seems like you begin to suspect that there is something else going on with the book other than those very sentences you are reading.

If this seems weird, we’re on the same page.

The narrator watches the father superior in the seminary. He watches the lights in the city, further off. He watches the other seminary students climb a lamppost. He describes in language that is sometimes beautiful, sometimes repulsive, sometimes funny, his recent circumcision, the black nun who he catches a glimpse of, a certain paper he has been writing on, the strange motions and speech of the priests. The entire time, Moresco courts a relentless sense of jamais vu whereby the familiar reveals itself as uncanny.

The bouncy, evasive little electron of an effect of a suspicion quickly trades valence with its opposite at any given space in the novel—because The Beginnings is an extremely spatial book, a kind of hyper-Euclidean exercise that makes fun of any over-serious appreciation for readerly temporality… —anyway, this electron flips from 1 to 0 and makes you say: No, there isn’t anything else going on with this book… is there? Oh, now I think there is something else going on. Except, wait…

You remain suspended or shunted—or “shucked,” of which more in a moment—between these two possibilities. What is going on in this book? Fascination mounts, as in a detective story, except every mote of light, every inscrutable piece of dialogue, is under our semblance of a suspicion. For what crime? Committed by whom? We cannot say and so read on.

It’s crucial to note that Moresco identifies characters in a simple, descriptive mode: none of them have real names—although what is a “real name”? (This is the kind of question or pseudo-question the book forces you to constantly ask yourself in metaphysico-linguistically paranoid fashion…) But it’s significant: a suspension of naming is part of Moresco’s strange apparatus of description.

Naming is somehow hostile to the integrity of his method. A name would shatter the crystal forming before us on the thread of the “plot.” Naming sets up a layer of language that cannot be further explicated—further shucked.3

“To shuck” is Max Lawton’s translation of one of Moresco’s favorite words, “Sgranare.” Francesco Pacifico, in his introduction, explains that this word is both “a blast and a translation nightmare.”

One-hundred-and-fifty-plus pages into the book, Moresco discovers a word he likes. A verb. “Sgranare.” “Sgranare” means two things, plus a third one I couldn’t see represented in the Cambridge Dictionary. “To shell/husk/shuck,” as in “to shuck an ear of corn,” as in “to shuck peas.” That’s one. The other is “sgranare gli occhi.” “To open one’s eyes wide.” The third one I’m talking about evokes a sense of separation between atomic parts. You could metaphorically handle it by using “pixelated”; you could say spaced out. Grano = grain. “Sgranato,” the past perfect, might sometimes mean “grainy,” but more often it means “having just become grainier.”4

The lack of proper naming takes Saint Augustine’s prime assumption about language, that its fundament is the name, and obliterates = pixelates = shucks it right out of existence, Wittgenstein-style. Augustine:

When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. […] Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified[.]5

The nameless world of Moresco’s The Beginnings is like a mounting Schoenberg string sextet for eyes-wide-open, a speeding camouflage pattern of the obliterative variety. You look deeper into the surface of the chaos and wonder again: What is going on in this book?

(Even the title obeys this pseudo-nominative rule. Here, a character is “the Fop,” there she is “the woman” —and what are we reading? Oh, you know, “the beginnings”. . . )

But if Moresco’s language is a kind of camouflage, I do not believe it is meant to conceal anything at all. It is a camouflage that has miraculously come into aesthetic self-consciousness, joyful and bewildering for its own sake.

I imagine something like the “pixelated,” granular Luxembourgian M2011, if it were moving:

The prose of The Beginnings is a camouflage that wants nothing more intensely than to fully reveal itself in all of its disruptive possibilities.

Against explanation

Our crystalline narrator-observer is like a denominator in an infinitely complex fraction severed from any possibility of a fixed numerator. He is a little x separated from the All by a very, very thin fraction line. This line becomes the lens-medium of his entire field of vision that includes the world in violently fluctuating and indeterminate numerator-magnitudes. . . The numerator of the world passes through this crystalline lens— —— ———hypnotically.

(The Beginnings is fun to read.)

In the beginning (whatever that means), we see that a man wearing glasses has appeared at the gates of the seminary—they eventually let him in, or let him back in, for it seems that maybe he has been there before.

Then the man with the glasses disappeared for a while. The air had become more limpid, warmer, there came a scent that seemed to have come from nowhere. Some time had passed, I had seen the hand with the lighter nails twice more inside the refectory carousel. The summer observance of napping after lunch had begun. I would stay awake for a long time in the dormitory, immobile and penumbral, among the aluminum reflections of the bedside tables and headboards of the beds lined up in a double row, under the single sheet of scented plaster. A few beds further on, the Cat [one of the priests] was sleeping or seemed to be sleeping, silent and still, with his knees raised up asymmetrically beneath the sheet, which stretched out to points quite distant from one another and most unexpected, as if under it were not a man, but a spinning wheel or some other bit of complex machinery. In the opposite row, a tad askance, the head of the deaf-mute seminarian took its repose, lightly beaded with sweat. I would rise up from my pillow to see if his crust [referring to the deaf-mute seminarian’s gelled hair]—the little lights inside it had recently started to turn on much later in the day, as the sky remained bright until it was time to go back to the dormitory for the night—were not melting in the great heat.6

Over and over, the slowly forming prose makes us wonder if maybe we are reading a kind of hyper-Knausgaard… but at every such attempt, a phrase of Wittgenstein’s sounds through my head:

Don’t explain, only describe.

This is Moresco’s method, but it also wells up out of us, his pleasantly surprised readers. Repeatedly, always repeatedly, you will want to explain and be explained to, but all you will get are descriptions, actions, observations, actions, descriptions and descriptions—no explanations. Explanations defuse; Moresco explodes, or crackles, or “crepitates.” If there is a simile or a metaphor, the plane of comparison is as real as that of the compared. Eventually, we learn to relax, let go of our explanatory obsession and—at last—explore.

The time for Chekhov’s gun has passed—this is Moresco’s gun cabinet, which also might be on fire.

Now, the flames had joined together into a single front that rose up into a cusp. They seemed to wish to unravel themselves from the bed of the heap so that it might fly away, torn free like a great crust. They unraveled, deboned through space, the wall having trouble containing them, shooting out from very low areas in little tongues, shucking into the cracks between the bricks, gnawing at even deeper points of the cusp, exposing at its peak skeletons of absolutely unknown objects, hurling them very far away, incinerating them for an instant before one was able to recognize them.7

Books like The Beginnings confirm a suspicion I have held for a while now: that the philosophical approach of phenomenology expresses itself best (justifies its existence) via the novel. But this “phenomenology” thing is already to SUBSTRACT something from Moresco. SIC; substract captures what I mean perfectly; to call Moresco’s prose “phenomenological” first abstracts and then removes, subtracts, something from it in a way that misses the point by over-saying it. (It’s an attempt at an explanation, not a moment of description.)

The phenomenologist sheds her clothes and dances a witches’ sabbath of discovery in such a novel.

Don’t explain, only describe: As readers who are either trained or addicted, or both, to constant explanation, and so the desire for the same, woven into everything, this is actually a very, very difficult demand, as difficult as it is worthwhile. It is what Wittgenstein elsewhere called “going the bloody hard way.” Moresco does it, or convinces us that he has done it, so that we don’t have to—we get to explore the chaos of what is never explainable but begs to be described—ostensibly, a kind of uncreated creation.

It would probably be far too “explanatory” to think of the original title of The Beginnings—Gli esordi—also as something like The Initiations.

Sempio and the magician

In the beginning was the act.

— Goethe’s Faust

Regarding the proliferating action of The Beginnings—indivisibly entangled with the spindly, viscous serifs of its prose—we might say, taking the words right out of Walter Kaufmann’s mouth as he recounts Goethe’s own method-of-no-method in Faust:

Goethe laughed at those who “come and ask me what idea I sought to embody in my Faust. As if I myself knew that and could express it! ‘From heaven through the world to hell,’ one might say in a pinch; but that is no idea but the course of the action.”8

There is something similar going on in Moresco, but instead of “from heaven through the world to hell,” it’s from silence through the infernal purgatory of the world to an affirmative articulation of that very same world. (I can only imagine, for now, how or whether Songs of Chaos, book 2, will advance this affirmative bent.)

The three vertical threads of plot are all crystallizing their own YES, their own affirmation of being, life, language, action, etc.

The language becomes explicitly part of the action by virtue of the narrator’s silence in Part 1. When he begins speaking in Part 2,9 something shifts and the action accelerates: ostensible car chases, speeches, gory street clashes between rival political groups, hideouts, quasi-Knausgaardian kitchen scenes and riots, told as if from the mouth of a sleepwalker recounting a passage out of Manchette’s Nada.

So, although I am writing mostly about the language and the style of The Beginnings, don’t get the idea that it’s somehow a novel full of “ideas” or “concepts.” The word and the act are one.

Goethe:

[“]Indeed, that would have been a fine thing, had I wanted to string such a rich, variegated, and extremely versatile life, as I represented in Faust, on the meager thread of a single central ideal! It was altogether not my manner as a poet to strive for the embodiment of something abstract. I received impressions—impressions that were sensuous, vital, lovely, motley, hundredfold—whatever a lively power of imagination offered me[.]10

Personally, one of my favorite “impressions,”11 maybe in the whole of The Beginnings, occurs in Part 2, where the narrator and this guy Sempio steal a skeleton right out of its grave, apparently to sell it to some medical students. They call the skeleton “the magician,” because that’s what was written on his tombstone. The skeleton sits upright in the backseat of the car as the narrator drives around, Sempio falling asleep.

“I wouldn’t have thought the bones of a skeleton would all stay so well attached one to the other . . .” I tried to say so as to keep [Sempio] awake.

“It must be the diet!” he sneered.

I would just barely turn my head, would gaze toward the mirror with eyes wide open, when the headlights of a car overtaking us would dazzle the magician’s skull for an instant, causing all its contours to leap out against the rear window.12

Creative obliteration

Moresco has been compared to Kafka.

The problem with comparing anyone to Kafka is that nobody is like Kafka. But if it is also the case that nobody is like Moresco, then maybe we could say that Kafka and Moresco are unlike everyone else in comparably violent ways.

However, one positive similarity that has flagged itself to me on several occasions is that between both writers’ descriptions of bodies and bodily movements. Moresco, for example:

I, in my turn, was observing the head of the father superior from behind. It was as if it had been sawed in two and haphazardly reassembled, this circumstance the result of a long-ago accident that had moved one of its parts back- and upward. It would look so different depending on whether you’d look at it from the right or from the left that I had even given a name to each of the two heads of which it looked to be constituted: one of them I’d call “paleolithic” and the other “syncopated.”13

In Kafka, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, heads and their positions are highly charged images (specifically of desire).

The head that straightens, the head that bursts through the roof or the ceiling, seems an answer to the bent head. We find it everywhere in Kafka. In The Castle, the portrait of the porter is matched by the evocation of the hometown church steeple that “firm in line, soar[ed] unfalteringly to its tapering point” (even the tower of the castle, as a machine of desire, evokes the melancholy, mad movement of an inhabitant who would have risen by breaking through the roof).14

A little further down, Deleuze and Guattari even give us a diagram (no matter that they immediately throw it aside), which assigns certain functions to two types of heads/positions:

bent head[…] = a blocked, oppressed or oppressing, neutralized desire, with a minimum of connection[;] childhood memory[.]

straightened head[…] = a desire that straightens up or moves forward, and opens up to new connections[.]15

For Deleuze and Guattari, this describes or explicates (but never explains!) something about Kafka’s relationship to “justice,” which is really just another name for vying modes of desire.

But in Moresco, these two heads that are present “everywhere in Kafka” become one head. They are divided and rejoined, smashed up and agglomerated. One no longer knows exactly what one is looking at, and down the line, desire becomes something more mysterious than mere mystery. It becomes hysterical.

This is an acute instance of that visual-linguistic obliteration I indicated above, the joyful tendency to explosively create by way of destruction, “shucking,” to combine two types of signification as one would two particles in an accelerator. In the resulting chaos, we can sift (quickly now!) through the minutest Heraclitean phenomena.

What does The Beginnings want us to desire? Does it desire? What do we desire from this or any book?

Don’t explain! Only describe!

The Beginnings, then, is a kind of detective novel, but instead of a killer, we hunt for the logical connection (must there be one?) between the “paleolithic” and “syncopated” heads of the father superior, just as in Kafka’s “Description of a Struggle” we are compelled to investigate the connection between the straightened head of the narrator and the bent, hung head of his interlocutor as they oddly make their way down the freezing nighttime street.

Forget “two-faced.” Moresco is two-headed—in one head! Does that make three?

. . . Again and again, amidst some of the most beautiful, infernal descriptions of monastic or “political” or literary-worldly mundanity that you’ve ever read in your life, you assault yourself with these questions that run, gleefully, sadistically, up against the walls of language.

Kafka aside: If the The Beginnings is the complementary opposite of any book, it is maybe Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten—Moresco flays the psychological bildungsroman before turning it inside out and subjecting it to his “increasingly vertiginous games of eternity.”

Eyes Wide Shucked

What if the tolerable consistency of our perceptual apparatus, otherwise called normality, was nothing other than the perfectly balanced tension between everything being really scary and, simultaneously, really funny on an inherent, objective level?16

Imagine if the Kantian synthetic unity of apperception were only the constant stasis whereby the deep hilarity and screaming dread of the manifold of all possible perceptions were checked (anstoßen?) into a purgatorial state of contiguous boredom.

The Beginnings removes that check, that unifying compromise of self-consciousness, and freely lets out the whirling Whatever of phenomena.

This whirl surrounds not a single point but traverses and penetrates a single plane, that of the “visage.”

Just as there are no proper names for characters, there are also rarely “faces,” so-called. Instead, any and every time a character is described in a significant way that evokes them as a being, we are made aware of their “visage.”

I asked Max Lawton about this word. He explained that Moresco’s original Italian here is volto. According to Lawton, this is more poetic than faccia (face). It’s also stranger, less colloquial.17

Significantly, a volto was also a kind of illuminated or gilt mask worn in 15th-century Venice during feast days, holidays and masquerades.

‘I want you to cover what’s left of their visages with a gold leaf!’18

We can think of the visages / masks of The Beginnings in a twofold way (differently, maybe, from the father superior’s two heads): first, as the mediating surface, or mirror, through which the world becomes descriptively reflected to a higher power;19 second, as a passport to Rabelaisian anonymity, as is proper to the chaos of Carnival.

The two sides of the plane of the visage gleam with reflective beauty and a joyful linguistic debauchery.

Evening would descend, the street sparkling for an instant, then vanishing. I’d crane my neck a bit within the frame, seeing in the rearview mirror that the white-faced worker was bringing the already lit cigarette up to the blinding stain of his visage, but, each time, I couldn’t comprehend what he was sucking at it with. [Emphasis mine.] […] The stain of his visage would become even more dazzling alongside the drop of light that was the bulb. He’d stop to gaze upon it from right up close before unscrewing it, the cloud of mosquitoes seeming unable to bite his visage.20

Moresco’s whirl of imagery surges magmatically (he often uses the word “magmatic,” especially to describe light) out of the opening created by his suspension of proper names and the bored metaphysical truce between the horror and hilarity of the real—mediated and multiplied forth by the visage.

The streets were deserted, the sidewalks all scratched up by the cuts of shovels. The sky was white, reflective. You couldn’t see those low-hanging stars, those stars. “They must all already be asleep . . . all extinguished . . . there’s only the little magmatic light that palpates all night beneath that sacred image, like an egg yolk . . .” I thought, breathing onto my frozen, stylized fingers.21

This imagery is visceral—in the non-hyperbolic sense of actual viscera. There is something organic and semi-repulsive about everything inorganic in the world of The Beginnings. Light palpates, becomes an egg yolk; elsewhere, clothes take on the role of skin, “crepitating” —or, for example:

Smudges of slightly exfoliated light would ride the curvature of each pebble, all of them together forming something like a pale galaxy.22

This is absolutely beautiful. But there is also something about it that makes my skin crawl.

Exfoliated light. Exfoliation is one of those words whose connotation blinds us to its other possible definitions. Exfoliation can be used in a geologic, inorganic sense. Thus, it means: “a process resulting in parallel fractures in the surface of rock”, which fits well in this context.23 But when you read the word “exfoliated,” that’s not what you think of, is it? You think of “the removal of dead skin cells and built-up dirt from the skin’s surface”,24 which is itself a second-order organisicm derived from the latin exfoliare, “to strip off leaves.” (Again, sgranato/shucked suggests itself. —Lawton gives the original as sfaldarsi, which can mean exfoliate or disintegrate: I suspect he chose the former word rightly, as “disintegrate” is far less ambiguous than “exfoliate.”)

This level of highly ambiguous imagery affects how we read the otherwise innocuously pleasing phrase, “pale galaxy”—the paleness of this galaxy now has something about it of dead skin cells being impersonally scraped away, under the mask / visage, both somehow living and dead, of us and our narrator.

“At the end of the end of the day […]”

As you finish The Beginnings (and so get closer and closer to Songs of Chaos, out in 2027), it becomes apparent that whatever distinction you thought might have existed between action and description, between depth and surface, is likely a groundless fantasy on your part and that it’s really all just one screaming plane of crystalline language—which dons your fantasy like a mask, a volto—the plane of one great, shining visage fleeing and reflecting in every direction.

I look forward to seeing how Songs of Chaos thwarts what I have said above, as I suspect it will with a violence.

Previous:

Illegible world—Just me and the dog (Juvenilia #1)

Gelegenheitsdichtung (Juvenilia #2)

THE GLOBE

Let this emotion walk out to you and then guide or push it away to the periphery. Now, it can express itself without feeling like it’s being watched.

A lead actor sitting in the half-light beside the pulleys and ropes on stage.

IMPURE BEINGS OF LIGHT

Mediated photosynthesis: consuming the flesh of our fellow creatures is the act whereby we eat impure beings of light. Our eyes are red like alembics filled with protoplasm. The blood of the vine, the veins of drained creatures, rises like dark water on the banks, pulled by the moon now rising. Men and women slinking off to bed are drawn out again—the river flows backwards. We live on the ecstatic drawn from every stone, rivulet-creature, and ferment. Like an anchorite run dry, you go into the damp caves, trying your teeth on the rocks; the rocks break and blood flows forth, warm from the now animated, now autonomous mouth. Look up. You see stage lights. They brighten the blood now, it is shining, and the eyes of an audience, hitherto unsuspected, unknown, stick to you in the silence of your bleeding.

ORTHO-ONTOLOGICAL MANNERS

It was not until the eighth grade (!) that I realized the indefinite article—a—was not capitalized like “I”. I seem to have given subject and object equal respect and importance. (Our orthographic conventions are averse to the ideality of the world as we find it.) This was the age for me, not incidentally, when life also became something I could do and not only something that washed over me.

But wouldn’t it be polite for me to start capitalizing not only “a” but also “the” and “you”? It is very common for people to write in all lowercase, extending this even to AN I.

SICKNESS IS A CRIMINAL

. . . a window looking out onto a vast garden, thickly interspersed with trees. Light outside: Symbolist blue–green, coolly intellectual light. Inside, the colors are warmer: browns, deep burgundy, soft pine greens, the healthful glow of a fire.

Image of an old European hospital—.

Here, I am in this factory–hospital, myself and the other objects. Not even proper lighting for sickness; fluorescently exposed instead, for repeat interrogation.

God forbid we treat disease with a modicum of hospitality.

BECOMING DISCOVERABLE

A certain kind of artistic–poetic production acts as if it had something to do with the surreal. But the surreal has retreated. We literally no longer see it. Actual surrealism’s basis is autonomous and hostile to being-made-conscious-of.

On the surface, attempts at surrealism deflect our attention away from what is most obvious: that it has become design and not art. (The recuperation of what is called the surreal, but only called that—Is the unconscious reflexively confronted by its production?). Surreality has even retreated from our dreams, and we no longer have the slightest idea where, in which sphere of word or being or image, to search for it again.

The hunt for a new surreality will have to deploy bewildering tactics, and though we search and search, finding nothing, these tactics themselves will become, of some assured necessity, surreal. Then, it will be exactly when the hunt stops that this new mode of surrealism will vanish again. Its traces will remain only as the inscrutable desires of muscle memory, as phantom pain, as deja vu. As thee again-biting of inner wit, lo…

Surrealism, to exist in three dimensions, must have movement and multiplicity and the feeling of a target. If it stops (or loses its status as a roving pack), it becomes design, an “art object”. (A “something” that would be better if it became nothing.)

Surrealism can hold out longer in two-dimensional territory (insurgents hiding out in the vast plane of the countryside).

The plane gives rise to a feeling of self-renewing concealability.

It is easier to imagine the world steeped in [20th-century] surrealism than it is to imagine the discovery of a new surreality. Doesn’t the surreal do the discovering? We would have to render ourselves discoverable.

GEOMETRICAL IDEA OF SELBSTBEWUSSTSEIN

Nothing great today—“is the understanding pictured as a depth or a surface?” —and such-like questions.

Topological/topographical thinking. Dieter Henrich.

WHAT DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND ABOUT ἐντελέχεια???

If the body is the clearest image of the soul, then handwriting is the clearest image of a thought (indefinite article).

Entelechy—the spiritual center of force of an individual (Goethe); the negative (speeding) and unbordered version of the Monad?

ORPHEUS /// THEIA

Dream of a woman that came to visit me while I was loitering around outside of some private event. For a minute, we stood facing each other, and, gradually, drew nearer, just like two planets whose orbits are rapidly decaying into each other’s fantasized centers of gravity.

I AM A POSITIVE PERSON

When the walls close in, it is not an oppression but a focusing. The walls close in until I’m a bullet in this chamber!

I’m having a great day. BANG!

DISSEMBLING

“Always be dissembling!” Sure. It’s good to appear to have completely forgotten about yourself.

This morning, my coffee tastes like—what? Like all coffee I have ever tasted before the sun has come up. Coffee tasted under the aspect of eternity—one composite cup. The blue hour before sunrise—mock eternity.