I once was a maker of words, now a maker of sentences. Oh, forgive me, I know this thought is leading to nowhere already. Why embark on any such thing at all? I am tired. I am already tired and yet I have hardly already begun. What was I saying? Did you forget what I had said already? And yes we can turn round and simply look behind us at what was there behind us: there all that beauty, and now what is ahead of us? Is there an empty window of darkness? a single pupil of the eye which symbolizes the receptivity of the soul right here, yes, right here in the body: don't look him in the eye, don't look evil in the eye and find out it is you looking back at you: Isn't that the lesson from the Lord of the Rings? (JRR Tolkein, some kind of timid, and yet investigative bastard...)
Here we are, writing a story for nothing, and for no-one, sounds like Samuel Beckett: or maybe it's our other friend Henry Darger? Maybe it is Adolf Wolfli or there, Robert Walser: there all of them the gang, with their hats out waving, their straw hats: or Vincent Van Gogh or maybe it's Robert Musil... Or maybe it's even Carl Jung: he's out there in some pictures with a straw-like hat: they are all waving their hats, these insane old European men with their best intentions: as if waving us on to some kind of future woven out of the threads of so many genetic fibers, woven from a thousand generations in a given land: we can say that the land has changed the people: this much is an ethnic fact: north to south, east to west: we are all becoming different: and the people are living here and we are all getting used to a specific kind of weather.
So far we all say good day to each other and we ask each other about the weather: but we never knew how bad we'd feel if we didn't really fully agree with the weather: here we are, most of us transplanted in Los Angeles for just a generation or two: that's all really, just a few instances of time where we could speak of the ullulation of the species through the reproductive act. So far we're all just putting up with the weather but nobody knows really who we are, admitting we are really just putting on and up with an act.
Words for the maker of words: that's all of them, these words are my only children, and you can shut them up in a jar or a desk drawer, or now on the back of a hard-drive somewhere whose very location one day will be forgotten. You can make and send forth a man, yes, you can embark on that myth: or you can live into your truest belief: that while the attempt to send forth one's seed ends only in chaos: the attempt to send forth kindness has some effect of leaving the entire system a little more kind, a little less selfish.
What I am saying, I admit, is a matter of conjecture, because I am only telling it to you now, and you cannot believe a man's kindness for what he says, only for what he does. Watch ever for what Men and women do, not for what they say. (What good are words then? -Some words are kinder, and tend to lead us into more imaginative spheres, while other words tend to hold us back: possibly even to retard or abuse: for there are some people who have turned their voice into an instrument of fear, of prompting rebukes and controversy, suggesting the most horrid thoughts, screaming into the delicate ears of young children:
Abiennia, the land of the Abbess
Glandolinia, the land of the Glandular Reflex.
Could it be that Henry Darger saw the eye of evil in his instinctual, glandular response? Perhaps but this renders for us a purely reductive bio-physiological response: the Glandolinians: like Sigmund Freud himself: interested in the glands of the Human Body (but this time in the guize of a charlatan-doctor, the hallmark of 19th Century thought, the medicine side-show): the idea behind psychotropic medicine is that mood could be controlled by modifying the chemical balance or imbalance of the brain. Glandolineans! But they could not not get the best of Abiennia: a-bien-nia. Bien, meaning fine and good. But also the way in which the syllables tripple round each other, like three, six, nine, sisters: Vivian sisters, to be certain, came trippling round the corner of the parapet of their little castle with clouds: the keep in the distance: because Henry Darger's work is about loss: it is about the loss of so many thousands and millions of men: the loss in a great battle, many sacrifices in such a great war: and Darger accepts all these sacrifices, nobly, as he commands his men: but this fight, this sacrifice, this sadness: to show that the Glandolinians will not win, but nor will the Abbienians! Isn't that the result for kind folk on this side of the dialectic of violence: in our version we get to win because we and the evil forces get to survive. In the darker version there is victory, to be certain, a certain kind of cleansing or purgation of what is unclean: and this ultimate act of hygiene has the effect of being a genocide of what we choose to forget when we live too much a clean and gentile life: and fail to realize that there is suffering going on all round us. That is what is truly appalling. There is so much suffering, and we are only barely, barely able to effect a single moment of that suffering. It is enough to drive some God-fearing men back to their home countries, back to the womb of their evolution: as if the dance of externalizing and conquest had somehow been stuck out here, way out in the wild west: where we attempted to conquer savages (thinking of course of "Dead Man" as the North Pacific version of this, and "Fitzcarraldo" as the Amazonian version): somewhere in this we realize that we are the savages: we turn around in dread and go back to our ruminations in the states where, somewhere we feel someone has given us birth.
It's horrible, horrible, yes. It is laughable and it is horrible. This is a kind of predicament, really for thought itself in the United States after the issue of colonization has come home to roost, and all the best intentioned ideas founder on the rocks of poverty and ignorance. Well, what did you ask for? Success? Victory? You asked for a certain kind of failure. Yes, it was a certain kind of most tender failure. You asked to be able to keep asking your questions until you had asked no more, till your very light had gone out: and the people would look around after you, asking: had he really meant this??? No-he has meant nothing at all, he has tried in vain, an emptiness, a nihilist, a man without qualities, a man without children.
And so I am a man without children. I think of them now, every day. I think to myself that I will not have any children to hold me back from my work, that I will continue to labor and toil, endlessly for a disease that knows no limit in the heart of human beings. What do I do here?
There are those who want to live forever. What about death and dying? Can it be so hard to face the consequence of a life where one has been given only to writing and to speculation? That one has given their life-time to speculation: to make that the only seeming child. I see the selfish gene in so many men, replicating and procreating, but what about simply stopping and breathing a sigh of grief concerning the labor of our continent? And what about overpopulation? (Now I am beginning to sound like an old saw, in great need of some kind of lubrication for all the wood-cutting i seem to do.) But just think on it, please, some of us will need to die to make way for the path of things to come ahead. Some of us go on to procreate madly: making children that seem born into an open fire: the children of the ghetto. And there are some of us who play at making love and never produce a single child. (Well, I have my writing, to be certain, and in this I retain a certain sort of dignity as a bachelor-machine, even when I pursue the course of being a married man).
You know I read this, and sometimes there are those who will read it after me. I can say that on my finger now is a band of yellow gold that I wear in an act of love that exceeds my ability to succeed or fail in what I do. Regardless of whether I am good enough, I still love, and this gives me a certain perspective concommitant or superior to Beckett, for example, as a similar bachelor machine. It is not fair to say this. I can't compare myself to any great authors, since it is an act of vanity and poor authorship if i compare myself to anyone great: Kleist or Hoffmansthall, Beckett or Seneca, Aristotle or Plotinus, Sartre or Heidegger, Jung or Freud. All of these intellectuals I seem to rather dutifully nod to and simply bow my head in their presence. What do I do? I write moments of connection about them, I do not exactly make them figures in my own plays, since I am not as obstinant a writer as to actually produce a play: like the story of Nietzsche in "The Second Book," Nietzsche is a figure in Muharem Bazdulj's book, not mine to be certain: I don't want to make him a "figure," I am overwhelmed and feel uncomfortable round him, just as one of my friends points out he will not speak yet on the matter of Goethe...
Rambling, wandering, oh yes, gamboling, and now I am afraid that I have outspoken and outstripped myself with my rambling just a little bit further: have you ever wondered what Loneliness James Joyce or what-his-name-Marcel Proust must have felt when they wrote such enormous tomes of themselves? I wish I had time to try to feel that much loneliness... but really I have to just plug on with my job and my life: I have to try to find a way to fend for a living and cover all the responsibilities of the position that I do. And I just barely cover them. Oh God, it seems I just barely cover the duties that I need to do.
Maybe one day I will become more adept, I will put down all anxiety and indecision, and I will make only decisive choices: maybe on that day I will become a kind and motivated man. In the meantime I will still struggle with my own delay, I will still be a conflicted man who likes to dawdle and to daydream, who wants to fall into fantasy, to fall off the edge, to float in some nebula of greatness for a moment, it is an error to be certain.
The way of the scribe is simply to report back what he does see. So I have attempted to write back to you, as a sort of maker of words, though I am a maker of nothing, since words were somehow given to me by the world: I can remember learning them one-by-one with an intense curiosity to know the workings of each one: to learn each implication, each tender insinuation of meaning. Of course I am indeed very far away from being a master of the English language, since any language itself is nothing unless it is constantly changing, adding, being reformed into some laughing lament of great grief.
A hard rain's a gonna fall. It'll be raining in all dimensions, not just one. It won't be any one kind of rain, it will be resoundingly hard rain, and we will have to learn to soften, just like mud, like the branches of a tree which with hold themselves from a river so that life can remain rooted in this spot, so that it does not have to all be washed backwards: back in evolution another billion years back into that salty, briney crotch of the ocean. But if the rain falls too profoundly, then become like the mud and silt, spread out, but yes, containing gold dust! Carry the ore of the mountains and deposit it in veins of life in the midst of the cold dead depth of the earth. There in that place where there has been no motion for a million or ten million years: pull forth the veins of sunlight and make a golden ring.
It is difficult to escape the mythology of the ring. The exit wound of the golden ring is one where one sits on the other side of heroism. Jung shoots Siegfried with the help of a savage in his dream: he wakes and needs to find some suitable interpretation for such an action lest he regard himself as Siegfried and shoot himself. I can say that I am moved to simply remain, and to heave a sigh where I do not know what exists in this particular space that is beyond the excellence, and perfection, the liberation that the Hero searches for. We can say that the hero searches in vain, but then what? It is not because the task is fruitless that one seeks to pursue it heroically: Christ says "my kingdom is not this kingdom;" and by this he acknowledges defeat. But this is the truest trajectory of the hero: no success like failure (and failure is no success at all). I am not here to advocate for a Christian point of view either, though Christ, I may say, figures large in Henry Darger's image of Abiennia Flag: Abbieannia. Christ, the official self-effacing hero. Thank God for Christ, I can say that. Siegfried must die, but Christ must not. Christ has already died, and according to the authorities (which makes this last statement exceptionally cheeky), "Christ has risen." But I cannot believe that this "Christ" has really risen till my neighbors and my brothers really can laugh and know in their hearts and souls that they can love again.
I said this once to a woman. I think that forever after she might hate me for it. I said that I really wished for a day when a child would wake up and from the moment they wake they would feel kindness, and they would grow and flourish, they would not be cursed. Maybe this kind of perspective is woefully one sided. Maybe such a comment provokes everyone who is in touch with the universe to give me a swift kick in the ass! But I tell you I love all this so much that I will try the best I can, and live and die by the thought that we do not have to be abused in order to grow: all this toughening: I will experience the toughening, this terrible toughening. When abuse comes into one's orbit, when one welcomes the abuse, takes it on, and plays with it, saying, I love you, I will be kind to you, no matter what you do, I will be kind to you. Oh how one wants to cry, once again! You could label me a "cry baby!" But then you would not be far from the mark. Some of my friends are tired and sad. Some of my friends are tired of talking. Some of my friends are somehow someone else: Hoffmann, Kleist, Nietzsche, Fichte, Darger, Web-Logs, Filth and Entertainment. Somehow all of this continues to move on.
I am so sorry, so sorry to embarrass myself in the future, so sorry to have said something that might compromise who I am or who I thought I should be, but I wanted to write just this instant a free writing, and to plunge from my heart into the depth of all I have been feeling: almost inexpressible: and therefore the delay between now and the last time I wrote a sentence like this. On top of this my best friend has left.
("You're gonna have to find yourself another best friend... Somehow" -Bob Dylan) (But Bob Dylan is not my friend, he is just some old strange fellow who is acquainted with despair, so I like him, I like the positivity he seeks in the midst of all his hard hard rain. It really is hard.)
Soft earth, mud to the sea, gold dust...
The cycle continues.
The cycle continues.
It is the development of the father, akin to the doctrine of the assumption of the Virgin Mary: flesh into heaven: that the hero no longer is the only hold of consciousness. We laugh and share a wry smile and say, "but enough of that, I still love you."
