Intimate Stranger

NIETZSCHE’S HORSE

I have been mulling over in my perambulating or peregrinating (or percolating) thoughts the notion of ‘the function of writing.’ In the light of the September 11 parting of the waters and the ensuing war. Note: not necessarily ‘the role of the writer,’ for that chestnut has for some time already been a horse drowned in many a shallow ford (in a manner of speaking); and no wonder the beast expired screaming and frothing at the bit, because numerous self-aggrandizing scoundrels, standing in the stirrups to look tall, had been flogging it to death. In my mind and memory I try to avoid the trap. Nietzsche, it is told, finally lost the remnants of his clear mind when he saw a horse being whipped in the street, and he went up to it and threw his arms around its neck and wept. But I’m not Nietzsche. And then, if I wish to hold to my tenet that “writing is an awareness-enhancing process,” I have to engage the question of how the above events affect our writing. And what our consciousness implies.

How are we all dealing with the aftershocks of incomprehensible death from the skies torching the skittles of our Western vanity? (Incomprehensible because carried out by humans like us.) Are we more or less alive than before? Has it modified our concerns? Did it change our writing? Is there any other perceptible smell except for the whiffs of decomposing flesh? Do revulsion and sadness and anguished anger smell? Rather — did only the flesh perish (and with it our glittering conceit of invulnerability, the ostensibly endless triumph of human ambition and ingenuity tumbling in a cloud of gray glory), or did some conceptions and values also fall away? How do we come to terms with naked terror? You were too shy or intimidated to talk back at me, other than saying you perhaps sleep less soundly and are more skittish. I respect your timidity, or possibly it is reserve, but at the same time I have to insist that you are a writer, that all our discussions around technique (arc, voice, tense, sense, angle and character) will be hot air unless we also think about how this activity fits in with larger social and ethical concerns. (I might as well say existential — you have been generous and patient enough to listen to me claiming that words are the original breath of awareness, and not just hot air.)

And how do we handle the spectacle of seeing the world’s only super-power using the awesome might of its air superiority to attack forces which, give or take a few caves and anti-aircraft artillery, can be compared to the New York Police Department? How do we come to terms with naked terror?

Talking about caves. . If it is true that the US and its allies occupy the overground it also implies that there is a vast underground out there. Portions of the population right here in America belong to this ‘underground.’ At least that is where they operate, even when they don’t know it. For it is not true that the word is too weak or insignificant or jaded to reflect the enormity of what happened, nor that it cannot digest and ultimately regurgitate the implications of what’s going on now. We will be producing notes from the underground, as has always happened on these occasions, and they will consist partly of the personal and partly of the public because this is the way we are and this is the duality in which writing always presents itself.

Take it further. There is an international conflict of interests. (Nobody is talking very much about the geo-political economic interests underpinning the conflict where vested multinational corporate privileges, the ‘right’ to strategic resources, are at stake.) Mr. Bush feigns genuine perplexity when he querulously asks why America is so much hated out there; to suggest that it is a misunderstanding “because I know how good we are” is either a fable or a fib. Same glib fish. He should consult his colleagues and his father. The world is a bitter and a hungry place for most people. It is also very angry. The rulers are seen to be the USA and its Northern allies (the other ex-colonial powers) and the gentlemen’s club of corrupt manikin regimes bolstered and fattened to fatuousness by these vested interests. Slowly an international ‘underclass’ is filling in the dots between their condition and their situation. Of course, it is silly to suggest that the dichotomy is simply a black-and-white one — peasants in Africa are not at war for the same reasons as those in Asia or Latin America and among the ranks of the ‘underclass’ you will find many bourgeois intellectuals. A well-off filmmaker like Jean-Luc Goddard is as fiercely angry about globalization squeezing his works out of the arena of public awareness and ruining his food and his certainties, and his colleague Wim Wenders is as anguished by the deceptions of the American dream he idolized and tried to emulate, as the Senegalese groundnut farmer obliged to buy his genetically modified grains from an American multinational company will be. And it is true, as well, that much of the humiliation is fed and compounded by the sight of unattainable consumer society products being dangled on TV screens worldwide (the way flashers expose their danglers), creating for the poor viewer the ambivalence of wanting to imitate as well as to vomit, and leading to the self-disgust which breeds fanaticism. We gag on this factitious Western paradise shoved down our throats. But this is also a tragedy, because our Manichean vision of Babylon is based on ignorance.

The world would benefit from knowing more about the diverse textures of American life, the dissidence and the solidarity and the tenderness, and the fears of many ordinary wonderful cussed human beings. And the fact that it will be the poor and the struggling and the half-alienated, including many immigrant would-be Americans, who are going to pay with their lives for the greed and the folly of the cowardly and corrupt masters of war. The world ought to be introduced to America, and vice versa, but not through the good offices of the present administration, because the only Americans they want us to meet are the interrogators and the spooks and presumably the oil executives.

Maybe we can then together dispatch Unum One-God, be He called Word or Profit.

And live happily ever after? The states screwed us. I mean, the construct of ‘state.’ After all, injustice originated with the protection of the privileges and the property of the powerful few (king, church, pure revolution — all ‘anointed’ by what could be termed the One-God), and it still does. In most parts of the world State has become a thing, an organism conflating its interests and prerogatives with those of the ‘country’ or the ‘nation’ or the ‘people.’ If however, you believe with me that (wo)man naturally strives for freedom, you will also agree that (s)he will aspire toward being a ‘free agent.’ And that you cannot be a writer except as free agent. Which does not mean that you do not have the same responsibilities as everybody else. Only that this is it, this is your charge and responsibility to society, as also to time and place and history: free agency. It is only ‘natural’ that the State should wish jealously to control perceptions of what it is doing, and why — telling us that now is the time to sacrifice some ‘individuality’ (indivi-duality) for the sake of the common weal and purpose draped in the patriotism of flag and anthem. ‘Superior interests’ always do, and patriotism in an environment where so many people have made a basic commitment to trying to be American is a potent prescription for making parrots of the population.

So it is going to be a tough ride for the searching spirit: free agency will be curtailed, accused of being a wanking cop-out at best. Or betrayal. But believe me: to compromise your right to be wrong is to irrevocably blunt your writing tools. Honesty in trusting your doubts and burrowing for the pain is not a value, it is a tool you cannot do without.

I repeat what I said before, that consciousness is ultimately a personal discovery, but it is also partly at least communal belonging. The word may be a tamed and color-crafted scandaroon, yet you ultimately have to let it fly so that other eyes may follow the whirring in the sky. Events like September 11 and the ensuing war (or blind man’s buff) bring home to us the challenges of our craft. We are lucky to have had this catalyst to shake our values, sharpen our perceptions, reshape our priorities, remind us of our inadequacies, reaffirm our conviction that the word — fashioned and used with patience, humility, grace, perseverance and dignity, and with the awareness of its discouraging obduracy — can reach out to mirror the terror and the complexities of reality.

(mirror note 3)

Talking about caves. . Chuck Wachtel, to whom I show the above entry, reminds me that there is another ‘cave’: resistance from within against the dumbing down of the public discourse, the apparent obtuseness of this (his) country’s foreign policies, the manipulation of sentimentality and fears kept vivid by ignorance. More to the point: there has always been resistance from writers. Maybe from shamans painting the animals and the trances on the walls of the cave. I must agree. (And admit that it may be hurtful not to point out the existence of these ‘counter-voices’ more consistently.) In class we looked at a section of Kenneth Patchen’s Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer. The man had been shamefully forgotten, and with him the struggles of his time. In preparing for the session I came across an essay written by Henry Miller about Patchen, maybe as an introduction to a book: “Patchen: Man of Anger and Light.” Miller found Patchen a powerful, sensitive being who moved on velvet pads. “A sort of sincere assassin. . He is American through and through, and Americans, despite their talkiness, are fundamentally silent creatures. They talk in order to conceal their innate reticence. . It’s always because we love that we are rebellious; it takes a great deal of love to care a damn one way or another what happens from now on: I still do. . No one in his senses wishes to admit being a voluntary part of this world, so thoroughly inhuman, so intolerable has it become. We are all (whether we admit it or not) waiting for the end of the world, as though it were not a world of our own making but a hell into which we had been thrust by a malevolent fate.” Every incipient artist in America, with the misfortune of being an artist and a human being, working away in the waiting rooms of sleep, will once again have to rise up in the revolt of the angels. The time is 1946. Atomic bombs had shaken the world and loosened the stays of morality; the nuclear race was on. “If through indifference and inertia we can create human as well as atomic bombs, then it seems to me that the poet has the right to explode in his own fashion at his own appointed time. . When men deliberately create instruments of destruction to be used against the innocent as well as the guilty, […] the sick, the halt, the maimed, the blind, the insane, when their targets embrace whole populations. . then we know that the heart and the imagination of man is no longer capable of being stirred.”