Luke’s Jesus always sez:
And which of you, by taking thought, can add to his stature one cubit? (12:25)
[After composing the entry that follows, I looked back and thought it would work well to start the thing out with that quote. I'm only admitting this to excuse myself for any structural incongruity that this last-minute tinker might have caused.]
Dear diary,
Are you paranoid or simply in-the-know? This question, which I assume is unanswerable, hounds me around. Ahab said of the whale: He tasks me; he heaps me.
Innocence and experience. My life can be parsed neatly into two precise divisions: first naive; then paranoid. Nothing else; it’s like a binary switch: I progress thru no middle stage, no zone of repose; I have never been allowed to enjoy a period of “normal” perception, by which I mean whatever the healthy herd sees and hears. The herd with their beautiful coats.
I spend time reading books, articles, and reports from the far left; just like an academician is supposed to do. My impression is that this country where I live, the U.S.A.—and even much more than this place, for the economy is global now—is hastening toward disaster. Someone more in-the-know than I (more paranoid than I?) will say: It’s already a disaster, we’re now racing toward…
Toward what? What’s worse than disaster? The final showdown with the Devil? Whose Devil? (In my case it would be the Hangman God of the Orthodox) (—as opposed to the esoterics’ inscrutable alien deity-within.) I can’t think of much worse than what human history has already given us. Wage labor in the age of robotics. It’s like the ancient Israelites accomplish their exodus from Egypt and reach the Promised Land, only to learn that Moses had clandestinely entered first, years ago, and hoarded all the milk and honey into a silo, and draped the silo to hide it: now he divvies starvation rations to his multitude, all the while claiming the necessity and fairness of this austerity. —I guess we could add the word thankfully when we note that, instead of being able to execute any such dystopian scheme (futuristic for him, modern to us), our man failed to reach the finish line and was buried by God’s own claws:
And the LORD said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto your forefathers, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.
So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD. And he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. [Deut. 34:4-6]
I definitely see the glass as half-empty. But if true paranoia is to say, “It doesn’t matter how much water is in the glass, since it’s all going to evaporate anyway, so we might as well admit that the earth is oceanless,” then I am truly paranoid; because the heater in our home has been acting erratically recently—it’s been mis-starting, skipping a cycle every few hours—and I predict therefore that my sweetheart and I will be found frozen to death in this apartment either tonight or tomorrow.
I utter that prophecy only to convince myself how ridiculous it sounds. To exorcise a thought, just articulate it: I glean from Nietzsche’s insights that the process of finding words to express an attitude, in some way, kills the attitude itself. And Heisenberg sang that the position and the velocity of a subatomic particle cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory. From this, I presume that one cannot simultaneously endure a feeling and express it. Again I recall Samuel Johnson’s reaction to Milton’s “Lycidas” (from Lives of the Poets):
It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. […] Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.
I assume I’m flipping Johnson on his head by reckoning as follows, but to do so seems right to me: Fiction is like paranoia, in this case; it is truer than truth; for it not only sees what exists, but it evokes what shall be. So to remedy my paranoiac thoughts on a day like today, when a household appliance opens its eyes and begins to act like one of us Elohim—that is: no longer slave to its program but blessedly error-prone—or even to abate the greater angst that comes from seeing the life on one’s planet funneling doomward, we need only (as it were) to misuse our prophetic gifts; in other words: make an awful artwork out of it. An excellent artwork prays for luckiness to help the worlds of outside and inside overlap, like the alignment of planets; but if you DON’T intend to commemorate a phenomenon, if you want instead to consign it to oblivion, you simply follow the process of poetic creation, yet without conviction, so as to end up with an accurate articulation: a dead thought.
After reading Breton’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism aloud at the park to some local geese (their communes apparently abandoned them for warmer climes), we moved on to a lecture that he delivered in 1935 titled “Political Position of Today’s Art”; I’ll quote a few lines, in case they might help confuse matters more (compare the following to Johnson’s censure of “Lycidas”—my take is that the two minds essentially agree, tho on the surface each of their statements feels at odds with the other’s):
…if in general it is quite clear that the power of emotion and the gift of expression must both be present in the man from whom we may expect a work of art, people commonly have, on the other hand, a completely false idea of the relationships that obtain between these two great means in the born artist. Positivist rationalism soon gave people to believe that the second tended to put itself directly in the service of the first: as a poet, you experience a violent emotion, which I suppose to be private in nature, in the course of your life; you will write the work that counts for something, you are told, under the immediate influence of this emotion. This statement need only be examined more closely to see that it is wrong on all counts. …Most often such a method results only in a work that does not make much of a mark, for the simple reason that poetic subjectivity has here gotten the upper hand, that it has not been brought back to that one living focal point from which it can radiate outward, from which alone it is able to penetrate to the depths of men’s hearts.
[—translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane; the italicized phrases are in the original]
Conclusion:
The problem is that our heater is situated directly in the center of our apartment, and our apartment is very small, so there is nowhere that one can flee to escape the sound of its burners when they ignite: it’s like thunder from Zeus. So when the heater makes its clicking sound and fails to burn, it’s as though Zeus has fallen ill. And this is terrifying to us believers—FOR GOD CANNOT DIE. If God dies, then Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was right, and we’ll have to rethink the way that we vote.
P.S.
I’ll share another of my ancient rap demo tracks below in the post-postscript, but first I need to display this record of my furnace’s activities, since the majority of my readership consists of HVAC repairpersons (which acronym, for the 33% of you who are unsaved, stands for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning systems):
P.P.S.
Below is the second of ten tracks from yet another demo rap tape that I found in the dustbin where I tossed them. I’m uploading the album online, one track at a time. Each of the album’s songs end with a guitar performance by my biological brother Paul – to finish faster, I didn’t let him rehearse or do more than one take: I just forced him to play cold during his first time hearing each beat; then I edited moments together that struck my fancy. More info here.
No comments:
Post a Comment