Next boring post (a complaint & a few quotes)

Dear diary,

I’ve been battling a cold, and it’s almost over; but, instead of being thankful, I’m annoyed, even resentful: for I deserve perfect health; it’s my due, not a gift: I refuse to be grateful for the ordinary diminishment of symptoms. The LORD must grant me actual riches, either physical or in the form of social renown, for me to give thanks (let alone praise). After tormenting me via sickness, God can’t just dim some of the symptoms and expect that I’ll say: “How majestic is thy name!” Otherwise he’ll learn to slack off in his duties more and more, until he expects to be worshipped for simply lying there in his throne-cloud, barely existing.

Anyway, so yeah, my cold is dwindling, but I’m pissed that it ain’t gone entirely. That pretty much catches you up on all the dreams and aspirations I’ve had since my last confession here.

And I gave my biological overseer (read: mom) pre-congrats on her impending grandmotherhood, because my brother got pregnant. (I only put it that way to amuse myself: I mean his wife has a bun in the oven.) That’s what I was told, in an instant text message last night, while I was watching a movie. Which movie? There Will Be Blood (2007): I keep returning to it: it’s brilliant: it encapsulates the U.S.A. that I know. – But can you believe that this news (the first of its kind, among my siblings: for none of us have spawned any offspring heretofore) was conveyed so unceremoniously, via insta-text? It seems that I should have at least received a singing telegram. We all recently gathered for Easter Daymare; why not make an announcement at that function? My mom said they expect the child in October. So that proves that the new life was conceived at the moment of President Trump’s inauguration. But I still haven’t heard a peep about this from either of the culprits (my bio-bro or sister-in-law), which further complicates matters: for maybe my mom was not supposed to blab to me this rumor. Some couples don’t like to make a big fuss about conception, at least in the early stages, since the pregnancy might go awry and then they’d be faced with the sad task of informing everyone of the false alarm. Or the alarm wouldn’t be false, exactly – for there was a fire; it just got extinguished sooner than expected: it didn’t get a chance to burn anybody.

Whenever couples inform you that “We hope the LORD will soon bless us with a child”, involuntarily your mind envisions this couple performing the sex act. So, if they say, “For half a year now, we’ve been trying to have a baby”, you’re stuck with the thought of their bare bulks rutting nonstop for six months straight. So I wonder why people reveal these wants. They should maybe say instead: “We love the thought of raising children, but we cannot figure out how babies are made.” Then you could explain it to them. And when they accept your offer to provide a demonstration, there’s a chance that the resultant children will be YOURS (scientifically speaking)! If you’re a man, that means you’re the father; and if you’re a woman, that means you are pregnant; and if you’re neither male nor female but any of the infinite gradations in between (or beyond all gender), then this might lead to a varying amount of possible upshots.

And I hate the way that people talk about capitalism. Let’s say two people are arguing. Person A, whom we’ll name Beelzebub for the sake of human warmth, says “Capitalism is bad for precisely three reasons: ONE, it kills true love; TWO, it makes living creatures sad; and THREE, it poisons all spacetime.” Then Person B, Beelzebub’s opponent in the debate, whom we’ll name The Frenchman – or, better yet, The Freeman – as it is written, “The word ‘Kraut’, derived from the food ‘sauerkraut’, is a derogatory term for the German people. During World War I, due to concerns that the American public would reject a product with a German name, American sauerkraut makers relabeled their product as ‘Liberty cabbage’ for the duration of the war”; likewise ‘French fries’ equal ‘Freedom fries’ (I copied this knowledge from the encyclopedia, but it can also be found in The Untold History of the United States, a documentary series that I highly recommend) – so our Freeman answers Beelzebub: “What you say is accurate, if you are speaking about our current system: for this system does indeed exterminate love, and bring misery to any being that possesses life, while contaminating spacetime such that not even black holes can breathe it; HOWEVER the malefactor in question—our current system—although labeled “capitalism”, is not actually capitalism, for Genuine Capitalism works and can do no wrong.” So, if something good happens, then THAT (i.e., the good) was caused by Genuine Capitalism; but if something bad happens, it’s the fault of some other system, or of some impure meddling that’s been done to Genuine Capitalism; like a Genetically Modified Capitalism, not the real thing as found in its natural state on the day when the LORD created it with his invisible market-hand. This brings to mind the way God himself explains how one should discern whether a given prophet is true or false, in the biblical book of Deuteronomy (18:17-22):

And the LORD said unto Moses . . . “I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. . . .
     “But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die.
     “And if thou say in thine heart, ‘How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken?’
     “When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken.”

Now I normally force myself to quit writing once I begin to cite from the King James Bible, but I need to share a couple other passages (nonbiblical excerpts, I stress) before I publish this entry, because they’re burning a hole in my quote-holster:

The following is from a personal letter to Catherine Carswell, written by D.H. Lawrence and sent on 29 September, 1922 from Taos, New Mexico. (Note that town, Taos: my favorite film is titled Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight – not the longer version, released in 1975 under a different title, but the revision from the 2012 Eclipse Series 33 set.) Lawrence has finally made it to America, and his remarks on this particular inferno spark my interest because I’ve spent my whole life here (tho in Burnsville, not Taos, alas); also what he says about travel in general intrigues me because I myself have never traveled. (When people extol travel, I feel unwise for having locked myself in my bedroom forever; and when people pour scorn on travel, I feel smart as tho I made the right decision.) One last note I should add: Lawrence’s brief remark about Australia is due to the fact that he recently visited that place and, in an earlier letter to the same recipient, deemed it strange. (“It’s really a weird show. The country has an extraordinary hoary, weird attraction. . . . I can’t quite explain it: as if one resolved back almost to the plant kingdom, before souls, spirits and minds were grown at all: only quite a live, energetic body with a weird face.”) Now here’s his oracle from Taos:

Well, I’m afraid it will all sound very fascinating if you are just feeling cooped up in London. I don’t want you to feel envious. Perhaps it is necessary for me to try these places, perhaps it is my destiny to know the world. It only excites the outside of me. The inside it leaves more isolated and stoic than ever. That’s how it is. It is all a form of running away from oneself and the great problems: all this wild west and the strange Australia. But I try to keep quite clear. One forms not the faintest inward attachment, especially here in America. America lives by a sort of egoistic will, shove and be shoved. Well, one can stand up to that too: but one is quite, quite cold inside. No illusion. I will not shove, and I will not be shoved. Sono io!

Nobody but I, among those who live here, thought the rendition of the U.S. that Lars von Trier presented in his movie Dogville (2003) was accurate. But I loved that film and thought it was spot-on, the way it represented this Free Land and the psychology of its inmates; likewise what D.H. Lawrence says above, about the egoistic will, “shove and be shoved”, is correctamundo (‘correct’ +‎ ‘-amundo’ as an intensifier; popularized by the character Fonzie on the sitcom Happy Days). Also I share his resolve, and speak with pride, right along with him, when he exclaims “I will not shove,” tho I clam up when he adds “and I will not be shoved”; for anytime anyone shoves me, I think to myself: “I probably deserved that.”

And the Italian phrase that ends the above quotation is employed by Lawrence also at the end of his poem “Medlars and Sorb-Apples”:

Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell
And the ego sum of Dionysos
The sono io of perfect drunkenness
Intoxication of final loneliness.

From what I can tell, it is not illegal to translate sono io as “I am”; likewise the Latin “ego sum”; which makes me think of Exodus 3:13.

Moses said unto God: “Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, ‘The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you’; and they shall say to me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say unto them?”
     And God said unto Moses, “I AM THAT I AM”: and he said, “Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: ‘I AM hath sent me unto you’.”

Sono io hath sent me unto you. Ego sum hath sent me unto you. You have received a summons from the intoxication of final loneliness.

Also, in John’s gospel (8:56-59), after Jesus claims “Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad,” the people question him, saying, “Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?” Then Jesus flips the script:

Verily, verily, I say unto you: Before Abraham was, I AM.

& to John, thus saith the Ineffable: Before Jesus was a foreboding in the consciousness of Yahweh, Dionysos drank him under the table.

But I want to return (or advance) to D.H. Lawrence’s letter, and copy two more fragments of observation, which he gives to Ms. Carswell, regarding my secure homeland:

Remember, if you were here you’d only be hardening your heart and stiffening your neck — it is either that or be walked over, in America.

Then at the end, Lawrence adds:

a gentle faith in life itself is far better than . . . money and motor-cars and wild west.

This elevating of gentle faith over ostentatious riches reminds me of Lawrence’s advice from a different letter (To Dorothy Brett; 1925), where he distinguishes loving from liking and favors the latter:

When Maruca likes a man and marries him, she is not so wrong. Love is chiefly bunk: an over-exaggeration of the spiritual and individualistic and analytic side. If she likes the man, and he is a man, then better than if she loved him. Each will leave aside some of that hateful personal insistence on imaginary perfect satisfaction, which is part of the inevitable bunk of love, and if they meet as mere male and female, kindly, in their marriage, they will make roots, not weedy flowers of a love match. If ever you can marry a man feeling kindly towards him, and knowing he feels kindly to you, do it . . . If you can marry in a spirit of kindliness, with the criticism and ecstasy both sunk into abeyance, do it. . . . a bit of warm flame of life is worth all the spiritualness and delicacy and Christlikeness on this miserable globe.
     . . . Put away all that Virginal stuff. Don’t still go looking for men with strange eyes, who know life from A to Z. Maybe they do, missing out all the rest of the letters, like the meat from the empty eggshell. Look for a little flame of warm kindness. It’s more than the Alpha and Omega; and respect the bit of warm kindliness there is in people . . .

Then he signs his letter “D.H.L.” and adds this postscript:

Remember I think Christ was profoundly, disastrously wrong.

I inscribed a big, healthy circle around that sentence in my copy of this letter. The first time I read it, I remarked to the springtime air: “I think my sister would benefit from following Lawrence’s counsel. She’s always looking for fantastic-romantic love; true love, so-called; all-caps LOVE; she’s always obsessing over her ‘love life’—she has already planned out how many children she and her husband will bring forth, and where they will live and how much they will travel and what their interests shall be — now all that’s missing is the man who will shoulder that burden.”

At this point in the entry, dearest diary, you must forgive what might resemble a segue; I only meant to jump abruptly to my final bit of reportage, without any connecting reason: I wanted to copy a couple blurbs from appreciations of two books I recently read, but now I realize that one of those books, Madame Bovary, centers on the very problems addressed in Lawrence’s letter. So please disregard this connection. I’m not trying to write a coherent essay, here; I’m just doing the literary equivalent of sweeping the rubbish of my brain’s chambers into the dustbin.

So I recently finished Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. I read that one silently by myself. And then the other book that I finished, which I read aloud with my sweetheart, was one I already told you about in previous entries: Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I bring these two works up because a third book that I often return to, which contains appreciations of a great variety of writers, mentions both of the above, and it interests me to juxtapose the relevant passages. That third book is called Genius: a mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds, by Harold Bloom. (When I read a text, especially after finishing it, I like to talk about it with other mortal souls, to compare our reactions; but I know no one who has ever read or is currently reading whatever I happen to be focused on at the moment, beyond my sweetheart in real life and a couple fine authors online; and one can never have enough friends; therefore Bloom’s impressions serve as the opinions of a proxy-companion: a disembodied member of my Happy Few Book Club, which exists exclusively in my imagination.) Now here’s what Bloom says about Flaubert’s heroine:

Emma Bovary is Gustave Flaubert, and almost all the rest of us as well. Madame Bovary is a kind of universal biography, not so much of the female Quixote, but of a sensual Quixote, female or male, whose quest is in no way metaphysical, whose desire is low romantic rather than High Romantic. Emma is a true alternative to Hamlet and Don Quixote: she is a genius of sensuality.

This take relieved me — until I read it, I thought there might be something wrong with me, as I identified so thoroughly with all of Emma’s agitated yearnings. And to see her as the alternative to Hamlet makes sense too; in my mind, this divides her most effectively from the narrator of Notes from Underground, who reminds me of a degraded, far-less-noble-than-Hamlet Hamlet. I’ve said before how ashamed I am that I relate so strongly to ol’ Dosty’s Underground Man; so my discomfort was partly alleviated yet partly exacerbated by Bloom’s assessment:

Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground features a narrator-monologist, the Underground Man, whom no reader can like or forget. The power of this protagonist is that he contaminates us: he speaks for and to our universal masochism, and we worry whether truly we share his lovelessness.

& this also clanged me:

We are not the same after recognizing the Underground Man in ourselves.

The only thing that afforded me relief is that I relate absolutely zero to the narrator’s resentful fear of women which flares up at the end of the book – I have none of that: I am the polar opposite.

However, what Bloom labels “our universal masochism” fills me to brimming. My earthly parents were both masochists of the highest order, each in their own unique way, and they passed on this trait to me fully. The only gift ever exchanged betwixt the twain was a hand-carved wooden plaque, which my mom thrust at my dad: it reads “GOD WILL NOT INSPECT YOU FOR MEDALS, BUT FOR SCARS.” This inheritance wouldn’t be so terrible if I could take pride in my painful wounds & losses, as they did; but I aspire to be an epicurean.

And I don’t just fret whether I truly share the Underground Man’s “lovelessness”: I know for a fact that it is my most defined trait – I’ve done scientific studies in my community, where I stand amid the kiosks in the mall and ask passersby to fill out multiple-choice questionnaires regarding…

No, it feels wrong to joke about this. I only wanted to say that I like those two books, and I like those two reactions to those two books.

P.S.

I think I burnt my tongue on that lentil soup that you made for me last night.

P.P.S.

In my last postscript, I shared my whole ten-track rap album Happy Songs of Love. The unveiling of that record was such a spectacular event, I don’t want to dilute its exceptionality by sharing another ancient-yet-never-before-released demo track here in this entry, but I’ll do it anyway.

The next album from which I’ll be sharing in the upcoming entries has no defining traits. Or maybe just one: All its beats were stolen from my brother’s drum machine. I bought my brother a drum machine for Christmas, wayback when, and he toyed around with it for a while; then I borrowed it from him, once upon a time, and I discovered that he’d saved a bunch of patterns on its battery (hard drive or whatever): the funny thing is that, because the medium was as informal as a sketch pad, many of these percussion patterns that my brother had stockpiled within his machine were obviously aborted ideas or plain screwings-around, thus it amused me to try to rap over them. So that’s why some of the background rhythms on the album sound a little TOO sparse, a little TOO janky. Like this one here: Below is my rap song called “Brown Rice and Drinking Cups” – ignore!

https://bryanray444.tumblr.com/post/172958426441/a-rap-demo-track-that-i-recorded-a-long-long-time