Week 37 (2)
Not
much to say.
Saturday, 23:07
It’s my birthday tomorrow. I’ve had three pints of Beamish. What do you expect?
Squawk
seven five zero zero
.
Friday, 18:53
“...humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels. Now, the conjectural ‘primitive language’ of Tlön has found its way into the schools. Now, the teaching of its harmonious history, full of stirring episodes, has obliterated the history which dominated my childhood. Now, in all memories, a fictitious past occupies the place of any other. We know nothing about it with any certainty, not even that it is false. Numismatics, pharmacology, and archaeology have been revised. I gather that biology and mathematics are awaiting their avatar... A scattered dynasty of solitaries has changed the face of the world. Its task continues. If our foresight is not mistaken, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.
“Then, English, French, and mere Spanish will disappear from this planet. The world will be Tlön. I take no notice. I go on revising, in the quiet of the days in the hotel at Androgué, a tentative translation into Spanish, in the style of Quevedo, which I do not intend to see published, of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
Not
in the mood.
Thursday, 21:47
Trying to work on Ruthie’s, which should help. Bright, cheerful, happy sex stories. Right?
I’m not in the mood.
Ann Coulter: don’t you ever dare to presume to speak for me or any decent, moral human being ever again.
I’m
not angry.
Wednesday, 22:15
I should be. Right? Shouldn’t I be?
I don’t see too many angry people. My boss seems to think the whole thing is a source of—I don’t want to say delight; I certainly don’t want to make him seem callous; he isn’t. But there’s a definite air of wonder I can sometimes feel humming through the air. Hackneyed comparisons to Pearl Harbor and JFK notwithstanding: this is a new thing. This has Never Ever Happened Before. There is a certain—edge, akin to wonder, right next door to disbelief, across the street from terror, that makes your eyes light up with new facts and developments, that keeps the radio tuned to NPR, that obsessively clicks through the middle 40s on the cable TV, where the news channels live.
One of my neighbors used to live in New York. His wife used to work for somebody who was working for Port Authority, whose offices were in the WTC. They’re tired. They’re stressed. They’re worried. They aren’t angry.
Another one of my neighbors is a firefighter. I don’t know yet if he’s angry, but if he is, he’s done something with it: something far more meaningful than flying the flag (as meaningful as that’s suddenly become): on the roof of his porch, he’s taken three of those hooks, those prongs like marlinspikes that firefighters used to poke and prod and haul out burning rubble, and stood them up in a tripod, and from them hung three mute firefighter’s helmets.
The spouse is pissed. She’s livid. She’s angry at our government and our national defense, worried about big-ticket pork-barrel missile shields instead of the shit that really matters. And she readily admits she’s got a bloodlust for whoever did this. But much as she wants to hit someone, hard, she knows it does no good at all to hit everyone who ever lived near the guy, or lent the guy five bucks, or said nice things about him at a party.
After all—if it really is bin Laden—a lot of his money and know-how came from right here in the good ol’ US of A. Like Noriega. Like Hussein. Like so many others...
Justice is meaningless on this scale. The only way we can win is to not give them precisely what they want: fear, anger, hatred, terror, the very reasons they need to keep on fearing and hating and terrorizing us. But our own bin Ladens—the snarling nasty white ones on the cable news shows, in suits, with smug doughy faces and bad ties and sanctimonious combovers—seem determined to give him—them—whoever—precisely what they all want—
Build it up again. That’s a goal I can support. That’s something I can feel something about. I want to see those towers there again, goddammit. I want to see them full of people and paper and offices and bond traders, even. I want to see the world’s largest filing cabinets put right back where they fucking belong. Built to withstand a couple of 767s, this time, instead of a measly 707.
I’m not angry. I don’t want to see bin Laden dead.
I want him to lose.
Being that I’m a Yank, I’m somewhat distracted at the moment. Didn’t hear a thing about it till I went into work. “Isn’t this crazy?” What? “The hijacked planes? The World Trade Center? The Pentagon?”
Planes?
Then there was the reporter on NPR comparing the whole thing to “you remember that scene from Independence Day?”
I distrust the rhetoric that’s flying around. Pearl Harbor. (Bad choice: conjures up the sneaking suspicion that Bush Knew, much as FDR supposedly did.) At War With Terror. (What were we doing before? Coddling it?) Must Keep Our Nation Safe. (How? In the name of God, how?)
The moral here: if someone wants to fly a plane into a 110-storey building badly enough, they will be able to do it.
(War with terrorism? What the fuck have we been doing about the well-orchestrated campaign of shootings and bombings and terror carried out against us every day right here in this supposedly inviolate homeland, that’s reduced what is a legal right to something that is available in less than 14% of the counties in this country?)
But such carping seems—
Yeah.
Unreal.
Trouble
and desire, or, Delaney’s dialectic.
Monday, 23:28
Still kicking dualisms around. Thinking, for instance, of desire and power:
Say I want you. That gives you some small modicum of power over me.
Say I have power over you. That means I have you, to a certain extent. I won’t yearn for you, or burn for you, or write soggy sonnets for you. I have power (what sort?) over you. I won’t want you; I already have you.
So. No desire.
It’s ridiculously simplistic, and dangerous to carry beyond a certain level of playful gedankenexperiment , but it could be said that power and desire exist, to a certain extent, in a relationship not unlike the relationship of capital and labor: complementary. Where one is, the other is not—but has been, or will someday be.
(One of the things that makes it simplistic is that power is not a thing spent through use, like capital, but rather almost a living thing, that grows with use and withers with disuse: desire sated brings power, or at least returns some modicum of self-control; but a surfeit of power brings new desires.)
Delaney’s dialectic appears in an essay entitled “The Rhetoric of Sex/The Discourse of Desire,” (reprinted in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & The Politics of the Paraliterary ; run, don’t walk. I’m serious) a loosely collected sheaf of vignettes and interlogues that has a lot to say about rhetoric and discourse, which, in turn, illuminate quite a number of things about sex and desire. Specifically, in section 7 (“Discourse and Desire”), as he’s discoursing on the experience of being a gay black male science fiction writer talking to straight white male science fiction fans about their troubles with women (which is one of the funnier images I’ve run across in a long while, and one of the many reasons you should run, and not walk), he lays out what he sees as the central problem of dealing with the unapproachable object of one’s desire (whatever that may be): the inability to say one of two simple statements:
“I like you; do you like me?”
(And did you notice we’ve already hopelessly mucked up the simple complementary relationship I established in the opening?)
What’s interesting about this is Delaney goes on to read the statement “I like you” as the desire to be loved; as taking pleasure in imposing your emotions on another person; as, in essence, sadistic. And he reads “Do you like me?” as the desire to love; as taking pleasure in the imposition of the desires of others over and above your own; as, in essence, masochistic.
Any relationship, of course, is a complex and tangled web of snarled and snarling tussles over who, precisely, is on top (or thinks they’re on top), and why, and how: playful, nasty, supportive, backbiting, sexy, vicious, ecstatic, rude or exhausting—in a very real sense, a relationship dies when someone wins once and for all.
If you can ever figure that out, that is.
But while Delaney follows along after those who are out of balance (and we’re all out of balance): those who can say the one, but are wrung dry at the thought of saying the other—
I like you; do you like me?
—I was more intrigued by puzzling out whether or not “love” is a transitive verb. Certainly, if one translates his dialectic in the simplest and most direct way possible: “I like you”; “I wish to impose my emotions on you”; “I love you”—it certainly seems to be. But we all know it isn’t, or rather, it’s both: the masochist can just as easily say “I love you” and mean something utterly different. So to clear up that potentially dangerous semantic confusion, I tinkered with the translation: rather than “I love you; do you love me?” I rendered the dialectic as “I love you; I am in love with you”—and like a bolt from the blue, was suddenly granted insight into the workings of the Great Undergraduate Exit Line:
INT, CAMPUS COFFEE SHOP. Sophisticated but Callow Sophomore lays hand on forearm of Sensitive Young Froshling, who is on the verge of being unable to control an attack of the weepy sniffles.
SOPHISTICATED BUT CALLOW SOPHOMORE:
I love you, I do. I’m just not [dramatic pause] in love with you.
Homework: construct a semantic rectangle using this re-rendered dialectic. Extra credit: poke holes in the entire thing, and demonstrate how utterly wrong I am. And you could really impress me by devising a syllogism and working that old bramantip magic on it.
Intended to stay up late last night to finish work on this week’s Ruthie pages, but I was literally—yes, in the literal sense—too tired to focus on the computer. Kept trying to open programs that were already open, like turning the key of a car already running. So I’m up early this morning to bat some clean-up and get it all wrapped up for the weekly turn-over. Then, more Yard Work. And then, if I’m lucky, a few hours in which I can write, before stumbling into bed like a felled ox (again) to get up early tomorrow and go once more to the Day Job to do it all over for someone else. (Working for a monthly magazine; this coming week, we’re in production.)
So of course I’m taking ten minutes with my fresh cup of coffee to natter on about nothing much, not even (ostensibly) what this blog is about.
Yard Work: I dislike it; I once, when young, swore a mighty oath Never to Mow the Grass Again, when I had such control over my life and personal fortunes that I could make such decisions stick. But having bought a house, I’ve pretty much let that one slide, too. —At least I can use a push mower, so not only do I not have to put up with the smell and the noise, but I can feel smug about being better for the environment than my neighbors. Who are all lovely people, really.
It was the chopping that got to us, though. Hacking out the old, tangled, mostly dead screen of arbor vitæ along the back fence and chopping it all into bits that could fit in the 10-yard yard debris drop-box we’ve rented. Playing John Henry—why did we say John Henry? It’s Paul Bunyan, dammit—with the dull mattock on the big thick ones that weren’t nearly as dead as they looked. It’s all gone now, but me and the Spouse and the tenant from downstairs were left staggering around, drooping, exhausted, wrung out. So I couldn’t stay up late last night to finish Ruthie. So I’m committing a horrible sin: waking up early on Sunday to,well, work.
Coffee’s good. Saw State and Main last night (instead of working, which prompted the idea of trying to stay awake, which led to having to be up early this AM); recommended. The squirrels in the attic are rampaging this morning, and Something Must Be Done about them (I keep wanting to call the landlord, until I remember—oh, yeah), but until then, they keep the cats preoccupied. And yesterday we got the fig tree and the pomegranate tree that the Spouse ordered, so we can plant them today, in our newly cleaned back yard. —They came in a box, the trees did. In the mail. I’m still boggled at that. Trees. In a box. Through the mail. Express mail, but still. Trees. In a box. They look great. Fig tree even has some little figs; the pomegranate has one lovely little flower, that, I presume, will someday become a pomegranate. Not really sure how those work. Yet.
So. A portrait of the eroticist at dawn. A couple of hours after dawn, really. But who’s counting?
nicholas urfé
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