every fifteen years or so I have a night where I cannot sleep.
when that happens I find something else to do so the night before I wrote most of this next bit I watched the dvd of Jim’s [1] last lecture and tried to remember for the nth time what it was that I once thought I knew about such things as complexity and potential: the sheen they lend to the mundane whose little halo would displace itself every now and again just enough to make the ultraviolet spectra glow almost imperceptibly in the sun coming through the window and glinting on a chalkboard which itself reverberated with unspeakable possibilities. That short time when the planets fell out of their ovaline orbits and spun wildly out of course as a matter of course nearly every day during lecture as if to demonstrate the plasticity of that reality we once thought of as objective and steady before it became clear that the imperfect symbolic habits of reasonable animals bore main responsibility for what had once been divinely ordained order.
that is not very good and I will have to come up with a better way of saying it once I have had sleep and then coffee and then food and then more coffee which will not happen except in my imagination once I have set this out there for anyone to read but let me just say this and that is that hell itself depends upon fixing that vibration and plasticity in simple and distinct terms that cancel one another out—or resolve into a perfect whole, which amounts to much the same thing—and that heaven depends upon hell and that never in my life have I been so compulsively but unwillingly drawn into making those sorts of distinctions as during that time when I was quite nearly insane. [2]
which tells me something about the urge to generalize and make pat.
there is a Simpsons episode where Lisa expounds Occam’s Razor, or the principle that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is probably the correct one, and the last time I saw this episode I got caught on the possibility that the simple explanations I was given for the way of the universe were thus probably the correct ones and this was not something I wanted to be true so I thought for a bit until I identified the difficulty which lies in framing explanations that take everything into account. thus even the simplest do not triumph out of simplicity alone but must actually explain all that is and not just posit what should be and this means that for complex phenomena the explanations have to be very careful not to gloss over that which explanation is so often so good at glossing over. so good even that invocations of the law of parsimony always make me suspicious that in our desire to have things explained we also have things amputated, mangled, dismembered, and shredded. simplicity is not the law or even the principle until all that shines through is registered and only to the degree that the registration is itself comprehensive.
my suspicion is that we in what is sometimes called Western culture even though there is no such thing as the West most often grasp after whatever explanation is aesthetically pleasing regardless of whether it offers everyone and everything a voice. my other suspicion is that most of what can be said to be is not immediately aesthetically pleasing and thus subject to being forgotten in most grand narratives.
this is not only my alibi for not telling you my story in a way that makes sense but it is at least thus my alibi.
but so this disjointed rumination began upon hearing Jim make reference to his favorite metaphor, the rhizome, wherein is reflected a kind of consistency of complex relations that do not reduce to a simple hierarchy, and upon almost remembering when I had the hots for complexity and could actually hold it (or not hold it, or be held by it) without incurring the wrath of some introjected superegoic entity: that thought that wants to be god by vanquishing the devil of perversity when it may well be the perversity that is divine and the entity wishing to straighten everything out the antichrist.
but so I was almost just remembering it and wondering if I will eventually be able actually to remember it because it made life so much more interesting. which is not to say there is not something interesting about being obsessed with things you would not think about if you could help yourself but you cannot do that either; it is interesting insofar as the misfirings of neurochemistry are interesting especially when you think it could never happen to you.
the question though that is the question of how to mediate complexity or for me the question of how to mediate complexity and remain true to its intricacies while living in a culture where one is asked to pay money in order to have the right not to dwell in an unsheltered public square this question was supposed to have been answered by a teaching position of one kind or another where one is paid both to think and to teach others to think as well.
which did not happen. because the other question I have is how did he do it. how do you stand there in front of hundreds of people and be confident that you can talk for an hour or more from just a few notes. how do you translate your own anxiety into a believable passion for the complex and the wonderful. although I have ridden that rush that is performance in various forms and it can use the interjection of energy from adrenal hyperactivity over the course of a fifteen-week semester it is adrenal exhaustion which obtains rather than a long sustained hum of creativity and vision. as much as I wished to disorder my senses when I first read Rimbaud there is a limit to what one can ask the physical superstructure to put itself through especially when it malfunctions the way I do.
some time ago I spoke with a student who had been in grad school one year longer than I and had one chapter of his dissertation written and many yet to go while I was not yet at the point where I was willing to call what I had a chapter or chapters in any recognizable form. in this conversation I learned that I was not alone which is one of those things I learn from time to time but it always surprises me to have it reiterated. we talked a little about ambition of which I think I might actually have had a little more than he but not in any kind of a constructively extroverted way such that it finds an outlet and we talked about the horror of going on the job market after graduation and the unique difficulties of starting your career in your 40s such as your disinclination to move away from the place that finally feels like home to wherever your first job offer is “for just a few years” as that could mean you live out your old age there.
and we talked about how having a dissertation to write suddenly made us both prolific writers in every venue except our actual dissertations.
somehow this was all connected. well to the extent that Jim’s passion was teaching and my passion has been writing or thinking or something that uses writing and thinking as its alibi for spinning around in tight circles until it can no longer walk straight and that I am not sure how to get the twain to meet especially when so much of my energy is spent trying to move beyond almost remembering things.
so much upkeep for the apparatus. so many breakdowns. which have amounted to long and complicated detours which have amounted to the actual course taken from there to here although neither there nor here were anyplace in particular and I have to wonder if the next twenty or thirty years will be smoother or just as unpredictable or if from here it is all watching as the names you grew up with become unattached one by one from the bodies that bore them and are written down by a varying number of writers depending on the name.
[1] Jim entered my life thanks to a random impulse. I was visiting the table for Comparative Lit and saw a pair of men next to it representing another department that started with “Comparative” but then ran off into a field that barely existed as a field but did so by hitching itself up to nearly anything else that one could study. and so I did the same. that one chance encounter became a long pedagogical relationship that was itself almost unbearably productive and then I left Seattle for San Francisco and another degree but before I could get myself and my life back there he died. he was the first to die insofar as I had not been acquainted yet with the tearing sensation when those you love cease to be because it took me many years to find out that love could actually spring up in almost any relationship and so for a long time I did not realize what friends were for. not that I did not have any. I did but I did not know that they were love affairs as well even though the erotic exchanges all remained below the level of legibility.
Jim was four years older than I was. as I write this I am three years older than Jim when he died. there is not enough information here for you to calculate our ages except in respect to each other although you might guess and be close. when Jim died my disbelief was also dealt a blow and by that I do not mean that I found myself suddenly faithful to anything or anyone but rather that I was a bit late in coming to realize that one is not granted an indefinite license to piddle around even if piddling around is one’s life work. although this moment here is a glimpse into that infinity in which we find ourselves or rather lose ourselves there will be eventually another moment beyond which all moments cease to be and thus infinity will be foreclosed at least to the eye that thinks it can see into the deepest reaches.
[2] I saw one time at the student health center a nurse practitioner who did not know what Zyprexa was so I told her it was an antipsychotic and it was for— and I hesitated because I was not sure what to say and she piped in with a shrug well it’s an antipsychotic! like I had said antihistamine or something equally obvious. then she asked why I was on testosterone so I told her. I got no argument or sidelong glances but still having to go into this every single time I mean everyone has their embarrassing health narrative that they have to go through every time they get a new doctor but really when I have to make the first two things you know about me are that I am a transsexual and may be psychotic I get a little uptight. she then asked if I’d ever had high blood pressure before at which point I confided that I was a little uptight just then so my blood pressure might be unusually elevated.
[3] the economy of scarcity seems to underwrite the production of writing as much as any other production: I mean we are talking all the time so it is not as though language itself is in short supply but given how long we have had the printing press you would think there would be more books. not that there are not enough. not that the amount of books held in a few thousand cubic feet underground just a few miles from here is not far greater than anyone could read in a normal lifetime but the ones that see the light of day insofar as somebody opens a printed leaf and reads it after that leaf has been cut and dried and run through the press and bound well just how difficult is this process that it needs to be closely vetted? that only certain voices make it into print?
granted it is a new day in publishing and anyone upon whom good fortune shone enough to place them within that minority which hoards the majority of the world’s wealth—and that is a whole other question: what makes wealth wealth. it is not labor. I have labored under delusions and burdens and with this wondrously incapacitating weighty incomprehensible shadowy truckload of absolutely nothing tethered to both feet in such a way that my gait is limited to six inches per step and I have done this for so many years I lose count now when I try to reckon the time but none of this laboring has produced a shred of wealth for me in anything like the commonly-conceived sense of wealth. this is the whole of it here this writing and reading and then writing again and reading and reading. or rather this is an incomplete, tiny, measurelessly inadequate smear from the endless stream of what runs through the alimentary canal that begins at my eyes ears fingers teeth tongue even olfactory sensors which have a story of their own that seems so trivial as never to be told and yet your cat knows you only by your smell and those things associated with your smell. this is all there is but this is not half nor third nor quarter nor millionth of what could be without my even having to move ever again from this chair and my work is to spread it out to whatever distance I can reach with my own influence but is it wealth I cannot even begin to ask that question please sir leave a tip in the jar when I tell you where the best pizza is my labor is written in the phonebook.
in the phonebook we are all writers I remember rushing to see my name in print that one time in all this time that my name was published in the phonebook. it is not there now nor will it probably ever be again because the telecommunications sphere is also changing in such a way only to increase traffic beyond whatever you believe your limits are for sitting in it blowing your horn at the unmoving conversations lined up ahead of you.
it was just another book. I took it off the shelf, opened it, read five sentences, closed it, and put it back on the shelf. I am thinking of selling it because I am getting old enough that I have some doubt whether there will be time enough left conscious to get to it a second time.
great piles of them. where are they. kept behind locked doors that are no longer doors did you know that to read a scholarly article you must find your way to an institution of learning that can afford to let the public through their electronic gateways without bribery or pay between $50 and $100 for the privilege of access from within the comforts of your own home? information is not only costly but apparently too precious to waste on anyone who is not going to be invited to parties or conferences where they can talk it up. what is a book without readers but a few scraps of paper bound together for a short while. why is it necessary to keep information available only to the well-heeled. besides the obvious.
a new part begins
in two weeks
