In the Beggarly Style of Imitation

by Jean Marc Ah-Sen

  I don’t know what roads Roderick ended up at exactly, what laid in store for him. He probably died like a dog in the streets, his head swollen and distorted beyond recognition. I do know that for a time he lived in a tent in Queen’s Park with the johns and hustlers and cocksuckers for company. He had a companion in the end, a woman covered in chancres who was devoted enough to live outside in the Canadian winter with him begging for change, and whom he, for a reason no one has been able to determine yet, half-strangled to death one morning until she was able to fight him off and flee. She sought nearby shelter at the Women’s College Hospital a few blocks from where they were camped out.

  It took nineteen years for this tinkering coincidence to find me, for Sveta to call me on the phone one day making no sense whatsoever about how she had come into work and witnessed a frantic woman in tears screaming, “Borgloon trynna kill me!” at the top of her lungs. The blood drained right out of Sveta’s face because that was not a name she had heard in almost a decade. She thought of me afterwards and found my number through Barbara, whom Ousmane had taken as his second wife after he had used her to desecrate the memory of his first, only to drop dead from a heart attack a few months later.

  Sveta was as unreliable as they come, but she never lied about Borgloon when we were “all pointillists in the Borgloon picture,” as she used to put it. Sex made her walk and talk the straight and narrow unlike most people. When she said that Borgloon made his way into the hospital after chasing his partner across Grosvenor Street looking like a ghoul advancing through a lazar house and wearing a T-shirt for a bandana that read Apex Novelties, I knew for sure it was him. I was working on the third floor of Whitney Block at this time—I had come a long way. It was no effort at all to come running down to meet Sveta and see him with my own eyes.

  The security staff of the hospital were very patient with Borgloon, mainly keeping him at a safe distance from Shanna, the woman he came to retrieve and who stoutly believed he’d come to finish the job he’d started. Borgloon was just pacing around menacingly. Sveta was huddled in a corner while I was mesmerized by the flood of memories dancing in my head: his stapled jodhpurs, being alone at my first prenatal visit, knocking over his drinks at the Maple Leaf Ballroom, his convalescence at my apartment, stealing the Pelham Park welcoming mats. My reminiscences ended when I heard Borgloon muttering to himself something about there being no way Le Rallic is dead because “Shanna is French and she doesn’t do the dishes.” I unravelled when I heard this gibberish.

  I almost traversed the invisible boundary separating the onlookers and guards from Borgloon, but my feet were fastened to the floor. He was practically a Swiss watch when I kicked him out of my apartment compared to the pig’s breakfast of a man he’d become. All so suddenly it became incidental if Borgloon was right about the causes of his afflictions and trials. Perhaps it wasn’t even important if my own ideas about how Borgloon got to where he got to were correct, what exactly led him there be it disease, injury or societal indifference. In the end, the fact that he was slogging the pathways of a park in the dead of winter living in a jerry-rigged tent was all that should have mattered.

  With more deliberating than I care to admit, I decided that I would bring along a thermos of soup and some poisson sale in a container the next day for Borgloon. I packed these away in my purse with care, rode the subway to work and sat with apprehension thinking on the many ways the meeting could go. I left my home earlier than usual so that approaching Borgloon would not affect my work schedule. I gave it an hour. I disembarked, walked out of the station and crossed over to the Ontario legislative building and passed Wellesley. I went tromping through Queen’s Park checking all the benches, above and behind trees, and beneath the monuments for a sign of Borgloon’s existence. I found nothing.

  I didn’t have the strength to go combing through hospital registries on my lunch hour every day. I made a half-hearted call to Rhonda and asked if she had ever met someone matching Borgloon’s description at St. Alban’s, the homeless shelter where she worked. She said that if my life ever depended on giving a description of a stalker who was terrorizing me, they would have arrested him, made a movie about his life and sold his letters before they dug up my remains. Then she hung up the phone. I have not seen him again to this day, and I don’t expect to tomorrow.

  Sentiments and Directions from an Unappreciated Contrarian Writer’s Widow

  Widowship

  A life in harmony with others is a wasted one.

  One husband’s sanctimony is another’s daily bread.

  A man’s character is usually the opposite of that which masquerades on his face; for this reason, moderation appears to be the greatest of hidden human faults, while it is at the same time the most difficult to apprehend.

  Learn to depend on disappointment, if only to disappoint others.

  Apparently, never let an opportunity go by to befoul a well-heeled fellow’s banquet table.

  A grudge can give one’s life purpose and, most invigorating of all, the conviction to believe in their own hypocrisy.

  A poor liar has the entertainment of others as his sole comfort.

  The worst thing about growing older is expecting that the world is beholden to you for growing more intractable and even-minded about your faults.

  A man free of complaint is like a hog without a trough.

  Death is the reward to those who constantly expect the best possible outcome in all enterprise.

  The greatest gift a father has ever given his son is a willingness and model against which to stray.

  How Fares the Companion?

  We pine for the deleterious failures of our closest companions so that they will both understand our suffering and pay homage to our resolve.

  To repay a friend’s confidence with secrecy is worse than betraying their trust.

  Be wary of anyone bearing gifts, be irreconcilable to anyone bearing advice.

  Passions in Decline

  The passions are like carcasses resurrected by forgetfulness, not unlike one’s progenitors.

  The passions can unseat only the mind that expects anything less from that great motive power and does nothing to indemnify itself against their will.

  Intemperance is an affliction of the soul that bestows even the most inane and vapid of activities with the sheen of an unobserved novelty.

  Avarice seldom exists unaccompanied by a rearing vainglory.

  An egotist is not so appalling a creature because he is never responsible for his failures, but because such accidents to his person further his bewitchment.

  A man free of obligations is not a liberated one: he is simply a bastard.

  One should manage their desires as they would honour the dying wish of a mortal enemy.

  Love is Pride’s way of acknowledging excellence in connoisseurship.

  There may not be much glory in a bottle, but enough to make glory seem like a fool’s errand.

  There is no worse abjection or greater triumph than feeling unloved.

  There is no more powerful inclination to stolidity than compassion and thoughtfulness in all endeavours.

  Society Parlance

  Silence is not an invitation to speak nor a substitute for eloquence.

  Boisterous people are to be avoided as if stupidity was catching.

  Ignorance is like an untapped reserve that can encompass any depth of delusion.

  There is no greater impertinence than to be kept waiting.

  No one is more eager to believe their own twaddle than someone who appears to gain the least from it.

  Romanticism is the solution to all of life’s problems if one is inclined to evade them entirely. In other words, it is just another way to beautify scoundrels.

  It is better to be an afterthought to your enemies than to be treated as if you were a curiosity.

  Ingratitude is the way to pay a compliment while living among barbarians, gratitude the means to exa
ct revenge while living with the civilized.

  Obligations were created for no better purpose than to clarify our disdain for one another.

  Good taste accentuates everything currently outside of one’s possession, bad taste everything within grasp.

  There are always people who are impeccably indisposed to do anything of value in life except fret about people indisposed to do anything of value in life.

  A modest favour cannot take the air of a tradition any more than it can a king’s pardon.

  Sententiousness comes at the price of poor conversation.

  A millennium of philosophical thought has still not found a remedy to the pretence of babbling coherently.

  Exhortations shape history much in the way that thieves declaim stolen goods.

  The indignities of living are so abundant that surprise in any situation is a fair appraisal of an individual’s artlessness.

  There are as many dullards in the world as there are gaps in one’s thinking.

  The world is a misbegotten accident, but no more so than is desired.

  Never call unannounced unless you are repaying the favour.

  An affectation gives purpose to the purposeless and so too to his accuser.

  We treat our errors as if they were accidents but view our accomplishments as if they were the product of meticulous planning, when it is the exact reverse that holds true.

  One’s mettle usually counts for far less than the ability to dispatch this resolve in an apposite setting.

  Treasures of Leisure

  Even a fruitless task can edify the mysteries of indolence.

  One must shake the scholarly pursuits as one would an infection or a companion who has outlived his use.

  The impulse to collect artifacts and memories about us is a desire to erect a monument to our own recklessness; not so that we may silence this lurid activity, but so that we may lay our heads on its altar.

  Expectation and hope are generally very stupid uses of one’s time.

  Reminiscence is death a thousand times over.

  Many a tried path has led to disaster, but only the untrodden road can render one’s misfortune truly exquisite.

  Masochism, Meaning and Purity

  It is the privilege of the damned to be able to alleviate the misfortunes of their countrymen and enlarge them upon their enemies. A competent writer on the other hand can find significance in every which thing. Taken together, such an individual should be indomitable.

  Experiencing literature is a very sobering experience: it answers questions life has articulated with the clarity and fitfulness of a stumbling drunk, and reiterates those questions with the clarity and fitfulness of a rambling one.

  There are some writers who take to the pen to settle scores, others to elaborate on their own conditions and still more who seek to communicate their intentions for the sallies of fame. None, however, are more effective than those who feel this compulsion as supremely as the pangs of masochism.

  It is an ill sign for a writer to have no one to call on for advice, company or repudiation.

  If one regards failure as an antecedent to success, they have never known either.

  The wise are never so clever as when they belie iteration for mastery.

  There are as many uses for a pen as a gallbladder.

  A diffuse and meandering preamble is the noetic equivalent of whistling in the dark.

  There are times when the literary arts hum the plangent tones of misery like a cracked drum over the distant roll of thunder.

  The myth of inspiration’s wayward muse is the closest cure to dilettantism as we are likely to produce, so we would do well to perpetuate it.

  A life spent composing aphorisms is a happily wasted one.

  Imagination is formlessness in a void of self-absorption.

  All meaning is created through crisis and diffusion.

  All purity is created through resemblance and disavowal.

  There are no new ideas, only unusual ways of forgetting.

  A Defence of Misanthropy

  Pugilism

  On the subject of my misanthropy, I have formed attentive if imperfect ideas, which according more to the spirit of its remedial qualities than to any other feature, I have incorporated to a progressive degree in my disposition to others, my outlook toward the world and my assessment of my own mental fitness. As a concept of some ill repute—a refuge for those who cannot satisfy the many demands impressed on them by modern living—a defence in the most popular sense of the word would imply its claims required definite qualification, or a justification of behaviour that when the mind is under the duress of punitive action, can serve to release the balance of a bad debt. But as there are no obligations in whose custody I must presently satisfy, the form of this “defence” is neither vindicatory nor in the nature of clarification; historically descriptive at times, perhaps—what has been written before on the subject not having been lacking in enumerating the social tendencies of the misanthrope—yet of what a misanthrope might “owe” to those who speculate on her actions is of no real concern, for who so dares possess the pathetic patience for imagined slights damns themselves to, it hardly needs mentioning, an ignoble failure.

  The defence of which I speak, and wherein I am in earnest to make, pertains to how misanthropy has availed me against the many noxious influences the world has on offer, namely pettiness, baseness of character, short-sightedness, improvidence, cupidity, graft, pusillanimity, ingratitude, physical violence, prurience and treachery; how such an attitude, the fondness for the collective views which comprise it, has prevented me from living too inclement a life insofar as an outlook is able to fare—a defence in the pugilistic sense of the word.1

  Praxeology

  The account I mean to give is descriptive of my worldview; it is entirely praxeological in nature and contains within it no word of solicitation or appeal to a higher ethics, despite how vociferously I champion its favour (I anticipate this finickiness will not be met happily). Perhaps it is enough to say that one cannot append to moral dictums a seal of immoderate approval any more than one can trace its authority to unshakeable grounds (i.e. a taboo or worse, a virtue), other than the source in which its textual origins reside. This is certainly not what constitutes a compelling description of a subject’s properties, viz. a natural kind. Hence, the question, “What is the good life?” may be reformulated as the consequentialistic, “What and to whom is the good life good for?”

  More often than not considered a philosophical dead end, misanthropy on an intuitive level is not so appalling an idea when it is encountered that mankind is hardly expected to form close attachments to everything with which it comes into contact. The variety we must confront daily provokes numberless responses that cannot without grim difficulty be resolved into an encompassing approbation for all things. Neither have misanthropy’s pollutant consequences germinated into great holocausts or massacres for that matter (differentiating here between a hatred of humanity qua humanity and hatred of particular groups contained within it). Similar to the reflexive action of all ideas originating in forbearance, it is enough to say that such a model of action operates within the confines of the degrees of success and failure befitting the individual’s will power, to say nothing of the moral value (if any) representative of the act itself. Misanthropic actions originating in restraint and forbearance should classify as supra-moral acts over and above the ambit of regulated ethical behaviour (unlike say non-interventionism or conscientious objection, which locate its motivations entirely within an ethical framework).

  To the extent a misanthrope relieves the world of the burden she embodies—in the sundry ways that beings are burden­some by merely expending numinous and material resources—misanthropy requires no more an account of the actions it stimulates than the effects of the sun on our native soil do. One does not arraign the sun on regulatory offences of
sunburns or phosphenes, but merely accepts its effects as part and parcel of its daily operations. It is the degree to which an individual is exposed to its rays that determines the resulting harm, and the misanthrope should relinquish all responsibility for the effects of those who hazard prolonged contact with her blistering irascibility.

  Bulwers and Algers of the World

  When a misanthrope achieves her goal, still yet to be defined, it is for the most part achieved negatively and at her own expense. Misanthropy is but one of a thousand meagre enterprises raising hob with the influences at play on the planet, moved as we all are by the first of the Four Noble Truths; it is not the answer to all troubles, but rather another ingredient in the confluence of activity that shapes and rends the world alike—therewith one should not overstate its relative importance. If we can conclude that misanthropy is merely a productive measure by which to understand the difficulties in life and best surmount them, this shall constitute a victory for our purposes.

  Though not as companionable an intellectual preoccupation as it once enjoyed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—generally regarded to have been stamped out by a Victorian sensibility that found influences against the common weal unsupportable—it still remains unclear whether the Bulwers and Algers of the world would be afforded the same indulgence in a modern setting for their anti-misanthropic screeds. It seems rather more likely that they would be constrained to a sphere of dubious pettifoggery; yet if there was ever a time whose expostulations of hate could beget a legion of misanthropes, surely it would be that of our own?