Readopolis

by Bertrand Laverdure

  courrège: Okay.

  She takes a bite of her sandwich.

  Ghislain takes a bite of his sandwich.

  courrège: You can think it over and write me.

  ghislain: I have two or three ideas.

  courrège: Go on.

  ghislain: For example, Captain Queenan dies because he didn’t consider the danger that the gangster-mole posed to his police department. Almost inexplicably, this cautious and informed man suddenly becomes naive and forgets that he could be followed. The fantasy of invincibility and the evidence of routine (even though a detective should never succumb to routine) are what blind the captain. Captain Queenan experiences the consequences of falsehood himself.

  courrège: Yes, and are there other examples?

  ghislain: The entire film is built on this principle. In fact, every murder happens in response to a falsehood. This is what we must take away from the story. There is no murder without falsehood. Whether this is a passive lie (evidence that the person who is being pursued misses and which helps their capture, and which is supported by the fantasy of instinct, the idea that instinct is a good guide) or an active lie (some of the evidence has been deliberately hidden, therefore transforming reality into a series of fantastical evidence).

  courrège: Every murder covers up a lie.

  ghislain: I would even say, despite what Laurent-Michel Vacher (whom I like very much) might think, that there is no death without falsehood.

  * * *

  I open and close my front door.

  All I remember, all that comes back to me, are the moments just before this conversation and the moments just after it.

  Courrège was sitting across from me, chewing her shawarma in one of the many internationally-themed food courts that exist in the underground tunnels of Montreal, between the Thai, Japanese, Mexican, Lebanese, Greek, Chinese, and Vietnamese food counters. My shish taouk had dripped on my paper plate, my chair wobbled, the surrounding decor had the pervasive kitsch and glitter of the future.

  Our eyes locked.

  The stunning gaze of friendship does not resemble that of love. A distinct, fragile, luminous gaze settled on my person. I’m not in love. No. But the seduction worked all the same. I thought it right to return her gaze, dive into her eyes, all the while controlling myself like someone who knows their proper place.

  At first, I held her gaze as a challenge. And then for a few seconds more. But how long can we tolerate staring at the other person, face to face, without awakening something?

  The thought came to me, the thought dissolved, the thought re-assembled, the thought reappeared. Suddenly, I had an overwhelming desire to fuck Courrège, to grab her passive, tender, listening body. A few seconds of sustained looking. That’s all it took. Ninety-five thousand neural connections later, and a world of biochemical impulses fired up, I was there. Courrège, my old friend, a girl with no fiery sexual aura, a sweet, young woman, an intellectual, somewhat funny, protected by the walls of straight pants and the ramparts of gentleness, too selfless to be real.

  * * *

  I’ve never liked Basile’s poems. At their best, they were lesser Denis Vaniers (his Iconostase pour Pier Paolo Pasolini*); at their worst, they were amateurish sketches, a bit pompous or mediocre (his Journal poétique†). For me, Basile was a novelist and a critic, first and foremost. For others, he had been an agent of counterculture, the founding member of the magazine Mainmise‡ (drug culture, underground movements, gay literature, feminism, etc.). Furthermore, the third volume of his Montreal trilogy, the French edition of which was published by Grasset (just like the first two volumes), had been titled L’acide. In Quebec, we’d contented ourselves with a different exotic title, Les Voyages d’Irkoutsk§, much less provocative. However, I had looked through his work enough to find something that corresponded to my latest whims.

  The Indebted Recluse

  by jean basile

  Hermit in your earthly cell

  you pay dearly

  for your solitude

  That’s why

  when this pure state

  becomes illusory

  and you know it

  you hold it against

  everyone and yourself

  (From his Journal poétique)

  For me the recluse represented an archaic model of humanity who stood for the status quo, cessation and withdrawal, corrective mortification.

  Is there a morality independent of obligation or sanction that can allow life to blossom and revere our actions rather than our fears? A scientific, atheist, natural morality that supports human cohabitation while also valorizing individualism?

  In any event, fantasizing about Courrège, naked and available, I was at the mercy of my sudden urges. There I was, half-guilty of imagining a pornographic sex scene with my oldest friend when all I had to do was invite her over and kiss her.

  Somewhere in the world was a book that was going to sustain me.

  A morality independent of obligation or sanction.

  An agnostic and natural morality.

  The idea was clear and necessary. No doubt, the book had been written.

  I told myself that I couldn’t begin to persuade Courrège to have sex, I couldn’t try to convince her without literary arguments. After all, I am Ghislain the reader and I live in the readopolis. I have to account for my actions and deeds to the World Confederation of Books (WCB), to the Infinite Library of Completed and To-Be-Completed Books (ILCCB). If the desired book doesn’t exist, it means that I haven’t searched for it enough or that it’s still too soon. Or that I should write it.

  [In fact, I had made bets, especially with Courrège and a few times with Maldonne, on certain predictions: I predicted when certain books on specific subjects would be published. Predicting new biographies of famous people was too easy to be interesting. All three of us predicted a biography of the boxer-poet Stéphane Ouellet one year before anyone else. Once you get to that point, it’s no longer a game.

  It was more interesting to foresee the types of stories or forms, characters or ideas that would come up in books over the more or less long term—but not less than one year in advance. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be challenging. The more complex and precise our predictions were, the more points we won. We needed to predict, for example, when a European or American trend would reach Quebec, when a particularly racy subject would find a talented author capable of handling it well, when a young talent would squash a dominant literary figure and with what kind of novel (since the world of letters only has room for one or two dominant figures. Beyond this number, it all falls into exuberant anonymity. The media space, the public mental space can tolerate only a tiny number of literary players.)

  The three of us—Courrège, Maldonne and I—all subscribed to an Anglophone website for predicting the destinies of books, The Official Wizard of Books (run by a fanatic from Chicago). Via the Anglophones, we had also found Penguins and Porcupine (the website of a Franco-Ontarian that referred to two major English publishing houses) and Le devin des livres (a badly designed site run by a partying Frenchman who was trying to copy Wizard of Books). I, too, intended to create our own site of literary predictions. I wanted to call it L’Oracle des ombres in honour of Michel Beaulieu.¶ But the time had not yet come. We already had fun in our approximate English, and our respective blogs, especially Maldonne’s and her MySpace, kept us fairly busy.]

  Here we are. It was easy, I found it by cross-referencing two or three things. A mere few seconds. I found a name: Jean-Marie Guyau. The book, in its 1898 translation by Gertrude Kapteyn, is called A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction, and was first published in 1885, in Paris, as Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction.

  It was too perfect.

  I quickly got on the BAnQ’s website > Iris Catalogue. Ten seconds.

  Fayard reprinted this book in 19
85, as part of its “Philosophy Books in the French Language” series. (Note to English readers: the book has been reprinted by Forgotten Books.)

  I didn’t bother placing the copy on hold.

  * * *

  I thought of Maldonne. At times, I succumbed to self-criticism. At times, I passionately deconstructed myself.

  With Courrège, it was Courrège. With Maldonne, it was more complicated. Our ambiguous understanding plagued me. Sure, I had felt a—let’s call it secondary—attraction for Courrège, but was it real? What did true desire look like—this thing made so commonplace in tons of books?

  Yes—Guyau. Yes, my interest in the ethics of anomie, the natural morality of the common stream of mortals.

  Yes—Maldonne as well. The stimulus and the cold mouth (to be filled with a complicit breath), my penis erect like a lead soldier. Courrège isn’t the one I want to fuck, it’s Maldonne through Courrège. Even for me, it’s byzantine.

  Metro Préfontaine, the subway station of a former mayor. Escalator, concrete. The grey walls, the strident colours of painted metal, the tunnels of sallow calcium, the Métro newspaper stands all passing by. A huge, red-orange Maccano structure that lets rain, wind, and dirt filter in.

  I slide my pass, shlonk!

  I notice a guy shuffling around, wedged into a coat with grotesque pockets and overalls the colour of a children’s TV show, handing out leaflets to people getting off the train.

  Looking naive with his pack of 8.5” x 11” sheets, he seems almost happy to be distributing his tracts.

  He walks towards me.

  I greet him. He hands me a leaflet. He tells me that first, we are plants, then we become human. He explains it all in two treatises that he’s willing to give me for free, though I insist on paying him. Two dollars, which he quickly pockets, thanking me. I stare at the pocket over his left knee; it’s patched-up with colourful felt fabric. He’s like a character from Sesame Street let loose on the streets of Montreal.

  My example begins towards the end of my life as a plant, when I was about twenty-five years old.

  He has written an allegorical text with cheerful flair, an adaptation of his socio-spiritual life, by resorting to the metaphor of metempsychosis. First, he was a plant: The walls of his apartment were bark. Then he ventured out on the street and became an insect, moved from one stage to the next in the chain of being: Not quite knowing in what direction he should lead his life, he became a silverfish.

  In the next treatise, he describes his life on the streets, this time using the language of role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons, and The Lord of the Rings, the ultimate fantasy novel.

  Clerics and priests are those who collect. Many people stop to tell them about their lives or their problems. The good priests will listen to them. Other passersby sometimes give them money to indirectly make amends for a past mistake (a question of karma, I imagine).

  But then came the orcas: Orcas drink a lot of beer and have no manners. They look like punks, with their piercings and tattoos. Many people are afraid of them.

  Lastly came the vampires: You cannot become a vampire without the help of another vampire. The same goes for drug dealers, they need a dealer higher up than them.

  Thousands of photocopyist writers wander America’s streets, distributing their fleeting wisdom, their conclusions on life. I had met one of them. I had met the last herald of our modern cities, the son of Hermes and the Gorgon, a creature who freezes our blood with a gaze full of hope, while giving us a smile. On paper, he circulated reassuring maxims about a distressing world. A discreet ferryman of words with no intermediary, of emancipated hardship, he was an ally of Megaphone magazine, a brother who acted alone, a bearer of the merits of difficult self-accomplishment. A being who had come straight out between the legs of liberty, if not born from the unlikely union of urban mythological figures.

  Was I a vampire or an orca? Had I gone beyond the insect stage. Had I donned wings?

  I needed to see things clearly.

  (In my non-relation with Maldonne, in my literary proselytizing, in my reading of Guyau.)

  BenGharok@yahoo.com ended his treatise with this sentence:

  In time, you will cross the bridge connecting the world of logic to the world of imagination and be able to see yourself clearly!

  * * *

  I was in a pre-emptive state. I felt a strong desire to buy two specific things before anyone else did.

  Pre-emptive. From pre-emption, the action of purchasing before others.

  It’s as though the dictionary is trying to hold running water in its bare hands.

  I felt the feverishness of acquisition. My feet led me to the Couche-Tard at the Joliette stop. This wasn’t about work, but frenzy. A mania pushing me to procure, before anyone else, Saturday’s Le Devoir and a bag of blue shark gummies.

  Why did I have this frantic craving for inessential things: a Saturday newspaper and a bag of blue candy in the shape of sharks. Bad question (no answer in sight).

  I thought of Guyau, of his formidable idea of moral fecundity. A thinker tugging at the conventions of thought. He introduces a pitch and sets the tone. He is a musician against complacency.

  His thesis was simple and compelling: “He who does not act as he thinks, thinks incompletely.” Also: “It may be said that will is but a superior degree of intelligence, and that action is but a superior degree of will. From that moment, morality is nothing else than unity of being. Immorality, on the contrary, is a dividing into two—an opposition of different faculties, which limit each other.”

  This track of pre-emptive acquisition led me back to Guyau. This “need” was someone else thinking in my place, therefore colonizing my moral territory. A loss of unity. I was not thinking completely. Someone was thinking for me, someone had invaded my ethical autonomy. Furthermore, I was actually thinking this need. So I had to fulfil it, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to think completely. Herein lay the whole problem of contemporary western life. All excess is good; all that is good is excess. The powerful image of the blue sharks and the Devoir, and experiencing the same rush of salivation for the gummies as for the Devoir’s literary pages, definitely made me think of Pavlov’s experiments.

  I read Guyau to convince myself of the contrary, and in a way, he applied himself to thwarting my desire to be convinced. I don’t know if you follow. At this point I must admit, I am myself grasping at straws.

  Guyau’s ethics of anomie was the organic solution to morbid nostalgia, to our thousand opinions on euthanasia, abortion, the death penalty, the right to make mistakes, the influence of culpability and confusion.

  No sanction. No obligation.

  Moral fecundity as libertarian and responsible sovereignty.

  I was surprised to find the fitting terms to reflect this ethics of anomie in the intuitive vocabulary of hockey players.

  We were under pressure. What is this pressure? To be under pressure. Guyau gives this cliché the full weight of a moral expression of anomie, the profundity of duty independent of obligation. He writes:

  There will always be found a kind of inner pressure exercised by the activity itself in these directions; the moral agent will, by a both natural and rational inclination, feel itself driven in that sense, and it will recognize that it has to make a kind of inner coup d’état to escape that pressure. It is this coup d’état which we call fault, or crime. In committing it, the individual does wrong to himself: he decreases and voluntarily extinguishes something of his physical or mental life.

  The hockey player as the professor of contemporary moral philosophy. Why not? These are people who must constantly surpass themselves in a pagan context. The obvious paragon of a territory intended for the natural expression of an ethics of anomie.

  Emergency over.

  I will wait.

  I sink back into Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke.
>
  I’ve lost my craving for the blue sharks.

  * * *

  To: readmeagain@sympatico.ca

  From: earnestoearnesto@gmail.com

  Dear cinephile and moral exegete,

  I miss you. Our movie night has transformed me into a curious talk show hostess resigned to listen to her guest of the week. It was unusual and delicious all at once. I’m not trying to come on to you. But I’m not trying to get out of it, either. Ah, we two love ambiguity, don’t we! Never a dull moment…

  There’s only one copy of Guyau at the BAnQ. You’re monopolizing it… So I haven’t been able to look through it to answer you… to examine moral fecundity like you…

  Your idea of moral fecundity reminds me of a kind of feminine pagan generosity. You know, a return to the mother goddess, to the primitive shelter of a generalized goodness that only needs to account for the survival of a human society based on a paradoxical matriarchy. An option that would no doubt give you shivers, like many other guys…

  I’m not insinuating that you’re anti-matriarchy, I’m only posing the question. It seems to me that a morality without values, yet one structured around the concept of fecundity, expresses everything that still counts in this world that’s stripped of everything and paradoxically filled from everywhere… When all that remains is life as an end in itself, yet unsurpassable and inalienable, fecundity becomes a magical phenomenon that subsumes all other epiphenomena still lagging behind old values plagued by various ideologies, dying beliefs and vague customs.

  I am fecund, Ghislain, as much as any other woman. Don’t let this realization terrify you! Anyway, shouldn’t (moral) fecundity lead to peace?

  The sound of peace is the sound of copulation, the sound of the last cry before orgasm; it’s the sound of a peaceful village before a summer storm; the sound of lipstick slowly sliding and spreading on the rosy and slightly moist lips of a woman who’s about to give herself. The sound of peace is not silence, but the light tapping on a keyboard when we’re writing to someone. The sound of peace is the sound of resilience, the sound of a human being joyously spitting out the seeds of fruit. The sound of peace is the internal sound, the sharp beating of organic valves suddenly recognizing a source of fecundity in the landscape, a reproductive source.