I was sitting in the center of the classroom, my hands resting chastely on my knees, and this is what occurred: little by little, the blackish mass of other listeners disappeared, and as if in slow motion, the raised hand of Augustus drew near me, the lips of Augustus drew near, the center of the classroom trembled, the light turned to ardor pure. I took a deep breath. What I was seeing had the tenor, the force of reality itself—it had truth seeping from its very pores. I let my eyes fall half-shut, much as theater curtains are pleated to intensify the mise-en-scène; your voice advanced toward me, flaring hot against my eyelids, and again he nears, his mouth-speech thrown like a rope around my neck, my own voice inside my head. His raised hands passed through solid objects. I was alone, chosen from among the rest.
I had accepted the challenge.
Somber, dominant, Augustus paced the hardwood floor. His eyes, orbiting planets, traced a revolution around me. He threw a question into the air—something viscously answerable by any mole who’d ever had a look down the shallow Hegelian tunnels of the assigned readings. His gaze swept past the raised hands of those few willing to attempt an answer, as if he were looking for “someone.”
I took advantage of the lowered tension that followed an interruption—a couple of bearded guys asking for donations to help fund the daycare center for children with Down syndrome that had recently opened on the ground floor—and slipped my hand in through the buttons of my blouse, à la Napoleon. Then I stared at Augustus, nodding in silence.
Without noting my demeanor, or even my presence, Herr Professor took a few more slow-motion steps, which carried him far to the right, the darkest side of the room. Then he spun abruptly around and gave a pat on the back to E.G., Éminence Grise, his chubby TA with the little goatee and the pink toad-like face. E.G. commenced sending little packets of saliva to everyone in the nearest rows as he held forth on a series of obvious and trivial points from the reading.
I’ve always defended myself candidly from all hostility. I crossed my arms and legs, gazed distantly (and, yes, disapprovingly) at Augusto, and waited for the class to end. Then I walked casually up to the dais on which his desk rested. Oh, he had no way of foreseeing the ferocity of my plan, the selfless devotion of my search. (Nor could he intuit it transcendentally, no matter how pure a Kantian he was.) He placed a book in his briefcase—fluorescent green spine, Die Diktatur, Carl Schmitt, the same translation that I have. He slid the ’79 edition of the Cartas privadas de Nicolás Maquiavelo in on top; still on the desktop was a volume of Leben des Generals von Clausewitz, and a copy of Lenin’s commentaries on the Prussian’s strategic doctrine. That Clausewitz book contains a magnificent sentence:
Regardless of whatever pleasure I may take in telling the story of my life to the world, my path leads me always across a vast battlefield; unless I enter it, no lasting happiness shall be mine.2
I wobbled a bit, overcome by the thought. Just then, Augustus hurled an ice dart my way: “You already passed this course—why are you taking it again?” He continued to fiddle with his books, not daring to lift his gaze to the human height where my own gaze awaited. I confess, I didn’t know what to say. I had no proof that he’d received my latest missives regarding his lectures, which I had diligently placed in the humble dusk of his fourth-floor office so that he could absorb my elucidations without the pressure of having to reason coherently in praesentia mihi. It is not often that one has the pleasure of seeing for oneself in real time that one has won an argument, simply because people don’t like to change their opinions in public. Likewise, as there were witnesses present, it was hardly the right moment to point out that this semester’s study program included a number of changes that clearly reflected observations (“suggestions”) I had made. The Old Man, as some students call him, is also an older man. He should share my position not because I’ve forced him to, but as the result of a careful examination of evidence consisting of brute facts and the manner in which they developed and in which they will continue to develop, whether he likes it or not.
And still the man couldn’t imagine—was not yet able to read—the ferocity of my hidden plans.
Whenever I am obliged to penetrate the depths of the Main Hall, I tend to walk quickly—I have a number of admirers with whom I prefer not to cross paths. The same goes for a group of students (batik clothing, dreadlocks) who dared to “confront” me3 in response to my pseudonymous cybernetic Lugonian crooning—I think it all began with me posting on the web forum the verse “Liberty, Liberty, that Venus of the Commoners.” At any rate, my elevated tone and structural daring were sufficient to light the ardent wicks of those Gulag punks. My “crime” was of course perfectly lawful (I avoided even mentioning that the fateful lines were drawn from the period of La Montaña, the anarchist newspaper where the definitive Voice of Río Seco—Lugones himself—shared top billing with that charlatan Giuseppe Ingenieros). The key element of my experiment was that I knew who they were, but they never found out my real name. All of which proves conclusively that my rate of speed in the Main Hall at that moment was a justifiable acquired response, not a sub-product of the contingent fact that Augustus was walking ahead of me, and there I was still trying to think up a clever form of revenge. How wise of him to jump into a taxi at his earliest opportunity.
For all I know, lots of things happened that week, but I never found out about any of them: so little seems relevant except for what comes from books, or one’s deciphering of them. (Of course, some perhaps overly dainty individuals hold that there is no difference.) Regardless, I can confirm that this was roughly the point when a number of faunal modifications were made to my ecosystem.
In my pied-à-terre, I have cultivated an expansive sense of austerity. Heaps of books and papers live in close cohabitation with my computer and other electricity-dependent species. On this somber stage, my omnivorous library has pride of place, ruling majestically over the rest of the incubi. At any rate, I was feeding good Yorick (my little red fish) when my kitten Montaigne began mewing archly from the foot of the bookcase. In keeping with her confrontational nature, Montaigne had been entertaining herself by gnawing on the little signs I put up to denote the various sections of my library—“Hobbesian Frenzy,” “A Social Engineering Night’s Dream,” “Police Academy 9: The Positivists Return.” To this day I don’t know how many sections it actually has.
Those were the facts. I chose a book at random (an old edition of Skinner’s Walden) and smacked Montaigne across the snout—a common technique for introducing conduct-altering data into small animals. (In fact I have certain doubts as to its efficacy. Once, when Montaigne tried to eat Yorick, I used the same method, rapping a book against the side of the fish bowl. This seemed only to excite the kitten even more—I always carry a little log book called Small Animals Journal for animal-related thoughts that occur at untimely moments. The proximity of the fish had powerfully awakened the predatory interest of the kitten, whose threatening behavior intensified: hackles raised, ichthycentric orbit, Yorick’s movements monitored through the crystalline penumbra.) I then left off observing my pets, abandoning myself to labors more properly celebratory of the divine within the human, or vice versa. Montaigne Michelle mewed plaintively and snuggled up against the warm computer; I continued typing through the hours of night and into the dawn.
I draw your attention to these delightful domestic vignettes, the intimate nucleus of my abstract bestial affections, in order to make more tangible the drastic transformation that the following pages hold. As preface to the horror, suffice it to say that the waters of this tranquil pond rose up in fraught crests as if driven by Sirocco winds; that the most profound spirituality was transformed into a hurricane. Kind reader: this is not a tale of obsession. My private tragedy, which shouldn’t be of particular interest to anyone else—anyone except you, Augustus, you who look at me now—is that I was forced to abandon my natural habitat, the velvet-lined home of my solitary, lettered existence, a
nd plunge deep into the brutal swamplands of a monster.
* * *
2 Schwartz, Karl. Leben des Generals von Clausewitz, Friburg: 1887, p. 45.
3 It didn’t take long for the news of my intellectual intimacy with Augustus to spread. As part of a smear campaign intended to slander both Augustus and me, certain cowardly and not unsarcastic elements let fly with criticisms such as, “Oh, sure, a treatise on political erotomania—at best it’ll be the kind of esoteric mumbo-jumbo you’d find in some realist novel.” This public statement was issued on the 2nd floor of the department, spoken through a cud-like mouthful of bread—perhaps a key experiment intended to determine whether carbohydrates can be used to strengthen one’s scrawny opinions, with no results to speak of. I had the good sense to put forward my answer in writing, from the comfortable solitude of my pied-à-terre: “Ah but no. As distinct from realist novels, the theory of AGR takes into account the manner in which decisive processes depend upon maniacal evolutionary developments based on the System of Personal Pronouns intrinsic to the Grammar of Romance Languages.” In this book, Cf. Section 2.1 et seq.
8
The four-hands idyll that Mara and Andy played with Pabst and Kamtchowsky included visits to the zoo and a couple of different cinemas. As the latter two didn’t consider themselves sufficiently perverse or attractive to make it worth the trouble of hiding their true personalities in an area as fraught as sex, there too Pabst and Kamtchowsky played their customary roles of lucid, intellectual pessimists. For them, sex was a commodity much like oats or rice; it was expected that someone else would take charge of adding value. Despite the morbid fantasies to which Pabst clung, Andy did not in fact suffer from some strange syndrome that let morons quote Shakespeare with the accent of a British scholar. His golden curls, fabulous shirts (or so they seemed to Pabst—in fact they were rather ridiculous), and carefree aplomb notwithstanding, Andy was a reasonably articulate guy who carefully hated all the things one is meant to hate. He was self-sufficient and far-seeing enough to have taken an otherwise colossal bourgeois failure (he’d dropped out of college) and turned it into a point in his favor: he now worked in the film world and made far more money than any mediocre academic, as he explained one day to Pabst, who sat there gritting his teeth while Andy nibbled on a brightly colored tab of paper.
In general, Pabst preferred to stay off to one side and masturbate. He considered himself to be something of a monk, albeit one with well-whetted appetites: the simple satisfaction of curiosity wasn’t a big enough bribe to convince him to give up the pleasures of misanthropy. He jerked off while walking around the apartment, or let himself drop gracefully into a beanbag chair; here at Mara’s he treated his penis with a long-lost affection, as opposed to back at his own desk, where solitude led him to twist it brutally back and forth in a spasm of emotional helplessness, sadism, and sadness.
Like some retired Nero too lazy to bother lighting the torch of any given desire, at times he laid back under the shifting lights of the mirror ball and let his eyes fall half-closed, his gaze drifting over the photographs of the destruction of Buenos Aires, the long avenues and ornate buildings in ruins, while Poppaea Kamtchowsky, backgrounded by a Puerto Madero laid waste (the A Grosso Modo series), took it from both ends at once. At other times he played the roll of DJ: with his pants down around his ankles and his cock safely in hand, he connected his mp3 player to Andy’s PC. (He’d once managed to awe Andy just by removing the CPU case, leaving all the colored cables and skeletal components of the drives and connectors in plain sight—a science nerd aesthetic that was just starting to catch on amongst hipsters.) Pabst took the role seriously, adjuncting the sessions for all he was worth—the fucking of others, his own jerking off—he and his fabulous alter-ego DJ Milk Blow, brought to you by a.a. cumming, inc.
Once, rubbing himself up with a bath towel, a pair of panties tucked into each nostril—Milk Blow was in charge of the outfits—Pabst saw a massive column of flame shoot up from the gothic fog of Buenos Aires. His mouth twisted, spasmed, he masturbated harder and harder, he murmured Kristeva and Chomsky, hold on tight! and his eyes rolled back. What followed was a disgorgement of theory, a spew of staggering dimensions; he could imagine his classmates from college, who’d always hated him, fighting each other barb and nail to see who would blog it first. The narrative was a recurring fantasy of his, a sort of “Jesus raises a ruckus in the temple”—he could visualize the shocked looks of the students with all their hippy accessories as he stalked the department halls like some justice-dealing tiger, shredding the banners and kicking down all the little stands with the Che Guevara merchandise and the garish Paco Urondo flags, the “We Shall Triumph” signs. In the end everything was in ruins and Pabst couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop laughing diabolically and pointing at the spelling mistakes on their posters.
Pabst agreed with Milk Blow that the notion of a masturbating DJ was in fact a redundancy, or an analytic truth, or a tautology—lately, Pabst himself preferred enumeration to synthesis. The songs they chose ran the gamut from “Personal Jesus” (either Marilyn Manson’s cover or Johnny Cash’s) to excerpta from the Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction, via Alien Sex Fiend, Butthole Surfers, Rage Against the Machine, Pixies, Rammstein and Sepultura. According to Pabst’s theory, the true tip of the sexual peak was the ’80s, when for the first time vanity knew no limits. That said, whenever it came time to choose a musical background for the day’s hump session, he never dismissed the furious, threatening rhythms most appropriate to the unfurling of the historical materialism of vanity: evil just makes you want to fuck.
The other force guiding his musical selections was his loyalty to Kamtchowsky. If he chose more playful songs (“Don’t Talk Just Kiss,” mid-’80s Madonna, Britney) or any of the more specifically seductive offerings, most of them by black singers, (“Doctor’s Orders,” “Love to Love You Baby”) he would be obligating her to demonstrate aptitudes which, all condescension aside, not even the most doting grandparent would be willing to testify she possessed. He took for granted that deep inside one or another of her organs, Kamtchowsky, currently down on all fours and mooing with pleasure, much appreciated this thoughtfulness on his part. The songs that, statistically speaking, were most likely to make adolescent girls spread their legs up on the speakers presented a perverse sort of challenge within Kamtchowsky’s graceless universe. For other girls, each specific motor activity correlated to a series of musical instructions that functioned like a private language hidden deep within a given community; for Kamtchowsky, however, hearing those instructions was like finding herself in the middle of a massive chessboard, and realizing that she isn’t a chess piece at all. It was as if those songs were in a language that Kamtchowsky could understand, but was incapable of speaking.
As for “Mars, the Bringer of War” (Holst’s The Planets, track 4), Pabst decided to hold off until they were all at least thirty years old. Otherwise these idiots would squeal with pleasure thinking that they were listening to the Star Wars soundtrack; they would pump each other furiously, with Pabst left bobbing his head in managerial silence.
After each orgy, they gathered to compare notes. Mara praised the beauty of Kamtchowsky’s feet, politely passing over the rest of her; when it was Andy’s turn to talk, he crossed his legs and pretended to take great huge bites out of the air. Pablo played a fundamental role, and not merely that of the birds that keep the ruins of Tlön from disappearing; his masturbation fulfilled the group’s expectations as regarded yet another metaphor for love. He also brought a number of deeply penetrating sociological insights to the table.
–Nowadays when we talk about the sexual revolution, we’re finally back to using “revolution” the way Copernicus originally meant it. In De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, his treatise on revolutions, it refers to the immovable, reiterated, fixed manner in which the planets trace their routes around the sun. A perfect term for that which is stabl
e and permanent, “revolution” had from the beginning the scientific and etymological meaning of a cosmic status quo. This powerfully conservative meaning held sway until the Jacobin brouhaha started in France. The alleged sexual revolution of the 1970s was a fallacy that has only now acquired its true meaning: conservation as the ideal modality for capitalism. Sex is a stable system of egotistical forms revolving around the sun of vanity. Promiscuity’s spirit of exchange proposes a new version of the foundational myth of democracy: namely, that participating in the exercise of assuming that all are equal should, by definition, enable us to transcend the obstacles of private activity, of mere intimate contingencies. Only now, depoliticized and thus cold and pure and free of all teleological nonsense, does the sexual revolution regain its true Copernican meaning—the conservative instinct of vanity as the moral and aesthetic triumph of democracy.
Mara and Andy had been listening carefully; Pabst and Kamtchowsky were sharing a beanbag chair.
–Yeah, said Mara, that whole ’70s thing was bullshit. You see how fucked up those guys are now, and you realize it was all bullshit. The other day I had a job shooting this extremely cool electro-hardcore group (Andy, remember? We saw them in that little underground club over on Constitución?) called Tradition, Family, and Private Property.
–Ha! Nice name. Go on, you were saying?
–Good, right? Anyway, the singer’s name is Dantón, and he plays with these two other guys—it’s a power trio, guitar and computer and voice. Somebody was profiling them for some crap newspaper supplement, and the singer was driving them crazy, saying that here in this country the only difference between the right and the left is which side their dick hangs down.
Pabst felt almost beautiful in these moments of laid-back sophistication.
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