by Norman Rush
You move from circle to circle. I had mystery going for me. At the faculty level I would say only a little about Nelson, on the grounds that Tsau was a sealed project, I was under an unofficial obligation not to say so much until Tsau was declared open, and so on. My exact relationship with Nelson I left vague. I dressed pretty much for the part, wearing ostrich-egg shell-chip chokers, for example. Circles interpenetrate. When word got around that Tsau was a female polity, then, voilà, feminist organizations lined up to book me. By the time they found me it was already established that I got respectable fees.
Before I could even begin to worry seriously about livelihood I was offered a halfway decent job, which I took and still have, at this moment. I am in the academic demimonde. I am an editor and manager for a marginal publisher of doctoral dissertations languishing because they’re too specialized or because they fall outside the desiderata of the regular university presses. I am in charge of Third World and Female Area acquisitions.
Maurice, who owns this business, has money he inherited, although he has less than he started with because Gretchen, the woman he formerly lived with and who persuaded him to start this enterprise so that she could fleece it discreetly, got a good deal out of him, that way and otherwise. He’s a very dreamy man interested in the Middle Ages, so interested that one of his first injunctions to me was to keep him from unbalancing the list in that direction: I am supposed to build up the more trendward side of things and to at all costs resist his antiquarianisms. I remind him of someone, and he spends a good deal of time in his office trying to think of who it is. He has an unpublished thesis which he won’t let me see. There’s a wonderful sound system in our suite, and one of the first things I was presented with when I took the job was a memo asking me to list any favorite classical recordings I might like to have played for us. Our offices, in Belmont, are in good taste. I did produce a list of old favorite records in self-defense, after I realized how unvarying the playlist was going to be, how much plainsong and continuo I was going to have to enjoy. I need a strong woman, he likes to say. He has once or twice complimented me on my shoulders. I may have a new fallback vocation as a dominatrix, at least if the current middleclass and higher decadence continues to unfurl at the present rate. I’m in control of my hours here. This is not precisely Guilty Repose, but it resembles it.
Being in America is like being stabbed to death with a butter knife by a weakling. Brazen Head is the most popular president ever. People think I have very interesting political slants. So much is siphoned from Nelson, so how should this make me feel? I seem to be all things to all women. Feminists like me because of Tsau, socialist feminists like me because of the cooperative side of Tsau, professional women, nonsocialist feminists, like me because of the private property and incentive side of Tsau, and lesbians like me because I never go around with men. There are no men, so far. People see me as women-identified, something new, and seem to be proud of me for it. The left is prolapsed, insofar as I can judge. I can’t find an enemy in my milieu anywhere. If you have ideas that rise above Power to the people! you qualify as someone who should write a book for the Monthly Review Press.
The below is all Denoon. These are my commodities. This is what I say, with attribution, in one form or another. There are three major, dire, world-historical processes going on that your ideologies—a word I always use in the pejorative, like my man—are not letting you pay attention to. I keep rediscovering how inadequate for analyzing the nature and depth of the impending general planetary crisis both class analysis and vulgar feminism are as exclusive filters, by the way. The main process going on could be called corporatism unbound, with the term corporatism understood to include the state corporations of the Eastern bloc, although these are turning out not to be competent variants of the main type. What is becoming sovereign in the world is not the people but the limited liability corporation, that particular invention: that’s what’s concentrating sovereign power to rape the world and overenrich the top minions who run these entities. The perfect medium for the corporation is an electoral democracy where nobody—in the mature systems—bothers to vote, parties disaggregate, labor unions decompose, corporations control who gets into parliament, accountability disappears. A second major world-historical process is the invisible war of states against nations, recognized states against nonstate tribal nations, a bitter war, bloody, one without rules, breaking out even in regions where everyone assumes the game is over: East Timor, Chittagong Hills, Roraima—there are so many sickening examples to give. Third is the destruction of nature accompanying the ascent to absolute power of the corporate system. Then I give my own emendation, a less pessimistic one, which is, slightly embarrassingly to me, seemingly the most popular. Mine is the jagged and belated but definite rise of women into positions of political authority. I take this seriously. I am embroidering a bit if I imply that Nelson ever took it as hopefully as I do, but he wanted to and was just afraid, I think, to really believe in it because of the implications of events like Margaret Thatcher monstrously sinking the Belgrano. He was afraid that the lateness of the rise of women was its own doom—not that he wasn’t trying to promote it nevertheless in his own molecular way at Tsau. So the above makes me interesting. I leave every group I speak to with at least this thought—that a true holocaust in the world is the thing we call development, which I tell them means the superimposition of market economies on traditional and unprepared third world cultures by force and fraud circa 1880 to the present, and that this has been the seedbed of the televised spectacle of famine, misery, and disease confronting us in the comfort of our homes.
They love me for it.
But back to my phonecall, because inhering in it is the cultural ghost of the whole perplex of women waiting in agony to be phoned by some man or other. I didn’t leave Africa to come back here with the covert purpose of waiting for a phonecall that would set me dancing and playing maracas. I left to leave. In junior high we were forced to read a short story about a girl who meets a boy when she goes ice skating and who then goes home and waits in agony for days for him to call. This is a famous story by a woman named Maureen Daly, who got elevated into the very top level of women’s magazines by it. The story is called Seventeen, and I think she was sixteen when she wrote it. The story won prizes. I had a very strong reaction to it. It sank into my soul and I vowed never to be her or anything like her. I vowed this. Also—and this is something I just now realized, thanks to the phonecall that’s driving me to the edge—it has to do with why, when I could have, I didn’t go after Nelson and stop him while he was still on his horse and heading for Tikwe. I had time. And I started to, but somehow I couldn’t do it. I realize that I was very moved, but in the wrong direction, by Jean Peters running out to stop Emiliano Zapata from going someplace he was determined to go. I may be confusing two different scenes, in one of which she presses a freshly ironed shirt on him, pleadingly, or tries to. I hated her. This would never be me. I wasn’t going to be Jean Peters in Viva Zapata when in fact the sensibility on the horse was who I really was. That was me.
Of course when I say my phonecall I should be saying message instead, which is all I have, because I was out when my mysterious friend called. Text is literally all I have. The call came to the office, and why the call came to the office is unmysterious, because I’ve written to enough people on business stationery for this number to get into circulation. There was the money order I sent for the Enfield. There were my notes to Adelah and to Mma Isang. The receptionist thought the call was from a woman but wasn’t absolutely positive. It wasn’t a clear line. The caller’s accent wasn’t American. There was no identification given. There was no request for a return call. And there’s nothing more to be gotten out of the receptionist. She’s sick of being quizzed. What is to be done? as Lenin so aptly put it. I think I need a maxim of some kind. Nelson’s—insofar as they’re apposite to this situation—are all so uniformly nothing but wry, as in Nothing ventured nothing lost, that they don’t
help me.
Why do I still regard it as surprising that he turned to her, even though I had deserted and I had thrust them together and we all know how absolute his need is for the eternal feminine when he gets into trouble, such as being stalked by lions, or a lion, to be fair. Why, just because I had left him naked to his enemies? They were being civil enough, actually. Was it just that I’d let in so many of them? He could have called out for me, of course, something that might have made all the difference. I could have swung in like Wonder Woman and cleared the place and said everything was my mistake, the party was off. But no, he was going to be the unmoved mover. I was actually observing the proceedings, on and off, from within the draperies and other demeaning vantages. Hell is closed and all the demons are here, he liked to quote from Marlowe. I was febrile. I was thinking So this is what he wants! Not only is she beautiful and not only are there bookmarks hanging out all over from her copy of Development as the Death of, but she’s punctual. It was, as usual, difficult to read him, expert though I am. He was sweating lightly, more than the warmth of the room called for. He could have sent someone to find me, detach me from my duties masterminding the finger food relays. Of course at times I was outside looking at the moon. Even when it ended no one came to look for me. I could have been found. She went into our bedroom with him, conducted him. I sat in a rocking chair the rest of the night. I began cleaning up toward dawn, picking up each beer can and ashtray individually, delicately, trying not to make a sound. I thought of Grace and finding her and suggesting we move in together.
One factor I should take into account is that America is driving me more insane than I already am. I know this because sometime last week I felt anguish because I don’t own a zester. I needed one urgently so that I could get little spirals and coils of carrot and jicama on top of the larmen soups I was eating for lunch that week. Then they would be attractive and I would like eating them better and my weight would go down. Another factor is that we seem to be in prefascism of some kind. The right is at the center everywhere. There could someday be a TV series set in the specious present called I Was a Liberal for the FBI. Of course if I’m a serious person the question should be What is to be done? by me about prefascism. Talking to people would be one answer. But that leads to nothing other than making them think I’m fabulous. The import of everything I say is that we’re locusts, all of us here in the white West, but that never comes through. I recur to Nelson so much it makes me sick. What am I doing? There are only two kinds of work in the world, he once said. One kind on balance adds to the work other people have to do, the other kind on balance lessens the labor of others. What am I doing, or which am I doing? Youth wants to know! and suppose you say Okay, then, I’ll write, I’ll talk. Everyone tells me to write a book. So you say Okay. But too bad about the language. On television a commentator the other day described someone as morally devoid and a politician called someone a spineless puppet, in the same sentence praising his own steadforthness. His constituents demanded their freedom of rights. They said We want our voices spoken. And of course where is the man who could laugh alongside me at this and help me to not keep dipping into despair? I need the man who said Lyndon LaRouche should be called Lyndon FaRouche instead.
All of which brings me back to my message. I read it, and what does it tell me to do? It says either nothing or a great deal. It says Hector proven alive Manhope police agent. It says Bronwen sent from Tsau after one week.
I was on all fours cleaning up around their bedroom door when she came out in the morning looking as though she’d been inducted into something so very exalted. She almost tripped over me. She had the decency to look ashamed. I kept on polishing. She went back in. I had the place clean as a jewel for them. My knees were burning by the time I got through. This will fade. I made sure fresh orangeade was waiting in the breakfast nook before I left.
So: What is to be done, Lenin?
One possibility is that I should find a way to have sex before I decide anything. I am living asexually. I can get sex. My celibacy is known and is highly exciting to certain oaves on my periphery. What could be more pointless than what I’m doing, id est developing a sacral attitude toward historical sex with Nelson? Nothing.
The message was allegedly from a friend, and the call was placed in Gabs. I have no friend in Gabs, really, but that hardly means anything, because the call could have been made on or in behalf of someone someplace else, or by someone visiting Gabs.
One thing I have definitely ceased with is slavishly reading through the corpus of great books I unfortunately missed that he enlightened me as to the importance of, at least until I decide What is to be done? All it does is make me hopeless. His greatest of neglected books was too much trouble, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, by George K. Zipf. It’s full of equations. Also, apropos being furious with actually existing socialism, I am giving up on reading socialist apologetic of any kind or stripe. I thought maybe I could convince him, if we ever met again, that socialism was curable and we could be socialists together and life could be like Berlioz on the stereo. This is an extreme of my extremis.
This is another item calculated to drive me mad. An epitome of how Nelson haunts me is his presence in the question of my weight. I may have left out that when I was hounding him on the details of his illumination in the desert and especially the fine detail of his discovery that the human body is a sort of confederation, I asked him if he thought I might be able to control my weight better if I ordered my body or my fat cells or whatever entity I settled on to cease absorbing lipids for a while. He balked at answering because he thought I was out to trivialize. But finally he did answer Yes, possibly. And then I pressed on and asked Well, would it be preferable to give my body an order to be slenderer or to ask it nicely to be slenderer, which? And I wouldn’t let him get away with saying that he didn’t know which would be better, commanding or requesting. But then he said Either one, with requesting probably better. So I’ve been doing this, and since I started I’m down six pounds.
The first part of the message is straightforward enough. Where it takes me is not. G’s being pronounced as H’s, Manhope has to mean Mangope, the dictator of the bantustan across the border that would someday like to engulf Botswana because they’re all Tswana after all, and there are five million of them under Mangope and only one million in Botswana. The Boers love Mangope’s irredentism and keep it pumped up. So this news, that Hector is a police agent working out of Mafikeng, leads in many strange surprising directions. It makes his amazing vanishment out of Tsau something that could have been arranged quite easily by the South Africans. A helicopter could have come down from the Caprivi Strip, for instance, and picked him up out at one of the pans. So it could have been meant to get Nelson ejected so that the South Africans through Mangope through Boso—and no doubt ultimately through a born-again Hector—could carry out some geopolitical maneuver for which they wanted Tsau as a base.
An interesting synergy is that the arrival of the message coincided with my decision not to go on with my Denoonian lifetime reading plan, which followed my strange surprising discoveries in the Tao Te Ching. I had never touched the Tao Te Ching until lately. This is an instance of the patchiness of my education. If I ever had touched it, that might have made a difference. I wonder. But then I haven’t read the Rig-Veda yet, either. My attitude to the East is out of The Lotus and the Robot, from my youth. What I thought when I got into the Tao was that I had the explanation of Nelson’s fall. He had made an intellectual mistake! In a moment of vertigo he had embraced something that in his right mind he would have recognized as propaganda, imperial propaganda, a noxious thing albeit very poetical. Halt! cria-t-elle, I thought, when XXXIV hit me: The way is broad, reaching left as well as right / The myriad creatures depend on it for life yet it claims no authority. / It accomplishes its task yet lays claim to no merit. / It clothes and feeds the myriad creatures yet lays no claim to being their master. / Forever free of desire, it can be called sm
all; yet, as it lays no claim to being master when the myriad creatures turn to it, it can be called great. / It is because it never attempts itself to be great that it succeeds in becoming great. That sent me back through the whole text. Halt! I kept thinking. Another gem was This is called subtle discernment: The submissive and weak will overcome the hard and strong. Then there was I shall press it down with the weight of the nameless uncarved block. / The nameless uncarved block is but freedom from desire, / And if I cease to desire and remain still, / The empire will be at peace of its own accord. Which I put together with something earlier: When the uncarved block shatters it becomes vessels: / The sage makes use of these and becomes the lord / Over the officials. Halt! There was more of the same, Take XLIII: The most submissive thing in the world can ride roughshod over the hardest in the world—that which is without substance entering that which has no crevices. For a day or so it was clear to me that all Nelson needed was Scientiae Athena to come back and illuminate what he had become on a dark night. He had become an impostor. The Tao Te Ching was a textbook on how to be one, and what kind to be. Or had Denoon always been an impostor without my noticing it, starting with so eloquently leading the world to expect Tsau was going to be some liberating municipal bromeliad running on sun and sweet breezes when in fact although the place was bristling and glittering with solar hardware how much did it do? A little water heating, some cooling, some grain drying? There was his marvelous personal solar crucible, but that was a toy. People had solar cookers but barely used them. And what was Tsau to him, really? Who was Tsau for?