Madam Nanna knelt to talk to me. She said, “Uncle Ned has a very special playroom with some very special toys and there are books there and pretty lights. Would you like to play in Uncle Ned’s playroom?”
I looked at Uncle Ned and then at Madam Nanna and offered a cautious nod.
“That’s good, Ralph. That’s very good. We’ll have to get you a treat for being so agreeable.”
ephexis
I
N
C
O
R
R
E
C
T
L
Y
There! I have spelled the word incorrectly.
unties of simulacrum
Eve sat in her studio, in front of an easel with no canvas. She had no more tears to shed over the loss of Ralph. Now, her grief and pain were silent, gnawing inward. She asked herself why she hadn’t kept Ralph’s talent to herself. Was she afraid of him? Did she truly not know how to handle him? Was there some piece of her deep down that wanted the world to see her baby boy and what he could do? Was it in some small way pride that had caused this great loss?
Douglas was off visiting his little graduate student. Eve knew all too well what he was up to. Those late-night trips to the office to grade papers. Eve had seen her once. Douglas had been talking to her and when she spotted Eve coming, the little cow had skedaddled off into the main office and out through another door.
And now, the disappearance of Ralph had caused a thicker wedge to be driven between them. They didn’t touch anymore and all conversation was strained. In bed at night, the accidental brushing of a foot against a leg resulted in the leg being moved away. There was a lot of sighing. The second one to awake in the morning would wait until the other was finished dressing and gone before rising.
Barthes had come back to California because he enjoyed the beach and liked being away from his mother and had been hanging around Douglas because he admired the way Douglas worshipped him. Barthes took to coming around unannounced. Eve didn’t like that. The man was impossible to talk to. In fact, language barrier aside, even the simplest transaction in a market became a huge production for the man. If it wasn’t his insisting that he could not possibly understand why apples had different names since they were, after all, all apples, it was because the line was too long or the store was too cold or the cashier was too surly or that the cashier didn’t know who he was.
Eve sat there in her studio in front of the easel and in walked Roland Barthes. He paused at the door to light a cigarette and tossed the spent match out into the yard.
“Hello, Roland,” Eve said, knowing that those would be the last intelligible words she would hear for some time.
But Barthes said simply, clearly, plainly, “Douglas is poking a graduate student.”
Eve was not so much stunned by the news (as she had known it, but still to have it shoved in one’s face was painful), but by the fact that Barthes had not simply uttered a simple declarative sentence, but one that had some meaning, and, no less, meaning in the world in which she lived. “Yes, I know,” she said, staring at Barthes as if he might at any second explode.
“I have the greatest respect for you,” Barthes said.
Eve eased off her stool and began to back away. There was something wrong. The man was making sense. Then Eve was taken by the fact that she was afraid because the man was making sense and the backwardness of it all made her even more confused. “That’s nice of you to say,” she said.
Barthes drew on his cigarette and blew out smoke. “He’s in her apartment right now. I saw them go in.”
Now, the image of her husband with that floozie up in her apartment, kissing and touching each other swam through her brain. It made her sick and she forgot about the strange man in front of her making sense.
“It’s awful,” Barthes said. “Let’s go there.”
Sudden anger swelled in Eve’s chest and she slammed her fists against her thighs and said. “Yes! Let’s go!”
“No,” Barthes said. “It would be better to get even with him. We French have a saying. C’est plus qu’un crime, c’est une faute. You see, because Douglas is off doing what he is doing, he is not here and so he cannot stop us. Do you know what I mean?” With that, Barthes approached. “I’m French, you know.”
Eve’s knee found Barthes’ groin rather easily. She then bopped him on the head with an empty coffee can.
Barthes said, looking up at her from the floor: “Discreet, but obsessed. What I mean by that, as much as any string of sounds uttered in a throat can actually mean something, is that situations become complicated by insistence on contextual anchors and moorings. And what if I were to write out what has happened here? Oh, what a lie that would be! Necessary and contingent, both at once, but then neither really.”
Eve stood staring down at the man, realizing that she had knocked the sense out of him. But now that he was himself, she helped him to his feet.
tubes 1…6
The playroom was twice as large as Mo’s studio and it was, interestingly, located in the same building as my room. I couldn’t see the ceiling as it was dark above. Most of the light in the room came from terminals and consoles and a few lamps. Screens gave eerie, greenish casts to the faces of the several people who were already “at play” in the playroom. Computers chirped and telephones rang, but when one of the white-frocked crew observed Uncle Ned’s presence, they all snapped to their feet and looked his way. Our way, as I was in his arms.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Uncle Ned said, “this is Ralph.”
“Ralph, these people are your new playmates.”
I gave Madam Nanna my best look of alarm and she offered a comforting nod and smile and mouthed the words, “It’s all right.”
Uncle Ned bounced me on his arm. I studied my face in the lenses of his glasses. Then I thought about my lunch of bananas and crackers and half a frankfurter and spit up on his uniform.
“Oh, for corn’s sake,” Uncle Ned said, holding me away from his array of medals. He gave me back to Madam Nanna. “Somebody get me something.”
The crew scrambled around, searching for napkins and bottled water. I looked for the slightest break in at least one of their faces, but found none. Dabbing at his olive jacket with a hanky, Uncle Ned said, “Okay, everybody go back to your play or whatever else you were doing.” When no one moved, he barked, “As you were.”
The crew went back to their terminals.
In the center of the room was a playpen, much like the one I had had at my parents’ house and exactly like the one in my room there with Madam Nanna. Beside it was a little sofa and piled high on the floor were books. Books of all sizes and thicknesses, soft- and hardbound. Madam Nanna carried me to the center of the room and placed me gently on the sofa. The chair was just my size. No adult could have sat on it. It was soft and perfect and beside it was a lamp, which Madam Nanna switched on. I grabbed a book, leaned back on the sofa, and began to read. There was a collective intake of air by the crew, but I ignored them and turned a page. One of them said, “I don’t believe it.” “He’s just going through the motions,” from another. And much to Madam Nanna’s credit, she said not a word.
“Okay, team,” Uncle Ned said, “let’s get to work.” Then away from me, he said, not knowing that I could hear him, “I want to know what makes the little bastard work. And I want that knowledge yesterday. Do you understand me, mister?”
“Yes, sir.”
Uncle Ned then came back to me and Madam Nanna, where he stood over me at the sofa and showed me his teeth. He was still raking at the darkened spot on his lapel with the rag. “Nanna, I’m going to leave you and our little fellow here.”
“Okay, Uncle Ned,” she said. Then to me, “Wave bye-bye to Uncle Ned, Ralph.”
I glanced up from the page of my book, considered offering him only a smirk, but did the prudent thing instead, I waved bye-bye.
äusserungen
A demo
n may be good, bad, or indifferent. I was all three. What good is a demon who is not bad? Why, he’s no demon at all. And what is more frightening than a demon who is unmoved and unimpressed by his own evil? In fact, the scariest thought by those inclined to believe in demons is that there are no demons at all, that finally they are responsible for the evil they see, discover, perform. Therefore, demons are good. And a good demon is really, really bad. And an indifferent demon is as bad as it gets, which is good. Out of the massa confusa there must come evil, because without it, there is no good, or so the literature told me. The unconscious, however, is ambivalent, unfocused, even wishy-washy, and so knows no distinction between good and evil. This I knew from watching the words on the page, realizing that though those words were issued perhaps consciously by some writer, they were, once left alone, without consciousness, were indeed without conscience, and certainly no longer in any way represented the things that they, initially at least, were seen to be representations of. Even my notes to Inflato, now removed from their moment of creation and delivery, if saved at all, would have meant nothing like what they meant then, perhaps serving solely as some sign to my parents that I had not been a figment of their imaginations. Words, I decided, were worse than photographs in that way, that way of cutting off time before and after the image, worse because, at least in a photograph, the constituent parts did not turn up in every other photograph as the words did in writing.
This is what I thought as I watched the crew scramble around me, jotting notes, attaching electrodes to my temples and my little chest, whispering to each other, then laughing at themselves for being afraid of my hearing. I read a couple of books while they monitored my brain activity, then mapped the loci of my brain functions (a term I use in spite of my disdain) and at one point they all gathered around one terminal and oohed and ahhed while I purposely shifted my thinking from Nietzsche to Ellison to Lowell to Mailer.5 I was open on the table, but I didn’t care. I was in control of myself, therefore in control of my observers, and I enjoyed the feeling, which was not one of power, but comfort.
causa sui
If I ended these pages here, where would I leave you? The abruptness of the ending would in a fiction be disconcerting, baffling, and disappointing, but in a reality? And what have I done by suggesting this? Have I betrayed myself as a fiction, or, by the self-conscious admission, simply reassured you that I am indeed real?
“I tried to turn the handle, but—”
K-nock, K-nock
Who’s there?
Ifaman
Ifaman who?
If a man grasps truths that cannot be other than they are, in the way he grasps definitions through which demonstrations take place, he will have not opinion but knowledge.
K-nock, K-nock
Who’s there?
Ahyoushould
Ahyoushould who?
“‘Ah, you should see ’em come round me of
a Saturday night…’for to get their
wages, you know.”’
subjective-collective
We see now, as in all scenes, notably foreshadowed, the specter of much that is to befall our hero, our autobiographer; the historical personification of which, as it painfully takes shape in this story, lies scattered, in misty and nebulous detail, through this laboratory and that, and those that come next. I was a curiosity then and perhaps forever, a rhinoceros at a church social, a dwarf on a basketball court, a hawk in a chicken coop. And there I was in the lab, under the scope, my heat and energy being measured, my blood being analyzed, my eyes watched, and all by rather cold, detached, uncaring eyes. At least Steimmel hated me, was afraid of me. These people, Madam Nanna included, had no genuine reaction to me, but only to my measurements. They put me through tests not identical with but very similiar to those performed on me by Steimmel.
“What a memory,” the female member of the crew of five said.
“Memory is no sign of intelligence,” the tall, fat man said.
“Still, it’s a remarkable faculty,” said the short, fat man.
I hadn’t yet written anything for them and they didn’t mention it, though my ability must have been reported to them. Madam Nanna didn’t say anything, but just watched and catered to my needs, bringing me bottles of juices, helping me with exceptionally large books, taking me to the potty.
I was amazed at how much I perceived the team as machines, extensions of their instruments and computers. I was shocked when their hands were not cold to the touch as they connected electrodes and other sensors to my skin. Finally, tired of the testing and the monitoring, I wrote a note:
Please allow me to demonstrate a talent of which you are, no doubt aware, and which you have been waiting to observe firsthand. I must tell you, that I admire your considerable patience.
“Remarkable.”
“What do you have to say now?”
“I’m impressed.”
“Me, too.”
“How do we explain it?”
“Is there any way we can weigh his brain?”
“Not precisely.”
“His chromosomal structure is normal.”
“Site brain activity and AER and EEG are erratic.”
“Why doesn’t he talk?”
Let’s get on with the pogrom.
“My god!”
“What?”
“Is it a misspelling?”
“I don’t think so. Look at his expression.”
“He can make a pun.”
I felt not quite real, looking at their faces behind the green glow of their screens. I was no longer taken by my perception of them as cold and machine-like, but by my perception of myself as somehow unreal, intangible, a skiagram, a reflection.
“He’s usable.”
“Definitely usable.”
ens realissimum
“There are no signs, there are only differences between signs.”
Could it have been, I thought, at that tender age, that the representation was the thing? Was there a real me, a complete and original me? Or was I simply the sum of their measurements, the tally of their observations, the compilation of their conjecture? Madam Nanna smiled at me, but was she smiling at me? No, she was smiling at my performance. Was she feeding me? No, she was feeding possibilities and potentialities. In several seconds, I moved from indifference to hatred of Madam Nanna and Uncle Ned and even the crew, with their interchangeable faces and bodies and voices. But I also experienced something a bit more profound, and troubling, a stirring of self-loathing as I recognized my capacity for emotional response. The self-loathing was exacerbated by the fact that its very existence was ironic testimony to the very thing in me that I was finding so unpalatable, namely a disposition toward witless and illogical responses.
consummatum est
The Papuans apparently, from rather old geographies, mind you, have a tradition of eliminating several words of their language upon the death of one of their number. So, the language must grow smaller and smaller, finally, following this to its logical end, disappearing all together. Except that there must come a time when the words necessary to express the custom to young members of the tribe are not sufficient. Therefore, the tradition necessarily kills itself and so language survives, in spite of the assassination attempt. ne consummatum est
1. Constructing the tautology that says one begins at the beginning depends on the ability of both mind and language to reverse themselves, and thus to move from present to past and back again, from a complex situation to an anterior simplicity and back again, or from one point to another as if in a circle. Said, Invention and Method, pp. 29–30.
2. To differ, sweet dog, sweet dog of light.
To defer, when shallow is the night.
To spell it with an A when an E will do.
To call on senses, active, passive, and blue.
3. Grammatology, that Derrida guy. A sick discussion at best, where writing becomes more than a capsule in space, but a warhead against language itself. “It breaks in
as a dangerous supplement, as a substitute that enfeebles, enslaves, effaces, separates, and falsifies.” Thought must be freed from writing, the paradox is that thought requires supplementation to be distinguished from nonthought (whatever that might be).
4. Mind you, this was all an act for the nurse.
5. At which point, I took it from their reaction, there was little or no brain activity they could locate.
The Straight and Narrative
GREIMAS
E
différance
there is no such thing as digression
Tinnitus is a ringing sensation caused by some such condition as a perforated tympanic membrane or an excess of wax in the ear. It is a sound heard only by the person with the condition, but it is a sound nonetheless, however unobservable by another. This makes it much like pain, but more interesting, of course, in that in all other matters we can hear, under normal circumstances, the same things. We never feel the same pain.
“I can hear the chicken,” I say.
To which you respond, “I cannot.”
I say, “You must be deaf.”
You say, “But I can hear you.”
“Then I must be imagining things,” I say.
But of the ringing in my ears? I complain of it and you might say that I should see a doctor about it. Granted, you might say the same when I claim to hear an imaginary chicken, but you will not mean the same thing, or at least the same doctor. The ringing is acceptable, as are after-images seen following the lighting of a flash. But let the ringing become a voice or allow the after-image to become a dog and you’ve got a problem.
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