vita nova
Mauricio pushed the cart while Rosenda toted me through the aisles of the store. No one gave us a second look, though a few women offered the customary baby-waves to me. I returned my customary sneer, which I had resigned to believing was seen as simply an odd smile. The people passing were set phrases, mechanically repeated every few seconds and becoming comic for it. Finding it funny, I started to smile and as I started to smile, more people paid attention to me, pointed and smiled also and so it became funnier…You get the idea. Until the whole store was abuzz with talk of the good-natured baby in the toddlers’ clothes section. People came over just to see me, playing peekaboo behind racks of down parkas for teenage girls, waving to me with wiggling fingers over displays of towels. All of this made Mauricio very nervous. Rosenda, however, loved it, and bounced me conspicuously against her ample teats. It was hilarious and I couldn’t stop, what constituted for me as laughter, smiling. The scene in the store had become a revolution of sorts. Clones of clones chasing the three of us through the aisles, Mauricio pushing the cart filled with a set of pajamas, a little toothbrush, some big-boy underpants, six T-shirts, three pairs of sweatpants, and a pair of sneakers, Rosenda trotting behind him, hoisting me back into position every three strides. Mauricio was perspiring and Rosenda was by now nervous as well. I was tired of it all and no longer smiling. And so, people took to making faces, attempting to return me to my good mood. Instead of sneering and running the risk of being misunderstood, I turned away from them all and buried my face in Rosenda’s neck.
Mauricio fumbled with the keys once we were back in the car. This time I sat in the front on Rosenda’s lap.
“Hurry,” Rosenda said.
“Okay,” Mauricio said.
“Hurry,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Mauricio,” Rosenda said.
“Okay.”
Conversation is a messy business at best.
1. Delacroix, Delacroix, Who’s Got the Delacroix?:
More than in any other European country, the slant toward didactics and the self-righteous was present in French painting. The predilection toward sermonizing in art appears early in the seventeenth century. Nicolas Poussin led the column through the trees and into the swamp. His painting Et in Arcadia Ego is a token of the amorphous. It depicts weary herdsmen reading the inscription on a grave marker, “I too am in Arcadia.” The Testament of Eudamis is an examination of prudent submission; the dead citizen of Corinth leaves his friends the chore of feeding his mother and daughter. Antithetical epigrams of such preponderance could only have come from the French. The formal character of Poussin’s art is Italian, though no Italian would have been so clumsy. The moralizing materializes in genre painting as well; Louis Le Nain’s serfs are stiff and probably stupid, unfortunately not at all like the ruffians of Brower and other artists of the Netherlands. Religious paintings became very different from those done in Italy and Spain. The new direction in France was toward the spiritual life of the individual and the redemption for which no sane person could hope. Grand goût was riddled with self-righteous arrows and so too was the academic spirit of France at the time—the fundamental concepts of truth and right somehow having been shamlessly tied together. Reason and this desire to pontificate formed the méthode classique, represented in the seventeenth century by Poussin and the writer Corneille.
In contrast to this heavy-fisted, ostentatious pose of the Wearisome is the second current, the Trifling. The Trifling was founded simply on taste. Of course, one is hard-pressed to say what a definition of taste might have been, but we can be assured that, in the final analysis, the taste prevalent in the Trifling was just as pompous and self-important as that of the wearisome. Early in the 1700s, there was a movement to make sentiment the criterion for artistic judgment. This was an escape from reason and morality, from the academic tradition, but of course it fell short of emotion or anything so genuine. What was of interest was the surface of reality. Charme and esprit were unthinkable, pure essentials of a taste, the refinement and elegance of which could only have been fashioned in any of the world’s more chic ghettos; both slaps in the face of reason and morality as well. By so-called definition, they are amoral. This absence from the sphere of moral sense was misread as frivolousness, bawdiness, and pornography, but actually it was only silly.
The appetite for the superfluous and inflated triggered the production of so many works of art that it is hard to get around the cumbersome of the whole of esprit to the rest of French painting. Watteau, Lancret, and others saw their paintings on the rocaille walls and ceilings of Parisian hotels in the first half of the 1700s. They were the delights of connoisseurs; others admired the floors. This decorative art, overstated as it was, was thought to be a fleeting trend. Watteau, a front-runner of the school, was considered an accident, a deformed offspring of the Wearisome.
Certainly, the characteristic reasonless and unfathomable personality of the French people and their artistic sensiblilities beat with great life, but they cannot suppress the pompous components of French spirit. Rather, the play and lackluster battle between these contrasting elements give rise to French art. Between Poussin and Rubens lies a stretch of ground covered with the bodies of Frenchmen having fallen to bitter diatribes. We see a battle between tight-minded puritans on the one side and slovenly and probably alcoholic bohemians on the other. Ingres and Delacroix met in the dark alley of the nineteenth century, Ingres being convinced that Delacroix was a scout of the devil, and he the self-elected Norman Mailer of linearism and classical tradition.
Of course, essentials of the Wearisome and the Trifling could not resist spilling into each other and this is in major part responsible for the growth of French artists. Many of the artists, because of this, were severely impaired by paranoia and fits of multiple personalities.
Poussin and Corneille were long finished as symbols of French thought. Art had been muscled into submission by Louis XIV and company. The result: artistic impotence, limp brushes failing any effective strokes. The Academy strangled artistic life. The reaction, the revolt, was to seek complete freedom from academic shackles. But this illusion of emancipation or undisciplined and unrestrained speed-painting was soon prostrate on the battlefield of art history. Watteau, Lancret, and Pater faded early in the eighteenth century; they had exhausted all the rocaille walls and ceilings, the oppressive climate of self-righteous pomposity squelching them.
The vicious fascist tendency that now confronted the loose, speed-sketching mentality of the petits maîtres was essentially a reversion to the Wearisome, the self-important sermonizing art that had infected France in the classic period of the seventeenth century. This might have been termed neo-classicism or neo-Poussinism; the grand goût was back. But it had been tainted by a half century of subjection to the irrational and it was in need of the centurial dose of riboflavin and iron. Diderot said, “First move, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare, be enraged—only then regale my eyes.”
In the nineteenth century the winds of two old schools could be smelt blowing out of the past, the linear and the coloristic, though taking on new meaning because of the addition of Romantic and sentimental elements. While both schools incorporated these elements they continued to grow significantly apart. The coloristic and shamelessly ornate, by the 1830s, was manifested fully in the work of Delacroix; the French Romantic school. Opposed to this was the neo-classicistic movement with its narrow insistence on line and structure, different from the classicism of David in that it moved toward the saccharine and mawkish. Ingres led the way. The rudimentary difference between the new schools is not actually discernible, but the struggle between them was even sillier than the struggle between the Poussinists and the Rubenists of the seventeenth century.
2. As the converse of that would be “to think to someone else.” Perhaps this makes no sense when discussing telepathy, but that is, how do the philosophers say it, a special case.
3. Thank you,
Mr. Kelly.
Lost in Place
HJELMSLEV
F
différance
1
Clockwise is a direction and so is south, but if one continues in a clockwise direction no progress will be made. And no one ever comes from clockwise, though people often turn south or to the south or from the south. The words on the page always travel in the same direction, whether left to right or right to left or up to down or, as in the case of short-cut seeking, bad poets, clockwise or counterclockwise in the shape of a gull.1 But there is no direction simply because the words are on the page and meaning knows no orientation and certainly no map. Meaning is where it is and only where it is, though it can lead to anyplace. Confusion, however, is necessarily only in one place and looks the same regardless of where it stands in relation to meaning. Being confused always looks the same and it comes from clockwise.
2
From shopping, Mauricio drove us down the road to a restaurant where we sat in a booth in the back near the kitchen door. The waitress came and said something baby-friendly to me, then to Rosenda and Mauricio, “My name is Trudy, if you need me.” And I thought, “and even if we don’t.” Rosenda ordered fruit and crackers and milk for me. I didn’t protest. I was starving. I actually enjoyed the intensity of the desire. But I never got to eat. The burning in the pit of my middle made me consider, through my discomfort, a connection with the world, wondering where bananas came from and what kinds of boats transported them.
3
Is there a circularity that has us pass into the other indefinitely? Are we in fact changed by the nonchange that traveling forever in a circle creates? Is a change of orientation, but not of spatial location, a real change? As I circle the bee on the flower with my net and the bee dances around to continue facing me, do I ever really get around the bee? With all the movement, there is no movement. For all the repetition, nothing happens. The circle displaces change, and this change from the presence of change becomes the absence of change, becomes negativity, nonbeing, lack, silence. Counterclockwise.
ephexis
What am I doing with this child? My wife is thrilled that he is with us, but what am I doing? He is trouble. What was he doing in the prison? Is he a devil-child? I thought I was helping. He wrote me a note. How could he write me a note? He’s a baby. It took me a longtime to get that job. That was a nice house. But a baby shouldn’t be locked up. It is not right for a baby to be locked up. But why was he locked up? Maybe he is a devil-child. Rosenda is so happy, though. A devil-child could not bring such happiness. Where are we going to go? That man who would come and talk to the baby was important, from the government. I could tell by the way I was no one to him. He was afraid of the baby. I could tell that, too. Maybe he is a devil-child. Or maybe the devil wants him.
My poor Mauricio, he is so scared. He makes me scared, too. It is a miracle that we finally have a little one. So long we have tried. I have prayed and prayed. I wonder why he was in the jail? He is a beautiful baby. His eyes tell me he is very smart. I hope he is smart like my Mauricio. I hope we can find a place where Mauricio will not be afraid. I hope we get to Mexico soon. My little boy. He is so beautiful. I loved him the moment I saw him for the first time. He is a miracle. I will protect him.
ootheca
Humans invented language. So says the innocent. Language invented humans. So says the cynic. My parents made an offspring. Or was it the case that I made them parents? There I was again, making parents of people. Chicken? Egg? Omelette? The beginning of sense is to realize that the term sense is a stand-in for whatever sense can be made within a particular context, just as thing serves for any noun substantive, just as quality serves for some adjective. Aliquid pro aliquo. To say that in some sense that thing has a certain quality means nothing, except here where it works to make my point. He was making sense tells you nothing of what he was saying. He had a certain quality. He came in waving this thing.
I was sick of the whole mess. I had no private language,2 but language for me was, in the strictest sense, a private affair. Somewhere the government was seeking me, but of course they could not make it public. They could have perhaps intensified their hunt for the missing Townsend baby, but that would not have served them. I was safe to that extent from any outsider turning me in. It being the case that no normal person would have been able to recognize me from the poor photograph so briefly flashed on the television two or three times.
Mauricio and Rosenda sucked up all the food that came to the table while managing to shove a banana and a bottle of apple juice down my throat. Watching them eat was a bit frightening, hands constantly reaching, jaws constantly working, lips smacking. Fried potatoes dipped in blood red sauce, grease dripping from buns and fingers. Their napkins were balled up and good for nothing at the end of their exercise. Rosenda slurped up the last of her frothy drink and smiled at me with a white mustache.
“How’s my li’l Pepe?” she asked.
Mauricio looked at me, but didn’t smile.
Outside, Mauricio paused before getting into the car. He seemed to listen to the wind. Then he fell in behind the wheel and looked back at me.
“What’s wrong, Mauricio?” Rosenda asked.
Mauricio just shook his head and squeezed the steering wheel, staring ahead through the windshield. “Need to hide,” he said.
“Hide?”
“Looking for us.”
“Where are we going to go?”
“Father Chacón,” Mauricio said.
“Father Chacón?”
“Father Chacón.”
“I think dinner made me sick, Mauricio.”
derivative
The Epigastric
The stomach before,
filled with sweet air,
supplying all that
lies in the cavity,
sitting
before the aorta,
the diaphragm,
expanding
with the motion of life,
it surrounds the cæliac
axis
and root
of the mesentric artery,
downward to the pancreas,
outward to the suprarenal
capsules,
receiving small and large
slanchic nerves,
semi-lunar ganglia,
on either side,
squeezing breath.
subjective-collective
Drs. Steimmel and Davis were being transported from the federal holding facility to what they were told was a remote federal reformatory, which was no reformatory at all, where they would have no contact with anyone, especially the press because they had not only witnessed the capabilities of a particular baby, but might also be able to piece together who might want him and why he might be wanted, and told also that the society was simply fed up with miscreants who sought out and made victims of children, that people were sick of having to be reminded of the problem with every use of milk from a carton and so they, Drs. Steimmel and Davis, were going to be put away, out of view, without a trial, without due process, without a second thought, but Steimmel and Davis were not concerned with this because the child still lived and was out there somewhere, waiting to be studied, waiting to be figured out, waiting to serve their desire for scientific fame and immortality, out there in the world, though they were in shackles, shuffling their feet through a long corridor from their cell, single file, toward the heavy door that led to the loading dock and to the yellow van that would take them to a helicopter that would in turn take them to a bastille that no one outside of the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI had ever heard of, Siberia, St. Helena, where they and, no doubt, Boris and perhaps even Ronald the ape, would spend the rest of their lives, reflecting on freedom and the days when they were so close to unlocking the secret of language and on the threshold of fame, where they might in time turn to each other or to whomever else the government had seen fit to lock away in similar fashion, seeking all those things that people n
eed in a life, love, affection, struggle, sympathy, and scorn, especially scorn, because scorn was perhaps the most close-making of human feelings, it being, even in art, the one thing that brought audience into the work, and so in science, Steimmel thought as they closed the yellow van doors, her wrists chained to her sides, Davis beside her on the metal bench, the male guard across from her, not in a uniforn but in a brown suit, his black pistol sheathed on his worn belt, staring ahead at Steimmel’s face, but not reacting nearly quickly enough when the desperate psychoanalyst threw her body across the space between them, her head leading the way, her skull feeling as though it might crack and split wide open as it struck the man’s chin, driving his jawbone up into his brain and causing him to black out so that he fell over and Davis reached into his pocket, found the key, and undid their cuffs and leggings, Steimmel pulling free the man’s pistol and testing the weight of it in her hand, glancing forward toward the van’s cab, thinking, then chanting, “Brute force, brute force, with all our brains, brute force.”
peccatum originale
Colonel Bill flew his Phantom south and landed on the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, which was floating idly in the ocean off Miami. He climbed down from his cockpit and was given a gift by an adoring young sailor, a blue cap with the insignia CVN 71. Colonel Bill, however, barely acknowledged the gift, and the young sailor not at all, but he did toss a salute up to the ship’s commanding officer before boarding a helicopter that would take him to Key Biscayne and the President’s orgy to which he so looked forward. From the helicopter, he looked down at the water and the approaching land, the helipad, and the sprawling complex of buildings. Where was that boy? He shook his head, stymied, angry at himself because he did not quite know how to proceed. But there was the President’s party below and that would at least take his mind off his problem. There would be women down there for the using. Maybe some of them were even enemy spies who had sneaked in hoping to gather secrets during intimate moments or while a senator or a general slept and talked in his dreams. He was excited by the prospect. He defied any of the commie bimbos to make sense of anything he said, awake, asleep, or climaxing or drugged into a stupor by a deftly planted Mickey Finn.
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