“Melvin, I really need your help. The government is after us.” Davis tried to look pathetic, biting her lip and hanging her head slightly.
“Whose government?”
“Our government. Why else would we be frightened?” Davis walked over and sat on the sofa, pushed through the magazines on the coffee table. There were no stories that were alarmingly new on the covers and no pictures of her or Steimmel or Ralph.
Steimmel went to the refrigerator and opened the door, stuck in her head, and came back with a beer in her hand.
“Help yourself,” Melvin said. He walked over and sat by Davis on the sofa. “You can’t stay here.”
“Just for a couple of days, Melvin.”
“No, no, no, no, no, no. I’ve got a new girlfriend.”
“Good for you.”
Steimmel fell into the chair across the coffee table from Davis and Melvin and took a swig of the beer. She stared at Melvin, unblinking.
Melvin was unnerved by Steimmel. He turned to Davis, “I don’t want you here. I don’t want Cynthia to find you here.”
“Cynthia,” Davis repeated the name. To Steimmel, she said, “Cynthia is her name.” She said the name into the air. “I’ve always wanted to be a CYNthia. Tell me, Mel, is she hot?”
“Okay, that’s it! Out!” When neither of the women moved, Melvin said, “If you’re not out in three seconds, I’m calling the police.”
That was when Steimmel produced the pistol and instructed Melvin to sit down and shut up.
anfractuous
Like all stories, any of these I offer here has another side.4 My depiction of the stories of my life, if you will, is not mere hedonistic practice, no mere anarchism. Nor am I about a self-serving and uncomplex upbraiding of any poststructuralist thinking, however bedazzled such thinking might be by its own reflection, mesmerized and mechanically decisive in the face of academic action. The presence of the stories at all betrays some other reading. All I can do is give my text a helmet and condoms and send it out into the world. After Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and Blood River, there are no simple stories, there are no good neighborhoods, there are no safe meanings. Meaning has become a spatial metaphor for presence, a kind of constant self-pinching and asking if we’re really awake. But if you pinch too hard, you leave a bruise, a mark, a mark that might be construed as a gesture, and any gesture is quite simply that, but it occupies space and so must have a meaning and any meaning is just what we’ve said it is and oh, what a circle, what a circle, what a circle.
will the circle be unbroken?
by and by, lord, by and by
Father Chacón came back into the bedroom singing. “M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E.” He stood at the foot of the bed and stared at me. I looked at the closed door behind him. “Your new parents are sleeping in the shed out back. I told them you would be warmer in here with me.”
unties of simulacrum
Colonel Bill, after a short and disappointing fueling stop at Strategic Air Command, flew his jet all over central and southern California hoping to spot his baby. From twenty thousand feet he could, of course, see nothing, and a couple of passes at fifteen hundred feet over the streets of Los Angeles and Long Beach only made the people below look like ants (in fact, to his thinking, they were ants), but he could not spot his baby. After several near misses with commercial airliners and a traffic helicopter, Colonel Bill landed his craft at March Air Force Base. From there he drove his Hummer to a nearby Filipino doughnut shop in Moreno Valley, where he sat and ate an apple fritter and drank a cup of black coffee. He stared at each of the customers as they came in. He passed the time chatting with the owner whom he knew.
“I don’t know where to start, Ferdinand, but it might as well be here,” Colonel Bill said.
“What are you looking for?” Ferdinand said.
“Can’t tell you.”
“Secret, eh? I keep many secrets, both here and at my home in Manila. Did you know that I was once tried for murder?”
“Murder? No shit?”
“No shit,” Ferdinand said. “They said I assassinated this guy. This guy was an enemy of my father. That was in nineteen thirty-three. But I wasn’t tried until nineteen forty.”
“Seven years? Were you in the pokey all that time?”
Ferdinand laughed. “No, no.”
“So, you got off.” Colonel Bill took a bite of fritter while he watched the man nod. “Did you do it?”
Ferdinand laughed. “I got off.”
Colonel Bill laughed, too.
“I really miss the Philippines when I’m here.” Ferdinand poured himself a cup of coffee and took a sip. “You know, there I’m considered a hero. I led the resistance against the Japanese back during World War Two, you know. I was in the Bataan Death March.”
“Damn Nips.”
Ferdinand nodded.
“You’ve seen a lot,” Colonel Bill said. “Now you have this shop and a presidency.”
“Yes, and two hundred thirty-seven million dollars. I love America.”
The two men laughed together.
Melvin shook his head. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “The two of you have twelve advanced degrees between you and all you could come up with was smashing the guy in the face with your skull?”
“It worked,” Steimmel said.
“So, what are you going to do to me?” Melvin asked.
“I haven’t decided. Just remember, Mel, we’ve got nothing to lose.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Davis was pacing the carpet in front of the window. “Steimmel, I’m stumped. I don’t know how we’re going to find that baby. The baby is the sign and I can’t even find him in my meta-perceptual field.” She began to sink. “And now I don’t even have Ronald. He was a good subject. Made Washoe seem like a rodent.”
Steimmel sneered. “That ape couldn’t communicate. It was Clever Hans Phenomenon and you know it.”
“It was not!” Davis shouted.
Melvin chuckled.
“What are you laughing at?” Davis asked.
“You two.”
“Tell me, Melvin, what kind of movies do you write?” Steimmel asked, mockingly engaged.
“I write action movies.”
Steimmel smiled and nodded. “I see. You write those phasic-level, mind-numbing, socially irredeemable, bar-dropping, celluloid anal wipettes. Well, I take photographs of ideas.”
Davis snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, Melvin, you’re Tavolga’s plot man. How do we find one particular baby out amongst twenty million people?”
“First of all, from what you tell me, your baby’s not out there among twenty million people. Some fantastic government agency has your baby. Some secret spy company has your baby in some covert day care.”
“Shall I just shoot him now?” Steimmel asked Davis.
“He’s right,” Davis said. “They’ve probably got the little sucker tucked away in a missile silo somewhere.”
“You two can leave anytime,” Melvin said. “I won’t call the police. I promise. Just walk out and I’ll say I never saw you. Please.”
“Stop begging, Melvin,” Davis snapped. “That’s why I left you. Always begging. Begging for sex. Then begging for me to stop.”
“I left you, monkey-slut,” Melvin said.
“Keep dreaming,” Davis said.
“Okay, that’s it!” Melvin said, standing. “Both of you, out of my fucking house, right now!”
Steimmel and Davis looked at each other and laughed.
bridge
GOD: Roland, do you think it was a good idea to go put your penis in that young graduate student’s vagina and move it around?
BARTHES: It had to be done. My penis is an extension, not of myself, but of the the very signification of my meaning, of my marks on any page, whether made by me when writing or arbitrarily marking. I’m French, you know.
GOD: It’s just that Douglas was so counting on her continued admiration.
BARTHES: I can’t help that. If my penis h
adn’t been in her, where would it have been? If not there, where? My penis, the instrument you gave me, the extension finally of you, of you and the other two sides of the triangle. Pulchritude.
GOD: And you did make a pass at his wife, however unsuccessful.
BARTHES: She’s crazy, that one. Neither of them are French, you know.
exousai
As I recall Michelangelo’s god reaching down from above to touch the hand of Adam in whatever sacramental action is meant to represent, am I to be moved in a way that my more obscure rendering of the same touching cannot achieve because of my lack of literal artistic vision? The colors and line and form, even mere size, might well impress, but to move from that appreciation of craft to a spiritually moving encounter, regardless of my cultural connectedness and proximity to the work itself is not a compelling notion to a baby unmoved by talk of heaven and the garden and the devil. After all, my conception of a god is perhaps more to be trusted, as I am closer to that thing than any other gesturing being, my not having been corrupted by indoctrination and poorly told Biblical tales, and being a more recent arrival from the big house. And so, one might tell me that because of the “power of art” that chapel ceiling does more to achieve its end than say Schnabel in his amorphous blue depiction of the Almighty. But I come back to my image. The baby on the bed being approached by the fat priest, two pictures of Norwegian cub scouts adorning the wall behind him while the parents of the youth are tucked away in some cold room far away from the fray.
As the good father approached, I found it in myself to grab paper and pencil from the nightstand beside me and scribble,
I do not understand the nature of your approach. I am young and naive, but be warned that I am capable of accurate and detailed representation of any turn of events.
I handed the note to the stunned man. He fell to his knees in the middle of the room and broke into an immediate sweat across his brow, his prayer requiring, apparently, much exertion, his lips working madly and forming unintelligible words. Then he opened his eyes and stared at me, backed away, his face full of fear. “My Lord,” he said. “My Lord.” He turned and snatched the crucifix from the wall and held it to face me. He was shocked and terrified by the fact that the symbol caused me no discernible discomfort or consternation. He found the knob of the door behind him and backed out, closing me in, leaving me alone.
ens realissimum
To wonder whether any age has failed is, of course, to miss the point. Snipers on the high ridge of the twentieth century can pick off the artists as they come out for food, but the work has not miscarried or failed. No more than dinosaurs were blunders of nature, no more than a fully conversant baby is a sign from god or the devil. Why make art? Why the gesture at all? Why worry? Let them all graze. Let the glaciers come. But, of course, my meaning is solely that, no more, simply what it is, sarcastic as it might be, a housel of sorts for the irreligious, an anthem for enemies of the state, a prayer to the dead god Plato. Things don’t twist, things don’t change, things don’t stay the same, things don’t do anything.
1. I have neglected here to mention from interior to exterior (or the reverse) because as I see it, there is no inwardness to my expression and so there can necessarily be no outwardness. There is no exteriority of the signifier or the signified. There is no absence to presence, no difference to sameness.
2. Anything you want.
3. But suppose we trace, if you will, the steps of rin and the footprints of run and what this leads us to is the fact that there can be no rin without run and there can be no run without a subject, “I” making ruin of it and so, at least “U” is necessary. So, rin is dependent on the presence of “I” and “U.”
4. Here I defer to popular wisdom, however against my grain and better judgment, it being the case that I, personally, do not adhere to the logical necessity of many or even one extra interpretation or decoding of a given story. I constantly consider the literal and come back with positive reports. It’s not the simplicity of the literal, but the cleanness of it, the weight of it, and, lastly, the fact that nothing makes such a figurative comment on everything like a literal statement.
The Period Is the Point
RALPH
G
différance
Staring at the door that had just been closed by the priest, I wondered if there was no inside and outside to the spirit of being, no body and soul, no opposite side to any orientation, but that we were Möbius surfaces, our topologies defined by the fact that we can never get around them to the other side, but are always there, both on the other side and staring at it confusedly, longingly, with much apprehension and eagerness. And if in an egomaniacal fit of reason I extrapolate from my picture of the individual to the world, perhaps the case is that there is no distinction between the real world and that which constitutes real for us in the use of this thing called language. There is no split or rupture from the world when it comes to the reporting of the real, as the consciousness of it is on the same side of the paradoxical tape, the Möbius strip of the world, all in the same place, tucked away in the same box in the attic, living in the same cage at the zoo. In fact, all fantasy, desire, falsehood, and delusion exist together with the real and language and so are all the same, which is why adults are prone to the supposedly irrational utterance, “This isn’t happening,” when under duress, but of course by even saying it isn’t happening, it is made so. Since there is, as I have said, no digression, let me add: The accused cannot deny guilt, for to deny it is to recognize it and so it is when denying the act itself, but to deny understanding of the charge is to deny the language, the soup in which the action and the guilt and the falsehood and the fantasy are all stirred. Such denial might well serve not only to get one off the hook but to erase the crime of which one is guilty anyway. Such was the case with the priest. Under his bed I found a scrapbook with newspaper clippings about his alleged activities with young boys in his last parish. He looked younger in one photograph, but by the clipping’s date I knew it was not so long ago. All along the margins were scribbled questions, all of a kind, asking more or less, “What does this mean?” or “I can’t even imagine what they’re describing.” The questions were interesting to me, because, as is the custom with newspapers, the stories of what reportedly transpired were so sketchy that I had no idea what had supposedly happened. The strangest thing was that the man had actually saved the clippings. Whether a sign of guilt or innocence, I do not know, but there they were, neatly pasted and taped onto the thick manila pages.
I resolved, as you can well guess, not to be there when Father Friendly returned. I went to the closet, the door of which was ajar, thinking that I would hide in there and then upon being found missing1 I would exit via the door of the bedroom. But as it turned out, inside the closet was a small door. I opened it and stepped through it into a corridor in which I could barely stand. I followed it.
subjective-collective
One Physicist to another: I hate your GUT.
MERLEAU-PONTY: Imagine you’re looking at a big arrow.
LACAN: Consider it imagined. Are you now going to ask me which way it’s pointing?
MERLEAU-PONTY: No. You’re seeing it. Now, imagine that it is invisible.
LACAN: Done.
MERLEAU-PONTY: Which way is it pointing?
LACAN: To the left.
MERLEAU-PONTY: Are you still imagining it?
LACAN: Yes.
incision
a
We do here
what we do
in a host of familiar cases.
Ask about relations,
about the thing named.
Recall the picture
of that thing.
Tell me which way it points.
Tell me its color.
And whether it can
be broken into pieces.
A queer conception,
sublime logic.
b
Let us assume X.
Even su
ch signs have
some place, some
language X.
Constituent parts
compose this reality—
molecules, atoms, simple
X.
c
From rags and dust
a rat is formed in the cellar.
It was not there before.
Only rags and dust.
exousai
I walked through that channel like the rat in the maze that Steimmel would have had me be. It was dark in there and there were many webs, but a tiny light at the end of it pulled me forward. I came to the end and saw that the light was from a room on the other side of a peephole. The room was furnished with stiff and square chairs and somber colors, brown and maroon. Father Chacón was waving his arms and talking to Mauricio and Rosenda, running his stubby fingers through the hair about his ears, then slamming his fat hands together as if in prayer.
“The child is possessed!” the priest said. “The devil is in him as certainly as I am standing here before you!” He held his face up to the dim light of the ornate chandelier.
Rosenda began to weep loudly and Mauricio held her. “It cannot be true,” she said. “He’s such a beautiful baby. He’s a good boy.”
“No, no, no. He is the devil’s tool! He wrote a note. The devil controlled his hand and he wrote a note.”
Rosenda pleaded with Mauricio. “Please, go get little Pepe so that Father Chacón can see how sweet he is.”
“He wrote letters on paper,” the priest said.
Mauricio left to collect me.
“Please, God,” Rosenda prayed out loud. “Please let the Father know how good my child is. Tell him that Pepe is not possessed,”
“Say what you will, Rosenda, but it will not change the truth. We must have an exorcism at once.”
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