West

Perhaps I am reading the wrong sort of books.

Only a less sane person can even contemplate that, and a far lesser one to actually see the sense of that contemplation.  I, however, am the sort of person who sees the same thing in the books that I read, who lays over them a veneer of my own character, stifling them even before they can truly teach  me anything.  But then what it is that they can truly teach me would have been lost to me.  I will still be laying that veneer if I attempted to answer that question, anyway.  It is perhaps creditable to my dominance over anything I come across, a dominance built on instability and misplaced passion, like a youth overcompensating for his awkwardness by being too passionate, too loud, in the perfectly wrong circumstance.  I seem to be doomed to be this awkward youth, regardless of how many books I – rightly or wrongly – read.

Give me an Irving, or more recently, a Bellow; give me Camus or a Pratchett, it is all the same to me.  It is a walloping kind of being overwhelmed by these giants, these giants whom I dress in suits always elegant but always ill-fitting.  The irony becomes obvious when I am, inevitably, impressionable in my style of writing, but adamant to a fault in my thinking.  This is how we play in the system of contamination, these giants and I.

That, however, is not a problem, or at least not the main one.  I plague myself with high-minded problems, which for all their high-mindedness, become all the more dangerous in their formulation, for they happen in theory.  In that, I am hopeless, and hence so am I with more mundane things. 

I can no longer see them.  I can no longer see what is mundane.  All my world happens somewhere else, and it is as though I am merely, occasionally visiting in this place, here where things are happening.  This might be where madness lies.  As Bellows so eloquently put, it is impractical for one to hate himself.  Tongue in cheek, he continues, hence that is why God sends a substitute: a husband.  Even that, I cannot have.  I have no roots here, I have no ground in the mundane.  Which, as I will not tire of repeating, makes my problems all the more dangerous, and all the sillier.

I seem to be afflicted with the problem of the West, not the West geographically (though that, too), but the Westernism of the whole of humanity combined.  (There is no racism in that statement.)  I seem to have the problem of the Self and its alienation.  Or perhaps, still impressionable, I am taking over Herzog’s problems, the problem of the impossibility of a grand synthesis, which is very ridiculous for a somewhat middle-aged person.  I might as well write him a letter, true to Herzog form. But then to whom will I be writing, if I were to do so?  Bellow?  Herzog?  Myself?  Damn the eternal problem of the pseudo-intellectual.  Being a separatist in himself, he seeks synthesis of history and thought, process and entity, feeling and rationality, the universe in a book.

I have not been productive for a long "lately."  Thoughts that overflow are not necessarily productive, and if this essay is to be a sample, obviously my thoughts hardly make coherent sense.  Which is of course a very obvious hypocrisy, in that I say the same of my students’ essays.  But then there is incoherence, and there is incoherence.  I am blind to my own faults, to a certain extent, which is itself a fault.  When it comes to the self there must be absolute honesty, or nothing.  But that is impossible.  We are all demented repairmen of ourselves.  I am sure of that. To such certainties I hold on with an iron grip, for I am at the mercy of my own whims enough.  A true case of separatism, yes, and a neurosis to boot. 

Bellow then makes the high-minded problems simple, reducing them eloquently to problems related to the physical.  I see some wisdom in this, for it is the physical that I turn to more often than not.  Debauchery can even be made to have the veneer of transcendence, if one is mad enough.  I fear becoming a Sade, or a more justifiably sensual Camus, but then it seems I have a last battle to wage:  what is me that is truly me, and what is me that I can discard.  My dominance of myself happens somewhere else: there is always a convenient excuse when it is selfhood and identity that is the problem.  Perhaps that is why I turn to Derrida for more drastic solutions: in that I know I am licked beforehand, but it would not hurt to contaminate myself further with the things I hate in myself such that they are all that will constitute me, in the end. 

In this I have a heart for Dostoevsky’s Fyodor Karamazov, being a buffoon and rejoicing in his own self-designed ruination.  Why must I go on like this is a mystery I must sooner or later face.  But then I have faced it.  I am a ruin, hear me and pity me, for it is currency to my perverse economy.  There can be no dignity possible to creatures such as I, no sublimation of animal desire and human destruction.  Even this piece reeks of rejoicing in my own madness.  In that one does not need a Bellow for clearer understanding:  I am my own nihilism.  In another world, I might have been my own critic, when I wrote that I have had to grow old.  In this world, growing old merely meant that when I was younger and still rejoicing in my suffering, I made it seem like a noble suffering; now that I have had to grow old, my suffering is nonsensical, intellectually pompous depravity, bereft of dignity or respect.  I have become ridiculous in my own eyes.

 My problem stems and ends and begins with an ideal, an ideal of decency which, in my desperation and assumed cleverness I made the desire of and the capacity to attain, identical.  Given enough steel of character, one might delude himself in believing that to know the good is to do the good, that knowledge of what is noble is that same as the capacity for the noble.  That is what makes my problems dangerous, the difference between the ideal and the attainable, to the soaring mind and to the character built on egoism and an inflated sense of capacity.  That is what makes my problems silly.  In these, I do not know how to live.  In this, I have never truly lived.

This, finally, is exactly the wrong way to do polemics.  And the final danger in all this, final, because it will be my death, is that there is no limit to my own buffoonery, all the more dangerous because it is a conscious buffoonery.  Even idiots have to have a moral sense, else they will not be rejoicing in their idiocy.  If I reach that limitless state of self-depreciation, then I will be utterly done,  twisted self-respect would be for nothing.  How have I become so utterly low?  It is the best rhetorical questions that make our own lives and actions their own answers.  The best, hence totally useless, and the most piercing.  For when they are asked, the moment they are asked, they become totally useless: they are always late.  Always too late. 

Written May 2009