Hate, hate, hate. Like a happy little steam engine. Beast of burden and the return of the repressed of every last grievance. Nasty invective, everywhere, going every direction, basically just the weather around here, pre-internet and all. The 20th century. Where Fidel Castro and Marilyn Monroe kiss, maybe. And what of the wider world? Worlds? Swamp gas? Yes, we’re burrowing inward, we be sundering, but the encyclopedia has to have its widths accounted for also. Horror and horror-comedy keep our unsteady nerves jagged enough to be very quick, responsive...reactive. Mostly. And the impetus to connect, to identify and establish meaningful intimacy, positively a commandment, if apparently forgotten by nearly all and performed perforce as pantomime. My man Mr. A. Theroux: “The problem of AIDS intrigued Eyestones as well, and specifically the cause of it, the worst disaster that we can reasonably expect to befall humanity in our lifetime.” And yet the AIDS crisis ultimately has nothing on the conditional opacity of grounded situational specificity, the locked-in syndrome of consciousness and identity, the failure of a self to either reckon with itself or supersede the hinderances it once imagined protective armour and which at a certain point may have a tendency to become the invisibly writhing self entire, its fake armature actual exoskeleton. A failure to provide or establish gravity, a failure to recognize the self where it is not flattering to look. We avoid hard work by asking for tasks. Western (wo)man(+) pleads for busy work and talks shit 'til lights out, bitter about the work and taxation of hours. Where do we place Theroux's Euegene Eyestones, sexual intellectual with blue balls, and what do we do with him? And do we not recognize this as precisely the problem with which Euegene himself wrestles? Where do I put myself? Beside that lady? Christ, really?! Laura is at all times a hot mess, a hopped-up vengeance freak, not easy to be around and she sniggeringly knows it, ever more unpleasant and circular of argument, habitually. Swiss. Clock. Work. “Mania or depression. Dopey energy or disinvigorating dead-endedness.” That’s Laura, muddy as a brash oil painting. “Why did he put up with all this shock-and-awe? Was it because he was convinced that by way of his understanding he had a way to help her? She was weak, he understood that, and yet a weak or soft metal that is alloyed with another weak element, amazingly enough, may produce a strong alloy with strikingly different properties from those of the parent metals. Copper and aluminum are both fairly weak, but the addition of 5X aluminum produces an alloy twice as strong as copper! Buckets, bridges, buttons, boathooks, biscuit tins, bugles, and bells—throw in as well, he thought, the brides and grooms of fate!” Sounds lovely. What could possibly go wrong? “Laura flourished in the malls, Eugene soon saw, who realized that if you have seen one, you’ve seen the Mall.” [Rimshot.] On a cross-country road trip our pair encounter wonders the likes of “a rattlesnake cattle round-up in Okeene, Oklahoma” and “discussed what foods they hated and chose their top ten favorite travel spots and did Zen exercises such as what does Zen taste like and what color is Zen and what is my original face?” It’s the worst vacation ever, but very close to real intimacy, and ultimately sadder than shit. Eugene confesses, possibly only to himself, that Laura’s “blank, uncomprehending stare irritated him so much he wanted to shove her off a butte,” but, ever with the big picture cross-referenced perspective available for consultation, Our Dubious Father of Sexual Intellection (eck eck) remains able to remind himself that everybody has their reasons, forgive them Pappy for they know not what they do, and “Hadn’t a drugged sleep been forced upon her?” Poor Eugene. Will he ever find his Our Lady of the Fully Formed Thought? “His disapproval became a mirror of what she soon saw she needed to hide and to avoid. On that trip but even before, he clearly saw she had become the dark source of his columns. She was a dark Rorschach blot he was determined to puzzle out.” Those final two words, “puzzle out,” are the index of a fatal weakness. Gustave Flaubert’s (encyclopedic, hilarious) Bouvard and Pécuchet. “The tiny contribute by totality to tear down.” Alexander Theroux tells us this directly just as the personnel at Boston's Quink weekly do with full peacock's verbal array and persistent soul-murdering resentment. But what of the expansive intellectual, the great and open lover, the philo-sopher who ‘cares so’ and evidently does so for the sake of the caring alone? In short, dramatic irony makes of him a monkey, then something more ghastly, and then it pulls out the rug, or maybe pulls back the curtain, leaving us with a profoundly sobering glimpse of actual no gravity and all that was once a person with all the human stuff now “smeared, stained, the way our tears actually mourn for us.” “Eyestones was a dreamer as dreamers go and as dreamers go, he left.” In Alcoholics Anonymous they tell you to identify instead of comparing. It’s good advise, leading one quite possibly from the trap of abyssal indentitarian tribalism, but it comes with a codicil, ‘kay? The thing about the imagination is that operationally you need to decentralize command and avoid getting the tires stuck in the muck. Eyestones: “When in The Sky’s the Limit pilot Fred Astaire flies off to war, one of the most unforgettable moments in all movies is that final heart-stopping closeup of Joan Leslie whispering…what? A prayer? A vow? A declaration of love?” A lovely string of rhetorical questions, vintage A. Theroux, but I think what is most lovely is the quality of openness here that will allow things to be left hanging. This too is a way, and it may have occasion to sparkle quite attractively. Check this out, for example, from Laura Warholic; or, the Sexual Intellectual, a novel whose title I really like saying out loud, page 469, chapter called “Katabasis”: “Did she dream about stags? Did she dream about deer? Did she dream about the wind and the rain in her hair? Did she speak about angels? What did they say? Did music somewhere in her heart start to play? Who was it held her? Gave her her part? Kissed her to fill up the hole in her heart? Why is a fountain? When is a tree? Who walks on the mountain? How breathes the deep sea? Are forests forever? Can honesty bend? How far is never? Why is the end? Wasn’t it time to give voice to her soul? When did she whisper? Where did she cry? Will the feeling of kneeling before love ever die?”
The feeling of kneeling before love will never die. However, in the very near future, paradise, like in Godard's Notre musique (2004) or Romero's Land of the Dead (2005)...or Don DeLillo's escape hatch plan Mao II (an extremely fine novel from 1991, though even DeLillo pales beside A. Theroux)...or even in the drop-out cinemas of my contemporaries Harmony Korine and Giuseppe Andrews (who is half a year older than me), infectious, scabby, and dicey as I find these....paradise...paradise will not be what was once not a parking lot, though Joni is assuredly welcome whenever...paradise will rather be a casually situated semi-remote compound you can protect and ornament without all that much effort...
Also, please.
We as a people.
Can we talk about Laura Warholic and her death? And the deaths of a whole lot of difficult friends we never speak of anymore...of the people we saw not comprehend that a brother or husband was gone forever out of seemingly nowhere...of the tragic dimension we require and seldom face unless forced?
L-U-V
JPW
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