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The grand hotel by the harbor was loved by
L’homme moyen sensible, who reaches for inexact hand-me-down phrases like that one to describe himself. A man clad in old familiar words, as if they were tweeds. A man without qualities. No, that isn’t true, Arribista corrects himself. He has qualities, he reminds himself. For one thing, he has this tendency when lost in the stream of consciousness to denigrate himself, and in this respect he is unfair to himself.
There were people, that year, claiming that the new president was a Muslim, there was all that trumped-up birth certificate crap, and we weren’t going to fall into the elephant trap of bigotry.
But I couldn’t deny the words that had tumbled out of my mouth in reply to Suchitra’s challenge. The question is the question of evil.
“Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores. The far-off Danube shall know thee, the cold North-wind, the untroubled kingdom of Canopus and the men who gaze on the new birth of Phoebus or upon his setting.” It was a strange choice of quotation,
D was in fact quite the striker of poses, a Dorian Gray type, slender, lissom, bordering on the effeminate.
gods permit that bodies be
“There is a particular kind of sadness,” she replied, dragging on her Gauloises, looking like Anna Karina in Pierrot le fou, “that reveals a man’s alienation from his own identity.”
The alphabet is where all our secrets begin.
“God is dead and identity fills the vacuum,” she said to him at the doorway to the gender zone, her eyes filled with the bright zeal of the true believer, “but it turns out gods were gender benders from the start.”
The first night and the second night, the first two nights of the new year, she demonstrates her wares, lets him see the quality of what’s on offer, not only physically but emotionally. She…and here I rear back and halt myself, ashamed, prufrocked into a sudden pudeur, for, after all, how should I presume? Shall I say, I have known them all, I have seen her like a yellow fog rubbing her back against, rubbing her muzzle upon, shall I say, licking her tongue into the corners of his evening? Do I dare, and do I dare? And who am I, after all? I am not the prince. An attendant lord, deferential,
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Prufrock
The downpour begins in earnest. Water on the camera lens. Fade to white.
“Elle avait des yeux, des yeux d’opale / qui me fascinaient, qui me fascinaient,” with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, “Chacun pour soi est reparti Dans le tourbillon de la vie…”
A gigantic insect. A monstrous vermin. A verminous bug. Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from troubled dreams to discover that he had been transformed in his own bed into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer. People disagreed on the best translation. The exact nature of the creature is not precisely specified in the Kafka story.
It was possessed of a disturbing, ersatz otherness which the earlier version, also a kind of imitation of life, had somehow avoided.
At first D is in low spirits, quoting Nietzsche (author of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft) asking “the Schopenhauerian question: Has existence then a significance at all?—the question which will require a couple of centuries even to be completely heard in all its profundity.” But gradually the two women cheer
These were men with slicked-down hair worn slightly too long at the back,
A single lantern still hung from the branch of a tree, its candle sputtering to its end. I heard one single hoot of what might have been an owl, but it is possible I might have been mistaken. In the sky a pale moon glowing faintly through gathering rainclouds. A hurricane was coming. All was still before the storm.
And where, right now, was the new Mrs. Golden, and what was her opinion of her husband blubbering to ghosts in the garden?
To have my head turned so easily by a pretty face.
Is it perfume..from a dress that makes me so digress?
“So wonderful,” he told me, “to see Goethe lying down among the sleeping bags, G. K. Chesterton standing in line for soup, Gandhi wiggling his fingers in the form of silent applause called up-twinkles—or actually of course it’s Ghandi because nobody can spell anymore, spelling is so boozhwa.
“It’s just an internet meme, but what to do, nobody knows anything, like I said, knowing things is boozhwa too.”
This thinker wore an Anonymous mask, the mustachioed smiling white-faced Guy Fawkes face popularized by the Wachowskis in V for Vendetta, but when I asked him about the man whose face he was wearing he admitted he had never heard of the Gunpowder Plot and did not remember, remember the fifth of November.
There was a voice in my head saying do it now, you fool, but a second, often louder voice, the voice of my cowardice, arguing that we had been friends for too long, that after a certain point it became impossible to transmute friendship into romantic love, that if one attempted to do so and failed one could be left without the friendship or the love, and here was Eliot’s Prufrock in my head again, agonizing in my own inner voice, Do I dare, and regarding the terrible and terrifying question of a declaration of love, Would it have been worth while / If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a
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Great Neck, Little Neck, raised thoughts of Gatsby in us all, and though we did not drive by Remsenburg, where P. G. Wodehouse had lived for so many years during his postwar exile from England, we often imagined, as we drove, a fictional universe in which Fitzgerald’s and Wodehouse’s creations might visit one another. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves might have intruded on the rarefied world of the Eggs, silly-ass Bertie stepping into sensible Nick Carraway’s shoes, and Reginald Jeeves the fish-eating, Spinoza-loving gentleman’s gentleman and genius finding a way to give Jay Gatsby the
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As to her death, a great sadness, but not in fact a tragedy, it didn’t rise to the level of tragedy.” Another shot. “I correct myself. A personal tragedy of course. A tragedy to me and my sons. But great tragedy is universal, is it not.”
“You’re young,” he said. “You don’t know what responsibility is. You don’t know guilt or shame.
Ends. “In the beginning,”
the nuclear-fission warheads of the left, to run away and settle in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia, which is where I was born.
expressing, like the Cubists, the need for many perspectives at the same time.
Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores.
The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates said and drank the hemlock, but that examination, I had always thought, should be an examination of the self by the self; autonomous, as a true individual should be, leaning on no man for explanations or absolution, free.
of principle, raised to be honorable
that a little strange? Did she know more
a leprechaun-green three-piece when he wanted to channel Oscar Wilde,
(which sucks us down, and we drown).
should try to set down
breaking the fourth wall to dive into the movies rather than out of them into the world.
like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett silently suffused by sadness both for the world and for themselves.
it was crooked as corkscrews, as W. H. Auden might have put it.
(This raises an interesting question: did Shakespeare know he was Shakespeare? But that’s for another day.)
But she is a minor character. I, also, myself. The same. Mine has always been a strictly supporting role.
Pray, do not mock me, Lear pleads. I am a very foolish fond old man….And to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
And I, the fool, beginning my soliloquy which would reveal the truth.
But if human nature were not a mystery, we’d have no need of poets.
Let me just set that down
Sometimes the bad guys win and what does one do when the world one believes in turns out to be a paper moon
and the creature out of Spiritus Mundi rises up and slouches toward Washington, D.C., to be born.
in our two cracked voices we were drunks in our own midnight choir, and we would try in our way to be free.
Life does not imitate art as slavishly as that.
