14. See “New Data on the Problem of Y-Linkage of Hairy Pinnae,” Stern, Centerwall, and Starker, American Journal of Human Genetics, 16: 455–71, 1964.
15. My lack of familiarity at the time with Balzac’s novella perhaps hindered my ability to be fair in reading S/Z, but just because one doesn’t see the shit in the toilet doesn’t mean one does not smell it. I perceived a claim in the text to point out the remarkable fertility of language, but, in the text, the very practice of language seemed to work like radiation on testes. The threat of epiphany was large and used to hold me hostage, the man telling me that if I stopped reading it was because I was inflexible and a slave to common thinking and forcing me to feel like a simple-minded disciple with each word deeper into the text, until the end when I threw the book out of my crib, and laid a load in my big-boy underwear.
16. The idea snapped me awake and I was shocked to find myself not only understanding a word or two but in agreement. It however served only to give me a trail of thought to pursue. My mind turned to the ancient Mesopotamians and how, for them, the cosmos was always shattering without warning, only to be rebuilt and suffer another cataclysm. I wondered if dying was like the cosmos shattering or coming finally together.
17. Please forgive the mention of the two in the same breath, but understand that even then I understood their missions to be different (though not so different as one might imagine) and both to be equally successful. Of course, I lacked the wit and cynicism (the two being functions of experience) of Twain and the charming naiveté of Grey (for this lack I cannot account).
18. A term and use I discovered reading Ishmael Reed.
19. I, of course, have left to tacit implication the required assumption that existence is better than nonexistence; an unintelligible claim, but I’m willing to allow it in spite of my failure to understand it. In fact, I have no opinion concerning the existence of god. I am not an atheist, since I do not express a belief that there is no god. I am not a theist, as I do not hold the belief there is one. I am not an agnostic because I do not profess ignorance and so an inability to answer the question. I simply do not care, and so I might incorrectly (however justifiably) be identified as a twentieth-century fundamentalist Protestant or a nineteenth-century Mountain Meadows Massacre Mormon or a Catholic from any century.
20. If for no other reason than my having claimed it.
21. This is was a lucky stroke, as I had just read about the theorems of Pappus. I would have been unable to provide a proof for the first theorem and I would not have recognized the second.
22. I, in fact, was slightly pained that I could not come up with a painting, the title of which might have had significant import for the situation. The fact of the matter was that the blot looked just like that painting, moving me as much, meaning as little. Not a knock on Motherwell at all, however. I love his Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, the colors, the shapes, the composition, the vacuity.
23. And so, I assume, nothing, as no thing can actually mean everything.
A Plot with a View
BARTHES
B
différance
What troubled my parents and Dr. Steimmel wasn’t so much that I understood language, but that I basically understood it as they did. It was clear, at least to me, that they suffered from a kind of jealousy, the nature of which remains unclear, but it concerned my having skipped what Steimmel would have wanted to call a symbolic or imaginary stage in my development, a prelinguistic rite of passage, a necessary inconvenience during which they expected to have enormous influence. But my thinking was organized; the time during which I was to roughly come to understand the delimiting of my body I used to form a personality, changing, as we always are changing, but knowing more than the parts of my body and their relations. Indeed, the claim might be made that because I lacked the prelinguistic clutter, the subtextual litter, I actually understood language better than any adult. Talk of time never threw me for a loop. Pronouns never confused me. I used me when I was supposed to and never once wondered when my mother used I whether she was speaking of me. You, me, they, them, it, she, he all did their work without baffling me for a second. What is more, the gap between the subject of enunciation and the subject of enunciating1 not only failed to appear to me as a place of entry, but also failed to register as something I might elide. For me, there was no gap, as there is no gap for anyone.
bridge
My parents stopped at a restaurant on our way home from the hospital and ate in awkward silence. They looked at me only occasionally and then only for a second, offering half-meant smiles. They talked a lot about how their food was only mediocre and finally, my mother said, “I don’t like that Dr. Steimmel. I don’t trust her.”
Inflato shrugged. “She got a little worked up, I guess.”
“A little worked up? It seemed to me like she was taking things awfully personally for somebody who’s supposed to remain clinical and objective.”
“Nobody can be objective,” Inflato said.
“You know what I mean.” Mo was irritated now and so she looked to me for more than a second. “You know what I mean, don’t you, Ralph?”
I nodded. Then I gestured that I wanted something to write on. Mo dug into her purse while Inflato glanced nervously around.
“My god, Eve,” he said. “What if somebody sees?”
“To hell with them,” Mo said. She put a pad and a pen in front of me.
I wrote:
I don’t want to go back to the hospital.
Mo read it and told Inflato what I had said. “Don’t worry honey, we won’t take you back there.”
“Maybe not there,” Inflato said. “Eve, we have to get some answers, learn what we need to do to deal with him.”
“Him is sitting right here. It’s not like he’s got a contagious disease, Douglas.”
“How do we know?”
I felt my little body convulsing with laughter. I wrote:
Father wishes I were contagious.
Mo read it and laughed.
Inflato grabbed the pad and read it. “Very funny. So, you’re smart, you little nipple-hound.”
I wrote quickly:
So, that’s it, you’re jealous of the attention your wife pays me.
He pulled the pad over, read it, and bit his lip. “That’s not it. You need special help. I don’t want you to grow up all twisted inside. You could become a juvenile delinquent or worse.”
A poststructuralist pretender.
That one really scared him. He ate a forkload of potato salad and looked away. I was not proud of having stepped on him the way I did, but I was interested in the exchange because it was my first real confrontation. Certainly, I had toyed with Steimmel and watched her lose her grip, but with my father at the table, I actually felt a twinge of anger. I learned at that table that I had a mean streak.
anfractuous
Whether atoms, monads, or words, things are made up of small things and small things are made of smaller things and, to some extent, my understanding of the whole world depends on my comprehension of its constituent parts. But my poop is my poop, to me here in California, to a fat Australian woman in Melbourne, to an engineer in Nigeria, to a pearl diver in the South Pacific. And though Inflato might have argued to the contrary, my performance at the shrink’s was limited to a finite number of readings. He would, in his philosophical mode, have liked to claim an infinite number of interpretations, but as is the case with most theories, application is a bit of a sticky wicket. Locke might have claimed all day that there was no material world, but still he would have stepped out of the way of an oncoming carriage that evening.
An infinite number of readings indeed. Certainly, my sentences read backwards or pulled from the text randomly will produce the kind of fragments certain individuals have suggested. I am free to read this way. But I do not, any more than I might walk the middle part of my trip to the refrigerator first this time and last the next. Even when I have read half the novel, when I go back
and read the first lines of the first chapter, I am reading the beginning. If I could, I would make numerous trips to the refrigerator. Sometimes I would be hungrier than others. Sometimes I would retrieve a bottle of milk, others, strained peaches. Still, it would be a trip to the refrigerator that begins at my little desk. Even if I were just going there to feel the cold air on my face, it would be a trip to the refrigerator. Never would I go there to see an elephant.
ens realissimum
G.E. MOORE: Imagine that we are characters in your story Sarrasine and that you know the truth about La Zambinella while I do not. Do we see the same thing when we see him come into the room?
BALZAC: You mean to say that I know La Zambinella is a castrato dressed as a woman and you do not.
G.E. MOORE: That is correct.
BALZAC: Well, we both see La Zambinella.
G.E. MOORE: But do we see the same La Zambinella?
BALZAC: We see her femininity and her station and her clothes and I have her appear as a kind of apparition. Are you asking if we see those things?
G.E. MOORE: Not exactly. You see a man in women’s clothes. I see a woman.
BALZAC: But we both see La Zambinella.
G.E. MOORE: But you see so much more than I.
BALZAC: I know more and perhaps I am aware of more. I can find and entertain certain ironies that you cannot, but I see the same Zambinella as you.
G.E. MOORE: But how can you, if you’re seeing with your mind and I am seeing with mine?
BALZAC: That is a different question.
seme
Fissure of Sylvius
Where in my head
do the breaches meet,
defining the parietal lobe
from the temporal?
Sylvius joining Rolando
at the tortured frontal,
where the crying starts,
where the crying stops.
Beginning in a depression,
an interior,
perforated space
situated within,
it moves out of the hemisphere,
pushes forward
a limb,
a short ascending finger,
upward,
inward into the frontal
convolution.
ephexis
What I know of my parents’ lives I know from photographs. I know somewhat more about my mother’s life now, but, generally, people are only inclined to speak of the past with those they believe will somehow not only share some commonality, but who will also be disposed to exhibiting sympathy. The photographs are many; some of their childhoods, some of their courting and marriage, but few in between.
1) My mother is eight, if my math is correct, and she is sitting on a porch with her brother Toby, I can tell by his ears, and they are looking down into Toby’s lap where there is a cat.
“This cat is dying,” Toby said.
“Is not,” said Eve.
“Papa said he’s real sick.”
Eve got up from her seat beside Toby and walked to the edge of the porch. “I think it’s going to snow.”
“The cat is suffering, Eve.”
“I hope there’s no school tomorrow.”
Toby put the cat down on the place where Eve had been sitting and walked over to stand behind her. “Sis, I’m sorry about your cat. I’m going to take it out back now, okay?”
“Maybe we can make a snowman in the morning.”
Toby put his hand on her shoulder. “Sure thing.”
2) Inflato is fourteen and standing in the background, behind his father who is posing with a fat man wearing a raccoon cap. Inflato is holding an oddly shaped case that seems heavy for him.
“I’m blind,” Douglas’s father said, tipping his beer bottle for another swig.
“Yeah, that’s some flash you got on that thing,” the fat man said to the tall, skinny man who was pulling the burned bulb from the pan of the Brownie.
“You boys ready to go kick some butt?” the fat man said. “How about you, Dougie? You want be on the team with your old man?”
Douglas tried to give the bag to his father. “No, I’m going to stay home. I don’t really like bowling.”
The skinny man and the fat man said, “Whoa, he don’t like bowling.”
The skinny man said, “What gives, Tommy? Your boy queer or something?”
Douglas’s father shut up the skinny man with a glare. “No, he ain’t queer.” Then he looked at Douglas. “You ain’t queer, are you?”
Douglas didn’t say anything, just put down the case.
“That ball too heavy for you, son?”
“I guess so,” Douglas said.
Douglas’s father turned to the fat man and the skinny man. “He’s going to stay in his room and read.”
“Read?”
“Read. Can you believe it?”
3) Mo and Inflato are not married yet. They are sitting in front of a campfire. It is not quite dark and there is a lake behind them.
“I didn’t think it would be this cold up here this time of year,” Douglas said. He held Eve tighter and pulled her hands under his parka.
“I don’t mind,” Eve said. “The fire is nice.”
“I didn’t expect it to be this crowded either.”
Eve looked down the trail. “Where did Derrick and Wanda go?”
“They said they were going to get some more gear from the car. But I think they went to you-know-what.”
Eve laughed.
“How is your painting going?”
“Not badly.” She watched as Douglas put another couple of sticks on the fire. “I just finished a big canvas that kind of scares me. There’s a lot of green in it. Green is tough for me. There are some places in it, though, where I could just live.” She stared into the fire. “I love the paint. The smell of it. The texture.” She seemed to laugh at herself. “Am I rambling?” Eve looked up at the sky, which was almost dark. “God, look at that moon.”
“My article on Propp’s theory of Russian fairy tales was just rejected by Modern Literary Theory.”
“I’m sorry.”
degrees
Is a photograph always present tense? I described them so. About photos people say things like, “Here I am after nearly drowning,” or “There you are with Linda Evangelista.” Looking up from the photo, you might then ask, “When were you with Linda Evangelista?” I tell you I was not with her. Looking back at the photo, you say, “Here you are right here with her.” So, better, let the question be, is what is in the photograph always in the present, without a before, without an after? Of course, it is. And isn’t that actually you in the picture?
incision
I was lying in my crib, reading Daisy Miller when I heard sounds outside my window. I stood up and attended to the noises, wondered if my parents heard them in their room, wondered if they were outside making the noises. Choosing not to engage in speech had its drawbacks, among them an inability to summon help from the next room. As I watched the sash of my window begin to move, I considered hurling a book across the room to make a ruckus, but I was not strong enough to do it and, even if I had been that strong, I would not have found it in myself to do such a thing to a book.2
My window opened and in rushed the cold February air. A woman’s voice whispered angrily to someone else outside. Then someone was climbing through the window into my room. Dressed in dark clothes and wearing a black knit cap was Dr. Steimmel. She put a finger to her lips as she approached my bed.
“Don’t be scared, Ralph,” she said. “This is all just a dream.3 I’m not going to hurt you.”
Another similarly dressed person was at the window, but he didn’t come in. “Just grab him so we can get out of here,” the man said.
“Shhhh!” Steimmel hushed him. “Come on, Ralphie.” She lifted me and held me to her chest. Her bra seemed to be made of hard plastic.
“Let’s go,” the man at the window said.
“I’m coming, damnit.” Steimmel wrapped me
up in the cotton blankets of my bed and carried me to the window where she handed me to the man. He was smaller than Steimmel and, in a significant fashion, softer. The cold air, in spite of the blankets, was rude and I felt my body shiver involuntarily. The man put me under the front of his wool coat. It was scratchy, even through the layers of blanket, but warm. He stepped away from the window and let Steimmel climb out.
“You should close the window,” the man said. “They might feel the cold and wake up.”
“Good thinking,” Steimmel said. She turned back to the house and quietly lowered the sash. “Okay, now, let’s get the hell out of here. Oh, my god, I can’t believe I’ve got him.”
The man carried me and the two of them made their way across the yard, crouched low like monkeys, to a dark sedan.
Inside the car, in the dark, Steimmel strapped me into a carrier in the backseat, stuck a legal pad and a marker in front of me, and said, “Knock yourself out.”
ennuyeux
On Ludwig Boltzman’s tombstone is carved: S = k. LogW. S is the entropy of a system, k represents Boltzman’s Constant, and W is a measure of the chaos of a system, essentially the extent to which energy is dispersed in the world. This equation meant little to me as I read of it the first time, but as I considered it I grew excited. The space between S and W is the space between the thing in front of me and the stuff hidden inside beyond my observation and comprehension. It raises the question: How many ways can the parts of a thing be rearranged before I can see a difference? How many ways can the atoms and molecules of my hand move and recombine before I realize that something is wrong? Thinking about it scared me. Certainly, I understood that natural events symbolize collapse into chaos and that events are motivated by dissolution, but the idea of such subversive and invisible change moved me. I likened it to observing the minds of others.
Glyph Page 5
