Selection from Urdoxa
A
Camus visage, downcast, dangling cigarette…It is the same
face transferred to the solemn moment of the blues musician
between sets, the Bukowski-esque writer who just can’t resist
another serving of hooch or thigh, the hitch-hiking painter
who keeps his masterpieces so inelegantly wrapped in brown
paper bag tucked under his arm in the pouring rain, the
anguished sound poet who has found himself speechless, the
rhetor who undoes himself with his own rhetoric and must
make a less than valiant retreat to the manuals of Cicero…It
is the same sublime image par excellence on woodcuts depicting
the voluptuousness of the sibyls with their worrisome faces…It
is retrospective, the specular chamber of internal reflection
that realizes that even the consciousness for-itself and
in-itself still remains unsatisfying…it is the fleeing of
the last Roman from the old empire as the invaders from
the north take crude axes to the workings of the sublime
that the uncouth could never touch with their hearts…The
quiet barrier between two expressions of madness: the individual
mind and the rumbling cacophony of a collective world.
I too have worn this face a thousand times, without warning,
without conscious effort. It is a mark or the brand of
one enmeshed in the labyrinth of thought and despair forced
to mediate selfhood with an outside world that would at
any time find any excuse to forget—all through the narrow
aperture of my eyes. I saw it in the photograph of a blind
Borges on the cover of his personalized anthology, and I
saw it again in a candid picture of Celine no doubt reflecting
on his tragedy in an age grown desensitized to tragedies
in the spirit of false stoicism. With the growing homogeneity
of culture and the corresponding decrease in the importance
of thought, will we ever see such faces again? Such a noble
pose that bears up to tragedy, lives in the perpetual accord
with all ironies, cannot be admired in mere imitation; it
springs from within. Machines can reproduce what they like;
they can produce everything save for the honesty beneath
what it tries to reproduce. I do worry because the machines
are better manufactured for this purpose. I wonder what
will become of it all?
I
started hanging out at a place called Le Bijou, a ramshackle
establishment with evergreenery wallpaper and white-grey
stucco borders. The tables were made of finished steel,
with those perfectly manicured, small, and closely spaced
scratches to dull any shine or any reflection. But everything
there—the beams, chairs, tabletops—were all rickety and
on the verge of failure. One walked through those rooms
with some degree of peril, that it would all suddenly collapse
like the spring of a rusty bear trap. Something was always
coming loose, a ceiling tile into someone’s lunch platter,
the sudden crack and thud of a breaking spindle-leg chair.
All the surfaces were rough, grainy, sometimes splintered
and mottled. In sum, this is what some people called charm.
The walls were lumpy in some places with water damage.
A true miracle that the place wasn’t condemned; I suspected
payoffs during inspection season.
There
was a stage—or more accurately, a raised platform, a boxy
piece of flooring a foot higher than the rest. Every few
days there would be some entertainment, but it was a sporadic
and hastily planned event. Usually someone just brought
a guitar and strummed a few practiced chords. One terrible
pop band called Stripped Nut graced the stage with their
wrenching caterwauls. The singer had no instrument, but
you could tell that she was accustomed to having one in
her hands during performance because she didn’t seem to
know what to do with her hands. The only thing sustaining
her presence was powered by her own vapid and empty lyrics.
Must have been a band that got together as a result of a
newspaper ad; those ones are the worst, the most artificial,
and the least talented. Some singers without an instrument
to keep them busy have made it a bad habit, during a vocal
lull when the prosaic solo tiredly emerges, to walk around
the stage and surreptitiously inspect and check up on all
the other members as if the singer was some kind of district
foreman checking on the productivity of those under his
employ. I hated that. The guitarist seemed to show a small
shred of integrity and creative spunk, him having attached
knives to all the tuning pegs with electrical tape. Too
bad this didn’t extend to his playing.
But
these forms of entertainment, as occasional as they were,
did not impress upon the patrons to give heed and attention.
Live acts, being so characteristically bad, were widely
ignored, a small nuisance in attempting to carry on a conversation
at a reasonable volume. It was just another outburst put
to the music, plucked from the glut of available genres
so strangely popular in the world. These entertainers and
their “craft” were merely something to gaze half-interestedly
at while waiting one’s turn to make a move at chess while
the opponent deliberates slowly over the matter of pawns.
Chess was perhaps the biggest draw at Le Bijou, the principal
means of socializing. Wending discussions of philosophy,
art, and matters of the world were the regular features,
and I did partake of my fair share in these proceedings.
It was like we had never left the Eighteenth Century. Colourful
and intelligent creatures all around in this shabby garden
made all the difference in this otherwise dismal city.
Le
Bijou crowd were arranged in a myriad of differing hues
according to personality. Some had, at one time or another,
inflated themselves like balloons with ideas for glorious
revolutions in the arts and scholarship. None of these
far-reaching idealist plans were punctured by any one singular
event, but rather time had brought them down to various
degrees of deflation. Some of them had procured reputations
for eccentric deeds that came about through dares, like
the fellow who could smoke a cigarette with his ears because
someone at a party claimed that you couldn’t hear smoke.
Some of them were very sad indeed, still fighting in an
academic war against the analytic tradition with delusions
of conquest, despite how many lives the war had already
claimed. Our side was not losing, but had lost at least
a decade earlier. But the traditionalists and avant-garde
needed each other more than they knew, a war of dual subsistence,
like two mutually supporting pillars, two intercalated economies
with similar strategies. Men like them couldn’t see past
the war. Not being able to dispense with the antagonisms,
all their efforts had been totally allocated to the defeat
of some large and abstract enemy rather than on more creative
pursuits. Sure, I was equally guilty of railing away with
them, but I knew it was all drunk talk: they could not make
that precious distinction. Ah, yes deconstructivists as
just another codename for a quasi-military group of discontents,
now miles away from their original intentions of freedom
and play…just another parody…I couldn’t help but to think
of the old guard like Volt and Lake, stewing helplessly
in a kind of dialectic against the traditionalists…The horrible
irony of endorsing the same strategy one once denounced
in earnest. Sometimes we need to put down our weapons,
see things for how they really are, dress up, and make the
transition from soldier to pall-bearing veteran.
On
the whole, the Le Bijou crowd were a bit of a theatrical
illusion where some final triumphant line like “then we
left and lived out the rest of our lives” was delivered,
but the intransigent curtain refused to fall on command.
The awkward silence ensuing when the play was supposed to
end, yet remained embarrassingly suspended in a wearisome
banality. The audience itches to leave, as do the actors
who have no more lines to deliver, everyone kept captive.
With the curtain refusing to fall and end the scene properly,
we all become subject to a humiliation of failure that makes
one gasp and turn red, all thoughts fixated on escape.
Oh, blushing Bijou, when will the actors exit the stage?
But it was the actors who suddenly forgot how to flee, that
instinctual mechanism blocked, in its place a paralysis…and
so the audience remained as their captors. I had one of
those moments once in different context: upon delivering
a harsh and well-scripted hate polemic against a woman where
I had to make a choice between continued nausea or freedom,
all this transpiring at a bus stop of all likely places.
Once I drove the final damning point home, I took for granted
that the bus would still be there when I turned around,
to board it and make my poetic exit, but it had just rolled
away. I was forced to wait for the next one with her there,
and so the climactic moment had been eclipsed by an unsuspected
failure. It made me believe that not everything could happen
in the tidy confines of fiction.
Though
the Bijou crowd could be a bit much, there were some good
times. Besides, it didn’t matter much to me. I had my
eyes to the future, my spirit in the past, and my feet wearily
and empirically trodding upon the ruddy face of the present.
It beat hanging down and out with the pathetic proles.
***
I
was tramping about town one night, too far from Le Bijou,
and looking for a beverage to sink myself into, to think
about how barbaric those days really were. I needed to
feel encased, if for but a moment, in a spiralling nimbus
of thought and to enclose myself in from the night. Something
had come over me and my countenance had been irremediably
changed, damaged, whatever. Saturday night dance whores
flitted like moths to their designated zones of debauchery
and inanities. Suddenly an object of public hatred, I regarded
them with my own critical eye, with a loathing disgust.
A group of tight-topped women in my path with their arms
folded neatly over their false breasts giggled. I said
in low and hating tones, “ you are stupid cattle.” The reply
came with uncanny force, like a scene outside of space and
time, in its own isolated scene constructed out of a solitary
and transcendent moment. One of the women, her face conveying
deep shame stemming from a resolute inability to care about
anything beyond her meagre sphere of idiocy, said, “I’m
so sorry.” For that one shining moment, this woman embodied
the entire dance-trash movement, and was directing an apology
to me. I must have dreamed this, she must have just flipped
me off, I’m certain of it. But on that day I got the fool
notion in my head that I had some power that could be exercised
over the masses, to make the shameless feel shame. I wondered
how far these powers extended. No longer an ineffectual
thought-producer, theory swiller, it came to light that
I had real sway and charisma over the masses. They could
be reshaped at will, within reasonable and definable limits,
and it didn’t necessarily require the heavy hand of capital
(ah, how pop culture is merely another name for consumer
culture!). In an abstract sense, who was acting on their
behalf as their leader, or was this position still open
and undecided? Was there a vacuum I could occupy? “Play
with their lives,” a voice inside me demanded. The notions
of play and death were rich in my blood; for those were
the tasks the Calembours had been successful at, a kind
of genealogical determinism. I know all of this figures
into my later writing.
Those
nymphs and waifs were chasing about town in cabs, looking
to find quick cures for bodily loneliness or just sating
the libido out of pure boredom and habit. What, other than
idleness and a lack of self-betterment, prompted them to
engage in such a nihilist enterprise so incommensurate with
a validated life? In talking with a man named Sam, a man
with rocks in his belly, a regular at Le Bijou, my curiousity
in this matter was intensely aroused rather than abated,
as was his intention.
“The
bulk of the citizens care not for reasons, our arguments,
or our poignant meditations,” he said bluntly with a slight
sententious air. “To them, there is no utility in art unless
it is pretty, no utility in knowledge unless it translates
into sex and money. They are ahistorical, hedonistic, ignorant
club machines that consume worthless products with no regard
for either yesterday or tomorrow. The now is all that concerns
them.”
“And
so products are geared mostly for them, unless dictated
otherwise, like when they decide to lasso us in and cater
to our tastes—which is not often. Not that I mind being
excluded from the market narrative. But marketing is strictly
focused on these listless and highly suggestible bodies,”
I added.
“Yes,
precisely for them and their ephemeral passions.”
“Is
it passion?” I countered. “You were correct in affixing
them with the label of machines, very apropos. Machines
have no passions, only programmable reactions. Their sensibilized
existence, the pop culturists, seems to admit of no feeling
in their repertoire. It’s just a process of the night,
a protracted commercialism beyond the normal realm of the
diurnal bustle. The night economy…an outlet for sex and
violence as machinic responses to an era out of its mind?
It’s a very pathetic subculture under the tyranny of its
own codifiers.”
“And
yet a very large and popular subculture. As for the passions
and the machine, let’s not quibble over my use of analogies.
Okay, I twisted the analogy a bit, but I think I can still
redeem the statement, salvage something from it, perhaps
reiterate the sexualization of biomechanics? Maybe we’ll
just drop it…”
“Among
westernized societies, it is a universal, this popular culture
motif. I could jump from London to Vancouver, from Chicago
to Berlin, and still find there a carbon copy of some original
form that does not exist. Sick isn’t it? I could go all
around the world and hear the same popular ear torture absolutely
anywhere. In a strange sense, pop culture of this magnitude
has taken over the world. This, of course, increases the
perils of our own survival, for if this slavish lifestyle
of narcotizing automata is so highly emphasized and endorsed,
relics like us go out of fashion. No room! Dissenters
to the trains! Theoreticians to their own closed off island
away from the meta-narratives of this world! Socially speaking,
we are already at a dangerous disequilibrium, too far out
of step with the common concern. All pie in the sky, all
silver-diamond brooches in the closet!”
[11.
My mother on several occasions spoke of a silver and diamond
brooch she hid in her closet, for when times got rough.
How could one not idolize the security of that brooch, that
symbol of the net that catches us when our fiduciary world
crumbles? That brooch, to me, was a constant source of
symbolic safety, the very firmament that ensured that we
would always have something to eat. Note my consternation
at having discovered that this brooch was a lie, that it
had never existed, but was merely a fable my mother told
as a manipulative gesture of my having faith in her as a
provider, a god. When that brooch disappeared from the
real, many of my dreams went with it, and what was left
was an empty haze where uncertainty reigned.]
“All
things return, like a gyroscope.”
“But
that’s affirming the fallacy of circularity in time, quite
vulgar in its conception,”[i]
I said. “What if their subcultural mechanisms succeed in
supplanting our own? What then? Do we hope for a return
that may never come?”
“Then
it will be a dark day indeed. But what is to be done?
It is not at the level of the participant where any changes
can be effected, less so at the level of the signifier.
A little touch of subversive knowledge given here or there
would be meaningless against the perpetual indoctrination
the media subjects these poor wretches to. I’ll tell you:
it’s okay to be stupid; it’s okay to spurn the intellect.
Who devised this bullshit? Well, a mixture of latent 1950’s
optimism for starters, anti-intellectualism spurred by a
quantitative rather than qualitative increase in human beings,
the need for mutable masses to be kept in check by large
powers, in short, a power structure of corporatists and
social engineers who borrow their crafty methods from the
history of politics. So, to assist any of the afflicted—for
surely anyone under the subtle yet ubiquitous tyranny of
being-control perpetrated by an invasive and manipulative
mega-economic apparatus is afflicted, and in my opinion
diseased—means nothing, despite the old cliché of an ounce
of prevention bullshit. Think of the enormous expenditure
in time and energy it would take to convert just one of
the afflicted! You’d have to start from scratch, re-educate
them, and then re-integrate them into the fold in such a
way that what you taught will stick. Now imagine that on
a larger scale!”
“I’d
like to look more into this power structure you speak of
before we turn to the hopeless task of treating the terminally
wounded,” I said in an attempt to shift away from Sam’s
rather jaded view of everything. He was more alive in talking
about the abstract, the power structures, it gave him a
thrill. Talk of this variety gave him full license to use
as many constipated phrasings borrowed from Marxist rhetoric
as possible. And, boy, could he ever stuff a sentence!
“I
may be too jaded, and a tad too reactionary,” he said with
surprising sobriety. “I mean, being vilified for having
any intellectual predilections is enough to instil a sense
of paranoia, hatred and misunderstanding, as I’m sure you’re
all too aware. I also include being excluded as a kind
of vilification. It is precisely the fact that we can do
nothing that prompts us to put into play our endless world
theories, and so we have no other choice but to continue
fabricating in a vacuum. The more the many do not care
to listen, the quicker our pens scratch across the page
with ideas and polemical manifestos. Why is that? We have
power only among ourselves; outside the small enclosure
of tightly nit thinkers in the sublime collegium we are
ineffectual.
“The
power structure is indeed an interesting manifestation and
extension of the state. But in concerns to pop culture,
the power complex is very complicated, vast, interconnected,
and distributed. It appears deceptively straightforward.
The power-wielders are surreptitiously present and absent.
There is no cohesive doctrine”—this, I have to remark, is
what stuck in my craw, got my gears a-going—“no end other
than the continuation of its existence in constant reformulations,
replication of itself through time, and the consumption
of products. But pop culture does more than exhaust the
wallet,” he said, on a roll, poised to strike at the heart
of the entire matter, “it is the enemy, for it consumes
time, makes it a cheap thing. With endless spectacles,
diversions, digressions, distractions of all types and stripes,
what you call the circuses, it fills the void of being with
flimshaw, hayseed, Styrofoam chips. Wherever there is a
gap in identity or meaning, it is there ready to insinuate
its smelly and amorphous body. It almost beckons us to
give up these fruitless searches for knowledge and surrender
ourselves to become one with its aberrant collectivity,
to give faith and trust in its mighty wisdom—as poorly shaped
as it may be. And perhaps we should strike at it with all
our might, to quarantine and kill it. Normalization, homogeneity,
the death of the spontaneous, numeralization, are its goals
and this is achieved by appealing to the primal needs of
its adherents: i.e., shocking spectacles of sex and violence,
pyrotechnics, and sustained peaks of inebriation—no accountability,
a curse word, a taboo notion! It is hard for people of our
more delicate sensitivities, our more discerning palates,
to understand the appeal of the cheap thrill the adherents
seem to tragically find to be the most ineffaceable truth.
For we are burdened with knowledge, and this gives us a
gravity…We won’t fly away tomorrow with the next airy craze!
No! My feet firmly planted, thank you very much! We are
historical, they are vulgar and without a sense of history…To
put it simply as fact, not entirely arrogant, we are their
unacknowledged betters. But there’s the rub, isn’t it?
Unacknowledged! Yes, it’s an us and them mentality, but
it so applies to this situation, with violence! At what
price, I ask you, at what price their empty happiness?
And how many of us will it try to take down with it even
if we try to stay suspended over and above them all…Oh,
such a vile exclusion…Why don’t they listen…even to themselves
for just a moment, perhaps even see the black and cancerous
heart of their most cherished nightlives for what it is!
Why don’t they cast off all their plastic pursuits and try
living in the world? Or is the message that this is the
world now?”
Sam
weaved like this, amidst sorrow and violent temper. One
could cut the pathos in the air with a knife; I suspected
him of over-rhetoricizing the issue, making an argument
from a false authority. What did he know? What did I know?
The speech had its effect regardless. It brought across
the feeling of being a species on the verge of extinction,
the last standoff of the buffalo. However, I could not
share his bleak view in its entirety, in its almost whiny
and bitter quality. Surely the situation—especially as
he presented it—was dire indeed and a cause for some action,
but I knew there was a solution at hand if only we could
get over our prejudices for just a moment—to grasp the whole
as a problem instead of relying on some antagonism. Ah,
you little generals! Youth, vigour, and piss (on it all)![ii]
To revaluate the method of the intellectual against the
ignorant, I found that it was too distracted with a confrontational
attitude. To none of them had it occurred that perhaps
change could be affected from within the evil bowels of
the enemy, to infiltrate and corrupt the foundations. One
option was to illustrate its ridiculousness. This could
be done, for example, by approaching the superlatives in
someone’s speech and increasing them unto absurdity. Predictable
calculus. But this strategy would most likely only heat
up the conflict, give sway to a glut of bothersome editorials,
give old Sam there a box upon which to stand and deliver
his coaxing and lament. No soap!
***
This
was a particularly formative year without forms. Apart
from my regular frequenting of Le Bijou, I had undertaken
to understand the club subculture by way of a non-interfering
observation method. Quietly in wait, an arachnoid entity,
a forgotten soul in the corner, I made mental notes on the
process inherent in the participation in this niche. I
then tempered these observations with underscoring speculations
concerning aetiologies and power structures. Regularly,
I was not one to observe symptoms with a view to creating
a clinical picture[iii],
but these movements in the night had overtly set themselves
up as clinicization. It was all about the comportment one
took going into these things, conscious or otherwise, and
the comportment the participants had in their perceptions
and reactions that thereby conformed to some systematization.
Hey, they bought it all up! But I still could not touch
this primal spring, the originary image from which all these
symptoms derived. A frequently returning thought plagued
me that perhaps what this subculture required was some tangible
image to get it started in earnest, a meaning I would produce
and control, in which they all could endorse lovingly…some
face or tenet that would unite them totally. The image,
when well constructed, was a binding force that promised
the possibility of unswerving allegiance. Perhaps I would
either construct this image or become it. Because, you
know, it is not what you start with but what you make of
it…and other valuable lessons Nevelson teaches us with her
sculptured scrap…Ernie Coombs was down with that philosophical
objective as well…[iv]
This
was not to say that I loathed any of them any less. Indeed.
I could loiter on this point interminably and exhaust my
list of adjectives, and others’ as well! But it was never
my intention to belabour my obvious opinions on the matter,
though I am painted red with the guilt of such action almost
every day. It was easier to let it rest that I had designs.
Beyond merely being frivolous citoyennes of the failed
proper speech republic, idle cutthroats of the dollar, poor
projections of the world’s normalized image, every temporary
obsession took on the aspect of a run-through concertina—fads
that were already on their way out, speeding away as soon
as anyone had gotten hold of them, the receding and dubious
image of the Yeti back into the woods…back into the mystery.
Well, no mystery, really, more like programmed shelf life
of the fad…But still…Ah, but the sun refreshes itself at
every moment that it hangs there, and refreshes the soil
with its rays upon rising. In fact, the process was analogously
similar: the recycling of image fragments from former eras
and once failed fads, from mer to merde.[v] Well, that was scattered…
I
had a feeling that the gentleman at Le Bijou, Sam, whose
real name Santerre,[vi]wanted
to inculcate in me an incendiary type of pathos for reasons
all too clear: he wanted desperately to cancel his loneliness,
to have me spearhead some sort of revolution whereas he
was too meek and uninspired to carry it through himself…Not
to mention the risk associated with failure! He’s one to
talk about accountability, that little frightened hamster!
He would retreat at the sound of the bugler! Le Bijou was
full of these emasculated types, all talk, all desiring
that the revolution would be started for them so they could
make their useless appearance and declare their essential
instrumentality in the victory (fools! They think that a
victory is forthcoming! Where do they get off?). Far be
it from me, a man so unstable and made excessively to order
by a violent death and return, to act as the catalyst of
their dreams or the fulcrum of action. They were all tired,
yet amusing, relics and nothing more…Perhaps tolerable conversationalists
and capable chess players, but not the stuff of dreams.
They had still to get out from under the anguish of a world
bent on the machina ante intellectum.[vii]
Once they cast this common lie from themselves, purged their
minds of it as practically ridiculous, they’d be free; otherwise,
they’d be under the yoke of fruitless dialectical battles
that could never be won. And indeed, it was a battle that
could never be won tangibly, with the hands, the words,
anything…because there could be no concrete results. My
strategy—if I could flatter myself into calling it that—was
to remain in a self-constructed world of abstractions.
Those within the practical narrative called it hiding; I
liked to call it self-preservation. Of course, this was
not always the solution, for I couldn’t be the Beautiful
Soul all the time.[viii]
So who is worthy of going on, if no one at Le Bijou? Well,
“twice shall their reward be given them, because they have
endured with fortitude, requiting evil with good and giving
in alms a part of what We gave them; and because they pay
no heed to idle talk, but say: ‘We have our actions and
you have yours. We wish you peace. We will have nothing
to do with ignorant men.”[ix]
Never
had I concerned myself with real people. All of my contacts
are in themselves products worthy of some fantastic fiction…phantasms
of Geist…derivations of literature. Real people filled
the air with disappointing noise, boring stock-tips, overdone
colloquial expressions made briefly popular by the media
(of course I have in mind the catch-phrases born on the
television, highlighted as clever, and thereafter falling
into the graveyard of catch-phrases past which are dredged
up by television only to have a good laugh at them). They
had “normal people” problems. Simple and uninteresting.
