Arrogance
1.
Sometimes
a desire will
detach itself from
you.
Sometimes a desire will become hard, impervious, separate,
like a ball,
a calculus, a cyst, and lay in you,
automatic,
wiggling its legs
around like a dying bug. That is what
you
feel in the
nerve, that bug s movement. It makes you
sweat.
You say
to yourself I don t want to obey.
You say to
yourself I won t obey.
Your internal dialogue sounds
like
the usual
script, the kind of thing that goes
on in the
minds of
criminals and prophets,
the merry band
of
exhibitionists,
voyeurs, addicts, beggars, sniffers,
heads,
fetishists, collectors, gamblers, veterans of suicide
and
moral cretins of
all types. From Isaiah to Jack the
Ripper,
from Rimbaud to Gary Gilmore. Archetypically it
is the
B-
movie mad
scientist shadowed by his gibbering assistant, and
then there's always the sacred horror movie
in the
serial
killer's head.
Not that for a second you
are in that
league. But you have intimations of that mania, sometimes.
You look back at certain points in your life and shudder.
You ll have five
minutes panic. Because there s nothing you
could have done about it, that bug kept wiggling
its legs.
You might say why am I here when you know why,
the bug had
gotten you to
go, you don t want to admit it. All a big
mistake you
say. Afterwards you say why do
I keep
doing
these things, the
horror, the horror, out damned spot,
when
you know about
the bug good and well. The bug just keeps
on
dying, spastic,
in the far reaches of the enormous nerve.
A
nerve like a
hospital corridor.
Okay, so you ve had that feeling before,
it makes your
stomach hurt, you keep walking hoping it will go
away, you
get in a car
and drive and try to listen to the radio
thinking that if
you don t think you won t think
about it,
if you drain the ocean you kill the fish. But
that doesn't
work, of course, the bug is too stupid to be tricked
like
that, the
bug has no attention span so to speak,
the bug
only has its instinct. What you want to do is
step on
it,
crush it, then
wipe it off the bottom of your shoe, all that
compact life
popped. You d like to see that little
staining
spot of bug
juice, death s watermark. But you can t
do it.
You are that bug.
2.
When
self went off to college his choice was
dictated
partly by the
urge to escape, get away from Atlanta and from
his parents
with adolescent angel wings,
as he imagined
himself, long
blondish hair and slender
hips, a Blakean
outlaw, and divided elementally from the capitalist
beast
around him.
Dedicated to failure and
failure's distance,
that most
important of high school discoveries, oh yeah, his
own distance, like Billy the Kid discovering the
trigger,
dedicated to
whatever curse it was (hoping it was a curse, a
palpable difference) that seemed the freshet in
his blood.
Most of his
friends at Gladstone High were going to
Athens,
which seemed cool
enough, with its camp Confederate trumpery
of white columns
and shady porticos, self had cruised around
the town and eaten burgers with his friends where
you were
supposed to eat burgers and snuck in and had a beer
where
you were
supposed to sneak in and have a
beer, gleefully
flashing your
fake ID in that hangdog teenage way, and
then
the tumultuous
drive back to Atlanta, all of you drunk. Self
wanted autre pays, autre moeurs, which he thought he
d get
in Austin. He’d
been there, of course. He’d run away at seventeen,
in a van stolen
by a friend from the friend’s father, and they’d made it
to Austin. He’d
already met Julia. He’d had a vision of himself and Julia
making the scene.
They’d talked on the phone, late at night, when his
parents were
asleep. Mark was the one who finally turned
him on to the
idea of going to
Austin rather than Julia coming to Athens.
This meant a
little family crisis, Dad saying why pay
that
much tuition
and not go to Virginia, which
is where Dad
went. They
even, father and
son, made a
trip to
Charlottesville together,
self feeling very
Stephen
Daedelish about
Dad s trip down memory lane, even looking up
an English
professor, now retired, who faked a memory of Dad
writing some
paper for his class on Melville, fall of
1950.
All too much - Dad, self, this rather dirty,
toothless man
standing there in his pajamas in the doorway of
his house.
Hard not to
notice that he hadn t buttoned his fly. Then Dad
and self visited
Aunt Lane in Maryland, and then came
home.
All this by car, which was a little too much
post-Oedipal
time with
Dad. Once they were home self said
sorry.
Luckily
Mark had a bundle stashed
away from selling
pot, mostly, at school, so he said he d loan
self tuition.
He said
we ll get jobs on the side, it isn t going to be
that hard.
Once
they got there Dad started sending
self three
hundred a month anyway.
3.
Freedom and power - these were the
dominant factors in
your mood
at this time,
more than mental
images or
metaphor. You
were actually living in a zone where you
were
up against
these things every day. You
had no
time for
trivia, for mediocrity, for idleness disguised as
making
money, for
papershuffling, for that hesitancy
before the
consequences, for
all the ebbing hearts of ebbing men.
You
felt in
consequence very interesting
- as
if you were
making extremely important discoveries. You felt like
you
were a
celebrity, living in your little
bubble of pure
access. Although
it sounds crazy, you felt like
you were
plugged into
other minds, that
instinctively you were
receiving from the collective unconscious circa 1982.
For
this reason, the
problem of making money took on for you
an
aspect which,
at other times in
your life, has
been
mediated by your
less concentrated, less uniformly
pressing
purposiveness. You
didn't want to
dissipate your
inventiveness, your purity, your year zero, in
something
minor, something merely remunerative. Especially
since you
were a star. It poses a metaphysical problem - stars
depend
on discovery,
the moment of discovery is the
moment of
stardom, but what
is discovered is star quality. Maybe
this
is the ability to be discovered, the zen like
emptiness of
the infinite regress, mirrors reflecting
mirrors. But you
were there,
you knew it, you felt it,
flashing from one
tained surface to another. So you needed enough money
to
eat, to buy paint with, to get gas for the old
truck you d
bought so that you could go around collecting junk,
and to
buy books.
You were reading like a madman in a
Dostoevsky
novel - that is to say, you took seriously everything
you
read. Everything
you read was about
you, it was
the
criteria. Toss the book away if it wasn't about you,
if it
wasn't about you the very ink the book was
printed in was
the track
of some disinherited turd and
none of your
concern. You'd stay up until three reading a chapter
from
one book
and then dropping it and reading a
chapter from
another book.
You let the books pile up in
mounds around
your bed. You
were willing to make this money by
cleaning
things,
hauling, digging - anything but such
work as would
abuse your brain
with ineffectual and alien concerns.
On principle you were - and are still -
arrogant about
not earning
a living. Leona Helmsley said that
only little
people paid taxes,
and at that time you thought
the same
thing about
earning money. Power
goes if you
don't
establish in
yourself certain standards,
let yourself
become arrogant
in certain ways. If you start
thinking
there is any
justification external to you for what goes
on
inside you, if you fall for that line, you're
fucked. It's
like the relationship between the best punk and
the record
companies. It's
a question of who uses
who. But you
understood that
this power was conditional upon a
certain
humility, upon a
willingness to beg. To mooch. It was
the
thing of the
two poles of abjection and
sublimity, the
sanctioned things
being untouchable, unclean. God protected
and unclean at the same time. And the difficult thing
is
that you were always conscious of the price one
pays for
the things one borrows - a certain loss of generosity,
a
certain loss of
self-esteem, a gradual entanglement in the
complex casuistry
of excuses, of separations from
one's
acts, of
disavowals ultimately damaging not so much to one's
honesty - which is always an iffy thing you
can't put too
much stock in,
since the thing about being honest is it goes
usually with
being dishonest about the function of
honesty,
pretending that
it doesn t have any, which is an up the
ass
kind of business
- but to one's integrity, one's ability
to
suspend judgement as to the rightness or wrongness of
one's
situation-of-
the-moment, and to loop out of oneself,
come
back to one's
present and familiar courses as a
stranger.
Do you know how
important that is? It is everything to
find
yourself the strange buckskinned man on your own doorstep,
because once you loose that art is a career and you
worry
about NEA grants
and other such crap. The whole point is
to
usurp the freedom
of a character in the funnies.
Sometimes,
not having enough money at the month's end to pay
my rent,
you would give
Dita or Mom a call and ask for money, or
even,
after events that
you are about to describe, Annie.
Annie, Julia's best friend.
Oh that bug!
Annie, Julia's best friend.
Oh that bug!
4.
Self is getting ahead of himself - yes,
slipping out of
his own
grasp like an eel, like a
dialectician's magic
trick, naughty
boy. Mentioning Margarete already. That wasn't
in the contract
now, was it?
Self,
in his eighteenth year, went West, like
many a
young man
before him - Billy the Kid, Huckleberry
Finn,
Rimbaud, we'll count Rimbaud, an honorable desperado,
for
whom West
was any dive on the road, any
travelling freak
show or
graffitied message on a bridge. Since
this time he
no longer likes to think of himself as having a
home. Self
thinks in
imperial terms about himself, Emperor
Street, he
thinks of his
life as a zone of rule having capitals in
the
full imperial
sense, cities into which the whole
essence of
the culture
is distilled: Austin, New
Orleans, Santa Fe.
This flight west
with Mark, all his things and Mark's
piled
in the
U-Haul which trailed behind them,
attached to self's
huge blue Plymouth, signified a shift in the
whole balance
of self's
life. Self had two guides
then: Patty Smith's
music and Rimbaud's poetry, and he felt obscurely
aligned
with the
message there. Il m'est bien evident
que j'ai
toujours ete race
inferieure. Time to prove it.