Tag: writing

The music stops briefly to let air enter and the child looks at the dog, the dog lying on the floor with its eyes closed and when the track changes the music resumes from the speakers, or what passes for music to our ears, the human ear is far more complex than we give it credit for, what the child hears from the speaker is actually not music at all but binary code, 1s and 0s in myriad and seemingly indecipherable code and the child’s ear translates the code into sound that it identifies as music and the dog cannot hear it, for as complex as a dog’s hearing is, it cannot differentiate pitch as nimbly as the human ear can, and must, if we are to absorb the binary code as sound, as music. The child slinks from the couch and stands upon its one-year-old legs and it moves to the sound of the music, the child like a giant to the dog, who sleeps on the floor or pretends to sleep, for the dog does not understand why the giant sways this way and that, the erratic movements of humans are not of a dog’s concern, at least not of this particular dog’s concern, for it is familiar with the giant child and its erratic movements, and so the dog lies there with its eyes closed while the giant child sways to rhythm and melody, a strange interlude within the larger context of the album, a popular album by a popular artist and thus accessible to the casual music listener, with the exception of this interlude, which doesn’t seem to fit within the pattern of the album at large, but the giant child is compelled into motion, the giant child fancies the rhythm and so it bobs its weight at the knees, it rotates its hips and waist, arms fanned out at its sides and the movement could easily be identified by an audience (though there is no one else here to witness the occasion) as dance, a singularly human response to sound, and the child dances to the odd abstract interlude despite the artist’s (perhaps) intended listener response, which is to listen, to focus the ears upon the sound and listen, to respond with the mind rather than with the body. The giant child does not know this nor is it concerned with the artist’s intentions, for the child is one year of age and knows nothing of artists, nor intentions, nor music, nor the intricacies of the human ear, nor the range of a canine’s auditory spectrum. The interlude fades out and a brief clap of silence envelops the room as the track changes again and then the album resumes its familiar sound and the giant child climbs back up onto the couch as the child’s mother clamors into the room with a flourish, happy to see that both child and dog are exactly as they were when she left the room to check on the laundry, and the mother is so proud to have such a well behaved child and such a calm dog. The mother hears the sound at the speakers and she recognizes it, she enjoys the sound, she likes the song and the album and she begins to sway, both child and dog looking up at her.

—indeed, as a disclaimer of sorts, because it is important for me to remain faceless, nameless, unattached and unadorned, unaffiliated, as always, for if I were encumbered by attachments or interests or an agenda of any type, how could my observations and the language I use to describe the events in the world possibly be taken objectively or seriously, as fact, which is precisely what I’m aiming for? How can my opinions be legitimate if the reader does not trust me?

For the purposes of these archives in this notebook and the many others like it (though each notebook is always unlike any other, for the observations and stories inside them tell of each day as singular, unique, just as all consequences are singular and unique) I shall be nameless, anonymous, not only as nine letters arranged a specific way on a page but also as self-identification in my own mind, I shall inject anonymity into my identity so as to render myself completely obscure. It is the world around me that concerns me, not my own role in it. What you see as symbols before you is my role; I need not concern myself with rediscovery or any further discussion whatever. By birth I was not named, and into death I shall go the same.

I imagine I’m a slave in ancient Rome during the early reign of Octavian. I’m approaching middle age but in fine shape, and my meager education allows me to work as an accountant for a quite reasonable and beneficent consul. I do not know any other life or situation, for I was born into servility and have demonstrated strength and aptitude in my duties. The respect I display and the ethic with which I perform my work has awarded me a sense of freedom and respect from my master and in my community. The Republic is in disarray with the separation of Antony to the Egyptians and the whore Cleopatra. The consuls and the local population all fear the worst, that a total breakdown of the Republic is inevitable. Octavian has begun recruiting a vast naval army and I volunteer, resigning my work as a clerk in hopes of being completely freed after military service. For months I train as the tension tightens and war becomes more of a certainty.

I have no wife, no children, and no family in a world that makes little sense to me. The machinations of man seem to govern all rules of the Earth, for we have truly become rulers of the land. There are no gods and the Republic is full of imbeciles who have nothing better to do than believe in mystic flattery. We are the true gods; the world is a hostile place where men encourage this hostility through politics and war and the perpetuation of enslavement. If I die in Agrippa’s war at least I’ll finally be absolved of this systematic separation of those with privilege and those without. The world is a cruel and barbaric place and the Republic is an ornate façade. I have studied Cicero and believe that a man stripped of the ability to govern his own fate is a gross injustice. So I will fight for my own freedom and nothing more; I shall not grieve if the Republic perishes.

Most other slaves have it far worse than I. They toil and bleed and are murdered for no other reason than for the powerful to assert its control. I observe in silence, grateful for my luck, but am aware that it is luck and only luck that separates the diseased slave from me, only luck that separates the servile from the privileged. Is not man in his status as god the most cruel and unjust?

[painting by Thomas Cole]

Ask yourself why you love literature, he said to the students in the room. Ask yourself why you’re devoted, what’s brought you here, to this room.

He paced. The room was silent.

I love literature more than any other form of art because it is most often the tale of the Everyman, he said. It is language, yes. It is storytelling in its purest form, yes. I love it for these things. But most of all I love it because of the Everyman.

What do you mean by Everyman, a woman asked.

The Everyman, said the man in front of the room, is you. It is me. It is the man or woman who lives in extraordinary times. Just like us. The Everyman is the character in the work, moving through it, making decisions, performing routine tasks, assigning obligations to him or herself. But the Everyman is also the composer of the work. Man must have firsthand knowledge of the Everyman in order to narrate him. The Everyman is also the translator of the work. Man must speak the language of the Everyman in order to translate him. The Everyman is also the great liberator of the work. Man must have a notion of the Everyman’s captivity in order to free him.

The room was silent. The students watched the man pace slowly in front of them, back and forth.

It was also in that third year that the rearing mother in her kindness and eagerness to communicate with the holy child read to it passages from the sacred text, she taught the child the phonetic genesis of their language by telling it stories and speaking the alphabet to the child very slowly, clearly enunciating each sound and asking the child if it understood her, Do you hear, she would ask it, and the child would nod and smile that yes, it understood, and so she took the child’s hand in hers and traced the shape of each sound in correspondence with the letter in her alphabet, slowly, repeatedly, snaking their fingers in tandem across the book in the child’s lap, and she asked the child, Do you understand, and again the child would nod and smile. The child had no desire to communicate, it was more or less puzzled by the world and could make no sense of it, confounded as he was without his sense of sight. The world to the child was a baffling mixture of sounds and smells and physical sensations that it struggled to understand or fit into any type of normative pattern. But once the child began to learn language from the rearing mother it finally found a pattern, it found measurement and mathematics, it found light and consistency where before there was nothing but chaos, darkness. By the beginning of the fourth year the child began writing on paper unaided by the rearing mother, the child wrote with a stubbed pencil the way it was taught. The handwriting was erratic and sloppy but still the sight of the child writing was a miracle to the rearing mother, a miracle considering the child was blind and unable to speak, and soon the child could write out its alphabet of letters and spell coherent strains of words and the rearing mother could hardly contain herself for the opportunity to finally communicate with the child, but before she could ask it a question the child wrote upon the paper to her, What do I look like? The rearing mother paused, both excited and anxious and said, You’re very pale. Then the child wrote onto the paper very slowly and deliberately, What do you look like?, as if to confirm that all humans are not just principally concerned about what we look like to others, but also with how we differ from them, what separates us, what is it about our skin, our muscular and skeletal constitution that makes us unique, proving that even at a very young age we understand how intimately connected are identity and appearance. I’m much different from you, the rearing mother told the child. But we’re still very much the same. And as the child wrote on the paper again the rearing mother felt closer to the child than she ever had, for the first time she genuinely considered the child her blood and her heart, her future and past, she temporarily forgot all about the child’s divine nature, and in its strange puerile scrawl the child wrote to her, I love you.

Riding through the morning fog a few months after joining the guild, the waves crashed and split at the shore on my right and I saw a body lying upon a wide mesa to my left. The mesa was composed of rock and short grass and I left my bike and walked over toward the body, expecting it to be a dead person, it was too odd a place for a person to rest without a blanket. When I got close I saw that it was a man about my age and that he was not moving. There was no one else around and I kneeled down to look closely at the face of the man, his chest slowly rising and falling. I wondered who he was, why he was lying there. He didn’t appear to be sick or wounded, but it was cold and the mesa was fogged over and when I reached down to touch the man his eyes opened wide and he grabbed my arm tightly with both hands, biting hard into my wrist. I shouted and tried to jerk the arm back from him but he was too strong, his grip was too tight. I hit him twice in the nose with my other hand and he let go of the arm, rolling over onto his stomach and folding upon himself. I was alarmed and hurt and I stood up, blood draining from my wrist. I looked around and there was no one on the mesa, no one down the road or behind me in the fog, and so I stood over the man and hit him in the head twice with closed fists, five times, then kicked him in the ribs and the back, the rage uncontrollable. I beat the man with my club, pounding him in the head and the torso, my senses heightened and focused, a ringing in my ears. I tried to imagine the man as the one who’d nearly killed me with his sword, the one responsible for my pain and chronic nightmares and I beat the man until he stopped moving, until he stopped breathing. I walked back to the bicycle and pedaled into the growing fog, the world silent. I can still remember the way the man’s head felt as my fists pounded it, his face mashed blood and flesh, a sack full of mud.

I read the words of thinkers and sometimes I read Shakespeare’s tragedies, namely Hamlet, I’ve read Hamlet thirty or forty times when in need of a break from the words of thinkers, I don’t read fiction or the histories, which are largely the same thing, both make-believe, I’d rather read the words of the pure thinkers because thought is a condition of itself and only itself whereas fiction and history are a condition of the surrounding narrative, the surrounding narrative that outlives them. Stories may live forever in one form or another but pure thought is fleeting and must be captured. Descartes, for example, Descartes sat in his room staring at the confluence between two bedroom walls and his bedroom ceiling, stricken at once was he, by candlelight, with an idea he simply had to capture, an idea that had nothing to do with narrative, nothing whatever to do with the world he lived in, the political and religious turmoil, his chronic pain, no, his walls and his ceiling spoke to him in coded heresy and mathematical jargon and he rose, wraithlike, and hobbled to his desk by candlelight to compose an unprecedented system of geometric coordinates, timeless and omni-universal, not to mention incredibly practical, thanks to his capturing of it. It simply had to be done. This is of course not to say there’s no merit in narrative or fiction or history, especially the great works, no, but I prefer to cultivate the garden in my mind with the purest of the pure, the foundations of all thought, which of course leads to culture, innovation, social hierarchy, paradigm, transcendence, what have you. Ideas that form building blocks of all culture and sociography, and Shakespeare is different, I am constantly haunted by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though for reasons I know not, I’m connected to the text without having seen the great tragedy performed, without having any friend like Horatio, without any father living or dead to honor. Hamlet and I are unique,

The voice speaks to me, it is a deep voice. At times I understand the language, two or three words per ten-second interval, I understand certain words that my mind fashions into a particular pattern, for this is the essence of mankind’s relationship to its languages. Sound from the mouth, boorish and vulgar. The human mouth hot and rank and moist spews forth sounds shaped by the lips and tongue, spit cascading outward in a shower of repugnance and we form patterns, this is how we begin to understand each other, if such a thing is possible. Words on pages written by hands skilled at constructing symbols, again, in patterns, much less offensive and disgusting, much more worthy of veneration, the written word. Anyone can speak. A person just born begins speaking immediately, incomprehensibly. But how long until that person can write legibly, coherently, construct a diagram of cogent thought? How long until we realize just how gifted this person is? How long until we realize that he or she says nothing of merit, that he or she never will? How long until we realize this person will have nothing of value to contribute to its culture? How long until we realize that we would much rather prefer this person to be silent, forever, wishing they would relegate all communication to the written form, if only he or she had the brainpower, if only he or she could muster some legitimate thought? Is it not the duty of man and woman to other men and women to think and apply the mind toward some ideal? Is it not the duty of a human being to wish to improve the life (and thereby, the ideas) of its fellow human beings? If so, doesn’t this require the human being to suspend the sick motion of its diseased mouth until it has properly prepared what exactly it is to share? Is this not a common notion? Is there no morality in keeping silent?