Chapter Fourteen: The House of Pain

I, the reluctant novelist, compose this fake novel from a place of suffering. Every word hurts. It’s unfair of Trumpistan to make me think like this and, worse still, to have to write like this. In your privilege as a reader you’ve put me to work as the conscience of a nation—a nation I’ve abandoned on at least three separate occasions. I don’t feel like I can go on with this much longer—yet what choice do I have? The falsity must be told. Someone has to call us all to account for our complicity in the Human Centipede Administration—and I appear to be the last novelist standing.

            Fuck you for that, for taking away my artistic freedom and respect for literature.

            I’m done with myself. Literature swallowed me whole a long time ago. My voice is hoarse. I appropriate the shrill whine of the political pundits I detest and speak from the house of pain where Dr. Moreau created me and all of the other manimals. Even the Sayer of the Law has abandoned us this time, replaced by a big-eared dwarf who, emulating Pontius Pilate, washes the dirty paws that shook Drumpf’s tiny hand in a devil’s bargain to keep US law as racist as possible.

            All that these Centipede segments seem to want to do is to get back at the cool kids who laughed at them in high school, the ones who smoked pot and had sex. These are the two big hangups these stunted momma’s boys never seem to grow out of. Of course they blame it all on Jesus. (Really they hate the Savior ‘cause He watched them jerk off with His omniscient eyes. So it’s really only guilt that keeps them kissing his ass in public, just like Drumpf kisses Putin’s ass, then they deny his every commandment with their politics like Peter before the crucifixion.)

 *          *          *

Otherwise, what? Mathias (of my writers group) says I only want to annoy people, or to get a rise out of them, by writing this bullshit. It’s possible. He also says I’m sometimes funny. He’s still caught up in the intentional fallacy: he believes I’m in control of what I write (“Just like soldiers believe they’re in control of a war,” sing that elecro-pop group I mentioned earlier). But you can’t make this shit up—it’s happening in real/fake time.

            Yet Mathias would claim that I still have free will and could choose to write anything I want, anything other than this political bull honkey.

            Free will, as a concept, is the basis of judgment and most monotheistic religions. Monotheists claim that it is God’s right (His duty!) to punish or reward our souls after death for lifetimes spent on Earth inside bodies doing stuff. But moralism’s kettle of worms is spilling out all over the kitchen table. The weight of judgment crushes us when our laws are skewed against the poor and only enforced upon those who can’t afford a lawyer. We store this oppression in our hearts and pass it on to our descendants. Judgment falls on me for writing this crap just as, in my nostalgia for morality, I heap a multitude of sins on the Drumpfster and all the real/fake public figures I appropriate here in imitation of Dante’s judgmental fake novel, The Self-Righteous Comedy.

            I’ve been rewriting Dante longer than Dante wrote Dante in the first place. (Behold another postmodern miracle!)

           Responsibility is always outside us, a wall upon which we lean. Responsibility can no longer be “taken.” It’s become a thing static and moot, crushed beneath the spectacle.

*          *          *

My writerly desire to prick your conscience, to add to the chorus of literature, preach to the choir, and engage other languages in self-defense of their assaults on fact and logic, remains inexplicable. (Unless, like Flip Wilson’s Geraldine character, the devil is making me do it.) For surely I’m not as bad as my nation’s leaders proclaim me to be in all of my elitist/liberal/taker glory. They’ve ruined my reputation as an American—by association with hillbillies—all over this continent. Europe is so stunned by Trumpistan it can’t make up its mind whether to laugh or cry.

            Such is the work of the novel: to try on other voices and languages like shoes. Or perhaps to sift through rhetorical styles, making room for the voices of conformity and protest until the novel makes some sense of the chaos of individuality that has emerged from our treasured plurality, “We, the people.”

            Society against the state, words against language; throwing shit against a wall until something sticks. Maybe the only value we ever find in living comes from the shortcomings of language to save us—the conscience behind the text’s composition, the form of a novel that speaks in-between the collected monologues I here repeat, assassinate, regurgitate, and negate with parody and indignation.

*          *          *

No wonder emigration is the natural state of novelists—we’re always looking for new languages, foreign terrain, and novel rhetorical forms to contradict the old ones. No single country is enough for us, no one language; no lone point of view is ever compatible with our search for meaning in all this chaos.

 

Novel Fragment/Teaser

Alone, he remembers to write.

He sends letters. He describes the landscape and becomes the image of his surroundings to the people who read his postcards and letters. He speaks of himself as a feature of the places he visits, practically in the third person, his own tiny image in the corner of a bigger picture. (Bruegel: The Fall of Icarus.) His hand across the postcard is nowhere, describes a static scene with precision, false objectivity, with imaginary calm—written to be read two weeks later by which time he’ll be somewhere else. The autobiographer never gives himself away, is guarded by his own hand. An autobiographer never commits suicide.

Between his meetings with Persey he lives in the joy of being just that unfulfilled, of waiting to see her again. Like the workers busy with the trees in Bruegel’s Stormy Day—hurrying to be ready. He sends postcards of these two paintings off to friends back home, having seen them in the National Gallery in Brussels. He passes Bruegel’s house every morning on his walk from the youth hostel to the only café he can find that’s open in the city at six in the morning when the jet lag pushes him excitedly out of bed and into the streets. A traveler, all this feels more real to him than any glib message he can squeeze into the three-by-five format. He has slipped out of his place in time. He knows that the people receiving these postcards are going through the same motions today as yesterday back in San Francisco, and that now, for the first time in his life, he’s marginally free, unable to understand what they’re saying all around him.

This is a fragment from my first novel, Inbetween, which I'm currently revising for publication next year. While this section has just been cut from the novel, I like it to much to consign it to oblivion forever so here it is for your reading pleasure. Two lovers, Americans, twenty-somethings, struggle with their relationship, art, and politics while experiencing Europe for the first time, just as the Cold War comes to an end and the reign of terrorism begins. Peak your interest?

After the Law

I do not see you, for I am not allowed to look at your differentiated, individual faces. Looking you in the eye is not necessary to my address and would be superfluous to my sense of decorum. By speaking, which is all that I ever do, I am making the rules. Therefore I am blindly addressing an audience of phantoms, an imaginary, undelimited mass denying the presence of any rarefied individual. In this, however, you escape me and flee; you get into trouble and you refuse to conform to my preemptive norms. For better or for worse. You escape your destiny and my mediation of your place in the crowd.

SAN SALVI

« La follia è una condizione umana. In noi la follia esiste ed è presente

come lo è la ragione. Il problema è che la società, per dirsi civile,

dovrebbe accettare tanto la follia quanto la ragione, invece incarica una scienza, la psichiatria, di tradurre la follia in malattia allo scopo di eliminarla.

Il manicomio ha qui la sua ragion d'essere. »

(Franco Basaglia)

PART ONE

i

from the inside of inside, from a place inside each of us where no other approaches, i speak with a voice that demands quieting, even if such a voice can’t be heard outside, where we are all vulnerable, in our uniqueness, in our power, in our heartbreaking desire to desire, to be other than what we are by being with another, where we know we are like no other and can never be, because we speak, from the inside of inside, among the drowned, even as they try to save us, because we are outside of belonging, inside belonging's power but outside of its truth, inside an inside, put away, hidden even from the city that surrounds this city, the speaking deafness of our outward personae, the curse of humankind, drown in our own individuality.

there is a burning red wound in the night, a lamp lit before the madonna, another imagined other that some can hide inside themselves, here, where to make a sound would be a sacred taking up of sides, drowning in refusal, another symptom, the inability to take part, more than a simple silence, our fear turned outwards, from inside this inside, an internal escape, an illusory impulse to flee, down this tree-lined avenue, its omnipresent dogs, its expected squatters' graffiti, these desperate political measures, and the walking dead, its walls a monument to hiding my refusal.

survivors have some nerve, surviving, but the drowned drown easily, in politics, la lotta, in protest, committed to their causes, the ends supplying the means, mouthing others' words, other rooms, other voices, so many agendas, so many programs, we being committed because of our effects, the abandoned church here becoming central to our twilight perambulations, bleeding red and luminescent the whole sleepless night through, some nerve, surviving, our effects confiscated, in the belly of firenze, in the womb of the city, in san salvi, where they think that they're saving us from ourselves when really they're saving us from their own indignation, what they might do to us, and their church, built to faith, belief in something that they know to be impossible, the uncertain certainty that there is something called reality that we all know too much about, that could be squashed with a faked miracle or two.

i, on the other hand, have no faith, not in their science nor their god, their sacred belief in conquering disbelief, or the red wound they would cut into the night in the name of his mother, offer up to his mother, against the night's natural darkness, this voice spits on their desire to quiet the inside of inside, even though its speaking tortures me, i know that its silence tortures them, once and for all, the voice of trauma, the voice of protest, the wound, refusal and resistance, abnegation and fear, even in this tree-lined avenue, even in this garden-filled fortification, a silent fortress walled into the heart of the city, into the mind of the city—i will not say soul—images imagined or born of the day-to-day, the real, what does it matter? inside the inside, interiority itself, a new-town of non-belonging and refusal, an outsider internalized, encircled by san salvi, san salvi's walls, the drowned saved, drowned again in other voices, other systems, out of sight, misunderstood even as we un-wall our voices, from inside, speaking the speech of disagreement, to imagined companions, the freedom of non-communication.

but i will not be drowned, they tell me, i will emerge eventually and speak the fear of my naked aloneness in their world of agreement and reality, to their world of agreement and so-called reality, spitting, croaking, bleeding out beneath this abandoned madonna in a city of new uses, her candle slitting the night open, the night that must fall, a languishing wound in its comforting darkness, a world that must drown such voices before they are heard and cause some poor woman to abandon home and hearth by loving me and all of my quiet madness.

inside the inside speaks an isolated voice of disagreement, of madness, yes, and sometimes listening but never hearing itself.

 

INBETWEEN --5 chapters

I

All that winter they were ripping up the streets of Europe, the streets of Paris and Florence, the streets of Rome. Scaffolding circles churches, hides triumphal arches, strips of green nylon tarpaulin stretched across its planks and frames. Streets have been uprooted, cobblestones stacked against the walls of black buildings. They're turning hotels into museums, letting the steam out of the sewers, putting statues behind glass; policemen are looking on, machine guns slung over their shoulders. In Rome they don't have any portable electric lights; instead they use little pots of fire that look like the old-fashioned anarchist's bombs in silent movies to warn cars of the edges, where the streets drop off into dusty pits. 

He looks across a muddy hole filled with heavy machinery at a museum. Closed for renovation, the sign says. 

A whole street in the center of Florence has been ripped up; the exclusive shops face each other across a dank pit of reddish earth, and the walls of green-shuttered windows seem to close in on you as you look up. A little rain slips into the narrow streets as Persey hurries home carrying groceries. Other Americans and the well-to-do Florentines pass slowly, laden with colorful brand-name shopping bags. In Paris, between snow flurries, he watches them pouring out cement sidewalks in long strips down the Boulevard St. Michael; they were laying out the streets of Europe that winter. People pass in a hurry, nobody watching the police frisking some Arabs up against a wall.