29 February '08

We are accustomed to think of ourselves as an emancipated people… Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is a blasphemy. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant look which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal illusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?

I am in possession of a rather curious trait. This trait determines that I am deeply impressed by most of what my senses pick up. That is, most books, movies, sights, et cetera leave a mark that while delible, is not easily erased. Thus, after seeing Fight Club I become violent. After seeing the Last Samurai I investigate the martial arts. After reading Blake I source the opiates and delve into mysticism. After reading Raymond Carver I mistrust women and relationships and drink whiskey like water.

Perhaps this is not curious at all, perhaps most people are subject to it (it is surely the psychological trait of our species that allows advertisers to profit). Whatever the case, Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a book I have been leaning on for a week-or-so, has leeched its way, by process of osmosis I suppose, through my skin, tissue and blood and has settled like plaque on the bone. I should preface what follows here with the assertion that I really am fond of this country; more particularly, this city. I am a vocal proponent of New York and the United States (indeed, I have often been in the peculiar position of defending America to Americans—many citizens I’ve met here a deeply apologetic about their country, their leaders, their domestic and foreign policy, et cetera—by asserting, as I do believe, that no country in the same position as the United States could claim to have done anything differently. Humans are, after all, the same the world over).

Back to the book, then. After reading the opening pages I saw a movie with some friends. As we sat down, a great guffaw erupted from the seats behind. I looked back to see a saggy man fisting big handfuls of popcorn. Staring at him was like staring at an old sock on a clothesline. His eyes were fat black slugs sunk in pink holes, the skin on his neck dripped to his chest. He was vulgar. In a children’s book snakes would be crawling out his armpits. If the Grimms had seen him he would have been immortalised sitting atop a throne atop a mountain eating children like drumsticks. If Shakespeare had written of him, the man would skulk around on stage executing his wives and eventually dying of syphilis. The man laughed when there weren’t jokes, talked when there were silences, belched at the climax and farted at the dénouement.

It is possible, of course, that I imagined the man. Or that he was not, in fact, as depraved as I have described. Whatever the case, it matters little (if he didn’t exist then, he does now, so it goes). The book, for the moment, has infected me, thickened my blood, turned my skin wan, a pallor more fitting of an apparition. The man is a symptom of this blood-thickening, of this infection. Events that last week I would have laughed at, or at least dismissed as curiosities, this week seem to confirm the myth of this country as, so says Miller, ‘a vast jumbled waste created by pre-human of sub-human monsters in a delirium of greed’.

It is possible that the plaque will crumble away—I started taking vitamins today and bought mouthwash to spur the process—and that the bad taste which lingers currently will be replaced. Until it does, however, experiences give way to a sickly, synthetic aftertaste, like that left behind after eating cheap chocolate or drinking diet soda. A cleansing ritual needs to be performed, a sacrifice of the highest order, something nascent and forged in fire that emerges spitting and steaming, drawing bitter effluvia from the body with the force generated by the spinning earth. Either that or I shall date a cheerleader and watch a romantic comedy. The end point, in all likelihood, will be much the same.

***

In other news, school continues to run its course. In a little over two months I will have finished the coursework component of my Master’s. In a little over two weeks I will know whether I am to remain in New York until May ’08 or May ’10. In the meantime, little changes. The City exacts its tidal drag, the atmosphere is frigid, the water from the tap, sharp. Little changes when change itself is the standard.

* The rest of the Miller quote is as follows:

Returning to the boat we passed bridges, railroad tracks, warehouses, factories, wharves and what not. It was like following in the wake of a demented giant who had sown the earth with crazy dreams… It was a vast jumbled waste created by pre-human of sub-human monsters in a delirium of greed

** Today is the twenty-ninth day of February, a day that has occurred five-hundred-and-two times since the birth of Christ. At the time Christ was born, the Romans had no numeral for (and therefore, based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis no comprehension of) ‘zero’.