The late Edmond Jabes* quotes Rene Char to the effect
that a person wears one face in approaching the truth, and
another face in the telling of it. (And what is all this talk
of death’s ultimacy? Walking toward, walking away …?)
I have one set of words with which to read and think, another
with which to speak.
And how do you say fin de siècle? If you say it better
than I (which is likely), let that put a further crisp edge
on your individuality. This insistence on the ‘you’
you think, and how you wish others to perceive ‘who’
you are? That projection, that friction-fiction, in all its
sharp-edged uniqueness—it is that fiction, that projection,
that dies.
But if you say it is a doorway in which everything dies—that
is, everything, as far as you are concerned, stops—then
the ‘you’ of which you speak is not the same as
the ‘you’ in which I am interested. And as for
Mr Spencer Short, I have only one brief sentence to add: In
the doorway or quay of that imagined final absence, no amount
of beer cans arranged to spell out ‘Fuck You’
in the front lawn of Mr Short’s poetry will do him,
or us, any good.
____________
“the way we’re driven to the impossible as if
/ to destruction, as if to distraction” (S. Short)**
Well, the point of all this (I should make clear) is to get
past adagia.
As for me—and before I go to coffee and oranges in
a not-so-sunny chair—I am just like Nabokov’s
Pnin, who announces tearfully, “I haf nothing! Nothing!”
Yet what is this “nothing”?
When Meg Hershey came to play house in Denver one day I (somehow,
inexplicably) followed through on my original intention, not
expecting her arrival, and drove, with her and another interested
ephebe, to some seminar room in Boulder, to see Edmond Jabes.
He held court there with his retinue, and I noticed some of
my own professors in attendance, and I was (and am) properly
attentive and (though you may feel free to disagree) respectfully
attuned and interested. I wonder idly now what Meg thought
of it, she and the other young lady, and whether they enjoyed
their visit. It must have been springtime, 1978.
Jabes died in 1991. I do not know when I, the “I,”
will die, but I have showered. And it is time to go out for
coffee and take my pills.
I have several different metaphors to pretend myself at home
in. But before I wade off to coffee with my Threepenny Review,
I wish to make a few suggestions.
I now have a student rather locked into some sort of sneering
Western smugness about life and death. When I mentioned a
view traditional in the Far East, her lip curled tellingly.
The view was simply that all life forms are sacred. I happen
to know that she (also) believes that death is final, though
I do not know whether or not she pays lip service to the further
notion that the seed sown in corruption may be miraculously
raised in incorruption that the very flesh of the dead
can thus be quickened by the hand of almighty God. But she
clearly believes that the human life form is superior to ‘lower’
life forms. And like another student of mine, she probably
does not want to view war as categorically ignorant or sinful
as a display of the three poisons of the human psyche:
ignorance, passion (cum attachment) and aggression. I can
imagine both of these students reading this over my shoulder
and becoming quite furious. Of course, having been an instructor
since 1980 (salaried, fulltime not a teaching fellow
as in Denver, 1978), I might have learned my lesson by now:
how to step and fetch what my students want to hear
how to dance to the rattle of a tin drum, how to shimmy, while
rambling in high class, ed-you-cated tones. What is particularly
distressing is that both students seem intelligent, and both
pass for what is considered, today, to be an A student. (The
latter student seems to think that a “just” war
is an extension of one of the Oriental martial arts.)
But none of the above seems to have anything at all to do
with Jabes or Short. I suggest that the notion of man’s
uniqueness, his superiority to other animals, and the notions
of a just war and a death which is not a door to a liminal
(Bardo) passage but a final quietus and end, are all tied
together in a very strange sort of meaninglessness: an umbilical
knot that stems from a basic impulse of self-contradiction
and fear. The fear that our lives are ultimately pointless.
That our very consciousness is no more than a brief epiphenomenon
of nature: nature, that is, construed as matter.
As though our being-here were a mayfly sort of tremor of
intent, ephemeral and dreamlike, a mote, a moment of not even
the remotest consequence to an expanding yet doomed universe.
The fear, indeed, that what we do not know will hurt us.
A fear that coils into itself, strange embryo, ready to unfurl.
____________
*The Book of Margins, Edmond Jabes, tr. Rosemary Waldrop
(University of Chicago Press, 1993)
**Tremolo, Spencer Short (HarperCollins, 2001)
Copyright © 2003 Jim McCurry
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