from Lola the Interpreter

Photograph by ZeroOne (on Flickr), via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

We make the best and the worst use of time by relegating it to postponement, deferral, waste, irrelevance; we send it out and away from things that can be thought or done; we estrange time from reality and thus from life’s activities; and in the process we either liberate ourselves or find ourselves stranded, and it’s probably the latter.

Just as baboons, ill at ease and querulous as the sun sets, move about restlessly and shout to no effect, so humans in March, the twilight of winter, grow irritable, anxious, and uncomfortable as the long familiar routines of everyday life deplete rather than sustain interest, energy, and appetite. Reality, lacking energy, begins to lose credibility; the past, running out of reality, begins to lose possibility. Lola quickly laughs sardonically when she spots the title of a book on display in the window of the bookshop on Higher Ave. March: A Comprehensive History of Humanity. Universality for Idiots, she thinks. Unity—coherence congealing into a whole—is illusory. Tony van Heuvel, nonetheless, refusing to blink a way out of a state of willed self-deception, gazes out a window into the midground of trees blown by the wind as if expecting to see the perpetual play of time with truth though there’s nothing but mist to be seen between the boughs. With what goals do we engage in introspection? There’s always the grand plenitude to come, the promised comedy when everything comes out, but this is just another labyrinthine day in the life, etc., with fence fibers half buried in rain. The past of the man of the hour recedes by the minute, the past of queen for a day has lost relevance. Her past is only a receding dim version of the woman who repeatedly steps slightly away from the life she has led, leaving dull fragments of it behind. What we have is a sequence of parts that can be unified only (mis)conceptually by an imagination bent only on eliminating details, the devilish essentials that are the sine qua non of reality. It’s only with a pencil drawn over a rough ridged surface that the illusory continuities on which a coherent imaginable life is predicated can be seen. Continuities are lost, only commas remain where long sentences and full paragraphs used to fill some time across some space. Penelope moves among her suitors or Penelope sits by day and again by night at her loom, she is either performing domestic labor or, as one fifth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher proposed, she projects “an image of the faithful labors of the philosophers.”

A woman is awake, she can’t sleep, no need to know why, she’s restless, wagging, maybe imagining herself giving a speech, speaking out, no need to know the cause or content, it may not be the reason she’s awake, wagging, restless, raging, maybe she woke just to reprimand the night, to whip the horses of the night, never to repeat. Humans may always have similarly hated, raged, enjoyed, marveled, worried, disdained, feared, and loved, not to mention shivered, sweated, danced, wept, sat, pissed, swallowed, laughed, slept, and fucked—we are unbeautiful beasts all of a kind—but given the vast amount that the things that repeatedly press on human thought haven’t changed, isn’t it likely that over time thinking minds have stayed the same? Some ants drown in a toe-deep creek and it’s because of just such incidents that Democritus “developed a thorough critique of the trustworthiness of the senses.” Though we make use of our different senses to coordinate our resulting sensations so as to figure out and focus on what’s present, what’s going on, we can’t similarly coordinate our emotions, our moods. And where anaphora doesn’t naturally occur, we invent it. Wakened by a siren at an early morning hour, I look out the window at two red emergency trucks and, with their flashlight beams playing over the side of the house, five firefighters in black invested with the right to look back at me. Neither ambivalence nor doubt nor uncertainty nor skepticism will secure us any immunity from that. Night: that is the name of the horse that over and over Lola imagines riding through long insomniac hours. Raccoons emerge from a drain pipe into the dark, chortling, giggling.

The quiet light of a returning normal life is interrupted by the roar of nomadic motorcycles—seven—plunging out of Chance Alley, it’s an unexpected event without perceptible inception, it’s suddenly appearing on (or being spontaneously released onto) Flutter Street, where a chancy I, never fully objectified, pulls back. Nothing: nothing though twice yesterday I found myself consciously noticing and noting something, as if in preparation for remembering it. Both times, too, I immediately felt that such noticing was a form of cheating, of forcing memory rather than simply being open to it. Say you are a character encountering a story. Stop the story. Got born. Get a name. The name won’t fit but you’ll have to wear it or go through the hassles—bureaucratic and social—of changing it. So many hassles! Too many homilies! And remember: these aren’t characters but names and names need to be differentiated from both the named and from personifications. Take my word for it: there are no allegories here. Our particular interpreter is looking for ideas to hold provisionally, they’ll be evasive, she’s a subject after vacillation, incoherence, doubt. Where there might be a name, there’s pathos.

Everyday life requires at least a modicum of agency. We gather things that make an appearance, we embellish the quotidian with a sequence of vivid social moments. A young friend tells me the saga of an unfolding multi-mishap housing crisis that continued over the course of the entire first year of her postdoctoral fellowship at a small distinguished bastion of established white life, where the crisis took occupancy of her psyche. Next a young woman, frequently touching her face, frequently pulling both sides of her hair across her cheeks, “shares” confidential information, which is okay, it’s hers to confide, I can only listen. Somewhere lurk the principles of selection determining what I hear, what I remember, elsewhere lurk my principles of description, my principles of narration.

In the (loose and close) grip of ambivalence, one is both deep inside the zone of choice and on the fringes of the conditions and circumstances that demand one. We are often striving to become what we are not, or is it playing that we are doing (play-acting, costume-displaying, lying, wielding ourselves metaphorically) as we struggle not for an ideal but for an alternative? Becoming personable, baby Deli looks up, giggles, wriggles, looks down, and intently squeezes peas, seizing or selecting, three or four in each plump ardent hand. Georgina Gerald Brown is responding—enthusiasm being a social value—to what’s neither false nor true. Here on a key is a haptic fingertip, a cognitive partner in the machinations of the mind, it’s tucked under the nail of an indexical finger that partners likewise with cognition but to different effects. This is a signifier, that the signified—and over there is an observer, a spectator, whose presence has to be ignored. Nearby a person on a “wrong track” passes, erring autonomously; there is no accompanying verse. Think of all the imprecisions (and ambitions) of the language of naming, the language used by those in thrall to eternal strivings and the quest for perpetual self-improvement! An aporia can’t be isolated, it’s not a sticking point but an extension into the temporal interior of an interminable through-zone. Every performance (and all performativity) is tantamount to transition: mended when what grass lift is and slippage slat bough in metal drift if. A falcon is nesting on a parapet overlooking a dream city in a dream not of a falcon but a dream of slow flight, a dream slowly reached—a dream flown to without city sounds, without shouts, without the acceleration of a car on an adjacent street, a train whistle from the distance, a train to another dream or from one. But this is prose, not dream. There is that third acacia on the relatively high hill higher than the sudden hill we pass in the car, that abandoned dump. Suspense is exhausting but inexhaustible—and it is insolent, perhaps because it thrives on the insufficiencies of the present, the untenability of our prospects for the future.

One can’t be a scholar of the future, one can’t learn from it, one can’t even learn about it. You think it’s a man in the distance coming along the country road, but as Husserl remarks, “it might be a tree moving in the wind, which in the gloom of the late afternoon at the edge of the field resembles a man in motion.” We define things by their peripheries, their proximities, the things around them to which they are bound but from which they differ. Trust has little to do with it; we cast out tendrils of interpretation as if with a paranoiac’s perspicacity and lucidity. “You utter fools, you senseless people,” says the Sophocles’s Old Slave in Electra, “do you take no heed any longer for your lives, or have you no inborn sense, that you fail to see that you are not merely close to but are in the midst of the greatest dangers?” To establish the character and value of something; we negotiate with the future, we barter with what we think we see ahead, what we expect to come. We traffic in what we hope for, what we fear, what we can’t finish by ourselves.

***

“Agathon of the beautiful verses is about to set the pegs on which to frame the play.” Here the beautiful Agathon, author of lost tragic verses, is a character in a comedy. Here for a moment and then, time being what it is (whatever it is), we have only his name and rumor with its subsequent commotion. Aristophanes continues: “He is bending new curves for his verses; he is chiseling some bits, fixing some with song-glue, knocking up maxims, making periphrases, wax-moulding, rounding, casting.” The comedian is always in motion, dancing to the staccato beat of disarray—motion is the genius of comedy, its reality. While that beautiful Agathon in his elegance prepares a song long with the legato of catastrophe, Aristophanes laughs. It’s tragedies that unfold in the aftermath of the collisions that cause history, but the grand profusion when everything comes out at the end is sheer comedy.

Five city pigeons fly into the air, driven from their perch under the eaves of a gray house by a homeowner bombarding them with tennis balls. A disheveled man goes by pulling a wagon and shouting curses to the curb and then to the corner store. Brotherfuck mothermouth turd-on-a-rock-in-your-face, do you hear me, do you hear me? Definitely—one should nurture one’s private sensibility (one’s “inner life”). One should deploy it in social spaces, pitch in, speak up, participate in “public life.” You can belong where you are for a moment. When everything gets loud enough—which is to say when sounds coalesce into a din—everything achieves synchrony, orchestration, and synonymy.

All in due course the arid dust in one place receives recompense from incoming rains and heavy floods in another are lifted from grey sodden fields by a dry dazzling wind. For a moment, both feet of justice are on the ground; on the hillside above the path through the park the buckeyes balance pink and white blossoms on clublike stalks. I assume there’s some determinate character to the reality of the moment—something necessary, something causing or compelling things of the moment to be real. Or, rather, to appear. But everything to this point has been the product of guesswork, like improvised masonry done on dry days through weeks of a wet winter or electrical wiring done by an amateur, and no doubt will be long after it. Along the median strip the hardies, the perennials, the continuing, are back: penstemons and sages, poppies and lavender, street people and day laborers. The stoplights flicker; a rock falls onto the edge of the highway—a rock with a pinkish-orange hue close to the color of a fallen peach in dust. Despite all the violence and crime inherent to tragedy, every tragedy also includes innocence. Each character makes its appearance but none are backed by a narrative, nor am “I”—I appear like all the others, unnarrativized, unstoried, on the margins of ambiguity. To live aesthetically—to live in terms of, to live in the contexts and limits of, the phenomenal world (and perhaps interpretations of it)—to live facing outward (without “seizing” or “capturing” or otherwise “possessing” phenomena): this is to live in terms of surfaces. Things surface, thoughts come to the surface, etc. And it’s not just there that we find something as indeterminate as a ricochet, something erratic, demanding decision, something for which we or you or I or she or they or one or he or someone has to take responsibility. In a burst of enthusiasm, I embarrass myself with a burst of enthusiasm. So be it: acts of synthesizing consciousness can produce “complete distinctness of ‘logical’ understanding,” which, however, can “pass over into vagueness.”

In a book such as this (whatever kind of book it is such of), typically the narrator—a given “I”—would have introduced an erotic element—a drive, a yearning so fundamental and unavoidable as to feel instinctual, intuitive: a feeling above all of feeling. But let’s set aside questions of kind, category, etc.—this is not a book in search of a genre, though genres may come searching for it or creep over some of its phrases. There’s no truth to identity. At best it’s subjunctive, not indicative. I pick up a pen—passionately, say—and, not yet even knowing what words will appear, I begin to write: subjectivity (personality) emanates from intoxication.

The phenomenal world is what there is—material particulars, happenstantial circumstances, everyday life—why speak of futurity, a metaphysical imposition, an empty category into which anything might enter but nothing has? Perhaps we do so because it offers prospects of what’s ahead far from the importunate past and—this may be key—without promises. The forces of eros, the barbs and bewilderments, the obliterating passions and (dare we say) pulsations—the relentless throbbing and irritable insistences—of eros (and let’s not limit eroticism just to sex) may be ubiquitous, they may be banal, but let’s credit them with pushing us along, taking us, for example, on yet another “intellectual promenade.” “With stopovers”—nominal, adverbial, prepositional, participial. Street drunkenly twig for gab compatibly starch. Every word is an iteration, each testing for something—accuracy? insight? truth (whatever that might be)?—seeking “successively closer approximations to the solution of a problem.” And there it is: skepticism makes too many demands. Lola is never overly eager to join together things that have no connections and with that to create a story pitting fate against fact, but what of clowns, tightrope walkers, a lion tamer, a parade of elephants? I don’t buy that they’re shadow forms under a big top—they’re feeling points, they’re proximities. Animated by sudden, worldbound, outfacing feelings, Lola laughs with both hands in the air: here’s to the raptures of proximity! Names are given heavy with hidden insistence generating an epistemology of given moments in and of the phenomenal world, the given and apparent world of the historical present, said to be a system, said to prohibit off-cycle harvests, said to be in the eye of a temporal maelstrom, said to be the last thing basking in sunlight at the end-time. Jewassi Zhdanov Jones swings right from the last daylight on Chant Street into the white-walled bar, she’s quickly crafted, or, since this is a social occasion, she’s already sitting at a table with Jamie Brecht Weiss, Freya Cyprian Slight, Rosie Consuela Hassan, and Lola: she’s quickly performed, immediate as a being in a continuous take of eternal duration. But it’s not as if everyday life were forever static and ahistorical—as if a single scoop of chocolate ice cream on a sugar cone were always to cost a dime, humans were to forage forever in hills and on plains to the edge of the terrestrial flat finite disk, or someone first called Silly couldn’t later and emphatically be known as Priscilla Salter Blaine with Pris banned flat out. Let’s imagine a city pigeon in harness presented as an allegorical image captioned “The Life of the Mind,” a punctum perceived amid “tangents and repetitions and intersections”

When doubt recedes, they say, it’s death that approaches to drive a wedge between meaning and its trappings, its contradictions, its digressions, and confusions as well as its minnows, fern spores, ladles, architectural renderings of commercial towers, stained glass windows, manifestos, curries. Of course one can imagine death as rapacious, greedy, an impatient predator, a scavenger charged with clean-up, or, then again, as a supreme and theatrical deity, over inked or underground. Well, as a skeptic once put it, it’s wisest to follow the principle of the one no more than the other, which is as applicable to interpretations of allegory as to personifications of death. The thought—a proposition, or perhaps a phantasm drawn from an impression—serves a sentence. There isn’t all that much distance between the prospect of death and the concept of beauty. A ridge, a sunset, a blossoming redbud—all are beautiful and, in their beauty, they assert their distance from us, but even today’s unvarying dull sky maintains distance, as if to make beauty itself inaccessible. The rain has stopped, low to the ground there’s fog—Floka pulls the hood of her raincoat back, Tasha her dog is off-leash and sniffs at dripping trees, wet hummocks, soggy soil under dark amorphous leaves.

On a battlefield (whether literal or metaphoric), humans encounter the problem of humanity: what is the value to being human? Call a character an exasperated chemist, Max Marie Ritter, and Max Marie Ritter will have retorts to clean, carbon to consider, big pharma to advise, and mockery to make of boy groups, mayonnaise, house cats, and conspiracy theories. Characters are necessary to human microhistories, but those histories are of what has happened and is happening and not revelations of intelligent inevitability nor milestones along a road to progress. Along with the plethora of interconnected phenomena come experiences of disconnection. Why isn’t it always summer? Pilar Piana Fleye isn’t asking a question, she’s complaining, demanding rays of attention. You never know why, says Milly Willis. And about this Milly Willis is right: those who love logic are apt to love lies. What case, then, can we make for human understanding?

From Lola the Interpreter, to be published by Wesleyan University Press in October.