Dear Friend,
I am unhappy. Below are a few of the reasons.
I AM NOT AN ANTI-SEMITE
This will not be dignified, this will not be good, this will not be interesting, this will not be cogent, I am very sad, all of the time, and though I’m not fucking stupid enough to think writing a blog post will make me happier, it’s better than doing nothing, which is what I have been doing and will continue to do. This will certainly not be virtuous. The “tradition” I “work in” contains both the very Jewish Phillip Roth’s very Jewish Portnoy’s Complaint and the virtuosically anti-semitic J.F. Céline’s Trifles for a Massacre. (If you don’t already know, Trifles is so unbelievably anti-semitic that Céline, the Vichy Frenchman Nazi fuck, was embarrassed of it; after his death, his widow, one Mme. Almanzor, a former ballet dancer of some renown, banned all reprints of the text. Unfortunately, it is very good, precisely because it is honest about the origin of all ethnic hatred: hatred of the self. Céline is a pathetic fuck and he knows it; the Jew is happier, more vital, more free, more humane, more creative, has a lot more sex and better— thus, Céline hates him. You’ve heard this quote already: Sartre: “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” I read it on the Internet Archive, scanned and translated by some Nazi frog fuck, chortling fatly behind his fat hands about how forbidden this text is, how (wink wink) censorious the estate and the state writ large is towards (wink wink) proper writing by the nexus of 20th century French prose… unfortunate and ironic, since it is in the right hands a better critique of anti-semitism than almost any polemic out there!) Some people argue Céline is the French Joyce. I am not an anti-semite, and certainly not the American Joyce. There is work that I should be doing, I should be studying for exams, but I am writing this instead, which will be neither beautiful nor dignified nor insightful nor even really funny.
Returning to the supposed topic of this section: what has become of the Jewish people? What has become of the great sufferers of the world? What has become of the loudest moral voices in the West, the modernizers, the revolutionaries, who fight for progress, equality and socialism, even under the inquisitor’s blade, even in the shtetl, in the ghetto? They got a state. Depressing— a perennial truth is that one cannot pin down virtue in a single person, in a single group— virtue is like a bird, who nests where it is convenient, or more accurately, in the few dry places in the world.
I AM A COWARD
At the core of who I am, I am a coward. This can be blamed on my upbringing. My parents were both hard-nosed immigrants who bulldozed a path through a world which did not understand them, did not recognize them as really human, even, to become landed gentry in the United States of America. These are settlers, people, Americans! Real Americans! Belt-buckle hatted Puritans! Scalp-a-native colonists! When you walk into a Walmart and see bug-eyed, fish-faced fats lining up in the frozen pizza aisle, nudging a shopping cart full of dust and ruin, subtly pissing themselves, thinking aloud about their petty little career goals and grievances, forming what appears to the outsider to be a cloud, a white mass, a few thousand pounds of marshmallow expanding and contracting— do you think those are Americans? Those are whites, sure, but not Americans— I doubt there are many Americans today, at least among the whites. Or perhaps not Americans, but Southerners, lazy slave-holders, tired rapists, the dregs of the human race content in their little incestuous niches, content to molest a niece or nephew, content with their connection to some (surely) illustrious past. (In this country, even the rapists are sad!) These are not the killers of men who are Americans! Today, all the Americans are immigrants with bloodshot eyes, teeth ground to stumps, who would kill a man without hesitation. All the people I grew up with were killers! I was raised by killers, by people who would kill for even a chance at promotion! Who would suck a million hooked purple cocks for a chance at a better life! Puritans! The aspiring land-owning class, the poor and hungry of Europe, who flooded over the seas to kill every single living thing they saw!
Therein lies the issue. To the Puritan, there is a strict barrier between the self and the Other; inside is Reason, inside is Spirit, outside is dead matter, flotsam, dead leaves, slaves. My parents desperately wanted to pass on their ruthlessness to me, but they did so through dominating me, humiliating me, because the child had passed from the inside to the outside. What they created is a toady who is bad at toadying; they installed in my chest a fount of two fluids opposed: self-contempt and a sense of superiority. Please— I reach out my hands to you, I show you my dirty nails, my ugly discolored palms— but I despise you, I will never grasp you— never! Not one thing in the world! I am a mortal coward. And of course I blame everything on my parents, though my childhood has been done for half a decade! (Though of course, have I not been driven to and from drawing rooms, into hallways, into stinking bathrooms with stone niches, into and out of rooms built by train tracks, by dead oaks? Have I not been blown around by cold wind for my entire fucking life?) I so want to live in the world, but whoever lives in the world has my contempt, whoever roots themselves I claim to be putting on airs. Of course they are putting on airs, shithead! Newsflash, pal— all human life consists of is the putting on and taking off of clothes. Get in line!
I AM LAZY
I have a fundamental contempt towards all forms of work. What else could explain my body, engorged and rippling, speckled with acne, discreetly rotting in places, releasing a subtle stink. How humiliating, to go about the world like this, sagging with this ridiculous fucking pregnancy! Who could, with this body, look in the mirror and smile! I am like a ball of uncooked dough! I do not even have the energy to jerk off!
I spend too much and too little time reading! And when I read, I read shit! Nonsense! Garbage! I am speaking, of course, of modernist literature. This is the source of all of my ills! This, I have realized, is the source of my physical and mental weariness, of my incurable laziness! William fucking Faulkner and Virginia fucking Woolf! I have developed a persistent asthmatic wheeze, I spend much of the day alone, when I speak what comes out but complaints and kvetches; Chance, Circumstance, but mostly Personal Idiocy have ruined me, caused me to live an old man’s life as a young man— so forgive me if I am tired of these books which celebrate old age, which celebrate the life which has been lived, which tell you that all the work’s been done, the well dug, the fields plowed or paddies flooded, the oxen killed, the harvest reaped, the sun flushed down the side of the sky’s white bowl down to the bottom of the world, that what’s left for you is winter, the only winter of your life, what’s left for you is to contemplate your handful of dry rice and remember, remember, motherfucker, remember, remember the oxen and the harvest and the sun, remember and think and criticize and sneer, oh, how stupid it all was, how ugly it all was, how ugly I was, but also all the others I knew, and therefore aren’t I so much better for my recognition? Of course, where else could my attitude towards life and other people come from, this insecure supercilious posture, of course to an old man everything the young do is ridiculous, of course the old man’s posture cannot stand the young man’s posture, this thief suddenly gains a righteous attitude towards that thief. But I am that thief, and only imagining myself to be this thief! In other words I am tired of all books, or at least all the books I have been reading recently, even if they are beautiful, incredibly beautiful. I read Sebald’s Austerlitz and thought it was incredible, but enough of that book, Christ! I don’t need another book about Memory; I also reread the Waves and am rereading Absalom!, so it seems like I’m making no improvement. Political my ass, moral my ass. What shall we do about the Nazis? “Well, I remember the Nazis.” Fuck off.
I AM PROFESSIONALLY AND ROMANTICALLY HOPELESS
Too many child-molestors show up in my short stories. I do not plan them, they simply appear, like dandelions in an empty field.
Who told this moron, this shit-for-brains, that he could do anything at all in the world? Who told this shower-pisser, this faggot, that he could learn physics, mathematics, and literature? Who told this toad, opening and shutting his wet mouth, that there was something in the world for him? Who told him that if he looked in the hallways, in the rice fields, under the oak trees, in the ditches, that there would be something for him? Well, shithead, I have been there, in the cold halls, in the damp rice, under the dead oaks, in the ditches, in the dumpsters, in the shit-piles, the dung-piles, the midden-heaps, the compost-bins, the junkyards, the academy! And what have I found? Jack! And what would I do if I found it? I don’t know what I would do if I found it. What if someone was there to love me? I don’t know what I would do if there was someone there to love me. What if a beautiful someone, gleaming head to toe with garbage and semen, were to emerge and embrace me? I think I would throw up! But for now, I still go daily to the rice fields, to the oak trees, to find them! But again, what if I found him? What would this shit-head do if his lover were to expose himself? What would this shit-head do if, walking on a beach, he saw his lover lying, buried fully in the sand, with only the tip of his huge erect cock sticking red out in the sun? What would he do if he got to hold his lover’s hips and ass, where a smile runs? What if he was presented with a Rilkean torso, which cries out that you must change your life? What would this shit-head do if he got to touch Apollo? Well, here’s what this shit-head certainly wouldn’t do. He certainly wouldn’t bend over and let Apollo fuck him in the ass. Certainly not. This shit-heel has his immigrant’s pride, his American’s pride, his human being’s pride! HE WOULD NOT TAKE IT UP THE ASS!!! But that’s love, isn’t it? You let me fuck you in the ass a little, I let you fuck me in the ass a little. That’s love, that’s happiness. That’s all we have in the world. To buffet around our hemorrhoids is the only redemption we get. But I would never let anyone fuck me up the ass. Even Apollo. That’s why I’m not getting into graduate school, and why I will never work a steady job.
re:proach us.