Death to anyone who opposes the negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive.
And I just want to say again that I’m extremely proud to have been invited. And, y’know, something occurred to me in the car on the way over here tonight, and it’s that we’re all — each and every one of us — ticking time bombs, potential first-person shooters, mall shooters, whatever…who, given the opportunity to cast off the constraints of petit bourgeois morality, would choose random sadomasochistic chem-sex with hooded strangers over real relationships any day of the week. We live in this crazy, inside-out, totally bizarro world today where, just to give you another example, several large-scale Phase III clinical trials have apparently confirmed the efficacy of fecal transplants in the treatment of social-anxiety disorder. I have a friend who’s a psychiatrist, and I called him recently because I’d been wondering about whether my fondness for chubby women with small breasts was somehow homoerotic — not that it’s something I’m overly concerned about or anything, I was just curious to see what his professional opinion was — and at some point in the conversation he mentioned tangentially the, uh…the funny thing about the fecal transplants.
Look — yes, life is super-trippy. Yes, it may contain intense violence, blood/gore, sexual content, and/or strong language that may not be suitable for children, on-screen defecation, long strings of snot, and sad, sad times…
But, again, I just want to say this:
Nothing else in my life compares to the vitality and plenitude of this moment right now, right here. For me, these plastic chairs and tables are as real an audience as the miners and cowboys Oscar Wilde regaled in Leadville, Colorado, in 1882, or the insensible drunks at the saloon who jeered Granville Thorndyke, the traveling thespian in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine: “To die, to sleep; / To sleep: perchance to dream”…
Oh Thorndyke, you preposterous, undaunted poseur…ever posing as the sad, sad, Ferbered prince…Oh sad, sad, Ferbered prince…sad, sad, Ferbered, oedipally conflicted, impotent prince and poseur…ever posing autobiographically as yourself.
As any mother-besotted son knows, especially the mother-besotted son who is unassimilable in the milieu of his contemporaries, the presence of the mother is simply the cruel betokening of her absence. The mother is the irreducible lack, the hole at the center of it all. And even when we are flying from that, we are flying toward it.
I’ve always thought of my childhood as Edenic, as a distinct kind of paradise (and my adulthood as an expulsion, as a fall), and I still think of Jersey City (circa 1960) as the loveliest place in the world, I still think of it as…as paradigmatically beautiful, with its prewar apartments and Beaux-Arts office buildings, and its pastel, beatific twilights…and infested, as it was, with nuns. And I used to tell people, when I got a little older, that my parents were very much like Rob and Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show…very young, sophisticated, very good-looking…although I never really identified much with their son, Richie, who was much too rambunctious and coarse for me. I guess the character, the boy, I identified with most on TV at that time was probably Davey from Davey and Goliath, a Christian stop-motion animated show produced by the Lutheran Church in America and Art Clokey, who’d produced the Gumby series, which used the same type of stop-motion animation, and which I also admired very much. And I felt such a close kinship with Davey because…well…because, I suppose, we were both kids who were motivated chiefly by metaphysical concerns. So I was this sort of mystically inclined, spiritually inquisitive little boy with these very secular, very cosmopolitan parents…I was this little boy who was drawn to transubstantiated things…who was always on the lookout for relics, for some occult talismanic object or dusty amulet…with parents who were more into, y’know, more into Scandinavian furniture and hypermodern fondue forks and things like that. That said, I’ve always recalled my childhood as sublime, as a kind of Eden, as I said. But as I was listening to my mom before — in her wonderful, amazing introduction — it made me begin to remember all sorts of things I guess I’d repressed…I mean, the solitary confinement and sleep deprivation, the force-feeding of beets, the mangled fingers, and the nudity…There’s something very black site about it all. And so, I hope one of the questions we can begin to address here tonight is: What was this childhood? Was it the Garden of Eden or was it Abu Ghraib? Because what begins to emerge here, if all too speculatively, is a whole substratum, a whole buried constellation of petit mal traumas, which orbit around the deepest and the grandest trauma. The death of my first sister registered to me as the loss, the temporary death (in her estranging grief), of my mother. And, of course, loss and abjection are the key motifs in Gone with the Mind. And perhaps the ghost of that little sister (the yūrei, the onryō) is the Imaginary Intern…or the mall shooter…or the disembodied voice of the Reading Group Guide, which can haunt the margins of a person’s autobiography like a bad conscience.
When I was ten or so…maybe even younger, maybe eight, nine…I was already thinking to myself: Can a series of completely unrelated, violent, hypersexualized, scatological lines of prose be a kind of writing, a kind of literature? Just one violent, hypersexualized, scatological line of prose after another. Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi—no climax, no resolution, no meaning. Because, I have to say, even then, at eight years of age, every other kind of writing struck me as banal and outdated, and just boring beyond endurance. And I remember very clearly, I must have been in second or third grade, so this would have been about 1964, ’65, and I was at some classmate’s birthday party at this slot-car racing place…I don’t know if you guys even know what slot cars are…I don’t even know if they even have slot cars anymore…They were these miniature powered cars that raced around in, uh, little grooves, little slots on a track. And I think this place was in Livingston…or maybe Montclair, I’m not sure. Somewhere in New Jersey. Typical slot-car place, decked out in strobe lights, with all this shiny, polychromatic paraphernalia…And I was standing off by myself, as usual, because I was terribly, terribly shy and extremely introverted, and maladjusted, and basically asocial…but I remember just being off by myself, mesmerized by the cars whizzing around this track (which must have suggested to me, I realize now in hindsight, a kind of warp-speed synaptic circuitry), just lost in this particular reverie. This is a time in one’s life when one only has a very inchoate, wavering sense of one’s métier, of course. But even then, at this slot-car raceway in, in…in Livingston, New Jersey — and I can remember this so vividly — thinking of that marvelous phrase coined by the manga artists Sakata Yasuko and Hatsu Akiko: Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi, and realizing that I wanted to do…what?…I didn’t know for certain then…but definitely something involving the interlacing of brutality and mysticism. It became obvious to me, at that very moment, amid that delirious hypersynaptic circulation of tiny cars, that my life’s work would exhaust itself upon two themes: nerves and nerve — that is, neurology and audacity.