Many years ago (this was in 1965), I was invited to have tea with the French wife of the American consul in Algeria. She received me, her face slathered in cream, in a room across the street from a notorious prison. I suggested that living in such close proximity to a place where so many Algerians had been tortured during the war for independence must be a cause for much distress. But no; she told me she’d had a maid tortured there herself, for stealing silverware. “But then,” she laughed, “I found the silverware!”
Needless to say, I didn’t stay for tea, but left at once to learn soon after that the maid had been tortured so severely she had been crippled. The soles of her feet had been beaten to a pulp with heavy rods — a method perfected by the thugs of Francoist Spain. The allegresse of the consul’s wife reminds me of those criminally vapid presidential debates, where Bush spoke so gleefully of the death penalty. In Curval’s words,
Better every time to fuck a man than seek to comprehend him.
Eros Breathing
The creative impulse, Eros breathing and dreaming within us, is radical to the core. Driven by inconstancy, restless, dynamic — it evolves. And like biological processes, it thrives on spontaneity, the necessary anomaly. A shape-shifter wired to subversion and beauty, it is also sublimely rational. Intuitive intelligence cultivates features that assure success: thorn, horn, scales, and fur; flamboyant courtship and postures; the love poem; mythmaking; the asking of riddles. The human imagination poses searching riddles, and the moment it does, poetry and science, philosophy and cosmology are born:
How does the wind not cease, nor the spirit rest? Why do the waters, desirous of truth, never at any time cease?
— Rig Veda
“The Riddle,” Hans Jonas proposes, “is a sacred thing.” One cannot help but think at once of Lewis Carroll, whose Alice is forever on the front line of the subversive and the avant-garde. Born of intuition and a deep and fearless seeing, Carroll’s inspired nonsense does a devastating job of unmasking the contradictions, presumptions, and perils of Empire. When Humpty Dumpty brags:
I took a corkscrew from the shelf;
I went to wake them up myself.
Dick Cheney could be speaking. (“The Snark was a Boojum, you see.”) As when certain other uninitiated Republicans succumb to an overspill of egg and explain their words were misspoken— spoken without their awareness. (This could be true.)
Eros (and the Alice books brim with it) and Empire are incompatible; we can easily exchange Eros for Truth (and the proof of this pudding is Bradley Manning, thrust into the treacle well for rending the veil). Empire fears and resents rational discourse, the tested intuitions, the bare facts that offer us the means to approach, unmask, and unriddle the enigmatic and vertiginous world. Writes George Steiner, “In the Gestapo cellars, stenographers (usually women) took down carefully the noises of fear and agony wrenched, burned or beaten out of the human voice.” Steiner goes on to speak of “a language being used to run hell, getting the habit of hell into its syntax.”
If the domain of Eros and Truth is the creative imagination — an ascendant irrational — and the child of clairvoyance and perception (and so: compassion), Humpty Dumpty and his ubiquitous tribe exemplify the abyssal irrationaclass="underline" reductive, determined by paranoia, shortsighted if not downright lethal. If the children of the ascendant irrational are poetry and science, the abyssal irrational suffers a deep-seated distrust of both.
But despite the fact of their ongoing abuse, ideas and the words that convey them continue to matter — profoundly so. When on September 11, 1973, Victor Jara, the great Chilean guitarist and singer, was taken to Chile Stadium and brutally beaten, the bones of his hands broken, then dared by his captors to sing. He raised his voice and sang “Venceramos” to the five thousand others who would perish as well, and whose voices joined his own. In a poem Jara managed to write that was hidden in a friend’s shoe, are the lines,
We are ten thousand hands
Which can produce nothing
Yet in that moment in hell,
One dead, another beaten,
As I could never have believed
A human being could be beaten.
Eros, its tree of life and serpent, triumphed — the serpent, that tireless emblem of inquiry and indignation; Jara wrote:
What I see, I have never seen before.
What I felt and what I feel,
Will give birth to the moment.
We are keepers, you and I, of a special gift: if the creative impulse is to remain vital and resurgent, “The book we begin tomorrow must be as if there had been none before, new and outrageous as the morning sun,” (Ernst Block). Says Borges, “You raise your eyes and look.”
A Cup and a River
As the world leans ever more precariously above the abyss and folly reaches potentially irreversible extremes, I awaken, unceremoniously, “isolated and alone”1 in those blue hours belonging to brigands and wolves — and return to a book that, from the first reading, has offered clairvoyance and an unsurpassable vision of erotic grace. As are all the best books, Omensetter’s Luck is unlike any other, yet conversant with those essential others that, by their very nature, persist — books you join as “a river swimming.”2 Like Brackett Omensetter himself, they manifest without warning, their turbulence unsettling and enlivening the dead water that imperils our most necessary affections and dreams.
Meteoric, Omensetter’s Luck is a mutable book spoken in tongues, its language like the current weather, inked in a bloody hail. There are laments, laughter in gales, storms of piss and vinegar, limericks of course, headwinds, tailwinds, doldrums, squalls. And if Furber, the novel’s inclement demon, unleashes a storm like things coughed up by cats, Israbestis Tot (his name a stutter and a hiss) is the resident forecaster and demiurge who gives the novel its breath (and so its spark).
Israbestis knows all the stories that matter: “The story of the man who went to pieces. . the saga of Uncle Simon, of the Hen Woods burning, and the hunt for Hog Bellman.”3 His tales of cats — Mossteller’s, Skeleton’s, and Kick’s, and of the fated “fence that a good stick would make a good loud noise on it if you was to run it along”4—are the very stories we want, the necessary stories, miraculous as serpents who speak and apples on fire. “Imagine growing up in a world where only generals were geniuses, empires and companies had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha — none of the things you loved.”5
Israbestis is the one to tell Brackett Omensetter’s story because he is the one to see him and survive the seeing, and this because he is something like Brackett — he appeals to children, animals, and bees; despite his bad knees, he too moves in grace of a kind. By offering us Omensetter, “this wide and happy man, dark. . deep brown like a pot of roast gravy,”6 (a fertile clay, one supposes, adamic; a black clay), Israbestis spells an alchemical process in reverse, by which gold will be beaten down to lead. For Brackett Omensetter will suffer Adam’s losses — not only the loss of possibility’s garden, the garden he carries within himself, but the loving recognition of Lucy (in On Being Blue, Gass tells us there is a flower named the Blue Lucy!), his own Eve. Lucy who, as Brackett comes undone, will say, “Where is my husband?”7 She will say, “Why must we live in these lonely pieces?” She will say,