SARAH:
I think that is sad.
MAX:
Yes, it is sad. She is trying to make language revert in on itself so it doesn’t communicate anything. Wittgenstein said the only thing that is left is silence and I think what he left out is that the only thing left is love.
SARAH:
Do you think love is silence?
MAX:
No, I don’t think so, I think love is relational and I think to understand the concept of love we always understand the idea that the person we love is trying to love us, so we understand intention. So I think there is this relational pocket of love that Wittgenstein is missing.
SARAH:
Like if you dropped Martin Buber’s I-Thou inside postmodernism—
MAX:
Yes—but I don’t know if you can put Buber inside of Wittgenstein.
SARAH:
When I was your age I walked into my professor’s office and said, “I don’t believe in postmodernism or deconstruction,” and she said, “Hmm, what all have you read about it?” and I said, “Hmm, maybe one book or two.” Terrible. Arrogant. But I still don’t believe in postmodernism.
MAX:
You don’t?
SARAH:
Do you?
MAX:
I do! Postmodernism devours everything, it eats everything, it acknowledges the void—
SARAH:
It has an appetite but no stomach!
MAX:
Yes, true—but it is the digestion of the fox and not the hedgehog—it can be playful and loving—for example, it can say, here is a coin from behind my ear, here is a pine cone from behind my ear, not HERE IS A DIALECTIC—
SARAH:
Okay, so it’s a victory of smallness against self-importance—
MAX:
Yes—
SARAH:
—but it’s so self-important!
MAX:
It can be.
SARAH:
You’re saying it’s against the totalizing impulse, it’s against Casaubon’s key to all the mysteries in Middlemarch.
MAX:
I haven’t read Middlemarch, I’m illiterate.
SARAH:
You’re hardly illiterate. My friend thought Middlemarch was about bunnies.
MAX:
That’s Watership Down, yes?
SARAH:
Anyway, I think the vision of postmodernism you describe is a new thing, it’s to be invented, it’s not postmodernism because it’s small and humble and loving, it could be called “loving postmodernism” or something—LPM—
MAX:
Yes, LPM—what is LPM?
SARAH:
It’s small incursions of meaning into the void—it has to do with smallness—
MAX:
Yes, and with luminous priorities—
SARAH:
Except I don’t even want postmodernism in the title because it only defines itself in the negative up against modernism, and I find that inherently nihilistic—
MAX:
It all goes back to the Holocaust and how can we deal with the void and still be a joyous mammal, what can we affirm in the face of the void—
SARAH:
Yes, but postmodernism is not affirmative, and the problem is that Heidegger and his cronies were Nazi sympathizers so they can void out history and that’s very convenient.
MAX:
But how do we deal with the void and meaninglessness? My two favorite songs are Nat King Cole’s “Smile” as in “smile while your heart’s breaking” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
SARAH:
Do you think “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is a sad song or a happy song?
MAX:
Exactly.
Sometimes Max would text me to distract me from nervousness before I gave a public reading (I am a reluctant public speaker) or to enliven my commute to New Haven. These dialogues would go something like this:
SARAH:
I’m on the Amtrak quiet car, it’s like my fairy godmother.
MAX:
Is it godmotherish because it transforms into a magically civilized place? Maybe death is an Amtrak quiet car, then we’d both be right in a way.
SARAH:
Yes. But would we know anyone on the car? And who is the conductor?
MAX:
No, I think you don’t know anyone, but there are familiar dinner rolls.
SARAH:
That sounds sad. Are there books?
MAX:
And the conductor is a reticent beautiful Steve Jobs.
SARAH:
That made me laugh.
MAX:
Good.
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