alienated publicly and from within—a systematic alienation. An uncaught criminal is a secret darer, victorious in his crimes. Estranged from the society he has betrayed and the neighbors who believe him an upstanding citizen (the truth is not invited to picnics), he is yet at one with the secret molding his criminal identity. But the recidivist does not even have this hidden retreat-as-triumph over the world. He is doubly alienated. Apprehended not just once but several times, his faith in his stealth shattered with his strength, he has nothing to do but rot. Staring out his window, he does not imagine himself jumping for joy in the great wide world, but only sees litterers, children with cigarettes, airborne germs strengthening the immune systems of jaywalkers. In his dejection he tries to inhale a star and ends up swallowing his tongue. He doesn’t need speech to represent him, after all—everyone knows what he is.
Hatred of the Outside
A homely love: looking out at the world through the television set, too modest for panes of glass; ordering a pet rock over the phone for the sheer pleasure of conversing; waiting for the right knock at the door and asking the mail carrier in for a cup of tea when her package arrives; staring at the floor as the neighbor’s cat gazes at her through the windowsill, proud that the salesman mistakes it for her cat. If she went out into the world she might have to discriminate, find a common point of interest, even have something to offer.
When she died the entire community attended her funeral. “She was just always there,” a distant neighbor said in the eighth eulogy, gesturing in the direction of her house. “I can’t say whether it was a passionate relationship,” the mail carrier said in the seventeenth. “But while I never saw her give it a lover’s kiss, there was a sort of mutual serenity.” After the community had spoken they wept as coffin and pet rock were lowered together into the burial plot. The next-door neighbor stayed behind after everyone else had left. He stared down for a while as dirt began to fill up the grave, then tossed in his meowing cat out of reverence.
***
First moral: One is free to love all, so long as one has never loved.
Second moral: A cherished object requites love to the lonely more than the crowded congregation bounces its sum amongst themselves.
Third moral: A cat owner can’t feel attached to what won’t submit to ownership.
Fourth moral: Get a dog.
The Limit of Judgment
The purpose of art is transcendence, both for the artist and the art lover. But they only escape themselves into something worse. Naïve consumer of beauty, the art lover wants to get inside the artist and experience “freedom” through his work—the artist’s solace, his militant daily routine. The art lover becomes self-conscious about the loss of identity involved in his consumption. His is the freedom of being lost in the Museum of Babel, where every combination of styles occupy a spectrum of infinite nuance, the subsections of wings folding in upon each other to form a labyrinth of periods. It is a freedom that ruins his enjoyment. Unable to casually detect the subtle differences between works, he is forced to study a style. Art appreciation becomes an endless homework assignment.
The problem of the connoisseur is that everything fit to be called “greatest” within his realm of taste, everything canonical, is, through no internal fault of its own, bound to become tedious when re-consumed again and again—Haydn’s string quartets. After one is familiar with the intricacies of the sheet music, with enough gradations of performances, one eventually gets exhausted with the obligation of always having to notice something more. One hesitates to admit that repetition is the death of love for fear of being branded an inept authority by his fellow snobs—something which, lacking the officialdom of the critic’s printed review, the connoisseur is already charged with by the resentful demos basking in the simple enjoyment of sensations. The connoisseur’s judgment, no matter how discerning, always occupies a precarious position. He eventually comes to discover a slightly novel personal meaning in every recital of “The Joke.”
The Coffin Coiffeur
If one has a wistfulness for robes, no need to browse a History of English Royalty. Barber shops offer the torso full protection from what gets cut off above it. To seat Europe’s last living monarch for a haircut and salvage such fine garments unstained . . . how proud Ann Boleyn’s tailor would be!
The Psychology of History
History distances us from humanity by presenting us with the psychology of implausible accomplishment. Psychology brings us closer to ourselves through case studies of deviants and morons—annals of weirdness and insufficiency the only key to unlocking the mystery of homo scribens. It is only when one of these freaks accomplishes something worth remembering that the rest of us feel insulted; he is no longer a safe object of comparison, an outlier that makes one proud to be normal, but becomes a fact to be memorized, venerated, and resented. History is habit writ large, madness made readable.
The Personal Is Political
—Insofar as the political represents the will of a dominant individual, expressing the destiny of a great man or the tyranny of a small one. But even here, the masses will stowaway as many private moments as their pockets can hold. The more transparent an individual is forced to be, the more he implies his opacity. Like the moon, a man shows us one face reflecting the light of others and keeps the other side of himself in continual night—no one knows what is beneath that hair. This reflective side is politics, and the public Confucianism of every person fuels a private Taoism by distracting from it. In the most refined of these identity obfuscators—congressmen and housewives—private is merged into public; Taoist stages are filled with Confucian props, the actors withdrawing into themselves in a Yin-yang spin cycle of duty. Picnic blankets are laid in rolling pastures, oil drills in deserts, and in the name of “right attitude” bellies and pockets are filled. In the most thoroughly confused individuals, character is made into an expression of nature, even as consciousness proclaims only “We!”
Mannequin Museums
When asked about our model of beauty, the tour guides of the future will say, “Confining their statues to clothing stores, it was a society that valued individuality of layering over form.”
“But why sculpt in plastic?”
“Thrift was their lesson to posterity.”
Imagination Bounded by Experience
One never bothers to wonder about the everyday life of some mediocrity, not realizing its comparative excitement when measured against those who enshrined themselves in cultural memory by escaping the glees of pleisure into a higher calling. Most people, lacking the innate sense of duty which talent imposes on its bearers like a destiny, instead fantasize about the status surrounding responsibility. They fill every particular image with the boundless delights which the supposed autonomy of the artist, the power of the politician, or the fame of the celebrity would bring them. In these cases, though, it is not freedom, power, or fame they imagine possessing, but the promises of their stereotypes: lack of surfeit. They can only conjure more of what they have already spent their entire lives in pursuit of, believing the difference between pleasure and joy to be a matter of degree.
Peering through the fence surrounding the pool of highborns, the eyelids of the talentless soon begin to droop from watching their betters drudge so much. Possessed of the naïve happiness arising from simply not being born genetic accidents, they take for granted their red-blooded impulse for excelling at the task of life. Natural supremacy is the privilege of the chained draft mule.
Mood and Memory
Although
