“A life!” (Text 334)

So says Soares. And I think it’s in the blowfly of text 334 (the fifth text I’ve read) that I’ve first seen, in this book, any living creature other than Soares. (I believe it’ll be a couple more texts before I see him in the company of other people.) (And, incidentally, text 214, if you’re keeping score at home, was the first time I saw Soares explicitly interact with a physical object, namely, some old pages he’d written.)

The way this text brings Soares back to himself, to being or feeling like he’s himself alone again, plays well against the self-separation he experienced back in the existentialist halcyon days of text 214. In fact, at the beginning of 334, he’s coming off a "mental slumber": "I haven’t existed. I’ve been someone else. I’ve lived without thinking."

Actually, the connection is a little creepy, now that I think about it.

Anyways. Contradictions aside, he’s himself again, small and insignificant as the blowfly. He’s come back to thought, too. Well, "thought," anyways. Thinking about his life, of course, leads him to believe his life is pointless. Seems captured by his mental image of "the side of the old farm that opened on to the fields, and in the middle of the scene appeared the threshing-floor, empty." (That image, its referential nature: Signifier? Signified? Both? Neither? Is there a center to that center? I don’t know: It’s been a while since I looked at that one paragraph of Derrida.)

Also, 334 is the first time I’ve seen Soares really place himself in some real context. A scene: surrounded by physical sounds from the office and the street outside, sitting at a desk, looking at a blowfly. Appropriate enough, in that he claims he’s not thinking, but feeling, "carnally, directly, with profound and dark horror," when he wonders "what supreme forces" might whack him with a ruler for the insignificant piece of life he is.

All of which gives way to one of my favorite lines so far, when the blowfly wanders off, taking Soares’s mental wanderings away with it: "The involuntary office was again without philosophy." I mean, heck if I know what the word "involuntary" is doing there, other than describing the office as if it were some reflex, something not of its own will. Whatever, though, anyway. It works. It’s art.

“Did you buy those jeans at the Gap? Because baby, I can see myself on the other side of them.” (Text 214)

This blog is fun. I think so, at least. Hopefully you do, too. I’m enjoying it. Contributing to it and reading it. I’m especially looking forward to seeing how our readings overlap and contradict when we start touching the same texts from different angles, at different times, through our own unique paths through the book. That’ll be fun. Also fun is taking things people write about one text and seeing how they look when held up against some other text. (Yes, in fact, I do have an awesome definition of fun. Envy my girlfriend and the dates I take her on.) Like, here’s Brian Stephenson on (or at least near) text 70:

While Bernardo Soares continually reevaluates his relationship with his writing through his writing, and in turn his relation with life, what’s important is not any final conclusion but the suggestion of it being an ongoing process where the continual evolution of the writing is what contains the benefit.

Which is great until you jump forward to text 214, in which Soares stumbles across some old writing of his, "this time in French, written some fifteen years ago," that he finds is written about a thousand times better and more fluently than he could achieve today, and is made to wonder who he’s become and whether he ever was the person who wrote those French pages in the first place: "Who did I replace inside myself?"

Text 214 is a wonderful little meditation on identity and our inability to maintain it across time and the gaps we place within our own histories, and it’s all I can do not to quote the entire thing at you right here, because it sort of kicks ass. It’s about one of those situations you can relate to if you write and if you find some old piece of writing of yours and you can’t help but wonder who you were when you wrote it, because sure as hell it wasn’t the you you know now who wrote that piece of merde. (Okay, admittedly a different situation from Soares’s, but the parallel is there.) (Not that this has ever happened to me.) (Only every time I see something I wrote more than ten minutes previously.) (Five.) (On a good day.)

What’s really great here and relevant to Brian’s statement is the way this text seems to explode the notion that the process is automatically its own benefit. When you look at yourself on a long enough time timeline, who you are and used to be becomes something frightening and practically unrecognizable; surely, no process can come out of that mess of selves, each separate and distinct from the next? It’d be like baking a cake after you wipe step eighteen* off the face of the planet. How can you conceive of conclusions when who you’ve been has already been concluded and what you’re left with is the vision of who you used to be, shockingly unknowable, somewhere down there "in the depths"?

Of course, Soares puts it better than I could:

It’s as if I’d found an old picture that I know is of me, with a different height and with features I don’t recognize, but undoubtedly me, terrifyingly I.

How am I not myself? How am I not myself? How am I not myself?

* – I’ve never baked a cake, but I assume step eighteen is the one that reads "Insert deliciousness now."

“A deep and weary disdain,” or, Dude needs some Gas-X for the soul (Text 35)

Soares is a dreamer, true. But he doesn’t just prefer dreams to reality. He thinks his dreams and his soul are literally more real than reality. He’d rather not visit reality, not even to spit on it. Reality, for him, is an "unaesthetic nightmare, like the result, in dreams, of a mental indigestion." Reality, like gas, isn’t something you want to deal with.

Not only that, but he actually thinks you’re sort of a jerk for doing stuff. Don’t you get it, you moron, he seems to say, getting his Holden Caulfield on; this is all total crap. It’s not worth it. He scorns all things "useful" that require "effort," but reserves his worst "disdain" and "writhing horror" for "all forms of violent effort." But in his mind, violence encompasses both things good and bad: "all those who work for mankind," "all those who fight for their country and give their lives so that civilization may continue," "[w]ar, energetic and productive labor, helping others." There’s nothing outside his head he much cares for. And it’s fascinating (at least to me) that he can so easily equate action and violence. As if nothing stands ‘twixt the two but perception.

It would be easy to argue that Soares is sort of a nutcase. You can see him now, can’t you, sitting in the corner of your local coffee shop, scowling at everyone who walks by? But as a reader of literature and litblogs, living in the early 21st century? You can’t say you can’t relate. Wouldn’t it be better to dream to live than live the dream? But then, too, as someone who cares about your family, your friends, about living a good and real life? You also can’t romanticize him much, can you?

Unless you purposely do stuff in order to be a jerk. Then, well: let me introduce you to your hero.

The Aesthetics of Discouragement (Text 307)

I’ve read about ten texts so far. Here’s how I read: I’m on my way to
bed, I’m on my way to the bathroom, I’m sitting at the computer, I’m
on my way to work in the morning, I stop and pick up the book and read
a text. Part of a text. Several texts. A line. The text I last read
the last time I picked the book up. A new text. Multiple new texts.
Sometimes I start from the beginning and read all the texts I’ve read
to date. Like I’m trying to memorize it, or something. Like I’m
looking for something. Not sure what.

Like any good bibliophile, I panic when I think about all the books
I’ll fail to read before I die. Which means I tend to read a lot of
books and I read them fast and that for as much as I do get out of all
the books I read I don’t get as much from each book as I might like or
as I might get were I to stare at each page for extended periods of
time. Which means that reading this way is weird. Which means I’m
wondering how my experience with this book differs from my experience
with any other book. Which means I’m wondering how much of what I do
find in this book is actually stuff of myself I’m putting there myself
in order for me to find it. Dreaming a dream of a dreamer holding a
mirror to someone else’s face who sees right through it to see
himself, wide-eyed and wondering, on the other side.

In any case, I’ve been in a terrible creative rut lately. Trying to
write creatively and instead writing nothing but crap. Wondering why
everything I write is crap. Wondering if everything I’ve ever done
that I once thought was good is actually crap. Wondering if I’ll ever
write anything that isn’t crap ever. It’s kind of a bummer.

Enter the second text on my list, subtitled "Aesthetics of
Discouragement." I’m not sure how many times I read it before I
realized that it’s sort of about me. Or the me I’d like to be, right
now, in my state of being discouraged. Sort of. Sort of not. On the
one hand, wouldn’t it be great to make my "failure into a
victory…endowed with columns, majesty and our mind’s consent"?
Wouldn’t it be swell to decorate the "prison cell" of this life, this
rut, with "the shadows of our dreams, their colorful patterns
engraving our oblivion on the static surfaces of the walls"?

But then of course there’s that pesky "on the other hand" clause.
Soares reveals his inability to do anything but dream:

Like every dreamer, I’ve always felt that my calling was
to create. Since I’ve never been able to make an effort or carry out
an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or
desiring, and action has meant dreaming of the acts I wish I could
perform.

"He
valorizes inaction, elevates dreaming to an art," indeed. Now if
only I could get a dream recorder plug-in for OpenOffice.org Writer,
I’d be all set.

“If only I had been the Madame of a harem!” (Text 343)

Sparked
by the editor’s suggestion–whose intro I only read enough of to have
some idea what I was getting into–I’m reading the texts that compose
this book in random order. I’ve nerded out enough to print a randomized
list of text numbers, so I can make sure I’ll hit everything,
eventually, while having some idea where I’ve been and how I got there.
Makes it easy (well, easier) to build my own chaotic order out of this
edifice of texts.

 

How cool is it that this book gives you nearly 500 possible
opening lines? How many opening lines do most books give you? A paltry
one. Two, maybe, if you skip or count the intro or preface material.
Which I seem to have done with this book. Oops. Point being, in any
case, that by my math, this book, which I’ve barely read more than ten
pages of, is approximately 250 times cooler than any other book I’ve
ever read. Sweet.

 

Anyway. My version of this journey begins in a harem. The sort of
harem a bored male office worker might like to imagine himself becoming
the madame of. Pardon me for getting my Beavis and Butthead on, but
it’s an uncommonly funny opening line. I mean, I laughed out loud when
I read it, and I so rarely laugh out loud when I read a book. But it’s
funny because here I am, starting this book that seems all mysterious
and deep and stuff, the stuff of some cracked genius, and I’m joining
this group blog to give the book a close reading, and we’re all going
to be critical about it, and it’s like English major night out at the
booty-dance club, right? All serious and sweaty and intense. And as the
bass drops, the book’s all like, "Nope, uh-uh. Smackdown. Harem!" Sort
of undercuts the whole thing. In a good way. A necessary way, perhaps.

 

Well played, Pessoa. Well played.\u003cbr\>And it turns out it's a pretty well-played opening line, thematically, too, as it leaks into the considerable desire of the narrator to become someone else: he's got this "boundless, insatiable longing to be always the same and other." I don't know if it's the whole point of the book, or if I've just gotten lucky with my random order, but I've seen this play out in the next couple texts I've read. Neat. More of that anon.\n\u003cbr\>\u003cbr\>For now, closing point: the closing paragraph of this text ("Come down from your unreality by the steps of my dreams and fatigues. Come down and replace the world.") is so totally and completely bad-ass, even though I have no idea what it means. It sure feels to me like the way a book like this ought to begin, though. I want it framed as a caption for one of those "Inspiration!" pictures. Deciding the contents of the picture can be left as an exercise for the reader.\n\u003cbr\>\u003cbr\>Also, did I mention I found my copy of the book in the poetry section of the bookstore? Makes sense, with an opening like that.\u003cbr clear\u003d\”all\”\>\u003cbr\>\u003cbr\>– \u003cbr\>Darby M. Dixon III\u003cbr\>tdaoc: \u003ca href\u003d\”http://www.thegrue.org/tdaoc/\” target\u003d\”_blank\” onclick\u003d\”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”\>\nhttp://www.thegrue.org/tdaoc/\u003c/a\> \u003c/div\>\n”,0]
);
D(["ce"]);

//–>

And
it turns out it’s a pretty well-played opening line, thematically, too,
as it leaks into the considerable desire of the narrator to become
someone else: he’s got this "boundless, insatiable longing to be always
the same and other." I don’t know if it’s the whole point of the book,
or if I’ve just gotten lucky with my random order, but I’ve seen this
play out in the next couple texts I’ve read. Neat. More of that anon.

For now, closing point: the closing paragraph of this text
("Come down from your unreality by the steps of my dreams and fatigues.
Come down and replace the world.") is so totally and completely
bad-ass, even though I have no idea what it means. It sure feels to me
like the way a book like this ought to begin, though. I want it framed
as a caption for one of those "Inspiration!" pictures. Deciding the
contents of the picture can be left as an exercise for the reader.

Also, did I mention I found my copy of the book in the poetry section of the bookstore? Makes sense, with an opening like that.