pathetic....little....

[MalignD at elvis.com]

There must be more to it than that, you say, but there
isn't. You can go on annotating events forever. The
thread of anyone's existence will unravel the universe
if you pull on it. As Proust and Joyce have amply
demonstrated, but I'm no Proust, I tend to take things
as they come as I said, which means without the
structure, and also the little touches (like Bloom's
bar of soap) which knit everything together. I'm not
much for knitting; with me it's mostly one damned thing
after another like a snarled fishing line. That's my
quarrel with Nabokov too. But it's easy to begin by
sneering at art, everyone does that but they all lose
in the end. The original epigraph from Aristotle
captures this tension between the full and the empty,
the knitted together and the loose, which is why I've
left it rather than put in one more up to date. Left it
there at the beginning, framed, as in a museum. Of
course Aristotle is simply wrong, despite certain
trendy attitudes about scientific truth which we don't
need to go into because what he says is psychologically
as well as factually premodern. The notion of a plenum,
a plenitude, of the world as full of stuff being the
sort of thing which is wanted when one is so conscious
of the other thing, whereas with us it seems that a
little less of our fellow men and women and their works
might be a good thing. Abhorring a vacuum, in fact, has
not been tenable since Torricelli, and for some eighty
years now, since the discoveries of quantum physics, we
have known space to be simply the relationship between
events, some of which take a long time to happen and
thus appear to us as objects. To the senses, empty
space is a place where nothing is happening. Some
places, presumably, are emptier than others. There is a
surfeit of space in some places, and getting more all
the time. 
   	Myself, I couldn't wait to go. I live in Arizona
now, a full-up postmodern kind of place. But my
love-child Obie stayed behind, I suppose because there
is in what Aristotle says something, the nostalgic
evocation of a time when everything had its place and
we all knew what that place was and stayed there,
nostalgic because we are in some doubt about this as a
historical reality (but what does that matter?) which
is why authors uniformly begin nowadays with their
ethnic and geographic credentials, awareness of these
things being a major factor in establishing one's
authenticity. In establishing the right to speak. Why
don't you like me, mister? 
   	Ay, yi yi. 
   	This is a local expression, pronounced so as to
rhyme with eye and often accompanied by a thespical
rolling of same. I associate it with Swedes and
Norwegians. (I'm English myself, and a little Frankish
--that is, Bavarian.) 
   	The girl-child in the ragged pinafore reappeared
across the street, where she slipped into an empty
garage with her rubber ball and began bouncing it
against the walls. Meanwhile Little Pituite, the naked
urchin beside me, squatted down on his haunches in the
grass and after a moment a stringy black turd began to
snake out of his anus and coil up on the ground beneath
him. 

-------------------------------------------------
Get your free @Elvis e-mail account at Elvis.com!
http://www.elvis.com