Empedocles killed himself by leaping into the caldron of Mount Etna. Disciples found his shoe on the rim of the crater.
Empedocles’s leap into the crater was meant to prove he was a god, or, in the view of some, to trick others into believing he was a god. An apotheosis or a swindle, depending. In that ambiguity, Empedocles becomes the perfect artist.
In Dostoyevsky’s Demons, Kirillov shoots himself, having explained to everyone that by this singular act he will prove that there is no God and that he, Kirillov, is God. Kirillov is perfectly rational and completely crazy.
Alfie sits in the rocker, jiggling while I talk, totally incapable of simply listening in a calm and thoughtful manner. It is torture for him to have to sit still and listen.
That is how the craziness of a family degenerates, like everything else. From my father, who was a vicious, diabolical, thoroughly concentrated lunatic, to my son, who is a small, repressed neurotic. It is impossible for this son to go crazy in the larger, generous Kirillovian sense. He could not go mad. It is insanity without creative force. It is like starvation, the mental starvation of a comfortably well-off, insane tax attorney who comes to visit his father in hopes of making that father regret having brought him into existence. He wants me to see how well things have turned out for him, but at the same time he wants me to see how bad everything is. He wants me to be proud of his achievements, and he wants me to be ashamed of having ruined his life.
He talks to me about the house. He wants me to let him fix the house, which he says he can easily afford. He won’t say the word rich. He says “comfortably well-off.” He has been giving Moll money. He is a minor artist too. He is a failed minor escape artist. He thought he would escape by becoming the opposite of me, the irreconcilable contradiction of his father. Whatever he set out to do it was because it was the contrary of what I would have set out to do. In the process he has made himself one hundred percent sane on the surface and seventy-five percent insane underneath. In fact the sane surface is held in place, cemented there as an unalterable rigidity of character, by the craziness underneath, lying there underneath as a permanent potential for a nervous breakdown.
He would like me to feel guilt, but I don’t feel guilt, I feel weariness.
Hölderlin wrote a play called The Death of Empedocles.
But Hölderlin didn’t commit suicide. He went insane instead. Büchner didn’t commit suicide either. He died of typhus at the age of twenty-three. Van Gogh went crazy and then committed suicide.
Hölderlin wrote about the death of Empedocles before becoming crazy. Van Gogh did some of his best paintings after becoming crazy.
It is probable that being crazy or not being crazy has no bearing on whether the art one produces is any good or not. In my experience the producers of minor art waste products are usually one hundred percent sane.
Of course I always had money, the freedom of money. Just that little bit of money made it impossible for me to lead a normal life. I was set apart from the others, because I had an independent income, a small fortune, which I actively squandered.
My parents did not commit suicide. Their cabin cruiser was sliced in two by the destroyer USS Keller off the coast of Florida.
In bed, I listen to the shrill cries of children playing in the street. They have, I notice, the same excited tones as the chirping of the sparrows. A long strand of cobweb hangs from the ceiling above my bed, and in the faint draft from the open door to the kitchen it wafts and sways, causing, it seems to me, the children’s voices to rise and fall. She has the radio on in there. I don’t understand how anyone can listen to the radio for even fifteen minutes and not want to kill himself. It seems impossible that she can listen to the demented voices and songs for hours at a stretch, that she can even sing along with them. Radio and television, I have always thought, are just part of an ongoing mental-annihilation-and-suffocation process that is crushing me and everyone like me. Everyone, that is, who is not actively complicit in the annihilation, who does not have a lucrative professional position with the task of furthering the annihilation, making it more pervasive and crushing every day.
The insulting, aggressive, brutal, brutalizing advertisements on the radio and television: that people—the viewers, the listeners, the so-called mass-media consumers—permit themselves to be talked to, to be talked at, even shouted at, in this manner is itself the most disgusting sign, indeed the most revolting symptom of a disease that is destroying not just the ones who are suffering from it and actively spreading it about in the form of professionally applied contagion, but everyone else as well, people like me, who would otherwise have nothing to do with it, who would keep themselves entirely free from it.
By “people like me,” of course, I mean the ones generally regarded as inveterate gripers, malcontents who deliberately, perversely, refuse to see the good in anything unless it is something they personally have invented. In other circumstances, I have always thought, such people precisely would be the healthiest and most productive people, while in this environment they have become the sickest and most useless.
Most of the people I see walking past on a regular basis, in the morning and again in the evening, going to work and coming home from work, who live in the houses up and down the street and whose faces are completely familiar to me, fail to look at my house, I have often noticed. Seldom an idle glance in my direction, and that is perfectly normal—one cannot expect them to look every time they trudge by, day in and day out, they are not municipal bureaucrats, it is not their business to look. But I have noticed lately that certain people, Professor Diamond chief among them, are systematically failing to look. My house is the most inescapable sight in the neighborhood, it is practically a tourist attraction, yet these particular people walk briskly by without turning their heads even a millimeter in this direction, having obviously made a resolution never to look in my direction. It seems to me, sitting at the window as they pass, that they are actually averting their eyes. Of course they know that I am at the window, they are intensely aware of this, and their refusal to look is nothing more than a primitive psycho-magical attempt to erase me from the picture. They pass with rapid steps, with rapidly accelerating steps, it seems to me, always on the opposite sidewalk, and sitting in my chair at the window I experience a strange excitement, as if my gaze were pushing them down the street. With these people, it seems to me now, I am locked in silent struggle.
Except for calls from my son and my sister, calls I have always discouraged, the phone had stopped ringing. Now it rings again, from morning to night. She spends a lot of time on the phone.
Without a word of greeting she places a bowl of cereal on the table in front of me and goes back to cleaning. I add milk from the carton and spill some of it. A small brown beetle traverses the tabletop. It encounters the milk puddle and stops. It seems to be thinking, oscillating tiny feelers. It turns and lumbers off in another direction. It moves slowly, hesitantly, like a blind thing. It seems weary. Reaching the edge of the table it waves its front legs in the air, poised above the precipice, as if feeling for something out there.
She has cleaned the stove. She has even scrubbed off the brown baked-on grease streaking the oven door. I watch her while I eat. She empties the cabinets above the counter, making maximum noise, banging cans and jars down on the countertop, slamming cabinet doors, while conducting a muttered commentary on the dirt, complaining about it, marveling that anyone would live in filth like this. She fills a saucepan with soapy water and puts it on the counter. She wipes the cans and jars, dipping her cloth in the water. She changes the water in the saucepan. She stands on tiptoe and scrubs the bare shelves with the cloth, then climbs on a chair to scrub the top shelf. She scrubs vigorously, the hammocks of flesh beneath her raised arms jiggle and sway. She is wearing a purple sleeveless dress that goes badly with her skin, her pale, unnaturally white skin that is now covered with reddish-pink splotches. The skin of her face, sweaty and flushed with effort, is so red, so inflamed, it l
ooks practically roasted.
Sitting in my chair, I listen to her moving about overhead. She can’t sleep, she says, and she goes up in the afternoon to rest. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, hear the television playing softly in her room.
A fair-weather day, the fullness of spring, and they pass the house in steady procession, down the street to the little playground in the park. An hour, two hours, and the same people trudge back up it, tugging the arms of reluctant offspring, leaning stiff-armed to the carriages—women mostly, couples sometimes, rarely a man alone. They parade their progeny (or their employer’s progeny) in several kinds of conveyance: enormous big-wheeled buggies, little red plastic wagons, covered trailers towed by bicycles. To accommodate multiple offspring they have double- and even triple-wide strollers that span the sidewalk like threshing machines, forcing others to step off onto the grass. There are streamlined three-wheeled racing strollers powered by the hard-muscled pistons of jogging females. A fair number of the women, I notice, also push before them gibbous bellies in various stages of tumescence in which the pupate forms of new homunculi are riding. How fermenting and fertile the world around us is, I find myself thinking. From a district of aging working-class white people drinking cheap beer on collapsing porches we have become a neighborhood of middle-class breeders.
The trees are in full leaf. The city’s mowers have striped the park in bands of varied green. It is the fecund season. Birds, insects, people, microbes surely, are breeding right and left, in trees, even under the ground, in cracks. Everywhere life swarms and pullulates, and meanwhile this house, inside this house, feels like a dead zone. I stand at my window and look out at the parade of families. They live in a world of beginnings, of the first step, tooth, word, date, marriage, child. So different from a world of terminals and closures. So many ways of marking an end. I am particularly fond of the phrase: it is curtains for him.
We know scientifically that the “purpose” of human life, as of all life, is reproduction and death. What we don’t know, don’t want to know, is that beneath a veneer of foolish happiness our own individual lives are nothing but reproduction and death, have no point but that, we are on earth for no other reason than that. The problem is, this life of reproduction and death, if measured by the criteria and standards of significance of an even halfway civilized culture, is meaningless, completely pointless, and stupid.
She has come back with a little television for the kitchen. The idea is never to have silence or an instant without the chatter of idiotic voices. The idea is to drive me crazy. I scream at her to turn it down. She turns it slightly lower. A few minutes later it is back up again.
She helps me upstairs to the toilet. She comes into the bathroom afterward, and we stand side by side looking down at the blood and shit.
Late afternoon, and the windows were open wide, letting in sounds from the street. I lay in bed, eyes closed, and pretended to sleep. She sat in the armchair. I opened my eyes, and she had closed hers. She was moving her mouth, gnawing on her tongue.
My son comes with flowers, a bouquet of yellow roses. His wife arranges them in a vase. She tries several spots, standing back a ways and considering, before deciding to place the vase on the mantel. Obviously the roses are her idea.
He has to visit. He doesn’t have the courage to just not come, and so he brings his family. They are here to make the visit into an occasion, to turn it into a superficial social event. Instead of painful silences we are going to have mindless chatter.
He regards the house with distaste, he has taught his family to regard it with distaste. That much is clear from the way they look at everything, the four of them sitting about the room, occupying every chair in the room, and in their boredom looking around with distaste at the paintings, as if these were somehow malevolent, as if the paintings were to blame for everything. Janine considers this house the locus of her husband’s suffering, the place that originally wounded him, the source, she probably thinks in her pop-culture way, of his primal abuse.
It is quite possible her husband has indoctrinated her into thinking that.
He has his mother’s large eyes. Eyes that expect the worse. He has been waiting his whole life for the gesture of affection that will wipe out all the wrongs of the past.
Meanwhile his wife walks around the house, appraising everything, writing it all down in her little notebook.
I walk in and find Moll at the kitchen table, staring at the little TV she has set up on the counter. Hypnotized by the television, she doesn’t seem to notice me passing through. As if she were losing her mind.
She looks weary, completely worn out. She has bursts of energy, an hour or two of activity so intense it is practically frenetic, cleaning, cooking, digging through decades of stuff piled everywhere in the house, sorting, stacking, and all the while humming or even singing, and then she collapses, falls asleep in a chair, arms hanging at her sides. A tall, obese woman who has gone completely limp, sitting at the table staring at television. The phrase: she’s had the stuffing knocked out of her.
I have not been able to put into words how astonishing it is to see Moll old.
They are moving furniture from a large Mayflower van parked in the street in front of a house at the end of the block. I watch them unload an enormous crescent-shaped leather sofa with matching easy chairs and a gigantic so-called entertainment center. They are obliged to disassemble the sofa, breaking it down into three separate pieces, each the size of an ordinary couch, in order to work it through the front door. A middle-aged couples hovers about, meddling and supervising the men who are moving their furniture. Now and then one or the other makes a little dart at some item being transported past them. The man addresses the movers, two burly black men and a smaller white man, with a familiarity that strikes me as false and forced, dropping his g’s in a completely shameless way that betrays his unease in the presence of people of a lower class, even though, I am thinking, he does not allow himself to think of people as belonging to a lower class, especially black people. He has a neat white-streaked beard and wears a Grateful Dead T-shirt and jeans. His wife flutters in and out of the house with the movers, practically stepping on their heels, hovering and interfering. The two of them strike me as typical university figures. A pair of university figures, I think, working in a department of the so-called humanities. A typical pair of shameless pretenders, who have long since lost faith in the humanities. Universities teem with such people, who in clever career moves have turned themselves into the foremost apologists and intellectual defenders of contemporary media trash culture. The university as presently constituted—minus those departments within it that now form a nearly self-contained scientific-technical institute, that have already effectively quarantined themselves from the rest—is a death trap for the mind, I have long thought. Standing across the street, watching the movers, I can picture the crescent-shaped sofa and chairs packed with upper-middle-class professional barbarians staring gape-mouthed at a television so big it is practically a cinema screen, just the sort of university people who are relocating, as they phrase it, to this part of town.
I think of André Breton’s remark—that “the simplest surrealist act consists of going into the street, pistols in hand, and firing blindly into the crowd.”
To which he adds: “Anyone who has not wanted at least once to be done with the current system of debasement and cretinism in this manner has a place reserved for him in that crowd, belly level with the barrel.”
Disregarding the fact that Breton was a notorious windbag, his infamous and shocking remarks are actually the most humdrum of observations: a frank acknowledgment that in the heart of any halfway decent artist lies a murderous hatred of the so-called wider public, a huge store of resentment and loathing of the so-called average person, who quite rightly recognizes genuine art as inimical to himself and his life habits and who therefore necessarily experiences it as something unpleasant and destructive. There is of course a near-universal agreeme
nt among people in the art-supply-and-consumption business to hide this fact from the wider public, and of course the artists themselves collaborate in this obfuscation for obvious motives having to do with career enhancement and ordinary human cowardice.
André Breton was born the same year as Antonin Artaud.
It has occurred to me that I can shoot Professor Diamond off her bicycle.
In my case the idea does not spring from an innate impulse to violence. I am not conscious of any such impulse in regard to Professor Diamond. I don’t imagine that in some hour of determined anguish I will, like Raskolnikov, resolve to shoot her, though I think it possible that I will shoot her.
Possible, but not very likely. As things stand, I find it impossible to say just how likely.
Like Raskolnikov I have on occasion thought of myself as an exceptional man.
Nor would it be out of some existentialist project to prove that “I am free.” I have never believed that I am free. I am absolutely not free, which is why I think it possible and perhaps even unavoidable that I will shoot Professor Diamond.