Lacuna, Blog 3: A Dawning

But then you thought, well, hold it.

Something was dawning on you. One ribbon at a time. The hills untying their bonnets.

An epiphany.

It’s just a cup of coffee, you thought. Let’s not get carried away.

Why would God come down and save you from drinking a cup of coffee? Why would He do that, hey?

Or She.

It wasn’t as if you’d usurped some town and coerced a girl into marriage—done those sorts of things. You’d just wanted your nice little cup of coffee, so you’d come down to this place and bought it. 

A nice cup of coffee. That’s all you wanted.

It was perfectly normal to just want your nice cup of coffee and you deserved to be able to have it without galivanting down the primrose path of extrapolation all the time. In fact, you thought, it may be a little abnormal, a little neurotic even, to do all that extrapolating instead of just enjoying your French Roast.

Having paid through the nose for it.

More ribbons: well, no, it’s not really neurotic to extrapolate the truth of things from the lies one is presented with on a daily basis by dear old corporate America, and therefore not to be able to fully enjoy your coffee, especially after paying so damned much for it.

It’s not neurotic, you thought.

It’s a little unusual, sure, but extrapolating moral truth can’t very well be called neurotic. If it were, what hope would be left for the human race?

Sometimes when you successfully determine what something is not you figure out what it is, especially if you’re someone who really thinks a lot about words, which for my purposes you are, being a writer. Suddenly, you knew exactly what you thought about whether thinking too much about your cup of coffee and about corporate wall posters and cups of latté and vortexes—all that—was neurotic or not. Which made this quite a beautiful epiphany, a rapture almost—a mini-rapture, of course, not the big one. Nothing Biblical.

But nice anyway.

*

As just explained, it began with a negative distinction. It’s not neurotic, you thought, to think about the moral implications of even the smallest things in your life, like your coffee. It can’t be. You know, because of there having to be some hope left for the human race. You know what it is, then?  you asked yourself.

It’s eccentric, that’s what it is. 

And that’s what it was. You were right. It was eccentric. Not neurotic.

And eccentric was a good thing, you thought. In fact, it was a great thing. So you started feeling really good about being eccentric and at last you were able to take a long appreciative sip of your excellent Tall-French-Roast-No-Room.

Of course, it was lukewarm by now and therefore pretty much ruined. Another three bucks down the drain and all. But you didn’t mind.

Mmm.

Another sip, shall we?

Mmm again.

You should be proud of yourself, you thought to yourself. You’re very eccentric.

Nobody else in that corporate coffee place was eccentric enough to do all that self-flagellating extrapolation and moralizing. They were just enjoying their coffee and speaking in comfortable tones to comforting people about normal everyday things like how they read on the internet that Jimmy Hoffa’s body had been found in the New York subway system—it was right there, they said, on The National Enquirer website.

And good for them. You were glad they were having a good time.

But you sure as hell weren’t, and that was a good thing because it meant you were eccentric.

And your epiphany wasn’t done yet. If there was one thing you liked to do with an epiphany, it was to keep it going, keep extrapolating on it.

You’re a born extrapolator.

It just so happened you’d read somewhere recently that James Joyce, the crazy eccentric Irish writer, had said something like this once to somebody or other: The state is centric, man is eccentric. Apart from the fact that you weren’t sure centric was a word—even when italicized—you had really liked that little nugget, especially because it was a truth that Joyce—more, perhaps, than any other human being who’d ever existed without going flat-out insane—had lived with great integrity.  I won’t tell you all the ways in which Joyce took the prize for eccentricity—that is, I mean, for humanity, for being irreducible. It would take about ten years to go over all those things. But you knew about them and you also knew that Joyce’s greatest desire as a writer was to capture the human organism—mind, body, thoughts, emotions, sins and heroisms, even bodily functions—in all its multiplicitous and eccentric multifacetedness, knowing as he did that to be human was to be irreducible.

The more multifaceted, in fact, the less reducible.

Same thing for multiplicitous, even if you’d just thrown that word in because you liked the swanky sound of it.

If to be human was to be irreducibly multifaceted and multiplicitous, to be human would always—always—mean being eccentric. When people were most eccentric they were most human. And when people were most human they were unquestionably eccentric. That’s partially why Joyce had written those two crazy novels—Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. He’d wanted to capture as fully and multifacetedly as possible the multifaceplicitous irreducibility of the human soul.

And in fact that’s what writing itself was all about and why writing wasn’t a career with formulas and protocols and swanky vocabularies and column inches to fit into, and facile post-modernist lacunas, and museums you had to go to—on sabbatical, for God’s sake—in order to force your failed relationship with your wife into a goddamn sarcophagus.

Writing was an attempt to capture in words the multiplicitousness of the human experience, not a single monetizable urge but everything, the all of it.

And Joyce was right.

Of course he was right!

He was James Joyce, for God’s sake.

Which means he was crazy.

Crazy right, that is.

Close to it, anyway.

*

Then you remembered that you were in this corporate coffee shop and it was its corporateness, not its state-ishness, that sought to reduce you. When Joyce said what he said, you remembered, he was thinking about Fascism, which was a big thing around that time. By “the state” he really meant the fascist state.

Not some corporate coffee shop. 

The bubbling brook of your eccentricly triumphant and epiphanic extrapolations had hit an upcropping of rocks and as a result was transforming into the white-water-y rapids of frustration and self-doubt.

But not for long, because you remembered in the nick of time that a big aspect of Fascism was its desire to own the means of production, to merge the state with “industry.” Nowadays, you thought, at least in America, we didn’t really define ourselves as an industrial economy. We thought of ourselves as a “service economy.” For instance, somebody else making you a nice cup of coffee and serving it up to you with a smile and letting you sit there in a shop that was carefully designed to give you a nice refined experience drinking it—well, they were performing a service along with providing an experience. You knew a service economy didn’t produce real wealth, like an industrial economy, but it did provide a capital gains-ish kind of wealth, which consisted mostly of numbers on a page and was mostly therefore an idea of wealth, not wealth itself. That is, nowadays wealth was a matter of financial shenanigans and the stock exchange and real estate and futures markets and all that.

What had been to the Fascists “Industrial Capitalism” was corporate capitalism now.

And while Fascism framed the merging of the state with “industry” as a matter of state takeover (thus, Nazism considered itself socialist), corporate capitalism saw this merger according to the inverse logic. Instead of the state taking over corporations, corporations were taking over the state and running it for their own purposes—ie., to make more money. For the capitalists and all. Think privatization and corporate lobbyists and senators being former corporate lawyers and lobbyists and hoping to go back to being corporate lawyers and lobbyists again after their terms in the senate were up. And all those fake charitable “foundations” that are actually tax evasion schemes to allow late-stage corporate capitalist fascismos like the Koch brothers to pay all those lobbyists working for them and all those think tanks and corporate propaganda mills.

Boy, were you on a roll! This was one of the best epiphanies you’d had in a long time!  The brook was bubbling quite happily again! The state, you thought triumphantly—the politico-corporate superstructure—is, after all, as centric as it ever was. Besides wanting to run your life from cradle to grave for its own profit it also wanted to tell you who you were—to reduce you, remember? That was a crucial aspect of the cradle to grave thing. They couldn’t run your life, your existence, if you thought you were someone you actually were. You had to think you were someone they wanted you to be—a consumer, a swanky drinker of fancy coffees, a professional, of course, with a career going happily and swankily right down into that greedy late-stage capitalist latté vortex. Thinking that you were someone who was defined by buying things. Or, furtherworse, that you existed only insofar as you bought things, that all you were was a buyer of things. Services. Things and services they’d designed for you so they could overcharge you for them and in the process of doing that induce you to forget the moral implications of what they were, all those corporate hacks.

Not who but what.

And what they wanted you to be.

Complicitous, that is.

With it all.

Art’s job, poetry’s job, you thought, story’s job, crazy Joycean stream-of-consciousness’s job, the job even of those wildly adulterous sodomy-istic Holy Sonnets that crazy old John Donne wrote, is to show you that you’re not some prefab idea of a person whose life can be run by others from cradle to grave and monetized like hell.

You were not a “consumer,” a “student,” a “teacher,” a “poet,” for God’s sake.

Or a professional. Someone with a career.

A poet with a career.

*

Poetry, you realized, can’t be a career. Poetry being a career made no sense. What kind of a career was poetry, after all?

To be a poet—or any kind of writer or artist that cared about their art more than their career—you practically had to be eccentric. Being eccentric wasn’t a career! Couldn’t possibly be! Careers were about protocols and methodologies, best practices and standard deviations. Careers were about going to conferences and networking and being extraverted all the time even if you’re an introvert. Careers were Ph.D.’s and cooking with cricket flour when it’s a big fad and has a lot of corporate backing, or even deciding through some clever linguistic sleight-of-hand that your ex-wife was a sarcophagus builder.

That latter might seem eccentric on the surface, you thought, but it really wasn’t. It was mostly just clever and well-educated and obscure in a kind of admirable college professor-ish way. Besides, it took going to a museum halfway around the world and reading all those little cards on the walls to even know all that stuff about sarcophagi.

That wasn’t eccentric.

That was something a professor would do.

On corporate government money.

It wasn’t poetry, for God’s sake.

All those things—even the sarcophagus stuff—those things were primarily about having a career. They were about being centric so you could do a good job and collaborate and make yourself a nice living and make the corporation a really nice living. Every day you got up, put on your straightjacket—your thought-protocols and methodologies and cleverness and all—and went to work.  But if you were a writer you knew how to slip out of the straightjacket when nobody was looking. If you were a writer you would find that tunnel, you know? The unused one. Where Jimmy Hoffa’s body was.

And go into it.

I mean, forget the damned coffee and the janitor and all that.

Who needs the janitor?

You’d go in and find Jimmy Hoffa’s body.

I mean really find it. Right there in that damned tunnel, with the rats and all, reeking of urine and littered with forgotten homeless people who’d gotten lost on their way to the river to throw themselves in. That’s why your story wouldn’t get published in a swanky magazine. The author of that particular story, bless his or her heart, or theirs, wasn’t eccentric enough to allow anything like that to happen. (S)he was too busy being post-modernist to even have the guts to go into that tunnel. After all, it’s not nice in there. It’s worse by far than that service corridor I was telling you about. No, better just stay in the lobby of the goddamned United Nations and talk with the janitor there. Who happened not to be in the service corridor muttering to himself anymore, although that was where he really belonged. Staying in the lobby, for both the author and the janitor, was easier and more aesthetically pleasing with all those flags hanging everywhere suggesting the world had achieved unity and peace. It also made the author seem very tolerant of others’ careers and respectful and not so elitist as he or she feared they were.

Swankier.

Being a professional, with a career—a career in writing.

Of all things.