Nowhere Ever Again

I

To restore what had been assumed lost but saved. I wish I could say succinctly just what reading has been, has meant, has represented, has done for me. What then must I do to convey to you . . . The Unbearable Lightness of Being. When did I read it?  I recall having read it, although I do not recall the year. I recall having said something about not liking it while I was reading it but loving having read it. What was that supposed to mean? I didn’t quite  say what I was trying to say. I often fall short of saying what I intend to convey. I was attempting  to say something witty about how I felt while, and how I felt after? Wondering how words never say what they mean at, or is that the other way around? Words never mean what they say at . . . something Addy said.

Now that was how many decades ago. Decades of reading for this reader. I did not finish The Reader. I saw the film. Wondering is a large part of existence, I remember a friend’s father had said to me once, where we were I cannot see, parallel lines on the horizon, railroad tracks descending, the earth is curved became a fact. What the hell do any of us know about existence? To be, to exist, I have forgotten what the differences were between being and existence, at least for the Existentialists. I think the difference here is that this is a posture for me the author, although it is not for me the narrator or expositor, whichever one it is for you–I am all of them; each of them? Different, this all from this each, which one is not every one, every one of them not all of them together we know–how is every one of them not togetherness? I still have so many questions to ask.

What if I were a character in one of his novels? I did like reading Kundera when I was an undergraduate . . . what does it mean to say that, to think that I should say that, want to say that agin as if it meant something I was sure others knew without my being able to explicate that something . . . I do not know what this says (or that prior something says), nor do I what I have intended by saying it . . . not it, but these . . . words, yes words and more words, streams of words, flowing words, water from a faucet . . . streams over falls, rivers over falls . . . I am a character in my own writing–no? Who is this speaking to you as you read what I have written for you to read–does anyone ever completely forget he is reading when reading? Everyone is a character in his or her life–the world, the stage, they are interchangeable, we should be able to understand this, stand under, become post to another lintel and another lintel, everyone fixed on personality, all personality again maskality, person is persona is mask we know have known used to know more readily, easily, having dexterity with these in words and other words and more words extended in line after line . . .

Context is improvisation. each of us does play many, many parts. Who would I be, though? Who could I become? Who would be with me, who would I be with? She? Pronoun after pronoun, why do some people insist on proper names in references rather than pronouns . . . the mirror is a stage, on not in, no? On stage . . . in a movie, in the mirror.

II

The most spoken pronoun in the mirror, which is it—I or you? He and she? What about him and her? She who is with him, she who is near him, she who stays over his apartment until morning, they are having coffee when she asks what she asks how she asks it of him. He who is–I am already many as I have said elsewhere before and elsewhere afterwards. Is it courage, though, that Oedipus has? You don’t think it would take courage. Would it have to be something else before he got to the stage of doing the deed which would require this courage? There would have to be courage of convictions, a sense of duty or responsibility that would go before this cutting out of the eyes. None of us has what Oedipus had. We can’t conceive of what he does. Can you? I know I can’t, not really, what would I do? Do I think I could do what he did? No.

We talk-talk around the idea of responsibility, but so long as it is another person who needs to take it, or how we do take responsibility but in words that circle around the notion without ever penetrating to the heart of the idea—ideas have hearts and sinew and flesh and blood and we have to have blood—how many bloodless fools do we listen to?Passion is in the blood; emotion is all surface, all frantically kinetic in the head.

III

There is not, nor has there ever been, any age, any culture, any society more full of shit than this one today here in America. We stink through future ages, for all the world to smell. I’m sick. Shit shit and more shit everywhere shit, a river of shit I am floating in without a paddle, upstream in a river of shit—would it matter if down stream? I read it when I was he, another me when I was an undergraduate.

He had discovered existentialism when he was a young college student, reading Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, and  Albert Camus. I read the same as you might have suspected. I read them in college where and when I first contacted them, thinking to myself that I was an Existentialist, saying this I can’t imagine how many times–no one I went to school with thought of himself or herself as an Existentialist. What does it mean to say this? But I was an Existentialist–I am one now, if I were pushed to say what philosophical camp I belonged in.

Why do I think ‘in’ is more appropriate to end a sentence with than ‘to?’ This is not the same as ending a sentence with the preposition itself functioning as a preposition and not as the name of the grammatical unit, thus a noun. I do think it is okay to end a sentence with ‘in’ and not ‘to.’ Why must we bicker about idiocies? It seems so much of our lives is spent in useless activities, which are not exactly what we mean when we say how sweet it is to do nothing. I want to do nothing more in my free time than read. To read or not to read has been a forgotten question of our existence, of our civilizations survival, having forgotten just how much reading, writing, literacy, advance literacy has meant to the building of civilization that most Post-post Structuralist fools have abandoned or demolished in their heads because they assumed they were liberating us from drowning in the currents of imperialism and colonialism, but puppies out with their flea bath water?