Because some of the people who read this are relying on me to be rational and cogent, if not apt, and because this business is anything but rational, though I'd like to think I'm being at least partially cogent, if not apt, it's only going to be here for a little while. And then it'll join its brothers and sisters at Run Run Duck. Regular irregularities will resume any moment.
-
Kathleen Sullivan's voice, in the interviews posted at Rigorous Intuition, her writing voice - is hard for me to read and accept, it has all the earmarks of a formal mind-set - jargon and learned vocabulary, the rote repetition of terminology and adopted identity - but just now it occurred to me that of course someone would sound like that if what she says happened to her has any validity at all, if what she says or something like it did happen to her; people back from the edge of overwhelming trauma that subverts the consensus reality and thus has no comforting blanket of ready acceptance, they aren't going to be normal, are they? So that if what she says, any of it, is true, she's only got a real small amount of beleaguered support, and a massive force of resistance, opposition, and threat stacked up against her.
So I'm writing this. Not because I believe her or disbelieve her, but because I remember. I remember Ricky Gasius who they told me jumped off the Bixby Creek Bridge, I remember him not being allowed to go with me and Polly camping, I remember the thick dark oily murk behind his beaming face as we talked at the door of his house, and the woman who told him no he couldn't go. He was adopted. He ended up a street waif in Carmel, one of the richest towns in the world even then, and he was cute and little and blonde. I remember us holding each other under the porch of that abandoned house in Monterey where I got the cask to make my first and best drum, and I remember him telling me something then I can't remember anymore.
Something happened.
I tried to get some of it down earlier, here, back in November 2002 - it's thin, sketchy, but what I wrote then still has the truth in it, as I remember it, there's no blurring of edges, and the supposition is clearly marked as supposition.
Something happened. And then other things happened, and eventually there was so much that had happened and the convolutions were so thickly massed there was no way to get to a center that was calm and clear, just murk and awfulness, and underneath it all a Pavlovian terror. And somewhere in there a kind of pastless innocence that a lot of people found attractive, because it had that joyous untainted perfection that's possible when you're only from right here right now, when the roots of your personality don't go anywhere real.
I'm not offering this as guide or evidence of anything, it just fits, and it comes right after I let myself imagine just now that what Kathleen Sullivan's saying might have some truth in it, might have a lot of truth in it, even if it isn't the narrative she presents, exactly as she presents it .
The world is no longer safe enough to hide in. And hiding is all I want, really - to get away from it. But there's no way to do that. Not and keep what seems to be the minimal amount of humanity I need to do the things I really want to do - write honestly, make good art, be funny - those things require integrity, personal integrity anyway, self-honesty, even if the more mundane forms of honesty aren't that important. Lying to bad people is no great sin, lying to ignorant people who mean you harm is no great sin either. But like I said in the earlier post,
"there are others out there".
I'm in a weird spot with this because most of what I write is monitored by unsophisticated ignorant people, among others, to whom I feel no debt whatsoever - but doing anything for the ones I meant by "others out there" means tacitly educating those ignorant people, and that means speaking in terms they can comprehend, in concepts they can understand, and that fills me with revulsion. Because it's that mass ignorance that made this stuff possible, enabled it, and enables it, that mass pathology that allowed all the weird shit to take place practically in full daylight, while people just turned away at the slightest sign of anything uncomfortable and too strange to be entertaining.
Something happened, then other things happened, then it just got too hard to keep going. Trance states. I remember for a while there I'd fugue out around anything to do with homosexuals, which of course is a clinical template for repressed homosexuality. Though if what I'm saying is true, and if what Sullivan's saying is true, there are other causes for that trance-state response.
None of this is going to get dealt with by healthy individuals, because there aren't any, only the healthy-by-comparison to the more damaged. Which is all it takes to make the less valorous feel good about themselves. I'm less fucked-up than you are, we're less fucked-up than they are, nyah nyah.
Prime images for me, that hold the rest within them if I could just get down to it, are that time in Ione the linked post is about, with the screaming and the smell, and one day at high school when I was a senior, at lunch, by myself in a little courtyard, under this tree, and thinking that they were on me bigtime, that something much more powerful than me was seriously fucking with me, and I'd called this shrink who'd helped me a lot the year before but he was gone, down in Mexico they said, and I can remember trying to memorize everything about what was there, and what made it through all the years and all the poisons and all the forgetting to me now here writing this is that sense of being 18 years old and up against what felt like an empire of viciousness, alone, and nowhere to go with it.
Right behind that is a vivid memory of being at home, that same year around that same time, and a car pulling into the driveway, and these guys getting out and coming up to the door fast, and looking at first glance like three of my friends, and they came to the door and shoved in past me, and I remember really clearly seeing that the one I thought was my friend Freddy, skinny like him with a full head of thick brown hair, was shorter than Freddy and he was wearing a toupee, and that was shocking to me, and I sort of remember him as having a limp though that's not nearly as clear as the toupee. That's real. That happened.
And then something else happened. Because whoever they were they were there for a reason.
You get used to it I think, enough that you can make it go away. You can live as though it didn't happen. That's how it works. But it doesn't. You just end up with less of what you are to carry into the days ahead.
So here we go again.

put here 12:57 PM

archives