Go-golly, how much?

January 29-30, 2010

Go-golly, how much?

“A garment is always a travesty.” – Leon Stilman in his afterword to Gogol’s The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (1960).

 “The Overcoat.”  At least poor Akaky Akakievich returns as a ghost, if only for a matter of days – if only the rumor of a ghost.

 “Diary of a Madman.”  Talking lap dogs, fish speaking in hieroglyphics.

     “A dog is an extraordinary politician and notices everything, every step a human takes.” Moreover, he can disappear into the furniture and watch unseen, even in plain sight. Like a child.

“I need spiritual food and I am served these inanities.”  Who said that?  What if I need inanities and I have to eat – and most solemnly – spiritual food, having been in the kitchen and knowing what goes into the pot.

The friends you have as a child, when there are nothing but inanities (profound though they may be): why do those friendships “work”? come with so little friction?  It isn’t that you haven’t yet learned pretense – you begin learning that in the crib – but you reserve it for your relationships with adults.

     Then you become an adult. Or, you pretend you have.

It isn’t only pretense that makes us successful, however. It’s luck, and where luck fails trickery, and whether trickery fails (or succeeds) a forgiving conscience.

How forgiving?

     The earthquake in Haiti has at least expanded the radio’s attention from dollars and cents to dollars and destruction, though with due emphasis on the dollars and cents needed to fix the destruction. Don’t send food. Don’t send water. Don’t send medicine. Send dollars. Dollars!

     Did you hear about the Lehman Brothers executive that gave his entire six-burglazillion-dollar bonus to Haitian relief?  Of course not! You did hear, though, that Hollywood raised 4.4 bogusillion in exchange for only several hours of face time on several outlets around the globe (meaning the northwestern quadrasphere).

Here’s the epigraph in context:

     “ ‘They receive you according to your clothes, they see you off according to your wits,’ says a Russian proverb. Arkady never had wits, but for one day in his life he had decent clothes and was received accordingly . . . . But is not a garment also a disguise? Is it not deceit to be received according to your clothes, not according to what you really are? Arkady in his new overcoat had no more wit, or virtue, than in the older one. He was welcomed and feted thanks to a travesty. But a garment is always a travesty, and one has to wear a garment. A man dies of exposure if he chooses not to wear one and to be undisguised, to be himself.”

travesty. [from Fr. travesty pp. of travestir, to disguise; It. travestire, from L. trans, over, and vestire, to dress] so “disguised by dress so as to be ridiculous; burlesqued.

                 n. 1. a burlesque treatment, imitation, or translation for purposes of ridicule.
    2. a crude and ridiculous representation; a ludicrous distortion. Wall Street. Hollywood. The radio.

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