Rant
Listening
to Last Car to Elysian Fields one of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux
novels I try to listen the way I read but
I cant I cant stop and look away turn back and make a note in the margin watch it expand to run inside out and upside
down around the page attaching itself to
the text in arrows and asterisks I can
only think vaguely of how Theodosia tells Dave he has unresolved anger issues meaning he is
angry most of the time and how Dave describes Castille LeJeune’s
attachment to the truth as tenuous if
not non-existent he’d just as soon lie as tell the truth Dave doesn’t draw the inference – and there
aren’t many inferences he doesn’t draw – that that means as well LeJeune would
just as soon tell the truth as lie because
truth and lie are all the same to him because
life doesn’t distinguish or because it can’t
be reduced to truth any more than families can be made into trees Dave has a great regard for the truth a great stake in finding and establishing it hence his anger it is those that believe in Truth that are angriest
in a world that can’t tell the truth from a lie the world has no regard for the truth it has no stake in our search for it; it doesn’t
rush to help its slovenly untidiness hinders
In the end – whoever God was or is or is not will be or will not be pale Ramon the world has no blessed rage for order nor does it bless our rage to it however enraged we become we are Punch and Judy
it is –
the world – like Kawai Jōji’s little house under Naomi’s management
At
first, Naomi had looked after the house and done the cooking, but this didn’t
go on for more than six months or a year. An even bigger problem than the
laundry was the house: it got messier and dirtier every day. She left her
clothes wherever they fell and her dishes wherever they happened to be when she
stopped eating. The house was littered with plates, bowls, and tea cups, their
contents half-consumed. There was soiled underwear everywhere. The floor,
chairs, and tables were always covered with dust; the dingy India-print
curtains had lost all of their original charm. The atmosphere of our bright “birdcage”
– our fairy-tale house – had changed completely, and the stuffy rooms assaulted
the nose with the smell of neglect. At one point I became so annoyed I said, “All
right, I’ll clean up. You go out into the garden.” I set to work sweeping and
dusting, but the more I cleaned, the dustier everything got. And I didn’t know
where to begin straightening up the things that were scattered all over the
house.
- from Junichiro Tanizaki’s Naomi,
a
novel (so far as I’ve gotten) about entropy how order becomes disorder – the order was
never real – about how a man’s bright ideal becomes grimy obsession it is Adam (and God) and Eve (and the Serpent)
all over again and we know from the
beginning because we know their story that the woman and her pet snake (or the snake
and his pet woman) will prevail because the Cosmic Order the Creator of the
Universe is so proud of – “and it was good and it was good and it was very good ” – is a sham he doesn’t see what he has created only what
he wishes he had he
only wishes he’d created free will: the
man has no choice; he is besotted with the woman – with the smell of her the way his lips fit in the curve beneath her
jaw with the weightless weight of her
breasts in her hands and frankly with
the way the inside of her clasps the outside of him; he can’t not accept her
gift – her breasts are like apples her
sex like its pulp Eden’s order was a lie anyway if it were not exposed now it would be later If it were not brought to light his way it would be another “let there be light” - not just that which
glances off the neat surfaces of what God has made but that which sees into its innards where the Goldberg cobbles together a machine to
repair machine to repair machine because
all collapsing under the weight of their irreplaceable parts
there’s
the truth
Naomi
and Jōji return from a dance at a café They
part with their friends heading in
another direction and go to stand on the
platform waiting for the last train It’s a windy late-winter night “My heart was full of the loneliness that follows
merriment” Jōji writes “Naomi didn’t
feel anything of the sort” in the same
tribe as those that search for the truth expecting to find it are those that
reflect on what has happened for something - some understanding – that will
redeem it, so it is not only vanity (הֵבֵל). no
all
is vanity the wise man says can there be deception where there is no
regard for the truth – if for the deceiver” truth does not exist or falsehood – only a kaleidoscope of circumstances
there
is the search for the truth on the one hand and there is what will happen to us when we
find it as Jōji begins to uncover Naomi’s
deceptions I stop reading I put the book aside I can’t be surprised by what he will find any more
than he can be since his is telling the
story after the fact but the truth – the
kind he is uncovering and the kind Dave Robicheaux discovers there
are things we are better off not knowing
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