Keeping Track

December 5, 2014

Lies, Damn Lies, and Indexes

“Writing is lying.” So I’ve been told – more than once; it’s the way one word changes the next. So you start out to say one thing and end up with some thing quite else. More than once, too, I've been told: “If you’re going to start lying, you had better keep good track.” So, over the last little while, I’ve been compiling an index of The Ambiguities.

I find, looking back through, I have lied about a lot of different things, though mostly I’ve been guilty of what I’ll call here “lies of omission.” That is, I haven’t so much lied on purpose as I’ve written about stuff I don’t know enough about to tell the truth. Big example! – I’ve written about religion. 

           I’m thinking that I’ll hear my own confession and confer my own absolution on that, however. No one knows enough to tell the truth about religion; and no one ever stops telling. 

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Lately I’ve been reading E. M. Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair. This young Cioran does not “like prophets any more,” he says, “than I like fanatics who never [doubt] their mission.” But, he is himself a prophet. He's the prophet of despair, who has never doubted his own. He doesn't doubt his own agony, his own anguish, his own misery; and he doesn't doubt his metaphysics. Because he is young, he knows all the big stuff, and his big stuff is not only big, it is Romantic.

Back street in Bucharest - fog.

     He knows, for example, that he’s against form, because “form always tends to complete what is fragmentary,” though somehow, at the same time, it also eliminates “the perspective of the universal and the infinite.” “The penchant for form comes from love of finitude, the seduction of boundaries.”  Therefore, it can “never engender metaphysical revelations.”

Ah, metaphysics, metaphysics. It’s air; it's so much foul-smelling or sickly sweet-smelling – or both: so much horseshit-smelling – fog. I don’t want to smell the fog. I want to see through it. Better, I want it to lift. Show me instead the houses, the shops, the people outside in the sun, drinking and arguing at the café tables, hurrying arm–in-arm along the street. The joy, such as it is, any joy there is is here.

But Cioran isn’t writing of joy; he’s writing of despair (dammit). The problem with the joyous is that they have no “genuine” sense of irony. 

     Lacking a sense of irony, I assure you, is not something I’ve ever been accused of, but for Cioran my irony can’t be genuine, because it doesn’t despair enough. It doesn’t toil unrelentingly enough, it doesn’t dig and delve deeply enough, it doesn’t tumble then gurgling into its own endless dark hole. My irony is only “skeptical,” which for Cioran is a near synonym of “lighthearted”; it skips along and loses sight of itself; it doesn’t, well, wallow.

          My God, is it possible that I am not sufficiently self-absorbed? Well, I am not like the good young Emile that counsels himself: “Let not the pettiness and rationality of commonplace existence [the shops and houses and sidewalk café conversations] spoil the pleasures and torments of my inner chaos, the tragic delights of my final despair . . . .” I'm not like that. At least, I'm not like that anymore.

Here is another reason to create an index: because despair is not final. Nothing is. Something will always come after.

          I’m reminded of an insight teased out of me by my Uncle Albert’s inability to wallow; I’ve written this before: The epic begins in medias res, in the middle of things. Stories in life, however epic or trivial, end there.

          So despair can’t be final, even if it comes at the end of the story, because the story ends in the middle.  And even after the end, there’s an index.

 r