[b]Bianco Luno
what you don’t want to hear
38
It is important for me that you see me as a threat[/b]
Here it is not important, however, whether this point of view is a reasonable one. Instead it is a reasonable point of view if – for all practical purposes – it has become important to me that I describe things this way. For, say, whatever reason.
Besides, it’s not like I can really know if what I intend it to mean is what the author intended it to mean 17 years ago. In fact, I don’t even see the point in asking him.
And why should I not aim my own at times caustic, cantankerous [and occasionally calculated] cynicism at those I feel are not warranted in rejecting it? After all, if something makes sense to me I don’t embrace it by tolerating what does not make sense. And it’s not like I don’t also see things the other way around.
I’m just being realitstic. The fact is that, over the years, I have managed to embrace any number of additonal, contradictory vantage points regarding what Emile Cioran framed as “the trouble with being born”. In other words, I’m certainly not here to judge your point of view about it; even though [if you don’t endorse mine] I just did.
[b]Bianco Luno
“At times we must choose between the lesser of two evils.”
In a democracy, when is this not the case?[/b]
Why? Perhaps because [in nearly every case] what we see as good will almost certainly be seen by another as evil.
Pain assures me that criticism, in the guise of some altruism, is impossible.
Criticism always becoming just a point of view.
[b]Having been brutalized by some youthful illusion, now our business is to “be real”. On and on like this until this perception, too, is undone.
In the paper I read about a graduate student shooting himself in the head in Ravenna Park.
Academically outstanding, athletic, lots of caring friends, active in social causes, close family…but though he counseled others well, everyone repeats, he was unforthcoming about his own deepest concerns, etc.
(An advertisement for a crisis clinic is appended to the article.)
He must have had some?
And he was articulate and we have a sound or gesture in the language for every feeling and what we can’t express others, given the chance, would surely be able to infer, all of us, of course, partaking in the same humanity?
(I am compelled to lend these handy assertions the inflection of a question.)[/b]
Similarly, whenever I ingest the news I invaribly react in the same manner. Every exclamation point always ends in a question mark.
[b]Bianco Luno
“So much pent up hatred…”
You say this with a very public sympathy, as though it might be relieved against them, or as though it wouldn’t be trained on you.
If injustice existed I would hate less.[/b]
On the other hand:
Hatred in an essentially absurd and meaningless world is no less hatred. But it would be so much more appealing in one that was not essentially absurd and meaningless.
Still, I understand the yearning for injustice. If it existed then so would justice. And, perhaps, the hatred could be subsumed in the realization that you at least know what is injust.
But there is still the problem of “I” tumbling over the abyss into oblivion. What of justice and injustice then?
No, we still need a loving, just and merciful God before any of this can – ultimately – matter.
[b]Bianco Luno:
Consensus as an expression of the face: the eyes appear to glaze over.[/b]
Depends on the concensus though. And, of course, your distance from it. One says things like this in order to appear above it. And that is easy enough to do in a world of words. And there surely must be a consensus to confirm that trolls are to words what words are to trolls: vents?
[b]Bianco Luno:
When my ex-wife left me I came close to killing myself.
I groveled before her, unable to breathe because I couldn’t hate her without seeing my own wretched image.
That May the cherry blossoms and the weather were especially lovely.[/b]
Sometimes it unfolds like this and sometimes it doesn’t. Does it matter?
[b]Bianco Luno:
“The truth shall make you free,”
in much the same way death will.[/b]
But the truth – whatever you insist that cannot possibly be – is of far less use to you after you die.
Registered and went to vote.
Tore my ballot into four pieces and placed it in the slot.
In a democracy, “if enough people…,” blah, blah, blah.
If enough people don’t…ditto.
It’s easy enough to be cynical about democracy when you go trolling to impugn it. But voters really do put into office the most despicable kind of scumbags.
Is there really any viable alternative but to get them out?
Or should we go much farther and troll for revolutionaries.
[b]Bianco Luno:
How do you imagine that I see myself?
Sometimes as a precocious boy, more often as an imbecile.
But these are not offered as a sordid bouquet of suspiciously convenient self-deprecations.
The hatred I have is too great yet for a boy or an imbecile and never releases you from its sight.[/b]
Trust me: he is a man who knows how to take hatred lightly. And an imbecile only in the most ironic sense. Yet it took me years to understand why. I still refuse to take it lightly myself.
Not while going about the business of lving in this world.
When my ex-wife left me I nearly died.
We were hardly married, and to the extent we were, what did that mean?
The ceremony, held in her apartment, was witnessed by two deadbeats living next door, kindly interrupting their fishing trip to toast us.
She baked a cherry pie, which we all shared.
The county collected forty dollars.
The affair seemed to mean something to her.
We were together two and one half years.
My last year as an undergraduate I lived with a woman, and when she left me I nearly died too.
(Grist for a mill.)
What an image, what a relief it should have been!
For many years the ‘you’ in these notebooks was her.
I can’t be sure anymore who it is.
It was never me though. I became a troll and I mocked him. The “nihilist” he called me. Oddly enough I called myself a “Nihilist” back then.
[b]Bianco Luno:
When I see her (rarely) on the street, after a short nervous exchange, she wants to give me a hug goodbye.
It seemed to mean something to her, and yet I was the one who nearly drove his…car into a concrete wall.[/b]
A witty example of being fragmented. What does something mean to you when it means other things too? We become embarrassed and so we usually keep these things to ourselves.
Or disguise them as philosophy?
A generation later, in his second Sketchbook, Frisch is closer to where I am now; I am thinking of the irony with which he says he believes in the constitutional state.
What will I think at his age?
Max Frisch* explored an elusive relationship between human identity and alienation. But surely this can be probed more forthrightly in a constitutional state.
After all, think about the irony of being called a troll in, say, Saudi Arabia.
- A few MAXims:
A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth.
Dignity: the doomed man’s final refuge.
I have no words for my reality.
Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.
Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.
You can put anything into words, except your own life.
We asked for workers. We got people instead.
[b]Bianco Luno:
If we knew what was wrong with her, we could insult her as well as mistreat her.
~
How dank, musty and pointedly male the perspective is here.
My unacknowledged responsibility for others and contempt for consensus—whom am I faulting as an impediment to my individuation?
Don’t I sometimes feel the caricature of boyish striving to trash the ‘ties-that-bind-us’?
I value (so predictably) the individual disproportionately?
How long can I go on degrading the connection that is essentially all that we are and can become?
It is my contention that the conflict between individuals and—not other individuals but—the relations they enter into is undeveloped.
The fall into one another’s arms must be so hard it almost kills (and in some cases does)—or else, it is no tragedy at all and the truth was never more than an inscrutable whisper in a prenatal dream.
~
My ex-wife was concerned with the relationship between us—and laudably took action.
~
As for me, I wanted to individualize myself against that unforgiving rock wall.[/b]
Here is the mind of a man who probed the mind of a man often accused of misogyny: Otto Weininger
Trolls across time probing their place [and the role of gender] amidst the masses by provoking, well, not the masses, right?
We are, after all, uncommon, aren’t we?
[b]Bianco Luno:
The radio reports a street kid’s comment from Rio de Janeiro, a city cleared of hordes of street children just before an Earth Summit: “I am an addict of everything.”[/b]
Or think of all the trolls portrayed in the film Bus 174. Some, it seems, just can’t help but tell us things we don’t want to hear.
Depending on who they are and who we are of course.