musing on the purpose of unreliability
Sunday 30 July 2006 | I like a cookie
Our fallibility manifests today first in an extremely material form: it’s time for the annual host swap (always pinching pennies, we are, here at the Un—and $59 is better than $99). So we’re moving from Bluehost to Dreamhost. Next year it’ll be Toasthost, or Posthost, or Posthaste, or Posttoasties, or God knows what; but all this means for you, fair reader, is that we’ll be down anywhere from 24-72 hours and can’t even say when. There are DNS servers to be pointed toward something or other and registrars to be changed and databases to be backed up and trust us, we don’t understand a bleedin’ word of it, we just gawp at the WYSIWYG and, pace Byron Katie and sesshin, follow the simple instructions. (Where “simple” equals “ruddy incomprehensible.”) So if the URL vanishes for a day or two, don’t panic—I’m over here doing more than enough panicking for all of us.
But less physically, more pontificatingly: Isn’t the claim of unreliability also an act of liberation via disingenuity? If I append, as it were, to all my posts, “But hey, don’t believe me—I never know what I’m parping on about anyway,” then I’m much more free to utter my barbaric yawp, n’est-ce pas? As Mandarin in her new incarnation as world-honored one says, “I can barely believe what I think—how can I possibly believe what you think?” The reassignation of my assertions into the humble category of vast uncertainty—the free and open acknowledgement of my Menschliches, Allzumenschliches-ness, my all-too-humanity—the willing admission that any utterance of mine is as peccable as anyone else’s, and perhaps even more prone to solecism or veniality: This all, or so we desperately hope, renders that which might otherwise seem conceited or even just plain declarative into pliable, mutable, harmless vanilla acceptability. Defanged, as the old Fritz joke had it (”Q: What does an Arthurdantoist do? A: Defang the Nietzsche”).
But also, as with other ludicrously pomo interpretations thusly constructed, there’s a strong historical component: I am among the uncountable taught never to trust or honor their own perceptions, emotions or opinions. Viz. to wit., the majority of us in creative writing workshops who stammer, “But I don’t know, this could just be me,” when they’re trying to point out that maybe eyeball-sucking zombies aren’t the most believable elements of your verse drama. Or that frightening affectation of undergraduate girls, when they end all their sentences? With question marks? Thus I give it away, give it away, give it away now. Immediate porcine squealing. Do it to Julia, not to me. Turning state before I’ve even been poured the first styrofoam cup of oily interrogation coffee, before the yellow legal pad and leaking blue-black Bic have even been pushed across the table for my handcuffed confession.
What all this here fancy-like talk really means: Voldemort has left the building, at last. He’s revisiting his former pair of California Zen temples for a few days, home to Missouri for a week or so, and thence Naropa. Plus: I’ll have my freaking hometown back. Minus: I think of him telling various people various things, and all of them hurt to imagine. In these productions of my twisted fancy I become, and our train-wreck of a relationship becomes, the verbal equivalent of a blog tag. “Crazy girlfriend, 2004-2005, who behaved badly and [therefore?] so did I, but one of us had the sense to walk away.” Followed by relieved dusting of hands. The Priestess, witchy and crazed, slavering and wild-eyed, clutching her zafu, rocking back and forth on it, vowing Medean revenge. (For, as a wise[-ass] person once said, “Living well isn’t the best revenge. Revenge is the best revenge.”)
At this point I start laughing at my own rhetoric and in my head hear, from Waiting for Guffman, “Bo-ring, bo-ring, bo-ring, bo-ring…”
Because nothing ever happens on Mars.
Then, too, there’s my current contretemps with the Brujo, regarding a behavior of his which I find, to say the least, problematic; and which he may or may not be willing to discontinue. I hole up in my Cerro Gordo cave, watch it rain, think, write, sleep, eat, go for a walk, talk to Mandarin, laugh and cry, think some more. If I can validate what’s valid—not the stories, but the actual gut-churning, heart-pounding, nauseating experience I am undeniably having—then I can say only, simply, I feel sad out of measure—no. Just sad. Nothing special, and nothing disgusting or inadmissable or weak-minded. Just what it is.
(Who would’ve known, she marvelled, that the strike-through would become such a staple typographic tool of weevil eradication? The DBT proffers the insight that I, or more accurately them, are on an “extinction continuum.” This euphemistic phrase makes me nearly helpless with the kind of weepy laughter I now seem to experience in her office with some frequency.)
Voldemort, whom I did love out of measure, without much restriction and with very little expectation, has left. I won’t ever see or speak to him again unless I seek him out, which I can’t imagine doing; while it’s painful to imagine never seeing him again (not historically my style; I usually stay or try to stay friends with my exes, God knows why), it’s far more painful to imagine the alternative. That bright happy uncluttered smile of his. How much easier and less foully complicated and healthier his life now, due to the salutary absence of crazy mentally interesting me. Oh, never mind that the same is true and in spades for me—never mind that he was increasingly an abusive wanker—I’m a romantic poet, goddammit, and I retain the right to be destroyed by sexual rejection, devastated and flattened like Dresden, like Pompeii, and to remake myself in deity’s image, arising from the ashes with red hair and eating lowfat Pringles like air! Or something like that.
As for the beloved Brujo…well, in this novel and historically unprecedented case, my lover seems repeatedly willing for me to feel the things I feel, and to express whatever preferences and requests I wish. Unlike V. (who so often said, heroically, “I’m not scared of you,” and then fled like a headless turkey), the Brujo really doesn’t seem scared of me, or at least not for very long at a time. My involuntary initial judgments don’t seem to drive him into such self-loathing that he has to lash out at me and make me lesser-than in order to survive his own screeching weevils. Or, maybe this time they will—I don’t know the whole story. I don’t have to know. I don’t have to be a reliable narrator. Hell, I don’t even have to write. All I have to do is type. I can type.
And I can change webhosts without losing two hundred blog posts! I can do it! Bodhi wahoo!
(Though it seems I still can’t utter affirmations without efflorescing sarcasm. A few days ago, driving through the hell realms of lower Cerrillos, the Brujo casually mentioned his inability to affirm his lovability, giftedness, beauty, etc., without simultaneously wrenching his face into pained contortions of disbelief and self-contempt. “Well, I could say affirmations for you; it’s not hard for me,” I offered. He looked at me, as they say, askance. “I can’t even tell you how codependent that sounds. Um, ‘I can’t say affirmations, but I don’t have to, because my girlfriend says them for me’?!” I nearly choked on my aguacate paleta, larfing.)
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