Typing email addresses into the login page for a blog whose name I don’t even remember. But this is me, now, here, in Los Angeles, in 2010. Not then, there, in college in Chicago five years ago. Sense of self temporarily rendered weirdly contiguous.
I’m not constantly measuring my surroundings to myself now; I’m elsewhere. Either I live my life so far into the future I’m planning someone else’s party, or I’m so passionately in a moment that any real ego drowns under the wave of explicit presence.
I’m pretty sure this boils down to a complex evolved gene propagation strategy I can’t consciously understand (constant expression of doubt, obsession with cognitive bias, obsessed with the possibility that your…)
Drinking. Even stupid shit is too much for me. Lost cause. Done. Over. If I don’t understand already, no one can show me.
This morning I found something irresistible on the beach.
Not a commercial for an amusement park ride, that carried one passenger past a rapid sequence of Dali and Deitch images; or a Carter-era one-liner. (Like, what is it but crotch?) Or a beautifully lit Arthurian romance or its pink “other side.” (Pirates.)
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The ultimate fantasy is to write about a fantasy, because fantasy is measurably quantum indeterminate: when you are conscious of fantasy as fantasy, it changes; it rejects measurement.
But what happens to it? Where does it go? Unlike Shroedinger’s cat, it is not penned in a steel cage.
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The components of a fantasy are in debit to memory; drawn from prior experience, memory, sound, sight. (At least in part.) In this regard is fantasy not a means of disguising a familiar experience and repressing it?
But when a fantasy is amplified beyond a critical point it becomes manifest, and then repressed itself; replaced by a physical symptom, like desperate travel, or writing about a fantasy.
What was it that I found irresistible? The impulse to humble my fantasy before myself; disclose it to JC Kollmorgen (or a beautiful exotic stranger); radically interrupt myself in desperate travel and writing about a fantasy.
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(Rick and George make this joke whenever they notice that a scene has been set in a paradisaical or tropical landscape; their next movie is going to be set in the Bahamas.)
Having a service job is the bones. K introduced me to one of her friends, a frigid little apple from Vermont, over the holiday.
“My name is Alex,” I said.
“How can I help you?” I wanted to continue.
I see her picture. I want to be able to weep like a child.
What is the story of Rand’s The Fountainhead? It is not the story of politics.
The allegation that politics are politics is a fantasy. Politics are love, sexual love, unto stone. The authority to allocate the love and hopes of men and women into a regulated quantum.
Politics are not the practices of governance. These practices are, in all societies, a clever minority’s malign diversion.
A prank on the other side of the room. By the door to the men’s lavatory.
The men at the table turn to look. They are entertained by the interruption. But while they are distracted, politics are spirited off of the poker table, up into a minority’s sleeve, in a whisper of a single motion.
Why do I remember it? Because it is not an administrative philosophy, and it is not a practical guide to governance. The Fountainhead represents only the story of Augustus. And in the way of an explanation into why such a man does not exist except 1900 years in the past offers Howard Roarke. And because so little has changed since The Fountainhead in terms of the contest between politics and governance, and so much has changed since the world knew a leader, like Augustus, who inspired valor and virtue in his people; who could trust his army to police and judge itself based on his own virtuous example; whose subjects looked upon a man and said: there is something that is somehow more than a man, though I know he is composed of the same matter as any man such as myself.
I had been accumulating and studying women all my life. Once, long. Until the delusion of love lost its power over me. And each casual conversation magnified my sense of the hollowness of the pursuit to which I had dedicated my adolescence.
Caught, to pass time in the company of other people. There were the remaining hours of the week to think about. And a handful of mechanical distractions to make me endurable. Like sex, reading, exercise, or travel.
Lacking even the combativeness to feel truly bad. And anything except “otherness” toward my body and the deadening depersonalization of anti-psychotics, anti-depressants. And paranoid-depressive battered, breaded, fried … food of thought.
Dad’s rejection of any creative contribution and the realization that he innocently, blamelessly, disliked me.
And then I watched her humiliate herself each day, each night, each morning, over each coffee, at each movie, when we slept in the same bed, in the same room, with the faces she made during love, by a man’s cheapest and most contemptible controls. I watched each smile, frown, tear, laugh; the conclusions of incomplete information.
The young woman my lies betrayed was subjected to a growing list of humiliating insults, until she could not help becoming reduced in my eyes. Before I knew it, the woman I was lying to—strangely, and never myself—appeared to be the one of us with unfortunate limitations.
Was it naive? Charitable?
Inevitable?
Devices for disrupting the conventions of a closed fictional story intent on the creation of its own reality: How to corral the herd.
- Take Une Femme, specifically the lovemaking minuet between A Karina and Brialy, her lover: How to reproduce a touch so light.
- To construct from a bare apartment a night club, never-never land: How to adore objects with a camera.
“Man dies in service of country, magnets, glass.”
My nostalgia for the short story outputs into the circuit of nostalgia for the film. That output is fed into my nostalgia for C., who Audry reminds me of. The total forms a feedback loop when inputted into nostalgia for the film itself again, oscillating in gain dynamically scene to scene.
