Thursday, April 23, 2020

BALTHAZAR (Fiction for a Sad Rainy Day)

Balthazar is not a real person.  I just made him up so I could write a dialogue, or think about one, anyway.  I intend him to be opposite to me but somehow overlapping like a Venn diagram.  I made him up because unlike me who spends time pondering about “sex” — at least what this culture calls “sex” which is pretty narrow and predetermined — Balthazar doesn’t think about it at all.  He just does it. He enacts thought with his body.

This is mostly fiction, made up, but other parts are real.  All writers draw from life, because what choice do we have?  Yet we two were not like that woman who has become famous for stories she found in old newspapers, sitting at tables with one short leg in the moldy basements of historical societies and small town libraries.  They reflect the interests of people who know little about the world outside their own, a defensive strategy in a world that has gone back to the danger of world wars with money meaning more than guns.  Why kill people when you can entrap them into systems that are more profitable?

Maybe you know about Edward Said’s book called “Orientalism,” which intrigued a lot of people.

Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author developed the idea of "Orientalism" to define the West's historically patronizing representations of "The East"—the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Said argued that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern World, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power., 

“According to Said, in the Middle East, the social, economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab elites indicate they are imperial satraps who have internalized the romanticized "Arab Culture" created by French, British and, later, American Orientalists; the examples include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Joseph Conrad, which conflates a people, a time, and a place into a narrative of incident and adventure in an exotic land.”   (Wiki)

I try to apply the ideas to the autochthonous people of the rez.  (Not all of them.)  Actually, a lot of people (like my family) think of all people of color as belonging to this category — dark, mysterious, and probably dangerous.  To be avoided.  But I was attracted.  

The characteristic Balthazar and I shared most was resistance to attachment, both of us but for quite different reasons.  Mine was to preserve objectivity as I had been taught in seminary, to distance the intensely emotional so as to consider it accurately.  His was to walk through the experience, add it to the others, and emerge from the other side, knowingly.  My stance which in seminary we had called “standing outside the theological circle” — knowing but not believing — made him curious.  He wished to believe, but had not found anything worth commitment.  In truth, neither did I.  

I’m not sure we understood what “believe” meant. Most people seem to understand it as some kind of leap of faith, but we were thinking more along the lines of testing experience, endless and contingent on the nature and state of the believer.  Some interpret “believing” as a kind of dependence but we loathed dependence as just another entrapment.

So — sex, religion, and I suppose the next big category we shared might be called scientific knowledge, knowing everything and understanding it all.  Cosmic, molecular, atomic, “deep time”, “thick history” — the new understanding, a total renewal of “reading” without print that includes the isotopes of rocks, the magnetic capacities of bird brains, and what living things still manage to float in the ocean between scraps of plastic.

This new vision did not include a big parent in the sky who might or might not save us, but rather gave us the legitimacy of our own selves, soulless, wingless, harpless, but part of everything else, crucial to the minute unfolding of time that accrued to existence.

For a while Balthazar had been an opera singer, a tenor in small venues, vibrant but undisciplined, which is forbidden in opera since the plot lines hold the melodrama.  So for a while he ran a boy band where they were undisciplined as well as melodramatic, if not operatic.  That was more fun, he said, but everyone accused him of the major sin of the moment, which was sex with boys, though women having sex with important men soon became a more popular thing to condemn.  I suspect he actually did “sex work” as a definable occupation but we never talked about it.  How could we?  I knew nothing that wasn’t in a book.  (Not novels.)

My literary life, which I disguised by living on a rez, was of near-lascivious interest to him and that was a pleasure to me because I could explore so many things without being put down for not really understanding Wittgenstein.  In fact, we share contempt for PhD darlings who are mostly of interest to young men because young women didn’t care and stayed away, the same as they avoided the seedy bars where those arrogant nobodies hid out, thinking they were accepted by the working class and engaging in what some call “splitting hairs”.  By now the working men are in nice homes with four foot wide TV sets.  They don’t talk much.

So now we come to another interest: death.  There’s a famous literary book called “The Sense of an Ending.” by Frank Kermode. Forget the novel and the movie that used the same title.  I need to reread it, esp. since a new epilogue has been added and it has such timely relevance, but the Oxford publishing wing is shut down temporarily because of the Pandemic.  “Examining the works of writers from Plato to William Burrows, Kermode shows how they have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.”  The entry from the Oxford Press misspells “Burroughs.”  Education has died.  At least standardized spelling.

Balthazar doesn’t carry his books around — reads them and discards them.  I keep them on endless shelves, higgledy-piggeldy, sideways in front of properly organized categories or sideways because they are too tall for the place on the shelf though they fit with the shorter others.  That’s the trouble with concrete real stuff — it doesn’t always fit.

I’ll tell you more if there’s another rainy sad day.  He takes a pill or a potion on such a day.  I just get acid-minded.  I was raised in the rain.  It made Ireland acid. When I was little I read a fairy tale about an old Irish couple who lived in a vinegar cruet and when it broke, they took their door with them.  I wonder if I could find it again. It was disguised history.

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