Posts made in March, 2011

It all began three days ago—it seems like eons have passed since—when I woke up with an odd feeling just below my right collarbone. Of course I immediately touched the spot. Nothing strange in that; it’s what we do when something unusual appears on our bodies. What I felt––and it was beyond my field of vision so I could only feel––was a smooth flat nodule that seemed to have formed almost precisely flush with my skin. Naturally I went to the mirror, though at first I didn’t understand what I was looking at. Not that I didn’t know I was looking at my upper torso: there was my chest, my collarbones jutting out a bit too prominently for my taste, and my neck, my gristly neck, of which I’m rather self-conscious. But in addition to these geographically normal items was a black button, uniform, round, and to all appearances made of a durable high quality plastic, situated just below my collarbone.

My first reaction was annoyance. Another normal response. My health is generally good and who wants to deal with a health problem? My second reaction—an impulse, to be precise—was to push the button. I won’t say whether I think this was normal or not, though it’s true, not everyone would have felt this urge. (I had no idea how apt that word would turn out to be.) And yet my desire to push the button could not have felt more completely natural, and I will even venture to say that many would have felt the same way. I almost did push it too, raised my hand until my finger (index) was hovering over the button––when I stopped. Because I suddenly wondered, what if it’s an off button?

Until that instant, the thought had not occurred to me. Not that the button said “Off,” or anything like that. But it’s the nature of a button to turn things on and off. Which raised the further questions, if it was an off button, was it also an on button? And if I did turn it off, would I be in a position to turn it back on? I think you can see the problem, though I must admit the full measure of my difficulties hadn’t hit me. But I did see right away, somewhat bitterly, how much better off I would have been if my first thought had been instead: what if it’s a start button? Perhaps even a kind of physical rejuvenation button. And why isn’t that just as likely? Then I would’ve pushed it immediately in the hopes of being young again, and then whatever would’ve happened would’ve happened. Except, and perhaps you already see the problem, the formula of the question itself more or less demands the negative answer. What if? We aren’t built to ask that question in full-blooded optimism. So in other words, and I saw this pretty quickly, I was being led around by the nose by semantics.

And yet, as I mentioned, I didn’t see the full panoply of the issues right away. In fact I was in a terrible rush, late for work as usual, and because I feared losing my job more than I feared discovering the true purpose of the button I actually managed to push my discovery out of my mind, wash up, dress quickly, and get out the door. And for the most part, that first day was not so terrible. I was quite busy, and though I occasionally felt the button there under my shirt, I taught my classes with good concentration. With the freshman, we read “Ozymandias.” With the juniors, we reviewed vocabulary words. They had trouble with “indulgence.” Only toward the end of the day did I start to wonder if perhaps some of my colleagues or even my students might be experiencing the same health phenomenon, the same kind of button appearing somewhere on their bodies, and I began to wonder if many of us aren’t similarly disabled—though that seems too strong a word—and all undergoing the issue in equal silence.

And then I went home.

That might’ve been a mistake, though how I could have predicted trouble, after my bland first day, I don’t know.

The problem was at home I had nothing to distract me from—the button. I will call it that. My evening, usually dedicated to study (I have been reading the collected works of Georges Sand) quickly devolved into a nightmare, an endless oscillating loop between an increasingly urgent desire to push the button, just push it, just push the god damn button. Push. It. And an equally intense resistance that set itself up as a reverberating clamor in my brain that boomed the words as though from a train-station loudspeaker: what if it’s an off button?

And then I would think, don’t be ridiculous. It could as easily have been a button that did absolutely nothing. Or a button that got rid of my allergies, or my acid reflux, or my toe fungus.

Sleep was out of the question under these circumstances, and the night wore on, and I truly understood the night then, how we are, each of us, lowered in those late hours of dark and silence into its deep well, narrow and cold and dank, where we experience our own hopelessness and taste the awful cold and tainted water of death. I had the TV on, its cool bluish light washing across the room, a movie about some guy in a desert location with motorcycles, and it was then, and only then—I say this with certainty, since it struck me as very odd that it took this long to have such an obvious thought—yet I swear I had not had it until just that moment when I sat on my old easy chair in the den, hopeless in the deep well of night—that I had the thought: who the hell put it there? You see what I mean. Why had it taken this long to have this most obvious of all thoughts? I can’t answer the question. I told myself it had to do with my being one of those people who makes a conscientious effort to be forward-looking. But that sounded like bunkum, and before I could even start to evaluate, I found myself thinking once again, the thought like some invasion of ants crawling up my brainstem, push it, why don’t you just push it? And I could see that another casualty of this medical condition (for so it seemed this was) was that my new obsession made impossible higher order ethical reasoning.

But who did put it there? I quickly ran through the usual suspects that paranoia might suggest: the Obama administration; rogue CIA agents; thugs hired by that

There’s a scene in Proust that has stayed with me—though I would not perhaps say I’ve been haunted by it; more like, it has lingered on in some cork-lined closet at the back of my head, an on-again, off-again oscillation of long duration. The scene is found in Time Regained, the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, and follows the narrator as he departs from one of the novel’s most famous set pieces: his visit to a brothel in which he discovers Charlus, who broods over In Search of Lost Time the way Satan broods over Paradise Lost, in flagrante delicto.

The narrator walks out into the street from the claustrophobia of the house of prostitution, in which the distorting effects of love and desire have been on display, into the Paris of World War I, as an air raid begins. The streets are suddenly plunged in darkness, antiaircraft guns begin to fire, and it’s even possible, because the narrator is now a few blocks away, that a bomb has fallen on the brothel itself. That bomb, those bombs, falling without warning from the night sky, metaphorically represent love itself, and the entire scene—the plunge into darkness, the sudden appearance of incendiary danger out of the sky, the illumination of the explosions––maps the human experience of desire and love.

The narrator is struck by how little those who are pursuing their pleasures would be distracted by the dangers of falling bombs. “Seldom do we take any note of the social setting or the natural surroundings in which our love affairs are placed. The tempest rages at sea, the ship rolls in every direction, torrents of rain, whipped by the wind, pour down from the sky: we give heed for just an instant––and then only to protect ourselves against some inconvenience it is causing us––to the immense scene in which we and the beloved body we are clasping close are but insignificant atoms.”
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The metaphor’s power at least partly derives from its fluctuation between its literal and figurative senses. The “immense scene” which forms the backdrop of love is the world and all its immediate dangers. But the “immense scene” is also metaphorically love and desire itself, the dangerous threat that turns the ordered world upside down, erasing external reality the way darkness in a blackout erases the city, and falling upon the unsuspecting flâneur like the explosives pitched from the cockpits of German biplanes. These are literal Gothas dropping bombs on Paris, but they are also representations of the violence and unexpectedness of love which strikes us as though the sky is falling, and meanwhile, we, like blind molds on our urgent business, ignore the very landscape in which we are encased—we, the “insignificant atoms” of the metaphor caught within prodigious geographies of desire.

Proust’s metaphor is like one of those massively complex atoms created in cyclotrons that disintegrates radioactively in milliseconds; in that way, it further reflects the paradox of human passion through the transient glimpse it offers of its ever vanishing essence—an essence that drives and determines us even as we fail to locate it except in the complex and inevitably disintegrating metaphors that artists create in homage to it—and so, yes, perhaps haunted was the right word after all.