39 Microlectures, page 10
Question #3: Who has no beard?
Chinese Zen master Wu-men Hui-k’ai compiled the forty-eight koans of the first classic text of the Zen koan, the Wu-men-kuan, or Gateless Gate, which he published in the year 1229. Koan #4, a single sentence, reads as follows.
Wakuan said, “Why has the Western Barbarian no beard?"
Bodhidharma, the partriarch from India, brought Buddhism to China early in the sixth century. Chinese Zen painting refers to him as the Barbarian from the West and depicts him with dark brooding eyes and a black beard. The Chinese monk Wakuan who asks the question in Koan #4, one may conclude, had no beard. Thus Wakuan’s question, while referring to Bodhidharma, actually refers to himself, and not only to himself, but also to everybody who is not Bodhidharma. As noted by Japanese scholar Katsuki Sekida, “Zen stories are never about other people. They are always about you."
9.2 THE STALWART WORDS OF GIBSON’S WALLACE
As long as a hundred of us remain alive we will never be subject to English dominion, because it is not for glory or riches or honours that we fight but for freedom alone, which no worthy man loses except with his life.
So reads the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, stand-in manifesto not of the Scottish Independence movement, but of Christian Identity, one of the many secret societies underpinning the current proliferation of xenophobic private armies in the United States. Christian Identity believes the Scots to be “the most pure of the Aryan peoples." Once these armies rallied around the obscure novel The Turner Diaries, an apocalyptic depiction of a brutal takeover of the United States by right-wing Aryan purists. A physicist named William Pierce wrote the book under the pseudonym Andrew McDonald, and true to the false name’s suggested ethnicity, groups such as Christian Identity, Pierce’s National Alliance, Aryan Nations, Christian Patriots, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society now look to a mythic Scotland for more mainstream sources of inspiration. Mel Gibson’s multi-Oscar historical fantasy Braveheart has become the recruiting tool of the believers in racial purity.
As William Wallace’s words emboldened Scottish serfs in the closing years of the 13th century, let the stalwart words of Gibson’s Wallace embolden would-be American serfs in the closing years of the twentieth century – Freedom.
So reads a recent publication of The John Birch Society.
When I graduated from high school, I weighed 112 pounds, and I was six foot. It always bothered me that somehow I wasn’t male enough. So, I think in part one of the reasons I gravitated to a hate group was it made me feel like a man. I wasn’t small anymore.
So states Floyd Cochran, ex-member of Aryan Nations.
Racist organizations refuse to be designated as such, laying claim instead to the title of nationalist and claiming that the two notions cannot be equated. In fact the discourses of race and nation are never very far apart, if only in the form of disavowal: thus the presence of ‘immigrants’ on American soil becomes the cause of an ‘anti-American racism’. The oscillation of the vocabulary itself suggests that the organization of nationalism into individual political movements inevitably has racism underlying it. Hannah Arendt, the twentieth century’s courageous analyst of intolerance, described how totalitarianism flourishes like a secret society in broad daylight. Impervious to material reality, the totalitarian state founds itself only on the myth that it produces of itself. Propaganda erases the very difference between crime and virtue, persecutor and persecuted, reality and fantasy. The private armies of America prepare themselves for the day when they will become the public armies of America, the military aspect of a new totalitarian state. With Timothy McVeigh as their martyr, guided by the stalwart words of Gibson’s Wallace, their fantasy and reality merge. The crime of the Oklahoma City bomb becomes a virtuous act, destroying hundreds of faceless servants of the old order. They look to Hollywood for the mainstream validation of their fantasies. As broad daylight begins to shine on the secret society, it does not fade away.
Nothing seems more obvious than who or what is a people. Peoples have familiar names. They seem to have long histories. Yet as one poses the open-ended question ‘what are you?’ to individuals presumably belonging to the same ‘people’, the responses will be incredibly varied. Passionate debates hinge around names. People shoot each other every day over the question of labels. And yet, the very people who do so tend to deny that the issue is complex or puzzling or indeed anything but self-evident. Floyd Cochran sought a community to solidify his unstable identity. The delusion of a solid identity, the illusion of purity, echoes an aversion to the impure – a hatred of the weak and the foreign. The delusion of a solid identity assauges the potent twofold fear, held by the individual and reinforced by so much of his social environment.
Fear #1: of the complexity of language
Fear #2: of the kaleidoscopic self
9.3 THE KALEIDOSCOPIC SELF
Question #1: Glasgow or Moscow?
It is the afternoon of Thursday, July 17, 1997, at the foot of the imposing John Knox monument atop a hill of the Necropolis, the massive municipal cemetery of Glasgow, Scotland. Local artist Ross Birrell delivers a lecture designed specifically for the thirty-five participants and instructors of the second annual Goat Island Summer School. Birrell’s performance work, public and ephemeral, has previously questioned aspects of physical urban reality. In his performance ‘The People’s Slalom,’ he skied down Argyle Street as though the shopping district were a mountain. Now, with maps and diagrams in hand, he explains the ancient, mystical, electromagnetic ley lines of Glasgow, demonstrating how they align exactly with those of Moscow, a city on the exact same longitudinal plane. Inverting the Glasgow city map, he overlays it atop the Moscow subway guide, thus exposing the vast conspiracy which has for centuries depicted Glasgow and Moscow as two different cities. After a crash course in conversational Russian, he gives us each a street guide, points us in the direction of Red Square, and bids us each farewell.
Question #2: Woman or dress?
Julie Laffin crawls down a sidewalk in Chicago in a red dress. The train of the dress follows as she crawls, unfurling like a flag. The dress extends to fifty feet, but it might be infinite. Only the body stops. When the piece has finished, the sidewalk returns to the pedestrians. The dress may hang in a gallery. But briefly we saw her crawling, we saw her face, her dress, her endless red, and we wondered: where did the woman stop and the dress start; where did the dress leave off and the red go on; where did the red end and the sidewalk begin?
Question #3: Man or money?
For Immediate Release: At 12 noon on February 19, 1997, William Pope.L will chain himself to the door of the ATM at the entrance of Chase Bank on 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Place, across from the southwest corner of Grand Central Station in Manhattan. William Pope.L, performance artist, worker, teacher, will wear a skirt made of money. As people enter the ATM he will remove bits of the skirt and hand it to them.
ATM Piece is an attempt to bring fresh discomfort to an age old problem: The haves and the have nots and what they have to do with each other. Admission is free.
9.4 WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due today.
Constantine Cavafy’s poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ unfolds in questions and answers, its voice a public and collective first person plural, its time the present – the uneventful mediterranean afternoon which marked the Roman Empire’s collapse. The Empire, having exhausted itself before the poem’s first line, now finds definition in its only two remaining aspects: 1) all that which is not Empire – or, barbarians; and 2) all that which remains of Empire – or, waiting.
Why isn’t anything going on in the Senate?
Why are the Senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of Senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
The nation that defined itself solely in relation to the outsider depends on the outsider for its existence, and as the nation diminishes, the outsider’s importance grows to eclipse the nation itself. The democracy, a government of citizens, willingly becomes a barbarocracy, a government of barbarians.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader. He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
The state has become insubstantial, no more than its most superficial totemic signifier – a color, a jewel, a list, a uniform, a flag – pure visuality. The state has become an image of the state. Its language, having lost its listener, loses its meaning. The state grows silent.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
The poet, born Konstantine P. Kavafis in 1863, published only one book of poetry in his lifetime. A reclusive man, he worked in the Department of Irrigation of a Greek territory of what is now Egypt. Perhaps his status as a displaced Greek citizen led him to understand the revelation so devastating to the Roman Empire that lends his poem its voice – that barbarians do not exist.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.
As we construct our citizens, so we construct our outsiders; as our state dissolves, so dissolve our barbarians.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
9.5 WHAT IS THE WORLD?
Question #1: What is race?
It is the afternoon of Tuesday, August 5, 1997, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. I stand in the hall, Francis McKee sits in his office, and we talk through the open door.
“Francis, have you ever written anything about race?” I ask.
“About rice?” asks Francis.
“No, race,” I say.
“I’m sorry, I thought you said rice. No. I’ve never written anything about race. Race is too big,” says Francis.
“Have you written about rice?” I ask.
“I have written about rice,” says Francis. “Rice is the right size.”
Question #2: Is the world mistaken?
The other in all his or her forms gives me I. It is on the occasion of the other that I catch sight of me; or that I catch me at: reacting, choosing, refusing, accepting. It is the other who makes my portrait. Always. There is a shock that happens daily, that is up to us to manage. There is a positive incomprehension: the fact that the other is so very much other. Is so very much not-me. The fact that we can say to each other all the time: here, I am not like you. And luckily. The other of all sorts, is also of all diverse richness. A hierarchizing spirit rages between individuals, between people, between parties. All the time. The world is mistaken. It imagines that the other takes something from us whereas the other only brings to us, all the time.
Question #3: What is rice?
Chinese Zen master Yuan-wu K’o-ch’in organized and finished the eleventh century 100 koan collection of Hsueh-tou Ch’ung-hsien, and published it as the second classic text of the Zen koan, the Pi-yen-lu, or Blue-green Cliff Record, in the first half of the twelfth century. The three sentences of Koan #5 relate a moment in the life of the Zen master Seppo, who lived in the eighth century.
Seppo addressed the assembly and said, “All the great world, if I pick it up with my fingertips, is found to be like a grain of rice. I throw it in front of your face, but you do not see it. Beat the drum, telling the monks to come out to work, and search for it.”
10. THREE NOTEWORTHY DEPARTURES
10.1 Nancarrow × 3
10.2 In memoriam to Kathy Acker
10.3 Not eulogizing Lawrence Steger
10.1 NANCARROW x 3
1: Tea and stopwatch
Conlon Nancarrow died on a Sunday last month at his home in Mexico City. He was 84. I talked to a friend who had a friend who once visited Nancarrow and witnessed the player pianos playing. The friend who visited, like most people, had never heard of Nancarrow, and only went along with a friend of his who wanted to make the pilgrimage. The friend who went along found the composer very pleasant, but also a little odd, particularly when he offered them some tea, they accepted, and he timed the brewing with a stopwatch.
2: Exactitude (from Calvino)
I wanted to tell you of my fondness for exactitude, for geometrical forms, for symmetries, for numerical series, for all that is combinatory, for proportions; I wanted to explain the things I had written in terms of my fidelity to the idea of limits, of measure … But perhaps it is precisely this idea of forms that evokes the idea of the endless.
3: Ghost of 19 seconds
A few days after I learned of Nancarrow’s death, as I attempted my annual late-summer cleaning of my study, I discovered David Murray’s dusty music review, printed on the pink paper of the Financial Times from 1990, which had first alerted me to Nancarrow’s music. I had clipped it while on Goat Island’s first UK tour.
Nancarrow has spent almost 50 years as a recluse in Mexico, hand-cutting his own piano rolls to achieve perfect definition for his musical experiments – exploiting more-than-human precision to extraordinary aural ends. Many are breathtaking. Try Study 21, in which two voices in even notes pass contrariwise from very quick to heavily slow and from sluggish to a crazy cascade in 3 minutes, simple but wildly disorienting. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to compare the experience with what an 18th-century listener might have felt upon encountering Bach’s Art of Fugue.
I think of the final 19 seconds of the Canon X, to which the review refers, as a kind of creative utopia — not only because of their extremeness, of the 110 treble notes per second in sequence harmonizing with the 2.33 bass notes per second, but also because of a more elusive reason. Certainly Nancarrow composed more complex, beautiful, or challenging studies than 21, but these final epiphanous 19 seconds strike me as the end point of a musical life of exactitude, lived to distill the musical desires of the human and leave them embodied in the machine. Although I was sad and angry that Nancarrow’s death meant a loss of new compositions, I recognized an aspect of irrelevance to it as well. He had labored most of his life to compose music beyond human performative and perceptive abilities. As he slipped out of this life last month, I pictured his pianos hammering away those insanely accelerated 19 seconds of Canon X, as if to prove that once we locate our limitations, we can also engender an ecstatic ghost who will transcend them. The ghost remains, compulsively transcending, long after we depart.
10.2 IN MEMORIAM TO KATHY ACKER
1: Survivor
I met Kathy Acker because Carol Becker’s car battery died. Carol had taken care of her for the day, including a visit to the health club and Whole Foods Market, as Kathy tried to improve her strength for the evening’s performance of “Pussy, King of the Pirates”. Since the battery failure, Carol planned to cab to Whole Foods, where Lin and I would meet them, drive them back to the club, and jump her car, so she could take Kathy to the performance. Carol had it administrated. She called with the plan. “Kathy’s better," she said, “but she keeps calling me ‘darlin’. It’s very odd." From Whole Foods to the club Lin and Carol rode in the back, no doubt sensing my desire to talk with Kathy. After some discussion of writing, theater, failure, Britain, the future, I said something else.
I said, “I’m a cancer survivor too."
Kathy said, “I hate that word. Survivor. You’re not a survivor, darlin’."
I said, “You’re right. Survivor sounds permanent, when survival is always temporary."
Kathy said, “There’s more to us than cancer."
2: Writing life writing death
I thought of that as our first conversation. Some days later, the telephone rang, and it became our last conversation. People who witnessed her final moments said Kathy died at peace. I believe them. Rabindranath Tagore the poet from India said, “I know I will love death when it comes, for I have loved life.” I want to talk about life, briefly, as writing. I think I began writing in earnest when I came to the realization that the library is my rough draft. I write by rewriting other people’s words, on the humble assumption that somebody already said what I have to say better than I will ever say it. My writing involves rearranging, altering, adding to, subtracting from, the words of those who came before. I did not invent this method. I copied the idea of copying. I learned it from guess who. Chance granted me a ten minute drive with her down Halsted Street on September 20, 1997, when the low afternoon sun was shining brilliantly through breaks in clouds the way it sometimes does. Kathy said she had written a new opera called “Requiem” about her cancer experience. She planned to make it into a novel to pay her medical bills. Most say she did not live to finish that novel. Don’t believe it. She has only taken a brief research trip. She plans to return soon, manuscript in hand. How else could she write about death?
