The things that confuse most people have never confused me. Who I want to fuck? Myself as Robert Mapplethorpe, forever. What happens to us after we die? We flop back onto the world, returning everything we won and grabbing at what we lost. The things that confound me are tiny and specific: numbers, flames, pieces of hair. These things are much more confusing. It is easier to picture creation clearly than it is a fire.
Last night, though, sitting on the edge of my bed in my first track jacket [red of course], I experienced my first spiritual crisis while looking at a pretty small cross-section of delivery menus from my neighborhood. It was one of the most ecstatic things I have ever felt in my life. Now I get why people like to be confused about giant things like why we are here; how: the slip never ends? Freefall surely isn't the only freedom, but it must be in the top 3.
When I was growing up, I was never a particularly churchy person because my parents only ever took me to one [obviously not unusual], La Cañada Presbyterian. Kevin Costner and his family also went[/go?] there. The place is preppy, fake, and boring to the max. I loathed being ordered to dress up. Too many people in the congregation had had plastic surgery[*], and the entire sight was just kind of sickening and scary to me. The church was located across from the only place I ever remember seeing a cigarette machine, a chain restaurant called Conrad's in a strip mall that also held a Vons market, Baskin Robbins ice cream, and my mom's favorite drycleaner.
I remember what bugged me most about church, starting from when I was little and through high school [after which i kind of forgot that people even go to church], was the idea that the world had been created for humans. I found it arrogant, and also for some reason, a lot of people used this idea to justify the idea of eating meat to me, or even to instruct me to eat meat [including, repeatedly, i shit you not, the extremely conservative Christian math teacher i had throughout most of high school]. When I think about the idea of a human-centric world now, the idea of 'meat' just has nothing to do with it. I'm sort of fascinated by the fact that these concepts were even connected in the minds of so many people I knew.
So, last night. I was ever so slightly drugged and sitting on the edge of my bed with maybe like 4 or 5 menus in my hand [we probably have about 40 from restaurants that will deliver here], trying to think of what I wanted to eat, and I got extreme vertigo, and I fell, not over physically, but just fell, dropped out. It was like being a ghost and walking through the papers that were in my hands in front of me. It felt so amazing. I don't know how long it happened. It wasn't instantaneous, and it didn't last longer than 15 minutes, but it could have been a few minutes or a couple seconds, I don't know.
I was realizing that there were god, what?, over 500 [vegetarian] dishes that I could order and have brought to me? And suddenly I considered that if the world was created for humans to use? That is actually the humblest way to possibly think of it. If the world was not created for us, we absolutely took it anyway and we are going to use it right up. How. Fucking
um
oh
For the first time I read the introduction to The Thief's Journal in the original French. The Grove translations of Genet's books are all loveably awkward [lots of 'i buggered him' and 'we were buggering together'... i expect to see new ones sometime in my lifetime]. The translations of Sartre's introductions are also slightly off. The idea at the end of the introduction to The Thief's Journal more or less makes it through, though: basically, every person's greatest secret is that s/he is exactly the same as you. This is totally distinct from the idea that 'we are all the same', which is how a lot of people misread the introduction. What Sartre is pointing to is the bigness and darkness of the secret, and the possibility of endless twins and mirrors. S/he is the same as you, s/he is the same as Jean Genet, and you are the same as Jean Genet, but the three are not the same. There are secret endless twins, but no triplets. I guess I'd phrase it: what no one will ever reveal to you, specifically, is that s/he is exactly the same as you, specifically.
It took me a long time to put my head back on after I read that. As far as I am concerned, there is hardly anywhere to go from there except to blood and bleach and out. It was months before I even started the actual book.
If that is our enormous and unlit, well, a smaller wink belongs to you and me
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Our Littlest Secret
