Publié en 1984

that if you can get enough to eat will sustain itself can move forward & can live till it dies at this moment in this world there are millions of others of your species who you could say in language eat stand & site, fuck & shit, ingest procreate & defecate on or near this same ground, whichever may you like it you sit stand or lie on a world globe orb or circumstance that’s a planet revolving on its axis in an orbit around so-called sun what else could you say that’s true ? You could begin to tell how often you remember you’re one of these sorts of beings in this sort of place you could say what it feels like with a memory and how often you feel the pull (not like being famous or considered beautiful) out of your self and place which is a place so little so parochial that if you lived in it withtout the past you might never even know the shape of the earth and not mich about the rest (someone said I love you I want to be you).

Houses & buildings were not just left as they were : all doors are large, none are revolving, there are no cagelike places, elevators are transparent, all windows can open, places open out onto other places, hallways are generous, there is no rent, backyards behind city buildings are joined without fences so you could ride a horse behind the streets, some pavements have turned back to dirt, there isnt any money, money became so physically large that to accumulate five dollars it would take a whole old-fashioned room full of these big metal things ellipsoid in shape, all the sewage of the world makes fuel plus a generous contribution from the stars, the ex-oil companies take care of that, we clean the streets, the schools are an essay on schools, you can get what you need from the stores and storehouses, if you act greedy no one will look at you, drugs are dispensed by old people, if you want dope you have to go to the museum, when you die there’s no hospital, it’s safe to be born and safe to die at home, there’s no accidents, hideous things have ceased to befall you, various women and men come to your house when you need them to work against these things, often old people say, « I have never suffered pain, » old people run the newspapers and storehouses, they meet in conventions to plan the free travelling all over the world of the 18-25 year-olds in place of the ancient colleges, they run the nursery schools, it is to your greatest disadvantage to live in a house without an old person, you have no influence then, the whales are farmers for the humans, we cat their underwater potato baked with a steak of shark & seaweed salad in America, poets and artists entertain the people in the neighborhood, there are contests and exchanges with other parts of the world, neighborhoods publish books, the printing costs are paid by Ex-Landlords Inc. (Ex-Publishers Inc lost all their money investing in solid-state computer systems and are seeking to re-invest in literature), there are still cockroaches in the cities, they live in a museum built on top of the Frick called the Watt on Fifth Avenue (no children allowed) named after former Secretary of the Interior James Watt who had an out-of-the-body experience at the opening and after that he wasted away in a noisy wilderness somewhere, there are no dentists, dentists had to admit at last there were herbs that cured toothaches without any pain at all, for years the dentists were held in the jails for sadists, now they are released and live among us, there are still doctors whom you never have to wait to see, when patients (the word patients was changed to people, or, colloquially, leeks) go to a doctor’s office (the word office was changed to house) they are given tea and perhaps lessons and ointments, acupuncture is practiced to prevent diseases, operations are rare, they are performed in operation cathedrals, most diseases and chronic debilitating disorders disappeared after people began to stop being paid salaries for their work and the medical profession (the word profession has been changed to chore or inspiration) became so predominantly female for a while, there was a comedy show you could still go to for a long time where some man would stick his hand into some part of your body and say, « I’m the doctor, I know what’s best for you and my time is precious, » all over the world it was good news to know at last that by gently and aggressively rubbing the tip of the penis and the penis all over before what they used to call sexual intercourse with a great big hot sponge soaked in honey and karkade you have a 100 % chance of avoiding getting pregnant, actually the sponge doesnt even have to be hot and it doesnt have to be a sponge, you can do it any way, and when this method of birth control was first discovered it marked the beginning of the death of both capitalism and armies : people all over the world fled from misplaced tasks, there is no useless work, nobody has a job contributing to the making of money by somebody else jobs are either in the community or in the world, nobody works to sell things and it didnt take long to find out that with people working at useful things all the time to provide themselves and other people with what they need, and with no manipulations of currencies or power or land, there was enough food and shelter for everybody in the world, though some in the world wound up having fewer of the luxuries than they were used to having, crime is fading away, there are still courts and much of what the courts have to do has to do with the rest of crime and the rest of land there is still bad feeling about all this sharing of property and land, maps have become much more complex than they used to be, everyplace is smaller and there are more places than before, there is at this moment no longer such a thing (though it is being worked on) as a map of the world, the air is clear, it is golden, in summer it is iced, there is a little store on the avenue where you can stop if you want for a draft of elixir, it is golden, in summer it is iced, remedies become opaque in moonlight if you’re nervous, have lost love, there are the mesmeric tobaccos and the aphrodisiac ones, there are the work tobaccos, take this if you cant sleep, take this cure for the pains of childbirth, it’s a mixture that must be stolen from a neighbor and stand in a glass in the room next to you emitting a light of all the colors, go to the store of help to get some, there are the histories of all the individuals of the world, everyone adds to this part of the book.

I had been wanting to keep a journal of one week of living in New York and every detail of everything that happened at work, home and in the community, to see if recording everything about living in the city would be illuminating funny or useful because it would be about money, work, politics and sex.

Everything you or I or anybody says always seems 100 % wrong sometimes, unless you keep forcing it to be closer to the truth, kids have sharper memories till they learn to use the language well and then there is always all that prevaricating and the language begins to lie loosely once more : can I say this ? I got very angry…

The cross-hatching technique which allowed our ancestors to exchange certain genetic traits for others, in order to provide their offspring with a way of life at once more variegated and more secure than their own, has just about run out of steam and has left us wondering, once more, what there is about this plush solitude that makes us think we will ever get out, or even want to. The ebony hands of the clock always seem to mark the same hour. That is why it always seems the same, though it is or course changing constantly, subtly, as though fed by an underground stream. If only we could go out in back as when we were kids, and smoke and fool around and just stay out of the way, for a little while. But that’s just it — don’t you see ? We are « Out in back. » No one has ever used the front door. We have always lived in this place without a name, without shame, a place for grownups to talk and laugh, having a good time. When we were children it seemed that adulthood would be like climbing a tree, that there would he a view from there, breathtaking because slightly more elusive. But now we can see only down, first down through the branches and further down the surprisingly steep grass patch that slopes away from the base of the tree. It certainly is a different view, but not the one we expected.
What did they want us to do ? Stand around this way, monitoring every breath, checking each impulse for the return address, wandering constantly about evil until necessarily we fall into a state of torpor that is probably the worst sin of all ? To what purpose did they cross-hatch so effectively, so that the luminous surface that was underneath is transformed into another, also luminous but so shifting and so alive with suggestiveness that it is like quicksand, to take a step there would be to fall through the fragile net of uncertainties into the bog of certainty, otherwise known as the Slough of Despond ?
Probably they meant for us to enjoy the things they enjoyed, like late summer evenings, and hoped that we’d find others and thank them for providing us with the wherewithal to find and enjoy them. Singing the way they did, in the old time, we can sometimes see through the tissues and tracings the genetic process has laid down between us and them. The tendrils can suggest a hand ; or a specific color — the yellow of the tulip, for instance — will flash for a moment in such a way that after it has been withdrawn we can be sure that there was no imagining, no auto-suggestion here, but at the same time it becomes as useless as all subtracted memories. It has brought certainty without heat or light. Yet still in the old time, in the faraway summer evenings, they must have had a word for this, or known that we would someday need one, and wished to help. Then it is that a kind of purring occurs, like the wind sneaking around the baseboards of a room : not the infamous « still, small voice » but an ancillary speech that is parallel to the slithering of our own doubt-fleshed imaginings, a visible soundtrack of the way we sound as we move from encouragement to despair to exasperation and back again, with a gesture sometimes that is like an aborted movement outward toward some cape or promontory from which the view would extend in two directions — backward and forward — but that is only a polite hope in the same vein as all the others, crumpled and put away, and almost not to be distinguished from any of them, except that it knows we know, and in the context of not knowing is a fluidity that flashes like silver, that seems to say a film has been exposed and an image will, most certainly will, not like the last time, come to consider itself within the frame.
It must be an old photograph of you, out in the yard, looking almost afraid in the crisp, raking light that afternoons in the city held in those days, unappeased, not accepting anything from anybody. So what else is new ? I’ll tell you what is : you are accepting this now from the invisible, unknown sender, and the light that was intended, you thought, only to rake or glance is now directed full in your face, as it in fact, always was, but you were squinting so hard, fearful of accepting it, that you didn’t know this. Whether it warms or burns is another matter, which we will not go into here. The point is that you are accepting it and holding on to it like love from someone you always thought you couldn’t stand, and whom you now recognize as a brother, an equal. Someone whose face is the same as yours in the photograph but who is someone else, all of whose thoughts and feelings are directed at you, falling like a gentle slab of light that will ultimately loosen and dissolve the crusted suspicion, the timely self-hatred, the efficient cold directness, the horrible good manners, the sensible resolves and the senseless nights spent waiting in utter abandon, that have grown up to be you in the tree with no view ; and place you firmly in the good-natured circle of your ancestors’ games and entertainments.

Ce que la philosophie transcendantale louait dans la subjectivité créatrice, c’était le sujet prisonnier de lui-même et qui se le cachait. Dans tout ce qu’il pense d’objectif, il reste prisonnier, comme les animaux le sont de la carapace dont ils cherchent en vain à se débarrasser ; sauf que ceux-ci n’ont pas idée de proclamer que leur prison est liberté.

La conviction généralement répandue selon laquelle les innervations, les points de vue, les connaissances ne sont que « subjectives », ne tient plus dès qu’on perçoit la subjectivité comme une forme de l’objet. L’apparence c’est l’ensorcellement du sujet dans ses propres déterminations, le fait qu’il est posé comme être authentique. Il importe d’amener le sujet lui-même à l’objectivité, et non pas d’exclure ses réactions de la connaissance.

C’est ainsi que la réduction ad hominem entraîne la chute de l’anthropocentrisme. Le fait que même l’homme tel qu’il est constitué st quelque chose de fait par l’homme, démystifie le caractère créateur de l’esprit. Mais comme la primauté de l’objet a besoin de la réflexion sur le sujet et de la réflexion subjective, la subjectivité, elle, à la différence du matérialisme primitif qui n’admet pas la dialectique, devient le moment qu’on a retenu.

Il est vrai qu’on ne peut les [sujet et objet] concevoir l’un sans l’autre ; l’apparence de la séparation s’exprime toutefois dans le fait qu’ils se médiatisent, l’objet par le sujet, plus encore et autrement, le sujet par l’objet. Cette séparation devient idéologie, pour ainsi dire sa forme normale, dès qu’on la fige sans médiation. C’est alors que l’esprit s’arroge le statut de l’autonomie absolue, statut qui n’est pas le sien : dans sa prétention à l’autonomie pointe sa prétention à la domination.

L’essai coordonne les éléments au lieu de les subordonner. […] Si l’essai, comparé aux formes dans lesquelles un contenu tout prêt est communiqué de manière indifférente, est plus dynamique que la pensée traditionnelle, grâce à la tension entre la présentation et la chose présentée, il est en même temps plus statique, en tant qu’ensemble construit de juxtapositions.

L’essai est à la fois plus ouvert et plus fermé qu’il ne plaît à la pensée traditionnelle. Il est plus ouvert dans la mesure où sa disposition propre nie le système et où il répond d’autant mieux à ses propres exigences qu’il s’y tient plus rigoureusement ; les résidus systématiques de certains essais, comme par exemple l’infiltration d’études littéraires par des philosophèmes largement répandus, acceptés tels quels, ne valent guère mieux que des trivialités psychologiques. Mais l’essai est plus fermé, parce qu’il travaille de façon emphatique à la forme de la présentation. La conscience de la non-identité de la présentation et de la chose la contraint à un effort sans limites.