Lurianics

Lurianics

by Michael Brodsky

Books We Live by, New York

Lurianics Copyright © 2013, 2018 by Michael Brodsky

Library of Congress Number:

ISBN: Softcover 978-1-62848-076-4

ISBN: MOBI 978-1-62848-074-0

ISBN: EPUB 978-1-62848-075-7

Published by Books We Live by, NY, publishing at Smashwords

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Cover: Church floor, 2013 © Frederic Colier

File under: General Fiction / Literature

In memory of Murray M. Simon

Laissez-moi l'interroger...

Doctor Miracle, in Offenbach’s Les Contes d'Hoffmann

By the Same Author

Novels

Detour

Circuits

Xman

X in Paris

Dyad

Three Goat Songs

*** (three asterisks)

We Can Report

Detour

Lurianics

Invidicum

Short Story Collections

Wedding Feast

Project and a play

Southernmost and Other Stories

Limit Point

Plays

Terrible Sunlight

Dose Center

Night of the Chair

Six Scenes

The Anti-Muse

Translation

Eleutheria by Samuel Beckett

Putting on his suit one morning to go to work, Isaac Luria realized he could no longer defer the overwhelming hatred he now felt for his kid brother, Larry. He summoned forth and gathered together all instances available to vindicate or at least buttress that hatred. But these did little to render plausible, assimilate a hatred that came from nowhere. Maybe hatred--a.k.a. pain (plenty of that to go around) accompanied by the idea of an external cause--was the wrong emotion, a displacement from the untried but true. Or maybe if hatred was the emotion in question it had displaced its target a little to the right or left, directing its lethal beam on Larry. Looking around the room, Isaac saw that everything was out of place. The desk was further from the uncurtained window than it should have been. The radio stood on the seat of an armless chair instead of on one of the shelves of the proud old case purchased specifically for the purpose of accommodating it.

Eating his breakfast at the kitchen table he thought of Larry’s overall unsavoriness and the more he thought the more he educed to confirm his emotion resembled a shoddy makeshift, On the subway, in the office, making his way along the cafeteria line he was always nowhere near overleaping the abyss separating conclusiveness from the frantic procuration of still another datum, another shard of evidence. As hatred unfolded it partook more and more of the nature of a thrashing past the impediment of its own inaccuracy.

Yet it was the very inaccuracy that made thrashing--propulsion--possible.

For the first time in years, Isaac felt himself propelled. Eating his pot pie alone, at his favorite table across from a little old man, he felt a surge of gratitude for this emotion, accurate or not. He wanted to tell this old man who looked deathly ill that a displacement from accuracy was by no means an occasion for mourning but rather the sole condition for going forward at long last.

The warming rays of autumn fell upon the bald skull unnoted. He might be as close to death as the old man if it wasn't for the urgency of this health-giving surge of hatred.

It was a long way back to his office on Sixtieth west of Broadway from the cafeteria, on Thirty-fifth and Eighth. All was out of place on his desk also. He went through his piecework with a tenacity that startled Polly and Lil. They were used to his restive reveries, his dawdling near a window. He looked at them. They made remarks. Their astonishment only mimicked his own, far less blubbery, more focused on the situation at hand. His astonishment at his own grim efficiency stuck to the issue and did not need to invoke past instances of odd behavior. Polly and Lil were terrified of sticking to this particular instance. They needed to buttress their playful taunting with supplementary evidence, to which all their attention was ultimately displaced. He went quickly through his tasks (filing, letters from the Admiral, his boss, to clients which had to be transcribed) because these tasks were suddenly so much impedimenta on the way back to his hatred. He had to stay close to it.

It baffled him therefore he did not want anything to mar it as specimen.

Someone more knowing might be able to decipher it. Some elder in the bethel of posterity, say.

Once during the afternoon Larry called. This was rare. Isaac could hear Lindy, Larry's girlfriend of the moment, giggling in the background. It seemed to have nothing to do with what Larry was trying to say, however.

At some other time Isaac might have taken Larry's casual tone for heartless indifference to all he was going through. Yet relief, a kind of relief, carried the day. Larry's high spirits could no longer be heard only in the key of smugness but as a lighthearted and therefore all the more potent rebuke to all this angling in putrefying depths, There was more to life than swimming with the fishes. Here was Larry less riding roughshod over Isaac's needs than inducing one altogether new, that is, the need to be convinced living in the world had no right to be all anguish, dutiful, dire.

Larry, as it turned out, was calling about money. Did Isaac have enough in his checking account to cover the cost of the plumber. Somehow this plea, which never failed to enrage Isaac and was enough to provoke a recomputation of vindicating instances, coming now at right angles to an investigation of his hatred, cheered him. How not heartily agree to Larry’s forging of his signature. Couldn‘t it be true that Larry's shameless, gross and flagrant persistence in his own being was the target of Isaac's hatred. He could no longer tell. Now that very grossness was the longed-for sign, come from deep within the earth's prolapsed womb, proving all was well with their relation and by extension with all the world, all of being. I thought we might meet for lunch tomorrow, Larry said. I'll be over at Lindy's tonight so I won't see you.

Around one the next day, Isaac hurried to the corner coffee shop, Tsim Tsum's, from whose threshold Larry would be sure to be nowhere in sight. Larry was a long time arriving from far off once Isaac spotted him. Once a block away Larry waved heartily but Isaac, pretending not to see, began to interest himself in the contents of a shop window adjacent to Tsum's. There was little of interest besides Larry's reflection, looming, lumbering, cumbersome, oafish, full of oppressively joyous self-importance. Hi, Larry said, sweating a little. Isaac's answer was to pull open the door of the coffee shop. No mean feat.

Once they were seated, Larry said, You act as if you don't want to know me. Is it because I don't have a job. I know you plod away come rain or come shine.

There was a strangely attired, a distinctively attired, woman sitting in the back of the restaurant, whom Isaac looked at from time to time. What do you mean. Isaac knew very well what Larry meant but he was eager to sustain this illusion of a misunderstanding, to postpone that moment of mutual comprehension which was bound to be so much paltrier than whatever impasse promised here of a mutual purgation just around the corner, expulsion of all causeless grudges and reasonless rancors. You find every effort you have to make as the older brother a kind of excruciation. It's as if you expect somebody, some thing, to intervene on behalf of the duties you refuse to perform. Why is that, Isaac said. Maybe brotherly love involves too much of the candid self-presentation you obviously find putrid. Larry had a way with words, as with the ladies--always had. So did Isaac, come to think of it--with words, I mean.

As lunch progressed, as the bacon and tomato gave way as they must to the pecan pie, Isaac found himself more and more repelled. Isaac drew back from Larry digging into his corrugated slab. As he drew back he felt ecstatic, as if in repudiating Larry's gleefully uncouth table manners, he was repudiating all the world, all of being. He was no longer little Isaac Luria. He had a feeling of freefloating he could not quite define to himself. He wanted an interpreter. But the feeling of unlimitedness was already dying, constricting. The constriction proclaimed Isaac to be no vaster than the narrow limits of his own prejudices. Why shouldn't Larry tear unrepentantly at his pecan pie. The contempt which had seemed to expand his contours and overpower the very universe had in fact limited him. He was once again reduced to familiar proportions, with no preponderance in the battle... of stances. It became clear that Isaac's stance, or stances, were at war with Larry's. Being, being here, comprised a sum of stances incessantly repudiated, incessantly readopted. With the pie under his belt, Larry decreed, We're very different. How so, Isaac said, looking at his watch (he needed a new band). At least he could make Larry feel that if he babbled it was on borrowed time. You work. Day in, day out. And it doesn't seem to matter that you haven't found out the nature of your true work. Or have you finally heard the voice from behind the burning bush? Before Isaac could answer, Larry said, You function so beautifully without knowing your purpose. You simply survive, day in, day out, your ignorance of that true work. You outlive it the way we outlive our hated relatives. Larry warmed to his warmed-over perspicuity. Isaac hadn't long to wait for the inevitable coup de grace. You have but usurped your life. Larry had a way with other people's words as well. Don't waste your breath. The text is foolish.

I could never work at something that was not my true work. That‘s why I'm hoping this job will come through. In spite of himself Isaac was forced to cry, Will you shut the fuck up. Larry drew back, bolstered by a smirk. As they walked--no, made their way--back to Isaac's office, Larry tried to show in different ways that Isaac's outburst had not occurred, at least for him. For Isaac it had definitely occurred. He felt raw, naked, would have liked, especially now, to dispossess himself further of everything that made him Isaac. All affinities, all tastes, all revulsions, all...stances. For wasn't it his affinities that made him visible and therefore susceptible to a diagnosing commentary that kills. And by the way who was it who'd said self-hate was the manure that fertilized the kitchen garden of genius. Larry's beaconlike smirk told him that he had cried out in that manner because he was trapped in a job he hated, had never found his true work. Isaac was on the fringe but on the fringe, too, one can be flagrant.

In front of the building, replete with doorman, three- phalanxed awning and what the brochure referred to with poker-faced fatuity as a landscaped plaza, Larry said, You're failing, Isaac, and it's killing you. Maybe, putz, Isaac began, though this was no place to begin, I prefer failure to success. Larry said nothing. More than Isaac wished to admit, Larry's silence called his lonely invincibility into question. Looking across the street Isaac got a whiff of the strangely attired woman he had noticed in the restaurant. If he didn't know better he'd call her a portent. As if in some way prodded by her strut he formulated, To succeed is to be degraded, necessarily, into intelligibility, Ejected from uniqueness into a chaos of sameness where anybody quickly becomes everybody. So this, said Larry, is the axiom upon which your floundering is founded. This is the evening star that guides your irrefutable self-perpetuation. Isaac was almost at the revolving doors. Larry could sound very Wagnerian (by way of the Old Testament) at the oxymoronic drop of a hat. But you know, Isaac, he shouted, what you must do with such axioms if you are going to do more than survive. Isaac looked back without answering. You must identify, isolate, and destroy them."

After a particularly unbearable afternoon at work, hounded by the whines of the Admiral‘s co-partner and spouse (his fourth time around), Donnabelle O'Day, Isaac returned to the coffee shop. The woman he had noticed twice before had displaced herself to a table not far from the one at which he had first spotted her that afternoon.

Taking her wan recognition of his barest existence for spacious invitation, in spite of himself he exited his booth though somehow still strangely fused with the leathery seat, hovered imploringly above what he needed to perceive as her willowy supple form and announced, May I. She shrugged but not disagreeably. As he sat down he reminded himself that this little encounter did not, could not, count. It was a fringe phenomenon, already bracketed, and would therefore never get in the way of his preparations. So as to be ready for the true work when it showed its warty face at last.

He studied her. This creature had nothing to offer but two very well matched breasts, a no doubt moist furry nexus, and a certain stringy toughness that inflamed his gases.

After a long silence which did not seem to ruffle her one bit he said, Name, please.

Shekhinah Jones--whether you like it or not. He thought of drawing out the syllables so she could undergo his hopefully irresistible boyish bumbling. But he was for once way ahead of himself and could only look back with distaste from the vantage of an accelerated retrospection at the stance to which he had almost yielded. You look a little under the weather, she said. She colloquialized with the vengeful precision of an alien. Ah, he murmured, thinking of her naked body yielding beneath his fat fingering. How could his mother have been mad enough to envision a career as a concert pianist for somebody with hands as unsightly as his?

He could hear her breathing, His desire mangled then had done with her. What a relief to be able to confess at last. Shekhinah Jones looked away from him, focused on other diners, rejected them in turn. What do you have to confess, she asked not quite looking at him. Oh the usual, he bartered, pleased with his slipperiness. No, she replied, banging her not-so-tiny fist on the table. Never that. You have no conception of what you really have to confess. I don't know what my true work is supposed to be, he said. And yet it seems as if there's a conspiracy out there in rat-race land, as if every racer wants to dope me up and destroy me simply because I've been lucky enough to find my true work, which of course I haven't and probably never will. Self-pity is not on today's menu, my love. Nor tomorrow's for that matter. Pushing her dish away she asked, Don’t you feel sick saying this? He replied, I'm waiting for my true work which will be in the service of humanity and humanity kicks me in the pants. Doesn‘t what you just said also make you sick. He looked more than baffled, he looked frightened. Exasperated she said, "If you speak of yourself as receiving only abuse at the hands of a conspiracy then this fixes you, gags and binds you to a stance, And by calling the slovenly unsummating indifference all around you a conspiracy you give it--and yourself--far more credit than is deserved, frankly, by either party. You show you are in being, too much in being.

You are the victim of a conspiracy. In this way you are at the heart of a drama. A drama as big as the world, as big as being. But you fail to see all the fanfare has long ago faded. And you are typed as one who deludes himself into believing his insignificance is marked for more than oblivion. If you began to accept with a jaundiced--an eagle--a gimlet--all right then, an ironic eye--your hefty insignificance for all those who do not see the epoch-making significance of that insignificance you would start finding yourself (though of course not immediately) marked for more than oblivion. For there is nothing funnier than a creator, quasi, pseudo or otherwise, who decides to take umbrage, in true dowager fashion, at his lack of appreciation. Wittier that, than anything he could think of penning to give Oscar a run for his money. If the true true-worker knows anything at all, it's that a true work is true to the extent that it knows how to feed off its repudiation by the movers and shakers. The true worker, if he's worth his weight in gold--or even platinum--knows he shouldn't be 'serious' hence 'seriously woundable' where his true work is concerned. He welcomes--worships--the death embrace of his detractors. If you could just manage the irony, outside all stances, you would be well on your way toward-- Here she lifted her arm to signal the waiter. She reordered a plate of the same. For when, she continued, you proclaim your true work to be a mission conducted on behalf of an already ingrate humanity-- Well, then, you are even worse off than I thought, more bound to a stance, to a sum of stances, than I might have ever thought possible. Given your...possibilities. He turned away as if she had just spit in his face. And she had. Don't you realize, she insisted, in a tone of voice equivalent to a forefinger’s chuck under the chin aimed at dragging him back to eye contact, that not only do you limit and localize yourself with such chatter but you also, and far more reprehensibly, grossly traduce and straitjacket the character of your mission. These professedly pure intentions only get in the way of the only unfolding that counts--the kind that refuses to be hemmed in.

How these Dark Ladies of the Sonnets do go on, he couldn't help thinking. Though why, will you tell me, should only he and Larry have the right to speak in tongues. "Maybe you long to be impaled, diagnostically speaking, as one who put his faith in life and was betrayed. Maybe you long to be frozen within a stance susceptible to the denigrating commentary of every passerby. But your mission, your true work as you call it, refuses to succumb. When you talk this way you seem to feel that you're catapulting yourself into a more tragic dimension--and the true work be damned. Maybe you feel that your plight assimilates to itself, to all its bright burning, everything around you--all of being--with nothing left over, no remainder. But you’re merely veering in the direction of a stance--a hand--I've seen played way too many times already. And even when played by sharpers who can run rings around your own self-stunting, it's still a crashing bore.

I, for one, know where this will all end, For it will end. It will be...refuted. For this stance, this stance of persecuted sufferer, of flagellated striver, of laboring innocent, is one stance among many, too many, doomed to decay, doomed to be obliterated by other stances, refuted by other stances. Refuted by their mere presence. In fact this stance is already over-big with its own refutation. Isaac blurted, How can I be refuted in-- In a feeling, she smiled, drawing back to make room for the little chafing dish brought by the waiter of what looked (more than smelled) like cod cakes, or was it the other way around. In any case, his obsequiousness was the maddeningly last word in disdain. "Yes, indeed, how can you be refuted in a feeling. I use the word refute advisedly.

As you slobber and grovel in what you take to be pure feeling, without algebraic sign or vectorly direction, some thing is taking account of this pure feeling, reducing it to its absolute value as just another point of view and we all know (or do we?) points of view are a dime a dozen. Somehow I feel in my bones that you are meant for something bigger than a point of view, one point of view among the grovelling infinity. Watching her eat, without appetite himself, tasting only the futility of what he was compelled to utter and half-gagging on the fare, he gave way at last: You're right: I can't be tied to the stake of any stance, any point of view. Especially as I've always worked so hard to be nowhere--to loathe life, to love nothing, to loathe the laws of life. She shook her head with the amusement that a sage's weariness often generates at the most unlikely moments, her fork in mid-air--which was of course where the shake needed it to be. Her drama coach had been nothing less than top-notch. "You can't just be nowhere. You have to be taught how to be nowhere. I can teach you. I don't need you. Oh, I see, you have just burst forth, sprung from Jove's forehead fully deformed, flouting all conventions. So you're suddenly outside all stances. Localizable in no point of view. Freefloating, unhinged. She shook her head. That's not how it's done. You're never suddenly outside all stances. Residing outside all stances is a process. It must be learned. As she saw Isaac was toying with the idea of abandoning his post, she quickly continued but with the slightest edge of entreaty in her voice. No matter how dissident you think you seem, how much outside all stances, you can always be throttled to fixity, that dissidence can always be naturalized as a kind of stance, a new kind of stance, a novelty act whose sheen is sure to wear off with time. Don’t be so quick to appall--to wunderkind your way into the hearts of your detractors (far less vicious, in fact, than fans, who understanding you better than you understand yourself feel divinely entitled to destroy you)-- for the powers that be will render you harmless, even tasty, in seconds flat. Something in her tone refunded him his appetite, He ordered a salad, though whether Cobb or Caesar or Greek or niçoise he couldn't have said, even if his life depended on it. When it arrived it was all wilted lettuce. Every bite was an excruciation but he realized soon enough it had nothing to do with the inferior quality of the greens, You look uncomfortable, she said, no longer eating, giving his joyless chewing movements her full attention--fuller than that focused so far on his words. Is it because you feel... recognized at last. I don‘t know if I can stand this kind of recognition."

He looked around. Was the restaurant filling up or thinning out. Filling up or thinning out. This uncertainty, this...oscillation, this being nowhere yielded him a split second's euphoria. It was as if in not being able to make up his mind about the state of things he was eluding all this unwelcome recognition. But then he was deposited once again on its doorstep. It chilled him to the bone. Why, she asked. This sort of recognition can only paralyze me, call a halt to all my preparations. For what. The beginnings of my plans to be ready for the true work. The mission, as you so playfully call it. No scorn intended. No label intended. Your recognition, he cantillated, setting down his fork, sends me back to zero or to a point a little to the negative of zero. Aren't you striving for recognition. My true work, my preparations for my true work, are striving for recognition but they are also striving at all cost to sidestep such recognition, identical with--no, tantamount to--obliteration. You confer recognition on me, the wet dream come true of any Hegelian slave. But (pace Kojève) suddenly I'm intelligible, paraphrasable, diagnosable, and with diagnosis comes--or goes--label which, as everybody knows or should know, is just a hop, a skip and a jump away from consignment to the deep freeze. The minute my true work and my preparations for the true work-- --which seem forever on the verge of overrunning and smothering the true work-- He pretended not to have heard. --are the least bit intelligible--the minute what I desperately need to believe is my mountainous complexity seems to offer even the most tenuous of footholds--then that work is as if put away, disposed of for good. At that point my true work is more the property of my commentators--that pitiful overschooled horde--than of me." He thought she might be moved by this image of heartless and lily-livered expropriation. She only went on more matter-of-factly as if all this was the all-too-predictable gibberish of a cornered rat. In fact, it did wonders for her appetite which seemed to have flagged immediately after the portentous phrase (though no more portentous than any that came before) consignment to the deep freeze hit the airwaves. You seem to know a lot about your true work, At the same time you know nothing about it. Waiter. Check.

The tip was generous. Freckles began to penetrate the powder and the rouge. Pancake, Larry graciously called it. I hate my work, he said rising. Not the true work, he added a little too hastily, I mean, the work I do for Admiral and Mrs. O'Day. But I know that once I begin the true work I will undergo it--the true work, that is--only as an obstruction on the way to the true work. I will undergo it as an embodied thrashing past its inherent unintelligibility.

But I thought, she remarked drily, refusing to budge, you treasured the unintelligibility. He sat down again. He was overcome with panic.

He'd been caught contradicting himself. Hence, he was a nonentity, a nullity. Seeing the look on his face she said, Don't act so frightened. So I've unearthed a contradiction or two at the very heart of your aspiration. He knew that his hangdog look as good as muttered, What do I do now. Where do I go from here. He remembered that a short time before he had experienced a second's worth of euphoria in being confronted with uncertainty. When was it. He struggled to remember. The restaurant. Something to do with the restaurant. Filling up...or...OR...OR... thinning out. He looked around. The state of affairs remained as ambiguous but it failed to trigger a euphoria. And there was certainly no euphoria to be expected from contemplation of the present scandalous state of affairs exposed by Shekhinah's merciless perspicuity. He treasured his unintelligibility yet he was forever thrashing past it. He shuddered to think of this state of affairs that was he, and he alone. He was ignominious, embroiled in contradiction. Try to use your contradictoriness. Try to cultivate yourself as an inexhaustible source of contradiction. Nurture yourself as a breeding ground of incompatibilities. He was visibly struggling to envision her exhortations, to make them flesh, even if he knew the struggle made him lumpishly typable, localizable, limitable, as one committed--at least for a second--to comprehending a string of words as subtending a state of affairs out there. He began to intone, to lay out all his contradictions before her. He loved radishes. But he also hated them. He was right-handed but given half a chance, also left-. Was it too fatuous to hope that she might suture his schisms at last. Perhaps, exhortations notwithstanding, it was all these contradictions keeping him from getting on with the true work. Even if a true work was not something you just got on with. Then a shudder ran through his frame at the thought that...that...that..on the contrary self-contradiction and self-contradiction alone might be the only force capable of propelling the true work forward. What if the true work--the successful true work, that is--was nothing more than a network of contradictions yoked into phantom compatibility, which yokage was the true work's only raison d'être. That is, as a templated word if not to the wise then to the far more numerous wise-asses, to the effect that if they didn't follow suit and yoke all their warring instincts together they'd be as good as dead, at least in a world that didn't suffer loose ends gladly.

Seeing his eyes tear and glaze over--all in an instant--she came (Shekhinah wasn't always as merciless, divinely wrathful, as rumor would have it) to his rescue. By cultivating contradiction, you're in good--the best--company. Rubbing elbows with the late Harry Ein-Sof (occupation: furrier extraordinaire), for example. Any true worker's soul must be the battleground of two kinds of light. First, there are the thought-saturated lights which want to create world upon world and--putting their money where their mouth is--get out of the way of the enterprise by contracting and leaving the vacuum--primordial space--pleroma--necessary for outflow. Then you have the thought-less lights, whose only thought is to resist the outflow of creation as representing that ol' demon change [like a widow whose sole aim is to live out the rest of her days in the Olinville Avenue (Bronx NY) apartment she's occupied since her wedding day fifty-five years before]. And this excruciating tension, perpetually revived, between the two kinds of light, between contraction and expansion, underlies every stage of the process of creation. So fasten your seat belt. Now, the thought-less light is not evil per se but it becomes evil by refusing vaginal penetration by the thought-saturated light, which by its very nature wants to scour (like any self-respecting penis) every nook and cranny in the womblike space ushered in by its own contraction--to wipe out every trace of the formless sludge that is the thought-less light. And into that mess, to get the dialectical ball of contraction and outflow rolling, the true worker sends a ray of his purest light. A thought packet, it's called in the Promised Land. But don't believe men of the cloth when they tell you the purpose of all this systole-diastole is to smelt out all your impurities--your very bowels--into the true work. To hide his dazzlement, he said, I treasure my unintelligibility yet I am forever thrashing past it. Toward what? Toward an ending. But why should you want to come to the end of unintelligibility. I.e., why sabotage the self-sabotage so early on in the game, especially given all we've been through together--and not just today. He hadn't the faintest idea what she was alluding to. And it frightened him. I don't want to--get intelligible, I mean (he could hear his critics-to-be licking their inky chops, and maybe Ms. Jones heard them, too), once I set foot in the turbid viscous eddies of the true work (can you set foot in an eddy, he wondered), this project unintelligibly flaunting its vast inexpugnability, it begins to cry out for beginning, middle and end. I am tortured by the unavoidable awareness of its need for beginning, middle and end. Nevertheless, like any good parent, so setting foot I begin to give shape to the eddies--the setting foot is by definition a giving shape. My mere presence is a shaping. But once the true work has beginning, middle and end it is bound to be recognized, obliterated, as a finite contoured thing, And when I confer recognition on you qua tortured pursuer of true working you, too, become a finite contoured thing."

A finite contoured obliterated thing. Fixed and formulated beyond appeal, gripped in the searing pincers of your consciousness of all my defects--the biggest being my obvious fear of making self-sabotage serve my own ends. It is no longer boundless. It is one not-so-true work among a plethora. It is one thing--with beginning, middle, end--among many things with each its beginning, middle, end. He had to admit--without knowing quite why and without giving a sign--that her formulation was much better. But would such a formulation have ever come to birth if his hadn't already been standing around positively clamoring for rectification and refinement. Out on the street, with strings of bulbs too bright for afternoon defining the open interiors of a high-rise in progress (was the good-looking kid glued to the window with its For rent sign a few steps ahead admiring his grimy reflection or was he in fact truly intrigued by the emptiness beyond?), she said, So we've established that you hate your brother and loathe, though not quite as much, beginnings, middles, ends since presumably when things have beginnings, middles and ends they are very much in and of the world, as things among things. As things among things they are not entitled to any particular reverence, any particular exemptions. Is it presumptuous to assume you loathe the natural development of all things--not just true works but birds, beasts, tables, smiles and the like. Is it safe to assume you detest with all your heart and soul the leisurely inevitability of a maturation unfolding day by day. Taking the measure of a tall office building--it looked as if it had arisen one day all of a piece, spared any excruciating incubation, such as seemed to be in store for him, or rather, the likes of him--he said, "If I am doomed to tend to the true work, to rub my face in its everlasting inchoateness (Watch it, Ike: your eloquence, if that's what it professes to be, is getting out of hand), then I want it to be much bigger than all other things with beginnings, middles, ends. I don't want the true work reduced to the common denominator of a leisurely unfolding in time with its inherent need to come to an end through beginning and middle--I don't want my true work maimed to the same sameness of leisurely unfolding through beginning, middle, end. It's not for me. Let's get that straight here and now. The fact that she was forever in his debt for having been allowed to tamper with his formulation a while back gave him the right to throw his weight around. It felt good. I get it: she murmured as if the heat was suddenly too much for her Southern sensibility, it's safe to assume you loathe anything and everything that stinks of evolution, ripening, maturation, gradual change, imperceptible progression. Though you simply must let go of the idea that everybody else is like you and Minerva."

He wanted to cover his ears. Instead he said, Yes, Yes. Yes. I loathe the notion of change, of development, and all it implies of a cheery, almost blissful, capitulation to life--to the laws of life, to all that life pretends to hold in store for those insane enough to harbor normal needs. How much more attractive don't you think to be walled off forever from change, to be insusceptible to change, to the slightest modification, to be completely refractory and immune to the will of the...exterior. And yet at the same time to be completely indefinable, to be completely outside diagnosis. For the inroad of diagnosis is possible only when the self complies with the demand of the exterior that it change. For the better, of course. Of course. But it is still impossible to stand absolutely still AND to be at the same time outside commentary, diagnosis, refutation. He wanted to tell her he was more than able to manage such a feat--to oscillate among the spaces between these incompatible, seemingly incompatible, stances. But he knew he was not yet deft enough to depict his legerdemain or strong enough to shoulder the heft of this very gift. But at the words very special gift he couldn't refrain from guffawing long and loud. After all he was only human. By his own unreliable assessment, the embarrassing guffaw could easily pass for a cough. Shekhinah was, in any case, playing deaf and blind.You're terrified of change, was all she said.

Terrified of growing beyond what you are now, terrified of having to look back on what you are now with a certain...detachment. For as we know there is no hate greater than that of a self for a previous self. So you're trying to compel the affections of your unholy substance, under the attributes both of thought and of extension, to cease and desist this very minute. He repeated, It's not for me." It cheered him up. At the same time he was declaring himself beyond rehabilitation. He went on. But he did not know if by going on he was making things direr or rendering the open-and-shut case against him less airtight. He did not know if by going on he was making things direr OR...OR...opening a few vents in the airtight case against him. Once again, for a split second, he felt exhilarated, Was it because he didn't yet know the impact of this going on. Was it because going on had engendered two possible interpretations of its consequences among whose spaces he was now about to...oscillate. To be oscillating among the spaces of these possible interpretations--was this indistinguishable from achieving localizability in no point of view. To oscillate in this manner, was this to be freefloating, unhinged, triumphantly outside all stances. Was this oscillation the dissidence that could never be...throttled to fixity.

He was about to go on. He went on. On he went, He did not know if by going on he was making-- Once again he succumbed to a euphoria that was not too different from vertiginous and symptom-laden panic. Once again, for a split second, he felt exhilarated not knowing what he was doing going on. It was as if the consequences of going on debouched simultaneously on both possibilities and on neither. Or was this pretty insight just another case of words--wordflow with all its syntactical vagaries--doing the talking and not he himself. Did he mean what he said or did the words do the meaning for the two of them--in the same that way Bogie, if he remembered correctly (and why shouldn't he? he'd seen the flick in question dozens of times), was supposed to do the thinking for the two of them (i.e., him and Bergman). In any event, there was no localizing the consequences. And he, as the arena of this going on, was unlocalizable also. For a split second. For as long as it took to be annihilated by a belittling gaze on the sidewalks of New York. I don't know, he went on, "if I could stand dragging around the carcass of a true work evolving into a defined and delimited event for then ultimately I, by extension, would become similarly defined and delimited. I.e., a prime target for the first diagnosis freak who happened to come along. And they all do, come along, I mean, sooner or later. As for the evolutionary part of the package, by extension I'd be similarly incomplete, sawed off, mutilated until further notice, non-unitary, a jerk in progress. The kind of open body my ex-pal Mike Bakhtin is--was--always raving about, a body exposed through every orifice, meatus and gland to the dubious delights of the carnivalesque.

"Under the circumstances, I'd be at the mercy of, and reduced to wooing, those contingencies favorable to my completion, my coming to an end. That is, if completeness seemed preferable to mutilation, the grass being always greener until it's your grass. So incompleteness is a form of mutilation. We've established that much. Process is, I think, a better word than incompleteness and process, my dear, where a work, true or otherwise, is concerned reflects the ineptitude, shoddiness, inferiority of the worker. In the case of a true work, conception should be identical to completion. The true worker refuses to be left alone even for a minute with the demon of invention, which is just another word for scheming behind the receiver's back, toying with foreshadowings cunningly planted, surprise middles and finishing touches galore. Otherwise, he would be unethical. So, whether completed or still evolving, you're always under attack. Not a pretty sight."

They were nearing Lincoln Center, where the New York City Ballet was finishing up its season. Hadn't he at one time believed his mission was to become a ballerina. The proximity of the posters under glass made him giddy, as it always did--giddy enough in this case to say, When you are dragging around with you, day in, day out, the never-to-be-completed carcass of a so-called true work then you are necessarily exposed to an infinity of pitfalls and malevolencies each with its own vested interest in obstructing completion. So there is something in the nature of the true work, of your true work as you perceive it, that invites reprisal. Where there is reprisal there must have been attack. Your true work is an attack. He looked her in the eye (whose color was different from the other's: the French had a word for this, didn't they?) and said with the sigh one reserves for the slowest of learners, To embark on any enterprise--on any large enterprise--is to at one and the same time convert the world, the rest of being, to an enemy, a festering malevolence out to destroy before it is destroyed, or rather absorbed into that enterprise intent on becoming all of being with no remainder. In front of the New York State Theater with the schedule of dances for each performance prominently displayed, he was giddily emboldened to say, I long to sink my teeth into a work that might turn out to be true and I long to be free of all such temptations--all the true works-to-be timidly making their hunger to be appropriated perceptible on the margins of my attention. I don't want the true work to appropriate me before I can appropriate it. Before you have to undergo the excruciation of consciously choosing. He ignored the stab, if a stab was indeed what it was. I am intrigued by the void that must succeed to successful completion of the true work. But you said that the true work--the true true work--is certain to become all of being. How does that leave room for a void. He shrugged. Then he brightened. The photo of a dancer he recognized but couldn't name (he was no authority on technique but wasn't that a grand jeté en avant?) elasticized and emboldened him further. It doesn't. Or rather it does and it doesn't. In any case the possibility/impossibility of an assumption on the part of the void succeeding to the true work, of nothing less than the dimensionlessness of all of being, or vice versa, allows me to oscillate in the spaces between scandalous incompatibilities. Wasn't that your term back there at Columbus Circle? I am everywhere and nowhere in my conception of the true work. Isn't that where you want me to be--unlocalizable, far from fixity? Contrary to popular belief, I'm no Miss Havisham nor was meant to be and you're no Estella. Still, there's no denying you're a fast learner. She looked around, refusing to be moved by dusk in the lunar landscape of the plaza. At least when anxiety--or is it humiliation?--is the teacher. He saw that the posters did not speak to her, not one bit, nor did the scurrying of what were obviously dancers toward the stage door fare any better. The true work is the be-all and the end-all, he continued. And at the same time-- he was already immersed in oscillation among two new possibilities, again scandalously incompatible. At the same time, she prompted, looking at her watch. So now it was he on borrowed time.

Was she in a hurry, pressed for time, or...or...OR...was she merely intimidated and consequently seeking refuge in the poker-face of her timepiece.

Was she in a hurry OR intimidated. Was she intimidated OR in a hurry. He couldn't tell whether or not the watch was a costly thing. At this moment it would be nice to be able to write off her intervention as the ravings of a bourgeois cow.

Isaac felt that there was no need to go on speaking, walking...being.

He had merely to oscillate among the spaces between these two possible interpretations of a gesture. The spaces between were signified by the word or--sorry, OR. He blessed the word. He was nowhere and everywhere, like a pirouetting ballerina seeming to be trying madly to keep up with the music--when, of course, an exquisitely controlled not-quite-keeping-up was the aesthetic phenomenon the hordes were paying to see, whether they knew it or not. Though she was looking hard at him--no doubt thinking he was absorbed in--into--the ballerina's figuration (who was it?--quick!--McBride? Farrell? the seraphically precise Kyra Nichols? one of the up-and-comings?)--he felt blissfully out of range, imprecise, unlocalizable, a cipher adrift in a sea of uncertainty warmed by currents bubbling up from the very wellsprings of being, or non-being. At the same time, she prompted again, an edge of real rage, real panic, in her tone--as if she just had to make this sale in the next five seconds if she wanted her commission. The true work is the be-all and the end-all. At the same time, as I thrash amid its trappings, i.e., its essence, the true work is an impediment on the way to some other kind of be-all and end-all. Some kind of compensation, mammoth reparation, sign. Call it whatever you like. Some kind of sign, preferably. Expiring complacently, Isaac thought she looked suddenly ill, much older. Was she overwhelmed, overcome by his masterliness in disengaging himself from the war of stances.

Was he imagining it or was she truly afraid to move, to gesture, to utter, lest whatever state of affairs was thereby initiated become a pretext for euphoric uncertainty as he oscillated--pirouetted--once again, among the spaces of the counter-interpretations he was sure to spawn for that state of affairs. After all, she'd already had a bellyful of his euphoria. If she must know, he was writing an ode to the true work with the body of his mind. Hell, he was doing only what one of his other ex-pals, Steph Mallomar, would have urged him to do, under the circumstances.

"So all your enemies, all those who are driven by a slothlike malevolence, which for better or worse remains a far cry from lucid conspiracy, will ultimately be attacking not so much the true work as your frenzied rush to have done at last with the true work--with true works, period. Perhaps those you