Change

Men cannot be changed, though their circumstances can be. But do not think to change other men. Rather go to where other men are different.

For 4130.2010

At least you have made an account of this nonsense because it is a good account and you have written it truly.

But there are sufferings that a man brings upon himself by choosing a path of conflict with other men and their systems, and then there are the private sufferings which are a man's own, that maybe the world knows nothing about and never will.

I think you bear a private suffering you are as yet not articulate enough to express to yourself--as to express it would be to understand it, to find a language that would make sense of it. Instead you have chosen a public suffering to distract you from what you feel privately but which remains most obscure to you.

It is an easier path to suffer publicly--to suffer among other men, at their hand, to be forced about and prodded and paraded around by their systems. To suffer publicly at the hand of lawyers and courts and jails makes a type of suffering manifest in a way that one's private suffering cannot so easily be made.

I think what you are calling an “adventure” is a placeholder for a more serious and private adventure you do not yet have the equipment to make. You may gather this equipment at some point, but these adventures among other men and their systems (misadventures really) will only distract you from the hard, lonely, silent work of gathering the tools to approach and overcome yourself.

Maximin and I both left the world of men for more than 10 years to perform this work and study. We did it in different ways but it was brutal, exhilarating, spirit-crushing and spirit-soaring. We were both very right and very wrong along the way and we went up the highest mountains that a man can climb from a small, cockroach-filled room in a friendless, empty town. There were no girls, no friends, no families, no jobs, no careers, no vacations, no tvs--nothing. It was 10 years of reading and writing, communing with other men long dead, who had done as we were doing and had left their account of it.

What I am trying say is that you are distracting yourself from some fucking hard work you may need to do. 10 years of hard study is the only way to get to where I think you want to go. Our guy Franz has written eloquently of the jail and trial and the incarceration so that you do not have to. He has written of it so well that you do not need to experience it. Brother Franz was that good.

What you must also recognize is that The Castle has no end. Franz just stops writing it. The systems of men do not have an end. If you choose to adventure inside them it will be your only adventure, an adventure administered to you by other men.

There is nothing private in such an adventure. Saying that it is “in your mind” does not make it a private adventure. It is a cowardice, a retreat, to speak of a “world of the mind.” There is no such world. You--your body--is being pushed around by other men. That is your world, and when men touch you and have a hold of you, when men take your fluids and tell you where to go and you are made to do their projects, then you will be too distracted to ever develop a project of your own, to explore the private sufferings that await you and pass through them, to overcome and to strike a new path and maybe, if you are lucky, to leave some sort of account of this great overcoming.

But as I wrote above you need 10 years of silent, preparatory work to gather the equipment for this adventure. You will find you have it in you to spend 10 years preparing for this journey, or you will not. Most men lack the courage and the will to leave the world of other men and prepare themselves for what is obscured and private. They look for shortcuts among other men, and it often takes the form of a public suffering. These are the unfortunates. Their lives are privately troubled by something they lack the will to engage and express and so they choose to suffer it publicly.

It is my observation that you are pursuing this unfortunate path. But there is time to change it. You must discontinue the public suffering and withdraw from the world of men. You must go to where it is most private and secret, the most lonely of terrains, the higher blue peaks, only sometimes visible in the distance.

When you have climbed that high and lived and worked there for 10 years you may come down from those mountains. Men will seem very different to you, but they will not have changed, for man does not change. This is work best done when you are in your teens and twenties, but it is work that can be done at any age, though it is harder to commit to it when you are older.

The question is how to live and each man who asks this question must develop his own vocabulary to ask it. With hard work and luck you may come to understand the question. The luck I can wish for you, but the hard work must be your own.

Against Sitting

Where reading and writing and it all goes wrong is in the sitting. So when it feels very wrong you get up and you take trips. But trips go wrong too when they are scheduled, and they are scheduled because you have committed yourself to returning to sitting.

So you do something entirely different.

You make a trip without a schedule and you have no plans to return to any sitting. There will be no more reading and writing or any of the other stuff and it is hard at first to think that those things will be gone and as the date approaches that you will leave you wonder if maybe you were wrong to decide to go on a trip without a schedule, a trip without an end. When again would the sitting come? When will the important writing be completed?

But then the trip starts, and it is a trip by bicycle, and it starts in the rain and at a high altitude and you have only a very poor map and a child’s vocabulary with which to speak to the people of a foreign place.

When you see the mountains from the airplane window they scare you, they scare the sitting and the writing and reading all away. You forget those things because you must ride a bike over these mountains. Something now is taking you forward and you must abide by it.

You put your bicycle together in the airport and you ride out into the night. The next day you ride up 2 mountains in the rain and into the clouds and the man who contributed the bike for you to ride has his wish of great suffering for you fulfilled. The contributor of the bike said that you would endure great pain and great suffering and now you are enduring them, but the cold and rain and the altitude forced upon you are greater than the wish of suffering you thought you had received. But you cannot stop to sit.

The suffering you endure and will endure is what you must ride into. The mountain is in your way and you must go over it on the bicycle. The suffering of the stomach and intestines will come later and so will the gales of the Patagone. The sufferings are all there waiting and your bicycle is riding towards them. You are being pulled along and it is a very different “being pulled along” than what the others are doing in their jobs and careers and marriages and families--because this is a “being pulled along” that you have created for yourself and committed yourself to and now it is done.

You start with a bad map and child’s vocabulary and the strength for 2 mountains and maybe you will die and the bicycle will stop and everyone will cry and then everyone will forget. But there is also the chance that you will endure through all the sufferings and finish the map, and you will depart from this place with the vocabulary of a man and a strength for all the mountains.

Daybreak

Murmur of the Heart

The interpreters of Sophocles were wrong. The son does not wish to kill the father. He wishes nothing on the father. The father is almost nothing to him. Unlike the mother he is mostly unnecessary.

As the son's lust is for many women--any woman even--he does not wish to fuck his mother, though his mother may wish to fuck him. Whether or not she wants him physically, she will have tried to make of him the perfect man, the man she has perfected for herself, made in the image of what she most wanted from the men she has known. Along with the investment of his upbringing she also shares with him half his genes and this makes for a powerful tie between them, stronger than anything she could have with his father. At the very least the mother will want the son to be near to her for life and to replace the father.

It is the father’s realization of her love for the son that leads him to want to kill the son. There is no jealousy or animosity between father and son before this realization. For fathers do not matter to sons. Verily, it is only mothers matter.

Response to a Reader

Darren,

I think your criticisms are correct [of the short story "Grisaille"]. On all counts.

Though you did fail to point out how unsympathetic a character Mooney was in all this. If Mooney-- as in "mooning" someone (yes, another one thinly veiled)-- was intended as a stand-in for me, I am being critical of myself in this characterization. Maybe I am. Or I was. I can't remember. The story was written years ago.

I do not think what I remember of you is very much like Devita and whatever you are today I know nothing about. Although 10 years ago when I lived in Paris and began to write it it was you and I in that first version and that was a very different story then. With editing and time the characters became something other. That Devita has never drunk scotch, sells furniture, is married, and has a pregnant wife (did you catch that?) is how he developed, and you didn't.

It's an early story of mine, and you may be right: it may be no good. I won't get into a discussion of truth and fiction, or what it means to be a true writer, or being a man, or even Chatwin, but I will say that when you try to create something you use the things and people and places you know about and then--and this is the exciting and the difficult part--you change them in different ways for an effect. This is the work of the imagination but it is also based upon some fact. While this story seems to have not worked out, you keep trying and you learn from the failures and you hope that with luck and harder work and better training you can achieve that thing you are after.

Suerte,

SOBER TRUCKER SUTRA

(from the words of E. Cannefax)

I met a couple a guys
all hopped up comin' in from Denver;
One was acting ... I don't even remember―
not too concerned about his health―
Like really, yeah―hard on your body, liver &
yeast in your stomach
compounded by poor eating habits
with nowhere near the proper amount of rest―
a lot stay up all night,
not a good right thing goin'―

Well, this guy he wasn't ready to go
to bed―
he was all zooed up―
your body's gonna give in and shut down.
Something will definitely give way
so watch 'em on that tollway in Ohio.

August 5, 1995