The Unpleasantest Absence
(Wrote this a while ago and never posted it:)
'What bores they are with their politics!' said theh notary Cardot. 'Close the door. There's no science or virtue that is worth a single drop of blood. If we were to call on truth to settle its accounts we should perhaps find it bankrupt.'
'Ah! It would no doubt have cost us less to enjoy ourselves doing evil than to quarrel about doing good. And so I myself would swap all the last forty years' speeches in Parliament for a tasty trout, a fairy-tale by Perrault or a sketch by Charlet.'
'You're absolutely right!...Pass me some asparagus...For, after all, liberty engenders anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings us back to liberty. Millions of people have perished without being able to establish any one of those systems. Is not that the vicious circle in which the moral world will always turn? When man thinks he has brought things to perfection, all he's done is to shuffle them around.'
This snippet of intellecutal acrobatics is Balzac pur sang, from a novel called The Wild Ass's Skin. I found the book in the Canfield free-pile and simply could not turn away a work of art with "wild ass" in the title. (I mean, damn... Balzac could've enjoyed a more-than-somewhat-successful career writing porn titles.) The whole "orgy" scene (a big philosophy-freestlye at the dinner-table, followed by less enlightened convo with various French chickenheads) reminds me of dining and drinking at Bennington, and dining and drinking in parts of New York, where ideas are not only infinitely mutable but undendingly fun to mutate.
I especially like that most of Balzac's bad boys seem more concerned with the fine shadings of charcoal nude-sketching or the way a certain word rings in the mouth and bounce off the page ("orchid box") than with shooting or stabbing one another, and this essentially artsy-irenic disposition certainly binds early-Victorian Era France to Post-Hipster/Blogger-Era Bennington.
But there's a key difference between Balzac's dandies' speeches and the speeches of Bennington students and ex-students: Too often, we don't talk about politics. (There is, for example, no "Politics" category on That's Plenty.) This unpleasant absence is robbing us of both sovereignty in our own world, as credit card-carrying quasi-adults, and a new realm in which/with which to play (to make art in and about).
Of course, Balzac's gentlemen arrive at the conclusion, however silly and wine-induced, however much an excuse to see the ladies (and bring on dessert), that tis better to chillax and get faced than to contemplate the social dynamics that are (back in the 1820s and 30s) driving their nation forward, toward two World Wars, movies like The Transporter, and the ignominy of Zidane.
***
I'm worried that people do really care [about the world outside Brook-Strong and Asshattan], but feign not-caring, and that this feigned not-caring is overpowering their really-caring, and soon no one will really care. Makes me think of this:
To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not?
(I had more to say, when I started this blargh, but now I forget where I was going. Something about George Packer, Lebanon, Christopher Hitchens... I forget. Anyway, point is, Balzac's the man. And so is J.B.)
when i take drugs
i always take prozac
when i read prose
i always read balzac.
s/z mofo's
Truer words have rarely been spoken. And even then, mostly by mute people.