In my dreams, I was constantly losing my brother in the midst of World War III. In despair, I didn’t want to go on, but I’d go on. I’d see him then as he was as a kid of four or five. His sweetness got him killed. Whereas I, even at my worst and most lost, always had an instinct for reality. I’d felt from an early age appointed or called by something. But reality was a minefield, starting with my own somatic experience (failure to be held). Something, some threat in the biological or social world, was always poised to interrupt where I was meant to go (K’s theory early in our friendship about Spinoza, Proust, imperial time, and death, and years later when he told me about what Grace Lee said about James Boggs, how she’d never met a person who could sleep so soundly, the kind of sleep that comes from being a Black man born in Alabama who lives and breathes a revolutionary humanity).
There came a point when R and I were so entwined that our nightmares began to rhyme, and sometimes they were identical. Since she was a kid she’d suffered from night terrors. They’d had to send her to a sleep center. Her nightmares often took place in the house she grew up in in Hastings-on-Hudson, the kind of house that can make you break down in tears just by walking through the door. It was a place I too came to love and to dream about (always as nightmare). Once when we were in Argentina I published an article implying that Alberto Nisman had been killed by Mossad and/or the CIA and the night before it came out we had conjoined nightmares about dying in a plane crash. Later, when R got involved in immigration activism, an ICE agent used to call her in the middle of the night, every night for months. He’d breathe heavily into the phone. Sometimes that’s all he did. She found out who he was somehow. Then the calls stopped. Then they started again. Then they stopped for good.
***
Questions about grandmothers:
Where do all the grandmothers go in the non-corporeal night to talk among themselves?
Well, who’s God? All the grandmothers getting together to make a long, silky beard?
Who was Thomas Pynchon’s grandmother?
Do the wombs of the grandmothers of mass murderers also dream of genocide?
Is Hillary Clinton just like your abuela, or did she deport your abuela?
Why was my grandmother afraid of cats and dogs?
When the Argentine junta ripped babies from the Marxist wombs of their mothers before
loading them (their mothers) into an airplane and dropping them into the Atlantic Ocean, and
subsequently gave those babies to prominent military families for adoption, who were these
babies’ real grandmothers? The ones in the Plaza de Mayo or the ones who called themselves
their grandmothers, whom they believed to be their grandmothers? Was Argentina their
grandmother? Was the ocean?
Who is the grandmother of the abyss?
Is the night’s grandmother another night? Or are all nights orphans?
Who is the grandmother clutching at my heart? What’s her name? Would she like a nice glass of vodka and apple juice?
***
I am talking to “AryanGirl88” on a fetish website. She leaves me a voice message: Heil Hitler! I wish Hitler had gassed your grandmother but I’m happy he gassed so many of your kike family. Heil Hitler! I’ve never heard, in a human voice, such an ecstasy of sexual pleasure.
***
A cousin is in the same room as you but at a different time. A sibling is in the same room as you all the time. A cousin is a haunting, a sibling is a mirror.
II
I’m a woman bathing naked with my friend in a Lithuanian lake in the oneiric forest outside the shtetl. We’re happy, there’s a vague eroticism in the blueish gloom of the ionized air, when we see, out of the corner of our eye, a man. His look is cruel, murderous, primeval. The Gentiles have the plague and they blame the Jews. We get out of the lake and hurry back to the shtetl.
No, this never happened, it’s something out of a cheap Israeli horror flick.
I used to imagine myself as Sabbatai Zevi and now I imagine myself as a beautiful sapphic heterodox kabbalist.
These lifeworlds are like bubbles: iridescent, expanding, and then pop! What we’re experiencing, in this country (this Empire, which is coterminous with the World), is the bursting of the bubble. That’s our schizophrenia, our pain, our sickness.
***************
Then one day I get sick. Well, I guess my luck was bound to run out sooner or later, I think to
myself.
So this is what it’s like to be sick, I think. Like being an undocumented immigrant from a country destroyed by U.S. imperialism and then suddenly you wake up in the United States itself: the nightmare country. Or, to stick to a more melancholy and bourgeois motif, like being an exile in a cheap and tacky country you’ll never come to recognize. Well, this is sickness, I think: my new country.
*********************
This is a book of sickness now. A viral book. Before it was a book about car crashes, violent deaths, so-called “deaths of despair,” and the sins of Sodom. Now it’s a book about sickness. Or rather, it’s the sickness itself. It’s intended to pick the suppurating wounds of my sickness, to let the sickness bleed and become the crisis, and to make everyone who comes into contact with itsick, too.
*********************
Dzokhar: But there’s a way out.
Me: Where?
–There’s always a way out. Where you least expect it.
–Show me where it is.
–Here.
–Where?
–Outside.
–I don’t see it.
–Are you for the abolition, not just of your own sickness, but of the world itself?
–Yes.
–Then you’ll see that sickness is the way out itself. The way out of sickness, the way out of binaries and mirrors. The way out of spacetime, too, which was enclosed long ago, before you were born.
–I don’t understand.
–You don’t understand because you’re sick.
–I thought sickness was the cure.
–It is, but you’re not sick enough.
**************************
What is making me sick? My paranoia. And: the air, water, and food. Patriarchy is making mesick. In the womb I was sick, too. Sex is making me sick, sexual desire. What about the abyss?The abyss makes us all sick, as does its absence. My immune system is making me sick, but so is heartbreak, to which my immune system responds. Joe Rogan is making me sick. Bitcoin is making me sick. Elon “we’ll coup anyone we want” Musk is making me sick. R made me sick, as I made her sick. This fucking bullshit is making me sick. Blood is making me sick: my blood, the Christian concept of blood. Hydraulics is making me sick. All the languages I can no longer speak: they’re making me sick, too. Fascism is making me sick. Hitler is making me sick. Stalin is not making me sick. God, on His deathbed…My cat is sick. Animals, in general, are sick in this apocalypse we’ve made for them, for us. High school is making me sick. McLean Virginia is making me sick. The CIA is making me sick. Living on stolen land is making me sick. Time is making me sick, as is space, with their mutilations. A chronotopic sickness is making me sick…
********************
And how could Maya’s sickness be summed up? By the fact that her last two Spotify searches were: Victor Jara and Death in June. Could her politics be summed up this way? No, she was aleft communist with a nihilist streak. But her sickness, her spiritual aesthetics, yes: it could be summed up this way.
***********************
What else? Her memory. She couldn’t remember if something happened three weeks or one year ago. The pain of yesterday was a foreign country to her. Today’s pain, on the other hand, was like a suicide bomber, or the origin of the universe. She kept the TV on in the background to drown the silence between songs. She seemed to remember everything and nothing at the same time.
************************
The only thing that bothered Maya about the ineluctable end of the universe, which otherwise
she wished would come as soon as possible, was the utter disappearance of all the music that
was ever created. Though of course most music had been lost, but it was a miracle that any of it
had been saved. There could be no theodicy for the holocaust of music. It brought her to tears
almost every day, she who’d not cried, or cried only much later, years later, when she saw a
passing train, over the deaths of her closest lovers and friends.
*********************
One day Maya called me sobbing. I just watched a documentary about Stanislav Szukalski, she said.
Well, that had all the elements that would bring her to tears: the destruction of his art at the hands of the Luftwaffe, the genius forgotten and unappreciated, the apostolic chase of young artists after the lost bodhisattva, the fungal nature of surrealism, the crazed self-belief of tormented autists. It also had all the things that would make her laugh: the tongue-in-cheek (or was it?) flirtation with far right political beliefs and motifs, the tragic horniness of the artist as an old man, Eastern Europe…
I watched the documentary, which could have been called The Boomer Shitlibs Versus the Polish Neo-Nazis, after the aging luminaries of the 1970s Los Angeles underground comics scene, brought to tears to discover Szukalski’s “original sin” of fascist anti-Semitism, though the guy was clearly a lunatic racist who used to run around in parking lots with them pointing outthe racial degeneracies of various passerbys, and the occultist weirdos of the Polish far-right, who competed for ownership over Szukalski’s legacy. Brought into referee this battle royale, bizarrely, is the hack historian Timothy Snyder, who pontificates his lame version of the two demons or horseshoe theory, and grants Szukalski absolution for his Asiatic sins. His founding of a crankish prewar Polish fascist avant-garde sect of a dozen or so thugs and invalid acolytes is presented as a profound betrayal of his friend Ben Hecht, the Zionist screenwriter, as opposed to more evidence that Zionism itself was born in kookiness, in petty-bourgeois parlor rooms, in apocryphal racial cosmology with blood and soil themes. But no, Szukalski did not support Hitler. He was an ecumenical, a surrealist fascist: he was of the opinion, in the 1930s, that one should let a thousand fascisms bloom.
Afterward, Maya and I talked about the chimerical colonialism of Szukalski’s imagination, his attempt to resurrect Poland to a kind of Aztec apex glory, and later, with Easter Island, the inexhaustible search for an Urheimat on indigenous land, the search for primitive expressivity against totalitarian modernity. We talked about the cranky geniuses of the right (because Szukalski was a right-wing figure, despite the Council on Foregn Relations rehabilitation), what those geniuses have in common (though there aren’t very many right-wing geniuses, they do exist), geniuses like Dali, Nabokov, Lovecraft, etc., the way they re all obsessed with a private and impenetrable childhood, afloat and historically discombobulated, the way they all have a florid erotic obsessiveness married to a kind of cuckold’s impotence (the projection of Szukalski’s comments on Picasso, whom he called “Pic-asshole,” as “the ultimate castrated failure”), the way they attach themselves to one woman for life, like a barnacle or an infantile parasite, the dark racial archetypes that haunt their inner lives, like Szukalski’s Judeo-African apes, who the Boomer shitlibs decide were actually Bolsheviks (scratch a liberal and get a Nazi…). We talked about Szukalski’s sickness, the loneliness of a sickness that has no diagnosis and no name, those lifelong sicknesses we take to the grave…
********************
Szukalski reminds me a little of my grandfather. Or rather, only in certain respects: the thick
Old World eyebrows, the prelapsarian childhood, the melancholic anti-communism, the loss of
country, the dying in a language you don’t understand…