City of God (27 page)

Over by the ocean beach innumerable swallows darken the sky, swirling about like dust storms, but do they feed as they fly, actually vacuum the air of the insect legions, as swifts do? They are small as sparrows, white-breasted, blue-feathered, with swept-back forked tails and pointed wing-tips. Space is the dimension of their lives, it's what they live in, like bird galaxies, though not, like swifts, for months, years, at a time without landing. They have a weakness for telephone wires, they can't resist the linear communal perch as now, with a gingerly first touch down, a few suggest to the rest a break in their migration, until they clear out of the sky over the long stretch of sanded road just behind the dunes and settle shoulder to shoulder on the cursive telephone cable, pole to pole to pole, breasting the ocean wind, head feathers ruffling, these little fuckers know how to live, they are arrayed now for some celestial concert only they can hear.

—I was aware as I did my philosophy in my own way, standing in front of the students in states of abstraction while they waited to write down what I said. . . I was aware that to the degree they were awed was the extent they would make fun of me behind my back. Professor
Ludwig Wienerschnitzel. Arguing with himself, lapsing into his German, hearing what he had just said aloud as if someone else had said it, and then disagreeing vehemently. Coming up with one startling brilliant assertion after another, and erasing each one with a wave of his hand, a grimace of self-disgust. Demonstrating the physical exertion of real thought. Hours of this. . . performance. Finally sinking into a chair exhausted, his hair matted with perspiration. But always, I say now here as a confession, always with no purpose but to make things as simple as the world is in its hereness and nowness, baring everything as far as possible to its simple naked
given.
The world as. . . everything that is so, everything that is the case. So I did that hard work, and it proved infernally difficult. So difficult as to drive me to serious considerations of suicide. But when once achieved, all the difficulty is over, is that not so? It should have been easy now for everyone, and yet. . . I was not understood! I numbered my thoughts and put them in developmental order, as a student makes outlines of his reading. The easier to understand. I did all that could be done. But the simpler I made the practice of philosophy, the more difficult it became for everyone else. Not just people, not just students, but my colleagues, my fellow philosophers! The very men who had taught me!

God knows, I did not look for gratitude. Only for someone in this world who would say to me, “Ludwig, you are not alone.” But all I heard from everyone was, Please explain this, say it so that I can understand it. You see? They didn't realize that to explain it was to negate it. I had reached the point of apparentness which is inexplicability. The point of all my work is to find only what can be said. And there is not much of that! I wrote to them, “Whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent.” I said to them, If you would understand what I have written, read what I have not written and perhaps then you will understand. But this only puzzled them further.

Migod. I would tell this or that young Englishman with whom I walked or went to the movies after an exhausting lecture: If you would live in the true spirit of philosophy, don't be a philosopher. Well what about you, Professor? I have left philosophy before, I tell them, and I will leave it again before it kills me, it was a mistake for me to come back, I tell them. If you are a philosopher by training, abandon philosophy and work with your hands. Become a carpenter, a nurse, a
hod carrier. Something simple and real in the real world, something that corresponds with the world as it is. If you are in love, I would tell this or that young Englishman, and, let me say here and now, there were never such enchanting young men as the English turned out, their skin coloring, their reticence, their capacity for self-subjugation, my goodness, what an enticement they were, what a constant, even agonizing enticement. . . But if you are in love, I would say to them, the one or two who genuinely did love me, we must separate, because love can exist only in separation, only in denial of the flesh is the love affirmed for what it is or otherwise it cannot be trusted as unconditional. And if it is not unconditional it is not love. That is the truth I practice when I have the strength to do so. All of civilization as it has developed is designed to sully our souls. All the values of society must be forsworn if you would live as a man. Wealth is a deadly condition. If you are wealthy, as I was—I was immensely rich—impoverish yourself, as I did. If you love, cherish your love by abandoning your lover, as I did. If you are an academic philosopher, leave it and live humbly, as I did. And if your obsession is language and thought, go to the movies as I do and let yourself bathe in the images, the lights and shadows, the places and sweet faces, let the pictograms flicker over you that are the opposite of language, that do not have to create analogs of the world in grammatical propositions, as language does, that do not have to map the world with sentences but are already there, simply and without effort, in it and of it.

I love movies. They make themselves out of the actual materials of the world, you see. They lift the world's appearances from the world as you would lift with your knife tip the iridescent blue-green coloration of the rainbow from the rainbow trout. . . leaving the substance of the world unchanged but rendered in exact homologous equivalence of itself. With movies you sit in darkness and learn that the world is everything that is the case. And that when they have reached their conclusion and the lights go on, what has not been shown cannot be spoken of, that there is a silence beyond them appropriate to the ineffability of that which cannot be expressed. And at this point you leave. From the darkness of the theater to the darkness.

But where was I?

—The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards

DANCING IN THE DARK

(
applause
)

till the tune ends,

We're dancing in the dark

And it soon ends;

We're waltzing in a wonder
of why we're here.

Time hurries by, we're here and gone.

Looking for the light

of a new love

to brighten up the night,

I have you, love,

And we can face the music together

Dancing in the dark.

I mean, no candlelight, no firelight, not one lumen,

This is definitely the dark we're dancing in,

As we ponder the meaning of our existence here—

Let me ask the equally imponderable question: Where is here?. . .

Of course we are lucky to have something under our feet on which to do our dancing.
That's something.

On the other hand who are the we I speak of?

I'm holding on to you and you dance well enough, but I can't see you and you haven't said a word.

Are you in fact there?

If you are, you know as well as I do life is short and as time goes by we don't go with it.

We're both looking for enlightenment, am I right?

Like a love at first sight?

And when this luminous love arrives bringing us out
of the darkness of where and who we are

We'll know what we're about, we'll see everything clear

including the person we're dancing with,

yes, babe, the person we're dancing in the light with, though obviously it won't be either of us.

Until that happens, if it ever does,

I am holding on to you and you are holding on to me which I suppose is some consolation.

All in all, this not very promising situation suggests

That, arm in arm, we'll be left facing the music

Though how music can be faced when it's all around you in the darkness
is anyone's guess. . .

(
applause
)

I can't let that go unanswered—

My colleague here is so into his own mind

No wonder he's in the dark

No wonder he doesn't see anything.

Lighting up the twists and turns of his brain

With all the voltage of a neutrino

He's dancing with his shadow

Dancing in the darkness of his mind.

I don't see a woman there

How could any woman dance to that beat?

I know what a woman can dance to

I know what it feels like to hold a dancing woman

Alive in her exertion, lithe, powerful in her being though she is narrow in the shoulders slender-waisted and light on her feet

I smell the sweet cleanness of her hair

She rests her temple on my cheek.

I feel the pulse in her wrist,

I feel her trust as she follows my lead and leans the small of her back into my hand

We sway and pirouette and match our steps our intimacy hums like another voice of the music

it flows through us as an uncanny harmony

And that is all the conversation I need from her

Dancing in the dark with her.

This is a blessed darkness we're dancing in

lending to us for the time of our dance

our centrality in the world, the magnitude of our romance

For as long as our song goes on.

(
applause
)

Whereas I see this as a scene in a nightclub.

Tables lit with small shaded lamps surround the dance floor,

A dim white gleam on each tablecloth

A wirey glow on the rims of the wine glasses. . .

This is a nightclub I have never had the good fortune to play in,

Terraced, with curved walls and lots of space between tables,

A supper club, in fact, where darkness is visible

And the sidemen sitting up on the stand

Are led by a non-playing leader with a baton

As he smiles with his back to them and looks benevolently upon the two dancers.

They're all smiling on the bandstand, they're getting paid

This is a Hollywood nightclub, you see

All fake, a soundstage for a movie nightclub

And the two dancers are the stars of the movie

And this is the scene where they discover they love each other

They dance staring into each other's eyes

While I and the rest of the band play on for them with big stupid smiles on our faces

Because the gig pays.

And the extras sitting at the nightclub tables in their black ties and evening gowns

They're getting paid too.

We're all extras in the lives of these star dancers

Dancing in the carefully lit dark with the dim spotlight on each tablecloth and the wirey glow on the rims of the wine glasses.

Now here's why we're here:

It happens to be a really bad time outside the nightclub,

The country is broke, no one is working,

Men stand in the cold streets on the breadlines

Duststorms sand the paint off jalopies abandoned in the desert

Worms eat into the cheekbones of the hungry children in the mountains

There are no brothers who can spare a dime

Certainly not in the street in front of the club where the cops slap their billies in their palms

and keep the beggars at bay
behind the police stanchions.

The beggars are waiting for the two stars to finish their dark dancing

And take their fur wrap and lambswool coat from the hatcheck

And come out to the street to hail a taxi

And toss a few dimes their way.

But this won't happen. The two star dancers will go on dancing

He in his black clawtail coat and slicked-down hair

She in her silver sequined gown with her clenching ass-halves clearly delineated.

These dancers of the silver screen

waltzing round and around

pretending their song will soon be over

are in fact the appointed collectors of the dimes.

Prying our hands open, uncovering our thin ten-cent hoard

They are hauling in the precious dimes of