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INTERVIEWER
I’m continually baffled by this. If the sentences don’t work—in their unexpected exactitudes, in their rhythms and freshness, in their allusiveness and connotative complexity—how does the story work? Is the story not being told with sentences?
GURGANUS
Exactly. And then there are writers whose sentences always surprise with their inevitable loving precision. Henry Green, early Evelyn Waugh, Walt Whitman, Toni Morrison, Chekhov, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, Nabokov, Montaigne, Dickinson, Agee, Beckett, Melville, Günter Grass, George Eliot, García Márquez, our lists go on and differ year by year. I keep the works of my current deities in easy reach. Scanning even one of their living sentences can resurrect me like CPR. People talk of plot and character, but too few genuflect to the beauty and power of the actual single sentence itself.
<3
Allow me to apologize for my self-absorption. My virus
is your virus, ours is a virulent commonwealth.
We breed them together, refine them, borrow them
from friends and strangers, camels and bats,
as my body fights its infection the global corpus
combats our latest invader—retrovirus, ebolavirus, coronavirus—
we are besieged, we sicken, we counterattack, we die.
But illness leads you inward, away from the tribe,
the clan, the calculus of multitudes
vs. singletons that constitutes American thought.
Interiority is a mode of social distancing.
Here, in the hospital, I am me, alone, a being
frightened of its own mechanical failings,
like a bystander trapped in a broken elevator.
I feel, to myself, like a construct, a built thing, a city
in which I encounter my own bacterial hordes as strangers
passing silently through a maze of narrow alleys.
I watch my heart pulsing and I do not think,
That is me, there beats my engine,
I think, Ah, skillful machine, as if it were an iPhone.
I feel the body’s otherness all around me.
I compose the urgent letter in its envelope,
I carry the scepter in its keep.
It is a prison and a vehicle of emancipation, a strong horse.
My legs trot and canter, my hair grows unlicensed,
my lungs expand and contract automatically.
I am me, alone, but how do I happen
to be here? What am I
if not my body?
Who am I if not that it?
The doctors tell me the many ways I might die
but not how I come to be alive,
existence is a fever of unknown origin,
a pandemonium of desires—
I want to live, I want to breathe, I want
to see as vividly as Vermeer and as broadly as a common fly
and as encyclopedically as the mantis shrimp
though I cannot understand why
it would need to differentiate ten million colors
or how anyone could measure its ability to do so—
the Ishihara test?—simple questionnaires?
I want my heart to shake its defiant fist at the sky forever.
I want my soul to swell with sorrow as with joy.
Most of all, with a desperation that embarrasses me,
as if I had been jailed a decade, I want to go home.
<3
APPIAH
People didn’t argue with the main claims because those were footnoted to articles in biology journals, which they didn’t feel equipped to disagree with. But I think what they felt was, in saying that there were no races, you were denying what the social constructionists were asserting, which was that, of course, in everyday life, in a country like ours, people have experiences as if there were races. People are treated as if races existed, and if you take that away, it sounds as though you are denying that you yourself are a Black person. Now, of course, I was saying that, as a claim about biology, there aren’t any White people either.
INTERVIEWER
But that means what?
APPIAH
What I was denying was the thought that these social cleavages mapped onto interesting biological ones. I was denying that once you’d classified people in those ways you could then say powerful and interesting things about their other properties, how smart they would be, or how honest, or whatever. And that’s part of a package of ideas that was put together in the nineteenth century. I was not denying that people thought there were races—that’s obviously true—nor was I denying there was racism. Racism doesn’t require races, it just requires people to believe in races.
My students are debating the nature of the woman in Klimt’s The Kiss. Why, you ask, are students learning about The Kiss in Landscape Design and Management at the local community college? Because, according to my extremely rough quant research, their future clients will probably be the type of people who fucking love Klimt. Or, at least, the aesthetic of Klimt. We can infer that their clients will want to exude an aura of knowing and appreciating Klimt.
There are about ten minutes left in class, so most of the students have tuned out and are waiting for the conversation to find a natural conclusion. I’m waiting, too, my mind having drifted to climbing palm trees with a saw, the breeze in my hair, and then tonight, maybe some cheap wine or a couple beers with Liz before bed—such a good life.
Max, my favorite worst student, signals that it’s time to pack up by playing, aloud from his phone, a Sonic Youth song, the one that inspired K to record her first demo. Now it feels heavier on pick scrapes than I remember. And as it turns out, this song is also on the playlist K sent me.
“Max,” I say. “Not now. I hate that band.”
“But you’re wearing their shirt,” Max says, shaking his head.
I point to the Klimt again. “Now listen, one last question before we wrap. You walk into the prospective client’s house and you see this hanging above a white marble table in the foyer. Klimt’s aesthetic. How might it inform the imaginary lines your client desires outside their home? Like, for example, azaleas or no azaleas?”
this is so funny
It’s as if they’ve all figured out exactly what they want in life. It’s fucking great. I bang on the window. They stop and look. I give them the thumbs-up. “Bravo! I’m very happy for y’all!” I yell.
Rob shakes his head and points at his ear. I don’t think they can hear me. They go right back at it.
Then, just like that, my indulgence in this, all this that is apparently life now, is interrupted by thoughts of my sister, and how she wasn’t scared of anything. Or was it that she didn’t care about anything? Why didn’t she call me when Heather died? Or even years later when I met Liz and we got married?
I try to sink these thoughts. My life has somehow turned out too good, and I worry that it might get even better, and then, after it gets as good as it can get, somehow it will all be taken from me. This is a reminder that some grief and some fears that I pretend are no longer alive are very much alive in me, alive as much as my sister might not be alive very soon. Wrap your head around that and walk straight through the fucking day.
But here are all of my students, kissing each other in the quad. I know they can’t hear me, but I bang on the glass and yell anyway, “Does this mean I’m doing a good job?”
By the time the window defogs, they have disappeared.
Meredith is staring out her office window, looking across the expanse of the quad, the students laughing and milling about, celebrating the end of the semester.
Meredith turns to me. She’s crying. She has an expression that is the absolute dead-on representation of dread.
“Is everything okay?” I say.
“The grass, Sack, it’s so long all of the sudden. Didn’t you just cut it?”
“Yes, just a few days ago. It looks like it’s growing faster than usual. I wanted to ask actually if we could switch to a different landscape design, a wild design? Also, I wanted to ask for this Friday and next Monday, and maybe Tuesday, off. For a family matter.”
“Sure. Whatever.” She turns back to the window.
“Okay, thanks,” I say. That was too easy. “Wait, to which one, the new landscape or the days off?”
“They seem synergistic to me, Sack.”
“Right.” I’m not sure I know what that means.
Class rule necessitates violence and its contested, overlapping, jostling ideologies. It justifies, or more, Orgreave in 1984, the armed wing of the state laying down manners on insurgent workers. It insists that waterboarding is not torture and anyway it defends our freedoms. It explains the necessity of the spikes carefully fitted at the bases of new buildings to ensure the homeless can’t sleep there. Rising unevenly from a fundamental necessity to capital – oppression – are brutalities necessary to sustain class rule at home; to sustain imperialism abroad; everyday sadisms so metabolised their cruelties often hide in plain sight.
The drives to such phenomena are hazy-edged, non-identical but inextricable, imbricated, mutually constituting. They’re constant but not static. The parameters and place of violence, repression and sadism change with history. And with them, from the rush of jouissance they tap, inevitably flows their excess – a scandalous, invested sadism, enjoying its own cruelty. A surplus sadism. Baum’s Halloween party.
Colonial sadism is not a result of racism; racism, rather, is created by that sadism – viciousness justifying itself post-facto. The agonies inflicted by the metropole’s torturers are the ‘civilising process’.
This exonerated colonial savagery continues even – especially – where the ‘civilised’ population is a subset within the borders of the state. Thus the management techniques of slavery, the panoply of baroque, spectacular, inventive viciousness, whips and rapes, punitive scatology, spiked wheels, salt-rubbed wounds.
Capitalist social sadism is still, of course, a racialised, colonial logic. Its victims are by no means always non-white, nor are those who apply it always white, but it’s intrinsically derived from these techniques of colonialism, its social Darwinism and naturalisation of hierarchies, and the racialising drive is irrepressible. New configurations of viciousness illuminate this, as neoliberalism stretches the boundaries of quotidian sadism.
[...] The liberal is often the most outraged and vociferous chanter on the demonstration. Richard Seymour once made the indispensable distinction between those who are liberals out of fidelity to liberal ideas, and those who are liberals out of fidelity to the liberal state. The latter will never be on the side of emancipation. The former, to the extent that such ideas embed ethical politics predicated, however fallaciously and ideologically, on certain supposedly liberatory and universal claims, may be.
Humans have many capacities. It’s a doomed enterprise to prefigure socialism, but we can certainly feed the drives that, as far as we can imagine, we’d like to hope will cut with its grain.