From Three Goat Songs
Not a particularly long time was required to discover their symptoms were opposed. She had a
predilection for well-fed goats whereas he was drawn toward the mineral, or rather, whenever it
was a question of the mineral and nothing but the mineral very quickly it became a sliding toward
total dispossession.
More accurate to say her predilection was anticipatory horror in the face of his inevitable
surrender to their charms. No point in telling her he positively loathed goats, well fed or not: Her
symptom had already learned to be intolerant of the specifications of his own: His symptom was
inconceivable to her own, which had its own course to run and intended to run
it.
Each time they went out, with or without the little
ones, into the sunny seaside air she tormentedly hammered out her symptom into a statement to
the effect that now for the last time only did she need to be told he would never abandon her for a
well-fed goat. How explain that this presentation of still another request for reassurance as the
absolutely very last request was but the surest perpetuation of such
requests.
Sometimes he was amused by the way she clutched at his wrist when a well-fed goat descended
the steeps before them in the direction
of the sea. Or rather, affected in some way by her clutching he chose or
was compelled to call the affection amusement. She was forever on the
lookout for udders wriggling amid the offal heaps adjacent to their
borne ground. Sometimes he caught sight of a goat long before her but
made it his business to turn away, pretending not to have seen. Though
it could be hard pretending with the animal busy urinating all over its
beard. At any rate, busy was not the right word since in such cases the
animal was invariably distracted by an odor of alfalfa, or timothy, or
peanuts, or sudan grass emanating from a nearby browse. His momentary vision of
himself--in her--in somebody's--vision--as one who had
missed a goat, did not care enough for the goats of this world not to
miss a goat--filled him with momentary delight. At once he became the
innocent her--somebody's--mistake made him out to be.
When sucking at the surface of the mineral world he was also
innocent--but only in her unseeing presence. In that presence the
sucking did not register as anything but laudable nonsurrender to the goats. Outside her
presence his connection to the mineral world could
only assume a somber canted unspeakableness. And there was no
emptying it out, this connection, this unspeakable connection, it was
always regenerated. Rather, connection or retreat from connection was
always different. Rather, he who worked hard to work himself up to
believing that talk about the connection would be equivalent to a being
cured of said connection found that the connection was always taking
new forms that invalidated, rendered completely irrelevant, any previous saying about the
connection--had there been any such saying.
What began over and over to smell like an outworn and unfashionable
connection exhausted by the words he one day anticipated speaking
suddenly revealed itself as the newest of new connections, albeit at the
very heart of the old connection, clearly subsumed by the old yet
completely new. Of course all this made sense only within walking
distance of a confessor. But he wanted to steer clear of confessors for in
actual fact he did not want to tell his confession. Without ever having
known confessors already he had had more than his fill of the subspecies. With such a
connection at his fingertips there could never come
a time when he need fear no longer shocking the ever delicate sensibilities of the confessor
he abjured with all his heart and soul.
For example, a sudden penchant for an upsurge of rock right at
the water's edge--an upsurge flayed by tiny lichenlike hairs of the same
fulvous or gamboge as the fissure whence they grew--the rawness of
this penchant made all previous avowal irrelevant, beggared all previous
exorcism. For here was a version of the symptom undeducible from and
insusceptible to the reassurances appropriate to any prior avowal. Here
at last was a version of the symptom--the connection--for which there
never could be words, a category for which all words found could only
qualify as the easiest camouflages to sleight of hand, as cunning makeshifts not only duping
confessor but cutting off speaker from perpetual
tangency to the intrinsic unsayability--that is, the very heart, the very
soul--of the connection. He was learning that once he found himself
talking about the connection he could be sure he was no longer in, of,
the connection.
Yet even if not to a confessor sometimes he had a hunger to
rehearse the addiction--this was what it was--to, for example, the tiny
hairs that striped the smooth rock faces smoothed even further by
spume there where the incoming tide was briniest. She did not care. It
was his--in her eyes overriding--craving for the well-fed goats, able to
prink and preen in a manner impossible for one whose life was as
difficult as hers--it was his overriding penchant for the goats--so
hypnotizing and against whose charms he was axiomatically powerless--that concerned her.
Pretending to take her madness seriously as
they were returning at dusk with the little ones after a visit to the old
folks he insisted it was still not clear whether he was charmed by the
goats themselves or simply overwhelmed by, appropriated to, their
desire for him, which appropriation, he might add, obliterated and
rendered laughable any question of an answering desire. Her worry was
all he got for answer.
Off he would go, whenever he got the chance, or made the
chance, far from goats and rocks, collapsing in a blind field spangled
with horseflies. In vain he tried to daydream, about a particularly
enticing rock face, about what life might be like unburdened by rock
faces or rather connection with rock faces or by the reproaches of a
yokemate convinced of his connection with goats--in vain he tried to
pursue these lines of thought. For they always converged on the same
fantasy: Spotting him from a distance routing among his byproducts
here she was descending to be sure of catching him in the act. And what
was her surprise when she found him all alone, entertaining neither
goats nor lichen-encrusted rock fissures, not that she would have balked
at his entertaining lichen though strictly speaking she could be abandoned in the name of
lichens as well as of goats. But for her there was
abandonment and then there was abandonment and abandonment in
behalf of lichens did not have the same tonality as abandonment in the
name of goats. Seeing himself through her eyes as she advanced upon
him--more than exonerated, exalted in his innocence--completely incapable of deciphering
the urgency of such an advance--this was the
image to which he over and over again returned.
One day as they were sitting at the edge of the road and at the
very moment when she was about to speak of their future a flock of
well-fed goats approached, slueing more than they scurried, even if
scurrrying was in fact their prime function. She clutched his arm. In response he said he had
absolutely no interest in goats. She nodded: You
say that but deep down. He cut her off, though she had already cut
herself off. He felt the upsurge of an exultation at the prospect of now
shocking, now reassuring her: I cannot conceive of myself not loving
smooth fissured rock faces streaked with fine hairs. And as he spoke
something new dawned on him: I mean, once I perceived such a craving
could exist I could not conceive of not being saddled with such a
craving. She tilted her face. This meant: How did you learn of such a
craving. This meant: With what kind of foul company were you obliged
to consort to end up learning of such a craving. Proudly he replied, I
learned of it from myself and myself alone, with all due respect, that is,
for the hysteresis between the learning and the craving when said
craving is, so to speak, just a craving to skin the boundaries of such a
craving. Taxing her perplexed impatient eagerness for him to continue
he did indeed continue but as he went about continuing he realized the
signal to continue came not singly from her but from their--his and
her--collusion with the impatient eagerness of the landscape, rocks and
all: It seemed inconceivable that I should not be saturated with such
a craving--tainted by such a craving--for to be saddled with such a
craving is to be connected to nonbeing, is to not be. Whereas the
craving--the symptom--the hunger--the connection you saddle me
with--the craving your symptom decrees that I am to be saddled with
belongs to the far larger domain of the comprehensible and makes me
member of a community to which I do not wish to belong. Maybe I
belonged to it once, maybe never. Seeing her weep I relented, adding:
The only problem is I can't decide whether I developed the craving
without exposure to outside influence or stumbled upon it in the wilderness. No matter the
provenance: suffice it to say I have developed this
unappeasable craving for the melancholy ruthlessness of smooth rock
faces and in a spasm appropriating it--the craving--have kept it warm
inside me ever since. Yet even though I am one with my craving--
whenever I see outside me configurations in any way resembling the
configurations that effected the initial appropriative spasm I cannot
help feeling what I see miraculously mimics, coincides with, what after
all has been incontrovertibly born deep within, has its roots, its origin,
deep within that within. She said, obviously still intent on the goats: Yes,
how explain the craving born from within but not the target of the
craving. How explain the target of the craving being contaminated by,
assimilated to, the autochthonousness of the mother craving. He mused:
For all practical purposes they too--the rock faces--are now autochthonous to my depths.
He tried to explain how he was still dully
wondering that anything in the outside world should end up resembling,
would dare to resemble, those spiky sullen forms germinated--proposed from--within. Her
sidelong look told him clearly he had forgotten that it was in the outside world he was fint
scbooled in these--his--forms and in how to excruciate along the contour of such forms. And so
my wonderment, he retoned, stunned and spasmed surprise, that such
forms can exist out then, in perfect mimicry of those within, perfections
long incubated with no help from the outside world, this stunned
surprise has become in fact, according to you, my desire, my craving,
my symptom. I don't hunger--always according to you--after the rock
faces themselves but after their blatant daring to be identical with
precursors living, lived, within. She looked pained, not so much for
herself as for meaning. For such a construction defaced the halidom of
meaning as she recalled it from her last stint of consecration. For here
was meaning no longer determining the trajectory of words required to
capture it but itself forced to yield to the caprice of their convulsed
proliferative inbreeding.
In other words, he went on, even if she was once again living
only for the receding buttocks of the goats or their advancing udders,
my desire, my hunger, my craving, my connection is nothing more than
my astonishment that the archetypes of that desire--that hunger, etc.,
can subsist as run-of-the-mill ectypes. Then vindictively, as if to stump
and do him in for overpopulating her life with goats and rocks when all
she had ever really wanted, etc.: And what is the connection between
finding it inconceivable that you should not love these hairy-fissured
spume-spluttered rock faces and finding it inconceivable that these very
rock faces may be found without the incubation of the eternally postponed possibility of
their manifestation sometime in the near future? Or
was she shaming his failure to generate another meaning of the sort that
had just capsized defaming her long cherished conception of meaning?
Was she developing a craving for just this sort of meaning? Everything went blurry, bloody.
He looked at her, hurt, not so much at her asking
the question as at her asking it here and now, at this point, of such
evident vulnerability and bloody, blurry confusion. He would have
preferred her asking later on, when the question could be linked if not
to an answer then to some equally potent counterquestion capable of
defusing its potency. This was a question outside their story, a question
aimed at his depths that had no business being mixed up with the story
as he intended to contour its unfolding, shear its multiplication. All he
could think of in the way of answer was: Sometimes I pretend I don't love the rocks, their
smooth unwrinkled recession from my drunken
touch. Sometimes I tell myself I am still making up my mind about their
faces. But before I can begin to make up my mind about whether or not
to make up my mind I find myself actively inventorying, absorbing
eagerly through such inventory, certain . . . secondary sexual characters perceptible to and
inventoriable by only a seasoned aficionado.
Before I have made up my mind whether or not to offer habitation to
the craving--the desire--the hunger--the symptom, it has already
taken up residence and more than residence, has gone ahead and eaten
up too too many qualia--golden ears of wheat on a swaying boulder,
for example--to allow my wavering any credibility.
He looked out to sea and hoped his apparent reflective calm
would shame her into calm too. After all, they had everything to live
for. There is something about the way certain rocks--not goats, rocks--
stare out to sea in the sunlight even when there is no sea, no sky, no
crystailine sea air but only a miasma--one third stench, one eighth
vapor--that fills me with rude, even lewd, delight. And it pains me--
that totally absorbed staring. Or rather, my prostration before the
staring is inseparable from pain. Yes, the very condition of my observa-
tion becomes the occasion of my downfall. It is not that I crave the rock
faces per se staring outward. I crave their absorption as a contemptuous
repudiation. I crave not the rocks but the rocks' not needing me in the
way I need them nor in any other way, since here they are looking out to
sea, for all intents and purposes at sea, and here I am looking to them as
if their very absorption was the sea's "inscrutable immensity." She
looked as if "I crave not the rocks but the rocks' not needing. . ." was
yet another desecration of the memory of meaning, recruitment of the
always reliable paroxysms of syntax to the ultimate dismemberment of
meaning as any self-respecting citizen had every right to know it. She
replied: Although your dream is ostensibly to undergo a fruitful collaboration between my
symptom, whatever that is, and your symptom,
whatever that is, in actual fact you want to slough as fast as possible the
viewpoint--the observations--your symptom has made possible, that is
to say, impossible to ignore, in order to have done with them and by
extension with the symptom and by surextension with any agonizing
interconnection with my symptom and by sursurextension--in tandem--with me. For you the
symptom--the craving--the hunger--the desire--the frothing at the mouth is the sum of occasional
verses to which it has given vent and if only you can find a way to run out of such verses you
thereby run out of the symptom and out of any craving to run with me.
Home
|