Date: Tue, 06 Jan 1998 13:00:34 -0800
Subject: Listening to the wall and writing: Job  


Why a Procrustean bed to come Lucio?

You ask me if I doubt your intoxication. I don't know, I haven't thought
about it, but you doubt that I don't doubt your intoxication or that
perhaps I don't listen with enough reverence to the cuts you make in my
flowing waves, stirring a froth. Recently I read in _Beyond Good and
Evil_ that it is precisely one's ability to be reverent that is always
contested and tested amongst high minded souls. This testing is done, in
part at least, by noticing a person's response to those who approach
without the secure cover of a recognizable authority, a cover which
inspires respect only by virtue of its shared value amongst many. One of
the more interesting doubts that Deleuze poses to the Hegelian text
comes when he questions the authenticity of Hegel's drunkenness in _DR_.
But whose to say. All I know is that you displace the conversation
(usually) in directions that I may have come to eventually but have not
been aware of yet. The verse in _Job_  xix, v. 23 is a case in point. I
went to the library with this in mind which actually is the first verse
that Quevedo comments on in _La Constancia Y Paciencia Del Santo Job_ (
see pg. 1330 in the Aguilar, Madrid 1961, edition of the Obras Completa
-- most libraries will have this one). His name means the one who cries
Quevedo tells us and comes about when _ab_(ornament, principal, first,
the master, the father) is dropped from the original name Jobab. So
what's so funny Lucio? You have often mentioned melancholia alongside
bitterness, why bitterness?

A formula to stir your Lacanian heart strings M+B=;-), that is,
melancholia plus bitterness equals satire. The mixture of tragedy and
humor is really one of the great enigmas of humanity.

The verse is related to xxxi, 35 -- the lines are written mise en abyme.
But what is the wall which separates, "splinters in their service"? Are
we not, to continue the thread began in the Blanchot list, in the very
"space" of literature, a hollow, hard space made by wail-words
scratching, emerging from  the nakedness of the heart which I suggested
was just what can be read as an "amnesiac narcissistic ego" in Deleuze!?
(note: I prefer the punctuation from chess). To communicate with a wall
is a bizarre thing that requires one have irregular rocks for a
head[ing] addressing itself to the clouds above that keeps music
encrypted, outside language as a "secret narrative" (see Derrida, _White
Mythology_) impossible to express through the semantic depth of
language. Yet, here I am, caressing the virgin skin of the Goddess,
sniffing the scent of her honey like a busy bee while the hounds of
Acteon close in on the members of my body.

Enjoy myself immensely like a pig in shit,
Ariosto