Recently, though, I had what to my great indignance turned out to be a “real” – i.e. warranted, requiring tests – health scare. I was scared shitless for a week, awaiting the test results, and my fright was completely different from my usual fear. It turned out to be nothing, in the end (thank the gods), but it did make me think about mortality in a more serious, non-bargaining sort of way. It was kind of a valuable experience, actually.

One thing I realized was that a big part of my fear of having a serious illness was actually a fear of having to act out the role of someone facing a serious illness. My relief at the end of the ordeal was largely a relief of not having to put on an act for other people and for myself – and act that, moreover, thrusts you into a kind of limelight. Mortality is the biggest drama, and the sick or dying man is center stage, with the lights shining brightly on him.

Fear of a major calamity like a serious illness is partly a kind of stage fright, in other words. Going through this brief scare, I suddenly understood why, when my father was fighting and, eventually, dying from cancer, he avoided contact with people, and avoided telling even his closest friends about it. Now I can totally understand not wanting to have to play that role. Now I felt bad, in retrospect, for having tried to make him talk about what he was going through: I had been forcing him to play a role that compounded his suffering.

I think people naturally do that as a way of showing their own concern, making sure their concern is registered and recognized. But to some degree it can be selfish, overlooking the pain of forcing the sick person to dramatize.

Sartre wrote about life as perpetual act, but he put it in strenuous, moralistic terms: You were a liar, living in bad faith, when you dramatized your predicament, allowing social roles to define you. G. put the issue of dramatizing your life in much more humane and forgiving terms. The problem with acting is not some metaphysical wrongness or dishonesty; the problem is simply that it causes pain, and it’s a pain we can never quite escape. The best we can do is think carefully about that pain, notice how our acting causes it, and try to defy or subvert the roles that are pre-written for whatever situation or predicament we are in.

My favorite part of G’s memoir A Kind of Testament is his description of a trip to Rome after the publication of Ferdydurke. A Polish painting student he met there wondered about his disinterest in the beautiful churches. He said they all looked the same inside, but in reality his distaste at visiting St. Peters and the other monuments of Western civilization was a desire to avoid the standard act of feeling humbled and dwarfed by them, having to take your hat off. The painter said, well why don’t you just not take your hat off? So that’s what he did. He went into the churches with his hat on and this choice empowered him.

Death is like a big awesome dark cathedral. It is so frightening that mostly we ignore it or push it out of view. But then when we are dragged kicking and screaming to its doorstep, we genufluct and bow and scrape. We are frightened and humbled by it, and we go through the postures and the poses and make the grimaces of awe and fear. Because that’s what other people expect of us. In other words, we remove our hats. Or, we go to great lengths to try and escape it, flee from it, which is kind of like chasing after our hat in a wind. And as some European writer said (not G.), there’s nothing so absurd as a man chasing after his hat.

So I hope that, when eventually I do approach the doors of that cathedral, I figure out how to do it on my own terms—maybe by just not taking my hat off.

G. wrote about art fairly cynically. Art, culture, is something people use to get others to obey, to dominate and control them, he said. His image is of one person grabbing another by the scruff of the neck and forcing him to bow down before High Culture. And what happens, inevitably, is that everyone winds up obeying each other—everyone bows down out of fear, or anxiety, or insecurity—and no one is left in charge (except perhaps the individual artist). Art ends up ridiculing us, humiliating us, almost like a dominatrix in some private fetishistic scenario.

G. was partly using art to tell a story about relations among people. But he also wanted to change this inauthentic relationship to Art, and remind us of Art’s possibilities to make us free.

We always need to ask of Art, or of Culture—does it open doors? Can we use to it expand or improve ourselves, or to love each other better? This is one way, indeed, to use Gombrowicz—the way he would have wanted to be used.

G. didn’t mean “sub-culture” in the 60s sociological catchword meaning, youth and rebellion, etc.; he meant it in the old sense of “culture” as nurture, as cultivation, as well as culture as “high culture.” Sub-culture is our inferior, degraded, idiosyncratic mythology constituted out of our inability to live up to our high (and, I would add, youthful) ideals. We sooner describe ourselves as evil than as misguided.

In this connection I’m reminded of William S. Burroughs again. He shot his wife in the head, playing a “William Tell” game. He became a misogynist, a lover of guns, even wrote of the Zen of marksmanship. All of these things, lifestyle choices, identities, interests and fascinations, predicated on covering up a trauma. The trauma was not the death of his wife. The trauma was that he had once done something singularly stupid and thoughtless, and had bad aim, and it had tragic consequences. How was he supposed to continue after that moment, being who he had been? If he was to go on living (some people would have killed themselves directly or indirectly), he had to make it make sense.

So he formed an identity in which, retroactively, his killing of his wife became not really such a terrible thing within the larger context of his values.

People do thoughtless or careless things, often in their youth, and if those things end in tragedy for someone, or otherwise stick in people’s memory, they spend their lives trying to live up to those acts. This is the roots, not of “evil” because that’s too strong a word for what most people are, but of “badness.” Of how we choose paths of selfishness and irresponsibility and make them into ethical choices. Transforming (unconscious, unchosen) practice, or accident, into (willed, self-defining) action.

It’s the tendency of the mind to claim happenstance and transform it into fate (which is just character) - the tendency that therapists often find themselves deconstructing and undoing, or helping patients to undo.

You could call it “sour grapes.” Principles, standards, ambitions, capacities - these upper definitions of ourselves - become grapes, and in our failure to live up to them, in our confusion, our lapses, our clumsiness, our failures, etc., our attitude toward those grapes is that they are sour. We redefine our ideals - not “downward,” because that would be to admit failure (and confusion, and clumsiness, etc.), but in some other direction. Upward in another direction.

(It’s what happens to us when we are old, too: Our bodies go out from under us, and we become sad to ourselves. You stumble. “I meant to do that.” Because someone who ‘just stumbles’ is sad, pathetic, pitiable. Does the mind, the personality, chase the body into its decrepitude, to have the whole thing be consistent?)

The most well-developed Western philosophies of failure are Catholicism (the Fall), Psychoanalysis (the Unconscious, Trauma), Marxism (again, trauma, due to class oppression). Other cultures, like Japan, make less room for failure. Saving face, honor, may well demand suicide. It’s an interesting attitude to human failure. In the West, failure is more negotiable. Because values are more negotiable, I suppose. Our culture makes room for disagreement. Whatever wrong you have done, there is always some point of view you could adopt from which it is right. Your story of getting there could be a story of self-discovery. The personal journey is always a good story, in whatever direction you travel.

G’s meditations on animal suffering have made me wonder whether that suffering isn’t sometimes at the heart of our alienation from them, particularly in people’s fears and phobias. I retain a silly childhood phobia of crickets, for example. I think in our unconscious we retain memories of our own or a parent’s destruction of an animal pest, which may have given us our first taste of death and pain and mortal suffering. Fear of a hated animal is fear of its pain, fear of it dying or dead — and thus, indirectly, a fear of our own destruction, our own mutilation.

It is like a fetish, really: In your mind you fix on the last thing you saw before the thing you couldn’t bear to see. You hate and fear an alive, intact snake because you can’t face the picture of a headless snake or one cut in half, writhing on the driveway; you fear an alive, intact spider because you’ve irrevocably buried the memory of one struggling with its legs pulled off; you maintain a foolish phobia of alive, intact crickets because you can’t bear the memory of one you saw once that was struggling, only half alive — only still alive — dragging its smooshed-out insides across the basement floor. (Still alive is the worst, most awful kind of alive. Insects disturb us because they may persist in their struggles, their movements, with only half a body, or without a head)

The ongoing hatred and fear of certain creatures that we carry into adulthood is an acausal loathing. An acausal reaction. Maybe all phobic reactions to things are acausal or have an acausal aspect: I hate you because I hate what will become of you after I have attacked you (attacked you because I hate you), etc.

Instead of hating death and suffering, which are too painful and abstract to think about, we hate the being that first made us aware of such surpassing, metaphysical pain in the universe.

My French paperback translation of Bakakai has Magritte’s Golconde on the cover — rain imagined as men in bowler hats descending from a blue sky.

Maybe it’s because of this cover, but I can’t not think of Magritte when I think of Gombrowicz. The two are never very far apart in my mind. I picture them both as a little bit aloof and alone. For some reason, I picture them both in bowler hats.

I imagine them both, Magritte and Gombrowicz, struggling to find a method to cut through appearances and find something true, something rock solid, lying underneath. In both cases — as painting, or as fiction — the result is surrealistic, as well as charming and humane. You could escape into one of Magritte’s evening paintings, just like you can escape into G.’s Diary.

I even imagine their domesticity similarly — with their wives and dogs (in Gombrowicz’s case, only late in life).

When I look at the photo of G. and his wife Rita, from the cover of her book Gombrowicz w Europie, Paul Simon’s song “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War” (based on a photo caption that captured the songwriter’s imagination) runs through my head.

Because almost at that moment it seemed that it would be too terrible if we communicated to each other on a level of total consciousness and awareness each of the other — like it would be too terrible, it would be the end of the bookstore, it would be the end of civ- … not civilization, but in other words the position that everybody was in was ridiculous, everybody running around peddling books to each other. Here in the universe!

(Like much of Ginsberg’s work, the account of his Blake-inspired fervor really could be described as “intense,” “exhilarating,” or “lived at a fever pitch.” There’s nothing wrong with those categories as long as they are truthfully, honestly applied.)

The point is: Humanity has devised a billion ways of not contacting each other. Everything you look at, everything we’ve done or accomplished, can be seen as a way of avoiding contact. The Hebrews of the Old Testament kept God behind a curtain because to be in his presence, they thought, was fatal. I think really being in the presence of the human is fatal, so we create structures, channels, protocols, machines, to redirect the energy, redirect ourselves, and protect ourselves.

Books, ideas, art, like grimaces, are too often just ways of not making contact. Just smoke and bars. Gombrowicz’s books are, refreshingly, not like that.

But also, the notion of abandoning all pride and decorum, donning a costume to save your life, has redemptive possibility. I am not I, I am not what I am. It represents the ultimate power to escape from past conditioning, the power as Burroughs puts it, to travel into space. It’s a very American dream, obviously. Reinventing yourself.

Well, ocean liners figure prominently in G.’s life and in his writing, and his own thought experiment of how a man behaves on a sinking ship makes an interesting, and very European, contrast:

[A] person for whom everything is over and done with is in a different position than those for whom much is over and done with. In what sense, in what direction, can a person whose meanings and directions have evaporated change? What remains if not the one thing still left to do: repeat oneself? This is why people who appear completely defeated by life function “as if nothing had ever happened” down to the very last minute of their lives. The captain of a sinking ship knows that in a minute the water will swallow him up–him and his honor, responsibility, duty–that for all practical purposes these no longer exist, that the water is already reaching his calves…why, then, does he recite his captainhood to the last minute of his life, instead of, let us say, singing or dancing? Perhaps because when there is nothing else to cling to, man can only grab onto himself, the principle of identity. “I am I” is a fundamental principle not only of logic but also the ultimate right of humanity; and when everything disappears, there is only the fact that I was someone; such a person and no other; and loyalty toward oneself appears to be the last law we can still obey.

So, which man is more free? The man who puts on a dress to save his life, or the captain who clings to his captain-hood as the ocean swallows him — claiming, as G. puts it, his “ultimate right of humanity”?

I don’t have an answer to this question. But in this quote I see America facing Europe across a vast dark ocean.

It can be both positive and negative. It’s Gombrowiczean the way we share music with people, for example. We have in our heads images, fantasies, of others when we are appreciating music. We want to put it out there for others. Somewhere there’s a box of mix tapes I made for my girlfriend in college. I hear a great song and I imagine making a film just so I could put it on the soundtrack. These days we make cds for our friends. The great sharing of culture now in the digital age is Gombrowiczean in the best sense.

On the other hand, under the table, there’s often a power play going on. Buried in outward discussion of aesthetics in an art gallery, say, there’s one person grabbing another by the scruff of the neck and forcing genuflection.

Like a ball in a tennis match, art is really just something that binds and connects the players. G. suggested we need to feel this leash. Whether aggressively or erotically, we wish to bind others to us, and ourselves to others, and art is one way. It is never solitary. Never alone. In our heads, at least.

In his Diary G. wrote about artists and writers, but he measured them against his own experience, not the other way around. He started from himself and wrote about his encounter with life and ideas. He described it as being a country squire strolling through the orchard of culture, picking an apple or a peach and tasting it and commenting on whether or not it was to his liking. Lillian Vallee, the translator of G.’s Diary, sums it up G.’s approach to art and literature really nicely: You should ask of it, “Does it strengthen or debilitate? Does it make you regard your identity as a more expansive, spacious, freer place — failures, complexes, ignorance notwithstanding — or does it paralyze, gag, diminish?”

G. had the same approach to philosophy. Although a voracious reader of philosophy, he tended to distrust systems of any kind because of the way they make an end-run around our humanity and our bodies. Systems, ideologies, religious, scientific theories all cut people down to size and compartmentalize them; they deform us when we attempt to live up to their ideals. G. spends many pages in the Diary reacting to Sartre, for example, who was all the rage at the time. I love this quote:

Thursday
How should I explain why existentialism did not lead me astray? …

When I applied maximum consciousness to life, in an attempt to found my existence on this, I noticed that something stupid was happening to me. Too bad, but no way. It can’t be done. It seems impossible to meet the demands of Dasein and simultaneously have coffee and croissants for an evening snack. To fear nothingness, but to fear the dentist more. To be consciousness, which walks around in pants and talks on the telephone. To be responsibility, which runs little shopping errands downtown. To bear the weight of significant being, to instill the world with meaning and then return the change from ten pesos. What do you want?

People that (we think) shouldn’t matter to us, do. Being slighted or ignored by a clerk or some anonymous person on the subway can ruin you for hours, sometimes. G. noted that having something he wrote criticized by some anonymous person was far more stinging than having a book savaged by a noted reviewer, because the smaller the shoe, the more it hurts.

It is particularly humiliating to want or need the approval of people who are “inferior” to us — that is, inferior in age, in station, in experience. It can produce a deformation of perception, whereby younger people seem much older, poorer people much richer, and so on. The power of the inferior and the “immature” over the superior and the mature is one of G.’s main themes. But this humiliation contains the seeds of something transcendent.

G. writes: “Allow a child, a puppy, a half-wit to seduce you.” That he spent his life mixing with people of different classes and ages is one of the most inspiring things about him. His gang of young friends in Buenos Aires. The young Canadian student he met and married during the last years of his life. It would be easy to compartmentalize him as a writer of the midlife crisis. A recurring theme in his fiction is middle aged men trying to orchestrate contact with youth. And indeed, much of his Diary is an extended meditation on youth and the way age feeds and depends on it.

Acknowledgement of the “inferior.” Declining to it willingly, allowing it to support you. It is like an underlying water to the universe. A water below the water. (I am thinking now of the Talking Heads line, “There is water at the bottom of the ocean” from that great midlife crisis song “Once in a Lifetime.”) Through intense and honest contact across divides of age and station, we can achieve a broader reinterpretation of our humanity.

(G. never would have called other people “hell,” like Sartre did.)

As with the character earnestly, doubtfully questioning the dark — but quietly, in case no one is actually there — people’s actions sometimes are senseless, are not thought through, don’t have a completeness of meaning. They’re absurd, in other words.

We can’t always know why we do or say certain things. There’s no reason, sometimes. Or — and here’s where G. rises above Freud, in my opinion — the reason is so stupid or shoddy, so objectively beneath the occasion, that it is better kept in the dark, so we invent better-sounding reasons, even if those reasons make us look worse. We’ll sooner describe ourselves as evil than as confused.

The stories we tell to make ourselves appear adequate to our shared ideals betray our humanity, force our human looseness, our unformedness, into some kind of straightjacket. Gombrowicz was about resisting those stories, those little sclerotic dishonesties — the better-sounding reasons for our inconsistent lives. Such stories harden the human countenance into a grimace.

Instead you should reveal your truth, G. said. Come clean with what is shoddy and obscure and inconsistent about you, revel in it and glorify it, and it will in turn strengthen you rather than pull you down.

I went to the fashionable store Ostende and bought a pair of yellow shoes, which turned out to be too tight. So I went back to the store and exchanged this pair for another in exactly the same style and size and identical in every other respect and they turned out to be equally tight.
Sometimes I amaze myself.

(from Diary)