rack and ruin

There are other American pronunciations besides Eye Rack; we know someone who borrows her books from a Lie Berry, a soft and fruity thing with a fine ripe pop. The books taste sweet and none of them tell the truth. She found her nearest Berry in a gated area in front of a school. Windows are not part of the normal architecture of most of the American schools I've seen, just passing by as I do, walking or riding, and whose idea was that I wonder: who decided that students should be blind, and what a horror, what a blank and inhumane thing, and someone should be ashamed of themselves for that idea but probably no one knows who that someone might be, and not even the person themselves, if there was a single person, and not, more likely, a cabal, not a physical cabal but a cabal in the air, a feeling, an impression, a vague message passed to and fro above the heads of children -- ah, it will be better for them if they don't have windows -- no windows for them! -- says this parliament of ghosts. If there are windows then the students will look out and strangers will look in and perhaps there will be a tree, and the child will not look at the teacher or at a book, they will look at this tree, and think, a tree, when they should be dwelling on George Washington or how to bake an apple pie or a hot dog or some other American thing. Then there will be neither apple pie nor hot dog nor awareness of George Washington and the whole nation will go to rack and ruin, to ruin and rack, and after writing that phrase twice it occurs to me to wonder where it came from. Why rack and ruin?*

The origin of rack and ruin is the kind of thing that children do not learn when they have windows to look out of, and trees, and passing strangers leering at them, all paedophiles and tuckshop ladies, or whatever the US equivalent is to a tuckshop lady. The pie was always half-cool and the flavoured milk was always half-warm in my brown paper tuckshop bag but what magic that was, and what an honour, to be the one who was chosen to fetch that black plastic tub at lunchtime, and a practical privilege too, because they let you out of class a few minutes early, and the school was quiet, everybody else still gluing paper to cardboard or writing the letter A, and you ran away from all of that, you and your partner, over the concrete pathways and under the awning.

What a strange unbounding you experienced in this silent mysterious landscape, which had the features of a school but the atmosphere of a deserted battlefield, and as you went on it became apparent that you could do anything you liked and no one would see -- you could climb over the fence and run away forever, or you could sit under a bush, and it was probably at moments like this that the idea of existentialism occurred to somebody -- to Sartre -- thinking the word freedom! as he was sent out to pick up the tuckshop bags with Simone de Beauvoir, who wore her hair wound on top of her head even at that age, which must have been about seven or eight. He let her bear most of the weight of the tub on the way back and she thought, why do all the boys behave like this, talking about themselves as he's doing now, jiggling around and smoking pipes, and why do they all have such short hair? I am the Second Sex.







* Rack and Ruin.

Maybe the schools do have windows, but only in the walls facing away from the road. That's possible. I might be looking at the only windowless walls and thinking that this phenomenon extends all the way around the building, and is it a mistake to imagine that the full nature of an American school building can be discerned from only a single view of the walls? They might have bow windows on the other side.

a distance organised around the "soldier"

Driving to Oregon we passed through south-west Nevada, where the mountains were primed in their cricketing whites, and then into the city of Reno, where fumes of cloud were boiling down the cliffs toward the outer suburbs, and a woman in a petrol station was telling the man behind the counter that her hens wouldn't lay their eggs in this freezing wind, then into northern California and up from a town called Susanville, into a national forest of firs and pines -- and all of a sudden the rain drops were lifting away from the heat of the bonnet, swinging like feathers on parabolas towards our faces behind the windshield; and it was snow.

The woods were silent, supernatural, not a bird, not a rustle, the branches were stifled with snow, the trees were spread with snow, the snow had been pushed aside on both sides of the road until it was as high as the car, and the even the heads of the road signs were buried; all the side roads had been barred with chains, and at one point we were stuck behind a snow plough, which lumbered forward slowly, slowly, slowly and spewed endless material out of its side like a stabbed elephant. Finally it dragged itself into a side niche and we went past with gestures, seeing that the spew had petered out and it was as if dead.

Every now and then the trees would stand aside and passing by we would see a paddock of snow, a pure vista, cleaner than anything else in the world, and through virtue of its purity looking more removed than the moon, "that pure in-itself," as Sartre writes, a snow field.

"But," he adds, "if I approach, if I want to establish an appropriate contact with the field of snow, everything is changed. Its scale of being is modified; it exists bit by bit instead of existing in vast spaces; stains, brush and crevices come to individualise every square inch. At the same time its solidarity melts into water. I sink into the snow up to my knees, if I pick some up with my hand, it turns to liquid in my fingers, it runs off, there is nothing left of it." I pictured myself getting out of the car and wading into one of those paddocks, where I knew my footprints would destroy the effect. Like the philosopher's full glass the snow was haunted, but by the holes my feet would make. "My dream of appropriating the snow vanishes at the same moment. Moreover I do not know what to do with the snow which I have just come to see at close hand. I can not get hold of that field; I can not even reconstitute it as that substantial total which offered itself to my eyes." It was all true, and the most I could do was what I was doing already, which was to feel drawn to it, pulled and lured towards -- what? -- not frozen water -- but what? -- and, think, it would be cold, see, evening was falling, and how thick were my shoes? Not very. The snow turned grey with twilight.

Haunted in Hazel E. Barnes's translation of Being and Nothingness becomes a graceful word; it makes the automatic actions of Sartre's world seem mythical. He writes about transcendence in a plain philosophical sense, but the language is transcendent too, a fantasy language. "Desire is an attitude aiming at enchantment," he writes. "Slime is the agony of water." (It's funny to see (said M. last night) how the house blinks before the air conditioning comes on.) There is one passage in which Sartre presents a scene and then turns it inside out around a single muscular action, the instant when "he throws his gun" --

The soldier who is fleeing formerly had the Other-as-enemy at the point of his gun. The distance from him to the enemy was measured by the trajectory of his bullets, and I too could apprehend and transcend that distance as a distance organised around the "soldier" as centre. But behold now he throws his gun in the ditch and is trying to save himself. Immediately the presence of the enemy surrounds him and presses in upon him; the enemy, who had been held at a distance by the trajectory of the bullets, leaps upon him at the very instant when the trajectory collapses; at the same time that land in the background, which he was defending and against which he was leaning as against a wall, suddenly opens fan-wise and becomes the foreground, the welcoming horizon toward which he is fleeing for refuge.

The prose performs magic, everything is transformed, as handkerchieves turn into rabbits or doves, and this is an effect that Proust liked (so his English translators make it appear), this metamorphosis of an object, event, or person, making it seem to open and grow, becoming multiple (as it always was, you realise, and this is one of the things he has revealed to you, revelation being his business), so that as Lost Time goes on it becomes evident that the early Charlus was always haunted by aspects of himself that the Narrator would discover in later volumes, and the girl making Moncrieff's "indelicate gesture" in Swann's Way was always haunted by a woman in Time Regained. In Jean he hadn't found himself yet, and the effect comes and goes. He sends Jean "with his mother to a swimming-bath" where the water turns into an "icy sea", this transformation moving on a pivot, as in Nothingness, but now the action is an action of the mind: "he had felt" --

Standing on a wooden raft that rose and fell to the movement of the water with, before him, an immense and liquid cavern that bellied outwards under plunging bodies which emerged again a little farther on and, though hedged about with other cubicles, seemed fathomless -- he had felt, like those ancients who believed that in a spot not far from Pozzuoli was an entrance to the underworld, that here was the gateway to those icy seas whose limits lay within this narrow space, their angry potency surging between the piles through which they could be reached, though far below they opened into a strange and unknown world, a counterpart, perhaps, of the one with which he was familiar, but unvisited by any light of the sun.

You didn't know this, but I've been trying to find an excuse to post something from that part of the book for weeks.