Ben Lerner

FEATURED WORK
• Preface To The German Edition

from
B E H O L D T H E MAN:
APOLOGY FOR THE PLAYER PIANO





PREFACE TO THE GERMAN EDITION

You fail to experience the city’s depth, you fail to experience the sense of distance available to you from your point of vantage. And, as the city prides itself on its dimensions, on the extent of its intervening spaces, it can be said that you fail to experience the city, a failure consistent with your lifelong experience of failing to participate in your life’s events. Let me finish. Does your ‘work’ not thus far consist of a failed attempt to generalize your failure to be present, to lend it the prestige of a system, so that you may speak not of the failure of experience but of the experience of failure, yet another tactical chiasmus that allows you to think, it is not that I’m failing the city but that the city is failing me, a way of talking that, while it does not enable you to get up early in the morning, it enables you to valorize your failure to get up. Do you not call yourself a critic in order to elevate your impotence, ennui, etc., to the level of the concept, as if from your private failures one could infer failures endemic to the historical moment, to the structure of experience itself, so that the extremity of your alienation ultimately becomes evidence of your contemporaneity. Has it not occurred to you that your ever-present low-level misery stems from anxieties too mundane and universal to warrant mention, from a childishness you’ve learned to conceal beneath a certain amount of rhetorical elegance, and that your incessant effort to instill dissatisfaction in others, what I’ve heard you call your ‘project,’ your ‘politics,’ is nothing but the attempt to avenge yourself upon those who triumph over this common angst. And even as you write these lines, are you not cognizant of the bad faith of your method, how you retreat into the self-reflexive at the very moment you’re most in need of otherness, of an otherwise, of some imaginative prospect external to your self-aggrandizing negativity. Killjoy. The city is rich

in prospects, in prospects within prospects, and yet I mope in my boxers, ingesting all manner of valerian rhizome in a sweltering studio, relying heavily on the comma, on the sonic sympathies of ‘depth,’ ‘sense,’ ‘extent, ‘events,’ etc., as if euphony were a protagonist and anaphora, a plot. Each sentence I compose progresses toward its own cancellation, its predicates lacking the strength to affirm or deny their subjects, predicates that prefer not to, etc., while reference itself seems some unapproachable consummation, requiring as it does two bodies, which disgusts me, although the promise of reference is all that I know of pleasure, a promise that must remain empty to be promising, a blank rain check that enables the indefinite postponement of my life’s first event. It is true that I hit my head in the afternoon of 15 June 1988 in my hometown of T, that I was thrown from my narrow board set with four small wheels headlong into the concrete, arising concussed into a preternaturally bright day redolent of cut grass, my hair suddenly gray at the temples, my German fluent, and that I brushed off my short pants and stumbled into the university, but I would not call this an ‘event’ per se, as, first, the loss of function I suffered extends into the present, and, second, there are questions as to whether or not it happened—I, for one, do not believe me, given my history of prevarication and the lack of bodily scarification, the other lingering damages being ascribable to any number of internal distempers. The other materials from which I could hew biography are equally suspect, e.g., my claim that I spent my thirteenth year in a closet, literally, or that I committed murder in North T, or that I would often assume the form of a question and spread through the suburbs, snuffing fireflies and melting butter. All that we know for sure is that I was repeatedly abused by my sitter M, who not only nightly snaked her tongue into my ear, who not only dipped my pacifier in stout, but who read me to sleep with Continentals, so that my dreams were replete with the debris of master dream-works long before I’d learn to speak. From these heroes of negation

you derived your manner of dress and address, so that you entered the kindergarten with a pistol in your fob, a cane in the sword in your cane, etc., and commenced to ingest your Crayolas, your Elmer’s, with a rapacity you have not since matched. Whether your inability to move beyond the oral stage can be ascribed to insufficient or excessively forceful breastfeeding is now impossible to determine, but it certainly remains the stage upon which your few desires play, what, with your smoking, biting, overeating, drinking, and verbal hostility, it’s no wonder you recurrently dream you’ve discovered purple, liplike divisions on the palms of your hands and the balls of your feet. No wonder your dreams of flying have given way to dreams of falling, your enuresis given way to bruxism, somnambulism to somniloquy, for even in your adolescence you had abandoned your body for the poetry of its pathologies. Pussy. You entered the city as minor villains enter underplots, sidewise, visiting its modern museums in the hope of cultivating emotions of vast geometric simplicity, living off a stipend conditional on gloom, leaving your time as unstructured as the advance-guard novels you pretend to read, as the paratactic verse you condescend to compose. Is it not your abiding aspiration to experience mediacy immediately, to objectify your distance from the world through the word and then to read it closely, so that you might recapture in the openwork of signs something of the life you are determined to renounce. It is in this sense and in this sense only that you can claim to be ahead of your time, for by forsaking everything in advance, you have bestowed upon your future the faint hope of recovering your past. It is true

that 20 January 1996 in North T I beat a rival with a length of pipe until he bled from his eye, that frozen precipitation fell around me as I delivered the beating, that while still swinging the pipe I began to select the language with which I would describe the swings, that that night, when I was called by my homeboys to account, I reported a mind gone blank with rage, while in fact my mind went crystal, a uniform hyaline matrix, calculating at once how to forgive myself the blows and where to place them. I know this is false because I have none of the confidence in the world of men such events are said to inspire, not to mention that I have no homeboys, and when I attempt to form a mental picture of the scene, it is not I who stand over the freshly lamed, but the popular actor C, a prominent figure in the dream life of our nation’s teens. All that we know for sure is that I was awarded scholarships both for my abilities and disabilities, that I departed from T and my parents, whom I’ve sworn I’ll pass over in silence, and enrolled in the university, installing myself on an urban campus the delimitations of which remain unknown to me, as do the rules of conduct, the name or nature of the degree that I’m pursuing, and the primary language of instruction. I call myself a critic because this feels like criticism, this failure to get up before the sun achieves its meridian, this tendency to structure my laments like propositions, to stack clauses as though I could clamber up them and gain perspective, gain perspective and leap to my death, it feels like criticism because its sole aim is to undo its object and its sole object is itself. And yet

you would make public your bleak stridulations, make of them a baedeker for the busted sons of the bourgeoisie, thereby making money, self-multiplying amounts of money, that would allow you to live in the manner to which you’ve grown accustomed, despite never having lived in it, the manner of the late Goethe, so that, wrapped in galyak, you would move with the moon through the birch lined alleys of your infinite estate, your mosaic beard attracting hitherto undiscovered Lepidoptera, etc. Is it not your hope to one day grace the covers of the reviews you denounce, to one day have a public to disdain, to arrive at your readings too drunk to read, to set off the bookstore sprinklers with your Egyptian cigarettes, and to establish yourself, once and for all, as the overlord of the underground. For as it turns out, you, who have spent the last 72 hours eating alkaloids and opiates in shifts so that your spleen might find its sad correlative in print, you, who on 2 January 1981 carefully wrapped your genitalia in chewing gum to the utter befuddlement of your parents, whom you’ve sworn you’ll pass over in silence, and a team of T’s morbidly obese nurses, you, whose ‘work’ thus far consists of a failed attempt to generalize your failure to be present, to lend it the prestige of a system, so that you may speak not of the failure of writing but of the writing of failure, just want to be loved, just want to go home,

I just want to go home, where the days, cast out of the line of days, can be entered from any corner like a field, where the small rain down can rain, where earthworms steam on the asphalt, where men sit on cinderblocks in undershirts drinking boxwine and smoking cheroots, where critics clear their throats with pistols, where children sip blue juice from outlets, where bitches complain to the polestar, where the moon spits on the coppices of spruce, where snow is packed into jars for the summers ahead, where the poor live under the bridge outside of time, where raccoons open each other for warmth, where the children make love ‘execution style,’ where coruscant skinks emerge in force, where the clouds have an ease of diction, where death has a way with women, where at night documents open to emit their redolent confessions—home, where failure grows precious through repetition and, although I can never hope to be forgiven, failure grows precious through repetition.

top ^
print this page