The Passion According to J.B.
James Bowden
after Clarice Lispector
And so, like bastard children, meaning accumulates. Accretes. And you love it. And it owns you. And you won’t disown it, for God’s sake, it has nowhere else to go, you created it! Who else will love it?
And really everywhere, in the corners you won’t touch and the patches of grass you water most. Dinner, with some other first-years: we ought to make this a tradition, and invite the others!, someone says. I smile and resist speaking: I am a recovering addict. I am on an anti-sentimentality campaign.
In my imagination, the first conference of Sentimentalists Anonymous convenes in Yalta. Don’t read into the location: it has no bearing. When it is my turn, I stand and look around me. By God, they’re all famous poets and giggling cliques of college students! I ask my question: can we love without piling on the meaning? Can there be poetry sans accretion? But wait–it’s rhetorical! Oh no! Cloudy crystals begin to grow up out of the ground around me, locking onto my feet, now my knees, now my torso contorted trying to break from. I am trying to destroy meaning with gasp meaning and that will not be permitted.
I close my eyes. I clench real tight. Til it’s so black my mind cannot begin to try to coerce discernible shapes of the layer of meat blocking me. I am all alone, in the dark. Something in me knows that I could think, but that it would do no good. Just like that, words pass out of usefulness. It is dark and there is no one but me. What do I want to do given this exact context? Given no baggage, no accretion, just my shaking head, no sign of how permanent or what to do or anything. I don’t know. I sit and shut up. When I am ready, I breathe out and open my eyes. I am still here. Out of the black comes a scratching sound, it is my bastard children come to beg for morsels, but I don’t want them, they bring me nothing, if I am a creator then I am also allowed to destroy, and from my belt I whip out eight needling shivs and flick them off every which way, John Wick style. The calm returns, or rather becomes clear now that everything else has gone. And I begin to miss my mother and so I whistle, feeling then reaction, I allow no space for meaning to crop up in between, I actively hold the nothing and am the nothing so there is nothing beyond it nor between it for my mind to grasp at anyway.
My pitch goes real high, a whinny, and I look down and all around my feet: shattered glass. And I look up and all around me: billions of onlookers making signs and odd gulps with their mouths and hands. My head reels impossibly with familiarity but something deep inside me just doesn’t want it. I turn and run, my strides to a gallop, I breathe in so much air that when I exhale I am a jet and Yalta shrinks behind me and I don’t look back I don’t look back nor do I think of Lot’s wife nor do I want your exegesis or anyone’s let alone mine and and
it’s just me. In the air. Of the air. Now I’m home. My bed in the cozy corner. Good. Good.
Perhaps someday a girl will come along again and light such fire in me that I will want to adopt a meaning together with her. And maybe I will be thorough with the prenups, though to be honest, I don’t believe in that kind of shit. It’s fine if she wants to separate: just don’t leave me here, a single mother, keeping warm a nest of decaying meanings, meanings that were only meant to exist with another. Or maybe I will find my village and it won’t matter he she it or what, a village to raise my meanings together. And maybe that will be okay. What I hope for against hope, though, is that she will be creature like me. That we will romp like unconscious animals in that fenestrated dark and against all odds, be.
See Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., a puzzling and wonderful book that I recently finished and will return to later.