I am having a baby.
It has not been an easy decision, but there are bigger fish to fry than uneasy fears of lapsing into obscurity and social irrelevance. From some spheres, I have already conducted general movements of withdrawal; these days, succumbing only to Pessoa’s “Book of Disquiet.” Perhaps I shall finish writing the last 700 pages of “In a Bar Called Mexico” 1 and finally be able to dispense, once and for all, with that genre, the hardest and most treacherous of epics—the autobiography. Anyhow, laying low for a while—but not for too long.
“It is no accident that I finally accepted feminism during a period spent alone with my five-year-old son in a fishing village in a foreign country, good and far away from the art world. I had retreated to write fiction—”
Lucy Lippard
1
Sunset along the Corniche, Beirut.
A few days ago, Willie Brisco2, friend, fellow Canadian artist, writer, curator, and self-contained enterprise, sent me an email quoting Adorno, attached to the note, “Menippean Satire.” Of course, as the story goes, Willie also writes an autobiography. We had even sworn to publish them together, a split-novel, like a split-LP. Our promise has since derailed into a year of silence and willful separation. And, down this withering trail of oblivion, the opening remarks (quote) to my novel followed, forgotten:
“The neon lights which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death. Yet they do not come from the sky. They are controlled from earth. It depends upon human beings themselves whether they will extinguish these lights and awake from a nightmare which only threatens to become actual as long as men believe in it.”
Adorno
… whose wholesale judgments and schema of mass culture I have long resented and fought tooth and nail to prove wrong.
2
Now, since I was foolishly holed up in Beirut, writing in a deaf, insular bubble, there remain only travel guides, maps and tourist pamphlets to flesh out the missing imagery, to offer my book the reality I was myself denied.
Postcard c. 1980.
End to chapter, “On Consummation”:
