On the Romance of Listlessness, or, On Lying

Current Music: Elbow: Cast of Thousands I was just about to write on the irony of my 9:30 p.m.-lethargy and my sitting at a screen when I realized I was half through an Elbow song, "I've Got Your Number," and that its lazy, ambling cynicism works much better to express it. The song has this jazzy, bass-heavy beat with light, twinkling vibes and guitar work, and the song just ambles along. But the lyrics are accusatory, and about three mintues in there is the BLARE from an organ, staccato-like. BLAAAAAARRRRRR da-da-da-da-do-do go the keys, in a sort of violently forced harmony. That perfect ambivalence. It's accusatory. The listener is implicated, there is a guilt. But then the lyric goes toward the end, "You've got my number." Well, there you are. Nice ending.

I've been reading Levinas to make sense of Derrida on hospitality, or rather, reading lots of secondary sources on Levinas to make sense of Levinas to make sense of Derrida. As far as I "get it" so far, the ethical--realm of self and other--is "haunted" by the realm of the political (justice), and vice-versa. This haunting always implies a thirdness (a la Peirce, only it's the socius itself). If it were simply a matter of me and you, Levinas says, then there would be no problem. But once there is a me and you a third is always already implicated--the world--in the "face of the other," bringing with it the law and the rest.

Well, my language certainly is not as accurate as the philosophers who like to throw around terms like "the face" in a very particular way. But as best I gather, the analogy is my listening to the Elbow song, they got each other's number, and I'm here to adjudicate the whole matter.

This doesn't translate well, necessarily, for the project at hand: what is the practical import of haunting in respect to disappearance--particularly that of the state-sponsored variety? Avery Gordon is on the brain, and her insistance that our ethical task with ghosts is to make room for justice--Benjaminian remembrance. I suppose the triangulation here is US, the GHOSTS, and the social between us, the space of memory. Well, this is the whole point of all ghost stories, Freud on the uncanny, and hysterics in general: when we forget or repress the social/superstructural/field of power animating bodies there can be no justice.

I admit I'm not certain how to lay this all out--how to get it--at least outside of an aesthetic or purely philosophical sense (my problem with Derrida to begin with). Perhaps I am foolish to even make the gesture that I somehow "get it." After all, someone has my number.

My intellectual problem mirrors the social one, I guess. I say I am listless, but here I sit with the compass, to encircle my associations and circumscribe the . . . oops, the catechism is leaking out of me. Which reminds me of a good joke; so, a farmer and his goat walk into a bar . . . .

I should really get to bed. I hate it that I am a morning person. It is so much more sexy, more romantic, to be a night owl. I could pretend (if I smoked), I could hoot. But someone's always got my number, the missing third and second to this monologue. It reminds me of Tracy's monologue last night: She laid spread-eagle, on the cold, black floor, and made a bed. Staring at the ceiling with a microphone in her left hand, she proceeded to spill the contents of a late night fretting over what her performance would be the next day. It was hilarious, and sleepily serious, and brilliant.

And I worry I will be doing the same thing here, in 10 minutes. But without the outlet. Or microphone.

Last night at one o'clock someone was beating on the side of my house. It scared me. Took an hour and a half to get back to sleep.

Oh, I hope that don't happen again. Creeps.