Joan Guenther on Moore and Doda

Used to be like that and now it goes like this: spectacle loves you.

Yes, the epoch of the Cartesian perspective is done. There’s no horizon. Any
more.

Doda’s clear about it. The era of simple-minded transgression is over! We can’t
scram the way we used to.

Everywhere is mirror/camera or wall/violence. Proposing this-that-and-the-other-

thing, I say the time of ideology is pretty much finished as well: is it advisable
any longer to believe in

a) the messianic promise (another world is possible),

b) a paradise past (where everything operates perfectly to produce these
memories; oh history, oh home),
c) romance (its luxury: the self realized and profit: a new and better ultimate)
or, even,
d) narrative (a rhetorical device: launch dawdle swell heave digress plunge
subside chuck) The arc no longer operates like a grassy verge.

What remains of the experience of belief? Only the aspect of identity; I’m one
who believes in the y chromosome or never mind I’m something else.

Is Catullus a zombie? For one thing he drools. Someone is forever wiping his
mouth. Doda says early in his paper he can’t quite decide how old Catullus is. I
ask myself the same question as I continue to read about drool. See pages 21,
47, 71, and 67, 79, 98.

Babies drool, demented elders, and zombies.

Is Catullus infantile? He’s only just been brought back to life. Is the poem on
page 63, CATULLUS, GET A CASE WORKER, an infantile inventory, teeth,
knees ears feet, hands, nose, the result of a joyful first consciousness of the
body, the body in the mirror, a first narcissitic fit? (Or given his resuscitation, a
psuedo-original paroxysm of pleasure in the self?)

On pages 23, 58 and 115 Catullus wears pajamas during the day. Or somebody
does. Also, there’s a fair amount of talcum powder scattered throughout the text.
See pages 40, 53 and 67. Possibly elsewhere. Both the very young and the very
old dress casually most of the time and we do like them to smell nice.

Is Catullus very, very old, over two thousand years and so demented? His agent
Harvey talks about his client as if he’s never been truly former, on page 15, as if
a longtime poet in a real rut. And the narrator too from time to time describes
Catullus career as one unbroken span from nearly lost archetype in the twelfth
century to full blown romantic in 1917 or thereabouts. On page 143 Catullus
himself references his antique face. On page 63, he’s described as cackling. He
breathes irregularly on page 35. He might be a very old man indeed.
Drooling Priapus in diapers either way. Or is our Catullus uncanny, undead, his
reinvigorated career a sour escapade of the carious defunct?

The narrator is certainly confused about Catullus’ condition. He peddles Catullus’

potential text as posthumous. He confesses to a necrophilic message “virtually
inextricable from the artist’s intent.”

Catullus has been resurrected and so might be a divine figure, a jesus figure, a
figure of sacrifice and benevolence. But I’m prepared to claim sons of god don’t
drool. Zombies do.

No one is more an isolate than the drooling zombie. The zombie is a chronic
performative, a proxy, an absolute commodity. The zombie is the spectator
beyond compare, whose relationship to life is bulimic: ravenous and anorgasmic.

Doda’s paper on LPWNM addresses the cut between public and private
experience. In an electronic world where everything is recorded, he posits a gap
as narrow as a tightrope, a slit, which inexplicably requires traversal, a kind of
sewing up.

I don’t disagree. There’s excitement in exposure. Isn’t that what makes perversity
the disposition of choice in the epoch of the spectacle? Yes, that’s the whole
point of the illicit: appearance.

Would slobber not serve very well as an objective correlative for the
unquantifiable joiussance of display, the ruin of the immediate, this very moment,
limited and lonely. What do you get instead, a representation of the present, the
twinkling in your life I’m writing about right now, flashed, flourished. The noise of
the crowd is almost painful.

(The mansions are built but the saints are not ready. Roll back the stone. There
are no signs of neurological functioning. On opening the coffin the body had
vanished, but from high up in the sky they heard the ring of his hand bell.
I feel very blessed. I do not deserve to live. I know there’s something I just cannot
see. Lazarus come out.)

It’s not the loss of boundary but the excess of borderland, the very narrow space
between wall and violence.

It’s nice to feel the love right back.