Reading Into Everything

I've just been through too many books without any sort of discussion. Taiwan has maybe eight people who aren't foreigners that can speak enough English and I certainly can't speak enough Chinese. So I think most of what I'm reading has been working its way into my life in other ways. I read Soul Mountain by Gao XingJian mostly over Chinese New Year Break, trying to analyze away the general feeling of sexual restlessness. Then I followed it up with Kerouac's Dharma Bums as a way of maybe opening up a critical dialogue between the two cultures' attempts at meaning. Sure as I am that there is much to be said about all the soul-seeking going on in each novel, I still can't get away from my own circumstances. I am sex-starved and further than I've even been from tenderness. I started some acclaimed Japanese novella but had to stop after a chapter of erotic imagery wrapped into a stifling Christian upbringing. It's a ghost, my desire. Zizek, whom I next turned to, says that a spectre is much more difficult to rid oneself of. While an actual human body can be quite easily abandoned and then avoided, the memory will remain forever with us. Perhaps I ought to remember this in dealing with women. Perhaps in dealing with my own mistakes and past short-comings.

Zizek's The Puppet and The Dwarf starts off with the introduction of the Gosel of Paul as the true but then again truly necessary betrayal of Christ. This is Christ the fractured-whole God that invites betrayal as the only means to his own salvation. Now at the end of chapter one we have applied this notion to the greater meeting of east and west in which the inward gaze of Buddha is the Evil Eye itself and the Sword of Christianity is the birth of Science.

Reading Zizek I always find myself spinning around two spheres of thought:

First, why don't we apply this sort of thought? Why aren't there people out there taking these interesting insights, these varied approaches to the truth, and applying them to the real world? Surely we could govern a little better if we proclaimed a more honest understanding of fundamental religion, of the economy of desire or the purpose of art. But then I think about applying Zizek to my own life...

This brings me closer to the second sphere: how on earth can we live with so much to think about? At one point in my life, in New York, I took the chance to act out what I was reading. A mix of Proust and Vollmann, I think, that allowed me to move like the River. But this was really only a prepared calculus of excuses and beautification that would have given me a year's worth of material to ponder over with each faltering step. But pondering is really only another word for regret. As long as the material pondered is in the personal past, the exercise serves almost no purpose: you will know only that you were different then than you are now. In fact, I've always loathed this very same thought process. People have always been intent upon their own personal sagas. So, while I had a good time living in someone else's dream I really was only acting out a past artificially projected into the future. In either the crumbling love of Proust or the hopeless meanderings of Vollmann's menagerie of alter-egos I was still the only thing more than a ghost. Again, I was all alone except for some anticipated fall, like a suicide who somehow expects to live beyond the fatal event. And, of course, I did.

The balance, then, is neither a whole-hearted acceptance of Literature as a responsible guide nor a complete neglect of it's value, either. It's only that I wish there were a better way to digest it other than having to read every page of every book as if the author were making some under-handed critique of my own life.