[watercolor by John Abbott]
Horror Vacui
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
–Walter Benjamin
1 January 1993, Orem
His feet are livid, I wrote. His face is drawn, an open eye leers upward. My own leering eye hunts images from the past and when they flash up delivers them to my inadequate pen.
6 January 1993, Orem
Dream: I was beating up John. I was on top of him, pounding him, blind with rage. Then pain! My testicles! John had grabbed my balls. He controlled me. The turnabout was inconceivable.
In a second dream I searched for John in downtown Farmington. I found him working in a small pizza place, and we talked for a minute before he had to return to his dough. I walked through town looking for Dad. I found him sitting at the counter of a café drinking a cup of coffee. He looked like a derelict, his shirt torn, thin stubble scattered across his drawn face. He was embarrassed to be seen with coffee.
7 January 1993, Provo
Nearly a foot of snow during the night. I’m in the cave of my office, a single light burning, snow falling softly outside.
“A boy he picked up in his Alfa Romeo sports car ran him over with it and left him helpless in the dust. . . . Pasolini spent so much time in the lower depths because he found them ethically preferable to the heights.” So writes Clive James in the New Yorker. I’m afraid I have been seeing John as the victim of a sordid accident, in some romantic way more moral than the rest of us. Ten years ago Žarko and I argued about Pasolini. In response to what he called my moralizing, Žarko maintained that an artist can’t restrict himself. As soon as you refuse to experience everything, he told me, you close yourself to the sources of art. Pasolini is profoundly subversive, as is art. If you can’t stomach Pasolini, you’ll end up a repressed, reactionary, unfulfilled, narrow-minded, bitter, bourgeois shell of a man. I responded that his string of adjectives exemplified moralizing.
A wall always separated me from John. I have been distant from other siblings as well, from my parents, from my wife. From myself. The wall metaphor is misleading, I think. There is no wall. I am the wall. To reach my brother I must destroy myself, must risk obliteration as the self I have become. And what will rise from the rubble? It won’t be a wall.
THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY 