From Proust To Porn In Less Than A Minute

Late summer, early September is when these tiny gnats begin to appear everywhere, especially in our apartment. Not in great numbers, thankfully, but occasionally one, only one, will appear and – like a sudden burst of notes in a Liszt piano piece – nag at your attention. Like the one just a minute ago who appeared as I was reading a passage in Proust that takes place in a brothel and my irruptive little buddy decided to land there. This by itself didn’t bug me so much; it was when the gnat began a conversation with the madam and requested a fresh young flame skimmer dragonfly. The madam smiled and returned with the brightest, twinkliest, prettiest and – if I may dare say so – sexiest insect I’d ever seen. She had a flame red body and wing veins black as obsidian. And that’s how it happened. How I went from Proust to porn in less than a minute.  

Genitalia come with all sorts of drapery. You can expect anything from a snowball vulgarity to a tube of fungus glue. We’re in science fiction now. Up to our antennae in pure astonishment. We’re just axles open to darkness, aren’t we? The bohemian stage suggests the hive is stirring with configurations. Like when we went to see Bob Dylan and found Bob Denver instead. I felt my chin fizz with newborn whiskers. I stood there and twirled a bright new baton. It’s how mass got massive. Densities formed badminton nets and drove the physicists nuts. You want to know what dark matter is? I’ll tell you what dark matter is: it’s dark. The kind of dark that matters. I want the sugar arms of twilight to melt into your tea. You sip. I sip. We get up and walk around. We whistle. We grow fins on our arms. We swim and swim and swim. And this, too, matters.

There should be people to welcome us into life. Like they do in hotels. Extend welcome courtesies. Give us a key and a map of the city. Here's what to expect. Here's what to avoid. But that isn’t life that’s a lie. The reality is way bigger. The reality is the shock of cold water when you enter a beautiful room. A swampy sweating bickering ensues. And the fall of a shoe.

Swann’s Way concludes with a broad spectrum of emotion, a bouillabaisse of conflicting feeling, everything ranging from saffron to crab, joy to betrayal, squid to fennel, remorse to resignation. And that’s the way it is in life, eternal dismay and confusion with fugitive hues of exquisite pleasure, a bizarre commingling of soupy incongruities, so that just sitting quietly can sometimes feel like you’re groping around in the dark feeling things, chairs, walls, light switches, anything familiar by which you can orient yourself. Swann feels the acute remorse of a backfiring epiphany, the realization that he’s suffered absurdly for a woman who did not please him or enjoy any real rapport, and with whom he felt a deep abiding love. He makes another discovery: the ability to view things from an objective distance, as if he were the writer of the story in which he’s trapped, so that he’s simultaneously in the thick of things, but also outside looking in.

Caravaggio’s musician comes to mind, the dreamy look of the lute player. He looks like he just got some bad news. But it’s probably a musical problem he’s trying to work out. Because music makes life endurable. Like Nietzsche said: without music life would be a mistake. It’s all about walking to the end of the world. The closer it gets, the more radical it gets. A colossal C minor.