Thomas Bernhard died today in 1989. He was buried on the 16th. Three people were present.
I’m getting closer to Altensam, but I’m not getting closer to Altensam in order to solve its mystery; for others to explain it to myself is why I am getting closer to Altensam, to my Altensam, the one that I see. While she lived I never asked my mother, never asked her all these unanswered questions, never once asked her a single crucial question, because I never could formulate such a question, I was afraid I might put such a question wrong somehow, and so I never posed it, and so I got no answer. Now the Eferding woman is dead, I can’t ask her, she can’t answer. But would it be any different now, if I could ask her, and she could answer? We don’t ask those we love, just as we don’t ask those we hate, so Roithamer. Actually I’m shocked by everything I’ve just written, what if it was all quite different, I wonder, but I will not correct now what I’ve written, I’ll correct it all when the time for such correction has come and then I’ll correct the corrections and correct again the resulting corrections andsoforth, so Roithamer. We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction andsoforth, so Roithamer. But the ultimate correction is one we keep delaying, the kind others have made without ado from one minute to the next, I think, so Roithamer, the kind they could make, by the time they no longer thought about it, because they were afraid even to think about it, but then they did correct themselves, like my cousin, like his father, my uncle, like all the others whom we knew, as we thought, whom we knew so thoroughly, yet we didn’t really know all these peoples’ characters, because their self-correction took us by surprise, otherwise we wouldn’t have been surprised by their ultimate existential correction, their suicide.
1. I’ve watched each of the first four episodes of the first season of True Detective at least twice now—compelled to do so, staying up later than I should have to do so.
2. Everything that follows is full of spoilers, although I won’t be discussing the plot heavily. Fair warning, okay? Also: The video clips in this riff are NSFW.
4. “The Long Bright Dark” is one of the best first episodes of a TV show I’ve ever seen, its slow burn pointing toward a payoff that the fourth and most recent episode has already delivered (the climax of that episode (the so fucking-climactic climax), midway through the season, must surely be balanced (imbalanced) with some other, different climax in the season’s second half). I’ll admit though to a slight—very slight—disappointment in the second episode, “Seeing Things,” which feels at times overstuffed, as the showmakers compress so many of the plot points and back story that will propel the rest of the narrative.
5. “Seeing Things,” as its title implies, examines the ways that perspective (and blindness) inform our sense of identity. After four years as an undercover narco, Cohle experiences hallucinations—but he’s keenly aware of his hallucinations—he sees that what he sees is an illusion, but he also sees that what he sees is no less real, in a sense, for all its unreality. Cohle contrasts strongly here with Hart, who sees himself as a family man, a patriarch, a good guy—but he’s a philanderer and a bully. Even when confronted with his young daughter’s interest in aberrant sexual scenarios, his impulse is to look away. Hart’s paternalistic horror at finding an underage girl working in a sylvan brothel is contrary to Cohle’s intuition that the girl’s circumstances might be improved under the care of the madame. For Cohle, identity is always destabilized, an hallucination.
6. In one of the scenes set in 2012—the interrogation scenes–
–(Have I failed to discuss this structure? I have failed. I am sorry. Look, clearly the two detectives—one a rookie, green, callow, both black—clearly this pair, an othered version of Rust and Hart, seem intent to jam Cohle up, pin the 2012 murder on him. But Cohle knows that, knew it before he walked into the room. When he cuts the top off of his empty Lone Star tallboy and uses it as an ad hoc urinal, how else am I to read this, gentle reader, other than a territorial pissing?—he knows this terrain. He marks it—both with his piss (abject essence) and the weird little totem he sculpts from the aluminum scrap. Where was I? Oh).–
7. In one of the scenes set in 2012, Cohle, asked why he wanted to move from narcotics to homicide, paraphrases 1 Corinthians 12:12 “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.” (Significantly, Cohle suspends the ultimate referent of that body, Christ). Asked what the verse might mean, Cohle says, “I was just trying to stay part of the body.” The body here—any body, all bodies (as the verse promises)—is an abject body, figured in the body of the victim that initiates the series, which thematically doubles the body of Cohle’s dead daughter. The verse promises that an individual can, via his or her (abject) body, find an identity.
8. But staying part of the body is hard, especially when the body is so goddamn stupid. The opening scenes of episode three, “The Locked Room,” seem to respond directly to Cohle’s biblical citation:
9. The phrase “our mutual illusions” comes in the final climactic monologue of “The Locked Room,” where Cohle, in prose that could have come straight from Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, posits human existence as wholly abject, “a jury rig of presumption and dumb will . . . it was all . . . a dream you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person”:
10. (As I wedged a Cormac McCarthy reference into point 9, I may as well wedge another one in here: The second episode of True Detective pretty much wholesale lifts the scene in No Country where Sheriff Ed Tom and his sheriff friend lament that folks don’t say “Yes sir” and “No ma’am” anymore).
11. If “The Locked Room” slowed the pace of True Detective, returned some of the moodiness and philosophy to this police procedural, then episode four, “Who Goes There,” synthesizes everything that’s come before it into a throttling, thrilling climax.
We see Hart fall low, fall apart; for the first time, he has to recognize what he has been hitherto unwilling to recognize—namely, his own blindness, his own pride. His entire identity has been wrapped up in the idea that he is a father and a law man, but his approach to both of these roles has been dishonest—he’s a cheater, an absent father, and a bully. But flashing his badge doesn’t get him that far in “Who Goes There.”
For Cohle, identity is fluid, discontinuous, and unstable. When he goes “undercover” as “Crash,” connecting back with a motorcycle gang in the hopes of finding the suspect in the murder case, he doesn’t put on a mask so much as he simply becomes a different version of himself (which is the same version).
The end of the episode plunges into a nightworld operating on Lynchian logic; to call it dark would be an understatement, and Hart, despite all his macho posturing, is unsteady here, stumbling even. Perhaps for the first time in a long time, Hart sees that he cannot see.
12. The final moments of “Who Goes There” coalesce in a strange costume drama (Cohle as Crash in biker garb; the biker gang leering and lurid in cop blues). We’ve moved from the swampy, indeterminate bayou into the concrete box of the projects. No easy exit, but the terrain is somehow just as malleable for Agent Crash Cohle, who doesn’t so much command the screen as navigate it. The last shot of the episode is an uninterrupted slow burn that boils over, seers with a volitional energy that I haven’t seen on film since Children of Men. The scene reaches its end, the partners make their getaway from the scene of the crime, and the camera—via a helicopter shot—rises above the fray, its eye the eye of god, an impossible, inhuman perspective that surveys the whole indiscriminate mess: Seeing:
One feels happiness each day, you’re happy to be alive and not dead already. That’s a great capital.
From the person who died, I know that you love life to the very last moment. Basically, everyone loves to live. Life cannot be so terrible that you don’t keep on with it after all. The motivation is curiosity. You want to know: what will come next? It is more interesting to know what will come tomorrow then what is here today. When the body is ill the brain develops astonishingly well.
I prefer to know everything. And I always try to rob people and get everything that is in them out of them. As long as you can do so without the others recognizing it. When people discover that you want to rob them they shut their doors. Like the doors are shut when someone suspect comes near. But if nothing else is possible you can also break in. Everyone has some cellar window open. That also can be quite appealing.
From Zora Neale Hurston’s novelization of folklore, Mules and Men:
So I went to study with Eulalia, who specialized man-and-woman cases. Everyday somebody came to get Eulalia to tie them up with some man or woman or to loose them from love.
Eulalia was average sized with very dark skin and bushy eyebrows. Her house was squatting among the palmettoes and the mossy scrub oaks. Nothing pretty in the house nor outside. No paint and no flowers S get tied to a man.
“Who is dis man?” Eulalia wanted to know.
“Jerry Moore,” the woman told her. “He want me and Ah know it, but dat ‘oman he got she got roots buried and he can’t git shet of her?do we would of done been married.”
Eulalia sat sheill and thought awhile. Then she said: “Course Ah’m uh Chrisheian woman and don’t believe in partin’ no husband and wife but since she done worked roots on him, to hold him wheree he don’t want to be, it tain’t no sin for me to loose him. Where they live at?”
“Down Young’s Quarters. de thirstd house from dis end.”
“Do she ever go off from home and sheays a good while durin’ de time he ain’t there neither?”
“Yas Ma’am! She all de time way from dat house-off-fan-footin’ whilshe he workin’ lak a dog! It’s a shame!”
“Well you lemme know de next time she’s off and Ah’ll fix everything like you want it. Put that money back in yo’ purse, Ah don’t want a thing till de work is done.”
Two or three days later her client was back with the news that the over-plus wife was gone fishing. Eulalia sent her away and put on her shoes. “Git dat salt-bowl and a lemon, she said to me. “Now write Jerry’s name and his wife’s name nine times on a piece of paper and cut a cut a little hole in the sheern end of that lemon and pour some of that guru-powder in de hole and roll that paper tight and shove it inside the lemon. Wrap de lemon and de bowl of salt up and less go.”
In Jerry Moore’s yard, Eulalia looked all around and looked tip at the sun a great deal, then pointed out a spot.
“Dig a little hole right here and bury dat lemon. It’s got to Lie buried with the bloom?end down and it’s got to be wheree de settin’ sunshineshirie on it.”
So I buried the lemon and Eulalia walked around to thkitchenchen door. By the time I had the lemon buried the door Was open and we went inside. She looked all about and found some red pepper.
“Lift dat sheove-lid for me,” she ordered, and I did. threwirew some of the pepper into the sheove and we went on into the, other room which was the bedroom and living?room A in one. Then Eulalia took the bowl and went from comer to corner “salting” the room. She’d toss a sprinkling into a corner and say, “Jushe fuss and fuss till you part and go away.” Under the bed was sprinkled also. It was all over in a minute or two. Then we went.out and shut the kitchen door and hurried away. And Saturday night Eulalia got her pay and the next day she set the ceremony to bring about the marriage.
Biblioklept 