coldhearted scientist وداد

I can compose calmly and directly now instead of having my brain expand and pulsate in asymmetrical ways. And composition is craftsmanlike and pleasant. As it gets sharper, I can feel the synapses click and the blood run through the capillaries in my temples. I have more wind in my chest, and more space in my mind.

“I wanted to write this in monument, but I only had ink. I wanted to write it in diamond, but I only had blood” (Fulton). I wanted to write the piece in English, but it needed to be in Spanish. Bending my mind and style across this moat of language was difficult, but now I have done it and the world of the text is my primary life. The clanging world is outside in the university. I am in a living room discussing poetry with my oldest friends.

To commemorate these things I will tell one of my famous stories. The name Sheherezade is Persian and means “city dweller.”

The telephone rang early one morning, while I still slept. When the machine clicked on I heard the beginning of the message, Cero, it is Bebeto, and picked up. Bebeto, an acolyte of Derrida, lives in Colombia and sends me eccentric manuscripts from time to time. He needed my passport number, he said, because he was going to invite me to speak at his university. I asked no questions, crazy Latin American scheme, it will never happen, gave him my passport number, and went back to sleep. I remembered Bebeto’s call as I would a dream.

In New Orleans, where I was living, everything but the music seemed like a hallucination. Later that day I talked to a friend whose death sentence has been commuted to “natural life.” Back when they tried to integrate the schools, the school bus on which Gary rode was assaulted by a white mob. He was then convicted of murder. Although the state can show no evidence against him, he has been in prison since the age of sixteen. Our conversation was punctuated by a recording that kept telling me I was speaking … with an inmate … at a state penitentiary. At work I defended myself and others against every imaginable kind of academic mayhem, and I ended the afternoon at Slinky’s Bar in Baton Rouge watching Andrei Codrescu lose at video poker.

I got lost looking for gas on the way home later that night, and found myself on the grounds of an old plantation in St. James Parish. The big house was columned, the oaks were hung with Spanish moss, and the cicadas were singing. I would have thought I had moved back in time had the man in the house not had a cellular phone and directed me to an ultra-modern service station. Bebeto’s call was now but one illusion among many.

It was in New Orleans I had met Bebeto, at a conference session that did not take place. Nobody had bothered to tell me that my part of the event had been canceled, so I had written my paper and appeared at the appointed time. I found the room empty except for Bebeto, waiting patiently, the only member of my prospective audience. He had chosen this session because of my paper title, he said, and I believe our paths were destined to cross.

Bebeto was glad to meet a local, since he and his Colombian colleagues were low on dollars. They needed to eat cheaply, and wanted to eat well. I told them about some good neighborhood places – the Taquería Corona on Magazine Street, Dunbar’s on Freret near the Dew Drop Inn, Eddie Bacquet’s Creole Soul Food just off Elysian Fields. Also, Mandina’s and Liuzza’s up by Jesuit High, in a neighborhood where the men still call each other “paisan,” Mandich’s at St. Claude and Kerlerec for shrimp-stuffed mirlitons, and finally, for oysters, Uglesich’s at Jackson and Baronne. They were so pleased with my selections that they invited me to the quasi-underground conference events they had arranged. Among these were a very good avant-garde play, involving puppets, they put on in a Bywater warehouse (whose use they had arranged for I do not know how). There was also a meeting about the latest Colombian political crisis which, although planned as a calm and serious event, got so tense and so whiskey soaked that we now refer to it as “the night of the disturbance.” There were Shining Path members present who heartily agreed with Bebeto that his identity was worthless (as a Derridean, Bebeto is violently opposed to identity as a concept, and as defenders of the subaltern, Shining Path members are, as we know, quite violently opposed to petit-bourgeois identities like Bebeto’s). In this venue I finally gave my paper, something about the formation of alternative identities in the Americas. A couple of Bebeto’s Colombian friends tried to achieve alternative identities by telephoning France.

I was admirably steadfast throughout these events, and Bebeto never forgot me. He sent me strange manuscripts and fanciful drawings. I was overworked and overburdened, and I did not write back. But a package came from Bebeto every few months for several years, and I got to know his style. […]

Axé.