MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCES
His idea about labor power came to him while he strode back and forth in his room in Paris and smoked cigarettes. Indeed, striding back and forth, he smoked cigarettes, but striding, smoking, whistling, etc., are contingent activities. What matters is the stage of development in the class struggle when it is possible for a person to think seriously — to have an idea — about labor power. Certainly, in Paris, Karl Marx strode, for example, smoking cigarettes. Now and then, he strode to the window, pushed it open to free the room of smoke and listen for developments. But the precisely particular determinants of consciousness, within the class struggle, are material circumstances. Intuitively, perhaps, Karl Marx felt the burden of determined consciousness in the black, thick hair thrusting from the top of his head like implications and slithering down his chest and back to converge at his crotch, like a conclusion. But, even scrutinizing the hair beneath his fingernails (very like the historical grain in wood), he detected nothing beyond mute, inexorable flux until — striding, smoking — he pushed open his window and noticed Monsieur Grandbouche, his landlord, a figure of bourgeois pieties, who shouted, “When will you pay the rent, my hairball?” Karl Marx strode back and forth and smoked. La question Grandbouche burned in his roots, like the residue of a summer rainstorm, quickening the dialectical material of his struggling circumstances. Hair twisted from his ears and whistling nostrils. Angry messages. An idea was occurring. Indeterminable millions would die. Indeterminable millions would eat. Thus, a Parisian landlord, frightened by a smoky blotch in the window, shouted a pathetic joke in the spirit of nervous conviviality, and as a result, his descendants would be torn to pieces, for he’d epitomized material circumstances by shouting — across generations of Grandbouche — an idea, intensified by repercussions, echoed in concussions of Marxian canons, tearing fascist ligament even in the jungles of the East. Voilà, implicit in a landlord’s shout is the death rattle of his children’s children.
BUSINESS LIFE
My uncle invested his money in a beauty parlor, began to make a little profit — and the union representative came. My uncle promised to hire union workers soon as the mortgage was paid. Pickets arrived. Back and forth with their signs in front of the beauty parlor. My uncle brought them coffee. They talked about their troubles.A picketer didn’t have a soft job. Long apprenticeship; pay wasn’t good; and morning to evening, march, march, march, screaming insults at my uncle’s customers. The signs didn’t look heavy, but try to carry one all day. My uncle agreed: a sign is heavy. Anyhow, business improved. After a while the union bombed the beauty parlor, set fire to my uncle’s car, and beat up my aunt. This was reported in the newspaper. Business became much better. My uncle negotiated for a second beauty parlor. One afternoon a picketer leaned against the window of the beauty parlor and lit a cigarette. My uncle started to phone the union, but he hadn’t forgotten his life in Russia, his hatred of informers. He put down the phone. The image of that man — slouched against the window, smoking, not carrying the picket sign so that people could read it — seethed in my uncle like moral poison. He soon developed a chronic stomach disturbance. Next came ulcers, doctors, hospitals — all the miseries of a life in business.
LITERARY CRITICISM
Photographs of suspected Jews — men, women, children with hair, teeth, etc. — are available in great sufficiency. If you demand one, either you hate, or do not understand, Borges’s critical point, which is that any reader knows stories of this exquisitely general kind. Besides, Borges made his story not from photographable reality — your Polish relatives whose undernourished kosher height never exceeded five feet six inches — but from a stupid story called “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” My aunt, a schoolgirl, was bleeding on the ground with her mother and father in Brest Litovsk.
SHRUBLESS CRAGS
The Prisoner of Chillon, by Lord Byron, isn’t essentially different from “The Secret Miracle.” It, too, is about a condemned prisoner who becomes ecstatic. Suddenly, after years in a dungeon, Bonnivard transcends his mortality:
What next befell me then and there
I know not well — I never knew—
First came the loss of light, and air,
And then of darkness too:
I had no thought, no feeling — none—
Among the stones I stood a stone,
And was, scarce conscious what I wist,
As shrubless crags within the mist;
For all was blank, and bleak, and grey;
It was not night — it was not day;
It was not even the dungeon-light,
So hateful to my heavy sight,
But vacancy absorbing space,
And fixedness — without a place.
Like Hladík, in a state of intensified absence, he is a presence.
SONG
Byronic romanticism entered the Russian soul, at the deepest level, as evidenced in the beloved folk song “Oi yoi, the shrubless crags.”
BLOSSOMS
Metaphysical possibilities — Hladík, Bonnivard — as inherent in the world, are appreciated by Wordsworth when he focuses on shrubless crags and imagines them spiritual entities, theoretical men who neither live nor die. They hover in the mist of universal mind, or the moods of finitude. In a snowstorm outside Smolensk, fighting the Nazis, my uncle was hit in the head by shrapnel, carried to a hospital, and dropped in the dead ward. That night a Jewish woman, who was a surgeon and colonel in the Russian army, discovered him when she left the operating room and, to smoke a cigarette, retreated to the dead ward. A vague moan, “Mama,” reached her from shadowy rows of corpses. She ordered a search. Nurses running down the rows, pressing back eyelids, listening at mouth holes, located my uncle. The body wasn’t dead; more you couldn’t say. The surgeon stepped on her cigarette. “I’ll operate.” My uncle lived, a hero of the people, guaranteed every right of Russian citizenship. At his first opportunity he fled, walking from Russia to Italy through the confusion of ruined cities; stealing by night across the borders of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Austria; starving, pursued by dogs and police, and always repeating to himself the address of his sister in lower Manhattan. When he got to America he struggled for years, with little English and great anxiety, to make money. Today he owns racetracks and a chain of beauty parlors. He drives a Lincoln Continental. Though he speaks six languages, he isn’t much of a conversationalist, but likes a good joke, especially if it comes from life — how, for example, during a Chinese dinner, his brother-in-law’s appendix ruptured. Both his sons are doctors and drive Jaguars. He reminds them that his life was saved by a woman less than five feet tall who, during the battle of Smolensk, performed miraculous surgery while standing on ammunition boxes. It could seem, now that he’s a big shot, he gives lessons in humility. But how else to defend himself against happiness? He sees terrifying vulnerability in the blossoms of nachas.