The Chalet in History

The question you are asking yourself right now, as you motor down a deserted boulevard in this sprawling city of the interior, is: who was the first person who eyed the primeval northern forest – the shaggy lindens with their colonies of bees, the imperious, shade-giving oaks and the scores of squirrels who depend each of them, the blazingly bright larches that have stood sentinel on the alpine heights for centuries – and thought: ‘Yes! Quick, quick now! Let’s chop all this down and build a chalet!’?

And it’s not just the taiga that’s being destroyed. It’s meadow and underbrush -- sassafras and birch, goldenrod and gooseberry, wintergreen and sedum, even the mosses and lichens that create their vibrant micro-ecosystems on the moist rot and rocky outcroppings that dot the forest floor. All hacked away to yield yet another chalet.

And yes, it’s always a chalet. That tiny Swiss house, transmuted by the alchemy of acquisition into a mental map of imagined economic progress: start with a subsistence hut of primitive accumulation, move to a utilitarian split-level subdivision, spend a fortune for a quasi-feudal suburban McMansion,  and, at the apogee of capitalist desire, obtain the unobtainable: a dwelling so special you seldom even use it – a pied-a-terre home chock full of the best appliances, a chalet on stilts with its head in a cunning cloud.

God’s honest truth: Adam and Eve didn’t eat of the tree of knowledge. They chopped it down, seasoned the timbers, leveled the garden, built themselves a chalet on a 10-acre plot, and successfully claimed ownership with a fraudulent deed from the serpent. The bible tale is just a cover story.

We have toppled royalty and toppled dictators and even toppled Gods. But will we ever topple landlords, who continue to exercise their despotic dominion over the planet, grading the hills and degrading the soil, so the globe – this whirling speck in space – comes to resemble Easter Island, but instead of haughty carved heads our civilization has left a sterile sprawl of chalets across the thawing permafrost as we nose without thinking into the slipstream of a future in which we will not exist.

 

The Morality of Error

While fucking off – aka wasting time – at Bookoff, a Japanese bookstore with a branch here in New York, I found a copy of Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick for a buck.

Now that I’ve read it, I have to say it: I love I Love Dick. More specifically: Part I is a bit choppy – chained to the one-word-at-a-time dissolution of Kraus’ sexual relationship with Sylvère Lotringer through a series of mutually masturbatory letters to a man named Dick, who Sylvère wants to induce to pay him to come to California to give some university seminars and Chris wants to fuck – but Part II, liberated from the chronology of this emotional mindfuck, starts moving with increasing power and rapidity until it slams, screeching, stomp-on-the-anti-lock-brakes-style into an ending that, you might say, shows what we talk about when we talk about the photocopy of love.

That second part of I Love Dick, called Every Letter is a Love Letter, brought me uneasily close to the ways I use my own text to seduce. I have long known that it is far easier for me to create a powerful physical connection while hiding behind letters and emails than it is to do so up front, in person, in the flesh. In fact, in a sense, this is why I am a writer, because writing allows me to hide my inability to be a full person in the world behind words. In person, I am often not who I am; in my writing, I am me. But, no doubt, this is a self-seduction.

In a sense, I Love Dick is a modern reprise of Kierkegaard’s “Diary of a Seducer” – though Kierkegaard, writing as Victor Eremita (the victorious hermit), who supposedly accidentally discovered this epistolic essay by a man named Johannes, triumphs in his terrible trick, seducing Cordelia and then abandoning her, whereas Kraus, writing as her non-hermetic self, crashes and burns, as Dick determinedly refuses to respond to her words. Kierkegaard knew – and Kraus does too, learning as she pursues and construes – that seduction is an aesthetic act. Seduction wears clothes (in I Love Dick, Kraus details what she wears when she finally meets Dick alone – ‘black Guess jeans, black boots, an iridescent silver shirt, the black bolero leather jacket that I bought in France. It’s what I planned but now it’s making me feel gaunt and middle aged.’) and has a hidden gestural grammar and style. You might put it this way: the bible was wrong; gestures are the word made flesh.

I Love Dick also brought me to this: I have spent most of my life selecting and pursuing various unavailable and inaccessible objects – in the book it’s Dick or the dick, take your pick – among which I myself am undoubtedly one, and so are all my book projects. I know from experience that when you do this, you repeat all your mistakes from prior attempts in hushed compression – a lifetime in six months or six minutes or six years – as if on a picaresque journey you’ve been on before and can’t help going on once more, until you incinerate your prior self and it rises from its own ashes to challenge you to get fired up enough to do the whole thing over again. In this way, you might say life is a series of self-immolating repetitions in which you douse yourself with gasoline and flick the lighter in the quest to find your self-generated inaccessible objects (and the self this self-pyromaniac quest unveils to you) over and over. Can you be charged with arson for setting yourself on fire again and again? The fucking eternal return of fucking eternal returns until you realize that life is a bunch of variations on the fucking theme of eternal return and that your eternal return is you: nothing more, nothing less, welcome home, hand me the matches, please.

Inflame me, my sweet inflammable you.

Now that I’m done with I Love Dick, I’m left with a not-yet-smoldering question: I found four errors in the book (I Love Dick was originally published in 1997; the edition I found in Bookoff was the 2006 reissue), and, given how precise Kraus is, how considered her considerations of art, texts, and situations always are, I wonder if these are simple errors or, rather, smoking guns with their own deliberate inflammatory meaning:

 

• On page 131, this sentence is missing the word ‘to’

“That I don’t want be the person who always knows anymore, who has the vision for two people and makes the plans.”

--what does it mean to take the ‘to’ out of the verb ‘to be.’ The ‘to’ implies a continuation or an aspiration – on the way to – and the verb without ‘to’ suggests a command structure in which language is reduced to shouted orders and mute fulfillment. A language of command and compliance is, of course, a language of power and oppression.

 

• On page 182, the phrase ‘Jane Bowles’ letters’ is rendered as “Jane Bowle’s letters”

--a simple typo? a sly reference to John Bowle, the 18^th century British writer who was the first to write in English on the then-unappreciated genius of Cervantes’ Don Quixote? Or what?

 

• On p. 207, the word judgment is spelled “judgement”

--could it be that Kraus spelled it that way specifically for the Dick of I Love Dick, who is British -- and Brits apparently spell judgment judgement?

 

• On p. 235, Felix Guattari’s book Chaosophy, which Kraus referred to correctly only a few pages earlier, is stated to have been written by “Gilles Dleuze”

--Felix Guattari has long been unfairly viewed as Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Plus-One’ – the phrase Kraus self-dismissively uses as she casts her eye on the funeral pyre of her life with a string of guys – Lotringer, Marshall Blonsky, Murray Groman, Gary Becker, Peter Baumann, Michael Wainwright, and, no doubt, others – for whom she did lots of things (as she says in the sentence with the first typo, she ‘has the vision for two people and makes the plans’) but who always were content to have her treated as the add-on, the date, the wife, the sex object, the fuck buddy, the monster, the less-than-necessary, the Jew, the other … the ‘Plus-One.’ And what does it mean to misspell the wrong name: Dleuze … d lousy dude who stole d credit for all d concepts of Anti-Oedipus … the loose woman in whom you can lose yourself ... the loser.

--Also, Chaosophy was edited by Lotringer and published by Semiotext(e), the book imprint Lotringer started and for which Kraus has been an important editor (division of labor: he coordinates the press’s Foreign Agents series – which included Guattari – while Kraus edits the Native Agents series) in 1995, the year I Love Dick takes place. So this could be a statement. A lashing out. A striking out. An erasure. A seduction.

-- a possibly more benign possibility: I Love Dick presents itself, in part, as a series of transcriptions of Kraus’ letters to Dick, and perhaps Kraus made these ‘mistakes’ in her letters, thus making it crucial for her to render these mistakes accurately, to embed them lovingly in the final text.

All errors are authentic. (This is what Eileen Myles is getting at in her introduction to I Love Dick, when she points out that she keeps typing 'Christ' when writing 'Chris.') Accuracy in error is a moral concept, one that Kraus evokes in I Love Dick, and one that I aspire to live by, though I have always failed in my attempts.