Glyph Read Online Free Page B

family, and so me. To view the sickness as it existed, I think, does not entail naming it, for to name it would be to miss the point and, more importantly, to limit appreciation of its effects by limiting our perceived possibilities. So, I will speak of a thing unnamed and address it as the multitude of things that it must be, keeping in mind that as I write, the thing has already undressed and changed its antigenic costume, leaving me stuck with language, with sense only in a context that no longer exists.
    My father’s father was a bowler. I know of the game only what I read in one article in a postmodern journal that claimed the game was an elaborate metaphor for the male-female and male-male (but not the female-female) relationship, the pins having something to do with epidermal boundaries and balls. Grandpa was a bowler, this I know because every photograph that I ever saw of him—he died during a tornado in Indiana in the late sixties—depicted him in a shirt, ugly even in black and white, which had short sleeves a darker color than the rest of it, and he was wearing similarly colored shoes with the number 9 tattooed boldly on their sides. Even in the photographs, I could see the disdain for the man on my father’s face. In one picture, the back of the photo said, “Elkhart, 1955,” my father’s father was pretending to use his son’s head as a bowling ball on his approach to the lane. The man was smiling largely. The boy looked tortured and in his eyes was not fear, but hatred. I believe the man, his name was Elton, worked in a musical-instrument factory, but had no aptitude for music himself. From things my father told my mother, he had no aptitude, no interest, and no idea that music existed outside the selections on the jukebox at the neighborhood lanes. My father pretended to love music, listening to the right kinds of music and memorizing the important works, but his interest was superficial, in spite of the breadth of his knowledge. He would listen to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and no tears would come to his eyes. He would simply walk over and flip the vinyl disc. He would put on Coltrane’s My Favorite Things , but would not become agitated or angry. Music never made him cry and it only made him smile when he purchased a difficult-to-find recording. He collected many jazz recordings and knew all the dates and all the personnel on each disc, but he felt nothing; I could see as he listened, stretched out on the sofa with his pipe or sitting in the recliner with a glass of cognac. In most things, no doubt sex among them, he confused enthusiasm with passion. He was a sort of involuntary ascetic. Like the Orfic, life in this world for Inflato was finally pain and weariness. He was passionate insofar as he was at war with himself. On the other hand, his intellect was more form than substance, a flash of style more than a deep well (no wonder the attraction to certain so-called schools of thought). Inflato imagined that he possessed a kind of control over his passions; as true as my having control over satyrs and muses. My father was not ugly, but neither was he handsome, and finally, a lack of handsomeness is a kind of ugliness, but this did not bother him, to hear him tell it, because Socrates was ugly. He would stand in front of the mirror and say to my mother, who was still drying after her shower, “In the Symposium , it is said that Socrates had a stumpy nose and a protruding belly.” He would say no more, but leave my mother and, unknowingly, me, to infer his meaning.
mundus intelligibilis
    WITTGENSTEIN: Friedrich, let me ask you a question. Do you think that my having consciousness is a fact of experience?
    NIETZSCHE: Terrible experiences pose the riddle whether the person who has had them is not terrible. Who has not, for the sake of his good reputation, sacrificed himself once?
    WITTGENSTEIN: If I know it solely from my own case, then of course I know only what I call that, not what anyone else