Scene | Dec 13 2007
Also, my face, in case you were wondering, is half-shaven. It’s true. I was shaving just now and remembered that I hadn’t sent this email yet, although I wrote most of it early this morning (the stuff up to the paragraph about snow). When I remembered this, I felt bad because maybe you won’t get the email today and so you will think that I’m not thinking of you when I am. Anyway, when I made the decision to stop shaving, I immediately envisioned a scene in which I’m standing across the street from our building (which in the process of burning to the ground), and there are lots of people there with me, watching it burn, and every now and then one of them looks at me and notices that half of my face isn’t shaven, while the other half is, and then there’s this moment when I see it dawn on this person that I must live in the burning building.
Recently I’ve been having these experiences. I walk out of the apartment and stand at the top of the stairs waiting for K as she locks the door, and while standing there I realize I can’t remember walking out of the apartment. I remember being about to leave, but I can’t remember leaving. Nonetheless I must have left because here I am at the top of the stairs.
*
From a recent email exchange:
Her: Also, please start doing something about your forgetfulness. I am beginning to find it unattractive. There are many things you can do. It’s like going to the gym, except in this case you make sure your brain muscle stays fit. I just found the tamari almonds in the freezer.
Me: I don’t get it. Are you saying the tamari almonds don’t belong in the freezer?
Her: Ohh sweetie, while it was funny to find them there, I am serious about training your brain. I’ve noticed it getting worse.
Me: I don’t get it. Are you saying my brain is not supposed to get worse?
I’ve never liked the word cunt. It’s nasty and crude. Not that pussy is any better. Cunt seems demeaning, while pussy seems—what?—silly. I can never decide which of the two to use in my diary. I try cunt for a time, then switch to pussy, then return to cunt again, sometimes in a single sentence. Neither word seems right for very long.
In desperation I have occasionally tried using vagina. However, vagina is so medical-sounding that I invariably cross it out. My diary is littered with sentences in which I’ve drawn a line through the word vagina and written cunt or pussy in the space above it.
A few times I’ve considered using the word sex, but sex is far too poetic-sounding, a poetry word. No one uses sex (meaning vagina) in everyday speech. Sex (meaning vagina) sounds ridiculous in everyday speech, it sounds like one is trying to be either lofty or vague, or both at once. It sounds poetical.
Baudelaire, if I’m not mistaken, used the word sex—or rather his translators did. Lord knows what word Baudelaire used.
Bernhard, by contrast, never once mentioned this part of the female anatomy. Of course I’m referring to that portion of Bernhard’s work that has been translated into English, because for all I know Bernhard used the German equivalent of cunt or pussy in one of his lesser plays or novels, or perhaps in one of his poems—not one of which has been translated into English!
At the same time I’m dubious, because nowhere in Bernhard’s translated work—twelve novels, three plays and a three-volume memoir—does he make reference, direct or otherwise, to sex. It’s true. Nowhere does anyone kiss anyone or try to kiss anyone or even remember kissing anyone. It simply doesn’t happen. Bernhard’s world is devoid of sex. The only possible exception is the scene in Bernhard’s last novel, Extinction, in which the naked protagonist encounters his spinster sister in the hall on the morning of their parents’ funeral, and sneers, Haven’t you seen a naked man before?
In a sense this is Bernhard’s only sex scene—his only scene, really: a repulsive man taunts his sister with his nakedness.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself. I develop and maintain smart, standards-compliant websites. I collaborate with design shops needing expert XHTML/CSS coding. Clear and sweet is my soul. 
