August 06, 2005
List of Moinous’s Conclusions
PHOTO: DREW BROOKSStranded as he is between two moments, between two non-realities, one of which he never thought he would explore, even though fascinated by exotic places, Moinous, rather than look outside of himself to see who he is and where he is going, turns inward, introrse his old friend Sam would say, and launches into a deep self-examination, to see if, once and for all, he can understand himself...
The first conclusion he reaches, among a number of others, during this moment of self-invasion, if one can permit oneself a little rhetorical contortion, is that even though he may be a good writer, time will tell, as Sam used to say, he is an impossible person, impossible in the literal sense of the word, impossible to understand, just as he finds it impossible to understand himself...
The second conclusion, an easy one to reach, is that Moinous invented himself, in truth, Moinous says, still in the state of self-invasion, there is no Moinous, Moinous invents himself and cancels himself on the spot of each situation in which he finds himself, he adapts to the circumstances of the moment, positively or negatively doesn’t matter since it comes out the same in the end, Sam would surely say, and Moinous must adapt, otherwise he would not be Moinous...
The third conclusion declares that Moinous conducts his life as a heroic self-construction, though it may appear to others as a pathetic self-deconstruction, Moinous expresses this notion by saying in his head, je vais toujours vers le devenir, Moinous always self-reflects bilingually...
The fourth conclusion is a conclusion within a conclusion that concludes that Moinous is moving towards an uncertain and precarious becoming, or as Sam once put it, he moves forward in order to fail better...
The fifth conclusion is self-evident, it reveals once and for all that Moinous is violently and incurably self-contradictory, but in the end, as old Sam would certainly emphasize, since everything Moinous says cancels out, he says nothing...
The sixth conclusion admits openly that Moinous’s entire oeuvre was forged out of a confused and chaotic love life, Moinous makes a mental list...
love given
love denied
love received
love in absentia
love interrupted
love found again
love misdirected
love never found
love lost temporarily
Moinous smiles as he contemplates his mental list lovingly...
In the seventh conclusion Moinous pauses and wonders if he is prophetic in his work, he shakes his head inside his head, and smiles joyfully at this preposterous thought, and how he has just imagined his head inside his head smiling the smile that smiles at the smile, Moinous digresses back into his next conclusion...
In the eighth conclusion Moinous thinks that to others he must look very bughouse, as Sam once described William Butler Yeats...
The ninth conclusion brings Moinous to admit that his position in matters of social behavior is rather unstable, ambivalent, and often unpleasant and irritable, but in political matters, Moinous is unchangeable and constant, he remains a leftist...
The tenth conclusion digresses to the fact that Moinous was born left-handed, but became right-handed out of necessity at a young and fragile age because of a fractured left wrist causing him to betray his natural leftist dexterity, and this might explain his perennial crisis of doubt, Moinous approves with a motion of his head inside his head, no smile...
In the eleventh conclusion Moinous wonders, if to others he appears silly when he tells his stories, Moinous has so many stories to tell, and he loves to tell them, he shrugs his shoulders inside his head, and mumbles, take it or leave it...
In the twelfth conclusion, Moinous says still shrugging his shoulders, silly perhaps, but unlike the rest of the sillies, as he agrees with himself that his silliness is unique...
The thirteenth conclusion is important, within Moinous’s train of thoughts, for it raises the question of whether or not his life coincides with his work, or vice versa, and if they are part of the same pattern, they must be, Moinous concludes, otherwise, he could not go on living and writing...
The fourteenth conclusion firmly states that just as Moinous’s life is a constant-life-in-progress, his work is also a work-in-progress, Moinous looks pensive as he self-reflects this further and wonders if this means that both his life and his work will always remain unfinished...
In the fifteenth conclusion Moinous admits that his life is a violent contradiction, but that is in fact the source of his artistic impulse...
The sixteenth conclusion picks up where the fifteenth conclusion left off, and points out that Moinous’s lack of inner self-assurance and his irreducibly divided nature are the dynamics of his writing...
The seventeenth conclusion brings Moinous to make, in a gentle ironic way, a quick mental list of what obsesses him...of course the list is incomplete...
reincarnation
communication
the dead but not necessarily death
artistic medium but not occult medium
supernatural systems
numerology
coincidence
sexuality
lottery
sports
In the eighteenth conclusion Moinous states that he is more interested in human life than vegetal life, though he makes an exception for trees, Moinous loves trees, and if he were to be reincarnated, which he doubts, he would request to come back as a tree, he doesn’t know what species of tree he would want to be, but if possible he would prefer to come back as a tall majestic tree on top of a hill...
The nineteenth conclusion puzzles Moinous but forces him to admit that his thwarted youth, his virile sexuality, his peculiar sentimental association with the happy few, happy fous, as he loves to say, his erotic adventures have led him to recognize the feminine in him as the source of his creative power...
In the twentieth conclusion Moinous re-affirms his aesthetics, life is made up of stories, therefore his life is the story of his life, Moinous winks to Moinous in his head...
In the twenty-first conclusion Moinous asks himself if he is quarrelsome, ruthless, reckless, disrespectful, egocentric, brutal, elitist, then he asks if he is gentle, kind, generous, attentive, caring, interested, polite, he concludes that he is well balanced...
The twenty-second conclusion raises the question of whether or not Moinous has a tendency to be too verbose, too garrulous, and if his verbosity and garrulousness are screens for his linguistic insecurity and deficiency...
In the twenty-third conclusion, Moinous congratulates himself for having been able to escape in his writing the cacademic abuse of indeeding, moreovereing, as-it-wereing, thusing, thereforeing, foregrounding, etctering, he also congratulates himself for having managed not to use cumbersome words like redolent, bespeak, purport, adumbrate, insofar as, and others he cannot remember now...
The twenty-fourth conclusion brings a happy glitter to his eyes as he considers how he has managed to avoid in his work the kind of journalistic sentences one encounters too often in bad writing, to illustrate Moinous rereads mentally a sentence in a piece of writing he encountered recently, Yet it is wide of the mark in failing to grasp the tragic import of an excoriating vision of irrevocable action as unelectable destiny, Moinous shakes his head in disgust...
The twenty-fifth conclusion brings Moinous to aks if his muse has finally spoken to him, or if it is too late, Moinous bangs his fist on the armrest of the seat in which he is seated to do his self-reflecting, and shouts, in his head of course, no, it is not too late, the muse will speak to me...
The twenty-sixth conclusion is of major importance because it concerns the never ending struggle of the writer, in this case Moinous, to understand from whence the sordid images come that threaten to master him...
In the second part of this conclusion, Moinous stubbornly considers ways to ensure that these images keep coming, têtu comme une mule, his mother used to say about him...
The twenty-seventh conclusion brings Moinous to wonder if there is a link between sex and the magic of writing, Moinous does not pursue this thought much further, for he knows that episodes of sexual energy and confusion in his life have always been closely paralleled by periods of magical explosions in his work...
The twenty-eighth conclusion is briefly stated, irrational humor...
In the twenty-ninth conclusion Moinous asks himself if he should come down off his stilts more often...
The thirtieth conclusion consists of another list in which Moinous wonders if he is...
a compulsive masturbator
a displaced person
a true orphan
un gourmand
un con
a genius
an acrobat
a deranged person
a demented person
a crooked person
a nice person
a fool
Moinous pauses, and then another makes list in which he asks if he is...
paranoid
lecherous
shy
crazy
happy
envious
salacious
depressive
unbearable
In a third list, Moinous loves lists, he wonders if he fears...
impotence
speechlessness
pain
loneliness
death
obesity
rats & snakes
Moinous asks in the thirty-first conclusion if he would be willing to make a fool of himself to be recognized...he hesitates...decides that it is not for him to decide...
The thirty-first conclusion is enormous in its implication, Am I as I Am, Moinous asks, because my mother forced me to stop loving myself too soon, and as he asks himself this rather intricate question, Moinous, for some unexplainable reason, recalls this line from William Butler Yeats, a shudder in the loin engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower...
The thirty-second conclusion was reached with some apprehension, Moinous questions if his life has been spent vainly in constructing a drama of opposites, anti-selves, masks, metaphors, he who abhors metaphors, Moinous concludes, no, that would be too banal, too much of a simplification, too self-evident...
The thirty-third conclusion has Moinous worrying about his bones, where will his bones find their final resting place, if they are buried, he wants the skeleton to be buried upright, and if his bones are reduced to ashes, he wants the ashes to be placed in a very tall thin container planted in the ground, Moinous wants to be vertical in death, Moinous bursts into mental laughter...
In the thirty-fourth conclusion Moinous explains that the past is what one should not have been, the present is what one ought not be, the future is where artists live...
In the thirty-fifth conclusion Moinous decides that he is a conglomeration of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of clothing patched together as is the human soul...
Moinous’s final conclusion takes the form of a poetic statement, as he remains stranded between two non-realities...
there in the tomb
the dark will grow darker
and when the wind will come up
from the great void and roar
it will make my old bones rattle
Moinous gets up from his thinking chair and goes directly to his desk to write his conclusions...
While writing the conclusions he has reached in the process of exploring his inner himself, he stops a moment to reflect further, not about his bones, but about his words...
Will my words still shake after I have changed tense, will they continue to rattle into history without me, or will there be a sigh of relief from the potentials as they whisper, Moinous, you should not have been, you should have left the dead alone?
The first conclusion he reaches, among a number of others, during this moment of self-invasion, if one can permit oneself a little rhetorical contortion, is that even though he may be a good writer, time will tell, as Sam used to say, he is an impossible person, impossible in the literal sense of the word, impossible to understand, just as he finds it impossible to understand himself...
The second conclusion, an easy one to reach, is that Moinous invented himself, in truth, Moinous says, still in the state of self-invasion, there is no Moinous, Moinous invents himself and cancels himself on the spot of each situation in which he finds himself, he adapts to the circumstances of the moment, positively or negatively doesn’t matter since it comes out the same in the end, Sam would surely say, and Moinous must adapt, otherwise he would not be Moinous...
The third conclusion declares that Moinous conducts his life as a heroic self-construction, though it may appear to others as a pathetic self-deconstruction, Moinous expresses this notion by saying in his head, je vais toujours vers le devenir, Moinous always self-reflects bilingually...
The fourth conclusion is a conclusion within a conclusion that concludes that Moinous is moving towards an uncertain and precarious becoming, or as Sam once put it, he moves forward in order to fail better...
The fifth conclusion is self-evident, it reveals once and for all that Moinous is violently and incurably self-contradictory, but in the end, as old Sam would certainly emphasize, since everything Moinous says cancels out, he says nothing...
The sixth conclusion admits openly that Moinous’s entire oeuvre was forged out of a confused and chaotic love life, Moinous makes a mental list...
love given
love denied
love received
love in absentia
love interrupted
love found again
love misdirected
love never found
love lost temporarily
Moinous smiles as he contemplates his mental list lovingly...
In the seventh conclusion Moinous pauses and wonders if he is prophetic in his work, he shakes his head inside his head, and smiles joyfully at this preposterous thought, and how he has just imagined his head inside his head smiling the smile that smiles at the smile, Moinous digresses back into his next conclusion...
In the eighth conclusion Moinous thinks that to others he must look very bughouse, as Sam once described William Butler Yeats...
The ninth conclusion brings Moinous to admit that his position in matters of social behavior is rather unstable, ambivalent, and often unpleasant and irritable, but in political matters, Moinous is unchangeable and constant, he remains a leftist...
The tenth conclusion digresses to the fact that Moinous was born left-handed, but became right-handed out of necessity at a young and fragile age because of a fractured left wrist causing him to betray his natural leftist dexterity, and this might explain his perennial crisis of doubt, Moinous approves with a motion of his head inside his head, no smile...
In the eleventh conclusion Moinous wonders, if to others he appears silly when he tells his stories, Moinous has so many stories to tell, and he loves to tell them, he shrugs his shoulders inside his head, and mumbles, take it or leave it...
In the twelfth conclusion, Moinous says still shrugging his shoulders, silly perhaps, but unlike the rest of the sillies, as he agrees with himself that his silliness is unique...
The thirteenth conclusion is important, within Moinous’s train of thoughts, for it raises the question of whether or not his life coincides with his work, or vice versa, and if they are part of the same pattern, they must be, Moinous concludes, otherwise, he could not go on living and writing...
The fourteenth conclusion firmly states that just as Moinous’s life is a constant-life-in-progress, his work is also a work-in-progress, Moinous looks pensive as he self-reflects this further and wonders if this means that both his life and his work will always remain unfinished...
In the fifteenth conclusion Moinous admits that his life is a violent contradiction, but that is in fact the source of his artistic impulse...
The sixteenth conclusion picks up where the fifteenth conclusion left off, and points out that Moinous’s lack of inner self-assurance and his irreducibly divided nature are the dynamics of his writing...
The seventeenth conclusion brings Moinous to make, in a gentle ironic way, a quick mental list of what obsesses him...of course the list is incomplete...
reincarnation
communication
the dead but not necessarily death
artistic medium but not occult medium
supernatural systems
numerology
coincidence
sexuality
lottery
sports
In the eighteenth conclusion Moinous states that he is more interested in human life than vegetal life, though he makes an exception for trees, Moinous loves trees, and if he were to be reincarnated, which he doubts, he would request to come back as a tree, he doesn’t know what species of tree he would want to be, but if possible he would prefer to come back as a tall majestic tree on top of a hill...
The nineteenth conclusion puzzles Moinous but forces him to admit that his thwarted youth, his virile sexuality, his peculiar sentimental association with the happy few, happy fous, as he loves to say, his erotic adventures have led him to recognize the feminine in him as the source of his creative power...
In the twentieth conclusion Moinous re-affirms his aesthetics, life is made up of stories, therefore his life is the story of his life, Moinous winks to Moinous in his head...
In the twenty-first conclusion Moinous asks himself if he is quarrelsome, ruthless, reckless, disrespectful, egocentric, brutal, elitist, then he asks if he is gentle, kind, generous, attentive, caring, interested, polite, he concludes that he is well balanced...
The twenty-second conclusion raises the question of whether or not Moinous has a tendency to be too verbose, too garrulous, and if his verbosity and garrulousness are screens for his linguistic insecurity and deficiency...
In the twenty-third conclusion, Moinous congratulates himself for having been able to escape in his writing the cacademic abuse of indeeding, moreovereing, as-it-wereing, thusing, thereforeing, foregrounding, etctering, he also congratulates himself for having managed not to use cumbersome words like redolent, bespeak, purport, adumbrate, insofar as, and others he cannot remember now...
The twenty-fourth conclusion brings a happy glitter to his eyes as he considers how he has managed to avoid in his work the kind of journalistic sentences one encounters too often in bad writing, to illustrate Moinous rereads mentally a sentence in a piece of writing he encountered recently, Yet it is wide of the mark in failing to grasp the tragic import of an excoriating vision of irrevocable action as unelectable destiny, Moinous shakes his head in disgust...
The twenty-fifth conclusion brings Moinous to aks if his muse has finally spoken to him, or if it is too late, Moinous bangs his fist on the armrest of the seat in which he is seated to do his self-reflecting, and shouts, in his head of course, no, it is not too late, the muse will speak to me...
The twenty-sixth conclusion is of major importance because it concerns the never ending struggle of the writer, in this case Moinous, to understand from whence the sordid images come that threaten to master him...
In the second part of this conclusion, Moinous stubbornly considers ways to ensure that these images keep coming, têtu comme une mule, his mother used to say about him...
The twenty-seventh conclusion brings Moinous to wonder if there is a link between sex and the magic of writing, Moinous does not pursue this thought much further, for he knows that episodes of sexual energy and confusion in his life have always been closely paralleled by periods of magical explosions in his work...
The twenty-eighth conclusion is briefly stated, irrational humor...
In the twenty-ninth conclusion Moinous asks himself if he should come down off his stilts more often...
The thirtieth conclusion consists of another list in which Moinous wonders if he is...
a compulsive masturbator
a displaced person
a true orphan
un gourmand
un con
a genius
an acrobat
a deranged person
a demented person
a crooked person
a nice person
a fool
Moinous pauses, and then another makes list in which he asks if he is...
paranoid
lecherous
shy
crazy
happy
envious
salacious
depressive
unbearable
In a third list, Moinous loves lists, he wonders if he fears...
impotence
speechlessness
pain
loneliness
death
obesity
rats & snakes
Moinous asks in the thirty-first conclusion if he would be willing to make a fool of himself to be recognized...he hesitates...decides that it is not for him to decide...
The thirty-first conclusion is enormous in its implication, Am I as I Am, Moinous asks, because my mother forced me to stop loving myself too soon, and as he asks himself this rather intricate question, Moinous, for some unexplainable reason, recalls this line from William Butler Yeats, a shudder in the loin engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower...
The thirty-second conclusion was reached with some apprehension, Moinous questions if his life has been spent vainly in constructing a drama of opposites, anti-selves, masks, metaphors, he who abhors metaphors, Moinous concludes, no, that would be too banal, too much of a simplification, too self-evident...
The thirty-third conclusion has Moinous worrying about his bones, where will his bones find their final resting place, if they are buried, he wants the skeleton to be buried upright, and if his bones are reduced to ashes, he wants the ashes to be placed in a very tall thin container planted in the ground, Moinous wants to be vertical in death, Moinous bursts into mental laughter...
In the thirty-fourth conclusion Moinous explains that the past is what one should not have been, the present is what one ought not be, the future is where artists live...
In the thirty-fifth conclusion Moinous decides that he is a conglomeration of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of clothing patched together as is the human soul...
Moinous’s final conclusion takes the form of a poetic statement, as he remains stranded between two non-realities...
there in the tomb
the dark will grow darker
and when the wind will come up
from the great void and roar
it will make my old bones rattle
Moinous gets up from his thinking chair and goes directly to his desk to write his conclusions...
While writing the conclusions he has reached in the process of exploring his inner himself, he stops a moment to reflect further, not about his bones, but about his words...
Will my words still shake after I have changed tense, will they continue to rattle into history without me, or will there be a sigh of relief from the potentials as they whisper, Moinous, you should not have been, you should have left the dead alone?
