I Understand Meursault

I understand Meursault now. At first I didn't. In the beginning, when I was an undergrad, I struggled with distinguishing btwn. pour soi and en soi, such difficult terms to understand despite their terseness. Spicer would call them examples of the Lowghost, ghosts of words with a former body. Meursault shoots and kills an Arab on the beach under the brutal, beating rays of the sun. A random act seemingly. I tell my son to stop using the word random because he really doesn't know its meaning. In his adolescent conception of things random is something that happens, not by coincidence, he doesn't believe in things happening by coincidence, but it is "just random," as if it is not enough to say random and enough not to explain what it means. I am taking a walk, a random sentence inserted into this discourse, but I have just come back from an early evening walk in the nearby date palm plantation and I intend my rambling sentences to be "a loose salley of the mind," as Dr. Johnson defined an essay. I tried to explain to my son that random is such an encompassing concept that there is no qualification for it--here I approach the curve before the penultimate leg of my walk--just or merely, in fact, not doing justice to this concept which can only be described with 'omni-' perhaps, a prefix attached to it, or "total randomness" would be a qualification to do justice to its true meaning, and so with my qualification I am just as at fault as my son in trying to qualify a word that is belittled by any qualification.

Meursault, a French Algerian (pied noir), became an Arab by killing an Arab. He got into the skin of an Arab, a being that he loathed. [...] My wife told me the other day, but being with her here, up until recently, has been an every day sort of affair or trial, especially when she was still working,--she said she had begun to hate people, and that these people at work had changed her into a person who loathes others, that she was not like this ever before. How does one love your enemy she asked, those people, who at work, in the lab, form a kind of neighborhood which she entered every morning at 8 o'clock and left around 4:30? For almost six years, and largely most of the time during those six years, she hated a certain number of people in the lab, her neighbors. How does one love your neighbors when they are your enemy? I told her to turn the other cheek, as Christ taught. (Can one love and hate them at the same time?)

Burroughs in his lucid, surreal sci-fi stories depicting worlds ruled by death,--that to get in the skin (I was going to write 'under') of another body is merely a matter of ejaculation. So, in hatred, we ejaculate our bad words and thoughts at others. My wife, who is Asian, was conditioned as a child to put on what I would call, being a glib American, a front--this quite simply leads to her vituperation directed at anyone in the environs within the confines of our large flat, which, as is the custom here, is made all the more private by walls outside of walls, until she gets under her own skin, and so can't stand herself, though she would simply rather die than go on, back to work the next day.

The olfactory bubble is the phrase used by the socio-linguist Hall to describe the Arab's cultural practice of not keeping one's distance as Americans want to do when in face-to-face intercourse. This tendency Arabs have is as notable as their penchant for staring [I really mean Indians]--[it was put once as "the lust of the gaze," in a non-sexual sense, or as I would call it, the optical equivalent of Whitman's loafing]--, which is a practice Americans do not like, using such expressions as, when stared at by a stranger, "take a picture, it lasts longer," meaning to indicate that a stare fixes one into a space or pins one like a species of butterfly to a paper for closer inspection, it is just plum impolite. I admit many of my memories reside in olfactory bubbles, for example, the woman, and being part Cherokee might attribute her to a down-to-earth-ness, I knew at university, who lived with another woman in an old house near campus that wreaked of the most pungent of odors, cat. The urine in certain spots of the carpet had rotted away the jute fibers in the backing and it was particularly pungent in the winter when the windows were tight shut despite the drafts from under the doors, a house similar to certain native American abodes in California that Angulo observed but without a smoke hole to relieve the draft of air from circulating around the house, making it a very large olfactory bubble. She admitted to me later, after she had moved from this cat's pismire, that she had not realized the state of the house because she must have been depressed, and she thanked me for my unflattering comment about the smell of cats that she had finally been jolted out of her depression. A bubble bursts, I suppose, after a certain amount of pressure from the outside. Living in the desert one would be particularly welcome to smells, as they don't linger, unless they are borne by aerosol spray, T.E. Lawrence's bedouin smelling, after sniffing the ethereal air, and finding traces of different layers of perfume wafted to his nostrils. Certain organisms cannot survive without water, so there are certain ones that cannot exist, where they would otherwise in a moister climate, and so it is healthier living here despite the dirt and dust. I remember the same woman, especially her breath after a shwarma sandwich [...]. I gag often at the cheap perfumes worn here. [...]

"Completion is the perishing of immediacy: 'It never really is'."--Sherburne, Key to Whitehead's PR, p. 70

"[...] the total nexus that is the tree is temporally thick [...]--it consists of generation after generation of actual occasions succeeding one another" (p. 78, ibid.)