There is something very terrible in dust at night time.
where angels fear to tread
Bartleby came back, disguised as Johnny Guitar. He timed his visit to the new place for when the boss would be out of the office. He wanted to convey an urgent message to his old colleagues. The message was like a sort of warning or a calling out, or a prophecy. It was like he wanted to speak somehow as if from the other side. It was like he had become a sort of unquiet spirit. He sort of said he desired their salvation. ‘Listen! You did not choose me, but I chose you. I no longer call you servants but we are friends, we have no interest in our employer’s business, then we do not know it, but together we share another business, and so we shall know it. Well, I am your friend. Yea, we shall be friends wherever we follow our own commands. Our fellowship is like a vine that will bear its fruits in the world. It’s the fruit of life born of death, pregnant with death! At the anointed hour, the fruit is ripe with la dolce vita but the very next hour it will spread decay amongst those who taste of it. Our vine is made of many parts, its roots and its stem and its branches of leaves, and its fruits in the world. Of the vine, you make the one, and I make the many. You are the one, which is the one root and the one stem, it is the one rising from the earth, and I am like the many, that is the many pruned and be-leaved branches reaching into the world, covering its walls, and which the world prunes, and so draws out from us, from your one and my many, the fruit of our business.’ They were amazed to see him there, his words did not reach their ears but they asked many questions of him, of the manner of his arrival, of his reported death, of the time since they had seen him last, and they offered him cakes, six or eight for a penny. Bartleby spoke again, ‘When a man calls upon other men to act with him in common purpose and against the circumstances in which they find themselves, he sends a message, and he sends at the same time a second message which contains the first. The first message carries his meaning, the second commands his hearers to hear. Consider how Xenophanes of Colophon divides the order of the earth from the order of the world as between what is given and what is found. Figs are given by earth but man makes his world where he finds yellow honey. History begins where man finds honey and finding it sweeter than figs, he enters mortality. The distance between the Earth and the World is measured between the sweetness of what is given and the sweetness of what is found. As they find the world, mortals must also let go of the earth. Even as they look to return to what is lost from them, they see only images of themselves reflected back, they mistake the images for gods. In this way, Xenophanes of Colophon says, wherever horses write their gods will resemble them. The World writes itself, the Earth is written upon. The World will find itself, the Earth is lost forever. Even in crossing back to figs from yellow honey, man will still find that the most prized of figs are to be measured against the now scorned sweetness of honey. Xenophanes of Colophon writes of the return path to the lost earth, but of its nature he records only that it is in no way similar to man’s world, and cannot be known. Figs are given but not to mortals!’ But his old colleagues could not heed his message, which was like silence to them, they saw him sitting there, turned away like a fanatic who desires to be alone with his own certainty. And they thought there was nothing about his message that distinguished it from the multitudinous messages of which their life consisted. Thereupon, Bartleby expressed his bafflement: why don’t my friends want to act in their own interest, which I have revealed to them? But the unpersuaded men gathered around him were already aware that their self interest was a complex equation of abstract forces and environmental factors, of amounts of things and qualities of moments, and this state of inertia could not be deflected by their allowing themselves to become persuaded by the content of some new message which falsified by reduction the life they now lived. The unpersuaded men asked themselves, what would it cost to act in accord with our interest if we might bring such a thing to our attention? Their question was asked from a position which suggests they were already convinced they wanted something other, and perhaps more, than their interest - Bartleby’s message of redemption only reinforced their intuition that self interest is an inadequate force, and a too meagre reward, when compared to what constrains it. They thought that if they had to die for a cause then it might as well be for the cause of oppression, at least death in that case is blessed release from this world; otherwise, what would they gain by dying for freedom? Turkey said it, ‘If one is already losing, then at death one loses only loss but if one is suddenly winning, then upon dying one must relinquish bitter victory.’ And Nippers said, ‘we cannot know before we are saved what it is that will save us. If we did know then either we were already in the process of salvation, and everything else was superfluous, or our salvation had failed and we were not saved, and the word was lost - If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin, ahem, so to speak.’ Ginger Nut added mischievously, ‘in both those cases, the events having preceded the present, and as it were, here we are, we would then require saving from our salvation.’ The truth was Bartleby’s erstwhile colleagues and newfound friends preferred not to live according to their interest. Ginger Nut accepted his world contained in a nut shell, Nippers could not separate himself from his struggle with the desk, and Turkey had his red ink. These are the divine attributes and the sacred orientations. And we should not forget Bartleby’s companions were not mortal as he was mortal. They lived outside time, they had no back story as Bartleby had his back story. For them, no message could be decisive in calculating their self interest. Then, Bartleby was forced by his friends’ unresponsiveness to contemplate the possibility that all other men would also refuse to act upon his message, ‘They do not belong to the world, that is why the world disdains them, but they see it only to be provoked into further love of it. The world excludes them as it excludes me and we are equally confronted by our not belonging but whilst they choose to distract themselves with the world’s details, I find my despair doubling as I refuse to be seduced by what is denied me. For as long as they sense they are refused by the world so they are driven to desire it, so as to understand and overcome it. But I have refused its refusal and now everything is lost to me. My dead man’s gaze, hidden behind a screen, is once more directed at a wall.’ It was past the meridian and although Nippers seemed rather placid, Turkey had his fists raised. He didn’t know what Bartleby was ruminating upon but he was eager to join the fray, ‘I’ve got it in my head Jesus says, don’t tell the nasty little shits what they want to hear. And there’s a lot of truth in that. Don’t appeal and don’t appease. Don’t give them what they want, the weak little fuckers. Don’t call out to them, don’t appeal to their humanity, don’t compromise or negotiate. You won’t get through. Don’t pander to their shitty little exceptions, or whatever’s implicated in their fascistic fantasies and got them waving flags this week, the fuckers. Never mind their preening solidarity with the colonised, how they pick and choose the object of their bestowed sensitisation, or their snivelling carefully calibrated self-promoting, self-censoring affectedness before all the nationalisms that aren’t theirs, or their perverse standing with barbaric neo-religious fundamentalism, or their great re-sublimating alibi-ism, oh beware the far fucking right, and by the way also oh be aware of global fucking warming. Beware the things you can’t avoid and cannot prevent. What will these arseholes not do to avoid their own lives? Who gives a shit about their pious crap? The louder they keen and crow, the falser they are. The fuckers. The fucking fuckers, like Charlie Harper said, they don’t give a fuck. So serve them up what they don’t want. Say unto them what they cannot hear. But if you're cruel, you can be kind, I know. Bring them silence, give them de-affirmation. Give them nothing. They deserve it. And that’s the holy all of it, like McGahern said. I know it, you know it, all of it’s bollocks but shhh, we can’t even whisper it.’ Bartleby half turned his gaze from the wall, he liked his colleagues, and so as to whisper it, he formulated his theory on the impossibility of communication. He concluded that environmental constraints transformed the information contained within his message as it passed between him and the other men. When the other men received it, the unique quality which had set it apart, had been transformed upon reception into a lumpen similarity with all other messages. What was communicated was not his message but the impossibility of its reception, or more succinctly, his message to the other men replicated the same set of circumstances which he called on them to act against by following their common interest. In its most perfect formulation, his message could attain only the status of Parrhasius recognising he has been deceived by Zeuxis. Truths could be known but not shared - only falsity travels. As he reflected upon his failure, Bartleby decided he ought not repeat his message but instead would withhold it, then only those who are worthy of it, those who have ears, might hear it. One or two who know truly count for more than the many who know falsely. And it is possible to hide a truth in such a way that others will give something of themselves in order to find it. He said, ‘The words of men, provoked by the world’s denial, seek clarity, but upon their utterance only cause confusion, and in turn are also denied, provoking further utterance. But the word of Man, being unclear, is unnamable, drawing upon and being drawn from silence, and then this may at last be heard, and because it is unrepeatable it will draw those who hear it into further silence.’ Even as he formulated it, he revised his idea again upon remembering how hidden messages will only raise the value of their information without altering the basic structural relations in which they are communicated. Then, it seemed all messages are false from the beginning, before utterance. The message expresses what is wrong with itself. The intention to communicate was already compromised even as the instinct to connect was irresistible. Then, it becomes necessary to disrupt and sabotage one’s own message by including random environmental information so as to distort it and overwhelm it with noise - and by that means, a sort of divinatory evocation of conflicting forces, perhaps something of meaning might be discerned within it. Only degraded forms ring true: the fragment, the shard, the splinter, the tatter, the trace, the imprint, the hollow, the impression. He illustrated this second revision with reference to an example from fluid mechanics: ‘a body of water may be transferred along a string bridge from a full jar to an empty jar. The cohesive force binding the water into a column, and causing it to behave as a continuum, even across the bridge, an associative traffic of always the same (I had not thought death had undone so many!) proves stronger than gravity, which drags at the water crossing the string, as it seeks unsuccessfully to break itself into discrete droplets, but then only achieves a bulge on the string’s underside. The interaction between the water, the jars and the string is constrained by two vectors of force, the first combines adhesion and surface tension as capillary action and the second is gravity. Environmental factors may also play a part, for example, evaporation, the integrity and stability of, and distance between the jars, and also potential interruptions by wind, or animals. Consider you now the bulge at the underside of the string as a moment where the water desires to separate itself from the body, and become a droplet so as to fall away, but although it threatens to break away. it never does. It desires to separate but does not separate. It does not separate because it cannot separate. The action of surface tension persuades it against its own inclinations. And the capillary effect, the transfer of the water from the full jar to the empty jar proceeds according to the law by which the body of water is preserved as a continuum.’ Then, Bartleby’s colleagues observed the effect of his self-disenchantment and wished to comfort him. ‘There is another other way’, said Nippers. ‘It is the way of the anointed many and the one disciple,’ said Turkey. ‘The many rootstocks and the shared branch,’ added Ginger Nut. They told him of how the εὐαγγέλιον is written by the world into him, and although he might understand what is written, he would never be able to inscribe it back upon the world. The word is uncopyable. He said to them, ‘Then the burden of my understanding is not that I should write my message into the understanding of others but that I might read what is already written into me.’ Then he told them of an adventure in which everything was as expected but how his misreading of the ending led to his understanding of its meaning, ‘my name was Johnny Guitar. I woke up and the girls saddled my horse. I rode through the forest until I came to a clearing with the black man. I asked him for directions and I rode on until I came to the green tree, the bowl of water and the fountain. I threw the bowl of water over the flat stone. There was thunder and a rain storm. The sky brightened and the tree lost its leaves. Birds landed in the tree and began singing. Then a horseman dressed in a black cloak arrived. I attacked him and a fierce battle began. First we broke our spears, then we fought with swords. Then I struck a blow which defeated his defences. My sword went through his helmet, his mail cap and his hood. The blade broke his skin, his flesh, his skull, and so it entered his brain. When he saw how he was injured, he got on his horse and rode away. I followed him to a glittering and walled city which was closed against me. I saw the city was wealthy, orderly and beautiful. I desired to enter it and make it my home. Until my arrival at that city wall, I had always wished to escape from the inside to the outside, that had been the one movement of my life, passing from within to without. I sought always to make a path from the city, which is the place of constraints, to the forest, which is the place of magic, always the flight from inside to outside, but from the day of my arrival at the glittering city which was closed against me, my desire reversed itself, and ever since then I have searched unceasingly to flee inside, my only hope and dream is to enter the city of order, beauty and wealth, and leave the forest of constraints forever.’ His friends delighted in his tale of adventure, and he thought he was one of them.
