Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

With Ali’s help, I’ve created two websites. They respectively set out the standard terms and conditions on which I sign off qua Family Officer or GEA Trustee. I have to say that writing those provisions was trickier than I’d anticipated. For example, it turns out that creating a website creates issues particular to the creation of a website. I had no option except to begin with a disclaimer about the website itself:

No warranty or representation of any kind, implied, expressed, or statutory, including but not limited to warranties of non-infringement of third party rights, title, or freedom from computer virus or any other harmful or destructive electronic or Internetian agent, is given or made by the Trustee [or Family Officer] with respect to the contents of this website. The Trustee [etc.] does not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained on this website or for any loss or damage of whatever nature (direct, indirect, consequential, or other) whether arising in contract, tort, or otherwise, which may result or follow from your use of (or inability to use) this website, or from your use of (or failure to use) the information on this site. No legal or other kind of advice is given on this website. The legal and other kinds of information on this website are ‘as is’. You must not rely on the information on this website as an alternative to seeking and receiving legal advice from your attorney or other professional legal services provider.

That was the easy part — the preliminaries. I cannot exaggerate how testing I found it to draft the main matter, i.e., to state efficaciously that which I wanted to say. The problems I encountered — conceptual, verbal, juristic — were horribly comparable, in their stubborn, enigmatic vitality, to those poison-resistant super-rats that, we are told, threaten to defeat every hostility of modern science precisely because they, the super-rats, have been strengthened by scientific hostilities. I’m suggesting that every attempt I made to eliminate a textual vagueness or errancy or inadequacy of sense resulted only in the making of more, less eliminable problems of sense. It was as if the very project of making sense was being mocked; as if the words I typed on the word processor’s white page, words of black letters, were not the symbols for which I’d mistaken them; as if, that is, each word, with its little lucifer of denotation, was in fact consubstantial with the darkness of uncommunication against which it supposedly was a counteractor; that is, the significance of a word lay not in its letter-by-letter symbolism but in its literal presence on the page, a presence that, though obvious, was a secret; that is, a word was exactly and covertly what it appeared to be, a letters-shaped blackness, which is to say, a kind of verbatim detail of the immovable, possibly entropic, and in any case finally annihilating, residual super-reality of blackness; so that every mark I made by pressing a key of my keyboard had a consequence opposite to the one I’d intended, namely, a decrease in the totality of light brought into the world and an increase in the totality of gloom. Or so it began to seem to me, after several months of futile refinements and do-overs, and a million miscarried meanings. I became so confused — so lost in a fantastic vigilance of ambiguity, obscurity and import — that one morning I sprang out of bed with a madman’s idea of a breakthrough: I had been trying to kill, or cage, the rats of complexity. Wrong! Let the revolting fuckers multiply! Let them run wild! Let them turn on whoever dared to approach! And who were these approachers, anyway? The transactions I signed off on, to which my disclaimers applied, were between professional bargainers and strong-armers doing everything to maximize their own advantage. There were no vulnerable parties here — no minors, no uninformed consumers, no persons acting under duress or undue influence, no judicially recognized or protected weaklings. Nobody here was being forced or duped into doing anything he/she didn’t or wouldn’t want to do. Nobody was going into this thing with her/his eyes not open. In a weekend-long lingual-legal rage, I composed a heartless, fearless, terrifying work of negation that burdened every person save myself with every conceivable responsibility and loss and risk, that in every instance unfairly and unlimitedly and gratuitously and disproportionately favoured me at the expense of the world and, most repellently of all, that withheld the basic hospitality of writing: my disclaimer, as completed, was a graphic monstrosity, a cruelly rambling, almost agrammatical near-balderdash of baffling dependent clauses and ultra-boring, ultra-technical phraseology that enveloped the reader in a dingy, alien, almost unbreatheable word-atmosphere offering barely a vent of punctuation, indentation, or line-breakage. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! At the same time, I was mental-mailing. Eddie — Remember when you told me (I paraphrase) that, by accepting the position of Family Officer, I was accepting the termination of a camaraderie that went back to our time on Lansdowne Road? You said something about hardball. So be it, my sometime amigo. Think of this as a brushback pitch . At three in the morning, I went to bed. I was still brainstorming, however. It struck me with great power that romantic human dealings also might profit from the availability of standard terms and conditions — from articles of association, one might less forbiddingly say — spelling out the footing of A’s entry into B’s intimate company and the precepts A would wish to apply to the conduct of such intimacy. Why not? Were we not always being told that good communication is the be-all and end-all of successful emotional transactions? Ideally, B would have articles of association of her/his own: A and B could openly discuss, from the outset, the question of how to proceed jointly, and come to an agreement — or disagreement — that would save them a bunch of he said-she saids and who knows how much else of the havoc caused and powered by human misunderstanding or claims thereto. To those who would ask, Gee, do we really need to have a heavy-duty convention before we get to date someone? I would answer, (a) Take it from me, it beats the alternative; and (b) It could be made fun, in a screwball comedy kind of way. To repeat: why not? Users of dating sites freely expressed requirements about a prospective partner’s intentions, not to mention stipulations about hobbies, height, ethnicity, smoking, looks, sexuality, etc. My idea was to go farther — go beyond the superficial pre-sorting of matchmaking, go beyond, especially, the (unspoken) mutual oaths on which (quasi-)marriages were founded and the apparatus of coercion by which the oaths were guaranteed. What this ‘beyond’ might involve, specifically, was for another day. I was tired as a workman. I went to bed.

Just as I was about to drop off, I had one last moonstricken rush of insight — that human articles of association, in their nobility like the great constitutional documents of the Age of Enlightenment, should promulgate a mission of human attachment surpassing of reciprocity. I could not understand this, my own thought, except in this respect: as I fell asleep, it seemed to me that I’d spied, like stout Cortez, a beautiful and unexplored ocean.

I woke up in daylight a few hours later. I looked again at my draft disclaimer. Filled with incredulous disgust, I deleted it. As for the ‘articles of association’: where had that folly come from? What was the matter with me?

Still, it was a constructive episode. In my post-delusional clarity, I found myself able to quickly produce the text that now appears on my websites. The text makes plain in straightforward terms that I’m signing papers as a mechanical agent; that my signature should for all substantive (as opposed to formal) purposes be treated as that of my principal (i.e., the relevant Batros(es)); that although I might be aware in very broad terms of the nature of the documents, I have no personal knowledge of their contents or any authority or expertise applicable to the contents; that I have accepted my mechanical agency on the basis of appropriate assurances received from my principal as to the lawfulness, efficacy, and adequacy of the papers I sign and the actions or outcomes connected to them; and that my principal, not I, bears all and any relevant responsibility and liability.