Norman Rush - Mating

He said that there was actually one writing project that if carried out successfully would be enough to justify anyone’s life. That would be a convincing essay against violence, against participating in official violence, ever. He had the noumenal form of the essay. It would be brief, it would be secular. The text would be printed on India paper in thirty languages. It would make a book about the size of a deck of cards. There could be a foundation to distribute it to everyone, on the order of the Gideon Bibles, internationally though. Of course the problem was that the essay itself would have to be a thing of genius, of compression, of inspiration. It would be like asking oneself to sit down and write not only a poem but a great poem. It would have to be like Thoreau on civil disobedience or Hume on causality. The fact was, he said, that this essay already existed in him, in his mind and feelings, but that was the problem: it was a conviction about violence, against violence, that overwhelmed any text he had ever tried to confine it in. The text was always pallid and weak compared to what he knew and felt, which was the proof that he lacked the genius to externalize himself on this issue. With this text you could cut the roots of war, of armies, and so on. Telling me this he got slightly flushed.

I was having trouble being sure how completely serious he was, especially when he seemed to remember that there was one other project that would justify his life however everything else he had done to date got ultimately judged. This would be to do something about flight capital, secret accounts, to do something conclusive to make the banksters stop helping the Wabenzi, the kleptocracy, by making bank secrecy illegal everywhere. I didn’t know who the Wabenzi were: it was what the Kenyans called the African civil servants who drive Mercedes-Benzes. If you wanted to accelerate African development by some unimaginable multiple, bank secrecy reform was what a serious person would put his best effort toward. Of course that would involve lobbying, going through the UN, setting up an organization, and he had sworn an oath to himself that he was never going to sit in an office again in his life. So that apparently was that. How seriously in all this I was being taken was not my question at that time.

It ended nowhere. In retrospect I regret being so passive. But I wanted to hear everything. I think I tried to be more probing about the bank secrecy idea — it had some feeling of reality and possibility about it — but I was deflected by his asking from nowhere if I didn’t think it was interesting that there was no term equivalent to cuckold to apply to women when they were being betrayed. Was it because the condition was so far from exceptional that no particular term was needed? He knew of no language in which that was not the case.

I love your mind, I said.

A Shift in the Scenery

It seemed we could ride up and over everything, not excluding the to me rather bold maiden decisions of the new mother committee to postpone the plenary and admit men to full membership in Sekopololo. Men could work for credits now instead of only for pula, which was an economic advantage to them, but they were still ineligible to run for any office or serve on committees. And there was no question of any change in the system of female-only inheritance of chattels and homesteads. I tried to tease Nelson by comparing men in Tsau to Jews in the Middle Ages or Indians in Fiji, with respect to land ownership. I was being polemical, and I was quick to add that I appreciated that the difference was that men in Botswana, on past performance, deserved it, unlike the Jews or Indians, obviously. He wouldn’t be drawn. The mother committee was shifting the scenery around quite a bit, I thought, but he was remaining serene.

Except that he did want to talk, however calmly, about the postponement of the plenary. His point was that there had to be a plenary. It was the custom to have at least one a year. He said more than once We have to assume they’re going to change their minds. Everybody had liked plenaries in the past. It was important to collect the whole social body together periodically. Batswana loved kgotla meetings, so they should love the plenary, which it was just like. He felt strongly enough about this that he had gone to the length of socially letting fall expressions of disappointment that the plenary was being postponed, obviously with the expectation that they would be passed along.

Letting his opinion be known around the plaza a few more times seemed to be enough for him. He stopped bringing up the plenary altogether, which was what I wanted.

So naturally I brought it up again myself. I had something to say that I thought might put the whole question to rest in a profounder way.

I think I put it confusedly.

I said: One thing about yourself that I think you don’t appreciate is the complexity of why people tend to accept things you lay out for them as good ideas. Don’t get mad, but in a way your lifework could be described as getting people to do things you regard as improvements, better for them. You have great powers of getting people to do things the way you want. Only partly is that because the things you come up with are sensible in themselves. The rest of it has to do with something benign about you, unusually so. You seem good. You seem unselfish. Even people who are really at loggerheads with you see it, although it may drive them even crazier against you when they do. Also you look counter to what you are, since you look more like an unemployed wrestler than anything else, which incidentally adds to your power. What you are operates cross-culturally, for some unknown reason. I may be trying to say that possibly the plenary is less important in a structural way than you think, and that it should sink or swim but you should hold back from using your powers to try to get it reinstated. What I want to feel is that you’ve divorced yourself from it.

This is as I reconstruct it. By the end of it I was confused about what, really, I was trying to say, other than quite obviously declaring appreciation tantamount to the most abject love.

His reaction to this was to say Light from the caves! This was a standby he used to greet solecisms or cant.

I was overwhelmed with the desire to apologize, which I suppressed.

An Impassioned Lecturette on the Enclosure Movement

When Nelson said in so many words that he loved me, I should have felt it more as the major benchmark it was, the thing long sought, than I did. We were living as though he had already said it, for one thing. And for another it seemed to me that something about his almost always appending a phrase like heart and soul or root and branch to his declaration made it more literary and less real. Something fell off a shelf in the middle of the night and when I said What was that? he said The scales falling from my eyes. I love you.

He started talking about movies with me, gamely but lamely, because he was worried he’d insulted the cinéphile in me by earlier saying things like Only a fool could think an art form is significant where your emotional response to it is signaled to you by mood music. He made good-faith efforts to think of movies he’d seen but forgotten he’d liked, like Dead of Night and Fame Is the Spur, neither of which I’d seen at the time, unfortunately. He was going to get better movies for Tsau, not just the kung fu films that were so popular: I should think about what classics I might like him to try to get. I remember saying to him Explain to me how I can love someone who has never seen a movie he liked enough to see twice? This had even been a point of pride with him, and it derived from his huge antipathy to repetition of experience in general, to which he attributed his recoil from the prospect of university teaching. I had tried lately to get a little deeper into that famous aversion of his.