Aaron McCollough

I ENDURE

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Neighbor-love and Daniil Kharms’ “The Old Woman” (more notes towards an unquiet metaphysics)

Posted on April 18, 2008 - Filed Under , | Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking about the idea of “the neighbor” for a long time. I was raised in the Methodist Church in Tennessee by parents with fairly eccentric views on religion (at least for the bible belt), and my reception of Christian doctrine and dogma was always pretty bipolar. On the one hand, I was attracted to the basic ethical message I found in scripture, and I was also invigorated by the feeling of community I found among my peers at Church (as opposed to the typical “freaks and geeks” dynamics of high school). On the other hand, I was often infuriated by the social conservatism of my more fundamentalist peers, and I could never square the exclusivity of the creed (particularly the Nicene’s “one baptism”) with the offer of Love, the insistence on Love, the command to love that made the religion revolutionary…the part that felt like Truth to me. There were many, predictable, heated arguments about Gandhi and hell, etc. I remember being fairly obsessed with Matthew 25:45 “whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me.” I’m not sure why this one of all the injunctions to love the neighbor (and enemy) really struck me. But it did. It really pinned me down in the way Kierkegaard describes the “as oneself” in the commandment of Matthew 23:39 pinning one down: “it penetrates into the innermost hiding place where a person loves himself; it does not leave self-love the slightest little excuse, the least little way of escape … this as yourself—indeed, no wrestler can wrap himself around the one he wrestles as this commandment wraps itself around self-love.”

Kierkegaard’s Christian ethics pivot on the effort to eradicate narcissistic self-love and replace it with neighbor-love. This isn’t about some sort of masochism. It is about identifying the “good life” in a universal, objective duty-bind with others. That has always appealed to me (irrespective of my own selfish tendencies). Identifying with this trend of thought has not come out of moral drills and sermons. It has surfaced in me as a kind of primal recognition: every time I think about Matthew 25:45 it surfaces. Often, when I am thinking about typical daily happenings, it surfaces. Infuriatingly, feeling (much less doing) what one ought, is difficult to the point of impossibility. The Judeo-Christian tradition knows this, and that is why it obsessively returns to the subject of the neighbor. Psychoanalysis and Political Theology have been similarly obsessed. Hannah Arendt’s description of the neighbor is particularly compelling in its emphasis on claustrophobic closeness. It seems virtually irrelevant to me that she is speaking of relationships under totalitarianism. I have no experience of such totalitarian relationships, but the following gloss from Kenneth Reinhard makes it sound pretty much identical to federal-democratic loneliness:

totalitarian loneliness is not simply a function of the disappearance of traditional social relationships of neighboring, but results from the overwhelming presence of this neighbor, who is neither fully interiorized nor exteriorized, but whose unbearable closeness makes the self ‘equivocal,’ interchangeable rather than singular, and thus threatens its ability to speak to others within a symbolic order.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud understands the pressure of the neighbor as an irritant, so far from lovable that it is rather an irresistible temptation to cruelty. Our neighbor, according to him, is “not only a potential helper or sex object, but also someone who tempts [us] to satisfy [our] aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity to work without compensation … to torture and to kill him” (66-69). That strikes me as rather overheated, to say the least, but the basic perversity of it is not utterly misguided. It helps me read Daniil Kharms, whose work I’ve been spending some time with over the last week. Kharms, of course, was a citizen of a totalitarian regime (Stalinism). A good, extensive selected edition of his work (Today I Wrote Nothing) has recently been released by The Overlook Press, edited and (for the most part) translated by Matvei Yankelevich. The entire volume is interesting, and Matvei’s introduction is a warm, useful one. He repeatedly stresses that it is a mistake to read Kharms as an “absurdist,” and I find that an interesting protest. Absurdism doesn’t do much for me. A friend once described it as “what’s going on inside the mind … of no one.” I think that captures absurdism at its most uninteresting, and it crops up all over the place in American poetry as nursed by Bly, Simic, Strand, Wright, Hugo, Tate, and the rest of the 70s-Quiet-Surreal. That inheritance is a blessing and a curse, and it makes me approach a book like Today I Wrote Nothing (another entry into the Another Republic sweepstakes) with some apprehension. And some of that apprehension ends up being well-deserved. Many of Kharms’ micro-fictions do feel like what is going on inside the mind of no one. However, “The Old Woman,” one of Kharms’ best-known pieces, is incredible and basically redeems everything around it (not that there aren’t also other pieces that redeem themselves). It is weird, disconcerting, and magical, but it is also something that has gravity. It is no joke and has none of the kind of irony that ends up colluding with power in order to get its bitter laugh. The story is brutally alienating, sublimely alienating, and its alienation effects depend on the problem of neighbor-love.

In his introduction, Matvei implies that the subject of the “miracle worker who worked no miracles” is the story’s heart (the story is hatched out of writers’ block), but I don’t think so. The old woman referred to in the story’s title is what’s interesting. She just shows up at the speaker’s apartment, barges in, and dies. Her ontological status is a little murky (she has a watch with no hands, for example; she appears while the speaker is napping and dies while the speaker is sleeping; and she seems to be a bit undead at certain moments). Her ethical status is a little murky, too, but it is that murkiness that gives the story urgency and weight. The speaker’s two primary reactions to the old woman are 1) sleepiness and 2) fury (when he discovers that she has died in his apartment, he kicks her in the jaw). As the speaker then muddles through the rest of his day, his disparate, mildly absurd non-adventures are made coherent by a recurring concern over what to do with the body and annoyance at being imposed upon in such a manner.

The speaker is oppressed by neighbor-love. He would like to be an autonomous agent, even if that autonomy is expressed only in personal clumsiness or decisions not to act (the speaker’s story really begins when he realizes he has forgotten to turn off the stove, and he returns home then only opting to take a nap). The old woman appears at his door seemingly out of the blue, but really, we can say she appears to call him back to the fact that even his petty marks of individuation are knotted up with relations to and responsibilities for others. Her dying and then being violated by the speaker only reinforce this fact, and they would seem either to give the lie to or to solidify (I’m not quite sure which) Kierkegaard’s conclusion that the ideal neighbor is a dead neighbor. Since the old woman seems to shift back and forth between being dead and sort of undead, maybe she does both. In any case, the speaker tries to shirk his responsibility by putting the old woman in a suitcase and getting on a train with plans of dumping her in the woods somewhere. Curiously, he feels physically ill on the train ride, leaves the suitcase unattended, and returns to find it stolen. This amplifies his concerns about being blamed for her death but also extends those worries into infinity (because he can never really know what the thief will do when he finds out what he has stolen). The worry and frustration, over which the speaker had initially had an illusory sense of control and which drove his narrative, thus becomes apotheosized into an almost mystical problem. The speaker can do nothing now but anticipate punishment, and so the story ends abruptly. He gets off he train, heads for some bushes to hide in, and prays. There are three lines of ellipses and then: “At this point, I temporarily end my manuscript in the belief that it has drawn on long enough.” Again, agency is indicated here (“I temporarily end my manuscript”), but it is a kind of empty agency. If this is a story about the problem of neighbor-love, there is no more story to tell. The speaker has lost his neighbor (albeit his dead neighbor), and in doing so, he has lost a future for himself.

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