The Dakar Days of August

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I ended up in Dakar.

I supposed, to look at things from the lighter side, it was actually rather amusing that I was completely out of money except for the price of a hamburger, stuck in an African whorehouse with nothing to do but drink Nescafe and hope the hours would pass faster. I mean -- forbid that I should end up with money and freedom! Or a clean pair of underwear! That would be totally out of character.

I'm looking at the sun -- to the sun now, for inspiration, but there is nothing. I watch it slip yellow rose and cerise behind a vaguely peach opacity some finger's breadth above the horizon. Stormclouds in the distance, invulnerable to parallax. With the sun barred behind them, the foggy mist of their downpour is frozen in a back-lit glow. I am in paradise now. The Gambians call it Kartong. A place of rolling surf and palm-wine and African lizards bedecked in reds and golds, and bungalows, and mosquito nettings and cool breezes. Herds of cattle wander the beaches and the children follow me shouting "Tubab! Tubab!" if I venture into town for a cold JulBrew. My skin is finally tinged gently scarletine and the sores on my arms are healing under the invigorating sun. Tonight perhaps I shall dine on fish in coconut sauce with Guinness Foreign Extra Stout.

But tomorrow -- tomorrow I go back to Dakar. Back to the fumes and the grime and the sweat and the roaches, and the hustlers. The spilled oil on rotten fruit, and dodging bellicose taxis on pockmarked market roads. I love that place. It is urban Africa where the world's light reflects off it.

The brothel I was staying in had a formidable population of cockroaches, but the bed was (predictably) large and I had running water. Ah, running water. Forget that the shower is a water hose hung by rusty clamps to the decaying plaster of a mildewed square meter. Just turn the faucet and it gushes freely. Ebbulient, cleansing.

So I stopped my sink and washed my clothes, which had grown thick and heavy with dust. The water ran brown, sluicing off the linen in a soapy grit. I hung them on a line strung through my window, eliciting hoots from the coffee vendors and security guard across the street. They all found it outrageously amusing that I had no wife to do this for me.

The whores mostly ignored me at first. But by the second night they began to greet me with surreptitious whisperings. In the darkness of the street, around a corner, beside the stairway. I never understand their French.

My visa was solicited, obtained. I passed into The Gambia. I could not write.

The narrative imposes structure and, with it, order. Order implies meaning. So to confer narrative is to impart significance. That is, one can not form events to a narrative without also defining the meaning of those events. This is a fundamental property of language, not a side effect of careless authorship.

This is why it is so dangerous to write autobiographical in a manner which sacrifices interpretation for plot, action, and colorful characters. Why I prefer to describe only my surroundings -- allow my words to create landscape -- and leave the rest to subjective interpretability and psychological possibility.

I thereby save my travels from the demon of objective coherency.

A friend of mine -- Mike, whom I originally met in Spain -- wrote me an email after my "La Fiesta de San Fermin; El Encierro" blog, and he complimented me rather graciously. He said -- and forgive me for paraphrasing, Mike -- that this blog was essentially better than most of my others, because on the one hand it was more engaging to read since it was less formalized (stilted), and on the other because through that narrative something of my everyday personality (ostensibly my "voice") came through.

It struck me that the same reasons he cited for liking it were precisely why I hated it.

Which is not to see that I could not see it from the preferential perspective. What he wrote me was why I wrote the entry -- consciously -- as I did. But now, as he and I looked on its finished form, we saw different things. And I wrote my next entry (on the Western Sahara) riding on fumes but I was unable to proffer more. I stagnated.

It is impossible to realize the extent to which I associate my writing with my self. From the personal perspective, this association translates into the following: insofar as it is writ does it accrete as internal reality. Before so it is disjoint, incoherent. But I should clarify. The writing is not a simple tool of ordenation, but the realization itself. I say before it si written -- linguified -- it is nothing; it is not even absence, for lack presupposes presence. It is man without God. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1:1. This, then, is my prerogative and my power. To be sovereign of my self, I enter into a mutually identificatory conjunct with the literalization of my understanding.

Why this should be so for my public self, however, is something more cumbersome. The paradoxage (that is my nominal suffix-abstracting conflation of "paradox" and "baggage") which Mike brings to the table -- as did, to a less predicated extent 'Armchair Traveler,' for those of you following along -- is this: if this new type of reader-oriented composition reveals that which is my "voice," should it not more accurately portray that which is my (public) self, and as such be more legitimate? Why, then, does my mind shun it?

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The necessary is to draw a distinction between one's social component and one's public self. The former arises within interaction, but is not itself a manifestation of being. There is an entity associated with this phenomenon, but it is the image of a self produced by one external, gleaned from the information which is exchanged. But this is outwardly, subjectively and subject-variationally imposed, and I will not confound it with self in this forum. Which is not to marginalize the entity. If one characterizes the self as the complete set of information associated with a physiospiritual being, this arises naturally as a constituent.

But the somewhat more restrictive criterion here is that the information be possessed by that selfsame being; for in such a way is he -- am I -- sovereign over such. It is hardly a leap to recognize that that information is precisely the public record of my compositions. Seen another way, this is all which history will license.

So what is implied in my voice's coming through is the appearance of that eminently recognizable gleaned product of social interaction. But to conflate that image with self is to risk spiritual homicide; to depart into a realm of social definition which dissolves hope of self-affirmation. A state of impotence and meaninglessness. The problem would be inextant were my writing not autobiographical. But as it is so, the sacrifice I make in succumbing to that demon's claws and esteeming good storytelling over subjective babble is a fundamental fictionalization of self. Fiction, which is the sworn enemy of reality. Thus, we discover the crux. An intrinsic fear of fiction. Or, assuming a simple port of the private drive into the public realm, I can say that I simply refuse to allow that written portrayal -- that composition which confers meaning to that public self -- to be mapped into that deadening, soulripping confinement of narrative readability. That I make this choice consciously.

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