Promises are for Liars

Part 1.5, given that the last post was on promises as well. Part 2 is coming, though I might not post it here. We’ll see.

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PROMISES ARE FOR LIARS
Because, you know,
Either you’re going
To do it or
You’re not.
Slight as light
Reflected from the stream
Onto the wavering
Willow leaves,
Eternal love
Doesn’t need
Eternity, see?
A cyclone of sand-
Hill cranes
Rises from the corn
Slathering the
Ephemeral work.
Let’s don’t worry.
Let’s don’t ask.
Our institutions
Are standing by.
But I keep thinking
How easy it is
To get lost in the sky
With nothing holy
To defend.

—James Galvin, “Promises Are for Liars” from X Poems. Copyright © 2003 by James Galvin. Reprinted without the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townshend, WA 98368-0271, coppercanyonpress.org, though I’d be perfectly willing to get it if anybody cared.

I was in class, I was listening to all the talk about a story I hadn’t read, and someone offered a story about their grandfather: how after grandma died he had a friend, and for 15 years he knew her, how he and this friend he knew would be with the grandkids at dinner, how after 15 years they would walk to their car and he’d still say: I will take her home, and then I will go home—For marriage is sacred.

But (so the story went) in never remarrying they gained something. Each time, they would see each other because they wanted to. I suppose this grandfather must have learned a lesson about eternity that most of us are just guessing at—after the first time, that is.

And this reminds me of another story, one told by Nietzsche: the human species was cruel to itself, delighted in cruelty, began exchanging cruelty (“let the forfeit/be nominated for an equal pound/of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken/in what part of your body pleaseth me.”)—substitution between flesh and thing, commodity fetishism (Derrida: a deferred substitution). All this pain became a mnemonic. The human species could—at last—remember. The human species could remember what they commanded, could enforce it, could obey, could expect to be obeyed, could patiently stretch the cord of a bow and arrow pointing to the future, could make promises.

Promises: so much blood, but what an exalted outcome! With a meaning so different from where it started! But as our story goes, with promises there comes an awful regularity: to will the future one must be able to predict it. To be made predictable: this has made us sick. All this subordination to the will of the community—we need anesthetic, we need sleep. Asceticism develops, turns against everything. It catches hold of our memory, of our promises, snatches them away from us, disembodies them, creates Truth. Truth: that to which we must give our bodies, promises risen so far above promising that the latter seems like puffs of smoke escaping from a carpet, ephemeral signals in a stream of wind promised on behalf of everything.

There’s the second story. Here’s a third, this time from Marx: labor enters its objects; each object needs a certain amount. We work over our objects until they are sold, and when they are sold, we are forgotten. The object holds what we cannot grasp: the power of our labor, abstracted, become value. But this value only becomes capital when it takes itself for the truth, when it demands its own logic of motion: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. The dead, the wills of the past, control the living—not even as some particularized will, but as the supreme abstraction of will itself, unmoored, abstracted, killed, floating above us as the God which gives all things Value.

What is a promise but a dead will, a will abstracted, looking over our shoulders with judgement? Shall I love as a vampire loves, desperately seeking life, only to devour what comes, finding no satisfaction? Or should I become short-sighted and impatient, forgetful and ornery, bathing in the present while the water upstream becomes a trickle, leaving for fuller rivers when there are rainclouds above? A thousand years of fighting, planting, and growing lay at the feet of this question. —And let’s be clear that the answer has nothing to do with moderation; nothing could be more absurd than a moderate promise.

There is making a promise, and there is keeping it. There is making your desires historical, and there is making them ahistorical. There is pointing a finger towards the future, and there is tracing an embalmed finger from the past. Each stands opposed to the other. Give one up? Perhaps promises are for liars.