THE YOUNG BRAHMANIANS. Gavin Keeney

Sometime, somehow, along the way, and always-already en route somewhere else, they had all become Brahmanians. It was unclear when they had taken this nominally sharp left turn, but it was clear that it originated within the short windowless Time when the enigmatic gesture of the Real-Real took root; a small seed planted in the soul, then, unfurling its delicate radical and turning, in turn, toward the moist earth of critical and poetical reflection, the soil of that collective state of things reflected in the specular, Pascalian wager regarding discours naturel, a nothing much spinning down through the centuries as a mysterious and incomplete Carte de Tendre, consulted here, and consulted there, but most often set aside again for reasons having more to do with the love of abstraction than anything resembling simple facts on the ground.

It was, then, le génie français’ fault. And yet all those who came afterwards (after the slow-motion avalanche of spiraling, delicate, velvet words inscribed in Time Itself by Time Itself) were somehow complicit — that is to say, those poor souls obsessed with the two infinities and the sublime Je ne sais quoi suspended in the elective, echoing void of the imagination were somehow collectively responsible (if that was even possible) for the splendid fixation that developed around the conceptual sign of Hypsos (the Sublime), for the repercussions of having answered its call, and for sketching in delicate arabesques all that it held within the slippery confines of its paratactical contours — the shape of things to come, after all, or things that come and things that call.

This call fell lightly, as a feather floats toward the earth from the nest of the sky, or the rain drifts (is drawn), at dawn, toward the tree-swathed slopes of green hills, not surprisingly because its time had finally arrived, and — marvelous as it may sound — because its call was, after a very long silence, answered, as if Rousseau’s plaintive cry in Emile had finally found a ‘home’. This ‘home’, echoing down the centuries, yet all but forgotten, was also a ‘home’ without doors or windows, a place that architecture rarely touched, a house that had to be burned down twice before it appeared. It seemed in some way to the Brahmanians that somehow Deleuze had spied it hiding in the curves and twists of his own eccentric and cranky rhetoric, perhaps having come once or twice there, while reading or merely looking at other things, perhaps entering in his own manner that second storey within his Leibnizian story, with Hölderlin, then, walled off from the world to see the world anew, walls plastered with maps, dreaming.

The Brahmanians dreamed the same dream that Thoreau dreamed (at Concord), that Emily Dickinson dreamed (in Amherst), and Joseph Cornell dreamed (on Utopia Parkway) — the dream of the world. This dream, always wrapped within the down of its own absent-mindedness, its very own Time (a time marked within the pages of Novalis, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Borges, Calvino, Kundera), was, then, a recurring dream. Within it, the Brahmanians found themselves walking up a stair, turning left, pausing momentarily (and in some cases repeatedly walking up the same stair and turning left to pause, again and again, as if stuck in a Robbe-Grillet novel) seeing before them an empty room, a spectral café, with the night-sky as ceiling and the walls fashioned out of thin air. Pausing, they would all think the same thought, one after another, the same idea sprung up from the same non-place. Here, somehow, they recognized, was the Real-Real (the Irreal) — and in pausing they were, in fact, checking and stamping their own passports before entering the room in which mere thin air and the vault of the heavens lived and breathed; a room that was a passage to /S/ome-where Else. (06/29/04)