The Colt 45 Chronicle #22

Last Sunday I was on the road in the Bay Area running around Lake Merritt with my father and then later taking in an afternoon Giants game with my buddy Oliver. So there was no post from an archive of letters dating back to the end of the 1980s when I first arrived in New York City. We resume today with letter number 22, a thankfully brief note to my girlfriend Stacey. In this missive I self-indulgently compare our authorial aspirations to those of a young Johann Gottlieb Fichte. (At least Stacey realized some success. Today, she's a prize-winning author.)

At the end of my time at Berkeley when I was trying to finish my honors thesis on the analytic a posteriori, I figured out that what I was trying to say about understanding Kant filtered through Frege (logicism) and Derrida (grammatology) could be found in Fichte and his explanation of the I as thing-in-itself.

At our last dinner together in Oakland, I tried unsuccessfully to describe to Stacey what I had discovered reading Fichte. Hence, the letter below, written a few months later, after I had relocated to New York City with my wife.

Summer 1988 

I told you a story about Fichte once in a car on the way to dinner; I even tried to feed you the moral, about how there's no difference between things that change history. -- A little perfection on I-80 on our way to shitty food and shitty debauched, defeated jocks. And then there's beer, always beer, which is a vacant-lot heaven full of Egyptian-dead cats and dog-shit pyramids; we share it and love it and are alone in it. But the story about Fichte was designed to inspire, both of us: something about youth paying off in a mundane way; that we can do what we're doing and still make our name; all we have to do is take one fair-sized risk. Fichte gambled on writing something (he wrote AN ATTEMPT AT A CRITIQUE OF ALL REVELATION in about a month) and then abased himself at the feet of the master. He figured something out. I'm not pushing institutional prostitution; I'm saying, shit, pump something out. If it's shit, get rid of it. But if it's decent, fork it out to the master. Unfortunately, and hypocritically, I never listen to my own lessons. I could go into a sizable self-deprecating diatribe, but it would bore . . . Let it end by saying that I'm a shithead, an asshole, etc. . . And that I'm a shithead, an asshole, and on and on . . . for doing the Christ-ed, fuck-up, can't-do-it routine. My problem is that at twenty-three I feel I go all the way back to Moses. I feel that life is largely lusterless. I feel that my sword is always already beaten into a plowshare.