#vidal

Day 152: Alan as Vidal - Thérèse Raquin (1980).

Can I request the Kiss Meme with Ira and Vidal …in secrecy or …in danger? (Feel free to ignore this ask if you'd prefer not to!)

Thank you! I'm sorry this took so long - I had to give it a second crack, but this version has gone a lot better.

Imagine this is set some three years after the last fragment, which was about their first meeting in Paris (where Ira is 18 and Vidal is 19) - now they're in England, and Ira is 21, and Vidal 22-23. They've had a few years of long-distance and other complications between then and now, and Vidal is travelling playing chess again.

Also you get to see Vidal's terrible English.

IN DANGER...

“The regnant minority is genuinely terrified of a new constitutional convention. They are happier with the way things are, with half the electorate permanently turned off and the other half mildly diverted by presidential elections in which, despite a semblance of activity, there is no serious choice. For the last two centuries the debate has been going on as to whether or not the people can be trusted to govern themselves. Like most debates, this one has been so formulated that significant alternative ideas are excluded at the start. "There are nations," said Herzen, "but not states." He saw the nation-state as, essentially, an evil—and so it has proved most of the time in most places during this epoch (now ending) of nation-states which can be said to have started, in its current irritable megalomaniacal form, with Bismarck in Germany and Lincoln in the United States.

“With some pride, the Inventor-owners of the United States announced that their republic would be "a government of laws and not of men." The world applauded. It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man. The republic was then given to lawyers to govern. Predictably, lawyers make laws, giving work to other lawyers. As a result of two centuries of law-making every aspect of an American's life has either been prescribed for or proscribed by Laws that even as they are promulgated split amoeba-like to create more laws. The end to this Malthusian nightmare of law metastasized is nowhere in sight.

(…)

One rationale for the necessity of new laws is the need to protect that vague entity known to lawyers as the public, to corporations as the consumer. Yet each virtuous law promptly creates counterlaws designed to serve those special interests that do not have at heart the public's interest. As a result virtually any polluter of rivers, corrupter of politicians, hustler of snake-oil who can afford expensive legal counsel is able to sail with the greatest of ease through the legislative chambers and courtrooms of the republic. This is the way that we are now, and that is the way we have always been. Nevertheless, from time to time, the system of ownership requires a sacrificial victim to show that the system truly works and that no one is above the law—except those who are.

What sustains a system that is plainly unjust if not illegal? The Lance affair suggests an answer. One third of the American population claim to be twice-born Christians. Although redemption is big on the evangelical Christian circuit, punishment of sinners is even bigger. To the fundamentalist Christian mind, evil is everywhere and every day is a lovely day, as John Latouche's lyric goes, for an auto-da-fé. According to hard-core white fundamentalists, Jews are forever guilty of the murder of our Lord. As children of Ham, blacks are eternally inferior to whites. The Pauline injunction that slaves obey their masters still applies in the sense that those without money must serve those with money, for money is the most tangible sign of God's specific love. Sexual activity outside marriage must be punished by law in the here-and-now as well as by God in eternity. The unremitting rage of the fundamentalist Christian against so many varieties of sin is the source of innumerable laws that have bred, in turn, other laws of the sort that now enmesh Bert Lance, the Georgia Laocoön.

I lied, I actually am going to write these.

This is a sketch of what is actually the climax of this story, as I currently see it, taking place at the Danse Macabre, a 'fancy ball' (masquerade) being held by a bunch of nasty students and rich kids who have broken into the Paris Catacombs for the night. Ira is invited, and he drags along Vidal, who by this point is basically just a ball of unrequited desire and migraines, and very little else.

I took the liberty of setting this out in my ~special formatting~ so it's an image, sorry (and sorry for those with screen-readers - reach out to me and I can furnish you with a copy, but it's 2.47 am right now). This is something I am trying to do to express when characters are speaking German, versus other languages. You'll see.

Little cw for like. real skeletons. and a not really totally consensual kiss.