The Latest Scar in Time
“The speaking subject gives herself away.”
— attributed to Julia Kristeva by Gordon Lish
“When you’re not saying anything, no one can hurt you.”
— John Cassavetes
I’ve cited the above quotations in pieces several times, but I didn’t come to feel their stipplings and imbrications until the second winter of the pandemic. As New York’s cases swelled, it began to feel that someone pushed a scenery set — a few-hundred-foot-high cone-shaped hill — up my street and deposited it in front of the house, obscuring the world. And then, going to the back windows, I found another already there: gray, ribbed, mottled, uninviting; our new life. Yes — it was happening again — the winter living with the virus had hemmed us in to a debilitating extent.
So what if the speaking subject gives herself away, as long as there is something to broadcast and give — however enfeebled it might be? This complaint began to dominant my thinking in the frosty January days. A neighbor had chosen that sacred silent time, the coldest historically, to build a new backyard fence, an act more in accordance with warmer hours. These and other blatant actions of cross-purposes were becoming more frequent in all districts and I wasn’t about to sidle up to a friend at a bar and jokingly, but with bitter seriousness, foist my bilious complaint on welcoming ears — an invitation to expose me during pillowtalk. Since college days, I had been living my life in such a spread-eagle cycle — endure darkness and complain to friends only if it qualified as a very bad transgression — but I’d grown more ornery in New York, fearlessly yelling at strangers, ready to fight for everything because there were so many who unknowingly endeavored to make my life a little hellish. I kept less inside, which demanded a different price. But, in the last years and first of fatherhood, I pulled up stakes, in a fashion, and retreated to the chair, to the syncopated space of our small domicile filled with books, toys, and food — and somehow filtered through the pandemic.
This real life experience of a Lynchian slow-motion shot that turns into a jump cut scare (disjunction — it seems slow, but suddenly you’ve been bitten) has changed what relics of pop culture inveigle to stay alive in me — a social media personality that skews toward celebration over reproach and my speaking self suffers, well on its path to extinction. There are phone calls, but they are few, almost indecorous in the mutual extrication of silence. But even before the pandemic the culture was headed this way — one could almost think AI pushed such a calamity in a devious HAL-9000-style so we would become nearly wholly dependent on devices. But I know what touch does, I’ve been to self-growth workshops in the Oregon woods — it is its own strong potion. It’s how earlier societies lived and thrived, it was their basis. We should be so lucky to touch. Zoom and its ilk are better than nothing, but our voices aren’t functioning in the same space, there is a displacement where the physical sound and smell of being isn’t even given shape, weight, timbre. My wife is over-swamped with work and multiple cell phones and hundreds of text conversations that begin on a Monday in December but stall, only to fructify on a Saturday in late January, before being nullified until the day after St. Valentine’s. So I settled on my own island as a war rages, as families are rent, and more people lose their minds, stocking ammunition and signing up for cults, while persons very close to me begin to die with regularity.
In deference to John Cassavetes, who aimed his words at the leading actress (Jenny Runacre) of Husbands in 1969, I would have to contend that when you’re not saying anything, it’s true that no one can hurt you, but a threshold might be close to getting crossed. In any case, when I couldn’t find my own words or when the speaking voice failed, I tucked in and tucked under amongst the cloistered worlds of poetry and fiction — here were my waters. In the alarming light of end times, the absence of speech silently reverberated in my body, while I cracked many a spine open, leaving open books all over the house like many miniatures of future skate parks. They were all around: Deleuze, Dara, Carson, Hardwick, Handke, Walcott, Stevens, Montale, Frost, Strand, and, of course, Rilke. But this was a specific hauntology. I sought them to buoy me and they pulled me down, deep into a dry maze located underwater. It wasn’t one work amongst them, but specific sentences or pages or sections — the coloring of one moment that orchestrated some unthinking emotion in me. A lifetime of loneliness had been buttressed by these authors. Of course, the past wasn’t even past, it had graduated in power by mixing with the odious present so I experienced both as a bitter confluence, blasting me with waves of grief. And I hid my crying eyes from my wife and my daughter, I kept the chokes silent, because I was remembering things no one wants to remember in the midst of so much sickness and death. Perhaps bookish people have good reason to seclude themselves — reading in the same space as people trying to be happy, by displaying movement and laughter, seems an invasion by both parties.
The winter rushed on and the pain redoubled. I had just finished a novel — or did a novel finish with me? The breathlessness had ended — there was no daily project (disturbance), except those mountains made of molehills surrounding the house. How to circumvent them? As Basil Bunting wrote of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos: “there they are … There they are, you will have to go a long way round / if you want to avoid them. / It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps, / fools!” Yet I was already going the long way around — there was still half of Proust to go through, 1500 pages, but it wasn’t the right time. My consciousness remained shuttered, my scurf constantly radiating and shedding — was this the beginning of an episode I would never forget? I tried to keep composed, but I’d become a holy terror. No one wanted to be around me — not that I asked for inclusion; as one takes to Twitter, one trades in some credentials required for the public sphere.
Certain tyrannies arise in the winter — I want snow and cold; bitter, battering cold to pound The City into submission, so I don’t have to hear the cars, trucks, horns, air traffic, or any adult-grade foolishness, and I can retain a certain spectre in my dark, third floor Beckettian den, keeping the purple black-out curtains splayed against too much solar succor. Give me bruise-colored skies from December to just before March, February 28th or 29th say, often the earliest ending of winter for The City during the 21st Century. Keep away O, colossal sun, at least until I get my fix of an exterior to match my interior — the brutality of a Midwest winter is a dove in my belly — an overwhelming event that joins everyone else living around me into the same landscape.
Such hugger-mugger threatens my achieved maturity. Live in the moment! some counsel might shout. I will, but I want the moment fractaled — and to witness the coils leading to it as well as the invisible ones streaming out of it, and across hours and decades. I ache for something of the mustiness of the 17th Century to overlay lands filled with devices and faces silently smiling with something more riven, but maybe something only the art of that Baroque period evokes.
Because I had just finished a novel, I could finally look at the one I’d avoided — Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. The great dour Rainer Maria — a writer who kept coming up in other contexts, including Michael Hofmann’s lectures on poetry in Messing About in Boats and Rilke’s rare maritime poem, as well as a susurrus around reading The Duino Elegies again, spurred by a new translation. But William Gass’ introduction to Malte struck first, with a sentence summing up my at-long-last understanding of writing:
“One probably cannot say it too often: writing is, among other things, an activity which discovers its object; which surprises itself with the meanings it runs into, and passes sometimes with apologies, or recognizes with a start like an old friend encountered in a strange place.”
And, seemingly, this is the antithesis of so many writers I have little respect for. The sentence, though, continued to slide and sidle around while I attempted to barricade my horned parts growing more owlish. “Friend,” that fire-engine red word hurled around so ungraciously today, lit up — my greatest fear was meeting an old friend in a strange place, say, an airport, if I even entered one again. If they were an old friend, then of course some frisson would have occurred; we had changed, or had gotten tired of some aspect, or we were both parents, but that would be very rare — of the men I grew up with more have gotten vasectomies than have had children. Outside of my family, I was barely in touch with anyone who knew me in my twenties or thirties, forget high school — I wouldn’t be surprised if half of them were now Republicans and maybe half of that half in a cult. In other words, no one (from a very different region of my life) could unbiasedly gauge my past speaking self against what now existed — if this new non-speaking self even had a heart or the least locomotion.
The pandemic had, after the first breathless year, given me what I wanted: a taste of death, the makings of a small quarry of hardship and pain to fit something elemental into my art — not the hackneyed quotidian that roused the wrong kind of reader. But now the second reverse-scalding winter opened up incrementally — windows were frosted, sicknesses accrued, positives prohibited any comfortable get-togethers. My non-speaking self wanted the past or a deformed version of who I’d become.
In order to dissect that reading and reflective subject, I’d need to go back, whether to Beckett or Orson Welles or to anyone else in order to bleach what stained my present life. I was a living, breathing person — though for two years, outside of my small family, this had been questionable. I felt more like an old, scuffed and dented chest, continually amassing “art experiences” as though I had no room to store them — and I sighed excitedly, happy to rely on psychical objects as metaphors rather than the computational or the digital.
In rare quiet hours, I considered what was happening to be the reputed “crack-up.” Maybe not one littered with the impress of an ambulance and escort, more a wild event where the plane of my reality broke away into separate panes of vision in a helter-skelter Saul Bass-title sequence fashion. This is the experience Rilke captures in Malte when he sees a woman leave her face in her two hands after she sits up from bending over: “It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.”
May I clarify more of the “crack-up”? The non-speaking self draped itself with a different garter and gown, of the reading and reflective self — a near impossible person to share with others in mixed company, something that at public questionings of artists always comes apart like wet newspaper since the public sphere-self most dominates. I had crossed over to a strange zone, but one I yearned for. Ricardo Piglia formats it better than anything:
“The value of reading does not depend on the book in itself but on the emotions associated with the act of reading … What is fixed in memory is not the content of memory but rather its form. I am not interested in what can obscure the image, I am interested only in the visual intensity that persists in time like a scar.”
This had been inserted in my brain for more than a year and a resident backhoe operator up there had already dumped dozens of shovelfuls of experience atop it, so the metabolism had begun a complex system of rooting, full of false flights and reorientations. I wanted to explore the new layer of sedimentary rock that had come down in those last two infamous years and dissect the pain that came with the scar.
Without being fully conscious of what I was doing in going back to certain people like Stevens, Schutt, Hardwick, Bishop, and Rilke, I did so in order to take a circuitous view of my past, fighting against the tide of the present. What was the emotion when first reading Stevens seriously in 2010, an innocent round-number of a year redolent with decaying hope politically and personally as my transitional existence came to debase my ego? Stevens had written later in life: “What I want more than anything else in music, painting and poetry, in life and in belief is the thrill that I experienced once in all the things that no longer thrill me at all.” But I first read Stevens when my life fluctuated between impulse and chaotic consequences, and I naturally gravitated to the ping-pong poems in Harmonium. Yet, the true emotional scar, even of that time, had been caused by those sphinx-like incomparably pentameter-laden poems often of tercets or couplets found in the later books. They spoke of experiences and emotions that I had no inkling of, yet desired. Now they fit better, a pair of tailored trousers, since I was older than the Stevens who wrote the Harmonium poems, largely when he was in his thirties. Revising the scar would create more of the dilation I needed to see outside my prison.
Literature and film would give me vestiges of former times — or at least the times surrounding experience of them before, as an uncanny olfactory efflorescence of one’s grandparent’s house. So I set my sight on Stevens, at least to snuggle next to something familiar, some art I could imagine was carried into the world while T.S. Eliot had not yet completed the Four Quartets, even before Ingmar Bergman blossomed. “Crude Foyer,” written in the early 1940s, is rarely discussed in Stevens appreciation groups, but it made a dent in my dough.
Thought is false happiness; the idea
That merely by thinking one can,
Or may, penetrate, not may,
But can, that one is sure to be able —
That there lies at the end of thought
A foyer of the spirit in a landscape
Of the mind, in which we sit
And wear humanity’s bleak crown;
In which we read the critique of paradise
And say it is the work
Of a comedian, this critique;
In which we sit and breathe
An innocence of an absolute,
False happiness, since we know that we use
Only the eye as faculty, that the mind
Is the eye, and that this landscape of the mind
Is a landscape only of the eye; and that
We are ignorant men incapable
Of the least, minor, vital metaphor, content,
At last, there, when it turns out to be here.
I read the poem on certain days of that nervy winter, renewably considering “Thought is false happiness” many times, since it’s the key construct, repeated in a replenishing instance while modifying “an innocence of an absolute.” Stevens had always been concerned with states or zones leading to the mind’s limits. “The palm at the end of the mind” is one such area but here it’s “the end of thought” — a type of nirvana. Can we reach that “foyer”? And that word glitters, because a “foyer” (a word hardly in use today due to both the paucity of architecture and language) is a vestibule, a passage, hall, or room between an outer door and the interior of a building, it is what we have to go through (think of the meat-grinder in Tarkovsky’s Stalker) to get to the promised room (the Zone). If we get there, the speaker says, we get to wear the “bleak crown” and read “the critique of paradise.” Would the “least, minor, vital metaphor” save us, as Stevens’s speaker contends? Yes, but only from being “content” “there, when it turns out to be here”; and this line nicely opens into cinematic visuals — David Lynch’s Black Lodge in Twin Peaks: the doppelgänger and the real Cooper both looking backward or forward — but also the sadness or perplexity of holding a type of nirvana and not knowing it and being barely conscious of the fact, until some strobe light awakens the ego to want to record it and to be seen as if one had reached it: an impossible selfie. On the day I first read this poem, I had tears in my eyes by the final line because I seemed to understand the import of that sign-off too well, since at a certain age one can key into the wholesome thought that what one has long been fighting has been a chimera, and we misused our metaphors in an effort to sate the proud fury that has little place near nirvana.
I kept toggling between reading experiences. One ordinary Saturday morning the scar in time showed itself plainly — and showed there was plenty of room still in my depressed chest, with room that allowed for something extra. I read the end of Heidegger’s essay “The Way to Thinking” — a paragraph beginning “When we name a thing, we furnish it with a name. But what about this furnishing?” leading to “We represent the relation between name and thing as the coordination of two objects. The coordination in turn is by way of an object, which we can see and conceive and deal with and describe according to its various possibilities.” Portentous words it turned out, since just after that sentence I had a flash memory of a brunch/breakfast place in Buffalo, located at the end of a v-shaped concrete island nestled between two streets — the image being as if I was outside in front, looking at the innocuous structure. I hadn’t thought of this place since the last time I ate there, about fourteen years ago. What called for its reappearance? I have no idea, but I know this is why I read. Little else except art and conversation can conjure something like this — yet the experience of art, its parabolic and paradoxical structure, saves the space for the configurations to be witnessed externally, like a viewer walking into a room in an art museum, and no matter how much she thinks that what goes on in the room is all about the art, well, isn’t it all about her, the viewer? I followed Heidegger’s sentences and they led me to a city I loathe, to the cusp of an establishment that never did much, except it housed my soul with another as we spoke, ate, and schemed for love over the course of ten or twelve meals. But no adjudicating here — all image, yet the image contains the history. Not the book itself, but the emotions conjured in the act of reading — time-travel. More doors, more possibilities, foyers. Of course reading can’t make one a better person, but certainly more fuller, doubling and trebling our life experiences with ease until one day we rappel down a mountain of austere, uncultivated prose and somehow decide, yes that happened in my life, when it was only the book. Maurice Blanchot has his own parable at odds with this:
“Reading makes of the book what the sea and the wind make of objects fashioned by men: a smoother stone, a fragment fallen from the sky without a past, without a future, the sight of which silences questions.”
I felt temporarily satisfied but not content. This experience happens several times a day, both the scars in time and the discontentedness. The hunt for human blood in Buffalo beneath the scar was tripped up by the lingering illusoriness that stayed with me through Steven’s foyer — and the touch of Blanchot’s strafing object-centered inquiries — smiting the ego down from the purview of the 1950s. By then I was saying even less in daily life, leaving out more Thank you’s and descriptions of food recently cooked for my consumption to my wife’s unsurprised chagrin. But how could I say something when everything is coming apart? The screams were loud in their silence — I have good pillows.
Maybe I’d like to amend Cassavetes’ saying to: When you’re not speaking, everything can hurt you more slowly because it passes through a foyer first, not necessarily crude and not ever obstinately optimistic. Reading is my own way of thinking, as I assume it is for others as well. In the above example, Buffalo is the place name over the image — the name and object, that sets off a minor detonation in my life situation, leading me to say: That once was my life, I couldn’t see around it, and now, on the surface, being older, I can. This led me to something not so perplex: I’m happy in minor graduations, though the world is incredibly more awful — and the “least, minor, vital metaphor”? I may have come upon it more in being a father, in traducing the equivocal single-person state that would have doomed me, that would have repeatedly tempted me into shallow waters where I would flounder and die out — and with that I reel back and gladly offer my speaking self to be immolated on shore, as I remain in the depths that are the wrong metaphor for me, but they’ll do, even as the pressure of reality continues to build. And what if that “least, vital metaphor” is not “contendness”? When does the metaphor take on its own essence and how do we follow or lead? But I probably won’t know if I did remain in the depths or on the sideline for many years, if at all. I know enough to divulge these secrets and that this letter to the world will help more than it hurts.
Kristeva might gag, but there is power in speaking and not speaking. My writing this is my speaking — my giving away, trying to display that innermost self that Proust implies comes out only from the work, from the writing. But why try? By writing it is already there — in the quality of the syntax, the quality of the metaphors that I must keep grasping (Stevens: “form gulping after formlessness”). Art, Blanchot says, is man’s presence to himself, and he further adds: “… why, at the moment when through the force of the times art disappears, does it appear for the first time as a search in which something essential is at stake …” This is the magic, the beauty, and, to some, the religion of art. The striations in memory aren’t only internal scars or a presence of oneself, they are forces other people, though few, see aside from the slope of our faces, the blue tear in the cloudy sky, or the snarky social media profile indenturing us to a counterfeit existence. Meet me on the hill of the page and I’ll show you everything in a handful of dirt.