But once here, her charisma could not distract him from the lurking threats of his own instability, of critical misunderstanding, of flawed taste, of his recently arrested ability to reason things out. Without warning the words of a recent review floated in front of his eyes like dust:
“Mr. Shirrey heralds the end of a long, and I mean long, trough in modern literature,” it had said. “His current trend, which I hope is indicative of his future plans, shows a rejection of the steroid-injecting, constant-motion, bloated novels his contemporaries have been vomiting up the past couple decades. In Shirrey’s work and in his distinguished editorial eye I find hope that this next generation of literary writers will not be taking the so-called ‘theme-and-idea network’ route that regularly wakes me up in cold sweat, but rather the higher road toward refined, sympathetic, high-quality, detail-filtered fiction. He understands restraint, and that is crucial to a writer’s growth…Might I say, this man is dangerously good. And he has arrived precisely when we needed him most.”
Monday, November 29, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
LMIV.
Jessi was right: Thad’s eyes searched her hungrily, wanting to interpret every movement as a sign that she was urging, inviting, tempting him closer; simultaneously he held the belief that she did not know he was there at all, and thus she remained, in his mind, an impenetrable, paradoxical siren, calling to him and not caring in the slightest whether he heard.
What a beauty she was, dancing there alone! Thaddeus, inches from her from torso to toe, felt ages away; she seemed alone on the dance floor and in the universe, a dancer who needed only music and herself. And again, simultaneously, he felt impossibly close to her, as if he were the only other person in her world. And it was, indeed, her world.
He saw in her both the woman he knew to be his friend, Harlow’s friend, Jessi Mühr with her fair skin and her dark paintings, her moody ways, her hidden smiles, which she sometimes bestowed on him when she thought no one was looking, though he could not possibly be sure what they meant; and he saw in her a stranger, a woman without a past, present only here, at Baci, for herself and possibly — could it be? — for him. He had seen her dance before; he had danced with her before, but it occurred to him now that her dancing was her art as well as her painting, she was breaking free; if she was not conscious of him there next to her it was because she was exploring the recesses of the universe through the portal of dance, as he had said she could, as he had said anyone could, if they chose. Ah, yes, he saw her spirit had risen past the atmosphere: the free, dovelike spirit of this woman who had so tragically argued against it, who had fought so valiantly and yet so chaotically on the side of emotion. Now she embodied the phenomenon he had described only hours earlier, that act of transcendence that requires both absolute denial and an unconditional acceptance of the self. To him it was a sign of acquiescence, of consent; where earlier she rejected him and logic, she now succumbed, she embraced, she accepted his theory and perhaps — might it be? — him.
As if he had proven his point all over again, he felt swell within him a satisfaction that is alien to the corporal pleasure of dancing, a triumph over ill reason purely intellectual, and he basked in his own success, unable, unwilling to retreat from its glamour. Immensely pleased with his powers of coercion, he immersed himself in the fruit of his philosophy, this beautiful woman dancing in front of him, the very essence, a demonstration, of transcendence, a balm to both his senses and his intellect, his body and his mind. He watched her still, pleased that she was wholeheartedly given to this state of being; she was dancing and alive with a fullness and vitality no emotion could beget, and to think (dare he think it? He dared:) that it was he who had brought her to it, like a wild, dying horse to cold water, cold, bubbling, flowing water: and she drank thirstily, naturally; like a spirit hitherto deprived of its nectar she drank.
For a moment he indulged lucidly in the memory of their discussion, that fateful discussion, his eloquence and fury, I do not wish to block out the sky! ah! To see her so heated, so passionately indisposed to his reasoning, to his offer, yet so endearingly incapable of articulating her frustration, to see her respond with such fervor (such!) was an unprecedented event (yes, he had evoked fervor in her, and something else, yes, of course); it filled him with pride and an insatiable urge to provoke her again, his profundity, her speechlessness, like stirring a flame: would she react? He basked in that lovely, cleansing memory: Is emotion neither good nor bad, indeed? What is emotion at all, then, but misfirings of the brain, so easily swayed by hormones and chaff, mere reflections of the stars, a grotesque, distorted illusion of reality, saboteur of good rhetoric and of fascination with the fantastic? What is this good and bad of which we so cavalierly speak, so sure of ourselves, as if they are but building blocks of our understanding of things, as if we cannot understand a thing not made of them?
But nothing, of course: like weather (he had said, so achingly eloquently), like falling in love, are the passing feelings of anger and melancholy and contentedness and cold and tired. Neutrality is everything; and oh, but everything is neutral; “good” and “bad” only appear in our interpretation of the events, of our feelings, which are so faultily based on our perception, a contorted lens. What a precarious thing on which to build a life — and by thus building, brick by brick, who could hope to reach the stars? No, it is because we categorize things as good and bad, as right and wrong, we seek to contain the universe in our minds, a universe as big as infinity itself, by imposing a constructed dichotomy onto it we try to force it into the minute shell of our brains, the ocean into a snail shell (and let naught few words be said on the beauty, the fragility of a snail shell, its proportions (what numbers again?), delicate because it is brittle, brittle because delicate, not unlike our minds, why, both are perfectly suited for their respective uses, but if one tries to contain the ocean into a shell, or the universe into a mind, but of course it will shatter, lose both its and the ocean's integrity, the beauty gone, and for what? for a misguided, emotion-based hypothesis); what a distorted portrait that gives our minds to think on, and thus our brains to act on! Good, bad, true, false! How silly, an illustrious folly/ like a child, indeed, like one of us. Do we not but draw a line and insist on pushing things sweatily to one side or the other, so that they bear these simple labels of black or white, thereby forbidding things to manifest their true colors? Perhaps because our minds are stubbornly (lazily?) stuck in this wretched chiaroscuro for so long, so much longer than we can remember (Too many metaphors! Too many possibilities: but please to stick with one/). Only allowing things to exist in our own system of classification, dismissing, denying anything that does not fit — how vain! Alas (thought he), how sadly we miss out on the glorious multitudinous creation by boiling everything within it down to one projected, empty characteristic or its opposite and refusing to see it on any other terms but only by the feeling it incites in us. I claim, nay I insist, I proclaim: Nothing, but nothing, is good or bad, neither death nor life nor love nor the sky; these things are simply themselves; without a human mind to impose on it such nonsense, it continues to be as it is — how freeing to allow it to be so! If a tree falls in the forest, does it bear moral implication? Are the other trees sad? But is anything in nature sad, or content, or bothered or stirred, or good or bad?
[High on the momentum of discovery, Thad’s magnificent, preposterous mind continued jubilantly:]
But that is why bad things happen so insistently to good people, causing thinkers and believers and prayers alike to cry out in indignant consternation over the metaphysical possibility of a benevolent god; that is why good things never cease to happen to the worst of people; in this new and galvanizing model of the neutral and endlessly beautiful undistorted universe, that sentence does not make but a capillary of sense! By crossing out the words that bear no meaning, one is left with the sentiment/the statement “things happen to people and things happen to people” (or if one wants to maintain that some people are inherently or deliberately good or bad (questionable at best) then one can even get away with “things happen to good people and things happen to bad people” — it matters not a scratch), which is true, but not worth saying; for those good and bad things which we perceive as blessings and atrocities are only things we feel particularly strongly about one way or the other (from another perspective we perceive (just as surely, surely) not the opposite but something completely different altogther, no? as the sun goes down from our perspective, does the earth not rotate from another's? and are those two events, from their respective perspectives, even remotely related?); we spend copious amounts of energy pushing them to one side of the dividing line we ourselves drew (which was worth saying, but not true: does it take much energy to think of things as good or bad? Is it equivalent to carting rocks, as in that (which?) circle of Hell? Perhaps not, on second thought; it is really quite natural — ah! because we are taught to do so, we are taught to expend our energy so, so it does not seem draining, but if we were taught not to, how impossibly enervating it would be in retrospect), never realizing that if only we erased the line we could spend those untapped energies creating new entities, new ideas, wings (!)—and not by building a stair to the heavens or by shuffling around objects of illusionary weight on the earth can we be free, be light, be lifted out of the confines, the cell of emotion, that pesky, damned, trickster, one-dimensional, jail cell emotion.
What a beauty she was, dancing there alone! Thaddeus, inches from her from torso to toe, felt ages away; she seemed alone on the dance floor and in the universe, a dancer who needed only music and herself. And again, simultaneously, he felt impossibly close to her, as if he were the only other person in her world. And it was, indeed, her world.
He saw in her both the woman he knew to be his friend, Harlow’s friend, Jessi Mühr with her fair skin and her dark paintings, her moody ways, her hidden smiles, which she sometimes bestowed on him when she thought no one was looking, though he could not possibly be sure what they meant; and he saw in her a stranger, a woman without a past, present only here, at Baci, for herself and possibly — could it be? — for him. He had seen her dance before; he had danced with her before, but it occurred to him now that her dancing was her art as well as her painting, she was breaking free; if she was not conscious of him there next to her it was because she was exploring the recesses of the universe through the portal of dance, as he had said she could, as he had said anyone could, if they chose. Ah, yes, he saw her spirit had risen past the atmosphere: the free, dovelike spirit of this woman who had so tragically argued against it, who had fought so valiantly and yet so chaotically on the side of emotion. Now she embodied the phenomenon he had described only hours earlier, that act of transcendence that requires both absolute denial and an unconditional acceptance of the self. To him it was a sign of acquiescence, of consent; where earlier she rejected him and logic, she now succumbed, she embraced, she accepted his theory and perhaps — might it be? — him.
As if he had proven his point all over again, he felt swell within him a satisfaction that is alien to the corporal pleasure of dancing, a triumph over ill reason purely intellectual, and he basked in his own success, unable, unwilling to retreat from its glamour. Immensely pleased with his powers of coercion, he immersed himself in the fruit of his philosophy, this beautiful woman dancing in front of him, the very essence, a demonstration, of transcendence, a balm to both his senses and his intellect, his body and his mind. He watched her still, pleased that she was wholeheartedly given to this state of being; she was dancing and alive with a fullness and vitality no emotion could beget, and to think (dare he think it? He dared:) that it was he who had brought her to it, like a wild, dying horse to cold water, cold, bubbling, flowing water: and she drank thirstily, naturally; like a spirit hitherto deprived of its nectar she drank.
For a moment he indulged lucidly in the memory of their discussion, that fateful discussion, his eloquence and fury, I do not wish to block out the sky! ah! To see her so heated, so passionately indisposed to his reasoning, to his offer, yet so endearingly incapable of articulating her frustration, to see her respond with such fervor (such!) was an unprecedented event (yes, he had evoked fervor in her, and something else, yes, of course); it filled him with pride and an insatiable urge to provoke her again, his profundity, her speechlessness, like stirring a flame: would she react? He basked in that lovely, cleansing memory: Is emotion neither good nor bad, indeed? What is emotion at all, then, but misfirings of the brain, so easily swayed by hormones and chaff, mere reflections of the stars, a grotesque, distorted illusion of reality, saboteur of good rhetoric and of fascination with the fantastic? What is this good and bad of which we so cavalierly speak, so sure of ourselves, as if they are but building blocks of our understanding of things, as if we cannot understand a thing not made of them?
But nothing, of course: like weather (he had said, so achingly eloquently), like falling in love, are the passing feelings of anger and melancholy and contentedness and cold and tired. Neutrality is everything; and oh, but everything is neutral; “good” and “bad” only appear in our interpretation of the events, of our feelings, which are so faultily based on our perception, a contorted lens. What a precarious thing on which to build a life — and by thus building, brick by brick, who could hope to reach the stars? No, it is because we categorize things as good and bad, as right and wrong, we seek to contain the universe in our minds, a universe as big as infinity itself, by imposing a constructed dichotomy onto it we try to force it into the minute shell of our brains, the ocean into a snail shell (and let naught few words be said on the beauty, the fragility of a snail shell, its proportions (what numbers again?), delicate because it is brittle, brittle because delicate, not unlike our minds, why, both are perfectly suited for their respective uses, but if one tries to contain the ocean into a shell, or the universe into a mind, but of course it will shatter, lose both its and the ocean's integrity, the beauty gone, and for what? for a misguided, emotion-based hypothesis); what a distorted portrait that gives our minds to think on, and thus our brains to act on! Good, bad, true, false! How silly, an illustrious folly/ like a child, indeed, like one of us. Do we not but draw a line and insist on pushing things sweatily to one side or the other, so that they bear these simple labels of black or white, thereby forbidding things to manifest their true colors? Perhaps because our minds are stubbornly (lazily?) stuck in this wretched chiaroscuro for so long, so much longer than we can remember (Too many metaphors! Too many possibilities: but please to stick with one/). Only allowing things to exist in our own system of classification, dismissing, denying anything that does not fit — how vain! Alas (thought he), how sadly we miss out on the glorious multitudinous creation by boiling everything within it down to one projected, empty characteristic or its opposite and refusing to see it on any other terms but only by the feeling it incites in us. I claim, nay I insist, I proclaim: Nothing, but nothing, is good or bad, neither death nor life nor love nor the sky; these things are simply themselves; without a human mind to impose on it such nonsense, it continues to be as it is — how freeing to allow it to be so! If a tree falls in the forest, does it bear moral implication? Are the other trees sad? But is anything in nature sad, or content, or bothered or stirred, or good or bad?
[High on the momentum of discovery, Thad’s magnificent, preposterous mind continued jubilantly:]
But that is why bad things happen so insistently to good people, causing thinkers and believers and prayers alike to cry out in indignant consternation over the metaphysical possibility of a benevolent god; that is why good things never cease to happen to the worst of people; in this new and galvanizing model of the neutral and endlessly beautiful undistorted universe, that sentence does not make but a capillary of sense! By crossing out the words that bear no meaning, one is left with the sentiment/the statement “things happen to people and things happen to people” (or if one wants to maintain that some people are inherently or deliberately good or bad (questionable at best) then one can even get away with “things happen to good people and things happen to bad people” — it matters not a scratch), which is true, but not worth saying; for those good and bad things which we perceive as blessings and atrocities are only things we feel particularly strongly about one way or the other (from another perspective we perceive (just as surely, surely) not the opposite but something completely different altogther, no? as the sun goes down from our perspective, does the earth not rotate from another's? and are those two events, from their respective perspectives, even remotely related?); we spend copious amounts of energy pushing them to one side of the dividing line we ourselves drew (which was worth saying, but not true: does it take much energy to think of things as good or bad? Is it equivalent to carting rocks, as in that (which?) circle of Hell? Perhaps not, on second thought; it is really quite natural — ah! because we are taught to do so, we are taught to expend our energy so, so it does not seem draining, but if we were taught not to, how impossibly enervating it would be in retrospect), never realizing that if only we erased the line we could spend those untapped energies creating new entities, new ideas, wings (!)—and not by building a stair to the heavens or by shuffling around objects of illusionary weight on the earth can we be free, be light, be lifted out of the confines, the cell of emotion, that pesky, damned, trickster, one-dimensional, jail cell emotion.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
XXV
It was six o’clock. The doorknob turned and the lock clicked several times in each direction, until with a final tired heave, the door swung open. Lisa left the keys in the lock as she came inside and dropped her bags on the couch, deposited her coffee cup and water bottle in the kitchen sink. She briefly considered changing out of her awful high-waisted slacks into something more forgiving, but elected to start rummaging through cupboards instead.
But what was she supposed to do with her writing?
She had recently realized that all this time, she had held the assumption that just writing for herself would suffice, that it would be enough, that it would sustain her for another sixty or seventy years. And it would, as long as her imaginary audience was there, anxiously waiting, poring over every word, validating her efforts with their ravenous appreciation. Today at work, it had come to her with stunning clarity that writing in her journal, saving documents to flash drives, sometimes, rarely rereading anything, constantly adding to it but never building on it, or even revising it, was all to go to waste without them, her faithful, invisible readers.
And now that her audience had disappeared, or rather, now that she realized they had never existed, it dawned on her that she needed to establish a real audience, to reach real people, to make real, living people want to read her writing, so that she could maintain the same feeling of purpose. If she could recreate in reality this imaginary group of people who found her writing so extraordinary, then she could continue to write as she always had—obsessively, passionately, constantly, forward-looking, messy, without direction, negligently, aggressively, gently, necessarily. But it also brought about a new responsibility, a distinct change to her fanatical, unharnessed writing.
Today, out of all days, had brought her the question of what it meant to write for a real audience as opposed to an imaginary one. (Why? What was it about today that made it so different from every other workday?
(Only that today was the latest in a long and continuous progression; since that Tuesday, when she began to teach herself to be happy, she had been coming to so many new conclusions that now they just did not stop coming, using existing conclusions as premises, building on one another. Every minute, practically, she was tripping on a new, self-evident truth, something she could not believe she had not thought of before, something that was immediately apparent and relevant and brought about a tangible change in her mental atmosphere. Today’s happened to be that she had not yet addressed the practical application of her discovery that she needed to make people listen to her, since they would not listen to her of their own accord. She must be heard. But how would she go about getting them to listen? Real people—neighbors, coworkers, strangers, students, curious, bored, hopeless, inspired, tired, desperate, insipid, intelligent, capable people?
(Not by keeping her treasures hidden. Certainly not.)
She pulled out a pot and its cover and put them on the counter. While searching for the elbow macaroni, she came upon coffee filters and assessed her energy level. She glanced at the clock, and determined that any less than three fourths of a cup wouldn’t affect her sleeping schedule, and even if it did, it was worth being able to think clearly in the meantime. She poured some grounds in the filter and hazarded another guess at the amount of water; when the machine was on, she went to get the milk, saw the Velveeta, and remembered her original plan.
Publish it?
Publish what?
She turned on the tap and filled the pan with water, allowing her brain to hold a debate with itself while she tended to her dinner. She placed the cover on the pan and turned on the burner, waited for the click of the gas. She stood against the counter, arms crossed, staring at the flame and listening to the gurgling of the coffee maker.
Publish her thoughts? Like a book?
(This did not seem to be coming naturally at all.)
A series of short stories? A novel? Could it pass as is? What is it, a memoir? Could be a new genre altogether? Should she add characters to be the voices of her thoughts? Would that sound unnatural? How did she know her thoughts weren’t the same as everyone else’s? Which did she prefer: to be a voice that seemed to speak from within, or an alien perspective; would that be fascinating or boring? Would she have a better chance of publishing an assortment of past and present thoughts if they mirrored her audience’s, or if they were on a completely different plane? Do people want to read their own minds or somebody else’s? Do people ever want to read someone else’s?
The dozens of documents saved on her laptop and scribbled in various notebooks around her apartment at this instant were filled largely with her unfiltered thoughts, in whatever form they cared to take at the moment. There were stories and poems and essays and riffs on life and pieces looking for a genre. Almost anything that had crossed her mind while she had access to pen and paper had been recorded. Her brain manifested itself in words, phrases, sounds, plots, rhythm, flow, and sometimes in a discernible structure.
The tremendous task of synthesizing all her previous thoughts into a readable, digestible form that held the slightest chance of attracting another beating heart loomed over her. Was that her only choice?
But what was she supposed to do with her writing?
She had recently realized that all this time, she had held the assumption that just writing for herself would suffice, that it would be enough, that it would sustain her for another sixty or seventy years. And it would, as long as her imaginary audience was there, anxiously waiting, poring over every word, validating her efforts with their ravenous appreciation. Today at work, it had come to her with stunning clarity that writing in her journal, saving documents to flash drives, sometimes, rarely rereading anything, constantly adding to it but never building on it, or even revising it, was all to go to waste without them, her faithful, invisible readers.
And now that her audience had disappeared, or rather, now that she realized they had never existed, it dawned on her that she needed to establish a real audience, to reach real people, to make real, living people want to read her writing, so that she could maintain the same feeling of purpose. If she could recreate in reality this imaginary group of people who found her writing so extraordinary, then she could continue to write as she always had—obsessively, passionately, constantly, forward-looking, messy, without direction, negligently, aggressively, gently, necessarily. But it also brought about a new responsibility, a distinct change to her fanatical, unharnessed writing.
Today, out of all days, had brought her the question of what it meant to write for a real audience as opposed to an imaginary one. (Why? What was it about today that made it so different from every other workday?
(Only that today was the latest in a long and continuous progression; since that Tuesday, when she began to teach herself to be happy, she had been coming to so many new conclusions that now they just did not stop coming, using existing conclusions as premises, building on one another. Every minute, practically, she was tripping on a new, self-evident truth, something she could not believe she had not thought of before, something that was immediately apparent and relevant and brought about a tangible change in her mental atmosphere. Today’s happened to be that she had not yet addressed the practical application of her discovery that she needed to make people listen to her, since they would not listen to her of their own accord. She must be heard. But how would she go about getting them to listen? Real people—neighbors, coworkers, strangers, students, curious, bored, hopeless, inspired, tired, desperate, insipid, intelligent, capable people?
(Not by keeping her treasures hidden. Certainly not.)
She pulled out a pot and its cover and put them on the counter. While searching for the elbow macaroni, she came upon coffee filters and assessed her energy level. She glanced at the clock, and determined that any less than three fourths of a cup wouldn’t affect her sleeping schedule, and even if it did, it was worth being able to think clearly in the meantime. She poured some grounds in the filter and hazarded another guess at the amount of water; when the machine was on, she went to get the milk, saw the Velveeta, and remembered her original plan.
Publish it?
Publish what?
She turned on the tap and filled the pan with water, allowing her brain to hold a debate with itself while she tended to her dinner. She placed the cover on the pan and turned on the burner, waited for the click of the gas. She stood against the counter, arms crossed, staring at the flame and listening to the gurgling of the coffee maker.
Publish her thoughts? Like a book?
(This did not seem to be coming naturally at all.)
A series of short stories? A novel? Could it pass as is? What is it, a memoir? Could be a new genre altogether? Should she add characters to be the voices of her thoughts? Would that sound unnatural? How did she know her thoughts weren’t the same as everyone else’s? Which did she prefer: to be a voice that seemed to speak from within, or an alien perspective; would that be fascinating or boring? Would she have a better chance of publishing an assortment of past and present thoughts if they mirrored her audience’s, or if they were on a completely different plane? Do people want to read their own minds or somebody else’s? Do people ever want to read someone else’s?
The dozens of documents saved on her laptop and scribbled in various notebooks around her apartment at this instant were filled largely with her unfiltered thoughts, in whatever form they cared to take at the moment. There were stories and poems and essays and riffs on life and pieces looking for a genre. Almost anything that had crossed her mind while she had access to pen and paper had been recorded. Her brain manifested itself in words, phrases, sounds, plots, rhythm, flow, and sometimes in a discernible structure.
The tremendous task of synthesizing all her previous thoughts into a readable, digestible form that held the slightest chance of attracting another beating heart loomed over her. Was that her only choice?
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Through the magnifying glass
Lisa’s framework of life and time—that is, her idea that the present is the lens of a magnifying glass—afforded her a healthy acceptance of death, a view completely free of fear. Ever since the image of the magnifying glass and the gigantic map occurred to her (which was unannounced and unforeseen, not unlike the big bang), it stuck in her mind, and she referred back to it as needed. It translated quite smoothly into the liberating idea that death is simply stepping back and seeing the entire map. She imagined details about that glorious day when she could really see what she’d been staring at. She pictured the freedom of movement she would experience after putting down the magnifying glass and stretching her fingers, her arms, her back, and standing up straight for the first time in her existence. She imagined her eyes adjusting to the picture as a whole, and the thousand tiny sparks that would race around in her mind as she comprehended connections between details and overarching themes that were too big to see at that minute level. She pictured an impressionist painting that was made of tiny little brush marks, that only form a picture when one sees it from far away. She imagined looking over both shoulders and seeing everyone she knew, also stepping back, blinking, stretching, dropping their magnifying glasses, slightly disoriented, as if they had just woken up, feeling the kinks and the range of motion of their forgotten bodies, looking around in awe at the people around them, people they knew from the map but never fathomed that they had been standing right next to them the whole time, people with whom she had wanted desperately to make a personal connection but could not because it had to be through the map; that is, it has to be through language, which obscures meaning; a connection has to bridge perspectives, to transcend—and, she was sure, these connections that she craved would be possible when she stepped back from the map and could shake someone’s hand, give them a hug and a kiss, instead of just seeing their shadowy, false tableau on the map.
Healthy? If Lisa thinks of death as a liberation, a positive thing, an “afterlife” that is really real life and the life she knows now is, to her, a preface, as misleading as a façade, why is that healthy? Not only is she remarkably unafraid of death, but sometimes she almost looks forward to it, on days when taking out the recycling seems at once too trivial and too much. On days when existence is just too heavy a burden, too expansive, she imagines that one day, one non-earthly day, she will somehow know what it was all about, why nothing is too much or too little, how the laws of energy and their fanatical economy prove true about relationships and moods as well: for every action a reaction, no motion wasted or created or destroyed, only reused, in a most sensible, traceable, necessary way. Days when she feels she has done nothing substantial at all, she remembers that if she just waits long enough, some day she will be able to step back, look over the map, and begin her real life, wherein lies real importance, knowing fully well why everything is as it is, and why she had to go through all this in the first place. Because in her mind, what you see on the map, when you see the whole thing, is a reason for living.
(What a paradox, that you can’t see the reason for living until after you’ve lived. Can that be right?)
But healthy? Is that healthy? Shouldn’t one fear the thing that happens to everyone in the world, yet no one has lived to tell of it? What is death, and does it hurt, or is it tedious, or is it nothingness, and are we punished for things we don’t know we did or for doing things we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to do?
These questions have never bothered Lisa, although she knows they exist, because almost everyone she knew was afraid of death. She had even heard some of them say they wish they could live forever. The prospect of immortality terrified Lisa. If something awful happened to her, if she became paralyzed or deaf or both, then she would just have to wait till she died, and it would all be all right. But if she were immortal and those things happened, then she would have no hope of ever walking or hearing again. Again, this was obvious to her, but she could never tell anyone because they would accuse of her being morbid. How is that morbid? To her, the idea that death is necessarily something bad is far more morbid than her idea that it might conceivably be good. To live forever would mean an infinity of wasted afternoons, tiredness, speeding tickets, not being able to think of the right word, lost things, slivers, rising gas prices, wondering, indecision, back pain, dieting, loneliness, allergies, not having enough money, feeling selfish, feeling guilty, wondering if it could have been different. When we all step back, she believed, we will see all these things as they are—as details that are so tiny they can’t be seen without a magnifying glass.
Healthy? If Lisa thinks of death as a liberation, a positive thing, an “afterlife” that is really real life and the life she knows now is, to her, a preface, as misleading as a façade, why is that healthy? Not only is she remarkably unafraid of death, but sometimes she almost looks forward to it, on days when taking out the recycling seems at once too trivial and too much. On days when existence is just too heavy a burden, too expansive, she imagines that one day, one non-earthly day, she will somehow know what it was all about, why nothing is too much or too little, how the laws of energy and their fanatical economy prove true about relationships and moods as well: for every action a reaction, no motion wasted or created or destroyed, only reused, in a most sensible, traceable, necessary way. Days when she feels she has done nothing substantial at all, she remembers that if she just waits long enough, some day she will be able to step back, look over the map, and begin her real life, wherein lies real importance, knowing fully well why everything is as it is, and why she had to go through all this in the first place. Because in her mind, what you see on the map, when you see the whole thing, is a reason for living.
(What a paradox, that you can’t see the reason for living until after you’ve lived. Can that be right?)
But healthy? Is that healthy? Shouldn’t one fear the thing that happens to everyone in the world, yet no one has lived to tell of it? What is death, and does it hurt, or is it tedious, or is it nothingness, and are we punished for things we don’t know we did or for doing things we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to do?
These questions have never bothered Lisa, although she knows they exist, because almost everyone she knew was afraid of death. She had even heard some of them say they wish they could live forever. The prospect of immortality terrified Lisa. If something awful happened to her, if she became paralyzed or deaf or both, then she would just have to wait till she died, and it would all be all right. But if she were immortal and those things happened, then she would have no hope of ever walking or hearing again. Again, this was obvious to her, but she could never tell anyone because they would accuse of her being morbid. How is that morbid? To her, the idea that death is necessarily something bad is far more morbid than her idea that it might conceivably be good. To live forever would mean an infinity of wasted afternoons, tiredness, speeding tickets, not being able to think of the right word, lost things, slivers, rising gas prices, wondering, indecision, back pain, dieting, loneliness, allergies, not having enough money, feeling selfish, feeling guilty, wondering if it could have been different. When we all step back, she believed, we will see all these things as they are—as details that are so tiny they can’t be seen without a magnifying glass.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Speaking of people who write poems, sometimes Heather did
Breathe.
A person in need of..
A person in lieu of..
..Some new way to navigate the night
Something to carry over into day
Somewhere very specifically,
In fact halfway between Greenland and Taxco
at an insurance office that used to be fast food
And halfway between a lot of other places, too
Continuous is not the opposite of transient, not only
To write a poem you need only say one thing
and then let it explain itself, that is
go back and unpack any part of it, every, if you want it to go on forever
but you must be discrete about it,
not because I insist but because you already are
Seems you can write about anything now, huh? and it will
hold, keep holding
someone's attention—but first, a second is a tick of a clock for everyone but for me, it is as many moments as I am aware of, which for us the aware makes the night and a second so
damn long. As many points in a second as there are on a line, or on a dot
A sleepless night is infinitely long
—anything, it seems, in fact, even a bench outside an insurance office, open 24 hours (the bench, not the office)
Get out of bed, get cold so that you have something to want to get back to
For now, you have 19, and 72, and a million, and
uncountable seconds to sit through, thinking
A triangle of light, greenish like mold
makes grassy shadows
The bench is wooden and wet. Sit. Many others have.
So this is what it looks like from inside
(this is the light that wakes me up when it turns on at Midnight, if I’m asleep and if I haven’t turned the blinds just right)
It’s a much different light now that I don’t fight it but instead come inside it, moth-like
Yes, to survive is such a basic instinct; when it is taken care of there is not much else that is as important, so one is lost, to navigate, without direction, on a map of infinitesimal (sic) detail. And if each is as important as the next, then one might as well be on a bench as in bed
Did you know the light went off at 5?
they are trying to save green, electricity to stop the flow of energy so you can finally get a break—
Breathe.
A person in need of..
A person in lieu of..
..Some new way to navigate the night
Something to carry over into day
Somewhere very specifically,
In fact halfway between Greenland and Taxco
at an insurance office that used to be fast food
And halfway between a lot of other places, too
Continuous is not the opposite of transient, not only
To write a poem you need only say one thing
and then let it explain itself, that is
go back and unpack any part of it, every, if you want it to go on forever
but you must be discrete about it,
not because I insist but because you already are
Seems you can write about anything now, huh? and it will
hold, keep holding
someone's attention—but first, a second is a tick of a clock for everyone but for me, it is as many moments as I am aware of, which for us the aware makes the night and a second so
damn long. As many points in a second as there are on a line, or on a dot
A sleepless night is infinitely long
—anything, it seems, in fact, even a bench outside an insurance office, open 24 hours (the bench, not the office)
Get out of bed, get cold so that you have something to want to get back to
For now, you have 19, and 72, and a million, and
uncountable seconds to sit through, thinking
A triangle of light, greenish like mold
makes grassy shadows
The bench is wooden and wet. Sit. Many others have.
So this is what it looks like from inside
(this is the light that wakes me up when it turns on at Midnight, if I’m asleep and if I haven’t turned the blinds just right)
It’s a much different light now that I don’t fight it but instead come inside it, moth-like
Yes, to survive is such a basic instinct; when it is taken care of there is not much else that is as important, so one is lost, to navigate, without direction, on a map of infinitesimal (sic) detail. And if each is as important as the next, then one might as well be on a bench as in bed
Did you know the light went off at 5?
they are trying to save green, electricity to stop the flow of energy so you can finally get a break—
Breathe.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
VI.
Ah, Jessi. It looked like she had really connected with Walter, as he explained his vocation with unprecedented candidness. He was coming out of his shell; he was speaking his mind honestly to them, and Harlow didn’t get it, but Jessi did. She must have been wallowing in her element.
For the first time that night, she didn’t hear him speaking to her. And for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t thinking about herself, either.
When the strange bird-man and -woman called out to Thad and pulled him away from the table, Jessi looked up suddenly. Her anxiety over Thad’s questionable authority and his claims about the separation of emotion and life, or emotion and art, evaporated when she saw the newcomers. She’d met them before; they came to these events frequently and deferred absurdly to Thad. The man was a painter she had once worked with. The woman’s name was Laura.
What a startling—miniscule!—coincidence, that brought her out of that onerous confusion. All at once one burden was lifted, and another made haste to take its place; Errol’s dream returned to her with vivid force, effectively dissolving everything she had been mulling over before, a suffocating, unforgiving black storm cloud.
For if you remember, it was only that morning that she had been up before dawn to answer his cry for help; it had been the first time she had witnessed him behave any differently than a kindly old piglet; she had never before seen him any less than delighted, enraptured by his own dreams and by her interpretation of them. In fact, he was a person, as she now noticed for the first time since she had started working for him over three years ago, who was enchanted by life in general, and his enchantment was beautiful and contagious. She wanted desperately not to lose that.
Plunged into her memories of that morning, which had flattened themselves into the folds of her brain but now, triggered by the name Laura, came out from their hiding and commanded her full attention like guerilla shadows, she was only half-listening to the discussion around her. She registered that Harlow again began to monopolize Walter’s conversation, beguiling him with her scheming fascination with his life, and only hazily noticed that he was looking at her, Jessi, when he spoke.
It was haunting. Errol Spice, as old as the Victorian house he lived in, as dusty as the attic that served as his home and her studio, who could see the world in fantastical color by closing his eyes—Errol Spice was no longer himself. He was terrified; he was depressed; when she left him at eleven o’clock this morning, promising to come back after getting some breakfast, he had only barely calmed down. What bothered her too was his anomalous reaction to a genuinely disturbing fear: he merely shook in little vibrations, shrank back into his pillows, and asked that she stay there, and asked that she paint.
How was she supposed to paint a fictional schizophrenia? Was it even schizophrenia that he dreamed about? She had no background in mental health and only knew the word to be associated with split personalities, or something, and she wasn’t even sure about that. She had never given it a second thought. But now Errol had described something so sad and so scary that even she had begun to feel fear, just by experiencing it secondhand. She had returned to him later that day, and he had scarcely improved. She’d considered taking him to the hospital.
His reaction—so timid, so humble—what was she supposed to make of it? He couldn’t sleep, but he didn’t get out of bed. He didn’t want to leave, although his very surroundings seemed to preserve the terror. He didn’t want to talk about anything else. His first and maniacal desire, the only way he could think to allay the fear, was to have Jessi immortalize it on canvas.
Reflecting on his odd reaction made her question why he had wanted her to paint anything for him at all. What kind of strange desire was it that compelled him to search out a willing young artist, a painter who did not mind his erratic demands and schedule and pay, who could visualize his vivid dreams and apparently do them justice, somehow to his satisfaction? She had long since stopped trying to evaluate his motives. For a long time now she had only ever listened to his requests with a benign condescension and accommodated, content to not have to look for a day job and to have plenty of time and sometimes the money to paint her own visions and meet friends for drinks. But this morning it nagged her. Why does he think that my painting can alleviate his fear?
She surfaced to hear Walter say, “I’d always been writing,” and she knew he was speaking to her as well as to Harlow, expecting a proper response. She forced herself back to Baci and fabricated a reply, knowing that the path down which her thoughts were taking her would soon ensnare her, as in a dark wood, if she let it; she needed to cling to Baci as she would to a search party.
“What did you go to school for?” she asked, hoping it was a relevant question.
“History,” he said, and involuntarily she started to slip back into the woods, the darkness of a dense wilderness encroaching around the edges; again she was surrounded by Errol’s attic and Errol’s dream.
She heard him say “I wanted to know everything,” and she was reminded of something Errol had said once, was it really three years ago? that she had begun to come see him regularly; before she got used to his eccentricity, there was a brief time when she tried in vain to understand it. “Toledo?” she’d said, picturing Madrid. “I think I know what it looks like. Do you want me to base it on a certain photo? Do you have any pictures from your time there?”
“Oh, no,” said Errol, the drawn-out o sounds making his voice sound even thinner, like a drinking straw. “That’s not what it looks like at all. Last night it looked very green, but blue. Is that teal, dear?”
“I—what? I don’t know what you mean,” she said crossly, frustrated at an old man’s senility. “I can’t paint it unless I know what it looks like, and I want to stay true to your dream, so I need you to tell me.”
“You will,” he said serenely, and she almost decided then to just paint whatever the hell she wanted.
But she was still curious. “Why do you have such a specific request in mind, but you won’t give me the specifics? Do you think I can just intuit them?”
“I want it to mirror what I already know, which is what I dreamt,” he answered, “but I also want to know more, which hasn’t happened yet. I want to know everything. And that includes what you see, too.”
Utterly exasperated, Jessi fumbled around in her own head, looking for a response.
“Why?”
For a moment, she thought Errol was speechless, or asleep. Then he said, “I don’t know. Surely nothing else seems necessary. What else is there?”
“It became necessary?” Harlow asked. Jessi jumped.
“But how will my guessing at what your dreams look like, and painting them for you, help you to know everything?” she’d demanded.
Errol Spice took several deep breaths before answering. “Because what you know is part of everything. If I don’t try to see from your viewpoint, I am limiting my possibility of learning. I need your piece. Together we can begin to put the pieces together. I…I wish we had everybody’s piece. But it’s just you and me, here, and I am asking—entreating you, dear—for yours.”
“Why mine?”
With the utmost delicateness he said to her, “If you’d rather not do it, then I would hate to force you. You are quite young, I notice. I think perhaps that you’re too young to understand. Which is, of course, why I value your piece so much. It is fresh and utterly unique.”
Naturally this inflamed Jessi and she said indignantly, “Well, I’m sorry if I think differently than you do. It’s just that I don’t see how you’re making any sense.”
“Please,” he said gently, patiently. “I can’t explain it. I want…the difference between our thoughts. I want to see the gap between our thoughts so that I can start to fill it in, to start to see everything. I didn’t choose to want this. I want it, though. I want to see during the day what I see at night. Through someone else’s eyes. Someone with an eye for color and has taste and elegance. My dear, you bring such elegance. Please.”
“You didn’t choose what you wanted,” she told Walter.
He licked his lips. “I suppose I didn’t,” he answered, vaguely confused. Before she could qualify her contention she was back in Errol’s attic, and he was lying comfortably under his purple paisley quilt, surrounded by fluffy pillows, his ancient fingers poking out over the edge of the covers by his chin, pointing at his toes, like a little boy having a bedtime story read to him. He seemed distinctly unaware that next to him, the picture of tranquility, Jessi was so upset she was actually shaking.
She began to speak but then was quieted by a silent urge inside of her; it seemed any movement or noise would scare him out of his peace, which would harm or maybe even kill him, she imagined, and no matter how maddening his esoteric explanations and nonsensical requests were, she was very, disproportionately fond of him. In his presence she felt a warmth she had not felt in years. Safe—she felt safe near him, and even in her insufferable state of anxiety which he had caused, she wanted nothing that might endanger that security.
She let out a long breath, committing to ignore his comments and do her job, feelings aside.
“All right,” she said, fighting to speak evenly, “please tell me what you want, and I’ll do my very best.”
She realized he’d been humming to himself, looking up at the sloped ceiling as if a movie were playing on it, just for him. Now he stopped, and his eyes darted over to her without disturbing his head’s nesting place in the pillows.
“Ah, yes. I’m so very glad, Jessi, to hear you say that. It is a great relief to me.”
“We were in Toledo,” she reminded him.
“You are too good to me. Yes, Toledo. It was a brilliant sort of emerald blue. What an interesting color! I don’t know that it’s found in nature, you know.”
“Hm. But you saw it in your dream?”
“Mm…‘saw’ is such a strong word, don’t you think? I would hesitate.”
She made a note and renewed her recent commitment to objectivity. “Okay. What else?”
When he had described the scene, a bewitching medieval scene of learning to waltz from a baron, or something, Jessi looked back at the notes she had taken. She had a page full of floating words and arrows and cross-outs and some diagrams which meant nothing to her, a list of adjectives attempting to describe a color he may or may not have seen, and some quotes she’d recorded verbatim, with the intention of deciphering them later. “I think I have it,” she told him, “but may I ask you to repeat your instructions? Just so we’re clear?”
“My instructions,” he said, and he sounded at once like a very young child and a very old man, like a teacher and a learner at once. He was both, he was all.
She waited.
“Please paint me my dreams,” he said, and with that, was no longer interested in talking.
Harlow was hopelessly confused.
“How is that like instructions?” she asked, her voice wavering on the edge of defeat.
“I think,” said Jessi, “if I know what you’re talking about, that you have it inside of you. The desire to do what you need to do. Almost that, you don’t want…what you don’t need. It is your job to figure out how to make it happen.”
“Yes,” agreed Walter, “yes, that’s it. Self-reflection can tell you quite a bit about yourself.”
She remembered how young she was when she first met Errol, when she attempted her first painting for him, when she brought it to him sheepishly, expecting to be rebuffed, unpaid, fired immediately. He loved it.
Part of what she loved in him was his complete disregard for the concept of right versus wrong. Because he was obsessed with the idea of Everything, he could not deny one or the other, so anything she said was valid. Everything she said, it seemed, when she was suggesting something new, a new idea or interpretation, he welcomed joyfully. He celebrated. He only rejected her comments when she said something literal or constraining or regressive.
She had never been around anyone who accepted her candid ideas as openly as she did, without judgment, with a willingness to consider them, with a desire to understand them. His dreams were just as much hers as his, because he allowed her to be a part of them. He asked her to paint something she couldn’t see, and when she finally let herself, it was the freest she had ever felt.
The schizophrenia dream scared her. There were no colors. There were no sounds. There were humanoid characters, lacking any warmth or human features; they were shadows of people, shells, they were more like death than life. There were foggy, blurry landscapes that did not entice, only depressed. There were no possibilities.
Painting a dancing scene with a flamboyant duke who had a nose as thin as air and a feathery boa the color of twirling—what did that even mean? She had painted it nonetheless, because Errol had said it matter-of-factly; he had made her believe it made sense; he had made her almost see it, and that was enough to get started. He trusted her the way a child trusts his mother, to do what is right, and the way a mother trusts her child, to imagine. He entrusted his dreams to her, and the only way she could do wrong was if she refused. Painting these synesthetic reveries, these excursions into life, these adventures that ignored parts of speech and grew entirely from free association and wordplay and an all-inclusive belief in the imagination—painting these was freedom. She could get lost in the colors and forget what words meant, or she could learn what a word meant based solely on its sound. The dreams became hers, and they shared with her the absurd joy, the disregard of “true” and “false,” the embrace of the world, the promise of endless possibility, of which they were made.
“I’d feel that I’d lost contact with myself,” she heard, “I don’t know what I would do.”
“Maybe you’d feel free,” she said before thinking, and she watched the swimming colors dissolve, and in their place, a swirling, unfocused sea of red and black and skin-white.
In the middle of an interminable conversation that was decidedly not about colors and words she found herself, struggling to pretend nothing was wrong, and Walter said flatly, “Ah, maybe. Does your motivation limit you?”
“No,” she said too quickly, almost forgetting that she was not within a dream-painting. “No, I mean. Not my motivation, no. But it might be freeing to live without constraints—” (she wished they had any idea) “—because if you’re not held to them…” (realizing that she was not making sense, she struggled to redirect her sentence) “You wouldn’t feel like you’d failed if you didn’t follow them.” There. She’d escaped her own trap, by barely making a point.
What would it be like to paint the schizophrenia dream? Could she enter it the way she had learned to enter the others? Would she find herself lost, or trapped, or both, amidst a backdrop of gray skies and claustrophobic horizons? Would she lose herself in the joylessness of confusion and a changing reality, of insincerity, of emptiness? It was the opposite of their usual dreams. Before, she and Errol had used sensory perception as law, so all that mattered were the senses and the delight they brought, their blissful exploration of the impossible, their effortless negation of the intellect, and in an impossible paradox, that intellect was challenged, validated, uplifted; now, in this dream, chaos reigned, lack of sensory stimuli abounded. The senses were utterly devastated and the intellect could not stand up straight without being pushed back down by contradictions and despair. There was no joy to be found in the senses’ play because the self was not intact. In order to paint it, she would have to undertake the same process she did to paint his happier dreams: She would have to enter into it as fully as she could, so that she could understand it, and interpret it, and visualize it. She would attempt to give it order, make it make sense, so that she could give it shape and put it on canvas, so that he in turn could look at it and understand his own dream, and now she understood why he wanted her to paint.
If Errol went there in his dream, she would have to follow him there.
For the first time that night, she didn’t hear him speaking to her. And for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t thinking about herself, either.
When the strange bird-man and -woman called out to Thad and pulled him away from the table, Jessi looked up suddenly. Her anxiety over Thad’s questionable authority and his claims about the separation of emotion and life, or emotion and art, evaporated when she saw the newcomers. She’d met them before; they came to these events frequently and deferred absurdly to Thad. The man was a painter she had once worked with. The woman’s name was Laura.
What a startling—miniscule!—coincidence, that brought her out of that onerous confusion. All at once one burden was lifted, and another made haste to take its place; Errol’s dream returned to her with vivid force, effectively dissolving everything she had been mulling over before, a suffocating, unforgiving black storm cloud.
For if you remember, it was only that morning that she had been up before dawn to answer his cry for help; it had been the first time she had witnessed him behave any differently than a kindly old piglet; she had never before seen him any less than delighted, enraptured by his own dreams and by her interpretation of them. In fact, he was a person, as she now noticed for the first time since she had started working for him over three years ago, who was enchanted by life in general, and his enchantment was beautiful and contagious. She wanted desperately not to lose that.
Plunged into her memories of that morning, which had flattened themselves into the folds of her brain but now, triggered by the name Laura, came out from their hiding and commanded her full attention like guerilla shadows, she was only half-listening to the discussion around her. She registered that Harlow again began to monopolize Walter’s conversation, beguiling him with her scheming fascination with his life, and only hazily noticed that he was looking at her, Jessi, when he spoke.
It was haunting. Errol Spice, as old as the Victorian house he lived in, as dusty as the attic that served as his home and her studio, who could see the world in fantastical color by closing his eyes—Errol Spice was no longer himself. He was terrified; he was depressed; when she left him at eleven o’clock this morning, promising to come back after getting some breakfast, he had only barely calmed down. What bothered her too was his anomalous reaction to a genuinely disturbing fear: he merely shook in little vibrations, shrank back into his pillows, and asked that she stay there, and asked that she paint.
How was she supposed to paint a fictional schizophrenia? Was it even schizophrenia that he dreamed about? She had no background in mental health and only knew the word to be associated with split personalities, or something, and she wasn’t even sure about that. She had never given it a second thought. But now Errol had described something so sad and so scary that even she had begun to feel fear, just by experiencing it secondhand. She had returned to him later that day, and he had scarcely improved. She’d considered taking him to the hospital.
His reaction—so timid, so humble—what was she supposed to make of it? He couldn’t sleep, but he didn’t get out of bed. He didn’t want to leave, although his very surroundings seemed to preserve the terror. He didn’t want to talk about anything else. His first and maniacal desire, the only way he could think to allay the fear, was to have Jessi immortalize it on canvas.
Reflecting on his odd reaction made her question why he had wanted her to paint anything for him at all. What kind of strange desire was it that compelled him to search out a willing young artist, a painter who did not mind his erratic demands and schedule and pay, who could visualize his vivid dreams and apparently do them justice, somehow to his satisfaction? She had long since stopped trying to evaluate his motives. For a long time now she had only ever listened to his requests with a benign condescension and accommodated, content to not have to look for a day job and to have plenty of time and sometimes the money to paint her own visions and meet friends for drinks. But this morning it nagged her. Why does he think that my painting can alleviate his fear?
She surfaced to hear Walter say, “I’d always been writing,” and she knew he was speaking to her as well as to Harlow, expecting a proper response. She forced herself back to Baci and fabricated a reply, knowing that the path down which her thoughts were taking her would soon ensnare her, as in a dark wood, if she let it; she needed to cling to Baci as she would to a search party.
“What did you go to school for?” she asked, hoping it was a relevant question.
“History,” he said, and involuntarily she started to slip back into the woods, the darkness of a dense wilderness encroaching around the edges; again she was surrounded by Errol’s attic and Errol’s dream.
She heard him say “I wanted to know everything,” and she was reminded of something Errol had said once, was it really three years ago? that she had begun to come see him regularly; before she got used to his eccentricity, there was a brief time when she tried in vain to understand it. “Toledo?” she’d said, picturing Madrid. “I think I know what it looks like. Do you want me to base it on a certain photo? Do you have any pictures from your time there?”
“Oh, no,” said Errol, the drawn-out o sounds making his voice sound even thinner, like a drinking straw. “That’s not what it looks like at all. Last night it looked very green, but blue. Is that teal, dear?”
“I—what? I don’t know what you mean,” she said crossly, frustrated at an old man’s senility. “I can’t paint it unless I know what it looks like, and I want to stay true to your dream, so I need you to tell me.”
“You will,” he said serenely, and she almost decided then to just paint whatever the hell she wanted.
But she was still curious. “Why do you have such a specific request in mind, but you won’t give me the specifics? Do you think I can just intuit them?”
“I want it to mirror what I already know, which is what I dreamt,” he answered, “but I also want to know more, which hasn’t happened yet. I want to know everything. And that includes what you see, too.”
Utterly exasperated, Jessi fumbled around in her own head, looking for a response.
“Why?”
For a moment, she thought Errol was speechless, or asleep. Then he said, “I don’t know. Surely nothing else seems necessary. What else is there?”
“It became necessary?” Harlow asked. Jessi jumped.
“But how will my guessing at what your dreams look like, and painting them for you, help you to know everything?” she’d demanded.
Errol Spice took several deep breaths before answering. “Because what you know is part of everything. If I don’t try to see from your viewpoint, I am limiting my possibility of learning. I need your piece. Together we can begin to put the pieces together. I…I wish we had everybody’s piece. But it’s just you and me, here, and I am asking—entreating you, dear—for yours.”
“Why mine?”
With the utmost delicateness he said to her, “If you’d rather not do it, then I would hate to force you. You are quite young, I notice. I think perhaps that you’re too young to understand. Which is, of course, why I value your piece so much. It is fresh and utterly unique.”
Naturally this inflamed Jessi and she said indignantly, “Well, I’m sorry if I think differently than you do. It’s just that I don’t see how you’re making any sense.”
“Please,” he said gently, patiently. “I can’t explain it. I want…the difference between our thoughts. I want to see the gap between our thoughts so that I can start to fill it in, to start to see everything. I didn’t choose to want this. I want it, though. I want to see during the day what I see at night. Through someone else’s eyes. Someone with an eye for color and has taste and elegance. My dear, you bring such elegance. Please.”
“You didn’t choose what you wanted,” she told Walter.
He licked his lips. “I suppose I didn’t,” he answered, vaguely confused. Before she could qualify her contention she was back in Errol’s attic, and he was lying comfortably under his purple paisley quilt, surrounded by fluffy pillows, his ancient fingers poking out over the edge of the covers by his chin, pointing at his toes, like a little boy having a bedtime story read to him. He seemed distinctly unaware that next to him, the picture of tranquility, Jessi was so upset she was actually shaking.
She began to speak but then was quieted by a silent urge inside of her; it seemed any movement or noise would scare him out of his peace, which would harm or maybe even kill him, she imagined, and no matter how maddening his esoteric explanations and nonsensical requests were, she was very, disproportionately fond of him. In his presence she felt a warmth she had not felt in years. Safe—she felt safe near him, and even in her insufferable state of anxiety which he had caused, she wanted nothing that might endanger that security.
She let out a long breath, committing to ignore his comments and do her job, feelings aside.
“All right,” she said, fighting to speak evenly, “please tell me what you want, and I’ll do my very best.”
She realized he’d been humming to himself, looking up at the sloped ceiling as if a movie were playing on it, just for him. Now he stopped, and his eyes darted over to her without disturbing his head’s nesting place in the pillows.
“Ah, yes. I’m so very glad, Jessi, to hear you say that. It is a great relief to me.”
“We were in Toledo,” she reminded him.
“You are too good to me. Yes, Toledo. It was a brilliant sort of emerald blue. What an interesting color! I don’t know that it’s found in nature, you know.”
“Hm. But you saw it in your dream?”
“Mm…‘saw’ is such a strong word, don’t you think? I would hesitate.”
She made a note and renewed her recent commitment to objectivity. “Okay. What else?”
When he had described the scene, a bewitching medieval scene of learning to waltz from a baron, or something, Jessi looked back at the notes she had taken. She had a page full of floating words and arrows and cross-outs and some diagrams which meant nothing to her, a list of adjectives attempting to describe a color he may or may not have seen, and some quotes she’d recorded verbatim, with the intention of deciphering them later. “I think I have it,” she told him, “but may I ask you to repeat your instructions? Just so we’re clear?”
“My instructions,” he said, and he sounded at once like a very young child and a very old man, like a teacher and a learner at once. He was both, he was all.
She waited.
“Please paint me my dreams,” he said, and with that, was no longer interested in talking.
Harlow was hopelessly confused.
“How is that like instructions?” she asked, her voice wavering on the edge of defeat.
“I think,” said Jessi, “if I know what you’re talking about, that you have it inside of you. The desire to do what you need to do. Almost that, you don’t want…what you don’t need. It is your job to figure out how to make it happen.”
“Yes,” agreed Walter, “yes, that’s it. Self-reflection can tell you quite a bit about yourself.”
She remembered how young she was when she first met Errol, when she attempted her first painting for him, when she brought it to him sheepishly, expecting to be rebuffed, unpaid, fired immediately. He loved it.
Part of what she loved in him was his complete disregard for the concept of right versus wrong. Because he was obsessed with the idea of Everything, he could not deny one or the other, so anything she said was valid. Everything she said, it seemed, when she was suggesting something new, a new idea or interpretation, he welcomed joyfully. He celebrated. He only rejected her comments when she said something literal or constraining or regressive.
She had never been around anyone who accepted her candid ideas as openly as she did, without judgment, with a willingness to consider them, with a desire to understand them. His dreams were just as much hers as his, because he allowed her to be a part of them. He asked her to paint something she couldn’t see, and when she finally let herself, it was the freest she had ever felt.
The schizophrenia dream scared her. There were no colors. There were no sounds. There were humanoid characters, lacking any warmth or human features; they were shadows of people, shells, they were more like death than life. There were foggy, blurry landscapes that did not entice, only depressed. There were no possibilities.
Painting a dancing scene with a flamboyant duke who had a nose as thin as air and a feathery boa the color of twirling—what did that even mean? She had painted it nonetheless, because Errol had said it matter-of-factly; he had made her believe it made sense; he had made her almost see it, and that was enough to get started. He trusted her the way a child trusts his mother, to do what is right, and the way a mother trusts her child, to imagine. He entrusted his dreams to her, and the only way she could do wrong was if she refused. Painting these synesthetic reveries, these excursions into life, these adventures that ignored parts of speech and grew entirely from free association and wordplay and an all-inclusive belief in the imagination—painting these was freedom. She could get lost in the colors and forget what words meant, or she could learn what a word meant based solely on its sound. The dreams became hers, and they shared with her the absurd joy, the disregard of “true” and “false,” the embrace of the world, the promise of endless possibility, of which they were made.
“I’d feel that I’d lost contact with myself,” she heard, “I don’t know what I would do.”
“Maybe you’d feel free,” she said before thinking, and she watched the swimming colors dissolve, and in their place, a swirling, unfocused sea of red and black and skin-white.
In the middle of an interminable conversation that was decidedly not about colors and words she found herself, struggling to pretend nothing was wrong, and Walter said flatly, “Ah, maybe. Does your motivation limit you?”
“No,” she said too quickly, almost forgetting that she was not within a dream-painting. “No, I mean. Not my motivation, no. But it might be freeing to live without constraints—” (she wished they had any idea) “—because if you’re not held to them…” (realizing that she was not making sense, she struggled to redirect her sentence) “You wouldn’t feel like you’d failed if you didn’t follow them.” There. She’d escaped her own trap, by barely making a point.
What would it be like to paint the schizophrenia dream? Could she enter it the way she had learned to enter the others? Would she find herself lost, or trapped, or both, amidst a backdrop of gray skies and claustrophobic horizons? Would she lose herself in the joylessness of confusion and a changing reality, of insincerity, of emptiness? It was the opposite of their usual dreams. Before, she and Errol had used sensory perception as law, so all that mattered were the senses and the delight they brought, their blissful exploration of the impossible, their effortless negation of the intellect, and in an impossible paradox, that intellect was challenged, validated, uplifted; now, in this dream, chaos reigned, lack of sensory stimuli abounded. The senses were utterly devastated and the intellect could not stand up straight without being pushed back down by contradictions and despair. There was no joy to be found in the senses’ play because the self was not intact. In order to paint it, she would have to undertake the same process she did to paint his happier dreams: She would have to enter into it as fully as she could, so that she could understand it, and interpret it, and visualize it. She would attempt to give it order, make it make sense, so that she could give it shape and put it on canvas, so that he in turn could look at it and understand his own dream, and now she understood why he wanted her to paint.
If Errol went there in his dream, she would have to follow him there.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
On Conciseness
Most novels try to only show what is necessary to convey the setting, establish the timbre, and develop the characters. David Foster Wallace includes almost everything, incuding the chemical names of the drugs they're taking, and the copyright number of the television they watch. He is the opposite of concise. The plot is buried under 1,000 pages of details. Some details are more relevant than others. But they all help tell the story in the most realistic way possible, because in real life, isn't that how it is? We are confronted with an infinity of facts and it is our job to decipher our own plot: in reality there is no detail-filter.
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