Wittgenstein's Mistress

by David Markson

  After so much discussion, when I went out for my walk yesterday I decided to walk through the woods rather than along the beach.

  Which is also to say that it is again tomorrow. And which I imagine needs no further explanation, by this juncture.

  Except to perhaps note that everything is still all lilac.

  What I do wish to mention, however, is that the poster had indisputably fallen some time ago, since it was covered with leaves. And with fluffy cottonwood seeds.

  The reason I wish to mention this is that through all of that time, in my head, the poster was still on the wall.

  In fact the very way I was able to verify that I had ever even been to the other house, some few pages ago, was by saying that I could distinctly remember the poster.

  On the wall.

  Where was the poster when it was on the wall in my head but was not on the wall in the other house?

  Where was my house, when all I was seeing was smoke but was thinking, there is my house?

  A certain amount of this is almost beginning to worry me, to tell the truth.

  I have no idea what amount, but a certain amount.

  Actually, I did well in college, in spite of frequently underlining sentences in books that had not been assigned.

  One is now forced to wonder if underlining sentences in Kierkegaard or Martin Heidegger might have shown more foresight, however.

  Or if some of these very questions may have even been answered as long ago as when Alexander the Great happened to raise his hand in class.

  Perhaps they were the identical questions that Ludwig Wittgenstein would have preferred to think about on the afternoon when Bertrand Russell made him waste his time by watching Guy de Maupassant row, in fact.

  Although come to think about it I once read somewhere that Ludwig Wittgenstein himself had never read one word of Aristotle.

  In fact I have more than once taken comfort in knowing this, there being so many people one has never read one word of one's self.

  Such as Ludwig Wittgenstein.

  Even if one was always told that Wittgenstein was too hard to read in any case.

  And to tell the truth I did once read one sentence by him after all, which I did not find difficult in the least.

  In fact I became very fond of what it said.

  You do not need a lot of money to buy a nice present, but you do need a lot of time, was the sentence.

  On my honor, Wittgenstein once said that.

  Still, yesterday, if he had been hearing the tanks coming off the assembly line in Tchaikovsky's sixth symphony, what exactly would Wittgenstein have been hearing?

  When people first heard Brahms's first symphony, all that most of them could say was that it sounded a lot like Beethoven's ninth symphony.

  Any donkey can see that, being what Brahms said in turn.

  I believe I would have liked Brahms.

  Well, and I certainly would have found it agreeable to tell Ludwig Wittgenstein how fond I am of his sentence.

  Then again I harbor sincere doubts that I would have liked John Ruskin, even if I have no idea what I have been saying that has now made me think about John Ruskin.

  Well, Ruskin being still another of the assignments I skipped, was doubtless what.

  And what I more truthfully happen to feel in regard to John Ruskin is sorry for him.

  This is because of the silly man having spent so many years looking at so many ancient statues that he almost went into shock on his wedding night, what with nobody ever having told him that living women had pubic hair.

  Normally, the person one might more probably feel sorry for under such circumstances would be Mrs. Ruskin. Except that she was sensible enough to soon go running off with John Everett Millais.

  When I comment that she was sensible, incidentally, I do not mean only because she ran off, but because it was with Millais, who had been a child prodigy. Which is to say that he had been painting from models with no clothes on since he was eleven.

  Sappho is said to have taught music, by the way.

  Well, and Achilles also played an instrument.

  I enjoy knowing both of those things.

  Although I additionally know that Achilles had a mistress at Troy, named Briseis. Some of that does begin to get a little confusing, finally.

  Actually, it is too bad that John Ruskin was not friendly with Robert Rauschenberg, who presumably could have thought up some way of rectifying things.

  Ludwig has such a silly look, for a name, when one types it.

  Doubtless I would have settled for calling a biography I had written myself simply Beethoven, too.

  Although now what I tardily might wish I had done, while I was at the other house, was to see if any of the versions in that one-volume selection from the plays were by the translator who made Euripides sound as if he had been under the influence of William Shakespeare.

  In spite of that, one has a fairly acute inkling as to when Medea is having her period also, incidentally.

  And if it is true that Odysseus was away from Ithaca for twenty years, Penelope would have had hers approximately two hundred and fifty times.

  I hardly mean to go on about this, even if one does now and again become preoccupied.

  Especially while sitting here with a puffy face.

  But all that I actually have in mind is all of that giveaway silence again, which would surely appear to verify that Samuel Butler was wrong about a woman having written the Odyssey.

  How curious. Even when I had already begun typing that sentence, I would have sworn I still had no idea who it was who had made that suggestion.

  So now I also remember that the translator who read Shakespeare too many times was named Gilbert Murray.

  Other than that I have no notion of who Samuel Butler was, however, unless perhaps he was the same Samuel Butler who wrote The Way of All Flesh.

  Although all I know about The Way of All Flesh, in turn, is that I would be pleased to hear that Ludwig Wittgenstein had not read one word of it.

  Gilbert Murray, I believe one can meanwhile assume, was somebody who translated Greek plays.

  When he was not reading Shakespeare.

  Rubens painted a version of Achilles hiding among the women also, by the way.

  Too, there is a drawing by him of Achilles slaying Hector, with a spear through the throat.

  One of the things people generally admired about Rubens, even if they were not always aware of it, was the way everybody in his paintings is always touching everybody else.

  Well, hardly including the way Achilles is touching Hector, obviously.

  Meantime I may have made an error, earlier, in saying that where Rupert Brooke died during the first World War was at the Hellespont, by which I mean the Dardanelles.

  Where I believe he actually died was on the island of Scyros, even though the latter is only a little bit south in the Aegean.

  I bring this up only because Scyros was the same island on which Achilles did all that hiding.

  Again, however, I am by no means implying that there is any significance in such connections.

  Even if the child born to the woman on Scyros who Achilles made pregnant grew up to become the very soldier who threw Hector's little boy over the walls.

  And after that became the husband of Helen's daughter Hermione.

  Which in either case still leaves me in the dark as to how I know about Samuel Butler.

  Although doubtless I read about him in a footnote, in one of the books about the Greeks I did pay attention to.

  At any rate I unquestionably paid enough attention to be certain that Achilles's son would have been far too young to be at Troy when he was supposed to. And that Hermione would have been practically old enough to be his mother.

  Then again I almost never read footnotes.

  Though once I did read a lovely poem by Rupert Brooke, about Helen growing older.

  Actually, the poem made her a nag.

  Besides Briseis, the name o
f another mistress I remember is Jeanne Hebuterne, who had a child by Modigliani. Although that particular story is one of the saddest I know.

  What happened was that Jeanne Hebuterne threw herself out of a window, on the morning after Modigliani died.

  While again being pregnant.

  The things women used to do, too, one is almost tempted to add.

  What do any of us ever truly know, however?

  And at least the word mistress had finally gone out of style.

  Meanwhile, Samuel Butler, the author of The Way of All Flesh, has suggested that the Odyssey was written by a woman, I am assuming the footnote said.

  Although doubtless there was rather more to it than that, it being a fairly safe guess that one does not change Homer from a man to a woman after three thousand years without including some sort of interesting explanation.

  I have no idea what that explanation may have been, however.

  Even though any number of people often insisted that there had never been any Homer to begin with, but were only various bards.

  There having been no pencils then either, being a reason for that insistence.

  Then again perhaps the footnote was in some book that had nothing to do with the Greeks at all.

  Many books frequently containing things that are connected to other things that one would have never expected them to be connected to.

  Even in these very pages that I am writing myself, for instance, one would have scarcely expected that T. E. Shaw would be connected to anything, even though I have only at this instant remembered that an additional book in the other house is a translation which was done by somebody with that identical name.

  What it is a translation of is the Odyssey, in fact.

  Then again, indicating that I now know approximately as much about T. E. Shaw as I know about Gilbert Murray may be less than the most impressive manner in which to make my point.

  In either case, doubtless the footnote was in no way connected to the opera about Medea, even if that also now happens to be in my head.

  Once, in Florence, sitting in a Land Rover with a right-hand drive and watching the piazza below Brunelleschi's dome fill up with snow, which must surely be rare, I listened to Maria Callas singing that.

  I had only a few moments earlier switched vehicles, after carrying several suitcases across one of the bridges over the Arno, and so had not even noticed immediately that the new tape deck was set to the on position.

  Medea was written by Luigi Cherubini, I might mention.

  Basically, I do that because of Luigi Cherubini being somebody I often mix up with Vincenzo Bellini, who wrote Norma, which is another opera that Maria Callas frequently sang.

  Although now and again I have mixed up Vincenzo Bellini with Giovanni Bellini in turn, even if Giovanni Bellini is one of the painters I have always most deeply admired.

  Well, even Albrecht Dürer, whom I admire to almost the same degree, once said that Bellini was still the best painter alive.

  I say still, since Dürer happened to be visiting in Venice at a time when Bellini was quite old.

  On the other hand this would have been before Dürer himself became practically as mad as Piero di Cosimo, presumably. Or as Hugo van der Goes.

  Well, or as Friedrich Nietzsche, for all that I was once extremely fond of one of Friedrich Nietzsche's sentences too.

  As a matter of fact still another person I was once fond of a sentence by, meaning Pascal, could doubtless be added to this same list, what with refusing to sit on a chair without an additional chair at either side of him, so as not to fall into space.

  In fact I now have to wonder if I did not mix up those two sentences as well, and that it was Pascal who wrote the one about wandering through an endless nothingness.

  I have no explanation for my generally speaking of Pascal as Pascal, but of Friedrich Nietzsche as Friedrich Nietzsche, incidentally.

  The question of the two dots over Dürer would appear to be basically the same as that of the two dots over Brontë, however.

  In either case, that remark about Giovanni Bellini would have naturally also had to have been made before Dürer died from a fever he caught in a Dutch swamp, where he had gone to look at a stranded whale.

  Although doubtless it was conversely made long after Bellini himself had become Andrea Mantegna's brother-in-law.

  I am now perhaps showing off.

  But where I truly did listen to Maria Callas singing Medea, on second thought, was in a Volkswagen van filled with picture postcards near a town called Savona, which is some distance from Florence although also in Italy.

  I had not noticed the tape deck in the van either, as it happened, since it had not been playing while I was driving.

  Only when the van went over an embankment and turned upside down in the Mediterranean did the tape deck begin to play.

  I was not able to think of any explanation for why it did that.

  Neither can I think of one now.

  As a matter of fact the tape deck did not begin to play as soon as the van turned upside down either.

  Actually I had already gotten out and was standing in the Mediterranean up to my waist before it started.

  What I was doing was trying to get some of the dirt out of my hair, from where the rubber mat from the floor had fallen on top of me.

  While I was doing that, I understood that my shoulder had gotten hurt.

  Doubtless it was not until I became convinced that my shoulder had not gotten hurt badly, in fact, that I began to hear Maria Callas.

  Which is to say that perhaps she had been singing before that after all.

  Good heavens, here I have been driving a car which is now upside down in the Mediterranean and I am hardly injured at all, I was thinking, which is assuredly something else that would have kept me from hearing her more quickly.

  In addition to which I was doubtless distressed over how wet I had gotten.

  Perhaps I have not mentioned how wet I had gotten.

  Well, doubtless I merely assumed it was unnecessary to mention that, already having mentioned being up to my bottom in the Mediterranean.

  Too, I have never been on my hands and knees on the inside of the roof of a car before, being doubtless one more thing that I was thinking.

  Though perhaps I had also noticed the sign by then, saying Savona.

  I have no recollection as to whether the sign indicated that Savona was ahead of me or behind me, however.

  As a matter of fact I have no recollection of ever having driven through any town with that name either, either in the vehicle which went over the embankment or in the one that I switched to subsequently.

  Had I driven through it in the vehicle which went over the embankment, I would have had to have been there already, naturally.

  Then again, considering how long the embankment appeared to have been deteriorating, perhaps there had been some sort of old detour around Savona altogether.

  As a general rule I preferred to avoid detours, however.

  Which is only to say that my sense of direction is sometimes less than extraordinary.

  Given a choice between driving off immediately on a road which turned away from the embankment, for instance, or walking until it appeared safe to continue straight on, I would have walked.

  Although as a matter of fact there was an identical Volkswagen van not a stone's throw from where I was standing.

  That one was full of soccer equipment.

  Some of the equipment turned out to be shirts, as it happened, with the name Savona on their fronts.

  Being wet, as I have mentioned, I changed into one of those.

  In fact I folded several others onto the seat, for the same reason.

  Not that I would have been driving until this point without additional clothing of my own, of course, what with still possessing baggage in those days.

  There it all was, upside down in the Mediterranean, however.

  Along with the picture postcards.


  Most of the postcards showed identical views of the Borghese Gallery, in Rome, incidentally.

  Although some few happened to be of the Via Vittorio Veneto, which is almost directly below the Borghese Gallery.

  The reverse of that statement being equally true, obviously.

  Modigliani was only thirty-five, by the way.

  Now that I think about it, I may have worn that soccer shirt all the way to Paris, even.

  Doubtless I stopped sitting on the other shirts after the rest of my own garments dried, however.

  As a matter of fact I waited for them to become partly dry before I started driving.

  What I did was take off my wraparound denim skirt and my cotton jersey and my underpants and leave them in the sunshine, and then put on the shirt that said Savona while I was waiting.

  While I was waiting I also continued to listen to Maria Callas singing Medea.

  The shirt was much too large, incidentally, hanging almost to my knees.

  Still, for some reason I enjoyed wearing it.

  In fact the shirt also had a numeral on it, although I have forgotten what numeral.

  Doubtless this was because the numeral was on its back.

  Where the shirt said Savona was across my breasts.

  Although where it actually said that was all the way from under one arm to the other, because of how much too large the shirt was.

  None of which answers the question as to whether I drove through Savona or not, meanwhile.

  The fact that I do not remember doing so is in no way a verification that I did not, I do not believe.

  One can drive through any number of towns without knowing the names of those towns.

  Well, and especially in Russia, as I have perhaps even said, where even Fyodor Dostoievski could have driven right past St.

  Petersburg without knowing it was St. Petersburg.

  For that matter I myself had once wished to stop at Corinth, in Greece, but only some time later discovered that I had already been through Corinth and gone.

  This was on a morning when I was driving counterclockwise, among mountains, from Athens toward Sparta, as it happens.

  Which is to say that it was on the very morning after I had believed that somebody had called my name, beneath the Acropolis, and not far at all from the intersection of Katharine Hepburn Avenue and Archimedes Road.