Reader's Block
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Sacajawea.
Fanny Imlay committed suicide with laudanum.
Rubens was fifty-three when he married his second wife Hélène. Who was sixteen.
No more behind
But such a day tomorrow as today
And to be boy eternal.
The second Brandenburg concerto, on an indestructible phonograph disc, is drifting eternally in space affixed to Voyager II
Anna Comnena.
Alfonsina Storni drowned herself in the Mar del Plata. Having mailed off her final manuscript that morning.
Ninety feet between bases is the greatest invention of Western man.
Jean Giraudoux was an anti-Semite.
Cavafy, acknowledged as the great Greek poet of his time. Who lived his entire writing life in Egypt.
The names of the dead.
Stanley Badner.
Carlo Crivelli was once imprisoned in Venice for kidnapping and rape.
And later knighted in Naples for creating altarpieces like the Madonna della Rondine.
Bruno Bettelheim committed suicide.
The shaving lotion that Malcolm Lowry drank in Manhattan in 1954 was Mennen Skin Bracer.
Protagonist will still have the same brand on a shelf at the cemetery.
O che dolce cosa è questa prospettiva!
1couldn't do that to him.
Said Nora, at the suggestion that Joyce be given a Catholic funeral.
The several ancient oaks. Reader's nighttime image of only the faintest glow from a single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window.
And?
Saint Jude?
Gertrud Kolmar died at Auschwitz.
Etty Hillesum died at Auschwitz.
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress.
And curst be he that moves my bones.
Remedios Varo was rumored to have committed suicide.
The ghost in the machine.
Alexander died in bed. Legend says that near the end he tried to drown himself in the Euphrates, hoping his body would be lost and his legions would believe he had been carried off as a god.
Roxane found him and shooed him back.
How does Protagonist spend a day like Thanksgiving?
Or any holiday?
How does Protagonist spend a simple Sunday?
Juvenal was an anti-Semite.
And can you not understand that having told you all this, I shall forever despise you for having heard it?
Someone wished Protagonist a merry Christmas in passing on the street yesterday?
Potestas Clavium.
Botticelli's father was a tanner.
Maria Callas was rumored to have committed suicide.
Nelly Sachs was gotten out of Nazi Germany at the last possible moment. On a flight to Stockholm arranged by Selma Lagerlof.
With Reader well aware that he has still not satisfactorily thought Protagonist through.
Once, indisputably, more of an existence than his cartons and the recusant weeds amid the headstones of strangers.
How has Protagonist managed to so calamitously fuck up his life?
More than fifty thousand people followed Sartre's cortege to Montparnasse Cemetery.
Where someone in the crowd fell into the grave on top of his coffin.
Truman Capote was an anti-Semite.
Or is he in some peculiar way perhaps thinking of an autobiography?
Did Jesus ever laugh?
Thirty-six publishers rejected The Ginger Man.
Houses. Automobiles. Summer homes.
Indulgences.
Jules Pascin committed suicide by slashing his wrists. And wrote, Lucy, forgiveness, to his mistress in blood on a wall.
Flaubert and Baudelaire were prosecuted for immorality in the same year.
Y la vida no es noble, ni buena, ni sagrada.
The skull, lower left foreground, a redundant nearer memento mori.
He was a moment in the conscience of mankind.
A one-legged woman in a conspicuously short skirt.
Kant's habits were so precise that shopkeepers in Konigsberg adjusted their clocks by his daily three-thirty walk.
Thomas Lovell Beddoes committed suicide.
A Christ of our neighborhood, Ortega called Don Quixote.
Can Reader force any of it all?
Or will memory still persist in sidetracking imagination?
A Wehrmacht officer in Picasso's studio during the occupation of Paris, re a photograph of Guernica: Did you do this?
To which Picasso: No, you did.
I grow older ever learning many things.
Said Solon.
Abraham Cowley died after sleeping off a drunk in a damp pasture.
As above, so below.
Remembering a Fern, lovely though fragile, who tolerated baseball games.
Remembering a Kate, strikingly handsome, who plucked a knotted root from a river in Spain.
Renoir was an anti-Semite.
Michelangelo died in Rome. And had to be smuggled out, quite literally wrapped like merchandise, to be buried at Florence rather than in St. Peter's.
Vasari's reportage in this instance authoritative.
Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended thee and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell.
Ross Lockridge committed suicide by running a hose from his exhaust pipe into his car.
Books are a load of crap, a Larkin line says.
Ernest Dowson was dead, penniless, at thirty-two. Of absinthe and influenza.
Nero kicked Poppaea in the stomach when she was pregnant. And killed her. The Monteverdi Poppaea opera concluding rather earlier in her biography than this.
Remembering a lithe, dark-eyed girl named Christine, who danced.
Remembering a Josie. And a Liz. And a Susan.
Marina Tsvetayeva hanged herself. And was buried no one knows where.
C. S. Lewis, on overly romanticizing the distant past: Think of a world without anesthetics.
A miniature American flag, fixed beside one of the graves.
Will Protagonist have ever found flowers?
The woman, bearing any?
Four of Freud's five sisters were incinerated by the Germans in 1944.
Four.
Aeschylus was a foot soldier at Marathon. And wanted that, rather than his plays, noted in his epitaph.
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion.
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
And only the day before yesterday, once having seemed.
Remembering a Rachel and an Anne and a Lisa.
Remembering Piero di Cosimo's Simonetta Vespucci.
By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down, yea, we wept.
Was Peter Warlock the only serious composer who ever committed suicide?
Tchaikovsky and Schumann and Hugo Wolf having tried, but unsuccessfully.
Berlioz also, though being histrionic only.
Who is the woman at the grave?
Erinna ofTelos.
Chaucer was the first poet buried in Westminster Abbey. Simply having lived in Westminster.
I have come to this place because.
Are Saint Francis of Assisi's stigmata the earliest ever recorded?
Shakespeare's mother and father were illiterate. And only one of his two daughters, Susanna, could sign her name. The other, Judith, made a mark.
Shakespeare's daughters. His one son, Hamnet, Judith's twin, died at eleven.
Before certain dawns at the gatehouse, like a windborne echo out of Protagonist's own childhood, the wailing of a far-off train?
Mitigating, will it, the morning's recollection of the emptiness of the day before?
Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come?
Remembering yet others?
Some undeniably casual, some fugitive.
Some even now dead?
Nonetheless.
Katherine Hamlet.
Of making many books there is no end.
I have not read a novel in any language in very many years, Joyce once mentioned.
Van Gogh shot himself in the chest.
And then walked home and took two days to die.
No survivor could recall having ever seen a single bird flying near any of the Nazi death camps.
Arbeit macht frei.
Mozart, the Ave, verum corpus.
A street in Paris, the late 1890s:
Madame Melba, you don't know who I am? I'm Oscar Wilde, and I'm going to do a terrible thing. I'm going to ask you for money.
Dostoievsky was an anti-Semite.
Who does walk the winter beach at water's edge in the distance far ahead of Protagonist?
Emma Bovary.
Anna Karenina.
Othello.
Jocasta.
Brünnhilde.
Hedda Gabler.
Romeo and Juliet.
Werther.
Dido.
Cio-Cio-San.
Antigone and Haemon.
Miss Julie.
Axel Heyst.
Quentin Compson.
Aïda.
Inspector Javert.
Mynheer Peeperkorn. Leo Naphta.
Smerdyakov.
Rudolf Virag.
Edna Pontellier.
Hero.
Manrico's Leonora.
Cheri.
Goneril.
Richard Cory.
McWatt.
Tosca.
Stavrogin. Kirillov.
Martin Eden.
Hurstwood.
Pyramus and Thisbe.
Roithamer.
Pierre Glendinning.
Winnie Verloc.
George Wilson.
Hedvig Ekdal.
Christine Mannon. Orin Mannon.
Willy Loman.
Senta.
Peter Kien.
Maggie Johnson.
Peter Grimes.
Bess, the landlord's black-eyed daughter.
Svidrigailov.
James O. Incandenza.
Konstantin Treplev.
Bartleby.
Septimus Smith.
Deirdre.
Seymour Glass.
Ophelia.
Samson.
Eustacia Vye.
Phaedra.
Alcestis.
Launcelot.
Shakespeare's daughters. His last surviving grandchild, Susanna's daughter Elizabeth, would live until 1670.
But leaving no further descendants.
A daughter of Dante's, called Antonia, went into a nunnery at his death.
And adopted the name Sister Beatrice.
Virtually every second book in every library in the world is irreparably deteriorating because of brittle paper and acid content.
Jesus? he murmured, Jesus—of Nazareth? I cannot call him to mind.
Protagonist's children?
With Reader well aware that he has categorically not thought that through either.
As with how much monumentally else?
Nine hundred and sixty Jews committed suicide at Masada, in 73 a.d., rather than surrender to the Roman legions that had lately sacked Jerusalem.
Two small rough orange stones.
Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.
Virgil died at fifty. Shakespeare was fifty-two. Dante, fifty-six.
Petrarch, seventy, died at his desk. Having been reading.
Yis-ga-dal v'yis-ka-dash sh'may rab-bo.
At modest estimate, at least 40 percent of the entire population of Europe was annihilated during the four years of the Black Death.
His inevitable portage of cartons? Beside a stairway to no passage?
In accommodations at a derelict graveyard? Where nobody comes, where nobody calls?
Now are fields of corn where Troy once was.
Dead?
She?
I would give you some violets, but they withered all, when my father died.
Vanishing point.
Toward what final grievous contemplation amid the disarray?
The sun will run out of hydrogen and commence to die in approximately one billion, one hundred million years.
In the interim, what more for the elderly man in the house at the beach but to saunter out among the sandpipers and the gulls one afternoon, and stand for a time abstractedly in late autumn solitude, and then walk unremarkably into the sea?
In the interim, what more for the elderly man in the house at the cemetery but to pause at his accustomed window one afternoon, and gaze for a time abstractedly at the ranks of still white stone beyond, and then turn unremarkably to the gas?
And Reader? And Reader?
In the end one experiences only one's self.
Said Nietzsche.
Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.
Wastebasket.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Markson is the author of Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), Springer's Progress (1977), Going Down (1970), and The Ballad of Dingus Magee (1966). He is also the author of a critical study of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. Except for periods in Mexico and Europe, Markson has spent most of his adult life in New York City.