Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  Quickly, quickly. Heidegger suggests that “Nothing nothings”—a calm, sensible idea with which Sartre, among others, disagrees. (What Heidegger thinks about nothing is not nothing.) Heidegger points us toward dread. Having borrowed a cup of dread from Kierkegaard, he spills it, and in the spreading stain he finds (like a tea-leaf reader) Nothing. Original dread, for Heidegger, is what intolerabilizes all of what-is, offering us a momentary glimpse of what is not, finally a way of bumping into Being. But Heidegger is far too grand for us; we applaud his daring but are ourselves performing a homelier task, making a list. Our list can in principle never be completed, even if we summon friends or armies to help out (nothing is not an army nor is it an army’s history, weapons, morale, doctrines, victories, or defeats—there, that’s done). And even if we were able, with much labor, to exhaust the possibilities, get it all inscribed, name everything nothing is not, down to the last rogue atom, the one that rolled behind the door, and had thoughtfully included ourselves, the makers of the list, on the list—the list itself would remain. Who’s got a match?

  But if we cannot finish, we can at least begin. If what exists is in each case the totality of the series of appearances which manifests it, then nothing must be characterized in terms of its non-appearances, no-shows, incorrigible tardiness. Nothing is what keeps us waiting (forever). And it’s not Charlie Is My Darling, nor would it be Mary if I had a darling so named nor would it be my absence-of-darling had I neglected to search out and secure one. And it is not the yellow curtains behind which fauns and astronauts embrace, behind which flesh crawls in all directions and flickertail squirrels fall upward into the trees. And death is not nothing and the cheering sections of consciousness (“Do not go gentle into that good night”) are not nothing nor are holders of the contrary view (“Burning to be gone,” says Beckett’s Krapp, into his Sony). What can I tell you about the rape of Lucrece by the beastly nephew of proud Tarquin? Only this: the rapist wore a coat with raglan sleeves. Not much, but not nothing. Put it on the list. For an ampler account, see Shakespeare. And you’ve noted the anachronism, Lord Raglan lived long after the event, but errors, too, are not nothing. Put it on the list. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. What a wonderful list! How joyous the notion that, try as we may, we cannot do other than fail and fail absolutely and that the task will remain always before us, like a meaning for our lives. Hurry. Quickly. Nothing is not a nail.

  A Manual for Sons

  (1) Mad fathers

  (2) Fathers as teachers

  (3) On horseback, etc.

  (4) The leaping father

  (5) Best way to approach

  (6) Ys

  (7) Names of

  (8) Voices of

     Sample voice, A

           B

           C

  (9) Fanged, etc.

  (10) Hiram or Saul

  (11) Color of fathers

  (12) Dandling

  (13) A tongue-lashing

  (14) The falling father

  (15) Lost fathers

  (16) Rescue of fathers

  (17) Sexual organs

  (18) Yamos

  (19) “Responsibility”

  (20) Death of

  (21) Patricide a poor idea, and summation

  Mad fathers stalk up and down the boulevards, shouting. Avoid them, or embrace them, or tell them your deepest thoughts—it makes no difference, they have deaf ears. If their dress is covered with sewn-on tin cans and their spittle is like a string of red boiled crayfish running head-to-tail down the front of their tin cans, serious impairment of the left brain is present. If, on the other hand, they are simply barking (no tin cans, spittle held securely in the pouch of the cheek), they have been driven to distraction by the intricacies of living with others. Go up to them and, stilling their wooden clappers by putting your left hand between the hinged parts, say you’re sorry. If the barking ceases, this does not mean that they have heard you, it only means they are experiencing erotic thoughts of abominable luster. Permit them to enjoy these images for a space, and then strike them sharply in the nape with the blade of your tanned right hand. Say you’re sorry again. It won’t get through to them (because their brains are mush) but in pronouncing the words your body will assume an attitude that conveys, in every country of the world, sorrow—this language they can understand. Gently feed them with bits of leftover meat you are carrying in your pockets. First hold the meat in front of their eyes, so that they can see what it is, and then point to their mouths, so that they know that the meat is for them. Mostly, they will open their mouths at this point. If they do not, throw the meat in between barks. If the meat does not get all the way into the mouth but lands upon (say) the upper lip, hit them again in the neck; this often causes the mouth to pop open and the meat sticking to the upper lip to fall into the mouth. Nothing may work out in the way I have described; in this eventuality, you can do not much for a mad father except listen, for a while, to his babble. If he cries aloud, “Stomp it, emptor!”, then you must attempt to figure out the code. If he cries aloud, “The fiends have killed your horse!”, note down in your notebook the frequency with which the words “the” and “your” occur in his tirade. If he cries aloud, “The cat’s in its cassock and flitter-te-bee moreso stomp it!”, remember that he has already asked you once to “stomp it” and that this must refer to something you are doing. So stomp it.

  •

  Fathers are teachers of the true and not-true, and no father ever knowingly teaches what is not true. In a cloud of unknowing, then, the father proceeds with his instruction. Tough meat should be hammered well between two stones before it is placed on the fire, and should be combed with a hair comb and brushed with a hairbrush before it is placed on the fire. On arriving at night, with thirsty cattle, at a well of doubtful character, one deepens the well first with a rifle barrel, then with a pigsticker, then with a pencil, then with a ramrod, then with an icepick, “bringing the well in” finally with needle and thread. Do not forget to clean your rifle barrel immediately. To find honey, tie a feather or straw to the leg of a bee, throw him into the air, and peer alertly after him as he flies slowly back to the hive. Nails, boiled for three hours, give off a rusty liquid that, when combined with oxtail soup, dries to a flame color, useful for warding off tuberculosis or attracting native women. Do not forget to hug the native women immediately. To prevent feet from blistering, soap the inside of the stocking with a lather of raw egg and steel wool, which together greatly soften the leather of the foot. Delicate instruments (such as surveying instruments) should be entrusted to a porter who is old and enfeebled; he will totter along most carefully. For a way of making an ass not to bray at night, lash a heavy child to his tail; it appears that when an ass wishes to bray he elevates his tail, and if the tail cannot be elevated, he has not the heart. Savages are easily satisfied with cheap beads in the following colors: dull white, dark blue, and vermillion red. Expensive beads are often spurned by them. Nonsavages should be given cheap books in the following colors: dead white, brown, and seaweed. Books praising the sea are much sought after. Satanic operations should not be conducted without first consulting the Bibliothèque Nationale. When Satan at last appears to you, try not to act surprised. Then get down to hard bargaining. If he likes neither the beads nor the books, offer him a cold beer. Then—

  Fathers teach much that is of value. Much that is not.

  •

  Fathers in some countries are like cotton bales; in others, like clay pots or jars; in others, like reading, in a newspaper, a long account of a film you have already seen and liked immensely but do not wish to see again, or read about. Some fathers have triangular eyes. Some fathers, if you ask them for the time of day, spit silver dollars. Some fathers live in old filthy cabins high in the mountains, and make murderous noises deep in their throats when their amaz
ingly sharp ears detect, on the floor of the valley, an alien step. Some fathers piss either perfume or medicinal alcohol, distilled by powerful body processes from what they have been, all day long, drinking. Some fathers have only one arm. Others have an extra arm, in addition to the normal two, hidden inside their coats. On that arm’s fingers are elaborately wrought golden rings that, when a secret spring is pressed, dispense charity. Some fathers have made themselves over into convincing replicas of beautiful sea animals, and some into convincing replicas of people they hated as children. Some fathers are goats, some are milk, some teach Spanish in cloisters, some are exceptions, some are capable of attacking world economic problems and killing them, but have not yet done so; they are waiting for one last vital piece of data. Some fathers strut but most do not, except inside; some fathers pose on horseback but most do not, except in the eighteenth century; some fathers fall off the horses they mount but most do not; some fathers, after falling off the horse, shoot the horse, but most do not; some fathers fear horses but most fear, instead, women; some fathers masturbate because they fear women; some fathers sleep with hired women because they fear women who are free; some fathers never sleep at all, but are endlessly awake, staring at their futures, which are behind them.

  •

  The leaping father is not encountered often, but exists. Two leaping fathers together in a room can cause accidents. The best idea is to chain heavy-duty truck tires to them, one in front, one in back, so that their leaps become pathetic small hops. That is all their lives amount to anyhow, and it is good for them to be able to see, in the mirror, their whole life-histories performed, in a sequence perhaps five minutes long, of upward movements which do not, really, get very far or achieve very much. Without the tires, the leaping father has a nuisance value which may rapidly transform itself into a serious threat. Ambition is the core of this problem (it may even be ambition for you, in which case you are in even greater danger than had been supposed), and the core may be removed by open-liver surgery (the liver being the home of the humours, as we know). There is something very sad about all leaping fathers, about leaping itself. I prefer to keep my feet on the ground, in situations where the ground has not been cut out from under me, by the tunneling father. The latter is usually piebald in color, and supremely notable for his nonflogitiousness.

  •

  The best way to approach a father is from behind. Thus if he chooses to hurl his javelin at you, he will probably miss. For in the act of twisting his body around, and drawing back his hurling arm, and sighting along the shaft, he will give you time to run, to make reservations for a flight to another country. To Rukmani, there are no fathers there. In that country virgin corn gods huddle together under a blanket of ruby chips and flexible cement, through the long wet Rukmanian winter, and in some way not known to us produce offspring. The new citizens are greeted with dwarf palms and certificates of worth, are led (or drawn on runnerless sleds) out into the zocalo, the main square of the country, and their augenscheinlich parentages recorded upon a great silver bowl. Look! In the walnut paneling of the dining hall, a javelin! The paneling is wounded in a hundred places.

  •

  I knew a father named Ys who had many many children and sold every one of them to the bone factories. The bone factories will not accept angry or sulking children, therefore Ys was, to his children, the kindest and most amiable father imaginable. He fed them huge amounts of calcium candy and the milk of minks, told them interesting and funny stories, and led them each day in their bone-building exercises. “Tall sons,” he said, are best.” Once a year the bone factories sent a little blue van to Ys’s house.

  •

  The names of fathers. Father are named:

  A’albiel

  Aariel

  Aaron

  Aba

  Ababaloy

  Abaddon

  Aban

  Abathur

  Abbott

  Abdia

  Abel

  Abiou

  Achsah

  Adam

  Adeo

  Adityas

  Adlai

  Adnai

  Adoil

  Adossia

  Aeon

  Aeshma

  Af

  Afkiel

  Agason

  Agwend

  Albert

  •

  Fathers have voices, and each voice has a terribilità of its own. The sound of a father’s voice is various: like film burning, like marble being pulled screaming from the face of a quarry, like the clash of paper clips by night, lime seething in a lime pit, or batsong. The voice of a father can shatter your glasses. Some fathers have tetchy voices, others tetched-in-the-head voices. It is understood that fathers, when not robed in the father-role, may be farmers, heldentenors, tinsmiths, racing drivers, fistfighters, or salesmen Most are salesmen. Many fathers did not wish, especially, to be fathers; the thing came upon them, seized them, by accident, or by someone else’s careful design, or by simple clumsiness on someone’s part. Nevertheless this class of father—the inadvertent—is often among the most tactful, light-handed, and beautiful of fathers. If a father has fathered twelve or twenty-seven times, it is well to give him a curious look—this father does not loathe himself enough. This father frequently wears a blue wool watch cap, on stormy nights, to remind himself of a manly past—action in the North Atlantic. Many fathers are blameless in all ways, and these fathers are either sacred relics people are touched with to heal incurable illnesses, or texts to be studied, generation after generation, to determine how this idiosyncrasy may be maximized. Text-fathers are usually bound in blue.

  The father’s voice is an instrument of the most terrible pertinaciousness.

  SAMPLE VOICE, A.

  Son, I got bad news for you. You won’t understand the whole purport of it, ’cause you’re only six, a little soft in the head too, that fontanelle never did close properly, I wonder why. But I can’t delay it no longer, son, I got to tell you the news. There ain’t no malice in it, son, I hope you believe me. The thing is, you got to go to school, son, and get socialized. That’s the news. You’re turnin’ pale, son, I don’t blame you. It’s a terrible thing, but there it is. We’d socialize you here at home, your mother and I, except that we can’t stand to watch it, it’s that dreadful. And your mother and I who love you and always have and always will are a touch sensitive, son. We don’t want to hear your howls and screams. It’s going to be miserable, son, but you won’t hardly feel it. And I know you’ll do well and won’t do anything to make us sad, your mother and I who love you. I know you’ll do well and won’t run away or fall down in fits either. Son, your little face is pitiful. Son, we can’t just let you roam the streets like some kind of crazy animal. Son, you got to get your natural impulses curbed. You got to get your corners knocked off, son, you got to get realistic. They going to vamp on you at that school, kid. They going to tear up your ass. They going to learn you how to think, you’ll get your letters there, your letters and your figures, your verbs and all that. Your mother and I could socialize you here at home but it would be too painful for your mother and I who love you. You’re going to meet the stick, son, the stick going to walk up to you and say howdy-do. You’re going to learn about your country at that school, son, oh beautiful for spacious skies. They going to lay just a raft of stuff on you at that school and I caution you not to resist, it ain’t appreciated. Just take it as it comes and you’ll be fine, son, just fine. You got to do right, son, you got to be realistic. They’ll be other kids in that school, kid, and ever’ last one of ’em will be after your lunch money. But don’t give ’em your lunch money, son, put it in your shoe. If they come up against you tell ’em the other kids already got it. That way you fool ’em, you see, son? What’s the matter with you? And watch out for the custodian, son, he’s mean. He don’t like
his job. He wanted to be president of a bank. He’s not. It’s made him mean. Watch out for that sap he carries on his hip. Watch out for the teacher, son, she’s sour. Watch out for her tongue, it’ll cut you. She’s got a bad mouth on her, son, don’t balk her if you can help it. I got nothin’ against the schools, kid, they just doin’ their job. Hey kid what’s the matter with you kid? And if this school don’t do the job we’ll find one that can. We’re right behind you, son, your mother and I who love you. You’ll be gettin’ your sports there, your ball sports and your blood sports and watch out for the coach, he’s a disappointed man, some say a sadist but I don’t know about that. You got to develop your body, son. If they shove you, shove back. Don’t take nothin’ off nobody. Don’t show fear. Lay back and watch the guy next to you, do what he does. Except if he’s a damn fool. If he’s a damn fool you’ll know he’s a damn fool ’cause everybody’ll be hittin’ on him. Let me tell you ‘bout that school, son. They do what they do ’cause I told them to do it. That’s why they do it. They didn’t think up those ideas their own selves. I told them to do it. Me and your mother who love you, we told them to do it. Behave yourself, kid! Do right! You’ll be fine there, kid, just fine. What’s the matter with you, kid? Don’t be that way. I hear the ice-cream man outside, son. You want to go and see the ice-cream man? Go get you an ice cream, son, and make sure you get your sprinkles. Go give the ice-cream man your quarter, son. And hurry back.