Speaking of the human body, Klee said: One bone alone achieves nothing.
Pondering this, people placed lamps on all of the street corners, and sofas next to the lamps. People sat on the sofas and read Spinoza there, an interesting glare cast on the pages by the dithering inconstant traffic lights. At other points, on the street, four-poster beds were planted, and loving couples slept or watched television together, the sets connected to the empty houses behind them by long black cables. Elsewhere, on the street, conversation pits were chipped out of the concrete, floored with Adam rugs, and lengthy discussions were held. Do we really need a War College? was a popular subject. Favorite paintings were lashed to the iron railings bordering the sidewalks, a Gainsborough, a van Dongen, a perfervid evocation of Umbrian mental states, an important dark-brown bruising of Arches paper by a printer of modern life.
One man hung all of his shirts on the railing bordering a sidewalk, he had thirty-nine, and another was brushing his teeth in his bathrobe, another was waxing his fine moustache, a woman was marking cards with a little prickly roller so that her husband, the gambler, would win forever. A man said, “Say, mon, fix me some of dem chitlins you fry so well,” and another man said, “Howard, my son, I am now going to show you how to blow glass”—he dipped his glass-blowing tube into a furnace of bubbling glass, there on the street, and blew a rathskeller of beer glasses, each goldenly full.
Inside the abandoned houses subway trains rushed in both directions and genuine nameless animals ate each other with ghastly fervor—
Monday. Many individuals are grasping hold of the sewer grates with both hands, a manifestation, in the words of S. Moholy-Nagy, of the tragic termination of the will to fly.
The Sea of Hesitation
“IF JACKSON had pressed McClellan in White Oak Swamp,” Francesca said. “If Longstreet had proceeded vigorously on the first day at Second Manassas. If we had had the 40,000 pairs of shoes we needed when we entered Maryland. If Bloss had not found the envelope containing the two cigars and the copy of Lee’s Secret Order No. 191 at Frederick. If the pneumonia had not taken Jackson. If Ewell had secured possession of Cemetery Heights on the first day of Gettysburg. If Pickett’s charge . . . If Early’s march into the Valley . . . If we had had sufficient food for our troops at Petersburg. If our attack on Fort Stedman had succeeded. If Pickett and Fitzhugh Lee had not indulged in a shad bake at Five Forks. If there had been stores and provisions as promised at Amelia Court House. If Ewell had not been captured at Saylor’s Creek together with sixteen artillery pieces and four hundred wagons. If Lee had understood Lincoln—his mind, his larger intentions. If there had been a degree of competence in our civilian administration equal to that exhibited by the military. Then, perhaps, matters would have been brought to a happier conclusion.”
“Yes,” I said.
Francesca is slightly obsessed. But one must let people talk about what they want to talk about. One must let people do what they want to do.
This morning in the mail I received an abusive letter from a woman in Prague.
Dear Greasy Thomas:
You cannot understand what a pig you are. You are a pig, you idiot. You think you understand things but there is nothing you understand, nothing, idiot pig-swine. You have not wisdom and you have no discretion and nothing can be done without wisdom and discretion. How did a pig-cretin like yourself ever wriggle into life? Why do you exist still, vulgar swine? If you don’t think I am going to inform the government of your inappropriate continued existence, a stain on the country’s face . . . You can expect Federal Marshals in clouds very soon, cretin-hideous-swine, and I will laugh as they haul you away in their green vans, ugly toad. You know nothing about anything, garbage-face, and the idea that you would dare “think” for others (I know you are not capable of “feeling”) is so wildly outrageous that I would laugh out loud if I were not sick of your importunate posturing, egregious fraud-pig. You are not even an honest pig which is at least of some use in the world, you are rather an ocean of pig-dip poisoning everything you touch. I do not like you at all.
Love,
Jinka
I read the letter twice. She is certainly angry. But one must let people do what they want to do.
I work for the City. In the Human Effort Administration. My work consists of processing applications. People apply for all sorts of things. I approve all applications and buck them upwards, where they are usually disapproved. Upstairs they do not agree with me, that people should be permitted to do what they want to do. Upstairs they have different ideas. But “different ideas” are welcomed, in my particular cosmos.
Before I worked for the City I was interested in changing behavior. I thought behavior could be changed. I had a B.A. in psychology, was working on an M.A. I was into sensory deprivation. I did sensory deprivation studies for a while at McGill and later at Princeton.
At McGill we inhabited the basement of Taub Hall, believed to be the first building in the world devoted exclusively to the study of hatred. But we were not studying hatred, we were doing black-box work and the hatred people kindly lent us their basement. I was in charge of the less intelligent subjects (the subjects were divided into less intelligent and more intelligent). I spent two years in the basement of Taub Hall and learned many interesting things.
The temperature of the head does not decrease in sleep. The temperature of the rest of the body does.
There I sat for weeks on end monitoring subjects who had half Ping-Pong balls taped over their eyes and a white-noise generator at 40db singing in their ears. I volunteered as a subject and, gratified at being assigned to the “more intelligent” group, spent many many hours in the black box with half Ping-Pong balls taped over my eyes and the white-noise generator emitting its obliterating whine/whisper. Although I had some intricate Type 4 hallucinations, nothing much else happened to me. Except . . . I began to wonder if behavior should be changed. That there was “behavior” at all seemed to me a small miracle.
I pondered going on to stress theory, wherein one investigates the ways in which the stressed individual reacts to stress, but decided suddenly to do something else instead. I decided to take a job with the Human Effort Administration and to try, insofar as possible, to let people do what they want to do.
I am aware that my work is, in many ways, meaningless.
A call from Honor, my ex-wife. I’ve promised her a bed for her new apartment.
“Did you get it?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve been busy. Doing things.”
“But what about the bed?”
“I told you I’d take care of it.”
“Yes but when?”
“Some people can get their own beds for their new apartments.”
“But that’s not the point. You promised.”
“That was in the first flush of good feeling and warmth. When you said you were coming back to town.”
“Now you don’t have any good feeling and warmth?”
“Full of it. Brimming. How’s Sam?”
“He’s getting tired of sleeping on the couch. It’s not big enough for both of us.”
“My heart cries out for him.”
She’s seeing Sam now, that’s a little strange. She didn’t seem to take to him, early on.
Sam. What’s he like? Like a villain. Hair like an oil spill, mustache like a twist of carbon paper, high white lineless forehead, black tights and doublet, dagger clasped in treacherous right hand, sneaks when he’s not slithering. . . .
No. That’s incompletely true. Sam’s just like the rest of us: jeans, turtleneck, beard, smile with one chipped tooth, good with children, backward in his taxes, a degree in education, a B.Ed. And he came with the very best references too, Charlotte doted, Francine couldn’t get enough, Mary Jo chased him through Grand Central with the great whirling loop of her
lariat, causing talk— But Honor couldn’t see him, in the beginning. She’s reconsidered. I wish she hadn’t thrown the turntable on the floor, a $600 B & O, but all that’s behind us now.
I saw this morning that the building at the end of the street’s been sold. It stood empty for years, an architectural anomaly, three-storied, brick, but most of all, triangular. Two streets come together in a point there, and prospective buyers must have boggled at the angles. I judged that the owners decided to let morality go hang and sold to a ménage à trois. They’ll need a triple bed, customized to fit those odd corners. I can see them with protractor and Skilsaw, getting the thing just right. Then sweeping up the bedcrumbs.
She telephones again.
“It doesn’t have to be the best bed in the world. Any old bed will do. Sam’s bitching all night long.”
“For you, dear friend, I’ll take every pain. We’re checking now in Indonesia, a rare albino bed’s been sighted there . . .”
“Tom, this isn’t funny. I slept in the bathtub last night.”
“You’re too long for the bathtub.”
“Do you want Sam to do it?”
Do I want Sam to do it?
“No. I’ll do it.”
“Then do it.”
We were content for quite a while, she taught me what she’d majored in, a lovely Romance tongue, we visited the country and when I’d ask in a pharmacie for a razor they’d give me rosewater. I’m teasing her, and she me. She wants Sam. That’s good.
Francesca was reading to me.
“This is the note Lee wrote,” she said. “Listen. ‘No one is more aware than myself of my inability for the duties of my position. I cannot even accomplish what I myself desire. How can I fulfill the expectations of others? In addition I sensibly feel the growing failure of my bodily strength. I have not yet recovered from the attack I experienced the past spring. I am becoming more and more incapable of exertion, and am thus prevented from making the personal examinations and giving the personal supervision to the operations in the field which I feel to be necessary. I am so dull making use of the eyes of others I am frequently misled. Everything, therefore, points to the advantages to be derived from a new commander. A younger and abler man than myself can readily be obtained. I know that he will have as gallant and brave an army as ever existed to second his efforts, and it would be the happiest day of my life to see at its head a worthy . . .’”
Francesca stopped reading.
“That was Robert E. Lee,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“The leader of all the armies of the Confederacy,” she said.
“I know.”
“I wanted him to win. So much.”
“I understand.”
“But he did not.”
“I have read about it.”
Francesca has Confederate-gray eyes which reflect, mostly, a lifelong contemplation of the nobility of Lee’s great horse, Traveller. I left Francesca and walked in the park, where I am afraid to walk, after dark. One must let people do what they want to do, but what if they want to slap you upside the head with a Stillson wrench and take the credit cards out of your pockets? A problem.
The poor are getting poorer. I saw a poor man and asked him if he had any money.
“Money?” he said. “Money thinks I died a long time ago.”
We have moved from the Age of Anxiety to the Age of Fear. This is of course progress, psychologically speaking. I intend no irony.
Another letter from Jinka.
Undear Thomas:
The notion that only man is vile must have been invented to describe you, vile friend. I cannot contain the revulsion that whelms in me at the sight of your name, in the Prague telephone book, from your time in Prague. I have scratched it out of my copy, and scratched it out of all the copies I could get my hands on, in telephone booths everywhere. This symbolic removal of you from the telephone booths of our ancient city should not escape your notice, stinking meat. You have been erased and the anointment of the sick, formerly known as Extreme Unction, also as the Last Rites, is what I have in mind for you, soon. Whatever you are doing, stop it, drear pig. The insult to consciousness afforded by your project, whatever it is, cannot be suffered gladly, and I for one do not intend to so suffer. I have measures not yet in the books, and will take them. What I have in mind is not shallots and fresh rosemary, gutless wonder, and your continued association with that ridiculously thin Robert E. Lee girl has not raised you in my esteem, not a bit. One if by land and two if by sea, and it will be sudden, I promise you. Be afraid.
Cordially,
Jinka
I put this letter with the others, clipped together with a paper clip. How good writing such letters must make her feel!
Wittgenstein was I think wrong when he said that about that which we do not know, we should not speak. He closed by fiat a great amusement park, there. Nothing gives me more pleasure than speaking about that which I do not know. I am not sure whether my ideas about various matters are correct or incorrect, but speak about them I must.
I decided to call my brother in San Francisco. He is a copy editor on the San Francisco Chronicle (although he was trained as a biologist—he is doing what he wants to do, more or less). Because we are both from the South our conversations tend to be conducted in jiveass dialect.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he said.
“What’s happening? You got any girl copy boys on that newspaper yet?”
“Man,” Paul said, “we got not only girl copy boys we got topless girl copy boys. We gonna hire us a reporter next week. They promised us.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m depressed.”
“Is it specific or nonspecific?”
“Well,” Paul said, “I have to read the paper a lot. I’m ready to drop the bomb. On us.”
One must let people do what they want to do. Fortunately my brother has little to say about when and where the bomb will be dropped.
My other friend is Catherine. Catherine, like Francesca, is hung up on the past. She is persuaded that in an earlier existence she was Balzac’s mistress (one of Balzac’s mistresses).
“I endured Honoré’s grandness,” she said, “because it was spurious. Spurious grandness I understand very well. What I could not understand was his hankering for greatness.”
“But he was great,” I said.
“I was impatient with all those artists, sitting around, hankering for greatness. Of course Honoré was great. But he didn’t know it, at the time, for sure. Or he did and he didn’t. There were moments of doubt, depression.”
“As is natural.”
“The seeking after greatness,” said Catherine, “is a sickness, in my opinion. It is like greed, only greed has better results. Greed can at least bring you a fine house on a grand avenue, and strawberries for breakfast, in a rich cream, and servants to beat, when they do not behave. I prefer greed. Honoré was greedy, in a reasonable way, but what he was mostly interested in was greatness. I was stuck with greatness.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You,” Catherine said, “are neither great nor greedy.”
“One must let people be—” I began.
“Yes,” Catherine said, “that sounds good, on the surface, but thinking it through—” She finished her espresso, placed the little cup precisely on the little saucer. “Take me out,” she said. “Take me to a library.”
We went to a library and spent a pleasant afternoon there.
Francesca was stroking the brown back of a large spayed cat—the one that doesn’t like me.
“Lee was not without his faults,” she said. “Not for a moment would I have you believe that he was faultless.”
“What was his principal fault?”
“Losing,�
�� she said.
I went to the Art Cinema and saw a Swedish film about a man living alone on an island. Somebody was killing a great many sheep on the island and the hero, a hermit, was suspected. There were a great many shots of sheep with their throats cut, red blood on the white snow, glimpses. The hermit fixed a car for a woman whose car had broken down. They went to bed together. There were flashbacks having to do with the woman’s former husband, a man in a wheelchair. It was determined that somebody else, not the hermit, had been killing the sheep. The film ended with a car crash in which the woman was killed. Whiteout.
Should great film artists be allowed to do what they want to do?
Catherine is working on her translation of the complete works of Balzac. Honoré, she insists, has never been properly translated. She will devote her life to the task, she says. Actually I have looked at some pages of her Louis Lambert and they seem to me significantly worse than the version I read in college. I think of Balzac in the great statue by Rodin, holding his erect (possibly overstated) cock in both hands under his cloak of bronze. An inspiration.
When I was in the black box, during my SD days, there was nothing I wanted to do. I didn’t even want to get out. Or perhaps there was one thing I wanted to do: Sit in the box with the half Ping-Pong balls taped over my eyes and the white-noise generator standing in for the sirens of Ulysses (himself an early SD subject) and permit the Senior Investigator (Dr. Colcross, the one with the bad leg) to do what he wanted to do.
Is this will-lessness, finally? Abulia, as we call it in the trade? I don’t think so.
I pursue Possibility. That’s something.
There is no moment that exceeds in beauty that moment when one looks at a woman and finds that she is looking at you in the same way that you are looking at her. The moment in which she bestows that look that says, “Proceed with your evil plan, sumbitch.” The initial smash of glance on glance. Then, the drawing near. This takes a long time, it seems like months, although only minutes pass, in fact. Languor is the word that describes this part of the process. Your persona floats toward her persona, over the Sea of Hesitation. Many weeks pass before they meet, but the weeks are days, or seconds. Still, everything is decided. You have slept together in the glance.
Donald Barthelme Page 81
