How Should a Person Be?
Page 6
ANN
There’s taking airplanes and waiting for airplanes, but another possibility is to make the difficult choices and decide. You remember the puer aeternus—the eternal child—Peter Pan—the boy who never grows up, who never becomes a man? Or it’s like in The Little Prince—when the prince asks the narrator to draw him a sheep. The narrator tries and tries again, but each time he fails to do it as well as he wishes. He believes himself to be a great artist and cannot understand why it’s not working. In a fit of frustration, he instead draws a box—something he can do well. When the prince asks how it’s a picture of a sheep, the narrator replies that it’s a picture of a sheep in a box. He is arrogantly proud of his solution and satisfied with his efforts. This response is typical of all puers. Such people will suddenly tell you they have another plan, and they always do it the moment things start getting difficult. But it’s their everlasting switching that’s the dangerous thing, not what they choose.
Sheila’s heart beats up in her chest . . .
SHEILA
Why is their everlasting switching dangerous?
ANN
Because people who live their lives this way can look forward to a single destiny, shared with others of this type—though such people do not believe they represent a type, but feel themselves distinguished from the common run of man, who they see as held down by the banal anchors of the world. But while others actually build a life in which things gain in meaning and significance, this is not true of the puer. Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built: nothing. In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. And yet they started off believing themselves too special for this world!
. . . Sheila listens on, in agony, fear, and dread . . .
But—and here is the hope—there is a solution for people of this type, and it’s perhaps not the solution that could have been predicted. The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult. They must work—without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked. And I don’t mean work for its own sake, but they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and lived through the hard work and suffering that inevitably comes with the process.
. . . Sheila’s insides begin to tremble . . .
They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger. Puers don’t need to check themselves into analysis. If they can just remember this—It is their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, not what they choose—they might discover themselves saved. The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering—which they foresee at the end of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves. In this way, they never give themselves to life—living in constant dread of the end. Reason, in this case, has taken too much from life.
. . . a weak personality . . . who only wishes to avoid suffering!
They must give themselves completely to the experience! One thinks sometimes how much more alive such people would be if they suffered! If they can’t be happy, let them at least be unhappy—really, really unhappy for once, and then they might become truly human.
I fell back, exhausted.
If I can do this, then perhaps my life, when I look back on it, will at least be not as empty as the heart of any Casanova.
• chapter 7 •
PRAYER OF THE PUER
There’s so much beauty in this world that it’s hard to begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live—if not Live. Let other people frequent the nightclubs in their tight-ass skirts and Live. I’m just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given this one chance to live.
I am writing a play. I am writing a play that is going to save the world. If it only saves three people, I will not be happy. If with this play the oil crisis is merely averted and our standard of living maintains itself at its current level, I will weep into my oatmeal. If this play does anything short of announcing the arrival of the next cock—I mean, messiah—I will shit into my oatmeal.
Who among us will be asked to lead the people out of bondage, only to say, God, I have never been a good talker. Ask someone else. Ask my brother instead of me. There is no way to accomplish what I feel I must accomplish with this play. There is no way in heaven or on earth! I am the wrong person to do it. Look at the shitty red hoodie I am sitting here in. Look at my dirty running shoes. I have such small breasts. God, shouldn’t you call upon a woman with great big knockers, who the people will listen to? Why do you call on me, who doesn’t have the cleavage to capture the world’s attention? Ask my sister instead of me, whose big breasts are much more suited to doing your work.
May the Lord have mercy on me for I am a fucking idiot. But I live in a culture of fucking idiots. I cannot be saved if not everyone is saved. If everyone around me talks nothing but shit, how can I hold myself aloof? My fate is not separate from everyone’s fate. If one man or one woman can stand up and call themselfs saved, that means we all are. And I know I’m not, so no one is.
Last night someone said to me, “Come on—all the five, six times I have seen you, you have been drunk out of your mind.” I was drunk last night too, when he was telling it to me. I resented the implication that I had been, in the five, six times we had seen each other, any drunker than he had been. For we are all, all of us, drunk all the time, and it’s not fair for him to single me out like that and make me the exception, when if it comes to the drinking habits in the circles I run in, I am the rule. The rule is: drink as much as you can afford to drink. We all, anyway, work better when we are drunk, or wake up the next morning, hungover. In either case, we lack the capacity to second-guess ourselves.
People say there is no direction to evolution—upward to any height; that the proper metaphor is the outward webbing of a bush, not the striving of a tree toward the heavens. When we were children, we would lift our arms to the skies as high as we could—as tall as we could make ourselves—stretch, stretch, stretch! When I look back on those gym classes and how we all stretched ourselves to be as tall as the tallest tree, I can’t help but think, Those were the most religious moments of my life.
If now in some ways I drink too much, it’s not that I lack a reverence for the world.
Today I am fasting. A girl I know who is a semifamous singer, and who is very slender and glamorous in pictures, once told me that when she has been eating badly, she will fast for a day or two. She said that Nietzsche made her think that her self-denial and need for purification were vulgar bullshit, but then she said no to Nietzsche—she sees no reason she shouldn’t enjoy emptying out, the same as she enjoys exploiting abundance.
The other night out at the bars, I learned that Nietzsche wrote on a typewriter. It is unbelievable to me, and I no longer feel that his philosophy has the same validity or aura of truth that it formerly did. No other detail of his life situating him so squarely in the modern age could have affected me as much as learning this. He typed Zarathustra? Goddamnit, the man had no more connection to the truth than a stenographer!
Knowing this, I don’t see why I don’t just kick it all to hell and shut up at last about my concern that I might put more shit into the world. The world is full to brimming with its own shit. A little more from me won’t even make a difference—it’s only natural. It’s to be expected. I should put a lot of shit in the play, so it will be a multicolored shit.
Everyone enjoys economy for
its relation to a certain morality, but if I have to suffer from other people’s excesses, why should I not suffer doubly from my own?
• chapter 8 •
MARGAUX PAINTS
I worked on my play for several days, badly. Finally one night, needing to get out of my apartment, I picked up my computer and went with it to our studio. It was early on a Friday evening, and I was walking slowly when I heard someone call out my name.
I turned and saw Margaux coming down the alley. She was pushing something on a trolley in front of her, and as she got closer I saw it was a tree—a baby tree in a pot! We hugged hello, and then I asked her if it was a tree she had grown. She said it was. Margaux grew plants on her balcony and she was really good at getting them strong. I was curious to know what her secret was. She told me she was going now to plant the tree in a friend’s yard, a friend whose father had recently died. I decided to go with her, and as we walked together, we talked.
SHEILA
You know what? If we ever have kids, I really like the idea of trading babies.
MARGAUX
(laughing) Yeah, that’d be fun—getting pregnant together. And you’re right! We’d have such adoring love for each other’s baby. But it might be hard . . .
SHEILA
What? To give up your own?
MARGAUX
Maybe . . . Do you think you’d prefer one to the other?
SHEILA
I think I’d have more fun if it was yours.
MARGAUX
Yeah, exactly, you would!
Laughter.
I think it’s a great idea. I think I always want culture to work like that. I think it would be less emotionally complicated if I was raising society’s child. But you’d have to sleep with somebody who’s really big with black hair.
SHEILA
No, because babies can be anything.
MARGAUX
But when they turn twenty, boy!
They laugh.
When we got to the yard, I watched as she dug a neat, deep hole and placed the tree inside it. I leaned against the fence and waited until she was done. I said I would walk her home, but on the way to her apartment, we stopped in at my place so I could pick up a sweater. Inside, Margaux pointed to a pile of papers on my desk, which were labelled on top with a black marker, Margaux.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Our conversations,” I said.
Margaux was quiet. She went to wait by the stairs.
On the walk to her place, Margaux mentioned that she had been painting swimming pools. In every painting she had made that month, there was a pool. She said she had been working on a painting of me in a pool before she left her house that night, based on the naked photos she had taken of me in the whirlpool at the Y. Did I want to see it? Of course I did! All my life I had dreamed of being friends with a painter who would make me into an icon that people would admire.
In her painting studio we stood before her fresh canvases. I recognized my narrow body in a small angular pool, seemingly outdoors, my head wooden and stiff. She put on the prescription glasses I had given her, without which she couldn’t see. I had told her, when I gave them to her, that it might be nice for her to see her paintings. She said she had never considered it, the images coming directly from inside her head.
Now she explained, touching its sides, “I wanted to call it The Genius but instead I’m calling it House for a Head. I don’t believe enough in genius, but I do believe in having a house for a head.”
I almost cried. I didn’t want to say it, but I felt pretty crummy at being demoted from genius to simply having a house for a head.
Alone in our studio, sitting before my computer, I was determined to finish my play, but instead I grew distracted and stared out the window. I now saw that hanging out with Margaux, and talking with Margaux, and sharing a studio with Margaux was not enough to make me a genius in the world. It would not help me lead the people or make me into the sort of person I should be. It would not help me finish my play, or solve any of my problems.
Yes it would. It would solve them all.
• chapter 9 •
THEY WANDER IN MIAMI
That winter, Margaux’s gallerist decided to take some of her paintings to Miami, where for a week the city would be turned into a giant art fair. Collectors from all over the world would attend, and all the top galleries would be there. The fanciest art would be shown at Art Basel, the largest of the fairs, and of the smaller fairs orbiting its periphery, one, called Scope, was where Margaux’s work would be.
Though her dealer had already left for Florida, Margaux continued painting. I said she should deliver the newest paintings by hand, not ship them, and said it was important for me to take the trip down with her. I wanted to record us there. Didn’t I need to write my play? she asked. I told her that the trip would be like writing; I hoped that if we went away together, like the mothers in my play, I could later study the transcripts and figure out what reality had that my play did not; learn why my play was not working, which was maybe the same reason my character was not working, and thus discover how I and the play should be.
Then I watched, the morning we were to board public transit to the airport, as Margaux stuffed three oil paintings packed in bubble wrap into her large duffel bag, along with twenty T-shirts. We were only going for three days.
On the plane ride down, we read an article in the New York Times about a painter who would be attending the fair that week, a twenty-five-year-old guy named Ted Mineo who had studied at Yale and was being represented by one of the top Soho galleries. Basel would be his debutante ball. From Miami Basel to the heavens! His dealer intended him to meet everyone. No doubt he would be kept busy his entire time there. It read as though his life for the past five years had been very well managed, from art school, to his discovery in art school, to his move to Brooklyn and so on, so he was quoted saying of the contemporary art world, “There’s a career track. You get your B.F.A. and then you get your M.F.A. You move to New York, you have a show, and it’s like being a lawyer or something else. And that doesn’t entirely square with the romantic ideal of being an artist, living in isolation and being the avant-garde hero.”
When we finished reading it, I asked Margaux if she had ever thought about going to Yale. She told me she had once spent several weeks thinking about it, after searching around on the internet and realizing that all the big artists had gone there. She had made millions of sacrifices for her art—maybe she should beg, borrow, and steal whatever she could to go. But then she thought, No, that’s awful—because there were just too many people who could not, and it seemed like it shouldn’t be the rule that you have to attend Yale. “In the end,” she said, “it felt too unfair to even think about, and it just seemed wrong to my morals and my faith in art. I think it would have really hurt me and made me sad. To me, it looked the same as joining a country club that Jews or black people aren’t allowed into. And lots of good people do join country clubs. But it would depress me too much. I figured I had to see what would happen without me joining the country club.”
When we arrived in Miami, we changed from our pants and sweaters, getting half-naked in the airport washroom, our clothes spread all over the counters. “Be careful,” I told Margaux, since she was so loyal. “Whatever outfit you choose for yourself now, you’ll be wearing for the next three days.”
Recently, Margaux had been trying to reassure me that I had a good brain. My brain had not worried me when I was younger, but over the past year I had become convinced that I did not think as well as other people. No, that was putting it gently—that I didn’t know how to think at all. Other people knew how to think, I thought, had opinions on things, a point of view. I did not.
As we walked down the side of the Miami highway, my arm linked through hers, the crescen
t moon faint in the sky overhead, I again brought up my fear. I explained that I felt my insides were a blank—a total neutrality—null.
“That’s amazing!” she said. “God, everyone else is like these automatic windup toys.”
“But I feel like other people are seeing and perceiving and synthesizing, and I’m—I’m not doing any of that!”
“You’re doing something, boy, let me tell you. I think mainly people have opinions on, Well, what do you think about abortion? Everybody we hang out with is pretty competent at vaguely intelligent party talk, but you say things that help me think better, you know?”
I shrugged, but inside was filled with something new, and prayed that what she said was true.
In any case, I believed it to be gold and held it near.
We finally found a cab and took Margaux’s paintings to Scope—a large, makeshift tent in the center of a muddy field in a park, in what the taxi driver told us was a very bad neighborhood that the city was trying to fix with art. Having delivered her paintings, we got into another taxi, then dropped our bags at our cookie-cutter hotel. We hoped to get dinner in Little Havana, at the other end of town, and walked around for a while trying to find a bus stop.
At four o’clock, we stepped onto a bus, midway through a conversation about what you need to know in writing and what you need to know in art. We came to the same conclusion: you have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything. Sitting up front, across from a seat labeled In Memory of Rosa Parks, we tested out this theory.
MARGAUX
David Lynch is pretty funny.
SHEILA
And Harmony Korine is hysterical. And do you think Werner Herzog is hysterical?
MARGAUX
(laughing) Oh my God, yeah. He’s really funny in a Kafka kind of way.
SHEILA
I think Manet is funny.