Lance Olsen’s novel Calendar of Regrets is concerned with tourists, travelers, cafés, voyeurism, the lure and illusion of art, what happens when we die: “Movement is a mode of writing. Writing is a mode of movement.” Every major character moves from existence to (literal or figurative) nonexistence. “I’ve been dreading the disengagement one experiences upon arriving home. You end up maintaining a fever-distance between where you are and where you’ve been. As if you’re recovering from some sort of illness.”
Vladimir Posner says that when a Russian is asked how he’s feeling, he tends to go on and on about how he’s actually feeling, whereas when an American is asked the same question, he invariably answers, “Fine.” We’re doing fine, making progress, moving ahead, living the dream, it’s all good …
Mesmerized—at times unnerved—by my ninety-four-year-old father’s nearly superhuman vitality, I undertook an investigation of our universal physical condition. The result was The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, which tries to look without blinking at the fact that each of us is just an animal walking the earth for a brief time, a bare body housed in a mortal cage. Some people might find this perspective demoralizing, but I don’t, truly. Honesty is the best policy. The only way out is deeper in. A candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating. I now see life entirely through that book’s Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects, and I find I can’t (after finishing the book, I couldn’t do anything for several months).
Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians goes to hell and back, just barely back, and ends with a tiny glimmer of uptick—not too much but not too little, either. It’s the only affirmation that anyone can offer: astonishingly, we’re here. The book majors in exposed nerve endings. Without which, sorry, I can’t read anything. Manguso is mourning both her friend Harris, who on p. 1 commits suicide, and herself (she’s “dead” now, too). “It doesn’t mean shit,” an Italian security guard tells her Israeli friend about his passport, which is crucial, since Manguso is always asking what, if anything, means shit? Nothing does or, rather, everything is shit. How then to put one foot in front of the other? Well, let us investigate that. Life and death are in direct tension (as are Manguso’s vow not to make anything up and her acknowledgment that, of course, she will—constantly). I did something I do when I genuinely love a book: start covering my mouth when I read. This is very pure and elemental; I want nothing coming between me and the page.
In Denis Johnson’s The Name of the World, Michael Reed, whose wife and daughter have recently died in a car accident, wants, as if he were Adam in Eden (or Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station), to name the world in a pre-fallen world, but he realizes that the world isn’t like that, was never like that, so he becomes a war correspondent in order to have running confirmation that the world is as terrible as he thought. Wherever he goes, he’s walking across a graveyard. So are you. So am I.
Our ground time here will be brief
IN HIS EULOGY for Christina-Taylor Green, one of the victims of the Tucson shooting spree, Obama said, “If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today.” However, for many people in the post-transcendent twenty-first century, death is not a passageway to eternity but a brute biological fact. We’re done. It’s over. All the gods have gone to sleep or are simply moribund. We’re a bag of bones. All the myths are empty. The only bravery consists of diving into the wreck, dancing/grieving in the abyss.
As baby boomers enter their/our senescence, we’re all looking for companionship in the dark. Michael Billington, reviewing Simon Gray’s Close of Play in The Guardian, wrote, “To embody death convincingly on the stage is one of the hardest things for a dramatist to do. Mr. Gray has here managed it in a way that, paradoxically, makes life itself that much more bearable.”
Greg Bottoms: “When things go wrong, when Nietzsche’s ‘breath of empty space’ moves over your skin, reminds you that you are but a blip in the existence of the world, destined from birth to vanish with all the things and people you love, to mulch the land with no more magic than the rotting carcass of a bird, it’s nice to imagine—” Imagine what, exactly?
Some people might find it anathema to even consider articulating an answer to this question, but if, as Rembrandt said, “Painting is philosophy,” then certainly writing is philosophy as well. Isn’t everyone’s project, on some level, to offer tentative theses regarding what—if anything—we’re doing here? Against death, in other words, what solace, what consolation, what bulwark? Tolstoy: “The meaning of life is life”—for which much thanks. Ice-T’s answer: “A human being is just another animal in the big jungle. Life is really short and you’re going to die. We’re here to stick our heads above the water for just a minute, look around, and go back under.” Burt Reynolds: “First, it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reynolds?’ Then it’s ‘Get me Burt Reynolds.’ Then ‘Get me a Burt Reynolds type.’ Then ‘Get me a young Burt Reynolds.’ And then it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reynolds?’ ” Beckett’s mantra: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Okay, you’re going to go on, I hope and assume. Congratulations. Why, though? What carries you through the day, not to mention the night? Beckett’s own answer: he liked to read Dante, watch soccer, and fart.
As a nine-year-old, I would awake and spend the entire night sitting cross-legged on the landing of the stairs to my basement bedroom, unable to fathom that one day I’d cease to be. I remember being mesmerized by a neighbor’s tattoo of a death’s-head, underneath which were the words “As I am, you shall someday be.” (Now, do I yearn for this state, the peace that passeth all understanding? What if death is my Santa Claus?) Cormac McCarthy: “Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.” I’m trying to do a very un-American thing here: talk about it. Why? Pynchon: “When we speak of ‘seriousness,’ ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death, how we act in its presence, for example, or how we handle it when it isn’t so immediate.” DFW: “You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of a writer’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.” The only books I truly love do exactly this—
In Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer tries and fails to write a biography of D. H. Lawrence, but the book conveys Lawrence better than any conventional biography does, and more important, it asks the question How and why do we get up in the morning? In many ways, it’s a thinking person’s self-help book: how to live your life with passion when you know every passion is delusional. Dyer is paralyzed by the difficulty of choice, because he can always see the opposite position—a different place to live, woman to love, book to write. His conclusion: “The best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D. H. Lawrence.” By getting up in the morning, we get up in the morning. By not writing our biographies of D. H. Lawrence, we write our biographies of D. H. Lawrence. The crucial line in Dyer’s most recent book, Zona: “We never know when we’re going to die and because of that we are, at any one moment, immortal.” All of his best books are fixed on this idea—searching for such moments, trying to produce such suspensions in the work itself. Extended footnotes divide Zona in two. Digressions give us at least the illusion of breaking away from time, killing it before it kills us. The book kept reminding me of an evening Dyer and I spent together a few years ago. It was terribly important to him to find exactly the right restaurant. I didn’t understand this. I remember thinking, Who c
ares? We found the right restaurant, where (after mocking me for ordering Prosecco—“another drink for the homosexual gentleman?”) he devoured what he called the best hamburger he’d ever eaten. Empty praise? Full stomach? It was crucial to him to at least try to enter the Zone. Dyer is determined not to waste his time on earth, and he knows the only way not to waste it is to waste it.
Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello eviscerates, chapter by chapter, a commitment (antiapartheid activism, animal rights, friendship, art, love, sex) that Coetzee, in previous books, had once affirmed. The “novel” consists almost entirely of a series of lectures that Coetzee himself gave, but in the book a fictional character named Elizabeth Costello gives the lectures. Coetzee/Costello is trying to find something that he/she can actually believe, and by the end of the book the only thing Coetzee can affirm, the only thing Costello affirms, is the belling of the sound of frogs in mud: the animal life of sheer survival. I love how joyous and despairing that is. It’s on the side of life, but along a very narrow ledge. My favorite books are candid beyond candid, and they proceed from the assumption that we’ll all be dead in a hundred years: here, now, in this book, I’m going to cut to the essence.
David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel is a book built almost entirely out of other writers’ lines—some attributed, most not, many mashed-up (weirdly, he insisted upon verbatim quotation of his “own” work in Reality Hunger). One of the pleasures of reading the book is recognizing so many of the passages. A bibliophile’s wet dream, but it’s no mere collection of quotes. It’s a sustained meditation on a single question: Against death, what consolation, if any, is art? Against the dark night of death, what solace is it that I still read Sophocles? For Sophocles, Markson implies, not a lot, but for me, maybe a little. Markson constantly toggles back and forth between celebrating the timelessness of art and mocking such grandiosity. The book forces me to ask myself: What do I push back with? Maybe art, and if so, barely.
Our ground time here will be brief
SHORTLY AFTER the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the editor of Image, a magazine interested in the intersection of art and faith, asked dozens of writers to respond. Annie Dillard’s “This Is the Life,” fewer than 1,500 words, is, to me, by far the best essay yet written about 9/11; she addresses the event extremely obliquely and doesn’t come even close to mentioning it. Instead, she uses 9/11 as the catalyst for an extremely far-ranging contemplation of the inherent relativism of all cultural “truths,” and given the actuality of death, the irreducible ephemerality of all human experience (each of us is, apparently, “as provisional as a bug”). And yet if nothing is meaningful, everything is significant.
Aggressively ambivalent, Dillard contains the contradictions: between ecstasy and despair, herself and the world, life and death. In The Writing Life, Dillard advises, “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place. Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”—which is precisely what she does here: she’s utterly unblinking, unapologetically sober (but still funny) about the fundamental questions of existence.
In case we need reminding, Dillard reminds us at the beginning of the essay, “Somewhere in there you die. Not a funeral. Forget funeral. A big birthday party. Since everyone around you agrees.” This sets the terms for all that follows: everything we do—seek to know Rome’s best restaurants and their staffs, take the next tribe’s pigs in thrilling raids, grill yams, hunt white-plumed birds, burn captives, set fire to a drunk, publish the paper that proves the point, elude capture, educate our children to a feather edge, count coup, perfect our calligraphy, spear the seal—is, in a sense, nothing more or less than a prelude to, distraction from, death. She relentlessly questions her own position as she rigorously investigates the world: “The black rock is holy, or the scroll. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows.” She establishes the problem, deepens the problem, suggests “solutions,” explores the permutations of these solutions, argues against and finally undermines these solutions, returning us to the problem (pretty much the M.O. of this book as well).
We know only the culture in which we live and we abide by its “truths.” The “illusion, like the visual field, is complete. Each people knows only its own squares in the weave, its wars and instruments and arts, and also the starry sky.” Can we not get beyond our own ethnocentrism? Of course, sort of, but say “you scale your own weft and see time’s breadth and the length of space. What, seeing this spread multiply infinitely in every direction, would you do differently? Whatever you do, it has likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or the Red Sox.” There is a good-sized rock in the garden, there is no way to remove the rock even if you peer at it from above and at many different angles, and all rocks are equally significant/insignificant: “However hypnotized you and your people are, you will be just as dead in their war, our war. What new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle?”
There is no wisdom, only many wisdoms—beautiful and delusional.
5
THE WOUND AND THE BOW
In which I make various self-destructive gestures, flirt none too successfully or seriously with suicide, pull back from the brink via the written word.
Other people
IN THE FIRST of the eight interlocked stories or chapters of Butterfly Stories: A Novel, William Vollmann tells “what happened to the child,” establishing the psychic interconnection—for the butterfly boy—between solitude, beauty, loss, pain, and punishment. The lyric catalogue of childhood humiliations in the first story yields, in the seven stories that follow, to litanies of the butterfly boy (who as an adult is called first “the journalist,” then later “the husband”) reenacting—with a lesbian traveling companion, the son of a former SS officer, a sybaritic and amoral photographer, and especially with a Phnom Penh prostitute named Oy—the sadomasochistic scenarios of his childhood.
Vollmann begins Butterfly Stories with an evocation of war torture by the Khmer Rouge. On the next page, he writes, “There was a jungle, and there was murder by torture, but the butterfly boy did not know about it. He knew the school bully, though, who beat him up every day.” Vollmann makes absolutely explicit the link between the butterfly boy’s childhood and his adult experiences in Thailand and Cambodia. The butterfly boy thinks about the school bully, “The substance that his soul was composed of was pain,” but this is at least as true of the butterfly boy, who “was not popular in the second grade because he knew how to spell ‘bacteria’ in the spelling bee, and so the other boys beat him up.” One evening, a monarch butterfly lands on the top step of his house, squatting on the welcome mat and moving its gorgeous wings slowly. Then it rises in the air. He never sees the butterfly again; he remembers it the rest of his life.
Butterfly Stories is told in more than two hundred very short sections, many of which deal with the economies of desire: “A middle-aged midget in a double-breasted suit came down the alley, walked under one girl’s dress, reached up to pull it over him like a roof, and began to suck. The girl stood looking at nothing. When the midget was finished, he slid her panties back up and spat onto the sidewalk. Then he reached into his wallet.”
In the middle of the novel, Vollmann appends to the conclusion of several sections the words “The End,” as if to suggest the ceaselessness of the butterfly boy’s capacity for self-inflicted punishment. After acting out “endless” scenarios of humiliation and loss, “the husband,” who may have AIDS, returns in the final chapter to San Francisco, self-consciously trying—and failing—to play his spousal role: “Sometimes he’d see his wife in the back yard gardening, the puppy frisking between her legs, and she’d seem so adorable there behind window-glass that he ached, but as soon as she came in, whether she shouted at him or tried desperately to please him, he could not feel. He c
ould not feel!” Reading this extraordinarily intimate book about the butterfly boy’s incapacity for ordinary intimacy, I couldn’t identify more closely with him if I crawled inside his skin.
Other people
E. M. CIORAN: “The universe is a solitary space, and all its creatures do nothing but reinforce its solitude. In it, I have never met anyone, I have only stumbled across ghosts.”
A day unlike any other
I LEAVE THE DOOR slightly ajar, turning the switch on and off for twenty seconds until a shadow of gray fills the room. Wet skin on cold glass. I close the door, but the hall light creases the bottom of the door. Shutting my eyes and turning off the light, I try to imagine what broken glass would sound like in the dark.
A day like any other
SCHOPENHAUER: “Suicide thwarts the attainment of the highest moral aim by the fact that, for a real release from the world of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent.”
A day like any other
NABOKOV: “I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.”
How Literature Saved My Life Page 7
