by Mark Slouka
Essays from the Nick of Time
Also by Mark Slouka
Fiction
The Visible World
God’s Fool
Lost Lake
Nonfiction
War of the Worlds
Essays from the Nick of Time
Reflections and Refutations
Mark Slouka
GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2010 by Mark Slouka
“Hitler’s Couch,” “Arrow and Wound,” “Eclogue,” “Listening for Silence,” “Blood
on the Tracks,” “Quitting the Paint Factory,” “One Year Later,” “Democracy and
Deference,” and “Dehumanized” were first published in Harper’s Magazine. “Hitler’s
Couch,” “Listening for Silence,” and “Arrow and Wound” were also published in
Best American Essays 1999, 2000, and 2003, respectively. “Speak, Video” was first
published in the Georgia Review. “Historical Vertigo” was first published in AGNI.
This publication is made possible by funding provided in part by a grant from the
Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State
Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders.
Significant support has also been provided by Target; the McKnight Foundation;
and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals.
To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
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Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
Paperback ISBN 978-1-55597-571-5
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-014-7
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2010
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010922924
Cover design: Kimberly Glyder Design
Cover art: Tina Mion, It was obvious upon seeing Joan of Arc even God couldn’t save her.
For my parents,
who taught me that skepticism is just a deeper form of reverence, and anger and wonder its purest expressions.
And for Leslie, Zack, and Maya,
who daily make me grateful to be here to wrestle with and marvel at the world for a while.
I have been anxious to improve the nick of time…;
to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future,
which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
—THOREAU
Contents
Introduction
REFLECTIONS
Hitler’s Couch
Arrow and Wound
Listening for Silence
Blood on the Tracks
Historical Vertigo
Speak, Video!
Eclogue
REFUTATIONS
Quitting the Paint Factory
One Year Later
Democracy and Deference: On the Culture
of Obedience in America
Coda: A Quibble
Dehumanized: On the Selling (Out) of American
Education, and What It Costs Us
Introduction
There may be someone even less suited to introducing a writer’s work than the author himself—a well-meaning relative, perhaps, or a lover with a grudge—but I doubt it. We’re the wrong people for the job; we approach demolition with a scalpel, surgery with a five-foot crowbar and a mallet. Despite this fact, most of us, unless we’ve grown sufficiently famous to affect disinterest convincingly, or retreated into enigmatic seclusion, will rise to the editor’s suggestion that we “say a few words” like gullible trout to a plastic cricket. It seems harmless, even interesting. It’s not.
There are many reasons for this, some obvious, most hidden in plain view. I’ve listed a few here as a kind of public service, a detour around the tar pit in which I flounder.
1. We’re Bound to Disappoint
A decade ago, before the gene for reclusiveness that I carry began to assert itself, I attended a Harper’s Magazine dinner at which I found myself seated at a very long, very wide table, stranded between people engaged in lively conversations. There was nothing to do but eavesdrop and eat. At some point, an attractive young woman directly across from me noticed my plight. “Who are you?” she called, with admirable directness. I told her. “Oh, you’re Mark Slouka,” she said. I smiled; indeed I was. “You know, it’s funny, but I thought you’d look different,” she said. My ego began to hiss quietly. “How so?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said, “I thought you’d be sort of dark and brooding and marked by tragedy.”
What would I have given then for Paul Auster’s eyes, or even Kafka’s? For a scar or a cape. Ignore the ill-fitting tie and the Vladimir Putin hairline, I wanted to say; trust me, inside I’m as dark and brooding as they come. I went home, brooded. Perhaps the dark jacket next time? The following day I mentioned the incident at home and paid the predictable price: Dad was dark and brooding and marked by acne, pale and shallow and… but you get the idea. Our clan, on the whole, is not given to coddling.
The anecdotal point? The words are who we are. They are our introduction. And our conclusion. To introduce them, therefore, is largely redundant, and because we sense this, because we feel we need something more, we rush backstage and drag our other self, like a shy director to a curtain call, into the limelight. Like most acts of desperation, it’s a bad idea. Best to let the curtain (or the cover) close.
2. We Know Too Much
Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them. They’ve spent years studying themselves, parsing themselves; they’re familiar with every tic and foible. Their own worst inclinations—toward pomposity, toward sentimentality, toward cuteness or tripe—are old, familiar adversaries; they’ve wrestled with them for years. And because of this, because they know every grip and feint, writers become very good at running defense, at masking or deflecting or, if necessary, shaping what is potentially embarrassing into a strength, an asset.
In short, they lack the ignorance to sum themselves well. The conversation—this lifelong disarticulation of the self—is ongoing; they resume it every time they sit down at their desks. How can they label the thing when it won’t stay on the slide; when it keeps growing out, branching; when every definitive statement (“My work is this,” “What I was after here was this”) immediately feels false, straining to grow a comma and a conjunction? How can they even begin without ignoring the strange, shifting country of human motivation with its thickets of regret, its clever labyrinths of self-justification and denial, its frozen meadows of nonnegotiable love?
And so they—we—lie; we summarize, we get cute. Because it wouldn’t do to say that we have no idea, really, why we wrote something, what particular force forced our hand, we say we do. Because we’re not sure what it is that compels us, like planets on a fixed orbit, to revisit the same places, to be drawn by the same sun that drew us ten years ago, or twenty, we pretend. We affect certainty; our hindsight vision is raptor-sharp. All in all, it’s not so hard to pull off: a general air of competence and self-control, a few writerly aphorisms, a touch of arrogance tempered by a julienne of whimsy or wit, and the thing is done. Everyone is satisfied; the check—a small one—arrives in the mail.
3. Time Disassembles
However difficult it may be to introduce a single work, introducing a collection of pieces written ove
r a period of years is infinitely more so. Time—never mind its other sins—complicates things. Everything, actually. To run with my astronomy analogy for a moment, though the general path of our interests may remain constant, our understanding of the places we visit will change with age, in large part because the bodies we pass will have moved in their own right, forcing new perspectives.
Like frost—to ground the metaphor—time forces things, exposes failures of understanding or compassion, takes what might otherwise appear to be whole and reveals the fissures, the accidents, the glue lines. Given enough years, everything—our lives, our work—can begin to look cobbled, a bit of this, a bit of that, “because it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Which is okay, maybe. Madness, like Ahab’s, runs on iron rails to its fixed goal; the rest of us make it up as we go along. We shift, we adapt, then deny it, strenuously. We’re a bit of a mess. We cling passionately to certain ways and means of being long after they’ve outlived their time; we embrace constancy as though it were always a virtue and never a sin.
A collection written over fifteen or twenty years, unless it be tightly restricted by subject, or trapped in the academic corral, is a bumpy thing, marked by scars and age spots, by contradictions and old refrains and stubborn retrenchments. Like the human being behind it, it will return to the same loves and gripes, essaying to find a way in. It will try different approaches, lenses, voices; laugh when laughing is possible, rage when rage is right. You can force a narrative onto it (after all, we do it to our lives all the time), slap a title on and cinch it tight, but the words, like the living, will escape every time.
An introduction, if it is anything, is an act of retrospection, and what could be more given to misreading than retrospection? Fifteen years ago, when I wrote the first of these essays, I was not yet thirty-six; my daughter was a toddler, my son barely four. I was in love with the same woman I’m in love with now—one constancy I don’t regret. I’d like to think I was more foolish then, but that would be presuming too much. Periodically along the way, some curiosity, some unresolved thing, presented itself and I followed it. Other times, some turn-of-the-millennium irritation crawled across my desk, and I smacked it. E. B. White once wrote of Thoreau that he was trapped between wanting to celebrate the world, and wanting to fix it. That’s a rack I recognize.
For a time I thought my fiction could allow me to do the first, my essays the second; that I could segregate the two. I was wrong. Though the work of fixing is anathema to fiction (except in the deepest, most abstract, most essential sense), my essays clearly do both. Or try. In fact, the longer I think about it, the less certain I am that the distinction between celebrating and fixing is useful. The most unabashedly political pieces here (those trained, often as not, on the second Bush administration, now happily receding in the rearview mirror) are celebrating something, something I believe needs defending, while the most meditative, by exploring the reflexiveness of memory, say, or the creative force of history, by celebrating, in other words, the sheer complexity of being alive in the world, can be seen as an attempt to fix our vision, which seems stuck, at times, on the simplistic and the trivial.
And so, fifteen years’ worth of meditations and arguments and borderline polemics, some relatively small-bore, others admittedly after bigger, more enduring game. I can’t sum them. Are they opinionated? Of course. Timidity belongs to other lines of work, not ours. Am I concerned that their occasional out of sync-ness with the times will cost me? Not a bit. Writers—unlike network anchorpersons or presidential speechwriters—are paid to stand outside the current and say what they see, and the readers worth having are those who appreciate the stance and the product.
For better or worse, I’ve resisted the temptation to tinker, to temper, to correct the too-sweeping generalization in light of future events. I’ve rebuffed my own maturity, perhaps because I don’t entirely trust it. Similarly, though our history-in-the-microwave momentum has given one or two of these essays a slightly dated cast, I’ve allowed this layer of verdigris to remain, first, because the pace of change in our day, driven less by actual human needs than by the rational absurdities of the market, is one of my subjects, and second, because I believe that the din of apparent change can mask the fact that the new boss, like the new app, ain’t, really. The name on the White House mailbox is less important than the American people’s stance toward power; the fact that today’s smartphone will be tomorrow’s 8-track tape is less interesting than our touching faith in (make that “dazed infatuation with”) all things technological. So the references to “Dubya” and videocassettes stay.
What are these essays about? They’re about the intersection of memory and history and fiction, because that is where I live as a writer. They’re about America, because America is where I’ve spent the majority of my years. They’re about how we work and how we remember and how we make sense (or not) of the things that happen to us. A number, I see, are about the losses exacted by what we’ve been trained to call progress, even when it’s not. They are, like the essays of those I admire most, my attempts to get at what matters, or what I thought mattered at the time that I wrote them.
While I can’t say much about them that they don’t already say for themselves, I can say this: the essay form has allowed me to grapple with our world in all its atrociousness and beauty. It’s been an outlet for speculation, a medium for wonder, a safety valve for emotion—for rage, let’s say. At times it’s conferred the illusion that we are not utterly helpless in the face of our species’ routine depredations. And for this I am grateful.
REFLECTIONS
Hitler’s Couch
1998
This was the Angel of History! We felt its
wings flutter through the room.
—SCHWERIN VON KROSIGK
I
If Stephen Dedalus, that fearful Jesuit, was right, if history, in the century of Bergen-Belsen and Nanking and Democratic Kampuchea, is a nightmare from which we are all—even the most effectively narcotized among us—trying to awake, how then do we explain the dream that foreshadows the event, the actual nightmare that precedes the waking one?
When he was eight years old, my father was visited by a nightmare so powerful that half a century later the mere retelling of it would stipple his skin with gooseflesh and lift the hair on the back of his arms. He himself would wonder at his own bristling body, the shameless atavism of fear. “Look at this,” he’d say when I was young, shoving one big arm across the table. “It never fails.” And seeing the coarse, familiar fur rise as if by some conjurer’s trick to the memory of a dream decades gone, I’d know that the immaterial world was a force to be reckoned with.
In the dream (although nothing translates as badly as dreams—no grief, no scent, no earthly grammar), my eight-year-old father hurries, clockwise, down a white spiral staircase. The stairwell has no windows, no central shaft; its sides are as smooth as a chambered nautilus. Just ahead, the left-hand wall continuously extends itself, emerging out of the seam.
He stops, suddenly aware of a sound coming from far below. He can make it out clearly now: the heavy scrape of footsteps, as harsh as steel on marble; behind these, what he assumes at first is the suck and hiss of a factory steam engine, then realizes is actually the sound of huge, stentorian breathing. The man coming up the stairs, he knows, is gargantuan, grotesquely fat; he fills the stairwell plug-tight, like a moving wall of flesh. Getting past him is impossible, the corridor is sealed. Resistance is inconceivable; if my father remains where he is, he’ll be crushed.
Turning, my father starts back up the stairs he just descended. He begins to run. Whenever he stops to catch his breath, he can hear the metronome tread, the fat man’s breathing. He rushes on, confident of his speed. The man is slow, after all, barely moving. He’ll simply outrun him, or keep ahead forever. The stairs unwind like a ribbon in the wind, rising into the dark. It’s then that he remembers there is no exit; the stairwell ends in solid stone. Having entered the dream already de
scending the stairs, he can only return to where he began. Instantly sick with terror, my father turns toward the unseen thing heaving itself up the stairs behind him, toward the enormous bellows of the lungs, already filling the corridor with their sound, and his own scream wrenches him awake. The year is 1932.
II
Seven years later, on March 18, 1939, my father, not yet sixteen, stood with his friend Cyril Brana, peering excitedly through the heavy blue curtains of his friend’s second-floor apartment onto Veveřý Street, in Brno, Czechoslovakia. It had rained the night before. The dripping cables of the trolley cars, catching the light, looped thin and delicate across the city’s drab pigment. Even though it was a weekday, my father said, there were no cars passing in the street below, no umbrellas hurrying down the cobbled walks or stepping over the puddles as if they were fissures into the earth, nor crowding the midstreet islands to the clanging of the trolley bell, their number suddenly doubled like inkblots on an opened paper.
Three days earlier, in an official radio message that must have seemed as unbelievable to those listening to it as the formal announcement of their own deaths, Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist. The message was delivered, as all subsequent communications would be delivered, in the declarative, staccato tones of an authority accustomed to ruling by decree, to establishing fact by fiat: Bohemia and Moravia were now the Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren, under the control of the Reichsprotektor; Slovakia, henceforth, would be an “independent” state under the German-backed Catholic clergyman Jozef Tiso.
Although the exact route the Führer’s motorcade was to take through Brno had not been divulged, it was easy enough to figure out by the placement of the soldiers. Already that morning, in the drizzling half-light of dawn, long lines of dark forms could be seen along certain streets and avenues, slowly coalescing into human shapes.
