by Ben Lerner
Dear Ben, I put down, I too found it a pleasure meeting you, albeit briefly, in Providence, though in such a crowd little conversation was possible. But to put a face to the name, as they say, if they still say that, and I hope there will be another occasion soon to be in each other’s company.
I deleted the “I too,” just made it “It was a pleasure,” and started a new paragraph: I remember writing William Carlos Williams in, what, 1950, and feeling the letter was very much an intrusion. I don’t mean to imply that I’m to you what Williams was to me then, only to sympathize with, to remember how I shared, the worry you expressed that reaching out might be construed as overreaching. But it isn’t, and you’re certainly not, and anyway how else is one to find one’s contemporaries, form a company? How else to locate the writers with whom one corresponds, both in the sense that we are corresponding now, and in that more general sense of some kind of achieved accord, the way we speak of a story corresponding with the facts? You no doubt know Jack Spicer’s use of that term in all its weird possibility, how he corresponded with the dead, took dictation. And of course we have Baudelaire’s sense of “Correspondances.”
The author could go back later and make sure he wasn’t overusing Creeley’s signature words. I’d reread the one or two matter-of-fact messages we had actually exchanged, would look again at his Selected Letters.
I also recall here that letter sent in my midtwenties because I was writing like you about starting a little magazine, articulating insofar as I could its “general program,” which of course involved expressing my discontent with the magazines then current. You ask if “we need another,” a good question, but I wonder how much the “we” should be its subject. Of course the magazine is a thing one hopes has its circulation, however small, has its influence, however hard to measure, but it is also the instrument through which your own sense of the possibilities of the art will be forged, tested. It seems to me now evident that the best magazines come from editors who themselves “need” the thing to exist, and out of the singularity of that need a magazine of some possible public use arises.
The card of the special collections librarian and the card of the archival appraiser she had recommended would hang above the author’s desk, a silver thumbtack in the plaster. As he worried about the growth of a tumor, as I worried about the dilation of my aorta, the letters would accumulate, expanding the story into a novel.
Attached to this e-mail are four recent poems I would be pleased, indeed, to have appear in your inaugural issue, to appear if they appeal. Their immediate occasion is a visit last summer to Lascaux …
I clicked send, transmitting the proposal to my agent, mild pain shooting through my chest, no doubt psychosomatic, and left to meet Alena at her apartment on the Lower East Side.
Along with an artist friend of hers, Peter, who also had a law degree, Alena had been working on a project—not an art project, she kept insisting—that she’d often described to me, but which I’d always largely dismissed as fantasy: she and Peter were in the process of trying to convince the largest insurer of art in the country to give them some of its “totaled” art. When a valuable painting is damaged in transit or a fire or flood, vandalized, etc., and an appraiser agrees with the owner of a work that the work cannot be satisfactorily restored, or that the cost of restoration would exceed the value of the claim, then the insurance company pays out the total value of the damaged work, which is then legally declared to have “zero value.” When Alena asked me what I thought happened to the totaled art, I told her I assumed that the damaged work was destroyed, but, as it turned out, the insurer had a giant warehouse on Long Island full of these indeterminate objects: works by artists, many of them famous, that, after suffering one kind of damage or another, were formally demoted from art to mere objecthood and banned from circulation, removed from the market, relegated to this strange limbo.
Ever since Peter—who had a friend at the insurance company—had arranged a tour of the warehouse for Alena, she was obsessed with the idea of acquiring some of these supposedly valueless works, many of which she considered to be more compelling—aesthetically or conceptually—than they had been prior to sustaining damage. Her plan, which I’d thought sounded naïve, had been to tell the insurer that she and Peter had founded a nonprofit “institute” for the study of damaged art and to encourage the company to make a donation. They wrote up a mission statement which I copyedited, informally affiliated themselves with a nonprofit arts organization run by one of Alena’s friends, dressed up like responsible adults, and got a meeting with the head of the insurance company, who, it turned out, was also a painter. They charmed her. The head of the company agreed these totaled artworks were of both aesthetic and philosophical interest and—to Alena and Peter’s surprise—was open to the idea of donating a selection for small-scale exhibition and critical discussion, assuming the details could be worked out. Peter spent a few months drafting an appropriately official-sounding agreement with the insurer (no personal details about the parties involved in the claim would be divulged, etc.) and Alena looked into various spaces where they could display the objects and host discussions about these no-longer-artworks and their implications for artists, critics, theorists. In the end, and to my shock, the insurer agreed to donate a gallery’s worth of “zero-value” art to Alena’s “institute,” and even covered the cost of shipping. That morning I’d received a text from Alena that she and Peter would like me to be the first visitor to the “Institute for Totaled Art.”
Alena buzzed me in and I climbed the four flights of stairs to her apartment. She lived in a giant rent-controlled loft in a former commercial building; an uncle was on the lease. It had one room that served as Alena’s studio and then a vast open space into which you could have fit at least two of my apartments. Sometimes Alena’s younger brother—a student at NYU—lived in the apartment with her, although he hadn’t been around in recent months. Almost all the furniture was easily movable and so the room was arranged a little differently each time I visited, which made me feel crazy; the black couch was no longer against the wall, but now the record player was; the drafting table was in a different corner; and so on. I kissed Alena and hugged Peter and sat on an empty crate and asked them where the institute was housed. You’re in it, she said, and disappeared into her studio. Shut your eyes, she yelled back to me.
I shut my eyes—whenever I shut my eyes in the city I become immediately aware of the wavelike sound of traffic—and then I heard her bare feet on the hardwood as she approached me. Put out your hands, she said, and I did. She dropped what felt like a series of porcelain balls or figurines into them. Now open them, she said: what I was holding were the pieces of a shattered Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture, an early red one. It was wonderful to see an icon of art world commercialism and valorized stupidity shattered; it was wonderful to touch the pieces with their metallic finish, to see the hollow interior of a work of willful superficiality. It probably wasn’t originally worth that much money by art world standards—somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand dollars, between one and two IUIs, a year or two of Chinese labor—but it had been worth enough money to charge the experience of holding its ruins with a frisson of transgression. Besides, somebody would probably pay a lot of money for the remnants even if the rubble had legally been declared worthless. Alena and Peter started laughing at my stunned silence and Alena picked up one of the smaller fragments from my hand and hurled it onto the hardwood, where it shattered. “It’s worth nothing,” she basically hissed. She looked like a chthonic deity of vengeance. Not for the first time, I wondered if she was a genius.
Dazed, I walked into her studio. There was more than one gallery’s-worth of artworks stacked against the wall, laid out on the kitchen island she’d installed as a work surface, or resting on the floor. Some were by artists I recognized, most were not. Some were obviously compromised—badly torn or stained. So many of the paintings had sustained water damage that I felt as though I’d been transported into a n
ot-so-distant future where New York was largely submerged, where you could look down from an unkempt High Line and see these paintings floating down Tenth Avenue. Why aren’t you touching anything, Alena said, you can touch them now, and she took my hand and pushed it against what either still was or had once been a painting by Jim Dine. “Since the world is ending,” Peter quoted from behind us, “why not let the children touch the paintings?”
But it was not the slashed or burnt or stained artworks that moved me the most, that made me feel that Peter and Alena were doing something profound by unearthing the living dead of art. To my surprise, many of the objects were not, at least not to my admittedly inexpert eye, damaged at all. Here was an unframed Cartier-Bresson print under a pile of other photographs on the island. I held it up to the pale light streaming in through the studio window but perceived no tears, scratches, fading, stains. I asked Peter and Alena to show me the damage, but they were equally baffled. Here was an abstract diptych by a well-known contemporary artist in what seemed to us perfect condition; Alena consulted the paperwork—heavily redacted by the insurer—and found that it was missing a panel, that it was in fact a triptych, but the two panels in her possession were uncompromised.
I sat on the makeshift daybed Alena had constructed for her studio out of cinder blocks and an old mattress—a mattress I’d checked more than once for the russet traces of bedbugs—and studied the Cartier-Bresson. It had transitioned from being a repository of immense financial value to being declared of zero value without undergoing what was to me any perceptible material transformation—it was the same, only totally different. This was a reversal of the kind of recontextualization associated with Marcel Duchamp, still—unfortunately, in my opinion—the tutelary spirit of the art world; this was the opposite of the “readymade” whereby an object of utility—a urinal, a shovel—was transformed into an object of art and an art commodity by the artist’s fiat, by his signature. It was the reversal of that process and I found it much more powerful than what it reversed because, like everyone else, I was familiar with material things that seemed to have taken on a kind of magical power as a result of a monetizable signature: that’s how branding works in the gallery system and beyond, whether for Damien Hirst or Louis Vuitton. But it was incredibly rare—I remembered the jar of instant coffee the night of the storm—to encounter an object liberated from that logic. What was the word for that liberation? Apocalypse? Utopia? I felt a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied as I held a work from which the exchange value had been extracted, an object that was otherwise unchanged. It was as if I could register in my hands a subtle but momentous transfer of weight: the twenty-one grams of the market’s soul had fled; it was no longer a commodity fetish; it was art before or after capital. Not the shattered or slashed works to which Alena thrilled, but those objects in the archive that both were and weren’t different moved me: they had been redeemed, both in the sense that the fetish had been converted back into cash, the claim paid out, but also in the messianic sense of being saved from something, saved for something. An art commodity that had been exorcised (and survived the exorcism) of the fetishism of the market was to me a utopian readymade—an object for or from a future where there was some other regime of value than the tyranny of price. I looked up at Peter and Alena, who were waiting for me to speak, but could only manage: “Wow.”
Although I knew it wouldn’t last, as I walked back to Brooklyn from Alena’s apartment across the Manhattan Bridge, everything my eye alighted on seemed totaled in the best sense: complete in extent or degree; absolute; unqualified; whole. It was still fully afternoon, but it felt like magic hour, when light appears immanent to the lit. Whenever I walked across the Manhattan Bridge, I remembered myself as having crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. This is because you can see the latter from the former, and because the latter is more beautiful. I looked back over my shoulder at lower Manhattan and saw the gleaming, rippled steel of the new Frank Gehry building, saw it as a standing wave; I looked down at the water to see a small boat slowly pass; the craquelure of its wake merged with the clouds reflected there and I briefly saw the vessel as a plane. But by the time I arrived in Brooklyn to meet Alex, I was starting to misremember crossing in the third person, as if I had somehow watched myself walking beneath the Brooklyn Bridge’s Aeolian cables.
Our world
The world to come
I wandered on Henry Street through Brooklyn Heights. Alex and I were meeting for a drink at a place just across Atlantic, although Alex wasn’t drinking. She had started a new job for which she was radically overqualified and underpaid; she was basically tutoring kids at an after-school program in Carroll Gardens, but she felt it would be best to apply for other jobs while employed and she wanted the structure and welcomed whatever money. I ordered something with bourbon and mint and a sparkling water for Alex and took our drinks to one of the wooden booths. The carefully selected ephemera on the walls dated from before the Civil War; there seemed to be a competition among hip bars to see who could travel back in time the furthest. We sipped our drinks under Edison bulb sconces.
“Are we going to talk about your very clumsy effort to seduce me?” I’d written Alex an e-mail about my semen analysis but we hadn’t really talked about my trying to do it all. She wanted us to go in and talk to the fertility specialist in detail about the results.
“I was amazed you could resist my charms—I even recited poetry.”
“I’m serious.”
“It was stupid and I’m sorry. I was, as you know, very drunk.”
“That was the problem. That’s what you should be sorry for.”
“Okay. But why?”
“Because if we’re going to try to make a baby, however we try to make one, I don’t want it to be one of the things you get to deny you wanted or deny ever happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“‘It was the only kind of first date he could bring himself to go on, the kind you could deny after the fact had been a date at all.’”
“That’s fiction and we’re not talking about a first date.”
“What about the part about smoothing my hair in the cab? The part that’s based on the night of the storm. The alcohol is a way of hedging. So that whatever happens only kind of happened.” I made myself not take a drink.
“Okay, but your whole plan only kind of involves me—my level of involvement to be determined, whether I’m a donor or a father. You’re asking me to be a flickering presence. I give reproductive cells and then the rest we figure out as we go along.”
“Yes, but that’s because it’s up to you. As I’ve said since the beginning, if you want to fully coparent, whatever that would mean, I would do that with you. I wouldn’t have asked you otherwise. I would prefer to do that with you, in fact. If you want to try to have sex as part of a reproduction strategy”—I involuntarily raised my eyebrows at the phrase “reproduction strategy”—“or whatever you want to call it, I’m open to that, too. We’d have to talk more about it. You would have to stop sleeping with Alena, at least during that time. That would be too strange.”
I drained my glass. “What, we’d be a couple? Are you proposing?”
“No. People do this. It would be like we were … amicably divorced.” We both laughed. We had no idea how it would work. But I knew how we could pay for it: I told her I’d sent off the proposal, described my plan to expand the story.
She was quiet for half a minute, then: “I don’t know.” I’d expected her to say it sounded brilliant, which was what she normally said whenever I ran a literary idea by her—an adjective she’d never applied to any of my nonliterary ideas.
“What don’t you know?”
“I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.”
“Nobody is going to give me strong six figures for a poem.”
“Especially a novel about deception. And it sounds morbid to me. I feel like you don’t need to write about falsifying the past. You should
be finding a way to inhabit the present.” I remembered the sensation in my chest when I’d sent off the proposal, as if that way of dilating the story was linked to the dilation of my aorta. “And anyway, you shouldn’t be writing about medical stuff.”
“Why?”
“Because you believe, even though you’ll deny it, that writing has some kind of magical power. And you’re probably crazy enough to make your fiction come true somehow.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“How often have you worried you have a brain tumor?”
“Not once,” I laughed, lying.
“Liar. Remember what happened with your novel and your mom.”
In my novel the protagonist tells people his mother is dead, when she’s alive and well. Halfway through writing the book, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and I felt, however insanely, that the novel was in part responsible, that having even a fictionalized version of myself producing bad karma around parental health was in some unspecifiable way to blame for the diagnosis. I stopped work on the novel and was resolved to trash it until my mom—who was doing perfectly well after a mastectomy and who, thankfully, hadn’t had to do chemo—convinced me over the course of a couple of months to finish the book.
“Do you know what I realized the other day,” I said, “while being interviewed by somebody from the Netherlands over Skype about that novel, which just came out in Dutch? I realized how the lie about his mom is really about my dad.”
“How?”
“Or about my dad’s mother, my grandma, whom I never met; she died when he was twenty. I don’t know if you want to hear a story about mothers and cancer right now.”
“I would like to hear the story.”
“My dad told me all of this when I flew home from Providence for Daniel’s funeral my freshman year of college. He picked me up at the airport and we started driving back to Topeka and I was so upset I could barely speak. I remember we were moving slowly because there was a light but freezing rain. The first part of the story I’d already heard: the day his mother died from breast cancer—‘cancer’ was never said in the family, but everybody knew, even the kids—he called up his girlfriend, Rachel, who was soon to become his first wife, a marriage that lasted all of a year, and before he could say anything, he realized that she was crying and that he could hear weeping, no, wailing in the background. Before he could share the news about his own mom, before he could even ask what happened, Rachel said: My father died. Rachel’s father, a well-known businessman in D.C., where my dad lived and was now in college, had been perfectly healthy, as far as anybody knew. But on the same morning my dad’s mom died after a multiyear struggle with a terrible illness, he just dropped dead at his office from a coronary.”
