The Blazing World

by Siri Hustvedt

  Phinny and I: PH. We make an F sound together, as in phuck you.

  Last night again. James Rukeyser has heard that I am building on Felix’s collection. He is interested in me now. Oh, yes, I hold a sudden luminous charm. Felix’s wife has Felix’s art and Felix’s money. Maybe he will lure me into a purchase. Show me the cabbage. That is what he means as he smiles. I am wearing my blue velvet beret. My affectation, which is not a pipe, courtesy of Phinny. James gives me his card. I have a flash memory—the stiff paper in my right hand, my thumb visible over the name. The business card is beige with black type. Miriam Bush joins us. “I have not seen you in years, Harriet! Why, what are you up to? Someone mentioned you. Who was it now? Are you still making those little houses?” James looks confused: little houses? He does not know that I have ever made art. When Phinny and I get outside I throw the card away. I see it in the wet gutter, its lettering invisible, just a small rectangle vaguely illuminated by the streetlamp as the ice-cold rain falls.

  I am ten in the memory. Am I ten? Maybe I am eleven. I cannot feel ten or eleven anymore, really, can I? No. But I am inside this memory; I am inside my body. I have walked from Riverside Drive to Philosophy Hall on a Saturday to surprise Father. Why have I done it? What possesses me? An idle whim? A plan? No, I am just walking in the spring air, and I decide to walk there. The day is sunny after a rain. Sun over puddles. That seems right, and it comes into my head that I am so close to Father’s office, and I walk through the doors and climb into the elevator. But I am nervous, yes, some anxiety is attached to this bold move. I have been to his office before, as he dashes in to pick up papers, while I wait with Mother. There is a smell in the gray hall, a dry smell like erasers; it is never noisy, hushed but with a hum, white noises, I guess, and low voices here and there, as if these are the sounds of mental work, of thoughts. I knock. He must say Come in, but this I don’t really remember. I see him before me at his desk and the window behind him. The light is hazy; the glass is smudged. His head is down. He looks up. “Harriet, what are you doing here? You should not be here.”

  It has nothing to do with you.

  “Harriet, you should not be here.” The ten-or-eleven-year-old is flummoxed. I’m sorry. Do I say I’m sorry? I think so. But this is crucial. What is the tone of his voice? Angry? I doubt it. Strict? Puzzled? Perhaps puzzled, but I can’t recall this accurately. What I recall is the drawing in of my breath, the pang, the shame. Why shame? This I know. I am deeply ashamed. In the memory he says nothing more. He looks down at the papers in front of him, and I leave. But is this possible? Maybe he escorted me to the door, and in the shifting eddies of recollection, those steps with Father to the door have disappeared. Maybe he patted my shoulder. He did pat my shoulder sometimes.

  And sometimes, too, I heard a hint of musical softness in his voice. I learned to listen for it—a crack in the tone that lifted a vowel into another register, not fully controlled. And something broke for an instant, as if he had seen me, his child, seen and loved.

  Mother is lying in bed. I hold her hand and idly look at the protruding veins in it—the palest of greens. I wouldn’t have recalled that if I hadn’t said to myself, Her veins through her skin are the palest of greens. Words consolidate memories. Emotion consolidates memories. Something has happened to Mother after Father’s death, and she is telling now, telling her life, telling me that my father did not want the baby. When she told him she was pregnant he did not speak to her for two weeks. I feel the cramp of emotion, but I don’t want her to stop. After I was born, I want to know, was it okay then? It took some time, my mother says, before he got used to you. Your father loved you, of course.

  Hume couldn’t find anything to hold on to, no self in the bundle of perceptions that become memories. Imperfect identity.

  He did not want me.

  But this is nonsense, Harriet, isn’t it nonsense? How many men have not wanted their unborn infants? Millions. How many women, for that matter? And how many have come to want them once the little thing has arrived, is out, is real? Millions. And yet, it took some time, she said, and there is the feeling, as if I’d been kicked, as if it had all become clear, as if a door had opened to a truth. And I look into the room, and there is the thing that has been born. There is something wrong with it. Count the toes.

  But I would first ask you to note that I do not attribute to Nature beauty, ugliness, order or confusion. It is only with respect to our imagination that things can be said to be beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.V

  But imaginations mingle, Professor. Imaginations merge. When I look at you, I see myself in your face, and what I see is deformed or missing.

  But nothing happened, did it?

  There is no one story, no perfect answer to the problem of H.B. Until about the age of three or four, every one of us is hidden behind amnesia clouds. The feelings come back, but we don’t know what they mean.

  Perhaps I wished for something rather than nothing—a smack of passion to make me believe I was really there for him, not missing. And then the blow rises up from imaginary depths. When there is nothing, the phantoms come up to fill the emptiness. It is not true that nothing comes of nothing. There is always something. I stand on the stool and look out at the street. Stand beside me, Bodley. Here, there is room for you, too. I love you, Bodley. You are my best friend. Breathe now, Bodley, breathe fire.

  Your order is my wilderness, Father. I cannot walk between the high rows of hedges and find my way out. I am not out of the maze. Stifled. I am trying to breathe, but I cannot. I am hardly breathing.

  Your patterns did not make sense to me, Father, or, rather, the sense they made is shallow. Tidy formulations to clean up the mess. I have read your papers, and I am a little sorry now, sorry for a life spent on true and false, however lean and elegant the logic.

  The “specialist” emerges somewhere—his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins—his hunched back, every specialist has a hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked . . .VI

  Felix goes to work. Felix comes home. Felix gets on a plane and flies away. Felix sells and Felix buys, but you should have told me about your secret life, Felix, your secret lives, on the chase. It did have something to do with me. You were wrong, Felix. But you wanted your babies, didn’t you? Yes. They were easier to love than me. Maisie rushing to the door, bouncing up and down in her pajamas, panting with excitement. He’s here. He’s here. Daddy! Daddy! Elusive fathers. How we love them.

  I am feeding Ethan, his tiny soft nose smashed against my breast. He pauses, a thin stream of milk bleeds from the edges of his mouth, and he looks around confused, blinks, breathes noisily, and returns to feeding. The curious Maisie is watching, pushing her head into my shoulder, whining at me. Is my Maisie lazy? Do you want to cuddle under my arm, lazy Maisie girl? Yes, Mommy. And I have them both, one hanging from a nipple and the other nudged into the cave made from underarm and elbow—a triple body. A depleted body of three. Tired as I am, I know this is joy. I say to myself: This is joy. Don’t forget it. And I don’t.

  To end there, with the babes. That is good for the sleepy mind grown lazy with writing.

  Tomorrow there is work, and there is Bruno at night. I call him the Rehabilitator, because he loves the big body of his big love. He likes to see me spread out on the bed, Harry, an aging, naked Venus no Baroque painter would have chosen, but here I am mooning over my own dive-bomber, Bruno the Bear. Not so young, my Romeo, an old fart if there ever was one, with a gut, too, and most of the hair worn down on his legs and the skin turned smooth, to his surprise! He’s not young! What happened? He worries over semen flow, a bit low, the flow, compared to days gone by. You’d think he had walked around with a volcano down there for years, conceited man. But face to face and pubes to pubes, or face to pubes and pubes to face, or straddling and riding or fingers inside delicate orifices here
and there, God (why do we call on the supernatural at times like this?), God, I cannot wait to tackle that fat man and kiss his round ass.

  And we fight and snarl, too.

  H: Finish the poem or flush it!

  B: Get your butt out there and show your own work, you coward!

  But I’m in love, isn’t that mad? Now, to really end here. I am wanted, wanted. In your eyes, Bruno man, I am shining (well, at least part of the time). Sleep now, sleep, as the bard says, sleep, the balm of hurt minds.

  January 18, 2000

  Maisie reported today that Aven has an imaginary friend who lives in her throat. The person is known as Radish, and is causing upheaval in the household. Maisie has taken to addressing Radish, which means that Aven spends a lot of time with her mouth gaping, so her mother can confront the invisible insurrectionist directly. I am all sympathy because Bodley was with me for years, and I remember him with much love, but Maisie is worried that Radish has made her appearance (it’s female) for dark psychological reasons—the child is under stress in nursery school. They are showing her letters and numbers she wants nothing to do with. She has just been given eyeglasses, another worry (for her mother, I believe, more than for Aven). I told Maisie that these friends, wherever they may be lodged, inside or outside, are usually helpful and serve some useful purpose. My own mother was very kind about Bodley. She set a place for him at the table and talked to him politely (when he wasn’t misbehaving).

  As for the plot, it seems to be working. Phineas has been offered a show of The Suffocation Rooms at Begley in the spring of next year. I had a hallelujah moment about my own queer sensibility, about showing my Phinny man. But then a hint of sadness, low thoughts soon after. I have begun to wonder if I could show work by Anonymous. That might be impossible. There is no orderly vision without context, it seems. Art is not allowed to arrive spontaneously unauthored. Bruno says that turning my pseudonyms into moving pieces in a philosophical game about perception is just a cover for my insecurity. I am masked twice. Phinny disagrees. He has been out and about with me, traveling incognito, so to speak. He says that he has seen it over and over again. He has seen that it matters little what I say; my intelligence is discounted. Piffle and twaddle. Were I to come out with The Suffocation Rooms, the powers-that-be would instantly back away.

  The work would look different.

  Would it look old-womanish all of a sudden?

  I insist that this is a question with urgency.

  I have often wondered what a Josephine Cornell would have looked like to people? Piffle and twaddle, frippery and sentiment? Soft?

  Not the same, surely, as Joseph.

  When it’s a gay man, it’s something else again, right?

  Phinny says yes and no. He cites Ethan; it’s queered, he says, but there’s macho and fey, top and bottom, somehow important.

  Is it?

  I tell him I like being queered with him, paired and queered.

  Eve, with her high heels and her low-cut sweaters and her corsets worn on the outside and her Rube Goldberg machines made out of old dresses, is oblivious to the onus of her sex. Well, she’s young. She knows about me and P.Q. She had to know because she lives here.

  Two days ago while we were lounging about before bed, Phinny actually yelled at the big B. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what she does! They see the widow or they see her money. They are blinded by what they think they see!”

  Another Goldberg, the Goldberg study, 1968. Women students evaluated an identical essay more poorly when a female name was attached to it than when a male name was attached. The same results were found when they were presented with a work of visual art. Goldberg study revisited, 1983. Men and women students rated the essay with a female name attached more poorly than with a male name attached. And so it goes, but there is a twist as the research progresses in the 1990s. When expert credentials are attached to a woman’s name, the bias disappears. For artists, expertise is fame. Sex and color don’t disappear; they no longer matter.VII

  Bruno does not want any part of bias studies or psychological research. I am not just another dame. I am his very own brilliant Harry. Give the jerks a chance. They’ll come around. Weirdly, his faith that Phinny and I are wrong makes me happy, and Phinny’s insistence that I am right makes me unhappy. I am perverse.

  (Phinny is thinking of himself, too. The glare of prejudice is all too familiar.)

  Sometimes I think of Anton sadly.

  There is something else. I met Rune. I can’t say why, but I didn’t mention our encounter to Bruno. It was at the opening for some silly work—balloons, faces. Such a handsome man. Anointed, heralded, wearing his laurels. Vain, I think, probably very vain, but aren’t we all? And then maybe we attribute more vanity to beautiful people than to the plain, and perhaps it isn’t fair. We talked about memory. Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses. Cicero. One thought led to the next. It was almost as if he knew me, one of those uncanny connections. And what about machine memory? This fascinates him, artificial intelligence, but, I say, they have hit many dead ends. I told him about Thomas Metzinger.VIII Looked at Rune’s work again—faces in surgery, flaps of skin. I have a catalogue. New surfaces, he was saying, surgically transformed, but also bionic technology for new limbs that respond to the nervous system, computers as extended selves-minds. All true. But what does it mean? He spoke to me about external memory—an odd idea. For him the frenzy for documentation, photos, films, the second lives on the Internet, the simulated wars and games. I pointed out that self-consciousness is not new. But the technology is, he insisted. He said, “I want my art to be these questions.” We don’t agree, but that might be the pleasure, the sharp back-and-forth, the agon with a worthy partner. I recommended papers and books to him, and he wrote them down. Read Varela and Manturana, I said.VIIII He said he would. We talked about Wechsler. On him, we agreed. O’s Journey. When we said goodbye, his handshake was just right, neither limp nor too firm. When his e-mail arrived, I felt giddy with hope, for the end of exile in my own head, for someone who will understand me, someone who will see what I know and talk back to me about it. Is this so ridiculous? Isn’t it possible?

  Recognition. Dr. F. Isn’t that what we talk about? My greed for recognition. One to one. Tête-à-tête. You and I. I want you to see me.

  Bruno listens to me, but he doesn’t always know what I am talking about. Nobody seems to know what I am talking about.

  A year ago, I saw part of his film diary—the man, Rune (once Rune Larsen), at daily tasks, brushing his teeth, flossing his teeth, lying on the sofa, reading, sitting in front of the computer, and then stroking a redheaded woman’s hair over and over as she lay with her head on his shoulder in a big rumpled bed. And I thought to myself, this is what we never see because we are inside, not outside, and most of us cannot recall habitual events except as a blur of routine. Is this why he wants the film? The date appears on the screen, and there is a film for each day. The film does not run all day. It is not Warhol’s sleeper or the Empire State Building, but he documents one event, often minor, every day.

  Do I remember if I took my vitamin this morning or brushed my teeth? Was it this morning or yesterday morning or the day before?

  The hair-stroking might remain inside Rune and the young woman as a memory, but most likely from the internal perspective of each of them, each “I”—but sometimes we remember as observers. It is a kind of false memory. I remember the afternoon I stroked your curls over and over when we were first in love. I remember lying with you in bed and feeling your fingers in my hair as you petted me for minutes on end and how lovely it felt, and I remember the daylight in the room, and I remember our love. What is the memory of love? Do we actually recall the feeling? No. We know it was there, but the manic desire isn’t there in the memory. What do we recollect exactly? The sensations are not reproduced. And yet, an emotional tone or color is evoked, something weightless or he
avy, pleasant or unpleasant, and I can summon it. I remember lying in bed with Felix. But is it one time or is it many times merged together from the early days of our clutching love, when I ached for his touch? I know I held his head sometimes when we fucked. I know I put my lips to his ear afterward and whispered words long forgotten, probably stupid words. But do I really remember a single time, the once only? Yes, in the Regina in Paris, with the uncomfortable beds we had to push together. Five stars and those beds. I think I remember the line of light between the heavy curtains as I sat on top of him, banging him. Long ago.

  I remember coldness, too, his back to me. The distance between us, his eyes dead to me. I remember this: at a dinner. Where was it? The caustic joke about marriage, not ours, of course, but the institution in general. What were his words? I can’t remember. I recall I started, looked at him. In my mind I see a plate with a gold rim. He turned his head. Now it returns with the memory, pain, perhaps not as acute, but pain arrives with a recollection so vague it has almost disappeared—there was a joke, a plate, a look, and a cutting pain. Is pain more durable than joy in memory?

  What moron said the past was dead? The past is not dead. Its phantoms own us. They own me. They have a stranglehold on me, but I don’t know if the revenants can be dispelled. Maybe I will consult with Radish. Maybe she will have some good advice for me. I will just have to keep working—the studio is burgeoning with the unseen works, the myriad monstrosities by someone named Harriet Burden. Maybe when the revelation comes the proverbial scales will fall from their eyes. Maybe when I’m dead some wandering art critic will come to the building where the goods are stored and look, really look, because the person (me) will finally be missing. Yes, nodding wisely, my imaginary critic will stare for a long time and then utter, here is something, something good. Rescued from oblivion like Judith Leyster.X Then again, what if it’s all crap anyway, despite my precious pseudonyms—the ones they desire, rather than me, not me. I am going to be sixty. Maisie has said she will throw a birthday party, and I have said, yes, but only for the dear hearts—no outlying friends of friends. Phinny wants to shop for a dress for me to wear when I turn the corner of another decade, something “ravishing,” he says.