Felix in dreams. Another Felix—hateful. He was never hateful in life—cool, closed, but not hateful. Why does he come?
But tonight, as I sit here at my desk and look out at the water—at winter, at the night, at the shining city—I feel a grief that has no object I can name, not Felix or my father or my mother. Just now, it came hard upon me, the grievous ache, but for what? Is it simply that there is so much less in front of me than behind me? Is it for the child called Harriet who walked with her head down? Is it for the old woman I am becoming? Is it because the fury of ambition has not been beaten out of me, not yet? Is it for the ghosts that have left their tracks inside me?
Yes, Harry, it’s the ghosts. But are names ghosts, too, insubstantial? Did you want to see your name in lights, up on the marquee? Vanity of vanities. The letters assigned to you at birth, designation of your paternity. Paternal lights? Is that what you hoped for? But why, Harry? Your father did not want the Burden born, his squalling burdensome little Burden, but there you were.
He came around.
Did he, Harry? Did he, really? Not to your satisfaction, I would say. Didn’t he prefer Felix? Didn’t even your mother favor Felix? Didn’t she say to you, You mustn’t be too hard on Felix? Didn’t she fuss over him, protect him?
Yes, but she loved me.
Yes, she did. But your work?
She didn’t understand my work.
It’s coming up, Harry, the blind and boiling, the insane rage that has been building and building since you walked with your head down and didn’t even know it. You are not sorry any longer, old girl, or ashamed for knocking at the door. It is not shameful to knock, Harry. You are rising up against the patriarchs and their minions, and you, Harry, you are the image of their fear. Medea, mad with vengeance. That little monster has climbed out of the box, hasn’t it? It isn’t nearly grown yet, not nearly grown. After Phinny, there will be one more. There will be three, just as in the fairy tales. Three masks of different hues and countenances, so that the story will have its perfect form. Three masks, three wishes, always three. And the story will have bloody teeth.
* * *
I. A standard definition of confabulation in neurology. Some brain-damaged patients fill gaps in their memories with stories and explanations that are manufactured unconsciously. Burden extends confabulation beyond pathology to the metamorphosing character of memory in general. In Notebook U, Burden writes at length on the myth that memory is fixed. She quotes William James in Chapter 11 of his Psychology (1896), “A permanently existing ‘idea’ which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodic intervals is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.” She cites Henri Bergson on memory, calling him “the enemy of every static division, threshold, and category,” as well as multiple neuroscience papers. “The demonstration of the vulnerability of memory when it is in an active state reinforces the idea that memories, reorganized as a function of new experiences, undergo a reconsolidation process.” S. J. Sara, “Retrieval and Reconsolidation: Toward a Neurobiology of Remembering,” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Journal 7 (2000), 81.
II. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 39.
III. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), German mathematician, logician, and philosopher, who decisively marked modern mathematical logic and early analytical philosophy, in particular Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein (the Tractatus). “The logic is out there” probably refers to Frege’s contention that logic is an objective reality, not created by the human mind. According to Frege, logic deals with a world of ideal, not physical objects, but these ideal objects have as much objectivity as physical things. In Notebook H, Burden charts her reading of Husserl, who was influenced by Frege. Burden writes: “The mind is inescapable. How can logic be floating in some ideal reality beyond the human body and beyond human intersubjectivity? And yet, ideas move among us, not as physical objects but as utterances and symbols.”
IV. Paul Virilio (1932–), French cultural theorist, critic, and urbanist, has written extensively on technology. He argues that modern life is gripped by a never-ending acceleration and that speed and light have now displaced space and time. He has often been referred to as an apocalyptic thinker. Burden is obviously unsympathetic to his views. In Notebook X, which she apparently used as a dumping ground for random thoughts, Burden writes, “The man is nothing short of hysterical, in the theatrical sense. He has gained a following among boneheaded, equally hysterical young men by pushing half-truths to their logical but extreme ends. He is the theoretical incarnation of panic.”
V. From a letter dated November 20, 1665, by Baruch [Bendictus] Spinoza (1632–1667) to his friend Henry Oldenburg. Spinoza, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 192.
VI. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 366.
VII. Philip A. Goldberg, “Are Women Prejudiced Against Women?” Transactions 5 (1968), 28–30. The study was replicated in 1983 by Michelle A. Paludi and William D. Bauer, using male as well as female subjects. “What’s in an Author’s Name?” Sex Roles 9, no. 3, 387–90. For later studies, see Virginia Valian, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998).
VIII. German philosopher, born in 1958, whose work integrates philosophy and neurobiology. Burden took extensive notes on a book Metzinger edited, The Neural Coordinates of Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).
VIIII. Humbert R. Manturana (1928–) and his student Francisco Varela (1946–2001), Chilean neurobiologists and philosophers who coauthored Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1972), a book Burden mentions repeatedly in her writings. In Notebook P, she quotes from the book: “Living systems are units of interactions; they exist in an ambience. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambience with which they interact; the niche, nor can the niche be defined independently of the living system that specifies it” (9). This embodied, embedded-in-the-environment position stands in opposition to computational theories of mind.
X. Judith Leyster (1609–1660), Dutch Baroque painter, a member of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, celebrated in her time but forgotten after her death. Because her work was similar to Frans Hals, many of her paintings were attributed to him. In 1893, the Louvre purchased what was believed to be a Hals but which turned out to be by Leyster. The discovery helped to restore Leyster’s artistic reputation.
Bruno Kleinfeld
(written statement)
Did we settle down the way two fogies ought to settle down in their late-middle-to-old-age, their copious butts in a couple of La-Z-Boy chairs, their feet propped on ottomans, muttering, Did you take out the garbage, dear? Did you remember the milk? No, we did not. Old Man Time screwed us over. He ripped my lady away before we could become the doddering old farts we deserved to be together, sans teeth, squinting through our cataracts, reaching out for the old, soft flesh in the middle of the night. But Bruno, you wax Romantic. Harry was not a settler, and who knows if she ever would have settled in, settled down with her bear. She had been there, done that, in the time before Bruno. The husband—what a strange word—the husband kept coming back, like smoke in the room, stinking up the air between us. Felix Lord and his dough and his art and his sex life still burned like a forgotten cigarette in one of those goddamned crystal ashtrays Harry kept around from her former life on the uppity Upper East Side. God, I hated that effete ghoul who refused to rest, the way decent, normal dead people do. He haunted her. I kid you not. My verbs are not casual. I am a poet, failed, maybe, but a blathering bard, nevertheless, telling tales of those halcyon days of Harry not too long ago and not too far away. I am Bruno Kleinfeld declaiming for all to hear that Felix Lord came to her in dreams, half dead a
nd half alive, a vampire with his fangs fastened in her neck, and my beloved would wake up sweaty and panicked, her eyes roaming the room for him, not because she wanted him back, but because she wanted to make sure he was dead and gone.
Maisie and Ethan, I beg your pardons, but Daddy-o took Mommy for granted. Did he fight for her? No, he did not. Where did it come from—Harry’s pseudonymous mania—except from him? How many women artists did Felix Lord show? Three? And over how many years? Harry watched, and Harry learned. She learned that her very own art-hustle mastermind wasn’t going to lift a finger for her work and that only art’s big boys get satisfaction. “He couldn’t help me, don’t you see?” Harry used to wail. “Sure he could” was my roared retort. After a while, the injustice of it all, the sick, sad misery of being ignored, cracked her heart in two and demented her with anger. I wanted her to fight on, but she decided to walk through the back door and send someone else around the front.
She was a strong woman, my Harry, but not an easy woman. The poem, the project of projects, the anthill that became a mountain, the thing I was eternally climbing and never getting over, my darling work of great verse, the one of Whitmanian proportions, my own American Commedia, that Harry had hugged close during the first year of our passion as my noble quest, became a bugbear once she understood that it wasn’t going anywhere. The poem became a nasty goblin that turned the flesh-and-blood darling of my life into a shrew, a carping, screeching, nagging witch who threw flaming daggers at me and the poem. “It’s so neurotic! You’ve rewritten it five hundred times. What is the matter with you? You’re so afraid. Do you think your cock will shrivel up if you’re not Dante, for Christ’s sake?”
No, it wasn’t easy loving Harry and the poem. I would creep off after a showdown about the interminable project and return to the hole across the street to lick my wounds on the scarred linoleum, and then crawl back, like the dog I was, to her big bed and her muscular arms that held me harder than any woman I’ve ever known. I couldn’t say it then, but the old girl was right about the poem. It had taken me into a dark wood all right, and it wasn’t ever going to get me to the Paradiso, but to give it up meant to give up me, myself, and I, as the ten-year-old Bruno Kleinfeld used to say as he admired his mug in the mirror after a game, reliving a big one he had blasted over the fence.
I couldn’t tell Harry, feminist warrior, that it was worse for a man, worse for a man to fail, to lose the strut in his walk as he feels the power sucked from his guts, the manly fire that had kept him going uphill. Millennia had piled up expectations, stone by stone, brick by brick, word by word, until the stones, bricks, and words weigh so much that the hopeful antihero can’t get out from under them—can’t see his way into a single line he might call his own, and he writhes under the tonnage, begging for mercy.
Despite her fears about the outside, Harry was free inside. She believed in her steam and fury, and she pushed her art out of her like wet, bloody newborns. When I die, they’ll see, she used to crow. The last joke will be mine. When I told her she reminded me of a de Kooning woman, one of those scary mammas with the leering mouths, she grinned with pleasure and rubbed her palms together. She hid The Heathcliff from me until she had finished it. The figure had a huge head thrust back, an open mouth, and a half-crushed birdcage between its gigantic hands. In the cage were bits of ripped lace, a book of Shelley’s poems, pieces of written-over paper, and a torn white stocking that drooped like a tongue between the bars. At first, the thing felt like a kick in the stomach, all force, but from up close, the person, if it was a person, had cuts and slices in its mottled bronze body and hanging breasts.
“Heathcliff was a man, Harry. This is a woman.”
Harry’s eyes ignited as she said, “He is more myself than I am.”
Catherine says it. The first and wildest Catherine in the great, meaty, diabolical novel that is Wuthering Heights. Harry’s brain ran hot and fast. I knew the book and its branching sensuous prose, an old favorite of mine, a literary brick, to be sure. But Harry gobbled down other treatises and tracts and obscure works I’d never heard of. She read and read, on top of making her art, and there were days when I said, “Harry, I don’t know what the hell you’re jawing on about now.” The woman was chin-deep in the neuroscience of perception, and for some reason, those unreadable papers with their abstracts and discussions justified her second life as a scam artist. Eldridge egged her on, too, but he wasn’t responsible for the ruse. Even though I fought The Suffocation Rooms and the idea of Harry as a gay guy (which she found hilarious and I found silly), I can now see the damage didn’t last. Eldridge set the record straight. I never met that namby-pamby kid Tish, but it seems to me he wasn’t worth the anagram shit. Ran off to Tibet. No, it was Rune in league with Lord’s phantom that made the mess. I blame the two of them. The story isn’t simple and it isn’t straight, but I’d like to offer up my memories, some foggy, some clear.
Once Harry and I were thick, tight, and coupled up (to the degree that was possible with a dyed-in-the-wool bluestocking), I saw more and more of the vulnerable girl in her. The nightmares were bad, but she also got the sobs or rages at night, especially after she had seen her shrink. “Why do you go in for that crap?” I asked her. “He just shakes you up. What good does it do?” But when I wheedled her for the dope on a “session,” she’d just shake her head and smile, tears still rolling. “You’re jealous of the doctor. That’s nice, Bruno. That’s really nice.” I wasn’t jealous. I didn’t like to see her upset, but she knew I didn’t have much use for psychoanalysis either. My pal Jerry Weiner got stuck for thirty years with some doctor on Central Park West, and as far as I could tell, Jerry stayed the same cheap, ornery bastard he’d always been. I liked Rachel, but then, Rachel would have brightened up the morgue if she had chosen to work as a coroner. That was just Rachel.
When Rune first popped up into Harry’s life is a mystery to me, but one May afternoon in 2001—I know because it was the spring before the towers fell, and the day was warm and sprouting, and I was close to the end of my semester at LIU—I found the two of them on Harry’s sofa, tittering like a couple of teenage girls, drinking chardonnay, eating peanuts. Harry did the introductions, and Rune, bleached teeth bright as an egg, said, “Oh, the poet.”
I didn’t like the way he said it. Oh, the poet. Didn’t like the Oh, didn’t like the way he trailed off on poet, didn’t like his whitened teeth or his belt buckle or the stupid tight shirt he was wearing or his scuffed boots or the way he had laid his arm over the back of the sofa or the way he talked about his “films.” Didn’t like the man from the start. When he finally waltzed his puny ass out the door, I felt relieved.
I remember Harry accused me of “glowering.” I said I didn’t glower, but that she was “all aflutter,” and it didn’t suit her, a mature woman mincing and giggling like a teenybopper. There was some peckish back-and-forth between us about semantics—glower, flutter, and mince—and then she looked down on me from the imperious heights of Harrydom, as cold and grand as she could be, and announced that she did not need my approval. She would not accommodate my whims. She had moved out of the way once too often, thank you very much, tiptoed around in her old life like a slavey waiting for crumbs to fall. (This self-portrait by Our Lady of the Coats struck me as nothing short of a howler.) I told her Rune looked like a fucking gigolo. Still hoity-toity, enunciating in complete, well-formed paragraphs, the Queen continued—he was a reigning king of the art market, surely I knew, and he just loved her work. She had given him the tour, the tour she gave only to friends, highly select friends who knew she didn’t show, knew she had finished with dealers and galleries and “all that.” I said maybe he loved her money, was sniffing around for a sale, and the fireworks went off, whistle, crack, boom. Cash and assets. Felix Lord’s cologne stinking aboveground.
After the fire-breathing sparks had been snuffed out between us, I wondered aloud if he didn’t strike her as a bit slick and shiny. Mr. S
urface Rune had mastered the art walk and the art talk, hadn’t he? Yes, he had, she admitted, but Harry waved her arms. He had loads of money, and ideas: Mr. Memory, Mr. Artificial Intelligence, Mr. Computer. My Harry’s face was all sunny and warm with Rune’s lofty thoughts. Can robots have consciousness? Is thinking information processing? They had debated the Turing machine, and the Turing test. “He’s dead wrong, Bruno, but it’s fun to argue, don’t you see?” And the art? I looked him up. I thought he looked like a goddamned male model with his rippling abdomen, popping biceps, films of him scratching his ass, picking his nose. Who is he kidding? I said to Harry, and she said, “But he is kidding, Bruno.”
The Blazing World Page 17
