Retitle Suicide Essay. Call it Fassinder and Plath: A Novel.
This morning’s handsome cab driver: I orally noted his short-sleeve shirt, and watched his ears lit by sun. Searched for outline (and found it) of tiny hairs.
Now, reading Bernadette Mayer’s Poetry State Forest, I regret being ruthless toward my construction-paper poems.
My mother said I saw an audiologist when I was three years old, because I stuttered.
Saw T. (of the long dick) on the street. I was wearing a red bow tie.
Nickolaus is making portraits of anuses. Maybe I’ll volunteer.
My Joe Brainard drawing easily gets crooked.
Title: “Tippi Hedren and the Three Bears.”
Add something clarifying about Harpo’s relation to homosexuality—and, particularly, about my wish to see straight men queered.
My father described Tom’s gift—or letter—as “latent homosexual behavior.”
After dinner, listened to Vladimir Horowitz play Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 (Arturo Toscanini conducting), first movement, 1941, Carnegie Hall.
My new (old) Hermes 3000 typewriter is the color of my father’s (1955?) Chevy, or at least the keys of the typewriter are that color.
Title for a novel: My Hyperarousal.
Michael Jackson died.
Dreamt that Debbie Reynolds told me that she couldn’t really sing, despite her Singin’ in the Rain fame.
Today would have been Jackie Onassis’s eightieth birthday.
Ted Kennedy died.
Spent the day revising Fassbinder and Plath.
Pound, at the end of his life, was electively mute.
Touched a stinging nettle plant yesterday. I thought it was peppermint.
We drank various leftover bits of wine—a row of refusenik bottles in the refrigerator.
My mother understood that my spelling, when I was a kid, was loco.
In the audience of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Othello, seen up close: Liev Schreiber, Meryl Streep, Ralph Fiennes, Joanne Woodward.
Ralph Fiennes seemed to be wearing garden clogs.
Onassis met her; she didn’t know who Onassis was.
Which means that this not entirely pink tablecloth’s pink matters.
Dream: seeing an opera DVD or else an Elliott Gould–esque early ’70s art film with some friends who didn’t want to see it.
We walked by a club afterward. A pimp, barker, or huckster outside said, “Any questions?” When I said, “What kind of place is this?” he replied, “Naked girls.”
We drove near a town (Ericeira?) where I’m sure my favorite Big Muscle Bears guy lives.
I imagined writing him an email, telling him I loved his voice and his body, and I hoped that if he ever visited New York, he’d contact me.
Why does a gay countertenor in the city of Alcobaça appeal to me?
The lost yet heightened life—the small career—the limited circuit of bars, cafés, performance venues—the disappointed hopes and unrealistic aspirations (and my eroticism a puzzle, a lacuna, an ellipsis, a deferral . . . deferred until it is too late)?
Earlier, in Marvão, a middle-aged, drably dressed woman, who seemed crazy or mentally disabled, or just slow (she was moving her jaw mechanically, as if adjusting her dentures, or suffering from tardive dyskinesia), walked onto the wall we were sitting on. Then, to retain privacy, or to grant her a privacy she seemed to refuse herself, we stepped off the wall.
Driving on country roads, I fell in love with goats—because of the sound of their bells.
_____________
Dream: lost my black denim jacket in Mia Farrow’s fancy apartment.
She had a painting of Liza in her bedroom; a grand piano, inches from her bed; a Deborah Kass appropriation of a Julian Schnabel.
Two days ago I weighed 127. Last night, I weighed 126. This morning, I weigh 124.5.
After dinner, listened to Ethel Merman sing three songs from Gypsy. Then I played the fourth movement of Chopin’s third sonata.
Begin taking the transcription of my journals seriously as a writing project.
Dream: Harpo was handsome but had a Hitler mustache.
Splattered balsamic vinaigrette on my pink shirt after birdlike nibbling at a tuna salad (trying to avoid the red onions filling it like a minefield).
Stood up on the desk, so that the air conditioner could blow-dry my shirt, wet from applying a wet paper towel.
David Foster Wallace committed suicide.
Started Doxycycline for the bite or rash on my right biceps.
Weighed 121.5 this morning, before breakfast.
I think I saw my double, Tom, on the train this morning. He spoke beautiful German.
When Gigli sings the word l’ultima, everything stops.
Dream: my mother offended Louise Glück.
Nathan Gluck died: tiny paid note in the Times.
Write an essay called “Paper Cuts.”
Find a way to make diaries function as poems.
This morning I weighed 120 or 120.5 pounds. Last night I weighed 124.5.
In the shower, cute Bard undergrad offered to lend me his soap.
A guy in the locker room complimented the color of my underpants.
I asked, at one point, whether she was “overflowing with skepticism.”
Being “open,” as it were, to exploring the caretaker’s (metaphorical?) sexual invasions of the infant body (maybe especially the butt?) lubricates the revision (and forgiveness) of this book.
Dreamt of some sexual entanglement (co-nudity) with ———, whose pillory-prone flesh haunts me—a limit-case of exposed, incestuous, hairy body-mass.
And saw sexy father Chris whose absolute unwavering straightness (combined with physical self-confidence) is ravishing and decimating.
Ate the last piece of orange cake, sprinkled with powdered sugar, garnished with apricots, cherries, black and red raspberries.
Mother, wiping the infant’s ass—never certain whether she has done a good job, never sure when the task is finished.
Finished watching Isabelle Huppert in Story of Women. Started reading Guy Davenport’s The Hunter Gracchus.
Davenport thinks the automobile is the enemy of true civilization.
No dinner tonight until I’m done with chapter nine.
Turns out my mother’s favorite film in the world is Isabelle Huppert’s Story of Women, about the abortionist who sexually rejects her handsome husband.
Let my next book be a longhand endeavor. Perhaps a novel? Certainly a book about texture, shininess—whether a mock-philosophical essay, or a set of focused yet wandering meditations.
Outside the restroom at the back of the train, the conductor appeared to be rubbing his crotch suggestively.
I ate two leaves of parsley, and two leaves of arugula.
I hope I haven’t inadvertently destroyed my complexion.
Book idea: Vanilla.
“Two different obituaries / mention The Misfits: I think we’re / on the trail of something wild” is a poem in eight-syllable lines, a tercet.
I don’t understand Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”
My mother reports my stepfather sneaking out of the house to mail his absentee ballot for Obama.
Dream: I applied for a job (posthumous) working on publicity for Anna Moffo in Pennsylvania.
Perhaps find every reference to death in a year of my journals?
My pants button popped off today at school (my Acne jeans).
I read John Bowlby’s Attachment in the hematologist’s waiting room.
The hematologist wants an MRI of my liver (abdomen).
Worried excessively about dropping my hematologist, switching to another in the same suite.
Dream: Joe Brainard takes part in a scholarly panel about his work. I’m on the panel; so is Helen Vendler. My parents, in the audience, are holding a paper bag containing my possessions.
_____________
Do I want to write Walter Benjamin’s Body this s
ummer?
Adorno’s rejection of Benjamin’s Baudelaire was cruel.
I read two Inspector Barlach mysteries by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I’m starting to learn the first movement of Chopin’s third sonata. Dinner tonight was pork and asparagus in the style of pepper steak.
At Lenna’s baby shower I ate two cocktail wieners, wrapped in puff pastry.
Dreamt last night of Elizabeth Hardwick—a sexual advance? Mine? Hers?
In the car today, listened to Arthur Rubinstein playing Chopin waltzes; the Yale String Quartet (with Aldo Parisot) playing a late Beethoven quartet; and the first part of Louise with Ninon Vallin and Georges Thill. While working out at the gym, I listened to Bali gamelan music and some Francis Poulenc piano ditties (Thème varié?).
A not entirely deep voice may mean he’s a virgin or a premature ejaculator, or else he needs his girlfriend to be gentle.
A glass (and a half) of white wine with G. on Bedford Street. I wore my skimpiest pair of white underwear.
Shiny: Autobiography of a Sensation.
When Dr. Bronner was a kid in Nazi Germany, someone poured pee on his head, because he was a Jew. Incidentally, he was a maniac.
Reading Don Quixote. Dulcinea is all the nonsense we assert as the motivation for our ongoing motion.
(2005–2009)
II
NO MORE TASKS
The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to pay attention. Dreamt last night of a senile woman who’d taken up piano-playing; dementia had etherealized her features. Like a seasoned, reputable coach, I stood behind her while she fumbled through Schubert. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to remember the history of song, and to remember the reasons that troubled people have looked toward song to relieve pain and to organize, with other sufferers, in resistance.
With curiosity and reverence, I pulled down, from the shelf, the legendary No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women, the original paperback edition, 1973, edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to revisit books to which we have ceased paying sufficient attention, books we have failed adequately to love.
On a transcontinental flight I read Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. I wanted to live in the crevice where words broke down, and where matter arose to compensate for the loss. Some words I found in The Unnamable: “grapnels,” “apodosis,” “sparsim,” “congener,” “paraphimotically globose,” “circumvolutionisation,” “inspissates,” “naja,” “halm,” “thebaïd.” These words—obstructions in the throat—seemed specimens of rigorous, refined accounting, of a system so late-stage, so desolate, it could satisfy description’s mandate only by lodging in words virtually never used. And, while 39,000 miles in the air, I imagined an island where the only currency, for the stricken inhabitants, gumming their porridge, was the obsolete word, the rare word, the word stigmatized, in the dictionary, as “literary.” I was imagining an island—call it the planet Earth—after most of it was rendered uninhabitable, where there were no words or only the most elementary words or only the most obscure words, only those words so specific, so paraphimotically globose, that they could function in this new, eviscerated terrain. Imagine, then, an ecology of language, where only “cang” and “ataxy” can make the rivers flow, where only “serotines” and “naja” can serve as verbal cenotaphs for the missing bodies, whether made of words or of matter, that failed to arrive at this final, spectral island. If we don’t live on that island now, we may, one day, and we might not be “we” any longer; we might be sparse tuft or diatomaceous phlegm.
Long ago I knew a little boy who was afraid of diatomaceous earth—a bug killer made from “the fossilized remains of marine plankton,” I learn from a website that sells this product, or defines it, or rails against it. I knew a little boy who was afraid that the presence of diatomaceous earth in the family’s garage would destroy his lungs. He feared that diatomaceous earth would insinuate its chalky presence into the house itself. The patriarch of that house had a name almost identical to the nineteenth-century German peasant who discovered diatomaceous earth. The name of that peasant, Peter Kasten, closely resembles my father’s name; the only object missing is the suffix “-baum.” The only object missing is the tree—not the actual tree, but the name for the tree, which is itself the sign of a so-called race, tribe, or population for whom poisons would eventually matter. There are no tribes for whom poisons do not always matter. Poisons mattered to the boy—not me, but my brother—who lived in the house adjacent to the garage containing diatomaceous earth. I imagine that my brother feared the diatomaceous earth not simply because it was possibly toxic to human lungs but because its first discoverer bore a name similar to our father’s. And so, as Michel Leiris and other word-unveilers have noted, we travel into our stories—our bodies, our destinies—through the words that accidentally or deliberately serve as the vessels holding the material facts, the powders, the liquids. I will say “unguent” here because I seize any opportunity to say “unguent,” not because I want perfume or healing or exoticism but because I want vowel mesh, I want a superabundance of the letter “n,” hugging its “g,” and I want the repeated, nasally traversed “u,” which is an upside-down “n.” Unguent. And thus we dive into that aforementioned crevice where words crossbreed: my brother feared death at the hands of a bug killer discovered by a German man whose name uncannily resembled the name of our German father.
The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to play with words and to keep playing with them—not to deracinate or deplete them, but to use them as vehicles for discovering history, recovering wounds, reciting damage, and awakening conscience. I used the word awakening because my eye had fallen on the phrase “to wake the turnkey” from The Unnamable. Who is the turnkey? The warden who holds captive the narrator, if the narrator is a single self and not a chorus. “To wake the turnkey” is a phrase I instinctively rearranged to create the phrase “to wank the turkey.” Why did I want to wank a turkey? Is wank a transitive verb? According to the OED, the word’s origin is unknown, and it is solely an intransitive verb, which means it has no object. I cannot wank a turkey. You cannot wank a turkey. We cannot wank a turkey. They cannot wank a turkey. The turkey could wank, if the turkey had hands. I have no desire to investigate this subject any further. Before I drop it, however, let me suggest that Beckett’s narrator, the solipsist who paradoxically contains multiple voices, is, like most of his narrators, intrinsically a masturbator, as well as an autophage, a voice that consumes itself. The writer’s obligation in the age of X is to investigate the words we use; investigation requires ingestion. We must play with our food; to play with the verbal materials that construct our world, we must play with ourselves. Producing language, we wank, we eat, we regurgitate, we research, we demonstrate, we expel; with what has been expelled we repaper our bodily walls, and this wallpaper is intricate, befouled, and potentially asemic—nonsignifying scratches without a linguistic system backing them up, scratches we nominate as words by agreeing together that this scratch means wank, that scratch means cang, this scratch means diatomaceous, that scratch means masks.
Susan Sontag once praised a maxim by the painter Manet, who said that in art “you must constantly remain the master and do as you please. No tasks! No, no tasks!” I often quote Sontag quoting Manet. Writing is a terrible task. It is also, sometimes, a pleasure, but it is more often a task. The arduousness of the task, and the succulence of the pleasure, are coiled together. For Sontag, writing must have often been a task, and she was often fleeing the task, even in her own writing. It’s possible to read any of her sentences as a round-trip flight between pleasure and task. The flight grows marmoreal—hardened into its pose—and that state of stillness-in-motion (a modernist ideal) is her finished sentence. “Mastery,” as Sontag, quoting Manet, constructs it, is a matter of fleeing task; we flee the task to become the master. Mastery, a dubious concept, needn’t be our lodestar; we can flee task not in search of mastery but in search
of circumvolutionisation. More on circumvolutionisation in a minute.
“No more masks! No more mythologies!” So goes the passionate cry uttered in Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Poem as Mask.” No more tasks, I say, crossbreeding Rukeyser’s phrase with Sontag’s (or Manet’s) “No tasks!” Mask and task are two nouns—two behaviors—I love. From Oscar Wilde come masks; from the Marquis de Sade, and from Yahweh, come tasks. After Eden, masks and tasks. In Eden, we had neither. Literature—the respite of the fallen—is the process of making do with mask and task, diverting ourselves with tasks that mask our disenfranchisement. We are disenfranchised, regardless of our station, because we belong to an earth that will continue to bear our presence only if we remain adequate custodians of this material envelope, fragile, in which we dwell, an envelope consisting of just a small interval of habitable temperatures. To unmask the systems that will destroy our possibility of inhabiting the earth is the task of a language that operates through masks and the avoidance of tasks. Past the obvious tasks we fly, in search of tasks more stringent, more personal, more flawed, more seamed, more circumvolutionary. Circumvolution must be voluntary; no master can impose it. Beckett’s word, circumvolutionisation, is not in my two-volume abridged OED. Perhaps the word does not really exist. Perhaps it exists only in Beckett’s mouth, or the mouth-mask that we call a novel. To flee the words we have been allotted by an immoral system that wishes to drain the swamp (as the current political administration describes its wish to destroy governance), and to seek circumvolutionisation, if circumvolutionisation turns you on, are the simple medicines I stand here to offer you. Circum- means “around.” Volvere means “to roll.” In my dream last night, the senile woman playing Schubert on the piano had sat, a few dream-moments earlier, gossiping with fellow sufferers in a room usually given over to psychoanalysis; my crime, in the dream, was either that I had crashed a borrowed car, or that my existence was filthy and inadmissible. In the dream, gobbets of mud were stuck to the bottom of my Blundstone boots. Homoeroticism lay encrypted within those muddy clods. My soiled homo-boots sat on the porch of the senile woman who’d been practicing her flawed Schubert. Dirt’s movement into and out of a house has always been the topic I circle around, and I beg you to take my circumvolutionisations as seriously as possible, and to eat them, as you would eat an allegory, biting hard into its brittle exterior, like an unfriendly candied almond, Mandelbrot, Mandelbaum.
Figure It Out Page 5
