by John Crowley
Don’t worry, Dad, he said one evening as his father observed the work. I’m not queer. Just artsy.
La Brea Medical Transcription Service • 1419 La Brea Avenue • Los Angeles CA 90019
For: Dr. Carla Young PhD
10/06/92
Subject: John C.
Second Session
CY: Notes. Second session, the presenting problem was set aside and at my suggestion a general life story was begun. In the course of that session a string of odd beliefs or magical thinking influencing behavior appeared. Unusual perceptual experiences, including bodily illusions. Inappropriate or constricted affect. This is a very odd duck.
Transcript begins at 02:07:00
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CY: John, we haven’t got a lot of time left in this hour. I want to be very clear as to how you yourself understand this story you are telling me.
JC: The story I’m telling?
CY: Well, your account. I meant it in no prejudicial sense.
JC: Though of course you have in fact prejudged it.
CY: I try not to prejudge. I may make tentative hypotheses.
JC: It’s okay that you prejudge. I would completely understand.
CY: Let’s continue with the account of your past you began with, and see where that leads us, from then to now.
JC: All right. But which account?
CY: John, you’re the one who believes there is more than a single account. I can only accept the one that brings you here to this office in this city in this year. The other is what you want to relate, which is fine, but it doesn’t have the same . . .
JC: The same ontological standing.
CY: That’s a rather chilly way to describe it. It doesn’t have the same claims, not in this room. I’d call it something more like a doppelganger, or perhaps it’s a sort of incubus, a creature and creator of dreams who rides you.
JC: There’s your prejudgment.
CY: Very well. Tell me whatever you like, and perhaps my judgment will surprise you by changing too.
JC: And what’s your judgment now? At this moment?
CY: What I think is that you have developed a sort of private mythology. A mythology in which you have become entrapped. One that limits you as a person even though it seems to you to be an enlargement.
JC: For a long time it did feel like an enlargement. An enormous, an indescribable enlargement. It doesn’t now.
CY: Exactly. Now you wish to escape from it, to free yourself to be . . . well, ordinary. To join the rest of us, from whom you’ve become so estranged.
JC: Doctor. I want help. But escape isn’t possible at all. Even the choice I face, which can change everything, doesn’t have escape in it as a component.
CY: Of course it does. I’d use the word “freedom” instead of “escape,” because there’s nothing to escape from. There is no actual evidence for it but your own fabulation. This idea that you alone can actually, physically, remake the past and make other choices—
JC: But what if, Dr. Young, I’m not alone? If the universe can divide once, it can divide many times. There may be vast populations by now that have done what I did, learned what I learned . . . You’re laughing.
CY: I can’t conceive what evidence could be collected that it’s possible, much less that it’s the case, that it’s common.
JC: Well, there couldn’t actually be any evidence except for the stories people tell. And just because no one before has ever told you theirs—
CY: No. I have heard stories in many, many forms. I have heard about worlds that people believe they inhabit but that can’t be found in the physical universe. I’ve also helped to uncover stories that I came to believe are true—stories of abuse and trauma—that persons in deep travail refused to allow themselves to know, and who were freed to some degree by coming to know them as true. All of it without physical evidence. Stories are your business. Mine too.
JC: Of course.
CY: And were you so unhappy in that supposed other life that you were able to conceive of this radical remaking? So desperate that you needed to believe this strongly in the possibility?
JC: No, no. I wasn’t desperate. I was living a pretty good life.
CY: But it wasn’t enough.
JC: It was enough, but the whole range of alternate possibilities haunted me, haunted me day and night. Haunted is wrong. Intrigued and tempted.
CY: How can you be tempted by something impossible? That’s harmless daydreaming; everybody does it. What was it you felt you didn’t have that made this daydreaming so . . . importunate, I guess? Did you feel you hadn’t got recognition enough, or fame enough?
JC: I would have liked more recognition. It wasn’t that I’d had none.
CY: For your screenwriting and film-making.
JC: No. I wasn’t making films. I was writing novels. I was living in New England and I had a family and I wrote novels and stories. I wasn’t dissatisfied. I just wanted to know what would have happened to me if I had made different choices. Choices that I couldn’t have made because I didn’t know they were possible, and I wouldn’t have known how to make them possible.
CY: So you returned from maturity—age what now, fifty? . . .
JC: Forty-nine.
CY: . . . to the point in time when it seemed you had the greatest chance to make a wholly different life. You were in the body you then possessed but with a consciousness that had been created later, in a different life. Is that right? How did you bring that off? I mean by what mechanism, what—
JC: Well, by no mechanism. I guess . . . I just understood that I could.
CY: And did the whole of this new-to-you other West Coast world come to be around you as you lived in it? The one I’d call “this world”? Did it day by day replace the one you had lived in all your life, begin to be changed for you, and not only for you but for everyone?
JC: Of course not. It’s a world that has existed from the beginning. At least now it does. All I did was to enter it.
CY: And what became of the world you departed from, the one where you went to the state school, lived in New York, wrote novels, all that?
JC: Here’s what I know: Both those states of the world exist until one is chosen. When one is chosen the other ceases to be. Ceases to have ever been. I don’t want to bring up the name Heisenberg here. It might be an utter misdirection.
CY: From what I’m hearing, John, this is all misdirection. Your task should be to learn that. Do you know the term “anosognosia”?
JC: Of course. A condition where a person is incapable of recognizing an illness, even a paralysis that seems impossible to ignore or deny. It might be you are thinking I am such a person.
CY: Well?
JC: If I am, of course, I wouldn’t be able to know it. And if I’m delusional—as I know you believe me to be—I’d deny it even if I was anosognosic.
CY: Yes, well. How anyway do you come to know about this condition? It’s quite rare.
JC: The first film I wrote and directed was about it. A short film. It’s actually called Anosognosia, a title that was almost designed to keep people from wanting to see it. But it also won awards. You’ve heard of it?
CY: No.
JC: It actually turns on two neurological conditions: that one, and one I heard about from a professor of neurology at USC: one where certain kinds of brain damage can cause people to fail to recognize common objects, including the alphabet. My film was about a viral plague that causes this condition, spreading among the story’s characters, eventually including an investigator of the plague, who continues to write his accounts though he can no longer read what he has written.
CY: I see.
JC: It was all done in still photographs, with his narration over. He can increasingly not recognize the various items he is studying as possible disea
se vectors, but he continues to make his notes. A sort of fruit I cannot put a name to—perhaps it’s foreign or tropical—I seem to recognize the shape—totally unknown to me though . . . We can see it’s an apple.
CY: And because of his anosognosia he can’t realize that he is suffering from the condition of being unable to recognize common things, the condition he’s seeking to find a cure for.
JC: Exactly.
CY: That is unbelievably cruel.
JC: Yes. It was also very funny. I was sort of unable to make such distinctions back then. It was . . . witty, and a few people still remember it for being witty. It’s on cassette, if you’d like to see it. A good transfer.
CY: Maybe. I think we have enough levels of illusion here to deal with already.
JC: In that regard. There’s something I haven’t explained clearly why I have come to you, something about this . . . story.
CY: Not about a writing block.
JC: I came because the terms of my . . . good fortune, superpower, mad illusion, whatever it is, are very specific and have become urgent. I have to make the choice I must make—whether to stay in this world or return to the world I began in—before the end of my fiftieth year. On my fiftieth birthday, in effect.
CY: And that would be when?
JC: The first day of December of this year. A month from now.
CY: Well, John. Let’s hope that we can relieve you of the anxiety that must come with that rule, or condition. Let’s assume that we can—together—help you to see it as it really is.
JC: And to choose correctly.
CY: Not to choose at all, and stay in the real world with the rest of us.
Transcript ends 51:36:00
At USC John C. was a theater and art major, though many of his classes were in the film department. The making of student films at that time was so constrained by the equipment that John C. felt that he could get more experience in the things most important to a director from theater work—directing actors, conceiving approaches to plays, building and slowing tension in a scene. He had used to believe that he couldn’t succeed as an auteur in film or theater because the real medium of both those arts was the same: not words, or actors, or camera movement, or “light,” or anything but other people. The medium of theater and film is other people: people who have to be cajoled, encouraged, bullied, subjected to the demands of the project. The contributions of these others—actors, designers, lighting technicians, animators, editors, costume designers, musicians and composers—have to be all put in service of an overarching vision, the director’s. That vision can be modified and even upended by brilliant work contributed by others, but only as the director perceives that work; the director has to be able to refuse any work that doesn’t meet what he sees in his head or heart. John C., who had never been assertive, who was small, easygoing, open, and afraid of hurting others, even the inadequate and the clueless—he could, he had believed, never be that imperial central point around which everything moved.
At USC he aimed to be. And learned that he could be. All that stood in his way was the past he had shed.
His mode had to be soft-spoken; it had to depend on the projection of a calm certitude, as though resulting from a long career in collaborative creation, though of course it couldn’t and didn’t. When he took modern-dance classes, when he did animation projects in art, he entered into them and spoke about them to others as though these were simply parts of a mastery he aimed for and in some sense therefore already possessed, and the others who must be his medium accepted and acknowledged that. By the time he was a senior he had taken on several independent projects, some with fairly large casts. His senior piece in directing was a chamber Hamlet, the text reduced to an hour’s playing time. A woman who had taken two acting classes with him was his inspiration: she was lean, fierce, disputatious, always challenging her teachers, constantly pissed off in a deep part of her; she wore her thick black hair in a boyish mop, she had a single thick eyebrow above her deep black eyes and a nose like a predator’s beak. She dressed in beatnik jeans and sloppy T-shirts, and it was clear to everyone—certainly to John C.—that she was what was called in those days, without censure in the circles in which she and John C. moved, a dyke. He wanted her for his Hamlet. Her first response to the invitation was swift and angry, as at an insult. Oh yeah right. He kept after her. It had long seemed to John C. that rage was what possesses Hamlet, fury, fury at his own inadequacy, at his opposers and the clueless: and few actors ever got that, not the ones John C. had seen. He and she tussled and argued over scenes and speeches, she yelled at him and he coldly demanded more and she mocked him and her obdurate lines and gave more, as though devouring herself to feed her Hamlet.
He staged the play on a small platform, the whole cast on stage all the time, getting up from their chairs or stools or the floor to enter the action. The characters were afraid of this Hamlet, and so were the actors. She was exalted at moments, face fuliginous, wrath unleashed and purified in beautiful sense: and it showed. No one had ever seen a Hamlet like this. They played the play in schools, in the park, in the rain, got into the papers, the news shows. Of course it was sensational that a woman, or a girl as most of the notices called her, was playing Hamlet; there were mentions of Bernhardt and Asta Nielsen (John C. had taken her to the film archive and retrieved a silent reel of Nielsen’s performance, which she watched with supernatural intensity and then said Bullshit), but whatever anyone imagined a woman playing Hamlet would be like, it wasn’t this. When Horatio challenged her actions—Why, what a king is this?—she rounded on him, the only loyal friend she has, grasping his lapel, almost unable to spit out the lines:
Does it not, think’st thee, stand me now upon—
He that hath kill’d my king and whored my mother,
Popp’d in between the election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage—is’t not perfect conscience,
To quit him with this arm? and is’t not to be damn’d,
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?
For her, it proved to be a one-time thing, as though in doing it she’d spent her lifetime’s store of black energy. John C. couldn’t get her to do more work, take on different things, some he’d written himself for her. His desire for her, the impossibility of it, how he and she had transmuted impossibility and need into shared power in art, made it seem she would have to go on giving and getting with him, but after graduation she went into biology, got a degree, set off on months-long collecting trips to the Costa Rican rain forest, sent him postcards and curt letters almost indecipherable, and then stopped.
Even a self-designed life has doors that won’t open, or won’t stay shut.
Becalmed, he stayed at USC, going to movies, acting in the movies people he knew were making, jokey or earnest or outlandish; he enrolled in graduate school just to keep working. He would forget, now and then, just how young he was, no matter how old the soul was that inhabited him, whose sour faults he still came up against. Classes he skipped, assignments he skimped, but his master’s thesis production of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi attracted actors and designers and techies who would come and go in his later life. The eclat he’d earned with his Hamlet won him resources and scope for a larger and richer production. He set the old dark play, a horror story at bottom, in present-day Italy, in modern dress: the factor Bosola was dressed in a soft Italian black leather jacket and dark glasses, his hair in a razor cut, a cigarette often in the corner of his mouth; the Duchess was sexual and fierce as certainly no college lead had ever been, in loose dressing-gowns and slips—John C. modeled the look, and the lust, on Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or on his memory of it—here, the play hadn’t, apparently, been filmed. He took the cast—the leads, anyway—to see Eclipse, with Alan Delon and Monica Vitti, Marcello Mastroianni in La Dol
ce Vita. Ennui, intrigue, a sense of entitlement smashed in jealousy and death. Rome is a city of young men waiting to have their shoes shined. Since God has decided to bestow upon us the Papacy, then let us enjoy it. He wanted to create a modern Italy as sinful and passionate and burdened by history as it had seemed to the Elizabethans: the story, after all, was a true one. The flashbulbs popping at the end as the police arrive to find the Duchess dead gave Bosola’s famed line more point: Cover her face, he tells the servants. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.
All that certainly caught people’s attention. But what he really did that was innovative was to teach his actors how to speak Elizabethan verse in the present moment, what his dyke Hamlet had had as an instinct. For most actors it was still the age of the British greats; college kids unable to do what the Oliviers and the Gielguds did ended up instead reciting the verse in a singsong lilt with a sort of pious or elevated expression. This is what John C. combated, astonishing himself with the toughness he could muster before them, all of them looking at him with awe, or at least as much awe as Californians could then produce. You have to find a way to say these lines as if you just now thought to say them, as though they came right from your heart and out your mouth. It’s you who’s saying this stuff. Say it as yourself. But say it as if you weren’t you but this person. Bosola. The Cardinal. The Duchess. When you have to say antique words your audience might not know, say them just the way you’d say the modern equivalent, they’ll get it because you—you the Cardinal—you know what it means and always have. He pushed them together, faces fiercely close; he made them take pauses impossibly long before huge shouted admissions or desperate, whispered fealty.
