Category: Blog Post

I received this message –or these messages– from my old friend Ruckert today, scrawled in his almost microscopic handwriting across the back of several subscription cards for a magazine called Country Living:

Late last night, as I was in the basement digging around for a book on the Black Hole of Calcutta, I stumbled across a photograph of the two of us (taken, if I’m not mistaken, by a now famous actor), from god knows when, but certainly long, long ago, before you assumed your current identity (such as it is) as a transparent imposter in polite society and stopped returning my phone calls.

In the photo we are standing on the tin roof of a trail shelter somewhere in the Green Mountains of Vermont, with the sun collapsing in the sky behind us. We look like two men on top of the world.

How could we have possibly known at the time that shortly thereafter we would both commence the very long, steep climb back down?

I’m not even sure, in fact, that I could properly call the journey of these last many years a “climb.” I’m not even sure that I could properly call it a “journey.”

To say that we fell off the top of the world would not, perhaps, be too much of an exaggeration.

For all I know, you may have an entirely different and far more cheering perspective on the years since that photo was taken, but if so, poor fool, I can assure you that you are sadly mistaken.

At night now I sit out on the porch in the darkness and listen to the chirping chorus of banjos from the surrounding woods.

Surely, you think, those can’t possibly be banjos I’m hearing.

Go ahead and think whatever you want. I’m pretty sure I know a chorus of banjos when I hear one.

What in god’s name, I wonder, made me think I wanted to live in the country?

Often, in the hours after midnight, I see lanterns moving through those woods, and I imagine that some locals –in all likelihood the feral characters I routinely encounter at the Casey’s store in town, buying giant jugs of Mountain Dew and cases of generic Sudafed– are hauling bodies back there to bury.

This is, I’m sure you’d admit, a most comforting thought for an entirely friendless man in his middle years, living alone in the absolute middle of fucking nowhere, to entertain as he makes one more futile attempt to find his way into sleep.

Come on out and pay me a visit sometime. You can help me stalk and kill that donkey (I think it’s a donkey) that’s been lurking around my property and nosing at my windows in the night. (Be sure and bring your camera.) We’ll build the biggest bonfire you’ve ever seen. Honest to god, there isn’t one thing left here that I wouldn’t burn.

It’ll be just like old times.

Happy trails, sucker.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

—George Orwell, “Reflections on Ghandi”

Poems are hard to read

Pictures are hard to see

Music is hard to hear

And people are hard to love

But whether from brute need

Or divine energy

At last mind eye and ear

And the great sloth heart will move.

—William Meredith, “A Major Work”

Do not die out, fire. Enter my dreams, love. Be young forever, seasons of the Earth.

—Czeslaw Milosz, “Unattainable Earth”

That last one standing is him.

He is not expecting rain.

And even if it does rain

He’ll be good and god damned

If he’s going to lay down

With the rest of the cows.

He needs to go to town.

From the scrap of his

Own damaged heart he

Is building a new,

Flawed (but healthy) part,

And wiring it with

A fierce, desperate

Desire for goodness.

It hadn’t been good for quite some time, but it was time for them to admit to themselves and to each other that now it really wasn’t good, and wasn’t going to get any better. Neither of them liked the doctor, a young Indian. He was a man who’d built too much science around himself, and he seemed to look upon them as if they were images on a satellite map. Almost a year they’d known him, and they’d never seen him smile.

What kind of a life did he have, for heaven’s sake, a man like that? Richard would sprawl there in the dark some nights trying to imagine what it was the doctor went home to each night. He tried with no success to imagine him in swim trunks, swimming laps at the YMCA, singing in the shower, or laughing with friends over dinner, but it was not possible.

How ridiculous to put your fate in the hands of someone so thoroughly, so reprehensibly competent.

They’d made a mess of Richard, and they weren’t going to fix him now.

“I’m afraid we are done with you now, more or less,” the doctor had said that afternoon. An unfortunate choice of words, Jan had complained later, but Richard was by now used to the man’s often infuriating English, which somehow managed to be both clumsy and precise at the same time.

Richard was trying to feel terrible in other ways than the ways in which he was recently accustomed to feeling terrible, but he didn’t have much room left for that sort of thing. He’d gone under pretty much for good several months earlier, but he’d had a brief rally that had given them a glimmer of something that was not quite hope. He was trying now to recognize the full and terrifying pity he felt for his wife, trying finally to imagine what her life might one day be.

He pulled himself up from the edge of the bed and eased himself a few feet to a chair by the windowsill. Jan had left him in the dark a few moments earlier, alone with all his machinery. She’d looked so tired, so resigned. That was the most discouraging part of the whole deal, her obvious resignation, which had been apparent now for the last couple weeks. Richard realized that he could no more imagine the life she was going home to right this moment than he could imagine his doctor as anything but the grim and impassive character who’d earlier that day washed his hands of him.

Richard saw his wife there on the street below him, hunched in the oddly granular twilight, waiting at a traffic signal, her arms full of things –his things– she was taking back to a home he would likely never again see. He watched her as she finally crossed the empty street, moving so slowly. She’d stood there at the red light for at least a minute, despite the fact that there had been no traffic that would have precluded her crossing at any time. That was so like her, Richard thought, so careful, so damned law abiding. He sat there at the window and watched his wife until she was folded into the darkness of a side street and disappeared entirely from view.

When I was a kid, there was this store out at the mall that sold cheese from all over the world. The place reeked. They must have had hundreds of different kinds of cheese. I like cheese as much as the next guy, but you wouldn’t think there would be any real need for so many different types of the stuff. I wouldn’t, anyway. I mean, why would anyone spend so much time dicking around with cheese? It seemed to me that there couldn’t have been much difference between some of the varieties, and a lot of them looked pretty much the same.

I never understood the place, to be honest with you, never understood how the hell it managed to stay open year after year. I guess maybe lots of people bought cheese for Christmas presents, although that doesn’t exactly make sense to me either.

Pretty much the only thing they sold was cheese. Well, pickles. They sold pickles as well, those great big pickles in giant jars, but I think those were mostly a point-of-sale novelty item to break up the monotony of all that fucking cheese. I don’t have any idea why anybody would go to a mall to buy a humongous pickle, unless, of course, they’re just completely bored out of their minds, which lots of people clearly are.

We used to drive around and get stoned and then go out to the mall to play Ski-Ball. We’d always walk down to the cheese shop because every day they gave away free samples of different kinds of cheese. They had a display out front with little cubes of cheese with toothpicks stuck in them, and they were never really dicks about it if you took more than you should or kept coming back.

The guy who ran the place always wore one of those big cheese hats made out of foam.

I once asked this guy if he could tell the difference between all the different kinds of cheese.

“Of course,” he said.

“Let’s see you prove it,” I said.

“Do the world a huge favor and don’t be such a smartass,” he said.

That pretty much became our favorite catch phrase all the way through high school, and in the right situation I still find it comes in handy now and again.

The day had been hot, and it was apparent that the night would bring little relief. There was no wind, nothing but the humidity and the stillness and the swelling sleigh bells of the cicadas from the trees. Up and down the block people were sitting out on the stoops of the apartment houses and duplexes, murmuring quietly and waiting for the darkness.

He was sweating profusely, and he was not a man who liked to sweat. It was a clammy sweat, sticky, persistent, difficult to make peace with. He knew he should find something to eat, but he had no appetite. He did not feel like eating.

It seemed to him that men had no business blasting themselves into space time and again when there was so much puzzling emptiness yet to be explored on the planet that was their home.

He lived with the regular intrusion of sirens, erupting at all hours. They mostly bored him, even as they served as a constant reminder of the seemingly limitless ways in which human behavior, and the human body, could be tragic and disappointing.

His wife now lived in the country.

His mother had come to look after his two daughters, who were spending a few days with him. He loved his daughters very much, he supposed, but they were better off in the country with their mother.

He was in the half-finished attic bedroom over the second-floor apartment that he had rented many years ago with his wife. It was hot up there, but his mother and the girls had taken over the bedrooms downstairs.

The attic room had a window that allowed him to stare out into the street while he listened to the radio. His mother had given him some money, and he was drinking a beer imported from Germany, a foolish indulgence. The beer would be warm before he could get halfway through a bottle, and he was trying to drink fast.

Outside the window he saw his youngest daughter struggling along the sidewalk with a strange cat dangling from her arms. She had the cat by the underarms (if cats can be said to have underarms) and it was hanging almost to the little girl’s feet.

Someplace out in the neighborhood an ice cream truck crawled tinkling through the dusk and the unmoving shadows of the condemned elms that were splayed in the streets. The sky to the west looked like it was bringing in some rain. That would be fine with him.

He was trying to think seriously about a photograph he had looked at many times in a book his wife had left behind. The photograph showed a Vietnamese monk seated calmly on a sidewalk, ablaze. There were other people in the photo as well, spectators, watching the monk burn. There were two men and a young girl. They all appeared to be leaning slightly away, as if they could feel the heat from the fire or were afraid the monk would explode.

The girl was holding a purse –or perhaps it was a book bag– and it was this girl he was trying to think about. He was wondering about the girl, as he had before from time to time, wondering what she was thinking and feeling there as she watched that man burn for some apparent principle she was likely too young to understand. He was wondering what had become of the girl, frozen there for all time, trapped in that image, and he was curious about what effect that moment had on her as she grew older and went out into the world on her own. He wondered what had happened in her life since that day.

He also, of course, wondered about his daughters.

And then he thought about the monk.

I read Nightwood again early this morning. There’s still nothing else like it.

Here’s something I wrote about that weird and beautiful little book the last time I picked it up and got literally lost in its pages:

Last night I sat down and blur-paddled my way through Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, a book I read –or try to read– every couple years, and which I love like few other books I’ve ever read or tried to read. I love this book differently than any other book I can think of, love its fuzzed weirdness and thickets of the barely explicable; I love the sense I have in every line of an eccentric and fascinating mind goading words across the page. I think it’s the only novel I’ve ever stumbled across that literally leaves me mind-boggled every time I pick it up.

It seems impossible that Nightwood could have been published in 1936, and I don’t know of another book that’s been published since that has accomplished its almost impossible combination of precise, vivid imagery and utter elusiveness, without ever quite abdicating its responsibility to tell a story.

I have been recommending Nightwood to friends for years, but few people seem to be able to finish the book, and I fully understand why. Djuna Barnes was likely crazy, and this is a crazy novel. The title couldn’t be more perfect –every time I finish it I feel exactly like I’ve been stumbling around in a dark, crowded place in the middle of the night, and my memories of the book inevitably begin to evaporate the moment the first murk of daylight begins to creep across the walls. I am, however, always left with scads of strange sentences and fragments that I’ve scrawled on index cards, and these words are the bread crumbs that keep leading me back to Nightwood time and again:

…but think of the stories that do not amount to much!

…I knew all at once that the tragedy of the beast can be two legs more awful than a man’s.

I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.

Were she a soldier she would define defeat with the sentence: ‘The enemy took the war away.’

…down the grim path of ‘We know not’ to ‘We can’t guess why.’

One’s life is peculiarly one’s own when one has invented it.

We do not climb to heights, we are eaten away to them….

The excess of his sensibilities may preclude his mind. His sanity is an unknown room.

Only the scorned and the ridiculous make good stories….