tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67564778975352794412024-03-05T12:13:59.469-08:00The Leaving YearsA blog for errant readersThe Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.comBlogger244125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-25981751532791871342023-11-22T08:47:00.000-08:002023-11-22T08:52:37.113-08:00The Grand<div style="text-align: right;">by</div><div style="text-align: right;">Kathryn A. Kopple</div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrCMPaSUdiv2u2kerO2aPfMj6VT-FF7MICq0yp1yG1JUzMHIVSU43uC4tCyXnCEa8KYAzErc0onHzGgA9xC1uizXwfyPQ8Nuf3PtEnHmvNQQLratVT2G8M_cSrbTZW_rB-8eQlGLU0B6B2kTSoyiVsnlNRe6xcSRUxtN5hU4uZNPZCrOY9folGIGN1_i8/s800/jacek_yerka_piano.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="724" data-original-width="800" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrCMPaSUdiv2u2kerO2aPfMj6VT-FF7MICq0yp1yG1JUzMHIVSU43uC4tCyXnCEa8KYAzErc0onHzGgA9xC1uizXwfyPQ8Nuf3PtEnHmvNQQLratVT2G8M_cSrbTZW_rB-8eQlGLU0B6B2kTSoyiVsnlNRe6xcSRUxtN5hU4uZNPZCrOY9folGIGN1_i8/s320/jacek_yerka_piano.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Jacek Yerka</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">I am still a child without a piano.<br />My sister is a piano without ever being a child. <br /><br />Without a piano, I would be exactly what I am,<br />not my sister, who does whatever a piano does.<br /><br />My father actuates as a piano,<br />otherwise, he would be only a father.<br /><br />My mother wants that piano to go out<br />and not come back till it finds a higher paying job.<br /><br />To think, thousands of tusks once stream this way<br />from the coast to the factories of Connecticut.<br /><br />One tusk for every hundred keyboards<br />bleached and lathed to create dazzling bridges.<br /><br />Pianos look a lot like elephants, all heft<br />and grace and great round tops.<br /><br />The one in our house rubs its back against the wall,<br />and out of its maw the glazed sounds<br /><br />I hear every day my sister must conjure<br />her destiny, though she must stare far<br /></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;">into my father’s past to find it, as he imagines<br />Beethoven flogging the piano till it weeps<br /><br />for joy, becomes Ode, exploding Glorias!<br />till the house can’t take anymore.<br /><br />There’s no living with him when he’s like this,<br />my mother says and looks at me.<br /><br />Hovered at my sister’s shoulder, my father says,<br />This is how you become immortal, beloved.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: "The Grand" first appeared in issue 47 of <a href="https://sandhillslitmag.com/">Sands Hill</a> in 2003. </span></p>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-1575980308976980002023-11-05T15:14:00.001-08:002023-11-05T15:15:36.127-08:00In a Dark Time<div style="text-align: right;">by</div><div style="text-align: right;">Theodore Roethke</div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /> </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: large; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrL8pT3v8BCi4676L6Olkm4e3RyvivJAA89gUJPH5nu23J6fF_0ne1GA5I_-W2UZsTQCpEt4UDJZ2rFB_RCOuizWP72mzgfQMbb36KOZt7NsAPbgzPT1SNxDGgHHeLo0iMzR-EG6KAC7ztR2XzrNvYHOCo9qtgAaBg36ckBS2gRjKLgPsSeEDvrzFjDZM/s629/Franz_Marc.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="442" data-original-width="629" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrL8pT3v8BCi4676L6Olkm4e3RyvivJAA89gUJPH5nu23J6fF_0ne1GA5I_-W2UZsTQCpEt4UDJZ2rFB_RCOuizWP72mzgfQMbb36KOZt7NsAPbgzPT1SNxDGgHHeLo0iMzR-EG6KAC7ztR2XzrNvYHOCo9qtgAaBg36ckBS2gRjKLgPsSeEDvrzFjDZM/s320/Franz_Marc.webp" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Franz Marc</span></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">In a dark time, the eye begins to see,</span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; </span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">I hear my echo in the echoing wood—</span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">A lord of nature weeping to a tree.</span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">I live between the heron and the wren, </span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.</span><br /><br /><div><span style="font-size: medium;">What’s madness but nobility of soul<br />At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire! <br />I know the purity of pure despair,<br />My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. <br />That place among the rocks—is it a cave, <br />Or winding path? The edge is what I have.<br /><br />A steady storm of correspondences!<br />A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, <br />And in broad day the midnight come again! <br />A man goes far to find out what he is—<br />Death of the self in a long, tearless night, <br />All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.<br /><br />Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. <br />My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, <br />Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?<br />A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. <br />The mind enters itself, and God the mind, <br />And one is One, free in the tearing wind.</span></div></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: This poem may be found online at <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43347/in-a-dark-time">Poetry Foundation</a>.</span></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-10795900629253869672023-10-09T07:53:00.002-07:002023-10-09T07:53:25.395-07:00Wildpeace by Yehuda Amichai<p> Not the peace of a cease-fire,</p><p>not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,</p><p>but rather</p><p>as in the heart when the excitement is over</p><p>and you can talk only about a great weariness.</p><p>I know that I know how to kill,</p><p>that makes me an adult.</p><p>And my son plays with a toy gun that knows</p><p>how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.</p><p>A peace</p><p>without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,</p><p>without words, without</p><p>the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be</p><p>light, floating, like lazy white foam.</p><p>A little rest for the wounds—</p><p>who speaks of healing?</p><p>(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation</p><p>to the next, as in a relay race:</p><p>the baton never falls.)</p><p>Let it come</p><p>like wildflowers,</p><p>suddenly, because the field</p><p>must have it: wildpeace.</p>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-46206203548692748172023-09-27T11:06:00.000-07:002023-09-27T11:06:19.691-07:00You Reading This, Be Ready<p></p><div style="text-align: right;"> by</div><div style="text-align: right;">William Stafford</div><br /><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwj9sqjezw4nlVERW68Vfp7wrTcNeyJ_FJ7fboBAAK57WPPQjAafQpxc0_ghkE_ZYzgNn06a0XOsN-U-ALe8Kaz5IZhKJ5nM8clUCO1q7PxdmEN0JctCAU0VsTpnGhUCmUpa_r43Gn0WYdzwSuS-Rf-vkoxfj2pX9soUSbA9Whtu74uCHXketZxXUtw9w/s770/Mark%20Belo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="763" data-original-width="770" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwj9sqjezw4nlVERW68Vfp7wrTcNeyJ_FJ7fboBAAK57WPPQjAafQpxc0_ghkE_ZYzgNn06a0XOsN-U-ALe8Kaz5IZhKJ5nM8clUCO1q7PxdmEN0JctCAU0VsTpnGhUCmUpa_r43Gn0WYdzwSuS-Rf-vkoxfj2pX9soUSbA9Whtu74uCHXketZxXUtw9w/s320/Mark%20Belo.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Mark Belo</div><p><br /></p><span style="font-size: medium;">Starting here, what do you want to remember?<br />How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?<br />What scent of old wood hovers, what softened<br />sound from outside fills the air?</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Will you ever bring a better gift for the world<br />than the breathing respect that you carry<br />wherever you go right now? Are you waiting<br />for time to show you some better thoughts?<br /><br />When you turn around, starting here, lift this<br />new glimpse that you found; carry into evening<br />all that you want from this day. This interval you spent<br />reading or hearing this, keep it for life –<br /><br />What can anyone give you greater than now,<br />starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?</span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Credits: This poem can be found online at <a href="https://thedewdrop.org/2019/06/05/you-reading-this-be-ready/">thedewdrop.org</a>.</div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-6077298302490641382023-09-24T08:52:00.001-07:002023-09-24T08:52:18.869-07:00Seashore<p><br /><br /></p><div style="text-align: right;">by</div><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Kathryn A. Kopple</div><br /><br /><br />From the shore, we look and say, "There!" and point out there, using our hands to commute unfathomable latitudes into the discrete anatomy of mast and skiff, ship and seabird, lighthouse and rockcliff. All the vocabulary of summer objects and all the wide sky for a backdrop. We make of it a little picture, a keepsake of the Cape, that we can pocket.<br /><br /><br />The always going sea<br />The fate of unanchored things<br />Found and then lost again<br /><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz2b6MDwXdoyKH2C9N3ikggkXTWOrApbG_Fnz1MkvqmF_qvp5LDGecjYCozTb3MmiENh-VR0td7DDkBbQE54sFBesFXqnoQLkJJXVKKYPd0olLUVkKQnN9oJuHPSduRpmH7hPTAvkIYLTdZWkU4jZ5Re4PfJ9ylXF5tcqN7X_s8MmXDsO90Z5y6SXJNEQ/s620/Andre%20Derain.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz2b6MDwXdoyKH2C9N3ikggkXTWOrApbG_Fnz1MkvqmF_qvp5LDGecjYCozTb3MmiENh-VR0td7DDkBbQE54sFBesFXqnoQLkJJXVKKYPd0olLUVkKQnN9oJuHPSduRpmH7hPTAvkIYLTdZWkU4jZ5Re4PfJ9ylXF5tcqN7X_s8MmXDsO90Z5y6SXJNEQ/s320/Andre%20Derain.jpg" /></a></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: center;">André Derain</p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>Credits: This poem was originally published in <a href="https://contemporaryhaibunonline.com/chohtmlarchive/index052.html">Contemporary Haibun Online</a> in 2009.</p>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-28322672972652839262023-05-18T06:56:00.004-07:002023-05-18T07:05:32.601-07:00Earth's Sunny Solar System<p style="text-align: right;"> by</p><p style="text-align: right;">Kathryn A. Kopple</p><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: large; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivkb85gY1_0RezRyVkcbQyokxERifFsFv0jdQ5LK_PCDc61t3j85iAL8WhctMqI59H-REId5W3axxROa_RNxHtpDDxOPnsaDF3AGHeH2KY6HWYZ-OTxry3FCZFfiuERaDQJ_3r3yvMUiQBJ3oThxzuDvpceejkvUaM_QU14teQ4yuJCOQBWfQOFl9z/s450/Robert.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="301" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivkb85gY1_0RezRyVkcbQyokxERifFsFv0jdQ5LK_PCDc61t3j85iAL8WhctMqI59H-REId5W3axxROa_RNxHtpDDxOPnsaDF3AGHeH2KY6HWYZ-OTxry3FCZFfiuERaDQJ_3r3yvMUiQBJ3oThxzuDvpceejkvUaM_QU14teQ4yuJCOQBWfQOFl9z/s320/Robert.jpg" width="214" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">Robert Rauschenberg</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: medium;">Small hands gripped the corners. It was a girl in a baseball cap and loose-fitting shorts with a puzzle in her hands. Her head was down as she studied the puzzle art on the box. Planets flung out across space with earth surrounded by a thick, blue halo off to the left. It was the most difficult puzzle in the store. All puzzles pose specific challenges but what counts is the number of pieces; this solar extravaganza boasted a thousand of them.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><span> </span>I coughed to let the girl know she wasn’t alone in the aisle. She glanced in my direction, her round face half hidden under the baseball cap, fingers still gripping the puzzle box like talons. Kids grip only the things they want. Their little fingers are endowed with strength beyond their height, weight, stamina. They are also precocious, going after games and puzzles that their parents don’t understand or like—and most of all fear will wind up in a mess on the living room floor. I’ve witnessed the tug-of-wars between adults and children, and the adults generally win, but not before something ends up on the floor. The Earth’s Sunny Solar System was dropped a lot. “Now look what you did!” “You made me!” “Don’t talk back to your mother!” “But you promised!” “You don’t even like puzzles!” The quarrels nasty and dry-eyed repeating like an unhappy song chorus—and the Earth’s Sunny Solar System, caught in the middle, going nowhere but back on the shelf. And yet, despite past disappointments, I held out hope that this would be the day I’d finally sell Earth’s Sunny Solar System. <br /><br />“Nice puzzle,” I said. <br /><br />“Dope,” she replied. <br /><br />I suggested we look inside and put out my hands. <br /><br /> She wouldn’t let go of the box. “The earth only looks blue from space.” <br /><br /> “Makes you realize how much they paid attention to the details when they made this puzzle.” <br /><br /> “It’s mostly blue. If it were all blue, the whole planet would be covered in water.” <br /><br /> “Excellent point.” I didn’t care if the earth were flamingo pink because all I wanted was to move that puzzle off the shelf. <br /><br />“It’s going to happen. I read about the ground disappearing.” <br /><br /> “That would be wild. I guess anything could happen.” <br /><br /> “Anything does,” she said. <br /><br /><span> </span>I decided to redirect the conversation. “If that puzzle doesn’t interest you, I could show you something else. We have lots of games. Do you like Parcheesi?” <br /><br />“I’m good,” she said. <br /><br /> “Yeah, that puzzle you’re holding is the best. Should we ring it up?” <br /><br />“Maybe later.” The girl put the puzzle on the shelf and walked out the store. <br /><br /><span> </span>Puzzles have a shelf life. After a year on the shelf, the boxes take on a ravaged appearance. Earth’s Sunny Solar System was going on three years. I peeked inside to discover a spider that turned out to be a hermit crab. Alone and unshelled, the pitiful thing scrambled over the jumbled cosmos. <br /><br /><span> </span>I wondered how many hermits escaped their crab-it-tats—if they were hiding (and dying) all over the store. I hurried to check and found the lot of them in distress, climbing the silicon walls desperate to get out. The mice didn’t look particularly happy either. They were thin and mangy, and no one wanted them. A garter snake hissed as I walked by. A menagerie of hostility caused by shortages in the supply chain. The chain, I imagined, wound the globe east and west, north and south; it held the world together. Now, that chain was coming apart link by link. We’d soon have to start feeding the mice to the snakes—and where that would leave the hermits I had no idea. <br /><br /><span> </span>When I mentioned my concerns to the manager, he took a hit off his vape. “What do you expect me to do about it?” Then, back turned to me, he lapsed into reverie. Unlike the hermits, he appeared pleasantly lost. <br /><br />“Uh, maybe I could have a hit?” <br /><br />“You’re too young to vape.” <br /><br />“I’m eighteen.” <br /><br />“In answer to your question, no. And get back to work.” <br /><br />“But the hermits…” <br /><br />“Fuck if I know,” he said. <br /><br />“That’s all you got for me?” <br /><br />“Pretty much.” <br /><br /><span> </span>Days later, the hermits and crab-it-tats vanished altogether. I gave the manager a look. “Was there a seagull attack?” <br /><br />“What are you talking about?” <br /><br />“The crab-it-tats are gone.” <br /><br />“Yeah, the crabs. Why are you bothering me about gulls?” <br /><br />“Gulls eat hermits in the wild.” <br /><br />He hit his vape. “You got some weird obsessions, that’s for sure.” <br /><br />“Because I care about the hermits?” <br /><br />“For starters.” Lemon haze poured out his nostrils. “It’s for the best.” <br /><br /><span> </span>I nodded, not because I agreed. I just knew—and that certainty gutted me. “Did you have to?” I got a rag and started dusting. People wandered the store lost in aisles of emptiness. Sometimes, they bumped into one another, saying “Excuse me” in zombified voices. No one shouted. No fights broke out. The sluggishness and monotony made me wish someone would start something. Time went faster when the kids and adults got into it. Or, when someone got caught shoplifting. It was store policy to take the offender straight to security. Her name was Lal. She was tough, like she’d been born to put people in a line up. She paced the catwalk (her name for the long plank held high in the air by two ladders) and, if she saw anyone sneaking around, she’d blast the suspect with her bullhorn. “You! In the Run-DMC t-shirt and cut-offs. Front of the store!” Typically, people would run, a stupid thing to do but people weren’t smart when stealing—always thinking no one was watching when no one escaped Lal. Maybe that was the real crime. Thinking they could get away with it. Not under Lal’s watch. She was a one-woman panopticon. <br /><br />“Hey!” <br /><br />“What!” <br /><br />“How about you come up?” <br /><br /><span> </span>I hesitated. It never occurred to me what life up there was like—that I, a mere salesclerk, would receive an invitation from Lal on the catwalk. Things like that just didn’t happen. The catwalk was where Lal worked and the rest of us underlings kept to the aisles, cash registers, and restrooms. Everyone and everything in its place. My place was below while Lal worked from on high. <br /><br />“Come on up.” <br /><br />“Okay.” I stuffed the cleaning rag in my back pocket. The ladder shuddered. I looked up at Lal. In what universe was this a good idea? I made a few calculations. Lal weighed approximately 150 lbs. I weighed in at 140 lbs. Our combined weight might push the scaffold’s weight-bearing capacities too far. A net was called for, at the very least a bunch of boxes—anything to break the fall. <br /><br />“What’s the matter? Afraid of heights?” <br /><br />“Nope.” <br /><br />“Then get your ass up here.” <br /><br />I girded myself for the climb. It was a lot farther to the top than it looked. When I managed to pull myself onto the plank, I was panting hard. Sweat stung my eyes. <br /><br />“Cat got your tongue.” Lal gave me a freaky smile. She reached out her hand. “Stand.” <br /><br />“Up?” <br /><br />“You can’t appreciate the entire effect sitting. You have to stand. It gives you added height.” <br /><br />“I figured.” Closing my eyes (which really was the stupidest thing to do while suspended mid-air), I managed to get my feet up under me and stood. “The view! It’s wild.” <br /><br />“You can see all.” <br /><br />“I never knew.” <br /><br />“You think I work this job for the lousy minimum wage! No, sir. It’s the rush that gets me out of my warm bed in the morning. Up here, I feel alive, free. It’s the best.” <br /><br /><span> </span>I glanced floorward. The linoleum looked hard, cold and cruel. There was always the chance I might survive a fall but, unlike Lal, I didn’t receive employee benefits. If I cracked my skull open, no HMO was going to cover surgery. I decided to sit. <br /><br /><span> </span>Lal remained on her feet. “I could weep to see the store. It’s so beautiful when filled with people. I see their happiness, like this one time a guy comes in. He’s very rich looking. Nice clothes. He has a woman with him. She’s also very rich looking. They have a child with blonde hair. A perfect angel. They buy bags of toys. The child gets a bunny. They don’t even try to steal anything.” <br /><br />“That is amazing.” <br /><br />Lal grew solemn. “I never had kids.” <br /><br />“Me neither.” <br /><br />“Don’t be a smart ass.” <br /><br />“I wasn’t,” I said. “It’s just that we don’t get a lot of families these days. There was a little girl, though.” <br /><br />“The one in the baseball cap.” <br /><br />“I thought for sure she would buy that puzzle.” <br /><br />“The one with the crazy cover and a thousand pieces.” <br /><br />“It’s called Earth’s Sunny Solar System.” <br /><br />“Whatever. She didn’t bite.” <br /><br />“No, she didn’t.” <br /><br /> <span> </span>Lal rested her hand on my shoulder. “If things keep up like this…” She paused, the logical conclusion to her thought difficult to articulate. Where would she go? Or me for that matter? <br /><br /> “It’s going to be okay,” I said. “They’ll get the supply chain up and running. When they do, this place will be stocked to bursting, and you will be back in business catching the bad guys.” <br /><br /> “If only.” <br /><br /> I let her have a moment. The scene below was dreary. Shell-shocked customers going round in circles. Cashiers slumped over the registers. The manager walking the floor vaping. “I’m going down.” <br /><br /> “Stay a bit longer.” <br /><br /> “No, really, I’m on the clock. I should get down.” <br /><br /> “Your choice.” <br /><br /> <span> </span>Easy for her to say. She loved it up there. She felt alive, free. I felt like I wanted to throw up. There’s no easy way off a plank. I had to roll over on my belly, kick out my foot till I found the ladder, then slide down until I could use my hands to hold on while I descended the rungs. I could feel Lal pacing above me. I closed my eyes and kept going. Above me, Lal cackled in amusement. I stepped away from the ladder. She waved down at me. I walked briskly to the bathroom, splashed my face with cold water, used the urinal, washed my hands, splashed my face, and used the urinal again. <br /><br /><span> </span>The following night, I stayed late. After the crab-it-tat fiasco, I wanted to make sure the animals lived through the night. I also figured that they had to notice what was happening, that they too felt the scarcity as keenly as the rest of us. My presence might offer some comfort. <br /><br /> <span> </span>The door rang. I must have forgotten to lock up. “We’re closed!” At the end of Aisle C, near the front of the store, there was the girl in the baseball cap. “Oh, it’s you.” <br /><br /> “I want to do it.” <br /><br /> “Excuse me?” <br /><br /> “The puzzle. I want to do it.” <br /><br /> “And if I let you, will you buy it?” <br /><br /> “I don’t have money.” <br /><br /> “I can’t let you have the puzzle. I can let you look at the bunnies. But just for a minute. Then, you have to go. No one is supposed to be here after hours.” <br /><br /> “No one is here anyways.” <br /><br /> “Even more reason for you to go home.” <br /><br /> <span> </span>She shrugged. Home didn’t seem to do much for her. I began to suspect there was more going on, like she was in foster care or homeless or… both. On the other hand, she looked fine. No visible signs of stress. <br /><br /> “I’m sorry. I can’t.” <br /><br /> “It’s about to rain.” <br /><br /> <span> </span>I went to check. I pushed against the door only to feel it push back hard. <br /><br /> “That’s the rain,” she said. “It’s coming.” <br /><br /> “It’s just the usual deluge for this time of year.” <br /><br /> She started down the aisle. “We should do the puzzle.” <br /><br /> <span> </span>The rain started in, harder and faster; water rushed under the door, around it, over it. I grabbed the girl’s hand. “Up the scaffold.” She didn’t ask questions. She began climbing. I stayed below and spotted her. After she reached safety, I followed. The ladder rungs were slimy and slippery. The lights flickered. I kept climbing until I was able to ease myself onto the plank. “It’s here,” she said. <br /><br /><span> </span>I stared through my knees. The watery umbra sloshed up one wall and down another, sweeping along plushies, rubber balls, gift bags, costumes, deluxe Legos, light sabers—and dozens of other gizmos ripped from their packaging and bumping around in the shadows. <br /><br />“It seems to have stopped,” I said with forced optimism. <br /><br />“There’s more coming.” <br /><br />“How can you be sure?” <br /><br />“I saw it from my house.” <br /><br />“Where’s your house?” <br /><br />“It’s not there anymore,” she said. “It was washed away with the others.” <br /><br />“That’s terrible.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I asked her name. <br /><br />“The name I use?” <br /><br />“Uh, okay.” <br /><br />“Yessel.” <br /><br />“That’s your username?” <br /><br />“One of them,” she said. <br /><br /><span> </span>In an otherwise functioning world, I’d try to get more information from her—like, place of origin, age, and address. Right now, our address was the mess down below and our precarious refuge above. I felt cold, queasy. Yessel put her arms around me. We sat without speaking. Beneath us, the water lapped hypnotically as the store grew darker until only the red neon of the exit signs were visible—and soon they started going dark. “Are you okay?” I asked to remind myself I was alive and okay. <br /><br />“It’s still coming in.” <br /><br />“It’s stopped.” <br /><br />“It’s coming closer.” <br /><br /> I pulled her arms tighter around my waist. “Yessel, it’s going to be okay. I promise.” <br /><br /> “We’re stuck.” <br /><br /> “Only till help comes.” <br /><br /> “We don’t have that long,” she said. <br /><br /> <span> </span>I suddenly felt the water around my ankles, then my knees. I braced myself. There really was only one way out. We’d have to swim. <br /><br /> “What is it about that puzzle?” I asked her. I lowered myself slowly into the water. <br /><br /> “It’s how I always imagined it.” <br /><br /> “The solar system?” I treaded vigorously. The water was freezing. <br /><br /> “Except the solar system is a lot bigger than a thousand pieces.” She reached over to test the water. “It’s like ice.” <br /><br /> “Don’t think about it.” <br /><br /> <span> </span>She slipped down off the scaffold. I grabbed her under the shoulders. “Put your arms around my neck and don’t let go.” I held her fast in the whipping current. The building groaned. The water shoved us up against the large windows. Above the sky had disappeared behind thick, greenish clouds. Yessel was still hanging on. I kicked out a foot and the store entrance collapsed. The water swept us out across the parking lot, down block after block, before we were spit onto a mound of land. We believed the worst of it was over, though the ground was a sponge and every step sucked us further into the ooze. Somewhere, a shuttle rocketed through space. Earth’s Sunny Solar System. Yessel and I struggled on, walking and sinking—and consoling ourselves with the idea that, if we could survive here, we could survive anywhere.</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: This story first appeared in the December 2022 issue of <a href="https://issuu.com/collectivemedia/docs/bluemountainreviewdecember2022">Blue Mountain Review</a>.</span></div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-63006961581800189592023-05-03T10:42:00.009-07:002023-05-03T17:17:25.853-07:00Personal Tragedies in Rodrigo Hasbún’s Los afectos<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: right;">by</p></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: right;">Kathryn A. Kopple </p></blockquote></blockquote><p><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">In 2015, the Bolivian writer Rodrigo Hasbún published <i>Los afectos</i> (Affections), a slim volume loosely based on the Ertl family, a clan foisted on the reader with precious little introduction. “The day papa returned from Nanga Parbat (with some heart-rending images, of a beauty that wasn’t human), he told us while we ate dinner that mountain climbing had become too technical and what mattered was being lost, that he wouldn’t climb anymore.” His wife and daughters take in their papa’s words, careful not to interrupt, as he sermonizes about communing with nature. These speeches – the reader learns – go on uninterrupted for lengthy periods and, finally, culminate in a bruised vision of the world that, in a fine turn of phrase, can only be healed by seeking out those places “where God is untroubled by our ingratitude and sordidness”. A lofty sentiment and one that is in lockstep with the character’s historical counterpart: the Nazi cinematographer and alpinist Hans Ertl – the same man who, throughout the 1930s and ’40s, fully earned his reputation as Hitler’s photographer. Hasbún, however, is not deeply invested in this aspect of Ertl’s story; he is drawn to the private life of the family man. Untethered by all but the most tenuous historical references, Ertl and every character in the book become protagonists in a personal tragedy.<br /><br />Throughout this tragedy, the intimacy of perspectives creates the feel of memoir, albeit one that is subject to fragmentation. Although Hasbún is best known as an acclaimed author, his scholarly work focuses on the interconnectedness between diary, biography and literature. He takes issue with the idea that diaries must be read at face value, as testimonials, when their very existence opposes worldly interests and demands. The diarist writes for a reader of one, presumably herself without, as Hasbún contends, “deference to the literary institution or publishing world." Diaries may enter the public domain but their purpose is other. They are reclusive, hermetic. It is as if there is no activity more solitary – or personal – than that of the diarist. Nor is it coincidental that <i>Los afectos</i> is a book imbued with solitude. Hans Ertl’s treks up mountains and through Amazon forest are journeys into the heart of solitude. He is the man who “leaves." His wife, Aurelia, languishes in the imposed solitude caused by her husband’s absence. Each of his three daughters is a solitary creature unable to sustain familial ties and relationships. Solitude of this sort is profoundly Heideggerian, that is, inescapable.</span></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1Uc4YRtW1labtj2xW0WzaIgv7-DMXg-niyu_YH1l02vibEn6p1-sUsSsA-QMR5xC0TZS5wWMUKhhTk4QhIowNhmii4eHbQtL5HyqJSVqp-aCuCtFZNCS1UnI5ComJFexCoGDcVGTG0W91EG04XuYN4EZOzfJxNb8tVnpZTUBM3eAgXNUJHKI7C2MO/s285/white%20mountain.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="285" data-original-width="285" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1Uc4YRtW1labtj2xW0WzaIgv7-DMXg-niyu_YH1l02vibEn6p1-sUsSsA-QMR5xC0TZS5wWMUKhhTk4QhIowNhmii4eHbQtL5HyqJSVqp-aCuCtFZNCS1UnI5ComJFexCoGDcVGTG0W91EG04XuYN4EZOzfJxNb8tVnpZTUBM3eAgXNUJHKI7C2MO/s1600/white%20mountain.jpg" width="285" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"> Israel Beltrán</div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />In fact, the entire novel reads like a Heideggerian fable. The characters are cast into a strange, new world to live out their finitude with precious few inner resources. Severed from their German homeland because of Hans’s Nazi past, their identities are stripped away; they must begin from scratch in Bolivia. In the high-altitude, low-oxygen city of La Paz, time is as precious as air. Hans wastes no time between expeditions. He returns from filming in Nanga Parbat already determined to set off again in search of Paititi, the lost Inca city of gold. His two eldest daughters, Monika and Heidi, are intensely aware that the clock is ticking and they are growing older by the second. The youngest daughter, Trixi, spends a melancholy Christmas alone with her mother, Aurelia, who tells the nearly thirteen-year-old that life is longer than people imagine, and that at times it feels “interminable." Trixi sees her mother as terribly lonely. She fails to understand how she has too much time on her hands. In her abject pronouncements, Aurelia echoes Heidegger’s assertion that it is through boredom our awareness of time is heightened. Boredom leads to gloominess but forces us to reflect upon the groundlessness of our existence. Aurelia smokes, drinks, and reminisces but, most importantly, she philosophizes. Sadly, it’s all downhill for her from there.<br /><br />In contrast with Aurelia’s lassitude, the eldest daughter, Monika, suffers fits of anxiety. Heidi, who fears and resents her sister, describes these episodes as grotesque. “It was ugly to see her writhing about, I won’t deny it. It was shocking, horrible even, to the point that, the last time, we had to tie her up.” The episode passes and Heidi suspects that Monika’s outbursts serve an ulterior purpose: they are a means of holding her distracted parents’ attention. Her resentment of her sister intensifies when she learns that their father is taking Monika with him on his next expedition. Heidi demands to go. Her father agrees in a way that unnerves the girl. “As if he had predicted all of it, including the questions I was asking, a strange smile appeared on his face. My chest froze and I looked at my sister and she at me and at that moment neither of us knew what to say.” A limit has been reached. Words fail. There is no turning back for Heidi. Now, like her father, she is the one who leaves. She also falls in love with Rudi, one of Hans’s assistants. Most significantly, she becomes lost, psychically speaking, unable to remember the day or the reason for the journey. This stripping away of perspective, time, and purpose brings her closer to what Heidegger calls authenticity.<br /><br />Authenticity, for Heidegger, refuses imitation, it can’t be contained in archetypes. Rather, it prefigures socialization as an ideal mode of being. Hans may be the paterfamilias of the Ertl clan but he is, above all things, a man who is true to himself. He becomes disillusioned with mountaineering because alpinists have become mere technicians. Averageness disgusts him. In contrast, he aspires to all things sublime. The rain forest is no less sublime than the glacier. Sublimity involves terror. It is awe-inspiring. Add to that a mythical Inca city of gold – buried in all that forest – and the quest promises certain glory. At one point, he heaps praise on Hiram Bingham, the man credited with discovering Machu Picchu, thus inserting himself in the tradition of great explorers. But then he has already proven his worth by filming the 1936 Olympics and being at Rommel’s side during the war. Hans also possesses a certain erotic magnetism. When Trixi asks her mother if she fell in love with him at first sight, she replies, “The second I saw him…. But I wasn’t the only one. I think everyone on the committee was a little in love with him.” And then, not least, his eye never fails him. Whatever he films turns to magic. Authenticity – the discovery of the ideal self – goes hand in hand with exceptionalism.<br /><br />For Hans’s daughters, living with such a man is overwhelming. Their feelings for him cause rifts and divisions – an utter lack of peace reigns over the family. It’s apparent that Hans loves Monika the most, ostensibly because she tests him. Of all the ironies to be found in the novel, the fact that Monika will go on to become a left-wing revolutionary is the most poetic. (But then, Heidegger too was a revolutionary. He found academic philosophy guilty of all manner of sins, not the least of them complacency. There is an air of nihilistic joy that runs throughout his writing, a sense that once the old norms have been destroyed, philosophy will arise like a phoenix from the ashes. And no doubt, Heidegger thought of himself as that phoenix. It’s also true that he was a committed Nazi and antisemite.) In <i>Los</i> <i>afectos</i>, it is Monika who forces the issue of Hans’s Nazism. She accuses him of being a “lackey of the powerful, a disgusting fascist”. Her words open a great wound in him. After her assassination by the Bolivian military, the elderly Hans has a grave dug for her, literally forcing him once and for all to stare into the abyss.<br /><br />When <i>Los afectos</i> first came out, it was marketed as a historical novel. From the disclaimer on the first page of the book to his assertions in numerous interviews, Hasbún is adamant that the book is historical only in the broadest sense of the term: as story. The story involves multiple points of view, lack of chronological cohesion, and a directness of expression that breaks down aesthetic distance. Instead of history, we are presented with instances that turn inward, personal, and reflective. Out of this assemblage of disparate voices, the question that arises is why history at all? Especially since Hasbún claims to use as little biographical detail as possible. The author seems to be pulled in by the unwritten aspects of the story – in what the historical record either suppressed or omitted. Nazism recedes into the background, almost imperceptible, as if opening a window to let in some fresh air.<br /><br />In the essay “Fascinating Fascism”, Susan Sontag remarks that it may “seem ungrateful or rancorous to refuse to cut loose” the work of Nazi propagandists from their past. She takes issue with the rehabilitation of Leni Riefenstahl despite the cinematographer’s ongoing commitment to fascism. The same could be said of Hans Ertl. He never became disillusioned with Nazi Germany: it was post-war, democratic Germany that failed him. Moreover, during his self-imposed exile in Bolivia, he sought out the friendship of the notorious Klaus Barbie. Barbie is thought to have been involved in Monika’s assassination by Bolivian security forces in 1973. Given his friendship with Barbie – and, as mentioned in the novel, Ertl’s relationships with high-ranking members of the Bolivia military – he may have had more to do with his daughter’s death than the novel suggests. Whatever role he played (active or passive), Ertl never repudiated Nazism or his fascist associations. He would go on to write two memoirs, both of which are imbued with sentimental accounts of mountaineering and exploration. Both memoirs pay homage to the Germany of his youth.<br /><br />However Hasbún adjusts the lens – the ever-shifting angles – it’s scarcely possible to insulate <i>Los afectos</i> – or any work of art – from its source material. The connection between old-world fascism and new-world exile is not severed but revised. Nazism may find itself reduced to mere figments, but even these have the power to mesmerize. The Argentine writer Manuel Puig, in his masterpiece <i>El beso de la mujer araña </i>(Kiss of the Spider Woman), explores the Nazi aesthetic, and how it catches us in a web of repulsion and attraction. The goddesses of Nazi cinema are no less beautiful because they are instruments of a brutal regime. They fascinate regardless. They provide an ideal of physical beauty and an antidote to the ugliness of existence. Fascism is predicated on a host of aesthetic values, among them the dictum that, without beauty, life is simply not worth living. <i>Los afectos </i>offers us a taste of such a life in the Ertl family saga. They are doomed and therefore beautiful. To paraphrase Heidegger, beauty is only as true </span><span style="font-size: medium;">as it is tragic.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b>Notes</b></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">All translations from the novel are mine unless otherwise cited. Regarding Hasbún’s critical investigations, please see Enea Zaramella, “Interview with Rodrigo Hasbún” in The White Review, <a href="https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-rodrigo-hasbun/">https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-rodrigo-hasbun/</a>, accessed 22 August 2021. A thorough discussion of the fascist aesthetic of Hans Ertl’s memoirs can be found in Caroline Schaumann’s “Memories of Cold in the Heat of the Tropics: Hans Ertl’s ‘Meine Wilden Dreißiger Jahre’” in Colloquia Germanica, vol. 43, no. 1/2, 2010, pp. 97–112, JSTOR, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/23981639">www.jstor.org/stable/23981639</a>, accessed 22 August 2021. Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism” may be found at UC Santa Barbara, <a href="https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm">https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm</a> , accessed 22 August 2021. Los afectos has been translated into English under the title Affections by Sophie Hughes.</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Credits: </b>This review first appeared in <a href="https://arsnotoria.com/category/culture/">Ars Notoria</a>.<br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><b>About the Author:</b> Kathryn A. Kopple holds a doctorate in Latin American literature (NYU). Her focus is the surrealist poetry of the Rio de la Plata. She has also published original poetry and prose in multiple venues, including The Threepenny Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms. She has published two novels – <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Little-Vel%C3%A1squez-Kathryn-Kopple-ebook/dp/B00DPKDY0U/">Little Velásquez</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Year-Kathryn-Kopple/dp/193686990X/">The Leaving Year</a> – set in Spain. Kathryn also hosts the literary blog <a href="http://theleavingyears.blogspot.com/">The Leaving Year</a>.</div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-47203645902484283022023-02-19T11:51:00.000-08:002023-02-19T11:51:59.741-08:00The House of Folly <p></p><div style="text-align: right;"> by</div><div style="text-align: right;">Peter Cowlam</div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKDf01IYSqRioWgeV81gKeQiJ4UrOJRuOo757Tdh_BOdtAvxJAJLi2yZobV7YeW9DdoNq5rXCQWHI0p51lGpvX0mjMqCF8WTrFI4RvP4HL483eSlslKgVQZRoB5_eFqWgzrCa8qvx8NH3WMINrremMp-j0T4piGFjAXhIuCr826hj5MNnWonxQaO1G/s784/Elena%20Motrich.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="784" data-original-width="770" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKDf01IYSqRioWgeV81gKeQiJ4UrOJRuOo757Tdh_BOdtAvxJAJLi2yZobV7YeW9DdoNq5rXCQWHI0p51lGpvX0mjMqCF8WTrFI4RvP4HL483eSlslKgVQZRoB5_eFqWgzrCa8qvx8NH3WMINrremMp-j0T4piGFjAXhIuCr826hj5MNnWonxQaO1G/s320/Elena%20Motrich.jpg" width="314" /></a></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span>Elena Motrich</span></div></blockquote><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Not new to these cloisters was one impatient student, who had come to consider Occidental principles – should he or shouldn’t he cheat? Nicola, the most recent of Schmutzburg’s guests, gazed from her dizzy summit, flanked by those primordial monarchs. Incredibly – for her own had been whirled away in the bitter night winds – another set of prints, another procession of black hollows, meandered from the vapours, like coals in pristine snow. The contest she had entered had a name – it was Frame Solutions. Her opponent had decided on his next move while her back was turned. She ignored him, musing on that solitary speck of a man (meaning Michael, a fortuitous presence, surely). If he turned, and looked up the mountain, at the sun and sky, and the clouds, it was only a matter of time before Schmutzburg, or its one last bastion, also entered his view. She didn’t wait, but with a toss of her hair swung away from the ledge and faced her opponent, but did not return to their game. Even if Michael, she thought, understood the inscription over the outer door, and entered, he wouldn’t last here long. For how could he remain? A cold stone floor and naked walls, a rudimentary bed, a low table, icy winds that howled in at the uncovered windows – no one was given more. <br /><br />So she reasoned, while a mess of guilty thoughts in her opponent threatened to stay his hand, an impulse he suppressed once it had formed as a possibility. Words he spoke were a veil on his clumsy machinations—<br /><br />‘You had begun a list of books.’<br /><br />Nicola studied the board and the new, illegal position of some of its pieces, and thought about how to answer. A few summarising sentences were impossible. What would a mere student of Schmutzburg understand of her own student life, with its autumn afternoons? Could it mean as much to him, those sudden gusts, the flutter and flurry and shower of leaves? <br /><br />She heard the bell – they both heard the bell – and was certain of what to say, was equally positive that the broad, extended lawns in the grounds of her orthodox life, cut and rolled into alternating bands of green – that these as phenomena were another dissimulation. Yet you cannot consign everything to the world’s history, from a surviving reality measured as private experience. The details were important. <br /><br />One day she looked outward from a bench in the convent garden, and conjectured at the surrounding symbolism. Urns or sanctified vessels that hadn’t stood the test of time, smeared as they were in lichens, moss and mould. Neither were the holy statuettes of unassailable stuff, when limbs were fractured and noses broken off. No. She, Nicola, had nothing to say, nothing at all of the books she’d read, and anyway a chilly wind was rising. (By now Michael was puzzling over that relief.) Squatting down at the board, she accused her opponent of cheating. Honourably, he conceded a fourth consecutive game.<br /><br />❦<br /><br />Here in the House, a benign old mystic in a creaking chair had trained his mind to ignore the woody friction when he leaned forward to dip his pen, or back to gaze into the shadows and contemplate. He had never stopped wondering at the seasonal rites of peoples beyond the perimeters of Schmutzburg. These musings reinforced themselves whenever he beheld the careworn faces of Westerners who sometimes sojourned here, his life at a remove from theirs, invested with other meanings. They arrived with their signs and symbols and burdens of prejudice, for the wise elders of the House to examine, in the fullest flower of every human folly. <br /><br />He’d dipped his pen for the last time that morning. He put it aside and glanced through his open arch. In the conical blueness, a solitary cloud had been busily disintegrating, and in that other perspective, in the oblong whiteness when he stood, a new set of prints curled up the mountainside.<br /><br />The bell tolled and he left his desk. He took down a heavy book from a shelf and blew away the dust. When he opened it and turned to the page he wanted, too many hands had been here before, and he was obliged to smooth away the creases, to flatten out its script, before placing in a marker. A spiral of steps led him into the lower chambers, and here he met Nicola in one of the passages. Dusty shafts of sunshine filtered in at intervals through slits in the wall. He apologised, but handed her the book – not too late, he hoped. Well, this had been a long time coming, but anyway, Frame Solutions wasn’t a game one learned overnight. The old man chuckled. <br /><br />‘I hear you’re beating all our best students,’ he said, adding, ‘I shall have to see if I can’t upset that winning streak,’ though it was years since he’d played. <br /><br />Down, down again, and at the very foot of those stairs a young English head turned with a start. The old man had begun to interpret for his benefit a plaster relief over the mantel, whose three divisions – one upper, two beneath – represented what? One in the pair depicted an unhappy village husband left holding a new-born baby, with an empty jug of ale. His suspicious wife knew his evil ways, and where you saw her creeping round from behind, she clutched at a wooden shoe and wound back her arm in preparation for a blow to the head. A cowardly neighbour, keeping his own head down but determined to miss nothing, reported what he saw. What we see is a luckless husband condemned by the village fathers. On the right of the pair, local worthies come together and are unanimous – the drunkard they hold aloft rides the skimmington. <br /><br />Michael looked at the old man, and at the relief, and at the old man again. ‘And that, the upper?’ he asked.<br /><br />‘Ah, that is the just god in his heaven, who sees that his law is carried out.’<br /><br />❦<br /><br />Here on another winter morning, the sun in its ice-cool heaven rose above Schmutzburg, a forgotten country, and forgotten its House of Folly. A hole appeared, or the tiniest chink, where a glimmer of light briefly penetrated a diffuse wash of moisture over Europe. A wrinkled old rustic in his mountain shack looked up for a moment and fancied he’d seen something, but heard only cars and a tourist coach. <br /><br />Michael was in the gallery, where the students had gathered, all of them determined to ignore him. Neither did Nicola speak, coming in moments after and finding herself a seat. Michael nodded. She opened a book. She’d got it for its commentaries, its author an expert on the game of games. Grading was able to mark her progress page to page. Then without warning she tossed her hair back across her shoulder, in a pause from the book, taking in what changes took place in the courtroom below. <br /><br />The affable old mystic sat at a bench with two others, while the man accused took his oath from a cleric standing by. That official withdrew, leaving in view a Westerner in early middle age. His dark hair had thinned to greying wisps at the temples, and had receded to the crown, and that made it all the more unclear to Nicola that a poet was about to be tried, his eyes bulging behind the lenses of his spectacles. Two deep furrows demarcating flabby jowls accentuated the flare of his nostrils. His thin lips formed an intelligent, whimsical smile. He stood waiting – a poet of the English municipality – in a shabby blue suit, a white shirt stiff at the collar, and a two-tone broadly knotted tie. <br /><br />The case against was roughly this, while the three old men were loose with their metaphors. Our poet took his afflatus not from any potent commingling afloat in the atmosphere, but from something much less elemental, bound up with the naked mastery of form. This was not to deny the necessity of rules – that was understood. The objection was one of emphasis, for what was the character or ingenuity of prosodic architectonics other than plain, arithmetic workings out, and the trivialisation of lived experience? <br /><br />The defence was less vague. Historical problems couldn’t be ignored, and the poet confessed to a growing sense of intimidation in the presence of his technological colleagues. For example, he, the poet, was capable of this: he could conceive a regular figure, a tetrahedron, in his mind’s eye, and could tilt it, rotate it, examine its lines and surfaces. But the crudest schoolboy, with his home computer, could do as much and more. Or on a grander scale, think of this inscrutable planet Earth, and make of that a vision – a blue ocean sphere suspended brightly in an enveloping darkness. Can any lyric prefigure again so stunning a photograph? Even Armageddon, that most vital conceptualisation in his repertoire, has been subsumed into mere technics and delivered up as a political possibility.<br /><br />The accused was a man of conscience, whose observations had something of a Janus nature, being both involuntary and the source of ceaseless irritation. If all our medieval visions were now the acquired, bastardised property of governments and technocrats, then the only freedom left was in wallowing – an art that was bourgeois, puerile – or in the frustrations of social protest. And anyway, they seemed to want to consider his case in a theological light, with accusations answerable only in the realms of the unknowable. The four looked up. The sentence seemed a mere formality – condemnation to the world again – but Nicola had allowed that open book to slide from her knees and fall with a thud to the floor. This first session was adjourned.<br /><br />❦<br /><br />Late evening. Michael sat in the gathering dusk on the edge of his bed – hands and forearms dangling, elbows on parted knees. He approximated cardinal points of the compass. North was cold and damp – the wall opposite. East was a window on a country in darkness. West, an open door on creaky hinges, allowing in the last warm rays of a world in decay. There as he guessed was the poet’s dying emblem, a dull red segment as the sun underwent its final descent. <br /><br />In the early morning the position was much the same, though now he heard voices and not the whirr of his thoughts. Above, the trial had repeated itself in all its developments, however much he disciplined his mind. He looked out of his eastern window and saw a distant country, its clouds of dust, its plumes and billows of brown smoke rising through an early frost, a dew. Nearer – below him on the courtyard – the poet had just snapped shut his tarnished cigarette case and returned it to a hip pocket in his jacket, which was crumpled where he’d slept uncomfortably. He lit up – a tarry, unfiltered cigarette – and drawing deeply looked east himself, though from his elevation couldn’t see over the bright icy slopes into the valleys. Six, seven students just out of earshot had formed a circle and discussed concluding details, until at last an elected spokesman, whose warm breath Michael saw exhaled excitably into the cold air, detached himself and strode up to the smoking poet. <br /><br />Later, a much older man was looking on, from the highest window in Schmutzburg’s southernmost tower. What he hadn’t seen – Nicola and Michael together again – was immaterial. His opinions concerning the two had already formed. Michael, immobile at the foot of the stairs, was pointing up uncertainly to the apex of the relief.<br /><br />‘The just god in his heaven,’ he said.<br /><br />Nicola, shrugging, said only, ‘Just god, no. It’s a landowner, that peasant’s feudal overlord.’ Meaning is always material – in this case a loss of revenue and the moral collapse of the workforce. We so like our parables of ownership and neglect.<br /><br />Six or seven students set up a small table, while Nicola stepped outdoors with a playing board and a canvas sack for the pieces. The unbidden young Englishman followed, bewildered, while his older compatriot must accept he was guilty as accused. The poet as he loses his voice reveals his remoteness in what he says for those who have lost their faith.<br /><br />❦<br /><br />Dreary grey scholars, who for generations had sneezed and drawn their secret signs in accumulating dust, consulted their archives, and were able to make one assertion: in its breadth of possibilities and relationships, that historic discipline Frame Solutions, first appearing in the fourth millennium BCE, had helped its adherents achieve superhuman powers of assimilation. If that was its extent, what of the rules? Well, exquisitely simple. The players began with twenty-four identical pieces, the opposing sets being differentiated by colour, and to each individual certain powers and scope of movement were ascribed, though not declared until its first move or capture. Thus an almost limitless range. Half a dozen students now formed a semicircle together with the silent Englishmen, while a seventh, large-framed and pale, could feel the colour rising in his cheeks. He would have to retract his confident offer to commentate on every move, or explain the rules, when almost certain to result was a first, embarrassing defeat. <br /><br />Nicola considered her options but wouldn’t make the decisive move. This was as much as Michael understood. The bell tolled again and the poet tossed down his cigarette butt onto the cold stone, crushing its smoky ember under a polished toe, a city shoe. A biting gust rolled in round the frozen peaks of that far eastern country, still twitching in its slumbers, under a long, feudal shadow. When the old man from the southern tower came out to the courtyard – robed, in open sandals, supporting his tottering frame on a staff – the sun in the east behind him settled on his grey hair bright as a halo. Nobody stirred. <br /><br />So far this wasn’t the game he’d come to see. He shuffled forward to the two seated at the board and crossed his arms, waiting. It was a hopeless position. He smiled. The student foundered. Like so many before him, he conceded – he retired, scratching his head. Then the old man put the tip of his staff to his lips (he cautioned the gasps, the hubbub, the euphoria), and next it was Michael, with a wrinkled hand pressed to the small of his back, as that pushed him to the newly vacated place. ‘Play,’ he was told, and unaware that the passing of only a few more days would see the commencement of his own trial, he squatted down nervously and took his place against that all-conquering female. A slight flicker of amusement crossed her features, but she restrained a smile and set out the pieces again. Michael, reluctant in his challenge, made a first tentative move. She snorted when he named his opening piece – a choice revealing a naivety unsuspected even in him. In the shadow of that tyrant god her failing religion had sought to vanquish, her compulsion to teach a lesson, and punitively, re-emerged. <br /><br />The old man chuckled, but didn’t remain, and when the poet took his place, assured that his own system could never be so vulnerable, no one foresaw his defeat, until late afternoon, when in the lengthening shadows, and a rising wind, only one spectator remained. But even he – pallid, large-limbed – shied away before the final outcome, consoled by the sure knowledge that both must t<span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 8.5pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">urn to that distant, inscrutable country, to those shadows over the mountains, for any hope of salvation.</span></span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-cb9c2922-7fff-7158-14e0-e31262d6d690"><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.44; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘<b>The House of Folly’ belongs to Peter Cowlam’s short-story collection </b></span><b><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Penumbra</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Penumbra</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> itself appears in Peter Cowlam’s recently published compendium edition </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Early Novels and Short Fiction</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, available at Amazon and other online retailers, as both hardback and ebook. </span></b></p><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-1959185500947244312022-07-14T05:53:00.000-07:002022-07-14T05:53:26.701-07:00Tress Theory, a Lesson<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: right;">by</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: right;">Kathryn A. Kopple </p></blockquote><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoTX6IzhlU32O6fokk-Nr68MbP9qvbi70amP4lnfUmSSiOIlPeSOcUi_ox8-l9t3PW6js_exy16ERUpwNaKBntEdXe__dY1sBwqN-fN9WRq6kZfkVmD2Gvbxv5KMmHdkWIEqo2e-x0Y_FWyvTInSuxa8gxjqhHc0Z-xXkglYRd1ENOvoeyfP5gn_iK/s1841/Aubrey%20(2).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1841" data-original-width="1319" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoTX6IzhlU32O6fokk-Nr68MbP9qvbi70amP4lnfUmSSiOIlPeSOcUi_ox8-l9t3PW6js_exy16ERUpwNaKBntEdXe__dY1sBwqN-fN9WRq6kZfkVmD2Gvbxv5KMmHdkWIEqo2e-x0Y_FWyvTInSuxa8gxjqhHc0Z-xXkglYRd1ENOvoeyfP5gn_iK/w247-h320/Aubrey%20(2).jpg" width="247" /></span></a></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope Illustration Aubrey Beardsley</span></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Charles gazed at the night sky and smiled. It appeared filmy, as if a giant sheet of wax paper hovered between him and the heavens. The hotel balcony, where he stood, gave him a sweeping view of the Gran Vía, the large boulevard that ran through the center of Madrid. Pulsing red, twinkling blue and violet, blinking yellow, speeding white high beams—the street swam with electric intensity below while above all was murky. Nothing shone or twinkled up there. Even the moon was less visible, something he noticed back in New York over a year ago. He didn’t make much of it, not at first, assuming that the moon’s disappearance was an effect of light pollution. Astronomers had long issued warnings: too much artificial outdoor lighting was responsible for transforming pristine darkness into an unsightly wash of cloudy denim. Charles experienced a sense of loss but in an abstract way. No one born after the Edisonian Revolution felt starved for more stars. So what if a few stars were no longer visible to the human eye? More like eight million but really who was counting? And then, one evening, standing on the roof of his Upper West Side apartment building, Charles realized that the moon was also disappearing from view. He couldn’t have been more pleased. <br /><br />He glanced once more at the sky before going inside, where Belinda was rummaging though her suitcase. She pulled out one item, then another, while Charles spoke in a feverish rush about what he had—or, more precisely, hadn’t—seen. <br /><br />“Very happy for you,” Belinda said. “Now where are my pajamas? I need to get out of these clothes.” <br /><br />“You can’t imagine how great this makes me feel.” <br /><br />“Truthfully, I can’t.” <br /><br />“Why is it so hard for you to be happy for me?” <br /><br />Belinda looked at him in exasperation. “It’s not easy to live with a man on a mission.” <br /><br />“All the more reason to get on with it. Get rid of the mess up there and start over.” <br /><br />“You mean down here.” Belinda said, working her way out of her dress. <br /><br />The mission Belinda referred to was Charles’ determination to rid the moon of names. As a member of the Historical Society for the Simplification of Lunar Nomenclature, he couldn’t bear the chaos of names that now cluttered the moon. He couldn’t look at the moon without seeing a mishmash of names. It drove him crazy. Names like Babbage, Bouvard, Bowditch (and those were only the Bs) created utter confusion, and the moon was littered with them. Considering that there were thousands of these offenses, Charles felt the solution was to simply start over. A blank slate. No more Babbage! Geologically precise terms only. How difficult could it be? A question he often shouted across a conference table at some Bouvard during meetings where he was invariably met with icy rejection. <br /><br />“She’s not the only moon out there. What about me? Are you going to have me deleted as well?” Belinda asked. She had finished the unpacking and now sat cross-legged on the bed, her back bolstered by oversized pillows. In her silky cream-colored pajamas, she practically glowed. <br /><br />“Have I told you lately how beautiful you are?” <br /><br />“Answer the question.” <br /><br />“Well, that is the point, isn’t it? Are we talking you, Belinda, looking sexy as usual, or Uranus XIV?” <br /><br />“You mean to say, Belinda. Her name is Belinda.” <br /><br /> “You mean, it. Uranus XIV is a planet, not a person.” Charles began inspecting the collection of bottled waters displayed on the sideboard. “Do you want something?” <br /><br />Belinda beckoned for the Perrier. Charles handed her the bottle. “I wish I could make you understand.” <br /><br />“Oh, I understand.” <br /><br />“Then you agree that the whole thing is an illusion. One that we’ve collectively created over thousands of years. Wipe the slate clean and we can start over without all these archaic beliefs, superstitions and fanciful names. Misconceptions of all kinds would be wiped away, for the better.” <br /><br />Belinda frowned. “I hope that you aren’t suggesting that I’m archaic.” <br /><br />“It never occurred to me.” <br /><br />“Good,” she said, as she undid her hair, allowing it to cascade over her shoulders, down her back, and swirl past her waist. <br /><br />Spellbound, Charles stared. Belinda’s hair never ceased to amaze him. He adored her hair–abundant, full of movement; it had a life of its own. Often, when he woke in the mornings, he would find long dark strands circling his fingers and wrists, the way a vine wraps around the branch of a tree. <br /><br />“How does it do that?” he asked. <br /><br />“What are you on about now?” <br /><br />“Your hair.” <br /><br />“What! Is it disappearing?” She laughed and then asked, “Are happy now?” <br /><br />“I was talking about your hair, not the moon.” <br /><br />“Right,” she said and began taking tiny, delicate sips of Perrier. She stared at him with singular intensity, energy rising within her—annoyance, possibly rage. <br /><br />She had the grayest eyes. Magnetic. <br /><br />Charles sighed. “I didn’t mean anything.” <br /><br />“Of course, not! You never mean anything.” <br /><br />“Let’s just change the subject.” <br /><br />“How I wish we could but all you ever talk about is your grand plan.” <br /><br />Charles responded in a prickly voice that he would happily stop talking about the moon if she found it upsetting. He sat down on the bed beside her. Her hair! It must be a trick of the light that made it seem to vibrate like that. “I really don’t want to upset you.” <br /><br />“I think you do.” <br /><br />“My god! What is it going to take?” <br /><br />“Oh, no, not this.” <br /><br />“What!” <br /><br />“You want to make me the problem. As if I’m responsible for the fact that you can’t get your way.” <br /><br />“I don’t mean to,” Charles said. “I am frustrated. Angry. Half the time I can’t get anyone to talk to me about the moon. It’s all about Mars now.” <br /><br />“You do sound sad.” <br /><br />“I am.” <br /><br />“Defeated is probably a better word.” Belinda was finished with the Perrier. She set the empty bottle on the night table. “At least you’re being honest.” <br /><br />“I love my work, Bel. I need my work.” <br /><br />“Where does that leave me?” <br /><br />A feeling of weariness came over Charles. He wanted to lie down next to her on the bed, but Belinda’s hair was in his way. Maybe she should cut it. Bel’s hair! That abundance he had always found remarkable suddenly struck him as encroaching mass of knots and tangles. <br /><br />Doing what he could to stay clear of Bel’s hair, Charles stretched out on his back and stared at the ceiling. He stared a lot at the ceiling. He found it comforting. “It’s for the best,” he said, after a long silence. <br /><br />“Listen to yourself!” Belinda got to her feet. She stalked the room, drawing the heavy damask curtains and shutting the door to the balcony with a sharp bang. She turned to face Charles. “You need to stop this.” She swept past Charles and resumed her place in the center of the bed. “Turn on the television. I want to watch a movie.” <br /><br />“Go ahead,” he said. “I’m going to take a shower.” What good ever came from trying to explain things to her? When it came to science, he was the expert. It was a lonely way to live, but there it was: no one to talk to about the one thing in life that defined him. His work. The moon. <br /><br />“Aren’t you going to take your shower?” Belinda asked. She was staring at the television screen. She held the remote out in front of her, as if it were a weapon and aggressively clicked through the channels. The face of a famous American model popped up on the screen, her voice dubbed in Spanish. <br /><br />Belinda asked Charles tersely if he was going to stand there all night. Clearly, his hovering irritated her. He retreated to the bathroom. Shirt, belt, socks, Italian loafers ended up in a little pyramid on the floor under the sink. When he’d finished soaping and rinsing, he slid open the glass shower door and a burst of hot air escaped, steaming up the room and clouding the mirror. He toweled himself off and slipped into one of the plush hotel bathrobes. <br /><br />Through the wall, he heard music and assumed Belinda had found some romantic comedy to watch. He wiped the steam off the mirror and inspected his chin. He needed a shave. The music in the next room grew louder, as if a child had gotten hold of the remote and was gleefully blasting the volume as high as possible. <br /><br />Charles yanked at the door and stepped into the suite. Belinda had fallen asleep, curled up in the center of the bed, her hair spread all around her, as serene and vulnerable as a nesting bird. With an impatient click, he hit the off button on the remote and watched the screen fade to black. The room was unbearably hot. Under the heavy terrycloth, he dripped. <br /><br />With unsteady steps, Charles went over to the door to the balcony and pulled. It refused to give way. <br /><br />“Where are you going?” asked Belinda. <br /><br />Had she been awake all this time? His sweaty hand slid off the doorknob. For a second, he thought he might pass out. <br /><br />“I need some air.” <br /><br />“Aren’t you feeling well?” <br /><br />“I’ll feel better if I can get a little fresh air.” <br /><br />“If you cared more,” she said in a far-away sounding voice, “you’d listen to me.” <br /><br />“I suppose,” he muttered. He couldn’t figure out whether it was the strange hotel room or the weeks of travel, but he desperately wanted to get away from her. <br /><br />“You act as if you care but all you really do is humor me. I am just your poor, confused Bel.” <br /><br />“I’m not going to argue with you,” he said, his voice brusque. He’d reached his limit. <br /><br />“And you accuse me of being predictable.” <br /><br />Charles flinched, injured by her insulting tone and yet unable to respond because he was too ashamed to admit all the ways in which he failed her. She deserved better but, for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine how to please her. What did she want? He had no idea. <br /><br />“Try to get some sleep, Bel. Things will look brighter in the morning.” <br /><br />“You know best, dear.” <br /><br />He wiped sweat from his eyes. “Don’t take it like that.” <br /><br />“You don’t want me to get too close to you, do you? I think it’s because you’re scared that if I really got inside your head you might begin to see things differently.” <br /><br />Charles wished she would stop talking. It was so damn hot in that room. He would suffocate if he didn’t get some fresh air. <br /><br />“I’m going to step outside now. I will feel more like talking after I get some air.” <br /><br />“Just one more thing.” <br /><br />“What is it?” He was already making plans to break up with her when they got back to the States. Who could live like this? <br /><br />“I’ve never once heard you say that you love me.” <br /><br />“I tell you I love you all the time.” Hopefully, that was enough to appease her. <br /><br />“You don’t mean it,” she insisted. “You tell me you love me because you think that’s what I want to hear.” <br /><br />“It’s not true, Bel. I care for you a great deal.” His heart was pounding. “Now try to rest. Sleep will do you good.” <br /><br />Charles wiped his hands on his bathrobe, pulled open the door, and stepped out onto the balcony. Still burning up, he waited impatiently to feel the wind on his face. He went to take off the cumbersome terrycloth. Who cared if he were to expose himself to all of Madrid? No one was out there to see him. He thought of Bel and her questions as he tried to undress. Whatever had come over her? She seemed determined to push him to the very edge. He tried to undo the belt to the bathrobe, but his fingers were tied in knots—bound by some substance that felt remarkably like Belinda’s hair. And there it was: music of a kind he didn’t immediately recognize. Celestial notes. As if the stars, blind to them though he was, had formed a choir. He remembered that, as a boy, he would carry a pocketknife on him at all times in case of emergencies. But that was a long time ago, and he had nothing to cut through the heavy cilia—no scissors or jackknife. Panicked, he groped about for the door. He tried calling for help, but it was everywhere: in his mouth, falling into his eyes, ringing in his ears. A tremendous gust pushed him against the balcony railing and started to drag him over. A ten-story fall to the ground below. Or was it the sky above? He’d lost all sense of direction. The music grew louder, one crescendo after the other when above him a moonbeam appeared, and through the silken light, he saw Belinda one last time, rapturously combing her hair, like a violinist pulling a bow across the strings of a Stradivarius.</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: This story originally appeared in 2021 in <a href="https://www.fictionalcafe.com/tress-theory-a-lesson-by-kathryn-kopple/">The Fictional Cafe</a>. </span></div></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-9323353236509420402022-06-27T11:05:00.000-07:002022-06-27T11:05:06.460-07:00Excerpt from John Crow’s Devil by Marlon James<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The Prologue: The End<br /><br />No living thing flew over the village of Gibbeah, neither fowl, nor dove, nor crow. Yet few looked above, terrified should an omen come in a shriek or flutter. Nothing flew but dust. It slipped through window blades, door cracks, and the lifting clay of rooftops. Dust coated house and ground, shed and tree, machine and vehicle with a blanket of gray. Dust hid blood, but not remembrance.<br /><br />Apostle York took three days to decide. He had locked himself in the office as his man waited by the door. Clarence touched his face often without thought, running his fingers over scratches hardened by clotted blood. The Apostle’s man was still in church clothes: his one black suit and gray shirt with tan buttons that matched his skin, save for his lips, which would have been pink had they not been beaten purple three days ago. Clarence shifted from one leg to the other and squeezed his knuckles to prevent trembling, but it was no use.<br /><br />“Clarence,” the Apostle called from behind the door. “Pile them up. Pile them all up. Right where the roads meet. Pile them up and burn them.”<br /><br />Men, women, and children, all dead, were left in the road. Those who scurried home with their lives imprisoned themselves behind doors. There were five bodies on Brillo Road; the sixth lay with a broken neck in a ditch where the bridge used to be. Clarence limped, cursing the hop and drag of his feet. At the crossroads he stopped.<br /><br />“All man who can hear me!” he shouted. “Time now to do the Lord’s work. The Apostle callin you.”<br /><br />Faces gathered at windows but doors remained shut. Some would look at Clarence, but most studied the sky. Clarence looked above once and squeezed his knuckles again. A dove had flown straight into his face, splitting his bottom lip and almost scratching out his left eye. He felt as if more would come at that very moment, but the Apostle had given him strength.<br /><br />“I talkin to every man who can stand. Heed the word or you goin get lick with friggery worse than any bird.”<br /><br />Birds. They came back in a rush; in screams and screeches and wounds cut fresh by claws. “You know what my Apostle can do.”<br /><br />Clarence knew the houses where men hid. He hopped and dragged to each one and hammered into the door.<br /><br />“Sunset,” he said.<br /><br />Three days before, when noon was most white, the village had killed Hector Bligh. Reckoning came swift, before they were even done. God’s white fury swept down on them with beaks and claws and the beat of a thousand wings.<br /><br />But there were things the villagers feared more than birds. One by one they came out and the men threw the bodies on the bonfire.<br /><br />“This was judgment,” said Apostle York. He had emerged from the office after the fire was lit. The Apostle’s face had no scratch. “Judgment!” he shouted over the brilliance of the pyre and the crackle and pop of burning flesh. “Judgment,” he said again in morning devotion, noon devotion, evening devotion, night mass, penitence prayer, children’s prayer, women’s prayer, blood atonement, prayer for the saints, and the School of Boy Prophets. From that day, the incident was never to be spoken of lest God again unleash his wrath on Gibbeah.<br /><br />The building had begun a week before the killing. With chopped down trees the villagers made a fence all around Gibbeah’s boundary. Then they surrounded it in barbed wire. Every city of righteousness had a wall, said the Apostle. This was God’s way of keeping holiness in and iniquity out. Sooner than expected, the fence was finished. It wouldn’t be long before nature hid wood and wire in the deceit of leaves, vines, and flowers. Soon Gibbeah would disappear from the map of men. Soon all would be spared from recollection but Lucinda.<br /><br />She had also spent three days in a room, but her door was locked from the outside. Lucinda panicked whenever she trapped fingers in her gorgon hair. Her eyes popped from jet skin. She had believed the Apostle, for love and God had punished her for sin. Before she went mad there were two faces in the mirror, neither of them hers. After Hector Bligh’s death there were three. Bligh’s eyes snaked her. They tormented her in dreams. She screamed at him in the tiny room below the church’s steeple. The room stank of bird flesh. In a fit of rage brought on by the fever that madness carried, she struck the mirror and shattered it. But in each broken piece was another face. Three faces became ten, then a hundred and a thousand and still more. A million eyes that saw everything and judged like God. She could do nothing but scream. By day her room was dark, but at night she moved back and forth in the light, a gaunt silhouette one instant, a ragged chiaroscuro the next.<br /><br />Human ash became dust. What dust would not cover, wind swept away. Gibbeah built a wall that sealed the village from memory. But within her walls Lucinda would not forget. His ghost lived with her now, his voice mimicked her cries, and his eyes saw her secret skin. The Apostle had called Hector Bligh a disgrace, abomination, and Antichrist. She called him the Rum Preacher.<br /><br />Chapter 1: The Rum Preacher<br /><br />Make we tell you bout the Rum Preacher. Even if you never live anywhere near them parts, you must did hear bout the Rum Preacher. After six years, false story and true story rub together so much that both start shine. People think that everything shoot to Hell after the Devil take hold of Lillamae Perkins, but if you did know Pastor Hector Bligh of the Holy Sepulchral Full Gospel Church of St. Thomas Apostolic, you would know him was on the road to Hell long before that.<br /><br />Before Pastor Bligh come to Gibbeah nobody ever see a man of God drink. Some people say Second Book of John, verse one to eleven, say that Jesus turn water into wine, so him must did drink wine too. Three man who sit down outside the bar all day say that him is man after all and man have right to get drunk just as him have right to scratch him balls when him want to scratch him balls or beat him woman when she don’t act right.<br /><br />Bligh drink like drinking goin out of style. All Saturday night when him should be readying himself for church, him down the bar drinking liquor and talking out people business. And when the time come to do the preaching, him don’t know what to say. We never see preaching like this yet. When Bligh drunk all you hear is mumble. When Bligh dry him sound like that mad captain in that Moby Dick picture that show at the Majestic. The preacher before him did have fire. Hector Bligh have nothing but ice. Maybe is fi we fault cause country people take things as them be, as if white man goin beat we if we change them.<br /><br />Lillamae.<br /><br />Lillamae Perkins. Is was two years since the morning her father wake up but just for a minute to see him bed all red and blood gushing like spring from where him penis used to hang. Nobody never see what happen, but everybody see Lillamae, outside her gate looking like them obeah her, with one hand holding the knife and the other hand holding the bloody cocky. She eat green pawpaw to kill out the baby. Two years later, Sunday come and Pastor Bligh was him usual drunk self. Him fling himself into the Pastor seat by the pulpit like him would crash on the floor if him did miss. Lillamae goin up to the altar to have them drive out her sin and iniquity, even though Preacher never call nobody yet.<br /><br />Everybody hear she.<br /><br />“Lawd Jesus Christ! Lawd Jesus Christ! Consuming Fire! Consuming Fire! LAAAAAAAAAWD!!!”<br /><br />Lillamae Perkins fling herself pon the ground. Her leg turn into scissors, she swing them open, then close, then open, and everybody could see her fishy which never cover up with no panty. Then she see Lucinda, who scream out to Holy Jesus Christ.<br /><br />“Wha Jesus goin do fi you, river-whore? Satan watching you from you start mix tea,” Lillamae say. People screaming and running, and tripping and crushing and more screaming, cause when she open her mouth is a man voice come out. Then she see the Pastor and all Hell break loose. Five deacon rush the altar. Churchgoer and sinner both call them “The Five.”<br /><br />“One idiot, two drunkard, one sick-fowl, and one who beat woman. Now who is who? Who is who?” is what she say. The Five circle her, wrestle her, but nobody could pin down Lillamae. She slip from one like grease and claw through another one face. She kick a deacon in him seed bag and five man become four. Lillamae beat up all of them. She crick the second man neck, break all of the third man finger, punch asthma back into the fourth man chest, and blind the last deacon in him left eye.<br /><br />Nobody know where the knife come from. Some people say she jump, some people say she fly. When demon take you, you can do anything. All people see is when she leap after the Pastor with the knife and him hold out him hand like him was goin catch her and she stab right through him left hand middle and him stuck on the wall like Holy Jesus crucified.<br /><br />“Fool. You should a do this two years ago when we was one. Now we is one and seven,” was all she say. Pastor Bligh bawling and screaming, but nobody goin cross a girl with eight demon in her. Then she scream and run out of the church.<br /><br />Two day pass and nobody can find Lillamae. Then Wednesday, a little boy find her body sailing down Two Virgins River. Pastor Bligh did drunk when him bury her. After that plenty people stop come to church.<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />Coming home from the bar, Pastor Bligh made his way up the road, teetering like a drunken colossus. But the fire dug holes in his gut and sent flame down his thighs screaming, Let me out! He moved over to the side of the road and released himself, bursting a black circle on the pavement with a torrent of yellow piss. The sun teased him from behind and suddenly there was lightness to the morning. He had learned long ago never to trust happiness. But something came over him, bringing both pleasure and a slight fear. A silliness that made him fall in love with pink-striped skies and opalescent dew bubbles and chickens crowing themselves awake. Bligh was still very much drunk. His pants were around his ankles and when he moved he tripped, fell backwards on the base of his skull, and knocked himself out.<br /><br />A church sister saw him first. She had come out to water her hibiscus and thought a mad man or a drunkard had fallen dead in the road. She inched toward him, afraid that he was merely asleep and would awake at that very second to rape her with calloused hands and dirty fingernails. But when she saw Pastor Bligh’s face, the woman frowned, disgusted and unsurprised. “Disgrace” she said. And yet she was relieved by Pastor Bligh’s behavior, as were many in the village. So tormented was he by his own sin that he could never convict them of theirs. But as she summed him up from head to foot, her view came to a halt midway. There looking at her was his dark penis and balls, sprawled as carelessly as he was, bracketed by his thighs and the open ends of his shirt. She forgot his arms; the right spread open and the left under his back. She forgot his face, gaunt and gray, his mouth open and pooling with drool. She forgot his shoes, dirty, brown, and mostly covered by pants that strangled his ankles. There was only the thing, lifeless between two legs yet as monstrous as a serpent in Genesis. Her dark face went white, even pink, as she rushed back to her house. For several minutes he was unconscious. Minutes that horrified old women and scandalized children who passed by on the way to school. Lucinda, who never witnessed the incident, would nonetheless report of it in the first person in that tone she reserved for special heresies.<br /><br />After the pee-pee incident, the concerned citizens of the village, namely Lucinda, had had enough.<br /><br />“Him goin mistake him chair for a toilet next Sunday, just watch,” said one observer, but as he was not a member of the church no one heard, anticipated, or dreaded it. In short, that person was not Lucinda, who had begun a letter-writing campaign to have Pastor Bligh removed. Lucinda remembered very little schooling other than the Bible, so her words often packed more Hellfire and damnation than she intended. She wrote to every church she knew, even the archdiocese, despite Pastor Bligh being no Catholic. Bligh answered to nobody but God, and Jesus wasn’t saying anything that Lucinda wanted to hear.<br /><br />Nobody answered Lucinda’s letters. She would never curse God, but reminded Him that this was why she also prayed to someone else. Then the Majestic Cinema started showing Sunday matinees at 10:00 and chopped the halved congregation to a quarter. The Pastor now drank day and night. He was spiraling downward and would have taken the village with him were it not for the other, who lead them instead to a light blacker than the thickest darkness.<br /><br />He came like a thief on a night colored silver. He came on two wheels, the muffler puffing a mist that made children cough in their sleep. As his motorcycle coursed up Brillo Road it left a serpentine trail of dust. There were no witnesses to his coming, save for an owl, the moon, and the Devil.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1QmoNY-5NjwowNTyx-3rDuR3I05vFZV6xqOsF_jo3-7rkcg5vkaT-QmG04F02fDUV80ZrPaQsusxhq40Sf_wAM3vci1gH8JEdHflGY7UG3RD38eGeDt8RvDf2ZcAoPrmtRPRwLtcIHBp1YctqPAFWIssvp2u1TkvWVTwoUTKS-KbkblTuEVPuVrX6/s267/john%20crow.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="267" data-original-width="188" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1QmoNY-5NjwowNTyx-3rDuR3I05vFZV6xqOsF_jo3-7rkcg5vkaT-QmG04F02fDUV80ZrPaQsusxhq40Sf_wAM3vci1gH8JEdHflGY7UG3RD38eGeDt8RvDf2ZcAoPrmtRPRwLtcIHBp1YctqPAFWIssvp2u1TkvWVTwoUTKS-KbkblTuEVPuVrX6/s1600/john%20crow.jpg" width="188" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: This excerpt can be found online at <a href="http://www.akashicbooks.com/extra/excerpt-from-john-crows-devil/">Akashic Books</a>.</span></div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-12054138390055900862022-06-05T13:48:00.002-07:002022-06-05T13:48:37.872-07:00Subway Odyssey<div style="text-align: right;"><span>by</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span>Paul Theroux</span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYzKhaf5wOC00arzvHBupbuOVeOYLZO3p7A8CGbViSDeU-WrZi2IqlJV8kKHZbOM-nohf53lO_zaygYtAZfFS3GI4hqv3uRmaqg5nS3a6J0mpFanrrDZJejJkFSaRVKZkb4-0Y_etiKXQ9G256xNjH_4506gkqHlVPYtqkIctz17Bmg6pu3VWOcmYP/s620/canal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="452" data-original-width="620" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYzKhaf5wOC00arzvHBupbuOVeOYLZO3p7A8CGbViSDeU-WrZi2IqlJV8kKHZbOM-nohf53lO_zaygYtAZfFS3GI4hqv3uRmaqg5nS3a6J0mpFanrrDZJejJkFSaRVKZkb4-0Y_etiKXQ9G256xNjH_4506gkqHlVPYtqkIctz17Bmg6pu3VWOcmYP/s320/canal.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;">New Yorkers say some terrible things about the subway - that they hate it, or are scared stiff of it, or that it deserves to go broke. ''I haven't been down there in years,'' is a common enough remark from a city dweller. Even people who ride it seem to agree that there is more original sin among subway passengers. And more desperation, too, making you think of choruses of ''O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark. ...''</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />''Subway'' is not its name, because, strictly speaking, about half of it is elevated. But which person who has ridden it lately is going to call it by its right name, ''the Rapid Transit''?<br /><br />You can wait a long time for some trains and, as in T.S. Eliot's ''East Coker,'' often ... an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about. (From ''East Coker'' in ''Four Quartets,'' copyright c 1943 by T.S. Eliot; copyright c 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.).<br /><br />The subway is frightful looking. It has paint and signatures all over its aged face. It has been vandalized from end to end. It smells so hideous you want to put a clothespin on your nose, and it is so noisy the sound actually hurts. Is it dangerous? Ask anyone, and, without thinking, he will tell you there must be about two murders a day on the subway.<br /><br />You have to ride it for a while to find out what it is and who takes it and who gets killed on it. I spent a freezing week in December doing little else except riding the subway. Having already ridden the subways of a dozen cities, each one typifying the city above it - the dusty charm of the Buenos Aires Subterranean, the marmoreal splendor of the Washington Metro - I wondered if the system of tunnels underneath New York reflected the city's unique neuroticism.<br /><br />I like the wildness of New York. But to write about its subway I would have to penetrate that wildness. It would be like exploring the labyrinthine Mato Grosso of Brazil. I mounted a series of expeditions to discover a way through that labyrinth.<br /><br />Each morning, I decided on a general direction, and then I set off, sometimes sprinting to the end of the line and making my way back slowly; or else stopping along the way and va rying my route back. I went from midtown to Jamaica Estates in Queen s, and returned via Coney Island. You can get anywhere you want i n New<br /><br />York on the subway. There are 230 route miles on the system - twice as many as the Paris Metro - and there are 458 stations. I saw most of those stations. The trains run all night - in London they shut down before midnight. (The New York subway isn't the only system with 24-hour daily service; the trains in Chicago and Philadelphia also run all night.) New York's one-price token system is one of the fairest and most sensible in the world; London's multifare structure is clumsy, ridiculous and a wasteful sop to the unions; Tokyo's, while just as complicated, is run by computers which spit tickets at you and then belch out your change.<br /><br />The Moscow Metro has grandiose chandeliers to light some stations, but the New York subway has hopeful signs, like the one at 96th Stree t and Br oadway: ''New tunnel lighting is being installed at thisarea as part of a Major Rehabilitation Program. Completion is expected in t he summer of 1980.'' They are over a year late in finishing, bu t at least they know there's a problem.<br /><br />The subway is full of surprises. It has what are probably the longest rides of any subway in the world, the biggest stations, the most track, the most police officers. It is a gift to any connoisseur of dubious superlatives: It has the filthiest trains, the most bizarre graffiti, the noisiest wheels, the craziest passengers, the most macabre crimes.<br /><br />Three and a half million fares a day pass through it, and in 1981 the total number of murder victims on the subway amounted to 13. This figure does not include suicides (one a week) or ''space cases'' - people who quite often get themselves jammed between the train and the platform.<br /><br />The subway looks like a deathtrap. It's not at all like the BART system in San Francisco, where people are constantly chattering, saying, ''I'm going to my father's wedding,'' or ''I'm looking after my Mom's children,'' or ''I've got a date with my fiancee's boyfriend.'' The New York subway is a serious matter - the rackety train, the silent passengers, the occasional scream.<br /><br />No one speaks except to the person on his immediate right or left, and only then if they are very old friends or else married. Avoiding the stranger's gaze is what the subway passenger does best. Most sit bolt upright, with fixed expressions, ready for anything. As a New York City subway passenger, you are J. Alfred Prufrock - you ''prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.'' Those new to the subway have the strangest expressions, like my English friend who told me there was only one way to survive the subway: ''You have to look as if you're the one with the meat cleaver. You have to go in with your eyes flashing.''<br /><br />To appear inconspicuous on the subway, many people read. Usually they read The Daily News, and a few read Nowy Dziennik, which is the same thing in Polish; The New York Times is less evident, maybe because it takes two hands to read it. But the Bible is very popular, along with religious tracts and the Holy Koran and Spanish copies of The Watchtower; lots of boys study for their bar mitzvah on the F line in Queens. I saw ''The Bragg Toxicless Diet'' on the B train and ''La Pratique du Fran,cais Parle'' on the RR.<br /><br />All over the system riders read lawbooks: ''The Interpretation of Contracts,'' ''The Law of Torts,'' ''Maritime Law.'' The study of law is a subway preoccupation, and it is especially odd to see all these lawbooks in this lawless atmosphere. The Transit Authority's police officers on the vandalized trains create the same impression of incongruity. When I first saw the police, they looked mournful to me, but after I got to know them I realized that most of them are not mournful at all, just overworked and doing a thankless job.<br /><br />We were at Flushing Avenue, on the GG line, talking about rules for riding the subway. You need rules: The subway is like a complex - and diseased - circulatory system. Some people liken it to a sewer and others hunch up their shoulders and mutter about being in the bowels of the earth.<br /><br />I said, ''Keep away from isolated cars, I suppose,'' and one of the two plainclothes transit policemen I was with said, ''Never display jewelry.''<br /><br />Just then, a man walked by, and he had Chinese coins - the old kind with a hole through the middle - woven somehow into his hair. There were enough coins in that man's hair for a swell night out in old Shanghai, but robbing him would have involved scalping him.<br /><br />There was a woman at the station, too. She was clearly crazy. She was saying, ''I'm a member of the medical profession.'' She had no teeth, and plastic bags were taped around her feet. I glanced at her and made sure she kept her distance. (The previous day, a crazy old lady like her came at me and shrieked, ''Ah'm goin' cut you up!'' This was at Pelham Parkway, on the No. 2 IRT line in the Bronx. I left the car at the next stop, Bronx Park East, where the zoo is, though who could be blamed for thinking that, in New York City, the zoo is everywhere?) Then a Moslem unflapped his prayer mat and spread it on the platform and knelt on it, just like that, and was soon on all fours, beseeching Allah and praising the Prophet Moh ammed. This is not remarkable. People pray or sell religion on t he subway all the time. ''Hallelujah, brothers and sisters,'' the man with the leaflets says on the BMT-RR line at Prospect Avenue in Broo klyn. ''I love Jesus! I used to be a wino!'' And Moslems beg and push their green plastic cups at passengers, and try to sell them copi es of something called ''Arabic Religious Classics.'' It is winter a nd Brooklyn, but the menare dressed for the Great Nafud Desert, or Ji dda or Medina - skullcap, galabia, sandals.<br /><br />''And don't sit next to the door,'' the second police officer said. We were still talking about rules. ''A lot of these snatchers like to play the doors.'' The first o fficer said, ''It's a good idea to keep near the conductor. He 's got a telephone. So does the man in the token booth. At night, sti ck around the token booth until the train comes in.''<br /><br />''Although,'' the second officer said, ''a few years ago, some kids filled a fire extinguisher with gasoline and pumped it into a token booth at Broad Channel. There were two ladies inside, but before they could get out the kids set the gas on fire. The booth just exploded like a bomb, and the ladies died. It was a revenge thing. One of the kids had gotten a summons for theft of service - not paying his fare.'' (One of the teen-agers got a prison term of up to four years for cooperating with the police; the other two were given sentences of 15 years to life imprisonment.)<br /><br />Just below us, at Flushing Avenue, there was a stream running between the tracks. It gurgled and glugged down the whole length of the long platform. It gave the station the atmosphere of a sewer - dampness and a powerful smell. And there was a rat. It was only my third rat in a week of riding the subway, but this one was twice the size of rats I've seen elsewhere. I thought, Rats as big as cats.<br /><br />''Stay with the crowds. Keep away from quiet stairways. The stairways at 41st and 43d are usually quiet, but 42d is always busy - that's the one to use.''<br /><br />So many rules! It's not like taking a subway at all; it's like walking through the woods - through dangerous jungle, rather. Do this; don't do that.<br /><br />''Last May,'' the first officer said, ''six guys attempted to murder someone at Forest Parkway, on the J line. It was a whole gang against this one guy. Then they tried to burn the station down with Molotov cocktails. We stopped that, too.''<br /><br />The man who said this was 6 feet 4, 281 pounds. He carried a .38 in a shoulder holster and wore a bulletproof vest. He had a radio, a can of Mace and a blackjack.<br /><br />The other day a teen-ager - 5 feet 6, 135 pounds -tried to mug him. The boy slapped the plainclothesman across the face while he was seated on a train, minding his own business. The boy said, ''Give me your money.'' He threatened him and kept punching. Finally, the plainclothesman stood up; the boy was still saying, ''Give me all your money!'' The plainclothesman took out his badge and his pistol and said, ''I'm a police officer and you're under arrest.'' ''I was just kidding!'' the boy said, but it was too late.<br /><br />I laughed at the thought of someone trying to mug this well-armed giant. ''Rule One for the subway,'' he said. ''Want to know what it is?'' He looked up and down the Flushing Avenue platform, at the old lady and the Moslem and the running water and the vandalized signs. ''Rule One is - don't ride the subway if you don't have to.''<br /><br />A lot of people say that. I did not believe it when he said it, and after a week of riding the trains I still don't. The subway is New York City's best hope. The streets are impossible; the highways are a failure; there is nowhere to park. The private automobile has no future in this city whatsoever. This is plainest of all to the people who own and, frightened of the subway, use cars in the city; they know, better than anyone, that the car is the last desperate old-fangled fling of a badly planned transport system. What is amazing is that back in 1904 a group of businessmen solved New York's transport problems for centuries to come. What an engineering marvel they eventually created in this underground railway! And how amazed they would be to see what it has become, how foul-seeming to the public mind.<br /><br />Yet, while some New Yorkers seldom set foot in the subway, other New Yorkers live there, moving from station to station, whining for money and eating yesterday's bagels and sleeping on benches. The police in New York call such people ''skells'' and are seldom harsh with them. ''Wolfman Jack'' is a skell, living underground at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn, on the GG line. The police there give him food and clothes, and if you ask him how he is, he says, ''I'm getting some calls.'' Call them colorful characters and they don't look so dangerous or pathetic.<br /><br />These ''skells'' are not merely down and out. Many are insane, chucked out of New York hospitals in the earl y 1970's when it was decided that long-term institutionalization was doing them little good. ''They were resettled in rooms or hotels,'' said Ruth Cohen, a psychiatric social worker at Bellevue Hospital. ''But many of them can't follow through. They get lost, they wander the streets. They're not violent, suicidal or dangerous enough for Bellevue -this is an acute-care hospital. But these people w ho wander the subway - once they're on their own, they begin to decompensate.''<br /><br />Ah' m goin' cut you up: That woman who threatened to slash me was decompensating. Here are a few more decompensating - one is weeping on a wooden bench at Canal Street; another has wild hair and is spitting into a Coke can. One man - who is decompensating in a useful way - has a bundle of brooms and begins to sweep the whole of the change area a t Grand Central; another is scrubbing the stairs with scraps of paper at 14th Street. They drink, they scream, they gibber like monkeys. They sit on subway benches with their knees drawn up, just as patients used to do in mental hospitals. A police officer told me, ''There are more serious things than people screaming on trains.'' This is so, and yet the deranged person who sits next to you and begin s howling at you seems at the time very serious indeed.<br /><br />The subway, which is many things, is also a madhouse. The subway is frightening - and what makes it even more frightening is the fact that it is so very easy for a passenger to get lost on it.<br /><br />There is nearly always a bus stop near the subway entrance. People waiting for the bus have a special pitying gaze for people entering the dark hole in the sidewalk that is the subway entrance. It is sometimes not pity, but fear; often they look like miners' wives watching their menfolk going down the pit.<br /><br />The stranger's sense of disorientation down below is immediate. The station is all tile and iron and dampness; it has bars and turnstiles and steel grates. It has the look of an old prison or a monkey cage. Buying a token, the stranger may ask directions, but the token booth - reinforced, burglarproof, bulletproof - renders the reply incoherent. And subway directions are a special language.<br /><br />''A train ... downtown ... express to the shuttle ... change at 96th for the 2 ... uptown ... the Lex ... CC ... LL ... the local ...''<br /><br />Most New Yorkers refer to the subway by the now-obsolete forms: IND, IRT, BMT. No one intention-ally tries to confuse the stranger; it is just that, where the subway is concerned, precise directions are very hard to convey. Verbal directions are incomprehensible; printed ones are defaced. The signboards and subway maps are not decipherable beneath layers of graffiti.<br /><br />People who don't take the subway say that these junky pictures are folk art, a protest against the metropolitan grayness, and what a wonderful sense of color these scribblers have - which is complete nonsense. The graffiti are bad, violent and destructive; they are antiart, and the people who praise them are either malicious or lazy-minded. The graffiti are so extensive and so dreadful it is hard to believe that the perpetrators are not the recipients of some enormous foundation grant.<br /><br />That Andy Warhol, the stylish philistine, has said, ''I love graffiti,'' is almost reason enough to hate them. One is warier still of Norman Mailer, who naively encouraged this public scrawling in his book ''The Faith of Graffiti.''<br /><br />Displacing signs and maps, blacking out train windows and obliterating instructions, subway graffiti are deeply menacing. ''In case of emergency'' is crosshatched with a felt tip; a yard-long signature obscures ''These seats are for the elderly and disabled''; ''The subway tracks are very dangerous. If the train should stop, do not -'' the rest is black and unreadable.<br /><br />There are few cars out of the 6,500 on the system in which the maps have not been torn out or defaced. Assuming the stranger has boarded the train, he (irrespective of his race) can only feel panic when, searching for a clue to his route, he sees in the map frame the message, ''Guzman - Ladron y Asesino.''<br /><br />He gets off the train, and then his troubles really begin. He may be in the South Bronx or the upper reaches of Broadway on the No. 1 line, or on any one of a dozen lines that traverse Brooklyn. He gets off the train, which is covered with graffiti, and steps onto a station platform, which is covered with graffiti. It is possible that none of the signs will be legible. Not only will the stranger not know where he is, but the stairways will be splotched and stinking -no ''uptown,'' no ''downtown,'' no ''exit.'' It is also possible that not a single soul will be around, and the most dangerous stations - ask any transit police officer - are the emptiest. Of course, the passenger might just want to sit on a broken bench and, taking Mailer's word for it, contemplate the macho qualities of the graffiti; on the other hand, he is more likely to want to get the hell out of there.<br /><br />This is the story that most people tell of subway fear - the predicament of having boarded t he wrong train and gotten off at a distant station; of being on the empty platform, waiting for a train that shows no sign of coming. Then the vandalized station signs, the crazy semiliterate messages, the monkey scratches on the walls, the dampness, the neglect, the visible evidence o f destruction and violence - they combine to produce a sense of disgust and horror.<br /><br />In every detail it is like a nightmare, complete with rats and a tunnel and a low ceiling. It is manifest suffocation straight out of Poe. And some of these stations have long platforms - you have to squint to see what is at the far end. These distances intensify a person's fear, and so do all the pillars behind which any ghoul could be lurking. Is it any wonder that, having once strayed into this area of subterranean gothic, people decide that the subway is not for them?<br /><br />But those who tell this story seldom have a crime to report. They have experienced shock and fear and have gone weak in the knees, but it has been a private little horror. In most cases the person will have come to no harm. Yet he will undoubtedly remember his fear on that empty station for the rest of his life.<br /><br />When New Yorkers recount an experience like this they are invariably speaking of something that happened on another line, not their usual route. Their own line is fairly safe, they'll say; it's cleaner than the others, it's got a little charm, it's kind of dependable, they've been taking it for years. This sense of loyalty to a regularly used line is the most remarkable thing about the subway passenger in New York. It is, in fact, a jungle attitude.<br /><br />''New York is a jungle,'' the tourist says, and he believes he has made a withering criticism. But all very large cities are jungles: They are hard to read, hard to penetrate; strange people live in them; and they contain mazy areas of great danger. The jungle aspect of cities (and of New York City in particular) is the most interesting thing about them - the way people behave in this jungle, and adapt to it; the way they change it or are changed by it.<br /><br />In any jungle, the pathway is a priority. Most subway passengers were shown how to ride it by parents or friends. Habit becomes instinct. The passenger knows where he is going because he seldom diverges from his usual route. But that is also why, unless you are getting off at precisely his stop, he cannot tell you how to get where you're going.<br /><br />The only other way of learning how to use the subway is by teaching yourself. This is very hard work and requires imagination and intelligence. It means navigating in four dimensions. No one can do it idly, and I doubt that many people take up subway riding in their middle years.<br /><br />Riders even assign a specific character to each line. For some people, the IRT - the oldest line - is dependable, with patches of elegance (those beaver mosaics at Astor Place commemorating John Jacob Astor's fur business); for others, it is dangerous and dirty. One person praises the IND; another damns it. ''I've got a soft spot for the BMT,'' a woman told me, but found it hard to explain why. ''Take the A train,'' I was told. ''That's the best one, like the song.'' But some of the worst stations are on the (very long) A line. The CC, Eighth Avenue local, was described to me as ''scuzz'' - disreputable -but this train, running from Bedford Park Boulevard, the Bronx, via Manhattan and Brooklyn, to Rockaway Park, Queens, covers a distance of 32.39 miles. For some of these miles, it is pleasant and for others it is not.<br /><br />There is part of the No. 2 IRT line - from Nostrand to New Lots Avenue in Brooklyn - that is indisputably bad. It is dangerous and ugly, and when you get to New Lots Avenue you cannot imagine why you went. The transit police call this line ''the Beast.'' But people in the know - the police, the Transit Authority, the people who travel throughout the system - say that one line is much like another.<br /><br />''Is this line bad?'' I asked Robert E. Huber of the Transit Authority, and pointed to the map in his office. ''The whole system is bad,'' he said. ''From 1904 until just a few years ago it went unnoticed. People took it for granted. In 1975, the first year of the fiscal crisis, Mayor Beame ordered cutbacks. They started a program of deferred maintenance - postponed servicing - and just attended to the most serious deficiencies. After four or five years of deferred maintenance, the bottom fell out. In January-February 1981, 25 percent of the trains were out of service, and things got worse - soon a 30-minute trip was taking an hour and a half. No one was putting any money into it. But of course they never had. It was under-capitalized from the beginning. Now there is decay everywhere, but there is also a real determination to reverse that trend and get it going right.''<br /><br />That determination may be there, but last year long-delayed maintenance of aging equipment exacted a terrible toll. In July, when an antiquated signal system failed, a Manhattan-bound IRT train slammed into the rear of a second train that had halted because of signal trouble in a darkened tunnel in Brooklyn. A motorman was killed and 135 passengers were injured.<br /><br />On Dec. 15, just south of the Times Square station, a motor on a West Side IRT train fell from its bracket, snagged on a track switch, causing the car behind it to skid off the tracks and tear through nine steel tunnel supports. The derailment, which occurred at5:50 A.M., injured 10 of the 50 persons on board and tied up service on the heavily traveled route for most of the day. If it had happened an hour later, during the rush, the accident would have been catastrophic. It was the third time in 1981 t hat a motor had dropped from a moving train onto the tracks.<br /><br />Feelings of foreboding notwithstanding, the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority last year ranked the New York subway system as the second safest in the country - behind the Metro in Washington. (The last passenger fatality in a New York subway collision took place in 1970 when a disabled IND train smashed into a crowded morning rush-hour train while switching tracks near the Roosevelt Avenue station in Queens. Two passenger s were killed and 60 injured.) That a spanking-new system like t he Washington Metro is not immune to fatal accidents was sadly brought home earlier this month when a rush-hour crash killed three persons and injured 25. It was the Washington system's first fatal accident in its six years of operation.<br /><br />It is the obvious decay and vandalism on the subways that conveys the feeling of lawlessness. Indeed, the first perception of subway crime came with the appearance of widespread graffiti in 1970. It was then that passengers took fright, and ridership, which had been declining slowly since the 1950's, dropped rapidly. Passengers felt threatened, and newspapers gave prominence to subway crime.<br /><br />Today, all the trains carry crime with them, picking it up in one area and carrying it to another. The South Bronx is regarded as a high-risk area, but seven lines pass through it, taking vandals and thieves all over the system. There is a species of vandalism that was once peculiar to the South Bronx: Boys would swing on the stanchions - those stainless-steel poles in the center of the car - and, raising themselves sideways until they were parallel with the floor, they would kick hard against a window and burst it. Now this South Bronx window-breaking technique is endemic throughout the system.<br /><br />Except for the people who have the misfortune of traveling on ''the Beast,'' no one can claim that his train is much better or worse than any other.<br /><br />The majority of subway crime is theft - bag snatching and pickpocketing. This is followed by robbery - the robber using a gun or knife. There are about 32 robberies or snatchings a day in the system, and one or two cases of aggravated assault a day. This takes care of many ''Part 1 Offenses'' - the serious ones.<br /><br />Serious crimes in the subways ran 60 percent to 65 percent higher last December than for December 1980. That increase was not the largest for a month, said Edward J. Silberfarb, a spokesman for the New York Transit Authority police. The record was the 80 percent rise of August 1980 over August 1979, when - because of the high price of gold - there was a sudden spurt of chain snatchings. (The 15,812 felonies reported in the transit system in 1981 represented an increase of 13.7 percent over the preceding year.)<br /><br />People do get mugged. I asked a uniformed Transit Authority police officer what reaction he got upon entering a car. ''A big sigh of relief,'' he said. ''You can actually hear it. People smile at me. They're relieved. But the ones who are the most pleased to see me are the handicapped people and the old people. They're the ones who get mugged mostly.''<br /><br />That is the disgraceful part: The victims of subway crime, according to some transit policemen I talked to, are most often the old, the mentally retarded, the crippled, the blind, the weak. The majority of victims are women. Minorities constitute the next largest category of victim: a black person in a white area, a Hispanic in a black area, a white in a Hispanic area. Of course, the old and handicapped are also minorities, regarded as easy targets and defenseless. But cities can turn people into members of a minority group quite easily. What makes the New Yorker so instinctively wary is perhaps the thought that anyone who boards the wrong train, or gets off at the wrong stop, is capable of being in the minority.<br /><br />Of course, many crimes on the subway go unreported, but this is also true outside the transit system. In one precinct, there might be 77 murders in a year, which makes the 13 in the subway in 1981 look mild by comparison. There were 35 rapes and rape attempts last year, which, while nothing to crow about, is not as bad as is widely believed (''I'll bet they have at least one rape a day,'' a woman told me, and for that reason she never took the subway).<br /><br />The perception of crime is widespread, despite the fact that statistically the experience of it is quite small. The whiff of criminality, the atmosphere of viciousness, is so strong in the stations and trains that it does little good to say that, relatively speaking, crime is not that serious in the subway. ''What do those statistics matter to someone who is in a car and a gang of six guys starts teasing and then threatening the passengers?'' said Arthur S. Penn, a New York lawyer. ''Or that other familiar instance - you get into a car and there's one guy way down at the end sitting all by himself, and the rest of the people are crowded up at this end of the car. You know from experience that the man who's sitting alone is crazy, and then, when the train pulls out, he starts screaming. ...''<br /><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The most frequent complaint of subway passengers, however, is not about crime. It is, by a wide margin, about delayed trains and slow service. The second largest category of complaint is about the discourtesy of conductors or token sellers; and the third concerns unclean stations. ''Mainly the smell of urine -it's really horrible at some stati ons,'' said Robert Huber of the Transit Authority.<br /><br />Discomfort, anxiety, fear - these are the responses of most passengers. No wonder people complain that the trains are too slow: When one is fearful, every trip takes too long. No matter that these are among the fastest subway trains in the world. Stan Fischler, in his enthusiastic history of the system, ''Uptown, Downtown,'' gives 55 miles per hour as the speed of an IRT Seventh Avenue express as it careens through the tunnel between the 14th Street and Chambers Street stations. The train going by sounds as if it is full of coal, but when one is inside, it can feel like a trip on ''The Wild Mouse'' at Coney Island.<br /><br />The most-mugged man in New York must be the white-haired creaky looking fellow in Bedford-Stuyvesant who has had as many as 30 mugging attempts made on him in a single year. And he still rides the subway trains. He's not as crazy as he looks: He is a plainclothesman who works with the transit-police task force in the district once designated ''Brooklyn North.'' He is frequently a decoy. In the weeks before Christmas, he rode the J and the GG and the No. 2 lines looking like a pathetic old man, with two festively wrapped parcels in his shopping bag. He was repeatedly ambushed by unsuspecting muggers; he would pull out his badge and handcuffs and arrest them.<br /><br />Muggers are not always compliant. In that case, the transit-police officer unholsters his pistol, but not before jamming a colored headband over his head to alert any nearby uniformed officer. Before the advent of headbands, many plainclothesmen were shot by their colleagues in uniform.<br /><br />''And then we rush in,'' said Sgt. Robert Donnery, who was until early this month the squad commander of the transit-police mobile task force. (He is now a squad sergeant of what has been renamed ''the task force'' - the combined mobile and robbery task forces of 80 plainclothesmen and two detectives.) ''Ninety percent of the guys out there can flatten me, one on one. You've got to come on yelling and screaming: 'You so-and-so! I'm going to kill you!' Unless the suspect is deranged and has a knife or something. In that case, you might have to talk quietly. But if the guy's tough and you go in meek you get sized up very fast.''<br /><br />The transit police force has 3,000 officers and 13 dogs. It is one of the biggest police forces in the United States and is separate from the New York City police, although the pay and training are exactly the same. It is so separate the men cannot speak to each other on their radios, which many Transit Authority police find inconvenient when chasing a suspect up the subway stairs into the street.<br /><br />What about the dogs? ''Dogs command respect,'' I was told at transit-police headquarters. ''Think of them as a tool, like a gun or a nightstick. At the moment it's just a test program for high-crime stations, late-night hours, that kind of thing.''<br /><br />I wondered aloud whether it would work, and the reply was: ''A crime is unlikely to be committed anywhere near one of these dogs.'' The canine squad, doing its part toward taking a bite out of crime, is headquartered on the same floor as the transit-police task force on the mezzanine of the Metropolitan Avenue station of the GG line. Last December, the bulletin board on the plainclothesmen's side was plastered with unit citations and merit awards, and Sergeant Donnery had been made ''Cop of the Month'' in May for a particularly courageous set of arrests. The motto of the mobile task force was ''Soar With the Eagles.'' A sheaf of admiring newspaper clippings testified to their effectiveness. As we talked, the second shift was preparing to set out for the day.<br /><br />''Morale seems very high,'' I said. The men were joking, watching the old-man decoy spraying his hair and beard white. ''Sure, morale is high,'' Sergeant Donnery said. ''We feel we're getting something accomplished. It isn't easy. Sometimes you have to hide in a porter's room with a mop for four days before you get your man. We dress up as porters, conductors, motormen, track workers. The idea is to give the appearance of being workers. We've got all the uniforms.''<br /><br />''Plainclothesmen'' is something of a misnomer for the task force, which has enough of a theatrical wardrobe to mount a production of ''Subways Are for Sleeping.''<br /><br />Standing on the platform at Nassau Avenue on the GG line, Howard Haag and Joseph Minucci looked for all the world like a pair of physical-education teachers on their way to the school gym. They looked tough, but not aggressively so. They a re healthy and well built - but this day some of that was padding : They both wore bulletproof vests. Underneath the ordinary clothes, the men were well armed. Each man carried a .38, a blackjack and a can of Mace. Minucci had a two-way radio.<br /><br />Haag has been on the transit police force for 17 years; Minucci, for almost seven. Neither has in that time ever fired his gun, though each has an excellent arrest record and a pride in detection. They are funny, alert and indefatigable, and together they make Starsky and Hutch look like a pair of hysterical cream puffs. Their job also seems much ha rder than any city cop's. I had been told repeatedly that the aver age city cop would refuse to work in the conditions that the transit police endure every day. At Nassau Avenue, Minucci told me why.<br /><br />''Look at the stations! They're dirty, they're cold, they're noisy. If you fire your gun, you'll kill 10 innocent people - you're trapped here. You stand here some days and the cold and the dampness creeps into your bones and you start shivering. And that smell - smell it? - it's like that all the time, and you've got to stand here and breathe it in. Bergen Street station - the snow comes through the bars and you freeze. They call it 'the Ice Box.' Then some days, kids recognize you - they've seen you make a collar - and they swear at you, call you names, try to get you to react, smoke pot right under your nose. 'Here come the D.T.'s' - that's what they call us. It's the conditions. They're awful. You have to take so much from these school kids. And your feet are killing you. So you sit down, read a newspaper, drink coffee, and then you get a rip from a shoefly. ...''<br /><br />Minucci wasn't angry; he said all this in a smiling, ironical way. Like Howie Haag, he enjoys his work and takes it seriously. A ''shoefly,'' he explained, is a transit-police inspector who rides the subway looking for officers who are goldbricking -although having a coffee on a cold day hardly seemed to me like goldbricking. ''We're not supposed to drink coffee,'' Minucci said, and he went on to define other words of the transit police vocabulary: ''lushworker'' (a person who robs drunks or sleeping passengers); ''flop squad'' (decoys who pretend to be asleep, in order to attract lushworkers).<br /><br />Just then, as we were talking at Nassau, the station filled with shouting boys -big ones, anywhere from 15 to 18. There seemed to be hundreds of them, and with them came the unmistakable odor of smoldering marijuana. They were boys from Automotive High School, heading south on the GG. They stood on the platform, most of them howling and screaming and sucking smoke out of their fingers, and when the train pulled in they began fighting toward the doors.<br /><br />''You might see one of these kids being a pain in the neck, writing graffiti or smoking dope or something,'' Howie Haag said. ''And you might wonder why we don't do anything. The reason is we're looking for something serious - robbers, snatchers, assault, stuff like that.''<br /><br />Minucci said, ''The vandalism squad deals with window kickers and graffiti. Normally we don't.'' Once on the train, the crowd of yelling boys thinned out. I had seen this sort of activity before: Boys get on the subway train and immediately begin walking - they leave the car immediately, saunter through the connecting doors and walk from car to car. I asked Minucci why this was so.<br /><br />''They're marking the people. See them? They're looking for an old lady near a door or something they can snatch or a pocket they can pick. They're sizing up the situation. They're also heading for the last car. That's where they hang out on this train.''<br /><br />Howie said, ''They want to see if we'll follow them. If we do, they'll mark us as cops.'' Minucci and Haag did not follow, though at each stop they took cautious looks out of the train, using the reflections in mirrors and windows and seldom looking directly at the rowdy students.<br /><br />''They play the doors when it's crowded,'' Minucci said. ''Look at that old lady. She's doing everything wrong.'' The woman, in her late 60's, was sitting next to the door. Her wristwatch was exposed and her handbag dangled from the arm closest to the door. Minucci explained that one of the commonest subway crimes was inspired by this posture. The snatcher reaches through the door from the platform and, just before the door shuts, he grabs the bag or watch, or both, and then he is off, the train pulling out with the victim trapped on board.<br /><br />I wondered if the plainclothesmen would warn her. They didn't. But they watched her closely, and when she got off they got off, too. The woman never knew how well-protected she was.<br /><br />There were men on the train, drinking wine out of bottles sheathed in paper bags. ''The winos don't cause much trouble,'' Minucci said. ''It's the kids coming home from school. They're the majority of snatchers and robbers.''<br /><br />Subway crime to a large extent is schoolboy crime. While most crimes are committed between noon and 8 P.M., the greatest number of them take place between 4 P.M. and 7 P.M. For instance, Minucci said,''On the LL line, on Grand Street, there's much more crime than before, because Eastern District High School relocated there. It's mostly larceny and bag snatches.''<br /><br />It was a salutary experience for me, riding through Brooklyn with Officers Minucci and Haag. Who except a man flanked by two armed plainclothesmen would travel from one end of Brooklyn to the other, walking through housing projects and derelict areas, and waiting for hours at subway stations? It was a perverse hope of mine that we would happen upon a crime, or even be the victims of a mugging attempt. We w ere left alone; things were quiet.<br /><br />But for the first time in my life I was traveling the hinterland of New York City with my head up, looking people in the eye with curiosity and lingering scrutiny and no fear. It was a shocking experience. I felt at first, with bodyguards, like Haile Selassie, and then I seemed to be looking at an alien land - I had never had the courage to gaze at it so steadily. It was a land impossible to glamorize and hard to describe. It was beat up, with patches of beauty, like a cityscape in China or India - futuristic in a ruined and unpromising way.<br /><br />Backed up by the plainclothesmen, unafraid, and sticking near the subway, I saw New York in a way I had never seen it before. What surprised me most, after seeing the housing projects and the desperate idleness and the rather fierce and drugged-looking people on these derelict frontiers, was that they had not wrecked more of the subway or perhaps even destroyed it utterly. Uniformed Transit Authority Police Officer John Burgois is in his mid-30's and describes himself as ''of Hispanic origin.'' He has had four citations. Normally he works with the strike force out of midtown Manhattan in areas considered difficult - 34th and Seventh, 34th and Eighth, and Times Square. Officer Burgois told me that the job of the uniformed transit cop is to reassure people by being an obvious presence. The transit cop in uniform also deals with loiterers and fare evaders, assists injured people and lost souls, keeps a watch on public toilets (''toilets attract a lot of crime''). As for drunks: ''We ask drunks to remove themselves.''<br /><br />I asked Officer Burgois whether he considered his job dangerous. ''Once or twice a year I get bitten,'' he replied. ''Bites are bad. You always need a tetanus shot for human bites.'' One of the largest and busiest change areas on the subway is at Times Square. It is the junction of four main lines, including the shuttle, which operates with wonderful efficiency between Times Square and Grand Central. This, for the Christmas season, was John Burgois's beat. I followed him and for an hour I made notes, keeping track of how he was working.<br /><br />4:21 - Smoker is warned (smoking is forbidden in the subway, even on ramps and stairs). 4:24 - Panicky shout from another cop: ''There's a woman with a gun downstairs on the platform.'' Officer Burgois gives chase, finds the woman. She is drunk and has a toy pistol. Woman is warned.<br /><br />4:26 - ''Which way to the Flushing line?'' 4:29 - ''How do I transfer here?'' 4:30 - ''Is this the way to 23d Street?'' 4:37 - ''Donde es Quins Plaza?'' 4:43 - ''Where is the A train?'' As Officer Burgois answers this question, a group of people gather around him. There are four more requests for directions. Since the maps have been vandalized, the lost souls need very detailed directions.<br /><br />4:59 - Radio call: There is an injured passenger at a certain token booth - a gash on her ankle. Officer Burgois lets another cop attend to it.<br /><br />5:02 - ''Where ees the shuffle?'' asks a boy carrying an open can of beer. ''Over there,'' Officer Burgois says, ''and dispose of that can. I'm watching you.''<br /><br />5:10 - Radio call: A man whose wallet has been stolen is at the transit-police cubicle on the Times Square concourse. Officer Burgois steps in to observe. Man: ''What am I going to do?''<br /><br />Officer: ''The officer in charge will take down the information.''<br /><br />Man: ''Are you going to catch him?'' Officer: ''We'll prosecute if you can identify him.'' Man: ''I only saw his back.'' Officer: ''That's too bad.'' Man: ''He was tall, thin and black. I had $22 in that wallet.'' Officer: ''You can kiss your money goodbye. Even if we caught him he'd say, 'This is my money.' '' Man: ''This is the first time anything like this has ever happened to me.'' 5:17 - Seeing Officer Burgois, a member of the public says, ''There's two kids on the train downstairs snatching bags - go get them!'' Officer Burgois runs and finds the boys hanging over the gate between trains, the favorite spot for snatching bags from passengers on the platform. Officer Burgois apprehend s t hem. The boys, Troy and Sam, are from the Bronx. They can't remember when they were born; they seem to be about 14 or 15. They deny the y were snatching bags. Each boy has about $35 in his pocket. They ar e sullen, but not at allafraid. Officer Burgois gives them a youth di vision form and says, ''If I catch you again, your mother's going t o pick you up from the station. ...''<br /><br />5:28 - ''Hey, officer, how do I get to ... ?'' At this point I stopped writing. I could see that it would be repetitious - and so it was, dreary questions, petty crime and obstinate sneaks. But no one bit Officer Burgois. He has been doing this every hour of every working day for 12 1/2 years, and will go on doing it, or something very much like it, for the rest of his working life.<br /><br />It costs about $25 - and takes about 45 minutes if there is light traffic - to go by taxi from midtown to Kennedy International Airport. For $5 it is possible to go by subway, on the JFK Express - which usually has a transit policeman on board - and the trip takes about 40 minutes (it's another 20 minutes by bus from the last JFK Express subway stop, Howard Beach, to the airline terminals). Critics of this service would like to see it withdrawn, because so few people use it. If that happens, there is another option - the express on the A line to Howard Beach, which takes under an hour and costs 75 cents.<br /><br />There are ducks at Howard Beach, and herons farther on at Jamaica Bay, and odd watery vistas all the way from Broad Channel to Far Rockaway. The train travels on a causeway past what looked like sleepy villages and wood-frame houses, and it's all ducks and geese until the train reaches the far side of the bay, where the dingier bungalows and the housing projects begin. Then, roughly at Frank Avenue station, the Atlantic Ocean pounds past jetties of black rocks, not far from the tracks, and at Mott Avenue is the sprawling two-story town of Far Rockaway, with its main street and its slaphappy architecture and its ruins. It looks like its sister cities in Ohio and Rhode Island, with just enough trees to hide its dullness, and though part of it is in a state of decay it looks small enough to save.<br /><br />That was a pleasant afternoon, when I took the train to the Rockaways. Out-of-season Coney Island, on the other hand, was populated by drunks and transvestites and troglodytes, and the whole place looked as if it had been insured and burned. Though it is on the other side of Rockaway Inlet, it is a world away from Rockaway Park.<br /><br />The subway stations usually reflect what is above ground: Spring Street is raffish, Forest Hills smacks of refinement, Livonia Avenue on the LL looks bombed. People aspire to Bay Ridge and some people say they wouldn't be caught dead in East Harlem - though others are. The Fort Hamilton station leads to the amazing Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the IRT No. 1 to a ferry landing. By the time I reached 241st Street on the 2, I thought I had got to somewhere near Buffalo, but returning on the 5 and dropping slowly through the Bronx to Lexington Avenue and then to lower Manhattan and across on the 4 to Flatbush, I had a sense of unrelieved desolation.<br /><br />Not long ago, The Daily News ran a series about the subway called ''The Doomsday Express.'' It was about all the catastrophes that are possible on the New York system - spectacular crashes and floods with heavy casualties.<br /><br />It is easy to frighten people with catastrophes - much harder to convince them that decay and trivial-seeming deterioration can be inexorable. The New York subway system is wearing out, and certain sections are worn out; a large part of it looks hopeless.<br /><br />There is a strong political commitment to the subway, particularly among down-market Democrats anxious to identify with blue-collar commuters who have no choice but to take the subway. But only money can save it. To this end there is a plan called the ''Five-Year Capital Program'' of $5.8 billion, which won approval from a New York State review panel late last year. The money is to be raised through M.T.A. bonds and will also include Federal, state and city grants. It will be the largest infusion of capital in the history of the city's bus and subway system, and will involve fixing and buying cars and buses, retiling and cleaning and lighting stations, restoring maps, windows and signs, repairing tracks and elevated structures - all the day-to-day things which, because they have been ignored, have given the subway and bus system a bad case of arteriosclerosis.<br /><br />Vital infusions of money aside, there is still the matter of the subway passenger. Most people who live in New York act as if they own the city: It makes some people respectful and turns others into slobs - and that is how they treat the subway. ''I pity you,'' people said when I told them what I was doing. But I ended up admiring the handiwork of the system and hating the people who misused it, the way you hate kids who tear the branches off saplings.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: This piece was originally published in 1982 in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/31/magazine/subway-odyssey.html">The New York Times</a>.<br /><br /></span><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: var(--color-content-secondary,#363636); font-family: nyt-imperial, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.25rem; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.875rem; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-size-adjust: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; width: 600px;"><br /></p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: var(--color-content-secondary,#363636); font-family: nyt-imperial, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.25rem; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.875rem; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-size-adjust: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; width: 600px;"><br /></p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: var(--color-content-secondary,#363636); font-family: nyt-imperial, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.25rem; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.875rem; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-size-adjust: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; width: 600px;"><br /></p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: var(--color-content-secondary,#363636); font-family: nyt-imperial, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 1.25rem; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.875rem; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-size-adjust: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; width: 600px;"><br /></p></div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-2512989734917592002022-05-27T08:29:00.001-07:002022-05-27T08:29:36.202-07:00Sins of the Nins<div style="text-align: right;">by</div><div style="text-align: right;">Katha Pollitt</div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /> </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">MY idea of hell is to be stranded on a desert island with nothing to read but Anais Nin's diaries, but some people, apparently, can't get enough of them. Her publishers, for instance. Having brought out seven volumes drawn from Nin's adult journals (1931-74) and supplemented those with four early volumes covering her teens and 20's, they are starting all over again with "unexpurgated" versions of the same material.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjuUf9-5vRd3RmcKGeGM4s_p-bvwYxqOenpBp_40RvV65kIpnaKYf4-yjwjTJF-cfqJ_CCcf9SDubQ8_WvHmGF_Q9oUpmhr56MYD57qvmPK2MuzJWbdYU0SyXm81J7vvFpi-aJ9i-nP651-vPrTLhPufpeB6JiFRMdr22hBAE9-qUarj6xBcwvvBkd/s550/tysoncormorant-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjuUf9-5vRd3RmcKGeGM4s_p-bvwYxqOenpBp_40RvV65kIpnaKYf4-yjwjTJF-cfqJ_CCcf9SDubQ8_WvHmGF_Q9oUpmhr56MYD57qvmPK2MuzJWbdYU0SyXm81J7vvFpi-aJ9i-nP651-vPrTLhPufpeB6JiFRMdr22hBAE9-qUarj6xBcwvvBkd/s320/tysoncormorant-1.jpg" width="233" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Carroll Tyson</span></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">"Incest," the second volume in this new series (it follows "Henry and June"), displays all the hallmarks of Nin's style -- tremulous and vaporous prose, staggering self-absorption and endless analysis of this or that tiny flutter of emotion. But like all unexpurgated books it is an improvement on the bowdlerized version, if only because it has more sex.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">A lot of sex. "Incest" finds Nin living outside Paris and conducting overlapping affairs with Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud and both of her psychoanalysts, Rene Allendy and Otto Rank -- as well as vague and complicated flirtations with Henry's wife, June, Henry's roommate, Fred Perles, and just about every other man mentioned in the index. How she managed to accomplish all this while keeping her banker husband, Hugh Guiler, in the dark is left rather mysterious, especially given that Miller seems to have moved in every time her husband left town, and sometimes when he was home. "When is that fellow Henry going to leave?" he asks plaintively at one point.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">These affairs all follow the same pattern: outrageous hero worship and masochistic self-abasement ("I give the woman's only gift: love, love, love") lead to suppressed resentment ("I must always make myself believe I am making a sacrifice for somebody"), disillusionment and a new infatuation with someone else. I found myself losing patience with this cycle, which Nin tended to attribute to the emotional insufficiency of everyone but herself: only she is capable of love, love, love.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">But no question about it, Nin is much more readable as a female Don Juan than she was as the dreamy princess in the tower depicted in the earlier series of diaries. When she is not rhapsodizing about her feelings, she can write earthily and entertainingly about sex, although unfortunately not in a way that can be quoted in a family newspaper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">The central "unexpurgated" event of "Incest" is, well, incest. Nin had an affair with her father. It is not quite as horrifying as it sounds: she had seen her father, a well-known pianist and composer, only once in the 20 years following his desertion of the family when she was 11. As depicted here, father and daughter are a matched pair: equally self-infatuated and self-mythologizing, equally sex-obsessed and equally crazy. Her steamy account of their trysts exudes a sense of triumph: at last the cold, aloof father who destroyed her childhood appreciates her at her true worth! But eventually father, too, is found wanting -- as indeed he was.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">I was less impressed by the other revelation uncovered in "Incest": the gruesome stillbirth described in the earlier published version of this diary was actually a late-term abortion (Miller was the father). That Nin would have disguised this fact when she published the passage in 1966 is, I think, significant: it shows that she was hardly the bold truth-teller of women's secret experiences that she claimed to be. She knew just how far she could go without risking real controversy and calling into question her image of ethereal femininity and selfless nurturance. In the 1960's, when abortion was illegal, it would have done some good for a well-known older woman to have gone public about her abortion. Now, no thanks to Nin, it's old news.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">The history of the abortion passage does, however, raise the question of reliability: how far should we trust the "unexpurgated" diary? After all, we were led to believe that the first series of diaries constituted an amazingly veracious document, in which a woman laid bare her inner life and the mysteries of womanhood. Now we are asked to accept "Henry and June" and "Incest" on the same grounds, although in important respects they falsify the earlier volumes. Like its predecessor, however, the new series consists merely of extracts of the voluminous original manuscript, so how do we know that it, too, is not a carefully crafted cut-and-paste job that omits whatever material undermines the image of Nin that her executors wish the world to see?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">The answer is that we do not know. "Incest" should probably be read as middling autobiographical fiction that sometimes rises to the level of first-rate pornography. For the real Anais Nin, and the real story told in the diary, we'll have to wait for her biography. SOME SENSE OF GUILT WEIGHED DOWN ON MY JOY</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">"I don't feel toward you as if you were my daughter."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">"I don't feel as if you were my father."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">"What a tragedy. What are we going to do about it? I have met the woman of my life, the ideal, and it is my daughter! I cannot even kiss you as I would like to. I'm in love with my own daughter!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">"Everything you feel, I feel." . . .</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Then I wanted to leave him. Still, in some remote region of my being, a revulsion. And he feared the reaction in me. I wanted to run away. I wanted to leave him. But I saw him so vulnerable. And there was something terrible about his lying on his back, crucified, while yet so potent -- something compelling. And I remembered how in all my loves there has been a reaction away -- that I had always been so afraid. And this flight, I would not hurt him with. No, not after the years of pain my last rejection had caused him. But at this moment, after the passion, I had at least to go to my room, to be alone. I was poisoned by this union. I was not free to enjoy the splendor of it, the magnificence of it. Some sense of guilt weighed down on my joy and continued to weigh down on me, but I could not reveal this to him. He was free -- he was passionately free -- he was older and more courageous. I would learn from him. I would at last be humble and learn something from my father!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">We spent another day in his room. He moved with great difficulty and pain, yet he shaved and bathed. He sat in an armchair and read me his manuscript on musical opinions and sketches. In between, there were autobiographical sketches and poems -- romantic poems. The whole book was romantic, idealistic, not as muscular or as dynamic as his own life. It is his own life which is a masterpiece.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">At night -- caresses. He begs me to undress and lie at his side. His caressing suppleness and mine, the feelings which run from head to toes -- vibrations of all the senses, a thousand new vibrations . . . a new union, a unison of delicacies, subtleties, exaltations, keener awareness and perception and tentacles. A joy which spreads in vast circles, a joy for me without climax because of that deeper, inner holding back. Yet missing only the climax and revealing by this very absence what intensity he and I could bring to the envelopment, to the radius and rainbows of a climax.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">We sat up until two or three, talking. "What a tragedy that I find you and cannot marry you." It was he who was preoccupied with enchanting me. It was he who talked, who was anxious, who displayed all his seductions. It was I who was being courted, magnificently. And he said, "How good it is that I should be courting you. Women have always sought me out, courted me. I have only been gallant with them."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Endless stories about women. Exploits. Teaching me at the same time the last expertness in love -- the games, the subtleties, new caresses. I had at moments the feeling that here was Don Juan indeed, Don Juan who had possessed more than a thousand women, and I was lying there learning from him, and he was telling me how much talent I had, how amazing an amorous sensibility, how beautifully tuned and responsive I was. . . . "You walk like a courtesan from Greece. You seem to offer your sex when you walk." -- From "Incest."</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: This article originally appeared in 1992 in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/22/books/sins-of-the-nins.html">The New York Times</a>.</span></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-17554699546526125592022-04-18T14:00:00.000-07:002022-04-18T14:00:34.702-07:00the mother by Gwendolyn Brooks<p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><div class="card-body" data-v-197036e9="" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; box-sizing: border-box; flex: 1 1 auto; line-height: 1.5; padding: 1.25rem;"><div class="poem__body px-md-4 font-serif" data-v-197036e9="" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0.5rem !important; padding-right: 0.5rem !important;"><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Abortions will not let you forget.<br />You remember the children you got that you did not get,<br />The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,<br />The singers and workers that never handled the air.<br />You will never neglect or beat<br />Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.<br />You will never wind up the sucking-thumb<br />Or scuttle off ghosts that come.<br />You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,<br />Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.<br /><br />I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.<br />I have contracted. I have eased<br />My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.<br />I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized<br />Your luck<br />And your lives from your unfinished reach,<br />If I stole your births and your names,<br />Your straight baby tears and your games,<br />Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,<br />If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,<br />Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.<br />Though why should I whine,<br />Whine that the crime was other than mine?—<br />Since anyhow you are dead.<br />Or rather, or instead,<br />You were never made.<br />But that too, I am afraid,<br />Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?<br />You were born, you had body, you died.<br />It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.<br /><br />Believe me, I loved you all.<br />Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you<br />All.</span></div><div class="poem__body px-md-4 font-serif" data-v-197036e9="" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0.5rem !important; padding-right: 0.5rem !important;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="poem__body px-md-4 font-serif" data-v-197036e9="" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding-left: 0.5rem !important; padding-right: 0.5rem !important;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2N2vaIeAjQTCWcjcRj4KF_JyPpPeGmArrb0HdOZWzy1U_HpDGaYxnnSDm8TguE3tVP-BeCCxXGHo_Zs-60rG9QD0Q_U3EAGUcyAQc5v26OoN0LjPjjAy7zzKJvWfp6OtcDRCnJE0WEDLcP6-yeA55MgIznpSVSCguTs7CiefD62rQlVTK1FzcMk23/s344/gwendolyn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="344" data-original-width="344" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2N2vaIeAjQTCWcjcRj4KF_JyPpPeGmArrb0HdOZWzy1U_HpDGaYxnnSDm8TguE3tVP-BeCCxXGHo_Zs-60rG9QD0Q_U3EAGUcyAQc5v26OoN0LjPjjAy7zzKJvWfp6OtcDRCnJE0WEDLcP6-yeA55MgIznpSVSCguTs7CiefD62rQlVTK1FzcMk23/s320/gwendolyn.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: This poem appears online at <a href="#">Poets.org</a>,</span></div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-75689322182781795822022-04-05T11:02:00.002-07:002022-04-05T11:02:51.320-07:00With Mercy for the Greedy (For my friend, Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment for the Sacrament of Confession)<p style="text-align: right;"> by<br /></p><p style="text-align: right;">Anne Sexton</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjGUlAt8J3svDsGEY7ch1NM-zOja1Wtd7X4sJN1nyDJwz5FajBKhSMG5toQcTzQ1Lfcc-GAmYLAXqceuNNGwu42ZvkRJ5buk28pEhhja5gRsliksUzHQto_JlaU1qNjWUI-l56CoiZymxLUnJUvE82I0MimM4BVuaZ6Cv1GnspBCsAGfIDtzDvm2nu/s600/dora.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="336" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjGUlAt8J3svDsGEY7ch1NM-zOja1Wtd7X4sJN1nyDJwz5FajBKhSMG5toQcTzQ1Lfcc-GAmYLAXqceuNNGwu42ZvkRJ5buk28pEhhja5gRsliksUzHQto_JlaU1qNjWUI-l56CoiZymxLUnJUvE82I0MimM4BVuaZ6Cv1GnspBCsAGfIDtzDvm2nu/s320/dora.jpg" width="179" /></a></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Dora Maar</span></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;">Concerning your letter in which you ask</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">me to call a priest and in which you ask <br />me to wear The Cross that you enclose; <br />your own cross,<br />your dog-bitten cross,<br />no larger than a thumb,<br />small and wooden, no thorns, this rose—<br /><br />I pray to its shadow,<br />that gray place<br />where it lies on your letter ... deep, deep.<br />I detest my sins and I try to believe<br />in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face, <br />its solid neck, its brown sleep.<br /><br />True. There is<br />a beautiful Jesus.<br />He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.<br />How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!<br />How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! <br />But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.<br /><br />All morning long <br />I have worn<br />your cross, hung with package string around my throat. <br />It tapped me lightly as a child’s heart might,<br />tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born. <br />Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.<br /><br />My friend, my friend, I was born <br />doing reference work in sin, and born <br />confessing it. This is what poems are: <br />with mercy<br />for the greedy,<br />they are the tongue’s wrangle,<br />the world's pottage, the rat's star.</span><div class="o-grid" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: adobe-garamond-pro; font-size: 22px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="o-grid-col o-grid-col_10of12" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; float: left; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline; width: 638.359px;"></div></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Credit: This poem can be found online at <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42566/with-mercy-for-the-greedy">Poetry Foundation</a>.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-7026912775020120852022-01-02T11:56:00.003-08:002022-01-02T11:59:43.399-08:00Magical Materialism <div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div> <div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;">by</div><div style="text-align: right;">Kathryn A. Kopple</div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg970tzua4NkHoQxpzYf0l6wKqQgq8-cc3eM9p1fV1HaTeruIsCYszxKWzHPOjDVFGfdxh-1BAfLb2FcZNtfGiwPaWrKXdLlLtWD6bI-nY6CL4CN-5WlxrHqZwCSGF-bLT4Us0CTNfiOi73GB6uCRYm9wzoBh2p99wug119HDm45CZQkNdjx9pTpkPN=s320" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg970tzua4NkHoQxpzYf0l6wKqQgq8-cc3eM9p1fV1HaTeruIsCYszxKWzHPOjDVFGfdxh-1BAfLb2FcZNtfGiwPaWrKXdLlLtWD6bI-nY6CL4CN-5WlxrHqZwCSGF-bLT4Us0CTNfiOi73GB6uCRYm9wzoBh2p99wug119HDm45CZQkNdjx9pTpkPN" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Salvador Dalí</span></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">I’m spread out in front of the television watching Nature in high definition. There’s something heroic and tragic about the swishing lizard, the way it risks a dune, the tiny sawing tail erasing its footprints. A blur. I should really call the occultist. Instead, I’ve spent all day collecting empty bottles to string up as makeshift wind chimes—now I’ve decided to consign them all to the trash. If I had a new prescription, I could search the Yellow Pages. Instead, it too goes into the bin. It’s not as if I don’t see the problem. Surely, I mean oculist. Surely, I don’t mean, a second kind of sight is what is needed here.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">Credits: This poem first appeared in the 2016 edition of <a href="https://concis.io/issues/summer-2016/magical-materialism/">concīs</a>.</span></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-70632101885001552512021-12-07T08:33:00.000-08:002021-12-07T08:33:03.209-08:00A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno (Spiegel, 1969) <div><br /></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>Years and years ago, the host of this blog went to a conference on literature at which the keynote speakers were poet Charles Bernstein and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. There was a liveliness in the air, a hilarity, that lingered after Bernstein finished speaking. What can you say? He was extremely funny. We were still wiping the tears from our eyes and giggling audibly when Habermas took the stage, shuffled some papers, looked out into the audience and said: "Time to hunker down." It made us laugh harder because... well, Habermas. The Frankfurt School. Critical apparatus heavier than lead and yet illuminating. Never was this more true than of the Frankfurt School's Theodor Adorno, who explained his position on hunkering down versus action in this interview with the magazine staff of <i>Der Spiegel</i>.</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYbjh0vQXaCV4IxAvDzGF0gyT-in68NRaLtpboFHBz5-Ps7iQrQ_YIPhhfxD_oXmBEVixQsY-rDImKPDl84rm6wDIEYpZOitVTEmcKbyh5yvin14kh0AxvgdwD3fihtcovhETeMua4Oak/s279/Grand+Hotel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="181" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYbjh0vQXaCV4IxAvDzGF0gyT-in68NRaLtpboFHBz5-Ps7iQrQ_YIPhhfxD_oXmBEVixQsY-rDImKPDl84rm6wDIEYpZOitVTEmcKbyh5yvin14kh0AxvgdwD3fihtcovhETeMua4Oak/s0/Grand+Hotel.jpg" width="181" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><br /><br /><br />SPIEGEL: Professor Adorno, two weeks ago, the world still seemed in order. . .<br /><br />ADORNO: Not to me.<br /><br />SP: You said that your relations with the students were not strained. In your courses, you said, discussions were fruitful, sober, and untainted by personal disturbances. But now you have cancelled your lecture.<br /><br />A: I did not cancel my lecture for the entire semester, but only until further notice. I hope to start up again in a few weeks. All colleagues do this when their lectures are so massively disrupted.<br /><br />SP: Were you subjected to violence?<br /><br />A: Not physical violence, but so much noise was made that my lecture would have been drowned by it. That was obviously the plan.<br /><br />SP: Are you repulsed only by the manner in which students today take action against you—students who once were on your side—or did their political goals also disturb you? After all, it is fair to say that there used to be agreement between you and the rebels.<br /><br />A: That is not the dimension in which our differences play themselves out. Recently I said in a television interview that, even though I had established a theoretical model, I could not have foreseen that people would try to implement it with Molotov cocktails. This sentence has been cited numerous times, but it requires substantial interpretation.<br /><br />SP: How would you interpret it today?<br /><br />A: In my writings, I have never offered a model for any kind of action or for some specific campaign. I am a theoretical human being who views theoretical thinking as lying extraordinarily close to his artistic intentions. It is not as if I had turned away from praxis only recently; my thinking always has stood in a rather indirect relationship to praxis. My thinking has perhaps had practical consequences in that some of its motifs have entered consciousness, but I have never said anything that was immediately aimed at practical actions. Ever since the first bedlam was organized against me in 1967 in Berlin, certain student groups have time and again attempted to force me into solidarity, demanding practical actions of me. I have refused.<br /><br />SP: But Critical Theory does not wish to keep conditions as they are. The SDS students learned this from you. You, Professor Adorno, now refuse practical action. Are you not cultivating a mere “liturgy of critique,” as Dahrendorf claims? <br /><br />A: In the case of Dahrendorf, a tone of fresh and cheerful conviction reigns supreme: If only you change little things here and there, then perhaps everything will be better. I cannot accept this presupposition. But among the APO, I always encounter the compulsive pressure to deliver oneself, to join in; this is something I have resisted since my earliest youth. And in that area nothing has changed in me. I attempt to put into words what I see and what I think. But I cannot predicate this on what will be done with it or what will become of it.<br /><br />SP: Scholarship in the ivory tower, then?<br /><br />A: I am not at all afraid of the term “ivory tower.” This term has certainly seen better days, as when Baudelaire employed it. But since you bring up the ivory tower: I believe that a theory is much more capable of having practical consequences owing to the strength of its own objectivity than if it had subjected itself to praxis from the start. Today’s unfortunate relationship between theory and praxis consists precisely in the fact that theory is subjected to a practical pre-censorship. For instance, people wish to forbid me to put into words simple things that show the illusionary character of many of the political goals that certain students have.<br /><br />SP: But these students apparently have a large following.<br /><br />A: A small group of students succeeds time and again in enforcing loyalty, something which the vast majority of leftist students may not fully resist. But I wish to emphasize again the following: They simply cannot refer to models of action that I allegedly gave them in order then to place me at odds with these models. There are no such models.<br /><br />SP: Yet it is the case that students refer, at times very directly, at other times indirectly, to your critique of society. Without your theories, the student protest movement might not even have developed.<br /><br />A: I do not wish to deny that. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to assess this connection fully. I would like to believe, for instance, that a critique of the manipulation of public opinion—which I consider legitimate even in its demonstrative form—would not have been possible without the chapter on the culture industry in the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and myself. But I think that one often conceives the connection between theory and praxis too reductively. If one has taught and published for twenty years with the intensity that I have, it does enter into general consciousness.<br /><br />SP: And thus also into praxis?<br /><br />A: Possibly, but not necessarily so. In our writings, the value of so-called individual actions is delimited by an emphasis on societal totality.<br /><br />SP: But how would one go about changing societal totality without individual action?<br /><br />A: This is asking too much of me. In response to the question “What is to be done?” I usually can only answer “I do not know.” I can only analyze relentlessly what is. In the process, I am reproached in the following manner: “If you criticize, you have to say how to do better.” But I consider this a bourgeois prejudice. Historically, there have been countless instances in which precisely those works that pursued purely theoretical intentions altered consciousness and, by extension, societal reality.<br /><br />SP: But in your writings you have set Critical Theory apart from other kinds of theory. It should not merely describe reality empirically, but also should consider [mit bedenken] the proper organization of society.<br /><br />A: Here, I was concerned with a critique of positivism. Note that I said also consider [mit bedenken]. In no way does this sentence suggest that I would be so presumptuous as to tell people how to act.<br /><br />SP: You once said, however, that Critical Theory should “lift the rock under which barbarism breeds.” If the students are now throwing this rock—is this so incomprehensible?<br /><br />A: Certainly not incomprehensible. I believe that their actionism [Aktionismus] can essentially be traced back to despair, because people sense how little power they actually have to change society. But I am equally convinced that these individual actions are predestined to fail; this also proved to be the case during the May revolt in France. <br /><br />SP: So if individual actions are pointless, is not the “critical impotence,” of which the SDS has accused you, the only thing that remains?<br /><br />A: There is a sentence by Grabbe that reads: “For nothing but despair can save us.” This is provocative, but not at all dumb. I cannot fault someone living in our world today for feeling despairing, pessimistic, and negative. Those who compulsively shout down their objective despair with the noisy optimism of immediate action in order to lighten their psychological burden are much more deluded. <br /><br />SP: Your colleague Jürgen Habermas, also a proponent of Critical Theory, has now conceded in an essay that the students have developed an “imaginative provocationism” and have really managed to change some things. <br /><br />A: I would agree with Habermas on this point. I believe that the university reform, of which we incidentally do not yet know the outcome, would never have been set into motion without the students. I believe that the general attention to processes of dumbing down, which are prevalent in our present society, would never have crystallized without the student movement. And furthermore, to mention something very concrete, I believe that it was only through the investigation, led by Berlin students, of the murder of Ohnesorg that this horrifying story penetrated public consciousness at all. With this I wish to say that I in no way close myself off to practical consequences as long as they are transparent to me.<br /><br />SP: And when have they been transparent to you?<br /><br />A: I participated in demonstrations against Emergency Laws [Notstandsgesetze] , and I have done what I could in the area of criminal law reform. But there is a decisive difference between doing something like that and taking part in the half-crazed activity of throwing rocks at university institutes.<br /><br />SP: How would you determine whether or not an action is worthwhile?<br /><br />A: For one thing, this decision depends in large measure on the concrete situation. For another, I have the strongest reservations against any use of violence. I would have to disown my entire life—my experiences under Hitler and what I have observed of Stalinism—if I did not refuse to participate in the eternal circle of using violence to fight violence. The only meaningfully transformative praxis that I could imagine would be a non-violent one.<br /><br />SP: Even under a Fascist dictatorship?<br /><br />A: There certainly may be situations in which things would look different. To a real Fascism, one can only react with violence. I am anything but rigid on this point. But I refuse to follow those who, after the murder of countless millions in the totalitarian states, still preach violence today. That is the decisive threshold.<br /><br />SP: Did students cross that threshold when they attempted to prevent the delivery of Springer newspapers through sit-down strikes? <br /><br />A: I consider this sit-down strike legitimate.<br /><br />SP: Was this threshold crossed when students disrupted your lectures with noise and sexual theatrics?<br /><br />A: To think that they did this to me, of all people, someone who has always opposed any kind of erotic repression and sexual taboo! To mock me and to loose three girls dressed up as hippies on me! I found that repulsive. The comic effect achieved by this was nothing more than the reaction of a philistine (Spießbürger) who giggles “he-he!” (der Hihi! kichert) at the sight of a girl with naked breasts. This nonsense was naturally planned in advance.<br /><br />SP: Was this unusual act perhaps intended to ruffle your theory?<br /><br />A: It seems to me that these actions against me have little to do with the content of my lectures; what is more important to the extreme wing is the publicity. They suffer from the fear of being forgotten. In this way they become slaves of their own publicity. A lecture such as mine, which is attended by about 1000 people, is obviously a magnificent forum for activist propaganda.<br /><br />SP: Can this deed not also be interpreted as an act of despair? Perhaps the students felt left in the lurch by a theory that they had considered at least capable of being translated into societal praxis?<br /><br />A: The students did not even attempt to have a discussion with me. What makes my dealings with students so much more difficult today is the prioritization of tactics. My friends and I have the feeling that we have been reduced to mere objects in precisely calculated plans. The idea of minority rights, which after all is constitutive of freedom, no longer plays any role whatsoever. One blinds oneself to the objectivity of the matter [Objektivität der Sache].<br /><br />SP: And in the face of such abuses you make do without a defensive strategy?<br /><br />A: My interests are turning increasingly toward philosophical theory. If I were to give practical advice, as Herbert Marcuse has done to a certain degree, it would detract from my productivity. Much can be said against the division of labor; but even Marx, who in his youth attacked it vehemently, later on conceded that we cannot do without the division of labor after all. <br /><br />SP: You have chosen for yourself the theoretical part, then, leaving the practical part to others; indeed, they are already working on it. Would it not be preferable if theory simultaneously reflected praxis? And, by extension, also the present actions?<br /><br />A: There are situations in which I would do this. At the moment, however, it seems much more important to me to think through the anatomy of actionism.<br /><br />SP: So, mere theory again?<br /><br />A: I value theory more highly at this point. I dealt with these issues—especially in my Negative Dialectic—long before the current conflict erupted.<br /><br />SP: In Negative Dialectic, we find the following resigned observation: “Philosophy, which once seemed passé, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed.” All conflicts aside, does such a philosophy not become “foolishness”? A question that you have asked yourself.<br /><br />A: I still believe that one should hold on to theory, precisely under the general coercion toward praxis in a functional and pragmatized world. And I will not permit even the most recent events to dissuade me from what I have written.<br /><br />SP: So far, as your friend Habermas once put it, your dialectic has, at its “blackest spots” of resignation, surrendered to “the destructive pull of the death drive.” <br /><br />A: I would rather say that the compulsive clinging to what is positive stems from the death drive.<br /><br />SP: Then, would it be the virtue of philosophy to look the negative in the eye but not to change it? </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />A: Philosophy cannot in and of itself recommend immediate measures or changes. It effects change precisely by remaining theory. I think that for once the question should be asked whether it is not also a form of resistance when a human being thinks and writes things the way I write them. Is theory not also a genuine form of praxis?<br /><br />SP: Are there not situations, for example in Greece, in which you endorse action that goes beyond critical reflection? <br /><br />A: It goes without saying that in Greece I would approve of any kind of action. The situation that prevails there is totally different. But for someone who is ensconced in safety to advise others to start a revolution is so ridiculous that one ought to be ashamed of oneself.<br /><br />SP: So, you continue to view the advancement of an analysis of societal conditions as the most meaningful and necessary aspect of your activities in the Federal Republic?<br /><br />A: Yes, and to immerse myself in very specific individual phenomena. I am not in the least ashamed to say very publicly that I am working on a major book on aesthetics. <br /><br />SP: Professor Adorno, we thank you for this conversation.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: This interview has been excerpted from a longer piece published by <a href="https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/a-conversation-with-theodor-w-adorno-spiegel-1969/">cominsitu</a> in March 2016.<br /></span><br /></div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-5445314921134774992021-12-01T06:24:00.001-08:002021-12-01T10:14:41.557-08:00 A Dark Prairie Requests My Presence<p><br /></p><br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">by José Lezama Lima</div><div style="text-align: right;">translated by Andres Rojas</div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">A dark prairie requests my presence;</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">its tablecloths, stable and taut,<br />whirl around me, fall asleep in my balcony.<br />They rule its expanse; its endless<br />alabaster dome recreates itself.<br />Over the waters of the mirror,<br />its voice brief amid one hundred paths,<br />my memory prepares its surprise:<br />fallow deer in the sky, dew, the glow of flames.<br />Without sensing I am being called<br />I enter the prairie slowly,<br />self-sure in a new, molten labyrinth.<br /><br />There I see distinguished remains,<br />a hundred heads, bugles; a thousand purposes<br />open their sky, their quiet sunflower.<br />Strange, this sky’s surprise,<br />where, without desiring to, footsteps return<br />and voices sound in its swollen center.<br />A dark prairie is passing by.<br />Of the two, wind or thin paper,<br />wind — a wind wounded with this<br />magical death, one and a farewell.<br />A bird and then another no longer quiver.<br /><br /><br />UNA OSCURA PRADERA ME CONVIDA<br /><br />Una oscura pradera me convida,<br />sus manteles estables y ceñidos,<br />giran en mí, en mi balcón se aduermen.<br />Dominan su extensión, su indefinida<br />cúpula de alabastro se recrea.<br />Sobre las aguas del espejo,<br />breve la voz en mitad de cien caminos,<br />mi memoria prepara su sorpresa:<br />gamo en el cielo, rocío, llamarada.<br />Sin sentir que me llaman<br />penetro en la pradera despacioso,<br />ufano en nuevo laberinto derretido.<br /><br />Allí se ven, ilustres restos,<br />cien cabezas, cornetas, mil funciones<br />abren su cielo, su girasol callando.<br />Extraña la sorpresa en este cielo,<br />donde sin querer vuelven pisadas<br />y suenan las voces en su centro henchido.<br />Una oscura pradera va pasando.<br />Entre los dos, viento o fino papel,<br />el viento, herido viento de esta muerte<br />mágica, una y despedida.<br />Un pájaro y otro ya no tiemblan</span><span style="font-size: medium;">.</span><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Credits: The above poem was found in translation at <a href="https://teoppoet.wordpress.com/2018/11/20/jose-lezama-lima-a-dark-prairie-requests-my-presence/">Teoppoet Poetteop</a>.</div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-2549608137902832182021-10-23T09:05:00.000-07:002021-10-23T09:05:37.042-07:00The Last Copy<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: right;">by</blockquote><p style="text-align: right;">Ariel Dorfman </p><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQHQZDzwHCedD6LHH8e8uEdjGjVgCww8jQ4pBY8tzR4TTw27zWEq7jQNwKuWI-5Kqsw6ecq-_O12D32h9jiZ_zDLG26PNkoeOlaFewWpxO9xhuBiVP63pLIPRTg6FBAqNj27ce5vrwpb0/s600/Johann.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="600" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQHQZDzwHCedD6LHH8e8uEdjGjVgCww8jQ4pBY8tzR4TTw27zWEq7jQNwKuWI-5Kqsw6ecq-_O12D32h9jiZ_zDLG26PNkoeOlaFewWpxO9xhuBiVP63pLIPRTg6FBAqNj27ce5vrwpb0/w381-h212/Johann.jpg" width="381" /></a></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Joanna Klain</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">OH MY GOD, she would know. As soon as she’d read the book, she’d know that he had lied to her.<br /><br />The revelation came to Antonio on the train, exactly at midpoint between Siena and Firenze, as if some part of his brain wanted him to understand how hopeless his situation was, suspended between two cities, not knowing whether to hurry forward to Firenze to make sure that the publisher did not send out any more copies, or backward to Siena to visit every one of his friends and also the local critics scattered across Tuscany, to rescue every last book out there.<br /><br />Why did he care?<br /><br />He did. He hadn’t seen her in twenty years, but every morning when he awoke, the first thing he thought of was her awakening at that same time. He imagined Graziela in her nun’s cell, he imagined her imagining him. She nursed the only image of Antonio that he wanted to be kept unbroken somewhere in this world. He derived an inordinate amount of comfort from that idea, that somebody thought well of him, thought he had a brilliant destiny ahead of him. Even if her image of his decency was fraudulent, a falsified memory, one that had persisted only in her head, belied by his drab, gray, lonely life and by what had really been corroding his mind that night long ago.<br /><br />And now the pure vision of a faultless Antonio that only she kept harboring, that hallucination of hers, was in danger of being shattered. She would devour the book, he knew it, he could not doubt that some harpy would remember that they had once been friends—not that anyone knew what had transpired that first and only night, but some malicious bitch would decide, had already decided, to send Graziela the novel by her old amico Antonio. Oh, he suspected who it might be, who would commit that perfidy, and Graziela would open the novel and start to read, out of loyalty to what they had been through two decades ago, and soon realize that her first love, Antonio, was a liar. Worse than that: that Antonio had not been a virgin when they had made love that night, when he had consoled her for the loss of her mother and sister. Worse still: that Antonio had fucked both the mother and the sister in Bellagio over consecutive weekends before the boat had capsized, before both her relatives had gone to their drowning and death in the generally placid waters of Lago di Como. The worst of all: he had used that tragedy to seduce her the day of the double funeral, used her grief to force her heart open and then her legs and deposit there the image of himself as immaculate and forever benevolent and ordained for great things.<br /><br />A prediction that was about to be fractured into pieces when Graziela in her cell one week from today, two weeks from today—or maybe it had already happened!—when she received that book written by her old flame, everybody had known he was sweet on her, even if nobody had guessed that the sweetness had been returned for that one night. Yes, the whole illusive construction, so to speak, would be torn down as soon as the faraway nun came to the second chapter, the only part of the novel that was true, that Antonio had not invented for his protagonist.<br /><br />Why had he taken that incident from his real life, from her life, and grafted it intact and exact onto the fiction of the character he had made up? What authorial demon had possessed him to slip into that entirely fabricated sham the one secret he had never revealed to anyone, that only she would recognize as she read among the cloisters while the Gregorian chants mingled with the songs of swallows outside, those birds fluttering under the sun and over the Abruzzian hills?<br /><br />He’d done it because he could think of nothing more heinous to implant on the absurd creature he’d invented, because that entirely imaginary Giaccomo led a life as dingy and boring as Antonio’s and that character had to be forced to sin grievously against the innocent so that he might rise and redeem himself, be saved from his lackluster fate, go on to a life of heroism and sacrifice for others, rescue African orphans, save widows left homeless and adrift in a Bangladesh flood, discover a formula to squeeze endless energy out of orange rinds and milk cartons and other rubbish, an idealized version of what Antonio’s long-dead mother had dreamt for her son, that he had inscribed only in those fictitious pages, fictitious, all of it, except for—She’ll never know, anyway, Antonio had said to himself, justifying his sacrilege, it’s more than likely she’s forbidden to read anything as frivolous as a novel in the strict confines of the Monastery of Santa Maria della Annunciazione. The mother superior was said to rule with a harridan’s fist, run a tight ship. Impossible that the novel could reach Graziela.<br /><br />But that was then, that was what he had thought when he was laboring over the episode, when he was clacking it into his computer, when he was correcting it as he did for a living with so many books by real authors, men and women who did not need to pay a vanity publisher like Montefeltro, that’s how he had depleted his days and many of his nights, rectifying and amending adjectives and cognates and mangled tenses. He was the best in the business, no mistake ever escaped his hawk eyes, but now he had made the only mistake that mattered: he had let his desire to see his name in print, his need to remedy and tweak his own novel, his own proofs and galleys, overcome the only wild and wondrous thing that had ever happened to him, to sully the woman he still revered, yes, he did care, he cared, but only now, on this train, had he realized it, realized that he could make it through the next—what?—thirty years of a lonely masturbating existence without ever seeing his name on the cover of a book or one word he had ever written by himself taking the world by storm (ha! with a vanity press?), he could live without that, but he could not live unless he could think of Graziela every day rising with the sun and the matins and offering a thought and a prayer in his direction.<br /><br />Probably a lie, that as well, everything in his life a lie except this sudden urgent fixation of his, to find every copy of the book and withdraw it from the planet or at least from Tuscany, as if the book were also a nun, needed to be sequestered away from the eyes and the cities and the whores and the lascivious looks of men who scooted by on their motorbikes with their tight leather pants and carefully coiffured hair styles. Probably a lie that she kept some memory of him alive inside the body that he had unhinged so magnificently that night while the waves lapped on the nearby lakeshore, while he licked her all over, inside out, the way the waves were making love to the pebbles and extracting a hushed cry from them as well. Probably a lie, because the next night they were supposed to meet again and she had left a note—not discourteous, not a hint that she had seen through him, no, just that the last thing her mother and sister had heard from her before going off on that dreadful boat ride on Lago di Como was that she had indeed decided to enter a monastery as had been her intention since childhood, and that she now realized that if her relatives had no rest with God it would be her fault, that she had to fulfill her pledge; but not a word about last night, not a word about what they had discovered together in that bed, not a word about remembering him forever, not a thank you for having given her at least a taste of another sort of heaven. Except for a postscript: I could never have taken this momentous decision if not for you. And I hope, in the convent, to be worthy of such a noble and considerate soul.<br /><br />So maybe she did collect and recollect each instance and turn of the bedclothes under the moon and sweat of that night, and if so, she would likely be appalled, perhaps more at his insensitivity at publishing that hidden island of their lives than at the original lack of purity in his heart.<br /><br />And if discovery was possible, then he had to have a plan. What would be best? He was closer to Firenze than to Siena, and the train was heading in that direction anyway, so why not start there, visiting Edizione Montefeltro?<br /><br /><br />Fortunately, Guido Vanni was in, talking to some other hapless client on the phone, but he motioned Antonio to take a seat, mouthing that he’d be done soon; and, in effect, it did not take long for the soft-spoken and urbane publisher to soothe the feathers of who knows what authoress at the other end of the line, concerned that her story of illicit infatuation among the ruins of Tarquinia had not been reviewed by one paper, not one—Do not worry, Signora, Vanni’s mellow voice had delivered the right message as he winked at Antonio, Do not fret, Samuel Beckett had <i>Waiting for Godot</i> rejected thirty-five times, or was it thirty-six, so all I can counsel is patience and also to pity the poor critics who have not yet seen the light, but they shall, we’ll send out another press release, yes, of course, of course, sì, ciao, ciao.<br /><br />“And what can I do for you, Antonio?”<br /><br />Said in a matter-of-fact tone, because he knew that Antonio was aware of how the business operated, had no illusions as to the success of his book, would understand that Montefeltro could not force some overburdened literary editor to assign the novel to even the most distracted of his contributors. Antonio was aware that all was vanitasvanitatis in such enterprises, Guido Vanni knew that all Antonio wanted was the satisfaction of seeing a book penned by him in the hands of friends and one or another illiterate relative and perhaps the bribing of some bookseller to place it in the window so a photograph could be snapped of the display, Antonio Sinone next to Umberto Eco and Stephen King, Nadine Gordimer and Dante. What, Vanni asked pleasantly, could he do for him?<br /><br />And Vanni was suitably impressed, when he heard what his copy-reading patron was requesting: a list of every store the book had been sent to, that he hunt down every last item, retire them all, all, bring them back, don’t dispatch even one more to anyone anywhere, call up the papers and ask them to return The Heart Thief, even if they had no intention of reviewing it, even if they were just using the novel as a doorstop or ballast, whatever, Antonio did not want even one replica of his book to circulate, not now, not tomorrow, not ever.<br /><br />Vanni did not ask why. His specialty was failure. As an expert in shipwrecked souls who had never lost their aspiration to greatness and stardom, he was not surprised when, once in a while, an author wandered into his offices and confessed that, now that his final fantasy had materialized, he found himself unable to cope with the sheer weight of the book in his life, was overcome by stage fright, would rather live forever secure in what might have been than in the hard realm where his best friend insisted that the book was extraordinary while behind his back all was sniggers and derision. Better not to risk those waters. Were those Antonio’s reasons? Vanni presumed they were different, but the real motive was none of his business. His business was to make money—not an excessive amount, enough to live a comfortable existence in his beloved Firenze—and now there might be still more money to be made, so …<br /><br />“You realize that such measures are not included in our contract?”<br /><br />Antonio realized it perfectly well and was prepared to pay whatever fees were customary in this case.<br /><br />“Well, there are things we can do and things we can’t do. Recall the books, that’s not hard, stop shipping them out if orders come in, take <i>The Heart Thief </i>out of the catalog and out of any advertisements we had planned—though there is one that was to appear in <i>La Stampa</i> that will have to be redesigned, and that’s costly—those measures are relatively easy, but I’m afraid certain things you will have to do by yourself, for yourself, Antonio. We can’t really call up the newspapers and withdraw a book—that might even be a way of guaranteeing that they’ll cover it, or at least read it to try and discover what secrets are concealed in that volume, not a bad tactic if you want to call attention to yourself, but apparently what you want is—”<br /><br />“Just the opposite,” Antonio said. “I don’t want anyone to know of this book’s existence.”<br /><br />“So you will have to find a way to retrieve your own book from the literary bureaus of the five papers we have sent it to, according to our files and—”<br /><br />“Our contract stated that you would provide books to at least thirty-five papers.”<br /><br />“Surely you’re not complaining that, for starters, we sent them to fewer papers, initially only regional ones—well, with one exception. I thought you’d be thankful that we had been prudent in our campaign, had begun with the local folks who might be interested in an author whom they can find dining in the taverna around the corner, and then go on to the national dailies, I hope we are not going to play a game of reproaches.”<br /><br />“Not at all. What else do I have to do on my own?”<br /><br />“You need to get them back from your friends and family, of course. And also …” Vanni looked over his computer records. “There has been one sale, it seems.”<br /><br />“One sale?”<br /><br />Vanni sighed. “One person is better than none, and you have to remember that we have not yet arranged publicity, author readings, book launches, there’s been no word-of-mouth yet. Given your current requirements, this should be a cause for joy and gratitude and not for recriminations. One sale—in your own hometown of Siena. Ten days ago.”<br /><br />“The Libreria Senese, or Feltrinelli?”<br /><br />“Senese,” Vanni said.<br /><br />Who could it be? Antonio wondered about this, vaguely, though his curiosity did not get the better of him and he left the visit to the Libreria Senese on the Via di Città for the last—after all, anyone who had, on who knows what whim or impulse, bought <i>The Heart Thief</i> was not likely to be in touch with Graziela or even aware of her monastic existence, so it made sense to tackle friends and family first, and then on to the critics.<br /><br />The next few days were intense, pulsing with a purpose that had been missing from his life, a fervor and excitement, in fact, that he had not felt since that night with Graziela, an outburst of energy and commitment that almost seemed to reincarnate the enthusiasm and zeal of his own character’s crusade in the novel he was now withdrawing from the hands of the twenty or so people he had been foolish enough to send it to, colleagues, childhood acquaintances, the owner of the ristorante that Antonio frequented three days a week and always on Sunday evenings. They were startled by the vehemence with which the author insisted on removing his masterpiece from the premises—but none had even opened it, no one had as much as cracked the first chapter, let alone the second one. Rather than disappointment, Antonio felt a bizarre sense of relief. Because Graziela, her mere existence, was actually doing him a service, once more: she was revealing to him that nobody cared about his work, about his dreams, about his alter ego Giaccomo, that only she remained true to him, only she would have consumed every word, she was his sole reader and it was crucial, therefore, that she never set eyes on that novel, that the one person who Antonio conjectured would have sent the book to Graziela be blocked from doing so.<br /><br />The only one Antonio was really concerned about. He had sent this Francesca a copy because nineteen years ago she had rejected him quite brusquely, this after leading him on, after having accepted dinner and a film and even a hand slipped into her hand and on her knee, and then at the portal to her house had said, No, this wasn’t right, she couldn’t do this to her friend Graziela. And Antonio pleaded with her, reminded her that Graziela was a nun and “nothing going on between her and me, I just feel sorry for her, that’s all, first she loses her only living relatives and then she checks into a monastery, for Christ’s sake.” But Francesca, damn bitch, had been adamant. She had her rules, loyalty to a friend was more important than a fling with someone she didn’t feel, after all, that attracted to, and she had added, unnecessarily, a series of disparaging remarks about his life, his prospects, his physique. And that’s why he had decided to send her his novel, so she could see that he had accomplished something, that all those years ago she had snubbed a man with a book in him, she would read it and apprehend what she had missed out on by her rebuff. Sheer lunacy on his part, Antonio now realized. She did not give a damn about him, there was the proof—the book was still in its package, still ensconced in the paper wrapper, with her address on the front and his on the back. She hardly recognized him when he came to repossess it, handed it over without a protest. Sure, she said, take it if you have someone else to give it to. And Antonio: “I can’t, I’ve written a dedication inside.” And Francesca: “A dedication? Why?” And Antonio: “Never mind.”<br /><br />Francesca looked at him with sudden interest. “No, hold on, what does it say?”<br /><br />“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Antonio said.<br /><br />That’s when she had tried to take it back from him, and he had held his ground, stuffed it in the bag that was already full of other copies, and she had tugged at the bag and he had wrenched it from her clutches and the books had come spilling out, right there on the floor of her living room, and she had been nonplussed long enough for him to scramble and snatch up the books and cram them back into the bag.<br /><br />I always knew you were crazy,” Francesca said.<br /><br />And Antonio’s answer confirmed her opinion. “Thank you,” he said, as he rose with all the books safe, including the one still inside the package, the one she was supposed to have at least opened a few weeks ago when it arrived.<br /><br />“For not reading my novel.”<br /><br />And with that he was gone. On his way home, he stopped by his aunt’s apartment, but she wasn’t there. He knew that she hadn’t read the book, because she had commented on it in the haziest of terms, claimed she had read it twice in fact, had gushed that it was fabulous, his mother would have been so proud. And went on and on, but the old woman hadn’t read a news item from the local paper in years, was too tired to decipher the labels on her medicine, asked Antonio for help in that task. On the other hand there was no chance Zia Bernarda would get rid of her one copy to send it to anyone. She would hoard it and delude herself into believing that a night would come when she’d read its paragraphs out loud over and over again to the photo of her dead sister.<br /><br />In his apartment, he carefully piled the salvaged novels of the day in a mound, next to the eighty other copies that would never have gone out anyway, soon to be joined by hundreds more volumes. Within a few days the whole edition would be here, overwhelming every corner of his home, all one thousand copies. He smiled at the thought of an author who squirrels away all his novels and lives and breathes and eats among them, reads the same book each day. What better reader than his own monomaniacal self, what better critic?<br /><br /><br />And the next day and the day after that were, in fact, dedicated to the critics, to visiting the five papers, starting with Siena’s own Il Corriere Nazionale—Il Citadino Oggi. No problem, the drowsy editor at the cultural desk had been more than happy to return both copies of the book to him, accepted his explanation that he’d found too many typos and that a new edition was forthcoming and these two would be replaced at that point. And no trouble either in Perugia, where a woman who was cleaning up the bathrooms at the Corriere dell’Umbria led him into a depository packed with books and watched him dig away until he had found both copies, and waved him aside when he tried to show her his identification. “Nobody reads them anyway,” she said. He had even less trouble at the two papers in Pisa, the Giornale Il Tirreno and La Nazione, where the editor tried to unload some of his nephew’s poetry on Antonio, wondered if he wouldn’t care to write a review for the Supplemento Culturale, ad honorem, naturally.<br /><br />The next morning he set out for the station. He was going back to Firenze and to the last journal on his list, the one he had postponed till now. First he stopped by his aunt’s, but again she didn’t answer the door. Maybe she was sick. This afternoon when he returned from Firenze he would have to check up on her. She had even forgotten to leave the answering machine on.<br /><br />Antonio wasn’t looking forward to the upcoming visit, the only one he had some trepidation about, had decided to leave for the very end of his quest: La Rivista dei Libri, on the Via dei Lamberti. “Why did you send them a copy?” he had asked Guido Vanni, and Vanni had shrugged his shoulders and said that authors were never happy no matter what their publisher did, most of them insisting on their books’ being remitted to the most prestigious magazines. And if Antonio hadn’t been hell-bent on repossessing every last copy of <i>The Heart Thief</i>, he would also have complained that Montefeltro was not doing enough to get the book the attention it deserved. “Go and see them, they won’t mind returning it to you. Ask for Giovanni Bellochio.”<br /><br />Giovanni Bellochio, the famous essayist?<br /><br />The same.<br /><br />All right, he’d do it. Anything, even speak to Bellochio, in order to spare Graziela the terror of seeing her story told for all the world to wallow in, anything in order to spare himself the humiliation of receiving a scathing letter from that nun in her monastery.<br /><br />But he had a reason for not wanting to see the famous writer, for putting it off until now. It was true that Bellochio, the acerbic critic, made every writer in Italy and many abroad tremble with his witty demolishment of their sources, their prose, their egos. Antonio, however, did not fear that Bellochio would do something similar to his book, The Heart Thief. No, there wasn’t a chance in heaven that anyone of that caliber would bother with anything issued by a vanity press, even if Montefeltro was just around the corner from La Rivista dei Libri. No, Antonio was concerned because—<br /><br />“Sinsone? Antonio Sinsone? In person?”<br /><br />He heard the voice of Bellochio emerging from the cavernous depths of the other room, muffled only by the thousands of books lining every wall and nook and cranny, the gruff voice he had heard on the radio and on television and once on the phone—only once—that very voice now calling, “Send him in, by all means, what a pleasure, what a pleasure,” the words ironic, seasoned with a chortle.<br /><br />Antonio ventured into the den of the dragon, the greatest critic in all of Italy.<br /><br />Bellochio gestured to him to take a seat while he finished a sentence on the computer, all the while smiling to himself, perhaps because he was bulldozing the reputation of some wretched author with the droll turn of phrase he had just written. But when the critic swiveled in his chair and looked at Antonio and then spoke, Antonio realized that the smile was one of anticipation, derived from the delight Bellochio was about to experience by flattening Antonio, erasing him like a superfluous adjective.<br /><br />“So, you’re Sinsone, eh? Antonio Sinsone? And me, I’m ungrammatical, eh? Don’t know the difference between the present and the past tense, eh? Write as if Dante had never breathed the air of the city where I was born and now reside?”<br /><br />“I was just doing my job.”<br /><br />“You have guts, I’ll give you that. I told you as much in our one and only phone conversation. And what else did I say?”<br /><br />“That I could stick my copyediting up my ass.”<br /><br />“And did you?”<br /><br />“I’m sure someone so eminent is aware that you can stick a book up your ass and many other objects, but not the copyediting itself. It’s a typical metaphor that doesn’t work. Of which you had several in your text.”<br /><br />“So you think I was wrong to demand a different copyeditor?”<br /><br />“It happens to me from time to time. Authors who don’t like my comments. Authors who think they are God. Authors who make up words that don’t exist in the dictionary.”<br /><br />“Listen, Sinsone. Every word that’s ever been worth its own piss and lots of words that are worth nothing at all, every word in the world in fact, existed in some other mouth before it was ever incorporated into a dictionary by some bureaucrat or paltry scrivener. And the words I invented in my book—that won the national book award for nonfiction, mind you—my award-winning book, translated into thirteen languages, was filled with words—”<br /><br />“Three words,” said Antonio.<br /><br />“The words you rejected, man. Words that will be welcomed reverentially into the next edition of each and every dictionary in Italy. And what words of yours will ever have that honor?”<br /><br />“My life has not ended yet, sir.”<br /><br />“You do have guts. That’s why, when I got your novel, when Guido Vanni alerted me to the fact that the worm of a copyeditor who had dared to criticize my style was coming out with a novel, no less, and that maybe this was my chance for revenge—oh, he’ll do anything to get a review, Guido is shameless, he’s doing you a favor, he really cares, Sinsone—Well, I murmured to myself, why not read his little book? And … you want to know what I think?”<br /><br />“No,” said Antonio. “I just want it back.”<br /><br />“Here’s what I think. The first chapter, shit. The third, the fourth, the fifth chapters, every chapter till the end, including the epilogue and the author’s note and even the acknowledgments, shit. But the second chapter, now, that’s as if somebody else had written it. Did you steal it, Sinsone, come on, you can tell me.”<br /><br />“No, of course not, I—”<br /><br />“Well, it’s the only thing that rings true in the whole muddle you have dared to call a novel.”<br /><br />“I want it back.”<br /><br />“Good man. Take that second chapter, delve deeper, turn it into a novella, keep up that tone, that sensuality, that remote guilt, that joking tone that does not quite hide the desire to escape from responsibility, and you may be onto something—write it, publish it, not with some quack like Guido Vanni. Publish it with Einaudi or Bompiani, and I’ll review it myself, you can take that promise to the bank. I’ll even write a note of introduction to the editors there.”<br /><br />“I know the editors there. I work for them.”<br /><br />“Ha! And they declined to publish it, right? How many publishers refused you before you went to Montefeltro and paid for your own monstrosity to come out?”<br /><br />“Thirty-five.”<br /><br />“Thirty-five! And why did you stop there? Why not go on to forty, sixty, seventy, one hundred? Why stop at thirty-five?”<br /><br />“You know why. It was a secret homage to Dante. That was his age, thirty-five, when he was midway through life, when he starts his journey into Hell that eventually ends up in Heaven.”<br /><br />“Yes, the allusions to <i>The Divine Comedy</i> are strewn throughout your text—they make it even more pathetic and, dare I say, purgatorial. Here, take it.”<br /><br />And Bellochio’s beefy, hairy hand passed Antonio a copy of <i>The Heart Thief</i>. Antonio put in his bag, then waited.<br /><br />“What is it now?”<br /><br />“The other one. Where’s the other one?”<br /><br />“What other one?”<br /><br />“Vanni must have sent you two copies.”<br /><br />“Oh, that one. I gave it to Maria Pietrangelli. A budding journalist friend at Il Firenze. The sweet girl came by the other day, asked me what I was reading and I showed it to her and offered her our extra copy.”<br /><br />“You can’t do that.”<br /><br />“We do it all the time. If I didn’t give away most of the books that we’re sent, I wouldn’t be able to step into my own office. It’s better than throwing them in the garbage.”<br /><br />Antonio stood up and, without further hesitation, reached across the desk and grabbed Bellochio’s enormous Rolodex, started to rifle through it.<br /><br />“What are you doing?”<br /><br />Antonio didn’t answer. He had found Maria Pietrangelli’s address, memorized it quickly, shoved the Rolodex into Bellochio’s empty hands that were trembling with rage.<br /><br />“Now this,” he said to the great man, “this is something that you can stick up your ass.”<br /><br /><br />Maria Peitrangelli had been warned that Antonio was on his way and refused to open the door.<br /><br />“All I want is the book Bellochio gave you. Just hand it over to me and I’ll leave, you’ll never see me again.”<br /><br />The voice on the other side of the door sounded timid.<br /><br />“I’m reading it now.”<br /><br />“Now? Right now?”<br /><br />“Right now. Until you interrupted me.”<br /><br />“How far have you gone?”<br /><br />“I’m starting the second chapter. It’s quite interesting, the second chapter.”<br /><br />“I need you to return the book to me. It’s full of typos, errors, nobody ever showed me the proofs or the galleys. I can’t have anyone reading it in those conditions. I’m a perfectionist. I’m a copyeditor myself. It would reflect badly on me.”<br /><br />“Well, you should have exercised more control.”<br /><br />Maria was right, of course. He wished she would open the door so he could explain how right she was, though not probably in the way she had meant it. Maybe he needed to pour his soul out to somebody, confess everything, receive some hint of absolution, and she sounded strangely full of empathy. Her voice had a lovely timbre. But no, no, no, he couldn’t tell her his sad story, not to a journalist and certainly not through a closed door.<br /><br />Suddenly, Antonio felt tired. How many days had he been at this task? Three? Was this really the end of the third day, and he still hadn’t received back all the books? Could it be possible? He realized that he had hardly eaten over this period, felt somehow purged and weary and soiled, all at the same time.<br /><br />“Are you going to write something about the novel?”<br /><br />“I think so. You should be pleased.”<br /><br />“Why bother? You’re not going to like it.”<br /><br />“Oh, don’t worry. I never write a bad review, not of anything. If I don’t like a book, I won’t publish a word about it. I only write about the books I like. I figure the world has enough pain already, without my having to add to it. I model myself on Bellochio, try to be his opposite.”<br /><br />“You can’t stand pain, the pain of others?”<br /><br />“No.”<br /><br />Antonio took a deep breath and then banged his head against the door. Hard.<br /><br />“What was that?”<br /><br />His ears were ringing, a big bruise must be forming on his forehead, tears came to his eyes.<br /><br />“That was me. I banged my head against your door.”<br /><br />“You banged your head against my door?”<br /><br />“Yes, and I’m going to do it again unless you give me back my book. I’m going to do it again and again until I get my book back.”<br /><br />There was a pause. Antonio could imagine Maria inside, weighing her options. He decided to hurry her along. He banged with his hand on the door, trying to make it sound as much like a head as possible. He let out a little groan.<br /><br />“I’m going to call the police.”<br /><br />“By the time they get here I’ll be all blood and bruises. And you’ll be responsible.”<br /><br />“All right, all right.”<br /><br />Antonio heard her secure the latch and then the door was slipped open slightly, just sufficient for a ray of light to come flooding out of the room so she would be able to see him, realize that he had indeed hurt himself, a big ugly bump forming on his forehead.<br /><br />“Wait here.”<br /><br />He heard her footsteps on the wooden floor, tried to imagine what her face might be like, whether she was Bellochio’s lover, whether she would be able to finagle another copy of the novel somewhere else. He hoped that Vanni had managed to have them all withdrawn, all of them returned from the bookstores, he thought that this Maria sounded like a determined woman, so obstinate that she might make the rounds until she found his novel and finished it. He knew that’s what he would do if someone had come along and stolen the book he was reading, he’d have definitely not rested until a new copy was in his hands.<br /><br />Now Maria was back. She edged The Heart Thief through the opening as if he, Antonio, was carrying the plague and she wanted to make sure that not a microbe could reach her.<br /><br />“You’re crazy, do you know that?”<br /><br />“Somebody else, a woman totally different from you, said exactly the same thing to me yesterday, so you’re probably right. But the other person wasn’t as nice as you are, didn’t say it the way you said it.”<br /><br />“How did I say it?”<br /><br />“I don’t know. A mix of pity and admiration, I guess.”<br /><br />“I’ll never see another copy of this book, right? No second printing? All that talk about typos and lost galleys, all that was a lie.”<br /><br />“A lie,” Antonio said. “So here’s the truth: I’m afraid you’ll never be able to read the rest of it, write your review.”<br /><br />“I doubt that I’d have written anything. The first chapter was not very good, if you don’t mind my frankness. But the second chapter, it showed promise, I sensed real passion and regret there.”<br /><br />Real passion and regret.<br /><br />Antonio kept repeating those words to himself on the train back home, almost like a mantra, the claptrap of the rails and the wheels of the train and the creaking of the wagons mixing in his mind, real passion and regret, regret, regret, not a bad way of summarizing what that night with Graziela had been, how it had led to these three days. Who would have thought he had it in him, to attempt this sort of journey way past the midway of his own life? Would the years ahead ever bring him anything this exhilarating? Or, when he got back the last two copies—only two more were out there, that’s all he needed to complete the thousand—would his existence return to its incessant Sisyphus rock, would the rest of his days be one manuscript after another, all by other writers, correcting their little foibles and lapses, pointing out anachronisms, flagging the words that people like Bellochio were creating for the men and women and children of tomorrow? Was that what awaited him once this odyssey of his was over, no sun anymore, no other stars in his sky? If millions of copies of The Heart Thief were out there, wouldn’t it be thrilling to spend every day till he died hunting them down, one by one, meeting people he would never have dared to approach otherwise, the cleaning woman with her mop and her generosity, Bellochio full of self-importance and yet strangely tender, and Maria, of course, that angel of mercy, who had looked at him through that gap in the door and felt compassion as the light streamed through. But no, if there were that many copies of his book in the world, one of them might fall, was sure to fall, into the hands of Graziela, would perturb her peace and destroy her feelings for him. No, better to bring an end to the task today.<br /><br />So he headed for Il Campo as soon as he arrived in Siena and then turned right and there it was, Libreria Senese, and there he was, old Albero, the same bookseller as always, about to close shop, but stopping to greet Antonio with severity.<br /><br />“Yesterday,” Albero said, “we returned all your books, all four copies of them. I said the request had to be a mistake. Why was Montefeltro withdrawing the novel? Guido Vanni said it was you, the author, that you’d decided you weren’t happy with the edition after all. And do you know what I said? I said: That book’s not a best seller, but it’s doing well. For a first novel, it’s not doing badly at all. Why, we sold a copy just the other day, last week.”<br /><br />“Yes, that’s why I—”<br /><br />“All I can say is that I hope your action is not some sort of plague of false modesty, that other authors don’t get it into their heads to do something similar. And talking about heads, that’s a nasty bump you’ve got there.”<br /><br />“Who was it?”<br /><br />“Who was what?”<br /><br />“Who bought my book?”<br /><br />Old Albero had never seen the woman before. She wasn’t a regular customer. He’d noticed her walking along the street from time to time; everybody in Siena had at some point crossed the path of everybody else, but this woman, she was most categorically not your typical reader of books. She could hardly see, in fact, and yet she had only wanted that book. Antonio’s book.<br /><br />Antonio asked for a description, though he didn’t need one, he hardly waited for the bookseller to conclude his observations when he was off. Zia Bernarda! Of course. Who else would want to acquire a copy of the novel? But why a second one? Had something happened to the first one?<br /><br /><br />This time, she was at home, welcomed him effusively, sat him down to the table, said, “You look terrible, how did you get that horrible lump up there? How long has it been since you ate anything, you look famished.”<br /><br />Antonio tried to get to the point, the novel, why had she—? but his aunt would not discuss anything but the ravioli she was cooking and the secret ingredients of the ragù, bequeathed to her by none other than Antonio’s saintly mother, may she rest in peace. His aunt would not accept any other topic of discussion than family and food until her nephew had cleaned his plate, sopped up the last remnants of the sauce with nice fresh bread. She took the plates into the kitchen and shuffled back and then plopped herself in front of him and waited for his questions.<br /><br />The first was easy to answer. His book was by her bedside and, yes, well, if he insisted, he could take it back, as long as he promised to bring her a new copy once it had been printed all over again. Such an extraordinary novel, such talent.<br /><br />The other one? The one she had purchased some ten days ago at the Libreria Senese? Oh, she had remembered that girl. “Remember that girl, Graziela, who seemed to be in love with you? Remember her, the one who decided to become a nun, bless her soul, though it would have been better, such a beauty, if she had married you and made you a happy man.” Well, Zia Bernarda had thought about that girl and that maybe she’d like to know of this triumph of the man she once had loved—well, not loved, “not sure that you two had ever really been sweet on each other, or you’d be together right now, right? But you could tell that something was there, some alchemy, so I sent it to her, didn’t pester you to inscribe anything for her, just sent it along.”<br /><br />Antonio didn’t remonstrate with her, brushed a gentle kiss on her hair, accepted some balm for the wound on his forehead, left her there, singing to herself, but as soon as the song faded and he was down in the street, his heart filled with dread, which increased absurdly as he traced his steps back to his apartment. The closer he got to it the more he felt that something terrible was about to happen, even if he now had in his bag the last copies of the novel, the last but one of the thousand, the last of his books but one.<br /><br />She was holding it in her hands.<br /><br />She was there, sitting on top of the pile of his books, in the black robes of her order, she was there waiting for him.<br /><br />She didn’t seem to have aged.<br /><br />He did not ask her how she had managed to get in, how she had convinced the porter to open the apartment, a nun can get anybody to do anything in Italy. He didn’t say a word, didn’t apologize, didn’t refer to the Heart Thief that was open in front of her. He had interrupted her reading of it, he could see that it was a worn-out book by now, that she had probably read it many times over, it looked like one of those books in a library, that has gone through a multiplication of hands and eyes and houses. But in this case, the only reader was Graziela. He could imagine her in that cell, perusing the story that neither she nor he had ever told to anyone, their secret, his secret, his vile behavior.<br /><br />“What happened to your head?” Graziela finally asked. “No, don’t answer that. Don’t breathe a word, in fact. I have something to say to you. I would like you to listen and not to interrupt me. Do you think that’s possible?”<br /><br />He nodded. Yes, that was possible.<br /><br />“I read your book. As you can see, I have read it several times over. And then I did something that perhaps I shouldn’t have done. I trusted someone. My best friend at the monastery. Sister Venedica. I told her that one of the chapters was about me. I told her about you and me and that night … And she … well, she told our mother superior, went and betrayed me. Sold me, her sister, sold me to gratify her vanity. I never thought it would be that easy to betray, to indulge our vanity. But this book has taught me, this book … Mother Superior called me in, asked me if it was true.<br /><br />“If what is true? I asked.<br /><br />“Is it true that you were not a virgin when you came to this convent, is it true that you lied when you came to this convent, is it true that you enjoyed that night of carnal love with a man? And I said yes, it was all true. And she said I must recant, I must repent. Repent having spent that night with a man. And … No, I said. No I don’t repent, I won’t, I can’t. That’s what I answered. I’m not sure where I got the strength to answer her like that. Maybe from the book. Mother Superior insisted. And the lie? Keeping this from me, your confessor, all these years? You don’t repent of that? And no, again, no, I can’t and I won’t and I shouldn’t. Because I understood that I could not live with myself if I got rid of that memory, of that night inside me, of you inside me. It was the first thing I thought about in the morning when I awoke and the last thing that visited me when my eyes closed to sleep. Not God, not Jesus or the Resurrection or the Mother of God or the sins of Eve, but your warm hand on my cold breast until my breast was warmer than your hand. So I left the convent. I took the few things I possess in the world and this book, I also took the book with me, and came to see you, came to thank you for having written this. I don’t know if what you say about yourself is true or is not true, what is or is not invented. And I really don’t care. I came to say this and only this: I’m ready. Now, finally, I’m ready. How about you? Are you ready, Antonio? Are you?”<br /><br />Antonio looked at her, sitting on top of the books as if on a tombstone or an altar, sitting in that room strewn with their story, Antonio looked at her, perched on that heap, holding in her hand the only book he would ever publish in this world, copy number one thousand, the last book, and he knew what to answer, what he had been whispering to her over the last twenty years and over the last three days and over the last hours that he had spent collecting every last copy so she would not suffer.<br /><br />“Yes,” Antonio said, “now I’m ready.”</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: This story originally appeared in 2011 in <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/08/the-last-copy/308582/">The Atlantic</a>. It has been reformatted slightly for coherence.<br /></span><br /></div></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-78177318655005053712021-10-18T07:56:00.001-07:002021-10-18T07:56:32.569-07:00The True Glamour of Clarice Lispector<div style="text-align: right;">by</div><div style="text-align: right;">Benjamin Moser</div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Catholic communicants are asked at Easter, “Do you renounce the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin?” The question preserves a conflation, now rare, of glamour and sorcery: glamour was a quality that confounds, shifts shapes, invests a thing with a mysterious aura; it was, as Sir Walter Scott wrote, “the magic power of imposing on the eyesight of spectators, so that the appearance of an object shall be totally different from the reality.”</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEyPnOPXkVe5cvsTbcezPG99g8BK7nNpTWy3Mxmldz1TCGlL_ReTEYufFy7cc02OnyfFO3gW3qhJR4IGYl3EbZGLRsuOMG94eDNazGcNRRZtRZa5jm0iCwohLaxUC0YGFd18xQguI0-3o/s462/hour_of_the_star_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="462" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEyPnOPXkVe5cvsTbcezPG99g8BK7nNpTWy3Mxmldz1TCGlL_ReTEYufFy7cc02OnyfFO3gW3qhJR4IGYl3EbZGLRsuOMG94eDNazGcNRRZtRZa5jm0iCwohLaxUC0YGFd18xQguI0-3o/s320/hour_of_the_star_cover.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />The connection between literature and witchcraft has long been an important part of the Clarice mythology, which endures even now, nearly forty years after her death.<br /><br />The legendarily beautiful Clarice Lispector, tall and blonde, clad in the outspoken sunglasses and chunky jewelry of a grande dame of midcentury Rio de Janeiro, met our current definition of glamour. She spent years as a fashion journalist and knew how to look the part. But it is as much in the older sense of the word that Clarice Lispector is glamorous: as a caster of spells, literally enchanting, her nervous ghost haunting every branch of the Brazilian arts.<br /><br />Her spell has grown unceasingly since her death. Then, in 1977, it would have seemed exaggerated to say she was her country’s preëminent modern writer. Today, when it no longer does, questions of artistic importance are, to a certain extent, irrelevant. What matters is the magnetic love she inspires in those susceptible to her. For them, reading Clarice Lispector is one of the great emotional experiences of their lives. But her glamour is dangerous. “Be careful with Clarice,” a friend told a reader decades ago, using the single name by which she is universally known. “It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.”<br /><br />The connection between literature and witchcraft has long been an important part of the Clarice mythology. That mythology, with a powerful boost from the Internet, which magically transforms rumors into facts, has developed ramifications so baroque that it might today be called a minor branch of Brazilian literature. Circulating unstoppably online is an entire shadow oeuvre, generally trying, and failing, to sound profound, and breathing of passion. Online, too, Clarice has acquired a posthumous shadow body, as pictures of actresses portraying her are constantly reproduced in lieu of the original.<br /><br />If the technology has changed its forms, the mythologizing itself is nothing new. Clarice Lispector became famous when, at the end of 1943, she published “Near to the Wild Heart.” She was a student, barely twenty-three, from a poor immigrant background. Her first novel had such a tremendous impact that, one journalist wrote, “we have no memory of a more sensational debut, which lifted to such prominence a name that, until shortly before, had been completely unknown.” But only a few weeks after that name was becoming known she left Rio with her husband, a diplomat. They would live abroad for almost two decades.<br /><br />Though she made regular visits home, she would not return definitively until 1959. In that interval, legends flourished. Her odd foreign name became a subject of speculation—one critic suggested it might be a pseudonym—and others wondered whether she was, in fact, a man. Taken together, the legends reflect an uneasiness, a feeling that she was something other than she seemed.<br /><br />In the eighty-five stories that she wrote, Clarice Lispector conjures, first of all, the writer herself. From her earliest story, published when she was nineteen, to the last, found in scratchy fragments after her death, we follow a lifetime of artistic experimentation through a vast range of styles and experiences. This literature is not for everyone: even certain highly literate Brazilians have been baffled by the cult-like fervor she inspires. But for those who instinctively understand her, the love for the person of Clarice Lispector is immediate and inexplicable. Hers is an art that makes us want to know the woman; she is a woman who makes us want to know her art. Through her stories we can trace her artistic life, from adolescent promise through assured maturity to the implosion as she nears—and summons—death.<br /><br />But something more surprising appears when these stories are at last seen in their entirety, an accomplishment whose significance the author herself cannot have been aware of, for it could only appear retrospectively. This accomplishment lies in the second woman she conjures. Clarice Lispector was a great artist; she was also a middle-class wife and mother. If the portrait of the extraordinary artist is fascinating, so is the portrait of the ordinary housewife, whose life is the subject of her stories. As the artist matures, the housewife, too, grows older. When Lispector is a defiant adolescent filled with a sense of her own potential—artistic, intellectual, sexual—so are the girls in her stories. When, in her own life, marriage and motherhood take the place of precocious childhood, her characters grow up, too. When her marriage fails, when her children leave, these departures appear in her stories. When the author, once so gloriously beautiful, sees her body blemished by wrinkles and fat, her characters see the same decline in theirs; and when she confronts the final unravelling of age and sickness and death, they appear in her fiction as well.<br /><br />This is a record of woman’s entire life, written over the course of a woman’s entire life. As such, it seems to be the first such total record written in fiction, in any language. This sweeping claim requires qualifications. A wife and a mother; a bourgeois, Western, heterosexual woman’s life. A woman who was not interrupted: a woman who did not start writing late, or stop for marriage or children, or succumb to drugs or suicide. A woman who, like so many male writers, began in her teens and carried on to the end. A woman who, in demographic respects, was exactly like most of her readers.<br /><br />Their story had only been written in part. Before Clarice, a woman who wrote throughout her life about that life was so rare as to be previously unheard of. The claim seems extravagant, but I have not identified any predecessors.<br /><br />The qualifications are important, but even when they are dropped it is astonishing to realize how few women were able to create such full bodies of work. And the women who did were precisely those exempted from the obstacles that kept most women from writing. These are the barriers Tillie Olsen adumbrated in her famous 1962 essay, “Silences in Literature,” the barriers that led to women constituting, in Olsen’s calculation, “one out of twelve” writers in the twentieth century. “In our century as in the last,” Olsen wrote, “almost all distinguished achievement has come from childless women.” Edith Wharton was far from middle-class; Colette hardly lived, or wrote about, a conventional bourgeois life. Others—Gabriela Mistral, Gertrude Stein—had, like many male writers, wives of their own.<br /><br />Clarice Lispector, as her stories make clear, was intimately acquainted with these barriers. Her characters struggle against ideological notions about a woman’s proper role; face practical entanglements with husbands and children; worry about money; confront the private despair that leads to drinking, madness, or suicide. Like so many women writers everywhere, she was ignored by publishers, agonizingly, for years; she was consistently placed in a separate (lower) category by reviewers and scholars. (She persisted anyway, once remarking that she did not enjoy being compared to Virginia Woolf because Woolf had given up: “The terrible duty is to go to the end.”)<br /><br />But her sympathy for silent and silenced women haunts these stories. The earliest ones, written when Clarice was in her teens and early twenties, often feature a restless girl in conflict with a man, as in “Jimmy and I”:<br /><br /><i>Mama, before she got married, according to Aunt Emília, was a firecracker, a tempestuous redhead, with thoughts of her own about liberty and equality for women. But then along came Papa, very serious and tall, with thoughts of his own too, about … liberty and equality for women. The trouble was in the coinciding subject matter.</i><br /><br />If these women are sometimes crushed by imposing, fascinating men, they become more assertive as the author grows older. But it is a different kind of assertion. The strident feminism of Clarice’s student years gives way to something less explicit, the characters stop flaunting thoughts about “liberty and equality for women.” They simply live their lives with as much dignity as they can muster. In art as in life, that is not always very much.<br /><br />Many are silent. The grandmother in “Happy Birthday” surveys the petty mediocrities she has spawned with wordless revulsion. The Congolese pygmy in “The Smallest Woman in the World” has no words to express her love. The hen in “A Chicken” has no words to say that she is about to give birth—and thus cannot be killed. In “The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels,” an adulteress utters not a single word, and in the end she is burned as a witch. At the execution, her husband admonishes the crowd, “Beware a woman who dreams.”<br /><br />Clarice was nine when Virginia Woolf asked a question she later quoted: “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” The question, Woolf believed, applied as much to women of her own day as it did to women of Shakespeare’s. How did Clarice Lispector—of all people—succeed at a time when so many other women were silenced?<br /><br />She was born on December 10, 1920, to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. It was a time of chaos, famine, and racial war. Her grandfather was murdered; her mother was raped; her father was exiled, penniless, to the other side of the world. The family’s tattered remnants washed up in northeastern Brazil, in 1922. There, her brilliant father, reduced to peddling rags, barely managed to keep his family fed; there, when Clarice was not quite nine, her mother died of her wartime injuries.<br /><br />Her sister Elisa wrote that their liberal father, whose own desire to study had been thwarted by anti-Semitism, “was determined for the world to see what kind of daughters he had.” With his encouragement, Clarice pursued her education far beyond the level allowed even girls far more economically advantaged. Only a couple of years after reaching the capital, Clarice entered one of the redoubts of the élite, the National Law Faculty of the University of Brazil. At the law school, Jews (zero) were even more rare than women (three).<br /><br />Her law studies left little mark. She was already pursuing her vocation into the newsrooms of the capital, where her beauty and brilliance made a dazzling impression. She was, her boss wrote, “a smart girl, an excellent reporter, and, in contrast to almost all women, actually knows how to write.” On May 25, 1940, she published her earliest known story, “The Triumph.” Three months later, at age fifty-five, her father died. Before her twentieth birthday, Clarice was an orphan. In 1943, she married a Catholic man—unheard of at the time for a Jewish girl in Brazil. At the end of that year, shortly after she published her first novel, the couple left Rio. In short order, she had left not only her family, her ethnic community, and her country, but also her profession, journalism, in which she had a burgeoning reputation.<br /><br />She found exile intolerable, and during her fifteen years abroad her tendency toward depression grew sharper. But, despite its disadvantages, perhaps exile—this series of exiles—explains how she managed to write. Her immigrant background left her less susceptible to the received ideas of Brazilian society. And in purely financial terms her marriage was a step up. She was never rich, but as long as she was married she did not have to work on anything but writing. She had two children, but she also had full-time help. This meant free hours every day: a room of her own.<br /><br />Traditionally “female” subjects—marriage and motherhood, kids and clothes—had, of course, been written about before. But had any writer ever described a seventy-seven-year-old lady dreaming of coitus with a pop star, or an eighty-one-year-old woman masturbating? Half a century or more after they were written, many of Clarice’s stories, read in an entirely different age, have lost none of their novelty.<br /><br />New subjects require new language. Part of Clarice’s odd grammar can be traced to the powerful influence of the Jewish mysticism that her father introduced her to. But another part of its strangeness can be attributed to her need to invent a tradition. As anyone who reads her stories from beginning to end will see, they are shot through by a ceaseless linguistic searching, a grammatical instability, that prevents them from being read too quickly.<br /><br />The reader—not to mention the translator—is often tripped up by their nearly Cubist patterns. In certain late stories, the difficulties are obvious. But many of Clarice’s reorderings are subtle, easy to miss. In “Love,” for example, we read: “They were growing up, taking their baths, demanding for themselves, misbehaved, ever more complete moments.” The sentence, like so many of Clarice’s, makes sense if read in a quick glance—and then, examined again, slowly, begins to dissolve. In “Happy Birthday,” amidst an awkward celebration, a child verbalizes an awkward pause: “Their mother, comma!”<br /><br />In “Why This World,” my biography of Clarice, I examined her roots in Jewish mysticism and the essentially spiritual impulse that animated her work. As the Kabbalists found divinity by rearranging letters, repeating nonsensical words, parsing verses, and seeking a logic other than the rational, so did she. With some exceptions, this mystic quality, which can make her prose nearly abstract, is less visible in her stories than in novels such as “The Passion According to G.H.” or “The Apple in the Dark.” But to see Clarice’s writing as a whole is to understand the close connection between her interest in language and her interest in what—for lack of a better word—she called God.<br /><br />In her stories, the divine erupts beneath carefully tended everyday lives. “She had pacified life so well,” she writes in one story, “taken such care for it not to explode.” When the inevitable explosions come, shifts in grammar announce them long before they appear in the plot. Laura, the bored, childless housewife in “The Imitation of the Rose,” has a “painstaking taste for method”—until, as she is thinking about how to explain herself to her friend Carlota, her grammar starts to slide.<br /><br />Carlota would be stunned to learn that they too had a private life and things they never told, but she wouldn’t tell, what a shame not to be able to tell, Carlota definitely thought she was just tidy and mundane and a little annoying, and if she had to be careful not to burden other people with details, with Armando she’d sometimes relax and get pretty annoying, which didn’t matter because he’d pretend to be listening without really listening to everything she was telling him, which didn’t ever bother her, she understood perfectly well that her chattering tired people out a bit, but it was nice to be able to explain how she hadn’t found any meat even if Armando shook his head and wasn’t listening, she and the maid chatted a lot, actually she talked more than the maid, and she was also careful not to pester the maid who sometimes held back her impatience and could get a little rude, it was her own fault because she didn’t always command respect.<br /><br /> These signals can be much more concise, as in “The Passion According to G.H.,” when another housewife recounts the mystical shock she underwent the day before. Remembering herself as she then was, G.H. says, “I finally got up from the breakfast table, that woman.” The transformation described in the novel—then to now, yesterday to today, her to me, first person to third—is resumed in a breezy anacoluthon, the break in grammar perfectly symbolizing the break in this woman’s life. Like so many of Clarice’s best phrases, it is elegant precisely because it disregards the mannered conventions that are the elegance of belles lettres.<br /><br />“In painting as in music and literature,” she wrote, “what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye.” As abstract painters sought to portray mental and emotional states without direct representation, and modern composers expanded traditional laws of harmony, Clarice undid reflexive patterns in grammar. She often had to remind readers that her “foreign” speech was not the result of her European birth or an ignorance of Portuguese.<br /><br />Nor, needless to say, of the proper ways women presented themselves. As a professional fashion writer, she reveled in her characters’ appearances. And then she dishevelled their dresses, smudged their mascara, deranged their hair, enchanting well-composed faces with the creepier glamour Sir Walter Scott described. With overturned words, she conjured an entire unknown world—conjuring, too, the unforgettable Clarice Lispector: a female Chekhov on the beaches of Guanabara.<br /><br /><br />This essay is adapted from the introduction to “The Complete Stories,” by Clarice Lispector, out in August from New Directions. Benjamin Moser is the series editor of New Directions’ Lispector translations.</span><br /><br /><br /><br />Credits: This review originally appeared in 2015 in <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">The New Yorker</a>.<br /><br /> </div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-81168627467694652662021-09-03T07:57:00.000-07:002021-09-03T07:57:12.352-07:00kitchenette building<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: large;">by</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: large;">Gwendolyn Brooks</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,<br />Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong<br /><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”<br /><br />But could a dream send up through onion fumes<br />Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes<br />And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,<br />Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms<br /><br />Even if we were willing to let it in,<br />Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,<br />Anticipate a message, let it begin?<br /><br />We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!<br />Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,<br />We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.</span></div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-70728423880805321862021-08-30T11:52:00.003-07:002021-08-31T16:45:13.356-07:00On His Trapeze<div style="text-align: right;">by</div><div style="text-align: right;">Michael Wood</div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">On 2 December 1978 Roland Barthes reported to an audience at the Collège de France on his desire to change as a writer, and told them about a specific moment when the thought of a ‘conversion’ hit him: 15 April that year.<br /><br /><i>Casablanca. The sluggishness of the afternoon. The sky clouds over, a slight chill in the air ... a kind of listlessness ... bears upon everything I do ... The beginnings of an idea ... to enter into literature, into writing, to write, as if I had never written before: to do only that.</i><br /><br />‘All the same’, he said a moment later, ‘I don’t want to make too much of that 15 April.’ Conversion was an idea, a dream, and his new plan, the object of his new fidelity and excitement, was above all to do with wanting to write differently rather than a project for a specific act of writing. He had ‘heard it said’, he reported in his next lecture, that he was writing a novel, ‘which isn’t true; if it were I clearly wouldn’t be in a position to propose a lecture course on its preparation.’ And then: ‘But I’ve decided to push that fantasy as far as it will go, to the point where: either the desire will fade away or it will encounter the reality of writing and what gets written won’t be the Fantasised Novel.’<br /><br />Barthes died just over a year later, in March 1980, so he didn’t get to push the fantasy for very long. Many of his readers have regretted the loss of what might have been easily recognisable as a novel, although the sentence I have just quoted seems to exclude its possibility. Other critics (and friends) like Antoine Compagnon have thought Barthes’s last book, <i>Camera Lucida</i>, was his novel; and still others see the notes for what Barthes called his <i>Vita Nova</i> as a conceptual framework for the novel we are all invited to write. It’s striking that in those notes Barthes includes the novel (along with the essay, the fragment, the diary) as illustrating only disappointment and impotence, so we should take seriously his idea of the new, of writing that is no longer what writing used to be. The work to come (if it came) wouldn’t look or feel like a novel even if it was one.<br /><br />Other intriguing aspects of the notes are the repetition of the (after all significant) date of 15 April 1978, the recurrence of the idea of the mother as guide (Henriette Barthes died on 25 October 1977), the possibility of taking Tolstoy as one’s master instead of Proust, and the notion that the story of the conversion, the entry into writing, itself will provide the plot of the new work. I should add, though, that another note makes fun of just this idea: ‘All this would mean that one gives up the childishness of the Vita Nova Narrative: these attempts of the frog who wants to be as big as ...’</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8rP3YC-JBpg-A232ac9EoSD1Z0WL1LhHBTHQcjAvfg52ObrYd_geWOPcSjq_Khb-hiYZYZe1WHkD6XL5fF1Gxou96fw3Rom07EjLV9uuh-OcRAkx8fSiOvHq8JYUI2zFrLNDFajRU6Qs/s500/Barthes.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="321" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8rP3YC-JBpg-A232ac9EoSD1Z0WL1LhHBTHQcjAvfg52ObrYd_geWOPcSjq_Khb-hiYZYZe1WHkD6XL5fF1Gxou96fw3Rom07EjLV9uuh-OcRAkx8fSiOvHq8JYUI2zFrLNDFajRU6Qs/s320/Barthes.jpg" width="205" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Barthes evokes Novalis, whom he quotes in his lectures: ‘The art of the novel excludes all continuity.’ He also alludes to a distinction Heidegger makes between an acceptance of ‘the assigned circle of the possible’ and the desire to leave this circle and enter the realm of ‘what is no longer the possible’. For Barthes writing represents the impossible and idleness (<i>oisiveté</i>) the possible: you can’t have one even if you try, and you can have the other without trying. We may speculate that what he wanted was not to achieve the impossible, and still less to arrive at some comfortable middle space of possibility, but to manage something like an occasional, dazzling infraction of the logic of opposites: to find in effort some of the virtues of pleasure.<br /><br />This is just what he argues for in his last piece of writing, still in his typewriter at the time of the accident that brought him to his death. The title is a little misleading, but this move also helps us to understand the claims in play: ‘One always fails in speaking of what one loves.’ This is what we are tempted to assert, Barthes suggests, of Stendhal’s evocations of Italy in his journals, and by extension of almost anything that matters to us, once we try to put it into words. It is the phrase ‘we are entitled to repeat mournfully (or tragically)’. But now we’re showing off in our pessimism, too pleased to fail, and Barthes is moving on. There is another Stendhal, the one who wrote the opening pages of <i>La Chartreuse de Parme</i>, where his love of Italy comes fully alive, irradiates the prose, in Barthes’s image. Stendhal was writing there, Barthes says, as distinct from (presumably) merely writing down, or putting into writing, what was in the journals. This is the new practice that Barthes wanted to enter. He associated it with the novel, because he often found it in novels. But the novel here is only a name for the achievement of an effect: that of what Barthes calls ‘festivity’.<br /><br />Two years after Barthes’s death, Chantal Thomas wrote very well of ‘the persistence of a theoretical desire progressively liberated from a concern with seriousness or consequence’. Does that sound frivolous? The concept of theoretical desire suggests a project that might be urgent, as well as fun. Barthes himself has a wonderful phrase about theory. ‘To some extent, theory is also a fiction’ – the context is a 1977 discussion of Sartre’s philosophical novels – ‘and it was always in this guise that it tempted me: theory is, as it were, the novel that people enjoyed writing over the last ten years.’ Theory was the novel Barthes enjoyed writing – many critics were busy thinking they were philosophers – and perhaps the only novel he needed to write.<br /><br />Tiphaine Samoyault is a little uncertain about Barthes’s status, sure only about his fame and his deserving protracted attention. She says he is a ‘great thinker’ – well, actually that he is ‘like all great thinkers’ – but didn’t produce ‘any system, any “strong thought”’. She is not wrong, but the near contradiction leaves us up in the air. She departs from the largely chronological line of her story to devote whole chapters to Barthes’s relations with quite different figures (Gide, Sartre, Sollers, Foucault), and she has some extended lucid comments on the connections and disconnections between Barthes and Blanchot, Derrida and Lévi-Strauss. None of this quite situates him as anything other than some sort of French intellectual, and indeed it is hard to situate him more precisely. Samoyault’s idea of ‘a politically committed solitude’ doesn’t help much, but the project of seeking ‘to be of one’s time in spite of everything’ gets us somewhere, and some of her remarks about Barthes’s personality – ‘assertive and elusive’ and ‘distanced proximity’ – work quite well as propositions about his prose style.<br /><br />It’s clear that – just to stick with the names Samoyault invokes – Gide, Sartre, Sollers and Blanchot are writers in a sense that Barthes is not, and that Sartre (again), Lévi-Strauss and Derrida are thinkers in a sense that he is not, if only because we don’t automatically regard critics as writers or thinkers. And then we feel the differences for more complicated reasons, ones that have to do with Barthes rather than his notional job.<br /><br />Two thoughts that recur in appreciations of Barthes are useful: he is a teacher who doesn’t teach, a commentator who has nothing to say. When Compagnon looks for a formula he says Barthes was not a maître à penser – the French phrase for guru – ‘but something like the master of a workshop, a master worker, a master artisan’. Italo Calvino said Barthes’s field was the science of the single object, the art of generalising where only the particular was in play. This was ‘the great thing that he – I do not say taught us, because one can neither teach nor learn this – but showed us is possible’. Louis-Jean Calvet, Barthes’s first biographer, said in 1990 that the loss of his voice, the absence of a ‘word’ from him, produced a ‘silence that leaves us prey to mere noise’. And Foucault, cited by Samoyault, said Barthes was the person ‘who most helped us to shake up a certain form of academic knowledge that was non-knowledge’.<br /><br />Perhaps these notions begin to add up. An artisan, the proponent of an impossible science, a man who had words for us (which is not the same thing as putting words in our mouth or telling us what to think), a man who claimed no perfect knowledge but could spot non-knowledge wherever it held sway, and especially where it was disguised as its opposite: this is someone, and it could hardly be anyone other than Barthes. Such a person would be ‘of his time’ even when he seemed to have opted out of it, as Barthes did at certain points. The time would just not be the same without him. Barthes cultivated a careful irony in relation to this idea. He said, for example, that he didn’t like the year of his birth: 1915. ‘An anodyne year: lost in wartime, undistinguished by any event; nobody well-known was born or died that year.’ Until quite late in life he played the unknown hero, the man whose obscurity – sometimes replaced by rapid mobility – was part of his fame.<br /><br />‘Were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections.’ Samoyault bravely quotes these lines from Barthes’s book <i>Sade, Fourier, Loyola</i>, and just as bravely ignores them: in part because Barthes had already played that friendly and detached role himself by writing a mock-critical study of a writer bearing his own name, and in part because she is the first biographer to have access to so many of Barthes’s friends and to the full Barthes archive of notes, letters, index cards and the rest. She takes her time and space – 715 pages in French – and is not afraid of the obvious and repetitive remark. Barthes’s childhood ‘to the age of nine’ is described in the next sentence as ‘his earliest years’. He ‘could not bring himself to keep a diary on a regular basis’; would we have guessed that ‘he did so only on an irregular ... basis’? I was especially taken by the ‘isolated village, where he enjoyed a certain solitude’ – it’s good to get away from it all.<br /><br />Still, there are worse interpretative faults, and once she has got over the fact that Barthes’s father died at sea before the child was a year old, her excitement that la mer and la mère are homophones (‘Barthes would find it impossible to break the first, primitive attachment every child has with its mother, and the reason for this lies in the depths of the sea’), and the temptation to psychologise the act of writing (‘One has written only in order to suspend the body, to lessen its pressure, to lighten its weight, to mute the unease that it arouses’), Samoyault settles down to a patient, intelligent exploration of the details of a life that was all about details.<br /><br />She follows Barthes on all his many travels, she tracks his friendships, she quotes him amply, and has some subtle and attentive things to say about his painting and about his love of music. We see his childhood in Bayonne, his schooldays in Paris, the war years in a series of sanatoria – ‘tuberculosis was incontestably the major event of his life.’ We join him in administrative and teaching posts in Bucharest and Alexandria after the war, and watch him putting his literary career together. He was always ready to learn – about structuralism from Greimas in Egypt, about Bakhtin and polyphony from Julia Kristeva in Paris – and always happy to recognise his debts: ‘I was surrounded by “formulators”, writers like Derrida, Sollers, Kristeva (always the same names, of course) who taught me things, persuaded me, opened my eyes.’ Brecht was also a revelation – he ‘wrote about every appearance made by the Berliner Ensemble on French soil’ – and even when his interest in live theatre faded, he still thought of ‘theatricality’ as an indispensable Brechtian move, ‘the main figure whereby signs are kept at a distance’, in Samoyault’s phrase. It’s not quite that signs are always intelligible for Barthes, as she suggests: ‘Against naturalness, against common sense, against the way History is forgotten, he sets the intelligibility of signs.’ But signs are always signs, waiting for the delayed arrival of their meanings or referents, and we are chronically eager to see this meeting as simple and inevitable, as if a smile could only mean kindness, and ‘I’ could only refer to me. Too long a delay or an entirely failed meeting can be a mess, but there is a form of intellectual freedom in the chance of these slippages.<br /><br />Maurice Nadeau, introducing Barthes as a new contributor to the magazine <i>Combat</i>, said he was ‘fanatical about language’, and as Samoyault shows, this zeal took many forms. He was sometimes afraid of language, especially in its spoken versions, and he didn’t always believe in the freedom I have just described: ‘Words are not free; there is a spatial death of words.’ Late in life he notoriously said language was fascist – ‘because fascism is not the prevention of speech but the forced obligation to speak’. But for Barthes language was all about signs. Over time, he gave the liberated Brechtian marker – the object or image that could be shown as not colluding in the lies it was asked to tell – a great deal of attention, and his response to the saturated stereotype, the sign we can’t see because we so thoroughly take it for granted, was almost physical. In this sense early works like <i>Mythologies</i>, mid-career works like<i> S/Z</i> and late works like <i>Camera Lucida</i>, so different in other ways, reveal a remarkable consistency. Not all surprises are ‘festive’, but there is nothing worse, for Barthes, than the sickening, confident pile-up of everything we are entirely sure we know. He has a name for it: literally the discourse of other people, more idiomatically, the way people talk, and in <i>S/Z</i> he shows a character dying of it: <i>‘c’est du discours d’autrui, de son trop-plein de raisons qu’il meurt.’</i><br /><br />These others are in our own heads, of course, that’s where they do the damage. They are us in many respects, or we are them. There is no lonely existential insight that will save us permanently from prejudice and platitude. But we can try thinking, and keep at it. In his later years Barthes was less keen on demythologising. The old myths remained as blatant and largely unquestioned as ever, but he realised more and more that myths can only be replaced by other myths. In his essay on Stendhal, Barthes even welcomes myth because it is alive, a ‘great mediating form’, but I don’t think this was because he had changed his mind significantly: he never thought myth was anything other than alive. The trick was to distinguish appealing and enabling myths from noxious ones. Frank Kermode, in <i>The Sense of an Ending</i>, written before Kermode came across Barthes, I think, but nevertheless a book that seems to have Barthes in mind, to be waiting for him, thought an attention to the difference between myth and fiction might do some of this work. Barthes thought the same and in a 1979 interview, speaking of Sartre, offered a sort of definition of his own method between the lines. He also suggested that while the idea of fiction can help us to see what is happening, it can’t do anything about the myth waiting in the shadows:<br /><br />If it’s true that Sartre, with a philosophical puissance that I do not possess, tried to produce a complete system of thought, I would not say that he failed. In any case, no grand philosophical system succeeds on the scale of history: at some point it becomes a vast fiction, which it always was originally, moreover. I would say that Sartre produced a great philosophical fiction that was incarnated in different writings and that managed to take the form of a system.<br /><br />History turns systems into the fictions they always were. This is not a matter of failure but of incarnation and writing. The difference between Sartre and Barthes is that the former sought a system and found one, while the latter was looking for something else: endless exact notations perhaps. Both men have a myth behind the fiction, and both myths, in this case, are worth having: they negotiate the impossible in different ways.<br /><br />Samoyault’s loyalty to Barthes’s sense of signs means she is always ready to listen to different opinions. Generally this tendency just helps us to think for ourselves, but at times it makes her seem a little wobbly. About Barthes’s death, for example. On 25 February 1980, he stepped off the pavement of the rue des Ecoles in Paris – either carelessly or looking around quite carefully, depending on the testimony of different friends – and was hit by a van. He was taken to La Pitié-Salpêtrière, where he was found to have several fractures but not to be in a grave condition. He never left the hospital, though; he died on 26 March. Did he lose the will to live? Did his grieving for his mother, which was constant, interfere with his recovery? How serious was the flare-up of the old lung condition? There is also the idea of an ‘iatrogenic infection of the kind that is regularly contracted in hospitals’. The official verdict was that ‘the accident is not the immediate cause of death, but favoured the development of pulmonary complications.’ Samoyault is sure that Barthes ‘was not ... deliberately allowing himself to die’ because of his mother’s death; but not sure that he didn’t ‘lose the will to live’ because his book<i> Camera Lucida</i> was ‘not yet taken seriously’. The balance seems odd, and I don’t see why all these possibilities couldn’t have played a part. It is certainly true, as Foucault is quoted as saying, that ‘people do not realise how much effort is necessary to survive in a hospital.’ Samoyault leaves the question open – ‘what did Barthes die of?’ – but there are perhaps too many half-answers in the air.<br /><br />This is certainly the case with the more difficult question of Barthes’s response to the Paris events of 1968. He was ‘bored’ and ‘wearied’ by many meetings, Samoyault says, and did not sign a crucial manifesto drawn up by his friends at the magazine <i>Tel Quel</i>. Does this mean that he ‘did not really feel concerned by May ’68’? He had a recurrence of his old illness, fainted in the street in April, was bleeding from the larynx in May, had bad ECG reports. This would surely be enough to keep him from taking part in a whole lot of demonstrations, but Samoyault is still on the defensive: ‘This ... is not an attempt to let Barthes off the hook for taking only a small part in the events.’ Not an attempt to inspect the hook either. When she says Barthes was engaged in ‘a painful re-examination of his place in the world’, she seems to reiterate rather than stave off the accusation of quietism. Structures don’t take to the streets; neither do painful re-examinations. What’s missing here, or is visible only across the blur of Samoyault’s analysis, is Barthes’s clear sense that the demonstrations and manifestos were too violent and too simple, too close to being mere mirrors of what they attacked, and the principle that people have a right to quietism even if we want them to behave differently, and even if we think they are wrong about the events. In one of the notes in the archive Barthes writes of being ‘on the trapeze without any safety net, ever since I’ve no longer had the nets of structuralism, semiology or Marxism.’ But he still has friends, he says, who hold the rope of the trapeze. It is dangerous to be ‘of one’s time’, whatever the time.</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: This article first appeared in 2016 in <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n22/michael-wood/on-his-trapeze">London Review of Books</a>.</span></div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-21192422763740802462021-08-27T14:16:00.001-07:002021-08-27T18:06:06.052-07:00The Tree (El árbol) by Maria Luisa Bombal<p style="text-align: right;"> <i>To a great artist, Nina Anguita, a wonderful friend
who gave life and reality to my imaginary tree, I
dedicate this story that, without realizing it, I wrote
for her, even long before I knew her. </i></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw9W2PSF0bj39aQR9H4jHumbByPi2jAmVzuvBLiDUcHiyinaxir9rDujVv5pdNKAyn5hBOp6F1LWzuXTJbJFuRN8e3XqsnmrzM6dphNmZZMnm-3KLb_lyNKu3nEaf789nJPMvGWJr0re0/s1200/Carmen.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw9W2PSF0bj39aQR9H4jHumbByPi2jAmVzuvBLiDUcHiyinaxir9rDujVv5pdNKAyn5hBOp6F1LWzuXTJbJFuRN8e3XqsnmrzM6dphNmZZMnm-3KLb_lyNKu3nEaf789nJPMvGWJr0re0/s320/Carmen.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;">Carmen Guedez</div></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The pianist sits down, coughs out of habit and thinks for moment. The streams of light
that illuminate the hall begin to deepen into a dim splendor until the moment when a
musical phrase rises into the silence and begins to expand, clear, direct, and joyfully
capricious.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Mozart, perhaps, Brigida thinks. As usual, she has forgotten to ask for the program.
“Mozart, or maybe Scarlatti…” She knew so little about music! And it wasn’t because
she didn’t have an ear, or a fondness, for music. As a child, she insisted on
taking piano lessons; no one had to make her do it, like her sisters. Her sisters, however,
now played very well and were able to read music easily, while she… She had stopped
taking lessons less than a year after she started. The reason for her inconsistency was as
simple as it was shameful: she had never been able to learn the key of F. “I don’t
understand, I don’t remember anything more that the key of G!” The indignation of her
father! “I could have given the task of teaching several daughters of an unfortunate
widower to anyone. Poor Carmen! She must have suffered a lot with Brigida. That
creature is retarded” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Brigida was the youngest of six daughters, all with different characters. When the
father finally came to his sixth daughter, he was already so perplexed and exhausted by
the first five that he preferred to simplify things by saying she was retarded. “I am not
going to struggle any more, it’s useless. Just ignore her. If she doesn’t want to study,
okay. If she wants to spend her time in the kitchen listening to fairly tales, that’s her
problem. If she wants to play with dolls at age sixteen, so what.” And Brigida kept her
dolls, and remained totally ignorant. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">How nice it is to be ignorant! Not to know exactly who Mozart was, not know his
background, his influence, and the special features of his technique! Just to let herself be
led by his hand, like now.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And Mozart leads her, in fact. He leads her across a bridge suspended over crystalline
water that flows through a bed of pink sand. She is dressed in white, with a parasol as
broad and smooth as a spider web opened over her shoulder.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“You look younger every day, Brigida. Yesterday I saw your husband, your ex
husband I mean. His hair is completely white now.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But she doesn’t answer, nor does she stop, and she continues crossing the bridge that
Mozart has extended for her toward the garden of her younger days.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There she saw tall fountains where the water sings. Her eighteen-year-old body, her
chestnut tresses that drop to her ankles when they are untied, her golden complexion, her
dark eyes, wide open and questioning. A small mouth with full lips, a sweet smile, and
the most lively and graceful body in the world. What was she thinking about, sitting on
the edge of the fountain? Nothing. “She is as foolish as she is pretty” they said. But she
didn’t worry about being foolish or “being awkward” at dances. One by one they asked
her sisters to marry, but no one asked her. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Mozart! Now he offers her a blue marble staircase where she descends between a
double row of frozen daylilies. And now she opens a gate of bars with golden tips so she
can throw herself at the neck of Luis, an intimate friend of her father. Since she was a
child, she would go to Luis when the others neglected her. He picked her up and she
wrapped her arms around his neck with little giggles and planted kisses on his eyes, his
forehead, and his hair that was already grey (wasn’t he ever young?) like a disorderly
rainstorm. “You are a necklace,” Luis said. “You are like a necklace of birds.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That’s why she married him. Because, when she was with that solemn, taciturn man
she didn’t feel responsible for being the way she was: foolish, playful, and lazy. Yes,
now that years have passed she knows she hadn’t married Luis for love; nevertheless, she
still doesn’t understand why, why one day she left him, suddenly… </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But then Mozart takes her nervously by the hand and, dragging her along with a
rhythm that gets faster and faster, making her cross the garden in the opposite direction,
going back over the bridge in a race that is almost an escape. And after having stripped
her of her parasol, and her transparent skirt, Mozart closes the door to her past with a
chord that was sweet and firm at the same time. And that leaves her in the concert hall,
dressed in black, clapping mechanically while the light of the street lamps grows brighter.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Once again the half-light, and a moment of silence. And now Beethoven starts to stir
up the warm sound of his notes, under a springtime moon. How far away the sea has
gone! Brigida advances through the beach toward the sea spread out in the distance,
refulgent and gentle, but then the sea rises up and calmly grows larger and, coming closer
to her, covers her with soft waves that start pushing her, pushing her from behind until
she feels her cheek pressing on the body of a man. And then it moves away leaving her,
forgotten, on the chest of Luis. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“You have no heart, you have no heart,” she used to tell Luis. It was beating so far
inside her husband that she could only hear it unexpectedly, on rare occasions. “You are
never really close to me when you’re by my side,” she protested in their bedroom when,
before going to sleep, he always looked at the afternoon newspapers. “Why did you ever
marry me?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Because you have the eyes of a frightened little deer,” he answered, and kissed her.
And she, suddenly happy, gladly accepted the weight of his grey haired head over her
shoulder. Oh, the bright, silvery hairs of Luis! </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Luis, you haven’t ever told me exactly what color your hair was when you were a
child, and you also haven’t told me what your mother said when your hair turned grey
when you were only fifteen years old. What did she say? Did she laugh? Did she cry?
And were you proud, or were you ashamed? And your friends in school, what did they
say? Tell me, Luis, tell me…”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“I’ll tell you tomorrow. I’m sleepy, Brigida, I’m very tired. And turn off the light.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">He unconsciously moved away from her to go to sleep, and during the entire night she
unconsciously leaned on her husband’s shoulder, searching for his breath, trying to live
under his breath like an forgotten, thirsty plant that spreads its branches in search of a
more propitious climate.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the morning, when the housemaid opened the curtains, Luis was no longer by her
side. He had gotten up stealthily, without telling her good morning, fearing that his
“necklace of birds” would capture his shoulders again. “Five minutes, just five minutes.
Your office won’t disappear just because you spend five more minutes with me, Luis.”
Her awakenings. Oh, her sad awakenings! However, it was strange that as soon as she
went to her dressing room, her sadness dissipated, as if with an enchantment.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">A wave surges, it moves very far away, rustling like an ocean of leaves. Is that
Beethoven? No.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is the tree rubbing against the window of the dressing room. It was enough for her to
enter the room for her to feel a great surge of wellbeing pass through her. How hot it
always was in the morning in her bedroom! And the harsh light! Here in her dressing
room, though, even the light was restful and refreshing. The pale chintz curtains, the tree
that spread shadows like cold, roiling water on the walls, the mirrors that reflected the
leaves and spread out into an immense green forest. How nice it was to be in this room!
It was like a world sunken into an aquarium. How this giant rubber tree chatters! All the
birds in the neighborhood come to live in it. It is the only tree on that narrow, sloping
street that goes all the way down to the river from the edge of the city. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">"I am busy, I can’t go with you… I’ve got too much to do, I won’t be able to go to
lunch… Hello, yes, I’m at the club with a commitment. Go eat and take a rest… No, I
don’t know. It would be best if you didn’t wait for me, Brigida.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“If she only had a few friends,” she sighed. But everyone seemed to be bored with her.
If she tried to be a little less stupid! But how to cover so much ground in such a short
time? In order to be intelligent, one has to start when you’re a child, isn’t that right?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Her sisters' husbands take to them to interesting places, but Luis, “why not admit it?”
was ashamed of her, of her ignorance, of her timidity, and even the fact that she was only
eighteen-years-old. Hadn’t he asked her once to say that she was twenty-one, as if her
youthfulness was an unpleasant secret of theirs? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And at night, how tired he always was! He never really listened to her. He smiled,
yes, but she knew that his smile was mechanical. He showered her with caresses from
which he was absent. Why had he married her? To continue a custom, or perhaps to
strengthen his old friendly relationship with her father. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Maybe for men life was a continuous series of accepted customs. If one happened to
be broken, it must cause confusion and chaos. And then men started to wander through
the streets of the city, to sit on a bench in the plaza, dressed more poorly every day, and
with their beard even longer. Luis’s life, therefore, consisted filling every minute of the
day with his job. How had she not realized that before? Her father was right in saying
she was retarded.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“I would like to see it snow sometime, Luis”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“This summer I’ll take you to Europe and, since it will be winter there, you’ll be able
to see it snow.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“I know it’s winter there when it is summer here. I’m not that ignorant!”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Sometimes, to wake him out of his rapture into real love, she would throw herself over
her husband and cover him with kisses, crying and calling him:
“Luis, Luis, Luis…”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“What? What’s going on? What do you want?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Nothing.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Why did you call me like that, then?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“No reason, I just wanted to call you. I like to say your name.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And he smiled, accepting that new game with benevolence.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Then summer came, the first summer after they were married. New duties kept him
busy and prevented him from keeping his promise of a trip to Europe.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Brigida, the heat is going to be awful this summer in Buenos Aires. Why don’t you
go to the farm with your father?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“By myself?” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“I would go to see you every week, from Saturday to Monday.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">She had sat down on the bed, feeling like insulting him. But she searched in vain for
words to shout at him. She knew nothing, nothing at all. Not even how to insult. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“What’s wrong? What are you thinking about, Brigida?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">For the first time, Luis came back after he left and leaned over her with concern, letting
the time pass when he was supposed to arrive at his office. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“I’m just tired…” Brigida had answered childishly, hiding her face in the pillows.
For the first time he had also called her from the club during lunchtime. But she had
refused to answer the phone, furiously brandishing the new weapon she had found:
silence.
That same night she had eaten supper in front of her husband without raising her eyes
to look at him, with all of her nerves tensed.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Are you still angry, Brigida?” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But she didn’t break her silence.
“You know very well that I love you, my necklace of birds. But I can’t be with you all
the time. I’m a very busy man. By the time you reach my age, you have become the
slave of a thousand different obligations.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Silence.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Do you want to go out tonight?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Silence.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“You don’t want to? All right then. Tell me, did Roberto call from Montevideo?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Silence.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“What a pretty dress! Is it new?”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Silence.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Is it new, Brigida? Answer, answer me…” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But she still didn’t break her silence.
Then right away, unexpectedly, astonishingly, absurdly, Luis rose out of his chair and,
violently throwing his napkin on the table, he left the house, slamming the door.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">She rose up with astonishment, trembling with indignation after such injustice. “And I,
and I,” she stammered disoriented, “I, who for almost a year… when, for the first time I
let myself make a complaint… Well, I’m leaving, I’m leaving this very night! And I’ll
never set foot in this house again…” And she opened the closets in her dressing room
with fury and frantically threw her clothes on the floor.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It was then when someone, or something knocked on the window.
After that, without knowing why, or what made her do it, she ran toward the window.
And she opened it. It was the tree, the rubber tree that a large gust of wind was rocking
so its branches rubbed against the window, that was summoning her from outside so she
would see it twist itself into an impetuous black flare under a sky that was full of stars on
that summer night.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It wasn’t long before a heavy downpour began to fall on its leaves. What a delight!
All night long she was able to hear the rain pouring on the rubber tree and flowing off the
leaves like a cataract. All night long she heard the trunk of the old tree creak and moan,
telling about the bad weather, while she was curled up under the sheets of the large bed,
next to Luis. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Handfuls of pearls that pour in streams, falling on a roof of silver. Chopin, Nocturnes
of Federico Chopin.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">How many times had she awakened early to find that her husband, now also stubbornly
silent, had silently slipped out of bed?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The dressing room: the window wide open, the smell of the river and the pasture
floating through that beneficent room, and the mirrors blurred by a halo of mist.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Chopin and the rain that falls on the leaves of the rubber tree, sounding like the noise
of a secret waterfall that even seems to drench the roses on the curtains, and mingles
with her turbulent nostalgia. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What to do in the summer when it rains so often? Stay in her room all day, pretending
she was recovering from depression? Luis had quietly come in one afternoon. He had
sat down next to her, looking tense. There was a moment of silence.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Brigida, is it true that you no longer love me?” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">She had foolishly cheered up for a moment. She could have shouted, “No, no, I love
you Luis, I love you,” if only he had waited, if he had not seemed so pleased by her
unusual calmness. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“Whatever it is, I don’t think we ought to separate, Brigida. We need to take plenty of
time to think about it. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Her feelings shut down just as quickly as they had appeared. Why get excited
uselessly. Luis loved her with tenderness and care; if sometime he ever came to hate her,
it would be justified. And that was how life is. She went over to the window and pressed
her forehead against the cold glass. There the tree was peacefully receiving the rain that
fell on it calmly and regularly. The room became immobilized in the systematic and
silent darkness. Everything seemed to stop, permanently and quietly. That’s how life is.
And there was a certain grandness in accepting it that way, mediocre, like something
definite and unchangeable. Meanwhile, a melody of serious and dignified words seemed
to rise from the depths of things, and she remained there listening: “Always.” “Never…” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And thus time passes by, the hours, the days, and the years. Always! Never! That was
how life is, that was life!</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Once she recovered, she realized her husband had slipped out of the room.
Always! Never!... </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And the rain, secret and tranquil, still kept on humming notes of
Chopin.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Summer stripped the sheets off its burning calendar. Luminous and blinding pages fell
off like golden swords, as well as pages of unhealthy humidity like the breath of swamps;
also falling were the furious pages of a brief storm, as well as pages of a hot wind, a wind
that brings the “flower of the air” and hangs it on the immense rubber tree. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Some children were playing hide-and-seek between the enormous convulsed roots that
rose up so high they lifted the paving stones, so the tree was filled with laughter and
whispering. Then she leaned out of the window and clapped her hands; the children
scattered away fearfully, without noticing the smile of the girl who would have also liked
to participate in their game.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">She stayed by herself for a long time, looking out the window, watching the branches
rock—on that street that sloped down to the river there was always some wind—and it
was like sinking her eyes into moving water, or in the restless smoke from a chimney.
One would be able to spend hours, drained of all thoughts, feeling the enchantment of
that well-being.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The room had scarcely begun to be filled with the dim light of dusk when she lit the
first lamp, and the first lamp was reflected in the mirrors so that it was multiplied like a
firefly that wanted to hasten the arrival of night.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Every night she slept next to Luis, suffering by fits and starts. But when her pain
increased until it struck her like a stab wound, or when she was seized by a desire to
wake Luis and slap him, or caress him, she would slip out of the room on tiptoes to her
dressing room, and open the window. Right away the room was filled with discreet
sounds and discreet presences, with mysterious footsteps, with delicate fluttering, with
the rustling of foliage, and with the gentle chirp of a cricket that was hidden beneath the
bark of the rubber tree that was immersed in the stars on that warm summer night.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Her fever dissipated as her bare feet cooled, little by little, on the floor mat. She didn’t
know why it was so easy to suffer back there in that room. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The melancholy of Chopin was spilling out in one movement after another, and also in
one melancholy after another, unfazed.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And autumn came. The dry leaves fell off and floated around before falling over the
grass of the small garden, or over the pavement of the sloping street. The leaves broke
off and fell… The top of the tree was still green, but further down the tree was turning
red, and then darkening like the worn lining of a sumptuous dancing cape. And now the
room seemed to be sunken into a sad golden cup.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Lying on the couch, she was waiting patiently for supper time and the unlikely arrival
of Luis. He had started speaking to her again, and she had resumed being his wife again,
without enthusiasm, and without anger. She no longer loved him, but she no longer
suffered. On the contrary, an unexpected feeling of plentitude and tranquility had taken
possession of her. Now, no one or nothing could hurt her. Perhaps true happiness lies in
the conviction that that one has irremediably lost all possibility of happiness. Then we
begin to live a life without hope or fears, finally able to enjoy all the small pleasures that
are the most enduring.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There was a tremendous noise and a white flash that knocked her back, trembling. Is it
the intermission? No, it’s the rubber tree, she knows it must have been. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">They had brought it down with a single blow of an axe. She had not heard the sound
of the work that had begun early that morning. “The roots had been lifting up the paving
stones of the street, so naturally, the neighborhood commission…”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Dazed, she has placed her hands over her eyes. When she recovers her vision, she sits
up and looks around. What does she look at? </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The concert hall suddenly lighted up, where the people are leaving?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">No, she has been trapped in the roots of her past and can’t leave her dressing room.
Her dressing room now invaded by a terrifying white light. It was as if they had torn off
the ceiling of her room and a harsh light came in from all sides, leaking into her pores,
burning her with coldness. And she saw everything in the light of this cold light. Luis,
with his wrinkled face, his hands that are covered with thick discolored veins, the lurid
colors of the chintz curtains.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Terrified, she rushes to the window. The window now looks out over a narrow street,
so narrow that her room almost touches the façade of a dazzling skyscraper. On its
ground floor, windows, and more windows filled with bottles. On the corner of the street
a string of cars are lined up in front of a service station that has been painted red. Some
boys in shirt sleeves are bouncing a ball in the middle of the pavement.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And all that ugliness had entered into her mirrors. In her mirrors, there were now
nickel-plated balconies, clotheslines with hanging rags, and cages with canaries.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">They had destroyed her intimacy, her secret; she found herself naked in the middle of
the street, naked next to an old husband who turns his back to go to sleep, who has never
given her any children. She doesn’t understand why, until now, she has never wanted to
have children, or how she had come to accept the idea that she was going to live all her
life without children. She doesn’t understand how she could stand the laughter of Luis
for a whole year, his laughter that was too jovial, that false laughter of a man who has
trained himself to laugh, because on certain occasions it is necessary.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Lies! Her resignation and her calmness were lies. She wanted love, yes love, as well
as trips, and doing crazy things, and love, especially love…
“ </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But, Brigida, why are you leaving? Why did you stay here?” Luis had asked her.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now she would have known how to answer him:
“The tree, Luis, the tree! They have cut down the rubber tree.”</span></p><p><br /></p>Notes: María Luisa Bombal was born in <a href="http://www.geographia.com/chile/vinadelmar.htm">Viña del Mar</a>, Chile, in 1910. Her first stories were published by the Argentine magazine Sur, which subsequently published <a href="https://www.themodernnovel.org/americas/latin-america/chile/bombal/niebla/">La Ultima niebla (House of Mist)</a> and <a href="https://www.themodernnovel.org/americas/latin-america/chile/bombal/amortajada/">La amortajada (The Shrouded Woman)</a>. She translated her two novels into English and they were published by Farrar, Straus. Bombal died in Chile in 1980. Please see <a href="https://www.themodernnovel.org/americas/latin-america/chile/bombal/">The Modern Novel</a> for more information.The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-37221382987213509092021-08-23T07:57:00.002-07:002021-08-23T13:50:44.321-07:00Fragment of "Elegy and Choros" by H.D.<p style="text-align: right;"> </p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCl-GaeLJIOvc9tH84f7mA8pceDCJGgbcU41Dmss9fjaPEtWGr1s02tUl_Sa-f6eF8GQv38MS58uUv1XsyWrkz5cpDBFrRjjJv7nGXTWC8g7Hu5EMb9I1pKvPd-CnAJo19FMzSNboTa_U/s562/hilda-doolittle-fashion_thumb.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="562" data-original-width="416" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCl-GaeLJIOvc9tH84f7mA8pceDCJGgbcU41Dmss9fjaPEtWGr1s02tUl_Sa-f6eF8GQv38MS58uUv1XsyWrkz5cpDBFrRjjJv7nGXTWC8g7Hu5EMb9I1pKvPd-CnAJo19FMzSNboTa_U/s320/hilda-doolittle-fashion_thumb.jpg" width="237" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Electra: </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">No one knows,</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">the heart of a child,</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">how it grows</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">until it is too late,</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">no one knows hate</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">but worse,</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">too late,</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">no one knows</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">love:</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">when she came</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">there was the whole earth in flame,</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">every hill,</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">every bush</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">must blush</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">rose</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">rose</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">rose</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">O, rhodedendron-name,</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">mother;</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">no one knows the color of a flower</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">till it is broken</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">Notes: The complete version of the poem can be found at <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=45&issue=3&page=15">Poetry Foundation</a>.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-49768553878800747252021-08-18T05:46:00.002-07:002021-08-18T11:41:22.359-07:00The Sluts and the Saints: A Letter to Zézim<div style="text-align: right;">by</div><div style="text-align: right;">Caio Fernando Abreau</div><div style="text-align: right;">(translation Brunas Danta Lobato)</div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw548MgWDsMorLEw7lbE7hDZ8FPOMfEmifK7zvdcCB5K23aCsU1W6eGGbxo5-SuIwIAAs86mIsRSxSdcPavofVaPxt2-hwAQfz4vnEGd8Nw7AAk3hP2TLtvk2X-sMPhypmEbBBqe9qnGU/s680/Vega.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="510" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw548MgWDsMorLEw7lbE7hDZ8FPOMfEmifK7zvdcCB5K23aCsU1W6eGGbxo5-SuIwIAAs86mIsRSxSdcPavofVaPxt2-hwAQfz4vnEGd8Nw7AAk3hP2TLtvk2X-sMPhypmEbBBqe9qnGU/s320/Vega.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Porto, December 22 of 1979<br /><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Zézim,<br /><br />I just got back from the beach, I was there some five days, completely alone (amazing!), and found your letter. These few days here, ten, and it already feels like a month, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I’m worried, Zézim, and want to talk to you. Please be quiet and listen, or read it, rather, you must be full of Adélia Pradian vibes and therefore a little too focused on small mysteries. It’s a long letter, so get ready, because I already got ready over here with a cup of Mu tea, cushion under my butt, and a pack of Galaxy, the pseudo-intelligent decision.<br /><br />So here: out of the few lines in your letter, twelve sentences end with question marks. They are, therefore, questions. I answer some. The solution, I agree, is not in restraint. It never is, nor will it ever be. I’ve always thought that the two most fascinating kinds of people in the world were the sluts and the saints, and they’re both entirely unrestrained, right? You don’t have to abstain; you have to eat of the banquet, Zézim. No one will teach you the way. No one will teach me the way. No one has ever taught me the way, or taught you, I suspect. I move blindly. There are no ways to be taught or learned. In reality, there are no such pathways. I’m now reminded of a verse from a Peruvian poet (is it Vallejo? I’m not sure): “Caminante, no hay camino. Pero el camino se hace al andar.” [sic]<br /><br />And more: I’ll admit that I, too, have thought, what if God breaks down? And it’ll happen, it’ll happen because you said, “God is my last hope.” Zézim, I care so much about you, please don’t think of me as unbearably condescending for saying this, but you’re too stubborn, Zézim. There’s no last hope besides death. The one who seeks doesn’t find. You have to be distracted and expect nothing at all. There’s nothing to expect. Nor unexpected. It’s all maya / illusion. Or samsara / vicious circle.<br /><br />Right, I’ve read too much Zen Buddhism, I’ve done too much yoga, I have this thing where I have to keep playing with magic, I’ve read too much Krishnamurti, you know? And also Alan Watts, and D. T. Suzuki, and this often seems a bit ridiculous to people. But I’ve taken for my personal use at least a certain tranquility from these.<br /><br />You ask: what do I do now? Don’t do, I say. Don’t do anything, while doing everything, waking up every day, making coffee, making the bed, walking around the block, listening to music, feeding the Poor. You’re anxious and that’s not very religious of you. Shocking: I think you’re not very religious. Really. You’ve stopped burning smoke to find God. What on earth? You’re replacing weed with baby Jesus? Zézim, I’ll tell you a deplorable cliché now, here we go: you won’t find anything outside of yourself. The way is in not out. You’re not going to find it in God or in weed, or moving to New York, or.<br /><br />You want to write. Right, but do you want to write? Or everyone demands it from you and you feel that you have to write? I know it’s not that simple, and that there are thousands of other things involved here. But maybe you might be confused because everyone keeps asking, what’s going on, where’s the book? Where’s the novel, where’s the novella, where’s that play? Fuck them, demons. Zézim, you only have to write if it comes from the inside out, otherwise it won’t work, I’m sure of it, you could fool a few, but you wouldn’t fool yourself, so it wouldn’t fill this void. There are no demons between you and the typewriter. What there is instead is a matter of basic honesty. This simple question: do you really want to write? Ignoring the demands, do you continue to want it? Then go ahead, search deep, as a gaúcho poet once said, Gabriel de Britto Velho, “stub out the cigarette on your chest / tell yourself what you don’t like to hear / tell everything.” That’s writing. Drawing blood with your nails. And it doesn’t matter the form, it doesn’t matter its “social role,” nothing, it doesn’t matter that at first it might merely be some self-exorcism. But you have to bleed abun-dant-ly. Aren’t you afraid of this surrender? Because it hurts, hurts, hurts. The frightening loneliness. The only reward is what Laing says that is the only thing that can save us from madness, from suicide, from self-erasure: a feeling of inner glory. This phrase is very important in my life.<br /><br />I knew Clarice Lispector fairly well. She was the unhappiest, Zézim. After the first time we talked I cried all night, because her whole existence hurt me, because it seemed to hurt her too, out of so much bleeding understanding of everything. I’m telling you about her because Clarice, to me, is what I know best of magnificent, literarily speaking. And she died alone, cheated, unloved, misunderstood, known as “a little crazy.” Because she gave herself entirely to her job of creating. Dove deep in her own trip and went inventing her own ways, in the greatest loneliness. Like Joyce. Like Kafka, crazy too, except that in Prague. Like Van Gogh. Like Artaud. Like Rimbaud.<br /><br />Is that the kind of creator you want to be? Then give yourself over and pay the price. Which, too often, is too high. Or do you want to write a competent little book to be released with hors d’oeuvres and suspicious whiskey on a pleasant afternoon at Livraria Cultura, with everyone you know celebrating? I don’t think so. I’ve known and know too many people like that. And I won’t give a penny for any of them. You, I love. I’m rarely wrong.<br /><br />Zézim, search through your memory, your childhood, your dreams, your passions, your failures, your sorrows, your wildest hallucinations, your most unreasonable hopes, your sickest fantasies, your most homicidal desires, in everything that’s seemingly the most unutterable, the most abominable guilts, the stupidest lyricisms, the most general confusion, the bottom of the bottomless well that is the subconscious: that’s where your work is.<br /><br />Most important of all, don’t go looking for it: it comes to you, when you and it are ready. Each writer has their process, you need to understand yours. Perhaps, this thing that seems enormously difficult is simply your sub or unconscious’ gestation.<br /><br />And reading, reading is food for anyone who writes. Many times you’ve told me that you couldn’t read anymore. That you didn’t like reading anymore. If you don’t like reading, how will you like writing? Or go ahead and write to destroy the text, but then feed yourself. Lavishly. Then throw up. To me, and this might be personal, writing is sticking your finger down your throat. Then, of course, you sift through the goop, mold it, transform it. There might even be a flower. But the defining moment is the finger in the throat. And I think — and I could be wrong — that this is what you haven’t been able to do. You know, when you’re drunk as shit, no one else’s finger is willing to go into your throat.<br /><br />Or then go to therapy. I mean it. Or try swimming. Or modern dance. Or a radical macrobiotic diet. Anything that will take care of your mind and/or body and, at the same time, will distract you from this obsession. Until it’s resolved, by force or on its own, it doesn’t matter. I just don’t want to see you choking like this, my dear friend.<br /><br />Pause.<br /><br />As for me, I was telling you about these past few days at the beach. That’s it, I woke up at six, seven in the morning, headed to the beach, ran some four kilometers, exercised, at around ten I headed back, to cook my rice. I rested a little, then sat down and wrote. I’d be exhausted by then. I was exhausted. I spent my days talking to myself, submerged in text, I managed to force it out. It was a shred that had come to me in September, back in Sãopa. Then it came, without my planning for it. It was ready in my head. It was called “Moldy Strawberries,” it’ll have an epigraph from Lennon & McCartney, I have the lyrics of “Strawberry Fields Forever” here waiting to be translated. Zézim, I think it’s so good. I was completely blind while I was writing it, a character (an adman, former hippie, who insists he has cancer in the soul, or brain damage caused by too many drugs, from past carnavais, and the symptom — which is real — is this persistent taste of moldy strawberries in his mouth) stopped in his tracks and refused to die or go completely mad at the end. It has a beautiful ending, positive, joyful. I was stunned. The ending made its way into the text and wouldn’t let me interfere. So weird. Sometimes I think that when I write I’m just a transmission channel, say, between two things totally alien to me, I’m not sure you know what I mean. A transmission channel with a certain power, or ability, selective, I don’t know. This morning I didn’t go to the beach and finally finished the story, I think already in its fourth version. But I’ll let it sleep for at least a month, then I’ll reread it — because I know I could always be wrong, and my current eyes might be unable to see certain things.<br /><br />Then I took notes, a lot of notes, for other things. The mind boils over. It’s so great, Zézim, it’s great, it isn’t dead, and that’s all I want, I’ll quit all my jobs out there the moment I feel that this, literature, which is all I have, is under threat — like it was, at Nova.<br /><br />And I read. I found out I love Dalton Trevisan. Boy, was I screaming while I read Knife in the Heart, it has some incredible stories, and so meticulously faceted, polished down to its gleaming essence, especially one of them, called “Woman on Fire.” I’ve read almost all of Ivan Ângelo, I also really like it, especially The Real Son of a Bitch, but then the title story put me to sleep and I stopped. But he has such a text, oh that he has. And a lot of it. But the best thing I’ve read these days wasn’t fiction. It was a short article by Nirlando Beirão in the latest Istoé (from December 19, please read it), called “The Rebirth of a Dream.” I’ve read it so many times. The first time, I was moved to tears — because he contextualizes all the experiences I’ve had in this decade. Of course he’s talking about an entire generation, but then I realized, my God, look how I’m so ordinary, so typical of my generation. It ends in utter joy: reinstating the dream. It’s so beautiful. And so bold. It’s new, healthy. A light bulb went off in my head, you know when something lights you up? Just as if he’d given shape to what I, confusingly, had only ever groped for in the dark. Read it, tell me what you think. I couldn’t refrain from it and wrote him a letter saying that. I’m not his friend, only an acquaintance, but I think we should say certain things.<br /><br />When I’m writing, I talk a hell of a lot, don’t I?<br /><br />Things are good at home. It’s always a great energy, it’s no use criticizing it. Their good energy doesn’t depend on any opinions I might have on it, isn’t it amazing? The house is kind of under renovation, Nair is building a kind of winter garden out back, will connect it to the living room. Today she was pissed because Felipe won’t be applying to college anymore: he failed his senior year again. My sister Cláudia got a Caloi 10 bike for christmas from her fiancé (Jorge, remember?), and I took it and just earlier today went on a great ride around Menino Deus. Márcia looks pretty, more grown up, sort of with an air of a younger Mila. Zaél is cooking, today made rice with raisins for dinner.<br /><br />Other people, I haven’t seen. I’ve heard that A Comunidade is in theaters now and I have a paycheck coming up. Tomorrow I think I’ll check it out.<br /><br />I’m so lonely, Zézim. So me-me-with-myself, because my me with family is only in passing. It’s good like this, I’m not afraid of any of my emotions or fantasies, you know? The days of total loneliness at the beach were especially healthy.<br /><br />You’ve seen the new Nova? There is mister Chico, stuttering, and a very funny picture showing everyone at the newsroom — me looking like “I don’t want to get involved, I have nothing to do with this.” Check it out later. Speaking of which, Juan stopped by, I was at the beach, he talked to Nair over the phone, he was getting off one bus and getting on another. He said he’ll be back on January or February third, Nair doesn’t remember, to stay for a few days. Will he stay? And nothing will happen. Someone told me once that I would never love in a way that “would work,” otherwise I would stop writing. It could be. Small miracles. When I finished Moldy Strawberries, I wrote in the margins, without realizing, “creation is a sacred thing.” It’s more or less what Chico says at the end of his article. It’s mysterious, sacred, wonderful.<br /><br />Zézim, give me updates, many, and soon. I didn’t imagine I would miss you this much. I don’t know how long I’ll stay, but I go on staying. I want to write more, go back to the beach, document everything. I’ve even thought: later on, when I’m about to return, wouldn’t you like to come join me? We could do that same thing again, we’d return together. My family loves you madly, today there was even a bit of commotion because everyone wanted to read Chico’s article at the same time.<br /><br />Let me take you down<br />’cause I’m going to strawberry fields<br />nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about<br />strawberry fields forever<br />strawberry fields forever<br />strawberry fields forever</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />That’s what I wish you for the new decade. Zézim, let’s go. No last hopes. We have brand-new hopes, every day. And none, besides living fully, more comfortable inside ourselves, without guilt, that’s it. Let me take you: I’m going to strawberry fields.<br /><br />Tell me about Adélia.<br /><br />And take care, please, take care of yourself. Any darker waters, dial 0512-33-41-97. I can at least listen to you. And please don’t mind any harshness on my part. It’s because I care about you. To quote Guilherme Arantes, to finish this off: “I want to see you healthy / always in a good mood / full of good will.<br /><br />A kiss from</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Caio</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />PS — Hugs to Neilo. To Ana Matos and Nino, too.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Credits: This letter with the translator's note originally appeared in 2019 in <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/sluts-saints-letter-zezim/">Los Angeles Review of Books</a>.</span></div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756477897535279441.post-2402410265639808502021-08-13T07:24:00.000-07:002021-08-13T07:24:45.327-07:00Wislawa Szymborska's "In Praise of Dreams"<br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /> </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: large; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDynyakTxq8ooihvoC6GITqNQMOgl-oJ7NkKXwaGWz9YPwVIYVbDApvxSf2LDW0QS12zCsmASAvTkime1aEyKHpqSXBWW-6XljRq2T5uG9MYUhYCDrATJaHlg1jgiAu5n5EZsIytiwFE4/s301/Pysink.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="301" data-original-width="300" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDynyakTxq8ooihvoC6GITqNQMOgl-oJ7NkKXwaGWz9YPwVIYVbDApvxSf2LDW0QS12zCsmASAvTkime1aEyKHpqSXBWW-6XljRq2T5uG9MYUhYCDrATJaHlg1jgiAu5n5EZsIytiwFE4/s0/Pysink.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Natalia Valenyuk</span></div></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In my dreams </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;">I paint like Vermeer van Delft.<br /><br />I speak fluent Greek<br />and not only with the living.<br /><br />I drive a car<br />which obeys me.<br /><br />I am talented,<br />I write long, great poems.<br /><br />I hear voices<br />no less than the major saints.<br /><br />You would be amazed<br />at my virtuosity on the piano.<br /><br />I float through the air as is proper,<br />that is, all by myself.<br /><br />Falling from the roof<br />I can softly land on green grass.<br /><br />I don't find it hard<br />to breathe under water.<br /><br />I can't complain:<br />I've succeeded in discovering Atlantis.<br /><br />I'm delighted that just before dying<br />I always manage to wake.<br /><br />Right after the outbreak of war<br />I turn over on my favorite side.<br /><br />I am but I need not<br />be a child of my time.<br /><br />A few years ago<br />I saw two suns.<br /><br />And the day before yesterday a penguin.<br />With the utmost clarity.</span><br /><br /></div></div>The Leaving Yearshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07566843331724247404noreply@blogger.com2