- A hope against hope but also knowing the...
- A preview of books written but who will publish them?
- An apology to myself for the failure of my most recent book.
- An attempt to understand
- A failure to be in touch with the present moment
The reality of the end..burying the ashes of Pati Hill in Stonington on Monday 19 September 2016.
William O'Rourke was writing to me about the lightning having to strike if a book like ST. PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin is to have some sort of life. He was remembering the sheer accident of his friend Jaimy Gordon's novel winning the National Book Award six years ago...a novel published by Bruce McPherson and for which he paid the entry fee for the competition so in so many ways all of these awards as are the reviews in the NYTimes etc simply a peculiar lottery and increasingly the only game in town with the death of print reviewing in the country--- no other newspaper has the influence and authority... but alway one remember just how tiny all of this world is and what the destination of each and every person alive in the moment of this being written and then possibly read... yet it is the getting from this moment to that sure destination...
OR
Publishing a book is a sad event.
It is mostly a mistake. But if a
life has been lead in which the thinking about, the writing of and finally the
publishing of a book has been a constant presence then one is forced to
conclude that indeed, this life also has been a mistake.
Because of the veil of death there is no way to truly evaluate any life
lived---that is if one is a believer in an after-life with its series of
judgments but if that too is only consoling fantasy, maybe even a necessary
fantasy…
The wisdom of Pascal would suggest, it is better to believe than to
dis-believe… and to try to believe without acknowledging this wager… because if
it is only a wager on the after-life one then is forced to wager on the
day-to-day and I guess that is what the publishing a book is all about: a
gamble… but just as at the casino there are very few real jackpots but many---
but not too many--- smaller jackpots and often for those who attend the casinos
with some regularity there are complimentary meals and even accommodations are provided
and often those accommodations come with the possibility of meeting other
“winners” or even more importantly “great” winners.
OR
In this afternoon of 29 October, 2016
now more than two month have gone by since the University of Notre Dame Press "published" ST. PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin and not a single notice of it in
any of the major newspapers in this country or in Ireland or England where is
it also supposed to be available.
This
is unlike my previous experience with the publication of THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV and GOING TO PATCHOGUE (published by Dalkey Archive a small literary publisher) when both were reviewed in the
so-called newspaper of record, The New York Times and in other major newspapers across the United States...
I am told in that consoling voice: times have changed... university presses simply don't know how to publish fiction in any meaningful way... and why are you conplaining?
NO NO NO.
I am drawing a line under this book. I have other books that deserve to be seen into print. Ireland is a dead place in too many ways. You only have to read ST. PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin and do not for a moment that what is described as happening at some moment in the past, is actually locked in the past simply by assuming that it is "in the past."
The simple fact the book is a report of this present moment in Dublin... and again I have ended up again resident in the final story of the DUBLINERS.
Brief prepared opening slides of SIX novels from an edition of the many posthumously to be published novels by Thomas McGonigle. Edited by V. Sirin & Bai Ganyo. Illustrations have been indicated but not included.
=ONE=
EMPTY
AMERICAN LETTERS
\\\\\\\\\The Bulgarian
Novel\\\\\\\\
A Book from Bulgaria written in the
American Language which pivots on a single violent death of an American woman
living in Upstate New York, USA.
BY
Thomas
McGonigle, late of Patchogue, New York, USA,
Sofia, Bulgaria and Dublin, Ireland
Thank you
and good
morning. добро утро! G
naydin. Dra dhuit ar
maidin.
naydin. Dra dhuit ar
maidin.
At first there is possibility: Welcome… but that word is ominous, there is the silent complement: and be gone with you.
EMPTYAMERICAN
LETTERS
Seni gormem imkansiz imkansiz imkansiz
ruyalarim olmasa
ruyalarim olmasa
---Zeki
Muran
nothing more illegitimate than to bring
chronological scruples to a work and…
E.
M. Cioran
Reader, and there is never a reason to
write unless one expects to be read… I could find an ear, for sure, any ear and
pour all of these words into that receptacle and have done so but such an ear
will surely die and then…
Reader,
you should know, what follows is concerned with work and a journey
around Bulgaria and why a few people are not with me and Piret as we make our
way in June as we went from Sofia to Strazhitsa, to Veliko Tarnovo to Varna to
Plovdiv to Sofia, to Pernik.
Warning:
(----) …is saying, the trailer was a mess:
there is blood all over everything and dog feces… her two dogs have been
locked in the bedroom and that is awful but the rest of the place is splattered
all over with blood and in the bathroom there are towels soaked with blood…
that is where they find her in the bathroom… Linda has tried to stop the
bleeding… the police are really very
good, the state Troopers, and talking with these homicide investigators and
while they didn’t answer all the questions…
Quoting an old document:
…and if it is to be another
seventeen years before my next visit:
the place is Istanbul but I am tempted to think of other cities, as if
the actual city mattered--- a change of mood you will notice, a hint of
optimism, seventeen years, another visit, I will be .., my life nearly at its
end--- if my parents as a model--- possibly dragging along some awful child,
who will not want to be here, I could probably sell him or her if there is
still a market for white children, would anyone be the wiser, when back in New
York City--- though the irony is, I will have come back here only a year later
with the woman who would be the mother of the son I am to be traveling with and
now I am on my way to .. and to think—in another -- years: … how many years older? …
The absence of those people gnaws at
our journey, never stopping us in our proverbial tracks, never goading us on,
but always shadowing, even on cloudy days… never speaking to us, but always
forcing us to speak of them, aware always they are listening and would hold us responsible
for every word we use or did not use when talking about them though to be sure
they are not ghostly figures, not figments of imagination but humans who would
surely be nailed to the earth as recorded in the registries of births and
inevitably the date of their departures is prepared but held in detail, as is
said, within the bosom of…
Setting out, but first it is necessary
to record the authority for the words which comes from the actual walking the
streets of New York City… either it is the wound in the side of Christ or the
demand of Thomas’s to stick his finger in the wound of Christ before belief..
but upon the appearance of Christ, according to John in the New Testament,
Thomas did not put his hand into the wound, something that would be impossible
if you follow this walking about Manhattan, this thing I call my walking life
which is my walking day for I am also walking in...
I am sure of it when I am finally
awake. There must be a destination and a
departure point because there is no hangover of fear when finally awake. If there has been no departure point, no
planned place of arrival, the awakening would have been consumed by uneasy
feelings leading quickly to…
I know the architecture of the
dreams: glossy pages of their intended
realization and the smell of newsprint on which they finally do appear alive
for a day and then yellowing, soggy with the damp, heaped up at the curb Friday
night.
No dream. This day in and day out of walking. Five days a week. My Walking.
Uptown is where I do my walking, up there where people are serious and
about their business, down here below Fourteenth Street and above Chambers
Street, business is hidden away and no one labors in public. This is the nature of how things work and it
works for me, this person who is now awake ready to walk again though he had
walked all night in the dream.
Nothing remains of the walk of my
dream. Nothing remains some might say
of my walking Uptown and they are probably right on most days but this is not
one of them.
a
…in
the Paleolithic. This implies, on the
one, a belief in a “soul,” able to leave the body and travel freely through the
world, and, on the other hand, the
conviction that, during such a journey, the soul can meet certain ---A History of Religious Ideas (Vol.
1) by
Mircea Eliade
b
(everything is a problem)
c
They would always be
separated from one another by a deep gulf of happiness.
---Three Travelers by Marie-Clair Blais
-1-
Never
not been in love with M------, written in the head, and written down in a
copybook while stretching out on the bed in the Howard Johnson’s in Saugerties.
Upstate
to Saugerties where the mother and father died, now so long ago, not a trace of
their own time or of those years remains except in a mind driving around in the town, out past
the house or what I know as being their house on 9W north of town.
=TWO=
“HE IS ALMOST DEAD”
From SITTNG WITH JOHN WESLEY
(An opening published in the
Notre Dame Review)
or WESLEY
BY Thomas
McGonigle
Thomas McGonigle’s The Beginning of
a Traditional Novel for the Twenty-First Century
BOOK
TWO
The other day, a Monday in the month of March, in a sunny
three window room overlooking Washington Square Park I asked Jack Wesley why he
began to paint.
I don’t know.
Why did you
continue to paint?
I liked doing it.
Why have you
stopped painting?
I am not now
inclined to paint.
Wesley was in
the first generation of Pop artists. He
is in his 85th year. Seven months ago he stopped leaving his
apartment to go down to the North Square restaurant on the corner of MacDougal
and Waverly Place for lunch which had become over the years a daily
activity. Now, the stairs down into the
place were too difficult and the stepping up and down at the curb in order to
cross the intersection had proven
frightening and dangerous since his step had become unsteady.
***
CHARACTERS INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER
***
I know exactly,
I told him, for better or worse, why I began to write fifty-three years ago in
the last century. I could not talk to
Melinda. I was reading about the First
World War and I knew the three poems connected to that war, In Flanders Fields,
Prayer of a Soldier in France and I Have a Rendezvous with Death.
I imagined a
soldier who thinks of Melinda while he is in the trenches in France and where
he will die on November 6, 1918. I wrote
a second story with the title, War Does
End, But the Stain of Sorrow Remains told from her viewpoint of waiting for
Joey to come home. I set the story in
Indiana.
Years later
Melinda told me she had read the stories and wondered how I had discovered her
birthday as my hero had died on her birthday.
So, for over
fifty years and once again I begin or rather… I see Melinda standing in the
second floor hallway either taking out or putting away books or clothing in a
locker. I think it must have been a
morning as there seemed not to be much of a rush. I was in my last year of high school and she
was in her second year.
But I did not
talk about Melinda to Jack as I had come to talk to him of my recent trip to
southern Arizona and New Mexico, along the Mexican border.
While sitting
with Jack Wesley I had shown him this picture which I said was an earlier version
of my most recent attempt at capturing that place.
That is a real
picture, Jack said. The clouds.
As I walked
back home I realized most of the pictures I had shown Jack were of cemeteries
in southern Arizona. He did not say
anything about it and of course always in the room is our shared memory of his
dead wife Hannah Green.
For some reason
or no reason I was telling the male nurse who was helping Jack walk down the
long hall to the door in order to send me on my way that I had known Jack and
his wife for a long time, even in France where I had gone to visit them in
Conques where they sometimes lived for months at a time, away from Barrow
Street.
Melinda even
inhabited France as she had gone there and met a French doctor while skiing in
the French Alps. Something happened but
she never told me what happened though she never went back to Europe.
I am sure I saw
Melinda with a tall fair haired French man who was obviously a doctor once on
the over-night train as I went from Vienna to Paris with Ruth in February of
1983. Ruth said it could not be Melinda
and before I had a chance to look again our way was blocked by the accumulated
ski equipment. In Paris the dollar was
very valuable during that moment and we moved from nice restaurant to the next
and Ruth asked Pati Hill what it was like to be thought very beautiful and Pati
said, I will tell you by saying it is now a pleasure when no one turns and
looks at me.
Ruth did not
believe her as it was obvious Pati was noticing still those heads and whether
they moved or not. She was also careful
to minimize what one could see of the backs of her hands, the most difficult
parts of the human body to disguise when it came to aging.
=THREE=
NOTHING DOING
For in that she poured this ointment on
my body, she did it for my burial.
(Matthew 26/12)
Writer: …I’m called the Writer.
Professor: And what do you write about?
Writer: Readers.
Professor: There’s obviously no point in writing about
anything else…
Writer: There’s no point in writing, full
stop. About anything.
(STALKER dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
Looking
for a house to die in and a place to have a hole dug for my corpse which shall
no longer be mine.
Gone west
to die echoing what was said of the dead in World War One but knowing, I
suppose, is a way of saying I knew it
was getting closer. Once you pictured yourself flung into a tree or bridge
abutment when something didn’t work out with her or him or anything else and
the thought of the resulting tears is sufficient consolation for leaving the
party earlier than expected
If
anything, back then I thought I would have ended up somewhere in North Dakota
as I had long ago been thinking of those little towns slowly closing up shop
and occasionally getting written up as
examples of how things are changing with the passage of shriveling time: the
school closing, the shops going.
But that
was not what happened.
Somewhere
in Arizona between Douglas and Apache or it could have been between McNeil and
Elfrida or between Ajo and Sells I turned off the radio or turned off the CD
player--- I forget what was playing--- and pulled to the side of the road.
It came
down on me… which probably echoes too
many songs…
-----------Does
it go on to this-----------
In the
National Gallery in London there is a painting by Nicholas Poussin. Landscape
with Travelers Resting. Three men
wearing Roman looking tunics are shown.
At the bottom of the painting a man is resting and looking. In the center right a man is adjusting a
sandal. In the upper left part of the
painting a man is walking. The men are
distinguished by the colour of their clothing: yellow, blue and red
Remember, when Marina was saying as we
walked in the Louvre, Look for the yellow as it is often at the center of the
painting about which the eye is to turn.
But she was not there in the National Gallery that afternoon.
What if
the three men are the same man?
Can that
be imposed upon this canvas?
And then
in the catalogue there is another painting mentioned as being painted at the
same time--- Landscape with a Man
scooping Water from a Stream ---
like this one, there is no reference to classical sources. But it was not meant to be shown as a
pendant, the writer of the catalogue asserts.
Three men together.
The men
in the painting are about the same age.
That has always been a problem for them.
They know and do not know the same things. Of course they do not look out at the world
with the same eyes, though they are being looked at with
eyes connected to a central nervous
system. The
difference in their ages is minimal. They come from the same town. They have had the same schooling. They are on the same road. At the moment they are going in the same
direction. They have come from the same
place though because of the way they are being seen that is possibly a mistake,
an assumption easily made and for the moment without consequence.
Nothing
is being hidden. A person has to start
from some place and three men had to have started from some place. They are stuck into those funny clothes which
to the viewers in the early 17th Century were as remote from their own day as
they are from a viewer today, almost four centuries later though it is possible
this is the costume many viewers would have expected these men to have been caught
in, at this moment, in oil on canvas.
-----------Or
does it go on to this-----
Could it
be believed that on another afternoon I was leaning against my car at the
Sandspit dock in Patchogue in late summer waiting for Pete Phlite to show
up?
Could it
be believed that Pete Phlite and I were sitting on the bench in front of our
cars parked on the Sandspit dock watching the boats enter and leave the
Patchogue River between two jetties made out of great boulders with those small
light houses at the end of each of them?
Could it
be believed that Karolin and I had been waiting at the Sandspit dock for Pete
Phlite to show up after he said, be right over and Karolin then listening, I
would often come down here and watch the boats enter and leave the Patchogue River
when I was a kid in high school or back from college.
Could it
be believed Pete Phlite asked me why I wanted to meet him at the Sandspit dock
in Patchogue?
Could it
be believed I had asked to meet Pete Phlite down at the Sandspit dock--- you
know where--- at the end there, where we can watch the boats enter and leave
the Patchogue River?
Could it
be believed Pete Phlite and I were talking about Al Wells, Sean Patrick
Bradford and George Kamenov while sitting up on the back of the bench in front
of our parked cars down there on the Sandspit dock?
----
jarring transitions?-----
The sun
made me shield my eyes as we watched boats enter and leave the Patchogue
River. I had wanted to talk about
Karolin's stepsister coming unwelcomed by her now many years ago from Estonia
to Edison, New Jersey to see their father a week after he had died unbeknownst
to this woman who had been traveling many days by way of Tartu, Leningrad,
Moscow...
Could it
be believed I was telling Pete Phlite about meeting Al Wells, Sean Patrick
Bradford and George Kamenov and how their lives had intersected mine as did
Karolin's life and the memory she had of her stepsister coming from Estonia
many years ago to see their father a week after he had died.
So, three
men described by saying their names. It would be a mistake to assume the men
whose names have now been revealed are wearing the costumes that might now only
be worn in a high school Latin end of the school year celebration if the
teacher had been trying to inspire the students to the lively nature of what
most people think of as a dead language, morbid and gone, really gone. Existing only in books and possibly in some
Vatican documents, written in the dilemma of finding Latin words that can be
applied to helicopter and ballpoint pen.
------all
these names?-----
If you blink you miss Apache, as they
could say. A closed up gas-station and
some other buildings. A u-turn to go
back
through the place (a line of cow skulls in front of that building to be
photographed) and another u-turn and pulling off to the side of the road. Nothing to pick up as a significant
souvenir. Flattened grass and types of
cactii I could not begin to name. No
garbage or broken bottles…the constant wind on the face but no waving trees… a
360 degree turn, a low water tank across there in a far field… barbed wire
fencing on either side of the road… not a house to be seen… wanting to say,
nothing to be seen… but then I would have to describe how I could be standing
by the side of the road… the sharp incline down from the edge of the shoulder…
Realizing
that in all of this movement not a single car has passed by.
----Arizona
to Patchogue and Arizona and Patchogue…----
Could it
be believed that I was telling Pete Phlite down there on the Sandspit dock I
had come back from the desert in Arizona and wanted to tell him about it and
about meeting Al Wells who had been in our class at Patchogue High School and
about this guy Sean Patrick Bradford who I had met again in Paris last year and
more recently I had been and was still
mourning the death of George Kamenov who had been a Bulgarian
psychoanalyst who had spend much of his life outside of Bulgaria and when he
had gone back to Bulgaria it was to study the curious behavior of the guards
and the prisoners in the Communist
concentration camps which had continued to exist in Bulgaria up into the early 1980s which is hard to believe but it
was not hard for Karolin to believe in any of this as she had met her
stepsister when that now middle aged woman had come to Edison, New Jersey from Estonia a week after their father
had died and who smelled of someplace where… she did not have the words for
the… but wanted this woman to go away as soon as possible while at the same
time…
Could it
be believed I had wanted to talk with Pete Phlite about a lot of such things as
I was still wondering if it was possible to talk and hope my interlocutor who maybe did not
even know where Bulgaria or Estonia were on the map but knew that Paris at least
was in France and could he be found to have an interest in this telling while I
was also interested in talking about someone who had gone to high school with
Al Wells and me at Patchogue High School and who had not really been back to
Patchogue after our parents had died?
----too
much being asked?---
Could it
be believed that by being down there on the Sandspit dock I was trying
to understand the goings off to Europe which I had always thought about
doing while I lived in Patchogue and as being a place somewhere out there
beyond Fire Island that ran parallel to the shore on which Pete Phlite and
I were now standing between our cars, turning our backs to the
sun to allow Karolin to take a picture of us, but in fact Europe was actually
off to the left, somewhere, in the direction where the sun came up, while of late I had come back from the
desert, from Arizona, from America
really, as was often said, and it lay out there where the sun was now setting
to our right when we turn away from the camera while suddenly a modified cigarette boat was speeding by
hurling up a vicious wake?
Could it
be believed as Karolin and I were driving out on the Long Island Expressway
from The City and had made the turn for the Veterans Memorial Highway that
arrived at an angle into the heart of Patchogue after passing the Pepsi Cola
bottling plant as I had called Pete Phlite: he being the only person I still
knew who lived in the village and was
likely to be free since he didn’t work on days without an r in them and
thus was likely to be free to meet us down there on the Sandspit dock where I
could talk with him about Sean Patrick Bradford, George Kamenov and Al Wells
who had been in our class but left Patchogue not to go away to college but to
enlist in the Marines as he was tired and fed up with school?
Could it believed as I was standing
there between our cars with Pete Phlite
==FOUR==
WITH ELIZABETH
WITH ELIZABETH. For want of a better title or maybe this is
the best title or it could be called THE STORY OF A DEAD TIME a journey with my
daughter.
Begin with what happened after Elizabeth and I came back from
Europe during the winter.
Beginning at the
beginning. The best way to go about talking, no, writing, since that is what...
Now, at this moment in the
year 2---, no place where the story or our story could be told: no room,
porch, campfire, ocean voyage, rail journey. No setting where such a story
could be teased out and then the effort to see this conversation redundantly
and artfully fixed to the page, arranged by the Scalpel of Chaos, though we
hadn't gone to Zagreb where such an instrument is available in a cafe near the
cathedral.
Neither Elizabeth nor I
could suspend our disbelief in order to hear me talking with a stranger on the
flight back from London: to hear me retelling what appeared to us as we moved
about the English countryside and then to Paris and in one of the near villages
painted by Monet: no, not that famous garden, for this was in January,
seemingly so long ago as I write in July and soon to be August then September
and...
Or, in Vienna in a taverna near the train station where the
Balkans are said to begin, where we were to hear about what Nuala had taken us
to see from the hill in Dalkey: the light to be made visible rising up out of
the Irish Sea revealing the colour of the winding sheet for the corpse of our
dreams as it was sent back into the earth.
All through the Spring I
would take notes of what had happened much as I did even on the flight back
when I had been reading Front de 1'est, 1941-1945 from which I copied
out what Leon Degrelle writes, "Shaking my hand firmly in his two hands at
the moment of my departure. Hitler told me with stirring affection: "If I
had a son I would want him to be like you."
Aware to be sure of the
folly of the taking for granted what had happened as being ordinary yet with
the possibility it was of interest that a father and his daughter might travel
to Europe looking for something that was not there in the still New World.
But nothing could be as
simple as that because life is never so easy as anyone knows who has ever tried
to describe even the brief moment of a hand about to reach out to be shaken
by... though if what had happened did not happen I would have been complaining
in reply: no, nothing much had happened while we were away--- no building fell
down as we walked by, no man held a gun to the head of a child demanding the
President of the United States get on the line and talk to him, right now,
motherfucker, hear me!
No, nothing had happened
to us, I guess, like any of that, but... though taken speechless and afraid of
what had happened as I sat in the aisle seat while Elizabeth looked down to the
mountains of Greenland, already that far along in the flight back to New York:
the mountains of Greenland across which no one has ever walked, I think, or
wanted to walk and of waking in the middle of the night trapped on the side of
one of those mountains while the plane flies overhead with a girl leaning to
see more clearly the figure waving helplessly up to the plane.
Suddenly if I inserted a
little biography here of Leon Degrelle Elizabeth would reply. Dad, do we really
need to know—-just leave the sentence where it is, people will get what they
want from it and will give you time to get around to it when you want to and
maybe you should think about what has happened and how you got so upset when
British Airways canceled two flights and put us on the third flight and still
the plane only has maybe fifty people on it and why did you get so angry and it
was so embarrassing and even if Audrey could lean across to you and tell me,
now Elizabeth, there are some parents who really do enjoy embarrassing their
children in a good way, I should say, don't you know?
Would anyone wonder how
it came to be that a father and daughter were on a flight back from London to
New York---remember it has not been stated how old this daughter is---she has
just turned twelve--- and that father was reading a book by Leon Degrelle and
there had been no sneering sentences to introduce the quote and are we to
assume this is to lull us into some sort of portrait of a lunatic who is about
to...
Or is it all for an
ironic purpose: though we have had no indication that irony is to be the thrust
of what is to happen and of course you have been too polite to ask who is this
Leon Degrelle?
Change the subject. As I
stood talking with Julian, now, the third Julian for me in Paris, the first
died three years before, maybe the other nearly dead, this one really alive and
Spanish-- the other Julian, Green, was American and had shocked people by
trying to resign from being an immortal in the French Academy and the second
one, Gracq, was French walking forever through the castle of Argol---anyway,
not really in Paris but in the village of St. Martin-le-Garenne, in the third
Julian's villa, by the cold fireplace, looking down to the Seine, I said, in
Paris, Elizabeth and I are only looking at paintings from before the French
Revolution. Everything that comes after is the creation of dealers though I
make exception for the paintings of historical events in the Louvre such as the
coronation of the wife of the murderous Emperor. All that other stuff which
people are always going on about is just decoration for motel walls in America.
Yes, a converted train station is an appropriate venue for such work. It would
have been far better if they had turned the station urinals into little museums
dedicated to the thrill of the sudden assignation.
You can't be serious,
Julian would reply, and point to the hazy winter Seine and artfully arranged
willows shaping themselves into material for impressionist paint.
If I revealed and I am
not about to for many and obvious reasons that Julian was the last secretary to
Leon Degrelle who lived out his last years as an exile in Spain, though even
Julian would not have a sense of the absurd large enough to understand why it
might be a literary necessity and possibility that he had to take up this
responsibility because did not Georgi Ivanov once argue that the memoir was the
last frontier of fiction and this was back in the 1930's in Paris when he would
lie upon his bed so wracked with despair that the cockroaches had no fear of
his inclination to squash them.
That is... a few years
ago... according to Nina Berberova in her apartment high up overlooking
Independence Hall in Philadelphia: Ivanov was the one unique person she had
ever met, the one Russian in exile who stood alone midst a swarm of men and
woman who stood alone: only Ivanov was concerned with his and other lives: once upon a time in St. Petersburg and later
in Paris and in Berlin and the truth residing within the fiction they walked
through.
Berberova had not been in
love with Ivanov. Her heart was taken elsewhere away from The Splitting of
the Atom where a corpse is the only fit object of a man's desire and now
she lived in this modern apartment--- all her relatives, all her friends from
that time dead, even her immortal enemies dead so no satisfaction down that
lane--- with best sellers in every Paris bookstore, long after it might have
mattered.
What a joke: going into
the grave at last being read...
But one gets used to such
ironies and the feeling that no matter what one could have done it was sheer
accident, that it was all mere happenstance allowing her to survive all this
time and now, why was an uninteresting word.
While the passing of
time--- eighty some years: a matter of tossing one newspaper over there on top
of another newspaper. How long does it take for the paper to move through the
air? When you answer you have what it feels like to have lived a great number
of years.
==FIVE==
THE END OF THE END OF THE BEGINNING
A book from the Sixties
1.
THEN
In order
that these lines reach their destination, perhaps hundreds of years are necessary... our sense of communication is inversely proportional to
our real knowledge of the addressee and directly proportional to our felt need to interest him in ourselves...
bound only to the providential contemporary...
Yes,
as Edward urged me, I, too, have found a sentence to read and now attempting to
complement those words of Mandelstam: because we are always beginning, or
rather, I am always beginning, again, might I quickly add, though I really did
not have to be so scrupulous if what I am aware of, out there on the street, is
now the way to be in this city of New York.
A place or a journey?
Have I found a real question?
At last?
The
only place I know is the creative nothingness out of which everything is
possible.
He could go on. Max Stirner. That's for
sure.
So a journey, a setting forth, but
without the library of more than five hundred volumes Lamartine packed for his
journey to the Balkans in 1856.
Or I could be with Xavier de Maistre
touring about in this room on East First Street in Manhattan but and how I
would still long for the nights of St. Petersburg though to even mention those
nights of the other de Maistre...
I have not begun to have my books bound in leather as Edward
suggested when talking to me in his
windowless room so long ago on the Upper West Side--- the grim fragility of
talking about books when now so much closer to those lines from 1965:
SHORT THOUGHT
ON DEATH
Bright white bird
Come
claim
me
for
black paradise.
I should
have stopped then--- did my claim ever really get any better than those lines?
Toss it all away.
I
did know, I think, the value of my life and it was not worth the breath of the
complaint---
Threw it all up, as people said in Dublin, became a driver and companion
to the rich guy in the south of France whose ad I had answered from The Times.
Did not come back to New York, stayed on until the guy was dead, moved
to the next possibility in Venice and then Trieste, away and not back as now
when not for a moment do I want any distraction because here in this moment of
beginning the rag of experience is my only necessary garment but
I had wanted to implicate you by writing, the
rag of experience is our only necessary garment.
In Manhattan, it is complicated getting
by subway from East First Street, between First and Second Avenue to West 114th
Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive.
Take the F train from First Avenue and Houston
Street to 47th and 50th Streets, change to the B or D and then at 59th Street
change to the 1 for 110th or 116th Street.
Walk over to Eighth Street and Broadway, take the
N or R train to Times Square, change to the 1 for 110th or 116th Street.
Walk over to Sheridan Square and Christopher
Street and take the 1 up to 110th or 116th Street.
With great regularity the trains are
being re-arranged because of construction and other circumstances are always
changing.
This
is right now. Back then, I probably never thought about how hard it is
to get down to East First Street, that is if I ever gave thought to getting down to East First Street.
It's an
expedition, a real expedition to go up to 114th Street between Broadway and
Riverside Drive, a real expedition for me. The word expedition is not exactly
apt for such a journey but it is an indication of the emotional adjectives
which ought to attach themselves to such a journey.
2.
I
They wake up on Friday night...
See them dancing in their pants at the
Astor Place subway station.
Proverbial electricity in the air, even
on the coldest Friday in winter.
Just let it rip, a guy is yelling down
Second Avenue.
Back twenty-five years ago: I'd walk over to the East Village on a
Friday night and see what was happening...
Possibility is Friday night. Have a
couple drinks, get into a conversation, who knows where, when--- say the right
words and Saturday morning takes care of itself: always something to do, get on
about doing it, no time to linger over thoughts about Monday.
But I'd rather be traveling forever in the winter of Europe. The
comforting variety of grey sky and the startling sign
DUBOIS
as the train leaves Gare du Nord while the overhead electric lines
divide the upward gaze having forgotten the face until I look out of the window
from a different angle, struck by the reflection of this old man and all that
he is trying to carry; as he says to himself, as the sky is segmented by the
complicated geometry of electricity.
Would
it have all been different if he had not been alone? The double-decker suburban
trains are idled having delivered their cargo to the city. A station sign
VILLERS LE BELLE
a beaten down once upon a time village with the detail of a swing set
behind a house with windows closed to the world by tacked-up newspaper.
How
easy it would have been to tip one's self into the Seine, on a whim, how easy
to notice the workmen repairing a flood wal1, the tourist boat on ahead and the
water green streaked with a stain of blue gasoline while no street lamps were
yet reflected in the late afternoon. He in the heady grayness and maybe there
would be a shout and then the head bobbing in the water and...
Not a thought of anyone,
not a fragment for those who would be left behind: just my self falling into
the water being watched by this man who turns to walk for the ferris wheel set
up in the Tuileries that
year notices Les Fils de Cain, a slash of modern
sculpture more alive than either of their bodies no longer being apprised for a
proposition walking on this January day as when in another year he had been in
Paris returning from Sofia in order to visit with Julian Green, one last time,
when that something having gone very wrong had gone wrong again and he was no
longer being looked at in that way and he no longer grazed...
Surely it is not all that hard to go to
the Upper West Side if you really want to go there? Do you really need to go
there at this exact moment?
The answer is in the obvious bulk of these pages though no one has ever
come to demand that I set forth on this expedition, this journey; coming by
demanding that I mark out the stations, the essential points of interest;
reminding me of the urgency, the brevity of time, as well they should, because
this is a traditional voyage, a merging with many another pilgrimage.
In January in Paris the night falls on
a man as he turns away from the Tuileries. The lights of the ferris wheel were
suddenly too bright. For a moment he had enjoyed the oddness of the glossy
lights in the late afternoon but now... just material for a contemporary
photographer while in the dark he would have been unable to see his face, when
he passed him again now on his return to walk across the bridge for the safety
of the mirrored back room of the little cafe emptying of the lingering lycee
students who reminded me of being in Nantes once upon a time with two hours to
kill, as is said, at a café next to the 24 hour EROS prono across from the
train station
===SIX===
JUST LIKE THAT
A novel from the Sixties of the last Century
Just Like That
Are you a Jew?
I was asked this question 35
years ago in Leipzig.
--- Are you
a Jew?
I
did not know his name. We had begun talking to each other near the facade of the still then, in 1965 war-ruined university but his question was not asked until some hours later as he
eased open my trousers in a shadowy room on a day bed next to a huge table
dominated by a
crystal vase filled with Christmas
ornaments.
At
once, I did not really understand his question and you must understand it was asked during my first
journey to Germany, during my first excursion to the east, to what was then called the German Democratic Republic
or what was
more familiarly known of as
East Germany. All back
when, I guess, it might seem to have been some sort of adventure, though indeed it was, to go behind the Iron Curtain, to that place where boys younger than I had attacked with their bare hands, as it was said on the radio, Russian tanks in the streets of Budapest while I had been playing at war dying face down in a gladiola garden on Furman Lane in Patchogue.
I was twenty years old
that spring and had been living in Dublin while
attending University
College, The new professor of English had given
a series of lectures on Shakespeare based upon a line in King Lear, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth,
And
while I could not even then begin to tell you truly what the theme of the lectures had been I both remembered that line, underlining it in my Penguin edition which stayed among my books for many years--- the book second-hand at Bamba's out in Rathmines---
and had the line with me immediately that April as crossed England to Belgium
and then through Holland on to Berlin and to Leipzig.
In a small crowded room of a municipal
hostel in Brussels a Vietnamese boy asked me why are you Americans attacking my
country? I tried to say that there was a
difference between a person and the country that claims him; that I hadn’t
killed anyone or wanted to kill anyone.
The Vietnamese boy would have none of that: you are an American, your
country is attacking my country and you are attacking me even though I am only
a Vietnamese students here in Brussels.
I tried to reply along the lines that because of all of this was the
reason why I was over here in Europe now… why I didn’t have an American flag on
my backpack, why I had been living in
Ireland. My answer seemed to be only an
answer to him. But that still doesn’t
change the fact that because you are American you want to kill me because I am
Vietnamese.
Later
as I tried to fall asleep in that tiny room I heard the Vietnamese boy’s
breathing. I do not know for sure, now,
that I was picking out his breathing and how I was able to distinguish it from
the many other sleeping forms, but I wanted to be able to single out his
breathing, to know where he was breathing.
After
leaving the hostel early in the morning, not seeing the Vietnamese boy who must
have maybe left even earlier, I took an address from a poster and went to what
turned out to be a bare office stuffed with newspapers behind the central train
station and was given posters attacking American and Belgian imperialism in the
Congo while urging solidarity with the Vietnamese people. They must have thought I was Irish--- I said
I was a student from Dublin. Both posters
showed a group of men in helmets looking down at a pile of dead bodies.
A few days later in the Amsterdam youth
hostel a boy from Ceylon was showing the other hostelers a pair of red panties
he said he had gotten from this girl who was so happy to forget them. He wished that the red colour was dried blood
though that was not the case with this girl, who knew so many men and boys, but
he had been her favorite, yes, she had really said that to him, as she was forgetting
her panties. He folded the lacy garment
and stuffed it into the front pocket of his fake jeans. He was going out later and maybe he would get
another pair of panties for the other pocket but I hoped in some way he would
fail in his quest because I felt a vivid sorrow for the girl even though
probably she could have only contempt for my adolescent compassion I am or was confused in my own mind about the differences between feeling
sorry, feeling pity, feeling compassion. These words were stirred around and about by the events of my childhood in Patchogue, a village sixty miles from New York City,
Distinctions of every kind held a great
sway over my imagination as I walked about the darkened streets of that part of Amsterdam. Even mentioning a day later
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