[sic]: A Memoir (13 page)

Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m’excuse.

In English:

Dunno. Sorry.

•

THERE ARE SEVERAL
consequences for all this.

We’ve covered Freud and Darwin. So that just leaves Nietzsche. The crystalline clarity of this morphine delusion proves, perhaps, the Nietzschean maxim that “some situations are so bad that to remain sane is insane.” I had always enjoyed, even as a very young child, a rich dream-life. Many of my experiences in dreams, in fact, have been far more vivid than some real-life experiences; not only do dreams account for some of the most emotionally engaged moments of my life, but—and this is somewhat embarrassing to reveal, but I’m being perfectly honest—they account for
every
moment in my life in which I’ve felt politically engaged. It’s a feeling I’ve never been able to recapture in waking life, to my great disappointment. (Then again, if I spent 1 percent of my time actually reading about politics, informing myself as a responsible citizen, instead of writing all the time about nothing, and reading books about Ezra Pound, whom nobody even knows anymore, let alone cares about, I might be able to fulfill this part of my life.) And primarily it’s for this reason that I’m typically tempted to consider dreams as unmediated, sacrificing intellectual gradations for intensity. But so many moments in waking life are unmediated as well—love, states of intoxication, listening to great music, et cetera—and I’ve had, on the other hand, analytical dreams, dreams that continue the day’s work, problem-solving dreams (these, to my mind, are failed dreams). So what, exactly, separates a sharp memory of early childhood, say, from a morphine delusion, or an image seen in a dream from an image read in a book? They’re all equally tangible, equally intangible products of electrochemical signaling. About twenty minutes ago, for example, I awoke suddenly, for no apparent reason. It’s about four thirty in the morning. I often awake like this now; I have ever since the transplant. I opened my eyes and the blue-grey light of early dawn, dim but secure, was distinct as porcelain. Then I realized it wasn’t daybreak at all, but fluorescent light emanating from one of the tallwindowed artists’ studios (wait, there are still artists in New York?) facing my apartment, across the narrow canyon of lower Broadway. (In the original draft of
The Waste Land
, Eliot writes of sailors seeing by starboard “something which we knew must be a dawn— / a different darkness,” and his friend Mr. Pound excised the line.)
⁷
That was the first realization, the thing about the light. The second: for the first few moments of wakefulness, I had entirely forgotten my hospital experience, the very subject of this book; and I’d only realized I’d forgotten it at the sudden appearance in my mind’s eye of the image—as vengeful as an illusion—of my hospital room’s wall, and at first I interpreted the image as a dreamt one. But the hospital wall was and is no dream, it was and is memory, and for the subsequent few moments this fact was dumbfounding; as the false dream gradually took proper form as true memory, it seemed to be a memory impossibly distant, a memory, perhaps, belonging to someone else. It couldn’t be my memory. Not yet. Pound once wrote a poem called “Envoi,” which begins by addressing a “dumb-born book,” and goes on to have a female voice quote or echo or rewrite or pay homage to or rip off another poem by the seventeenth-century English poet Edmund Waller. And Hugh Kenner, that wonderful aforementioned critic who people don’t read enough of these days (people couldn’t possibly read him enough, but alas, they live their lives as responsible citizens, reading about politics), describes the poem as “in a time so far declined from Waller’s that the lady singing Waller’s song does not know his name.”
⁸
Pound is not the lady, and the lady doesn’t know Edmund Waller; but she sings his song.

I think the fact that I had entirely forgotten, for a few moments, my hospitalization is a good sign, and the fact that I misinterpreted the recollection of the hospital room’s wall as a dream is another good sign. Isn’t that mental health? Ultimately a healthy person
correctly
assigns electrochemical signalings to dream or to imagination, to memory or to delusion. But before the healthy person does this, doesn’t the healthy person also temporarily
miscategorize
—especially if such miscategorization might serve as a self-saving mechanism? What else, after all, is creativity, if not self-permission to get something wrong, in order to subsequently reorder that something to get it right, like the little boy Freud saw, hiding his toys so that he could lose them, so he could have something to seek? With that thought: back to sleep. It’s twenty to five. I can regrasp sleep; it’s tangible, within my reach. No problem. And now I remember I’d been dreaming, not of the hospital but of something else, I remember what it was and I kid you not: it was and is the end of this chapter. I’d been dreaming about reading exactly what I’m writing right now. I hadn’t written it; I was reading it, and what I’m doing at this moment is transcribing it—trying to be as accurate a court reporter as Mohammed’s scribe. (I’d read that phrase, in the dream. I kid you not. This parenthetical was not in the dream. Okay, back to the dream.) The dream was about voice: this is a memoir, and to tell a memoir, especially a memoir of the experiences I have to describe, I have to adopt a voice other than my own, and speak through it. (As I mistook my memory of the hospital wall for someone else’s memory; as Pound is not the lady singing the song that is not hers, not that she knows. This parenthetical, incidentally, wasn’t in the book in the dream, either. And the artist has turned off his fluorescent light, but now there is, in fact, the blue-grey light of early dawn, dim but secure, distinct as porcelain. From blackness to blue-grey dreaming to red noontime life, back to blue-grey sunset back to blackness. There will be repetition in this account. But back to transcribing the chapter in the dream. Here’s how it ended. I kid you not:) It’s my voice and not my voice. So what’s true, what’s false? What if I grabbed a light-blue highlighter and highlighted the true statements, left the false statements alone? I would highlight this one, then. This one is true. If I were to be perfectly honest.

VI

WAS PICASSO SMART?

Golaud:
Je dis une chose très simple. Je n’ai pas d’arrière-pensée; Si j’avais une arrière-pensée, pourquoi ne la dirais-je pas?

I’m saying something very simple. There’s no subtext. If I had a subtext why wouldn’t I just say it?

—Maurice Maeterlinck, the libretto

for Debussy’s opera
Pelléas et Mélisande

How I’d wanted to go step by step through the
story, chapter by chapter, block by block, regimented, writing a draft and polishing a block until lo and woe and behold there it stands: the simple story in the sunlight, a line of polished blocks. So much for that.

You’ve probably forgotten, for example, that when I was talking about
Don Giovanni
and the Rolling Stones’
Some Girls
I also brought up Paul Klee—how he was enamored of the Mozart opera, how he once inscribed a painting with a list of his sexual conquests. One of my major “security blankets” during the hospitalization was an old art book on Klee that I’d inherited from my parents. Why was it such a comfort?

First of all, obviously, because I, along with so many others, admire his art. It’s pleasurable to look at, and finding sources of pleasure is an important aspect of dealing with high levels of pain.

But along with my love for his art is my love for what I imagine he was
as a person
. Isn’t that odd? I don’t just like his art, I like
him
, as an imaginary friend. When I realized this, I found this was very odd, for I normally see myself as an early twenty-first-century, darkly brooding, edgy, raw post-postmodernist, not a seventeenth-century, teleologically minded, moral sentimentalist like the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, or Holden Caulfield. But then I realized that my favorite artists are those I imagine would be nice people to know. And that’s fucked up. David Foster Wallace wrote that “watching his scenes I again felt that I admired [David] Lynch as an artist and from a distance but would have no wish to hang out in his trailer or be his friend.”
⁹
On the other hand, when I met Lynch I found him to be extremely nice; I got a really good feeling from him. Unlike DFW, I
would
like to be his friend. Some of Lynch’s subject matter is pretty disturbing, but some of the things I’ve been writing about are pretty disturbing too. And I wouldn’t like it if someone read my book and said, I admire him as a writer, but I would have no wish to meet someone who wrote things like that, or to be friends with someone who would write things like that. When I was writing this, I gave a draft of part of this book to a friend in publishing, and she said she thought the writing was good but warned me that if it’s published “you won’t be able to have regular relationships anymore.” What the hell did she mean by that? Maybe the stuff about girls? And then—as a matter of fact—she never talked to me again. And I wondered, maybe I shouldn’t publish it? This issue of the interconnectedness of guilt and fear and writing was, as I tried to demonstrate, the heart of my morphine delusion, and it was—as we’ll see—a major preoccupation of my father when he quit his job and devoted himself to writing, and was afraid he was upsetting everyone. He wasn’t upsetting me. I told him that.

(And for that matter, David Foster Wallace wrote some pretty disturbing things as well, and it’s the same thing—I admire his writing
and
I would have liked to have been his friend, and when he killed himself I was extraordinarily upset and felt as if I had lost a good friend; and I wish he were still around so that I could ask him about this. I know he’d reply.)

(And needless to say the most obvious example of good artist slash bad person is Pound. How could you want to meet someone who said over the radio, on April 30, 1942,

Don’t start a pogrom. That is, not an old-style killing of small Jews. That system is no good, whatever. Of course, if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom up at the top. I repeat . . . if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom up at the top.
¹⁰

And yet we read that years later Allen

Ginsberg had taken the master’s hand and leaning over had kissed him, gracefully and naturally, on the right cheek. Pound appeared greatly moved. As he turned to walk into the house, he gazed a last time into the younger poet’s eyes and said, “I should have been able to do better.” Then he stepped across the threshold and was gone from sight.
¹¹
)

Anyway, the third reason the Klee book was such a comfort stems from my strong association of this particular copy of this particular book with my childhood and my parents, whose collection of art books was a source of fascination for my preliterate self. In all probability my parents hadn’t intentionally hidden the books, but as I moved, as a child, from the periwinkle foyer, where guests from the outside were greeted and from the inside were bid farewell, through the vaguely Iberian, stucco arched entryway, finally reaching the living room, all blacks and deep reds—this was where the expensive furniture was; this was where adults would sit after dinner, lowball glasses held over crossed legs; this was where I, as a baby, had been forbidden to tread, a prohibition that had never officially been lifted—I nonetheless had the distinct sense that I was traversing some precarious threshold. The voluptuousness and the silence were tangible there: the odd sensation of being simultaneously cloaked and unveiled: the art books weren’t on open shelves, but tucked inside a cylindrical occasional table of solid walnut that doubled as an end table for a Venetian blown-glass lamp. It opened not with hinged cabinet doors but with curved retractable shutters, rather like a tambour desk: sliding the pleated panels open released the delicious odors of wood, furniture polish, and the pungent aroma of old books: sweet almond-vanilla tempered with the slight touch of mildew. And what books! I hadn’t yet learned to read. I remember what English looked like then: paragraphs were solid blocks of grey, but when I looked closer they would fall apart, delicately, into spindly tessellations. (And like I said before, I have no memory of not knowing how to read music. Music held.) If the words were indecipherable, the potency of the glossy, hand-fastened plates of Klees and Picassos and de Koonings more than compensated. They represented nothing less than the veiled mystery of my parents’ life together before I had existed; they represented, in fact, my parents’ complicity in my very coming to existence. (In other words, those books, and for that matter my parents’ record collection, equally cryptic, represented the mystery of sex, which is to the virgin what, later, death will be to the spoilt.) I’ve already talked about this, but what I haven’t said is the fact that, reading the Klee book during my fifth or maybe sixth chemo, I hit upon a passage I’d long forgot I’d read. It states that Klee, late in life, was haunted by the question of whether he had given eroticism the proper weight in his work as a whole. What a question! Particularly coming from an abstract, plastic artist—an artist who doesn’t deal in words. Because those who don’t deal in words, at first glance, seem to me to not have to think about the question of sex as those who think in words do, precisely because sex is not a question until it’s put into words. While Roth and Bellow and Updike and Erica Jong and Norman Mailer
think
about sex, Picasso
has
sex. Which brings up the question of whether Picasso was
smart.

“Was Picasso
smart
?” a brilliant young woman asked me once, long ago. I knew exactly what she meant. (O what gorgeous young minds we had, smooth as sanded sandalwood. One afternoon, we’d driven across a black bridge, over water.) After all, painters like Picasso and Klee can get away with the casual epigram, the tossed-off aphorism, but writers, uniquely and unjustly burdened by the weight of words, will inevitably be snared. Try paging through Bartlett’s. You’ll find the painters’ quotes are startlingly brilliant, effortless, unlike favorite quotations by Eliot and Nietzsche and Kafka and the great Romanian aphorist Cioran, which seem to have been unearthed laboriously. “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary” (Picasso). “Imitate nothing” (Klee). “Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun” (Picasso). “Color and I are one” (Klee). “Everything you can imagine is real” (Picasso). Aha. Yes, a painter, a plastic artist, a musician would say something like that, wouldn’t he. And consider the counterproposal of the man of letters: Alexander Theroux’s devastating final sentence on the 878th page of his latest novel,
Laura Warholic
: “Dreams, by definition, do not come true.”

The book on Klee was published the old-fashioned way. Like the
New York Times
tirelessly points out every week or so in an article about one or another of the arts, it’s not that nobody has the money to hand-insert plates anymore, it’s just that there’s no longer a market for it. (I don’t need my local paper to remind me over and over that pursuing a career in the arts is risky. That’s what parents are for, in high school. And by the way,
New York Times
, there’s no longer a market for you either.) The text is written by a German art historian named Will Grohmann, and it’s so refreshingly free of the contemporary art critic’s second thoughts, irony, and deconstructive analysis. Like how Grohmann writes that Klee’s range of reading is “awe-inspiring”; the young painter’s “maturity of judgment is astonishing”; Klee “speaks of the most abstract matters in vividly graphic language”; indeed, “only a man with so rich a store of images and anticipations was capable of producing works so entirely new.” Grohmann tells us that in 1906, in Munich, at the age of twenty-seven, Klee married a pianist named Lily Stumpf. (Fortunately, Grohmann refers to her as Lily, not Stumpf.) Around this time, Klee was making etchings, and his former professor, a guy named Struck (Struck? Stumpf?), liked them enough to facilitate their exhibition. One of them is called
Virgin in a Tree
. Klee wrote Lily that this work “may suggest something true enough: that enforced virginity, so highly praised, is good for nothing.”

Sixteen years later, Klee created a pen and watercolor work entitled
Analysis of Various Perversities.
Mr. Grohmann’s demureness strikes the present-day reader as charming, and ultimately as bewildering, as his choice of comma over semicolon after the first clause of his opening sentence, betraying his discomfort.

Nothing was alien to Klee, he was even interested, though not overly so, in sexual problems. To the extent that he saw them from outside, he did not think the love life of human beings very different from that of other living beings; to the extent that he was involved personally, he often felt that he was neutral. He wondered whether, in the end, people would believe he had taken too little account of such matters. His attitude to the erotic was something else; no one will maintain, surely, that he lacked Eros, but Klee himself often doubted that he had given it its proper place in his work as a whole.

Paul Klee,
Analysis of
Various Perversities
, 1922.

That’s the sentence I was talking about before. What’s coincidental is that the watercolor in question pictures a doctor at work. “The medical and experimental are brought to the fore,” Mr. Grohmann writes, “presenting us with a kind of laboratory with much apparatus.”
¹²
I suppose my hospital room was a kind of laboratory; there was certainly much apparatus, things stuck in my chest, my arms, the catheter implanted in the chest leading straight to an artery. Baudelaire wrote that “the act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.” My young, brilliant pain management MD—but here, unprepared, we are presented with the intentionally unemphatic entrance of the real Not Her Real Name. Obviously Caroline was not Caroline’s real name, but neither was Caroline not the real Not Her Real Name; just as Sophie (not her real name) was not the real Not Her Real Name. The true Not Her Real Name—I’ve saved the four-word, tetragrammatonical epithet in all its capitalized glory for the one who deserves it: epithets are, by one definition, contemptuous: let the penalty match the transgression. Not Her Real Name: or Nothereal, as I’m going to call her for short, for convenience. I deserve a little ease at this point. (Alexander Theroux even said once, probably more than once, that revenge was the “single most informing element of great world literature,” not “love and war, with which themes . . . it has more than passing acquaintance.”)
¹³
Nothereal: a word that looks—although I’ve never pronounced it, only written it down—like it would rhyme, ironically, with “ethereal,” since she was anything and everything but ethereal, real, all too real: the real Nothereal, a word whose secondary characteristics include a resemblance to “gonorrhea” and “guttural” and “Notting Hill”; these secondary characteristics are less ironic, although the person to which the word points was, and I assume remains, physically disease free, elegantly articulate, and, much to her eternal dismay, was neither raised on Clarendon Cross nor, for that matter, able to physically contribute to the assault of persons with darker pigmentation (to the best of my knowledge, anyway).
*