The World Is the Home of Love and Death (40 page)

The idea in power at the time was that such historically bastardized and compromised architecture should be simplified, redone, should be
purified.
This was no longer identified as a fascist ideal. Anyway, now a wall of indirect light, of softened glare: the windows face east and it is afternoon; the direct sun is on the other side of the apartment: a wall of light partly broken by narrow brick piers and metal mullions and handsome, very expensive curtains; much of the room is glazed in almost a Greek wave of light.

We look out from the seventeenth floor; and to the right is the gargantuan stone-and-steel reality of the engineers’ load-bearing webs (above mostly invisible-from-here gigantic masonry piers) of a bridge known for its ugliness: a stupendous framework of massive aerial beams and patterned light. When you go near the window or when you sit in certain couches and look out, it bursts on you and overshadows the pretensions and accomplishments of the room. It is witty that it is there, it is
wittily
horrendous, and the final pretension of the room is this alliance with nightmare: we are
“children of the age, rich garbage,”
one of the wits here has said; when you are in the torn room, you see in the flying enormousness of the structure of the bridge a mocking or hectoring ratio and proportion to what goes on here and to the people who are here.

It is a post-war
socialist
ratio, rude and smothering, that says the considerable style and brio of the room are, ultimately, shitty eat-drink-and-be-merry, as well as rich and cleverly thought out and in some ways genuinely pretty and aspiring. The quality of fashion is as if kicked by a very intelligent, gloomy, hysterical seriousness, more satiric and hysterical than reasoned, into a high gear, a
monstrousness.
The room offers a too-obvious lecture on the monstrousness of soul in people and monstrousness of fate and the monstrousness of forces of society and the monstrousness of genetic inheritance and of psychological destiny—this is
deep
and yet fashionable and is a claim of art—and it does have force in the immediate moment on the gathered artists and figures: the tragedy of things in general in the significant form of monstrousness.

“People are always laughing about fashion, but what else is there? You can’t live in a textbook,” Moira says. “I read all the time but I have to come up for air. But what do I know: I’m nuts. If I could be anybody I wanted, I would be Kafka.” She has an oval face, a very finished air of style and mind, unexciting eyes, too-large teeth, and a truly extraordinary physical presence that comes from the degree of style and of madness—she is suicidal, enraged, self-aware. I know it makes no sense, but it was as if she had a brain tumor that caused her to be chic instead of inducing trembles or other forms of vertigo.

The absolutist, or dreamlike nature, of the looming bridge, the way it was there and was
looming
, the claim of deep meaning was rude and antagonistic; it was also childlike. The proportion of failed art and failed will, the size, the scale—this was before the 1960s argued that art didn’t matter. The sermonizing and lamentation were
amusing
, but it was also the use of art as a bludgeon, a
who the fuck are you?
It is an attempt to be authoritative and deep in relation to truth-as-politics. But then the backlash of the noticeably failed genius or whatever of the place and its makers was something that affected the people there and formed a kind of cage of fixity and staleness of reference, not of art but of minor coquetry with truth so that the result was
merely
fashion. Which could be seen as psychological punishment or daily failure through the loss of God. But the chief use of art-failure and serious politics of the left or right is that in the end, obviously, one really isn’t
overshadowed
by it except psychologically esthetically: Other people are overshadowed for you in their politics. It is just a frisson of the moment in the city.

Things in America are so much a matter of date and the onrush of flows of money that certain words and phrases used back then have in my memory a special air: they suggest the era and the Kellows and their friends and my youth:
witty, rich garbage, artists, artistes, socialist, pretty, serious, neurotic
 …

Socialist
meant genuinely human, not racially snobbish, sexually profound—really, it did for a while. It meant
Would-not-EVER-have-been-Fascist or Nazi.
It meant
is not now sanguine about the bomb.
It meant
is in no sense a killer but is richly human.
I suppose it meant that it was a lie and propaganda and it
really
meant something else. Have you ever seen a movie in which the flight of wooden arrows in a late medieval battle is reproduced along with the various sounds they make, the twang of the bows, the whirring in flight of the missiles, the thunk when they hit? One is as if caught in a warlike flight of a wooden rain of arrows, among actual deaths, failures, psychological collapses … I
was on the right side: I am ironic.
 … It was that kind of era.

Moira said in her nervously aging, mad ingenue, toothy way, the tones of which got in your head and stayed there, “Oh (
uh
) I
ih-
hate it-
teh-teh
when rihich people have me-eeee-an fayissis [
faces;
high-pitched voice and staring-eyed, rictus-grin] and don’t enjoy theee-’ngs; ruh
itch
pee-uh-pill oh-utt tuh-ooo
enjoy
thih-em-sell[deepened tone]ves:
I
 … love having a good time … do you?”

A melancholic hysteric, recurrently suicidal: God knew what she ever
meant
—I mean it was as if a poet had written her speeches for her and meant them to remain obscure. She sometimes said she wished she could get a poet to fall in love with her and write things for her to say; she said she would like it if I came to see her early in the morning and “told me deep things to say.…” I had been ordained as
a poet
by some critics although I wrote prose; the term meant I was a Jew and used adjectives and was a smart-ass and it also meant that I was not politically identifiable. It didn’t mean that I was a poet except with some critics, and by poet they meant eccentric and competent—no more than that. Yes, it did.

“The bridge is falling,” she said and giggled, but she half-persuaded herself; and she craned her neck and looked toward the windows to see if the bridge or its shadow was bending. “It feels like the end. I dreamed about the ovens again last night. I am truly mad, you know: I come from New Jersey and that is just too much to ask of someone like me. Ha-ha. I have imperfect breasts and a lot of sorrow—a lot … I think we all should be good: we should all go and scrub out the temple and see if there’s any oil left.… Or say Kaddish because it is the apocalypse …”

Everything in her was directed toward an unarguable guiltlessness, innocence at last. The 1960s were being bred or hatched here.

From where I sat next to Moira on a couch in a grouping near the wall of light, I saw the rapid, current-rippled rush of the East River, muddy eddyings seventeen floors down which were at moments in the light white-gilded. But there was no sound, I didn’t actually hear the throatily murmurous noise of the water or smell the water stink … but they were there in
my head
, memories in the jumble of blown and lightly drifting, changeable, and itchy rays and intimately atticy old scenes and
feathers
 … a lot of fancy-slanted impermanencies. The mind, more scarily and less persistently than a window or a river, is newly and stalely and stably and unstably itself every moment.
This aging junior world
is a spherical dervish in a half-sunlit path—I whispered that one sentence in Moira’s ear. She giggled. Ora is watching from half a room away. And is jealous. Ora once dreamed she was a horseshoe crab scuttling in shallow water (in Maine) and a gull got her:
And the gull was you, Wiley!
It carried her aloft and dropped her in order to crush her shell; it wanted to eat her, Ora said.

It sounded to me more like gull equals girl and she was dreaming about the ecstasies and deaths in being female and she was blaming me, which I guess was to the point.

I told her, and she said,
Explain that to me, say it again slowly
, she said it to me with a kind of angry rapture of attention. At the party, in that particular present-tense moment—of teasing her (perhaps)—what comes back most sharply is how uninnocent I was: I feel my gull wings spread; I feel my
intelligence
like a very-hard-yellow-beak-attempt to tear at her, to turn her over. To make her momentarily helpless, sunny side up. And in her neck, her young neck, in the thin tendons of her strong young neck and her bare arms, in the dank womanliness of her postures—so unlike Moira’s dryness, so unlike anyone: that patient, maybe sullenly amused
sweetness
, that
thin
, restless shell of patience, is life and resentment. It is clear even in the death-gamble of her beautifully boned, fine-eyed face—a face for stories.

But the resistance in her, the intelligence and yet the incomprehension—like a coil in a heater so that the electricity of the woman is joined to the electricity of the rage … the toughness. She glows darkly with anger behind the patience verging on the actual intention to betray and hurt and even murder, actually murder, the urgency to lie—she has a code of honor but no conscience; she is willing to go to hell and to be suicidal rather than be obedient, rather than listen to anyone, rather than learn.

And I know this genitally as well, that she is sexed up by this stuff. But with her sexuality is nothing ideal, nothing movielike, it’s just Ora and her deep-womanly sexual shit, the Ora stuff …

And she shifts her posture, a vaguely semi-boyish stance of the legs—and a quivering abandonment of her breasts, a fleshly, dirty, runaway thing.

I am uninnocent. The papery now is astir as if with fire, with its merciless transience; motion is the substance of love. Anyone might wish for stillness, for an end to the eerie lawlessness of people in reality.… Oh, the restlessness of the light … I am a music of fireworks. Real truth is not necessarily meant for humans to see in human terms and might very well be lightless. One is a guest in the universe—I whispered that to Moira. We can spy but we cannot know. Blinking eyes and the reality of the sun are a bitter explanation of the condition of motion—geographical motion plus a continual efflorescence and dying, the tiny spiraling and flick of the gray, unnameable, undammable, damnable mumble of bustling unstillness in an unnamed everywhere. Of course we are mad in the fixed-liquid-airy-wind,
The Breath of God
, I am sorry. It is pompous but I am half-consoled by this unmapped and emotion-laden condition, this ungeographical, seaborne, breathborn sense of God-as-motion. I don’t know the moral weight or the consequences of saying that Time does not forgive us. Time offers no protection against
chagrin.…
Imagine all posterity laughing at your errors, cursing you for your errors, without bothering to remember you. What would timelessness be, Moira? Moira is nailed and fixed in place in psychic pain, in overwhelming meaninglessness,
crucified
by nerves … And I am
uninnocent as hell—
for the moment—but I do not intend to harm her.

“Do you feel you’re on a strange planet?” Moira asks. She says to Harvey Deuteronomy of me, “He is easy to talk to.”

I really do not understand time, but I feel myself as a young stalk of it stretching his legs on the couch, and goony with consciousness: one lives in the moments
wildly
no matter the austerity one attempts. My state is fringed with distances and exhaustion and doubt and voices.

The queerly swift shuffle and giant glides of the mind are part of a disbelieving rivalry with light. Moira (born Sadie) is real. Her real name is
This Moment
, is her sudden swallow of champagne. “Look: the sky is raw with time,” she said to me. How strange it is, the moment of re-entry to the world. The city is so noisy it is like an echoing porch around this room.

Moira-Sadie says to me, “I see it in your eyes: you’re someone who can use a little help. You’re so sure of yourself …” She is clearly troubled by madness. Pain, when it gets bad enough, jealousy, say, things in the mind, things in the body, is a smelly lion on the path … I think she told me this; I think she made up the image; and I stole it and in memory I hear myself saying it.

But I think it was Sadie-Moira. Her mind, like mine is a cagey, broken rustling of bits of caught or fleeing attention.

Moira said: “I don’t know how to behave with intellectuals.… Well, I’ll just invent something.” I realized how valuable in this world people’s methods were to them since they had risen to this point, so I assumed she was talking fictionally. Whacko Williams, the elegant comedian-turned-television producer, moved nearer. Moira said, “Look: here is the Handsomest Man in the World—and the sexiest except for a couple of English bastards no one has ever heard of—”

“Oh,” said Whacko, “those
duchess-eaters
 …”

“Duchess-eaters.” repeated Moira said with a sly
you-are-stupid-I-am-wicked
grin.

“They are
pussy
cats,” Whacko said.

Moira giggled and laughed enthusiastically: “Oh let’s talk dirty some more,” she said.