Authors: Donald Barthelme
“YES,” Bill said, “I wanted to be great, once. But the moon for that was not in my
sky, then. I had hoped to make a powerful statement. But there was no wind, no weeping.
I had hoped to make a powerful statement, coupled with a moving plea. But there was
no weeping, except, perhaps, concealed weeping. Perhaps they wept in the evenings,
after dinner, in the family room, among the family, each in his own chair, weeping.
A certain diffidence still clings to these matters. You laughed, sitting in your chair
with your purple plywood spectacles, your iced tea. I had hoped to make a significant
contribution. But they remained stony-faced. Did I make a mistake, selecting Bridgeport?
I had hoped to bring about a heightened awareness. I saw their smiling faces. They
were going gaily to the grocery for peanut oil, Band-Aids, Saran Wrap. My census of
tears was still incomplete. Why had I selected Bridgeport, city of concealed meaning?
In Calais they weep openly, on street corners, under trees, in the banks. I wanted
to provide a definitive account. But my lecture was not a success. Men came to fold
the folding chairs, although I was still speaking. You laughed. I should talk about
things people were interested in, you said. I wanted to achieve a breakthrough. My
penetrating study was to have been a masterly evocation, sobs and cries, these things
matter.
I had in mind initiating a multi-faceted program involving paper towels and tears.
I came into the room suddenly, you were weeping. You slipped something out of sight,
under the pillow.
“ ‘What is under the pillow?’ I asked.
“ ‘Nothing,’ you said.
“I reached under the pillow with my hand. You grasped my wrist. An alarm clock spread
the alarm. I rose to go. My survey of the incidence of weeping in the bedrooms of
members of the faculty of the University of Bridgeport was methodologically sound
but informed, you said, by too little compassion. You laughed, in your room, pulling
from under the pillow grainy gray photographs in albums, pictures of people weeping.
I wanted to effect a
rapprochement
, I wanted to reconcile irreconcilable forces. What is the reward for knowing the
worst? The reward for knowing the worst is an honorary degree from the University
of Bridgeport, salt tears in a little bottle. I wanted to engage in a meaningful dialogue,
but the seminal thinkers I contacted were all shaken with sobs, wracked is the word
for it. Why did we conceal that emotion which, had we declared it, could have liberated
us? There are no parameters for measuring the importance of this question. My life-enhancing
poem was mildly meretricious, as you predicted. I wanted to substantiate
an unsubstantiated report, I listened to the Blue Network, I heard weeping. I wanted
to make suitable arrangements but those whose lives I had thought to arrange did not
appear on the appointed day. They were deployed elsewhere marching and counter-marching
on fields leased from the Police Athletic League. I was perhaps not lucky enough.
I wanted to make a far-reaching reevaluation. I had in mind launching a three-pronged
assault, but the prongs wandered off seduced by fires and clowns. It was hell there,
in the furnace of my ambition. It was because, you said, I had read the wrong book.
He reversed himself in his last years, you said, in the books no one would publish.
But his students remember, you said.”
THE REVOLUTION OF THE PAST GENERATION IN THE RELIGIOUS SCIENCES HAS SCARCELY PENETRATED
POPULAR CONSCIOUSNESS AND HAS YET TO SIGNIFICANTLY INFLUENCE PUBLIC ATTITUDES THAT
REST UPON TOTALLY OUTMODED CONCEPTIONS.
PAUL sat in his baff, wondering what to do next. “Well, what shall I do next? What
is the next thing demanded of me by history?” If you know who it is they are whispering
about, then you usually don’t like it. If Paul wants to become a monk, that’s his
affair entirely. Of course we had hoped that he would take up his sword as part of
the President’s war on poetry. The time is ripe for that. The root causes of poetry
have been studied and studied. And now that we know that pockets of poetry still exist
in our great country, especially in the large urban centers, we ought to be able to
wash it out totally in one generation, if we put our backs into it. But we were prepared
to hide our disappointment. The decision is Paul’s finally. “Are those broken veins
in my left cheek, above the cheekbone there? No, thank God, they are only tiny whiskers
not yet whisked away. Missed in yesterday’s scrape, but vulnerable to the scrape of
today.” Besides, most people are not very well informed about the cloistered life.
Certainly they can have light bulbs if they want them, and their rivers and mountains
are not inferior to our own. “They make interesting jam,” Hank said. “But it’s his
choice, in the final analysis. Anyhow, we have his typewriter. That much of him is
ours, now.” People were caressing each other under Paul’s window. “Why are all these
people existing under
my window? It is as if they were as palpable as me—as bloody, as firm, as well-read.”
Monkish business will carry him to town sometimes; perhaps we will be able to see
him then.
“MOTHER can I go over to Hogo’s and play?” “No Jane Hogo is not the right type of
young man for you to play with. He is thirty-five now and that is too old for innocent
play. I am afraid he knows some kind of play that is not innocent, and will want you
to play it with him, and then you will agree in your ignorance, and then the fat will
be in the fire. That is the way I have the situation figured out anyhow. That is my
reading of it. That is the way it looks from where I stand.” “Mother all this false
humility does not become you any more than that mucky old poor little match-girl dress
you are wearing.” “This dress I’ll have you know cost two hundred and forty dollars
when it was new.” “When was it new?” “It was new in 1918, the year your father and
I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I
know there have been other wars since, better-publicized ones, more expensive ones
perhaps, but our war is the one I’ll always remember. Our war is the one that means
war
to me.” “Mother I know Hogo is thirty-five and thoroughly bad through and through
but still there is something drawing me to him. To his house. To the uninnocence I
know awaits me there.” “Simmer down child. There is a method in my meanness. By refusing
to allow you to go to Hogo’s house, I will draw Hogo here, to your house,
where we can smother him in blueberry
flan
and other kindnesses, and generally work on him, and beat the life out of him, in
one way or another.” “That’s shrewd mother.”
THE poem remained between us like an immense, wrecked railroad car. “Touching the
poem,” we said, “is it rhymed or free?” “Free,” Snow White said, “free, free, free.”
“And the theme?” “One of the great themes,” she said, “that is all I can reveal at
this time.” “Could you tell us the first word?” “The first word,” she said, “is ‘bandaged
and wounded.’” “But . . .” “Run together,” she said. We mentally reviewed the great
themes in the light of the word or words, “bandaged and wounded.” “How is it that
bandage precedes wound?” “A metaphor of the self armoring itself against the gaze
of The Other.” “The theme is loss, we take it.” “What,” she said, “else?” “Are you
specific as to what is lost?” “Brutally.” “Snow White,” we said, “why do you remain
with us? here? in this house?” There was a silence. Then she said: “It must be laid,
I suppose, to a failure of the imagination. I have not been able to imagine anything
better.”
I have not been able to imagine anything better
. We were pleased by this powerful statement of our essential mutuality, which can
never be sundered or torn, or broken apart, dissipated, diluted, corrupted or finally
severed, not even by art in its manifold and dreadful guises. “But my imagination
is stirring,” Snow White said. “Like the long-sleeping stock certificate suddenly
alive in its green safety-deposit
box because of new investor interest, my imagination is stirring. Be warned.” Something
was certainly wrong, we felt.
THE HORSEWIFE IN HISTORY
FAMOUS HORSEWIVES
THE HORSEWIFE: A SPIRITUAL PORTRAIT
THE HORSEWIFE: A CRITICAL STUDY
FIRST MOP, 4000 BC
VIEWS OF ST. AUGUSTINE
VIEWS OF THE VENERABLE BEDE
EMERSON ON THE AMERICAN HORSEWIFE
OXFORD COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN HORSEWIFE
INTRODUCTION OF BON AMI, 1892
HORSEWIVES ON HORSEWIFERY
ACCEPT ROLE, PSYCHOLOGIST URGES
THE PLASTIC BAG
THE GARLIC PRESS
BILL has developed a shamble. The consequence, some say, of a lost mind. But that
is not true. In the midst of so much that is true, it is refreshing to shamble across
something that is not true. He does not want to be touched. But he is entitled to
an idiosyncrasy. He has earned it by his vigorous leadership in that great enterprise,
his life. And in that other great enterprise, our love for Snow White. “This thing
is damaging to all of us,” Bill noted. “We were all born in National Parks. Clem has
his memories of Yosemite, inspiring gorges. Kevin remembers the Great Smokies. Henry
has his Acadian songs and dances, Dan his burns from Hot Springs. Hubert has climbed
the giant Sequoias, and Edward has climbed stately Rainier. And I, I know the Everglades,
which everybody knows. These common experiences have yoked us together forever under
the red, white and blue.” Then we summoned up all our human understanding, from those
regions where it customarily dwelt. “Love has died here, apparently,” Bill said significantly,
“and it is our task to infuse it once again with the hot orange breath of life. With
that in mind I have asked Hogo de Bergerac to come over and advise us on what should
be done. He knows the deaths of the heart, Hogo does. And he knows the terror of aloneness,
and the rot of
propinquity, and the absence of grace. He should be here tomorrow. He will be wearing
blueberry
flan
on his buttonhole. That is how we are to know him. That and his vileness.”
HOGO was reading a book of atrocity stories. “God, what filthy beasts we were,” he
thought, “then. What a thing it must have been to be a Hun! A filthy Boche! And then
to turn around and be a Nazi! A gray vermin! And today? We co-exist, we co-exist.
Filthy deutschmarks! That so eclipse the very mark and texture . . . That so eclipse
the very mark and bosom of a man, that vileness herself is vilely o’erthrown. That
so enfold . . . That so enscrap . . . Bloody deutschmarks! that so enwrap the very
warp and texture of a man, that what we cherished in him, vileness, is . . . Dies,
his ginger o’erthrown. Bald pelf! that so ingurgitates the very wrack and mixture
of a man, that in him the sweet stings of vileness are, all ginger fled, he . . .”
Henry walked home with his suit in a plastic bag. He had been washing the buildings.
But something was stirring in him, a wrinkle in the groin. He was carrying his bucket
too, and his ropes. But the wrinkle in his groin was monstrous. “Now it is necessary
to court her, and win her, and put on this clean suit, and cut my various nails, and
drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something
flattering, and be witty and bonny, and hale and kinky, and pay her a thousand dollars,
all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price.” Henry let
his mind stray to his groin. Then he let his mind stray to her groin. Do girls have
groins? The wrinkle was still there. “The remedy of Origen. That is still open to
one. That door, at least, has not been shut.”
KEVIN was being “understanding.” We spend a lot of our time doing that. And even more
of our time, now that we have these problems. “Yes that’s the way it is Clem,” Kevin
said to his friend Clem. “That’s the way it is. You tell it like it is Clem baby.”
Kevin said a lot more garbage to Clem. Peacocks walked through the yard in their gold
suits. “Sometimes I see signs on walls saying
Kill the Rich
,” Clem said. “And sometimes
Kill the Rich
has been crossed out and
Harm the Rich
written underneath. A clear gain for civilization I would say. And then the one that
says
Jean-Paul Sartre Is a Fartre
. Something going on there, you must admit. Dim flicker of something. On the other
hand I myself have impulses toward violence uneasily concealed. Especially when I
look out of the window at the men and women walking there. I see a great many couples,
men and women, walking along in the course of a day because I spend so much time,
as we all do, looking out of windows to determine what is out there, and what should
be done about it. Oh it is killing me the way they walk down the street together,
laughing and talking, those men and women. Pushing the pram too, whether the man is
doing it, or the woman is doing it. Normal life. And a fine October chill in the air.
It is unbearable, this consensus, this damned felicity. When I see a couple
fighting I give them a dollar, because fighting is interesting. Thank God for fighting.”
“That’s true Roger,” Kevin said a hundred times. Then he was covered with embarrassment.
“No I mean that’s true Clem. Excuse me. Roger is somebody else. You’re not Roger.
You’re Clem. That’s true, Clem.” More peacocks walked through the yard in their splendid
plumage.
WE opened eggs to let the yellow out. Bill was worried about the white part, but we
told him not to worry about that. “People do it every day,” Edward said. The giant
meringue rose to the ceiling. We were all in it. Dan turned off the television set.
“You can’t cook according to what that woman says. She never has the proportions right,
and I don’t think there ought to be cannabis in this meringue anyhow.” “I just don’t
like your world,” Snow White said. “A world in which such things can happen.” We gave
her the yellows, but
she still wasn’t satisfied. It’s easy enough to motivate policemen if you give them
votes and scooters to ride about on, but soldiers are a little more difficult. More
soldiers. Cash their checks. Just because they are soldiers is no reason for not cashing
their checks. Philippe laid down his M-16, his M-21, his M-2 and his fully automatic
M-9. Then he laid down his M-10 and his M-34 with its mouthfed adapter. Then he laid
down his M-4 and his M-3. It made a pile, that hardware. “Well I suppose that identifies
you,” the girl behind the wall said. Then she gave him his money, and gave the other
men their money too. We were amazed that the performance was allowed to continue.
There were a lot of things against the government in it. We gave Snow White the yellows
in an aluminum container. But she still wasn’t satisfied. That is the essential point
here, that she wasn’t satisfied. I don’t know what to do next.