Book and life converge

Weds Dec 23  first day of winter, the solstice turn was last night and tonight at 9:28 pm I have just read this in Tournier’s novel The Ogre:  They are celebrating the Sun Child, “risen from his ashes at the winter solstice.  The sun’s trajectory had reached its lowest level and the day was the shortest of the year: the death of the sun god was therefore lamented as an impending cosmic fatality.  Funeral chants celebrating the woe of the earth and the inhospitableness of the sky praised the dead luminary’s virtues and begged him to return among men.  And the lament was answered, for from then on every day would gain on the night, at first imperceptibly but soon with triumphant ease.”  page 264

Lines from Chris Kraus

Schizophrenics aren’t sunk into themselves.  Associatively, they’re hyperactive.  The world gets creamy like a library. 231

Anyone who feels too much or radiates extremity gets very lonely.  227

“Schizophrenia,” Géza Róhreim wrote, “is the magical psychosis.”  A search for proof.  An orgy of coincidences.) 226

Capitalism’s ethics are completely schizophrenic; i.e., they’re contradictory and duplicitous.  Buy Cheap, Sell Dear.  Psychiatry tries its hardest to conceal this, tracing all disturbances back to the Holy Triangle of Mommy-Daddy-Me.  “ The unconscious needs to be created,” Félix wrote in Mary Barnes’ Trip. A brilliant model.  226

If art’s a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become a subject too.  217

How I like to dip into other people’s books, to catch the rhythm of their thinking, as I try to write my own.  Writing around the edges of Philip K. Dick, Ann Rower, Marcel Proust, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley.  It’s better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill--getting larger cause you’re entering another person’s language, cadence, heart and mind.  207

the ideal reader is one who is in love with the writer & combs the text for clues about that person & how they think--- 132

The rest was history, or, Chris had gotten one thing right: beneath his reputation at the Mudd Club as the philosopher of kinky sex, Sylvère was a closet humanist.  Guilt and duty more than S&M propelled his life.  109

To initiate something is to play the fool. I really came off the fool with you, sending the fax, etcetera.  Oh well.   I feel so sorry we were never able to communicate, Dick.  Signals through the flames.  Not waving but drowning.  91

Accepting contradictions means not believing anymore in the primacy of “true feelings.”  Everything is true and simultaneously.  87

The Bataille Boys saw beatitude in the victim’s agonized expression as the executioner sawed off his last remaining limb.  33

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick.  Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997, 2006.

Who Loves Me not by Chris Kraus

Half-way into Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick.  Noticed that former student Robbie B, now librarian at New Hampton, had read it (Goodreads notification? which I never look at) and then it turned up on the back shelves as I was rearranging back there in the alcove.  Book first published in 1997.  Way back then.  From now (Paris attacks, Daesh, etc) doesn’t it feel even more dated.  Those heady days of Deleuze and Bataille.  Even refers to the Bataille Boys a couple of times.  I thought I could tell Scott (and Paul H) to read it, that it would plug onto his disseration as perfectly as a Lego.  And since it is from that far back, how did I manage to miss it?  And would anyone who didn’t know much about all that theory be that interested in it?  Would Paul read it?  I don’t think so---as removed from his world as possible and far too self-enclosed, like a hothouse, a small academic coffee house gossipy closet drama.  

Friday Nov 20  

After Kraus I should change my character’s name from Andrew to Andrea Campéon, or Angela.  Would that do anything of value to it?  

Kraus just praised my method---reading lots of books and writing around the edges of them.  Quote coming.  In spite of that I’m really ready for this book to end and really tired of it, tired of her brilliant, brainy and clever whining about all of it, her love for Dick just isn’t as wonderful and she wants it to be and the rest is, finally, pretty tiresome.  I’ll give the New Yorker writer from this past April, Leslie Jamison, the public and last word and then privately I’ll disagree.  I guess my disagreement will be proof positive of Kraus’s great success.  

“How I like to dip into other people’s books, to catch the rhythm of their thinking, as I try to write my own.  Writing around the edges of Philip K. Dick, Ann Rower, Marcel Proust, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley.  It’s better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill--getting larger cause you’re entering another person’s language, cadence, heart and mind.”  207  You’d think Goodreads or somewhere would inscribe that over their lintel.  

Now at 227 & heck, Kraus has turned it all up and around and I love the book again, can’t stop reading it, don’t want it to end.  The best.  What a book.  

“You said: ‘I’m sick of your emotional blackmail.’” 232

whole book is that.  A cabinet of curiosities.   

After Kraus instead of making Andrew into Andrea, better to just take that character out all together.  

Maybe I am mildly schizophrenic?  Have I ever wondered that?  see page 232 ff  Now I am really really tired of the book, so ready to have it over, trying not to rush it.  Too much.  But enough already, let’s put this unexquisite corpse into the grave.  

Finished the book around 1 pm.  Sigh of relief, impatient relief.  Lunch.  After lunch, in the mail, issue of Parabola, Winter issue on Free Will and Destiny.  Kraus’s book has a Foreward and an Afterword.  Isn’t that some sort of warning?  I liked it in the Foreward where Eileen Myles pays Kraus a huge compliment: “Chris knows (like Bruce Chatwin knew) how to edit.”  15.  I wonder.  Maybe in a line-by-line way, maybe, as Myles explains, in a drummer’s pacing way, knowing how to go everywhere and “make it move.”  But maybe not so much in a don’t tire the reader too much way.  Chatwin would have, I’m absolutely positive, shortened Kraus’s 260 page book by at least thirty to fifty pages.  Minimum.  Now that Parabola is here, like a godsend, I can read it cover-to-cover as the perfect antidote to having spent the past week on Kraus’s Dick.  I mean Kraus’s Love.  Well, Kraus’s I.  There it is:  what if she had called the book, from the first, Dick Loves Me.  Would it have been a better book, a better feminist book, much less a period frozen in amber-time and much more of a timeless work?  Or is my very suggestion a sure backslide on my part into the leaden sludge of patriarchist helpfulness?  It is a fascinating cabinet of curiosities, a narrative collection of odd people, trendy oddities, topical themes and obsessions from the 90s, as these floated around in various currents and eddies of the academic and artsy worlds Kraus herself floated around in.  
It seems so dated now.  This is what some parts of those worlds really did feel like back then.  A fragile time-capsule. 

I do like the way Leslie Jamison ends her terrific essay on Kraus.  

"A story that flashes “back and sideways” keeps its emotional pulse live: “To organize events sequentially is to take away their power,” Kraus writes. “Emotion’s not at all like that. Better to hold onto memories in fragments, better to stop and circle back each time you feel the lump rise in your throat.” Taken together, Kraus’s books summon these “contradictory, multiple perspectives” on an even broader level: they approach a recurring consciousness from different angles, dip into the trajectory of a life at different moments. They preserve a certain electricity by refusing to resolve these life materials into a single, coherent narrative. They are all windows to the same exhibit, all doorways to the same club under the same full moon, all promising and winking and opening their legs at once. They are all committed to the live wire of feeling (Ahhh, feelings), committed to circling back to what makes the lump rise in the throat, what makes the heart beat faster; committed to keeping emotions forceful by refusing to slot their evocations neatly into any genre, refusing the divide between authenticity and artifice, refusing to distinguish between reality and performance. It’s all lumpy. It’s all performed. It’s all real. "  "This Female Consciousness"

Interview with my other writer

What made you become a writer?

I think I began writing to find a place of solitude.  I craved silence where I could be away from the battles I felt were going on all around me, and the war, the great war, that had ended as I was born and which no one talked about but which I could sense was still in the bodies and minds of the adults in my life.  My parents fought various silent battles with other family members.  I felt in the middle in ways I could not name and could not comprehend.   I remember reading James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans when I was ten years old, and I didn't understand much of it, but I still finished it.  I remember reading Hudson’s Green Mansions and being enthralled by the mysteriousness of it, even while, again, I understood little of it.  In my father’s store when I would go into the large meat locker, turn out the light and stand in the black super cold air for as long as I could among the hanging carcasses of beef.  Then when I turned the lights on I would see the slabs of fat, bone, red flesh and muscle, very dark pearls of dried blood, those cows had been cut in half and I could see inside their rib cages as they hung upside down by legs tied together and hung over big metal hooks from the ceiling.

Like everyone born in 1944. I am a child of WWII.  We could feel that “something had just happened” although no one would or could talk about.  Later, when we were about thirteen, we saw photos of the concentration camps in Life magazine.  I can still see those black and white images of bodies piled high.  Only many years after that did I see Goya’s whole series on the horrors of war from an earlier century. 

How do you work?

I work by stealing any chance I can find to sit and write more on what I’ve started.  But starting is difficult because it is so easy to imagine what you want to create but not so easy to find the right way into it.  After I feel started, what comes next plays on my mind all the time and I need to get it down when and as soon as I can.  If I have a big stretch of time for writing I will try to write steadily but this may involve stretches of pausing, even long stretches, to feel my way into what needs to come next.  I often also write things that I hope I might be able to patch in to the work later on after I get a sense of how the whole is shaping up.  There then is a back and forth effort in drafting and redrafting.  I never can write for more than a few hours at a time because my attention fades. 

Do you know the end of your novel when you start writing?

I know only the beginning.  Or an image of a person in a specific location.  From there I wonder about the situation and how it might unfold.   I just start writing to see where it will take me.  I have often wanted to use a murder story as a framework for finding what I really want to have develop.   It gives people gravitas that they, otherwise, might not have. I’ve not yet done this but the notion appeals to me.  I never know the end until I’ve reached it.  But finding that point can be a tricky question.  Knowing how to cut yourself off becomes crucial.  

What inspires you?  Who or what is your source of inspiration?

I have to see a place in front of me. A place I imagine or remember from which I can then continue dreaming. One of my stories starts with the memory of a time I was in Buenos Aires and the hotel room has stayed clearly in my mind.  The room, the lobby and the street.  From there I imagine my character engaging in an action that sets the story going.  

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers? 

Everyone makes it up, so advice is difficult to give.  Write what you want to write, how you want to write it.  Use anything that helps you find this.  Use everything, use nothing, find whatever keeps you going.  There are lots of difficult moments that are typical for all writers so you need encouragement to keep going.  Ultimately your work becomes so precisely yours that no advice is helpful.  

The following question appear in Patrick Modiano's novel Paris Nocturne.  

Would you prefer to be part of the revolution or contemplate a beautiful landscape? 

​  

         Always I have wanted most to contemplate a beautiful landscape.  ​The revolutions seem interesting enough but from a great distance, great enough to see the landscape that frames them, either the fields or the perspective of history. 

Which do you prefer?  The depth of torment or the lightness of happiness?

​         In my earlier years I thought I preferred the depth of torment but that was a mistake I learned to see through and correct and now I know that the lightness of happiness is what I prefer and have always, really, wanted to prefer.  ​

Do you want to change your life or rediscover a lost harmony. 

​   Again, there has been an arc or trajectory over the years, from the illusion of wanting to change, through the experiences of what that entailed and how those attempts never quite panned out, to the sense that the ever elusive lost harmony continues to pull me forward into some unknown.  ​

What could a lost harmony really consist of?

​     Not knowing this is what makes the loss so appealing and the harmony so meaningless and meaningful, as if both possibilities could somehow co-exist in a paradise of paradoxes.  ​

Interview with Writer J P Jones

J P Jones has published four novels.  See link below to his Facebook page.  His fifth novel will be out early next year.  He lives in Washington, DC.  

Why write novels?   

Because I am very opinionated and my ideas don't fit well with any group's thinking.  (Clevinger!)  So I write about the world in a way to illustrate the world that I see.   When I began writing, I very much wanted to write about people, places, and events that I thought no one else was writing about.  In essence I write because I disagree to some degree with everyone and feel a deep need to express my opinions.   My father was always politic and agreed with everyone.   When I was in my late adolescence I decided that I would never do that. I wouldn't argue with people - at least not very much -  but I would ALWAYS state my opinion.  And, after 40 years in the DC metro area I hate Fed gov't employees who, if they have any opinions (which usually don't), seem incapable of expressing them.   They are all around me and seem to live and die while making no difference whatsoever in this world.  That would drive me crazy.  Thousands and thousands of little nebbishes, commuting to their jobs, eating lunch in the cafeteria, and going home in grid-locked traffic.

How do you work? 

I work by sitting at the computer and forcing myself to keep writing until I get something going, occasionally stopping to think out a situation or character.  I usually do this thinking at a window where I look out but take no cognizance of the scenery.  I'm totally inside my head.  Sometimes I do this thinking while staring at a wall.   (As my brother used to say:   "Thinking about something is hard so people do so little of it."   He came up with inventions that were patented.  

How does an novel originate?

I start with an idea that I want to write about:   Tunis - the limitation of liberal attitudes about race in DC -  Cumberland and its people who didn't leave to find a job in the metro areas- what would have happened to me in Vietnam -  how modern young people react to a crime that touches them.   

Do you know the end of your novel when you start writing?

Often I know only the end of a story and figure out how to get there.   In one case, I just started writing to see where it would take me.  I have always used a murder investigation to hang my story on.   It gives people gravitas that they, otherwise, might not have.  I've written short stories that don't use crime.   I don't think those stories would interest anyone but me - and possibly not even me very much.


Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Advice:  Look for some central idea about a person or place that you feel no writer is addressing, then explore it.  Find what's unique in your thinking/life/experience.  Don't rely on other writers to give you guidance on any central point in your story.  If you can't come up with a central idea, then forget it.  If you have to do research, do it, then forget most of it.  Don't make the work a showcase of all you know about a certain subject.   I made this mistake on the first draft of my book about Vietnam, which included a first part about a court-marital in WWII.  I deleted all that voluminous crap Don't make it a travelogue, either. I made this mistake on my first draft of the Tunis story. I deleted all those trips to other cities in my second or third draft.

https://www.facebook.com/jp.jones.90226

Unknown American Source of Beckett's Fiction

Tuesday afternoon Oct 20

found this terrific link between Kenneth Burke’s novel and Beckett’s Unnamable--in The Believer from 2006  

"Towards a Better Life is the longest piece in this collection, a sort of one-sided epistolary novel with a flamboyantly solipsistic narrator. Ostensibly, the story is about the narrator’s relationship with the ex-friend to whom the epistles are addressed, but the discourse seldom escapes the confines of his own mind; instead of relying upon external images or events to explain his emotional state, the narrator writes in carefully balanced aphorism and analysis, something like Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable from the point of view of Jane Austen."    by  Dan Johnson 

--------

Katherine Anne Porter took a few copies of Burke’s new novel to Paris to have Sylvia Beach sell them in Shakespeare and Company.  Beckett bought a copy there perhaps five or six years later.  

This last is my invention but I did check the timelines and I think it quite possible.  It is so wonderful I just know it must be true.  Or at least "true."  Remember,  as Chinua Achebe says, all stores are true. 

Uknowing Fiction

I will die.  But not yet.  Fiction usually follows such a claim. This fear of death took breaks during the day but then kicked into full gear right after twilight.  I couldn’t drive, couldn’t do anything, certainly couldn’t sleep.  Drinking made it worse.  Exercise gave a temporary chill.  You think you can adjust to most things, even insomnia over a long stretch.  But this isn’t so.  After Claudia left, disappeared, whatever it really was, sleeplessness never adjusted itself to my way of life.  But since I found the boxes and built a special bookshelf to hold only memory fiction, not sleeping and I reached an uneasy, deeply felt truce that allowed of no compromises.  Not sleeping was better than dying.  Anyone would make that choice, were it a choice. 

         Then waiting and not waiting to go to take a piss would pass the time, or pass me rather than time.  Brush teeth, floss, check the iphone, check the weather, scan some news sites, sleep would tip-toe into the darkened room and my lower abdomen would wake further up and ask, now? or if not now, how soon?  When can we get up?  How soon should we get up?  Should we wait some more?  The terrors of dying wrestled with the terrors of the night and the terrors of the bladder staged the events.  One person could get suicidal, another homicidal, mass rioting looked good, finally some semblance of sleep quieted everyone but by then it was too late.  Dawn lightened us all up and we rose into the inevitable exhaustion of dutiful daytime.

         I would wander through the day with scratchy eyelids, acutely jumpy at every noise, clumsy with every task.  I could look back over three years, weary and depleted, enervation dragging my bones through the motions. 

I had moved from New England to Madrid in January 2004 to see if my sunless fears and sleepless dramas could be translated into  more comfortable foreign variations.  On return to Boston that May to sort papers, discard books, clear out my old office, a strange thing happened. 

         Behind some piles books, I came across an unfamiliar stack of small, brown cardboard boxes.  After talking to Carolyn, the department chair, it became clear that they were the unpublished papers, notes and remains of a close friend and former literature teacher of mine in England, Malcolm Lord.  They had been sent without forewarning by his sister from the retirement home in which Malcolm died from a heart attack a year or two before.  Stricken with Parkinsons Disease and attendant and mysterious complications before his time, Malcolm had retired early from his professorship at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.  More students than not had noticed a death wish in Malcolm.  They asked each other about it?  Is he manic? Is he serious?  He would talk about Hemingway’s suicide, Mishima’s suicide, Woolf’s suicide, Plath’s, Berryman’s, as if he had known them, as if, somehow, they had recognized him as one of their own.  Malcolm could be cold and offish, but with death you got the sense it was personal. 

         Later on I tried to contact Malcolm’s sister, Rebecca.  We had met once for a beer at trendy pub in London when I had gone over for a conference.  (“Rhino” or some such name.  Malcolm fancied himself keyed in to the best of what was new).  I had his phone number in Norwich but it no longer worked.  I sent a letter that Royal Mail later returned unopened.  Malcolm was divorced and estranged from his wife, Barbara, after refusing to have children.  Egoist to a fault.  I knew of no other family members.  I was left to figure out why these boxes had been sent to me and what I was supposed to do with them.  Malcolm had a few devoted students who knew him much better than I did.  I always wondered if he had any friends. 

         I went through the boxes, finding in each a jumbled assortment of things.  Each box had a number on the outside, nine in all but then I noticed number 4 was missing.  Malcolm had become devoted to things Jungian and then to the much older typology of personalities known as the Enneagram. 

         In the box marked 5 I found some intriguing notes and journals.  Lectures by Eliade and Eliot, notes from Burgo’s seminars on ethics and theology, a volume of the Philokalia owned by Kathleen Raine, Beckett’s novels in original editions, reading notes on Blanchot, Bataille and Deleuze.  Poetry volumes by Ashbery and Muir.

         To my absolute astonishment, I found the original copies of a triangular correspondence between Ricardo Sanchez, Julian Vicente and Francisco Ayala, which concerned the latter’s visit to El Moral near Salamanca in 1975 to deliver a lecture on “Que es literatura?,” the title of which had always made me laugh.  Never knew why.  Sanchez and Vicente discuss at length what Ayala and his wife might like for breakfast.  She was a younger American, much younger, famously long, dark red hair, a former student (perhaps?) and he loved the traditions of Castille.  They wondered if jamon iberico might satisfy with bread and coffee for a small first breakfast.  Or if good butter and jam would be enough. 

Sanchez, gay but tortured and still closeted, had always wanted Vicente to acknowledge his writing as worthy of attention, so he seemed, in the letters, to be soliciting much more than information about foods and habits.  Vicente gave nothing, could barely come up with any information about Señora Ayala’s domestic tastes and less about Sanchez’s unsubtle mentions of his own work. 

         In the first box I found conventional academic papers, manuscripts of projects, many of which seemed drafts, unfinished .  works, works in progress.  Malcolm had long been obsessed with questions of craft and meaning in the writing of fiction.  His papers circled around these topics, especially the relations of novels to other arts such as music, painting, philosophy, sociology, the whole gamut of the university curriculum.  He admired many books on craft, from James down to Lodge, and the art or arts of fiction writing occupied his thoughts as much as the larger issues of meaning.  He admired Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, but he was determined to work out a Poetics of Fiction or desperate to have someone do it.  He had heard of Burke’s failure to complete his Symbolic of Motives and for a while studied his work, hoping to find a model in it for writing a Symbolic of Fiction.  But Burke, and so many others who wrote on these topics, got too far into sociology or cultural history or poetry proper,  or even, as with Bernhard, into the musicality of the voice telling the tale. 

         Malcolm’s papers kept coming back, text after text, to the poetics of fiction.  He had found Lispector and Pessoa, Valle-Inclán and of course Borges.  With each something was found to be not quite what he was looking for.  Fiction could never be poetry and yet his notes dealt again and again with Eliot, Saint-John Perse, Francis Ponge, he had introduced me to Everson’s “syzergy” River-Root, and, of course, to Lax, who had not yet then been much published.  He had discovered Stevens through Anne (the late poems from “The Rock”) and Rilke’s  “Ninth Duino Elegy” (a commentary on “the angel, not the unsayable”).  Beckett, all of Beckett, The Unnameable, even as he always noted his disappointment and dismay that Beckett had turned from fiction to drama.  These were Malcolm’s fears, essentially, that his inner dissatisfaction with his own writing of fiction would or could dissolve into the mere focus on words of poets or philosophers.  Poetry he knew, with exquisite delicacy, became at once, in an instant, too fragile to deal with reality, and philosophy he showed time and again walked into the house of fiction with juat as inevitable a flat-footed thud on the floorboards. 

         Poetry sees where we are, what things are here.  Particulars being variable.  But---Malcolm--insisted---poetry shows us what is anew.  Under new aspects, each time.  Transmuted.  The variations felt.  Poets sing songs beyond us and yet they show us it is we who are singing.  Things change in the poet’s song, but they are still our ordinary things, things we know.  We hear the poet sing and feel the pressure and the release of reality.  I thought at once that many of these notes could have been published if I could make the effort.  But soon such notions seemed beside the point. 

         Malcolm had followers and devoted readers but lacked the drive for shameless self-promotion that characterizes what writers call fame.  He read every evening until 10 p.m and slept without chemical aides or aides of any other sort through the night.  The sleep of the peripheral man.  When he gave talks he hit upon stretches of brilliance without warning and so often without follow through and they seemed rambling and unfocused.  He even seemed often to lose interest in talking at all. 

         In the box marked “Observer” I found many maps.  Malcolm had somehow obtained an annotated cloth reproduction of the Mappa Mundi from Hereford Cathedral.  This extraordinary object from around 1300 shows the world divided into three continents (Europe, Asia, Africa), with its center in Jerusalem, fashioned as a little keyhole.  Another reproduction featured the Tapestry of Creation from the Cathedral of Girona, Spain.  The needlework panel dates from the 11the century.   The tapestry, of which only the upper part remains, is divided into three cycles:  the Genesis, presided over by the Christ Pantocrator; the cosmic elements; and the Stories of the Holy Cross.  Christ Pantocrator, depicted as a beardless young man, occupies a circle in the center of the tapestry. He is surrounded by a circle whose sectors, aside from the upper one with a dove, symbol of God, show the seven days of the creation, until the creation of Adam and Eve. The two circles include quotes from the Genesis.

The remaining space in the rectangle including the central disk, houses at the corner four representation of Winds, depicted by four young winged men in Roman-like dresses, driving vessels and blowing air into horns. The central upper square is an old man representing the Year, with the Wheel of Time, while at the upper corners are the personifications of the Rivers of Paradise. The other six upper squares depict the Four Seasons, as well as Samson and Abel (or Cain).  I found a series of almost imaginary maps of Australia drawn by French explorers in the mid 1700s.

The two lower corners show the personifications of the Sun (left, symbolizing Sunday) and the Moon (right, much deteriorated, symbolizing Monday), while the side outer squares represent the months (only eight of which survive). At the bottom are incomplete scenes of the discovery of Holy Cross.  There were hand-drawn maps of the estuarial coasts of North Carolina and Virginia, complete with meticulous descriptions of flora and fauna.  Most impressive of all was Malcolm’s own nine by seven map of natural catastrophe, with exhaustive detail on hurricanes in the Gulf, the tornadoes in Texas, Missouri and Indiana, maps of volcanic eruptions from Vesuvius to Kiluea, Copahue and beyond.  There was also a detailed description of the meteorite that fell on the Yucatán Peninsula fifteen million years ago, wiping out all the dinosaurs. 

         In the Peacemaker box, I discovered heavily annotated copies of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” by Borges, Lispector’s novels and stories, and Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet.  (Malcolm was obsessed with a solar cult said to have its roots in the pre-Inca Andean civilization of Tiwanaku.)  Borges, he once told me, as director of the national library in Buenos Aires, had a secret vault of ancient texts, even a lost text from Tiwanaku, showing the cosmology of their mythology and religious practices.  Historians will say they did not develop written culture.  Malcolm knew, he said, this to be false.  He had talked with Borges about these things for hours one strange April day in Orono, Maine.  He avoided direct sun, I noticed, when we traveled in Bolivia and Chile. 

         In “Tamas, inertia,” box 1, I found a short, odd text---handwritten--called “A Sartorial Spirituality.”  It was not signed, but I suspect it was written by Malcolm’s British wife, Vi, who worked for many years in London’s garment world, a job she had trouble combining with her passion for the art of the Pre-Raphaelites.  The result of this ongoing friction was satire and her model was Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, “The Stitcher Re-Stitched.”  She begins:

         What is the human being but a work of raiment and what is             the world but the living robe of God?  If language is the             expressive vestment of thought, then clothes are the                          expressive vestment of the body.  Nature and life itself

         is but one garment woven and ever-weaving from the loom

         of time.  As Carlyle writes, “The whole external universe

         and what holds it together is but clothing and the essence

         of all science lies in the PHILOSOPY OF CLOTHES.”

                  The philosophy of clothes is not some specialized

         sub-study taught in design schools.  It is the key to                            understanding everything.  It is the seed and jewel of all

         spiritual knowing.  The human being is the fabricated                        animal and fashion is the key to understanding the human                 being.  Let me put this in a simple terministic formula:                       Mankind = manikin = mannequin.  Like Plato’s demiurge

         in the Timaeus, the couture designer takes the old rags of                  matter and forms them into something sublime.  God is the                  great fashionist and designers on earth are his prophets, his             priests:  mortal portals to his immortal power. 

Pretty good.  I thought of Adam and Eve discovering their desire for clothing to cover their nakedness.  Before the Fall they were nude, wearing the garment of God’s grace.  After their exit from Paradise, to clothe our shame, we wear harsh skins of animals or the marvelous colors of vain pride.  These are but funereal robes until we put on the white robes of baptism.  I looked at my feet.  Did they go barefoot in Paradise?

         My first job was working as a research assistant to a Hungarian cultural historian, John Lukacs, at La Salle University in Philadelphia.  Lukacs had no relation to the Marxist writer with whom he was often confused.  In addition to many books on Hitler and 20th century Europe, he had also become obsessed with the history of secret societies and needed someone to dig through archives.  It was pretty dull, but I got paid and it led me to theories about the Knights Templars, Schneebaum’s researches in New Guinea and Alain Fournier’s The Lost Estate.  Inspired linkages followed, in hindsight.

         When I was in Philadelphia, I received a handwritten letter from Malcolm telling me that his wife had left him for a Slovenian poet.  She was living somewhere in the Philly area and was having a tough time.  It seems she had fallen in love with the poet at a writing conference in Boulder.  Susan and I had met a few times and had some memorable long walks through Elkins Park, where she lived, usually in a carriage house near one of the mansions.  She could find no one to talk to in the area even if Tyler Art was there and other out-lying posts of other universities in the city.  No cafes to speak of, no one who had even heard of Mrs Dalloway or The Waves.   During the last of these walks, she was clearly pregnant.  I left Philadelphia soon afterwards for my first teaching job and we lost touch.  I think she changed her name.  I often wonder about the child. 

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         Nothing could have prepared me for what I found in box 7 marked “Third Eye Chakra.”  Malcolm had written a long work, written near the end of the 60s, on the spiritual abstract in contemporary fiction.  He started with Kandinsky’s famous 1910 treatise on The Spiritual in Art and argued that we could see Kandinsky’s insights being developed in mid-century fiction if we but had the eyes to comprehend it.  He noted that Kenneth Burke’s novel, published in 1932, was a signal event in this development and one that influenced Samuel Beckett’s work in as yet unrealized ways.  He was desperate to do more research into the archives of each writer.  He had discovered that when Burke’s novel was published, one of his friends, Katherine Anne Porter, took five copies with her to Paris to have Sylvia Beach sell them in her Shakespeare & Company bookshop.  Beckett bought one of those copies four or five years later, he was convinced.  And in Burke’s strange and prophetic novel Beckett found further encouragement to strip fiction of the remainder of its traditional markers and renew it spiritually with a voice and manner that culminates in the final work of his trilogy The Unnameable.  In a manner reminiscent of the advice given in the medieval classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, writers eliminated as many of the practices of writing known in the tradition to find an abstract or formal or minimalist voice and telling and in this way, Malcolm argued, real spiritual meaning and illumination shone forth.  Where Modernism at the beginning of the century settled for shock and breaking apart of all the previous cultural norms, for the next generation, the search for the true spiritual depths within art became the goal and practice. 

         Malcolm worked out these ideas in the early 80s.   I first met him then in Cambridge and I was also most interested in how Kandinsky’s ideas had found depth of influence in writing as well as in the visual arts.  We both attended a conference in England at Dartington Hall on spirituality in literature and the arts organized by Kathleen Raine and her Temenos group.  The possibilities and powers for unknowing fiction seemed promising to us.  Of course, given what happened, it is easy to say that now.

         There were notes of various forms of occultism at the Temenos Conference, hints and references in many of the papers to Blavatsky, Theosophy, Hermeticism, ancient wisdom practices such as the construction of memory theaters, and studies of secret patterns of meaning in architecture, temple designs, arts and crafts from many traditions which embody such practices.  I was fascinated by these ideas as had Malcolm been when he had encountered them years earlier in the 60s.  We talked about the importance of the great Renaissance magician, Giordano Bruno, whose theories of an infinite universe and a multiplicity of worlds, combined with his fascination with the Hermetic tradition of magic, memory, symbol and language led to repeated charges of heresy.  Many have speculated on possible connections between the “Giordanisiti” (the followers of Bruno) and the Rosicrucians, the mysterious brotherhood of the Rosy Cross first come to light in Germany in the early 1600s, and with the Freemasons, who first surface in 1646 in England.  The conference we were attending was but a continuation, really, of that ultimate desire for universal language, universal symbolic communion, that becomes convergent in these occult humanist movements in European thought.  The hunger for an ethic and aesthetic of universal love, charity and beauty that would overcome all the differences that tend to war and intolerance and which lead instead to a kind of Rosicrucian effort at a total reformation of man, as in the recurring dream of the imagination, the human become divine, or the human and divine united through imagination.

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         Malcolm’s essay was amazing, probably the best thing he had ever written, and I wondered by he had not published it.  It might have been part of a larger work.  Maybe he moved on, lost interest, something pushed him away from it.  Typical of him.  I wondered too if I would find in other boxes that he had written fiction as well.  I never heard him talk about this but it would not have surprised me.  He once told he wanted to transform the meaning of the word “dilettante,” to raise it up from its negative meaning and restore it to a being a term of honor and value.  “One should be a true amateur, a true dilettante,” he liked to say, “ we should want to embrace the whole of life, everything, preferably all at once.” 

         I had never heard him say, however, that he might try his hand at fiction to see how that might help him find how to live the wholeness of vision. 

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         Ray Philips, one of the university security guards whom I’d known since I was an undergraduate at Maryland, woke me.  It was getting really late and I had a longish drive back to the village I used to stay at on the Pennsylvania line.  I decided to leave the last box, marked Gemini, for tomorrow.  My astrological sign.

         I got back to the little house I rented, Mason Cottage, next to a civil war graveyard that surrounded a plain white 19th century wooden Methodist church.  The nearest grave belonged to one Dolphus Brown, died in 1863.   Who remembers thee?  I took a hot shower and lay on the bed, turning things over in my mind and listening to world forecasts faint on the tv turned down low. 

Thunder showers, fog, reduced vision, westerlies, low 40s, rain over the next two days, polar vortex, clear, sunny skies over the plains, chance of a typhoon in the Philippines. 

         I went to bed.  With the sound of recorded bells from the church tower and the hum of the highway distant, I fell into a profound sleep.  I began to dream, bright colors, vast motions and shapes.  I felt I was a moth in a huge sacred interior like the Byzantine National Shrine in Washington or the gothic cathedral there on the other side of the city.  A gigantic nave, a mashup of every cathedral I had ever visited, including somehow St Peter’s basilica and the cathedral at Atun.    I flew up to the ceiling, hovering among the roof bosses, decorated knobs at the intersections of the arches.  I looked from one end of the cathedral to the other.  Each roof boss depicted an event in the history of the world, from creation through the Fall and expulsion from Eden, the figural precursors of Christ in the Kings of Israel, on through the Nativity, Jesus’s lectures and miracles, crucifixion, death, resurrection, ascension and, finally, Christ triumphant, in majesty framed by a radiant vagina-like mandala.  His beginning is his end. 

         I looked a long time at the rose window, soaking in the ruby-red and lapis lazuli glass hues.  Then I flew abruptly down into the choir, now transformed into an eagle, and circled the lectern and under the stalls.  Each seat featured elaborate carvings symbolizing moments of mercy.    There was an elephant with horse’s feet, a gaping fool with his tongue stuck out, a bear being hanged by geese, a series of Green Men peering out all phallic and menacing, a fox lecturing an audience of ducks, a blacksmith trying to put horseshoes on a dog, endless images of wrestlers, a devil conducting dentistry on a poor open-mouthed soul, birds, a dragon, a pelican feeding its young and finally the image of a lovely mother and child dancing together. 

         Out I floated into the chapter house with stone carvings of three-headed kings, veiled women, fighting lions, and tumblers, directly over the dean’s throne.  There were many, many monkeys and the carving of an enormous serpent eating a rather charming cat.  One vault entered the head of a Green Man and went out through his mouth.  There were mouths everywhere.  Architectural orality.  Fierce eucharistic gluttony.  Eat the bread-body of God and wash it down with his sweet blood--like Leopold Bloom with a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy.  Transubstantiation.  I thought of seedcake. Back I flew into the body of the cathedral and floated there gazing at its cruciform shape, the simple vaulted ceiling and the light pouring in through the clerestory, down into the chapels beneath.  I felt majestic.  Then I was suddenly sucked up into an octagonal wooden lantern where my head burst through the glass into the air faster and faster.  I could see the cathedral’s twin towers receding below me and the vivid green flatness of Pennsylvania around it.  The sky was getting deeper and deeper blue and I couldn’t breathe.  My face smoldered in the intense heat.  I could smell myself burning.  Father can’t you see? 

        

        

        

        

Hotel Courier

Hotel Courier

As soon as I checked into the Hotel D'Angleterre I knew it was a mistake.  I went into the room, put my valise on the desk and lay down on the bed.  I had thought I wanted a room there because the grand, stone building is one of Copenhagen's oldest.  But it has all been remodeled.  Now it is sumptuous, white, gold, classic, fine but too much.  For this project I did not want all this new gilt.  I had a room in the First Hotel Skt Petri and a second in the Blu Royal.  For this third night I needed to find a replacement for the Angleterre.  I went back down to the front desk.  The young man heard me out and suggested a much smaller hotel by the water.   I walked down to the 71 Nyhavn Hotel.  Perfect.  An old warehouse, dark wooden beams, white walls, brick walls.  Being on the water added everything that the gilt at the Angleterre would have removed.  I spent the night there, my third night in Copenhagen.  I was now ready. 

A few years after I had moved my practice from Long Island to Portland, Maine, I had a client who was with me for what I then thought was a long time, about six years.  He told his problems slowly but after a while the stories, about his failures, searches, successes, insecurities, a divorce, some moves, pain, recovery, injury, guilt, all somehow coalesced less for him, I think, than for me.  I wanted to get out altogether, to walk away from all that, to close down shop and if I ever reopened one it would not be as a therapist.  Maybe something else, scrimshaw? copper geegaws, who knew?  But something in that one patient's presence gave me the permission I wanted.  In hindsight it was a gift.  Whether he offered it, I don't know.  Perhaps I simply stole something from him.  I didn't know that either.  Sort of the way therapy usually went, even when patients chose to exit and declared themselves better or ready or over or missed appointments over and over until there were no more.  But I could never be sure it was really this patient.  Perhaps it was Claudia's leaving, disappearance, betrayal, whatever it was, it felt like all of the above.  No matter now.  I was in Copenhagen to put all of that behind me, to close the doors once and for all on that earlier, long chapter of my work life.  I wanted now to become a kind of private emissary, a trusted courier.  I used the three hotels to establish my credibility for this venture.  No one would really ever know why I was living in three hotels at once, or how I did so, or what it involved.  No one would really notice but if anyone did I would still remain beyond their calculations, even if they followed me for three days and established clearly my three-part regime of overnights.  In the first few weeks in the city, my goal was to walk between the three hotels looking like someone who had lived in Copenhagen for years and years, if not for all of his life.  So I practiced each day walking the streets without looking at anything in particular.  I especially never wanted to look like someone new in his environs who was noticing things the way travelers do.  After a night at the Blu I would decide either the next night would be at the warehouse, the Nyhaven, or at the Skt Peter, the First as I called it.  I liked how long and straight Studiestraede was and there I could walk without looking at anything special or being looked at in any special way.  In time each pathway became affectionate to me in special ways, but I worked hard not to show that to myself lest anyone seeing me should discern this.  From First to Nyhaven, "71" I began to call it, was such a clean slice down Landemaerket and right onto Gothersgade.  Then the third day the lovely triangle would complete itself as I walked with slight purpose and slight delay from 71 to the Blue, or Blue, as I liked thinking of it.  Whether coming or going between Blue and 71 I could rarely resist staying on the waterfront as much as possible.  Even so, in the coming weeks, I loved exploring the city as I walked the routes possible within the inscribed triangle. 

I wanted to walk like a native, or at least like someone who has lived in Copenhagen for years.  I knew Americans were always noticed in foreign cities by virtue of the space they took as they walked.  I watched other people on the sidewalks and quietly tried to imitate their posture, their body language, the angles of arms and the tilt of the head.  I walked slowly and deliberately, I walked as if I had a meeting in six minutes.  I practiced aimlessly sauntering, like the fellow on the  opposite side of the street in the dark green jacket who looked as if he were killing time until his girlfriend came up behind him and put her hands across his eyes.