by Rick Moody
At a much later venue, in Connecticut, I had to do it in a room that shared a wall with the staff break room, and I could hear them making jokes, talking about their shifts, thinking aloud about what to do for the weekend. It made it very hard to get to the point of no return.
For a sexually compulsive person who had taken a vow of chastity, who had grown out of arrested and adolescent self-destructive sexual longing, who had grown into a long-delayed adulthood that was antithetical to these things, I had a lot of trouble adjusting to masturbation in various doctor’s offices, and to the massive vitamin diet I was about to go on, which was intended to get me to a much more fertile state. As I also had, as guys in their fifties sometimes do, prostate difficulties during all of this, I was also going to Freelancers Medical, and having fingers stuck up me, by an extremely good guy called Dave (I never called him by his honorific title). At one point, Dave even said, “I feel something!,” which are the ominous words you don’t want any doctor to say when he has his finger up you. To put it another way, he definitely was feeling something, but maybe he could keep it mostly to himself until a more definitive ruling was being given by a urologist. I did in fact have to go to a specialist, a guy who probably had his finger up the asses of men literally hours of the day, and his office was particularly rich for its melancholy. I had to give a sample there too, a urinary sample, and in the men’s room, I could hear a guy in the next stall straining to pee. He sounded like a goat in the rut, straining and straining but getting nothing out. Eventually his daughter, who reconnoitered with him out in the hall, brought an empty sample jar to the nurse at the front desk, set it down, and said that her father couldn’t do it. To which the nurse said, “Well, he can just sit there until he can then.” I believe it was suggested he drink more fluids. Eventually the bodily productions would issue forth.
The urinary specialist told me I didn’t have cancer yet and that I should come back later. Instead I just had pain, and lower back pain, and these, according to Dave the doctor, were some kind of lower pelvic something or other, which might be occluding the size of my sperm sample. There were a lot of things going on that were more important to me than the size of the sample. I was more interested in my writing, more interested in my teaching, in my daughter, in my wife, than in my sperm sample, but if you want to be on the team you do what the team asks of you, and that means you take the foul-smelling fish oil vitamins. You take the vitamins, you get accustomed to the heavily thumbed pornography in the little closets, you comfort your wife through the wild mood swings of her meds, and you pray for a quick end to a thing that is not going to end quickly at all.
We waited, waited through the long nights of winter, waited through, for example, the jackhammering in the Park Slope apartment next to us, where the new neighbors’ renovation was proceeding into its last phase. There had been months now of the intense environmental degradation owing to the renovation pursued by the short lady and her gigantic Flemish or Belgian husband, and our only hope was to get out of town to Dutchess County as much as possible, except on teaching days or days when my daughter was with us.
And let me tell another story from the same period, that same January, that same wintery indoors of 2014. Though this story began in 2010, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, when I participated with the physicist Melissa Franklin in a public discussion about “nothing,” and in particular about the way “nothing,” as a creative limit, informs the work of Samuel Beckett. I always like talking about Samuel Beckett! He was a writer I was so obsessed with in college that I didn’t talk about much else in sophomore year. It is rare that I meet people who are more obsessed with the topic than I am. Melissa Franklin, however, knows a lot about Beckett, and she knows untold amounts about physics. As an interlocutor, she was an artful dodger, and I ultimately felt set up for failure at the chat, which took place at an institution where thoughts about “nothing” are likely well integrated into the Rubin’s Eastern and Buddhist-inflected programming.
As a result of this talk, however, an online study group on Beckett sprang up among friends of mine. In particular, we started reading Beckett’s trilogy: Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable. These were books that I had read in college (except that I never finished The Unnamable), and about which I had a lot of passionate feelings. When we, the group of my friends in this very loosely organized group of friends in my online reading group, finished the Beckett trilogy, we determined we should read all of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the structure of which was aped by Beckett in his work, and Dante was followed by Don Quixote, which was followed by Chaucer, after which the reading group fizzled.
It was the shelter in the storm for me, in my period of great change, with my new wife, and my bountiful trips to reproductive endocrinologists, to have a work of literature that I was reading slowly, at my own pace, in the few available moments I had to do so. And the reading groups, whose membership ebbed and flowed, were often full of committed nonspecialists with real insights on these classics. People worked hard and brought a lot to the discussion. No unusual angle of engagement was turned aside.
The point of bringing this all up, however, is less to mention Beckett and Dante than it is to talk about one of the participants among those of us I’m going to call the Beckett Study Group, which was the first iteration of the book group. This group featured a mathematician, a painter, a musician, me, and M.J., who was a blogger of some kind and a freelance editor and a person who seemed to have as much if not more of her life online than in the fleshy “actual” world of humans. This made her a perfect heroine of the Beckett Study Group, which acknowledged the ways in which the body, as a warehouse for the self, was complex and difficult.
M.J. wrote to me not long after I began writing a music column for an online magazine called The Rumpus, for which I still write. She wrote to me, in part, I believe, because she liked my music columns. But she also had this way, an extremely persuasive way, of getting you well integrated into the world of her online self.
Very quickly after writing to me, M.J. came to send me her poems, which were not necessarily poetry as I understood poetry in the contemporary academic sense of the word, meaning not fragmentary, free, political, containing traces of languages that were not English, or concerned with the works of Emily Dickinson, but rather which boasted old-fashioned features like rhyming and meter. (Though later on she wrote original and moving collage poems, some of them made out of lines from Wikipedia, but much transmuted, like this: “the monks and lacan found themselves on / the same train to Paris. / they did not interact except to smile, except to / share cheese sandwiches and tea. / a passenger sketched the scene, which / might have been one of a kind.”) She would send links to her online stuff, and while she was not institutionally literary in the way they might have thought about literature at the Associated Writing Programs convention, she kept up with the Beckett Study Group, which was fine with me, and seemed thoroughly to enjoy it.
There was something strange going on with M.J., though, that seemed to have to do, for example, with her being mostly indoors, perhaps agoraphobic, and more internet-connected than face-to-face. Her parents, as she recounted it, were not well. Her dad was depressed, and her brother was depressed, and she felt responsible for them all. I think the family lived in the Middle Atlantic part of the East Coast, and occasionally M.J. would go from her native San Francisco (where she was married to a fellow we infrequently heard about) east, to try to stabilize whatever difficult situation had recently come up among her parents and her brother. M.J., I believe, was considered the most competent person in the family.
When M.J. got back to the Bay Area, one thing she did, and I think it was a long-standing tendency, was to eat, as people under a lot of stress do on occasion, myself included, and as a result for a very slim woman (the M.J. I saw in one photograph was thin and wry and beautiful) she had become a bit obese. She was open about this. I asked, at one time, a poet friend of mine in San Francisco if she would read a couple
of M.J.’s poems and evaluate them for her, but that friend wrote back, after meeting with M.J., that she was never going to progress as a poet until or unless she dealt with her personal problems, chief among these a food addiction. She needed, my friend said, to start there.
Curiously, it seemed to me then, M.J. was also preoccupied with the founder of the website where I published my music columns, and with other well-known writers online. She said that there were people trolling her online, and that she was suffering as a result. I had no reason not to take her words as entirely credible, though something also seemed wrong to me, as though a misapprehension lay at the heart of her point of view.
As gently as I was able, mindful of my own privileged position in the writing world and mindful of a desire not to presume that whatever the scale of that privilege was it did not mean that I knew more about the kinds of relationships that people had with others in an online setting, I tried to alert M.J. to the possibility that maybe what was happening online wasn’t quite as she imagined, and very quickly M.J. decided that she had, for the time being, had enough of me.
In my experience, even the most troubled people often tell the truth, often a very revealing truth, even if layered in metaphor or allegory, and according to this way of seeing it, I decided that I hadn’t quite done a good job with M.J. When she tested the waters of being back in touch a few weeks later, I was glad for it. I was responsible for many people, in those days, Laurel and my daughter, and my extended family, and my students, and so on, but I didn’t feel comfortable with letting M.J. down.
Why did she want to talk to me again? If she associated me with a cabal of successful writers online keeping her in obscurity or otherwise harming her? I wasn’t sure. Nevertheless, M.J. seemed to declare our difference of opinion null and void, and went back to writing frequently, with the same warmth.
The same problems were still a part of her life, she was taking care of a dreadfully ill family, and not really finding a lot of freelance editing for herself, and not getting that much prose written, or poetry, and so on. And I tried to help, but I also recognized limitations on my ability to help, for being 3,000 miles away from her, and busy with my own portfolio of difficulties.
It was in this period, perhaps in the middle of reading Purgatorio, or very nearly, that M.J. started to send me spam messages that she’d gotten via email featuring that sort of word salad that one occasionally received in those days. “Take sharpness filling soda cans wetness smooth dancing sheep horse paper handbags skipping forests play together in worlds with pencils, schools page drink slime loving living nectar of bees of pollen and butterflies amok children bikes cars sliding.” You know the type. Like many other admirers of process-oriented and collage poetry I had much loved computer-generated word salad when first exposed to it, and I definitely tried to evolve some collage-oriented work of my own from it. But over the course of time I had come to feel that the automatic writing component of spam, so redolent of the computer in the process of underestimating poetical writing, was too easy to simulate. It only glancingly related to the philosophical mission of poetry. What I mean is: word salad got boring for me.
But M.J. instead, even years into the advent of machined word salad, had decided that the word collages were specifically targeted at her, and that the bots, or the frauds, or the identity thieves, who were sending this stuff to her, had somehow invaded her computer, and were now privy to her information, her life story, or were using other means, and would I mind looking at the enclosed and offer my opinion on the subject?
Usually, the word salad enclosed by M.J. would mean nothing in particular, but would just have the contoured, postmodern look of arbitrarily formulated word salad—not the Antonin Artaud kind of word salad, but the “buy Vicodin online!” kind of word salad. That was as much as I could see. Reading M.J.’s forwarded word salad was sort of like reading the phone book, or a compendium of weather-related data. You could give the text a few lines, and admire an inadvertent poetical phrase, but otherwise there was nothing to say. Often what would happen with M.J. was that she would become exasperated if I refused to endorse her interpretation of a spam explosion, or whatever it was, and she would then lurch prosaically back into her tirade about oppressors online, and start in on how I had, it seemed, betrayed her and her needs, by refusing to renounce these miscreants, who had sullied her reputation, and so forth.
Here’s part of Mandelbaum’s translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, from Canto XIII, Virgil’s apostrophe to the sun:
“O gentle light, through trust in which I enter
on this new path, may you conduct us here,”
he said, “for men need guidance in this place.
You warm the world and you illumine it;
unless a higher Power urge us elsewhere,
your rays must always be the guides that lead.”
In the Dante reading group, which followed the very difficult and dark reading of the Beckett trilogy, I found myself finally at a threshold with Dante in which I was no longer struggling with the text, and in which I could turn to the thematic arc of the book, and accept it, and live with it, and live in it, and not expect, any longer, Dante to be a dramatist and nothing besides. As Virgil extols the sun itself, and as Paradiso comes to turn to the orbits of light in the concentric heavens, I wanted to make the journey of the whole of Dante this time, even as much of the Dante reading group fell away the longer we spent on it. M.J. was one of the people who fell away. Canto XIII, quoted above, goes on to catalogue how the eyes of the envious are stitched shut in the Purgatorio, for some long duration, because they cannot rightly see what is in front of them, and thus they stumble around the mountain of Purgatory for hundreds of years, until they are redeemed of the envy that has caused them to suffer in this way. Was this “stitched shut” quality more an aspect of my character? Or of M.J.’s?
While it would be too judgmental, and too reductive, to say that M.J. was somehow envious, as are the sufferers in the passage from Dante above, or that she would map onto the purgatorial journey of Canto XIII, which I don’t believe she elected to read with us, I did sort of feel like there were ways that she wasn’t entirely seeing what was happening to her and around her, and that this was, after a fashion, a choice she made. Or this is how I thought about it then. She would lock herself into a vault of her self-designed torments, and refuse to come out for a while, and she had an answer for every route out. Now, I am extremely well acclimated to the conviction that mental illness is not a choice, that it is an illness, and that the torments are real. I know this firsthand. This self-inflicted but unavoidable misery was my own recollection of major depression, that you were locked in with the dread, and that you had a hundred answers for why the treatment that might work would work for everyone but you. The whirlpool of delusional thinking makes it so hard to clamber up the mountain of grace and there to begin to attempt to see, at the summit, the light that is all around you.
At a certain juncture M.J.’s insistence on the hermeneutical meanings of the random messages she received online went from being a sort of funny, plausible interpretation of gibberish to being mystifying, and unyielding. She could mock herself and her deteriorating circumstances for a while, and then gradually she couldn’t mock her circumstances at all, and the whole story became dreadfully serious.
This I grew used to, but with increasing discomfort, a discomfort owing to the mental illness in my own family, and the fact that Laurel and I were trying to deal with incipient dementia and worse among those in the generation that preceded us, and with vast sums of money that we were beginning to pay into treatment for infertility, and with problems of my child custody agreement. Eventually, I wrote these words to M.J.: “You need to consult a mental health professional.”
It is perhaps a comprehensible fact of life that nobody ever seems to like the sentence “You need to consult a mental health professional.” M.J.’s response was very unhappy and immediate and personal, and she wanted nothing more
to do with me, and a great silence opened up between us. I have used the sentence with other people occasionally, over the course of my life, and this is often the outcome.
Ours was a bifurcated friendship in the first place, in that M.J. often seemed to write to a Rick Moody who had only tangentially to do with me, and who stood for something from her point of view, and this made me uncomfortable, and put me in a curious position. But on the other hand, as Laurel might say of me, I expend real effort on difficult people, and I come, because of expending the effort, to give them reserves of time and appreciation, and sometimes I do this to the detriment of people I most care deeply about and live with. It’s true, perhaps. I like the genuineness of really troubled and bereft people, and I end up giving them a lot of time. In this case, I experienced some grief, from the sudden absence of M.J., who, in a curious twist of millennial culture, I never ever did meet in person, not even once, and whose own reports of homeliness I can neither confirm nor deny, for all I know of her was the one or two photographs I have described.
Her last letter to me, from summer of 2013, is heartrending in the extreme. It is both lucid—
but you do have my sincerest apologies if i’ve added to your already large burden of hurt
—and subtly full of a distraught and erroneous belief: