by Rick Moody
if you wanted to humiliate me, to show me up as less than your intellectual equal i could have spared you the time. i humiliate myself daily, as does the universe. it’s just the way things are.
(Capitalization as in original.) Already, of course, the email messages of deepest concern behind M.J.’s back were circulating at an enormous rate. Though most of the Dante reading group constituents were on the East Coast, there was a real effort taking place to try to find a way to reach out to M.J.’s husband, through email or snail mail or telephone, to try to let him know what we were being told, if he did not already know.
It was my wife, Laurel, who suggested that we had to do something about M.J. And this she felt in part because her mother was going through related crises, and because she had close friends and family with problems, some of them people she had worked with in her videos. Laurel knew, and knows still, a lot about this kind of suffering, the loneliness, the exile, of delusion, and the way that it becomes a responsibility that isolates the sufferers and drives away everyone who might help. Laurel, though she wasn’t reading Dante with us, was a powerful advocate for the group doing something about M.J., just to make sure that we had been responsible and alerted others who were responsible. And so we did, though for my part, I did it while no longer speaking to M.J. directly, because of the implication in her last note that I was somehow involved in the conspiracy against her, or that in some way I didn’t care or worse wanted to hurt her, when these were the furthest from my wishes for her peace and equanimity.
As I have said, what I know about delusion, from having lived with schizophrenics and bipolar sufferers when myself an inpatient at the psychiatric hospital in 1987, likewise from being related to any number of mentally ill people, both through marriage and by blood, is that even delusion often tells a very human truth, if read properly. I had to let go of M.J., because of email messages like this:
do you know what’s happening and why?
are you angry because i posted in the rumpus comments of your music column?
angry because i contacted you for help?
angry because i wrote poems?
i am a person, first.
a person.
But if I had read the notes carefully, perhaps I shouldn’t have let go of her at all, even though she was someone I scarcely knew; if I had thought more clearly about her initial difficulties; if I had inquired further, perhaps I could have done more. The only way I can comfort myself now is to think that she had closer family and close friends, and it is my understanding that they were doing their utmost too to try to stem the tide of woe closing over M.J. But the pain was significant then for me, and it is now too, the pain of thinking that more might have been done.
Not long after this upsetting sequence of events, I learned from various members of the Beckett/Dante Study Group that M.J. then began to struggle with frankly psychotic delusions about messages being delivered to her through the electrical system in her apartment. I remember reading a few Facebook posts—expunged now, appropriately—that featured comments of the “I hope you are getting the help you need” variety. Loving, but direct.
We watched M.J. collapse in some way, and we watched it happen in microns. I have always opposed light psychiatric terminologies like “psychotic break” and “nervous breakdown” that frame these transitions into mental illness as cataclysmic and sudden, when, in my experience, they are a lot slower moving, and more holistic, and they certainly were slow-moving with M.J., not to mention (for point of reference) myself. I do not, that is, consider myself cured of the depression and obsessive thinking and alcoholism and self-destructiveness that afflicted me as a younger person. I consider myself to be in remission to greater and lesser degrees, and possessed (for which I am grateful) of a number of extremely useful tools and approaches that allow me to head off problems. But I am, while much changed, still myself, and M.J., while performing an excellent facsimile of upstanding (and extremely funny) citizenry, was, it seems, in tremendous discomfort. The longer I knew her, the longer my circle knew her, the more difficult it became for her to pretend otherwise. If there were tools at hand, which I think there were, she failed to see them herself, or to know how to employ them, or they failed to work.
In short, I became one of M.J.’s delusions. I was, it seems, one of the people attempting to control her and her thoughts, and this was apparently the case because she had never entirely overcome the fact that I was a successful and somewhat well-known writer myself. In the end, this felt particularly disquieting to me, and it was one of those delusions that, if repeated enough, starts to feel like maybe it should be accurate somehow, that I was an online oppressor, if only because it has been repeated so often.
By winter of 2014, the silence, and the determination to let others nearer to M.J. lead the charge, made her death harder to take (and I’m forecasting here, slightly, in that she didn’t pass away until a couple of months later). That she took her life sank in after the shock that she was no longer living, this person with whom I emailed at least once or twice a week, if not more, for a couple of years. The suicidal part settled in like a howling in the night. I don’t know, didn’t know, probably never will know how M.J. did what she did. And in a way that’s just and right, in that the silence between us, which could still be intimate and (at least for me) supportive, does not inevitably suggest a discernible or interpretable death. That is her affair. It is an intimacy of her life. My friend Iris, also in the reading group, asked her if she wanted to rejoin when we got to Don Quixote, which came later, and the reply was thanks but no thanks, which is a remark free of distorted thinking, but also one that wants for the warmth that we had all felt for her.
Her poetry was really warm, sometimes it had an Ogden Nash quality, funny, charming, surprisingly antique, and as a mood it overcame her only occasionally, but it was the writing I liked best about her. As a prose writer, as she herself would have said, she could not lie. In a way it is a dangerous habit for a writer, as a capacity for editorial intervention is self-protective sometimes, and allows us to pass by topics and narratives that would require too much of us, or that could even endanger our well-being.
I’m still circumambulating around her death, especially on a day like today (for I am setting down these words on the anniversary of her death), and can find no end to the agony in it, even in the light above purgatory.
February
There were years in the nineties that I went north in February, having stayed at an artist’s colony north of Albany in the deepest winter months, but that kind of crackpot thinking I had come to leave behind. I was instead this February to go south, to lead a so-called “master class” at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. This oddly named berg, New Smyrna, celebrates an ancient Greek city-state that is now part of Turkey. I believe the site of “old Smyrna” was multiply conquered, and the site of tribal conflicts. Why New Smyrna, Florida, wanted to summon up that legacy is unknown to me. The Floridian Smyrna is not that far from Daytona Beach where, as you might suspect, you can drive your car on the beach. The region has excellent citrus and some slightly seedy pockets hidden away. Serial killer Aileen Wuornos apparently frequented a bar in or near New Smyrna.
The part of town where the arts center is located is dense with mangrove and canals, and, one presumes, gators, and the arts center itself is constructed with boardwalks and informal hangouts, and we were there with Dana Schutz, the artist, who was already friendly with Laurel, and who is a lovely and unpretentious and funny and thoughtful person whom we came to love without hesitation. She was pregnant with her son at the time she was there. The other “master artist” was jazz pianist and composer Marilyn Crispell. Marilyn is a truly unforgettable person, mild-mannered and easy to talk to, a bit like some of my sister’s friends, well acclimated to the counterculture and its iterations. But then when you talk to her about music and the people she has known and played with, Marilyn takes on a dense and powerful importance t
hat is as if she were concealing inside a second self. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone play piano live the way that Marilyn plays it, in a kind of luminous possession.
You can go through life listening to jazz, and knowing a lot of jazz players, as I have done as an adult, and still never really get an idea of the fundamental principles of jazz—for example, what improvisation really summons or requires. How it might feel to take the idea of improvisation to heart, and to make it a principle of being, a kind of art-making that is more broadly important than simply: it’s going to be flavored like New Orleans and have sevenths and ninths in it. Or: it’s going to genuflect in the direction of Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis. Marilyn Crispell truly composes the music on the spot, and it comes from wherever Coltrane came from, which doesn’t mean that it sounds like Coltrane (or perhaps more accurately like McCoy Tyner), or Coltrane’s music, but that it comes from the same idea of what music is, a set of procedures that rain down on her like ions from above.
So the three “master artists” were as just named, and then there was a group of students, handpicked by each of us. I had given applicants to my “writing” class a description that indicated that I didn’t need for people to be “writers,” that my class was interdisciplinary, and that anyone was welcome to sit in. I have always wanted to teach this interdisciplinary class. I have always wanted a class that was in no way a traditional writing workshop, and in which I didn’t teach fiction writing, but rather some impulse to compose literature, or to use language, in a way that was not normatively inclined toward genre at all. I wanted to make a class that was about using language to arabesque around the traditions of contemporary writing instruction, that was spacecraft in an era of train travel where traditional writing classes were concerned, or maybe I was just trying to make a class that was like one Marilyn Crispell would teach, except that it was made out of words, and finally I was going to have a chance.
Does it sound preposterously idealistic? Maybe! I know and can feel, at this point, having been teaching in one capacity or another for nearly thirty years, that teaching is not about the dispensation of information. Teaching is not about a professor giving you information that she happens to have available, in which process you consume the information, as though it were comestible, after which you are then in some fashion ready to teach yourself. And teaching writing is the teaching that is least like this. French pedagogy often involves lecturing, and I could therefore no more teach writing in France than I could teach physics. Teaching in my mind is about an exchange of human values, an oscillation between teacher and student in which the roles are dynamic, and the subject matter in some ways is a matter of indifference. The listening that is required for teaching is omnidirectional, and the talking is omnidirectional, and it’s perhaps more like playing jazz than it is like preparing for an SAT. The more I teach the less certain I am that I know anything, but the more I can feel the future of the student in and around her or him, and the more I know how to get there without undue time-wasting. I know nothing, but I can feel the personalities, and, in a way, I can love the personalities, no matter who they are, who the student is, love in this case meaning respect and esteem and compassion in a rigorously pedagogical environment, I can practice the kind of transferential esteem that works in psychoanalysis to make it possible for students to see their own way into growing and changing, and challenging themselves. I wanted to teach this class at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, in which you could bring anything to the class. One of the assignments was: I read aloud Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou may’st in me behold”), we discussed it for a minute, and then they had to rewrite it from memory, after which we all read our results aloud at the same time, in various different configurations, and recorded the results. This was the class I always wanted to teach.
Laurel and I were trying to have a baby the old-fashioned way in February, getting ready for another full-scale IUI when we got back in town in March (because the prior one had turned up nothing), and therefore we were using thermometers and attempting to do what you need to do to bring the whole thing to fruition, but at the same time I was having a lot of the aforementioned issues, prostate and pelvic floor pain, and feeling like an old, fat, irritating white guy.
A poet and photographer friend of Laurel’s who, with his wife, had also gone through infertility, had suggested to me, on a number of occasions, how awful the whole thing had been. They had recently adopted in 2014 (indeed, their son had been at our house at the wedding, and had memorably rolled down the hill in the backyard quite a few times), and their having done so enabled them to put the infertility treatments aside. Laurel’s friend had written a song about how much he hated seeing other people and their children, how much he hated the children, and how bad he felt for hating the children. Or for being envious of the children and the parents to the point of hatred.
I didn’t know what to make of this feeling, then, but now in a way it was my feeling and it was Laurel’s feeling, too, and it was my job, and responsibility, and duty, to try to understand and feel what Laurel was feeling, and to try to help. There was one contextual difference between us, of course, and it was that I already had a child. And she did not. I had, in a way, backed into being a father. I might have put it off even longer. But by the time we were in New Smyrna, my daughter was five and was well on her way. Laurel had the role of stepmother in hand, and had known Hazel, my daughter, since she was very young, but she had no child of her own, and her frustration with the meager pace of our fertility got to her.
Park Slope was to fertility what Wisconsin is to dairy farming, what France is to unpasteurized cheeses, what the Gulf of Mexico is to red tides; everywhere you went in Park Slope was occluded by breeders demanding that you accommodate both parent and spoiled brat while the parent reached over you for his kombucha. The park near us was gummed up with the 10% and their offspring, if not the 1% and theirs, and they were awfully hard to watch sometimes. In fact, Laurel and I had a jokey, not-at-all-funny gesture that we had borrowed from our friend who wrote the howl-of-pain lyric about children when he could have none, a gesture that we used when we found ourselves in particularly dense sidewalk traffic with some battalion of Park Slope parents, and that gesture involved miming the act of pulling the pin out of a hand grenade with one’s teeth and then lobbing the device into the crowd. We winced at the gesture when we first knew of it, and then we adopted it too.
This is an indication of how great was the pain we were in.
The hatred of children, when you are desperately trying to have a child, is explicable to me now, and the desire not to gloat about one’s child because of the other people out there who are suffering with infertility, and in enormous pain with their suffering, is obvious to me now, and in a way it dates to the education that I got during our long period of involvement with the medical community.
There was a musician at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, in New Smyrna, Florida, who was simultaneously chatting up a number of the younger visual artists there, and at least one of my writing students, and I could remember well the time in my life when I would have thought of that preoccupation with the germinating youth of the colony as a worthy strategy for the weeks ahead, but it now seemed like some sepia-toned and antiquated approach to life. The personal lives of the other colonists seemed to be happening behind some scrim, and in front of me was the next move in our long, crushing path toward parenthood.
At the same time, Laurel had embarked on this photo project that involved trying to take portraits of people, at night, who were distantly related to her through DNA. She went online, to sites like 23andMe and Ancestry.com and located people who were listed as cousins or distant relations of some kind, and then she approached these people and asked if they would allow her to take their picture. She ended up doing hundreds of these images. In 2013 and 2014 she, and sometimes we, drove all across America taking these photographs. I think I went on about half of the total volume of DNA photo
shoots. Laurel ended up traveling 50,000 miles in the United States of America taking these images, all of people on her mother’s side of the family, because her dad, being third-generation Japanese American, had far fewer DNA matches online. (In Japan, DNA research had not yet had its moment. But it’s also true to say that there are simply far fewer Japanese Americans than Americans of European descent, only about 1.3 million, and thus fewer of them to participate on this side of the ocean as well.)
In New Smyrna, therefore, one thing we did to keep to ourselves and to avoid the rabble with its youthful enthusiasms was to go on little field trips to take photos of people for Laurel’s work. It’s worth saying here how much I revere my wife’s work. It is a great revelation, being in a relationship with someone whose work I passionately love, and whose work continues to challenge me, and which causes me to learn new things. Laurel’s early videos, a sequence of incredibly difficult-to-watch videos that she made in collaboration with strangers (men) who stopped her on the street, is world class, and enormously important, but it is not now the work that I think about when I think about how much I admire her as an artist. I admire the entire span of the Nakadate canon, but also the work that doesn’t call attention to itself immediately—for example, her second feature film, The Wolf Knife, which was made for the ridiculous sum of $5,000. (She did spend a little bit on postproduction later.) There are moments in The Wolf Knife where Laurel’s eye, what she sees through the lens, is the subject of the story, not the characters so much as how the characters exist in space and light, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle, the love that moves the sun and all the other stars besides.
In her photographs and her videos, Laurel tends to see into space and how people are in space in ways that I never am able to do. This is talent, like Gregory Crewdson shooting the best photograph of our wedding on his iPhone, but it’s also looking carefully at the world. Because I have cared about photography and have been related to photographers, because it has always been at the margins of my family and among my close friends, I have taken many opportunities, even if I had to be photographed in the process, to watch photographers perform their magic—Gregory Crewdson, Tina Barney, David LaChapelle, Sylvia Plachy, etc. Like these others, Laurel thinks with her utmost clarity and power when she’s looking through a lens. She’s a great writer (she studied with Robert Stone when she was a graduate student at Yale, and with Deborah Digges at Tufts, when she was an undergraduate), and when she has time to write, it is invariably interesting and gets somewhere that I really want writing to go, but it is in her photographs (and videos and films) that the visible world is made new, and where human emotions and human frailty are most evidently at the center of the work. I wish writing, as I experience it, were as good at documenting emotional frailty and the fragmenting of dignity in a consciousness, as Laurel’s work has often been.