by André Aciman
UNDERGROUND
I seldom read what passes for poetry on posters inside New York subway cars. Usually these poems are no better than Hallmark verses sweetened with dollops of treacle and peppered with just enough irony to flatter the average straphanger.
This time I did read the poem, though: it was a poem about time, or about the redemption of time—I wasn’t sure. I read the poem through, wondered about it for a while, and then my mind drifted and I forgot about it. A few days later, there it was again, in another subway car, staring at me, as though still asking something, insisting. So I read it once again and was as intrigued by it as I’d been the first time. I wanted to stop to think about it, partly because its meaning kept teasing and giving me the slip each time I believed I’d seized it, but also because the poem seemed to be telling me something I understood perfectly well but couldn’t quite prove I’d actually inferred from the poem itself. Was I projecting onto the poem something I hoped it was saying because I’d been nursing a similar thought myself?
The third, fourth, fifth time I came upon that same poem in the subway, I felt that something was indeed happening between us and that it had as much to do (a) with the poem, (b) with me, but also (c) with how I kept running into it, to the point that the poem began to acquire an auxiliary meaning that had less to do with itself than with our little romance. On several occasions I even looked for it, expecting to find it, and was mildly disappointed when I couldn’t spot it. Indeed, I started fearing it had outlived its time in the subway system and was now being replaced by an ordinary ad.
But I was wrong, and what a joy it was to see it again, waiting for me, hailing me from its end of the car with a winking I’m over here! or Haven’t seen you in ages! How have you been? The joy of reencountering it after fearing I’d lost it began to mean something that was not necessarily irrelevant to the poem itself; both the worry and the joy had wormed their way into the very content of the poem and pollinated it, so that even the history of our nodding acquaintance in the transit system was woven into a poem that was itself about the transit of time.
But perhaps something deeper was going on.
* * *
To understand the poem, I wanted to understand my experience of the poem—from how I felt at our first meeting, which I had started to forget, to the thrill of rereading it whenever I could, down to the state of bafflement it left me in each time I was coaxed to trace its meaning but found myself failing again and again, as though my failure to understand the poem were ultimately its hidden, perhaps its truer, meaning. There were no external, incidental facts to set aside or dismiss if I wanted to grasp both the poem’s effect on me and the person I was upon reading the poem.
The way in which or the place where we land on an art object, a book, an aria, an idea, a piece of clothing we long to buy, or a face we would like to touch—all these cannot be irrelevant to the book, the face, the tune. I even want my first tentative, mistaken readings of the poem to mean something too and not to be forgotten, because misunderstanding, when we feel we’ve misunderstood a poem, is never entirely our fault but the fault of the poem as well—if fault is indeed the right word, which it might not be, since what spurs a fault in reading may be an unintended, undisclosed, subliminal meaning that the poem continues to intimate despite itself, even when it manages to distract us for a moment, a meaning waiting in the wings, forever inferred and yet forever deferred—the suggestion of meaning, a conditional meaning that is simply not quite there or that was once partly there but was later removed either by the poet or the reader and is now a latent, unreal meaning that lies in limbo and is still trying to work itself back into the poem. There is not a single work of art that is not riddled with such fault lines that are constantly asking us to see what’s not there to be seen. Ambiguity in art is nothing more than an invitation to think, to risk, to intuit what is perhaps in us as well, and was always in us, and maybe more in us than in the work itself, or in the work because of us, or, conversely, in us now because of the work. The inability to distinguish these strands is not incidental to art; it is art.
What we call meaning, what we call resonance, enchantment, and ultimately beauty, would remain totally unfathomed and silent without art. Art is the agent. Art allows us to reach our truest, deepest, most enduring selves by borrowing someone else’s skill, someone else’s words, or someone else’s gaze and colors; left to our own devices, we wouldn’t have the insight, or the comprehensive vision, much less the will or the courage, to enter that place where only art can take us.
Artists see other than what is given to be seen in the “real world.” They seldom ever see or love places, faces, things for what they in themselves really are. Nor, for that matter, do they even know their impressions of them as they in themselves really are. What matters to them is to see other or, better yet, to see more than what lies before them. Or, to put it differently: what they reach for and what ultimately touches them is not experience, not the here and now, not what’s there but the radiance, the echo, the memory—call it the distortion, deflection, deferral—of experience. What they do with experience is and becomes experience. Artists do not merely interpret the world to know the world; they do more than interpret: they transfigure the world to see it differently and ultimately to take possession of it on their own terms—even if it is for a short while, before they start the process all over again with another poem, another painting, another composition. It is their mirage of the world that artists long to hold, the mirage that breathes essence into otherwise lifeless places and objects, the mirage they wish to take away with them and leave behind in finished form when they die.
Art seeks not life but form. Life itself, and Earth along with it, is all about stuff, a clutter of stuff, while art is nothing more than the invention of design and a reasoning with chaos. Art wants to let form, simply form, summon up things that were hitherto unseen and that only form—not knowledge, Earth, or experience—could have brought to light. Art is the attempt not to capture experience and give it a form but ultimately to let form itself discover experience—better yet, to let form become experience. Art is not the product of labor; it is the love of labor.
Monet and Hopper weren’t seeing the world as it was; they were seeing other than what lay before them, experiencing not what was given but what always felt elusive and strangely withheld and that needed to be invented or restored, imagined or remembered. If they succeeded, it is principally because it didn’t matter which of these four it was. Art is the huge negative, the gran rifiuto, the everlasting nyet—or call it the inability, even the failure, to take things as they are or to accept life as it is, people as they are, events as they happen. Indeed, Hopper said he wasn’t painting a Sunday morning or a woman sitting, ever so lonely, on an empty bed; he was painting himself. Similarly, Monet wrote that he was painting not the Rouen cathedral but the air between the cathedral and himself, what he called the envelope, the thing that wraps around an object, not the object itself. What interested him was the endless traffic between himself and what he called the motif (the subject matter). “The motif,” he once wrote, “is insignificant … What I want to reproduce is what lies between the motif and me.” What he wants to represent hovers between the visible and the invisible, between design and raw stuff.
* * *
So here is the poem I kept running into in the transit system. It’s entitled “Heaven,” by Patrick Phillips.
HEAVEN
Patrick Phillips, b. 1970
It will be the past
and we’ll live there together.
Not as it was to live
but as it is remembered.
It will be the past.
We’ll all go back together.
Everyone we ever loved,
and lost, and must remember.
It will be the past.
And it will last forever.
The poet here is remembering a cherished past—let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a love that occurr
ed a while back or long ago but that no longer exists and therefore exists in memory alone. In his ache to hold on to the past, the poet conjures a time in the future when he’ll be allowed to return to that past, not the past as it happened and was once lived, but as it’s been cradled and cherished and crafted by the mind and a faculty that the poet Leopardi called le ricordanze—remembrance as a creative act, the past eternally preserved, eternally held firm, eternally relived, like a Venice that stays forever not as it once was but as it always longed to be, nothing added, nothing altered, nothing taken, nothing lost. Venice forever, a past that transcends time.
This is not a homogenized, refurbished past cleansed of all incidentals; rather, it is a past that never really was but that continues to pulsate, a past that, even back when it was the past, harbored an unfulfilled wish for a might-have-been version of itself that wasn’t unreal for not being.
What the poet is describing is a time in the future when the past will have become an everlasting present. In the words of Virgil, “Perhaps the day may come when we shall remember these sufferings with joy.” There is no name for this melding of past, present, and future tenses. Which should not be surprising, since what the poet wishes here is to transcend, to undo, to overcome time altogether and be with all those he ever loved and lost and continues to love and long for. But, then, this is no longer time. This is eternity. This is not life. This is the afterlife. Hence the title of the poem: “Heaven.” This is a poem about death. No wonder I’ve been reading it underground. And the coincidence of reading about death underground surely must mean something too, since coincidence is what confutes and jostles how we attempt to make sense of time, and this is precisely a poem about what will happen when we vanquish time and lie outside of it, beyond time, after time. This is a poem about an eternal future that is an eternal past. Which is the ultimate illusion, the ultimate fiction, the ultimate victory. This is a poem about a place in time that does not exist.
And here we confront the ultimate paradox: to think of ourselves outside of time in this heaven that is past, present, and future is to think of a time when we won’t even be able to think of anything, much less of time or of love. The poem is projecting a time of plenitude and indeed drawing a sense of harmony, redemption, and fulfillment from this projected plenitude, which is supposed to take place in eternity but where the awareness of plenitude, to say nothing of awareness itself, will be impossible to have. The dead are without awareness.
Part of me does not wish to drop the matter here. I want to palpate this imponderable situation, which is why, perhaps, I propose that the best way to grasp the paradox of mind after death is to imagine the opposite scenario. An old man is lying on his deathbed surrounded by his wife, children, and grandchildren, all of whom had brought him much happiness. Naturally he is extremely sad. He says he feels for their sorrow: “Who knows,” he says, “your sorrow may last your entire lives, yet I don’t want you to feel any. Worse yet, your sorrow makes me very sad, not because I’m the reason for it, but because you are my children and I don’t want to see sorrow in your lives. I know how you’ll miss me. My room, my desk, my seat at the dinner table. I know how this hurts.” But there is also another reason for the dying man’s sorrow. “What kills me now is not your sorrow only, but mine as well. I know how much I will miss you. I will miss you as you are all now, I will miss you as you were as children, I will miss you for one hundred days, one hundred years, ten thousand years, forever, because my love never dies, and the worst of it all is that I would rather miss you and ache for you for eternity than think that as soon as I die now I will not even have a brain to know that I ever loved you. I miss you already, because the thought of forgetting or not even having you in my thoughts is unbearable, is worse than death to me, which is also why I can’t stop crying.”
Art allows us to think the unthinkable, to posit one paradox after another in the hope of firming up wisps of our lives and feelings by transfiguring them, by giving them a shape, a design, a coherence, even if they are and will remain forever incoherent. Incoherence exists, which is why composition—art—exists. Grammarians called this unthinkable, imponderable, impalpable, fluid, transitory, incoherent zone the irrealis mood, a verbal mood to express what might never, couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t possibly occur but that might just happen all the same. The subjunctive and the conditional are irrealis moods, as are the imperative and the optative. As defined by Wikipedia—and I quote Wikipedia because the Oxford English Dictionary does not house the word—irrealis moods indicate “that a certain situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking.” Instances of irrealis moods in addition to those I’ve just mentioned are legion.
Most of our time is spent not in the present tense, as we so often claim, but in the irrealis mood—the mood of our fantasy life, the mood where we can shamelessly envision what might be, should be, could have been, who we ourselves wished we really were if only we knew the open sesame to what might otherwise have been our true lives. Irrealis moods are about the great sixth sense that lets us guess and, through art sometimes, helps us intuit what our senses aren’t always aware of. We flit through wisps of tenses and moods because in these drifts that seem to take us away from what is around us, we glimpse life, not as it’s being lived or was lived but as it was meant to be and should have been lived. I am always looking for what’s not quite there, because by turning my back to what I’m told is all there is, I find more things, other things, many perhaps unreal at first but ultimately truer once I’ve ferreted them out with words and made them mine. I look at places that no longer exist, at constructions that have long been torn down, at journeys never taken, at the life we’re still owed and for all we know is yet to come, and suddenly I know that, even with nothing to go on, I’ve firmed up something if only by imagining that it might happen. I look for things that I know aren’t quite there yet, for the same reason that I refuse to finish a sentence, hoping that by avoiding the period, I’m allowing something lurking in the wings to reveal itself. I look for ambiguities, because in ambiguity I find the nebulae of things, things that have not yet come about, or, alternatively, that have once been but continue to radiate long after they’re gone. In these I find my spot of time, my might-have-been life that hasn’t really happened but isn’t unreal for not happening and that might still happen, though I fear it may not come about in this lifetime.
* * *
Today while riding the C train I saw the same poster again. It looks older and yellowed. Clearly, its days are numbered. And yet as I made a point of rereading it—because it’s just there waiting to be reread still—it seemed to want to disclose something new, if not something about itself, then something about my seeing it again and thinking back to that time when every line seemed new to me and was still able to mystify me, again and again. I missed those days, the way we might miss our first few days in a grand hotel when we’d get lost in its convoluted corridors and continue to fail to watch for those reminders that told us we’d yet again taken the wrong turn. And yet, each mistaken corner seemed filled with the thrill of mystery and discovery. The way we might miss the first week of a new love, when everything about the new person seems miraculous, from their habits and cooking, down to the new phone number, which is still difficult to remember and which I don’t want to learn for fear that it might lose its luster and stirring novelty.
I want to relive the first reading of the poem, and the second, and third, because a different me is present in each. I want to rediscover the poem from scratch all over again and pretend that these verses, “Everyone we ever loved, / and lost, and must remember,” didn’t just remind me of something I seem to recognize about my own life but whose cadence I understand only because each of the three verbs folds upon one another ever so neatly and in a manner that suggests I might have written them myself.
I look at the poster of the poem for the nth time and am starting to think that perhaps what I’ve written about this
poem is not quite finished, may never be quite finished, since the meaning I thought I’d captured yesterday has gone into hiding today or couldn’t possibly be the correct meaning, though I also suspect it might resurface and prove to be correct in a few days—a chain of events that is not irrelevant to the poem itself—because there is nothing definite about the poem’s meaning, because its true meaning is itself a could-be meaning that hasn’t really surfaced yet but isn’t unreal for not surfacing but might still surface sometime soon, though I fear it did so the first time I read the poem and then never surfaced again.
IN FREUD’S SHADOW, PART 1
I am in Rome again this summer. I am here because I’ve been told there is still a chance I might be able to visit Villa Torlonia, once known as Villa Albani, where I hope to set eyes on what some claim may be the original statue of Apollo Sauroktonos, Apollo the Lizard Slayer, conceived by the legendary fourth-century Athenian sculptor Praxiteles. This is not the first time that I’ve come to Italy lured by the possibility of seeing the statue. But I’ve failed each time; hence, my guarded skepticism. The Torlonias have always been reluctant to let people see their villa, even more so their prized antiques, some of which owe their existence in the villa to the expert hand of Cardinal Albani’s secretary, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the scholar, archaeologist, and father of modern art history who lived from 1717 until his murder in 1768. This is my third visit to Rome to view the statue, and I fear it might turn out to be yet another fruitless one. I am reminded of Freud, who made a point of visiting Michelangelo’s Moses whenever he was in Rome and got to see it each and every time.