Wittgenstein's Mistress

by David Markson

  The basement of this house is extremely damp, even at this time of year, as I have also perhaps mentioned.

  One can smell the dampness, in fact.

  And to tell the truth I was down there for quite some time.

  So perhaps the pain is arthritic after all, and it was the dampness in the basement which aggravated this.

  Although on yet another hand the whole business could have actually gotten started at the spring, when I was washing my underpants on the day before I ever even gave a thought to the basement.

  In any case one generally feels wisest in enumerating all such possibilities where an injury is concerned.

  Meanwhile the way one reaches the basement is down a sandy embankment at the rear of the house, which I do not remember if I have mentioned or not.

  The reason I mention it now is that I would have been confronting that part of the house in returning from the spring, this doubtless having been what brought the basement into mind to begin with.

  Even if I have confronted that identical part of the house any number of times without having thought to go down to the basement at all.

  So that to tell the truth I have no real idea why I went down there yesterday either, when one comes right down to it.

  What I did, after I did happen to get there, was to look at the eight or nine cartons of books.

  What one does after having happened to get someplace often having very little to do with why one may have gotten there, however.

  So that perhaps I had no reason whatsoever for having gone to the basement yesterday.

  Although I do believe I have mentioned the eight or nine cartons of books.

  These being the eight or nine cartons of books which have more than once perplexed me by being in the basement rather than in the house, especially since there is adequate room for them, up here.

  In fact many of the shelves up here are half empty.

  Although doubtless when I say they are half empty, I should really be saying they are half filled, since presumably they were totally empty before somebody half filled them.

  Then again it is not impossible that they were once filled completely, becoming half empty only when somebody removed half of the books to the basement.

  I find this second possibility less likely than the first, although it is not utterly beyond consideration.

  In either event the present state of the shelves is even an explanation for why so many of the books in the house are so badly damaged.

  Such as the life of Rupert Brooke, for instance. Or the poems of Anna Akhmatova, or of Marina Tsvetayeva.

  Perhaps if there were more books on the shelves, so that so many of them were not standing askew, there would have been less opportunity for the sea air to have ruined as many as it has.

  The person who left the additional books in the basement would not appear to have thought of this, however.

  Still, perhaps there was some equally important reason for the additional books having been left there.

  Perhaps it was my curiosity about this very reason which finally led me to go down to the basement yesterday to look at the eight or nine cartons after all, in fact.

  Even if I did not actually look at the eight or nine cartons of books.

  What I looked at was one of the eight or nine cartons.

  Although as a matter of fact I have no idea why I keep on speaking about eight or nine cartons, either.

  There are eleven cartons of books in the basement.

  One being able to make this sort of incorrect estimate in many such situations, of course.

  And which in fact will then remain in one's head for some time even when one knows better.

  Well, as I have just been illustrating.

  All of the books in the basement have their own peculiar odor of dampness, incidentally.

  I have no idea how one would describe this, but it is an odor of dampness that is peculiar to books.

  Or in any event this was undeniably the case with the books in the one carton I had opened before, which was the same one I opened again yesterday.

  Possibly I have not mentioned having opened one of the cartons before.

  One would scarcely be speaking about eleven cartons in the basement of a house on a beach as containing books without having opened at least one of the cartons to discover this, however.

  As a matter of fact one should have doubtless opened all eleven of the cartons before speaking about them in that manner.

  So I am still operating on the basis of very limited evidence, actually.

  Although to tell the truth the entire question has never interested me very deeply.

  In fact moving the rusted lawnmower to open even that same single carton again may have been little more than a way of passing my time, yesterday.

  Once I had found myself downstairs in the basement with no reason whatsoever for finding myself there, as I have indicated.

  Had I been in a different frame of mind I might have moved the baseballs after all.

  And in which instance very likely my shoulder would not feel the way it does, either.

  Actually I did look through the books this time, however, which I had not done on the other occasion when I had opened the carton.

  Well, the other time I had not moved the lawnmower first in any event, so that it would have been difficult to look through the books even if I had wished to.

  All I had wished to do on that occasion was to discover what the carton contained, however.

  Yesterday I took the books out of the carton.

  With only one exception, every single one of them was in a foreign language.

  Most were in German, in fact, although not all.

  The one book not in German or in another foreign language was an edition of The Trojan Women, by Euripides, which had been translated from Greek into English.

  By Gilbert Murray.

  I believe the person who had translated it was Gilbert Murray.

  As a matter of fact I am not now certain I looked.

  One finds that many of the Greek plays have been translated by Gilbert Murray, however.

  In fact I suspect I have even once discussed this subject.

  Then again it is perhaps surprising that I did not devote more attention to the translation after all, that being the only book from the carton that I would have been able to read one word of.

  Although actually I can read Spanish, too.

  Or perhaps I should say I was once able to read Spanish, not having tried to do so for years.

  And to tell the truth I never read Spanish very well when I did read it.

  Two of the books from the carton were in Spanish.

  One of these was a translation of The Way of All Flesh.

  In fact I did have a certain amount of difficulty in recognizing that one, come to think about it.

  Basically, this was because the word carne was used in the title, and for some moments I kept thinking of carne as meaning meat.

  Certainly The Way of All Meat did not seem like the sort of title that anybody would give to a book.

  The difficulty persisted only until I noticed that the book had been written by Samuel Butler, however.

  Naturally one would sincerely doubt that anybody one believed had already written one book called The Way of All Flesh would have then written another book called The Way of All Meat

  Or that the reverse of that statement would have been very likely true, either.

  Still, I must admit that the confusion did briefly exist.

  The other book in Spanish was not a translation, but had been written in that language. This was a volume of poems by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

  Well, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz being still another person I suspect I have mentioned.

  My reason for suspecting this is that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was Mexican, and I am quite positive I have spoken of having once lived in Mexico.

  Living in Mexico one would naturally have become familiar with the n
ames of certain Mexican poets, even if one did not read the language they wrote in very well.

  If one does not read a language very well, one generally reads poetry in that language even less well than that, as a matter of fact.

  Although I do believe I once did make an effort to read certain poems by Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, even if the chief reason I did so may have only been because of how taken I was with his name.

  Certainly it has a memorable resonance, when one says it out loud.

  Marco Antonio Montes de Oca.

  Mountains of Goose being what the second half of it would curiously appear to mean, on the other hand.

  Although Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz certainly has a resonance of its own.

  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Sister Juana Inés of the Cross being the translation here, obviously.

  The sister part also making her a nun, of course. Even if I had not thought of the other connection until this very instant.

  Which is to say the connection between Sor Juana Inés of the Cross and St. John of the Cross.

  Well, possibly there is a connection. Then again, possibly all sorts of people who had something to do with the Catholic Church were called of the Cross, and it is no more than a coincidence that I have suddenly been thinking about two of them.

  Doubtless if I were more interested in such matters I would have been thinking about any number of them.

  For that matter I have no idea what I have been saying that has now made me think about Artemisia Gentileschi again, either.

  Even if as I said a few pages ago I was surprised that I could have written as many pages as I already had without having thought about her long before that.

  Well, Artemisia perhaps being the one person who, if one could have been positive of a life after death, almost any woman artist would have happily hanged herself to see.

  Even if nobody had ever even taught her to read or write.

  Or were the paintings themselves perhaps enough, if one was Artemisia?

  That was a ridiculous question to have asked.

  Still, it is perhaps an indication of how one feels about Artemisia Gentileschi.

  Of the Brush.

  Although for the life of me I now additionally have no idea why I have just remembered that Galileo was one more person who went blind.

  In Galileo's case this would have been from looking at the sun too many times through his telescopes, or so it was said.

  But so how in heaven's name has this in turn reminded me of that cracked old oblong of plate glass that I used to use as a pallet, all of those years ago in SoHo, and which before that had been the top of my aunt Esther's coffee table?

  Or that they actually named a disease after one of those baseball players?

  One would certainly give almost anything to understand how one's head sometimes manages to jump about the way it does.

  Esther was from my father's side of the family, actually.

  I have just made some souchong tea.

  Before I came back to the typewriter I went upstairs and took the framed snapshot out of the drawer in the table beside my bed, for just a moment.

  I did not put it back on the table itself, however.

  There was no book by Marco Antonio Montes de Oca in the carton either, if I happen to have given that impression.

  On the other hand there were no less than seven books by Martin Heidegger.

  I have no way of indicating the titles of any of these, of course, short of returning to the basement and copying out the German, which it would certainly seem pointless to trouble myself with.

  When I say it would seem pointless, naturally what I mean is that I would still not understand one word of the German in any event.

  A word that certainly did catch my attention was the word Dasein, however, since it seemed to appear on practically every page I opened to.

  Martin Heidegger himself remaining somebody I know no more about than I know about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, on the other hand.

  Except for now knowing that he was certainly partial to the word Dasein, obviously.

  Then again as I believe I have said one is frequently apt to come upon a name such as Martin Heidegger's in one's reading, even if one is scarcely apt to be reading any books by Martin Heidegger himself.

  At least this would presumably remain the case if one happened to ever do any reading, which as I have also said I have stopped doing.

  In fact I cannot remember the last book I read, even if it may on occasion have appeared to have been a life of Brahms.

  All things considered I still do not believe it has ever been verified that I did read a life of Brahms, however.

  As a matter of fact it has only at this moment struck me that every solitary thing I know about Brahms could have been learned by reading the backs of the jackets on phonograph records.

  Possibly I have not mentioned reading the backs of the jackets on phonograph records before.

  It is a thing one does, however.

  Well, or did, in any event, since it can now also be fairly definitely stated that I have not read the back of the jacket on a phonograph record for basically as many years as I have not read a book.

  In fact there are no phonograph records in this house.

  Well, there is no phonograph either, when one comes down to that.

  Actually, this may have surprised me when I first came to the house, although it is not something to which I have given any thought since I perhaps first gave it some thought.

  Well, as I have furthermore said, I have not played any music since having gotten rid of my baggage in any case, said baggage having naturally included such things as generators for operating such things as phonographs.

  None of this is counting whatever music I hear in my head, conversely.

  Well, or even in certain vehicles when I have turned on the ignition and it has happened that the tape deck has been set to the on position.

  Hearing Kathleen Ferrier singing Vincenzo Bellini under either of those circumstances being hardly the same thing as making a deliberate decision to hear Kathleen Ferrier singing Vincenzo Bellini, obviously.

  Although what I am now suddenly forced to wonder is if certain things I do know about Brahms would have appeared on the backs of the jackets on phonograph records after all.

  Such as about his affairs with Jane Avril or with Katharine Hepburn, for instance.

  Or for that matter how do I know that Beethoven would sometimes write music all over the walls of his house when he could not get his hands on any staff paper quickly enough?

  Or that George Frederick Handel once threatened to throw a soprano out of a window because she refused to sing an aria the way he had written it?

  Or that the first time Tchaikovsky ever conducted an orchestra he was positive that his head was going to fall off, and held on to his head with one hand through the entire performance?

  Well, or on another level altogether, would anybody writing the information for any of such jackets have actually troubled to put down that Brahms was known for carrying candy in his pocket to give to children when he visited people who had children?

  Certainly nobody writing such information would have put down that one of the children to whom Brahms now and again gave some of that candy might very well have been Ludwig Wittgenstein.

  Perhaps I have not mentioned that one of the children to whom Brahms now and again gave some of that candy might very well have been Ludwig Wittgenstein.

  On my honor, however, Brahms frequently visited at the home of the Wittgenstein family, in Vienna, when Ludwig Wittgenstein was a child.

  So if it is a fact that Brahms was known for carrying candy in his pocket to give to children when he visited people who had children, then surely it is likely that Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the children he gave candy to.

  Very possibly this was what was in Wittgenstein's own mind all of those years later, in fact, when he said that you do not need a lot of money to give a nice p
resent, but you do need a lot of time.

  By which I mean that if the person Wittgenstein had wished to give a present to had been a child, he could have naturally taken care of the problem exactly the way Brahms generally did.

  Doubtless one does not stroll about Cambridge carrying candy in one's pocket to give to Bertrand Russell or to Alfred North Whitehead, however.

  Although what one might now wish one's self is that Wittgenstein had been in the basement with me yesterday, so as to have given me some help with that Dasein.

  Well, or perhaps even with that other word, bricolage, that I woke up with in my head, that morning.

  Or likewise with the whole sentence that I also must have said to myself a hundred times, a little later on, about the world being everything that is the case.

  Surely if Wittgenstein was as intelligent as one was generally led to believe he ought to have been able to tell me if that had meant anything, either.

  Then again, something else I once read about Wittgenstein was that he used to think so hard that you could actually see him doing it.

  And certainly I would have had no desire to put the man to that sort of trouble.

  Although what this for some reason now reminds me of is that I do know one thing about Martin Heidegger after all.

  I have no idea how I know it, to tell the truth, although doubtless it is from another one of those footnotes. What I know is that Martin Heidegger once owned a pair of boots that had actually belonged to Vincent Van Gogh, and used to put them on when he went for walks in the woods.

  I have no doubt that this is a fact either, incidentally. Especially since it may have been Martin Heidegger who made the very statement I mentioned a long while ago, about anxiety being the fundamental mood of existence.

  So that what he surely would have admired about Van Gogh to begin with would have been the way Van Gogh could make even a pair of boots seem to have anxiety in them.

  Even if there was only the smallest likelihood that a pair of boots Van Gogh used to wear were the same pair he also once painted a painting of, obviously.

  Unless of course he had painted with only his socks on, that day.

  Or had borrowed a second pair of boots.