Wittgenstein's Mistress

by David Markson

  As a matter of fact it is not even impossible that every solitary remaining book in that basement is a book about art.

  Nor does the simple happenstance of my having found no such books in the one carton I did open in any way eliminate this possibility, surely.

  As a matter of fact I could go back down there at this very instant and check.

  Nor would I even be required to move the lawnmower again, come to think about it, what with not having put back the lawn-mower once I did move it.

  I have no intention whatsoever of going back down there to check.

  At this very instant or at most likely any other.

  And especially since I have still not even come close to resolving the question as to why I went down there yesterday to begin with.

  Even if I did not go downstairs to the basement yesterday.

  To tell the truth it has actually already gotten to be the day after tomorrow.

  Or even more probably the day after that.

  Moreover it is raining.

  In fact it has been raining since the morning on which I threw out my red roses, which I did not put in either.

  By either, of course, I mean also not having put in the days.

  Either.

  Well, I believe it was some time ago that I indicated that I sometimes indicate them and I sometimes do not.

  Possibly it began to rain on the day after the day after I went to the basement.

  On the day before the day after the day after I went to the basement I was still typing.

  I think.

  In any case what I have also not put in is that the first day's rain broke a window.

  Or rather it was the wind that did that, that night.

  Such things can happen.

  Oh, dear, the wind has just broken one of the windows in one of the rooms downstairs, having doubtless been all I thought.

  This would have been right after I had heard the glass, naturally.

  And while I was upstairs.

  Actually, a certain amount of the rain is still coming in. Not much, any longer, but some.

  Well, most of the wind actually died down again quite quickly, as it turned out.

  So that now the whole notion of a warm steady rain is quite agreeable, even.

  Even if I am finally convinced that the pain in my shoulder is arthritic after all.

  The same thing would hold true for the pain in my ankle, presumably.

  Possibly I have not mentioned my ankle in some time.

  This would be the ankle I broke when I unexpectedly got my period in the middle of carrying a nine-foot canvas up the main central staircase in the Hermitage and fell, that I am talking about.

  Then again the ankle may not have been broken but merely sprained.

  The next morning it was swollen to twice its normal size nonetheless.

  One moment I had been halfway up the stairs, and a moment after that I was making believe I was Icarus.

  In fact very probably it would have been a wind which caused that too, since there were similarly all sorts of broken windows in the museum on its own part, by then.

  Although what I had actually just done was shift the way in which I was standing, naturally, so as to close my thighs.

  Forgetting for the same instant that I was carrying forty-five square feet of canvas, on stretchers, up a stone stairway.

  And naturally all of this had occurred with what seemed no warning whatsoever, either.

  Although doubtless I had been feeling out of sorts for some days, which I would have invariably laid to other causes.

  At any rate it is that ankle that I mean.

  And outside of which I would most likely not mind the rain in the least, as I started to say.

  With the exception of missing my sunsets, perhaps.

  Although what I have basically been doing about the rain is ignoring it, to tell the truth.

  How I do that is by walking in it.

  I did not fail to notice that those last two sentences must certainly look like a contradiction, by the way.

  Even if they are no such thing.

  One can very agreeably ignore a rain by walking in it.

  In fact it is when one allows a rain to prevent one from walking in it that one is failing to ignore it.

  Surely by saying, dear me, I will get soaked through and through if I walk in this rain, for instance, one is in no way ignoring that rain.

  Then again, doubtless it is rather easier to ignore it in my own particular manner of doing so if one happens to have no clothes on at the time.

  Well, or no more than underpants.

  Although as a matter of fact I stepped out of those on the front deck each time I decided to walk, also.

  Well, doubtless I had already gotten soaked while I was out there deciding about the walk in either case.

  So that by then it would have scarcely made any difference whether I kept on my underpants or not.

  Although what I am more likely admitting by all this is that I may very well have been coincidentally aware of needing a bath, as well. Or at least on the first of those occasions.

  Normally I bathe at the spring, of course. Well, or summers as now, in any case.

  Oh. And I have finally stopped staining, incidentally, which had begun to look like forever.

  And in either event it was actually an amusing diversion, soaping myself and then walking that way until I was rinsed.

  Even if for a minute I believed I had lost my stick while I was at it.

  When I looked back there it was, however, standing upright.

  Which is to say that the stick was already not lost even before I had begun to worry that it might be.

  So to speak.

  Not that there would have been any point in trying to write anything with it in the rain to begin with, on the other hand.

  Well, not that anything I ever write is still there when I go back in any case.

  Then again, perhaps it might have been interesting to see one's messages beginning to deteriorate even before they were finished being written after all.

  Like Leonardo da Vinci doing The Last Supper, one might have felt.

  Well, one rather doubts that one would have felt quite like Leonardo.

  Even by writing left-handed.

  Or backwards, so that one would have needed a mirror to read it.

  Meaning that the image of what one was writing would have been more real than the writing itself.

  So to speak.

  Have I ever mentioned that Michelangelo practically never took a bath in his life, by the way?

  And even wore his boots to bed?

  On my honor, it is a well known item in the history of art that Michelangelo was not somebody one would particularly wish to sit too close to.

  Which on second thought could very well change one's view as to why all of those Medici kept telling him don't bother to get up, as a matter of fact.

  Although come to think about it even William Shakespeare himself was terribly tiny, which is something I did once mention.

  I mean so long as one would appear to be getting into this sort of thing.

  Well, and for that matter Galileo would never even ever shake another person's hand, once he had discovered germs.

  Not that a solitary other soul would believe that there were such things, of course. Even though Galileo kept insisting he had seen them.

  In some water, I believe this was.

  And they move, too, Galileo kept telling people.

  Which became just as significant a moment in the history of science as Michelangelo not going near water at all became in the history of art, in fact.

  I do not remember any longer if the water in which Galileo found the germs was the same water in which he had proved that the life of Lawrence of Arabia had to be put in first, on the other hand.

  And on later thought it may have been Louis Pasteur who would never shake anybody's hand.

  Or Leeuwenhoek.

  What
I find interesting about the possibility that it might have been Leeuwenhoek, actually, is that Leeuwenhoek was from Delft.

  So that one of the people he would have refused to shake hands with would have almost assuredly been Jan Vermeer.

  Unfortunately the same footnote that brought up Leeuwenhoek in connection with Delft gave no indication as to whether Vermeer might have taken this as a slight, however.

  Well, or as to how Carel Fabritius may have felt about it, either.

  Emily Brontë once painted a quite effective watercolor of Keeper which I have actually seen a reproduction of, incidentally, even if I have no idea what I have been saying that has now made me remember this.

  Any more than I have any idea what has also now made me remember that Pascal invented the first adding machine.

  Or how I even know that he did.

  There goes my head again in that way that it sometimes does, doubtless being the only explanation here as usual.

  Although one of my sunsets just before the rain was finally another Joseph Mallord William Turner, actually.

  Even if what this next reminds me of is that one more thing that John Ruskin became famous for, besides the other thing I have already told about that he became famous for, was watching sunsets himself.

  Although the real reason I remember this about John Ruskin is because he actually gave his butler instructions to remind him when it was time to look.

  On my honor, John Ruskin once told his butler to announce the sunsets.

  The sunset, Mr. Ruskin, being what the butler would say.

  Even if something different that has just struck me is that I myself would appear to be saying on my honor extraordinarily frequently, of late.

  Every single time I have said it it was only because what I had been talking about was the gospel truth, however.

  Such as about Mrs. Ruskin not turning out to have had certain superfluous material taken away by somebody like Phidias, for instance.

  Even if for the life of me I still cannot remember what I had been trying to get that monstrosity of a canvas up that stairway for, on the other hand.

  Or whatever became of my pistol either, to tell the truth.

  The pistol being the one with which I had shot holes into one of the skylights in the museum so that the smoke from my chimney would go out, obviously.

  Well, I have just mentioned this. Or perhaps it was only certain additional broken windows that I mentioned.

  Nonetheless the last place I would seem to remember still carrying the pistol in was Rome, for some reason.

  Well, on the afternoon when I ran into that alley, in fact, which was actually a cul-de-sac. On a street full of taverns below the Borghese Gallery, at the intersection of Calpurnia Avenue and Herodotus Road.

  After seeing my own reflection, highlighted against a small stretched canvas coated with gesso in the window of a shop selling artists' supplies, as I had passed.

  Still, how I nearly felt, in the midst of all that looking.

  Looking in desperation, as I have said.

  But too, never knowing just whom one might find, as well.

  Although as a matter of fact it may very well have been Cassandra I had intended to paint, on those forty-five square feet.

  Or should I have spelled that Kassandra, perhaps?

  Even if a part I have always liked is when Orestes finally comes back, after so many years, and Electra does not recognize her own brother.

  What do you want, strange man? I believe this is what Electra says to him.

  Although it is the back of the jacket on a recording of the opera that I am thinking about now, I suspect.

  Well, or because of imagining that somebody may have actually called one's own name, do I possibly mean?

  You? Can that be you? And here, of all places?

  It was only the Piazza Navona, I am quite certain, so beautiful in the afternoon sun, that had touched a chord.

  Still, not until dusk did I emerge from the cul-de-sac.

  In Italy, no less, from where all painting came.

  So why would I now suddenly be thinking about certain murals by David Alfaro Siqueiros, of all people?

  And to tell the truth I also have no idea whatever became of my thirty silent radios either, actually, that I once listened to and listened to.

  Poor Electra. To wish to murder one's own mother.

  Yet everybody, in those stories. Wrist deep in it, the lot of them.

  Doubtless the radios are still in my old loft in SoHo, as a matter of fact.

  Still. So where are my seventeen wristwatches, then?

  It did run on, that madness.

  Walking in the rain I have not gone much farther than to where one can see the toilet fastened to pipes on the second floor in the house where I knocked over the kerosene lamp, incidentally.

  Even if there is no second floor.

  Although what I am really remembering about that ankle now is how astonishingly adept I became at maneuvering my wheelchair, once I had located one.

  Skittering from one end of the main floor to the other, in fact, when the mood took me.

  From the Buddhist and Hindu antiquities to the Byzantine, or whoosh! and here we go round the icons of Andrei Roublev.

  But which in turn now makes me wonder that if I am presently hurting in two places at once, as I undeniably am, would this then mean that I am actually hurting in four?

  Except that I have now completely forgotten what the other two places are that I might have meant, unfortunately.

  Andrei Roublev was a pupil of Theophanes the Greek, by the way. In fact he was also a sort of Russian Giotto.

  Well, perhaps he was not a Giotto. Being the first great Russian painter nonetheless, having perhaps been all one meant.

  And Herodotus was almost always spoken about as having been the first person ever to write down any real history, incidentally.

  Even if I am not especially overjoyed at being the last.

  As a matter of fact I am quite sorry I said that.

  Such thoughts again being exactly the sort one would have wished to believe one had gotten rid of with the rest of one's baggage, naturally.

  Oh, well. One can be thankful that they have been coming up only rarely these days, at least.

  Have I ever said that Turner once actually had himself lashed to the mast of a ship, to be able to later do a painting of a storm?

  Which has never failed to remind me of the scene in which Odysseus does the identical thing, of course, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put.

  But now good heavens.

  Here I sit, and it is only after all this time that I have remembered the most significant thing I had meant to say about the basement once I had started to say anything at all about the basement.

  The person who wrote that book about baseball did not make any sort of ridiculous error in its title after all, as it turns out.

  On my honor, there is a separate carton in the basement which contains absolutely nothing except grass that is not real.

  Artificial grass being something I had never even heard of before, I would swear. So that doubtless I would have scarcely been able to imagine what it was down there at all, if the carton had not had a label.

  Then again, if the carton had not had a label, unquestionably I still would have been struck by the manner in which what was inside of it certainly did look like grass.

  The things one tardily becomes aware of.

  Even if the whole notion actually saddens me now that I do know about it, to tell the truth.

  Grass being simply supposed to be grass, is all.

  Well, or quite possibly the book itself is a sad book, and for this identical reason, which would have been a point that I missed until now completely, of course.

  In fact quite possibly even those people Campy or Stan Usual may have been sad too, if somebody once told them they would have to stop playing their game on real grass.

  Although surely even peo
ple who played baseball must have had more important things than that to worry about, or one would certainly wish to imagine that they did.

  Certainly the one they named the disease after must have had more important things to worry about.

  The instrument that Ludwig Wittgenstein used to play was a clarinet, by the way.

  Which for some curious reason he carried in an old sock, rather than in a case.

  So that anybody seeing him walk down the street with it might have thought, there goes that person carrying an old sock.

  Having no idea whatsoever that Mozart could come out of it.

  Doubtless A. E. Housman thought he was just somebody carrying an old sock, in fact, on the afternoon when Wittgenstein found himself with diarrhea and asked if he could use the toilet, and A. E. Housman said no.

  On my honor, Wittgenstein once needed a toilet in a considerable hurry, near some rooms at Cambridge that were Housman's, and Housman would not let him in.

  Actually the composer who most often came out of the sock would have probably been Franz Schubert, having been Wittgenstein's favorite.

  Even if I have no idea why this reminds me that Brahms's friends were frequently embarrassed because prostitutes would call hello to him when they passed.

  Or, for heaven's sake, that Gauguin was once arrested for urinating in public.

  Or that Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman often used to nod to each other while walking the streets in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War.

  Presumably this last will at least make it seem less improbable that people like El Greco and Spinoza did exactly the same thing, at any rate.

  If hardly in Washington, D.C.

  Clara Schumann actually visited the Wittgenstein home in Vienna with Brahms on occasion also, incidentally, if I have not made that clear.

  And which was perhaps an additional reason for Brahms wishing that children would go away.

  Whereas Schubert was one more person who had syphilis, unfortunately. This being an explanation for why he never finished the Unfinished Symphony, as a matter of fact, having died at thirty-one.

  And Handel can be put on the list of people who went blind, I think.

  But who was somebody named Karen Silkwood, whom I suddenly also feel I would like to tell that you can now kneel and drink at the Danube, or the Potomac, or the Allegheny?