The Devil Never Sleeps

by Andrei Codrescu

  The Art of Escape

  In 1959, when I was thirteen years old, I found the Ursuline nuns’ coin collection on top of a cabinet in our school chemistry lab. The box was a small wooden casket with a sliding top filled with Greek and Roman gold and silver coins minted between 27 B.C. and A.D. 200

  Our school was a former Ursuline teaching convent, renamed the Red Star Elementary School Number 2. It was connected to a closed Catholic church built in the year 1723, a Baroque fortress in whose mossy walls you could still make out cannonballs left behind by a forgotten Turkish siege. Tunnels led from the school to the church and from the church to the outside of the city walls. Fifteen generations of nuns were buried in the walls of these tunnels, which had also been used for escape into the surrounding mountains. The Turks, who occupied the city several times, were particularly fond of nuns.

  I am reminded of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which—not three hundred years old—does have the potential yet for living through a Turkish siege. And moss-covered cannonballs wouldn’t look too bad embedded in all the Italian walls. In fact, Disney could stage a Turkish siege—for practice. Give any place three hundred years and it will experience a Turkish siege, sooner or later.

  In any case, our fortress had undergone little or no change from the time the nuns lived there. Their classrooms were our classrooms, and their cells housed teachers’ offices. We met in their prayer halls for our young communist indoctrination and self-criticism sessions. The chemistry lab had also been theirs. The retorts, burners, and chemical containers dated from the end of the last century. There were also some dusty glass cases behind which copper alembics and medieval jars lay neglected. In the floor-to-ceiling wooden cabinets there were rare birds’ feathers, large and small eggs, a narwal horn, teeth from different animals, small skulls, shells, fish skeletons, bones of every shape and size, snake skins, pressed plant books, and samples of petrified and dried wood.

  The nuns’ laboratory was a wondrous kunstcamera whose chiaroscuro mystery served two purposes: It was a lesson in the magic of the bounty of forms in the natural world, and it was the perfect place to test the chemistry of sexual attraction when you could bend over a test tube with your crush of the moment.

  There wasn’t much chemistry being taught in the lab because for most of my four years there we didn’t have a chemistry teacher. What we had was an hour each week when we could either study in the dusty and scary old lab or go to the school garden and sit with our books under the withered apple trees. Most kids went to the garden and pretended to read, but I preferred the old lab, especially if I could lure the studious and philosophically inclined Dulcea there, a serious girl with black eyes and chestnut hair who did, eventually, become a famous doctor.

  But the day I found the nuns’ coin collection I was alone.

  I took out three gold Roman denarii bearing the heads of Octavian, Tiberius, and Claudius, and put them in my pocket. Every week I added three more gold coins to my collection and put the box back on top of the shelf. Eventually there were no more gold coins and I had forty pieces at home, hidden behind my small bookshelf containing, among other things, the complete works of Mark Twain translated into Romanian, all the Jules Verne novels I could find, and Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, the funniest book ever written.

  For almost a year, when I was alone in the house I would take out my Roman coins, turn out all the lights, and feel them, living out fantasies I have now forgotten but that were adventurous and delicious and substituted for masturbation which I didn’t discover until my fifteenth year—which doesn’t yet bring me to the subject of this essay, but it gets us closer.

  My stepfather’s mother, a shrewd peasant woman who loved money above all else, came to live with us for a month when I turned fourteen. In one of those moments when she had my whole attention I told her that I was the owner of a great treasure. My parents were somewhat inured to my stories, and they had dismissed my statements to that effect with condescending ennui over the past year. But the old woman believed me. So I showed her. Forty heads of Roman emperors on rounded lumps of gold. Together we conceived a plan to find out just how much my treasure was worth. In Stalinist Romania in the 1950s owning gold was forbidden to individuals and there were severe punishments involved. A perennial charge against Jews was their ownership of illegal gold. An entire family from next door had been dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night and arrested after Securitate officers dug up our courtyard. We never saw them again.

  So there were risks. Our plan involved my taking a single coin to the Bruckenthal Museum and asking to see an archaeologist. I would then tell him that I’d found it near Ocna Sibiului, a village five miles from the city, where there were Roman digs.

  The archaeologist smoked while he studied the coin. I had chosen one at random. “This is very exciting,” he said after a very long time, “Tiberius. No Tiberius denar was ever found in Romania.”

  “That’s right,” I said, beaming with pride. “This is the first time.”

  The archaeologist gave me a choice. I could show him the exact location of my find and then have my name inscribed in the annual bulletin of the Bruckenthal Museum, which was the greatest honor conceivable, or I could sell him the coin for five Romanian lei.

  I went home to ponder my choice and to consult with my step-grandmother.

  “It would be a great honor indeed,” the old woman said, “to have your name inscribed in the annual bulletin of the Bruckenthal Museum.”

  “Yes,” I countered, “but five leis will buy two Jules Verne novels I don’t have.”

  “Or a pair of pants,” she said.

  “Or two eclairs with whipped cream at the Flora.” I was warming up to the game. I then thought of all my delicious fantasies of being a Roman and buying a sailboat—a trireme—and wowing naked natives with my wealth. I said, “But think how much more this gold coin must have been worth in Roman times.”

  The fact that the gold coin was worth more in the past seemed logical to me. The coin was after all old, and we were steeped in the knowledge that the past was a dank and filthy place of exploitation and misery while the future, particularly the communist future, was shiny, glorious, and golden. “Golden” was the adjective to describe the future under all circumstances. So what we had here was the natural progression of things from a oncepowerful but devalued past to a shiny but yet unrealized future. The past had actually decayed and become worthless while the future was being prepared. That something once worth a sailboat was now worth only a pair of pants seemed natural to me.

  The shrewd old woman did nothing to discourage this belief.

  I went back to the archaeologist. “I have thought about this long and hard, and while I would very much like the honor of having my name inscribed in the annual bulletin of the Bruckenthal Museum, I don’t think that I can remember exactly where I found this coin. So I’ll take the five leis.”

  “Five leis?” the archaeologist exclaimed indignantly, “Whoever gave you the idea that you’d get five leis for something you don’t remember finding?”

  “I remember finding it,” I said. “I just don’t remember where.”

  “The point is that you have something here that is wrapped in mystery. Two leis. That’s it.”

  Now two leis didn’t even buy one eclair. Or even one Jules Verne.

  “In that case,” I said, “I think that I’ll have to think about it some more.”

  “On the other hand,” mused the archaeologist, “if you had two, or, let’s say, three of these, I could offer you ten leis for the three of them.”

  I went back to consult with the shrewd old woman and we came to the following conclusion. I would take three coins to the archeologist and get ten leis. She would take the rest of my coins with her to the village where she lived and she would bury them in a secret place known only to herself and to me. This seemed very logical to me so I took the three coins to the archaeologist, got ten leis, bought two Jules Verne novel
s, and the old woman took the money with her back to her village and buried them in a secret place whose exact location she never disclosed to me—and now she’s been dead for lo, these past thirty years.

  I spent a great deal of time in the Bruckenthal Museum. Even before I’d sold my coins to the archaeologist, I spent all my spare time in the mysterious twilight coolness of the Bruckenthal painting galleries. I was a lonely kid, living an intense fantasy life, and besides reading, the only thing I liked to do was look at the Flemish paintings in the Bruckenthal. These Flemish paintings, by Vermeer, van Eyck, and Rembrandt, had come to the Bruckenthal as gifts to Baron von Bruckenthal, governor of Transylvania, from the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, who was rumored to have been his lover. Whether that was true or not, Maria Theresa, the most prudish ruler of that bureaucratic empire, liked to drop off a canvas from the Vienna Gallery in the baron’s palace whenever she came to visit. Which was quite often, judging by the great number of works in the museum. Baron von Bruckenthal was famous for his ingenuity, and particularly for having invented the rack-wheel, a torture device he had created specifically to provide a very painful death for the leader of a peasant rebellion named Horia. The rack-wheel that crushed Horia to death with its metal spikes had a place of honor in the Bruckenthal Museum, along with some other devices, such as an Iron Maiden and a Procrustean bed. This too was one of my favorite rooms, providing my adolescent sexuality with some powerful metaphors for the so-called torments of love, which I suffered in abundance nearly every day.

  I divided my time equally between the still lifes of rich Dutch burghers and their portraits, and the baron’s ancient torture devices, living inside a deep and detailed succession of imaginary worlds. I am convinced that a structural analysis of my mind would reveal a glistening fish on a platter next to a large onion below a hanging duck, while off-stage a bosomy Flemish servant is wiping her forehead with a corner of her dress revealing a milky white thigh and no underwear. Stretched on a torture rack behind her is my very own pale, skinny body with the off-stage voice of Aurelia saying, “Not yet. Not yet.”

  Aurelia, my girlfriend, said that a lot.

  And I still hadn’t discovered masturbation.

  That discovery occurred almost a year after I had bedded not Aurelia, but Marinella, the school trollop, in a hayloft above a goatshed on the grounds of the local mental hospital. Suffice it to say that a year after that experience I found myself atop our living-room Biedermeier armoire next to a chipped marble statuette of Napoleon with his hand in his vest, an object my mother had carried, along with a few other possessions, across the border into Romania on the night that Hitler ceded Northern Transylvania to Hungary. I owe my existence to this border crossing; the fact that Napoleon crossed with my mother should have imbued him with significance for me, but I’m quite sure that this was not on my mind when I discovered masturbation. As I successfully concluded this startling new discovery, my mother walked in early from work, and the last drops of my adolescent effluvium nearly landed on her head as she opened the door.

  She pretended not to see me there next to Napoleon, and the incident was all but forgotten. It would be an understatement to say that I lived in a dream for my first fifteen years, but it would be accurate to note that the dream I lived in was a dream of art, composed equally of imagination and history.

  I will let you and myself off this embarrassing hook by recounting only one other historical intersection of art and nascent sexuality. At some point at the end of the fifties, the torture instruments at the Bruckenthal were replaced by a collection of artifacts purporting to glorify communism. The torture room became the room of the History of the Communist Party, and most of it was taken up by a huge bronze sculpture of a locomotive on top of which stood Lenin with his arm outstretched. This was Lenin Arriving at the Finland Station and it was big enough to hide behind and make out. Plus nobody ever went into the History of the Communist Party room, whereas the torture room had been quite popular. I must thus include Lenin on a locomotive among the significant objects of my first wave of sexuality.

  The proper appreciation of art does not begin in college, not even in high school; it does not begin after the advent of sexuality; and it doesn’t have anything to do with the opinions of experts, or rather, it can be the result of the opinion of any experts. The experts who organized the art-world of my childhood were only modest connoisseurs: a gigolo-baron, my mother with her prized statuette of Napoleon, a shrewd old woman who robbed me, an archaeologist who did the same, and a provincial communist party organization. Art assumes its significance in the psyche when it grows in the fertile soil of innocence and imagination, aided by history.

  When I look at paintings, sculpture, photography, or any other kind of image now, I listen foremost for the echo of that time before time when things were generators of fantasy. When something strikes me, it is because traveling through time on some stretch of pigment or sheen of stone is a world I have now mostly forgotten.

  Traveler, oh, traveler, where headest thou?

  To the light of my birth, to my first how.

  The Pleasures of Art

  I met my painter wife, Alice, in 1965. We lived on New York’s Lower East Side. She studied at the New York Studio School, an abstractionist enclave, while I worked at the 8th Street Bookstore, an avant-garde haunt of poets. At that time, poets and painters were great friends. The covers of books by Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Ted Berrigan, Ed Sanders, and scores of others were graced by the art works of Red Grooms, Alex Katz, Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Donna Reed, and many others.

  The mid-sixties were a playful time. Poets played with words, artists played with their materials, poets played with artists, and artists played with poets. What made these playful times significant was that this playfulness was serious business. The adult world was going to hell. Young men were dying in Vietnam, young protesters were teargassed on the streets, the Soviets pointed their nukes at us, we pointed our nukes at them, and, according to most thinkers, the world as we knew it was going to end in a heap of rubble in our time. Our response to this state of affairs was to question “the world as we knew it,” and to see if there wasn’t some way out of this grim agreement, by uncovering worlds as we didn’t know them. The key to such uncovering was in play. The seriousness of doomsayers was challenged by a myriad of artistic alternatives. Art burst the confines of canvas, questioned patronage, privilege, and aesthetic definition. Museums were regarded with as much suspicion as police stations.

  The revolutionary playfulness of art in the sixties was not new to art. It proceeded from the very beginning of the consciousness that saw fit to create artifacts that were separate from nature and that fixed the forms of an artist’s perception into some kind of material. That consciousness is as old as art itself and is present in all art, including ritual and religious art. In ritual and religious art there is inscribed also a mnemonic of the ritual, but that is the art’s most fragile characteristic and tends to disappear as soon as the ritual is no longer practiced.

  Some of the most enduring conventions of art were challenged successfully in my own time by the spirit of play. Andy Warhol’s paintings, collages, silkscreens, and films, for instance, challenged the separation of art from commerce, daily life, other arts, and drawingroom seriousness. Joe Brainard’s extraordinary number of small collages, including some on matchbooks, questioned the value and pricing of art objects. Some of them sold as cheaply as ten leis, if I remember correctly. The high-minded purism of abstractionists was deflated by pop artists. Going back in the history of art one can make an easy argument, of course, for the succession of styles under the pressure of new aesthetic convictions. But this is not what I am talking about. The period I am describing aimed not just at overthrowing the aesthetic conventions of the older generation, but art itself, including the products of the artists themselves. The surrealists had discussed this issue at length and they had resolved, at least theoretically, that the process of the i
magination was more important than its products. The irony of the present, which is that the products are now valued as products with little or no regard for the process, is only one of the many ironies that were self-evident to us in the sixties but are no longer either self-evident or important enough to uncover.

  Which brings me to the true subject of this essay, which is irony. Just kidding. But to mention only one night in a long series of nights in the midsixties—a time that consisted mostly of long nights—I went to visit the great American poet Ted Berrigan at 3 A.M., his favorite hour, and I found him in the process of rearranging the pictures on his walls.