(Kerri McCaffety, Two interior shots of Molly’s)
The Duc de Berry, who commissioned the Very Rich Hours to entertain his jaded senses, was particularly fond of the Imagination. The Devil is gratified here by both his earthly senses and his boundless imagination that redeems the tormented after thoroughly enjoying them. The Voyeur extracts Salvation by pulling the Spirit out of the Flesh like a mollusk from a shell.
(Jean Colombe, Hell, from the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)
In this special section of Hell, which is the Devil’s favorite, the damned are exquisite and tortured exquisitely. One can only imagine, with some frissons, the audition.
(Fra Angelico, The Last Judgment. Erich Lessing /Art Resource, NY)
(below)
Here is the Devil as Pan and Godfather, old god of nature, dispensing pleasure and power to lustdriven witches, and blessings on his spawn. There is a certain panic behind his eyes, as if he hears the footsteps of the Inquisition in the distance.
(Francisco Goya, Witches’ Sabbath. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
Catholic tombstones are waiting rooms for the Day of Judgment. In their little perennial houses, the dead rehearse their defense for the Almighty, and rest for the day when they will be called to rise and utilize their creaky bodies again.
(Sandra Russell Clark, Creenwood, from Elysium: A Gathering of Souls: New Orleans Cemeteries)
Grandfatherhood
Well, I’m a grandfather. What of it? Grandbébé Marcus is three months old and when I hold him I feel ancient, like a tree. I hold his light, light person, weighing about the same as an average grocery bag, and feel this awesome shoot of energy. His eyes light and widen when he sees me and he smiles, and I am filled with his innocence. Almost everything he sees is for the first time: His gaze finds the things of this world one by one and bathes them in a wide surprised wonder. A bird. A fence. The word waffle on the side of the Waffle House. Or perhaps only part of the bird, the red part, and one slat of fence, and the a in the waffle. I’m not sure how much of the thing he sees but that much of it lightens up, as if seen for the first time. I can only intuit, like a man in the dark, the vastness of that first gaze.
His innocence makes me feel simultaneously guilty and awed; guilty because I have forgotten how it was to look on something for the first time; I have even forgotten how to look on something as if it were the first time. That’s the essence of grandfatherhood then: to have twice forgotten innocence, in both its primary mystery and in the awareness of its necessity. That is what grandbébé Marcus teaches, in his Osh Kosh farmer overalls bulging over diaper, and plump feet like two white yams. My son tells me that one whole month before Marcus laughed while awake, he laughed in his sleep. What did he laugh at in his dreams, way before he found something to laugh at in our world? Did things present themselves to him in their hilarious wholeness before he actually saw them? I feel him struggling with his body as its needs assert themselves and his laughter changes to crying: hunger, gas, discomfort, growing muscles, tingling nerves, excess of light, heat, cold, all the facts of the body surging through fields of discovery outside himself. Or maybe there is no outside himself yet, only a plane of sensations intersecting each other at speeds inconceivable to the slow, diminishing, dim grandfather-tree holding him between two huge limbs. The work of generations, the measure of time—they weigh about twenty pounds, have eyes that widen in astonished delight, their name is Marcus, who invents the world as he finds it.
Love in the Nineties
My friend William Talcott, a poet and a gentleman, complains most bitterly about love in the nineties. He offers himself as an example. He’d fallen madly in love with an unhappily married Japanese woman who reciprocated this love, but then returned to her husband, a boring guy who threatened to drown himself if she didn’t rejoin the fold. In response, William produced a beautiful book of verse, entitled Benita’s Book, which was his lover’s name. Like all poets, he credits his beloved with magical powers: “You’re also in / my thoughts Benita, your power to heal / imaginary ailments just by smiling.” Of course, it would seem from this that the poet knows that his ailments are imaginary, but you don’t know poets. Here is what he says next: “When we touch / that place moves where all lovers go—/ a pasture by the sea / and you can ride the ponies there.” No longer ailing, he now transports Benita to that imaginary, though crowded, place where lovers and ponies surf. Now, it’s easy to find the brokenhearted pathetic, but consider the alternative. “The other day,” William writes to me, “I was on the trolley eavesdropping on two animated young men, discussing the merits of Levi’s 505s versus 512s.” Enough said. The callousness in the body proper is clearly but a reflection of the callousness in the body politic.
Another poet, friend of mine, Jim Nisbet, has also produced a wrenching volumette of the heart entitled Across the Tasman Sea. It is the story of a poet abandoned by a woman who chose a professional career over his lyric ministrations. The denouement could have been predicted, since the affair unfolds from letting her drive his car to long-distance phone calls and then, finally, to e-mail. The distance grows as we reach the outer limits of technology, after which the lovers dissolve and the so-called real world reasserts itself. It leaves a poet, Mr. Nisbet in this case, declaring: “Tell me / you’re / there / at the end / of this fabulous / bus ride.” He knows she won’t, but what’s imagination for?
The Blessed Waters of Sleep
These days, I dream of sleep. Sweet narcotic of healing, come to me, I beseech, as I toss restlessly amid the real and imaginary reefs of middleage anxiety. Come to me with all your cool salves, your chasms, your phantoms, and even your hells! I lie awake, reviewing my life, cursing my doctors, disemboweling my enemies, reinterpreting the once sweetly simple, climbing the ladder of the never-ending list of things to do that will never be done. I think of E. M. Cioran, the great philosopher, who suffered also from insomnia: “And while a world interior to our waking solicits us, we envy the indifference, the perfect apoplexy of the mineral,” he said. I have tried melatonin, sleeping pills, valerian extract—all in vain. I have even tried to buy the sleep of others, convinced that those who sleep more than their share are possessed of a magical substance. As I think of the sleepers, the gifted ones, the young, the unconcerned, sleep recedes even further. It isn’t fair: I, who am a worshipper of dreams, am locked out of the kingdom of dreams, while others, who have neither the vision nor the skill to fully tend their dreams, get to roll like pigs in the treasures of the moon goddess.
It was not always thus. I was a sleepy child once in a dreamy city in a slumbering country at the edge of Europe. Romania was steeped in the sleep of centuries, from which history woke it loudly every three decades or so, in order to plunge it into a nightmare of death and destruction. My hometown, Sibiu, in Transylvania, was swathed in layered, thick walls, still sporting moss-covered cannonballs from the countless sieges it endured. Inside these walls we slept, my fellow burghers and I, while the half-lidded, somnolent eyes of attics in the steep roofs, watched over our nights. All of our houses, built in the thirteenth century, had owls. They perched on trunks full of German encyclopedias, top hats, discarded armor, rolled-up maps. The Pied Piper of Hamelin, it was said, piped the children of Germany over the mountain here, to Sibiu, where they slept.
My kingdom of childhood sleep was vast. I slept in hollows on the dark side of the Teutsch cathedral, I slept on the grass in front of the Astra library, and I slept in school with my head on the books, absorbing more of their wisdom than otherwise possible. My favorite book (not a school book) was A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain. I identified with the Yankee who falls asleep and wakes up in another day and age where his superior knowledge enables him to control the world. I was certain that just over the threshold of my own sleep lay the world meant for me.
Our great romantic poet, Eminescu, spun his verses from moon dust and star gossamer. He dreamed tales of stars
who fell in love with mortal girls. Spirits, goblins, ghosts and old sages populated his verse, freshly arrived from the shores of Morphia, goddess of sleep. His poetry fed from the dark soil of fairy tales and songs sung in high mountains beneath sheer walls of granite. The thick forests teemed with creatures eager to enter our dreams: most of them did so directly, but some reached us via Eminescu’s poetry. Over in England, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge broke open the outer shell of reality’s hard nut and let the sweet contents pour out like a purple fog, bringer of dreams, portents, nocturnal voyages. And over in America, Edgar Allan Poe, suspended like a question mark of smoke from the end of his opium pipe, warned the nation of daytime and optimism that a dark dream, an unseen shroud, stretched just below its sunnyness.
The world of sleep is vaster than the world of awakeness. Think of all the nights that stretch from our frightened, monster-haunted human beginnings to the loudness of today when we are doing all we can to banish night. We began in the shelter of the cave, steeped in a nameless dream that had at its center a single flame whose mystery we have not yet fathomed. What was it that woke us from the essential sleep of beasts to the odd knowledge that now compelled us to consider our existence? We awoke from this meditation-dream only when hunger propelled us to kill, and that was good, because for those few hours we forgot the tormenting flame and happily became beasts again. Eating well caused insomnia, however, so we invented song, art, and poetry, to while away the dark. The nights of the neolithic were long.
Humans have slept fitfully since then. At certain times, history seemed to disappear. A pall of sleep settled over certain ages, obscuring the dailiness of what was, after all, no progress, no development, no awakeness. But when history awoke, it did so with huge explosions, with booms, with cannons, with bombs, with bombast, with men on horses and tanks, an unbearable din of boastful assertion, a rejection of sleep. War woke us up from the eternal contemplation of the dream-flame and put us on the path of Insomnia. Our cities are brightly lit odes to Insomnia, our modern economies are the fruits of sleeplessness. Bowed before blinding small screens, the drones of the working world keep on working past their duty, past what is strictly necessary to bring home the food. The evil goddess of Insomnia rules our world as fiercely as sweet sleep once did it.
Who are the partisans of sleep today? Artists, certainly. Dream is our material, the stuff from which we draw art. One can draw wiggly lines of light from us back to the cave painters at Lascaux and see the dreams we dreamt. Some, like Goya, Bosch, Hoffman, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Freud, André Breton, declared the poetry of the dream openly. Others simply fed at the dark fountain and felt themselves expand. Some mystical poets have denied the waking world any reality at all, maintaining that we are all a dream in the mind of God, dreaming of that which dreams us. That “that” was once a butterfly for Lao Tsu. Of course, most people of the world have known, just like Lope de Vega, that “la vida es sueño.” Even our superficial pop singers give it to us without respite, “life is but a dream, ah, ah!”
Some philosophers and scientists have to be included among artists. Insights bombarded them in sleep, apples hit them with force and revelation, atoms arranged themselves behind their closed eyelids. All thinkers speak with wonder of the state just before sleep, the antechamber of sleep, the residence of Sister Hypnagogia. It is there that most great revelations are encountered. But only those with the fortitude to rise and commit their visions to paper can wrench these jewels from the night.
Pregnant women cherish their sleep, whose calming waters they float in just like the child floats inside them. The amniotic waters of sleep, our first, are also the sites of our first dreams. Today’s doctors are as keen on sleep as the early medicine men: They don’t know how or why but literal sleep heals it. Whether we are all asleep or not, the vastness of the unconscious is greater than the shards of what we know.
Professional Hazards
Dr. Felix Post has some unhappy news. He shouldn’t, though, with a name like that. With a name like that he should be a delivery service for happy news. Honey, guess what just came by felix post? Be that as it may, the inaptly named psychiatrist has studied one hundred writers and reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry that the profession is a hotbed of mental illness. Poets, he discovered, had more mood swings and manic depression requiring hospitalization than novelists or playwrights. Yet psychosis or depression was evident in 80 percent of the poets, 80.5 percent of the novelists and 87.5 percent of playwrights. This is doubtlessly due to the fact that poets have more time on their hands: The average poem is at least 80 percent shorter than either a novel or a play, leaving the poet free to dial many emergency services in search of an audience. Novelists and playwrights, while considerably more psychotic and depressed, take it out on their characters instead, who then become models for our children when they are adapted for the screen; thus is the moral fabric of society shredded and torn.
In an unusual reversal of commonly held belief, Post found that only 31 percent of the poets were alcoholics compared to 54 percent of the playwrights. That’s understandable: playwrights have more money for booze.
Half the poets, Dr. Felix found, failed to ever achieve “complete sexual union,” while 42 percent of playwrights were known for their sexual promiscuity. Dr. Felix does not specify if the promiscuous playwrights achieved “complete sexual union,” or whether the failing poets were promiscuous in addition to being incomplete or what happened should union occur between a poet and a playwright.
But these are small quibbles. The benefits of these findings to society are immense. Jesse Helms can now point at these figures with his cigarette and say, “See, I told you so. Cut their funds. They are nuts.” Employment agencies are sure to take note. “We were thinking about hiring a poet to represent us in our negotiations with IBM, but that’s out now.” Next to pay attention will be landlords. “You’re a playwright you say? Forty-two percent promiscuous? You’ll set the dogs next door howling! Find another place!” Personally, I take Dr. Post’s figures with some degree of anxiety: I write poetry and novels, and I have written plays. I must have the sorry sum of all vices and failings. Now, if only had I time enough for them!
Part Five
Amnesia of the Body Politic
Tolerance, Intolerance, Europe & America
There is a legend that the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who piped all the children out of Germany, piped them over the mountains to my hometown in Transylvania. It’s an interesting story, I’m sure you know it. The Pied Piper of Hamelin rid the town of rats and mice by charming them away with his flute playing in the year 1284, about seven hundred years ago. When the citizens of Hamelin refused to pay him the price they agreed on, he charmed away their children in revenge.
It’s an amazing story if you really think about it, which is what I do—think about stories—and I’m in good company because a lot of writers retold and thought about this story, Goethe, Browning, and the Brothers Grimm among them. What interests me about this story is what happened to these children after they were piped away. If indeed they were piped away to my hometown, what possibly happened to them is that they grew up into rather dour and humorless businessmen who built big walls around the city, kept very much to themselves, and traded with other people until they became rich. When they became rich, they attracted a lot of attention and were attacked by their neighbors who burned down their big houses and took their stuff. One of those who attacked was Vlad the Impaler who came to be known as Dracula, but who wasn’t a vampire, only a Wallachian prince who liked to conquer places and then skewer their inhabitants on stakes. After Dracula left, the inhabitants built even bigger walls and became even more suspicious of strangers than they’d been before. They watched out for anyone who wasn’t like them and either expelled them from town or killed them. In the seven hundred years that have passed since they first got to my hometown, the good citizens expelled Jews, if any of them were foolish enough to settle there, banished o
r tortured anyone who worshipped in a style different from their own Catholic religion, and burned witches in the town square.
In this, they were no different from the rest of their European neighbors who, in those seven hundred years, made war against each other for reasons of religion, class difference, or personal animosity. Christians made war against the Islamic Turks and against each other. Catholics made war against Protestants, one kind of Catholic made war against another kind of Catholic, one kind of Protestant made war against another kind. Anyone who challenged the official doctrines of their religious leaders was tortured and burned. The Inquisition went even further than that, and tortured and killed anyone who dared to think differently. In fact, freethinkers were viewed as more dangerous than just about anyone else, and the Inquisition made sure that ideas like “the earth revolves around the sun” were promptly squelched. Even after it became common knowledge that the earth does indeed revolve around the sun, the Church took a very long time to acknowledge that fact. Only recently did the pope say that, yes, perhaps Galileo was right and the Church wrong. But what is the value of an apology hundreds of years after the wrong? About zero, I’d say. The Church has also grudgingly acknowledged recently that Darwin may have been right, that God didn’t make the earth in six days, and that, perhaps, before he made man he made something like a monkey first. Duh. Welcome to the nineteenth century, Mr. Pope! And yes, by the way, wouldn’t it be nice if our own fundamentalist Christians right here in the state of Louisiana would come at least as far as the nineteenth century. Living in medieval Europe as they do is no picnic …
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 16