by Carole Maso
Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, & Moments of Desire
Carole Maso
Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org
Copyright © 2000 by Carole Maso
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
Published 2014 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection
eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941088-26-5
eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers
Published in the United States of America
IN MEMORY—
John Hawkes
Zenka Bartek
Nathalie Saurraute
James Laughlin
Kathy Acker
William Burroughs
Marguerite Duras
William Gaddis
Allen Ginsberg
Robert Bresson
Contents
The Shelter of the Alphabet
Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose: A Lifelong Conversation with Myself Entered Midway
Surrender
Precious, Disappearing Things: on AVA
A Novel of Thank You
Richter, the Enigma
Except Joy: on Aureole
The Re-introduction of Color
Break Every Rule
Rupture, Verge, and Precipice Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not
Acknowledgments
Break Every Rule
The Shelter of the Alphabet
NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND
THIS IS THE PLACE I WILL BE CONCEIVED. In joy and love, with awe and fear—some fear. This is the place I will be made—next to water. And the longing for water shall never leave me. What are my parents, two kids from Paterson, New Jersey, doing here? That’s my father, over there, stepping off a navy destroyer. It’s 1955 and he’s stationed here, and my mother has come to be near him. They love the song the water sings and the sailing songs. Later my mother will tell me that they read books aloud to one another and I like to imagine they read Yeats, and Melville, and maybe Sonnets to the Portuguese and other such conception texts. I like to imagine that language conjured me and the sea and these two people crazy for each other. Photos from this time reveal them to be so young: my mother golden blonde, with eyes the color of the sea. She is sitting next to a window, looking out—the window like the eye, transparent, suggestive, dazzling. And my father, a stringbean, a stick figure, though an ecstatic one, in a white sailor’s suit. The pants with nobody in them, as we children will call him later.
I cannot from this distance hear their sighs or prayers, but I can imagine them. They are desirous, delirious, blindingly in love. But looking at these photos now, more closely, I see that something belies the surface joy. Of course. They have already had two miscarriages. I am wanted almost too much. Their devotion to the unknown future, their longing, is nearly palpable. After their lovemaking, in those first moments after my conception, there is absolute stillness, and prayers to the Virgin; they are wishing I might stick; they are hoping I might cling like a barnacle. My mother lies by the oceanside, lulled in blue, unmoving, my father’s dreaming head resting on her breast—my small fin forming. Ocean child. Fin, small flipper. My mother says her rosary to the mysterious, silent Mary who smiles her wan smile. Great sorrow and great joy already live in me: sandwiched as I will be, on one side by two silky siblings who could not hold, and on the other side by a brother with a hole in his heart. But I am all health, I am all hope: I am miraculous, I am beloved from the start—and they make hope my home, my domain. I am desire and ocean, song and songs the blood sings. And they call me Carole, of course: song of joy. I am feared for and wanted beyond all reason. I live in their watery blue world of worry and desire, with the ghost images of the bodies that did not take.
Home is my mother’s breath and blood. Home is my mother’s voluptuous body and the darkness—the miracle of it and the ocean that cradled us. And their hope.
There must have been an element of ferocity…
There must have been an element of ferocity to have produced such a fierce child. To have made me at once so fierce and so mild.
PATERSON, NEW JERSEY
Paterson is one of the great American poems, and it is a place, and it is the place where I was born and lived for a time. From the beginning home to me is a poem. I am born in a modernist masterpiece by William Carlos Williams. And in fact as I am being born he is completing Book Five of that opus, the book of the triumph of the imagination. Mysteriously he is handing this to me as I now begin to breathe. I am not surprised; it seems like destiny to me. And in the times of my illness, I will in fact believe I am the chosen one, handed this directly from him who wrote not for love or fame or because he wanted to say something, but to keep his sanity.
“It’s a strange courage you give me, ancient star.”
And yes, I am a daughter of Williams, who combined poetry, fiction, fact, criticism, bits of this and that in his work. A strange brew. I am his daughter as you, even if you know nothing of my work except this essay, will see. He has sent me on this charmed path.
“Rigor of beauty is the quest.”
And then there is Allen Ginsberg, the other native of Paterson I grew up with. I adored his great heart and hunger, his music and outrage and audacity. His fallibility. How, as a teenager, I howled his Howl.
I feel thankful to have had these two as my literary fathers. It feels like a much more fortunate literary inheritance than my southern friends who have Faulkner to contend with. Williams, that troubled iconoclast, seems to me a far more benevolent, happy influence simply in terms of what he allows. Somehow Faulkner continues to look best far from home on the Latin American writers. I, as a North American, am grateful not to have to wear his necklace of crows and thorns.
Home is my father playing the trumpet—the music drifting. In Paterson. My grandfather’s house has a stained-glass window, and when my grandmother weeps, sick of this life, sick of the burden of simply being herself, there is the stained glass to focus on. My Grandpa Frank on the other side of town—with his Armenia and his wife, who will not live long-worked in the silk mills. Later, he will be beaten nearly to death with the pipe he began to keep under his bed for protection. Paterson, by then, having turned against us.
But not against me, not then.
Cadence was the block I lived on. Language my home. Charmed one, I was born into a poem.
ERSKINE LAKE
Home was a blue lake in summer then and a man in a boat who followed us as we swam its length and a woman who taught us all the names of the wild flowers, and they were our parents. I don’t know how it happened and so quickly, but suddenly there are five of us children. There is not one quiet place. And I learn to build a place of silence and serenity and space in some newly discovered zone of my brain. A place where I might not only live, but flourish. Without it, there is no interior life; without, it I sense I am going to die. Imagination was my home, my salvation then. The blue lake. The space in me.
And my mother, too, is a consolation through the chaos, constructing a safe universe, a world of love and stability in which to experiment, play; a place of confidence where in those long summers before school started she handed me the secret key. As we sat next to the water, she taught me that glittering, miraculous handful of charms—the alphabet. The child draws the letter A and makes a home under its roof. She learns of the shade a T might cast. The light coming off K. The shelter of the letter M.
And my mother reads to me. All kinds of wondrous things: Wordsworth and Blake and Jarrell and Poe as I fall
into a dream next to the lake’s pale oval. A B C D…
VASSAR COLLEGE
Here I meet my triumvirate of women, the women who will be always true, always rigorous, demanding, loving, always urging me to the next place, always meeting me at least part of the way.
Helen. During our courtship in that Hudson Valley we pick apples. I recite Frost’s “After Apple Picking” to her so that words and the apples become interchangeable—round, heavy, luscious, carrying sensual meaning: the apples, the language, and my strange love for this woman I have only just met. Everything becomes entangled; the apples falling, and the falling in love, and the delicious surrender to it all. Everything round and gorgeous and falling: home.
We in the nearly twenty years since that day have created a place—a familiar place, on which for the most part we can agree: home. A continuity. A kind of home is in her arms, in her enormous intelligence, in her flexibility, in her passion—and we are, despite everything, despite danger and madness and sorrow and addiction, safe. A little safe.
How did she know so long ago what it was I would need? We would need? How has she done it—continually been willing to reinvent, the world and our lives, so that we might not only continue, but thrive?
And at Vassar there is Miss Page, my beloved teacher, my most trusted ally, my support, my role model. Everything about her awed and terrified me—a brilliance, an intelligence as I have never seen, a sensitivity, a discretion, an extraordinary intuition. And six-feet tall! She was everything. Miss Page, who allowed me my first chance to write, to try, even though I had been rejected from the creative writing senior central course where one wrote a creative thesis. And for many years I will be rejected over and over from almost everything—but not by Barbara Page and not by Helen. And not by my mother. What can they see that I can’t? That no one else can?
Miss Page introduces me to the third woman—Virginia Woolf. We read her together in class. I begin to write. For the first time. And I am left permanently changed.
On almost any page of those luminous, beautiful novels I can find peace, challenge, the shock of recognition, company. One could live here, in lines like this, happily, for a long time. And I have done just that. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Between the Acts, The Waves.
And in fact I feel more at home there than just about anywhere. And it is for the most part home enough to dispel the terrible house that mental illness builds, for the first time really during the time I am at Vassar—a place that will become so demanding and after a time so familiar that I do not have a choice but to live there. And chanting sentences is the only way to feel better finally. And writing sentences, making shapes, is the only way to feel better. Sustaining, miraculous language, that all these years keeps illness at bay. Dear Virginia Woolf. Dear Barbara, dear Helen. Dear fifty pages toward a novel I write as a senior in order to graduate. Maybe I will be saved.
72 CARMINE STREET
Where we ran the ten blocks breathlessly because back then you got the Village Voice classifieds the night before and ran to each possibility and hoped somehow amid the crowds of people all wanting the same thing, you would somehow luck out and find a home in it all.
We did find one. We have kept it now since 1978. We will never give up these two rooms, and when I think of home as a place, this is the place I think of. Two minuscule rooms I share with you and our two cats on the edge of Soho in the West Village of Manhattan. I love you, though it doesn’t always seem so obvious, and I love unreasonably these two altogether unremarkable little rooms. The place I have witnessed in every kind of light, at every time of day, and in every season. A place of so many intimacies, and revelations, and heartbreaks. Sometimes for breaks from writing I will talk to Mr. Angelo, our ancient, Greek superintendent, in the street; or bring my clothes to the Rastafarian tailor; or pray for whatever seems dire and impossible at Our Lady of Pompeii. In fact, we have grown up here together. The Minetta Tavern, the Van Dam Theater, the Bleecker Street Cinema, all the things that were once ours—now gone. I feel the accumulated memories of being long in a place—or at least having that place as a base. Here we bought the Christmas tree that year, here I kissed another, here is where we sweated under lights, dancing. Here, the corner where we wept, and here—all this—a place so resonant. If memories take up space and possess color, these streets are black by now from the overlapping of so many accumulated events. Here I lay down in the snow for hours, unable to imagine a way to go on.
How many times did we walk those same streets “dead drunk,” and for once a phrase seems to fit, seems to make some sort of sense, “dead drunk,” limping toward home? In all the sorrow and regret and frustration we could not express any other way back then.
But somehow we have survived. Survived the deaths and acquisition of cats, the thousand disappointments, all the drunkenness, all that we did to each other that was unforgivable and that we have somehow forgiven. All the good and bad news—and the devastating news—deaths of friends. This is where the calls come. This is where life seems unlivable and I get under the covers for days and days.
And you launch me again, sending me off on the next necessary thing I must do in order to write, to keep writing. You set me off for the first time in what will be many times, to do what I must do—and it doesn’t finally somehow destroy us (though it sometimes comes close), but strengthens us in our love for each other and allows us to go on and change and grow and grow up. Much of the time we live off your student loans or a credit card or a meager salary or nothing. I go to my first artists’ colony. It is the first time I am given months of uninterrupted time. When Yaddo says no, when MacDowell says no, when there is nothing, nowhere to go, there is Cummington, a community of the arts where artists are not guests but residents, a place that offers space and solitude in an excessively beautiful countryside. I stay for months and months on end.
NEW YORK CITY
And then I am back and suddenly Gary is dying. The new virus. Thus begins our long season of suffering. Of renunciation. Of fear. Of sorrow. Of good-bye.
And my first book is finally published. Without compromise. And with that, I am satisfied.
And then the phone call in the middle of the night: the first of October 1986.
PROVINCETOWN, MASSACHUSETTS
I am returned to the ocean, pale zygote, after a long separation. Back in silence to my one dreamy cell of being. Another new home. Provincetown in winter. The off-season. I am given a small studio at the Fine Arts Work Center. I have brought my few familiar things, my portable Virgin Mary, my pocket Sappho. I paint everything white. In this home at the end of the world—surrounded by water, desolate, beautiful—I enter my long period of mourning. Home of grief and water. Home of sorrow. Having for months counted T-cells, having learned the incredible shadow a Τ is capable of casting, I try to heal. I walk the streets, the dunes, the beaches. I go to the bars and St. Mary’s of the Harbor.
If home is physical sanctuary, comfort, recognition, bliss, then home for me is Provincetown. Much of my earthly longing goes there. I ache for the place. It’s a primal longing, a sexual one. It is the place I am most drawn to in the world. And irresistibly, and a little against my will, I keep returning there. I am a Pisces after all.
It’s strange. I have lived now almost ten years without fear. Fear was a home and then it was not. Sadness was a home and then it was not anymore. And what could be worse? AIDS. I think of the urgency in me that Gary’s death created. A monstrous acceleration, a new conviction to living, working—loving with a new recklessness, abandon, urgent, urgent. Gary who taught me to do everything, to be everything, to want, to have, to try everything—to not be afraid anymore.
VENCE, FRANCE
To keep living. To keep writing, to not tire. I get an NEA and decide to leave the country and live cheaply for a long time on the money. I choose an artists’ colony in France called the Michael Karolyi Foundation.
It is perhaps the oddest and most strangely lovely time in my life. I
am at once utterly at home and completely estranged and alone.
What do I remember
that was shaped
as this thing is shaped?
—William Carlos Williams
Stepping off the plane I am shocked to find that I remember this place, though I have never been here before. I remember clearly being a child, walking through a forest of small oaks, carrying a metal box of cinders to keep warm, with a woman who is my mother. She is not my Paterson mother, but another mother. I remember the war. There are terrible things, there are wondrous things outside the reach of my recollection, my consciousness, that are suddenly set into motion here. I, as a result, acquire a false sense of security, of belonging, of fluency. I am born for a second time into a different and distant home—a home from long ago. And I am filled with longing and unfinished things, and I feel unspeakable pain and sorrow at this intimation of a home which perhaps never existed and which I have been separated from, severed from until now. What else eludes me, I wonder, slips away? What else goes unremembered? I am bereft. A home I have been separated from and have forgotten and yet has haunted me. I have written about it from the start… France.
I think of all the things that are outside the range of our memories or imaginations or intelligence or talent—it’s the place I suspect which is our true home. If we could get there we would finally feel okay. But we can’t. We are all homeless, groping, roaming in the darkness, aware of only a fraction of it.