by Carole Maso
Time passes: It’s shocking. You change shape. Your parents age and eventually die. You remember your mother in a bathing suit, beautiful on a dock at a lake. And when you put on your bathing suit now, she is exactly back at age thirty-five, in you.
Time passes. I digress.
A progress. A child is born. Grows. Learns to write. One day has children. Those children too sing the old songs, teach beloved things to the next children. A progress of numbers. They grow old.
My father playing his trumpet in the moody half-light.
I got to dance in a circle. I got to kiss you on the cheek.
The left-handed boy lived.
I wanted—
The pleasure of accumulated meanings, of accretion, which is the narrative act. A fragile constellation, through time and space, of relationship. An architecture of stars, of—
The joy has been in watching you grow. The joy has been in loving you.
I talk to a faraway friend and ask what will happen next. How did she find out? Who will leave whom? Where did the other woman go? And what about the child? She’s not sure. My dear friend, a glass artist, tells me she is making glass books. Will there be further fractures?
One makes shapes.
K.
I wrote you one thousand love letters. You probably never got them all.
I imagine the progress of the glass books as she speaks.
The fragility of her voice trembling over the thin wires.
The relatives place the white ravioli on the beds to dry. I open my mouth to receive the host. Where have you gone?
And when she was joyful as well—she remembers now—ecstatic, she would turn herself into a horse. So that the horse took on many meanings.
The desire of the girl to be a horse. The novel to be a poem. The desire to change shapes again and again.
Is the lyric Orphic voice reliant for its energy and power on an insistent and intense sexuality?
Careful of the intercom.
As I write these notes to myself, I traverse the country “promoting,” as they say, my American Woman in the Chinese Hat. Right now I am flying from Los Angeles to New York. We’re going fast, at some 33,000 feet. The nose of the plane is already dipped in night. At the tail, where I sit, last day. This tells me something important, but I don’t know what yet, about novel writing. There’s movement and stasis. The sun setting at my side.
I’m reading a magazine with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain on the cover in between jotting these things in my notebook. I’m flooded with memories, associations, the history of a lifetime, my lifetime—and these things make Kurt Cobain’s suicide even more painful today. Without my points of reference this pain could not exist in this way. The novel can create these responses, these states by the gradual, leisurely building up of moments though space and time. The novel possesses the sound, the structure, the spaciousness, the heart to get some of it down. Let’s hope.
Jenny Holzer: “In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.”
Row your boat, row your small boat.
And, only a little after this it will be Kristen Pfaff, the bass guitarist from the band Hole—good-bye.
My dear glass friend has had a second breast removed now. Now what? Emotion as narrative: sadness, ferocity, fear, can give integrity, as we through fiction rehearse, pray, conjure, bring the night closer and also, simultaneously, dispel it. A beautiful, passing landscape.
Tarkovsky: “The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
How to incorporate the joys and pleasures, tenderness, delicacies, the generosities and seductions of the novel and its narrative capacities with the extraordinary, awesome capabilities of poetry? There’s the challenge. Who is up to it? I wonder.
A girl in a striped bathing suit sits at the water’s edge. She digs deeply in the sand and from the vast beach makes shapes: an arch, a pyramid, two towers. Not child, but not yet adult, she is at that tender age of becoming.
The glass might mend itself.
The child draws the luminous letter A in the sand. She hears the phosphorescent ocean.
Miracles might occur. Who is up to it?
A small voice rises in me. I am, it says.
And then the plane is enveloped in darkness.
For Cynthia
April–December 1994
NOTE: All italicized material is from a Carole Maso novel or from a work-in -progress.
Surrender
I HAD COME FROM FRANCE WHERE I had gone to write, living on a borrowed $1,000 for months, but I was at the end of my resources: financial, emotional, psychic. Even this life, beautiful and mysterious and charmed as it was, had become intolerable—I was moving every few weeks, uncertain as to what would happen next, house-sitting or caretaking or other more elaborate and difficult arrangements. And the woman, dear Helen, who had over the years seen me through all this—inventing schemes, guiding me, urging me even into each necessary if troubling arrangement so that it might be possible to write my books—four in all then, in one state or another of completion—she, too, was at her wit’s end. And so I had decided to accept, yes, the outlandish, impossible offer of meaningful employment by the wild-eyed iron-willed woman I had met a few years earlier at the MacDowell Colony. She, one Lucia Getsi, had predicted on the first day of my residency there—based on very little, only my first novel-—that I would teach at her school, Illinois State University (ISU). With no MFA, no teaching experience, and no real evidence that the Midwest existed at all, I nodded unworriedly, convinced no such thing would be possible. Two years passed. I went to Provincetown; I went to France; I finished a second novel. But possible indeed it was, and before I knew it Lucia’s prediction had come true.
I was destitute, and I had no prospects of publishing. My press, the noble North Point Press, about to do my third book, had just folded, and the New York publishers were less than enthusiastic. What choice did I have? And so once again in sadness, in weariness, my leave-taking began. There had been so many leave-takings already. I would leave France, leave home (New York City), leave Helen, to do a job that I was unconvinced could even be done, in an imaginary Midwest, in a place called Normal.
Landing at the Bloomington, Illinois, airport and looking up into a sky of utter vastness, I felt I was falling upward into a dizzying blue sea. It was captivating here in its vastness, its flatness, its nothingness. I have never seen anything quite like it. Only vaguely does it recall Aries, which Van Gogh thought recalled Holland.
All summer I had walked in lushness, caressed by light, by olive and lemon and fig trees, embraced by gently rolling hills. Because my time in France was coming to its inevitable end, it had become too beautiful there, too painfully perfect. My parting became a kind of unbearable opera of longing. But then, overnight it seemed, there I was in the Midwest, and there was nothing, and the nothingness, the weird, fierce resignation of it was somehow exhilarating. I surrendered in seconds to this void, and like all landscapes I form a permanent bond with, it, at a crucial moment, a moment of crisis, of change, happened to mirror my internal state identically. My remoteness, my desolation. Stepping off that plane, the world was devoid of everything, a clean slate of sky, a nihilism of space, empty, the end, and yet it was oddly beautiful—like my own brand of nihilism.
And so I am dropped headlong into a strange land, a world utterly alien to me: world of dramatic and violent weather, dramatic and resolute landscape, dramatic and bizarre academia. Weird world of students and faculty and politics and paper. I have not been in school for a very many years. And from this vantage point the university seems as odd and coded and impenetrable as just about anything. Because I am just the visiting artiste, I do not have to go to faculty meetings, but I do anyway for their circus-like aspects. I go to academic parties for the spectacle, the Who’s A
fraid of Virginia Woolf qualities, the bizarre vocabulary, the accents. I roam Normal/Bloomington memorizing middle America. I am a tourist, and there are many fascinating things out there. I come to class in the first week with my findings. At the hospital down the road I tell them there is a stone bench and engraved into the bench is written, “Today we prepare for our dreams of tomorrow.” I tell them as students of writing it’s going to be tough going, as they can go and see for themselves, because the clichés are literally written in stone.
In my tour of downtown Bloomington I see a radio tower that looks a lot like the Eiffel Tower. How far I think I’ve come from anything even a little familiar.
Luckily there are a few new friends: a colleague and fellow fiction writer who murmurs “Blanchot, Blanchot, Blanchot,” like a prayer, like the way out of here; another who loves the local band Thrill Kill Cult and Beckett. And of course there is Lucia. Having gotten me into this thing, she takes full responsibility. We swim together several times a week. We take trips to Chicago. She saves me with her thousand generosities: her impromptu three-course Italian meals, her gossip, her poems. Also, she is an extraordinary scholar. She allows me to sit in on her German Romanticism class. She lends me the Novalis translations she has done. It’s ecstasy then. Lucia, high-spirited, determined, with her stubborn Tennessee accent, does all she can to cheer me up. She says not to feel so bad—after twenty-five years in Bloomington, she still does not feel at home here.
And there is the woman who the day I arrive has already left five messages on something called the Voice Mail. She implores me to let her enter the class. She is older, about my age. She, too, becomes my friend, with caution, because she is my student, and I know from the first day of class that this is a sacred relationship. It’s a delicate balance to maintain, and a crucial one. There are only a few things I tell myself in the beginning: work the students as hard as you work yourself, and respect with your entire being that relationship (in other words, no matter what, do not sleep with them). I am so lonely here. Helen, back in New York, shows no signs whatever of visiting.
In a surprising and unanticipated turn, I end up adoring my students, feel them to be more talented than most of the published writers I have come across, want to celebrate their instincts, their feeling for language, their willingness to try anything with me. They seem unreasonably hopeful, perky, wholesome—but I consider that this may be just in comparison with the French. They are diligent, intelligent, open-minded, and, like the landscape, filled with longing and possibility.
Stupidly and naively and without any real feeling for their actual lives, I come to class one day thrilled with an event from the evening before—a tornado! The weird, green sky, the awful silence, the seemingly backward-flying birds. I tell them of my fantasy: to go to the thing’s center, to be obliterated, to achieve oblivion. In reality when the tornado comes I have no idea what to do and feel scared. No key to the basement, I stay in my attic apartment alone, the radio saying over and over, take cover. I’m afraid—and there’s no one here to die with me. The class is clearly appalled by my comments. What do I know of the grief such phenomena have caused them, their families? Immediately I regret my flippant tourism. The next day I go into a brief but heartfelt apology. I have learned something. What was I thinking? After my apology they slowly begin to trust me. They tell me about cows and corn and the prairie. The semester can begin, finally. I seem like a New Yorker to them: exotic, ridiculous, impractical, and yet somehow credible (it must be the two books), or, if not entirely credible, at least worthy of trust. And I think they enjoy teaching me things, the roles reversed.
Writing classes are about trust, of course, and after a while, in the safe place we have created together they begin writing their dreams, their fantasies, their desires. What many of them write about again and again is a thing they have never seen—the ocean. I am so moved by their longing—these children of the Midwest, these children of ISU—cinder-blocked, landlocked. They swim in high water. They never tire. They begin to learn how to write themselves free.
My graduate class at first makes me a little nervous. After all, I have never been to graduate school myself. I have never been in a writing workshop before. I have never taught anyone anything. But they, too, are unreasonably kind.
Still, something is a little off. I am often lost there, disoriented. The boys seem too perfect, too polite. I am amazed at the heightened, garish sexual fantasies they inspire. And the girls—they’re too complacent, too nice. I realize that part of why I’m here is to teach them to be bad, to question, to disobey. Normal: I feel on the edges of town and then out into the countryside, the severity of farmers, rising at dawn, eating dinner at five and to bed. They would not approve of me, these men. There’s a certain unreality to everything I see or perceive. Here, where people still eat lots of beef and lots of candy bars and smoke cigarettes, and many—it is true, as the French like to say of Americans—are overweight. The fat people for the circus must be grown out here, I think in a dream. And even the university is a paradox, a very unusual place. On the outside it is a lot of ugly buildings plunked down in the middle of nowhere. On the inside there is a gleaming altar to the most innovative and experimental literature in the world. It is taught here, it is valued, it is even published. Illinois State now houses both Dalkey Archive Press and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, as well as Fiction Collective Two. And in the Unit for Contemporary Literature, the dream of a literary avant-garde Utopia is slowly being realized. In this whole wide country there is no other place that comes close to it. Few places in the world come to mind. And my New York is light years away.
This land of stark miracle springing from the extraordinarily fertile earth. Flat earth. Where each night on the flatlands I dream of a curvaceous woman. She cups water in her hands. And I marvel at the beauty of the cornfields and the sky. Count pheasants. Visit what I’ve dubbed the Beckett tree, straight out of Godot. The land is breathtaking in its austerity, in its uncompromising forever, as gorgeous as anything I’ve ever seen. A different sort of ocean.
But I fear at times the cornfields and the miles and miles of soybean fields and the sky. We are up to our thighs in corn. We imagine we drink utterly pure, sweet water. Heartland water. Perfect water. But three younger women now, natives of this place, all from the heart of the heart of the country, are stricken with cancer, and I am forced to wonder what it is about. The pesticides in the sweet water? The beloved injected cows, that delicious, coveted beef? The feed?
This pristine countryside. We drive. I take my class hours and hours away to another school to see the great filmmaker Stan Brackhage, who has turned up to speak and show films. We are examining alternative narrative strategies in my graduate class. Hearing him speak and watching his extraordinary films in the dark, I forget for a few hours how far away I am from home. For a little while I am more at home than I am anywhere else.
I was expecting nothing. Then, after a while I was expecting an extreme provinciality from my central Illinois. But finally I have come to realize that it is no more provincial than one of the minor cities: Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, say. And, in fact, it may be somewhat better, who knows? I joined the Normal ACT UP, a branch that included maybe ten people. One freezing October night we read the names of those who had died all the way through until dawn, and there was a legion of people here to grieve all ages, all types. All night.
And of Chicago, I recognize immediately that it is a city I might, given the chance, come to love. I find myself more comfortable there than in any other American city I know outside of New York. It seems real—its architecture, its grandeur, its people, its cultural life, its miseries. I find it a relief after the pretty toy of San Francisco, the segregated contrivances of Boston, artificial D.C., sprawling, incomprehensible L.A. And the other cities: Houston, Atlanta, whatever. Who knew?
And in retrospect ISU will be among the best institutions I shall teach in. Schools that now include Columbia, Bennington, Brown.
The goddess is waiting again, having gone home to New York and having flown back to Chicago, for her all-too-small, all-too-private plane to take her back to Bloomington. I look for the dark angel I see each time in the propeller’s rotating blade. So many hair-raising American Eagle trips that year, flights I was pretty sure I’d never get off alive. They were always cartoonish, it seemed, with drinks flying and ladies crying. Before boarding they would check our weight and the weight of our carry-ons, in order to assign seats. So much waiting that year. The wings are frozen solid again. I entertain the grim possibility that perhaps at last this will be my final flight.
There are many strange dangers. I have always feared the Midwest, I realize that now—known for its clean-cut serial killers, its smoldering, unreadable violences. When I walk into my friendly, neighborhood liquor store I literally see red before my eyes. Sometimes it’s only for an instant, but sometimes it’s something more prolonged. It’s odd because I do not ordinarily have such visions, and yet the color is undeniable—red. Only much later do I learn of the triple murder that occurred there a year or so before. OK, maybe I, too, have come to die. I can’t help wondering.
Or maybe I’ve come here just to dance: We pile into the truck in our glitter and bows and head for Peoria to the local gay club to watch our friend perform in drag. I am a little smug. I am of course from New York City, and dubious to say the least. In my time I have witnessed more than one cross-dressers’ convention in Provincetown, that gay mecca, and I fancy myself something of an expert.
Peoria, Illinois. The audience in this grungy club is the weirdest mix: lots of working people, farmers and the like, their wives, businessman types, young lesbians, and gay men of all ages. I have never seen such a sight. Our friend appears center stage. It is he who is the goddess, with those cat eyes, those cheekbones, that perfect jaw, that smile. His hair is fabulous, his makeup is fabulous, his dress. He, or rather, she, is more amazing than anything I’ve seen, and she’s just my type, too: a young, kind of decadent Bianca Jagger. She bends her knees, blows kisses, does a little turn. And the music begins. I wonder what the French would think. Nothing here is ever quite what it seems. And I must admit I am a little bit in love.