Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love

by Anna Moschovakis

  I said, What are the three things?

  He said:

  One. I had a book under contract—not a theory book, a memoir—and yesterday it was rejected by the publishers.

  Two. I’ve always known how I was conceived, I’ve just never said it aloud to anyone. I don’t need to talk to my mother. I don’t need to spit in a tube.

  Three. Laurance is leaving me for a graduate student studying post-Fordism at the New School. He’s a child. A handsome, sophisticated, non-neurotic, adoring child.

  Four. You’re too slow. All of them are true.

  I didn’t punch him in the gut, but I punched him in my mind. I sat on my hands; the concrete was cold and wet. I made a face he couldn’t see because it was dark and we weren’t looking at each other anyway.

  I thought about Kat, about how she would run in some combination of horror and amusement from this man, with his ego and his bluster and his inability to hold his booze. But Kat dismissed so many things; that was, I figured, why she had chosen to leave. She got bored, it got hard: easier to start over with someone new. Whereas the critic, I got a strong sense, wasn’t going anywhere. Whether that was out of loyalty, inertia, or something altogether different I would discover only if I agreed to suspend my own judgment, something I had always found—maybe to a fault, and especially after drinking—easy to do.

  I placed my hand, still damp, with bits of gravel embedded in the flesh, palm-up in his lap. It sat there unacknowledged, a gesture made in a foreign language.

  I said, What is the title of your rejected book? I couldn’t be certain the words were coming from my mouth.

  He sat there silently.

  You realize, I said, that I’m not going to sleep with you.

  His legs were long and slim. His shirt was open at the neck. The margins contracted around us.

  The light at the end of our tunnel dimmed, the airborne dust once more invisible as a feathery rain sifted down the open shaft. My hand lay unclaimed on Aidan’s lap, held there by a combination of embarrassment, affection, and low blood circulation due to the alcohol.

  Then he picked it up and brought it to his neck, curling my fingers so they cradled his throat, and squeezed. He looked at me without turning his head and said—constricting his vocal chords so he sounded (unintentionally, I guessed) like a goat—“Arrr-uu-baa.”

  CAROLYN, KRYSTAL, COLE, Matt, Bin, Kicker, Biscuit, Sol, Ophelia, and Eleanor/Data shuffled around the bonfire, testing positions for heat and intensity of smoke. Once they had settled, the sound of a gong issued from somebody’s cell phone. Each of Crescent Farm’s residents—core members and short-termers and visitors alike—pulled a piece of paper from some fold of clothing, crumpled it into a ball and threw it in the fire. Then they all hugged and wished each other a happy and healing Lithía. It took a full five minutes for all of the hugging permutations to be identified and performed.

  Eleanor had labored over what to put on her piece of paper. The instruction, delivered by Krystal over breakfast, had been to write a list of what she wished to leave behind with the passing solar year, a leaving-behind that was meant, she presumed, to make room for new beginnings. The first draft of her list contained just one item: the short sentence by which she had come to refer to the thing that had happened. In subsequent revisions—she revised the list several times over the course of the day—she added and then crossed out a series of abstract nouns (“envy,” “ambivalence”), signifiers of aging (“forehead wrinkles”), and precisely worded descriptions of psychological habits (“the feeling of apathy that follows the establishment of an intense emotional connection to a hopeless cause”). She added and then crossed out a few proper nouns: the school where she taught, Abraham, Danny K.M. She added and redacted the names of certain sex toys that she had no intention of or reason for giving up. Every effort to participate was met with a new brand of distancing critique (what we know about Eleanor: that she is a critic). Each time she filled a page with redacted items, she started a new one, until she had thrown out four failed lists. When it came her turn to approach the fire, she felt embarrassed tossing in her final revision: a sheet of blank paper with one corner torn off.

  From somewhere in his jacket Bin produced a worn paperback copy of the Corpus Hermeticum, switched on a tiny flashlight that he pointed at its pages, and began to read aloud:

  1. It chanced once on a time my mind was meditation on the things that are, my thought was raised to a great height, the senses of my body being held back—just as men who are weighed down with sleep after a fill of food, or from fatigue of body. Methought a Being more than vast, in size beyond all bounds, called out my name and saith: What wouldst thou hear and see, and what hast thou in mind to learn and know?

  He passed the book and flashlight to Sol, who read:

  2. And I do say: Who art thou? He saith: I am Man-Shepherd (Poemandres), Mind of all-masterhood; I know what thou desirest and I’m with thee everywhere.

  At this point all but Eleanor snapped their fingers in appreciation. Eleanor understood the imperative too late, snapped once into dead air and felt a rush of self-consciousness.

  Sol passed the book to Kicker, who read:

  3. And I reply: I long to learn the things that are, and comprehend their nature, and know God. This is, I said, what I dsiree to herr. He answered back to me: Hold in thy minnnd all thou wouldst knowow, and I will tch thee.

  Kicker paused but did not pass the book to Eleanor, who was standing to his right, straining to understand words that were bleeding at their edges. Instead, he continued to read sentences of which she only caught every third or so: “All things where opened to mee” and “All thngs turned into Lighght.”

  Carolyn tapped Kicker on the shoulder, took the book from his hands, and gave it to Eleanor, indicating with a sparkly nail the spot where she should pick up.

  Eleanor observed the group standing around the fire. Sol had lit a joint and was smoking languidly, appearing normal; Bin had his eyes closed, directing his attention to the recitation; Cole was locked in a self-embrace, massaging their shoulder blades; Carolyn had stepped back from the fire, her gaze skyward. Kicker wasn’t doing anything, and Eleanor couldn’t see Matt or Biscuit clearly because they were on the far side of the soaring flames.

  Nobody had grown an extra limb; no eyes had migrated to the centers of foreheads or anywhere else they didn’t belong. Nobody’s face was melting.

  Eleanor was relieved when the words on the page in the book she now held sealed their edges and came into focus, just in time. She read:

  But in a little while Darkness came settling down on part [of it], awesome and gloomy, coiling in sinuous folds, so that methought it like unto a snake.

  At the word “snake,” Eleanor saw something flicker at her feet and jumped. She continued:

  And then the Darkness changed into some sort of a Moist Nature, tossed about beyond all power of words, belching out smoke as from a fire, and groaning forth a wiling sound that beggars all description.

  She could not locate the meanings of the words “wiling” and “beggars” and worried she might have misread them, but she carried on.

  [And] after that an outcry inarticulate came forth from it, as though it were a Voice of Fire.

  Eleanor passed the Corpus to Cole on her right, but already she knew that she would not listen to any more about snakes and Moist Nature and smoke belching from fire. She sat on the grass.

  At this point, Eleanor’s thinking became unfamiliar. Had she not been aware of just how familiar her thinking was to her in general, how expected it had become, even in its extremes, in its total enthusiasm and its total skepticism, its most rational gestures and its most impulsive ones? All of it now seemed dull and pathetic, as if thought were a giant mountain and she had spent her life so far considering one side of it only, attempting to scale it, duly scraping her hands and knees, her sights set on the mountain’s unattainable peak, without it ever once occurring to her—how stupid she’d been!—to reli
nquish her frontal perspective, to let the mountain become unrecognizable. As if it had never occurred to her to walk to the other side.

  She lay down and faced the sky, ankles splayed and hands palm-down on the grass. She thought to meditate on the moon, but her mind turned quickly to the movements of the stars, which began to cross each other in what were clearly significant ways, and she thought about what it would be to be a dancer if you were really a star, and what it would be to be chalk if you were writing the sky, and the sentence that came to her came all at once, without letters or words, without phonemes or syntax or subordination; the fully fledged sentence that came to her was: We are performance that is quality life try now. She turned her palms up, tiny slugs pressed into the flesh.

  She wondered if she had seen the sentence on an imported T-shirt, or on the cover of a three-ring binder from the dollar store, or a full-page ad for some new pill or perfume—common sites for almost meaningless strings of words apparently chosen, like colors, for their mood.

  Almost meaningless.

  We are performance that is quality life try now.

  Her thoughts flew to Mr. Brandt, her eighth-grade Germanimmigrant grammar teacher, who was despised for a host of unforgivable things that amounted only to a profound lack of curiosity about the adolescent mind, but who was at least partly responsible for Eleanor’s fluency with the structure of the English language and, by extension, her ability to make a living—if an inadequate one—teaching those with different relationships to the structure of the English language to combine its words in conventionally meaningful ways. But more important to Eleanor now was that Mr. Brandt had taught her to do this:

  And this:

  She mapped and remapped against the chaos of sky but was stymied by the phrase “try now,” a classic employment of the imperative mood that seemed vital to the message of the sentence, that seemed to constitute its heart and soul, but that she could not with any amount of effort, using the Reed-Kellogg System or the Hybrid-Tree System or even by improvising an ad hoc system, find a way to fit into a diagram that held its own.

  Whether by her efforts or not, the sky’s chaos had slowed to a steady pulse. Eleanor was suddenly, acutely aware that she wasn’t alone—around the fire or in her trip—and she tried lifting her head, a granite boulder, to get a position on the others.

  A baritone voice a few inches from her right ear began to intone two words on repeat: Invigilator, resist!

  In Artificial Hells, some of which Eleanor had managed by now to read, the word “invigilator” appeared in a chapter she liked about artists outsourcing authenticity, and she had been compelled to look it up in the dictionary only to find that it essentially meant “proctor,” a role she had played often and well, if reluctantly, in her teaching life.

  Invigilator, resist—

  What was the voice commanding her to do? To refrain from observing the others? Or was her role as observer acknowledged implicitly in the instruction, in which case what was it that she should be resisting?

  She sensed violence lurking in the word, envisioned a prison guard in the center of a panopticon, or a sadistic director watching his actors flail. She frowned, sunk in confusion, until a star detached from the sky and jetted toward her, prompting her to rise.

  This was a bad idea. The body, even one that has established a reputation for cooperation, can become a traitor at will. When she rose, a wall of nausea rose with her, or was it just thirst, or did she need a cigarette? She made her way along the tiki-torch–lit path to the main house, escorted by a fleet of purple-black rats that scattered, then doubled back with her every step.

  She reached the door. The handle seemed far away; she recognized it as a tool but couldn’t recall what it was for. She waited. Ripples on the door’s surface appeared and disappeared according to the rhythm of the instrumental bridge in “This Town” by the Go-Go’s: three sets of 4/4 followed by one set of 2/4.

  She touched the ripples with her fingers. She touched them with her tongue. I bet you’d live here / if you could and be / one of us.

  Time passed. The door swung in and Eleanor entered the house, colliding into a body that vanished before an encounter could be realized.

  There was no one in the house. The lights were off, but the moon shed bluish beams through the row of low-E windows. Eleanor went straight to the cedar-lined bathroom. She retched into the composting toilet for a while, but she wasn’t really nauseated, just thirsty, so she drank from the tap until she could drink no more. As she was lifting her head up from the sink, her eyes fell on a gold sticker on the side of the mirror that proclaimed in all caps, TRUE MIRROR®: SEE YOURSELF™.

  She straightened up, and then she saw herself: a woman with suntanned pale skin and brown hair, a woman with one eye slightly higher than the other and whose chin had lost its symmetry; a woman who badly wanted, badly needed, but did not have a cigarette. She sat on the edge of the toilet and moved her mouth around a little.

  On the built-in ledge that held the patchouli- and fig-scented candles there was a stack of books that included an illustrated Kama Sutra, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, a hot-pink staple-bound pamphlet called Cultural Tips for New Americans, and a copy, identical to the one she had picked up in Abraham’s bathroom, of the 1969 paperback of The Idea of Progress Since the Renaissance.

  Eleanor’s head swam at the coincidence. It was not a good kind of swimming, not a salubrious stint in the YMCA pool or an uplifting session in the Dead Sea, but a one-way swimming into open water—the kind that takes unsuspecting children past the point of no return, that sends surfers after a wipeout down to the seafloor instead of up toward the sun.

  To walk to the other side.

  In free diving, no apparatuses are used to extend the human breath. Eleanor couldn’t remember the last time she’d inhaled.

  She grabbed an eyeliner pencil that had been left on the sink and an unopened bill from the ledge. The eyeliner broke on impact. She found her phone in her back pocket and typed an email to herself, punching the screen with her index finger. She hit “Send.”

  The bathroom didn’t get reception and Eleanor needed to see what she had written, so she navigated to her out-box. She stared, opened her mouth, closed it.

  There was no mistaking the conclusion of her thinking, but the thinking itself seemed to vanish on arrival, making her worry that—as the message suggested—she might finally actually disappear, become sawdust, fall into the composting toilet—fertilizer for next year’s radishes.

  She extracted the book stacked below The Idea of Progress, an acid-yellow–covered translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, hardcover and new looking, which she opened to the bookmarked poem.

  She read the word at the top of the page:

  “Barbárian.”

  She continued to read the poem aloud, finding herself—unintentionally at first and then with a conscious sense of comfort—approximating Ross’s speaking pattern.

  Long áfter the days and the séasons, and the béings and the cóuntries,

  The pénnant of blóody méat against the silk of árctic seas and flówers; (they don’t exíst.)

  Recóvered from old fanfares of Héroísm—which stíll attack our hearts ánd héads—fár from the ancient assássins—

  Oh! The pennant of bloody méat against the silk of arctic seas ánd flówers; (théy dón’t exíst)

  Sweetness!

  Despite her ability to combine words with some fluency and to teach her students—as well as she could under the circumstances—to do the same, Eleanor was not (though she rarely admitted this) an all-in lover of poetry. Perhaps her love for poetry was tempered by the fact that she was often called upon to defend it to people who, as opposed to having complex feelings about it as she did, actively wished it ill.

  At this moment, she was all-in; she was in love—not only with Rimbaud’s lines but with the translator’s translations of them, and with the trace of the occurrence of the alchemy of translation, a communi
zation (she wasn’t sure if this was the right word) that in this case crossed barriers not just of language but of death, that made appear in English—certainly for the very first time—images that were all but destined to exist: A pennant of bloody meat! The silk of arctic seas! She finished her recitation, leaving Ross’s inflections mostly behind.

  Live coals raining down gusts of frost,—Sweetness!—those flashes in the rain of the wind of diamonds thrown down by the terrestrial heart eternally charred for us.—O world!—

  (Far from the old refuges and the old fires that we can hear, can smell.)

  The live coals and the foam. Music, wheeling of abysses and shock of ice floes against the star.

  The Star!! Eleanor thought. Tzaddi! And then: Addi! Then: Addis!

  O Sweetness, O World, O músic! And there, shapes, sweat, tresses and eyes, floating. And the white, boiling tears,—O sweétness!—and the voice of woman reaching to the depths of the arctic volcanoes and cáverns.

  The pennant. . . .

  And after reading the poem Eleanor felt different, and it was a good kind of different, and she kissed the page, she did, and then she closed the yellow book and she kissed its cover, she did, and then she removed the bookmark from Illuminations and slid it arbitrarily into The Idea of Progress Since the Renaissance, and then she closed her eyes for a long moment, and then she opened them.

  To: eleanornoteleanor@gmail.com From: eleanornoteleanor@gmail.com of iban Noy reilly Herr of o Camboya folié mu thoughts id o al invisible yo the Orders id My linda id solitaria in Teo id i Gould hace One Wise i AND i Sony Knowles Wheat ir id rehén diez Thad mean i am fútiles dura thag mean i sm edad dirá thag mean i hace no Eleanor no existe QED

  THE CAFÉ WAS ABOUT TO close, but we slipped in before the staff locked the door, and a young woman with a purple septum ring that matched her purple shirt brought us coffee and a scone. We sat at a small round table flanked on three sides by windows through which several sculptures—impressive mostly for their size—were visible in the surrounding field. Chip was out there pacing, one hand held to his ear, the other gesturing dramatically in the air.