In yoga class, everyone goes around and gives their “fall intentions.” The sexy girl with the shaved head whom I sometimes fantasize about in class says she is working on kindness, and discovering that kindness to self and others can be a slow process. Two others say they’re working on being comfortable with doubt and uncertainty, not pushing things, knowing they will happen. Some more “loving kindness.” I pass. It always gets me how mute and inarticulate I am in these settings. I’m supposed to be a writer, yet language doesn’t come easily to me, and when it does, I am suspicious of it. But I like the idea of yoga being about a practice, about not knowing. That’s what writing is for me. A ritual. My impulse to write was private, was the way that I was silent, or not silent, in the face of capitalism, desire, the family. Was a way to write through these feelings.
John sends me the obituary of an art critic—a failed painter who had started painting again—because he knew I’d like it. “Although my guess is that the art ‘object’ is done with, I myself still go on making ‘paintings,’ but this doesn’t have much to do with making salable physical objects. Making them is more like philosophical investigations, art criticism, or yoga.”
The problem with the work I was writing was one of time. Now that I was inside the semester, I didn’t have any time to write. Or, when I had the time, I didn’t have the mental space. On days when I wasn’t teaching, I felt so distracted, never in a pure space to think. When I feel too consumed, I also cannot read—everything feels too porous. I sit on the couch and ignore my surroundings. I surrender to screens. I read reviews of shows I don’t even watch. I watch clips of actresses on talk shows, the repetitive gesture of them smoothing their hair behind their ears, their rehearsed anecdote, their bashful or witty humility, their glowing skin, their charming white teeth. Open on my laptop, amidst other windows, I watch Hitchcock’s Vertigo over and over, just like the narrator in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, his meditation on memory.
Can you think of writing as a gaze? I ask my students, who are mostly unmoved. This is what I wished for in writing—a gaze that was elegiac and hungover. Clutch writes me of the trance they go into now when they are teaching. All the mindless things I bleat out about the essay. My performance has grown thinner and thinner. I feel we are supposed to be sages when teaching writing, I complain to Clutch, that’s what the students want—to tell them not only how to write from life but also how to live. When I have not figured out how to live. On the couch, paging through the photos of Roland Barthes, captioned “Distress: lecturing” and “Boredom: a panel discussion,” in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. When I write Danielle about this, she says she was also on her couch, on that same day, staring at the same page.
It was that fall that Chantal Akerman died. She had committed suicide. Some believed she was in despair over her last film being booed at a festival, a film that takes place almost entirely in her elderly mother’s Brussels apartment before her mother’s death, a film Akerman edited while still deep in grief. I was trying again to find a publisher for a book I’d written about my mother, and was in the process of receiving a fresh round of rejections. I meant to write “round,” but originally I wrote “wound.” The life of an artist seems so exquisitely sad sometimes, I wrote to Bhanu, when I learned about Akerman’s death. How fragile it can feel, when an artist commits suicide. And so I thought of Akerman’s films all fall. How her work was so brilliant at recording dead time and blank space. That is all I want a work of art to do, to record time, to imagine other vast solitudes, including our own. My cinephile student and I mourn Akerman together. We are both rewatching her films. The slow silence of Hotel Monterey, that beautiful shot of the pregnant woman in the hallway like a Vermeer. That desire I feel, for art that is like a trance. I tell my student I have been watching clips of Sans Soleil on my phone, while riding on the train through the Hudson River Valley.
I try to make it outside on the porch with Genet so he can enjoy the autumn sun. The landlord has cut back the butterfly bush. I am bleeding heavily. Dreams of blood now mark time for me. I get home and the dog has scattered my bloody tampons and pads all around the living room but mostly immediately in front of the door. The little presents he leaves for me—How dare you abandon me! At community acupuncture, I get a painful needle in the center palm for sleep, as I haven’t been sleeping well. I’ve been having trouble closing the border between day and night. I am woken up by my upstairs neighbor knocking on my door, telling me she just caught a kid urinating in our backyard and trying to steal my bicycle. He ran away. We stand in the entryway, marinating in the excitement. I admired her wool poncho—I spend all fall coveting everyone’s fall coats. I googled her the other day: She takes Nan Goldin–esque photographs, everyone naked in bed in blissed-out orgies and stoned, half-closed eyes. I never see her. I am continually confused by who now lives upstairs. Their constant deliveries I sign for, while Genet has fits. There is the agoraphobic self-help guru who tells me in passing that she just ordered fountain pens from Japan. I suppose she tells me because she’d heard I was a writer, or perhaps she just saw me writing in my notebook on the porch. There is the blond actress with imaginary bedbugs who is in the bedroom directly above ours—we can hear her take apart her bed at night. She is often away, acting in regional theater.
My father visits in early October. All we have in common is old films. Together we can go into various arcana of early Hollywood. At night on the couch in his basement he watches one of his vast collection of John Wayne movies. That night we watch The Philadelphia Story together, him uncomfortable on the couch, Genet trying to hump his arm, me sitting on the floor. We share a love for Jimmy Stewart, his second favorite actor after John Wayne, I think because they were both Reagan Republicans. I can see my father is not well. He is frail, his belly has gotten massive. He pees all over my bathroom floor.
My notes for the last time I watched Vertigo:
“Do you believe that someone out of the past, someone dead, can enter into possession of a living being?”
“She wanders. God knows she wanders.”
“Anyone could become obsessed with the past.”
On September 11, 1902—the same date will begin his novel—Rilke writes a letter to Rodin, in his halting French, recalling an earlier conversation. He had told the old man that his wife was coming to Paris to work, and so must leave their daughter with her grandparents. The sculptor had replied, Oui, il faut travailler, rien que travailler. Rilke’s desire to learn from the sculptor, to adopt his mode of being, echoed throughout his life in his search for masters to tell him how to occupy his time. He took Rodin’s advice as gospel, repeating it to him almost a year later in this letter: I must learn to work, to work, he repeats, that is where I fall so short! He reminds the sculptor of his statement and tells him that he’d come to Paris not only to write a study of his work but also to ask him: How was one to live? And now he understands, the young poet writes to the sculptor. To work is to live without dying. But how to find the quiet space inside himself within which to work? This will occupy him for many years. The frightening abyss that opens up between his good days. The sculptor suggests he study the zoo animals at the Jardin des Plantes, as he himself once did. Rilke writes his famous poem about the panther’s exhausted gaze through the bars of his prison. More than a decade later, in the midst of crisis, unsure whether he should still write, exhausted after finishing his novel, he tells Lou Andreas-Salomé of a dream of a pale lion in a freshly painted green cage, and within the same cage a naked man, seemingly on exhibition. Over the pallor of the man’s nude flesh, and over the dream, a violet shadow. (She tells him that his dream is of Paris, that he must return.) When Clara comes to Paris, they barricade themselves inside their separate studios and take the sculptor’s dictum literally, seeing each other only on Sundays. Miserable in their closed-off spaces, they despise Paris, its dreary winter. The cruelty and confusion of the streets, the beauty one can find in the art here, does not replace th
e monstrosity, Rilke writes to one of their friends on New Year’s Day.
Once the book on the sculptor is finished, Rilke does not know how to occupy his time. He writes in a letter that the city has plotted against his attempts to stay inside and write, its unrelenting scream has broken against his silence, its fearsomeness follows him into his sad room. This catalyzes three attacks of influenza—long feverish nights shot through with dread, just like the great fevers of his childhood. Finally, after the third attack of flu, his father gives him money to recover in solitude again at the Italian shore. Exhausted, in the midst of a severe depression, he swims nude in the ocean, eats only fruit and milk, and attempts work on some poems.
Later in the fall, as the weather changes, I begin traveling by myself into the city on my days off, to walk around aimlessly, to turn time into space. My walks that fall were the opposite of the impulse to search for my name online, to see whether I still existed. I am reminded of that line of Sontag’s: “For the character born under the sign of Saturn, time is the medium of constraint, inadequacy, repetition, mere fulfillment. In time, one is only what one is: what one has always been. In space, one can be another person.” On one such Saturday I feel compelled to leave—to disappear. I dress simply—white button-down, black jeans, black plain sneakers, my floor-grazing black coat with its various folds. I love how the coat makes me feel strange, exorbitant, but worry today that I am too conspicuous. Today I just want to be lost. To be someone other than myself. There is a bereftness to waiting for the train to go into the city on an overcast Saturday. Couples in puffer coats cling to each other. I like to look at what’s been thrown onto the tracks: a Play-Doh container, a plastic hanger, mini plastic rum bottles. On the train I don’t want to write in my notebook, because I don’t wish to be conspicuous, but I do anyway. It is boring to look at people on this train, everyone on their phones. A pair of young women with identical looks—glittering black sneakers, immaculate makeup they check on their phones, dark shiny jeans. One glares at me, as if annoyed, either at my coat or that I’m writing in my notebook. I become so self-conscious as she stares that I stop and close my eyes. On the train I try to read my book of stories, a Walser collection I’d just received in the mail, but I can only flip through it. The introduction is by William Gass. Lately it seems that every book I’m reading has an introduction by William Gass or Susan Sontag. I underline two lines: “At least three of Walser’s seven siblings were successful. Success was something Walser studied, weighed, admired, mocked, refused.” Anna was just emailing me, worried that she should be online more, interacting with readers, so that she’s not forgotten. Lately I just want to shrink as small as possible. To write as small as possible. That is the space of my longing, however irrational. I watch a girl apply mascara, sandwiched between two women in puffy coats who get off at Canal Street. While standing to exit at Union Square, I take a photograph on my phone of my favorite psychic flyer.
KEANO
SPIRITUAL CONSULTANT
POWERFUL MASTER IN LOVE
TELLS PAST-PRESENT-FUTURE
After the number, it offers one free question by phone. If I had one free question, what would I ask? The thought preoccupies me as I sit writing up my notes in a crowded coffee shop on Avenue A—the only place I’ve found where I can sit and write—while a family crowds in next to me, the boys talking of video games. As I walk around, feeling irritated, crushed, by the crowds of brunchgoers, my aimlessness begins to feel soothing for me. In my notebook, a quote I ripped from a lamppost, finding it perversely funny: “People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”—Dale Carnegie. How easily, I write in my notebook, the day can escape. How difficult it can be to attempt to penetrate it, to describe the texture of what it means to walk around in a body. After some time I find I can block out the voices around me, can begin to write in a way that feels like walking around, can try to write what I’m thinking. I want to know what it’s like to be a psychic, to feel such porousness, is it painful? Or, if the psychic is pretending to be psychic, what is it like being an impostor? While walking around I take pictures of psychic signs in shop windows. The glowing cursive handwriting. The small hominess of the window display, the few crystals, the table. Since I moved here, I keep taking photographs of these signs. They make me feel calm, radiant. At Tompkins Square, the dog parade is just letting out. The dogs seem so cheerful in their costumes. I try to take a picture of a pack of them. The Doberman in the massive purple tutu, the little terrier dressed as a cardboard box of Dove soap, a hamburger dog, a painting-easel dog, a pumpkin dog, a rat terrier with just X’s in orange masking tape covering his flank. All fall I think about the opening narration of Sans Soleil, the trance of the female voice: “He wrote, ‘I’ve been round the world several times, and now only banality still interests me. On this trip, I’ve tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.’” The batteries fall out of my camera into the street, and I must scramble to scoop them up. As I attempt to fit them back in, I eavesdrop on a man covered from bald head to toe in tattoos, talking to two women—about someone, assumedly at the parade, wearing an outfit that costs more than he makes in a month. As I hear this I feel embarrassed of my conspicuous black coat. Walking around, I feel crushed by all the crowds. I see an older woman in a bowler hat and bright red hair, head to toe black, a rainbow cane, her little dog. I smile at her gratefully. I continue to wander around, down Avenue A. Outside a medical supplies store, a sign: a smiling woman inside an MRI machine, with the words ARE YOU CLAUSTROPHOBIC? The storefront of an old photocopier repair store makes me think of Sebald and Cornell, how they didn’t take their own photos but sometimes copied found photos inside a photostat. I remember now that I had wanted to write about Joseph Cornell during the fall, about how I had begun seeing landscapes through his vision. I go inside a kitschy odditorium, with Ouija boards, various creepy things, a glass case with empty nineteenth-century medicinals. I think of Diane Arbus visiting odditoriums near Times Square. A sign tells customers not to pet the horned stuffed calf. This is some Edgar Allan Poe shit, says a drunk man asking to use the bathroom. I listen to him and the pink-haired girl behind the counter argue over whether Edgar Allan Poe lived in New York or Baltimore. New York, he said, but she said he was wrong. I almost intervened, thinking of Poe’s tiny cottage in the Bronx, where he lived during the last years of his life, the caged songbirds on the front porch, how he would write poems with his cat on his shoulder. The manager asks the man to leave. This used to be more of a colorful neighborhood, but there are still colorful characters, he says in an ingratiating way to a tourist family. I am reminded again of Sans Soleil, the scene of drunken homeless men in Japan. “He didn’t like to dwell on poverty.” A few blocks away, I find myself inside Mast Books. I flip through Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency on the table, which I keep on paging through whenever I find it in a bookstore. I marvel again at the vulnerability, and yet formal elegance, of this series of portraits of bodies and community and time. The way Goldin indexes images. The stiff pose of her parents next to a pair of mannequins. The intimacy of photographing her friends in solitude. Alone looking at a bathroom mirror. Naked while sad or voluptuous in bed. Showering or in a bath. Weeping or masturbating. The rawness of the self-portraits, the brutality of the artist’s battered face, her heart-shaped bruise. The starkness of emotions. Her tribe, so many of them no longer here. Cookie Mueller bored in a bar. Greer Lankton. A study in couples and pairs. In party dresses. Embracing naked. Goldin and her ex Brian posed in bed, like a watchful theater. I trace my hand across the spines of the vintage Grove editions. I pick up a New Directions translation of Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp, because it has on the back, in gold embossing, “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp,” the only book I buy and take home with me. How much I understand that sentiment—although every book I’ve published embarrasses me. With both their visibility and their invisibility. How I now feel slightly paranoid in books
tores, how being an author has changed my relationship to them. Now that I look for Walser, I see they don’t have my books, a fact I greet with fleeting ambivalence. I finger a copy of Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born. An old copy of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight with a terrible moony illustration of a woman on the cover. I take a photograph of a facsimile of one of Basquiat’s notebook pages, which I’d just seen on exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum: I feel like a citizen it’s time to go and come back a drifter. After watching the Julian Schnabel biopic of Basquiat sometime that fall, I had emailed Anna, wondering whether the drive to fame is something like the drive to genius. Basquiat wanted to be famous. And he was. But he was also a genius. I used to dismiss so many artists who wanted fame—but then the ones who want fame are the ones who are remembered, more often than not. Like Robert Mapplethorpe, who played the game, unlike Peter Hujar, who did not. I wonder sometimes about my identification with writers and artists who were failures. Anna wrote back that yes, in a person’s lifetime, the successful ones are the ones who want to be, who are in the right place in the right time with the right look and the right agent and the right personality, but after we’re all dead, she thought, it’s anyone’s game who’s remembered. Which of course is how she would think about it, as a competition, still, even after death. Anna was always worried about being remembered. That was her ambition, to be remembered. I wasn’t sure anyone was going to be remembered. Writing was what I felt compelled to do while I was living. Not about what would happen after I was dead. Maybe writing was about being visible when I felt invisible, as I felt invisible as a child, unspecial, ignored. Or maybe writing was about becoming invisible again after having become too visible. Maybe it was both. I wasn’t sure anymore. A genius goes inside someone else’s heart and blood and stays there forever, Anna wrote me. Maybe this was the difference between the two of us. Anna was sure we were geniuses, or at least sure that she was. I was worried that I was a fraud. That’s what publishing a book felt like—that every book was somehow an elaborate fraud, and I would someday be found out.
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