At the library I feel vaguely misanthropic, with everyone still taking selfies inside the grand building. I am told I cannot get a library card because I forgot to bring proof of address, even though I show the man in the small gray room several up-to-date university and college faculty IDs from all of my various campuses. Apparently this is not enough proof that I live here. I sit on the floor and try to write in my notebook, but I am told by a security guard to leave. I go behind the building and sit in Bryant Park. I want to sit here and think about Nymphlight, Joseph Cornell’s little film set in Bryant Park, the silence and space of his ballet of pigeons, which I watched on YouTube the night before. Yet outside in Bryant Park it is all crowds, here for an ongoing winter festival sponsored by a bank. I sit and watch the carousel and try to calm down. I watch the mothers with their young children, documenting the ride on their phones, and wonder if I feel some sort of longing watching them. I like the carousel best when it goes around and around emptily to its French cabaret theme. Surely Cornell loved this carousel, I think. Strange to think that he may have sat here, on his lunch break or day off, watching the same sort of scene that I’m watching now. Our bodies in time layer over each other. Although he probably would have appeared creepier for sitting here watching children on a carousel. As the carousel goes around I see myself in the foil mirrors of its interior. Around and around, not going anywhere. Some of the butterflies on the facade are held up with duct tape. The cat with gold fingernails looks so calm, and yet surprised. When I text John where I am, he texts back that he loves the demented bunny the best. The frog is so grumpy, I reply. I watch an older well-dressed woman by herself, on the bench, riding in circles. I watch an extremely tanned mother and daughter stop outside the carousel to take selfies. They have matching long blond hair, leather miniskirts, stilettos. They take picture after picture of unsmiling faces in front of the carousel, without looking at it, scrolling through the phone to examine the resulting photographs. A little girl scoops up gravel and throws it at me, and I smile at her. Her playfulness and spontaneity calms me down. I look up Bryant Park on my phone and learn that it used to be a potter’s field, that thousands of bodies of the poor or unclaimed were buried here, before being moved to Wards Island. Later there were forty miles of bookshelves underground, but now the library is being emptied of its books. I try to think of that, of all the dead bodies there before the books. And now the nothingness.
Afterward, I wander across the street to the Mid-Manhattan branch. There are no tourists here, just people sitting around, passing time, heads on the tables. Mostly men, with books open in front of them. It is so quiet. I feel more at home here, in its griminess. I go upstairs to the fifth floor to find the biography of Joseph Cornell that I wanted. I sit down at a large table and read that Cornell was a lover of biographies. “They attest at least partly to the difficulty he had in sustaining friendships. He fared better with the deceased. He loved to immerse himself in the lives of the illustrious dead, with whom his identification was intense . . .” I watch an ancient-looking man wearing a baseball cap, a red sweatshirt, a paisley scarf around his neck, eating an orange out of a plastic bag, reading a book with a magnifying glass. I sit across from a woman in a red coat and a fluorescent pink hood. She has books all around her. A book on Rasputin. One on wooden spoons. I realize she is asleep. I think back to watching Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason last week, recorded in the middle of the night from Turner Classic Movies. I kept on pausing on Shirley Clarke’s bookcase in her room in the Chelsea Hotel, while Jason Holliday ventriloquizes Katharine Hepburn’s calla lilies speech from Stage Door. There is a skull on top of a pile of books in the background, a sort of vanitas, like the one I always visit at the Met, the early seventeenth-century Dutch still life with a skull and a writing quill, an expired lamp with its wisp of smoke—these objects of the writer scattered around, all in vain. The film makes me uncomfortable, Shirley Clarke asking Jason Holliday behind the scenes, “What else you got? What makes you cry?” as he gets more and more inebriated, his life story compelled from him. John tells me about all the regulars who contact him at the museum down the street, where he works as a librarian. People from all over the country, who have vast research questions that often lead nowhere, sometimes various conspiracy theories. John tells me he worries that, when he is making connections in his own writing and thinking, he is like the people calling his library, seeing connections that aren’t there. But that’s all I do lately too—I try to follow connections.
I realize, looking at my notes now, that this building has been closed for some time, although I haven’t returned to Midtown in over a year.
It took Rilke a year to filter through the shocks of the city, to begin to transmogrify the experience of arriving in Paris into language. In a long letter, penned on July 18, 1903, to Lou Andreas-Salomé, a year after he first arrived, he begins to become the other self of his fictional journals. Remembering this recent past, he writes of a porousness to the suffering of others, these people with their melancholy gazes thrust out into the streets, in crowds, for where they sleep he does not know, how he feels wrenched into their lives. In this unreal landscape, time has become layered and confused. This great fear has taken him back to military school, where he felt completely alone, a boy among boys, and now in the city he is alone again, the carts drive right over him as if he doesn’t exist. This fear has been growing for some time, taking the quiet green out of his rural retreat with his wife and child, and growing as huge as a house or street or city while in Paris. At night he reads Baudelaire and feels dazed by this companionship, and by his new experiences with poverty. When writing of these street figures, these fragments of caryatids, as if the city is a ruin, Rilke is also thinking constantly through the figures of the sculptor, whose monograph he is supposed to be writing. His eyes are hurting, his hands too, he writes Clara upon arriving at the sculptor’s run-down estate in the suburbs, the outside pavilion of dazzling white plaster figures, these gigantic showcases filled with fragments. A piece of arm and leg and body is for Rodin an entire thing, he writes his wife, who probably knew this, as she herself had apprenticed with the sculptor. Nothing is lacking. He describes to her tables, model stands, chests of drawers, all covered with little figures of baked clay, the sculptor’s miniature body fragments, or abattis. These cases resemble a medical museum, like the small, crammed, harshly lit room of small wax figures the sculptor would frequent in the later nineteenth century at the Hôtel-Dieu. Some speculate that Rodin later visited hospitals, a ball of clay in his pocket. Hand surgeons can now identify the various neurological problems present in his models of convulsive hands. Like the blessing left hand, whose original model appears to have a form of Dupuytren’s contracture, the condition named for Guillaume Dupuytren, the chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu, who pioneered the corrective procedure, and was best known for treating Napoleon Bonaparte’s hemorrhoids. There is something anatomical to Rilke’s gaze in these descriptions of his initial encounters with the Paris public, the palsied figures and gestures he describes, like the hands of working-class men the sculptor observed from life. The oddly clasped hands of the begging crone that paralyzes the neurasthenic young nobleman in the novel, who watches the pencil emerging slowly from those open hands, and realizes he is supposed to buy it. The lengthy passage in the letter following a man suffering from St. Vitus’s dance—a convulsive energy to the writing, as if the poet is performing this man’s convulsions down the street on the page, which he saves in its entirety for the novel. Walking down the boulevard St. Michel to the Bibliothèque nationale, he witnesses the crowd’s collective gaze at a slender man, who keeps grabbing his black overcoat collar, folding it back down with both hands, hopping, as if pretending to trip or stumble. He begins to follow him, witnessing his jerking and twitching. The disquiet moving through his body. He notices how the man struggles for control, attempts to appear casual and composed. He dances on the bridge, a crowd circling around him. Rilke doesn�
�t go to the library that day. He writes, What book could have been strong enough to help me get past what was inside me?
Perhaps, Bhanu writes me, to begin Drifts I have to find a door. As I receive her email that fall, a compassionate answer to my feelings of block with this ongoing project, I was meditating upon a large book—still open on my desk now—featuring reproductions of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings Melencolia I and Saint Jerome in His Study. For some time, I had been hoping to write about these images. When Bhanu wrote me this, I felt it was no coincidence that Dürer derives from a word for “door.” All that fall I was infected by the drawings and prints of the Renaissance son of a Nuremberg metalworker. I have been thinking of this diptych as Dürer’s meditation on the space of thought. Often I have stared at the facing pages, measuring the clutter and chaos of Melencolia I, on the left, with the order and clarity of the scholar on the right, his well-lit and industrious studioli with his content and sleepy animals at his feet. How cluttered the scene on the left, the space conjured there—it feels like my mind now. The angel of melancholy is surrounded by tools of mathematics and precision: a sphere, a lamp, a measuring instrument, a cutting tool (a scythe perhaps), some wood, a numbered chart, an hourglass, a hammer, a bell, other tools. The angel has keys around her waist, the putto, or blind baby cherub, is writing in the open notebook on his lap. The scales hanging from a wall, a big rhomboid structure in the background, a landscape in the distance, a rainbow, underneath a funny flying rat carrying the sign that reads MELENCOLIA I. The angel’s expression is furrowed, her hand on her cheek, her body hunched over, the posture a mood. The hourglass represents the urgencies of time.
I think of how Dürer was in his early forties when he made Melencolia I. The same year, he completed the charcoal drawing of his elderly mother, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother at the Age of 63, which he worked on when she was dying. His mother who bore eighteen children. He records the ravages of her face. After his youth, he portrayed other aging faces but not his own. His last self-portrait was in 1500, at the age of twenty-eight. His bearded Jesus face, his noble brown coat with the fur collar. John points out to me how the hands are often skewed in early self-portrait drawings, like Dürer’s done in a mirror when he was thirteen. Drawing in a mirror required a direct gaze and an active, moving hand (which was difficult to portray). Often the mirror image of the drawing hand is obscured, hidden behind the visible hand’s sleeve. Perhaps it’s impossible to record the self at the immediate moment of contemplation, John emails me from work. Perhaps, he jokes, the study is really named Melencolia I, the “I” as in first person, as opposed to Melencolia One.
In the morning, the parade of dogs with their owners. We all cross the street to avoid altercations. This morning Genet growled at a friendly pit bull—I had to pull his thrashing body away, only for him to whimper when the same dog was behind us on the way back. I think of the seemingly identical feral cats that lurk outside of the new cat house and I begin to see the house and the sidewalks as a dimensional space, like one of Dürer’s engravings, as if these are all the same striped cat drawn in different poses. I take photographs of the copycats as they laze around on spookily warm days. Walking from Midtown to the Village right before Halloween, the golden retriever with the huge orange lion mane lying glumly on the ground while everyone took its picture.
In November the warm weather continues to be unnerving. “Happy Apocalypse!” I begin greeting people. On my days off I walk around my neighborhood and take photographs of the Halloween decorations that are still up. The impressive decorations on the massive porches of some of the grand Victorian houses. Families of mannequins dressed as zombie brides, buried families, dog and cat skeletons, skulls on the ground, flying skeletons hanging from trees. Sometimes just cobwebs strewn over the bushes, over the front of the houses. Which reminds me of the passage I just read about spiderwebs in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “Here it is difficult to keep our minds above water, as it were, to see that we stick to matters of everyday thought, and not to get on the wrong track where it seems that we have to describe extreme subtleties, which again we are quite unable to describe with the means at our disposal. We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.” It is while walking around that I can experience what Cornell in his diaries notes as an “absence of wanderlust nervousness.” The itchiness subsides as I take photographs. A batlike decoration strung in a tree looks almost exactly like the flying ratlike thing in Melencolia I, which appears again, John and I discover, in one of Dürer’s Passion images.
That late fall, I go back to reading The Tanners. “The next morning the painter unpacked his landscapes from their portfolio and first an entire autumn fell out of it. . . .” The fall leaves make the light yellow as I walk around and think about the painters of yellow: Vermeer, Van Gogh, Hopper. What if a work had a sort of weather? I ask my students. What if it could be shot through with yellow light? How sensitive and melancholy Genet is, looking out the window, like a little prince. The rain tranquilizes him. I catch him gazing at me. The strong, vinegary smell of the fruit from the yellowing gingko tree. Like the ferment of vomit. I read somewhere that only the female gingko tree stinks. We can’t keep Genet from gobbling up the yellow flesh balls on the sidewalk. Sometime in November, he starts throwing them up in the middle of the night. I wake up in a patch of his yellow-green vomit. So much feels premonitory that fall. While in the death pose at the end of yoga class, I stare at the speaker, made from a hollowed-out butternut squash, hanging from the ceiling of the studio. I realize it replicates the inexplicable squash hanging from the ceiling in Dürer’s Saint Jerome in His Study. Later we eat at an Ethiopian restaurant and see a decorative squash hanging from the ceiling. There appears to be a vast referentiality everywhere.
One Saturday in the middle of November my father calls me from the emergency room. The exhaustion and panic in his voice. When he calls, the image open on my desktop is the self-portrait of Dürer as a melancholic, pointing at his enlarged spleen like a Christ figure. In one window I am thinking through that image, while in another I am calling up the search box at the Mayo Clinic’s website, entering the words “enlarged spleen fatty liver leaking bile.” Is my father’s urine the color of cola or dark orange? What does it mean that I was reading about melancholy and the humours while my father was in the ER? That bile is the humour of the melancholic? It means nothing, or: it means everything. That this is the mode of collapse.
All November I walk around, entranced and revulsed by trees in the neighborhood. I take hundreds of close-ups of the trees. The scars, holes, and scales of the bark. Like abstract paintings, stripped and haunting. The bulbous protrusions on these tree bodies, how they look at twilight. My uncle, my father’s identical twin—did I think he was like one of these trees at the end? I remember years ago, just after he died, sitting around the kitchen table at the old house with my father and my aunt, the medievalist. My father began talking about the bubonic plague, because he has just read a book on the subject. How the modern stems from a third of civilization being killed off. My aunt moves the conversation to puerperal fever and cradle death. This is when I love them the most, feel the most kinship with them. Untangling death, always at a remove of history. We weren’t able to discuss the real death at the table, the chair where my father now sat occupied previously by his twin brother, who lived in that house his entire life with his mother and sister. His bones molded into a hunched-over curve, unable to carry the weight of his bloated tumorous belly, the death that resided in him for months. Like the death everyone has housed inside them, as Rilke writes in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. How John and I would sit with my uncle, in the living room in the old house, my uncle in his mother’s old rocking chair. We asked him about his time in the navy. I read to him from the sports section, announcing the headlines in humorous voices. He enjoyed the tedium of this, of listening to the baseball news. It became difficult to help him upstairs, into his
own bed. I remember—his nosebleed on the sheets, how we had to be careful with his body. And then his coma in the hospital, holding his hand.
In the fall of 1907, at a reading in Vienna, Rilke wears a black velvet cape and reads one of the early scenes from his novel in progress, which takes his alter ego from the city to the ancestral house of his childhood. The noble and immense spectacle of the death of his grandfather, whose body grows larger and larger, taking up the space of the old manor house, until the patriarch insists on being carried from one room to another, like a funeral procession for a still living man. What is a novel but a large ancestral estate, after all—there is history in the walls, one demands to be carried into every room, falling into a paroxysm of melancholy and rage when one room is left abandoned. The dogs linger in the room of the dying man, occupying spaces like something out of Velázquez, dancing among the absent-minded and drowsy things. The tall, lean Russian wolfhounds running around the armchairs, reared like heraldic animals, resting their paws on the white-and-gold window sill, the glove-yellow dachshunds on the silk-upholstered easy chair near the window, the sullen setter rubbing against the edge of a table, causing porcelain cups on painted trays to tremble. After reading out loud from this dense and decorative passage, Rilke suffers a nosebleed—one wonders if it was a precursor of the death he had within him, as his character theorizes that everyone has a death within them, living dormant for two more decades, a cancer of the blood, catalyzed by the prick of one of his favorite roses, while living in Switzerland.
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