That fall I rely on animal videos to get by, unable to bear the spectacular violence reported in the media, the seemingly constant shootings, dashboard videos of murders of teenagers by police. Instead I watch video of the new baby red pandas at the Prospect Park Zoo, listed as vulnerable because of the deforestation in their native habitat of the Eastern Himalayas. Even with the melancholy of watching animals in captivity, and the intense sadness thinking about the imminent destruction of their species, there is still something soothing about these zoo videos—the slow, silent ambling of these burnished-color baby animals, through grass, climbing on trees, staring at the camera. In counterpoint to these slow, silent videos, the recently circulated video juxtaposing yellow cabs, Times Square, a Gap in Herald Square, as sites of future attack. I walk through the guards armed with assault rifles at Grand Central on the way to and from the Metro-North, thinking of the paranoiac and vulnerable psychic energy of these massive public spaces. I smile at the large dogs, who are serious, working. The feelings of a strained fellowship amidst waves of people, waiting to trudge upstairs.
John and I muse that Dürer really originated some version of the soothing animal video. All fall I think about the animals in the margins of Dürer’s prints. The old skinny dog curled up in Melencolia I versus the contented sleeping dog and lion in Saint Jerome, their paws almost touching. My own dog is aloof and melancholic in the other room, he needs his own space in the mornings, although at some point he will decide to curl up on the little rug underneath my desk. Throughout the day, from the Met print room where John is doing research, he texts me images of the tiny affenpinscher with the lion-cut who reoccurs in the margins of Dürer’s Passion scenes, striking sassy poses in scenes of Christ’s torture. Later I read that Dürer laid a painting of himself out in the sun to dry, and the self-portrait was so realistic his dog licked the face of the painting. (John: How do we know this? Did it leave a mark?) But, as he writes me, this suggests for us two important things: (a) Dürer had a dog and (b) Dürer allowed his dog to lick his face. I like the idea that the Dürer who was wrecked with this crushing project, these scenes of death, who considered the Passion of Christ the greatest artistic subject, also put his little dog there to make him happy. The beautiful shape Genet is making now, a curve at rest. His yawn and stretch. His darling little mongrel face, perhaps part affenpinscher, we don’t know. His little gray goatee. I have taken to calling him “The Bearded One,” after Dürer’s nickname. Genet, my little panther I study. He stares at me with glowing amber eyes.
The intense pleasure I take from my dogwalker’s updates. She tells me which dogs, from his neighborhood pack of bearded wizards, he has walked with that day. Most are duos with names that make me happy: Betty White and Sonic, Fonzie and Annabelle. I’m glad Genet has friends, because he is not good at meeting new dogs, because of his fear aggression. He’s not friendly, I have to tell people when we are out walking. Though he is silent and worried when others bark at him, usually tiny furry dogs more neurotic than him. During the day I watch my dog, his melancholy and sensitivity, his aloofness yet desire for affection, and I think that we get the animals that we deserve. As I wait for my bagel, I watch the outside table where the dog and baby people congregate. I have to stand off to the side with Genet so he doesn’t freak out at dogs passing by. I watch the woman who is my neighborhood nemesis, with her Pomeranian on her lap—now dressed in the same identical brown sweater with skull and crossbones that Genet has, which cannot, I think, be a coincidence. She is my nemesis because she lets her little dog off the leash in the neighborhood, as she meanders slowly behind him, and also because once, when her little dog ran up to Genet and I scooped him up, she said something in Polish to me with a tone that I interpreted to mean, What’s wrong with unfriendly people like you, with your unfriendly dogs? As I’m watching them now, she lets her dog under the communal table, where it takes a little shit, which she then scoops up with a napkin and ambles over to the garbage can to throw out.
By the end of the semester, I am so stuffed full with the words of others that I have just enough energy to scribble down notes of my own, hoping to remember them later. My favorite student, the cinephile, confesses to me that his depression has returned. I remember, at that meeting at the beginning of the semester, the lawyer telling us that the students’ depression is not our problem. I worry over them, the ones who drop out. I write letters to their advisers, full-time tenured professors, who often don’t reply. There is a student from the Midwest, a scholarship kid, who has not shown up most of the semester. When she comes to class it’s obvious she hasn’t slept all night, her head on the table, and when I call on her she is all hollowed eyes and irritation. She picks apart everyone else’s writing and is sensitive about her own. When we meet, I try to push, and she bristles at me. She likes to list the writers that she loves, lyric essayists she wants to write like, although, she notes, she also wants to make money writing. Didn’t you write, like, one of those “girl” novels, she said to me at one of our early meetings. I can tell when she says this she’s trying to irritate me, and it works. I think she reminds me too much of myself, the bad student I used to be, like a ghost with chaotic energy. Danielle writes me that she had to learn boundaries with students—I have to save something for myself, she says. And yet I wonder sometimes if my career is not in writing but in depression.
Leaving the train station, returning home, I hear the bleatings of the broken mechanical horse outside the Tibetan restaurant. Originally it played “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” but it has become increasingly demented, making erratic and glitchy sounds. Eating my lunch, the pale blue eggs trickled out a blue pus at my desk, while I was meeting with a student. How repulsed my students probably are by the pungent salads I bring from home. Back at the apartment, I feed Genet and eat a piece of chocolate while standing up. When I take him outside, he walks briskly in the dark. He is always spooked walking at twilight. It was twilight when he was attacked by a large dog off its leash, where we last lived, in North Carolina. Halloween decorations are still up—a fogged window, the words HELP ME scrawled on the window from inside, where a standing figure appears to have its hands against the frosted glass. An orange hand sticking up from the ground. I remember, now, writing this, that it was around Halloween when he was attacked as well. How we stumbled into the house of the two men watching from a nearby porch, watched as the dog dragged the puppy into the street thrashing him back and forth—worried him in his mouth—that’s the word for it, “worried.” I look this up later and it’s from the Old English wyrgan, to strangle, changed gradually to mean to cause anxiety. A dog’s pleasure at clamping down with his incisors, like Genet with his bone or stuffed animal or this large dog with my puppy in his mouth. My puppy’s yelps of distress, as I threw myself onto them, into the street. We could have been hit by a passing car. He was a doctor, the man said, although Genet backed away from him, too nervous and shaking to be examined, his tiny puncture wounds covered by bloodied matted hair. I can see now, just behind my cowering puppy, a bowl of Halloween candy still out in their deluxe kitchen with its marble island and countertops. The art on the walls. One of them drove us the few blocks home, me cradling Genet, both of us shaking. Out walking now in our neighborhood the trees look like sculptures in the night. One house bright with Christmas lights for a night shoot. The camera crews appear often around here. Several television shows film in the neighborhood, which can stand for any city suburb. I think this one is for The Americans, the show about Soviet spies living in the DC suburbs in the Reagan era. It’s a show where almost everyone turns out to be a spy. There’s a surreality to entering one place masquerading as another, the present masquerading as another time. When I first moved here Boardwalk Empire was filming, and in the middle of summer there was fake snow on the vintage cars. Later in the summer there were Greek letters on one of the houses and red cups littering the lawn, one of the grand Victorians remade as a University of Iowa fraternity house on Girls.
Lately I have been fixing my students’ writing problems in my sleep. Former students write me, wanting to meet, wanting advice, letters of recommendation, solace. Everyone wants to be a writer, but they want to be successful writers, famous writers, and I don’t know how to advise with that. Writing is a life of constant rejection. It never stops, the rejection. My friends who write me looking for help with their publishing woes. I realize I’ve been trying to fix everyone’s existential crises except my own. Which I then pour forth in letters, in a new genre I’ve been thinking of as the complaint. I worry, when I do not hear from Sofia or Anna or others, that I have said too much, that I have annoyed them. Yet sometimes I’m the one who drops the conversation. It can become too much, to be in conversation. I am reminded of those lines from The Tanners, “Writing a letter, you get carried away and make incautious remarks. In letters, the soul always wishes to do the talking and generally it makes a fool of itself. So it’s best I don’t write.” To have countless correspondents, to crave that communion, and yet to be removed, to need privacy. Cornell copying down into his journal a line from a Rilke biography: “In the letters written between 1910 and 1914 we find Rilke (continually) expressing a longing for human companionship and affection, and then, often immediately afterwards asking whether he could really respond to such companionship if it were offered to him, and wondering whether, after all, his real task might not lie elsewhere.” I write to Sofia of my longing to be a nobody. Is it possible, still, to leave one’s name, one’s face, to transcend oneself in the work? Sofia writes me of these panic attacks she has lately where she worries it’s gone, that she’s lost it, perhaps, she writes me, it’s like your choking. For I will never again have the solitude of being totally unknown, a zero, creating in that freedom, she writes. I tell her of an epigraph to a book I plan to write, Foucault noting that he writes in order not to have a face, and she says she knows it well, it is actually the epigraph to a book she plans to write, the narrator a zero, dissolved, not like the books she is currently working on, steeped in identity and community. I’ve ceased marveling at what Sofia calls our parallel utopian concepts of literature. She writes me that today her son played soccer, and every time her son’s team scored, a kid on the losing team would encourage his own team by piping in “It’s still zero-zero!” It reminded me of the state I have to psych myself into in order to write anything. I have to pretend I’ve never failed, she writes, that I’m still at the beginning, that everything is still zero-zero. This effort of will to imagine you’re still at the beginning and everything is still possible, even though you know where you really are. It’s still zero-zero, Kate. It’s always zero-zero.
On a Sunday in November, to distract ourselves from thinking about the crisis of my father’s illness, John and I take several trains to the Lenox Hill neighborhood on the Upper East Side—a penthouse apartment that housed a very small portion of the vast art collection of the spouse of a major Venezuelan media mogul, responsible for donating a major collection of Latin American geometric abstraction to the MoMA—to look at an informal display of colonialist travel books from Alexander von Humboldt, the nineteenth-century naturalist and explorer of Latin America. The display was accompanied by these exotifying landscape print portfolios. It was a kind of cocktail party that we’d never normally attend, or be invited to, a very New York and seemingly humorless mixture of culture workers and moneyed collectors, but John had been asked to go by a colleague to represent the library. It was an apartment where no one seemed to live, but occasionally assistants would inhabit to rearrange and store the art. The entire time we were looking at the books, laid out on a dining table like a banquet, John kept on whispering in my ear that he felt he was in César Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, the speculative work about the nineteenth-century German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas, who mentored under Humboldt, who while traveling into the Pampas in Argentina is attacked by various calamities, including being hit by lightning while riding his horse and becoming horrifically disfigured, his vision altered, until the novella itself takes on the feel of a hallucinogenic landscape painting. The only thing I was interested in was a book previously owned by the art collector’s grandfather, a media mogul who was also an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History in the 1930s. The book featured gorgeous, outlandishly hand-painted Colombian pigeons. Since I had just been thinking of Joseph Cornell, his fascination with pigeons, his Natural Museum boxes, it felt like a connection I couldn’t explain. What does it mean, I wrote Sofia, that John and I felt we were in a César Aira novel? Afterward we walked around the early Netherlandish room at the Met. My favorite painting in that room, which I return to often, is Portrait of a Woman—I love how distracted the woman looks, her jeweled fingers woven through her prayer book. I am also always compelled by the lactating Virgins, their pointed, naked breasts. On the train home seeing pairs of pale people who looked like twins, almost as if they were out of a Netherlandish painting, with their translucent skin, but in contemporary dress, with shopping bags and running shoes.
Sometime that month, I see the old woman crossing the street. Slung on her arm a black Coach purse, with its familiar gold clasp. It is a purse I recognize intimately, as it is identical to the one that I use when I take the old camera out on my walks, as I did all that fall. I was startled to see that purse on her, as it was the same exact purse my mother used to carry, the purse I would bring to the hospital for her when she wasn’t herself anymore, that she would guard as some memory of her former identity.
Outside on the porch, with a coat on so Genet can sit in the sun. He’s still vomiting up the yellow gingko balls at night. Yesterday I didn’t leave the house. I lounged around, and bled, and watched TV on my computer, and laid books on top of me, in the hope that I would read them. The day before, I had participated in a faculty reading that, up until the hour before, I was sure I was going to cancel. I told myself that if I had to do this reading I would write new work for this event, which I’ve known about for months. I wanted to write about Dürer’s Melencolia I, but instead I continued my practice of filling up my notebooks with notes and little fragments. So
I read a section on Victorian postmortem photography from the book on my mother, which I still can’t find anyone willing to publish in its current form. It felt alienating reading from a book I had already written, about another period in my life, even though it hadn’t yet been published. It was as if that book was from another self, as if the writing of the book allowed me to become another self while moving through it. What would it be like, I wondered, thinking of the genius grant winner, to write a self in the time you were the self you wrote about in your book, so you were sure it was you? At the reading, I was followed by a graphic novelist who documented the nervous condition of being thirty-seven—my same age—in a witty way, a creamy way, Bhanu wrote to me yesterday, after I wrote her in distress, which I realize now is often when I write to her. To conclude the reading, one of the full-time professors, a much-awarded poet, read a cycle of history poems for more than forty minutes, even though we were told to read for no more than ten. Since I was in the front row, I had to try to keep an alert expression on my face, although I was falling asleep. At the dinner afterward, the head of creative writing, seated to my left, remarked to me that the graphic novelist gave the best reading, and, smiling, I agreed, although quickly she realized who she was talking to and apologized. It was true, anyway, I hadn’t given a good reading. Only polite clapping afterward. A donor was apparently seated to the right of me at the dinner, and the department head, a medieval scholar, whispered to me to try to be charming, and only later did I have time to reflect how odd it was for her to ask me to perform that role. But this is what I do, usually, smile and agree. This is why, I believe, Walser is so important to me, his passivity and servility that’s undercut with pricklier energy, when he sits down and writes. Writing is a way to counter that other, public, self, who must be constantly polite in order not to get fired, in this exhausting life as what I’ve begun to think of as the amazing traveling adjunct. When the professor interviewed me for the class, she told me she didn’t have time to read my books, which she gestured to, a little pile of two on her desk. I felt so depleted the entire evening—it didn’t help that I had bled through my trousers, on the train there, so I was also worried more than anything that I would get blood on the new white silk blouse that I’d purchased that month, in anticipation of the reading, which was ridiculous and unnecessary, but often how I psych myself up to do public events. I spent the entire day in bed, dreading the reading, and the entire next day recovering from it. I wrote to Bhanu, Perhaps this shame and self-loathing is partially why I am a writer. Perhaps because of the feeling of invisibility I felt as a child. I didn’t know artists or intellectuals or even women with professional careers growing up in the lower-middle-class Midwestern suburbs. How startling this was for me, when I began teaching at these schools, these students were children of doctors and lawyers and professors and artists, they had gone to special schools for the arts or boarding schools, they knew they were brilliant, they wanted to be successes, they wanted their families to recognize them, and their families did recognize them. This initially filled me with bitterness, although I’ve since gotten over it and can regard it with some distance. Because I had arrived too early for the reading, I had wandered around the dance department. Spying a poster of Yvonne Rainer, I wondered briefly if maybe I could have been a modern dance major—the fantasy that my parents would have allowed such a thing. Would I then have been more happy, more well-adjusted, more confident? At the dinner: the department head, two other full-time professors—one a fairly known novelist a decade or so older than me, and the other a much older, celebrated novelist, the grande dame of the small creative writing department—as well as the graphic novelist my age, who was also a visiting professor with one class. The full-timers complained about their students, their need for trigger warnings especially. I found myself siding entirely with my students, how I had learned from this generation, how they thought of consent in different ways than I did when I was their age. The atmosphere became intense, perhaps hostile toward me, this unknown usurper. I remember now, the full-timers insisted on giving me money for a cab ride home after the dinner, because it was late and would take me more than an hour to get home. I refused politely but finally took the fifty dollars they pooled, which only cemented for me their perception of my relative youthfulness and their awareness of my precarity.
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