Drifts

by Kate Zambreno

  Earlier that day, before the reading, I had left the house only to pick up my white silk blouse from the dry cleaner’s. I chat there often with the perennially disquieted Vera, who over these three years I have convinced to like me—she sometimes smiles at me when I walk by, and I wave at her, and she waves back, a victory. When I moved here, I took in to the corner dry cleaner’s a kimono-like navy jacket that had a slim navy sash of the same material. When I wore the jacket afterward, I became increasingly aware that the navy sash felt of a different material, even though it was the identical color and length of my sash. I took it back to Vera, repeatedly, showing her the sash, both of us exasperated, and she would show me the spare or lost belts and sashes they kept, clipped to a hanging belt, none of which matched. Finally, a month later, Vera told me she had found my sash, which matched the thicker, sturdier material of the jacket, as opposed to the silkier sash she’d given me. I had thought I was going crazy. That subtle feeling—something is amiss, although everything appears normal on the surface. It has stayed with me the entire time I’ve been in this city. Vera is perpetually at war with the owner, Mr. Kim. In the summer, Mr. Kim refuses to put on the air-conditioning, and Vera complains of the heat. But the real issue is the question of time. Mr. Kim often tells customers their clothes will be done far earlier than Vera would like, because it’s just the two of them working there. Vera is often so dyspeptic when I see her, so I let her complain to me for a while—which makes me happy, to offer this service. On this visit, a man in front of me was angry that she couldn’t find an item he’d dropped off months ago. When he left I asked her whether this happens often, customers losing their patience with her, over items they should have picked up long before. She told me the story of a woman who last week tried to pick up her wedding dress, which she dropped off three years earlier. The woman was incensed that the dress looked dingy, and tried to insist she shouldn’t have to pay for it, which, as Vera explained to her and to me, of course it did, it spent three years encased in plastic at a humid dry cleaner’s. I listened to the story and made the appropriate noises in response. Vera is also the name of my deceased grandmother, and even though this Vera speaks Spanish and has thin blond hair she pulls back into a ponytail, and is only in her early fifties, I think, she reminds me of my grandmother, with her fleshy brown arms fanning herself in the humidity, and also my grandmother’s vitality and temper. My grandmother half-paralyzed in a wheelchair, still perched like a queen over the plastic-coated kitchen table, ruling over everyone with a grabber, dictating control over her two adult children she lived with, like Joseph Cornell’s tyrannical mother who he loved so dearly. My grandmother for decades worked linens at Marshall Field’s, and we would visit her there when we were children. The way Vera smooths her tan hand over the plastic casing reminds me of watching my grandmother, with her brown wrinkled hands and yellow nails, expertly fold and smooth a fitted sheet. Genet is in the other room on the bed as I’m writing this. He is curled up on my pillow, near a small spot of dried blood on the sheets. He has licked the spot and it has grown wet and wider and faded. I curl around him and smell him, kissing the white diamond on his little barrel chest. I feel the most voluptuous when it’s just me and my dog alone like this, in an unmade bed, when I can bury my head into his neck, weeping.

  Could this work, could Drifts, unfold like a dream? It is still yellow outside but the trees are now bare. I bring The Tanners with me to the local café, along with Renee Gladman’s Event Factory, another yellow book. On the first page of Event Factory: “The city was large, yellow, and tender.” On a gloomy, rainy day, I take photographs of the wet cats in the alley. In early December I write to my TV correspondent in Idaho that I’m feeling both miserable and joyful, blocked and slow, yet porous and sensitive. He has just learned he is becoming a parent. He’s now making lists of writers with kids, to try to bolster himself. Elizabeth Hardwick, for instance. Clarice Lispector. Susan Sontag. Later, however, there’s something I want to say to him about this list he was making, but I don’t say anything.

  I keep getting consumed by the constant tragedies, passively participating in this collective mourning online. Then I binge-watch crime procedurals (the fantasy perhaps of a functional justice system), so as to avoid a constant intake of news. An ambient political depression. The pulsing vulnerabilities of my students, as they too deal with all of this. How they attempt to write through their traumas. How I don’t often know how to help them hold space for this trauma, but I wish to, and by the end of the semester I feel like an exhausted social worker. I’m starting to feel run-down, to get swollen glands. At the close of the semester I felt sure that what I needed to feel better, to be a new person, was a new red lipstick—an expensive red, housed in a silver or gold case. I scroll through my phone on the train home, fixated by the slight derivations of shades of red. I go to the Sephora off Union Square after Monday’s class. The park is filled with homeless animals, the dogs, the litter of kittens living on a woman like she is their house, but I look away. That feeling still in the pit of my stomach. At the Sephora I buy a red Dolce & Gabbana lipstick, which I’ve decided on after lengthy research, but it is too orange. The next day I return the lipstick at a different Sephora off Times Square, and get a YSL red, which I don’t like either but don’t bother returning. The patient and bored salespeople who stand and watch as I present to them my screaming red mouth. The red stains on my teeth, my fingers. What I probably want is a new face and new personality. To be someone other than myself.

  Didn’t Sontag, like, have a Sephora VIP card, one of my students in my seminar asks. We are discussing her writing on photography. There had recently been a news item—her email archive had been made public. Let her shop in private! I snap back, and they are surprised by my sudden vehemence.

  The little dog by my side is beginning to resemble the doll-like bearded lynx in that Dürer sketch Sketches of Animals and Landscapes, which is the title for the section of Drifts I am transcribing from my notes. The silver-blue fur and peach-pink flesh of the baboon, the only colored element in the drawing. The sleepy lions. The two stacked views of the same bridge in a landscape from different perspectives. Genet brings me his red large geometric ball. I don’t notice him now, too immersed in my process of transcription, so he goes looking for another toy to entice me to play. He now pushes his rubber bone into my hand. Writing this, I am reminded of the beginning of Austerlitz, where Sebald remembers wandering into a zoo in Antwerp, and links the intent gaze of the nocturnal animals to the gazes of philosophers and writers, illustrating the passage with the eyes of an unidentified Wittgenstein. An opening that strangely dissolves into a visual memory of a crowd of travelers at the grand train station.

  I love reading about Cornell’s epistolary friendship with Marianne Moore—both of them living with their claustrophobic mothers, her in Brooklyn, him in Queens, the caretaker/nurses of their families. They wrote each other of rare books and animals. How he writes her of the referential library of his mind:

  Dear Miss Moore,

  For some time I have been trying to feel collected enough to write to you about an interesting thought or two that has come to me in the past year or so. But there seems to be such a complexity, a sort of endless cross-indexing of detail (intoxicatingly rich) in connection with what and how I feel that I never seem to come to the point of doing anything about it.

  The other day I made my way to the office and looked at the book that’s been open on my desk for two years now. In a quick spirit of collage, I had placed a postcard of a photograph of Joseph Cornell against Dürer’s Melencolia I while attempting to wrestle with this seemingly intractable pile of notes. The photograph is of Cornell as an old man, sitting in a hard chair against a background of faded paisley wallpaper, his hand resting a book against his head, eyes closed, as if he is mimicking the posture of Dürer’s angel. In the foreground, overflowing shelves of files and boxes. I read somewhere, in a book about Cornell, that horror v
acui, fear of empty spaces, was a specifically Victorian malady. Is this our real phobia with our books? I write to Sofia. The horror—and perversely the desire—to be empty?

  At times in the morning, I feel my office, with my little dog asleep curled up on the rug, is the calm space of Saint Jerome’s study, especially when I have arranged and stacked all the notes and scraps on my desk, or hidden them off to the side. I am reminded of a discovery of this period of reading, that the local hermit saint of Nuremberg, where Dürer was born and lived, was Saint Sebaldus, his relics enshrined in the church Dürer and his family attended. My dog, contemplative on the carpet, catches me looking at him and jumps up to the chair. So distracted by my father’s health, I often can only scribble down notes. The last time I spoke to my father, he told me that he’s waiting a month to go to a liver specialist. It frustrates me, this refusal to deal with his body, with the possibility that he might have his twin’s liver cancer. I know he doesn’t want to know. His voice sounds exhausted. I ask him how much he slept the night before. I can imagine him sitting up in his chair, in pain. It is the fact of my father’s solitude that afflicts me. Genet lies on the little shag rug under the desk. He wants me to pick him up and cuddle him, and I do.

  Yesterday I watched Tokyo Story on my computer. The pathos of elderly parents who travel to Tokyo to see their adult children, who are too busy to spend time with them. To watch these characters inhabit homely interiors, the mother and father slowly folding items in and out of a small leather carrier. The grief and ongoingness of the everyday. And the magnificent, tender face of Setsuko Hara, who plays the dutiful daughter-in-law and widow. It had just been reported that she died earlier in the fall, at the age of ninety-five. She never married, living a life of seclusion, refusing all interviews and photographs. That moment at the end of the film, between her and the youngest daughter—“Isn’t life disappointing?” “I think so.” An ecstasy almost to her look of resignation, so open and pained in its cheerfulness. At some point watching the film I began to weep and couldn’t stop. I am still shaken by the experience of watching it. Thinking of my widowed father up all night, folding laundry, watching movies. He tells me he is having trouble reading his book on the history of punctuation. My little dog’s chin is on my notebook, he sighs heavily into the desk as I scratch his little beard. I know now I must go visit him, as soon as the semester is over, even though I dread it.

  The last two weeks of December, I am sick in bed with a respiratory infection. I flip through books, a biography of Wittgenstein’s family I began on the plane ride home from Chicago, having flown in to take my father to specialists, his illness still a mystery. How regressive I get after I see my father. I am no longer a writer, someone who thinks. I am a complete nobody. Two weeks ago Drifts felt possible, and now I feel time escaping me, and me allowing it to escape. On Christmas Day I force myself out of bed to go on a walk. It was in the seventies that weekend—it felt suspicious not to need a hat or coat. In that widely circulated photograph of Robert Walser dead in the snow on Christmas Day, I find the most touching detail to be his hat, some paces away, thrown by the velocity of his fall or the wind.

  When I look through my winter photographic studies from that period, the lighting is cooler, grayer. The trees change, look starker, more sculptural. The decaying brown leaves at the end, stripped trees, the howling white birch. Besides trees, stone lions, and houses, which remain unmoving except for sudden attacks of weather, I’ve been making a series of photos of pieces of colored fabric in the landscape. A shock of color out of nowhere. The bright orange monk robes in the distance. The vivid blue of a T-shirt on the ground, today, a purple broken umbrella amidst the grass and browning leaves, a baby’s bib with LOVE repeated in rainbow letters in a bush. Roses in the winter, growing in concrete gardens. I take several photographs of a card made of gold foil on the sidewalk. It connected to a passage I read today in Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby & Co: “Walser wanted to be a walking nobody, and the vanity he loved was like that of Fernando Pessoa, who once, on throwing a chocolate silver-foil wrapper to the ground, said that, in doing so, he had thrown away life.” I wonder if I’m suffering from the paralysis that Vila-Matas describes, this “Bartleby’s syndrome.” But the longing to write is stronger than ever, as is my constant notetaking.

  I crop the photograph taken in the fall of the old woman outside in her garden, pulling weeds. The crouch of the photo. Its slowness. The coloration burnt and somber. The nakedness of her lawn.

  Vila-Matas on Robert Walser: “But the vanity he loved had nothing to do with the drive for personal success, rather it was the sort that is a tender display of what is minimal, what is fleeting.”

  To put everything I love into my boxes, the small and the tender.

  Right before the New Year, a long walk around the neighborhood in the winter light with my camera. A man stops his car to ask me why I’m taking pictures of the houses. I’m taking pictures of the trees, not the houses, I say to him. Although I am also taking photographs of the houses, the decaying and crumbling exteriors of the many abandoned and run-down houses, their rotted doors and windows. I’ve thought of doing that myself, someday, he says, and, rolling up his window, drives off. I puzzled over this the rest of the walk home, as I stopped to take detailed photographs of the patterns of the trees. People always say that about art, or any form of keeping time, of collecting. That they could do it—but of course they could do it, the thing is, whether they do or not. There is one particular tree, a white birch, that I continually take photographs of, its circling patterns that look like Munch’s scream. In some ways I know I am taking the same photograph, or some version of the same photograph, and there’s almost no discernible difference between the hole I focused on a few weeks ago and the same one today, except perhaps light and season. I am now wearing a long coat and leather gloves, although it is still unseasonably warm outside. Velvety green moss grows in one of the recesses that I focused on today, and perhaps that is new, or maybe I was just able to see it differently today. Trees register the changing of time almost imperceptibly. I think of the sequoias sequence in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Jimmy Stewart takes Kim Novak as Madeleine to Muir Woods, trying to get her to remember if she’s ever been there before. When he tells her that some of the trees are two thousand years old, she remarks that trees are the oldest living things. “I don’t like it,” she says, “knowing I have to die.” They walk over to the cross-section of a tree cut down, its rings mapping across centuries. The music becomes ominous. Kim Novak, now playing Madeleine haunted by the spirit of Carlotta, places her gloved finger on the tree, whispering to it: “Somewhere here I was born. There I died. It was only a moment for you; you took no notice.” Her coil of silver-blond hair a spiral of infinity. She walks off, as if sleepwalking, ghostlike in her silvery coat. I am struck by the sublimity of the massive trees as I move about, I feel small when I also place my hand on a knot on the tree and look up, a gesture I am more likely to do on a solitary walk, but John tells me I still do this when walking together. When I was a child, my father often took us to the local arboretum. Still every time I go on a walk or to a botanical garden with him—it’s been some time since he was well enough to walk long distances—he has a habit that John and I often mimic, lovingly, of stopping at the foot of one of the massive trees, reading the marker, and then repeating the name of the tree in an exaggerated, loud cadence: “Loblolly pine. Okay.” Here in my neighborhood there are little placards on some, pointing out their species. Tulip tree or various pines. I read somewhere that Wittgenstein, too, liked to identify trees on his long walks. That story of Wittgenstein sitting with a fellow philosopher in the garden, pointing at a tree and saying over and over, “I know that is a tree.” When a stranger enters the garden, Wittgenstein tells them, “We are not insane, we are doing philosophy.” I know this is a tree . . . I wanted to take photographs of the two dying trees outside of my father’s house, with decaying limbs, one of them sprouting giant mushroo
ms. These early memories I have of being alone and playing, and whispering to the two massive trees in the front yard of my childhood home, watching and listening as they rustled in the wind, and feeling I had done something to effect that movement. If I had gone outside to take photographs, I knew my father wouldn’t have understood. It felt impossible to try to explain to him how unbearably beautiful I found the decay of these trees from my childhood. And that art for me is a way to remark upon solitude, for myself and others. A way to mark time.