Drifts

by Kate Zambreno

  As I look through the photographs, I am still moved by the solemnity of the growths and textures on the trees, the hauntingness of the holes, like abstract paintings. To be afraid of holes—or not a phobia, really, to be intensely drawn to them—it is becoming clear to me that the narrative I am interested in deals more with holes than what is filled in. I don’t need to remember what the trees looked like, but how moved I felt when I walked through the spaces between them. If I took a photograph of the same tree every day—which I would like to do, if I remembered to—it would be about the taking of the picture, the process and the ritual, a way of marking the day and layering time, which is increasingly what the project of art is for me. If these photographs were ever viewed, the viewer would only wonder at the vast unknown of the day beyond the taking of this one daily photograph. All we can do is wonder over the imaginary solitude of others, what others do when they are alone, how they deal with the vastness and ephemerality of the day, which I think is for me increasingly the meaning of and crisis of art.

  What Rilke desired was to discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of his art, the tangible means of expressing everything, like the sculptor with his disembodied hands. This desire for language to be broken down to its smallest elements—for a language to become a thing—mirrors the conclusions of the notebooks Wittgenstein kept while stationed on the front lines in the Austro-Hungarian army, theorizing the limits of language, what can be said about the world versus what can only be shown. The philosopher did not care much for literature, save the volume of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief he carried in his rucksack. He thought that it was impossible to express the mystical in language, so one should not even try, which is in diametrical opposition to the poet’s searching. In September 1914, Wittgenstein, son of a steel tycoon, wanting to redistribute his wealth before he enlisted, gave the insolvent poet an anonymous donation of twenty thousand Austrian kronen, a fortune at that time. And yet the philosopher did not care for Rilke’s writing, especially the novel, which he found excessively sentimental. The two were never to meet, and the poet never learned that the philosopher was responsible for this largesse. Rilke promptly spent the money on a new cream suit and on a new, younger lover. He was almost forty when he was drafted, brought back miserably to the bullying atmosphere of military school, although his patroness, the princess, arranged for him to be transferred to the war office in Vienna, personally escorting him from the barracks. Incapable of performing his task of writing fluff pieces on war heroes, he was reassigned to hand-rule sheets of paper for five months. This mindless labor is not what Rilke meant when writing of longing for work, that only on these rare days of work did he become real.

  Before the semester begins again, what I can finally manage to read is Norman Malcolm’s memoir of his friendship with Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was not writing, he tells his friend, because his thoughts cannot sufficiently crystallize. I have increasingly become Dürer’s melancholic angel, moving notes around and around, formalizing or finishing nothing. I have so little time left before teaching, so little pure time, and what I have I am squandering. Now there is a chance we might be moving for another library job for John. Always another listing for a job popping up that makes him envision imaginary futures. Or maybe we can figure out a way to survive in New York. We still consider getting a cabin in the country, somehow commuting in to teach . . . this conversation is constant between us. How to live, where to live, should we stay in the city, should we go and live in the woods? I spent the night weeping at the dining room table, I tell Sofia, worried over how to move forward with this book, just moving around my notes from the previous fall, attempting to arrange them. She replies to me that she was weeping at her kitchen table the exact same night. I was telling myself today, to overcome my intense frustration with how slowly my book is moving, that everything is writing, she writes me. That reading is writing, taking notes is writing, watching films is writing, copying is writing. Trying to extend all of these activities with equal intensity, so as to achieve a total experience of literature.

  The last time I spoke to my father, I asked him whether the books I ordered for him had arrived, the first few in a Western pulp series by Louis L’Amour. He told me he was having trouble reading, he didn’t have the attention span to keep up with his new history of mathematics. I asked what he liked to read as a kid, maybe he should go back to reading that—detective stories, like Dashiell Hammett, or Westerns. My father has always considered reading fiction as unserious, even though every night he watches at least one Western, sometimes more than one. Because I am also having trouble reading—that porousness where I make too many connections—I am only watching television on my computer. I try to read one of the novels by Norbert Davis, featuring a private eye and a Great Dane, because he’s Wittgenstein’s favorite crime novelist. I can’t get past the first couple of pages. The opening line: “I’m in disguise. I’m pretending I’m a tourist.”

  To keep the dog still beside me in the office, I feed him drops of honey off my finger. I pick the sticky threads of goop from his eyes. To chart Genet’s moodiness, how he wanders about the apartment—that seems like writing to me. I’m in bed, I’m not in a good space. A single line from Suzanne, canceling our planned chat. Don’t disappear on me, I write to her, but she does, for long periods, she hides, or maybe I hide. The ones I love disappear, and I go chasing after them, and perhaps this is also why I am a writer.

  Before I am to return to work, I finally find some clarity. It helps to listen to repetitive music on loop. And this brings me to gazing again, on a new morning, at the diptych of the paralyzed angel of melancholy and the Saint Jerome open on my desk. How they relate to what I am now thinking through, and how writing can reveal the depth and energy of thought. Before his spiritual self-portrait in Melencolia I, Dürer was so interested in idealized forms, in beauty and proportion. In drafts of his own text on beauty, Four Books on Human Proportion, which he was likely working on while conceiving Melencolia I, Dürer expresses a fragment of doubt in his notebook: “What beauty is I know not, although it adheres to many things. When we wish to bring it into our work we find it very hard.” Both images, side by side, are beautiful, yet I am far more moved by Melencolia I. That Dürer has captured the silence of the room, and the cluttered act of thinking, of attempting to represent an inner experience. If I am to think of memory as a room, according to the medieval mnemonic, the mind then becomes a space as well, that can be either well organized and spare, or chaotic and crowded. Looking at the image of Saint Jerome, I think of how Wittgenstein wished for silence in his life, and how he would often go away somewhere, to a room sparsely furnished, in order to think. Sometimes a chair in a room was all he needed. And one can consider his resulting fragments as a series of empty rooms where each single thought is the only ornament. In his later Philosophical Investigations, he writes, “A person caught in a philosophical confusion is like a man in a room who wants to get out but doesn’t know how.” When I look at the two Dürer engravings side by side, I realize I am looking at two rooms, one half outside and mostly cluttered and in disrepair, and the other shaded with light, a sheltered, illuminated, comfortable, well-organized space. Perhaps the melancholic angel is an oblique self-portrait. The angel is the stand-in for Dürer’s philosophical confusion, his doubts about the rules of art and the geometry of beauty he thought to be true. She is blocked—she is frustrated with the old forms, and wants to create new ones. His angel’s dress is crumpled, she is hunched over, her hand on her face, perhaps deep in thought. Even the phrase “deep thinking” suggests a spatial aspect to thought. When I look at this image, in the middle of the night, I also go to Joseph Cornell at his kitchen table, in his mother’s house in Flushing, Queens, working in the silence of the night, feeling paralyzed and stuck. Like Sofia and me each weeping at our own kitchen tables.

  Sofia writes me that she has finally watched Sans Soleil. All the vibrations—the dancers and the animals, how painfully
marvelous, she writes. Isn’t it wonderful, I respond, how the piece travels, the technology of it, its trance state? All the shots of animals—the dog at the beach, the cat temple, the emu. Sofia writes me, I am trying so much (when life allows) to think about dissolving. A longing for this risky outward movement—like the risk Marker takes in filming Japan and Guinea-Bissau, or the risk anyone takes in writing about anyone or anything else. Rather than an identity that consolidates itself endlessly, an identification outward. Sofia writes me of the way she feels obliged to package the narrative of who she is and what she writes for this round of interviews for tenure-track positions. The exhaustion of expecting to chant, to belong to various groups and identities. But then there is the other group, the place where we meet, the eternal group, she writes, the radiant zeroes.

  All I’m interested in lately, I respond to Sofia, is communicating through private letters or with the dead. She agrees. “Isn’t that the basis of not only all art, but all religion? To have one’s own dead. Who is more ours than Rilke?”

  Although it’s almost the end of January, yesterday was the first real snow. The way it lightly blankets everything reminded me of how I’m feeling lately. It is still sunny on our walk, and the two striped cats outside of the new cat house guard the spots in the sun. Whenever I see these particular cats a few blocks from our apartment I’m reminded of my little cat, because I think they must be related. I haven’t seen her in some time. Yesterday I felt a seize of worry for all the outdoor cats in the snow. I coo to them when I walk by, laugh at their furrowed and stern expressions.

  Today, after writing about my lost raccoon cat, I spy her. We’re walking briskly in the cold when we pass the massive apartment building on the corner. A mother and her small daughter are looking adoringly at my little cat, curled up in a bush in a patch of sun. The mother is talking to her daughter about the cat, and the little girl is holding on to the iron garden fence. I stop and look at my cat, behind them, but then the mother looks back at me, and I feel I am bothering them, crowding their moment, so I move on.

  When I saw the little girl clutching the low iron gate surrounding the garden, it occurred to me that the whole scene resembled a miniature zoo, and that my cat was like the lion sprawled out on the carpet in Dürer’s Saint Jerome. Dürer attempted several times to draw a lion before actually seeing one in person. He used earlier sketches and prints of lions as his source, so they often look like large house cats. Even the lion in Saint Jerome looks like a wild cat, not quite a lion, napping side by side with the little dog, their paws almost touching, like a Renaissance version of those videos where different animal species become friends.

  I read an article in the Sunday magazine about a sanctuary where abandoned parrots act as empathy animals for traumatized veterans. For weeks, I can’t stop thinking about these parrots with episodic memory and theory of mind, who mumble and pace furiously or pluck away at their feathers as they recover from the trauma of abandonment, but are also still able to see others’ solitude and pain. John sends me details of the parrots in a Dürer engraving of Adam and Eve. A caption from a biography: “In preparation for the return journey to Nuremberg, Dürer dispatched his trunk, had a traveling-cloak made, accepted many going-away gifts—including a third parrot, which necessitated bringing another birdcage—and settled his account with his landlord.”

  I see my new editor, an extremely smart young woman who is also named Sofia, a couple of months later out in the world. I am not sure what Drifts is about anymore, I tell her, but I know I want to write about dogs. And parrots. Have you read this article? I ask her, as I ask everyone, as I am apparently not properly socialized.

  What is the landscape you’re working in, I start to ask other writers, both students and friends, rather absurdly. A better question to ask, though, than What are you writing? or What is your book about? or—what Suzanne and I ask each other, quickly, lightly yet rather pointedly, when we see each other in person—Are you writing?

  This weekend there was a great blizzard, about thirty inches of snow. We woke up Saturday morning with everything covered in white, like a bright empty field. While John shoveled I trudged around in my snow boots and took photographs of buried cars, of icicles hanging from the houses. Snow caps like silly hats atop the large lion statues. There was no pathway cleared from my house to the corner where the old woman lived in the yellow-and-brown house. By the time I finally got there, at the end of the weekend, someone had cleared the way to her front door. I wondered if that meant she was in town, as I hadn’t seen her in some time. We often wondered if she went somewhere warm in the winter, or whether that was possible, in her state of seemingly genteel poverty. Although it’s difficult to know with New Yorkers—she might hoard her money.

  On one of our walks around large hills of snow, trying to convince Genet to go, an impossible task in the snow, I saw one of the striped cats. I had a feeling in my chest, a mourning for my cat, but knowing again that I was going to do nothing about it. Everything seemed to have disappeared in the snow. I watch the old man who wears socks and sandals in the summer talking to a young woman shoveling out her car in front of the house. I wanted her to tell him to stop bothering her, but she was too nice. I was surprised to hear him speaking with a Swiss accent.

  At the beginning of February, sometime after the large snowstorm, we woke up to Genet growling, in a way that felt urgent and new. John thought the dog was dreaming and told him to go back to sleep. But then I became aware that there was an intruder in the apartment, though I don’t know how. Now that I think back on it, I wonder if my nervous system had somehow merged with my dog’s, as if I could smell or sense someone intruding in the house, moving around almost silently. John was slow to react, waking up in disbelief. I went to the door of the bedroom and realized there was no lock. I felt sure we were going to die. That this was it—the quiet before some unknown impending violence. I turned to John and told him I loved him. Although he still didn’t believe anything was happening. When we finally opened the door and ran out into the main room, we saw the window in the kitchen flung open where someone had entered. The open back door where they escaped. Snow was blowing in onto the kitchen floor. Everything afterward happened so fast, and yet we were somehow still within it. I became aware in the minutes that followed—and how they stretched on—that only my belongings were missing. It was my laptop that was buried within the couch that was taken, while John’s was left sitting on the kitchen counter, even though the intruder had entered through the kitchen. It was my heavy backpack that contained my new blue notebook with my notes for Drifts, most of which I had recently transcribed, except for the last week of notebooking. The old camera, too, was taken from a bookcase in the office, the one I had used as I wandered around in the blizzard, everything snowed under. It was as though the robber had set out to steal the notes and source materials for my novel. But what use were they for anyone? Why would he or they—maybe they were working in a group—have wanted that old camera, with photographs of lion statues and trees?

  Since then I have wondered if perhaps Genet is not actually paranoid, if perhaps he is protecting us from unseen forces.

  My laptop and camera were recovered, along with my phone and a pair of sunglasses. When the two police officers arrived, one of them turned on the phone-finder app, as my phone was broken and couldn’t be turned off, and she tracked the signal to the contents of a backpack of a man they then arrested. He had dumped our bags by then and most of our belongings, including the notebook. We saw the man in the police station, in the middle of the night, waiting with us to be brought into a room for questioning. He looked at us and we looked at him, both rather blankly. We were told later that he was responsible for a series of cat burglaries in the area. How agile he must have been to shimmy up our window like that.