by Joshua Cohen
Many friends, either by reason of his temperament and recent good spirits, or because of his “unlimited flow of ideas and great enthusiasm for putting them into practice,” have been led to believe that his death was caused by some unaccountable misadventure. Besides, his inadvertence alone had always involved the risk of an accident.
“Inadvertence”: She is referring to Turing’s fussing with cyanide. Yes? No? Or Undecidable?
HER OWN ASYLUM
ON ANNA KAVAN
ANNA KAVAN, A BRITISH FICTION writer of genius, first appeared as a character—the heroine of Let Me Alone (1930), the third novel by Helen Ferguson, later known as Helen Edmonds, earlier known as Helen Woods, born probably in Cannes, probably in 1901. By 1938, after publishing six novels, she’d internalized the discord between her Home Counties realism and her itinerant life, had a psychological break, been institutionalized, and dedicated herself to heroin addiction. She had also come to identify with her most autobiographical, but also most mystical, character, taking Kavan as a pseudonym and then as her official surname. This new life required neither quotationmarks nor husbands (both Edmonds and Ferguson had mistreated her); neither children (one died in WWII, another died in infancy, a third was adopted and given up) nor parents (her father died young, possibly a suicide; her mother was a vain socialite who may have sexually auditioned her daughter’s lovers). But it did require a new prose style: stripped, brittle-boned, shorn.
In the mid-’40s, Kavan met Dr. Karl Theodor Bluth, a physician and writer who’d escaped Nazi Germany. He became a close friend and business adviser (after the war, Kavan earned a living renovating homes in bomb-cratered Kensington) and helped administer her injections. Most of Kavan’s other friends were gay, including the Welsh author Rhys Davies, who became her amateur editor. Thanks to the Rolleston Committee, tasked by the Ministry of Health in the ’20s with relieving drug dependence throughout the U.K., Kavan’s most reliable dealer was the government itself. But when the vice laws changed in 1965, Kavan was forced into counseling. After Bluth died, she suffered the black market, and stockpiled all the opiates she could, dying in 1968, her head atop the Chinese lacquered box in which she kept her stash. The police, searching her home, claimed they’d recovered enough heroin “to kill the whole street.”
Kavan’s corpus has been made available again in new editions, appearing throughout the 2010s. The most notable rereleases are Asylum Piece (1940), a story collection retelling the author’s first experience in a mental ward; Sleep Has His House (1948), an account of insomnia; Ice (1967), a post-nuclear-war novel; and Julia and the Bazooka (1970), a compilation of narcotized fantasies. But I Am Lazarus, first published in 1945, is the best introduction to Kavan. Its fifteen fictions show the fullness of her career, from febrile impersonations of Eliot and Hardy and the even graver absurdity of mimicking Kafka to her later efforts at making them cellmates. (Kavan on their mutual konsonant: “Why does the ‘K’ sound in a name symbolize the struggle of those who try to make themselves at home on a homeless borderland?”)
Lazarus allows genuine characters—Dr. Pope, Thomas Bow—to enjoy the company of abstractions like “the adversary” and “the adviser,” and establishes London as the capital of a private Mitteleuropa. Throughout, Kavan’s motif, the imperiled woman, is as inescapable as her setting, the clinic or sanatorium—whitewashed, windowless, almost unfurnished, almost unfurnishable rooms where some days the patients are voluntaries and other days they’re prisoners, even if they’ve committed themselves. Nature itself becomes an inmate, convalesces.
From “Palace of Sleep”:
The wind was blowing like mad in the hospital garden. It seemed to know that it was near a mental hospital, and was showing off some crazy tricks of its own, pouncing first one way and then another, and then apparently in all directions at once.
From “Who Has Desired the Sea”:
The late autumn sun came into the ward about two in the afternoon. There wasn’t much strength in the sun which was slow in creeping round the edge of the blackout curtains so that it took a long time to reach the bed by the window.
“A Certain Experience” recounts the impossibility of relating the experience of discharge, as the narrator cannot be certain that the asylum is not rather everything that surrounds it, beyond “the courtyard with its high spiked walls, where shuffling, indistinguishable gangs swept the leaves which the guards always rescattered to be swept again.” “Now I Know Where My Place Is” concerns a grand hotel the narrator either stayed at as a girl or only remembers from a photograph—though it might also be a dream or, as the previous fictions have conditioned us to imagine, yet another institution. “The Blackout” and “Glorious Boys” concern the Blitz—the privations, the darkness. During peace, “asylum” is for the insane. During war, it’s for everyone else.
FROM THE DIARIES
AMERICAN WOMAN COMPLIMENTED BY GREEK MAN
“You look like one million dollars. Because you are tall.”
BUCHAREST HOSTEL
The paint has flaked from the wall in the shape of the country I will found for you, my love.
BIBLIOTHANATOS, OR EPIGRAPHS FOR A LAST BOOK
ONCE, IN THE FUTURE, A man wanted to keep a secret safe from everyone. He wrote it down into a book.
Once, in the future, some child will have to look up what a book is on the computer. What a book was.
Once books go, can we still use the word “binding” or “bound”? What will bind us together now, what will be bound? Certainly nothing between covers.
In other words, what to make of “margin” or “marginal” in a postbook world?
I like the archaic English for book: “boke.” As in Chaucer, at the end of Canterbury Tales, disavowing himself of “the boke of Troilus, the boke also of Fame, the boke of the five and twenty Ladies, the boke of the Duchesse, the boke of Seint Valentines day of the Parlement of briddes.” It’s like “book,” but only in past tense.
Pages are more fraught than screens. With a page you’re reading, you always know there’s a page you’re not reading just on the other side.
Bookmarks: (personal) envelopes, pencils and pens, an ermine’s baculum (penis bone), my father’s expired driver’s license, a scrap of a dead neighbor’s ex libris on which I wrote the word “bibliothanatos”; (historical) Mao had bookmarks made featuring his sayings, “Be serious, be active,” bamboo bookmarks from Nepal, corn husks from Czechoslovakia, American bookmarks made as advertisements for Heinz in the warty shapes of pickles; it’s believed that Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) first popularized bookmarks; the term now indicates a computer function that holds an online “page” detailing the life of Elizabeth (inaccurate).
Revelations is the last book of the Bible, at least of the New Testament. It seems too obvious that the Bible should end with Apocalypse. No good novelist would have allowed it.
W, a librarian friend, mentioned that he’d cataloged approximately thirty books called “The Last Book,” or a variation on that title.
People enthuse about the smell of books, but it is only the smell of dust. This instructs in mortality: After the book is composed, it decomposes. That (and other reasons) is why there are multiple copies.
People enthuse over touching a book: texture, heft in hand. It should be noted for posterity that if you closed your eyes and ran your fingertips over a page, you could tell which parts of that page were blank and which held ink. Words were palpable, words felt palpable, until the advent of recycling, and digital printing, the 1990s.
The taste of books. Monks poisoned the page tips of forbidden books to punish their readers. Rabbis placed honey there to encourage their students to lick and go forward. Lick and proceed.
At least that was the story I heard from my uncle (not a monk, his name is also Cohen).
I asked, “But when you finished the lesson and shut the book, wouldn’t all the honeyed p
ages stick together?”
He said, “The problem with your generation is not just that you can’t tell a story, it’s that you can’t listen to one neither.”
OPEN SESAME
A WRITER STANDS OUTSIDE OF A story yelling, “Open Sesame!” and then, what do you know, the story, as if it were a seed, opens. And treasure is found inside. That treasure, of course, is just another story, and it all begins again.
Or else, say the writer is no different from any other of his tribe—say he’s actually a thief. And the story is no story, but really a mountain. “Open Sesame!” then (this writer continues), the mountain opens, and my meaning is revealed.
A version of this nonsense—this magician’s stage business—occurs in the tale “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” popularly known from The Thousand and One Nights.
But Ali’s tale is not to be found in the oldest manuscripts of that collection. Some believe it to be the invention of one Youhenna Diab, known as Hanna of Aleppo, an Arab Christian storyteller said to have communicated it to Antoine Galland, the first translator of the Nights into French; while other scholars argue for a purely Western source and believe that Ali is the incorrupt fiction of Galland himself (though Richard Burton, the first translator of an unexpurgated Nights into English, claimed that Ali was to be found in an Arabic original, a mythical manuscript often forged but never found).
Indeed, Galland (1646–1715) is the earliest source for this exclamation: “Sésame,” he has his Baba say, “ouvre toi!” while the ponderous Burton (1821–90) has given us not “sesame” but “Open, O Simsim!”
In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the brothers Grimm collected what seems to be a German variant of the tale under the title Simeliberg. In their telling, a mountain somewhere in the Reich opens to disclose its myriad riches when addressed by the word Semsi: “Berg Semsi, Berg Semsi, thu dich auf.” The Grimms, who were, we should remember, philologists by training and compilers of a dictionary, explain this Semsi—given in subsequent editions as Simsi, and Semeli—as an archaic German word, or name, for “mountain.” Wilhelm Grimm, the younger of the brothers and the better writer, notes: “This name for a mountain is, according to a document in Pistorius, very ancient in Germany. A mountain in Grabfeld is called Similes and in a Swiss song a Simeliberg is again mentioned. This makes us think of the Swiss word ‘Sinel’ for ‘sinbel,’ round.”
Was Ali Baba Galland’s creation, or only a character adapted from European folklore? Should we think that Galland, that forty-first thief, in an ostensible translation of Arabic into French, gave us, instead, an immemorial German children’s story in Oriental guise? Thus far we have an errant Arab “original,” a French Sésame from the seventeenth century, a German Semsi collected in the early nineteenth century, and an English “Simsim” from later that same century. Our understanding is complicated even further when we think that Burton, whose English is the latest of the revisions discussed here, has left us with the seemingly most authentic salutation: His “Simsim” is nothing but the Arabic word for “sesame”—Sesamum orientale.
Which came first, Simsim or Semsi? The Sésame or a more germinating seed? As this is the “Middle East,” opinions and arguments support every agenda, obliterating synthesis. In favor of the primacy of sesame: That seed was prized by Babylon for its ability to ward off, or remove, evil curses. In favor, why not, of an Oriental heritage for Semsi: That word, whether or not it means or names a Teutonic mountain, might be a mondegreen of Arabic’s greeting, the peaceful Salaam. Where does that leave us—wedged between the cave wall and the protecting boulder admitting no light? Searching still, as scholars have always searched, for an Arabic source for a German folktale/French art story that, in our Englished day, has become the quintessential narrative of Arabia?
The mountain opens for the voice, the voice rolls away the sepulchral stone—and treasures lie within, they lie behind, proverbial silver, metaphor’s gold; the precious gem of language, made when all the facets of all the languages join as one. Words are borrowed in preparation for this call—words, sounds, translations, tralatitious mistranslations—but by whom, in what way?
Where did I first hear this cry? Not as a reader of Scheherazade’s mortal, crepuscular entertainment, but as a fanatic of weekend TV. In cartoons come Sundays, when Bugs Bunny twitched his ears, ashed his cigarlike carrot, and gave out to a rock face in gumptious New York immigrant-speak, “Close, seza me!”
* * *
—
(I WRITE THIS IN the summer after the sixth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq—civilization’s cradle, birthplace of the Nights. In Iraq, Ali Baba served as U.S. military slang to characterize “the natives,” much as Vietnam’s Charlie was used to dehumanize the enemy of that previous lost war. But, in time, thanks to occupation, many Iraqis themselves began using the epithet Ali Baba to describe the American soldiers who regularly looted Iraqi museum property and homes; soldiers who need demonstrate no causality, nor do they need any magic formula to burst down doors—just force.)
ME, U, BAKU, QUBA
ONE THING ABOUT DICTATORSHIPS, THEY’RE either very expensive or very cheap to fly to. There’s no such thing as a midrange regime: Extremities charge extremities. I know a guy, it cost him $4,600 just to get to North Korea (Newark-Beijing-Dandong, and then across the DPRK border in a Jeep). I know another guy, it cost him $2,800 just to get to Laos (Newark-Tokyo-Bangkok-Vientiane). I flew nonstop from JFK to Baku, Azerbaijan, visa included, for all of $500. The plane was a brand-new Airbus A340; the pilots were military-grade, and the senior or just older pilot wore medals on his chest that resembled poker chips: two black, one yellow, which at Trump casinos, back when there were Trump casinos, would’ve been redeemable for $1,200. The flight attendants, uniformed in sky-gray and blood-red, were gorgeous: The men were creatic gym creatures bursting out of their polo shirts; the women were dripping with makeup and curvaceous, their skirts slit as high as it gets, at least in the world of Islamic female-flight-attendant fashion. The three exorbitant meals they served over the course of the ten-hour, thirty-minute, 5,812-mile/9,353-kilometer flight were culturally specific (mutton stews and breads) and hot (very hot). The in-flight-entertainment selection was operated by individual seat-back touchscreen and generous and included, alongside the standard Hollywood and Russian offerings, an impressive selection of Azeri content, all of it bearing the seal of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Azerbaijan. I tried to catch up on Star Wars, the prequel trilogy, in order to prepare for the upcoming release of the sequel trilogy, though by the middle of Episode II—Attack of the Clones, I’d had enough and switched to an Azeri property, but it was only in Azeri—no subtitles, no dub—and so I wasn’t able to ascertain whether the lawyer was the good guy, or the bad guy, or not a lawyer at all and instead a slick plastic surgeon on trial for corrupting his wife.
The plane was mostly empty, with no more than two dozen other passengers, about half of whom would terminate in Baku, with the other half Israeli—Russian-Israelis, Parsim (Persian Israeli), and Teimanim (Yemeni Israelis). Leave it to the Jews to find out that AZAL, the Azerbaijani government’s official airline, or flag-carrier, had been subsidizing ticket prices from America, and so the cheapest way to get from New York to Tel Aviv was to go through Baku and wait. I’m not sure that this subsidy policy was created for the express purpose of saving Jews money, but then neither am I sure that it was created to encourage visits by American tourists and business travelers. Instead, dictator president Ilham Aliyev just cares about being able to boast domestically that his country now has biweekly direct flights from/to New York. The airport, which Aliyev is constantly renovating, as if he were intent on expanding it in tandem with the expansion of the universe, is named for his father, Heydar Aliyev, the previous dictator president. At its center is a glitzy foreign-flights terminal that resembles the Galactic Senate from Star Wars. The landing was baby-gentle, the dep
laning swift; the Israelis dispersed to window-shop duty-free caviar and Rolexes until their departure for Ben Gurion.
I was processed through immigration and customs, asked no questions, but photographed twice. The first person in Azerbaijan to ask me any questions was my cabdriver: “What you doing here?” And, “What you pay?”
I answered the “what I doing here?” with, “I’m a tourist,” because to say that I’d come to this majority-Muslim authoritarian country as a writer, let alone as a journalist, would be like saying I’d come to prey on your youth, or to masturbate into the Caspian. I answered the “what I pay?” with, “How about 20 manats?”—because that was the amount suggested by “Zaur J” on a messageboard on TripAdvisor.com. Other posts had suggested 14, 16, 25, 30, and taking the 116 shuttle bus to the 28 May train station for 40 qepik, which was roughly a quarter.
I settled on 20, because it wasn’t my money. A bit over $12. The driver suggested 25. Which was a bit over $15. He still hadn’t asked where we were going.
Azerbaijan is a nation bordered by threats and built atop lies. This makes it not too different from any other nation, except: To the south is Iran, to the north is Georgia and a hunk of Russian Dagestan (which doesn’t do much to buffer the rumblings of Chechnya and Ossetia); to the west is a short border with Turkey and a long, troubled ton of border shared with hated Armenia, with which Azerbaijan has been engaged in an on-and-off war over the Nagorno-Karabakh exclave since 1988; while to the east is the largest enclosed inland body of water on earth, the oil-and-natural-gas-rich Caspian, whose greatest local landlord is SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic), which partners with and administers contracts for the AIOC (the Azerbaijan International Operating Company), a consortium of extractors headed by BP (U.K.), and including—in order of declining equity—Chevron (United States), INPEX (Japan), Statoil (Norway), ExxonMobil (United States), TPAO (Turkey), ITOCHU (Japan), and ONGC Videsh (India). To make it clearer, Azerbaijan is a seabound country with dwindling but still significant reserves of oil, outsized reserves of natural gas, the highest Shia population percentage in the world after Iran, an ongoing conflict with an Orthodox Christian neighbor, close-enough experience of the Georgian/Abkhazian and Chechen Wars, a sense of Russia as representing the highest of culture, yet a sense of Putin as the lowest of thugs, bent on recapturing a toxic mashup of Soviet/Tsarist glory, and so perpetually reconnoitering the Central Asian steppes for the next Donbass or Crimea. Dropping oil and natural-gas revenues have sparked a rising interest in the previously inimical—because Sunni—Salafism blowing north from Iranian Kurdistan and south from Ciscaucasia. As of 2016, over 1,500 Azerbaijani citizens were in Syria fighting for ISIS.