Many Shouts.
Hurry, it’s in the air!
No one can pinpoint the moment the bag becomes truly a zeppelin, thanks to the gas, but after so long a wait, a water-boiling interlude, this phase transition in fact seems to elude even the closest watcher: suddenly. Now there is much to do. We all adore the zeppelin when it sails, do we not? We are all ready to have our hearts broken.
The dogs are loosed and rush baying onto the field.
The zeppelin is unbound from earth now, unfixed, a thing of the sky and beyond. It wants to go to outer space—not as a rocket would but by drifting, by departing this world with our amazed and yearning eyeballs in gentle tow.
There could never be enough of this.
If only X were here to see it!
The dogs have joined us now where we stand under the zeppelin’s fuzzy shadow, the zeppelin soaring so gradually, yet now already beginning to depart the field, to incline for the mountains, there to be lost in the higher air—
Look!
Great god, look! It’s the mother ship!
Look!
But the dogs have their noses to the ground. They’re chasing traces, sniffing hoses, rooting for nozzles.
No, dogs, that’s beside the point! The gas was only to fill the zeppelin—please, look, before it is too late.
One dog whines, finding a nozzle, and rolls over it in his excitement. Others come growling and grumbling, wanting a piece of the action. He’s got a good one! This dog can really detect a strong whiff of gas, a tendril left behind in the quick disconnection of nozzle from socket.
Yummy, the dogs all say. Nasty, yummy gas. Gotta gotta get me some of that.
No, look in the air! we shout.
It’s so beautiful!
Too late, gone. They missed it.
The Zeppelin Sails and the Dogs Sniff the Gas Nozzles.
’Twas ever thus.
Hey, man, these dogs don’t even LIKE zeppelins! They like gas.
Cut ’em some slack.
Yeah, what were we thinking?
—McSweeney’s, 2004
What Remains of My Plan
There’s something embarrassing about knowing what you know, after a while. On certain days it can all seem to plunge into either the category of that which never needed explaining in the first place or that which you’re astounded to realize you’ve never even begun making clear. Heads nodding in agreement are usually also falling asleep, but just when you think you’re the last one awake in the room, admonishing the snoring, your head jerks upward on your stiffening neck, and you see the crowd has tiptoed out not wishing to disturb. The lecture was your dream of lecturing. In it, you tested precepts unimportant to anyone but yourself. On those days it is a relief the room is vacant.
When Thomas Berger was asked why he wrote, he said, “Because it isn’t there.” Bernard Malamud’s answer to the same question: “I’d be too moved to say.” Somewhere between climbing Berger’s imaginary mountain and, like Malamud, recording a grievance against inexpressibility, that’s where my answer lies. It’s probably typical of me that I solve the question by looking to the right and left of me for Berger’s and Malamud’s assistance, but then again there was nobody asking the question but myself in the first place, so I needed some company.
“Writing is a lonely business” is both a dull myth and a material fact of the profession, one I happen to be temperamentally suited to endure but which doesn’t gratify my sense of what it’s for. I began writing in order to arrive into the company of those whose company meant more to me than any other: the world of the books I’d found on shelves and begun to assemble on my own, and the people who’d written them, and the readers who cared as much as I did, if those existed. Humans are social animals, but I’d been socialized to ghosts, arrangements of sentences on pages, and needed urgently to be audible to them. People could come afterward. They would, wouldn’t they? Sometimes I think I relied on that too much. But it’s too late to demote the ghosts I gave first seating at my table. Some pretty fine human beings have indulged my error, over the years.
My friend Maureen, a professor of philosophy, once told me of the moment she recognized her vocation. It was when she heard philosophical work analogized as the task of creating an area of descriptive illumination against the backdrop of a sea of infinite dark. To work to clarify even a tiny area of night, to infill it with philosophical light, was all one could hope for, a life’s honorable work. Yet the emphasis she’d heard, the emphasis that moved her to commitment, wasn’t that of acknowledging the brave lonely smallness of a single philosophical enterprise. It was that the context for the effort’s meaning was the proximity, however faint or distant, of other small zones of illumination. The work that had gone before and would come after. The work going on adjacent and simultaneously, all around.
Among the things I’m embarrassed to know, finally and after all, is that the conversation never really got better than the talk in the bar of the Radisson. Elsewhere the drinks were more expensive, but I’ve never been great at appreciating expensive drinks. The model proposed by the science-fiction field, unsustainable for me, alas, was of a coherent ongoing collective action, engaged in by a cadre of living writers and the only-very-recently dead. We were always to reinscribe and honor the whole history of the field every time we jotted a line. If, in the bar of the Radisson, I often wanted to scream, “You fools, don’t you see, it’s every man for himself?,” ever since exiting that inoperative utopia I’ve been shouting, “You fools, don’t you understand, we’re all in this together?” That shout is this book.
Even more embarrassing to realize I know, the best action may be not in the bar of the Radisson but in the scorned conference room, where a panel discussion is playing to a packed house, where the most helplessly committed audience any artist could ever dream existed is currently being taken for granted, around the clock. Here and there—not only at the science-fiction convention but on a book-tour stop in a medium-size city—the secret readers of the world are made visible, not the aspiring writers or even the Amazon reviewers jockeying in that tiny social arena, but the naked minds complicating themselves by extended submission to a machine of words that some other human, possibly you, threw together. How marvelous that anyone should want to do such a thing and then announce themselves in public! It really is strange for all concerned, most of all for the writers, who if they are honest have, usually, nothing to add to, but every probability of accidentally subtracting from, whatever it was they managed to put across. Yet in my gratitude I go around accepting your gratitude, and then, when I’m asked questions I open my mouth and words fly out, every time.
The truth is, nothing about what I do qualifies me to weigh in on this and that, and it is probably only dangerous that my practiced employment of the tool of language makes my personal opinions decant from my brain so readily. For they are only a person’s opinions. When I make a remark about politics my qualification is that I’m a citizen, like you, not that I’m a novelist. When I make a remark about culture—about a song or a film or even a book—my qualification is that I’m a fan. I knew a crack addict once who explained to me that before he smoked crack, or took any drug, he drank beer. No matter how glamorously vile, illegal, and destructive others might consider crack to be, he personally saw beer as his baseline situation. Well, before I wrote, and in between each of the times that I wrote, I was a reader, and surely after I have quit or been rendered incapable of writing I’ll be a reader still. That’s my beer.
What’s a novelist? I remove myself from human traffic to sit in a room alone and make up stories about human traffic that doesn’t exist. For my living I climb into and then punch my way out of the paper bag of my solipsism on a daily basis—and on the days I don’t manage to punch my way out there is no coach who blows a whistle and tells me to remove myself from the field in favor of a better-rested substitute (“Where’s your Negative Capability today, son?”). Among other things, this is nice work if you can get i
t. The loneliness is overrated, especially if a bookshelf is near, and mine is.
When I was fifteen, I for the first time handed over a book to its author for an autograph—it was Anthony Burgess. I still drag my books out and have them autographed by the people who wrote them, not only in order to someday put my grandchildren through rocket-pilot school but because the sorcery of the connection between those lumpy and endearing human animals and the flights of language and invention that sometimes fly out of their fingers still astounds me. And because having had my own books pressed into my hands for a signature has never stopped seeming like the only certain thing I had to offer the people who’ve troubled to exit their homes to view me. Yes, I am the person who made that weird thought go into your head. Yes, I’m as flabbergasted as you are, really. Thank you.
Nietzsche: “The thinker or artist whose better self has fled into his works feels an almost malicious joy when he sees his body and spirit slowly broken into and destroyed by time; it is as if he were in a corner, watching a thief at work on his safe, all the while knowing that it is empty and that all his treasures have been rescued.”
Memorial
Well, the first thing to admit
Is that it isn’t dead yet. Or never lived.
It was a memorial to itself all along.
My creature stands, a wicker man,
Built of postures weathered into timber.
Interior shelves jammed, paraphernalia
Wreathed in dust webs, yet of
Sporadic use. So I don’t tear it down.
Besides, I’m fascinated. He looks
Like me, but was never me.
I’ve slept inside a night or two
But lately camp a little farther West.
Squatters use it as much as I do.
At certain hours, chimps of rage
Mount candles in the eyes.
I’ve heard them dancing at its feet, the fools.
Imogen is our friend’s daughter, and our friend.
More important, today she is our babysitter.
She loves stupid jokes and baking,
Talks like a born writer, but quips,
“I could never be a writer—too many words.”
Imogen’s young, sure, but our baby is dew,
And looks on Imogen as a savant, a titan.
Who knew Imogen was out there? Why complain if
They keep bringing them along like hotcakes?
(The baby has no cynicism. Imogen’s, if it exists,
Is made of green saplings, bent into a kooky cup,
Hidden in the woods. Maybe she wears it like a crown.)
A dark tribe, prey to fair invaders,
Hosted their blond lords for a season, until
Some local flu, to which the tribesmen were inured,
Chopped them down like trees.
Then, seeing how the foreigners had favored their dead,
The tribe buried the blonds
In a gated plot, on a high hill,
Each in a box, and marked with stone.
Then maintained the scene for generations,
Memorial to—you know—what can happen.
Their own dead the natives dispatched
In mounds of sand on a sloped beach,
To wash to sea, as tradition ordained.
“I’ll write a poem,” I joked,
Teasing my golem into view.
Nothing makes him grunt like a poem.
(I learned I was no poet sophomore year.)
But what shock, to see how decrepit
That figure had become. By night
My camp had drifted West, farther
Than I’d imagined I’d go. Or than he’d imagined.
He doesn’t have much imagination!
Who would restock those shelves? Or use
The binoculars? Could my memorial be made
A scarecrow on shoals, a warning? Likely not.
He may not be visible to anyone else.
—Guilt & Pleasure, 2008
Things to Remember
1. I remember hearing once (I don’t remember where) that memory honors no point of origin, has no interest in or indeed any capacity for making a pure return to the site of its inception. No, instead each memory is only a photocopy of the previous memory. Memory, ventriloquist but no dummy, loves the path of least resistance. We trash the original and start again with the last version, like a nervous troupe of actors working from a script in endless revision, always basing our performance on the most recent draft. And, to keep our performances coherent, burning every available scrap of the previous edition. We have no recourse to the author or to any of the author’s sources, no document or evidence, no mountain to pilgrimage backward toward. Glance back and the mountain is gone. Better not to glance, so you may imagine you feel its massiveness at your back. The only document is our revision, these freshly inked onionskin sheets clutched in our trembling grasp, current for the moment, but no more final than the previous sheaf, quite equally eligible to be discarded. Memory is a rehearsal for a show that never goes on.
2. No wonder dreams are fatal and must be systematically forgotten. The memory of a dream is every bit as tangible as any other memory. As tangible as those based on some dim receding occurrence or encounter, a moment, an undream. The memory of a dream is stronger, in a way, because it knows it is a fiction.
3. I remember that when I was a child forgetting enraged me. It seemed a conspiracy enacted by others. My own memory was perfect, and I doubted anyone else was honest when they claimed to have forgotten. How awfully convenient for them. They could call themselves forgetters but I called them liars. After a few years I was forced to consider a substitute hypothesis, seeing that the forgetters, who were everyone, so often seemed in good faith. Their dispute with the obvious permanence of memory was a weakness begging indulgence. The ritual fiction of forgetting was the only way they could tolerate themselves, the only method for getting through their days. I was stronger than anyone I knew, but not in the way I’d first imagined. They believed they forgot, and I, alien among them, would be forced to pretend to believe them as well, in order to form an adequate tolerance of the sole universal religion, the one in which I found myself enrolled anywhere I encountered another consciousness, another conscience. And yet the power of faith is that it enlists disbelievers by pretense. Masks, as always, melt into the face. I forgot that forgetting was a falsehood, began to believe the ritual not only necessary but involuntary. The moment I experienced forgetting I forgave them all instantaneously, even as I joined their cult. I have never forgotten, however, my original suspicions.
4. We make lists of things we want to remember, and then we lose the lists. My life is a tattered assemblage of abandoned calendars, misplaced agendas, water-damaged address books with names blurred, family trees I’ve never managed to hold coherently in mind, third cousins unrecalled named for third uncles unmet, files of papers I’ve misplaced or never look into, schoolwork praised by teachers with faces I can’t bring to mind. I once found a packet of love letters from a woman I couldn’t recall. A list of mummified sentiments as useless as a grocery receipt. Our memories may be tomb-worlds, after all, a place to spare others having to dwell. Whereas the one thing I am sure I can remember about your eyes is that each time I see them they’ll be eyes I could never have forgotten. We list things in order to cross them off, to relegate them with relief to the kingdom of amnesia. So leave me off your lists.
5. What if we are only, after all, a kind of mortal list, a countdown? Human consciousness may be time’s attempt to remember itself. It is possible we are only things to remember. The enumerated lives, the names of those gone, our letters and maps and charts, a mnemonic device for otherwise uncountable eons, a way to give a hint of flavor to the void. Yet time most likely found it unbearable to remember itself entirely. A glance in that direction was all that was needed. How attendantly can we care to notice ourselves slipping away, how eager should we be to remember forgett
ing, and being forgotten? So, mercifully, we’re not falling down on the only job we’re given, because our job is double, we’re markers and erasers. (I’ll never get over my delight at discovering the erasable marker, with which on a smooth surface one may endlessly draw and redraw a day’s agenda, as if each day’s was different from another’s: 1. Remember. 2. Lunch break. 3. Forget.) We’re here as much to forget as to remember, that’s what it means to punch the clock. To forget on time’s behalf. How could time hope to be forgotten without us?
—Tar, 2008
Acknowledgments
Eric Simonoff, Bill Thomas, Sonny Mehta, Devin McKinney, Kevin Dettmar, John Hilgart, Shelley Jackson, Brian Berger, Franklin Bruno, Herman Ottsirkel, Jaime Clarke, David Shields, Vivian Gornick, and Amy, Enabler.
And Sean Howe, Matthew Specktor, and Giles Harvey, each in their way co-author of these pages.
Read an excerpt from
Dissident Gardens
By Jonathan Lethem
Available from Doubleday
September 2013
1 Two Trials
Quit fucking black cops or get booted from the Communist Party. There stood the ultimatum, the absurd sum total of the message conveyed to Rose Zimmer by the cabal gathered in her Sunnyside Gardens kitchen that evening. Late fall, 1955.
Sol Eaglin, Important Communist, had rung her telephone. A “committee” wished to see her; no, they’d be happy, delighted, to come to her home, this evening, after their own conference just across the Gardens—was ten too late? This a command, not a question. Yes, Sol knew how hard Rose labored, what her sleep was worth. He promised they wouldn’t stay long.
How did it happen? Easy. Routine, in fact. These things happened every day. You could get exiled from the cause for blowing your nose or blinking at suspicious intervals. Now, after so long, Rose’s turn. She’d cracked the kitchen window to hear their approach. Brewed some coffee. Sounds of the Gardens filtered in, smokers, lovers, teenagers sulking in the communal lanes. Though winter’s dark had clamped itself over the neighborhood hours ago, this early November night was uncannily balmy and inviting, last pulse of the earth’s recollection of summer. Other kitchen windows were spilled to the lanes, voices mingled: Rose’s plentiful enemies, fewer friends, others, so many others, simply tolerated. Yet comrades all. According Rose their respect even through their dislike. Respect to be robbed from her by the committee now entering her kitchen.
The Ecstasy of Influence Page 47