Myself, as Nonie. When I am her, my fear of someone else’s reality and ambitions—as real people—I have a recklessness in me of opposition—as if at the approach of horsemen—those Mongols, those barbarians—and then the unembarrassed, uninhibited thing of the practice of bravery: my ambition explodes outward, explodes inward, too, omnisciently, ubiquitously . . . I am a fighter like her, ruled by chance events, strategic audacity and the like. I pray. I have courage. I am pretty.
Nonie says, “I expect to be present at the end of the world . . .”
*
When I oppose my full will, my full presence, as tyrant-dreamer to Leonie or to anything, I become, essentially, an enclosing universe in which only one mind remembers. Only one mind moves the elements of destiny.
I can remember presenting myself to girls in my head as hard wish and then as sweet wish and as madness and even in my own head, as part of the hallucinatory parleying with this power, being turned down and my suffering then and the further suffering that the suffering was real and went on and lasted. I have a real and defective life now.
The landscape, crushed and vaginally centered, of the boy’s new, ill-informed sexual sensibility has a weird hot, even burning light. A sense of girls in a flurry of transgressions brings on a faint sweat and then a contradictory coolness: rebellious delectation . . . In an odd moment of one’s personal history. I closed down parts of myself—so that they wouldn’t burn—closed down so many I saw chastity as a device to improve one’s intellect because one would have more of one’s mind at one’s disposal . . . One was like a warship this way, with closed bulkheads, with sexuality continuing illegally in me . . . a heavy milk-water of unwanted memory, snakelike lengths of current . . . I choke . . . My shoulders and my butt embarrass me. Lonely, brute, true ground. An ordinary day of indifferent madness—of moments of the fire-torn nausea of sexual recall—sexy boy, Sally Brown said—it requires some technique to get through it.
Still, much of me is enfolded, budded—power, of amusement, of prettiness tightly hidden . . . of the insobriety of sex which could not be known except by living it—so that much of what went on, much of what went on between people might have occasions, might have reality, but might not have a name.
THE
END MUSIC
Remsen
I am in Remsen’s bedroom with Remsen. Outside the windows (of one wall) two Lombardy poplars utter their green exclamations at the boundary of a good-sized suburban backyard; and one sees the red tiled roof of a three-car garage; while outside the windows of another wall, a well-trimmed privet hedge separates a side yard from the tar-paved aisle of the St. Louis street, practicing some tactic or other of recession under a sky in which the moving clouds, very fat, King Cole–ish and very white, seem to be seated above a city of low-lying buildings which moves faintly in a shadow-tinted procession, roof by roof, in a queerly powdery light of considerable beauty before the seated and reviewing and as-if-overfed and stupendous and sovereign vapors in the air.
I do not know why, to my eyes, the cloud shadows are still and the street and the roofs seem to float to the east. Or why, from the cloud-occupied reviewing stand above the house, light descends to surround the house I am in with Remsen with cloudless and unchanging near-brilliance.
Remsen has pale blue eyes, brightish-colored lips—rosy and curly—to go with his thick and tousled, very dark hair. A tousled soul? Suburban-Byronic?
And then a look—more than a look, the somewhat startling young man’s reality of what is to me an almost searing athleticism: he is so powerfully shaped and so tall—and so young—seventeen—that remembering it I am restless, whereas at the time it seemed heated of him but not disturbing: the gym-inflected physical proportions: the physical smartness—the thick, pulsing neck, the adolescent but wide chest, the big (or biggish) arms: the youthful thick and new hairness of him—a precocity of physical existence.
He is precocious, too, in his reading, his scholarship, his schooled mind. Above the abysses of the physical and intellectual self—sensations, recognitions, outcries—moves the rather fancy raft of willful measurement—the vanity here is restrained by a sense of scientific measurement: I get better grades; X has larger arms. Y is handsomer.
It is as if he has a seagoing nature—or a seagoing mathematical code of reality, of danger and courage, and a seagoing mathematical version of himself that he has grown into—legs and mouth, tousled hair, all of him—and so his vanity, a psychological thing, and his ambition, which is a given but which is riddled in his case with large, rotten sports of surrender, have to do with being seaworthy.
But the eyes, a spiritual thing—uncorrupt and not like my eyes—his considerable, warmly frozen good looks—it (he) is entirely isolated: only a single ship moves on his ocean except for fragments from a shipwreck, fragments, measurements . . .
Careful, willful—not discreetly restrained—not entirely effective on dry land or even on his solitary sea—he is not considered attractive in spite of the above, in spite of his parents having money: he is standoffish—well, to extend the image, he sails in his solitary way, and he is shy, even recessive, but a captain of the ship, spoiled, assertive, abruptly unshy, demanding, demandingly talkative, too talkative, too bold, too conceited, too assertive—a spoiled child hotly enclosed in the freezing clasp of demons—stumbling on the pile of new money (up from the slums: Lila said)—he is so difficult, so deeply mooded that only I like him. The measurement thing in him—it is like a menu (or some other list) which, if he courts you—me, I mean to say—he casually tosses it down in front of me and I can choose, wisely to know him, foolishly to escape him—that is what his courtship seems like or that is what enters my mind when he courts me.
A late-in-adolescence masculine self that is not me and, furthermore, which has grown in milieus and locales and sites unlike those I have known, and which is physically differently placed and socially and economically.
The mind, the Marxism (of that era in a smart seventeen-year-old mind: he was two years older than I was), the Freudianism—he had three sessions with a refugee analyst—a rigid (rigidly programmatic) mind doctor, physically repellent and yet a man assured of his ultimate charm and his power over your imagination and my extraordinarily alone, vain friend: this other doctor that he’d had since he was thirteen he used as an example of error in regard to Freudian doctrine and to neurological science (in 1944), and the surviving (and worsened) American vanity, the spirit of rivalry, the sense of pain in him—he was an unhappy young man. The almost incredible extent to which he was spoiled, self-deferential, closed off, and full of longing—the extent of his knowledge of the world and his absence from it even while he was wrestling in it—he was a wrestler, mountain climber, restless athlete of an irregular sort: contemptuous of it (the reality of himself as an athlete or of athleticism or of the world: almost a tantrum of seeing it all as a joke)—his only admitted current inferiority being to the corruption of the school and of grades—that is, his moral superiority—his pride was such that one cannot call it Luciferian so much as a sort of totality—the pride of an absolutist: the four corners of the universe are in it in a carpentry of willful comprehension but not entirely true.
His comprehension proved its accuracy in terms of the navigation on the sea on which he was the only ship, the only captain, a sea he had brought into being by some sort of demand his existence made on reality; this accuracy of placement worked directly in regard to the utter corruption of anything that would argue any falsity in the setup of his totality.
I mean, imagine the contempt in which he held anything that was part of an un-Freudian capitalism.
He has a brain, Remsen—it is inaccurately placed (although he thinks he has navigated accurately) and it is tossed up and down. Remsen is, actually, a superior sort: a lonely, agonized, very handsome and somewhat appalling-looking creature, of phenomenal shyness, superior ability, and wry, ruthless and cold and nervous awareness, alternately half-panicked and sublimel
y superior, grimly amused in his superiority.
He is coldly aware that his looks are arbitrary and not entirely successful, but he does not quite believe it all the time: that alternates with periods of daydreaming in which he is wistfully and coldly, oddly, full of longing for Utopian sex and perfect good times and perfect looks and so on, all of which, somehow, he believes are possible here on earth, for lucky people.
That daydreaming coincides, in peculiar symbiosis (one of his favorite words), with hallucination-tinged periods of strenuously physical practicality—trips and treks or gym stuff, wrestling meets, and the like. His physical strength and his being rich don’t make him humble: perhaps they exist in some irregularity and in terms of comparisons. In courtship, he is very humble, pleased to want something, perhaps, and perhaps, then, even a little crawly-crawly and defiant—or deviant—it’s odd . . .
And then he’s given to ownership claims and to quick retreats from that: he owns your attention—and then he is sarcastic and produces sort of would-be withering critiques of your (and others’) capacity for friendship and he does oddly cold betrayals of you—he walks by you even though you say hello—but more frequently these are betrayals of himself, since he is the only ship on the sea . . .
He does not talk seriously. He and I have ‘intelligent talks’ but not ‘serious talks’—he has an elaborate code in these matters, some of it from his reading, some from his analysis, from his thinking about how things ought to be, Utopianly or, at least, under circumstances in which he is happy, or happy enough.
Grinning, his handsome eyes curiously alight, oblique, or slanted with a kind of observance—of masculinity and of you and of himself, of his pulse, and of the pulse of the moment as it moves in the curious ways time does move—he says lightly—it is a matter of attitude, clearly—that we are not homosexual and that we do not fiddle with anything homosexual . . . This seems arbitrary and a matter of naming, but it is also true in another sense in that it sets the pitch for feelings.
But if you do not have some sense of male attachment as romantic and you go off without regard to jealousy, say, or to someone’s, his need to see you, then he becomes enraged, pitiable, and lonely. He comes to you in the lunchroom and tells you of his betrayals of you—with a doctor or with someone you never heard of: a temporary friend to upset you: a betrayal you never noticed; I hadn’t known that our friendship, his and mine, extended that far; then he flashes with feeling, his eyes take on a burning glow, almost a reddish illumination—a smouldering—and his mouth glitters—not just the teeth between the savagely healthy lips but the curls of the lips themselves in a sort of salivary thing that perhaps, if you are older, suggests what he will like when he is older if he lives; and he flushes, a reddening of himself, a confession of a sort; and, in real life, a passage of glamour—he is betrayed by it—by life, into life. He has access to a handsome car; you go out in it with false ID and go to a rough bar where there are whores, something like that—and feeling, and feelings roil and boom; and you discuss them with him—intelligently but not seriously . . .
He is a good friend and a fine companion—at times (when he feels like it or when the spirit moves him—or when I have seduced him or elicited it), or it is for long stretches of time because it is a fashion among intellectuals in wartime, or his mind doctor is influenced by that and feels that is good, and Remsen fills with that; the doctor eggs him on to be a good guy with me. Or his parents love him in such a way that he cares for me—or ‘loves’ me openly—or one of his parents does it, or eggs him on. Remsen is unmusical, unaffectionate, essentially untalented but very intelligent, a sad boy whose grief is concentrated on himself in a form of, I think, depressive rage, not a diagnosis I would have made back then or known how to make, but I had a sense of him that I say now was of someone self-autopsied—a little as if a tulip could tear itself apart in a spiritual wind.
If I take simple terms—again, not terms I commonly used when I was young, but terms such as ambition and love and the infant discovery of the world and the child’s discovery of language and of human hours and of the course of light—I feel in him a vastness—well, let me avoid the image of the sea and use the actual river and a boy there, grieving over a father, but not the father’s death so much as the father’s reality—and the reality of the father’s life—and let me place this in the varied onrushes, flowerings and flowings, exfoliations, acrobatic swirls and tricks of time, in the universal restlessness, the unending motion, himself made of related motions, cousin motions—this other male self, perhaps of mine—since perhaps I only imagine I see him—the vastness or completeness of things, certain things—birth, say, or the restlessness of an hour as it shudders, shimmers, glides, flaps its wings, alights, crawls, scurries and scutters—the unending curved (like a wing) universe of an hour stretching here, there, to Saturn, to the Milky Way, to night on the other side of the globe—this is attached to the self, like fingers, the bone-length and tendon-sewn and muscle-inflected and skin-wrapped fingers of the mysteriously childlike, then boylike hand—but to the mind as an absolute idea, an idea of absolute things, including the self, so that, in a sense, one feels the universe, the entire truth murmuring in one—as if time, all unknown to oneself, were God—or this is known but denied since it cannot be controlled.
And the effort to control this—to bring this under the rule of one’s moods, as one’s moods constrain the feelings and attentions of one’s parents, one’s nurse, one’s self, and under the rule of one’s logic, as one’s logic constrains the mechanisms and comprehensions of things, and under the rule of one’s prayers as one’s prayers, and wishes and dreams, constrain and control the attention of the all, of the great curved, brooding, onrushing universe—brings him to such games as, like Jass’s—or Nonie’s—or like mine but differently—try to effect the conquest of this last finality of entirety: to emerge from and to fly, despite the contradiction of having motion in the midst of motionlessness—it is not logic now for him, it is mooded prayer and he is the solitary pray-er, the captain of address to meaning—to fly in timelessness which he controls and in which, to use a term I would hardly have used back then, down the corridors of time, or along the river, or through the interlaced and superimposed tulips and cups of various now’s to then, he rides and overrides and cancels by a personal motionlessness, a contradictory rage of stillness, like a child’s stubbornness, a writing-of-reality—so that he is a very, very handsome suicidal depressive—in a tantrum of God-defiance, time-hatred, often barely able to find a reason to go on with things, to go on, to continue to live in the rush and bumble and buzz and self-willed, other-willed relentlessness of motions of time.
But his mind is like an octopus of hands, some of them as vast as the river, and some of them articulated like skeletons with theory, and all them driven by will to grasp this and that—as if in a fairy tale or in an audiovisual film at school of nature lore—but not exactly theoretically but in accordance with birth-and-identity—his, of course—and his flowering flight toward death, with the narrow personal meaning seen as a true width taken as the first term, the plane of argument, so he is holding a great many workable ideas, almost truths—sexuality, for instance, and historical, or dialectical, analysis, Marxist notions of justice and of social class, a Freudian sense of personal reality—but everything is distorted by his personal existence, by the infant ambition, tantrum, trauma of pursuing limitlessness in an actual light.
Now, it is understood—as it was then—that to spend so much time on description, to expend words and thoughts in such drawn-out and complex metaphors means you love someone. His attempt to command truth and to make time be obedient—the powers of the will seem to be elements more of a science than of any practice of wizardry nowadays—ends in his being able to manage me, my feelings: he can seduce me somewhat; he can command my love—not endlessly or timelessly or even tirelessly, but often and recurringly—it is unlikely that this can take the place of the command of the universe but it does
sometimes . . . which is to say, you see, that he, in a way, loved me.
In a way.
This stuff, these things—this that I have spoken about, these elements of the mind and these bent-back corners of the real world—are vaguely curative, temporarily, are therapeutic—life preservers . . .
But I think we all knew that when we were adolescent. To him, with his cast of mind—him as an intellectual creation partly of absolute language, of a sense of language locally permitted—him in his inevitable sense of failure in regard to time, real time with a witness, ideas that interest him also sadden him, they excite him—a depressive—with a sense of happy ending, of final power; and they are interesting in themselves—works of genius—and, then, bewilderingly, bitterly regarded toys, items of furniture of a nursery of a world—I don’t remember the phrases common among people like us for such things then except the slighting ones: too brainy for his own good . . . moody, very smart . . . not an easygoing, happy person . . .
But my father was in that last category and he was not easygoing or particularly happy: he was in motion toward and around and above and below those things: they were each an axis, each a summit, a lawn, sunlit or dark: I always felt he had chosen that category. And then I felt that elements of the category, naturally, had chosen him, had exerted their wills, their rules: the earthen gravity had caught him now and then.
Because of my father’s manner of speech, and because of lawns and backyards back then, I had mixed in my mind—a little like photographs of paintings of the three Graces, or like an erotic notion of the Muses—the words suckle and sucker and honeysuckle . . . Folly or error, nourishment, and the mad, and maddening, vine of God and its intoxicating scent enticing you to breed.
The Runaway Soul Page 99