Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  Not as many guffaws as Wakefield would like. The reason might be that Company spouses also work for The Company and are equally repetitive.

  “Only children are not bored by repetition: they are surprised by it. They anticipate it with delight. How is it possible for a marvelous thing to reappear in the exact same form only a second later? On the other hand—and I’m speaking for children here—how could things fail to repeat themselves? A tired parent who makes the mistake of shortening the bedtime story by leaving out a repetition or two is in for a tantrum. What happened to repetition number eight, Daddy? Those of you who repeat certain experiments over and over know what the children mean. You cannot leave out a DNA combination because it looks mind-numbingly similar to the one that came before. Happily, computers don’t get bored, which is why they are saving our sorry sleepy ass over and over.”

  The Devil, seated in the projection booth above the room, dressed in cap and knickers like a projectionist of silent movies, doesn’t like the drift of Wakefield’s talk. He suspects that his client is pursuing a deconstructive agenda that, after a few detours in art, will take him down to the elemental building blocks of matter, possibly, for the purpose of exposing him, the Great Malign One, hooves and all, before this conclave of geeks. The Devil hates to be seen. Or Wakefield may be after even bigger game; he may intend to shed his body and become pure talk, just a stream of words funneling like a twister out of a djinni bottle. In that case he might escape entirely, and the Devil would be left holding nothing but a wrinkled skin surrounded by a voice coming out of nowhere and everywhere. He may be wrong about this, but just in case, he lets his gaze drift over the heads of the assembled and shoots a quiverful of rays into the room, causing particular movies to unroll in each and every head. For good measure, he casts around a few itches as well.

  Wakefield is saying, “Children know intuitively that we exist in a world that is born of and lives by repetition. Life itself proceeds by replication,” but the audience is seeing black-and-white film images of scenes from their lives. An artificial intelligence specialist sees his father kneeling beside a bed, slowly pulling up a woman’s stocking as she holds her leg out to him. A marketing analyst squeezes in anger the teddy bear that his older brother has just made wet with some unspeakable substance. A virtual reality designer drops the chalice at her first communion and sees big drops of red wine stand in relief on her white patent-leather shoes. A Russian engineer watches a pancake being slowly rolled up by a mean boy from his school as his beloved Pioneer neckerchief disappears inside of it. At the same time, the marketing analyst experiences an unbearable itch between two toes on his left foot and has to scratch it or die. He takes off his shoe and scratches away. The AI specialist feels something lodged between two back teeth and cannot wait another moment to dislodge it, whatever it is. Meat? He’ll never eat meat again. The virtual reality designer wishes now that she’d never gone home with that Russian guy from the disco: her crotch is burning but it’s a different sort of itch. She slips her right hand between her legs as discreetly as she can. Farkash sinks lower in his seat: he sees himself perched on the steep-pitched red roof of his family house in the village; his mother is calling him in to wash before dinner. An insect is crawling in his armpit, making it tickle dreadfully; he can barely keep his balance. Farkash rakes at the offending pit.

  And so on, until everyone in the room is caught in a silent film of embarrassment or in the throes of physical discomforts that call for instant remedy. The room shifts, sways, rustles. Good show, laughs El Diablo, I should be a filmmaker. Then he remembers. He is. Not just one filmmaker, but many. The movie guides list hundreds of his works.

  Is Wakefield disturbed by all the fidgeting? Yes and no. You can’t expect to make a deal with the Devil and not be interrupted. This may be His Interruptiousness’s very nature. The long, uninterrupted peace of paradise was shattered for good by Lucifer. Nothing’s been completed since. Not a thought, not a speech. Of course, Wakefield isn’t aware that the Devil is actually in the room, but it’s safe to attribute all fuckups to Satan. That way one has deniability. Wakefield is determined to ignore the distractions of his audience. He’s inspired by the certainty that he really truly doesn’t know where he’s going, so why stop now? His listeners can fidget all they want and take from him what they will. Besides, being interrupted gives you a chance to think. He decides he likes being interrupted, he needs to be interrupted. He perseveres.

  “So children, who are just discovering language, and poets, who can’t get over it, have a marvelous tool for confounding themselves and others. My friend Ivan Zamyatin says that language is a splendid alien, shipwrecked on our planet, who was captured by apes and hacked to bits. The English bit is from its neck.”

  Maggie imagines the shipwrecked alien, silicon-based perhaps, strewn about like a dismembered mannequin. Two Saxons and a Gaul break his neck into chunks like a loaf of bread and eat it. The English language is born. She can see that. She’s a farm girl.

  The Devil turns red: not fair. How did Zamyatin guess that? It was true, he had seen the shipwreck himself and had, proud to say, helped himself to a few alien crumbs. Right now, in his pocket, he carries seven or eight words that have never been spoken on earth, and never will be. He feels them there. Vowely. Long. Dark. Yum.

  “Now let’s examine the nature of success. A poet feels successful when he has written a great line. A software designer, when he clinches a patent. A rich man, when he’s made another million. I know that most of you at The Company are techies, and some of you are rich, very rich.… It’s said that The Company is bigger than the Catholic Church, so God pops up naturally here. When the Messiah returns, he won’t be going to Jerusalem, he’ll be coming here to the Midwest, to the headquarters of The Company.”

  Scattered applause.

  “But is being bigger than God a good thing? It doesn’t mean you are God. John Lennon told a reporter that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus Christ. The fallout was definitely not good. It occurs to me that if the Messiah did show up in Typical, she might be put in the paper shredder before anyone could perceive her divine nature. Or, worse, divinity might interfere with the productive rhythms of the workday and disrupt the idyllic life that you lead here in the best-possible-workplace-on-Earth, and that won’t do. Pity, for instance, the government that files suit against The Company! God, you’ll remember, didn’t want any competition from his creation, so he split up Adam and Eve in order that the separated halves might compete with each other, leaving Him the absolute boss. That was in biblical times. In capitalist society, the biblical God is just another product, the real divinity is the Economy, with a capital E, and the government is its visible mouthpiece. Heretics say that there are a lot of gods, but even if this is true, the underlying principle is the same, no matter what their names: if you get bigger than me I’ll bust you up.”

  Voice from the crowd: “What the hell are you talking about?”

  My sentiments exactly, thinks the Devil. God? Has Wakefield gone bonkers? Is he making a pitch to the other side? Or what he thinks is the other side? The Devil laughs. He hasn’t thought about God in a long time. It’s like a former employer or an ex-wife, you rarely give them a thought if you can help it. Personally, he’s always had the utmost respect for God, for not interfering. Admirable detachment. God is sleeping, let Him rest in peace.

  Unfortunately, Wakefield seems to think that God is still paying attention. He can’t be that stupid. You keep doing that, El Diablo silently admonishes, and you’ll end up dead and sorry. God gave up on your kind a long time ago. When is the last time the likes of Wakefield had a sign from the Creator? As for the Messiah, the Devil begs to differ. The Messiah concept is the result of one of many deals his kingdom made with Yahweh before His big nap. Some of the terms are still secret, but it boils down to deterence: each side has a Messiah ready to go at any given time. If the powers of darkness launch their Messiah first, the other one will activate automatically, witho
ut disturbing God’s sleep. It’s mutual assured destruction, a MAD policy if you will, and it’s worked fine so far. The Devil knows that Wakefield is only using God and Messiah metaphorically, but still, it’s a serious issue; don’t put your foot in it or you’ll end up eating that foot, toes and all. Or maybe—the Devil pauses thoughtfully, biting his hoof—this Wakefield character is more clever than I think. Has he made another deal with one of my confederates? A chatty, indiscreet devil? Paranoia. Bad habit. But it’s not unheard of for one devil to go behind another’s back. You can never be too sure.

  “What are you talking about?” insists the heckler, a bit more exasperated now.

  You go, girl, the Devil urges.

  “I’ll know soon enough,” says Wakefield, and somehow he does. “Robert Frost wrote, ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ and Ted Berrigan answered, ‘I am that Something.’ Well, I know something that’s worth a lot of money. If I tell it to you—not the whole thing, of course, just a teaser—you’ll want to give me as much money as I can carry to hear the rest of it. And I might or might not tell you everything. I don’t really need any money, I just think that it might be fun to play with yours.”

  Voice: “Isn’t that a classic hustle?” Wakefield loves it: hecklers are the spice in a great what-will-he-say-next presentation.

  “Well, here it is. Please pay close attention because I will be as surprised as you are by what I’m about to say.”

  He pauses, scanning the faces in the audience. They would like to pay attention, but things itch.

  “The currency of the future is poetry.

  “I will repeat this, following the poetic-scientific formula I outlined earlier.

  “The currency of the future is poetry.

  “The currency of the future is poetry.

  “Say it with me, folks!

  “THECURRENCYOFTHEFUTUREISPOETRY.”

  Only Maggie joins in; there is some hissing in the upper tiers of the theater. Someone up in the projection booth shouts, “Viva prose!” It doesn’t phase Wakefield. Bring on the philistines.

  “In the future, money as we know it now will be useless—it already is. Instead of using these particular abstract units we call currency, we will use poetry to conduct our transactions. Poetry is the highest expression of any language. Money is also a language: you may think that the words of this language belong to you, but they are being spoken at this very moment by a multitude. It’s eleven A.M. Central Standard Time; do you know where your money is? It may be in a shipment of rifles headed for Colombia or it may be stuck in a computer in Hong Kong. You may be speaking its name or in its name, but the actual money is as fluid as language, it flows, it’s everywhere and nowhere at once, and anyone can speak in this language, not a word of it is copyrighted. When Richard Nixon took America off the gold standard, he put money firmly in the province of the imaginary; money became something that has to be taken on faith. In the realm of the abstract, currency will not rule, creation will. Take a million dollars, which isn’t much, you can spend that for lunch in some places—a million dollars takes up a lot of space if you’re going to use greenbacks. You can’t transport it very easily. But if you exchange that dough for a work of art, let’s say one of the cheaper paintings of Robert Motherwell, you can roll it up inside a hollow cane and limp across the border with it.”

  Wakefield is thinking that if he could only get his hands on a few of the canvases he saw at the Company mess hall, he’d roll them up inside a cane and limp back home and he’d never have to take another job like this again.

  The Devil loves the bit about the cane. Canes have been part of his wardrobe since time immemorial. His first cane was a branch he tore off a tree after his fiery fall from Paradise to a mountainside in Thrace. He’d twisted his ankle on landing, and he limped about leaning on that flowering branch until he found a cave, his first cave. He killed a mountain goat with his cane and made a flute from a leg bone, a hat from the horns, a shirt from the fur, and a knife from a rib. One night he played his flute and fell asleep with his horns on. When he woke up there were three nymphs in the cave, as smooth and naked as Eve. They gave themselves to him night after night when he played the flute. They disappeared whenever he took off his horns, so he took the horns off when he was tired of nymphs. Alone, he used the bone knife to fashion canes. When he felt lonely he played the flute and the nymphs reappeared, sometimes the original three, sometimes others. Bored after a long time, he began to wander, killing new animals, changing his appearance, carving new canes from wood and bone, but always keeping his first flute, cane, and horns nearby. Over time, his flute and his first cane acquired all sorts of powers. They could draw to them creatures of every sort who listened raptly to his music, or they could lift him through the air to cavort with birds. In later ages, his various canes were made of rare woods and precious metals, encrusted with stones. He’d collected sword canes with deadly blades belonging to princes whose souls he gathered. He’d transported magic scrolls, money, and yes, even pictures by famous artists, in hollowed-out canes. Some artists he had never been able to persuade to give him a work, like the Master Theodoricus, a Bohemian monk so horrified that one of his devotional works might end up in Satan’s collection, he had himself crucified. The fool, Beelzebub snarls, remembering Theodoricus, you thought you were painting for God, inspired by angels, but you would have been part of the greatest gallery in the world. He really should revisit his treasures, stored in his innumerable caves, and have some of them framed. As for Wakefield, his boy is on the right track now. Nothing wrong with envy and a little greed.

  Wakefield continues, oblivious to the Devil’s digressions. “What, you may be wondering, makes a Robert Motherwell painting worth a million dollars? The common agreement of a few esthetes backed by a dubious appraisal at Christie’s? Not at all. What makes a Robert Motherwell painting worth a million dollars is its uniqueness as a work of art made by the one and only Robert Motherwell. When you see a Robert Motherwell painting, you know immediately that Robert Motherwell had no idea what he was going to paint before he painted it. The value of the painting is in what is discovered when one has no idea what he is looking for. And that goes for both Motherwell and the viewer of Motherwell’s painting.”

  The heckler pipes up: “When is the fire sale?”

  The Devil finds himself in total agreement with Wakefield. Like souls and fingerprints, art is singular, it is a product of a man’s spirit, of his evolving complexity. Unlike milk from many cows, for instance, it never has the same texture and flavor from one artist to another.

  “Buddhist monks create, over many days, an intricate mandala from grains of colored sand. When the mandala is complete, they sweep it away with great ceremony. The form of the mandala is traditional; no deviation is allowed. The monk-artists work to recreate the same design in exactly the same way it’s been done for thousands of years. The point is the practice, which is a form of meditation. The final product is irrelevant, a mere material object, only a by-product of spiritual discipline. The difference between a modern artist and a Buddhist monk is in the approach. The artist goes into the void empty and returns with a souvenir, if you will. The monk approaches the void with a traditional body of knowledge and arrives at emptiness. Our world, no less than that of the monks, is full of junk that gets in the way of spiritual practice. The artist plays with the junk, the monk orders it into nothingness. The final product has monetary value only for those outside the process. It is a grotesque accretion of its creator’s impurities, a truly filthy object that should be disposed of as quickly as possible, either destroyed or sold in a gallery. Its value is directly proportional to the necessity to eliminate it. The more a work cries out for obliteration, the more valuable it is. It is at the point of greatest contradiction, at the crossroads between its impulses to self-destruct or to continue, that money enters the picture.”

  Amazingly, Farkash’s accented basso pierces the silence: “I can agree with this!” Heads
turn toward Farkash, whose views on anything outside mathematics are completely unknown. Embarassed, he mutters, “Hmmm,” then, “Sorry,” and folds his arms across his chest.

  The Devil snorts. He hates Buddhists. It’s personal. Buddhists don’t recognize his importance. As far as they are concerned, he is just one among many manifestations of the next world. Buddhists have gone as far as to put all the devils they can imagine on a wheel, half of which is occupied by angels. The devils and the angels have equal status and, as the wheel turns, equal opportunities to manifest. The demons and the angels are just different aspects of one another: ugly is beautiful and vice versa. Absolutely no discrimination. The Devil’s whole sense of self, which is based on a sense of aristocratic election, is offended by this treatment. He’s also offended by the Buddhists’ indifference to images, their treatment of art as a superficial manifestation of action, a nervous by-product they seek to eradicate through meditation. An accomplished Buddhist lives in a void made by the erasure of the material world. Imagine an emptiness where all is potential and equal. No emotions, no passions, no crime, no ecstasy, no suffering, no guilt, no reason to make a big deal about anything. It’s too depressing. Even more egregious is the growing appeal of Buddhism in his beloved Western world, the center of wealth, the fountainhead of objects and images. A few years ago, a man who abandoned all earthly pursuits and withdrew from his “normal” life would have been put in a mental institution. But because he’s a Buddhist, well, now it’s okay. Disgusting!