by Joshua Cody
Although if I do say myself, my breakdown was not accomplished without some relish of artistry. Let’s zoom in on a detail of my inadvertent contribution to Abstract Expressionism in America.
Because what in the name of God is the sense of any of this at all. And I’m alone, without Nothereal, without anyone, and Nothereal is not in a psychiatric ward, because she has access to my records. Wretched outcast, deprived of my kinsmen. There was no sound. The beautiful old glass lamp—Oriental, deep bourbon—I’d inherited from my father. There was still no sound. I picked the lamp up and hurled it against the wall with two arms. Its trajectory was straight, not a curve. The end of the trajectory made sound. I went into the kitchen, got a glass from the cupboard, and filled it with water, and drank. Then I threw the glass against the wall. Then I picked up every glass in the cupboard and threw each one against the wall, glass by glass, until there were no more glasses. Then I picked up a plate and threw the plate against the wall. Then I threw every plate in the cupboard against the wall. I had a nice coffee table from India, a heavy glass top set into a rosewood frame. I picked up the heavy glass and I didn’t throw it against the wall; I flung it across the room, so it made an arc, and it landed on the floor, and the sound of this green glass cracking wasn’t tinny and trebly like the plates and glasses had been; this was deep and resounding, so now things are getting serious, like listening to the original recordings remastered, like the original recordings were good enough to merit remasterings.
I have a set of four matching antique Chinese chairs. They’re hand-carved, out of teak, and even the plates that are set into the backs of the chairs—sculpted reliefs of scenes from Peking opera—would be valuable if sold as parts, apart from the wholes to which they belong. I paid far too much money for them, thousands of dollars, but even so I got them at a bargain (I’d wanted to treat myself on moving to New York). They’re quite heavy; by the time I had lifted the last one over my head and smashed it directly down into the wood floor, shattering it, I was tired. I walked over to the destroyed coffee table, glass and wood crunching under my feet like forest leaves and twigs. The table’s thick green glass had broken into big, sharp hunks, and I picked one up. I felt the sudden need to squeeze something, the need for release—what biologists call “escape.” I did that, and then I looked down at my hand, which was bleeding freely. I squeezed tighter. Then I held the edge of the glass against my neck, the spot where I had first felt a pulled muscle which turned out to be a tumor, which turned out to be treatable with six months of chemotherapy, except that it didn’t work, and so it might not be treatable, and I was finding out if it was tomorrow. Standing among the devastation with the glass against my throat; feeling, from the inside, the warmth of my blood pumping gently along the edge of the shard of glass, which even under a microscope would appear as smooth and clean as the wall of a tsunami. And I slowly scraped the edge of the glass along my skin and, oddly, it reminded me of the way I would slowly slide the edge of my cock along the edge of Nothereal’s gorgeous cunt until she screamed. Beauty herself was born of blood and foam. And wouldn’t it feel as good as that? And the blood coming out and the tumor will feel as good as that. Finally.
Here I could really, as they say in Hollywood—or at least apparently as film director and Brooklyn native Darren Aronofsky said to Mickey Rourke, which is kind of depressing in a way—try to “bring it,” and write that, on the edge of this cliff, skating on the pond at the edge of the wood, at the edge of this broken shard of heavy glass, the buildup met its dialectical payoff, and that for the first time in really how long I saw myself as if in a mirror and there was a rescue. But the truth is that we hysterics and opera lovers depend on a bifocal lens of perception far more than we should: that a more accurate representation of life is less dramatic than the alterity of walls of sound and silence in Mozart, or the fast-slow-fast-slow of the Rolling Stones. Life is more like a series of gradations, a color wheel. What I mean to say is this:
What I realized is this:
(Jeez, writing this is way harder than I thought. Because most of this stuff, you know, I’ve just been copying from journals I kept when I was sick, but now I’m actually writing, and it’s harder than you’d think.)
Okay, so the first image I had when I was about to kill myself was that it was just me and a mirror, me standing in front of a mirror, staring mutely at my reflection, and there was no sound and no language and just the blood pumping. But then—
This is what’s hard to describe, but I realized that that wasn’t the case at all. Rather, it was me between two mirrors, producing an infinite line of selves, like at the end of Citizen Kane, when Orson Welles walks between the two mirrors—except in a good way.
“Good,” in that these many selves, logically then, must take up exactly as many different positions in space—virtual positions, perhaps, in that the whole thing was in a way an illusion produced by mirrors, but different positions nonetheless.
So that:*
How do we position suffering in human life? This was the crucial question. It is one position, suffering. But it’s not the only position. It is one position at a specific point in time and space. But human beings are more than that; they do not exist at only one position at a specific point in time and space. Human beings are all over the place and whenevertime. It’s an odd fact, and perhaps you will find this idea juvenile; but to me, in that moment, it was important—if only in the sense that if I hadn’t had this realization, then you would not be reading these words, because I would have dug that shard of glass so nice and deep, tracing out where the tumor had been, and then you would not be reading these words because I would have collapsed and bled to death. But now I always had, via music, a sensitivity to form, where one is in relation—I already said this, I think, at the beginning—one feels a relationship to a frame, which could be a physical surrounding like where you’re sitting in a Starbucks, or where you are on an island in Greece or on an island at the mouth of the Hudson River; and the same could be said for time, you might be on the edge of a night or the edge of a morning, or indeed on the edge of the sunset where afternoon turns into morning.
I’m so glad I realized this, because I did not enjoy not having been born. But perhaps this wasn’t entirely some screenwriter’s deus ex machina, some sort of divine intervention. The ironic moral to this story may well be that tucked away within and behind my madness was, in fact, the very “humanistic,” old-school, unfashionable literary education bestowed on me via my parents, all that reading I’d done which I’d felt so guilty about and which on some level (again, the morphine delusion) I felt had somehow put me in the hospital, and for which on some level I’m afraid you, reader, will hate me, just like that girl who read some of this and then never talked to me again—it may have actually been a saving grace. Because let’s go back to that description Mr. Tytell gives of Pound’s breakdown in the gorilla cage. There was more to it—I saved the rest for now. Let’s rewind just a second, and then continue. No, too far. Stop. No, go ahead. Goddammit, gimme the remote. Okay. Now.
Pound, the man of words, was now caught in the most overwhelming moment of his life without the power to summon language.21
But here’s what’s next.
But he might have realized, in some silent corner of his being, that language was merely the artistic fiction of tragedy, the rationalization of pain, and that the flow of words would be invented by the novelist or playwright, or Pound himself in the Cantos he would soon begin to write, to stylize and heighten and explain the conjunction of superior forces and the puny human who could dare to defy them.22
Well and so that’s the thing: I literally—well not literally, my dad always complained my mom misused that word, like this one time they were supposed to have dinner with friends, a married couple, and he was working late at the office writing advertising copy he despised and he just couldn’t get out of it and so basically he stood her up like Ray Liotta did to Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas (which is how the
characters fell in love, not unincidentally) and she told him afterward, “I was literally a third wheel.” Well no you’re not literally a wheel, you’re more than a wheel for heaven’s sake, you’re my wife. Obviously he didn’t say that to her—he told me after. And then he talked about the misuse of the word “ironically” in NFL sportscasting. (I don’t have time to get into this here, I’ve gotta go meet a friend of mine, but—if you’re from Wisconsin, you’re pretty much fascinated by football by default, no matter what. And even me—the only sport I really understand and love is tennis, but still, football—let me put it this way. My father, after a stroke slash maybe nervous breakdown slash losing a lot of money in the crash of Black Monday 1987 slash his son realizing that literature could potentially be of some worth somehow somewhere at some time—he gave up all his belongings [not really] and wandered to the desert like a Christian ascetic [really! kinda] and roomed with me for a while in Chicago and Franzen came over [actually really!] and then moved to Los Angeles [definitely really!] and died [definitely]. And we went over there, my brother and I, and, just like what they said about Orson Welles who died at his typewriter, what better way to go, there was a real typewriter in the apartment with a real unfinished poem in there, which I will not reprint [but I will reprint a few other things, just you wait], and there were piles of manuscripts and piles of books but there was nothing on the walls except for a huge poster of Brett Favre. Piles of books and stuff in different languages but nothing on the walls except for Brett Favre. So that should tell you something. And my father as a tennis player was on the pro circuit as a youth. [But he’d satirize the NFL sportscasters: “Down at three and ironically, that’s exactly where the quarterback of the Jets last week” and he’d get pissed off—that’s not irony. But he came not only from literature but from radio and TV so he’d know, standards were higher then.])
So I can’t use “literally.” But I guess I can use the whole idea of the literary in some self-saving sense—if only in the sense that I saw manifold but ordered reflections of myself, each endowed with a different hue of self-awareness: and, most important, that this self-awareness, just as Pound “might have realized,” is in the form of a flow of words not yet invented—the flow of words that has just been invented here, now. The many reflections were, in fact, many selves: one that lost itself in the tight and soft sublimity of Nothereal’s body; one that saw the line back to the child in my parents’ book on Klee; one that was bidding good-bye to the body and the mind the morning of its almost death; and there were also selves infused with other selves: one that saw Caroline watching herself crack a whip in front of a client and thinking this is absurd; one that saw Sophie deftly performing the tightrope walker’s walk of playing the role of a woman in New York whose mind was actually at ease; one that saw Nothereal, easily the most opaque example here, aware of her condition on one level and, on another, its helpless victim, like a nation of people can be rendered a victim, rendering her a victimizer, like a nation of people can be rendered a victimizer.
So the intelligently underemphatic ending, the certainly not disappointing truth: that moment in my apartment with the glass at my throat was not as hysterically climactic as I might like to believe now or, indeed, perhaps wanted to believe then. But I did breathe some kind of sigh of relief, as if something like a chapter had ended (and indeed I think it had) (notwithstanding a few aftershocks). I put the glass down, and I called my mom. I remember, while dialing her number, thinking about those books called Fifty Things To Do before You Die, or whatever, and how bullshit they were because there’s only one thing to do before you die, and that’s not die. I’d turned down my mom’s offer to fly in from Milwaukee to accompany me at my appointment for the scan results. I told her I’d changed my mind; would she be willing to fly in? Sure, she said. Great, I said. Thanks a lot. Then I called the suicide hotline and gave a brief description of the events of the evening, and a very nice gentleman calmed me down. I collapsed on my bed and fell into a deep sleep for about four hours. I awoke when my mom knocked at the door. I let her in. She was totally cool about the carnage; I said I’d been upset by comments made by a woman I’d been involved with, and that I was worried about the results of the scan—all entirely normal. I made some coffee, we cleaned up the place, went over to the hospital. Scan looks fine, the doc said. I made an appointment with a shrink, and my mom and I had lunch at Da Silvano and then caught The French Connection at the Film Forum. We sat in the first row. I gauged the audience’s reaction, as I tend to do now, watching the film and watching the watching. As good as the film is, the car chase has been rendered less effective due to its familiarity; but Hackman’s performance still startles.
•
Are we talking about suicide? No. I never wanted to kill the self; I wanted to kill the disease. Suicide, I think, is something else. Pound got away, for instance, but Hemingway didn’t. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it? Given everything. And now everything lately. David Foster Wallace, September 12, 2008. Our greatest writer. As if I wasn’t thinking of him during that whole thing. My God. As if he hadn’t helped. Not just the writing but the human being. And I know but then Rachel Wetzsteon. As if I wasn’t thinking of her thinking about Auden. I mean that’s the whole thing and I never even got a chance to ask her. Not my fault but still. Christmas 2009. And this whole thing’s about Auden, in that sense—it’s not about Pound. It’s about Auden and Rachel. And Alexander McQueen—February 2010. What the hell? And for that matter if we’re speaking of the fashion world—unfairly criticized from the outside by the feminists who may well paradoxically long for the reappropriation of the aesthetic, of which the object of their scorn is the sole and lonely survivor, Pound and his pre-Raphaelites long since gone—the model Daul Kim? Her unforgettable face—the Korean and the Tartan and the Hun? It’s one thing to give it up and move to Jersey or Los Angeles or (okay, if you’re extremely lucky) to Milwaukee. But suicide? And another model, Ruslana Korshunova, at the age of twenty flinging herself off a high-rise three blocks from where I’m sitting, right now, writing? (Too big a word, “writing.” Frapping.) Remember it wasn’t so long ago that a woman of Ruslana’s beauty gave birth, in a bloody foaming, to Western literature, of which we are presently a part. Helepolis, destroyer of cities! Heliandros, destroyer of men! Remember that not so long ago that a woman of Ruslana’s beauty sat back and watched the world destroy itself over her. (Or maybe she didn’t sit back but, as Pound’s ex-girlfriend H.D. felt, she felt terrible, and took herself out of the picture and moved to Egypt to wait the whole thing out. If so, she’s still there.) For Pound, the essential tragedy was that “poor old Homer” was blinded by Helen’s beauty, and thereby “transmitted it for all ages even though he never saw it with his own eyes but only ‘echoes it’ in the terrified chatter of old men.” In other words, the tragedy wasn’t a question of Eve’s teeth sinking into the flesh of the apple: the tragedy was that Adam, blinded by her beauty, never saw it with his own eyes, and terrified, has chattered madly about her ever since.23 But press “ahead” a few times on the remote and somehow Ruslana, far from blinding our first and only author with her beauty, far from destroying the world, herself is destroyed, at the age of twenty, by the world; she somehow manages to let herself drop off the sheer side of a high-rise, unseen. That’s not water down there, that’s concrete. And Mr. McQueen, and Ms. Wetzsteon, and Mr. Wallace. I did not enjoy not having been born, and perhaps it wasn’t entirely some screenwriter’s deus ex machina, some sort of divine intervention, and my goodness I do love being alive, sitting here with this first edition of the Cantos my father gave me—and maybe, you may well argue, the house is too thick and the paintings a shade too oiled (and the old voice lifts itself, weaving an endless sentence), and you may well be right—but my goodness, fuck you, I happen to be so happy to be here with all these gifts and words and all these selves. And here this text was intended as a riposte to the literature of disease, so many of those books I read at the beginning of the whole thin
g and none of them any help, pure dreck, pale pastel book after book on the shelves in the chains that probably sell scented candles not just to increase revenue but to mask the smell of paper: pale pastel book after book, each one the same, the three-act structure of (I) diagnosis, and (II) the discovery of how beautiful life actually is and how there’s more to it than my hedge fund job ever told me it was and look at how lovely this flower is and this butterfly and this herbal tea, and (III) recovery and a book deal and getting a little place in Vermont maybe. If there are some who require disease to teach them such things then fine, but I am not, was not, one of those, thank you very much. I loved life and found beauty and sources of pleasure in things on the outside and on the inside, and illness was not an opportunity for existential awakenings, it was the very opposite of beauty or grace, it was a harrowing, a descensus: and then went down. The principle emotions were terror and above all rage. But never a death wish. And then I suppose I have to grudgingly admit that there may be something about coming out on the other side—like the morning I woke up and impulsively grabbed a bottle of Evian and drank, and it was the first time in months that I could swallow. Or not too long after that, when I could swallow food. It didn’t matter that I threw it up immediately, just the fact that I could swallow food. And then, not too long after that, walking outside, alone, in the air, two blocks through the bright mist to my café, where I walked indoors, ordered a coffee, and, trembling, took it outside and sat down at the cheap little table with my notebook, like a normal person, and an old man, walking slowly by, warmly remarked, “Now that’s the life.” (He was right.) Those two blocks that morning were a voyage to Cythera, an epic journey to an island, myrtle green, and back. And the rediscovery of taste: salt came back first (my favorite), then the rest. So yes there is a rebirth and I’m not saying the whole thing was worth it but of course, to be alive again, to at least not be probably dying in this present moment for two years, to have reacquired the resources of the senses and just the pleasures provided by perception, all of this regained: of course there is some sort of renewal. Orson Welles famously said that RKO gave him “the greatest train set a boy could ever play with,” and this has been misinterpreted. He wasn’t talking about the resources of a Hollywood studio: he was talking about the resources of life. Maybe he didn’t know it, but still.