by Joshua Cody
* My dad’s referring to the poet John Crowe Ransom, his mentor at Kenyon College. My father went to a couple of different colleges but never finished a degree. Ransom wanted him to stay and finish his degree, but my dad was restless. He told me that in their last conversation, he told Ransom that maybe he’d come back, and asked him if he’d still be there. “Oh, I’ll be here,” Ransom said, a bit wanly.
IX
The Age of Innocence
And there is no new thing in all this place.
—Ezra Pound, “The Tomb at Akr Çaar”
Now the Eskimos have all those words for snow, and David Foster Wallace once said that we should have many more words for gradations of self-consciousness; the Ancient Greeks had several words for love. What I described above—the love between parent and child—they called στοργ, or storgē. Romantic or erotic love, another theme of this little essay, they called ε´ρως, or érōs—a whole different thing. And there’s a question the extent to which their concept of ε´ρως is isomorphic with our notion of romantic love, but for our purposes, just for right now, sitting beside this lake, it’ll suffice, since the other thing that occurs to me when I think about all this stuff and, inevitably, about Carmilla and Caroline and Sophie and Nothereal is how absurdly far any of this stuff is from “love”—romantic love. When both parties understand this, the resulting intimacy creates its own sort of love, I suppose: the shared love of Love, an object each party regards from a certain distance, each party then bound to the other in the very absence of the object: here the director of photography would want to shoot the lovers’ faces not facing each other, but spooning, both looking off in the same direction, through the salty Mediterranean sea mist that stings their eyes, periwinkle after the sun’s setting—or later, because we’re over schedule, the leading actress just suffered another nervous breakdown, she’s locked herself in her trailer, and we’ve “lost the light”; so everyone waits until it’s pitch black, the actress feels better, and now the director has the lovers stand at the helm of the ship or ferry, and the island has already announced itself not through its own form, as was expected in daylight, but, unexpectedly, by blocking out the stars. Of course the writer and the director and the crew and the performers will “work this in” to the story, they might have to reshape a few things here and there, but it’s no big deal in the end, and as a matter of fact the original version is, by the time of the wrap party (with champagne glasses tinkling and dresses like in Fitzgerald), entirely forgotten by everyone involved; and the audience, at the premiere three hours ago, never knew another version had been originally intended, and would never know. Remember that the only reason Eliot saved his original manuscript of The Waste Land in the first place—he gave it to John Quinn, a lawyer, his patron, and it was lost for years before turning up in the New York Public Library—was that “it is the only evidence of the difference which [Pound’s] criticism has made to the poem.”32 Oh and the lovers never get to the island but float past it.
During a crisis of (what do they call it?—yes) “existential” proportions when one is simply not sure if one will be alive in a few months the real thing—by which I mean, I hesitate to say, love, I mean the real thing, I think we all know what that is, of course it’s a cultural construct and we can discuss Eleanor’s court all we want and twelfth-century Provence all we want and l’amour courtois all we want, but we may as well also discuss particle physics then, we may as well discuss cells and atoms then, we know the sharp intake of breath that accompanies the thrill and the swell that, as the serpent opens its mouth, is unlike any other swell or thrill, unyielding, we know when every cell of the body is slightly misshapen, slightly oblong rather than round, so pointed the anticipation, so acute the focus upon the beloved. The wind of that, the grains of sand of that, the angle of the shaft of sunlight of that, the motion of the dust particles illuminated by the shaft of sunlight of that. The Klee colors of that, the yellow spot of Picasso of that. The sheer hurtling forth: the leap, the tipping downward. It’s chemical and physiological, and it’s stressful; so maybe the body, hunched down in the trenches of survival mode, won’t allow the direct experience of love, and settles for the substitute I’ve described above, a little or a lot like Windows running in safe mode.
Or of course maybe I’m simply incapable of love, with or without the stress of a life-threatening disease.
It’s not the Annie Hall slash Groucho Marx gag about not wanting to belong to a club that would have me as a member. That’s just egoism: nothing’s good enough. No, it’s more interesting than that. This is the thought that tends to haunt me, flutteringly, raising dust through a sunbeam in some attic of the mind—the basement being too damp for dust: what if my ethical principles prohibit me from subjecting the object of my love to—in a word—me?
And what if this me isn’t the diseased me, but the pre-diseased me?
The title plates, in silence, speak of the eventual destinies of our characters, and then as the end credits roll—and they just began to roll, with the music (“Can you hear the music?” the dying Isolde asks the audience, with not inconsiderable urgency, at the end of the opera) that just started, the music that signals us to stand up and prepare for the walk back from the darkness into the outdoor light that will, just for a moment, blind us—we can’t help but wonder whether there’ll be a sequel (turned out there was); whether these lives, sundered, will ever crisscross again; whether Popeye will finally track down the heroin smuggler from Marseilles.
At the same time, it’s an ending. Funny how in English we speak of “closing” titles in movies, for instance, referring to the end credits. Or in music: that’s a great closer. Or “what did the Stones close with?” It’s funny because endings are openings: we leave the theater, we go outside, into the bright mist, maybe to an island, myrtle green. The lights come up. We leave the confines of the stage; the angle expands, the view widens. We feel a breeze, or as Da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist, would have called it, a zephyr, over the baked earth, the terra-cotta, right?
I’m being oblique here—I’m just thinking of two moments that bookend the whole thing, the diagnosis/hospitalization/recovery thing: two moments that in different ways have to do with love.
As far as the first it’s a woman I know I care for so deeply, to whom I’m so irresistibly attracted, that at a certain point I wondered why I never—what? Made love to her, obviously, but also lived with her, had a child with her, supported her, sort of partnered up with her as a companion, this is in a way what marriage is, I guess. One answer to that is that the circumstances were never quite right, she was dating somebody when I was single, I was dating somebody when she was single, but my feelings for her, and hers for me, so greatly and obviously outweighed our feelings for our respective rivals that the obstacles would certainly not be credible in the context of a Provençal tale of unrequited love. Another answer is that we’re friends, so sleeping together might “ruin a good thing,” although honestly I’ve never understood this idea, so dear to the hearts of screenwriters and sitcom hacks. Never in my life has sex “ruined a good thing.” Why would it? Only if, again, I cherish this woman to the extent that I would never want to inflict myself on her. That’s not what the sitcom writers mean, and that’s not what Groucho Marx meant. But just look at whom I called that afternoon when the pulled muscle in my neck suddenly was potentially something other than a pulled muscle. Talk about an infliction! Look whom I spent that week with, fretting over the pending results of the biopsy? It should be okay, it’ll probably be okay, it’s some kind of virus, it’s probably nothing but it’s good to be sure. Look whom I called with the news. I will never forget her words on the phone, just two words, “Oh Josh,” a descending minor third (couldn’t be otherwise, could never be otherwise, not in Mozart and not in the Rolling Stones), low register, somewhere between piano and pianissimo, and I detest hearing my name pronounced but these were the two purest words ever addressed to me, unadorned of self, unself-conscious,
unstrategic, not “helping,” not afraid, not trying to comfort, not reflective, not God what should I say, not why him and not me, not thank God him and not me, not okay so that’s what it was there were two possibilities and this is the one that we’re dealing with now, not okay we’re going to deal with this you and I, not holy shit I’m freaking out, no empathy, no sympathy, no quick recalibration, no impressive recovery, no rapid inventory, no recontextualization of the events of the past few days, no grave understanding, no coming to terms with mortality, no anger, no shock, no pity, no sadness, no fear. What resides there, then, in the absence of all of those moves of the mind untaken, that the audience will never miss? A soft exhalation of communion.
In other words, love. The subject of another book. But to end this one, I should add that I found basically the same thing—in written words, unvocalized—at the end of the whole business (or deal) when the first big CT scan was fine, my mom and I saw The French Connection, and for the first time it looked like perhaps I would actually be one of those people who survived. I popped an e-mail to an ex-girlfriend, not just any ex-girlfriend but—well we hadn’t communicated in ages, I mean this is going pretty far back (one time we drove across a black bridge together and yellow grain was turning orange) (and one time we flew into Manhattan together and were excited to go to a bookstore) and why we parted—again, really can’t go into this but I hope she won’t mind if I take the liberty to quote her: she e-mailed back,
What wonderful wonderful news. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about your music; we had a very vivid conversation about it, maybe in a dream but it doesn’t seem like it.
Needless to say, it takes a certain gift as a writer to be able to get away with repeating an adjective like “wonderful” within the first four words, not have it seem precious. A certain (read pretty immense) gift to do it without a comma, which risks a pretentious grab for “breathlessness”* to attain the truly expressive dactylic meter, which she then just as thoughtlessly (in the highest sense of the word) abandons, after a single tetrameter, in favor of an offhand, free-verse mention of my music, which has nothing at all to do with my recovery except of course that the fact that it has nothing to do with my recovery has everything to do with my recovery; she is saying that all of those things in life that you were unable even to behold from afar are now being placed back in your hands, restored. Not to mention the reference to a dream—maybe a dream but it doesn’t seem like it. We were having a conversation in a dream “and,” not “but” (that’s the only correction I’d make), maybe we weren’t in a dream, because the two of us are two people who are unable to see each other since our breakup, and also we’re two people who probably live together pretty much constantly, within our dreams and without them. I’m not going to go through the whole message, which, incidentally, is a model of brevity, but here’s how it ends:
Thank you for this message. Thank you so much for going through all that and getting better.
This from a woman, first of all, too modest, herself, to write—in spite of the fact that she’s the most gifted of all the writers of my generation I’ve had the pleasure to meet or read; and this from a woman I mistreated, not once not twice, who suffered at my doings and now is thanking me for having dared to dream, first, of my own death, and then daring to dream of recovery. Theroux (“Dreams, by definition, do not come true”) is wrong, Picasso (“Everything you can imagine is real”) was right. “Was Picasso smart?” this same woman asked me once, long ago, before New York, before Italy, before Paris. I knew exactly what she meant. What a gorgeous mind she has, smooth as sanded sandalwood, and her skin like the petal of a white flower: yes, my darling, he was.
* * *
* You know what I mean? It’s like Michelle Pfeiffer’s frankly god-awful performance in this movie the father of another ex-girlfriend of mine directed, an otherwise sublime adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, where the only way she can play a scene, apparently, is to rush through the door after having raced up six flights of off-camera stairs. But that woman is another story: that’s when I was no longer simply dreaming of recovery: that was sad too, and also not only.
X
Canal Street
Let us end this book by answering an old question, rather than posing a new one: who stole the Mona Lisa?
—Norman Mailer, Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
Okay, um, here’s maybe not such a bad way to end this:
So a lot of the aforewritten (that’s not a word, but anyway) was inscribed in longhand, in journals, in hospital rooms, or at the side of a lake; in waiting rooms, or in cafés, where people, obviously, sit in different proximities to vertical walls. So I’ve got this pretty big stack of journals here, which I term “journals” as opposed to notebooks. Notebooks have horizontal lines. Journals are just big blank pages, so you can make up your own lines. As David Byrne once mused, “Notebooks? What good are notebooks? They won’t help you survive.” He was correct. Journals, on the other hand, just might.
The Mona Lisa at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, France, 2005.
(Obviously these aren’t the correct definitions of the words “notebook” and “journal.” It’s just the way I think of them, and I’m a little tired, this book turned out to be a little longer than I thought, and way more work. Plus I’m hungry. Let’s just agree that the word “notebook” strongly suggests ruled paper, and classrooms, and after-school afternoons; and “journal” is a broader rubric.)
Anyway it’s funny how each of these journals comes to an end, and then there’s another one that follows. Like look at this one here, for example. So on the last page, I wrote—I remember this, I remember writing this, I was sitting in that café over on Church Street—I wrote, “A woman just came up. Is that your paper? I hadn’t noticed that I’d been sitting next to a copy of the Times. Boston won the World Series. ‘Boston Sweeps Series.’ That’s the headline. I almost asked her why on earth—what with all this—why on earth she’d want to read the Times? But I gave it to her, of course, without saying anything. She’s taken it back to her seat, on the other side of the café, to my right; she’s reading it now. Hopefully she’s waiting for someone, anticipating a meeting with a friend or a spouse or boyfriend, and she just needs to pass the time. What I mean to say is—I hope to God she’s not just actually reading the Times, as an activity in itself: hopefully that isn’t the only reason she’s here, having coffee at four o’clock in the afternoon, sunnier now than before, the day’s turned surprisingly warm, I don’t even need the coat I brought. Hopefully she’s waiting for someone.”
It goes on:
I have space left in this notebook for about ten more handwritten lines, and after that I’ll have to go buy another one, over on Canal Street. No more pages. I’m heading towards the edge of the last page, even as I write. Canal Street, in the seventeenth century, was the northernmost edge of New York. The key to any kind of composition, it occurs to me, is to write against an edge, a frame. Put a frame around something, anything—the frame of cancer, say, around a life—and you’ve already gotten somewhere, without even willing it: then, as if by magic or by grace, you’re waiting for someone, and can read the Times.
Acknowledgments
The author is indebted to the following, in roughly chronological order.
Patricia Cody
Matthew Cody
Nancy Bush
Ann Volkwein
Cassie Jones
William Breitbart
Barry Crooks
Rick Dickens
Paul Bozymowski
Katherine Lytle
Anne Philpott
Aaron Adams
Juliette Adams
Theodore Boulokos
Heather Keller
Sam Katz
Jonathan Dreyfous
Swanna MacNair
Edward Lovett
Erin Lovett
Gabriel Jones
Belzu DuHoinx
Louis Warren
; Ildiko Szollosi
Max Karkégi
Fred Lerdahl
Peter Maxwell Langrind
And then of course Bill Clegg, Jill Bialosky, Alison Liss, Alexandra Pringle, and all the inspired, admired persons at W. W. Norton and Bloomsbury, whose continued demonstration that books are, in fact, collaborative never ceases to create a sense of wonder.
Notes
1. Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (Little, Brown, New York, 2005), 641.
2. Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America (Knopf, New York, 2005), 538–540.
3. C. David Heymann, Ezra Pound: The Last Rower: A Political Profile (Viking, New York, 1976), 309.
4. Ibid., 53.
5. Ibid., 62.
6. Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story (Random House, New York, 1991), 19.
7. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1971), 67.
8. Hugh Kenner, “Leucothea’s Bikini: Mimetic Homage,” in Noel Stock, ed., Ezra Pound: Perspectives: Essays in Honor of His Eightieth Birthday (Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1965), 39.
9. David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Little, Brown, New York, 1997), 189.
10. Heymann, Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, 118.
11. Ibid., 298.
12. Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1967), 94.
13. Alexander Theroux, “Revenge,” Harper’s, October 1982.
14. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: An American Master (Knopf, New York, 2004). 628–629.