American Genius: A Comedy

by Lynne Tillman

  The English built a society around and against embarrassment, since they fear it, no one of them wants to be embarrassed or to embarrass others, but it's more than not wanting, it's a potent, silent anxiety, so subtlety condemns them to understatement, but when at parties they drink heavily, rage, make false or true accusations, or behave licentiously, they forget embarrassment, and their bad acts are usually forgotten the next day when no one mentions the other's objectionable behavior, since they aren't Puritans. Persecuted Puritans fled England for America, where they thrived, and in America conversations and news about crimes, sinful nights, or a sinner's bad acts are received with a thrill, since the wickedness of others invigorates Puritans, and many go West, young men and others, to be lawless, since outlaws are Puritan Antichrists. As a consequence of their sins, sinners-Methodists believe everyone is a sinner-who bring shame to themselves and their families will just work harder, supposedly, to overcome their weaknesses. The English upper classes especially don't want to appear to work hard or to be called intellectuals, and they despise Puritans. Here, in this place for serenity and repose, not a day goes by when I'm not privy to some small shameful or shameless episode, loose talk, or am established even briefly as a subject of conversation, of which I am mostly unaware, happily. One resident or guest, who prefers "guest" as she insists she makes her own decisions, complains incessantly about her closest friends, who are not here, and I am glad not to be one of them, and in her complaints, like most sensitive people, she is blameless. But I am a Puritan who also has ignoble and disgraced thoughts. Separatists chose to be Congregationalists rather than Presbyterians whose church had a hierarchy; the Separatists formed individual congregations with as few as four members, on the basis that sainthood could be divined from those who desired to be members, a tautological wish. The Separatists wanted a holy kingdom, and probably most English people thought theirs was holy enough and felt bothered, since another's righteousness is a nuisance and insulting. In the New World, the Puritans strove for salvation, unimpeded by Parliament, the king, and venerable and rigid traditions, though they knew sin was inevitable, that no matter how hard they worked, they would never have certainty of God's love or if they were good, which was anyway preordained. Still, they had to prove their virtue in this life to achieve a place in heaven, and so they praised rectitude and accumulated, and the more they had, the more they decided God had demonstrated his love to them. They saved and prayed they were saved and followed their God's law, and, far away from the landed gentry they once feared or honored, they took possession and claimed the land, directing a furious violence against its brown- and red-skinned possessors, the earlier claimants, whom they smote with the vindictiveness and passion they felt toward the English and other Europeans who'd persecuted them. The Puritans slaughtered without compunction, because they would not be stopped in the creation of their heaven on earth. Manifest Destiny is also a Puritan's idea, and the history of civilization is dominated by the missions of righteous conquerors.

  Acceptance is American love, shunning is a Puritan's punishment, animals do it regularly, mother cats shun their three-month-old kittens from one day to the next-I have witnessed this ordinary crueltyturning away from or hissing at them, but human mothers shouldn't, though some do in other ways, and mammals such as humans are both obvious and subtle, like people at parties who turn toward and away abruptly, who search crowds for a partner, for sex, friendship, advancement, or to wile away time, and there is an imposingly tall woman here, the acerbic one who now leads the women's table, occasionally there is one, who peers intently over the tops of people's heads, seeking a better connection, since love and acceptance, like fame, are also pursued in this secluded place where residents hope to make themselves into something, or to escape something or themselves, or to realize themselves in a novel guise, and where some seek renown, goodness, or worthiness, while others seek calm, peace, and quiet. The Count may just want peace, he's had the other. His Calvinist relatives speak ill of him, or don't speak to him, his wife may have abandoned him, his Parisian gang deserted him, all of which is etched in deep creases on his skin, in the deep lines on his high forehead, around his mouth, and on his chin, but time is his constant friend, even if it passes and is ambivalent.

  Puritanism successfully infiltrated America, nowhere else so completely, and in this country fame is a visible proof of God's love, it sits beside material wealth, intangible but a form of temporary approval, and may be gained and lost, possibly the devil's work, whose business easily fools sinners, and so the famous, whose celebrity rests on the effervescent fascination and mood of non-famous others, must maintain that goodwill through incessant appearance and reappearance, to fix their stars in a worldly firmament and also in limited imaginations. The famous become paranoid. Celebrity is coruscating and fleeting, since its value isn't attached to anything, there is no logic to fame and no use to it, except for exciting suffocated imaginations that consume hope. Dante's paradise became tiresome, blandly beautiful, because in it there was nothing left to hope for, while hell was vivid and detailed. I'm an American Calvinist who rebukes herself, also with other lives, a desperate convict on death row or an escaped slave, Harriet Jacobs, caged for years in an attic hardly bigger than her body, whose authorship was disputed because she was black, but I still can't discount all lesser anguish, and I also don't believe I should, though others' pain overwhelms or even shames mine, but relativity is also historical, so my ethical compass wobbles. It must be why a dark night is endless, when I often remind myself that I must unmake everything, but the best I can achieve is a temporary, furtive indifference to myself, the others around me, and my projects on the floor.

  The transvestite frequently sat on the stoop of her tenement building with two of her friends, a woman who might be a dwarf, another in mismatched clothes, with no teeth, and I've watched them from across the street, never joining their conversations, but drawn, in a ghoulish way, to their irregular animations. The imperfections I notice and remember include skin tags, achrochordons, the excess skin or flaps that form on the human body in response to the skin's irritation in areas of friction, heat, and moisture, where a bra strap or a waistband might rub the flesh. I notice moles at the corners of lips, bristly hair shooting from them, or large, flat hairy moles that patch upper arms and backs of necks, which can be removed, but when they aren't, invariably catch my eye. There are some discolorations that can't be removed, some moles or sebaceous cysts also that, if removed, would leave small craters in legs and arms, since they run beneath the epidermis like underground rivers and more than what was apparent and visible on the skin would require removal. A cyst on the upper arm that is nearly flat on the surface of skin may have deep roots beneath and connect to another cyst farther down the arm that may be larger, and it would be a mistake, my dermatologist told me, to have it removed, because the excision's scar would be more unsightly than the cyst or mole. But I don't like moles. Also I notice stooped shoulders, wandering eyes, palsies of every sort, harelips, limps, because, for one thing, I am interested in defective bodies that function anyway. Over the years, my dermatologist has treated me for a variety of nevus, or nevi, birthmarks or moles, which he excised; seborrheic dermatitis; dilated blood vessels or telangiciectasias; benign growths, or seborrheic keratoses; solarkerotses, or sun damage; skin tags; acne rosacea; xeroderma, or dry skin; tinea, or a fungal infection of the feet or skin pads; and nummular eczema, or coin-shaped, blistery and encrusted skin, and none of these was life threatening. I didn't ever mention the pressure or weight on my heart, since he wasn't a cardiologist, and since my internist insisted, after she ordered an EKG and echocardiogram, that there was no physical cause for the pressure, that it might be stress-related, which should have been reassuring but wasn't. Each mark, redness, or patch has its charac teristics, which my dermatologist recognized immediately, and when he did, he said aloud the name of the malformation or minor disease with an intellectual's satisfaction, and I always asked him to r
epeat and spell it, so I could see its design and remember it. Every imperfection and unsightliness of my flesh, since failures and mishaps are worth recording, he noted, and I watched him write up, in his neat script, each defect, chronic or acute skin condition, dutifully, even lovingly, in his increasingly thick file on me.

  After the removal of a nevus, my dermatologist presses cotton soaked in an antiseptic lotion or salve on the fresh wound, then he asks me to continue to press the ointment-soaked cotton against it until the blood stops flowing, and, without looking, only feeling the slight burn of medication against the skin, I do so, even though I easily become nauseated at the sight of blood and on occasion have fainted. I regret fainting at the sight of blood, a revulsion I can't control which begins as revolutions in my stomach, the second heart, and I have often envied my dermatologist's job, which involves blood spurting, but affords him the right to stare with childlike attention, professional concentration and intense pleasure at the deformities and growths, ugly moles, with hairs shooting from them, on the bodies and faces of his patients, numbering into the thousands, and then his expertise in knowing how to burn or cut them off complements his desire to rid the body, or the world, of its abnormalities and threats. When he performs a procedure, I look, if I can, without dizziness, or follow the procedure's reflection on his glasses, though sometimes he takes them off, as the blood rises to the surface of the skin and spills onto the cotton square he holds in one hand, when he appears to trust his naked eye only, and with the knowledge that he has removed some imperfection, some excess that has, in some way, gracelessly defined me, one of his patients, he confidently sprays antiseptic on the wound and covers it with a Band-Aid.

  Scars form on areas where people have been badly cut or burned about which everyone has some memory, whose presence never lets you forget the event, which may have been dramatic or even traumatic. I have sometimes touched a trail of dead skin on other bodies and felt its inexpressibility, since other people's scars are different from the ones I have but not in abundance, though mine are more internal, I like to believe, but there's one that's visible, right above my left knee. My dermatologist may have marked it in his file on me. It was caused by my walking, absentmindedly, lost in the promise of a delicious, troublesome boy, angry at my mother or father, sad about my brother, or worried about a best friend, past a car with a broken fender, while I was in summer camp. By that time I longed to go to camp, to escape the place where I lived among people who had more than enough money to be content, though they were not, because money doesn't bring happiness, just its possibility, which is usually squandered, and to escape my parents and neighborhood. The jagged fender tore into my flesh. Blood streamed from a deep cut, or gash, I felt faint, collapsed, and the worried owner of the camp quickly carried me in his arms to his car, to have the cut looked at, cleaned up and stitched by a local doctor. He did a poor job, even though the cut required only six stitches, and sometimes I touch the ugly scar just above my left knee, but I can't remember all that it covers. It is the same leg on which my insane cat tore my flesh, leaving four indentations, the left leg that is controlled by the right side of my brain, which has some significance, especially to people who research and rely on such ideas. The wound was bandaged for a week or two, the raw wound and its secretions hidden, while it healed into an unsightly scar. It hid something terrible, though wounds are not supposed to be obscene.

  In the place where I was raised, there was much ordinary obscenity, many girls disliked their faces, especially their noses, and had their noses broken and surgically fixed when they were teenagers. They were bandaged for weeks. I was invited to visit a friend whose nose had been surgically broken and fixed, who had just come out of the hospital and was lying in bed, having a party for her new self and newly straightened nose. It was attended by her friends, of which I was one, though I was much closer to her cousin, who died not long before in a car accident, a traumatic event that changed my life, though there is no visible scar covering it. This girl lay in bed, bandaged and bruised, and happy, though her eyes were bloodshot, black and blue, and her face was swollen, and her skin a fabric of purple blotches. I sat at the edge of her bed, which was covered with a fluffy white comforter, surrounded by her other friends, and looked at this girl's swollen face and bloodstreaked, black and blue eyes. I turned green, I was informed later, in a disparaging way, and fled the room, raced down the stairs, to the front lawn, which was covered in a fresh, light snow, and fell upon it and fainted. For a while, I rested in the snow, cold, relieved, dizzily unattended by my friends, not caring then that they may have thought I'd been insensitive to the girl with the purple, swollen face. But I was never again invited to such an event in a place where girls regularly had their noses broken, straightened and thinned, because they saw their noses and themselves as imperfect and ugly, inadequate, in part because of the religion into which they were born, whose clannishness produced certain facial characteristics, which they wanted to abolish while remaining tribal, though they wanted also to be accepted into the larger society by looking more like it.

  An accumulation of newspaper and magazine clippings, photos of chairs, boxes of loose papers, objects, postcards and letters, yellow pads with doodles, notes toward serious projects, such as my essay on the futility of strict constructionist readings of the Constitution, various sketches and designs, lists for lifetime affairs, favorite quotations, my archive of forgotten and failed ideas, and a number of small paper and wood constructions, which lacked necessity or conclusiveness, clutter my room. I often move in my chair, restless on the seat, most chairs don't satisfy, chairs send messages about attitudes and values, their designer's character, too. A chair is an idea. I shift and squirm, because my skin itches on another's idea, since ideas can be uncomfortable. Shakespeare's line, "a Barber's chaire that fits all buttocks," amuses me, and I conjure an image of a bawdy chair, which I haven't ever seen, and a lap, to suit Samuel Johnson's "Mistaking a lady's lap for my own chair." I might sit upon a lap of carnal disaster, or I have, or I might be that lap for another. I can leave a chair but not the past, I like chairs, I like history, not my past particularly, because I'm wedded to it, there is never a respite. I can fly away from a chair, while my mother can barely rise from hers, what I take for granted takes every ounce of her will, concentration, and energy, but it's nothing for me to rise from a chair, I can rise over and over, and at her age and in her condition, she can't. I also can forget and even dismiss what I look like, because I don't really want to live in my body or in the past, even if I do, which is against my will or without my knowledge or approval, since about most things I don't have a choice. I'm compelled to trust in imagination, it may offer, when it presents itself, something like choice, even though Shelley wrote, the Count says, "we have lost our ability to imagine." But ingenious chair design disproves the poet and also the Count, unless he wouldn't consider design imaginative, and many don't because of its attachment to function, but then imagination itself as well as creativity may be attached to the human function, and they have been discredited, since overvalued and extravagantly praised, they fell from grace, and also because they spring from what can't be known, reasoned with, or controlled, the unconscious, a force of nature like that the 18th century named "genius." Of the Moderns, the Count preferred the Romantic poets, though he also liked William Burroughs and Jean Genet, but not nearly as much as the Sumerians and Greeks, and once reminisced about his memorable warrior summer of'68, recalling it with Wordsworth's phrase: the "perishable hours of life." Chairs don't perish in that sense, design doesn't either, history may, I think it may, I worry that it does, I'm not sure what happens when we forget to remember. Languages carry a history, which is often forgotten, but which also communicates itself in every word.

  The Zulu alphabet contains the same letters as the English, and in English the word "Zulu" is mostly deployed descriptively and with prejudice. A Zulu is a member of the Bantu people mainly inhabiting Zululand and Natal in South Africa
. The Zulus, since the 19th century, have been noted for their fiercely patriarchal social organization and aggressive defense of territory, first against the Boers in 1838 and sub sequently against the British in the Zulu Wars of 1879-1897. The Zulu noun a-ba-ntu means men or people, but in the Zulu language there are few short words, while there are many in English. My first introduction to Zulu was: "Don't behave like a Zulu," which was said to me by a teacher when I was seven, so I asked my mother what Zulu was, and she told me to look it up in the dictionary, where I learned it was a derogatory term for a black person in the U.S. At that time the only black people I knew were the women who worked in our house, the boy I roller-skated with sometimes, and Junior, who worked for my father and my uncle. A Zulu hat is a kind of straw hat with a wide brim, which I might wear under a hot sun, if I were alone, and astronomers often keep track of events according to standard solar time that corresponds to the Greenwich time zone. This is called G.M.T. (Greenwich Mean Time), U.T. (Universal Time), or Z (which is colloquially called Zulu Time). I want to ask the Count about Z Time.