by Greg Baxter
We ruined the romantic night of a couple beside us. It may have seemed to them impossible that such a conversation could take place. For most of this time I was shrinking into myself, since Fielding had not adjusted to the European volume of speaking. It was only when the guy said something to insult us, not to us but at us, that I joined the conversation with vehemence.
After dinner, we had a few pints – or rather I had pints and Fielding had nothing. He wanted wine, so we went to La Cave. At the time I was living without sleep, and I felt that I was tempting a catastrophic medical condition, and this gave me great, if ephemeral, vitality. I was finally living my philosophy, and this rare predicament demanded loyalty. As much as Fielding had come for his own adventure – he was visiting a friend in Paris the week after – I knew that his father and my father had sent him out of concern for my health.
I begged to know whether or not he liked my writing. He refused to answer: to him the question of liking something was the stuff of an irrational mind. An essay was sound or unsound: it had no other value. He could perform an exegesis, but not a review. I was emotionally battered then, and I nearly wept: I felt sick for caring – my whole premise was that I was past caring. I told him I would quit; I would kill myself. He seemed bored and annoyed by my emotion, and gracefully said he had only wanted a debate, but I was not up for one. We changed the subject, drank the wine and went home. When we got there, Elísabet was finishing her novel on my computer in the dining room. Nothing stopped that woman from creation – she was like some mythic mother figure, birthing new ideas and creatures at the speed of light. I drank some vodka and Fielding had a glass of water, and we all talked for an hour. I felt I might die from frustration.
Fielding’s parents always hope I might provide him with some direction when we are together, and as much as he’d been sent to see that I was all right, I also knew his father wanted me to knock some sense into him. The truth is that I felt nothing for his life, and his assuredness, but envy, and I had nothing but admiration for his commitment. He wants nothing in life but to be given space to think, and record his thoughts, and edit them. He is given a small monthly allowance by his father and rents out rooms in a house his father bought for him. He demands absolute silence from his housemates. They are not allowed to play music, and there is no television. He has gone through many phases: athlete, hunter, fiction writer, monk, high-dollar rug salesman. But his most recent incarnation – philosopher – seems to suit him. I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and graduate student – at the University of Texas and the University of Sussex. I also aped as a philosopher. If I read Hegel, I believed and wrote like Hegel. It was the same with Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Plato, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin. In philosophy, I was always a reactionary: at Texas, surrounded by conservative students, I became a Marxist and kept a copy of the Communist Manifesto (in German) in my back pocket. When I got to Sussex, everyone was a radical, so I threw myself into American pragmatism and told people I was a libertarian and capitalist.
Since I am not who I am, I must embrace the form that suits me best. Fielding’s seven-page essay took him twelve months to write. He was tackling an unimaginably large problem with unimaginable concision. I was finishing my essays as fast as I could type them. He spent a year making sure there was nothing dispensable in his writing, and that nothing was repeated. I repeat myself with recklessness, and since I am the subject, and I am dispensable, there is nothing I say that is essential. He is precise; I am erratic. He refines; I pollute.
I went to the West for a few days after my thirty-fourth birthday. It was the first week of September, and a slow fortnight of teaching before the heavy load of autumn began. I had just learned I was going to be a father – Clare was almost two months pregnant – and there was, and still is (it is October now), a dust cloud in my head from the explosion of that discovery. I have no thoughts that feel right, or if they do, minutes later I’m ashamed of them. I decided I would like to buy a large German sedan, for instance, with an excellent crash rating and leather seats. I decided I would like to live in the country. I decided I wanted another child, maybe another two, with Clare, as soon as possible. She let me discuss these things out loud with myself. And she did not seem too disappointed when I reversed them, only amused. At that time all she could do was sleep and rub her belly: she was starting to put on weight from eating the whole time, but it was good weight and she looked beautiful. Her breasts were large and robust. I groped and sucked them relentlessly.
We stayed just outside Letterfrack, in a white cottage with a red door and skylights in the roof. When we arrived, Clare immediately rearranged the furniture so that the couch was in front of the fire, and fell asleep with a plate of bread in her lap. I felt that I had some job to do, some responsibility. I made sure the fire would blaze. I unpacked the groceries. Nothing else needed to be done. I read from a few of the books I’d brought with me, but I was not in the mood to sit still. I walked outside to take pictures of the landscape with my phone – the inlet, the little road, and Bengooria, the small mountain that stood over us to the east.
The first two days were warm and sunny. This slightly disappointed me: I had hoped for something grey and violent, so that the windows would rattle, and the front door would creak on its hinges, and threaten to blow open – the kind of elements that make you feel that civilization is impossible to reach. Instead I could perch on the fence post outside with a coffee, aim my face into the sun, and watch the traffic go by.
Bengooria is not terrifically imposing – one is never really in its shadow – but it is unique among hills in the vicinity. The English name, Diamond Hill, is fitting: the ground rises up around it, green, tan, rolling, until it shoots up in dramatic grey rock. And when the sun hits it, parts of it go white, so that it could, if you were trying to come up with a name, resemble a dirty crystal. I have a tendency to accept new sights – especially the sublime – as new mythologies in me. The feeling is not exactly articulable; sometimes you feel a thousand years old, sometimes you feel that you are home in an unfamiliar place: it is like remembering, but there is nothing to remember. Sometimes you sense that the earth could tell you stories, that a stone might suddenly shout, You’re standing on top of me! or that if you waved a magic wand, all the mountains and trees would reveal themselves as ancient gods and kings and begin to wage war with each other. I did not know what I thought of Bengooria, but it was alone, rather pretty, and exposed, and seemed to draw fascination out of me.
In the stack of books I brought with me, the one I most looked forward to reading was a collection of essays by Tim Robinson, who has spent the past twenty years writing about, and mapping, Connemara. I am tempted, always, to make much of landscape, and to go on about it as though I invented it. But to be here, and considering landscapes, is to be doubly on Robinson’s turf. Over the first twenty-four hours, I studied the sight of Bengooria so that I might come up with a word for it, one bright shining word, small but hard as a stone [Goyen]. It was on the second day, Thursday, that, reading Robinson, I came across his attempts to name a sight, from the topmost peak of Errisbeg, where Roundstone Bog becomes visible as a whole for the first time, stretching away to its indeterminate limits, which are often blurred with haze …
I have tried several times to describe this landscape. Not long ago I went up to look at it again from the top of Errisbeg, trying to find an adjective for it, and the one that came spontaneously to mind was ‘frightened’. For a moment I felt I had identified the force that drives the expansion, the self-scattering, of the universe: fear. The outline of each lake bristles with projections, every one of which is itself spiny; they stab at one another blindly. There is a fractal torment energizing the scene, which is even more marked in aerial photographs, in which the lakes seem to fly apart like shrapnel. Of course all this is purely subjective and projective: I was the only frightened element of the situation.
I quote this at length not only because I wan
t to compare his predicament with my own, but because I like it so much. That is all that matters now; I am compelled to write it down again, here and in my thoughts, so that I can appreciate what it might have felt like to write. There was a time in my life when I would not have done so, because I would’ve been too ashamed not to have done my little mountain more justice than his bog. I might simply have reprocessed the scene and called it my own, or called it inadequate because I was jealous.
There is nothing to be seen in Connemara that Robinson has not studied; no inch of earth he has not hiked across. I know of no project like his – you would struggle to name it. I teach a few of his essays. His mission is, deceptively, a humble one, one that has no glory-seeking: he digs in the earth for stories; he walks; he talks to locals; he has arguments with himself. Like Augustine, he works from awe and modesty.
I do not fear influence; I fear redundancy. In Connemara I keep Robinson’s mastery of the place near me. I learn how to observe what he observes. I learn how the landscape wears invisible dimensions: the geological forces, local mythology, the self, the historic. I learn how geography confers consciousness. I try to appreciate death. These things emerge in my mind as one entity, a mood, and if I sit very still I will have it all to myself.
The assumption I always make is that a few days away from the city, without the burden of work, will unleash great productivity in me, or that something I may have struggled with will become illuminated. I feel that I am bound for deep peace. No matter how many times I disprove this theory, I am seduced by it. On the morning of the second day, while Clare slept, I put on some warm and comfortable clothes, set up my computer, made a pot of coffee, and opened a blank page. After twenty minutes, I found myself cutting my toenails. I like to cut an edge and pull slowly across, revealing some of the quick, and when I am done with all ten, I air them out, and press them against the floor. After an hour, with nothing done at all, not a sentence, I was sitting on the floor in a corner, wishing I were dead. A little while later I began – as I do when all hope of writing is lost – hitting myself on the forehead with a closed fist. It is a punishment, but also an attempt to exhaust myself. I have always been like this. The fact that I cannot rid myself of such panic – such vanity – is as distressing as the panic itself, as distressing as the fact that it bothered me that Fielding did not like my essays, even though I proclaimed, in those essays, not to care if they were liked or not. It does me no good, I suppose, to declare that my past is behind me; but I like to think that if I confess, I will be the only one left who believes my own lies. Publicly I have a high opinion of myself. One learns this behaviour – this self-deception – or else one sleeps on the street. But privately I think there is no one more abject, more devious, more insecure, more envious, more desiring of approbation. These are my weaknesses, and in my day-to-day life I conceal them, because I cannot defeat them. I am as much my weaknesses as I am my strengths. But to conceal them here, to myself, would be insanity. So I betray them. I hand them over like spies. I give up their identities. I have them running through the streets of a great dark city. They are chased down blind alleys and assassinated. I do not write because I am honest; I write because I am dishonest.
On the Friday, Clare rose early to leave for a wedding in Westport. I had that day and most of the next to myself, and no car. I could do nothing in the cottage. I read a few more of Robinson’s essays, but not deeply. The two dozen books I’d brought, as though I were going away for six months, became a distraction. I had a late lunch. I read and marked some stories by students. I edited something I’d been writing.
The weather, after a sunny and warm Wednesday and Thursday, was slightly melancholy, and the forecast was for heavy wind and rain. If I was ever going to walk up Bengooria, it was then or never, and I had already left it late – Letterfrack National Park closed at five-thirty, and the next day Clare and I were driving to Roundstone, because the Robinson essays I’d read were about that part of Connemara. To get to the hill I had to walk along a narrow, bending road with no hard shoulder, no way to escape traffic, and it was probably the peril of the road that had delayed me. I set out. I brought the essays and stories I was teaching in class the next week – Montaigne’s ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’ and Bruno Schulz’s ‘The Street of Crocodiles’ and ‘Cockroaches’. It was about three p.m.
If two cars had come speeding from opposite directions, I would’ve got squashed. I hurried around bends, and when cars did come, I hopped into the other lane, or jumped on a stone wall overlooking a steep drop, or into a thicket. The wind was already gusting, but the rain hadn’t started. Over the sea, to the west, the sky was bright and clear. Behind Bengooria, it was black.
No cars passed, either coming or going, on the long, but not perilous, walk from the main road to the park entrance. I was dressed in jeans and a jacket, and some hiking boots I bought three years ago and had worn once or twice. I wanted to get as high as possible in the short time I had, so I set a brisk pace, and overtook an older, German-speaking couple. I reached the lower summit – to call it this is misleading; it’s only a point at which the real hike begins – just before five. There was no way I would get to the top, and anyway, the wind was now shrieking down the mountaintop, and the black clouds were approaching. Rain began to fall. Another group of tourists had reached the lower summit from the opposite direction. They were dressed in waterproof hiking gear, and laughed at me in Italian – I was already getting soaked. I stopped for a moment to gather the view. I remember the sky was still clear above the sea, and the water was like a large flash of light. Behind me, now that I was very close, the rock peak of Bengooria seemed large indeed.
In Letterfrack, at a pub, I had a few pints and seafood chowder. When I go to the West, I only eat seafood chowder: I don’t mind that I look like a fool. I also drink Guinness. I embrace the tourist in me. While I sat, I read and annotated the Schulz piece. Schulz wrote the stories in The Street of Crocodiles as love letters. I think that is magnificent, and that is how I read them. That is how I shall write stories, if I ever go back to fiction. Then I read the Montaigne, as much as I could before I had to return. I had to leave before it got dark, or I’d be killed on the road for certain. Clare had given me a journal for my birthday, and I filled ten pages of it, copying lines from the essay. Montaigne’s humility is infinite. I write his lines not to study or admire, not necessarily, but to tear the last sinews of self-love from my body, to obliterate pretence, to give up ambition. And in that state my own thoughts flow toward nothing, carry nothing of significance, and go where they please.
On the walk back to the cottage, I stepped off the road to a beach of pebble and stone that ran alongside it. It seemed possible that it would bring me most of the way back. It was raining heavily, and nothing of the bright sky was left. I looked behind me: Bengooria was invisible. The water was choppy, swift, swelling. I could not help but think again of imminent fatherhood, but it was not the tide that made me think of it. It was simply the way the world constantly resists man’s attempt to make himself profound. I walked a few hundred metres down the beach. I saw a pier, another few hundred metres in the distance, where I could rejoin the road, but there the tide had come all the way in. There was no way I could scale the wall back. It was too steep and overgrown. I went all the way back to where I had stepped off the road.
9
I Saw a Dead Man on My Lunch Break
Tuesday morning, 14 October
I have been up since four a.m. The more tired I get, the less I want to close my eyes. I dug one of my favourite books out – I have no bookshelves, so I have stacked about two hundred books in seven or eight tall piles in my living room. Clare – who has moved in so we can save money – came up for a bowl of cereal, and each mouthful, to my tired mind, was like a bulldozer scooping up stones. This is someone who weathers my snoring, who is eating food for my child inside her. I feel monstrous for being annoyed. I went outside in the cold and closed the door. I observed my sleepy s
treet – still dark, still waiting for the clocks to change.
Tuesday night, 14 October
Everything I did today was substandard. I drove my Vespa without passion. I wrote the news without the slightest contempt for myself. My little class of top talents, which I finished teaching an hour ago, is bored. I sense that they hate me for boring them.
Wednesday morning, 15 October
I ate two very old bananas, grey on the outside but a little yellow on the inside, still, and drank some coffee. I had a cigarette on the terrace and read from a book a student gave me, Sartre’s What is Literature? My student has underlined and annotated the book with an energetic seriousness that suggests she thinks she’s actually having a conversation. As though she and Sartre are sitting in a café and he is saying these things and she is either nodding contemplatively or waving her hands at him in disgust.
Wednesday afternoon (the office), 15 October
Mary Anne, Nicola and I had a long lunch with wine. It was the first time Mary Anne has spent her lunch hour outside the office since she started ten months ago. Normally she gets soup from the place next door and goes right back to work. We went to a Tex-Mex place near Jervis Street. I ordered a cheeseburger, and the waiter had to run to the shops when I asked for mayonnaise and mustard. The thought of ketchup on a cheeseburger enrages me.