by Ben Lerner
“Let’s be sure to check in.” She laughed. “But this doesn’t get you out of writing the catalogue essay.” She had a big show coming up at a Chelsea gallery.
Several sidecars later we were saying something like a real goodbye. We were near the D stop on Grand Street, nobody out except the rats. She was meeting someone uptown and I was going home. It felt like her nails might break the skin on the back of my neck. It was the sexiest kiss in the history of independent film. I felt horrible descending the steps to the downtown platform because I knew I’d hardly ever see her again.
But when I walked onto the platform, there she was, waiting across the tracks for the uptown train. One or two other people waited far down the platform, a man in a hooded sweatshirt was passed out or had passed away on one of the wooden seats, but otherwise we were alone, having just said our passionate farewell, staring at each other’s ghost in the quiet tunnel. You know the embarrassing experience of saying goodbye to someone only to learn they’re walking in your direction, meaning the social exchange has to extend beyond its ritual closure, at which point there are no established mores to guide you? I’d ended things aboveground only to resume them below it, electrified rails charging the distance between us. She stared at me calmly and—involuntarily, idiotically, awkwardly—I waved and walked farther down the platform.
But wait: I had supplanted the closure of that kiss with a clumsy half wave that would resonate back through and color her memory of me; that couldn’t stand. I walked back toward her but now she was facing the tile wall, scanning a movie poster. I called her name not knowing what I planned to say and, to my surprise and confusion, she wouldn’t turn around; no way she couldn’t hear me unless there were earbuds I couldn’t see. Was she crying and didn’t want me to know? Was she angry? Was she expressing indifference or smoldering intensity? I could see the yellow light of a train deep in the tunnel to my left, rails beginning to shine as it approached. I sprinted up the stairs and down the uptown side; as the train roared into the station across the platform, I reached her, which meant it never happened, waking the next morning in the Institute for Totaled Art.
* * *
Dear Ben, I deleted, Thank you for your kind invitation to contribute work to the first issue of your journal and for enclosing a poem of your own. Did Bronk even have e-mail? Probably not. He died in 1999. There are advantages in being a neglected writer but one doesn’t want to enjoy them entirely without relief, I had paraphrased from a letter he sent to Charles Olson in the early sixties, and so you were kind to write. I am afraid I do not have any poems to send. Your letter prompted me to look over the notes I do have and trying to read my most recent effort I became aware how much tolerance and prepossession reading me at all requires. Does it please you to know how much I value your description of my poems, your appreciation of “Midsummer” especially, and the fact that they were given to you by Bernard, to whom I hope you will send my warm regards? It is good to know where one’s friends are in dark times. That last line didn’t sound like him at all.
Natali had mailed the copy of Bronk’s selected poems that I’d brought to the hospital back to me when Bernard was transferred to a rehab facility in Providence. It had a kind of aura now; in the margins were my illegible undergraduate notes and imitations in pencil, in addition to a series of coffee stains, small traces from a previous self in love with the nonexistent daughter of the couple to whom I’d eventually brought the volume as a kind of offering; now all those distances, real and fictive, were reflected in Bronk’s poetry, as though in some impossible mirror. I deleted:
I don’t know if I know how to read the poem of yours that you enclosed. Understand I am easily baffled. I remember when Cid Corman was printing my work in Origin, the magazine you mention as a kind of inspiration. Well, every time I saw the magazine I wondered who in the hell these people were and what in the name of God they were talking about. Except maybe Creeley. I would receive books with cordial letters from other contributors but I didn’t care anything about their books and I told them so which at the time I thought a coarse necessity. I was reacting to what I saw as the logrolling and mutual back scratching and pretending to like each other that made poetry like any other industry. One should not—no rather cannot as a practical matter—expect one poet often to genuinely like the work of another—not a contemporary’s. Even when we think we are writing to one another we are not writing for one another and so incomprehension is probably a necessity. We poets are not, as Oppen would say, coeval with each other, let alone our readers. It’s in this sense the “public” is right to think of poets as anachronisms. It’s one reason among others that I could never edit a magazine.
I looked around the apartment, thinking how, if I weren’t abandoning these letters, I might insert some physical particulars into them. I love how in Keats’s letters, for instance, he’s always describing his bodily position at the time of writing, the conditions of his room: “The fire is at its last click—I am sitting here with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated upon the carpet,” for instance. But what I perceived—rain on the skylight, a pigeon cooing beside the idle AC window unit, the smell of cilantro from downstairs, weak yellow of the cactus flower on the sill, beta-blocker beside my glass of water—I couldn’t see ascribing to Bronk in his large house in Hudson Falls.
I highlighted the rest of the letter in blue and hit delete. Somehow destroying the fabricated correspondence made it seem real; how many authors have burned their letters? Abandoning the book about forging my archive left me feeling as though I actually possessed one, as though I were protecting my past from the exposure of publication. Al Jazeera was streaming in a separate window: “Given the gutted institutions,” somebody said, “a true transition could take years.” Sirens in the distance. I tapped and then banged on the actual window to try to dislodge the stout-bodied passerine—I always felt like I was interacting with the same bird no matter where I encountered it in the city—but it only preened and repositioned itself a little. (I just Googled pigeon and learned they aren’t true passerines; along with doves, they constitute the distinct bird clade Columbidae.) “Now we turn to weather developments in the Caribbean.” After a while I left for campus to meet a student.
An unusually large cyclonic system with a warm core was approaching New York; it was still a few days away off the coast of Nicaragua. Soon the mayor would divide the city into zones, mandate evacuations from the lower-lying ones, and shut down the entire subway system. For the second time in a year, we were facing once-in-a-generation weather. Outside it was still just unseasonably warm, but there was a sense of imminent, man-made excitation in the air. “Here we go again,” a neighbor said to me, smiling, when he passed me on the street; he only seemed to acknowledge my presence when our world was threatening to end.
I was still on leave, but I kept in touch with graduate students whose manuscripts I was informally advising and two or three undergraduates who were working on honors theses of naïve ambition; otherwise I was making myself as scarce as possible. But I had to fill out some forms to fix my tax withholding in Human Resources anyway, so I decided to make a rare appearance on campus and meet one of the graduate poets, Calvin, in my office.
In the last few months, Calvin’s messages to me had become both more frequent and harder to parse. Instead of sending me revisions of poems or comments about the readings I’d suggested, his rambling e-mails had begun to include long passages about “the poetics of civilizational collapse” and “the radical eschatological horizon of revolutionary praxis.” Then they would switch suddenly back into a more mundane register as he complained quite sanely about tuition and fees and his sense that graduate school wasn’t making him a better writer. He also expressed a great deal of concern about my health, despite my having already insisted it was fine, because he’d read the story in The New Yorker.
I took the 2 to Flatbush, accepting, as I left the station, some gl
ossy apocalyptic literature from an elderly Jehovah’s Witness. There was more security at the front gate than usual and when I walked onto the lawn I realized there was an Occupy-style protest, a large circle in front of the hall where my office was housed. When I joined the group, however, I realized it wasn’t a protest, but rather an organizational meeting preparing for hurricane relief. I was impressed with how smoothly the leaderless meeting was run; by the time I broke off from the group to meet Calvin in my office, I’d volunteered to serve as a liaison between the campus and the co-op, helping them coordinate food drives; it was just a question of e-mail introductions. One of the most vocal students in the circle, Makada, had been in my undergraduate seminar the year before; I took a totally unjustified pride in her acumen and poise, which made me feel avuncular and old.
I felt that something was seriously wrong with Calvin as soon as I saw him sitting on the floor before my locked and dark office door, his back against it, a book open in his lap, but his eyes staring blankly at the opposite wall, his earbuds blasting something, but there was nothing unusual about encountering a student thus. When I greeted him and moved to unlock the door, there was a strange mixture of urgency and slowness of response, as if he had to keep reminding himself to react to external stimuli, but then reacted violently.
When I finally found the correct key and opened the door I was surprised by a sudden blast of wind, a few papers swirling in it. The large window facing the lawn was open some ten inches, had perhaps been that way for many months, although the computer and desk would prove to be dry, undamaged. As I took in my office from the doorway, I felt I was looking into the office of a dead man—a mildly musty smell, despite the open window; the disarranged papers, a leftover plastic Starbucks cup that had once held iced coffee, a small plastic bag of almonds, an open copy of the Cantos facedown on the desk: it felt like somebody had planned to be right back and never returned, dissected. I picked up the papers and hastily organized the desk, then turned on my computer, reassured by the Apple start-up chime, F-sharp major chord, a registered trademark.
My desk faced the wall; I swiveled around in my chair so I was facing Calvin in his; although we’d often sat in these positions before, he kept looking either at the screen or the window behind me with such fixed intensity that I couldn’t help but turn around to see what he was seeing (nothing). I asked him how he was.
“I’ve been good, I’ve been good,” he said.
I asked what he’d been doing, how his work was coming.
“It’s been amazing, amazing.” He was bouncing his right leg up and down rapidly, a habit I had, but which in him alarmed me. I suspected his energy had its origin in prescription amphetamines, which I had used, before my aortic diagnosis, semirecreationally.
“Did you read the O’Brien poems?”
“Man, I have been reading everything. Have been reading and not sleeping.” Adderall. Or, paradoxically, withdrawal from Adderall. He put a piece of gum in his mouth, and offered me some, which I accepted.
“What did you think of Metropole?” It was the O’Brien book we were due to discuss.
“You know how those poems just spider out, how those poems just spider out on the page?”
“Go on,” I said, unfamiliar with the phrase, which made me uneasy.
“How they can move in any direction, how you can read one line a thousand different ways, the syntax shifts as you go.” This was true, was often true of poems, but was particularly true of O’Brien’s work. I was relieved by the comment’s applicability, since I feared Calvin and I were in distinct universes. I said some things about the form of Metropole I thought he might find useful, and he took notes, head bent over a legal pad. But when I stopped talking, he kept writing.
“So has reading Metropole made you think any more about the prose poems at the center of your manuscript, how you might strategically disrupt your sentences, for instance?”
And writing.
“Calvin?” Finally he looked up from the paper and met my eyes. His were hazel, shining, although the shine I probably imagined. I felt a manic energy of my own, as if I’d had too much coffee.
“Do you see this?” he said, holding the pad up to me, which was now largely covered in a kind of microscript.
“You have bad handwriting,” I said.
“How the materiality of the writing destroys its sense, like we talked about in class. You start by writing and then you’re drawing. Or you start by reading and then you’re looking. Poetics of modal instability. Pushed past the point of collapse.”
I recommended a famous essay about the visual components of writing, in an attempt to reassimilate Calvin’s frightening energy to the academic. I swiveled around to the computer and searched an academic database to get the full citation. When I turned back around he was looking out the window the way Joan of Arc looks out of the painting. Was he being called?
“What kind of gum is this?” I asked.
It took him a while to look at me. He smiled. “Nicotine gum.” That’s why I was a little nauseated. It was strong. I didn’t spit it out: it was one of the few things connecting us.
“Are you quitting?”
“No, but my mom bought me a ton of this at Christmas.”
“How is stuff going beyond poetry?” I felt I could ask, after the mention of family.
“Well, you said once that we shouldn’t worry about our literary careers, should worry about being underwater.” I must have been joking around in class—half joking. “And in any new civilization you need those who have a sense of usable history and can reconstruct at least the basic concepts from science. Also there is the literalization of all literature because the sky is falling, if you know what I mean—that’s no longer just a phrase. A lot of people can’t handle it, how everything becomes hieroglyphic. I lost my girlfriend over that. Body without organs, for instance. I can swallow but there is a cost to swallowing in the sense that I don’t have the same kind of throat. That’s a metaphor but it has real effects, which is what she couldn’t understand. What’s tricky is you want to test it, take poison or whatever to show how you can absorb it, but you don’t know in that instance if it will be symbolic or spider out.”
The college did not have good psychiatric services. He was twenty-six; no one could force him to get help or even legally contact his parents, whoever they were.
“Nobody thinks we’ve been told the truth about Fukushima. Think about the milk you’re buying from a bodega, the hot particles there, I mean in addition to the hormones and what those do. There are rabbits being born there with three ears. The seas are poisoned. Look at this”—here he pulled his hair back, maybe to indicate his widow’s peak; I wasn’t sure—“that wasn’t there when I lived in Colorado. And I know that some of the bone mass in my jaw has thinned, can feel that when it clicks, but I can’t afford insurance. And now there is this storm, but who selects its name? You have a committee of like five guys in a situation room generating the names before they form. The World Meteorological Organization’s Regional Association IV Hurricane Committee—I looked it up. And ever since I looked it up I can’t get service on my phone. Every call is just dropped.”
“I agree it’s a crazy time,” I said. “But I think in times like these we have to try to stay connected to people. And we have to try to make our own days, despite all the chaos. We have to focus on feeling comfortable in our own skin, and we need to be open to getting help with that.” I was desperately trying to channel my parents.
“Exactly. And the skin is where a lot of the information is entering now. The pores. The pores are the poets of the skin. Who said that? And people try to seal them, silence them. I guess I did. My girlfriend would seal the pores on her face with egg whites and other shit and she’d have no idea where that was coming from, even if the companies say all natural or organic. Why do you think they sell so much makeup at airports? They don’t need to test them on animals; they have supercomputers that can basically feel pain at this point.
It’s like molecular caulking but you’re not going to keep particles out that way and you’re just shutting yourself off from the social. From what’s coming.”
“Calvin”—I spoke slowly—“a lot of the things you’re saying aren’t really making sense to me.” Was that true? “I get the feeling you’ve been really stressed. This is a stressful place, a stressful time. Sounds like you’re going through a breakup. I often feel really worn out when I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to write.” He looked at me with hurt surprise. “I’m wondering if you’re seeing anyone or maybe could consider seeing somebody. Just to talk through things.”
“Okay, wow. Wow. You want to pathologize me, too. I guess that’s your job. You represent the institution. The institution speaks through you. But let me ask you something”—I sized Calvin up physically; he was taller than I was, nearly as tall as the protester, but thin, almost lanky; I involuntarily visualized punching him in the throat if he attacked me—“can you look at me and say you think this,” and here he swept the air with his arm in a way that made “this” indicate something very large, “is going to continue? You deny there’s poison coming at us from a million points? Do you want to tell me these storms aren’t man-made, even if they’re now out of the government’s control? You don’t think the FBI is fucking with our phones? The language is just becoming marks, drawings of words, not words—you should know that as well as anybody. Or are you on drugs? Are you letting them regulate you?” He stood up so suddenly I flinched, then felt bad for flinching. “Sorry for wasting your time,” he said, maybe holding back tears, and stormed out of my office, forgetting his legal pad.
How would Whitman have tended such an illness, what gifts would he have distributed? No sides, no uniforms, no nation to be forged out of the suffering. I did the things one does, the institution speaking through me. I e-mailed my closest colleagues and the chair about my concerns and asked for advice. I e-mailed two students I thought were friends with Calvin and asked if they’d been in touch with him lately, without saying why. Then I e-mailed Calvin to say I was sorry if I’d upset him, but I was concerned about him and wanted to be of whatever help I could. I did not say that our society could not, in its present form, go on, or that I believed the storms were in part man-made, or that poison was coming at us from a million points, or that the FBI fucks with citizens’ phones, although all of that was to my mind plainly true. And that my mood was regulated by drugs. And that sometimes the language was a jumble of marks.