Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Also on this shelf, beside the Super 8 camera, sits a five-inch-tall porcelain replica of a toilet, my household’s half-assed homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, another outmoded yet still detonating innovation. Inside the tiny toilet’s bowl, a transparent glass marble dumbly rests (an instrument of divination, like the fortune tellers Benjamin finds in the arcades); and in the toilet’s chassis, where its plumbing should be, resides a bundle of 2-by-3½-inch cards—a handmade, nondenominational tarot deck, a gift from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who decorated them with rubber-stamped images of Proust, various bodhisattvas, a Virgin Mary, and other divinities.

  One night, my mother accidentally spilled sugar on the kitchen floor and told my stepfather to sweep it up. She called out for him: “Sugar Boss!” (Henceforth, in my private lexicon, “Sugar Boss” became his nickname.) Already stooped from Parkinson’s, he stooped even more to clean up the sugar, whether with a whisk broom or a wet paper towel. He could be boss of sugar, but he could not be boss of my mother’s life, her body, or even of his own body, over whose movements he had less and less control. Sugar Boss was sweet, passive, easily trampled, easily ignored, almost speechless. Sugar Boss, now a corpse, posed for me, during the last decade of his life, a nosological dilemma: was Parkinson’s the sole cause of his shocked, masochistic inanition, or did Parkinson’s continue a process already in motion?

  My aim, originally, in this essay, before Sugar Boss became a corpse, was to write about a kind of literature that follows in the wake of Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Joe Brainard, and more recent models—a literature that makes no bones about its corpse-like exhaustion and that recycles its depletion (its stance of no longer caring about literature) into a new, faux vitality, a vitalism composed of ellipses, blunt honesties, paratactical leaps, silent sulking fits, and a staged love affair with its own posthumousness. If literature’s foundation—what I’ve recently called “the jejune sequentiality” of onward-proceeding speech—has decayed, and we are now writing with invisible ink, could we learn to savor invisibility, and turn this deficit into a new source of energy? (Recurrent bad dream: in a taxi, I’m writing a poem or essay, but the ink turns out to be invisible.) Before Sugar Boss became a corpse, I’d hoped to issue a hortatory call for texts that might take blissful advantage of literature’s posthumousness and enjoy their deadness. I wanted to wake up my own language (or put it to sleep?) with a call perhaps anachronistically and credulously avant-garde; to start writing with more parsimony and less passion; to exhort myself to be cold, meager, scant, illegible, inaudible, and to find in that bleak zone a new repose, the repose of corpse pose; to play dead, in prose, before my time, thereby magically evading actual termination, like Scheherazade with her stories.

  My new idée fixe is asemic writing—writing that doesn’t use words or signs. (Classic examples are the drawings of Henri Michaux, author of Miserable Miracle, a mescaline journal in the spirit of Benjamin’s hashish investigations.) I’d love to pontificate on behalf of asemic writing—to give you asemic assignments—but I’m distracted by a graveyard in California, Home of Peace Cemetery, where, tomorrow, or soon thereafter, with or without my presence, my stepfather’s corpse will be interred in a small plot of land. Another family member is also buried there—my mother and father’s first child, a stillborn boy, nameless, delivered on February 17, 1955. This stillborn baby—who remains a focus of my mother’s ruminations—demotes me from my perch as second son. In fact, I am the third son, if we count the first child, who had no out-of-womb existence except as corpse.

  My mother, who suffered a stroke a few years ago, can speak cogently, but she has difficulty reading and writing; she sometimes write words, or groups of letters recognizable as words, though she is mostly unable to decipher them. Now she regards literature as a region from which she has been unfairly barred; and in this twilight world, largely without literature, except for the occasional audiobook, except for Moby-Dick and poems of Emily Dickinson and a few other CDs she plays without apparent pleasure, she engages in eddying rumination. My older brother, who is a cellist but in another life might have chosen to be an airplane pilot or a psychoanalyst, calls it “perseveration.” One subject on which she perseverates, as if making a poem out of thought itself, is the stillborn first child. (Earlier this year, with a rabbi, my mother planned a magical scheme. For a fee of $500, the rabbi offered to perform a ceremony to reclaim the stillborn child’s soul.) The great romances of my mother’s life have been with the disappeared, the out-of-reach, the forfeited; the stillborn child possesses an irrevocable reality and potential that we four surviving children lack. But now I’m stuck in the cul-de-sac of autobiographical recitation; I need a good dose of asemic writing to wake me up.

  I’d promised myself to end this essay with a guidebook on how to “go asemic”—how to deterritorialize literature, how to enfranchise the hand, or mouth, or mind—but the only suggestion I can think of is to urge you to find an old bathrobe, shirt, skirt, or towel, to lay it on the floor, and to write on it, perhaps with oil sticks, pastel crayons, markers, charcoal, graphite, or pen and ink; then, if you like, you could affix this item of former usefulness—now serving as papyrus—to a wall, with ordinary pushpins, and enjoy the spectacle.

  The stillborn child my mother delivered on February 17, 1955, is only theoretically my sibling. The stillborn child is my mother’s preoccupation, her pet corpse, her philosopher’s stone, her pact with the unfinished and the unfinishable; he is her grudge, and we are together a tapestry of grudges, intricate as a codex Bible. (She recently contemplated belated legal action against the hospital or doctor connected to that 1955 stillbirth.) Like my mother, I covet the unconsummated, the never-arrived; as in Delmore Schwartz’s story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” I pose as an Orphean voyeur who wants to turn back time to arrest an unfortunate or desired cataclysm at the instant before its fatal commencement.

  I was ushered into the realm of literature at an early age. When my mother took me to kindergarten the first day, she told the teacher, “Wayne’s a reader.” (I’ve mentioned this incident, a decade ago, in a long poem; repeating the story now is a self-cannibalizing act that leaves an aftertaste of shame.) I knew at the time that my mother was lying, exaggerating, or speaking her own wish. I wasn’t a reader, not yet; I could only eavesdrop and finger-paint. Any good fortune I’ve had, as someone granted a privileged and seemingly unhindered relation to literacy and to literature, I owe to the stillborn child, for if he’d survived his birth (I recall learning that he’d been strangled by the umbilical cord), I’d be the third son, not the second; in my life-as-fable, only my mother’s second son is the child destined to have a felicitous and unencumbered relation to literature.

  Does my relation to literature seem unencumbered? Do I seem a serene-tempered representative of literature’s pleasures, rather than its ordeals, curfews, and solitary confinements? Where did you get the idea that anyone’s relation to literature could come without fleshly exactions? When I write, I’m on the verge of physically exploding. Hands sweating, I’m hunched over, poised to attack or defend, like a raptor or a cowering dog. Language compels me to sweat, slaver, tremble, squeeze. My body is a bloody washcloth I’m systematically wringing. Sentences demand aviation: adrenaline and anxiety provide horsepower for my freakish, impossible flight. Caught in a schizogenic double bind, I use language to flee language. To write, I must burn imagination’s mansion to the ground, like Rochester’s Thornfield in Jane Eyre. The guilt and depletion I feel after writing is an arsonist’s hangover of remorse—an arsonist who knows that he has destroyed the last house on earth, or the last house that his paltry book of matches has the power to destroy.

  Is masochism the only gate into literature? I’ll end on a more cheerful, less self-flagellating note: here, as promised, are assignments for attempting a practice of asemic writing, the only closure—the only paradise—I can propose.

  Write a few phrases, without premeditation, on a large surface. Use
ink, acrylic paint, tempera, or any other wet medium. Then, take another surface, the same size, and press the two surfaces together, strongly enough to make an imprint. Separate the surfaces; observe the irregular, unscripted patterns that the original phrases imprinted upon the receiving membrane. Reorganize these islets and puddles into new shapes, not necessarily into letters or words. Or else form new words based on the puddles. We’ll call this sheet the puddle surface.

  If you are not satisfied with your puddle surface, repeat the process by writing, on a fresh surface, some new phrases, without premeditation, this time using a different color ink or paint than you’d used in the previous experiment. Then, press the newly inscribed surface onto your earlier puddle surface. Separate the two surfaces, and examine again your now-transfigured puddle surface. Doctor it, judiciously and quickly, by using a rag, paper towel, or piece of cardboard.

  Place random strips of nonstick masking tape—known as “artist’s tape”—on a large surface, whether paper, canvas, wood, cardboard, or whatever is easily obtained. Then, take a pastel crayon, or any other marker that makes a strong impression, and quickly write some phrases or sentences on the tape. Let your markings exceed the tape’s edges and impinge on the surrounding surface. Carefully peel off the masking tape. (You may discard the tape, or you may use it, later, for new experiments.) Observe, on the now untaped surface, what remains of the words you originally wrote. Using a different color marker or crayon, play with the areas formerly covered with tape. Don’t feel obliged to reform the asemic traces into words.

  Using a liquid medium, copy a preexisting text (for example, a paragraph from the newspaper or from an email) on a spacious surface. Spend no more than five or ten minutes copying. Then, impress this surface onto another surface, of equivalent size. Separate the surfaces; observe the results. (Your focus will be, I imagine, not on the original surface, which functions as a photographic negative, but on the second, imprinted sheet, the so-called puddle surface.) Now, using any medium, wet or dry, begin to improvise upon this puddle surface.

  Apply black gesso to a piece of wood. Let dry. Then, with a white pencil, start writing or scrawling on the primed wood. If you are not pleased with the results, cover or circle the parts you don’t like with an opaque liquid medium—say, cobalt blue Flashe vinyl paint.

  In the trash, or on the street, find some refuse elements that seem likely surfaces for your marks. Take these surfaces home, and apply black gesso to them. Let dry. Then, with a strong opaque color—red, green, lavender, pink—in whatever liquid medium you like, with finger, brush, popsicle stick, Q-tip, or any implement you desire, begin to write something very unimportant, something so trivial you would never impose it on a reader. When you lose interest, stop writing words, and let your hand move freely, and with whatever impulse strikes it, across the surface. If you don’t like the results of this scrawl, speed up the process, and move your hand more frenetically. If necessary, begin humming, mumbling, singing, cursing, or shouting, while moving your hand.

  (2013)

  BEAUTY PARLOR AT HOTEL DADA

  Toronto, Steam Works, impulse: man in sling.

  Today, read Marguerite Duras, Lol Stein.

  Maybe I should spend a telltale year typing up excerpts from my journals.

  Finished reading Peter Handke’s Thucydides reflections, short taut book.

  Downloaded Jacques Lacan’s essay on Duras (in French).

  Guy downstairs doing his perpetual spanking act, with the counterpoint of a dog’s barking.

  Saw, at galleries: Basquiat text paintings (Cheim and Read); John Tremblay paintings and Wayne Gonzales paintings (Paula Cooper); Betty Tompkins (FUCK paintings) at Mitchell Algus; Matt Connor’s debut show at Jeff Bailey.

  Dream: told a fiction writer (Tom Perrotta?) that I was working on Three Torsos—three truncated fictions.

  Malcolm Gladwell sitting next to us at this café.

  Tomorrow (Father’s Day) write about all the opera tunes I played manically tonight and how their libidinal surfeit made it impossible for me to concentrate on Cioran’s Tears and Saints.

  Fiddlehead ferns, intended for dinner, were rotten. They smelled (Steve said) “like a horse stable.”

  Dream: in a dark room I put John Ashbery’s hand (not unwilling but passive) on my cock and made him give me a hand job.

  K.’s chest hair, thickly encrusted, like a pizza’s charred bottom.

  White butterflies (moths?) enjoying each other’s presence and also the proximity of hyssop.

  Dream: slept in President Bush’s bed at the White House. Discovered he did yoga every morning, by himself.

  Sad not to be Greta Garbo. Sad not to be more experimental.

  In love with Zuco 103, rock band, Amsterdam/Brazil.

  Book idea: Beauty Parlor at Hotel Dada.

  _________

  Tanned guy who looked like a damaged Andalusian Bruce Springsteen, gap-toothed, watching a soccer game; a frizzy-haired woman who looked like Helen of Troy; at another table, Lenny from Of Mice and Men; and a more educated male companion, distantly Jewish, wearing silver wire-rims and eating yellow rice.

  The sound of this convent room’s window closing is like a cry of pain or irritation—a noise that someone with very long hair might make.

  I cope with boredom by scanning his body for erotic potential: small butt, in proper gray slacks.

  Dreamt last night that I didn’t give my address to Paul Newman, even though he was interested in me. He said that Joanne Woodward hadn’t paid attention to me until I said “It’s necessary to blow up your idiosyncrasies” (meaning exaggerate or amplify your oddness).

  Started reading a book about blind blues singers. Wrote down eleven French words I didn’t know.

  Dream: I tried (energetically) to explain to my mother the gay scene in Berlin.

  Small amounts of wind are disturbing or enlivening the remnant plants (weeds? corpses?) in our garden.

  Dream: buying wine with Eve Sedgwick—a meager selection at the wine shop, which was either in Brookline, Brooklyn, or the West Village (the Gold Coast).

  ______________

  I didn’t buy a blue down jacket because it was a woman’s size—and therefore the shoulders were too tight.

  Long ago, sitting behind Ashbery and Koch at a fussy organization’s poetry reading, I noticed the tension in Koch’s neck.

  Drinking jasmine tea and wearing my clumpy fag-butch retro-monster patent-leather construction boots.

  Dreamt I met my father in Vienna or Prague. We ate at a pancake shop.

  Listened to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert; Anna Moffo (I swear it’s her very first recording) singing “Là ci darem la mano” (probably from 1956’s Aix-en-Provence festival); Teresa Stich-Randall singing “Porgi amor” and “Dove sono” (applause after “Dove sono” suggests to me that the performance is also from 1956 Aix-en-Provence); Jan Peerce singing the Passover scene from La Juive; Robert Merrill and Dorothy Kirsten singing the death of Thaïs; Mary Garden singing “Depuis le jour”; Renata Tebaldi singing arias from Turandot, Manon Lescaut, and Butterfly. (Which proves: the past has been unfairly abandoned.)

  Listened also to Michèle Morgan (in French) reading children’s stories.

  He rubbed my feet while I read Borges. Borges bores me. That confession seems heretical.

  A soccer player said something sweetly conspiratorial about my orange-and-red sneakers.

  He smelled of cigarettes. I was shaving at the sink, and he was drying his hair and body with the automatic dryer.

  Started to watch Manon 70, starring Catherine Deneuve, made in ’68, when ’70 was the Ungaro-clad future.

  Want to read David’s anthology of essays that hover around the topic of public sex.

  She said, about my bare legs (I was wearing mid-calf pants), “They’re green.”

  Dream: my right hand and right shoulder (right, not night) froze as I tried to play my Fauré impromptu for a piano teacher—an old master, wearing just a
jock strap. He was part of a louche gay couple, pale and hairless. In Lamont Library a man was mopping the floor of a toilet stall. A guy named Lucky Bastard was applying for admission to CUNY or Princeton. C. stood up in the audience (she was volunteering for the admissions committee at Princeton), but she “spotted” her leotard with urine (pregnancy incontinence) and quickly sat down again.

  On Beniamino Gigli I feel a crush developing. I listen for his idiosyncrasies. Are they glottal peculiarities, or perversities of attack?

  Gilles Deleuze suggests that remembering and repeating are not absolutely opposites.

  Individual sentences may be choppy and sometimes repetitive, but through accumulation, the whole acquires a strange momentum and inevitability—even amid the deadness.

  I want to minimize the self-flagellation without omitting it altogether.

  Discipline myself in the near future to write another hypersexed novel in notebooks—a pornographic fantasy.

  My neck looked saggy and old tonight.

  This notebook’s tight pages encourage ellipsis and abbreviation.

  I will not exterminate the book.

  Bumped into Massimo Audiello, who said that Duncan Smith’s unpublished chef d’oeuvre was a long semiotic blow-by-blow analysis of the film Sunset Boulevard.

  Maybe Yves Sharp’s twin is a movie star, or Yves Sharp is convinced that this star is his twin, but the star won’t acknowledge the twinship.

  Clearly it’s fictional, because Yves Sharp doesn’t exist and therefore Caroline Kennedy couldn’t write him an email, mentioning her decision not to run for Senate . . .