Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  40.

  Remember a sexual experience from your past. Try to remember what your attitude toward the experience was while it was taking place. Were you excited? Were you nervous, bored, ambivalent? Did you feel rushed? Unprepared? Coerced? Were you too aggressive? Too passive? Now ask yourself if you still have the same attitude toward that sexual experience. If, for example, you remember feeling ambivalent, do you now feel nostalgic about the experience, and remember it as a cameo from the golden age of your erotic awakening?

  41.

  Watch a huge bee dive-bomb a flower. Notice the bee’s directness but also its precise, mannered choreography—the fussiness of its approach to the flower. Notice the bee’s ADD, its tendency to lose interest in a flower it had just a moment ago adored. Do you consider the insect a benighted creature, subject to compelled behaviors? Or do you consider this bee a paragon of a body at one with its destiny? Does fear of bees prevent you from trying this thought experiment? Take a moment to consider the bee’s predations from the flower’s point of view. Does the flower welcome or tolerate the bee’s visit? Is the flower destined to permit random invasions? Is the flower a lesser creature—merely a vessel, a landing site, a fecund ornament? Was your recent conduct floral or beelike? If you have behaved like a bee, try, for a day (or even just for an hour), to assume the flower’s mode.

  42.

  Do you consider every housefly you’ve greeted in your life to be essentially the same fly, or variations on the same fly, or do you grant each fly its own identity? If a fly happens to be buzzing in your vicinity as you read this paragraph, get a flyswatter or a rolled-up newspaper and kill the fly. Now contemplate the dead insect. Does it represent a unique loss or a generic absence? Has the grand total of fly consciousness in the universe diminished or remained the same? If there happens to be more than one fly buzzing around you as you read this paragraph, try this time not to kill the flies, and simply to notice (or even to enjoy) their aerial voyage. Ask yourself whether each fly has an identical drop of fly consciousness, or whether the flies lack consciousness and are analogous to our toes and fingers. Your big left toe does not have a consciousness separate from your big right toe. Or does it? Does each of your two big toes (assuming you have two feet, which is not a universal condition) possess a differentiated will, a separate mission, a distinct claim on a beneficent God’s attention? Would you wish to be cruel to your toes, and to say, in their presence, I prefer the left toe, or I prefer the right? Is it not of paramount importance to act equitably toward both toes, to let each toe pursue its own course and enjoy its own sensations, and to be entitled to call its sensations mine?

  43.

  I’m waiting in line at the sandwich shop. I’m in a good mood. The government is shut down today but the post office is still open. It’s LA weather in October in New York: unseasonably sunny and warm. A woman holding a baby boy has ordered a sandwich and is now departing. In a burst of kindness I get out of line to help the woman by opening the door. She says, “Thank you.” The baby smiles at me. Meanwhile, the man who had been waiting in line behind me—he looks like a fashion model—has silently glided over and stolen my place. I gently try to reinsert myself into line, in the same position I’d been standing earlier, before I’d absented myself generously to help the mother and child. The fashion model seems unaware of my existence. I am filled with anger at this arriviste, and torn between rival options. Should I say, “Excuse me, this was my place in line”? Should I cede my former station to him? I refuse to capitulate. He gradually gets the message and allows me to reclaim the position I’d earlier staked out. But I don’t know what to do with my excess rage at this fashion model who took over my place in line without looking directly at me to acknowledge my presence. He simply stepped right over where my body had formerly been. Later I might cut this paragraph, because it doesn’t give advice; it merely complains. To this complaint, there are no solutions. Nor is there a solution to the rage I feel when I see another man in line allow his pet dog to lift its paws onto the counter—where the sandwiches will be placed—and scrape the countertop and nearly lick it. I happen to be friends with that man, the man with the dog who is invading the countertop with dog scratches and dog tongue. I could say to this man, my friend, “Excuse me, but you should prevent your dog from licking and scratching the counter where human beings place their sandwiches.” You see that my emotions, if I allow them free rein, lead toward anarchy, disillusionment, rudeness, alienation, fines, fistfights, name-calling, and, possibly, prison.

  (2017)

  ODD SECRETS OF THE LINE

  1.

  “Strive for passive-aggressive ekphrasis,” I cautioned myself, wishing to avoid what responsible critics call a coherent argument. (As Rosalind Krauss writes in The Optical Unconscious, “Of course, it’s easy enough to laugh at Ruskin. The most analytic mind in Europe did not even know how to frame a coherent argument.”)

  I planned to turn my back on argument; but then I changed my mind. Taking an embarrassingly old-fashioned position, I decided to focus on the line. Huge differences separate the artist’s line and the poet’s, but I decided to lump them together and to speak as the line’s prophet, its infatuated scribe. The line, I vowed to assert, represents the unerring rightness of the hand’s will. (How Germanic!) I’d lump together the line and the gesture, the curved and the straight, the thick and the thin, the obelisk and the curlicue, the outline and the internal scratch, the smear and the indentation, the fold and the crease, the wiggling perimeter and the frottage-induced rivulet. I’d lump together every line I’d ever seen and loved, whether Ezra Pound’s or Louise Bourgeois’s, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s or Mina Loy’s, Michelangelo’s or Chloe Piene’s, Adrian Piper’s or Charles Olson’s, Anne Sexton’s or Jean Dubuffet’s. I decided to feed my appetite for hasty summation on the line’s ample (and not yet funeral) meats, with the aim of inspiring writers and artists to make their lines more strange, more self-confident, more wandering, more meager, more resolute in refusal and adhesion. I decided to lump together the poetic line and the drawn or painted or photographed line, not because I insisted that every difference vanish, but because I wanted to approach more closely what I love—the line, both as a measure of duration (iambic pentameter) and as a mark of charcoal traveling a specific itinerary, intended or accidental, across an acid-eaten page.

  The line, beyond my power to summarize, matches Gertrude Stein’s ideal cow, her license to explore the continuous present of composition, whether with a gerund, a past participle, or a grazing finger. The line, never a liar, never “bad” or “good,” rises before me as a tactile utopia, an event that you, as a human being, can manufacture, if only through intensive wish and a 3B pencil.

  My statements, elementary, are political exhortations, part of a gradually assembling platform of art activism, whose final contours I hope will exceed the reach of the Situationists; don’t let the simplicity of my statements deceive you, or prevent you from estimating, at full value, my communitarian enthroning of the line-making impulse as a heaven we can occupy today.

  Ink, paint, graphite, food, sewage: these substances make lines. The line begins and ends; its end (like any trickster’s or saint’s) recapitulates its beginning. The line lacks a genuine middle; or maybe its middle is muddled. Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky divided lines into several categories. In capricious acts of faux-systematization, they created line-drunk taxonomies. Klee and Kandinsky made those generalizations early in the twentieth century, a good time for making grand claims. Now, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, one hundred years after Kandinsky helped invent abstract painting, one hundred years after the Armory Show, we can’t surrender to spartan hypotheses, but we face a political and historical predicament in which very simple statements may be the only sane thing we can offer.

  A different, more labyrinthian version of this essay might discuss a certain Picasso painting that, like a drawing, consists of merely a few lines—lines inscribed not only for the
information they convey, but also (presumably) for the sensation of pleasure, mastery, pride, or release that the making of the line afforded Picasso’s hand and soul. Maria Callas, in an interview, used the word soul to describe a singer’s process of intense listening. Soul, not the ideal word, mystifies. The first thing I learned in college was to stop mystifying. Most of my papers, however, performed stealth acts of mystification. I mystified anything I could get my hands on. Mircea Eliade’s notion of “sacred time” inspired my collegiate mystifications. No one talks any more about Eliade. Smart people still occasionally talk about Gaston Bachelard—timidly. They feel the need to apologize for Bachelard, because he mystified rooms, corners, nooks, attics, thresholds, closets.

  André Masson’s lines prefigure Jackson Pollock’s—if we believe that art history moves forward rather than in circles, a retrograde rondo that Alexander Nagel sketches in his book Medieval Modern. Masson, a mystifier, made automatic drawings that don’t look very automatic. Masson suffered a severe wound in the First World War. I don’t know the nature of his wound. Perhaps it resembled other major masculine aesthetic wounds—Henry James’s, Ernest Hemingway’s, Guillaume Apollinaire’s. Major modernist wounds, all of them. Masson’s wound might have made him a mystifier.

  Egon Schiele was not a mystifier. And yet observe his final (or nearly final) drawing, which depicts his wife, Edith, the night before she died, just two or three days before Egon himself perished; this ultimate drawing, like a perfume atomizer, mystifies. His lines mystify wife, mystify life, mystify the artist’s role as humble servant of truth. He renders her nose accurately—quasi-photographically—but also mystifies it. When I copied the drawing, my hand a yearning imitator’s, I clumsily enlarged her features. I turned her quasi-Roman nose into a Jewish nose.

  Egon Schiele’s line, unlike an amateur’s, forgets to fail. His line often captures the look of perversion, but to call his line “perverted” performs a back-alley mystification job on it.

  A few years ago, an art critic accused me of avoiding argument. That insult contained a grain of truth. I pretend to avoid argument, or to bury it in a flood of verbal ornamentation. I need to hide my argument—or hide from myself its very existence—because random details restore my birthright optimism, while strict argument fastens me to an electric chair. I avoid argument because I don’t want to get into fights. But maybe, now, if I talk about the line only in the most general terms, with few references to literature or art, then I intend to pick a fight over the right—anyone’s—not just to a line, but to the line; as if every line secretly enlists in a larger—global?—network of lines; as if the line, made with pen, brush, or hand, occupies a larger fiefdom than a single person dared possess.

  2.

  Listen to Emily Dickinson, in 1860, delineate her encounter with the other side:

  Just lost, when I was saved!

  Just felt the world go by!

  Just girt me for the onset with Eternity,

  When breath blew back,

  And on the other side

  I heard recede the disappointed tide!

  Therefore, as One returned, I feel,

  Odd secrets of the line to tell!

  When Dickinson limned her almost-encounter, her aborted divine audience, her coitus interruptus with the void, she described the information she came back to report as “odd” and “secret.” She won’t actually deliver the news in the poem; she’ll only do a feint—a mummery—of delivery. Full disclosure will happen elsewhere, outside the poem. Delivery will happen “next time,” after she has prepared herself for numinous audition. Delivery will happen after she dies, when her poems, delayed for lack of sufficient postage, finally achieve transmission. She’ll need to wait until her right, odd moment arrives—a moment that remains entirely promise. In place of tale-telling, she subsists on a triumphant diet of braggart exclamation, confessing the presence of a full knowledge she lacks the liberty to disclose.

  She compares her predicament, as witness, to that of “Some Sailor, skirting foreign shores.” The Sailor doesn’t wear skirts, but then why do this metaphorical mariner’s navigations qualify as “skirting,” a process affiliated with feline, undercover acts of sabotage and refusal? Dickinson also compares herself to “Some pale Reporter, from the awful doors / Before the Seal!” We won’t get lost in ruminations, now, about the “Seal,” but we will pause on the word pale; we will ask if this Reporter’s pallor indicates racial whiteness (the line to which she refers might be the Mason-Dixon Line or the color line), the blood-drained face of terror, or familiarity with a reportorial turf legendarily known, like Siberia, as “beyond the pale.”

  Dickinson’s declarations occur in verse lines. Critics have questioned the exact nature of Dickinson’s lines, and whether their arrangement on the published page reflects her intended choreography. But let’s assume, for the moment, that she intended to write in lines. At least once, she uses the word line to describe the incremental stations of a poem’s flight down a page. In August 1862, she wrote to her aesthetic confidante T. W. Higginson, “I marked a line in One Verse—because I met it after I made it—and never consciously touch a paint, mixed by another person—”

  I feel preternatural curiosity about what makes a person choose to tumble out her thoughts in lines, measured or unmeasured, rather than in the stately and functional, if pedestrian, equipage of prose sentences and paragraphs. We already know that the distinction between writing in verse lines and writing in prose has philosophical legs; in a Shakespeare play, when a character speaks prose, rather than verse, we surmise differences in dignity, station, seriousness, and orderliness.

  The question “Why did Dickinson write in lines?” hides a swarm of nearby questions. In a letter, when Dickinson moves from prose to poem, what changes occur in the atmosphere? Can we always alter the humidity by shifting from unlineated prose to lineated poetry? When we enter the “line,” do we sink into a sonic chamber of echoes and murmurs, an intertext that, like a cathedral, whether in Canterbury or in Cleveland, occupies a metaphysical location always the same? When, as writer or reader, you enter the poetic line, do you stumble on a force field of cohabitations resembling Stéphane Mallarmé’s or Edmond Jabès’s postulated “Book,” a sumptuous plenum transcending individual signature? Does the line’s size—a vast circus tent where “the onset with Eternity” always almost happens but never clicks permanently into gear—exceed Dickinson’s measured plot of space, an avowedly puny cubicle?

  The term online—the internet—signals a Dickinsonian state of potentially rapturous or engulfing presentness-to-all-visitations. When she writes a poetic line, or places herself in the posture of readiness to write a poetic line, she rises, in our contemporary, electronic sense, to “online” status: available, receptive, projective.

  The poetic line, a grave and timeless portal, requires a very simple password. Dickinson concocted her password—irrevocable, unhackable—from metrical and orthographical materials. By writing a line that has a family resemblance, however odd, to iambic pulse (whether trimeter, tetrameter, or pentameter), she signed on. Let us therefore not underestimate the serious stakes of stepping into the sanctuary—live, wired, hooked up—of the poetic line, literally the same line your aesthetic foremothers and forefathers used, the same line your enemy uses, the same line the dead poets still use, the same line the future’s poets will use, if we can count on a future.

  I’m still addicted to Mircea Eliade’s sacred time. I treat the line as an ethical or phenomenological or faith-based category, like the Crucifixion, that re-manifests itself in every telling, in every rehearsal, in every botched, fallen, provincial simulation. A bad poetic line in Boise is still the line, the very line whose odd secrets Dickinson was entrusted to tell, though her gait was, supposedly, too spasmodic to get the message clearly out.

  3.

  Will my blood-sugar level permit me to pay attention, briefly, to a painting by Picasso, in my principled effort to defend the line—my birthr
ight, and yours, too—as zone of blissful possibility?

  I don’t want to call the line “phallic.” I don’t want to call the line “not phallic.” And so I won’t pay attention to exegetical traditions that preach the line’s code-traversed identity, its lack of freedom to espouse whim; instead, I’ll side with those who claim that a line can do anything—lift Lazarus, undo meaning—as well as those who claim that a line can do next to nothing. Even a fat line, like Picasso’s in his plump-line phases, makes minimal impact on the mind, or on a mind not eager to be marked by trespassing footprints.

  It embarrasses me, however, to talk about Picasso, especially after looking through the catalogue from his 2012 show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, an exhibition which focused exclusively on works that eschewed color in favor of white, black, and gray; whenever I look through this catalogue, in search of a painting or drawing that will exemplify Picasso’s identity as he who puts in motion the line’s noblest possibilities, the image I find usually portrays a woman or a man. These days I favor Picasso’s neoclassical works, which recall Ingres by rendering, with a serenely gracile or bloated refinement, bodies and faces mostly through outline: a contour drawing. And when I discover, embarrassed, that the most beautifully Ingres-esque Picasso works depict men and women, the women sometimes nude, the men less frequently nude, I grow afraid that this circumstantial coupling of Ingres-esque contour line with “man” or “woman” tendentiously argues for a symbolic equivalence between line (as formal tool) and codified gender, as if, because line in Picasso’s hands does such a good job of creating the sign of “man” or “woman,” then line exists merely to elucidate gender, rather than to serve as wily double agent.