Yes, the past that grows as time contracts, and the past that catches up though the present takes off running (the past is retro but also avant-garde). And that’s why, he thinks, the true tragedy of people like Lord Jim or Jay Gatsby: bastards who insist on going back into the past to alter the present, not knowing that such a senseless and logicless colossal effort will end up breaking them beyond all repair. Wiser on his part, he says to himself, would have been to sit down and await the slow yet inevitable return of that boomerang through the years. Getting old. To recapitulate revising and rewriting with the help of what was thought to be oblivion, but, really, was understanding.
And, ah, many years had to pass before they would discover all those degenerative mental illnesses to which they attributed the gradual yet incessant destruction of the more or less recent memory (like waves lapping at the foundation of a castle) were just the opposite: they were the ever healthier past eating the weak and sickly present and spitting it up all over the future. Chewing it unhurriedly but unceasingly to thereby attain the privilege of not recognizing anything or anyone who hadn’t been around or passed through on that ever greater and longer yesterday. In that landscape full of details they didn’t know how to see or decode in their moment. Having the past present, yes, was nothing more than, finally, understanding everything that’d happened. Understanding it too late, when there was no tomorrow left and—tomorrow never knows—everything was the certainty of the pure dark night.
Like him and where he is now: being the light with the lights out; because there’s no desire left to read others and you read yourself better in the dark, blindly, without being able to see the enormity of what’s crashing down on top of you.
Here it comes
Look out! … ’Cause here she comes …
Here it is.
She’s coming down fast … Yes she is … Yes she is …
The night.
The night that, in an ideal order of things, you shouldn’t know but only imagine. Having never been there, because at night you were sleeping.
Another night that’s the same night as always, barely interrupted by those diurnal and blank pages that separate the chapters of a book.
And who was it who wrote that night is always a giant? Probably his favorite writer. Or one of them. Or one that once had been his favorite but not anymore. He has and had so many … The same thing happens with favorite authors as with girlfriends: at first, you want them to be identical to you, you want to write like them; then you come to understand, maybe when it’s already too late, that what most and best suits you isn’t an opposite but, yes, a complement (and so, sometimes, as a reader, you ended up getting married to and living happily ever after with books that, as a writer, you hated and only dreamed of leaving or murdering or being unfaithful to until death do you part). Someone who wasn’t an implacable mirror of your own defects but a container of strange virtues that could end up saving your life, distancing you from faults and vices and tics, completing you. When you’re no longer young, on the other hand, you fall in love with the books of others you realize you’ll never be able to write. An unrequited love and yet, even still, a warm-hearted love. A good friendship. A mature or resigned love that has already learned that a favorite writer always arises from the distant or nearby echo of other writers who were once or continue to be or—though he hasn’t read them yet, though he may never read them—will never now be but might have been his favorites. It’s all the same. For good or ill, writers on their own are never really alone: they’re accompanied by other writers who are also on their own. In the harsh dark, immersed in the impassioned and faltering and so-oft cited madness of art of the Henry-James variety. Another favorite of his, one who was and remains and will remain a favorite. A creator of great sleepless characters (those professional witnesses, those “reverberant” beings, who seem to absorb everything around them) and of long sentences that wake you up though some people said they put them to sleep. Either way: some and others working, doing what they can and giving what they have and all of that. Occupying small rooms in an immense tower. Looking out from one window to the next, waving to each other with a sad and complicit smile. Passing like ships in the night and …
In any case, if it were so, if that were true, once more, another model of the past to add to his list.
Another past to which now, as he writes it, he adds a † in the margin. The symbol that always precedes each of the entrances with no exit.
There inside.
In biji notebooks.
Many. Too many.
All devoted to sketches and never-developed plans.
He had notebooks devoted to the project of a novel about Gerald and Sara Murphy, the people who inspired the characters in Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, his own parents’ favorite novel. Photographs of the ones (the Murphys) and the others (his parents). The ones and the others stuffed into those robotic/automobilistic get-ups/costumes. The Murphys at a ball in Côte d’Azur; his parents, decades later in one of their nomadic ad spots with the Festival de Cannes as backdrop. Calling each other—like the Fitzgeralds—“Goofo.” Thinking, like the Fitzgeralds, that maybe it would be better to be siblings before being lovers and envying their children without having the slightest idea what it meant to be siblings, because his parents were both the kind of only-child who can’t accept competition or sharing. His parents fell in love with each other because, at last, they’d found someone else who loved themselves as much as they did.
He had so many notebooks about his sister Penelope and about the things that’d happened to her and about the things that she’d made happen to him. And, yes, Penelope was a great character, his best character. And she’d always hated him for it, because that’s what she was for him. And that was why Penelope had done something so terrible, so that, for once, not even he would dare put it in writing and tell others about it. Something that snatched sleep away from her forever and went running off with it, hooting with laughter, into the night, along a beach where a river ended so a sea could begin.
He had the inevitable notebook/chronogram containing his romantic history. Names and phone numbers (from the times when telephone numbers were written down) and places, starting out with the mystery of that girl who let herself fall into swimming pools and wrapping up with X throwing himself out a window. (X, who’d been the closest he’d ever come to a homosexual or bisexual experience or whatever it was: they got along well, they had a great time, they happened to be on one of those writers’ trips together and discovered they no longer believed in love, for that reason, they took on the role of the perfect and asexual couple, with the exception of one night when they were a bit drunk and tried something, but it turned out so choreographically awkward they decided not to repeat it. But they kept traveling together and saving money by sleeping in double rooms together, until one night X woke up and said, “I can’t take this anymore” and went over to the window with two, admirably graceful, little hops and a third hop that was slightly longer and definitive. X was a poet. Quite a good one, according to people who understood such things.)
He had a notebook dedicated to the attempt, as vain as it was in-vain, of transcribing a dream where, in a time when almost everyone had lost the ability to dream (an obvious expression of desire, a longing for everyone to suffer what he suffered), a kind of futuristic delirium melted into the memory of a brief yet (something he only came to understand years later) transcendent love episode with, in the background, one of his favorite Bob Dylan songs playing the whole time. He’d taken a lot of notes on that dream, rehearsed different variations of its trajectory (somewhere he’d read you can control your dreams if you put them in writing first and read them while falling asleep and thereby crossed a threshold, like someone passing from one room to another). The idea, he thought then, making use of the diffuse memory that ended up being the last of his waking dreams (he didn’t know it yet; but, yes, it’d been a dream about the end of dreams), was that of t
rying to write something in the International Language of Dreams, like a dialectical variation of something he’d once written about the International Language of the Dead:
† I.L.D. (International Language of the Dead) Short sentences. Referential mania. Selective memory. Words other people said so you repeat them later. Parentheses like the echo of something that happened or could’ve happened. Many Capital Letters. Footnotes like the part underneath, what gets packed away first. Stickers on the suitcases of celebrity tourists. Stamps on passports. Swimming pools of memory. Ellipses (three or more than three dots). Chemical syntax. Cut-up. We interrupt this program. Short Attention Span. Zapping. Kamikaze. Heil. Loops and Samplers. Volare. The suddenly comprehensible language of airports. Osmosis. What happens to people who don’t speak English when they listen to Bob Dylan or to those who don’t speak French when they listen to Serge Gainsbourg: somehow you understand them, as if the words were signals, like the mute eloquence of the signpost on the side of the road. The drawing of a rolling stone, the drawing of a made bed. Next exit. Emergency exit. Kilometers. Miles. Frequent flyer. Turbulence coming up. We’ll keep reporting. Back in our studios. Last minute: it has been proven that human beings keep functioning for an indeterminate amount of time after the death of the heart. The brain stops receiving blood, but it doesn’t know it, nobody tells it anything, it keeps thinking, dreaming it’s still alive.
Question: What’re the post-mortem thoughts of a brain like?
Answer: They’re like this:
He had other even more personal notebooks that recorded an accelerated and particular excursion of his to Switzerland, theoretically in name and memory of Vladimir Nabokov (including fragments of his books, reflections about the author, and the latecomer journal of another and again-frustrated attempt at reading, for the tenth or hundredth time, Ada, or Ardor, the only book of Nabokov’s that’d resisted him). Journey and journal justified by the celebration of a conference on Nabokov and an article about a particle accelerator for an airline magazine. Trajectory that, in reality, (im)practically, had ended up configuring the secret and crazed itinerary with the more unstable than stable objective and intention of destroying the entire planet.
He, also, had a desperate notebook where he collected the never-realized book projects of others, and whose authors included authorities from David Copperfield and T. S. Garp, to George Steiner, or to that loon Maximiliano Karma, the onetime comatose fiancé of his sister Penelope. And from this last one, fan of the noveau roman (that maneuver only for geniuses but so often poorly executed by those without talent), he’d stolen an idea he’d found interesting, enticing. And out of which he’d been able to squeeze a few pages. Scribbling them with handwriting that went up and down, throughout a couple hours, sitting in and never leaving the car of the Territet-Glion funicular, in the outskirts of Montreux. In that funicular that appeared in the plot of Tender Is the Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald and that, inevitably (that book and that author were his favorites), had been used by his parents as the stage for one of their many traveling ad spots.
Something, once again, with Vladimir Nabokov (and along the way rescuing the Russian from the clumsy and unworthy-of-his-person claws of “Maxi,” that loony and comatose and one-time husband of Penelope) and his relationship with an FBI agent. Really, about the relationship of the agent with the writer.
And he looks for it at the foot of his bed and finds it and reads his notes:
† He can see him because he can imagine him. He imagines he sees him: lying in his motel bed, awake and unable to sleep because of the hoarse, rasping voice of the air conditioner, so sick and tired of trailing VN and VN2.
Here it comes again, like a movie revealed by the camera obscura of his mind, projecting itself in the darkness, passing through those transparent things that are time and space. And, his eyes wide open and as if lidless, the blinds lowered, outside a dog is barking; in the next room, walls wallpapered with a harlequin motif, he feels and hears VN’s fierce and luminous peals of laughter and VN2’s dark and delicate chuckle and, at times, it’s as if they’re laughing at him, damn them.
Thus, then, his need not to hear them and to deny the present and to throw the whole thing in reverse. The past that doesn’t pass: the history of his ancestors arriving and founding Russian America (Русская Америка, trans. Russkaya Amerika, and, oh, how he savors the character of those Cyrillic characters, like a taste at once exotic and all his own) in the name and by the will of Peter the Great (Пётр Вели́кий, trans. Pyotr Velikiy), settling there from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century, places later known as Alaska and Hawaii and California, acquired in 1867 by the United States government, paying the colonists seven million dollars or what would be about one hundred and twenty-six million dollars today. All of them, corpulent men swathed in XL animal skins, guided by the pioneering star of Semyon Dezhnev and his drifting voyage and, later, the course set by the sails, crisp with frost, of the Sv Petr and the Sv Pavel, bows facing what for them was East and what would soon be the Far West for so many. The frozen vapor of those blazing men billowing from the small volcanoes of their bearded and orthodox mouths, letters catching like hooks in their throats, harpoons and seals and whales and bears of polar white.
Ivan Nijinski—renamed and translated as Johnny Dancer by his coworkers at the Bureau—counts and recounts all those snowy and frozen things while others count the warm whiteness of sheep, to shelter himself from the lupine and steppe-ish winds of insomnia. It does no good, of course; and yet he likes to imagine them anyway. To bolster himself with their bygone heroism and convince himself that his present mission—though not so epic—shares something of the grandeur of his ancestors’ trajectory.
Ivan Nijinski (a.k.a Johnny Dancer, agent 0471 of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI) following and observing the writer and professor Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков, C-File 6556567, error of agent John F. Noonan to be fixed in the file: Vladimar in place of Vladimir) and his wife Véra Yevesyevna Nabokov (Ве́ра Евсе́евна Набо́кова, C-File 6556566).
Why him? Because he is a descendent of Russians and because he speaks Russian and—above all—because of his perfect student aspect. Johnny Dancer doesn’t stand out among the other attendees of seminars in Russian Literature (Lit 311) at Cornell University, Ivy League, East Hill, Ithaca, New York (climate like that of the Yalta summers and Siberian winters).
Plus, Johnny Dancer likes to read and now, since he’s been going to the Russian’s classes, he likes it more and more; though not as much as that oh so nerdy roommate of his (Thomas Ruggles Pynchon) and his friends on whom a file should be opened immediately (David W. Shetzline and Richard George Fariña; check the latter’s Cuban connection).
That previous agent sent to this university by the FBI, on the other hand, had the unmistakable aspect of a not-so-secret or open-secret bureaucrat; he hadn’t the slightest idea who Vronski or Doctor Henry Jekyll were; and he was immediately unmasked by Vladimir Nabokov (VN from here onward) and invited to tea by Véra Nabokov (VN2 from here onward); both ending up asking him (as a joke? in earnest?) what the chances were of their son Dmitri (Дми́трий Влади́мирович Набо́ков, as yet without a case file, young man of a perpetually bored air) joining the Bureau in order to combat those “ever so shoddily written soviets and, along the way, those ever so shoddy soviet writers.”
Johnny Dancer, on the other hand, has had no direct contact with VN or VN2; but there are moments when he feels they know everything about him and, like right now, in the next room, they’re making fun of him (days before, the couple was conversing animatedly at a table in a highway café in very loud voices and, he’s sure he’s not imagining it, giving him sidelong glances and smiling mischievously and making comments about how much they’d someday like to travel to Machu Picchu so that, it scares him to think that’s what t
hey’re plotting, he’ll be forced to follow them astride the backs of llamas). Beyond all of this, there’s something that intrigues or, rather, fascinates him about the two of them: VN and VN2 seem to be a single entity split into two people (might that be true love, Johnny Dancer wonders, or a form of romantic psychosis? his parents never felt like that with each other), so happy to be together all the time. And he, Johnny Dancer, darting after them like one of those fish feeding off of what’s tossed overboard from those perfect and unsinkable vessels. VN and VN2 forcing him to follow them along the highways and byways of California and Oregon and Montana and Wyoming and Utah and Colorado and Nevada and Arizona and New Mexico. VN2 at the wheel of various automobiles (the only time VN, following VN2’s instructions, tries to drive that Buick or that Chevrolet Impala or that Plymouth in the wide open parking lot of a shopping mall, the Russian takes aim and fires and hits the only other automobile parked in the lot) along the chasms and plateaus of the Grand Canyon, of Oak Creek Canyon, of Palo Alto, of Estes Park, of Ardis Heights, of Longs Peak, of Rollinsville, of Telluride, of Glacier National Park, of West Yellowstone, of Taos, of Ashland, of Lone Peak, of New Zembla, of Mt. Carmel, of Afton, of Dubois, of Jackson, of Riverside.
The Dreamed Part Page 31