Was dich umgliss
mit hehrster Pracht,
der Ehre Glanz,
des Ruhmes Macht,
an sie mein Herz zu hangen,
hielt mich der Wahn gefangen.
[Around thy head
in splendor bright,
were glorious rays
of fame and might,
by them my heart was blinded
and madness held me captive.]
She drew him.
He took. He bit into her . . .
. . . flooding memories object formation . . .
Tries to envelop him insect distinctness, creature thing twitch, involuted, encompass to field sky, making him child everything, it’s all all all, this feeling in them he must feel this feeling in them all through them, measure to the utmost grain, making him, making him know
Gives into her, she’s all laid out there like that, the length of her form looks up against him, smooth curves all running, flowing one another, like a river of her, reeling all her places, and driving she presses back and she wants him clutches she is trembles of him
The sharp angle of a shoulder blade makes a spot on the inside of her wrist a tender pang . . . the way it is, the way it all is . . . for a moment
2
it was always present there, in that place not that other, and then that feeling was even more, gave expression to that other
She’s here, now, the strangeness of her so close, back and forth between remembering her across the room and her closeness all around him, the impress of her skin and the diffuseness of her, to get around her, gather her all up, embrace her, but she’s like a landscape, a planet, a fog, all around him now an atmosphere, wanting to grasp her, he’s among her
Tense swirl of his hair only soft wave to the touch, artistic tension
She’s ambiance
3
I wanted it to start like this.
I wanted to get into her, do her really good.
It’s supposed to be a story about two little people—well, they’re not “little,” I just refer to them that way, the “little couple,” I call them. Not that I really “call” them that to anybody, or, at least many people—mainly it’s how I refer to them myself, the way I’ve designated them, you know, in notes I’ve made. Of course, there are conversations, I mean, I’ve told others about it, not just you.
Well, of course, my wife.
It’s the story of this couple. Their names are Ada and Evan and they live in a college town and they’re samizdat, bohemians, a couple of weeds among the ivy towers, and they run across each other and have a thing, only of course they have to work it into some kind of “statement,” as people used to say, even though at that time the term had been worn out once already, it was a prim and corny and simplistic way to characterize things, you understand, not that, in fact, people like Ada and Evan didn’t retort in equally simplistic ways, and even make “statements.”
See, Ada was an artist. It’s not that simple, but I mean, she was in art school and this whole conception of herself is important. Not that Evan didn’t have his own aesthetic spin on things, what with all his music—he was one of those drifting savants, a little Johnny Appleseed or Woody Guthrie-like music connoisseur, “Kung Fu” with a record collection—and his wardrobe. Evan was a quick stroke of a guy, something about his character like cotton candy: he could seem to have plenty going on, but then he’d just evaporate. I guess you could say he was evanescent. He was sharp looking, but then soft enough, and the important part is that he was Ada’s find.
She’s the melody.
4
She’s the one I’m after. I want to get into her. I want to do her character, do her up good, because it’s exceptional. It’s exceptional because it’s about being exceptional, and the whole romantic ideal of the exceptional. And it’s about how utterly mundane and ordinary and snotty and petty the exceptional is. And it’s about lying. It’s about the most ridiculous lies—no really, truthfully, about making things up in life, it’s really about trying to make up your whole life and pass it off to other people as true, extraordinary, of course, because what really happens just isn’t enough.
Of course, there’s also the town they lived in. I’m not sure what I’ll call that, yet, so let’s just say Nemo, for now. Nemo, for nobody, because that’s what everybody who lived there thought they were—I mean, was afraid they were. Well, everybody meaning the pertinent ones, here. They all thought they were in some cranny, a place of consequence for neither beast nor man—no! That’s it! No man! That’s what I’ll call it. No-man. Noman. No, that’s really great, because you see it’s perfect for Ada, the whole thing about her wanting a man, a husband, the bohemian princess and her vigil for domestic—hep and avant-gardsy, but domestic—bliss, and that wonderfully suffering state of hers in the meantime. Noman. In no man land. (It could just as well be Nowhere, in the middle of which they felt themselves proverbially to be. Not unlike any other no place, not even unique in that regard, a nowhere like all the other nowheres. New York, Paris, San Francisco, Babylon. It’s one of the meanings of any place name, a horizon or condition, the asymptote perhaps. Where does the name of a place occur? On the map? On the road sign? In the town, on it, just outside? You pass that sign, over and over again, always to and from there, daily passing, proverbially passing, you always say it in passing, on the border of being there or not being there, pronouncing it to those who don’t know it, addressing it, enveloping its contents, so mystified and generic to those not marked by it, and still, to those from there, who have been there, through there, you must pronounce it, always repeating it, incantation incantation, as if reminding yourself it is familiar. The name of the place never stops announcing
5
itself—here we are passing the sign again. It never gets there. But I promise you, I’ll cut out this kind of comment when I get all this stuff in story shape.)
It’s the setting. But it’s also a character, in its way, the strange looming character, the giant in the mouth of which live these tiny creatures, the little couple. So big it looms intangible, like the biggest names on a map that you don’t notice when looking at the finer print of the cities or towns. You see this big circle on the map and wonder what it designates. Is that some “You Are Here” point, or is it a giant stadium, perhaps home of some famous mythical champions? No, it’s just the “o” of the town name, or of the state name (though you may get that sudden chill from the overlap of two different ontological planes superimposed, an instant in transferring where one is sensed somehow proportionate to the other, a giant “O” traced upon the land, or your wide environs diminished by print).
There’s the town, and then there’s the state (more immense figure still), with their wide-open ethos, the prairie charm and flatness, the two-bit mythos and the grandiose plain. The town had a Main St. with a bend in it and every year at the end of summer blossomed the rich pastels of frat boy shirts. And that famous emblem of life there, on the big slate of a solid wall open to view across the tract of the railroad, the graffiti which read:
still
bored
All this and more I want to tell.
But memory . . .
6
Like finding only ruins. Whole civilizations lost from just ten years ago. Last week. Yesterday.
It’s hard enough to invent, to fabricate something, to make it up, as they say, out of thin air. How do you stare down a void and then just wipe it away? How could you face it, how would it not include you, involve you, be your condition as well? I mean, how can you create anything from nothing? Even the special people, the ones with the power of thought, they have to have something to start with. It’s impossible, really, I mean who could ever have been capable of creation?
You try hard to express something, as if you could reach back inside yourself and jar some ethereal convolution, straining—it’s straining, I tell you, against nothing, and maybe it’s the worst kind of straining of all, because at least if you’re physically straining there’s something, something there resisting you, there’s something there. So it’s a very difficult thing to make nothing into something. It’s hard to make things up. And then you turn around and find something right there in front of you, readymade, in the flesh, born and bred, something no less that’s crying out to be told, that’s making a big racket all about itself, that’s giving itself away, in more than one sense. There are some stories—events and people’s lives—too intriguing to be thought up. And you find one there right in front of you, acting itself out for you, you just have to copy it down. And what’s more, it’s unbelievable!
But that’s when you run up against memory. Or perhaps forgetting. Once again, I’m not sure. I’m not sure what’s the something and what’s the nothing, when it comes to that. That memory. It’s like a big rope or cord made out of gaps or spaces. Ora says I’m obsessed with it. But that’s only because I’m mortal. After all, she doesn’t have to worry about it.
Oh, Ora. That’s my wife. Well, not exactly, but that’s another story.
7
So now I have the problem that I want to deliver this story and I can’t—I just can’t—can’t get it tracked out. It’s like I was saying about the cord. Or it’s like a net, full of space, full of emptiness, and you get tangled up in it, or the way you walk in a net and everything is compensation for the wrong move, the wrong weight, there’s nothing fixed, only teetering. There’s something very strange, in a way, a kind of paradox: that you have all these events, themes, aspects, details, but they don’t really have an order. Then you want to tell them and it seems you have to put them in order, but that order is something else on top, as if it has to be put down on the story, but which again, isn’t a story without that order. As if things themselves were just a story, just showing themselves out that way. I think it’s really more difficult than magic. But Ora, again, she thinks I’m trying too hard, making more out of it than I need to. Of course it’s not like snapping your fingers and jumping from one place in time to another.
This is my problem. The story, here, that compels me, is about two people who want to be a story, to rip off the most sordid, rash, indulgent accounts of themselves, even if they contradict each other, even in defiance of the disbelief of others. I have to tell that, document it, give a testimony of it. I have to tell a story about people who tell stories. You see rivals in an action movie, two famous actors, and they’re the imago, the conceit of sleekness, in their suave calm moments and through all their action, even if they’re old and puffy, and there’s the whole process for that appearance, the way an actor is duped up, doubled, not only makeup and lighting and flattering positions and athletic stand-ins and editing and special effects, but just the fact of orchestration, that the action is choreographed, it’s all planned out. James Bond looks carefully calibrated, perched around corners, then skimming along, etc., but the willy-nilly of real life is that everything is happening at once, so when two boxers are fighting, the orchestration has more than one source, and the chaos that results is also a matter of this multiplication of orders, no super-vision. If I want to tell how these two characters make things up
8
impulsively, I have to relate the willy-nilly, the diverse vantages. I want to record them. But if I tell their story, then it will be a story, and I won’t be able to avoid orchestrating them in some way.
Besides, how would you know I’m not making it all up?
There are those who want to go off away from here, who restlessly seek elsewhere and otherwise, jealous as if meaning not here could be theirs. As if any of this could be taken for granted. You want to fly off to a paper-thin utopia, to geometry and nirvana, but then you realize you’re already a ghost, it’s like you had been a ghost and just walked right through everything. This world is elusive enough. You never have this world, let alone some other one. I don’t want homogenized perception. I don’t want immortality. I don’t want the empty profusion of idylls, wispy brushstrokes of amorphous gratification, twinkly-assed solipsism. They fly from the blandness of things for some metaphysical Hollywood. I want to catch them in the net of detail, the infinitesimal magnitude, the ineluctable grain of circumstance.
I want the streets they lived on, the clothes they wore, what was in their pockets, the layout of their apartments and the streets in Noman and the pattern of cracks on the sidewalk they walked down on a hot summer day or when they were sitting on some porch waiting on someone or just farting around, smoking a cigarette, hedging. I want the time of day, the angle of light and redolence of the hour, the romance of their things, the chattel of their whims, artifacts, arty facts, art effects, our defects. I want the smell of their hair products, the songs that most made them swell, the way they wiped their asses, where the pains were on their bodies or the annoyances—cowlicks, scabs, bony protrusions, folds of skin, fingernails—what they fidgeted with, what pricked their memories and brought gushes of evocation, the movie soundtracks of their situations, the way things spoke to them, the voices of the buildings and spaces, trees, shadows, containers, glasses, angles, shops,
9
designs, shoes, moods, recriminations, books, distant creatures, expressions, rain, sap, milk, blood, the strains of them and the straining of them, the sidelong sense, transection, loops and snags of memory, hyperaesthesia, visual and auditory illusions, coenaesthesic disturbances, projection of libidinal cathexes, endopsychic perceptions, nerves of voluptuousness, not only the sun, but trees and birds, “bemiracled relics of former human souls,” speaking in human accents, and miraculous things happening everywhere around. Divine rays.
So I try to write.
10
A flit, a flutter. A twitter and a flick. The lightest impact, barely convincing the hearing, vague and hallucinatory, like some faint tug of the memory. But such a sound . . . the note of ephemera, of great movements against stillness, of thought against walls, of the illicit ipseity of cozy and banal afternoons. A leaf . . . (and all that falls with it) . . . An insect . . . (the whisper crack of doom) . . . That last piece of paper . . .
11
How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise—the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream—be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book—to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.
– John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
So far I’ve just got this. They’re a little couple. I have them both down. Down and doing it. I have him nestled into his aloof sensitivity, there between her legs, and her, with her played-out retreat—that’s what I’ll call it, seeing her lying there taking him on, taking him in (she takes him in) as a motion of retreat, as starved sophistication, consent forcibly portrayed as such, she always “lets him” and marvels at herself about it. This is her grip.
Just this tableau, this film loop, a video clip. It’s a fugue of them in the act, a vamp, waiting for me to start in. But I can’t seem to get—I don’t know the words, the verses.
Oh, well.
Silent partners are the best, the ones who take it deep inside. Interior. Internalize this interior exterior. Interior exterior interior exterior interior exterior interior exterior . . .
Oh, that’s good.
He was already thinking about that question, the one you always think sounds so bad, and does sound bad when you hear it from others, when you hear someone else say it with that bedroom
12
confessional tone, a magnanimity gathering the little performance pride into the conciliatory smugness, the always duplicitous extrication from the act, like the disconnection itself, pulling out. Ah. Oh, man. Gosh. Huh.
Switching places. I see him as my body. Like a dream I had once where I hit the ground by a sort of astral projection effect. Falling to shallow water I am suddenly watching my own body as it smacks the surface, then I’m there, lying stunned in six inches of sea.
I feel her now. Engulf.
Englobe. Indulge. Angle. Angel. Ungual. Unglue. Enigma.
It doesn’t matter. The words come up as they see fit, counting their own various times to this rhythm of the in-out, interior exterior.
I go on about it.
Slide in and in and in.
Her breaths break and run off, stop short and trail; she sucks in that stuttering breath, like the kid crying long and hard trying to stuff it up.
13
Now I do not know how to begin. My tongue and native gifts are powerless to help me, the words I could have uttered have been snatched clean out of my mouth. I do not know what to do about it, unless it is just this—a thing, I swear, that I have never done before. Only now, with heart and hands, will I send my prayer and entreaties up to Helicon, to the ninefold throne whence the fountains pour from which flow the gifts of words and meaning. Its lord and the nine ladies, Apollo and the Camenae—nine sirens of the ears who, at their court, preside over those gifts and dispense their favors to people as they choose—they give their springs of inspiration to many so completely that they cannot with honor deny me just one tiny drop!
– Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan
I can’t remember anything.
I remember that Ada looked something like Elizabeth Montgomery. You know, the actress that was in Bewitched. She had that oval face and that kind of neat little nose with a curve in it, like a doll’s. There was something soft about her features but sharp at the same time. She looked smart, sophisticated. But then, that’s what she was, in the older sense of the word. Ada was a wayward debutante. Fanciful and artsy, she was too distinctive to fall in with conventional posh, with the preppie fad of the nouveau riche, or to be in a sorority. But as she swerved off into fringy style she also drifted to a peculiar loftiness, to trite notions of grandeur, to speciousness and conceit, to her own unhinged castle. She was sophistic.
Oh, the lies, well . . . I mean everything from the most banal embellishment to the most outrageous falsehood, and for the most trivial reasons. I’m talking about someone who just as an excuse for a missed engagement told people that someone tried to rape her. No, I swear. She really did that. One day I heard some people talking
14
about her, that something had happened to her. I asked around and I got the story that a man had broken into her apartment while she was there alone. He threatened to rape her. She pleaded with him not to do it. And then—here’s the really nice touch—she bargained with him—so the story went—and got him to settle for jerking off on her hair.
Well, that’s the story, that’s the way people got it. It seemed pretty spectacular, and so of course I asked around about it some more. But after only a short time, the whole thing evaporated. I mean, there’s a kind of life that stories have, you know? If word goes around and it becomes established as fact, well then it has other consequences, takes its part in the line of things, becomes presumed. But after only a short while, there was this vague . . . well, vagueness. Nothing seemed to have settled about this story. After a while, no one seemed to have learned anything more about it, there was no confirmation, no corroboration. There was no resolution to the story. And most of all, there seemed to be no further effects, no follow-up. It was just sort of gone.
The word had to get around, or, that is, the lack of it. After some time, I heard people saying that nothing had really happened, that there had been no assault, no man breaking in, nothing. Of course, I had to find out for myself. You see, Ada would get herself into these situations, like making plans for something she didn’t really want to do. And then she’d try to find some other way to get out of it.
I know what you’re thinking. “How could she do that? How could she use something like that to get out of an engagement?” I said the very thing myself.
How did I know this? Well, I have my inside sources. But I wouldn’t want to spoil the whole story, show you all the works before you see the show. Besides, that’s supposed to be a big moment in the story, one of the main acts, in fact the peak of all the lying business, the crowning moment of the thorny issue.
15
A hole, the sight of a hole, the angle that connotes hole-ness, you know it’s there and you know that there’s going to be an approach because a hole is the inevitable look into it, the forward edge and then the dimension beyond it, and there’s going to follow that overhead view, the circle instead of the ellipse, and then that something else beyond, but it’s the hole, the ellipse still, a big hole in the floor in the corner, the tidy plane of the floor suddenly made conspicuous by its interruption, and the far edge now a turned back lip giving way to the guts and the skeleton of the structure, it’s that hole and that picture, of lurid construction, a ragged edge of the materials torn into banality, and it’s this angle itself the compulsion, the vortex of impulse, the very sign, the very neurological trigger, of having to see.
16
So where was I? Oh, yes, Ada was bewitching and she drew Evan. Ada was bewitching Evan.
She designed him.
I don’t know where it began. Who knows where it really begins? The precise instant—no, who even knows what the measure is? What measure, of time or space, for that idea, that desire. What kind of event is it? Perhaps somewhere there was that first sight, the bolt of lightening, but it’s always a matter of some lapse, of some shoreline wiping itself away, of the bank receding, dropping away from under you, submerged, obscure, back and back to the oceanic. Whether it’s the rest of the world chasing the signs and rumors of the fait accompli, or the flirts themselves persuaded of their feelings by the audience of their display, or whether it’s the lover’s affirmation catching up to inclination, or inclination catching up to declaration, or whether it’s the couple in thick together tracking their fate on the slippery slope of memory, the moment isn’t solid, it’s not a point. There’s always a horizon, a distance, a span, a vanishing point.
So like paleontologists or linguists, with only vestiges you put together something for a source. You have a conviction or you make something up. It’s something between fact and fiction, a strange suspended account, legend.
I don’t know exactly when and where it began between Ada and Evan, what happened, but I’ve got a strong idea how. She made him up. Oh, not from thin air, mind you, although you could make a case for that. She had certain raw material to work with. But she had her exquisite container all ready, her valise of the ideal. This she so maintained, preserved and tended and refined and lustered up, that whatever—whomever—she found to fill it would be well suited. She needed a certain kind of dummy—I don’t mean an idiot, I mean like a clothing dummy. In this she had a definite penchant, if not compulsion, for the stray, the unfinished, for wayward boys with rakish good looks and rockabilly instincts, wild flowers to be
17
converted with husbandry. She wanted her own rough gem to carve into that certain old fashion which is timelessly groovy and genetically appealing to every ordinary special girl.
And Ada was just an archetypical girl. She didn’t want to be part of the social fabric, she wanted to pick it. She wasn’t just born into good taste, she had to have the good taste to choose it. This can be explained by her background. You see, Ada had a modest, humble upbringing. She was the daughter of a chauffeur. She spent the idle moments of her young womanhood in the richness that was only her own resourcefulness, climbing up trees to watch the glimmering parties of her father’s wealthy employers, to study the conduct of the accomplished. Of course she had her youthful foibles. From a childhood crush she developed the adolescent notion that the man of her dreams, the man she was going to marry, was the wealthy family’s younger son, the debonair William Holden. What she couldn’t see because of her foolishness was that the real man of her dreams was the more sturdy and tempered older brother, Humphrey Bogart. Sabrina was a formative part of Ada’s experience.
And then she got to mix. She made her own entrance into the world, so eagerly anticipated and preconceived from all that formative material. You go into society, you get into things, and you start to move about with that rippling movie self-consciousness. Through the mouth of the cave, the great sumptuous entry and scene, life decked out around you, exceeding somehow, as if sodden with itself, the heavenly host assembled, the shadows and forms. It was a coming out, but it was a going in, this thick impression of society, a place you went into that was a world opening up, and even though it was a space, a stage, agora, you were stretched into it as if it clung to your skin.
It was a party. Glistening soliciting, ceremony baloney, through the hooey, the world so translucent and three-dimensional, the cinematography, every distraction an attraction, she swore that when
18
everyone was almost standing still she could see the furniture creeping, so many spikes and wires and vectors of attention, a great heaving blobulous of psychic algorithms
“Did you say ‘sidekick’?”
She didn’t know whether he’d said that on purpose or just couldn’t hear her.
“No, I said ‘psychic.’ Sigh—kick! Sometimes, I think, I’m psychic.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“You’re psychic?”
“Sometimes I think I’m psychic. You know, some pretty weird coincidences—I mean, really spooky, man—”
“No, I meant that sometimes I am psychic.”
Which, of course, was good because “psychic” means having to do with the psyche, without which, according to most theories—well, the Greek ones anyway—of animate beings, she wouldn’t be. One. An animate being, that is. Self-sufficient, capable of self-motivation. She’d be an automaton, or an inanimate object if perhaps subject to some efficient cause, a visual effect, an illusion, or perhaps an invention, a fiction.
One such automaton who fancied himself omniscient tried to light a match held in his teeth. The flame burst up at his eye, and while he was not blinded by the light, he paid for this metaphor with singed eyelashes. You see a cute face, a catastrophic face, everything has an encouraging face, you face everything encouraging, with adventurous giddiness, you get your nerve up, liquor, solutions.
19
Liquor has a cute face, you flirt with liquor, liquor makes you a sucker for cute faces, you get drunk on cute faces, you try out a metaphor. You flirt with a metaphor, you get drunk on a metaphor. You go too far, get carried away sloppy romantic. Later you go to bed with this metaphor, later still you awake to embarrassment that you were seduced by such a metaphor. The light burns you. Foolish pranks for burning and bursting, moths fluttering to the night lights. A demimonde of their own devising, sinister heaven, gallery of Batman villains, with elfen shoes and tights, all things to surpass in abstruseness, too smart to be pretty, too pretty to be smart, blood on the lips. Mephisto himself would’ve been lame.
You stand yourself up, grip yourself, clutch yourself. You’re walking in the dark. A face after a face after a face after a face . . . it’s all face, infinite extension, the back of the cards going to the horizon, towering up in your own estimation, totems. You fucking hate these pretenses. These people suck. Tiny tiny squalid, like some miserable, pathetic, stupid kind of insect that puts its nose in the air to seem big. The whole group of them. They’re all one swath, a cast, a flimsy, vicious clique. They keep a periphery around you but keep looking at you from the corners of their eyes, like weaselly, scavenger dogs. When you’re not looking they’re talking about you, but they keep up their sniveling courtesy to your face. Everyone you see is putting on some stupid act—what for? You’re right here. What do they think you are? Look, even that coffee table is putting on an act. What’s the matter with me? I’m so out of it, I’ve been living in a hole. They’ve got all the information. They know what things mean that I’ve never heard of before. I’m out of date, my perception has no pertinence anymore, and here I’ve been going along with all my opinions, judgments, justifications, logic, based on some miserable, narrow view of things, as if I’d thought of it all myself, as if I’d thought of it all. As if I’d thought at all. I must look so stupid.
I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I’m at the spot where I find myself.
20
SCENE
Various apparitions, persons not as yet otherwise identified, including the newfound flame, who thus flicker in mysterious light: will-o’-the-wisps.
Flame. Ian McCulloch.
Apparition. Ian Curtis.
Flame. Ian McCulloch’s more poetic.
Apparition. Ian Curtis is more raw.
Flame. Ian McCulloch’s more romantic.
Apparition. Lyrical.
Flame. Yeah, that’s it. Lyrical. Like with his lyrics.
Apparition. Lyrical’s not lyrics. It’s not the lyrics. It’s not—
Flame. No, I know—
Apparition. I mean, the way his lyrics are, they are lyrical. But lyrical’s like . . . it’s like . . .
Flame. Yeah, I know. I didn’t mean—
Apparition. You know, like the way poetry, or imagery is lyrical. Like films.
Flame. Yeah, I know. Lyrical.
Apparition. Yeah, lyrical. It doesn’t mean the lyrics, like just the words.
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Flame. Yeah, but I meant that even his lyrics are lyrical.
Apparition. That’s what I meant.
Flame. No, I—I mean, yeah, I know. That’s what you meant. But that’s what I meant when I said it. I meant that, like, the images—I mean––the way he writes.
Apparition. Yeah, that’s what I said.
Flame. Well, yeah. Yeah.
Apparition. Ian Curtis is more . . . more . . .
[head tilting to one side slightly, one side of upper lip curling up, as if he’s preparing to strike] He’s . . . elemental.
Flame. [strange autistic nod, like a tic] Yeah.
Apparition. You know . . .
Flame. Yeah. [Pause, a sidelong injection of everything else going on around them, the music playing, the murmur of all the other talkers, which wants to take our attention just now, and there’s so much to see, here, the tone of it all, the light of it] Ian McCulloch writes better music.
Apparition. I don’t know. Different.
Flame. Well, I mean, it’s more—I mean, I don’t mean this like “beautiful”—it’s beautiful in an intense way—but, you know, the music’s more of a thing.
Apparition. Love Will Tear Us Apart.
Flame. Uh. Well, yeah. There is that. [A funny kind of self-conscious snicker.] I just find that—I mean, when I’m listening to “Porcupine” . . . [like “wow”] I don’t know. You know?
22
Apparition. I want to play Joy Division over loudspeakers on top of all the buildings in New York City. All over the city, so that’s all anyone could hear.
Flame. [Strange reflexive smile, involuntary, as if it’s possessing him] Uh, man. Yeah.
A fluid montage pass through the scene. Faces, beer, streamers of candlelight, the translucence of dimly lit eyes, some return glances, the rocking of the image.
Second Apparition. It’s a fucking vicious song, man.
Third Apparition. It’s a political statement.
Fourth Apparition. What’s that song—who’s that by? I can’t remember.
Fifth Apparition. What song?
Second Apparition. No, man, it’s not like that. It’s better than that.
Third Apparition. It’s not about being better. You don’t understand it.
Fourth Apparition. Oh, it’s that song. You know. Who’s it by?
Fifth Apparition. How can I tell you who it’s by if you don’t say what it is?
Second Apparition. No, man, you don’t get it. It’s fucking anarchy, man. Anarchy’s like saying, “fuck politics” an’ shit.
Fourth Apparition. The one where they say “Free Nelson Mandela.”
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Fifth Apparition. Oh. I don’t know what the name is.
Third Apparition. I think that is the name of it.
Fourth Apparition. So that’s a political song. You know that one?
Second Apparition. Who’s Nelson Mandela?
Fourth Apparition. You don’t know who Nelson Mandela is?
Fifth Apparition. Who’s it by?
Fourth Apparition. You don’t know who Nelson Mandela is?
Second Apparition. No.
Fifth Apparition. Who did that song?
Fourth Apparition. He doesn’t know who Nelson Mandela is.
Fifth Apparition. So who did that song?
Third Apparition. Oh, it’s—it’s that group—what’s their name?
Fourth Apparition. He doesn’t even know who Nelson Mandela is.
Second Apparition. Why don’t you fucking tell me, then?
Fifth Apparition. What’s the name of the song?
Third Apparition. I thought that was the name of it.
Fifth Apparition. Isn’t it some reggae song?
Fourth Apparition. No, I think it’s African. It’s like African music. You know, Nelson Mandela. It’s an African thing.
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Third Apparition. No, it’s one of those British groups.
Fifth Apparition. British?
Third Apparition. Yeah, you know. It’s one of those ska groups. I think it’s the English Beat.
Fourth Apparition. English Beat? English Beat does that song?
Fifth Apparition. I always get them mixed up with UK Chameleons.
Third Apparition. UK Chameleons? No. That’s completely different. They’re nothing like English Beat.
Fifth Apparition. Well, you know, the names.
Third Apparition. The names? How are those—
Fourth Apparition. English Beat? I know them. They don’t do that song. I’d remember that. Why can’t I remember?
Second Apparition. Some great fucking political statement.
Fifth Apparition. Some great memory.
Fourth Apparition. Why can’t I remember that?
Third Apparition. But you do remember it. You wouldn’t even know you’d forgotten it if you didn’t remember some of it.
Second Apparition. What difference does it make? You can’t help it anyway. If it’s worth remembering, you’ll remember. If not, well fuck it.
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Fourth Apparition. What is memory?
Sixth Apparition. Memory’s biological. It’s a neurological process.
Seventh Apparition. It’s an epistemological problem. You can’t presume any agency apart from memory to consider it.
Eighth Apparition. Memory is subconscious.
Ninth Apparition. It’s not just some faculty or organ. Consciousness has to be of something.
Tenth Apparition. It’s a pure operation.
Eleventh Apparition. It’s the differential system of information itself.
Twelfth Apparition. It’s all an illusion.
Thirteenth Apparition. Including that?
Fourth Apparition. But what are you saying? I have my memories. I know what happened to me. It has to be real things that happened to me. It’s there, I remember it. Why wouldn’t I remember—I mean, why wouldn’t it be real if I remembered it. I know what happened—I know it happened to me, I know what happened. It happened. I know it happened to me—I mean, it’s me—it’s my memory—I know it’s my—I know what—I am. I mean, I am—I mean, I know I am—I mean I know it happened to me. If there weren’t things really happening that I could remember, then how could I know any of this was happening right now, how could anything happen to me—where would I be? What would I be? Are you saying I don’t know who I am?
Fifth Apparition. I thought you just didn’t remember the name of that Nelson Mandela song.
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A whiskey swill montage, these voices run all together into one big stream, like a river, like running pipes, a big river of running pipes, that you go down, down into like a steely cold hole all around you, yeah, yeah, that’s it, and then, eyes are made. I mean, it’s like an eye shot, looking into eyes that are looking back at you, that’s what you see. Not a picture of eyes, not an image of eyes, but eyes. Eyes. Are there eyes without image? Eyes. Looking into eyes.
They’re looking at each other. This is the scene where they see each other, as if for the first time. It would be too easy to pass the whole thing in that smug third-person way. I’d pass it on to you, you and me in this reportorial relationship, as if you were there with me and I was pointing them out to you, gossiping about them. We could belittle them, make fun of them, roll our eyes at them, with petty jealousy or envy, the smugness of being outside the flirt, the bitterness or loftiness, the critical suspicions, the distaste for either of them or the embarrassment of either of us. And believe me, I could make a case for it with all the lurid self-consciousness and boomerang anxiety and verging on so many impulses at a party like this.
But to see them as they see each other that moment. They look into each other’s eyes. To look at that other . . . I looked into her eyes . . . and feel everything . . . I look into your eyes . . . and see . . . He looked into my eyes . . . even as it allows me to commit all those errors that would make me grateful for some third-person omniscience. Oh, god, look at the way they’re looking at each other.
I look at you and see you look back and then my project for you is under way. I’m set off. I’m justified, as if you “returned” my gaze, an equitable trade, the same coin or currency, like for like. Everything to be closed in the circle of that like. I see your gaze and in your gaze I see myself as desired.
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Ada, that is. Ada, that is, seeing. Ada that is seeing. All that for Ada. Except to see it in her place.
Evan is caught in Ada’s gaze. It’s a question of active and passive. He looked like a matchstick, his hair dyed red and standing up from his gaunt frame. He flashed in her eye. Her gaze was like what they call in science fiction a tractor beam. A mythology, a theology, an absolute gaze. But in the science of that gaze, no more certainty. Which way does vision issue? The light reflected from the object strikes the eye, the optical nerves through the optical apparatus. She receives the vision of her desired object. The vision comes to her. Or does she issue her gaze, even in this technical passivity allow this vision, turn her gaze upon him? And the attraction, like vision, which way does it issue? Does she fix the whole apparatus of her desire on him, or does he exert the force of attraction, transmit, give it off?
She looks. Good.
“Memories are psychic transmissions.”
Evan turned to see Ada as the one offering this remark to the conversation. He knew who she was, but he’d never really looked at her before. She looked good.
“What’s that mean?” one of those others said to her.
“Where do you think all these thoughts of ours come from?” says Ada. “And how do they come out of us in all these sentences? We’re like radio receivers. And we’re getting all these psychic transmissions all the time and then we’re this machine that translates them into speech.”
“But then,” says one wily interloper, “if that’s the case and we are the receivers—then there’s still the question where do the thoughts come from.”
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“What do you mean?” says Ada.
“What’s the transmitter? What’s transmitting the thoughts?”
“Rocks,” says Ada.
“Rocks?” the interloper barks out sarcastically.
“Rocks—the ground—all the metals and minerals, but also all the things we make out of them, all the solid things.”
“But why rocks? Why the solid matter? What about everything else? What’s the liquid and gasses supposed to be?”
“That’s the waves coming in and going out. Because the transmissions go out into space and also come in from space. But the earth is where everything is buried, it’s where all the dead go, where they are buried, but also even further down where they are, going all the way back, all those layers of all the civilizations and even the dinosaurs, and then when they decay they give off these transmissions and they come back to us from the ground and they keep on going in us and they’re our thoughts.”
“Hmm. Well, that’s certainly an interesting idea. It’s syncretic. You’ve got your cognitive science and paleontology and occultism and reincarnation all in one half-baked recipe.” The wily interloper is looking very smug.
Evan notices that Ada looks unbothered, almost as if she didn’t hear him.
Then she says, “But it’s a fact. It’s proven.”
The wily interloper balks. Then he says, “Says the Cretan.”
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No one says anything and the music is going on and to look at all their faces you’d think it was of no effect, the group standing there like unruffled birds after no more than the sound of one’s squawk. But to actually be inside any one of them, to be one of them, you might feel the tension, as Evan did, and wonder what was going through Ada’s mind, like maybe daggers.
After the wily interloper and some apparent cronies had moved off, the girl standing next to Ada says, “He called you a cretin.”
But Ada had turned to Evan to talk to him. “So you like Echo and the Bunnymen?”
And the music. And you take off. And the music. And the music takes off. This is the music. You take off. You, the music, take off.
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Walpurgis-Like Dream
Party Host
Now we can let loose and mix,
The coolest crowd is here.
Music’s good, the mood is thick—
Who’s gonna get more beer?
Chatterbox
People will say anything.
They don’t care who they hurt.
That guy there’s having a fling,
His girlfriend’s just a flirt.
King of White Ghostlike Apparitions
Hey, you guys, it’s good to see
All your ugly faces.
You can see my girl and me
In all the right places.
Punk
Fuck this standing around shit
We gotta get slashing.
Let’s stir up these cows a bit
And make room for some thrashing.
Airhead
I know I should like this song
And the way they’re dressing,
But I can’t quite go along,
It seems so depressing.
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King Apparition
I don’t care what you guys say
This is how to do it:
When the love gets in the way,
Just back off and screw it.
Titanic Girl
He can pout and I can bitch,
The whole thing’s just a drag.
But then when he gets the itch
It’s me makes his tail wag.
The Band, all together (really loud)
Mosquito, fly, suck and buzz,
Under the skin transmission.
No wasp beats our sting because
We’re the insect musicians!
Lead Singer, solo
Blabber mouth and rattle bag
You gotta make a noise.
Blah blah blah and yak yak yak
You don’t know what know is.
Avant-Garde in Embryo
Skull is mindless, so is heart
The time is out of joint.
One thing’s sure, the point of art
Is not to get the point.
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A Little Couple
(her) Through the crowd and on the floor
We’re dancing all around.
(him) But in this scene I’m not sure
We’re getting off the ground.
Curious Hanger-On
Is it for attention they’re
Trying to be shocking?
Or maybe it’s just that square
Types like me they’re mocking.
Retro
The new stuff’s not quite up to
Rockabilly level.
But its roots are also true
Music of the devil.
Artsy Type
The ambiance here tonight
Is out of history.
Everything would be just right
If this were Italy.
Purist
All these fucking poseurs here,
The music’s really lame.
Even the amount of beer
and shit they have is tame.
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Young Witch
Glam girls get made up to pose
Then flitter all around.
I just take off all my clothes
And wriggle on the ground.
Older Woman
These kids think they’re all so bad
The way they snarl and dress.
They can have the life I had
And rot in happiness.
Lead Singer
Mosquito, fly, suck and buzz
I just want your body.
No wasp beats my sting because
My taste is more bloody.
Fashion Groupie Turning One Way
These are the coolest people.
Look, every girl’s so chic!
The guys are sharp as needles
Or pins stuck in their cheek.
Fashion Groupie Turning Another Way
But, god, if so many here
Are doing it this way,
Then the style is much too clear.
It’s already passé.
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Exene-Like Girl
I feel like a big black bug
Is crawling over me.
I’d give Death itself a hug,
The devil sympathy.
Stalwart
Look at how they scoff and sneer,
Tear everything apart.
When the same contempt they fear,
They’ll say they have a heart.
Independent Thinker
With oddballs and discontents
I should feel right at home.
I’ve got my own dissidence,
Of them I’ll not be one.
Zeitgeist of the Hour
Like avant-gardes before us
Our cry is “make it new.”
Though history can bore us,
Greece had its dada, too.
Curious Hanger-On
It’s quite a congregation
And many types I see.
It can’t be that everyone
Is making fun of me.
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Crusader
Mixing with this wicked crew
My soul cannot be hurt.
After all, the word says too
God made man out of dirt.
Worldling
No revolutionaries
Are dancing in the aisles.
You’ll find many old ideas
Are dressed up in this style.
Dancer
They’re going to change the music.
A new wave is coming.
There’s no way to confuse it
In endless techno-drumming.
DJ
They kick up their legs and fling!
They throw themselves about!
Clumsy hop and crooked spring,
How does it look? Look out!
Guitarist
Strange the way their bodies dance
Even though they are dead,
While that bunch there in a trance
Just dances in the head.
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Dogmatist
People try to look too far
When they just need to see.
Things are just the way they are
Or else they wouldn’t be.
Idealist
Why do my dreams dictate me,
And then betray me, too?
Still I won’t change them greatly
For what else would come true?
Realist
There’s nothing going on here
That hasn’t been before.
It’s only that it’s so near
That I feel insecure.
Supernaturalist
Here they let their demons show.
I worship dark spirits.
There’s another realm, I know
Because of all this shit.
Skeptic
They shirk what is commonplace
And think they dodge the trap.
That some harsher truth they face
Like all the rest is crap.
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Lead Singer
The wasp wants to sting because
Dilettantes are fishin’.
Mosquito, fly, suck and buzz,
They are all musicians.
Manchild
From the top of our spiked hair
To the shoes on our feet,
We’re the coolest anywhere.
Punks rule, get off the street!
Perpetual Fuck-Ups
Being different isn’t good.
We drift to lowest ground.
We’d be normal if we could.
No one wants us around.
Glam Spooks
In the darkest, dreary swamp
There is a light that glows.
We display with eerie pomp
The glamour of our souls.
A Fallen Star
I got big there for a while,
My song got good air play.
It’s easy to get in style,
But hard to stay that way.
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Hard Cores
You dancers make way for more,
We’re flying through the air.
If you want to find the floor,
We’ll gladly knock you there.
Punk
You don’t just stand there and sway.
Your dance is all worn out.
Let me show you sheep the way
To throw yourselves about.
Airhead
These people are vampires, they
Only come out at night.
I could never be that way—
Oh, no, it’s getting light!
Band (softly)
The mist clears as they turn on
The harsh light of the day.
The night was just a phantom
And dreams that blow away.
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I don’t know how it is, I seem to be always writing about myself. I mean all the time to write about other people, and I try to think about myself as little as possible, and I am sure, when I find myself coming into the story again, I am really vexed and say, `Dear, dear, you tiresome little creature, I wish you wouldn’t!’ but it is all of no use. I hope any one who may read what I write, will understand that if these pages contain a great deal about me, I can only suppose it must be because I have really something to do with them, and can’t be kept out.
– Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Awaken with the runoff of dreams, the feeling that you’ve been coursed, furrowed, plied, and the day is a great restless opening waiting to be filled. You have to go somewhere and do things, to class, an errand, or work if you’re unlucky or uncharmed, and walking along, the amorphous urge to utter, utterly, to utterly utter, the utter urge, is playing you like a compulsion, not so much hunger as oral fixation, the urge to mouth, and the associations start piling up, your mind is a gear churning with everything, you’ve got that engaged feeling, going with the flow, playing along with whatever comes up, jazz, all movement is your wit, everything in step with your wit, jags, snatches, slits, slats, slots, kernels, gems, sparks flying, ideas popping off in gross, you’re some queen ant of ideas. Ideas subdividing, replicating, a virus of inspiration. Your enthusiasm makes you enthusiastic. You beam. You gladly get caught up in things. Your spirit is expansive, makes you lavish, you lavish this spirit. You talk to people. About anything, because it’s all connected. You’re generous. You can’t wait to get to the fruition, to produce all this, to get in front of that clean slate. It all whips up, keeps expanding. It billows. Late in the day, you get away, you get to the table, ready for the project of these ideas. You have the taste of it all in your mouth. But you’re sated. Now it’s all vague, it’s an aroma. Where were you going to start? Not only that, but with all of it now so airy, how were you going to put it down in the first place? Before
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you is a vast plane, a desert of bleached white, like snow but more glaring and antiseptic. What would ever breach it? What mark, what blow, what incision? And beyond that fathomless leap, there’s putting one such blow after another. You might as well be plowing. Nothing but barren ground around you, and you hard upon it. Stranded, and high above you the clouds, moving away.
(I read over that party sequence again the next morning and I think I got carried away. I may work out a revision of it. Ora says I make too much overture, that I interject too much. But then I try to let down all that and I find myself getting caught up in the mood and the characters. Then I turn around and look at it again and wonder, why did I act like that? And it is like acting, like I’m acting, but it just comes out of me, it’s me putting on an act in spite of myself, without me trying to put on an act. It’s a compulsion. Like I’m some kind of drunken actor.
But then Ora said that thing again the other day—we’ve been through this so many times—about how she wants me to tell a nice story. We were at the cosmetology conference and in between lectures over lunch she says, “where are all the nice descriptive passages.”)
Ada in her apartment.
(There’s no way to describe. You can’t really deliver it, you know, like long descriptive passages in nineteenth century novels, everything about the place, the setting, all the details, as if it were painting or trying to record. There’s always the gap of that difference, the indication of the thing. Even if I were to show you the very thing, present it to you in and of itself, or in some science fiction of “virtual” reality, there would still be the difference of relating, referring. Even if there were no “time,” no Time, there’d still be “times,” and the event of the indication would be distinct from the other it refers to. (Ora says this is not really a contradiction, that it’s
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only a problem for “beings.”) But this is so much superaddition, a kind of mad formal extrapolation, because this is what we do anyway, refer to things, refer things to people, as if there were anything but reference to things, as if any “thing” thus referred to were not already inscribed, already “evoking.”)
The day orbited her, the lines of a great skirt, all the things around her a veil of scintillation. It was a new day, there was a new sun. Twilight. A change of pallet, a whole new set of colors to everything. Her constellation, the objects around her apartment . . .
( . . . suggest the solidity we don’t have. That rooms are filled with all these objects as if time itself could be had, as if against passing, forgetting, the trailing off of experience. Keepsakes, knickknacks, condensations, as if something could be had from time, some fruit or issue, some accretion given off by time. As if to ward off the realization of passing itself.)
Besides, I can’t remember all that detail, and worse still is what I think I remember. You know, the way you remember details so fondly and cherish them as if they were living preserved in you and then you find out that someone else remembers differently or you go back, see the place again, or see the person again—with people, especially people and faces—and all this other detail jumps out at you. You find yourself making adjustments, but assimilating the material to memory (or assimilating to it), saying “oh, yeah, now I remember, your face was more like that, yeah,” “oh, of course there’s that mark,” or that nose, or that angle there or that breadth to it there. I don’t remember, but I’m reminded and then I remember. How can you ever catch up like that? How can you ever catch detail that way?
I remember that Ada wanted to be recorded. I remember that there was a time that she wanted to be recorded. But then later there weren’t any records of her. The time when she wanted to be recorded came first, and later, she didn’t want to be recorded. She went
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through this phase where she was all infatuated with photographs, old black and white photos of her parents, even grandparents, and then, of course, she had to get all infatuated with her sweetheart’s photos and family photos. It was fun and narcissistic and the view of anything or anyone was a matter of Ada wanting a view of herself, of her appearance in the world. The more proximate to her, the more she was interested: her friends, her family, her loved one(s)—her retinue. She wanted to project herself into the family album, she wanted that someone that would be posed with her in posterity, that certain special someone that would go well with her, make her pretty picture.
But something happened.
I think she got jealous.
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