–Hannah Arendt, “Willing” (footnote), The Life of the Mind

(Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971. During those five years I appeared, on the face of it, a competent enough member of some community or another, a signer of contracts and Air Travel cards, a citizen: I wrote a couple of times a month for one magazine or another, published two books, worked on several motion pictures; participated in the paranoia of the time, in the raising of a small child, and the entertainment of large numbers of people passing through my house; made gingham curtains for spare bedrooms, remembered to ask agents if any reduction of points would be pari passu with the financing studio,put lentils to soak on Saturday night for lentil soup on Sunday, made quarterly F.I.C.A. payments and renewed my driver’s license on time, missing on the written examination only the question about the financial responsibility of California drivers. It was a time of my life when I was frequently “named.” I was named godmother to children. I was named lecturer and panelist, colloquist and conferee. I was even named, in 1968, a Los Angeles Times ”Woman of the Year,” along with Mrs. Ronald Reagan, the Olympic swimmer Debbie Meyer, and ten other California women who seemed to keep in touch and do good works. I did no good works but I tried to keep in touch. I was responsible. I recognized my name when I saw it. Once in a while I even answered letters addressed to me, not exactly upon receipt but eventually, particularly if the letters had come from strangers. “During my absence from the country these past eighteen months,” such replies would begin.

This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my enentire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cuttingroom experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.

During this period I spent what were for me the usual proportions of time in Los Angeles and New York and Sacramento. I spent what seemed to many people I knew an eccentric amount of time in Honolulu, the particular aspect of which lent me the illusion that I could any minute order from room service a revisionist theory of my own history, garnished with a vanda orchid. I watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral on a verandah at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, and also the first reports from My Lai. I reread all of George Orwell on the Royal Hawaiian Beach, and I also read, in the papers that came one day late from the mainland, the story of Betty Lansdown Fouquet, a 26-year-old woman with faded blond hair who put her five-year old daughter out to die on the center divider of Interstate 5 some miles south of the last Bakersfield exit. The child, whose fingers had to be pried loose from the Cyclone fence when she was rescued twelve hours later by the California Highway Patrol, reported that she had run after the car carrying her mother and stepfather and brother and sister for “a long time.” Certain of these  images did not fit into any narrative I knew.

Another flash cut:

“In June of this year patient experienced an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out. A thorough medical evaluation elicited no positive findings and she was placed on Elavil, Mg 20, tid. The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses and increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress… . Emotionally, patient has alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings. Her fantasy life appears to have been virtually completely preempted by primitive, regressive libidinal preoccupations many of which are distorted and bizarre… . In a technical sense basic affective controls appear to be intact but it is equally clear that they are insecurely and tenuously maintained for the present by a variety of defense mechanisms including intellectualization, obsessive-compulsive devices, projection, reaction-formation, and somatization, all of which now seem inadequate to their task of controlling or containing an underlying psychotic process and are therefore in process of failure. The content of the patient’s reponses is highly unconventional  and frequently_bizarre,…filled with sexual and anatomical preoccupations, and basic reality_contact is obviously and. seriously impaired at time’s, In quality and level  of sophistication patient’s responses are characteristic of those of individuals of high average or superior intelligence but she is now functioning intellectually in impaired fashion at barely average level. Patient’s thematic productions on the Thematic Apperception Test emphasize her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure …”

The patient to whom this psychiatric report refers is me. The tests mentioned—the Rorschach, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Sentence Completion Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index —were administered privately, in the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, in  the summer of 1968, shortly after I suffered the “attack of vertigo and nausea” mentioned in the first sentence and shortly before I was named a Los Angeles Times “Woman of the Year.” By way of comment I offer or that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.

–Joan Didion, “The White Album”

Evening and I haven’t left my apartment.  Haven’t so much as traded my boyfriend’s-t-shirt -and-yoga-pants combo for a pair of jeans and sweater.  All day the winds have been up: rocking parked cars, tripping their alarms.  A city-wide chorus of blaring deaf-blind complaint.  Whipped trash collects in the empty lot across the street.  Sheets of cardboard, broken blocks of styrofoam, countless plastic bags.  They catch on one another and on the cut edges of the chain link.  Or, with sudden inspiration, they spin and rise, two, three, four stories, snagging finally on the adjacent four-flat’s cable hook-up.

Dark clouds now and thunder.  I wonder if this is why I haven’t yet started my day: I’ve been waiting for the rains to come.

An exhausting three weeks of travel.  Some moments of real sweetness, real joy.  Many moments of beauty.  Roe deer in the leafless woods on the way to Helsingor.  Snow heaped like sleep over Copenhagen’s frozen søerne.  (Even just the lake names: Peblinge, Sortedams, Sankt Jørgens.)  Berlin never changes.  Soft-boiled brown eggs served in gold-gilt porcelain cups.  Two taps with the silver spoon.  Dense, bitter bread.  In Charlottenburg, small netted seed bags strung up in every hedge, bush, and tree.  Birds darting, clinging, pecking, retreating.

Back in the states, all’s well in life, in love.  I only now realize that my recent “Brace, Unbrace” might have come off as current news.  I wrote it many years ago, as Jeremiah and I divorced, and then was put back in mind of it as Kase’s J announced that the engagement was off, he was out.  She is suffering tremendously of course, and I retrieved it in part to share with her.  So many of you were good enough to write sympathetically.  I struggled to respond appropriately, baffled as I was.

Past tense, past pain.  Except that everything’s present in memory.

S and I are still very much together (happily so, small stresses notwithstanding).  He’ll be in Omaha for the next three months, but we’ll see one another every few weeks, both of us going back and forth.  In my head I’ve launched “The Great Spring Turn-Around.”  I’m going to wipe down the fridge and get my tires rotated.  I’m going to do core work-outs and vacuum under the bed.  I’m going to take a multi-vitamin.  I’m going to figure out where to recycle my glass.  I’ll be better, smarter, thinner, and more productive.  My life will be an advertisement.  People will respect me.  (Laugh with me here.)

I do hope to write.

C.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

C.

Emmanuel Lévinas: Oh no.  For that you must read [Vasily] Grossman.

A breach of vigilance and I answer an invitation, not as myself (which self?), but as someone else entirely.  ”Oh gosh, I’m sorry.  Will you please not tell?”  ”Sure, no problem.  Your secret’s safe with me.”  In seventh grade I gave Ty Williams my diary by accident.  I meant to give him my History notebook which was the same color and size.  What to do?  What to do?  In the girls’ bathroom clutching my hair.  A desperate letter written in the passing period and stuffed in his locker vent.  Later that day a vent letter in return, “I didn’t understand what it was.  But now that I know I won’t read any more.  And I won’t say anything to anyone. I promise.”

I lock the site down anyways.  (But why post it online if you don’t want anyone to see it?  Why write if you don’t want to be read?)  I call Emory all day, but she doesn’t pick up til late.  I feel dirty and naked and like I’ve done something wrong.  ”You haven’t done anything wrong, sis.”  ”Haven’t I?”  This is just how I felt as a child, caught in a lie.  Except that I’m working so hard to be truthful.   “I don’t think that’s it, sis.  A pen name isn’t a lie.”  I close my eyes, listen to her breath across the line.

“Remember when we were little,” she finally asks, “and we were all the time seeing things we weren’t supposed to see?  And remember how the grown ups would stand over us telling us what we in fact saw, even though we could see they were lying?  The more right we were, the worse it was for us, so we didn’t saying anything about most things, even to each other, not until we were older, and still.”  She stops.  She starts again, “I think it’s like that, Cat.  It’s not that you’re lying.  It’s just that you’re saying what you see, and when you were small you were made to feel ashamed for that, made to disavow yourself.  But you’re a grown-up now.  And so am I.  And it isn’t for anyone to dictate our vision.”

* * *

I’m reading Hamlet with my freshmen.  In the midst of Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and Hume they’re grateful for the break.  The idea of literature as a break from philosophy worries me and I say so.  Anyway, I’m not sure what kind of break it amounts to.  The play is breaking me.

We only have two days of class and I want us to see . . .  ”I want us to see . . . “: In my head this is how I start every sentence.

I want us to see, really see, this moment in history that is still so much our own: the rise of mercantilism, the Reformation, the invention of the press, cheap textiles which means cheap clothes, and all of a sudden theater . . .  

I want us to think about our bodies, our insides and our outsides.  I want us to have on hand our familiar anxieties about where exactly the truth of the matter (any matter) resides.  What is a coin, and how does it carry its value?  What is a word, and how does it carry its meaning?  What does the Bible say?  Oh yeah?  Says who?  What are deeds good for?  And without their aid, is there any way to discern the workings of the spirit?  How will we tell classes apart if everyone’s wearing taffeta?  And is that a boy or a girl up there?  A hero or a villain?  A nobleman or a slave?  A Christian or a Jew?  How do we know she’s a virgin?  There’s only one way to find out . . .  I want us to wonder why Hamlet’s world is populated with whores.

I want us to ask whether this is a tragedy of inaction.  Really?  And then to ask further, What do we, as philosophers, have staked in that conceit?  Do these hours — spent in words and thought — count as real hours of our real lives?  Here, now, in the classroom, in conversation with one another, or back in our bedrooms, at our desks, writing notes in the margins with our upcoming papers in mind?  Aren’t we, as much as Hamlet, prone to soliloquy?  And now think of all the havoc Hamlet wreaks!  What are the stakes of what we say to ourselves?  What hangs in the balance?  Are we ever so blessed as to be spared the burden of decision?

I want us to puzzle over the relationship between epistemology and ethics.  (Hamlet seems to be looking for more perfect knowledge.  Is that in fact what he’s hurting for?)  And I want us to bring that puzzle to bear on the relationship between philosophy and tragedy.  (How does tragedy prompt us to philosophy?  Can we help but think what ought be done in any given moment of the play?  What does it mean that our judgment is thwarted, our solutions rendered impossible, by the progressing action on the stage?  What are we at then?  Racing to catch up without any hope of a finish?  And why would we need to practice that? What, if anything, does it have to do with our lives?)

There’s more to talk about, so much more to talk about, but we’re out of time.  I would have liked to ask why Hamlet needs Horatio to tell his story for him.  And why Horatio needs a stage to tell it.  And who will sound out our stories for us?  Who will insist that our bodies be borne away like the soldiers we might have been?

* * *

Katy and Jean are hosting this moth’s Creative Writing dinner.  Our two most famous members are out of town — he to a Greek isle, she to an Italian monastery, both to write.  Their absence should take some of the pressure off, but doesn’t.  I’m a wreck of nerves and all the worse for having sworn off alcohol for Lent.

We eat.  We chat — gossip mostly.  They drink wine.  I drink water.  Mike serves up generous slices of apricot tort.  We move from the dining room to the living room, and out come the dog-eared pages.  My pages.  Printed from their home computers.  Single or double-sided.  With typed or handwritten comments.  Red or black ink.  Stapled or paper-clipped together.  Jean waves his pages at me, “Now, Catlin, you know how this goes. You’re not allowed to say anything.  We talk.  You listen.”

They love it.  They love everything about it.  They read passages aloud to one another, laugh in all the right places, compare it to published authors’ work, say things like, “I’d give a thumb to have written that sentence!”  They go so far as to pick out passages for contest entries and piecemeal publishing.  Amy says, “Do you know Rick Johnson, Cat?  Oh, right, you can’t talk.  Don’t answer that.  But send me an email tomorrow, ‘kay?  I think he’d be into this and I’m happy to put you in touch.”

I feel happy and sick and like I wish I was drinking.  Somewhere in the prose I quote Wittgenstein. Someone makes a crack about Cavell.  I forget the rules and pipe up, “Be nice!  I mean to write a dissertation on Cavell!”

Something changes.  Jean makes a face, “You’re in the only PhD granting program in the country that will accept a creative dissertation and you’re going to write scholarship?”  Paul isn’t so nice about it: “It’s a damn waste, Catlin.”  Katy shakes her head, “I agree.  It’s a shame.”  But Paul interrupts her angrily ”You’ve got the fucking gift.”  Julia rushes in with diplomacy, “Maybe she has a gift for this other thing too.  Scholarship can be a calling.”  Her eyes flick to mine.  I’m wild inside.  She looks back at Paul.  Philip brings his elbows to the table, ready to level, “Look, Cat, you’re going to write the best book that’s ever been written on Cavell, or Foucault, or whoever.”  Amy finishes his sentence, “And no one will care.”  Philip raises his hand, “And a few people will care, but they’ll care for the wrong reasons or in the wrong way, say at the wrong depth.  A footnote?  A whole bunch of footnotes?  That’s not what you want to be.  That’s not going to be satisfying for you.  You’ve got this other work.”

I drink three full glasses of water, one right after the other.  ”Um, excuse me.”  I get up to the use the restroom.  When I return they’re back in my prose.  I pick up where I left off taking notes on their comments.  On the carpool ride home, Paul and Julia get in a terrible fight about whether or not criticism can attain to art.  Julia speaks of Barthes, Benjamin, Sontag, Auerbach.  Paul won’t give them to her.  ”It’s a different thing,” he says over and over, “You’re either trying to get your point across, or you’re trying to get a world across.  It’s the difference between an argument and a story.”  Julia insists, “Stories are often arguments and vice-a-versa!”  Paul retorts, “Bad arguments.  Bad stories.  The very structures undermine one another.”  I let the highway noises drown them out.  I’m thinking about the words implicit and explicit, implicate and explicate – the one folding in, the other folding out.  And I’m thinking about Ophelia, her skirts in the water, spreading wide like her legs wouldn’t, her mad songs and her sanity, her days and her nights.

C.

We organize the coins according to color, then according to size, finally according to prettiness.  The coins flat on the table remind me of the broken ice on the lake, and for a little while we talk about what the fishes might be up to underwater in the winter.  Maybe not much of anything.  Maybe they’re sleeping.  ”Um you know what?” she asks again.  ”What?”  ”If I could have any superpower I would make myself able to swim without breathing.  I mean without coming up for air.”  ”Like a mermaid,” I suggest.  ”No ’cause I would have my feet still.  And also I wouldn’t be cold.”  ”Because you’d be cold-blooded?”  ”No I’d be warm and I wouldn’t get cold in the water.”  I nod, “Oh I see, like a whale, or a porpoise.”  She purses her lips and doesn’t answer.  She thinks I don’t get it.  I nudge her almod milk toward her and try to redeem myself, “That sounds pretty awesome, Ayani.”  ”What would you be?” she asks self-consciously, politely.  I’m pushing the coins around again.  ”If I could have any superpower?  Oh, I’d be a writer.”  ”I thought you wanted to be writer when you grew up?”  ”Yeah, I do.”  I pause.  She’s bent over the table.  I’m talking to the top of her many-pom-pom-ed head, figure-eight elastics and purple plastic beads.  I count to three.  I plunge, “Because think of the best book you’ve ever read, Ayani, a book that just swallowed you up so you didn’t know who you were anymore, and time didn’t go by when you were reading, and you could see everything happening like it was real even though there weren’t any pictures.”  She looks up.  She’s got her trying-to-be-nice face on, confused but encouraging.  I say, “I think that’s a kind of superpower, being able to write like that.”

At the threshold of our apartment she pitches the bottom of her foot against the inseam of her new stretchies: tree pose.  I’ve set her up with a small stack of Euros.  I would give her the gold coins, except that my lover has been using them in his sculptures lately.  ”Um, Cat?”  ”Yeah, Ayani?  ”Do you think next time we could draw pictures?”  ”Yeah, I’d like that.” “‘Kay, Bye.” “Bye.”

C.

A week ago last Wednesday I was up early to help with the ashes.  After services, I went for a long run north.

I run along the lake shore, between the ten-lane highway and intermittent harbors.  Where I live, south of the city, there are hawks and falcons, flocks of teals on the water, solitary cormorants and loons.  The wrens blend in, but are easy to hear, and twice I’ve flushed grouse from the tall grasses.  Nearing the city the birds run out and by the time I reach the big harbor, which spans the length of downtown, shunting the trail west against traffic, there are only gulls and geese to see.  The mangy gulls dart like paper planes and beak at the harbor trash.  The geese are more dignified in their grey smoking jackets, lazing on the storm breaks or lustily champing the lawn.  They always keep some kind of formation: black heads working leeward, white tails windward and blown up like skirts.  In better weather, when the boats are out, the full sails on the water mimic their full flanks on shore.  Like tea leaves or dowsing rods, their orientations determined and revelatory.

I made it as far where the big harbor feeds the improbable river at its would-be mouth, then turned around, home-bound, cars and trucks buzzing the trail.  Between the Art Institute and Field Museum, before the jettied planetarium which marks the harbor’s end, a solitary goose stood fixed on the trail.  It was too cold for running really.  My breath froze prismatic in front of me.  Dry frost spun on the asphalt where cars and trucks passed.  No one else was out.  The goose watched me impatiently.  I thought it would spook as I approached, but instead it stretched its neck toward me, stuck its purple tongue out, panted audibly and rolled its eyes road-ward.  I followed its gaze.  A corpse — goose corpse — hit at the breast and banged around between axles before coming to rest in the curb salt.  Head and neck pulverized, breast bloody and wet, the boat of its body badly scuffed, legs tucked stiffly, black feet clenched.  The trailside traffic made a small arc around it.  I looked to the goose again.  It stretched its neck toward the highway, wove its snake head and rustled its wings.  The familiar shush and shudder of so much fast moving armament, and beyond that a dull scraping.  Four lanes away, past the dead and near body, another goose struggled and shook.  It had been hit at the tail.  At a distance of several feet, flickering between vehicles, its legs were pressed into the road surface — a primitive alphabet or spring’s posies preserved.  It heaved its head, neck, and breast skyward, back-end following, flustered its wings, and finally succeeded in flipping itself over.  Now rocking in panic like a turtle, or beetle, or like a legless man I saw once, pants tied at the thigh, tipped out of his wheelchair by an unobvious stair.

I watched as traffic caught on, smooth and unassailable, folding itself into the middle lanes as if lining up for the sacrament.  Dust and ashes, frost and salt.

The whole world cries mutely to the mutely crying world.  The trinity suffers its came, its coming, will come.  The goose wanted me to do something.  To fix, to make better.  To rush into traffic?  To bury its dead?  Not because I was human.  But because I am animal: vegetable, mineral.  Of  course I did nothing.  I ran on.

C.

Not with a bang

He claps his hands on his many hanging dress shirts

Lifts them en masse from the closet rod we hung together

Holds small household items up: scissors, tweezers, paring knife

“Do we have two of these?”

To make sense is to put two and two together

What is it to take two and two apart?

His pairs of shoes picked out from my pairs of shoes

And then to take those twos apart again?

“Do you want one of these egg cups?”

One of these serving spoons?

One of these reclining chairs?

So all stands singular

To unmake coupled creation

(At least for a time, I tell myself)

To unmake—at least for a time—the two-by-two animaled world

How does the world end?

In my garden soggy husks of rotted bulbs ferment under the top-most soil

Even the light spring rain exposes them

They show at the bottoms of small fist sized puddles

Pulverized, white-skinned, encased in glass

My peach tree is pushing forth sturdy little buds

Popcorn save for the raspberry pink of them

And my red-twigged dogwoods

Bobbing and bowing of their own accord

Offer green tongue-shaped leaves that hang twinned

Like lungs

Or hands

Bound at the wrist

Held palms-out

And open

C.

Entering the darkness and stumbling to light

* * *

Devils cast lots for my clothes

While seraphim tend my soul