Remains

This indelible image of the poet dying young, with the suggestive black shadow cast by his unconscious head on the wall, is of John Keats on his deathbed in Rome, 1821. It was sketched by his friend Joseph Severn, who noted at the bottom that it was “drawn to keep me awake — a deadly sweat was on him all this night.”

In these posthumous lines, Keats anticipated that death — writing at the time for his beloved, Fanny Brawn, perhaps, but surely also for the rest of us, his future readers:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d — see here it is —
I hold it towards you.

The haunting power of these words reaching from the grave is all the more intense for our knowing that Keats’s tuberculosis had already begun to cough his lungs out, killing him within two years.

Never married, Keats left no direct descendants. But he managed to impregnate the future a different way, with words.

When we read his work, however, we don’t quite bring him all the way back to life. And the process is the reverse of what he imagined. When we read as intently as we can, it’s his red life that starts streaming through our veins.

 

Death masks

Leafing through the newspaper, I come upon the obituary pages and wonder how the photographs are chosen.

The current practice seems to be this: if the deceased lived well into old age, then the photographs of them are usually drawn not from the very end of their span, but close enough to reveal at least a hint of their advancing years. An exception is made if they have long since faded from public view — then they’re pictured as they were best known.

— Now if the dead had desires, I imagine they’d want their pictures to show them at the height of their powers or feeling.

And for the better souls among them, I’m convinced that these heights would be entirely different from the ones defined for us by flashbulbs.

 

Cut to black

For cultural if not genetic posterity, better a cut to black than a fade to it.

Consider how sharp a shape these shortened lives possess — Arthur Rimbaud, Percy Bryce Shelley, Robert Johnson, Charlie Parker, Alan Turing, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Smithson…

There’s no doubting that an early death can confer many advantages. Those brought down in their prime remain so much more vivid to us than those whose lives merely trailed away.

Oh, to duck both the compromises of the middle years and the irrelevancies of the declining ones! Only when our promise remains wide open do we stay so alive in others, so open-ended.

 

Own hands

von Kleist, Mayakovsky, Crane, Pollack, Berryman, Curtis, Cobain

You can take the shape of your life into your own hands by ending it.

Which is not to say that suicide is usually a deliberate technique of cultural survival, though in certain cases it can be.

When Sylvia Plath stuck her head in the oven, it was no doubt anguish that drove her there, but dramatic and even exhibitionistic poems like Lady Lazurus looked forward to the act:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

And when Ray Johnson drowned himself in Sag Harbor, it was almost certainly the last move in his elaborately convoluted communications with the world — perhaps another in his Death series of artworks, which thoroughly mix up elements of art and of life.

In retrospect, his body of work, so close to being ephemeral, in fact becomes a kind of cultural coffin or reliquary — which works only if we his survivors care enough to collect, preserve, and decode it.

 

Fade

Fading away gives a more ambiguous and even compromised shape to a life.

Early Visions (Holmes;1989)

At the end of the first of his volume of Coleridge’s life, with the second not to appear for another ten years, Richard Holmes pauses to reflect on this interruption, which has the advantage, he says, that it

…does allow the reader to consider the position dramatically, as it were. Suppose Coleridge had indeed died, as he and his friends clearly expected he would, aged thirty-one, somewhere in the Mediterranean in 1804? …

To begin with, the whole “mythos” of his career would surely wear a quite different aspect. … He would be one of the Promethean figures, still moving upwards on the parabola of genius…

His literary achievement would have a sharp, bright clarity. It is is difficult to think that the shadows of failure, plagiarism, apostacy, or even opium addiction, would mark his reputation in any significant way.

 

Alternatives

The sad thing is that you can take any number of lives and see how much better they’d be — for us — had they ended at their peaks.

I imagine Auden dead in ‘45 rather than ‘73 — never a false step taken.

But I’m glad he didn’t imagine such a thing. Your life is not your artwork, and when you try to make it so, you achieve a kind of death-in-life that is the fate of those who try to make it so — living by rigid principles, arranging themselves as pictures for others to behold — models for others to follow.

I’ll describe the pitfalls of such masters & gurus in a separate post.

 

postscript

8.1.08 — The New Yorker just published a book review of Posthumous Keats by Stanley Plumly, which is pertinent to the first part of my remarks here. From the reviewer’s conclusion:

“Keats, of all poets, cannot be divided between the artist and the man,” Plumly writes. But in a sense it is precisely the violent sundering of the artist and the man that is Keats’s tragedy.

When I read Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love this past winter, I underlined his observation that someone’s death

I’ve kept turning this thought over in my mind, trying to make sense of it in light of my own experiences of mourning. As I’ve done so, a life has come back to me — a young woman: a suicide.

 

Survivor’s guilt

She was my intern in a summer school classroom for learning disabled children. Before meeting her I’d been told that she was a gifted but troubled college graduate, now seeking a meaningful new direction for her life (turning away from a long and intense training as a violinist). In my classroom, she proved to be perfectly diligent, though without the infectious enthusiasm with children that typifies natural-born teachers.

The last day of the session was a half-day, which culminated in a performance/show-and-tell/cupcake celebration of the class’s accomplishments. When it ended at noon, we all went our separate ways, free for the summer. Her way, I learned by phone that evening, was to go directly home and kill herself.

That news made me backtrack obsessively through the hours & days before. Somehow I wanted to pay her the attention that I now blamed myself for having given her only fleetingly. Certainly she came back to me with much greater force dead than alive, on one occasion uncannily so: a few days afterwards, I was walking on Connecticut Avenue when I happened to glance over at the passing blur of traffic, where for a moment I thought I saw her behind the wheel of a car. I had already started raising my hand in a wave when I realized she was gone.

At her funeral I was surprised to find a reception line of the kind I’d encountered previously only at weddings and diplomatic functions. As I made my way down this line I expressed my sadness to the family members for their unexpected loss. Her father, who stood there radiating health, prosperity, and prominence, contradicted me sharply. Her suicide, he said, had been inevitable after so many previous attempts — “She was never meant for this world,” or words to that effect. When her siblings nodded in agreement, I turned away, numb.

Meanwhile, I’d forgotten about the snapshots we’d taken of the class celebration. When they came back from the photo processing store, they bluntly corrrected my mistaken memory. Where I had remembered a serious but composed, pale but pretty young woman, the photographs of her showed only a haggard and forlorn face, with the darkest imaginable circles under her downcast eyes.

How, I kept asking myself, could I have missed such telltale signs? At whom had I been looking?

What I really wanted to do then was to peer back into a more ordinary time for her and catch some of the unguarded and unweighted moments of her life — opening a window or putting on sandals or drinking a glass of water.

 

Passing

It’s the impending and then the actual absence of someone close to me that invests even the most everyday aspects of her being with such importance. I could even say that the longing for a departed lover is not unlike the act of mourning her, with the same sharpening of perception.

These ideas can lead in a less morbid direction when you consider your position in the wider world. Many lives are lost to you almost every day, and not by any tragedy, but merely in the mundane course of things — a rider on the subway, a cashier in a store, a child on a tricycle, a reader in a café, none of whom you are likely to see again.

If you focus your full attention on such people, their presences before you sharpen terrifically. You can put yourself in a kind of one-way touch with them in the same way as you do with other departed souls, equally present in their impending or actual absences.

This was the kind of devotion that Jack Kerouac at his best paid to others. In Visions of Cody, he finds himself in a cafeteria, watching the people around him, drawn in particular to a solitary girl whom he observes with a gentle loving kindness:

This in a passage that ends with Kerouac’s famous pronouncement that

which to me implies that to observe things this freely means you have to let them go — a relinquishing rather than a possessing.

This past week brought the latest feud between Martin Luther King’s three surviving children. Another unseemly squabble over money and power has again landed them all in court and again dishonored their parents’ legacy.

There is a sort of monument to that dishonor, the King Center in Atlanta, which I visited several years ago. At the time still under the family’s private control, it was a badly designed and poorly maintained theme park, with the parents’ tomb set out in a long pool of water the color of a chlorinated swimming pool, and a hackneyed International Civil Rights Walk of Fame that aped the much older Stars Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard.

A cold wind happened to be blowing across the desolate expanse of the place that day, and King’s powerful spirit could be felt only in its utterly forlorn absence.

 

Library

This brought to mind another place named for King — the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library in Washington dc.

This is a crypt-like building with brooding dark glass set in a grid of dark steel. Its main entrance is recessed below the out-jutting mass of the upper floors, and I well remember the feeling of dread I had on first approaching it.

This was around 1973 or 4, when the building was still brand-new. Already, however, it had a feeling of dilapidation, with its elevators and its hvac systems frequently malfunctioning. No connection was evident either to its purported hero nor to its surroundings, where the ground floors of old buildings were tenanted by a striking number of wig shops and record stores perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy.

With my usual ignorance of star architects, it was only on reading the library’s Wikipedia entry just now that I learned that the design’s mastermind was none other than the illustrious Mies van der Rohe. And that this was his last building — a fittingly disconnected tomb for a certain kind of aesthetic ambition.

 

A book

But it was on one of my initial visits to this library that I encountered a haunting book that I’ve kept in mind ever since. The first glimpse I had of it was in a thumbnail review that happened to catch my eye as I leafed through the exotic pages of the Times Literary Supplement (dense newsprint on stock so light as to be translucent, the pages fluttering from a traditional wooden newspaper stick).

The book in question, AR Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World, was the neuropsychological case study of a Soviet soldier irreparably brain-damaged by machine-gun fire. Why such a book should have caught the attention of a questing teenager I don’t know, but it led me first to an obscure section of the library stacks to retrieve it and then to one of the reading areas (populated by a roughly equal mixture of scholars, pensioners, homeless people, and junkies) to read it.

To read is to try putting yourself in the place of the writer, but here my effort quickly doubled back onto the act of reading itself. For early on the first-person sections of the book had me imagining myself scanning through its lines (or rather its letters) in the same way Sublieutenant Zasetsky would have had to, three letters at a time, with the focal point displaced up and to the right, as I’ve clumsily diagrammed above.

Sitting at a chair with the book resting on the table in front of me, I also had to try picturing myself suddenly becoming “very tall, but my torso [...] terribly short and my head very, very tiny — no bigger than a chicken’s head.” Or to imagine other hallucinations of my body image, from which my entire right side could suddenly vanish or in which my limbs could arbitrarily reposition themselves (my right leg, for example, hanging out above my shoulder).

I was also obliged to try matching this kind of constant perceptual instability with similar cognitive lossses — with no piece of knowledge ever securely in my grasp, fighting over and over again to reclaim territory I thought I’d long since mastered: basic literacy, the facts of my life story, etc.

 

A tomb in miniature

Mallarmé proclaimed that a book is a spiritual instrument — a tomb in miniature for our souls.

The Man with a Shattered World is both of those things, though in saying so I’m willfully misapplying Mallarmé’s Symbolist notion. The power of Luria’s book comes from its plainspoken and hard-won truth, illuminated from the inside by the patient’s relentless determination and from the outside by Luria’s informed compassion.

Zasetsky devoted his life to slowly piecing his memories together on the page: first into words and then into phrases and finally into sentences. Luria reports that “he started this story before the war ended and continued to work on it for twenty-five years.” He goes on to remark:

One would be hard put to say whether any other man has ever spent years of such agonizing work putting together a 3000-page document which he could not read.

Luria however could read it, carefully and knowledgeably, and in so doing turned himself into the other unassuming hero of the work. He wrested case history 3712 from utter obscurity by excerpting, organizing, and explicating his patient’s writings without ever reducing the man himself to a mere compendium of damage and symptom.

His modest volume is a model memorial.

in 1981, Bucharest was a capital of stupidity. A series of grandiose Five Year Plans had industrialized the once-agrarian nation, with new factories obsolete on completion. The faces of the poor souls on the streets of this city were bloodless and gray from slight but sustained malnutrition.

From time to time, plainclothes policemen — easily recognized by the long black shiny leather overcoats they all wore — would line up along the wide boulevards of this paris of the east, a sure warning to the able-bodied and clear-witted to make themselves scarce. Soon a phalanx of black limousines, bearing one or more members of the Ceausescu family, would come hurtling down the road at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour, stopping for neither traffic-light nor hapless pedestrian in their way. It was not uncommon for the latter to be run over by several cars in succession — the security rule for these motorcades was never to slow or swerve for any reason whatsoever.

On winter nights, energy shortages would stop all the escalators and extinguish three of every four lights at the central square transit station (unirii), deadening what was meant to be the hub of the city. At the Intercontinental Hotel, which loomed overhead nearby, prostitutes would hunt for foreign businessmen in the bar, but such catches must have been few and far between in those lean years. Even so, in a northern district where Party officials had their residences, one evening I spotted a bright red lobster claw discarded on a cobblestone street.

At the time I was in love with a marvelous Englishwoman employed at the British Embassy. The price I paid for the intense sweetness of her company was participation in the unending round of social events that she was obligated to attend. This social life was informally but rigidly enforced by the Embassy, apparently standard practice after the scandalous defections to Moscow of Philby, MacLean, and Burgess back in the 60s. The idea was to minimize social contact with anyone outside the trusted circle (to which, as a yank and diplomat’s son, I’d been readily admitted).

Especially for unmarried members of the Embassy, this meant night after night of boring chitchat with a restricted number of souls who’d long since exhausted their repertoire of stories, opinions, and jokes. It was also an unwitting parody of English life, with dart and badminton contests, refreshments of shandies and crisps, and, on the occasion that now comes back to mind, stag nights.

 

The intricacy of idiocy

Any small circle is bound to trade in melodramas and gossip, which human nature supplies all too readily and abundantly.

It so happens that a new addition to the British Embassy staff was a young accountant, rather tall, rather thin, rather bland, with aviator glasses and sandy hair that was starting to recede a bit from his bony forehead. In his previous post somewhere in central Africa he’d taken up with an Australian secretary, to whom he’d place long distance calls late every night. On one such occasion, lonely no doubt, or perhaps bored, he’d proposed and she’d accepted, with the wedding planned for London.

So on the eve of his departure I was pressed into service for the obligatory stag night, which gathered our circle’s five bachelors in a nearly deserted beer hall somewhere in Bucharest. We had very little in common. In addition to the accountant and myself, there was a silver-haired gentleman with impeccable but reticent manners who, for all I knew, could well have been the mi6 head of station there (as Graham Greene would have cast him); a burly young Londoner who brought a more common touch, fond of beer, the Buzzcocks, and football matches; and a red-haired Scot from Edinburgh whose unconscious use of the word jew as an epithet had earned several rebukes from me on past occasions.

If only I could recover the napkin I doodled on that night! For as we downed one glass of beer after another, I had finally hit upon a solution to my ever-growing boredom and despair.

With all topics of interest seemingly depleted long before, I’d taken it for granted that the structure of our conversation would be equally impoverished. But now I resolved to simply note down the chain of associations that we were pursuing in so desultory a fashion, and as I did so, I was startled to find an intricacy to our idiocy, which came to me with the force of a revelation. I can no longer recall its exact pattern or contents, but it wove together the unlikeliest of elements along the most improbable of paths — a salacious joke giving way to a commonplace piety, a patchy reminiscence of a distant location evoking a more vividly recalled movie scene.

I can remember my blue ink blurring into the cheap paper as the nodes of my diagram kept revealing new interconnections & defining a new pattern, but no other particulars remain, other than the sad denouement of the human story here. It turned out that the fiancé had started cheating on his betrothed just before he’d gone to wed her in London, and when he brought her back to Bucharest, he persisted in his folly, the marriage unravelling before it was much past its honeymoon.

 

Trains of thought

Edgar Allan Poe, who was fascinated by chains of association, once wrote:

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest; and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.

Illimitable distance and incoherence apply equally well to the steps of a conversation, as I’d discovered in the course of the episode I just recounted.

But introspection — the conscious study of your own thoughts — is a much harder task than Poe implies, as anyone who tries it discovers. The mind has a mind of its own, you know, and its web of distractions soon has you losing track of the very resolve you made to keep track!

Poe, however, makes an even bolder case for the potential to retrace steps — or rather his character does, C. Auguste Dupin, literature’s first detective.

In a tour-de-force of reasoning, Dupin reads the mind of a friend during a silent 15-minute span of their walk across a very busy fictional Paris, at the conclusion of which Dupin responds out loud to what he has successfully deduced to be the latest line in his friend’s long internal monologue.

I had wanted to summarize for you the long chain of associations that Dupin managed to trace in this passage, but on re-reading the story, I find that their abstruseness resists compression, as is suggested by the opening line of Dupin’s own summary:

The larger links of the chain run thus — Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichols, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer.

So best for you to read the real thing in its entirety, which you can find here .

 

Descendants

Poe’s Dupin has innumerable descendants in literature, most famously Sherlock Holmes, who appropriates not only his logical method but also his melancholy.

But it strikes me that a more important successor lies outside the field of literature altogether — or so he would have had us believe, convinced as he was that his field was science.

I am speaking of course of Sigmund Freud, who was as confident in real life of his infallible analytic abilities as Dupin was in Poe’s fiction. Freud’s associative method is the same as Dupin’s, and what suits our purposes especially well here is that in 1898 he diagrammed an example of it: the psychical mechanism of forgetfulness.

From Neurology to Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud’s Neurological Drawings and Diagrams of the Mind

For anyone interested in diagramming sentences, as I’ve shown myself to be, this is a delightful specimen of something similar: diagramming thought. Although Freud’s associations are just as esoteric as Poe/Dupin’s, and are in German rather than in English, they’re still well worth taking a brief stab at deciphering (for a full account, see the first chapter of his Psychopathology of Everyday Life).

Freud recounts that on trying to recall the name of an Italian painter, Signorelli, two other painters sprang to mind instead: Boticcelli and Boltraffio. As you can see, these three names thus constitute the upper row of his diagram.

Freud’s circles and squares tell us that his word associations operate not only on the whole word but also on its parts (and not the phonetic parts, but simply letter groupings). The right-hand column is easily deciphered: signor is man in Italian, which translates into herr in German. And a little further knowledge of German — that tod und sexualitat means death and sexuality — confirms our suspicion that as usual with Freud, this diagram will trace another example of sexual repression. But beyond these obvious clues, it’s difficult to fathom the rest of the diagram, the intricate workings of which become clear only in Freud’s written account.

A simplified version of the account goes like this: in the course of a polite conversation, Freud had remarked on the trust that Bosnian Turks were said to place in their doctors and on their resignation to fate. He reports that he was about to add that for the Bosnian men, life without sex isn’t worth living, and it was this inappropriate remark that he had self-censored. But meanwhile he’d already associated this suppressed pairing of sex and death with Trafoi (a town in Italy), where he’d recently received news of a patient’s suicide. So when he wanted to move on to an unrelated remark about an Italian painter, his subconscious turmoil blocked his word recall, generating the two false candidates as surrogates for his suppressed thoughts.

With these basic clues unmasked, the mechanism of associations that the diagram traces so ingeniously becomes clear.But the real question to ponder is what bearing this might have on the truth.

 

Abduction

Poe’s Dupin, like Sherlock Holmes, is confident in the infallibility of his deductive reasoning; so too is Freud. — What arrogance!

Whether their logical method is to argue from general law to specific instance (deduction) or vice versa (induction) may be beside the point, for in fact they necessarily employ a third, more error-prone procedure, which Charles Peirce called abducton:

See this useful webpage for Pearce on abduction

A mass of facts is before us. We go through them. We examine them. We find them a confused snarl, an impenetrable jungle. We are unable to hold them in our minds. We endeavor to set them down upon paper; but they seem so multiplex intricate that we can neither satisfy ourselves that what we have set down represents the facts, nor can we get any clear idea of what it is that we have set down. But suddenly, while we are poring over our digest of the facts and are endeavoring to set them into order, it occurs to us that if we were to assume something to be true that we do not know to be true, these facts would arrange themselves luminously. That is abduction.

Or, more succinctly:

The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course,
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

It’s hard to conceive of any other means by which to make sense of a mysterious web of associations. But by the same token any sense we do make of such a web can never be more than conjectural. Whenever we’re seduced by such brilliant conjecture, we should immediately try imagining the presumably innumerable alternative explanations that must exist side by side.

This uncertainty shouldn’t dismay us — it springs us into wide-openness.

 

The odds of being right

But look: I’m not sure why elementary math is never applied to the analyses of Freud, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, and any number of other bold thinkers — not to mention to so many other fascinating conjectures and predictions in such areas as history or politics or crime or (of especial interest to us) conspiracy.

Probably because the odds are so discouraging.

Take any chain of association, and first of all admit that your confidence in the correctness of each link, no matter how cleverly derived, will never be 100%. Well, then, what will it be? Ninety-five per cent? Ninety? Eighty? Seventy? Aren’t Freud’s brilliant inferences likely to fall within the lower range?

Remember that a chain of associations is a stepped sequence: a single misstep throws off all remaining ones too. We can illustrate this with the steps in Dupin’s speculation, which can be pictured like this:

Since there are seven steps in this sequence (even the first item in an inference), the odds are easily calculated. If our confidence in each link is as high as ninety-five per cent , then 0.95⁷ = .70 — that is, the whole chain has a seventy per cent chance of being true.

With ninety per cent confidence, however, it’s only 47% likely. With eighty per cent, it’s only 21% likely. And with seventy per cent confidence, we’re down to an eight per cent likelihood of our end result being correct.

That’s why Poe is imaginative literature — and Freud too.

 

First, three stories to prepare a second approach to a difficult portrait — of Maryanne Amacher.

 

1. What’s
in the box?

My first lesson in plot analysis and in self-inflicted fate came in the unlikely form of a vampire movie that I saw at about age 10.

The lesson I learned doesn’t depend on the circumstances in which I learned it, but since the scene stands out so clearly in my memory, I might mention that this was on a late afternoon in 1966 or 67. It took place in the Marine Guards’ living quarters, which was across the street from the US Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, where my father worked as a diplomat. On Saturday afternoons, my brother and I used to go over to hang out with the Marines, enlisted men whom we looked up to with a good deal of awe, though in fact they were determinedly regular American guys with next to nothing macho or warrior-like about them.

Lacking American television, the Marines made do with the old 16mm prints that the Pentagon circulated among the military’s far-flung outposts — to isolated places like this one behind the Iron Curtain and to the various embattled bases in Vietnam where these guards had recently survived their mandatory one-year tours of combat duty.

On that particular afternoon, the black-and-white movie was already flickering against their living-room wall, but we’d arrived in time for the scene that has stuck in my mind ever since. One of the Marines, who’d watched the film enough times to have gotten it down cold, pointed intently at a figure in the projection. He told us to keep a close eye on the guy to see where his curiosity would land him.

Evidently a newly arrived guest in Count Dracula’s castle, the poor fellow had heard strange noises in the hall outside his bedroom and had cracked his door open just in time to glimpse the Count’s trusted old servant staggering a bit under the weight of the large pine-wood box he was carrying on his shoulder. Soon he disappeared with the box down a dark stairway, and the guest, curious about what was in that box, went after him.

I don’t have a visual memory of the scene that follows, but I surmise that the film has the guest following the servant into the crypt below the castle, where Dracula, now shielded safely from daylight, re-emerges triumphantly from his coffin. On finding that his guest has discovered his secret, he must have sunk his teeth into his unfortunate visitor’s neck and sucked his life away.

The next scene comes back to me vividly, no doubt because of the sardonic satisfaction with which the Marine greeted it. As the old servant again staggers into view under the weight of the same wooden box, the Marine called out in words more or less like these:

The poor guy was dying to know what was in the box, right? Well, now he’s dead, and he’s in the box.

 

2. Where the
Woozle wasn’t

Many will remember a similar but simpler loop from Winnie the Pooh — from the wintry scene in which Piglet finds Pooh following a line of fresh footprints in the snow. Piglet speculates that these may be the tracks of a Woozle, and so he excitedly joins Pooh in the hunt.

click to expand

The tracks lead the two of them in a loop around a clump of trees, which they continue circling as they notice with mounting concern that the number of tracks keeps growing, from two to three to four — an alarming increase in a pack of possibly hostile creatures.

After fear forces Piglet into making a hasty excuse and exit, Pooh sits down to puzzle over the situation for a while. Eventually it occurs to him to try putting his own paw into one of the footprints, and on finding that it fits, he concedes to himself that

I have been Foolish and Deluded, and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.

 

3. Self-stalker

Almost the same scenario was enacted by an older woman named Lisa. She feared she was being stalked by a man who would not only tail her almost everywhere but occasionally break into her house when he knew she was away. He had yet to leave a trace.

Fueling Lisa’s suspicions were all sorts of odd hang-ups recorded on her telephone answering machine, which she guessed the man kept making to see whether she was at home or not. Soon she decided to stop re-erasing the tape, preserving the traces as evidence if ever needed by the police.

When she did go out, she took to checking not only her rearview mirror but also that answering machine, dialing in remotely every so often to detect any new disconnections. If she heard one of the telltale clicks, as she did with increasing frequency, she’d race home to try catching the phantom perpetrator in the act.

Of course, you will have deduced that the aborted calls on Lisa’s machine were her own. If she was like a cat compulsively chasing her tail, in her case it was not for fun.

 

Superimpositions

All three of these stories overlap with that of Maryanne Amacher in a pretty clear way, but I’ll start with a less obvious entry-point provided by the third story.

If we consider the plight of poor Lisa, we can speculate that when alone in her house she couldn’t have stopped herself from imagining the furtive presence of her stalker as he’d been tiptoeing through her rooms, perhaps that very day (his eyes gleaming). Almost as if he were in still the place with her now.

Thus the nightmare recounted in my previous post.

Fear often makes what you can’t see more palpable than what you can — and events removed in time can still seem to overlap in a coinciding space. They intermingle in people’s minds if nowhere else. (And where else is there for us?)

The reverse is also true, for events in separate spaces can also be superimposed. Well, that’s a trivial observation, now that I consider it, especially when it comes to sound. For don’t our ears constantly bring us assorted news of other places? Think of the whistle of an unseen train, the tolling of a distant bell, the rumble of thunder beyond the horizon.

Such sounds carry with them a sense of their separate space: the church-bell’s tolling, for instance, tells of its size and curvature, and the thickness of its brass; it even hints at the height and solidity of the tower housing it.

Maryanne Amacher used to rail against the typical study and understanding of music that was blind to the reciprocal spaces of music — the space that determines the quality of a sound and the space that a sound defines. Music theory and notation, she would complain, measured the time of music and its internal relations, but they left out half the story, which was space. (Story is the right word here because for Maryanne sound worlds were populated by sound characters, a peculiar conception that I mostly failed to grasp, no matter how many times I asked and listened and she answered and illustrated. But I’ll try coming back to the idea later.)

The first piece I remember her describing to me, perhaps when we met (was it at Scott Fisher’s Portola Valley house in 1993? or in my Varick Street studio the following year?), was a live superimposition of sounds from spaces unlike each other in every way but for their having near-identical acoustics. Maryanne had matched an art gallery to a car rental office so that, as I imagined it, her gallery audience would find themselves startled by such invisible occurrences as a conversation conducted nearby or some footsteps approaching from across the room or a car horn echoing off walls that seemed but could not possibly be the ones right there.

This must have felt like a form of acoustic haunting, the presence of absence; and just as a spiritualist’s sensitivity is said to enable her summoning of unseen presences (I have my doubts), so too could Maryanne’s exceptionally receptive hearing (no doubt at all).

 

The woman in the
leather helmet

That Maryanne was herself haunted by all kinds of otherworldly apprehensions was immediately clear to anyone encountering her, at least in the latter years of her life when I came to know her. Her appearance, together with the startling cackle of her laugh, put you in mind of an old bohemian witch. Tightly clad in black, her arms and legs and torso were like the spindly limbs and trunk of a tree in winter; and her long bright yellow hair resembled a scarecrow’s straw.

Most striking was the antique black leather helmet she so often wore. This she kept pulled down tight over her head, giving her the unlikely additional air of a windswept World War I ace pilot, just descended from her antiquated biplane.

Clearly Maryanne had once been a beautiful woman, but with age her face had started caving in on itself — perhaps from her emaciation, but also, surely, from her addiction to nicotine. The way she dragged so deeply and desperately on her roll-your-own smokes made you wonder whether the repeated suction of lips and cheeks had taken permanent effect.

Oddly enough, this gave her the one thing she had in common with her fellow upstaters, as I found when I visited her in Kingston or worked with her awhile in Troy — many women upstate had the same drawn features and the same smoker’s rasp and cough. But this was her only point of overlap: Maryanne lived entirely in her own world, which was sometimes wildly out of joint with the real one.

 

Two misadventures

Wanting to suggest a visual idea to us once, she insisted on our driving back through a pelting rain to Albany, where she’d arrived by bus that morning. She’d been transfixed by the odd sci-fi view of the city that she’d had on stepping down from bus to parking lot, and she felt we’d really get her vision if we were to see it for ourselves.

I’d glimpsed Albany in passing several previous times from Interstate 787 (which like so many American highways cuts the city off from its waterway, in this case the mighty Hudson), so I could imagine what she was after — the skyline was the oddest jumble of buildings, the product of the state capitol’s outrageous pork funding that had outdone itself above all in the construction of a huge performing arts center, which took the outlandish shape of a tilted flying saucer.

But when we found our way through all the underpasses and side-streets to the Albany bus station, Maryanne could not recapture her view. She had us drive from one spot to another in the parking lot, then cruise the adjacent streets to see if we could locate an auxiliary parking lot (we couldn’t; there wasn’t one). Her annoyance mounting, Maryanne spitefully declared that we’d driven her to the wrong Greyhound station, that Albany had to have a second station that we were just incapable of finding. Defeated, we drove back up and across the river to Troy, windshield wipers fighting the blinding rain.

There followed, during that particular residency, an equally odd episode in which Maryanne reported a geist in the house we were sharing that week. It had left a large puddle of urine near her shower, she said, and then it had made off with her leather helmet, which, despite her having turned her room upside down, was nowhere to be found. When it was discovered tucked into one of the folding chairs of the theater in which we were working, this too, she said, was a trick of the geist.

 

The madness of art

Even conceding that Maryanne was a little mad, couldn’t one argue that such a trait is the usual mark of the visionary artist? Even an essential attribute?

Certainly when I introduced my slightly-mad-friend to various Soho types back in the mid-90s, they all immediately declared her to be the real thing — which was undeniably true compared to them, for where her obsessions were artistic and spiritual (what was the mind of the universe?), theirs were artistic and material (what were the market valuations of artworks and real estate?)

But to be honest, where Maryanne’s genius is concerned, I’m unable to form a complete judgment; if she was really possessed of it, I was too late to see it in full flower. Most of what I knew of Maryanne came either from her diminutive but devoted cult of admirers or from my intermittent but intense conversations with her. Of her actual music and installations, I was able to gain very little direct knowledge — to my frustation, there were several pieces I only just missed catching.

 

Maas tunnel

For example, there was the time when a Dutch group — ex-anarchist squatters become government-subsidized arts collective, who went by the name of V2 (surely not for the Nazi rocket!) — when these cyber-zealots had brought each of us over to Rotterdam, I to give an illustrated talk on recent work and Maryanne to create a site-specific sound installation. I delivered my talk in V2’s headquarters, which boasted a computer studio with a floor tilted at an edgy but worse than useless 30º angle; Maryanne created her sound installation under the vast Rotterdam harbor, in an old pedestrian tunnel that led from one side to the other. Though my plane had arrived in time for me to to have attended her show, my hosts neglected to alert me to the installation or even to Maryanne’s presence in Rotterdam, so that when we did run into each other (very happily, for neither of us knew anyone else there), it was too late for me to hear her piece and I had to make do with exploring the tunnel after the fact with her. She pointed out where she’d placed her speakers and explained how she’d shaped the sound waves as they traveled in either direction back up the tunnel.

The totality of the work was up to me to imagine — and the way I imagined it then, it was great.

 

Moral support

Now my mind skips forward a year or two, to a time when Maryanne orbited back into my life for another few days. She’d had to venture into the city and had asked me to lend her moral support by accompanying her on two undertakings, both of which had her even more fretful than usual.

The first took us to a Riverside Drive apartment that served as a sound studio for John Zorn, who’d prevailed upon her to make a CD — her first. No small tribute to him that he overcame Maryanne’s extreme perfectionism and her ocd tendency to spin in circles, both very present that afternoon. Not only did he eventually extract the Sound Characters: Making the Third Ear cd from her, but also a really spectacular follow-up, Sound Characters, vol 2 (see Zorn’s Tzadik music label).

I was reminded of Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine, where the flickering of light at a certain rhythm produces otherworldly colors in a distinctly unfamiliar part of your visual cortex (I’ve written about this elsewhere).
Both experiences are trippy: non-pharmaceutical psychedelia.

I sat next to Maryanne as she reviewed a track with Zorn called “Head Rhythm,” a decidedly peculiar piece of music that sends rapid high-pitched tones deep into your ears. You hear these tones at first in the usual fashion (though a bit more uncomfortably), but within seconds you experience an additional effect, one as much of touch as of hearing — an odd clicking that flutters close within your inner ear, making you aware of that part of your head as if Maryanne’s were the first music ever to enter it.

A few days later, Maryanne took me to a Kronos Quartet reception, which was hosted in one of the apartment palaces along Central Park West — the Dakota, I think, famous as the site of a different music-related story: John Lennon’s New York life and death. Earlier Maryanne had told me that the party was in honor of the composers from whom Kronos had commissioned new works, but now she confessed what was causing her such nerves — while she’d accepted the Kronos commission and taken their initial payment, she hadn’t been able to compose anything to her liking for string quartet and had never fulfilled her obligation.

No matter, so far as I could tell at the reception: encountering warm welcomes only and not even a hint of recrimination, Maryanne was soon much more at her ease, especially when she ran into La Monte Young, with whom she happily exchanged news and reminiscences, two old veterans of extreme experimental music.

I’d last seen Young two decades earlier in a downtown loft where he’d performed his Music for Well-Tuned Piano, five or more hours of absolutely levitating music that reorganized my ideas about where music could reach. At the time, Young had the look of an ascetic adept of higher musical and spiritual practices, his clothing a blend of downtown and Indian styles. Now, however, he was utterly changed in appearance — I could’ve mistaken him for an aging Hell’s Angel, pot belly jutting out between the two sides of his unbuttoned black leather vest and fingers from his fingerless black leather gloves. Quite curious.

 

Outward appearance

But why should someone’s outward appearance matter at all? Only because, like it or not, it does — we can’t help but be influenced by such impressions even when we think we know better.

One might wish that the Formalists were right in their insistence that artworks are autonomous creations, detached from the life and personality of whoever created them. But the truth is messier, as it so often proves to be: works have at best a compromised purity, never completely separable from the external associations we bring to them, many of which come from the impressions we’ve gathered of the artist at first-, second-, or tenth-hand.

I recall the peculiar wrenching that my first encounter with John Cage gave me. When as a teenager I’d first listened to his electronic music and read (and re-read) his book Silence, I’d formed a stable image of the man, one that I took from black-and-white photos of the 50s and early 60s. With his crew-cut hair, clean-shaven face, and tie-clipped necktie, he had the square look of an American astronaut or engineer, bravely facing the mid-century future.

In 1977, though, I watched him gently delivering remarks at a little lecture podium, and the shaggy soft-shouldered man pacing a little in front of us was nothing like what I expected. It was the nature of his voice, especially, that so surprised me: exaggeratedly effeminate, it stopped just short of lisping.

Since social typing is an automatic and uncontrollable process, I saw or felt one stereotype displace its opposite in an instant. This reframed my view of both the man and his art, relevantly or irrelevantly as the case may have been — I could argue for either, and the truth is almost certainly both; it’s only unfortunate that I can’t freely alternate between knowing and not-knowing, but must live and think in-between.

 

Parts, not sum

I’ve observed that personal impressions often don’t add up the way we assume they will — and are sure they should (only in novels do we find find that reassuring unity of character).

Recently the memory came back to me of a young woman I knew long ago in Providence. She had one of the the most beautiful speaking voices I’ve heard, with a warmth and good cheer that projected her presence right over the telephone line to wherever I’d happened to have called in from (usually a cramped phone booth by the roadside). Pitched slightly low with a feeling more of the lungs than of the throat, her speech was completely unaffected. With her pronounced working-class Rhode Island accent, youse guys sounded pleasingly natural coming from her lips.

Her person — to use the word in one of its curious senses — was at odds with her voice, for she was far from lovely in appearance, with an acne’d face and a fleshy body bulging under the shapeless clothes she favored. She occupied space with an awkwardness that her voice gave no hint of.

It was as if there were two beings within her, one of whom was set free in her sound.

 

Dream House

High on my list of places to go when I settled in Manhattan seventeen years ago was the Dream House, La Monte Young and Marion Zazeela’s sound and light space, located in a loft downtown on Church Street. But perhaps because I knew that as a permanent installation it wouldn’t be going away, I deferred my visit in favor of shows that would be — and found, this many years later, that I’d ended up never going at all.

It still surprises me, though, that two different factors hadn’t combined to propel me there. The first was an interest in permanent sound installations, for I bemoaned with Maryanne that none of her Music for Sound-joined Rooms had ever found a permanent home. Such permanence would have had, I thought, two advantages: to separate the work from its creator’s fretful presence (the spider removed from her web); and to allow extended or repeated listening by those drawn to it deeply, an opportunity for acoustic contemplation on equal terms with the visual contemplation of paintings displayed in museums. Since in theory the Dream House exemplified just this idea, I’d have thought I’d have hurried over to see it in practice.

The second motivation should have been my desire to re-experience this sort of piece by La Monte Young at larger scale (by Young and Zazeela, to be correct, though Zazeela’s magenta light environment interested me far less than Young’s musical one). I’d already encountered their Music and Light Box (1967-8) when in 1999 it was revived for a group show in San Francisco. That show, curated by Larry Rinder, was called Searchlight: consciousness at the millenium; and, having made a rare solo work for it (Flicker-track ), I was on hand for the opening. Among several astonishing pieces there (Tantric drawings, Maisin dyed bark cloths, Irwin’s disc paintings), Young’s work stood out for what he’d created with the most minimal of set-ups — a couple of sine waves tuned so precisely that their interaction with the space and with your ear kept changing as you moved around, even when you turned your head ever so slightly .

When on a recent Saturday evening my wife and I arrived at the Dream House downtown, we paid our five dollar donations, entered the two-room loft space, and found ourselves alone there. First to strike me were the cloying scent of Indian incense and the unreal saturation of magenta light. To the left, however, was the the larger of the two rooms, which resounded with what the exhibit hand-out informed me was a La Monte Young composition entitled

The title presumably gave the formula for the piece’s realization — though this was beyond my ability to figure out and verify.

The music itself was similar to, but far more complex than, the earlier installation I’d heard in San Francisco. Four speakers at each corner of the room emitted the music’s various frequencies at a loud, throbbing, but not ear-splitting volume. When I stood still, the sounds would resolve into a stable pattern, a kind of rhythmic beating in my ears; but as I moved around, they would modulate intricately into unusual microtones and labyrinthine rhythms.

I was also struck by how the sounds seemed to articulate my exact position within the space — as I approached a wall, the sounds would register their reflections off that wall in relation to those off the three more distant ones, and the music would thin out a bit from the denser mix I’d heard towards the center. What’s more, the sounds seemed to register the exact angle at which they entered my ear, an angle that perceptibly shifted with even the slightest inclination of my head.

All this made me conscious of sound as physical frequency, and I even thought I could feel the wavelength between the crests of a given sine wave. Perhaps the shifts in what I heard could be explained by the different angles at which the wave would enter my ear (I pictured a wave hitting a beach obliquely), each angle in turn depending on my position and bearing in space. But note: it’s possible my account gets this all wrong, for I am neither acoustician nor physicist; I merely report what thoughts were running through my head at the time.

Stepping back, when I now ask myself how closely did the Dream House match the ideal I’d formed of a permanent sound installation, I’d have to concede that it fell short in a couple of ways. The space didn’t shrug off the personal presence of its creators despite the perfect abstraction of the music, nor did it escape a sense of its particular time, already a little outdated. It didn’t feel like forever.

Somehow I objected to the Indian-style shrine set up against one wall of the main room, the source of the incense that had annoyed me on entry and which I now saw burning reverently in front of a guru’s color portrait — the late Indian singer Pandit Pran Nath, to whom Young had discipled himself. Nothing wrong with the deep study of the drones and microtones of the Indian tradition, but no need for its superficial trappings!

And one was always aware of the artists’ nearby presence, for they lived in the same building, I believe in a loft just below the Dream House. It’s their own disciples who run the place, one of whom had answered our door ring and then handed us a fairly thick sheaf of artists’ statements and newspaper articles — quite informative, as it turned out, but somehow sad, as if the world needed reminding by them of Young’s vast but underground influence on so much that came after him in experimental and rock music.

While we were there, only one other visitor came and went. When we left the place, we left it empty; and when we told several friends of our visit, they confessed they’d always intended to go, but never had.

 

City-Links

A short while after I started writing this piece, a small exhibit on Maryanne’s early work opened on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side. It was in an unlikely spot — a small storefront that had only just been converted to a gallery space, as I could see from Google’s StreetView which, slightly out of date, still showed the address as a vacated shop once offering Chinese goods or services of some sort. In place of China had come Germany — ludlow 38 künstlerhaus, an outpost of the Goethe-Institut which now presents its temporary exhibitions there. Why Germany’s official arm for cultural outreach had taken this interest in Maryanne Amacher I couldn’t figure out; after her death I’d been told of her Swiss parentage, her father once a railroad engineer in the Alps.

For some reason the small main gallery room is raised up on a wooden platform, to get to which you have to clamber up a few wooden steps from the front door, itself up a few stone steps from the street. Perhaps because it hasn’t had time to settle into itself, the gallery has a makeshift and unsteady feeling about it but this matched the nature of the exhibit.

On one wall were pinned a row of photocopied notations and scores, impressive in their exactitude but difficult to make sense of. Onto the opposite wall a slide projector cast somewhat blurry photographs of obscure performances, studio spaces, and installations, these too a bit hard to place given the lack of context.

Close to that wall, inviting one’s more careful perusal, was a large table piled fairly high with more photocopies from the archive — grant proposals, project descriptions, and newspaper clippings. The disorder of the papers there must have been intentional, for it undoubtedly reflects the state of the Amacher Archive, established only upon her death last year. It will take a long time to restore, organize, and annotate the notebooks, scores, correspondence, recordings, and other artifacts recovered from the shambles of her half-caved-in house in Kingston.

The exhibit shed light on Maryanne’s City-Links projects, to which she devoted vast energy from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. The piece I described earlier linking an art gallery to a car rental office was a good example of this series; from the useful print-out that served as the exhibit catalog, I discovered its proper listing: City-Links #9 (No More Miles — an Acoustic Twin), Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, 9.28 – 11.3.74.

Sonic telepresence, Maryanne’s term for what she was after, entailed just this kind of transmission of sounds between divergent locations, effected by her hooking up remote microphones to dedicated telephone lines. In her sound installations, she combined these sound feeds to suit their new acoustic space through adroit mixing and filtering operations.

Though I wish I’d experienced these pieces, even more do I wish I could have shadowed Maryanne as she created them. Hers was a practice of intent and extended listening; but just as the world of scents will never disclose itself to me the way it does to a hound, so too the sound worlds that Maryanne entered may never be fated to reach my ears.

I remember Maryanne’s describing the hours, days, weeks, and even months that she’d devote to listening to specific telelinked environments — acoustic worlds that she could not only hear more clearly in this live dislocation but also project herself out into. It was this solitary extended attentiveness to sound that I regarded as a form of heroism peculiarly hers; and my most vivid picture of her, conjured up entirely from her reminiscences, was of her sitting and sometimes pacing in the loft she once had near Wall Street, an area utterly deserted during its non-money-grubbing hours and thus perfectly conducive to the quiet listening (and, I won’t neglect to add, the often extremely loud amplification) that she both depended on and lived for.

Now I picture her listening to the transmitted sounds of the nearby New York harbor, as she’d done earlier to those of the Boston seaport during her years at mit. She could foretell the approach of an airplane minutes before it could be heard, she said, simply by attending to the audible flights of birds, who felt from afar this encroachment on their airspace.

 

Beware pietism

I said earlier that I was unsure of Maryanne’s genius; but at one time, apparently, I had no such doubt at all, as I discovered just now when a computer search for Amacher-related files turned up a 2001 Word doc, only barely recalled, in which I nominated her for the MacArthur “genius” award.

When I wrote nine years ago that

She hears and sees certain things with a clarity and focus that the rest of us lack — something to do with the existence (almost the life) of sounds in particular spaces.

those words ring familiar, expressing the same thought I just expanded upon above; but to be honest with myself and with you, I lacked then what I still lack now, which is the broad experience (and thus the evidence) to justify that claim (which remains conjecture).

Rather than the idealized studio picture I painted above, in the light of later knowledge I could have evoked the other Maryanne I came to know better, who would have been biting her nails, stopping for smokes, adjusting knobs endlessly and indecisively, fretting about industrial toxins, by turns haranguing and cajoling friends on the phone, imagining technical problems where none existed, fantasizing about a post-human future that would transform consciousness beyond all recognition, etc.

It’s tempting to heroize and sanctify the dead, especially during that span when living memories are still fresh and the need to eulogize still felt. Reverence for the departed often works best to preserve her memory, but at quite a cost to that memory itself: reduced to such simplicity, it’s a mere ghost of the truth.

 

Gone for good?

At the Ludlow38 gallery, a second room for listening was provided in the back, where a few chairs faced a sizable speaker flanked by two smaller ones. I sat listening in the darkness there for five or ten minutes to the surprisingly soft playback of a filtered atmospheric recording, which I can’t say affected me much one way or the other.

Not that I’d been expecting to gain any real experience that I might then weigh as evidence, for I knew the installation could in no way be considered one of Maryanne’s own. Her long, painstaking, and neurotic process of listening to and then tuning a specific space was one she largely kept to herself, and certainly never entrusted entirely to anyone else.

This meant in the past that her music never spread far; the fear in the present is that it may have no future.

 

Thunderstorms

Some of the wind caught in Maryanne’s harbor recordings later became weather in Lecture on the Weather, John Cage’s 1975 spoken word composition. It says something for Maryanne’s excellence as a composer that when Cage sought environmental accompaniment for his spoken score, he turned to her. It says something else of her that of only two people capable of driving the man of the famously sunny disposition into a frustrated rage, she I’m told was one.

In 2007, fifteen years after Cage departed this life, Lecture on the Weather was revived by Laura Kuhn, an old friend of mine who runs the John Cage Trust. When she’d called beforehand for my help in tracking Maryanne down, I told her it was easy: she had only to look across the river.

Each summer, Maryanne would move across the river to teach at Bard. In July 2009, a bad spill there knocked her unconscious and first put her in the hospital. By October, neglectful medical treatment for this indigent patient (uninsured, off the grid) had put an end to her.

For Maryanne lived on one side of the Hudson, in Kingston, while Laura was now on the other, having recently moved the Trust to Bard College. It was there that the revived production was to be rehearsed and premiered — in the big new theater, a Frank Gehry special.

Ten or fifteen minutes before the show, my wife and I found ourselves scrutinizing the architecture, which had first presented itself to us with its impressively elaborate if puzzlingly arbitrary facade. Once through the door, we saw that the lobby and side passages had had to accommodate themselves as best they could to the facade, with the awkwardness of the arrangement sometimes visible in the inelegance of certain joins.

We were peering up at one such problematic juncture near a side staircase when suddenly down rushed Maryanne, quivering with anger and beside herself with indignation. Her fierce stage-whisper still resounds in my memory, and if I can no longer make out all her words, I haven’t forgotten their gist. Just as the sentences in many of her emails all ended in exclamation marks, so did the ones in her tirade, which went something like this:

Oh, Paul, this is just terrible! You have no idea how impossible they’ve been! I can’t raise the volume high enough, I can’t move the speakers to where they really have to go! They have no idea how real artists need to work! You can’t imagine how middle class they all are!

As you can imagine, I later had the inverse of this account from others, whose experience was so trying that Maryanne was dropped from the piece next time it was performed.

But as I sat in the theater with my abruptly lowered expectations, something remarkable happened, which I wrote to Maryanne about the next day. My intense experience of her music had me hearing it in specific parts of my body — it was no exaggeration to say, I wrote, that at one point I’d felt a thunderclap travel right through my left elbow.

 

Installation

I’d dispatched that message to citylinks@aol.com, but on receiving no response, guessed that the email address was now defunct or no longer attended to; in any case, busy with other things, a month or two went by without my noticing until one morning the phone rang with Maryanne on the line, very excited.

She’d spotted a few stills of our recent work Point A –> B in Wired magazine (somehow a big deal in her eyes). She said our images had told her we’d be the perfect visual collaborators for a vast new project starting up the river at a huge new arts and research center called Empac, and did I remember the old storyboard she once showed me for a sound characters serial drama?

I did, but barely. That is, I remember her having brought it to me on her first or second visit to my studio in the mid-1990s, but as for the storyboard itself, my memory has preserved not a page of it. I do remember Maryanne talking excitedly of her sound characters and of her plans to make them the protagonists in a drama unfolding over a series of episodes in the manner of a TV show. And in fact she told me she’d conceived the work in the 70s for public-access cable television, which at the time fed the now-forgotten utopian fantasies of quite a few avant-garde artists looking for new ways to put themselves out there.

But as I already mentioned, I never could grasp quite what she meant by a sound character — I didn’t know what they sounded like, much less how they might then be made to look. And so that particular conversation didn’t lead anywhere.

This telephone conversation now did: it was the start of a collaboration — one that I should have known better than to have had us undertake (as I even kept telling myself after we’d begun, foreboding what did soon start derailing). But Maryanne had three ideas, and two of them were compelling.

 

1. / Lagrangian Points

Maryanne told me our working title would be Lagrange. A bit disappointed in me when I failed to know its meaning, she gave me an excited but disjointed explanation, which I can condense to this:

Lagrangian points, she said, were locations in space around which dimensionality fractured. What caught my attention was that surrounding these points were spots with several directions “down,” a notion that rhymed with something I’d long had in mind. She went on to say that somehow Lagrangian points allow in theory for the effortless slingshotting of spacecraft from one such point to another. They could also provide ideal points of equilibria for the founding of space colonies.

My colleague Marc Downie has a degree in physics, and so I turned to him for a more grounded explanation, which he also gave to Maryanne (whose enthusiasm for science exceeded her grasp of it). He’s diagrammed it again for us here:

The drawing shows a two-body system, in this case the moon orbiting around the earth. Newton long ago accounted for the basic forces at work here — gravity and inertia; and the amazing interplay between the two forces in this special case was also calculated long ago by the mathematician, Lagrange, for whom the points are now named.

The Lagrangian points exist in precise relations to the two bodies, locations where the gravitational pull is perfectly counterbalanced by the inertia of the rotating object. As a consequence, at those points neither force prevails, the result being exact equilibrium.

Consider yourself near such a point, like so:

As you fall towards earth (downward in the diagram), you actually end up not there but rather at the Lagrangian point. This is because as you move into a tighter orbit it becomes a faster orbit, which is counteracted by the pull of gravity that soon draws you back towards the Lagrangian point. (This is apparently the best account I can reproduce, without Marc’s going to equations.) As you can see here, you’d be hard pressed to say which direction is down, for gravity is pulling you in at least two directions at once here.

The fact that there are five of these Lagrangian points for two gravitational objects is surprising. As soon as you consider an entire solar system, with its myriad orbital bodies, the situation becomes fantastically complex. So if you want to know how to get to, say, Neptune, you’ll need to ascertain not only where the other planets are, but also where all the Lagrangian points are en route — because they are as important gravitationally as the planets themselves.

Thus your best path from point A to B in space is far from obvious. But if you calculate it correctly, you can slingshot around Lagrangian points exerting little propulsive energy of your own — space travel made easy.

My own interest in such things was both simpler and more internal. My curiosity had to do with one’s state of mind in zero gravity, a situation in which all our natural orientation is upended. At a time when foot surgery had immobilized me on the living room sofa, I’d begun trying to project myself into different anatomies and movements, an effort made easier by the pain-killing codeine I was on, which had me floating out of body a bit. So I devoted the emptiness of many long days to imagining myself a dog straining at the end of a leash… a toddler spinning herself silly… a condemned man plummeting from the scaffold… — and, in the case Maryanne’s idea had brought to mind, an astronaut floating in zero-gravity.

Right after our call, I emailed her the relevant text I’d written for my Other Bodies project:

Most of this text survived the long passage to the final work intact; much else did not.

 

Dumb Bunnies

It was several months later, after Maryanne had started working with Marc, Shelley, and me, that I suggested to Maryanne that we find a more vivid and less abstruse title than Lagrange. A bright gleam came into her eye; silent a moment, she then confided to us with a cackle that her real title for the piece was Dumb Bunnies.

The blank look I gave her left her visibly dismayed with me, as if I really were dimmer-witted than she’d ever considered. She condescended to give me what was to her the blatantly obvious explanation — that we were all dumb bunnies, our knowledge of reality being the merest sliver of the truth, if not pure delusion.

She’d swallowed Ray Kurzweill’s utopian Singularity ideas whole, but only as new justification for long-held notions of her own.

Her fervent belief, it eventually came out, was that all our misconceptions were about to be cast aside, that the revelations of science would soon illuminate even the dimmest recesses of our mammalian brains, and we’d be transformed into cybernetic beings of a superiority we could not begin to imagine.

This conviction came not just from her reading of science-fiction, but also of science itself — though her reading of the one was about the same as of the other.

At that time, Maryanne was fanatically tracking the construction of Cern, the huge sub-atomic particle colliding accelerator on the Swiss-French border, about which she’d call me with breathless updates. She was convinced that when the facility came into operation, the discovery of the postulated sub-atomic particle called the Higgs-boson would somehow transform the whole fabric of our reality — not just our understanding of the cosmos, but our whole existence within it.

Such notions were fed by Maryanne’s autodidactic bent. A lonely woman living an increasingly isolated life in a run-down house in the depressed upstate town of Kingston, New York, she seemed to occupy her off-hours with surfing the Net. She sought out obscure sites bearing arcane bits of knowledge, much of it concerning astro- and particle physics, which she felt had a direct bearing on her own work.

For example, when it came time for us to prepare a formal project proposal for Empac, she wanted to illustrate her musical processes with a collection of color diagrams whose source she was reluctant to reveal. She couldn’t argue, however, when Marc recognized them as visualizations of gravitational waves, but said that even so they illustrated the spatial processes of her music better than even her own notations. Moreover, she seemed to find them particularly beautiful, though to my eye their arbitrary color-codings were needlessly garish and their effect inadvertently trippy. Later on, when our collaboration had started to fail, she took to resending us these downloaded images as a kind of reproach — by then we were certainly dumb bunnies in her eyes, as betrayed by the muttered and often abusive asides she’d taken to making (and then denying having made) in our presence.

 

2.
Vestibular system

The second exciting idea Maryanne mentioned on that first phone call concerned the sensory basis of balance and orientation.

Maryanne was forever fascinated by the overlooked and startling capabilities of the ear. She disdained and was determined to cast aside the usual simplistic notion of “hearing,” a purely passive conception held not only by laypeople but also, and inexcusably, by musical theorists.

One such capability was served by the inner ear’s otoacoustic emissions: the amazing little sounds that the ear itself actively generates in order to filter and shape the louder sounds penetrating from the outside world. These are what I presume she was somehow managing to play in the “Head Rhythm” track I described earlier.

Maryanne’s interest had now shifted to the vestibular system. This is the inner ear’s sloshing labyrinthine gyroscope that serves to re-orient us in space whenever we move our heads — move either to go somewhere or to turn to look at something (the ear plays unexpected roles in both locomotion and seeing).

She was surprised and delighted when I expressed not only a similar interest, but also a familiarity with the subject. She wanted to know what I knew and, more especially, how I’d come to know it.

In the Eighties, I said, I’d worked intensively with children who had severe learning disabilities, primarily dyslexia. Quite a few were also said to have sensory integration disorders, and so part of their treatment was provided by occupational therapists. These ot’s had set up a medium-sized trailer right outside the school building to house what’s nowadays termed a sensory gymnasium. Individual pull-outs for OT were thus a welcome break for many students: going from the classroom to the trailer was like going out to the playground. Kids might find a swing, a slide, a teeter board, and a crawl-space set up for them there, where their playing on such equipment was supposed to stimulate their vestibular systems and start correcting its malfunctioning — thus moderating their clumsiness and disorientation, on the one hand, or their over-fast or slow activity levels, on the other.

Now the curious thing about our interest, Maryanne’s and mine, was that it was not in the integration of the senses, but in something like the opposite: the rearrangement of the senses. For if our senses compose the world we find ourselves in, wouldn’t altering them give us the compositions of new worlds to enter?

Some such unspoken understanding was behind our interest, though as an impulse it was nothing new: you could go back to the 19th century to find Rimbaud famously pushing his derangement of the senses toward the same end. This too was an age-old pursuit, as has long been evidenced by the falling-down-drunk and the high-as-the-sky.

By children too. They spin themselves dizzy till they don’t know up from down, right from left, back from front — their rapid rotations sloshing the fluid of their inner ears into waves and eddies that now give back only deranged readings of space and direction.

 

Special educators

Before leaving the trailer, let me recall the head OT who presided over it, a middle-aged woman whose heavy glasses were continually slipping down her nose. Pushed back up, their thick lenses were so strong that they also worked in reverse, magnifying her eyes so that they seemed to swim out a bit from her face.

Of a horse in motion — of a horse not cantering in the field but stepping backwards in its stall.

I don’t know if I was only imagining it, but I thought the OT’s own motions betrayed a bit of the clumsiness she worked so zealously to correct in the children. If this was the case, it wasn’t surprising: often the very best teachers are those whose own learning had never come naturally.

I could say the same for myself. Teaching storytelling and writing to language-impaired students was something I felt called to do — for if to the outside world my words seemed fine, this was far from my own inner experience of them.

In the alienation of my teenage years, I’d started putting quotation marks around whatever anyone said; and soon did so most emphatically around my own utterances. Though this habit gradually faded away, in its place came an automatic transcription of speech, as if something inside me couldn’t help printing the words coming through my ears onto the dark page of my eyelids.

If the visualized words were my own, I’d often find myself revising and rearranging them in successive drafts — and this rewriting would quickly have me falling out of the present moment, then scrambling in a panic to catch up again.

Well, enough of that personal digression, which at least explains something important for our story here: that my identification with the troubled youngsters worked so well for me in the classroom that I gained a certain self-confidence that was later to fool me with Maryanne — fool me into thinking that where others had failed, I, with my special education experience, could succeed. I was sure that by prizing her special abilities and allowing for her quirks, I’d soon arrive with her at a good understanding and a workable set of accommodations.

 

3. / Sci-fi figures

It was the third of Maryanne’s inspirations, expounded upon at some length on that first phone call, that immediately gave me pause and was to cause us much trouble and mutual incomprehension later on. She wanted us to create “3-dimensional VR Characters” for a “Four Part Mini Series adopting the serialized format of television and comics.” While to no-one’s ear but Maryanne’s did any of her music even hint at narrative (much less at character development), she’d long dreamed of her Sound Characters enacting the kinds of dramas that apparently animated her fantasies.

An avid reader of science fiction, she’d decided that Olaf Stapledon’s visionary novels of the Thirties — Last and First Men and its sequel Star Maker — would give us all the cosmic characters and dramas we needed. While I picked up the Dover paperback and started plowing through it, I pressed Maryanne for details on exactly how she saw such VR characters appearing.

Well, there was one species in Stapledon that had evolved eyes at the back of the head to afford a fully circular field of view; and another that had grown a large eye atop the crown of the skull, where its telescopic lens could take in vast reaches of the heavens above.

But I’ve given you these two examples much more succinctly than she did me. Perhaps reluctant to be pinned down and to look foolish, she was ecstatic about the general idea but hazy on its details, referring with maddening vagueness to passages found somewhere or other in the two sci-fi novels.

Maryanne had studied with Stockhausen in the mid-60s, as had La Monte Young in 1959.

Maryanne expressed herself much more clearly quite late in our failed collaboration, when she sent me the draft of a peculiar homage she’d just written, I believe for Artforum. It was to appear in a series of tributes to the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen who had just died. In her contribution, she imagined giving him a kind of virtual immortality in which he would take the form of a VR avatar,”KS,” who would walk out of your futuristic 3D TV to emit his radiant energy, emanate “sonic imaging” in “myriad dimensions,” and interact with the celestial images visible in his head.

From the start I agreed with Shelley and Marc that any sort of depiction we could devise for such figures would look awfully cartoonish. Since our own work wasn’t like that at all, I thought it strange that Maryanne would ask us to change our approach so radically when she herself had no such intention — to her credit, her own music was never so clumsily explicit in this way, and her current plans indicated no turn in that direction.

 

Phantasms

I said earlier that I’d had trouble hearing any of the phantom presences Maryanne said were in her music. However, later on I wondered if I’d do better by considering her sound characters as fleeting rather than persistent, elusive rather than bold — rather like the ephemeral trails left by subatomic particles in a bubble chamber.

In the theater, I found there were times when a momentary shift in the music seemed to trace some sort of quick passage through the space, or when a sound would manifest itself in an unexpected spot as if from another world partly overlapping ours. — I’m trying to remember this right; but in reporting these impressions to you, I can’t tell if I’m stretching the truth a bit. Did I actually experience these effects so clearly or did I simply want to so much that I persuaded myself I had?

I’ll admit that at the time I gradually stopped giving Maryanne the benefit of the doubt, eventually losing all patience with her. A few months after our collaboration ended, Maryanne fell ill and then died. But the puzzle of the woman has lingered with me like a ghost, and it keeps me at this effort of writing.

When I happened to pull the Star Maker volume off the shelf again recently, I was startled to alight upon a particular passage I didn’t recall (or had never read before — it was to the back of the omnibus volume). Stapledon is describing earlier universes that were “non-spatial but nonetheless physical,” many “of a musical type,” in which

The creatures appeared to one another as complex patterns and rhythms of tonal characters. They could move their tonal bodies in the dimension of pitch, and sometimes in other dimensions, humanly inconceivable. A creature’s body was a more or less constant tonal pattern, with much the same degree of flexibility and minor changefulness as a human body. Also, it could traverse other living bodies in the pitch dimension much as wave-trains on a pond may cross one another.

I then began to think more about Maryanne’s sensory acuity (her extraordinary sensitivity to sound) and possible sensory derangement (her seeing sounds as beings). I wondered about a possible relation to the condition of synesthesia, dimly remembering that for synesthesiacs (though no such word exists) a sound is involuntarily perceived as a color.

Paul Schmidt, who translated Voyelles and all the rest of Rimbaud, figures in my previous piece, Russian Recoveries, as does Velimir Khlebnikov, all of whom Paul also translated.

This brings Rimbaud back again briefly, for he expressed vowel-sounds as colors — A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu; or as Paul Schmidt’s English version begins, Black A, white E, red I, green D, blue O—vowels, / Some day I will open your silent pregnancies.

The dictionary has synesthesia as a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, of which seeing sounds as colors is only one case. Perhaps Maryanne’s experience of sounds as living creatures was another case, very rare, and organically based — and one that I and most others could never grasp unless perhaps through mescaline or madness. Conveying that physiological experience by other means — by music or by the moving image — might be beyond anyone’s reach.

But there’s more to consider. Synesthesia, the dictionary says, has a second meaning previously unknown to me and even more suggestive here: a sensation felt in one part of the body as a result of stimulus applied to another, as in referred pain.

Couldn’t this relate to Maryanne’s obsession with creating a certain kind of auditory illusion? In the theater she spent almost two months positioning something like 35 different speakers in the least likely of places, with one for example in a small storeroom down a little hallway leading out from the orchestra pit, the door cracked open at a precisely calculated angle. She kept rearranging such speaker positions in order to baffle your sense of direction — you were to have no idea where sounds were coming from: what sounded above was actually below and what sounded far was close; and you were to hear sounds not just in your ears, but also in distinct other parts of your skull and your body.

 

Disappointments

At the outset of our project, Maryanne had announced her quest for a sound she’d sometimes hear at two or three in the morning from her house in Kingston. This particular sound had a quality unlike any she’d encountered before, and while she knew its source to be a distant freight train somewhere up the Hudson Valley, knowing what it was did not exhaust its mystery — a sound could not be reduced to its mere identification.

It was reassuring that Maryanne was intently looking and listening out into the world again, tracking down something new. This would continue the new direction she seemed to have found in Teo!, a massive 48-speaker outdoor installation she’d created in Mexico City a couple of years earlier. As can be heard on the reduction to stereo in her second Tzadik cd, Sound Characters 2, her music here had taken shape in more distinct parts and, most strikingly, included a bizarre-sounding instrument that sounded like a broken bagpipe blown by an otherworldly spirit.

Having lost track of my original copy of the cd, I just acquired a new one and was reminded of how great a project this may well have been. Maryanne’s liner notes are well worth your reading, for they present her thinking in its most cogent and enthusiastic form (half her sentences end in exclamation marks). You’ll also enjoy the adventure she recounts of the ancient cave deep under the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, where she had to race against rising carbon dioxide levels to record herself performing the four-chambered cavern — playing its walls by striking them with an old cake pan.

Once our new Empac project was approved, Maryanne arranged to be driven around with an expensive microphone so extraordinarily sensitive that even she marveled over its accuracy. She spent several days trying to find and record the mysterious sound of the rails to her satisfaction. As with Albany’s phantom bus station, however, she failed to recapture her original impression, and soon she was making no more of what I’d thought had been a guiding and grounding idea for her.

Instead she turned to that exacting and long-drawn-out process of placing speakers, after which she encountered, created, or imagined technical problems that soon had her chasing her own tail. She depended in her work on many trusty old DAT tapes, which were as precious to her as they were precariously preserved — on several occasions, she’d excitedly refer to a particular recording as embodying precisely the qualities she was after with us, but then refuse to play it for fear of damaging it. When it did come time to play back her recordings in Empac’s rocket-science theater, she balked at what she said was the unacceptable quality of the sound transfer. I couldn’t follow all the technical details she kept hashing out with the patient, long-suffering, and supremely qualified audio engineer, but essentially it came down to her refusal to accept any kind of stepping down from digital source to analog output — a step necessary in making anything whatsoever audible since sound waves are themselves analog.

I now believe this all to be part of Maryanne’s instinctive determination to safeguard her original impressions from the fallen world — for fear that any subsequent realization of them might truly be a stepping-down, a descent into a reality that might mar and betray what she had in her head.

In the end, whatever was in her head didn’t emerge in time for us, and we had to leave her behind. Since we’d succeeded in creating so much of our own work already while she seemed to have nothing to show for all her spinning of wheels, I had to inform her that we were parting ways. At first disbelieving me, she then made one last-ditch effort, defiantly declaring that she had 45 minutes of the final music complete and that we had to journey back up to Troy again to hear it properly.

It was a sad occasion. Though perfectly spatialized and with some curious auditory illusions, the sound-mass itself comprised dated sawtooth samples that felt more like placeholders than inspiring elements of a new composition. If I knew they actually were placeholders, that would come as a relief to me now — for even if we no longer had the time then to wait for what she might have eventually put in their place, I’d be sure that she’d still been on her way somewhere and might ultimately have got there. Now we’ll never know one way or the other.

 

Endlessly revising

Micah Silver was the young music curator at Empac who first approached Maryanne to commission a music installation from her and soon embraced her addition of us as visual collaborators. Eventually he had to preside over our creative divorce, which he did with good grace (no, great grace), after which he helped guide our now Maryanne-less project, Upending, through to its ambitious completion with a completely different musical component (the late composer Morton Feldman and the very much alive Flux Quartet).

All the while, though, he remained true to Maryanne, and when she fell at Bard, he was immediately at her hospital bedside, taking such attentive care of her through all the deceptive ups and deeper downs of her last months that he became co-executor of her estate and then, upon her death, co-founder of her archive. Together with Sergei Tcherepnin, the gifted pianist and composer who’d known Maryanne since his childhood and who served as Maryanne’s project assistant with a patience amounting to utter saintliness, Micah recently restaged what Maryanne had managed to complete during her truncated time at Empac. And now the two young men are trying to figure out how to do the impossible —perform Maryanne’s work in her absence, giving the music a chance at a decent afterlife.

From time to time during the drawn-out writing of this account I’ve called or written Micah with some little question or other. I’ve noticed that whenever I’ve criticized Maryanne, for example complaining that she’d re-used the same old sound samples to death, he’s countered with a cleverly argued defense; but when I’ve speculated that when younger she must have been less difficult and self-defeating, he’s told me that by all accounts she was always exactly as I’d found her: impossible.

After Maryanne’s death, Micah was joined by Maryanne’s old friend Robert The in creating her formal archive, and so it soon fell upon them to rescue the scores, notations, recordings, and other key possessions from the ruins of her home. Poverty, neglect, and the passage of time had done a job on the place, collapsing parts of the upper floors down onto the lower and letting in the rain and the cold (in winter absences, Maryanne had told me more than once, she’d kept the pipes of her house from freezing by positioning bare light-bulbs at strategic junctures nearby). Maryanne had lived in two over-crowded rooms by the side door, and if her fears at Empac had been with interior pollution and once upon a time at Nasa with possible contamination, her immediate concern at home ought to have been with the mold and the mildew all around her, the noxiousness of which must have been multiplied by the choking clouds of her cigarette smoke.

To his surprise, Micah told me, they’d discovered a room intact on the second floor, a space that Maryanne had kept surprisingly neat in contrast to the mess everywhere else. Vertical filing cabinets held clearly labeled red folders, many designated as series with labels like “important early notes #1 of 3.”

The main point Micah made in relating this discovery to me was that it underlined the obsessiveness with which Maryanne had kept returning to the same materials. Tweaking a typed statement over the course of many years, for example, she’d preserve every draft pristinely, even those in which she’d changed no more than a single word. No draft was ever deemed perfect enough to let go of, and the anxious author would never cease hovering over what had come out of her so painstakingly.

Not too long ago, I happened to catch myself in a similar position. In writing this, I continually shuttle between three views of my text: my favored text editor, the blog entry interface, and the rendered web page — a series of nervous and compulsive roundtrips.

When I happened to look down at the post revisions list, I saw it as a disconcerting self-portrait:

 

Versions

Also, inevitably, a version of myself.

What I’ve nearly finished setting down here is one version of Maryanne, the best I’ve been able to manage.

Another version is Upending itself, which by beginning with the dedication In memory of Maryanne frames the eighty-six minutes to follow as an elegy. For me, there’s a deep sadness in the vacated world that the 3D projections conjure up, where glimpses of a cradle and of a young girl and a young woman (both slender, both blonde) imply what you never see: the later stages of that suggested life, now departed.

But it’s likely that this version exists only in my own eyes. Most viewers won’t know who the Maryanne of the dedication is meant to be; and I suspect that my collaborators, Marc and Shelley, will soon tell me that I’ve filtered my sense of things a bit to make this a fitting way to end.