At the time I had a small manual typewriter whose slightly balky keys required that I strike them forcefully enough to propel the letters against the raised ink ribbon, imprinting slightly splattered black marks on the white paper.

The sharp report of my early morning typing was so loud as to jar awake whatever part of me still lingered in sleep. This routine was not only my daily mental exercise but also, to the slight degree befitting the gaunt teenager I was at the time, my physical exercise too. For typing demanded at least a few exertions:

— rolling the stiff index cards into the platen straight.

— striking the keys at an even rhythm that was fast enough to keep pace with my thoughts, but not so fast as to jam the letters.

— tugging the carriage return lever to bring me back to the left margin while pushing me one line space down the page.

Typing is such a loud and forceful action that an iconic image of the early-to-mid 20th century is of a writer at his typewriter pounding out urgent dispatches, often from the front. Writing was a kind of battle with the page, and the writer figured as either an actual or a symbolic war correspondent, his inner tortures sometimes seeming as brutal as any combat swirling around him on the battlefield.

I say "Him" not only because the grammar I grew up with made the third person singular male by default, but also because as a teenager I chose my literary heroes from a pantheon of men. Eliot, for example.

This detail from his typed draft of The Wasteland illustrates the violence of revision:

The typist at teatime evoked by Eliot in these lines, however, is not a man but a woman — and not a writer, but a secretary, on whom the typewriter confers the altogether different social role of female subservience.

Her job is to take down the man's dictation in shorthand and then type up a fair copy for him afterward, his hands never having touched the machine (though perhaps having touched her, at least implicitly).

No secretary would ever dare eviscerate a page the way the author did; only another writer would (as in this most famous of cases did Ezra Pound to Eliot's actual draft).

Visual vehemence

What's particularly striking is the look of VISUAL VEHEMENCE that typing gave to raw pages. It was as if with this particular machine a writer felt he could physically pound some sense into his draft, asserting his muscular dominance over words that might otherwise go their own evasive ways.

Seeing a word or phrase gone wrong, he'd correct it with crude and impatient directness — x-ing it over with the x key, covering it up with Wite-Out^®, or scribbling all around it with pencil or pen.

Until the time when a writer's text was finally typeset and printed, there was no way he could keep his doctoring of the page under wraps, and so the manuscript never lost its sense of immediacy, never seemed completely done. The writer as reviser always threatened a return, the corpse still so warm that it could be shocked back to breath anew.

Sometimes the writer resorted to more violent surgery of his pages. Wielding a razor-blade like a scalpel, he'd cut whole limbs of his draft and then Scotch^®-tape them back into a newly Frankensteined body, stitches showing.

Cutting

If all the foregoing seems to push its metaphorical readings too far, they at least report accurately the sense I had of things as an impassioned young man, when writing seemed as if it might be turning into concrete and heroic action the way that painting had in the hands of Jackson Pollack. I took this notion not so much from Kerouac's celebrated amphetamine-fueled typing of his On the Road manuscript ("spontaneous prose") as from Burroughs's razor-blade cut-ups.

I tried forcing parallels between verbal and filmic syntax, as described in an earlier entry, Succession.

For cutting as a physical act engrossed me in those days: I was as immersed in filmmaking as I was in writing. (Also, though this scarcely belongs here but would be dishonest to omit: at a couple of moments of extremity, I turned to self-cutting, but thankfully with fingernails not razor-blades).

The editing of Super-8 film was a literal cut-and-paste procedure, which began with my cutting the acetate film footage into different shots. I'd hang these strips from the little nails I'd hammered in rows near the top of my bedroom walls and then lie on my bed while pondering how to combine them. When I'd chosen two shots to splice together, I'd use a mechanical film splicer to scrape the emulsifier off the edge of one strip and bond it with film cement to the edge of the other (the glue's acrid smell and its lingering stickiness on my fingertips now comes back to me for the first time in many years).

Since I couldn't afford work-prints and had to operate directly on my original footage, the physical act of cutting constituted what we'd now call destructive editing: each cut would consume at least one frame of film and could not be undone without additional damage. This meant that making a cut was never a decision I could take lightly nor execute automatically.

While this is not quite so true of cutting up and then pasting different typewritten pieces together, it's certainly the case that writing and editing in what's fast receding as the mechanical age was necessarily a slower, more deliberate, and above all more visible process than in the word processing of our digital age.

Since to cut-and-paste on the computer is easy, fast, and invisible, writers now leave no trace of their efforts.

It once occurred to me that this contemporary version of cut-and-paste has many of the same consequences (except pain) as the nip-and-tuck of contemporary facelifts, a thought that led to this text from Other Bodies :

Unearthed

Inside the Exhibition and Admit the Peacock. 2006, Roundy Wells Press: Massachusetts.

Several years ago my cousin Rebecca Kaiser Gibson sent me two chapbooks of her poetry, which I carried with me on a trip to Austria and read carefully in my cramped barracks-like hotel room at night.

(By day, among other things, I came across an audiotour that sent me walking over the underground slave labor factories of Mauthausen-Gusen, an experience I wrote about elsewhere).

For some reason, I never opened Rebecca's books at home here in Manhattan until recently, when I looked up the poem that had had lingered so long with me and triggered the thoughts now finding voice in this piece of writing.

The poem is entitled Exhibition: The Books of Kells, and the middle of its fifteen lines, reproduced below, muse on the materiality of this sacred medieval tome, which had once been buried by thieves to hide evidence of their crime:

The closeness of Rebecca's observations, it seems to me, puts the reader in nearly the same relation to the page as the original scribes, whose thoughts may have wandered along similar lines as they spent their days in the inscription or illumination of the gospel passage entrusted to their care. What boat from what plant on what shore had brought this particular color to their brush?

Wonderings like these are to explain visual things, which is fitting, for the Book of Kells was more to be seen than to be read. As a precious sacred object, its purpose was to inspire churchgoers from afar rather than to be pored over by a pious parishioner in the library.

Or by a monk in his cell. But he had no need for it there, where his practice of slow reading had him humbly absorbing a very short passage of Scripture to the exclusion of all other words (and fleshly temptations) over the long spells of self-inflicted solitary confinement.

The rhythm of the words must have come to rule the rise and fall of his breath, even the pumping of his blood; and as for their meaning, it must have enlarged to fill all the space left vacant in his solitude.

This, I think, is what poetry wants; wants and now rarely gets — the inwardness, slowness, and spaciousness of contemplation.

These are conditions that poetry still commanded in the days when the memorized lines of Shakespeare and Keats could be effortlessly called to mind and to tongue. But now ever less so.

Even these lines of prose want something similar, though they'll never have it. Here on the screen the eye skids off of in every direction, the hand reaching for this or that other window or hyperlink, the mind ever distracted and distanced.

Henry / Husky

The first I learned of my cousin's poetry was about twenty years earlier when she'd started reading me drafts of the pieces she was writing — almost transcribing — at her father's bedside. Rebecca called these the Henry poems, Henry being her father, though he went by that name only on such things as his law firm's letterhead and the briefs he signed.

The world knew him as Husky: the right name for this larger-than-life great-uncle of mine, who at that time was being felled by a cancer that had begun in his lungs and moved to his brain — likely caused by his heavy cigar habit, if not by his wife's second-hand smoke which joined with his in pervading every nook and cranny of their sizable home.

This property, which stood just over the District line in an old Maryland suburb of Washington, had white colonial columns flanking its front door; a living room dark with heavy drapes and Persian carpet; and a bright blue swimming pool in back that would half-blind me as a boy after too many hours playing Marco Polo in its chlorine.

Facing the house across Bradley Lane was the high fencing of the Chevy Chase Country Club, a place Husky regarded with special scorn, refusing to forget the days when its rules barred all Jews from joining. Husky would time his celebration of American independence with the club's, which often meant July 3rd rather than the 4th. After a big hotdog-and-hamburger barbecue, family and friends would lean back in their lawn chairs to watch the country club's fancy fireworks exploding in the wide-open skies over their well-guarded fairways and sand-traps.

Part of our pleasure was in paying no dues for the bigots' rockets' red glare.

Search

My father has only recently stopped hinting to his children that the Constitution nowhere requires the possession of a law degree for an American to become a Supreme Court justice. Since none of the three of us ever showed the slightest interest in law school (but rather downright contempt, at least on my part), this was his wry way of conveying his idea of a citizen's highest aspiration.

It was from a similar feeling that he would often relate to us the perhaps fanciful story of Husky’s near-nomination to our highest court. In those days, however, I paid scant attention to such family history, not wanting my future to be projected from their past ... which has meant that few of the details I’ve now wanted for this account are in my immediate possession. Several east-to-west-coast phone conversations with my parents have helped, and I’ve also tried my luck on the web.

But there I’ve been surprised to find so little. After filtering out hits for no-relations Henry J. Kaiser the industrialist and his grandson Henry Kaiser the experimental guitarist (whom I once encountered as he prepared for an odd artist-in-residency in Antarctica), I found few links to follow.

The Washington Post’s obituary — overseen, I think, by that paper’s writer and editor Robert Kaiser (Husk’s nephew and my cousin once-removed) — proved to be hidden online behind quite a paywall: a frameable paper reprint was the only option, an exorbitant $74.95. Meanwhile, the New York Times’s archive, though free for the reading, yielded a cursory notice that told me nothing new.

Google Books returned a set of better results: scanned pages from an unlikely source, "The World's Foremost Amusement Weekly," The Billboard (a publication that still exists, minus the "The" in its name). Husky appeared in several articles of the late 40s, all concerned with the recently passed and much detested Taft-Hartley labor law. The newspapermen were evidently in Husky's corner, as revealed for example in this sentence (its phrasing straight out of a post-war film noir):

It was from a brief article on June 18, 1949, that Husky’s own distinctive voice has come back to me most clearly, a gruff quick-witted rumble that sounds across the decades:

This barb was pure Husky. Given his own habit of plain speaking and direct dealing, he must have had trouble stomaching the convolution and cant of his field, not to mention the high-mindedness that often masked its self-serving methods (— the more incomprehensible the statute, the more numerous the billable hours, as I once learned in a different context).

Imagine Husky’s fury over the Tea Party’s union-busting tactics in Wisconsin (headline news as I write this paragraph). It was in liberal Madison in the Great Depression that he earned his law degree.

Husky’s belief, I gather, was that management and labor should just be allowed to duke it out (Husky looked like an ex-boxer) — the opposing parties’ naked interests should be plain for everyone to see, and government bureaucrats should have no business meddling (“mediating”) in the fight other than to referee it.

It was an outrage to labor that the Taft-Hartley legislators had limited the rights of workers to call a strike and walk out on their bosses. Let the two sides be free to go through the rounds, and may the best man win. (The best man, it went without saying, would be the worker.)

Phonies

Husky had a long memory for shape-shifting hypocrites. No one aroused his scorn like a phony (his favorite term of disparagement), and he skewered phoniness in whatever form he found it.

Case in point — He was one of few liberals who didn’t fall for John F. (Jack) Kennedy in his so-called Camelot days, for why should he let down his guard for so obvious a phony? He wouldn’t turn a blind eye to the man’s father Joseph Kennedy, that anti-semite and Nazi appeaser who’d channeled his own ambitions through his boys’ political careers and who’d succeeded in buying his second son a presidency.

As for the slightly later legend of Robert (Bobby) Kennedy — embraced by the so-called youth counter-culture and, like his brother, sanctified after his assassination — Husky would have none of him either, unwilling to forget that Bobby had once served his father’s pal Joseph McCarthy with no small show of zeal. Even after resigning his post as a senior staff member of McCarthy’s red-baiting Investigations Subcommittee, Bobby’d never repudiated the demagogue, who also escaped any denunciation by Jack, a Senator at the time, which confirmed at least to Husky the phoniness of both brothers’ liberalism.

Strange attire

Husky’s manner of dress bewildered my parents as much as it did me, for with his loud shirts (often bright red) which he wore with collar wide open around his powerful neck, he looked more like a Mafioso than he did the usual bloodless buttoned-down DC lawyer. Looking different was almost certainly his point, though given the widely rumored and too often actual corruption of organized labor by organized crime, it was still a weird choice for him, even if it signified nothing real (his beloved American Federation of Musicians was never suspected of being mobbed up the way the Teamsters and the Longshoreman’s unions were proven to be).

In the late 60s and early 70s, Husky drove a bright red Pontiac convertible (buy American), its top down whenever possible. I remember his second daughter, Tamara (or Tammy, the nickname she still went by then), telling me that Husk had a touching habit of giving rides to any hitchhikers he encountered on his daily commute downtown, getting into good-natured but disputatious conversations with his passengers, who tended to be college students or drop-outs — hippies as they were called early on, then freaks as they came to call themselves a few years later when the Flower Power dreams of peace and love had wilted.

Young fashion reflected this disillusionment, shifting from bright exotic psychedelia to working-class drab: thrift store work-shirt, blue jeans, and boots. This is what I wore on the breaks from prep school that, with our parents posted abroad, my brother and I would often spend at Husky’s; and if his mafioso clothing looked perverse to me, my workman’s outfit must have struck him the same way. Like the middle and upper class youth of my generation who followed this fashion, I’d never done a bit of manual labor in my life, so surely I counted as a phony too, though my uncle for once bit his tongue and didn't say so outright.

(He did once insist on buying me a tailored pair of trousers, with shiny beige fabric [double-knit?] and permanent creases running down each leg. But this I wore not even once.)

Social aging

Social aging is Jean Améry’s term for a cultural obsolescence that he took to be at least as dismal as the body’s inevitable decline. Améry — anagrammed from his given name Mayer to put him at a linguistic remove from anschluss’d Austria, though he never stopped writing in his native German — was an unwilling expert on torture, having been schooled first by the Nazis in its Gestapo interrogation rooms and concentration camps and then, as he attested, by the betrayals of his old age (which he terminated in suicide at age 66).

As you get older, Améry observed, one of the deepest betrayals is that of your own thinking as it starts to date. Not that your ideas necessarily strike you as any less vital than they've ever been, but that they no longer mesh with whatever’s on the collective mind of the ever-younger world slipping away from you. When the times move on, they leave you behind in the increasingly irrelevant, or at least disregarded, past.

A telltale symptom of this loss of sync is that new terms and phrases start sounding wrong to your ears and positively ridiculous coming out of your mouth — so that as far as updating yourself goes, in this and in many other ways (clothing, to pick an even more ludicrous example), you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Even if you remain true to what comes naturally to you, you start second-guessing yourself, wondering whether the way you've been putting things now strikes others as quaint or stale, either option equally mortifying.

As for your store of accumulated wisdom, said to be the reward of maturity, but no longer so regarded by the young (and certainly not by an earlier version of me where Husky was concerned) — that wisdom is scaffolded by a once-common frame of reference that’s aging at least as fast as you are.

(I imagine that the older Améry must have found this cultural outmoding even more painful than Husky did, for he'd suffered through the inverse experience when young, which must explain his having written so profoundly about each.

(A secular Jew, Améry had been steeped from birth in German culture, but with the rise of Hitler this culture was no longer his but only his Nazis persecutors' — who robbed him not only of Nietzsche, whose philosophy they cited, but even of Novalis, about whose poetry their periodicals could still publish not-wholly-obtuse appreciations. Even a certain German word — Jud — had become a stamp of death, for he saw how the word became flesh and how the incarnated word finally led to a heap of cadavers.)

No fork taken

I mentioned earlier my parents' perhaps wishful belief that Husky was once nearly tapped for a judgeship on the Supreme Court. I think they might stress this possibility not only because of the great honor it would have brought him, but also — perhaps a subconscious thought — because it might have changed who he ended up becoming.

There are few areas in American life where so-called seniors can still command respect (or, failing that, exert force). With no fixed term or mandatory retirement age, and in confident possession of absolute autonomy, Supreme Court justices can continue working long into their old age — never facing the threat of irrelevance since their considered opinions still weigh as heavily as ever in the scales of justice.

No hope of that happening anymore with Reagan- or Bush-appointed justices, all chosen by ideological litmus tests.

At least during Husky's years, the tendency of judges was to move to the left in their thinking; conservatives appointed by Nixon or Ford ended up taking much more liberal positions than anyone could have expected, not excluding themselves.

Confined to private life, Husky did the opposite, moving not so much toward the right as away from the left — not in his political ideas, and certainly not in his championing of labor, but in his general outlook on society, which he regarded with mounting bile. And if his scorn for the phoniness of many liberals was very often justified, this had the unfortunate effect of focusing his criticism more sharply on those who betrayed the cause than on those who'd never espoused it to begin with. I wonder whether Husky might even have succumbed unawares to the perverse logic of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

So far as actual rather than figurative friends went, Husky had ever fewer, for he grew estranged from those contemporaries who didn't share his skepticism about phony liberals but instead stuck cheerfully to the party line (Democratic, of course).

Disillusionment

In 1999, ten years after Husky's death, I found myself standing in the projection booth of the State Theater at Lincoln Center, where we were setting up our projections for the New York premiere of BIPED. Working with me were two others: my colleague Shelley Eshkar, who was configuring our playback computer, and Jack Young, who'd spec'd our equipment and was now setting up the projector.

A fourth man was also with us in the booth, sitting in a corner and reading the sports pages. He had no job to do but was well paid for not doing it — by week's end, he'd have collected a paycheck far greater than those of the Cunningham dancers, even though their performances were to meet with standing ovations.

Union contract required this shadow's presence, and while it insured the man's excellent salary, it was at the cost of his actual worth, by which I mean his dignity.

The perversity of this situation made me think of Husky, who'd had a hand in establishing the principle behind it. For he must have negotiated such things as the house minimums of Broadway, which required that a large number of live musicians be present for every show no matter how many were actually needed to perform the music. Not so long ago, many such superfluous musicians simply had to show up to be paid. They were known as walkers, so named for their daily perambulations from home to theater and immediately back again.

If earlier on I suggested wishful thinking on my parents's part as they looked back on Husky's life, the same is likely true of me when I speculate that for a temperament as adverse to bullshit and procedure as Husky's, the unintended consequences of the inflexible and quickly outmoded union rules he set up, however well-meant originally, must have given rise to a growing unease in his gut that was all the greater for his having (for the sake of his own self-regard) to suppress.

Diet and exercise

At home Husky's diet relied increasingly on midnight raids on the fridge (for club sandwiches bulging with cold-cuts) and on television, which was almost always on. His running commentary was gruffly amusing and often incisive, but answering the fools on TV doesn't do much to sharpen your wits. Other than the newspaper, I didn't see him reading much else, and so the deeper arguments to be found in real books stopped challenging his habits of mind.

Just as your arteries tend to harden with age, so too does your thinking. Exercise of mind and body is said to go far in counteracting both effects of aging, but Husky was getting little of either.

Pain and soliloquy

As my memory brings Husky's final scene into sharper view, I see that it was probably not at Husky's bedside that Rebecca took down the lines for her Henry pieces. Instead she must have sat next to the substantial leather chair in which I always found Husky as he suffered through the protracted days of his dying. So agonizing was the pain of his cancer that it sometimes drove him temporarily out of his mind.

When I visited, I'd already hear his loud groans from the ground floor, so it was with dread that I climbed the stairs to his study, a dark room with a large television and desk. Next to the desk, a second door opened to a little bathroom connecting his study to the master bedroom he shared with his wife, my aunt Paula, to whom I was not related by blood and for whom I was not named.

Paula was an anesthesiologist who as a young lady had braved medical school to become a doctor in an era when women didn't do that. They were meant to enter medicine only to become nurses, and then to be constantly at a male doctor's beck and call.

Husky's groans were not answered with the painkillers one would have expected his doctor, or his wife herself, to prescribe. His untreated agony was agonizing to witness, and I could not find it in my heart to forgive Paula for just standing by, still smoking her cigarettes. She insisted on not having her husband sedated into incoherence, and even mentioned fears of his getting addicted, as if that could possibly matter for this mortally ill man.

Only very recently did I learn more to account for Paula's strange stance. As my parents tell it, Husky had earlier suffered a kind of psychotic break from his brain cancer, which his doctor had attempted to treat with thorazine only to provoke an even more intensely unpleasant reaction from him. Now Paula resisted giving him all but the most minor sedation, and the man was left on the rack of his body, subject to its unpitying torture.

By then Husky had lost most awareness of others and no longer talked much to us. Instead what poured from his mouth was long stretches from Shakespeare, speeches that he must have learned by heart as a youth and which had now come back to him with an astonishing intensity and eloquence.

If I could pretend to greater erudition than I possessed at the time, I would identify some of the lines that erupted from Husky in his anguish, no doubt opting for Lear. But because I recoiled from all the hamming-up of stage productions — from the feigned emotions overplayed by thespians — I kept myself then and for a long time afterward in ignorance of the Eternal Bard.

Still I was sure that Husky channeled Shakespeare more truly than had any actor declaiming to the far balconies. He may have mumbled and for all I know mixed up many of the lines, but his were true soliloquies — not stage-whispered to the complicit eavesdropping audience, but directed only inside himself, the sound rumbling around in his damaged lungs and the sense flaring up in his failing brain.

Towards the end of my stay in St. Petersburg this past spring, I paid a visit to the "house-museum" of the poet Alexander Blok, where I snapped this photo of a small picture hanging in the back passageway connecting Blok's study with his bedroom. There was no identifying label, but I presumed it to be Alexander Pushkin depicted there, moments after the senseless duel that was to take his life in 1837.

Fatally stricken, Pushkin sags against his seconds in the dimming field of snow.

The scene sets the model for the Russian poet's prototypical death, blurring as it does the boundary between suicide and execution. It was a death repeated, with variations, by a whole line of Russian poets — by Lermontov (duel: 1841), Gumilev (execution: 1921), Khlebnikov (starvation & neglect: 1922), Esenin (suicide: 1925), Mayakovsky (suicide: 1930), Mandelstam (prison camp: 1938), and Tsvetaeva (suicide: 1941).

Blok, dispirited and broken at the end, died with less drama, though in more or less the same manner (visa denied for medical treatment abroad: 1921). Russia found a way to do all these poets in.

Or so I was thinking as I turned back into Blok's study to gaze out his window again, wondering why I had come.

At the click of my camera, one of them had come over quietly to collect the 100 rubles ($3) apparently required for snapshots.

It was April. Through the window, framed by long dark curtains, the day was dazzling. Remnants of glinting winter ice still bobbed on the narrow Pryazhka River (really no more than a channel), which curved under a couple of small arcing bridges as it made its way towards the larger Bolshaya Neva, where static cranes loomed over the dockyards. No ships moved in the currents beyond.

Blok's desk, perfectly tidy, was at right angles to this view; a placard informed me that he had written nearly all his poems there. But now I imagined him not sitting in his desk chair but standing before his window, peering through the same glass I was.

The sun would have gone down and it would have been dark out. It would have been real winter, not start of spring.

This idea propels the plot of Housebound.

It's an old notion of mine, not much better than a superstition, that by somehow finding the same day-to-day glances that a person once took of a familiar place, you can enter that life a little yourself. Any secrets you manage to recover this way are the important ones — precisely because they aren't. They're out in the open, hiding in plain sight.

Of course there are better ways to bring back the thoughts of the poet — reading him being the most obvious. My lack of Russian kept that path largely closed to me; Paul Schmidt (about whom more later) had translated only a handful.

To my surprise, Dedalus happened to have memorized a particular Blok poem in Russian, and afterward when he recited it to me on the riverbank outside, I recognized it as the first in Paul's posthumous book of translatons. The second of its two stanzas reads, first in Russian, then in Paul's translation:

Умрешь - начнешь опять сначала
И повторится все, как встарь:
Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,
Аптека, улица, фонарь.

Die, you only start all over
And it’s all the same as before:
Night, ice in the dark gutter,
The street, the street light, the store.

As I write this, I'm sitting at my own desk in upper Manhattan, where the Internet connects me to (and distracts me from) some of the bits and pieces I am trying to make sense of from here. Just now, it was a Google search that got me that Blok stanza in Russian.

One of the words — канала — has now caught my attention. Paul had rendered it as gutter, but online I find it defined as channel. If it's not a gutter but a channel, then it's almost certainly the Pryazhka, a thought which has conjured up the following confusion of viewpoints in me:

I picture Dedalus reciting the poem as we stand next to the channel mentioned in it, but I also feel (as if on the back of my neck) the gaze of the poet down from his window above.

Somehow from that vantage point Blok takes in not just the scene he describes in his poem but also my own future — and therefore phantom — presence within it.

(Die, you only start all over.)

Nightmare

A recurring nightmare of my teenage years had me thinking I'd been woken up by the furtive movements of intruders in the dorm room in which I was sleeping.

As my eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, I would discern the outlines of another room partly superimposed over mine, with ghostly figures going about their lives within it. Somehow it would come to me that this was the room of a house that once stood on the same spot as my school cottage; I pictured it as having burned down in colonial times, everyone aflame — something to do with New England witchcraft.

When it dawned on me that these ghosts were starting to become aware of me as an intruder in their space, my dread would mount until I'd wake up for real, my heart pounding and my eyes half-expecting to encounter the same figures again, only this time themselves fully awake and closing in on me.

I'd switch on the overhead light and write down the nightmare in the stenographer's spiral notebook that I always had at hand — My Education, as my then-hero William Burroughs was later to call his own book of dreams. (This was the last book he was to publish in his lifetime, "pre-posthumously" so to speak, a used copy of which I bought for next to nothing the other day from a sidewalk vendor on Broadway.)

Generations

This nightmare came back to me when I was meditating on the succession of lives in any given dwelling-place, especially old ones. How hard it is to recover any real sense of these lives, though they all must have left telltale traces.

Some such traces tell a tale at the Dostoevsky Museum in St. Petersburg, which occupies the apartment that the famous writer and his family tenanted in the final three years of his life.

The first thing to strike you there is the variety of distinct wallpapers, a different pattern in each hallway and room. Just as you ask yourself how anyone could possibly have plumbed Dostoevsky's taste in decorattion, you come upon the explanatory exhibit pictured above, which Charles Abbott, an American artist-in-residence at the museum, kindly snapped for me.

It's a superb piece of urban archaeology, the dig having been directed not down into the earth, but sideways into the wall, one paper-thin layer after another, until Dostoevsky's stratum was reached (and somehow identified — I wonder how).

The museum has done its best to peel back time, restoring the apartment to the Dostoevsky version. On opposite arms of the apartment you find the two poles of his existence: the nursery in which he played with his children and the study in which he toiled and slept. The guided tour culminates in the latter room, where you encounter the desk where he wrote Karamazov and the divan where he lay down to die.

But if the museum has done a fine job of restoring the life of this notable author, it has necessarily been at the expense of the other ghosts there. I grant you that Dostoevsky did evoke the impoverished underclass of his city, to whom he gave fevered voice; Crime and Punishment in particular maps his vision onto the Haymarket district of St. Petersburg so powerfully that today tour groups visit the likely sites of the novel as if Raskolnikov, Alyona Ivanovna, and Sonya Marmeladov once actually lived and breathed there.

These urban types were indeed rescued from oblivion by Dostoevsky's powers of imagination, but it's also true that, in Viktor Shklovsky's shrewd observation, such characters all seem to think alike, as if since childhood they have been reading the same author — Dostoevsky.

So rather than escaping the thrall of one man, the city and its lost inhabitants simply become, in the minds of his many readers, varied reflections of the author himself.

Communal living

St. Petersburg is said to have found itself reflected very differently in the soaring poetry of Anna Akhmatova, but her living quarters brings her life, or at least your reading of it, right back down to earth. Her house museum is an altogether more elaborate and fussily interpreted affair than Blok's, and as a consequence I managed to wrest far less from it than I'd hoped.

My camera did capture this detail of a penciled floor plan that I happened to spot in a crowded vitrine, where notes and letters lay under the reflective glass. I took this particular page to be a contemporaneous sketch of the complicated spatial and familial subdivisions that existed in the apartment sometime in the 1930s or thereabouts. However, since the accompanying sign was in Russian alone, you run the risk, as usual, of my having got this identification wrong.

It's true that the divvying-up of apartment space in Soviet times was a fraught procedure. The prevailing Marxist doctrine gave no value to private property, which collective possession was supposed to have superseded, and in the communal apartments dictated by such policy, lives were thrown together in spaces originally designed for a very different mode of living. This is starkly apparent in the communal apartment that Akhamatova occupied for some thirty years, for it was carved out of the much larger space of the formerly aristocratic Fountain House, itself a part of the Sheremetev Palace.

The history of this living space made it peculiarly suitable for Akhmatova, who could take her place on both sides of its divide. As the noble poetess of 20th century Russian literature, didn't she rightfully belong in a palace setting? But, as the bereft wife and mother giving voice to so many other Soviet women (who, like her, queued endlessly at police stations and prisons for any word of missing husbands and sons), wasn't she also suited to the same sort of cramped communal quarters in which they were all living out their days?

The private life that Akhmatova led in this particular spot now reads in retrospect as an everyday Soviet soap opera. When she first moved in with her lover and eventual common-law husband Nikolai Punin, his soon-to-be ex-wife (also named Anna) merely shifted to a different room in the same apartment. Fifteen years later, when Akhmatova left Punin, the two Annas simply exchanged their rooms again. No one, it seemed, could get away from anyone else — unless of course it was the State that snatched them away, as it did Punin (arrested 1949, died in the Gulag: 1953).

But then no life was private in those days — or at least no life was supposed to be, and Akhmatova had to assume that the State was watching and listening to her everywhere and at all times. And so she composed verse inside herself, sub-vocally, and then took unusual measures to ensure its survival outside the confines of her head. Summoning a trusted friend into her room, she would chat idly about the weather for the benefit of the microphones hidden in the walls, a phantom policeman at the other end of the presumed wires. Meanwhile, she would silently write down her stanzas on slips of paper, burning each in an ashtray when her friend had committed it to memory.

Now, standing in the same room where this furtive transmission had once taken place, I'd had to abandon my idea that the doorways, walls, and windows of the place would have somehow retained at least a faint imprint of Akhmatova's inward life there. In its misguided earnestness, the museum had succeeded only in smothering its subject. The rough English of its website claims that the literary display using new visual language creates a model of Akhmatova poetic world, but this visual language proved to be only kitsch — its design tried gussying up and poeticizing the array of photographs, letters, identity cards, and other artifacts on display there by interspersing them among new white pillars and sculpted figures, with a hugely blown-up photograph of the garden trees outside serving as a backdrop.

These elements were all meant to evoke the "White Hall" of Akhmatova's Poem without a Hero, for many of whose sections she explicitly identified this House on the Fontanka as the setting, and more particularly the windows of the house, which served to frame her ghostly visitations.

But I felt only a kind of vacancy in the place; even when I stood at Akhmatova's window, nothing stirred in me.

Shaky ground

But I was on questionable ground everywhere I went in Russia, partly because I was so hopelessly ignorant: I picked up virtually nothing of the language, never managed to decipher Cyrillic properly, had a hard time distinguishing between past realities and present ones, didn't quite know what I was looking for—even though I was conscious of looking for something very intently—and when I did find a connection or make a discovery, I had every reason to doubt its validity.

When I got back to New York, it was as if half of me still lingered behind in St. Petersburg or Moscow, or perhaps on a train, white birch trees blurring by outside. I found myself trying to re-unite my divided soul by immersing myself in all manner of Russian translations, one of which was Nadezhda Mandelstam's second memoir, Hope Abandoned, which I'd bought and half-read 25 years earlier. Now as I opened it up again, the glue of the spine disintegrated into gray dust, and white pages fluttered down to my tabletop. I rebound the book in sections using gray duct tape, which had the unintended but perhaps appropriate effect of making it seem like a samizdat edition. When insomnia kept me up at night, I busied myself with hunting down unfamiliar passages.

One such passage related Osip Mandelstam's memories of his close friend and fellow poet Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhamatova's first husband, whose abduction and execution by the secret police in 1921 foreshadowed Osip Mandelstam's own fate seventeen years later. Mandelstam often recalled Gumilev's responses to his poetry, and enjoyed repeating one of them in particular:

This is a very good poem, Osip, but when it is finished, not a single one of the present words will remain.

Delighted by this idea, I marveled over it for a bit, but then turned it back on myself more pessimistically. Perhaps a few of the observations that I'd brought home with me were promising, I thought, but if I were ever to get the whole picture right, probably not a single one of them would remain.

(This thought may explain the four month lapse between the start of this text and now.)

Fatalism

It's true that pessimism gives way to fatalism all too easily in St. Petersburg. Many of its tourist sites commemorate the dismal fates of its citizens, a fact that was brought home to Marc Downie and me almost immediately upon our arrival in the city when we were taken to the site reserved for our Point A to B installation.

A taxi-ride across the Neva River conveyed us to Hare Island, where Peter the Great had erected the first part of his new capital, the Peter and Paul Fortress, to defend from the Swedes what was still a mere swamp off the Bay of Finland. Descending within the ramparts of the fortress, we proceeded down the so-called Secret Passageway that led to the vaulted brick chamber where we were to set up our piece.

The sense of this having been a dungeon was confirmed by our hosts, from whom we also learned that it had been somewhere in this vicinity that Peter the Great had had his own son Alexis tortured to death. On an exploratory walk around the small island a few days later, I was surprised to find that Alexis had been given a little resting place of his own there, a small side chapel in the Peter and Paul Cathedral at the center of the island, where the remains of the entire Romanov line were collected. A larger side chapel had been added in the late 1990s to house the questionable bones of Nicholas II and his family, exhumed from the pit in Ekaterinberg where they'd been tossed after execution by the Bolsheviks.

The architecture of St. Petersburg memorialized many other such bloody scenes, from Decembrists' Square, where Nicolas I unleashed deadly fusillades on the futilely reform-minded rebels, to the garish Church on Spilled Blood, which marked the spot of Alexander II's assassination by the Nihilists. Though off the usual tourist paths, the oppressive Bolshoy dom stood in plain sight on the Neva — the very place where the Stalinists interrogated, tortured, and often executed their many local victims during the Terror of the Thirties. It still functions today, incredibly, as a headquarters of state security.

But here you may fairly reproach me for confusing a sense of fatalism with a mere awareness of fatality. What makes the bloody history of St. Petersburg seem pre-ordained and unalterable rather than improvised and open-ended? Why do its figures seem to have been crushed by an implacable Fate that simply dwarfed them?

Perhaps it's the very scale of the city. On first arrival, many of the state buildings, residences, churches, canals, and bridges look pretty familiar to anyone who knows Amsterdam or Paris or Venice. But that familiarity shrinks away when you begin to walk around — you find it taking you four or five times longer than you expected to go from point A to point B, the blocks are so long; and since that archway you're passing under is more than ten times higher than it seemed from a distance, you've become a mere mouse by the time you scuttle through it.

False futures

But there was a moment in Russian history when those who'd armed themselves with the best new ideas strode the city and the country like giants, believing it well within their power to reinvent the world top to bottom. The tumult of the 1920s had them convinced that they could blow their future wide open.

That they turned out to be wrong — grievously so — is perfectly clear in rearview.

But what if we could avoid looking backward in the usual simple fashion? — forget that we already know how it all turned out? Could we find a different angle, one that lets us glimpse what they thought they were seeing at the time (even if much of it proved to be illusion)?

These at any rate were my desires. I longed to peer back through that brief window in time and watch all the speculated futures of the period spin themselves out — to see them before they diminished down to the Stalinist none.

I met with mixed success. The actual future — the present — had a foot on the neck of each alternative.

Shunted

My first week in St. Petersburg I was too busy with other things to try tracking down more traces of the 1920s; and then my intention was briefly derailed by a probably pointless train ride to Petrozavodsk, a provincial capital 8 hours to the northeast, where we were to give an artists' talk.

But as we pulled into a station along the way, Marc looked out the window and happened to spot a remarkable device — a special sort of train that had been shunted off on a nearby siding (too easy a symbolic ending).

A glance at the thing revealed how it worked: it could reach back to grab a fresh pair of rails from a stack behind it, swivel the pair forward to lay them down in front of itself, then advance over this new length of track, and repeat — thus, a train that can build its own route as it goes along.

Dedalus kindly drew a diagram of this mechanism for me after we pulled out of the station again.

Viktor Shklovsky

My enthusiasm for this contraption was oddly displaced, for I felt I'd mostly borrowed my sense of it from someone else — from the spirit of Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984), whom I'd been re-reading on the train ride.

Nothing suited Shklovsky better than a metaphor driven by machine; his prose runs the way a combustion engine does, with a series of controlled explosions that hurl the vehicle forward.

Here's a literal example of an explosion going off in a paragraph — of Shklovsky accidentally blowing himself up while testing dubious safety fuses for a bomb (this in the 1920 campaign against the White Army, down near the Black Sea):

A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922.

My arms were flung back; I was lifted, seared and turned head over heels. The air filled with explosions. The cylinder had blown up in my hands. I hardly had time for a fleeting thought about my book Plot as a Stylistic Phenomenon. Who would write it now?

I first encountered Shklovsky's work back in the 1980s, when friends had put me up for the night in their battered apartment on St. Marks Place. The street noise of early-morning garbage trucks had awoken me, stiff-jointed, on the living room floor, where I happened to spot an unfamiliar title in a teetering pile of books nearby. This turned out to be Shklovsky's Third Factory, that most inventive of memoirs. Opening it at random, I read a paragraph or two, and haven't stopped reading Shklovsky, off and on, ever since.

Shklovsky and his circle (Jakobson, Eickenbaum, Brik) were ardent theorists of literary form, and I suppose their ideas run in a direct line of descent first across Europe to the Structuralists in France and then outward to academic post-modernists ensconced seemingly everywhere around the globe. But we shouldn't hold the originals responsible for the imbecility and bloodlessness of present-day Theory — it's been the academic inbreeding of ideas that has led to the current sterility.

It puzzles me that Shklovsky still remains so obscure, known if at all for a few easy bits from his 1925 book Theory of Prose. Far more interesting than his theory of prose is his practice of it, which is best found elsewhere, in his autobiographical works. These have been unusually well-served by an American academic, Richard Sheldon, whose translations and contextual commentary open up Shklovsky about as wide as can be imagined in English.

Now that I was in his native land, however, I was expecting to find a good deal more about the man, one of the few of his kind to have survived the Twenties and Thirties to live and work on to a decent old age. But in an early sign that contemporary Russia has little place for such figures, I found not a single Shklovsky volume in any of the main St. Petersburg bookstores; nor did I fare much better in Moscow, where with the help of my friend Alla Kovgan I turned up only a cheap paperback edition of Sentimental Journey, its experimental nature thoroughly disguised by the conventional genre illustration adorning its cover: three soldiers on horseback cross a wintry landscape.

Alla was determined that her homeland cough up more of Shklovsky for me than that, so she posted a request for Shklovsky on an online book exchange site. Dozens of sellers responded from across the country, but only one from Moscow. When she rendezvoused with him the next day, he offered her Shklovsky's collected works in three large volumes, all for a mere 300 rubles (about ten bucks). "Who needs this kind of nonsense anymore?" the man said as he handed over the books to Alla, who nonetheless returned to strike a triumphant pose, cradling her trophies, for my camera.

Idolatry

The kitchen in which I'd snapped Alla's portrait belonged to a young Russian yoga instructor, who to my surprise made a comfortable enough living in Moscow to afford the nicely renovated apartment in which we were now staying.

She and I had one thing in common: an interest in what we each supposed to be the wisdom of the east.

Shklovsky wrote many paragraphs one short sentence long.

But my east was Russia — hers, India.

An object of my eastern pilgrimage was the Tretyakov Gallery — not the main building, but its distant cousin, the State Tretyakov Gallery, to which 20th century art was consigned. There, or so Alla and Dedalus had assured me back in New York, I was certain to find a rich trove of the Russian avant-garde, its only real repository in a country whose treasures had been carted off by the capitalist curators and collectors who'd placed so much higher a value on it.

So one morning I set off in the direction of that museum, which my map showed to be toward the river and across from Gorky Park. I walked the most direct route, which went along Sadovoye Kol'sto, a busy ring road meant more for cars, trucks, and buses than for people.

This took me past October Square, where a heroic statue of Lenin was now dwarfed by symbols of global capitalism — signs for Japanese consumer electronics companies. With their neon switched off, both Canon and Hitachi formed dull red letters against the overhanging sky.

Beneath the Hitachi name I could read its corporate slogan. In slightly awkward or at least incomplete English, it called on me to Inspire the next. (The next what: generation?)

Iconic

The museum, when I reached it, stood big, white, and listless on the embankment, with the river winds whistling around it.

The place was nearly empty, and not another soul was to be found in the collection I'd come to see. Then again much of the soul seemed to have vanished from many of the artworks I found there.

For example, from Malevich, whose Black Suprematist Square of 1915 was at one time a clean break from the past: an open door to the future.

Now, it must be said, the artwork wasn't wearing its age well; was in fact falling to pieces. Its black paint, somehow faded to a dark blue, had cracked into a network of crisscrossing white lines, disfiguring the purity of the square.

How differently this Malevich had fared from the Russian icons, many centuries older, that I admired later that afternoon at the main Tretyakov Gallery closer to the city center. It immediately struck me that the haloed saints of the icons had weathered the ages much more successfully than had poor Kazimir Malevich — perhaps had even gained in power by virtue of their long passage through the ages. Though the paint had partly seeped into or chipped off of the now warped and gnarled wood panels that served as their vessels through time, still the holy figures were unperturbed and undiminished — still they commanded the gaze of the more numerous viewers filing past them.

Not so Malevich. By the 1930s, in the ussr at least, his day was already done, his artistic revolution reversed by the larger Communist one.

In the Teens and Twenties, when everything was in upheaval, many had been fooled into thinking that both the artistic and the political revolutionaries were marching in the same triumphant parade. But by Stalin's time this folly had been cruelly exposed. Stalin's taste ran backwards, social realism was decreed the order of the day, and all artists were either pushed back into line or run into the ditch.

One would have supposed Malevich to be simply an innocent victim in all this, as indeed he was. Yet the quality of his innocence is something I now have cause to question. The seeds of my doubt were planted a little earlier, back in St. Petersburg, though they didn't flower until after my return to New York.

Veneration

On Nevsky Propect stands an American contribution to the St. Petersburg cityscape dating back to the early 1900s — the Singer Sewing Machine Company building, an art deco structure whose distinctive glass turret thrusts a Singer globe skywards. Long since converted to other purposes, the building now houses the city's largest bookstore, Dom Knigi, which is where I'd first failed in my search for Shklovsky and where I then had to content myself with surveying the collection of art books on sale, my lack of Russian putting all but picture books out of my reach.

As I made my way back to the art book section, my attention was drawn to a glass cabinet on the side, where half a dozen different Bibles lay behind locked glass windows. Each Bible was bound in thick leather, as I seem to recall, and each had its unique cover embellished by an assortment of gaudy jewels. Equally gaudy were the price tags for these kitschy volumes, well over one hundred thousand rubles apiece, thus running in the 4- to 5,000 dollar range.

So much for atheism in Russia — the strenuous Soviet attempts to stamp out religion had backfired badly, though could any commissar have devised a better argument for atheism than these post-perestroika, conspicuous-consumption, luxury-item Bibles?

Moving on, I found the art books in the back to be devoted mainly to the treasures amassed by the tsars and their successors in the Hermitage museum, where Old Masters from Italy, France, and Holland were the main attractions. But at the bottom of a pile of discounted books, I came across a real discovery — In Malevich's Circle: Confederates, Students, Followers, an English-language catalog for what had evidently been a large exhibit at the State Russian Museum. Beautifully printed, the volume reproduced many artists I'd never heard of, and since the whole thing was mine for a mere $14, I accepted the considerable weight it added to my suitcase.

Cult

Only on returning to Manhattan did I do more than marvel at the paintings, posters, sculptures, ceramics, stage sets, transit designs, and other products of Malevich's influence. Now I sat down to study the text properly, trying to make better sense of a movement that I began to realize was far more disciplined than I'd known.

—Disciplined being the operative word, for Malevich and his followers adhered as strictly to Suprematist theory, methods, and goals as did any radical ideologue to Marxism or religious fanatic to otherworldly doctrine. Disciples like Nikolai Suetin even wore the Suprematist black square as insignia on the cuffs of their overcoats, absurd as that may strike us today.

But nowadays it's hard to conceive of art as more than a personal experience (at best) or as a social marker of taste and status. The utopian fantasies of Suprematism — Messianic in their certainty — were far more overarching than any we now entertain.

How strange it now sounds to hear Malevich proclaiming the Suprematist desire to build the world up as a non-objective system, moving further and further away from the object, like the creation of the cosmos in nature. And explaining to Osip Brik:

M: The surface of the world is not organized ... It is covered with seas and mountains. In the place of this nature, I want to create a Suprematist nature, based on the laws of Suprematism.
B: What will we do with this nature?
M: You will adapt yourselves to it, just as you have adapted yourselves to the nature of the Lord God.

By Malevich's reasoning, if the earth itself could be remade along Suprematist principles, so too could man. Malevich's teaching was a form of reeducation, with methods not far removed from those of political indoctrination.

Many forms of brainwashing take a pseudo-medical approach, and so we find Malevich subjecting his student/patients to a precise course of treatment — from diagnosis and prescription, to dose and incubation, to surgery. The goal was to erase eclecticism in the art students and to develop pure sensations in each one. To that end, students were observed continuously, sometimes in isolation from each other, as their work was closely inspected and interrogated. Special tests registered their physiological reactions to color and color associations; other measures verified such things as the painterly dosage on the painterly conduct of the artist (whatever that could have meant).

Well, history had in store something other than the clinical fine-tuning of Suprematists for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — for example, the coercive mass production of Soviet comrades for Stalin (and, in the Great Terror, the paranoid purges from the ranks thus formed, sometimes of even the truest believers).

In any case, even as we note Malevich's authoritarian bent, it's a stretch to say it ever took significant hold. The words that most struck me in Malevich's Circle were spoken in 1934 by the dying master. Expressing confidence in the the future of his own art, he doubted that of his disciples, one of whom poignantly quoted him in his diary that day:

I am looking far ahead; perhaps when you are old, I will be understood. But all of you will be crossed out.

And it's true that other than El Lissittsky, none of Malevich's followers ever came close to matching the intensity and sweep of his originality. While Suprematist principles of composition did prove powerful even in weaker hands, designing for textiles and ceramics was surely not the revolutionary outcome they'd all once envisioned.

But on the other hand: were canvases? Even Malevich's own?

Mayakovsky

The last "house-museum" on my list was Mayakovsky's, in Moscow. It occupied several floors of the apartment building in which the poet had taken a room and had written his final pieces, the place where his suicide, shocking the nation, had finally discharged the line of a poem he'd written twenty years earlier — Let a bullet mark the period of my sentence.

150,000 Moscovites had thronged the streets for his funeral procession.

Nowadays the streets there surprise you by being so much quieter than those of New York or Paris. Even downtown near the Kremlin, the tolling of the bells at the Cathedral of the Assumption rises clearly above any traffic noise.

I remarked on this as I walked to the museum with Alla, who was researching a possible film on Mayakovsky and who had immersed herself in the man. The museum building was right off Lubianka Square — just past the notorious cheka headquarters in whose dungeon Mayakovsky would almost certainly have met his end had he not done himself in beforehand. As it was, his self-destruction in 1930 rendered him harmless to Stalin, who not only declared him the best of Soviet poets but issued his famous threat that "indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime."

The Mayakovsky Museum proved to be the site of a different kind of crime — not of indifference, but of bad taste.

It was the same story, really, as at the Ahkmatova Museum, though because it aspired to the colossal tumult of Mayakovsky, it was an even bigger mess. The designers were after the same thing, though: a series of metaphorical spaces to interpret the poet's life, heavy-handedly evoked with symbolic constructions loosely inspired by Mayakovsky's life and works. The entrance, as described by the museum's website, is enough to warn you of what's coming:

The entrance to the Museum is performed in the post-modern style. There is taboo truss lying as a border at the memorial building as a symbol of interrupted time in the flow of current life.

Only the poet's original room, with desk and bed, roped off at the entrance, is preserved as it was at his death — the rest of the museum spills over into larger spaces that were never his, its cascading exhibits all a-jumble with posters, publications, photographs, etc, done up in a forced and faked Futurist style that quickly had us looking for the door.

Remaindered memories

What to do without the remaindered books that find their way so easily to my bookshelves? Two will now help show us to the end of this odd chronicle, though by what roundabout route I won't know till I've written it.

My Futurist Years (1992, out of print)

The first is a collection of pieces by Roman Jakobson that had sat, half-read, in my studio for six years or so. When I got back and read it properly, Jakobson helped me overwrite the trivializing impressions I'd involuntarily gathered at the Mayakovsky museum.

For it turned out that Jakobson had lived in the building as well — had been there first, setting up the Moscow Linguistic Circle in the apartment his parents had vacated on the third floor, and later on, finding Mayakovsky a room to sublet on the floor above. The poet had been seeking a refuge to work in, a place apart from the complicated triangle he'd long formed with Lilya and Osip Brik.

Triolet eventually married Louis Aragon, the French poet who abandoned Surrealism for Communism.

For his part, Jakobson was also part of a lovers' triangle, or rather a would-be one. The object of his I think unconsummated desire was Lilya Brik's sister, Elsa Triolet, who also frustrated the ardor of none other than Viktor Shklovsky, whose epistolary masterpiece, Zoo, or Letters not about Love, was written to her.

So the two men were rivals in love. They were also allies and contenders in literary theory — but friends too, as revealed in the best anecdote of Jakobson's book, one that brings the same building back to life:

Worried that his left-wing but non-Bolshevik adventures would soon have him arrested by the Reds, Shklovsky had been hiding out and sleeping in the thick bushes around the Church of Christ the Savior (before Stalin had torn this and a good many other Moscow churches down). Having decided to impersonate someone else, Shklovsky had come over to use Jakobson's typewriter to falsify some old identity papers, for which he'd had the presence of mind to use pre-Communist orthography. He'd then stripped off his burr-covered clothing and was in the process of shaving his head when a professor of linguistics happened to drop by. Ignoring the unintroduced guest (as was the prudent custom in those days), the professor immediately launched into a scholarly discussion of Old Russian manuscripts — only to be surprised when the strange naked guy chimed in with a few learned points of philology.

Such were the peculiar conjunctions of those times...

Return

— ... times that Paul Schmidt thought were coming around again, an idea that first brought him to my studio sometime in the mid-90s.

That studio was on Spring Street in Soho, close to the Hudson River, which my windows framed perfectly. When the Queen Elizabeth 2 sailed to sea, it dwarfed the low warehouses on the waterfront, looking for all the world like a horizontal skyscraper taking leave of midtown: a curiously old-fashioned sight.

In the Thirties, El Lissitsky had proposed horizontal skyscrapers for Moscow, but since they were never built, you have to imagine them there.

A bit less imagination was needed for my Spring Street views, for they suggested things rather easily to you. For example, the buildings that housed Holland Tunnel's air vents stood in the river and looked like castles, as everyone who came there exclaimed — castles with an enormous moat. They'd inspired one of Bob Wilson's sets for Einstein on the Beach — a relevant fact for me in those days, since I was busy making Visionary of Theater.

It was in that connection that Paul Schmidt had come to hear of me. He'd known Wilson a long time, they having picked each other up on a street corner in Austin in 1960. More recently Paul had written the libretto for Wilson’s Alice (1994).

Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, Volume II, Prose, Plays, and Supersagas

But when Paul knocked on my door, it wasn't to talk about Wilson, but about Velimir Khlebnikov. He brought me a volume of his translation of the untranslatable: Khlebnikov's Collected Works. (My copy was later lost, perhaps reshelved by mistake in Wilson's archive down the hall.)

Around the same time I met Maryanne Amacher, who was madly possessed by these kinds of ideas (and later that of the Singularity) and whose sad story I will someday try to relate.

Paul had picked up on a kind of millennial feeling that was in the air then, which only intensified as the World Wide Web took off a little while later. Now he wondered whether the world Khlebnikov had foretold in the 1910s might not be revealing itself to us now, perhaps in the kind of hypermedia he'd heard I was exploring.

You've already seen that utopian ideas leave me cold, but I was interested in whatever conjunctions Paul could trace for me. He pointed me to such Khlebnikov texts as "The Radio of the Future," which did accurately imagine such things as a game of chess between two people located at opposite ends of Planet Earth. Still, there was to this and the other essays a starry-eyed tone not much to my liking (like the flight of birds in springtime, a flock of news departs, news from the life of the spirit), not to mention considerable grandiosity (the invention of a universal language, a numerological system for prophecy, and so on).

Problems of tone also put me off the poems, heroic though Paul's translations of them were — to match the intricate wordplay of Khlebnikov's Russian, Paul had found all sorts of amazing English equivalents by delving deep down into the roots of our language and playing freely there. But in his introduction to his translations, he observed that "the use of neologisms and word games can be off-putting to the reader of English," and sadly this summed up my case.

Meanwhile, I'd become more interested in the stories of these two men, Khlebnikov and Schmidt, than in the texts. The philistine's usual fallback, you might be justified in saying.

Numerology

When I went back to Paul Schmidt's Khlebnikov recently, I tried tackling the part I'd found most problematic originally — the prophetic writings called The Tables of Destiny.

These were among the last things Khlebnikov wrote, and they reported the discovery what he thought to be the pure Laws of Time, with which he could calculate time's structure in powers of two or three, the lowest even and odd numbers. Stranger still, he maintained that an event always reverses itself, turning into its opposite state after a predetermined number of days.

By some obscure logic, the poet believed his equations to have the force of Jehovah's Vengeance is mine, and I shall repay. This helps explain the patterns he then kept calculating, like this one:

Behavior and punishment, act and retribution.
Say the victim dies at the initial point.
The killer will die after 3⁵.

Which works as well for an individual destiny,

The military agent Min put down the Moscow uprising on December 26, 1905; he was killed 3⁵, 243 days later, on August 26, 1906.

as it does for a historical one:

Bulgaria was conquered by the Turks at the battle of Tvnovo on July 17, 1393; 3¹¹ days later a reverse event occurred: she was declared independent by the treaty of Berlin on July 13, 1778.

The ravings of a crackpot? — without question. But what had brought him to this?

Khlebnikov first started searching for the laws of time, he said, in 1915, on the day after the Battle of Tsushima — that is, on the day after the Japanese navy had destroyed the Russian fleet, taking more than 4,000 Russian lives. I wanted to discover the reason for all those deaths, he wrote — and soon, no doubt, the reason for the millions more that the Russian Civil War began piling up around him. And then for his own death as well, which was fast approaching in 1922 when he wrote this partial account of the Tables, having only six months left to live.

On his deathbed (as I hope I recall correctly, for I can't put my finger on the source) he insisted on wide open windows, the better to disperse the smell of his bodily decay. Now I imagine him there calculating his own eventual reversal — which would have had him springing right back from death into life.

But in the end he was, like so many others, not the king, but the victim of his times.

Transmission

So, too, was Paul Schmidt, but in one way only: he had aids. It was death by sexually transmitted disease, rather than by starvation or war, that was the scourge of his particular time and place and person.

Apparently he'd acknowledged his illness to friends only a little while before we met. Even then he avoided the word aids, preferring "the virus," which he pronounced distastefully — as if the word were, like the infectious agent itself, foreign to him.

Little else was. Paul embraced everything, everyone — he was a translator, poet, actor, scholar, bon vivant, and sophisticate. In earlier days, he was also said to have been the most beautiful of men (as seen here), never bashful about using his attractions to full effect.

But I'm afraid I'm the wrong person to do him full justice, not only because I knew him only in his last few years, but because a good part of him was largely lost on me — his elegance, for example, or his knack for the grand gesture. At Paul's memorial service, someone recounted his last adventure, undertaken not more than one week before he died. Substituting tuxedo for hospital gown, he'd had two old friends spirit him off for a final elegant evening at the opera. When I visited him a day or two later, he passed over this and we spoke as usual about more serious things.

So what did we talk about? All this — literature and life and fate — though with more wit than you've encountered in my rather mournful account here. Paul connected me to many things I was curious about, and he did so generously: when he told me something new, he acted as if he were merely reminding me of it.

Although Paul was ever-weaker in his last days, he was still attentive, still intent on somehow hanging on a bit longer. It's a cliche to say that he was at greater peace: his ease may have been drawn from the sedatives dripping into his bloodstream. But he seemed less beset by pain, free of the horrible cough that used to ambush him so mercilessly.

I remember that cough most painfully from our time in Jerusalem a year or so earlier. There were moments when I was almost as wracked by it as he was — in my case by the guilt I felt over having invited him there. I'd brought him in as the writer for an Israeli museum project we were doing with Robert Wilson, the absurdity of which I've related elsewhere (in the second half of this post).

This was a good time to be in Palestine, for it was in the interlude between the two intifadas, when peace seemed just over the horizon. Someday I'll reconstruct the long and miraculous walk I took in Jerusalem and the West Bank, along a route only ghosts could travel today.

But while Paul's time in Jerusalem had its low points, triggered mainly by those fits of coughing, it also had its highs. Many situations tickled his fancy there — for example, that one of the city's more elegant old restaurants happened to be in the YMCA (The Young Men's Christian Association, as Paul liked to draw the name out wryly). We made a good audience at dinner, Marco Steinberg and I, listening raptly as Paul told one story after another.

This was a form of oral transmission, I suppose, though I'm one of its weaker links, forgetting much that I've heard. Decades earlier, at Harvard, Paul had done far better — absorbing Russian poets through the inspired teaching of Roman Jakobson, whose flight from the ussr had eventually landed him in America. There in Cambridge he channeled Khlebnikov and Mayakovsy for his students in the same way the two poets had once recited themselves for him in Moscow.

Since for Paul the act of translating was above all a performance, he took from Jakobson's spirited Russian renditions all the presences, rhythms, and tones he later aimed for in English.

Last vessel

I don't know how the posthumous publication of Paul's last book, The Stray Dog Cabaret, could have slipped by me at first, but eventually I discovered it among the remaindered copies at my local bookstore. As I leafed through the pages, a clear image of the papers on Paul's desk came to mind, conjured up either from memory or imagination — I did remember that when I'd last visited Paul in his apartment, he'd mentioned having been tinkering with the translations of just a few last Russian poems. Knowing his gift for understatement, I should have been a better translator myself: a few meant quite a few.

The editors followed Paul's practice of arranging the poems in conversational series, as he had done, for example, in a sequence on suicide. Sergei Esenin's suicide poem of 1925 is rebuked in a poem by Mayakovsky, who ends up writing one of his own, however, five years later — which is in turn answered by Marina Tsaeteva's gentle reproach of both her departed friends.

These translated voices spoke to me during my time in Russia, where my dog-eared paperback copy rode with me in my coat pocket. Paul said the American verse of Walt Whitman, in translation, had shaped the irregular lines of Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky, which made me wonder if some such influence might cross over the other way.

I've dreamed of setting up a series of mirrors, angled so that they'd reflect not only across space, but across decades. I'd hang one such mirror in the phantom "house-museum" I imagine establishing at Paul's now-dispersed studio apartment on West 23rd Street — the mirror's frame to be round, like a porthole.

Paul had modeled his room in the compact style of an old ocean-liner stateroom, with bookshelves, cabinets, and Murphy bed built in to beautifully carpentered woodwork. Its windows opened onto the gardens of the building's inner courtyard just below, but now that Paul is no longer at the helm of his desk there, the scenery has started to slide away behind the glass, our vessel having cast off and set sail for the open...

1. Against averaging

I In physics, the more you magnify matter, the less you can predict it. Zooming into a small number of particles brings you face to face with the indeterminacy of things. Even at the scale of water droplets, the irregularity of Brownian motion is clearly visible to you, the droplets light enough to be buffeted by single air molecules as they randomly collide with the mist.

It's only as you zoom out again to regard things in aggregate that the laws of statistics can begin re-asserting themselves; soon they restore the regularity of the world we're accustomed to occupy. The chair I sit in is solid & supports me; my molecules don't fall through its molecular cracks.

The stability of thought is similar.

It dismays me at times that I am myself so easily averaged — that the over-all pattern of my thoughts is so predictable. This is true not only from the distance of my own slightly estranged but still intimate vantage-point, but even more unnervingly from the impersonal machine gaze that merely tracks me as data. After all, given my zip code, credit card purchases, and web browsing history, a simple set of statistical algorithms can predict not only most of my basic views but also much of my day-to-day behavior.

But when I slow down and pay close attention to single thoughts and sensations, letting them occur to me as they will, my mind loses this regularity.

It grows stranger, and so do I.

To speak of a single thought is misleading, however, for the closer I look at one, the blurrier its boundaries and the less stable its state.

A given thought trembles on the verge of any number of possibilities. Then, without warning, it turns itself inside out, shapeshifting from one form to another. (This derails whatever train of ideas I thought I was riding.)

So — if I am what I think, then best to live as close up as this, and as unstably, as freely.

2. Limited number, limitless space

It brings me up short when I stop to think how relatively few things I can bring back to life in my mind.

Recently re-reading Speak, Memory, I found myself envying the prodigious memory of Vladimir Nabokov, who flaunts his superior talent for snapping any childhood scene back into the sharp focus of his virtuosic prose.

My case must have the redeeming virtue, however, of being more common. (Reader, do we have this in common?)

Several years ago my youngest daughter made the request for another childhood story, please, Daddy the main feature of her bedtime ritual. I started out bravely enough, with all the familiar memories that I myself had long since relied upon to make sense of particular times — key signposts of my life. Before long, though, I was dismayed that the once palpable vastness, say, of my enthralling year in Second Grade could now yield so few well-formed stories — six or seven, not one hundred and twenty. The ones that did come to me were wonderfully vivid still, but when I tried peering around their corners to find others, my view was blurred and my grasp uncertain.

This went on for several years, by the end of which I getting splinters from scraping the bottom of my barrel, though whatever I managed to dredge up continued to delight my daughter (even as she then requested more). By the end of that time, my mental exertions felt like the dry heaves of a comic book figure.

Recently I've come to understand that my ideas are similarly few in number. Again, there isn't an unlimited number of insights I can choose among, but just a handful in any given category, which I keep coming back to. Most of them I've been circling around for many years now.

But having learned to acquiesce to this reality, I've managed to shift it slightly. I continue to range among this small number of ideas, but I now often slow down to focus on the gaps between them. The closer I look, the larger these gaps become, a kind of spaciousness that comes as a great relief.

Circling around an idea now means choosing among a myriad possible orbits, each with its own series of different vantage-points; and in moving from idea to idea I can now take any number of paths that swerve as much as this one has.

— I just dropped by there without calling, you know. — Yeah? — Yeah, really. I just wanted to say hello.

The rest of this was lost to me as I passed out of earshot, but my mind continued to spin out the story a bit further. The locker room context and the gym’s rap music both entail a lot of manly boasting, and this must have made me think it was a woman he’d gone to visit ... a woman who’d perhaps spurned him before, but who now, seeing him again, his body more impressive after his many hours of hitting the gym weights, now gave way to his charms...

I could picture the leering grin that accompanied this account, but this was something I saw only in my imagination, for I hadn’t cast a glance at the two guys talking.

On reminding myself of this fact, I then backtracked and played out a different ending, this one having the door answered not by the woman I’d conjured up, but by another man — a rival, perhaps even someone the protagonist knew but had never suspected, or perhaps a fearsome stranger standing tall in the doorway — the story branching off from there into a different kind of pulp fiction, making me shaking my head wryly at the foolishness of these speculations, which were founded on so very little.

With nothing to go on, still, our minds run on pretty far. We get way ahead of ourselves. And it seems to me that our days are full of such fractured stories — stories about as broken as those we dream at night.

Fiction's failure

The branching structure of such speculations, which typically end as inconclusively as the one above, rarely finds expression in literature, where our taste has tended to favor more unified plots. Two decades ago, however, there was the feeling that new forms of writing were possible, ones well-suited to this sense of branching contingency. For the serious-minded, there was hypertext fiction, which had its simpler counterpart in children’s books of choose your own adventure.

In the years since then, hypertext has become ubiquitous on the web, where we expect everything to branch off in unexpected directions. But the form of hypertext fiction seemed to die long ago from lack of interest, probably for good reasons that I thought we could start exploring here.

Childhood reading

Unexpected, yes, but not too unexpected. It seems to me that the branches that media (hypertextual fiction and computer games) take today are quite conventional.

I confess that, as a child, I must have spent weeks, maybe months, choosing my own adventure (mainly the work of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston). And while most of this fiction has thankfully left little trace, Greek mythology for me has been forever turned upside down by getting a first reading in "The Cretan Chronicles".

Once, while attempting to convince my father of the virtues of these great works, I succeeded in persuading him to "read" one. Rather than playing the game in good faith — reading the page, engaging in dice-roll based combat, choosing the next page by carefully studying the options (and perhaps even sneaking ahead, finger carefully held at the start of a speculative branch) — my father frustratingly chose simply to move to the page with the highest number, that is, the page "closest to the end" of the book. He quickly came to an end for "his" character (impaled on spikes, poisoned by something-or-other) and never reached the "final page".

Gaming

Somewhere in this anecdote are many of aspects of not just most "interactive" literature, but of most narrative computer games today. For the format seems hemmed in on two sides: firstly by some universal and evenly-paced arc of progress-towards-the-end, which always appears and dominates the 'reading' experience; and secondly by the compromises needed to trim the exponential complexity of a branching tree at some point (and then to turn the story into a game — one where you have to avoid all end-points but the final one).

We can look at the two recent most critically successful computer games — Mass Effect and Fallout 3 — that are narrative-driven and see these boundary forces at work. Both were the eagerly awaited work of studios that have previously defined the state-of-the-art for interactive narrative (in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Oblivion). What's unexpected, in this day of increased production budgets and computer storage is that both provide central narratives that are actually shorter than their studio's previous outings while maintaining the same formal structure (a linear introduction, linear ending, central hub-and-spoke pattern in the case of Mass Effect / Knights of the Old Republic; a linear main quest and many geographically located side stories in the case of Oblivion / Fallout 3).

If we believe that these studios — with budgets and, frankly, talents vastly exceeding that available to academic "interactive fiction" researchers — really do represent the state-of-the-art of something, then we should understand that some limit has been reached. I suspect it's a combination of the market place's willingness to enjoy long interactive stories — stories so long that "progress" along them is not obvious — and the studios' ability to quality assure their branching trees — to play test all branches, all intersections; study them, craft them, focus group them. For this feeling of quality assurance dominates today's interactive works; crafting and recrafting "the experience" has become the way that studios navigate the forces faced by their choose-your-own-adventure formats.

Through the cracks

Perhaps the most memorable computer game experience I've ever had was encountering Ultima Underworld (a very early first person 3d game). Impressive at the time was its sheer size — we played long into the hours of dawn before discovering that we were only on the "first level". But looking back, more impressive was how this "size" felt — very different from the geometrically much larger Fallout 3. Being in corners of the Underworld dungeon felt as though you were "interacting" with the work of a single author — a single, unsupervised, author — you might have been the only person ever to read the note left there in that locked box. The only person: no play-testers, no design-committee, perhaps no other player.

Once, we fell through an unexpected hole in an underground river all the way through to level 4. Everything is "broken" at this point — the narrative exposition in micro and macro (we've missed 4 "levels", some 50%, of the story and pacing), the game balance (our equipment, sufficient for the monsters of level 1, is no match for the larger monsters here) — the arc of progress is utterly confused, and we are no longer traversing a tree of options, but navigating a complex graph. Ultimately, we come to a sticky end; but now dead-ends are no-longer ends but speculations. We re-encounter this level in a future attack on the game.

This was a move available only to a medium still young, with its rules still up for grabs: I believe it's impossible for today's games to ship without such a random game-breaking "branch" being edited out in testing. But I could draw you a map of level 4 from memory after 15 years.

Degrees of unfreedom

Well, I can't draw you any of the maps I once made of the maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

But I distinctly remember the graph paper I always had at hand to help me plot out the labyrinthine passages of this original computer game, Adventure, which ran in a simulation of its original mainframe code some 25 years ago on my little Apple IIc.

It was a game of branching sentences, not pictures, which made for a considerable difference from what came later, when computer graphics overtook text, and mouse or joystick replaced keyboard.

When you launched Adventure, the program first set its scene for you —

Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave, where others have found fortunes in treasure and gold, though it is rumored that some who enter are never seen again. Magic is said to work in the cave.

and then gave you its method —

I will be your eyes and hands. Direct me with commands of 1 or 2 words.

This initial instruction seemed to invert your usual relation to a written text — putting you in charge of what you were to read. In a novel, it is the author who tells you what to see and do next. Here, by contrast, you seemed free to dictate your own path.

And because you always made your choices in the dark (not for nothing did the game put you in a series of caverns), you didn't immediately sense how limited your options really were. Instead your initial impression was of having been given many degrees of freedom. And in fact you did have much ground to cover (it was a pretty vast space, arranged on a considerable number of levels), but as you played and re-played the scenes you discovered how hemmed in you were by the walls of those caverns, by the branches of that structure, by the simplistic rules of your interaction.

people who "think" move around blindfold amid the tiny room of the human mind — and in this metaphysical game of blind man's bluff, they bump into each other — and push each other away simply because they're moving about, and the space is very restricted. It's the space of a dozen words.

Emphasis added, partly to underline Valéry's sounding so unexpectedly like Wittgenstein — another strange mindfellow whom we can add to the list.

But the first list to compile would be a stab at the dozen words Valery had in mind — even though I doubt it was an exact number: a dozen is simply more than a handful, which would have been easier. We might begin

How appropriate that my botched sketch of such a space would produce a Necker Cube, an optical illusion that keeps keeping flipping foreground and background, mind oscillating between two opposite readings — an unwittingly accurate portrayal of my own mental space, if not yours.

But for now I'm interested in who it is that's crowded into there — philosophers, gurus, dreamers, poets, spiritualists, psychologists, etc.

Or not even that: I want to know the effect of all that crowding.

Tumult

One effect, surely, is that of contamination. Different thinkers impinge on each other, subtle discriminations blur out, buzzwords proliferate, and after a while there's even a sense that all these disembodied presences are battling for your mind-share.

Descartes argues with Dogen who's fending off Whitman, but their disputes quickly get so entangled that you can no longer tell where one begins and the other ends. Add to this a bit of incense and sitar music, a dash of psychedelia, some crackpot particle physics Taoism, both the Egyptian and the Tibetan Books of the Dead, etc, and before you know it your mind is buzzing in confusion.

In place of the quietude you'd sought in your inward reflections, what you encounter instead, at least at first, is a kind of seance run amok, all the spirits clamoring for your attention.

see also Mental Economy / Lenses

For you are the medium through which they must either pass or perish, a thought that puts me in mind not only of Richard Dawkins but also of Philip K. Dick.

Jory

In Ubik, Dick imagined a cryonic facility that can prolong consciousness past the point of death. Once there, any disembodied half-life is gradually used up in communications with others, who must therefore keep their message-passing to a minimum.

Soon the protagonist discovers not only that his friends and associates are all suspended in this limbo, but that so is he. To make matters worse, an energetically degenerate adolescent named Jory is also in there, and he's busy eating up everyone else's bodies of thought, taking over all mind-share.

Imagine a teenage neighbor who keeps turning up the volume of his music to drown out yours.

It's a noisy world that keeps consuming my thoughts no matter how inward.

Other people make books. I am making my mind.

So wrote Paul Valéry in the early part of the last century. For fifty-one years, he would arise at five o'clock every morning to devote two hours to his contemplations, undisturbed by the outside world. The picture that comes to mind is of the writer at his desk, the darkness at the windows of his Parisian abode gradually dissolving into dawn.

If as he remarked daytime lights up my ideas and my ideas light up my nighttime, then these in-between hours must have had him observing both of these operations attentively as one form of illumination gave way to the other.

Like a monk, Valéry was perfect in the constancy of his meditations — though since his was an atheistic introspection, we should add a secular cigarette, coffee cup, and fountain pen to our portrait of this thinker. And while his likeness should age as we watch him, his objects of inquiry should not, for they remained the few core puzzles of consciousness on which he'd been steadily training his attention since his earliest maturity.

In any case such questions are timeless.

Towards the end of his life, he wryly likened himself to a cow attached to a post, grazing on the same questions in the meadow of my mind. His note-taking was a kind of perpetual preparation, without purpose, without end — perhaps as instinctive as an ant's...

But such modesty was uncharacteristic. More often Valéry took a haughty pride in this never-ending lifework of his, preferring it to the poems and essays that won him such acclaim both early and late in life. What he regarded as his real work — the Cahiers — refused to resolve itself neatly into any kind of comfortable closure. The almost impossibly high standard he upheld for writing and for thinking could only be approached, but never attained; such approaches were stabs at the truth, inscribed on the page in quick entries.

Valéry scorned lesser forms of literature as being too easy — novels, especially. Reading them, he said, helps to kill second- or third-class time. ¶ First class time does not need killing.

The Notebooks

Certainly first class time is what's called for if you're to try wrapping your mind around the far reaches of Valéry's meditations. They pose a fantastic challenge not only for their profundity but also their abundance: the facsimile edition of his notebooks, published posthumously, runs to 29 large volumes.

These are less like personal journals than laboratory logbooks, in which Valéry meticulously recorded the results of his inward experiments. It is up to us, his readers, to replicate his findings — that is, to try them out on ourselves, treating our "I" as as an experimental subject inside the laboratory of our own consciousness.

Valéry makes this possible for us because he's not pondering the specifics of personality and characteristics the way that novelists and diarists do. His interest in states of mind is

emphasis added

only in what is not yet personal in those states, since their contents, the person, seem to me subordinate to those conditions (1) of impersonal consciousness and (2) of mechanics and statistics.

By this way of thinking, personality just isn't as important as we tend to think it is. Best to regard it as a kind of room we happen to inhabit:

Certainly I cannot help having opinions, habits, a name, affections and aversions, a worldview of my own, just as the walls of my room are bound to have some color or other. But relative to all that I am, I am only what light is to that color; it could illuminate anything whatsoever.

Body of thought

When you start observing your mind, what first happens is that you become more conscious of your body — after a while, exquisitely so. All kinds of subtle and fleeting sensations surface, and these too of course are thoughts that you can choose to trace. Often they will take you off in unexpected tangents, sometimes letting you alight on an unusual perch from which to peer inward and outward.

A possibly eccentric way to judge the profundity of various thinker's accounts of mind is by examining their insights into the body. If so, then by this standard Valéry ranks very high, as you can see in this little note:

Just as the mouth is strangely sensitive and contains a medley of strong pressures, contending strains, obstructions and hard bodies interposed; of indefinable presences; of tastes and savors, moist contacts and a general slipperiness—so is the overall sensation produced by the body and the shifts of attention taking place within it like the movements of the tongue feeling and fumbling within its cavern...

Such unexpected sensitivity to the body — on the part of a thinker descended from Descartes — leads to many of Valéry's best entries; a wonderful little volume could be made from his notes on pain.

In probing pain, he found, the mind encounters its powerlessness — one's intelligence encompasses it, describes it, possesses it, and — can do nothing.

But perhaps it can. For a pain we could clearly conceive and almost circumscribe would become a sensation without pain. As such, he thought, you could attend to it in almost the same way as you listen to music: certain pains are grave and acute, some andante and furioso, held notes, organ stops, arpeggios, progressions, sudden silences, etc.

This observation is not merely clever but true, as you can see for yourself the next time you're not feeling well and can trace your pain not unthinkingly but rather with an attitude approaching connoisseurship.

Who'd have thought that Valéry had so much in common with Artaud — and Michaux?

For illness does have its uses. It reminds us that health is a kind of ignorance or self-deception — that simplicity, immediacy, naturalness are merely the effects of insensibility, or of a mercifully limited range of feelings.

Beneath the simplicity of our illusive body image, our self-conception no longer holds:

Man is man only on his surface. Lift off the skin, dissect; here the machinery begins. And soon you lose your bearings in an inexplicable substance, foreign to all you know and yet the basic stuff of the man you are dissecting. It’s the same thing with your desires, your feelings, and your thought. The familiarity and the human aspects of these things vanish on examination. And when, after lifting off the skin of language, I try to look beneath it, what I see bewilders me.

This notion of dissection, of putting your mind on the anatomy table, also invites the use of different lens settings:

If you set your microscope to the first magnifying‑power, you get “Man is free.” If you step it up to the second, you get “Man is not free” — and then, maybe, it’s no longer Man that you are seeing.

Narcissus

If so many of Valéry's entries try reaching beyond the mundane facts & circumstances of the individual self, there is still a slight sense of preening to be found even in his private journals.

May I risk an ill-founded generalization about French writers? It is this: that they seem always to have one eye on the mirror, the better to judge the figure they are cutting. In Valéry's case, at least he always had his other eye trained on truth and on clarity, things that later generations of French intellectuals seemed ever more willing to sacrifice in favor of cleverness, novelty, and fashion.

Valéry sometimes exulted in the glory of his literary isolation; he never joined any of the -isms that dominated French intellectual life, though when elected he was an energetic member of the Academie Francaise. Still, he prided himself on his inward dedication to the more rigorous, demanding, and unpublicized pursuits of his early-morning contemplations, when he was far removed from the herd.

His pride held steady even as he kept negating the value of the personal "I", which he said was as non-existent and as necessary as the center of gravity of a ring — or as arbitrary as the point of origin in geometric space.

But about the vanity of mirror-gazing, we can give Valéry the last and best word:

The Narcissus -- thought finds a man in the mirror.

No perfection

But we're still not done with Valéry, who in 1935 noted in his journal that having got up before five o'clock — it seems to me, at 8, that I've already lived through an entire day in my mind, and earned the right to be stupid until evening.

I might have dismissed this remark as false modesty had I not — two years ago, holed up in a wretched hotel in Austria, not far from the gusen concentration camp [see this entry] — happened upon a footnote in Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. There I was dismayed to discover that my hero Valéry had contributed money to the anti-Dreyfus cause earlier in the century — not, as Arendt pointedly quotes him as having declared, without reflection.

So much for the value of reflection, so called, when it yields so easily to bigotry. But it's too often the case that the smartest of fellows show the most deplorable of judgments.

More recently I came upon Valéry's public praise of Marshall Pétain, the general whose design for the Maginot Line would give the Nazis their perfect outflanking blitzkrieg and who would later, as the head of Vichy France, become their chief collaborationist.

To be fair, at the time of the address, all of this was several years in the future, and Pétain was still a hero from the first world war. What one finds in Valéry's praise is actually nothing more than willful hyperbole, a mind getting carried away by its ideals (the Military Man of Action), paying little or no attention to actuality. The tone is an embarrassment:

But you, sir, fortified by that great, that almost legendary calm which attests its confidence in what will endure sustained by that watchful common sense which distinguishes you, by the prudence and foresight which have made you the Sage of the Army, you who keep, as a frontier to your thoughts, a silence which we feel to be fortified with facts, solidly organized in depth, you at least are that rare man whom the severest critics, the harshest controversialists, the very ones who ceaselessly practice the role of belittling the famous, and whose chosen vocation is to damage any greatness impressed on the public mind, have been obliged more or less to spare.

A piece of puffery, as can be seen from the air-blown rhetoric that piles clause upon clause over the underlying emptiness. Valéry's son later recalled that whenever his father came upon a military parade, he would fall into step with the marching soldiers, which was no doubt the kind of thing that had happened to him here.

Modeling mind

But Valéry's flaws are the the flip-side of his virtues; neither would exist without the other.

Valéry's approach — clear from the start in his precocious Introduction to the method of Leonardo, which he wrote in his early twenties, and also in his masterpiece M. Teste, which came to him a little later — was always to exalt his subject, to make it into an ideal model of mind. This allowed him to dispense with personality, with individuality, with the usual stuff of biographical profile, both for his own life and for others'.

And if this determination to generalize (or rather: to universalize) his subjects always ran the risk, when applied to the messiness of actual life, of discarding a few too many vital facts, well then, so be it. The opposite failing is so much more often the case in writing that Valéry remains a crucial counter-balance.

So let us read him the way he read others. He confessed the value of his reading was not so much that of the works themselves as of the idea of their authors which those works impressed on me. His interest was in

the work that incites me to picture the living and thinking system that produced it—an illusion, no doubt, but one that develops energies not to be found in the attitude of a purely passive reader.

When he remarked that

If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.

he was mistaken.

After all, wouldn't we get Wittgenstein's lion perfectly well if he were to exclaim hungry! or horny! or cold!?

Surely there are a good number of elemental things that he and I (and you) all feel in the same fundamental way — sleepy, irritated, sated, snug, itchy, sore, for example. And even torn, unsettled, fresh, perplexed, secure, etc.

Those are all states of mind/body, and as such pretty simple to designate: a single word does the trick.

But what about stringing a number of words together in a sentence? Well, I've just eaten so I'm full and feel like lying down over there on that warm grassy patch in the sun wouldn't be beyond the reach of our mutual understanding.

Translation

This all works for one main reason. I can translate the lion's thinking to mine because I can translate my body to his.

The lion and I, each of us a mammal living on the planet Earth, have quite a few things in common: a heart, a spine — a pair of lungs, of eyes — nose, mouth, teeth, tongue — throat, stomach, gut, anus.

We each have four limbs, and if all of his are legs while two of mine are arms, still, I know from crawling what it's like to be down on all fours. It's true that I can only crawl clumsily, but still, I can imagine doing so superbly — spine parallel to the ground, lungs filling with air, heart beating, eyes alert, ears perked, tail twitching.

I can think my way from this body to that.

Bats

Much harder to think my way into bodies that have, for example, a very different relation to gravity, on the one hand, and to the sensory world, on the other — as this provisional text from Other Bodies suggests.

Also hard to imagine the thoughts and sensations of an electric eel — or (as Marc suggests) any eusocial animal, like an ant or a termite.

Woman

One last thought about Wittgenstein's remark.

If it were true, you know, then it would also be true that were a woman to speak to me, I wouldn't understand her either.

1

Asked what he was trying to get out of the dancers with all his questions, the composer said he wanted his music to express what they would be feeling when they danced onstage.

2

The dancers replied that they wouldn't be feeling anything — they would be too busy counting.

3

Earlier, the composer had said he was a practicing Buddhist. Now I wondered whether he ever remembered to count his own breath.