Looking for a good specimen of typewriting, I found myself rummaging through a box of my old papers. There I recovered a rubber-banded stack of 3×5″ index cards on which I’d once catalogued the vestiges of dreams that I could dredge up the morning after — mostly nightmares, like this fragment of tortured adolescence:

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.

 

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

 

1. What’s
in the box?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

2. Where the
Woozle wasn’t

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

click to expand

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

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

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

 

3. Self-stalker

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

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

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

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

 

Superimpositions

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

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

Thus the nightmare recounted in my previous post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The woman in the
leather helmet

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

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

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

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

 

Two misadventures

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

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

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

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

 

The madness of art

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

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

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

 

Maas tunnel

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

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

 

Moral support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Outward appearance

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

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

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

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

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

 

Parts, not sum

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

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

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

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

 

Dream House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

City-Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Beware pietism

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

When I wrote nine years ago that

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

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

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

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

 

Gone for good?

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

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

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

 

Thunderstorms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Installation

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

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

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

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

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

 

1. / Lagrangian Points

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

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

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

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

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

Consider yourself near such a point, like so:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Dumb Bunnies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

2.
Vestibular system

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Special educators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

3. / Sci-fi figures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Phantasms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Disappointments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Endlessly revising

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Versions

Also, inevitably, a version of myself.

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

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

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

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).

As for Blok, he was dispirited and broken at the end, dying 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.

My friend Dedalus Wainwright and I were the only visitors in Blok’s museum that day, though in keeping with not yet abandoned Soviet labor practices at least ten babushkas were employed to keep an eye on the place, marking the empty hours with their cups of tea.

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 Canal, which curved under a couple of small arcing bridges as it made its way toward the larger waterway, the Bolshaya Neva river, 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 bank of the canal 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 (or canal, as Charles Abbott has since informed me). So if it’s not a gutter but a channel or canal, then Blok almost certainly meant the Pryazhka Canal outside his window, a thought which has conjured up the following confusion of viewpoints in me:

I picture Dedalus reciting the poem as we stand on the bank, 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 decoration, 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?

Shklovsky’s colliding oppositions take things much farther than their better-known equivalents in Soviet film, as advanced most famously by Sergei Eisenstein, though perhaps that seems the case only because cinema has appropriated montage thoroughly (if trivially) while writing has largely fallen back on its old devices.

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 of 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.

He would have risen up with the like-minded ones of his razed generation, some of whom had dubbed him The King of Time. With these Tables, Khlebnikov thought he’d legitimized his crown.

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…

Both Forest and Pedestrian will be exhibited at the 2009 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism.

 

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.