III.
At the Museum of the Moving Image, an exhibit on nineteenth-century motion-picture games explains this principle: when vision is interrupted, the mind retains an afterimage of what the eye had seen. If a light illuminating successive images flashes, the darkness between causes us to merge this afterimage with the next, which we sum to one in flux rather than two in succession. If a light is constantly shown on successive images, we see only a blur. That is: interruption is necessary to the illusion of continuity.
In the car driving home, I think this must also be the structure of memory — images that we retain in isolation, but sum together as they flash in our minds. Perhaps this is also the structure of dreams. Dream logic emerges as we work to make sense of the succession of images, separated by blackness.
Thus Chris Marker’s La Jetée: memory presented as discrete images (stills). If we cannot recall the image immediately before or after, we cannot recall motion. Nevertheless we work to sum these images together, and make sense of them in time. The logic of memory is the logic of trauma.
*
Visit to the La Jetée bar: C. has given us directions out of a dream — “Take the only street with trees.” The area is not far from our Shinjuku hotel, but in a direction we never walk. (I remember friends saying on our first visit, “Don’t go that way.”) We keep to the main streets, to avoid getting lost, but see no sign of the old drinking district he had described. And then: a street with trees. We take it away from the neon, into the darkness. There are blue tents in the bushes, shelters constructed by the homeless. It is a weeknight, the street is otherwise empty. We come to a crossroads — in one direction, more blackness — in another, the old ramshackle district of bars. C.’s directions worked.
Wandering among the bars, La Jetée is still hidden. We ask another “mama-san.” She graciously leads us there. It is up a flight of stairs. No way to look inside before opening the door…
*
At the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side — interior rooms, banned from use by building codes, were walled up rather than changed. Some later reopened, with interior windows added to satisfy requirements for light and air…
When I sang about this, I imagined someone still living inside when those interior rooms were re-opened. I associated the darkness of these spaces with a lost language.
Hide my eyes from the light
And say the words that I can’t understand
Adapted to the singer’s point of view for a later chorus, this becomes:
Hide the light from me
And say the prayers that I should understand
*
Sitting with my mother at the kitchen table, I ask about the jacket I saw in It Happened One Night — both Clark Gable and the sleazy character on the bus wear the same cut, they are only tailored differently. She knows the name of the jacket: Norfolk. How did her father buy his clothes? Were they on a rack? Thinking about it, she recalls the view from their apartment on Riverside Drive, windows facing upriver — warships at anchor. They moved to 86th Street when? It must have been very soon after the war began, because she remembers being on 72nd Street when she heard about Pearl Harbor, and what would she be doing on 72nd Street when they lived on 86th Street? The wind off the river was so strong she had to walk home backwards from the subway on Broadway. Suddenly she remembers: a tailor used to come to the house, and fit her father for clothes. “A Jewish tailor,” she says. “Where did he find one of those?” I say, and make her laugh.
*
Show at the New York Public Library of 1960s mimeo books and magazines — this thought: that a “poetics” should enable one to identify poetry in new places, not just in other poems.
This is the test of a useful poetics, because arguing about poetry itself is circular and pointless — we already know all those things are poems, from someone’s point of view. No need to establish the hierarchy from our perspective.
So poetics does have a function — it is poems that do not.
Wasn’t this Cage’s insight into music?
*
On Beacon Hill to see an early music performance of Sephardic songs — the venue is a building I’d never noticed before, an abandoned synagogue on the north side of the hill.
The musicians are in the center, on the bima. There are two galleries for the audience, at right angles to one another — these must have once separated men and women. The space has the haphazard dimensions of the interior of a city block, but covered over with a skylight. There are several layers of painted decorations on the crumbling walls. Palm trees.
During the performance, the singer chooses to face one gallery, and then the other, in turn.
*
At a restaurant, Dad says to me, “Since we see you so rarely, you should order the caviar.” I suggest we split it — I think maybe he wants the caviar, which is why he’s urging it on me? — and that way it will cost no more than two other dishes at the table. No, no, he says, he doesn’t like caviar the way I like caviar. Anyway, it always makes him uncomfortable. Uncomfortable? Yes it reminds him of the trans-Siberian railroad. “You know the story,” he says, as he always does when introducing a story he has kept to himself. It seems that on the trans-Siberian railroad, if a train was coming from the other direction, the one he and his family were on would be diverted to a sidetrack, where it would wait for hours, even days. While there the conductors would lock all the doors and windows — because wherever they were, however remote, people would eventually arrive, with plates and cups, begging for food.
Once, my father and his family were in the dining car as the train sat like this. They were served caviar. Caviar? Apparently the meals came with the tickets. “It wasn’t luxurious, by any means, although after prison camp it was certainly a shock.” And while they had the caviar before them, people were banging on the window glass, hungry.
I say I’ll have something else. He insists. So I insist we split it. We do. He has the tiniest taste. (I eat the rest.)
*
Saw Sunny Murray with Sabir Mateen, at the Unitarian Church in Amherst: Sunny Murray played as light and free as his records — that skittery, constant, calming sound. But seeing his body language, I felt he was simultaneously playing traditional tunes in his head: ballads with breaks, turnarounds, solos. When he started a song on the brushes, alone, I was sure he was waiting for Ben Webster or Lester Young to join in. And he hummed — atonal humming, like the memory of a beautiful song without the melody or the changes. Just the space for its feeling.
*
As I leave my parents’ house, my father looks away. Is he hurt? Depressed? There is so much he wants from me, I think. Or so much he thinks he wants from me. The guilt I take away is like cases in my hands.
*
Takuboku Ishikawa’s Romaji Diary — like Campana’s Orphic Songs — Boethius’s Consolation — the dream of a writing so complete that prose and poetry are equally needed. Also Pascal’s Pensées — these are thoughts, events, that must be recorded, and the form they take is a mirror of that necessity.
And if I wrote in a language no one could read, like Takuboku, could I include it all? Takuboku gave his diaries to a friend and his wife, and therefore to an audience. So from whom was the romaji shielding him? His family — his rivals — but not from those closest. Circles widening out.
*
Dream: with Dad in some kind of basement cafeteria, I am questioning him about something and his face clouds over. He says there are family secrets I don’t know. Like what? I am pressing. Like his middle name, he says. Face becoming completely closed and dark, shrinking away from me behind glasses. “The middle name is Magarshack. Like the writer,” he says. Like the translator, I ask? “The writer,” he says. The distinction is lost on me. Out in the street, 86th Street walking west with Mom, I say Dad told me his real middle name. “Don’t do that!” she yells at Dad, who is suddenly there too. Why not? I say. “Now you know he is born under a blue sign star,” she says. It is a frightening idea. Then in a highway restaurant with Dad, in Vermont — it is divided over two stories (!), with multiple dining rooms, antiseptic. He tells me how he once worked there — it was a fine restaurant then — while commuting to Lincoln, Nebraska. This is somehow connected to the secret of the middle name. He shows me how far it is on a map. Then, he says, he stopped (commuting? working? writing?).
*
John Wieners walks into the Poetry Room at Lamont Library to give a reading. He opens a book (his own) and begins. But then he stops, and looks at the page like he has never seen it before.
I recognize something in that gesture: looking at one’s work, and finding it at times intimately familiar and at other times foreign and strange.
If Wieners’s work weren’t true, it would never be familiar to him. And if it were always familiar, it wouldn’t be so true.
*
My own reading at Lamont Library. N. is there. K., who has been staying with us, is also there. A few students.
I spent so many hours in this room, years ago, listening to recordings of poets reading. Stein. Stevens. Ashbery.
The sunlight is low, and the room is overheated, as always.
I am overcome with feeling. Something other than pride. It is hard to read clearly, because for a moment I am near tears. There is a recording being made.
*
Do we only tell each other’s stories? Ask others to tell our own? Can we tell our own? Or is that what stories are for — to tell someone else’s, and allow another to tell yours?
*
I find bits of stories everywhere in Boston:
D.L. MOODY
CHRISTIAN EVANGELIST,
FRIEND OF MAN,
FOUNDER OF THE NORTHFIELD SCHOOLS,
WAS CONVERTED TO GOD
IN A SHOE STORE ON
THIS SITE
APRIL 21, 1855
Harry Houdini
(Erich Weiss)
1874-1926
In memoriam to the great Artist
and past National President who performed
one of his well known escapes from this bridge
On May 1, 1908.
Society of American Magicians
Boston Assembly Number 9
THIS ESCALATOR IS
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
COUNCILOR HYMAN PILL
FRIEND OF THE SUBWAY RIDER
AND ALL MANKIND
And the plaques of memory, those I saw in Paris as a child — to the martyrs of the resistance, fallen on this spot — nearly always with flowers fresh or recently faded. The bullet holes in the walls fascinated me then.
*
In Paris now, I take note of a different set of markers:
165 enfants Juifs de cette école
déportés en Allemagne durant
la seconde guerre mondiale
furent exterminés
dans les camps nazis.
N’oubliez pas.
This in the Marais, at the beautiful stone school building behind the Marché des Blancs Manteaux. Inscribed over one of the two entrances, it says:
ECOLE PRIMAIRE
COMMU. DE J’ GARÇONS
ISRAELITES
MODE MUTUEL
FOND MUNICIP. JUIN MDCCCXLIV
Over the other door, the stones are effaced:
ASILE ECOLE PRIM.
ALE DE JEUN
SRAELITES
I look up asile — “refuge” (cognate: asylum). Or is it a fragment?
*
Who memorializes the survivors? They have to die before they can be remembered. And when they die, the ones who remember them — but not the events they survived — will write their stories. If they ever told them to anyone.
A plaque is for the dead; an effaced inscription is for the living. Or: the living are an effaced inscription.
*
In Boston, it’s as if we live in a utopian novel about the future — its vocabulary rooted (and limited) by the past’s projection. The 1930s steel towers of Post Office Square, the Italianate parapets of State Street, the granite office “blocs” named for once prominent families… each an old idea of what should be here, now.
The present and the future may be as entangled here as in Japanese. I sang this once about Walden Pond:
We went walking in circles today
At the edge of water, of now and never
We’re never in time
But it could have been equally about Logan airport: flat earth with low hills beyond — the setting sun exactly as in the luminists’ paintings — the use of the land exactly as Henry Adams might have predicted.
*
Long walk through neighborhoods not meant for walking — overpass to train tracks, CSX loading facility, car repair shops. And the domestic life hard by: sagging wooden balconies on the backs of brick buildings, “Boston International Gourmet” with signs otherwise in Russian, “Allston Tropical Market” with a few Brazilian products on largely empty shelves — imported soap, Easter candy, magazines, an enema kit, plantains, meat, packaged bread.
A girl makes silly faces at her mother through the curtains of a ground floor window. I think of something my mother told me only recently — how in New York during the war, my father’s parents’ friends would bring to the house all their bills, official forms, and documents, for my father to translate, fill out, make calls about or otherwise fix. He was still a boy, but the only one who had learned enough English. He resented it, she said. Was it the responsibility he disliked? The tie to the emigrés? The constant reminder of their troubles? Or perhaps: the use of his skills for their ends.
A wag has placed a plaque to Quentin Compson’s suicide, on the bridge back to Cambridge:
Quentin Compson
Drowned in the odour
of honeysuckle
1891-1910
Lyric: only a moment amid a life of failure. Life of success would be epic.
*
N. and I play my mother a Sinatra record, with orchestrations by Gordon Jenkins. I had predicted she wouldn’t like it. She doesn’t (she prefers Nelson Riddle). “So ‘Hearts and Flowers’!” she says. It reminds her of Radio City Music Hall on a Sunday, when she was a child. Why? It was so dreary — everyone dressed up in a horrible way (though she remembers her own royal-blue winter coat with pleasure) — and the place was too big, too many people. And can you believe it? Her brother mentioned just the other week how much he had loved it there, how he would go every weekend. How could he? Maybe if you had to see a movie the day it opened…
But didn’t she like the movies they played?
Yes, of course — but better to see them at the Alden, Loew’s 83rd, or the Beacon — which was big, but not like Radio City. She and her best friend would go together and refuse to sit in the children’s section, instead asking someone on line to accompany them through the door. “Otherwise you were surrounded by horrible children, and watched over by a matron.” There they would watch the film more than once — just stay and let the feature begin again. “You tried to come in for the start, but sometimes you missed it, so then you waited for it to come around. And then you’d get sucked in all over again…”
My father adds that he remembers being in the balcony at Loew’s 83rd, alone at the noon show, watching Sergeant York with Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Joan Leslie. And then staying all day, watching over and over. He says he learned English that way —
I look up Sergeant York. It was released July 2, 1941. How many weeks or even days had he been in the country? I have to ask him what time of year they arrived in New York.
*
What are these different sections? Each an attempt to tell the story. Each a way to say it all. Each a form that tells a part of the story; or, the same story in a partial way — 1. declarative/narrative, 2. direct address (letter), 3. interior (internal monologue and dream), 4. address to self (diary), 5. lyric.
Cf. Ring construction (Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles) — AB C B’A’ — with (sometimes) an additional “latch” at the end. Note her ideas about endings: in a ring, the beginning (and the progress to the center) determines the end — it is a foregone conclusion, you know from the first half the signposts that mark your progress to it. She makes comparisons to pattern poetry; and to Leviticus, formed in the shape of the Temple.
That is, look to the beginning — and the center — to determine the end.
For front?
Books, my unlucky obsession, why do I stay with you…
Isn’t one well-earned punishment enough?
Ovid (Tristia II)
*
Back in Paris, in very bourgeois surroundings this time — piano practicing upstairs — startled madame in the entryway when I opened the door — children arriving at school in the morning, led by the hand — flag over the entryway.
My own bourgeois background reflected as in an antique mirror; the European upbringing my father carried with him.
Finding it so hard to write, to continue this work without questioning it in the most fundamental manner. Isn’t it just complaint? Decadent, self-indulgent complaint?
Beggar outside the bakery this morning, as I buy croissants. I give him the change. This is only further implication: I am now the right age, wearing the right coat, and carrying the right croissants, to be giving a beggar small change. And writing? Every man in this neighborhood is eating croissants, and writing.
*
Writing through — as therapy? This too smacks of complaint. And yet, writing as consolation — Boethius — this seems like something else again. The consolation of poetry: poetry may not enter this text, but it might address me, in my situation. What does poetry have to offer? What Cage points to: acceptance of the sounds I find. I happen to find this endlessly yammering voice of criticism. Listen to it, as to the piano practicing upstairs, the children’s voices in the street, the garbage trucks in the morning. It is still yammering, but in combination with these other sounds, does it become something more?
I hear a chorus of silent reproach — more like prayers in a church, than thoughts in a library. It rises with the stillness here in the afternoon, after lunch and before the children leave school. It is in the ashy sky with its dribbling rain, which brings it back down to the balconies and roofs, draining it into the gutters and washing the streets.
*
N. says: write more. Don’t just edit.
I am in a hurry to finish, however. Why? To rid myself of this task. (To whose end, this use of my skills?)
*
Show in Paris at a lovely underground bookstore, “On the Margin” of the bourgeois city, in a North African neighborhood slowly filling with hipsters. The audience is sweetly curious, and attentive. A boy from Colombia tells me afterwards: usually everyone here is too cool, or aggressive like Dada. You brought an honesty we needed, he says. My head spins a bit. Our playing tonight was amateurish, I thought — we are out of practice, and the sound system in the store was primitive. But honesty and amateurism — these are not mutually exclusive. The boy is so direct, I cannot imagine he needs any instruction in feeling. Is he offering it to me?
*
Two mystical dreams:
At Pyramides metro stop in Paris, a man builds pyramids of snow, which hover above the ground.
In a plane flying over a mountain, so close to the ground the pilot follows the roads on it, and points out sites such as a man walking below, etc.
*
C. takes us to Agnès Varda’s installation for “les Justes” at the Panthéon.
Varda has filmed two versions of the same set of anecdotes, or fragments, illustrating situations in which people hid Jewish children during the war. One version is black-and-white, filmed to look like a “war movie.” The other is color, in dramatically contemporary, hand-held video. The focus here is on the details of normal life: hands, feet, earth, trees.
Everywhere in Paris this time, I find black plaques to the deported children. Each school we pass seems to have a new one — with fresh flowers.
“Les Justes”… such an odd formulation. Nuns and priests figure heavily among them, it seems.
Why only those who helped the children?
Afterwards, C. suggests a café, but then complains that it is “full of disgusting Frenchmen, eating.” We go to the apartment where we are staying instead; I make him coffee and we share a galette des Rois (it is the season). N. finds the prize in the first slice, and wears the crown. Seeing her, C. says he regrets not bringing his camera — “This is the second opportunity I have missed this month,” explaining that the other was a fight that broke out in the streets between demonstrating firemen and the police.
N. shows him her digital camera and he uses that, taking her portrait with the crown from the galette. The encounter is uncannily like N. with her father.
C. refuses the pastry, explaining that he never eats in the middle of the day. The apartment is across the street from a camping store, and C. remarks that he used to buy his food there — a mix that provides all necessary vitamins and nutrients for the day, in one draught. “Don’t you eat raw meat, as well?” N. asks. “Just a little, at night,” he says. He truly is a cat.
*
N.’s insight while in Paris: when she paints (or I write), the mind wanders — if you are afraid of where it might wander, you don’t paint (or write).
*
Amazing view on the flight home — breaking through the clouds over France, the sky blue above a solid field of gray. Glimpses of the North Atlantic — whitecaps — and eventually, the North American coast, entering by the St. Lawrence and tracing its path. On approach to Boston, the Charles is frozen, a light snow makes the shape of it and all the rivers and ponds especially clear. The city huddled against its harbor. Trees everywhere, instead of fields. Highways instead of roads.
Our house this morning, flooded with light. The New England sky. Bare branches all around. We live in a village, truly, not a city at all. Still an outpost.
*
The retrospection of Breton at Percé Rock, Quebec, 1944. The war is across the sea. A year of forgotten (unknown?) struggles. And his own prose at this moment: placid, nostalgic, even spiritual — strangely (for him) uncombative. Because the real battle was elsewhere?
*
The world is always at war, its beginnings and endings are illusions. World War II began the moment the first one ended. World War III began as soon as the second one was finished. Haven’t we lost count by now?
The world is always at war, because the memory of war is in the present. Has any generation truly known peace? Peace, without an afterimage of war?
Do we even know what peace is, except as the negation of war? Do we have a positive idea of peace?
Would that be enlightenment?
*
My reluctance to even print this manuscript out… The privacy of the screen is greater than the notebook — it’s the feeling that this could all evaporate, like a memory, with an electric shock. What would the traces be? The effaced inscription — the erased description —
*
My father’s feelings — that would be his book. I can tell a story only of his actions. And my feelings.
*
In New York again — Dad takes us to an expensive meal. The details are repeating. (Is this permission to finish, at last?) Home the next day, N. and I draw the shades in the afternoon, luxuriate in our privacy and peace. Two days later: I slide into a depression, like I’m on a slope of black sand. (Will this force me to stop, regardless?)
*
The ideal opening: “I hate traveling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.” (Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques)