Glyph (2 page)

1

My father was a poststructuralist and my mother hated his guts. They did not know—how could they have known?—that by the age of ten months I not only comprehended all that they were saying but that I was as well marking time with a running commentary on the value and sense of their babbling. I lay helplessly on my back and stared up at their working mouth parts, like the mandibles of grasshoppers at work, mindless in their activity.

2

One evening, my father looked down at me, my mother standing beside him. He was not a fat man, but he was bloated, moving as if he were larger than he actually was. His face looked pulpy and I wanted to, and often did, squeeze his fleshy cheeks and pull. He hated that, and my insistence on doing it, coupled with my lack of speech, led him to say, “Maybe he’s mildly retarded.”

“Maybe, he’s just stupid,” my mother said and so stationed herself in my thinking as the brighter of the two. I smiled my baby smile at her, unnerving her on a level that her speech
⁴
kept her from knowing. “Look at him,” she said. “He’s smiling like he knows something.”

“Gas,” my father said. “He can’t be stupid.” He was bothered by the thought. “Look at me. Look at us. How can he be stupid?” What an imbecile.

“Lots of geniuses come from people of average or even less-than-average intelligence,” she said.

Never were truer words spoken and they hung in the air like a tenacious perfume. My father fanned his nose and stroked the thin beard of which he was so proud and for which he cared like a garden. I looked away from his pudgy cheeks to my mother’s soft features. Oedipal concerns aside,
⁵
I preferred the company of my mother, not simply because of the comfort of her softness and somewhat more compassionate nature, but because she possessed a native intelligence, a subhuman mind, though nothing negative is meant by that, an ability to abandon cohesion to what my father would call the signified. But he, for all his gum-bumping could not begin to understand not only the disconnection, but the connection itself, falling repeatedly into the same trap, the thought that he not only could talk about meaning, but that he could make it.

Although they were well on their way to separate ways,
⁶
I moved things along one evening. I lifted my father’s fountain pen from his shirt pocket as he was putting me down for the night. I was nearly one year old at the time and I used his pen to write the following on my crib sheet (pardon my pun):

The following morning I awoke to my mother screaming. “Douglas! Douglas!” she called to my father.

Inflato came running to her, his mouth frothy with teeth cleaner.

“Look,” she said. “Look at that.” She pointed into my crib. I scooted over so they could see better.

“It’s not funny,” Inflato said.

“I know it’s not funny.” She looked at him looking at her. “I didn’t write it.”

“Enough already. It’s not funny.”

“Did you write it?” she asked.

“No, I did not. Does that look like my handwriting?”

“Well, does it look like mine?” she shot back.

He stormed out. I could hear him spitting into the sink in the other room. My mother remained and she was staring at me. She believed that my father had not written the message and she knew that she had not and, barring some very strange intruder from this realm or another, I was the only other suspect. She left the room and returned quickly with a book, which she opened and handed to me upside down. I turned it over and began to read. She took it back and again gave it to me with the words turned over. Again, I righted the book and read.

“You understand?” she asked.

I nodded.

A weird giggle escaped from her throat and she swallowed it as quickly as it had been issued. She looked as if she were contemplating calling my father back into the room, but she didn’t. “And you can read?” she asked.

I nodded once more.

She took the book and read aloud from the first page. At least, she pretended to read from it, as she made up some drivel about bears and a blond girl. I shook my head. She then read, “‘One: The world is all that is the case. One-point-one: The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”’
⁷

1

And so my mother became my supplier. She gave me magazines and novels and philosophy books and history texts and volumes of poetry. I consumed them all, trying to at once escape myself and stay as close to my own thought as possible, feeling more pure and freer with each turned page. Nothing in my mind became untied from the world, though I did experience a kind of self-erasure, a becoming transparent, and so allowed the words
⁸
to present themselves as what they were, referring to nothing other than their being. I was a baby fat with words, but I made no sound.

2

Books and nipples. Nipples and books. My lips were good at closing about that sweet red circle. The food had long ceased to be interesting, though it was far better than peas, and so the sucking, though routine (and not), is exercise in being. To say that it was like a raspberry is both inadequate and inaccurate, as I had no experience with anything but raspberry flavor. The breast itself was nothing, the nipple was everything. Once I spied my parents engaging in sex,
⁹
and I saw Inflato sucking away at my favorite nipple. I was not jealous, did not consider that he should not be there, but he was doing it all wrong. I was fascinated by the texture of it, like a relief map of another planet, perforated as it was by numerous orifices, apertures of the lactiferous ducts. He, with his clumsy tongue, was not treating it badly, but neither was he serving it justly. When they caught me staring, they stopped and began to laugh.

Boredom is the baby’s friend. I would giggle when Inflato decided to toss me about like a sack of flour only to see if I might trigger some kind of gag reflex and so
spit up
on him. Boredom is not blind to anything, and certainly not to amazement. It is nothing close to amazement and I am not suggesting that somehow the meaning of one circles around to find itself almost that thing of which it is believed to be the opposite. Boredom is a high hill, a crow’s nest, a hunter’s blind (to use the word
blind
yet again), from which everything can be seen. And what better place to stand in observation of one’s self, to be free of sensation and confusion.
¹⁰
Taedet me ergo sum.

Inflato yaks about the ongoing critique of reason, feels he is a part of it. I suppose he is as much a part as anyone else.

About rationality and Leibniz and Aristotle’s conception of a principle of reason: Grog was being chased by a snake and so he leaped from one side of the stream to the other. Trog was waiting on the other side and said, “How did you ever get away from that snake?”

“I leaped,” said Grog.

“Oh, that is leaping,” said Trog. And though he had cleared the stream many times before in a similar manner, from then on he leaped. What was more, he could tell someone he was going to leap and tell them afterward that he had leapt.

Inflato took me to his office. I rode in a carrier on his back and observed, during our walk through the parking lot, the thinning of his hair. He kept talking to me and asking if I was “all right back there” and calling me “buster” and “little feller.” We met a woman at the mailboxes and the back of his head took on a different spirit. He used me shamelessly, talked to me sweetly, but did not mention, mind you, that I was either mildly retarded or flat-out stupid.

The woman, who was younger than my mother, and perhaps prettier, but far less interesting, stepped around to look at my face and touch my nose. She cooed at me and I glared back. “He’s so cute,” she said. “How old is he?”

“Ralph will be one year old next month. Right, Ralph?”

“I can’t believe the semester’s half over already,” the woman said.

“Would you like to have coffee sometime?”

Amen. Fiat, fiat. Amen. My mother hated talking to my father, but she tried all the time. I could not tell whether he hated talking to her, but he seemed to avoid it, until it started and then he couldn’t be silenced. Of course, my mother, knowingly or not, though I took her to be genuinely concerned, often approached Inflato badly.

“Whatever happened to that novel you were working on?” she asked.

He stopped eating, put down his fork, and said, “Fuck novels. I’ve found a better way of expressing myself. Besides, nobody is fooled by fiction or poetry anymore. Writing is the only thing.
¹¹
Criticism is my art.”

“What about after you get tenure?”

“I realize that all of this must be hard for you as an artist, the challenging of your station as superb creator, but what we’re discovering about language doesn’t diminish your worth, only that of your art.”

My mother sat there, staring at him. If she could have, she would have struck him dead with a bolt of lightning. “You used to dream of being a novelist.”

“That was childish,” Inflato said. “I was a kid and didn’t know any better. I used to think that novels were high art and mysterious, but they’re not. They are what they are.”

“You’re rationalizing. You’re a failed writer and you can’t stand it.” My mother drank some water and smiled at me. “Your son’s going to be a writer.”

“He’s cut out to be one, that’s for sure.”

“What kind of crack is that?”

I knew what kind of crack that was as well as she. The laughable truth, of course, was that Inflato was being so conspicuously seduced, or fooled, by the language he had chosen, though claiming a simple awareness of discourse. Had he truly been aware of what he was about with language then he would have shut up long before that and perhaps retreated to the reciting of Walt Kelly’s or Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical doggerels in his quest to make
¹²
meaning. He chewed with his mouth open and talked with his mouth full.
Rabbits are rounder than bandicoot’s sam.
For Inflato, the subject of his failure as a writer forced a kind of reappraisal of agony and he didn’t suffer with dignity, but like the coward he was, advanced with a pointing finger.

“So, you don’t think what I do has any value,” my mother said.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then what did you say?”

“I can’t believe we’re finally rid of Nixon.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Come on, Eve,” said Inflato. “Your paintings can only be exactly what you are, a product of your culture.”

“And your work?”

“I readily admit the same is true for me.”

“But yet you put your name on your few articles and your perpetually near-completed book.”

Zing! Zeno could have had no quarrel with that arrow.

“Fuck you,” Inflato said.

“Fuck you, too!”

And so for Inflato, from there on down it was uphill all the way.

My mother, let me from here on call her Mo, put paint on canvases with a kind of abandon. Not a lot of paint, but with a wild hand I envied. There was great tension in her strokes, as if something, I am pressed to say what, was about to be catapulted somewhere. I was moved by the shapes and colors and whereas I recognized forms, trees, horses, houses, whatever, it was not to them that I attended, but something beyond them, or within them, or around them. And strangely her big paintings were as good as her small ones. But for all the colors and light she flashed on the surface, there was a blackness in her, a darkness of spirit
¹³
that I found not only compelling, but necessary. That part of her wanted to eradicate all form from her work (she loved Mondrian), but the conflict was too great, she saw too much, and was not so much unable to free herself from that vision as she was committed to killing it. And of course one cannot slay an absent dragon.
Kant was a cunning Christian.

Mo was brushing gesso onto a large canvas when a man walked into her studio. I was in my monkey swing, a contraption that allowed me to stand and bounce, but finally was simply a way of chaining me up so that I could not waddle away or into trouble.

“Hello, Clyde,” she said.

“Eve.”

“I thought I’d take you up on your invitation.” He turned a circle in the room, looking at the canvases. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. “These are striking.” He did not say they were good. I liked that. Mo liked that. “And this is the most beautiful creation here.” He indicated me with a glance and made my mother smile. The line was frankly a bit sickening, but it rang as genuine, so I let it pass and continued bouncing. “What’s his name?”

“Ralph.”

“Great ears,” Clyde said.

Clyde turned back to the work. He walked to the far wall to look at a huge mostly ochre canvas. “I love this one,” he said. “It’s lonely though. I can feel you in it, but no one else.”

I stopped bouncing and listened to Clyde.

“I see movement in a world that is frozen, but that’s not to say that it feels cold. Does that sound stupid?”

Yes.

“No,” Mo said. “That’s exactly how I felt when I made it.”

I knew this was true, and I was impressed by his acumen, but still to say such a thing. But, for me, to say anything was a bad beginning.