[sic]: A Memoir (19 page)

constantly interrupted, broken, twisted into nothing by its direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion . . . This loss of self-control, common among uneducated revolutionists, is rare—Shelley had it in some degree—among men of Ezra Pound’s culture and erudition.
¹⁹

Whoops and here’s the break:

There it is—the loss of language, the reversion to the purely graphic, like the cavemen painting under torchlight at Lascaux. Mr. Tytell writes of Pound, arrested for treason, in the six-foot-by-six-foot “gorilla” cage, open to the elements, for three weeks, soldiers staring at him but no one speaking: then the breakdown.

In later years he characterized the experience by saying, “The World fell in on me.” Actually, the breakdown was a wordless catharsis . . . Hemingway had once told him that a writer needed to feel terrific pain before releasing his subject. The breakdown was an admission of such pain. Pound, the man of words, was now caught in the most overwhelming moment of his life without the power to summon language.
²⁰

Although if I do say myself, my breakdown was not accomplished without some relish of artistry. Let’s zoom in on a detail of my inadvertent contribution to Abstract Expressionism in America.

Because what in the name of God is the sense of any of this at all. And I’m alone, without Nothereal, without anyone, and Nothereal is not in a psychiatric ward, because she has access to my records. Wretched outcast, deprived of my kinsmen. There was no sound. The beautiful old glass lamp—Oriental, deep bourbon—I’d inherited from my father. There was still no sound. I picked the lamp up and hurled it against the wall with two arms. Its trajectory was straight, not a curve. The end of the trajectory made sound. I went into the kitchen, got a glass from the cupboard, and filled it with water, and drank. Then I threw the glass against the wall. Then I picked up every glass in the cupboard and threw each one against the wall, glass by glass, until there were no more glasses. Then I picked up a plate and threw the plate against the wall. Then I threw every plate in the cupboard against the wall. I had a nice coffee table from India, a heavy glass top set into a rosewood frame. I picked up the heavy glass and I didn’t throw it against the wall; I flung it across the room, so it made an arc, and it landed on the floor, and the sound of this green glass cracking wasn’t tinny and trebly like the plates and glasses had been; this was deep and resounding, so now things are getting serious, like listening to the original recordings remastered, like the original recordings were good enough to merit remasterings.

I have a set of four matching antique Chinese chairs. They’re hand-carved, out of teak, and even the plates that are set into the backs of the chairs—sculpted reliefs of scenes from Peking opera—would be valuable if sold as parts, apart from the wholes to which they belong. I paid far too much money for them, thousands of dollars, but even so I got them at a bargain (I’d wanted to treat myself on moving to New York). They’re quite heavy; by the time I had lifted the last one over my head and smashed it directly down into the wood floor, shattering it, I was tired. I walked over to the destroyed coffee table, glass and wood crunching under my feet like forest leaves and twigs. The table’s thick green glass had broken into big, sharp hunks, and I picked one up. I felt the sudden need to squeeze something, the need for release—what biologists call “escape.” I did that, and then I looked down at my hand, which was bleeding freely. I squeezed tighter. Then I held the edge of the glass against my neck, the spot where I had first felt a pulled muscle which turned out to be a tumor, which turned out to be treatable with six months of chemotherapy, except that it didn’t work, and so it might not be treatable, and I was finding out if it was tomorrow. Standing among the devastation with the glass against my throat; feeling, from the inside, the warmth of my blood pumping gently along the edge of the shard of glass, which even under a microscope would appear as smooth and clean as the wall of a tsunami. And I slowly scraped the edge of the glass along my skin and, oddly, it reminded me of the way I would slowly slide the edge of my cock along the edge of Nothereal’s gorgeous cunt until she screamed. Beauty herself was born of blood and foam. And wouldn’t it feel as good as that? And the blood coming out and the tumor will feel as good as that. Finally.

Here I could really, as they say in Hollywood—or at least apparently as film director and Brooklyn native Darren Aronofsky said to Mickey Rourke, which is kind of depressing in a way—try to “bring it,” and write that, on the edge of this cliff, skating on the pond at the edge of the wood, at the edge of this broken shard of heavy glass, the buildup met its dialectical payoff, and that for the first time in really how long I saw myself as if in a mirror and there was a rescue. But the truth is that we hysterics and opera lovers depend on a bifocal lens of perception far more than we should: that a more accurate representation of life is less dramatic than the alterity of walls of sound and silence in Mozart, or the fast-slow-fast-slow of the Rolling Stones. Life is more like a series of gradations, a color wheel. What I mean to say is this:

What I realized is this:

(Jeez, writing this is way harder than I thought. Because most of this stuff, you know, I’ve just been copying from journals I kept when I was sick, but now I’m actually
writing
, and it’s harder than you’d think.)

Okay, so the first image I had when I was about to kill myself was that it was just me and a mirror, me standing in front of a mirror, staring mutely at my reflection, and there was no sound and no language and just the blood pumping. But then—

This is what’s hard to describe, but I realized that that wasn’t the case at all. Rather, it was me
between
two mirrors, producing an infinite line of selves, like at the end of
Citizen Kane
, when Orson Welles walks between the two mirrors—except in a good way.

“Good,” in that these many selves, logically then,
must
take up exactly as many different positions in space—virtual positions, perhaps, in that the whole thing was in a way an illusion produced by mirrors, but different positions nonetheless.

So that:
*

How do we position suffering in human life? This was the crucial question. It
is
one position, suffering. But it’s not the only position. It is one position at a specific point in time and space. But human beings are more than that; they do not exist at only one position at a specific point in time and space. Human beings are all over the place and whenevertime. It’s an odd fact, and perhaps you will find this idea juvenile; but to me, in that moment, it was important—if only in the sense that if I hadn’t had this realization, then you would not be reading these words, because I would have dug that shard of glass so nice and deep, tracing out where the tumor had been, and then you would not be reading these words because I would have collapsed and bled to death. But now I always had,
via
music, a sensitivity to form, where one is in relation—I already said this, I think, at the beginning—one feels a relationship to a frame, which could be a physical surrounding like where you’re sitting in a Starbucks, or where you are on an island in Greece or on an island at the mouth of the Hudson River; and the same could be said for time, you might be on the edge of a night or the edge of a morning, or indeed on the edge of the sunset where afternoon turns into morning.

I’m so glad I realized this, because I did
not
enjoy not having been born. But perhaps this wasn’t entirely some screenwriter’s
deus ex machina
, some sort of divine intervention. The ironic moral to this story may well be that tucked away within and behind my madness was, in fact, the very “humanistic,” old-school, unfashionable literary education bestowed on me via my parents, all that reading I’d done which I’d felt so guilty about and which on some level (again, the morphine delusion) I felt had somehow put me in the hospital, and for which on some level I’m afraid you, reader, will hate me, just like that girl who read some of this and then never talked to me again—it may have actually been a saving grace. Because let’s go back to that description Mr. Tytell gives of Pound’s breakdown in the gorilla cage. There was more to it—I saved the rest for now. Let’s rewind just a second, and then continue. No, too far. Stop. No, go ahead. Goddammit, gimme the remote. Okay. Now.

Pound, the man of words, was now caught in the most overwhelming moment of his life without the power to summon language.
²¹

But here’s what’s next.

But he might have realized, in some silent corner of his being, that language was merely the artistic fiction of tragedy, the rationalization of pain, and that the flow of words would be invented by the novelist or playwright, or Pound himself in the
Cantos
he would soon begin to write, to stylize and heighten and explain the conjunction of superior forces and the puny human who could dare to defy them.
²²

Well and so that’s the thing: I literally—well not
literally
, my dad always complained my mom misused that word, like this one time they were supposed to have dinner with friends, a married couple, and he was working late at the office writing advertising copy he despised and he just couldn’t get out of it and so basically he stood her up like Ray Liotta did to Lorraine Bracco in
Goodfellas
(which is how the characters fell in love, not unincidentally) and she told him afterward, “I was
literally
a third wheel.” Well no you’re not literally a wheel, you’re more than a wheel for heaven’s sake, you’re my wife. Obviously he didn’t say that to her—he told me after. And then he talked about the misuse of the word “ironically” in NFL sportscasting. (I don’t have time to get into this here, I’ve gotta go meet a friend of mine, but—if you’re from Wisconsin, you’re pretty much fascinated by football by default, no matter what. And even me—the only sport I really understand and love is tennis, but still, football—let me put it this way. My father, after a stroke slash maybe nervous breakdown slash losing a lot of money in the crash of Black Monday 1987 slash his son realizing that literature could potentially be of some worth somehow somewhere at some time—he gave up all his belongings [not really] and wandered to the desert like a Christian ascetic [really! kinda] and roomed with me for a while in Chicago and Franzen came over [actually really!] and then moved to Los Angeles [definitely really!] and died [definitely]. And we went over there, my brother and I, and, just like what they said about Orson Welles who died at his typewriter, what better way to go, there was a real typewriter in the apartment with a real unfinished poem in there, which I will not reprint [but I will reprint a few other things, just you wait], and there were piles of manuscripts and piles of books but there was nothing on the walls except for a huge poster of Brett Favre. Piles of books and stuff in different languages but nothing on the walls except for Brett Favre. So that should tell you something. And my father as a tennis player was on the pro circuit as a youth. [But he’d satirize the NFL sportscasters: “Down at three and
ironically
, that’s exactly where the quarterback of the Jets last week” and he’d get pissed off—
that’s not irony
. But he came not only from literature but from radio and TV so he’d know, standards were higher then.])