Someday_ADE (14 page)

Dearest,

I hate this something you and I didn’t name. It’s gone out of control. With time, with time weighing us down, with no time to think about the future, with every fear about time passing—when will love come?—we grab love and hold it tight. Now we have it, now we have it, here it is, do you see it? I give it to you. I will forget everything else to love you.

“Let us forget the whole world!/ For you alone, dearest, I long!/ I have a past no more,/ I do not think of the future.” (Verdi, Don Carlos)

“Love is begot by fancy, bred by ignorance, by expectation fed,
Destroyed by knowledge, and, at best,/Lost in the moment ’tis
possessed.” (George Granville, Baron Lansdowne)

Impossibly, I love you.

“Love incapacitates me, my language is never enough. The language is the matter, language is matter, it matters, it doesn’t matter, we matter, we are matter, you and I are the matter, the matter of love, the stuff of it, you and I. We are not enough, neither is love, there’s no sense to it, it doesn’t make sense to you or me that this is what we are in, love, a state of temporary grace with each other. It doesn’t make sense, it’s not sound. It is a sound. It’s your voice.”

Dearest,

You wanted to know, when you phoned (I love the sound of your voice) what was on my mind. Just as you called I was thinking (I had pushed you out of my mind in order to think), Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed. Then the telephone rang. Anyway it’s Sunday, and I was thinking of Lewis Carroll and Edith Wharton, who wrote in bed, enviable position, with a board on her lap, traveling or at home, every morning. As she finished a page, she let it drop to the floor, to be scooped up later by her secretary who typed it. Lewis Carroll (I don’t know where he wrote) and Wharton, it was something about her love letters to Morton Fullerton, and Carroll’s love of Alice, his desire for young girls. Was his sense of the absurd best exemplified by the ludicrous position he fell into, his love for such a small being. How crazy it must have felt to him, spending Sundays with Alice, bending down to hear her speak all day long, looming over the tiny object of his illicit affections. Even stranger to him must have been his wild, prohibited longing, if he actually felt it, to insert his penis into that girl’s vagina. He must have felt so small and so big, and there it was, the topsy-turviness of his intimate world which he then concocted into words, and with words published (in the old sense), though no one knew, or wrote his body, I think, and its occupying desires. Alice had to become small to become big. Carroll had no sense of scale, did he, no proportion? Did he ever tell Alice, I love you? Did Lewis Carroll love Alice the way I love you or very differently? Is love the same for everyone, from its beginning to its end? If I wrote to you the way Wharton wrote her lover, would you like it? Please tell me, I want to give you what you want, I want to be everything you want me to be.

Now I’m crimson. I don’t want to feel like this, but I can’t help it, my words stall on my tongue, they won’t come, and then they can’t stop coming.

“I’m so afraid that the treasures I long to unpack for you, that have come to me in magic ships from enchanted islands, are only, to you, the old familiar red calico & beads of the clever trader....Well! and if you do? It’s your loss, after all!” (Edith Wharton, to Morton Fullerton)

Alone with longing, Paige verged toward alienation, like a spectator in her own amorous theater, where she could no longer play the ingenue. Now the paper hearts were actors, and some had important roles and others minor parts, just a line or two appended to a sexy action. Some characters were walk-ons, others appeared as comic relief.

Still, Paige fell in love, and, when she fell, plummeted into a lavish set of conventions. The modes were intractable and not her own, yet sensation maintained that her love was unique. Paige was capable of holding contradictory ideas and emotions, and, as ridiculous as it all was, she bore the irony. People bore it all the time, and some were so experienced in love’s disappointments, they had discarded or discredited it. But Paige couldn’t let it go, and, for its part, love wouldn’t leave her alone.

Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;/My fingers ache, my lips are dry;/
Oh! if you felt the pain I feel!/But oh, who ever felt as I!” (Sappho)

Ironically, I love you.

Dearest,

Your love proposes and then marries me to a different idea of me, a new identity with its own poetic license, so now I’m different from myself but joined with your self, and you are different from yourself, at least from the way you have been, and the way your life has gone, and our love is the best difference that you and I will ever experience. Isn’t it? Won’t our love mark, cloud, inflect, protect, deform, consume, and subsume us? Won’t it cast shadow or sunlight over all other experience? Isn’t love the limit? Or, more gravely, like death, an inconsiderate end parenthesis.

“Do you not hear a voice in your heart/ which promises eternal
happiness?” (Bellini, Norma)

“Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?”
(Terry Britten/ Graham Lyle)

Paige knocked her leg hard against the table. It hurt. Then a voice whispered: I don’t want to die. Paige swung around in her chair, her solitude broken by a strange visitor, the voice an interruption or maybe a discovery, a sensation inside her. But nothing shakes or reaches the vicissitudes of the imaginary inside. I don’t want to die, it repeated. She wasn’t sure if it actually spoke, it was barely a voice, but she believed she’d heard it before.

Immortally, I love you.

“She wanted to be saved. She wanted to tear his eyes out. She wanted to eat his flesh. She wanted to carve her name on his forehead. She wanted him dead. She wanted him around. She wanted him to stand like a statue. She wanted him never to be sad. She wanted him to do what she wanted. She wanted him invulnerable and invincible. She wanted to look at him. She wanted him to get lost. She wanted to find him. She wanted him to do everything to her. She wanted to look at him.

“She had no idea who he was or what he was thinking. She only pretended that she knew him. He was an enigma of the present, the palpable unknown. He was the loved one, and he wasn’t listening to reason. He would save her, and she would never die.

“She didn’t want to die. She wanted to be saved.”

Irrationally, I love you.

Paige turned off the computer. “She wanted to be saved” winked one last time. She tore up all the hearts and threw them in the garbage and, days later, wondered if they should have been recycled with the newspapers. She liked recycling.

“...For the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend. Orlando had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position; she need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did.” (Virginia Woolf)

She sorted through some papers, closed her books, drew the covers off her bed, and undressed. She laid her head on a pillow and shut her eyes. Paige dismissed the present, and then the dead sat on a chair and talked, and love and hate gamboled, trading blows and kisses. Friends and enemies mingling, and her neck out of joint, Paige awoke just before the sun did. She rubbed sleep from her eyes and turned on the computer.

“Love is a necklace around the throat, it needs a durable clasp, so it can be put on and taken off again and again. Some necklaces you never want to take off, though.”

Paige Turner is writing to you.

I love you.

Impressions of an Artist, with Haiku
A Portrait of Peter Dreher

A man, whose insufficient portrait will be rendered here, does not keep cats or wear a beard. He is of medium size, reasonable weight, and looks like an architect or a philosopher or an accountant. But he’s an artist, has a studio and a house and travels between those places, and others, moving with deliberation, and going and coming.

This man likes stillness, so a cat might be a great companion, since nothing can be more still than a cat, especially when it hunts, except for an inanimate coffee cup or a corpse. Holding still for a long time suggests death and maybe infinity.

See. observation
Reclaims exhausted routines.
Noise can be music.

Understanding endlessness might make this artist, who is usually not the subject of a picture, capable of envisioning the scientific hereafter. A very few minds can grasp the concept, the capacity for which might be compared with comprehending the finality of death, which few can, also, though death has an absolute place in life, creating the desire for immortality and, from that, as well as sexual curiosity, everything else emerges: collecting antiques or jewelry or baseball cards, writing love poems, keeping busy, watching soccer, losing oneself in drink.

This man has typical worries, plumbing that goes wrong, the wrong comment at a party, a wronged lover, and he has some that are atypical, unless one is an artist and considers, daily, what is being portrayed or represented, a practice of and in pictures. He might ask himself, what is good about what I’m making? And never know. No one can know. But let’s say of this artist that he is sincere; he would like to make honest paintings. What that is, he also acknowledges, vexes art-makers. No right way, no theological answers.

Cave drawings in Lescaux described prehistorical life, their travails, activities, triumphs. Early humans named their surroundings, and marked out days and nights in pictograms. They required records of their existence, since death—or whatever they called that event—savaged them, a monster swooping down and taking their breath away. Their sincerity has never been doubted. Is insincerity, he asks himself, laughing a little, the fault-line of so-called advanced civilization?

Owls, moonlight unmoors
Wolves, frantic prey scurry
Night licks voraciously.

The artist happened to be walking near a nighttime forest, musing about cave dwellers and their drawings, when he looked up and saw a star streak across the sky. Cave people saw shooting stars too, linking him to Neanderthals in a great chain of being and nonbeing, doing and undoing. But the exuberant flash might vex another man, on the other side of the world, who, watching it leap in his evening sky, could feel overwhelmed by the expanding universe and his own shortcomings. Then the artist imagined the distraught stranger weeping, and the other’s sadness cast itself, like a ghost, across him and the heavens.

A star lives and dies, there is the wonder of it and the immensity of experience, good and bad. Is there an antonym for “wonder”? Hell. Mystery’s opposite? Boredom. By now he was in his studio, staring at a water glass. He had looked at it for more than thirty years, the very same glass. Some people thought he was crazy. But he was only beginning to see it, or he kept seeing it differently and he tried to depict that, how it changed, how his capacity changed, and he himself changed over the years. He didn’t mean to paint an autobiography, but he was, also.

The next day, he placed a skull on a black cloth. It considered him, uncannily. “Alas, poor Yorick,” the artist repeated aloud several times. The skull seemed to levitate. Other than death, outcomes and results were unpredictable, in any case he wouldn’t want to predict the end, unless he could begin again, immediately. The point, perhaps, was to find what he was looking for through its execution; he himself had not lost anything specific, or everything was lost and found again in endless repetitions, and, the more he worked, the more change he discovered in minute variations. He might be surprised by the color of an eggplant or the verve of a flower or the eerie acoustic of an empty room.

A phantasm or a wisp of conversation lay beneath the surface, a palimpsest, rising, later, onto the surface as a still life. In practice, the reality of imperfection and the hope for perfection strafed his imagination and capabilities; he was similar to, and dissimilar from, others in trying and sometimes giving up. Friction between styles and forms required conscious choices, approaches and adaptations to changing conditions in need of living concepts. Things made in time, of time, he thought.

A green vase, a blue
Vase on a dark wood table,
Images inside cups.

The artist worked in solitude which brought him a kind of happiness, but even in solitude, in a peaceful place, the soot of mixed emotions collected in corners. A recollection absorbed him, he glanced at the garden, and an image passed like a summer’s day. His father sent to the Russian front, never to return, his mother whispering to him, consolingly; then he thought he heard her voice, but it was only a breeze whipping through the bamboo. She found him curious, amusing, and perhaps as a consequence—though he could never know—he was rarely lonely.

A farmer’s cheese, green tea tickling his tongue, a long letter from a friend, a sweet kiss when he needed it, the sun’s regular rise, at slightly different times, during which he might be aroused by an idea, these contented him. He also swayed on shaky foundations, balancing as best he could, unbalanced by what no one can control.

Drawing with pencil.
Sketch a paradise. Damned
War, never again.

Be aware, he remonstrated with himself, otherwise time passes with only a sense of its absence, the way that distraught man, on the other side of the world, might feel it. He buttoned his shirt and combed his hair. He might have a cup of tea, eat a biscuit, sit in a chair, listen to Bach, or watch TV. Half-empty or half-full? His friends joked with him. Invisible choruses sang dissonant arias about the arbitrariness of choice and the dissipations of history, the news on TV shattered composure, as it if were a pane of glass. The common libretto was comic and tragic, everyone’s opera.