Violation (36 page)

The rent would be paid somehow—how? At nineteen, I went back east to interview at a couple of universities, trailing my fragments of education like a vestigial fin. I found myself in New York City for the first time. I had a few days, a few dollars, so I went to the Museum of Modern Art. What this meant, I did not really know; I had never been to an art museum before. I had never really thought to find the real paintings in the books I read until someone said to me, “Of course, you're going to MoMA!” But of course. Suddenly I was dream-walking—right before me, Klee's strange fishes and Weston's
Nude on Sand
and Rousseau's gypsy. I found a small room with two Seurat paintings and several of his small charcoal drawings. There was
Guernica
and Steichen's portrait of Garbo and in its own big dim room,
Water Lilies
in all its quiet, outsized glory.

I was alone and broke and at sea, and I spun through the rooms in a strange chaos of feeling. Giacometti. Miró. Brancusi. Brancusi! I sat for a while near Matisse's
Dance (I)
, with a punch-drunk global citizenry slumped together on the padded benches. I saw what faint clones I'd come to love—fraying posters and book covers speckled with cooking oil—and I saw that everything I'd thought about this art was wrong. There was nothing haphazard or easy here; all the chaos was deliberate. The casual curve I had traced was a meticulously planned and unrepeatable single stroke at once. These were objects, not pictures; I could trace layers of paint, note the bare edge of canvas, the scratch of a chisel, rough strokes so dismissively confident they left me fearful and breathless. Those points of color, those drops of paint were more than beyond me—what had seemed simple turned out to be instead transcendent, to be born of the true simplicity that has passed through complexity into knowledge, into knowing exactly which drop, where. What a wash of feelings broke over me, evoked by those drops. By the knowledge that I would never. Never. Never be able to do this.

Later, almost too tired to go on, I turned a corner and saw
Starry Night
and started to cry. A guard watched me, concerned. I was crying in a strange mix of gratitude and envy and greed.
Starry
Night
was real after all; it was raw, disturbing, confusing, and it was there in front of me. I could stand there as long as I wanted. For the first time, I knew why people steal art, knew what it means to love the image and its real insertion into the world so much that one wants to consume it like cake or heroin, like water slaking a long thirst.

A few years later, I walked to the Metropolitan along Fifth Avenue through Central Park in the snow, and felt that I was in one of the novels my mother used to dream over in our little mountain town. Back to MoMA, where I discovered Boccioni's
The City Rises
and its frenzy of men and horses so fraught with life and fantastic optimism and power. I found Picasso's fine
Woman in a Flowered Hat
and Klimt's enthralling
Park
. I discovered more than one indigo city, more than one dark river. I went to the Tate Gallery and then the National Gallery in London, walking through each with the kind of private thrill one feels upon hearing important news for the first time. You know you will remember and you know you will soon enough ask someone where they were when they heard, if only so you can say where you were when you heard. Eventually I read Robert Hughes's
The Shock of the New
—a great opening of doors; I was shocked by it all and everything was new. Once I had stepped irrevocably down another path, I could see the almost infinite size of this world where many people live their entire lives. How much more there was, always so much more: Vermeer, Daubigny, Holbein the Younger, Courbet, Daumier. The annoyance of Pissarro, the challenge of Kandinsky, the frustration of David Hockney. Richard Dadd's
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke
, stopping me in midstep. Looking at great art was, for years, an extended single moment of waking up from a dream in which I'd thought I was already awake.

So much more. Millet. Rembrandt. Willem Kalf. The Masters, what a shock of the new. The portraits of Amsterdam smell of supper breath and faint sweat. Heda's
Still Life with a Gilt Goblet
brought me to a standstill, an intensely tactile scene. (I heard an Englishman behind me say, “Can't see the point, quite.”) The extraordinary
Kitchen Maid
—rather small, vibrant, glowing—leaped across the room with its light. If something left me cold—Pop Art stymied me for years—I returned to it a few years later with fresh eyes. I was promiscuous, hungry, indiscriminate, as infatuated by genres and periods and artists as I'd been with Lisa or Keith. (And really, hasn't that been true all along, this dilemma of the generalist, the appetitive, drawn to so much breadth that depth is sacrificed?) Alone, I finally found the Frick—how did I not know? I went to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, the Whitney, the de Young. I watched a woman in line at the Rijksmuseum suddenly start pushing people out of her way, shoving to the front; people stared at her in bemusement as the guard smoothly stepped in and cut her off before she reached the doors. “I don't understand what he is saying!” she complained loudly to the rest of us, when the guard pointed her back. “I have a plane to catch and I have to see
The Night Watch
!” Tokyo. Miami. Pittsburgh! How much more. How much I didn't know.

I got to Florence, at last, on someone else's dime because I did not have enough dimes of my own. In my years poring over the graying plates of the
Pietá
and the sibyls and Moses, I had imagined Florence as a medieval gallery. How strange the real Florence looked, peopled and busy, but I warmed to it: brocade and origami, marbled paper and tiny glass candies, the casual arrogance in all things Florentine. I went after Michelangelo until I had seen everything of his in that whole bustling town—his house and the tombs and the crucifixes and every sculpture and painting. One always struggles to know the difference between love and need; love is so often acquisitive and demanding. To see the desired, to be allowed only to see—this is not enough. One wants to consume it, to make the thing part of oneself. The sculpture or the painting that is so undeniably and enduringly there is as elusive as water because it can't be saved; the object itself is a memory, ephemeral, disappearing in the irreplaceable moment of sight.

I stood in the tomb, surrounded by marble in every shade, by
Night
and
Day
and
Dawn
and
Dusk
, and felt a capacious, almost infinite joy, eternal and brief and pure. More than once I walked
down the long hall lined with the unfinished slaves to warmth and daylight and David. I watched for hours as people slowly paced down that dim hall, as though they were afraid they would die before they got to the end; I watched people emerge under the skylight, break into laughter and sometimes tears, take photographs, chatter to each other, and reach up toward the cool calves without a word. I left knowing that all the key chains and coasters in the world can't take away the thing itself.

Melancholy seeped in. Ambition is, if not actively corrupting, corroding. To simply be happy is not enough; to bake a really good pie or play Monopoly with the kids, go out for a game of tennis with a friend—not enough. The wanting corrodes. I thought I was a prodigy until I met a few. I reached for the brush, the light, eventually for the words, and perfection evaded me—even a shadow of what I could see in my mind evaded me until something simply broke, or rather grew: a membrane that sealed me to the past, away from the glassy world. I suppose genius is no picnic, but to be moderately talented is a chronic wound. “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” How do we adjust to that, what kind of answer is there to such disappointment? To not being able to make what seems so possible to make, play what seems so easy for others to play? To knowing that Flaubert, who occupies another planet from me, felt himself to be a dullard? To be stuck with kettles. Sometimes I teach writing workshops. Sometimes midway through a workshop, I want to take one of my earnest students aside, the woman who quit her accountancy job to write travel books, the retired plumber who has the outline of a novel in his hand, and say, “Save your money.” I know you like it here. I know you are trying. But. You know.

Thirty-some years after I saw
Starry Night
for the first time, I tiptoed into the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He took no classes, began painting in service to God—later, with more of an eye to profit. His magnificent triptych of orchards in bloom was meant to sell—“motifs which everyone enjoys”—but he couldn't
help himself, he always went too far. So much work, such hurried work—such a frenzied eye. Those wild strokes like the scuffing of thoughtless heels in the dirt, those slaps and smears of paint tossed off almost in irritation, skidding off the edge—blossoms and twigs hanging in space without anchor. Somehow in a few flowering sprigs of almond van Gogh trapped the instant of change—beauty fading even in its beauty; the death to come in all bright gay life. He got genius, and that's all he got. Art is about being broken, I think; I suspect that great artists are reaching out of a totally shattered place, and it is nothing to envy. (But I envy it still.) He believed he'd done nothing new, nothing truly good; he shot himself.

I found my way to Rome—to one of the dark cities on a river, to the rest of Michelangelo. On a fine morning, I was one of the first people into the Vatican Museums, and while everyone else lined up to get headphones for the audio tour, I walked quickly through a series of galleries opening one into the next like Russian nesting dolls, lined with tapestries and murals and maps and Etruscan bowls and vestments and medals, the ceilings wrought with
trompe l'oeil
and the floor a turmoil of
pietra dura
. The rooms were splendid and deranged, and as I walked they piled layer upon layer until I floated just above the floor in a fever dream. I got lost and finally went backward down an up staircase past warning signs, past
If you wish to avoid the embarrassment of alarm signals, refrain entirely from touching any work of art
signs and finally pushed open a door that I think was not supposed to be open and found myself in the Sistine Chapel. The empty, silent Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo left years of his life in here, most of them spent lying on his back in lamplight with flakes of plaster watering his eyes until he couldn't see what he painted. Toward the back, behind the choir screen, straight up, I found the Delphic Sibyl. Serious, extraordinarily strong, she turned from her concentrated study, turned completely. She had endured the long thin line of time that brought me to her at last. I wonder if this love I feel, tainted always by hunger, by
infinite shades of hunger, is in fact what love always is. If wishing is a necessary part of love.

I find my way up a back street near the Coliseum to the little San Pietro di Vincoli church, the ancient church of St. Peter in Chains, the old links kept as relics in a bronze tabernacle under the altar. To the right in the small dim room is a large white statue; it costs fifty cents to turn on the lights, and I don't have the change. I beg without shame until a gracious Frenchwoman near me puts in the coins and the lights click on. Moses is just beginning to turn his head. His face is angry and severe; he thrusts out a leg as though about to rise. How sad he is (I see this at last), what a piercing sadness, fierce and disillusioned. I am grateful to be free of my younger obsessions, I think. But I wonder at times what happened. Once I thought all of life was lifting me toward something like a great wave. When did the wave break and slide along the shore and drop me in the foam?

Stevens again: “I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life?”

Conjunctions
, August 12, 2014

I've been writing this essay for more than twenty years. I never forgot that moment when I turned a corner in MoMA and saw
Starry Night.
Right then I learned lessons about intimacy and beauty and hunger that I have never forgotten. What was acutely painful for years is now simply wistful, but the hunger never seems to completely disappear. Frank O'Hara wrote a wonderful poem called “Oranges” about how we are driven to create in particular ways, whether we like it or not. Go read it
.

     
So Long As I Am With Others

ONE YEAR WHEN I WAS IN MY EARLY TWENTIES, THE WORLD
came to weigh upon me without reason. I was often afraid or crying for the want of something nameless and large. I went to see a woman, a beautiful woman with thick honey hair, who looked at the palms of my hands and asked me several odd questions:
Did I dream of robbers? Did I sweat when I ate? Were there times when one foot was cold and the other was hot?
She gently took my wrist and felt my pulse for a long time. Then she prescribed: herbs, a homeopathic remedy, and herself. I was to spend a few hours each week looking into her eyes. They were terrifying, those hours, but so was everything else and I had nothing more to lose. I shivered with embarrassment, the simple weirdness of it: the two of us in a sunny room, knees touching, hands together, looking at each other without a word. I don't know if it was the medicine or her amber gaze, but I got better. The world lost an ounce at a time and one day I could hold it by myself.

Socrates said that one should simply be as one wishes to appear. But one self implies another,
makes
another; without two, how can there be one? “
Up to a point
we can choose how to appear to others,” wrote Hannah Arendt, who knew a thing or two about choices. “Living things
make their appearance
like actors on a stage.” In hundreds of photographs, Arendt stares at the camera, ironic or solemn; she doesn't smile. She is alert to self-display, its possibilities. Its sorrows. Be as one wishes to appear—an absurd idea. I don't know what I wish for, and I don't seem able to control the being part, either. I am alive and so I present myself to others.
I align with Arendt—up to a point, I choose. Trouble is I am often past that point; by existing, I have crossed it.

Light falls across objects like oil, spilling everywhere. It sticks to things, beading up, bouncing back—reflection. I realized somewhere in the nineties that everyone was recording everything, the jam of cameras and camcorders spreading; now the smallest event doesn't happen until its capture. A passing fad, I thought, these big, expensive toys—and then it was smaller cameras and tablets and cheaper everything and more of them so that now even the click is an application. Click. Click. Everything. Pictures of everything. The world, if it cared, can see photos of my street, my house, my lawn, the broken lawn chair on my faded deck, the weeds beneath my chimney. But why would the world care?

At some point I just stopped taking photographs, even when I know I'll wish for one later—vacations, weddings—I forget to record what I'm doing in the midst of doing it. Another of my modern failures. I have a lot of photographs of my first child, the earliest when he was crowning, damp black hair emerging from my strained vagina into the shadowed dimness of my bedroom. At first I took a lot of photographs of my second child and my third child, too. But as they grew, I took fewer pictures, for lack of time and because more than half the time they seemed to scowl; they didn't care to be seen—not by me. Their friends, that was a different story and still is; the peer group reflects; this is where they emerge. With me, once the source of everything, they turn aside.

I FLINCH AT
photos now. Friends cheerfully send me pictures of my hand blocking the lens, trying to turn away; I get pictures of my feet, my buttocks, my graying hair bent over a book, unaware. Up to a point, I think, I can choose how I appear to myself. But most of us glance at ourselves and glance away, unsure. One wants to own oneself,
be
oneself, but how?
This is how I look
. I present myself to myself, and what a disappointment. On certain days, the mirror shows me a conjoined twin I've come to hate and can't escape. My face is like a sinner dangling in purgatory, strung between
enemy and friend. The sagging eyelids, the coarsened skin, the false smile. At least I'm dressed. A friend is diagnosed with a small lesion and all her skin must be examined, inch by inch. All her skin must be photographed, several times: armpits, belly, between her toes, her breasts, inside her labia. She stands naked, arms spread, legs apart, staring into the future. Every inch of her skin. On the one hand, she could die. On the other, she might as well.

I would hide from Diogenes's lamp; my secret fear is that this is it, this is as real as I get, this false and slippery face like a funhouse mirror, attenuated, swollen, halved. I am mirrored inside and out, stuck in this meaty machine and not always happy about that, and stuck also in this consternation. I am split: observing, observed. Observing the observer, aware of being observed. Helplessly distant. “So long as I am together with others, barely conscious of myself,” (Arendt again; I always think of her as the old woman, weary, a bit gnomish) “I am as I appear to others.”
Barely
conscious?

One of the most radical inventions surely must be the Renaissance self-portrait: Europe is lined with tired faces, burdened by velvet and lace in darkened rooms, one after the other with sorrowful eyes, vaguely aghast. The damp brush is stayed for a moment in slow surprise. The young Rembrandt, still recovering from what he's seen, covers his own face with shadow; he looks away, not meeting the eyes.

FOR A BOOK
tour, I need photographs. I have long resisted, but finally I submit. I hire a model to teach me what to do. She brings a makeup kit—I usually wear none at all—and she
tsk-tsks
over my wispy eyebrows, painting new ones on, rubbing in foundation, sprinkling powder, color, balm.

“You should get settled, then look down, away from the camera,” she tells me. “Think of a secret, and then look up.”

“A secret,” I say. “What kind of secret?”

“Something no one else knows,” she says. “Something very private.” She grins, and then demonstrates: she crouches, bent, eyes closed and hair falling forward—a still and pensive body,
without a face—and then she looks up and the room is alight, her eyes bright and a tiny smile, the barest part of a smile, a smile that makes you want more, that makes you want to say something, anything, to make her smile a little more. To discover her. And then she turns to me and says, “See?”

Until the first century of the Common Era, there were no full-length mirrors, no way to see one's entire body. People saw only parts of themselves. Imagine that first time: at last the whole, no longer rippling and shadowed in a pond but
there
, upright, lit, still. Complete, or seeming so. At last an answer to the burning question:
How do I look?
And not so very much later, an entire gallery of Versailles was mirrored, so that all the diamonds in Louis XIV's crown could reflect upon themselves. He walked down the hall, and one Louis after another turned to see—to see himself, itself, each Louis admiring the Louis who walked; each Louis leading to this one in particular, so multiplied that he had no end. How much ignorance of the world would I need to be that sure of myself? To believe that nothing else is as precious as me? I long to be so blessed.

The model's advice works. It takes me a while; I am aware of her watching, of the blank black eye of the camera, the stiffness of my pose. But I am also full of secrets. I review a sexual fantasy, eyes cast down, and then look up, my crotch warm with memory.

“That's good!” she says. “Keep going.” I think of sex for a while. Then I think of crimes. Wishes. I think of running away and changing my name. I think of being famous and rich. I am full of contempt and pride, and pleasure in my contempt, comfort in my pride. I glance up, see the camera, and think,
you don't know anything about me
. And the photos are good and in a few I have a tiny smile full of promise.

A BELOVED FRIEND
tells me that I
hold myself apart
, and it feels like a death sentence. It doesn't matter that she's right. I do. At a staff meeting with its invariable chatter of phone messages and weather and
where did you get those shoes
, I sit in a corner, doodling daisies on the agenda. I sit in a circle of friends and listen half-heartedly
to another's confession, my thoughts on my own. Really, you don't know anything about me. My head hums with a countering stream of comments, ironic and amusing. I rehearse arguments—I always win. I dream of disasters, myself the hero, romances where I am the prize. While others speak. While others think I am listening.
This
appearance is unwelcome, this reflection a distortion, surely this can't be the truth. Smooth mirrors reflect sharper images, more precise imitations. “Reflection at rough, or irregular, boundaries is diffuse,” I read, and this is what I seem to be—a rough boundary, diffusing any image close to true.

I seem to have lost years of my life when I wasn't looking. Rilke prayed: “Fling the emptiness out of your arms / into the spaces we breathe.” Pay attention. My selves flash out of emptiness; they jostle like a crowd at the fair, giving way, pushing back. I am less concerned with the place from which they appear—with whether it is a nothing or a something, with whether knowing would be a comfort or a nauseating vastness outside my reach—then with the
becoming
. Who wins today? The self who displays (who preens, poses, curries favor) or the self who watches (wonders at, pities)? The judge? The one who flees the very sight? Selves multiply like layers of paint, and in the crowd it seems impossible to wholly become one, to completely
become
, anything, even for a moment. Impossible to be complete. Rilke, who wrote a great deal about the struggle of being and appearing, spent his life creating a veneer; he was his own brand, the brand
Rilke
, a narcissist and philanderer; Rilke was a bit of a creep.

Who is it—what is it?—that knows the difference between itself and another? That knows itself to be a self, this face to be its face? What knows its own hiddenness, its self-deception? I am me because
I know myself
to be me, but how? Here I am; I am me partly and confusingly because of what I know myself not to be; what I feel as difference. I am me because I am not you. You are the other, forever
an
other, irrevocably
not-me
. And thank god for that. I am irrevocably
not other
—and yet I seem always to be the tiniest fraction removed from being
this
. (What would it be like to
be you? Instead of this? To be her? Him? To be, for just one damned second,
not me.
)

And Socrates be damned, most of the time we are not trying to be as we wish ourselves to appear, but the opposite: ever more expert at acting. Did he think it was such a simple matter? Pick from the grab bag of possibility, like buttons from a box? The urge to claim a space for the self collides and colludes with the urge to construct a self to fit the space. We are not entirely in charge here; habits long lost to memory are driving the bus; we wake up in the midst of action. And the actor is only the self, of course; how could it be otherwise? There is nothing this wormy ego does that isn't mine. All of it—growth and loss like a rash; endless rebirths of a self beyond boring, refusing to die. The mask, the play, the rehearsed grin, the ritual gasp, the parsing of threats—the certainty of not wholly belonging to any other, of being never wholly
with
. All mine.

Grieve—
I
grieve, you should, too—for the inability to be true, that one is never authentic. One is only, in Arendt's words again, “an appearance among appearances”; nothing and everything is false, authentic, whole, broken. More or less. “Our modern identity crisis could be resolved only by never being alone and never trying to think.” We're working on that. She believed, or claimed to, that we are all the same in some buried place, that a kind of psychic fundament exists, a ceaseless biology of mind—a sameness of selves as our cells are the same. (They are not, though, our cells: not exactly the same, any more than a blade of grass in a meadow is like another.)

We claim to want this place where
we are the same
—claim that we would run to meet each other there. Finding that space is the purpose of our lives, we say, glibly taking each other's hands and swaying in affirmation.
Kumbaya
. Perhaps we mean it. I think I do. I think I don't; I am not certain about this. Where we are the same is, for now, just mine; this space remains mine alone. I may not want to share. I look at my sister, my son, faces known all their lives—so familiar, even with all the thoughts behind the face opaque as snow—and a buried lonesomeness flies up, stinging.
In the midst of washing my breakfast plate I am dizzied by a great gulf of difference; I have no idea who they are, what they want, what they need.

Facing those others who believe themselves to know me, I smile and say hello. How nice to see you. A
me
speaks, a
you
listens—at least with half an ear—to words upon which we might in part agree. What is intimacy but having a few more words in our shared vocabulary than we have with the others to whom we turn in longing?—though the meaning of each word is always a matter of debate, and one we no longer have the heart to carry on because of the risk we will find there is no agreement after all. The words hunker down like ticks, digging in, thick with cliché, the giant delicacy of the social sphere. You are so far away, your desires so different and vague, and language is little more than the demilitarized zone in which we try to negotiate some unstable peace. Never mind that these are old concerns, that they are solipsistic and infinitely regressive, that many good minds have followed them into tiny corners from which they seem unable to escape.
Communication
is the second self, or third, always false; the first one cowers or cries out, depending.

I say to a friend,
I want to be done with the witness
, and he turns away, hissing,
I want to obliterate it
. He would like to die as a self aware of itself, in order to be seen as a self at all. We can be exactly as we long to be, appear exactly as we are, only by not knowing we have appeared—and what a thought of heaven
that
is. Our struggle to be at peace with ourselves would be gone; we would no longer be trying to
be
ourselves at all. Awareness without reflection—animal life. Or perhaps more the the heliotropic plant, quivering toward the light. Responding, but never having to act. The dream of extinction while still blessedly alive.