stories

What happens to them, Scrimshaw and Emily and Bess, the boy with no name, Magda’s son? What happens to us?

What is in the story and out of the story? (O potato). We are all of us struggling with this question and doing much better than we think, ourselves outside of any history but the buzz-daze, the quotidian stream as Caro says (who are these characters?)

Marjorie writes to Michael in the last days of the Twilight symphony (in the subject line of the email she writes “Icarus to Daedalus”; I’ve never seen her though I know of her novels, done and to be—she is a sister to the Calipha of the Amazons with arms of gold [for whom CA was named] and lives near Grauman’s Chinese Theater where Jack Summerland parked Bette Davis’ Rolls—and so it isn’t hard to imagine her done up in all these feathers and the heavy wax we must wear [if time would allow I would sponge her sweating arms and face, the weight of this costumed pretense defies flight]: I think her girlish, is it because she takes the part of slim-hipped Icarus? and imagine that she is as fair as Magdalena was when I first met her; outside fiction, I dare not imagine her breasts):

“I love the idea of east of the sun and....The themes are courageous. The linking of the landscape with the persistent, perceived movement of time seems so organic. Already, the hero is attractive in his careful attention to pathmaking. I sense the displacement of the Polish man, the lostness of Magdalena, the search for the intermediary in the half-light. The belt of great ancient lakes across the land is a rich setting. The central emotional tissue here, though, constitutes our deepest mysteries—and so I can see how this would have been gestating a long time, make itself visible only in dreams, and be difficult to talk about out loud. I am looking forward to every stretch of each arc.”

Michael writes back to Marjorie:

“Have you seen Scrimshaw? I think he is in California. (I know one of my ex-wives is.) Speaking of arcs, once long ago she painted a full length portrait of me across the back and arms of a Victorian settee. She had gessoed the sofa into a surface of the quotidian, a mural of her art, her erotic life and her mothering. My body upon it is rhizomic, more Zeus than Daedalus, though my long hair and beard appear as brown mass of roots like the ends of freshly pulled beets. Her son is, as always, a cherub with golden ringlets (how he was in real life). My penis—or rather the Zeus penis of the figure on the painted sofa, this is such a strange sentence to form—is like a sea cucumber, bloated and pale and rich as a grub, though itself tufted in the brown tendrils of the nest of hair.”

The cherub would have turned twenty-eight years old this year. Outside fiction, I dare not imagine my penis. Her photo (not Marjorie, not Caro, not Magda) appeared in (what was then) The Buffalo Evening News. She is standing in a white gallery in the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo wearing a long navy knit dress with long sleeves and a simple scooped neckline (I remember it so well I can imagine the sensation of the fabric beneath my finger, the shape of her ample breast against it: rusk or madeleine), standing before the sofa, a faintly ironic look on her face, the expression I recognize from when she considered seducing someone else. My body is clearly visible behind her, as if there were a satyr lying there in the gallery (the gallery—even today—is just beyond the main sculpture hall, a cavernous—this is the official word for such spaces—and cool white marble space which looks out on Olmstead’s lagoon and casino; on the wall near the lagoon door there is a case of blue glass Picasso figures, nymphs and satyrs and a horse shaped like a penis, comic and erotic and wicked, the color and granularity of beach glass, a shade or so lighter than a sand burnished shard from a bottle of Phillips Milk of Magnesia).

Caro writes:

“Seeing the afternoon’s harvest there in a pool on the bed made her catch her breath. These shards looked so much like the Lake to her, the angles and curves of the surface beat, sharp and dull, blue green umber light merging, blending, overlapping. As with the Lake, she could not take her eyes away. She had with her a square, shallow cigar box, bought on a whim for its bright, ornate decoration. She’d been keeping pencils and odds and ends in it. Removing them, she poured the beach glass into the box. The inside of the lid was golden and hot as midday. She opened it wide, and the color of the Lake shifted musically beneath it.”

In the Thursday Home section of the Times, there is a report that someone is marketing beachglass from France in small fabric bags at fifteen dollars each. The beachglass is scented with sea smells and tied with raffia. They say good glass is rare now with the bottle deposit laws in the states. Caro has already been collecting beach plastic for years. It has the soft burnish of watercolor or old photos.

In Saturday’s Times “Critic’s Notebook” (itself a tradestyle for a putative unfinishedness) Neil Strauss misreads Brian Eno to dismiss interaction as unfinished:

“At their best, they illustrate an idea that...art is more meaningful as an evolving process than as a packaged product.”

Strauss was talking about the (first ever) Macintosh New York Music Festival. Jaron Lanier was there as a rockstar. Strauss wrote: “Virtual Reality is exciting but only as a substitute when reality is not available.”

When will that be?

Tom Boyle says that interactive fiction is a “mistake”:

“You know why? Because a work of art, despite what the French critics might say, has to have an organizing principle behind it. A genius, a person, is responsible for it, and if you break the spell of it in any way, it ruins it. To read is the same thing as to write.

“You know you’re in another world when you’re reading, when you’re really concentrating, when you’re focusing? That’s what it’s for. So if you’re constantly bringing yourself out of that world to access something... it doesn’t give you what a novel is supposed to give you, which is to live in another world, make it, invent it, see it in your head.”

It is the end of genius we seek (here:__invent a world). “The point is,” Strauss or someone writes elsewhere, dismissing the interactive, “Someone has done it. It is finished.”

The point is a smear of light. The someone remains whether her voice has a name, O my mother, my Magda.

Scrimshaw is an imaginary figure. I imagine him walking across the frozen Ontario prairies like St. Christopher, his son on his back, in search of Anna Magdalena.

I knew Tom Boyle in Iowa before he too became a rockstar, a dayglo scarecrow: I saw him once crossing the great salt desert carrying Jaron Lanier on his back, his dreadlocks waving in the hot wind, soprano sax before him like a satyr’s pipe.

The Twilight Doctor looks back on the wake of the freighter. In the swirling calm that rocks between the screw churn of the twin engines a confetti of jetsam floats and sinks under moonlight in the slush of dark water: rusted shards of iceburg lettuce, blue jars from a remedy for the Captain’s dyspepsia, snarled audio tape trailing from a broken audio cassette like the tentacles of octopi, the windsock of a condom like a white sea cucumber reinflated by the water, brown rusk rocking like a life raft, and everywhere scraps of colored papers: bridge scores, loveletters, yellow pages, suicide notes, lists, drafts of novels, doodles, anatomically correct drawings of hairy pussies (makeshift porn), glossy scraps of real porn (cum pearled aureole), a poem about the water. The scraps float like phosphorescent creatures: small skiffs lingering briefly in the oily roil then capsizing of their dampness.

He has borrowed the Captain’s infrared lenses. He looks on life and it is good.

In the gallery (two decades later) there was an installation by Jennie Holzer following the Venice Biennale. Crawl lights blinked above marble floors in neon halls:

WHEN YOU EXPECT FAIR PLAY YOU CREATE AN INFECTIOUS BUBBLE OF MADNESS AROUND YOU.

YOU ARE SO COMPLEX THAT YOU DON’T ALWAYS RESPOND TO DANGER.

MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE.

WITH ALL THE HOLES IN YOU ALREADY, THERE'S NO REASON TO DEFINE THE OUTSIDE ENVIRONMENT AS ALIEN.

WHEN SOMEONE BEATS YOU WITH A FLASHLIGHT YOU MAKE LIGHT SHINE IN ALL DIRECTIONS.

IT IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST TO FIND A WAY TO BE VERY TENDER.

Jennie Holzer is from Ohio (I have her current address in my computer). She could easily sue me (though I love her art; or maybe I’m only sucking up since it is in my self-interest to find a way to be very tender). Everything is in copyright (outside fiction, we do not live far from each other):

Today four granite benches remain in the marble sculpture hall: a commission in honor of the Biennale, they are engraved with Truisms as if memorials to truth, which is exciting but only as a substitute when reality is not available.

When will that be? (How does recurrence make meaning is not the same question as what does it mean.)

DYING IS EASY, YOU HAVE TO KNOW HOW TO DISAPPEAR.

This is Baudrillard not Holzer. (So what is under copyright?)

(Given the mutability of the text, it isn’t clear what is under copyright. For instance, you can save me, dear reader, from Jenny Holzer—unless, of course, you are Jenny Holzer but even then...—if you will only edit each of the lines above so that they say something else: if every reader in every version changes every word then Tinkerbell will fly again. The image is immutable; though it can be replaced.)

What happened to history? When more than half the population remarries at intervals history enters a new temporality, outside of generation, body, proximity. (My daughter was in my stomach once. Young man’s variations in the same nave a dying man did once. I was in my ex-wife once. My husband also within me. Her within him, her her also (it’s possible) and him him. I rode a bike here yesterday and walk where I was then today. We all live just beyond the isle of the day before.)

Carole Maso says:

“The same corner I now turn in bright light, in heat, and in some fear,

I once turned in snow and the mind calls that up reminded of–”

(Do we say what we write? The human genome can be rewritten; the dream image is immutable, though it can be replaced; the voice disappears into air, to music, to memory.)

Josh is talking (he’s the one who scanned the photos of the old men, the w/c blackboard, the enchanted hills here; his music on the QuickTime movie after afternoon; though it is a year ago when he says this). The auditorium is dimmed for the computer screen although in truth Jane has hardly used it (do you believe these names, Josh and Jane? some things are true. They went up a hill to get to the auditorium. I dare not imagine her breasts. There is a photo of her, one of the few she's ever allowed, punkish and sassy on a rented sofa. No tendrils.) She squints through the dimness of the auditorium of the sister school. She is the first critic of afternoon. He rises to ask his question: scarecrow, no dayglo (granny glasses, this year his hair yellow as popsicles).

“I wonder if you can comment on this–”

She nods, she can, she paces (leather micromini, fuchsia nail polish, etched black hair, geisha make-up) nervous as a carny barker: guess your weight skinny rocker? Josh is as nervous as she; it seems a dance without proximity, tick to nervous tick, very techno.

“If, as everyone seems to want to suggest, hypertext approximates the way our minds work now, would it be fair to call it the new realism?”

There is a kind of hush all over the world.™ (Someone in my row audibly caught her breath: it was me.)

What happens to us? Where is the story?

“I deny this is the postmodernism of Coover, Barthelme and Barth,” Michael says.

“Paul Auster? Paul Auster?” Jaron caws the question like a parrot from his perch on Tom’s back. (George Landow paces the garden in measured steps and a blue blazer with gold buttons, courtly as the Count of Monte Cristo.)

Eco lounges on a wooden bench looking over the paesaggio, his head upon the lap of Signora E. He is wearing eyeglasses with thick black frames which make him somehow look like Godard. The overalls are the indigo of new denim, the brass buttons glint in the twilight sunshine. Signora E. has braided her hair and rolled it into a crown atop her head, pinning it in place with a passion flower, itself a purple crown, itself crowned with a diadem of translucent tendrils, the milky translucence of a jellyfish.

“Yet there is a way to argue that the postmodernist fiction demonstrates more allegiance to the power of story than does realist or neo-realist fiction.”

It is a slow evening. Figs ripen on the slope below. Even Jane has slowed her pacing and sits, picking nervously but deliberately at her own forearm. Marjorie and Signora E. exchange languid smiles. Magda watches them with a sisterly eye. (Isn’t Caro here?) Magda is seated on a redwood lounger. The American lawn furniture seems comic in this landscape, its puffy plastic cushions hemmed in green twine. Yet Magda does not seem comic. She brings a solicitor’s dignity to her statement, still a hint of an East European accent (“Coover” edges toward “Coofer” in her speech).

On the twilight edges of the garden Josh is upset. He thinks Michael has taken his point without acknowledging it. Caro whispers with him, soothing. (It is not just Caro: everywhere the women are whispering, a sweet soughing underneath the landscape: Have you ever thought how much of the world does not have names? Instead they have these songs.) Long-legged showgirls walk slowly in the shadows wearing sequins and lace, feathers and wax, rhinestone diadems in the form of passion flowers. Caro tells him there are no points, merely fireflies rising, the smear of the milky way, the susurrus.

“Coover,” Magda says, “says as much somewhere. The novel, he says, serves as a mythic reinforcement of our tenuous grip on reality. The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from mystery to revelation...”

The ebbing light silhouettes the twitching duo of Tom and Jaron into a shadow play single figure: one of the linked band of The Seventh Seal or the monster gnarled into the tree of Sycorax. Jane smiles in a scarlet gash. Coover eyes Magda through the swirl of borolo (Pio Cesare Nebbiolo 1987) in the balloon before him, looking up at her through the glass globe as if a deep-sea diver. The wine sheets slowly down the glass orb, her sad sweet face is ruby, bloody, rose. Glenn Gould stands next to Coover. Each is dressed in black. They have been drawn together like iron filings under the magnet of the coming night: twin soldiers, Napoleonic.

Gould’s broad Canadian vowels sound melancholy in the Italian twilight. Still he is quite animated, taking cover with Coover to join in Magda’s point, “It’s like that Switched on Bach record of some years back, eh?” (His accent makes "record" into “ray-chord” and rhymes it with “wrote”; Caro finds herself quite taken with him, thinks him as vulnerable as Coover.) “The sounds of the thing recall no particular experience and so underline what I take to be the record’s motivation: a utilization of the available technology to actualize previously idealized aspects of the world of Bach.”

He pronounces the word, utilization, with a long vowel on the second beat and a long i in the middle:

Does the image interrupt the reverie? The Twilight Doctor shifts in his seat (a wood and canvas sling like the deck chairs on a steamer). His stomach growls quietly (he is certain no one else hears) and he feels slightly dyspeptic, thinks it the red wine. He lets his hand hang idly beside him on the lawn and plucks a tuft of grass which he twists in his long fingers into a peasant chaw. There is a surprising sweetness to it, a spiced undertone of clover and mustard.

“I have always admired Gertrude Stein.” I think it is Carole Maso who speaks: she is blond, zaftig and pale, as radiant as a new sun on the Mediterranean.

“There is a sorcery Stein does in the autobiography of Toklas: Stein writes Toklas writing Stein and makes the self so transparent it disappears, all her ego dissolving under the intensity like a jellyfish drying on the beach at noon.”

Eco lifts his head up from his wife’s lap. The showgirls in the garden pause and sway like a pasha’s fans, their diadems twinkling like the coming stars. Jane no longer fingers her forearm. Softly Jaron plays a Milhaud composition for the saxophone; Coover lifts a glass (a scarlet globe like the relics of a saint) in a half-toast.

“This is impossible of course,” the maestro utters, “I won’t have you putting words in my mouth as if some character in a fiction. It is as I wrote about McLuhan many years ago (can it be three decades, bellissima?) [Signora E. nods; the showgirls sway.]: he knows that a computer performs many operations at instantaneous speed, in a single second, but he also knows that this fact does not authorize him to declare that the instantaneous synchronization of numerous operations has put an end to the old syntax of linear sequences.”

“Toronto was full of them then,” says the Twilight Doctor. His voice is a husk, he drops the wad of chewed grass on the lawn. “In the sixties there were all sorts of poseurs and sycophants like lamps along Yonge Street. They filled themselves with bright ideas and took them for a drive down the QEW, like wheat farmers in their new Ford Galaxies, a whole parade of convertible, bright ideas travelling across the Peace Bridge and into the states...”

Gould draws himself up as if about to duel, straight backed and glaring. Coover also draws himself up as if in sympathy. Everywhere the women are whispering, a sweet soughing underneath the landscape (How does recurrence make meaning is not the same question as what does it mean.) Magda looks so pale. From the chapel come the notes of the sarabande which begins the variations.

“I’m not pessimistic about history,” Michael says (he wishes Cixous were here, thinks of the delicate tracery of her collarbone in the photo, bright eyes, hint of a weeping mole on her upper chest). “If we have entered a new temporality–seemingly outside of generation, body, proximity—it is not outside of conversation. Nor memory or reverie.”

Will he have the last word? The showgirls promenade again in the garden. Let the wind speak, this is paradise.