My mental circus, inside and out.

cont

The story he had to tell was as sexy as cinema. Miriam, the heroine, was beautiful, the villains pure evil, the rescuers likeable eccentrics, the love story tragic with a literal blinding of the unhappy lover in the Nazi death camp. He'd tried to sell it to Hollywood . "Dear Mr. Spielberg." He'd thought of crossing the ocean to stalk Oprah's neighbor. Slut for fame. He would have sold himself in an instant for a larger audience than this.

His parents sitting like Ramses and consort as he built to his crescendo where he was to let his audience in on a secret. “Most poignant, in the end, was the effect on the family of Miriam’s silence about her past.   The part of the story I couldn’t tell in the book, out of respect for the surviving children, was of the suicide of Miriam’s son and her daughter’s descent into madness. This was the more recent memory underground, the consequences that could not be offered or explained in Bath , where she disguised herself as a modest housewife.  The house of this once bold and beautiful old woman, crammed with her disorganized papers, was suffering from subsidence, its walls cracking with the weight of memory.”

 Love flowed from his audience with loud satisfactory applause, the acclamation of his peers, the admiration of the women.  The pain and pleasure of sweaty hands slapping together, his audience suffering for him as their claps became compulsively regular.  They joined as one, their gift to him, the highest admiration of his powers. 

Oswald now approached the podium and spread his hands, deflating the crowd.  “Professor Scherzer has given us a brilliant exposition of memories that resist representation in our undertanding of the past, specially of the seminal crime of modern history that reveals the effects of modernization and the disintegrations and displacements of moral life on Nietszche’s Gewesensein as it unfolds in the singularity of a life spent negotiating these folds and waves of Ricoeur’s l’oubli.  We now have a few moments for Professor Scherzer to entertain questions on this subject, the theme of our conference.”

 Having only an inkling of what Oswald meant, Scherzer studied the audience, staring at him like a baffled cow with heat exhaustion.   Finally, a hand.  Not surprisingly, it was Gadsby.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 30, 2005 15:05 | link | comments (1)

For Maria

The historian stood at the podium. Scherzer neatened his papers, running his hands along the edges, squaring them.  The audience rising above him in the auditorium, packed with his new colleagues, also contained his parents.  They sat high in front him, neatly dressed, holding themselves straight, right angles, hands folded, well-preserved.  One could never say his mother had a lap.  She was hard, dark, tiny, prim, small breasts in the belted dress, some muted colour, ochre or moss.  Dad in the tweed suit jacket and brown suede shoes, clipped head, chin smooth as calfskin.  In his introduction, Oswald had mortified Scherzer by pointing out to the world that his parents were there. "And how delighted we are to have Professor Scherzer's parents here, from Poole." They sat, proud and smug,  a traumatic rupture in the smooth flow of his public adoration.

Scherzer was furious they had come.  Furious.  The night before, over his mother's crispy duck,  he had cringed when they enthusiastically proclaimed they would attend, never asking, assuming that he would like nothing more than to have them gazing down on him as he performed.  He couldn't refuse them, couldn't explain to them how inappropriate they were to thrust themselves into his professional life.  He tried different versions in his head: magnimous acceptance, polite decline, rude confrontation.  Magnimous acceptance had won out, though inside he roiled as he smiled tightly.  "Of course."  He then picked up the delicate pancake, rolled around the shredded meat and the purple plum sauce, and shoved the whole thing in his mouth. 

Mildly queasy at the podium, he began to speak of a woman, of her historic survival on the run from the Nazis, of his bold reclamation of her past, but could not resist his compulsion to straighten his papers, flipping a page, straightening, flipping a page, straightening.   The room was stoking up.  His male colleagues cast off their jackets and dug fingers into their ties; the women looked translucent.  He had to have them, his audience.  He lived for it.  The way he could woo them, their eyes petting him as though he were a beloved labrador who's brought the stick. "You've done well, boy."

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 28, 2005 13:02 | link | comments (3)

Sleeeeeeeep

I've taken up running.  I'm sore, exhausted, and ravenous, and fear it's making me stupid.  Amid all the rumors, innuendoes, guesses, data, facts, oddities, old song lyrics, and all the other cultural detritus  that's in my head, I seem to remember that exercise is supposed to increase your mental energy.  This never seems to happen for me, and I believe it is yet another of those ungrounded rumors that we all believe with a weird certainty despite all evidence to the contrary.  Instead, I feel that my head gets wooly. I become obsessed with meaningless data about time, distance, heart rate, goals, and my other thoughts tend to turn on a hamster wheel.  I am never enlightened when I exercise.  I never have a eureka moment.  Instead, I would just like to sleep, sleeeeep, sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep, like Dorothy in the poppy field. 

There are many things I believe on faith: that Michael Jackson's penis is, indeed, striped like a barber pole; that Thomas Pynchon really meant for his novel to resist any meaningful interpretation; that I'm losing brain cells year by year; that somewhere there are bloggers over 40; oh all kinds of things, maybe everything.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 26, 2005 12:28 | link | comments

How Do You Write?

The way you write tells much about you.  I don't mean the words on the page, but the physical act of writing, how you conduct yourself in the process. When you write, you are close to the fringes of consciousness, because even in the most rational sort of writing, like  history or philosophy,  you are creating out of you, no matter what words and ideas you've eaten,. 

I have often thought that writing is a lot like shitting, so that some writers can only produce hard little nuggets while others have what can be appropriately termed logorhea, spilling out a viscuous mess of words, like the hero of Wonder Boys who can never stop and whose words eventually blow away, dry and light as dust.  Both of these are kinds of writer's block.  All writers have voices in their heads, parental voices, teachers' voices, constantly nagging at them that they are doing badly, that they can't succeed at this, that  everything they do is shit and they'd better control it and civilize it somehow, put it in the appropriate receptacle.  Some writers are so frozen by the past that they can't put their fingers to the keys. 

Many who call themselves writers are merely poseurs, in love with the image of the writer.  Wary of such pretensions, my friend M told me that she will never call herself a writer unless she writes on that day. 

 I know a woman who writes everything down.  She has a small portable Dell, and takes it to every meeting, where she furiously types everything anyone says. I have gotten emails from her, on the smallest of issues, that are six to seven long paragraphs.  What stern voice is in her head, driving her to obsessively write in this way?

I write in bed, like Henry James's sister, Alice, the neurasthenic, or Madame Blavatsky, the nineteenth-century spiritualist (though apparently she also chain-smoked).   There are two other things that happen in bed: dreaming and sex.   Both of these are deeply related to writing as creative acts.

 

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 25, 2005 12:36 | link | comments (2)

Max

Yesterday, the baby and I slept together on my daughter's couch.  Max was profoundly asleep, his head on my shoulder, exhausted after his happy efforts at crawling, more like scooting at the moment,  but he does get up on his knees and sway back and forth trying to get the momentum going.  His heavy sleep, his sensual warmth and his smell, created a deep responsive peace in me.  Already, I see signs of his personality emerging, his restless energy to move forward, his intelligence (he was able to scoot to find his bottle, which was still nestled in the diaper bag), his relentless curiosity about new objects, especially complicated electronic ones, and his sociability.  He and his father played with hysteric laughter, Max crawling, his father mock-hiding and re-emerging, the wonder of the fort-da moments, here and gone and back again. When Max first wakes up, he does not like to see any other face than his mother's or father's and he will piercingly cry until he realizes the stranger means no harm.  He loves to eat paper, tearing it into little bits with intense concentration.  He is also afraid of grass, I think because he finds it too tickly and prickly. My daughter says he is fascinated by birds. In some ways, I feel poignant about Max, because I know he will eventually face all the sufferings of life, other than the momentary frustration of delayed feedings, and I would like to keep him from anything that will disrupt his intrinsic joy.  From the start, his default mode has been contentment and energetic creativity, ruffled occasionally by hunger or discomfort, a happy baby overall.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 24, 2005 14:39 | link | comments