...more recent posts
February 28, 2002
In my younger and more vulnerable years, as well as in my older and even more vulnerable years, the phrase from Samuel Beckett, “imagination dead, imagine” is capable of striking fear in my heart more readily than any description of fire and brimstone, any passage of Paradise Lost, any portion of Dante’s Inferno. I mean, it’s the end isn’t it? Real death as opposed to mere oblivion, of which the latter actually seems like a deeply desirable state at this strange corner of the year. Iatrogenic is a word applied to medical treatments whose side-effects are more unpleasant than the symptoms of the condition being treated; it seems to cover a vast array of medical regimens. I’ve been availing myself of some iatrogenic medicine recently which has resulted in days made tidal with waves of nausea and immobility. Thankfully, the tide seems to be in retreat as the body, once again, shifts to accommodate another poison. The thing that remains is the reminder of how certain conditions are a threat to the imagination, nausea being one of them. Nausea obliterates all of the senses replacing it with one sensation. One vast cloud of heavy gas weighing out all of the faculties, bleaching all colour, disarming the imagination. But even in the midst of this debilitating bout there was one recurrent image that persisted with me like a morbidly funny talisman reminding me of the existence of imagination and of humour: I put on a shapeless wool coat and wrap it about myself, a body that in my state I perceive as an amorphous and pale lump, and stagger outside. The landscape is a hybrid of poor video and something more romantic, Lawrence Olivier as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights in that Hollywood version of the Yorkshire moors. My tottering steps lead me to a narrow path running parallel to a cliff. I shuffle along against a headwind until I fall over the cliff in something that is both a bowling pin collapse and a lemming-like dive. This image, which a fretful doctor might define as suicidal ideation, actually managed to make me laugh each time it re-ran in my mind. So, Sam, I suppose what I have to say is that I can’t fully imagine the dead imagination, not yet anyway, and thanks for your beautiful irony.
January 17, 2002
I’m not sure how old H. is. She has children my age (40), is technically a grandmother, though she avoids the moniker, and recently underwent her first face lift (this I am sure of because she asked me if I liked it the same way you ask your best girlfriend if she likes your new hair do.) I have to say that I’m not too keen on her face lift or her new hair do, now everything aspires too violently upwards, skin, hair, eye brows. As I was talking to her last night at a party I kept thinking of flying buttresses and how great she looked before she shocked her hair and face into an anti-gravitational revolt. She has recently lost her second husband and is vaguely thinking about looking for a third. She joined a video dating agency and was full of the delights of technology as a way to find a companion (she kept reiterating that she did not want to have sex with these men or a new husband). She has recently secured a book deal to write on the subject of dating after fifty, a sort estrogenless Sex in the City, and after several glasses of bad champagne decided that we should work together on the book. I’m not over 50 and am proud to have never been on a date, but this doesn’t seem to bother her. H. is one of those people that either reduces you to a cauldron of oozing hatred or who you forgive endlessly for her faults. She’s an only child, a Gemini and is the only woman with children who I have ever heard admit to having no innate maternal instinct. Perhaps it’s this unholy trinity of selfishness which we share that assists us in some bond. There is something vaguely immoral about her and her completely ageless capacity for having a good time reassures me that real maturity can be avoided indefinitely.
January 15, 2002
I am currently engaged in attempting to write my mother’s biography for a catalogue to accompany a retrospective exhibition she is having at the end of 2002. There is something slightly unnerving about wading through the almost illegible slanted writing and the cut and pasted typed material taken from old catalogues. She appears to have been an adventurous creature, joining the R.A.F. during the Second World War, studying in London, and traveling widely and alone before succumbing to marriage at the then horribly late age of forty. There never seems to have been any doubt about what she wanted to do and yet her capacity to articulate this knowledge lags so far behind her painting ability that it leaves me with a feeling of vertigo. She constantly strays from the tone required for such a treatise: she’s studying Rembrandt’s etching techniques in the National Library (relevant enough material), but then we get several long paragraphs about watching the Dublin pigeons play with chipped plaster from the Library’s dome, the noise of which distracts her from her studies. There are long lists of long-dead Dublin artists, people forgotten by posterity, but whom loom large in her lexicon of a painting life. I ruthlessly edit them out and we argue on the phone about why they should or shouldn’t be included. A six month stint in Connemara turns into a weather report for the period as a result of an uncharacteristically hot summer which fell in the middle of her sojourn there. Mention of a borrowed studio in Spain turns into a reminiscence of a young man who would arrive at 6 a.m. to chisel away at tessera pieces of marble for a large mosaic (what else did he chisel away at I find myself wondering). So I edit it with as much objectivity as I can summon while simultaneously learning more concrete facts about my mother than I have managed to elicit in forty years. Who am I to delete her chiseling young Spaniard in Tarragona; to omit the freakishly warm Irish summer of 1955; to murder the National Library pigeons; to banish the old lady painters I remember coming for Sunday dinners with their tweeds as thick as their Anglo accents?
She agrees to my edits, resigns herself to the nature of such a piece.
I resolve to keep the original document.
January 5, 2002
During a week long absence of my spouse over the new year, who tends to accumulate and distribute detritus about our abode in a way that brings to mind the word spoor, I discarded objects and cleaned with an energy and enthusiasm for the task that I thought had deserted me. In most households I have occupied I have been the cleaner. Cleanliness held no fascination for my parents. I lived with a man who subsisted on porridge and fried sausages. I would discover pots sporting the most fantastic blue and green moulds and Antarctica of sausage lard sculpted into frying pans all stowed under a bed or in a closet. Suppression superseded soap in his domestic system. My current house mates on the North Fork apparently find domestic chores to be as compelling as daily Bible reading. Cleanliness is not next to godliness, in fact I suspect it may be indicative of small mindedness, mania and neuroses, but it does appeal to me in odd ways. It’s one of those chores that you are alone with, you and your conscience. It’s for the pleasure of completing a task that needs to be performed on a repetitive basis and without rewards financial or professional. Who the hell will notice if you clean the plastic box in which you keep your cleaning supplies? Nobody. But it reassures me to know that I’ve resisted the temptation not to clean it. This latest episode of cleaning convinced me that the pleasure accrued from cleaning might be applicable when tackling other, grander projects in life. Quiet tenacity without expectation of reward. You can just pay someone to do it of course, but it’s an inexpensive and straightforward way in which to garner some feelings of virtue. Others have busier lives and for them it makes sense to pay for it, but I have expended considerable energy on avoiding a life of extreme busyness. A certain level of distraction is desirable, but your average New York day - as documented, for instance, in a recent issue of the New York Observer describing a day in the life of certain City notables on September the 10th - resembles some kind of assault course that would shave my nerves to a bloody fray. Short of being able to retreat to a cork lined room one of the things you can do to be less busy on other’s terms, but to be amply distracted, is to clean your own toilet.
December 12, 2001
Perhaps it was the timing. Christmas came early for me this year. I think I worked myself into a seasonal froth and prematurely ejaculated all of my seasonal jissum. And now I’m finding it hard to get hard for the holidays, which isn’t like me. Some mania had me doing it too early, baking mince pies by the baker’s dozen, boiling plum puddings until I had steamed my epidermis into a ruddy ooze, combing FAO Shwarz for various godchildren and wrapping their gifts with ornate paper they will never notice, even mailing cards to people who there is a substantial chance that I will never encounter again. And now I am left with something akin to a hangover of the season as those around me are just getting up to speed. The Swiss contingent feeding us with troughs of melted cheese, friends variously taking their kids to chop down Christmas trees, doing too many drugs, having nervous breakdowns, and ordering several phyla of beasts from d’Artagnan. Me, I have this underwhelming desire to sit very still, perhaps not eat anything except for some vegetable broth, to read extensively. It seems unlikely that this will happen, there is a piglet in a box in our van, a house full of humans, and two children wielding axes in anticipation of felling their first Christmas tree. In situations like this I have come to take comfort in the retreat to the kitchen and in what one can produce there for those gathered. One can participate while being absent, contribute while not having to converse, to celebrate by doing.
December 4, 2001
I am sitting on a bench in Soho. A French woman wearing too much perfume sees the bench, some of which I am saving surreptitiously for my late date, and informs her husband that (littoral translation), “truly, there is a rarity of benches in New York.” She’s right. I momentarily resent her for stealing my date’s portion of the bench, but I have been waiting a long time and some part of me knows that his arrival will coincide with a vacancy on the bench beside me. I have been sitting there since the last gasp of late fall evening light, which brings a brief stillness before dark. I have been running errands for former super models as a favor to a friend. Do former super models run their own errands? Probably not. Nor do they sit on benches anonymously, waiting for their perpetually late date, and get to see the day turn from gilded bronze to milky tea. The bench clears of perfumed French shoppers, of art boys trumpeting articles about themselves in Art Forum, and of Southern belles asking their mothers for cash hand outs on cell phones. My late date arrives, crooked with the day and in need of a seat.