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October 6, 2002
I’ve been thinking about Jim’s new T-Mobile Sidekick. Do I want one? It appeals to me as I am seduced by the idea of digital exhibitionism, of trying to stream a written “day in the life” onto the web in a more accurate fashion. The verb “to show” comes to mind, to make a show out of simply showing you. The French verb “faire”, to make or to do — wouldn’t it be nice to make as one was actually doing? Or would it? You see, as with most things, I have both misgivings and enthusiasm for it. The ability to document your life without the intrusion of a camera crew, or a laptop, to convey it immediately without too much damn interference from all that fussing with equipment, or with subject, style, plot, editing, and those other unmentionables, is both modern and ancient. We are able to revert to a freer form of the old instinct by the facility with which we can now communicate. And this makes so much sense at this juncture, as where else can we go at this late hour in the day when the anxiety inducing suspicion haunts us that we’re just crumbing the remains from the table of all the great makers? Technology is, at some level, a compensation that permits us to be primitive again. Oral tradition is rampant, the peripatetic pedestrian can communicate her sightings instantly to a loved one; you can blog away until you’re blue in the face; stream your bedroom antics onto the web; concoct mini movies with video cameras the size of a box of sugar; e-mail digital portraits of your New York family to your Granny in Greenland. It’s both wonderfully liberating and a frightening democracy.
I couldn’t sleep on Friday night and sat in bed watching a documentary on “The Making of the Misfits.” Arthur Miller, in the interviews, seems so incredibly male, as does Clark Gable in the actual footage from the film. And of course Marilyn is there being so essentially female that it is somewhat shocking, verging on the indecent. And then there’s Monty. It’s a great heterosexual moment (how many can you cite after this?), in both the film’s ending when Gable leaves with Monroe, and Miller’s obvious appreciation in the documentary of his former wife. As Miller was flying back to the East Coast from the set, he hears that Clark Gable has died. (Miller’s marriage to Monroe has also ended.) Gable insisted on doing his own stunts. You get the feeling that he had to put down his manhood at the end of the movie in order to make his character’s departure from the cowboy life convincing. In some mythical way you could believe that this, rather than a mere heart attack from overwork, is what killed the actor. What’s this got to do with Jim’s new “mobile”? I don’t know, except that insomnia had me pondering the two things back to back, and one is a documentary and the other enables you to provide evidence of your own existence to an audience. It strikes me that this is what it’s all about really. It’s a deeply unoriginal thought, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to reiterate it, just as with the occasional compulsion to share the contours of a deeply unremarkable day. The documenting of a life, at whatever level of accomplishment and with whatever degree of invention, is integral to existance itself, and the undeniable urge to convey the human condition has always been with us from the earliest cave paintings, to Joyce’s Ulysses, and in everything in between and beyond. Should there be more or less people exposing their creative efforts? Edit or babble? Gag it or succumb to logorrhea? Suppress or publish? Self-destruct of self-preserve? Old chestnuts. I’m never sure. And grateful for the not knowing.
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.