“What do you mean, your sperm are abnormal?”
“It’s normal to have abnormal sperm,” I said, as if she’d insulted me, and she laughed. I sat down on the futon and beckoned for her to join me there and thought: This is going to be fine; after all, we made out a few times in college. She did come toward me, but only to pick up one of the embroidered Indian pillows from the futon, which she swung into my face. “Go to sleep, you fucking idiot, we are not having sex.” Stunned, I opened my mouth to say a lot of things — about joke cycles, the origins of poetry, correspondences — but instead I stretched out and, placing the pillow over my head, not under it, said: Good night. Later she told me I’d kept her up by trying to recite “High Flight.”
* * *
Dear Ben, I put down, I too found it a pleasure meeting you, albeit briefly, in Providence, though in such a crowd little conversation was possible. But to put a face to the name, as they say, if they still say that, and I hope there will be another occasion soon to be in each other’s company.
I deleted the “I too,” just made it “It was a pleasure,” and started a new paragraph: I remember writing William Carlos Williams in, what, 1950, and feeling the letter was very much an intrusion. I don’t mean to imply that I’m to you what Williams was to me then, only to sympathize with, to remember how I shared, the worry you expressed that reaching out might be construed as overreaching. But it isn’t, and you’re certainly not, and anyway how else is one to find one’s contemporaries, form a company? How else to locate the writers with whom one corresponds, both in the sense that we are corresponding now, and in that more general sense of some kind of achieved accord, the way we speak of a story corresponding with the facts? You no doubt know Jack Spicer’s use of that term in all its weird possibility, how he corresponded with the dead, took dictation. And of course we have Baudelaire’s sense of “Correspondances.”
The author could go back later and make sure he wasn’t overusing Creeley’s signature words. I’d reread the one or two matter-of-fact messages we had actually exchanged, would look again at his Selected Letters.
I also recall here that letter sent in my midtwenties because I was writing like you about starting a little magazine, articulating insofar as I could its “general program,” which of course involved expressing my discontent with the magazines then current. You ask if “we need another,” a good question, but I wonder how much the “we” should be its subject. Of course the magazine is a thing one hopes has its circulation, however small, has its influence, however hard to measure, but it is also the instrument through which your own sense of the possibilities of the art will be forged, tested. It seems to me now evident that the best magazines come from editors who themselves “need” the thing to exist, and out of the singularity of that need a magazine of some possible public use arises.
The card of the special collections librarian and the card of the archival appraiser she had recommended would hang above the author’s desk, a silver thumbtack in the plaster. As he worried about the growth of a tumor, as I worried about the dilation of my aorta, the letters would accumulate, expanding the story into a novel.
Attached to this e-mail are four recent poems I would be pleased, indeed, to have appear in your inaugural issue, to appear if they appeal. Their immediate occasion is a visit last summer to Lascaux …
I clicked send, transmitting the proposal to my agent, mild pain shooting through my chest, no doubt psychosomatic, and left to meet Alena at her apartment on the Lower East Side.
Along with an artist friend of hers, Peter, who also had a law degree, Alena had been working on a project—not an art project, she kept insisting — that she’d often described to me, but which I’d always largely dismissed as fantasy: she and Peter were in the process of trying to convince the largest insurer of art in the country to give them some of its “totaled” art. When a valuable painting is damaged in transit or a fire or flood, vandalized, etc., and an appraiser agrees with the owner of a work that the work cannot be satisfactorily restored, or that the cost of restoration would exceed the value of the claim, then the insurance company pays out the total value of the damaged work, which is then legally declared to have “zero value.” When Alena asked me what I thought happened to the totaled art, I told her I assumed that the damaged work was destroyed, but, as it turned out, the insurer had a giant warehouse on Long Island full of these indeterminate objects: works by artists, many of them famous, that, after suffering one kind of damage or another, were formally demoted from art to mere objecthood and banned from circulation, removed from the market, relegated to this strange limbo.
Ever since Peter — who had a friend at the insurance company — had arranged a tour of the warehouse for Alena, she was obsessed with the idea of acquiring some of these supposedly valueless works, many of which she considered to be more compelling — aesthetically or conceptually — than they had been prior to sustaining damage. Her plan, which I’d thought sounded naïve, had been to tell the insurer that she and Peter had founded a nonprofit “institute” for the study of damaged art and to encourage the company to make a donation. They wrote up a mission statement which I copyedited, informally affiliated themselves with a nonprofit arts organization run by one of Alena’s friends, dressed up like responsible adults, and got a meeting with the head of the insurance company, who, it turned out, was also a painter. They charmed her. The head of the company agreed these totaled artworks were of both aesthetic and philosophical interest and — to Alena and Peter’s surprise — was open to the idea of donating a selection for small-scale exhibition and critical discussion, assuming the details could be worked out. Peter spent a few months drafting an appropriately official-sounding agreement with the insurer (no personal details about the parties involved in the claim would be divulged, etc.) and Alena looked into various spaces where they could display the objects and host discussions about these no-longer-artworks and their implications for artists, critics, theorists. In the end, and to my shock, the insurer agreed to donate a gallery’s worth of “zero-value” art to Alena’s “institute,” and even covered the cost of shipping. That morning I’d received a text from Alena that she and Peter would like me to be the first visitor to the “Institute for Totaled Art.”
Alena buzzed me in and I climbed the four flights of stairs to her apartment. She lived in a giant rent-controlled loft in a former commercial building; an uncle was on the lease. It had one room that served as Alena’s studio and then a vast open space into which you could have fit at least two of my apartments. Sometimes Alena’s younger brother — a student at NYU — lived in the apartment with her, although he hadn’t been around in recent months. Almost all the furniture was easily movable and so the room was arranged a little differently each time I visited, which made me feel crazy; the black couch was no longer against the wall, but now the record player was; the drafting table was in a different corner; and so on. I kissed Alena and hugged Peter and sat on an empty crate and asked them where the institute was housed. You’re in it, she said, and disappeared into her studio. Shut your eyes, she yelled back to me.
I shut my eyes — whenever I shut my eyes in the city I become immediately aware of the wavelike sound of traffic — and then I heard her bare feet on the hardwood as she approached me. Put out your hands, she said, and I did. She dropped what felt like a series of porcelain balls or figurines into them. Now open them, she said: what I was holding were the pieces of a shattered Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture, an early red one. It was wonderful to see an icon of art world commercialism and valorized stupidity shattered; it was wonderful to touch the pieces with their metallic finish, to see the hollow interior of a work of willful superficiality. It probably wasn’t originally worth that much money by art world standards — somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand dollars, between one and two IUIs, a year or two of Chinese labor — but it had been worth enough money to charge the experience of holding its ruins with a frisson of transgression. Besides, somebody would probably pay a lot of money for the remnants even if the rubble had legally been declared worthless. Alena and Peter started laughing at my stunned silence and Alena picked up one of the smaller fragments from my hand and hurled it onto the hardwood, where it shattered. “It’s worth nothing,” she basically hissed. She looked like a chthonic deity of vengeance. Not for the first time, I wondered if she was a genius.