Jenny Holzer: “In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.”
Row your boat, row your small boat.
And, only a little after this it will be Kristen Pfaff, the bass guitarist from the band Hole — good-bye.
My dear glass friend has had a second breast removed now. Now what? Emotion as narrative: sadness, ferocity, fear, can give integrity, as we through fiction rehearse, pray, conjure, bring the night closer and also, simultaneously, dispel it. A beautiful, passing landscape.
Tarkovsky: “The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”
How to incorporate the joys and pleasures, tenderness, delicacies, the generosities and seductions of the novel and its narrative capacities with the extraordinary, awesome capabilities of poetry? There’s the challenge. Who is up to it? I wonder.
A girl in a striped bathing suit sits at the water’s edge. She digs deeply in the sand and from the vast beach makes shapes: an arch, a pyramid, two towers. Not child, but not yet adult, she is at that tender age of becoming.
The glass might mend itself.
The child draws the luminous letter A in the sand. She hears the phosphorescent ocean.
Miracles might occur. Who is up to it?
A small voice rises in me. I am, it says.
And then the plane is enveloped in darkness.
For Cynthia
April — December 1994
NOTE: All italicized material is from a Carole Maso novel or from a work-in — progress.
Surrender
I HAD COME FROM FRANCE WHERE I had gone to write, living on a borrowed $1,000 for months, but I was at the end of my resources: financial, emotional, psychic. Even this life, beautiful and mysterious and charmed as it was, had become intolerable — I was moving every few weeks, uncertain as to what would happen next, house-sitting or caretaking or other more elaborate and difficult arrangements. And the woman, dear Helen, who had over the years seen me through all this — inventing schemes, guiding me, urging me even into each necessary if troubling arrangement so that it might be possible to write my books — four in all then, in one state or another of completion — she, too, was at her wit’s end. And so I had decided to accept, yes, the outlandish, impossible offer of meaningful employment by the wild-eyed iron-willed woman I had met a few years earlier at the MacDowell Colony. She, one Lucia Getsi, had predicted on the first day of my residency there — based on very little, only my first novel-that I would teach at her school, Illinois State University (ISU). With no MFA, no teaching experience, and no real evidence that the Midwest existed at all, I nodded unworriedly, convinced no such thing would be possible. Two years passed. I went to Provincetown; I went to France; I finished a second novel. But possible indeed it was, and before I knew it Lucia’s prediction had come true.
I was destitute, and I had no prospects of publishing. My press, the noble North Point Press, about to do my third book, had just folded, and the New York publishers were less than enthusiastic. What choice did I have? And so once again in sadness, in weariness, my leave-taking began. There had been so many leave-takings already. I would leave France, leave home (New York City), leave Helen, to do a job that I was unconvinced could even be done, in an imaginary Midwest, in a place called Normal.
Landing at the Bloomington, Illinois, airport and looking up into a sky of utter vastness, I felt I was falling upward into a dizzying blue sea. It was captivating here in its vastness, its flatness, its nothingness. I have never seen anything quite like it. Only vaguely does it recall Aries, which Van Gogh thought recalled Holland.
All summer I had walked in lushness, caressed by light, by olive and lemon and fig trees, embraced by gently rolling hills. Because my time in France was coming to its inevitable end, it had become too beautiful there, too painfully perfect. My parting became a kind of unbearable opera of longing. But then, overnight it seemed, there I was in the Midwest, and there was nothing, and the nothingness, the weird, fierce resignation of it was somehow exhilarating. I surrendered in seconds to this void, and like all landscapes I form a permanent bond with, it, at a crucial moment, a moment of crisis, of change, happened to mirror my internal state identically. My remoteness, my desolation. Stepping off that plane, the world was devoid of everything, a clean slate of sky, a nihilism of space, empty, the end, and yet it was oddly beautiful — like my own brand of nihilism.
And so I am dropped headlong into a strange land, a world utterly alien to me: world of dramatic and violent weather, dramatic and resolute landscape, dramatic and bizarre academia. Weird world of students and faculty and politics and paper. I have not been in school for a very many years. And from this vantage point the university seems as odd and coded and impenetrable as just about anything. Because I am just the visiting artiste, I do not have to go to faculty meetings, but I do anyway for their circus-like aspects. I go to academic parties for the spectacle, the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf qualities, the bizarre vocabulary, the accents. I roam Normal/Bloomington memorizing middle America. I am a tourist, and there are many fascinating things out there. I come to class in the first week with my findings. At the hospital down the road I tell them there is a stone bench and engraved into the bench is written, “Today we prepare for our dreams of tomorrow.” I tell them as students of writing it’s going to be tough going, as they can go and see for themselves, because the clichés are literally written in stone.
In my tour of downtown Bloomington I see a radio tower that looks a lot like the Eiffel Tower. How far I think I’ve come from anything even a little familiar.
Luckily there are a few new friends: a colleague and fellow fiction writer who murmurs “Blanchot, Blanchot, Blanchot,” like a prayer, like the way out of here; another who loves the local band Thrill Kill Cult and Beckett. And of course there is Lucia. Having gotten me into this thing, she takes full responsibility. We swim together several times a week. We take trips to Chicago. She saves me with her thousand generosities: her impromptu three-course Italian meals, her gossip, her poems. Also, she is an extraordinary scholar. She allows me to sit in on her German Romanticism class. She lends me the Novalis translations she has done. It’s ecstasy then. Lucia, high-spirited, determined, with her stubborn Tennessee accent, does all she can to cheer me up. She says not to feel so bad — after twenty-five years in Bloomington, she still does not feel at home here.
And there is the woman who the day I arrive has already left five messages on something called the Voice Mail. She implores me to let her enter the class. She is older, about my age. She, too, becomes my friend, with caution, because she is my student, and I know from the first day of class that this is a sacred relationship. It’s a delicate balance to maintain, and a crucial one. There are only a few things I tell myself in the beginning: work the students as hard as you work yourself, and respect with your entire being that relationship (in other words, no matter what, do not sleep with them). I am so lonely here. Helen, back in New York, shows no signs whatever of visiting.
In a surprising and unanticipated turn, I end up adoring my students, feel them to be more talented than most of the published writers I have come across, want to celebrate their instincts, their feeling for language, their willingness to try anything with me. They seem unreasonably hopeful, perky, wholesome — but I consider that this may be just in comparison with the French. They are diligent, intelligent, open-minded, and, like the landscape, filled with longing and possibility.