Reference?
I'll give you frame of reference!
ACT
TELL YOU WHAT I SPEND THE MOST TIME doing is comparing sadnesses. No, not comparing — didn't mean to say comparing — comparing, they say, is invidious, and if there is one thing I do not want to get caught doing it is doing anything which looks to people like it is invidious — but picking, meant to say picking, not comparing, but picking, as in the worst sadness among all the sadnesses. But I don't mean sadnesses agreed upon by people but sadnesses seen and deemed sadnesses by me — sad scenes seen and deemed so just by me — the saddest of the sad scenes seen by just by me. Or I suppose you would have to say the greatest sadness instead of the worst sadness, the greatest sadness out of all the great sadnesses felt by me when I saw a scene of something I saw as sad. This does not necessarily mean it was actually sad, does it? It just means I saw it as sad when I saw it. So I spend a lot of time — I probably spend most of it, my time — looking them all over in my mind and seeing which one I can honestly say to myself Gordon, there wasn't anything you ever saw that made you feel as sad as this thing did. But which one is it, which one? Because I can't decide — I can never decide. And besides, just because it is the saddest-looking scene to me, this does not mean it would be the saddest-looking scene to anybody else, does it? On the other hand, my idea is no two things seen can be equally sad-looking, can they? I mean, face it, can any two things seen be equally anything? And what about when you compare between looks? In other words, you look this minute and then you look the next minute, but who is supposed to come along and say to you okay, these two times you looked are equal in the way they make you feel about what you were looking at? What's even more invidious to me is the fact that the number of times can't ever be just actually two times, can it? I mean, if you think about it, even if you look at something just once, even if you are thinking about it in your mind and you think okay, you are going to look at this thing you are looking at just once, you actually didn't, did you? Because, come on, face it, didn't the look you gave it divide itself up into all of these millions of billions of little tiny looks all piled up? In the sense that, you know, one look is made up of so many of these little teeny tiny looks you can't even count them all, can you? So seen in the light of like this dialectic of mine, how do you go about saying like this little teeny tiny look is sadder-looking than that little teeny tiny look was? Or to be really scientific about it, not the look, not the look you looked, but the thing you saw? Because it's the thing, the thing — isn't it the thing itself we're talking about? Because we're not just sitting here jawing about just your various different infinities of looks, are we? I think this is Hegel. I don't know the first name that goes with this — but, you know, I'm positive it's like Hegel. Anyway, this is what he said he was thinking, wasn't it? I read all these people. It is this habit I have, always reading these books by these people. I walk around with these books of theirs always showing everybody. Like if somebody asks me what do you have there which you look like you are reading there, I show them. Some persons with books would not do it. I am not casting any aspersions on any of these persons, but some of them wouldn't. I think you know this. I do not think I have to marshal an argument or go work it out as a theorem for you. Some persons with books, you ask, they are only too happy to hurry and show you. Other people, forget it. It's human nature. All you can do is chalk it all up to, you know, human nature. Myself, I show. This is my nature. You have to go along with your nature. Like I once was sitting on these steps waiting for this movie to open and there is this book I have with me for just for this occasion — in essence, waiting. The movie was a little way away and I was there, oh my God, so way early for it, which, granted, is another thing in the framework of my nature as a human, me always being there, wherever it is, so way early for whatever it is — so okay, so I get my ticket, so I go to the box office and I hand over my money and I get myself my ticket, and then I go with it like, you know, like down the block or up the block, depending on which way you have this way of thinking about this conceptually-wise as a relation, that is — so okay, so I have gone and got myself my ticket and go sit on the steps in front of this building like waiting and everything.
Waiting.
With my book.
Hegel probably.
Like some Hegel probably.
So people keep coming along on the sidewalk and asking me what book? — and there's not this least little unhuman hesitation in me, you know? I don't care. They want to know what book, do I care? Here, this book. I just hand it right over and say, "Here, this book." And they look it over and hand it back over and off on their merry way they go and who's not happy?
Everybody's happy.
Hey, I just remembered something.
Ted Lewis.
Remember Ted Lewis?
Guy who wore this broken-down top hat.
Entertainer guy — drawly singer guy, band-leader guy, a little, you know, cane-play and soft shoe.
This was what he used to say, Ted Lewis.
He used to say to everybody is everybody happy?
In this kind of voice he had.
Like hey, is evv — ree — bod — dee — hap — pee?
All drawn out, all elongated and drawly.
And drawn out.
And tap his top hat on the top.
Jaunty.
Jauntily.
With fingertips.
Give his cane a hike and say is evvvvvvvvvvvv.
Like that.
Which made me, I don't know, sad. Or see that he was. Because Ted Lewis kept having to do it all of the time, kept having to do this act of his all of the time — always come out there where they could see him singing a little bit and dancing a little bit and leading his band for them and walking around for them and then, just at what he must have decided was the one special particular undividable point for him to do it, hike his cane a little and beat on this beat-up top hat of his a little and say hey, is evvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv?
It was pretty sad.
It was sadder by far, I say it was a lot sadder to me by far than this terrible white van that comes up to the sidewalk that says Ozram Trans on the side of it over facing over to my side of things where I am sitting over on the side with the book on the steps — and I say even still sadder by far than when there are these people which start getting out of it and which keep coming out of it — I counted, I counted — ten morons in all, all together it's ten morons in all, and the driver.
Who went up the way with them or down the way with them and must have got tickets for them.
So you think they have a moron rate?
Because I get in on my own two feet.
That's Hegel for you.
IN REALITY
Some many years ago I brought out a story I called "The Psoriasis Diet." It shows up in the collection What I Know So Far. What I knew about psoriasis and diet was this — that the only scheme tying psoriasis to diet in a plausible relation was eating your heart out looking for a cure. For as long as I am able to remember, searching for a method to manage the psoriasis that assails me has occupied the major fraction of my experience. Time and again I have had to take my life into my hands in an effort to keep psoriasis from forcing me into a hospital bed. I mean by this that I had been seeking relief in therapies as risky as X-ray, Grenz ray, ACTH, arsenic, aminopterin, and methotrexate. About six weeks before this book was slated to go to press — this would place us in the fifty-sixth year of my taking treatments for psoriasis — it was recommended I try something known as Skin-Cap, marketed in a cute little canister whose contents one sprays on oneself where lesions are. It worked — with stunning dispatch. I set to buying Skin-Cap by the ton, stockpiling canisters against the frantic imagining of a future when something altogether too good to have been true would be snatched away from me as capriciously — or is it as inexplicably that I should say? — as it had (pop!) popped into view. For one could purchase Skin-Cap without prescription. Indeed, this was the best of it, wasn't it? — that the canister declared its only active ingredient to be zinc pyrithione. Mere zinc the cure for psoriasis? Too wonderful, too wonderful! — very like discovering a thorough washing with a strong soap dissolves malignancies. I told my son Ethan. He has psoriasis. I told Updike. He has psoriasis. I tried to tell Nicholson Baker. He has psoriasis. I called all my friends to tell them all to all call all their friends where there might be among them those who have psoriasis. For six weeks Skin-Cap — which is formulated abroad and which is shipped into the United States and which is sold at pharmacies with no more restraint than would be imposed upon the sale of a roll of adhesive tape — was the acoustical event to stand me up against the world. Hold back the conditions with the right word? This was the right word! — the pair of them — and, apropos of my insistent horseplay, they're, hey, hyphenated, are they not? Then tonight — just after midnight, and two days shy of the day for the printing and the binding of this book — I am the one who gets a call. It is from George Andreou, friend and former colleague at Alfred A. Knopf. Andreou reports CNN reporting there is some rogue component in Skin-Cap that can kill you — run, Lish, drop everything, cry havoc, head for the hills! Why give this account here — at the close of a book of fictions? How on earth does any of this bear on the matter of fiction? Well, it's a story, is it not? And if it isn't, then what — as far as I could possibly be earnestly concerned — is? Oh, but you must not tell me art is the art of the insincere.