Therefore I felt your curiosity would be aroused in the Nameless collection and in the way his papers relate to “objects” and to an ambiguity in the achievement of civilizations and cultures extending from pre-Columbian times to our own day.
It is peculiar, I know, to sense how a culture may be trapped in its institutions or achievements and yet may return to those “objects” when it is sensed that these relate beyond/beneath themselves to unfathomable needs of deaf, dumb, blind ages of man that cry for a creation, cry for a tongue …
I do not wish to dwell on this in detail as it would be impertinent of me to attempt to summarize in a paragraph or two something that occupies such large tracts of the Nameless imagination.
I mention it because I wonder how large it may come to loom in your appreciation of Nameless theatre as “novel-ghost” that resides within “technical address”.
The point here as I see it (if I may add a further note) is the subtle and varied connection between past and present that lies in a language of things through historical investitures into the naked life of one’s time: the irony of coming abreast of one’s time.
The only eye-witness account I possess of Nameless is the one my wife gives of him when they met in New York City. I shall come to this in a moment or two but first of all I would like to comment on the scene (Two Paces to Rose and Maria) — the last thing he wrote before his death.
The temptation exists, I am sure, to see this as a prophecy of his coming death but such an interpretation is false.
Nameless was ill and the people he met, houses, places he visited which appear in his narratives become stages written into the very base of his experience — a base that resists being identified with any idea of a total structure of the past; that resistance opened out proportions of continuously “dying structure” into continuously “living present” upon which to resume ever further advances into a territory of ceaseless compassion as well as descent into projected/unfulfilled ghosts of time as these bear upon the naked terror of our time.
It is inevitable therefore that the advance of “dying structure” into “living present” (in a body of work created by any one man) would appear, in one or other of its facets, to coincide with his actual death and would lend itself therefore to be interpreted as prophecy.
This would be quite wrong. Nameless was not a prophet nor an animist. I hope I have made this clear. He was something of a poet, perhaps, something of an ironist in the deepest sense, perhaps. And it is against a background of “dying structure” into “living present”, implicit in his work, that one needs to see the objects in my wife’s house (the curtains, for example, with their painted design of the base of the pyramid of the sun that seems prophetic of his fall) that he draws upon in his last piece of writing to evoke the dream-play of Rose as projected ghost or prince built into an ageing woman’s womb of a past childhood or return to the implacable fantasies of her youth.
In fact this is a consistent thread to weave into the play Christ and the Firing Squad that occupies various strands within the Nameless imagination’s sacrificed bodies or cloaks worn by others as inner face to outer face.
Nameless arrived at the house (which he describes in his scene) on the outskirts of Greenwich Village not long after my wife had had a busy and exciting morning discussing plans with her drama group in New York.
She told me when she first saw him at the door how immensely frail he looked; and worn as if (a vivid impression flashed upon her) he had literally ascended from a hollow place that left its mark on him. So much so he seemed to her eloquent with the silences of an inner face; eloquent mosaic character composed of inner stains and dyes …
I find this a peculiarly sensitive and appropriate description in the light of what I afterwards learnt of the Nameless expeditions.
There was another aspect to this Nameless frailty that absorbed her. It was something elemental like the sun on earth — non-solid energy so to speak — as if he gave himself to others and others subsisted upon him (as he subsisted upon them).
All this combined to create a very deep vibration of sympathy between them and, coming on top of the morning’s excitement, led to an animated conversation (traces of which appear in the Rose scene written by Nameless).
My wife describes it all as a “confession” she made to him — a strange phrase to use for a sudden heightening and deepening of her responsibilities as an actress both to the past and the present in the roles she hoped to play.
I wonder, my dear Goodrich, is “confession” to a daemon that visits one the very foundation stone of all inspiration? What do you think?
So far it was a blissful and enjoyable encounter but something happened at the last minute which left my wife with a feeling of deep disturbance, of having laid bare certain secrets prematurely perhaps.
Again an odd phrase to use. (I myself despise secrets as you know.) And yet the implications are enormous. It is as if Nameless were inviting her to reflect on varieties of the self-exposure of the past, varieties of deep-seated preparation required for growth into a living present, a living encounter with a living present. To reflect therefore deeply with an eye of vision on the enormous tragedy of the late twentieth century, the enormous tragedy of a premature ripeness that we find everywhere, a premature nakedness that sells itself everywhere bound up with a kind of immature projection of stasis as art of prophecy.
All this came to a head when he was about to leave. For it was then that he delivered his bombshell.
“Would it be possible for me to stay, to be with you for a day, and for a night?”
His words had an instantaneous effect upon her. It conjured up the feeling in her that he was trying to pick her up in her own house, on her very doorstep, that this man who seemed to her — yes she actually said the word — that this man who seemed to her Christ (if anyone could be Christ in the late twentieth century) was making a naked proposal to her.
And yet, woman of the world as she is, all her instincts of respectability were up in arms. She was confused and said the first thing that came into her head: “My husband would not like it.”
He looked at her then. And his eyes were alone. Not lonely. Unfathomably alone. Wholly compassionate, wholly seeing.
“I am sorry.” That was all he said. He turned away and as he stepped into the road looked back for the last time.
Had she really rejected him? Did it mean that a tide of history would flow now not towards the Absent Door of the Virgin but towards the Absent Door of a Prince?
She felt a kind of rage at herself and she slammed the door fast in his face. The sound echoed through the house like the fall of a heavy mask to the floor, an uncommon mask generations would invest with rage and begin to seek, as threshold to inner faces, inner encounters.
Ah, my dear Goodrich … who knows.? Who knows.?