Not sure about any of this, just throwing it out there…but this all seems to represent a fairly radical revision of Descartes, whose “I think, therefore I am” becomes instead “I stink, therefore I think.”
Right?
There are smells that your own body produces that can have the same effect as Proust’s madeleine, producing that extraordinary, unbidden gust of remembrance, the mémoire involontaire. I once mentioned this in passing to the Imaginary Intern, adding that I was reluctant to talk about it because I thought people might think it’s juvenile or gross, and he said, “No, no, no, dude…you should absolutely talk about it, it’s something so many people can identify with,” which is such a totally Imaginary Intern thing to say, by the way — he was so perspicacious about things like this, but without even the slightest bit of self-importance or pretension. I, on the other hand, have always been squeamish and neurotically reticent about things like this, but I do think it’s particularly pertinent here: there’s a certain bowel movement of mine — and it’s not something I can reduplicate at will; I’ve yet to figure out what food or combination of foods actually produces it — whose smell immediately transports me back in time to a very specific men’s room at the Deal Casino, a beach club in Deal, New Jersey, that my family frequented during summers when I was a little kid. This was a very lovely and carefree, very richly experienced, almost psychedelically vibrant time in my life (a time when I first saw zeppelins in the sky, first heard the sound of mah-jongg tiles being shuffled, first caught glimpses of naked Marlboro-smoking middle-aged women in cabanas, etc.) and that particular fecal smell, and the memories it instantly evokes, buoys me for hours and sometimes days on end, and it’s something that probably got me through my almost unassuageable grief when the Imaginary Intern left, and I’d sit there on the toilet desperately hoping to re-conjure his face from the configuration of cracks in the tile floor.
I think I mentioned before all his elaborate variations on my own motifs, which seemed to me so much more brilliant than the original ideas…Well, after he suddenly left — which I’ll talk about more in a minute — in my grief, in my anguished disbelief (which almost immediately exposed long-repressed memories of my dead sister and swelled into a pain of infinite yearning that’s never quite abated), I ransacked the house in search of any remnants of him, and I found a trove of his “poems,” which were not originally intended as poems at all, I suppose, but were simply artless collations of my own fragmentary notes, but which have the numinous, elegiac, oracular quality (in my opinion, at least) of the greatest poetry, of, say, a Friedrich Hölderlin or, uh…of a Gérard de Nerval…whose disdain for the material world matched that of the Imaginary Intern (“This life is a hovel and a place of ill-repute. I’m ashamed that God should see me here”), who famously walked his pet lobster Thibault at the end of a blue silk ribbon through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, and who hanged himself from a sewer grating in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne with an apron string he believed to be the Queen of Sheba’s garter. As the Imaginary Intern would say, you can’t make this stuff up…which, come to think of it, is a sort of ironic thing for an Imaginary Intern to say.
In a very literal sense, the Imaginary Intern existed for the project — he was all about the project…all about the production of Gone with the Mind, that was his sole remit, as they say. So, thanks largely to him, everything we talked about, no matter how seemingly extraneous or irrelevant — Twizzlers commercials, the molecular basis of infrared detection by pit vipers, Betty Boop, Helen Keller, Jenna Jameson, parasitic worms, whatever — somehow or other wound its way back to our work. The only exception to this, the only thing we didn’t treat in a utilitarian way, the only thing that was completely sacrosanct, was the epic, heroic role the Soviet Union played in the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, and, in particular, the defense of Stalingrad.
One afternoon, I got back home from the gym and he was gone. I found a note he’d left behind entitled “Ciao”:
One just keeps saying, “No…No…No…”
Head bowed, hat in hand,
A cringing, cunning little step back,
With each dialectical evasion,
Retreating, receding, “no…no…no…”
Until one simply disappears…
I miss, so terribly, working on Gone with the Mind with him. And I miss the times when we’d just sit around, listening to music together in the dark (usually moody, British postpunk pop) or watching TV.
Life’s a harrowing fucking slog — we’re driven by irrational, atavistic impulses into an unfathomable void of quantum indeterminacy — but, still…it’s nice to have a friend, a comrade, a paracosm, whatever, to share things with.
The earliest folktales tended to be about single-cell organisms which lived deep below the surface of the earth, where temperatures routinely exceeded one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Soon, though, folktales began to feature tiny multicellular worms which had evolved to survive in the extreme, inhospitable conditions of the subsurface biosphere. These worms — belonging to “the vast and diverse phylum of nematodes”—ate bacteria and often grew no bigger than two-hundredths of an inch. Then, for a very, very long period of time after this, almost all folktales pivoted around a cobbler, his fat, conniving wife, and their gullible daughter. But the degree of refinement was extraordinarily high, each ensuing folktale an almost imperceptibly subtle modification of its predecessor. Today, these elegant algorithms have given way to autobiography, with the hope that it might carry the same breadth of allegorical signification.
So were I to say something like…I don’t know…something like…and I’m just riffing here, I’m just freestyling…something like…“I was a delicate little boy with flaxen bangs from Jersey City, who was alternately titillated and revolted by other children my age…those, those filthy, cross-eyed children in Jughead whoopee caps who’d run around screaming at the tops of their lungs with long pink roundworms wriggling out their nostrils…and my pretty, my pretty young mother — she was so young then! — in her, in her, her pink Izod polo shirt and her short, khaki wraparound skirt and her penny loafers — would prepare me a lunch of cream of mushroom soup, with banana Turkish taffy for dessert, and she’d read aloud folktales about other delicate little boys just like me (whose pretty mothers also read to them as they ate), exertions which would leave her almost too exhausted to fend off the coarse advances of the stooped, hook-nosed peddlers and the, uh…the sweaty merry-go-round operators who seemed to be endlessly ringing our doorbell”…something like that…I think you could discern in even something like that, certain folkloric elements, certain of the, the, uh…the generic narratemes that the Soviet folklorist Vladimir Propp enumerated…And even though the lexicon (Jughead, Turkish taffy) and the clothes (the Izod polo shirts, the penny loafers) clearly situates it in a very specific time, in a relatively contemporaneous reality (the early sixties), there’s still, to my mind at least, an illud tempus (to borrow Eliade’s phrase) suggested here…a kind of, uh…a vaguely medieval, once-upon-a-time-ness suggested by these roving peddlers and those caterwauling, parasite-infested children…We are — all of us — so deeply, so atavistically inculcated with the structures and the tropes that inhere in the very act of storytelling, that no sooner do we begin narrating our own presumably unprecedented childhoods, than we — no matter who we are — reflexively conjure up the very same brigands and woodsmen, the very same vagabonds and troubadours and ogres, the very same hermits and sly, anthropomorphic animals, or recognize their interchangeable avatars whom we have inescapably become, through the telling and the retelling…And I think you’re going to find in some of the excerpts I’m planning on reading tonight…and right now I can just pick arbitrarily a couple of lines off the top of my head, lines like “I was fascinated by the nuns who seemed to float across the boulevard on rainy afternoons,” for instance…or, uh… “I got my first hand job from a schizophrenic girl with webbed fingers”…or even in a passing recollection like — and I don’t remember the exact words off the top of my head here — something like “I’m pacing outside the club, smoking a cigarette, it’s like mid-January and I’m fucking freezing in this filthy Trix T-shirt, one of those little blue dental bibs with the metal-ball chains, red plaid flannel pajama bottoms with this giant hole in the crotch, and a pair of white clogs…and my father calls to tell me that he’s surprised I hadn’t been included in Philip Roth’s list of ‘formidable postwar writers’” or…or even in a section that appears toward the very end of the autobiography where I say something like “I’m fifty-eight years old, and I’d still rather try to support myself by mowing people’s lawns and babysitting than by teaching” or, uh — and this is one of the last lines in the whole book—“Would it be so terrible for a man who perseveres under the Damoclean threat of cancer and the ever-present specter of assassination to simply try and have one last meal with his old mother in the food court of a mall?” I think even in these lines, you can find a sense of the fantastic…a sense of fairy-tale enchantment…But that idea of enchantment, as we move through the second decade of the twenty-first century, seems ever more adulterated, ever more degraded…and, one wonders, by what exactly? As chronologies of diagnosis and treatment replace the surrealist poetry of our symptomology, how quickly it can all begin to seem like a PowerPoint presentation at a TED talk or the strobe-effect of PTSD flashbacks in a Lifetime movie…