This, of course, could have been written without my leaving Manhattan. As quite a lot of far better stuff was written, even by me. Guilt, as I said, is a better vehicle. Still, I've dipped myself into the southern Atlantic and in general insinuated my body into what until then was just a high-school geography lesson. Ergo sum.
I was also entertained there by a local pharmacist, a native of Yugoslavia who had fought either against the Germans or against the Italians, and who was clutching at his chest almost as often as I was. As it happened, he had read almost everything I'd penned; he promised to get me a Baby Hermes with my favorite typeface, and he treated at a chur- rascaria at the Leblon beach. When I meet people like him, I feel like an impostor, because what they think I am does not exist (from the moment I finished writing what they just finished reading). What exists is a haunted lunatic trying
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hard not to hurt anyone—because the main thing is not literature but the ability not to cause pain to anyone; but instead of owning up to this, I babble something about Kan- temir, Derzhavin, and the like, while they listen with an open mouth, as if there were something else in the world besides despair, neurosis, and the fear of going up in smoke any second. But perhaps even official messengers of Russian culture—of a certain age especially—feel the same way, particularly when they drag their bones across all kinds of Mo- gadishus and Ivory Coasts. Because everywhere there is dust, rusty soil, twisted chunks ofdecaying metal, unfinished buildings, the swarthy multitudes of the local population for whom you mean nothing, just like for your own. Sometimes, far away, you can see the blue shine of the sea.
No matter which way journeys begin, they always end identically: in one's own corner, in one's own bed, falling into which you forget what has already become the past. It is unlikely I will ever find myself again in that country and in that hemisphere, but at least, upon my return, my bed is even more "mine," and for a person who buys furniture instead of inheriting it, this is enough to detect a sense of purpose in the most pointless meanderings.
1978
(Translated, from the Russian, by Alexander Sumerkin and the author)
Altra Ego
I
The idea o(the poet as an inveterate Don Giovanni is of relatively recent coinage. Like many concepts enjoying great currency in the popular imagination, it appears to be a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution, which, through its quantum leaps in human accumulation and literacy, gave birth to the very phenomenon of the popular imagination. To put it differently, this image of the poet appears to owe more to the public success of Lord Byron's Don Juan than to its author's own romantic record—awe-inspiring perhaps, but unavailable to the public at the time. Besides, for every Byron we always get a \Vordsworth.
As the last period of social coherence and its attendant philistinism, the nineteenth century is responsible for the bulk of notions and attitudes we entertain or are guided by today. In poetry, that century squarely belongs to France; and perhaps the expansive gesturing and exotic affinities of the French Romantics and Symbolists contributed to the dim view of the poet no less than the general lowbrow notion of the French as certified immoralists. On the whole, underneath this bad-mouthing of poets lies the instinctive desire
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of every social order—be it a democracy, autocracy, theocracy, ideocracy, or bureaucracy—to compromise or belittle the authority of poetry, which, apart from rivaling that of the state, hoists a question mark over the individual himself, over his achievements and mental security, over his very significance. In that respect the nineteenth century simply joined the club: when it comes to poetry, every bourgeois is a Plato.
II
Antiquity's attitude toward a poet was, however, by and large both more exalted and more sensible. That had to do as much with polytheism as with the fact that the public had to rely on poets for entertainment. Save for mutual snip- ing—usual in the literary trade of any age—disparaging treatment of poets in antiquity is rare. On the contrary, poets were revered as figures of divine proximity: in the public imagination they stood somewhere between soothsayers and demigods. Indeed, deities themselves were often their audience, as is evidenced by the myth of Orpheus.
Nothing could be further from Plato than this myth, which is also particularly illuminating about antiquity's view of a poet's sentimental integrity. Orpheus is no Don Giovanni. So distraught is he by the death ofhis wife, Eurydice, that his lamentations rend the ears of the Olympians, who grant him permission to go down into the netherworld to bring her back. That nothing comes of this trip (followed in poetry by similar descents in Homer, Virgil, and, above all, in Dante) only proves the intensity of the poet's feeling for his beloved, as well, of course, as the ancients' grasp of the nitty-gritty of guilt.
As much as the subsequent fate of Orpheus (he was torn apart by a crowd of angry maenads for his refusal—because of his vow of chastity, made in mourning for Eurydice—to submit himself to their bared charms), this intensity points up the monogamous nature of at least this poet's passion. Although, unlike the monotheists of later periods, the ancients didn't put much of a premium on monogamy, it should be noted that they didn't run to the opposite extreme either, and reserved fidelity as the particular virtue of their premier poet. In general, apart from the beloved, the only feminine presence on a poet's agenda in antiquity was that of his Muse.
The two would overlap in the modern imagination; in antiquity they didn't because the Muse was hardly corporeal. The daughter ofZeus and Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory), she had nothing palpable about her; the only way she would reveal herself to a mortal, particularly a poet, was through her voice: by dictating to him this or that line. In other words, she was the voice of the language; and what a poet actually listens to, what really does dictate to him the next line, is the language. And it is presumably the language's own gender in Greek (glossa) that accounts for the Muse's femininity.
With the same allusive consequences, the noun for language is feminine in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and German. In English, however, language is an "it"; in Russian it is "he." Yet whatever language's gender happens to be, a poet's attachment to it is monogamous, for a poet, by trade at least, is a monoglot. It could even be argued that all one's capacity for fidelity gets spent on one's Muse, as is implied in the Byronic version of the poet's romantic program—but that would be true only if one's language were indeed one's
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choice. As it is, language is the given, and knowledge of which hemisphere of the brain pertains to the Muse would be of value only if one could control that part of one's anatomy.
IV
The Muse, therefore, is not an alternative to the beloved but precedes her. In fact, as an "older woman," the Muse, nee language, plays a decisive part in the sentimental development of a poet. She is responsible not only for his emotional makeup but often for the very choice ofhis object of passion and the manner of its pursuit. It is she who makes him fanatically single-minded, turning his love into an equivalent of her own monologue. What amounts in sentimental matters to obstinacy and obsession is essentially the dictate of the Muse, whose choice is always of an aesthetic origin and discards alternatives. In a manner of speaking, love is always a monotheistic experience.